Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town Into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe--And Started the Protestant Reformation (39 page)

T
HE
C
OLLOQUY OF
M
ARBURG

Philip of Hesse is flanked by Zwingli and Luther in a near contemporary representation of a meeting that could have healed the breach between Wittenberg and Zurich, but ended up highlighting fatal divisions.

Many of the signatories of this document left Marburg with the profound sense of an opportunity lost. The two wings of the Reformation would go their separate ways, and the cities of southern Germany would be forced to choose, often with difficulty and acrimony, which route to follow. Zwingli met a tragically early death, accompanying the Zurich army in the confessionally charged Kappel War of 1531. Luther regarded this as God’s judgment for his blasphemy of the Lord’s Supper, an opinion confirmed in his mind by the death of Oecolampadius only seven weeks later. This double decapitation substantially weakened Swiss influence over the Reformation. Zwingli’s successor, the capable Heinrich Bullinger, had to bend every sinew to preserve the Zurich Reformation and conciliate a chastened and humiliated city council. The scars of the conflict ran deep, as another Swiss church leader, John Calvin, would discover when two decades later he attempted to reach out to Luther’s
heirs and was sharply rebuffed. Reconciliation between Luther and the Reformed would wait another four centuries, arriving only in the very different confessional context of the late twentieth century.

The denouement of Marburg was a tragedy for the Reformation every bit as profound as the slaughter of the Peasants’ War. The prolonged efforts to bring the two parties to agreement, and profound depression that these efforts had failed, reflected a clear perception that the Reformation had reached a decisive moment. From a modern perspective it is hard to reconcile Luther’s certainty in his unique power to interpret true belief with his furious denunciation of “fanatics” who exercised the same freedom of scriptural interpretation. Zwingli expressed the sentiment with succinct anguish with his frustrated cry at the end of the first day’s deliberations at Marburg: “Should, then, everything go according to your will?”
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By 1529 Luther’s worldview had hardened into a reflex of didactic certainties, friend or foe, God or the Devil. God had chosen him as his instrument; he would not be moved by worldly considerations to compromise truth. In the last two decades of his life he would set about the building of a church on these principles. Those who were with him would follow; others would await God’s judgment. The church he built would be a reflection of both these adamantine strengths and Luther’s very human weaknesses.

10.

T
HE
N
ATION
’
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P
ASTOR

N THE YEARS FOLLOWING
the Colloquy of Marburg the Reformation moved into a new phase. Gone were the apparently limitless horizons of the first years, the endless astonishing triumphs in adversity, the perplexity of old institutions baffled and dismayed by the phenomenon that was Martin Luther. The years of adversity of the mid-1520s had changed all that: the limitations of Luther’s movement, theological, social, and emotional, had been cruelly exposed. Luther’s enemies in the old church were now irreconcilable, and had been joined by an increasing number whose hopes of sharing the new evangelical freedoms had been cruelly dashed. It was time to tend the needs of those who, for better or ill, had thrown in their lot with Luther.

These, it turned out, were still very numerous. Since 1521 and the condemnation of Luther at the Diet of Worms, representatives of territories sympathetic to the evangelical cause had fought an increasingly dogged battle to ameliorate the edict’s conditions and prevent its enforcement. In 1526, when the Diet convened at Speyer, they were able to extract a significant concession. The emperor and his brother Ferdinand were in a weak position, since they desperately needed help from the German Estates to combat the imminent Turkish threat to Hungary. In
return for the necessary funds they were obliged to concede that until final resolution of the matter at a general council of the church the German territories should make what arrangements they thought proper for the regulation of religion. This effectively suspended the Edict of Worms in evangelical territories; Charles, who had not been present at Speyer, was appalled, and when the Estates reconvened in 1529, again in Speyer, he insisted this compromise be repudiated. The majority of the German Estates accepted this verdict, but six of the Protestant princes and fourteen of the imperial cities would not. These dissidents, led by John of Saxony and Philip of Hesse, made a formal written protest against this decision; the Protestation of Speyer was the prelude to the creation of a formal association of territories adhering to the Reformation (and, incidentally, the origin of the name Protestant). In 1530 they adopted a common statement of faith, the Confession of Augsburg. In 1531 their leading figures entered into a mutual defensive alliance, the Schmalkaldic League.

Luther and Wittenberg were central to all of these endeavors. Much of Luther’s energy in these years was expended as an adviser to princes, a strategist in the high stakes game of ecclesiastical politics.
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But the reformer was always clear that this was only a means to an end. His central role, doggedly pursued in the middle of all other preoccupations, was preaching the Gospel, teaching and exhorting: the nation’s pastor. Wittenberg was the fulcrum, its congregation always the immediate focus of his pastoral care and the experimental laboratory for the creation of a new Christian community. Luther and his colleagues also devoted a great deal of attention to building the institutional structures of a new church, a fitting Christian home for the people he had drawn out of Babylon.

These multiple obligations could not have been undertaken by one man. Luther was fully aware that many of these time-consuming tasks required skills that others possessed more abundantly than he. The creation of a systematic theology for the new church required the forensic clarity of a Melanchthon; the drafting of numerous church orders was the particular vocation of Johannes Bugenhagen. These fellow laborers
in the vineyard included a new generation of Wittenberg printers who now replaced the early pioneers, Rhau-Grunenberg and Lotter. Well-organized and highly professional, these new men now smoothly expanded production to meet the very considerable demand for Wittenberg Bibles, prayer books, and pastoral theology.

Luther was harassed, busy, and always in demand. But he was also very rooted in Wittenberg, among a circle of loyal and devoted colleagues, and in his growing family. The Augustinian cloister was no longer an empty shell, but a house full of noise: the noise of children, students, and lodgers. This, too, was the domain of the remarkable Katharina von Bora, mistress of the household and an indispensable helpmate to Luther in all his work. This was Luther’s new world, the place where much of the work of the Reformation was conducted and the model of the new Protestant family was built. It provided an important lodestar for the new church he was creating, and the home comforts to sustain him in adversity.

THE FIRST FAMILY

Through all the trials of the years after 1525, Luther’s greatest consolation was that he found himself at the center of a growing, happy family. This was for Martin as surprising as it was unexpected. Although he made clear very early his opposition to clerical celibacy, he had no desire or intention to take advantage of the new freedoms himself. He supported and approved the marriage of his colleagues and others among the evangelical leadership, but gently parried well-meaning attempts to find him a suitable life partner.
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The alliance with Katharina von Bora was not, as he freely admitted, a love match. He allowed himself to be proposed as suitor only when other possibilities had fallen through: had he had his choice, he rather ungallantly confessed, it would have been another of the fugitive nuns.

Katharina, for her part, was in love—but with someone else. Shortly
after arriving in Wittenberg she had met Jerome Baumgärtner, a young scholar in the Melanchthon circle.
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The two swiftly came to an understanding. The young lovers had not, however, reckoned with Jerome’s father, a prominent member of the Nuremberg patriciate, who had no intention of marrying his son to a runaway nun. Jerome, who had hastened home to secure his father’s blessing, was not permitted to return. Katharina took this hard and showed little enthusiasm for the proposed substitute, Dr. Kaspar Glatz, pastor at Orlamünde. Only to avoid this fate did Katharina suggest, with a levity perhaps concealing a serious purpose, that she might marry Luther.

Despite these unpromising beginnings the union soon blossomed into a partnership of real depth and touching devotion. Katharina set about bringing order to Luther’s rather chaotic bachelor home: refreshing fetid bedding that Luther had allowed to rot unchanged for far too long; tidying and creating a home in the cavernous Augustinian house, where Luther had to this point presided over a fluid and changing household of guests, visitors, and boarding scholars. Katharina now took this in hand, discovering a flair for business and administration that created, finally, a solid foundation for Luther’s home life. Until this point Luther had lived rather a hand-to-mouth existence. He should, in principle, have had no money worries. The Augustinian cloister was now his own, and gifts of money and produce augmented a relatively generous salary. But the outgoings of the household were also considerable, and Luther was a generous and imprudent giver. He also made nothing from his most marketable resource, his writings, refusing offers of payment from his publishers out of a scrupulous desire to retain his intellectual independence. In consequence he frequently felt short of money and put upon, as the complaints in his letters about money matters attest.

Happily for Luther, Katharina proved equal to the task. Bringing order to the household finances became her vocation, pursued with energy and considerable flair.
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While Luther held forth at the dinner table, Katharina ensured that it was well stocked from her substantial market garden. While students and disciples hung on the great man’s every
word, Katharina was on hand to ensure that they kept up to the mark with their boarding fees. The result was that the family could soon boast a modest prosperity. When in 1540 Katharina’s brother looked likely to default on a mortgage and lose the family farm, Luther was able to step in and purchase the property. Improvements were also undertaken to ensure that the Augustinian cloister was suitable for the expanding household.

This soon included the couple’s own children. As was usually the case in the sixteenth century, children followed very quickly after marriage. Hans (named for Bugenhagen) arrived in 1526; Lucas Cranach was the godfather. A first daughter, Elizabeth, followed in 1527, with four further children born between 1529 and 1534: Magdalena, Martin, Paul, and Margarethe. Like many men who experience fatherhood relatively late in life, Luther was a devoted parent. He involved himself very directly in the children’s upbringing. When Elizabeth died in infancy, an all too common event for parents in those days, Luther was distraught. It used to be claimed that parents in this period prepared for the savage frequency of losing their young by keeping an emotional detachment from their children. Luther’s utter wretchedness suggests otherwise.
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