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 (40 page)

When away from home, Luther wrote his children letters of touching intensity, patiently converting the joys of the Christian life into a language of storytelling fit for the very young.
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The same correspondence demonstrates how much Luther had come to respect and love his wife. Katharina was, within a very few years, his trusted soul mate, with whom he shared his hopes and fears, as well as instructions for managing affairs in his absence.

Luther’s experience of marriage and fatherhood was important for his movement in a number of ways. His new family circumstances helped turn his very practical mind to a future that involved building a community. In recent years there had been much comment on the very strong strand of apocalyptic expectation in Luther’s approach to the trials of the Reformation. He believed that he was living through the last days, the climactic struggle between God and Antichrist that would
precede the coming of the Kingdom. This was undoubtedly a source of great strength to him as Luther contemplated his expulsion from the church and the likelihood that his defiance would end in his own death.
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But it is impossible to be a father without also focusing on the future of children on this earth—contemplating that there may indeed be a future. This mental reorientation undoubtedly helped Luther focus his mind on the task of church building, and particularly on the task of Christian education.

T
HE
L
UTHER
F
AMILY
M
AKING
M
USIC

Luther was a passionate musician and a devoted father; this sentimental nineteenth-century portrayal distills the importance of Martin and Katharina for the creation of a new model of the Protestant family. Philip Melanchthon looks as if he would rather be elsewhere.

The joyous success of Luther’s family life also provided a welcome refuge against the constant barrage of events, the turmoil of crisis and decision making that scarcely receded in his later years. A home full of children was hardly restful, but it certainly provided distraction from complex events in the Empire and crises in the church. It brought out the best in Luther, in a way that theological disputation patently did not. But
most of all, Luther’s home life, lived in a very public way, provided the new church with a powerful archetype of the new Protestant family. In the Catholic Church such family comforts as priests had enjoyed had been furtive and semiclandestine. The priest’s woman was often the subject of public mockery and faced a dismal prospect of dispossession and penury in the event that the priest died. Children were always illegitimate.
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Now the Protestant churches not only regularized these unions; they provided the potential for a stable family at the heart of each local community, the children educated in the new faith and suited for a profession of their own. Often they followed their fathers into the church. The power of Luther and Katharina as a model and exemplar is demonstrated in the proliferation of copies of Cranach’s double marriage portrait.
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Quite quickly in these portrait pairs the haunted psychological study of Luther taken for his marriage was replaced by a dignified picture of the mature patriarch. Copies of this paired portrait hung in many sober Protestant homes, presiding over households where the Christian life was both lived and taught: the holy household as church.

FOR THE CHILDREN

Luther’s preoccupation with Christian education long preceded the arrival of his own family. As we have seen, even in the most turbulent days of the first Reformation controversies he still found time to instruct the youth of Wittenberg in the essentials of the faith, a patient task that perhaps provided welcome respite from the turmoil of events that swirled around him.
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This task of Christian education became for Luther a lifelong vocation, extending out from Wittenberg and Electoral Saxony to the whole family of cities and territories that had adhered to the new evangelical way.

This task consisted of two closely related elements: the design of a catechism, or catechisms, that would make the essentials of the new faith evident to new generations entering the church, and the provision
of schools. In the matter of the catechism Luther was not in any way minded to be prescriptive. There was to be no single text or formula required for use: in this, as in other tasks of preaching the Gospel, he valued individual initiatives from others of the talented band of scholars gathered around him.

The impetus for the drafting of new handbooks of catechismal instruction came from the obvious need for a general survey of the new church emerging in Saxony by the middle of the 1520s. It was clear that the church had become separated from the Church of Rome, but what had taken its place? Were the new churches adequately supplied with Christian preachers? And what of the congregations? What did they know of their faith? What indeed should they be taught? The first road map to a new standard of Christian knowledge was provided by Luther in two early works: the short manual of prayers known as the
Betbuchlein,
and the preface to his
Deutsche Messe,
the new vernacular worship service (1525).
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Here he sketched out the need for simple, straightforward works of instruction, set out in question and answer form, on the Ten Commandments, the Creed, and the Lord’s Prayer. His subsequent description of the educational regime envisaged for Wittenberg, with German instruction on Mondays and Tuesdays, added two further themes, baptism and the sacraments. Thus was established the catechismal agenda that would shape all subsequent efforts at Christian education in Wittenberg and beyond.

Luther’s ministerial colleagues rose to the task. Between 1522 and 1529 some sixty different editions of thirteen different instructional works were published in Wittenberg. These texts took many forms. Among the most successful was a work of the Augsburg reformer Urbanus Rhegius,
A Comforting
Disputation in Question and Answer Form Between Two Craftsmen
. This pamphlet would not normally be thought of as a catechism, though it followed exactly the agenda set out by Luther in his preface to the
German Mass
. It is also a reminder that at this point the work of Christian instruction was by no means confined to small children, but extended to adults drawn into the new movement, by
choice or accident of geography. Rhegius’s work enjoyed a huge success, with eighteen editions in three years, including eight in Wittenberg and four in Nuremberg.
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The publication of catechismal works engaged all of Wittenberg’s printers: these works, after all, stood in the first rank of the task of building the new church. It was only in 1529, after a full decade of widely disseminated publications of this sort, that Luther himself took the task in hand with the two works that would come to dominate this field, his
Small
Catechism
and
Large Catechism
.

The
Large Catechism
was intended specifically as a manual for those teaching the faith, clergymen instructing their congregations, and (in an ideal world) parents their children. It offered a fairly full exposition of the five crucial elements of faith as defined in Luther’s agenda-setting exposition of 1525. The
Small Catechism
served the needs of those of meaner understanding. The highly emotional tone of the preface to this work laid out the urgency of the task.

The deplorable, miserable condition which I discovered lately when I, too, was a visitor, has forced and urged me to prepare [publish] this Catechism, or Christian doctrine, in this small, plain, simple form. Mercy! Good God! What manifold misery I beheld! The common people, especially in the villages, have no knowledge whatever of Christian doctrine, and, alas! many pastors are altogether incapable and incompetent to teach. . . .

Therefore I entreat [and adjure] you all for God’s sake, my dear sirs and brethren, who are pastors or preachers, to devote yourselves heartily to your office, to have pity on the people who are entrusted to you, and to help us inculcate the Catechism upon the people, and especially upon the young.
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These two works were immediately disbursed in multiple editions in Wittenberg and beyond, published and republished in a steady sequence. The
Small Catechism,
in particular, proved to be an infinitely malleable text, published as a wall chart and in a school text, in Latin and German,
to combine both language training and religious instruction; all this in addition to numerous editions of the German original (assigned to the grateful Nickel Schirlentz) and translations into French, Dutch, and Danish, as well as Low German.
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Yet this publishing success, if anything, understated the importance of Luther’s works. Luther’s models would be enormously influential on the future development of the catechismal form in several respects, such as the establishment of the main subject categories and his pioneering of a hierarchy of texts for different levels of instruction. Equally important was his encouragement of a vivid variety of texts rather than insisting that the church use exclusively his own works. This was especially so of the church in England, where numerous catechisms were in use after the establishment of a Protestant church, and new ones written and sold throughout the reign of Elizabeth.
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The catechism would continue to be one of the most popular and characteristic forms of instructional writing of the Protestant tradition and a steady source of work for its printers in many parts of Europe.

By 1529 Luther had also refined his understanding of how Christian education should be accomplished. In particular he no longer believed that this crucial task could be left in the hands of parents or even pastors. Ministers could exhort, reprove, and extol, but if parents did not value education then their children would not be sent to school. Reluctantly Luther now conceded that this was the case. Parents, particularly those engaged in agriculture, would not sacrifice their children from necessary tasks in the home or fields for the doubtful benefits of learning their ABCs. The only solution was to place responsibility for ensuring attendance in the hands of the local government. The state, as Luther bluntly told Duke John in 1526, must be the “guardian-general of the young,” taking on the obligations of negligent parents. In Melanchthon’s more melodious phrase, government should serve “as a common father.”
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The duty of compulsory school provision was later routinely encapsulated in the church orders and ecclesiastical constitutions provided for Lutheran cities and territories. This ambitious program called for a vast increase in school places, the establishment of new schools, as well as the
expansion of existing provision. School ordinances, enabling charters for these new schools, were often appended to the new church orders.
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This represented a potentially revolutionary consequence of the new evangelical regimes, particularly as all of these new schools would be placed under the control of the local authorities.

In medieval Europe schooling had largely been a prerogative of the church, not least because literacy was an essential entry requirement for the priestly office. This monopoly on literacy was increasingly challenged in the late Middle Ages, as cities set up new schools in competition with church institutions to provide an education for the children of their own civic elite. In this respect the new Lutheran educational agenda only confirmed an existing trend and meshed well with the clear desire of civic authorities to take control of local educational institutions. But the aspiration toward universal provision articulated by Luther and Melanchthon was essentially new.

The state would be the guardian of the new educational institutions, but they would still serve the purposes of the church. This was made clear in Luther’s influential and widely disseminated
Sermon on Keeping Children in School
.
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For Luther, as he here made plain, the chief purpose of schooling was to train up a new generation of ministers. The church could no longer subsist on the largely ad hoc process by which priests had committed themselves to the new evangelical teachings, with a greater or lesser degree of sincerity. Saxony alone had eighteen hundred parishes; who was to man them when the first generation had passed on? So Luther addressed himself to parents to urge them to regard the church as a proper vocation for their children. It was only should this plea fail that he resorted to an argument of self-interest: education, he admitted, could also fit their children for a career in commerce or business that could make them a good living, or prepare them for a career in local administration. Luther’s priorities were echoed in Melanchthon’s commentary for the Saxon school ordinance of 1528. Schools, he wrote, were “for raising up people who are skilled to teach in the church and govern in the world.”
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