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 (49 page)

In due course the political wheel of fortune would turn against the Habsburgs, providing German Lutherans with some relief. Once again the critical figure was Maurice of Saxony. Having abandoned the Protestant princes in 1546, he now turned against Charles. Old, tired, and worsted on the field of battle, the emperor abandoned the project of re-Catholicization, leaving it to his brother Ferdinand to settle the question of religion in Germany. The resulting Peace of Augsburg ostensibly gave Lutherans all they could hope for: freedom of religion under the protection of their local prince. But the festering sores left by the memory of the Interim controversies were laid bare in repeated eruptions of theological feuding, as the contending factions fought for possession of Luther’s legacy. At the heart of much of this lay the contentious figure of Matthias Flacius Illyricus.

After the capitulation of Magdeburg, Flacius retreated to Jena. Here in the rump of Ernestine Saxony he found a base from which he could harry the Wittenbergers in a series of theological controversies. These became increasingly abstruse and to many in the movement infuriatingly self-destructive, though most led back in some way to the doubtful accommodations embedded in the Leipzig Proposal, now taking on a canonical status never intended by Melanchthon, who had been trying to make the best of a political emergency.
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Flacius sought targets where he
could find them, first Melanchthon, then the highly respected George Major, even a colleague in Jena. The logical if absurdist consequence was a schism among the Lutheran ultras, leading in 1561 to the expulsion of Flacius and his supporters from Jena.

No sooner was this conflict resolved than a new danger emerged: Calvinism. In the middle years of the sixteenth century, John Calvin was rapidly emerging as one of the most dynamic forces in the international Protestant movement. Although his primary concern was for the conversion of his French homeland, Calvin also had an interest in building the church in Germany (in an earlier stage in his career he had worked for three years in Strasbourg, so was well acquainted with the ecclesiastical politics of the Empire). Calvin’s bruising encounter with the Hamburg Lutherans proved to be no more than a temporary rebuff. By the 1560s Calvinism was making serious inroads in the Empire, particularly among the smaller principalities of the German northwest. Most dangerous of all was the growing indications that the electors of the Palatinate intended to convert their lands to Calvinism. The Rhineland Palatinate occupied a sensitive and strategic territory close to the heartlands of the Calvinist resurgence in western Europe. Any shift in its political allegiance was, therefore, a potent threat to the political balance of power, as a potential military ally to the Calvinist insurgency in France and the Netherlands. Any change in religion here also presaged a full-blown constitutional crisis in the Empire. The guiding principle of the Peace of Augsburg, that each prince should choose the religious disposition of his lands, envisaged only a binary choice between the two prevailing orthodoxies, Catholic and Lutheran. There was no room for the distinctly un-German force of Calvinism.

Yet despite this, the prestige of the Palatinate ensured that this unwelcome interloper could not be ignored, particularly as it became increasingly clear that Calvinist theology was not without appeal to the Melanchthonite wing of Lutheranism. Gnesio-Lutherans, as the orthodox were now known, followed these developments with a dogged determination to root out any signs of backsliding or theological equivocation.
Once again Wittenberg and Electoral Saxony lay at the heart of the crisis. The death of Melanchthon in 1560 and his friend Paul Eber in 1569 finally severed the connection with the first generation of reform. The new leaders of the church soon came under suspicion for doctrinal revisionism, forcing the elector to take the extraordinary step of banning German editions of the new Wittenberg catechism. Worse was to follow. Persuaded now that the crypto-Calvinist tendencies of the Melanchthonite wing of his church amounted to a betrayal of public doctrine, Elector Augustus, who had succeeded his brother Maurice in 1553, had four of its leaders arrested; two died in prison.

Things could not continue this way, and Augustus now joined a concerted effort to heal the rifts that had festered since the divisions opened up by the Schmalkaldic War. The result was the Book of Concord, a new statement of Lutheran belief that closed the door to theological equivocation. It was a resounding victory for orthodoxy, and a repudiation of the spirit of Melanchthon or any accommodation of the foreign force of Calvinism. For two generations relations between Lutherans and Calvinists would be almost more poisoned than those with the forces of resurgent Catholicism: better a Catholic than a Calvinist, was the notorious refrain. Such antagonisms bedeviled attempts to find a common Protestant front in an era of increasing confessional conflict; in this, the convivial cross-confessional celebrations of the 1617 Reformation Jubilee were more a brief interlude than a lasting act of healing.

PROPHET, TEACHER, FRIEND

The querulous disputatiousness of the theological controversy casts a somber light on the troubled decades after Luther’s death, an era paradoxically often thought of as an interval of relative tranquillity between the showdown with Charles V and the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War in 1618. But there was more to Lutheran church life—and far more to Luther’s legacy—than shrill pamphlets and the restless search for
theological purity. In the search for this other Lutheranism it is often the parishioners, the men and women in the pews, who set the tone. Beneath the hubbub of theological argument and the corrosive search for the enemy within, we see the emergence of another form of church: the calm unfolding of a new worship tradition slowly embraced by generations of parishioners. This, for Luther, would have been his true legacy, and perhaps his largest gift to the church: a people confident that separated from the Catholic Church they had found a new and vibrant worship tradition, one that bore all the hallmarks of Luther’s lifelong vocation to build a new Christian people.

A traveler in Germany in the second half of the sixteenth century would inevitably pass through many different political jurisdictions; and thus, through both Protestant and Catholic states. It would not take long for him to discern the confessional allegiance of each locality, purely from the physical appearance of the church interior and the nature of the worship service. It did not require the radically stripped-down austerity of Reformed worship to be aware of the revolution wrought by Luther, most obviously, of course, when the congregation came together in church. Here the tenor and temper of congregational worship would have been utterly different from the Catholic Mass. The traveler would have been struck especially by the prominence of the sermon in a service built around a liturgy in German, and by the high level of congregational participation, evident not only in the vernacular responses but in congregational singing. Lutheran worship was suffused by singing, a passion of Luther’s, and one of his most profound legacies to his church. In the religion of the everyday, this musical heritage was certainly more deeply rooted than any of his leading theological revelations.

For Luther, music was an essential conduit of God’s word.
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So long as it was stripped of its theological monstrosities, he was quite content that the canon of the Mass, the Credo, Gloria, Agnus Dei, should form the framework of the Protestant liturgy. Music was for Luther a multivalent expression of devotion: an articulation of the voice of the Christian community; a comfort to the troubled soul; a powerful teaching tool.
Between 1523 and 1524, a busy and contentious time in his developing movement, he wrote no fewer than forty hymns. Although other ministerial colleagues would eagerly take up the charge, these original compositions of Luther always had a special status in the movement. Many are still sung today. Luther’s hymns were the stimulus for a vast outpouring of composition and publication that utterly defined his movement. In the course of the century, Germany’s printers turned out over one thousand editions of the German hymnal.
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The fact that so many of these survive in only one copy suggests that many further editions may have been published that are now altogether lost. One can say with confidence that in the course of the century several million copies would have been in circulation, for use in the church, the classroom, and the pious home.

It was never Luther’s intention that singing should be confined to the worship service. Luther’s 1524 hymnal was published first and foremost for the Wittenberg town school and its choir. Other hymnbooks were specifically for domestic use, interspersing hymns with prayers appropriate for the family. Luther was careful to ensure that he composed hymns for every part of the catechism. In an age when so much learning was inculcated by rote, song was seen both as a critical aid to memory and as a means of sugaring the pill of endless repetition.

Luther, as we have seen, was both a passionate advocate and an acute philosopher of education. This, along with his musical legacy, was his second major contribution to the development of the Lutheran social community. Luther’s catechism was one of the most popular and republished of his books, but there was nothing prescriptive about its use. Here, as in his benignly curious attitude to liturgy, Luther positively encouraged variety.

These two passions, music and education, coincided in the extensive use of music in the Lutheran schoolroom. We have seen already how striking was the concentration on schoolchildren in the jubilee celebrations of 1617: in the performance of plays, the learning of new prayers, the distribution of commemorative medals. This ubiquitous pedagogic instinct had by this time become thoroughly engrained. It was quite
common in a church community to teach new hymns or catechismal responses first to the children; their voracious memories could then be a help to the slower minds of their elders. In many German towns, the school, and its choir, became a crucial salient of Lutheran pedagogy. The school choir at Joachimsthal made a biannual singing procession through the town. They sang at funerals and at a special procession in Lent, chasing out the pope. This conscious evocation of the medieval practice of driving out death is a neat example of the appropriation of pre-Reformation ritual for new purposes. All of this had its effect; Joachimsthal instituted an hour of congregational singing preceding the Sunday service that was popular and well attended. The Joachimsthal choir was also sent round the town recruiting new scholars:

Come with us, dear children,

And become pious students

We shall lead you to our school

Where you will study God’s Word.
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For Luther and his colleagues the freedom from papal tyranny was only a beginning. The education of the Christian community to a comprehensive understanding of their faith was a necessary part of the process of Reformation. Lutheran pastors would never be content that they had achieved this goal, and regular inspections of parishes by the territorial officials sometimes presented a bleak view of how much still needed to be done.
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But the result was certainly a vast and sustained increase in school provision. Literacy rates took a large step forward, and crucially the gaping chasm between urban and rural education levels began to be addressed. By the end of the century most habitations of any size in Lutheran Germany had a school.

When schoolchildren confronted a raging master, or their parents sang in the church or workplace, they did not always see Luther’s hand at work (perhaps, in the case of the schoolchildren, thankfully so). Their Luther was a different presence: a semimythical figure, a folk memory
through which was channeled many different emotional needs. Teacher, prophet, healer, and friend: Luther was all of these things. From beyond the grave, now beyond reproach and beyond criticism, he continued to guide his flock: a benign giant stripped of the foibles of his lifetime.

This mythical Luther took several forms. There was Luther the prophet.
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The reformers’ own attitudes to their prophetic status had, as we have seen, been decidedly cautious. In their writings Luther and his colleagues seemed extremely doubtful whether the role of prophet could be attributed to any living teacher; unless, that was, the prophetic vocation was defined so loosely that it lost all meaning.
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In Luther’s case the awful warning of the false prophets, and their claim to inspired utterance, was a further incentive to reticence. Paradoxically, this reticence was largely abandoned after Luther’s death, when he was no longer there to prophesy. Volumes of Luther’s prophecies became a popular subculture of the Luther publishing industry.

By the time of his death Luther’s was one of the most famous faces in Christendom. Through the efforts of the Cranach workshop, friend and foe alike had been able to track the physical change in Luther through a series of portraits drawn from life. After his death it was only representations of the mature Luther that were disseminated, on medals, mass-produced studio portraits, and in broadsheets. These provided the opportunity to place Luther in a whole series of new illustrative scenarios: standing foursquare alongside his elector or protectively behind his shoulder; the companion of Jan Hus in a genealogy of reform; tilling the Lord’s vineyard with his Wittenberg companions.

These were the official images of Luther; folk memory and custom created more. Most powerful were the images of Luther as wonder-worker, the chosen one of God. Here Luther is identified as God’s special instrument by quasi-miraculous acts or occurrences. Responding to Catholic taunts that if Luther were a true prophet this should be revealed in miracles, in 1576 Johann Lapaeus accompanied the by now familiar list of Luther’s prophecies with direct evidence of miracles.
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The most spectacular proof of Luther’s special status was the “incombustible
Luther,” portraits of Luther thrown into the flames, which nevertheless refused to burn.
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This was a remarkably early tradition, first found in an account of the burning of Luther’s books at Worms, where a portrait of Luther added to the pyre emerged unscathed. It was also remarkably long lasting, with portraits of Luther discovered in the ruins of burned houses through to the eighteenth century.