Renegade

Over my career, I have read dozens of biographies of Martin Luther. Almost every single one spends far more time on Luther up to 1525, than Luther after that date. The ‘early Luther’ is the Luther of drama—of the Ninety-Five Theses and the defiant ‘Here I stand’ at the Diet of Worms. The later Luther can be grumpy, contentious, and sometimes just boring as he taught Old Testament day in and day out. Forbidden to leave the boundaries of Electoral Saxony, this is a Luther who has nowhere near the drama of the early 1520s. Roper’s biography is typical in this fashion. She devotes three hundred pages to Luther up to 1525, but just over one hundred to the remaining twenty-one years of his life. The first one hundred pages take the reader to the Ninety-Five Theses.

Roper is a masterful writer. Martin Luther was born in November 1483, to an upwardly mobile entrepreneur in the booming mining industry. The story is engaging and alive with small details—the smells of mining or the brawls between those who dug mines and those who operated the winches. Indeed, these small details run throughout the book making it, at times, a simple joy to read. Roper has a gift for immersing the reader into the sights and sounds and smells of Germany in the late-medieval era. These details of life, for the details of mining and common living in Holy Roman Empire—there are abundant sources, and she has, pardon the pun, mined them all to her and the reader’s benefit. In later chapters, when she describes what would have happened to Luther during the first days in the Erfurt Augustinian friary, she likewise has tremendous sources. She can turn, for example, to official court records in describing the mining industry because all the mines ultimately belonged to the nobility who owned the land and that which was beneath it. People like Hans Luder (Luther’s father) did not own but merely leased them. For monastic life, there are literally hundreds of texts from the era that describe in minute details life within the closed walls of an abbey. This, however, is not the case for the life of Martin Luther. Though the scholarly edition of his works, D. Martin Luthers Werke, which was begun in 1883 and was not completed from more than a century, contains over one hundred volumes of his writings, lectures, sermons, commentaries, as well as his letters, and then later his musings over dinner with friends and students—the so-called Table Talk (more on them in a moment)—documentation for his early life until he began to teach in Wittenberg in 1514, is miniscule.

The earliest letter we have from Luther is from 1501 and it is less than a paragraph, written to an old teacher while Luther was at university. It is the kind of letter one might write to a teacher, but tells us almost nothing about Luther other than he was a fairly polite young man of seventeen who wrote a former teacher a nice letter. The next letter is not for another two years, and then another four years after that for the next letter. All told, there are exactly six extant letters from Martin Luther before he began teaching in 1514. How then does one construct the inner Luther during these formative years? Here is rub for Roper. In order to construct the early Luther, she must depend almost entirely on the reflections of the later Luther. She does this by combing through his later letters where he describes some incident of the past. She also depends a great deal—throughout the book—on his Table Talks. The Table Talks are a rich resource for many of the juiciest stories of Luther. Here Luther is wont to even say, as she notes in one chapter, that Christ committed adultery three times. And thus, the danger of depending on the Table Talks for constructing a sense of the inner man. The Table Talks are free-wheeling dinner conversation tidbits. Luther was always a showman, and this comes across in the Table Talks. But do they really reveal the inner man? Probably, but in colors and broad brush strokes, not in finely etched details. The letters present similar problems. Most of these come from much later. They are the reflections of a middle-aged man on his younger self. Too often, people do not realize how old Luther was when he posted the Ninety-Five Theses or walked to the Diet of Worms. This is partly due to the portraits we have of him. One of the earliest is from this era, it is an etching – so it is black and white. Luther is thin and muscular. The other famous picture of him is from much, much later. This is a color painting. The skinny monk is now an obese old man. The etching and the painting reinforce the false dichotomy between the so-called ‘Young Luther’, and the ‘Late Luther’. But Martin Luther was ten days shy of his thirty-fourth birthday when he posted the Ninety-Five Theses. When he stood before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms, he was twice the young emperor’s age. Why does this matter? Because we know that Luther was always concerned with his own self-understanding and self-fashioning. He later cast his life in prophetic terms, a voice called from the Wilderness to reform a fallen and corrupt church. Roper knows this and tries to steer clear of the pitfalls of using these sources, but at times she cannot help it.

This is apparent for example in one of the early and prominent motifs—that of the renegade. Here Luther moves from rebellion to rebellion, from one father figure to the next. Hans Luder comes across far better here than he did in Erik Erickson’s telling (or Richard Marius’), but he is a force to be reckoned with, both physically and psychically. Roper tells us a number of times of his physical dominance and of his ambition. Young Martin was his hope for the future—a mining scion. But Martin rebelled in 1505 and joined the monastery, breaking this relationship. Here Roper successfully charts a course away from the rocks that shattered Erickson’s story. One can read far too much into Hans’ anger. Most fathers, indeed most parents, would react rather angrily to a twenty-one-year-old’s sudden decision to alter the entire direction of his life without even the slightest bit of consultation. Here the decision to enter the monastery is one of rebelliousness and less a desire to save his soul.

The desire to save his soul only really comes to the fore once Luther has entered the monastery. Here Hans has been replaced by Johannes von Staupitz—Luther’s mentor and confessor—and God the Father. Here, finally, the rebel and renegade confronts a Father who cannot be overcome. The Father in Heaven looks sternly down and judges harshly. Luther the rebellious sinner cannot run from this Father. Rather he is struck down in fear and trembling—in Anfechtungen. Anfechtungen, a word that looms large in Luther’s discourse and in Luther scholarship, is difficult to translate. Bainton described it as the fear and affliction of one who dreaded his near certain damnation. He then left the word untranslated in the rest of his biography. Roper has followed this lead. Erickson located the source of some of Luther’s Anfechtungen in the repressed sexuality of a late adolescent. Roper dismisses lust in a single sentence. It was not lust, but fear of the God the Father. What goes unanswered in Roper’s account is the actual source of Luther’s fear. Yes, he feared damnation. But he feared damnation because of sin—actual sins. And here the dependence upon later reflections, I think, harms her analysis. She says lust could not have been one of Luther’s fears because he once remarked that nocturnal emissions are simply a natural part of the life of a male, while in other places he remarked he did not even look at women during this era. Here we have an older-man’s self-reflection, however. He is a forty-eight-year-old looking back. The lack of lust served the theological purposes of the older Luther. It was not lust that plagued him—or even his fellow young monks—but the futility of works in general. Good works could not overwhelm the dread of damnation. However, if one looks at letters Luther wrote almost fifteen years after this era, while in Wartburg, he laments the degree to which his body betrayed him. Lust was a problem for him then; it burned within him. Should we simply assume that it was not an issue for the twenty-two-year-old Luther but was for the thirty-four-year-old? Here Roper has been misled by the later Luther’s self-fashioning and theological reframing of his life.

Prophet

Sometime around 1517, we are not positive of the exact day, Brother Martin Luder began to use the name Luther, explaining that it came from eleutherius. It was fairly common for Humanists of the sixteenth century to either Latinize or Hellenize their last names, such as when Philip Schwartzertd became Philip Melanchthon. Luder, unfortunately meant tramp in German and so was less than ideal for a simple translation into either Latin or Greek. So, instead, Brother Martin chose a homophone – one with a much more pleasing connotation. Eleutherius connotes one who has been freed or one who brings liberation. Both connotations would have pleased Martin in 1517. Having now arrived a new understanding of the justification by faith, he was the one freed from the works. He was also, he believed, called to bring this good news to others. Luder became the one freed, the one who frees.

Here, as Roper traces Luther from October 1517 and the posting of the Ninety-Five Theses, she is on much surer ground. Now, because he was famous and people saved their letters to and from him, the historian has a far richer hoard of primary texts from which to build a portrait. She passes over in near silence the debate over whether or not Luther posted the Theses on the door of the Wittenberg Castle Church or simply mailed them to his prince. A number of reviewers may take her to task for this, but I do not think it is the biographer’s job to follow every rabbit into every warren of Luther scholarship. In the end, it makes very little difference which one he did—the content of the Theses was explosive whether ‘posted’ to the door, or ‘posted’ in the mail. And Roper is right to note that Luther intended to be provocative and perhaps even helped foment their popularity. She does, however, tend to over-exaggerate the degree to which Luther and his new-found prophetic voice was solely responsible for the division that followed. For example, Cardinal Cajetan comes across as a diplomat seeking some sort of compromise position when he met with Luther at Frederick the Wise’s insistence in October 1518. Luther’s arrival on one of the days of discussion with the Papal Legate with a legal counselor is here represented as a provocation. What is left unsaid is that Cajetan’s hands had been tied by both the Holy Roman Emperor and the Pope before he even met with Luther. Luther was to completely recant or face extradition to Rome for trial as a heretic. When it became clear to Luther that a discussion was not to be had, prudence dictated that he bring a lawyer with him, which he did. It was not the stunning act of either rebellion or prophecy that dictated that decision. It was simple self-preservation.

Despite a few such moments, what does become clear is the degree to which Luther, especially after Rome had excommunicated him, became increasingly comfortable in the role of prophet. Even the most theologically compelling treatise of 1520—On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church—harkens to this new prophetic identity. Rome is Israel in Babylon and Luther represents himself as a prophet calling the church to repentance. Roper also strikes the right chord when discussing Luther’s prophetic identity as he approached the Diet of Worms. What I wished she had delved into a bit more is the degree to which Luther almost certainly felt he was walking to his martyrdom in Worms. The belief that this would be has last prophetic moment lends his reluctance to capitulate there a deeper meaning than simple rebellion or stubbornness. This was to be his final testament.

At this point, we are now three-quarters of the way through the book and the rest moves with great speed. Roman Catholic readers will appreciate the attention Roper pays to Luther’s understanding of the physical and the bodily and how this helps explain his refusal to follow Zwingli on the memorialist understanding of the Eucharist, though some may grimace when she says this view of the physical and bodily is alien to the modern worldview. Roper slows one last time, and it is a topic worth slowing for: Luther’s anti-Semitism. She calls Luther a ‘grand hater’ (p. 384) and begins the chapter with his anti-papal tracks. This mistakes propaganda with actual enmity, however. Luther was never a grand hater of the papacy the way he was with the Jews. Even his early work, That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew, is not really a pro-Jewish tract. It was meant to convert them. Roper is to be praised for not trying to offer Luther any excuses. There are none. Where she does misstep, I think, is to overestimate 1) Luther’s uniqueness and 2) his prophetic voice on this note. Luther was not unique, which is what makes him so chilling. He was more widely read than many of his colleagues, but his voice on the Jews was not remarkable. He was a voice not unlike many, many preachers of the medieval era when it came to the Jews. For example, the Judensau (a statue on one of the eaves, representing a pig suckling Jews—it is virulently anti-Semitic) on Wittenberg’s main church had been there for two centuries before Luther first preached a single sermon anywhere. By overestimating his uniqueness, she then overestimates his influence. Germany did not need Martin Luther to discover anti-Semitism; it was already there as it was in so many other places in the medieval world.

Roper’s Luther

The greatest contribution Roper makes among the panoply of Luther biographies is to present a human Luther. Yes, he is presented in grand and bold colours, but Luther—even among his contemporaries—was regarded as a larger than life person. But Roper has done a wonderful job of humanizing him. He has weaknesses here, not grossly distorted ones as in Erickson or Richard Marius’s biographies, but rather mundane weaknesses that make the reader recognize a person behind the myth. She gets a few small facts wrong. For example, Emperor Charles V was Emperor Maximilian’s grandson, not son. Had he been his son, there would have been very little to haggle over when it came to electing the next emperor. What made Charles’s election precarious was that he was but a boy of nineteen. His father died when he was five. Despite these, this is a wonderfully rich, detailed biography that adds much to our understanding of Luther—the person.