In honor of the five-hundredth anniversary, the excellent German art-book publisher Taschen has produced a facsimile with spectacular colored woodcuts. Michael Knoche. Knoche himself ran out with the two volumes in his arms. Anyone who wants to give himself a Luther quincentennial present should order it immediately. The volumes lie flat on the table when you open them, and the letters are big and black and clear. Among the supposedly Biblical rules that Luther pointed out could not be found in the Bible was the requirement of priestly celibacy.
Well before the Diet of Worms, Luther began advising priests to marry. He said that he would marry, too, if he did not expect, every day, to be executed for heresy. One wonders. But in he was called upon to help a group of twelve nuns who had just fled a Cistercian convent, an action that was related to his reforms.
Part of his duty to these women, he felt, was to return them to their families or to find husbands for them. At the end, one was left, a twenty-six-year-old girl named Katharina von Bora, the daughter of a poor, albeit noble, country family.
She was the one who proposed. One crucial factor was her skill in household management. One monk became a cobbler, another a baker, and so on. It was a huge, filthy, comfortless place. A friend of the reformer, writing to an acquaintance journeying to Wittenberg, warned him on no account to stay with the Luthers if he valued peace and quiet.
Luther would accept no money for his writings, on which he could have profited hugely, and he would not allow students to pay to attend his lectures, as was the custom.
Luther appreciated the sheer increase in his physical comfort. When he writes to a friend, soon after his marriage, of what it is like to lie in a dry bed after years of sleeping on a pile of damp, mildewed straw, and when, elsewhere, he speaks of the surprise of turning over in bed and seeing a pair of pigtails on the pillow next to his, your heart softens toward this dyspeptic man.
More important, he began to take women seriously. He objects, in a lecture, to coitus interruptus, the most common form of birth control at the time, on the ground that it is frustrating for women. Every year or so for eight years, she produced a child—six in all, of whom four survived to adulthood—and Luther loved these children. He even allowed them to play in his study while he was working. If he becomes too noisy and I rebuke him for it, he continues to sing but does it more privately and with a certain awe and uneasiness.
Luther was not a lenient parent—he used the whip when he felt he needed to, and poor Hans was sent to the university at the age of seven—but when, on his travels, the reformer passed through a town that was having a fair he liked to buy presents for the children. In , when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene.
Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies.
Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech. A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. We will both probably let go of each other soon.
And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor. The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews.
His sentiments were widely shared. He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing. It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews.
As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal.
People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. Another judge must judge Luther. Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him. Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote.
Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite? Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed?
When Luther was young, he was good at friendship. He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. Hence the fifty-seat dinner table. As he grew older, he changed.
He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon. Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils.
This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews. His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones. Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement.
In early , he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him.
He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. Had he left his message in the interior, in the existential-psychic realm, it would inevitably have developed further into what we now call psychotherapy for the understanding of human helplessness and healing. Trust as the heart of the Protestant Reformation.
This very fragility in humans is what God chooses to give grace to. This is at the core of Protestantism. If this core experience of recapturing the message of Jesus is denied in favor of group-think and compulsory obedience that only serve to bolster the institutionalized security of a sacramental practice that pretends to have God in its pockets, then Protestants can and should never arrange themselves with such fake reassurance by the impersonal.
But that which helps a person to risk living fully in relation to and through trust in God is no human authority, neither in politics nor in the Church, but instead only the Word of God as found in the Bible. Faith that is, trust and the Bible - both are part of the core of Protestantism, and yet, they also in a certain sense are part of the problem of the Protestant tradition.
Protestantism begins essentially with the scene at the Diet of Worms : an individual stands up to the cardinals, the theologians, the emperor who is present but whose opinion does not contribute to the question of what faith is.
This one individual person stands up for what he has recognized in the Bible as God's word and what he, in the name of God and Jesus Christ, seeks to preserve for the spiritual care of people in the church.
There is no turning back. When people dare to do so, then we have a church that can connect to Jesus, which Martin Luther sought to reestablish in his own time and in his own way.
Without this prophetic condensation of existence within the individual person we cannot access what Christianity actually means. Luther is an example of faith by showing that he as a human being, as a person of the Middle Ages, beyond the plethora of his fears, was able to mature only in relation to the person of God toward the courage to risk himself as person.
No other foothold exists for him: neither a reference to his father nor reference to what he has learned, to what he has been in the church, or what role he plays in society. None of that helps him now. Only the relationship with God, grounded in the Word of the Bible in Christ, carries him across the abyss. This dimension is psychologically exemplary for the human character at the beginning of modern times. Luther here really breaks new ground.
Psychotherapy and the Reformation. And for that he deserves also psychological credit. Erik Erikson credit him for this: Luther, he says, was full of problems, full of conflicts, had a neurotic constitution. But how he has worked this out, is exemplary, is truly great. What Erikson did, of course, not appreciate in his studies on Young Man Luther is the religious dimension.
Yet that dimension is the only one that Luther really has at his disposal. The message of Jesus is certainly a kind of psychotherapy, if we interpret it in a Lutheran way. Certainly, it is not simply an interpersonal encounter that serves to exchange kind intentions or insights. Instead we should say: What we call psychotherapy is made possible by the permission to turn to a place of unconditional asylum.
No matter what a person has done, no matter what she has become, she is justified as she is. God accepts me, forgives me, surrounds me, not because I am so good, but because God is so kind.
This is what no society can say to us. Given certain circumstances, society would instead even bring criminal law to bear on a particular case. Even church law cannot say this, because it, too, has a paragraph for everything.
It is really only possible to speak of unconditional acceptance in an absolute, religious sphere of encounter, and precisely in that space therapy takes place. If you will, psychoanalysis is a weak imitation of what once, on the ground of the New Testament, became conscious in the person of Jesus. Paradoxically, from the perspective of the church, it is reminiscent of what could have been within the church, but what now unfolds besides or even against the Church. Faith as trust, sin as despair.
Luther made a decisive contribution to overcome anxiety through trust, and to see in the first place the fundamental tension of human existence, namely that the only basic alternative is between anxiety and trust. This made religion separable from politics, economics and other areas of life. With this, Western society has increasingly struggled to come to a consensus on politics, education and other social issues without the direction of an overarching faith or any shared substantive set of values to replace it.
Although people benefit from individual freedoms that were not available years ago, these freedoms have also led, for instance, to the right for someone to purchase whatever they want without regard for the needs of anyone else. In doing so, factories pollute the environment in ways that contribute to global warming.
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