Her piety is more a matter of inference than record,”1 observed Preserved Smith. Does Katie come up short on piety—on the spiritual side of life? That is one of the questions we explore in this chapter.
How do we judge an individual’s spirituality, especially if we are looking for a role model? A Mother Teresa who devotes her life to serving the poorest of the poor? A megachurch minister who has his own TV program and writes bestselling books? A pope who forsakes red Prada shoes and washes the feet of homeless derelicts? Only God knows the heart. But we all make judgments.
So how do we even begin to comprehend Katharina’s spiritual life—and even that of her husband? Martin has been judged harshly in reference to his vulgarities and anti-Semitism. Yet he had a profound spiritual nature that was invigorated by his love for theological and biblical scholarship. His letter writing and words at table are filled with godly counsel and pious platitudes. And what of Katie? Neither of them, we can conclude, warrant canonization as a saint, even if Protestants had carried on the tradition.
As I pondered how one might assess Katie’s spirituality, I have called forth dozens of women from the pages of Scripture as well as from Christian history. As a hardworking wife and businesswoman, Katie’s biblical match was the Proverbs 31 woman. And actually, like Katie, this woman in Proverbs is not a model for our typical ideal of true spirituality. “She certainly is a remarkable woman,” writes Rich Deem. “However, I maintain she is not the ideal Christian wife . . . What do we know about [her] prayer life? Nothing! We don’t know if she ever prayed.” Deem goes on to observe that this woman was like Martha in the Gospels, “a typical type A personality” who “got irked that her sister [Mary] was sitting” listening to Jesus instead of helping her prepare the meal.2
Mary, the sister of Martha, as we so easily assess her spirituality, is not a biblical match for Katie. But I wonder if Mary, the mother of Jesus, might be. Even suggesting her name, however, is nothing short of shocking. After all, she is the most adored saint of the Catholic Church. How could a runaway nun stand spiritually alongside her? Such a comparison requires us to recognize Mary for who she was—a down-to-earth first-century Palestinian woman.
In Luke’s gospel, we learn that Gabriel appeared and told her that she had been chosen to give birth to the Messiah. Whether or not she recognized this mighty angel, the experience was terrifying. But she has the wherewithal to question the news. She knows better—virgins don’t have babies. Gabriel explains. She solemnly accepts the commission. But only after her cousin Elizabeth blesses her does she sing the Magnificat. And what a song it is. So far there is little comparison between Mary and Katie, except that we glimpse Mary as a confident and questioning woman in her own right. When we meet the virgin Katie as a young adult, she also would have sung that same Magnificat at the Cistercian monastery of Marienthron (Mary’s throne).
“Mary’s story is that of an ordinary woman,” writes Scot McKnight. “Mary has become for many little more than a compliant ‘resting womb’ for God, and she has become a stereotype of passivity in the face of challenge . . . quietude to the point of hiding in the shadows of others.”3
Truly the biblical Mary was an ordinary woman. Argula von Grumbach and others argued that in the sixteenth century. There is no evidence she was both sinless and a virgin her entire life. The Gospels make clear that Mary had children after she gave birth to Jesus, both sons and daughters. In fact, like Katie, she probably had at least six children. And Joseph, like Martin, was apparently much older than his wife. Soon after Mary sings the Magnificat, and after Katie leaves the convent, both are focused on child rearing. If Mary spent much of her life praying (as the concrete statues suggest), the Gospels make no direct reference to it.
In her book God’s Ideal Woman, Dorothy Pape challenges Bible expositors who have characterized Mary as a behind-the-scenes homebody. “But with the possible exception of the angel’s announcement of the coming conception,” writes Pape, “the scriptural record never shows us Mary at home.” Katie spent much of her time at her Black Cloister boardinghouse, but like Mary she was often on the road: Mary “is hurrying off to Elizabeth,” Pape continues, “then going to Bethlehem for the census, then to Jerusalem for purification rites, down to Egypt, back to Nazareth, then to Jerusalem again for the Passover, to Cana for the wedding, to Capernaum, to a city near the Sea of Galilee with her other sons to persuade Jesus to come home, and finally to Jerusalem again.”4
And we can imagine Mary bustling around Nazareth, much like Katie did in Wittenberg. In fact, there is a statue of Katie in Wittenberg that shows her not in prayer but walking, almost on the run. It would be fitting if statues of Mary depicted her in the same way.
Both women present fascinating accounts of spiritual uncertainties. Mary is not fully aware of the implications of the gospel and her son’s role in it. She frets when she discovers that her boy is not with the returning Passover crowds, and she appears more than a little irritated when she learns he had purposely stayed behind to talk to learned men in the temple: “Son, why have you treated us like this,” she demands. “Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you” (Luke 2:48). Years later, when religious leaders were condemning Jesus and saying he was possessed by Beelzebul, his mother and brothers “went to take charge of him, for they said, ‘He is out of his mind’ ” (Mark 3:21). Mary fears for her son’s sanity and wants to bring him home. Another version is even stronger: “they went out to take custody of Him; for they were saying, ‘He has lost His senses’ ” (Mark 3:21 NASB).
Katie in a similar way feared for her husband—that he might lose his senses. And she was sometimes less than certain about the implications of the Reformation. Obviously, the two women played very different roles in salvation history, and Mary’s place is truly on display in biblical proportions. But in the Gospels, she emerges as a very normal first-century woman. It seems unfortunate that we so easily imagine her as an untouchable saint, the gold standard of spirituality. Katie is not seen as such a model, but she too is often airbrushed as a saintly heroine. How important it is to let both women be themselves.
As already noted, viewing Katie alongside Martha in the Gospels, rather than her sister Mary, is not a stretch. “Without marked spirituality,” writes Preserved Smith, Katie “was a Martha busied with many things rather than a Mary [Martha’s sister] sitting in devotion at her master’s feet.”5 Like the Proverbs 31 woman, and for that matter, most of the women in the Hebrew Bible, Katie is not on record as being unusually devout.
Although there are stories of how Martin rose early in the morning to pray, no one has ever suggested that Katie got up at 4:30 for devotions. She rose before dawn to begin her workday. We might wonder if she had gotten all prayed out when she was in the convent. In fact, if we were to characterize Katie’s spirituality after 1525, we would see it most plainly realized in marriage, motherhood, and hard work.
In that sense, she was very different from her God-intoxicated husband. “He makes most sense,” writes Martin Marty, “as a wrestler with God, indeed, as a God-obsessed seeker of certainty and assurance in a time of social trauma and of personal anxiety.”6
One of the stories sometimes told about Katie relates to her challenging not only the Bible but also her husband. As the account goes, Martin was reading about God commanding Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac (Genesis 22). Katie was adamant that God would never command a father to kill his own child. Martin, of course, corrected her and said that’s exactly what God did.7 Whether Katie pressed her point or let it go is not recorded, but the story demonstrates how differently the two of them perceived God, and it also demonstrates Katie’s ease in challenging her husband’s claims on Scripture. And maybe the story has something to say about gender. I’ve known women in my own circle of acquaintances who have strongly objected to an account of Abraham acquiescing without argument—Abraham, the very man who bargained boldly with God in an effort to save Sodom.
Katie, as we have come to know her, was more emotionally balanced than her erratic husband. He struggled with black depression and spiritual despair. “He was sure” writes Marty, “that the nagging, even horrifying Anfechtungen that assaulted him as a young professor and then lifelong were a plague to everyone . . . Anfechtungen attacked with a voice that came during what he called the night battles in the dark chambers of the cloister and of his soul.” Though difficult to define, this was an “inner voice . . . that haunted him,” questioning the very “existence or reality of God.” Luther was convinced that those “who wanted and needed to find and be found right with a gracious God must struggle.”8
Everyone? There is no evidence at all that Katie ever wrestled with God, and certainly not in such dramatic ways as did her husband. She was a woman of the world who had to manage a vast household and farm. There was no time to wrestle with God, especially when she was forced to wrestle with a husband battling demons and the darkness within his own soul.
As stated earlier, the story is also told how Katie confronted Martin on one occasion after he had fallen into a deep, black depression. She took her mourning dress out of storage, put it on, and confronted him in the hallway. “Who died?” the professor asked. “God,” she told him. “You foolish thing,” said Martin. “Why this foolishness?” She was ready with an answer: “It is true. God must have died, or Doctor Luther would not be so mournful.”9 He considered her words. Indeed, he was behaving as though God were dead. Some have cited this story as evidence of Katie’s spiritual insight, but it is more properly seen as a simple object lesson that she hoped would help pull her husband out of his depression.
We should not imagine that most women of the sixteenth century who identified with the Reformation were like Katie—more Martha than Mary—in their spirituality. A number of women wanted to get in on the action: writing treatises, tracts, testimonies, and in other ways defending the tenets of Reformed beliefs, not the least of whom were Argula von Grumbach and Katherine Zell. And they both strongly defended their spiritual heritage by speaking out.
Argula’s heroes were Deborah and Esther, while at the same time she was concerned about what she perceived as biblical constraints. “I am not unacquainted with the word of Paul that women should be silent in church,” she conceded, “but, when no man will or can speak, I am driven by the word of the Lord when he said ‘He who confesses me on earth, him will I confess and he who denies me, him will I deny.’ ”10 She was willing to break the law by conducting religious meetings at her home and officiating at funerals. She faithfully carried on Luther’s reform, outliving him by nearly two decades. The “old Staufferin,” as the Duke of Bavaria cynically describes her, was twice imprisoned, the last time at age seventy shortly before her death. She, not Katie, stands as a spiritual role model.
Katherine Zell likewise defended her preaching by citing biblical precedent. But Katie had no reason to defend herself with Scripture. It is, however, tempting to put words in her mouth—words that help convince the reader that she was a pious evangelical, a role model who demonstrates how we ought to live. Hollie Dermer’s writing illustrates this as she prays a prayer for Katie—a prayer spoken more to her readers than to God:
Once Katie found out that they were indeed to be wed she reflected and then prayed:
“Now I shall no longer be Katharina, runaway nun; I shall be the wife of the great Doctor Luther, and everything I do or say will reflect upon him . . . It’s like an assignment from God. God, keep me humble. Help me to be a good wife to your servant Doctor Luther. And perhaps, dear Father, You can also manage to give me a little love and happiness.”
God heard and answered Katie’s prayer. The Lord blessed them with a very loving, caring marriage.11
We long for Katie’s actual words, though not these. “There are no records to give insights into how Katharina herself discerned her religious calling,” writes Kirsi Stjerna,12 who deals with Katie’s life from her convent years through her two decades as a minister’s wife. But whether a calling or not, she made a profound vocational decision in “facing the unknown and leaving what was for all practical purposes her only family,” her sisters at the convent.13 And what can we make of her spiritual life during the several years she was a nun, as well as during the two years after she escaped? Considering Luther’s condemnation of monasticism, it would be of interest to know her assessment of the system. It is striking that there is no evidence that Katie looked back at her life at the convent in negative terms. Other nuns escaped and brought with them tales of misery and despair. She would have had the perfect forum at the table, but none of the students or other guests ever reported such comments from her. Nor did her husband recount any claims of abuse or unhappiness. Unlike Florentina von Oberweimar, who told a disparaging story of convent life (published in a tract with an endorsement by Martin Luther himself), Katie may have been relatively content and not an active participant in the conspiratorial plans to escape.14
At one point, Katie asked her husband, “Why is it that under the pope we prayed so ardently and frequently and that now our prayers are so cold and rare?” His response, interestingly, seems to speak for them both: “We were [then] driven that way [but now] we are so ice cold and lazy in our prayers that we are not consistent in them.”15 We wonder if Luther was chiding Katie more than himself with “ice cold and lazy.” We know from other sources and his own writings that the phrase would not describe his own outlook—unless he was in the midst of despair. Katie’s own words—“cold and rare”—are telling.
Katie’s praying “ardently and frequently” at the convent also says volumes. Not all nuns could thus speak. Convents were typically not left to their own devices, and that was true of Marienthron. A supervising abbot was assigned to check up on the nuns, and he visited the convent regularly. He was not at all impressed by the devotional life of the nuns, regarding them as slackers in their observance of prayer and careless in their times of collective worship.16 Was Katie one of those lax in worship? Or did she pray, as Martin suggested, only because she was driven to do so? Or did she pray “feverishly, diligently, and frequently,”17 from the heart, as she later recalled. She hardly appears to be driven.
Whether Katie first entered and then left the convent for spiritual reasons—reasons bolstered by Martin’s biblical and theological arguments—is certainly not clear from the available sources. Indeed, there is no evidence that Luther, in all his complimentary comments about her both in letters and at table, ever spoke of her as being an exemplary convert to his teachings, as, for example, Argula was. Whether or not Katie truly thought through his teachings before she escaped, the longing for freedom no doubt was a powerful motivation in itself.
Most of the German nuns in this era did not enter a religious life with unbounded enthusiasm. In fact, many resented the restrictions, and not just those who became enflamed by Reformation teachings. The abbess Verena von Stuben and her nuns at the well-endowed convent of Sonnenburg illustrate this. When Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa (appointed in 1452) sought to institute monastic reform in all the territories of Germany, she balked, as did other well-heeled noblewomen. She had work to do administering her lands and attending politically important weddings, and she could not do it all herself. The nuns willingly ran errands to the village and far beyond.
That she should be cloistered was absurd. Besides (no doubt rolling her eyes at the thought), Cusa was merely a “bourgeois Rhinelander.”18 Who was he to order her around? He did, however, have the power of the church behind him. So she eventually offered a compromise. Cusa could reform the nuns, but she would be exempt. Cusa was adamant. His expectations were clear. The abbess was to be far more than an administrator. Her first duty was to serve as a spiritual role model to the nuns, who would look up to her in their training and devotion to God. More specifically, she was to be present at most, if not all, of the daily hours, choirs, masses, and vespers, not gadding about outside the convent, involved in business or social engagements unbefitting to an abbess.19
When she refused to comply, Cusa ordered her out and appointed his own handpicked abbess. However, Verena managed to stay in control and stall the process for six years, but in the end, it was no contest. The Cardinal not only excommunicated her but also placed the convent under interdict, which among other things did not allow a priest to administer Mass—a huge deal even for flighty nuns. If that were not enough, he used his power to halt all rent payments and put an embargo on food and fuel deliveries. Even the mercenaries who delivered supplies at the behest of Verena’s brother-in-law could not break Cusa’s stranglehold, and Verena, this “true Jezebel,”20 as Cusa called her, was forced to retire. Yet in the years that followed, she won significant victories, including a “handsome annual pension” and a lifting of the ban that had been placed on her and the convent. It is no doubt an understatement: “The cloister was never successfully reformed.”21
What is most significant about this account is the drastic gap between expectations and reality—particularly in light of the church’s efforts to reform the convents by tightening discipline. Such reform efforts were well underway when Katharina was progressing through the monastic system. What we wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall observing her and her compliance with spiritual expectations. Did she participate with passion, or did she merely go through the motions?
What if Katharina had become a celebrated abbess with all the spunk she demonstrated as a ruling matron of the Black Cloister? How different her life would have been—and dare we say, less fulfilling. Unlike some celebrated abbesses, Katie had no deep spiritual insights to offer. She was no Hildegard, who filled her days and notebooks with vivid revelations and messages from God. From what we know of Katie, such spirituality would not have easily conformed to her psychological makeup. What did conform was discussion at table, and she was not simply a silent observer.
On one occasion, she challenged her husband: “How could David say, ‘Judge me according to my righteousness,’ when he didn’t have any?”22 Good question. Hadn’t her husband repeatedly quoted Paul that none of us have righteousness? Luther liked to brag about his wife, as in a letter he wrote in 1535. He sent greetings, as he often did, from not just “Katie,” but “my lord Katie,” boasting about her wide-ranging activities, including planning fields and selling cows. But the kicker in this letter was to say that he had baited her with a hefty amount of money—50 gulden—if she would finish reading the Bible before Easter, having already nearly read through the Pentateuch.23 But the outcome was not assured. When he was nagging at her to reach the goal he had set, she reportedly sassed back, “I’ve read enough. I’ve heard enough. I know enough. Would to God I lived it.”24
Katie’s primary understanding of Scripture, we can assume, came not from reading but rather from her sitting at table as her husband interacted with students. Though it may have been a backhanded compliment, Luther on one occasion reportedly remarked, “Katie understands the Bible better than any papists did twenty years ago.”25
Since he assumed that “papists” two decades removed understood next to nothing about the Bible, we might wish he would have offered a more convincing compliment. But there are indications she was biblically and theologically competent, if not astute. Indeed, we imagine her as wife, mother, and entrepreneur, not particularly a scholar. But she did enjoy sitting at table listening to the discussions and debates among students and her husband. From the “table talk” notes, it appears she was not always appreciated, but she was Doctorissa, perhaps only to designate that she was “Doctor” Luther’s wife. We know from correspondence, as well as from “table talk,” that she understood enough Latin to interact with matters being discussed.26
But the fact remains that Katie was more a Martha than a Mary who was focused on learning at the feet of Jesus. When Luther had been so ill in the summer of 1527 that he and some of his closest friends believed he was dying, he prepared for the end: “In a loud prayer he surrendered himself to God’s will,”27 as he had repeatedly done. But the assurance he needed most was not from God. “Several times he turned to his ‘beloved Katy,’ admonishing her to submit to God’s will. She should remember that she, the former nun, was his wife and she should concentrate on God’s Word.”28
Dr. Katie was known for her medical skills, and she was on call when a serious problem arose and often exchanged helpful hints with other women in the community. In fact, at times the Black Cloister became a virtual hospital. Luther highly approved of this ministry to the sick, but he had concerns. Expertise and medicine were not enough. He wrote about this problem that “our wives, even Kate, experience: that intercession [to God] applies only to their husbands, not to them. Consequently, to the women’s disadvantage, they do not use it [prayer and Scripture] when they need it.”29
Katie would have no doubt responded that the women—particularly when confronting a serious medical issue like a difficult birth—were too focused on what had to be done. Let the men do the praying. He had written to her about prayer when he was away in 1540, urging her to pray, not for him specifically, but for another reason: “Pray diligently, as you owe it to our Lord Christ.”30
Luther felt compelled to nag Katie to improve her devotional life. Not so Philip Melanchthon with regard to his wife Catherine, if the words of Joachim Camerarius are taken at face value:
She was a very pious woman, who loved her husband devotedly; an industrious and active mother of her family, liberal and benevolent towards all, and so careful for the interests of the poor, that she did not only lose sight of her ability and strength in the distribution of her charities, but even interceded for them among her friends, with the greatest earnestness, and even impetuosity. She led a spotless life, and was so anxious to cultivate a pious and honorable character, that she did not concern herself about expensive entertainments, or costly dress.31
It is difficult to imagine Katie being described as “very pious” or leading a “spotless life . . . so anxious to cultivate a pious and honorable character.” In many respects, this first lady of the Reformation, the one who is referred to as the first Protestant pastor’s wife, was an ordinary woman of her times married to a man who led a far less than spotless life himself. Her pride and prejudices often mirrored his own, and we dare not clothe her (or him) with an undeserved mantle of Christian graciousness. Her apparent anti-Semitism is evident in a letter from Martin in 1545 (a year before his death), telling her how he suddenly became physically weak and dizzy as he and his party were approaching Eisleben. He tells her that his severe headache was [for whatever reason] his own fault. He goes on, however, to make a crude anti-Semitic joke, which he would have assumed Katie would find humorous, saying that if she had been with him, she would have blamed it on the Jews, who were blowing a cold, icy wind at him. If he were not so consumed with theological reform, he tells her, he would focus his attention on ridding the country of Jews.32
How did she react to that letter? We don’t know. Did she laugh in agreement, or did she wish that her husband would behave more like a good Christian? Unfortunately, the way to understanding Katie is through her husband, and his letters and talk at table are often inconclusive.
Martin’s words to Katie in his letters of February 1546, less than two weeks before he died, as previously noted, however, are quite revealing:
Dear Kate, read St. John and the smaller catechism, of which you once said: Really everything in this book is applicable to me. For you want to care for your God, precisely as if he were not almighty, and could create ten Dr. Martins, if this aged one should perish in the Saale, or in the oven, or on Wolf ’s bird-decoy.33
Here Martin packs a lot in a very short paragraph: read the gospel of John and the smaller catechism, reminding her of her own words—that she had once said that everything in at least one of the books was applicable to her. What follows is more difficult to discern through translation. But he seems to be accusing her of wanting to care for her God as though he were not almighty. In some ways, that assessment sums up Katie’s spirituality—and that of many of us. She went about her daily tasks guided by the axiom that “God helps those who help themselves.” Martin, however, stressed prayer and God’s almightiness in every aspect of life.
Unlike her husband, Katie did not have people hovering around her bedside, begging for final words and confessions, when she died. Indeed, the only final words we have from her come in dozens of versions in English alone, including, “I will cling to Jesus”; “I will cling to Christ like a burr on a dress [like a burr on a topcoat; like a burr to a frock]”; “I will stick to Christ like a burr on cloth”; “I cling to my Lord Christ”; and J. H. Alexander’s version: “I will cling to Christ like a burr on a velvet coat.”34 What a holy way to depart this world of physical pain—except that such platitudes are untrue.
Like almost every effort to put pious words in Katie’s mouth, this saying comes with dubious authenticity. “The quote has been popularly ascribed to Katharina Luther, née von Bora, as her deathbed expression of faith.”35 But despite its many recurrences and its attribution to her, it more properly belongs to Duchess Katharina of Saxony, and the words may very well have been put in her mouth as well. They were transferred to Katie in the nineteenth century.36
In one sense the burr analogy is fitting. Katie the farmer would have had many of them clinging to her skirt. Her spirituality was infused with hard work, often out in the fields. She would have hitched up her rough woolen skirt and would still have to yank off the annoying burrs. So also her life, as the adage is remembered: “How full of briars [or burrs] is this working-day world!”37
Martin Luther comforted himself in the face of death, even as he had in the deaths of his daughters. His words of consolation, whether quoted with any precision or not, are vintage Luther: “You will rise again, and shine like a star, yea, as the sun. I am joyful in spirit, but I am sorrowful in the flesh. We . . . should not lament as those who have no hope; we have dismissed a saint, yea, a living saint for heaven. O, that we could so die! Such a death I would willingly accept this very hour.”38
His words are not Katie’s. There is no indication that her worldview was so spiritually optimistic. Her life was filled with burrs, especially those unbearable burrs of her daughters’ and her husband’s deaths—and that terrible burr of her own death, which meant leaving behind motherless children.