FROM ERFURT TO WITTENBERG
Martin Luther, the bright and ambitious son, was sent to the University of Erfurt in 1501 by financially secure artisan parents who hoped to see him make a name for himself by progressing through the arts curriculum to the study of law. For nearly four years he devoted himself not only to the traditional pursuits of logic and natural philosophy which formed the core of the curriculum at the universities but also to the newly fashionable studies of classical Latin literature known at the time as the “humanities” (studia humanitatis) or “good literature” (bonae literae), and known to modern historians as “humanism.” But returning to Erfurt from a visit home in summer 1505, he was overtaken by a ferocious summer storm, and the lightning was so close that he prayed desperately for his life. Reacting to the situation in a typically medieval way, he appealed to a saint for intercession, making a vow to Saint Anne—a favorite late medieval saint, the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary—that if she preserved him from death, he would devote himself to the religious life.
Vows to saints were commonplace in Catholic Europe, intimately connected with the practice of pilgrimage. Healing and deliverance, along with successful or unproblematic childbirth, were common motives for such vows, which might be made by people of any social status, from cobblers to kings, and indeed were often offered up by entire communities or cities, for example in seeking to avert or survive visitations of epidemic disease. Luther himself, in an earlier brush with death, a deep wound to the leg which he claimed was a self-inflicted injury (an accident with a sword), had twice invoked the assistance of the Blessed Virgin to save him from bleeding to death.1
It is not entirely clear why Luther chose Saint Anne, and he never explained his choice. Her feast day was 26 July, but that lay some weeks ahead when Luther found himself in the storm. The shrine of Saint Anne at Düren in the far west of Germany had seen a popular pilgrimage develop in the early years of the sixteenth century, so maybe she was just a little more in the popular mind at that time. She was, by some accounts, a patron saint to those in danger from thunderstorms, but a more likely consideration is that she was the patron saint of miners—his father’s profession. In Luther’s native town of Eisleben, a new church to Saint Anne would be built in the suburbs in the 1520s, and there may already have been a chapel dedicated to her, or at least plans to erect a church. Saint Anne was, as these examples indicate, an increasingly prominent figure in late medieval piety, as the mother of Mary and therefore the matriarch, so to speak, of the Holy Kin. There is nothing extraordinary in Luther’s invocation of this saint at a moment of crisis. His impulsive appeal to her was probably little more than a reflection of contemporary devotional fashion. Such recourse to the saints was entirely normal in medieval Catholicism.
That Luther made a vow in such a moment of terror is not remarkable at all. That he kept his vow is much more revealing. On 16 July 1505, to the astonishment of his student friends, Luther threw over the study of law, upon which he had only just embarked, to enter the Erfurt house of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine (the Augustinian or Austin Friars). The day was not without significance. It was the feast day of Saint Alexius, who was himself said to have renounced worldly wealth and prospects to take up the religious life.
According to one alternative account, however, Luther had a very different reason for fleeing from the world into the cloister: the need to avoid prosecution for homicide after having killed a man in a duel or brawl. This notion, launched upon a rightly skeptical world nearly forty years ago by an amateur historian, Dietrich Emme, has proven surprisingly unappealing to an age which not only delights in finding that heroes have feet of clay and cupboards full of skeletons, but has also been absurdly receptive to quaint ideas about religious leaders (compare, for example, the credulity with which so many respond to the idea that Jesus Christ was married to Mary Magdalene). Luther the homicide, however, has won less of a following than Luther the homicide detective. The idea itself, though constructed with the usual panoply of scholarship, is sadly without merit. Nothing could be more piquant than the notion that the founder of the Protestant tradition joined a monastery because he was on the run, but it will not do. Were there any truth in it, it would make nonsense of Luther’s own perfectly straightforward account of how he joined the Augustinians because of his vow to Saint Anne. Luther was capable of misremembering things and misrepresenting things. But he was hardly a barefaced liar, and to represent as the fruit of piety a decision which actually arose from criminal necessity would require some explaining. The weak point of Emme’s theory, as so often with dubious historical theories, is that there is no evidence for it. He bases his entire case on a couple of stray remarks from Luther’s “table talk,” recorded by devoted disciples decades later, but neither of these remarks has anything to do with a homicide.2 The key text in Emme’s theory is one in which Luther attributed his joining the friars to the providential will of God, who brought this about “in case they caught me,” adding, “Otherwise I would have been caught really easily.”3 Sadly, this recollection is rather obscure, leading one recent scholar to accept Emme’s hypothesis on the grounds that it is difficult to make sense of Luther’s comment in any other terms.4 But there is no context to suggest who “they” might have been, and absolutely nothing anywhere to link this with any supposed homicide. Emme’s error is to presume that the risk from which admission to the religious order protected Luther was a risk which pertained at that time. The easiest way to make sense of Luther’s comment is to refer it to the time in his life when “they” really were out to capture him, namely the later 1510s, when it is certainly the case that key men in his order, such as Johann von Staupitz, did what they could to protect him, and when his ideas spread very rapidly among his German confrères. As a secular doctor of theology in a similar position, he would have been far more exposed to the machinations of his enemies. As a friar, he benefited from the solidarity that medieval institutions tended to show with their members.
The disproof of Emme’s thesis, though an argument from silence, is utterly compelling. Had Luther indeed killed someone in a student brawl, whether by accident or design, and had he then secured legal immunity by joining a religious order, the scandal could never have escaped the eagle eyes of his enemies. Even the whisper of such a rumor could hardly have been missed by Luther’s first and most hostile biographer, Johannes Cochlaeus. On the first page of his life of Luther, Cochlaeus, after a brief account of his subject’s parentage, birth, and childhood, comes down off the fence by informing us that the future friar, from his first years in the religious life, was already remarkable for weird behavior, which was a sign either of mental illness or of some “occult commerce with the devil.”5 An author so desperate for muck to rake could never have missed something as juicy as a rumor of manslaughter, especially not if it was something Luther himself had spoken of at his noisy and well-reported dinner table. Nor could a scandal of such a kind have passed unnoticed. Luther’s theology professor at Erfurt, Bartholomaeus Arnoldi of Usingen (generally known as Dr. Usingen), who joined the Augustinians at Erfurt himself a few years later, could hardly have been unaware of the matter if Luther really had required his order’s protection to elude arrest and justice. The story would have been the talk of both university and friary. Nor would Dr. Usingen have had any motive to let the story languish in decent obscurity. Although originally on good terms with his former pupil, he subsequently became an implacable foe of Luther and his new doctrine, publishing around a dozen pamphlets in defense of the old faith in the last ten years of his life. In the mid-1520s, he had to leave Erfurt because of the triumph of the Reformation there, and he moved to Würzburg, where he died in 1532.6 It is inconceivable that he would not have known and disseminated such a discreditable story had there ever been so much as a whisper of it.
Had Luther fled to the monastery, or been consigned there, on account of manslaughter, then this fact would in addition have constituted a serious impediment to his ordination, and he would certainly have required a papal dispensation in order to be made a priest. There is no indication that such a dispensation was ever sought or issued. Nor can one take Luther seriously as a swordsman. Emme interprets an earlier episode in his student career, when he nearly bled to death as a result of a self-inflicted sword injury, with typical bravura, seeing in this story a veiled account of another duel.7 Yet even though Crotus Rubianus remembered the young Luther as handy with his fists—an entirely credible observation, given the unmistakable indications of short temper found all over his writings—it is a big step from there to sword fighting.8 And a man who almost killed himself with his own sword is unlikely to have been a first-rate fencer. No, Luther the homicide has to be regretfully put away.
At the time, Luther’s decision to commit himself to the religious life was seen as both voluntary and providential. His novice-master in the order, Johannes Nathin, saw in his conversion a miraculous intervention by God,9 and no doubt Luther himself saw things in the same light. (He was always something of a self-dramatist, and had he ended his days in some parallel universe as a respected Catholic theologian and preacher, this story might have had a central place in his hagiography.) It is all the harder, therefore, to know what to make of his later claim that his vow was “forced and necessary” (which plays a key part in Dietrich Emme’s curious speculations).10 His decision, by his own account, was entirely voluntary and indeed positively willful, taken without the knowledge of his father (who would rather have seen his son an affluent lawyer than a mendicant friar) and persisted in despite the urgings of his friends. If Luther saw any coercion here, it had to be the hand of God at work, and at times he writes as if this were the case. But in the light of his later conviction that monastic vows were intrinsically sinful, as breaches of both the first and the fourth commandments (Luther followed the Catholic numbering of the Ten Commandments), it would make no sense to infer that, in his view, God had compelled him to join his religious order: that would be equivalent to God having compelled him to sin—a moral and metaphysical impossibility in the Western theological tradition. What “forced” Luther into the cloister was the same thing that ultimately “forced” him out of it: his conscience, that powerful and unruly organ.
It says something very important about Luther that he kept his vow. Not many people, even then, held themselves bound by hasty vows taken privately in moments of crisis. And there were plenty of pressures brought to bear. His father, in particular, was unimpressed. His friends urged him to reconsider. One of the effects of his theological conversion was to be a total reconsideration of the nature of monastic and devotional vows, thanks to which, twenty years later, he freed himself sufficiently from his former conscience to enable himself not only to abandon the habit and habits of a friar but eventually to take a wife. In the summer of 1521, in hiding at the remote Saxon fortress of the Wartburg, Luther was able to rethink his vows in the light of his new understanding of the “gospel” (as he liked to term his new religious message). In doing so, he recalled a couple of things his father had said to him at the time of his entry into religion. The first was this:
When, to the great annoyance of my father, I had made my vow, after he had calmed down, he said to me “Let us hope it was not some trick of Satan’s!” That saying put down such roots in my heart that I never heard anything from him that I have preserved more tenaciously. It seems to me that God spoke to me as though from afar through his mouth, too late to make a difference, but still enough to constitute a warning and a correction.
This should not be misread (as it is by the translators of Luther’s correspondence, who turn “it seems” into “it seemed”) as a claim that Luther had been troubled by his father’s words from the moment he uttered them.11 Rather, it was only in 1521, at the very crisis of his life, when, as far as he knew, he had faced death by appearing before the emperor in the Reichstag at Worms, that the full significance of his father’s words, echoing down the years, dawned upon him.
The other comment of his father’s that stuck in Luther’s mind was an invocation of the fourth commandment, “Honor thy father and mother.” This recollection, about thirty years later, was focused on his first celebration of mass, which is when he reports his father as having said to him: “Son, don’t you know that you ought to honor your father?”12 This comes across as though his father is already providentially voicing the case against monastic vows that Luther was to work out in the early 1520s. But the comment itself was surely, in its original context, no more than a simple statement of an obvious reproof: the son owed it to his parents to discuss his vocation with them. What the story certainly shows is that Luther took his decision for himself, without consulting his family. His father’s evident rage on hearing the news is understandable—a poor friar was much less likely than a successful lawyer to be able to look after his parents in their old age. But it is worth noting Luther’s comment that his father’s speculation about the diabolical instigation of the storm that had precipitated his son’s act was voiced tarde—late, that is, too late. Luther had presumably found it wiser and safer to inform his father after the event. Even at the age of 22 a young scholar, however handy with his fists, might have had something to fear from a burly miner.
In 1505 Luther was a medieval Catholic with a strong and lively conscience. So his vow was binding. You could under some circumstances escape from monastic vows, thanks to the supreme jurisdiction exercised within the Roman Catholic Church by the pope. Thus, Luther’s renowned contemporary, Desiderius Erasmus, secured a papal dispensation in 1517 releasing him from the monastic vows he had undertaken as a teenager, when consigned to the religious life by his guardians. It was this dispensation that enabled Erasmus to live the wandering life of a freelance scholar, rather than spend his days immured behind the walls of some monastery or on the run as an “apostate” or “gyrovague” monk.13 But Luther, unlike Erasmus, had taken his vows as an adult, with full knowledge of the implications. The German province of the Austin Friars had just the previous year promulgated revised statutes, under which no one could be admitted to the order under the age of 18. But Luther was already over 21. In the modern world, more discriminating procedures for the assessment of vocations would dismiss a decision taken in haste and under stress, and the analysis of consent in courts of all kinds is far more subtle. Around 1500 it was only manifest duress that would have allowed people to wriggle out of such a promise. Until he felt himself released from his vows by the logic of his new theology (which was only in the early 1520s), Luther neither questioned their binding character nor sought to escape them.
Curiously enough, the Bible offers a tale of a rash vow, and, fortuitously, we have Luther’s comments on it, in some lecture notes that survive from the period before his theological breakthrough. The tale is that of Jephthah, who, before going out to make war on the enemies of Israel, swore that if he returned home victorious, he would make a burnt offering to the Lord of whatever should come forth from the doors of his house to meet him. Predictably enough, his triumphant return was marred by the emergence from those doors of his daughter, who herself insisted that he should keep his word to the Lord, as a result of which “he did with her according to his vow” (Judges 11:30–40). Many medieval exegetes, revolted by the idea of human sacrifice, and equipped with a theology that allowed and indeed required the non-fulfilment of rash and illicit vows, found in the euphemistic phrasing of the final verse of that story an excuse for arguing that, rather than actually killing his daughter, Jephthah merely brought about her “death to the world” by dedicating her to a life of virginity—a naively anachronistic application of medieval concepts of the religious life to the very different world of ancient Israel. Luther would have none of that. For him, Jephthah fulfilled his vow to the letter. Much later on, he would criticize Jephthah’s vow as “ungodly because it was contrary to charity.”14 But by that time he had utterly changed his entire conception of the place of vows in Christian life. Before his own conversion, he held Jephthah to the same exacting standard as himself.
Living as a friar, under a vow of obedience, Luther was at the beck and call of his religious order, which decided on where he should live and how he should work. So he did as he was told, moving from Erfurt to Wittenberg for the academic year 1508–9 to teach, then back to Erfurt to resume theological study, before being returned once more to Wittenberg, which was to be his home for the rest of his life, to take up the professorship of scripture there. It was his religious order, likewise, which sent him to Rome over the winter of 1510–11, the only time he ever set foot outside his native land, on a sort of business trip. In the 1510s he was entrusted with higher responsibilities, serving for several years as a district vicar, with supervisory responsibility for 10 houses.15 Luther at this time was hardly famous, but he was certainly a coming man among the Augustinians, and his brethren would have been expecting him to rise at least to the heights of Johann Staupitz as provincial vicar, and maybe higher still. There was no room for doubt about his talent, and though his temperament may have been questioned, he might also have been expected to mellow with age. If anything, Luther was to be one of those whose edges harden with age, but that could not have been foreseen at the time.
Luther entered fully, conscientiously, and at times belligerently into the religious life of the Austin Friars. We have his own word for it that he was a devout and dedicated friar, and there is no reason to doubt him.
I was a real saint, I celebrated mass every day, and confessing with a pure body and heart I prepared to offer the sacrifice.16
After his death, a former confrère from the Erfurt house testified to the young Luther’s devotional zeal.17 He was keen to recite the canonical hours of prayer, and became neurotically anxious in the 1510s when his increasing responsibilities as a university lecturer and a senior member of his order inevitably made it difficult for him to fulfil this obligation, so that he sometimes found himself trying to catch up on a backlog of two or three weeks.18 The anxieties and scruples which he recalled as an older man are characteristic of a certain type of youthful religious enthusiasm, often seen in the Catholic religious orders or in the more rigorous and exclusive Protestant sects.
It was taken for granted that educated friars would be ordained priests, and Luther was made a priest in spring 1507. He later reported the awe with which he approached the celebration of his first mass, and he was prey to as many anxieties about his celebration of mass and his making of his regular confessions as he was about his recitation of the hours.19 The intensity and orthodoxy of his devotion are alike evident in his later recollections of occasional experiences of awe in the presence of the consecrated eucharistic wafer of bread. At the Corpus Christi procession in 1515, in which Staupitz was carrying the consecrated host, he was overcome with “horror,” as he later put it, at the thought of Christ’s presence. It tells us even more about Luther’s hypersensitive conscience that he later felt it necessary to “confess” this reaction to Staupitz, who brushed the whole matter aside as wrongheaded.20 Reports of such powerful emotional responses to the eucharistic presence of Jesus are common in medieval hagiography, interpreted there in a positive light as a sign of divine favor.21
Luther’s recollection of that curious episode in 1515 casts light not only on his piety but also on his evidently somewhat tense and troubled relationship with Staupitz, his hero and mentor. For all their undoubted closeness, and for all Staupitz’s decisive influence on him, Luther’s stories about him betray an undercurrent of mutual incomprehension beneath the more obvious mutual admiration and affection upon which biographers usually focus. Thus, although Luther did make confession to Staupitz, there is no sense that Staupitz was what would later be called his “spiritual director.” For Luther also made his confession to other priests, in search of a consolation which neither Staupitz nor they proved capable of bestowing. In discussing his peculiar trials and tribulations (which he and his biographers describe as his Anfechtungen), he reported that when he asked Staupitz about them, Staupitz replied that he himself had never experienced such things, but that obviously they were meat and drink to Luther.22 On a similar occasion, he bluntly told Luther that he could not understand him. And later, seeing Luther looking downcast in the refectory and asking what was wrong, he was treated to the classic wail, “Oh, what shall I do?”23 Luther in these moods must have been a somewhat tiresome presence around the house, and Staupitz’s responses, filtered though they are through the rose-tinted lenses of Luther’s memory, do not sound uniformly sympathetic. And while Luther subsequently maintained that Staupitz’s spiritual advice was particularly important in pointing him towards his new theology, the gist of that advice—that Luther should focus his attention on Jesus Christ—sounds like fairly standard pastoral counsel aimed at overcoming an unhealthy tendency to introspection.
Luther’s youthful loyalty to his order was unquestioning. When one of the great German humanists of the day, Jakob Wimpfeling, dared to dispute that Saint Augustine of Hippo had ever really been a monk, and therefore fell into controversy with the Austin Friars, who claimed him as their ultimate founder, Luther had no doubts about what side to take. The Austin Friars traced their origins to Saint Augustine, though the historical connection was at best tenuous. The order which Luther joined had in effect been founded in the thirteenth century by the amalgamation of a variety of religious houses and societies that invoked the patronage of Augustine. And while Augustine certainly had lived some kind of communal religious life, Wimpfeling’s reluctance to interpret that life as monastic or mendicant in the formal sense those terms held by 1500 was historically justified. If you belonged to any kind of institution or association in the Middle Ages, you were expected to defend it to the hilt, and Luther knew where his duty lay. An annotation in one of his texts of Augustine, probably from around 1510, excoriated Wimpfeling’s stubborn and willful effrontery. And according to one of his more wildly exaggerated reminiscences, Wimpfeling’s audacity in this matter almost got him killed.24 Once Luther began to map out his own theology, his commitment to the religious life in general and to the Austin Friars in particular crumbled rapidly. But he did not renounce his affiliation to the friars until he was well down the road to Reformation.
Friars did not study law, they studied theology, so as a new recruit in 1505, Luther transferred to the study of theology in the scholastic tradition. He later recalled how he had sold almost all his books, including the law books that he had probably only recently acquired. As an arts student, Luther had inevitably been exposed to the new currents of Renaissance humanism. Even in joining the Augustinians, he kept his Plautus and his Virgil so as to have some recreational reading.25 And we know that he attended the lectures of Hieronymus Emser (later to be one of his fiercest early critics) on the popular classical Latin play Sergius, written by Johannes Reuchlin. Emser did proceed with the study of law, developing his interests in the humanities in parallel, and like many of the more talented humanist lawyers, he made a career in service at the court of a prince, in his case the other Duke of Saxony, George, whose capital was at Leipzig. Emser’s story perhaps shows us what kind of career Luther might have enjoyed had it not been for the vow in the thunderstorm. Apart from his intense reading in the scriptures, which were now, thanks to print, much more easily available to young scholars than they had ever been before, there was presumably nothing unusual about this theological training. In due course he proceeded to the degree of Bachelor of Divinity, and began teaching as well as studying.
Luther looked back on his time as a theology student at Erfurt without enthusiasm. But he did see in that period the start of his lifelong engagement with the Bible, albeit with no thanks to his teachers. Years later, he shared an unflattering recollection of his theology teacher at Erfurt, Dr. Usingen, who, he claims, warned him anxiously against recourse to the Bible, the wellspring of all factions, urging him instead to turn to the ancient doctors of the Church, who had distilled the truth out of the Bible.26 His encounter with the Bible, as he recalled it on one occasion, was fortuitous or providential:
At twenty years of age, I had not so much as seen a Bible, and I thought the Sunday readings were all there was to the Epistles and Gospels. But then I found one in the library, and immediately took it back with me to the monastery, where I read it and reread it, again and again, to the amazement of Dr. Staupitz.27
But such comments of his about the condition of theology and his own religious knowledge before the Reformation must be taken with a pinch of salt. They are in effect theological critiques of late medieval Catholicism masquerading as autobiography. Thus, although Brecht solemnly rehearses this remark about the Sunday readings as a statement of fact, we can put down this obvious joke as rhetorical exaggeration. (Need one really point out that even before the Reformation a man with a university education in Christian Europe could not actually have been unaware of the existence of the Bible and of the approximate scope of its contents?28) Luther was not on oath in his table talk: on another occasion he recalled coming across a Bible as a boy, and enjoying the story he read in it so much that he hoped one day to have a copy for himself.29 He added that the monks gave him a copy bound in red leather, a telling detail that carries the ring of truth. The general drift of all these reminiscences is his exposure to the Bible text once he had joined the Austin Friars, and his insatiable appetite for it. This we can believe. Another of Luther’s later claims was that through his studies he became so familiar with the Bible that he knew the gist of each chapter, although he added that this was compromised once he began to learn Hebrew, which for some reason confused his memory.30 Undue reliance on a memory that was perhaps not as reliable as its owner liked to imagine goes a long way towards explaining some of the more startling errors and inaccuracies that vitiate Luther’s otherwise often impressive scholarship.
The Bible has a central role in another, lengthier recollection of his Erfurt days. By his own account, as a young Master of Arts he was much troubled with sadness—depression, we would call it today—and found solace in reading scripture. As a result, he maintains, he soon discerned “many errors in the papacy.” But convictions about the authority of the pope and the church and doubts along the lines of “Are you alone wise? You might be wrong!” got in the way of these perceptions.31 His later views about the diametrical opposition of scripture and the Roman Church are clearly reshaping his memories here. The evidence of his early writings, mainly lecture notes and marginalia, which he himself excluded from the edition of his collected works in the 1540s because they were written before he had “discovered the Gospel,” gives little reason to believe that his reading of the Bible led him in novel directions until the mid-1510s. Some scrappy notes on his copy of Peter Lombard’s Sentences (the basic textbook of medieval Catholic theology), which probably reflect his early lecturing as a Bachelor of Divinity at Erfurt around 1509–10, show an entirely conventional approach to the subject. The most that we ever see in his pre-Reformational writings are entirely mainstream criticisms of the notorious institutional failings of the Catholic Church and moral failings of the clergy, expressed with considerably less than the vigor of Sebastian Brandt or Desiderius Erasmus. Reformist critique was an orthodox genre.
Luther’s later reminiscences of his time at Erfurt draw our attention to a crucial figure in his development: Dr. Johann von Staupitz, the Vicar General of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine in Germany. The importance of Staupitz in Luther’s life is well known, largely thanks to the frequency and ardor with which Luther recalled it later on. As vicar general, Staupitz was an exceedingly busy man, often on the road about the business of the order and in high demand as a popular preacher. Academically, in addition, he had responsibilities at the new University of -Wittenberg, where he served as lecturer in scripture for the university’s first ten years. Yet few scholars seem to have realized how puzzling it is that Luther credited Staupitz with so great an influence on him. The two men were only rarely in the same place, and the only occasion when they may have been together for any significant period was in 1508–9, when, as we shall see, Staupitz summoned Luther to Wittenberg to lecture in philosophy. They were together again for a while in summer 1515.32
Luther first met Staupitz at Erfurt in 1506, and seems to have fallen instantly under the spell of the man whom he was later to regard as one of the formative influences on his life and character. Indeed, with characteristic exaggeration he went so far as to say “I got nothing from Erasmus; I got all my stuff from Dr. Staupitz.” He was certainly right in saying that he got nothing from Erasmus. Neither Luther nor Erasmus took long to realize how little they had in common, however much their contemporaries may have tended, for various reasons, to lump them together. But it is not even remotely true that he got everything from Staupitz. The distinctive features of Luther’s theology, those features that broke with the medieval Catholic tradition, were all his own work. His exaggeration of his debt to Staupitz serves chiefly to drive home the real point, namely that he owed nothing to Erasmus. But it does also reflect a very real influence, albeit one that was more personal than theological. Many of Luther’s recollections of Staupitz, which mostly date from ten years or more after Staupitz’s death, are of pastoral advice about dealing with sin and guilt and conscience. Without seeking to embark on long-range psychoanalysis (always a suspect procedure), one can observe that, as almost all scholars agree, there was something not only neurotic but even morbid about Luther’s early anxieties over his spiritual life and state. Staupitz’s robust commonsense advice helped preserve the balance of Luther’s mind until his development of a completely new theology of sin and grace in the years before 1520 brought him a more permanent resolution.
It was Staupitz, though, who was responsible for pointing Luther towards the study of theology and for deploying him to the new university at Wittenberg, to fill the place he had himself vacated as professor there. The house of Austin Friars at Wittenberg took on a new lease of life thanks to the founding of the university (though it was soon afterwards made redundant thanks to Luther’s new theology in the 1520s). A regular stream of Augustinians can be seen on the Wittenberg matriculation registers until around 1520. What is clear is that Staupitz saw talent and promise in the young novice, and marked him out from the start as a coming man, fast-tracking him for high office in the order. It is equally clear that Luther, the common man of humble artisan stock, was bowled over by the attention he received from Johann von Staupitz, the intellectual scion of a noble house of Saxon landowners. Staupitz was extremely well connected: his boyhood friendship with Frederick, the future Elector of Saxony, with whom he had been educated, was to be a determining influence not only in his life but also in Luther’s. As Luther’s social, academic, and hierarchical superior, Staupitz was in the ideal position to shape the young friar’s development, and all the evidence indicates that he added to his social advantages a good measure of personal charisma: he was a popular and effective preacher in an age when the role of the preacher was one of the most influential of all public roles.
Luther’s subsequent claim that Staupitz “incited” him “against the pope” is simply incredible as it stands, and should at most be read as an interpretation of events rather than a mere recollection.33 Staupitz certainly offered Luther some encouragement and guidance as trouble swirled about him in the latter part of the 1510s. But there is nothing in his own writings to suggest any kind of hostility towards the papacy. A recent scholar has spoken rather expansively of “Staupitz’s anti-Roman sentiments,” but on inspection this comes down to a casual description of Christ as the “true pope” (found in a later copy of notes taken down while he preached) and a joke about a papal election, itself known only from Luther’s table talk.34 If this is “anti-Roman sentiment,” there is more of it to be found in the writings of John Fisher, who went to the block on Tower Hill in 1535 rather than renounce papal primacy.35
Staupitz’s emphasis on making satisfaction for one’s sins within the context of penance has something in common with Luther’s original challenge to indulgences, but nothing at all in common with Luther’s subsequent rejection of sacramental penance in general and penitential satisfaction in particular. That Staupitz “incited” Luther against indulgences is more plausible. Staupitz, like many Catholic contemporaries, was disturbed by recent developments in the theory and practice of indulgences. There is no indication, however, that Staupitz had any wish to repudiate the basic doctrine of indulgences (as opposed to its more luxuriant recent developments in theory and practice). Scholarly attempts to trace elements of Luther’s theology to roots in that of Staupitz remain deeply unpersuasive.36 There are perhaps, in the later Staupitz, some echoes of Luther’s Reformational teaching, but these are at best faint, and at most they show not his theological influence over Luther, but Luther’s theological impact on him. Staupitz’s own early work shows him to have been a typical theologian of his religious order. His main original work, Sermons on Job, delivered and written up around 1500, stands squarely in the tradition of medieval biblical interpretation. Like the first great commentator on the Book of Job, Gregory the Great, Staupitz finds in Job above all an exemplar, both a “figure” (as medieval theology put it) of Jesus Christ and a model for all good Christians to imitate. Gregory’s commentary was often referred to as the Moralia, and, as that title indicates, it was decidedly moralistic in tone, concerned with virtue and reward. The mature Luther had very little time for Gregory, but Staupitz knew his commentary well. Staupitz’s own commentary was learned in the fashion of its time, citing liberally both from the Latin Fathers of the Church and from selected medieval theologians and spiritual authors. The official theologian of the Austin Friars was Giles of Rome (d. 1316), who had himself been a pupil of Thomas Aquinas, and Giles was indeed the most frequently cited medieval authority in Staupitz’s Sermons on Job.37 Augustine, the order’s patron, was of course also very obviously present in the work. But the Augustine of the early Staupitz was very much the medieval Augustine, the author of the Confessions, the City of God, and On the Trinity. This was not the Augustine of the mature Luther. Staupitz’s Augustine was the Christian philosopher and mystic. Luther was drawn to the narrow-minded polemicist of the interminable tracts against the Pelagians, to Augustine the advocate of a harsh and unyielding doctrine of predestination.38
Staupitz and Luther had a meaningful personal relationship, one that had a major influence on both their careers. But this relationship was more personal and spiritual than intellectual, and historical understanding of it has been unduly colored by the roseate glow in which the later Luther bathed his recollections of one of the most important friendships in his life. Only for short periods were they in the same place long enough for Luther to have imbibed much of Staupitz’s actual teaching. Occasional conversation and correspondence seem to have formed the substance of their relationship, and Staupitz’s influence on Luther is to be seen more in attitudes and commitments than in doctrine: in moral seriousness and pastoral dedication, in a yearning for reform, and in a profound commitment to the study of theology in general, and in particular to the study of the scriptures. Staupitz evidently groomed Luther to be his own successor in the scriptural lectureship at Wittenberg which was to be Luther’s lifelong calling. And he certainly encouraged his interest in scripture: perhaps it was thanks to him that the friars gave Luther his red-leather Bible. It was moreover at Staupitz’s instigation that Luther took his doctorate in 1512, thus qualifying him for the teaching position at Wittenberg. But in the crucial years of the later 1510s, when Luther embarked on his campaign against indulgences and on his personal theological odyssey, their paths crossed but rarely, and nothing like enough to justify Luther’s own claims that Staupitz “incited” him against indulgences and the papacy—unless all he meant by that was that Staupitz offered him encouragement in his quest for truth and reform.
Luther’s relationship with Staupitz might at first sight seem to be problematized by one of the most curious episodes in his career, his journey to Rome on business of his religious order over the winter of 1510–11. For Staupitz had in 1510 sought to impose some forceful reforming measures onto the Augustinians of Saxony, and Luther was actually sent to Rome as one of a two-man delegation, seeking to block his program. It says something for both men that this did not lead to a breach between them. However, there is little reason to believe that Luther was heavily invested in the business or outcome of this mission. The mission was unsuccessful, and he is not on record as expressing any resentment about this, which he probably would have done if he had had any real interest in the matter. His fundamental lack of interest is evident in the fact that, while he frequently reminisced in later life about his trip to Rome, he never said a word about his business there. Friars away from their house were obliged, by the rule of the order, to travel in pairs. Although it is not known who the other friar was, the likeliest candidate is Luther’s own former novice-master, a leading figure in the Erfurt house, Johann Nathin, who was at the heart of the opposition to Staupitz’s plan. When the Staupitz plan was, eventually, triumphant, the Erfurt house became divided, and Luther was with the minority which supported Staupitz.39 Luther will have been sent along to accompany Nathin and assist with whatever clerical work (writing or copying letters, etc.) had to be done. Brecht does not accept that Luther was necessarily the “junior partner” on this mission, but it nevertheless seems highly likely that this was precisely his role.
Luther’s later recollections dwelled not on the business of the mission but on his essentially devotional motives for undertaking the journey.40 By his own account his personal agenda was one of pure piety, and there is no reason to disbelieve him. He even went so far as to declare that his chief purpose in travelling to Rome had been to make a general confession and thus avail himself of the fullness of forgiveness.41 Perhaps he had it in mind to acquire the superlative indulgences offered to penitents at the church of Santa Maria Scala Coeli. The acquisition of indulgences was a powerful motive for pilgrimage in the later Middle Ages, as we can see from the surviving narratives of the great pilgrimage to the Holy Land, which often detail the special indulgences available at particular holy sites. Luther also indicates, however, that he was disturbed by the contrast between the holiness of Rome as a place of pilgrimage and the wickedness that he found prevalent there. He was there for only four weeks, but the visit furnished plenty of material for his memory or imagination.42 Twenty years later, he would often raise a laugh with anecdotes about the moral and spiritual depravity he had observed on this visit, but we need to be a little cautious about taking these stories too literally. They all date from long after his excommunication by Leo X, and reflect a state of mind in which he had come to view the papacy as nothing less than Antichrist. Many of the tales he told are clearly jokes picked up and brought home and ultimately transmuted into historical fact: for example, the Roman priests who consecrated the eucharistic host not with the words of Christ but with the cynical parody “Bread thou art, and bread thou shalt remain.” The “words of institution” were pronounced by priests at that time in an almost inaudible undertone, so this recollection can only have been of rumor or humor, if it was not simply made up for comic effect. But there were two Romes for late medieval Christians: the city of pilgrims, abounding in churches, shrines, and relics; and the city of political prelates, swarming with beggars and prostitutes, poorly governed, and racked with poverty. Luther doubtless saw the second, but he went to see the first.
On his way back from Rome in winter 1511, he made a point of calling on the Holy Maid of Augsburg, one Ursula Lamenit, who was reputed to need no physical sustenance beyond the Blessed Sacrament. Figures of this kind were a familiar feature of the late medieval religious scene, and might end up celebrated as saints or condemned as frauds, depending on circumstances. One such fraud was the Holy Maid of Leominster, amusingly described by Thomas More.43 Another, it turned out, was Ursula Lamenit. But while Luther later noted her subsequent exposure as a fraud, he credited himself with no preternatural insight into the truth back in 1511.44 His visit to her reflects a characteristically Catholic openness to the possibility of Eucharist miracles, which he retained even after his conversion, observing years later that although some such miracles were presumably Satanic frauds, the genre as a whole confirmed the doctrine of the real presence of Christ in the consecrated materials of the Eucharist.45 The visit to Rome, then, had no discernible impact on his devotion or his theology. There is no sign of disillusionment or disenchantment in the Luther of the early 1510s. He returned from Rome, as he had departed from Germany, a devout Catholic.