7

ROME AND WITTENBERG

Johannes Eck spent the autumn of 1519 at work on his defense of papal primacy against Luther’s Proposition XIII.1 The text was finished on 7 February 1520,² and not long afterwards he set off for Rome to offer a presentation copy to the pope. He arrived in March and formally presented his autograph manuscript to Leo X on 1 April, with a brief speech that charged Luther with heaping up all that the great heresiarchs of the past had thrown up against the apostolic see.³ A papal commission had been established to consider the Luther affair in late January or early February, and Eck soon found himself added to its number. Early in May he let Johann Fabri know that the commission had completed its work, and that he had been summoned by Leo to a conference at the Villa Manliana with another theologian and a couple of cardinals for a final review of the text and a decision. The outcome was a draft bull condemning 41 statements selected from Luther’s oeuvre as variously “heretical, scandalous, false, offensive to pious ears, or contrary to Catholic truth.”⁴ Many of these propositions had already been picked out for attack by Eck at Leipzig or elsewhere, and it was Eck who showed the pope precisely where the condemned propositions were to be found in Luther’s writings. So it was in many ways Eck’s Luther whose teachings were condemned in the bull Exsurge Domine (“Rise up, O Lord”), formally promulgated on 15 June 1520.⁵

Rome and the papacy were very much on Luther’s mind throughout 1520. The suspicion that the pope might be the Antichrist was burgeoning within him, especially after he read Ulrich von Hutten’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s demolition of the “Donation of Constantine,” which came into his hands in February.6 However, he was not yet ready to air his suspicions publicly. It was neither Eck nor Hutten who drew him once more from cover on the subject of the papacy, but a minor Catholic polemicist called Augustin von Alveldt, an Observant Franciscan friar. Alveldt’s treatise On the Apostolic See made a serviceable case for papal primacy, and was published in both German and Latin in late spring. Like the work of most of Luther’s opponents, it is generally brushed aside by those historians who look upon the evidence within the perspective carefully laid out for them by Luther himself.⁷ But its merits can be better appreciated from the fact that Wittenberg put out three replies to it in a matter of months. More importantly, it was responsible for a significant, though generally overlooked, development in Luther’s thought.

Luther took on the vernacular edition of Alveldt’s work in his On the Papacy at Rome, dashed off in May and published in June.⁸ This characteristically mordant effort, which with unwitting irony censures Alveldt for the bitterness of his invective,⁹ is more than mere polemics. It is the first treatise to set out an idea that would become integral to the Protestant tradition, that of the “invisible Church,” or, to be more precise, of the distinction between the visible and the invisible Church. An appeal to the authority of the universal Church was and is a fundamental element in the Catholic account of Christianity. The Protestant appeal to the authority of scripture alone is a radical alternative to it. In 1520, the doctrine of the supreme teaching authority of the Church held sway almost throughout Europe. Any serious alternative account of Christianity had to undermine this powerful and deeply rooted consensus. In On the Papacy at Rome Luther found an ingenious way to achieve this.

Alveldt’s treatise offered a theory of the papacy which resonated with a powerful theme in early modern European culture: monarchy. His argument came down to three crucial claims: that any human society or organization had to have a single head or leader; that God would not have left his church on earth without such an essential feature as that single head or leader; and that the evidence of scripture demonstrated that Saint Peter, and therefore by extension his successors the bishops of Rome, occupied that position of leadership. Of course Luther contested the claim that Peter and his putative successors exercised any such role by divine right. But he was still ready to allow the pope a measure of worldly authority, provided that it was not employed to compromise the teachings of the Gospel. That much he had already argued at length against Eck the previous year. But Alveldt’s framing of the argument within an overall perspective of the naturally established and divinely authorized conception of monarchy provided a context in which the medieval reading of certain scriptural texts as undergirding papal primacy once more became very believable. What Luther did in On the Papacy at Rome, therefore, was to tear down Alveldt’s elaborate theoretical perspective, a task he performed with elegant simplicity by redefining the whole concept of the church. The argument he constructed instead rendered irrelevant the principal contention, that any human organization requires a single head. Initially, returning to dualist and fideist ideas he had deployed elsewhere, Luther briefly ruled his opponent out of court for invoking nature and reason in matters that concerned grace and faith. But that was just familiar sparring: not even Luther actually thought or sought to exclude nature and reason from theological discussion and reasoning, however useful such statements might be as debating points. He was often led on by such rhetoric, but he was never taken prisoner by it. His masterstroke was simply to remove the church from the world, and thus from the scope of Alveldt’s arguments.

The way Luther did this depends to a surprising extent on ideas he borrowed from his opponent. Alveldt had distinguished several possible meanings of the word “church” in his own discussion of Matthew 18:17, “Tell it to the church.” Luther picked up these meanings—universal church, local church, and church building—and characteristically proceeded to insist that only one of them was authentically scriptural. His particular conception of the literal interpretation of scripture made it impossible, in his analysis, for a word in scripture to bear two meanings: scripture was to be interpreted in such a way that it always kept “a certain, simple, and indivisible meaning on which our faith may settle itself without wavering.”10 The Bible’s “church,” for Luther, is the true church, the universal church, the body of the faithful united under the headship of Christ. This church, he announced, “is not of this world.” Christ said that his kingdom was not of this world, but Alveldt sought to reduce that kingdom to this world in his argument for the necessity of an earthly head.

Luther at no point in his attack on Alveldt uses the phrase “invisible church.” That label was a conceptual or terminological coinage he would mint a little later, in his response to another Catholic polemicist, Ambrosius Catharinus (as we shall see in due course). Yet the concept is already there in his thought. The true church is the body of true believers (not of those who make a false outward profession of faith): but “nobody can see who believes.”¹¹ It is therefore a spiritual and not a physical assembly, and any attempt to transform it into an outward assembly or union represents a fundamental misunderstanding of its nature. The true, universal, Catholic Church, the spiritual community of Christians, has no physical aspects at all. Those who postulate that the Church is an outward community in this world are “really Jews,” Luther added, trading once again on the traditional dichotomy between the “carnal” Jews and the “spiritual” Christians.¹² It is indeed blasphemy to conceive the church in such a worldly fashion. Because the true church is wholly spiritual, it cannot have an earthly head, and it needs only its spiritual head, Christ. The spiritual church of true believers cannot be discerned by earthly eyes, and therefore cannot have an earthly ruler: “How can anyone rule something that he can neither know nor recognize?”13 The corollary is equally explosive. No outward church on earth can be the true church. His syllogism was incisive:

That which one believes is neither corporal nor visible. We can all see the outward Roman Church, which is why it cannot be the true church.¹⁴

In effect, for Luther, the “Roman Catholic Church” was a contradiction in terms. The fact that it was “Roman,” local—and no one denied that it was Roman: its essential Romanitas was unmissable—was in itself what showed it could not be “Catholic,” universal, true. It was precisely the local habitation and the name which made it “a” church, which, in consequence, meant that it could not possibly be “the” church. The “Catholic Church,” for Luther, was everywhere, but at the same time nowhere. After this, the canter through the usual scriptural texts is mere ornamentation, there to reassure readers that Alveldt’s appeal to scripture can safely be discounted. And Luther skirted cautiously around the issue of Antichrist with two teasing hints, implying, without stating, that the Roman Church displayed the same grasping avarice that was expected to characterize the Antichrist.¹⁵ This was a line of argument he would develop soon afterwards at greater length in the Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. But the real significance of On the Papacy at Rome is its redefinition of the church, which was to be fundamental to Protestant Christianity. Luther never wavered from this new understanding. Twenty years later, he was still deploying the notion the same way, to evade the implications of Augustine’s famous observation, itself a commonplace of Catholic polemic against “scripture alone,” that he would not believe in the Gospel unless the authority of the Church induced him to do so:16

The true church has never had a name or title in this world. It was always the church without a name that was the true church. So it is believed, but not seen.¹⁷

Luther’s reply to Alveldt, then, was the first text to set out the concept of the invisible church. The position was adopted under the pressure of debate, to escape the authority of the visible church. His answer was to spiritualize the church in such a way as to deny it any effective governmental or disciplinary structure. The point of this move was to ensure that there could be no head of the Church functioning on earth, and thus to overthrow the ecclesiastical authority of the papacy. The price was high: the church became an essentially spiritual and invisible reality, known only to God, entirely dependent on Christ in the Holy Spirit. Given Luther’s doctrine of certainty, one could at least know if one was oneself a member of this, the only true church. But one could not know if anybody else was. So really it was the self, God, and his Word: there is a profound individualism about Luther’s emerging theology. The little-known treatise against Alveldt is essentially occasional in inspiration, a brief polemic against a respectable case for the papacy. But its significance for the tradition of Protestantism is immeasurable.

Undermining the visibility and thus the identity of the church problematized the whole domain of church governance and authority. Luther’s ultimate resolution of this new problem would be his doctrine of the “two kingdoms,” roughly coterminous with the “spiritual” and the “temporal” spheres of human life.¹⁸ Under this doctrine responsibility for the external governance of the church would be transferred to the temporal sphere. That Luther’s thinking might be heading in such a direction is evident from one of his most widely read writings of that year, his Appeal to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, another crucial component of what was becoming a systematic attack on the papacy and the religious system it ruled. The Appeal, a call to the “second estate” of the Holy Roman Empire to take in hand the vast task of church reform which Luther now saw as necessary, was in a sense his first explicitly “Reformational” work. Much of it is a litany of grievances old and new. The lengthy denunciations of the ways and means by which the Roman curia filled its coffers from German pockets recapitulated or embroidered familiar complaints. The fees for dispensations and privileges, the charges that the papacy could levy upon new incumbents of major ecclesiastical offices, and the offerings for indulgences and for crusades which never took place, told a familiar tale of corrupt Italians battening upon long-suffering Germans. But the proposal that priests should be allowed to marry in order to put an end to the scandals of “concubinage” (long-term but unlawful quasi-marital relationships) was more novel, as were the calls for cutting back and controlling religious festivals, pilgrimage, religious vows, mendicancy, masses for the dead, and confraternities.19

More important than such details, however, was the platform from which Luther launched his manifesto. Part of the story of Europe’s Middle Ages was the way that the papacy and the clergy had successfully labored to establish “the freedom of the church”—that is, the effective legislative and jurisdictional autonomy of the church considered as the body of the clergy. One consequence of this was that the responsibility for ecclesiastical reform had been left to the clergy. Luther’s appeal to the nobility was thus a direct challenge to established custom, but he took matters further by denying the underlying principle upon which that custom was founded. The very notion of any real distinction between clergy and laity, he argued, was fundamentally unsound and unchristian. All Christians were, by virtue of their one faith and baptism, priests.²⁰

The idea that would later be labelled “the priesthood of all believers” was deployed to break down what Luther called the first bulwark erected by the papacy around its usurped privileges. The papacy was by now the chief target. The Appeal had been written in June, and was off the presses by August, when he wrote to a fellow Austin Friar at Magdeburg:

I am issuing a vernacular book against the Pope on reforming the state of the Church. In it I deal with the Pope pretty fiercely, virtually as Antichrist.21

His suspicions about the true nature of the papacy were hardening, though he was still cautious about voicing their full extent. For the most part, Luther confined himself in the Appeal to dropping broad hints about the Antichrist, affirming that he was indeed at work in Rome, but making adroit use of veiled or conditional statements to suggest and imply, rather than assert, that he was to be identified with the pope.²² At only one point did he teasingly let the veil slip, arguing that, even in the absence of other evidence, the sale of special spiritual “faculties” by papal legates in Germany “would be” enough to show that the pope really was the Antichrist. It was clear by now what he really thought, but in this, his final discussion of the subject in the Appeal, Luther still held back slightly on the question, offering to say more about it another time.²³

Notwithstanding his time-consuming polemical engagements, Luther continued to develop his new understanding of faith and justification in his preaching and in his devotional and pastoral writings (the works of his that achieved the widest circulation in those early years). His sermons that year recapitulated the emphasis on approaching the sacraments in certain expectation of God’s grace, without reliance on one’s own preparation or merits.²⁴ Luther presented his doctrine of certainty not as the dramatic innovation it was but as a plain and simple interpretation of the scriptures. The unselfconscious naturalness with which he wove this idea into his discourses no doubt helped to familiarize it to a widening audience. His renewed campaigns on Lenten confession and Easter communion were arousing widespread interest—putting scruples, as the Bishop of Merseburg saw it, into the consciences of the simple faithful. The bishops called on Luther to write less provocatively—in vain, of course.25 At the instigation of Georg Spalatin, Luther wrote up much of his pastoral teaching in On Good Works, a more formal Latin treatise that was completed towards the end of Lent and was in print by June.²⁶ The overwhelming importance of believing that one was pleasing to God was emphasized again and again. Such faith was itself only possible by the grace of God, and the message was driven home by the insistence that not to show such faith was to make Christ a liar.²⁷ Good works could not bring about such faith, such certainty. This was easily verifiable by asking those who devoted themselves to traditional good works, none of whom dared to claim with any certainty that they or their works were pleasing to God. Faith, however, made even inadequate works good in God’s eyes, and this was what the faithful were to believe.²⁸ Such faith was in fact the greatest work that could be done by or in a human being.²⁹

Luther’s new understanding of justification had originally been formulated in the context not simply of his wrestling with Paul’s epistles but also of his ruminations on the practice of sacramental confession. In its first iteration, faith alone was simply faith in the words of absolution, “I absolve you …,” pronounced upon the penitent by their confessor. The priest, for Luther as for the medieval Catholic tradition, was speaking here not in his own right but as a spokesman for Christ. The sound was the sound of the priest, but the words were the words of Christ. Luther’s doctrine was therefore bound up with the theology of the Christian sacraments from the start; yet, as it developed further, it compelled him to take a fresh look at the whole idea of the sacraments. If “faith alone” was all that mattered, was there even a need for sacraments? Did they have any point? Such questions almost posed themselves, and it certainly required no unusual intellectual powers to pose them. The idea of “faith, not works” cast doubt on vast tranches of the religious performance that constituted late medieval Catholicism—indulgences, of course, but also pilgrimages, protracted or intricate cycles of prayer, asceticism, and monasticism. There was no immediately obvious reason why the sacraments should be exempted from this acidic critique.

Luther addressed this concern directly in one of the three great tracts he issued in 1520, the Babylonian Captivity of the Church.30 After an amusing preface, with all sorts of jibes at his opponents, whom he dismisses as egged on by an emissary of Satan and motivated by the vain hope of achieving worldly glory through disputing with Luther, he gets down to business abruptly:

First of all, one must to my mind deny that there are seven sacraments, and for now posit only three: baptism, penance, and the bread. And all these have been taken away from us into miserable captivity by the Roman curia, and the Church has been stripped of all her liberty (although, if I wish to speak as scripture does, I would have only one sacrament, and three sacramental signs, of which more in due course).³¹

This was far and away Luther’s boldest challenge to Roman Catholicism, the first frontal assault on a doctrine probably familiar to almost all the Christians of Western Europe.³² The seven sacraments were, in name at least, as familiar as the ten commandments: you might not be able to remember them all, but you knew how many there were.

The Babylonian Captivity is a loosely constructed text, abounding in digressions, but its ultimate achievement is to offer a fresh understanding and definition of the very nature of a sacrament. This objective is attained synthetically rather than analytically, and is not achieved until the closing pages, where Luther concludes that, properly speaking, the name “sacrament” should be restricted to “promises with signs attached to them.”33 But he has been tending to this conclusion from the point when, having attacked the Catholic practice of administering communion in one kind (i.e., under the form of bread, but not of wine) and the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, he starts to expound his own interpretation of the Mass as a “testament” or promise. In a manner more mystical or sacramental than strictly logical, Luther identifies the Mass with the promise of Christ, the promise of salvation, happily interchanging the words “promise” and “testament” (the latter, not the former, being the word chiefly used in the Gospels and Epistles). The “Mass is the promise of Christ,” “the greatest promise of all,” and consists first and foremost in the words of promise which Christ uttered as he gave his disciples the bread and wine. The concept of the promise ties the sacrament very firmly into Luther’s theology of justification by faith alone. Justifying faith had already been defined as an unwavering assent to Christ’s promise of forgiveness and salvation, envisaged as assent not merely to a general truth but to the specific realization of that promise in the life of the individual believer in question. Assent to this indubitable and indefeasible divine promise generated in the believer that certainty of grace which delivered the necessary peace of conscience. By presenting the Mass as embodying the promise of forgiveness of sins in the sacramental body and blood (“For this is my blood of the new testament, which is shed for many for the remission of sins,” Matt 26:28), Luther made the sacrament a sort of visible expression of that promise.³⁴ As he would later argue, this sacramental embodiment of the promise rendered it easier for people to grasp the promise and thus to believe it.35

The focus on faith and promise (or testament) had the consequence of undermining the theoretical basis of the religious use of the Mass that had dominated Catholic culture for nearly a millennium, the celebration of the Mass for specific votive or intercessory purposes, chief among them the speeding of the passage of Christian souls through purgatory to heaven. The key to this lay in the essential individualism of Luther’s new understanding of the Mass, itself the concomitant of the essential individualism of his entire theology. As Luther puts it in a crucial passage, the Mass, as a promise,

can do no good to anyone, cannot be applied to anyone, done for anyone, or shared with anyone except the believer in person and alone, on account of their faith. For who can accept for someone else or apply to someone else the promise of God, which demands faith of each and every person?³⁶

Much of the structure of late medieval Catholicism was founded on the celebration of Mass for the sake of goods to be attained in this world or the next. Monasteries, friaries, colleges, and confraternities were largely financed by endowments or donations given in return for the celebration of masses for the dead. If the Mass was, as Luther now emphasized, a testament (or promise) rather than a propitiatory sacrifice, then the basis of this entire ritual economy was swept away. These devastating conclusions were only sketched out in the Babylonian Captivity, in which Luther coined the damaging label “private mass” as an alternative to the traditional term “votive mass,” but he would set out the argument more forcefully a couple of years later.³⁷

Luther was well aware of the corrosive impact of his teaching. Would it not overturn monasticism and the institutions of intercession and charity? It would indeed, and that was the idea: such was the very machinery that had taken the church into its “Babylonian Captivity.” The logic of the denial of sacrifice, however, once more led him into repudiation of a millennium of tradition, this time a tradition common hitherto (like monasticism) to all Christendom. Not that this bothered him in the slightest. No human tradition, however venerable, however universal, could stand in the face of the pure Word of God, or at least against Luther’s interpretation of it. He rounded off his discussion of the Eucharist by relating faith in the testament to “peace of conscience.” “For this is the testament of Christ, the unique remedy for past, present, and future sins. Only adhere to it with undoubting faith and you will believe that what the words of the testament state will be given gratuitously to you.” Only this complete faith—certainty, though he does not use the word here—only this complete faith can confer “peace of conscience.”38

Certainty, lack of doubt, is likewise the core of Luther’s doctrine of baptism, the key to which, for him, lay in the “words of promise,” which he identified as “Who believes and is baptized will be saved” (Mark 16:16). We Christians, he wrote, should “exert ourselves on this promise, with absolutely no doubt that we are saved after we have been baptized.”³⁹ He attacks contemporary theologians as “wicked men who even assert that no one ought to be certain of the forgiveness of sins, nor of the grace of the sacraments,” a position he dismissed as “impiety.”⁴⁰ Certitude was required alike of the candidate for baptism and of the recipient of communion.⁴¹ His emphasis on the act of faith, of course, posed a problem for a culture in which the baptism of infants was the norm, as by no ordinary use of speech could faith possibly be ascribed to those who had not yet learned even to speak, much less to reason or to believe. Though Luther had no inclination to turn his back on such a venerable tradition, infant baptism was neither explicitly commanded nor even explicitly mentioned in scripture. By the middle of the 1520s an important strand of Protestantism had emerged which rejected the practice on those grounds, but this was not something which Luther himself foresaw in 1520, though some of his opponents already realized that his theological principles could call infant baptism into question.42

The central theological message of the Babylonian Captivity was the definition of a sacrament as a divinely instituted sign attached to a “word of promise.” But this rather subtle redefinition was at the time less eye-catching than two of the more substantial digressions which preceded the main development of Luther’s argument. Traditionally minded theologians were more provoked by his blunt attack on the doctrine of transubstantiation. Even though Luther himself did not deny the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the eucharistic elements, he did not accept the medieval Catholic doctrine that the bread and wine were transformed into that body and blood. For his insistence on accepting the “most plain and simple sense” of scripture wherever possible led him to insist that, since the scriptures referred to the eucharistic elements not only as “body” and “blood” but also as “bread” and “wine,” all these names must be true.⁴³ Luther’s ignorance of Wycliffe’s teaching is indicated by his dismissal of the charge that his doctrine might be smeared as Wycliffite or Hussite. His doctrine was maybe not far from that of Hus, but his commitment to the real presence was far clearer than Wycliffe’s. Wycliffe did not in fact believe that the body of Christ was in the consecrated host, though, like Luther, he insisted that the host was, just as it seemed, bread. But it is very difficult to read Wycliffe as upholding any kind of real presence of the sort maintained by both Lutherans and Catholics.⁴⁴ Transubstantiation itself was now falling foul of Luther’s revolt against Thomas and Aristotle, as was the virtual mechanization of the Mass in late medieval culture as an instrument of intercession in this life and the next, along with the doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice that underpinned that process.

Luther’s concerns extended from sacramental doctrine to sacramental practice, and the other headline issue in the Babylonian Captivity was his growing conviction that the customary way of distributing communion within Latin Christendom should be radically changed.45 For several hundred years, it had been the custom that only the priest who was actually celebrating a mass would partake of the consecrated wine, the blood of Christ. If anyone else took communion, they would receive it only in the form of the consecrated bread, the body of Christ. The celebrant, however, would take communion “in both kinds.” In the overwhelming majority of masses celebrated in Western European churches at that time, it should be added, the celebrant would be the only person taking communion at all. That custom would draw Luther’s fire later, but his first target was communion “in one kind.” Christ’s words were straightforward: “When he says, ‘Drink it, all of you,’ he is not recommending but commanding.”⁴⁶

Luther had first raised questions about this traditional practice towards the end of 1519, during the prolonged aftermath of the Leipzig Disputation. In his Sermon on the Blessed Sacrament he made the modest suggestion that the church authorities would do well to allow the laity to partake of the chalice when they took communion.⁴⁷ The Hussite movement in Bohemia had made access to the chalice one of the main planks in its reform program, and it is possible that Eck’s attempt to paint Luther into a corner at Leipzig as a sort of closet Hussite had backfired by causing Luther in his turn to look on the Hussite program with interest and even sympathy. Certainly those who took Eck’s side saw this passing comment of Luther’s as further evidence of his Hussite credentials. What is more interesting is how little impact this had on Luther’s swelling body of supporters. Given the history of hostility between Germans and Czechs (or Bohemians) over religion, one might expect this mudslinging to have damaged his reputation among Germans. But it made little difference: Luther’s books kept on selling. Notwithstanding the genuine modesty of his proposal, there was an outcry against his sermon, mainly emanating from Leipzig, where grumpy Duke George fulminated in vain against his cousin’s far from tame theologian. As usual, Luther responded to opposition by raising the stakes. A second salvo on the subject urged the case for communion in both kinds more positively and ridiculed the diocesan machinery which had called upon him to withdraw his sermon from circulation.48 In the Babylonian Captivity Luther returned to the subject yet again, developing a powerful case in favor of administering both the bread and the wine to the laity, and adding the incendiary charge that, in denying them the chalice, the pope and clergy had been tyrannizing over them too long.⁴⁹

It was with the Babylonian Captivity that Luther graduated from reformer to revolutionary. His theology was already the intellectual groundwork for a new religion, but if his ideas had remained essentially speculative, like so much scholastic theology, it might have done little more than flutter the dovecotes of Europe’s universities. But the seven sacraments were the pillars of Catholic society. Stripping them down to two (baptism and the Eucharist)—a position on which all the varieties of sixteenth-century Protestantism concurred—was radical enough, although marriage and ordination continued as social rituals, while confession gave way to spiritual direction (at least for the devout minority) and the disappearance of extreme unction made little difference to the deathbed scenes that remained as much part of Protestant as of Catholic culture. But the repudiation of the idea of the Mass as a sacrifice, the skepticism about transubstantiation, the doubts about religious vows, and the support for communion in both kinds pointed towards a very different future for Christianity. Many who had sympathized with Luther thus far began to have doubts when faced with this manifesto. It was the Babylonian Captivity that shifted Henry VIII’s attitude towards Luther from polite academic interest to the loftily dismissive polemics of his Assertion of the Seven Sacraments, with which he made his bid the following year to be recognized as the “Defender of the Faith.” But many others were exhilarated by Luther’s call for faith and his offer of profound peace of conscience rooted in the unshakable certainty of the Gospel’s promise of salvation. Inspired by his lively and consoling reading of Saint Paul, they found themselves drawn after him down a hitherto unsuspected path.

That positive message of the Gospel was the theme of Luther’s final major work of this astonishingly creative and productive year: the essay on Christian Liberty, which offered an escape from the “Babylonian Captivity” that he had earlier diagnosed. Like so many things he wrote, this essay was essentially the product of circumstances. When Karl von Miltitz visited the court of the Elector Frederick in late summer, he managed to bring about a meeting between Staupitz, Link, and Luther, in the hope of persuading Luther to write in conciliatory terms to the pope.50 That letter, dated 6 September 1520, became the dedication or preface to the essay, though the arrival in Germany the following month of the papal bull against him almost made him change his mind.⁵¹ But a meeting with the emollient Miltitz himself at Lichtenberg, at the Elector’s Court, put the plan back on track, and the book was in print by December. Miltitz’s hopes were not entirely fulfilled. Luther meant well, politely assuring the pope that his quarrel was nothing personal. But the effect of this mild overture was drowned out by what followed—a torrent of denunciation against Rome as worse than Babylon or Sodom, outdoing the infidelity of the Turks, with vigorous asseverations of Luther’s determination to resist Rome as long as he had faith. Perhaps this reflected the arrival of the papal bull. Luther justified his strong language by the examples of Christ, Saint Paul, and the prophets, loading the blame for controversy onto Prierias, Cajetan, and Eck, and casting himself in the role of the pope’s candid friend.52

Despite this inauspicious start, the Christian Liberty itself was a stirring if unsystematic exposition of Luther’s new theology, developing still further the dramatic contrast between the spiritual and the corporal, the visible and the invisible, which had flowed out of his sharp separation of Law and Gospel and into his idea of the essential invisibility of the true church. This contrast made sense of the eye-catching paradox which famously opened his argument:

The Christian is the absolutely free lord of all, the subject of none.

The Christian is the most obedient servant of all, the subject of all.⁵³

Christian liberty was internal and spiritual, directed towards eternal life, while Christian service or obedience was external and physical, directed towards communal life in this world. What was important, in Luther’s view, was to keep these two spheres (in effect, his “two kingdoms”) appropriately separate. External and physical service in this world, the fruit of law, was of no consequence to the spiritual liberation from sin and growth in grace and love needful for life in the next. That all came from the gospel. Thus Luther’s theory of “Law and Gospel” was for the first time properly expounded here, and justification by faith alone was set out more clearly than ever before, along with the priesthood of all believers.⁵⁴ “Christian liberty” was the freedom of the spirit, freedom in the faith of the Gospel, freedom from the external constraints imposed by the law, by that external church which he had already denounced as false precisely because of its externality and its visibility. It led towards not a “law of love”—for Luther would brook no law for the faithful—but a life of love, modelled on Christ and modelling Christ for others. Ceremonies are helpful scaffolding for beginning the construction of the devout life, but Luther felt they end up getting in the way. One should not be ruled and dominated by ceremonies and observances—hence some of Luther’s wide popular appeal, for the late medieval Church was laden with ceremonial observance, and the contrast between this and the liberating teachings of Christ could be mercilessly exploited.

Luther’s extension of this polemic from ceremonial observances to the observance of the moral law was far more contentious. Recapitulating his repudiation of Aristotelian ethics, Luther dismissed observance of the moral law as any kind of means towards salvation. His denigration of traditional external moral theology was rooted in his reading of Paul and appealed insistently to the words of Christ, but Luther was far happier with Paul’s doctrine of salvation by grace than with his forthright moral rigorism, and far happier with Christ’s image of the tree and the fruit than with his unmistakable emphasis on righteous moral agency. The rhetoric of the rejection of “good works” tended to focus on the repetitive and often almost mechanized ritual performance of late medieval Catholicism, and in doing so made common ground with the Erasmian critique of “superstition.” This has led even acute readers and critics (such as the great Leopold von Ranke) to miss the full extent of Luther’s radicalism in the field of ethics.55 But the logic of Law and Gospel, the denial that there could be in this fallen life any genuinely “good” works, tended in a very different direction from Catholic moralism, whether it was that of Desiderius Erasmus or that of Thomas Aquinas. Luther always repudiated the accusation that he was an “antinomian,” that is, someone who believed that justification by faith was so powerful that a believer need no longer bother even trying to observe the moral law. Yet it is revealing that he and his successors found it so often necessary to repudiate that accusation, and it is not evident that their reiterated denial was always an adequate inoculation against the virus, which has flared up more than once in the broad Protestant tradition. Luther’s polemic against “good works,” his insistence that every good work is in and of itself a sin, put him in a different theological world from both Erasmian humanism and scholastic Catholicism. Their theological world, he concludes in the peroration of Christian Liberty, in a fleeting reference to the doctrine that was gradually crystallizing in his mind, was the creation of Antichrist.56

Throughout the year 1520 Luther had been toying with the idea that the Antichrist might indeed have arrived at Rome, in accordance with the medieval legend or prophecy. He voiced his thoughts or fears about this a little more decisively in his private correspondence than in his public utterances, but even in public he had dropped hints. That Rome was the seat of the Antichrist became apparent to him a few months before the identification of that figure with the somewhat anodyne and implausible person of Leo X himself. Indeed, in the letter to Leo which served as the preface to Christian Liberty, Luther had gone out of his way to avoid making any sort of direct attack upon the person of the pope, even though his suspicions about what was happening in Rome were deepening.

What settled his mind on the subject was the papal condemnation of his teachings that was brought to Germany that autumn by Aleander and Eck. Luther finally got a sight of the bull in October 1520, shortly after Eck had promulgated it at nearby Leipzig, and the effect was, as he put it, liberating. “Now I am much more free, at last made certain that the pope is Antichrist.”⁵⁷ Within weeks he had completed his initial response, Against the Execrable Bull of Antichrist, and he followed this up with a detailed defense of the 41 condemned propositions, The Assertion of All the Articles (of which both Latin and German versions were in print early in the new year).58 There was no theological advance in these squibs, though the Assertion, with its prefaces on faith alone and scripture alone (doctrines which were not picked out for condemnation in the bull), offered the nearest thing to a handbook of Luther’s teaching then available. It would be supplanted in this capacity before long by Philip Melanchthon’s Commonplaces (1521), a handy compendium of Lutheran theology which rapidly attained the status of a textbook and commenced the process by which “Lutheranism” emerged as a dogmatic system.⁵⁹

As he had threatened earlier in the year, Luther paid back the pope in kind. His books were being burned on papal instructions in many German cities, so the students of Wittenberg reciprocated. On the second Sunday of Advent, Luther preached against the “papal decretals,” “foolish philosophy,” and the “doctrine of works.”⁶⁰ This spurred his students to direct action. As he reported to Spalatin, parodying the formal style of ecclesiastical pronouncements,

In the year 1520, on the tenth of December, at 9:00 a.m., all of the Pope’s books were burned at the East Gate of Wittenberg: the Decretum, the Decretals, the Sextus, the Clementines, and the Extravagantes, and the latest bull of Leo X; together with the Summa Angelica, Eck’s Chrysopassus and other stuff of his and Emser’s, as well as other things thrown on by various people.⁶¹

“So now,” he added, gleefully, “the pyromaniac Papists can see that it is no great thing to burn books they can’t confute. That will be news!” He was also pleased to see his supporters rallying in the face of the papal challenge. Ulrich von Hutten published a typically caustic edition of the text of Leo’s bull, complete with sardonic annotations—which showed almost no interest in Luther’s theology, focusing instead on sniping at Rome and the Romans.62

Yet another Italian Dominican and Thomist, Ambrosius Catharinus, joined the fray towards the end of 1520. His Apologia for the papacy was published in December, and reached Luther early in the new year, probably at about the same time as news of his formal excommunication at the hands of Pope Leo X, which was pronounced on 3 January 1521. Luther dashed off a brisk reply, the Response to Ambrosius Catharinus, published just before he departed for Worms. The deft ploy of the reply to Alveldt had now hardened into clear dogma: the church was, and had to be, invisible. He had dealt before with the “rock” and the “church” of Matthew 16:18, but now he spelled out his new understanding of the church:

Therefore, just as the rock is without sin, invisible and spiritual, perceptible by faith alone, so too it is necessary that the church be without sin, invisible and spiritual, and perceptible by faith alone, as it is necessary that the foundation be one with the structure. For we say “I believe in the holy Catholic Church,” and faith is a matter of “things unseen.”⁶³

As the church was invisible, Luther’s doctrine of the church did not need to be elaborate, and discussion by theologians of his “ecclesiology” is therefore somewhat misplaced.⁶⁴

Luther wasted little time on Catharinus’s arguments. The chief importance of his Response to Ambrosius Catharinus was that it set before the public a full exposition of the doctrine of the papal Antichrist. The question was no longer whether the papacy existed, he maintained, but what the papacy was. And that was now clear: Antichrist.⁶⁵ The importance of this moment is impossible to exaggerate. It represents Luther’s decisive public break with the established church. The suspicion of the true, hidden nature of the papacy had been dawning on him for some time, but he had hesitated to proclaim it boldly before the world. Once the pope had, by condemning his doctrine and excommunicating him, declared open war upon the “gospel,” he had unmasked himself. Together with the ritual burning of the canon law and the papal bull, the equation of the papacy with Antichrist represented Luther’s definitive response to the ecclesiastical sanctions directed against him.66

In justification of his stunning claim, Luther’s Response embarked upon a lengthy exposition of Daniel 8:23–25, one of the scriptural passages traditionally bundled up with the medieval myth of Antichrist. The distinctive religious customs and devotional practices of the Catholic Church are turned here into the “twelve faces of Antichrist” and variously denounced as iniquity, blasphemy, and hypocrisy. Daniel does not himself label as “the Antichrist” the “king of fierce countenance” whose awful advent he here prophesies, but for Luther it was “obvious that this king was to be Antichrist, the adversary of Christ and his kingdom.”⁶⁷ The realization of the Antichrist loomed large, then, in Luther’s imagination. Characteristically, however, he brought a crucial innovation to the traditional story. While he was aware that he was tying together a catena of widely separate scriptural texts in time-honored fashion, he found a crucial error in the traditional conception of Antichrist. Earlier commentators, he claimed, had failed to understand that the Antichrist was not an individual person, as medieval legend had it, but a corporation:

Hence they erroneously apply the name Antichrist, which Paul uses for the man of sin and the son of perdition, to a single person, when Paul means by it an entire body and chaos of wicked people and a whole line of rulers.⁶⁸

The incorporation of Antichrist made his identification with the papacy a far more durable and potent theme, and gave Luther’s theory more traction than had been achieved by Wycliffe and Hus, who had also found Antichrist in the papacy. As long as the Antichrist was envisaged as an individual person, the identification was wide open to falsification. For the Antichrist was to be dispossessed of his usurped kingdom only by the second coming of Christ. Therefore any candidates for the role who happened to die before the end of the world would manifestly be disqualified, to the discredit and discomfiture of those who had cast them in that role. Incorporating the Antichrist over time as the institution of the papacy both eliminated the risk of falsification and made the papacy itself more demonic. It was a master stroke, the ingenious culmination of two or three years of relentless reflection on the defining institution of the medieval Catholic Church. That said, it would not do to exaggerate the coherence of Luther’s thinking on this subject. There was at least as much raw emotion as rational inquiry at work here. As the years passed, the concept of the papal Antichrist became more and more deeply entrenched in his mind and in the Protestant tradition. In order for Lutheranism, and indeed for most forms of Protestantism, to be true, Roman Catholicism had to be not only false but a sort of ultimate antithesis of the truth. The apocalyptic urges in early modern Protestantism all tapped into this root, with the paradoxical result that the papacy became an integral component in Protestant belief systems. As Luther put it years later:

I believe that the pope is the devil possessed and incarnate, because he is the Antichrist. For just as Christ is God incarnate, so the Antichrist is the Devil incarnate.69