8

WORMS AND THE WARTBURG

Charles V (only 19 years old when elected Holy Roman Emperor) was not even present for his own election. He voted for himself by proxy and was elected in absentia on 28 June 1519, the same week that saw the commencement of the Leipzig Disputation. Charles, who had been brought up in the Netherlands, had at that point been in Spain for nearly two years, getting to know the kingdoms that he had inherited in 1516. There is no evidence that Luther’s ideas had yet reached Spain, nor that Charles had so much as heard of the troublesome friar. He set out from La Coruña in May 1520, leaving his subjects seething with resentment at the idea of sharing their king with the Empire while paying handsomely in extra taxes for this dubious privilege. (A rebellion ensued.) He was in Flanders by June. The Holy Roman Empire was deficient in central control at the best of times, but a half-year interregnum followed by a year of absentee government gave Luther the best possible chance for survival and success. The self-important papal agent, Karl von Miltitz, hung around various princely courts, ineffectually seeking some progress or compromise on the Luther business. But nobody was paying much attention. Nor was Charles in any great hurry to get to Germany. He stayed in the Netherlands for several months, making two trips to visit Henry VIII, once at Canterbury and then again at Calais. A political alliance against the French was more important to him than a dissident friar in Saxony. By the time he reached Aachen for his initial coronation as “King of the Romans” in October, it was almost two years since Maximilian had died. Luther himself acknowledged long afterwards how much the emperor’s timely death and the consequent interregnum had assisted the cause of the “Gospel.”1

The greatest test of Luther’s career was his summons to appear before the emperor, princes, and prelates gathered at the Reichstag (or “Diet”) in Worms. He had been guaranteed safe-conduct by Charles V, but he was understandably far from secure about it. According to some canon lawyers, there was no obligation to keep one’s word with heretics. Just over a hundred years before, the Czech dissident Jan Hus had been summoned under a similar safe-conduct to appear not before the Reichstag but before a general council of the Church, convened at Constance. With his heresies condemned, yet refusing to recant, Hus was arrested notwithstanding Emperor Sigismund’s guarantee, and was tried, convicted, and burned alive. The history of Hus was well known, and Luther frequently alluded to it. The heightened excitement of his letters in the approach to the Reichstag betrays a nervous intensity remarkable even by his standards. He was expecting nothing less than martyrdom, and his ultimate departure from Worms in one piece may have come not only as a surprise but even as a kind of disappointment, or at least an anticlimax.

Papal diplomacy was keen to engage with the new emperor over Luther. Girolamo Aleander and Johannes Eck had been appointed to convey the papal bulls against Luther to Germany and promulgate them.² They were in the Empire by September, when Eck secured the publication of the bull in Meissen, Merseburg, and Brandenburg. In October, Luther’s books were confiscated in Ingolstadt. The bull targeted not only Luther but also his followers and supporters, aiders and abettors, and Eck had been given the discretion to decide who they were. He was prompt to use this power to settle a few scores. Willibald Pirckheimer, widely reckoned the author of A Well-Beaten Eck, was picked out by him, as were Lazarus Spengler, who was also thought to have written a satire against him, and Bernhard Adelmann, the outspokenly pro-Lutheran canon of Augsburg who had done all he could to besmirch Eck’s reputation. It was no surprise to find the names of Carlstadt and Johannes Doltz (or Dolsch), prominent colleagues of Luther’s at Wittenberg, but the almost unknown and essentially inoffensive humanist from Zwickau, Johannes Sylvius Egranus, had done no more than many other humanists to merit inclusion. Pirckheimer and Spengler protested noisily at first, but both sought reconciliation and absolution from Eck, as did Egranus. In Pirckheimer’s case, this may have been easier because he found that his mild sympathy for Luther was being characteristically interpreted as enmity by its beneficiary. The fate of this early band is intriguingly diverse. Pirckheimer gradually distanced himself from the Reformer and died a Catholic. Spengler went on to be a key figure in the Nuremberg Reformation—in Luther’s view, the key figure.3 Adelmann and Doltz remained in the Lutheran camp while Carlstadt and Egranus, who also became committed Reformers, were both to fall out with Luther over matters of doctrine.

After spending a month or two more in the Netherlands, hearing worsening news of disorder and rebellion from Castile, and delaying his arrival in Germany on account of the epidemics raging that year, the new emperor, Charles V, finally arrived in Cologne on 30 October 1520, where he agreed with the electors to convene the Reichstag in January 1521 at Worms, a major city on the Rhine between Mannheim and Mainz.⁴ Erasmus was still in the imperial entourage at this time, and wrote to Reuchlin from Cologne emphasizing that he would have preferred to be an onlooker rather than a participant in the drama. Nevertheless he lobbied busily among the luminaries of the imperial court, urging restraint and moderation on anyone who would listen in an attempt to avert the cataclysm which perhaps only he could foresee.5

The Reichstag at Worms opened formally on Sunday, 27 January 1521, with a Mass of the Holy Spirit in the cathedral, at which the emperor was flanked by five of the six other electors. No mention was made of Luther in the opening addresses, but in private conversations it was recognized that the Luther business was both important and challenging.⁶ Aleander was under instructions to secure the reception and implementation of the excommunication of Luther and the condemnation of his 41 articles. Once ensconced at Worms, he realized the magnitude of the task, one for which he had little training. A scholar by experience and temperament, Aleander had the scholar’s keen perception and stereotypical incapacity for decisive action. He had taught Greek at Venice and Paris before being recruited to the service of Érard de la Marck, Prince-Bishop of Liège, and in 1519 he had been an altogether appropriate if somewhat unexpected appointment as Vatican Librarian. It was presumably his scholarly credentials that led to his nomination as papal nuncio to the Court of Charles V for the purpose of implementing the bulls against Luther. Aleander was certainly well equipped to explain the theological issues, and was happy to do so whenever he was given the opportunity. If Luther had not changed all the rules of the game, this might have been qualification enough. But Aleander’s reports from Worms show that it was not a scholar that was needed, but a negotiator: someone more like Cardinal Wolsey. Aleander was not even a cardinal, nor indeed was he empowered to negotiate. Worse still, he had no experience of politics at the papal curia, still at that time a crucible for the refining of political skills. His laments at the situation in Worms and through much of Germany make enlightening reading, but show that he had no plan beyond pressing on relentlessly with demands for the implementation of the bulls.

Aleander had reported at the end of February that the Saxon household of Elector Frederick was serving as a sort of command center for a Lutheran political campaign. They had brought a printing press with them (Worms had not had a press hitherto), and used it to churn out campaign materials. It was raining pamphlets, he said.7 There was a large painting on display at the elector’s lodgings, showing Luther in front with Ulrich von Hutten behind, carrying a box on which were shown two chalices and the slogan “The Ark of True Faith.” Before them frisked Erasmus with a harp, like David, and bringing up the rear was Jan Hus. And there were images of Luther everywhere. He was depicted as a saintly friar, sometimes with a halo, or else with a dove—the symbol of the Holy Spirit—hovering above his head.⁸ These pictures sold like hotcakes, so that Aleander could not even get hold of one to send to Rome. People venerated them like sacred icons, even kissing them, and the citizens of Worms put them up in the windows of their houses, in what seems to have been recorded history’s first picture poster campaign. When Luther did get to Worms, a priest touched his gown three times and went his way rejoicing as though he had touched one of the holiest of relics. Aleander half expected to be hearing of miracles before long.⁹

Aleander reported in particular that the Roman position, which was that Luther should be condemned out of hand, lacked heavyweight support among the secular princes. The ecclesiastical electors (the archbishops of Cologne, Mainz, and Trier) were predictably favorable, but there was a warning sign in the fact that he and Eck had hardly managed to get the bulls against Luther published anywhere other than in ecclesiastical principalities (e.g., Mainz, Liège, and Cologne). Among the secular electors, Frederick of Saxony was of course dedicated to his protégé’s cause, while the Count Palatine of the Rhine was silent and something of a cipher. Only Elector Joachim I (Margrave of Brandenburg and brother of the embattled Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz) was a committed opponent of Luther. But while Aleander saw all this, he did almost nothing about it. He was in close and regular contact with the emperor and Jean Glapion, the French Observant Franciscan who had become the emperor’s confessor the year before, but he left all the politics to them. Aleander certainly spoke French, but probably knew little or no German, which was a further impediment.

A still more serious problem was reported by Cuthbert Tunstall, the English envoy to Worms, who realized it as soon as he arrived: the emperor was besieged with conflicting advice from the various interest groups around him. The Spaniards wanted him to return to Spain to suppress the urban unrest convulsing Castile. His chancellor, Guillaume de Cröy, Lord of Chièvres, was at least hesitant about dealing with Luther, perhaps influenced by Duke Frederick, who had considerable influence with Charles in his own right. Charles’s next closest adviser, bizarrely, thought the top priority was to head for Italy for his second coronation, the full imperial coronation that could only be conferred at the hands of the pope. But then, Mercurino Gattinara was an Italian.10 What Tunstall did not mention, perhaps because Charles had spoken with Henry VIII in person on his way to the Netherlands from Spain, was the emperor’s other interest in Italy—wresting the duchy of Milan from the grip of Francis I of France, who had seized it after his victory at Marignano in 1515. In circumstances as complicated as these, the papal nuncio had to get into the politicking himself and build up some kind of party around Elector Joachim. Aleander’s perceptive correspondence gives no indications that he ever considered any kind of strategy for achieving his goals beyond a nagging insistence on obedience to the Holy See.

Months were spent at the start of the Reichstag deciding just how the Luther affair should be taken forward. Aleander simply wanted the papal bulls read, received, and implemented. But Luther’s complaint that he was never given a proper opportunity to defend himself in public—a little disingenuous in the light of what had transpired at Leipzig, and of his astonishing presence in print—had fallen on receptive ears, and there was a groundswell of opinion in favor of allowing him to appear in person. From the Roman point of view, this was not part of the script. Aleander was reluctant to see him granted this sort of opportunity for publicity, but was compelled to give way. For all the risk it entailed, this was a triumph for Luther and his supporters. Aleander did his best to safeguard papal interests by securing undertakings that Luther would be given no scope for publicizing his cause, but instead would be allowed only to answer two questions: firstly, whether he had written the books attributed to him; and secondly, whether or not he was prepared to recant those propositions that had been singled out for condemnation. Such undertakings, however, were more easily given than enforced.

The imperial summons, issued on 6 March, was forwarded to Luther from Worms by Elector Frederick in a letter of 11 March. It probably found him at Wittenberg around the middle of the month.11 His first instinct was to refuse to attend if all he could do was say yes or no.¹² The only recantation he was inclined to make concerned the papacy. Once, he wrote, he had regarded the pope as the Vicar of Christ. Now, however, he revoked that opinion, because the pope was the enemy of Christ and the devil’s disciple!¹³ The gaps in Luther’s surviving correspondence at this point may betray a real struggle with his conscience, perhaps a realization that he was prepared to risk martyrdom and that, whatever the outcome, he might be able to make something useful out of his appearance before the emperor if he obeyed. At any rate, by the end of the month he was making plans to set off in company with the imperial herald who had delivered the summons.¹⁴ Travelling by way of Leipzig, Erfurt, and Eisenach, he was cheered along his way, and en route he picked up a number of companions and sympathizers, such as Justus Jonas and Martin Bucer.

Luther arrived in Worms on Tuesday, 16 April. Aleander knew instantly, from the clamor that arose throughout the town.15 The following morning the imperial marshal called on Luther at breakfast to summon him to appear before Charles and the princes later that day. Led in by the back door for fear of popular disturbances, he was warned not to speak until and unless spoken to. Joannes ab Eck (no relation of Dr. Johannes Eck), an imperial official, opened proceedings with the two agreed questions, asking whether the books circulating under his name were his, and whether he wished to retract anything in them. This was followed by a recitation of the titles of his books. In reply, Luther shrewdly seized the opportunity to make his case, rather than simply answer the questions. Acknowledging that they were his and that he stood by them, he nevertheless affirmed his readiness to retract anything that was contrary to scripture, as this would involve matters of faith and the welfare of souls. This specious concession—Luther never did concede that anything he taught had been shown to be contrary to scripture—enabled him at once to insinuate one of his fundamental principles, that scripture alone was sufficient to resolve theological issues. He did not wish to deny Christ before men, he went on, so he sought time for reflection. After some deliberation, the princes decided to allow him a day’s grace, insisting that when he returned he would give his answer viva voce, not in writing. On his way back to his hostel, there were many voices crying out support and encouragement. According to Justus Jonas, many of these cries of support were scriptural quotations or allusions. This may or may not be true, but it certainly shows how Luther’s disciples saw the situation. The overtones of comparison with Christ’s appearances before Herod, Pontius Pilate, and the high priest are unmistakable in their retelling of these events. After the fate of Hus a hundred years before, and given the wide currency of the parallelism between the two men, there was a general sense that the whole affair would end in flames.

Next day (Thursday, 18 April) Luther appeared once more before the princes, and was once more asked whether he acknowledged his books and whether he would retract. There was widespread expectation that he would. After bidding for the goodwill of his audience by pleading his inexperience in worldly affairs as a humble friar, he launched into a speech, reiterating that the named writings were indeed his own, “For I frankly acknowledge nothing other than what is mine alone, and written by me, excluding interpretation by the efforts of anyone else.” Then he launched into an apologia for his oeuvre, distinguishing different veins of work. Many of his writings, he claimed, were simple pious instruction and exhortation with which even his opponents could hardly find fault. To revoke these, he argued, would be to deny the known truth. Then came his polemical works against the pope and the papists, mention of which enabled him to slip in a brief aside against them as torturers of Christian consciences who plagued Christendom and leeched away the livelihood of Germany with dues and levies. To recant these would be to aid and abet tyranny. Finally he distinguished a third class of his writings, essentially private communications, in which, he conceded, he had expressed himself more bitterly than was becoming for a friar. But even these, it transpired, he could hardly recant for fear of lending support to tyranny. Allowing free rein to his histrionic tendencies, he likened himself to Christ before the high priest, and challenged his enemies, “If I have spoken evil, bear witness of the evil” (John 18:23). He would, he insisted, be the first to cast his books on the pyre if he could be convicted by the scriptures of any error. The discord that had arisen through his teaching was neither his fault nor his problem: as he had observed before, Christ had brought not peace but a sword. Warning the emperor against the temptation of putting facile compromise before the Word of God, he implored the assembly not to condemn him.

He was then asked again whether he recanted or not. His answer rings down across the centuries:

Unless I am convinced by the evidence of scripture or by cogent reasoning—for I believe in neither Popes nor Councils alone, because it is plain that they have often erred and contradicted each other—I am overwhelmed by the scriptures I have myself quoted, and with my conscience thus taken captive by the Words of God, I neither can nor will revoke a thing, since it is neither safe nor sound to do anything against one’s conscience. God help poor little me. Amen.16

The imperial spokesman countered by appealing to the authority of former ecclesiastical councils, most notably Constance, asking yet again if Luther would recant. Exchanges continued along these lines, with Luther repeating his contention that, while he was unable to gainsay scripture, church councils often contradicted each other. According to the Lutheran account, it was Charles’s Spanish entourage that booed and hissed Luther off the stage. (Even the marginal note, “The man of God is laughed at,” hinted at the parallel between Luther and Jesus.¹⁷) But it is likely that many listeners were unsettled by his outright repudiation of the authority of ecclesiastical councils, which for 1200 years had been the Church’s standard means of resolving doctrinal uncertainties and defining orthodoxy. Over the next few days, the assembly debated how to respond to Luther’s intransigence.

In the meantime, Luther himself was the cynosure of all eyes, receiving visits from all and sundry, many merely wanting a closer look at the notorious dissident.18 The following week, Luther was summoned to appear at the lodgings of the Archbishop of Trier on Wednesday 24 April. He turned up, with his supporters and closest friends, to face a select delegation of the Reichstag which included the bishops of Augsburg and Brandenburg, the Marquis of Brandenburg, Duke George of Saxony, and Dr. Conrad Peutinger, among others. Their spokesman was one Dr. Hieronymus Vehe, secretary to the Margrave of Baden, who made one final attempt to persuade Luther to back down. He rebutted Luther’s comments about councils from the previous week, and emphasized the ill effects of his books, which were fomenting sedition and disorder. Reminding him not only of the readiness of imperial clemency but also of the imminence of imperial justice, Vehe warned that if he did not relent, he would face outlawry. In reply, Luther repeated his strictures on the Council of Constance, emphasizing his view that in condemning Hus’s principle that the Church was the corporation of the predestined, they had condemned the Word of God itself. His final position remained his strict adherence to that Word.

Later that day Luther also received a visit from Johannes Cochlaeus, a humanist scholar just a few years older than himself. Cochlaeus, like many humanists, had initially greeted Luther’s reforming initiatives moderately favorably, but the Babylonian Captivity had given him second thoughts. Any lingering sympathy between the two men was dispelled by their encounter at Worms. Cochlaeus hoped to get Luther to debate with him before a panel of judges appointed by the emperor. What Happened at Worms reports Luther as responding with a handsome and polite demurral, while a lampoon published shortly afterwards had Cochlaeus running scared and refusing a challenge from Luther. Cochlaeus’s account, which is highly circumstantial and probably reliable, tells a rather different story. Luther was indeed unwilling to enter into a debate (he later said he had been prepared to consider it, but was talked out of it by a friend), and when Cochlaeus invited him to suggest possible judges, he contemptuously proposed that they select a small boy.19

The final throws of the dice came on Thursday, when Peutinger and Vehe called a couple more times to urge Luther to submit either to the judgment of the Reichstag or at least to that of a future general council. They perhaps thought their last offer had elicited some sign of possible compromise from Luther, who was then summoned to one last meeting with the Archbishop of Trier. But when it became apparent that rumors of his submissiveness were somewhat exaggerated, the archbishop dismissed him. Soon afterwards, he received word from the emperor that he had thirty days to get himself to a place of safety. Luther therefore left Worms unscathed and unhindered—much to many people’s surprise—on 26 April. A week later, on his way home, he disappeared off the face of the earth. Rumor ran riot. He had been murdered. He had been kidnapped. He had been snatched by papal agents. It was many weeks before the truth leaked out, namely that he had been seized in a pre-planned, phony raid and whisked away into hiding. His refuge, which remained a well-kept secret, was the Wartburg, a medieval hilltop fortress near Eisenach. It would be Luther’s home for the best part of a year, until March 1522.

The most remarkable outcome of the Reichstag at Worms was not the famous edict of outlawry against Luther, which made its way onto the statute book over the few weeks following his departure. The astonishing thing was the way that Luther and his followers seized control of the news, getting their account of his appearances into print within days, and adroitly putting together a picture of injured innocence which was unsubtly modelled on the story of Christ’s passion. The Edict of Worms was intended to mark the beginning of the end for Luther. But the historical memory of that assembly has been fixed indelibly by its Lutheran representation, What Happened at Worms, which hit the presses instantly, taking the imperial and Catholic authorities entirely by surprise. Its impact was enhanced by a superb frontispiece depicting Luther the friar, haloed and cleft-chinned, with a faraway look in his eyes, holding an open bible while the Holy Spirit descended upon him from on high in the form of a dove. Never before had a public event of this kind, in effect a show trial, been so promptly reimagined by its victim for public consumption. Even the Christian account of the passion of Jesus took a generation to establish itself.

The parallel with Jesus, implicit in What Happened at Worms, was made painstakingly explicit in the Passion of Martin Luther according to Marcellus published soon afterwards, with a fine title page showing the wronged friar’s face, chin tilted defiantly upwards, saintly, contra mundum. Serious parodies of this kind were by no means original. The ancient lives of the saints, after all, had often modelled their narratives on the events of the Gospels, and medieval parallels can also be found. But the casting as Christ of a hero who was still alive, in a widely reprinted pamphlet that usually included a portrait, gave the Passion of Martin Luther far greater importance than its predecessors in the genre.20 As R. W. Scribner argued many years ago, one of the more curious features of the public image of Martin Luther was the way in which so many of the accoutrements of the traditional cult of the saints became attached to his person, from the haloes on some of the printed portraits to the stories of miracles that began to cluster around his very name. As a humble preaching friar of the Order of Hermits of Saint Augustine, he fulfilled medieval expectations of the holy man—just like recent Italian avatars such as the Observant Franciscan Bernardino of Siena or the Dominican firebrand Girolamo Savonarola. With astrological evolutions heading towards a rarely witnessed concatenation of planetary conjunctions in 1524, those expectations were entangled with millenarian hopes and anticipations of sublunary upheavals. What people thought about Luther was at least as important as what Luther thought about in the heady atmosphere of the early 1520s.21

The parallel between Luther and Christ was sharpened still further by the runaway success of another pamphlet launched at that time, the Passion of Christ and Antichrist, an early exercise in graphic literature which presented German readers with a stark and shrewdly drawn contrast between Christ and the pope—or the Antichrist, as Luther and his followers now insisted on calling him. A Wittenberg production, with words by Melanchthon and pictures by Lucas Cranach, it was crude and biting irony in the vein of the master.²² Luther loved it. The implicit logic was clear. If the pope was Antichrist, then Luther was Christ, or at least Christ-like. Variations on the theme ran through Protestant culture across Europe for a century or more.

The theological identification of the pope as Antichrist that Luther had worked out in the context of his own excommunication was the seed of a rapidly growing obsession with Satan and his indefatigable machinations against the “Gospel.” Medieval and early modern Christians took the devil much more seriously than their modern successors, and there was nothing strange in Luther’s concern to renounce the devil and all his works. Late medieval art often depicts the gates of hell as the mouth of a gargantuan demon, sucking down sinners into endless torment. But the devils and demons were not often named by theologians and writers of that era. Luther himself, in his early commentary on the Psalms, frequently found it necessary to discuss the devil, but almost invariably as “diabolus.” Heiko Oberman familiarized us with the general importance of the devil in Luther’s thought and psychology.²³ But from about the middle of 1521, Luther’s demonology underwent a sharp change. Rather than the more abstract diabolus (devil), it was now the far more personal figure of Satan that loomed large in his imagination. This is not to claim that “Satan” never figures in Luther’s prose before this time: it does, but only rarely, and mostly in quotations or echoes of specific scriptural texts. And it is important to note that this shift is visible in his Latin writings, but not in his German, in which “Teufel” remained the standard description. In his Latin the shift is striking. As late as the Appeal to the Christian Nobility, in the summer of 1520, “Satan” appears only twice, while the term “devil” predominates. Five years later, in The Enslaved Will, the ratio is completely reversed.24 The growing prominence of Satan in Luther’s Latin reflected his theological development as well as his psychological response to the tensions and threats of his times. After his flight from Worms, Luther spent most of the next twelve months at the Wartburg fortress, and in later years he looked back on that period as one of particularly direct confrontation with Satan, “who often vexed me with his illusions” there.²⁵ But it was also during this time that he embarked on his translation of the New Testament, a group of documents that were themselves mostly products of an extremely tense and threatening time, and which use the Hebrew name Satan fairly often. Luther’s growing concern with him should therefore be seen as an integral part of his “evangelical” agenda.

The first fruits of Luther’s confinement at the Wartburg were seen in a pamphlet against the Louvain theologian Jacobus Latomus. Latomus had been working since the middle of 1520 on a defense of the condemnation of Luther promulgated by his own university, but it was May1521 before it appeared in print. Luther had a copy by the end of the month, and had finished his own rebuttal by the end of the next. After a now routine disavowal of personal abuse, followed by an equally routine dismissal of his opponent as a model of “disdain, arrogance, pride, malice, wickedness, impudence, superciliousness, ignorance, and stupidity,” Luther turned his Confutation of Latomus’s Reason almost accidentally into the most substantial exposition thus far of his theological or scriptural method.26 The Confutation focused on just two of the issues that Latomus had raised: Luther’s paradoxical contention that every good work was a sin; and his insistence, in defiance of the overwhelming majority of previous theologians, that baptism did not take away all sin from the baptized. Each of these claims rested especially heavily on a single scriptural text, and the discussion turned principally on the interpretation of these texts. Luther’s engagement with Latomus therefore had the side-effect of requiring him to explain the basis on which he approached the task of scriptural interpretation, and it is in this that the particular interest of the Confutation lies.

The idea that “every good work is a sin” dated back to his defense of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1518, and had been picked up not only by the Louvain theologians in their condemnation but also at Rome in the papal bull. Defending it against Latomus, Luther still, just as in 1518, rested primarily on one text, Ecclesiastes 7:21, “For there is no just man on earth who does good and sins not.” His interpretation here was counterintuitive. The “natural” or “commonsense” reading of these words is as a fairly anodyne observation to the effect that there is no one on earth, no matter how good, who only does good things and never does bad things. To put it another way, it divides human actions into the good and the bad, and posits that even a good life will not result exclusively in good actions, but will also include some bad ones. This rather laborious statement of the obvious is necessary here precisely because Luther’s interpretation of the text is so startling. In his reading, the real meaning of this truism is a profound paradox: that there is no human action, however good, which is not at one and the same time a sin; that no human being, however good, is capable of performing an action, not even a good action, which is not in some degree simultaneously a sin. This amounts to a variation on that principle of Luther’s commonly summed up in the phrase simul iustus et peccator, “at once just and a sinner.” Understandably, those who were unconvinced by his new theology saw his reading of Ecclesiastes 7:21 as absurd. That a good work should be at the same time a sin was, for them, meaningless, a contradiction in terms, while the attempt to derive this from that text was merely willful. Latomus’s response is typical of Catholic reactions. It was obvious to him what the text meant, and he could scarcely believe that Luther was serious. He drew parallels between this and other scriptural texts which dilated upon the mixed fruits of a human life, and thought that would be enough to show his opponent the error of his ways. In addition, he cited various early Christian Fathers to emphasize the traditional view that sins and good works were mutually exclusive.27

As a rhetorical flourish, Luther’s description of good works as sins was intriguing and even appealing, a sharp way to remind listeners of the inevitable imperfections of the Christian’s life in a fallen world and fallen flesh. Taken out of context and reduced to a principle, however, a teasing paradox was transmuted into a destabilizing contradiction in terms. After all, as his opponents tirelessly argued, if even the best of good works were sins, why bother trying to avoid sinning? Luther had no intention of pursuing his ideas down the blind alley of antinomianism, but his refusal to give an inch led him to turn paradox into axiom. This led him into exegesis of the kind he imposed upon Ecclesiastes 7:21, as tortuous as anything he or Erasmus ever complained of in the most recondite of scholastic logic-choppers. Oscillating as ever between logical literalism and rhetorical rodomontade, Luther argued himself into an unnecessary corner in his determination to concede nothing to those who took issue with him. It was just one small routine in a larger process by which spiritual and scriptural ideas which might in other hands have become the subject for dialogue and discussion instead metastasized into inflexible dogmatic axiom.

Luther relied almost as heavily on a second text in making his case, Isaiah 64:6, “We have all become like one unclean, and all our righteousness like a menstrual pad.” Once more, he had no time for any figurative interpretation of this transparently figurative utterance. Latomus invoked the authority of Jerome to mitigate the rigor of Luther’s reading, urging that Isaiah was acting as a spokesman for the Jewish people, rather than making an individual confession.28 But Luther had tremendous fun “slippery sloping” this response. “If we are allowed to mess about with figures of speech in this way, at our mere good pleasure, without giving any reason, what is to stop everything taking on a new meaning?” And he happily descanted on this with some comical rereadings of well-known texts: “Blessed are all those who trust in Him—that is, some of them.”²⁹

In no writing, least of all the divine scripture, is it permissible to seek out figures of speech at one’s own mere good pleasure. Rather, they should be avoided and one should strive after the pure, simple, and primary meaning of the words, until the context itself or evident absurdity requires a figure of speech to be admitted.³⁰

While Luther was grappling with his enemies in spirit in the Wartburg, things were happening back in Wittenberg. Without the overpowering presence of Luther to stifle him, Andreas Carlstadt could finally come into his own. Luther later looked back on his colleague as something of a copycat.³¹ Coattailing on Luther’s charisma, Carlstadt was now free to develop his own ideas in new directions. Luther had cast doubt on monastic vows and clerical celibacy in the Appeal to the Christian Nobility, and his destabilization of customary certainties and traditional taboos had already led a few priests, by summer 1521, to seek to regularize their situation in life by taking wives (presumably, in many cases, women with whom they were already in de facto long-term relationships). Controversy arose over these cases, especially when the Archbishop of Mainz sought to enforce canon law against the priests involved. This led Carlstadt to reflect on the question of clerical celibacy which, in theory at least, prevailed throughout Latin Christendom. In the churches of Eastern Europe and the Middle East, married men could become priests, though monks were forbidden to marry, and in general marriage was not permitted for those already ordained priests (not even for widowed priests). But in the churches under the jurisdiction of Rome, marriage was deemed incompatible with the priesthood. It was certainly not possible to ground such a prohibition on scripture alone: the priests of the Old Testament had been permitted to marry, and while the marital status of the apostles in the New Testament was a matter for debate, it was evident that marriage and the priesthood had been neither always nor everywhere incompatible.

Carlstadt worked all this out, and published his Axioms on Celibacy, Monasticism, and Widowhood at Wittenberg in 1521.32 He rushed at once to the straightforward conclusion that the church’s laws on celibacy and clerical marriage were groundless and godless. (He put this into practice in January 1522 when, in his mid-thirties, he married a teenage girl.) Carlstadt’s Axioms were sent to Luther, who was certainly not unaffected by it. Before he had read it, he saw a big difference between the voluntary celibacy to which monks and friars freely vowed themselves and the celibacy which was required of any man who wished to be ordained a priest. Celibacy was of the essence of monasticism, but not of priesthood. However, after perusing Carlstadt’s arguments, Luther found himself tending against the whole idea of vows and celibacy, though he had by no means made up his mind. In isolation at the Wartburg, he reflected on this question through the autumn. His first response was a brief paper, Theses about Vows, which he sent to Melanchthon on 1 August 1521, a long list of theses for disputation, which Melanchthon promptly sent to the printer, perhaps ahead of an actual disputation on the subject.33 A few weeks later he returned to the subject in a further letter to Melanchthon, in which he recalled his father’s remark on his own decision to join a religious order: “Let’s hope this is not some Satanic delusion!” This was apparently the most memorable thing his father ever said to him, judging by the number of times he mentioned it. He brought it up again in the dedication to his father which prefaced his definitive views on the subject, his Judgment on Monastic Vows, completed in November and printed at Wittenberg that winter, with Luther making a brief and unannounced visit to the town to superintend production.³⁴

Until impelled by Carlstadt’s initiative, Luther had not reflected seriously on the implications of his theology for the “religious life.” As soon as he did so, the incompatibility of the voluntary piety of monasticism with his notion of justification by faith alone became apparent to him. But it is curious that he had not drawn the inference before. For with vows, as with everything else, it all came down to certainty of salvation and peace of conscience. Amidst all the monastic authors, Luther wondered whether there was even one who placed any confidence in the value of their own vows: “Give me one who dares to assert that his vow is pleasing and welcome to God.” As he saw it, for them to do so would be in their terms “presumption,” for they taught that certainty of grace was, ordinarily speaking, impossible to attain.³⁵ Without the confidence that what one was doing was pleasing to God, however, one simply should not act. It was a universal principle of late medieval moral theology that to act against one’s conscience was sin. Luther raised the stakes. Peace of conscience was, for him, the fruit of certainty of grace. Any action which did not result in peace of conscience, any action which was not performed in peace of conscience, was therefore done contrary to conscience and was, by definition, sin:

That conscience which either does not believe or—which is the same thing—doubts that it and its deeds are pleasing to God, thereby sins at once against itself and faith, doing that which it does not believe is pleasing.36

The monastic vow, then, from the mere fact that monks could not be certain that it was pleasing to God, was most definitely displeasing to God. All that can give Christians the certainty that Luther requires is faith in Christ, as he conceives it.

This is the faith that scripture teaches. No one who has this faith can act against their conscience, for they cannot doubt that they are pleasing to God, because Christ has been given to them. Anyone who does not have this faith cannot but always act against their conscience, because they cannot but doubt whether they are pleasing to God.³⁷

Luther put forward numerous other arguments in what was a substantial treatise, concluding that

Our consciences are fortified by that which we have proved from the evident and certain testimony of scripture, namely that monastic vows are of their nature contrary to the Word of God, the Gospel, faith, Christian liberty, and the commandments—not to mention common sense and self-contradiction.³⁸

But the rock on which he founded his judgment was certainty of conscience. Looking back, he saw his role in the downfall of monasticism as providential. When five refugee nuns from Fribourg turned up at Wittenberg in 1532, he jokingly remarked that God, “who blew away monasticism by means of me,” was rewarding him for the work by sending him tithes of it.39

Quite when Luther had abandoned the common elements of religious life as an Austin Friar is not clear. It may be that right up until his departure for Worms he continued to participate in the communal prayer of his house. But there was no such possibility at the Wartburg, where he was able to reflect on monasticism and perhaps also to grow away from it in the relative freedom of that captivity. It was still to be several years before Luther abandoned the last vestiges of his life as a friar. His tonsure had gone by 1523, having doubtless been abandoned for reasons of disguise during his stay at the Wartburg, and it is not likely that he was any longer trying to keep up with his canonical hours or his fasts. But on his return to Wittenberg he still resided in the friary and wore his habit.⁴⁰ Only with his marriage in 1525 were the ties finally cut. All outward signs of his former state of life were renounced, though he and his growing family continued to dwell in the former friary, which a grateful prince eventually made over to him formally in 1532.

The autumn of 1521 also saw Luther reach his final judgment on what he called “the private mass,” which is to say the celebration of masses for votive purposes, such as for the relief of souls in purgatory. Luther’s new theology was as devastating in its implications for votive masses as it was for the votive life. His conception of the rite of the Eucharist as a “testament” had been developed in 1519–20, initially, in a minor way, in his 1519 commentary on Galatians.⁴¹ It was expounded at some length in a sermon preached on Easter Day (8 April) 1520, in which Luther first aired his view that Christ had only instituted two rituals for Christians—baptism and the Eucharist.⁴² Doubtless some of that sermon found its way into the Babylonian Captivity, which set out the doctrine of eucharistic testament in some detail. In the Abrogation of the Private Mass, Luther was picking up an interpretation of the eucharistic ritual briefly adumbrated in Galatians and especially Hebrews, in which the concept of the last will and testament was exploited to identify Christ as the testator and eternal life as his bequest to his heirs, the faithful.43

The imagery of the Eucharist as a reading of Christ’s “testament” to his legatees was especially appealing in a culture in which the last will and testament was such a powerful social symbol and legal instrument. Given Luther’s growing attachment to the theory of univocal meaning for scriptural keywords, it is not surprising that his adoption of this unconventional (though scripturally based) “testamentary” interpretation of the Eucharist led him to downplay the “sacrificial” interpretation which prevailed in patristic and medieval theology. The Greek διαθηκη served to render the concept of a pact, treaty, or covenant as well as that of a testament, and the Gospel narratives of the Last Supper clearly presented the eucharistic action in the light of the Passover sacrifice that commemorated the covenant God had made with Moses and the Israelites. Luther, of course, retained a conception of Christ’s death on the cross as a sacrifice. But for him the testamentary interpretation of the eucharistic ritual excluded the traditional conception of that liturgy as itself a “sacrifice.” It was the ancient doctrine of eucharistic sacrifice which underlay the whole apparatus of votive masses and religious foundations seen throughout Catholic Europe, in which the celebration of the Eucharist was a placatory or intercessory ritual directed towards securing divine assistance for this or that temporal or spiritual goal. This practice, seen preeminently in the celebration of masses for the sake of the souls of the faithful dead, had been a part of Latin Christianity for over a thousand years, and was one of the biggest drivers of the tide of endowment and benefaction which had enriched the Western Church over that period via complex institutional structures ranging from monasteries through confraternities and chantries to “obits” (temporary foundations supporting masses for a limited time) and individual masses. By challenging the conception of the Mass as itself a sacrifice, Luther struck at the very root of this liturgical economy, and laid down a foundation for the social and political processes of “the Protestant Reformation,” which entailed widespread expropriation of the church. In the wake of his condemnation at Worms, he started to draw practical conclusions from his theoretical premises, and hence to call for thoroughgoing reform.

The theological value to Luther of the conception of the Eucharist as testament was that it enabled him to connect the Eucharist still more effectively with his core doctrine of justification by faith alone, and thus to interpret the sacrament in terms of the certainty that lay at the heart of his religious vision. The language of testament was far more unilateral than that of covenant, with its implications of agreement between two parties, and therefore sat much better with his conception of the sheer gratuitousness of salvation. The Christian, as a legatee of the testament, merely had to believe that Christ spoke the truth in making his bequest of the forgiveness of sins. You could accept the bequest or reject it—but you could not deserve it. Simple and scriptural, his innovative account of the Eucharist was very potent.

Even in “abrogating the private mass,” Luther centered his theology on certainty. Certainty of salvation and the certitude of scripture, powerful coordinating principles in his theology, are here explicitly set in their mutually corroborating relationship:

Conscience will damn you any which way, unless it is altogether established on the certain, mighty, and salvific Word of God, that is, unless it is built upon rock. That is the infallible certitude we seek.44

The purpose of Christ’s legacy in the eucharistic testament was to leave his followers a tangible guarantee of his promise, the substance of which was the forgiveness of sins.

So we cling to the Divine Majesty, which is forever firmly bound to us through the priceless token bestowed upon us, expecting with the utmost certainty, with the sweetest and most tranquil confidence, that he will deliver what he has promised.45

The anxious multiplication of sacrifices by indefatigable priests could not deliver this ultimate certainty. The sacrificing priests of medieval tradition were themselves lost souls and blind guides, “offering sacrifice always and everywhere, yet never attaining certainty, because, having let go of the promise of the infallible God, they are borne hither and yon by their sacrifices and uncertain works.”⁴⁶ Luther’s conscience clung desperately to a certainty that he felt was under perpetual and imminent threat—from papists and fanatics, from the slippery Erasmus, from those who placed, respectively, institutional church authority, personal divine inspiration, or human scholarly common sense between the naked text and the open mind. To inculcate certainty is to insinuate doubt.