10

THE MEANING OF MARTIN LUTHER

Only towards the end of 1525 did Luther at last find the leisure to turn to the first of the three threats of that year, the challenge from Erasmus. The culmination of the slow-motion controversy between them broke little new ground. Although Luther showered Erasmus with ironic praise as the one who “alone before all the others set about the real issue,” not pestering him with trivialities like the papacy and indulgences, the first of his opponents to get to the root of his teachings by focusing on free will and grace, this was mere rhetorical posing.1 His opponents had been picking out this issue for six years. His position on free will had been condemned by the papal bull Exsurge Domine in 1520, and Erasmus himself borrowed much of the theological substance of his case from the works of earlier controversialists such as John Fisher. From the Catholic point of view, from which Erasmus entered the fray, it was too little, too late. He was no longer in much of a position to damage Luther, as he might have been had he weighed in five years earlier. Luther was too big now to have any need to fear, or brook, contradiction. Yet their exchanges are nonetheless important for our understanding of Luther and his development, largely because Erasmus was such an acute observer and managed to expose more clearly than previous controversialists some of the internal methodological difficulties within Luther’s theological position.

Luther’s considered response to Erasmus, The Enslaved Will, was finally released in December 1525. There was little new on show, nor did Luther’s ideas develop further to any significant extent across the remainder of his life.2 The flat denial of the moral freedom of the human will was a position Luther had adopted years before, but this was a position he took not out of any commitment to philosophical determinism, but for entirely theological reasons. The point of his uncompromising teaching was to highlight the priority of divine grace in human salvation, and to emphasize divine predestination as its ultimate cause. Previous theologians of predestination, such as Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, had for the most part insisted, notwithstanding the absolute and unconditional nature of divine predestination, that the human will remained in some real sense free. The logical coherence of this claim might well be questioned, and Reformation theologians from Luther onwards tended to simplify matters by simply dismissing the concept of free will in relation to human salvation, noting that it was nowhere to be found in scripture. On the contrary, the very notion of liberum arbitrium, free will, was smoke blown into the eyes of the church by Satan precisely in order to compromise the theology of grace. On predestination as such there was little if anything to choose between Luther and Thomas Aquinas. The difference was that Luther entirely repudiated the concept of free will.

Erasmus’s treatise On Free Will made two important contributions to the debate. The first was to deconstruct Luther’s carefully crafted self-image as a purely biblical theologian. The humanist critic saw in Luther, for all his genuine insights into Paul, not a scholar after his own heart, but yet another scholastic theologian with an axe to grind, overthinking and over-arguing his insights out of a misplaced pride in his own intellectual ingenuity. Secondly, he forced Luther to address one of the deepest scriptural and philosophical difficulties with the doctrine of predestination in the extreme form in which he advanced it, a difficulty further sharpened by his rejection of free will. This difficulty was that of reconciling a divine decision to save only a fraction of humanity (and, it was generally accepted, a small fraction at that) with the plentiful scriptural testimony to the at least potentially universal mercy and benevolence of God. “Nolo mortem peccatoris” (Ezek 33:11), Erasmus cited, “I desire not the death of the sinner.”3 Luther was by no means unaware of this text. He had cited it himself on occasion. But he had skirted round it since developing his new theology. The problem lay in reconciling the divine choice of the elect out of the “mass of perdition” with the apparent universality of the offer of mercy and salvation both in scripture and in Luther’s preaching. Erasmus’s challenge was, essentially, to ask whether that offer was genuine or not. For if God had chosen but a small minority for salvation, the divine offer announced in the scriptures would not be as straightforward as it seemed, but would, on the contrary, seem at best equivocal and at worst mendacious. Deus solus verax?

Luther’s answer to this question should probably not be regarded as a central plank of his theological platform, with which it is not obviously consistent. That answer was to distinguish between the “revealed” will of God—the scriptures, including their apparently universal and conditional offer of salvation—and a further “hidden” will of God, the inscrutable and unrevealed will of the Trinity, by which the actual choice of the elect was unconditionally determined. Ezekiel was therefore speaking only of God’s revealed offer of mercy, not of that “hidden and fearsome will” by which he determined who would partake of it.⁴ This solved the immediate problem, giving a perfectly plausible explanation for the theological data: God chose some and not others, and the Bible simply did not account for this, and it was not for mere human beings to pry into the most intimate and awesome counsels of the divine majesty. But the logical price was high. The appeal to a hidden will of God was at least counterintuitive for a theology that rested on what was revealed sola scriptura, by the Bible alone, and by a Bible that was to be read as a transparent text in accordance with what Luther elsewhere in this very work calls the “simple, pure, and natural signification of the words.”5 In the light of this hidden will, the revealed text of scripture nonetheless remained therefore equivocal, for the offer of salvation was not being made upon the stated conditions, but was being determined by further considerations not even to be found in the small print. Luther had no answer to this beyond assertion and imprecation, and it is tempting to conclude that the extraordinary ferocity of his subsequent hatred for Erasmus may be traced to the mental discomfort occasioned him by his opponent’s drilling into this fault line in his theology.

On this occasion, as on innumerable others, Luther expressed himself with an otherwise unaccountable bitterness towards a man who had been by far the mildest of his critics. This started in The Enslaved Will itself. Erasmus may have been a prejudiced critic, so we need not concur with his claim that, of all Luther’s books thus far, none contained as much “malicious vituperation” as this.⁶ As Luther’s polemics go, it is relatively restrained. But he was justified in feeling that the tone and wording of his own essay had done nothing to merit what was still a ferocious response. And from this time on, Luther spoke of Erasmus with unmitigated contempt. One of his milder claims was that for Erasmus, as for the pope and all the cardinals, “Religion is nothing but a fairy story,” dreamed up to maintain papal power.⁷ Erasmus was a clown, a Judas, an Arian and an Epicurean, an equivocator, an amphibologist, indeed an atheist.⁸ This last allegation Erasmus found especially hurtful. Luther’s default sneers were that Erasmus was “as slippery as an eel” and that he “spouts ambiguities.”⁹ So much might be taken merely for the niceties of sixteenth-century debate, but there is a disturbing solemnity to other comments which takes them close to the absolute zero of cold and considered hatred:

Therefore I enjoin upon you, by divine authority, hatred for Erasmus (this he said to me). He looks on our whole theology as if he were Democritus: he just laughs at it. So I shall write against him, even if he is killed; for I have decided to kill him with my pen…. What if I do kill him? So too I killed Muntzer.10

The scribe’s parenthesis testifies to his shock at the deliberate solemnity of this execration, and it was no mere “one-off.” Luther frequently delighted in the divine providence that brought so many of his foes to a bitter end, and he regarded hatred for Erasmus as an integral component of his legacy:

This I bequeath you as my testament when I am gone, and I call you present as witnesses of this, that I hold Erasmus for the greatest enemy of Christ there has been this thousand years.

The reason I hate Erasmus with all my heart is that he brings into dispute the things that ought to be our joy.¹¹

Luther loved his enemies. He rejoiced in his hatreds and savored them, rolling them around his mouth like some fine vintage. He was not inclined, however, to bless those who cursed him. On the contrary, “everyone curses when they pray, so, when I pray ‘Hallowed be thy name,’ I curse Erasmus and all those who hold opinions contrary to the Word.” “I pray all of you who care about glory and the Gospel, be enemies of Erasmus, for he hates religion.”¹²

He saw where the appeal of Erasmus’s argument lay:

This idea of Erasmus’s is the ultimate temptation and the most perilous, namely that he thinks God unjust in dealing evil to the good and good to the evil.¹³

Of course he does not accurately represent the case here. Erasmus was as aware as any Christian moralist that bad things happen to good people and that this process of trial and temptation was part of the dispensation of providence. But lurking below this account is his sensitivity to the Erasmian question about what divine “justice” means in Luther’s account of faith, justification, and predestination. His pervasive critique of Erasmus as a doubter and an equivocator is a reductive and instinctive response to the sort of mental subtlety that not only shied away from Luther’s assertive certainties but also succeeded in problematizing them.

Luther had piggybacked quite successfully on the humanist critique of scholasticism, which had been voiced par excellence by Erasmus. But from where Erasmus stood, Luther looked like just one more quarrelsome scholastic with a bee in his bonnet, leading Christians astray into endless agonizing about the finer points of dogma when the crucial task was to initiate them into faith and justice by presenting them with the teaching, example, and person of Jesus as depicted in the Gospels. Ultimately there were two very different understandings of religion at work here. Erasmus saw all the weaknesses and drawbacks of the established Church. After all, few had pointed them out more insistently than he. But when challenged by the Reformers as to why he did not therefore join their brave new church, he simply observed that, when he saw a better one, he might. He saw nothing in the convulsions and upheavals of the civic Reformations of Germany and Switzerland to persuade him that the new establishment had anything better to offer than the old. And the instant fissiparousness of what we now call “the Reformation” gave him no cause to prefer it to the still imposing unity of the Catholic Church, no matter how striated and pitted that ancient monolith now seemed. Luther was offering a highly cerebral account of Christianity powered by a surge of emotional commitment, and the rhetoric of “faith alone” and “faith not works,” even when qualified by the insistence that the Christian life was meant to be fruitful in good works and personal sanctification, was perhaps unlikely in principle to drive any dramatic movement of moral and social reform. At any rate it did not evidently do so. The first Lutheran convert to Catholicism of any note, Georg Witzel, a young priest who, coming under the influence of Luther at Wittenberg, took a wife and served a while as Lutheran pastor of a parish near Eisenach, reverted to the faith of his fathers in the later 1520s largely out of a growing feeling that the new teaching was failing to bring forth the fruits of good works predicted for it.14

Luther had never intended to “start the Reformation.” He had not even intended to launch a new theology, a new doctrine, on the world, let alone the new religion that actually transpired, the first in a rapidly expanding family. As a Christian, he could not actually conceive of himself as founding a new religion, so he dutifully credited the truth to scripture. His intention, like that of so many reformers before him, was to call Christians back to the original and central truths of the Gospel. Yet in the end, he had a shrewd sense of the originality of his own intellectual achievement. He saw clearly enough that he was the first to bring the truth to light, at least in his own times. In his showdown with Carlstadt at Wittenberg in spring 1522 he reminded his audience that it was he, Luther, who had opened the way to truth. Like Paul, he took a legitimate pride in his apostolic role, even though he did not claim to have been snatched up into heaven to meet Christ in person.¹⁵

Although it does not do to romanticize the perceptions and intuitions of “ordinary people,” who are no less prone to flattery, self-deception, willful blindness, and obstinacy as whoever we imagine we exclude from that category, yet the evidence set before us by the linguistic record of our kind, by the everyday usage of ordinary vernacular speech, can help us understand the past. And ordinary people, as witnessed by everyday speech and usage, had a clear idea of what was going on. What they saw in Luther’s movement, and in Zwingli’s, and in due course in Calvin’s, not to mention in the “Anabaptist” traditions denounced by the others, was novelty. Luther’s movement was as much a novelty in sixteenth-century Germany as Islam in seventh-century Arabia or Mormonism in nineteenth-century America. From Cajetan onwards, the whiff of novelty hung about it, for two or three generations—until Lutheranism and Calvinism had become so much part of Europe that they were themselves established, traditional, comfortable, and every bit as complacent as the late medieval Catholic Church before the tidal wave of dissident print swept over it with Luther precariously surfing on top.

This common perception was somewhat bruising to the tender consciences of the new evangelists. They knew, after all, that all they were doing was summoning people back to the true, original Word of God, stripped of its human accretions, the barque of Peter scoured of the limpets which had accumulated on its hull through 1500 years on the seas of history. So the charge of innovation was especially hurtful and offensive. And innovation was a “charge.” Sixteenth-century Europe was a traditional society, not a modern society. The “new” was not, as it is today, a challenge, or an opportunity, or at the very least a marketing ploy. The “new” was a disruption, a risk, a threat. The charge of reckless innovation (innovation was by definition reckless) was a surefire way, for the most part, to put a thinker or writer in the doghouse.

The evidence for this is most visibly preserved in a pamphlet produced by a Protestant controversialist to rebut the charge of innovation. Urbanus Rhegius, the leading Lutheran preacher in Augsburg in the 1520s, produced his pamphlet New Learning in 1526.16 The burden of his argument was that people had got it all wrong. The “new doctrine,” the “new learning,” was in fact popery. It was the evangelium, the “Gospel,” which, as its name showed, was really the “old” religion, because it was the religion of the New Testament itself, not the religion that had gradually overlaid that old religion through the intervening centuries, until eventually it had completely obscured the truth. The charge of innovation, of “new doctrine,” he pointed out, had been levelled by the Pharisees against Jesus himself, so the prevalence of the charge in modern times itself became evidence that it was false. As Luther put it:

The peasants are brutes who think we made up the religion we preach. When they are examined, they say “yeah, yeah,” and don’t believe a word of it.17

The charge of novelty stung, and was rebutted. Protestants insisted that it was the Catholics who were the real innovators. But the peasants never called Catholicism the “new religion,” and it is revealing that the Catholic preachers and pamphleteers never felt they needed to defend the claim that their faith was the “old religion.” Instead, they relentlessly appealed to an antiquity and a tradition that they felt able to take for granted, irrespective of the objections of their opponents.

Notwithstanding the novel character of his thought, Luther owed more than he realized to medieval theology. But it is his conscious repudiation of medieval theology, rather than his unconscious assimilation of many of its obsessions and presuppositions, that is the most important thing about his relationship with it: “Before our time, none of the universities had any idea about the real subject of theology.”¹⁸

Luther is commonly praised by modern theologians, Catholic as well as Protestant, for putting Christ at the center of his theology. Yet in this, of all his thinking, he showed himself at his most medieval. As he himself noted in one of his obiter dicta, Bernard of Clairvaux (a Cistercian monk of the twelfth century) excelled all the ancient Fathers of the Church in his preaching “because he preached Christ so beautifully.”19 A focus on Christ, “Christocentrism,” was very much the creation of medieval Christian sensibility: because the humanity of Christ, especially the suffering humanity of Christ, in solidarity with sinners and with the human race in general, loomed ever larger in the artistic and devotional imagination of the later Middle Ages. This intense devotion to Christ is all over late medieval spiritual literature: among the best-selling religious books in 1500 was the Imitation of Christ. The centrality of Christ is even more obvious in late medieval art. No one was depicted more commonly in painting, sculpture, or illumination than Jesus, usually on the cross or in his mother’s arms. Luther’s “theology of the cross” is stylistically (though not theologically) prefigured in the south German ivory carvings of the crucifixion and other passion scenes. It is no surprise that Dürer, a product and a master of this artistic movement, was drawn to Luther’s teachings. Luther’s focus on Christ was no radical departure from late medieval Christianity, it was its fruit: perhaps its culmination, perhaps its exaggeration, but most certainly its fruit.

This profound Christocentric legacy in Luther’s thought may help explain what are from one perspective the two anomalous, if likewise medieval, features of his mature theology: his continued adherence to the doctrine of the “real presence” in the Eucharist and his continued acceptance of the place of visual imagery in the Christian life. Most traditions of early modern Protestantism other than his own abandoned both the Catholic and the Lutheran doctrines of eucharistic presence²⁰ and excluded visual imagery from public worship. More generally, the use of images in worship has been closely correlated in Christian history with more “realist” doctrines of eucharistic presence. Other evangelical theologians found it hard to see what role that kind of real presence could have in the world of “justification by faith alone.” And it is easy to understand how, in the world of “scripture alone,” the Old Testament’s relentless polemic against idolatry could be turned against the elaborate apparatus of imagery at work in late medieval Catholic life and worship. Luther’s position on these issues was somewhat anomalous, even if he was able to defend the real presence, to his own satisfaction, in terms of a straightforward reading of scripture, while justifying the place of images by excluding the worship of images but not their use for purposes of instruction and meditation. The theologians of the other Reformation traditions, who were mostly ready to acknowledge their debt to him (Zwingli alone, rather unconvincingly, denied any such debt), seem to have felt that his papist past simply clung too closely to allow him to jettison all its errors. Like Moses, he had led people towards the promised land but had not lived to enter it. If this view does get near to explaining the anomalies, the reason is that Luther’s own personal engagement with Christ had been shaped so deeply by the artistic and imaginative resources of late medieval devotion. The cross of Christ, so central to the emergence of his theology, was inseparable for him from its artistic depictions. And his sense of Christ was inseparable from a realist understanding of the Eucharist, as is evident in his later reminiscences of his first mass and of the “horror” he experienced when Staupitz was carrying the consecrated host in a Corpus Christi procession.

If the role of Christ is part of the medieval inheritance in his thought, so too is the role of Antichrist, which is indeed one of the deepest marks of medieval Catholicism on his mind. The scriptural basis for the doctrine of the Antichrist was scanty at best, and far from clear, but this medieval legacy left its mark on the entire early modern Protestant tradition. The meaning Luther, Calvin, and so many others attached to those scattered texts had been forged through centuries of speculative interpretation. It was a thoroughly medieval myth which Luther took up and reforged as a weapon against the papacy.

The very bibliocentrism of Luther’s theology, one of its most powerfully attractive features, was rooted in medieval Christianity. It was movable print, that last fruit of medieval Catholicism,21 that brought the Bible within the reach first of all scholars and then of almost everyone. But veneration of the very words of the Bible was already a cultural reality. Luther’s appeal to the Bible was thoroughly traditional, even though his growing disdain for tradition, “human tradition,” was not. He did not have to give the Bible central place: it held that already. All he had to do was to disconnect it from the institutional structures that had hitherto controlled its interpretation, to emancipate the divine word from human bondage. The rhetorical device with which he achieved that was the key phrase “Word of God.” This was already in limited use as a synonym for the Bible, albeit chiefly in a liturgical context or as part of a phrase, “preaching the Word of God,” which was a late medieval periphrasis for “preaching.” Luther took up the phrase “Word of God,” in its narrow sense as a synonym for scripture, and popularized it. It thus became simultaneously a synonym not only for scripture but also for his particular message, for his particular interpretation of scripture. It was a powerful slogan with which to challenge the papal church.

At a deeper level, the problems that worried Luther were thoroughly medieval problems. The intensity of his engagement with sin and guilt is the legacy of centuries of monastic piety. Self-examination and confession lay at the root of his concept of justification by faith alone, and while these practices have deep roots in the Christian past, most notably in the reflections of Saint Augustine, they were developed in the Middle Ages with an intensity and profundity that shaped both Luther’s spiritual growth and his theological journey. His conception of the “imputation” of divine justice to the Christian by virtue of their faith (itself elicited in the Christian by divine action) could hardly have been formulated until the medieval nominalists had forged their concept of divine “acceptation,” by which God accepted human good deeds as good works despite their imperfections. Luther’s doctrines of the intrinsic sinfulness of all human works (even good works) and the consequent impossibility of the commandments was an imaginative elaboration on such ideas, and led him ultimately towards the radically new, ultra-Augustinian thesis that baptism—notwithstanding a thousand years of tradition to the contrary—did not take away all sin. Even his powerful anti-Pelagian rhetoric and his successful characterization of Catholic theology as Pelagian (or semi-Pelagian) owed their impact to the fact that Augustine’s condemnation of Pelagius had been so universally assimilated by Christian theologians (even when they inadvertently compromised it).22 Everyone knew that Pelagius was wrong.

Luther’s problems were medieval problems, but his solutions were new solutions. The big novelties in his thought were the invisible church, the ineradicable persistence of sin in this life, and the certainty of grace (through justification by faith alone). Each of these central ideas directly contradicted the presuppositions of a thousand years of Christian writing and preaching—and, ironically, contradicted Luther’s favorite ancient Christian writer, Augustine of Hippo. For Augustine, the Catholic Church was emphatically visible. That was the whole point of his lengthy controversy against a North African Christian splinter group, the so-called Donatists. For Augustine, baptism took away all sin: whatever flaws remained, however difficult and problematic, were not, as such, sin, and he indignantly repudiated the suggestion that he thought otherwise. For Augustine, no one could be certain that they enjoyed the grace and favor of God. For a millennium, medieval Christian theologians echoed and embroidered his themes. Luther, starting each time with Augustinian insights, namely the persistent sinfulness of Christians, the flawed character of every human action, and the absolute priority of divine grace in justification, developed those insights in directions which fatally undermined other outworks of Augustine’s theological structure. For Augustine the divine and the human cooperated in salvation, and salvation was therefore, from the human perspective, cooperative. For Luther, it was passive. Although Luther is commonly, and to some extent justifiably, classified as an “Augustinian” theologian, his theological achievement was to shatter, or at least to transcend, the Augustinian paradigm.

Luther had never intended to open a path to the individual and subjective interpretation of the scriptures. Truth was his object, and his notion of truth was as objective as everyone else’s at that time. But the literalness of the literal sense of scripture was always going to be a debatable quality, and the potential depth of the problem became apparent with the endless and intricate disputations that arose over one of the simplest statements in the New Testament, “Hoc est enim corpus meum,” “For this is my body.” For a statement which might seem, grammatically, in the “cat sat on the mat” class, this proved prodigiously contentious in sixteenth-century Europe. “Lutheranism” could barely be said to have come into existence before other preachers, such as Zwingli in Zurich, began weaving their own threads into the new religious fabric by proposing that this apparently apodictic utterance should be taken not literally but figuratively, lest Christ be imagined to have said something so manifestly contrary to the evidence of the senses. For Luther, it was obvious that Christ called it his body, and that, as Christ (God) could not lie, it must be so. But it was equally obvious that it was still bread, obvious both to the senses and because the Apostle Paul, also incapable of lying in such a matter thanks to the inspiration and guidance of the Holy Spirit, often called it bread. So it had to be both: body and bread. For Zwingli, it was obviously bread, not only because Paul called it bread but also because this was evident to the senses; therefore, though Christ had called it his “body,” it could not be two things at once. It had to be either his body or bread. He went for bread, resolving the question by the evidence of the senses. But for him it was obvious that, if Christ’s words were to be taken literally, it had to be his body and therefore not bread, because it could not be two things at once. He preferred the Catholic solution to the Lutheran one, though he preferred his own to both. For the Catholics, it was obvious that Christ called it his body and that Christ could not lie; therefore, the evidence of the senses was not in this case to be relied upon, and it was Paul’s description of the sacrament as “bread” that was figurative, rather than Christ’s description of it as his body.

Luther did not like the idea of having anyone else decide whether he was right or wrong. He incessantly demanded the right to be heard, but denied that anyone had the right to preside or judge at the hearing. After failing to persuade Cajetan at Augsburg, he returned home and appealed to a future general council of the Church, affiliating himself for the moment to the late medieval “conciliarist” tradition, which held that in matters of dogmatic definition a general council was superior even to the pope. But at the Leipzig Disputation he went out of his way to show how church councils had contradicted each other, and retreated to his last redoubt, the principle, which he derived from the fifteenth-century canon lawyer Panormitanus, that a single individual, properly reliant on solid scripture, might conceivably maintain the truth against a pope or even a council. The Leipzig Disputation itself was only submitted to the judgment of Paris because Eck refused to go on stage unless it was agreed that some judge be appointed. As the judgments of Louvain, Cologne, and Paris all came down against him, Luther showed a sturdy disregard for their cavilling. A couple of years later, at Worms, when Johannes Cochlaeus offered to dispute against Luther, he asked who might adjudicate the outcome, and Luther suggested they ask a boy, or else a youth who happened to be in the room.23 The only judge, for Luther, was scripture, and he already knew that scripture was in his favor. What more was there to be said?

The “Panormitanus Principle,” which Panormitanus himself seems to have advanced as a sort of thought experiment rather than as a practical policy, was powerfully corrosive because it was profoundly individualistic. Ultimately, although nothing could have been further from his mind, Luther’s theological synthesis was a triumph of individualism. This individualism was evident in both the substance and the method of his theology. The focus of his teaching was the personal certitude of divine favor which grew out of the doctrine of justification by faith. Allied with the idea of the invisibility of the church (while one could be certain of one’s own standing with God, one could never have such certainty about anyone else, so the true church had to be invisible), this tended theologically to put the individual’s “relationship with God” (as it came to be called much, much later), rather than the church, at the heart of the Christian religion (even if that individual relationship with God has often been manifested in practice by transferring from one church community to another). In terms of theological method, the exaltation of the Word of God above all human authority necessarily conferred upon each and every person the right and duty to work out for themselves what the Word of God might actually mean. Opponents of the Reformation were prompt to attack what they thought was the fatal flaw in the Protestant scripture principle, arguing that Luther and his followers were establishing the right of private or individual judgment, which they saw as an unconscionable subordination of eternal truth to personal whim. None of the early Reformers was prepared for a moment to entertain such a preposterous notion. The pure Word of God was above all human authority, especially that of the random and perhaps uneducated individual. Each of the Reformers knew what the pure Word of God was, and if anybody failed to agree with them on it, that was evidently the outcome of pride or folly or both. Yet the interpretative maelstrom which this principle unleashed was irresoluble, and Protestants came to accept that this was so. Two hundred years later, it was widely accepted among Protestants themselves that “private judgment” was, precisely, one of the great achievements of the Reformation. The fundamental tenet of Protestantism, for many in that tradition, was now to be identified as the right of the individual conscience against the oppressive structures of popery.

Luther would never have subscribed to such a position, yet it was discernibly related to the rhetoric of conscience with which, especially in the years around 1520, he had justified his own stand for truth. No more than Thomas More did he make a stand for “conscience.” Each made a stand, in conscience, for truth. Thomas More aligned his conscience with the definitions of the Catholic Church. Martin Luther aligned his with the pure Word of God, the plain text of scripture. Each of them took their departure from a conception of conscience which was very much the creation of medieval European Catholicism. Generations of primarily monastic reflection on sin and guilt, virtue and vice, within the context of sacramental confession had raised self-examination to an art form which in extreme cases could be psychologically damaging. “Conscience” was the mental process by which individuals assessed and passed judgment on their own lives and actions, measuring thoughts, words, deeds done and undone, against criteria supplied by scripture, tradition, and the Church. By 1500, it was an established principle of moral theology that no one should ever act, nor be expected or required to act, against their conscience; and that to act knowingly and willfully against one’s conscience was a mortal sin. It was to this principle that Luther appealed loudly and often in his brushes with ecclesiastical authorities around 1520. There was nothing new in the principle. What was novel was appealing to this principle against not simply the judicial but the dogmatic authority of the Church.

Luther’s conscience was lively but unruly. This is evident from his later reminiscences, which record how during his time as a friar his tender conscience fostered anxiety over the observance of minutiae of the rule of his religious order. Life in religious orders was envisaged as a training in conscience and a denial of self. Obedience in indifferent matters was a training in humility. Self was subordinated to community—via the paternal authority of the prior and his hierarchical superiors up to the pope. Luther’s conscience, however, did not respond to this training, which troubled him and his confessors, who, as he remarked, simply could not understand the anxieties of a man whose life seemed relatively blameless. Luther went instead in a radically different direction, as he developed a new theology of justification which at least bestowed upon him that “peace of conscience” which became for him the practical measure of theological integrity. His peace of conscience rested not on the rigorous examination of conscience and the exhaustive cataloguing of failure in confession, nor even on the “perfect contrition” of which medieval theology spoke, but on the promise or guarantee of forgiveness which he found first in the words of absolution uttered by the priest to the penitent (words which, medieval theologians held, were the words of Christ uttered by the priest as his representative and in his name), and then in the more general promise of forgiveness that he identified as the central message of the Gospel. This peace of conscience was the fruit of his doctrine of certitude of grace, by which, for Luther, the burden of salvation was taken off the self.

Yet at a deeper level, the deployment of peace of conscience as a practical yardstick of doctrinal truth amounted to an assertion of the self shrouded beneath a professed subjection to scripture. In practice, introspection, often a psychologically harmful introspection, remained a marked feature of the Protestant traditions. And, as the emerging notion of “private judgment” showed, the appeal to the plain meaning of scripture alone necessarily thrust onto the individual the onus of deciding just which of the competing plain meanings of scripture was the authoritative one. The inherent individualism of this approach to scripture was obscured partly by Luther’s insistence on scriptural transparency and supremacy, and partly by the sheer force of his personality. The egotism of his rhetoric drowned out the intrinsic individualism of his logic. This egotism manifested itself unmistakably in his life. Successive repudiations of paternal authority—first that of his father, then of his spiritual father (Staupitz), of his princely father (the Elector Frederick), of the pater patriae Charles V, and ultimately of the Holy Father himself (the supreme figure of Christian fatherhood on earth was unveiled by Luther as Antichrist)—marked the stages by which Luther emancipated his conscience and his own individuality from any earthly subjection.24 By 1530 nobody told Luther what to do. The certainty of divine favor that he had uncovered in the certainty of scripture had freed this particular Christian from any merely human authority.