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A Family Rift

At the same time Katharina von Bora was living her childhood and early adult years as a cloistered nun, one hundred miles away in Erfurt, Germany, her future husband was living a markedly similar life as a monk.

Like Katharina, Martin Luther never expected to enter monastic life. In fact, his father, Hans Luder,1 had lofty expectations that his firstborn would pursue a career in law, and for the first twenty-two years of Luther’s life, the plan unfolded accordingly. Luther spent four years at Erfurt University, first studying liberal arts and then law. He took his academic work seriously, completing his bachelor’s degree in one year (ranking thirtieth out of fifty-seven students) and two years later his master’s degree (improving his rank to second out of seventeen students).2 His father was proud of his son’s accomplishments and immediately began to address Luther with the pronoun ihr, the more formal and respectful “you,” instead of the familiar du, to demonstrate that he considered Luther a professional.3 Hans also presented Luther with an extravagant gift: a complete edition of the Corpus juris,4 a not-so-subtle hint at his expectation that Luther would continue on to earn a law degree at the university. That was the plan, and Luther seemed willing to go along with it, until the fateful evening of July 2, 1505, changed everything.

That night, twenty-two-year-old Luther was caught in a violent thunderstorm as he traveled on foot back to Erfurt from the village of Stotternheim. Fearing for his life as lightning flashed and deafening thunder rolled across the countryside, Luther cried out to St. Anne, patron saint of miners5 and mother of the Virgin Mary, promising that if she protected him, he would become a monk. “Suddenly surrounded by the terror and agony of death, I felt constrained to make my vow,” he later wrote in the introduction to his treatise On Monastic Vows.6 Luther kept his promise, in spite of his father’s protestations and in spite of the fact that he himself questioned whether he should spend the rest of his life as a monk.

Great Expectations

Hans was furious. As Luther himself put it, his father had paid “bitter sweat and toil” to put him through the university in order to launch a respectable career in law, not to spend the rest of his life chanting psalms and praying in a dank cell.7 Hans undoubtedly worked hard to fund his son’s education; however, the picture Luther liked to paint of his family as destitute farmers wasn’t entirely accurate. Although in his later years Luther emphasized that he was born of peasant stock—for instance, he mentioned more than once that his mother gathered firewood and carried the sticks home on her back—the truth was, the Luders were not peasants or farmers, nor were they exceedingly poor.8

Hans was the son of a farmer, but he was not a farmer himself. According to German tradition, the youngest son, not the oldest, inherited the land, so when Hans came of age he was expected to pursue his own profession. Soon after their marriage, Hans and his wife, Margarethe, settled in the county of Mansfeld, an area rich in mineral resources, particularly copper. The Luders first lived in Eisleben, where Luther was born, and then later moved to the town of Mansfeld. There Hans worked his way up in the local mining industry from pickman in a copper foundry to business partner in a series of small shafts. He also had a leaseholder’s interest in three smelting works. Together these business ventures, while not hugely lucrative, allowed him to purchase a house for his large family (Luther was one of eight children) and fund his oldest son’s university education.9

Some scholars speculate that Luther invoked the image of agrarian peasant beginnings in order to present himself as a person who had overcome great hardship on his path toward achievement and success.10 Biographer Richard Marius adds that Luther was not unique in rewriting his past: “A whiff of hardship hangs over the family history as Luther told it—though like many successful men recounting their autobiography to adoring disciples, he may have exaggerated his youthful rigors.”11 Biographer Peter Manns, however, is more overtly critical of Luther, implying that the Reformer may have intentionally reworked the details of his personal history in order to deemphasize a middle-class upbringing:

He would have obtained the same effect had he emphasized with equal vigor his origin as the son of a “poor miner.” Oddly enough, Luther did not do this, or did it only infrequently, and not with the same insistence. For compared with that of a farmer, his father’s profession was difficult, interesting and quite modern. In other words, due to his father’s profession, little Martin grows up in a nearly modern ambiance yet makes nothing of that fact.12

Regardless of the reasons for Luther’s revisionist family history, one detail is consistent in all his accounts: almost from the start of Martin’s life, Hans Luder intended that his firstborn would become a skilled lawyer, holding out hope that the career choice would raise the Luder family to the highest status open to them. Plus, adds Manns, “Smelters always found themselves embroiled in some legal dispute and constantly needed cash. It was expected that little Martin would come to the aid of the firm in the quickest possible way through the study of law and a wealthy marriage.”13

Birch Branches and Dunce Caps

Toward this end, young Martin was sent to school, beginning with grammar school in Mansfeld at age five, and then private school at the age of thirteen—first in Magdeburg, which was about forty miles from his parents’ home, and then, a year later, in Eisenach, nearly one hundred miles away. Luther did not have fond memories of primary school, particularly the eight years he spent in Mansfeld, which he later referred to as “an ‘asses’ stable and devil’s school,’ run by ‘tyrants and jailers.’”14 Luther compared his primary education to purgatory and hell,15 and recalled a morning in which he was beaten fifteen times with a birch branch for failing to decline and conjugate his Latin verbs properly.16

Such corporal punishment was not unusual for the time. In addition to the birch branch, wooden horse halters were hung around the students’ necks as a form of punishment,17 and the student who had performed least well during the morning was forced to wear a dunce cap and was “addressed as an ass”18 for the rest of the afternoon. As biographer Richard Friedenthal points out, “A birch the size of a garden broom, as the scepter of every schoolmaster, is proudly displayed on the title page of all the pedagogic tracts of the day.”19 Yet one wonders if Luther, who was always sensitive in nature, found these disciplinary measures especially humiliating and harmful. The fact that decades later he mentioned the punishments he endured as a schoolboy suggests that though common, these physical disciplinary measures left a lasting impact on him.

Although Luther had relatives in Eisenach, when he arrived there at age fourteen to attend the parish school of St. George, they couldn’t afford to have him live with them. His father had scrimped every penny in order to fund his eldest son’s education, but Luther was left to fend for his own room and board. Initially Luther probably found lodging at a hostel or in a school, as these places often provided rooms for students without family or housing. Later the wealthy matron of the Schalbe family offered him free board at her house when she heard him singing in church and noticed how devout he was.20 Luther also joined some of his classmates as they roamed the streets in the children’s choirs, singing door-to-door for money. “These were the origin of the modern practice of caroling,” says biographer James Kittelson, with one critical difference: these boys caroled all year long. “Far from Christmas revelers, they were beggars who became adept at using this accepted means for students to acquire food and drink.”21 This wasn’t altogether unusual. As Richard Friedenthal points out, begging for alms was not seen as disgraceful and was even considered standard practice for boys who were more financially secure than Luther.22

Put aside, for a moment, the Luther you know from the history books and think about Martin Luther the young boy, left to make his own way in an unfamiliar city. It’s hard to envision this Luther, the meek young teenager, begging on the streets for money and food, struggling financially, sleeping in hostels and unfamiliar homes. Like Katharina, Luther was forced to rely on the kindness of strangers and forge his own way in the world. Not only were these lean years an important part of Luther’s personal history, they also helped to shape the Reformer and theologian he was to become.

Familial Friction

Like Katharina, we don’t hear much from Luther about his family life and boyhood years, but not because his words weren’t preserved. Oddly, he simply didn’t seem to have much to say about his nuclear family. Richard Marius points out that in the 7,075 entries that comprise what’s known as Luther’s Table Talk—the copious notes students transcribed during their dinnertime conversations with him—Luther mentions his father a scant twenty-seven times, as well as only occasionally in his letters and theological works.23 Was it because, having left home at a young age, Luther, like Katharina, simply didn’t have much of a relationship with his parents? Or was there perhaps a deeper reason for the distance between parents and son?

Some scholars have drawn radical conclusions about Luther’s relationship with his parents, particularly with his father. In 1958 biographer and Freudian psychiatrist Eric Erikson suggested that Luther’s frequent use of slang and his propensity for scatological humor, as well as his revolt against the patriarchal fathers of the Roman Catholic Church, were all the result of Hans’s excessive discipline. “Hans beat into Martin what was characteristic of his own past, even while he meant to prepare him for a future better than his own present,” Erikson states.24 He also declared that the root of Luther’s theological questions and rebellion could be traced back to his tenuous relationship with his father.

While Freudian literary and historical theory isn’t as popular as it once was, and Erikson’s theories should be vetted against more contemporary analysis, we do know from Luther’s own admissions that both of his parents used physical punishment to discipline him as a child, a practice not uncommon in early sixteenth-century Germany. “My father once whipped me so severely that I ran away from him, and he was worried that he might not win me back again,” Luther recalled. “I wouldn’t like to strike my little Hans [Luther’s own son] very much, lest he should become shy and hate me. I know nothing that would give me greater sorrow.”25 Luther’s writings contain few mentions of his mother, but the little he does share about Margarethe does not reflect well on her. He recalled in his Table Talk, for instance, that his mother once beat him until he bled for stealing a nut off the dining room table.26 While corporal punishment was common both at school and in the home during Luther’s time, his comments, though brief, suggest that he believed his parents and teachers may have overstepped their bounds. In fact, Luther even went so far as to suggest that his parents’ severe discipline drove him to seek comfort and refuge in the monastic life.27

Relations between parents and son did not improve as Martin matured. As was mentioned earlier, Hans Luder was livid when Martin abandoned law school just a few weeks after he’d begun. He considered the monastery a waste of Martin’s education—the education Hans had worked so laboriously to fund—and his future. It seemed, though, that by the time Luther celebrated his first Mass in 1507—a momentous occasion, his first act as a priest following his ordination—Hans had recovered from his anger and forgiven Martin. After all, Martin postponed the event by a month, just so his father, whom he hadn’t seen since his university days, could attend, and when Hans arrived for the ceremony with twenty horsemen and much fanfare, he made a generous contribution to the monastery, which seemed like a positive sign.

But Hans, it turned out, was still seething with resentment beneath his seemingly generous and gracious exterior. After the Mass, when father and son sat down to dinner, Hans turned to Martin with an accusatory question. “You learned scholar,” he fumed, “have you never read in the Bible that you should honor your father and your mother? And here you have left me and your dear mother to look after ourselves in our old age.”28 Imagine Luther’s disappointment in this moment, one of the most celebratory milestones in his life thus far. Initially pleased by his father’s decision to attend his first Mass, Luther must have been crestfallen when he realized Hans hadn’t altered his opinions a bit. Hans’s acerbic words undoubtedly cut his son to the core.

Luther assured his father that he could do more for his family by praying for them as a monk than by remaining out in the everyday world, and he reminded Hans that he had been called to the cloister by a sign from heaven. “What if it were only a delusion of Satan?” Hans shot back at his son, a response that both angered Luther and watered the seeds of doubt buried deep inside him.29 “‘On hearing these words of my father’s,’ said Luther, . . . ‘I was so shocked that I felt as if a sword had pierced my heart—to think that I needed him to draw my attention to the Ten Commandments. After that I could never get what he said out of my mind.’”30

The fact that Luther reiterated his father’s caustic words about his monastic call not once but twice in his testimony before the Diet of Worms nearly fifteen years later attests to the fact that Luther truly could not get his father’s words out of his head. Hans’s criticism angered and offended Luther, but it also deeply hurt him.

There are hints, both in what Luther chose to say about his parents (his father in particular) and in what he left unsaid, that his decision to enter the monastery carved a chasm between Luther and his father. It’s possible that chasm was never entirely bridged, the rift never entirely mended. Although he did confer with Hans before asking Katharina to marry him, and Hans and Margarethe did attend Martin and Katharina’s wedding, Luther admitted that it was only the possibility of a grandson to carry on the Luther name that ultimately softened his father and eased the tension in their relationship. “Then my father restored me to his favour and I became once more his dear son,” Luther said, in reference to the birth of his first son, whom he named Hans in honor of his father.31

But even a grandson and the continuation of the family name could only help so much. The truth is, the relationship between Luther and his father remained strained at best. Unlike some of his siblings, who settled near Mansfeld and carried on the family mining business, Luther lived his adult life in Wittenberg, more than seventy-five miles away from his childhood home. He saw his parents very little. Even when Hans lay on his deathbed in 1530, Luther did not visit him, but instead wrote him a letter, citing dangerous travel conditions and a politically unstable environment as the reason for his absence. However, these conditions didn’t stop Luther from traveling a much longer distance just a few months later to take care of some business.

Luther wrote to his closest friend Philip Melanchthon that the news of his father’s death at the end of May had “thrown [him] into sadness,” yet he mentions his father’s death only after first complaining about a lack of letters from friends and then communicating several bits of news and gossip.32 He then briefly mentions the possible public reaction to his recently published Exhortation to the Clergy Assembled at the Diet of Augsburg, before finally, in the second half of the letter, announcing his father’s death.

Luther begins by reflecting on “the very kind love [my father had for me],” but then in the next breath implies that his father was simply a vehicle through which God conveyed his love: “for through him my Creator has given me all that I am and have.”33 A few lines later Luther writes, “Seldom if ever have I despised death as much as I do now,” acknowledging that “the pity of heart and the memory of the most loving dealing[s] with him have shaken me in the innermost parts of my being.”34 Yet at the same time, his comments to Melanchthon are distant and seem more preoccupied with the thought of death itself, rather than grief over the personal loss.

Yet “the righteous man is taken away from calamity, and he enters into peace;” that is, we die many times before we die once for all. I succeed now in the legacy of the name, and I am almost the oldest Luther in my family. Now it is up to me, not only by chance, but also by law, to follow [my father] through death into the kingdom of Christ.35

On June 19, Luther’s friend Veit Dietrich observed, “Within two days [Luther] has gotten over [the death of] his father, although it was very hard for him.”36 Dietrich also reported that upon hearing the news, Luther picked up his Psalter, went into his room, and “wept so greatly that the next day his head [hurt],” but “since that time he has not betrayed any further emotion.”37 That his first reaction was to weep suggests that Luther began to accept his father’s death right away. He didn’t exhibit denial, anger, or any of the other typical five stages of grief, but instead slipped almost immediately into acceptance, which could imply that the loss did not as profoundly affect his emotional state as one might have assumed.

In short, it seems evident that Luther did not have a particularly close relationship with his parents and may have even been estranged from his father for several years following his entrance into the monastery. As Richard Marius notes, “The least that can be said is that Luther’s recollections of both mother and father but particularly of his father are ambivalent,”38 which leads one to consider the possibility that Martin and Katharina may have had more in common than is readily obvious at first glance.

A close look at Martin and Katharina’s family histories reveals unexpected commonalities. Although Luther spent his elementary years enrolled in a nearby village school, like Katharina, he was separated at a young age from his nuclear family and relocated one hundred miles away among strangers. From about the age of thirteen on, Luther lived independently in an unfamiliar town and attended an unfamiliar school that was at least a day’s wagon ride from his parents and siblings and his hometown. Like Katharina during her years in the cloister school, and later in the convent, Luther likely didn’t have much contact with his immediate family during this time. Likewise, he didn’t have much money. His father paid for his schooling, but Luther was forced to fend for himself to survive.

Katharina’s plight as a virtual orphan surely resonated with Luther, who had also experienced familial distance and subsequent feelings of isolation, abandonment, and perhaps even betrayal as the result of his tenuous relationship with his father. Luther may have recognized his own imperfect childhood and his own strained familial relationships in Katharina’s challenging personal history and circumstances. Perhaps, in spite of their many differences, the fact that they were both unmoored and unattached and in many ways wayward souls served to connect Luther and Katharina in a powerful way. Though their paths were by no means identical, Martin and Katharina did share a surprising number of similar experiences, particularly in their formative teenage and early adulthood years, which may have offered them unexpected common ground.