Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther - Hardcover

Derek Wilson, a leading biographer and novelist, came to prominence thirty years ago, after graduating from Cambridge, with A Tudor Tapestry: Men, Women and Society in Reformation England. This was followed by several critically acclaimed and bestselling books such as Rothschild: A Story of Wealth and Power; In the Lion’s Court: Power, Ambition and Sudden Death in the Reign of Henry VIII; and  All the King’s Women: Love, Sex and Politics in the Life of Charles II. He has also written and presented numerous radio and television programs. Visit his Web site at www.derekwilson.com.

The Scene: A dusty highway near the free city of Erfurt in high summer. Peasants work in the ripening grain fields stretching to the forest fringe. The air is heavy with sullen afternoon heat and to the distant south the sky above the Thuringian mountains is black with an approaching storm.

A solitary figure comes into view striding purposefully towards the city. He is a thickset young man, recognisable from his cap and the satchel of books on his back as a student from Erfurt university. He is deep in thought and not until the first heavy drops of rain come thudding into the dry ruts at his feet does he realise that he is in danger of a soaking. He casts around for shelter and begins to run towards a clump of trees. All around him the landscape is suddenly alive with livid lightning flashes. The ground trembles with the crashing timpani of thunder. He stumbles forward, terrified and alone under the fury of the heavens which, as he well knows, is nothing less than the wrath of God. Then a light, brighter and more lurid than any of the others flashing among the swirling clouds, explodes around him. With an earth-splitting crack a thunderbolt strikes the ground a mere matter of metres away. The force of it throws him off his feet. Petrified, he lies in the mud able to do no more than gabble frightened prayers. 'Holy St Anne, holy St Anne, save me! Let me live! Please, let me live! Mercifully hear me and I will become a monk.'

That is a fanciful reconstruction of the dramatic event which happened to Martin Luther on 2 July 1505 but the actual circumstances must have been just as momentous for he looked back on it as the major turning point in his life. He was true to his panicking vow. He dared not be otherwise; to play fast and loose with the awesome God of the storm would be to put at risk his eternal soul. Fifteen days later he presented himself at the Augustinian house in Erfurt as a novice monk. From that moment his life took a new direction. So did the life of Europe - and the world.

There is always more behind such Damascus Road experiences than the simple events themselves reveal. Young Martin's inner turmoil was greater than the electric ferocity of the tumbling clouds. Spiritual forces were already propelling him towards the cloister and he was doing his best to avoid them. Like St Paul, he had been 'kicking against the goads' until God was obliged to employ drastic means to bend the disobedient young man to his will. So, at least, it seemed to the logic Martin derived from his religious upbringing.

The troubled student had been born twenty-two years before, in November 1483, and baptised on St Martin's Day (11 November). His parents, Hans and Margaretta (known in the family as Hanna) Luther (or Lüder), belonged to that group of struggling but upwardly mobile 'working-class' people who are the backbone of any stable nation. It was their outlook on life and Martin's ambivalent attitude towards it that formed the bedrock of his later development. Gross Hans (so called to distinguish him from a younger brother, Klein Hans) came from moderately prosperous farming stock in the small Thuringian town of Möhra but, as a younger son, he had had to make his own way in the world. Being a canny and thrusting young man he did that rather well. First of all he married into the professional classes. His bride was a Lindemann. Her family was well established in the nearby, prosperous city of Eisenach, where for generations they had been doctors, lawyers, teachers and civic dignitaries. The couple moved far away from home and family to settle in Eisleben. Hans had resolved to find work in the recently opened copper mines, but was there more to this decision to strike out on their own? This was an age in which society was fairly static and to put a hundred kilometres of rough, hilly terrain between themselves and their own people must have been an upheaval. Can it be that the Lindemanns disapproved of their Hanna throwing herself away on one of those rough Luthers? Hans' family had a far from savoury reputation. One of his brothers made frequent court appearances charged with acts of violence. It is useless to speculate on the reasons why Martin's parents decided to make a fresh start but the fact that they did so is evidence of a determined and courageous spirit which they certainly passed on to their son. Gross Hans was not the sort of man to be deflected from a chosen course of action by the disapproval of his 'betters'. Nor was Martin.

The reformer's later recollection of his parents' life in the early years of their marriage was one of hardship. 'My father was a poor miner,' he said. 'My mother carried all her wood home on her back. It was in this way that they brought me up.'1 Like many people who have risen from humble origins, Luther was ambivalent about his working-class background. He could be proud of the honest toil by which his parents had improved their lot while disdaining the vulgarity and herd instincts of ignorant 'peasants'. It was soon after the birth of Martin, their second son, that Hans and Hanna moved to nearby Mansfeld. Mining was back-breaking and dangerous but it was better paid than work on the land and less dependent on the changing seasons. Hans was able to save enough to buy into a mine-owning syndicate. Later, he enjoyed sufficient standing in the community to borrow capital for the development of his business. Steadily his affairs improved but so did Gross Hans' expenses and the size of his family. By 1505 Hanna had borne him four sons and four daughters. Life was always a struggle for the ambitious entrepreneur and Hans could never count himself a rich man. What he could do, however, was give his children a better start in life than he had had. It was a matter of pride for him to do so and he may well have felt himself to be under the watchful eye of his socially superior in-laws. Some sons could follow him in the business but others would not be pitched out, as he had been, to fend for themselves in a harsh world. Young Martin showed promise from an early age and his parents decided to invest sacrificially in his education.

Apart from this significant fact there seems to have been nothing remarkable about his upbringing. He always remembered his parents with affection, while acknowledging that they were strict. His father could be jovial good company, especially when he had a few beers inside him, and his mother was both pious and loving. But neither of them hesitated to wield the stick and Martin recollected that it had been Hanna who, on one occasion, thrashed him till the blood flowed.

As to his religious training, it undoubtedly followed the pattern of conventional piety and routine rituals that were the norm amongst the lower orders in northern Germany. Men and women of every degree were acutely aware of living at the interface of two worlds - the physical and the spiritual. To vary the metaphor, they occupied a no-man's-land fought over by angelic and demonic hosts. Here signs and wonders were part of everyday experience and miracles were eagerly looked for. Special places - churches, shrines, holy wells - were foci of heavenly power. Others - forest depths, mountaintops, river banks - might be the very thresholds of hell, where devils, elves and hobgoblins lurked. No one doubted the power of magic or the authority of particular individuals to exercise it.

It was inevitable that the priests, set apart from the rest of the community by their celibacy and ritual consecration, should have derived an extra cachet from their position as mediators between man and God. It was also inevitable that around the Church, the clergy and their holy apparatus there clustered a horde of popular superstitions, which endowed religious objects with a magical power to which theologians themselves had never laid claim.2

Theologians might not claim it but few priests, monks or friars were inclined to disavow the supernatural gifts upon which their hold over simple folk depended. The social framework of every European state was hierarchically structured and the authority of the clergy depended ultimately on the spiritual sanctions they possessed. Priests alone could 'make Christ' on the altar. They alone could absolve sins. Their prayers were efficacious for the repose of departed loved ones. And one way to achieve heaven was to be buried in a monastic habit. Preaching underlined this salvation magic but was far from being the only medium employed to maintain the influence of ecclesiastical professionals over the laity. Medieval Christianity was essentially a visual religion of garish colours and dramatic shapes, a chaotic jumble of images in stone, paint, stained glass and, increasingly, cheap propaganda prints. Illiterate parishioners gazed on a bewildering array of dramatically illustrated scenes - biblical episodes, saintly miracles, moral tales, apocalyptic visions - with no means of relating them to each other or to their own lives.

The ubiquitous representation which made the greatest impact was the 'doom' traditionally set up over church entrances or on chancel arches. This showed Christ the judge separating humanity into sheep, chosen to enjoy the eternal blessedness of heaven, and goats being dragged by demons into the grisly maw of hell. It was by playing on the fear of the unknown that the priestly hierarchy kept their talons on the minds of the people. They taught that only within the ship of the Church and its sacramental system could the devout soul journey safely through the perilous seas of this world and come safe to haven.

Sinners consigned to hell for failing to keep the divine law

But the clergy were not alone in holding sway over the imaginations of ordinary folk. Other supernatural forces were at work, or were believed to be at work. When one of her infant children died, Hanna Luther did not attribute the tragedy to the inscrutable will of God or seek within herself the reason for divine judgement. She accused one of her neighbours of maleficium, witchcraft. Young Martin was brought up on numerous stories of occult visitations. He accepted as self-evident that such evil-inspired people existed and that one should wear charms, recite incantations, sprinkle the hearth with holy water and employ such other resources as the Church provided to ward off their attacks. The Stygian unknown is the breeding ground of fantasy and just as outer space today provides unlimited scope for imagining worlds peopled by superior beings, some of whom have visited Earth in flying saucers, so, in the sixteenth century, the mysterious origins of illness, animal diseases, bad weather and undeserved misfortune were readily attributed to ill-disposed persons who possessed secret powers and might well be in league with the devil. Statistics compiled in West Germany in 1986 suggested that a third of the population still believed in the existence of witches. If that is the case in our own sophisticated, materialistic and rational age it is not difficult to understand how such beliefs could be universal in the sixteenth century. Popular religion among the illiterate masses in Europe was, thus, a hotchpotch of Christian dogma, Christian myth and pagan survivals. There were numerous other forces active within the Church -- revivalist preachers, publishers of vernacular devotional treatises, humanist scholars and members of lay communities following a regimen of personal holiness and public service. We shall have to explore these later. For the moment we must content ourselves with the common religious experience with which Luther grew up. He tells us very little about the personal beliefs of his parents so we must assume that they shared the observances common to their class. That would have involved weekly attendance at mass but reception of communion probably no more than twice a year, devotion to the miners' patron saint, Anne (supposed maternal grandmother of Jesus), keeping of the numerous holy days and festivals prescribed by ecclesiastical authority, occasional confession and possibly rare excursions to some not-too-distant shrine to gaze on saintly relics and offer prayers for particular needs. As was not (and is not) uncommon, it was the woman of the household who was more devout than her husband. A colleague of the reformer, who met Frau Luther in later years, recorded that she possessed all the 'virtues which are fitting in an honourable woman [and] shone especially in modesty, fear of God and prayer, and other upright women used to take her as an example of virtue'.

The Schutzmantelbild. The Virgin Mary, representing the Church, extends her protective cloak around the faithful

The precocious child was sent to school probably at the age of five. In the Mansfeld Grundschule the elements of reading, writing and Latin grammar were instilled in him by the crude but effective methods of rote learning and the application of the birch when he failed in his lessons. Only by such mechanistic and harsh methods could the teacher (who will have had at most one assistant) have kept control of his lively charges. Within one room he had to instruct three classes - beginners, intermediates and seniors. For all but the most gifted pedagogues the work came down to either dominating the pupils or being dominated by them. Not surprisingly, Luther spoke scornfully of primary education in later years. However, what he resented most was not the beatings (and he tells us that on one occasion he was thrashed fifteen times in a single day) so much as the poor Latin that he was taught. The language of the Church and scholarship had become corrupted over the millennium since the silver age of Tacitus, Juvenal and Pliny and it would be many years before the Renaissance rediscovery of pure classical style reached Saxony.

Martin's next educational move, at the age of thirteen, was of short duration but may well have had a profound influence on the impressionable adolescent. A friend of his was being sent to a famous school at Magdeburg, some seventy kilometres from Mansfeld, and it was decided that Martin should accompany him. The institution was run by the Brethren of the Common Life, a revivalist order which had swept like a breath of fresh air through the conventional monastic spirituality of northern Europe. Their movement, which had begun over a century earlier in the Netherlands, was summed up in the title they gave it - the Devotio Moderna, the 'New Devotional System'. Like traditional religious orders the followers of this way gathered together in single sex communities to follow a life of prayer, meditation and service. But that was where the similarity ended. The brothers and sisters of the Common Life followed a more open, more fluid rule than their cowled colleagues. Though many clergy belonged to the order, it was essentially a lay movement and there was even room within it for families. Preachers of the order held out to their hearers a pathway to holiness which did not, of necessity, take the monastic life as its point of departure. To men and women who were looking for something more than the passive role allotted to the laity in church life it offered a quality and intensity of religious experience hitherto only available within the cloister. Followers of the New Devotional System were urged, by ascetic practices, to turn away from the world and model their lives on that of Jesus, and the most popular devotional book produced by the order took as its title, The Imitation of Christ. The instant popularity of this manual by Thomas à Kempis indicates that there were thousands of ardent souls looking for something more than formal religion. First printed in Augsburg in 1486, it went through more than twenty imprints in Germany alone ...