Martin Luther: Catholic Dissident by Peter Stanford, Hodder, £20
On page 90 of Peter Stanford’s compelling new book we find Martin Luther in a gloomy mood. “What hell may be in that last day, I am not altogether sure,” Luther admits.
“I do not believe it is a special place where damned souls now exist like the place painters depict … Everyone carries his hell within him, wherever he is, as long as he feels and fears the last necessity of death and God’s wrath.” As Stanford comments, Luther is “making hell sound less like a place than an inner torment”, and Luther assuredly knew all about the pangs of depression and anxiety.
Mercifully, Stanford avoids lapsing into psychobabble, but he wisely sees shifting mental tides as one of the keys to Luther’s intellectual journey. There’s the famous story of why Luther became a monk, for example. In 1505, caught in a thunderstorm, Luther promised St Anne that he would head to the cloister if his life were spared. It is all, as Stanford puts it, “just so neat, like one of those perfectly rounded moral tales found in sugary hagiographies of saints”.
Perhaps he was just looking for an excuse to abandon his law studies, or perhaps Luther, already preoccupied with death, succumbed to one of those “erratic switches” that define the lives of people trapped by mental anguish. We can’t be sure, but time at the Augustinians’ establishment in Erfurt provided little respite and Luther continued to be blighted by what he called Anfechtung: a psychic struggle that felt like a “physical onslaught” and “as real as if Satan himself had been beating him with fists”.
A sense of unworthiness before God did have its compensations, however. A desperate Luther pored over Scripture and, through his reading of Paul, stumbled across what he regarded as his breakthrough moment. With the notion of justification by faith alone, Luther was able to conceive of salvation in a way that made his wretched creatureliness irrelevant and, as he put it, a God of wrath became a God of love. This, as Stanford explains, “was not startlingly original” and Luther would never really lose the habit of “self-criticism bordering on self-laceration”, but it was such stuff as Reformations were made on.
Stanford works hard to capture the inner Luther and his account of the first stirrings of what would come to be known as Protestantism is also impressive. Luther is not portrayed as a revolutionary. In the early years he had “no ambition to topple” the Church “from its dominant position … or set up a rival structure”, but Stanford does an excellent job of tracing how matters spiralled out of control.
The drama of the various confrontations and debates is wonderfully portrayed, especially the showdown at Leipzig in 1519 when Johann Eck proved himself expert at goading Luther. “Are you the only one who knows anything?” Eck asked. “Except for you, is all the Church in error?”
Luther’s reply, with his buttons well and truly pushed, was far more extreme than he probably intended: “I want to believe freely and be a slave to the authority of no one, whether council, university or pope. I will confidently confess what appears to me to be true, whether it has been asserted by a Catholic or a heretic.”
It’s such statements that encourage some people to claim Luther as a trailblazer of religious liberty, although, as Stanford makes clear, Luther “never set out to champion modern freedoms”. Genies were let out of bottles unwittingly, but Stanford is at least able to grant Luther credit for championing “ideas of individual responsibility” and for demonstrating “how powerful, well-entrenched elites can be confronted and vanquished, if only you have the courage.”
The author even suggests that “we are all better off” because of Luther – and, while as a Catholic he cannot support all the theological positions crafted in Wittenberg, he concedes that Luther “forced my Church to reform and save itself”. One rather suspects that the Church would have done that anyway, since the signs were all there well ahead of Luther’s clumsy protest, but Stanford’s analysis is certainly generous.
This spirited book, focusing on the period up to 1530, covers all the major developments: the divisions that began to emerge within the Lutheran camp; Luther the social conservative fuming at his message being hijacked by rebels; the tricky business of imposing discipline. The narrative is peppered with keen insights, with Stanford writing very well, for instance, about the unsung role of Johann von Staupitz, vicar-general of the Hermits of St Augustine in Germany, in shaping Luther’s early career.
It is vital to recognise where Luther came from and I suppose there’s always a temptation to wonder, as Stanford does, what Luther would “make of the modern Catholic Church”. Perhaps, Stanford muses, he would be “a pin-up in the dissident ranks of the so-called ‘liberal’ or ‘à-la-carte’ Catholics”. Or perhaps it’s wiser to leave historical figures in their historical context. When Stanford does that, his book is first rate.
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