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German literature
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Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance
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Johannes von Tepl
Sebastian Brant
"Ship
of Fools"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
Illustrations by
Albrecht Durer
Desiderius Erasmus
Hans Sachs
Martin Luther
Hans Jacob
Christoph von Grimmelshausen
Martin Opitz
Andreas Gryphius
Christian, baron von Wolff
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Late Middle Ages and early Renaissance
The late Middle Ages in Europe was a time of
decadence and regeneration. A proliferation of
literary forms, including didactic literature, prose
renderings of classic works, and mystical tracts,
was one symptom of this double tendency. The elegant
Minnesang was replaced by the wooden verse of guild
poetasters, the Meistersang (“mastersong”). The
age’s preoccupation with death produced a macabre
flowering of art: the dance of death, a large body
of sermon literature on the memento mori theme,
tracts on the art of dying well (ars moriendi), as
well as a rich body of visual and plastic art.
A curious and remarkable work, Der Ackermann aus
Böhmen (Death and the Ploughman is the colourful
title of a modern translation), consists of a debate
between its author, Johannes von Tepl, and the
figure of Death that is in effect a confrontation
between the moribund late Middle Ages and the
life-affirming tendencies of a nascent Renaissance.
Perched significantly on the watershed between a
dying and a rising culture, Johannes von Tepl made
his work, written about 1400, a monument to his
young wife, Margaretha, who had recently died in
childbirth. The author (the “ploughman”) raises a
hue and cry against Death, who has robbed him of his
wife. Death answers his complaints, and a debate
follows in which Johannes defends the value of human
life against its attacker, Death. God judges the
debate and gives victory to Death but honour to man.
The Renaissance in Germany—rich in art,
architecture, and learned humanist writings—was poor
in German-language literature. Works from Italy were
eagerly received and translated, especially those of
Petrarch,
Boccaccio, and
the humanist scholar Gian
Francesco Poggio Bracciolini.
Rabelais’s works found
a vigorous imitator in Johann Fischart. For Germany
the 16th century was an age of satire. One of its
most popular works was Das Narrenschiff (1494;
Ship
of Fools) by
Sebastian Brant, who thus inaugurated a
genre of “fool” literature. (The best-known
representative of this body of work is probably
Desiderius Erasmus’s The Praise of Folly [1509].)
One of the most versatile writers of popular plays,
short stories in verse, and narrative and satirical
poems was the Nürnberg shoemaker and Meistersinger
Hans Sachs, whose style has the simplicity and
roughness of woodcuts.
Among the abundant popular literary digests known
as Volksbücher (“folk books,” popular prose
narratives), one that deserves mention—because of
its resonance in a time of renewed enthusiasm for
learning and because of its grand future—is the
Historia von D. Johann Fausten (MARLOWE CHRISTOPHER
"The Tragical
History of Doctor Faustus"1587). This story of
a doctor whose thirst for knowledge leads him to
make a pact with the Devil was to supply
Goethe with
the outline of his drama Faust.
Johannes von Tepl
also called Johannes von Saaz
born c. 1350, Tepl or Schüttwa,
Bohemia [now in Czech Republic]
died c. 1415, Prague
Bohemian author of the remarkable
dialogue Der Ackermann aus Böhmen (c.
1400; Death and the Ploughman), the
first important prose work in the German
language.
After taking a degree at Prague
University, he was appointed, probably
before 1378, a notary in Saaz (Žatec),
and he became headmaster of the grammar
school there in 1383. In 1411 he became
a notary of Prague New Town, where he
remained until his death.
In the Ackermann—which, though
described in a Latin dedication as an
exercise in rhetoric, probably arose
from the death of the author’s first
wife in 1400—a plowman, representing
Man, bitterly accuses Death of unjust
dealings toward humanity. Death’s
counterarguments reconcile the plowman
to the necessity of Death’s activities,
though the plowman still champions human
nobility against Death’s more negative
view. God, the judge, awards Death the
victory but Man the honour. Its complex
structure, vigorous rhythmical prose,
and expression of human grief make this
work—despite the uncertain state of the
text—unique in medieval German
literature. Widely regarded as
essentially medieval in thought and even
in technique, it contains elements of
Renaissance literature and humanistic
thought.
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Sebastian Brant
"Ship
of Fools"
PART I,
PART II,
PART III,
PART IV,
PART V
Illustrations by
Albrecht Dürer
Brant also spelled Brandt
born 1457, Strassburg [now
Strasbourg, France]
died May 10, 1521, Strassburg
satirical poet best known for his Das
Narrenschiff (1494; The Ship of Fools),
the most popular German literary work of
the 15th century.
Brant studied in Basel, where he
received his B.A. in 1477 and doctor of
laws in 1489; he taught in the law
faculty there from 1484 to 1500. In
1500, when Basel joined the Swiss
Confederation (1499), he returned to
Strassburg, where in 1503 he was made
municipal secretary. Maximilian I
appointed him imperial councillor and
count palatine.
Brant’s writings are varied: legal;
religious; political (in support of
Maximilian, against the French and
Turks); and, especially, moral
(adaptations of the aphorisms of Cato,
Faceto, and Freidank). His chief work,
however, is Das Narrenschiff, an
allegory telling of a ship laden with
fools and steered by fools setting sail
for Narragonia, the “fool’s paradise.”
The ship allegory is not sustained;
instead Brant presents more than 100
fools representing every contemporary
shortcoming, serious and trivial.
Criminals, drunkards, ill-behaved
priests and lecherous monks,
spendthrifts, bribe-taking judges,
busybodies, and voluptuous women are
included in this unsparing, bitter,
sweeping satire. Brant’s aims are the
improvement of his fellows and the
regeneration of church and empire. The
language is popular, the verse rough but
vigorous; each chapter is accompanied by
a woodcut, many ascribed to Albrecht
Dürer; they are beautifully executed but
often only loosely connected with the
text. Brant’s work was an immediate
sensation and was widely translated.
Two English versions appeared in
1509, one in verse by Alexander Barclay
(The Shyp of Folys of the Worlde) and
another in prose by Henry Watson, and it
gave rise to a whole school of fool’s
literature. Yet Brant essentially looks
backward; he is not a forerunner of the
Reformation nor even a true humanist but
rather a representative of medieval
thought and ideals.
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Desiderius Erasmus
Albrecht Durer - Desiderius
Erasmus of Rotterdam
born Oct. 27, 1469, Rotterdam, Holland [now in The
Netherlands]
died July 12, 1536, Basel, Switz.
humanist who was the greatest scholar of the northern
Renaissance, the first editor of the New Testament, and also
an important figure in patristics and classical literature.
Using the philological methods pioneered by Italian
humanists, Erasmus helped lay the groundwork for the
historical-critical study of the past, especially in his
studies of the Greek New Testament and the Church Fathers.
His educational writings contributed to the replacement of
the older scholastic curriculum by the new humanist emphasis
on the classics. Bycriticizing ecclesiastical abuses, while
pointing to a better age in the distant past, he encouraged
the growing urge for reform, which found expression both in
the Protestant Reformation and in the Catholic
Counter-Reformation. Finally, his independent stance in an
age of fierce confessional controversy—rejecting both
Luther's doctrine of predestination and the powers that were
claimed for the papacy—made him a target of suspicion for
loyal partisans on both sides and a beacon for those who
valued liberty more than orthodoxy.
Early life and career
Erasmus was the second illegitimate son of Roger Gerard, a
priest, and Margaret, a physician's daughter. He advanced
asfar as the third-highest class at the chapter school of
St. Lebuin's in Deventer. One of his teachers, Jan Synthen,
was ahumanist, as was the headmaster, Alexander Hegius. The
schoolboy Erasmus was clever enough to write classical Latin
verse that impresses a modern reader as cosmopolitan.
After both parents died, the guardians of the two boys sent
them to a school in 's Hertogenbosch conducted by the
Brethren of the Common Life, a lay religious movement that
fostered monastic vocations. Erasmus would remember
thisschool only for a severe discipline intended, he said,
to teachhumility by breaking a boy's spirit.
Having little other choice, both brothers entered
monasteries. Erasmus chose the Augustinian canons regular at
Steyn, near Gouda, where he seems to have remained about
seven years (1485–92). While at Steyn he paraphrased Lorenzo
Valla's Elegantiae, which was both a compendium of pure
classical usage and a manifesto againstthe scholastic
“barbarians” who had allegedly corrupted it. Erasmus'
monastic superiors became “barbarians” for him by
discouraging his classical studies. Thus, after his
ordination to the priesthood (April 1492), he was happy to
escape the monastery by accepting a post as Latin secretary
to the influential Henry of Bergen, bishop of Cambrai. His
Antibarbarorum liber, extant from a revision of 1494–95, is
a vigorous restatement of patristic arguments for the
utility of the pagan classics, with a polemical thrust
against the cloister he had left behind: “All sound learning
is secular learning.”
Erasmus was not suited to a courtier's life, nor did things
improve much when the bishop was induced to send him to the
University of Paris to study theology (1495). He disliked
the quasi-monastic regimen of the Collège de Montaigu, where
he lodged initially, and pictured himself to a friend as
sitting “with wrinkled brow and glazed eye” through Scotist
lectures. To support his classical studies, he began taking
in pupils; from this period (1497–1500) date the earliest
versions of those aids to elegant Latin—including the
Colloquia and the Adagia—that before long would be in use in
humanist schools throughout Europe.
The wandering scholar
In 1499 a pupil, William Blount, Lord Mountjoy, invited
Erasmus to England. There he met Thomas More, who became a
friend for life. John Colet quickened Erasmus' ambition to
be a “primitive theologian,” one who would expound Scripture
not in the argumentative manner of the scholastics but in
the manner of Jerome and the other ChurchFathers, who lived
in an age when men still understood and practiced the
classical art of rhetoric. The impassioned Coletbesought him
to lecture on the Old Testament at Oxford, but the more
cautious Erasmus was not ready. He returned to the Continent
with a Latin copy of St. Paul's Epistles and the conviction
that “ancient theology” required mastery of Greek.
On a visit to Artois, Fr. (1501), Erasmus met the fiery
preacher Jean Voirier, who, though a Franciscan, told him
that“monasticism was a life more of fatuous men than of
religious men.” Admirers recounted how Voirier's disciples
faced death serenely, trusting in God, without the solemn
reassurance of the last rites. Voirier lent Erasmus a copy
of works by Origen, the early Greek Christian writer who
promoted the allegorical, spiritualizing mode of scriptural
interpretation, which had roots in Platonic philosophy. By
1502 Erasmus had settled in the university town of Louvain
(Brabant) and was reading Origen and St. Paul in Greek. The
fruit of his labours was Enchiridion militis Christiani
(1503/04; Handbook of a Christian Knight). In this work
Erasmus urged readers to “inject into the vitals” the
teachings of Christ by studying and meditating on the
Scriptures, using the spiritual interpretation favoured by
the “ancients” to make the text pertinent to moral concerns.
The Enchiridion was a manifesto of lay piety in its
assertion that “monasticism is not piety.” Erasmus' vocation
as a “primitive theologian” was further developed through
his discovery at Park Abbey, near Louvain, of a manuscript
of Valla's Adnotationes on the Greek New Testament, which he
published in 1505 with a dedication to Colet.
Erasmus sailed for England in 1505, hoping to find support
for his studies. Instead he found an opportunity to travel
to Italy, the land of promise for northern humanists, as
tutor to the sons of the future Henry VIII's physician. The
party arrived in the university town of Bologna in time to
witness the triumphal entry (1506) of the warrior pope
Julius II at the head of a conquering army, a scene that
figures later in Erasmus' anonymously published satiric
dialogue, Julius exclusus e coelis (written 1513–14). In
Venice Erasmus was welcomed at the celebrated printing house
of Aldus Manutius, where Byzantine émigrés enriched the
intellectuallife of a numerous scholarly company. For the
Aldine press Erasmus expanded his Adagia, or annotated
collection of Greek and Latin adages, into a monument of
erudition with over 3,000 entries; this was the book that
first made him famous. The adage “Dutch ear” (auris Batava)
is one of many hints that he was not an uncritical admirer
of sophisticated Italy, with its theatrical sermons and its
scholars who doubted the immortality of the soul; his aim
was to write for honest and unassuming “Dutch ears.”
De pueris instituendis, written in Italy though not
published until 1529, is the clearest statement of Erasmus'
enormous faith in the power of education. With strenuous
effort the very stuff of human nature could be molded, so as
to draw out (e-ducare) peaceful and social dispositions
while discouraging unworthy appetites. Erasmus, it would
almost be true to say, believed that one is what one reads.
Thus the “humane letters” of classical and Christian
antiquity would have a beneficent effect on the mind, in
contrast to the disputatious temper induced by scholastic
logic-chopping or the vengeful amour propre bred into young
aristocrats by chivalric literature, “the stupid and
tyrannical fables of King Arthur.”
The celebrated Moriae encomium, or Praise of Folly,
conceived as Erasmus crossed the Alps on his way back to
England and written at Thomas More's house, expresses a very
different mood. For the first time the earnest scholar saw
his own efforts along with everyone else's as bathed in
auniversal irony, in which foolish passion carried the day:
“Even the wise man must play the fool if he wishes to beget
achild.”
Little is known of Erasmus' long stay in England (1509–14),
except that he lectured at Cambridge and worked on scholarly
projects, including the Greek text of the New Testament. His
later willingness to speak out as he did may have owed
something to the courage of Colet, who risked royal
disfavour by preaching a sermon against war at the court
just as Henry VIII was looking for a good war in which towin
his spurs. Having returned to the Continent, Erasmus made
connections with the printing firm of Johann Froben and
traveled to Basel to prepare a new edition of the Adagia
(1515). In this and other works of about the same time
Erasmus showed a new boldness in commenting on the ills of
Christian society—popes who in their warlike ambition
imitated Caesar rather than Christ; princes who hauled
wholenations into war to avenge a personal slight; and
preachers who looked to their own interests by pronouncing
the princes' wars just or by nurturing superstitious
observances among the faithful. To remedy these evils
Erasmus looked to education. In particular, the training of
preachers should be based on “the philosophy of Christ”
rather than on scholastic methods. Erasmus tried to show the
way with his annotated text of the Greek New Testament and
his edition of St. Jerome's Opera omnia, both of which
appeared from theFroben press in 1516. These were the months
in which Erasmus thought he saw “the world growing young
again,” and the full measure of his optimism is expressed in
one of the prefatory writings to the New Testament: “If the
Gospel were truly preached, the Christian people would be
spared many wars.”
Erasmus' home base was now in Brabant, where he had
influential friends at the Habsburg court of the Netherlands
in Brussels, notably the grand chancellor, Jean Sauvage.
Through Sauvage he was named honorary councillor to the
16-year-old archduke Charles, the future Charles V, and was
commissioned to write Institutio principis Christiani (1516;
The Education of a Christian Prince) and Querela pacis
(1517; The Complaint of Peace). These works expressed
Erasmus' own convictions, but they also did no harm to
Sauvage's faction at court, which wanted to maintain peace
with France. It was at this time too that he began his
Paraphrases of the books of the New Testament, each one
dedicated to a monarch or a prince of the church. He was
accepted as a member of the theology faculty at nearby
Louvain, and he also took keen interest in a newly founded
Trilingual College, with endowed chairs in Latin, Greek, and
Hebrew. Ratio verae theologiae (1518) provided the rationale
for the new theological education based on the study of
languages. Revision of his Greek New Testament, especially
of the copious annotations, began almost as soonas the first
edition appeared. Though Erasmus certainly made mistakes as
a textual critic, in the history of scholarship he is a
towering figure, intuiting philological principles that in
some cases would not be formulated explicitly until 150
years after his death. But conservative theologians at
Louvain and elsewhere, mostly ignorant of Greek, were not
willing to abandon the interpretation of Scripture to
upstart “grammarians,” nor did the atmosphere at Louvain
improve when the second edition of Erasmus' New Testament
(1519) replaced the Vulgate with his own Latin translation.
The Protestant challenge
From the very beginning of the momentous events sparked by
Martin Luther's challenge to papal authority, Erasmus'
clerical foes blamed him for inspiring Luther, just as some
of Luther's admirers in Germany found that he merely
proclaimed boldly what Erasmus had been hinting. In fact,
Luther's first letter to Erasmus (1516) showed an important
disagreement over the interpretation of St. Paul, and in
1518 Erasmus privately instructed his printer, Froben, to
stop printing works by Luther, lest the two causes be
confused. Ashe read Luther's writings, at least those prior
to The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Erasmus
found much to admire, and he could even describe Luther, in
a letter to Pope Leo X, as “a mighty trumpet of Gospel
truth.” Being of a suspicious nature, however, he also
convinced himself that Luther's fiercest enemies were men
who saw the study of languages as the root of heresy and
thus wanted to be rid of both at once. Hence he tugged at
the slender threads of his influence, vainly hoping to
forestall a confrontation that could only be destructive to
“good letters.” When he quit Brabant for Basel (December
1521), he did so lest he be faced with a personal request
from the Emperor to write a book against Luther, which he
could not have refused.
Erasmus' belief in the unity of the church was fundamental,
but, like the Hollanders and Brabanters with whom he was
most at home, he recoiled from the cruel logic of religious
persecution. He expressed his views indirectly through the
Colloquia, which had started as schoolboy dialogues but now
became a vehicle for commentary. For example, in the
colloquy “Inquisitio de fide” (1522) a Catholic finds to his
surprise that Lutherans accept all the dogmas of the faith,
that is, the articles of the Apostles' Creed. The
implication is that bitter disputes like those over papal
infallibility or Luther's doctrine of predestination are
differences over mereopinion, not over dogmas binding on all
the faithful. For Erasmus the root of the schism was not
theology but anticlericalism and lay resentment of the laws
and “ceremonies” that the clergy made binding under pain of
hell. As he wrote privately to the Netherlandish pope Adrian
VI (1522–23), whom he had known at Louvain, there was still
hope of reconciliation, if only the church would ease the
burden; this could be accomplished, for instance, by
grantingthe chalice to the laity and by permitting priests
to marry: “At the sweet name of liberty all things will
revive.”
When Adrian VI was succeeded by Clement VII, Erasmus could
no longer avoid “descending into the arena” of theological
combat, though he promised the Swiss reformer Huldrych
Zwingli that he would attack Luther in a way that would not
please the “pharisees.” De libero arbitrio (1524) defended
the place of human free choice in the process of salvation
and argued that the consensus of the church through the ages
is authoritative in the interpretation of Scripture. In
reply Luther wrote one of his most important theological
works, De servo arbitrio (1525), to which Erasmus responded
with a lengthy, two-part Hyperaspistes (1526–27). In this
controversy Erasmus lets it be seen that he would like to
claim more for free will than St. Paul and St. Augustine
seem to allow.
The years in Basel (1522–29) were filled with polemics, some
of them rather tiresome by comparison to the great debate
with Luther. Irritated by Protestants who called him a
traitor to the Gospel as well as by hyper-orthodox Catholic
theologians who repeatedly denounced him, Erasmus showed the
petty side of his own nature often enough. Although there is
material in his apologetic writings that scholars have yet
to exploit, there seems no doubt that on the whole he was
better at satiric barbs, such as the colloquy representing
one young “Pseudo-Evangelical” of his acquaintance as
thwacking people over the head with a Gospel book to gain
converts. Meanwhile he kept at work on the Greek New
Testament (there would be five editions in all), the
Paraphrases, and his editions of the Church Fathers,
including Cyprian, Hilary, and Origen. He also took time to
chastise those humanists, mostly Italian, who from a
“superstitious” zeal for linguistic purity refused to sully
their Latin prose with nonclassical terms (Ciceronianus,
1528).
Final years
In 1529, when Protestant Basel banned Catholic worship
altogether, Erasmus and some of his humanist friends moved
to the Catholic university town of Freiburg im Breisgau. He
refused an invitation to the Diet of Augsburg, where Philipp
Melanchthon's Augsburg Confession was to initiate the first
meaningful discussions between Lutheran and Catholic
theologians. He nonetheless encouraged such discussion in De
sarcienda ecclesiae concordia (1533), whichsuggested that
differences on the crucial doctrine of justification might
be reconciled by considering a duplex justitia, the meaning
of which he did not elaborate. Having returned to Basel to
see his manual on preaching (Ecclesiastes, 1535) through the
press, he lingered on in a city he found congenial; it was
there he died in 1536. Like thedisciples of Voirier, he
seems not to have asked for the last sacraments of the
church. His last words were in Dutch: “Lieve God” (“dear
God”).
Influence and achievement
Always the scholar, Erasmus could see many sides of an
issue. But his hesitations and studied ambiguities were
appreciated less and less in the generations that followed
his death, as men girded for combat, theological or
otherwise, in the service of their beliefs. For a time,
while peacemakers on both sides had an opportunity to pursue
meaningful discussions between Catholics and Lutherans, some
of Erasmus' practical suggestions and his moderate
theological views were directly pertinent. Even after
ecumenism dwindled to a mere wisp of possibility, there were
a few men willing to make themselves heirs of Erasmus'
lonely struggle for a middle ground, like Jacques-Auguste de
Thou in France and Hugo Grotius in the Netherlands;
significantly, both were strong supporters of state
authority and hoped to limit the influence of the clergy of
their respective established churches. This tradition was
perhaps strongest in the Netherlands, where Dirck
Volckertszoon Coornhert and others found support in Erasmus
for their advocacy of limited toleration for religious
dissenters. Meanwhile, however, the Council of Trent and the
rise of Calvinism ensured that such views weregenerally of
marginal influence. The Catholic index expurgatorius of 1571
contained a long list of suspect passages to be deleted from
any future editions of Erasmus' writings, and those
Protestant tendencies that bear some comparison to Erasmus'
defense of free will—current among the Philippists in
Germany and the Arminians in the Netherlands—were bested by
defenders of a sterner orthodoxy. Even in the classroom,
Erasmus' preference for putting students directly in contact
with the classics gave way to the use of compendiums and
manuals of humanist rhetoric and logic that resembled
nothing so much as the scholastic curriculum of the past.
Similarly, the bold and independent scholarly temper with
which Erasmusapproached the text of the New Testament was
for a long time submerged by the exigencies of theological
polemics.
Erasmus' reputation began to improve in the late 17th
century, when the last of Europe's religious wars was fading
into memory and scholars like Richard Simon and Jean Le
Clercq (the editor of Erasmus' works) were once again taking
a more critical approach to biblical texts. By
Voltaire'stime, in the 18th century, it was possible to
imagine that the clever and rather skeptical Erasmus must
have been a philosophe before his time, one whose
professions of religious devotion and submission to church
authority could be seen as convenient evasions. This view of
Erasmus, curiously parallel to the strictures of his
orthodox critics, waslong influential. Only in the past
several decades have scholars given due recognition to the
fact that the goal of hiswork was a Christianity purified by
a deeper knowledge of itshistoric roots. Yet it was not
entirely wrong to compare Erasmus with those Enlightenment
thinkers who, like Voltaire, defended individual liberty at
every turn and had little good to say about the various
corporate solidarities by which human society holds
together. Some historians would now trace the enduring
debate between these complementary aspects of Western
thought as far back as the 12th century, and in this very
broad sense Erasmus and Voltaire are on the same side of a
divide, just as, for instance, Machiavelli and Rousseau are
on the other. In a unique manner that fused his multiple
identities—as Netherlander, Renaissance humanist, and pre-Tridentine
Catholic—Erasmus helped to build what may be called the
liberal tradition of European culture.
James D. Tracy
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Hans Sachs
born Nov. 5, 1494, Nürnberg, Ger.
died Jan. 19, 1576, Nürnberg
German burgher, meistersinger, and
poet who was outstanding for his
popularity, output, and aesthetic and
religious influence. He is idealized in
Richard Wagner’s opera Die Meistersinger
von Nürnberg.
Wagner’s opera is partly a tribute to
the common people—and Sachs was one of
them. The son of a tailor, he was
apprenticed to a shoemaker in 1509 after
studying at a Latin school. He became a
master cobbler in about 1519. Many guild
workmen and tradesmen of that day
practiced a type of singing based on
elaborate rules; to become
meistersingers (“master singers”), they
had to prove themselves in a contest.
Sachs became a master in the Nürnberg
Singschule in about 1520, conducted a
school of meistersingers at Munich, and
headed the Nürnberg group in 1554.
Some of Sachs’s 4,000 meisterlieder
(“master songs”), which he began writing
in 1514, are religious. An early
champion of Martin Luther’s cause, he
wrote a verse allegory, Die
Wittembergisch Nachtigall (1523; “The
Nightingale of Wittenberg”) that
immediately became famous and advanced
the Reformation in Nürnberg. His 2,000
other poetic works include 200 verse
dramas, 85 of which are Fastnachtsspiele,
or homely comedies written to entertain
Shrovetide carnival crowds.
Sachs remained a cobbler while
pursuing the arts. Grief came to him
with the loss of his seven children and,
in 1560, of his wife. After marrying
again in 1561, when he was 66, he
resumed his output of cheerful
composition. Virtually forgotten after
his death, Sachs was rediscovered two
centuries later by J.W. von Goethe. Some
of Sachs’s plays, such as Der farent
Schüler im Paradeis (1550; The Wandering
Scholar), are performed today, and
renewed interest in Renaissance music
has resulted in a revival of his songs.
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Reformation
The culture of Germany in the 16th
century stood in the shadow of the Protestant
Reformation, which was initiated by the German monk
Martin Luther in 1517. Luther contributed to the
development of the German language in his
translation of the Bible, one of the vital forces
creating a standard language in a Germany whose
culture was essentially regional and whose language
was essentially a collection of local dialects. The
century’s literary culture produced few classic
works but many instruments of religious propaganda,
which now reached comparatively large audiences
because of new media developed since the 14th
century—the woodcut and the printing press. An
extensive body of polemical literature served the
causes of the parties to the religious schism
initiated by Luther. Epistolae obscurorum virorum
(1515–17; The Letters of Obscure Men), a witty
satire written in large part by the humanists Crotus
Rubeanus (Johannes Jäger) and Ulrich von Hutten
against the anti-Semitic and antihumanistic forces
at work in the German universities, opened a gap
between humanists and conservative scholastic
intellectuals that would favour the move of the
humanists into the Lutheran camp, where they became
part of an important intellectual coalition against
the Roman Catholic party. The satiric mode of
literature set the tone for popular polemics such as
the “fool” satires of Thomas Murner, a Catholic
adversary of Martin Luther: Die Geuchmat (1519;
“Field of Fools”) and Von dem grossen Lutherischen
Narren (1522; “Concerning the Great Lutheran Fool”).
The 16th century, although poor in great works of
literature, was an immensely vital period that
produced extraordinary characters such as the
revolutionary humanist Ulrich von Hutten, the
Nürnberg artist Albrecht Dürer, the Reformer Luther,
and the doctor-scientist-charlatan Paracelsus. In
the early modern period, as in various periods
before and after, Germany was subject to division
and party wrangling.
Martin Luther
Martin Luther in 1529
by Lucas Cranach
German religious leader
born Nov. 10, 1483, Eisleben, Saxony [Germany]
died Feb. 18, 1546, Eisleben
Main
German theologian and religious reformer who was the
catalyst of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation.
Through his words and actions, Luther precipitated a
movement that reformulated certain basic tenets of
Christian belief and resulted in the division of
Western Christendom between Roman Catholicism and
the new Protestant traditions, mainly Lutheranism,
Calvinism, the Anglican Communion, the Anabaptists,
and the Antitrinitarians. He is one of the most
influential figures in the history of Christianity.
Early life and education » Early life
Soon after Luther’s birth, his family moved from
Eisleben to the small town of Mansfeld, some 10
miles to the northwest. His father, Hans Luther, who
prospered in the local copper-refining business,
became a town councillor of Mansfeld in 1492. There
are few sources of information about Martin Luther’s
childhood apart from his recollections as an old
man; understandably, they seem to be coloured by a
certain romantic nostalgia.
Luther began his education at a Latin school in
Mansfeld in the spring of 1488. There he received a
thorough training in the Latin language and learned
by rote the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, the
Apostles’ Creed, and morning and evening prayers. In
1497 Luther was sent to nearby Magdeburg to attend a
school operated by the Brethren of the Common Life,
a lay monastic order whose emphasis on personal
piety apparently exerted a lasting influence on him.
In 1501 he matriculated at the University of Erfurt,
at the time one of the most distinguished
universities in Germany. The matriculation records
describe him as in habendo, meaning that he was
ineligible for financial aid, an indirect
testimonial to the financial success of his father.
Luther took the customary course in the liberal arts
and received the baccalaureate degree in 1502. Three
years later he was awarded the master’s degree. His
studies gave him a thorough exposure to
Scholasticism; many years later, he spoke of
Aristotle and William of Ockham as “his teachers.”
Early life and education » Conversion to monastic
life
Having graduated from the arts faculty, Luther
was eligible to pursue graduate work in one of the
three “higher” disciplines—law, medicine, or
theology. In accordance with the wishes of his
father, he commenced the study of law. Proudly he
purchased a copy of the Corpus Juris Canonici
(“Corpus of Canon Law”), the collection of
ecclesiastical law texts, and other important legal
textbooks. Less than six weeks later, however, on
July 17, 1505, Luther abandoned the study of law and
entered the monastery in Erfurt of the Order of the
Hermits of St. Augustine, a mendicant order founded
in 1256. His explanation for his abrupt change of
heart was that a violent thunderstorm near the
village of Stotternheim had terrified him to such a
degree that he involuntarily vowed to become a monk
if he survived. Because his vow was clearly made
under duress, Luther could easily have ignored it;
the fact that he did not indicates that the
thunderstorm experience was only a catalyst for much
deeper motivations. Luther’s father was
understandably angry with him for abandoning a
prestigious and lucrative career in law in favour of
the monastery. In response to Luther’s avowal that
in the thunderstorm he had been “besieged by the
terror and agony of sudden death,” his father said
only: “May it not prove an illusion and deception.”
By the second half of the 15th century, the
Augustinian order had become divided into two
factions, one seeking reform in the direction of the
order’s original strict rule, the other favouring
modifications. The monastery Luther joined in Erfurt
was part of the strict, observant faction. Two
months after entering the monastery, on Sept. 15,
1505, Luther made his general confession and was
admitted into the community as a novice.
Luther’s new monastic life conformed to the
commitment that countless men and women had made
through the centuries—an existence devoted to an
interweaving of daily work and worship. His spartan
quarters consisted of an unheated cell furnished
only with a table and chair. His daily activities
were structured around the monastic rule and the
observance of the canonical hours, which began at
2:00 in the morning. In the fall of 1506, he was
fully admitted to the order and began to prepare for
his ordination to the priesthood. He celebrated his
first mass in May 1507 with a great deal of fear and
trembling, according to his own recollection.
Early life and education » Doctor of theology
But Luther would not settle for the anonymous
and routine existence of a monk. In 1507 he began
the study of theology at the University of Erfurt.
Transferred to the Augustinian monastery at
Wittenberg in the fall of 1508, he continued his
studies at the university there. Because the
university at Wittenberg was new (it was founded in
1502), its degree requirements were fairly lenient.
After only a year of study, Luther had completed the
requirements not only for the baccalaureate in Bible
but also for the next-higher theological degree,
that of Sententiarius, which would qualify him to
teach Peter Lombard’s Four Books of Sentences
(Sententiarum libri IV), the standard theological
textbook of the time. Because he was transferred
back to Erfurt in the fall of 1509, however, the
university at Wittenberg could not confer the
degrees on him. Luther then unabashedly petitioned
the Erfurt faculty to confer the degrees. His
request, though unusual, was altogether proper, and
in the end it was granted.
His subsequent studies toward a doctoral degree
in theology were interrupted, probably between the
fall of 1510 and the spring of 1511, by his
assignment to represent the observant German
Augustinian monasteries in Rome. At issue was a
papal decree that had administratively merged the
observant and the nonobservant houses of the order.
It is indicative of Luther’s emerging role in his
order that he was chosen, along with a monastic
brother from Nürnberg, to make the case for the
observant houses in their appeal of the ruling to
the pope. The mission proved to be unsuccessful,
however, because the pope’s mind was already made
up. Luther’s comments in later years suggest that
the mission made a profoundly negative impression on
him: he found in Rome a lack of spirituality at the
very heart of Western Christendom.
Soon after his return Luther transferred to the
Wittenberg monastery to finish his studies at the
university there. He received his doctorate in the
fall of 1512 and assumed the professorship in
biblical studies, which was supplied by the
Augustinian order. At the same time, his
administrative responsibilities in the Wittenberg
monastery and the Augustinian order increased, and
he began to publish theological writings, such as
the 97 theses against Scholastic theology.
Although there is some uncertainty about the
details of Luther’s academic teaching, it is known
that he offered courses on several biblical
books—two on the book of Psalms—as well as on Paul’s
epistles to the Romans, the Galatians, and the
Hebrews. From all accounts Luther was a stimulating
lecturer. One student reported that he was a man of
middle stature, with a voice that combined sharpness
in the enunciation of syllables and words, and
softness in tone. He spoke neither too quickly nor
too slowly, but at an even pace, without hesitation
and very clearly.
Scholars have scrutinized Luther’s lecture notes for
hints of a developing new theology, but the results
have been inconclusive. Nor do the notes give any
indication of a deep spiritual struggle, which
Luther in later years associated with this period in
his life.
The indulgences controversy » Indulgences and
salvation
In the fall of 1517 an ostensibly innocuous
event quickly made Luther’s name a household word in
Germany. Irritated by Johann Tetzel, a Dominican
friar who was reported to have preached to the
faithful that the purchase of a letter of indulgence
entailed the forgiveness of sins, Luther drafted a
set of propositions for the purpose of conducting an
academic debate on indulgences at the university in
Wittenberg. He dispatched a copy of the Ninety-five
Theses to Tetzel’s superior, Archbishop Albert of
Mainz, along with a request that Albert put a stop
to Tetzel’s extravagant preaching; he also sent
copies to a number of friends. Before long, Albert
formally requested that official proceedings be
commenced in Rome to ascertain the work’s orthodoxy;
meanwhile, it began to be circulated in Germany,
together with some explanatory publications by
Luther.
Luther clearly intended the Ninety-five Theses to
be subservient to the church and the pope, and their
overall tone is accordingly searching rather than
doctrinaire. Nevertheless, there is a detectable
undercurrent of “reforming” sentiment in the
work—expressed in several theses beginning with the
phrase “Christians are to be taught that…”—as well
as some openly provocative statements. Thesis 86,
for example, asks,
Why does not the pope, whose wealth today is greater
than the wealth of the richest Crassus, build the
basilica of St. Peter with his own money rather than
with the money of poor believers?
Scholars have disagreed about how early Luther
began to formulate the theological positions that
eventually caused him to part ways with the church.
If he had done so by the fall of 1517, then the
Ninety-five Theses must be viewed as the
first—albeit hesitant—manifesto of a new theology.
Most scholars, however, believe that Luther’s
conversion was a lengthy process that did not
culminate until well after the indulgences
controversy was in full swing in the spring of 1518.
Indeed, his conversion to a new understanding of the
gospel was heavily influenced by the controversy,
according to this view.
By the end of 1518, according to most scholars,
Luther had reached a new understanding of the
pivotal Christian notion of salvation, or
reconciliation with God. Over the centuries the
church had conceived the means of salvation in a
variety of ways, but common to all of them was the
idea that salvation is jointly effected by humans
and by God—by humans through marshalling their will
to do good works and thereby to please God, and by
God through his offer of forgiving grace. Luther
broke dramatically with this tradition by asserting
that humans can contribute nothing to their
salvation: salvation is, fully and completely, a
work of divine grace.
Luther’s understanding came to him after a long
inner conflict in which he agonized, even despaired,
over his inability to marshal his will adequately to
do good works. While meditating on The Letter of
Paul to the Romans (1:17)—in which the Apostle
declares, “For in it [i.e., the gospel] the
righteousness of God is revealed through faith for
faith: as it is written, ‘He who through faith is
righteous shall live’”—Luther experienced an
illumination that he later described as a kind of
conversion. “It was as if the very gates of heaven
had opened before me,” he wrote. The dramatic and
intensely personal nature of this experience helps
to explain Luther’s determined refusal, during the
indulgences controversy, to recant his theological
views.
The indulgences controversy » Luther, Cajetan,
and Eck
By the summer of 1518 the causa Lutheri (“the
case of Luther”) had progressed far enough to
require that Luther present himself in Rome to be
examined on his teachings. After his territorial
ruler, the elector Frederick III of Saxony,
intervened on his behalf, Luther was summoned
instead to the southern German city of Augsburg,
where an imperial Diet was in session. Frederick
took action not because he supported Luther’s
teachings—which were still being formed—but because
he felt that it was his responsibility as a prince
to ensure that his subject was treated fairly. Rome,
for its part, acceded to Frederick’s wishes because
it needed German financial support for a planned
military campaign that it hoped to sponsor against
the Ottoman Empire—whose forces were poised to
invade central Europe from Hungary—and because
Frederick was one of the seven electors who would
choose the successor of the ailing Holy Roman
emperor Maximilian I. The papacy had a vital
interest in the outcome of this election.
Against these larger political issues, the case
of the Wittenberg professor paled in importance.
Luther’s antagonist at the imperial Diet, Cardinal
Cajetan, was head of the Dominican order, an ardent
defender of the theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, and
one of the most learned men in the Roman Curia.
Cajetan had taken his assignment seriously and was
thus well prepared for his interrogation of Luther.
Once the two men met, their fundamental differences
quickly became apparent. Their encounter was made
even more difficult by the fact that neither had
great respect for the other—Cajetan observed that
Luther had “ominous eyes and wondrous fantasies in
his head,” while Luther remarked that Cajetan may
well be “a famous Thomist, but he is an evasive,
obscure, and unintelligible theologian.”
In Cajetan’s view the key issues were Luther’s
denial that the church is empowered to distribute as
indulgences the infinite “treasury of merits”
accumulated by Christ on the cross—on this point
Luther directly contradicted the papal bull
Unigenitus Dei Filius (1343; “Only Begotten Son of
God”) of Clement VI—and Luther’s insistence that
faith is indispensable for justification. After
three days of discussion (October 12–14), Cajetan
advised Luther that further conversations were
useless unless he was willing to recant. Luther
immediately fled Augsburg and returned to
Wittenberg, where he issued an appeal for a general
council of the church to hear his case.
Luther had reason to be nervous. Papal
instructions from August had empowered Cajetan to
have Luther apprehended and brought to Rome for
further examination. On Nov. 9, 1518, Leo X issued
the bull Cum postquam (“When After”), which defined
the doctrine of indulgences and addressed the issue
of the authority of the church to absolve the
faithful from temporal punishment. Luther’s views
were declared to be in conflict with the teaching of
the church.
Well aware that he was the cause of the
controversy and that in Cum postquam his doctrines
had been condemned by the pope himself, Luther
agreed to refrain from participating in the public
debate. Others, however, promptly took his place,
sounding the knell of reform in both church and
society. The controversy was drawing participants
from wider circles and addressing broader and
weightier theological issues, the most important of
which was the question of the authority of the
church and the pope. Eventually, a bitter dispute
between Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt, a
colleague of Luther at Wittenberg, and Johann Eck, a
theologian from Ingolstadt and an able defender of
the church, drew Luther back into the fray. Because
the entire controversy was still considered an
academic matter, Eck, Carlstadt, and Luther agreed
to a public debate, which took place in Leipzig in
June 1519.
The setting was hardly a friendly one for Luther
and Carlstadt, because Duke George of Saxony had
already established himself as a staunch defender of
the church. Upon hearing the sermon of the opening
ceremony, which exhorted the participants to adhere
to the truth in their debating, George remarked that
he had not realized that theologians were so godless
as to need such preaching. The initial debate
between Eck and Carlstadt covered extensive
theological ground but was listless. Luther’s debate
with Eck was more lively, as Eck, a skillful
debater, repeatedly sought to show that Luther’s
position on the issue of papal primacy was identical
to that of Jan Hus, the Bohemian theologian who was
condemned for heresy at the Council of Constance
(1414–18). This was a conclusion calculated to shock
the audience at Leipzig, whose university had been
founded in the previous century by refugees from the
Hussite-dominated University of Prague. Luther
repeatedly denied the charge but then noted that
some of Hus’s opinions, such as his assertion that
there is one holy Catholic Church, were not
heretical. Eck’s prodding led Luther to state that
even general councils, such as the Council of
Constance, can be in error when they promulgate
opinions not de fide (concerning the faith). This
admission was perceived as damaging to Luther’s
cause and allowed Eck to boast that he had succeeded
in revealing Luther’s true beliefs.
The indulgences controversy » Excommunication
Meanwhile, after a delay caused by the election
of the new German emperor, the formal ecclesiastical
proceedings against Luther were revived in the fall
of 1519. In January 1520 a consistory heard the
recommendation that Luther’s orthodoxy be examined,
and one month later a papal commission concluded
that Luther’s teachings were heretical. Because this
conclusion seemed hasty to some members of the
Curia, another commission, consisting of the heads
of the several important monastic orders, was
convened; it rendered the surprisingly mild judgment
that Luther’s propositions were “scandalous and
offensive to pious ears” but not heretical. After
Eck appeared in Rome and made dire pronouncements on
the situation in Germany, yet another examination of
Luther’s writings was undertaken. Finally, on June
15, 1520, Leo issued the bull Exsurge Domine (“Arise
O Lord”), which charged that 41 sentences in
Luther’s various writings were “heretical,
scandalous, offensive to pious ears,” though it did
not specify which sentences had received what
verdict. Luther was given 60 days upon receiving the
bull to recant and another 60 days to report his
recantation to Rome.
At first Luther believed that the story of the
bull was a malicious rumour spread by Eck. When the
reality of his condemnation became clear, however,
he responded belligerently in a tract titled Against
the Execrable Bull of the Antichrist. Upon the
expiration of the 60-day period stipulated in the
bull, on Dec. 10, 1520, Luther cancelled his
classes, marched to a bonfire started by his
students outside one of the city gates, and threw a
copy of the bull into the fire.
The ensuing bull of excommunication, Decet
Romanum pontificem (“It Pleases the Roman Pontiff”),
was published on Jan. 3, 1521. Martin Luther was
formally declared a heretic. Ordinarily, those
condemned as heretics were apprehended by an
authority of the secular government and put to death
by burning. In Luther’s case, however, a complex set
of factors made such punishment impossible. The new
German king (and Holy Roman emperor), Charles V, had
agreed as a condition of his election that no German
would be convicted without a proper hearing; many,
including Luther himself, were convinced that Luther
had not been granted this right. Others noted
various formal deficiencies in Exsurge Domine,
including the fact that it did not correctly quote
Luther and that one of the sentences it condemned
was actually written by another author. Still others
thought that Luther’s call for reform deserved a
more serious hearing. A proposal was therefore
circulated that Luther should be given a formal
hearing when the imperial Diet convened in Worms
later in the spring.
Understandably, the papal nuncio Girolamo
Aleandro, who represented the Curia in the Holy
Roman Empire, vehemently rejected this idea. His
position was clear: a convicted heretic did not
warrant a hearing. The Diet could do nothing other
than endorse the ecclesiastical verdict and bring
the heretic to his deserved judgment. Charles shared
Aleandro’s sentiment but realized that the idea of
giving Luther a hearing enjoyed widespread support
in Germany. Charles’s adviser Mercurino Gattinara,
mindful of the need for good relations with the
estates (the three main orders of society—clergy,
nobility, and townspeople), repeatedly urged the
emperor not to issue an edict against Luther without
their full consent. Gattinara’s caution was
justified, because in February the estates refused
to support an edict condemning Luther’s writings and
instead urged that, in view of the restlessness of
the commoners, Luther be cited to appear before the
Diet “to the benefit and advantage of the entire
German nation, the Holy Roman Empire, our Christian
faith, and all estates.” Charles acceded, and on
March 6, 1521, he issued a formal invitation to
Luther to appear before the estates assembled in
Worms. Charles’s apparent surrender was perhaps the
only acceptable resolution of the matter; even
Aleandro could easily convince himself that Luther’s
citation was in the best interest of the church. If
Luther recanted, the problem of his heresy would be
removed; if he did not, the estates could no longer
refuse to endorse formal action against him.
The indulgences controversy » Diet of Worms
Luther appeared before the Diet at Worms on
April 17, 1521. He was informed that he had been
called to the meeting to acknowledge as his own the
books that had been published in his name and to
repudiate them. He briefly acknowledged the books
but requested time to ponder his second answer,
which was granted. The following day Luther admitted
that he had used inappropriate language but declared
that he could not and would not recant the substance
of his writings. According to a traditional but
apocryphal account, he ended his statement with the
words, “Here I stand. I can do no other. God help
me. Amen.”
Following his appearance, Luther participated in
intense discussions involving representatives of the
emperor, Aleandro, and the Saxon elector Frederick.
Although every effort was made to induce Luther to
recant, in the end the discussions failed over his
refusal to repudiate a single sentence from the 41
cited in the papal bull. But behind that stood the
charge that Luther, a single individual, presumed to
challenge 1,500 years of Christian theological
consensus. On April 26 Luther hurriedly left Worms,
and on May 8 Charles drew up an edict against him.
Charles undertook one more unsuccessful effort to
obtain the support of the estates, which continued
to fear that Luther’s condemnation would incite
rebellion among the commoners. The Diet then
officially adjourned. On May 25, after the elector
Joachim Brandenburg assured the emperor of the
support of the few rulers who remained in Worms,
Charles signed the edict against Luther.
The document enumerated Luther’s errors along the
lines of Exsurge Domine, declared Luther and his
followers (some of whom were identified by name) to
be political outlaws, and ordered his writings to be
burned. Thus, the causa Lutheri was considered
closed. It was enormously important, however, that
doubts about the propriety of the edict were voiced
at once. Its claim to represent the “unanimous
consent of the estates” was plainly incorrect, since
by the end of May most of the rulers had long since
left Worms. Meanwhile, on his journey back to
Wittenberg, Luther was “kidnapped” by soldiers of
Frederick and taken secretly to Wartburg Castle,
near the town of Eisenach, where he remained in
hiding for the better part of a year. During this
period few people knew of Luther’s whereabouts; most
thought he was dead.
During his stay in the Wartburg, Luther began
work on what proved to be one of his foremost
achievements—the translation of the New Testament
into the German vernacular. This task was an obvious
ramification of his insistence that the Bible alone
is the source of Christian truth and his related
belief that everyone is capable of understanding the
biblical message. Luther’s translation profoundly
affected the development of the written German
language. The precedent he set was followed by other
scholars, whose work made the Bible widely available
in the vernacular and contributed significantly to
the emergence of national languages.
The indulgences controversy » Controversies after
the Diet of Worms
Attempts to carry out the Edict of Worms were
largely unsuccessful. Although Roman Catholic rulers
sought determinedly to suppress Luther and his
followers, within two years it had become obvious
that the movement for reform was too strong. By
March 1522, when Luther returned to Wittenberg, the
effort to put reform into practice had generated
riots and popular protests that threatened to
undermine law and order.
Luther’s attitude toward these developments was
conservative. He did not believe that change should
occur hurriedly. In accordance with his notion of
“making haste slowly,” he managed to control the
course of reform in Wittenberg, where his influence
continued to be strong. Nevertheless, it is
undeniable that Luther’s significance as a public
figure began to decline after 1522. This is not to
say that he did not play a crucial role in the
continuing course of events—for he did. Nor is this
to say that his influence may not be discerned after
1522—for it can. After the Edict of Worms, however,
the cause of reform, of whatever sort, became a
legal and political struggle rather than a
theological one. The crucial decisions were now made
in the halls of government and not in the studies of
the theologians. Moreover, by 1523 various other
reformers, including Thomas Müntzer, Huldrych
Zwingli, and Martin Bucer, had arisen to challenge
Luther’s primacy of place and to put forward a more
radical vision of reform in church and society.
Beginning in the summer of 1524, large numbers of
peasants in southwestern Germany staged a series of
uprisings that were partly inspired by Luther’s
reform proposals, though they also addressed
long-standing economic and political grievances. By
the spring of 1525 the rebellion, known as the
Peasants’ War, had spread to much of central
Germany. The peasants, who were supported by the
reformer Müntzer, published their grievances in a
manifesto titled The Twelve Articles of the
Peasants; the document is notable for its
declaration that the rightness of the peasants’
demands should be judged by the Word of God, a
notion derived directly from Luther’s teaching that
the Bible is the sole guide in matters of morality
and belief. Luther wrote two responses—Admonition to
Peace Concerning the Twelve Articles of the
Peasants, which expressed sympathy for the peasants,
and Against the Murderous and Robbing Hordes of the
Peasants, which vehemently denounced them. Both
works represented a shift away from his earlier
vision of reform as encompassing societal as well as
religious issues. It is likely that they helped to
alienate the peasants from Luther’s cause.
Luther faced other challenges in the mid-1520s.
His literary feud with the great Dutch humanist
Desiderius Erasmus came to an unfortunate conclusion
when the two failed to find common ground. Their
theological dispute concerned the issue of whether
humans were free to contribute to and participate in
their own salvation. Erasmus, who took the
affirmative view, argued that Luther’s insistence on
the radical priority of grace undermined all human
ethical effort. Luther insisted that Erasmus’s
position reduced the great soteriological drama of
the Incarnation and the cross to shallow moral
concepts.
In 1525 Luther was isolated from various other
reformers in a controversy over the meaning of the
Eucharist, or the Lord’s Supper. The dispute
concerned the proper interpretation of Jesus’ words
of institution when he said, “This is my body…This
is my blood.” Whereas Zwingli argued that these
words had to be understood symbolically, as “This
symbolizes my body…This symbolizes my blood,” Luther
argued strenuously for a literal interpretation.
Accordingly, Zwingli held that Jesus was spiritually
but not physically present in the communion host,
whereas Luther taught that Jesus was really and
bodily present. The theological disagreement was
initially pursued by several southern German
reformers, such as Johann Brenz, but after 1527
Luther and Zwingli confronted each other directly,
with increasing rancour and vehemence, particularly
from Luther. As far as he was concerned, Zwingli was
an “enthusiast” who did not take the plain words of
Scripture seriously. Thus, the reform movement
became a house that was publicly divided.
In the view of some, notably Landgrave Philip of
Hesse, this division had serious political
implications. There was no doubt that the emperor
and the princes of the Catholic territories were
determined to suppress the new Lutheran heresy, if
necessary by force. The disagreement over communion
precluded one strategy of dealing with this ominous
Catholic threat, namely by establishing a united
Protestant political (and military) front. Whereas
Luther, in his wonderful otherworldliness, gravely
doubted the wisdom of any effort to protect the
gospel by military means, Zwingli envisioned a
comprehensive anti-Catholic political front that
would reach from Zurich to Denmark. When Philip
first entertained the notion of a colloquy between
Zwingli, Luther, and a number of other reformers, he
was prompted by his desire to create the basis of a
Protestant political alliance. Luther was initially
reluctant and had to be persuaded to attend the
meeting, which was held in Marburg on Oct. 1–4, 1529
(see Marburg, Colloquy of). From the outset Luther
made it clear that he would not change his views: he
took a piece of chalk and wrote the Latin version of
the words of institution, “Hoc est corpus meum”
(“this is my body”), on the table. In the end the
two sides managed to fashion a contorted agreement,
but the deep division within Protestantism remained.
On June 13, 1525, Luther married Katherine of
Bora, a former nun. Katherine had fled her convent
together with eight other nuns and was staying in
the house of the Wittenberg town secretary. While
the other nuns soon returned to their families or
married, Katherine remained without support. Luther
was likewise at the time the only remaining resident
in what had been the Augustinian monastery in
Wittenberg; the other monks had either thrown off
the habit or moved to a staunchly Catholic area.
Luther’s decision to marry Katherine was the result
of a number of factors. Understandably, he felt
responsible for her plight, since it was his
preaching that had prompted her to flee the convent.
Moreover, he had repeatedly written, most
significantly in 1523, that marriage is an
honourable order of creation, and he regarded the
Roman Catholic Church’s insistence on clerical
celibacy as the work of the Devil. Finally, he
believed that the unrest in Germany, epitomized in
the bloody Peasants’ War, was a manifestation of
God’s wrath and a sign that the end of the world was
at hand. He thus conceived his marriage as a
vindication, in these last days, of God’s true order
for humankind.
While Luther’s enemies indulged themselves in
sarcastic pronouncements upon his matrimony—Erasmus
remarked that what had begun as tragedy had turned
into comedy—his friends and supporters were
chagrined over what they took to be the poor timing
of his decision. (It is noteworthy that Luther was
not the first of the reformers to marry.) Katherine
of Bora proved to be a splendid helpmate for Luther.
Table Talks, a collection of Luther’s comments at
the dinner table as recorded by one of his student
boarders, pays tribute to “Dr. Katie” as a skillful
household manager and as a partner in theological
conversations. The couple had five children:
Johannes, Magdalene, Martin, Paul, and Margarete.
Luther’s letters to his children, as well as his
deep sadness at the loss of his daughter
Magdalene—who died in his arms in September 1542—are
indicative of the warm relationships that
characterized his family and marriage.
Later years
As a declared heretic and public outlaw, Luther
was forced to stay out of the political and
religious struggle over the enforcement of the Edict
of Worms. Sympathetic rulers and city councils
became the protagonists for Luther’s cause and the
cause of reform. When Charles V convened a Diet to
meet at Augsburg in 1530 to address unresolved
religious issues, Luther himself could not be
present, though he managed to travel as far south as
Coburg—still some 100 miles north of Augsburg—to
follow developments at the Diet. In Augsburg it fell
to Luther’s young Wittenberg colleague Philipp
Melanchthon to represent the Protestants.
Melanchthon’s summary of the reformers’ beliefs, the
Augsburg Confession, quickly became the guiding
theological document for the emerging Lutheran
tradition.
Luther’s role in the Reformation after 1525 was
that of theologian, adviser, and facilitator but not
that of a man of action. Biographies of Luther
accordingly have a tendency to end their story with
his marriage in 1525. Such accounts gallantly omit
the last 20 years of his life, during which much
happened. The problem is not just that the cause of
the new Protestant churches that Luther had helped
to establish was essentially pursued without his
direct involvement, but also that the Luther of
these later years appears less attractive, less
winsome, less appealing than the earlier Luther who
defiantly faced emperor and empire at Worms.
Repeatedly drawn into fierce controversies during
the last decade of his life, Luther emerges as a
different figure—irascible, dogmatic, and insecure.
His tone became strident and shrill, whether in
comments about the Anabaptists, the pope, or the
Jews. In each instance his pronouncements were
virulent: the Anabaptists should be hanged as
seditionists, the pope was the Antichrist, the Jews
should be expelled and their synagogues burned. Such
were hardly irenic words from a minister of the
gospel, and none of the explanations that have been
offered—his deteriorating health and chronic pain,
his expectation of the imminent end of the world,
his deep disappointment over the failure of true
religious reform—seem satisfactory.
In 1539 Luther became embroiled in a scandal
surrounding the bigamy of Landgrave Philip. Like
many other crowned heads, Philip lived in a
dynastically arranged marriage with a wife for whom
he had no affection. Engaging in extramarital
relationships disturbed his conscience, however, so
that for years he felt unworthy to receive
communion. His eyes fell on one of his wife’s
ladies-in-waiting, who insisted on marriage. Philip
turned to Luther and the Wittenberg theologians for
advice. In his response, which he amply augmented
with biblical references, Luther noted that the
patriarchs of the Old Testament had been married to
more than one wife and that, as a special
dispensation, polygamy was still possible. Philip
accordingly entered into a second marriage secretly,
but before long it became known—as did Luther’s role
in bringing it about.
From the mid-1530s Luther was plagued by kidney
stones and an obvious coronary condition. Somewhat
sheepishly, he attributed his poor health to the
severity of his life in the monastery. He
nevertheless continued his academic teaching—from
1535 to 1545 he lectured on the Book of Genesis, one
of his most insightful biblical expositions—and
preached regularly at the city church until his
colleague Johannes Bugenhagen assumed that
responsibility. Even then, Luther continued to
preach in the Augustinian monastery. After the death
of one of his oldest friends, Nikolaus Hausmann, in
1538 and that of his daughter Magdalene four years
later, references to death became increasingly
abundant in Luther’s correspondence. Thus he wrote
in a June 1543 letter to a friend:
I desire that there be given me a good little hour
when I can move onward to God. I have had enough. I
am tired. I have become nothing. Do pray earnestly
for me so that the Lord may take my soul in peace.
In February 1546 Luther journeyed, despite his
failing health, to Eisleben, the town where he was
born. He set out to mediate an embarrassing quarrel
between two young and arrogant noblemen, the counts
Albrecht and Gebhard of Mansfeld. He was successful,
and he so informed his wife in what proved to be his
last letter. One day later, on February 18, death
came. His body was interred in the Castle Church in
Wittenberg.
Significance
Martin Luther is assuredly one of the most
influential figures in Western civilization during
the last millennium. He was the catalyst for the
division of Western Christendom into several
churches, but he also left a host of cultural
legacies, such as the emphasis on vernacular
language. He was primarily a theologian, and there
is a great wealth of insights in his writings, which
in their definitive scholarly edition (the so-called
Weimar Edition) comprise more than 100 folio
volumes. But he was not a systematic theological
thinker. Much like St. Augustine in late antiquity,
Luther was what might be called a polemical
theologian. Most of his writings —such as Bondage of
the Will against Erasmus and That These Words ‘This
Is My Body’ Still Stand Against all Enthusiasts
against Zwingli—were forged in the heat of
controversy and were inescapably given to one-sided
pronouncements, which are not easy to reconcile with
positions he took in other writings. It is,
therefore, not easy to find agreement on the
elements of Luther’s theology.
Moreover, the assessment of Luther’s theological
significance was for centuries altogether dependent
on the ecclesiastical orientation of the critic.
Protestant scholars viewed him as the most stunning
exponent of the authentic Christian faith since the
time of the Apostles, while Catholics viewed him as
the epitome of theological ignorance and personal
immorality. These embarrassingly partisan
perspectives have changed in recent decades, and a
less confessionally oriented picture of Luther has
emerged.
Certain key tenets of Luther’s theology have
shaped Protestant Christianity since the 16th
century. They include his insistence on the Bible,
the Word of God, as the only source of religious
authority; his emphasis on the centrality of grace,
appropriated by faith, as the sole means of human
salvation; and his understanding of the church as a
community of the faithful—a priesthood of all
believers—rather than as a hierarchical structure
with a prominent division between clergy and laity.
Luther was not the first to express these notions,
and indeed recent scholarship on the 15th century
has shown that much of what was traditionally
considered Luther’s revolutionary innovation had
striking antecedents. Nevertheless, the vigour and
centrality that these ideas received in Luther’s
thought made them in important respects dramatically
new. Certain corollaries of Luther’s central
teachings also made his achievement new and
noteworthy. His insistence, for example, that sacred
Scripture be available to commoners prompted him not
only to translate the Bible into German but also to
compose hymns and to advocate the establishment of
schools in the cities.
Recent interpreters of Luther have attempted to
understand his thought in terms of his struggle
against the overpowering reality of the Devil or in
terms of his intense fear of a death that would
permanently separate him from God. Although there is
evidence to support both views, neither quite
captures Luther’s spiritual essence. What seems to
characterize him more than anything else is an
almost childlike trust in God’s overarching
forgiveness and acceptance. Luther talked much about
his tentationes (“temptations”), by which he meant
his doubts about whether this divine forgiveness was
real. But he overcame these doubts, and his life
thereafter was one of joyous and spontaneous trust
in God’s love and goodness toward him and all
sinners. Luther called this “Christian freedom.”
The centre of scholarly attention in Luther
studies in the late 20th century was Luther’s
understanding of the proper role of the Christian in
society and politics. According to many scholars,
Luther’s disavowal of the German peasants in 1525
and his notion that, as he once put it, “the Gospel
has nothing to do with politics” facilitated a
tendency toward political passivity among Protestant
Christians in Germany. Likewise, his strident
pronouncements against the Jews, especially toward
the end of his life, have raised the question of
whether Luther significantly encouraged the
development of German anti-Semitism. Although many
scholars have taken this view, this perspective puts
far too much emphasis on Luther and not enough on
the larger peculiarities of German history.
Luther’s notions developed in opposition to the
belief developed by the medieval Catholic Church
that all of society wore a Christian mantle. The
notion of a “Christian” politics or a “Christian”
economics was anathema to Luther. However, this did
not mean that the public realm had no principles
that needed to be honoured. What Luther rejected was
the notion that there was a uniquely “Christian”
approach to these realms; uniquely Christian, Luther
insisted, was only that which pertained to Jesus’
salvational work of redemption.
Hans J. Hillerbrand
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The Baroque
The political and social consequences
of the Reformation reached with devastating effect
into the 17th and early 18th centuries. German
literature of the Baroque period (c. 1600–1720)
suffers equally from the miseries of the Thirty
Years’ War (1618–48), in which the various tensions
set in place by the religious divisions were fought
out, and from Germany’s dependence on foreign
cultural models—particularly on the French model.
It was an age of contradictions and extremes: A
wealthy, sophisticated, overly ornate court society
coexisted with political chaos and destructive
warfare. A courtly literature of sublime, chivalric
ideals and romances that were played out in utopian
landscapes thrived opposite a court drama obsessed
with violence, intrigue, murder, and betrayal.
Sensual lyric poetry with Petrarchan-Platonic
strains of ideal love was matched by poems
exhibiting a preoccupation with death, mutability,
the corruption of the flesh, and the illusory nature
of life (“Life is a dream” was a prominent motif of
Baroque literature). Extremes of worldliness met
extremes of religiosity.
The period produced one major work that
quintessentially expressed the chaotic extravagance
and deep wretchedness of life in Germany in the 17th
century: the novel Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus
(1669; The Adventurous Simplicissimus) by Hans Jacob
Christoph von Grimmelshausen. It is a bildungsroman,
or “novel of education,” with many parallels to
Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival. After his
putative father disappears in a marauding episode of
the Thirty Years’ War, the young hero sets out into
the world as a simple fool, knowing nothing yet
often wiser than the experienced fools he
encounters. His crazy-quilt career takes him through
one role after another: a fool, a woman, an
officer’s adjutant, a
Robin Hood
("The Merry
Adventures of Robin Hood")
- like highwayman, an
army officer, a prisoner of war, a pilgrim, a
nobleman, and a snake-oil salesman. Erotic
adventures in Paris leave him with a disfiguring
disease. He makes visits to utopian communities. One
of them is populated by mermen and mermaids and
located at the bottom of a lake in the Black Forest.
The only controlling logic of the work is
unpredictability. There is no development of
character, no movement toward an ethical goal, only
the changing of masks. At each point where a stable
life could develop, some unpredictable catastrophe
interferes, often brought about by the war. In the
end, the fool-hero abandons the treacherous world
and retreats to the forest, where he lives as a
religious hermit.
Alongside Grimmelshausen, other Baroque writers
who deserve mention are the poet and poetic theorist
Martin Opitz, who introduced foreign literary models
and rules into German poetry, and the lyric poet and
dramatist Andreas Gryphius, who wrote sonnets and
tragedies imbued with a deep Christian faith.
Baroque-era efforts to form a German literary
culture in the popular theatre and in the
Sprachgesellschaften (“language
societies”)—established to further the use of the
German language and the development of German
literary activity—were small currents in the chaotic
tide of pessimism, fear, cynicism, and despair that
swept Germany in the 17th century.
C. Stephen Jaeger
Hans Jacob
Christoph von Grimmelshausen
born 1621/22, Gelnhausen, near
Frankfurt am Main
died August 17, 1676, Renchen,
Strasbourg
German novelist, whose Simplicissimus
series is one of the masterworks of his
country’s literature. Satiric and
partially autobiographical, it is a
matchless social picture of the often
grotesque Thirty Years’ War (1618–48).
Apparently the son of an innkeeper of
noble descent, Grimmelshausen was
orphaned at an early age. While still a
child, he was drawn (or kidnapped) into
the Thirty Years’ War by Hessian and
Croatian troops. He served as a
musketeer, formally joined the imperial
army, and in 1639 became secretary to
Reinhard von Schauenburg, commandant at
Offenburg. After the war, as steward for
the Schauenburg family, Grimmelshausen
collected taxes from peasants, dragged
defaulters into court, and served as
host at a Schauenburg tavern. To
supplement his income, he sold horses.
He left in 1660 when it was found that
he had bought land with money belonging
to the family. Afterward he was
successively a steward for a wealthy
physician and art lover, Johannes Rüffen
of Strasbourg; a tavernkeeper at
Gaisbach; and a bailiff at Renchen,
where he survived an invasion.
Grimmelshausen, who had begun writing
in his army days, published two minor
satires (in 1658 and 1660) and then (in
1669) the first part of Simplicissimus
(full title Der abenteuerliche
Simplicissimus Teutsch [“The Adventurous
Simplicissimus Teutsch”]).
Grimmelshausen’s authorship, however,
was not established until 1837 from the
initials HJCVG, which he used in a
sequel to identify himself merely as
editor.
Modeled on the 16th-century Spanish
picaresque novel, Simplicissimus tells
the story of an innocent child brought
into contact with life through his
experiences of the Thirty Years’ War.
The novel traces the development of a
human soul against the depraved
background of a Germany riven by war,
depopulation, cruelty, and fear.
Simplicissimus gives full rein to
Grimmelshausen’s power of narration, eye
for realistic detail, coarse humour,
social criticism, and gift for creating
convincing characters.
Grimmelshausen’s continuations of
Simplicissimus include Die Lanstörtzerin
Courage (1669; Courage, the
Adventuress)—which inspired Bertolt
Brecht’s play Mutter Courage und ihre
Kinder (1941; Mother Courage and Her
Children)—and Das wunderbarliche
Vogelnest (1672; “The Magical Bird’s
Nest”). One part of the latter,
translated as The False Messiah (1964),
is about an adventurer whose pose as the
messiah enables him to steal a wealthy
Jew’s money and daughter; it is a satire
on gullibility and avarice.
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Martin Opitz
in full Martin Opitz von Boberfeld
born Dec. 23, 1597, Bunzlau, Silesia
[now Bolesławiec, Pol.]
died Aug. 20, 1639, Danzig [now Gdańsk,
Pol.]
German poet and literary theorist who
introduced foreign literary models into
German poetry and who was a pioneer in
establishing a national German
literature.
Opitz studied at universities in
Frankfurt an der Oder, Heidelberg, and
Leiden, where he met the Dutch poet
Daniël Heinsius. He led a wandering life
in the service of various territorial
nobles. In 1625, as a reward for a
requiem poem on the death of Charles
Joseph of Austria, he was crowned
laureate by the Holy Roman emperor
Ferdinand II, who later ennobled him. In
1629 he was elected to the
Fruchtbringende Gesellschaft, the most
important of the literary societies that
aimed to reform the German language. He
went to Paris in 1630, where he made the
acquaintance of the Dutch jurist Hugo
Grotius. He lived from 1635 until his
death at Danzig (Gdańsk), where
Władysław IV of Poland made him his
historiographer and secretary.
Opitz was the head of the so-called
First Silesian school of poets and
during his life was regarded as the
greatest German poet. He was the “father
of German poetry,” at least in respect
to its form. His Aristarchus sive de
Contemptu Linguae Teutonicae (1617)
asserted the suitability of the German
language for poetry. His influential
Buch von der deutschen Poeterey, written
in 1624, established long-standing rules
for the “purity” of language, style,
verse, and rhyme. It insisted upon word
stress rather than syllable counting as
the basis of German verse and
recommended the alexandrine. The
scholarly, stilted, and courtly style
introduced by Opitz dominated German
poetry until the middle of the 18th
century. Opitz’s poems follow his own
rigorous rules and are mostly didactic
and descriptive—formal elaborations of
carefully considered themes.
In retrospect, Opitz’s activities as
an aesthetic educator and translator
have assumed much importance. He
translated from Heinsius, Grotius,
Seneca, and Sophocles; he partly
translated from the text by O. Rinuccini
the libretto of Dafne, the first opera
in German; he introduced the political
novel (John Barclay’s Argenis) into
Germany; and he edited (1638) the German
version of Sir Philip Sidney’s prose
romance Arcadia and the 11th-century
poem Annolied. Opitz’s Opera Poetica
appeared in 1646.
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Andreas Gryphius
born Oct. 2, 1616, Glogau, Silesia
[now Głogów, Pol.]
died July 16, 1664, Glogau
lyric poet and dramatist, one of
Germany’s leading writers in the 17th
century.
Gryphius (the family name Greif was
latinized after the fashion of the
times) was orphaned early in life, and
the horrors of the Thirty Years’ War
soon cast a shadow over his unsettled
childhood. A refugee from his native
town, he was educated in various places,
revealing himself in the process as a
brilliant scholar. Crowned poeta
laureatus by Count Georg von Schönborn,
whose sons he tutored, Gryphius went to
Leiden and stayed there six years, as
both student and teacher. After
extensive travels in Holland, France,
and Italy, he finally returned to
Silesia in 1647 and, in 1650, took up
the important administrative post of
syndic in Glogau, a post he filled until
his death.
Gryphius’ literary reputation has
increased enormously during the 20th
century. His plays are distinguished by
a deep sense of melancholy and pessimism
and are threaded through with a fervent
religious strain which, faced with the
transitoriness of earthly things and the
fight for survival in the ravaged
Germany of the time, borders on despair.
He wrote five tragedies: Leo Armenius
(1646), Catharina von Georgien, Carolus
Stuardus, and Cardenio und Celinde (all
printed 1657), and Papinianus (1659).
These plays deal with the themes of
stoicism and religious constancy unto
martyrdom, of the Christian ruler and
the Machiavellian tyrant, and of
illusion and reality, a theme that is
used with telling effect in the
middle-class background of Cardenio und
Celinde. The theme of illusion and
reality is a fundamental one in his
three comedies, the best of which are
Die geliebte Dornrose (1660; The Beloved
Hedgerose) and Herr Peter Squentz
(1663).
Gryphius’ lyric poetry covers a wide
range of verse forms and is
characterized by a technical mastery and
assurance and a portrayal of human
emotions in adversity, the sincerity and
compulsive power of which stamp him,
particularly in his sonnets, as a great
poet.
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APPENDIX
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Christian, baron von Wolff
German philosopher
Wolff also spelled Wolf
born Jan. 24, 1679, Breslau, Silesia [now Wrocław, Pol.]
died April 9, 1754, Halle, Prussia [now in Germany]
Main
philosopher, mathematician, and scientist who worked in many
subjects but who is best known as the German spokesman of
the Enlightenment, the 18th-century philosophical movement
characterized by Rationalism.
Wolff was educated at the universities of Breslau, Jena,
and Leipzig and was a pupil of the philosopher and
mathematician Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. On the
recommendation of Leibniz he was appointed professor of
mathematics at the University of Halle in 1707, but he was
banished in 1723 as a result of theological disputes with
Pietists, who were followers of the German movement for an
increase of piety in Lutheran churches. He became professor
of mathematics and philosophy at the University of Marburg,
Hesse (1723–40), and, as science adviser to Peter the Great
(1716–25), he helped found the St. Petersburg Academy of
Sciences in Russia. After returning to the University of
Halle, at the request of the king of Prussia, Frederick II
the Great, he became chancellor (1741–54).
Wolff wrote numerous works in philosophy, theology,
psychology, botany, and physics. His series of essays all
beginning under the title Vernünftige Gedanken (“Rational
Ideas”) covered many subjects and expounded Leibniz’s
theories in popular form. Wolff emphasized that every
occurrence must have an adequate reason for happening or
there arises the impossible alternative that something might
come out of nothing. He applied the rational thought of the
Anglo-French Enlightenment and of Leibniz and René Descartes
in the development of his own philosophical system, the
Wolffian philosophy. Rationalism and mathematical
methodology formed the essence of this system, which was an
important force in the development of German philosophical
thought.
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