The Hunger for Certainty

Martin Luther
by Martin E. Marty, Ph.D.

(Page 2 of 4)

1483-1519

Shortly before midnight one November 10, probably in 1483, in the Saxon town of Eisleben, Margarethe Lindemann Luder gave birth to a son. When he was grown and had made enemies, some of them charged that this "beloved mother" had been a whore and bath attendant. Not at all. She was instead a hardworking woman of trading-class stock and middling means. When he did later write of her, Luther remembered Margarethe as someone who could punish him severely. Parents in her time and place routinely did that. But, he recalled, she had meant heartily well.

His father, Hans Luder or Ludher-later Luther-was a leaseholder of mines and smelters. He was to become respectable enough to serve as one of four citizens who represented others before a town council. This ambitious and occasionally jovial father could likewise be a harsh disciplinarian, but-as Martin also said of him-Hans had meant heartily well.

Eisleben, where the family lived for only a few months after the child's birth, straddled the edge of the Harz Mountains and the Thuringian forests. Haunting the dark heights above the town, many believed, were witches and poltergeists. In the town churches, peasants and villagers took refuge against both threatening supernatural beings and natural hazards. The Luthers, among these other Saxons, needed such refuge. Tales of the Black Death, which had killed perhaps one-third of Europe's people, kept later generations aware of the precariousness of living and terrified when plaguelike diseases struck. Peasant existence and, for men like Hans, the mining business brought daily hazards. Thus, while a mine could yield copper and produce prosperity, it also might collapse on the miners or drag leaseholders like Hans into debt.

Pleading for all the help they could get, cowering believers prayed to saints. Miners invoked their popular protector St. Anne, known to them as the mother of the Virgin Mary. The pious, hoping such saints would shield them, feared a God who judged and punished them. To ward off the devil in such a setting, the Luther infant was brought just hours after his birth to Sts. Peter and Paul Church. There, after the saint of that day, they christened him Martin. The baptismal rite, though subdued, was momentous. The church taught that its waters cleansed the infant of sin as they drove out the devil and produced a new Christian.

Seven years after his baptism, his prudent parents sent Martin to Latin schools, first in his hometown of Mansfield, then in Magdeburg, and finally in Eisenach, for an experience that he later recounted as being in purgatory and hell. Those three schools were literally "trivial," which meant devoted to the trivium, because teachers drilled three subjects into the heads of urchins: Grammar served Luther well as he produced writings that now fill about one hundred mammoth volumes. Rhetoric, the second discipline, helped him become the influential writer and speaker whose words affronted and charmed multitudes for decades. The boy made much less of the third, logic, though it did help him survive philosophy courses later at the university.

In the Latin schools Martin also wrestled with Christian basics. If teachers taught also about the love of God, it was their warning that Jesus the Son of God would judge them after their death that fired their imaginations, especially Martin's. More alluring were Aesop's Fables and other stories that helped inform and prompt a mature Luther to salt his discourse with parables and narratives. In school Luther lived in terror of the "wolf," the classmate charged to tattle weekly on the children and finger them as candidates for physical punishment. But there were joys, as when young Martin savored the music that filled the chapel during Masses. Having learned to sing, the boys at Magdeburg and Eisenach performed during door-to-door rounds, welcoming "crumbs," or small gifts.

Influences that shaped the child remain obscure. He had several brothers and sisters and was close to one of them, Jacob, with whom he remembered playing. But he was very young when the burden of influence moved from home and family to school. The pious Brothers of the Common Life ran the school at Magdeburg and no doubt shared their love of the Scripture and the life of simple prayer with him. Some thought his known sightings of one begging Franciscan friar, formerly Prince Wilhelm of Anhalt, and his friendship with a learned priest at Eisenach inspired this alert adolescent when he later chose his vocation. Whatever young Luther might have been planning to study, father Hans insisted he take up law. Having a son who was an attorney or a judge would one day enhance the status and serve the practical needs of the aged Luthers.

He came to admire his teachers at Eisenach, so the Latin schools cannot have been such purgatories and hells as a scornful Luther later deemed them. So neither was his chosen university at Erfurt in Thuringia simply the whorehouse and beerhouse he would one day recall. In the summer of 1501, after taking his oath of loyalty to the dean, he launched a career that kept him in the university world all his life. Hans Luther's son was on track toward joining the Thuringian or Saxon elites through an academic career in a time when the fates of universities, the church, and civil governments were intertwined.

Luther used the university as his base as he developed his decisive role in the portentous intellectual, spiritual, and political dramas of his day. He remarked that the market town of Erfurt was a fortified city, so he felt protected there in many ways. Among the walled-in population of about twenty thousand lived almost a thousand priests, monks, and nuns. Faith was a public matter; the churchgoing citizens took Christian images from the sanctuaries to the streets, where townspeople enjoyed sacred processions, festivals, and displays of piety.

University authorities in Erfurt sternly regulated academic life. At four each morning the bell roused students for a day of rote learning and often wearying spiritual exercises. Starting low in class ranking, Luther studied hard and moved toward the top, usually enjoying his courses. He said he regarded the ceremonies that came with his master's degree-achieved in 1505-as incomparable among joys on earth, and he came to know enough joys to give weight to such a comparison.

While he followed his father's wishes and enrolled that year in legal studies, he almost instantly dropped out of them, explaining that in his mind law represented nothing but uncertainty. At Erfurt the edgy law professors liked to call theologians asses. Luther returned the compliment ever after by showing his disdain for lawyers. In the academy he now began to ask himself whether theology might offer him the certainty he was seeking in life, the assurance his soul and mind demanded, and a boon he could provide to others.

At Erfurt two living teachers and three dead philosophers especially caught his interest. Bartholomeus Arnoldi von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter were the professors who instructed Luther in the thought of the ancient thinker Aristotle and, from more recent centuries, William of Ockham and Gabriel Biel. Usingen and Trutfetter staged disputations, dead-serious debates, about their philosophies, ostensibly to seek truth. They taught students to be suspicious of even the greatest authors, men who might give the impression of being certain about assertions and claims when they were not or had no reason to be.

Luther determined along the way that when the philosophers considered human reason to be a credible agent for knowing and pleasing God they could offer none of the assurance of the love of God that he craved. As he studied philosophy he developed a lasting love-hate-from some angles even a hate-hate-relation to Aristotle. The Greek sage was a legitimate guide on practical earthly subjects, Luther affirmed, but he charged that Christian universities employed Aristotle's approach to reason as a deceptive and finally unsatisfying means for coming to know God.

© 2006 Viking, a division of Penguin Putnam, used by permission.

About the Author

Martin Marty, one of today's most respected theologians, is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote public religion endeavors. His more than fifty books include Modern American Religion. He is a winner of the National Book Award and was the first religion scholar to receive the National Humanities Medal.