The Hunger for Certainty, Part 2

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

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Luther's professors, adapting what some called the modern way and others referred to as the nominalism of Ockham and Biel, stressed a commonsense counsel: Test theory by experience. For Luther, this meant questioning the writings of his teachers and then moving on to testing the absolute authority that the key institution, the church, claimed as the guardian of divine truth. Nominalists contended that only a particular, individual thing, not a general idea, was real.

That meant humans could learn of a world beyond their everyday scene only through divine revelation, which is one reason why Scripture became so decisive for Luther and why he came to reject so much of the church's use of Aristotle's reason as a means of using ideas to find and please God.

Interrupting his academic course on a July day in 1505, the twenty-two-year-old graduate surprised friends and perhaps to some extent himself when he decided to trade academic garb for the cowl. He held a farewell supper for friends who then led him with tears, he said, to the door of the town's Black Cloister. With more than a tinge of melodrama he turned to pronounce, "This day you see me, and then, not ever again." Friends had to ask why he made this sudden decision. One acquaintance blamed Luther's apparently abrupt move on the melancholy he displayed after the death of two friends. Another faulted the supernatural, musing that an apparition must have visited him. His father, who thought Martin was now going to waste his education, his life, and the prospects of his parents, was predictably furious.

Luther later admitted that fear turned him to his new course. On the way back to the university after a journey home on July 2, as he neared the village of Stotternheim, he was jolted by a thunderbolt and lightning. "Help me, St. Anne," he prayed, and then vowed, "I will become a monk." He busied himself with interpreting this event all his life.

Sixteen years later he wrote to his father that he had that summer day been called by terrors from heaven. Specifically, cowering in the agony of prospective sudden death and the dread of divine judgment, he made the monastic vow he thought he could never break. Soon he was called to prostrate himself before an altar at Erfurt, over the brass plate that covered a tomb. Buried there was an Augustinian leader who in 1415 at a church council in Constance had helped condemn to death the prophetic Bohemian preacher Jan Hus. Ironically, Luther and others came later to honor not the buried Augustinian but his victim Hus as a precedent for their own ventures, a martyr to true faith and a man who defied those spiritual rulers who turned him over to secular authorities for execution.

The custodians of the cloister doors that closed behind Luther on July 17 belonged to the very strict Order of Augustinian Hermits. Luther selected his order well, since Augustinians prized scholarship, as did he. They honored and studied the fifth-century scholar and bishop St. Augustine, as would he. He was ready for self-punishing treatment, and they offered it. Monastery rules demanded that the novice master, the prior, and other chapter leaders must regiment the lives of monks. Luther dutifully obeyed, but though he had sought rigor, he came to chafe under the weight of the monotonous routines. Years later he disparaged the monastic disciplines as distractions from what he determined the fear-stricken and spiritually hungry people of God deserved.

Beyond the walls of the university, the fortifications of Erfurt, and then the protective confines of the cloister, the world around Luther was in turmoil, and he was soon to find himself unexpectedly central to much of its drama. We know almost nothing about what he knew or thought about the political and religious conflict of the moment, but one of its features had to stand out: His was an entirely Catholic world. After Spain had defeated the Muslims and purged the Jews in 1492, Europe became almost solely Christian, and Christianity was the only faith recognized and supported by the governments. Christians did not live near the people they called the Turk, Muslims with whom they were in imperial conflict. Small Jewish communities mainly under force and sometimes partly by choice still huddled in Italian ghettos or clustered around synagogues in numerous towns of northern Europe. Mountain valleys hid a few dissenting Christian sectarians. While folk beliefs that the theologians of the day called pagan were very widespread, a Christian could roam through Europe and find familiar the main beliefs of almost anyone he met. By the time Luther died, however, even the surface unity of Western Christendom would be shattered. What he learned in the university and how he used that learning contributed decisively to the shattering.

To help make sense of Luther's inner world, his thought, and the emphases in his subsequent career therefore requires some acts of imagination. I like to picture someone from any remote culture where people did not worship God stumbling onto the monastic scene and being utterly bewildered. Such a person from beyond Christendom in those years might well have comprehended the new sciences then developing in Europe, but the form that the search for meaning took and the theology used to interpret it would have been alien and forbidding. Luther, like the poets Chaucer and Dante before him and like the scholars Desiderius Erasmus and Thomas More in his own time, inhabited a spiritual world in which people struggled in inventive ways with God and Satan, going on pilgrimages and fearing purgatories. Their religious ventures taught them to be consumed by the threat of damnation and the hope of being saved for eternity with God.

Luther boasted that if ever a pious monk could have gotten to heaven through his monkery, it would have been he. He said he prayed, fasted, kept vigils, and almost froze to death in the unheated chambers. Though his colleagues evidently considered him a good friar, he confessed that he faced persistent temptations. These were not beguilingly sexual, and little in his record would attract those with prurient tastes. As he wrestled against the lures of the devil, he instead became increasingly convinced that no one could ever do what he fervently aspired to do, that is, please God through monastic efforts. Their hours spent in solitude gave Augustinians ample time to explore the inner life. Luther testified that from the first he struggled with himself and his God. The proper dealing with a God of wrath and love and the search for certitude in God's relation to humans became the grand themes of his life. Explain his life story as one will, it makes sense chiefly as one rooted in and focused by what has to be called an obsession with God: God present and God absent, God too near and God too far, the God of wrath and the God of love, God weak and God almighty, God real and God as illusion, God hidden and God revealed.

On April 4, 1507, a bishop ordained Martin a priest. Then on May 2 twenty horses and twenty horsemen made up the guest party of father Hans Luther, who arrived at Erfurt carrying twenty gulden to donate on the day of Martin's first Mass. The cloister enclosure, the miles between old home and new monastery, and enduring bitter feelings had kept father and son apart. Now for Martin this day was to be the most portentous since his baptism. Since the presence of Hans threatened to turn celebration into trauma, it is natural to ask why the father appeared at all. Guilt and fear after the death of two friends in the plague prompted him, thought some. Maybe he held himself responsible for their deaths because he had long spurned his son's God-pleasing vocation. Or, moved by a puzzling if prudent change of mind, he could have come to show newly found pride in his priestly son. Then again, he could have been merely keeping a parental obligation. Perhaps he hoped against hope that the two would be reconciled. Whatever the reason, the father was ostentatiously present.

When newly ordained priests celebrated Mass for the first time, they were made aware of the privilege they gained therewith to offer God the sacrificial gifts of bread and wine. Those who partook of the prescribed meal at the altar believed that they ingested not bread and wine but the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Such a ritual naturally inspired awe. Luther rehearsed the precise and complex motions of the rite as he learned them from a textbook. Still, mixed feelings about his unworthiness to hold Christ's body and to pour his blood came to overwhelm him. How dared he, sinful monk Martin, presume to talk directly to God, to represent the people, and to create the impression that he was worthy to participate in the change of bread to flesh, wine to blood?

© 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.