The Hunger for Certainty, Part 3

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

(Page 4 of 4)

Though filled with dread, he survived the ordeal. At a celebration after Mass Hans Luther chose the moment to interrogate his cornered son: What if that thunderstorm at Stotternheim and your call to the monastery came from the devil? Hans then turned catechist and asked his son standard questions about the Fourth Commandment: Have you not heard that you are to honor father and mother? Had this son not disobeyed God when he dishonored his own parents by his choice to go against their strong wishes and enter the monastery? It is not known if Luther responded, though on occasion he later referred to the questions that had to sear his soul.

Luther showed a need for a new figure to act as father, since his dealing with his own parent was strained and his life behind cloister walls kept the two remote from each other. He found one in his Augustinian superior, the blue-blooded Vicar General Johannes von Staupitz. Well positioned, Staupitz had significant influence on his longtime friend Frederick the Wise of Saxony. Frederick was titled Elector because he was one of seven secular and ecclesiastical princes who elected the Holy Roman Emperor.

Staupitz showed himself to be an astute talent scout when in 1508 he sent young scholar Luther to be substitute professor of moral philosophy in the backwater Saxon burg of Wittenberg. While the local bishop was opposed to the idea and the church did not charter it, Frederick in 1502 had started a university there, a place that Luther described as existing at the edge of barbarism. The school originally had to settle for second-rate talent, so the elector and Staupitz wanted to upgrade it.

Staupitz early recognized Luther's abilities. For example, he assigned the monk the task of helping reconcile two quarreling Augustinian factions. That duty meant a trek to headquarters in Rome. When in November of 1510 or 1511, after having crossed the Alps on foot, the impressionable young monk first saw the holy city, he gasped in awe but, curiously, thereafter recorded few observations about the grand sights. Unmoved when he glimpsed the ancient Pantheon, by then converted to a church, he commented not on classic examples of architecture but on the evils of paganism.

After his four business-filled weeks in Rome, he even withheld comment on the splendor of the city's seven great churches. A crawl through the catacombs, described to him as burial places for thousands of early Christian martyrs, did lead him to be stirred. Like many other northern European visitors, he expressed shock at the chaos, the filth, and the practices of locals who urinated in public and openly patronized prostitutes. Priests appeared to him to be ignorant and corrupt functionaries who scorned the pious, profanely raced through their obligatory Masses, and blasphemously hurried Luther through those he celebrated.

He dared not let the Roman days pass, however, without seeking to satisfy his spiritual thirst. He heard that the merits he would accrue by venerating saintly relics or by saying Masses would shorten the number of years his own parents would have to spend suffering in purgatory. He later revealed that he had wished they were already dead, so their future sins would not nullify his efforts at getting all their transgressions purged. Climactically, on his knees at the Lateran Palace he climbed the Santa Scala, then believed to be the very stairs brought to Rome from Jerusalem, steps that Jesus had himself climbed in the court of Pontius Pilate fifteen centuries earlier. On each step Luther said a stipulated prayer. When he had finally made his way to the top, a question nagged at him: "Who knows whether this is really true?" This is the moment in Rome that he would speak and write about in a sermon more than thirty years later.

Luther and a companion who made the round-trip by foot over the Alps in winter returned to Wittenberg to report on a failed mission, but his superiors did not lose confidence in him. In October of 1512 under a pear tree in the cloister garden, Staupitz astonished the still uncertain monk by ordering him to receive the doctorate and thence to serve the Augustinian congregation of monks in Wittenberg as a teacher of theology and by preaching. No, the twenty-six-year-old Luther at first protested, he had already spent so many energies that he did not expect to live long. Further, only those more gifted and older than he should preach and be doctoral teachers. One lure about the offer, however, did attract him. He would be teaching Scripture and would no longer have to take on the dreaded task of expounding Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. He obeyed orders, overcame his doubts about the assignment, and proudly accepted the doctorate on October 19 that year. He often said that he would not exchange his doctorate for all the world's gold, since he saw it as a call and commission to his work and because it gave him courage. Since some jealous colleagues at his alma mater in Erfurt, where he had taught briefly, sneered that his rapid rise in the academy resulted from favoritism, he was happy not to make Erfurt his permanent home. He found good reason to respond positively when Staupitz assigned him again to Wittenberg, where the vicar general cajoled Elector Frederick into underwriting his protégé's stipend.

The young monk and Staupitz, who became his confessor, inhabited a universe in which they thought a threatening God kept a suspicious eye on every human act. While the confessor appeared to Luther to have figured out a way to live under this weight, uncertainty about God's will for him terrified Luther. He quickly became a virtuoso self-examiner, boring his mentor during six-hour confession sessions. A genius at probing reasons for his own hidden resistance to God, he grew dependent and later said that without the help of Staupitz, his venerable father in Christ, he would have remained a papal ass, doomed to be swallowed up in hell.

His weary mentor berated Luther for making do at confession with what he called flummery and pseudo faults, as if calling every fart a sin. Luther in turn averred that he was confessing not the usual monkish transgressions about sexual temptations, but what he called knots, spiritually serious problems. Staupitz often was of help as his protégé wrestled with these knotty phobias and specters.

He discerned that the dread of death or hell, the apparent ultimate challenges, indicated in Luther a still deeper torment, a fear of God, a failure to know the love of God in Luther's inmost heart, and an inability to be certain about the promises of God.

Explicit rules for the rite of confession began with the demand that the sinner be contrite. That sounded like a simple idea-to be contrite meant to be sorry for sins, as Luther was-but he rendered it complex. Since the monk wanted a pure relation with God, it struck him that even being sorry could mean being self-centered. Through contrition a person could seek advantage by proving to God that he could cooperate in the steps he climbed to please God. Luther instead began a lifelong search for ways in which humans could experience the love of God without using God, without turning God into a convenience. Felicitously he borrowed from Augustine an image that helped him describe the central problem about humans. Even while being contrite, he noticed, they would be "curved in" upon themselves, cramped, protective, in no way open for God to break into their souls. Curved in upon himself, he lived with the terrors that marked his moves within the dreary cloister walls. Of his experience there he later said that he feared hell somewhat; death, more; failure to please God the judge who made drastic demands, most: "I trembled."

Somehow he came to conceive that repenting, turning from sin, should begin with a focus on the love of God and not of the self. He next had to reject what his teachers in the modern way had taught him in their precise formula: "To those who do what lies within them, God does not deny grace."

© 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.