On Luther, In Trepidation

Martin Mosebach

My Christian name was chosen for me in the spirit of ecumenical compromise. My mother, who was not a fervent Catholic, but who could never have imagined abandoning the Catholic Church, voted for Martin, after Saint Martin of Tours, who was especially venerated in her native city of Cologne, above all in the splendid Romanesque Great Saint Martin Church (Gross Sankt Martin) -- with the accent on the second syllable of Martin! My Protestant father was contemplating paying homage to Martin Luther, but my mother ensured that I was baptised in the hospital immediately upon my arrival, despite the fact that (or because) my father was not there -- she clearly preferred not to risk becoming embroiled in any denominational debates. According to family legend I screamed dreadfully throughout the proceedings. 'No wonder, if he's called Martin,' remarked my father, who only met me once I was already a baptised Catholic. But it was the Roman legionnaire born in Pannonia, the hermit monk in Italy, the bishop in Roman Gaul and the visitor to the imperial court in Trier who would colour my life, not the German Doctor Martinus. It was through the figure of St Martin of Tours, one of the founding fathers of the Western world, that the universal Roman church of the first millennium won my heart. As I steadily increased my knowledge of church history, one thing above all -- puzzled me about the other Martin, the great reformer: how could one profess Christianity without Rome and Constantinople, without the liturgy and the music of the first thousand years, without the monastic traditions from Egypt, without St Benedict, St Francis or St Dominic, without Romanesque basilicas and the Gothic cathedrals of France? How could one call oneself a Christian without the legacy of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Athens? Wasn't that an ahistorical Christianity, dreamt up in the provinces in order to keep a tight rein on any links to the opulence of the past and the no less opulent present-day cultures of lands beyond Germany? In Luther's day the Popes were integrating new continents into the Church, even as he was setting about cutting off a large part of Germany from the main currents of civilisation.

So I cannot bring myself to see Luther's impact as anything other than an enduring national catastrophe for Germany. Although I lack the historical-philosophical pathos of one such as East Prussian poet and translator Rudolf Borchardt, who converted from Judaism to Protestantism and accused Luther of having betrayed Germany's historical mission, which (in his view) consisted in the translatio and continuation of the Roman empire, there is no doubt that it was Luther who dealt the fatal blow to the Holy Roman Empire, that supranational commonwealth and unique German-European creation. The spiritual division of our nation into new regions colonised by Rome and the barbarian remainder, which the medieval emperors, the French Cistercians and the Knights of the Teutonic Order had previously healed, now became a permanent fixture. And it is no comfort -- nor would it have been to Luther -- that the religious divide in this nation has faded, because the indifference that has caused it to fade is itself a product of division. The fact is that, as a religion that is guided by the notion of the recognisability of truth, Christianity can demand unusual sacrifices, including the misery of a nation, if that is what the spirit of truth demands. But what is the religious yield of the Lutheran revolution that set out to shatter the entire edifice of the ancient Church with its apostolic foundations? What did the struggle against a whole tradition gain? What kind of freedom for Christian peoples was created when the faithful were deprived of the guidance of a distant Pope only to be subjected to the rule of the local territorial prince? What kind of freedom is it that denies the free will of the individual human being? Was it really necessary for Luther's justification theology to jettison ecclesiastical unity? It is true that, in its day, righteousness through good works took on a superstitious aspect in popular religion -- it is worth remembering, in passing, what a wealth of magnificent architecture and painting, how many hospitals and charity organisations we owe to religious foundations set up to save human souls -- but the doctrine of the papal church never approved of the simple trade in souls. In the holy masses that Luther often celebrated as a monk, the prayers citing the grace as the prerequisite for every good deed are so plentiful that he need only have recalled the spirit of the ancient liturgy as a means of confronting the ills of his own time. The Mass contains the words 'In our weakness, we can do nothing without your help', there are repeated references to 'prevenient grace' and to the fact that all good works 'are begun by God and completed by Him', and the hope is even expressed that God may 'gently steer our rebellious will to Him'. The liturgy that Luther did away with makes no mention of an opposition between grace and works.

In his fundamental opposition to the Church as it had evolved over the centuries, Luther wanted to rely solely on the Holy Scriptures; that he could not know (given his particular level of knowledge) that the Scriptures were themselves a product of tradition and that there was thus no conflict between the Scriptures and tradition, may be forgivable -- but there is no forgiving what he did with the Scriptures that he now deemed to be the ultimate authority. He poured scorn on St Jerome, but he could have learnt much from the patron saint of translators. St Jerome was so deferential towards the original Greek of the Scriptures that he preferred to write incorrect or unclassical Latin rather than blurring the true sense of an expression by adopting a smoother formulation, which he could easily have done. The brilliant writer Luther knew no such humility towards literal meaning. If something was at odds with his own theological intentions, he did not hesitate to intervene, not only in the infamous use of 'allein durch den Glauben' ('through faith alone') for per fidem in St Paul's Epistle to the Romans but also when he dismissed a entire canonical letter, describing it as 'dry as straw' because it did not correspond to his own ideas. It is a constant source of astonishment to discover the high-handed, apodictic ease with which the defender of sola scriptura ignores the express teachings of Jesus, which are set out again by St Paul. It was certainly not in the Bible that he found the idea that marriage is a 'worldly matter'. May it suffice to cite just one very short example, among countless others, for the way that it marks out the arrogant translator, who mistrusts the original text and feels the need to dramatise it. In Matthew 22, Luther translates '... quod silentium imposuisset Sadducaeis' ('... that he had put the Sadducees to silence') as 'that he stopped the Sadducees' maws'. This formulation conjures up the irascible dogmatist, who would have loved to have stopped the whole world's maws; it seems to hint at the resentment of the astounding autodidact towards the superior civilisation of Rome; moreover, it also reveals something of the ranting brutality of the German Expressionists, who later regarded Luther as their founding father. One need only glance at the equivalent passage in the King James (cited above) to see what reverential restraint in the approach to a sacred text should look like.

When I expounded ideas of this kind, my father always became very uneasy. He preferred not to contradict me, but his relationship to Luther went far beyond evaluating or weighing up the latter's achievements and failings. With his passionate, wild heart, the human being Martinus Luther stood before my father amid a huge mass of personal testimonials; the immoderacy of the man was to his credit. My father felt that, when it came to matters of religious belief, the cool style of the Roman Curia was not appropriate -- who could remain impassive in discussions of love and salvation, sin and hope? He was positively in love with Luther and advised me, above all, to study Luther the mystic, the heir to the mystic fifteenth century, who rediscovered and published the Theologia Teutsch of the mysterious 'Franckforter'. That was good advice, because Germans have to live with Luther -- however much they may wish otherwise. In the same way that we have to reconcile ourselves to our forebears -- be they good or evil, dull-witted or clever -- because we were formed from them, we have no option: there is no escaping the past. My dream of a Germany without Luther is therefore strangely insubstantial. It would also be a Germany without Goethe and Hölderlin, without Johann Sebastial Bach and Richard Wagner, without Johann Georg Hamann and Friedrich Nietzsche. And even if Protestant culture has remained deeply alien to my nature, even if I never feel a part of it, I nevertheless have to admit that this alien thing is part of me. Incidentally, my father was ultimately drawn to the Greek Orthodox Church. Since Luther never knew it, he was also never able to damn it -- so there was a way out for my father.

Excerpt from Luther! 95 Treasures -- 95 People: book to accompany the National Special Exhibition, Augustem, Lutherstadt Wittenberg, 13 May - 5 November, 2017 (Published by the Stiftung Luthergedenkstaetten in Sachsen-Anhalt, Hirmer, 2017), pp. 295-298.