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CHAPTER 1
WITTENBERG 1517
On 31 October 1517, Halloween, the eve or vigil of the Feast of All Saints, as everyone knows, a young German friar purposefully made his way to the Castle Church in the Saxon university town of Wittenberg and nailed to the door one of the most famous protests of all time — the "Ninety-Five Theses." Within weeks, Martin Luther and his bold challenge to the authority of the Catholic Church were the talk of Germany; before long, the talk of Europe. The Ninety-Five Theses themselves, ninety-five pointed and often witty barbs poked into the religious practice of the "indulgence," were originally composed in Latin as the basis of a formal public disputation or debate in the university, but they were soon translated into German and put into print, the medium that enabled them to spread like wildfire.
Bizarrely, there is almost no reliable evidence for this well-known story — though there were ninety-five theses. There is no credible evidence that Luther actually went and nailed them to the church door that day, and every reason to believe that he did not. Not that nailing theses or other papers to a church door was in any sense a bold or unconventional act. Church doors often served as notice boards, especially in university towns. For example, a few years later, the excommunication of Martin Luther was nailed to the door of Great Saint Mary's, the university church in Cambridge (and someone promptly scrawled some graffiti on it, though that is another story). But, as was first pointed out long ago by Erwin Iserloh, there is no evidence that any disputation on the theses took place in Wittenberg that day, nor that any was planned in the immediate future. There would therefore have been no point in nailing them up on the notice board. Luther himself never refers to such an episode, and there is simply no mention of this story anywhere until after his death. It has all the hallmarks of myth.
Not that this would matter very much if it were not for the fact people are so loyally attached to the legend. When Iserloh first challenged this hallowed centerpiece of Luther hagiography, howls of protest echoed round Germany. All sorts of reasons were put forward for accepting the traditional theory. A blizzard of special pleading broke out, in a classic exemplification of Kolakowski's "law of infinite cornucopia," which states that for any position one is already minded to uphold, "there is never a shortage of arguments." Yet for all the reasons, arguments, and circumstantial evidence adduced, there is still no sign of the story in the historical record until after Luther's death.
The allure of the legend lies, at least for our time, in its image of the romantic rebel, of the individual asserting himself against the system. But this is to misread the man. Luther was indeed a rebel, or became one: a quiet conformist could never have achieved what he did. Yet he was a reluctant rebel, who was drawn from cover only gradually, as circumstances brought him to acknowledge the initially unthinkable idea that the teachings he was deriving from the scriptures were utterly incompatible with the teachings and practices of the church structure of which he had imagined himself to be an obedient servant. He showed unusual courage over the ensuing half a dozen years, during which he emerged as the charismatic leader of a mass movement in Germany and shattered, forever as it turned out, the medieval Christian unity of Europe. His temperamental doubts and anxieties were allayed or repressed by the cast-iron certainties forged in his volcanic intellect: the certainty of faith and the certainty of scripture. But these certainties were not in place in 1517. It was his emerging teachings that gave him the gathering confidence and courage to stand firm against the imposing authority of church and empire. Nevertheless, the legend, like many legends, has an element of truth at its core. Luther was, in the end, an individual, and did assert himself — against almost anything. Yet he was never aware of his own individualism, of what turned into a monstrous egotism. He remained to the end utterly convinced that he was a mere instrument in the hands of God and that his own identity was entirely subordinated to the Word of God.
Luther's own recollections of the events surrounding the Ninety-Five Theses suggest a rather different story. When he was in his pomp, in the 1530s and 1540s, holding court in the former house of the Wittenberg Austin Friars, which his sovereign prince, the Elector Duke Frederick of Saxony, had given to him as his family residence once the brethren had all abandoned the communal life, a devoted circle of students and friends gathered daily at his table to catch his words of wisdom. Their gleanings survive in the collections of Tischreden or table talk, Twitter-like obiter dicta that furnish so many glimpses into Luther's life and character. He discussed the start of the indulgences controversy on numerous occasions, but invariably in terms of writing — never of "disputing" — and without any reference to the crucial details of popular legend. Years later, he remembered it as being "after All Saints" in 1517 that he "first decided to write against indulgences." His recollections of these events show consistency in referring to writing (rather than to a disputation), though not about the precise chronology. On another occasion, setting the matter in a broader context, he said: "In 1517, on All Saints' Day, I first began to write against the pope and indulgences. In 1518 I was excommunicated. In 1519 I disputed with Eck at Leipzig." The formulation is particularly significant: he "disputed" with Eck at Leipzig, but he "began to write" on the Feast of All Saints in 1517. And there is nothing about church doors or hammers and nails.
Nor is there any indication that Luther sent out his theses in a search for instant publicity and notoriety. His letters were quietly dispatched to the episcopal chanceries, where, like so many unexpected and unaccustomed communications that reach busy offices, they sat for a while, as people fitfully wondered what, if anything, should be done about them. According to an account Luther wrote to the Elector Frederick about a year later, some people were saying that he had "started this whole dispute at the elector's instigation, when in fact no one knew of it, not even among my closest friends, except the Most Reverend Lord Archbishop of Magdeburg and Hieronymus, Lord Bishop of Brandenburg." He had "humbly and respectfully notified them before initiating the disputation."
Nor, finally, did Luther actually see himself at the time as challenging papal authority: that came later. The challenge to indulgences set him on a collision course with Rome, but that was not immediately evident. In a more detailed account of these events, in the preface he wrote for the first volume of his Latin Complete Works published in 1545, Luther went out of his way to emphasize that his original motives were entirely loyal, in that he felt that abuses of indulgences were detrimental to the honor of the papacy. He even imagined that he would have the pope's support. He was trying to start a debate, not to bring down a system.
What is known for certain about 31 October 1517 is that Luther posted — that is, mailed — his Ninety-Five Theses that day, sending copies to nearby bishops in order to call their attention to what he saw as misleading and questionable devotional and pastoral practices relating to indulgences. His cover letter made his intention clear, as Iserloh pointed out. He wanted to secure public correction of what he felt were the misleading claims being made for papal indulgences issued to raise funds for the rebuilding of Saint Peter's in Rome. Beyond that, he probably had some general intention of holding a disputation on his theses, quite possibly in a better known university than the very new institution at Wittenberg, which had been opened barely 15 years before. While it is going too far to suggest that university disputations were like modern sporting contests, the disputation was still the premier academic forum in what was still, for all the growing importance of print, a largely oral culture. The scholar who would emerge as Luther's most effective and best-known opponent, Dr. Johannes Eck, had made his name just a year or two before with well-publicized performances at disputations in the universities of Vienna and Bologna, where, among other things, he had justified the charging of modest rates of interest on loans as a legitimate business practice that did not merit the label "usury" — a position which was then rather radical. When Luther drew up his theses, he may have had no intention of debating them in a backwater like Wittenberg. Ironically, he may even have been indirectly inspired by the example of the man who was to become one of his bitterest foes.
The earliest appearance of the popular legend is found in the preface contributed by Philip Melanchthon to the second volume of Luther's Complete Works, published in 1546. The second volume appeared after Luther's death, and Melanchthon, his long-serving right-hand man and close friend, wrote a brief life of his mentor to form the preface. It is in this little biography that we first find the story:
Luther, burning with pious zeal, issued the propositions on indulgences (which appear in the first volume of his works). And on the eve of the Feast of All Saints 1517 he publicly posted them up on the church that is next door to the castle in Wittenberg.
Of course it is possible to argue that Melanchthon knew Luther well, and could be telling the story on the basis of some personal recollection shared between them over the previous thirty years. But this argument falls down precisely because of the absence of any corroboration in the ample records of Luther's anecdotes. If the nailing of the Ninety-Five Theses had been one of Luther's stock tales of his youth, then it would certainly have found its way into these collections. If Melanchthon had heard it from Luther, then others would have heard it too, and even if it had not been written down at the time, once Melanchthon had made the story canonical in his little biography, memories would have been jogged.
Indeed, it is likely that it was precisely because Melanchthon had the Ninety-Five Theses without all the related letters and papers which enable us to set that document in context, that he leapt to the erroneous but entirely understandable conclusion that the theses were intended for a university disputation and were therefore posted, as would have been usual, on the church door. It is the letter Luther wrote to the bishops which shows that, at the start, he had a rather different plan in mind. It is moreover quite possible that Melanchthon was conflating an earlier event, a disputation concerning various principles of scholastic theology that had actually taken place in September 1517, with the Ninety-Five Theses. For he only came to Wittenberg in August 1518, nearly a year later, by which time the Ninety-Five Theses had already made Luther a national and controversial figure. Looking back over a gap of thirty years to a vague recollection of events known to him only by report, Melanchthon seems accidentally to have forged one of history's most enduring myths.
For it is to Melanchthon that we can trace the story back, but no further. This is best seen in a brief analysis of the "new evidence" that was brought forward after Iserloh's challenge in favor of the traditional story. It seemed unimpeachable: a precise description of the event found in manuscript in a printed copy of the New Testament that had been massively annotated by Luther himself:
In the year of our Lord 1517, on the eve of All Saints, the propositions about indulgences were [ ] posted on the doors of the temples of Wittenberg by Doctor Martin Luther.
There are two features of this text that immediately give rise to doubts. The first is that it refers to "Doctor Martin Luther." Luther was by no means averse to the first-person pronoun, and rarely if ever adopted the Caesarian third person when talking about himself — a subject on which he was always happy to dilate. The second and subtler point is that the words seem partly to echo and partly to embroider the words with which Melanchthon reported the posting of the theses in his brief life of Luther. This is best seen by comparing the two.
Melanchthon: ... Lutherus, studio pietatis ardens, edidit Propositiones de Indulgentiis, quae in primo Tomo monumentorum ipsius extant, Et has publice Templo, quod Arci Witebergensi contiguum est, affixit pridie festo omnium Sanctorum anno 1517.
Manuscript: Anno domini 1517 in profesto omnium Sanctorum pr[ ] Witembergae in valvis templorum propositae sunt propositiones de Indulgentiis a Doctore Martino Luthero.
The use of the terms "propositions" and "temples" points towards some dependence of the manuscript note on the printed text. In any case, the decisive information is that while the New Testament in which this note is found was heavily annotated by Luther himself, this particular note is not in Luther's hand but in that of his secretary, Georg Rörer. Moreover, it is found on the last page of the index, a relatively prominent place, and was clearly added by Rörer himself, who almost certainly chose the book as a keepsake of his master when Luther was on his deathbed. (It was common at that time for scholars nearing death to let their friends choose books from their collections as mementos.) Rörer perhaps added the note about the posting of the theses when he read about it later in Melanchthon's little biography. And already we see the accretions of legend forming around the core of truth. In Rörer's version, it is doors, and not just the church, and several churches, not just one. It still gives us no reason to believe that there is any evidence for this best-known "event" in Luther's life prior to the biographical sketch that Melanchthon composed after Luther's death.
Popular and scholarly attachment to this mythic event is astonishing, doubly so in that the event itself, had it indeed taken place, would have been as such entirely routine — the posting of a notice on the notice board in advance of a disputation. There is a powerful and deeply ironic will to believe the story (ironic because the story is very much the sort of thing Luther would later denounce as "human tradition"). Andrew Pettegree's recent account of Luther goes to considerable trouble to vindicate the tradition, claiming to offer new evidence in its favor. However, the case made is flawed by the same problem that has bedeviled the discussion ever since Iserloh first challenged the consensus: a confusion between evidence and arguments. Thus it is clear that theses were printed in advance for a disputation that Luther conducted against scholastic theology, in September 1517. But no one has ever disputed the historicity of that disputation, which is manifest from the date of the disputation as given on subsequent reprintings of its theses. As Iserloh observed, the various printings of the Ninety-Five Theses never give a date for any disputation: no date, no notice. Evidence relating to the disputation against scholastic theology does not constitute evidence for the nailing up of the theses against indulgences. Far more intriguing is Pettegree's claim that Luther had already had the Ninety-Five Theses printed before Halloween 1517. Given Pettegree's status as the foremost historian of the early modern printed book in our times, there is good reason to take his conclusion seriously. But evidence that Martin Luther printed the Ninety-Five Theses is still not evidence that he nailed them to the church door, nor even that he proceeded immediately to hold a disputation about them. His approach to the bishops was obviously the result of a plan rather than a whim, and given his intention to hold a public disputation with their permission, having the theses printed was a perfectly sensible way of making it easier to inform people about his aims. That a disputation was held or planned for 31 October that year is improbable in the extreme. The appointed day for disputations at Wittenberg was Friday, and Halloween that year fell on a Saturday.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Making of Martin Luther"
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