Luther’s Inner Life Changed the World: A Personal Struggle Became a Global Reformation

Born in 1483, Martin Luther was around 34 years old when the Reformation began. As a multi-year event which changed society, civilization, and culture, the Reformation can be understood on various levels: spiritual, intellectual, political, ecclesiastical, and even economic.

The precipitating cause for all of those changes was, however, personal: The Reformation finds its roots in the conscience of Luther. His self-analysis and his questions about his own status — specifically, his status vis-a-vis God — were the causes of theological questions which lie at the core of the Reformation.

As Jonathan Kay writes:

Luther’s struggle against the Vatican began as a struggle against himself. He started his career as a tortured German academic whose spiritual neuroses were tangled up with biblical exegesis — a state of constant agitation that members of the religious classes then referred to as the “bath of hell” — according to Craig Harline’s outstanding new history, A World Ablaze: The Rise of Martin Luther and the Birth of the Reformation.

The problem for Luther was this: Like any human being, he knew that he was imperfect and flawed. In spiritual terms, this meant that he was sinful; everyone occasionally does the wrong thing, and Luther was no exception. What, then, is to be done about the resulting guilt?

The guilt which concerned Luther was not the feeling of guilt, but rather the objective fact of it. No matter how people feel about their failings, the failings themselves are events which cannot be wished away.

At first, Luther attempted to embrace the common teachings of the times: One could pay for one’s sins, and work off the guilt. A person could identify failures, confess them to a priest, and perform specific tasks assigned as penances.

Luther eventually identified several problems with this system: First, one had to identify the sins. What if a sin was forgotten and unconfessed? Second, given the perpetually imperfect nature of human beings, the next wrongdoing would soon be committed, and so the individual is in a never-ending cycle of confessing sins and working them off. Other problems permeated the system: How does one know if the prescribed penitential actions are sufficient? etc.

Luther’s search for inner peace — his search for a confident hope that he would not face painful eternal punishment for his sins — took place in the context of late medieval monasticism. Imposing hardships on one’s own self was a type of continual penance. Luther became a monk and lived, at first, in the monastery in Erfurt, starting in 1505. He had arrived in Erfurt in 1501 to study at the university there.

Luther was both a monk and a scholar, i.e., a highly-educated person. Some men were monks but not scholars; others were scholars but not monks. Luther was both.

Kay writes about Harline’s book:

Harline lingers on details of archeology, food and hygiene that allow the reader to imagine cloistered life in the 16th century. Even in a relatively well-funded monastery, such an existence was hard, filthy and, in the winters, freezing. As a scholar, Luther found a measure of comfort and privacy in his friary’s unglamorous nooks — including a third-floor tower room that once had been part of Wittenberg’s outer battlements, the visitors’ chambers and even the cloaca (cesspit).

The self-imposed hardships were a type of comfort to Luther: They made him feel that he was in some way addressing his own imperfections. Yet he still suffered from anxieties, wondering if he had done enough to earn forgiveness. In the word ‘earn’ lay the cause of most of Luther’s troubles.

The church of Luther’s era presented a muddle of ideas concerning salvation. It taught, on the one hand, that entry into the afterlife was a free gift. But on the other hand, it taught that each individual had to prove herself or himself worthy of that gift. Luther’s ideas amounted to a challenge to this usage of the words ‘free’ and ‘gift.’

Luther reasoned that, if one had to prove one’s self worthy of a gift — by feeling contrite, by performing acts of penance, by adhering to the traditions of the church — then it wasn’t really free. Luther focused on the word ‘grace’ and used it to refer to a unilateral gift, given by God to human beings, bestowing upon them a salvation and a justification in which they were passive: a “justification” which declared that compensation had been made for their sins and which thereby purchased the “salvation” which gained them entry into the afterlife — entry into heaven.

Compensation had been made for people’s sins, but people didn’t make that compensation. The compensation was made by God, as a gift to people.

As Luther’s career progressed, he became a priest and a professor. As a priest, he carried out certain tasks within the church and on behalf of the church. As a professor, he taught, researched, wrote, and published. His work as a professor initiated, or at least accelerated, certain skepticisms which Luther began to have regarding some of the church’s teachings and some of its practices.

In this context, the word ‘church’ refers to the organization which oversaw the spiritual life of nearly all of western Europe. This would later be called the ‘Roman Catholic’ church.

Luther’s research led him to the conclusion that the church had departed from its foundation: It was created to carry out the teaching and work of Jesus, but in fact had become something different. The church was failing to put into practice the ideas of Jesus, even though it had been founded to do that very thing. In short, the church was no longer Christian.

It is from this idea that the word ‘reformation’ arises: Luther wanted to reshape the church, to form it again, so that it would return to its original mission and purpose.

But Luther’s ideas remained, for a long period of time, in Luther’s head. He was not famous and hadn’t published much. His lecturing at the university and his preaching in church didn’t directly touch on the issues which were most troubling him — although, in hindsight, it can be seen that these issues were indirectly and obliquely simmering under the surface of his public speaking and writing, a sort of latent reformation in the making.

When Luther’s concerns about the church became public, they were mature, having benefited from a long period of reflection. Luther’s thought appeared in a mature form, as Jonathan Kay explains:

Luther’s first set of theses — not the famous 95 titled Disputation on the Power and Efficacy of Indulgences, but a more plodding 99 denouncing Aristotle’s influence on Christian theology — was almost completely ignored. Luther waited, pathetically, for many weeks, expecting some form of appreciation or critique from fellow scholars. Even when he produced his more provocative set of theses in October 1517, it took more than a month for any feedback to roll in — despite Luther’s efforts to move things along by sending personal copies to local bishops.

Although Luther was perhaps frustrated by a lack of speedy response and attention, it was, Jonathan Kay hypothesizes, this slow pace which allowed Luther’s thought to continue to develop and mature, and finally emerge as a considered viewpoint with substantial supporting argumentation. The years leading up to these two sets of theses, as well as the weeks and months afterwards, constituted a time of refining.

Kay suggests that, had Luther’s ideas gain fame sooner, they might have been weaker, and readily dismissed.

Was Wordsworth a Liar? No: Read Him Carefully

In the year 1800, William Wordsworth wrote that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” Scholars, teachers, and students quote this sentence often, and it has become part of the standard understanding of Romanticist literature.

This sentence is also wildly false.

Aside from the ambiguity of what “good poetry” might be, in contrast to other poetry, the alleged spontaneity of poetry in general, and Romanticist poetry in particular, is a standard motif in the self-advertisement of Romanticism. Like much self-advertisement, it is at least exaggerated, and more likely simply wrong.

Romantic poetry, both in its British and in its German incarnations, routinely features rigorous structures. Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud” is structured in multiple ways: the number of syllables per line, the stress on the various syllables in the form of an iambic foot, the division of the poem’s twenty-four lines into four stanzas of six lines each, and the strict rhyme scheme. A close reading will reveal yet more ways in which the poem is calculated. A stricter poetic structure is difficult to imagine.

The same is true of Romanticist poetry from Germany: Goethe’s “wild” poetry is meticulously planned.

Wordsworth was a smart man. Why would he write about poetry as a spontaneous overflow of emotion, when it is a premeditated and numerically determined product? He might have written this for various reasons.

His famous statement might have been a continuation of the self-advertisement of the Romanticist movement. Romanticism needs its readers to believe that such poetry is an unplanned eruption of uncontrollable emotions. In fact, Romanticist poetry is carefully planned to appear unplanned, strictly controlled in order to appear uncontrollable, rationally calculated to appear irrational. Perhaps Wordsworth was delivering the standard Romanticist trope in order to encourage his audience to continue buying his books.

A second, and more honorable motive, might be that Wordsworth wrote what he wrote because it didn’t mean it in the way in which it is often understood. A careful reading of the context in which Wordsworth’s famous sentence finds itself may illuminate a slightly different meaning.

The text from which the famous quote comes is the preface to one of his own books. Introducing his book to the reader, he comments about his colleagues, the other writers who were part of the British literary scene at that time. He writes:

I cannot, however, be insensible to the present outcry against the triviality and meanness, both of thought and language, which some of my contemporaries have occasionally introduced into their metrical compositions; and I acknowledge that this defect, where it exists, is more dishonourable to the Writer’s own character than false refinement or arbitrary innovation, though I should contend at the same time, that it is far less pernicious in the sum of its consequences.

Seeking to differentiate himself from some of the less than desirable practices of these other writers, he explains that his writings have purposes, unlike the texts produced by those other authors:

From such verses the Poems in these volumes will be found distinguished at least by one mark of difference, that each of them has a worthy purpose. Not that I always began to write with a distinct purpose formerly conceived; but habits of meditation have, I trust, so prompted and regulated my feelings, that my descriptions of such objects as strongly excite those feelings, will be found to carry along with them a purpose.

In defending and promoting his poems, Wordsworth argues that his writing is shaped by his “meditation” — the opposite of an irrational eruption of passion. He further boasts that he has “regulated” his feelings — again in contrast to wild uncontrollable emotions. Indeed, the very claim that his poems have “purpose” entails that they are subjugated to a higher purpose, and therefore are disciplined.

Then comes his famous generalization about “all good poetry” — yet in the same sentence, he argues that such poetry is product of “thought” — thought being the antipode of feeling.

If this opinion be erroneous, I can have little right to the name of a Poet. For all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: and though this be true, Poems to which any value can be attached were never produced on any variety of subjects but by a man who, being possessed of more than usual organic sensibility, had also thought long and deeply.

By using the word “purpose,” Wordsworth is indicating that his writing is premeditated, and therefore the antithesis of a “spontaneous” outburst of emotion.

Why, then, does he insist on writing about this alleged spontaneity?

The spontaneity that he describes is not an unregulated eruption, but rather the reaction or response of a trained intellect. It is a spontaneity born of training and intellect.

Wordsworth tells the reader that the feelings are not raw and wild, but rather “modified and directed.” By training and practice, “by the repetition and continuance” of such discipline, people obtain the mental habit of connecting their feelings to “important subjects.”

After being subjected to such rigorous training, the intellect of the would-be poet will be such that it automatically or reflexively composes verse in a way, and about such subjects, as Wordsworth indicates.

For our continued influxes of feeling are modified and directed by our thoughts, which are indeed the representatives of all our past feelings; and, as by contemplating the relation of these general representatives to each other, we discover what is really important to men, so, by the repetition and continuance of this act, our feelings will be connected with important subjects, till at length, if we be originally possessed of much sensibility, such habits of mind will be produced, that, by obeying blindly and mechanically the impulses of those habits, we shall describe objects, and utter sentiments, of such a nature, and in such connexion with each other, that the understanding of the Reader must necessarily be in some degree enlightened, and his affections strengthened and purified.

The reader might consider the example of an athlete, whose long hours of training allow him to react quickly and automatically — spontaneously — in a game. This act may seem spontaneous, but it is the product of long and arduous training.

Or likewise also the example of someone who has learned an affected and highly technical way of speaking — perhaps a lawyer or a physicist, or one who has learned a foreign language. That individual will react quickly — spontaneously — in a conversation, but that reaction is the fruit of a long process of mental discipline.

When Wordsworth, then, writes that “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” he was indicating, not a natural and untamed spontaneity, but rather an automatic reaction, a learned reflex, instilled into the mind by training and discipline. An examination of the disciplined structure of Wordsworth’s own texts supports this reading.

The Mosaic Law: The Birth of Justice

Contemporary discourse includes much talk of justice, including “climate justice,” and “racial justice,” and dozens of others. Nearly everyone will agree that justice is a good thing, and nearly everyone will claim to desire justice.

But what is justice?

To find a useful and coherent definition of this word, the reader will want to consult the primary sources.

Perhaps one of the earliest hints of justice is found in the famous set of laws known as Hammurabi’s Code. Hammurabi was the king of Babylon around 1750 B.C., and his legal document is, in part, an example of the principle of rule of law.

The phrase “rule of law” is often used and rarely understood. It means that laws should apply to all citizens equally. For example, if a sign says “no parking here,” then, if a car is parked there, it doesn’t matter whose car it is, or who parked it there. The car should get a ticket and its owner should have to pay the fine, no matter who the owner or driver is.

The rule of law is a principle which prevents power from being abused. Without the rule of law, a person who happened to be a close personal friend of a senator or a mayor might avoid paying the fine for parking her or his car illegally, while ordinary citizens would have to pay the fine for doing the same thing; that would violate what most people intuitively consider to be justice.

While Hammurabi helped to crystalize the notion of rule of law, it was Moses who largely formed the broader concept of justice. The rule of law turns out to be merely one part of justice.

Moses lived around 1400 B.C., was born in Egypt, and led a group of escaped slaves to freedom. In the course of that journey, Moses encountered a sociological problem: to give the former slaves their liberty was a good action, but in order for them to form a society for themselves, it would be necessary for them to develop a sense of justice and social order. As former slaves, they had little leadership experience, and little experience in making value decisions on a societal level.

A set of directives called “The Mosaic Code” is not only a set of laws, but it also implies an underlying sense of values, and largely corresponds to what is now considered justice.

The Mosaic Code is not located in one place, but rather is scattered in bits and pieces across five different books. Those books are called the Torah or the Pentateuch: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

In the book of Numbers, for instance, Moses clarifies a legal distinction between intentional murder and accidental death, and states that the value of human life exceeds the value of money, and that therefore a fine is not a suitable legal penalty for murder (cf. Number 35:9 - 35:34).

Elsewhere, Moses broadens the concept of intent beyond homicide to other actions (cf. Numbers 15:22 to 15:31). The distinction between intentional crime and accidental unintended actions has become part of the concept of justice.

Buried in the Mosaic Code are a set of ideas which define justice and the larger worldview behind justice, for example, the distinction between moral and legal, the distinction between proactive and reactive legislation, standards of evidence, standards of testimony by witnesses, the distinction between crimes against property and crimes against persons, a restriction of capital punishment, increasing the legal status of women, human life as having value and dignity, a distinction between guilt and shame, the surprising assertion that even slaves had rights which they could legally claim against their masters, the restriction and ultimately the abolition of slavery, and other concepts.

Each of these points needs to be expounded at length: they are simply listed here.

Moses also deals with the concept of privilege. He creates four classes, each of which is to receive special privileges: widows, orphans, foreigners, and the poor.

All of these points are either introduced initially by Moses, or greatly amplified by Moses from mere hints of them in Hammurabi’s Code.

In some points, Moses is the opposite of Hammurabi: Hammurabi gave legal privileges to the wealthy and powerful; Hammurabi relegated slaves to the status of mere property, whose lives were at the whim of their masters; Hammurabi gave no legal protections or status to women; Hammurabi’s laws were purely reactive, with no proactive elements.

So, while Hammurabi foreshadowed justice, it was Moses who comprehensively articulated it.

Following Moses, a series of thinkers continued to reinterpret and reapply the concepts of justice to different societies and circumstances. The history of justice is the history of texts: The Magna Carta of 1215, The Tübinger Vertrag 1514, The English Bill of Rights of 1689, The U.S. Declaration of Independence, The U.S. Bill of Rights, and others.

Justice has a long history, but any perspective on it will reveal the central role of Moses. Any modern or postmodern sense of justice, even and especially those which claim to reject Mosaic thought, will, under close examination, ultimately reveal themselves to be founded on Mosaic Law.

Bossuet Replies to Hobbes: A Kinder, Gentler Absolutism

Although forms of absolutism have been around since the beginnings of recorded history, Thomas Hobbes is one of the most prominent formulators of modern political absolutism, along with Jean Bodin.

In 1651, Hobbes published Leviathan, his most famous book. The usual understanding of his political theory is drawn from the first half of the book. Hobbes presents what he considered to be a logical argument, the conclusion of which is that society needs to be ruled by an absolute monarch.

As envisioned by Hobbes, the absolute monarch should have limitless and unconditional power, or very nearly so. Hobbes views anarchy as an imagined natural state of humans prior to the formation of a commonwealth. In this primal state, human life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” in one of his most famous phrases. Government arises as the result of a social contract, in which each individual, simultaneously with other individuals in the same society, cedes power to the monarch.

The fact that this cession is done simultaneously in a mutually-agreed-upon act is what puts the “common” into commonwealth. But once made, this social contract is irrevocable.

By 1679, the Leviathan had been on the market for twenty-eight years, variously loved and hated. The common understanding of the book, based primarily on the first half of the text, was established as the received view of Hobbes.

It was in 1679 that Jacques-Benigne Bossuet began to write his Politique tirée des propres paroles de l'Écriture sainte. This book was his systematic exposition of political absolutism. Bossuet, born in 1627, was younger than Hobbes, who’d been born in 1588.

Responding to Hobbes, Bossuet hoped to formulate a version of absolutism which was perhaps more humane than the version found in the Leviathan. To do this, Bossuet looked to place limits and conditions on the power of the monarch.

“The king of Hobbes is a less restrained and probably harsher ruler than Bossuet’s,” writes historian Eugen Weber.

Bossuet begins by stating that “royal authority is sacred,” paternal, and “subject to reason.” Each of these constitutes some limiting factor. There are limits on how kings may use power, and on the purposes for which they use power, as Bossuet writes:

The kings must respect their own power and use it only to the public good. Their power coming from above, as we have said, they must not believe that it belongs to them to be used as they please; but they must use it with fear and restraint, as a thing which comes from God and for which God will call them to account. Kings should therefore tremble when using the power that God has given them, and think how horrible is the sacrilege of misusing a power which comes from God.

By labelling royal power as “paternal,” Bossuet places upon monarchs the moral obligations and duties of parenthood. Parents are ethically responsible to care for their children, and by observing the care that they give, parents are judged as good or bad. Kings, as “paternal” rulers, are subject to a similar evaluation.

Bossuet further requires that monarchs use their power only in ways which are “salutary to mankind.” He admonishes kings to “use” their power “with humility.” He points out that kings have power ab alio — from outside themselves — and that therefore it is entrusted to them, yet it is not inherently or intrinsically theirs, even if it is innately theirs. Bossuet writes that kings “are endowed with” power “from outside.” Concerning power, he states:

Fundamentally, it leaves you weak; it leaves you mortal; it leaves you sinners; and burdens you with greater responsibility towards God.

A further bridle on royal power is Bossuet’s demand that it is subject to reason. Although it will be a large interpretive question as to exactly which royal actions are rational and which are not, it is nonetheless clear that this is intended by Bossuet to be some form of limit on monarchical action.

Bossuet is clearly differentiating himself from Hobbes. Although Bossuet had begun writing the book in 1679, he added sections to it between 1700 and 1704. Parts of the text are therefore more than half a century later than the Leviathan.

Although raw temporal dislocation does not prove that Bossuet’s theses are different from Leviathan’s, it does show that Bossuet had ample time to reflect both on Hobbes and on the historical events of that half century.

In any case, it is plausible to argue that Bossuet’s monarch is not as invincible as the monarch in the first half of Leviathan. Bossuet boldly places limits and moral boundaries on monarchs in a way which Hobbes does not.

There is a less common understanding of Hobbes — a reading which includes the second half of Leviathan in addition to the first half — and this less common interpretation would yield a monarch who is more clearly under a moral yoke and less likely to engage in capricious actions to which his subject must unquestioningly submit. More emphasis on the second half of Leviathan might yield a kinder, gentler Hobbes — one who’d be in some ways similar to Bossuet’s vision of a more benevolent ruler.

“Suffer Naught to Vex Thee” — Copyrights and the Use of Primary Texts

Teaching a Humanities or Western Civ course, an instructor using some of the textbooks on the market might find his students wrestling with a sentence like “Let not aught vex thee” — in the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius — and quickly a discussion of late Roman Stoicism becomes a lesson in Elizabethan vocabulary.

Certainly, it is proper for students to learn to negotiate the language of Edmund Spenser or John Donne. But Marcus Aurelius didn’t write in Elizabethan English, or any kind of English for that matter. He wrote in Greek, despite the fact that his mother tongue was Latin.

In some fantasy world, high school juniors and seniors, and university freshmen, might be able to negotiate the Greek of the Meditations, and negotiate it well enough to engage in the thought contained in the text, rather than get bogged down in the grammar and vocabulary.

In the real world, students are already quite challenged by the antiquated English of the translation, and challenged to the point that it impedes their exploration of Aurelius’s mental world. Which begs the question: Why are students confronted with a translation that hides thought in obscure language?

In the mid nineteenth century, Britain, and to a lesser extent America, had a bumper crop of classicists, many of whom brought translations of the Greco-Roman canon to the publishing marketplace. As a stylistic flourish, these translations were cast in what was already archaic English. When, e.g, George Long offered his rendering of Marcus Aurelius into English, it was an English that was already antiquated in the nineteenth century when he published it.

The language was a deliberate affectation, which may or may not have served a purpose when it appeared, but over a century later constitutes merely an obstacle to the student.

Why, then, would a contemporary publishing company bring to market an anthology containing texts which are needlessly obscure?

The answer: Copyright fees.

Such textbooks typically contain a large number of short excerpts, including many from classical Greek and Latin texts, along with medieval writings. Depending on the scope of the work, texts from the Ancient Near East may be included prior to the Greco-Roman material, and extracts from post-medieval works afterward.

Major texts from the canon are constantly being translated afresh: The Meditations by Aurelius were rendered into contemporary American English, e.g., by Gregory Hays in 2002, and by Scot Hicks and David Hicks in the same year. These texts make the thought of Aurelius accessible to the students, and allow them to explore the ideas, rather than the vocabulary.

Including these recent translations, however, costs money.

Older translations from the nineteenth century are usually in the public domain, not requiring modern publishers to obtain permission or pay fees.

When it comes to textbooks, caveat emptor. Affordable anthologies may be filled with classical texts translated into an affected antiquated pseudo-Elizabethan English rather than into twenty-first century American idiom.