Only in October, though, did he finally settle on a project that proved sufficient to ease his anguish. It was by reading scripture that he had opened his heart to the Spirit, and thereby had revealed to him the startling fact of God’s love. What better could he do, then, than break down the barrier that had for so long existed between the learned and the unlearned, and give to Christians unfamiliar with Latin the chance to experience a similar joy? Already, back in 1466, the Bible had been printed in German; but in a shoddy translation. Luther’s ambition was not merely to translate directly from the original Greek, but also to pay tribute to the beauties of everyday speech. Eleven weeks it took him to finish his rendering of the New Testament. The words flowed from his pen, phrases that might have been heard in a kitchen, or a field, or a market-place, short, simple sentences, language that anyone could understand. Easily, fluently it came. By the time that Luther had finished, even his constipation had eased.
‘If you picture the Bible to be a mighty tree and every word a little branch, I have shaken every one of these branches because I wanted to know what it was and what it meant.’15 Now, with his translation, Luther had given Germans everywhere the chance to do the same. All the structures and the traditions of the Roman Church, its hierarchies, and its canons, and its philosophy, had served merely to render scripture an entrapped and feeble thing, much as lime might prevent a bird from taking wing. By liberating it, Luther had set Christians everywhere free to experience it as he had experienced it: as the means to hear God’s living voice. Opening their hearts to the Spirit, they would understand the true meaning of Christianity, just as he had come to understand it. There would be no need for discipline, no need for authority. Antichrist would be routed. All the Christian people at long last would be as one.
Here I Stand
They found him hiding in an attic, in a house beside the city gate of Frankenhausen. When he insisted that he was an invalid, and knew nothing about the terrible battle that had just been fought, they emptied out the contents of his bag. A letter left no doubt as to his identity: Thomas Müntzer, the notorious revolutionary who had been preaching the imminent extermination of the mighty, and the reign of the downtrodden, when all – as in the days of the Apostles – would be held in common. Dragged through the streets of the city, where piles of corpses bore witness to the full terrible scale of the slaughter inflicted on his ragtag army, he was led into the presence of his conqueror. Duke George of Saxony, the cousin of Prince Friedrich, was a man who had long dreaded where the elector’s sponsorship of Luther might lead; now, in the charnel house of Frankenhausen, he seemed to have his answer. Interrogating his prisoner, all his darkest suspicions were confirmed. Müntzer insisted on calling him ‘brother’; repeatedly quoted the Old Testament; justified the insurrection of the poor against the rich as the necessary sorting of the wheat from the chaff. The duke had heard enough. Müntzer was put to torture. Some said that he had been brought to recant his views; but nothing in his final message suggested that he had. ‘Do not allow my death to be a stumbling block to you,’ he wrote to his followers. ‘It has come to pass for the benefit of the good and uncomprehending.’16
Luther, brought the news that Müntzer had been executed, and his head displayed on a pikestaff, was grimly delighted. For three years, ever since he had finally succeeded in slipping the Wartburg and returning to Saxony, he had been wrestling with an unsettling conundrum: the failure of the Spirit to illumine all those inspired by his teachings as he himself had been illumined. When Argula von Grumbach, a Bavarian noblewoman, publicly praised Luther’s translation of the New Testament, she did so in terms that perfectly corresponded to Luther’s own elevated sense of his mission. ‘Ah, but how splendid it is,’ she wrote, ‘when the spirit of God teaches us and, more, helps us understand first this passage then that one, God be praised! revealing to me the real, authentic light shining forth.’17 Yet the coming of enlightenment, it turned out, revealed different things to different people. Many of Luther’s followers, inspired by the premium that he had put on freedom, complained that he was dragging his feet. That a man who had dared to oppose both pope and emperor should now seem to shrink from campaigning for a universal liberty, one in which the poor might be freed for ever from the exactions of the rich, struck them as a sorry disappointment. Müntzer, a former priest who believed himself appointed by God to bring the oppressed to the lordship of the world, had been particularly vituperative. Making play with the one-time monk’s growing bulk, he mocked Luther as a mound of soft-living flesh, and fantasised about cooking him as a dainty for the Devil.
It did not need the culinary fantasies of Müntzer to inspire in peasants and miners across the various territories of the empire a mood of insurrectionary ferment. The uprising crushed so bloodily at Frankenhausen was only one of a number of such revolts. Again and again, rebellion was justified as obedience to the Bible. In 1525, when thousands of peasants assembled in Baltringen, a village in northern Swabia, they proclaimed it their ambition ‘to hear the gospel and to live accordingly’.18 It was not they who were responsible for the war, but the lords and abbots, who oppressed them as Pharaoh had oppressed the Israelites. They wanted nothing that was not promised them by scripture. Unsurprisingly, then, the entire course of the peasants’ revolt, once the imperial nobility had rallied against it to brutal effect, slaughtering some hundred thousand rebels and bringing devastation to vast swathes of the empire, was charged by Luther’s critics to his account. ‘There were many peasants slain in the uprising, many fanatics banished, many false prophets hanged, burned, drowned, or beheaded who perhaps would still live as good obedient Christians had he never written.’19 The accusation was one that preyed on Luther’s conscience. Anxiety that he might have been responsible for sending multitudes to hell tormented him. So desperate was he not to be held responsible for the uprising that, as it reached its bloody climax, he condemned the rebels in terms so hysterical that even his admirers were taken aback. Luther did not care. He understood what was at stake. He knew that to acknowledge the rebels as his own would be to threaten his entire life’s work. Without the backing of supportive princes, there could be no possible future for his great project of reformatio.
‘Frogs need storks.’ Luther had no illusions as to the beneficence of earthly rulers. He knew how blessed he was in his patron. Few princes were as steadfast or wise as Friedrich. The majority, Luther acknowledged, were at best ‘God’s gaolers and hangmen’.20 Yet this was sufficient. In a world that was fallen, there could be no prospect of arriving at a law that adequately reflected the eternal law of God – nor was it the task of the Church to make the attempt. It was one of the more grotesque enterprises of the papacy to have created an entire legal system, and then foisted it on the Christian people. This was why Luther had consigned volumes of canon law to his bonfire in Wittenberg. It was the duty of princes, not of popes, to uphold the frameworks of justice. Yet what were the proper frameworks of justice? Luther, precisely because he scorned to think of himself as a lawyer, took for granted much of what, over the course of long centuries, had been achieved by the very legal scholars whose books he had so publicly burned. Rulers who embraced Luther’s programme of reformatio had little option but to do the same. Anxious to govern their subjects in a correctly Christian manner, they settled on a simple expedient: to appropriate large portions of canon law and make it their own.