September 2006

Parish History Episode 65 - Brother Martin

Hans Luther was a miner. He lived and worked in deep valleys in the Harz Mountains of Germany - valleys so steep-sided that it was said that, like some coal-mining valleys in South Wales, the sun only penetrated them for a few hours a day. The nearest town was Eisleben, with its copper-smelting furnaces. Copper, not coal, was the mineral which Hans Luther hacked out of the rock with his pick-axe, working in a number of different drifts and shafts in the valley.

The life that Hans lived, in the German state of Saxony, five hundred years ago, was similar in many respects to that lived by hundreds of thousands of miners in South Wales, in the North-East of England, and in other parts of the British Isles, until a generation ago. It was a life where men worked hard, but were paid comparatively well for their labour.

Many men wasted their wages on drink. But Hans was a God-fearing man, who stayed sober, and attended Mass regularly. His wages were spent on making his home comfortable, where his wife, Margarethe·, brought up eleven well-fed children. He also saved money, so that his sons might enjoy a good education, and his daughters make good marriages.

His type would have been familiar on the coalfields around here, a hundred years or so ago. If Hans had lived in a pit village near Houghton about 1900, he would probably have belonged to the Primitive Methodist Church, would have taken a pledge of abstinence, and would have been a Local Preacher in the chapel, a Parish Councillor, and secretary of the Lodge, the Co-Op store, and the Welfare Hall. And, whether he lived in Sixteenth-Century Saxony or Twentieth-Century England, he would have been determined that his sons would not follow him down the pit. The boys would, he prayed, gain scholarships, and go to university.

His second son, Martin, born in 1483, did achieve all this. In 1501 he entered the University of Erfurt, intending to study Law. How proud his father must have felt!

But the student Martin was an unusually pious youth. He graduated in 1505, but instead of entering any legal chambers, he decided to enter a monastery, in the belief that he was more likely to achieve the salvation of his soul in the cloister than in the law courts, He chose to enter a house of Augustinian Friars, situated in Erfurt, where he had just graduated. Though nearly three centuries old, the Augustinians were an austere Order, with strict discipline. Their Vicar-General, Johann von Staupitz, saw the potential in Brother Martin, and he was pushed forward. The young man was ordained, and celebrated his first Mass in 1507. The following year he was sent by Staupitz to Wittenberg, a new university, where he taught theology.

Staupitz must have been pleased with his protégé. In 1510 he sent the young Luther to Rome, to represent the Augustinians in some legal action that they were involved in. It was not an edifying experience. Luther spent much of the time in legal wrangles in back rooms at the Vatican.

There was a great deal of building work going on in Rome at the time, and many artists were employed in enriching the buildings of the city. But Luther does not seem to have had any great interest in any of the arts, except music.

There was also a great deal of military activity. The Italian Wars, which had begun with the French invasion of Italy in 1494, were still going on. The armies of the Kings of France and of Spain, and of the German Kaiser, fought with each other for control of the peninsula, and the Italian cities and princes fought to retain their wealth and their freedom in a complicated game of alliances and campaigns. At this point in time, Julius II, Pope from 1503 to 1513, had persuaded the foreign powers (the Germans, the French and the Spaniards) to join with him in an attack on Venice, then the richest state in the world, so that the wealth and lands of Venice could be divided up between them. Venetian territory was invaded, and, though the Venetians fought hard and repulsed some of their enemies, the French king, Louis XII, won spectacular victories. Pope Julius, fearful that the French were intending to stay, and control Northern Italy, then formed the “Holy League” with Spain and with Switzerland, and with Venice itself, to expel the French from Italy. Luther saw Pope Julius, clad in armour, reviewing his troops, before leading them out to attack the French. Again, though it might have been a gallant sight, to see the Pope of Rome mustering his armies for battle, it was hardly an edifying experience for a devout young friar from beyond the Alps.

(After the French had suffered some serious reverses, the German Kaiser and King Henry VIII of England decided that, in their piety, they must join the Holy League, and they both attacked France in the rear. King Louis XII sent an envoy by ship to Edinburgh to remind King James IV of Scotland of “the Auld Alliance”. King James enthusiastically joined the war, and mustered soldiers for an invasion of England, while the main English army was in the process of embarking for France. It looked as if it might be an easy campaign for the Scots. But the Kingdom of England was wealthy enough to possess reserve armies, and also there were many feudal lords in the North only too anxious to continue their cross-Border quarrels with the Scots.

The reason many of these lords were anxious for a fight was because they blamed the shortage of cattle in their byres and their fields on the activities of some of King James’s subjects from across the Border. Edwin Gilpin of Kentmere, of whom more later, was among the many North Country chieftains who marched out, in 1513, along with his brothers and brothers-in-law, to meet the invader. They made a stand at Flodden, and in the battle there King James and thousands of his men were slain, and the invasion was repulsed.) By that time, Luther had returned to Wittenberg. Also, in that year, 1513, Pope Julius died, and was succeeded by Leo X., who reigned until 1521. Leo, a son of Lorenzo “the Magnificent” of Florence, was famous neither for military nor diplomatic skills, nor yet for piety, but he was, during his eight years in office, to become the greatest patron of the arts ever to sit upon the Papal Throne. He oversaw the rebuilding of St. Peter’s Cathedral in Rome, together with much of the Vatican, and left these edifices standing in all the glory that they still display, nearly half a millennium later. At one time Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael were all simultaneously on Pope Leo’s pay-roll.

Leo did a lot for the city of Rome. But what was happening in Germany, where Luther had returned, seems to have concerned him not abit. In his view, countries like Germany and England had little connection with art or religion, but they did possess some wealth, and this needed to be channelled Southwards, to assist the Pope in paying his artists, so that Rome might be beautified.

The means chosen to raise money for Pope Leo’s architectural and artistic works was to promote the sale of Indulgences. The Roman See had, during the last two centuries, raised large sums of money by this means, and Indulgences had been hawked all over Western Europe. But Pope Leo had more expensive tastes than almost any of his predecessors, and it was realised that more aggressive means of promoting the sale must be adopted. One aggressive salesman who, in 1517, won the contract for selling Indulgences in two dioceses of Saxony was Johann Tetzel, a Dominican friar.

Luther was, of course, already aware of the practice of buying and selling Indulgences. Though the common people who bought them, for themselves or for their family (for it was seen as a pious duty to try to buy your deceased parents out of Purgatory, or even out of Hell), seemed to assume that their purchase automatically reduced the time that you spent in Purgatory (and the more you paid, the less time you spent there), and salesmen like Tetzel did nothing to disabuse them of this notion, Luther was aware of the need for genuine penitence and the impossibility of simply buying your way into Heaven.

But still, he was meant to be teaching theology to the students at Wittenberg, and many of them asked questions of their teacher. Like Henry Gillow, Rector of Houghton-le-Spring until just before Martin Luther’s birth, the youngLuther was unsure of his own salvation, or of the salvation of his parents. He was aware that his father, Hans, had spent every spare pfennig he had ever earned on the education of Martin and his brothers; and had spent so much on his sons that, devout man though he was, he had not even bought an Indulgence for himself. Hans had spent all that money to put Martin through the Law Faculty at Erfurt, and might have expected that the boy might help his family in return, when he began to earn; but then Martin had thrown it all away, to become a penniless friar. Martin had not even bought an Indulgence for his father - though he of course could, and did, say Mass for him.

At this point, Johann Tetzel appeared on Martin Luther’s horizon. The members of the Theology Faculty at Wittenberg were all talking about the energetic friar and his businessmethods. As Tetzel went round the towns of Saxony, he was accompanied by some musicians and other assistants, who sang jingles in crude dialect : in English rendering, the jingles would have gone something like this:
As soon as thy coin in my box doth ring,
Thy mother will go to Heaven, and sing.
He was said to have Indulgences on sale, which, so he claimed, would give pardon for the vilest sins (which he proceeded to enumerate). He even possessed Indulgences, which, he claimed, remitted future sins - though these, he admitted, were very expensive. But one man - so the story went - was impressed by such an offer, and got together the cash to purchase one. Then, immediately it was drawn up and handed over, he drew a dagger, and placed it against Tetzel’s throat, threatening him, and demanding that the friar hand over all his cash. Tetzel reluctantly handed over his takings, including the sum he had just received for the Indulgence. Then the thief went off with the money, still retaining the Indulgence he had purchased, remitting future sins. He now possessed the cash with which to indulge in the sins for which he had secured pardon.

Martin Luther listened to these tales, told by his colleagues, and then wrote out his famous Ninety-Five Theses, condemning many popular ideas which had come, in folk-religion, to be associated with the belief in Purgatory and the effectiveness of Indulgences, and, in October, 1517, he nailed the Theses to the door of the Castle Church (for church doors then served also as church notice-boards). The theses were written in Latin, not German, and were obviously being put forward as topics for debate within the University. There was then no reason to expect that the debate would ever go outside the common rooms of Wittenberg University. If that had been the case, nobody to-day would ever have heard of Martin Luther.

But Tetzel was furious. His sales were not as good as he had expected, and he blamed the slowness of his business on the nit-picking debates of the theologians at Wittenberg, interfering with the peoples’ need for salvation. Tetzel tried therefore to persuade both the ecclesiastical and the secular authorities to condemn Martin Luther as a heretic. Soon many men, all over Germany, had heard of the matter, and Luther’s Theses were being discussed everywhere.

Appeals were made by Tetzel’s friends to the Roman Pope and the German Kaiser, and Luther was summoned to appear before various tribunals and enquiries. The opinions of the learnèd, already unsettled by Erasmus’ writings, tended to be sympathetic towards Luther, and, though he was censured, the authorities in Church and State seemed unwilling to condemn him. Eventually, in 1521, he appeared before the new Kaiser, Karl V, at the Diet of Worms (the Diet was the German parliament; Worms was the German city where it sat), and was censured again, but still no effective action was taken against him. Public opinion, or much of it, was obviously on his side. By this time, people outside Germany were hearing of the dispute. Rector Kent, in Houghton, probably read all about the affair. So did England’s new King, Henry VIII : this was Henry VII’s second son, the man described in last month’s article as Henry, Duke of York, the prince destined to be an Archbishop of Canterbury, who had enjoyed many serious discussions with Erasmus. But the Prince’s elder brother, Prince Arthur, had died, unexpectedly, before his father, and so, when King Henry VII came to die, he was succeeded by his second son, who was to be the much-married Henry VIII.

England’s new king was, outwardly, an exceedingly pious man. As stated above, he had seen it as his duty to join Pope Julius’ “Holy League” in 1513, and to attack France “in the back”, and had only withdrawn from the Papal alliance when he discovered that the cost of the war outweighed the value of the loot obtained. When he heard of Luther’s appearance before the Diet of Worms, he wrote a blistering attack on Luther’s ideas, and was rewarded by Pope Leo X with the title “Defender of the Faith”. King Henry was so pleased with the title that he commanded that it should be inscribed upon all his coins. His heirs and successors, even unto to-day, have continued to use the inscription F.D. upon their coinage.

By now many people, in all parts of Europe, had heard of Martin Luther. But not everybody : in Kentmere, a remote dale in Westmoreland, there lived Edwin Gilpin, a minor lord and, as we have seen, a veteran of Flodden. He dwelt in a fortified manor house, Kentmere Hall, dominated by a pele tower. He almost certainly had never heard of Luther or of his Ninety-Five Theses. Eight weeks before Luther had nailed his Theses to the door of the church at Wittenberg, Edwin Gilpin’s wife had given birth to a boy, who was christened Bernard. Probably Edwin cared not a whit for quarrels between monks. Probably he was fed up with the noise of the infant crying, and spent as much time as possible out on the fells, hunting the deer, out of earshot of Bernard.

(Edwin Gilpin was not alone in his indifference to what happened at a Diet of Worms. The matter would have probably died out early, if it had not been for Tetzel’s constant attempts to justify himself. And, anyway, it might be asked, who won the dispute ? Well, in recent years, “Consultations” between Catholic and Lutheran scholars have gone over the battlegrounds again, and have concluded that there is “nothing heretical” about the Ninety- Five Theses. In other words, Luther has, in a sense, won. Or, alternatively, as Edwin Gilpin would probably have thought, it was all hot air, just a quarrel among monks. Or perhaps it means that the Reformation was all a mistake.

But whose mistake ?)

Dick Toy

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