A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [70]
He had been born in 1483, the son of a Mohra peasant who became a Mansfield miner, a husky, hardworking, frugal, humorless, choleric anticleric who loathed the Church yet believed in hell—which, in his imagination, existed as a frightening underworld toward which men were driven by cloven-footed demons, elves, goblins, satyrs, ogres, and witches, and from which they could be rescued only by benign spirits. It was Hans Luther’s conviction that these good witches rarely interceded, though occasionally they could be propitiated by men living lives of relentless, joyless virtue.
Since children were born wicked, as Hans believed, it was virtuous to beat them senseless with righteous cudgels. However, Martin, the eldest of seven children, was never a submissive victim. He was not strong enough to overpower his father, but when the thrashings entered the realm of sadism, the two became, as he later recalled, open enemies. He received no sympathy from his mother. Though more timid, less irascible, and less worldly than her husband—she spent hours on her knees, praying to obscure saints—she shared Hans’s convictions, including his belief in the salubrious effect of a vigorously applied lash. On one occasion, according to Luther, she caught him stealing a nut and whipped him to a bloody pulp.
The Church was the last career such parents would have chosen for their eldest son. He knew it, and that decided him. “The severe and harsh life I led with them,” he wrote, “was the reason I afterward took refuge in the cloister and became a monk. ” Despite its inspirational beginning, his visit to the Vatican left a poor impression on him, but at the time he kept that to himself. His colleagues, dazzled by his treatises and his performances in his lecture hall, would have been astounded to learn that he had never shed the pagan superstitions infused in him even before he had reached the age of awareness—that a part of him was still haunted by pagan nightmares of werewolves and griffins crouched beneath writhing treetops under a full moon, of trolls and warlocks feasting on serpents’ hearts, of men transforming themselves into slimy
Martin Luther (1483–1546)
incubi and coupling with their own sisters while in a cave Brunhilde dreamed of the dank smell of bloodstained axes.
Luther was peculiar in other ways. His fellow monks spoke of the devil, warned of the devil, feared the devil. Luther saw the devil—ran into apparitions of him all the time. He was also the most anal of theologians. In part, this derived from the national character of the Reich. A later mot had it that the Englishman’s sense of humor is in the drawing room, the Frenchman’s sense of humor is in the bedroom, and the German’s sense of humor is in the bathroom. For Luther the bathroom was also a place of worship. His holiest moments often came when he was seated on the privy (Abort) in a Wittenberg monastery tower. It was there, while moving his bowels, that he conceived the revolutionary Protestant doctrine of justification by faith. Afterward he wrote: “These words ‘just’ and ‘justice of God’ were a thunderbolt to my conscience. … I soon had the thought [that] God’s justice ought to be the salvation of every believer. … Therefore it is God’s justice which justifies us and saves us. And these words became a sweeter message for me. This knowledge the Holy Spirit gave me on the privy in the tower.”
Well, God is everywhere, as the Vatican conceded four centuries later, backing away from a Jesuit scholar who had gleefully translated explicit excretory passages in Luther’s Sammtiche Schriften. The Jesuit had provoked angry protests from Lutherans who accused him of “vulgar Catholic polemics.” Yet the real vulgarity lies in Luther’s own words, which his followers have shelved. They enjoy telling the story of how the devil threw ink at Luther and Luther threw