A world lit only by fire_ the medieval m - William Manchester [71]
Again and again, in recalling Satan’s attacks on him, Luther uses the crude verb bescheissen, which describes what happens when someone soils you with his Scheiss. In another demonic stratagem, an apparition of the prince of darkness would humiliate the monk by “showing his arse” (Steiss). Fighting back, Luther adopted satanic tactics. He invited the devil to “kiss” or “lick” his Steiss, threatened to “throw him into my anus, where he belongs,” to defecate “in his face” or, better yet, “in his pants” and then “hang them around his neck.”
A man who had battled the foulest of fiends in der Abort and die Latrine was unlikely to be intimidated by the vaudevillian Tetzel. Yet Luther’s reply to the jubilee agent was not as dramatic as legend has made it. He did not “nail” a denunciation of the pope on the door of Frederick’s Castle Church. In Wittenberg, as in many university towns of the time, the church door was customarily used as a bulletin board; an academician with a new religious theory would post it there, thus signifying his readiness to defend it against all challengers.
Luther’s timing was canny, however. He took advantage of another tradition, the elector’s annual display of his relics on All Saints’ Day, November 1. This always brought a crowd. Therefore at noon on October 31, 1517, he affixed his (Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis indulgentiarum (Disputation for the Clarification of the Power of Indulgences) alongside the postulates of other theologians. He did something else. He prepared a German translation to be circulated among the worshipers who would gather in the morning. And he sent a copy to Archbishop Albrecht, sponsor and secret beneficiary of Tetzel’s carnival act.
Luther’s theses—he had posted ninety-five of them—were preceded by a conciliatory preamble: “Out of love for the faith and the desire to bring it to light, the following propositions will be discussed at Wittenberg under the chairmanship of the Reverend Father Martin Luther, Master of Arts and Sacred Theology.” It did not occur to him that his position was heretical. Nor was it—then. The pontiff, he agreed, retained the right to absolve penitents, “the power of the keys.” He simply argued that peddling pardons like Colosseum souvenirs trivialized sin by debasing the contrition.
However, he then lodged an objection, one Rome could not ignore. The papal keys, he pointed out, could not reach beyond the grave, freeing an unremorseful soul from purgatory or even decreasing its term of penance there. And while he absolved the Holy See from huckstering indulgences, he added a sharp, significant observation, which, in retrospect, may be seen as the first warning flash of the fury he had bottled up within since his hideous childhood. It was, in fact, a direct criticism of the Apostolic See—breathtaking because it could only be interpreted as the premeditated act of a heresiarch, and thus, a capital offense. He wrote: “This unbridled preaching of pardons makes it no easy matter, even for learned men, to rescue the reverence due the pope from … the shrewd questionings of the laity, to wit: ‘Why does not the pope empty purgatory for the sake of holy love and of the dire need of the souls that are there, if he redeems a … number of souls for the sake of miserable money with which to build a church?’ ”
THE SALE of indulgences plunged. Fewer and fewer quarter-florin coins rang in the pontiff’s bowl. The jubilee had virtually collapsed; Tetzel’s spell had been broken. Luther was the new spellbinder—divine or satanic, for opinion was deeply divided—and accounts of his audacity