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trying to define the papacy and his relationship to it. Meeting Von Miltitz in Altenburg in January 1919, he had appeared anxious to preserve the unity of Christendom, offering to remain mute if his critics would also. He was prepared to issue public statements acknowledging the wisdom of praying to saints and the reality of purgatory. He was also willing to urge his followers to make peace with the Church, and would even concede the usefulness of indulgences in remitting canonical penances. To Tetzel, lying on a monastic deathbed, he sent a gentle note, assuring him that the issue between them had been a minor incident in a larger controversy, “that the affair had not been begun on that account, but that the child had quite another father.” In March he even sent the pontiff a letter of submission.

This was young Luther redux—a flashback to the moment when, as a twenty-eight-year-old monk, he had first glimpsed the capital of Catholicism and prostrated himself. Then a devout pilgrim, he had genuflected before saintly relics, worshiped at every Roman altar, and scaled the Scala Santa on his knees. Now he wrote the Holy See in the same exalted mood. The response from the Vatican, prompt and friendly, invited him to Rome for confession. But by then Luther’s inner struggle had resolved itself. Leo’s overture was declined once more. Wittenberg, after all, was still safer for an avowed recreant, and as the dark doppelganger within him reformed, he made his final, irrevocable turn away from Rome. The Luther who would make history was reemerging: willful, selfless, intolerant, pious, brilliant, contemptuous of learning and art, but powerful in conviction and driven by a vision of pure, unexploited Christianity.

In a brief, insightful passage he grasped this side of his temperament: “I have been born to war, and fight with factions and devils; therefore my books are stormy and warlike. I must root out the stumps and stocks, cut away the thorns and hedges, fill up the ditches, and am the rough forester to break a path and make things ready.” Thus, within a month of repledging his allegiance to the Holy Father he wrote Georg Spalatin, chaplain to Frederick: “I am at a loss to know whether the Pope is Antichrist or his apostle.” And in a more moderate but nevertheless revolutionary note, he suggested: “A common reformation should be undertaken of the spiritual and temporal estates.” *

His followers, like him, were angry men; wrath was a red thread binding the Lutherans together. More and more—and especially after Leipzig—they resembled an insurgent army, with Wittenberg as its command post and new hymns which sounded like marches. Some members of his retinue left memorable contributions to polemical literature, but none could match the vehemence of their leader when fully aroused. After reading the Curia’s continuing, uncompromising, absolute claims for the primacy and power of Catholic pontiffs, he published an Epitome which opened by describing Rome as “that empurpled Babylon” and the Curia as “the Synagogue of Satan.” Three years earlier he would have been shocked to read such a diatribe, let alone write it himself. Now it was only an overture.

“The papacy,” he wrote, “is the devil’s church.” And: “The devil founded the papacy.” And: “The pope is Satanissimus.” And: “The papacy is Satan’s highest head and greatest power.” And: “The pope is the devil incarnate.” And: “The devil rules throughout the entire papacy.” And: “The devil is the false God [Abgott] of the pope.” And: “Because of God’s wrath the devil has bedunged us with big and gross arses in Rome.” Either Satan was the pope’s excrement or the papacy was Satan’s excrement, but it had to be one or the other. He wrote that unless “the Romanists” curbed their fury—as though his own tone were temperate—“there will be no remedy left except that” true Christians “girt about with force of arms … settle the matter no longer with words but by the sword. … If we strike thieves with the gallows, robbers with the sword, heretics with fire, why do we not much more attack in arms these