Recasting the reformer - Review

Commonweal, Sept 10, 1999 by Eamon Duffy

Martin Luther

The Christian between God and Death

Richard Marius

Harvard, $35, 542 pp.

Richard Marius is one of America's most distinguished Renaissance scholars, and the author of a superlative (and far from hagiographic) biography of Thomas More. He is not a Christian believer, but he is deeply and intuitively sympathetic to the project of sixteenth-century Christian humanism, which Marius sees as an attempt to construct a benign piety and morality which would unite men and women everywhere in mutual understanding, tranquil tolerance, and rational well-doing.

How does such a man write a biography of Martin Luther? For Luther was the ultimate antihumanist. He was, Marius tells us, "an absolutist, demanding certainty in a dark and conflict-ridden world, where nothing is finally sure and mystery abounds against a gloom that may ultimately be driven by fate." In the face of the riddle of existence, Luther abandoned reason for faith, a turn revealed in his conversion in terror, and in his lifelong wrestling with a God from whom he demanded assurance against the dark, and preservation from the sea of oblivion which lashed and plucked at all the living. Marius's Luther is a tumultuous and contradictory personality whom it is hopeless to try to nail down. To make sense of him requires not an effort to decide whether he was right or wrong, good or bad, but a search for the universal quality in him which "tells us something about the human condition we share in all the centuries."

The key to this Luther-for-all-seasons, Marius thinks, is the fear of death. We may be baffled or repelled by sixteenth-century religious convictions-heaven, purgatory, hell, predestination, grace, con- and transubstantiation-all, for the secular men and women for whom Marius writes, as alien as the language and customs of Lilliput. But fear of death is universal, and for Marius it is the heart of Luther's mystery.

This book is therefore a polemic, attacking cultural historians like Lucien Febvre who maintain that atheism was impossible in sixteenth- century Europe. For Marius, radical skepticism about the most fundamental Christian claims was a byproduct both of the breakdown of medieval religion and of the advent of humanism, the consequence of exposure to pagan art, mythology, and philosophy. The modern doubter can therefore find his doubt prefigured in the religious struggles of the age of Luther. He dwells on the account Luther gave in old age of the skepticism about the relics and legends of Rome which assailed him during his stay there as a young monk. "We are by nature," Luther reflected, "inclined to doubt."

So Marius's Luther is both a craggy and enigmatic man of his time-the last monk of the Middle Ages, the first of the great dogmaticians of the Reformation-and also the perennial figure of Everyman, cowering between the immensities, fearfully shouting his message of faith alone into the darkness. For Marius, Luther's worst fear "is not of judgment and hell to follow but merely of death, which he, following Paul, seems to take as annihilation." Heaven, hell, and all the rest of the paraphernalia of the supernatural were ways of articulating and emphasizing the ultimate horror of death, what Newman called "the masterful negation and collapse of all that makes me man." Here Marius thinks Luther stands in radical discontinuity with most late-medieval thought about the last things, focused as it so often was on the material torments of the damned. The whole Reformation message therefore arises out of Luther's struggle with the terror of nonbeing, the struggle "to keep reason at bay and God with us."

This is a tricky framework for any biography of a sixteenth-century man, not merely because it oversimplifies the sophistication of medieval Christian eschatology and exaggerates the gloom of late medieval religion, but most of all because it risks projecting twentieth-century concerns and attitudes onto the past. Nevertheless, into this frame Marius weaves a gripping and illuminating narrative, focusing essentially on the reformer's first forty years. Marius has a rare gift for concise exposition, and leads us sure-footedly through Luther's major writings-the lectures on the Psalms, Romans, and Galatians, and, above all, the extraordinary series of Reformation treatises that poured from him in the early 1520s: On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Address to the Christian Nobility, Liberty of a Christian Man. Marius's account of these works, informed by a lifetime's study of Renaissance polemic, is clear, shrewd, concise, and sometimes sternly dismissive, but always rewarding. He will have no truck with the efforts made by some of Luther's admirers, like the late great Gordon Rupp, to exculpate Luther from charges of using gutter language and obscenity. He traces in stark and sobering detail Luther's deep-seated hostility to the Jews and their religion, a dishonorable legacy which served to swell "a cultural stream that runs like an open sewer through our history." Marius's Luther is emphatically the fallible man, warts and all.