CHAPTER 1

The Vow

ON A SULTRY DAY in July of the year 1505a lonely traveler was trudging over a parchedroad on the outskirts of the Saxon village ofStotternheim. He was a young man, shortbut sturdy, and wore the dress of a universitystudent. As he approached the village, thesky became overcast. Suddenly there was a shower, then a crashingstorm. A bolt of lightning rived the gloom and knocked the man tothe ground. Struggling to rise, he cried in terror, "St. Anne help me! Iwill become a monk."

The man who thus called upon a saint was later to repudiate thecult of the saints. He who vowed to become a monk was later torenounce monasticism. A loyal son of the Catholic Church, he waslater to shatter the structure of medieval Catholicism. A devoted servantof the pope, he was later to identify the popes with Antichrist.For this young man was Martin Luther.

His demolition was the more devastating because it reinforceddisintegrations already in progress. Nationalism was in processof breaking the political unities when the Reformation destroyedthe religious. Yet this paradoxical figure revived the Christianconsciousness of Europe. In his day, as Catholic historians all agree,the popes of the Renaissance were secularized, flippant, frivolous,sensual, magnificent, and unscrupulous. The intelligentsia did notrevolt against the Church because the Church was so much of theirmind and mood as scarcely to warrant a revolt. Politics were emancipatedfrom any concern for the faith to such a degree that the MostChristian King of France and His Holiness the Pope did not disdaina military alliance with the Sultan against the Holy Roman Emperor.Luther changed all this. Religion became again a dominant factoreven in politics for another century and a half. Men cared enough forthe faith to die for it and to kill for it. If there is any sense remainingof Christian civilization in the West, this man Luther in no smallmeasure deserves the credit.

Very naturally he is a controversial figure. The multitudinous portrayalsfall into certain broad types already delineated in his own generation.His followers hailed him as the prophet of the Lord and thedeliverer of Germany. His opponents on the Catholic side called himthe son of perdition and the demolisher of Christendom. The agrarianagitators branded him as the sycophant of the princes, and the radicalsectaries compared him to Moses, who led the children of Israel outof Egypt and left them to perish in the wilderness. But such judgmentsbelong to an epilogue rather than a prologue. The first endeavor mustbe to understand the man.

One will not move far in this direction unless one recognizes atthe outset that Luther was above all else a man of religion. The greatoutward crises of his life which bedazzle the eyes of dramatic biographerswere to Luther himself trivial in comparison with the innerupheavals of his questing after God. For that reason this study mayappropriately begin with his first acute religious crisis in 1505 ratherthan with his birth in 1483. Childhood and youth will be drawn upononly to explain the entry into the monastery.

At Home and School

The vow requires interpretation because even at this early point inLuther's career judgments diverge. Those who deplore his subsequentrepudiation of the vow explain his defection on the ground that heought never to have taken it. Had he ever been a true monk, he wouldnot have abandoned the cowl. His critique of monasticism is madeto recoil upon himself in that he ispainted as a monk without vocation,and the vow is interpreted,not as a genuine call, but rather asthe resolution of an inner conflict,an escape from maladjustment athome and at school.

A few sparse items of evidenceare adduced in favor of this explanation.They are not of the highestreliability because they are all takenfrom the conversation of the older Luther as recorded, often inaccurately,by his students; and even if they are genuine, they cannot beaccepted at face value because the Protestant Luther was no longerin a position to recall objectively the motives of his Catholic period.Really there is only one saying which connects the taking of the cowlwith resentment against parental discipline. Luther is reported tohave said, "My mother caned me for stealinga nut, until the blood came. Such strict disciplinedrove me to the monastery, although shemeant it well." This saying is reinforced by twoothers: "My father once whipped me so thatI ran away and felt ugly toward him until hewas at pains to win me back." "[At school] Iwas caned in a single morning fifteen times fornothing at all. I was required to...