Martin Luther: A Penguin Life - Rilegato

Marty, Martin E.

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 0670032727 ISBN 13: 9780670032723

Casa editrice: Viking Pr, 2004

Riassunto

A minister, historian, and scholar reassesses the life and times of Martin Luther, describing his seminal role in the Reformation, his religious beliefs and fresh interpretation of the human relationship with God, his conflict with Church leaders, and his lasting influence on world history and religion. 25,000 first printing.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Martin Marty, one of todayÂ’s most respected theologians, is professor emeritus at the University of Chicago, where the Martin Marty Center has been founded to promote public religion endeavors. His more than fifty books include Modern American Religion. He is a winner of the National Book Award and was the first religion scholar to receive the National Humanities Medal.

Estratto. © Riproduzione autorizzata. Diritti riservati.:

Preface

Martin Luther is the story of Martin Luther, not a history of the Protestant Reformation, though its subject was the most prominent figure in the combined religious and political stirrings of sixteenth-century Europe. While his name appeared near the top in the inevitable rankings of "most influential people" of the millennium past, not until a brief afterword does this book include a measure of his influence, examine his legacy, or visit the twenty-first century.

Curiously, for all the academic and popular attention long given him, at the time of this writing only three or four biographies of Luther are in print in English. Librarians report that few historical figures have received more monographic scholarly attention than he. Such scholarship has informed its author, but this Penguin Life is not and cannot be an extended entry into the debates that it inspires. There are suggestions for further reading in the final pages.

Nor is this the work of either a hanging judge or a flack. The flaws that blighted Luther's reputation, such as in his relation to peasants in 1524-25 or to Jews late in his life, are gross, obvious, and, in the latter case, even revolting. While it is tempting for us contemporary scholars to parade our moral credentials by competing to see who can most extravagantly condemn historical figures such as Luther, in this story wherever denunciation would be in order his words and actions will show him condemning himself without much help from this biographer interfering as a righteous scold.

Conversely, as for possible efforts at biographical public relations on Luther's behalf: For his positive contributions to the development of human liberty, the free expression of conscience, support of music, development of literary style, and his role in reshaping religious life, he needs no advertiser, and readers will not find one here.

This portrait of Martin Luther will not depict a modern person, because he was not one. Those devoted to periodizing in history might call him a late-medieval contributor to the early modern scene. He left tantalizing and often unsubtle clues that credibly evoke deep psychological assessments, and touching on them here will contribute to but cannot begin to exhaust efforts at accounting for some dimensions of his personality.

He makes most sense as a wrestler with God, indeed, as a God-obsessed seeker of certainty and assurance in a time of social trauma and of personal anxiety, beginning with his own. Those who bring passion to what is a universal search for meaning in life may well identify with such a search, though of course by no means all will find Luther's resolution attractive or even accessible, because it appears in a Christian framework. People of other faiths or of no explicit religious commitment may find his specific solutions alien, but they can grasp what he was about by analogy to approaches that they already find familiar from other studies of literature and history or from their own experiences.

This account consistently connects the story of Luther's inner experiences with that of his relations to the external surroundings. Biographers of controversial, spiritually profound figures regularly receive warnings that in a changed world, often described as secular, publics cannot identify with or find relevant inner struggles that reflect remote times and places. Yet moderns who cannot picture receiving direct messages from God, like those Joan of Arc claimed, have little difficulty discerning how her response to such messages changed French and English history and why it is urgent to pay attention to her own accounting. Few people have mystical experiences like those of Bernard of Clairvaux, but awareness of his informs the understanding of his preaching to support crusades.

Stories of Francis of Assisi's stigmata, which looked like replications of the wounds of Christ on his body, sound incredible to most of us, but dealing with them is crucial for anyone who would come to terms with his impact on medieval life.

In the present case, perhaps most contemporaries cannot identify with Luther's sense of guilt and dread in the face of an angry God, yet what he made of his struggles is integral to the story of modern Europe-indeed, the modern world. If it is true that fewer people today struggle with guilt before God while more have difficulty facing anomaly and absurdity, finding meaning in life in the face of an apparently indifferent universe, or embracing firm faith of any sort, many of them may find in Luther a classic case of one facing such difficulties, seeking meaning, often doubting, and even falling into despair until he grasped faith, or it grasped him.

As for genre: A century ago historians of theology held a near monopoly among scholars dealing with religious figures like Luther. In his case, during the past half century social historians have impressively chronicled and analyzed the cultural context, though often at the expense of attention to his ideas and beliefs.

Today, in a world where personal spiritual quests and global religious conflicts alike are familiar, we can expect that many readers will welcome the kind of cultural history or biography that pays attention both to those theological themes and to their settings in monastery, home, church, university, and empire.

One sometime hears that in a secular and religiously pluralist culture, theological language and ideas may sound arcane and forbidding, and one should play them down. That makes little sense when a biographer deals with the life of a theologian who had an immense bearing on the world around him, since such a figure drew on theological language and ideas. Biographies of, for example, an astronomer, a microbiologist, an athlete, or a politician must invite readers to the complex thought worlds, in turn, of astronomy, microbiology, athletics, and politics. Thanks to his gift for pithy and salty expression and his passion for transgressing linguistic and social boundaries, Martin Luther makes it possible for a biographer with some ease to invite into his world people who might, in the normal course of things, stand outside it. It is the biographer's task to make them feel sufficiently at home in that world that they can make judgments about the story and sufficiently ill at ease in it that the telling can provoke them into fresh thinking.

Observers of the art of biography in recent years have regularly noted that beginning the story of a life with the birth and ending with the death of a subject, an approach dismissed by some in the not too distant past in favor of essays on theory, is coming to find renewed favor. I will begin with Luther's birth and end his story at his death, largely leaving to others the accounts of his posthumous influence and its global consequences.

Chapter One

The Hunger for Certainty
1483-1519

Shortly before midnight one November 10, probably in 1483, in the Saxon town of Eisleben, Margarethe Lindemann Luder gave birth to a son. When he was grown and had made enemies, some of them charged that this "beloved mother" had been a whore and bath attendant. Not at all. She was instead a hardworking woman of trading-class stock and middling means. When he did later write of her, Luther remembered Margarethe as someone who could punish him severely. Parents in her time and place routinely did that. But, he recalled, she had meant heartily well.

His father, Hans Luder or Ludher-later Luther-was a leaseholder of mines and smelters. He was to become respectable enough to serve as one of four citizens who represented others before a town council. This ambitious and occasionally jovial father could likewise be a harsh disciplinarian, but-as Martin also said of him-Hans had meant heartily well.

Eisleben, where the family lived for only a few months after the child's birth, straddled the edge of the Harz Mountains and the Thuringian forests. Haunting the dark heights above the town, many believed, were witches and poltergeists. In the town churches, peasants and villagers took refuge against both threatening supernatural beings and natural hazards. The Luthers, among these other Saxons, needed such refuge. Tales of the Black Death, which had killed perhaps one-third of Europe's people, kept later generations aware of the precariousness of living and terrified when plaguelike diseases struck. Peasant existence and, for men like Hans, the mining business brought daily hazards. Thus, while a mine could yield copper and produce prosperity, it also might collapse on the miners or drag leaseholders like Hans into debt.

Pleading for all the help they could get, cowering believers prayed to saints. Miners invoked their popular protector St. Anne, known to them as the mother of the Virgin Mary. The pious, hoping such saints would shield them, feared a God who judged and punished them. To ward off the devil in such a setting, the Luther infant was brought just hours after his birth to Sts. Peter and Paul Church. There, after the saint of that day, they christened him Martin. The baptismal rite, though subdued, was momentous. The church taught that its waters cleansed the infant of sin as they drove out the devil and produced a new Christian.

Seven years after his baptism, his prudent parents sent Martin to Latin schools, first in his hometown of Mansfield, then in Magdeburg, and finally in Eisenach, for an experience that he later recounted as being in purgatory and hell. Those three schools were literally "trivial," which meant devoted to the trivium, because teachers drilled three subjects into the heads of urchins: Grammar served Luther well as he produced writings that now fill about one hundred mammoth volumes. Rhetoric, the second discipline, helped him become the influential writer and speaker whose words affronted and charmed multitudes for decades. The boy made much less of the third, logic, though it did help him survive philosophy courses later at the university.

In the Latin schools Martin also wrestled with Christian basics. If teachers taught also about the lov...

Su questa edizione

• Editore: Viking Pr
• Data di pubblicazione: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0670032727
• ISBN 13: 9780670032723
• Rilegatura: Copertina rigida
• Numero di pagine: 240