The Oak & the Ax

In the summer of 1505 a man in Saxony was knocked flat by a bolt of lightning. "St. Anne help me!" he cried as he lay on the ground. "I will become a monk."

For Christendom, the moment in which lightning struck Martin Luther was almost as crucial as the episode of the Damascus road. In Here I Stand (Abingdon-Cokesbury; $4.75), a new biography of the founder of the Reformation in Germany, Roland H. Bainton, a Quaker and a Yale professor of church history, carefully details the character and extent of the great crisis that was set in motion that day. Within 13 tumultuous years the Luther energy had blasted Christianity out of its late-medieval lethargy, ripped the universal church to sectarian shreds, created the Protestant movement and set its main direction.

Yet Luther was more than a great religious figure, according to Bainton's book. He was one of the master builders of modern Germany, both for good and for ill. He was a literary genius. And he was an immense, complicated personality, with room inside for half a dozen men.

Such a man defies biography. The writer of it should have both the religious passion to comprehend how a man who sometimes seemed almost a devil could also be almost a saint; and the theological dispassion to talk, without raising his voice, about the most controversial Christian of modern times. Biographer Bainton has plenty of dispassion, and also a handsome way of writing. His Luther biography is easily the most readable in English; if it fails to understand all the Martin Luthers and to reconcile them in one man, that was more than Luther could do, either.

Grace & Mercy. Martin Luther was born at Eisleben, Saxony, in 1483. His father was a tightfisted miner who had fought his way up to foundry owner. Old Hans sent his son to read law at the University of Erfurt, but Martin's sensitive mind became preoccupied with fear for his soul. A nameless, periodic and overwhelming despair seized him. It had been acute for about six months when the lightning struck.

The monk's cowl did not keep out the demon of despair, says Biographer Bainton, and the despair was finally defined: Luther had begun to doubt the goodness of God. "I wished I had never been created. Love God? I hated Him!" The Devil visited Luther by night, and the monk-priest never doubted that he was real. In the dark night of his own soul, Luther found his own convictions: the whole nature of man is corrupt; man must be born again to be saved.

But how can a man be saved if he cannot be sure that God is good and will save him? "Then," says Luther, "I grasped that . . . through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I [went] through open doors into paradise." Luther had discovered the guiding theological principle of the Reformation.

With his beliefs established, he was ready at 34 to begin his life work. In 1517 he nailed his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church of Wittenberg. The Theses were a protest against the corrupt Roman Catholic practice of the day, of selling "indulgences" to the living for the reduction of the purgatorial terms of the dead.

Luther soon went on to attack the institution of the papacy, the role of celibacy in the clergy, the number of the sacraments; before long he had assailed most of the major tenets in the structure of Roman Catholicism. More to the point, all Germany soon knew, by pamphletc that poured from the newly invented printing press, what Luther had done--and thousands of Germans approved.

"Ungrateful Beasts." Luther was excommunicated by the church and outlawed by the state. In reply, he declared: ". . . As they excommunicated me for the sacrilege of heresy, so I excommunicate them in the name of the sacred truth of God. Christ will judge whose excommunication will stand." He also said: "Why do we not . . . assault . . . the whole swarm of the Roman Sodom . . . and wash our hands in their blood?" Then for a year he went into hiding in the Wartburg, there to begin his translation of the Bible, a work as fundamental to the German language as the King James version is to English.

Back in Wittenberg, the Reformation had begun. Many priests, monks and nuns were leaving the cloister and getting married. Mass was celebrated in plain clothes, and parts of it recited in German. The laity took the cup of Communion to its own lips, and it smashed the images of the saints.

A few years later, Luther himself married Katherine von Bora, an ex-nun, who bore him six children. He became the model for future German papahood, according to Bainton: he appeared to love his children dearly, yet he was stonily unforgiving when disobeyed, and was known to cut up his son's pants to mend his own: he wrote the children gaggingly sentimental letters while he was away from them and sometimes called them "idiots" when he was home.

Age did not improve him. He was prematurely an irascible and peevish old man, according to Bainton. He railed against both the rival Protestant sects and the Jews. He talked a blue streak, some of it the plain vulgarity of his generation, and lorded it crudely over his congregation: "You ungrateful beasts, you are not worthy of the treasure of the gospel. If you don't improve, I will stop preaching rather than cast pearls before swine."

Luther himself was only too conscious of his excesses, and once, when asked why he was so violent, composed a salient epigram on his entire life. "A twig," he said, "can be cut with a bread knife, but an oak calls for an ax."

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