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two years later receiving the priesthood.

      Luther attended the recently founded university in Wittenberg, a town of 2000 inhabitants, mainly brewers. Here degree requirements were lenient, and Luther took his doctorate in theology in five years instead of the usual twelve. He therefore skipped scholastic niceties and stuck to what he calls ‘the kernel of the grain and the marrow of the bones’, by which he meant Scripture. In 1512 he became Professor of Scripture at Wittenberg.

      Luther was a deeply religious man who sought perfection in his chosen life: ‘I would have martyred myself to death with fasting, prayer, reading and other good works.’ But try as he might he could never attain his own ideal of goodness. This puzzled and troubled him deeply, for the whole trend of the age was to emphasize man’s will, his powers of achievement. But always Luther felt his complete unworthiness before God, whom he had been brought up to believe was above all a Judge. ‘We grew pale at the mention of Christ, for he was always represented to us as a severe judge, angry with us.’ ‘When will you do enough,’ Luther asked himself, ‘to win God’s clemency?’ And it became clear that the answer was, Never.

      How then could he be saved? As a Professor of Scripture, Luther sought an answer in the New Testament, and as an Augustinian, in the commentaries of the founder of his Order. Now it so happened that a complete edition of St Augustine’s works, in nine volumes, had for the first time become available in 1506. Augustine had started life as a Manichaean, and the Manichaean battle between matter which is bad and the spirit which is good marks nearly all his writings. Moreover, in a fight to the death with the heresy of Pelagius, who denied original sin, Augustine had laid a sometimes excessive emphasis on man’s need for grace, and his incapacity to do good unaided. Both characteristics appealed to something deep in the German character, and notably in Luther’s. To the question, How then could he be saved? Luther found an answer in the 17th verse of the first chapter of St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans as interpreted by St Augustine. Not efforts of will, but faith alone could justify man before God, and this faith was not something to be toiled for, not a result of virtus, but a free gift from above, a grace. Grace, moreover, was granted to man irrespective of his merit, and God’s decision to grant or withhold it lay completely beyond the range of human understanding. This discovery comforted Luther, who believed that formerly he had been on the wrong track.

      In 1510 Luther visited Rome on business for his Order. ‘I fell on my knees,’ he says, ‘held up my hands to heaven and cried “Hail, holy Rome, sanctified by the holy martyrs and by the blood they shed here.”’ Luther was not a humanist save in so far as he valued sound texts of Scripture and the Fathers, and he took no interest in the Sistine ceiling or the Laocoön. He was annoyed by the speed at which Roman priests said Mass: ‘By the time I reached the Gospel the priest next to me had already ended and was shouting “Come on, finish, hurry up.”’ But this was hardly a scandal to Luther, whose own life had become so hectic by 1516 that he wrote: ‘Rarely do I have time for the prayers of the breviary or for saying Mass.’

      What did profoundly shock Luther in Rome was the Renaissance itself. Aristotle’s Ethics was a prime text in Rome and it figures in Raphael’s Stanze; Luther abhorred the book, declaring it ‘grace’s most dangerous enemy’. Italians, particularly since the revival of Platonism around 1460, held the created world to be both good and beautiful. Luther did not find the world either good or beautiful. He was shocked by the way clergy and laity alike had reconciled the spiritual with the physical, the pursuit of salvation with the pursuit of happiness here and now. While remaining spiritual beings directed towards the life beyond, they had completely adjusted themselves to the world below. Hence Luther’s complaint that the Italians were ‘Epicureans’. ‘If, they say, we had to believe the word of God in entirety, we should be the most miserable of men, and could never know a moment’s gaiety.’

      Luther returned to Wittenberg in 1511 to resume teaching and his study of St Augustine. Presently one of the great German princes, Albert of Hohenzollern, decided to acquire the archbishopric of Mainz. Since he was only twenty-four and thus well below the prescribed age, and furthermore was already Bishop of Magdeburg and Halberstadt, he applied to Rome for a costly dispensation. In order to help Albert, Pope Leo agreed that the St Peter’s indulgence should be preached in North Germany on special terms. The great banking family of the Fuggers would advance the dispensation payment in return for administering the indulgence, half the proceeds of which would go to Albert, half to building St Peter’s. As part of the ensuing campaign in 1517 a Dominican named Johann Tetzel began preaching near Wittenberg. He was somewhat imprudent in his methods, especially regarding indulgences for the dead, and a famous verse was attributed to him:

       As soon as the coin in the coffer rings,

       The soul into heaven springs.

      Luther watched in dismay as the brewers of Wittenberg trooped across the Elbe to buy Tetzel’s indulgence: those earning 500 gold guilders a year paid six guilders, those earning 200, three, and so on. For one who believed that man was justified by faith alone, the notion of achieving forgiveness by works, still more by work in the form of money, was utterly repugnant. Luther decided to protest. By nature conservative in his attitude to society, he did so in the approved manner, by writing letters describing the abuse to four local bishops. The result proved disappointing. Some scoffed at his scruples, others pointed out that this indulgence was the Pope’s and outside their control.

      Luther then drafted 95 theses stating his views on indulgences and other matters, and posted them on the door of the university church: a usual way of inviting discussion and in no sense a gesture of defiance. The first four theses are related and evidently express what was then uppermost in Luther’s mind:

      1. Our Lord and Master Christ, in saying ‘Do penance’, intended the whole life of every man to be penance.

      2. This word cannot be understood as referring to penance as a sacrament (that is, confession and satisfaction, as administered by the ministry of priests).

      3. This word also does not refer solely to inner penitence; indeed there is no penitence unless it produces various outward mortifications of the flesh.

      4. Therefore punishment [of sin] remains as long as the hatred of self (that is, true inward penitence), namely until entering the kingdom of heaven.

      The key words in the 95 theses—‘tribulations’, ‘fear’, ‘punishment’, ‘despair’, ‘horror’—would have puzzled an Italian. Indeed, they are conspicuous by their absence from Italian writings of the day. Partly they reflect the national temperament, but to a larger degree they reflect Luther’s own spiritual crisis and the solution to it he had found in St Augustine. Luther makes plain in the 95 theses that what counts in Christianity is inner disposition, not rites and sacraments. In February 1518 he made the point more forcefully still by addressing to Rome a highly critical Resolution concerning the Virtue of Indulgences.

      Rome was now directly involved. At this time the city had only one topic of conversation: whether or not Roman citizenship should be conferred on Christophe Longueil, a French resident who had changed his name to Longolius and made stirringly Ciceronian speeches in praise of the city. Longolius had once compared Augustus unfavourably with Charlemagne: Leo thought this youthful indiscretion should be overlooked, but others held that it marked Longolius as an irredeemable barbarian. It is one of the tragedies of history that the large-minded Leo, who knew Germany at first hand from his years of exile, had never studied theology, and was therefore incompetent to treat with Luther, as he did with Longolius. The Luther affair passed to the Master of the Sacred Palace, a highly intransigent Dominican named Sebastiano Prierias, who once stated that ‘anyone who denies that the doctrine of the Roman Church and of the Roman Pontiff is virtually infallible, so that even Holy Scripture draws its force and authority therefrom, is a heretic.’ Shocked by Luther’s Resolution Prierias dashed off a reply, abusing the German roundly, calling him a son of a bitch, and centring his arguments less on Luther’s statements than on the fact that a humble friar had dared to question the teaching of the Pope.

      Leo, however, did not leave it at that. He had a friend in the leading Italian philosopher of the day, a man of the same moderate temperament as himself. This was Tommaso de Vio,

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