THE DAY THE MIDDLE AGES ENDED
REVOLUTIONARY THEMES IN LUTHER’S TREATISES OF 1520 by James Mitchell September, 2008
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There can be little doubt that the three great polemical treatises written by Luther in 1520 intended to effect radical reforms in the Church on many different levels: core theological issues and principles, the administration of the sacraments, the reorganization of church offices, the definition and requirements of priesthood, the financing of Church activities—almost all significant areas of Church authority and administration came under Luther’s scalpel. Since however none of the proposed reforms were ever adopted by the Church in response to Luther’s demands, and since Luther himself could have hardly ignored his likely expulsion from the Church simply through the act of publishing his reform agenda, it seems awkward to speak of his eventual attainments as constituting a Protestant “reformation.” 1 The term seems sensible only if we were to say more broadly that Luther succeeded in reforming religious life and culture in about half of the German nation, and elsewhere in Europe, starting in the early sixteenth century. But is this what Luther set out to do in the 1520 treatises, and would it not be more accurate to suggest that the treatises represent a pathway to revolution instead of reformation? In this paper we will demonstrate that there is an important sense in which this in fact the case, and in so doing we will develop a definition of revolution which reconciles more modern attitudes with Luther’s early intentions. To do this, we must emphasize the mutual involvement of church and state in this period. The history of church‐state relations in medieval Europe has a long and complicated history, but very Lindberg suggests that Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, in his Commentarius historicus et apologeticus de Lutheranismo etc. of 1694, was the first author to apply the term “Reformation” to Luther’s era or epoch (Lindberg, Carter, The European Reformations, [Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell, 1996], 10). This prompts the question whether Luther actually knew that he was living during the Reformation period, let alone managing its construction. Standard encyclopedic and other reference works however do not mention von Seckendorff as the creator of the term. Remarkably, an original edition of the Commentarius is owned by U.C. Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. 1
3 generally the prevailing concept gradually evolved that the state exists in order to protect the church, while the church anoints rulers and looks over their shoulders, as it were, to make sure its own interests are sustained: neither can or should rule without the consent of the other, and the extent to which this principle appeared self‐evident to contemporaries is nowhere better observed than in the policy of cuius regio, eius religio, agreed upon in the Peace of Augsburg treaty of 1555 to determine the religious make‐up of Germany in a spirit of compromise between Lutheran and Catholic forces. However surprising such an arrangement might be found today—imagine that a modern immigrant to Alaska would have to adopt the religion of its governor and become a member of the “Assembly of God”— the point is that in the mid‐sixteenth century, this was viewed as a logical and coherent solution to the outstanding problem of the moment, one which was found acceptable to all the parties involved. It follows from this interlocking of the interests of church and state that to attempt a radical reorganization of either would have a profound effect upon its counterpart, and that both taken together may be understood as a single Establishment. It is important also to understand that a rebellion or revolt, of which there were several in the High Middle Ages, is not the same as a revolution, which has a very different set of priorities. A revolution intends nothing less than a radical restructuring or reorganizing of an existing agent or authority, whereas a revolt seeks remedy for a specific set of issues, and possibly the replacement of a ruler, and generally nothing further. To create change, revolutions require not only practice, but also as much theory as may be required to re‐ structure an existing agency of power. In this respect, the often‐ repeated denial of Luther’s status as a revolutionary due to his condemnation of the Peasants’ Revolt of 1524‐26 seems irrelevant, since in fact there was nothing revolutionary about the revolt to begin with. 2 Luther may have very correctly seen it as counter‐productive to
“It is evident from their grievances that the peasants least of all considered themselves revolutionaries. Their demands, antecedent to their
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4 the success of his own undertakings, aimed as they were towards creating a radical paradigm shift in the exercise of clerical authority in his time. The fact is that no revolutionary political ideology or systematic plan for governmental reform was available or even envisioned in that era—no plan to overthrow the nobility or any movement to introduce Volksdemokratie or popular democracy, for example—and Luther, appalled by any display of useless violence, would have hardly been disposed to recognize peasant revolts as an advancement to his cause. So what exactly is revolutionary about the three treatises of 1520? A commonly heard criticism of Marxist theory is that neither Marx nor his immediate followers took pains to describe exactly how a socialist would live, work, or behave as an ethically‐responsible individual after a socialist revolution, in other words how the newly‐ realized socialist subjectivity could be constructed inside the projected socialist state. Martin Luther, on the other hand, goes to some length in his third 1520 treatise to share his vision of how a truly liberated subject would appear and behave in his new surroundings. The Freedom of a Christian undertakes to show “how a righteous, free and pious Christian, that is, a spiritual, new, and inner man, becomes what he is.” 3 He is to become a “perfectly free lord of all, subject to none.” 4 His independence from the various instances of Papal and clerical oppression is to be achieve through inner faith as opposed to a blind obedience to the “works” imposed and offered for sale by the Church. Luther’s proposed path to liberation requires a transformation of the “inner man.” The journey of Christian self‐realization will lend a new
violence, were moderately and modestly voiced. They pleaded their desire to be obedient toward just government.” Sessions, Kyle C. “The War over Luther and the Peasants: Old Campaigns and New Strategies.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1972): 27. 3 Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Transl. Charles M. Jacobs, A.T.W. Steinhäuser and W.A. Lambert. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973), 277. 4 Luther, Three Treatises, 276.
5 value to the performance of “good works,” since these also will have become expressions of a spirit suffused with inner faith. The Freedom of a Christian therefore explains how the realized Christian “becomes what he is,” namely a free subject of God’s kingdom. In this respect, the third treatise is a continuation and elaboration of a discourse begun in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which Luther speaks of the “blessedness of Christian liberty,” known only to a few because of the “tyranny of the pope,” whose papacy is “truly the kingdom of Babylon and of the very Antichrist.” 5 These words are prefaced in the paragraph preceding which begins with a passionate outcry: “I lift my voice simply on behalf of liberty and conscience, and I confidently cry: No law, whether of men or of angels, may rightfully be imposed upon Christians without their consent, for we are all free of all laws.” (Italics mine.) 6 These words are revolutionary to the core, and they express sentiments common to many modern revolutionary movements of the future, wrapped in the familiar language of liberation politics: liberty, conscience, freedom, and the overthrow of tyranny. The revolutionary model requires the existence of a proletariat, a numerically substantial class of subjects in a society who need to be liberated, clearly defined by Luther in the present context as the aggregate of true‐believing Christians. Most surprising of all, Luther states that no laws are to be imposed without the consent of those who are expected to obey them, a complete reversal of medieval political strategy. The significance of this lofty principle to the success of later revolutions in Europe and America promoting popular democracy to replace existing autocracies can hardly be overestimated. Because Martin Luther was quite simply the only influential writer during the entire course of the Christian Middle Ages to express political ideals of this magnitude and influence, it is not overstating the case to argue that the Early Modern Era in Europe began on the day he wrote the lines we have quoted above.
Luther, Three Treatises, 196. Luther, Three Treatises, 276.
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6 In this brief essay we have outlined several steps taken by Luther in his 1520 treatises along his pathway to revolution, which enables us now to suggest a preliminary definition of how the term revolutionary may be applied to him. Emphasizing the inseparability of church and state during the late medieval period, we have argued against assuming that rebellions or revolts will qualify automatically as political revolutions. Luther’s description of the transformation of the “inner man,” effected by faith after a rejection of a false conception of works promulgated by the Church, shows the destination of the revolutionary process. By adopting the vocabulary of liberation politics, Luther conforms to a language that transcends historical particularity, and his assertion that laws must not be imposed without the consent of those governed by them sets the parameters for revolutionary political discourse for centuries to follow. But there is another overriding sense in which the three treatises and the entire Reformation along with them may be regarded as an expression of revolutionary thought. In his collection of history lectures at the Humboldt University of Berlin, transcribed and published in 1837 as Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, G.W.F. Hegel develops his conception of world history as an evolutionary process in which Spirit (Geist) becomes conscious of its own freedom. Human history is accordingly represented as an ongoing actualization or self‐realization of human freedom, an elevation of consciousness from the bonds that restrict it. Having himself been educated to be a Lutheran pastor, Hegel writes in Part Four of the Lectures: “This is the essential content of the Reformation: man is in his own nature destined [durch sich selbst bestimmt] to be free.” 7 Luther’s demands for spiritual freedom, expressed again and again in the 1520 treatises, were clearly an evolutionary and a revolutionary milestone in what Hegel viewed as the most defining aspect of human affairs, the long march toward freedom.
In Mure, G.B. “Hegel, Luther, and the Owl of Minerva.” Philosophy 41 (1966): 135.
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7 BIBLIOGRAPHY I. Primary sources Luther, Martin. Three Treatises. Translated by Charles M. Jacobs, A.T.W. Steinhäuser and W.A. Lambert. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973. II. Secondary Sources Mure, G.R.G. “Hegel, Luther, and the Owl of Minerva.” Philosophy 41 (1966): 127‐139 Sessions, Kyle C. “The War over Luther and the Peasants: Old Campaigns and New Strategies.” The Sixteenth Century Journal 3 (1972): 25‐44.