Staupitz encouraged Luther to preach and lecture – in August 1513 he began lecturing on the Psalms. By 1515, he was preparing his lectures on St Paul. His problem, he found, was to understand the phrase ‘the justice of God’. He assumed that it meant the punishment meted out to sinners. So God was a just and angry God – admirable, but hardly lovable. He wanted to be able to drop his defences, to experience emotional catharsis, a sense of reconciliation. And one day, as he wrestled with this problem of the justice of God, it came. ‘I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith.’ The significant words here are ‘through grace and sheer mercy’. Luther had succeeded in breaking through the psychological barriers of fear and mistrust, into a perception of an all-loving God. ‘Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise.’
As with Wycliffe, the historical accident of being born far from Rome prevented Luther from using his new insight for the good of the Church. If he had been born an Italian, he might, like St Francis, have appealed to the pope to allow him to form a movement to carry his message directly to the people. There was nothing in it that was contrary to the teachings of the Church. He wanted to assure people that they were not damned, that this medieval world of devils and demons was a lie, or at least, only a half-truth. It was the other half that mattered: the grace and mercy of God. Faith itself was enough to ensure salvation. This was the message Luther poured into his sermons of 1515 and 1516.
Unfortunately, it contained the germ of a disagreement with the present policies of the Church. In 1513, Julius the warrior-pope had been replaced by Leo X, the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Leo shared with Rodrigo Borgia the feeling that life was intended for enjoyment, and spent so much time in his hunting boots that pilgrims found it hard to kiss his feet. He ate well, drank well, kept court jesters, and spent enormous sums of money on art and entertainment – for example, on the newly invented entertainment called opera. Leo was the pope of whom it was said that he spent three papal treasuries – his predecessor’s, his own and his successors’. Inevitably, he needed money, and since he could not proclaim a Holy Year for another ten years or so, he encouraged the sale of indulgences. These were bits of paper, handed out by a priest that stated that the recipient was, for the time being, freed of all his sins. Since everyone believed literally in the picture of the afterlife described in Dante, with each minor sin costing, perhaps, a century in Purgatory, most people felt that indulgences were a good bargain. But they were, of course, expensive – a prince could expect to pay twenty-five gold pieces, and even a commoner was expected to find one gold piece – perhaps a year’s income.
If Luther was correct about faith, then these highly profitable indulgences were useless, or at least, irrelevant. A piece of paper was no substitute for faith. Besides, religious experience demanded suffering – Luther knew this from personal experience. ‘God works by contraries, so that a man feels himself to be lost at the very moment when he is on the point of being saved… Man must first cry out that there is no health in him. He must be consumed with horror. This is the pain of Purgatory.’ Luther was not saying anything with which the desert fathers would not have agreed wholeheartedly. But for the pope and the German princes, it was being said at the worst possible moment.
For example, Prince Albert of Brandenburg was already a bishop of two cities, and when the archbishop of Mainz died, he recognised that this appointment would be a valuable addition to his income. The problem was that three archbishops had died within ten years, and the parish could not afford the vast fee demanded by Rome to install a new one – ten thousand ducats. Albert borrowed this from the German banking house of Fugger. Their interest rates were enormous, and he had to repay the debt as quickly as possible. The answer lay in the sale of indulgences. The pope would grant the right to sell indulgences in Brandenburg if Albert would agree to pay over half his proceeds to the Church…
If indulgences were to be sold, there was no point in doing it half-heartedly. Albert chose a Dominican named Tetzel, a skilled salesman. He would approach a town preceded by a trumpeter and a drummer, and would be met by the town dignitaries, who walked with him in solemn procession, preceded by the papal cross. Then Tetzel would preach a hellfire sermon in the market place until everybody was shuddering, and old ladies rushed home to count their pennies and see if they amounted to a gold piece. Monks collected the cash and handed over the pieces of paper.
In fact, indulgences were not to be sold in Wittenberg. This was not due to religious scruples, but to the fact that Luther’s own prince, Frederick the Wise of Saxony, held the franchise for that area. Nevertheless, many of Luther’s parishioners hastened to cross into Prince Albert’s territory to take advantage of the offer. Luther was disgusted. To Frederick’s embarrassment, he preached against this blatant commercialism, this cut-price salvation. And on the eve of All Saints, 1517, he posted on the door of the Castle church in Wittenberg a placard, written in Latin, containing ninety-five theses which he challenged theologians to debate. His first point was that Rome was too rich. ‘Before long… Rome will be built of our money.’ He was, of course, mistaken. The pope was rich, but he was always broke. Papal indulgences do not remove guilt, said Luther, and they endanger the soul by generating a sense of false security…
Luther’s chief target was Albert, so he sent him a copy of the theses. Albert, naturally, sent a copy to the pope, who is reputed to have remarked: ‘Luther is just a drunken German; he will feel different when he is sober.’ The problem did not strike him as particularly serious. Indeed, it was not particularly serious. A papal bull correcting the worst abuses of indulgences would probably have satisfied everyone, including Luther. Instead, the pope decided to do nothing for the time being. If Luther wanted theological argument, he should get it in due course. Meanwhile, he could be ignored. And back in Wittenberg, Luther continued quietly with his duties. Most of his fellow townsmen disagreed with his attack on indulgences – they felt that the Church could not be entirely wrong about how to go about saving souls. Meanwhile, someone had spread the controversy by having Luther’s attack translated into German and printed in the form of broadsheets. This made it a subject of debate all over Germany. On the orders of the pope, Luther’s superiors ordered him to repudiate his ninety-five theses; he refused politely – pointing out that they were not, in any case, dogmatic assertions, but subjects for debate. The Augustinians were unwilling to condemn Luther, for he was under attack from their chief rivals, the Dominicans, the detested order who became ‘Inquisitors’ and burned witches and heretics. Meanwhile, Luther was preparing to defend himself by studying the Bible, and concluded that the text ordering ‘penitence’ was a mistranslation; it did not say ‘do penances’ but simply ‘be repentant’. So the argument gradually became warmer. The preacher Tetzel attacked Luther; Luther replied; their arguments were rushed into print. Germans who had long felt resentful about the wealth of the Church began to nod in agreement. A Dominican named Prieras described Luther as a leper with a brain of brass and a nose of iron, and Luther retorted with an attack on Boniface VIII, calling him a wolf. Everybody could understand abuse, and the broadsheets achieved a new popularity. Suddenly, everyone in Germany had heard of Martin Luther.
Eighteen months after he had nailed the theses to the church door, the Church decided to grant Luther’s request for a debate. It was to take place in Leipzig, and the Church was to be defended by a scholarly monk named Johann Eck. In 1519, Luther walked into Leipzig, followed by two hundred of his students with battle axes. They remembered what had happened to Jan Hus, and were willing to put up a fight if the bishops tried to do the same thing to Luther. When the debate began in the great hall of the castle, Eck immediately accused Luther of holding some of Hus’s ‘heresies’. To Eck’s delight, Luther replied that he was not so sure they were heresies. The debate continued for several days, until the duke said he needed the hall for a ball. But Eck had got what he wanted – admissions that amounted to heresy. Meanwhile Luther, now a national hero, was cheered by crowds along his route back home.