58 - Luther: A Life. Martin Luther: An Illustrated Biography

Luther: A Life
By John M. Todd
New York, Crossroad, 1982. 396 pp. $17.50.

Martin Luther: An Illustrated Biography
By Peter Manns
New York. Crossroad, 1982. 223 pp. $50.00.*

Walking down the steps of St. Peter's Basilica one morning in 1963 during the Second Vatican Council, which I attended as a Protestant observer, I got into conversation with a Roman Catholic priest who was in Rome finishing his doctoral work. When I inquired about the subject of his research, he replied, "Martin Luther."

Every fiber of my Protestant body braced itself for the inevitable attack on the man who had destroyed the unity of Christendom and ripped apart the seamless robe of Christ. "You know," the priest continued, "I'm beginning to think he was right."

That comment, as I began to discover in the years after Vatican II, was only the iceberg tip of a change in outlook that might be called Roman Reformation Research Reconsidered. For while not all agree that Luther was "right," more and more Catholic scholars are now reporting that Luther not only had many legitimate complaints about the state of the late medieval church, but that, given the intransigence of the late medieval church, a rupture was all but inevitable. This shift in mood is astonishing, particularly when one recalls the centuries in which Luther was targeted for calumny and abuse as every Catholic's favorite scapegoat for all that had gone wrong in the church and the world ever since the sixteenth century. From the harsh polemics of many, Catholic scholars in pre - Vatican II days (and even the otherwise exemplary Jacques Maritain in Three Reformers), the Catholic appraisal of Luther, thanks to such scholars as Josef Lortz, Louis Bouyer, George Tavard, Hans Küung, and others, has moved recently in refreshingly new directions.

Some of the fruits of this new attitude are evidenced in John Todd's Luther: A Life and Peter Manns's Martin Luther: An Illustrated Biography. It is significant that the year 1983 - predestined for Luther scholarship since it is the 500th anniversary of his birth - should be ushered in by two sympathetic lives of the great Protestant reformer,

*This review is reprinted with the permission of the publishers from The New York Times. "Book Review" section, Dec. 26. 1982 pp. 1, 14.

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both written by Roman Catholics. That both books are published by Crossroad, a house with a detectable Episcopalian pedigree, and that the present review is written by a Presbyterian, only serves further to indicate how the one who was a symbol of such terrible division is becoming a rallying point for drawing divided forces back into conversation and even mutual appreciation.

John Todd is a British Roman Catholic layman who had previously written a book on Luther for specialists, and another on John Wesley and the Catholic Church. His present intention is biographical rather than theological, and he writes in a way that enables the theologically untrained to get a feel both for the man and the movements of his time. In the face of many available biographies of Luther, this one excels in humanizing Luther without psychologizing him out of existence, in large part by quoting much more frequently from his endless letters than from his endless theological tracts.

Endless is the right word. As Todd demonstrates, the amount of writing that flowed from Luther's pen is staggering. In his mature years, Luther was producing a significant pamphlet - sized essay, on the average, every two weeks, an output that makes him a kind of sixteenth-century counterpart of the Rev. Andrew Greeley - if a comparison may be offered that neither principal would appreciate. And it is in the midst of all the fulminations, broadsides, attacks, and polemics that the human Luther also emerges, thanks to the tilt of Todd's citations. We discover Luther writing gently to friends, comforting them in the midst of their doubts, anxieties, and bereavements; sending notes of affection to Katherine von Bora, the woman he married when he was forty - two; directing missives to and about colleagues on the university faculty at Wittenberg, dealing with everything from course assignments and promotions to the status of Aristotle. Present - day academics will be consoled to discover that in the midst of the most hectic days of the Reformation, when Luther was an international figure being lauded and damned, he was simultaneously knee - deep in local battles over that perennial university obsession, revision of the curriculum.

It is an impression of sheer energy that comes through in this account. "A man driven" is Todd's summation - juggling six theological balls in the air with one hand, writing tract after tract with the other, all the while preaching ever), week or even more often in the local church, lecturing on biblical exegesis at six o'clock in the morning, traveling widely, battling the Pope, translating the Bible into German, writing chorales for the new liturgies, transforming the former Augustinian priory at Wittenberg into a home where he and Katie could house a huge extended family as well as their own children, and somehow surviving despite ongoing bouts with kidney stones and constipation, about which he writes with an earthy coarseness not usually associated with clerics.

There were even more devastating ongoing bouts with Anfectung, grievous doubt. Luther was, and remained, a medieval man for whom Satan and hell were daily realities that continually threatened to

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overwhelm the other reality he sought to affirm - the reality of a gracious God whose mercy was more ultimate than judgment, and whose triumph over Satan and hell was assured, even if by so unlikely a route as the death of a weak man on a cross.

It was that sort of assurance about a gracious God that Luther was unable to find within the Roman Catholic religion to which he had given himself so unstintingly and unsparingly in his early years as a priest. And it is this inner struggle that is clearly revealed in the volume by Peter Manns, who is a Roman Catholic priest and theologian in Germany. On first examination, the volume is deceptive. Its lavish format suggests that it is a gift designed for Protestant coffee tables-boxed, large in size and price, containing six sections of stunning color photographs, along with reproductions of portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and examples of the painting, architecture, and sculpture of Luther's time. To gild the lily, there is even an introduction by the church historian Jaroslav Pelikan, which is absolutely as close as one can come to a Protestant imprimatur.

Many readers, no doubt, will be more than satisfied to leave it at that, and they will have their reward. But they will pay the price of missing an utterly engaging text in which the author shares a view of Luther both perceptive and appreciative, proposing the thesis that what Luther sought and needed, both for his own inner health and for the renewed health of the Church Catholic, could have been achieved within an undivided church. That there was nevertheless a rupture is not something for which Father Manns lays blame exclusively at Luther's door; for he shows that the mind - set of Rome and the papacy being what they were, the price of desperately needed reform almost inevitably meant institutional sundering. Father Manns's intention is not to second - guess the sixteenth century but to suggest that today, partly because the sixteenth - century divisions were so open and bare, there are ways to begin to close the wounds from both sides - as Catholics recognize the legitimacy in Luther's concerns, and Protestants confront the degree to which those concerns are susceptible to treatment in a church that (as Vatican II so dramatically began to illustrate) can embrace the notion of ongoing reformation.

Father Manns's work should not only warm Protestant hearts by its generous assessment of Luther and what lay behind his most disputatious comments (even the image of the Pope as Antichrist is given a measure of intelligibility), but it should remind Catholics that the sixteenth century, which they have always regarded as the least attractive of the twenty centuries of their history, has salvageable elements in it. And neither Protestants nor Catholics can fail to be instructed and charmed by Father Manns's unexpectedly engaging treatment of Luther's marriage to the ex - nun, Katherine von Bora.

At one point, however, the author seeks to prove too much. Well aware that he will be attacked for doing so, he nevertheless tries to make a case for Luther's scathing attacks on the Jews. If many Protestants

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and Catholics are not aware of the baleful anti - Semitic streak in Luther, they need to be, if only in order to disavow it totally. No excuse that Luther was only a child of his time, or that Erasmus was worse, as Father Manns tries to remind us, will suffice. And while Father Manns is not trying to whitewash Luther, and remains personally horrified by the statements, we are now in a time, and always should have been, when utter repudiation is the only way to respond to this side of Luther. While we cannot expect Luther to have lived in a post - Auschwitz world, we who do are forever denied the right to think or even to whisper the anti - Semitism he shouted so loudly and coarsely.

This continuing struggle illustrates, in a particular case, what must also be true of our thinking about the entire Reformation. Both books suggest that the task today is not to replicate or refight the battles of the sixteenth century but, acknowledging how divisive they were back then, to turn the arguments of that time in creative directions today. If people today do not seek a "gracious God" with quite the single - mindedness of a Martin Luther, surely everyone yearns for a gracious neighbor. And if the two are not identical, they are at least related in ways that Luther did not fully state, and of which we need desperately to become aware if the Luther presented to us by Mr. Todd and Father Manns is to continue to speak to us today.

Robert McAfee Brown
Pacific School of Religion
Berkeley, California