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Luther Sic-Luther Non
By Jean Bethke Elshtain

"Luther is far more paradoxical, and interesting, than the popular image holds and far less the unambiguous patriarch than narrowly construed feminist argumentation would have it…. Luther emerges as radical in his views, penning a political - theology that bears both liberating-with our notion of fireedom in mind-and baneful implications."

WHAT do we think about when the name "Martin Luther" is mentioned? My students are almost unanimously clear: Luther is the reformer who fought against an oppressive church, venal churchmen, ignorant superstition, and for "freedom." Mind you, Luther's freedom may not quite be "our" freedom, these same students willingly concede, but one vital blow for what has become our freedom in the West. Luther is a ray of light piercing the darkness of the Dark Ages. Luther in some sense made possible Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence, and my right to read anything I want, so the story goes. Luther has had a good popular press. We are all, in some ways, dominated by this Whiggish philosophy of history, tied as it is to visions of progress, breaking out of restraints, unleashing unbounded human energy, enabling "science" to take over from "faith."

If Luther is "for" freedom, as the story goes, it would seem that his revolution also, at least over the long run, served what we call the "interests" of women-perhaps despite Luther's own time-bound prejudices in the matter. To be sure, Luther has been located by a few feminist thinkers as one in a very large company, a rogue's gallery of patriarchalists intent on keeping women down whatever else they intended. I think Luther is far more paradoxical, and interesting, than the popular image holds and far less the unambiguous patriarch that narrowly construed feminist argumentation would have it. A more richly interpretive critique, however, does not leave Luther unscathed. By broadening the grounds of interpretation and critique, I will call another "Luther" into being as a problematic rather than paradigmatic thinker.

Jean Bethke Elshtain is a member of the Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts at Amherst. She is the author of Public Man, Private Woman (1981). Her latest book, Meditations on Western Political Thought (1986) analyzes the moral and political implications of figures such as Kant, Rousseau, Mary Wollstonecroft, Jane Addams, and others. Part of the fascination in continuing Luther research relates to the always new insights that emerge, prompting both a "Yes" and a "No."

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I

The "popular view," as I sketched it above, is not "all wrong." There is a version of Luther that emphasizes certain features of his thought and downplays others, reasonably locating him as a father of freedom. But what sort of freedom and to what ends? Here it is necessary to introduce one of the perennial problems of political life and thought - authority. To set the stage for the "legitimation crisis" of Luther's epoch, one must conjure up images of dislocation and unsettlement: the break-down or ungluing of the medieval synthesis, of feudal ties of reciprocity and the manorial system; a Europe emerging from the devastation of the Black Death; the waning power of the papacy vis a vis princes; the rise of trade, commerce, and a new mercantile class.

The majority of people were non-literate (a better term than "illiterate" which presumes literacy as a standard), their lives suffused with powerful visual images and revolving around shared sacred rituals. Although all men and women "believed" (this is a world permeated with the great Christian story), some were believers in different ways, heretics and reform spiritualists alike.¹

Johan Huizinga speaks of a world passing away, a world swept by waves of mysticism and occasional violence, extremes of piety and kindness as well as cruelty. All this is familiar-perhaps too familiar because we see it through eyes that divide the world, before we even begin to look, into "religious" and "secular," a division that makes no sense at all in Luther's time.² For religion in this God-drenched age was a force in itself, one not reducible to the terms of particular socioeconomic configurations.

A different sense of time prevailed for those living in Luther's epoch, for time was not yet money, fragmented into units and assigned "value." (The term value, which we often apply to an individual's moral beliefs and guiding motivations, is drawn from market economics.) Holy Days, most commonly celebrations of the lives of saints, were numerous and the rhythm of the seasons was tied to the life of Jesus: Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Ascension. It was an era of Carnivals and Fools. For example: a carnival season ran from St. Martin's Day (November 11) to Shrove Tuesday in February. Celebrations that have come down to us as Mardi Gras or Carnivale (if you live in Venice) invited rituals of reversal, the wearing of masks and taking on other personae. Sexuality, from all the evidence, was fairly loose. It was normal for a city to have "a bawdy house and a beer house," in Luther's words. "Society was both permissive and conventional," writes John Todd in his biography, Luther: A Life. "Perhaps a cliche may be valid-the reaction from self-indulgence found an outlet in pilgrimages

¹ Those omitted by definition from the medieval synthesis, for example, Jews, nevertheless existed inside their own world of belief. There were no "secularists" as we understand the term.
² John Huizinga, The Waning of the Middles Ages (Garden City: Doubleday Anchor Book,1954).

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and formal religious gestures of all kinds, sometimes hysterical."³ There were no ID cards, no licenses, no citizen dossiers, no fingerprints. The individual has not yet become a bureaucratic object.

One dimension of the "complex Luther" reflects this "freedom." He was, for example, a hearty beer drinker. More importantly, he exhibits relative ease about matters regarding the body and what we rather antiseptically call its "functions." He is notorious for his vivid descriptions of his bowel problems. But, more than that, and more interesting in terms of representations of sexual identity and the self, is his condemnation of attacks upon the female body by those he thrashed as pretentious "schoolmen, the monks, and such other" who (he has one "Crotus" in mind) dared "to blaspheme God's creature through whom he was himself born. It would be tolerable if he were to find fault with the behavior of women, but to defile their creation and nature is most godless."⁴ Luther also took the side of a young married woman who learned her husband was impotent after marriage but wanted children. Luther advised her to seek a divorce and, if her husband wouldn't grant one, to have intercourse with another man but to ascribe "the children to the putative father."⁵

From our lofty perch, one afforded by the widely shared view that the modern human is the measure of all things, analysts and laypersons alike frequently persist in presuming a sharp fissure between the supposed un-free or less-free past of the medieval and early modern period and our own self-celebrations as rational beings, free from superstition, free, too, from "nature," the controllers of our individual and collective destinies. Yet, systematic attempts to suppress female sexuality by channelling it into and through rigid norms deepened with the emergence of classical bourgeois civilization. Luther, in what seems to us an unusually liberated view of the matter given our present-mindedness, is, in fact, well within the range of expressible opinion for his age and more flexible than many subsequent thinkers.

But I noted a "legitimation crisis" and described above the markers of a time fraught with upheaval. Enter, explicitly, the problem of authority. Luther emerges as radical in his views, penning a political-theology that bears both liberating-with our notion of freedom in mind-and baneful implications. We will look at both sides of this authority problem, the liberating side we call "Luther sic" and the baneful side "Luther non."

II

Hannah Arendt writes that "the moment we begin to talk and think about authority, after all, one of the central concepts of political thought, it is as though we were caught in a maze of obstructions,

³ John M. Todd, Luther: A Life (New York: Crossroad, 1982), p. 16.
⁴ Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 87.
⁵ Also cited in ibid., p. 88.

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metaphors, and figures of speech in which everything can be taken and mistaken for something else, because we have no reality, either in history or in everyday experience, to which we can unanimously appeal."⁶ Arendt is correct about the maze in which we find ourselves when we turn to the elusive yet inescapable matter of authority, one linked in complex ways to what counts as freedom in any given age. In our own era, for example, those who think about authority almost unanimously appeal, or make reference to, a perceived displacement, debasement, or sublimination of authority, seeing authority as an ambiguous notion at best. The modern thinker who sets out to pin down or uncover authority does so from a stance which accepts our own crisis of authority as a starting point. That crisis of authority enters into everyday discourse when some among us lament the breakdown of the authority of teachers or parents, or when increases in crime are seen as a disintegration of the authority of the law, hence an invitation to law-lessness.

Arendt provides a helpful marker for consideration of the crisis of authority in Luther's time by reminding us that the roots of authority and power lie in the Latin auctoritas and potestas, respectively, each bearing divergent meanings. Authority appeared originally in a context in which it was inseparable from legitimation or entitlement: the right to speak, the right to be heard, for those in authority were augmenting (auctorilas derives from the verb augere, to augment) the foundation of political order, hence participating in the freedom of politics or the freedom that politics makes possible. (Potestas or power, however, meant simply the ability to compel or to enforce obedience and it was inseparable from violence.) Interestingly, our word "author," the creator or originator of a text, also derives from the same root as authority: authorial, authoritative, authoritarian, authorize are overlapping moments that set the horizon for our considerations.

It is Luther as author and his dramatic claims that the authorial self can interpret and understand Scripture on its own, if he, or she, is true to the authority of Holy Writ, who helps to unleash an interpreting and reading self that forms part of the backdrop to our notion of individual freedom. The Word in hand, the text before us, insisting upon our author-ity, the individual-if armed with Luther's prodigious scholarly and rhetorical gifts-could breach the "second wall" of the Romanists, the doctrine that interpretation of Scripture belonged to no one save the pope.⁷ "Therefore, it is a wickedly invented fable … that the interpretation of Scripture or the confirmation of its interpretation belongs to the pope alone."⁸ In his "Preface to the Revelation of Saint John," Luther writes: "About this book of the revelation of John, I leave everyone free to hold his own ideas, and would bind no man to my opinion or judgment;

⁶ Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 136.
⁷ Martin Luther, Three Treatises (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1960), from "An Open Letter to the Christian Nobility," pp. 20- 23.
⁸ Ibid., p. 23.

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I say what I feel."⁹ Pitting his interpretation, and the authority of Scripture itself (Luther having pierced its secrets) against the church, whose emissary, Cajetan, was in sympathy with critics of church corruption but insisted the church's authority-its authoritative teachings-must be upheld, Luther helped to harness the nascent social energies of his day, including the eruptive force of the vernacular.

In a brilliant discussion of translation that prefigures Wittgenstein's ordinary language philosophy, Luther indicated that he had translated the New Testament "to the best of my ability and according to my conscience…. No one is forbidden to do a better piece of work." However, whatever his mistakes, he would "not suffer the Papists to be the judges" for he knew better than they "how much knowledge, work, reason, and understanding is required in a good translator; they have never tried it."¹⁰ For help in translating-in making a translation "clear and strong" if one wants to speak "German, not Latin or Greek"--one must be true to the linguistic field in which one is immersed, one must look to "daily use." "We must not, like these asses, ask the Latin letters how we are to speak German; but we must ask the mother in the home, the children on the street, the common man in the marketplace about this, and took them in the mouth to see how they speak, and afterwards do our translating."¹¹ He importantly inaugurated an explosion of words-his own and others-vulgar, earthy, often angry.

But matters are never so simple. If the authoritative interpreter is denied, who then has the interpretive right or freedom? Luther's deed to us is fraught with ambivalence: not just everyone, not just anything goes--despite his apparent interpretive pluralism in the citations above. For authority remains-the authority of internal textual evidence. Nevertheless, his claims are dramatic: the Christian requires only the pure Word, needing neither the structural social edifice of institutional Christianity nor the vast intellectual edifice of medieval thought that reached through reason toward God.

Though Luther was no Occamist, he placed strong limitations on the ability of reason to attain or aspire to the heavenly through human capacities. With the scholastic doctors as his explicit target, Luther restricts and restrains philosophy. Aristotle gets put in his place, much diminished from his pinnacle in Aquinas' systematic theology. Yet, something of the Arabic philosopher Averroes' doctrine of the "doubletruth," found in Aquinas, is also at work for Luther, namely, the idea that what is true philosophically may not be "the truth," may not be theologically pure. We would say that Luther insisted upon different discursive universes having their own rules and tests, with theology on a different plane from philosophy. God's Word, Luther argued, needs no

⁹ "Preface to the Revelation of Saint John, 1522," in E.G. Rupp and Benjamin Drewery, Martin Luther (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), p. 98.
¹⁰ "On Translating: An Open Letter, 1530," in Rupp and Drewery, Martin Luther, pp.87-91,87.
¹¹Ibid., p. 88,

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elaborate justifications; moreover, God is radically unknowable through reason. We have intimations of God only through the workings of God's grace, not our own minds.

Luther's renewed emphasis on the simple, decent, pure Christian life-certainly this is how it was perceived by many during his life-time, and has come down to us-offers the promise of a "democratic" epistemology of simple faith against the "aristocratic" epistemology of church scholars.¹² Sola fides, scriptura sola-faith alone, only the Scripture: the Christian had need of nothing more, given the free gift of grace. The ground shifted from the ritual of the mass, turning on the special authority of the priestly office, to listening to the spoken word, to exhortations and interpretations from the minister to fellow believers. To the Word, Luther attributed great power. In one of his Wittenberg Sermons, 1522, he told the faithful that

faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed Indulgences and all the Papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached, and wrote God's word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept, or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip [Melanchthon] and [Nicholas von] Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the Papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it. I did nothing; the Word did everything. Had I desired to foment trouble, I could have started such a game that even the emperor would not have been safe. But what would it have been? Mere fool's play. I did nothing; I let the Word do its work.¹³

This sounds rather disingenuous, yet Luther clearly believed that he was but an imperfect vehicle through which the awesome force of the Word worked its way.

III

What of women and the authorial self, women and the power of words if not the Word?¹⁴ Luther does not address himself explicitly to this issue. Remember, he does call for the translator to use ordinary language, to consult "the woman in the house" as an expert on language. This is boldly populist and that may be problematic where women authors are concerned. Here I pose a paradoxical possibility for provocative purposes: Luther's deflation of the "aristocratic epistemology" of medieval philosophy and literature may have eroded rather than strengthened the author-ship of women as well as the churchmen who were his explicit nemeses. For there were medieval women writers, not just a few rare women here and there but a respectable company whose work has come down to us. "In contrast with women writers of the more recent past, medieval women writers did not use male pseudonymns but

¹² See the discussion in Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Boston: Little Brown, 1960), pp. 141-164,152.
¹³ "Extracts from the Wittenberg Sermons, 1522," in Rupp and Drewery, Martin Luther, pp. 100-102.
¹⁴ It would be unfair to criticize Luther for not putting women in the pulpit immediately, contrary to all extant social arrangements and expectations. But posing the authorinterpreter issue is reasonable-there were reading and writing women.

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identified themselves by name and sex. In addition, unlike the works of women writers of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and even nineteenth centuries, those of medieval women provide little evidence that they were ridiculed for or prevented from accomplishing their literary endeavors."¹⁵

Why didn't the medieval woman writer resort to the strategic ruse of the nom de plume? What happened between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries that altered the social terms under which women authored, had author-ity with words? I shall hazard one point of interpretation that implicates Luther in the eclipse of female written authority: women are importantly privatized in Luther's thought. Women are not a special target: the overall effect of Luther's political theology is to strip individuals of social imbeddedness and a civic identity. Luther's doctrine of "the two Kingdoms" bifurcated the self: a radical interiority was invited, a privatization followed.¹⁶ No longer situated in a social order with no distinctions between state and society, public and private, as we know them, the post-medieval woman could go public only if she were not "named," for the private realm was dictated as her sphere.¹⁷

I seem to have moved prematurely to "Luther, non," but it is impossible to interpret Luther unambivalently: his work is so fraught with tensions and lurchings that, to be true to his complexity, one cannot endorse the Luther of Whiggish history. Take, for example, Luther on the family and the "woman in the home." We find a powerful insistence on conjugal equality, though man and wife have different authoritative status since men were heads of households. Men and women are bound by the same set of moral rules and each has available a life of simple piety, each can know "the freedom of the Christian." The social relations of everyday life gained a new sanctity, no longer construed as second best to lives of the ecclesiastical orders. The "natural desire of sex" is compatible with mutual respect and is granted new legitimacy.¹⁸

An enrichment in intimate life, including more open expression of familial love and devotion, is attributable in part to the revolution in sensibility Luther helped to inaugurate. This transformation is marked in a poignant letter to his own son. Luther addresses "Hans Luther" as

¹⁵ Katharine M. Wilson, ed., Medieval Women Writers (Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1984), p. xix. See also Peter Dronke, ed., Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). See also the three volumes in Roland H. Bainton's series, Women of the Reformation (1971, 1973, 1977).
¹⁶ Obviously, Luther's work didn't bring about this result singlehandedly. Complex social and economic transformations were also at work. The discursive background to Luther's emphases was set very early, for example, with St. Paul's insistence on freedom as part of an inward domain. See Hannah Arendt's discussion, "What is Freedom?," in Between Past and Future (New York: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 145.
¹⁷ There is an additional eclipse of symbolic and discursive representations of the female or the feminized in Luther's thought, given his stripping of the greatest of all female symbols-Mary--of her sacral authority and role, together with his repudiation of the saints.
¹⁸ See a more complete critical dissection in Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman, pp. 80-92.

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"dear little son" and signs "Your loving father." He writes his child a vivid tale of a beautiful garden where "many children are," wearing, "golden jackets" and gathering "nice apples under the trees," riding. "pretty little ponies with golden reins and silver saddles."¹⁹ The point of the tale-a picture of heaven for a child-is to instruct the child in righteousness, but also to take some of the sting off always present. possibility in an era when child mortality indices were, by our standards, breathtakingly high. Luther is preparing his own "dear little Hans" for the garden.

It is a moving letter, so dramatically at odds with Luther the thundering polemicist that one wonders: can it have been written by the same man? The answer is "probably not" for Luther displayed a many-sidedness that strikes us as peculiarly modern. His is at one and the same time a self-certain self proclaiming at the Diet of Worms: "I neither can nor will revoke anything, for it is neither safe nor honest to act against one's conscience," and a self that peers over the abyss and sees … nothing: "Ich bin's nit."²⁰ In our moments of self-conscious acknowledgment of the demands and authority of a free conscience, even if there be risk, in our moments of existential dread, we recognize Luther as one of us-male and female alike.

IV

Sheldon Wolin, in his interpretation of Luther in Politics and Vision, sees Luther attempting to depoliticize religious thought by assaulting the ecclesiastical polity-a complex ordo, or order, in which regnum and sacerdotium comprised aspects or moments within a greater whole, the respublica Christiana.²¹ Yet, Luther's "depoliticized religious thought" exerted and continues to exert a profound influence on political structures and ideas. W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, however, in an essay, "Martin Luther and the 'Two Kingdoms'," depicts Luther as definitely a "political theologian" whose doctrine of the Two Kingdoms (die zwei Reich) set forth a theory of temporal government with serious consequences.²² The difference between these positions is not great, for each concurs on the most important point: that Luther is aptly located within the domain of political theory.

Interestingly, it is with Luther's explicit understanding of temporal authority that the picture of Luther the freedom-fighter is most out-of-focus. For within his vision of the necessity for and justification of the secular arm, we see a harshness that inclines toward political authoritarianism,

¹⁹ "To Hans Luther at Wittenberg, 19 June 1530," in Rupp and Drewery, Martin Luther, p. 153.
²⁰ "Luther's Answer before the Emperor and the Diet of Worms, 18 April 1521," in Rupp and Drewery, Martin Luther, pp. 58-60, 60. Erik Erikson, in Young Man Luther, offers a dramatic account of the "fit in the choir" during which Luther fell to the floor crying "Ich bin's nit" or "non sum." (New York: W.W. Norton, 1958), pp. 23-40.
²¹ Wolin, Politics and Vision, 143.
²² W.D.J. Cargill Thompson, "Martin Luther and the 'Two Kingdoms'," in David Thomson, ed., Political Ideas (New York: Penguin, 1982), pp. 34-52, 34, 40.

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toward the absolute state. The markers of the story refer back to the question of authority, a problematic inseparable from issues of legitimacy, force, order, as well as freedom. In "An Open Letter to the German Nobility," Luther appeals to the secular princes to reform the church by openly revolting against its institutional forms and the authority internal to, and flowing from, those forms. His treatise is a wide-ranging, often vituperative rejection of the ecclesiastical edifice of medieval Christiandom. He strips the church, as an institutional edifice, of authority-he de-authorizes the church-yet he simultaneously valorizes secular authority.

The paradox here is startling and explicit, requiring no hermeneutical cleverness to expose. In depoliticizing the church, Luther does not so much break the bonds of authority as draw them ever tighter by providing for the flow of all legitimate authority over persons and events, over "externals," to secular rule. Assaulting the "three walls of the Romanists" (we discussed the "second wall," the pope's exclusive interpretive authority), Luther counters the claim that temporal power has no jurisdiction over the spiritual. To the contrary, the pope should have no authority over the emperor or any other lawfully established princes. But the obverse does not pertain. "I say," he writes, that "the temporal power is ordained of God to punish evil-doers and to protect them that do well…. Therefore, [it should] be left free to perform its office without hindrance throughout the whole body of Christendom."²³ The nobility should set themselves against the pope "as against a common enemy." Further deauthorization of the church is proclaimed by Luther in another of his great treatises, "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," in which he takes on the sacraments and diminishes the church's mission as dispenser of sacred ritual.²⁴

By stripping political power of restraints exercised by ecclesiastical institutions and by downgrading the "right of resistance," a major and growing strain in medieval thought lodged in the idea of a social contract, Luther also squeezed out space for notions of rule based on the consent of the governed. He limits resistance to that of the individual commanded in a matter of faith-but faith, like freedom, pertains only to the "inner" self, not to "externals."²⁵ In general, the prince should be obstructed in his grim work neither by pope "above" nor "the people" below. A new theory of the state and an attack against the doctrine of a natural right to resist tyrannical rule go hand-in-hand in Luther's thought. Luther's symbol of temporal rule is the sword-the bloody sword always unsheathed and at the ready.

True Christians-and they are few-have no need of any institutional edifice. But the vast majority require reproof and correction. For this, Luther turns to the secular arm, interweaving church and state into one

²³ "Open Letter," in Three Treatises, p. 17.
²⁴ "The Babylonian Captivity of the Church," in Three Treatises, pp. 115-261.
²⁵ See "Secular Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed," in Rupp and Drewery, Martin Luther, pp. 107-112.

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edifice of power that becomes the Landeskirche, the state church. Given Luther's bias against institutions, combined with his greatest fear-disorder and chaos-he is forced to rely on secular authority, indeed to depend upon it, upholding only the weak reed of the prince's conscience as a check on his power.

Luther's celebrated "priesthood of all believers" and freedom of the Christian, when translated by others into directly political terms, brings into painfully sharp focus a "Luther" repressed in the Whiggish account noted earlier. Luther hated and feared disorder, insisting it must be put down at all costs. Temporal government must have the power to suppress disobedience with no interference from institutional church authority. The kingdom of this earth is primarily the kingdom of evil-doers and they must be restrained. Politically disturbing features of this view emerge with searing clarity in the famous case of the Peasant Revolt.²⁶ When the chips were down, Luther could turn nowhere but to the prince and call upon him to slay without mercy those who had dared to take up arms under Lutherian slogans of the radical equality of all Christians, and as the priesthood of all believers.

Unfortunately, Luther seems to turn to force enthusiastically, not reluctantly. The peasants, Luther cries, merit "death in body and soul." They are "faithless, perjured, lying, disobedient knaves and scoundrels" for reneging on their oath to be "true and faithful, submissive and obedient" to their rulers. The only result of their foul actions is murder and bloodshed, turning "everything upside down, like the greatest disaster." Given the threat posed by the insurgents to law and order, "everyone who can" should "smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful or devilish than a rebel."²⁷ It is better that all the peasants be killed rather than sovereign authority destroyed. This is very strong stuff.

Luther wrote a follow-up pamphlet to explain the first one which had disturbed even his most faithful followers by its open bloodthirstiness. There is no way-this is the crux of his second message-to avoid the obligation to obey established civil authority. God is the author of the kingdom of the world and all who are not true Christians-nearly everybody save a few of authentic faith-belong to this kingdom alone. The world of the fallen is fundamentally orderless; hence, order must be imposed. Luther concludes on the grim note that the world cannot be "ruled without blood." The bloody sword is described as God's rod, a statement that cries out for a psychoanalytic gloss so obviously that it is best to demur. But it is difficult not to concur with Ernst Troeltsch's harsh judgment: "Within the law of the State, Luther's rigid idea of Original Sin and his demand for severe discipline, his contempt for the masses, and his conception of the civil authority as the representative of

²⁶ "Revolt" in the singular is a misnomer for the reference is to not one but a series of uprisings in 1524-5 by peasants pressed by economic change and anxious to recover lost liberties.
²⁷ "Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, May 1525," in Rupp and Drewery, Martin Luther, pp. 121-126.

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divine punishment and reward, inclined him to extreme severity, and he was urgent in recommending the exercise of penalties like breaking on the wheel, decapitation, and torture."²⁸

V

Luther additionally opens up the self to more far-reaching control by the temporal powers in his assault on the laxity of church-inspired social forms-the festivals and holy days mentioned above. He would reduce the whole lot to Sundays only, because feast-days, with church sanction, "are now abused by drinking, gaming, idleness, and all manner of sins…. There are, indeed, some mad prelates who think they are doing a good work if they make a festival in honor of St. Ottilia or St. Barbara or some other saint … but they would be doing a far better work if they honored the saint by turning a saint's-day into a working-day."²⁹ At this juncture, we are brought back to Luther's understanding of "the self," or of that self that figures in his third foundational treatise, "The Freedom of a Christian." It is, to our way of thinking, both a familiar and a strange freedom. Familiar, because we recognize its individualism and evocation of a kind of radical, interior subjectivity. Strange, because we are not comfortable with paradox. Being the children of liberal society, it makes no sense for us to be told that the Christian is a perfectly free lord of all and subject to none, yet, simultaneously, a dutiful servant of all, subject to all.³⁰

For Luther, there is no contradiction. Just as there are two kingdoms, human nature is two-fold, spiritual and bodily, inner and outer. It is the inner man who is free and righteous, and this inner man is justified by faith alone. He must obey God's commandments first in his heart and soul-first and, it should be added, foremost. The true Christian needs neither the law, nor good works, nor institutions. Yet, he is active in loving service to others even as he must be subject to governing authorities in externals. That is the story, and it is one that quickly goes underground, becoming a tale of two selves: one who retreats into the citadel of inner freedom, accepts a sharp bifurcation between public and private morality, and, in thus accepting, is drawn into the orbit of whatever power is dominant at the time. Troeltsch explains the impoverishment of Lutheran social theory, as compared with Catholic and Calvinist social thought, by the fact that Lutheran Christian individualism retired behind the line of battle of "all external events and outward activity," having no theory of a form for social life other than the state.³¹

²⁸ Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Vol. 2 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 533.
²⁹ "Letter," in Three Treatises, p. 73.
³⁰ "The Freedom of a Christian," in Three Treatises, pp. 262-316.
³¹ Troeltsch, op. cit., p. 540. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who broke from the official state Lutheran church over Nazism, found the Lutheran conception of church and community impoverished compared with Catholic teaching. To express a "concrete solidarity," he turned, in part, to Catholic sources. See The Cost of Discipleship (New York: Macmillan, 1978).

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VI

The deconstruction of female representations, potent and authoritative images, is unnoticed in received notions of Luther and the Reformation, perhaps because we have been such a militantly upbeat "protestant" society. The institution which Luther aimed to strip of all authority was construed in gendered terms as female, specifically as a mother, mater ecclesia. The church as mother is evoked early in patristic literature. The church brings forth new life and nourishes all humanity at her breast. To be sure, this imagery is ambivalent for the "mother" required and nurtured male mediations. Nevertheless, it is mother church (also sometimes called "the bride of Christ"), not father church, and its "care-taking" authority that Luther assaults. This is the institutional moment of Luther's masculinization of theology.

In Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages, Caroline Walker Bynum details a feminization of religious language in twelfth century life. The markers of this feminized discourse included dramatic use by male writers (primarily members of the Cistercian order) of powerful female images to express their ambivalence about the exercise of earthly authority and to convey their relations to those over whom they held authority in maternal terms. Abbots and brothers are referred to as mothers. Devotion to the Virgin increased as did devotion to female saints, with the percentage of saints who were women involving a steady increase.³² Bynum indicates that "there is some reason to hold that the increased use of marriage and motherhood as metaphors in the twelfth century reflects a more positive evaluation of these institutions in society…. Saints' lives begin to emphasize the influence of mothers on children at the moment when motherhood becomes an important image of God's activities. The locution "mother-Jesus" came to stand for "compassion, nurturing, and union." "Throughout the Middle Ages, authors found it far easier than we seem to find it to apply characteristics stereotyped as male or female to the opposite sex."³³ If to this feminized discourse one adds the writings of thirteenth century women mystics, discussed by Bynum, a. rich picture of flourishing female-constituted spirituality emerges.

The symbolic-sacral moment of Luther's masculinized discourse lies, then, in his explicit diminution of the symbol of the Holy Mother and his repudiation of maternal tropes and metaphors more generally. Salve Regina chanted medievalists: Hail, Holy Queen. Hail-and farewell - Luther insists. "They put that noble child Mary right into the place of Christ," Luther laments. "They fashioned Christ into a judge and thus devised a tyrant for anguished consciences, so that all comfort and confidence was transferred from Christ to Mary, and then everyone turned from Christ to his particular Saint. Can anyone deny this?"³⁴

³² Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother.- Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), p. 137.
³³ Ibid., pp. 143,162.
³⁴ Quoted in Todd, Luther, p. 319.

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This is one of the chief sins of the Romanists that they would have us rely more on "Mary the Mother of Jesus, and the Saints" than on the Word.³⁵

Why should this matter, especially to a desacralized age such as our own? Moreover, did not the veneration of the Mother "oppress" women? Perhaps we have been too quick to leap to the conclusion that a theology without a dominant female symbol, whatever faults we may find with "her" from our standpoint, and a social world bereft of the authority such symbols confer on women-I say symbols because the plethora of medieval female saints were also obliterated inside Protestantism-is a matter of little import to us. We often think in reductive ways, for example, when we construe power in crudely binary terms: some have it, some don't-and those who do can compel those who do not. Thus, we lose subtler yet no less powerful webs of meaning and significance.

Feminist-informed cultural anthropology offers a critical wedge into Luther's deconstruction of female religious authority and authorities. The rise of secular male dominance is a complex, many-faceted question. But the "symbolic mechanisms" that help to establish this dominance includes the loss of guiding female symbols and the preeminence of male symbols.³⁶ The symbol of the succoring mother, sacred yet not terrifying, available to all her "children," existed in tension with the symbolism of women as the bringers of sin and the downfall of human kind. The masculinization of theology in Protestantism, with veneration of Mary condemned as ignorant idolatry, did not usher in some glorious new day for women free from limiting ideals. Instead, it invited the loss of a female-linked transcendent moment, a historic rupture we have yet to explore fully. The individual mother in the family may have gained a new status, though this was already happening in the high Middle Ages, but the female-as metaphor, as politically charged symbol, as emotional repository of human hopes-faded. Luther deconstructed, perhaps, more than he knew.

We are haunted by Luther-his over-personalization of religion and under-institutionalization of political and social life; his augmentation of secular authority and advocacy of civic passivity; his severance of public and private morality. The darker side seems, as this discussion ends, to prevail. But there is that other Luther-the avatar of individual conscience, the gentle family man who pictured golden gardens for a son and grieved long for a dead daughter. This Luther is perhaps best exemplified in a nativity sermon on "The Birth of Jesus," a tale, as Luther tells it, of the infusion of ordinary events with extraordinary meaning, a homey, down-to-earth story of the birth in humble surroundings

³⁵ A feminist-informed interpretation of Mary may be found in Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex.- The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
³⁶ I am relying here on Peggy Reeves Sanday's fascinating study, Female Power and Male Dominance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981).

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of a Savior who came among us as a vulnerable infant, "a true baby, with flesh, blood, hands, and legs."³⁷. It is this Luther of simple piety, shorn of thundering judgments, for the moment free from guile and anger, who comes into view as well. Alas, in the genealogy of political life and thought since Luther's death in 1545, this is not the Luther who has prevailed.

³⁷ Roland H. Bainton, The Martin Luther Christmas Book (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1948), p. 39.