Luther, Martin

LUTHER, MARTIN. - Initiator of Lutheranism and of Protestantism, b. at Eisleben (Saxony) in Germany on 10 Nov. 1483, to the miner Hans and Margherita Ziegler, and d. there on 18 Feb. 1546.

I. LIFE AND DOCTRINE UP TO 1517

Luther's family was of peasant origin and possessed some modest means; from the rough peasant environment Luther also preserved, even later, the violence and coarseness of his language, an almost superstitious fear of the devil in his many disguises, and for long years a preoccupation bordering on scrupulosity about doing what he believed he ought to do. Amid privations, and not without the help of benefactors, he attended the "trivium" at Mansfeld, then the school of the "Brothers of the Common Life" at Magdeburg from 1497, moving in 1498 to Eisenach; then, provided with a scholarship, he entered a university college at Erfurt to study jurisprudence according to his father's wish. The strictly legal studies were preceded by a course in philosophy; Luther followed it, learning Aristotelianism with an Occamist stamp and obtaining the academic title of "magister artium" at Epiphany in 1505. He had barely begun his studies in law when on 2 July 1505, the feast of St. Anne, while he was returning with a friend to Erfurt, a lightning bolt struck his companion, and Luther, under the impression of the event, made a vow to St. Anne to become a religious. In fact, two weeks later he entered, against his father's will, the convent of the Augustinian Hermits of Erfurt, where in 1506 he made his monastic profession and on 3 Apr. received priestly ordination.

The convent belonged to a "reformed" Congregation: a severe discipline was practiced there, interest in study was lively, and the life of piety and zeal for preaching were intense. Luther accepted its Rule with the conviction that it represented the sure way to attain salvation. Having entered the priesthood by order of his superiors, for the same reason he resumed his studies of philosophy and scholastic theology, in the "Studium generale" of the convent, whose orientation was the "via moderna," Occamism; in 1508 he is a lecturer in moral philosophy in the convent of Wittenberg, whence, in 1509, having become a bachelor in theology, he returns to Erfurt, to the Studium of the Order as "lector sententiarius."

These years of intense life of asceticism, study, and teaching were for Luther also years of harsh interior struggles. He had studied philosophy and theology on the then-fashionable Occamist texts of Gabriel Biel, and had assimilated their themes, learning in the field of epistemology to devalue concepts as mere "names" and to contest the claims of Aristotelian metaphysics in order to rely above all on experience; in the domain of theology, to recognize as the intimate essence of God His sovereign will and therefore to consider the dogmas to be believed and the laws to be observed as simple expressions of God's concrete will, not deducible in any way from the supreme divine Reason, thus accentuating the separation between faith and science; in the field of moral theology Luther had accepted the principle that man is capable of doing good, of becoming pleasing to God, of loving Him perfectly, when he truly engages his will: a principle thus formulated by Biel, "facienti quod in se est, Deus infallibiliter dat Gratiam," which externalized the concept of Grace and rejected the Thomistic doctrine of Grace as "habitus." Seriously concerned about his eternal salvation, as he himself asserted, Luther had engaged energetically in the practices of monastic asceticism (fasts, penances, pious devotions, examinations of conscience, humiliations, etc.) according to the Rule of his Order, convinced that they represented the way of perfection and could assure him peace of conscience and certainty of final salvation. Instead he could not attain the longed-for interior tranquility: the motions of concupiscence, despite mortifications, did not cease to make themselves felt; the thought of the pains of hell terrified him; sacramental confessions did not reassure him about the forgiveness of his sins; in the very reading of the Bible he felt like a nightmare the word of God's justice, which he believed demanded perfection of man. The young religious thus passed through grave crises of despair, to which certainly contributed the nervous tension of meditation and constant self-control, a timidity dating back to childhood and now aggravated into true scrupulosity. In opening up to his superior, Staupitz, Luther found relief and a first guidance toward peace of spirit, setting himself on the path of the mystics, of St. Bernard, of Tauler, above all of Gerson, author of the De consolatione theologiae, learning to renounce his restless activism in order to assume instead an attitude of quiet, of passivity, letting God and His Grace act, entrusting himself wholly and entirely to the love of God.

At this time Luther also had an intense external activity: besides teaching and preaching, he had functions of governance in the Order: in 1515, as district vicar, he had the supervision of eleven convents. In 1510-11 he made a journey to Rome to support his convent's appeal against a decree of union of the observants with the non-observants promoted by Staupitz; later he would give it a particular significance in function of his anti-papal polemic: but the recollections of the time show him concerned above all with his interior perfection, with making a general confession, with gaining the indulgences connected with pious practices; and, although he had noted with scandal the ignorance and laxity of clergy and people, the worldliness of cardinals, he does not receive a disturbing impression of the papacy of Julius II. On returning from his mission, which had had no success, he was definitively assigned to the convent of Wittenberg. At the University, recently founded there by the prince elector, he obtained in 1512 the doctorate in theology, and in 1513 began his lectures on biblical exegesis as Staupitz's substitute, commenting on the Psalms. In these years, in connection with his interior crisis, Luther's theological system also came to maturity, strongly reflecting his religious experience. Disappointed by Occamism in ethics and theology, Luther sought to define his experience of his relations with God through the study of St. Augustine, to whom the traditions of the Order naturally led him. What he now approached, however, was not the Neoplatonizing Augustine of the humanists — with whom at Erfurt, his university of formation, he had had few and superficial contacts — but the anti-Pelagian Augustine, in whom the themes of Adam's sin, its consequences, Grace and Predestination occupy the foreground. These motifs, if one accepts the results of Müller's research, already presented themselves organized in an "Augustinian" system recognizable in eminent theologians of the Order in the 15th-16th centuries (Favaroni, Giovanni Perez, Simone Fidati da Cascia, and, with Occamist contaminations, Gregory of Rimini): such a system started from the identification of original sin with concupiscence, affirmed the immanent imperfection of all human works, and the necessity of integrating man's "imperfect justice" with the "perfect justice" of Christ bestowed by Grace (the theory of "double justice"). In this system of late Scholasticism L. found elements to justify theologically his experience of the radical sinfulness of man, a slave of concupiscence, and of liberation through total abandonment to divine mercy, while in the meditation of the Bible, during the winter of 1512-13, he became convinced that he had found the profound meaning of the word of God in the exegesis of the concept of the "justice of God" (Rom. 1:17) of St. Paul, whereby it is no longer, as he had previously understood with anguish, the "wrath of God" that punishes, but that which, mercifully forgiving, makes sinners just.

From this "exegetical discovery of the Gospel" (L. said he had made it on a day in 1519 in the tower of the convent, whence the name "tower experience" ["Turmerlebnis"]), while Denifle has been able to prove that such an interpretation was familiar to the great majority of medieval exegetes) and from the mystical-quietistic-Augustinian motifs recalled, he derives not only a personal religious attitude, but a whole new orientation with regard to traditional religious practices, the institutions of the Church, and monasticism, which gradually emerges in his university lectures and his sermons, as a critique of works of devotion, of vows, of ascetic commitment in general insofar as they claim to be "meritorious," such as to be pleasing to God by their own efficacy, and as an exaltation of the Sacrifice of Christ as the sole source of forgiveness and merit. This orientation becomes ever clearer and more determined in the Lectures on the Psalms (1513-15), in those On the Letter to the Romans (1515-1516) and On the Letter to the Galatians (1516-17), in the disputations, also of 1516-17, On the Powers of the Will of Man without Grace and Against Scholastic Theology, as well as in certain sermons and in his correspondence, where he condemns the excessive recourse to indulgences, the development of the cult of the saints, pilgrimages, particular devotions, the pomp and worldly interests of men of the Church: it finds support in the circle of his disciples, in many confreres and colleagues, beginning with Staupitz.

II. LUTHER AND LUTHERANISM IN GERMANY (1517-1546)

To give broader resonance to these ideas and experiences of the cloister and the school, to make them a revolutionary ferment in the German environment, already charged with anti-papal and anti-ecclesiastical tendencies, for the many national, economic-social, political and cultural reasons that constitute the general causes of the "reformation" (v.), there came the publication of the indulgence for the construction of St. Peter's in Rome, in connection with the family and financial policy of the Brandenburgs. Albert of Brandenburg, archbishop of Magdeburg and administrator of the bishopric of Halberstadt, from 1514 also elected archbishop of Mainz, in order to accumulate these bishoprics upon his person had obligated himself to the Apostolic Chamber for 24,000 ducats. For the payment he had bound himself with the Fugger Bank of Augsburg, and the Curia, to facilitate it for him, had granted him the preaching of the indulgence for the Fabric of St. Peter for eight years in the territories of his bishoprics and in those of Brandenburg, with the clause that half of the net revenue was to go to Rome.

In the preaching of the indulgence, entrusted to the Dominican Giovanni Tetzel, there were repeated highly deplored abuses, due to the current formula of "indulgentia a poena et culpa," to the abuses of the collectors in issuing the certificate, whose taxation was in proportion to the wealth of the applicant, to the exaggeration concerning the efficacy of the indulgence for the dead, while the ethical-religious conditions required even by the theology of the time for gaining them were too much passed over in silence. In Saxony its preaching had been prohibited, but L. learned of it from one who had gone to gain the indulgence at nearby Jüterbog, and, in coherence with his doctrines, he contested such preaching, posting, according to the academic customs of the time, on the doors of the All Saints' church of Wittenberg, which was the church of the University and of the castle, on 31 Oct. 1517, 95 theses in Latin. One part of them was dogmatically correct; another strongly polemical against indulgences and the Pope who distributed them; the rest rejected the indulgence as such and the concept of the "thesaurus Ecclesiae" concerning the merits of the saints: to the exterior practice of indulgences was opposed a more spiritual religiosity, the acceptance of the cross. The theses, in the overexcited environment, immediately had a vast and profound resonance. In two weeks they were by then known throughout Germany and found particularly lively support among the humanists and in ecclesiastical circles that desired the reform of the Church. The "antitheses" of Wimpina, of Eck, of Prierias had little effect; indeed they gave L. the occasion to confirm his affirmations in the replies to the latter two. Meanwhile Tetzel and the aggrieved Albert of Mainz reacted in turn by denouncing to Rome certain propositions of L. as heretical. The Holy See intervened mildly, seeking to impose silence on L. through the superiors of the monk; but it obtained a contrary result, since L. at the Chapter of the Order of Heidelberg, on 24 Apr. 1518, delivered a reply on the subject of indulgences and won over to his ideas some confreres, among them Butzer and Brenz. He shortly afterward drafted Resolutiones to the 95 theses, which he sent with an accompanying letter to Leo X.

The canonical process against L. began in Rome in May 1518; in July of the same year he was ordered to present himself in Rome within 60 days to clear himself of the suspicion of having spread erroneous doctrines; however, through the intervention of his prince, the elector of Saxony Frederick the Wise, he was able to appear at Augsburg before the cardinal legate Tommaso de Vio Gaetano. In the interrogation that took place on 12-13 Oct. 1518 L. refused to recant; then he departed from Augsburg for fear of being arrested, not without first having drafted an appeal to the Pope, badly informed, to inform himself better. On 28 Nov. 1518 then at Wittenberg, foreseeing condemnation, he appealed from the badly advised Pope to a "future ecumenical council." Card. Gaetano had asked the elector of Saxony for the surrender of the friar, but it had been refused on the pretext that L.'s heresy had not been proven. Without result was the mediating action of a resourceful papal emissary, the German Miltitz, to whom L. in Jan. 1519 had promised only to keep silent, provided however that his adversaries did the same. In the course of the Leipzig disputation with Eck (from 27 June to 16 July 1519) L.'s doctrinal situation worsened, since he had contested, beyond the primacy of the Pope, the infallibility of the councils. Meanwhile his opposition to the Pope found new arguments in the writings of Huss on the Church, in the confutation of the "donatio Constantini" of Valla, in the grievances ("gravamina") of the German Church with respect to the Curia, listed from the 15th century onward, while the young humanists of the circle of Ulrich von Hutten and the revolutionary knights led by Franz von Sickingen spoke out loudly in his favor, pushing him to turn his theological controversy with Rome into a German national question, taking advantage of the widespread aversion to the Curia. It was in this atmosphere that the writings of 1520 were composed which mark his break from the Church and from its doctrine: the pamphlet On the Papacy in Rome, the Sermon on the New Testament (against the sacrificial character of the Mass), but above all the three great programmatic writings of reform: To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (June 1520), De captivitate Babylonica Ecclesiae praeludium (Oct. 1520), On the Freedom of a Christian, with an epistle to Leo X (Sept. 1520). In the first, published in a very evocative popular German, of which 4,000 copies were sold in a few days, L. advocates the demolition of the three orders of walls of the Romanists, that is, the distinction between priests and laity, the exclusive right of the hierarchy to interpret the Bible, the right of the pope to convoke councils, as a premise for the reform of the Church; and he asks that this be entrusted to an ecumenical council of the type of that of Constance, which would reorganize the Church along national lines, eliminate the "gravamina" of the German Church, reduce the number of feast days, crush usury, improve the conditions of the peasants, free the clergy from the obligation of celibacy, modify or abolish canon law, especially the pontifical decretals, reform the method of teaching in the universities, removing the books of Aristotle and replacing them with the study of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and mathematics, and establishing the commentary on the Bible in place of that on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. The De captivitate Babylonica, drafted and published in Latin in reply to a writing by the Cremonese Dominican Isolani, designates as "captivity" the refusal of the chalice to the laity, the doctrine of Transubstantiation, the sacrificial character of the Mass; it denies the quality of Sacraments to Confirmation, Holy Orders, Matrimony, and Extreme Unction; it retains as Sacraments only Baptism, the Supper and Penance, but the latter with a particular interpretation. The pamphlet On the Freedom of a Christian is, finally, the calm exposition of L.'s mystical-religious doctrine, according to which the Christian, entrusting himself to God and trusting in him, becomes lord of all things and is released from every subjection. Good works, to which he remains obliged (assistance of one's neighbor, the commandments, etc.) have meaning, but not with a view to a merit to be acquired before God, rather insofar as they spring from a pious soul, thus renewing the condemnation of works meritorious for eternal salvation which were an essential part of the traditional conception of Christian life. L. thus mobilized the national forces for the reform of the doctrine and the structure of the Church. This represented a strengthening of the movement but at the expense of the initial religious inspiration. The social, economic, political and personal motives, in fact, then predominant in the classes to which he appealed, made themselves felt more and more, and at times decisively, upon the reform.

Meanwhile the proceedings against L. were concluded in Rome on the basis of the acts of the Leipzig disputation. The bull Exsurge, Domine of 15 June 1520 threatened L. with excommunication if within 60 days he did not repudiate 41 propositions declared partly heretical, partly "false, scandalous, seductive and contrary to Catholic truth." They concerned man's incapacity, faith, justification, Grace, the Sacraments, the hierarchy and Purgatory. Moreover the bull condemned to destruction the books containing such errors. The bull was published with great difficulty in Germany through the efforts of Aleander and Eck. L. rejected it with the writing Against the Bull of the Christ of the End (Oct. 1520), and by burning it publicly, together with the Corpus iuris canonici, the Summa of St. Thomas and writings of his adversaries, on 10 Dec. 1520 at Wittenberg. There followed therefore on 3 Jan. 1521 the bull Decet Romanum Pontificem which declared L. and his followers excommunicated, to which in turn L. responded with other and more violent pamphlets, with other anti-papal caricatures.

The bull, according to the laws of the Empire, was to be executed by the public authorities. But L. now had, among the nobility and the princes, supporters who were not disposed to sacrifice him. Therefore when at the Diet of Worms (1521) the papal nuncio requested the ban for L. and his adherents, L. obtained a hearing, and only for his refusal to recant and through the resolute intervention of the new emperor Charles V was he struck by the imperial ban (8 May 1521), which implied the prohibition of preaching his doctrine and the condemnation of his writings to the fire. However, L., while he was leaving Worms before the imperial safe-conduct expired, was abducted by masked knights of the Elector of Saxony, who took him to the Wartburg, where L. lived for ten months under the false name of Jörg. In this refuge L., rejecting as diabolical temptations the doubts about the legitimacy of his conduct that surfaced in him in the form of nightmares and hallucinations, became ever more firmly convinced of a special vocation from God to fight the ecclesiastical institutions and to hate the papacy, and this multiplied his energies as a writer. From this period date the writings De votis monasticis iudicium, which soon made the monasteries deserted, De abroganda Missa privata and On the Abuse of the Mass, which declared the sacrifice of the Mass a shameful idolatry; but above all the beginning of his German translation of the Bible, which created a new instrument for the diffusion of his doctrine and constituted at the same time a literary monument destined to exert a decisive influence on the formation of the German literary language and to supplant the pre-existing crude or incomplete translations. This translation was the first to go back to the original Hebrew or Greek text; it did not, however, remain immune from errors, partly because of defects in the text and an inadequate knowledge of the languages, partly because of distortions of the text imposed on L. by the concern to corroborate his thesis of justification by faith alone, which also led him to attribute different value to the books of the Bible and to reject as "straw" the letter of St. James, which recommends works. Meanwhile his ideas found realization: priests married; friars and nuns abandoned the convents; Mass was celebrated in German; Communion was distributed under both kinds without any longer requiring fasting; they even proceeded, as Carlstadt did at Wittenberg, to the demolition of images, altars and crosses. The revolutionary knights, bound together in a league (Brüdergemeinschaft) under the leadership of U. von Hutten and F. von Sickingen, assaulted the territories of the ecclesiastical Elector of Trier "to open the door to the word of God." This movement, however, was drowned in blood by a league of great Rhenish princes that deprived the lesser nobility of the leading role in the work of "reform" (Knights' War, 1521-22). L. was called to Wittenberg by the

DIGNA MERCES PAPAE SATANISSIMI ET

CARDINALIVM SVORVM.

www.berlin.de www.berlin.de

Wenn zeitlich gestrafft solt werden/
Papst vnd Cardinel auff Erden/
Ar Gesterjung verdient het/
Wie jr Recht hie gemalet siecht.

Mart. Luther R.
V. 1545

(from A. Bernareggi, I. Papi, Milan 1958, p. 16)
LUTHER, MARTIN - Satirical print against the Pontiff and the cardinals (1545).

his refuge in March 1522 from Melanchthon, troubled by the unrestrained agitations promoted by Carlstadt and by the Anabaptists, the so-called "fanatics"; these had organized themselves in nearby Zwickau around Storch and Münzer and rejected not only the papacy but, as a whole, the existing religious and social organization, public worship, and private property; they appealed to their own direct illumination by the Holy Spirit, despising the biblical exegesis of the learned, considered themselves elect by God and demanded "rebaptism" as proof of adherence to the new faith. L. restored calm in Wittenberg by persuasion and by the secular arm, having Carlstadt and the fanatics exiled, resumed his lectures at the University and gave a new ordering to worship and discipline, abolishing private Mass, private Confession and fasts, eliminating the Canon from the Mass, which was however still preserved in Latin and with the customary vestments and ceremonies, distributing Communion under both kinds, but also under one kind alone. He advised the master of the Teutonic Order to suppress the Rule of the Order and to marry; he too in Dec. 1524 abandoned the monastic habit and in June 1525 married a former Cistercian nun, Catherine Bora (v.).

Lutheran propaganda against "human traditions" not founded on the Bible, against the hierarchy and monasticism, the appeal to the "freedom of the Christian," stirred up the restlessness of the peasants, impatient of serfdom, and led them to formulate their demands in the name of the Gospel. In 12 articles they demanded, besides agrarian contracts, the appointment of parish priests and the preaching of the Gospel "without human additions." L., asked for his opinion, at first largely acknowledged the soundness of the peasants' demands (Admonition to Peace, 1525). But when these, under the influence of Anabaptist preaching, went so far as to assault convents and castles, to destroy churches and altars, and the great lay and ecclesiastical lords moved against them, L. abandoned them to themselves, condemning them as rebels against the order established by God and approving their extermination in act, in the writing Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants (May 1525), which put an end to the Peasants' War (1524-25) and oriented L. toward a more conservative tendency. In these years the first clarification within the movement stirred up by L. also took place. Some elements broke away who now recognized in him an innovator and not a simple restorer of Christian life. A part of the humanists in Erasmus's following perceived the irreconcilability of the humanistic concept of the dignity of man with the Lutheran pessimism of "de servo arbitrio" (polemic between Erasmus and L., 1524-26) and declared for the old Church. The people, after the outcome of the Peasants' War, considered themselves betrayed by L. and adapted to the old order of things or else leaned toward the Anabaptists. The radicals reproached L. for setting himself up as a new pope by imposing his exegesis of the Bible. This drove L. to press forward in the definition of the new doctrine, in the organization of the new Church and in the determination of the new worship, while the general political situation prevented the Emperor and the Catholics from giving practical execution to the Edict of Worms, and the estates favorable to L., with the request for an ecumenical council as the only legitimate judge on the controverted doctrines, with the bargaining of aid against the Turks, with freedom of action in the individual territories with respect to the Edict of Worms (Diet of Speyer, 1526), with forming themselves into a league in defense of the innovations, created for the innovators the best conditions for carrying out the new ecclesiastical ordinances. In worship the German language was introduced, a large part was given to religious hymns sung by the people, of some of which L. himself composed the text and music. The organization of the communities, at first conceived on democratic bases, after the Anabaptist experience was hinged on the princes, as "supreme bishops of the territories," and by their order the "visitations" were carried out: consequently the ecclesiastical institutions of the respective territories were reformed. To ensure unity in preaching after Melanchthon's Loci communes, L. compiled in 1529 a small and a large catechism; for instruction, as well as for liturgical use, as early as 1523 he had published a Booklet for Baptism and in the same 1529 a Booklet for Marriage.

In these years (1525-30) a decisive shift takes place in the direction of the movement of "reform." The doctrinal and practical anarchy that had been unleashed in various places in the name of the freedom of the Gospel had demonstrated the necessity of setting certain barriers to the reforming arbitrariness of individuals, and these could be provided only by the police forces of the princes. Therefore L. recognizes in the territorial lord who has adhered "to the Gospel" the right and the duty to ensure with his ordinances the "reform" and the government of the Church "according to the Gospel," and accepts for himself the role, fundamentally secondary, of reformer of doctrine, worship, and preaching, by public commission. L.'s writings, therefore, from 1526 onward refer ever more to pastoral, liturgical, and ethico-social problems; while the "Lutheran" princes, even before L. had to elaborate the theory of their "right of visitation," as "eminent members of the communities," attributed to themselves a directive function in the administration of the Church, assuming the tasks of "summi episcopi" and giving rise to the creation of autonomous regional Churches (Landeskirchen) founded on the political principle sanctioned in 1555, of "cuius regio, eius et religio," whereby it fell to the prince to establish the religion of his territory. From this moment the history of Lutheranism loses its unitary character to fragment into the history of the individual territories, into the activity of the individual reformers, into the particular evolution that in each territory organization, worship and not infrequently doctrine itself present. Thus the individual territorial Churches acquire their physiognomy: the Saxon Church under the combined influence of L. and Melanchthon; that of Hesse with the uninhibited syncretism of Margrave Philip, who also makes use of Zwinglian elements; the Church of Strasbourg under the direction of Bucer and Capito; that of Zurich under the influence of Bullinger; while the Church of Brandenburg undergoes the action of Agricola, Bugenhagen reforms Denmark, Osiander reforms Nuremberg, Oecolampadius imposes himself at Basel, and other figures of lesser account imitate them in other regions, reorganizing ecclesiastical life in a Lutheran sense, examining and approving pastors, constituting parishes, drawing up liturgical rubrics, organizing institutions of popular education, writing catechisms and pastoral instructions, which the princes then by virtue of the "ius reformandi" make obligatory.

This preeminent position of the princes in defending and determining the structure of the new Churches becomes evident when Charles V, reconciled with the Pope and having concluded peace with Francis I, sought to impose respect for the old institutions wherever they still survived. Against this decision, taken by the Diet of Speyer (1520), the princes presented a formal protest (whence the name "Protestants"), appealing "to the Emperor, to the council, to good Christians"; at the same time, chiefly through the work of Philip of Hesse, they sought to form a united front against Charles V's intentions of restoration. In order to be able to include the Zwinglians as well, Philip of Hesse promoted the religious colloquy of Marburg (1-4 Oct. 1520) between L. and Zwingli to settle the divergences between the Zwinglian eucharistic symbolism and the Lutheran theory of the real presence: with no other result than that of determining L. to draft the 15 articles of Marburg, which he then reworked into the 17 articles of Schwabach and the 10 of Torgau, which would be made use of by Melanchthon in drafting the Augsburg Confession.

At the Diet of Augsburg (1530), in accordance with the request of Charles V, who thought to resolve the German religious question by a compromise, the dissident princes presented a profession of faith, which was at the same time a theological-juridical justification of the religious innovations, the Confessio fidei augustana, drafted by Melanchthon and revised by the Saxon Chancery. It took care to show the substantial conformity of Lutheran beliefs with the Bible and with the doctrines of the ancient Church, and in general with the traditional ones, mitigating the divergences and criticizing the doctrines not accepted as a product of scholasticism, insisting on the condemnation of the Anabaptists as subverters of doctrine and of the social order, and rejecting the Zwinglian doctrines. Regarding the institutions, it claimed the use of the chalice for the laity as well, marriage for priests, the abolition of monastic vows, exalting by contrast civil activities as service of God, the non-obligatory nature of abstinences and fasts, the suppression of the Canon in the Mass, because it included the idea of the meritorious renewal of the sacrifice of the Cross. L. could not be present at the Diet because he had been struck by the ban: however, he had approved the Augsburg Confession from Coburg, while nevertheless recommending not to go further in concessions to the Catholics. The Confutatio pontificia, while recognizing the positive elements in the dogmatic part, contested the justification of the innovations as contrary to Holy Scripture, to the laws of the Church and of the Empire; the attempt at compromise failed: Melanchthon wrote against the Confutatio the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the Lutheran princes renewed the protest of Speyer, organizing in the League of Schmalkalden (near Gotha), March 1531, resistance to the Emperor and to the decisions of the Diet, which L. justified, urged on by Philip of Hesse. To this League had adhered, besides the initiator Philip of Hesse, John of Saxony, Wolfgang of Anhalt, the dukes of Brunswick, the counts of Mansfeld, several cities among which Strasbourg, Ulm, Constance, Magdeburg, Bremen, Lübeck, always "for the defense of the Gospel." It constituted a broader coalition than that of the signatories of the Augsburg Confession, included rich cities of the north, the anti-Habsburg dukes of Bavaria, and could avail itself of the support of Francis I of France. Taking advantage of the political-military difficulties of Charles V, the adherents of the League obtained a new interim at Nuremberg in 1532, which allowed them to proceed undisturbed in the suppression of monasteries, in the confiscation of monastic property, in the reform of worship; to consolidate the organization of the new Churches, to strengthen their party by attracting new princes and by the secularization of other ecclesiastical territories, scarcely hindered by the conservative forces, disunited in their aims and methods, uncertain about the very assessment of the nature of the religious movement. The new political-organizational force of the Lutherans was revealed in 1537 in the objections and demands they opposed to the Council convoked by Paul III first at Mantua and then at Vicenza: the 23 Schmalkaldic Articles, drafted by L. in a harsh tone, emphasize, in contrast with the Augsburg Confession, the divergences of the new Churches, placing in the foreground the rejection of the Pope as "Antichrist" and declaring an agreement with Rome impossible. The appeal of the Lutherans to the Council revealed itself as a mere polemical and dilatory expedient: as early as 1538 L. declared to the nuncio Vergerio that his participation in the Council was useless, because he was certain of being in the truth. The Lutherans also drew substantial strengthening from the policy of compromise continued by Charles V, from the postponements of the council, from the "Religious Colloquies" of Hagenau, Worms, Regensburg (1540-41) in which the most conciliatory personalities of the two sides met: Melanchthon and Bucer for the Protestants, Gropper and Pflug, albeit with Eck, for the Catholics, the latter supported by the papal legates Contarini and Morone themselves. Agreement was reached on the formulas of original sin and of justification, the Catholics having accepted the theory of double justice; the Catholic side admitted, without encouraging it, the marriage of priests and the use of the chalice for the laity. Agreement on the number of the Sacraments and the authority of the Pope proved impossible. Thus the dogmatic agreement under imperial aegis (interim of Regensburg 1541) failed and there remained, to the great advantage of Lutheran expansion, the interim of Nuremberg of 1532. In the meantime the "reform" had reached electoral Brandenburg, Württemberg, ducal Saxony and other cities in the south and the north; it had to its credit the understanding with Denmark and with France, the suspension of proceedings against the usurpers of ecclesiastical property before the Imperial Chamber Court. A moral and organizational weakening, on the other hand, had been brought to the innovators by the Anabaptist excesses "to establish the Gospel" at Münster in Westphalia ("Kingdom of Zion," 1535) and by the bigamy of Philip of Hesse, which L. with Melanchthon and Bucer had justified by appealing to the Old Testament in a secret opinion, which instead became public knowledge and led an embarrassed L. to resort to denials and to theorize "the lie of emergency and utility" (1539-40).

Charles V took advantage of this situation when, having secretly come to an agreement with the Pope, he prepared to act by force against the innovators, after having drawn into his orbit Philip of Hesse, under the threat of a trial for bigamy, the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg, Maurice of Saxony, envious of his electoral cousin and eager for the electoral dignity. Having restored Catholicism in the duchy of Cleves, by seconding Maurice's coup against the territories of his cousin defended by the Schmalkaldic League, he succeeded in defeating and taking prisoner the elector of Saxony (Mühlberg, 24 Apr. 1547) and shortly afterwards Philip of Hesse himself. The Schmalkaldic League was destroyed and the princes undertook to carry out the decisions of the next diet. However, the Lutheran party was still strong in the north and Charles V, at the Diet of Augsburg (1548), had to limit himself to imposing on the Lutherans a Catholicizing ecclesiastical regime until the decisions of the council, in which the princes undertook to participate (interim of Augsburg, 1548). This reform, viewed with distrust by the Pope, found no heartfelt adherence either among Catholics or among Lutherans: it nevertheless permitted the restoration of Catholic institutions in Lutheran territories, especially in Saxony, where however it gave rise to a lively polemic between the accommodating Melanchthonians and the rigid Lutherans (Gnesio-Lutherans) concerning the Catholic acts of worship held by Melanchthon to be religiously indifferent ("adiaphora").

Meanwhile L. had died of cardiac arteriosclerosis (the suicide is a legend spread on the basis of late 17th-century documents). In his last years he had withdrawn more and more into the background, leaving the direction of the movement to others, theologians and princes. He was physically suffering, embittered by the disorders that had arisen in the new Churches, by the divisions among his followers, by the inclination of many of them toward Zwingli and Calvin, by the rough interventions of princes and city magistrates in the life of the Churches. The idea of the imminent end of the world was often on his lips and his pen. To the very last he remained unshakable in the conviction that he possessed the true Gospel and that the papacy was the Antichrist. For the convocation of the Council at Trent he had written in March 1545 his most violent invective: Against the Papacy in Rome Founded by the Devil, and he had put into circulation nine of the most vulgar caricatures drawn in the workshop of Lucas Cranach, illustrated with sarcastic verses under the title: Portrait of the Papacy by M. L.

III. THE CONSOLIDATION OF LUTHERANISM

The humiliation of Lutheranism was short-lived: a new betrayal by Maurice of Saxony revived resistance in the north; the Schmalkaldic League was reorganized, in alliance with France; Charles V, caught without an army at Innsbruck in 1552, had to renounce his program of Catholic restoration and allow his brother Ferdinand, named King of Germany, to grant, at Passau, the free practice of their own religion to all adherents of the Augsburg Confession until the next Diet, which was held at Augsburg (1555). This Diet, in its "recess," sanctioned that concession without limitation of time; the Lutherans remained in possession of the properties secularized by them up to 1552; the only limitation on their political-territorial expansion was imposed by the "reservatum ecclesiasticum," whereby bishops and abbots who wished to become Protestants could do so "without diminution of their honor," but forfeiting their office; the imperial chamber court was to be composed of an equal number of Catholics and Protestants. Lutheranism was thus officially recognized, though restricted to a minority in the Diet and with the general commitment to a return to religious unity, should the Council, in which the Lutherans had for a moment taken part in 1552, succeed in re-establishing it.

IV. LUTHERANISM OUTSIDE GERMANY

Meanwhile Lutheranism had spread not only through four-fifths of Germany, forming there compact zones or scattered islands according to the whimsical boundaries of the autonomous territories, but also into the regions to the north and east. Here it had been established less by a vast and profound movement of conscience than by the authoritarian action of the local lords, and it therefore presented a distinctly conservative aspect in doctrine, organization and worship, linking up with the L. of the phase of The German Mass and with the Melanchthon of the Instruction to Visitors of 1529. The first "reformed" territory of the north-east was that of the Teutonic Order, Prussia, which the Grand Master Albert of Brandenburg transformed into a duchy, later adhering to the Augsburg Confession and making Königsberg, together with Osiander, a center of Lutheran thought; there followed Livonia, through the influence of the Archbishop of Riga, brother of the Duke of Prussia, Courland and Samogitia. Only partially, because it was also opposed by Hussites, Calvinists and Italian anti-Trinitarians, did Lutheranism establish itself with King Sigismund II in Poland (Diet of Petrikau, 1556). Lutheranism in Scandinavia had an eminently political-national character. In Sweden it was established as early as 1527 (Diet of Westerås) through the work of King Gustav Vasa, founder of a national dynasty against union with the Danish crown, and of the preachers Olaf and Laurentius Petri, preserving Catholic elements both in its organization, which remained on the old episcopal foundations, and in its liturgy. In Denmark and Norway this establishment was the common work of the monarchy and the nobility, greedy for ecclesiastical property and jealous of the autonomy of the clergy. In Denmark, with the support of King Frederick III, Tausen had the doctrine and liturgy of

L. approved by the Diet of Copenhagen (1530) ("Confessio hafniensis"); the reform of the ecclesiastical structure, with the king as supreme moderator of the Church and with superintendents in place of bishops, as in Saxony, came in 1536 under Christian III and through the work of Bugenhagen. The same system was established in Norway from 1547. In the other countries to the south and west, Lutheranism amounted more to currents of ideas and groups of initiates than to the formation of compact Churches within defined territories. In the Netherlands, on the other hand, the initially Lutheran Churches ended up going over to Calvinism, and in Hungary Calvinists and anti-Trinitarians soon prevailed. The German groups remained Lutheran, here as in Poland and Croatia, also for ethno-national reasons. From 1540 to 1575 the expansion of Lutheranism is therefore slowed by the Catholic Reformation and by the increasingly active competition of Calvinism. In the 17th-18th centuries Lutheranism made no substantial gains but, if anything, suffered losses, and in the 19th-20th centuries its cultural and organizational influence is closely connected with that of German culture and politics: its expansion is due to German nuclei that emigrated to countries outside Europe, especially to the United States of America.

V. THE ELABORATION OF THE LUTHERAN DOGMA

While in the Catholic countries the work of Catholic renewal and restoration unfolds, in the Lutheran territories lively theological polemics soon arise to disturb the life of the Churches, which is practically identified with that of the territories. For reasons of doctrine and of social order, the generation that followed L. and Melanchthon stresses the importance of dogmatic principles, concerns itself with establishing a new orthodoxy, emphasizes its religious value and therefore not only gives prominence to the professions of faith formulated during the struggle (Augsburg Confession, Apology of the Augsburg Confession, Smalcald Articles, L.'s catechisms) but concerns itself with defining their meaning univocally. In this theological elaboration there naturally make themselves felt the greater and different religious and ecclesiastical experience, the pressure of the opposing polemic, the demands of one's own apologetics, the litigious spirit of the schools. Thus almost every article of the Augsburg Confession becomes the object of controversy: regarding the "adiaphora," that is, acts of worship held to be indifferent in conscience, the rigid Lutherans (Flacius, Nicholas of Amsdorf) set themselves against the "Philippists," that is, the followers of Melanchthon; Osiander, supported by Brenz, revives the Catholicizing idea of intrinsic justification against the extrinsic one of the Augsburg Confession; Major (whence the Majoristic controversy) maintains against L. and Amsdorf that good works are necessary for salvation; the antinomians Poach and Otto, pupils of L., deny, vigorously opposed, the obligatory character of observing the Decalogue, that is, of the moral law for salvation; the Melanchthonian Pfeffinger in his Researches on the Freedom of the Human Will (1555) maintains against Flacius and Amsdorf the active part (synergism) of man in the work of his salvation. Regarding the "Supper," the "Gnesio-Lutherans" accuse of "crypto-Calvinism" the Melanchthonians who incline to the merely symbolic interpretation of the Eucharist; Calvinist suggestions provoke controversies on Predestination; Christology itself is called into question regarding the communication of the specific properties between the human nature and the divine nature in Christ and the omnipresence of Christ in the Eucharist. Even the text of the Augsburg Confession is discussed, the rigid Lutherans contesting the "variata" edition issued in print in 1541 by Melanchthon with modifications, incriminated as deviating from the original thought of L. and of the Churches. The controversies are conducted with harsh accusations and counter-accusations of heresy, which could lead to the exile of the defeated, and not only the doctrinal unity of Lutheranism but its very political-organizational unity appears threatened, precisely at the moment when Catholicism is regaining combative vigor. The danger is perceived by theologians, among them Andrea and Chemnitz, and by princes, who succeed in giving life, not without strong political pressures, to a series of regional "concordias" that concluded with the approval by all the Lutheran princes and their theologians of a "formula of concord" elaborated in the monastery of Berg, near Magdeburg, in 1577, and shortly afterward, with the official publication of the Book of Concord containing all the Lutheran dogmatic texts (1581). A compromise is reached between the Melanchthonian and Lutheran currents; regarding original sin, free will and human powers, the concept of Melanchthon prevails, with the recognition of some natural knowledge of God and of the capacity to fulfill civil duties with natural powers; justification is reaffirmed, against Osiander, as extrinsic; regarding good works the conception of the Augsburg Confession is reconfirmed, that is, that they are not meritorious, but obligatory by divine command and as fruit of the Holy Spirit in us; regarding Law and Gospel, against Melanchthon, the function of the law to cast into despair and to admonish the regenerate is reaffirmed; in the Supper the body of the Lord is truly present according to L.'s concept; regarding the person of Christ the Nestorianizing Christology of Zwingli is rejected; the "adiaphora" are held to be modifiable and abolishable, except that whoever opposes this makes of it a question of conscience; regarding Predestination and divine election, divine foreknowledge, which has as its object both the destiny of salvation and that of damnation, is distinguished from Predestination, which has in view only beatitude, with the consequent rejection of the Calvinist doctrine; finally the condemnation of heresies and sects (Anabaptists, Schwenckfeldian mystics, Neo-Arians, anti-Trinitarians) is confirmed.

This Lutheranism of the Formula of Concord, which is elaborated into a system in the theological faculties with the aid of Aristotelian-Scholastic logic and metaphysics and with the exploitation of manuals of Spanish Jesuits, becoming ever more integrated with a rational justification of the bases of faith-belief, remains open to Catholic influences (dogma as a truth to be believed as the foundation of belonging to the Church; the rational preambles of faith; the ethical demands of the Christian life; the visible Church with a hierarchical-normative system) and to Calvinist influences (in the doctrine of the Eucharist, in that of Predestination, in certain democratic-presbyterian tendencies in church government); these influences not infrequently bring individual theologians back to Catholicism or else push them toward a more radical and consistent Calvinism. Doctrinal suggestions, always combined with political calculations, lead powerful princes, such as the Hohenzollerns of Brandenburg and of Prussia and the Palatine Elector of the Rhine, to adhere to Calvinism, which in the 17th century comes to embrace in Germany a good third of the Protestants. The presence of this third confession in Germany will be one of the causes of the politico-religious Thirty Years' War (1618-18), which, after having endangered the economic-political bases of Lutheranism with the Edict of Restitution of 1629, confirms the principles of the Diet of Augsburg of 1555, extending its advantages also to the Calvinists and sanctioning the further expansion of Lutheranism by moving the normal year of amnesty to 1632.

VI. THE ELEMENTS OF DISSOLUTION IN LUTHERANISM

The stabilization of the legal situation and of its relations with the other Christian confessions does not, however, halt the internal ferment of theological tendencies and spiritual currents, nor does it constitute an efficient barrier against the penetration into the Churches of the philosophical and political ideas of the succeeding ages. The mystics show themselves impatient of official orthodoxy: Sebastian Franck (d. 1542), Schwenckfeld (d. 1561), the Neoplatonizing Weigel (d. 1588), but above all Jacob Boehme (1575-1624) and the Bohemian Angelus Silesius (d. 1677), who ends in Catholicism. More organized and more extensive is the reaction against the dogmatic rigidification of the theologians, against the secularization of the bureaucratized territorial churches, against the Christianity of mere custom of many of the faithful, represented by the Pietism of groups advocating an active Christianity, made up of affective fervor and moral commitment, concretized in a "praxis pietatis." It is a reform within the reform, which harkens back to the Lutheran mystics, and in its reaffirmation of works as the substance of the Christian life it reveals the influence of post-Tridentine Catholicism, while in its devaluation of dogma the Enlightenment (v.) makes itself felt.

Its initiator is Philipp Jakob Spener (1635-1705) with his programmatic writing Pia desideria, or Earnest Desires for a God-Pleasing Improvement of the True Evangelical Church (1675), which acted with the support of the Saxon court and dominated the University of Leipzig; its implementer was August Hermann Francke (1665-1727), who acted from Halle, securing the victory of Pietism in northern Germany and even in Sweden and the Baltic countries, and created schools, orphanages, seminaries for teachers and preachers, and biblical publishing institutes. A movement apart within Pietism is represented by the "community of the brethren" ("Herrenhüter") promoted by Count Zinzendorf (d. 1760) on his estate of Herrnhut in Silesia: it sought to be an "ecclesia" within the Lutheran Church; it particularly cultivated affective devotion and the Christianity of the heart. The political demands of the unitary bureaucratic State combined with the adogmatic spirit led the King of Prussia Frederick William III to impose by force a union of the Calvinist Churches with the Lutheran ones (the so-called "Old Prussian union," 1817), against which, however, various Lutherans rebelled, maintaining their Lutheranism as a "Free Church" (Freikirche), that is, without public recognition. In these groups the revival movement of the 19th century was particularly affirmed, with the affirmation of revealed dogma as the foundation of the Church, against the rationalist exegesis of the Bible and the idealistic interpretations of Christian theology: it constituted "Neo-Lutheranism," emphasizing the conservative elements in doctrine, in worship, and in the structure of the Church, open to ecumenical demands, particularly alive in the first and second postwar periods of the 20th century, concerned to differentiate itself from rationalistic and individualistic currents, to claim full autonomy of organization in the face of the State, and therefore increasingly inclined to recognize the convergence of doctrinal and ecclesiastical-organizational interests with Catholicism, toward which the old diffidences have ceased in many.

VII. NUMERICAL CONSISTENCY OF LUTHERANISM

From the statistical point of view, Lutherans were reckoned before World War II at about 62 million, distributed as follows: 1) Territorial churches and Free churches: in Germany, 16 million; in the rest of Europe: 21 million; in North America: 4 million; elsewhere: 150,000. 2) United churches in the originally Lutheran territories: 21 million; 3) Lutherans not organized into churches, in the U.S.A.: about 10,000.

VIII. ASSESSMENTS

The contrasting elements of L.'s personality — imaginative force, vehement passion, tenderness of affection, concreteness in organization, virulence and vulgarity of language, poetic and musical sensibility, mystical impulses and implacable hatreds, suggestibility and obstinacy, exaltations and depressions — have for centuries offered material for the apologetic exaltation of his followers and for the denigration of his adversaries. The historical-theological and psychological contextualization, the fruit of the studies of the last fifty years, including those of Catholics such as Denifle, Grisar, Cristiani, and Lortz, reduces the novelty of L.'s doctrine, rediscovers its fundamental motives in the theology of the late Middle Ages, emphasizes the psychopathic elements of his character as an explanation of his contradictions, distinguishes in L. what was religious exigency, a living Christian sense, an aspiration toward a renewal of Christian piety, from the formulas in which L. expressed it and from the institutions he promoted, and underscores the extraneous influences that interfered with it. The multiplicity of the motives of L.'s personality has therefore always permitted and will always permit interpreting him one-sidedly, whether as a mystic impatient of theology, or as an expression of the German soul, or again as an overthrower of the Church and a destroyer of dogmatic consciousness.

Lutheranism, moreover, having constituted itself into an ecclesiastical and dogmatic structure, has stamped the customs and life of the populations that received it with its biblicism, with its affective piety expressed in choral music and in its rich hymnody, with the religious prominence given to civil professions and the quasi-sacerdotal character attributed to the prince and the paterfamilias, but also with the separation between religion and morality deriving from the pessimistic conception of invincible concupiscence, with the renunciation of social action for the realization of evangelical principles in the conviction that economics and politics are profane realities subject to the Evil One, opposing a weak and often ineffective resistance to the anti-Christian forces of theoretical rationalism, political laicism, pure economism, and radical nationalism.

Mario Bendiscioli