Martin Luther is widely regarded as the first and greatest of the reformers. His teaching overcame not only the borders of Germany, but also of Europe. Unlike his great predecessors, there is no dispute about him whether such a person actually existed. And further. The founders and reformers of antiquity came from royal families, Luther's background is more than modest.
On November 10, 1483, a son was born to the miner Hans Luder and his wife Margaret. According to custom, the next day his father gave him at baptism the name of the holy day of his birth - Martin. The couple lived in the town of Eisleben, but they themselves were from Möhra, a town near Eisenach in Thuringia. Martin's grandfather, Heine Lüder, was a peasant who owned a yard from which he had to pay taxes. The hereditary tax that the Luders were required to pay was a feudal rent, but they also had the right to move freely.
In fact, the spelling of the surname of the future reformer varied: Lüder, Luder, Loder, Ludher, Lotter, Lutter, or Lauther. Therefore, remembering that his surname in childhood sounded differently, for simplicity we will write the usual name. So, Martin grew up in a large family, where crackling was easily distributed. One day, the mother punished the child so severely for eating a nut that his nose started bleeding, and his father beat him so badly that the boy avoided him for days on end until he went with him to the world. Of the seven children, Martin loved his brother Jacob the most.
At four and a half years old, Martin went to school, where he went without vacation. Even on Sunday, the children sang in church. A neighbor's boy, Nikolaus Emer, later Luther's son-in-law, sometimes carried him on his back to school. For nine years (1488-1497) the child attended the Mansfeld Latin school, where they first taught to read, then write.
Then he went to study in Magdeburg for a whole year. There, the future founder of Protestantism learned from the “brothers of common life” (Canonici Regulares Sancti Augustini Fratrum a Vita Communi), a pious community that originated from the Netherlands and was so named because it voluntarily united clergy and laity under the leadership of a clergyman for a common monastic life but without taking a monastic vow. Here, unlike the city school, they were not punished with rods. The reason why Luther left Magdeburg and went to Eisenach on Easter 1498 is unknown. However, the Luders had relatives there, perhaps they hoped for their help.
There Luther spent three years studying at St. Georg. Finally, the father decided to send the 18-year-old dullard to the University of Erfurt to study law. In February 1505, he was the second of 17 applicants to take the master's exam. He was supposed to start his law school, but an event occurred that dramatically changed not only Luther's life. On July 2, 1505, he was staying with his parents in Mansfeld, and when he returned to his house, a severe thunderstorm overtook him not far from Erfurt. Lightning struck near him, and Martin fell, exclaiming: "Saint Anna, help, and I will become a monk!"
According to canon law, a vow given under such circumstances should not bind and can be regarded as a plea for help. However, Martin decided to fulfill the vow given to the grandmother of Jesus Christ (Saint Anna in the apocryphal Gospels was called the mother of Mary), and on July 15 of the same year knocked at the gates of the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. Brother Martin donned a white cassock with a hood and became a novice novice. And the father got angry and again began to address his son on "you", although not long before that, out of respect for the master, he addressed "you". He categorically refused to give his consent to the entry of his son into the monastery.
Be that as it may, the father later relented and agreed, which, by and large, was not required. On May 2, 1507, the newly consecrated Father Luther celebrated his first Mass in the monastery church - Primiz. In general, little remarkable life continued until October 1510. The following month, Brother Martin, 27, was sent to Rome by order of the order over a dispute over the nature of the Augustinian subjugation of the German monasteries. In the Eternal City, he read masses, visited the seven main churches, catacombs and other holy places.
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Pope Julius II, during whose pontificate (1503-1515) Luther visited Rome, was more of a military leader, diplomat and philanthropist than a shepherd of souls. “Whatever the private character of Julius II, he is above all the savior of the papacy,” noted the prominent cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt. - He achieved a deep understanding of the true foundations and conditions of papal authority, the restoration of which he devoted himself with all the strength and passion of his unshakable soul. Without bribery, at the general desire, he ascended to the throne of Peter and immediately stopped trading in high positions and titles."
Under him, the Vatican museums were enriched with many masterpieces of antique sculpture: Laocoon, Venus, Torso, Cleopatra and others. According to Vasari, excavations were carried out under him precisely to find the statues. In a word, the pope was not the worst, but the splendor of the papal court in the Renaissance indicated a crisis of the church. It was during Brother Martin's stay in Rome that the construction of St. Peter's Cathedral was in its early stages. Standing next to the creations of world culture, created by contemporary geniuses and creations of past centuries, Luther did not notice anything of this.
Not being a revolutionary thinking about transforming society, Luther nevertheless poses hard-hitting questions to the authorities: "Why does the pope, who is now richer than the richest Crassus, not prefer to build St. Peter's Cathedral with his own money, but demands it from the poor believers?" His 89th thesis reads: "Does the Pope, when allowing the sale of indulgences, care about the salvation of souls more than about money?"
Six weeks of waiting were wasted. The mission with which Luther arrived with a comrade ended in a mess. They were not even allowed to approach the higher authorities. In early April 1511, Luther returned to Erfurt. Loyalty to his church was preserved, but his stay in Italy caused in him an antipathy to everything "Romanesque", in which he saw cunning and cunning. That same autumn he was transferred to Wittenberg. On October 19, 1512, the faculty of theology conferred the degree of doctor biblicus on Peter Martin Luther. Until the end of his days, Luther will remain a professor at the University of Wittenberg, teaching a course on reading the Bible.
Brother Martin wondered how to find the mercy of God and, contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church, answered: sola fide - only with the help of faith, and sola scriptura - only with the help of the Holy Scriptures. He also spoke out against the trade in indulgences and called for depriving the pope - "a pitiful, stinking sinner" - of secular power and forcing him to study the Bible and prayer books. Undoubtedly, Martin Luther is a religious reformer, but we must not forget that he is also a writer and translator of the Bible into German, thereby approving the norms of the general German literary language, the so-called Standarddeutsch or Hochdeutsch.
Let us note in passing that Martin Luther never nailed his famous theses to the church gates. At least there was no evidence of such an action, and Luther himself never mentioned it anywhere. The 95 theses were nailed down thanks to the humanist and reformer Philip Melanchthon, who, in the preface to the second volume of Luther's writings, wrote that Martin “publicly nailed them to the door of a church near Wittenberg Castle”. By the way, during this event Melanchthon himself was in a completely different place and could not see it in any way.
On January 3, 1521, Pope Leo X, with his bull Decet Romanum Pontificem - "Befitting a Roman Bishop" - finally delivered Luther and his supporters to excommunication. According to imperial law, excommunication was to be followed by exile. However, Charles V, the emperor of the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation", was in no hurry in dealing with Luther. For him, it was not paramount, in addition, the papacy got too involved in secular affairs, intriguing against the election of a new emperor in Germany. Luther may well have been at the stake, as happened with the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus, but several imperial princes took him under their auspices.
Martin Luther's contemporaries - humanist scholars extolled him as a "German Hercules", a "Wittenberg nightingale", who contributed to the emergence of a sense of national community among Germans. Ironically, the history of the Reformation, at the origin of which was Luther, set aside the formation of the German nation in both cultural and state unity, in comparison with other countries of Western Europe. On his coat of arms, Luther engraved one Latin word: Vivit ("he lives"). Despite everything, Luther is still the largest and controversial historical figure. In this sense, he lives.
In conclusion, I would like to ask one question: what confession or church is Martin Luther considered to be the founder of? Of course, many will answer that he was the founder of the Lutheran Church and the Protestant denomination. And, oddly enough, they will be mistaken. Because Martin Luther has absolutely nothing to do with either one or the other.
The reformist movement, founded by a humble monk from Erfurt, he himself called "Evangelical Christianity", emphasizing by this name that, in his opinion, the authority of Holy Scripture for any Christian should stand above church tradition, the authority of Holy Tradition and the decrees of councils (that is, in other words: "The truth is only in the Bible"). The name "Lutheranism" appeared only fifty years after the death of the founder of this church, and even then it did not take root immediately.
As for Protestantism, Luther himself not only had nothing to do with this term, but also vehemently opposed its use to designate a confession. It appeared as follows: in 1526, the Speyer Reichstag (a congress of the highest aristocrats of the empire and representatives from cities) at the request of German princes sympathetic to the reformers, suspended the Edict of Worms against Martin Luther, according to which he was declared a heretic.
However, the 2nd Speyer Reichstag in 1529, under direct pressure from the pope and the emperor, canceled this decree. In response to such flagrant interference of Rome in imperial internal affairs, six princes and fourteen free cities of the Holy Roman Empire, the so-called Speyer protest was filed in the Reichstag in Germany. By the name of this document, the supporters of the Reformation were later called Protestants, and the totality of non-Catholic confessions that emerged as a result of the Reformation - "Protestantism."
So, as you can see, Martin Luther did not create any "Lutheranism" and especially "Protestantism". Which, however, does not at all negate his outstanding services in reforming the Christian Church …
IGOR BOKKER
