Luther, Martin (Eisleben, 1483-1546, Eisleben), the dominating personality of the Reformation, was the son of a peasant who had abandoned agriculture for mining and won a modest competence. The boy received his schooling at Mansfeld, Magdeburg, and Eisenach. From 1501 to 1505 he studied successfully at Erfurt University and then entered an Augustinian monastery. His first years of monastic life were consumed in a struggle for the clarification of inner religious conflicts. He was ordained in 1507 and in 1508 taught philosophy at the then recently founded University of Wittenberg. In 1509-10 he lectured at Erfurt and developed his knowledge of Hebrew and Greek. In 1512 he received the degree of Doctor of Theology at Wittenberg, became professor of biblical exegesis there, and delivered between 1513 and 1518 a series of lectures which attracted wide attention and drew students from other parts of Germany.
The beginning of Luther's career as a reformer came almost accidentally when, on 31 October 1517, he nailed to the door of the castle church at Wittenberg his 95 theses (Thesen, see Theses, 95), directed against the sale of indulgences (see Ablasskram). The theses rapidly circulated both in the original Latin and in German translation, and soon adversely affected this source of revenue for the Church. Invited to a disputation at Leipzig with Johann Eck, Luther asserted that the papacy was a historical, not a divine, institution, and denied the authority of rulings by the oecumenical councils. On his return to Wittenberg he plunged into a ferment of theological writing, producing his three outstanding tracts An den christlichen Adel deutscher Nation, De captivitate Babylonica (Von der Babylonischen Gefangenschaft der Kirche), and Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (1520). Through the support of his sovereign, the Elector Friedrich der Weise of Saxony, Luther was able to escape a summons to Rome, but the investigations of Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg were followed by the Papal Bull Exsurge Domine (1520), demanding recantation. Luther's decisive answer to this was the public burning of the Bull at Wittenberg on 10 December 1520. A Bull of Excommunication was immediately issued (January 1521).
By this time Luther had a large following in Germany, and this popular support aided the Elector in his desire to defer the operation of the Bull until Luther had an opportunity to defend himself before the imperial court. Accordingly Luther was summoned to appear before the Diet at Worms in April 1521 (see Wormser Reichstage). His courageous and unflinching defence (narrated in a famous passage of Ranke) was unavailing and he was outlawed by the Edict of Worms (May 1521). Luther meanwhile was spirited away by his patron's orders and given asylum under the assumed name of Junker Jörg in the Wartburg. Here he spent ten months largely devoted to the translation of the New Testament which appeared in 1522 (see Bible, Translations of). (It was during this period that Luther's legendary confrontation with the devil was alleged to have taken place.) In March 1522 he emerged from hiding and hurried at the risk of his life to Wittenberg, in order to check the excesses of the reforming party led by Karlstadt (Predigten vom Sonntag Invocavit bis Reminiscere).
Luther's opposition to violent insurrection and his insistence on temporal authority became even clearer with the outbreak of the Peasants' War (see Bauernkrieg) in 1525 (Ermahnung zum Frieden and Wider die räuberischen und mörderischen Rotten der Bauern). In that year he married a fugitive nun, Katharina von Bora (1499-1552), an act intended as a symbolical denial of the principle of clerical celibacy; it also initiated a lifelong happy union. In 1526 appeared Luther's order of service for the new Church (Deutsche Messe). In the same year he broke with Erasmus, whose defence of free will in De libero arbitrio he rejected with De servo arbitrio. From 1526 to 1529 he was active in the reorganization of the Church in Saxony. As an outlaw he was necessarily absent from the Diet at Augsburg (1530), at which a compromise between Protestant and Roman Catholic standpoints was unsuccessfully attempted. Luther's protracted and devoted work on the translation of the Bible came to a provisional end with the publication of the complete work in 1534, but he continued to improve his rendering right up to his death (Ausgabe letzter Hand appeared in 1545). He was buried in the castle church (Schloßkirche) at Wittenberg.
The number and bulk of Luther's works, partly in Latin but principally in German, is immense. The Weimar edition, begun in 1883, exceeds 100 vols.; the greater part of it belongs to doctrinal history and theological polemics. In addition to the works cited, mention should be made of the sober and moving account of the martyrdom of Heinrich von Zütphen (Heinrichs von Zütphen Märtyrertod im Jahr 1524), and above all of the masterly tract on translation Ein Sendbrief von Dolmetschen (Ein sendbrieff D. M. Luthers. Von Dolmetzschenn und Fürbit der heiligenn, 1530). Further, Luther was a poet of power who created, partly by translation from Latin or adaptation, a number of moving hymns (Geystliche gesangk-Buchleyn, and Enchiridion geystlicher gesenge, both 1524, the latter expanded repeatedly and last reprinted in Luther's lifetime in 1545); some have found their way into English hymnals. R. Massie (Martin Luther's Spiritual Songs, 1854) and Catherine Winkworth are noted translators. Among the most famous are ‘Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott’ and the tender Christmas hymn ‘Vom Himmel hoch’. A great mass of observations on the human soul and human affairs is preserved in the Tischreden, collected by his friends and published in 1566. He also translated into German prose a number of fables of Aesop (Etliche Fabeln aus Esopo, 1530).
Luther's greatest literary monument is his translation of the Bible. Though it is now recognized that he owed more to his predecessors than was formerly thought, his ability to render the original into truly German phrasing, direct, memorable, and apt, is unsurpassed. He applied to his work the principle he enunciated in the Sendbrief: ‘den man mus nicht die buchstaben inn der lateinischen sprachen fragen, wie man sol Deutsch reden, wie diese esel thun, sondern man mus die mutter jhm hause, die kinder auff der gassen, den gemeinen man auff dem marckt drumb fragen, und den selbigen auff das maul sehen wie sie reden, und darnach dolmetzschen so verstehen sie es den und mercken, das man Deutsch mit jn redet.’ To these qualities of homeliness, urgency, and power (achieved by extreme conscientiousness as well as good sense) Luther adds a highly developed sense of rhythm, which is especially conspicuous in his rendering of the Psalms. The Lutheran Bible has become, in consequence, a book of immense influence, and reflections of its prose are detectable in many later authors. His idiomatic prose style marks the beginning of a new age in the history of the German language (see German Language, History of).
The essential features of Luther's doctrine are the affirmation of justification by faith, the rejection of justification by works (in Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen), and the assertion of direct communication with God without priestly mediation. The immense and rapid success of his teaching over large tracts of Europe was made possible not only by the abuses of the existing Church, but also by the widespread spiritual malaise accumulating through plague, famine, and wars in the preceding century. This is evident in the early tendency of the Reformation to be associated with revolutionary and social unrest. Luther himself denounced the subversive movements, insisting on the duty of the human being to fulfil his obligations within the existing social framework. He thus strengthened the hands of the ruling princes, who gained by the attack on the papacy, and at the same time prepared the swift change of Lutheranism from a dynamic spiritual to a rigid conservative force.
To see Luther as a nationalist is a distortion. He attacked the papacy for spiritual, not political, reasons, and his support of the existing political structure discouraged any trend towards German unity. By concentrating the minds of his contemporaries exclusively on theological and ecclesiastical problems he obstructed the influence of the new humanism as represented by Erasmus. Only three years before his death he expressed his intolerance in matters of faith by calling for the destruction of the synagogues (Von den Juden und ihren Lügen, 1543).
So dominating a figure was bound to become a subject of later literary works, among which may be mentioned: Z. Werner's play Martin Luther oder Die Weihe der Kraft (1807), H. von Kleist's Novelle Michael Kohlhaas (1810, in which Luther makes an important appearance), poems by Uhland (‘Die Ulme von Hirsau’) and by C. F. Meyer (‘Lutherlied’), and novels by L. Schücking (Luther in Rom, 1870) and W. von Molo (Mensch Luther, 1928). Among contemporary works concerned with Luther were Die wittembergisch Nachtigall (1523) by Hans Sachs, and the hostile Von dem Großen Lutherischen Narren by Th. Murner (1522) and Monachopornomachia by S. Lemm (1539).
Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimarer Ausgabe), four sections in more than 100 volumes, appeared 1883 ff.; Ausgewählte Werke (8 vols.), ed. H. H. Borcherdt, 1914-25; an 8-vol. Studienausgabe, ed. O. Clemen and A. Leitzmann, 1950; and Ausgewählte Schriften (6 vols.), ed. K. Bornkamm and G. Ebeling, in 1983.
