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The great religious reformer was a brilliant polemicist but he was also a vile antisemite with a bilious character

Dan Hitchens Thursday April 29 2021 The Times

Luther has a good claim to have invented the modern world: his public defiance of the Catholic Church, beginning in 1517, exploded into a mass religious movement without which, perhaps, there would have been no British Empire, no Enlightenment, no American or French Revolutions — at least not as we know them. Luther’s methods, meanwhile — his masterly use of books and pictures, his ability to pick fights and win them — make him the father of PR as well as Protestantism. What’s more, though Luther never intended this, his rebellion inspired the notion that the individual is supreme over the dead weight of tradition, that it is up to us to make our destinies.

That may not be especially good news, because Luther was in many ways a repellent character. Short-tempered and thin-skinned, he took disagreement as a personal insult not just to himself but to God. When the celebrated Dutch scholar Erasmus raised some thoughtful criticisms of Lutheran theology, Luther called him “the greatest enemy of Christ there has been this thousand years”.

It’s all fairly amusing handbags-at-dawn stuff until you get to 1524, when the oppressed German peasantry took up arms in the biggest popular revolt Europe had seen. Given that many of the rebels were radical Protestants, Luther might have been expected to support their cause. Unfortunately, they were the wrong kind of radical Protestants, so he issued a pamphlet entitled Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants urging the German princes to “stab, smite, slay” the “poisonous” insurgents. As Lyndal Roper observes in this new book, he “seemed to be sanctifying the bloody slaughter of thousands of peasants”.

Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants isn’t even Luther’s most notorious work; that would be On the Jews and Their Lies, a sickening diatribe that advised Christian rulers to burn down synagogues, raze Jewish neighbourhoods and compel their inhabitants into forced work programmes. In the light of Luther’s massive popularity in 1930s Germany — On the Jews and Their Lies was displayed at Nazi rallies like a sacred text — it’s hardly surprising that several historians have given him a lot of the blame for what happened next.

All of this has been playing on Roper’s mind. In 2017, the 500th anniversary of Luther’s original protest, she published a biography, Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet, which brought critical acclaim and more than 100 speaking invitations. “Luther took over my life,” Roper recalls. But as she travelled the world, giving talks, appearing on panels and even speaking from Luther’s old pulpit in Wittenberg, she started to wonder if it was all a bit too celebratory. “I sensed that I needed to confront the less comfortable sides of his legacy.”

As Roper admits, Luther’s admirable and less admirable qualities can be hard to untangle. She warms to his “rambunctious masculine posturing” — his outrageous humour, rollicking conversation and willingness to go toe-to-toe with bishops and princes. But at some point Luther’s masculinity shades into misogyny. “Cleverness is the garment that suits women least,” he declared, while mocking Pope Paul III as “Virgin Paula the third”. His scorn for monks and celibate priests, Roper observes, changed the meaning of manliness: “Instead of a multiplicity of different kinds of masculinity, Lutherans valued only one.”

Similarly, Roper praises Luther’s polemical brilliance while acknowledging how very weird it could get: “When Luther is off the leash, pigs, excrement, and bodily fluids tend to feature.” Satirists have often made use of toilet humour, but Luther’s brand of it can be deeply disturbing. “The Devil,” he writes, “has emptied his stomach again and again . . . the Jews . . . guzzle it like sows.” It doesn’t take a Freudian to notice, as Roper does, some serious psychological issues here.

Roper describes Luther’s antisemitism at length, but she doesn’t quite confront the looming question: how much does it discredit the rest of his thought? Is there a middle ground between, “Luther should be written off entirely” and, “Well, he was a man of his time”? The question has implications for many of our present debates over school curriculums and public statues, but Roper holds back from attempting an answer.

I also wish the book had probed Luther’s theology more closely. He had a famously bleak view of Homo sapiens — “the human being, corrupted to the root, can neither desire nor perform anything but evil” — which may help to explain why his imagination so often descended to the sewer. He was also, as Richard Rex shows in his incisive study The Making of Martin Luther, preoccupied above all with certainty. Medieval Catholicism had preserved at least some space for doubt, about scriptural interpretation and the state of one’s soul. Luther, by contrast, asserted that there was “no room for perplexity or doubt in theology” and that “a conscience which . . . doubts that it and its deeds are pleasing to God, thereby sins at once.” That, as much as his macho personality, seems a likely cause of his violent reaction to any sign of doubt or dissent.

Despite these absences, Roper’s book proves that a rigorously scholarly work can also be a pleasure to read. It ends with a flourish, too: a chapter detailing the remarkable rise of “Luther kitsch”. The bestselling Playmobil figurine of all time, believe it or not, is the Luther one; in 2017 Luther marzipan, Luther rubber ducks and Luther socks adorned with his (possibly apocryphal) line, “Here I stand, I can do no other” flew off the shelves. Maybe that’s what happens when we’re not sure whether to praise or condemn the past: we respond, instead, with a slightly nervous laugh.

Living I Was Your Plague: Martin Luther’s World and Legacy by Lyndal Roper, Princeton, 296pp; £25