When I started my research on The Magic Battery, I needed to find out about the Reformation in Germany. I’d picked that period because it was a time of change and technological advancement, a good background to set changes in magic against. Learning about Martin Luther was important, since I wanted to understand the ongoing conflict of ideas. At the same time, I wanted to learn about daily life in that period. It’s easy enough to get information on the emperors and electors, the wars and alliances, the states and borders. Finding out how people traveled, ate, and married took more work.

Lyndal Roper’s Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet turned out to be very useful for both purposes. It tells the story of Luther’s life while including lots of details about how he lived. It gives a lot of insight into how people thought in those days.

From my perspective as an atheist, he’s a mixed case with some huge negatives. On the positive side, he took a courageous stand against the corruption of the Catholic Church. On the negative, he claimed that we’re incapable of being good. Satan influences all our actions, and we deserve Hell just by existing. God punishes people for something they have no choice about.

Then there’s Luther’s On the Jews and their Lies. It was a vicious piece even for its time. It called for the burning of Jewish synagogues and schools and razing and destroying Jews’ houses. In The Magic Battery, Frieda thinks: “Those were the words of a madman, not a holy man. Someday, she feared, the German people would follow those words. She had often admired Luther’s courage, but his way couldn’t be the right way.” Today, as this post goes public, is the anniversary of Kristallnacht, when Germany did follow those words. Roper notes that antisemitism “was common currency at the time,” though it didn’t normally reach such levels.

Considering Luther’s virulent anti-Judaism, it’s surprising people haven’t demanded that the Lutheran Church change its name. But you have to understand people, even if you condemn some or most of what they said and did. A church that could make Rodrigo Borgia pope needed someone to denounce it.

Most people imagine that Europeans in the nineteenth century and earlier, especially religious leaders, were very evasive about sex and other bodily functions. But in the sixteenth century they didn’t have flush toilets, they lived closer to animals that weren’t shy, and disease and death were facts of everyday life. They couldn’t and didn’t push such things out of sight, and Luther didn’t. Roper writes, “So apparently untroubled was he by his sexuality that he unabashedly mentioned experiencing nocturnal emissions, which he simply dismissed as physical phenomena.” Concerning his wedding, she tells us:

Sixteenth-century weddings were not for the faint-hearted. Wedding feasts were ribald occasions, and the couple would be bedded down together in front of the guests, with a cover placed over them; later, the revelers would “sing them on” as they spent the night together. As was customary in Saxony, Luther and Katharina’s marriage was consummated before the wedding, in the first half of June, and the celebrations — “leading her home” — took place two or three weeks later.

Luther considered sex sinful, but only because he considered all human action sinful. He held that good works couldn’t redeem anyone, but faith could. In his view, God didn’t care what you did, just whether you worshipped him. In other words, Luther’s God was a narcissist.

The story of the Diet of Worms and the events leading up to it is impressive. Luther started out just wanting to reform corrupt practices in the Church, such as selling a shortening of deceased relatives’ time in Purgatory (as if priests decided that for God). In December 1520, he made a formal break, publicly burning the papal bull which threatened him with excommunication. In 1521 he accepted the summons to Worms because he was promised safe conduct and had strong allies to back it up.

In Worms he chose his words carefully but didn’t compromise on his ideas. In Roper’s translation, he said, “I am bound by the Scriptures I have quoted and my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and will not retract anything, since it is neither safe nor right to go against conscience.” The words “Ich kann nicht anders” (“I cannot do otherwise”) didn’t appear in the official transcript, but an account published by his supporters included them. Certainly they’re in the spirit of what he said.

He supported the idea that people should follow their own judgment, but only if it was based on the Bible. He opposed the peasant uprising of 1525, writing that “nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when you must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.”

I don’t admire Luther. He pushed a theology that deprives people of all responsibility. He urged the killing of people like dogs. You can draw a straight line from his writings to Kristallnacht. Yet I have to be impressed by his standing up to a corrupt church and rejecting an authority that told people what to think. Understanding people from past centuries is a complicated business. Smashing their statues doesn’t add to anyone’s understanding. Books like Roper’s do.

A nitpick I have to mention: In commenting on a painting, Roper says “the dove looks more like a pigeon.” Since a dove is a pigeon, what else should it look like?

Next week, how about some more dystopian science fiction? I’ve borrowed Brave New World from the library and am re-reading it for the first time in half a century.