Martin Luther and the Thunderstorm

in this lecture we're gonna be looking at Luther in the thunderstorm and the issue of Lutheran the thunderstorm is not simply the story of how Luther decided to abandon law school and to turn against his father's wishes and to join a monastery the rather it's the entire context of what Luther thought he was doing when he was joining the monastery and beyond that we want to look at some of the issues of what Luther was stepping into in terms of relationships in terms of education who were the Augustinian friars whom Luther was joining and we could begin to simply with the story itself in 1505 Luther had finished his bachelor's and his Masters of Arts laying the foundation for his overall education and providing him now the opportunity to take the next step in terms of his education in there are lots of ways in medieval education that you could do this after the bachelors and the masters you could pursue medicine theology philosophy and law these were considered to be the supreme subjects in theology above all was the queen of the sciences as it was known meaning it was the supreme subject to be studied well sort of a reason despite the fact that Luther had promised to go to law school and had enrolled and was beginning his studies it bought his books and all these kinds of things suddenly he withdrew from the University of Erfurt for the study of law and he entered the Augustinian monastery there in the city and Luther later says that the spark of what drove him into the monastery was actually an experience he had in a thunderstorm riding a horse back from his parents house heading to law school Luther says that on the 2nd of June 1505 Luther while on the road was caught up in the midst of a thunderstorm and he doesn't really embroided the story very much but he does say that the storm and the Lightning was crashing near enough to him that he feared for his life and there are all kinds of medieval assumptions about this the biggest one the most important one is that in the medieval world it was believed that if someone was struck down by a sudden death in this case if Luther had been hit by lightning and it perished it was seen somehow as a direct judgment by God to die suddenly like this was proof but the Lord was angry with this person and so there are certainly enough in the culture of the medieval world that Luther is a part of for him to be fearful for his life and to sense in this thunderstorm the judgment of God and the story he tells is that during the midst of the thunderstorm crying out for his life he prays to a saint Saint Anne st. Anne is said to be the mother of the Virgin Mary though she is not named and in the scriptures we don't actually have her name according to scriptures but according to tradition her name was Anne and Luther calls on her to intervene for him again very much a medieval act calling on the Saints to be an intercessor between you and the Lord is very much part of the fabric of Catholic Christian life he calls out the saint and he says st. Anne I will become a monk this is in a manner of speaking a last-ditch effort saying if you save me if you get me out of this then I will devote my life to prayer and fasting and to the life of the monastic and all the way up until his excommunication and eventually his renunciation of his monastic vows Luther saw this vowel as ironclad and any medieval person would he vowed to a saint that you'll do something in this case if his life is spared and it was then that vow is now permanent and Luther took it quite seriously and historians have noted that there might be a bit of duplicity here it's hard to say Luther doesn't quite tell us but people have noted that st. Anne was actually the patron saint of copper miners of miners in general and of course the Middle Ages Saints were assigned to all kinds of professions and walks of life in needs of the Christian along the journey of life in this case and was said to oversee the plight of miners so there does seem to be a bit of a jab at Luther's father at least or at least a twisting of his arm if he tells his father that he has sworn to st. Anne that he'll become a monk well his father in the mining business himself certainly doesn't want to cross the Saint who was said to oversee his industry not everyone though believed Luther in the context of the immediacy of his desire to become a monk Luthor's father was frankly quite angry about this though as we said in a previous lecture he wasn't so angry that he stayed angry forever he eventually came to terms with his son's decision but he was angry that Luther had left him out of the decision that he had decided this seemingly on a whim that he had withdrawn from school and that he had sold his books as fast as possible and that he had joined the monastery and only really notified his father of this after the fact one of Luther's friends actually similarly sort of scratched his head about this Luther suddenly on his way to law school rising up the ranks of civil service suddenly enters the monastery and the friend thought that one of the things that could have been influencing Luther was that just prior to the thunderstorm experienced two of their closest friends had died and you get the sense from this story from Luther's friend that they all took it quite hard that maybe the carefree days of youth were beginning to sort of fade and Luther as he's entering into his mid-twenties is beginning to wonder about the state of his soul particularly after the death of two close friends unfortunately the context of this story and the importance of it and Luther's mind at the time of this incident are almost impossible to penetrate and Luther's mine and all that he ever really said for the remainder of his life was that he swore to st. Anne and he joined the monastery the night before he entered the monastery he had dinner with his friends and then he walked to the gate of the cloister and then as he entered he said to his friends this day you see me and then never again and you have to get the sense of this in the Middle Ages to join the monastery it was not simply to join just any old profession and in particular as we'll say in a minute the Augustinian order was particularly observant of the rules they were not lacks in other words as to the rules of the order of being a monk in their order and for all intents and purposes Luther was now leaving the world you don't go on furlough as a monk you don't get to go on shore leave and get to go see your friends and have a few parties and if you laughs and then head back the to become a monk was to cut oneself off from the world and the pleasures and the joys that you had known on the outside world now monasticism also fits very squarely within the medieval understanding of salvation as we talked about in a previous lecture the process of the circle of life you might even say or the circle of sin confession absolution penance and then a restoration to the state of grace this circle the cycle of the Christian walk was achievable certainly by the lay life but it was taught widely in the Middle Ages that those who questioned or doubted their souls ability to do their penance and to grasp hold of the works of Christ that if one feels this doubt or this compunction that perhaps they're feeling a call to the monastery and the monastic life is in a manner of speaking an intensification of this form of Christian life you give up everything which is a good work you devote yourself to prayer and fasting and penance which again works the Christian more and more into that state of grace you might see it somewhat as exercise if you feel a bit flabby spiritually the monastic order is the place to be and that context really is what is going on in part in Luther's mind again he doesn't really express any serious doubt at this point in his life about his salvation at least not vocally he doesn't say that he was in peril of his soul rather at the thunderstorm incident he is fearful for his life in that moment and he makes it vow and then he keeps it Luther will later have a very serious spiritual crisis when he attempts to do his best to be a monk but still it is certainly on though his mind that he is joining the monastery to work out his calling in his salvation before the Lord in a number of people have seen in this something like Paul's experience Paul of course in the book of Acts the great persecutor of the early church has a vision in which the Lord comes to him and it reveals himself he falls from his horse stricken blind after that over a period of time Paul finally converts fully and becomes the Apostle that is featured so heavily in the New Testament however it's not a one-to-one comparison Luther believed that he already was a Christian there was no sense in which he was sort of a rank-and-file pagan or that he was somehow backslidden or that he was corrupt in these kinds of things and then he has a conversion in the full sense this is a very medieval act you make a vow you keep it and it's not a situation of converting to the faith but rather a conviction you might say of leaving the world to do the better life to do the spiritual life to work out your penance with more vigor than you ever could as a lawyer so if you're gonna call this conversion of any kind it's not a conversion to the faith but rather a conversion you might say by Luther to a deeper awareness of the need for a spiritual life now there are some other issues that we have to deal with in terms of the context here setting aside the spiritual issues here of Luther wanting to go be a monk in order to work out a salvation there are some other issues at work contextually and interpersonally in Luther's life that certainly played a role in his decision to join the Augustinian order if you'll recall Luther had been part of the University of Erfurt and there he had been a precocious student remember he graduated second in his class in his MA and 1505 well one of the things that seems to be arising in Luther's mind is a real sense and a real awareness of his internal desire to study theology during his days as a student at airport he had two mentors and teachers in particular who dramatically shaped his engagement with this world and they were bar fallow mayo's Arnold often known by the name moon Segen and another faculty member in the realm of logic or philosophy named truth fetter these two men really form a bridge between Luther's previous life and his call to go be a lawyer and his subsequent decision to join the Augustinian order both of these men have dramatic impacts on and their impact carries on after the Reformation and becomes one of the biggest and most important sore spots for Luther as the Reformation gets going and this piece is always under explored in fact it's very little of it in the secondary sources but it is dramatically important to understand what Luther is doing do you see when Luther joins the monastery he doesn't just join any monastery rather he joins a group called the observant Augustinian friars and we can't go into the backdrop too much of monasticism but there are a couple of keys here whenever you see the name observant in front of a monastic order in the Middle Ages or after that's a key an observant order is essentially a reform movement within an order whenever that order has grown a bit lazy the word observant here means that they're gonna actually observe the rules they're gonna have to follow the rules and do what the order is supposed to do which is a way of distancing yourself from those who are fat and lazy well this group the observant Augustinian friars have a pan-european influence and rootedness but here in the area of Saxony there is a particular well spring of this group as a reform movement and more importantly the first reformer within the Augustinian friars order to give shape and laws and decrees and to become the head of this group was actually a professor from Erfurt his name is johannes Zechariah and in 1492 not long before Luther came to airport he had reorganized and brought together a reform movement of this August and in order and so it can't be coincidence Luther has spent his time at the University of Airport he studied with his men he knows these men there is this wellspring of this observant Augustinian group gathering now in this city and its ties to the University of Erfurt run deep you almost get the sense that just as Luther is graduating and he's coming out of the womb of the University of Airport and he's going into the study of law that the influence of his teachers who themselves were observant Augustinians drew him in personally in interpersonally to desire frankly to be one of their numbers again there were other monastic orders that Luther could have chosen but he chose --is this new reform movement this really intensified Augustinian group there in the city of Airport it just so happened the two of his most important and influential mentors were themselves members of this order in one of the things at this reform group the observant Augustinians were really focused on was education now there are lots of things that the Augustinian friars are focused on as a whole across europe but this group in Erfurt in particular was really focused on education which is to be expected because they are attached to a university and several of its faculty members are part of the order and luther is precocious remember he's a good student and we should just say a couple of things about what these mentors had instilled in Luther during his time at air fort which seems to be one of the things that draws him into the order troop fetter in particular was the professor of logic and he was when the new devotees to this view called the via Madonna now a bit later when we get into Luther against the Scholastic's we're gonna talk a little bit more about the via Madonna but needless to say it is a relatively newer philosophy that's just come on the scene it's associated originally with the teachings of William of Ockham and it's really kind of a scathing by eating kind of Emperor's got no clothes move against some of the other more elaborate systems of philosophy and theology from the Middle Ages the older model was called the Via Antiqua and it's sometimes referred to in terms of its epistemology as teaching realism again we'll get into more of these concepts a bit later well troupe Federer was not a realist and he was not part of the via Antiqua rather he was a nominalist as they say in part of the via moderna and he inspired in Luther a desire to really engage critically with the philosophies in the theologies of the past just as akhom had before and just as many in the via moderna did more importantly is the influence of OOOs Egon Segen who was a rich thinker like troop Feder when he was teaching his students when he was teaching Luther he stressed that they should question overly simplistic answers now we didn't instill in them just sort of radical doubt sort of cynicism but he did say don't simply take answers at face value or simply because some great thinker has said it question whether or not they have said it incorrectly or if they've said it too far or whatever might be he and Sigyn was well respected very well respected both at the University of Erfurt and beyond there is the movement of northern humanism for example which is associated loosely with people like Erasmus and others he and osakan was respected by the humanists he was considered to be a good rich deep thinker well both of these mentors both of these teachers or they are an airport and they're part of this order and it stands the reason that luther is drawn to be around them more to go in more deeply into the study of theology because during the quadrivium during his time studying for his master's as he's laying the foundation of his study of the arts the study of theology itself was actually not a subject that was taken up again theology is considered to be an advanced subject after the master hoards but he gets just enough just a philosophy of course the algae will be discussed here and there by students of all ages but there is sort of this tantalizing drawing of Luther to realize that if he comes back to airport and if he joins the Augustinian order he can engage in theology he could be back with his mentors any kid in essence follow his heart you might say and there are other folks there as well the Augustinian order was really drawing others for example one of Luther's lifelong friends and his partner in crime you might say a man who would go with Luther to Vinton Bourg who'd become a professor there and who would be one of the shapers of Lutheranism is a man by the name of justice Jonas well Jonas himself was roughly Luther's age he was a couple years younger and just to show that Luther wasn't the only one sort of caught in the sirens call of the august indian order justice Jonas comes to the University of Airport just after Luther he comes in 1506 and he too is a lover of humanism and Erasmus in fact later he would be professor of Greek and other languages well justice Jonas as a student follows a nearly identical path he studies at the University of Airport and then drawn in he joins the Augustinian order as well and the story of Luther and Jonases friendship would be legendary and just to give one more little wrinkle to show you how much Luther cared and was committed to these two mentors and to the Augustinian order we need to look ahead a little bit after that posting the 95 theses in the eruption of the controversy surrounding Luther's revolt really against the Catholic Church Luther didn't write air fort or his two old professors off in fact during the earliest years of his controversy Luther spends in an ordinate amount of time writing and in one case traveling to the University of Airport to meet an attempt to win his professors over to his side for example in 1518 Luther attempts to go and seat route fetter and by this point Luther is well known as a rebel and he arrives and truth' Feder sends his servant to tell Luther that he is ill and he was until this was a brush-off Schrute Feder seemingly felt a bit portrayed by Luther hit one of his students had now become this sort of renegade and Luther it's a real impassioned piece that he sends the troop Feder in which he says amongst other things but now he realizes that the learning and the teachings of Aristotle were quote a waste of time this is a real shot this is real painful for Luther to admit and frankly from that point on he intrude Feder for intractable enemies on either side of the Reformation there is this sort of painful sense and Luther that he is betraying men whom he'd followed from the University of Airport into the order and to write his old professor and say in a nutshell that everything that I studied with you is a waste of time is really an indication of the ripping of their relationship the situation is worse with jiggin he had a little bit more of an influence on Luther and in fact they had a number of interactions together face-to-face again just after the Reformation there was something called the Heidelberg disputation in 1518 and unciekin was actually present there he came for the debate and as we'll see in a later lecture the Heidelberg disputation is really the coming-out party for Luther's more radical statements on grace and justification his views were somewhat piecemeal or halting in the 95 theses themselves as we'll see a nun Segen had come to the Heidelberg disputation and the two of them had travelled back together to airport and along the way Luther says in a later letter they attempted with all of his might to persuade his old mentor and friend to join him to see his views but he has turned away once again simply will not come with him and Luther later admits that this again is in quote obstinate old man and again the relationships is ruptured and in this case who singen even takes the flight back to Luther several years later in 1522 listen again delivered a number of sermons championing traditional views of ecclesiastical authority which was the crucial issue for Luther in his fight against realm his denial that the papacy had authority over doctrinal matters was really the lynchpin for all of his other arguments Luther's old mentor and friend stands up for the traditional Catholic Church provoking Luther to write a number of serious blasts against his old mentor and there are a number of stories like this but what we need to know is that following this thunderstorm moment Luther personally and spiritually felt a call to the monastic life and we take Luther seriously here when he's talking about his desire spiritually to become a monk and that he is following his vow we really shouldn't let cynicism creep up too much and see it simply as self-serving still Luther's called a monastery was not 100 percent entirely about saving his soul but rather there was the added benefit of reuniting with his mentor's and his teachers and as we'll look at in later lectures the theology that he begins the study and learn at the University of Airport becomes the bedrock of the issues that Luthor raises first and foremost in the Reformation he drinks deep of late medieval theology and after his move to the University of Wittenberg away from his old mentors after he has his break in his Reformation breakthrough Luther turns back and the two men who shaped his young life now become his enemies okay that's it for this lecture in our next lecture we're gonna be looking at Luther the monk just what in the world happened that drove him nuts what actions of penance that he perform why did he become depressed and angry and bitter and we'll discuss his next great spiritual advisor Johan stout buds