Philological
Limits to
Knowledge
or
Luther's Tower
Experience
OUR pathways
into the past
are meanderings through the interpretations of history writers.
The
way becomes difficult when their attitudes are very different from
those
they are writing about. Martin Luther often spoke and wrote in
language
offensive to his biographers and to Reformation scholars. Here I
want
to follow one such case. It shows how each generation must
interpret
the sources for itself, and the kind of foolishness which can result
when
we fail to honor David Hume's maxim that is ain't always what it
ought
to be.
An unbridgeable
and
frightening chasm separates what we are from what we know we should
be.
“Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is
perfect”--this vast distance which removes filthy temporality from the
perfection he envisaged was responsible for some of Luther's most
colorful
language. “Oh dear Lord and Father, if I have from time to time
used words in a sinfully careless manner, Thou knowest I did not do so
with
wicked intent, but to drive away the sorrows of my weak flesh.”
Well might he beg forgiveness for his careless way with words.
Luther's sin
had
not been so much in “bad” language--although there had been plenty
of that--as in his bold figurative attempts to express a religiously
motivated
contempt for this world. Such usage made him all but
incomprehensible
both to the literal-minded and to those who affirm the flesh, into
which
categories sometimes fall both leaders and mass memberships of
organized
religion. One such misunderstood Lutherism has produced a major
distortion
in Luther biography. Our day of somewhat freer usage offers an
opportune
time in which to try to straighten it out.
The comedy
began
among those voluminous notes made at Luther's table by his colleagues
and
soon to become famous and beloved to many generations as his Table
Talks.
What has come down to us are not the actual records his companions
kept,
but at best only copies at one remove. We can now study them in a
superb
critical edition by Ernst Kroker, whose careful collations tempt us to
reconstruct the atmosphere of the Luther household in our own
fancy.
Recurring themes in this great mass of documents from Luther's last
fifteen
years are the thoughts and concerns of old age. He knew that his
life's
work was essentially behind him and that it could not be undone even
if--as
the devil regularly assured him--it had all been for the worst.
There
is much reminiscence on just how it all came about. Scholars have
naturally
been inclined to read into the material their own desire to nail down
exactly
what had happened, where and when, but Luther was really trying to come
to
terms with his own development and deeds, not to set the record
straight.
On one occasion
he
admits that if he had it all to do over again he would not be so naive
as
to offer his Gospel to the crowd, but would reserve it for the troubled
in
heart. He was brought to this remark by a memory of the famous
negotiations
at Augsburg in 1530. It caused him to recapitulate the thought
processes
which had finally led him to his Gospel. Since this is only one
of
the many times Luther traced these lines, it might be an entirely
unremarkable
occasion were it not for an ill-fated misinterpretation of his
concluding
sentence. Here is Table Talk 1681 in my translation from Georg
Rörer,
who probably gives us our best version of a transcript made at table by
Johann
Schlaginhauffen:
These words “just” and “mercy” used to trouble my conscience deeply, for the fear would immediately strike me when I heard them: if God is just, then He will punish us--and so on. But as I gave more careful thought to the meaning, and to the occurrence of the words, I hit on that passage, “The just shall live by faith,” Hab. ii [4]. That means the justice of God is revealed independently of the Law. --I began to change my mind. If we are expected to live by faith, and if the justice of God is for the salvation of everyone who believes, then passages containing the phrase do not frighten sinners. They offer the greatest comfort. Thus heartened, I realized that the justice of God is certainly not something whereby sinners are punished, but by which they are made just, and whereby the penitent are saved.
Thus far these remarks are recorded in Latin, and Luther may have spoken them in Latin. The last sentence shifts to German. It stresses his great wonder that in this shabby mortality he should have been permitted such a high insight, the Gospel itself, as he concludes:
The Holy Spirit inspired me with an ability like that, in this sewer (cloaca).
In another copy of Schlaginhauffen's
transcript,
one by Johann Lindener, the word cloaca is abbreviated Cl,
perhaps on the assumption that all who knew Luther would understand
what
he had said, or maybe for propriety's sake--in the Rörer
manuscript
a later hand has marked cloaca through and placed in horto
above the line ("in his garden"). This misses the point.
Luther
is not reporting a sudden insight, much less a particular spot where it
occurred;
he is thinking about his intellectual development and his gratitude
that
the Spirit should have granted him "this ability" in our contemptible
world.
Thirty some odd years
later
(1566) Johann Aurifaber collected, emended, translated, and embroidered
on
the Table Talks. When he came to these notes, he simply dismissed
the
problem of propriety by substituting the word alone: “The Holy
Spirit inspired me alone with an ability like that.” Although
in this way Aurifaber suppressed Luther's frequent theme of the
unworthiness
of the flesh and, in great admiration for Luther, allowed him to appear
pretty
arrogant, Aurifaber does seem to have recognized cloaca as
figurative. He does not suggest that Luther's theological
research
was restricted to some particular sewer. But this is exactly the
way
one of Luther's good friends did pass on the Schlaginhauffen
transcript,
much to the confusion of later ages.
Conrad Cordatus
was
an old preacher who had trouble getting along with his parishoners and
who
turned up frequently in the Luther household between jobs. The
only
member of the company older than Luther, he claimed that he was the one
who
first dared take notes at table, a practice soon adopted by several of
the
younger men. At the time of the table talk in question, the
summer
of 1532, Cordatus was pastor at Niemeck, about three German miles (14
English)
from Wittenberg. At such times he copied out the table notes from
friends
regularly boarding with Luther. Since Cordatus had the habit of
inserting
these borrowings by the date of his own receipt of them, we can often
make
a pretty sound guess as to what he got secondhand. The passage
which
concerns us is in a series copied from Schlaginhauffen.
With respect to
just
such borrowed material Cordatus causes some trouble. He was so
well
acquainted with the Luther household that his many elaborations are by
no
means worthless. Furthermore, Cordatus usually recopied his own
notes
and in doing so sometimes inserted yet more information. Thus
multiple excerpts from Cordatus's notebook may agree with one
another,
but not with one of Cordatus's own later, revised copies.
The table talk under discussion offers a good example of the kind of
problem
Cordatus poses. Our best rendition of Cordatus's own earliest
version may be
the
so-called Khumer Manuscript. It too is in Latin except for the
final
sentence. Here is my translation (and my emphasis):
These words “just” and “justice of God” were a lightning bolt in my conscience. On hearing them I was immediately seized by the fear: He is just, therefore he will punish. But one time when, in this tower, I was thinking about these words, “The just shall live by faith,” “justice of God,” I recognized: If we are supposed to live justified by faith, and the justice of God is intended for the salvation of all who believe, then my soul takes immediate cheer, for it is the justice of God which justifies and saves us. These words became happy words for me. --The Holy Spirit gave me this ability in this cloaca in the tower.
Cordatus has by no means
lost
the substance, but his version would not hold much interest for us if
it
were not for a funny quirk of scholarship in the early twentieth
century.
At that time, Cordatus's interpretation of Luther's insight as a sudden
one,
and of cloaca as designating a particular compartment in the
cloister,
was accepted at face value. Research seemed to indicate that the
privy
may indeed have been located in a tower overhanging the Elbe
River.
There can be no doubt about Cordatus's desire to display his knowledge
of
the Black Cloister: one version of his notes records that the room was
heated! As for Cordatus's own subsequent copy, here we find
Luther
saying: “But one time when, in this tower where the secret spot of the
monks was located, I was thinking about these words. . ..”
Cordatus's
habit of of using the first person throughout, thus putting his own
commentary
into Luther's mouth, has caused considerable editorial frustration,
because
the situation is not always so obvious as it is here.
In this case it seems
probable
that Luther, as was his frequent wont, concluded a reminiscence on
early,
crucial deliberations with a figurative expression, calling this world
here
below a cloaca (or some German equivalent). According to
medieval
topoi, the privy is a proper domain of the devil, hence a frequent
metaphor
for the world and its sinfulness. In Luther's view the world is
the
devil's realm, and he “imprints the seal of his ass” on all his
work. Those who govern it are “fart lickers.” Luther
liked to refer to his own physical self as a “maggot bag.”
He sometimes wondered in disgust that mankind has not by now “shit the
whole world full, right up to the heavens.” Luther's scornful
condemnation of the flesh in strong, figurative language was not
restricted
to his later years, although we do encounter such harshness most
frequently
in the Table Talks. In his early thirties the young professor
had,
for example, admonished his students in the lecture hall that spiritual
man
is ashamed of the external self “and condemns it as a latrine
and sewer [latrina, cloaca]. ...What else is this
body?”
To sum
up--Cordatus
was not present to hear the remarks concerning justification in summer
1532. Even if he had taken the notes himself, he might, when
recopying
, have had difficulty suppressing his good information on the layout of
the
Black Cloister. His impression that Luther had been telling about
a
sudden insight does not agree with Schlaginhauffen, who was present and
whose
notes he was probably using. Cordatus's literal interpretation of
cloaca is out of line with Luther's usual figurative
usage.
Entirely aside from all this, however, we would in any case hesitate to
say
that we might today, with the help of Cordatus alone, locate the exact
spot
where Luther was suddenly struck with a most decisive doctrinal insight.
That is
precisely
what was claimed in 1911. Strange to say, the debate which
immediately
ensued did not at all touch the relative reliability of sources.
Scholars
were interested solely in just how that “tower” compartment where
the “event” occurred had been used! As a consequence, the
expression “tower
experience” entered into the Luther legend, where it remains to
this day a well understood term for the crucial turning point
in his
theology. It has deeply colored the popular Luther image, as in
John
Osborne's 1962 drama,
Luther,
with
its important anality motifs, or in the widely read psychological study
which
may have inspired Osborne, Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther
(1958). Let us leave aside the very dubious question as to
whether
there really was some decisive turning point in the mature Luther's
thinking
or, if so, how we might go about documenting it today. I just
want
to show how naiveté about philological limits to our knowledge
of
the past shaped Luther biography in a most remarkable way.
Even though we
are
now able to reap earlier editorial labors, the complicated and massive
transmission of the Table Talks is not fully clarified and probably
never
will be. We are at best able to overview the many manuscripts in
a
far less confused way than the nineteenth century could. In those
days
Aurifaber's very free translation into German was still the
standard.
As that century progressed, and the authentic transcripts gradually
came
to light, the first reaction was indignation that the garrulous
Aurifaber
could so have duped the pious for three hundred years. Editors of
the
new sources were quick to condemn Aurifaber, and inclined to tout the
authenticity of their own particular manuscript item. H.
Wrampelmeyer, for example, brought
out the Cordatus notes in 1885, and his exaggerated claims were widely
accepted
at first. Thus the highly respected St. Louis edition of Luther's
works
(1887) cast Aurifaber to the winds and gave us the Table Talks
according
to Cordatus and one other of the table companions whose notebooks had
become
available, Veit Dietrich.
It was an age of
religious
polemic. Just after the turn of the century the self-confidence
of
pious Lutheran warriors was seriously undermined by an incredibly
vicious
and enormously learned four-volume study by the distinguished
medievalist,
Father Heinrich Denifle. Not only could Denifle offer
overwhelming
patristic documentation to refute such foolish claims as that by
Luther-Aurifaber
that Luther “alone” had formulated the doctrine of justification
by faith; Denifle renewed old sixteenth-century charges that Luther was
mentally
and morally depraved. He initiated the psychiatric approaches to
Luther
which became so popular as the century progressed to the insights of
Sigmund
Freud.
The first reaction of
the
Lutherans was skeptical reexamination of their Luther legend, and they
were
hard put to meet all Denifle's many attacks. One can imagine
their
consternation at the appearance in 1911 of yet another multivolume
Catholic
Luther biography, this time by Father Hartmann Grisar. Their
fears
were allayed by an introduction critical of “Catholic
excesses.” Grisar was for his day remarkably balanced and
unprejudiced; his work soon became the most widely circulated Luther
biography,
translated into English, French, and Spanish. Toward the end of
Volume
I, Grisar introduced the “tower” into Luther scholarship. His idea
was that Luther wished to report the exact physical location of a
sudden
Gospel insight. After quoting Conrad Cordatus to that effect,
Grisar
inserts after the “tower” reference his own words: “[Luther]
seems to be pointing with his finger to the very spot.”
From our
vantage,
Grisar may seem just a little dramatic, but the reaction he provoked in
the Lutheran
camp was violent. Not that they were really seeking sympathy with
the
distant human being Martin Luther, or trying to understand him.
Both
sides were engaged in a skirmish in which the quality of each move was
gauged
by its impact on the opponent. We have difficulty today
appreciating
the horror with which Wilhelminian Lutherans, already demoralized by
Denifle's
stunning blows, now received the news that the most sublime moment in
church
history, their moment, had transpired in a stinking unmentionable
place.
Within the year an eminent Lutheran, Otto Scheel, had published his
lengthy
refutation of Grisar: a painful attempt to argue that, since the room
was
heated, it must have been Luther's study.
Scheel's Luther
biography
of 1917 reveals in few words his pious sophistry:
It was the tower of the Gray Cloister in Wittenberg, most probably, if we are permitted to follow the indications in a table talk, Luther's study which was located in the tower. This reported location, concerning which doubts are not possible, helps decide with some certainty the other question as to the time when the Gospel was discovered.
Scheel's contention that the room
was
heated also goes back, as we have seen, to Cordatus's
information. Even
the most promising Reformation scholar of that day, Preserved Smith,
was
taken in--and he had just written a doctoral dissertation (Columbia,
1907)
on the Table Talks! “It is strange, and yet certain,” he
wrote in the Harvard Theological Review, “that this revelation
was vouchsafed to him in the privy of the Black Cloister, situated in
the
little tower overlooking the town walls.” Just to cite one other
giant of the era, and to show the perils of pedantry, in the fourth
edition of his authoritative Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte
(1933)
Reinhold Seeberg still quotes Cordatus, then asks coyly “whether
cloaca is the correct interpretation of transmitted Cl--how
would clusa be?”
Not only was
Seeberg
representing the sources in a less than candid fashion; he was making
excuses
which had long since become unnecessary. In 1919 the editor of
the
Table Talks, Ernst Kroker, had finally spoken up and said that cloaca
had to be taken figuratively. He had even come forward with a
most
convincing parallel, Luther's comment on music: “Since in this life
into this shithouse our Lord God has placed such a noble gift [as
music],
what can we expect in that eternal life?” Yet Kroker's article was
marred
by further debate with Grisar about the interrelationship of the
various
manuscripts, which Kroker now explained in an unnecessarily complex
way--and
his parallel was not heeded. Thus the “tower experience”
became an indelible fixture in accounts of Luther's development.
Lutherans with
overly
refined sensibilities struggled helplessly. The great Gustav Kawerau
lashed
out that “Surely Romish Christians are also convinced of the
omnipresence
of God; Grisar's discovery will not cause Protestants one moment's
discomfort. They walk on hallowed ground wherever God is their
companion.” Even the brilliant Karl Holl became shrill:
“Luther's report that the illumination was granted him in the tower
of the Wittenberg cloister has to be accepted as a reliable
recollection
because of its palpable quality . . . I find no cause to discuss
Grisar's
further determination of the location . . . What kind of company of
cynical
idiots does Grisar take Luther and his table companions to be!”
A natural corollary of the Germans' traditional idolatry of their great
has
been that some take mischievous glee in presumed foibles of the
great.
This national characteristic gave fertile ground for the myth of Luther
in
the “tower,” as becomes apparent in the imposing psychological
study by Paul Reiter during the Second World War. With high
sobriety
Reiter subjects Luther's mental disorders to powerful modern
insights.
The facts are clear to him: “In several [of the Table Talks] we have
precise data concerning the spot where the event occurred.”
Reiter
knew “personally several lyricists to whom the ideas for excellent
works
occurred while they meditated during the defecation process.”
Foreign
scholarship
never seems to have questioned this continental peccadillo. James
MacKinnon
and G. Gordon Rupp, to mention only two major authorities from the
English-speaking world, follow in Preserved Smith's uncritical
footsteps,
at best doubting, as MacKinnon, that “his cell in the tower of the
Wittenberg Monastery” was really a cloaca. A wistfully
comic chapter in Luther biography might well have been terminated in
1952
when Karl August Meissinger confessed that his own efforts of forty
years
together with the “infinite exertions of Reformation research”
had failed to locate the exact time and place of the so-called “tower
experience.” The two best biographies in English, that by Roland
Bainton (1940) and that by John M. Todd (1964), seem to agree with
Meissinger
that such a quest is vain, and in 1977 Lowell C. Green, an American,
reflecting,
no doubt, the good sense of Heinrich Bornkamm (1961), suggests that we
avoid
“the problematical word, ‘tower experience’.” But in
Germany the legend has continued strong. Peter Kawarau’s Luther
(1969), while in other respects a sound work with theological
emphasis,
quotes Cordatus by way of dating the “tower experience.”
Hanns Lilje informs us in his more popular Martin Luther (1964):
“Since Luther's study, the scene of this decision, was probably located
in the tower of the Black Cloister in Wittenberg, this moment is called
the
Tower Experience.”
Every comedy
has
its moral, and this one may have two. In the first place, we
should
probably note that it was begun by learned men who felt they were
serving
a higher cause than mere learning. In our own day our work may be
largely
freed from confessional trammels of the kind weighing on Grisar,
Scheel,
and the others; yet servitude to other ideals than learning itself,
continues
to prove obligatory--Reformation studies, already marked by the
socialist
ethic, now cultivate sensitivity, diversity, and gender awareness.
Secondly, while
Grisar
and Scheel may be forgiven their uncritical reliance on Cordatus, it is
difficult
to understand why none of the others profited by Kroker's edition of
the
Table Talks (1912-1917). They seem not to have appreciated how
strictly
limited is our knowledge of the past by the vagaries of
documentation.
Seeberg was a historian, Reiter a psychologist, Kawerau a theologian;
none
felt obliged to be a philologist as well. Anyone who wants to
impose
his opinion must, of course, examine the record. To those who
quite
correctly protest that in our age of specialization this is impossible,
the
Nazarene gave grating answer: “Be ye therefore perfect.”
For your amusement, here is just a little sampling of web links to the "Tower Experience." One could assemble a similar list for the equally spurious "Stotternheim Experience" and for the "Nailing of the 95 Theses."
http://www.iclnet.org/pub/resources/text/wittenberg/luther/tower.txt
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1519luther-tower.html
http://thelutheran.net/editorial/tower.htm
http://users.rcn.com/tlclcms/tower.html
http://home.t-online.de/home/MH.Reinhardt/texte/luthturm.htm
http://www.schlosskirche.ch/sonntagsgedanken/turmerlebnis.html
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