The Life of Thomas More by Peter Ackroyd

Author:Peter Ackroyd
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780307823014
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-26T20:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER XXI

I AM LIKE RIPE SHIT

HEN Martin Luther proclaimed his theses at Wittenberg he was announcing, too, the triumph of his own self-awareness. The era of Protestantism, as it has been called, was inaugurated by the drama of one man’s spiritual torment. It began when a bolt of lightning hurled him to the ground and, as he lay prostrate in the thunderstorm, instilled in him a great fear. ‘Help me, St Anne!’ he called out. ‘I want to become a monk!’1 Stefan Zweig described Luther as ‘the only genuinely dramatic nature in German history’, and the episodes of his religious reawakening have all the lurid emotionalism of that moment when, while participating in the Mass, he fell to the floor of the choir and raved as if in the grip of demonic possession. ‘Non sum!’ he cried out. ‘Non sum!’ It is not clear whether, in his frenzy, he spoke in German or in Latin; in English we may take it to mean ‘I am not’ or ‘I am not present’. His was a character doomed always to live in lightning. In that respect he is strangely similar to another great German visionary, Jakob Boehme, the cobbler from Upper Lusatia who saw a vision of the universe in the sunlight reflected upon a pewter dish. Boehme was reviled and rejected by the burghers of the German cities, but his essential message remained intact ‘to show how man may create a kingdom of light within himself’.2 The spirit of Luther’s writing, too, with its reliance upon paradox and dramatic conflict as well as its attentiveness to the whole struggling process of human becoming, anticipates the style of such German philosophers as Hegel and Heidegger.

Yet how different Luther was from Thomas More; they might even be cited as the two great figures representing the ‘medieval’ and the ‘modern’ worlds. Luther disobeyed his father completely and irrevocably, while More remained the model of filial piety. Luther abandoned the law in order to enter a monastery, where More had forsaken the Charterhouse for Lincoln’s Inn. More moved easily within any institution or hierarchy to which he became attached; Luther was seized by violent fits of remorse and panic fear in any fixed or formal environment. It is hard to imagine More screaming out ‘Non sum!’ during the Mass. More obeyed and maintained all the precepts of the law; Luther wished to expel law altogether from the spiritual life. More believed in the communion of the faithful, living and dead, while Luther affirmed the unique significance of the individual calling towards God. More believed in the traditional role of miracles; Luther saw visions. More’s irony and detachment were very different from the intense seriousness and self-absorption of Luther. Yet one characteristic was held by them in common, even if it served only to embitter and inflame their dispute; as Luther confessed, ‘he heard God’s voice in his father’s words’.3 If one were to write the psychopathology of the Reformation, one might begin by examining the different reactions to that paternal voice as exemplified in the careers of Luther and More.

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