Young Man Luther by Erik H. Erikson

Author:Erik H. Erikson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

VI

The Meaning of “Meaning It”

* * *

IN GOETHE’S day it became fashionable for German and Nordic men of the arts and sciences to divide their lives into the periods “before” and “after” their first trip to Italy—as if a thinking and feeling man’s humanist awareness was fully ripe only after Nordic discipline and thought had been combined with the style and sensuality of the Mediterranean.

Luther, too, went to Rome. What we know of this visit and of his reactions, however, indicates not only a monastic self-restriction, but also a decidedly provincial unawareness of the nature and the culture of the South, and a strange anonymity, considering the fact that ten years later he became the Pope’s effective antagonist. In the autumn of 1510 he set out for Rome on foot, one of two monks who were to present in the Vicar General’s office in Rome an urgent appeal from a number of Augustinian monasteries of the Saxon congregation. These monasteries were opposed to plans already decreed by a papal bull, on recommendation of the General of the Order, Mariano de Genazzano, to give Staupitz, just appointed provincial general of all of Saxony, sweeping power to reorganize the twenty-nine monasteries of his congregation. Twenty-two of the monasteries had approved the plans; but seven objected, among them Nuremberg and Erfurt, the two largest and most influential. Over Staupitz’s head they decided to send two representatives to Rome. The official spokesman was probably an older monk from Nuremberg; his mandatory socius itinerarius (for an Augustinian never traveled alone) was Father Luther from Erfurt. Exactly what mixture of political principle, inescapable obedience, local loyalty, or personal ambivalence was responsible for Martin’s selection for this errand is impossible to know.

By its very absence of any overt sensation, Martin’s journey was an event strange to behold. The future reformer, acting as chaperon to an older monk on a regional routine errand to the capital, crosses Southern Germany and Northern Italy, climbs over the Alps and the Apennines, all on foot, and mostly in abominable weather, finally “comes upon the Italian Renaissance,” and notices nothing; just as nobody notices anything unusual about him.

He passed through Florence, where, as yet a public novelty of a few years, Michelangelo’s gigantic David stood on the porch of the Signoria, a sculptured declaration of the emancipation of youth from dark giants. Little more than a decade before, Savonarola had been burned in Florence: a man of fiery sincerity; a man who, like Martin, had tried academic life, and had found it ideologically wanting; who also had left home to become a monk, and, at the age of twenty-nine, after a long latency as an orator, had burst out preaching against the papal Antichrist. He also became the leader not only of a local political movement, but of an international movement of rebellious northerners. Luther later called him a saint; but there is every reason to believe that at the time of this journey both the visual splendor and the passionate heroism

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