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biography Roper’s Luther is a man of intense friendships and equally intense enmities. His openness, personal warmth and ‘breezy indifference to formalities’ are attractive characteristics. But he was also a man energised and motivated by opposition, who could be extraordinarily intransigent, authoritarian and unforgiving. Was this a blessing? Only ‘someone with an utter inability to see anyone else’s point of view’, writes Roper, ‘could have had the courage to take on the papacy’. The tragic course of Luther’s relationship with Andreas Karlstadt, loyal disciple turned bitter critic, is traced in rich and moving detail. Luther had a tendency, extreme even for his age, to personalise theological disagreements and, since he identified his own cause so closely with Christ’s, to see opponents as literally demonic. It led him to misunderstand the causes of the great peasant risings of 1524–5 and to call for the punishment of rebels in terms shocking even to contemporaries, let alone sensitive liberals today. Nor does Roper tiptoe around the most controversial aspect of Luther’s thought: his visceral anti-Semitism. This is often regarded as either a typical prejudice of the era or as an unfortunate peculiarity of embittered old age. Roper unsparingly documents how hostility to Jews was a leitmotif of Luther’s career, going beyond the conventional antiSemitism of contemporaries, Catholic and Protestant. It was not incidental but central to his theology: ‘true Christians’ (in other words, Luther’s followers) were the new chosen people of God; Jews had to be displaced, disparaged, even destroyed. Luther’s calls for the burning of synagogues and Talmuds were nothing less than ‘a programme of complete cultural eradication’. This is to come close to resurrecting another mid-20th-century theme: the argument that Luther was a progenitor of the Holocaust. Roper does not quite say so, though she is not shy of asserting that Luther’s top-down view of political authority – a product of his psychological dependence on God as father, and of his upbringing in a princely territory rather than a self-governing town – ‘provided the theological underpinnings of the accommodation many Lutherans would reach centuries later with the Nazi regime’. Luther viewed a Christian as simul justus et peccator (‘at the same time justified, and a sinner’). It is appropriate, therefore, that Roper regards this authoritarian figure as also, paradoxically, a prophet of liberation. He never exhibited the instinctive revulsion for female bodies felt by many monks (was that because he grew up with younger sisters?) and he came to renounce asceticism and espouse ‘remarkably uninhibited’ views on sexuality and marriage, as well as to enjoy a full sexual life himself after marrying the ex-nun Katharina von Bora. This was the unexpected consequence of a ‘gloomy anthropology’: if all human actions were intrinsically sinful, then sexual pleasure was no worse than other forms of human Woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger, depicting Luther as the German Hercules, with a cudgel, c 1519 indulgence and could cheerfully be enjoyed and celebrated. For a leading feminist historian, Roper is surprisingly forgiving towards Luther’s notoriously patriarchal and chauvinist attitudes, pointing out that when he said that women should ‘bear children to death’, Luther was in fact insisting that the agonies of childbirth were natural and pleasing to God and simultaneously denouncing the widespread belief that women in labour were under the sway of the devil. Yet the paths of sexual liberation were dangerously uncharted. In denying marriage to be a sacrament, and thus any right of the Church to regulate it, Luther accidentally set himself up as an authority in marriage disputes: his advice, as Roper documents, ‘at times seemed to have been made up on the spot’. In 1539 Luther caused lasting damage and embarrassment to the cause when he privately agreed that Philip of Hesse, a leading Lutheran prince, could, like a polygamous Old Testament patriarch, covertly contract a bigamous second marriage. Even before the age of the leaked email, there was no chance of a signed memorandum such as this remaining secret. On occasion, Roper’s generally surefooted negotiation of Luther’s theological landscape stumbles slightly. She considers it an ‘extraordinary concession’ that Catholic representatives at the Diet of Augsburg were ready to agree that salvation came ‘by faith and grace, not by works alone’. But no reputable medieval theologian believed people could be saved ‘by works alone’ (a version of the ancient Pelagian heresy) – the process necessarily began with an unmerited offer of God’s grace. In noting en passant that Luther speculated very little about the afterlife, Roper overlooks his teaching about a pre-resurrection ‘sleep of the soul’ – intensely controversial in the 16th century and rapidly rejected by the Protestant mainstream. She rightly lays emphasis on Luther’s belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but goes on to paint this as an aspect of his thinking ‘which is difficult to understand today and where the gulf that separates our world from his seems at its greatest’. Roper’s ‘our’ evidently does not extend to the many millions of Catholics and other modern Christians who do believe Jesus to be really present in forms of bread and wine. No one, however, can accuse Roper of failing to take Luther’s ideas seriously: the particular virtue of this book is its determination to relate those ideas to the social settings in which Luther was formed and to the personal preoccupations and inner life of a flawed but fascinating individual. Aspects of the presentation will doubtless infuriate uncritical admirers, as well as some Luther scholars of the old school. Yet this unfailingly inventive and compelling account is a welcome gust of fresh air into the thick celebratory atmosphere of anniversary season. There will never, and never should, be a ‘definitive’ biography of Luther. But anyone seriously interested in one of the most influential figures of the last half-millennium will need to make time to read this one. To order this book at a special discount from our partner bookshop, see page 19. Literary Review | june 2016 6
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biography tom stern Ecce Homunculus The Making of Friedrich Nietzsche: The Quest for Identity, 1844–1869 By Daniel Blue (Cambridge University Press 344pp £29.99) Which famous philosopher wrote, ‘I have experienced so much, happy and sad, enlivening and dispiriting, but God has led me safely through it all as does a father his weak little child’? The words are taken from the autobiography of the profoundly religious thirteenyear-old Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche was given to writing autobiographies. The most famous of these, Ecce Homo, was penned in 1888, shortly before, or perhaps during, his descent into madness. You might have heard of that one because it contains chapters such as ‘Why I am So Clever’ and ‘Why I Write Such Good Books’. From 1858 to the end of the 1860s, Nietzsche wrote at least six autobiographies. These take centre stage in Daniel Blue’s new book on Nietzsche, covering the years 1844–69. We might be tempted to think of this as ‘Nietzsche: The Early Years’, but that would have misleading connotations. ‘Early Nietzsche’ customarily refers to the period 1868–76, when he was overtly under the influence of Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy and Richard Wagner’s personality. In Blue’s 320 page account, Nietzsche buys Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation on page 216 and meets Wagner on page 300. This is ‘Nietzsche: Before the Early Years’. Eight years old on page 58, eighteen halfway through, we leave him aged twenty-four, arriving in Basel to take up his first university position in philology: employed, financially independent and no longer asking his mother to do his washing. Nietzsche was born in the Prussian village of Röcken, near Leipzig, in 1844. His father, a Prussian cleric, died when he was not yet five. The family moved to the nearby town of Naumburg. At thirteen, he had sufficiently good grades, and a sufficiently dead father, to gain entry to a famous and excellent school, Schulpforte, which had a mission to look after the sons of deceased Prussian civil servants. He studied in Bonn and Leipzig, before being offered a position at Basel. If you haven’t studied Nietzsche in some detail, then everything you’ve read by him was written after that. A good deal of Blue’s focus lies in providing an accurate English-language account of the facts of Nietzsche’s early life, building on and correcting previous versions. Here, his success is unquestionable. There may be some minor errors – Nietzsche’s maternal grandfather, one supposes, did not both die in December 1859 and then celebrate his birthday in August 1860 – but Blue is a sensitive, careful and reliable narrator. He is also frank. Nietzsche would become a worldfamous atheist, losing his faith during the period in question. We might wonder why. Ultimately, Blue thinks, we can’t know. Blue also resists the temptation to relate Nietzsche’s early experiences to his later, famous ideas – a common vice of philosophical biography. In truth, you should already have a pretty good idea if you are the sort of person who should read three hundred clearly written and accurate pages about Nietzsche’s youth: it will depend on whether you have strong interests in Nietzsche’s life and works. Things could be different. If Nietzsche had had a surprisingly interesting youth, or had come of age in fascinating times, or had produced important, underappreciated work during this time, then such a book might have a wider appeal. But it would be hard to make a case for any of these and, with the partial exception of the third, Blue does not try – which is not to say he ought to. As regards Nietzsche’s life, there are no major surprises. Academically, he was june 2016 | Literary Review 7

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Roper’s Luther is a man of intense friendships and equally intense enmities. His openness, personal warmth and ‘breezy indifference to formalities’ are attractive characteristics. But he was also a man energised and motivated by opposition, who could be extraordinarily intransigent, authoritarian and unforgiving. Was this a blessing? Only ‘someone with an utter inability to see anyone else’s point of view’, writes Roper, ‘could have had the courage to take on the papacy’. The tragic course of Luther’s relationship with Andreas Karlstadt, loyal disciple turned bitter critic, is traced in rich and moving detail. Luther had a tendency, extreme even for his age, to personalise theological disagreements and, since he identified his own cause so closely with Christ’s, to see opponents as literally demonic. It led him to misunderstand the causes of the great peasant risings of 1524–5 and to call for the punishment of rebels in terms shocking even to contemporaries, let alone sensitive liberals today.

Nor does Roper tiptoe around the most controversial aspect of Luther’s thought: his visceral anti-Semitism. This is often regarded as either a typical prejudice of the era or as an unfortunate peculiarity of embittered old age. Roper unsparingly documents how hostility to Jews was a leitmotif of Luther’s career, going beyond the conventional antiSemitism of contemporaries, Catholic and Protestant. It was not incidental but central to his theology: ‘true Christians’ (in other words, Luther’s followers) were the new chosen people of God; Jews had to be displaced, disparaged, even destroyed. Luther’s calls for the burning of synagogues and Talmuds were nothing less than ‘a programme of complete cultural eradication’.

This is to come close to resurrecting another mid-20th-century theme: the argument that Luther was a progenitor of the Holocaust. Roper does not quite say so, though she is not shy of asserting that Luther’s top-down view of political authority – a product of his psychological dependence on God as father, and of his upbringing in a princely territory rather than a self-governing town – ‘provided the theological underpinnings of the accommodation many Lutherans would reach centuries later with the Nazi regime’.

Luther viewed a Christian as simul justus et peccator (‘at the same time justified, and a sinner’). It is appropriate, therefore, that Roper regards this authoritarian figure as also, paradoxically, a prophet of liberation. He never exhibited the instinctive revulsion for female bodies felt by many monks (was that because he grew up with younger sisters?) and he came to renounce asceticism and espouse ‘remarkably uninhibited’ views on sexuality and marriage, as well as to enjoy a full sexual life himself after marrying the ex-nun Katharina von Bora.

This was the unexpected consequence of a ‘gloomy anthropology’: if all human actions were intrinsically sinful, then sexual pleasure was no worse than other forms of human

Woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger, depicting Luther as the German Hercules, with a cudgel, c 1519

indulgence and could cheerfully be enjoyed and celebrated. For a leading feminist historian, Roper is surprisingly forgiving towards Luther’s notoriously patriarchal and chauvinist attitudes, pointing out that when he said that women should ‘bear children to death’, Luther was in fact insisting that the agonies of childbirth were natural and pleasing to God and simultaneously denouncing the widespread belief that women in labour were under the sway of the devil.

Yet the paths of sexual liberation were dangerously uncharted. In denying marriage to be a sacrament, and thus any right of the Church to regulate it, Luther accidentally set himself up as an authority in marriage disputes: his advice, as Roper documents, ‘at times seemed to have been made up on the spot’. In 1539 Luther caused lasting damage and embarrassment to the cause when he privately agreed that Philip of Hesse, a leading Lutheran prince, could, like a polygamous Old Testament patriarch, covertly contract a bigamous second marriage. Even before the age of the leaked email, there was no chance of a signed memorandum such as this remaining secret.

On occasion, Roper’s generally surefooted negotiation of Luther’s theological landscape stumbles slightly. She considers it an ‘extraordinary concession’ that Catholic representatives at the Diet of Augsburg were ready to agree that salvation came ‘by faith and grace, not by works alone’. But no reputable medieval theologian believed people could be saved ‘by works alone’ (a version of the ancient Pelagian heresy) – the process necessarily began with an unmerited offer of God’s grace. In noting en passant that Luther speculated very little about the afterlife, Roper overlooks his teaching about a pre-resurrection ‘sleep of the soul’ – intensely controversial in the 16th century and rapidly rejected by the Protestant mainstream. She rightly lays emphasis on Luther’s belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, but goes on to paint this as an aspect of his thinking ‘which is difficult to understand today and where the gulf that separates our world from his seems at its greatest’. Roper’s ‘our’ evidently does not extend to the many millions of Catholics and other modern Christians who do believe Jesus to be really present in forms of bread and wine.

No one, however, can accuse Roper of failing to take Luther’s ideas seriously: the particular virtue of this book is its determination to relate those ideas to the social settings in which Luther was formed and to the personal preoccupations and inner life of a flawed but fascinating individual. Aspects of the presentation will doubtless infuriate uncritical admirers, as well as some Luther scholars of the old school. Yet this unfailingly inventive and compelling account is a welcome gust of fresh air into the thick celebratory atmosphere of anniversary season. There will never, and never should, be a ‘definitive’ biography of Luther. But anyone seriously interested in one of the most influential figures of the last half-millennium will need to make time to read this one. To order this book at a special discount from our partner bookshop, see page 19.

Literary Review | june 2016 6

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