THE MITIGATED FALL OF HUMANKIND:

MARTIN LUTHER’S RECONCILIATION

WITH THE BODY

As the five-hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the German

Reformation looms ahead of us, interested observers are witnessing a resur-
gence of voices that perceive in the challenge to the late medieval Catholic
Church a substantial break with past spirituality and, in the widespread con-
fessional circles, a reassertion of the conviction that the Reformation ushered
in advances that have made the modern West the distinctive culture that it is.
I encountered a first-class example of faith-centred confidence during my six
years’ service on the Wissenschaftlicher Beirat of the Evangelical Church in
Germany, which prepared twenty-three articles listing aspects of the
Reformation legacy. These articles assert that the Reformation contributed
to the dignity of the individual, formation of democracy, tolerance and
mutual respect among people, the fruitful interaction of faith and the
Enlightenment, the foundation of charitable institutions, the free economy,
and multiculturalism, among others.1 In a recent column in Die Welt,
Thomas Kaufmann and Heinz Schilling, two of Germany’s foremost
Reformation historians, have argued that the significance of the
Reformation should not be confined to the realm of religion.2 Both similarly
and dissimilarly, Brad S. Gregory has also asserted enduring, but negative,
effects of the Reformation upon the modern West.3
My own reaction would be to qualify each of those claims. But for the
present purpose, this essay argues for one respect in which the Lutheran
Reformation, and particularly its founder Martin Luther, did substantially
break with Catholic values: it laid the groundwork for a new respect for the life

1
‘Perspektiven für das Reformationsjubiläum 2017’ (Wittenberg: Luther 2017 — 500
Jahre Reformation, published as a pamphlet without a date but probably 2009); articles
7–8, 16, 5, 14, 19, 22 respectively.
2
‘Die EKD hat ein ideologisches Luther-Bild’, Die Welt, 24 May 2014, unpaginated.
Schilling was a member of the Wissenschaftliche Beirat, which produced the twenty-
three articles referred to in n. 1 above.
3
Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Reformation Secularized
Society (Cambridge, 2012).

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 52 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 12

of the flesh on earth.4 Luther did this consistently within four arenas: his
sexual relationship with his wife, Katharina von Bora; his articulation of the
bonds between Adam and Eve and other Genesiac figures and their spouses;
his doctrine concerning the ubiquity of the incarnate Christ in the Eucharistic
elements; and the decoration and equipage of Lutheran sanctuaries. Each of
these subjects is already a well-known dimension of the reformer’s thought
and practice, but in this essay they are viewed as closely related to one
another. In each of these areas, Luther does more than endure the ineluctable
physicality of the world as one dimension of ‘this vale of tears’ (Jammerthal ).
He is more comfortable in his worldly concreteness than were his Catholic
clerical forebears.

I
SEXUALITY
At least since Erik H. Erikson’s study Young Man Luther appeared, we have
taken it for granted that the young Luther could neither desist from, nor suc-
ceed in making expiation for, sins that were at least partly sexual in nature.5 We
can never know for sure the dimensions of the thoughts that made the monk
rouse his confessor out of his sleep at night in order to confess. The monastic
paradigm, predominant in the West since the ascetic turn that grew from the
sixth century, had as its ideal as complete a nullification of the demands of the
body as possible.6 These demands along with spiritual shortcomings consti-
tuted evil, and the preachers of the half-millennium between the final conver-
sion of Western Europe and the beginning of the Reformation often harangued
their listeners on the need to suppress every desire except one’s longing for the

4
When I presented this paper at the ‘Cultures of Lutheranism’ Conference (The Oxford
Research Centre for the Humanities (TORCH), Oxford, Feb. 2015), Lyndal Roper’s
biography Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet (New York, 2017), had not been pub-
lished. It is evident that she and I share certain interests and also the inclination to place
the reformer in his flesh and in his concrete world. I wholeheartedly commend her study
to the reader. My own fuller development of the points made in this essay appear in The
Personal Luther: Essays on the Reformer from a Cultural Historical Perspective (St Andrews
Studies in Reformation History, Leiden, October 2017).
5
Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History (New York),
101–2, 158–63.
6
The classic study is Peter Brown, The Body and Society: Men, Women and Sexual
Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988). For a synthesis of attitudes and
practices in the high and late Middle Ages, see Jacques Le Goff and Nicolas Truong, Die
Geschichte des Körpers im Mittelalter, trans. Renate Warttmann (Stuttgart, 2007); origin-
ally Une histoire du corps au Moyen Age (Paris, 2003). The literature on this subject has
been growing apace.

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 THE MITIGATED FALL OF HUMANKIND 53

presence of God. Luther was conditioned by this moral framework and did, as
we know, practise ascetic acts designed to favour spiritual concentration while
pushing beneath the threshold of perceptivity the desires for food, sleep and
sexual gratification.
One of the clear ways in which the reformer broke with this model of
Christian existence was not simply in his theology but also in his style of
living with an unpreoccupied conscience. Luther’s gradual formulation of the
doctrine of justification by faith was more than a corrective to the Catholic
aggregations of the ages; it was also his personal liberation to be an imperfect
Christian while simultaneously sorrowing to God for that imperfection. We
can never look for a 1960s sexual revolution in Luther’s thought and behav-
iour, but still, he noticeably departs in them from the norms of the Church.
Luther not only taught that human sexuality was ordained by God for the
perpetuation of the species, which the Church conceded, but also that hus-
bands and wives should appreciate the gift of sexual congress within their lives
together. Martin and Katharina enjoyed being together in the bedroom, and
this became a central part of their wedded bond. They continued their inter-
course beyond the time when Katharina was likely to conceive, and when at 62
Luther became impotent, shortly before his death, Katharina wrote to him of
her distress. He replied to her from Eisleben a week and a half before his
demise, ‘I would gladly love you if I could, as you know’.7
In Luther, we see for the first time a model of the sexually active man of
God. In the light of earlier prevailing ideals, this celebrity of the German
Reform movement laid down a most improbable template for the entire
subsequent pastorate: the coital divine happily ensconced with his apprecia-
tive spouse within the bedstead, the Himmelbett, in the parsonage. We have
no data on when servants ceased to sleep by the marital bed, but while they
were still present, they may or may not have fostered an abstinent ideal within
that piece of furniture. However, as parsonages became larger and more solid,
clerical couples enjoyed a greater spatial remove from the rest of the house-
hold. After separate studies for the preparation of sermons, parish visitors
were most concerned about the provision of separate bedrooms for the
Hausväter and Hausmütter.
Luther nevertheless did not advocate sensual abandon in the master bed-
stead. Even marital sexuality threatened to get out of control and needed to be
held within bounds. But Luther knew from personal experience that restraint
was almost impossible. One could not be engaged in sex and think about

7
D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar and Vienna, 1883–1999), (hereafter, by custom, cited
as WA for Weimarer Ausgabe), Briefwechsel, 11, no. 4201: 286–7.

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 54 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 12

God.8 His fullest treatment of God’s response to connubial relations may be

found in a sermon the reformer preached in 1545, at the wedding of
Merseburg clergyman Sigmund von Lindenau:
How can the marriage bed be pure? There is much impurity in
marriage. True it is: there is not much purity there . . . But
[St. Paul] speaks about a certain purity that is supposed to exist
in the estate of matrimony, [namely] that spouses are not to whore
or commit adultery. Whatever occurs in marriage beyond that, God
covers the heavens over. Whatever is done to the end of producing
children, God says yes to, for it is ordinance, etc. ‘This impurity’,
says God, ‘I don’t want to see’. Here parents, father and mother or
spouses are pardoned. Because of their innate sinfulness, God will
not count it [the sex act] as impurity. He will hold and count it as no
sin. God will build a kingdom of heaven [ein Himelreich]9 over that
work and for the sake of his order and creation will cover up what-
ever impurity is there, etc.10
Here Luther applies the doctrine of justification by faith to marital excess. In
‘real life’, sex was at the centre of Martin and Katharina’s connubial relation-
ship, and they treasured their bond. Affirming an abstract depravity did not
make them feel depraved in their intercourse. Martin’s love of his wife’s beer
and cookery were part of his affinity for her and all that lay within her sphere.
His epistolary salutations to her reveal this.

II
TEACHING THE BOOK OF GENESIS
In mid 1535, when Luther presumably began writing his lectures on the Book
of Genesis, he had been married for ten years.11 Ordinarily these two facts are
not juxtaposed. Luther digresses from the text far more than, say, John Calvin
in his own rigorous commentaries on Genesis.12 The Wittenberger spends

8
WA, Schriften, 42, ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose von 1535–45’, 3.
9
Luther may be punning with reference to the word Himmelbett, which some married
couples slept in: a wood-enclosed bedstead, with walls and a ceiling. These can be seen in
folkloric museums throughout Germany.
10
‘Predigt bei der Hochzeit Sigmunds von Lindenau’, WA, Schriften, 49: 803.
11
Luther’s Works, 55 vols., ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia and
St. Louis, 1955–86), Lectures on Genesis, 1, introduction, ix. Henceforth, this English-
language edition (abridged) of Luther’s works is referred to as LW. I have drawn on it for
some translations from the WA.
12
Various editions are available online, such as5http://www.ewordtoday.com/comments/
genesis/calvin/genesis2.htm4(accessed 11 July 2017).

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 THE MITIGATED FALL OF HUMANKIND 55

nearly two and a half pages speculating on the house-like form of a woman’s
body, an analogy he doubtless drew from the familiar Schützmantel Madonna
images — the Virgin sheltering Christians under her cape — that had sur-
rounded him once, besides the Genesis commentary of Nicolas of Lyra, which
he often cites.13 Luther is curious about women’s physical shape, and he does
not refrain from saying so. ‘He who marries a wife has her as a next and home
where he stays at a certain place, just as birds do with their young in their little
nest’.14 Luther takes refuge, as monks and priests could not, in the body of a
woman. ‘The effecting cause of the wife and of marriage is God, but . . . the
final cause is for the wife to be a mundane dwelling place to her husband’.15
Today, he continues, contrasting the norms of his own day with those of the
first day after the creation of Eve, if a woman exposed her breasts and other
parts of her body, she would kindle lust.16 And so she soon did.
In this abstract treatment of the effects of the Fall upon human sexuality,
Luther will lead his readers to think that he condemns sexual union. Some of
the medieval approach to Adam and Eve is audible here. The original pair
became depraved; in their new-found lust they lost all restraint. Luther says
that now ‘man has fallen into blasphemies, into hatred, into contempt of God,
yes, what is even more, into enmity against God’. Luther refers to the desire of
the flesh as hideous.17 Yet intercourse is ‘fleshly work’, and he and Katharina
counted their sexual congress as an aspect of their vocation, their Beruf,
something that God has called them to do.
Luther depicts the scene of the Fall in language that reveals his compre-
hension of the beauties of the created world. Not only was the fruit of the
forbidden tree lovely. Even the serpent into whom Satan entered in order to
seduce Eve was ‘a most beautiful little beast’. After its abuse, it had to bear the
penalty of ugliness.18 All three creatures who took part in the disobedience of
God had to undergo a striking diminution in their attractiveness along with
the perversion of their moral capacities. The loss of character is felt and is

13
Nicolas of Lyra, Postilla fratris Nicolai de lyra de ordine minorum super Genesim Exodum
Leuiticum Numeri Deutronomium [sic] Josue Judici Regum & Paralyppomenon
(Strasbourg, 1492), on Genesis 2: 21, sec. ‘i’. I take this citation from Pelikan, LW, 1:
131, n. 69.
14
LW, Genesis, 1: 132.
15
Ibid., 1: 136.
16
Ibid., 1: 140.
17
WA, Schriften, 42, ‘Vorlesungen über 1. Mose, 1535–45’, for example 53. LW, Genesis, 1:
142.
18
WA, 42, ‘Vorlesungen’, esp. 140; LW, Genesis, 1: 152; cf. 187 on the transformation of the
serpent.

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 56 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 12

visible in one’s physiognomy and physiology, too, in our ‘flesh, body, mind,
muscles and blood, through the bones and the very marrow’.19 Adam and Eve
recoiled from the sight of their sexual parts. ‘The glory of the genitals was
turned into the utmost disgrace, so that man was compelled to cover them
with a girdle’.20 People were even self-conscious about being naked when they
were alone.21
In expostulating on the immediate consequences of the Fall, while being
distinctly himself in bringing into his commentary domesticated puppies,
‘caterpillars, flies, fleas and bedbugs’, and the noises of mice and leaves — in
short, the concreteness of everyday life — Luther draws on the long tradition
of explication that precedes him.22 He includes such language as ‘as the scho-
lastics rave’, in describing the results of the Fall, and he often refers to
Nicholas of Lyra. Luther accepts the preponderance of learned opinion that
Adam and Eve were despoiled through their transgression. The alleged irre-
mediability of this ruin would be the basis of one of the great theological
disputes in the age of orthodoxy: whether humankind any longer shared in
the image of God.23 Its most extreme exponents, exemplified by Cyriacus
Spangenberg, could find ammunition here. Luther unequivocally disparages
what remains of human moral fibre and self-control. All the same, he subse-
quently finds relieving qualities in Adam and Eve’s postlapsarian condition.
Luther vacillates in these lectures between the linguistic arsenal of condem-
nation and that of advocacy. He turns from the theme of depravity to divine
mercy. God was gentle toward His wayward children because ‘even then
Christ, our Deliverer, had placed Himself between God and man as a
Mediator’.24 God has not repudiated the first woman and man, and they
retain the hope of a restoration to paradise after their death. Luther turns
from expressions of horror to encouragement toward the goodness of life.
People should not concentrate on the troublesome but delight in ‘God’s gifts
and blessings’.25 He returns to the theme of the wonder of the female body.26
Wives and husbands console one another in the midst of their respective

19
LW, Genesis, 1: 166.
20
Ibid., 1: 168.
21
Ibid., 1: 167.
22
LW, Genesis, 1: 170–1, 208. On the unattractiveness of a vegetarian diet, LW, Genesis, 1:
210.
23
Robert J. Christman, Doctrinal Controversy and Lay Religiosity in Late Reformation
Germany: The Case of Mansfeld (Leiden, 2011), esp. ch. 2, 48–96.
24
LW, Genesis, 1: 181.
25
Ibid., 1: 201.
26
Ibid., 1: 202.

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 THE MITIGATED FALL OF HUMANKIND 57

burdens. Luther’s imagination fits out in some detail the domestic environ-
ment of our first ancestors, however short of perfection everything now is.
This coincides with the reformer’s contented life within the world. Adam
gives his wife, Luther says, a pleasing name, which is ‘a joyous omen of life’.27
‘By assigning this name . . . he gives a clear indication that the Holy Spirit had
cheered his heart through his trust in the forgiveness of sins [committed by]
the Seed of Eve’.28 Indeed, Luther thought that one pope or another ought to
have canonized Eve, ‘who was full of faith, love and endless crosses’.29 When,
as the Bible says, Adam knew Eve, theirs was not an unrelievedly ‘leprous’
act.30 ‘Adam did not know his Eve simply as a result of the passion of his flesh;
but the need of achieving salvation through the blessed Seed impelled
him too . . . The work of procreation is something good and holy that God
has created’.31 As over and over again throughout his adult life, Luther
verbally marks the separation between his views and those of the proponents
of celibacy. By drawing on what we know of his marriage to Katharina, we
may be sure that he says these things with conviction. If he protests too much,
it is likely because of his own conditioning as a celibate and the vociferous
opposition to clerical marriage on the part of Luther’s principal opponent,
the Catholic Church.
Luther’s inclination toward matrimonial intimacy is even clearer as he
considers the interaction of Isaac and Rebecca. Inspired by the model of his
own parents, Martin Luther believes that joking lies at the heart of matrimo-
nial happiness. Isaac and Rebecca had endured a great deal. Luther observes,
Comfort was needed . . . and this could be achieved by embracing
and jesting. This is honorable fun with one’s wife; it is becoming to
an honorable husband . . . With the woman who has been joined to
me by God, I may jest, have fun, and converse more pleasantly [than
with a sister or a servant].32
Husbands should show joviality toward their mates even in public, and most
certainly in the bedroom. God ‘wants amiability and mutual friendliness,

27
WA, Schriften, 42, ‘Vorlesungen’, 165. LW, Genesis, 1: 221.
28
Ibid., 42: 164. LW, Genesis, 1: 220.
29
LW, Genesis, 1: 235. Cf. WA, Schriften, 42: 239, 251.
30
Luther used the word leprous to characterize licentious sexuality. Such a meaning does
not correspond to modern definitions. To be leprous at that time was not only to have the
disease of leprosy but also to behave sinfully, including without restraint.
31
LW, Genesis, 1: 237. This opinion occurs repeatedly in Luther’s 1527 sermons on Genesis:
WA, 24.1, on Genesis ch. 3, 81–121.
32
LW, Genesis, 5: 31.

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 58 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 12

embraces, kisses and fun to spite the devil’.33 ‘It pleases God that I am
courteous to my wife’. God will be patient concerning the details ‘whether
you embrace her during the night, when she is naked, or during the day,
when she is clothed’.34 Nevertheless, couples should strive for moderation in
their mating.
The evidence from Luther’s private existence is that Martin and Katharina
strove to conform their nuptial behaviour to the new clerical ideal that Luther
described and that his wife Käthe too accepted. Whatever reservations Luther
had about the ‘leprous’ qualities of intercourse, he decisively rejected the
previous and ongoing Catholic paragon. Only that rare Evangelical clergy-
man — one in a thousand, or one in a hundred thousand — who genuinely
required neither sexual outlet nor companion, he opined, should fail to wed;
and every woman ought to take a husband. All women did require supervi-
sion. Luther was not free of personal needs. He found a treasured palliative in
Katharina and he teased her regularly. She ministered to his body and to his
spirit, as he did to hers.

III
THE UBIQUITY OF CHRIST
Martin Luther’s belief in the physical presence of Christ’s body and blood in
the Eucharistic elements might seem unrelated to the above, but I suggest that
it is not. Alone of the major reformers, and even including the variegated
Anabaptists, Luther insisted that Christ’s dual-nature-in-one went on after
his death and resurrection. Christ was physically as well as spiritually present
in the bread and wine that were extended to members of the visible church
at Holy Communion. Bernhard Lohse has described the rapid development
of Luther’s position, such that by 1523 he was convinced that the faithful
simultaneously ate both spiritually and physically.35 Why could he not, like
his peers within the founding generation, ultimately including Philipp
Melanchthon, dispense with the physical presence of the Son of God? For
one thing, Luther insisted that in keeping with sola scriptura, one had to
believe that Jesus pronounced the Aramaic equivalent of the Latin word est

33
Ibid., V, 33. I have written about Martin and Katharina’s ‘asymmetrical joking relation-
ship’ (drawn from A. R. Radcliffe-Brown) in ‘The Masculinity of Martin Luther: Theory,
Practicality, and Humor’, in Scott H. Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (eds.),
Masculinity in the Reformation Era (Kirksville, 2008), esp. 180–5.
34
LW, Genesis, 5: 34.
35
Bernhard Lohse, Martin Luther’s Theology: Its Historical and Systematic Development,
trans. Roy A. Harrisville (Edinburgh, 1999), esp. 306–13; the original German was
Luthers Theologie (Göttingen, 1995), 324–32.

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 THE MITIGATED FALL OF HUMANKIND 59

in instituting a new seder among his disciples. His first detailed treatment of
the matter is ‘Da diese Wort Christi ‘‘Das ist mein Leib’’ noch fest stehen
wider die Schwärmgeister’, (1527).36 This was followed by ‘Vom Abendmahl
Christi, Bekenntnis’ in 1528.37
At the Marburg Colloquy in 1529, Luther heaped scorn upon his opponents.
He exclaimed in argument that to turn is into represented, a mere rhetorical
device, was to turn the opening words of the Bible, ‘In the beginning God created
the heavens and the earth’, into ‘In the beginning, the cuckoo ate the hedge-
sparrow feathers and all!’ For the Wittenberger, if Christ loses his dual nature, he
ceases to be the Incarnate God. His fleshly reality must be inseparable from his
spiritual being, including after his ascent to God the Father. He must eternally
retain two natures in one. Just as Christ had to suffer physically on the cross and
die wretchedly in his human nakedness to atone for our sins, Luther requires the
concrete body upon the Communion table and not a memorial emblem. Now
that the magical work of the priest in transubstantiation had been eliminated, he
did not see what remained as akin to the papal ‘superstition’. In contrast to
Zwingli, Calvin and the Anabaptists, for Luther the physicality of Christ does
not contradict his divinity; it underscores the marvellous, eternal uniqueness of
him. At Marburg, Johannes Oecolampadius reproved Luther, ‘Don’t cling so
firmly to Christ’s humanity and flesh; lift your thoughts to Christ’s divinity!’
Luther responded, ‘I know God only as He became human, so I shall have Him in
no other way’.38
In another context, in discussing God’s Providence at the dinner table, he
urges family, guests and boarders to take refuge in the humanity of Christ. Do
not, he instructs, concern yourself with the secret plan of God but rather with
what he has presented to you, the incarnate Son:
We have sufficient to learn in the humanity of Christ, in which the
Father has revealed himself. We are fools who pay no attention to
the Word and the revealed will of the Father in Christ, but rather
brood over and dig into the secrets which are concealed [and] which
God has not commanded us to know.

36
WA, Schriften, 23: 64–283.
37
Ibid., 26: 261–509.
38
Walther Erich Köhler, Das Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529: Versuch einer
Rekonstruktion (Leipzig, 1929), 27; and LW, 38: 3–90. See 5http://divdl.library.yale.
edu/dl/FullText.aspx?qc¼AdHoc&q¼3163&qp¼164, Yale Divinity Digital Image and
Text Library, the full translated transcript of the Marburg discussion of Christ’s presence
in the Eucharist, 19 (consulted 7 August 2015).

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 60 PAST AND PRESENT SUPPLEMENT 12

He insists that we should fix our eyes on God in the flesh.39 He was not simply
blathering as the engaging host of a dinner. In a formal setting, Luther reit-
erated these sentiments. In lecturing on Genesis at least six years after
Marburg, he said:
We have Christ’s clear word about the Lord’s Supper, where he says
concerning the bread: ‘This is my body which is given for you’, and
concerning the cup: ‘This is the cup of the New Testament in my
blood’. Therefore, when the fanatics depart from faith in these
words and discuss how these things can be so, they gradually get
to the point where they simply deny this word of Christ and attack it
. . . Therefore, we must simply maintain that when we hear God
saying something, we are to believe it and not to debate about it but
rather take our intellect captive in the obedience of Christ . . . Thus it
is in the Word alone that the bread is the body of Christ, that the
wine is the blood of Christ. This must be believed; it must not and
cannot be understood.40
Luther’s reconciliation with bodily existence sets him apart from his col-
leagues Ulrich Zwingli and John Calvin (and many others), who must in some
measure go on regarding flesh and spirit as incompatible elements. Hal
Parker has recently published an article in the Renaissance Quarterly that,
while not directly focused on the discussion here, draws on Peter Burke’s
‘cultural hybridity’ and does see similarities between Catholic and Calvinist
perceptions of the body.41 The spirit, as in the Neoplatonic and in the
Christian mystical framework, is always in a higher place, and in order to
reach its realm the seeker must struggle to leave the body behind as he climbs
the metaphorical ladder.42 Although Luther experienced the feebleness and
degradation of the body, yet he accorded it respect and looked forward to its
revivification along with the soul and its unified progression to heaven.
Between death and that event, it slept peacefully in its ‘little bed of rest’
(Rühebettlein). He seldom harangued against fleshly sins in the pulpit even
though we know he perceived them in himself and those whom he counselled.

39
WA, Tischreden, 4, no. 5070: 642.
40
WA, Schriften, 42.1: 118; trans. from LW, Lectures on Genesis, Chapters 1–5, 1: 157.
41
Charles H. Parker, ‘Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls: Corporality and Religious Difference
in the Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxvii (2014), esp. 1266.
42
Examples of this schema could be endless. One that derived from the early sixteenth
century and was available north of the Alps was the Neoplatonic discourse of Pietro
Bembo that closes Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, trans. Charles S.
Singleton (Garden City, 1959), 340–57.

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 THE MITIGATED FALL OF HUMANKIND 61

He was more patient than his confrères concerning the physical life on earth.
He did not specify as frequently as Calvin those transgressions of the flesh of
which one ought incessantly to repent. Catholic divines and Calvin pit them-
selves against the temptations of the body, but Luther does not, or not often.43
Apart from marrying, Calvin is traditionally ascetic. Indeed, the Genevan
reformer engaged in minute self-examination when he was ill in order to
determine God’s application of illness to him for his sins.44 Luther is not
such an ascetic even though, theologically, he affirmed that illness was either a
testing or a punishment for sin. Predominantly, Luther’s God is a father into
whose side one nestles and gains loving consolation (Trost) and advice. The
child whispers into the parent’s ear, a physical concept. In his lecture on the
Song of Songs Luther declares that ‘God kisses us’, just as we similarly express
our love for our wives and children.45 Luther has a keen sense of the suitability
of metaphors of palpability for spiritual truth. It makes sense for this
personality to find a panacea for human ills in Christ’s physical presence in
the Eucharist.

IV
THE PASTOR’S BODY AND THE DECORATION OF THE SANCTUARY
After his conflict with and triumph over Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt,
Luther did advocate a certain cleansing of sanctuaries, but his definition of
clean was very different from that divine’s, just as it was different from
Zwingli’s and Calvin’s. The Wittenberger also had a contrasting sense of
orderly process in instituting change. Just as Luther initially thought that
consciences should not be forced to adopt new teachings and practices by
means of the hasty imposition of both, so he argued against the iconoclasm
that had begun in his absence. Ultimately, the tests of every image were
twofold: one, whether it accurately reflected scriptural recital or precept, or
a historically validated person or individual of more recent vintage, such as a
martyr; two, whether the onlooker attributed supernatural powers to it. The
first was essential and the second impermissible. Crucifixes remained prom-
inent in every Evangelical church, and their wounded fleshliness was inescap-
able. Luther laboured in his preaching to inculcate the correct attitude in his

43
Nonetheless, Luther does observe the city parishioners’ immoral behaviour and on one
occasion urges pastors everywhere to preach against such transgressions: ‘Ein
Vermanung D. Martini an alle Pfarrhern. 1539’, WA, Schriften, 50: 485–6, a very short
admonition.
44
Mentioned in Jonathan Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in
Renaissance Culture (London and New York, 1995), 110–11.
45
WA, 30.2, ‘Vorlesung über das Hohelied. 1530–1’.

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Catholic-conditioned hearers. On the traditional feast day of the discovery

(by Saint Helen) of the holy cross, he instructed from the pulpit:
It is the custom to pay great honor to the holy cross. People [even]
house it in a silver container. I don’t find fault with this but with the
abuse [of the practice]. Many simple people are seduced and misled,
such that they run here and there to the holy cross — to Torgau, to
Dresden and to wherever else there is a similar shrine with crosses
on which Christ never suffered. Such running does not produce the
discovery of the holy cross but instead buries it more deeply in the
ground . . . Such craziness and darkness is undoubtedly from
the devil . . . It is done similarly with images, such as the image of
the Virgin, Saint Lawrence, Saint Nicolas, and others, from whom
the people alone seek comfort and help and in whom they have
confidence. This, too, is a great error and idolatry. You have often
heard that we should not trust in saints, angels, human beings, or in
any other creature.
Therefore, where such misuse and error occurs in worshipping
images and the cross, one ought to remove [abreyssen] the cross or
image and do away with it [weg thun], [and] also tear the church
down there as well. Nevertheless, I do not entirely find fault with
images, and especially not with the figure of the crucified Christ.46
One ought not to kiss the cross or give money for the purchase of a
monstrance, however. ‘It would be better to give a penny to your neighbour
who is in need’, he advises. ‘Honouring the cross must occur inwardly, in
your heart’.47
Luther’s meaning is clearly visible in Lucas Cranach the Elder’s predella to
the altarpiece in the City Church of Wittenberg (Saint Mary’s). Here, from his
preacher’s wall-niche, Luther points to the figure of the crucified Saviour,
whose eyes are closed and whose body hangs limp. He stresses the incarnation
of God in this hypostasis. The reformer draws attention not to Jesus’s suffer-
ing but to the accomplished atonement. The parishioners who listen and look
on the left-hand side of the painting are not adoring an image suffused with
divinity but are learning from the man-made, entirely telluric object.
A painting of Jesus on the cross represents the Son of God but does not

46
WA 17.2, ‘Vor der erfindung des Creutz Christi’, from Stephan Roth’s Festpostille (1527),
423–4. Luther followed the traditional pattern of preaching according to set pericopes in
accord with the ecclesiastical calendar. Thus, this subject comes up in Luther’s sermons
on or near 14 September, the Feast of the Discovery of the Holy Cross.
47
WA, Schriften, 10.3, ‘Predigt zu Borna am Tag der Kreutzerfindung. 1522’, 118.

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incorporate or channel him. A picture is, as Luther repeatedly calls it, merely
a Figur.
We might consider whether, apart from the Saviour on the cross or in the
tomb, other nude bodies appeared in Evangelical sanctuaries. This is a more
difficult question than it might seem, for we would need to know how many
of Cranach’s post-Reformation nudes, of which there were hundreds, ever
stood in sacred space. By Luther’s standard, Adam and Eve were eligible,
although he preferred Gospel representations. Lucretia stabbing herself was
painted strictly for the secular market. To trace the history of a church’s
adornment is challenging and requires us to figure out which items were
on display during the Reformation era and which were permanently
removed, and which temporarily stored or disposed of. Cranach made him-
self prosperous by catering to private, including Catholic, customers.
Luther did not advocate that worshippers should abandon their sensitive
faculties upon entering the church but that they should employ them in
approaching and gaining the Word through every medium in which it was
presented. Luther was a multimedia specialist of his day. Several of these
media are physical: paintings and statues, stained glass where available,
hymns that were not merely used liturgically but that conveyed Bible stories,
burning candles that suggested the ineffable Spirit, organ music that roused
the emotions and reminded educated men of the music of the spheres. Luther
was comfortable among these himself, so much so that he was able to leave
them within his flexible concept of adiaphora; each pastor could decide which
to use and how to employ them. By contrast, Reformed divines, following
Calvin, could hardly allow any matter to be ‘indifferent’.
Luther’s permissive corporeality within the churches was nonetheless dis-
tinct from that of Catholicism. For Catholic clergy and laity alike — and
indeed for many simple Lutheran laity until perhaps the twentieth century
— the heavenly and the earthly interpenetrated and reciprocally bore on one
another.48 The theology of works fostered numerous acts designed to elicit
God’s blessings, often via a saint’s mediation. Luther regarded such as-
sumptions as false and superstitious, along with rituals of popular culture
— applying the Virgin’s belt to the bellies of women in labor, healers’ incan-
tations for the curing of worms, graveside recitations by the laity — that were
meant to extract an outcome from the powers of spiritual interecessors.
Luther heaped up pedagogical media, combining them in sanctuary and
service, school and home. Book illustrations, paintings, prints and statues

48
Matthias Zender (ed.), Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde, Neue Folge (Marburg, 1958–85),
passim; numerous examples of popular belief and practice that survived before World
War Two, such as the treatment of and attitudes toward the dead.

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joined other means of teaching God’s programme for humanity, such as

sermons, catechisms and schoolroom curricula. All these instructed; they
did not confer grace or heal as in the Catholic system. There were no holy-
water stoups in Evangelical churches. God was more often a friendly force
who desired the salvation of His children and deigned to assist and comfort
them. Teaching through the eye is a means of helping and consoling. Luther’s
main exceptions to this cosmic benignity were Satan and his minions, whom
the reformer viewed in a very traditional way. But these creatures permitted
by the Divinity could not injure by their depiction. The remaining decorative
objects of the sanctuary were no longer charged with supernatural potenti-
ality; in Luther’s scheme, at any rate, they had no power beyond reminder
and instruction.

V
CONCLUSION
Martin Luther is distinctly not a modern man. When he holds forth, for
example, on the ability of a (female) witch to coax milk out of a towel or a
handle, we know that he reaches back culturally to at least the fourteenth
century and continues to share, in the sixteenth century, a number of features
of his contemporaries’ world view. He can easily be regarded as a late medi-
eval man. His achievement in his own time is to enable himself and his fol-
lowers to dwell with some equanimity in the world. He is better at this than
Calvin, who ever feels the downward pull of the body and all human attach-
ments. Luther found ways to allow his body and his spirit to be at peace with
one another; indeed, we might say in more recent terminology, to be inte-
grated. Luther makes the mundane life of the body compatible with the cul-
tivation of spirituality; he reconciles them. He achieves this for himself and
expresses that compatibility not merely in his private relations with Katharina
but also in his biblical interpretation, his theology and his recommendations
for ecclesiastic décor and equipage. Neither the flesh nor the larger telluric
sphere is solely evil. Its legitimate functions are not nearly as tainted as they
had been and continued to be within Catholicism, and as they would be
within Reformed Christianity. Because he was a celebrity–clergyman,
Luther’s example was clearly noted. Further study would be needed to deter-
mine how far this model influenced the churches that soon travelled under his
name. It is already certain that Martin publicized to his personal epistolary
circle his happiness with Katharina, and this theme occasionally appears in
other men’s wedding sermons. When they are examined, these four sites of
accommodation with the flesh do not appear as a cohesive whole but as
separate topics. They can well be regarded as an aggregation. The shift that
Luther ushers in is by no means simply theological. It bears the imprint of a

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quite coherent personality, and it speaks to Evangelical Christians in their

daily lives.
Nonetheless, its limitations must be seen. Luther and Lutheran clerics after
him continue to regard freewheeling, imaginative, determined or preoccupy-
ing eroticism, whether in himself or among the patriarchs, as something to be
avoided. Marital sexuality is still a means of avoiding worse sins, and even
that requires God to avert His gaze. The reformer perceives that the physical
presence of Christ in the Host can easily be misunderstood. He and his fol-
lowers deal with this in two ways: by instructing their parishioners not to
intellectualize, including theologize, this Presence but to receive it in faith.
The Host contained no sacral power. The mystery of the Eucharist could not
be rationally grasped. Secondly, when the parish visitations got under way,
visitors were to warn pastors to make sure that the credulous laity took
neither pieces of the host nor a remnant of baptismal water out of the
churches in the hope of curing or securing themselves against misfortune.
This effort continued well past Luther’s death. Teaching and admonition
were never entirely effective in view of the similarity of the Lutheran wafer
and doctrine to the Catholic predecessors. Likewise, in their layout and
adornment, Evangelical sanctuaries so resembled the Catholic ones that un-
educated people, slow to absorb the fine points of Lutheran teaching on
images, might assume that all was as it had been before. Hence, a few
Lutheran authorities even resorted to painted words — the Decalogue, the
Lord’s Prayer — above their altars. Luther was confident that his parishioners
could make distinctions between image and person: ‘In my opinion, there is
no person, or very few of them, who doesn’t understand that the crucifix that
stands there is not my God — for my God is in heaven — but only a sign
[zeychen] of Him’.49 Yet, a certain unease about physicality persisted in the
Lutheran world. These were problems that Luther’s successors grappled with.
He himself knew, diabolical temptation (Anfechtung) aside, that the Heavenly
Father loved him as a man in the flesh and in the worldly, concrete setting. He
preached over and over that his listeners should rely upon the promise of
God’s love for them.
Finally, I am not arguing that Martin Luther’s positioning himself com-
fortably within the tangible, sensual world altered western civilization.
Change occurs under the weight of multiple and variable factors. The survival
of the flesh, avoidance of disaster, and aspirations toward pleasure already
dominated the lives of the multitude of ordinary people, who had never
conformed themselves to the model of ascetic spirituality held out by late
medieval clergy. Cockaigne or Schlaraffenland was as much their desire as

49
WA, Schriften, 10.3: 31.

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attaining paradise. We know from Luther’s absorption of popular speech and

world view that he was amply familiar with the common people’s appreci-
ation of the body. In combining the demands of human existence with high
theological principles, he presented a modified paragon to those who
admired him.

University of Arizona Susan C. Karant-Nunn

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