The darkest biography yet of the irascible Luther, by Harvard
professor emeritus and novelist Marius (Thomas More: A Biography,
1984, etc.). Marius claims that Luther's profound fear of death
drove him to the extremes of the Reformation - extremes that, in
Marius's view, were largely unnecessary to achieve lasting change.
Marius may have overstepped the biographer's boundaries by
concluding that history without Luther would have been far much
more peaceful: "for more than a century after Luther's death,
Europe was strewn with the slaughtered corpses of people who would
have lived normal lives if Luther had never lived at all." Marius
places the blame for much of modern ontological uncertainty
squarely on the monk's shoulders, and also saddles him with
responsibility for desacralizing communion, contributing to the
decline of biblical authority, and plunging Europe into religious
intolerance. These charges may be harsh, but Marius does show where
Luther's writings degenerated into virulent anti-Semitism (a topic
universally glossed over by previous biographers) and superstition.
Marius also surpasses other biographers in tortuously documenting
the reformer's dark side; here we see Luther as an unstable
individual whose depths of despair were truly frightening. Yet
Marius's book tends too far in this direction and almost completely
ignores the joy that also, paradoxically, suffused Luther's copious
writing and his personal life. Marius chooses to end Luther's story
in 1527, almost two full decades before his death, saying that the
later Luther is "not as interesting" as the man who sparked the
Reformation. But by neglecting the last two decades of Luther's
life Marius also ignores his transformation into a family man and,
at times, a mellower creature. Marius's book should be read in
tandem with Heiko Oberman's similarly titled Luther: Man Between
God and the Devil for a more balanced portrait. Valuable for its
depiction of Luther's mad wrestling with doubt and despair, but too
one-sided to capture the contradictions in its complex subject.
(Kirkus Reviews)
Few figures in history have defined their time as dramatically
as Martin Luther. And few books have captured the spirit of such a
figure as truly as this robust and eloquent life of Luther. A
highly regarded historian and biographer and a gifted novelist and
playwright, Richard Marius gives us a dazzling portrait of the
German reformer--his inner compulsions, his struggle with himself
and his God, the gestation of his theology, his relations with
contemporaries, and his responses to opponents. Focusing in
particular on the productive years 1516-1525, Marius' detailed
account of Luther's writings yields a rich picture of the
development of Luther's thought on the great questions that came to
define the Reformation.
Marius follows Luther from his birth in Saxony in 1483, during
the reign of Frederick III, through his schooling in Erfurt, his
flight to an Augustinian monastery and ordination to the outbreak
of his revolt against Rome in 1517, the Wittenberg years, his
progress to Worms, his exile in the Wartburg, and his triumphant
return to Wittenberg. Throughout, Marius pauses to acquaint us with
pertinent issues: the question of authority in the church, the
theology of penance, the timing of Luther's "Reformation
breakthrough," the German peasantry in 1525, Muntzer's
revolutionaries, the whys and hows of Luther's attack on
Erasmus.
In this personal, occasionally irreverent, always humane
reconstruction, Luther emerges as a skeptic who hated skepticism
and whose titanic wrestling with the dilemma of the desire for
faith and the omnipresence of doubt and fear became an augury for
the development of the modern religious consciousness of the West.
In all of this, he also represents tragedy, with the goodness of
his works overmatched by their calamitous effects on religion and
society. "
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