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, Müntzer'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.
Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death is an empathic, critical, and beautifully written account of the life of one of the most important figures in Western history. Marius's primary goal is to describe the inner life of Martin Luther--specifically, to describe the way Luther's near-obsessive fear of death drove him to search for a gospel that would convince him that God offered real hope for everlasting life. Marius argues that Luther's failure to find the answers he sought was a primary cause of the Reformation--and that it led him to demonize whoever he believed had taken shortcuts to find those answers. Marius defends his arguments with close readings of Luther's voluminous writings and with ample documentation of the political movements during which the Reformation occurred.
The book's broad scope gives it an appealing quality of honestly grappling with the fullest possible understanding of Luther's situation as a man of the middle ages, even if Marius's ultimate verdict on Luther and his legacy is quite harsh. Marius claims that Luther's angry denunciations of Catholics, Jews, and other Protestants exacerbated the disastrous nationalist movements and religious schisms that determined the subsequent course of European history. "Luther's temperament was his tragedy," Marius writes. "He was an absolutist, demanding certainty in a dark and conflict-ridden world where nothing is finally sure and mystery abounds against a gloom that may ultimately be driven by fate, the impersonal chain of accidents that takes us where we would not go because our destiny is to be the people we are, and so we have no choice but tragedy." --Michael Joseph Gross
