He later compared this experience to purgatory and hell. In , Luther entered the University of Erfurt , where he received a degree in grammar, logic, rhetoric and metaphysics. At this time, it seemed he was on his way to becoming a lawyer. In July , Luther had a life-changing experience that set him on a new course to becoming a monk. Caught in a horrific thunderstorm where he feared for his life, Luther cried out to St. The decision to become a monk was difficult and greatly disappointed his father, but he felt he must keep a promise.
The first few years of monastic life were difficult for Luther, as he did not find the religious enlightenment he was seeking. A mentor told him to focus his life exclusively on Jesus Christ and this would later provide him with the guidance he sought. At age 27, Luther was given the opportunity to be a delegate to a Catholic church conference in Rome. He came away more disillusioned, and very discouraged by the immorality and corruption he witnessed there among the Catholic priests.
Upon his return to Germany, he enrolled in the University of Wittenberg in an attempt to suppress his spiritual turmoil. He excelled in his studies and received a doctorate, becoming a professor of theology at the university known today as Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenberg. Through his studies of scripture, Luther finally gained religious enlightenment. Finally, he realized the key to spiritual salvation was not to fear God or be enslaved by religious dogma but to believe that faith alone would bring salvation.
This period marked a major change in his life and set in motion the Reformation. Luther also sent a copy to Archbishop Albert Albrecht of Mainz, calling on him to end the sale of indulgences. Aided by the printing press , copies of the 95 Theses spread throughout Germany within two weeks and throughout Europe within two months.
The Church eventually moved to stop the act of defiance. This page is best viewed in an up-to-date web browser with style sheets CSS enabled. While you will be able to view the content of this page in your current browser, you will not be able to get the full visual experience. Please consider upgrading your browser software or enabling style sheets CSS if you are able to do so.
This page has been archived and is no longer updated. Find out more about page archiving. Luther died on 18 February in Eisleben.
World War One Centenary. In , when he went to the Diet of Augsburg, another important convocation, he kept a picture of his favorite child, Magdalene, on the wall of his chamber. Magdalene died at thirteen. Schilling again produces a telling scene. Magdalene is nearing the end; Luther is holding her. One thing that Luther seems especially to have loved about his children was their corporeality—their fat, noisy little bodies. Sixteenth-century Germans were not, in the main, dainty of thought or speech.
A representative of the Vatican once claimed that Luther was conceived when the Devil raped his mother in an outhouse. We will both probably let go of each other soon. And then you want to congratulate him on the sheer zest, the proto-surrealist nuttiness, of his metaphor.
The group on which Luther expended his most notorious denunciations was not the Roman Catholic clergy but the Jews. His sentiments were widely shared.
He did not recommend that they be killed, but he did say that Christians had no moral responsibilities to them, which amounts to much the same thing. It is the fact that the country of which he is a national hero did indeed, quite recently, exterminate six million Jews.
As scholars have been able to show, Luther was gentler early on because he was hoping to persuade the Jews to convert. When they failed to do so, he unleashed his full fury, more violent now because he believed that the comparative mildness of his earlier writings may have been partly responsible for their refusal. People whom we admire often commit terrible sins, and we have no good way of explaining this to ourselves. Another judge must judge Luther. Luther lived to what, in the sixteenth century, was an old age, sixty-two, but the years were not kind to him.
Actually, he lived most of his life in turmoil. When he was young, there were the Anfechtungen. He spent days and weeks in pamphlet wars over matters that, today, have to be patiently explained to us, they seem so remote. Did Communion involve transubstantiation, or was Jesus physically present from the start of the rite?
Should people be baptized soon after they are born, as Luther said, or when they are adults, as the Anabaptists claimed? When Luther was young, he was good at friendship.
He was frank and warm; he loved jokes; he wanted to have people and noise around him. Hence the fifty-seat dinner table. As he grew older, he changed. He found that he could easily discard friends, even old friends, even his once beloved confessor, Staupitz. People who had dealings with the movement found themselves going around him if they could, usually to his right-hand man, Philip Melanchthon.
Always sharp-tongued, Luther now lost all restraint, writing in a treatise that Pope Paul III was a sodomite and a transvestite—no surprise, he added, when you considered that all popes, since the beginnings of the Church, were full of devils and vomited and farted and defecated devils. This starts to sound like his attacks on the Jews. His health declined. He had dizzy spells, bleeding hemorrhoids, constipation, urine retention, gout, kidney stones.
Whatever this did for his humors, it meant that he could no longer walk to the church or the university. He had to be taken in a cart. He suffered disabling depressions. From a man of his temperament and convictions, this is a terrible statement. In early , he had to go to the town of his birth, Eisleben, to settle a dispute. It was January, and the roads were bad. Tellingly, he took all three of his sons with him.
He said the trip might be the death of him, and he was right. He died in mid-February. Appropriately, in view of his devotion to the scatological, his corpse was given an enema, in the hope that this would revive him. After sermons in Eisleben, the coffin was driven back to Wittenberg, with an honor guard of forty-five men on horseback.
Bells tolled in every village along the way. Luther was buried in the Castle Church, on whose door he was said to have nailed his theses. Although his resting place evokes his most momentous act, it also highlights the intensely local nature of the life he led. The transformations he set in motion were incidental to his struggles, which remained irreducibly personal. His goal was not to usher in modernity but simply to make religion religious again.
In honor of the anniversary of the Ninety-five Theses, three museum shows are displaying items from his life and his religion. By Peter Schjeldahl. The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit.
The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited. Tyson Brown, National Geographic Society. For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource. If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer.
If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media. Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service. Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives. Join our community of educators and receive the latest information on National Geographic's resources for you and your students. Skip to content. Twitter Facebook Pinterest Google Classroom.
0コメント