Martin Luther
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MARTIN LUTHER: THE RELUCTANT REVOLUTIONARY<br />
PROF. M. M. NINAN<br />
(http://www.newadvent.org)<br />
Extreme simplicity and inflexible severity characterized their home life, so that the joys of childhood<br />
were virtually unknown to him. His father once beat him so mercilessly that he ran away from home<br />
and was so "embittered against him that he had to win me to himself again." His mother, "on<br />
account of an insignificant nut, beat me till the blood flowed, and it was this harshness and severity<br />
of the life I led with them that forced me subsequently to run away to a monastery and become a<br />
monk." The same cruelty was the experience of his earliest school-days, when in one morning he<br />
was punished no less than fifteen times.<br />
Hans <strong>Luther</strong> was ambitious for himself and his family, and he was determined to see <strong>Martin</strong>, his<br />
eldest son, become a lawyer. He sent <strong>Martin</strong> to Latin schools in Mansfeld, then Magdeburg in 1497,<br />
where he attended a school operated by a lay group called the Brethren of the Common Life, and<br />
Eisenach in 1498. In the Latin school, the Ten Commandments, "Child's Belief", the Lord's Prayer,<br />
the Latin grammar of Donatus were taught.. The three schools focused on the so-called "trivium":<br />
grammar, rhetoric, and logic. <strong>Luther</strong> later compared his education there to purgatory and hell.<br />
<strong>Martin</strong> <strong>Luther</strong>’s residence from ages 14 to 17 in Eisenach, Germany.<br />
In his fourteenth year (1497) he entered a school at Magdeburg, where, in the words of his first<br />
biographer, like many children "of honorable and well-to-do parents, he sang and begged for bread<br />
— panem propter Deum" (Mathesius, op. cit.). In his fifteenth year we find him at Eisenach.<br />
At eighteen (1501) he entered the University of Erfurt, with a view to studying jurisprudence at the<br />
request of his father. University of Erfurt, he later described as a beerhouse and whorehouse. He<br />
was made to wake at four every morning for what has been described as "a day of rote learning<br />
and often wearying spiritual exercises." He dropped out almost immediately, believing that law<br />
represented uncertainty. <strong>Luther</strong> sought assurances about life and was drawn to theology and<br />
philosophy, expressing particular interest in Aristotle, William of Ockham, and Gabriel Biel. He was<br />
deeply influenced by two tutors, Bartholomaeus Arnold von Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter, who<br />
taught him to be “suspicious of even the greatest thinkers and to test everything himself by<br />
experience.”<br />
Philosophy proved to be unsatisfying, offering assurance about the use of reason but none about<br />
loving God, which to <strong>Luther</strong> was more important. Reason could not lead men to God, he felt, and he<br />
thereafter developed a love-hate relationship with Aristotle over the latter's emphasis on reason.<br />
For <strong>Luther</strong>, reason could be used to question men and institutions, but not God. Human beings<br />
could learn about God only through divine revelation, he believed, and Scripture therefore became<br />
increasingly important to him.<br />
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