Martin Luther

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