The great German reformer Martin Luther has been described by one of his many biographers, Heiko Oberman, as ‘a man between God and the devil’. But this description shouldn’t be thought of as placing Luther permanently betwixt and between, caught in a life-long wrestle. There was in Luther’s life a turning point. The portraits that we have of Luther tell their own story of his life as a life in which there was a major change. There’s the thin Luther, gaunt and wasting away through his severe spiritual disciplines and through worry for his own soul; and there’s the fat Luther, the man of beer and sausages, full of bonhomie and swagger.
So what happened? In the 1950s, the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson (1902-94) wrote a biography of Luther called Young Man Luther. Placing Luther on his couch, Erikson accounted for the transition in Luther’s character as a resolution of his deep identity crisis. He painted the young monk as a gifted individual in ‘acute psychic despair’. Luther’s theology gave him a way of articulating his psychological state:
...Luther’s definition of man’s condition – while part and parcel of his theology – has striking configurational parallels with the inner dynamic shifts like those which clinicians recognize in the recovery of individuals from psychic distress (p. 206).
Erikson surmised that Luther’s theological breakthrough had come because he had finally found a resolution to his incessant self-questioning. For Erikson, Luther’s relationship with his father, the miner Hans Luther, was the source of his apparently spiritual, but in fact psychological troubles. Projecting his fear of his stern father onto the Father of all, Luther could find nothing to comfort him.
They were visceral troubles too: this was another element that Erikson drew in to his depiction. The older Luther made an off-hand comment about having made his breakthrough while ‘in cloaca’ – namely, the toilet. Like many people of his era, Luther was prone to gastrointestinal troubles of one kind or another, and was not shy of talking about it. For Erikson, nothing could be clearer: Luther was moving from an anal retentive to an anal explosive phase of life. The moment of great insight was literally gut-wrenching. His movement from the darkness of doubt to the light of faith was in essence a movement of his bowels.
Erikson’s analysis of Luther suffers from inattention to the historical evidence, as many historians have noted since. He relies overly on the older Luther’s own anecdotes about his childhood experiences. He suspends the great bridges of his analysis by the merest of historical hairs. Since he cannot accept its veracity, Erikson reduces Luther’s theological thinking as a projection of his inner world. Luther inhabited a world in which one could address God, and in which one had to deal with the torments of the devil. Erikson cannot accept that this world has any reality, and so any theological talk must be a code for some other state of affairs, a way of expressing oneself in particular circumstances. There is no line between superstition and religion, for Erikson; so he feels at liberty to interpret religious talk as being about something else other than what it purports to describe. Erikson reduces the genuinely spiritual and theological aspects of Luther’s life to the psychological (as if theology is only a way of talking about psychology).
Though making historical errors is grave, it is the second of the two problems with his work that is the more serious. That a psychological explanation, however tenuous, can be made to explain in toto the spiritual or theological language that a person speaks is clearly reductionistic. This reductionism is characteristic of thinkers in the modern era in which theological language is, by definition, not granted any purchase on the real world. It was the German thinker Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-72) who argued that all human talk of God was simply a projection of ourselves on a large screen. ‘God’ is simply a way of externalising our very human and very earthly inner struggles and wishes. Theology is simply anthropology, and no more. God is made in the image of man, not the other way around.
Feuerbach’s anthropological view of religion complemented the three great anti-theological movements in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth: Marxism, Darwinism and Freudianism. These three great materialisms all, in their different ways, take it as axiomatic that religious language must be a code for some other longing that lies within the human heart, whether it be sex, or capital, or just surviving and passing on one’s genes. Each then provides its own, totalising explanation for the human condition, without remainder. God is simply surplus to requirements.
The father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, for example, saw that religion had provided a means for human beings to find security against the terrible randomness and sheer power of nature. This is a very useful function for religious beliefs to serve; but nevertheless, all religious beliefs are ultimately ‘illusions and insusceptible of proof.’ Modern, sophisticated human beings have nothing to fear from the disappearance of religious belief and indeed ought to pursue it. But of course Freud was clearing the ground in order that he might build his own edifice upon it. Psychoanalysis, not religion, was intended to provide the transcendent explanation of human existence, and the solution to all its woes. Freud and his disciples were the master interpreters of the data of human life.
Each theory offers itself as the key to understanding human drives and as the single most powerful explanation for the shape of human civilisation and yet exists right alongside equally powerful totalising explanations. Marx, Darwin and Freud each produced accounts of human behaviour that appeared to do God out of a job. The old ‘problem of evil’ was drained of its force entirely since, on each description, human maladjustment had an entirely material, or ‘natural’ explanation. Each view has had a powerful impact on global civilisation, not least because of the completeness of the picture that each offers. But the very presence of three systems of thought each claiming to provide a complete description of human existence means that, at the very least, each theory cannot be all there is to say about it. Not that they are mutually exclusive necessarily, not at all. Indeed, there have been many intellectuals who have put forward a kind of blended psychoanalytical and Marxist theory. This shows, however, that each theory leaves room for more to be said about the world than they offer. It is the claim for exclusivity that is the least plausible thing about them. And if it is the case that more than one interpretation of reality might be admitted to have some purchase, then why is there not also room for a religious or metaphysical explanation of things alongside them? If the completeness of each grand theory is its chief weapon against God, then each must be counted as failing to exclude the possibility of God.
Erik Erikson’s depiction of Luther is basely reductionistic. Nevertheless, Erikson was right in observing this: that Luther is fascinating study in the psychology of faith and doubt. Erikson’s reductionism is a warning against a form of reductionism that lies on the other side – to imagine Luther as simply a theologian, a man of pure mind and spirit. Luther was a whole man: an academic, but also a man of prayer; a scholar but also a preacher. His radical insight was not merely a matter of rational conviction, but also a matter of deep personal spiritual necessity. It is true that Luther did say much later in life, possibly when he was in his cups, that he had come to his great insight about the grace of God while in the ‘cloaca’, or the toilet. And it was true that Luther had deeply disappointed father Hans when he entered a monastery. This snap decision had come when the young Luther was caught in a severe storm and terrified by a thunderbolt landing beside him. Fearing for his very life, he called out to St Anne to save him. As he walked away damp but alive, he vowed to dedicate his life to the service of God.
We can only speculate as to Luther’s frame of mind as he entered the monastery. What is manifestly in evidence is that Luther’s was not a quiet soul. Luther was the master surveyor of the topography his conscience. He checked it constantly, but always found bumps and hollows. He could not see anything within but the wreckage of his life. He could not, by his own account, feel that the holiness and purity of the righteous God meant anything but death and destruction to him. What he saw was a self-curved-in-upon-itself, by turns proud and disgusted. Though this frustrated his confessor, Johannes Staupitz, who must have been bored to tears listening to Luther rehearse his minuscule faults, he determined to talk the troubles of his conscience with the utmost seriousness. How could a man of sin stand confident in the presence of a truly holy God? He could find no confidence.
Out of the shady areas strode forth his tormentor.
Luther recalled later:
It is not a unique, unheard-of thing for the Devil to thump about and haunt houses. In our monastery in Wittenberg I heard him distinctly. For when I began to lecture on the Book of Psalms and I was sitting in the refectory after we had sung matins, studying and writing my notes, the Devil came and thudded three times in the storage chamber as if dragging a bushel away. Finally, as it did not want to stop, I collected my books and went to bed. I still regret to this hour that I did not sit him out, to discover what else the Devil wanted to do. But when I realized that it was Satan, I rolled over and went back to sleep again.
Here he sounds almost jaunty, blasé, as if there was nothing unusual about the Devil poking around in the dining-room. He talks about the Devil as if he was some rat or some other animal making an unwanted noise. Though he hear him talk in this flip way about his encounters with the Devil, we can also infer what night-time torments for the Luther in his monkish cell must have been like:
When I awoke last night, the Devil came and wanted to debate with me; he rebuked and reproached me, arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied: Tell me something new, Devil! I already know that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins - not fabricated and invented ones - for God to forgive for His beloved Son’s sake, who took all my sins upon Him so that now the sins I have committed are no longer mine but belong to Christ. This wonderful gift of God I am not prepared to deny [in my response to the Devil], but want to acknowledge and confess.
The Devil visited him not to frighten him by simply being a creature from the underworld or some kind of cartoonish monster with horns on his head and a pointed tail. That in the end is laughable. The Devil – or to give him one of his biblical names, Satan, literally ‘the accuser’ – has his real power in telling us the truth about ourselves. He prosecutes the case against us.
0 comments:
Post a Comment