Marius, Martin Luther: The Christian Between God and Death

Marius, Richard. Martin Luther: The Christian between God and Death. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.
Richard Marius’ biography of Martin Luther is seriously engaged with previous Luther scholarship. He writes in his introduction that past studies of Martin Luther have been plagued by Catholic – Protestant partisanship, and that his book is an attempt to correct this. He wants to write about Luther “both sympathetically and critically, with neither malice nor partisanship toward any religious confession” (p. xii). Marius is particularly influenced by the psychiatrist Erik Erikson’s 1958 biography of Luther, which interpreted his life through a Freudian lens. Although Marius does not agree with Erikson’s Freudian conclusions, he also centers his book on a psychological analysis of Luther. A central premise of Marius’ work is that Luther’s life and impact on history was in large part determined by his individual “temperament,” a concept he defines as “the mysterious and perplexing force that makes all of us unique and gives us our own niche in history” (p. xiii). Marius updates Erikson’s Freudian approach by looking at Luther through a modern psychiatric or even psycho-pharmacological lens. He asserts that the “melancholy temperament” that plagued Luther throughout his life and that profoundly shaped his thinking would today be considered “clinical depression.” He asks about Luther, “did some chemical imbalance throughout his life plunge him into depression, and did his tortured mind then fix on thoughts of failure, meaninglessness, and death?” (p. 480).
Marius’ focus on Luther’s “depressive personality” is central to his thesis. He asserts that Luther’s tendency to melancholy rumination created an obsessive fear of death which helped determine his revolutionary reformation theology as well as his political views which would eventually profoundly influence the development of the Lutheran Church. Marius argues that “Luther’s horror before death is a continual presence in his work – a presence seldom noticed by modern scholars” (p. 60). This horror was not a fear of hell, as Marius asserts that Luther did not even believe hell to be a physical place, but rather saw it a psychological state of this life. For Luther hell was the existential fear of non-being. Luther’s spiritual crisis was his inability to reconcile his fear of death with the Christian promise of life after death. As a young monk, Luther had seen his fear of death and his inability to overcome it through the monastic life as an ultimate form of unbelief. Marius interprets Luther’s theological breakthrough that set the course for the Reformation as centering on his desire to reconcile his fear of death with Christian thought. He writes that “the Luther who discovered justification by faith understood that no matter how great our faith, it cannot be strong enough to stave off terror before death” (p. 205). Luther’s radical insight was that the true Christian did not have to work to achieve certainty of his status before God, but could accept doubt as part of the human and Christian condition and turn to Christ and God for grace. Marius continually returns to his theme of the importance of Luther’s depressive attitudes. In his discussion of Luther’s response to the German Peasants’ Rebellion, he asserts that Luther’s social and political conservatism also stemmed from his pessimism and his belief that “the world cannot be Christian or even very good, and those who try to make it so are deceived” (p. 427).
Marius’ book is structured chronologically, although it doesn’t cover the last twenty years of Luther’s life, since he concludes that “by 1526 the most creative part of his life was over” (p. 472). Luther was an outrageously prolific writer, and Marius makes extensive use of his lectures, sermons, books, letters, and treatises. The most intriguing source he uses is Luther’s “table talks,” which were discussions he had with his fellow monks and students which were transcribed and kept by his disciples. Presumably, these sources offer insight into what Luther might have thought and said in a more casual setting, although this does not mean they somehow reflect Luther’s “true secret thoughts.”
Overall, I thought Marius’ book offered an interesting interpretation, and he was able to assemble an incredible amount of detailed, convincing evidence. However, his focus on Luther’s “temperament” means that he ascribes immense importance to the role of Luther’s individual personality in history, while neglecting analysis of broader social and intellectual currents which shaped Luther’s time. Marius concludes that “for more than a century after Luther’s death, Europe was strewn with the slaughtered corpses of people who would have lived normal lives if Luther had never lived at all” (p. 485). Marius believes that Luther’s particular personality so affected the world that events were absolutely contingent on Luther’s temperament. However, this sort of hypothetical conclusion is not the kind a historian can or should make.
Category:Reformation