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Martin Luther: A Penguin Life by Martin Marty Lipper/Viking 199 pp. $19.95 |
Martin Marty's biography of Martin Luther is the latest volume in Penguin Lives, a series edited by James Atlas with the aim of matching name writers with name subjects, and published for a general audience as a library of biographical essays of no more than 200 pages each. This format, which places a premium on interpretation, has produced an interesting if uneven series of marriages; some work, some don't. Garry Wills on Augustine was the first and probably the best marriage of minds since Augustine has long been not only Wills' special passion but also his favorite font for footnotes, regardless of what he is writing about. Peter Gay on Mozart was a happy combination, but Francine du Plessix Gray proved to be a cranky choice for the nearly inscrutable Simone Weil. Thomas Cahill used his assigned subject, Pope John XXIII, to pout about the papacy of John Paul II, and Karen Armstrong demonstrated that the Buddha is yet another subject about which she has nothing new or even interesting to say.
Marty shares more than a first name with his subject. As an ordained Lutheran pastor, he surely must have come to terms with Luther long before he became a preeminent historian of American religion. Still, no two personalities could be less alike, and Marty does not hide his ambivalence toward the man who—also ambivalently—gave his name to one family of Christians in what is now a denominational division of labor. I think I am right in saying that this is Marty's first biography, though the list of his publications is as long as the Mississippi and therefore error on this biographical point should be forgivable. But on the Reformation he is, if academic balkanization is to be respected, a highly skilled and informed auditor, which is why, perhaps, he agreed to take on Luther—and why, in any case, one wants to read Martin on Martin.
Like other scholars, Marty sees Luther as a man of the late Middle Ages whose religious doubts and despair influenced the development of early modernity, notably the exercise of free conscience. His biographical intent, he explains, is to connect "the story of Luther's inner experiences with that of his relations to external surroundings" without using, as Erik Erikson did in Young Man Luther, elaborate psychosocial categories. Spiritual struggle and its consequences are quite enough. As Marty rightly sees, Luther "makes most sense as a wrestler with God, indeed as a God-obsessed seeker of certainty and assurance in a time of social trauma and of personal anxiety, beginning with his own." Marty also supposes that "perhaps most contemporaries cannot identify with Luther's sense of guilt and dread in the face of an angry God, yet what he made of his struggles is integral to the story of modern Europe—indeed the modern world."
For readers like myself—not to mention those who have never read a biography of Luther—the lack of a brief, separate chronology of important dates is a real drawback. But there are none in any of the Penguin Lives, a publishing decision that suggests a mandate to authors to keep the story moving and make it fast. This isn't easy when assaying a man whose collected works run to 55 volumes in the American edition. But Marty is a master of the quick stroke, as evidenced by the following passage, which conveys not only what the landscape of Luther's childhood was like but also how it impacted the inhabitants' imaginations:
Eisleben, where the family lived for only a few months after the child's birth, straddled the edge of the Harz mountains and the Thuringian forests. Haunting the dark heights above the town, many believed, were witches and poltergeists. In the town churches, peasants and villagers took refuge against both threatening supernatural beings and natural hazards. The Luthers, among these other Saxons, needed such refuge.
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