Brother Martin's Problem

The indispensable Cardinal Ratzinger Fan Club Blog features a salutary article on Luther's scrupulosity, the forgiveness of sins and trust in God's mercy. It makes for fascinating reading, especially given my schizophrenic relationship with Luther.

I'm as triumphalist as Trent but yet I enjoy a Lutheran hymn as much as the next Lake Wobegonian--and may I remind you, a seventeenth-century Lutheran service had more Latin in it than an American Catholic mass today. But it's not just a matter of music or liturgical aesthetics. I've always felt Luther was more of a sad figure than a contemptible one, for all the troubles he brought upon his Mother, the Church.

In some sense, he couldn't help himself. He had a dark and gloomy Teutonic mind obsessed by superstition, werewolves and scatological diatribes. Some people paint him as the first modern, but I think he was, in his own strange and sad way, the last medieval. I should elaborate on that and say his was the mind of the plague-ridden, death-obsessed fifteenth century rather than the glorious, gilded, Thomstic thirteenth; his was the dank halloween Gothic of twisted dead trees rather than the gaudy carts and rainbow robes of the great Mystery Plays.

Considering Luther belonged to neither time and had the bad luck as a man out of time to be stranded in the hedonistic and Machiavellian High Renaissance, his sad rending of the Church's unity takes on a sense of tragedy rather than malevolence. It seems Luther, poor, pitiable Luther took Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott to mean God's warm embrace was as comfortable as sitting on cold stone, not that the Lord as permanent and mighty as a mountain. "Divine mercy trumps divine justice," as the ingenious gentleman Don Quixote de la Mancha said once.

While perhaps there's those of us who need to remember God's justice, the flip side of the coin is just important lest we think God's oceanic grace insufficient to heal us. While I'm not suggesting we kick off our shoes, stuff ourselves silly or put our feet up on the ottoman this Lent, it's still an infinite comfort amid the sackcloth and ashes. To quote Luther himself, grasping for the truth even amid his own personal nightmares:

And though this world, with devils filled, should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us:
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him;
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure,
One little word shall fell him.

Perhaps what he didn't realize is sometimes that little word is simply Confiteor.