Rapidly, Martin Luder ascended the hierarchy of the Augustinian monastery in Erfurt. First elected subdeacon, then deacon, he was then selected to teach at the new University in Wittenberg (1508-09). After this stint in lecturing on philosophy and theology, he returned to Erfurt for two more years and there received new positions at the monastery. Here he took on many roles, as a prior, a vicar, a preacher, a lecturer, a reader. Even the tender of fish in a certain pond, thereby maintaining a legacy of a previous donor.
"Erfurt was a prosperous monastery, and it had many properties to administer. Luther learned how to ensure that debts were paid, annual dues delivered, and the monastery provisioned.... Luther might gripe about the administrative burdens, but he clearly relished the intellectual work, and he was evidently good at managing people and organizing, skills he may have picked up from his father. He could be firm, too." [p.47]In this period (roughly 1505-11), Luther's rector, confessor, and mentor was Johann von Staupitz, who recommended Luther get his doctorate in theology. Luther, as a young, pious, even unhealthily ascetic aspirant, later told the story, he didn't think at the time he'd live that long. But, he said it was Staupitz who had told him, on one of their talks out under the tree in Erfurt that God needed clever people both in heaven and on earth. Whether the right encouragement at the right time, or the right motivations set out plainly in front of him, he pressed on.
This doctoral task was finished by 1512 but, at 28, Luther's life then got more problematic. At a moderate doctoral, celebratory party after his advancement (as was typical of their time, too), his former teachers and cohorts back in Erfurt, where he had spent most of the previous decade, began to be outspokenly critical of him and his work. He would take it as a great wound but sharpened that grief into acumen, raising the bar of his ecclesiastic disagreements. [p.55]
Then at Wittenberg, Luther, with his new title and position had to also develop himself as a public persona. He cultivated friendships with 'intellectuals, printers, and artists', like Louis Cranach, and the mayor Hans Crapp, even the goldsmith Christian Döring. As a district vicar he had to manage and administrate personnel matters, in promoting people or transferring them to other offices. With his advancement again in 1515 to district vicar he oversaw eleven priories. Firing people or demotions and promotions became a regular part of the job. [pp.72-3]
"One of his first acts after he became district vicar in 1515 was to appoint his old companion and fellow monk Johannes Lang to be prior at Erfurt. A humanist and close friend... followed him from Erfurt to Wittenberg in 1511. Sending him back not only helped a friend; it also stamped Luther's authority on his former community....[He] advised him to keep a budget, noting down all income and expenditure, so that he could work out "whether the convent is more of a monastery than a tavern or inn" -- a strategy not likely to smooth his friend's path." [p.73]At Wittenberg, Luther studied theology. He lectured on Psalms, Hebrews, Galatians, he translated a few of the Penitential Psalms. For these, Roper tells, he drew from Jerome's old Latin texts, and with reference to the Hebrew text of Johannes Reuchlin, a contemporary humanist. There were other knowledgable peers that Luther surrounded himself with at Wittenberg as well. Andreas Karlstadt conferred Luther's doctoral degree on to him and, early on, strongly disagreed with him. But, in time, and despite such vitriol as they would receive, Karlstadt became a strong supporter. The professor of law there, Hieronymous Schurff was just two years older than Martin. Wenzeslaus Linck gained his doctorate the year before Luther and then became prior at Wittenberg for those crucial years of 1511-15.
In the years 1517-18, as Luther lectured on Hebrews, and Karlstadt on Augustine, the turning away from the old scholastic traditions which for centuries had vaunted and maintained Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Aristotle, as staples in the scholastic monastic traditions in German lands, had also begun. The returning to Christian sources, and other sources was at last happening in south German lands, too. A textual criticism that was also, as they said borne by their faith, by their conviction that this was what their God told them. This was the renaissance that Luther and his peers began to see and believe and spread.
A student in 1517, Franz Günter, devised a set of defenses or answers for Luther's disputations against scholasticism. And they were even more scandalous and far reaching than Luther's own famous set in 1517.[p.81] Wasn't this what they wanted? After all, they could crow, it was just these sorts of advancements, along with things like the project that Erasmus of Rotterdam had to spread his new translations from the Greek, as 'a return to original and classical sources', that upset and excited so many. And because they were seen as attacks on ... clerical authority.
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notes, quotes and pagination from Roper, Lyndal: Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet; Random House, NY, 2017
