Out of the Storm: The Life and Legacy of Martin Luther By Derek Wilson, Pimlico, £8.50

Religion is meant for the masses but is essentially a specialist subject. That is why all religions evolve through crises over the correct interpretation of the word of god or of the scriptures. All religious reformers have used their original interpretations to clinch debates with the establishment. Therefore, to write the life of a reformer like Martin Luther is also to write about the life of Christianity itself. In providing an account of “the life of Martin Luther, warts and all”, Derek Wilson understands the importance of placing every detail in context, often having to go back centuries for the purpose. And having the “non-specialist reader” in mind, it is even more important that he is able to induce the reader, as Heiko Obermann put it, to leave behind his “own view of life and the world: to cross centuries of confessional and intellectual conflict in order to become [Luther’s] contemporary”. Add to it the demands of reconciling the contesting strands of Reformation scholarship without intimidating the reader. Wilson’s is an unenviable project, but one that he delivers with sincere effort and lucid analysis.

If Luther’s life were inscribed within heroic parameters, then the Vatican-endorsed Christian establishment would be reduced to a mere gallery of rogues. But Wilson takes his “warts and all” promise quite seriously. On the one hand, there is Luther’s spiritual struggle and his righteous indignation at the rising sale of indulgences. Yet on the other hand, there is the intellectual arrogance of a successful academic and his comparison of his enemies to pigs “whose shit stinks worse than that of any other animal”. The charm of Wilson’s narrative is that he slips in incidents from Luther’s adolescence and youth, letters and notes which, one finds, throw light on his later actions.

Luther strayed from a career in law to become a monk, earning the wrath of his father. Sixteen years into monkhood, he wrote a letter to his father recounting their face-off, in which he had upbraided his father. But his father’s words had left their mark. “‘Have you not also heard,’ you said, ‘that parents are to be obeyed?’” Luther wrote. “But I was so sure of my own righteousness that in you I heard only a man, and boldly ignored you though in my heart I could not ignore your word.”

Luther’s introspective faculty is indeed of a different order. His “years of silence” in the cloister saw the emergence of the “external Luther” and the “internal Luther”. Wilson writes that “they did not start off in tension but gradually... pulled further and further apart until a violent sundering became inevitable”. As a teacher in Wittenberg, Luther dismissed the theories of Aristotle, Erasmus and Augustine one after another. In retrospect, one could call this phase the preparation for his collision course with the Holy Roman Empire.

For a man of religion, Luther comes across as remarkably combative. (Of course, given the history of the crusades, the Inquisition and the hounding of heretics, it would be difficult to call Christianity a great promoter of peace and harmony.) The events leading up to, and following, the nailing of the 95 Theses to the door of the church attached to the Wittenberg Castle in 1517 show that in a different age, Luther would have made an excellent gladiator.

Luther’s confrontation with Johann Maier von Eck is laid out in cinematic detail: “When Eck ranted, Luther sniffed ostentatiously at a posy of flowers. While Eck tried to stir his audience to righteous indignation, Luther tried to make them laugh.” Who would have thought that an earnestly pugilistic man like Luther could have a sense of humour too? But there are quite a few instances where Luther is found having fun, though hardly at his own expense. It is hard to believe that he was entirely serious when he named his treatise against sacerdotal priesthood, Martin Luther’s First Trumpet Blast Against the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. And after the famous Diet of Worms, Luther summed up his interview with the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V, thus: “Are these your books?” “Yes.” “Will you revoke them or not?” “No.” “Then get out!”

The narrative sags a bit once Lutheranism becomes a sect in 1520-21, but only because Luther’s followers, such as Andreas Karlstadt, Leo Jud and Zwingli aren’t half as interesting or original as their spiritual leader. Wilson reclaims lost ground in the ‘legacy’ section, where he takes up Luther’s anti-semitism and influence on the arts, and refutes the claim that the reformer was against religious art. Wilson’s ability to make cross-cultural leaps is admirable. He describes Johann Tetzel as a combination of P.T. Barnum and Winston Churchill, and the black friars as the KGB of that age. Thanks to the Wilsonian lightness of touch, one gets to understand a passionate man with frailties without feeling overwhelmed by the complexities of his spiritual quest.