Theological Origins of Modernity

104 chapter four
Luther was educated in this environment. He clearly admired the work
of Cicero and counted Virgil and Lucian as two of his favorite authors,
but he considered Ockham his master. 12 Whatever its intellectual merits,
and they were many, this education was not spiritually satisfying for Luther.
Th is is probably not surprising. From the time of Petrarch, humanism
moved increasingly toward a Neoplatonist view of Christianity that
focused on man as the imago dei and diminished the importance of the
Fall and original sin. During the latter fi ft eenth century the diffi culties
of sustaining this position also led to an increasing skepticism not about
the existence of God but about the capacity of human wisdom to understand
the divine order of the world. 13 Humanism also employed its growing
scholarly resources to demonstrate that Scripture was a human and
not a divine creation. Nominalism, by contrast, raised questions not about
the existence of God but about his goodness. Both rendered problematic
the traditional religious answers to the problem of death and salvation.
Humanism seemed to suggest that there might be no life aft er death and
nominalism that even if there were an aft erlife there was nothing we could
do to insure or even improve our chances of salvation. Luther’s education
thus not only failed to provide him with the spiritual resources to confront
the most serious problems of life, it suggested that no such resources were
available.
luther as a monk and his spiritual crisis
Th e seminal event of Luther’s spiritual life, discussed above, occurred in
1505 when he was caught in a violent thunderstorm. Fearing for his life, he
made a vow to St. Anne to enter the monastery if God spared him. His fear
of death and the vow he made point to severe religious doubts, for to fear
death, as Luther himself later suggested, is to doubt the central tenet of the
Christian faith, the salvifi c power of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and
to doubt this is to doubt that Jesus Christ is God. 14 More telling for Luther
than the fear of death and nothingness, however, were his growing doubts
about his own salvation in the face of a distant and harshly judging God
who, as Ockham oft en repeated, was no man’s debtor. Luther’s entry into
the monastery was partly a response to his fear of death, but was more fully
a manifestation of his desperate search for a means to gain salvation. 15
His spiritual concerns aside, Luther’s decision to enter a monastery of
the observant Augustinian Hermits in Erfurt was almost certainly due to
the fact that it was a leading center of nominalist theology. Th ere he apparently
studied theology under Johannes Nathen, who had spent four or fi ve