The Reticulator

Lyndal Roper says this pair of statues in the city market at Wittenberg is “disconcerting.” The wide-bodied man in the foreground is Martin Luther. The narrower one further away is Philipp Melanchthon. She refers to the statues in her essay in the April issue of American Historical Review, Martin Luther’s Body: The “Stout Doctor” and His Biographers:

The two Reformation heroes tower over the meat stands and vegetable stalls like two caged giants. But the effect of their being seen side by side like this, even with the nineteenth-century attempts to minimize the difference, is disastrous: the stout Luther confronts the cadaverous Melanchthon.

But her article, although it includes many portraits of the “stout” Dr. Luther, doesn’t feature a photo of the statues. It was harder to find one on Google than I would have expected, but I came up with the above from someone who seems to have vacationed in Wittenberg. (Click on it to go to his gallery at WebShots.)

The essay really is about Luther’s large physical body.

Luther was stoutly built. Saints and pious clerics tend, on the whole, to come in Melanchthonian shape, their thinness underlining their indifference to the temptations of the flesh.

Luther was not only different, especially as he grew older, but his iconographers found it important to picture him that way. It’s a good fit with Lutheran theology, too, and its treatment of the relationship between body and spirit.

You could say that Luther was a “get in touch with you body/listen to your body” kind of guy. He especially was in touch with its digestive and excretory functions. When it came to the latter, he recommended that the devil listen to his body, too. Roper calls it “integrating his anality into his theology”:

…Luther is able to joke about both the devil and excrement, and he integrates his anality into his theology rather than just projecting it onto others.

But he was more than anal. Even in something like the Eucharist, he saw no reason to give up the physicality of it, no matter how ae-reasonable it might seem.

Luther’s physicality was integrally connected to some of his deepest theological insights. It was central to his rejection of monasticism and its abhorrence of sexuality, eating, and drinking. It was also, one might suggest, profoundly linked to his intransigence on the issue of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, making it impossible for him to compromise with Ulrich Zwingli at Marburg and to find common cause against the Catholics, however advantageous to the movement that might have been. His insistence on the physical materiality of the Eucharist divided him from both Catholics and Zwinglians: for Catholics, the bread appears to be bread, but its essence is transformed into the body of Christ; for Zwinglians, the bread remains bread, but it symbolizes the body of Christ; for Luther, the bread was at once a material thing and the body of Christ. Tellingly, when Zwingli and Luther debated the issue, Zwingli adduced John 6:63: “The flesh profiteth nothing.” Luther’s position is well conveyed in the words attributed to him at Marburg: “The word says that Christ has a body. This I believe. The word says that the body of Christ ascended into heaven and sits on the right hand of God. This I also believe. The word says that this same body is in the Supper, and I believe this. Why should I discuss whether it is outside of a place or in a place? This is a mathematical argument. The word of God is above it, for God created mathematics and everything. He commands us to have faith in this matter.” Even if human rationality cannot comprehend how it is that Christ can be present in the bread and the wine, it remained true, Luther argued; it was a theological truth surpassing reason. It is surely not too farfetched to connect this insistence on the materiality of the Eucharist and the reality of Christ’s presence to Luther’s generally positive attitude toward the physical.

Roper is said to be working on a biography of Luther. I look forward to reading it when it comes out.

URL here even though it doesn’t do much good unless you have a subscription to AHR.

Here’s why there should not be a playoff system for college football like there is for basketball. It’s a comment from the Live Glog for the MSU-Texas game at CBS Sports. It was made well into the first half, when the teams were neck and neck.

Agreed, texas looks great. Both these teams i think are going to go deep in the tournament.

So in a well-fought game that is almost becoming a traditional rivalry, instead of enjoying the athleticism of the players and the drama of the contest, people are instead thinking about the tournament.

Well, in basketball that’s OK. There are a lot of games so the individual contests don’t count for as much. But for football it would be a great loss.

What a deal! I can upgrade FeedDemon 2.7, which I got for free, to a new version, also for free!

The disadvantage: The new free version displays advertisements.

The advantages: None that the Newsgator people are telling me about. No new features that they’re bragging about.

I would be glad to pay $10 and get an ad-free version, except there is no reason to that I’m aware of.

I used to synchronize with the Newsgator service so I could use the web product to synchronize my feeds and read them when I was away from my home computer. Newsgator discontinued that at the end of August in favor of Google Reader. Maybe I’ll use Google Reader some time in the future, but I’m happy now to do without synchronization and to read the feeds only on my home computer. I haven’t suffered any withdrawal symptoms at all. Life is less hectic this way. I guess I owe Newsgator some thanks for taking their service away and making my life simpler. So maybe I’ll buy a new version of FeedDemon at some point, but upgrading software for no advantage would be adding a complication to my life that would nullify some of the gains.

Good timing. I didn’t read the Little House books as a kid, but I read them to my kids several times when they were young, and we’ve visited some of the sites, too. This summer I got to thinking about them again. I needed a bicycling destination in southern Minnesota, and picked the Plum Creek site, which Myra and I visited for the first time.

So it was fun to find this good article at the New Yorker by Judith Thurman about Laura Ingalls Wilder and her daughter Rose. It seems there was also a chat session with the author at which readers could ask questions. It was there that I found a good summary of the complicated relationship between the two women in writing the Little House books:

QUESTION FROM GUEST: Were you able to see whether or not Laura learned from Rose’s edits?

JUDITH THURMAN: Great question. That would require a really close study of the manuscripts and the correspondence. And even then it might not be conclusive. “The First Four Years” suggests Laura could not write anywhere near as well on her own as she did with Rose. And, in fact, I think they needed each other, the odd chemistry of their closeness and distance and past, to transcend the limitations they both had.

And the article itself explains how Rose wasn’t able to write anything as well on her own without her mother’s material, either.

I wonder if Thurman isn’t a little too hard on “The First Four Years.” I did not read that one to my kids, btw — didn’t even discover it until we had read the others a couple of times. Here’s what Thurman says.

At some point soon afterward, Laura did set down the story of her experience as a bride and a young mother, but she abandoned it. That was the manuscript that was found after her death; in 1971 MacBride published it, without revisions, as “The First Four Years,” and it is now marketed as volume nine in the Little House series. But Laura’s instincts were right. The writing is prissy and amateurish; the heroine is bigoted and obsessed with money. It is too simplistic for an adult reader, and too mature for a child. In slightly more than a hundred pages, there isn’t even a glimmer of the radiant simplicity that draws one to the Little House books.

The first time I read that book I almost couldn’t stand to do it. The difficulties and unrelieved disappointments Laura and her husband faced made were too painful, especially after the wonderful childhood and adolescence. There are difficulties and disappointment in the regular Little House books, too, but they are overcome. Not so in The First Four Years, it seemed.

Yet, when I went back to read it quite a few years later, it was much easier going. Maybe we had been through a few more difficulties ourselves by then; in any case, it was a lot easier to accept and appreciate how life ended up for Laura.

I’ve often wondered if anyone else has had the same differing reactions to that particular book at different stages of his/her own life.