Martin Luther and the Arts: Music, Images, and Drama to Promote the Reformation by Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth (review)

Reviewed by: Martin Luther and the Arts: Music, Images, and Drama to Promote the Reformation by Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth Aaron Klink Martin Luther and the Arts: Music, Images, and Drama to Promote the Reformation. By Andreas Loewe and Katherine Firth. Leiden: Brill, 2023. 278 pp. Studies of Luther's liturgical reforms, views of music, and later Lutheran liturgical practices continue to proliferate. Recently, growing attention has been paid to Lutheran visual culture. Loewe and Firth build on this scholarship, but also help advance our understanding in crucial ways, especially with a chapter on Luther's views of the dramatic arts. The authors note that one of the volume's goals is providing a more comprehensive account of Lutheran theological aesthetics, both in the Reformation era and in later periods. The opening chapter on music argues that Luther's views of music are rooted in the Greek philosophy he learned at the university, although he departed from Greek views on some points because of his theology. Luther did not see music as a neutral art, advising End Page 82 that care needed to be taken to use music properly. Another chapter, reprinted from Lutheran Quarterly, explores the composition and afterlife of Luther's hymn Ein feste Berg often translated as "A Mighty Fortress is Our God." The authors argue that "A Stronghold Fortress Is Our God" is a more accurate translation. The hymn was used to celebrate military victories and nationalist goals by both the Weimar and National Socialist governments. However, the discussion of the use of the hymn after Luther's death seems to veer off the book's stated topic. Luther never wrote a treatise on visual images so the authors derive his views from various places in Luther's corpus. That is problematic since Luther's statements on art were contextual not systematic. They also make extensive use of the questionably accurate Table Talk. Like other treatments of Luther on art they begin with his response to Karlstadt's iconoclastic sermons at Saint Mary's Church in Wittenberg in 1522. They argue that Luther proposes three types of images, but then confusingly list four. They make an important and convincing case that Luther's theology of images is rooted in the writings of Augustine. Because illiteracy was widespread in Reformation Europe, Luther knew that images would play an important role in instructing individuals in the faith. A separate chapter explores Luther's use of visual images to instill theology, but also to generate hatred toward Luther's opponents. The authors explore Luther's use of the so-called Judensau, a vile and negative picture of Jews that was embedded in the exterior of Saint Mary's Church in Wittenberg. Luther used other images in his battles against the Roman Catholic church including some that showed the pope as a donkey. Finally, the book treats Lutheran drama. For Luther, drama could foster biblical literacy and promote theological understanding. He celebrated and affirmed attacks by carnival dramas on the papacy but condemned the excessive drinking and revelry that accompanied carnivals. In the same way, Luther's increasing questioning of the doctrine of transubstantiation led him to reject the processions and dramas that accompanied the feast of Corpus Christi. Luther believed that passion plays, properly done, could promote the End Page 83 Theology of the Cross. Lutherans stopped performing traditional passion plays, but the authors draw on Luther's advice to Joachim Greff, who wanted to write a Lutheran passion play to be presented in the German city of Dessau in 1543. This book's contribution is its explicit effort to develop an account of Lutheran aesthetics through its treatments of music, art, and drama. However, the book's arguments are not entirely convincing, and its selection of texts and sources not always well defended. German Lutherans sang many hymns, so is the chapter on the use of "A Mighty Fortress" representative of the use of Lutheran music? Their extensive engagement in secondary literature seems incomplete. They provide no engagement with Mark Mattes's major book on Luther's aesthetics (Martin Luther's Theology of Beauty: A Reappraisal, 2017). Those critiques aside, the connections the authors draw between Luther...