Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  On the other hand, in a letter to Staupitz, who was already at that time staying at Salzburg, he again makes much of the importance of Hutten’s and his friends’ literary work for the advance of the new teaching. “Hutten and many others are writing bravely for me.... Our Prince,” he adds, “is acting wisely, faithfully and steadfastly,” and as a proof of the favour of the Ruler of the land he mentions that he is bringing out a certain publication in Latin and German at his request.

  “The Prince is acting faithfully and steadfastly,” such was probably the principal reason why Luther refrained from joining the forward movement as advocated by the Knights of the Empire. The clever Elector was opposed to any violent method of procedure and was unwilling to have his fidelity to the Empire unnecessarily called in question. To Luther, moreover, his favour was indispensable, as it was of the utmost importance to him, in the interests of his aims, to be able to continue his professional work at Wittenberg and to spread abroad his publications unhindered from so favourable a spot. He was also not of such an adventurous disposition as to anticipate great things from the chimerical enterprise proposed by Hutten’s Knights. He was, however, aware that the religious revolution he was furthering lent the strongest moral assistance to the liberal tendencies of the Knights, and he on his part was very well satisfied with the moral help afforded by their party. His coquetting with this party was, nevertheless, a dangerous game for Germany. As is well known, Sickingen appealed in exoneration of his deeds of violence, and Hutten in defence of his vituperation, to the new gospel which had recently sprung up in the German land.

  Efforts have frequently been made to represent Luther as treating the efforts of the party opposed to the Empire with sublime contempt. But it is certain “he was as little indifferent to the enthusiastic applause of the Franconian Knight [Hutten] as to the offers of protection and defence made him by Franz von Sickingen and Silvester von Schauenberg, the favourable criticism of Erasmus and other Humanists, the encouraging letters of the Bohemian Utraquists, the growing sympathy of German clerics and monks, the commotion among the young students, and the news of the growing excitement amongst the masses. He recognised more and more clearly from all these signs that he was not standing alone.”

  His language becomes, in consequence, stronger, his action bolder and more impetuous. He casts aside all scruples of ecclesiastical reverence for the primacy of Peter which still clung to him from Catholic times and he seeks to arrogate to himself the rôle of spokesman of the German nation, more particularly of the universal discontent with the exactions of Rome. Both are vividly expressed in his book “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome” which he wrote in May, 1520, and which left the press already in June.

  He addressed his book “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome” to a very large circle, viz. to all who hitherto had found peace of conscience and a joyous assurance of salvation in fidelity to the Church and the Papacy. He sought to prove to them that they had been mistaken, that the Church is merely a purely spiritual kingdom; that the riches of this kingdom are to be obtained simply by faith without the intervention of priestly authority or the hierarchy; that God’s Kingdom is not bound up with communion with Rome; that it exists wherever faith exercises its sway; that such a spiritual commonwealth could have no man as its head, but only Christ. Ecclesiastical authority is to him no longer what he had at first represented it, an authority to rule entrusted to the clerical state, but a gracious promise of Divine forgiveness and mercy to consciences seeking salvation. His new dogmatic or psychological standpoint, with its tendency to tranquillise the soul, is noticeable throughout.

  In the same work he deals angrily with the prevailing financial complaints of the Germans against Rome. He tells the people, in the inflammatory language of Hutten and Sickingen, that in Rome the Germans are looked upon as beasts, that the object there is to cheat the “drunken Germans” of their money by every possible thievish trick from motives of avarice. “Unless the German princes and nobles see to it presently, Germany will end in becoming a desert, or be forced to devour itself.” A prediction which was sadly verified in a different sense, indeed, from that which Luther meant, though largely owing to his action. The German princes and nobles did indeed do their share in reducing Germany to a state of desolation, and the misery of the Thirty Years’ War stamped its bloody seal on Luther’s involuntary prophecy.

  In the same year, 1520, Luther hurled his so-called “great reforming writings,” “An den Adel” and “De captivitate babylonica,” into the thick of the controversy. They mark the crisis in the struggle before the publication of the Bull of Excommunication.

  Before treating of them, however, we must linger a little on what has already been considered; in accordance with the special psychological task of this work, it is our duty to describe more fully one characteristic of Luther’s action up to this time, viz. the stormy, violent, impetuous tendency of his mind. This, as every unprejudiced person will agree, is in striking contrast to the spiritual character of any undertaking which is to bring forth lasting ethical results and true blessing, namely, to that self-control and circumspection with which all those men commissioned by God for the salvation of mankind and of souls have ever been endowed, notwithstanding their strenuous energy.

  The necessity of these latter qualities, in the case of one who is to achieve any permanent good, has never been better set forth than by Luther himself: “It is not possible,” he says in his exposition of the Lord’s Prayer, “that any man of good will, if really good, can become angry or quarrelsome when he meets with opposition. Mark it well, it is assuredly a sign of an evil will if he cannot endure contradiction.” “But deep-seated pride cannot bear to be thought in the wrong, or foolish, and therefore looks upon all others as fools and wicked.” He declares that these passionate and self-seeking men are the “worst and most shameful in the whole of Christendom,” forgetting that he himself was classed by his contemporaries and pupils among these very men. If he really was desirous of hearing the voice of Christ speaking within him, as he actually believed he did hear it, then he ought not to have allowed that voice to be drowned by his passionate excitement. Men chosen by God had always been careful to await the Divine inspirations with the greatest composure of mind, because they knew well how easy it is for a troubled mind to be deaf to them, or to mistake for them the deceptive voice of its own perverse will.

  The writing already mentioned, “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” contains the saddest examples of Luther’s unbridled excitement, and of the irritation which burst into a flame at the least opposition to his opinions.

  It is directed against the worthy theologian of Leipzig, Augustine Alveld, a Franciscan, who had ventured to take the part of the Apostolic See, and to gauge Luther’s unfair attacks at their true value. Luther falls upon this learned friar with absolutely ungovernable fury, calls his book the “work of an ape, intended to poison the minds of the poor laymen,” and him himself “an uncouth miller’s beast who has not yet learnt to bray.” “He ought to have too much respect for the fine, famous town of Leipzig [whence Alveld wrote] to defile it with his drivel and spittle.”

  Alveld, however, may have consoled himself with the fact, that Rome and the Papacy were the object of Luther’s wildest rage: “The Roman scoundrels come along and set the Pope above Christ.” But he is “Antichrist of whom the whole of Scripture speaks ... and I should be glad if the King, the Princes and all the Nobles gave short shrift to the Roman buffoons, even if we had to do without episcopal pallia. How has Roman avarice proceeded so far as to seize on the foundations made by our fathers, on our bishoprics and livings? Who ever heard or read of such robbery? Have we not people who stand in need of such that we should enrich the muleteers, stable-boys, yea, even the prostitutes and knaves of Rome out of our poverty, people who look upon us as the merest fools, and who mock at us in the most shameful fashion.”

  Such unrestrained violence, which tells of a bad cause, is not merely the result of Luther’s embittered state o
f feeling arising from the struggle with his opponents; we notice it in him almost from the outset of his public career, and it is evident both in his utterances and in his writings.

  The ninety-five Theses, of which the wording was surely strong enough, were followed by his first popular writing, the “Sermon on Indulgences and Grace,” which ends with a furious outburst against his adversaries; whatever they might advance was nothing but “idle tattle”; he will not “pay much heed to it”; “they are merely dullards who have never so much as sniffed the Bible,” but are infatuated with their “threadbare opinions.” The exclamation of Duke George of Saxony at the Disputation at Leipzig: “Das wallt die Sucht,” might be taken as the watchword for the whole of the disputatious and passionate course Luther pursued, from the nailing up of the Theses to the advent of the Bull of Excommunication. It is not deliberate and calm logic which leads him on from step to step, rather he advances by leaps and bounds, and allows himself to be carried away in his excitement against his opponents to still stronger outbursts against the Church, sometimes, it is true, merely for the pleasure of trouncing his enemies and winning the applause of readers as quarrelsome as himself. Only a few months after the publication of the Theses, he wrote in this sense to a friend: “The greater the opposition, the further I advance; the former propositions I leave to be barked over, and set up others in order that they may fall upon them also.”

  At the same time, however, he declares that his only crime is that, “he teaches men to place their hopes in Christ alone, not in prayers, merits and works.”

  The Dominican, Silvester Prierias, in his Dialogue directed against Luther, had touched upon the Indulgence Theses, though only cursorily; Luther was, however, intensely annoyed by the circumstance of his having replied from Rome, and in his character of Master of the Sacred Palace, for that Luther’s true character should be unmasked at Rome could prove extremely dangerous to him; he was also vexed because Prierias upheld the authority of the Pope, both as regards indulgences and Church matters in general. Luther says, it is true, that as regards his own person he is ready to suffer anything, but that he will not allow any man to lay hands on his theological standpoint, his exposition of Scripture and (as he insists later) on his preaching of the Word and Gospel; “in this matter let no man expect from me indulgence or patience.”

  He certainly proved the truth of the latter promise by his first coarse writing against Prierias, who thereupon entered the lists with a rejoinder certainly not characterised by gentleness. In his answer to this, Luther’s anger knew no bounds. It would be most instructive and interesting to compare the two replies of the Wittenberg professor in respect of the advance in his controversial theological position exhibited in the second reply when placed side by side with the first. We must, however, for the sake of brevity, content ourselves with selecting some characteristic passages from Luther’s second reply, which appeared at the same time as the work on the Papacy, directed against Alveld.

  “This wretched man wants to avenge himself on me as though I had replied to his feeble jests in a ridiculous manner; he puts forth a writing filled from top to bottom with horrible blasphemies, so that I can only think this work has been forged by the devil himself in the depths of hell. If this is believed and taught openly in Rome with the knowledge of the Pope and the Cardinals, which I hope is not the case, then I say and declare publicly that the real Antichrist is seated in the Temple of God and reigns at Rome, the true Babylon ‘clothed in purple’ (Apoc. xvii. 4), and that the Roman Court is the ‘Synagogue of Satan’ (Ibid., ii. 9).” He unjustly imputes to Prierias the belief that the Bible only receives its inward value from a mortal man (the Pope). “Oh, Satan,” he cries, “Oh, Satan, how long do you abuse the great patience of your creator?... If this [what is contained in Prierias’s book] is the faith of the Roman Church, then happy Greece, happy Bohemia [which are separated from Rome], happy all those who have torn themselves away from her, and have gone forth from this Babylon; cursed all those who are in communion with her!”

  He goes so far as to utter those burning words: “Go, then, thou unhappy, damnable and blasphemous Rome, God’s wrath has at last come upon thee ... let her be that she may become a dwelling-place of dragons, an habitation of every impure spirit (Isaias xxxiv. 13), filled to the brim with miserly idols, perjurers, apostates, sodomites, priapists, murderers, simoniacs and other countless monsters, a new house of impiety like to the heathen Pantheon of olden days.” He inveighs against the teaching of Rome with regard to the primacy; “if thieves are punished by the rope, murderers by the sword, and heretics by fire, why not proceed against these noxious teachers of destruction with every kind of weapon? Happy the Christians everywhere save those under the rule of such a Roman Antichrist.” Prierias himself is described by Luther as a “shameless mouthpiece of Satan,” and as “a scribe held captive in Thomistic darkness, and lying Papal Decretals.”

  In a similar fashion Luther, in his controversial writings, heaps opprobrious epithets upon his other opponents, Tetzel, Eck and Emser.

  It is true that in their censures on Luther his opponents were not backward in the use of strong language, thus following the custom of the day, but for fierceness the Wittenberg professor was not to be surpassed.

  Luther was not appealing to the nobler impulses of the multitude who favoured him when, in 1518, he sought to incite his readers against another of his literary opponents, the Dominican Inquisitor, Jakob van Hoogstraaten, and his fellow-monks, with the violent assertion that Hoogstraaten was nothing but a “mad, bloodthirsty murderer, who was never sated with the blood of the Christian Brethren”; “he ought to be set to hunt for dung-beetles on a manure heap, rather than to pursue pious Christians, until he had learned what sin, error and heresy was, and all else that pertained to the office of an Inquisitor. For I have never seen a bigger ass than you ... you blind blockhead, you blood-hound, you bitter, furious, raving enemy of truth, than whom no more pestilential heretic has arisen for the last four hundred years.” Is it correct to characterise such outbursts in the way Protestants have done when they mildly remark, that Luther fought with “boldness and without any fear of men,” and that, though his onslaught was “fierce and violent,” yet he was ever fearful “lest he should do anything contrary to the Will of God”?

  Luther, on the other hand, as early as 1518, made the admission: “I am altogether a man of strife, I am, according to the words of the Prophet Jeremias, ‘A man of contentions.’”

  Hieronymus Emser, who had met Luther at the Leipzig Disputation and before, might well reproach him with his passionate behaviour, so utterly lacking in calmness and self-control, and liken him to “the troubled sea which is never at rest day or night nor allows others to be at peace; yet the Spirit of the Lord only abides in those who are humble, in the peaceable and composed.” In another work he laments in a similar way that, “in the schools and likewise in his writings and in the pulpit Luther neither displays devotion nor behaves like a clergyman, but is all defiance and boastfulness.”

  It was in vain that anxious friends, troubled about the progress of their common enterprise, besought him to moderate his language. It is true he had admitted to his fellow-monks, even as early as the time of the nailing up of his theses, his own “frivolous precipitancy and rashness” (“levitas et præceps temeritas”). He did not even find it too hard a task to confess to the courtier Spalatin, that he had been “unnecessarily violent” in his writings. But these were mere passing admissions, and, after the last passage, he goes on to explain that his opponents knew him, and should know better than to rouse the hound; ... “he was by nature hot-blooded and his pen was easily irritated”; even if his own hot blood and customary manner of writing had not of themselves excited him, the thought of his opponents and their “horrible crimes” against himself and the Word of God would have been sufficient to do so.

  Such was his self-confidence that it was not merely easy to him, but a veritable pleasure, to attack all theo
logians of every school; they were barely able to spell out the Bible. “Doctors, Universities, Masters, are mere empty titles of which one must not stand in awe.”

  2. The Veiling of the Great Apostasy

  Besides his stormy violence another psychological trait noticeable in Luther is the astuteness with which he conceals the real nature of his views and aims from his superiors both clerical and lay, and his efforts at least to strengthen the doubts favourable to him regarding his attitude to the hierarchy and the Church as it then was. Particularly in important passages of his correspondence we find, side by side with his call to arms, conciliatory, friendly and even submissive assurances.

  The asseverations of this sort which he made to his Bishop, to the Pope, to the Emperor and to the Elector are really quite surprising, considering the behaviour of the Wittenberg Professor. In such cases Luther is deliberately striving to represent the quarrel otherwise than it really stood.

  If the cause he advocated had in very truth been a great and honourable one, then it imperatively called for frank and honest action on his part.

  The consequence of his peaceable assurances was to postpone the decision on a matter of far-reaching importance to religion and the Christian conscience. Many who did not look below the surface were unaware how they stood, and an inevitable result of such statements of Luther’s was, that, in the eyes of many even among the nobles and the learned, the great question whether he was right or wrong remained too long undecided. He thus gained numerous followers from the ranks of the otherwise well-disposed, and, of these, many, after the true aims of the movement had become apparent, failed to retrace their steps.