Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  But then he continues, following up the idea which possesses him: “He who desires to live single undertakes an impossible struggle”; such people become “full of harlotry and all impurity of the flesh, and at last drown themselves therein and fall into despair; therefore such a vow is invalid, being contrary to the Word and work of God.” Most of the younger religious, he declares elsewhere in a description which is as repulsive as it is untrue, were unable to control themselves, for it is not possible to take from fire its power of burning; among them, and the clergy, there prevailed “either harlotry under the name of a spiritual and chaste life, or an impure, unwilling, wretched, forlorn chastity, so that the wretchedness is greater than anyone could believe or tell.”

  What Luther says would leave us under the impression — to put the most charitable interpretation upon his words — that he had lived in sad surroundings; yet what we know of the Augustinian monasteries at Erfurt and Wittenberg affords as little ground for such an assumption as the conditions prevailing in the other friaries, whether Franciscan or Dominican, with which he was acquainted. He speaks again and again as though he knew nothing of the satisfaction with their profession which filled whole multitudes who were faithful to their vows, and which was the result of serious discipline and a devout mind. He goes on: “They extol chastity loudly, but live in the midst of impurity.... These pious foundations and convents, where the faith [according to his teaching] is not practised stoutly and heartily,” must surely be gates of hell. Those who refrain from marriage for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven are, he considers, “so rare, that among a thousand men there is scarcely to be found one, for they are a special miracle of God’s own.” He who enters a monastery, he writes (not in the least afraid of speaking as though this had been his own experience), can, in reality, never avoid sinning against his vow. The Pope leaves such a one to be, as it were, burnt and roasted in the fire; he accordingly might well be compared to the sacrifice which the children of Israel offered to Moloch the fiery idol. “What a Sodom and Gomorrha,” he cries in another passage, “has the devil set up by such laws and vows, making of that rare gift chastity a thing of utter wretchedness. Neither public houses of ill fame, nor indeed any form of allurement to vice, is so pernicious as are these vows and commandments invented by Satan himself.” Such are his words in his “Postils,” written for general, practical use.

  His “larger Catechism” was also used as a means to render popular his most extravagant polemics on this subject. The sixth Commandment makes of chastity a duty, and Christ’s counsel of voluntary continence was to serve for the preserving and honouring of this very command. Yet Luther says: “By this commandment all vows of unmarried chastity are condemned, and all poor, enslaved consciences which have been deceived by their monastic vows are thereby permitted, nay ordered, to pass from the unchaste to the conjugal state, seeing that even though the monastic life were in other particulars divine, it is not in their power to preserve their chastity intact.” Thus “the married state” is, at least, according to this passage, prescribed for all without exception in the Ten Commandments.

  Still further to strengthen his seductive appeals to the clergy and religious, Luther, as he himself informs us, advised those who were unable to marry openly “at least to wed their cook secretly.”

  To the Prince-Abbots he gave the advice that on account of the laws of the Empire they should, for the time being, “take a wife in secret,” “until God, the Lord, shall dispose matters otherwise.” In 1523 he advised all the Knights of the Teutonic Order, who were vowed to chastity, “not to worry” about their “weakness and sin” even though they had contracted some “illicit connections”; such connections contracted outside of matrimony were “less sinful” than to “take a lawful wife” with the consent of a Council, supposing such a permission were given. This last letter, too, was at once printed by Luther for distribution.

  His spirit of defiance led him to clothe his demands in outrageous forms. On one occasion he declared in language resembling that which he made use of concerning the laws of fasting: “Even though a man has no mind to take a wife he ought, nevertheless, to do so in order to spite and vex the devil and his doctrine.”

  The Fathers of the Church accordingly found little favour with him when they required of the clergy, monks and nuns, not merely the observance of celibacy, but also the use of the means enjoined by asceticism for the preservation of chastity; or when they betrayed their preference for the vow of chastity, though without by any means disparaging marriage. They quoted what Our Lord had said of this doctrine: “He that can take it, let him take it” (Matt. xix. 12). The Fathers, in the spirit of St. Paul, who, as one “having obtained mercy of the Lord,” joyfully acquiesced in His “Counsel” of chastity (1 Cor. vii. 25), frequently advocated the doctrine of holy continence. But Luther asks: Of what use were their penitential practices for the preservation of their chastity to the Fathers, even to Augustine, Jerome, Benedict, Bernard, etc., since they themselves allow that they were constantly troubled by temptations of the flesh? In his opinion, as we already know, the attacks of sensuality, the movements of the carnal man and the enduring sense of our own concupiscence are really sins.

  Jerome in particular, the zealous advocate of virginity, received at Luther’s hands the roughest treatment. This saint is erroneously reckoned among the Fathers of the Church; he is of no account at all except for the histories he compiled; he was madly in love with the virgin Eustochium; his writings give no proof of faith or true religion; he had not the least idea of the difference between the law and the Gospel, and writes of it as a blind man might write of colour, etc. His invitations to the monastic life are described by Luther as impious, unbelieving and sacrilegious. Scoffing at the Saint’s humble admission of his temptations in his old age and the severe mortifications he practised to overcome them, Luther says: The virgin Eustochium would have been the proper remedy for him. “I am astounded that the holy Fathers tormented themselves so greatly about such childish temptations and never experienced the exalted, spiritual trials [those regarding faith], seeing that they were rulers in the Church and filled high offices. This temptation of evil passions may easily be remedied if there are only virgins or women available.”

  All these fell doctrines and allurements which without intermission were poured into the ears of clergy and religious alike, many of whom were uneducated, already tainted with worldliness, or had entered upon their profession without due earnestness, were productive of the expected result in the case of the weak. The sudden force of Luther’s powerful and well-calculated attack upon the clergy and upon monasticism has been aptly compared to the effect of dynamite. But whoever fell, did so of his own free will. Such language was nothing but the bewitching song of the Siren addressed to the basest though most powerful instincts of man.

  The historic importance of the attack upon ecclesiastical celibacy is by no means fully gauged if we merely regard it as an effective method of securing preachers, allies and patrons for the new Evangel. It was, indeed, closely bound up with Luther’s whole system, and his early theories on holiness by works and self-righteousness. His war on vows was too spontaneous, too closely connected with his own personal experience, to be accounted for merely by the desire of increasing the number of his followers. The aversion to the practice of good works which marked the commencement of his growth, his loathing for the sacrifices entailed by self-denial, the very stress he lays on the desires of nature as opposed to the promptings of grace, the delusion of evangelical freedom and finally his hatred of those institutions of the old Church which inspired her adherents with such vigorous life wherever they were rightly understood and practised — all this served as an incentive in the struggle.

  A strange element which, according to his own statements, formed an undercurrent to all this and which indicates his peculiar state of mind, was that he looked upon the temptations of the flesh as something altogether insignificant in comparison with the exalted sp
iritual assaults of “blasphemy and despair” of which he had had personal experience. In the passage already referred to, where he chides the Fathers with their “childish temptations,” he says: Why on earth did they make such efforts for the preservation of their beloved chastity, or exert themselves for something entirely, or almost entirely, impossible of attainment? The temptations of the flesh are nothing at all, he proceeds, “compared with the Angel of Satan who buffets us; then indeed we are nailed to the cross, then indeed childish things such as the temptations which worried Jerome and others become of small account.” In Paul’s case, according to him, the “angelus colaphizans” (the angel who buffeted him, 2 Cor. xii. 7) was not a sting of the flesh at all, but exalted pangs of the soul, such as those to which the Psalmist alluded when he said: “God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” where he really means: “God, Thou art become my enemy without a cause,” or again, that a sword has pierced his bowels (pains of the soul). He himself, Luther, had endured such-like things, but “Jerome and the other Fathers never experienced anything of the sort.”

  Luther complains as early as 1522, i.e. at the very outset of this “Evangelical” movement, of the character of the auxiliaries who had been attracted to him by his attack on priestly and monastic continence.

  In a letter sent to Erfurt he expresses his great dissatisfaction at the fact that, where apostate Augustinians had become pastors, their behaviour, like that of the other preachers drawn from the ranks of the priesthood, had “given occasion to their adversaries to blaspheme” against the evangel. He says he intends sending a circular letter to the “Church at Erfurt” on account of the bad example given. The person to whom these bitter words were addressed, Luther’s intimate friend, Johann Lang, the Erfurt Augustinian, had himself shortly before forsaken the monastery. The circumstances attending his leaving were very distasteful to Luther.

  The evangelical life at Erfurt, where many of the priests were taking wives, must be improved, so he writes, even though the “understanding of the Word” had increased greatly there. “The power of the Word is either still hidden” he says, of the new evangel, “or it is far too weak in us all; for we are the same as before, hard, unfeeling, impatient, foolhardy, drunken, dissolute, quarrelsome; in short, the mark of a Christian, viz. abundant charity, is nowhere apparent; on the contrary, the words of Paul are fulfilled, ‘we possess the kingdom of God in speech, but not in power’” (1 Cor. iv. 20). In the same letter he complains of the monks who had left their convents to reinforce the ranks of his party: “I see that many of our monks have left their priory for no other reason than that which brought them in: they follow their bellies and the freedom of the flesh. By them Satan will set up a great stench against the good odour of our work. But what can we do? They are idle people who seek their own, so that it is better they should sin and go to destruction without the cowl than with it.”

  Luther complained still more definitely of his “parsons and preachers” in the Preface to the “Larger Catechism” which he composed for them in 1529: Many, he says, despise their office and good doctrine: some simply treated the matter as though they had become “parsons and preachers solely for their belly’s sake”; he would exhort such “lazy paunches or presumptuous saints” to diligence in their office. What he had predicted in 1522 became more and more plainly fulfilled: “It is true that I fear some will take wives or run away, not from Christian conviction, but because they rejoice to find a cloak and reason for their wickedness in the freedom of the evangel.” His consolation, however, is, that it was just as bad and even worse in Popery, and if needs be “we still have the gallows, the wheel, sword and water to deal with such as will not do what is right.”

  In later years, as his pupil Mathesius relates in the “Historien” of his conversations with him, Luther was anxious to induce the Elector to erect a “Priests’ Tower” “in which such wild and untamed persons might be shut up as in a prison; for many of them would not allow themselves to be controlled by the Evangel; ... all who once had run to the monasteries for the sake of their belly and an easy life were now running out again for the sake of the freedom of the flesh.” According to Lauterbach’s “Tagebuch,” however (1538), the Elector had before this decided to rebuild the University prison as a jail for such of the clergy of Luther’s camp who misbehaved themselves, and the Notes of Mathesius recently edited by Kroker allow us to infer that the prison had already been built in 1540. Thus the account given by Mathesius in the “Historien” and quoted by him in sermons at a later date must be amended and amplified accordingly.

  Even Luther’s own followers looked askance at many of the recruits from the clergy and the monasteries, who came to swell the ranks of the preachers and adherents of the new Evangel. We are in possession of statements on this subject made by Eberlin, Hessus and Cordus.

  “Scarcely has a monk or nun been three days out of the convent,” writes Eberlin of Günzburg, “than they make haste to marry some woman or knave from the streets, without any godly counsel or prayer; in the same way the parsons too take whom they please, and then, after a short honeymoon, follows a long year of trouble.”

  Eobanus Hessus, the Humanist, writes in 1523 from Erfurt to J. Draco that the runaway monks neglected education and learning and preached their own stupidities as wisdom; the number of such priests and nuns was increasing endlessly. “I cannot sufficiently execrate these fugitives. No Phyllis is more wanton than our nuns.”

  A third witness, also from Erfurt, Euritius Cordus, complains in similar fashion in a letter written in 1522 to Draco: No one here has been improved one little bit by the evangel; “on the contrary, avarice has increased and likewise the opportunities for the worst freedom of the flesh”; priests and monks were everywhere set upon marrying, which in itself is not to be disapproved of, and the young students were more lawless than soldiers in camp.

  Protestant historians are fond of limiting the moral evils to the period which followed the Peasant Wars of 1525 as though they had been caused by the disorders of the time. The above accounts, given by followers of the new movement, extend, however, to earlier years, and to these many others previous to 1525 will be added in the course of our narrative.

  It has also frequently been said that the confusion which always accompanies popular movements which stir men’s minds must be taken into account when considering the disastrous moral effects so evident in the camp of the Reformers. But this view of the matter, if not false, is at least open to doubt. The disorders just described were not at all creditable to a work undertaken in the name of religion. The results were also felt long after. If all revolutions easily led to such consequences, in this instance the lamentable moral outcome was all the more inevitable, seeing that “freedom” was the watchword.

  The undeniable fact of the existence of such a state of things was all the more disagreeable to its authors, i.e. Luther and his friends, since they were well aware that the great ecclesiastical movements in former days, which had really been inspired by God, usually exhibited, more particularly in their beginnings, abundant moral benefits. “The first fruits of the Spirit,” as they had been manifested in the Church, were very different from those attending the efforts of the Wittenberg Professor, who, nevertheless, had himself designated this period as the “primitiæ spiritus.” It was but poor comfort in their difficulty to strive to reassure themselves by considerations such as Cordus brings forward to meet the complaints we quoted above: “Maybe the Word of God has only now opened our eyes to see clearly, to recognise as sin, and abhor with fear, what formerly we scarcely heeded.” This strange fashion of soothing his conscience he had learnt from Luther. (See vol. iv., xxiv.)

  It is worth while to observe the impression which the facts just mentioned made on Luther’s foes.

  Erasmus, who at the commencement was not unfavourably disposed towards the movement, turned away from it with disgust, influenced, in part at least, by the tales he heard concerning the apostate priests and religious. “T
hey seek two things,” he wrote, “an income (censum) and a wife; besides, the evangel affords them freedom to live as they please.” In a letter to the Strasburg preacher, Martin Bucer, he said: “Those who have given up the recital of the Canonical Hours do not now pray at all; many who have laid aside the pharisaical dress are really worse than they were before.” And again: “The first thing that makes me draw back from this company is, that I see so many among this troop becoming altogether estranged from the purity of the Gospel. Some I knew as excellent men before they joined this sect; what they are now, I know not, but I hear that many have become worse, and none better.” — The evangel now prospers, he says elsewhere, “because priests and monks take wives contrary to human laws, or at any rate contrary to their vow. Look around and see whether their marriages are more chaste than those of others upon whom they look as heathen.”

  Valentine Ickelsamer, an Anabaptist opponent of Luther’s, reminds him in his writing in defence of Carlstadt in 1525, that Holy Scripture says: “By their works you shall know them.” Even while studying at Wittenberg [a few years before] he had been obliged to appeal to this “text of Matthew septimo,” out of disgust at the riotous life people led there; “they had, however, always found a convenient method of explaining it away, or got out of the difficulty by the help of some paltry gloss.” “You also,” he says to Luther, “loudly complained that we blamed only the faults on your side. No, we do not judge, or blame any sinner as you do; but what we do say is that where Christian faith is not productive of Christian works, there the faith is neither rightly preached nor rightly accepted.”

  It is true that this corrector of the public morals could only point to a pretence of works among his own party, and in weighing his evidence against Luther allowance must be made for his prejudice against him. Still, his words give some idea of the character of the protests made against the Wittenberg preachers in the prints of that time. He approves of the marriage of the clergy who had joined Luther’s party, and refuses to open his eyes to what was taking place among the Anabaptists themselves: “They” [your preachers], he says, “threaten and force the poor people by fair, or rather foul and tyrannical, means, to feed their prostitutes, for these clerical fellows judge it better to keep a light woman than a wedded wife, because they are anxious about their external appearance.... Such declare that whoever accuses them of keeping prostitutes lies like a scoundrel.... But if such are not the worst fornicators and knaves, let the fiend fly away with me. I often wonder whether the devil is ever out of temper now, for he has the whole of the preacher folk on his side; on their part there has been nothing but deception.” Were the people to seize the preachers “by the scruff of their neck” on account of their wickedness, then they would call themselves martyrs, and say that Christ had foretold their persecution; true enough the other mad priests [the Catholics] were “clearly messengers and satellites of the devil”; nevertheless he could not help being angered by Luther’s “rich, uncouth, effeminate, whoremongering mob of preachers,” who were so uncharitable in their ways and “who yet pretended to be Christians.”