Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  His pseudo-mysticism and factious temper thus continued to play an unmistakable part in his ideas concerning the Turk.

  “Against such might and power [the Turkish] we Germans behave like pot-bellied pigs, we idle about, gorge, tipple and gamble, and commit all kinds of wantonness and roguery, heedless of all the great and pitiful slaughters and defeats which our poor German soldiery have suffered.” “And, because our German people are a wild and unruly race, half diabolical and half human, some even desire the advent and rule of the Turk.”

  So scathing a description of the German people leads us to enquire into his attitude to German nationalism.

  5. Luther’s Nationalism and Patriotism

  In spite of his outspoken criticism of their faults, Luther recognised and honoured the good qualities of the Germans. His denunciations at times were certainly rather severe: “We Germans,” he says, “remain Germans, i.e. pigs and brutes”; and again, “We vile Germans are horrid swine”; “for the most part such shocking pigs are we hopeless Germans that neither modesty, discipline nor reason is to be found in us”; we are a “nation of barbarians,” etc. Germans, according to him, abuse the gifts of God “worse than would hogs.” He is fond of using such language when censuring the corruption of morals which had arisen owing to abuse and disregard of the Evangel which he preached. Even where he attempts to explain his manner of proceeding, where, for instance, he tries to justify the delay in forming the “Assembly of true Christians,” he knows how to display to the worst advantage the unpleasing side of the German character. “We Germans are a wild, savage, blustering people with whom it is not easy to do anything except in case of dire necessity.”

  By the side of such spiteful explosions must be set the many kindlier and not unmerited testimonies Luther gives to the good qualities peculiar to the nation. In various passages, more particularly in his “Table-Talk,” he credits the Germans with perseverance and steadfastness in their undertakings, also with industry, contentment and disinterestedness; they had not indeed the grace of the Italians, nor the eloquence of the French, but they were more honest and straightforward, and had more homely affection for their good old customs. He also believes that they had formerly been distinguished for great fidelity, “particularly in marriage,” though unfortunately this was no longer the case.

  Much more instructive than any such expressions of opinion, favourable or unfavourable, is the attitude Luther adopted towards the political questions which concerned the existence, the unity and the greatness of his country.

  Here his religious standpoint induced him to take steps which a true German could only regret. We have already shown how the defence against the Turks was hampered by his action. He also appreciably degraded the Empire in the eyes of the Christian nations. He not merely attacked the authority of the Emperor and thereby the power which held together the Empire, by his criticism of the edicts of the Diets, by the spirit of discord and party feeling he aroused amongst those who shared his opinions, and by his unmeasured and incessant abuse of the authorities, but, as years went by, he also came even to approve, as we have seen above ( ff.), of armed resistance to the Emperor and the Empire as something lawful, nay, praiseworthy, if undertaken on behalf of the new Evangel.

  “If it is lawful to defend ourselves against the Turk,” he writes, “then it is still more lawful to do so against the Pope, who is even worse. Since the Emperor has associated himself with the defenders of the Pope, he must expect to be treated as his wickedness deserves.” “Formerly I advised that we should yield to the Emperor [i.e. not undertake anything against him]; even now I still say that we should yield to these heathen tyrants when they — Pope, Cardinals, Bishops, Emperor, etc. — cease to appeal to the name of Christ, but acknowledge themselves to be what they really are, viz. slaves of Satan; but if, in the name of Christ, they wish to stone Christians, then their stones will recoil on their own heads and they will incur the penalty attached to the Second Commandment.”

  He saw “no difference between an assassin and the Emperor,” should the latter proceed against his party — a course which, as a matter of fact, was imposed on the Emperor by the very laws of the Empire. How, he asks, “can a man sacrifice his body and this poor life in a higher and more praiseworthy cause” “than in such worship [resistance by violence] for the saving of God’s honour and the protection of poor Christendom, as David, Ezechias and other holy kings and princes did?”

  Countless examples from the Old Testament such as the above were always at his command for the purpose of illustrating his arguments.

  In the “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen,” in 1531, he warns the Imperial power that God, “even though He Himself sit still, may well raise up a Judas Machabeus” should the Imperial forces have recourse to arms against the “Evangelicals”; their enemies would learn what their ancestors had learned in the war with Ziska and the Husites. Resistance to “bloodhounds” is, after all, mere self-defence. Whoever followed the Emperor against him and his party became guilty of all the Emperor’s own “godless abominations.” To instruct “his German people” on this matter was the object of the writing above referred to.

  “As I am the Prophet of the Germans — this high-sounding title I am obliged to assume to please my asinine Papists — I will act as a faithful teacher and warn my staunch Germans of the danger in which they stand.”

  By thus coming forward as the divinely commissioned spokesman of the Germans, as the representative and prophet of the nation, he implicitly denied to those who did not follow his banner the right of being styled Germans. He was fond of professing, in his war on Pope and Church, to be the champion of the Germans against Rome’s oppression. This enabled him to stir up the national feeling amongst those who followed him as his allies, and to win over the vacillating by means of the delusive watchword: “Germany against Italian tyranny.” But, apart from the absolute want of justification for any such appeal to national prejudices, the assumption that Germany was wholly on his side was entirely wrong. He spoke merely in the name of a fraction of the German nation. To those who remained faithful to the Church and who, often at great costs to themselves, defended the heritage of their pious German forefathers, it was a grievous insult that German nationalism should thus be identified with the new faith and Church.

  Even at the present time in the German-speaking world Catholics stand to Protestants in the relation of two-fifths to three-fifths, and, if it would be a mistake to-day to regard Teutonism and Protestantism as synonymous — a mistake only to be met with where deepest prejudice prevails — still better founded were the complaints of Catholics in Luther’s own time, that he should identify the new Saxon doctrines with the German name and the interests of Germany as a whole.

  Even in the first years of his public career he appealed to his readers’ patriotism as against Rome. In 1518, before he had even thought of his aggressive pamphlet “To the German Nobility,” he commended the German Princes for coming forward to protect the German people against the extortions of the Roman Curia; “Prierias, Cajetan and Co. call us blockheads, simpletons, beasts and barbarians, and scoff at the patience with which we allow ourselves to be deceived.” In the following year, when this charge had already become one of his stock complaints, he summed it up thus: “We Germans, through our emperors, bestowed power and prestige on the Popes in olden days and, now, in return, we are forced to submit to being fleeced and plundered.” In the writing against Alveld, “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome,” a year later, he declared in words calculated to excite the ire of every Teuton, that in Rome they were determined to suck the last farthing out of the “tipsy Germans,” as they termed them; unless Princes and nobles defended themselves to the utmost the Italians would make of Germany a wilderness. “At Rome they even have a saying about us, viz. ‘We must milk the German fools of their cash the best way we can.’”

  That Luther should have conducted his attacks on the Papacy on these lines was due in part to Ulrich von Hutten’s
influence. Theodore Kolde has rightly pointed out, that his acquaintance with Hutten’s writings largely accounts for the utter virulence of Luther’s assault on “Romanism.” There is no doubt that the sparks of hate which emanated from this frivolous and revolutionary humanist contributed to kindle the somewhat peculiar patriotism of the Wittenberg professor. All the good that Rome had brought to Germany in the shape of Christian culture was lost to sight in the whirlwind of revolt heralded by Hutten; the financial oppression exercised by the Curia, and the opposition between German and Italian, were grossly exaggerated by the knights.

  Specifically German elements played, however, their part in Luther’s movement. The famous Gravamina Nationis Germanicæ had been formulated before Luther began to exploit them. Another German element was the peculiar mysticism, viz. that of Tauler and the “Theologia Deutsch,” on which, though he misapprehended much of it, Luther at the outset based his theories. German frankness and love of freedom also appeared to find their utterance in the plain and vigorous denunciations which the Monk of Wittenberg addressed to high and low alike; even his uncouth boldness found a strong echo in the national character. And yet it was not so much “national fellow-feeling,” to quote the expression of a Protestant author, which insured him such success, but other far more deeply seated causes, some of which will be touched upon later, while others have already been discussed.

  It is, however, noteworthy that this “Prophet of the Germans,” when speaking to the nation he was so fond of calling his own, did not scruple to predict for it the gloomiest future.

  A dark pessimism broods over Luther’s spirit almost constantly whenever he speaks of the years awaiting Germany; he sees the people, owing to his innovations, confronted with disastrous civil wars, split up into endless and perpetually increasing sects and thus brought face to face with hopeless moral degradation. His cry is, Let the Empire dissolve, “Let Germany perish.” “Let the world fall into ruins.” He consoles himself with the reflection that Christ, when founding His Church, had foreseen and sanctioned the inevitable destruction of all hostile powers, of Judaism and even of the Roman Empire. It was in the nature of the Gospel to triumph by the destruction of all that withstood it. It was certainly a misfortune, Luther admits, that the wickedness of the Germans, every day growing worse, should be the cause of this ruin. “I am very hopeless about Germany now that she has harboured within her walls those real Turks and devils, viz. avarice, usury, tyranny, dissensions and this Lernean serpent of envy and malice which has entangled the nobles, the Court, every Rathaus, town and village, to say nothing of the contempt for the Divine Word and unprecedented ingratitude [towards the new Evangel].” This is how he wrote to Lauterbach. Writing to Jonas, he declared: “No improvement need be looked for in Germany whether the realm be in the hands of the Turk or in our own, for the only aim of the nobility and Princes is how they can enslave Germany and suck the people dry and make everything their very own.”

  The lack of any real national feeling among the Princes was another element which caused him anxiety. Yet he himself had done as much as any to further the spread of that “particularism” which to a great extent had replaced the national German ideal; he had unduly exalted the rights of the petty sovereigns by giving them the spiritual privileges and property of the Church, and he had confirmed them in their efforts to render themselves entirely independent of the Emperor and to establish themselves as despots within their own territories. Since the unhappy war of 1525 the peasantry and lower classes were convinced that no remedy was to be found in religion for the amelioration of their social condition, and had come to hate both Luther and the lords, because they believed both to have been instrumental in increasing their burdens. The other classes, instead of thanking him for furthering the German cause, also complained of having had to suffer on his account. In this connection we may mention the grievance of the mercantile community, Luther having deemed it necessary to denounce as morally dangerous any oversea trade. It was also a grievous blow to education and learning in Germany, when, owing to the storm which Luther let loose, the Universities were condemned to a long period of enforced inactivity. He himself professed that his particular mission was to awaken interest in the Bible, not to promote learning; yet Germans owe him small thanks for opposing as he did the discoveries of the famous German Canon of Frauenburg, Niklas Koppernigk (Copernicus), and for describing the founder of modern astronomy as a fool who wished to upset all the previous science of the heavens.

  Whilst showing himself ultra-conservative where good and useful progress in secular matters was concerned, he, on the other hand, scrupled not to sacrifice the real and vital interests of his nation in the question of public ecclesiastical conditions by his want of conservatism and his revolutionary innovations. True conservatism would have endeavoured to protect the German commonwealth and to preserve it from disaster by a strict guard over the good and tried elements on which it rested, more particularly over unchangeable dogma. The wilful destruction of the heritage, social, religious and learned, contributed to by countless generations of devout forebears ever since the time of St. Boniface, at the expense of untold toil and self-sacrifice, can certainly not be described as patriotic on the part of a German. At any rate, it can never have occurred to anyone seriously to expect that those Germans whose views on religion were not those of Luther should have taken his view of the duty of a patriot.

  The main fact remains that Luther’s action drove a wedge into the unity of the German nation. Wherever his spirit prevailed — which was by no means the case in every place which to some extent came under his influence — there also prevailed prejudice, suspicion and mistrust against all non-Lutherans, rendering difficult any co-operation for the welfare of the fatherland.

  In discussing a recent work which extols Luther as a “true German” a learned Protestant gives it as his opinion, that, however much one may be inclined to exalt his patriotism, it must, nevertheless, be allowed that Luther cherished a sort of indifference to the vital interests of his nation; his “religious concentration” made him less mindful of true patriotism; this our author excuses by the remark: “Justice and truth were more to him than home and people.” Luther, it is also said, “did not clearly point out the independent, ethical value of a national feeling, just as he omitted to insist at all clearly on the reaction of the ethical upon the religious.”

  On the other hand, however, his ways and feelings are often represented as the “very type and model of the true German.” Nor is this view to be found among Protestants only, for Ignatius von Döllinger adopted it in later life, when he saw fit to abandon his previous position.

  Before this, in 1851, in his Sketch of Luther, he had indeed said, concerning his patriotism, that, in his handling of the language and the use he made of the peculiarities of his countrymen, “he possessed a wonderful gift of charming his hearers, and that his power as a popular orator was based on an accurate knowledge and appreciation of the foibles of the German national character.” In 1861, he wrote in another work: “Luther is the most powerful demagogue and the most popular character that Germany has ever possessed.” “From the mind of this man, the greatest German of his day, sprang the Protestant faith. Before the ascendency and creative energy of this mind, the more aspiring and vigorous portion of the nation humbly and trustfully bent the knee. In him, who so well united in himself intellect and force, they recognised their master; in his ideas they lived; to them he seemed the hero in whom the nation with all its peculiarities was embodied. They admired him, they surrendered themselves to him because they believed they had found in him their ideal, and because they found in his writings their own most intimate feelings, only expressed more clearly, more eloquently and more powerfully than they themselves were capable of doing. Thus Luther’s name is to Germany not merely that of a distinguished man, but the very embodiment of a pregnant period in national life, the centre of a new circle of ideas and the most concise expression of those religious and
ethical views amidst which the German spirit moved, and the powerful influence of which not even those who were averse to them could altogether escape.”

  Here special stress is laid on Luther’s power over “the more aspiring Germans” who followed him, i.e. over the Protestant portion of the nation. Elsewhere, however, in 1872, Döllinger brings under Luther’s irresistible spell “his time and his people,” i.e. the whole of Germany, quite regardless of the fact that the larger portion still remained Catholic. “Luther’s overpowering mind and extraordinary versatility made him the man of his time and of his people; there never was a German who understood his people so well, or who in turn was so thoroughly understood, yea, drunk in, by the people, as this Monk of Wittenberg. The mind and spirit of the German people were in his hands like a harp in the hands of the musician. For had he not bestowed upon them more than ever one man had given to his people since the dawn of Christianity? A new language, popular handbooks, a German Bible, and his hymns. He alone impressed upon the German language and the German spirit alike his own imperishable seal, so that even those amongst us who abhor him from the bottom of our hearts as the mighty heresiarch who seduced the German nation cannot help speaking with his words and thinking with his thoughts. Yet, even more powerful than this Titan of the intellectual sphere, was the longing of the German nation for freedom from the bonds of a corrupt ecclesiasticism.”

  The change in Döllinger’s conception of Luther which is here apparent was not simply due to his personal antagonism to the Vatican Council; it is closely connected with his then efforts, proclaimed even in the very title of the Lectures in question: “Reunion of the Christian Churches”; for this reunion Döllinger hoped to be able to pave the way without the assistance of, and even in opposition to, the Roman Catholic Church. The fact is, however, that in the above passages the domination which Luther exercised over those who had fallen away with him has been made far too much of, otherwise how can we explain Luther’s own incessant complaints regarding the small response to the preaching of his new Evangel? The production of a schism by his vehement and forceful oratory was one thing; vigorous direction and leadership in the task of religious reconstruction was quite a different matter.