If a she-ass could speak to Balaam then how much more can he, Luther, proclaim the truth by the power from on high, even though the whole world should be astonished at the solitary figure who dares to stand up against it. He calls to mind, that the prophet Elias was almost alone in refusing to bow the knee to Baal. Discouraged by the opposition he met with from the Catholic party he was ready to liken himself to Jeremias the prophet, and like him to say: “We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed, let us forsake her.”
In the New Testament Christ Himself and the Apostles were Luther’s favourite types, because, like himself, they were against a whole world whose views were different. The fact that they were alone did not, he says, diminish their reputation, and their success proved their mission. Like Paul and Athanasius and Augustine it is his duty to withstand the stream of false opinions: “My rock, that on which I build, stands firm and will not totter or fall in spite of all the gates of hell; of this I am certain.... Who knows what God wills to work by our means?”
When, at different periods of his public career, and in preparing his various works for the press, he had occasion to ruminate on the biblical questions connected with Antichrist, he was wont also to consider the prophecies of Daniel on the end of the world. By dint of a diligent comparison of all the passages on the abominations of the latter days he came to find therein the corruption of the Papacy fully described, even down to the smallest details, with an account of its overthrow, and, consequently, also of his own mission. In the same way that he saw the impending fall of the Turkish Empire predicted, so also he recognised that the German Empire must shortly perish, since, as he had learnt from Daniel, it was to receive no other constitution. As for the Papacy, at least according to one of the most forcible of his pronouncements, within two years “it would vanish like smoke, together with all its swarm of parasites.”
In Daniel viii. we read that a king will come, “of a shameless face, and understanding dark sentences.” He will lay all things waste and destroy the mighty and the people of the saints according to his will. “Craft shall be successful in his hands and his heart shall be puffed up. He shall rise up against the prince of princes, and shall be broken without a hand.” His coming will be “after many days.” The king thus prophesied is generally admitted to have been Antiochus Epiphanes, while the words “after many days” do not refer to the Last Day or to the End of the World, but to the latter end of the Jewish people. Luther, however, took these words and the whole prophecy in an erroneous, apocalyptic sense. He brought the description of the king into connection with the passages on Antichrist, and the great apostasy, in the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, the Second Epistle to Timothy and the Second Epistle of Peter, etc. There seemed to him not the slightest doubt that the Papacy, with its pernicious arrogance and revolt against God, was here described in minutest detail.
This idea he finally elaborated while writing his violent work “On the Babylonish Captivity.” He therein promised to tell the Papists things such as they had never heard before. This promise he fulfilled soon after in the detailed reply to Ambrosius Catharinus, which he hastily wrote in the month of March, 1521. In this Latin work he proved in detail to the satisfaction of learned readers, whether in Germany or abroad, that the Papacy was plainly depicted in the Bible as Antichrist, and likewise its approaching great fall.
“I think that, through my exposition of the Prophet Daniel, I have carried out excellently what I promised the Papists to do.” Thus to his friend Link, on the completion of the work.
Daniel’s Antichrist, according to Luther’s interpretation, assumes various shapes. These, Luther assures us, are the different forms and masks of Romish superstition and Romish hypocrisy. Amongst these he reckons, as the last, the Universities, because they had made use of the Divine Word in order to deceive the world; here he introduces the prophecy in Apocalypse ix., where a star falls from heaven, the fountains of the deep are opened, locusts with the strength of scorpions rise up out of a thick smoke, and a King reigns over them whose name is Apollyon, or destroyer. The star Luther takes to be Thomas Aquinas, the smoke is the empty words and opinions of Aristotle and the philosophers, the destructive locusts are the Universities, and Apollyon is their master, viz. Aristotle. As for Antichrist himself, i.e. the Papacy, Jesus will destroy him with the breath of His mouth, according to the word of St. Paul, which agrees with the “destruction without hands” prophesied by Daniel. “Thus the Pope and his kingdom are not to be destroyed by laymen, although they greatly dread this [at Rome]; they are not worthy of so mild a chastisement, but are being reserved for the Second Coming of Christ because they have been, and still remain, His most furious enemies. Such is the end of Antichrist, who exalts himself above all things and does not fight with hands, but by the breath and spirit of Satan. Breath shall destroy breath, truth unmask deceit, for the unmasking of a lie means bringing it to nought.”
Apocalyptic fancies such as the above were to dog Luther’s footsteps for the rest of his life. Both in his writings and in his “Table-Talk” he was never backward in putting forth his views on this abstruse subject.
Of the ideas concerning the Papal Antichrist which, since Hus’s time were current among the classes hostile to Rome, Luther selected and absorbed whatever was worst. Hus’s work on the Church he read in February, 1520. The birth and growth of the theory in his mind even previous to this can, however, be traced step by step, and the process affords us a valuable insight into his mentality by revealing so well its pseudo-mystical element.
We may distinguish between the earliest private and the earliest public appearance of Luther’s idea of the Papal Antichrist. Its first unmistakable private trace is to be met with in a letter of December 11, 1518, to his brother-monk and sympathiser Wenceslaus Link. Luther was at that time labouring under the emotion incident on his interrogation at Augsburg, of which he had just published the “Acta.” Sending a copy to his friend he declares, that his pen is already at work at much greater things, that he knew not whence the ideas that filled his mind came, but that he would send Link whatever writings he published, that he might see “whether I am right in my surmise that the real Antichrist, according to Paul [2 Thess. ii., 3 ff.], rules at the Roman Curia.” The first public expression of this idea is, however, to be found in the pronouncement he made subsequent to the Leipzig Disputation in the summer of 1519, viz. that if the Pope arrogated to himself alone the power of interpreting Scripture, then he was exalting himself above God’s Word and was worse than Antichrist.
Not long after Luther showed how deeply he had drunk in the ideas of Hus; in February, 1520, he confessed to being a Husite, since both he and Staupitz too had hitherto taught precisely Hus’s doctrine, though without having recognised him as their leader; the plain, evangelical truth had been burnt a hundred years before in the person of Hus. “I am so astonished I know not what to think when I contemplate these terrible judgments of God upon men.” On March 19 he sent to Spalatin a copy of Hus’s writing, which had just been printed for the first time, praising the author as a “marvel of intellect and learning.”
In his conception of Antichrist Luther differed from antiquity in that he applied the term not so much to a person as to a system, or a condition of things: the ecclesiastical government of Rome, with its “pretensions” and its “corruption,” appears to him in his apocalyptic dreams as the real Antichrist. That he finally came to see in the person of the Pope more and more an embodiment of Antichrist was, however, only to be expected; when one wearer of the Papal tiara died, the mask of Antichrist passed to his successor, a matter of no difficulty since, as the end of the world was nigh, the number of the Popes was in any case complete.
As early as February 24, 1520, having previously found new fuel for his ire in the perusal of Hutten’s edition of Lorenzo Valla’s dissertation against the Donation of Constantine, he wrote to Spalatin: “Nothing is too utterly monstrous not to be acceptable at Rome; of the impudent forgery of the D
onation they have made a dogma[!]. I have come to such a pass that I can scarcely doubt that the Pope is the real Antichrist whom the world, according to the accepted view, awaits. His life, behaviour, words and laws all fit the character too well. But more of this when we meet.” The allusion to the “accepted view” may refer to a work, reprinted at Erfurt in 1516, and which Luther must certainly have known, viz. the “Booklet on the Life and Rule of End-Christ as Divinely decreed, how he corrupteth the world through his false teaching and devilish counsel, and how, after this, the two prophets Enoch and ‘Helyas’ shall win back Christendom by preaching the Christian faith.”
Greater even than the influence of such writings, in confirming him in his persuasion that the Pope was Antichrist, was that of the excitement caused by his polemics. We have already had occasion to speak of his stormy replies to the “Epitome” of Silvester Prierias and the controversial pamphlet of Augustine Alveld the Franciscan friar. In the latter rejoinder he promises to handle the Papacy “mercilessly” and to belabour Antichrist as he deserves. “Circumstances demand imperatively that the veil be torn from the mysteries of Antichrist; indeed, in their effrontery they themselves refuse to be any longer shrouded in darkness.” Speaking of Prierias, who was a Roman, he says: “I believe that at Rome they have all gone stark, staring mad, and become senseless fools, stocks, stones, devils and a very hell”; “what now can we expect from Rome where such a monster is permitted to take his place in the Church?” In his replies to Prierias and Alveld he depicts Antichrist in the worst colours to be supplied by a vivid imagination and an over-mastering fury: If such things are taught in Rome, then “the veritable Antichrist is indeed seated in the Temple of God, and rules in the purple-clad Babylon at Rome, while the Roman Curia is the synagogue of Satan.... Who can Antichrist be, if not such a Pope? O Satan, Satan, how greatly dost thou abuse the patience of thy Creator to thine own destruction!”
The anger of the sensitive and excitable Wittenberg professor had been roused by contradiction, particularly by the tract which hailed from Rome, but the arrival of the Bull of Excommunication moved him to the very depths of his soul and led him to commit to writing the most hateful travesties of the Roman Papacy.
In the storm and stress of the struggle, which in the latter half of 1520 produced the so-called great Reformation works, the Antichrist theory, in its final form, was made to serve as a bulwark against the Papal excommunication and its consequences. Luther drops all qualifications and henceforth his assertions are positive. The wider becomes the breach separating him from Rome, the blacker must he paint his opponents in order to justify himself before the world and to his own satisfaction. Previous to its publication he summed up the contents of his “An den christlichen Adel” as follows: “There the Pope is severely mauled and treated as Antichrist.” As a matter of fact, the comparison is so startling that he could well speak of the booklet as “a trumpet-blast against the world-destroying tyranny of the Roman Antichrist.” In the writing “On the Babylonish Captivity,” a few weeks later, he exclaims: “Now I know and am certain that the Papacy is the empire of Babylon.” “The Popes are Antichrists and desire to be honoured in the stead of Christ.... The Papacy is nothing but the empire of Babylon and of the veritable Antichrist, because with its doctrines and laws it merely makes sin more plentiful; hence the Pope is the ‘man of sin’ and the ‘son of destruction.’”
Hereby he had prepared the way for his attack upon Leo the Tenth’s Bull of Excommunication, which he published in German and Latin at the end of October, 1520, under the title, “Widder die Bullen des Endchrists” and “Adversus execrabilem Antichristi bullam.” Such a name was well calculated to strike the fancy of the masses, and there cannot be the slightest doubt that Luther welcomed it as a taking, popular cry.
It is easy to meet the objection that the Papal Antichrist was nothing more to Luther than a serviceable catchword, and that he never meant it seriously. That such was not the case we have abundantly proved already; on the contrary, we have here a clear outgrowth of his pseudo-mysticism. He ever preserved it as a sacred possession, and it found its way in due season into the Schmalkald Articles and into the Notes Luther appended to his German Bible. The idea, which never left him, of the world’s approaching end — with this we shall deal at greater length in vol. v., xxxi. 2 — is without a doubt closely linked with his cherished theory of his being the revealer of Antichrist and the chosen instrument of God for averting His malice in the latter days.
The Bible assures us, according to Luther, that, “after the downfall of the Pope and the delivery of the poor, no one on earth would be feared as a tyrant” (Psalm x. 18); now, he continues, “this would not be possible were the world to continue after the Pope’s fall, for the world cannot exist without tyrants. And thus the prophet agrees with the Apostle that Christ at His coming [i.e. His second coming, for the Last Judgment] will upset the holy Roman Chair. God grant this happen speedily. Amen.”
In 1541, Luther wrote a Latin essay on the Chronology of the World, which, in 1550, was published in German by Johann Aurifaber under the title of “Luthers Chronica.” This work, which witnesses both to Luther’s industry and to his interest in history, is also made to serve its author’s views on Antichrist. Towards the end, alluding to what he had already said concerning the several periods of the world’s history, he adds, that it was “to be hoped that the end of the world was drawing near, for the sixth millenary of its history would not be completed, any more than the three days between Christ’s death and resurrection.” Besides, “at no other time had greater and more numerous signs taken place, which gives us a certain hope that the Last Day is at the very door.” Of the year A.D. 1000 we here read: “The Roman Bishop becometh Antichrist, thanks to the power of the sword.”
In the same year his tireless pen, amongst other writings, produced a Commentary on Daniel xii. concerning the “end of the days,” the abomination of desolation and the general retribution. The Papal Antichrist here again supplies him with abundant exemplifications of the fulfilment of the prophecy; the signs foretold to herald the destruction of this Empire, so hostile to God, had almost all been accomplished, and the great day was at hand.
Other people, and, among them some of the great lights of Catholicism, both before and after Luther’s day, have erred in their exegesis of Antichrist and been led to expect prematurely the end of the world. Yet only in Luther do we find united a fanatical expectation of the end with a minute acquaintance with its every detail, scriptural demonstrations with anxious observation of the events of the times, all steeped in the deadliest hatred of that mortal enemy the Papacy.
His conviction that God was proving his mission by signs and wonders sometimes assumed unfortunate forms, for instance, when he superstitiously seeks its attestation in incidents of his own day.
We see an example of this in the meaning he attached to the huge whale driven ashore near Haarlem, in which he saw a sign of God’s wrath against the Papists. “The Lord has given them an ominous sign,” he writes, on June 13, 1522, to Speratus, “if so be they enter into themselves and do penance. For He has cast a sea monster called a whale, 70 feet in length and 35 feet in girth, on the shore near Haarlem. Such a monster it is usual to regard as a certain sign of wrath. May God have mercy on them and on us.” Other natural phenomena, amongst them an earthquake in Spain, led him to write as follows to Spalatin at the beginning of the following year: “Don’t think that I shall creep back into a corner however much Behemoth and his crew may rage. New and awful portents occur day by day, and you have doubtless heard of the earthquake in Spain.”
When, in 1536, extraordinary deeds were narrated of a girl at Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, and attributed to demoniacal possession (she could, for instance, produce coins from all sorts of impossible places, even out of men’s beards), Luther, we are told, utilised in the pulpit these terrible signs and portents, “as a warning to abandoned persons who deem themselves secure, in order that now, at last, they may
begin to fear God and to put their trust in Him.”
At Freiberg in Saxony, towards the end of 1522, a cow was delivered of a deformed calf. On this becoming known, people, as was then the vogue, set about discovering the meaning of the portent. An astrologer of Prague first took the extraordinary phenomenon to refer to Luther, whose hateful and wicked behaviour was portrayed in the miscarriage. Luther, on the other hand, discovered that the monstrosity really represented a naked calf clothed in a cowl (the skin was drawn up into strange creases on the back), and that it therefore indicated the monkish state, of the worthlessness of which it was a true picture, and God’s wrath against monasticism. In a tract published in the spring, 1523, he compared in such detail and with such wealth of fancy the creature to the monks that the work itself was termed monstrous. The cowl represented the monkish worship, “with prayers, Masses, chanting and fasting,” which they perform to the calf, i.e. “to the false idol in their lying hearts”; just as the calf eats nothing but grass, so “they fatten on sensual enjoyments here on earth.” “The cowl over the hind-quarters of the calf is torn,” this signifies the monks’ “impurity”; the calf’s legs are “their impudent Doctors” and pillars; the calf assumes the attitude of a preacher, which means that their preaching is despicable; it is also blind because they are blind; it has ears, and these signify the abuse of the confessional; with the horns with which it is provided it shall break down their power; the tightening of the cowl around its neck signifies their obstinacy, etc. A woodcut of the calf helped the reader to understand the mysteries better. To show that he meant it all in deadly earnest, he adduced texts from Scripture which might prove how “well-grounded” was his interpretation. He declares, that he only speaks of what he is quite sure, and that he refrains from a further, i.e. a prophetic, interpretation of the “Monk-Calf” because it was not sufficiently certain, although “God gives us to understand by these portents that some great misfortune and change is imminent.” His hope is that this change might be the coming of the Last Day, “since many signs have so far coincided.” Hence his strange delusion concerning the calf goes hand in hand with his habitual one concerning the approaching end of the world.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 679
