Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The results furnished by such painstaking research are more reliable than the vague accounts and complaints of contemporaries. Should the examination be continued in other dioceses it will undoubtedly do as much to clear up the question as the Visitation reports did for the condition of affairs in the 16th century under Lutheranism, though probably the final result will be different. The Lutheran Visitation reports mostly corroborate the unfavourable testimony of olden writers, whereas the fewness of the culprits shown in the Catholic lists of fines would seem to bear out, at least with regard to certain localities, those contemporaries who report favourably of the clergy at the close of the Middle Ages. One such favourable contemporary testimony comes from the Humanist, Jacob Wimpfeling, and concerns the clergy of the Rhine Lands. The statement of this writer, usually a very severe critic of the clergy, runs quite counter to Luther’s general and greatly exaggerated charges. “God knows, I am acquainted with many, yea, countless pastors amongst the secular clergy in the six dioceses of the Rhine, who are richly equipped with all the knowledge requisite for the cure of souls and whose lives are blameless. I know excellent prelates, canons and vicars both at the Cathedrals and the Collegiate Churches, not a few in number but many, men of unblemished reputation, full of piety and generous and humble-minded towards the poor.”

  Luther himself made statements which deprive his accusations of their point. Even what he says of the respect paid to the clerical state militates against him. Of the first Mass said by the newly ordained priest he relates, that “it was thought much of”; that the people on such occasions brought offerings and gifts; that the “bridegroom’s” “Hours” were celebrated by torchlight, and that he, together with his mother, if still living, was led through the streets with music and dancing, “the people looking on and weeping for joy.” It is true that he is loud in his blame of the avarice displayed at such first Masses, but the respect shown by the people, and here described by him, would never have been exhibited towards the clergy had they rendered themselves so utterly contemptible by their immorality as he makes out.

  In a sermon of 1521, speaking of the “majority of the clergy,” he admits that most of them “work, pray and fast a great deal”; that they “sing, speak and preach of the law and lead men to many works”; that they fancy they will gain heaven by means of “pretty works,” though all in vain, so he thinks, owing to their lack of knowledge of the Evangel. During the earlier period of his change of opinions he was quite convinced, that a pernicious self-righteousness (that of the “iustitiarii”) was rampant amongst both clergy and religious; not only in the houses of his own Congregation, but throughout the Church, a painstaking observance of the law and a scrupulous fulfilment of their duty by the clergy and monks constituted a danger to the true spirit of the Gospel, as he understood it. It was his polemics which then caused him to be obsessed with the idea, that the whole world had been seized upon by the self-righteous. It was his polemics again, which, later, made him regard the whole world as full of immoral clerics.

  The extravagance of Luther’s utterances in his fight against clerical celibacy might perhaps be regarded as due to the secluded life he had led at Wittenberg during the years he was a monk, which prevented him from knowing the true state of things. Experience gained by more extensive travel and intercourse with others might indeed have corrected his views. But, as a matter of fact, he was not altogether untravelled; besides visiting Rome and Southern Germany he had been to Heidelberg, Worms and Cologne. His stay at the latter city is particularly noteworthy, for there he was in the heart of the very region of which Wimpfeling had given so favourable an account. Can he, during the long journey on foot and in his conversations with his brother monks there, not have convinced himself, that the clergy residing in that city were by no means sunk in immorality and viciousness? His visit to Cologne coincided in all probability with the general Chapter which Staupitz had summoned there at the commencement of May, 1512. Luther only recalls incidentally having seen there the bodies of the Three Kings; having swallowed all the legends told him concerning them; and having drunk such wine as he had never drunk before.

  Two Concluding Pictures towards the History of Woman.

  We may, in conclusion, give two pictures which cast a new and lurid light on what has gone before.

  Luther’s standpoint, and, no less, the confusion which had arisen in married life and the humiliations to which many women were exposed, come out clearly in the story of his relations with the preacher Jodocus Kern and his spouse. Kern, an apostate monk, had wedded at Nuremberg Ursula Tagler, an ex-nun from the convent of Engelthal. On Dec. 24, 1524, Luther joyously commended him as “a monk, metamorphosed into a married man,” to the care of Spalatin. When Kern went to Saxony in search of a post the girl refused to accompany him until he had found employment. During his absence she began to regret the step she had taken, and the letters she received from her former Prioress determined her to return no more to her husband. The persuasion of her Lutheran relatives indeed induced her to go to Allstedt after Kern had been appointed successor to Thomas Münzer in that town, but there her horror only grew for the sacrilegious union she had contracted. Coercion was quite fruitless. The minister, at the advice of her own relatives, treated her very roughly, forced her to eat meat on Good Friday and refused to listen when she urged him to return to the Catholic Church. Having made an attempt to escape to Mansfeld, her case was brought before the secular Courts; she was examined by the commissioner of Allstedt on January 11, 1526, when she declared, that it was against her conscience to look upon Kern as her husband, that her soul was dearer to her than her body and that she would rather die than continue to endure any longer the bonds of sin. This the commissioner reported to the Elector Johann, and the latter, on Jan. 17, forwarded her statement to Luther, together with Kern’s account, for the purpose of hearing from one so “learned in Scripture” “how the matter ought to be treated and disposed of in accordance with God’s Holy Writ.”

  Luther took a week to reply: The Allstedt woman was suffering such “temptations from the devil and men, that it would verily be a wonder if she could resist them.” The only means of keeping her true to the Evangel and to her duty would be to send her to her people at Nuremberg. Should, even there, “the devil refuse to yield to God’s good exhortation” then she would have to “be allowed to go,” and “be reckoned as dead,” and then the pastor might marry another. Out of the scandal that the wanton spirit had given through her God might yet work some good. “The Evangel neither will nor can be exempt from scandals.”

  The unhappy nun was, as a matter of fact, forcibly brought to Nuremberg and placed amongst Lutheran surroundings instead of being conveyed to her convent at Engelthal, as the laws of the Empire demanded. From thence she never returned to Allstedt. Kern, during the proceedings, had declared that he did not want her against her conscience, and was ready to submit to the Word of God and to comply exactly with whatever this imposed. In accordance therewith he soon found a fresh bride. During the Visitations, in 1533, he was charged with bigamy and was reprimanded for being a “drinker and gambler,” although his industry and talents were at the same time recognised. Nothing is known of his later doings.

  Two open letters addressed to Luther by Catholics in 1528 form a companion picture to the above. They portray the view taken by many faithful Catholics of Luther’s own marriage.

  In that year two Professors at the Leipzig University, Johann Hasenberg and Joachim von der Heyden, published printed circulars addressed to Luther and Catherine von Bora, admonishing them — now that ten years had elapsed since Luther first attacked the Church — on their breaking of their vows, their desecration of the Sacrament of Matrimony and their falling away from the Catholic faith. It is probable that Duke George of Saxony had something to do with this joint attack. It is also likely that hopes of sterner measures on the part of the Imperial authorities also helped to induce the writers to put pen to paper. In any case it was their plan, vig
orously and before all the world, to attack the author of the schism in his most vulnerable spot, where it would not be easy for him to defend himself publicly. Master Hasenberg, a Bohemian, was one of George’s favourites, who had made him three years previously Dean of the Faculty of Arts. He addressed his open letter to “Martinus Luderus,” the “destroyer of the public peace and piety.” Von der Heyden, known in Latin as Myricianus or Phrisomynensis (a Frisian by birth), was likewise a Master, and Papal and academic Notary at Leipzig. Of the two he was the younger. His letter was addressed to “Khete von Bhore, Luther’s pretended wife,” and served as preface to a printed translation he had made of the work: “De lapsu virginis consecratæ,” then attributed to St. Ambrose. Both epistles, according to one of the answers, must have been despatched by special messenger and delivered at Luther’s house. They drew forth printed replies, some of which can be traced to Luther himself, while Euricius Cordus ridiculed the writers in a screed full of biting epigram.

  The Leipzig letters, the first of which was also published in German, made a great sensation in German circles and constituted an urgent exhortation to thousands of apostates estranged from the Church by Luther’s new doctrine on Christian freedom and on the nullity of vows.

  Relentlessly Hasenberg put to Luther the questions: “Who has blasphemously slandered the pious promise of celibacy which priests, religious and nuns made to God, and which, throughout the ages, had been held sacred? Luderus. Who has shrouded in darkness free-will, good works, the ancient and unshaken faith, and that jewel of virginity which shines more brightly than the sun in the Church? Luderus.... Do you not yet see, you God-forsaken man, what all Christians think of your impudent behaviour, your temerity and voluptuousness?”

  Referring to the sacrilegious union with Bora, he proceeds: “The enormity of your sin is patent. You have covered yourself with guilt in both your private and public life, particularly by your intercourse with the woman who is not your wife.” In his indignation he does not shrink from comparing the ex-nun to a lustful Venus. He thunders against Luther: “You, a monk, fornicate by day and by night with a nun! And, by your writings and sermons, you drag down into the abyss with you ignorant monks and unlearned priests, questionable folk, many of whom were already deserving of the gallows. Oh, you murderer of the people!” “Yes, indeed, this is the way to get to heaven — or rather to Lucifer’s kingdom! Why not say like Epicurus: There is no God and no higher power troubles about us poor mortals? Call upon your new gods, Bacchus, Venus, Mars, Priapus, Futina, Potina, Subigus and Hymenæus.” His wish for Luther’s spouse is, that she may take to heart the touching words of St. Ambrose to the fallen nun, so as not to fall from the abyss of a vicious life into the abyss of everlasting perdition prepared “for the devil and his Lutheran angels.” And again, turning to Luther: “Have pity,” he says, “on the nun, have compassion on the concubine and the children, your own flesh and blood. Send the nun back to the cloistral peace and penance which she forsook; free the unhappy creature from the embraces of sin and restore her to her mother the Church and to her most worthy and loving bridegroom Christ, so that she may again sing in unison with the faithful the Ambrosian hymn: ‘Iesu, corona virginum.’... This much at least, viz. the dismissal of the nun, you cannot refuse us, however blindly you yourself may hurry along the sad path you have chosen. All the faithful, linked together throughout the world by the golden chain of charity, implore you with tears of blood; so likewise does your kind Mother, the Church, and the holy choirs of Angels, who rejoice over the sinner who returns penitent.”

  The writer, who seasons his counsel with so much bitterness, had plainly little hope of the conversion of the man he was addressing; his attack was centred on Catharine Bora. This was even more so the case with von der Heyden, a man of lively character who delighted in controversy; even from his first words it is clear that he had no intention of working on her kindlier feelings: “Woe to you, poor deluded woman.” He upbraids her with her fall from light into darkness, from the vocation of the cloister into an “abominable and shameful life”; by her example she has brought “many poor, innocent children into a like misery”; formerly they had, as nuns, “lived in discipline and purity,” now they are “not merely in spiritual but in actual bodily want, nay, the poorest of the poor and have become the most despicable of creatures.” Many of them now earned a living in “houses of ill-fame,” they were frequently forced to pawn or sell their poor clothing, and sometimes themselves; they had hoped for the true freedom of the spirit that had been promised them, and, instead, they had been cast into a “horrible bondage of soul and body.” Luther “in his pestilential writings had mistaken the freedom of the flesh for the true liberty of the spirit, in opposition to St. Paul, who had based this freedom solely on the Spirit of the Lord, as in 2 Cor. iii. 17: ‘Where the Spirit of God is, there is liberty’” Luther’s preaching on liberty was one big lie, and another was his opinion that the “vow of virginity, where it was observed, was wicked and sinful, which statement was contrary to God and the whole of Scripture,” and more particularly opposed to St. Paul, who strongly condemned those who broke their plighted faith to Christ; St. Paul had quite plainly recommended clerical celibacy when he wrote, that he who is without a wife is solicitous for the things that are the Lord’s, but that the husband is solicitous for the things of the world, how best he may please his wife (1 Cor. vii. 32 f.).

  Your “Squire Luther,” he says to Bora, “behaves himself very impudently and proudly”; “he fancies he can fly, that he is treading on roses and is ‘lux mundi’”; he forgets that God has commanded us to keep what we have vowed; people gladly obeyed the Emperor, yet God was “an Emperor above all Emperors,” and had still more right to fealty and obedience. Was she ignorant of Christ’s saying: “No man having put his hand to the plough and looking back is fit for the Kingdom of God” (Luke ix. 62)? He reminds her of the severe penalties imposed by the laws of the Empire on those religious who were openly unfaithful to their vow, and, particularly, of the eternal punishment which should move her to leave the “horrid, black monk” (the Augustinians wore a black habit), to bewail like “St. Magdalene the evil she had done” and, by returning to the convent, to make “reparation for her infidelity to God.” St. Ambrose’s booklet on the fallen nun might lead her, and her companions in misfortune, to a “humble recognition” (of their sin), “and enable her to flee from the swift wrath of God and return to the fold of Christ, attain to salvation together with us all and praise the Lord for all eternity.”

  We catch a glimpse of the gulf which divided people’s minds at that time in the very title of the reply by Euricius Cordus: “The Marburg literary society’s peal of laughter over the screed against Luther of two Leipzig poets.”

  Two satirical and anonymous replies immediately appeared in print at Wittenberg, the one entitled: “New-Zeittung von Leyptzig,” of which Luther “was not entirely innocent,” and the other quite certainly his work, viz. “Ein newe Fabel Esopi newlich verdeudscht gefunden.” In the first reply spurious epistles are made to relate how the two Leipzig letters had been brought by a messenger to Luther’s house, and had then been carried by the servants unread to the “back-chamber where it stinketh.” “The paper having duly been submitted to the most ignominious of uses it was again packed into a bundle and despatched back to the original senders by the same messenger.”

  In his “Newe Fabel” (of the Lion and the Ass) Luther implicitly includes von der Heyden, all the defenders of the Pope, and the Pope himself under the figure of the Ass (with the cross on its back); “there is nothing about the Ass that is not worthy of royal and papal honours.” The author of the letter he calls an ass’s head and sniveller; the very stones of Leipzig would spit upon him; he was the “horse-droppings in which the apples were packed”; his art had brought on him “such an attack of diarrhœa that all of us have been bespattered with his filth”; “If you wish to devour us, you might begin downstairs at the commode,” etc.

>   We find nothing in either writing in the nature of a reply — of which indeed he considered the Leipzig authors unworthy — except the two following statements: firstly, Luther had sufficiently instructed his faithful wife, and the world in general, “that the religious life was wrong”; secondly, Ambrose, Jerome, or whoever wrote the booklet, “had stormed and raved like a demon” in that work, which was “more heretical than Catholic, against the nun who had yielded to her sexual instincts; he had not spoken like a Doctor, ... but as one who wished to drive the poor prostitute into the abyss of hell; a murderer of souls pitted against a poor, feeble, female vessel.” Hence Luther’s views are fairly apparent in the replies.

  The Church, yea, even the Church of the earliest times, was made to bear the curse of having degraded woman and of having, by the religious life, declared war on marriage.

  A contemporary, Petrus Silvius, who read Luther’s writings with indignation and disgust, wrote, in 1530: “Luther, with his usual lies and blasphemy, calumniates the Christian Church and now says, that she entirely rejected and condemned matrimony.”

  In what has gone before these falsehoods concerning the earlier degradation and his own exaltation of woman have been refuted at some length; the detailed manner in which this was done may find its vindication in the words of yet another opponent of Luther’s, H. Sedulius, who says: “It must be repeated again and again, that it is an impudent lie to say we condemn marriage.”