Yet Bucer had some strong things to say to Landgrave Philip of Hesse, regarding Luther’s addiction to abuse. To try and persuade him to deal courteously with his foes, particularly with the Zürichers after their “mistaken booklet,” so Bucer writes to the Prince, “would be like trying to put out a fire with oil. If Master Philip and I — who have kept rigidly and loyally to the Concord — succeed in turning away the man’s wrath from ourselves, then we shall esteem ourselves lucky.” The “foolhardiness” of the Zürichers has “so enraged him, that even Emperors, though they should be good Evangelicals, would find it hard to pacify him.” “No one has ever got the better of Dr. Luther in invective.”
Fresh light is thrown on the psychological side of Luther’s controversial methods when we bring together those utterances in which his sense of his own greatness finds expression. We must observe a little more closely Luther’s inner thoughts and feelings from the standpoint of his own ideal.
4. Luther on his own Greatness and Superiority to Criticism The art of “Rhetoric”
Characteristic utterances of Luther’s regarding his own gifts and excellencies, the wisdom and courage displayed in his undertaking and the important place he would occupy in history as the discoverer and proclaimer of the Evangelical truth, are to be met with in such plenty, both in his works and in the authentic notes of his conversations, that we have merely to select some of the most striking and bring them together. They form a link connecting his whole public career; he never ceased to regard all his labours from the point of view of his Divine mission, and what he says merely varies in tone and colour with the progress which took place in his work as time went on.
It is true that he knew perfectly well that it was impossible to figure a Divine mission without the pediment and shield of humility. How indeed could those words of profound humility, so frequent with St. Paul, have rung in Luther’s ears without finding some echo? Hence we find Luther, too, from time to time making such his own; and this he did, not out of mere hypocrisy, but from a real wish to identify his feelings with those of the Apostle; in almost every instance, however, his egotism destroys any good impulse and drives him in the opposite direction.
Luther’s confessions of his faults and general unworthiness are often quite impressive. We may notice that such were not unfrequently made to persons of influence, to Princes and exalted patrons on whom his success depended, and whom he hoped thereby to dispose favourably; others, however, are the natural, communicative outpourings of that “colossal frankness” — as it has been termed — which posterity has to thank for its knowledge of so many of Luther’s foibles. In his conversations we sometimes find him speaking slightingly of himself, for instance, when he says: “Philip is of a better brand than I. He fights and teaches; I am more of a rhetorician or gossip.”
A passage frequently quoted by Luther’s admirers in proof of his humility is that which occurs in his preface to the “Psalter” published by Eobanus Hessus. The Psalms, he says, had been his school from his youth upwards. “While unwilling to put my gifts before those of others, I may yet boast with a holy presumption, that I would not, as they say, for all the thrones and kingdoms of the world, forgo the benefits, that, by the blessing of the Holy Spirit, I have derived from lingering and meditating on the Psalms.” He was not going to hide the gifts he had received from God, and in Him he would be proud, albeit in himself he found reasons enough to make him humble; he took less pleasure in his own German Psalter than in that of Eobanus, “but all to the honour and glory of God, to Whom be praise for ever and ever.”
In order to know Luther as he really was we should observe him amongst his pupils at Wittenberg, for instance, as he left the Schlosskirche after one of his powerful sermons to the people, and familiarly addressed those who pressed about him on the steps of the church. There were the burghers and students whose faults he had just been scourging; the theologians of his circle crowding with pride around their master; the lawyers, privy councillors and Court officials in the background, probably grumbling under their breath at Luther’s peculiarities and harsh words. His friends wish him many years of health and strength that he may continue his great work in the pulpit and press; he, on the other hand, thinks only of death; he insists on speaking of his Last Will and Testament, of the chances of his cause, of his enemies and of the threatened Council which he so dreaded.
“Let me be,” Luther cries, turning to the lawyers, “even in my Last Will, the man I really am, one well known both in heaven and on earth, and not unknown in hell, standing in sufficient esteem and authority to be trusted and believed in more than any notary; for God, the Father of Mercies, has entrusted to me, poor, unworthy, wretched sinner that I am, the Gospel of His Dear Son and has made and hitherto kept me faithful and true to it, so that many in the world have accepted it through me, and consider me a teacher of the truth in spite of the Pope’s ban and the wrath of Emperors, Kings, Princes, priests and all the devils.... Dr. Martin Luther, God’s own notary and the witness of His Gospel.”
I am “Our Lord Jesus Christ’s unworthy evangelist.”
I am “the Prophet of the Germans, for such is the haughty title I must henceforth assume.”
“I am Ecclesiastes by the Grace of God”; “Evangelist by the Grace of God.”
“I must not deny the gifts of Jesus Christ, viz. that, however small be my acquaintance with Holy Scripture, I understand it a great deal better than the Pope and all his people.”
“I believe that we are the last trump that sounds before Christ’s coming.”
Many arise against me, but with “a breath of my mouth” I blow them over. — All their prints are mere “autumn leaves.”
“One only of my opponents, viz. Latomus, is worth his salt, he is the scribe who writes best against me. Latomus alone has really written against Luther, make a note of that! All the others, like Erasmus, were but frogs. Not one of them really meant it seriously. Yes indeed all, Erasmus included, were just croaking frogs.”
I have been tried in the school of temptations; “these are the exalted temptations which no Pope has ever understood,” I mean, “being tempted to blasphemy and to question God’s Judgments when we know nothing either of sin or of the remedy.”
Because I have destroyed the devil’s kingdom “many say I was the man foretold by the Prophet of Lichtenberg; for in their opinion I must be he. This was a prophecy of the devil, who well saw that the kingdom he had founded on lies must fall. Hence he beheld a monk, though he could not tell to which Order he belonged.”
“Be assured of this, that no one will give you a Doctor of Holy Scripture save only the Holy Ghost who is in heaven.... He indeed testified aforetimes against the prophet by the mouth of the she-ass on which the prophet rode. Would to God we were worthy to have such doctors sent us!”
“I have become a great Doctor, this I am justified in saying; I would not have thought this possible in the days of my temptations” when Staupitz comforted me with the assurance, “that God would make use of me as His assistant in mighty things.”
“St. John Hus” was not alone in prophesying of me that ... “they will perforce have to listen to the singing of a swan,” but likewise the prophet at Rome foretold “the coming hermit who would lay waste the Papacy.”
When I was a young monk and lay sick at Erfurt they said to me: “Be consoled, good bachelor ... our God will still make a great man of you. This has been fulfilled.”
“On one occasion when I was consoling a man on the loss of his son he, too, said to me: ‘You will see, Martin, you will become a great man!’ I often call this to mind, for such words have something of the omen or oracle about them.”
“Small and insignificant as they [Luther’s and the preachers’ reforms] are, they have done more good in the Churches than all the Popes and lawyers with all their decrees.”
“No one has expounded St. Paul better” than you, Philip (Melanchthon). “The commentaries of St. Jerome and Origen are the merest trash
in comparison with your annotations” (on Romans and Corinthians). “Be humble if you like, but at least let me be proud of you.” “Be content that you come so near to St. Paul himself.”
“In Popery such darkness prevailed that they taught neither the Ten Commandments, nor the Creed, nor the Our Father; such knowledge was considered quite superfluous.”
“The blindness was excessive, and unless those days had been shortened we should all have grown into beasts! I fear, however, that after us it will be still worse, owing to the dreadful contempt for the Word.”
“Before my day nothing was known,” not even “what parents or children were, or what wife or maid.”
“Such was then the state of things: No one taught, or had heard or knew what secular authority was, whence it came, or what its office and task was, or how it must serve God.”— “But I wrote so usefully and splendidly concerning the secular authorities as no teacher has ever done since Apostolic times, save perhaps St. Augustine; of this I may boast with a good conscience, relying on the testimony of the whole world.”
Similarly, “we could prove before the whole world that we have preached much more grandly and powerfully of good works than those very people who abuse us.”
“Not one of the Fathers ever wrote anything remarkable or particularly good concerning matrimony.... In marriage they saw only evil luxury.... They fell into the ocean of sensuality and evil lusts.” “But [by my preaching] God with His Word and by His peculiar Grace has restored, before the Last Day, matrimony, secular authority and the preaching office to their rightful position, as He instituted and ordained them, in order that we might behold His own institutions in what hitherto had been but shams.”
The Papists “know nothing about Holy Scripture, or what God is ... or what Baptism or the Sacrament.” But thanks to me “we now have the Gospel almost as pure and undefiled as the Apostles had it.”
“Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great gifts on any bishop as He has on me; for it is our duty to extol God’s gifts.”
It is easy to understand what an impression such assurances and such appeals to the heavenly origin of his gifts must have made on enthusiastic pupils. Before allowing the speaker to continue we may perhaps set on record what one of his defenders alleges in Luther’s favour. “An energetic character to whom all pretence is hateful may surely speak quite freely and openly of his own merits and capabilities.” “Why should such a thing seem strange? Because now, among well-bred people, conventions demand that, even should we be conscious of good deeds and qualities in ourselves, we should nevertheless speak as though unaware of them.” Luther, however, was “certain that he had found the centre of all truth, and that he possessed it as his very own; he knew that by his ‘faith’ he had become something, viz. that which every man ought to become according to the will of God. This explains that self-reliance whereby he felt himself raised above those who either continued to withstand the truth, or else had not yet discovered it.” By such utterances he “only wished to explain why he feared nothing for his cause.” “Arrogance and self-conceit are sinful, but he who by God’s grace really is something must feel proud and self-reliant.” “The only question is whether it is a proof of pride that he was not altogether oblivious of this, and that he himself occasionally spoke of it.” “Christ and Paul knew what they were and openly proclaimed it. Just as Christ found Himself accused of arrogance, so Paul, too, felt that his boasting would be misunderstood.” Besides, “Luther, because the title prophet [which he had applied to himself] was open to misconstruction, writes elsewhere: ‘I do not say that I am a prophet.’”
The comparison between Christ’s sayings and Luther’s had best be quietly dropped. As to the parallel with the Apostle of the Gentiles — his so-called boasting (2 Cor. xi. 16; xii. 1 ff.) and his frequent and humble admissions of frailty — St. Paul certainly has no need to fear comparison with Luther. He could have set before the world other proofs of his Divine mission, and yet he preferred to make the most humble confessions:
“But for myself I will glory in nothing but in my infirmities,” says Paul ... “gladly therefore will I glory in my infirmities that the power of Christ may dwell in me; for which cause I please myself in my infirmities, in reproaches, necessities, in persecutions, in distresses, for Christ. For when I am weak then am I powerful ... although I be nothing, yet the signs of my apostleship have been wrought in you in all patience, in signs and wonders and mighty deeds.” “For I am the least of the Apostles, who am not worthy to be called an Apostle because I persecuted the Church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am and His grace hath not been void, but I have laboured more abundantly than they all: yet not I but the grace of God with me.” “But we became little ones in the midst of you, as if a nurse should cherish her children: so desirous of you, we would gladly impart unto you not only the Gospel of God but also our own souls because you were become most dear to us.... You are our glory and joy” (2 Cor. xii. 5 ff.; 1 Cor. xv. 9; 1 Thess. ii. 7 ff.).
“God has appointed me for the whole of the German land,” Luther continues, “and I boldly vouch and declare that when you obey me in this [the founding of Evangelical schools] you are without a doubt obeying not me but Christ, and that, whoever obeys me not, despises, not me, but Christ [Luke xx. 16]. For I know well and am certain of what and whereto I speak and teach.”
“And now, dear Germans, I have told you enough; you have heard your prophet; God grant we may obey His words.”
As Germany does not obey “misery” must needs overtake it; “when I pray for my beloved Germany I feel that my prayer recoils on me and will not ascend upwards as it does when I pray for other things.... God grant that I be wrong and a false prophet in this matter.”
“Our Lord God had to summon Moses six times; me, too, He has led in the same way.... Others who lived before me attacked the wicked and scandalous life of the Pope; but I assailed his very doctrine and stormed in upon the monkery and the Mass, on which two pillars the whole Papacy rests. I could never have foreseen that these two pillars would fall, for it was almost like declaring war on God and all creation.”
“I picked the first fruits of the knowledge and faith of Christ, viz. that we are justified by faith in Christ and not by works.”
“I am he to whom God first revealed it.”
“Show me a single passage on justification by faith in the Decrees, Decretals, Clementines, ‘Liber Sextus’ or ‘Extravagantes’” in any of the Summas, books of Sentences, monkish sermons, synodal definitions, collegial or monastic Rules, in any Postils, in any work of Jerome and Gregory, in any decisions of the Councils, in any disputations of the theologians, in any lectures of any University, in any Mass or Vigil of any Church, in any “Cæremoniale Episcoporum,” in the institutes of any monastery, in any manual of any confraternity or guild, in any pilgrims’ book anywhere, in the pious exercises of any Saint, in any Indulgence, Bull, anywhere in the Papal Chancery or the Roman Curia or in the Curia of any bishop. And yet it was there that the doctrine of faith should have been expressed in all its fulness.
“My Evangel,” that was what was wanting. “I have, praise be to God, achieved more reformation by my Evangel than they probably would have done even by five Councils.... Here comes our Evangel ... and works wonders, which they themselves accept and make use of, but which they could not have secured by any Councils.”
“I believe I have summoned such a Council and effected such a reformation as will make the ears of the Papists tingle and their heart burst with malice.... In brief: It is Luther’s own Reformation.”
“I, who am nothing, may say with truth that during the [twenty] years that I have served my dear Lord Christ in the preaching office, I have had more than twenty factions opposing me”; but now they are, some of them, extirpated, others, “like worms with their heads trodden off.”
“I have now become a wonderful monk, who, by God’s grace, has deposed the Roman devil, viz. the Pope; yet not I, but God th
rough me, His poor, weak instrument; no emperor or potentate could have done that.”
In point of fact “the devil is not angry with me without good reason, for I have rent his kingdom asunder. What not one of the kings and princes was able to do, that God has effected, through me, a poor beggar and lonely monk.”
How poor are the ancient Fathers in comparison! “Chrysostom was a mere gossip. Jerome, the good Father, and lauder of nuns, understood precious little of Christianity. Ambrose has indeed some good sayings. If Peter Lombard had only happened upon the Bible he would have excelled all the Fathers.”
“See what darkness prevailed among the Fathers of the Church concerning faith! Once the article concerning justification was obscured it became impossible to stem the course of error. St. Jerome writes on Matthew, on Galatians and on Titus, but how paltry it all is! Ambrose wrote six books on Genesis, but what poor stuff they are! Augustine never writes powerfully on faith except when assailing the Pelagians.... They left not a single commentary on Romans and Galatians that is worth anything. Oh, how great, on the other hand, is our age in purity of doctrine, and yet, alas, we despise it! The holy Fathers taught better than they wrote; we, God be praised, write better than we live.” Had Gregory the Great at least refrained from spoiling what remained! “He broke in with his pestilent traditions, bound men down to observances concerning flesh-meat, cowls and Masses, and imposed on them his filthy, merdiferous law. And in the event this dreadful state of things grew from day to day worse.”
“On the other hand, it is plain that I may venture to boast in God, without arrogance or untruth, that, when it comes to the writing of books I am not far behind many of the Fathers.”
“In short the fault lay in this, that [before I came], even in the Universities the Bible was not read; when it was read at all it had to be interpreted in accordance with Aristotle. What blindness that was!”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 750
