Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  On another occasion he tells us how he would gladly have left Wittenberg with Melanchthon and the others who were going by way of Nuremberg to the Diet of Augsburg, but a friend had said to him: “Hold your tongue! Your tongue is an evil one!”

  After the publication of the “Vermanũg an die Geistlichen,” or possibly even before, Melanchthon seems to have written to him, re-echoing the observations of startled and anxious friends, and saying that the writing had been “variously” appreciated, in itself a significant remark; Luther himself at that time certainly dreaded the censure of his adherents. Still, he insists as defiantly as ever on his “invective”: “Let not your heart be troubled,” he admonishes Melanchthon, “My God is a God of fools, Who is wont to laugh at the wise. Whence I trouble myself about them not the least bit.” On the contrary, he even came near regarding his writing as a special work of God.

  As we have already pointed out, the defiant and violent steps he took, only too often became in his eyes special works of God. His notorious, boundless sense of his own greatness, to which this gave rise, is the first of the phenomena which accompanied his hate; these it will now be our duty briefly to examine in order better to appreciate the real strength of his ethical principles in his own case.

  Companion-Phenomena of his Hate

  As a matter of fact Luther’s sense of his superiority was so great that the opponents he attacked had to listen to language such as no mortal had ever before dreamed of making use of against the Church.

  The Church is being reformed “in my age” in “a Divine way, not after human ways.” “Were we to fall, then Christ would fall with us.”

  Whenever he meets with contradiction, whenever he hears even the hint of a reproach or accusation, he at once ranges himself — as he does, for instance, in the “Vermanũg” — on the side of the persecuted “prophets and apostles,” nay, he even likens himself to Christ. He stood alone, without miracles, and devoid of holiness, as he himself candidly informed Henry VIII. of England; nevertheless he pits himself against the heads of both Church and Empire assembled at the Diet.

  All he could appeal to was his degree of Doctor of Theology: “Had I not been a Doctor, the devil would have given me much trouble, for it is no small matter to attack the whole Papacy and to charge it” (with error). In the last instance, however, his self-confidence recalls him to the proud consciousness of his entire certainty. “Thus our cause stands firm, because we know how we believe and how we live.”

  With these words from his “Vermanũg” he defies the whole of the present and of the past, the Pope and all his Councils.

  He knows — and that suffices — that what he has and proclaims is God’s Word; “and if you have God’s Word you may say: Now that I have the Word what need have I to ask what the Councils say?” “Among all the Councils I have never found one where the Holy Spirit rules.... There will never be no Council [sic], according to the Holy Spirit, where the people have to agree. God allows this because He Himself wills to be the Judge and suffers not men to judge. Hence He commands every man to know what he believes.” Luther only, and those who follow him, know what they believe; he takes the place of all the councils, Doctors of the Church, Popes and bishops, in short, of all the ecclesiastical sources of theology.

  “The end of the world may now come,” he said, in 1540, “for all that pertains to the knowledge of God has now been supplied” (by me).

  With this contempt for the olden Church he combines a most imperious exclusiveness in his treatment even of those who like him were opposed to the Pope, whether they were individuals or formed schools of thought. They must follow his lead, otherwise there awaits them the sentence he launched at the Zwinglians from the Coburg: “These Sacramentarians are not merely liars but the very embodiment of lying, deceit and hypocrisy; this both Carlstadt and Zwingli prove by word and deed.” Their books, he says, contain pestilential stuff; they refused to retract even when confuted by him, but simply because they stood in fear of their own following; he would continue to put them to shame by those words, which so angered them: “You have a spirit different from ours.” He could not look upon them as brothers; this was duly expressed in the article in which he went so far as to promise them that love which was due even to enemies. On his own authority he curtly dubs them “heretics,” and is resolved in this way to tread unharmed with Christ through Satan’s kingdom and all his lying artifices. Luther’s aggravating exclusiveness went hand-in-hand with his overweening self-confidence.

  In consequence of this treatment the Swiss, through the agency of Bullinger, Zwingli’s successor, complained to Bucer, “Beware of not believing Luther readily or of not yielding to him! He is a scorpion; no matter how carefully he is handled he will sting, even though to begin with he seems to caress your hand.” To this Bucer, who had also ventured to differ from Luther, wrote in his reply: “He has flung another scathing book at us.... He speaks, and means to speak, much more harshly than heretofore.” “He will not now endure even the smallest contradiction, and I am sure that, were I to go any further, I should cause such a tragedy that all the churches would once more be convulsed.” Another Protestant voice we hear exclaiming with a fine irony: “Luther rages, thunders and lightens as though he were a Jupiter and had all the bolts of heaven at his command to launch against us.... Has he then become an emperor of the Christian army on the model of the Pope, so as to be able to issue every pronouncement that his brain suggests?” “He confuses the two Natures in Christ and brings forward foolish, nay godless, statements. If we may not condemn this, then what, pray, may be condemned?”

  His natural lack of charity, of which we shall have later on to add many fresh and appalling examples to those already enumerated, aggravated his hatred, his sense of his own greatness and his exclusiveness. What malicious hatred is there not apparent in his advice that Zwingli and Œcolampadius should be condemned, “even though this led to violence being offered them.” It is with reluctance that one gazes on Luther’s abuse of the splendid gifts of mind and heart with which he had been endowed.

  A recent Protestant biographer of Carlstadt’s laments the “frightful harshness of his (Luther’s) polemics.” “How deep the traces left by his mode of controversy were, ought not to be overlooked,” so he writes. “From that time forward this sort of thing took the place of any real discussion of differences of opinion between members of the Lutheran camp, nor did people even seem aware of how far they were thus drifting from the kindliness and dignity of Christian modes of thought.” What is here said of the treatment of opponents within the camp applies even more strongly to Luther’s behaviour towards Catholics.

  The following episode of his habitual persecution of Albert, Archbishop and Elector of Mayence, illustrates this very well.

  On June 21, 1535, the Archbishop in accordance with the then law and with the sentence duly pronounced by the judge, had caused Hans von Schönitz, once his trusted steward, to be executed; the charge of which he had been proved guilty was embezzlement on a gigantic scale. The details of the case, which was dealt with rather hurriedly, have not yet been adequately cleared up, but even Protestant researchers agree that Schönitz deserved to be dealt with as a “public thief,” seeing that “in the pecuniary transactions which he undertook for Albert he was not unmindful of his own advantage”; “there is no doubt that he was rightly accused of all manner of peculation and cheating.” Luther, however, furiously entered the lists on behalf of the executed man and against the detested Archbishop who, in spite of his private faults, remained faithful to the Church and was a hindrance to the spread of Lutheranism in Germany. Luther implicitly believed all that was told him, of Hans’s innocence and of Albert’s supposed abominable motives, by Schönitz’s brother and his friend Ludwig Rabe — who himself was implicated in the matter — and both of whom came to Wittenberg. “Both naturally related the case from their own point of view.” Luther sent two letters to the Cardinal, one more violent than the other. The second would
seem to have been intended for publication and was sent to the press, though at present no copy of it can be discovered. In it in words of frightful violence he lays at the door of the Prince of the Church the blood of the man done to death. The Archbishop was a “thorough-paced Epicurean who does not believe that Abel lives in God and that his blood still cries more loudly than Cain, his brother’s murderer, fancies.” He, Luther, like another Elias, must call down woes “upon Achab and Isabel.” He had indeed heard of many evil deeds done by Cardinals, “but I had not taken your Cardinalitial Holiness for such an insolent, wicked dragon.... Your Electoral Highness may if he likes commit a nuisance in the Emperor’s Court of Justice, infringe the freedom of the city of Halle, usurp the sword of Justice belonging to Saxony, and, over and above this, look on the world and on all reason as rags fit only for the closet” — such is a fair sample of the language — and, moreover, treat everything in a Popish, Roman, Cardinalitial way, but, please God, our Lord God will by our prayers one day compel your Electoral Highness to sweep out all the filth yourself.

  In the first letter he had threatened fiercely the hated Cardinal with publishing what he knew (or possibly only feigned to know) of his faults; he would not “advise him to stir up the filth any further”; here in the second letter he charges him in a general way with robbery, petty theft and fraud in the matter of Church property, also with having cheated a woman of the town whom he used to keep; he deserved to be “hanged on a gallows three times as high as the Giebichstein,” where Schönitz had been executed. Incidentally he promises him a new work that shall reveal all his doings. The threatened work was, however, never published, Albert’s family, the Brandenburgs, having raised objections at the Electoral Court of Saxony. Albert, however, offered quite frankly to submit the Schönitz case and the grievances raised by his relatives to the judgment of George of Anhalt, one of the princes who had gone over to Lutheranism, who was perfectly at liberty to take the advice of Jonas, nay, even of Luther himself. “In this we may surely see a proof that he was not conscious of being in the least blameworthy.” At any rate he seems to have been quite willing to lay his case even before his most bitter foe.

  Such was Luther’s irritability and quickness of temper, even in private concerns, that, at times, even in his letters, he would pour forth the most incredible threats.

  On one occasion, in 1542, when a messenger sent by Justus Jonas happened to offend him, he at once wrote an “angry letter” to Jonas and on the next day followed it up with another in which he says, that his anger has not yet been put to rest; never is Jonas to send such people into his house again or else he will order them to be gagged and put under restraint. “Remember this, for I have said it. This man may scold and do the grand elsewhere, but not in Luther’s house, unless indeed he wants to have his tongue torn out. Are we going to allow such caitiffs as these to play the emperor?” — He had, as we already know, a sad experience with a certain girl named Rosina, whom he had engaged as a servant, but who turned out to be a person of loose morals and brought his house into disrepute. “She shall never again have the chance of deceiving anyone so long as there is water enough in the Elbe,” so he writes of her to a judge. In letters to other persons he accuses her of “villainy and fornication”; she had “shamed all the inmates of his house with the [assumed] name of Truchsess”; he could only think that she had been “foisted on him by the Papists as an arch-prostitute — the god-forsaken minx and lying bag of trouble, who has damaged my household from garret to cellar ... accursed harridan and perjured, thieving drab that she is!” Away with her “for the honour of the Evangel.”

  Even in younger days he had been too much accustomed to give the reins to his excitement, as his two indignant letters (his own description of them) to his brother monks at Erfurt show. Even his upbringing of his own children, highly lauded as it has been, suffered from this same lack of self-control. “The mere disobedience of a boy would stir him to his very depths. For instance, he admits of a nephew he had living with him — a son of his brother James — that once ‘he angered me so greatly as almost to be the death of me, so that for a while I lost the use of my bodily powers.’” — So exasperated was he with the lawyers who treacherously deceived the people that he went so far as to demand that their tongues should be torn out. At times he confesses his hot temper, owning and acknowledging that it was “sinful”; to such fits of passion he was still subject, but, as a rule, his anger was at least both right and called for, for he could not avoid being angry where it was “a question of the soul and of hell.” Anger, he also says, refreshed his inner man, sharpened his wits and chased away his temptations; he had to be angry in order to write, preach or pray well.

  Repeatedly he seemed on the point of quitting Wittenberg for ever in revenge for all the neglect he met with there; “I can no longer contain my anger and disappointment.” It was to this depression of spirits that he was referring when he said, that, often, in his indignation, he had “flung down the keys on Our Lord God’s threshold.” He sees his inability to change his surroundings and how Popery refuses to be overthrown; yet, as he told us, he is determined to “rain abuse and curses on the miscreants [the Papists] till he is carried to the grave,” and to provide the “thunder and lightning for the funeral” of the foe.

  A gloomy, uncanny passion often glows in his words and serves to fire the fanatism of the misguided masses.

  “Lo and behold how my blood boils and how I long to see the Papacy punished!” And what was the punishment he looked for? Just before he had said that the Pope, his Cardinals and all his court should have “the skins of their bodies drawn off over their heads; the hides might then be flung into the healing bath [the sea] at Ostia, or into the fire,” unless indeed they found means to pay back all the alien property that the Pope, the “Robber of the Churches, had stolen only to waste, lose and squander it, and to spend it on whores and their ilk.” Yet even this punishment fell short of the crime, for “my spirit knows well that no temporal penalty can avail to make amends even for one Bull or Decree.”

  Side by side with language so astonishing we must put other sayings which paint his habitual frame of mind in a light anything but favourable: “It is God’s Word! Let what cannot stand fall ... no matter what!” “The Word is true, or everything crumbles into ruin!” “Even if you will not follow” — such were his words to Staupitz as early as 1521, “at least suffer me to go on and be carried away [‘ire et rapi’].” “I have put on my horns against the Roman Antichrists”; in these words Luther compares himself to a raving bull.

  This frame of mind tended to promote his natural tendency to violence, hitherto repressed. His proposal to flay all the members of the Roman Curia was not by any means his first hint at deeds of blood; such allusions occur in other shapes in earlier discourses, particularly in his predictions of the judgments to come. The Princes, nobility and towns, so he declared, must put their foot down and prevent the shameful abuses of Rome: “If we mean to fight against the Turks let us begin at home where they are worst; if we do right in hanging thieves and beheading robbers, why then do we let Roman avarice go scot free, when all the time it is the biggest thief and robber there ever has been or will ever be upon the earth.” Whoever comes from Rome bringing in his pocket a collation to a benefice ought to be warned either “to desist, or else to jump into the Rhine or the nearest pond, and give the Roman Brief — letter, seals and all, a cold bath.” Not without a shudder can one read the description in his “Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” written in his last days, of the kinds of death best suited to the Pope and his Curia, of which the flaying and the “bath” at Ostia is only one example. (Cp. below, xxx., 2.) True enough he is careful to point out that such a death will be theirs only should they refuse to amend their ways and accept the Lutheran Evangel!

  Ten years previously, in 1535, he had written to Melanchthon, who shrank from acts of violence with what appeared to Luther too great timidity: “Oh, that our most venerable Cardinal
s, Popes and Roman Legates had more Kings of England to put them to death!” These words he penned soon after Henry VIII of England had sacrificed the lives of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, to his sensual passions and his thirst for blood. Luther adds, of the Pope and the Curia, with the object of vindicating the sentence of death he had passed on them, “They are traitors, thieves, robbers and regular devils.... They are out and out miscreants to the very bottom of their hearts. May God only grant you too to see this.”

  Fury had stood by the cradle of Luther’s undertaking and under its gloomy auspices his cause continued to progress. Without repeating what has already been said, it may suffice to point out how his excitement frequently led him to take even momentous steps which he would otherwise have boggled at. Only too frankly he admitted to his friend Lang in 1519 and soon after to Spalatin, that Eck had so exasperated him that he would now shake himself loose and write and do things from which he would otherwise have refrained. His early “jest” at Rome’s expense would now become a real warfare against her — as though Rome was to be made to suffer for Eck and his violence. In 1521, from apprehension of his violence and out of consideration for the Court, Spalatin had kept back two of Luther’s writings which the latter wished to be printed. “I shall get into a towering rage,” so the author wrote to him, “and bring out much worse things on this subject afterwards if my manuscripts are lost, or you refuse to surrender them. You cannot destroy the spirit even though you destroy the lifeless paper.” — This incident at so early a date shows how deeply seated in him was his tendency to violence; even at the outset it was to some extent personal animus which led him to shape his action as he did. Self-esteem and the plaudits of the mob had even then begun to dim his mental vision.