Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Hence the secular element had necessarily to assume the guardianship of the property. But of the secular authorities, which was to take control? For these authorities, which all were looking forward expectantly to their share of the church property heaped up by their Catholic ancestors, were not one but many: There was the sovereign with his Court, the civil administration, the towns with their councils, not to speak of other local claimants; to make the confusion worse there were the church patrons, the trustees of monasteries, the founders of institutions, and their heirs, and also those endowed with certain privileges under letters patent. Moreover, the leaders of the religious innovations insisted that the property acquired was to be devoted to the support of the preachers, the schools and the poor. Hence to the above already lengthy list of claimants must be added the preachers, or the consistories representing them, likewise the administrators of the relief funds, the governors of the schools, and the senates of the universities which had to furnish the preachers.

  The war-council of the town of Strasburg, in 1538, addressed a letter to Luther concerning their prospects or intention of securing a share of the church property there. On Nov. 20 of that year he replied, peremptorily telling them to do nothing of the sort; under the conditions then prevailing they must “de facto stand still.” Yet no less plain was his hint to them to warn Catholic owners “who hold church property but pay no heed to the cure of souls,” to amend and to accept the new Evangel; if they “wished to go,” i.e. preferred banishment, so much the better, otherwise they must once for all by some means be “at last brought to see that further persistence in their wantonness” was out of question.

  To add to the general chaos in many places the powerful nobles, as Luther frequently laments, without a shadow of a right, set violent hands on the tempting possessions, and, by entering into possession, frustrated all other claims.

  The leading theologians of Wittenberg gradually gave up in despair their attempts to interfere, and contented themselves with exhortations to which nobody paid much heed.

  They saw how the lion’s share fell to the strongest, i.e. to the Elector, and how everywhere the State took the pennies of the devout and the poor, using them for purposes of its own, which often enough had nothing whatever to do with the Church.

  Nowhere do we find any evidence to show that the theologians made use of the authority on which on other occasions they laid so much stress, or made any serious attempt to check arbitrary action and to point out the way to a just distribution, or to lay down some clear and general rules in accordance with which the graduated claims of the different competitors might have been settled. They might at least have associated themselves with the lawyers in the Privy Council and formulated some rule whereby the rights of the State, of the towns and of the church patrons could have been protected against the worst attacks of the plunderers. But no check of this sort was imposed by the theologians on the prevailing avarice and greed of gain. It is plain that they despaired of the result, and, possibly, silence may not have been the worst policy. No one can be blind to the huge difficulties which attended interference, but who was after all to blame for these and so many other difficulties which had arisen in public order, and which could be solved only by the use of force?

  When an exceptionally conscientious town-council sent a messenger to Luther in 1544 to ask for advice and instructions how to deal with the property of two monasteries which had been suppressed, the “honourable, prudent and beloved masters and friends” received from him only a short and evasive answer: “We theologians have nothing to do with this ... such things must be decided by the lawyers ... our theology teaches us to obey the worldly law, to protect the pious and to punish the wicked.”

  If, however, the lawyers were to follow the jurisprudence in which they had been trained, then they could but insist upon the property being restored to its rightful owners, who had never ceased to claim it for the Church, and had even appealed to the imperial authority. Luther’s reply constituted a formal retreat from the domain of moral questions, questions indeed which had become burning largely through the action of his theologians. It was an admission that their theology was of no avail to solve an eminently practical question of ethics coming well within its purview which was the safeguarding of the moral law, and for which, indeed, this theology was itself responsible. In this, however, as in so many other instances, they sowed the wind, but when the whirlwind came they ran for shelter to their theological cell.

  Still, the question of church property caused Luther so much heart-burning in his old age that his death was hastened thereby.

  The lamentations wrung from him in 1538, his description of himself as “tormented” and the “unhappiest of all unhappy mortals,” were due in no small measure to the rapacity he had seen in connection with the church lands. The bulwarks he strove to erect against this disorder were constantly being torn down afresh by the unevangelical disposition of the Evangelicals, and yet he refused to admit, even to himself, that he had been the first to open the way to such arbitrary action. As in his own house he had set an example of destruction of church property, so in his turn he met with bitter experiences even in his own dwelling and in the case of his own private concerns. His tenure of the Black Monastery at Wittenberg was uncertain, and, as already stated, hostile lawyers at Court even questioned his right to dispose of his possessions by Will on the ground that his marriage was null in law, whether canon or civil. The Monastery had been given him by the Prince, and Luther and Catherine Bora used it both as their residence and as a boarding-house for lodgers. It had not, however, been given to Luther’s family, and from this the difficulty arose. He was most careful to note down in his account books the things that were to be Katey’s inalienable property on his death, but, when he was no more, Katey and her children had in their turn to make acquaintance with the poverty and vicissitudes endured by so many churchmen whose means of livelihood had been filched from them.

  Luther and the Images

  Can the charge be brought against Luther’s teaching of being in part responsible for the outbreaks of iconoclastic violence which accompanied the spread of the Reformation in Germany? Did his writings contribute to the destruction of those countless, admirable and often costly creations of art and piety which fell a prey to the blind fury of the zealot, or to greed of gain?

  Assuredly he would, had he seen them, have disapproved of many of the acts of vandalism which history tells us were perpetrated against Catholic churches, monasteries and institutions. Generally speaking the ideas of Carlstadt and Zwingli, wherever they gained the upper hand, proved far more destructive to ecclesiastical works of art than Luther’s gentler admonitions against the veneration of images. Nevertheless, his exhortations, though more guarded, made their way among both the mighty and the masses, and were productive of much harm.

  He himself declared frankly, about the end of 1524, that “by his writings he had done more harm to the images than Carlstadt with all his storming and fanaticism will ever do.” In the course of the next year he boasted of having “brought contempt” on the images even before Carlstadt’s time. He had repudiated the latter’s acts of violence and his ill-judged appeal to the law of Moses; on the other hand, he had undermined the very foundations of image-worship by his Evangelical doctrines; this was a better kind of “storming,” for in this way those who once had bowed to images now “refused to have any made.” As much as the most fanatical of the iconoclasts, he too wished to see the images “torn out of men’s hearts, despised and abolished,” but he “destroyed them [the images] outwardly and also inwardly,” and so went one better than Carlstadt, who attacked them only from the outside.

  He had, so he continues, speaking to the German people, “consented” that the images should be “done away with outwardly so long as this took place without fanaticism and violence, and by the hand of the proper authorities.” “We drive them out of men’s hearts until the time comes for them to be torn down by the hands
of those whose duty it is to do this.” Meanwhile, however, it was “every man’s duty” to “destroy them by the Evangel,” “especially the images of God and other idolatrous ones.”

  In his Church-sermons he makes his own the complaint, that, though these images which attracted a great “concourse of people” should be “overthrown,” the bishops were actually attaching indulgences to them and thus increasing the disorder.

  In his sermons against Carlstadt at Wittenberg he had said things, and afterwards disseminated them in print, little calculated to impose restraint on the zeal of the multitude: “It were better we had none of these images on account of the tiresome and execrable abuse and unbelief.”

  The iconoclasts at Wittenberg were anxious, he says, to set about hewing down the images. His reply was: “Not yet! For you will not eradicate the images in this way, indeed you will only establish them more firmly than ever.”

  Accordingly it was then his own opinion that they should be “abolished” and “overthrown,” particularly such images as were held in peculiar veneration; in 1528 he again admitted that this was his object, when once more proposing his own less noisy and more cautious policy as the more effectual; in his sermons on the Ten Commandments printed at this time he declared that the way to “hew down and stamp out the images was to tear and turn men’s hearts away from them.” Then the “images would tumble down of their own accord and fall into disrepute; for they [the faithful] will say: If it is not a good work to make images, then it is the devil who makes them and the pictures. In future I shall keep my money in my pocket or lay it out to better advantage.”— “The iconoclasts rush in and tear down the images outwardly. To this I do not object so much. But then they go on to say that it must be so, and that it is well pleasing to God”; this, however, is false; it is a mistake to say that such a Divine command exists to tear them down.

  The grounds on which he opposed the old-time use of images were the following: By erecting them people sought to gain merit in God’s sight and to perform good works; they also trusted in images and in the Saints instead of in Christ, Who is our only ground for confidence; finally — a reason alleged by him but seldom — people adored the images and thus became guilty of idolatry. Here it is plain how much his peculiar theology on good works and the worship of the saints contribute to his condemnation of the ancient Catholic practice. In his zeal against the existing abuses he overlooks the fact, that to invoke before their images the Saints’ intercession with Christ was not in the least opposed to belief in Christ as the one mediator. As for the charge of adoring the images to which he resorts exceptionally — more with the object of making an impression and shielding himself — it amounted to an act of injustice against all his forefathers to accuse them of having been so grossly stupid as to confuse the images with the divinity; even he himself had elsewhere sufficiently absolved them of the charge of adoring saints, let alone images.

  The real cause of this premature attack on images found in these sermons was the storm called forth by Carlstadt, which Luther hoped to divert and dominate by the attitude he assumed; otherwise it is very likely he would have refrained from assailing the religious feelings of the people in so sensitive a spot for many years to come, or at any rate would not have done so in the manner he chose by way of reply to Carlstadt.

  Nor assuredly would he have gone so far had he himself ever vividly realised the profoundly religious and morally stimulating character of the veneration of images, and its sympathetic and consoling side as exemplified at many of the regular places of pilgrimage at that time. Owing to the circumstances of his early years he had never enjoyed the opportunity of tasting the refreshment and the blessings to be found in those sacred resorts visited by thousands of the devout, where those suffering from any ill of soul or body were wont to seek solace from the cares and trials of life. Indeed it was particularly against such images as were the object of special devotion and to which the people “flocked” with a “false confidence” that his anger was directed.

  His animosity to image-worship would also appear to have been psychologically bound up with two tendencies of his: first, with the desire to attack the hated Church of the Papists at those very spots where her influence with the people was most apparent; secondly, with his plan to bring everything down to a dead level, which led him on the specious pretext of serving the religion of the spirit to abolish, or to curtail, the most popular and cheering phenomena of outward worship.

  It is a reprehensible thing, he says, even in his sermons against Carlstadt, to have an image set up in the church, because the believer fancies “he is doing God a service thereby and pleasing Him, and has thus performed a good work and gained merit in God’s sight, which is sheer idolatry.” In their zeal for their damnable good works the princes, bishops and big ones of the earth had “caused many costly images of silver and gold to be set up in the churches and cathedrals.” These were not indeed to be pulled down by force since many at least made a good use of them; but it was to be made clear to the people that if “they were not doing any service to God, or pleasing Him thereby,” then they would soon “tumble down of their own accord.”

  It was a mistake, so he declared in 1528 concerning the grounds of his verdict against the images, to “invoke them specially, as though I sought to give great honour or do a great service to God with the images, as has been the case hitherto.” The “trust” placed in the images has cost us the loss of our souls; the Christians whom he had instructed were now opposed to this “trust” and to the opinion “that they were thereby doing a special service to God.” Amongst them memorial images might be permitted, i.e. such as “simply represent, as in a glass, past events and things” but “are not made into objects of devotion, trust or worship.” — It is dreadful to make them a pretext for “idolatry” and to place our trust in anything but God. “Such images ought to be destroyed, just as we have already pulled down many images of the Saints; it were also to be wished,” he adds ironically, “that we had more such images of silver, for then we should know how to make a right Christian use of them.”— “I will not pay court to such idols; the worship and adoration must cease.” Whoever “with his whole heart has learnt to keep” the First Commandment would readily despise “all the idols of silver and gold.” — Yet of the “adoration” of the images he had said in a letter of 1522 to Count Ludwig von Stolberg, that the motive of his opposition was not so much fear of adoration, because adoration of the Saints — so he hints — might well occur without any images; what urged him on was, on the contrary, the false confidence and the opinion of the Catholics that “they were thereby doing a good work and a service to God.”

  We have just quoted Luther’s reservation, viz. that he was willing to tolerate the use of images which “simply represent, as in a glass, past events and things.” Statements of this sort occur frequently in his writings. They go hand in hand with a radical insistence on inward disdain for image-worship, and a tendency to demand its entire suppression in the churches. It was on these lines that the Elector of Saxony acted when ordering the destruction of the images in the principal church of Wurzen (above, ); images which represented “serious events” and those overlaid with gold were not to be hewn to pieces.

  In the book “Against the Heavenly Prophets” Luther, in the same sense, writes: “Images used as a memorial or for a symbol, like the image of the Emperor” on the coins, were not objectionable; even in conversation images were employed by way of illustration; “memorial pictures or those which bear testimony to the faith, such as crucifixes and the images of the Saints,” are honest and praiseworthy, but the images venerated at places of pilgrimage are “utterly idolatrous and mere shelters of the devil.” And in the “Vom Abendmal Christi Bekentnis” (1528) he says: “Images, bells, mass vestments, church ornaments, altars, lights and such like I leave optional; whoever wishes may discard them, although pictures from Scripture and representations of sacred subjects I consider very useful, though I leave ea
ch one free to do as he pleases; for with the iconoclasts I do not hold.”

  In one passage of his Church-postils he entirely approves the use of the crucifix; we ought to contemplate the cross as the Israelites looked upon the serpent raised on high by Moses; we should “see Christ in such an image and believe in Him.” “If it be no sin,” he says elsewhere, “to have Christ in my heart, why should it be a sin to have it [His image] before my eyes?”

  But Catholics were saying much the same thing in defence of the veneration of images, though to this Luther paid no attention: If it be no sin to have in our hearts the saints who are Christ’s own friends or Mary who is His Mother, how then should it be sinful to have their images before our eyes and to honour them?

  As years went by Luther became more and more liberal in recommending the use of historical and, in particular, biblical representations. In 1545, when he published his Passional with his little manual of prayers, he said in the preface, alluding to the woodcuts contained in the book: Such pictures ought to be in the hands of Christians, more particularly of children and of the simple, who can “better be moved by pictures and figures”; there was no harm “in painting such stories in rooms and apartments, together with the texts”; he was in favour of the “principal stories of the whole Bible” being pictorially shown, though he was opposed to all “abuse of and false confidence in” images.