Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The reason of his readiness to depart, viz. the world’s hatred for his person, he elsewhere depicts as follows; the politicians who were against him, particularly those at the Dresden court, are “Swine,” deserving of “hell-fire”; let them at least leave in peace our Master, the Son of God, and the Kingdom of Heaven also; with a quiet conscience we look upon them as abandoned bondsmen of the devil, whose oaths though sworn to a hundred times over are not the least worthy of belief; “we must scorn the devil in these devils and sons of devils, yea, in this seed of the serpent.”

  “The gruff, boorish Saxon,” as Luther calls himself, here comes to the fore. He seeks, however, to refrain from dwelling unduly on the growing lack of appreciation shown for his authority; he was even ready, so he said, “gladly to nail to the Cross those blasphemers and Satan with them.”

  “I thank Thee, my good God,” he once said in the winter 1542-43 to Mathesius and the other people at table, “for letting me be one of the little flock that suffers persecution for Thy Word’s sake; for they do not persecute me for adultery or usury, as I well know.” According to the testimony of Mathesius he also said: “The Courts are full of Eceboli and folk who change with the weather. If only a real sovereign like Constantine came to his Court [the Elector’s] we should soon see who would kiss the Pope’s feet.” “Many remain good Evangelicals because there are still chalices, monstrances and cloistral lands to be taken.” That a large number, not only of the high officials, but even of the “gentry and yokels,” were “tired” of him is clear from statements made by him as early as 1530. Wishing then to visit his father who lay sick, he was dissuaded by his friends from undertaking the journey on account of the hostility of the country people towards his person: “I am compelled to believe,” so he wrote to the sick man, “that I ought not to tempt God by venturing into danger, for you know how both gentry and yokels feel towards me.” “Amongst the charges that helped to lessen his popularity was his supposed complicity in the Peasant War and in the rise of the Sacramentarians.”

  “Would that I and all my children were dead,” so he repeats, according to Mathesius, “Satur sum huius vitae”; it was well for the young, that, in their thoughtlessness and inexperience, they failed to see the mischief of all the scandals rampant, for else “they would not be able to go on living.”— “The world cannot last much longer. Amongst us there is the utmost ingratitude and contempt for the Word, whilst amongst the Papists there is nothing but blood and blasphemy. This will soon knock the bottom out of the cask.” There would be no lack of other passages to the same effect to quote from Mathesius.

  Some of the Grounds for His Lowness of Spirits

  Luther is so communicative that it is easy enough to fix on the various reasons for his depression, which indeed he himself assigns.

  To Melanchthon Luther wrote: “The enmity of Satan is too Satanic for him not to be plotting something for our undoing. He feels that we are attacking him in a vital spot with the eternal truth.” Here it is his gloomy forebodings concerning the outcome of the religious negotiations, particularly those of Worms, which lead him so to write. The course of public events threw fresh fuel on the flame of his anger. “I have given up all hope in this colloquy.... Our theological gainstanders,” so he says, “are possessed of Satan, however much they may disguise themselves in majesty and as angels of light.” — Then there was the terrifying onward march of the Turks: “O raging fury, full of all manner of devils.” Such is his excitement that he suspects the Christian hosts of “the most fatal and terrible treachery.”

  The devil, however, also lies in wait even for his friends to estrange them from him by delusions and distresses of conscience; this knowledge wrings from him the admonition: “Away with the sadness of the devil, to whom Christ sends His curse, who seeks to make out Christ as the judge, whereas He is rather the consoler.” Satan just then was bent on worrying him through the agency of the Swiss Zwinglians: “I have already condemned and now condemn anew these fanatics and puffed-up idlers.” Now they refuse to admit my victories against the Pope, and actually claim that it was all their doing. “Thus does one man toil only for another to reap the harvest.” These satellites of Satan who work against him and against all Christendom are hell’s own resource for embittering his old age.

  Then again the dreadful state of morals, particularly at Wittenberg, under his very eyes, makes his anger burst forth again and again; even in his letter of congratulation to Justus Jonas on the latter’s second marriage he finds opportunity to have a dig at the easy-going Wittenberg magistrates: “There might be ten trulls here infecting no end of students with the French disease and yet no one would lift a finger; when half the town commits adultery, no one sits in judgment.... The world is indeed a vexatious thing.” The civic authorities, according to him, were but a “plaything in the devil’s hand.”

  At other times his ill-humour vents itself on the Jews, the lawyers, or those German Protestant Reformers who had the audacity to hold opinions at variance with his. Carlstadt, with his “monstrous assertions” against Luther, still poisons the air even when Luther has the consolation of knowing, that, on Carlstadt’s death (in 1541), he had been fetched away by the “devil.” Carlstadt’s horrid doctrines tread Christ under foot, just as Schwenckfeld’s fanaticism is the unmaking of the Churches.

  Then again there are demagogues within the fold who say: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin?” These, according to him, are in almost as bad case as the others. Thus, “during our lifetime, this is the way the world rewards us, for and on this account and behalf! And yet we are expected to pray and heed lest the Turk slay such Christians as these who really are worse than the Turks themselves! As though it would not be better, if the yoke of the Turk must indeed come upon us, to serve the Turkish foeman and stranger rather than the Turks in our own circle and household. God will laugh at them when they cry to Him in the day of their distress, because they mocked at Him by their sins and refused to hearken to Him when He spoke, implored, exhorted, and did everything, stood and suffered everything, when His heart was troubled on their account, when He called them by His holy prophets, and even rose up early on their account (Jer. vii. 13; xi. 7).” But such is their way; they know that it is God Whose Word we preach and yet they say: “We shan’t listen. In short, the wildest of wild furies have broken into them,” etc.

  Thus was he wont to rave when “excited,” though not until, so at least he assures us, having first “by dint of much striving put down his anger, his thoughts and his temptations.” “Blessed be the Lord Who has spoken to me, comforting me: ‘Why callest thou? Let things go their own way.’” It grieves him, so he tells us, to see the country he loves going to rack and ruin; Germany is his fatherland, and, before his very eyes, it is hastening to destruction. “But God’s ways are just, we may not resist them. May God have mercy on us for no one believes us.” Even the doctrine of letting things go their own way — to which in his pessimism Luther grew attached in later life — he was firmly convinced had come to him directly from the Lord, Who had “consolingly” whispered to him these words. Even this saying reeks of his peculiar pseudo-mysticism.

  All the above outbursts are, however, put into the shade by the utter ferocity of his ravings against Popery. Painful indeed are the effects of his gloomy frame of mind on his attitude towards Rome. The battle-cries, which, in one of his last works, viz. his “Wider das Babstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” Luther hurls against the Church, which had once nourished him at her bosom, form one of the saddest instances of human aberration.

  Yet, speaking of this work, the author assures a friend that, “in this angry book I have done justice neither to myself nor to the greatness of my anger; but I am quite aware that this I shall never be able to do.” “For no tongue can tell,” so he says, “the appalling and frightful enormities of the Papal abomination, its substance, quantity, quality, predicaments, predicables, categories, its species, properties, differences and accidents.”
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br />   The more distorted and monstrous his charges, the more they seem to have pleased him when in this temper.

  In a morbid way he now heaps together his wonted hyperboles to such an extent, that, at times, it becomes very tiresome to read his writings and letters; no hateful image or suspicion seems to him sufficiently bad. “Though God Himself were to offer me Paradise for living another forty years, I should prefer to hire an executioner to chop off my head, for the world is so wicked; they are all becoming rank devils.” He compares his own times to those which went before the Flood; the “rain of filth will soon begin”; he goes on to say that he no longer understands his own times and finds himself as it were in a strange world; “either I have never seen the world, or, while I am asleep, a new world is born daily; not one but fancies he is suffering injustice, and not one but is convinced he does no injustice.” With a strange note of contempt he says: “Let the world be upset, kicked over and thrust aside, seeing it not only rejects and persecutes God’s Word, but rages even against sound common sense.... Even the seven devils of Cologne, who sit in the highest temple, and who, like some of the council, still withstand us, will God overthrow, Who breaks down the cedars of Lebanon. On account of this [the actual and hoped-for successes at Cologne] we will rejoice in the Lord, because by His Word He does such great things before our very eyes.”

  Here, as elsewhere too, in spite of all his ill-humour, the progress of his Evangel inspires him with hope. Nor is his dark mood entirely unbroken, for, from time to time, his love of a joke gets the better of it. His chief consolation was, however, his self-imposed conviction that his teaching was the true one.

  A certain playfulness is apparent in many of his letters, for instance, in those to Jonas, one of his most intimate of friends: “Here is a conundrum,” writes Luther to him, “which my guests ask me to put to you. Does God, the wise administrator, annually bestow on the children of men more wine or more milk? I think more milk; but do you give your answer. And a second question: Would a barrel that reached from Wittenberg to Kemberg be large and ample enough to hold all the wine that our unwise, silly, foolish God wastes and throws away on the most ungrateful of His children, setting it before Henries and Alberts, the Pope and the Turk, all of them men who crucify His Son, whereas before His own children He sets nothing but water? You see that, though I am not much better than a corpse, I still love to chat and jest with you.”

  In the Table-Talk, recently published by Kroker from the notes taken by Mathesius in the last years of Luther’s life, the latter’s irrepressible and saving tendency to jest is very apparent; his humour here is also more spontaneous than in his letters, with the possible exception of some of those he wrote to Catherine Bora.

  Suspicion and Mania of Persecution

  A growing inclination to distrust, to seeing enemies everywhere and to indulging in fearsome, superstitious fancies, stamps with a peculiar impress his prevailing frame of mind.

  His vivid imagination even led him, in April, 1544, to speak of “a league entered into between the Turks and the most holy, or rather most silly, Pope”; this was undoubtedly one of the “great signs” foretold by Christ; “these signs are here in truth and are truly great.” “The Pope would rather adore the Turk,” he exclaims later, “nay, even Satan himself, than allow himself to be put in order and reformed by God’s Word”; he even finds this confirmed in a new “Bull or Brief.” He has heard of the peace negotiations with the Turks on the part of the Pope and the Emperor, and of the neutrality of Paul III towards the Turcophil King of France; he is horrified to see in spirit an embassy of peace, “loaded with costly presents and clad in Turkish garments,” wending its way to Constantinople, “there to worship the Turk.” Such was the present policy of the Roman Satan, who formerly had used indulgences, annates and countless other forms of robbery to curtail the Turkish power. “Out upon these Christians, out upon these hellish idols of the devil!” — The truth is that, whereas the Christian States winced at the difficulties or sought for delay, Pope Paul III, faithful to the traditional policy of the Holy See, insisted that it was necessary to oppose by every possible means the Turk who was the Church’s foe and threatened Europe with ruin. The only ground that Luther can have had for his suspicions will have been the better relations then existing between the Pope and France which led the Turkish fleet to spare the Papal territory on the occasion of its demonstration at the mouth of the Tiber.

  But Luther was convinced that the Pope had no dearer hope than to thwart Germany, and the Protesters in particular. It was the Pope and the Papists whom he accused to Duke Albert of Prussia of being behind the Court of Brunswick and of hiring, at a high price, the services of assassins and incendiaries. To Wenceslaus Link he says, that it will be the priests’ own fault if the saying “To death with the priests” is carried into practice; to Melanchthon he also writes: “I verily believe that all the priests are bent on being killed, even against our wish.” — It was the Papists sure enough, who introduced the maid Rosina into his house, in order that she might bring it into disrepute by her immoral life; they had also sent men to murder him, from whom, however, God had preserved him; they had likewise tried to poison him, but all to no purpose. We may recall how he had said: “I believe that my pulpit-chair and cushion were frequently poisoned, yet God preserved me.” “Many attempts, as I believe, have been made to poison me.”

  He had even once declared that poisoning was a regular business with Satan: “He can bring death by means of a leaflet from off a tree; he has more poison phials and kinds of death at his beck and call than all the apothecaries in all the world; if one poison doesn’t work he uses another.” He had long been convinced that the devil was able to carry through the air those who made themselves over to him; “we must not call in the devil, for he comes often enough uncalled, and loves to be by us, hardened foe of ours though he be.... He is indeed a great and mighty enemy.” Towards the end of his life, in 1541, it came to his ears that the devil was more than usually busy with his poisons: “At Jena and elsewhere,” so he warns Melanchthon, “the devil has let loose his poisoners. It is a wonder to me why the great, knowing the fury of Satan, are not more watchful. Here it is impossible any longer to buy or to use anything with safety.” Melanchthon was therefore to be careful when invited out; at Erfurt the spices and aromatic drugs on sale in the shops had been found to be mixed with poison; at Altenburg as many as twelve people had died from poison taken in a single meal. Anxious as he was about his friend, his trust was nevertheless unshaken in the protection of God and the angels. I myself am still in the hands of my Moses (Katey), he adds, “suffering from a filthy discharge from my ear and meditating in turn on life and on death. God’s Will be done. Amen. May you be happy in the Lord now and for ever.”

  “A new art of killing us,” so he tells Melanchthon in the same year, had been invented by Satan, viz. of mixing poison with our wine and milk; at Jena twelve persons were said to have died of poisoned wine, “though more likely of too much drink”; at Magdeburg and Nordhausen, however, milk had been found in the possession of the sellers that seemed to have been poisoned. “At any rate, all things lie under Christ’s feet, and we shall suffer so long and as much as He pleases. For the nonce we are supreme and they [the Papist ‘monsters’] are hurrying to destruction.... So long as the Lord of Heaven is at the helm we are safe, live and reign and have our foes under our feet. Amen.” Casting all fear to the winds he goes on to comfort Melanchthon and his faint-hearted comrades in the tone of the mystic: “Fear not; you are angels, nay, great angels or archangels, working, not for us but for the Church, nay, for God, Whose cause it is that you uphold, as even the very gates of hell must admit; these, though they may indeed block our way, cannot overcome us, because at the very beginning of the world the hostile, snarling dragon was overthrown by the Lion of the tribe of Juda.”

  The hostility of the Papists to Lutheranism, had, so Luther thought, been manifestly punished by Heaven in the defeat of Henry of Br
unswick; it had “already been foretold in the prophecies pronounced against him,” which had forecasted his destruction as the “son of perdition”; he was a “warning example set up by God for the tyrants of our days”; for every contemner of the Word is “plainly a tyrant.”

  Luther was very suspicious of Melanchthon, Bucer and others who leaned towards the Zwinglian doctrine on the Supper. So much had Magister Philippus, his one-time right-hand man, to feel his displeasure and irritability that the latter bewails his lot of having to dwell as it were “in the very den of the Cyclopes” and with a real “tyrant.” “There is much in one’s intercourse with Luther,” so Cruciger said confidentially, in 1545, in a letter to Veit Dietrich, “that repels those who have a will of their own and attach some importance to their own judgment; if only he would not, through listening to the gossip of outsiders, take fire so quickly, chiding those who are blameless and breaking out into fits of temper; this, often enough, does harm even in matters of great moment.” Luther himself was by no means unwilling to admit his faults in this direction and endeavoured to make up for them by occasionally praising his fellow-workers in fulsome terms; Yet so deep-seated was his suspicion of Melanchthon’s orthodoxy, that he even thought for a while of embodying his doctrine on the Sacrament in a formulary, which should condemn all his opponents and which all his friends, particularly those whom he had reason to mistrust, should be compelled to sign. This, according to Bucer, would have involved the departure of Melanchthon into exile. Bucer expressed his indignation at this projected “abominable condemnation” and at the treatment meted out to Melanchthon by Luther.