Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  He was very inventive and quite indefatigable in devising new epithets with the help of the devil’s name; his adversaries were, according to him, “full of devils, on whose backs moreover lived other and worse devils”; it seems to him to fall all too short of the truth to say they are “endevilled,” “perdevilled,” or “superdevilled” and “the children of Satan.” The devil’s mother, grandmother and brothers and sisters are frequently alluded to by Luther, particularly when in a merry mood. In hours of gloom or emotion he could, however, curse people with such words as “may the devil take you,” “May the devil pay you out,” or “May he tread you under foot!”

  He was perfectly aware, nevertheless, of the failings of his tongue, and even expressed his regret for them to his friends. During his illness, in 1527, we are told how he begged pardon for and bewailed the “hasty and inconsiderate words he had often used the better to dispel the sadness of a weak flesh.”

  Melancholy is “a devil’s bath” (“balneum diaboli”), so he remarked on another occasion, against which there is no more effective remedy than cheerfulness of spirit.

  5. The Psychology of Luther’s Jests and Satire

  Joking was a permanent element of Luther’s psychology. Often, even in his old age, his love of fun struggles through the lowering clouds of depression and has its fling against the gloomy anxiety that fills his mind, and against the world and the devil.

  Gifted with a keen sense of the ridiculous, it had been, in his younger days, almost a second nature to him to delight in drollery and particularly to clothe his ideas in playful imagery. His mind was indeed an inexhaustible source of rich and homely humour.

  Nature had indeed endowed Luther from his cradle with that rare talent of humour which, amidst the trials of life, easily proves more valuable than a gold mine to him who has it. During his secular studies at Erfurt he had been able to give full play to this tendency as some relief after the hardships of early days. His preference for Terence, Juvenal, Plautus and Horace amongst the classic poets leads us to infer that he did so; and still more does Mathesius’s description, who says that, at that time, he was a “brisk and jolly fellow.” Monastic life and, later, his professorship and the strange course on which he entered must for a while have placed a rein on his humour, but it broke out all the more strongly when be brought his marvellous powers of imagination and extraordinary readiness in the use of the German tongue to the literary task of bringing over the masses to his new ideas.

  Anyone desirous of winning the hearts of the German masses has always had to temper earnestness with jest, for a sense of humour is part of the nation’s birthright. The fact that Luther touched this chord was far more efficacious in securing for him loud applause and a large following than all his rhetoric and theological arguments.

  Humour in his Writings and at his Home

  It was in his polemics that Luther first turned to account his gift of humour; his manner of doing so was anything but refined.

  The first of his German controversial works against a literary opponent was his “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome wider dem hochberumpten Romanisten tzu Leiptzk” (the Franciscan Alveld or Alfeld), dating from May and June, 1520. Here he starts with a comical description of the “brave heroes in the market place at Leipzig, so well armed as we have never seen the like before. Their helmets they wear on their feet, their swords on their heads, their shields and breastplates hang down their back, and their lances they grip by the blade.... If Leipzig can produce such giants then that land must indeed be fertile.” On the last page of the same writing he puts the concluding touch to his work by telling Alveld, the “rude miller’s beast,” that he does “not yet know how to bray his hee-haw, hee-haw”; were I, says Luther, “to permit all the wantonness of these thick-heads even the very washerwomen would end by writing against me.” “What really helps it if a poor frog [like this fellow] blows himself out? Even were he to swell himself out to bursting-point he would never equal an ox.”

  In his first German booklet against Emser, viz. his “An den Bock zu Leyptzck” (1521), he plays on the motto of Emser’s coat-of-arms “Beware of the goat.” There was really no call for Emser to inscribe these words on his note-paper, for from his whole behaviour there was no doubt that he was indeed a goat, and also that he could “do no more than butt.” Luther’s reply to all his threats would be: “Dear donkey, don’t lick! But God save the poor nanny-goats, whose horns are wrapped in silk, from such a he-goat; as for me, so God wills, there is no fear. Have you never heard the fable of the ass who tried to roar as loud as the lion? I myself might have been afraid of you had I not known you were an ass,” etc.

  It is certainly not easy to believe his assertion, that it was only against his will that he had recourse to all this derision which he heaped on his adversaries in religious matters of such vital importance. He has it that his words, “though maybe biting and sarcastic,” are really “spoken from a heart that is breaking with grief and has been obliged to turn what is serious into abuse.” As a matter of fact the temptation to use just such weapons was too great, and the prospect of success too alluring for us to place much reliance in such an assurance. His “grief” was of quite another kind.

  At a later date his humour, or rather his caustic and satirical manner of treating his opponents, looked to him so characteristic of his way of writing, that as he said, it would be quite easy to tell at a glance which were the polemical tracts due to his pen, even though they did not bear his name. This was his opinion of his “satirical list” of the relics of the Cardinal of Mayence. Writing of this work to his friend Jonas he says: “Whoever reads it and has ever been familiar with my ideas and my pen will say: Here is Luther; the Cardinal too will say: This is the work of that scamp Luther!... But never mind; if they pipe then I insist on dancing, and, if I survive, I hope one day to tread a measure with the bride of Mayence [the Cardinal].” He had still “some sweet tit-bits” which he would like “to lay on her red and rosy lips.” This last quotation may serve as a specimen of the rough humour found in his controversial letters.

  The reader already knows how the Papacy had to bear the brunt of such jests and of an irony which often descends to the depths of vulgarity. (Above, vol. iii., -235; vol. iv., p f., 304 f, 318 ff.)

  But it was not only in his polemics that his jests came in useful. The jovial tone which often characterises his domestic life, the humour that seasons his Table-talk (even though too often it oversteps the bounds of the permissible) and makes itself felt even in his business letters and intimate correspondence with friends, appears as Luther’s almost inseparable companion, with whose smile and whose caustic irony he cannot dispense.

  The monotony and the hardships of his daily life were alleviated by his cheerfulness. His intercourse with friends and pupils was rendered more stimulating and attractive, and in many cases more useful. Under cover of a jest he was often able to enforce good instruction more easily and almost without its being noticed. His cheerful way of looking at things often enabled Luther lightheartedly to surmount difficulties from which others would have shrunk.

  There is not the slightest doubt that his extraordinary influence over those who came into contact with him was due in no small part to his kindly addiction to pleasantry. It was indeed no usual thing to see such mighty energy as he devoted to the world-struggle, so agreeably combined with a keen gift of observation, with an understanding for the most trivial details of daily life, and, above all, with such refreshing frankness and such a determination to amuse his hearers.

  In order to dispel the anxiety felt by Catherine Bora during her husband’s absence, he would send her letters full of affection and of humorous accounts of his doings. He tells her, for instance, how, in consequence of her excessive fears for him “which hindered her from sleeping,” everything about him had conspired to destroy him; how a fire “at our inn just next door to our room” had tried to burn him, how a heavy rock had fallen in order to kill him; “the rock really had a
mind to justify your solicitude, but the holy angels prevented it.” In such cheerful guise does he relate little untoward incidents. “You try to take care of your God,” he writes to her in a letter already quoted, “just as though He were not Almighty and able to create ten Dr. Martins were the old one to be drowned in the Saale, suffocated in the coal-hole, or eaten up by the wolf.”

  He was also joking, when, about the same time, i.e. during his stay with the Counts of Mansfeld, he used the words which recently were taken all too seriously by a Catholic polemist and made to constitute a charge against Luther’s morals: “At present, thank God, I am well, only that I am so beset by pretty women as once more to fear for my chastity.”

  The irony with which he frequently speaks and writes of both himself and his friends is often not free from frivolity; we may recall, for instance, his ill-timed jest concerning his three wives; or his report to Catherine from Eisleben: “On the whole we have enough to gorge and swill, and should have a jolly time were this tiresome business to let us.” The last passage reminds us of his words elsewhere: I feed like a Bohemian and swill like a German. Among other jests at Catherine’s expense we find in the Table-Talk the threat that soon the time will come when “we men shall be allowed several wives,” words which perhaps are a humorous echo of the negotiations concerning the Hessian bigamy.

  Now and again Luther, by means of his witticisms, tried to teach his wife some wholesome lessons. The titles by which he addresses her may have been intended as delicate hints that her management of the household was somewhat lordly and high-handed: My Lord Katey, Lord Moses, my Chain (Kette) (“catena mea”). To seek to infer from this that she was a “tyrant,” or to see in it an admission on his part that he was but her slave, would be as mistaken as to be shocked at his manner of addressing her elsewhere in his letters, e.g. “to the holy, careful lady, the most holy lady Doctor; to my beloved lady Doctor Self-martyr; to the deeply-learned Lady Catherine,” etc.

  It has already been pointed out that many of the misunderstandings of which Luther’s opponents were guilty are due to their inability to appreciate his humour; they were thereby led to take seriously as indicative of “unbelief,” statements which in reality were never meant in earnest. On the other hand, however, certain texts and explanations of Luther’s have, on insufficient grounds, been taken as humorous even by Protestant writers, often because they seemed in some way to cast a slur upon his memory. For instance, his interpretation of the Monk-Calf was quite obviously never intended as a joke, nor can it thus be explained away as some have recently tried to do. Nor, again, to take an example from Luther’s immediate circle, can Amsdorf’s offer of the nuns in marriage to Spalatin be dismissed as simply a broad piece of pleasantry.

  Humour a Necessity to Luther in his Struggle with Others and with Himself

  There can be no doubt that a remarkable psychological feature is afforded by the combination in Luther of cheerfulness with intense earnestness in work, indeed the persistence of his humour even in later years when gloom had laid a firm hold on his soul constitutes something of a riddle; for even the sufferings of the last period of his life did not avail to stifle his love of a joke, though his jests become perhaps less numerous; they serve, however, to conceal his sadder feelings, a fact which explains why he still so readily has recourse to them.

  First of all, a man so oppressed with inner difficulties and mental exertion as Luther was, felt sadly the need of relaxation and amusement. His jests served to counteract the strain, physical and mental, resulting from the rush of literary work, sermons, conferences and correspondence. In this we have but a natural process of the nervous system.

  A further explanation of his cheerfulness is, however, to be found in the wish to prove against his own misgivings and his theological opponents how joyous and confident he was at heart concerning his cause.

  He hints at this himself. I will answer for the “Word of Christ,” so he assures Alveld in his writing against him, “with a cheerful heart and fresh courage, regardless of anyone; for which purpose God too has given me a cheerful, fearless spirit, which I trust they will be unable to sadden to all eternity.” He often gives the impression of being anxious to show off his cheerfulness. He is fond of speaking of his “steadfast and undaunted spirit”; let Emser, he says, take note and bite his lips over the “glad courage which inspires him day by day.”

  Seeking to display this confidence in face of his opponents he exclaims satirically in a writing of 1518: “Here I am.” If there be an inquisitor in the neighbourhood he had better hurry up.

  His courage and entire confidence he expressed as early as 1522 to the Elector Frederick of Saxony who had urged him to fight shy of Duke George: “Even if things at Leipzig were indeed as bad as at Wittenberg [they think they are], I should nevertheless ride thither even though — I hope your Electoral Highness will excuse my foolish words — for nine days running it were to rain Duke Georges, each one nine times as furious as he. He actually looks upon my Lord Christ as a man of straw!” In such homely words did he speak, even to his own sovereign whose protection counted for so much, in order to make it yet clearer, that he was quite convinced of having received his Evangel, “not from man, but solely from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ”; the Prince, his protector, should know, that God, “thanks to the Evangel, has made us happy lords over death and all the devils.” For this reason, according to his famous boast, he would still have ridden to Worms in defiance of the devils, even had they outnumbered the tiles on the roofs.

  From the castle of Coburg, though himself a prey to all sorts of anxiety, he addressed the following ironical, though at the same time encouraging, admonition to faint-hearted Melanchthon: Why don’t you fight against your own self? “What more can the devil do than slay us? What then? You fight in every other field, why not then fight also against your own self, viz. your biggest enemy who puts so many weapons against you in Satan’s hands?” It was thus that Luther was wont to fight against himself and to rob the devil of his fancied weapons.

  Often enough did he find salvation in humour alone, for instance, when he had to overcome serious danger, or to beat down difficulties or the censure of his friends and followers. The plague was threatening Wittenberg; hence he jokes away his own fears and those of others with a jest about his “trusty weathercock,” the governor Metzsch; the latter had a nose which could detect the plague while yet five ells below the ground; as he still remained in Wittenberg they had good reason to know that no danger existed. On the same occasion he laughs and cries in the same breath over the behaviour of the schoolboys, all the schools having been already closed as a measure of precaution; the plague had got into their pens and paper so that it would be impossible to make of them “either preachers, pastors,. or schoolmasters; in the end swine and dogs will be our best cattle, towards which end the Papists are busily working.”

  Further instances of jests of this sort, made under untoward circumstances, are met with in connection with his marriage. His union with Catherine Bora, as the reader already knows, set tongues wagging, both in his own camp and outside. The resentment this aroused in him he attempted to banish by a sort of half-jesting, half-earnest defiance. “Since they are already cracked and crazy, I will drive them still madder and so have done with it!” He jests incidentally over the suddenness of his marriage, over the proof needed to convince even himself that he was really a married man, over his surprise at finding plaits of hair beside him when he awoke; he also makes merry over his not very seemly play on the words Bore and bier.

  At a later date he found the arrangement of the new ritual very irksome, both on account of the difficulty of introducing any sort of uniformity and also owing to the petty outside interests which intruded themselves. Here again he tries to throw such questions to the winds by the use of humour: “Put on three copes instead of one, if that pleases you,” he wrote to Provost George Buchholzer of Berlin, who had sent him an anxious letter of inquiry; and if Joachim, the
Brandenburg Elector, is not content with one procession “go around seven times as Josue did at Jericho, and, if your master the Margrave does not mind, His Electoral Highness is quite at liberty to leap and dance, with harps, kettledrums, cymbals and bells as David did before the ark of the Lord.”

  During the whole of his career he felt the embarrassment of being called upon by the Catholics to produce proof of his higher mission. At times he sought to escape the difficulty, so far as miracles went, by arguing on, and straining for all they were worth, certain natural occurrences; on other occasions, however, he took refuge in jests. On one occasion he even whimsically promised to perform a manifest miracle. This was at a time when he was hard put to provide lodgings for the nuns who had fled to Wittenberg and when it was rumoured that he had undertaken a journey simply to escape the trouble. “‘I shall arm myself with prayer,’ he said, ‘and, if it is needful, I shall assuredly work a miracle.’ And at this he laughed,” so the notes of one present relate.

  Luther frequently lays it down that merry talk and good spirits are a capital remedy against temptations to doubts on the faith and remorse of conscience.

  He exhorts Prince Joachim of Anhalt, who had much to suffer from the “Tempter” and from “melancholy,” to be always cheerful, since God has commanded us “to be glad in His presence.” “I, who have passed my life in sorrow and looking at the black side of things, now seek for joy, and find it whenever I can. We now have, praise be to God, so much knowledge [through the Evangel] that we can afford to be cheerful with a good conscience.” It was perfectly true — so he goes on in a strangely shamefaced manner, to tell the pious but faint-hearted Prince — that, at times, he himself still dreaded cheerfulness, as though it were a sin, just as the Prince was inclined to do; “but God-fearing, honourable, modest joy of good and pious people pleases God well, even though occasionally there be a word or merry tale too much.”