Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The festivities at Merseburg, the kindness and hospitality of which he was the recipient at Lobnitz and Leipzig, and, lastly, the change of air and surroundings brought Luther to a much better frame of mind.

  The messengers from Wittenberg found him at Merseburg. After they had seen him and listened to his stern admonitions, they were delighted to receive his assurance that, after all, he would return to Wittenberg. His resolve had, in fact, been merely the result of strong excitement. Now, moreover, not only had the depression ceased of which he had so long been the victim but a notable change of mood had supervened and his confidence and courage had been restored. Such sudden changes are not without their parallel in Luther’s earlier life, as has been sufficiently shown above.

  He now returned in a better temper to Leipzig, where he preached a vigorous sermon on Aug. 12, and was there entertained by Camerarius, Melanchthon’s confidant; he also “associated with his circle of friends in the best of humours.”

  After his return to Wittenberg on the 16th we hear no more of his vexation, though he did not put much faith in the disciplinary measures that had been drawn up for the town, notwithstanding that they were backed by the Elector; the Court itself, so he wrote, read nothing and only scoffed at everything.

  He now threw himself once more into the struggle with his theological foes. A glance at these labours and at his lectures shows him working at high pressure, while, as his letters show, he retained his sense of humour.

  He set to work immediately on the 32 articles which the Louvain Faculty of Theology had published with the object of enlightening Catholics on the nature of the Protestant doctrines.

  Already in Aug. he had set up his 76 theses “Against the Articles of the Theologists of Louvain.” Here he does not take his opponents seriously, but, for the most part, simply pours forth his annoyance on them and their theses, sneering at them and scourging them with coarse invective. He calls them arch-idolaters, a school of blockheads, lazy bellies and rude asses, the accursed, hellish brew of Louvain; speaks of their mad, raving conceit; they are bloodthirsty incendiaries and fratricides, a stinking cesspool, a school of obscenity and muck, are these great, gross epicurean swine of Louvain. “They come straight from hell and teach what they have seen in the Mirror of Marcolfus, i.e. the ordure of man-made laws.” “For, instead of giving the people Holy Scripture, they do nothing else but cack, spew, belch forth and fling human filth amongst them.… And thus Holy Church is to be looked upon as no better than a latrine for the scamps of Louvain wherein they, playing the lord, may void their belly when over-full, and where, moreover, they slay and lay waste. This indeed may be termed foolery and raving!” The strange elation in which Luther penned so odd-sounding a “reply” is, again, not to be explained by any ordinary psychology.

  In Sep. Luther commenced a work on a larger scale against the Louvain theologians and their Paris colleagues, which, however, he was not able to finish. The fragment “Against the Donkeys in Paris and Louvain,” which exists in two drafts, shows plainly enough what sort of book it would have been had death not interrupted his work. He urges that, whoever wishes to teach theology whilst refusing to acknowledge the truths taught by him concerning the Law, sin and Grace, is as well fitted to do so as an ass is to play upon the harp, as the Papacy is to govern the Church, or as the Louvain scholars to promote the cause of learning. In this work he fancied he had recovered his olden stormy vigour. To his friend Jacob Probst he candidly admitted: “I am more angry with these Louvain quadrupeds than beseems me, an old man and so great a theologian; but I want it to be said of me that I took the field against these monsters of Satan, even though it should cost me my last breath.”

  He was busy at the same time on a revised edition of his Latin “Chronology of the World,” of which the aim was to show the near advent of Christ. On Oct. 16 he finished his Latin Commentary on the Prophet Osee, and sent a copy as a gift to Mohr, the dismissed pastor of Zeitz, with a kindly letter of religious consolation and encouragement. He also despatched a lengthy circular to the printers on the capture of Duke Henry of Brunswick, the enemy of the Evangel; this letter is a monument to his aggressiveness so nearly verging on the fanatical; in this he had been strengthened by the supposed intervention of heaven on his behalf against Henry and against the Pope and the Mass.

  His intimate correspondence was also steeped in the new enthusiasm which had laid hold on him. “What a joyful victory has God, Who hearkens to our prayer, given us,” so he wrote on Oct. 26 to Jonas. “Let us believe and let us pray! He is faithful to His promises!… O God, do Thou maintain our joy, or, rather, Thine Own Glory!”

  The jokes we had missed for a while now once more made their appearance in his letters. In the first epistle written after his return he hastens to tell Amsdorf of Mutian’s reading of the inscription “Soli Deo gloria” (viz. “To the Sun-God be glory”) on a tower belonging to the Archbishop of Mayence; after all the “Satan of Mayence” was perhaps right, so he says, in having the inscription taken down. In another letter he cheerfully relates the old tale of the peasant who, with hands devoutly folded, said to Satan: “Thou art my Gracious Master the Devil.” He is also delighted to be able to tell the story of a Popish preacher, who, before the war, exhorting the people to pray for the Duke of Brunswick, had said: “If he is worsted then 14 parsons will be had for the price of a penny.”

  His last lecture was delivered just before Christmas, 1545, when he ended his exposition of Genesis. At its close he said: “Here you have our dear Genesis; God grant that, after me, someone may do it better; I am weak and can go on no longer; pray that God may grant me a happy deathbed.” But his “weakness” was merely temporary. A little after he wrote: “Whoever must fall let him fall if he refuses to listen to the Son of God. We pray and look for the day of our deliverance and destruction of the world with its pomps and wickedness. Would that it come speedily. Amen. I have taken the field against the donkeys of Louvain and Paris, but, nevertheless, feel pretty well, considering my advanced years.”

  Impelled by the ardent desire to do something for the furtherance of peace within his camp, in spite of his bodily weakness and his distaste for worldly business, he undertook at the request of Count Albert of Mansfeld to act as arbiter in the dispute between the latter and his brother and nephew concerning the royalties from the mines and certain other legal claims.

  “My time is entirely taken up,” so he says, “with affairs which do not in the least interest me; I must serve the belly and the table.” Already at the beginning of October these matters had induced him, with Melanchthon and Jonas, to proceed to Mansfeld. As soon as his course of lectures was finished, viz. at Christmas, he again repaired thither, in spite of the severity of the weather, again accompanied by Melanchthon, who was inclined to grumble at being called upon to listen to the squabbles of quarrelsome people. Luther, however, as he wrote to Count Albert, wished to see the “beloved lords of his native land reconciled and on good terms” before “laying himself to rest in his coffin.” He returned to Wittenberg shortly after Christmas, owing to Melanchthon’s falling ill.

  These two journeys to Mansfeld, afterwards to be followed by a third and last, have, by controversialists, wrongly been made out to have been due to Luther’s desire to escape from Wittenberg on account of his bitter experiences there.

  2. Last Troubles and Cares

  Theological Disruption

  “The sad controversies of the last few years had made Luther recognise that a race of theological fighting-cocks, gamesters and idle rioters had arisen, and that dissensions of the worst sort might be anticipated in the future. The nation in which each one obstinately followed his own way was beyond help.… The Swiss refused to have anything to do with the German Reformation; the Bucerites held themselves aloof from both Lutherans and Swiss, the Brandenburgers wanted to belong neither to the Church of Rome nor to that of Wittenberg; at Wittenberg itself the Martinians and the Philippists (so-called after Luther and Melanchthon) wer
e hostile to each other, and finally the Princes and magistrates all went their own way. ‘Things will fare badly when I am dead,’ such was Luther’s repeated prediction. Whether he looked at this Prince of the Church, at that Landgrave, or that other Duke Maurice, there was not one in whom he could entirely trust. More than one Mene Tekel was written on the wall, yet none perceived it save the old man at Wittenberg at whom they all shrugged their shoulders.”

  Such is the description by Luther’s latest Protestant biographer of the “sad decline of the Evangelical party.”

  The Zwinglians had received a severe blow from Luther in his “Kurtz Bekentnis” of Sep., 1544; but the Swiss, who were hardy and independent fellows, soon prepared a furious counter-reply. The “old man at Wittenberg” was not deceived as to the profound and irremediable breach, yet he succeeded, at least outwardly, in driving away his annoyance and cares by the use of ridicule. Early in 1546, to one of his confidants who had bewailed the new step taken by the Swiss, he wrote the following, which forms his last utterance against the Zwinglians: “If they condemn me, it is a joy to me. For by my writing I wished to do nothing else than force them to declare themselves my open foes. I have succeeded in this, hence so much the better. To adapt the words of the Psalmist: ‘Blessed is the man who hath not sat in the council of the Sacramentarians, nor stood in the way of the Zwinglians, nor sat in the chair of the men of Zürich.’” To another intimate, Amsdorf, the “Bishop” of Naumburg, who was allowed a deeper insight into his soul than others, Luther confided that one of the principal reasons of his hatred of his competitors in Switzerland and South-West Germany was that “they are proud, fanatical men, and also idlers. At the beginning of our enterprise, when I was fighting all alone in fear and dread against the fury of the Pope, they were bravely silent and waited to see how things would go. Later on they suddenly posed as victors, and as though, forsooth, they alone had done it all. So it ever is: one does the work and another seeks to enjoy his labour. Now they even go so far as to attack me, who won their freedom for them.… But they will find their judge. If I answer them at all it will be nothing more than a brief recapitulation of the sentence of condemnation irrevocably passed upon them.” — No such answer was, however, to be forthcoming.

  Against Melanchthon Luther’s ardent followers, the Martinians, were, as we know, highly incensed for attempting to modify the doctrines of the Master. Melanchthon’s sufferings on this account have already been described (vol. v., ff.). With a grudging silence Luther bore with his friend’s Zwinglian leanings on the doctrine of the Supper, and with their other differences.

  Both, moreover, were surrounded by an atmosphere of theological bickerings, “where individuals, who, had it not been for these squabbles, would never have achieved notoriety, gave themselves great airs.”

  We may recall how Melanchthon had even thought of leaving Saxony, where, as he wrote to Camerarius, he was bound down by undignified fetters; such was his weakness, however, that he could not bring himself to do even this. Luther’s coarseness, lack of consideration and dictatorial bearing it was that led Melanchthon to say that he who ruled at Wittenberg was not a Pericles, but a new Cleon and an unsufferable tyrant.

  On the question of the veneration of the Sacrament differences at last sprung up even between Bugenhagen and Luther; the former, usually his pliant instrument, took upon himself during Luther’s absence to abolish at Wittenberg the elevation of the elements during the celebration. Apparently this was in the second half of Jan., 1542. Luther expressed his disapproval of this action and declared he would revive the rite. In 1544, when the three Princes of Anhalt were at Wittenberg and asked him whether it would be right to abolish the Elevation, he replied: “On no account; such abrogation detracts from the dignity of the Sacrament.” There is no doubt that it was his antagonism to the Zwinglians that was here the determining factor; moreover, as he admitted Christ to be present in the Sacrament during reception in the wider sense, i.e. during the liturgical action, he had no theological grounds for doing away with the elevation and adoration of the elements. In his own justification he went so far as to say: “Christ is in the bread, why then should He not be treated with the greatest respect and also be adored?”

  The Lutheran preacher Wolferinus of Eisleben was in the habit of pouring back into the barrel what remained of the consecrated Wine after communion. Luther called him sharply to account, as he found that his conduct was tainted with Zwinglianism; in order to evade the difficulty he ordered that, in future, preachers and communicants should see that nothing was left over after communion.

  Luther, towards the end of his life, had to taste a good deal of that “theological ire” of which Melanchthon frequently speaks, and not only from the Swiss. We need only call to mind Johann Agricola, and his “antinomian sow-theology,” as Melanchthon termed it. His inferences from Luther’s doctrine of the inability of man to fulfil the Law he never really withdrew even when he had betaken himself to Brandenburg. In the Table-Talk dating from the latest period and published by Kroker, Luther’s frequent bitter references to Agricola show the speaker was well aware that his Berlin opponent still hated and distrusted him as much as ever. After Luther’s death it became evident that Agricola “was capable of everything,” and that Luther was not so far wrong, when, on another occasion, he declared that he was not a man to be taken seriously. Agricola finally died, loaded with worldly honours, in 1566.

  A more serious critic of Luther, at any rate on the question of the Sacrament, was Martin Bucer. The latter’s friendship with the Swiss and the too independent spirit in which he planned the reformation of Cologne, caused Luther great anxiety towards the end of his life. In his plan Luther, so he says, was unable to find any clear confession of faith in the Sacrament, but merely “much idle talk of its profit, fruit and dignity,” all carefully “wrapped up that no one might know what he really thought of it, just as is the way with the fanatics.” In all this talk he could “readily discern the chatterbox Bucer.” Bucer, on his side, was dissatisfied with the progress of Luther’s work in Germany. Owing to the Interim he was no longer able to remain at Strasburg and accordingly accepted a post at the English University of Cambridge and died in England in 1551.

  The Controversy on Clandestine Marriages

  It was, however, annoyances and disagreements of a different sort that kept Luther to the end of his days in a state of extreme indignation against the lawyers and politicians of the Court.

  A letter of Luther’s to the Elector Johann Frederick dated Jan. 18, 1545, on the controversy with the Saxon lawyers about Luther’s denunciation of clandestine marriages (those entered upon without the knowledge of the parents) as illegal, carries us into the thick of these disagreements. His sovereign, he says, had ordered him to confer with the lawyers and come to an arrangement with them; Luther, however, after summoning them before him, had declared categorically that, “I had no intention of holding a disputation with them; I had a divine command to preach the 4th commandment in these matters.” Thus, in the questions under discussion, he is determined not to submit either to the secular or the canon law but only to the Divine. “Otherwise I should have to give up the Gospel and creep back into the cowl [become a monk again] in the devil’s name, by the strength and virtue of both the spiritual and the imperial law. And, besides this, your Electoral Highness would have to cut off my head, doing likewise with all those who have wedded nuns, as the Emperor Jovian commanded more than a thousand years back.” As a result of his arguments, “the lawyers of the Consistory and Courts agreed to give up and reject altogether the clandestine espousals [i.e. marriages ‘sponsalia de præsenti’].” In these words he announces his final apparent victory in this long-drawn controversy.

  In the same letter he touches on the deeper side of the quarrel.

  The lawyers at the High Court have always stuck to many points of “the Pope’s laws” which “we of the clergy” don’t want. “Some, too, made out [in accordance with Canon Law then stil
l in force] that, on our death, our wives and children could not inherit our goods and wished to adjudicate them to our friends, etc.” They had paid no attention to the writings of the new theologians; and yet the latter, “few in number and insignificant maybe, have done more good in the Churches than all the Popes and jurists in a lump.” Hence the preachers had simply disregarded the lawyers, viz. in respect of the clandestine marriages; this had brought about peace. When, however, the “Consistory had been set up” (1539), the whole business had begun anew. “The jurists fancied they had found a loophole through which to raise a disturbance in my Churches with their damnable procedure, which, to-day and to all eternity, I want to have condemned and execrated in my Churches.” “Spoon-fed jurists” thrust themselves forward; but these “merry customers” are not going to make “of my Churches, for which I have to answer before God,” “such dens of murderers.”

  In order to understand the victory over the lawyers of which he speaks it will be necessary to cast a glance back on the whole struggle.

  As we have already pointed out in the words of a Protestant biographer of Luther the legal status of Lutheranism threatened to give rise to dire complications, while any downright abrogation of Canon Law, such as Luther wished for, was out of the question. The sober view of the situation taken by the lawyers did not deserve Luther’s offensive treatment. Moreover, under the leadership of Schurf, the lay professors of jurisprudence at the Wittenberg University had many objections to raise against Luther’s demands. They not only upheld clandestine marriages as valid, but, at the same time, defended the indissolubility of marriage, even in the case of adultery, in accordance with the laws of the olden Church; they also held that second marriages were not lawful to the clergy. Schurf likewise wanted the “Evangelical bishops” to be consecrated by papal bishops. A further cause of constant friction lay in the fact that the professors of law were obliged to base their lectures on the books of Canon Law in the absence of any others; whence it came that Luther had to listen to many disagreeable references to the questions of Church property, of the right of inheriting of the children of former monks, of the marriage of nuns, of the legal status of the monasteries, etc. Schurf was otherwise a good Lutheran and had assisted Luther with advice at the Diet of Worms. Melchior Kling, his pupil and colleague at Wittenberg, agreed with him in following the Canon Law on the question of clandestine marriages, according to which (before the Council of Trent had required for the validity of marriage, that it should be performed publicly in the presence of the parish-priest), they were regarded as valid, albeit wrong and forbidden, so that no new marriage could be entered into so long as the parties lived.