Luther’s most ardent admirer after Flacius was perhaps Nicholas Amsdorf. In the Jena edition of Luther’s works for which he was responsible Amsdorf extols him in the Introduction as a man of God, “the like of whom has not been seen on earth since St. Paul’s day,” a man whom God “had raised up by His special Grace as a chosen instrument and bestowed on the German nation”; “by the Spirit and Word of God he had been led to attack the Pope, and his services in revealing him as Antichrist must be esteemed as highly as his vigorous advocacy of the doctrines of the Trinity, the Incarnation and Justification through Christ.” Nay “he had been specially raised up” “in order to unmask the Roman Antichrist.” But, on account of all his other doctrines too, “pious Christians ought to acknowledge with grateful hearts this great miracle which God has shown to the world and used against the Pope in these last sad times through the precious man of God Martin Luther.” Amsdorf, however, as he hints in the same Preface, found to his dismay that Protestant “cavillers” were now even more numerous than in Luther’s lifetime, who “picked from Luther’s writings only antologies and contradictions.” Some had even dared to distort his writings. He complains that the Wittenberg complete edition of Luther’s works was so unreliable that he was now compelled to undertake the present new Jena edition: “Many things in those tomes were deleted, expurgated and altered for the sake of currying favour.” The real Luther, particularly as he is seen in his denial of the need of good works, is numbered by Amsdorf among the Saints; this is clear from the title of one of Amsdorf’s works, where he places Luther on a par with the Apostle of the Gentiles.
Particularly around Luther’s tomb did veneration centre. Thus the verses of August Buchner invite his readers to visit Luther’s tomb, and proclaim it a greater thing to have seen this little resting place than even the proud Temple of Capitoline Jove.
Immediately after his death a lengthy “poem” was published at Wittenberg entitled “Epitaphium,” celebrating both the deceased and his grave:
“In mine own sweet Fatherland
I did die a death so grand.
At Wittenberg in peace I lie;
To God be praise and thanks on high.”
In it Luther tells how he had been sent by God that he might —
“Before the trump of doom unmask that devil’s child
The Antichrist, with fiendish sin defiled.”
For ever and for ever it would remain true that
“Pope and Antichrist have sprung
From the wicked devil’s dung.”
His grave was marked only by a stone let into the ground bearing on it a metal plate with his name, the date and place of his death, and his age.
On a bronze memorial tablet in the wall was described in Latin verse the dark night in which the world was plunged under the Papacy, until at last Luther “once more made known the Grace of Christ, and, moved by the Divine inspiration (‘Dei adflatu monitus’) and called by the Word of God, had caused the new light of the Evangel to illuminate the world.” Like Paul his tongue had sent forth lightnings, like John the Baptist he had shown to the world in its darkness the Saving Lamb of God, and also brought to light the Tables of Moses, the Prophet of God, in their counter-distinction from the Gospel. The altars had been purged of the Roman idols. In reward for all this he had been exalted by Christ to the stars in order that he might share in His eternal joy. Beside the monument there was placed in the following century a framed painting representing Luther in the pulpit, pointing with his finger to the Crucified, while a dragon with wide-open jaws was swallowing the Pope and his helpers. On this painting the verses given above were repeated.
The Elector Johann Frederick had another memorial tablet cast, but, owing to his defeat in the Schmalkalden War, this was taken by his sons to Weimar and later, in 1571, to Jena, where it was put up in the church of St. Michael. On it, above the life-size figure of the deceased, stands the verse: “Pestis eram vivus, moriens ero mors tua papa.” Other Latin verses at his feet state that, through him, the great fraud had been exposed whereby godless Rome had ensnared Christ’s flock. Would that Christ would help the orthodox school of Jena to vanquish the swarm of false doctrines (of the New Believers) that was springing up now, when the end of the world was so close.
2. Luther’s Memory among the Catholics. The Question of His Greatness
A faithful Catholic visiting the Schlosskirche at Wittenberg must necessarily have been assailed by thoughts much at variance with the eulogistic language of the epitaph and other expressions of Lutheran feeling. Let us suppose that one of those zealous and cultured Catholics who had been drawn by the attack on the olden religion into yet closer sympathy with it had crossed the threshold of the church — for instance a preacher such as Dr. Conrad Kling of Halle, who in the midst of trials and slanders was seeking to save the remnants of Catholicism, or a man like the historian Wolfgang Mayer, or the learned and sharp-witted Kilian Leib, Prior of Rebdorf, or one of the highly gifted women of that day, for instance, Charity Pirkheimer, the sister of the humanist and Superior of the struggling Poor Clares of Nuremberg — what would have been the impressions called forth by the building and the monument?
The building itself recalled the oneness of the divine edifice of the Church whose work it was to build up all the regenerate into one body, without dissensions or divisions, that oneness to which the Church in olden days, when barely out of the hands of the persecutor, had borne witness at the baptismal font of St. Peter’s in Rome in the impressive inscription: “One chair of Peter and one font of Baptism!” The pulpit of the Schlosskirche called to mind the commission given by the Divine Saviour to His Apostles and their successors to baptise all nations and preach that doctrine which He Himself was to preserve infallible by His Presence “all days even to the end of the world.” The altar reminded the Catholic visitor of the eucharistic Sacrament and of the unbloody sacrifice formerly offered there. The bare walls spoke of the iconoclastic storm against both the images of the Saints and any living union of the faithful on earth with the elect in heaven, while the elaborate monuments to the dead seemed to proclaim in these times of excitement the peace in which those departed men had passed away happy in the possession of the one olden faith.
This ecclesiastical unity — such would have been the thought of the Catholic — has been shattered in our unhappy age by the man whose remains are here honoured by his followers, and not in order to reform, or improve, but rather to replace the thousand-year-old heirloom of the Church by a new faith and worship.
Even Luther’s very monument re-echoed the menaces pronounced by Luther upon Catholicism when he desecrated what was most sacred for so many thousands, and laid rough hands on the one consolation of their sorrowful lives.
The fierce announcement to Popery: “My death will be your plague” fell from his lips not once but often. “Only after my death will they feel the real Luther.” “My life shall be their hangman, my death shall be their devil!” “When I die I shall become a spirit to plague the bishops, the priestlings and the godless monks so greatly that a dead Luther will spell to them more trouble than a thousand living ones.”
With the oft-repeated words: “Pestis eram vivus, moriens ero mors tua Papa,” which are also engraved on his death mask in the Luther-Halle at Wittenberg, he proclaimed that his death would do more harm to the Papacy than his life; as long as he lived the Papists would benefit to some extent from his labours, but, when he died, they would be deprived even of this. The threat, though grotesque, is quite in keeping with his belief in himself. He says that it is he alone who is still holding back the storm that is threatening to engulf all the Papists. He asks the Catholics of Germany: “How if Luther’s life were of so much value in God’s sight that, did he not live, not one of you would be sure of your life or existence here below, so that his death would be a misfortune to you all?” He even goes so far as to prophesy: “One day they will cry: Oh, that Luther were still living!” He parades before the Catholics the se
rvices he had rendered by resisting the fanatics and those who denied the Sacrament; the Catholics, so he says, would never have been able to do so much. “They are ungrateful, of this will I speak to them when I am dead. I have inveighed against them enough in the ‘Vermanũg,’ but it is all of no use.” “After my death the Papists will see all the good I have done them, and in me the saying will be fulfilled: ‘He died justified of his sin.’”
Thus in his half jesting, half serious fashion he proclaimed himself a sort of defender and pillar of the Papacy. The idea did not seem too strange to his friend Jonas to prevent him introducing it into his funeral oration on Luther: “The Papists,” he says, “Canons, priestlings, monks and nuns would in years to come wish that Dr. Luther still lived; they would gladly obey him, and, if they could, call him from the grave; but their chance is now gone.”
These great expectations and bold prophecies were as little realised as that of the impending fall of the Papacy.
On the contrary the Papacy gathered strength, renewed its youth from one decade to another and, though the apostasy also grew, yet a gradual revival of the ancient faith set in throughout the Catholic world. On the minds of the faithful Catholics there remained, however, indelibly stamped the gloomy recollection of the towering defiance with which the Wittenberg professor and his secular allies had sought to introduce an alien teaching and reform.
The inflexible will on which Luther so prided himself is the sign manual of his personality. Nothing is so characteristic of Luther as his obstinate determination which yielded to nothing, and the appalling pertinacity that ever drove him on and never allowed him to retreat.
“No one, please God, shall awe me so long as I live!” To no other principle was he more faithful throughout his life. Thus we hear him declaring:
“Good, then let us bid defiance in God’s name; whoever feels compunction let him draw back; whoever is afraid let him flee!… I have brought Holy Scripture and the Word of God to light as no other has done for a thousand years. I have done my part. Your blood be upon your own heads and not on mine.”
“When we see and feel the world’s wantonness, anger and hate, let us learn to defy it,” “to the disgust and annoyance of the world.” “This is an exalted defiance and an excellent consolation.” “Defiantly we boast: The Gospel that we preach is not ours but our Lord Christ’s.”
Luther defied not only “the world,” i.e. his ecclesiastical opponents and Catholicism generally, but also what he calls the devil, i.e. the inner voice that reproached him; he defied life and death, Emperor and princes, and, to boot, his own followers. Yet it was to him not so easy a task to defy the olden Church: “Rather than anger the Christian Church, or say one word against her, I would prefer to lose ten heads and to die ten times over. And yet do it I must.” “They tell us ‘the Christian Church is where Popery is.’ But no, Christ says, ‘My word shall prevail and you shall obey me and listen to me alone, even should you go cracked, mad and crazy over it.’”
He was highly elated at the thought that the powerful protectors of the Church had “not been able to put him down.” All their success he regards as mere “devil’s dung”; the princes, “the tyrants and men of great learning” might be incensed at the blow he had dealt them, but, so he declares, for the defence of his teaching he would have to give them “thirty blows more to induce remorse and repentance.” For “in this may God give me no patience or meekness. Here I say No, No, No, so long as I can move a finger, let it vex King, Kaiser, princes, devils and whom it may.” “In the matter of doctrine no one is great in my sight, I look upon him as a mere soap-bubble, and even less; this there is no gainsaying.” The same was to hold good of his crass writing on the “Captive Will”: “I defy not only the King [of England] and Erasmus, but also their God and all the devils, fairly and rightly to dispose of that same booklet!”
“His enemies’ anger and fury,” so he declares when in this mood, is to him “real joy and fun.” He will force himself to be of “good and cheerful heart” about their “baneful books.”
With frightful earnestness he warns the Catholic princes: “It is the truth that you will go headlong to destruction; I know that on the word will follow the deed and that you will perish.… We have this consolation that we are not affrighted, even should emperors, kings, princes, Pope and bishops fall in a heap and kingdoms lie one on the top of the other.” “What is a prince or emperor, nay the whole world compared with the Word? They are but dung.” “Papacy, Empire and Grand Turk” mean nothing to us. “Such is our defiance.”
In his scorn for those who vex him and write against him he is determined to “put out his horns”, He will be a “huntsman and be after his quarry”; “I hunt the Pope, the cardinals, bishops, canons and monks.”
Of the defiance of the “hard Saxon” not only the Papists but the Court-lawyers and the theologians in his own camp had to taste when they annoyed him. Not only did he oppose the Papists, “cheerfully and confidently” condemning them to hell and to “eat the devil’s droppings,” and rejoicing with a “good conscience” at the impending destruction of these “slaves of Satan”; but he had similar, nay even stronger words of defiance ready for the “false teachers” amongst the New Believers, to wit for the Swiss and for such as Agricola. When the latter defended himself and said, “I too have a head,” Luther retorted: “And, please God, have I not one too.” But with such “stiff-necked” heretics “God was determined to torment him so as the better to defy the Papists.”
A defiance so utterly overwhelming as Luther’s the world had never before seen. The Catholics were quite dumbfounded. Can we take it ill if they failed to admire this form of Titanic greatness. A frightful greatness (perhaps it were more accurate to say a great frightfulness) indeed lurked behind Luther. Yet a Catholic would have had to throw over all religious and moral standards before he could extol a man as great simply on account of his strength of will, determination, power of resistance, inflexibility and defiance. Men felt that, after all, what was important was the aim and the means used in pursuing it. If all that mattered was merely the inflexibility of the will, this would have spelt an “upsetting of all values” and the strong man, he who towered above his fellows owing to his physical strength and his power of bidding defiance to the world would become the ideal of the human race.
Nor would a thoughtful Catholic contemporary have been much impressed by the modern eulogies of Luther’s defiance.
“Because he feared neither hell nor the devil, he stands out for all time as the embodiment of human greatness”; “in his brave spirit there does not seem to have existed the faintest shadow of the pallid fear of man.” “In word and writing he is the greatest demagogue of all the ages”; “the sledgehammer blows of his berserker fury and wild humour rained down on every side.”
“Since his road led to the goal, it must have been the right road, hence let critics hold their tongues.”
“Such a master knew best what tone to adopt in order to sway the nation.”
“His is the wrath and fury of a hero.… Heroes and hero-fury are inseparable.”
Those who speak in this way admit that there were darker sides to his picture; they, however, insist that, in Luther we see, with “the mighty will of the hero,” “traits of the dæmonic greatness of a leader of history” “casting both light and shadows.” Luther “shook the world to its foundations.” He was a man “of mighty powers and dimensions. In the case of almost all the really great men of history, not only their virtues, but also their defects bear an heroic stamp.” These defects are simply the “reverse side of such a man’s greatness.”
It is to cherish too low an idea of greatness, not merely according to the Christian but also according to the merely natural standard, if strength of will or eventual success are alone taken into account and the aim and whole moral character of the work completely disregarded. In one sense of the word Catholics have never been unwilling to grant Luther a certain greatness, particularly as
regards his astounding mental gifts and his powers of work. Döllinger was quite ready in his Catholic days to include “the son of the peasant of Möhra amongst the great, nay, among the greatest of men,” though Döllinger qualifies the admission by the words which immediately follow: “His disciples and admirers were wont to console themselves with the ‘heroic spirit’ of the man, who was so intolerant of any limitations or restrictions and who, dispensed by a kind of inspiration from the observance of the moral law, could do things, which, done by others, would have been immoral and criminal.”
There was no neutral vantage-ground from which to judge of Luther’s labours and his influence. Every thinking man did so from the ethical standpoint, and the Catholic likewise from the standpoint of his Church. It is clear that Luther must not be tested by the standard of profane greatness, but by a religious one. It would be to do him rank injustice, and he would have been the first to protest were we to consider merely the force of his character and the extent of his success, rather than his objects and his influence from the moral and religious standpoint.
He represented himself to his Catholic contemporaries as a divinely commissioned preacher; in the name of the Lord he called on them to forsake the Church of all the ages, because he had come to proclaim afresh a forgotten Gospel. Hence they were bound to examine the actual state of the case and to probe for the moral signs which the words of Christ and the Apostles had taught them to look for, and, when they found the necessary religious qualities and moral greatness wanting, who can blame them for not having gone over to him? With them it was not a question whether they might admire in him a strong man, a Hercules or “superman,” but whether they were, at his bidding, to sever the tie that had hitherto bound them to the Church, follow him blindly, and commit their eternal salvation to his guidance. Luther had never tired of urging: “No man shall quench or thwart my teaching, it must have its way as it has hitherto for it is not mine” (but God’s). “I call myself Ecclesiastes [the preacher] by the Grace of God.… I am certain that Christ Himself calls and regards me as such, that He is my master, and that He will bear me witness on the Last Day that it is not mine but His own Gospel undefiled.” It was this rôle of Evangelist that the better class of opponents felt disposed to examine.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 889
