intrigues and the spread of the so-called Sabbatarians, a sect of
Christians settled in Moravia who had been led astray by the Jews to
introduce circumcision, the observance of the Saturday-Sabbath and
other Mosaic ceremonies, which prompted him to undertake a slashing
work against the Jews.
He had been acquainted with the sect since 1532. In his lectures on
Genesis he lamented that the plague of Sabbatarianism was flourishing
greatly in those districts where the madness of the Catholic rulers
would not permit of the Evangel taking root; the Sabbatarians were
the very apes of the Jews and were busy Judaising Austria and
Moravia.[1603] In March, 1538, he had sent to the press his “Brieff.
... wider die Sabbather” in which he proves that the Messias had
already come and had abrogated the Mosaic law.[1604] In the preface
which Justus Jonas prefixed to his Latin translation of the letter it
was pointed out, that the treasure of Holy Scripture had been unlocked
in this age by the preaching of the Evangel; that it was the duty of
the Evangelical teachers to strive to bring the Jews into the right
path by means of the new light; and that the Jews in every country
would be well advised to be guided by Luther’s booklet.[1605]
The idea of defending Christianity in detail by the light of the new
knowledge of the Scriptures against the madness of the Jews took firm
hold on Luther’s imagination; he cherished the idea that “perchance
some among them might be won over.”[1606] He was greatly incensed
against Ferdinand, the German King, who, as he said, was laying waste
the Evangelical Churches, while permitting the Jews—who in their
insolence oppress the Christians—to reside in his lands.[1607] On
May 18, 1542, he received news of the expulsion of the Jews from
Bohemia and other territories. But later in the year a writing of the
Sabbatarians was sent him, which, in dialogue form, attacked him and
proselytised for the sect. This Jewish movement began also to gain
ground outside the borders of Moravia.
This gave the necessary stimulus “to the fanatical campaign against the
Jews which the Reformer started in the winter of 1542.”[1608]
At the end of 1542 he published his “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen,” and
in March, 1543, his “Vom Schem Hamphoras.”[1609]
In the first he begins by proving against the Jews the Messianic
character of Christ, answers their objections and lays bare their
falsehoods, after which he considers how the Jews should be dealt
with. In the second he discusses the Jewish legend concerning Christ’s
miracles, and in particular scourges the superstitions connected with
the use of the “Shem Hammephorash”; he then examines the genealogies
of Christ in the Gospels in order to refute the objections of the Jews
in this connection, and again discusses the proofs that Christ was the
Messias, at the same time defending in detail His birth of a Virgin.
Both writings he addresses to the Christians in order to strengthen
them in the faith in view of the dangers which threatened from Judaism.
Full of zeal for the defence of the fundamental doctrines of
Christianity, the coming and the benefits bestowed by the Messias,
he refutes at great length the supposed learned proofs of his Jewish
opponents. On the other hand, he thunders furiously against the
blasphemies, the unseemly behaviour and the usury of the Jews who
stood in high favour at several of the Courts; he even demands with
“great earnestness” that their synagogues and private houses, the
scene of their blasphemies, be set on fire and levelled to the ground
(“Let whoever can, throw brimstone and pitch upon them”[1610]), that
their books be taken away from them and “not one page left,” that
their Rabbis be forbidden on pain of death to teach henceforth, and
that all be hindered from “praising God publicly, thanking Him,
praying or teaching”;[1611] further, that the streets and highways be
closed against them, that they be forbidden to practise usury, and be
expelled from the land unless indeed willing to earn their bread at
the sweat of their brow with axe and spade, spindle and distaff. All
these counsels were, of course, addressed primarily to the authorities,
but, such was their nature, that they might easily have provoked the
people to an unchristian persecution of their Jewish fellow-citizens.
These writings, with their unmeasured vituperation and their obscenity,
also bear painful witness to the deterioration of his language with
advancing years.
“Fie on you,” he cries, “fie on you wherever you be, you damned Jews,
who dare to clasp this earnest, glorious, consoling Word of God to
your maggoty, mortal, miserly belly, and are not ashamed to display
your greed so openly.”[1612]—“Whenever you see or think of a Jew, say
to yourself: Look, that mouth that I see before me has every Saturday
cursed, execrated and spat upon my dear Lord Jesus Christ Who redeemed
me with His precious Blood, and also invoked malediction on my wife
and child and all Christians that they might be murdered and perish
miserably; he himself would gladly do it if he could, if only in order
to get hold of our goods; mayhap he has already to-day many times spat
on the ground, as it is their custom to do, when the name of Jesus is
mentioned, so that his venomous spittle still hangs about his mouth
and beard and leaves scarcely room to spit again. Were I to eat, drink
or speak with such a devilish mouth, I might as well eat and drink
out of a can or vessel brimful of devils, and thus become partaker
with the devils who dwell in the Jews and spit at the Precious Blood
of Christ. From which may God preserve me.”[1613]
“I, accursed ‘Goi’ that I am, cannot understand whence they [the Jews]
have this great art, unless it is, that, when Judas Scharioth hanged
himself and his bowels gushed forth, and, as happens in such cases,
his bladder also burst, the Jews were ready to catch the Judas-water
and the other precious things, and that then they gorged and swilled
on the merd among themselves, and were thereby endowed with such a
keenness of sight that they can perceive glosses in the Scripture
such as neither Matthew, nor Isaias himself, nor all the angels, not
to speak of us accursed ‘Goiim,’ would be able to detect; or perhaps
they looked into the loins of their God ‘Shed’ and found these things
written in that smokehole.”[1614]
“Where are they now, those dissolute Christians who have been made or
wish to become Jews? Here for a kiss! The devil has eased himself and
emptied his belly again. That is a real halidom for Jews and would-be
Jews to kiss, batten on, swill and adore; and then the devil in his
turn also devours and swills what these good pupils spue and eject
from above and from below. Hosts and guests are indeed well met and
the dishes are well-cooked and served.” The devil should have been an
angel but “became a devil, who with his angelic snout devours what
exudes from the oral and anal apertures of the Jews; this is indeed
his favourite dish on which he battens like a sow behind the hedge
about St. Margaret’s Day; that is just as he would have it! Therefore
the Jews have got their deserts.” They renounced their dignity as the
chosen mouthpiece of God, therefore the “devil defiles and bespatters
them so much that nothing but devil’s ordure bursts forth from him
everywhere; this indeed is quite to their taste, and they wallow in it
like the swine.”[1615]
In this way Luther unloads himself of his fury against both devil and
Jews; two things are characteristic of his hatred of the Jews; first,
that the devil is made to bear the greater share,[1616] though the
latter promptly shifts the burden back on to the shoulders of the Jews;
secondly, that the presumption of the Jews in seeking to be first
everywhere is castigated with all Luther’s native coarseness.
“It is thus that the wicked, scoundrelly foe mocks at his captive
Jews; he makes them say ‘Schem Hamphoras’ and believe and expect
great things from it; he, however, means ‘Scham Hamperes,’ i.e.
‘hither filth,’ not that which lies in the gutters, but that which
forthcomes from the belly.... The devil has taken the Jews captive
so that they must do his will (as St. Paul says) and deceive, lie,
blaspheme as also curse God and everything that is God’s. In return
for this he makes a mock of them with his ‘Scham Hamperes,’ and leads
them to believe that this and all their other lying and tomfoolery is
something precious.”[1617]
The blinded presumption of the Jews is nevertheless so great that they
fancy themselves far superior to the Christians. “Do you think a Jew
is so badly off? God in heaven and all the angels must laugh and dance
when they hear a Jew ructate, that you, accursed ‘Goi,’ may know for
the future how fine a thing it is to be a Jew.” And yet they lie and
use bad language if a man ventures to hold up to public obloquy, as
an “arch prostitute,” one of his pious cousins.[1618]—“Have I not
told you above, what a grand and precious gem a Jew is; he has but to
break wind, for God to dance and all His angels, and even were he to
do something even grosser, it would still be looked upon as a golden
Talmud; what such a man voids, whether from above or from below, that
the accursed ‘Goiim’ are forsooth to regard as a holy thing.”[1619]
“Nay, were a Rabbi to ease himself into a vessel under your nose, both
thick and thin, and to say: ‘Here you have a delicious conserve, you
would have to say you had never tasted a better dish in your life.
Risk your neck and say differently! For if a man has the power to say
[like the Rabbis] that right is left and left right, regardless of God
and all His creatures, he can just as well say that his anus is his
mouth, that his belly is a pudding-dish and that a pudding-dish is his
belly.”[1620]
In exoneration of Luther it has been said that, in this case, in making
use of such “shocking comparisons,” he was not merely following his
natural bent, on the contrary, “in his angry zeal he deliberately
sought for them.” It is perfectly true that neither his angry zeal nor
his deliberate intention can be denied any more than his desire to
“stir up the world against what was in itself shameful and disgusting,”
and his longing to do something towards its removal. But surely there
was another kind of language and a different tone with the help of
which he might have effected more, such, for instance, as had been used
by great and pious men in the past whose inspired and glowing words
contrast glaringly with Luther’s hideous obscenities.
The results achieved by Luther with these two writings were but of
trifling importance.
We hear practically nothing of any conversions of Jews or apostate
Christians being due to them. Luther had been wise himself to declare
that he did not expect any conversions to result from them. In the
Saxon Electorate, however, the unjust enactment of 1536 was, on May
6, 1543, revived against the Jews by a public mandate abrogating
that mitigation of it which Josel Rosheim had been successful in
obtaining. “Official reports go to prove that the cruel persecution
of the Jews [in the Saxon Electorate] was no mere paper measure; only
after Luther’s death did things settle down.”[1621] In Hesse a severe
decree against the Jews, issued in 1543, seems to have owed its origin
“to the writings of the Reformer. This being so the rebuff with which
Luther met in the Electorate of Brandenburg must have been all the more
annoying.”[1622]
One of the lasting effects of these two screeds was, that, in the
subsequent anti-Jewish risings the charges there contained, and couched
in language so fervid and eloquent, were constantly appealed to in
vindication of the measures used. No distinction was made between what
was true and what was false, or between the horrible exaggerations and
the actual fact, though the unreliability of many of the statements is
often quite palpable.
Even in the few passages we had room to quote the reader may have seen
how Luther’s charges against the Jews amount to calumnies; the Jews,
he alleges, were in the habit of cursing and blaspheming God and all
that is God’s; “regardless of God” they made out right to be left and
left right. His love of exaggeration leads him to say that all Jews
curse the Christians every Sabbath, and are ever desirous of stabbing
them and their wives and children. Theft and robbery he makes into
crimes common to every Jew; all of them he accuses indiscriminately
of murder; “all their most heartfelt sighing, hopes and longings are
set on this, viz. to be able to treat us heathen as they treated the
heathen in Persia in the days of Esther ... for they fancy they are
the chosen people in order that they may murder and slay the heathen
... just as they had made this plain to the world by the way they had
treated us Christians in the beginning, and would still gladly do even
now were they able, yea, have often done so.”[1623]
It is true he refuses credulously to believe all the crimes with
which rumour charged them, for instance, their poisoning of the
wells.[1624] The calumnies he made his own were, nevertheless, so
great, that, after the magistrates of Strasburg had been repeatedly
approached by Josel von Rosheim with the proposal to forbid the
circulation of the two writings, they finally decided to prohibit
their being printed in the city. The councillors were of opinion that
the very enormity of the assertions would prove the best refutation.
They wrote, that it was better to keep silence and to leave the
calumnies to sink into oblivion; to this the petitioner agreed.[1625]
Josel von Rosheim, the zealous spokesman of the Jews, achieved a
brilliant success with the Emperor Charles V. Certain extensive
privileges were guaranteed him on April 3, 1544, and were made public
in 1546, whereby all the rights and liberties of the Jews were
confirmed.
Nor was there any lack of condemnation of these two writings of Luther
at the hands of the Protestants themselves.
On Dec. 8, 1543, Bullinger of Zürich made to Bucer his complaint
already referred to, concerning the “lewd and houndish eloquence”
of the Wittenberger; he adds that such effusions were unseemly in a
theologian already advanced in years; no one could tolerate a work
so obscenely (“_impurissime_”) written, as “Vom Schem Hamphoras”;
Reuchlin, were he still alive, would declare, that, in Luther, all the
old foes of the Jews—Tungern, Hoogstraaten and Pfefferkorn—had come
to life again [though their language fell short of Luther’s]: he was
sorry for Luther’s murderous hatred of the Hebrew commentators and for
the undue stress he laid on his own German translation, which was far
from being devoid of prejudice.[1626] Bullinger expressed himself much
more strongly, in 1545, when the split between Zürich and Wittenberg
had been accentuated by Luther’s “Kurtz Bekentnis”: No one writing on
questions of faith and matters of grave importance had ever expressed
himself in a way so utterly at variance with propriety and modesty as
Luther, etc.[1627]
The Nuremberg preacher, Andreas Osiander, at that time one of the
greatest authorities on Hebrew and on Rabbinic writings, wrote so
strong a letter about the untruth of certain of Luther’s anti-Jewish
strictures that no one ventured to bring it under the Reformer’s
notice. Cruciger relates that Osiander afterwards withdrew some of
the strongest things he had said in the letter, but that he still
maintained that Luther had not in the least understood what the Shem
Hammephorash meant to educated Jews.[1628]
The Shem Hammephorash or “peculiar name” was, according to Luther, a
cabalistic formula of the Jews, supposed to be endowed with the most
marvellous magic power; it was made up of seventy-two three-lettered
names of angels, themselves formed from a rearrangement of the letters
of the Scripture text, Ex. xiv. 19-21, concerning the pillar of cloud
that went before the Jews on their departure from Egypt. To each of
these angelic names was appended a verse from the Psalter with the
“great name of God, Jehovah, also called the Tetragrammaton.” So great
was the power of this magic formula that it could strike blind or dumb
all Christians everywhere in the world, could drive them mad, nay,
kill them outright, if only the words were rightly uttered and in a
mood pious enough. Even the superstitious use of the Tetragrammaton
alone, was, according to Luther, responsible, in the case “of the
devil and the Jews,” for “much sorcery and all kinds of abuse and
idolatry.”[1629] They call it the Tetragrammaton because they are
chary of pronouncing the four consonants of the all-too-sacred name of
Jehovah, but, “in their heart they abuse and blaspheme God.” They do
not see that they are “using the Holy Name in the shameful abuse they
practise with their ‘Scham Hamperes.’”[1630]
The cause of the mad aberrations of the Jews is, however, in Luther’s
eyes, due to the “Word of God not enlightening them and showing them
the way.” Now, however, God’s Word has risen and shines brightly;
it even casts its beam into those parts where the Papacy reigns ...
for there “thick darkness, lies and abominations were worshipped
with Masses, Purgatory, Invocation of Saints, monkery and one’s own
works.”[1631] It was a great and godly work that he had undertaken in
unmasking not only these but also the many Jewish abominations.
* * * * *
As to the sources whence Luther derived his information, he
uncritically took his material mainly from anti-Jewish writings. The
book “_Victoria adversus impios Hebrœos_” of the Carthusian, Porchetus
de Salvaticis, dating from the beginning of the 14th century, provided
him with the Jewish blasphemies against Christ, and in particular with
the supposed mysteries of the Shem Hammephorash; Antonius Margaritha
supplied him with more recent material in his work “Der gantz
jüdisch Glaub” of 1530. It is probable that he also made use of the
“_Dialogus_” against the Jews by Paul of Burgos (1350-1435), which he
quotes in his lectures on Genesis. He also mentions incidentally as his
authorities Jerome, Eusebius, and Sebastian Münster.[1632]
_Comparison with an earlier Jewish writing of Luther’s_
A more accurate insight into the psychological and historical
significance of the two screeds against Judaism is obtained by
comparing them with an earlier writing of Luther’s, dating from 1523,
which is perfectly fair to the Jews. The comparison will lead the
reader to ask what was the real reason for his extraordinary change of
attitude.
Filled as yet with great and unrealisable hopes of that conversion of
the whole Jewish race which he fancied he saw coming, Luther had, in
1523, published a booklet entitled “Das Jhesus Christus eyn geborner
Jude sey.”[1633]
In it he points out that the Jews were blood-relations, cousins and
kinsmen of the Saviour. No other people, so he warmly declared, had
been so marked out by God, hence they must be dealt with amicably and
soberly instructed out of Holy Scripture and not be scared away by
pride and contempt, as had hitherto been the wont; the fools, Popes,
bishops, sophists and monks, the great dunderheads, had hitherto
indeed behaved in such a way that any good Christian would have
preferred to become a Jew. Hence he exerts himself in this work, in a
calm and friendly way, to prove to the Jews from the Bible, that their
Messias had already come. At the same time he indignantly scourges
“the lying tales” and false charges brought against them, as for
instance, that, “to repress their stench they must have the blood of
Christians.” The main thing was to treat them according to Christian,
not Popish, charity.
So far was he disposed to go the better to win over the Jews, that he
was even desirous that Christ should not at the outset be put before
them as the God-man, but merely as the Messias. He also declared
in a sermon shortly after, that, when instructing a Jew on Christ,
the catechumen was only to be told that Christ was a man like other
men, sent by God to do good to mankind; only when the heart had been
stirred to love of Him was mention to be made of His Godhead.[1634]
“The Jews merely interest him,” says Reinhold Lewin, speaking of this
book, “as subjects for conversion; this is the standpoint from which
he regards the whole Jewish question.” “Should the new method not
succeed and kindness prove of no avail ... then it will not be worth
while any longer to make use of it; harsher measures will then serve
the purpose better.”[1635] The same writer also quotes the preface to
the Latin translation by Justus Jonas as expressive of the wish of the
Wittenbergers: “May the Jewish business speed its way as rapidly as
the outspreading of the Word of God which has wrought so marvellous a
change and so sublime a work of God.”[1636]
It is perfectly true that, had the optimistic expectations of Luther
and his friends been realised, it would have been of incalculable
advantage to their cause, for they would have succeeded where the
ancient Church had failed. “The conversion of the Jews,” says Lewin,
“an idea which can be read between Luther’s lines without any danger
of forcing them—is to be the coping-stone of the grand edifice he had
erected; the Papacy [in Luther’s view] had failed, not merely because
it had recourse to wrong methods but above all because its foundations
rested on forgery and falsehood.”[1637]
The fact is, however, that no increase in the number of conversions
took place. This disappointing experience, the sight of the growing
insolence of the Jews, their pride and usury, not to speak of personal
motives, such as certain attempts he suspected them to have made on his
life at the instigation of the Papists, brought about a complete change
in Luther’s opinions in the course of a few years. As early as 1531
or 1532, when a Hebrew baptised at Wittenberg had brought discredit
upon him by relapsing into Judaism, he gave vent to the angry threat,
that, should he find another pious Jew to baptise he would take him
to the bridge over the Elbe, hang a stone round his neck and push him
over with the words: I baptise thee in the name of Abraham; for “those
scoundrels,” so he adds, “scoff at us all and at our religion.”[1638]
From that time he begins to put the Jews in the same category with the
Turks and the Papists.
The more he studies the text of the Old Testament, and the Old Jewish
commentators, the more indignant he grows at the misrepresentations
and trivialities to be met with in the works of the Rabbis. According
to him, they are oxen and donkeys; they are as bad as the monks; with
their droppings they make of Holy Scripture, as it were, a sink into
which to empty their obscenity and stupid imaginings.[1639] He is also
aghast to discover that they led astray even great churchmen like St.
Jerome, and Nicholas of Lyra of whom he was particularly fond.[1640]
What was even worse, they were ensnaring learned contemporaries who
were familiar with Hebrew, particularly those who fancied they could
improve upon Luther’s translation of the Old Testament thanks to their
closer acquaintance with the original text, men, for instance, of the
type of Sebastian Münster of Basle (the pupil of the Jewish grammarian
Elia Levita). Münster, according to Luther, was a regular “Judaiser,”
seeing that he paid heed neither to the faith, nor to the words, nor
to their setting; albeit hostile to the Jews, he, too, was undermining
the New Testament. Much of Luther’s anger in his writings against the
Jews was intended for their Judaising pupils. Hence on the publication
of the work “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen” we hear him declaring: “We
have been at great pains with the Bible and been careful that the sense
should agree with the grammar. This has not pleased Münster. Oh, those
Hebrews—including even our own—are great Judaisers; hence I had them
also in mind when I wrote my booklet against the Jews.”[1641]
_Some special motives for his Polemics against the Jews_
The real cause of Luther’s deadly hostility, voiced in his later
writings against the Jews, was the blasphemous infidelity displayed in
their treatment of Scripture and in their life as a whole.
“The Jews with their exegesis,” he says, “are like swine that break
into the Scripture”; the end and object of their life and intercourse
with us, is, as the movement started in Moravia proves, to make us
all Jews; “they never cease trying to entice Christians over.”[1642]
They are quite at liberty to prefer, as indeed they do, the law of
Moses to the Papal decretals and their mad articles,[1643] but they
have no right to prefer it to the pure Evangel. Sooner than this let
us have a struggle to the death!—Such were the thoughts uppermost in
his mind when he sat down to pen those two writings which constitute a
phenomenon in the history of literature.
On the other hand, Luther’s most recent biographer is wrong when he
explains the whole controversy by saying: “There can be no doubt that
the radical change in his attitude on the Jewish question was an
outcome of his increasing depression.”[1644] That, on the contrary, it
was Luther’s religious excitement which was the prime psychological
mover is plain from many of the effusions contained in both these
writings. That, however, his state of depression had some share in it
is perfectly true.
“The wrath of God has come upon them,” he writes in one such passage,
“of which I do not like to think, nor has this book been a cheerful
one for me to write, for I have been forced to avert my eyes from the
terrible picture, sometimes in anger, sometimes in scorn; and it is
painful to me to have to speak of their horrible blasphemies against
our Lord and His dear Mother, to which we Christians are loath indeed
to listen; I can well understand what St. Paul means in Romans x. 1,
when he says that his heart was sore when he thought of them; such
is the case with every Christian who earnestly dwells, not on the
temporal misery and misfortune of which the Jews complain, but on
their addiction to blasphemy, to cursing, to spitting at God Himself
and all that is God’s, even to their eternal damnation, and who yet
refuse to listen or lend an ear but will have it that all they do
is done out of zeal for God. O God, our Heavenly Father, turn aside
Thy wrath and let there be an end of it for the sake of Thy dear Son.
Amen.”[1645]
“O my God,” he groans elsewhere, “my beloved Creator and Father, do
Thou graciously take into account my unwillingness to have to speak
so shamefully of Thine accursed enemies, the devil and the Jews. Thou
knowest I do so out of the ardour of my faith and to the glory of Thy
Divine Majesty, for it pierces me to the very quick.”[1646]
If, however, we look more closely into the matter we shall see that the
“ardour of his faith” was also fed from other sources. There was, for
instance, the reaction of his own protracted struggle in defence of the
new doctrines and against the Papacy, a struggle which left deep marks
on all his labours and on all his writings.
Towards the end of a career which had worked such untold disaster to
the Christianity of the past he feels keenly the need of vindicating
the dignity of Christ if only to soothe his own conscience; he was
resolved to hammer it in with the utmost defiance, just as formerly
he had clung to the idea that, by his doctrine, he was defending the
rights of Christ against the Pope. He is now resolved again to take
his stand on this, his efforts becoming the more violent the more the
sight of the ruin wrought by his own work affrights him. Hence his
eagerness to take advantage of Jewish attacks on the pillars of the
faith in order, while triumphing over them, to enjoy the sense of
his comradeship with Christ, the Son of God now so soon to come in
Judgment. Here again he allows his vanity to mislead him and to paint
his intervention on behalf of the great truth of Christianity as far
more successful than that of any of the Popes; this helps him to close
his eyes to the wounds which the inner voice tells him he had inflicted
on the Christian truths and on the public life of Christendom. For was
he not doing for Christ what the Pope was quite unable to do? Indeed,
“the world, the Turk, the Jew and the Pope are all raging blasphemously
against the name of the Lord, laying waste His Kingdom and deriding
His Will; but ‘greater is He that is with us than he that is with
the world’; He triumphs,” so he wrote at that time to some foreign
sympathisers, “and will triumph in you to all eternity; may He console
you by His Holy Spirit in which He has called you to oneness with His
Body.”[1647]
It is true, so he says elsewhere, that the Pope admits the existence
of Christ, but, in spite of this, neither Jews nor Turks are quite
so bad; the Jews have far better arguments than the Papists for
themselves and their religion; the foundations of the latter are
easily shaken; the Papist Church is a worse “den of murderers” than
Turks, Tartars, or Jews.[1648]
All the more glorious and creditable to the new Evangel is therefore
the victory won by Luther over the Jews; it may serve to show the
world that his school’s study of the Bible could furnish the weapons
to bring about such a result. The Pope, with his unbiblical treatment
of the Jews, had merely succeeded in making them doubly un-Christian;
but to us God has unlocked the Holy Books, hence on us devolves
the duty of pointing out to the Jews their errors.[1649] Luther
accordingly claims, that his “Von den Jüden” was the first real
work of instruction on Judaism, one which “might teach us Germans
from history what a Jew is and warn our Christians against them as
against veriest devils.” It was only fitting that he who had unearthed
Scripture should also “wipe clean the holy old Bible from Jewish
‘Hamperes’ and ‘Judas-water.’”[1650]
Nevertheless everything else—even his yeoman service in the cause of
the Bible, and his shaming of the Papacy, which had so ineffectively
struggled against the Jews—recedes into the background before his
determination to crown his whole life-work by snatching from the Jewish
devil the honour of Christ our one Salvation.
This was admittedly his motive for taking up his pen yet a third time.
_The Third Work against the Jews, 1543_
As early as June, 1543, Luther was engaged on a new polemical work
against the Jews entitled “On the last words of David.”[1651] It is
a lengthy essay on 2 Kings xxiii. 1-7, and certain other striking
passages, with the object of proving that the Messias was to be a
God-man and of vindicating the mystery of the Trinity.
He intended to show by these examples how helpful Hebrew learning
and Bible study can be in defending Scripture against the attacks
of unbelievers; he also wanted to establish that neither Jews nor
Papists possessed the real key to the Bible, viz. the knowledge of
Christ; “for in this all sticks, and lies, and rests: Whosoever has
not or will not have this man called Jesus Christ, the Son of God,
whom we Christians preach [the new Evangel undefiled], let him avoid
the Bible; such is my conscientious advice, else he will certainly
come a cropper, and become ever blinder and more crazy the more he
studies.”[1652]
In David’s final words on the Messias, Luther saw something peculiarly
solemn; David, when “about to die and depart,” gives his parting
injunction and adds: “This is my firm belief; on this I stand fast and
immoveable.... Hence I am joyful, and will gladly live or die as and
when God wills.”[1653]
“Whoever can boast [like David] that the Spirit of the Lord speaks
through him, and that His word is on his tongue, must indeed be very
sure of his cause.”[1654]
In this writing the Jews are not attacked in such unmeasured language
as in the two others just considered; the tone of the whole is much
calmer, indeed comparatively kind. It may be that the representations
made to him concerning his violence had not been without some effect.
The end, like the beginning, expresses the wish that, without suffering
ourselves to be led astray by the false readings of the Jews, we should
“plainly and clearly find and recognise our dear Lord and Saviour in
Holy Writ.”[1655] This is what leads Melanchthon to praise the work
as enjoyable reading, because there is nothing sweeter to the pious
than to deepen their knowledge of the God-man and to learn the art of
real prayer so different from that of the heathen, the Jew and the
Turk.[1656]
_Against the Turks_
The honour of Christianity and of its Divine Founder was also what
Luther had at heart in the two books which in his later years he was
instrumental in publishing against the Turks, viz. his “Vermanunge zum
Gebet wider den Türcken” (1541) and his new edition (1542) of an old
work against the Koran, the “Verlegung des Alcoran Bruder Richardi.”
In one passage of the Vermanunge he even couches this thought in the
form of a prayer:
“Yes, indeed, this is our offence against them [the Turks], that we
preach, believe and confess Thee, God the Father, as the only True
God, and Thy Beloved Son our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost as
one eternal God.” “Thou knowest, God the Father Almighty, that we have
not sinned in any other way against the devil, Pope or Turk and that
they have no right or power to punish us.” Most fervently, as in the
very presence of God, he declares that he must withstand the devil who
is helping the Turk to set up “his Mahmed in the stead of Jesus Christ
Thy Beloved Son.”[1657] Speaking of prayer against the Turk he makes
every Christian say to God: “Thou tellest, nay, compellest, me to pray
in the name of Thy Beloved Son Our Lord Jesus Christ.”[1658]
In this writing he strongly reprobates both the public disorders on
the side of the new Evangel and the Papists’ obstinate resistance to
the Word of God; both would be terribly punished by means of the Turks
unless people set about amending their lives and giving themselves up
to earnest prayer. Now, after the Evangel had been preached for so
many years, “everyone knew, thank God, what each class and individual
man should do or leave undone, which, alas, formerly we did not know,
though we would gladly have done it.”[1659] Should our prayer fail to
achieve the desired object, “then let us say a longer and a better
one.” “How happy should we be were our prayers against the Turk again
to prove of no avail, but, instead, the Last Day came—which indeed
cannot any longer be far off—spelling the end of both Turk and Pope as
I do not for a moment doubt.”[1660]
At any rate Luther might have used better weapons against the Turks
than he actually did in this so-called admonition.
About the time he wrote it we hear Luther occasionally expressing a
hope that the Turks may be converted to the Evangel, now shining so
brightly and convincingly.
“I should like to see the Evangel make its way amongst the Turks, which
may indeed very well happen.” “It is quite in God’s power to work a
miracle and make them listen to the Evangel.... If a ‘Wascha’ [Pasha]
were to accept the Gospel we should soon see what effect it would have
on the Grand Turk; and as he has many sons it is quite likely one of
them might reach it.”—He despaired of the overthrow of the Turkish
empire, but was fond of dreaming of the coming of a “good man who
should withstand the dogma of Mohamed.”[1661]
“The Turk rules more mightily by his religion than by arms”; such was
Luther’s opinion. He had to be confronted with the belief in Christ,
that belief which Luther had learnt “amidst the bitter pangs of death,”
viz. “that Christ is God”; in great temptations nothing could help us
but this faith, “the most powerful consolation that is bestowed on
us”; this same article of faith God was vindicating, even by miracles,
against Turk and Pope. To this he too would cleave in spite of any
objections of reason.[1662]
He did not, however, patiently wait till the “good man” came who was to
oppose the dogma of the Turks; he himself set about this undertaking
in March, 1542.[1663] After having, shortly before, become acquainted
with the Koran in a poor translation, he proceeded himself to translate
into German a work against the Koran, written in 1300, by the Dominican
Richardus (Ricoldus). To it he appended a preface of his own and a
“Treue Warnung.”[1664]
He had undertaken, so he says, to disclose and answer the
devil-inspired “infamies” contained in the Alcoran, “the better to
strengthen us in our Christian faith.”[1665]—This out-of-date book
of a mediæval theologian was, however, hardly the work to furnish an
insight into the Koran, particularly as it built far too much on badly
read texts and doubtful stories uncritically taken for granted; from
such defects the refutation was bound to suffer.
Some of Luther’s own additions are characteristic.
Here he gives up all hope of any conversion of the Moslem; he likewise
despairs of the success of the Christian armies.[1666]—“Mahmet,” so
he teaches, “leads people to eternal damnation as the Pope also did
and still does.” He reigns “in the Levant” as the Pope does “in the
land of the setting sun,” thanks to a system of “wilful lying.”[1667]
“Oh, Lord God! Let all who can, pray, sigh and implore that of God’s
anger we may see an end,” as Daniel says (Dan. xi. 36).[1668]
Bad as Mahmet was, Luther was loath to see in him Antichrist; “the
Pope, whom we have with us, he is the real Antichrist, with his
‘Drecktal,’ Alcoran and man-made doctrines.” “The chaste Pope takes
no wife, but all women are his.... Obscene Mahmet at least makes no
pretence of chastity.... As for the other points such as murder,
avarice and pride, I will not enumerate them, but here again the Pope
far outdoes Mahmet.” “May God give us His grace and punish both the
Pope and Mahmet together with their devils. I have done my part as a
faithful prophet and preacher.”[1669]
Words such as these were certainly as little calculated to further
the common cause of the Christians against the Turks as had been the
somewhat similar thoughts which, at an earlier date, he had been wont
to weave into his exhortations to resist the Turks.[1670]
As a last straw Luther in the “Treue Warnung” goes on to declare,
that, unless Christians mend their life, are converted to the Evangel
and live up to it, it is to be hoped that the Turkish arms will prove
victorious.
For amongst those who “pretend to be Christians and to constitute
the holy Church” there are, so he declares, so many who “knowingly
and wantonly despise and persecute the known truth and vindicate
their open and notorious idolatry, lying and unrighteousness.” Such
Christians, of whom the forces that had been raised chiefly consisted,
formed, so he thought, an army which might itself well be styled
Turkish. “If then two such ‘Turkish’ armies were to advance against
one another, the one called Mahmetish and the other dubbing itself
Christian, then, good friend, I should suggest you might give Our
Lord God some advice, for He would assuredly need it, as to which
Turks He is to help and carry to victory. I, the worst of advisers,
would counsel Him to give the victory to the Mahmetish Turks over the
Christian Turks, as indeed He has done hitherto without any advice
from us and even contrary to our prayers and complaints. The reason
is, that the Mahmetish Turks have neither God’s Word nor those who
might preach it.... Had they preachers of the Godly Word they might
perhaps, some of them at least, be presently changed from swine into
men. But our Christian Turks have the Word of God and preachers, and
yet they refuse to listen, and from men become mere swine.”[1671]
The public danger which threatened owing to the advance of the Turks
caused Luther, however, about this time to promote the sale of the
Latin translation and confutation of the Koran brought out under
Melanchthon’s auspices by Bibliander (Buchmann) of Zürich. In a popular
hymn which he composed he also took care to couple the Turkish danger
with that to be apprehended from the Papists. This short hymn, “which
became a favourite with the German Evangelicals” (Köstlin), begins:
“In Thy Word preserve us, Lord,
Ward off Pope and Turkish sword.”
The picture which Luther incidentally paints of himself in his
effusions against the Jews and the Turks, receives its final touch in
his last great and solemn pronouncement against Popery which the lines
just quoted may serve to introduce.
_The Hideous Caricatures of “Popery Pictured”_
One cannot contemplate without sadness Luther’s last efforts against
the Papacy.
Fortunately for literature the projected continuation of the frightful
book “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft” never saw the light;
Luther’s intention had been to make it even worse than the first part.
His final labours, aimed directly at the Pope and the Council
of Trent, consisted in suggesting the subjects and drafting the
versified letterpress for a number of woodcuts, designed expressly
to ridicule and defame the Papal office in the eyes of the lower
classes. Even apart from the verses the caricatures were vulgar enough
in all conscience. Nudities in the grossest postures alternate with
comicalities the better to ensure success with the populace.
An attempt has been made to exonerate him of direct responsibility for
the pictures, and to set them down to the account of the draughtsman
who, according to a passage in a letter of Luther’s, was believed to be
his friend, the famous painter Lucas Cranach.
That the whole was really a child of Luther’s own mind is proved,
however, by the very title-page “Popery Pictured by Dr. M. Luther,”
Wittenberg, 1545, as well as by his clear and outspoken statement
shortly before his death to Pastor Matthias Wanckel of Halle. “I
still have much that ought to be told the world concerning the Pope
and his kingdom, and for this reason I have published these images
and figures, each of which stands for a separate book to be written
against the Pope and his kingdom. I wanted to witness before the
whole world what I thought of the Pope and his devil’s kingdom; let
them be my last Will and Testament.” “I have greatly vexed the Pope
with these nasty pictures,” “Oh, how the sow will lift her tail! But,
even should they kill me, they must gorge on the filth that the Pope
holds in his hand. I have placed a golden thing in the Pope’s hands
[i.e. in the picture to be described immediately] that he may pledge
them in it.”[1672]—Again, in a letter to Amsdorf, he alludes to a
scene in which the Furies figure, saying that he had designed them
(“_appingerem_”), and describing in detail what he meant the figures to
stand for.[1673]
Hence it is impossible to contest Luther’s real authorship.
It is true that, on one occasion, he speaks of Cranach the painter as
the draughtsman of one of the pictures; he may, however, have simply
meant that it originated in his studio. According to expert opinion the
technique of the woodcuts differs so much from the master’s that they
cannot be attributed to him; they may, however, have been executed by
one of his pupils under his direction.[1674]
We may now glance at the nine pictures which make up the “Abbildung des
Bapstum,” commencing with that just referred to.[1675]
The picture with the Furies to which Luther refers is that which
represents the “birth and origin of the Pope,” as the Latin
superscription describes it. Here is depicted, in a peculiarly
revolting way, what Luther says in his “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel
gestifft,” viz. the Pope’s being born from the “devil’s behind.” The
devil-mother is portrayed as a hideous woman with a tail, from under
which Pope and Cardinals are emerging head foremost. Of the Furies one
is suckling, another carrying, and the third rocking the cradle of
the Papal infant, whom the draughtsman everywhere depicts wearing the
tiara. These are the Furies Megæra, Alecto and Tisiphone.[1676]
Another picture shows the “Worship of the Pope as God of the World.”
This, too, expresses a thought contained in the “Wider das Bapstum,”
where Luther says: “We may also with a safe conscience take to the
closet his coat of arms with the Papal keys and his crown, and use
them for the relief of nature.”[1677] As a matter of fact in this
picture we see on a stool decorated with the papal insignia a crown or
tiara set upside down on which a man-at-arms is seated in the action
of easing himself; a second, with his breeches undone, prepares to do
the same, while a third who has already done so is adjusting his dress.
The picture with the title “The Pope gives a Council in Germany”
shows the Pope in his tiara riding on a sow and digging his spurs
into her sides. The sow is Germany which is obliged to submit to such
ignominious treatment from the Papists; as for the Council which the
Pope is giving to the German people it is depicted as his own, the
Pope’s, excrement, which he holds in his hand pledging the Germans
in it, as Luther says in the passage quoted above (p. 422). The Pope
blesses the steaming object while the sow noses it with her snout.
Underneath stands the ribald verse:
“Sow, I want to have a ride,
Spur you well on either side.
Did you say ‘Concilium’?
Take instead my ‘merdrum.’”[1678]
“Here the Pope’s feet are kissed,” are the words over another picture,
and, from the Pope who is seated on his throne with the Bull of
Excommunication in his hand, two men are seen running away, showing
him, as Köstlin says, “their tongues and hinder parts with the utmost
indecency.”[1679] The inscription below runs:
“Pope, don’t scare us so with your ban;
Please don’t be so angry a man;
Or else we shall take good care
To show you the ‘Belvedere.’”
Köstlin’s description must be supplemented by adding that the two men,
whose faces and bared posteriors are turned towards the Pope, are
depicted as emitting wind in his direction in the shape of puffs of
smoke; from the Pope’s Bull fire, flames and stones are bursting forth.
Of the remaining woodcuts one reproduces the scene which formed the
title-page to the first edition of the “Wider das Bapstum,” viz. the
gaping jaws of hell, between the teeth of which is seen the Pope
surrounded by a cohort of devils, some of whom are crowning him with
the tiara; another portrays the famous Pope-Ass, said to have been
cast up by the Tiber near Rome; it shows “what God Himself thinks
of Popery,”[1680] yet another depicts a pet idea of Luther’s,[1681]
viz. the “reward of the ‘_Papa satanissimus_’ and his cardinals,”
i.e. their being hanged, while their tongues, which had been torn out
by the root, are nailed fast to the gallows. “How the Pope teaches
faith and theology”; here the Pope is shown as a robed donkey sitting
upright on a throne and playing the bagpipes with the help of his
hoofs. “How the Pope thanks the Emperors for their boundless favours”
introduces a scene where Clement IV with his own hand strikes off the
head of Conradin. “How the Pope, following Peter’s example, honours
the King” is the title of a woodcut where a Pope (probably Alexander
III) sets his foot on the neck of the Emperor (Frederick Barbarossa
at Venice).[1682] It is not necessary to waste words on the notorious
falsehoods embodied in the last two pictures. Luther, moreover,
further embellished the accounts he found, for not even the bitterest
antagonist of the Papacy had ever dared to accuse Clement IV of having
slain with his own hand the last of the Staufens. Among the ignorant
masses to whom these pictures and verses were intended to appeal,
there were, nevertheless, many who were prepared to accept such tales
as true on the word of one known as the “man of God,” the Evangelist,
the new Elias and the Prophet of Germany.
* * * * *
In the “Historien des ehrwirdigen in Gott seligen thewren Mannes
Gottes,” Mathesius says of Luther: “In the year [15]45 he brought out
the mighty, earnest book against the Papacy founded by the devil
and maintained and bolstered up by lying signs, and, in the same
year, also caused many scathing pictures to be struck off in which he
portrayed for the benefit of those unable to read, the true nature and
monstrosity of Antichrist, just as the Spirit of God in the Apocalypse
of St. John depicted the red bride of Babylon, or as Master John Hus
summed up his teaching in pictures for the people, of the Lord Christ
and of Antichrist.” “The Holy Ghost is well able to be severe and
cutting,” says Mathesius of this book and the caricatures: “God is a
jealous God and a burning fire, and those who are driven and inflamed
by His Spirit to wage a ghostly warfare against the foes of God
show themselves worthy foemen of those who withstand their Lord and
Saviour.”[1683] Mathesius, like many others, was full of admiration
for the work.
The woodcuts pleased Luther so well that he himself wrote autograph
inscriptions above and below a proof set, and hung them up in his
room.[1684]
“The devil knows well, that, when the foolish people hear high-sounding
words of abuse, they are taken in and blindly believe them without
asking for any further grounds or reasons.” The words are Luther’s own,
though written at an earlier date.[1685] That they applied even more to
caricatures Luther was well aware, nor was this the first time that he
had flung such pictures amongst the masses the better to excite them.
As early as 1521, at Luther’s instigation, with the help of Cranach’s
pencil, Melanchthon and Schwertfeger had done something of the sort in
the “Passional Christi und Antichristi.”[1686] In a booklet of 1526,
“Das Bapstum mit seinen Gliedern,” containing sixty-five caricatures
and scurrilous doggerel verses composed by Luther, everything
religious, from the Pope down to the monks and nuns, was held up to
ridicule.[1687]
The use of caricature was, it is true, not unusual in those days of
violent controversy, nor were Catholics slow to have recourse to it
against Luther; Cochlæus, for instance, in his “_Lutherus Septiceps_”
has a crude illustration of a figure with seven heads. But everything
of this nature, his own earlier productions included, was put into the
shade by Luther’s final pictures of the Papacy.
At the end of his “Wider das Bapstum” Luther had ventured to hope that
he would be able to go even further in another booklet, and, that,
should he die in the meantime, God would raise up another man who
would “make things a thousand times hotter.” His threat he practically
carried out in his “Popery Pictured,” in what Paul Lehfeldt calls
his “highly offensive and revolting woodcuts,” which “certainly
made things a thousand times worse seeing the appeal they made to
the imagination.”[1688] The fact, that, “in spite of the numerous
reprints,” very few copies indeed have survived is attributed by
Lehfeldt to the indignation felt in both camps, Lutheran and Catholic,
which led to the wholesale destruction of the book.
So pleased was the Elector of Saxony with the “Wider das Bapstum”
that he helped to push it; he bought twenty florins’ worth of copies
and had them distributed; this Luther hastened to tell Amsdorf with
all the greater satisfaction, seeing that he had heard that others
were expressing their disapproval of the book.[1689] It may be that
the Elector also helped to spread the caricatures. If we may believe
a sermon by Cyriacus Spangenberg, some of Luther’s own friends
nevertheless made representations and begged him “to desist from
publishing such figures, as of late he had caused to be circulated
against the Pope.”[1690] Yet three years after Luther’s death the
fanatical Flacius Illyricus, in bringing out a new edition of the
caricature of the Pope on the sow, with a fresh description of it,
characterised it as a “prophetic picture by Elias the Third of blessed
memory,” and took severely to task all who felt otherwise.[1691] He
has it, that “Many who walk according to the flesh rather than in the
wisdom, piety and retirement of the spirit, did a few years ago [1545]
actually dare to call these and certain other like figures shameless
prints, and fancies of a brainless old fool.” The writer thinks he
has proved, that, “far from being an outcome of wanton stupidity they
proceeded from a ghostly, godly wisdom and zeal.”[1692]
Such attempts at vindication only prove that Luther was not alone in
allowing himself to be dominated, and his mind darkened by such morbid
fancies.
* * * * *
The psychology reflected in these much-debated woodcuts deserves more
careful scrutiny.
Those undoubtedly take too superficial a view of the matter, who, in
their desire to exonerate Luther, refuse to see in these caricatures
anything more than the exuberant effusions of ridicule gone mad. On the
other hand, some of Luther’s enemies are no less wrong in failing to
see that the indignation which speaks from these drawings is meant in
bitter earnest.
If, as is only right, we view this frivolous imagery in the light of
Luther’s mental state at the time and of his whole attitude then, it
will stand out as a sort of confession of faith on the part of the
author, appalling indeed, but absolutely truthful, a picture of his
deepest thoughts and feelings, steeped as they were in his sombre
pseudo-mysticism and devil-craze. The same holds good likewise of the
“Wider das Bapstum” of which this set of illustrations is a sort of
supplement.
The revolting images which rise before his mind like bubbles to the
surface of the fermenting tan, seem to him so true to fact that he
protests that the cuts are in no sense defamatory; “should anyone feel
offended or hurt in his feelings by them I am ready to answer for their
publication before the whole Empire.”[1693]
So much had he brooded over the illustrations, that, as is shown by
his answer to Amsdorf concerning the Furies, he could describe their
every detail with an enthusiasm and minuteness such as few artists
could equal, even when descanting on their own work. In the midst of
his sufferings of body and mind and of all his toil, he finds leisure
to explain to his friend how: The first Fury, Megæra, assists at the
birth of the Pope-Antichrist, because she is the incarnation of hate
and envy and thus shows that the Pope “as the true imitator, nay, ape,
of Satan hinders all that is good”; the second, Alecto, according to
classic teaching, has the special task of symbolising that “the Pope
works all that is evil”; in this he is helped by the “old serpent of
Paradise”; the latter it is who is to blame for all the misfortunes
of the human race from the beginning, and for still “daily filling
the world with new misfortunes by means of the Pope, Mohamed, the
Cardinals, the Archbishop of Mayence, etc.; and who simply can’t
cease its sad abominations”; as for the third Fury, Tisiphone, she
is passive, she arouses God’s anger, whereby the tyrants and the
wicked, as, for instance, Cain, Saul and Absalom, are punished for
the doings of the two other Furies, etc. “Such is the devil of those
possessed and of the insane, who also blaspheme God. This Fury rules
more particularly in the opinions of the Pope and the heretics
and in their blasphemous doctrines which fall under a well-merited
reprobation.”[1694]
It is characteristic of the mental attitude of the writer that, in
the very next letter to the same friend, he replies to a question of
Amsdorf’s regarding a fox of abnormal shape recently caught; according
to Luther “it might well portend the end of all things”; this end he
will “pray for and await”; but “of any Council or negotiations” he is
determined “to hear nothing, believe nothing, hope nothing and think
nothing.” “Vanity of vanities,” such is his greeting to Trent; as for
Germany, he can only discern “the spark of the coming fire prepared
for its chastisement, the decline of all justice, the undermining of
law and order and the end of the Empire.” “May God remove us and ours
before the desolation comes!”[1695]
When in such a mood he is convinced that the fresh revelation of
Antichrist in the new engravings constitute a grand service to the
Kingdom of God. He knows already the exalted reward of their faith
prepared for himself and his faithful followers. “I have this great
advantage: my Master is called Shevlimini [see above, vol. iv., p.
46]; He told us: ‘I will raise you up at the last day’; then He will
say: ‘Dr. Martin, Dr. Jonas, Mr. Michael, come forth,’ and summon us
all by our names as Christ says in John: ‘And He calls them all by
name.’ Therefore be not affrighted.” This he said shortly before his
death, reviewing his last publications.[1696]
By a similar misuse of the words of the Bible he invites all his
followers, and that too in the name of the “Spirit,” to do to the Pope
just what the three rude fellows are doing over the inverted tiara of
the Pope in the woodcut entitled “The worship of the Pope as God of
the world.” The verses below the picture are scarcely credible:
“To Christ’s dear Kingdom the Pope has done
What they are doing to his own crown.
Says the Spirit: Give him quits,
Fill it brimful as God bids.”
In the margin express reference is made to the solemn words of God
(Apoc. xviii. 6), where the voice from heaven proclaims judgment on
Babylon: “Render to her as she also hath rendered to you, and double
unto her double according to her works: in the cup wherein she hath
mingled, mingle ye double unto her.”
It would surely be hard to find anywhere so filthy a parody of the
sacred text as Luther here permits himself.
The same must be said of the utter hatred which gleams from every
one of the pictures. Into it we gain some insight from a letter of
Luther’s to Jonas: To console his suffering colleague he has a fling
at the Council of Trent: “God has cursed them as it is written:
‘Cursed be he who trusts in man.’” God, says he, will surely destroy
the Council, legates and all.[1697] Jonas was ailing from stone,
besides being tormented with “dire fancies.”[1698] Luther, who himself
suffered severely from stone, exclaimed to his friend Amsdorf:
Would that the stone would pass into the Pope and these Gomorrhaic
cardinals![1699] A prey to anger and depression, to hatred, defiance
and fear of the devil, he is yet determined to mock at Satan who is
ever at his heels in small matters as well as in great. “I shall,
please God, laugh at Satan though he seeks to deride me and my
Church.”[1700]
Such, judging by the letters he wrote in that period, was the soil
which produced both the caricatures and the “Wider das Bapstum vom
Teuffel gestifft.”
So deeply seated in Luther’s devil-lore, not to say devil-mania,
was the tendency that inspired the woodcuts, that, when once his
conscience pricked him on account of the excessive coarseness of one
of the scenes, he could not be moved to admit any more than that the
drawing might be improved on the score of decency and be made to look
... “more diabolical.” The picture in question was that of the “Birth
of the Pope-Antichrist.” Evidently some friends had protested against
the cynical boldness of the birth-scene. Luther writes to Amsdorf:
“Your nephew George has shown me the picture of the Pope, but Master
Lucas is a coarse painter. He might have spared the female sex as the
creature of God and for the sake of our own mothers. He could well
design other figures more worthy of the Pope, i.e. more diabolical;
but do you be judge.”[1701] Later on, when Amsdorf still betrayed some
scruple, Luther promised him: “I shall take diligent steps should I
survive to see that Lucas the painter substitutes for this obscene
picture a more seemly one.”[1702] So far as is known, however, no such
substitution took place, and still less was the caricature withdrawn
from circulation; nor, again, would it have been at all easy even for
the cleverest painter to produce something “more diabolical.”
For the coarseness of the drawings there exists no shred of excuse.
Luther had indeed never disdained to be coarse and vulgar when this
served his purpose; as time went on, however, his love for the
language of the gutter became much more noticeable, at least in his
controversial writings. To some extent this was the reaction of the
impression he saw produced on the masses by his words, his growing
sense of the power of his tongue being in part responsible for the ever
more frequent recourse he had to this “original” mode of speech; to
some extent too his obscene language and imagery were simply an outcome
of his devil-craze, with which, indeed, they were in perfect keeping.
Certain admirers have sought to excuse Luther by pointing out
that, after all, none of his obscenities was of a nature to excite
concupiscence; this we must indeed allow, but the admission affords but
a small crumb of comfort. Without finding anything actually lascivious,
either in the draughtsmanship of these pictures or in the filthy
language to which Luther was generally addicted, one can still regret
his “peculiarity” in this respect.
That, in those days, people were more inured than our refined
contemporaries to the controversial use of such revolting coarseness
has been stated and is indeed perfectly true. The fact is, however,
that what contributed to harden the people was the frequency with
which the Protestants in their polemics had recourse to the weapon of
obscenity. Who had more responsibility in the decline in the sense of
modesty and propriety among German folk than the Wittenberg writer
whose works enjoyed so wide a circulation? It has been pointed out
elsewhere that though certain Catholic writers of that age, and even of
earlier times, were not entirely innocent of a tendency to indelicacy,
Luther outdid them all in this respect.[1703] Nevertheless, however
great the lack of refinement may have been, though the lowest classes
then may have been even more prone than now to speak with alarming
frankness of certain functions of the body, and though even the better
classes and the writers may have followed suit, yet so far did Luther
venture to go, that the humanist Willibald Pirkheimer was expressing
the feeling of very many when he said, in 1529: “Such is the audacity
of his unwashed tongue that Luther cannot hide what is in his heart; he
seems either to have completely gone off his head or to be egged on by
some evil demon.”[1704]
As day is to night so is the contrast between such strictures and the
praise bestowed on Luther by his own side, not indeed so much for
the works last mentioned as for his literary labours in general. The
unprejudiced historian must admit that there is some ground for such
praise (cp. xxxiv., 2). That Luther’s popular writings must contain
much that is really instructive and edifying amidst a deal of dross is
surely clear from the favourable reception they met even in quarters
not at all blinded by prejudice. In what has gone before we ourselves
have repeatedly dwelt on the better elements often to be found in the
non-polemical portion of Luther’s literary legacy.