AT THE GRAVE
1. Luther’s fame among the friends he left behind
The first panegyrics on Luther, the funeral orations and encomiums
which were immediately printed and scattered broadcast through Germany
constitute an historical phenomenon in themselves. They show orators and
writers alike fascinated as it were by Luther’s overpowering personality,
and they, in turn, fascinated many thousands who read them. Jonas was
the first to deliver at Eisleben an address in his honour, viz. in the
afternoon of Feb. 19; this was followed by another by Cœlius previous to
the departure of the funeral procession on Feb. 20; whilst Bugenhagen,
too, delivered one of his own on the 22nd, after the arrival of the body
at the Schlosskirche. The rhetorical effusions of Jonas and Cœlius, who
had been present with Luther at the end, likewise Bugenhagen’s address,
and the account of Luther’s death which they published in conjunction
with Aurifaber, are all crammed with incredible praises. Melanchthon,
too, forgetful of all the pain he had suffered at Luther’s hand and
shutting his eyes to all his weaknesses, paid his tribute of honour to
Luther’s memory, first in a notice affixed at the University, then in a
Latin funeral-oration which he delivered in the Schlosskirche as soon as
Bugenhagen had had his say, and, again, in a short writing on his friend
and master which he prefixed to the second volume of the Latin edition of
Luther’s works (1546).
“Alas, gone is the chariot and horseman of Israel” (2 Kings ii.
12), so Melanchthon said in the notice of Luther’s death, which he
addressed to the students,[1446] “who ruled the Church in this the old
age of the world. For it was not human sagacity that discovered the
doctrine of the forgiveness of sins and trust in the Son of God, but
God revealed it through this man whom He raised up before our eyes.”
In his funeral oration he extols the departed as one of the long line
of Divine tools starting in Old Testament times, a man taught by God
and exercised in severe spiritual combats, of a friendly nature, not
at all passionate or quarrelsome and only inclining to be violent
when such medicine was needed by the ailments of the age. “Whatsoever
things are true, whatsoever modest, whatsoever just, whatsoever holy,
lovely and of good fame” according to the Apostle (Philip. iv. 8) had
been exemplified in him. Now, however, he had gone to join the company
of the Prophets in heaven, etc.
According to the similar address delivered by Jonas[1447] only at the
end of the world would people clearly see what “splendid revelations
he had had when first he began to preach the Evangel.” Luther had
the “Spirit of God in rich and exalted measure,” he was “a past
master in spiritual combats.” “In the hour of death he had cast all
his cares on Christ.” In the spirit of Luther, who was equal to Noe
in his words and preaching, Jonas prophesied, that what he had once
said would be fulfilled, viz. that, after his death, “all Papists and
monks would be scattered and brought low”; Luther’s death, like that
of all the prophets, would have in it “a special power and efficacy
to overcome the godless, stiff-necked and blinded Papists,” nay,
before two years were over, they would all be overtaken by a “gruesome
chastisement.”—To such an extent had Luther’s pseudo-mysticism and
fanatical expectations infected his pupils. Nevertheless Luther’s
admissions concerning the imperfection of his work were also taken
over by his pupils. “In spite of the great and bright light of the
Evangel,” so Jonas confesses in his funeral oration, “the world has
reached such a pass that now among many are found not only the common
sins and shortcomings but, to boot, blasphemy, disorders, defiance,
or deliberate persistence in the grossest vices; yet no one is ready
to acknowledge that he is a sinner.” The sermon in question was again
preached by Jonas at Halle later on.
Cœlius, in his funeral oration, declared that no one before Luther had
known how to call upon God, how to look up to Him in trouble, or what
a man ought to do, or how he was to serve God. But “by him God has
unlocked Holy Writ which formerly was a book closed and sealed.” The
dear man had been a “real Elias and Jeremias; he was a new John the
Baptist, preaching the great day of the Lord, or else an Apostle.”
According to Bugenhagen’s sermon,[1448] the deceased was “undoubtedly
the Angel of whom it is written in the Apocalypse (xiv.): ‘And I saw
an angel flying through the midst of heaven having the eternal Gospel
to preach.’” Through him, “the God-sent reformer of the Church,” God
the Father has “revealed” the great mystery of His Beloved Son Jesus
Christ.
These eulogies, which owe their fulsomeness partly to the bad taste of
the humanistic period, were strong in their effects on men’s minds; the
preachers, moreover, who had been trained or appointed by Luther, were
anxious thereby to strengthen their own position and to show their scorn
for Popery. Even in the above addresses Luther and what he stood for is
contrasted with “the oppression and tyranny of the hateful Popedom” from
which the world had been delivered. (Bugenhagen.)
In many of the churches Luther’s picture was hung up with the
inscription: “The Holy Dr. Martin Luther (‘_Divus et sanctus_,’ etc.).”
Writings were published bearing such titles as “Luther, the Prophet,”
“Luther, the Wonder-Worker.” All sorts of medals were struck in his
honour, one with the inscription: “_Propheta Germaniæ, Sanctus Domini_,”
others with Luther’s motto: “_Pestis eram vivus_,” etc.[1449] Even in
his lifetime pictures appeared in reprints of his works where he was
represented with a halo and with the Dove, as the symbol of the Holy
Ghost, descending on him from heaven.[1450]
The most popular biography of Luther was that of Johann Mathesius, who
died as pastor of Joachimsthal in Bohemia. He met with a success such as
can be accounted for only by the passion in favour of Wittenberg then
prevalent in Protestant Germany. The appellations so common in later
years, Luther the “Wonder-Worker,” “Chosen Instrument,” “True German
Prophet,” “Man full of Grace and the Holy Spirit,” are to be met with
already in the “Historien” of Mathesius, delivered originally as sermons
and first published in 1566. In these “stories” he has interwoven in
Luther’s laurel wreath much that is untrue or doubtful, for instance,
the saying attributed to Erasmus and since frequently quoted on his
authority, is spurious, viz. “that, when Dr. Luther explains Scripture,
on one of his pages there is more reason and common sense than in all
the tomes and scrolls of Scotists, Thomists, Albertists, Nominalists
and Sophists.”[1451] Mathesius wishes people “not to be forgetful of
so worthy a man’s life and testimony,” yet even he gives us a glimpse
into the bitter controversies now already raging among the Lutherans; he
points out how “God loves the peacemakers and calls them His own dear
children while He sends adrift all who delight in war and strife.” He
himself had some experience of the antagonism between the progressive
party and the more old-fashioned Lutherans. Indeed one of the principal
reasons why he wrote the “Historien” was because “many an ungrateful
fellow actually forgets this great man and his faithful industry and
toil.” He already sees the “Wittenberg cisterns” defiled by “all kinds of
brackish, foul, baneful, muddy and uncleanly waters.”[1452]
Though historically the tales of “the pious panegyrist,” as
Maurenbrecher a Protestant calls him,[1453] cannot be said to rank
very high, yet the energy with which he claims a thoroughly German
character for Luther and for his own biographical work was pleasing
to many. He uses the term “Prophet of the Germans” _ad nauseam_,
even in the Preface addressed to the Wittenberg authorities; God had
bestowed Luther “as a gift on us, the descendants of Japhet, and the
Holy German Empire in these last days”; he, Mathesius, had a living
“under the Bohemian Crown,” but as a German by birth he had “preached
officially in his mother tongue” and “of set purpose, had these
_German_ sermons, to the honour of Our God and the blessed _German_
Theology, published in German in order that some at least in Germany
might be reminded what this blessed _German_ Church in the Kingdom of
Bohemia thought of the doctrines of this great _German_ Prophet.”
By his exertions for the preservation of the Table-Talk Mathesius also
sought to glorify Luther’s memory.
An influential group of panegyrists, who, like Mathesius, noted down,
collected, or published Luther’s utterances, comprises Cordatus,
Dietrich, Rörer, Schlaginhaufen, Lauterbach and, to pass over
others, Aurifaber, Stangwald and Selnecker. Cordatus, who went as
Superintendent to Stendal in 1540, compared Luther’s sayings to the
oracles of Apollo.[1454] Aurifaber, one of those present at Luther’s
death at Eisleben, became in 1551 Court Chaplain at Weimar and in 1566
pastor at Erfurt. In the “Colloquia,” or Table-Talk, which he caused
to be printed at Eisleben in 1566, he says, in the Preface addressed
to the Imperial towns of Strasburg, Augsburg, Ulm, Nuremberg, etc.,
that Luther was the “Venerable and highly enlightened Moses of the
Germans.”
Like Aurifaber and Stangwald (1571), Selnecker (1577) took for the
motto of his edition of the Table-Talk the words of Christ, “Gather up
the fragments that remain,” etc. (John vi. 12); he further embellished
his collection with the words:
“What, full of God’s spirit, Luther once taught
That doth his godly flock now hold fast.”[1455]
Of the Lutheran die-hards who were never weary of fighting for the
true olden spirit of Luther in opposition to the Protestant critics
who very soon sprang up, the most eminent were Flacius Illyricus,
Justus Menius, Nicholas Amsdorf and Cyriacus Spangenberg.
Concerning the father of the latter, Johann Spangenberg, Luther, in
the last days of his life, had advised and “faithfully exhorted, that
he should be called as Superintendent [to Eisleben].”[1456] Full of
boundless admiration for Luther his son Cyriacus wrote his “Theander
Lutherus,” where he says that the latter was the “greatest prophet
since the days of the Apostles” and a “real martyr,” particularly
because the devil had persecuted him so greatly. In consideration of
this he canonises him and speaks of him as “St. Luther.”[1457] In the
preface he assures us that it was only Luther’s holy and persistent
prayers that had hitherto spared Germany the perils of war which
would otherwise have overtaken her. The significant and lengthy title
of this remarkable work runs as follows: “Theander Lutherus; of the
worthy man of God, Dr. M. Luther’s spiritual Household and Knighthood,
of his office as Prophet, Apostle and Evangelist; How he was the third
Elias, a new Paul, the true John, the best Theologian, the Angel of
Apocalypse xiv., a faithful witness, wise pilgrim and true priest,
also a good labourer in our Lord God’s vineyard, all summed up in
one-and-twenty sermons.”
Flacius Illyricus, the Wittenberg Professor famous for his connection
with the “Magdeburg Centuries,” made Luther’s exemplary life play its
part among the “Marks of the true Religion.” He proves in the book
bearing this title the advantages of Protestantism over Popery by the
mark of holiness, and by the pious life of some of the New Believers
so different from that of the Catholics, and, in so doing, he appeals
boldly to the founder of Protestantism. Whatever was alleged against
Luther was false; “the Papists have never ceased from spreading these
untruths, particularly in distant lands where the true state of the
case is not so well known.”[1458]
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.”[1459] 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.[1460]
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.[1461]
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.”[1462]
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.[1463]
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.[1464]
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.[1465]
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.[1466]
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,[1467]
or a man like the historian Wolfgang Mayer,[1468] or the learned
and sharp-witted Kilian Leib, Prior of Rebdorf,[1469] 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[1470]—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!”[1471] 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!”[1472] “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.”[1473]
With the oft-repeated words: “_Pestis eram vivus, moriens ero mors
tua Papa_,”[1474] 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?”[1475] He
even goes so far as to prophesy: “One day they will cry: Oh, that
Luther were still living!”[1476] He parades before the Catholics the
services 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.”[1477] “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.’”[1478]
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.”[1479]
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!”[1480] 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.”[1481]
“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.”[1482]
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.’”[1483]
He was highly elated at the thought that the powerful protectors
of the Church had “not been able to put him down.”[1484] All their
success he regards as mere “devil’s dung”;[1485] 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.”[1486] 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!”[1487]
“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.”[1488]
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.”[1489] “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.”[1490]
In his scorn for those who vex him and write against him he is
determined to “put out his horns”,[1491] He will be a “huntsman and be
after his quarry”; “I hunt the Pope, the cardinals, bishops, canons
and monks.”[1492]
Of the defiance of the “hard Saxon”[1493] 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”;[1494] 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.”[1495]
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.”[1496]
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).[1497] “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.”[1498] It was this rôle of Evangelist that the
better class of opponents felt disposed to examine.
“Because you call yourself an evangelist and proclaimer of the Gospel,”
so Duke George of Saxony wrote in his reply to Luther, “it would have
better beseemed you to punish with mildness whatever abuses existed
therein, and to instruct the people kindly.”[1499] On the contrary, so
the Duke urges, his behaviour is anything but that of an “evangelist,”
what with his passionate abuse and vituperation, and his criminal breach
of the public peace and religious unity: “Where peace and unity are not,
there there is neither the true faith, which indeed is not to be found in
you.”
* * * * *
It is worth while to consider what response would have been awakened in
the minds of serious Catholic visitors to Luther’s grave by his startling
success.
Those who to-day claim unqualified “greatness” for Luther are usually
thinking of the astonishing success of his undertaking, and of his
influence and that of his labours on posterity. They boast: “He tore his
age from its moorings,” “he reduced to ruins what for a thousand years
had been held in honour”; “he gave a new trend to civilisation.”
A man of insight could, however, explain otherwise many of these effects.
The result of Luther’s preaching was undoubtedly very great. But, in the
first place, this result was not solely due to the efforts of one man but
was rather the outcome of the circumstances in which that man lived, the
product of divers factors in the history of the times.
His contemporaries saw full well that Luther, with his fiery temperament,
had merely assumed the direction of a spirit that had long began to
pervade the clergy, regular and the secular, leading them to cast aside
the duties of their calling and to seek merely honours and emoluments.
They were also aware of the oppressive burden of abuses the Church had
to carry and of the far-reaching disorders in public life. Society was
now anxious to liberate itself from the Church’s tutelage which had grown
irksome. Everyone was conscious of the trend of the day towards freedom,
individuality and new outlooks. Both the Empire and the olden idea of the
Christian nations united as in one family were in process of dissolution
owing to political and social trends quite independent of Luther’s work.
His contemporaries saw with deep misgiving how Luther’s new doctrine and
his innovations generally were strengthening all these elements, and
setting free others of a similar nature which could not fail to help on
his work. Nevertheless the elements of unrest, without which he would
have been unable to achieve anything, were not of his making.[1500]
We can still judge to-day, from the writings of those who lived at that
time, of the feelings, in some cases enthusiastic in others full of fear,
with which they listened to the Wittenberger as he proclaimed war on
all that was obsolete, or demanded in fiery language the reform of the
Church, for which all were anxious.[1501] The more alluring and seductive
the very word “reformation,” the more effective was the help proffered
for the overthrow of the Church under the cloak of this watchword. In
the field of learning there were the humanists who had fallen foul of
Catholic authority and the spirit of the past; in the lower strata of
society there were the peasants who aimed at bettering their position;
among the burghers and in official circles hopes were entertained of an
increase of authority at the expense of the bishops, now regarded with
ever-increasing jealousy; finally the nobles and knights were allured
by the prospect of the success of a revolt under the banner of the
Evangel which would redound to the advantage of their caste. What chiefly
brought Luther’s star into the ascendant was, however, the protection he
obtained from the princes. Without his Elector, without the Landgrave of
Hesse, without the allies of Schmalkalden, in a word, without political
authority on his side, all the force of his words would have availed
nothing, or at least would never have sufficed to enable him to found a
new Church. The Princes who helped to spread his teaching and reformation
saw the lands and privileges of the Church falling into their lap, and
what was even more, the extension of their sphere of influence to the
spiritual domain where, so far, the Pope and the bishops had reigned
supreme.
Thus in his success those well versed in the conditions of the times
recognised for the most part only the working of natural causes.
Luther, as all were aware, shortly after having been put under the Ban
was wont to say that the movement he had begun was something so great
and wonderful that it could not but owe its success to the manifest
intervention of God. “It cannot be,” he exclaimed in 1521, “that
a man should of himself be able to start such a work and carry it
through.”[1502] He was fond of saying he wished no earthly means to be
used for arriving at the goal. Yet, in this very statement of 1521, for
instance, he refers “to the sermons and writings” by which he had “begun”
to disclose the Papists’ “knavery and trickery.” His burning words indeed
acted as a spark flung on the inflammable material accumulating for so
long. Anyone aware of the condition of Germany and of the artifices by
which the author of the gigantic apostasy sought to consolidate his
position at Wittenberg by means of the Court, and at the same time to
excite the fanaticism of the masses, would feel but little impressed by
Luther’s appeal to the apparent simplicity of his writings and sermons,
as being out of all proportion to the unexampled success he attained.
He was indeed heard to say that he attributed everything to the words
and the divine power of Christ: “Look what it has done in the few years
that we have taught and written such truths. How has the Papists’ cloak
shrunk and become so short!… What will it be when these words of Christ
have threshed with His Spirit for another two years?”[1503] These words
were, however, spoken the year after the publication of those fearfully
violent writings: “On the Popedom at Rome” (against Alveld), “To the
German Nobility,” “On the Babylonish Captivity,” “On the Freedom of a
Christian Man” and “Against the Bulls of End-Christ.” When uttered, his
seductive writing “On the Monastic Vows” was already there to unbar the
gates through which crowds of doubtful helpers would flock to join him.
Catholic polemics of that day, in order to demolish the objection arising
from the marvellous spread of Lutheranism, set themselves to examine
the relation between the new dogmas and their dissemination. Luther’s
doctrine, as they frequently pointed out, was bound to secure him a large
following.
In this particular it was easy enough to prove that it was not merely
the “greatness” of the man which drew such crowds to him. The persistent
vaunting of the universal priesthood, the right bestowed on all of
judging of Scripture, the abandoning of the outward and inward Word to
the feelings of the individual, the sweet preaching of a faith which “no
sin could harm,” the denial of the merit of good works, the assertion
that, not they, but only faith was required for salvation, and, not to
speak of many other points, his contemptuous and unjust strictures on the
Church and her doings, all this—human nature being what it is—could not
fail for a time to help the cause of the New Evangel of freedom, and,
under the conditions then prevailing, to assure it a real triumph.
This Evangel came upon Germany at a time when the Church’s life was in a
state of decay, when the adequate religious instruction of the young was
neglected by the Church, and when the dioceses were for the most part
governed by younger sons of princely or noble houses, who were quite
unfitted for their spiritual work. It is noteworthy that the defenders of
the Church had very little good to say of the bishops.[1504]
Of the new preachers and promoters of Luther’s Reformation a large
number was composed of apostate clergy and escaped monks and nuns whom
Luther had won over. It was plain enough that it was no such “great and
immortal” work as he claimed, to have attracted such people to his party
thanks to theories which, while seeming to calm the conscience, really
flattered the senses, for instance, by what he said on celibacy, vows
and priestly ordination. “Do not seek to deny that you are a man, with
flesh and blood; hence leave God to judge between the valiant angel-like
heroes [those religious who were faithful to the Church] and the sickly,
despised sinners [whom they upbraided as apostates].[1505]… Chastity is
beyond healthy nature, let alone sinful nature.… There is no enticement
so bad as these commands [of celibacy] and vows, forged by the devil
himself.” Youthful religious were to be dragged out of their monasteries
as quickly as possible, and priests were to learn that theirs was but a
“Carnival ordination.” “Holy Orders are all jugglery and in God’s sight
they have no value.”[1506]
Hence contemporaries, considering events from the standpoint just
described, must needs have told themselves that Luther’s success,
unexpected and astounding as it was, could not after all be laid down to
the “greatness” of any one single man.[1507]
What, moreover, must have been the thoughts of the observer regarding the
permanence of Luther’s work who lived to see the master’s own Lutheranism
falling to pieces, according to the statements of his most zealous
admirers,[1508] as soon as he was dead? Luther himself almost seemed
ready to ring down the curtain on the premature termination of the great
tragedy of which he could not but despair.[1509]
* * * * *
In the very year of Luther’s death Cochlæus passed in review the havoc
wrought in the Church, embodying his observations in the work he had just
finished and was to publish three years later, viz. his “_De Actis et
Scriptis Lutheri_.”
These pages seem still to tremble with the excitement of the terrible
period they describe. It is impressive to hear this voice of the
Catholic spokesman coming as it were from Luther’s tomb and telling of
the devastation of the storm raised by the Wittenberg professor. As
Kawerau says, Cochlæus himself could point to a life “which, year after
year, ever since 1521 had been devoted feverishly to the ecclesiastical
debates of the day in which he was so keenly concerned and consumed
in ceaseless controversy [with Lutheranism].”[1510] The grey-headed
scholar, “illuminated and inspired as he was by the truest spirit of
Christianity,”[1511] had once in 1533 declared: “Whatever I write now or
at any time against Luther, I write for the glory of God, the service of
the truth and the good of my neighbour. For I believe firmly that Luther
is a malicious liar, heretic and rebel and I can find nothing but this in
his books and in my own conscience.… I am not, however, bitter or hostile
to Luther personally, but merely to his wickedness and vices. Were he to
desist I would gladly go and fetch back so learned a man from Rome or
Compostella and give him my love and my service.”[1512]
Cochlæus calls to mind first of all the course of public events in
Germany. At Ratisbon, where he was staying, the Diet of 1546 was
opened with great pomp by Charles V at the very time Cochlæus was
penning the Preface to his work. He relates how the same Kaiser had
declared at the Diet of Worms in 1521 in the edict against Luther
that “his writings contain hardly anything but food for dissensions,
schism, war, murder, robbery, conflagrations, and a great apostasy
of the Christians.”[1513] “The times are grave and perilous,” so his
warning had run: “Oh, that they may not mean the disgrace of our
country!”[1514] Now, however, Cochlæus sees with grief that “Luther
has brought nearly all Germany into shame and confusion.” “Our
fatherland has lost all its former beauty,” he exclaims, “and its
Imperial power is shattered.” He trembles at the sight of the dangers
within and without.[1515]
“The mischief caused by Luther’s revolt is so great that it is out
of comparison worse than the effects of even the most unhappy war.
Never indeed in the whole of history have the miseries of war caused
such injury to Christendom as the blows dealt us by this heresy.” In
its consequences it was worse than the triumphal progress of Arianism
in early Christian times. He instances the Peasant Rebellion and the
frightful destruction that followed in its wake; also the machinations
of political alliances, hostile alike to the Church and the State, the
loosening of the common bonds that unite the Christian peoples, and
the decline of the authority of the rulers, which was “attacked and
dragged in the mire by Luther and thus rendered contemptible in the
eyes of the masses.”[1516]
Even more loudly does he bewail the ruin of so many immortal souls;
owing to Luther, countless numbers have been torn from the bosom of
the Mother Church, founded by Christ, and set on the road to eternal
damnation. No tears could suffice to bewail this the greatest of all
misfortunes. Piety has declined everywhere and the new preaching
of faith alone has lamed the practice of good works. “From every
class and calling the former zeal for good works has fled.” He also
ruthlessly describes the effect of Luther’s doctrines and example on
Catholics. “The clergy no longer do their duty in celebrating the
Sacrifice of the Mass and reciting the Church’s office and Hours; to
the monks and nuns their Rule is no longer as sacred as it used to
be. The charity of the rich, the rulers, and the great has dried up,
the people no longer flock to divine worship, their respect for the
priesthood, their benevolence and pity for the poor are coming to an
end. Discipline and decorum are tottering everywhere and have fared
worst of all in our family life. We see about us a dissolute younger
generation, which, owing to Luther’s suggestions and his constant
attacks on all authority ecclesiastical and secular, has cast off
all shame and restraint. On anyone admonishing them they retort with
a falsely interpreted Bible text, an invention of pure wantonness,
such as ‘increase and multiply,’ etc. So far have things already gone
that virginity and continence have become a matter of disgrace and
suspicion.” In even darker colours does he paint the sad picture of
the moral decline among the Protestants: Morals are trampled under
foot, reverence and fear of God have been extinguished, obedience
has become a byword, boldness in sinning gains the upper hand and
“freedom” of the worst kind reigns supreme.[1517]
Full of grief he comes at last to speak of the man who was responsible
for all this misery. Bugenhagen had boasted of Luther’s prophecy
that, if in life he had been the Papacy’s plague, in death he would
be its death. But the Papacy still lives and will continue to live
because Christ’s promise stands. “Luther, however, was the plague of
our Germany during his lifetime … and, alive or dead, he was his own
plague and destruction.”[1518]
“Woe,” so he concludes, “to his godless panegyrists who call evil
good and good evil, and confuse darkness with light, and light with
darkness!”[1519]
3. Luther’s Fate in the First Struggles for his Spiritual Heritage
Luther’s reputation was to suffer a sudden and tragic blow owing to the
success of the Imperial arms in the War of Schmalkalden.
Hardly had the grave closed over him than, in the following year, after
the battle of Mühlheim on April 24, 1547, won with the assistance of
Duke Maurice of Saxony, the Kaiser’s troops entered Wittenberg. A
notable change took place in the public position of Lutheranism when the
vanquished Elector, Johann Frederick, was forced to resign his electoral
dignity in favour of Maurice and to follow the Emperor as a captive. His
abdication and the surrender of his fortresses to the Emperor was signed
by him on May 19 in Luther’s own city of Wittenberg. The Landgrave of
Hesse too found himself forced at Halle to submit unconditionally to the
overlords of the Empire and to see Duke Henry of Brunswick released from
captivity and honoured by the Emperor in the same city.
The dreaded Schmalkalden League, Luther’s shield and protection for so
many years, was, so to speak, annihilated over night.
Luther’s theological friends were also made to feel the consequences.
Flacius, after the taking of Wittenberg, fled for a time to Brunswick.
George Major, Luther’s intimate friend and associate, also escaped, but
returned later. Amsdorf was obliged to give up the bishopric of Naumburg
of which he had assumed possession, hand it over to the lawful Bishop
Julius von Pflug, and hasten to Magdeburg, the new stronghold of the
Lutheran spirit.
It is true that Luther’s cause soon recovered, at least politically
speaking, from the defeat it had suffered in the War of Schmalkalden;
the wounds inflicted on it in the theological quarrels among themselves
of its own representatives were, however, more deep and lasting. Here
Luther’s prediction was indeed fulfilled to the letter, viz. that his
pupils would be the ruin of his doctrines.
_The Osiandric, Majorite, Adiaphoristic and Synergistic Controversies_
The theological warfare which followed on Luther’s decease opened with
the Osiandric controversy which arose from the modifications of Luther’s
idea of justification introduced subsequent to 1549 by Andreas Osiander,
pastor and professor of theology at Königsberg. After Osiander’s death in
1552 the struggle was carried on by the Court preacher Johann Funk who
held like views. Johann Brenz also defended Osiander’s opinion, whereas
Melanchthon, Flacius Illyricus, Johann Æpinus, Joachim Westphal, Joachim
Mörlin and others were opposed to it. Duke Albert of Prussia was for
a long time a patron of Osiander’s doctrine, but was persuaded later
to alter his views, and his Court preacher Funk did likewise. The old
Lutherans, however, continued the struggle against Funk and, in 1566,
owing to the charges brought against him by the Estates of abusing his
position and of having violently championed “heretical doctrines,” he was
beheaded.[1520] Osiander, however, the author of this new “heresy,” had
himself been by no means wanting in Lutheran zeal where Catholics were
concerned. Already in 1549 he wrote a tract against the Interim entitled:
“On the new Idol and Antichrist at Babel,” in which he lashed those who
“were sneaking back to Antichrist under cover of the Interim.”
The second, or Majorite controversy broke out at Wittenberg itself, and
like the ones which followed was called forth by the opposition of
the Lutheran zealots to any Melanchthonian modifications of Luther’s
doctrines. George Major, professor at Wittenberg, and subsequently
Superintendent at Eisleben, backed by Justus Menius, Superintendent
at Gotha, had the courage to declare that works were necessary for
salvation, and that, without works, no one could be saved. For this he
and Menius were branded as “heretics” by Flacius Illyricus, Nicholas
Amsdorf, Johann Wigand, Joachim Mörlin and Alexius Prætorius. It was in
the midst of this passionate wrangle, which deeply agitated the ranks
of the preachers and disturbed the congregations, that Amsdorf, with a
determination and defiance equal to Luther’s own went to the extremes
of publishing his tract entitled “That the proposition ‘good works are
harmful to salvation,’ is a sound and Christian one.”[1521] Flacius
brought a writing against Major to a close with the pious wish that
Christ would speedily crush the head of the serpent. Major, the confidant
of Luther whom he had once despatched to attend the religious Conference
at Ratisbon, was now obliged to give in; he made a shameful recantation.
Menius, however, was denounced to the preachers and people as a “Papist,”
and, in spite of his weak compliance, was unable to maintain his position
against the inquisition put into motion by the higher powers. Although
he resigned his office as Visitor and submitted patiently to a reprimand
from the Court, he was obliged to leave the land; he besought the
sovereign in vain for protection against his theological adversaries and
freedom to communicate with the “dear gentlemen” at Wittenberg. The Town
Council of Gotha was forbidden to give him a testimonial to the purity
of his doctrine, and he himself, in spite of his protest that he was as
much heir to Luther’s doctrine as Flacius, was summoned to take his trial
before a sort of religious Synod at Eisenach in 1556, which also ousted
him from his Superintendency. “He died on Aug. 11, 1558, from the effects
of what he had undergone.”[1522]
In the third great controversy, the Adiaphoristic, Flacius Illyricus
behaved with great violence, indeed his extreme Lutheran views were the
cause of the quarrel which in itself well illustrates the pettiness
and acrimony of those concerned in it. The question under dispute was
whether certain “indifferent matters” (ἀδιάφορα) sanctioned in the
Augsburg Interim of 1547 might be allowed in Protestant circles even
though Luther during his lifetime had frowned on them. Under the Elector
Maurice the theologians and Estates of the Saxon Electorate had answered
in the affirmative. This answer embodied in the so-called “Leipzig
Interim,” was firmly contradicted by Flacius. It is true that what was in
question was not only ceremonies, images, hymns and such-like external
things but also the rites of Confirmation and Extreme Unction, and, in
a certain sense, the use of Penance, the celebration of a kind of Mass
and the veneration of Saints. Flacius was supported by Nicholas Gallus,
Johann Wigand, Nicholas Amsdorf, Joachim Westphal, Caspar Aquila, Johann
Aurifaber, Anton Otto and Matthæus Judex. These poured forth a stream
of angry tracts against the opposite party, the Wittenbergers, who,
however, defended themselves with a will, viz. against Melanchthon,
Bugenhagen, George Major, and Paul Eber, and their friends elsewhere,
such as the Provost of Magdeburg and Meissen, Prince George of Anhalt,
Bernard Ziegler and Johann Pfeffinger of Leipsig, Justus Menius of Gotha,
etc. Even the use of lights on the altar and of surplices were to these
zealots “Popish abominations” and a sign of the abandoning of all that
Luther had won; they even complained, though untruly, that the Wittenberg
theologians no longer declared the Pope to be Antichrist.[1523]
Bugenhagen, Luther’s right hand man at Wittenberg, had to hear himself
charged by Flacius, Amsdorf and Gallus with having denied and falsified
Luther’s doctrines and with teaching something not far short of Popery.
These Adiaphorists, wrote Amsdorf, “in the name and under the semblance
of the Word of God, seek to persuade us to worship the Antichrist at
Rome, the Whore of Babylon and the Beast on which she is seated (Apoc.
xvii.).” Such dangerous men he brands as “belly servers” “who seek to
make terms with the world.” He himself on the other hand was ready to
meet the contempt of the world for the falling off in the number of
Luther’s true followers, hence on the title-page of the new edition of
Luther’s works, which he commenced when the quarrel was at its height
(1555), he printed the consoling verses: “Fear not, little flock, for
it hath pleased the Father to give you a Kingdom” (Luke xii. 32), and
“In the world you shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have
overcome the world” (John xvi. 33).[1524] Towards the end of the Preface
he consoles those who shared his way of looking at things, and, as Luther
had done before, he alludes to the near end of the world, when everything
would be righted.
At the time when the private judgment Luther had preached was thus
bearing fruit we hear Melanchthon groaning: “You see how many teachers
are fighting against us in our own Churches; every day new foes spring
up, as it were, from the blood of the Titans; gladly would I leave these
regions, nay, shake off my mortal coil, to escape the fury of such
men.”[1525] Melanchthon too was accused of indirectly promoting Popery.
An obstinate opponent of his was that very Johann Aurifaber who had been
present at Luther’s death and who subsequently published the Table-Talk.
Melanchthon included him in 1556 among the “unlearned fanatics, men
filled with furious hate, lickspittles at the Court who seek to curry
favour with the populace,” and with whom it was impossible to come to
any understanding.[1526] Aurifaber, like many others of his party, was
dismissed from his post as Court preacher at Weimar, and, subsequently,
when pastor at Erfurt, was excommunicated on account of his teaching,
particularly on original sin. His opponents he persisted in charging with
Popery.
Against any relapse into Popery the Lutherans were well guarded since
1555, by the Religious Peace of Augsburg and its principle: “_Cuius
regio, illius et religio_.” This, however, produced no inward unity,
rather the opposite. The war among the theologians on account of the
“adiaphora” still went on in the Protestant camp. The hopes entertained
of the Protestant Convention at Coswig (1556) suffered shipwreck owing
to Melanchthon’s disinclination to come to terms. Nor did the Conference
at Altenburg (1568) settle things. It was not until 1577-1580 that the
formulas of Concord established a “_modus vivendi_” by leaving to each
individual Church the decision about the “adiaphora.” Flacius himself
was compelled to leave Wittenberg early in the controversy. He went to
Magdeburg, but fell into disgrace on account of his tendency to insist on
the Church’s independence and had to go into exile to Ratisbon, Antwerp,
Frankfurt, Strasburg, wandering about from place to place until, at
last, he, Luther’s most ardent champion, died in want and poverty at
Frankfurt-on-the-Main (1575).
With the Synergistic controversy the name of Flacius is likewise very
closely linked.
Here, however, the question on which minds were divided was a vital one.
Many refused to accept Luther’s rigid doctrine that, in Justification,
the Holy Ghost worked on man as on a senseless block. Johann Pfeffinger
of Leipsig agreed with Melanchthon in assuming some sort of co-operation
(“_synergia_”) of the human will. In this he had the Leipsig Interim on
his side; eventually Victorinus Strigel of Jena, George Major, Paul Eber,
Christian Lasius and others also embraced this view. Against them stood
the zealots like Flacius and Amsdorf, the latter of whom boldly attacked
Pfeffinger’s “_De libertate voluntatis_” and insisted on the unfreedom
of the will. Certain of the theologians of Jena also distinguished
themselves by their opposition to the Synergists.
Flacius Illyricus went to great extremes in his antagonism to
Synergism. He asserted that man was powerless by means of free will
to effect anything in the matter of his salvation because “original
sin was a ‘substance’ for otherwise holiness too would not be a
‘substance’”; the soul was by nature a mirror or image of Satan; it
was itself original sin, and original sin was no mere ‘accident.’ It
was impossible for Luther’s doctrine to be carried to its legitimate
conclusion more ruthlessly than in this theory of Flacius. “It was
utter demonism, was this doctrine of the substantial bedevilment of
human nature.”[1527] At this point, however, Luther’s true friends
drew back: Johann Wigand and Tilman Hesshus, professors at Jena,
withstood Flacius, arguing that he was a traitor to Lutheranism
and that his teaching was Manichæan. Like some others Cyriacus
Spangenberg, then Dean of Mansfeld, was accused of favouring Flacius
and of teaching that Satan had created man, that sin was baptised, and
that pregnant women bore within them young devils. As was usual in
such controversies, the people took an active share in the quarrel.
When the Elector August of Saxony assumed the government of the
Duchy of Saxony, Hesshus and Wigand were deprived of their offices
and driven from the land. Nine Superintendents and 102 preachers
lost their posts at the same time. Hesshus had already tasted exile
as pastor of Magdeburg, when in 1562 the Town Council expelled him
from the town with his wife and child on account of his too emphatic
enforcement of the strictest Lutheranism.
Spangenberg too had to flee when the administrator of Magdeburg called
in the troops against the Flacian preachers. Cruel measures were
used to force the burghers to accept the doctrine professed by the
governor; the bodies of relatives of the Count of Mansfeld were even
exhumed and reinterred in places untainted with “substantialist error.”
Spangenberg’s fate was that of many faithful Lutherans.
Having made his escape to Thuringia disguised as a midwife he there
accepted a position as pastor, but was again driven out in 1590 owing
to the rigid views on original sin he had imbibed from Luther. From
that time he lived by his pen until his death at Strasburg in 1604. He
declared that he was suffering on behalf of the articles on sin and
righteousness, but that he was determined to remain “a staunch old
disciple of Luther’s.” The behaviour of the Wittenberg theologians was
a source of great grief to Spangenberg: They have not only fallen away
from Luther’s doctrine in ten or twelve articles, but also speak of
him in the most unseemly manner: “They call Luther a ‘philauticus,’
i.e. a man who thinks highly of no one but himself, and whom nothing
pleases but what he has himself said or done; item, a ‘philonisticus’
and ‘eristicus,’ a quarrelsome fellow who always insisted he was in
the right, believing no good of anyone, yielding to no one, only
seeking his own honour and unable to endure that anyone else should be
highly thought of.” “His books [so they say] contain things that are
very Manichæan, and others that resemble the old heresies.”[1528]
Nor was Spangenberg doing an injustice to the Wittenberg professors when
he charged them with having thrown Luther over.
_Cryptocalvinism_
At the time when Flacianism was being suppressed by force, a trend
of opinion known as Cryptocalvinism had the upper hand in the Saxon
Electorate where it was causing grave troubles. Such was the name given
to the gradual leavening of the pure Lutheran doctrine with elements
derived from Calvinism. In other Protestant districts on German soil
Calvinism took root openly, and either supplanted Luther’s teaching, or
prevented its springing up. This was the case in the Palatinate, where
the Elector Frederick III exerted his influence in favour of Calvinism
with the help of the Calvinistic professors of Heidelberg Caspar Olevian
and Zacharias Ursinus. The Elector himself told his son-in-law Johann
Frederick of Saxony, that though for more than forty years the “pure
doctrine” of the Evangel and the holy Word of God had been proclaimed,
“little amendment of life had followed,” and, in “excessive eating and
drinking, gambling, avarice, immorality, envy and hatred we almost outdo
the Papists.”[1529] He also said that it was not merely the lack of
morality in Lutheranism that prejudiced him against it, but that he had
decided to introduce Calvinism into his land because he had discovered in
Luther’s writings many errors and contradictions which he must remove,
particularly in his views on the “bodily presence of Christ” in the
Sacrament of the Altar.[1530]
The spirit of criticism which Luther had let loose in the Saxon
Electorate grew among some of the Cryptocalvinists into scepticism,
though they boasted of being great admirers of Luther. This scepticism
was first directed against the mystery of mysteries. Luther’s own
uncertainty regarding the Sacrament of the Altar, his halt mid-way,
and his strange theory of the ubiquity of Christ, were in themselves a
challenge. Around Melanchthon there grouped themselves at Wittenberg
and Leipsig men, who, by a prudent introduction of the Calvinistic
view of the Supper according to which Christ is only received
spiritually, sought to question at the same time two of Luther’s pet
dogmas, viz. the indwelling of Christ in the Bread at the moment
of reception (Impanation) and the ubiquitous albeit spiritualised
bodily presence of Christ. Hardly six years had elapsed since Luther’s
death when the Hamburg preacher, Joachim Westphal, strove to set up
a barrier against the threatening inroad of Cryptocalvinism in his
“_Farrago Opinionum de Cœna Domini_”(1552). The Elector August, who
assumed the reigns of government in the Saxon Electorate (1553-1586),
for quite twenty years of his reign was entirely committed to
Cryptocalvinism. Among the theologians and Court officials who were
responsible for his attitude were, particularly, Melanchthon’s
son-in-law, Caspar Peucer, Court physician to the Elector, the Court
preacher Christian Schütz, Johann Stössel, Superintendent of Pirna
and Privy Councillor Georg Craco, the most influential person in the
government of the Saxon Electorate. A “_Corpus doctrinæ Philippicum_”
was drawn up in 1560 from Melanchthon’s writings by these so-called
“Philippists.” In 1571 a Catechism appeared, which, like the
“_Corpus_” had the Elector’s approval. The doctrine it contained was
endorsed by an assembly of theologians at Dresden in the same year,
and it was intended to enforce it as the true faith throughout the
land.
As might have been expected, the opposition of the “Gnesiolutherans”
against these doings in the Saxon Electorate, the original home of
Lutheranism, was very strong.
Protests were registered by Martin Chemnitz, the “aristarch of
Brunswick” as the opposite party called him, and by the Jena
theologians, as, for instance, Wigand, Hesshus, Johann Frederick
Cœlestinus and Timotheus Kirchner. At Jena the new system was branded
as a “fresh incursion of devilish spirit” and, in a “Warning”
against the Wittenbergers, it was stated: “They want to make an end
of Luther, that is to say, of his doctrine, and at the same time
to appear innocent of so doing.”[1531] Similarly in the following
year, 1572, a writing entitled “Von den Fallstricken” declared:
“They trample Luther’s doctrine under foot, laugh at it, ridicule
it and anathematise it in the most scandalous manner,” etc.[1532]
The Jena divines, so they asserted, were alone in having the true
unalloyed doctrine which they were anxious to keep free from all
the extravagances and errors of the Pope, the Turks, blasphemers of
the Sacrament, Schwenckfeldians, Servetians, Arians, Antinomians,
Interimists, Adiaphorists, Synergists, Majorites, Enthusiasts,
Anabaptists, Manichæans and other sects.[1533]
The divergencies were so considerable and far-reaching, and the
falling away from Luther’s doctrine so great, that Aurifaber, who
boasted of having closed the eyes of his immortal master and of
being soaked in his spirit, prefaced as follows the collection of
the Table-Talk, which he gave to the world in 1566: “His doctrine is
now so despised, and, in the German lands men have become so tired,
weary and sick of it, that they no longer care to hear his name
mentioned, nor do they much esteem the testimony of his books. It has
come about that, if one wishes to find Dr. Martin Luther’s doctrine
pure and unfalsified anywhere in the German lands, one has to put on
strong spectacles and look very closely; this is a dreadful thing to
learn.” Aurifaber has this sole consolation, viz. that Luther, because
he had foreseen this state of things, had proved himself a “true
prophet.”[1534]
Another writer speaks in the following terms of the decay of Luther’s
doctrines and the utter contempt for his person: The endless
benefits Luther brought to Germany—of these the author enumerates
eighteen—those who now profess the Evangel treat with the “most
shocking and gruesome unthank,” doing so not merely by their “evil
life” but by “scorning, decrying and condemning” both his benefits and
his faith. People refuse any longer to follow the great teacher in his
chief doctrines “about the Law and the true knowledge of sin,” “true
justice,” “the distinction between Law and Gospel,” and about the
holy sacraments. “This worthy sendsman of God” meets with “shameful
contempt,” nay, with something worse than contempt, seeing that, “to
boot, he is abused, reviled and defamed by most people,” which “is
all the more hard in that not only his person but also the wholesome
doctrine and divine truth revealed to us by Luther the man of God,
is too often contemptuously rejected by the greater number.” The
author, in his concern, also fears that as people were also bent on
introducing changes in the language “in a few years not much will be
left of Luther’s pure German speech.”[1535]
At the Court at Dresden, however, the opposition to the Cryptocalvinism
described above gradually gathered strength. Finally the Elector August,
too, was won over, partly on political, partly on theological grounds.
As early as 1573 August declared: “It would not take much to make him
send all the rogues to the devil,”[1536] and, on another occasion that,
“for the sake of three persons he would not expose his lands to the harm
wrought by the Sacramentarians.”[1537] When at last an unmistakably
Calvinistic writing by Joachim Curæus on the Supper was published by a
Leipzig printer, known to be well disposed to the Wittenberger party,
the fury of the Elector broke loose and he declared at a meeting at
Torgau “The venomous plant must now be torn up by the roots.”[1538] In
his name the so-called Articles of Torgau denoting more or less a return
to Luther’s doctrines were drawn up by an ecclesiastical court. All the
theologians who refused to subscribe to them were to be “arrested.” On
this the Leipzig theologians all signed the Articles, that they agreed in
their hearts to all the things contained in Luther’s writings including
his controversial writings against the Heavenly Prophets and his “Kurtz
Bekentnis” on the Supper.[1539] Among the many Cryptocalvinists who
submitted without any protest was Nicholas Selnecker, the editor of
Luther’s Table-Talk. In matters of faith he followed the bidding of the
secular authorities, and on one occasion, wrote to the Elector that “he
would gladly crawl on hands and knees to Dresden only to escape the
suspicion which had been cast on him.”[1540]
Among the Wittenbergers, on the other hand, four theologians refused
their assent: “Luther’s books,” they said, “were not positive; sometimes
he wrote one way, sometimes another; besides which there were dirty spots
and objectionable things in his controversial writings.”[1541] Such
was the opinion of Widebram, Pezel, Moller and, particularly, Caspar
Cruciger. The latter, a personal friend of Luther’s, called the Articles
of Torgau “a medley of all sorts of things which Luther himself, had
he been alive, would not have signed.” His fate like that of the three
others was removal from his office and banishment from the country.
Of the four former favourites at Court Stössel the Superintendent though
he craved pardon was kept a prisoner until his death; the Court-preacher
Schütz, in spite of his promise to hold his tongue, was shut up in prison
for twelve years; the Privy Councillor Craco was flung into the filthiest
dungeon of the Pleissenburg at Leipzig, tortured on the rack for four
hours and died with mangled limbs on a miserable layer of straw (March
16, 1575).[1542] Finally Peucer, professor of medicine and history, who,
owing to his influence, had once controlled the University, because he
declared he would not “abjure the doctrine of the Sacrament that had been
rooted in his heart for thirty-three years and adopt Luther’s instead,”
was left pining in a damp, dirty dungeon in the Pleissenburg and was
constantly harried with injunctions “to desist from his devilish errors”
and “not to fancy himself wiser and more learned than His Highness the
Elector and his distinguished theologians, who had also searched into and
pondered over this Article [of the Sacrament].”[1543] He continued to
languish in prison, after the death of his wife, Magdalene, Melanchthon’s
daughter, sorrowing over his motherless children, until after wellnigh
twelve years of captivity he was released at the instance of a prince.
“The behaviour of the Elector and Electress and their advisers towards
him gives us a glimpse into an abyss of injustice, brutality and malice
made all the more revolting by the hypocritical religious cant and
pretended zeal for the Church under which they were disguised. In spite
of all the attempts made of old as well as later to excuse the course of
the so-called cryptocalvinistic controversies, it remains—especially the
case of Peucer—one of the darkest pages in the annals of the Lutheran
Church and of civilisation in the 16th Century.”[1544]
But the intolerance displayed by orthodoxy in that struggle had been
taught it by Luther. As has been shown already, he had urged that,
whoever advocated blasphemous articles, even if not guilty of sedition,
should be put to death by the authorities; the sovereign must take care
that “there is but one religion in each place”; above all, such was the
opinion of his friends,—the sovereign should “put a Christian bit in the
mouth of all the clergy.”[1545]
_The so-called formula of concord (1580)_
Owing partly to the wish of the secular authorities for some clearer
rule, partly to the sight of the confusion in doctrine and the bad
effects of the quarrels on faith, there arose a widespread desire for
greater unity based on some new and thoroughly Lutheran formulary.
The Confession of Augsburg and the Apologia were found insufficient;
they contained no decisions on the countless controversies which had
since sprung up. Thus it came about that “one German province and town
after another attempted to satisfy its desire for unity of doctrine by
means of a confession of faith of its own.… This in itself, in view of
the dismemberment of Germany and the attitude of the Emperor towards
the reformation, would necessarily have resulted in a splitting up of
the Lutheran Church into countless sects unless some means was found
of counteracting individualism and of uniting the Lutherans in one
body.”[1546]
It was, however, the politicians, who, in their own interests, were the
chief promoters of union.
Elector August of Saxony wishful of achieving the desired end “by means
of a princely dictum” led the way in 1576 with the so-called Book of
Torgau.
This work was drawn up by the theologians Jakob Andreæ, Martin Chemnitz,
David Chytræus, Andreas Musculus and Wolfgang Körner. The Book of Torgau
was subsequently revised by Caspar Selnecker and reissued under the title
of the Book of Bergen (1577). It was hoped that it would become the
theological statute-book for all the Protestant Churches; the Protestant
Estates of the Empire were to accept it and it was proposed by the
theologians that all the Lutheran preachers and school-teachers should be
required to give their assent to it.[1547]
Selnecker supported this attempt by referring to the Council of Trent
which had been successfully concluded in 1563. They ought, so he said,
at last to draw up a “common body of doctrine” as an “evangelical
counterblast to the damnable conciliabulum of Trent”; he adds frankly
that this was essential, “in order to check the corruption of morals
amongst the Evangelical people which was growing worse and worse”; at
the same time he wished to see “a united front against the idolatrous
Popedom and its devilish satellites the Jesuits, with all their verminous
following.”[1548]
Hopes of preserving Luther’s work by means of the new Formula had risen
high since Frederick, the zealous Calvinistic Elector of the Palatinate,
had been called away by death in Oct., 1576; his successor, the Elector
Louis held Lutheran views and was determined to make a stand for
Lutheranism.
In spite, however, of the latter’s patronage, and notwithstanding the
efforts of the Electors of Saxony and Brandenburg, the Formula, as Louis
of the Palatinate sorrowfully admitted, was not approved by even one-half
of the Protestant Princes and townships. One of the strongest objectors
was Landgrave William of Hesse. He did not hesitate to abuse Luther’s
memory in the rudest language, and asserted that the latter had written
“contradictory things.”[1549]
The Unionists, not satisfied with their partial success, published on
June 25, 1580, the “_Formula Concordiæ_,” consisting of an “_Epitome_”
and a “_Solida declaratio_.” This document occupies an important place in
the history of Lutheranism.
The doctrines of original sin, unfreedom, justification, the Supper, the
ubiquity of Christ and of the “_communicatio idiomatum_” were taken as
they had been by Luther, though they are often stated with deliberate
ambiguity. Thrusts at Melanchthon, not to speak of Calvin, are found more
particularly in the “_Declaratio_.”
The permanent rift with Calvinism was as strongly emphasised, as that
with the Papacy. One of the propositions taken from the Articles of
Schmalkalden ran: “All Christians ought to shun the Pope and his members
and followers as the kingdom of Antichrist, and execrate it as Christ has
commanded.”[1550]
The cement, however, which was to bind together the antagonistic Lutheran
views and schools was not very durable. The fact that “Melanchthon’s
memory had been completely blotted out,”[1551] or that the Pope had been
condemned afresh, did not suffice to bring people together, nor did much
good come of the smoothing over, toning down and evasions to which it
had been necessary to have recourse in the work in order to arrive at a
written basis of outward unity. Over and above all this it became known
that the Protestant Estates were at liberty to add printed prefaces of
their own to the Concord, in which they might, if they chose, set forth
their own theological position, and thus interpret as they liked the
text of the Concord, so long as they did not interfere with the text
itself.[1552] It was also known that the father of the whole scheme,
Jakob Andreæ, Inspector General of the churches of Saxony, had quite
openly made of the acceptance of the Formula a pure formality and had
told the Nurembergers who showed signs of antipathy that all that was
required was their signature, and that this would not prevent their being
and remaining of the same opinion as before.[1553]
The authors of the Concord, however, displayed such mutual distrust,
nay hatred of each other, as greatly to obscure even the origin of the
Concord and to raise but scant hopes of its future success. Andreæ
bewailed Selnecker’s “diabolical tricks”; he was very well aware that
the latter would be delighted were he (Andreæ) strung up on the gallows.
Selnecker, on the other hand, complained loudly of Andreæ as a dishonest,
egotistical man; he accused Andreæ of calling him: “a damned rascal, a
good-for-nothing scoundrel, an arch-villain and a hellish thief.”[1554]
Andreæ was equally severe in his censure of the church-councillors and
theologians for the part they took in the matrimonial questions: “After
a theologian had dealt with marriage cases two years in the Consistory,”
he said, “he would by that time be well fitted to be appointed keeper of
a brothel.”[1555] We hear an echo of Luther in the coarse language his
followers were in the habit of using against each other.
In spite of all this the Concord constitutes the greatest and most
important step ever taken by Lutheranism to define its position. The year
1580 gave to the Lutheran Churches a certain definite status, though,
among the theologians, the controversies continued to rage as before.
The Concord itself, the supposed new palladium, became a theological bone
of contention. The following years were taken up with wild quarrels about
the Formula of Concord. At Strasburg alone in three years the different
parties hurled against each other approximately forty screeds, full of
vulgar abuse, and the literary feuds had their aftermath in the streets
in the shape of hand-to-hand scuffles between the students and the
burghers. Even at Wittenberg the quarrels went on.
The Calvinistic Count Palatine, Johann Casimir, notorious for his
bloody deeds on behalf of the French Huguenots, instructed one of his
theologians, Zacharias Ursinus, to draw up the so-called “Neustadt
Admonition” in which the adherents of the Concord were accused of “making
an idol of Luther”; it was a mere farce when the Concord professed to
subordinate his books to Holy Scripture, because in reality they were
exalted into a rule of faith and treated as the standard of doctrine;
all subscribers to the Augsburg Confession were wont without exception
to appeal to these writings whatever their opinions were; as a matter
of fact, owing to the errors, exaggerations and contradictions they
contained it was possible to quote passages from Luther’s writings in
support of almost anything. His controversial works, above all, had no
claim to any authority, though it was to these that the followers of the
Concord preferred to appeal. “Here, as his own followers must admit,” so
the “Admonition” declares, “he had been carried away into excitement and
passion which exceeded all bounds and had been guilty of assertions which
contradicted his own earlier declarations, and which he himself had often
been under pressure obliged to withdraw or modify.”[1556]
There was, however, a large party which did not make an “idol” of Luther,
but openly rejected his teaching. It was in this that Aurifaber saw a
fulfilment of Luther’s prophecy of the coming extinction of his doctrine
among his followers. As early as 1566 he said that the master had not
been wrong in his idea, that “the Word of God had seldom persisted for
more than forty years in one place.” “The holy man,” he goes on, “had
frequently told the theologians and his table companions that, though his
teaching had thus far grown and thriven, yet it would begin to dwindle
and collapse when its course was finished. And he had declared that his
doctrine had stood highest and been at its best at the Diet of Augsburg,
anno 1530. But that now it would go downhill.” That, as stated above,
the Word of God seldom persisted in one place for more than forty years
he had proved “by many examples” taken from the times of the Judges,
Kings and Prophets; even the teaching of Christ had not remained pure and
free from error for longer “in the land of the Jews, in Greece, Asia and
elsewhere.”[1557]
4. Mutual Influence of the Two Camps. Growing Strength of the Catholic
Church
One cannot but recognise in the history of the 16th century the
religious influence indirectly exerted on one another by Lutheranism and
Catholicism, an influence which indeed proved advantageous to both.
_Luther’s Churches_
To begin with the phenomena grouped around the Formula of Concord we
may say, that the movement towards greater religious unity, among the
Lutherans was largely stimulated by the brilliant and to Luther’s
adherents quite unexpected example of Catholic unity resulting from the
religious struggle and particularly from the Council of Trent. Selnecker
had insisted that Protestants must endeavour to produce an “evangelical
counterblast” to Catholic theology and the Council.[1558] In the case of
many others too, it was the harmony and united front of the Catholics
at the Council of Trent that served as an incentive to create a similar
positive bond between their own Churches. Many once more mooted the
question of a Protestant General Council, but others, as for instance
Andreæ, pointed out how impossible this would be and what a danger it
would involve of even greater dissensions. It was also of advantage to
the Protestant writers on theology to have a clearly formulated statement
of the Catholic doctrine set before them in the definitions of a General
Council and explained in the “Roman Catechism.” Though Luther had
distorted beyond recognition the Catholic doctrines he attacked, it was
less possible than formerly to doubt—after so solemn a declaration—what
the teaching of the despised Church was, or, with a good conscience, to
deny how alien to her was the anti-Christian doctrine of which she had
been accused. Catholic polemics, too, who were growing both in numbers
and in strength, must necessarily have opened the eyes of many to the
interior continuity, the firm foundation and the logical sequence of
the Catholic propositions and, at least in the case of the learned and
unprejudiced, led them to regret keenly the absence of clearness and
logic on their own side. The latter holds good in particular of the
untenability of the conciliatory Lutheran theology which sought to gloss
over all the contradictions and which had given rise to the phantom of
the Concordia.
“In the work of unifying Protestant theology,” Janssen justly writes,
“no slight service was rendered by the Catholic controversialists and
apologists and also and especially by the Tridentine Council and the
Roman Catechism. Those who opposed to the hurly-burly and confusion of
the new teaching the settled, uniform system of a theology, harmonious
and consistent in all its parts, thereby made manifest to the dissentient
theologians the defects and the glaring discords which Protestantism
presented both in its formal and material principles. The sharply defined
terminology and the wealth of speculative matter which they offered stood
here also in very good stead.”[1559]
This thought also reminds us of the great store of spiritual treasure
that Luther’s Churches carried away with them when they severed their
connection with Mother Church. Who can question that Luther bequeathed
to his Churches much of the heritage of mysteries which Christianity
brought to mankind? Faith in the Holy Trinity; in the Father as Source of
all being; in the Eternal Son as the Redeemer and Mediator; in the Holy
Spirit as the organ of sanctity; again, in the Incarnation, in Christ and
His works, miracles and Resurrection; finally a firm belief in an eternal
reward, in the again-rising of every man and the everlasting life of the
just; in short all the consoling articles of the Apostles’ Creed must
be included amongst the treasures which Luther not only took over from
the olden Church but, in his own fashion, even defended with warmth and
energy against those who differed from him.[1560]
On Catholic principles we may broadmindedly admit that countless
well-meaning men since Luther’s day have found in the doctrine he
preached the satisfaction of their religious cravings. Very many erred
and still err “in good faith” and “with no stubbornness.”[1561] But
wherever there is good faith and an honest conviction of having the best,
there a religious life is possible. “This the Catholic Church does not
deny when she claims to be the one ark of salvation. One would think
that this had been repeated often enough to make any misapprehension
impossible on the part of Protestants. As to how far this result is due
to the Protestant Churches and how far to the Grace of God which instils
into every willing heart peace and blessing, is no open question seeing
that the Grace of God alone is the foundation of a truly religious
life.”[1562]
But if, on the one hand, Lutheranism owes much to the ancient Church,
on the other, we cannot shut our eyes to the fact that the revival in
the Catholic Church during the 16th century was indirectly furthered by
Luther and his work.
_Progress and Gains of Catholicism_
There were Catholic contemporaries who pointed out that the going over
to Luther of many who were members of the Church merely in name, and
whose lives did not correspond with her demands, had a wholesome effect
on the Church’s body. This held good of the monasteries in particular.
In many places relief was felt and a revival of discipline became
possible when those, who had entered the religious life from worldly
motives, took their departure in order, as Luther himself lamented, to
seek greater comfort in the bosom of the new Church. “God has purged
His floor and separated the chaff from the wheat,” wrote the Cistercian
Abbot, Wolfgang Mayer.[1563] Augustine Alveld, the Franciscan, portrayed
with indignant words the evil lives of many apostate monks and declared
with relief that: “Those who were of the same pack and lived among us
have now, thanks be to God, all of them run away from their convents and
institutions.”[1564] In lesser degree the same was true of the laity.
“Indirectly, though very much against his will, Luther helped to promote
the regeneration of the Catholic Church by means of the Council of
Trent.”[1565] It was his apostasy which made possible that gathering
of the Bishops which hitherto external obstacles, shortsightedness,
indolence and worldly aims had prevented.
Theological studies profited by the struggle with Protestantism. More
attention was bestowed on the question of man’s natural and supernatural
equipment; the dangers with which the excessive spread of Nominalism
had threatened the doctrine of Grace were effectually circumvented, and
the indispensable need of Grace for any work meritorious for heaven was
more strongly emphasised. Thus, on the whole, there was a gain which we
must not underrate, a new development of theological lore and a clearer
formulation of dogma on threatened points similar to that which had
resulted from the great controversies in Patristic times.
Under the Divine guidance the Church also more than made up for the
numbers torn from her, by the rapid growth of her missions in distant
parts of the world, where the voyages of discovery and the conquest
of the Western Continent at the dawn of the new century gave rise to
unlooked-for new opportunities; this, too, at a time when Lutheranism
and the other Protestant sects were still inclined to discountenance any
universality and preferred to remain strictly local and national.
Above all it is indisputable that the Catholic Church, in order to
emphasise her opposition to the so-called Evangelical freedom, devoted
herself ever more assiduously to promoting a true inward life of religion
among the people, the lower clergy and the bishops.
Whereas—at the close of the Middle Ages and dawn of the new era—the
Papacy had been too eager in the pursuit of humanistic aims, had
cultivated too exclusively merely human ideals of art and learning, and
at the same time had become entangled in secular business and politics
and was altogether too worldly, after Luther’s terrible attack on the
formalism of the Church the Popes devoted themselves more and more to
the real problems of the Kingdom of God, summoned to their side better
advisers in the shape of Cardinals of strict morals, and introduced
disciplinary new regulations in the spirit of a St. Charles Borromeo. The
charge of shallowness brought against Catholic life was not—so far as it
was justified—made in vain. From the new seminaries, from the sublime and
saintly figures, who, in greater numbers than ever before, set an example
of heroic virtue, and from the newly founded religious Orders such as
the Theatines (1524), Capuchins (1528), Somaschans (1528), Barnabites
(1530) and last but not least the Jesuits (1534), a new spirit breathed
through the Church’s life and revived once more the practice of prayer,
self-denial and neighbourly charity.
In this connection we need have no scruple in characterising the
“Spiritual Exercises” of St. Ignatius Loyola as a phenomenon typical of
the increasing religiousness of the age. Many, particularly amongst the
influential representatives of the Church in Germany, under the guidance
of such men as Pierre Favre, Peter Canisius and Claude Jaius, found in
them a new wellspring of love for the Church and her aims.[1566]
“To the Exercises, through which many of the great German nobles went,”
so Pierre Favre wrote from Ratisbon, “almost all the good was due that
was afterwards done in Germany.”[1567]
The struggle with the apostasy called forth everywhere an increase of
intellectual activity on the part of the threatened Church. Not only
was theology deepened, but all the cognate branches of learning were
more sedulously cultivated. “I scarcely think,” wrote the Jesuit, Peter
Canisius, to the General of his Order, speaking of religious writings,
that “Our Order could undertake or carry out any work that would be more
useful and more conducive to the general welfare of the Church. Fresh
writings on religious questions make a great impression and are a source
of immeasurable comfort to the hard-pressed Catholics at a time when the
writings of the false teachers are disseminated far and wide and cannot
be exterminated.”[1568] Canisius was, however, of opinion that a simple
exposition of the Catholic faith was more in place than polemics; he did
not wish to see too much heat and human passion in the writings: “We do
not heal the sick by such medicine but only make their case worse”;[1569]
as he says in a memorandum: “In Germany there are countless numbers who
err in religion, but they do not err from stubbornness or bitterness;
they err after the manner of Germans who by nature are generally honest,
very ready to accept everything that they, born and bred in the Lutheran
heresies, have learnt, partly in schools, partly in churches, partly by
the writings of false teachers.”[1570]
There is a true saying of Erasmus’s often quoted by Catholics: “Just
as it would be wrong to approve all that Luther writes, so, too,
it would be unjust, if, out of hatred for his person, we condemned
what is true or distorted what is right.”[1571] “What writer is
so bad,” he asks elsewhere, “that we do not find some good in his
writings?”[1572]—What there was of good in his own and Luther’s
writings was not without its effect on Catholicism. Some of their
censures of things Catholic were seen to be deserved, and, in the
course of time, were acted upon, at least in order to give opponents
less cause for fault-finding.
The following remarks of Erasmus also found an echo amongst Catholic
contemporaries and bear witness to the good which came of the sad
religious struggles: “Often have I pondered in my own mind, whether,
perchance, it had not pleased God to send a strong physician to deal
with the profound corruption of morals in our day, who should heal by
cutting and searing what was incapable of remedy by means of medicines
and bandages.”[1573]—“May God, Who is wont to turn evil to good, so
dispose matters, that, from this strong and bitter medicine (‘_ex hoc
violento amaroque pharmaco_’) with which Luther has purged the world,
as a body sick unto death, there may come some good for the morals of
Christians.”[1574]—In 1524 he even went so far as to term Luther a
“necessary evil” which they must not even desire to see removed.[1575]
Yet Erasmus writes severely of him and ranks him with the greatest
foes of the people of God: God had chosen to use Luther as a tool just
as He had used the Pharaohs, the Philistines, Nabuchodonosor and the
Romans.[1576]
That Luther wielded a wholesome rod was admitted even by the Papal
Legate Zacharias Ferreri in an admonition he addressed to him in 1520;
with such a scourge as this God from time to time tried Christians in
order to bring them to repentance. “If you are a scourge, praised be
the name of the Lord, if by this wicked instrument He is leading us to
a better mind, purifying and purging us!… Is it astonishing if, even
through you, we are purified and cleansed? Oh, that the Almighty would
pour on us ‘clean water,’ ‘sprinkle us with hyssop’ and wash us!”[1577]
Thomas Murner, the Strasburg Franciscan, a man who was wont to scourge
the failings and abuses in the Church of his day in very outspoken
language, frankly admitted in a reply to Luther’s book “An den Adel”
that much of the Wittenberg monk’s censure might be useful to those
who wanted to put a stop to immorality, and to abuses and obsolete
ecclesiastical customs and statutes. He even goes so far as to say
to Luther: “Where you speak the truth, there undoubtedly the Holy
Spirit speaks through you, for all truth is of God.” He adds, however,
“Where you do not speak the truth, there assuredly the devil speaks
through you, he who is the father of lies.” Speaking of the pictures
of Luther with the symbol of the dove, which even then were common,
in his satirical fashion, he suggests an improvement: “They paint the
Holy Spirit over your head as though He were speaking through you.
Now I learn for the first time that the Holy Spirit can say silly
things.… I should suggest that they paint over your head, the Holy
Ghost on one side and the devil on the other, and, in the middle,
the city of Prague,” (to symbolise the heresy of Hus of which he
accused Luther).[1578] Anxious as Murner was to see an end of the real
abuses which Luther censured, yet, in the true Catholic spirit, he
left to the ecclesiastical authorities the right and duty of taking
the initiative, and it was to them that he addressed his urgent
exhortations.
Cochlæus is likewise unable to refrain from remarking that, in
Luther’s writings, side by side with what is worthless there is much
that is good, in his exposition of Holy Scripture, in his exhortations
and also in his censures. For many men, and among them some of high
standing, believed [at first] that he was guided by the Spirit of God
and by zeal for virtue to remove the abuses of the hypocrites, to
amend morals to improve the education of the clergy, and to promote in
people’s hearts the love and worship of God.“[1579] Cochlæus points
out how Luther had taught his followers to steep themselves in the
Bible, so that they gained “so much skill and experience” that they
had “no scruples in disputing about the faith and the Gospel even with
magisters and doctors of Holy Scripture”; they had been much more
diligent than the Catholics in learning by heart the Bible in its
German dress; they were in the habit “of quoting Scripture more than
the priests and monks did, for which reason they accused Catholics
of being ignorant of it or not understanding it however learned they
might be as theologians”; their teachers “quoted the Greek and Hebrew
texts, and the variant readings, scoffed at our theologians when
they were ignorant of these things and all agreed in representing
Luther as the best theologian in the world.” Cochlæus also admits,
that, in the field of historical criticism Luther and his party were
ahead of many Catholic preachers, who, albeit in good faith, were
fond of adducing “fables and tales invented by men.” He describes
the zeal of the Protestant printers, which far exceeded that of the
Catholics, the “diligence, care and money” lavished on the writings
of their party, and “how carefully and accurately they printed their
books”; apostates and escaped monks travelled far and wide through
Germany, peddling Lutheran writings “like booksellers.”[1580]—It is
notorious, on the other hand, that the Catholic writers were hardly
able to find publishers. At Ingolstadt Cochlæus managed to preserve
a Catholic printing press, which was in danger of being shut down,
and established a second at Mayence whence a large number of good
works issued. “Stress must be laid on the self-sacrifice with which
Cochlæus, after having by dint of many privations amassed a sum of
money for the publication of his own writings, devoted it to the
printing of the works of one of his colleagues, being convinced that
they would prove of greater benefit to the common cause than his own
productions.”[1581]
In all these particulars, in the study of Holy Scripture, in the
cultivation of historical and critical research among the clergy, in the
use of the vernacular and of the art of printing for the instruction of
the faithful, a real, though rather slow, change for the better took
place. Had it not been for the misgivings felt even in the highest
circles, and for a certain amount of prejudice against anything new, due
to the fear of heresy, the gains doubtless would have been even greater
and more quickly secured. In all this the Church owed much to Protestant
example, for it was the innovators who involuntarily pointed out better
methods of satisfying the spiritual needs of the new age, and a more
effectual way of exerting a religious influence over the people.
Further examples of this are to be found in the sermons and in the
catechism.
Clear-sighted Catholic contemporaries, like the worthy Dominican preacher
and writer Johann Mensing, comparing the Bible preaching used and
advocated by Luther with the empty, vapid sermons in vogue among many of
the Catholic preachers were keenly conscious of what was lacking. At the
close of a book written in 1532 Mensing exhorts the Catholic clergy to
study Holy Writ and to make more use of it in the pulpit: “There are some
now who say that Luther has driven the learned to Scripture. Would to God
it were true that our well-beloved masters and brothers, the theologians,
would turn their hearts wholly to Holy Scripture and leave out those
other questions which serve no useful purpose. Some of them preach the
laws and canons of heathen doctors and poets which are of small help
to salvation, or they air their own opinions, and, where Scripture and
Holy Church or the witness of the olden Doctors is not enough, reinforce
them by incredible miracles, whereas, with the aid of Holy Scripture,
they ought to endeavour to establish in men’s hearts the fear of God,
faith, hope and charity, mildness and pity and such like.” If they learn
something from the Lutherans in this then “we may hope that God has
permitted Luther’s heresy for our good, it being to our profit that such
heresy has arisen, and, as some declare, driven us to the Scriptures.”
Mensing wonders, however, whether the dispersal of the monks, the
plundering of the convents and lack of stipends for learned theologians
and preachers will not make study of any kind a difficult matter for a
long while to come.[1582]
In the field of catechetical instruction it was clear that Luther and
his followers had given their attention very skilfully to the young, the
better to imbue the rising generation with their doctrines. At the time
of Luther’s first appearance, as recent research has established, in many
parts of Germany there was no regular, systematic religious instruction
of the young by the clergy or in the schools, but the children were left
to pick up what they could in the home or from the public sermons.[1583]
There were indeed regulations in force for the priests and the schools,
but they were not acted upon. About the very elementary home instruction,
Cochlæus had words of commendation in 1533. As they were taken to the
services and the sermons, the children had, he says, “sucked in” their
religion “as it were with their mothers’ milk, and this is still the case
to-day amongst Catholics.”[1584] In his sermons published in 1510 Gabriel
Biel asks for no more than that the parents should impart to their
children a knowledge of the things essential and prepare them for their
first communion.[1585]
Luther, however, as our readers know, insisted that his preachers must
concern themselves directly with the children.
He enjoined on them to preach from the pulpit at set times, even daily if
necessary, on the most elementary points of doctrine, and again at home
in the house to the children and servants in the mornings and evenings;
if they wished to make Christians of them these points would have to be
recited or read to them, “and this, not merely in such a way that they
learn to say the words by heart, but that they be questioned on them
one by one and made to say what each means and how they understand
it.”[1586] “Let no one think himself above giving such instruction to
the children or look down upon it,” he wrote; “Christ, when He wished to
train up men, had to become a man, hence, if we are to train up children,
we must become children with them.” At Wittenberg and elsewhere from 1528
onwards four sermons a week for two weeks on end were preached on the
Catechism four times a year. When, seeing the importance of the matter,
Luther himself took the Catechism in hand he was so anxious to make it
popular and practical, that he first published his “Smaller Catechism”
(1529) in the form of sheets to hang upon the wall (this method had been
used even before his day), and thus to act on the memory through the eye.
It would, however, be historically incorrect to describe Luther as the
originator of the Catechism. Catholic Catechisms, even illustrated
ones, had existed before Luther’s time, having been printed not only
in Germany but also elsewhere. But, after the success attained by
Luther’s Catechism, writers of Catholic Catechisms tried to profit by
his example. The best of these Catholic works was the famous Catechism
of Peter Canisius. It was first printed in Vienna in 1555 under the
title “_Summa doctrinæ christianæ_”; eighteen years later it had already
been translated into twelve different tongues.[1587] It is a work rich
in thought and positive matter where almost every word is based on Holy
Scripture or some utterance of the Fathers and other ecclesiastical
authority. Abbreviated editions, the “_Parvus Catechismus_” (Viennæ,
1559), the “_Institutiones_” (1561), and particularly the short
German one: “The Catechism or Sum of Christian Doctrine arranged in
question and answer for the simple,” rendered it of greater use for the
common people.[1588] “Canisius’s book,” writes a Protestant expert in
pedagogics, “is a masterpiece of brevity, precision and erudition; in it
one sees from beginning to end an endeavour to excel in style even the
great Protestant prototype” (viz. Luther’s Catechism).[1589]
Among the secular no less than among the regular clergy work for the
souls of the children continued to win new friends. St. Ignatius of
Loyola esteemed the teaching of the Catechism so highly that he expressly
made it a duty incumbent on all members of his Order previous to their
making their profession. Lainez, his companion and successor, when
staying at Trent during the Council, instructed the people and the small
folk in the Catechism. The Council itself impressed on the bishops
in 1563 the duty of seeing that the children in each parish received
religious instruction from the priest on Sundays and holidays.[1590]
The spread of the new religion had at first been followed by a lamentable
decline in the educational system by no means confined to those regions
torn away from the old faith.[1591] The Protestants were the first
to recover their balance, partly owing to Luther’s vigorous appeals
on behalf of the schools, partly thanks to the active co-operation
of Melanchthon, who had great experience in this sphere and on whom
his co-religionists in consequence bestowed the title of “_Præceptor
Germaniæ_.” The methods followed by the Lutherans were borrowed
principally, as indeed was only to be expected, from the treasure-house
of the humanists. Protestant effort was largely crowned with success,
especially since the old Catholic endowments of the Grammar Schools,
and some part of the income of the sequestrated Church properties, were
applied by the sovereigns and townships to the erection and maintenance
of these new educational institutions.[1592]
The Catholics indeed were angry to see that these flourishing schools
were at the same time hotbeds of the New Faith. They also lamented
that, owing to the sad conditions of the times, they themselves had
fallen astern of the other party in the matter of education. Their best
leaders exhorted them to take a lesson from their opponents and thus
reconquer the position the Catholic schools had lost. “With the spread
and development of the Jesuit schools a change came over the face of
affairs.”[1593] Before this Archbishop Albert of Mayence had declared in
1541 that the Protestants were far ahead of Catholics in the matter of
education and were drawing all the youth of Germany into their schools.
In 1550 Julius Pflug, bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz, wrote to Julius III:
“The Protestant schools public as well as private are in a flourishing
condition; ours are crumbling into ruin; the Protestants attract men by
large salaries, we do not do this.” Already in 1538 George Wicel had
expressed his regret to Julius Pflug that so little was done for the
schools among the Catholics as compared with the Protestants, and that
already the want of men of learning was being felt.[1594]
To mention two other spheres in which Catholics received a stimulus from
Luther’s example and work, we may call to mind the German translation of
the Bible and the German hymns.
What was good in Luther’s translation of the Bible was very soon turned
to account in Catholic circles. If Catholic writers made use of Luther’s
translation in their own editions, they probably excused themselves by
arguing that Luther himself was undoubtedly indebted to the Catholic
translations of the past. In the same way Luther had made use of some of
the old hymns of the Church, amended and popularised them and published
them as his own. Catholic hymns in the German language there were already
in plenty. But, after 1524, when the first Protestant hymn-books made
their appearance, Catholics copied these efforts to collect and improve
on the originals, and the first Catholic hymn-book brought out by Michael
Vehe, Provost at Leipzig as early as 1537, contained fifty-two hymns
with forty-seven tunes—though, strange to say, the old Catholic hymns
were given in the new Protestant version.[1595] A much bigger hymn-book
was that of Johann Leisentritt, a Dean (1567); it contained in the
first edition 250 hymns and 147 tunes. In the following century hymns
well known to be Protestant but of which the words were orthodox were
incorporated without demur in the Catholic collections.
The Middle Ages had been too neglectful of positive studies, particularly
of history and languages, both of which are of such vast importance to
theology. Since the dawn of humanism, however, a good beginning had been
made, and the need of meeting the demands of the new age was recognised,
as, in the domain of Biblical languages, the example of Faber Stapulensis
and Jodocus Clichtoveus shows.[1596] The methods of the Protestants made
further progress in this field imperative.
In criticism and church-history, where much good work had been done by
the Protestants, Peter Canisius was one of the first to suggest that it
would be advisable to devote more pains to the study and examination of
the history of the Papacy, since, as he wrote, our “people seem to be
still quite asleep” and unaware of all that had been done in the opposite
camp. He was anxious for books that should be in no way inferior to those
of the other side, and of which “the style must be in keeping with the
present method and trend of scholarship.”[1597] It is not as yet enough
known generally what great success crowned the labours of Onuphrius
Panvinius (1529-1568) the Augustinian Roman antiquarian and historian,
who was spurred on by the labours of the Protestants, though even more
by the humanist traditions of his native country. Better known is the
Oratorian, Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607), whose “Ecclesiastical Annals”
unquestionably laid the foundation of a new era in the writing of Church
history.[1598]
Good and useful work was done by some of the Protestant scholars who
edited the writings of the Fathers.
Thus Luther, for instance, encouraged Bugenhagen to edit certain works of
St. Athanasius on the Trinity and himself wrote (1532) a Preface to them
which is well worth reading.[1599] The Patristic labours subsequently
undertaken by Catholics, even the great work of Marguérin de la
Bigne,[1600] that forerunner of the French Maurists of the 17th century,
had their _raison d’être_ in the very ideas which Luther had set forth in
his above-mentioned Preface to Bugenhagen’s work.
The worksomeness of the Catholic Church showed that people were beginning
to understand the new era and to mould themselves to its requirements.
“How can one deny,” asks Adolf Harnack, “that Catholicism, as soon as
it pulled itself together for the counter-reformation … was for over a
century in far closer touch with the new era than Luther’s Protestantism?
Hence the many converts from Protestantism to Catholicism, particularly
among learned Protestants, down to the days of Queen Christina of Sweden
and even after.”[1601]
* * * * *
As for the ideas, however, which constituted the essence of the religious
innovations the Catholic Church could not accept them short of being
untrue to herself and betraying what had been committed to her custody.
Whereas she gradually found a way to comply with all just demands for
betterment and progress, she was nevertheless obliged relentlessly to
close her ears to proposals for the subversion of her dogma and the
alteration of her constitution.
She steadfastly refused to make her own the new and mistaken conception
of the Church, of Bible interpretation, of faith, justification and
good works. In spite of the heart-rending sight of the growing apostasy
around her, she kept her eyes fixed on the promises of her Founder and
remained true to her olden conception of the Church as a visible society
controlled by Chief Pastors who are the vicars of Christ.
Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg in Baden, one of the greatest lawyers and
humanists of the 16th century, who had for a while dallied with some of
the demands of the innovators, afterwards repudiated as follows any idea
of going over to their side:
“I shall remain true to the doctrines and decisions of the Church even
should all the host of heaven command me otherwise.” “Such an insult
I will on no account offer to the Lord of Truth as to believe He had
deceived us for so many hundreds of years”—by permitting the Church to
fall into error in spite of the promise that the Spirit of truth would
always remain with her.
“For more than a thousand years the Church has taught us by the
voice of her Doctors who all take their stand on Holy Scripture. But
you twist the Gospel about as you please. Is Luther then to be set
above all the Doctors of the past? Our forefathers, who also were
authorities and all the wise men, would have called such a demand
sheer madness.” “You, however, argue that the Spirit leads and guides
you. But what sort of Spirit is it that teaches you to scold and
calumniate as you do? In the Epistle of James I have read on the
contrary that wisdom is peaceable and modest.”
“Give me a man who renounces all earthly things, keeps all the
precepts of Christ, loves his enemies from his heart and does them
good, abuses none and is cheerful in adversity. Such a man I will
call worthy of the Evangel. But among the ranks of such men you can
scarcely reckon Luther.”
“You are free to censure abuses, but is it right on their account to
throw the whole Church into confusion? You blame the whole for the
misdeeds of some of its parts; pleading the defects you attack what is
good and thus unsettle everything.” He too, so he tells his opponents,
was at pains to go to the sources of Faith, but he preferred the
interpretation of Jerome, Augustine and Chrysostom to theirs;
and, again, unable to control his indignation, he exclaims: “What
incredible arrogance is this that one man should require his reading
to be accounted better than that of all the Fathers of the Church,
nay, of the Church herself and the whole of Christendom?”[1602]
When passions were at their height voices such as these failed to secure
a hearing. The deep chasm torn open by the wanton act of one man could no
longer be bridged over; the bond of religion that had hitherto united the
German nation had been rudely severed.
5. Luther as described by the Olden “Orthodox” Lutherans
It is a study that will well repay us to follow through the history
of Protestantism the changes that Luther’s description underwent. The
awakened historical sense of the present day has already led more
than one critic to undertake this task, with a crop of interesting
results.[1603]
It would be a mistake to think that Luther’s memory survived anywhere
among the orthodox Protestants with that freshness and distinctness which
the statements of some of his old friends might lead us to expect. Of
the actual personality of the man no clear picture had been transmitted.
His words and deeds were commented on according to the outlook of the
different schools, needless to say, always with a certain affection and
admiration, but no one troubled to leave to posterity a living picture of
his unique character as a whole.
Tracing the history of the Protestant representation of Luther down
to the present day three periods may be distinguished, the so-called
Orthodox one, the Pietistic and Freethinking one that followed, and
the last hundred years. Orthodoxy, with its rigid attachment to the
formularies of Faith, with the assistance of the State was for a long
while able to suppress all contrary tendencies; towards the middle of
the 18th century, however, the Pietists and, at the other extreme, a
free-thinking party also made their appearance on the field.
Pietism was a reaction against the hard-and-fast doctrinal system of an
earlier age, which, clinging desperately to Luther’s doctrine of works,
tended to be neglectful of the Christian life and of the revival of
morals. If Pietism rather exaggerated the moral side of religion, the
so-called “Enlightenment” erred in another direction, setting out as it
did to vindicate the rights of reason and, in so doing, making scant
account of subordination to the truths of Divine revelation.
On the whole, Orthodoxy retained a supernaturalist view of Luther,
though it was apt to assume different colours according to the leanings
of the several schools.
Pietism, in its conception of his person, frankly throws over the real
Luther and seeks to “vindicate his spirit against the claims of his more
orthodox adherents.”
The period of the enlightenment also presents a “sadly distorted”
picture of Luther; it had “not the least comprehension of his fiery
spirit” and, as was its wont, was “anxious to wipe out everything too
distinctive.”[1604]
“Misunderstood and disfigured ‘beyond recognition,’ Luther steps over
the threshold of the new era. But here again misfortune awaits him:
‘Sectarians, Anabaptists, Pietists, Democrats, Rationalists, Orthodox’
… all these set to work to improve upon the hero until they can stamp
him as their own.”[1605] Finally, “the latest phase of theological
development spells a revision of the whole idea and appreciation of
Luther.” In the consciousness of having far outrun Luther on the road
to a purely natural religion minus any faith, people are beginning to
“emphasise more strongly the fact, that he was held captive in the bonds
of mediæval feelings and ideas.”[1606]
“Who really knows him?” asked Adolf Harnack in 1883, “and who can be
expected to know him? People are willing enough to worship him as
what they wish him to be, as the upholder of their own ideals; but in
their heart of hearts, they feel that, after all, he was really quite
different. His character impresses all, but his convictions are left
in the background, or else are worked up into new and more serviceable
coin.”[1607]
Yet all these Protestant impressions of Luther, to be examined more in
detail below, however they may differ have at least this much in common,
that Luther must be acclaimed as the great opponent of the authority of
the olden Church.
Maybe we shall come nearest to a correct picture of Luther if we combine
the modern view of his being a “mediævalist” with the olden orthodox
claim that he was a Prophet of God. Luther stood partly for the old
supernaturalist Christianity, partly for a new pseudo-supernaturalism;
so far those who speak of his “mediævalism” are in the right. He himself,
however, summed up his own character in that of the God-sent “Prophet of
Germany,” and divinely appointed conqueror of Antichrist and the devil—a
point which was rightly emphasised by his orthodox followers.
To go back now to the various descriptions of Luther. The Orthodox
derived their idea of Luther from the oldest traditions. In these there
was a breath of the supernaturalism in which Luther’s own view of himself
was decked out, of the inbreathing of the Spirit, of his mysterious
struggles with a power unseen, and of his divinely assured victory over
the Roman Babylon.
At the present day one marvels to see how cheerfully and naïvely members
of the old “orthodox” school were wont to magnify the founder of their
denomination on the lines sketched out by Luther himself. All that
interested them was the teacher, Luther the theologian; to them he
appeared a sort of “professor of divinity of heroic dimensions.” In the
century which followed his death it was the custom to exalt him “into
the region of the marvellous and more-than-human.” So fond were they of
“depicting his divine halo” that it became quite the usual thing to “set
Luther side by side with the olden Prophets and Apostles.”
After Elias and John the Baptist, he is “the third Elias, who makes
ready the way against the return of Christ to Judgment.” He is the
second Noe, the second Abraham, the second Samson, the second Samuel,
the second Jeremias, above all, he is the second Moses who frees the
people from their bondage; the Egyptian bondage, so some one computed
had come to an end in B.C. 1517 just as the Papal bondage reached its
end in 1517 A.D.[1608]
Holy Scripture, so the orthodox declared, points to Luther not only
where it speaks of the revelation and overthrow of Antichrist (2
Thes. ii. 8), not merely where it proclaims that living waters shall
go out from Jerusalem (Zach. xiv. 8), but also in the Apocalypse of
John where we are told of the angel having the eternal Gospel—flying
through the midst of heaven to the mount on which is seated the
Lamb with 144,000 who bear His name—“in order to preach it to them
that sit upon the earth, to every nation and tribe, and tongue and
people” (Rev. xiv. 6). That this angel was Luther is also plain from
the fact that, if the letters of the verse quoted are reckoned by
their position in the alphabet and then added together the number
will be exactly the same as that of the words (in German): Martin
Luther, Doctor of Holy Scripture, born at Eisleben, baptised on
Martinmas-Day, viz. 819![1609] In a sermon in 1676 the flight of the
angel through the midst of heaven is taken to signify the marvellously
rapid spread of Luther’s Evangel, and the Gospel he preaches is termed
“eternal,” because Luther’s doctrine is found even in the Fathers of
the Church.[1610]
The story of Hus, the “swan,” as prophetic of the coming of Luther,
was an integral part of the panegyrics even of Mathesius and
Bugenhagen; it served much the same purpose as the statue of a monk
with the inscription L.V.T.E.R.V.S., said to have been erected by
Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa.[1611]
The recovery of Melanchthon and Myconius for whom Luther had prayed
so ardently became evident miracles. The preservation of his picture
in great fires was another miracle of frequent recurrence. Splinters
from a beam in his house, according to Gottfried Arnold, the Pietist,
in his Church-History, were deemed an efficacious cure for toothache
and other ills. Arnold calls this a subtle form of idolatry. Leonard
Hutter, who became professor at Wittenberg in 1596, learnedly set
forth the proofs of Luther’s “being endowed with a ‘_spiritus
vatidicus_’ enabling him to foresee many things of importance,” though
his prophetic insight is chiefly confined by Hutter and others to his
peculiar divine gift for the interpretation of Holy Writ, or to his
proclamation of the destruction of contemners of the Evangel.[1612]
Johannes Klai (or Claius), the German grammarian and a zealous
Lutheran, expressed it as his opinion in 1578 that the German used by
Luther was so pure and beautiful that he could have learnt it only by
the special help of the Holy Ghost.[1613] Johannes Albertus Fabricius
collected, chiefly in the interests of the orthodox party, the titles
of the works dealing with Luther; the bare lists of the books setting
forth the services he had rendered, the honourable epithets bestowed
on him, his eminent qualities, his miracles and his own prophecies
and those of others, occupy many pages.[1614]
Even as late as 1872 Carl Frederick Kahnis, the Lutheran theologian
and professor at Leipzig, depicted Luther in his “Deutsche
Reformation” with all the olden traits. Luther’s doctrines he regarded
as the true norm, though it was necessary to understand and develop
them. According to Kahnis the young monk’s experience with the devil
in the refectory at night and again at the Wartburg, were real
assaults of the Evil One on the chosen prophet of God, visible and
audible marks of the hostility of Satan to the saviour of mankind,
for Luther “was no slave to fancy or excited feelings.” “Maybe,” so
he says rather incautiously, “no Father of the Church since the days
of the Apostles ever had to feel so keenly the power of Satan.” The
prophecy of the “bare-foot monk” and the auguries of the Eisenach
Franciscan become matters of history, for had not Luther himself
appealed to them? Even the tale of the Elector’s dream who saw the
monk’s pen stretching even to Rome and blotting out everything there,
rested, according to him, on “history.” As for the fallen Church of
pre-Lutheran days, against which his wonderful pen worked, it sinks
into the abyss of its own errors before the rising sun of Luther’s new
doctrine.[1615]
6. Luther as seen by the Pietists and Rationalists
Luther, as pictured to themselves by the Pietists, differed widely from
the Luther of the orthodox. To Pietists like Spener, Luther’s actual
doctrine—regarded by them as contradictory and wavering—appealed far less
than certain personal mystic traits of his. To them the inward struggles
of soul to which Luther ascribes his transition from despair into the
peace of the Gospel, his remarks on piety and the interior life, his
realisation of the universal priesthood, and the breathing of the Spirit
were very dear. They were less enamoured of Luther’s views on faith,
the outward Word, or the State-Government of the Church. At any rate,
the Pietists wove from the material at their disposal a new Luther who
was practically a counterpart of themselves. They preferred to dwell on
his earlier years, when Luther, as Gottfried Arnold said in 1699 in his
“Kirchenhistorie,” yet lived “in the Spirit,” and before he had ended “in
the flesh” as he did later. They either said nothing of his worldlier
side or else openly censured it as the fruit of his backsliding and later
errors.
Arnold complains bitterly that things had gone so far after Luther’s
death that he was called a “Saint” and a divine man, and that he
was made out to be the Angel foretold in the Apocalypse. Still he
recognises in him “in a usual way,” an “apostolic mission” in so far
as he had been the recipient of “a direct inspiration, stimulus or
divine gift.” “At the first” he had “indeed been mightily directed,
and utilised as a divine tool”; at any rate up to the time of his
breach with Carlstadt he could boast of enjoying “the strength and
illumination of the Spirit which gave him on particular points and in
difficult cases a rule and true certainty.” Only with such limitations
will the historian of Pietism accept Luther’s epitaph at Wittenberg
where mention is made of the inbreathing of God’s spirit.[1616]
Whereas the orthodox Lutherans, owing to the abiding influence of
Melanchthon’s humanism, allowed the study of philosophy and of the
wisdom of the ancients, the Pietists at Leipzig, Giessen, Stargard
and elsewhere rejected all philosophy, appealing to Luther who had
spurned it as the offspring of that fool reason which ought to be done
away with; Melanchthon, they urged, had corrupted the faith by the
admixture of Plato and Aristotle, and, hence, had never been regarded
by Luther “as a true, staunch theologian, but rather as a cunning
Aristotelian dialectician.”[1617]
When other Lutherans taunted them with their separatist tendencies so
much at variance with Luther’s view of the outward government of the
Church by the State, the Pietists retorted by appealing in defence
of their conventicle system and so-called “_collegia pietatis_,”
to Luther’s Church-Apart of the True Believers. They quoted those
passages of the “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” (1526),
where Luther lays stress on the ideal kinship of those who earnestly
desire to be Christians, and characterises the services in the Church
as worthless for those who “are already Christians.”[1618]
“Thus quite a struggle raged around Luther’s person.”[1619]
Books appeared on the one side with such titles as “_Lutherus
Antipietista_” and on the other: “Luther the precursor of Spener who
faithfully followed in the footsteps of the former.” Count L. von
Zinzendorf, with his Pietistic leanings, claimed to be a perfect
counterpart of Luther; he wished, as he said in 1749, to be “what Luther
had been in part, and what, according to the logical sequence from given
premises, he should and ought to have been.” “The Luther who still lives
and teaches in Count von Zinzendorf,” was the title of a work by one of
the latter’s followers. Things went so far that, in the controversies,
it became necessary to ask: Which Luther do you mean, the earlier or the
later? Nor was even this sufficient, for Consistorialrat J. A. Bengel of
Württemberg (†1752) actually distinguished three Luthers: “the first and
the last,” he said, “were all right, but the middle one, owing to the
heat of controversy, was sometimes rather spoiled.”[1620]
Among the Protestant writers of the so-called “Enlightenment” we again
find Luther under a different guise.
They disagreed with the Pietists’ renunciation both of the conclusions
arrived at by reason and of worldly pleasures; in the latter respect
they found in Luther a welcome advocate of enjoyment of the good things
of the world. His advocacy of a cheerful addiction to earthly pleasures
was summed up by them in the saying attributed to him: Who loves not
women, wine and song, etc.[1621] On the other hand, by setting Luther on
a rationalist plane, they blotted out his essential characteristics; they
showed no comprehension for his faith though they were not disposed to
minimise his labours for the amendment of religion and for the bringing
of light out of darkness.
Gottfried Herder extols him, now as a church founder, now as a writer,
and yet again as a great German. Luther’s doctrines seem to him of
comparatively small account, but he is willing enough to depict
him as a model of cheerful, “strong, free, wholesome and exalted
sensibility.”[1622] He is unsparing in his criticism of Luther’s attacks
on the Epistle of James and adds: “The sphere of the Spirit of God is
wider than Luther’s field of vision.”[1623] In these circles critics
were disposed to be bolder and more outspoken than among the orthodox
and the Pietists; they also found other things to censure in Luther.
Lessing condemns in the severest language his vanity and irascibility:
“O God, what a terrible lesson to our pride,” he exclaims, “and how much
do anger and revenge degrade even the best and holiest of men.”[1624] He
nevertheless opines that Luther’s faults had been of service to him in
his great task.
Those few who really perused Luther’s writings marvelled at his
extravagant ideas about his divine mission and struggles with the devil,
about the end of the world and Antichrist. As a general rule, however,
they conveniently skipped all that Luther said against human reason and
had no eye for his energetic supernaturalism and his insistence on the
bare letter of Scripture.[1625]
Among those infected with the rationalism of the age, antagonism to
Catholicism undoubtedly helped to shape their view of Luther. They felt
their whole outlook to be at variance with that of Catholicism. Under
these circumstances it was natural that Luther should be depicted first
and foremost as the liberator from the Papacy; in Luther they recognised,
not without some show of reason, “the opponent of all outward authority,
of everything Catholic in every domain of the life of the mind”[1626]—an
argument, moreover, which occasionally they turned against the Lutheran
“Church” itself.
Thus was the dictator of Wittenberg, such as the Orthodox knew him,
transformed into a “champion of freedom”; the rationalists made his
pen the vehicle of their own ideas. Luther became the “herald of
the Enlightenment.” He began what others were to carry on later. “A
little longer,” so one wrote in 1797, “and the heavenly light which
Luther only saw dimly as in a dream will stream in upon us in all its
brightness.”[1627]
The Berlin leader of this movement, A. F. Büsching, as early as
1748, said of himself that he had seen “Luther in his true greatness
and as known only to the few; how, in matters of religion, he had
absolutely refused to depend on any man, but had relied simply on his
own insight and convictions and what had been borne in upon him by
diligent reading of the Bible.”[1628] The Halle editor of Luther’s
Works, J. G. Walch, vaunted among the other services rendered by
Luther that of having established freedom of conscience; in the eyes
of Julius Wegscheider he was the “_libertatis cogitandi assertor_”; it
was this which inclined even Frederick II of Prussia to respect him,
though otherwise he considered him a “furious monk” and a “barbarous
writer.”—Those who thus credited Luther with tolerance “had no inkling
of the antithesis between this idea and the true Luther.”[1629] His
wanton way of dealing with the Canon of Scripture was urged against
the Orthodox in defence of a more critical treatment of Holy Writ.
Lessing, referring to Luther’s whole system of Bible interpretation,
wrote to J. M. Goeze, the chief pastor of St. Catherine’s church at
Hamburg: “What greater authority had Luther than any other Doctor of
Divinity?”[1630]
Less dangerous to Lutheranism, and in itself harmless enough, though
quite characteristic of the age, was the discovery then made, that
Luther was the very personification of a public benefactor and great
servant of the State. The Leipzig Professor, C. H. Wieland, described
him as a “scholar to whom all were indebted”; Luther, he says,
“unmasked obsolete prejudices and opened up to his contemporaries in
more than one direction fresh prospects of a coming enlargement of the
circle of human knowledge. And this great man _was a German_.”[1631]
From the good bourgeois point of view the fact that Luther had, as
it was thought, cultivated respect for the secular authorities was a
great feather in his cap. Such people readily shut their eyes to the
severity with which Luther had been wont to lash the rulers, even the
highest in the land, and to the fact that he had undermined the very
foundations of authority. The patriotic thought that “this great man
was a German” was made to cover all his failings.
This sort of patriotism gradually produced a new pattern of Luther,
differing in many respects from the others. Particularly after the
outbreak of the great German wars of deliverance and the burning
enthusiasm for the Fatherland which they called forth many felt that
they could not sufficiently extol Luther as the great German, and a
typical child of his beloved country.
Gœthe repeatedly called Luther a “great man.” But what, above all,
prepossessed him in his favour was, first, his “Struggle against
priestcraft and the hierarchy,” and, then, his translation of the
Bible. “By him we have been freed from the fetters of intellectual
narrowness … and have once more the courage to stand upright on God’s
earth and to realise our own divinely endowed nature.”[1632] The poet,
himself a true child of his age, had no eye for the truths defended by
Catholicism against Lutheranism. In a letter to Knebel dated August
22, 1817, when the centenary of Luther’s promulgation of his Theses
was being celebrated far and wide, he said: “Between ourselves, the
only interesting thing in the whole business [the Reformation] is
Luther’s character; it is also the only thing that really impresses
the masses. All the rest is worthless trumpery of which we still feel
the burden to-day.” As for the usual view of Luther he characterises
it as mythological.
7. The Modern Picture of Luther
In the so-called Romantic School the picture of Luther tends to become as
shifty as the character of the age.
The Romanticists, like the poets they were, were anxious, as in other
fields so also in respect of Luther, to make a stand against the
shallowness of the “Enlightenment.”
Zacharias Werner, while still a Protestant, wrote in Luther’s honour
his drama “Die Weihe der Kraft,” and, then, as a Catholic, the drama
entitled “Die Weihe der Unkraft.”
Novalis, who was deeply read in Luther’s works, was of opinion that
he, like Protestantism itself, was something democratic; to him Luther
appeared a “hothead.” Disgusted with Lutheranism and vaguely conscious
of the beauty of the past he was anxious to see the scattered faithful
once more united in a new Christianity. “Luther,” so he wrote,
“treated Christianity as he liked, failed to recognise its spirit
and introduced another letter and another religion, viz. the sacred
principle of the Bible over all.” A “fire from heaven” had indeed
presided over the commencement of his career; later on, however, the
source of “holy inspiration had run dry” and worldliness gained the
upper hand in Luther.[1633]
The religious spirit which had animated the Romanticists and had led them
to cast yearning eyes at the Middle Ages was soon extinguished by the new
criticism, historical and Biblical, and by the spread of infidelity.
_The latest efforts to portray Luther_
Luther had now to submit to being criticised by scholars who prided
themselves on being dispassionate and were not slow to pass judgment on
the characteristics, whether actual or imaginary, which they seemed to
discover in him. What the Göttingen Church-historian, Gottlieb Jakob
Planck, representing the so-called “Pragmatic” writers had begun—much to
the disgust of the then Luther devotees[1634]—was pushed forward by many
other Protestants. The lengths to which independent criticism has gone of
recent years is emphasised in the Göttingen theologian, Paul de Lagarde.
Typical of his remarks is the following: “That great scold Luther, who
could see no further than the tips of his toes, by his demagogy threw
Germany into barbarism and dissension.”[1635] It was particularly with
Luther’s “coarseness” and tendency to indulge in vulgar abuse that the
critics were disposed to find fault. Some indeed were inclined to excuse
him. Hardly any other writer, however, in seeking to exculpate Luther
has used language so startling as that of Adolf Hausrath the Heidelberg
scholar who, in his Life of Luther (1904), “thanks God for the barbarism
of these polemics,” and goes so far as to say that, “since Luther’s road
led to the goal it must have been the right one.”[1636]
Of the three comprehensive and most widely known biographies of Luther,
that of Hausrath depicts Luther from the standpoint of a liberal
divine. Here Luther almost ceases to be a theologian, or at any rate
the theological problems amidst which Luther lived are scarcely even
mentioned. On the other hand, in the biography by Theodore Kolde of
Erlangen (2nd ed., 1893), the Wittenberg professor again figures as
a teacher; his scholarly two-volume work is positive in tendency and
regards Luther as a preacher of truth against the darkness of the Middle
Ages—which, however, the author has misunderstood and fails to treat
fairly. The third large modern work on Luther, also in two volumes, is by
the late Julius Köstlin of Halle and Breslau; a new edition was published
in 1903 with the collaboration of G. Kawerau; here the picture of Luther
is a product of the so-called theology of compromise.[1637]
Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, professor of History at Bonn and Leipzig,
said truly in his “Studien” (1874), that the traditional Luther
“myth” the “stuff and rubbish” which the past had looked upon as true
history, deserved to be cleared away. He traces back to Sleidanus the
“current ‘_fable convenue_’” about Luther; this writer, in the work
he published in 1555, which became a classic, had begun the process
of “moderating and toning down the theological colours” of Luther’s
picture, in such a way as to make Luther the living expression
of the “already finished programme of the Protestant princes and
theologians.” He lifted the author of the religious upheaval “out of
his democratic, revolutionary setting” and stamped him as a “model”
for theologians. Maurenbrecher, as a layman, is very frank in his
opinion as to the central question of Bible-interpretation: “It is
undoubtedly the right of every man at the present day to appeal
to Luther’s own example, in favour of the unfettered freedom of
Bible-research.”[1638]
By an objective portrayal of his characteristics, Protestant
non-theologians such as Maurenbrecher have done good service,
particularly as regards the more secular side of Luther’s picture.
The historian Onno Klopp was still a Protestant when, in 1857, in his
“Katholizismus, Protestantismus und Gewissensfreiheit in Deutschland,”
albeit recognising Luther’s merits, he censured his “boundless
confidence in the infallibility of his own judgment”; the “unstable
character of the new Church, so dependent on the favour of princes”;
also the blind, idolatrous veneration of his followers for him,
especially the attitude of the “narrow-minded Elector and his advisers
who were ready to take all the morbid drivel of a quarrelsome old
man for the Word of God.” And these same authorities, so Onno Klopp
declares, set up a new “Protestant Cæsarean Popedom” which year by
year became more burdensome and oppressive.[1639] On the whole his
portrait of Luther is the reverse of flattering.
Had the writings of Leopold von Ranke and Carl Adolf Menzel been as
independent as Maurenbrecher’s or as broad-minded as Klopp’s, their
picture of Luther would have been more true. Even to-day, in spite
of the abundance of works on the Reformation period, an independent
historian at home in all the profound and detailed studies which have
recently appeared, is still lacking in Protestant circles; hence a
living picture of Luther’s person has not yet been painted.
As for the Protestant theologians they have, as a rule, not
contributed much to the portrait of Luther; what they have given us
has been rather a sort of kaleidoscope of Luther’s dogma; they busy
themselves more with crumbs from his history than with it as a whole.
Dealing with some particular doctrine, writing or action of his
they have sketched, so to speak, only one facet of his personality;
with the help of this they have, nevertheless, built up a picture
of the founder of Protestantism as he seemed to them. Hence even
the fundamental conception of Luther’s message, i.e. that whereby
it differs essentially from Catholicism has been very variously
estimated.[1640]
Protestant theologians of more “positive” leanings have protested against
the Rationalist views of those other theologians who hold that Luther
banished dogma from his Christianity, and rediscovered Christianity “as
a religion.”[1641] They declare that, not only did he not abrogate dogma
but that he actually “revived and preserved” it. A religion without dogma
was unthinkable to him.[1642]
It is true that these positive theologians who believe in the existence
of Lutheran “dogmas” are at variance when it comes to stating clearly
the actual dogmas which Luther “revived,” or in what his essential
message consisted. Some insist above all on the ethical side; thanks to
Luther there came a “deeper understanding for the idiosyncracies of the
individual” than was the rule in mediæval Christianity.
Where such inveterate differences of opinion prevailed even the
theology of conciliation was bound to fail. Reinhold Seeberg, the
Berlin theologian, tried to promote some sort of settlement in his
“Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion,” a work “framed on the lines
of the olden Gospel and in the spirit of Paul and Luther which seeks
to make the Christian standpoint understood in wider circles.” But
his scheme met with a poor reception; the more orthodox looked at it
“askance, and, on the other hand, the progressive party were only the
more confirmed in their antagonism.”[1643]
Several Protestant theologians of late years have compared Luther to St.
Paul. This, for instance, was also done by Walter Köhler of Zürich, a
liberal theologian, who does not hesitate to reprehend in Luther whatever
he finds amiss, and who also shows considerably more broad-mindedness
than many others in his appreciation of the works of Catholics.
_The Janus-Picture of the Mediæval and Modern Luther_
Thanks to Denifle’s work Luther’s relation to the Middle Ages is now more
clearly seen. The need for bestowing more attention than has hitherto
been done on that side of Luther’s picture which belongs to the Middle
Ages has been strongly insisted on by another liberal theologian,
viz. Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. In Troeltsch’s writings Luther’s
features become to a great extent mediæval. His views on grace and
faith, his ethics, his Churches, the stress he lays on the Word—all
this, in reality, is an echo of Catholic times. All that forms the very
being of Luther is mediæval and the Protestant traits are merely the
wrapping.[1644] With the belief in revelation, which he still retained,
he had been unable to rise above the hedge of the mediæval way of thought.
Troeltsch thus comes to the conclusion that the new era in which we
live did not commence with Luther but only some two centuries ago,
i.e. with the dawn of the Enlightenment. The older Protestantism,
no less than Luther himself, belongs to the Middle Ages. Luther
stuck fast in the Middle Ages chiefly because he clung to the
belief in the “supranatural,” whereas the modern world, thanks to a
mathematico-mechanical natural science, has done away with all that
stands above nature.
Troeltsch also points out that Luther traces his conception of the
Evangel back to Paul, and not to Jesus as the New Theology does; also
that he, like the earlier Protestantism, had not completely shaken
himself free of the mediæval asceticism, and that he held fast to the
traditional doctrine of an original sin.
A Catholic writer has expressed himself more correctly on Luther’s
false “supranaturalism,” according to which God does everything and
man nothing: “The innermost kernel of his doctrinal system was more
ultra-mediæval than the Middle Ages themselves.” “So far was he from
desiring to make religion less unworldly or less Christian, that,
according to what he was incessantly hammering into his hearers, man
was to live himself ever more and more into conscience and faith, into
Christ and the Gospel.”[1645]
Nevertheless the objection brought forward repeatedly of recent years
against the theory of Luther’s mediævalism is also worthy of note;
it is urged that, particularly in the early years of his tempestuous
struggle, he threw off ideas which stamp him as thoroughly modern.
F. Loofs, for instance, says: “His leading ideas include in them a
whole series of inferences which, however, he never followed up to
their logical conclusion.… I may mention Luther’s dislike for all
bare historical and dogmatic belief, the tendency he had caught from
Erasmus to criticise even the Canon, the distinction he adumbrated
between the message of salvation or ‘Word of God’ and the actual
written word of Scripture.… Semler, who has been styled the father of
Rationalism, in his ‘Abhandlung vom freien Gebrauch des Kanons’ has
not unjustly claimed Luther as a forerunner … moreover, the services
rendered by Luther to the [liberal Protestant] theology of the 19th
century in many of its varied schools of thought cannot easily be
overlooked.”[1646]
In these remarks there is doubtless much truth, and there are facts
which go to bear out the theory that Luther indeed stands in close
relations to the modern spirit. There can be no doubt that, in Luther,
we find mediæval and modern features combined. What is wanting is an
organic connection between the two; as explained in the foregoing
volumes it was only at the expense of flagrant contradictions that
he took over certain elements from the past while rejecting others;
that he took one step forward towards modern infidelity and another
backwards. The ancient figure of Janus with one face looking forward
into the future and the other back upon the past was harmonious, at
least inasmuch as the two faces were depicted as separate. In Luther,
however, the two faces are one, a fact which scarcely improves his
physiognomy.
From the recent studies on Luther we can now see more clearly than
before that a “revision of the whole conception and appreciation of
Luther” is imperative in his own household. But, in view of all the
work already done, “is it not high time for us to expect an estimate
of the Reformation as a whole which shall also be just to the whole
Luther?” Stephan, who asks this question, answers it as follows: “We are
still to-day in the midst of a new development that started more than a
century since from the contrast presented by the different schools of
thought.”[1647]
_The “Religious” Reformer and the Hero of “Kultur”_
Two other conceptions are in vogue at the present day, which are in part
a reaction against the rather over-bold assertions sometimes made about
Luther’s mediævalism. Some have insisted that Luther is to be taken as a
“religious” teacher, without examining his actual doctrines too narrowly.
To others he appears in the light of the founder of modern “Kultur,” i.e.
of civilisation in its widest sense. Neither of these ideas can boast of
being very clear, nor have they met with any great success.
Those who regard Luther merely as a religious teacher practically
confine themselves to imputing to him the “religiousness” of modern
Protestantism as the inward force which moved him; albeit, maybe, in
his teaching, he did not quite come up to the modern standard. This
was to all intents and purposes the view of Albert Ritschl and his
school. Luther, they declared, taught first and foremost that both
“piety and theology should rest on the consciousness of having in
Christ a Gracious God, thanks to which consciousness we rise superior
to the world with all its goods and all its duties.” With him “it was
not a question of denominations but simply one of religion.” Ritschl,
as another Protestant not unjustly observed, “undoubtedly fell a
victim to the temptation” of “modernising” Luther.[1648] Moreover,
whereas, according to Ritschl, one of Luther’s main achievements was
his introduction of a new view of the Church as an institution devoid
of legal jurisdiction, according to other Protestant scholars, it was
“chiefly in his views regarding the Church that Luther remained under
the spell of mediæval thought.”[1649] On the other hand, some few
have sought to make out Luther’s religiousness to have been simply
ethical. Thus Wilhelm Wundt, the philosopher, declared that Luther had
taught mankind no new religion but only a new ethical system, which,
however, was merely an offshoot of the Renaissance. As against this we
may set the affirmation of Paul Wernle, viz. that neither Luther nor
Lutheranism had a system of ethics at all.[1650]
Recently, it is true, Luther’s “religiousness” has been described
by a skilful pen as consisting in an interior union with God, as
something altogether “spiritual,” “personal,” as “a sentiment bringing
comfort to man’s conscience.”[1651] The truth is, however, that the
greatest minds, in mediæval and still more in patristic times, were
also in favour of greater inwardness and were against that sort of
righteousness which consists merely of words and works. This is a
result borne in upon one by all the research now being conducted with
so much vigour into the views prevalent in the Middle Ages and earlier.
Hence those who look upon Luther as a new preacher of religion are
compelled to paint the pre-Lutheran world as absolutely heathen.
Luther, “with his peasant’s pick, relentlessly attacked the vulgar
polytheism of the people, the sublime polytheism of public worship
and dogma, and likewise the pantheism of mysticism.” But, even if
we suppose that all these dreadful things prevailed before Luther’s
coming, what did he set up in their place? He induced people, so it
is said, to “seek God and find Him in Jesus Christ the image of the
fatherly heart of God, to fear, love and hope in God above all things,
to fix our heart on God alone and there let it rest.”[1652]—But this
was precisely what the olden mediæval Church had sought to do, hence,
where is Luther’s peculiarity?
The state of the question to-day would almost seem to justify
the words of the famous Ernst Moritz Arndt in his “Ansichten und
Aussichten der teutschen Geschichte.” He wrote in 1814: “What
Luther really taught and wished has hitherto been understood only
by the few; his contemporaries failed to understand him, nor did
he understand himself”; but “he foresaw that fiery, disembodied,
formless Christianity that was to consist of nothing more than fire
and spirit.” Arndt concludes with the solemn words: “But peace be
with thine ashes, thou great German man, and may the earth hide thy
shortcomings and Christian charity thy faults.”[1653]
The aim of other modern thinkers is to breathe new life into Luther
by depicting him as the founder and the hero of modern “Kultur.” The
conception of the author of Protestantism as the fount and origin of all
present-day civilisation is certainly new and different from the earlier
portraitures we have thus far considered. In this picture the “cultural”
traits are put in so strong a light that his “religiousness” tends to
vanish.
Modern civilisation is non-religious. It is perfectly true that Luther
materially contributed to the expulsion of religious influences from
the secular government and from public life in general; also that he
intervened with a powerful hand to promote the secularisation—that had
already begun—and to loosen the existing bond between the Church and
the world. On the other hand, it is quite wrong to shut one’s eyes
to the other powerful factors at work both before him and in his day
which were also tending towards the civilisation of to-day with its
estrangement from the Church and preponderance of material interests.
Such a factor was the later Humanism. The whole background of the time
in which he lived and the seething ferment that preceded the birth
of the new world has been misunderstood. His friends indeed point to
the after-effects of his undertaking as seen in the subsequent growth
of education and scholarship; also to his attitude towards public
morality; to the services he rendered to the German tongue; even to
the benefit which, indirectly, accrued to agriculture, to the arts,
to music, poetry, etc. But, even if we are disposed to allow that
an improvement has taken place, it would be utterly unjust to blink
the fact that many other spiritual and material influences were at
work in all these spheres and were far more potent than Lutheranism.
The Lutheran territories were still in a state of servitude and
general backwardness when there passed over Germany a great wave of
civilisation that was partly of German partly of foreign and even
of Catholic growth. For the good that undoubtedly exists in modern
civilisation we have to thank partly the natural sciences, which on
their revival found a fertile soil even in Italy and France, partly
commerce in which, however, the South of Europe was as active as any
other region of the world, partly the arts, the best work being,
however, cisalpine, partly the development of the State and the army,
which again is certainly no indigenous product of Protestantism;
hence what we now know is the result of a rivalry between varied
influences and many countries. Then again all those qualities which
to-day give Germany so high a place among the nations had existed in
his countrymen long before Luther’s day; such were their readiness
to appreciate the good in others, their openness to outside ideas,
their ability to exploit foreign progress, their industry, their
domesticity, their tenacity in overcoming all obstacles, and their
sober outlook.
Those who make Luther the hero of “Kultur” are also apt to forget the
sad ethical, social and political consequences of the schism. To these
Adolf Harnack referred plainly enough in a lecture delivered in 1883:
“We are well aware of what the Reformation cost us Germans and still
costs us. For ages it delayed our political unity; it brought on us
the Thirty Years’ War; it made it difficult for us to be just to the
Church of the Middle Ages, nay, even to the Church of Antiquity—we
cannot break with history without obscuring it—it brought upon us a
religious schism which still hinders our growth.”[1654]
If, however, we examine those elements of the new “Kultur” which from the
religious or moral standpoint are somewhat questionable (though, amongst
Protestant unbelievers, writers are not wanting who are ready to justify
them) we meet with many indications which lead us back to Luther. Yet,
here again, on the other hand, there were other great and far-reaching
causes at work which account for them, which have but little to do with
Lutheranism. Such were, for instance, the English Deism which reached
Germany by way of France and which helped to produce the infidelity of
the Enlightenment; also the revolutionary ideas of 1789 on liberty, the
Rights of Man and the lawfulness of rising in revolt, ideas to which
the masses are still addicted; then again the luxury that was imported
from abroad; above all the inclination of the human heart everywhere to
sensuality, to egotism and to promote one’s own standing and temporal
welfare even at the expense of one’s neighbour. These maladies to which
human nature is prone have, by various causes, been sadly aggravated in
modern times. How far Luther was responsible for some of these causes
should not be difficult to determine after all that has been said
above. At any rate his repudiation of authority in religious matters,
his new ideas on faith and good works, and, again his whole system of
subjectivism, were poor barriers against the inrush of those elements
hostile to faith in God, to Christianity and to ethics, which, in modern
civilisation, have a place side by side with much that is good.
Nietzsche laid it down that Luther was the first to free the German
people from Christianity by teaching them to be un-Roman and to say:
Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.[1655] He was anxious to make Luther
the patron of his newest brand of “Kultur.” But this new, antichristian
and atheistic “Kultur” is largely repudiated in Protestant circles.
Many, like Walter Köhler, refuse to admit that Luther was in any sense
the father of modern freethought; how could he have been, asks Köhler,
since he would not sanction any freedom of conscience, and did not even
understand what such a thing was?[1656]
Hence Luther makes a rather unsatisfactory “Hero of Kultur.” To depict
him in this light his relations with the more favourable side of “Kultur”
have to be so much exaggerated and distorted that one almost expects
him, the sworn opponent of “fool reason” and champion of the “enslaved
will,” to leap from his grave in protest; on the other hand, it is quite
impossible to claim Luther as an advocate of that side of modern “Kultur”
which is antagonistic to religion and morality. Protestant authorities
have also protested against any claim being made on his behalf that he
at least abolished that “Kultur which was directed by the Church”; on
the contrary, so they declare, the “Kultur” for which he stood was in
many respects “still tied up to the one and only Church” and was quite
“mediæval in its character.”[1657] Thus, here again, a sort of dual
picture, painted partly in the gay colours of the present day, partly in
the sombre tints of the past.
_A “Political” Luther?—Conclusion_
Over and above all the previous presentations of Luther another
strange portrait has recently appeared, which finds admirers among lay
historians and students of political history. Here Luther’s political
traits are emphasised. Houston Stewart Chamberlain, in his much-read
work “Grundlagen des 19 Jahrhunderts,” insists on this view of Luther,
starting from the assumption which is beyond question “that the
separation from Rome for which Luther fought with such passion all his
life was in itself the greatest political upheaval that could possibly
occur.… However pitiful the later history of the Reformation may have
been, still Luther’s deed was an undying one for this reason, that it
rested on a firm political groundwork.” Chamberlain quite rightly makes
much of Luther’s attempt to link his cause with that of the princes and
with the German national sentiment.
“Without the princes,” says Chamberlain, “nothing could have been
done. Who seriously believes that the princes who patronised the
Reformation were inspired by or acted from religious enthusiasm? The
fingers of one hand would be more than enough on which to reckon
up those of whom such a thing holds good. Political interest and
political ambition backed by the awakening of national sentiment were
the determining factors.” “Even in the later wars of religion the
political question was paramount.” It was his desire to win over the
German statesmen that made Luther “speak so highly of the ‘German
nation’ and so disrespectfully of the Papists.” That was why he wrote,
for instance: “For my Germans was I born, them will I serve.” He
is “more a politician than a theologian.” “Luther is, above all, a
political hero.”
This portrait of the “political hero” is not one whit less one-sided
than the others; above all, the author, who has no understanding
for Christianity and the Church, fails also to see the so-called
“religious” side in Luther. It is true that political motives often
loomed so large in Luther’s case and in that of the princes who
lent him their support as actually to obscure the religious side
of the struggle. Luther himself, however, was anything rather than
a great politician on the world’s stage. He had, in fact, to quote
a Protestant historian, woefully distorted and imperfect views of
the actual trend of human events, particularly of the determining
personalities and active factors in the politics of that day. Never
perhaps has a more childish diagnosis been given than that contained
in the advice of the Wittenberg theologian to his sovereigns about
their attitude towards Charles V.[1658] The circumstance that he was
deficient in political sense may explain to some extent his mistakes
and want of logic in this sphere, but cannot excuse the masterful tone
in which he so often expresses himself on the public questions of
the day. Then again there was his changeableness. Resistance to the
Kaiser, which at one time he had declared unlawful, was advised by
him later. After he had handed over the rights of the Church to the
lawyers he turns on them and denounces them as his worst foes, who
must be fought with every weapon for the sake of the independence
of the preachers. In the same way, in spite of the religious freedom
which he seemed at first to proclaim as a lasting principle for all
future government of Church and State, we find him making his own that
repellant intolerance, which, at last subsequent to 1530, led him to
advocate the death-penalty for those who held “sectarian” doctrines,
or any that differed from his own.
Discouraged by the failure of all these attempts to portray Luther
others, at present, are inclined to deny him any mark of distinction and,
in particular, any creative power, and depict him simply as the sum,
or “product, of existing historical forces.” They emphasise strongly
the pre-existing factors and regard him less as a mover than as one
moved. This view, however, has also been stigmatised by Protestants as
“Mythological.” They object that even “the masses also have a certain
share in the achievements of genius,” and that genius itself is but “a
child of its time.”[1659]
“The literary portraits of Luther,” says the Protestant author of “Luther
im Lichte der neueren Forschung,” “are all more or less unlike the
original. They are not in the strict sense of the word portraits at all
but rather represent a type.… Every age has to some degree altered the
traditional picture of the Reformer to make it fit its own ideals.” “The
naïve way of idealising which credits the hero of history with our own
ideals … is still at work even at the present day. If we cannot claim the
whole Luther for ourselves, we can at least claim a bit of Luther.”
“In most of the popular Luther biographies of recent times,” the same
author says, “all that is harsh and rude, violent and demagogic, rough
and crude in the physiognomy of the Reformer has been obliterated.”[1660]
Adolf Harnack, also, seeks to discourage the practice of “hero painting”;
he speaks unkindly of the common, “emotional pictures” of Luther as the
reformer of civilisation which are fabricated somehow or other with the
help of a select collection of artificial strokes. He adds: “The reformer
himself would not recognise such a picture as his.” “Such a thing would
be to him,” to quote an expression of Luther’s own, simply “a painted
Luther.”[1661]
To get as close as possible to the real Luther and not to present a
painted or fictitious one has been our constant endeavour in the present
work. We venture to hope that the claims of objective history may be
recognised even in a field which trenches so closely on religious
convictions. There is so much that is purely historical and may be judged
quite apart from denominational considerations, so much neutral ground
where it is merely a question of facts. To construct an opinion of one’s
own based on the incontrovertible facts is open to everyone. We trust
that the new discussions that seem called for for a further sifting of
facts will be undertaken in all calm and in the dispassionate temper
befitting the historian. Should these volumes serve as a stimulus in this
direction, the author will feel that, by this alone, he has achieved
something great.
APPENDICES
XLI—APPENDIX I
LUTHER’S WRITINGS AND THE EVENTS OF THE DAY ARRANGED IN CHRONOLOGICAL
ORDER
[The list in the original was compiled by Peter Sinthern, S.J. We have
retained it intact, save that here, as in the body of the work, we give
the title of each of Luther’s German writings in the quaint spelling
of the earliest “Urdruck” to which we had access. _Note of the English
Editor._]
As the plan of the present work, as explained in the Introduction
(vol. i., pp. xxvii., xxxi.), did not allow of a strict chronological
order being followed, and as, moreover, many of Luther’s writings and
not a few events of the day had to be passed over in silence, the
following list may be found both interesting and useful.
Reference is made in it to all Luther’s publications, even the smaller
ones, and the reader is told where they may be found, either in the
older Erlangen edition, or in the more recent Weimar edition, so
far as the latter goes. Such a catalogue forms the best skeleton
for Luther’s history. The list is based on that given by Köstlin
(“Luther,”⁵ 2, p. 718 ff.), slightly enlarged, for instance by
references to Luther’s correspondence (in Enders, De Wette and the
Erlangen ed.), to his Disputations (as in Drews), and to his sermons.
Works which do not figure in the actual list for each year but in the
paragraph inset at the end, are those which, though published during
the year in question, were written earlier. Some works apparently
omitted in the list will be found either in the Sermons or in the
Correspondence of Luther.
The bringing into conjunction of Luther’s writings with the principal
events of the years in which they saw the light will be found of
advantage, in that the two often mutually complete and explain each
other.
Till =1516=. Accession of Pope Leo X, 1513; of Kaiser Maximilian I,
1493; of Frederick, Elector of Saxony, 1486; of George, Duke of Saxony,
1500; of William IV, Duke of Bavaria, 1508; of Joachim I, Elector of
Brandenburg, 1499; of Albert Archbishop of Mayence, 1514; of Scultetus,
Bishop of Brandenburg, 1507.—In 1502 foundation of the University of
Wittenberg. In 1503 death of Andreas Proles. Johann Lang, professor
(since 1511) at Wittenberg goes (1515-16) back to Erfurt. In 1510 Eck
is appointed professor at Ingolstadt; Carlstadt wins his doctorate.
In 1511, Amsdorf becomes a licentiate in theology. In 1513, Spalatin
is appointed Court-chaplain and secretary to the Elector Frederick. In
1513-1514, the attitude of the peasants becomes threatening. In 1515,
publication of the “Epistolæ obscurorum virorum” of Crotus Rubeanus,
etc.—1483, Nov. 10, Birth of Martin Luther. In 1497, he is sent to
Magdeburg to the Brothers of the Common Life. In 1498, he goes to
Eisenach and, in 1501, to Erfurt. 1502, he becomes a Baccalaureus. In
1505, he is made a Master and enters the cloister (July 17). In 1506, he
makes his vows; his first Mass (May 2?). He begins to study theology.
In 1508, he goes to Wittenberg to study; his lectures on dialectics and
ethics. In 1509, he becomes a Baccalaureus biblicus (March 9); late in
the year he returns to Erfurt and becomes Sententiarius. At the end of
1510 he goes to Rome and early in 1511 returns to Germany; “deserts to
Staupitz” and removes again to Wittenberg. In 1512, the Cologne Chapter;
beginning of his friendship with Lang and Eberbach; his doctorate (Oct.
18); he succeeds Staupitz as professor of Holy Scripture. In 1514 he
takes Reuchlin’s side. In 1515 is made District-Vicar at the Chapter of
Gotha; his discourse “Against the Little Saints.” His opinions become
fixed whilst engaged on his Exposition of Romans (1515-1516); echoes of
the new doctrine in his sermons at Christmas.
1. 1510-1511. Marginal notes to the Sentences (Bks. i.-iii.) and
certain works of St. Augustine (publ. 1893). Weim. ed., 9, pp. 2 ff.,
28 ff.
2. 1513-1515. First lectures on the Psalms: “Dictata super psalterium”
(publ. 1743 and 1876, complete 1885). Weim. ed., 3, pp. 1(11)-652 (ps.
i.-lxxxiv.); 4, pp. 1-462 (ps. lxxxv.-cl.); 9, pp. 116-121 (ps. xli.).
3. 1514-1517. Sermons on the Lessons (in Latin) preached at the
monastery (publ. 1720). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 18(20)-141; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 1, pp. 41-214.
4. 1514-1520. Sermons (ed. Roth, 1886). Weim. ed., 4, pp.
587(590)-717; 9, pp. 203(204); cp. “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 25-232.
5. 1515-1516. Lectures on Romans (ed. Joh. Ficker, 1908).
6. 1515? “Sermo præscriptus præposito in Litzka” (publ. 1708). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 8(10)-17; “Opp. lat var.,” 1, pp. 29-41.
Sermons, cp. Nos. 3, 4, 6. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 4-27. Erl. ed., 53,
p. 1.
=1516.= Hermann von Wied becomes Archbishop of Cologne; Erasmus’s
“Colloquia”; his first edition of the Greek New Testament with a new
Latin translation; Lang as Prior of Erfurt.—Luther’s first mention of
Tauler, in his “Commentary on Romans”; his mystical letters to Spenlein
and Leiffer (April 8, 15); his quarrel with the Erfurt monks (June
16); his Catholic sermon on Indulgences (July 27); his sermons against
the “holy-by-works” (July-Aug.); Opposition to his new theology at
Wittenberg and Erfurt (Sept.); back to Augustine! (Oct. 19); Carlstadt’s
Theses; Luther busy on Galatians and Titus, 1516-1517.
7. 1516-1517. “Decem præcepta Wittembergensi prædicata populo” (publ.
1518). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 394(398)-521; “Opp. lat. exeg.,” 1, pp. 1-218.
8. (Sept.). “Quæstio de viribus et voluntate hominis sine gratia”
(Theses for Barth. Bernhardi: “Initium negocii evangelici”). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 142(145)-151; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 232(235)-255.
9. (Oct. 27, 1516-1517). “In Epistolam Pauli ad Galatas” (Lectures,
publ. 1519). Weim. ed., 2, pp. 436(451)-618. Irmischer, 3, pp. 141-485.
10. 1st ed. of “Eyn geystlich edles Buchleynn” (the “Theologia
Deutsch”), with “Vor Rede.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 152(153); Erl. ed., 63,
p. 238.
Sermons, cp. Nos. 3, 4, 7. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 28-78.
=1517.= Creation of 31 new Cardinals (July 1); ridicule of the German
Humanists; Hutten settles in Germany; his edition of the “Donatio
Constantini”; “our” Erasmus (March 1) publishes his paraphrases on
the Epistles, and, later, on the Gospels; the old exegesis fares
badly; “De planctu ecclesiæ” reprinted at Lyons; Tetzel visits
Magdeburg, Halberstadt and (in Oct.) Berlin; Luther nails up his Latin
Indulgence-Theses (Oct. 31).
11. “Die sieben Puszpsalm mit deutscher Auszlegung nach dem
schrifftlichen Synne” (first personal work published by Luther). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 154(158)-220; Erl. ed., 37, pp. 345-442.
12. “Auslegung deutsch des Vater Unnser fuer dye einfeltigen Leyen”
(publ. by Agricola, and by Luther himself in 1518, No. 31).
13. Lectures on Hebrews (still unpublished).
14. “Disputatio contra scholasticam theologiam” (Theses for Franz
Günther). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 221(224)-228; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp.
315-321.
15. “Die zehen Gepot Gottes … mit einer kurtzen Ausslegung” (publ.
1518). Weim. ed., 1, pp. 247(250)-256; Erl. ed., 36, pp. 146-154.
16. The 95 Indulgence-Theses: “Disputatio pro declaratione virtutis
indulgentiarum.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 229(233)-238; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1,
pp. 285-293.
Sermons, cp. Nos. 3, 4, 7. Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 79-137; Erl. ed.,
53, p. 1 f.
=1518.= Philip II Landgrave of Hesse (March 31); Sickingen and his
men desert the French for the Kaiser (May 16); Melanchthon goes to
Wittenberg (Aug. 25).—Early in 1518 Archbishop Albert sends his report to
Rome; Tetzel’s counter-theses (Jan. 18); Leo X directs the Augustinian
superiors to take steps; the Heidelberg Chapter and the Disputation
in Luther’s favour; Lang displaces Luther as District-Vicar; charges
formulated at Rome against Luther as a spreader of heretical opinions
(middle of June); he is summoned to Rome (Aug. 7); the Augsburg trial
(Oct.); Papal Bull to defend the doctrine of Indulgences (Nov. 9); Luther
appeals to a General Council (Nov. 28); he discovers the secret of the
certainty of salvation.
17. “Eyn Sermon von dem Ablass und Gnade.” Weim. ed., 1, pp.
239(243)-246; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 4-8; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 326-331.
18. “Resolutiones disputationum de indulgentiarum virtute.” Weim. ed.,
1, pp. 522(525)-628; 9, pp. 171-175; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 126-293.
19. “Sermo de pœnitentia.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 317(319)-324; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 1, pp. 331-340.
20. Theses for the Heidelberg Disputation (Leonard Beyer’s). Weim.
ed., 1, pp. 350(353)-355; 9, pp. 160(161)-170; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1,
pp. 387-390.
21. “Asterisci Lutheri adv. Obeliscos Eckii” (publ. 1545). Weim. ed.,
1, pp. 278(281)-314; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 410-456.
22. Preface to the complete ed. of “Eyn Deutsch Theologia.” Weim. ed.,
1, pp. 374(378)-379; Erl. ed., 63, pp. 238-240; cp. No. 10.
23. “Eyn Freiheyt dess Sermons Bepstlichen Ablass und Gnad belangend.”
Weim. ed., 1, pp. 380(383)-393; Erl. ed., 27, pp. 10-25.
24. “Ausslegung des 109 Psalmen.” Weim. ed., 1, pp. 687(689)-710; 9,
pp. 176-202; Erl. ed., 40, pp. 3-38.
25. “Ad dialogum Silvestri Prieriatis de potestate Papæ responsio.”
Weim. ed., 1, pp. 644(647)-686; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 6-67.
26. “Sermo de virtute excommunicationis.” Weim. ed., 1, pp.
634(638)-643; “Opp. lat. var.,” 1, 2, pp. 306-313.
27. “Sermo in festo S. Michaelis in arce Wimariensi” (publ. 1556).
“Opp. lat. var.,” 1, pp. 226-232.
28. “Acta Augustana.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 1(6)-26; 9, p. 205; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 2, pp. 354-361, 367-392.
29. “Appellatio a Caietano ad Papam.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 27(28)-33;
“Opp. lat var.,” 2, pp. 398-404.
30. “Appellatio ad futurum concilium universale.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
34(36)-40; “Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 438-445.
31. “Auslegung deutsch des Vater Unnser fuer dye einfeltigen Leyen.”
(Cp. No. 12.) Weim. ed., 2, pp. 74(80)-130; 9, pp. 122(123)-159; Erl.
ed., 21, pp. 159-227; 45, pp. 204-207.
32. “Sermo de triplici iustitia.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 41(43)-47; “Opp.
lat. var.,” 2, pp. 322-329.
“Decem præcepta,” cp. No. 7. Brief explanation of the Ten
Commandments, cp. No. 15. Sermons, Erl. ed., 16², pp. 3-33; cp. No. 4.
Letters, Enders, 1, pp. 138-337; 5, p. 1; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 3-5.
=1519.= Death of Maximilian I, Charles V succeeds him (June 28); Ulrich
becomes Duke of Würtemberg; the “Onus ecclesiæ” of B. Pirstinger of
Chiemsee; death of Tetzel (Aug. 11); Capito becomes cathedral-preacher at
Mayence; Zwingli at Zürich (Jan. 1); Oldecop visits Rome; Miltitz calls
on Luther (Jan.); the Leipzig Disputations (June-July).
33. Preface to Prierias’s “Replica.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 48(50)-56;
“Opp. lat. var.,” 2, pp. 68-78.
34. “Kurtz Unterweysung wie man beichten sol.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
57(59)-65; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 245-253 (cp. No. 66).
35. “Unterricht auff etlich Artikell.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 66(69)-73;
Erl. ed., 24, pp. 3-9; 24², pp. 5-11.
36. “Eyn Sermon von der Betrachtung des heyligen Leydens Christi.”
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 131(136)-142; Erl. ed., 11, pp. 144-152; 11², pp.
154-163.
37. Commentary on Galatians, cp. No. 9.
38. 1519-1521. Second course of Lectures on the Psalms. “Operationes
in psalmos” (Ps. i.-xxii.). Weim. ed., 5, pp. 1(19)-673; “Opp. lat.
exeg.,” 14-16.
39. “Sermo de duplici iustitia.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 143(145)-152; “Opp.
lat. var.,” 2, pp. 329-339.
40. “Disputatio et excusatio adv. criminationes Eccii.” Weim. ed., 2,
pp. 153(158)-161; 9, pp. 206(207)-212; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp. 12-17.
41. “Eyn Sermon von dem Elichen Standt.” Original text, Weim. ed., 9,
pp. 213-220; Erl. ed., 16, pp. 150-158; 16², pp. 50-57. Revised text,
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 162(166)-171; Erl. ed., 16, pp. 158-165; 16², pp.
60-67.
42. “Eyn kurtze Form des Pater Noster zu versteen unnd zu betten.”
Weim. ed., 6, pp. 9(11)-19; Erl. ed., 22, pp. 21-32.
43. “Kurtze nützliche ausslegung des Vatter Unsers fürsich und
hindersich.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 20(21)-22; Erl. ed., 45, p. 208-211.
44. “Eyn Sermon von dem Gepeet unnd Procession yn der Creutz Wochen.”
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 172(175)-179; Erl. ed., 20, pp. 290-296; 16², pp.
69-76.
45. “Eyn Sermon von dem Wucher.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 1(3)-8; Erl. ed.,
20, pp. 122-127; 16², pp. 113-117.
46. “Resolutio super propositione sua (Lipsiensi) XIII de potestate
Papæ.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 180(183)-240; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp.
296-384.
47. “Scheda adv. Hochstraten,” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 384(386)-387; “Opp.
lat var.,” 2, pp. 295-297.
48. “Resolutiones super propositionibus Lipsiæ disputatis.” Weim. ed.,
2, pp. 388(391)-435; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp. 228-292.
49. “Tessaradecas consolatoria pro laborantibus et oneratis.” (publ.
1520). Weim. ed., 6, pp. 99(104)-134; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 88-135.
50. “Contra malignum Ioh. Eccii iudicium.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
621(625)-654; “Opp. lat. var.,” pp. 472-514.
51. “Ad ægocerotem Emserianum additio.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
655(658)-679; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 13-45.
52. “Sermon von dem Sacrament der Puss.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
709(713)-723; Erl. ed., 53, p. 30 f.; 20, pp. 179-193; 16², pp. 35-48.
53. “Eyn Sermon von der Bereytung zum Sterben.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
680(684)-697; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 258-274; “Opp. lat. var.,” 3, pp.
453-473.
54. “Ad Eccium super expurgatione Ecciana.” Weim. ed., 2, pp.
698(700)-708; “Opp. lat. var.,” 4, pp. 47-58.
55. “Eyn Sermon von dem heyligen hochwirdigen Sacrament der Tauffe.”
Weim. ed., 2, pp. 724(727)-737; Erl. ed., 21, pp. 229-244; “Opp. lat.
var.,” 3, pp. 398-410.
56. “Eyn Sermon von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des heyligen waren
Leychnams Christi.” Weim. ed., 2, pp. 738(742)-758; Erl. ed., 27, pp.
28-50.
57. “Scholia in librum Genesios” (publ. 1893). Weim. ed., 9, pp.
329-415.
58. “Enarrationes epistolarum et evangeliorum quas postillas vocant”
(publ. 1893). Weim. ed., 9, pp. 415-676.
59. Latin Advent-postils (publ. 1521). Weim. ed., 7, pp. 458(463)-637.
Sermons, cp. No. 36, 41, 44, 52, 55-59. Letters, Enders, 1, p. 338—2,
p. 289; 5, pp. 4-8; Erl. ed., 53, pp. 5-34; 56, pp. i.-vii.
=1520.= Suleiman II begins his career. The war in Hungary. Coronation
of Charles V at Aachen (Oct. 23). Hutten offers Luther his own and
Sickingen’s protection; his “Vadiscus” and “Inspicientes” (April). Münzer
at Zwickau (May 17); Urban Rhegius cathedral-preacher at Augsburg; Link
succeeds Staupitz as General Vicar (Aug. 28). Eck goes to Rome; the first
Consistory against Luther (Jan. 9). The Stolpen decree of the Bishop of
Meissen (Jan. 24). Luther’s letter to Charles V (Aug. 30); his third
and last epistle to Leo X (after Oct. 13). The Bull “Exsurge” and its
condemnation of 41 theses (June 15), published in Germany by Eck (in
Sept.) and burnt by Luther (Dec. 10). Luther’s open attack on the freedom
of the will.
60. “Eyn Sermon von dem Bann.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 61(63)-75; Erl. ed.,
27, pp. 51-70.
61. “Eyn Sermon von dem Wucher.” Weim. ed., 6, pp. 33(36)-60; Erl.
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