Of this there was not the shadow of a proof. The contrary is clear from Protestant documents and protocols.[289] The Court of the Saxon Electorate, where an insult to the Emperor was apprehended, was aghast at Luther’s resolve to publish the charge concerning the “equipment from Italy,” and Chancellor Brück hastened to request him to alter the proofs for fear of evil consequences.[290] Luther, however, was in no mood to yield; the writing comprising this malicious insinuation and other falsehoods was even addressed in the form of a letter to the Saxon Elector and the allied Princes. At the same time the author, both in the text and in his correspondence, gave the impression that the writing had been composed without the Elector’s knowledge and only at the request of “many others, some of them great men,” though in reality, as Protestants admit, the “work had been written to order,” viz. at the instigation of the Electoral Court.[291]
“We all know,” Luther says, seemingly with the utmost gravity, in this work against the Duke, “that Pope and Papists desire our death, body and soul. We, on the other hand, desire to save them with us, soul and body.”[292] There is no need to waste words on the intentions here ascribed to the Papists. As to Luther’s own good intentions so far as the material welfare of the Papists goes, what he says does not tally with the wish he so loudly expressed at that very time for the bloody destruction of the Pope. Further, as regards the Papists’ souls, what he said of his great opponent, Archbishop Albert of Mayence, deserves to be mentioned: “He died impenitent in his sins and must be damned eternally, else the Christian faith is all wrong.”[293] Did Luther perhaps write this with a heavy heart? Yet he also condemns in advance the soul of the unhappy Duke of Brunswick, “seeing there is no hope of his amendment,” and “even though he should feign to repent and become more pious,” yet he would not be trusted since “he might pretend to repent and amend merely in order to climb back to honour, lands and people, which assuredly would be nothing but a false and foxy repentance.”[294] Hence he insists upon the Princes refusing to release the Duke. But even his own friends will not consider his religious motives for this very profound or genuine, for instance, when he says: Were he to be released, “many pious hearts would be saddened and their prayers for your Serene Highnesses become tepid and cold.”[295] His political reasons were no less founded on untruth. The only object of the League of the Catholic Princes was to seize upon the property of the evangelical Princes; “they were thinking, not of the Christian faith, but of the lands of the Elector and the Landgrave”; they have made “one league after the other” and now “call it a defensive one, as though forsooth they were in danger,” whereas “we for our part have without intermission prayed, implored, called and cried for peace.”[296]
While Luther was himself playing fast and loose with truth, he was not slow to accuse his opponents of lying even when they presented matters as they really were. When Eck published the Bull of Excommunication, which Luther himself knew to be authentic, he was roundly rated for saying that his “tissue of lies” was “the Pope’s work.”[297] In fact, in all and everything that Catholics undertake against his cause, they are seeking “to deceive us and the common people, though well aware of the contrary.... You see how they seek the truth.... They are rascals incarnate.”[298] In fighting against the lies of his opponents Luther, once,—curiously enough—in his writing “Widder die hymelischen Propheten” actually takes the Pope under his protection against the calumnies of his Wittenberg opponent Carlstadt; seeking to brand him as a liar, he declares that he “was notoriously telling lies of the Pope.”
We already know how much Carlstadt had to complain of Luther’s lying and fickleness.
This leads to a short review of the remarks made by Luther’s then opponents and friends concerning his want of truthfulness.
Luther’s work against Duke Henry of Brunswick entitled “Wider Hans Worst” was so crammed with malice and falsehoods that even some of Luther’s followers were disposed to complain of its unseemliness. Simon Wilde, who was then studying medicine at Wittenberg, wrote on April 8, 1541, when forwarding to his uncle the Town Clerk, Stephen Roth of Zwickau, a copy of the booklet which had just appeared: “I am sending you a little work of Dr. Martin against the Duke of Brunswick which bristles with calumnies, but which also [so he says] contains much that is good, and may be productive of something amongst the virtuous.”[299]
Statements adverse to Luther’s truthfulness emanating from the Protestant side are not rare; particularly are they met with in the case of theologians who had had to suffer from his violence; nor can their complaints be entirely disallowed simply because they came from men who were in conflict with him, though the circumstance would call for caution in making use of them were the complaints not otherwise corroborated.
Œcolampadius in his letter to Zwingli of April 20, 1525, calls Luther a “master in calumny, and prince of sophists.”[300]
The Strasburg preachers Bucer and Capito, though reputed for their comparative moderation, wrote of one of Luther’s works on the Sacrament, that “never had anything more sophistical and calumnious seen the light.”[301]
Thomas Münzer repeatedly calls his enemy Luther “Dr. Liar” and “Dr. Lyinglips,”[302] on account of the unkindness of his polemics; more picturesquely he has it on one occasion, that “he lied from the bottom of his gullet.”[303]
Bucer complains in terms of strong disapprobation, that, when engaged with his foes, Luther was wont to misrepresent and distort their doctrines in order the more readily to gain the upper hand, at least in the estimation of the multitude. He finds that “in many places” he has “rendered the doctrines and arguments of the opposite side with manifest untruth,” for which the critic is sorry, since this “gave rise to grave doubts and temptations” amongst those who detected this practice, and diminished their respect for the Evangelical teaching.[304]
The Lutheran, Hieronymus Pappus, sending Luther’s work “Wider Hans Worst” to Joachim Vadian, declared: “In calumny he does not seem to me to have his equal.”[305]
Johann Agricola, once Luther’s friend, and then, on account of his Antinomianism, his adversary, brings against Luther various charges in his Notes (see above, vol. iii., p. 278); the worst refer to his “lying.” God will punish Luther, he writes, referring to his work “Against the Antinomians”; “he has heaped too many lies on me before all the world.” Luther had said that Agricola denied the necessity of prayer or good works; this the latter, appealing to his witnesses, brands as an “abominable lie.” He characterises the whole tract as “full of lies,”[306] and, in point of fact, there is no doubt it did contain the worst exaggerations.
Among the writers of the opposite camp the first place is due to Erasmus. Of one of the many distortions of his meaning committed by Luther he says: “It is true I never look for moderation in Luther, but for so malicious a calumny I was certainly not prepared.”[307] Elsewhere he flings in his face the threat: “I shall show everybody what a master you are in the art of misrepresentation, defamation, calumny and exaggeration. But the world knows this already.... In your sly way you contrive to twist even what is absolutely true, whenever it is to your interest to do so. You know how to turn black into white and to make light out of darkness.”[308] Disgusted with Luther’s methods, he finally became quite resigned even to worse things. He writes: “I have received Luther’s letter; it is simply the work of a madman. He is not in the least ashamed of his infamous lies and promises to do even worse. What can those people be thinking of who confide their souls and their earthly destiny to a man who allows himself to be thus carried away by passion?”[309]
The polemic, Franz Arnoldi, tells Luther, that one of his works contains “as many lies as words.”[310]
Johann Dietenberger likewise says, referring to a newly published book of Luther’s which he had been studying: “He is the most mendacious man under the sky.”[311]
Paul Bachmann, shortly after the appearance of Luther’s booklet “Von der Winckelmesse,” in his comments on it emits the indignant remark: “Luther’s lies are taller even than Mount Olympus.”[312]
“This is no mere erring man,” Bachmann also writes of Luther, “but the wicked devil himself to whom no lie, deception or falsehood is too much.”[313]
Johann Eck sums up his opinion of Luther’s truthfulness in these words: “He is a man who simply bristles with lies (‘homo totus mendaciis scatens’)”.[314] The Ingolstadt theologian, like Bartholomew Kleindienst (above, p. 95), was particularly struck by Luther’s parody of Catholic doctrine.—Willibald Pirkheimer’s words in 1528 we already know.[315]
We pass over similar unkindly epithets hurled at him by indignant Catholic clerics, secular, or regular. The latter, particularly, speaking with full knowledge and therefore all the more indignantly, describe as it deserves what he says of vows, as a glaring lie, of the falsehood of which Luther, the quondam monk, must have been fully aware.
Of the Catholic Princes who were capable of forming an opinion, Duke George of Saxony with his downright language must be mentioned first. In connection with the Pack negotiations he says that Luther is the “most cold-blooded liar he had ever come across.” “We must say and write of him, that the apostate monk lies like a desperate, dishonourable and forsworn miscreant.” “We have yet to learn from Holy Scripture that Christ ever bestowed the mission of an Apostle on such an open and deliberate liar or sent him to proclaim the Gospel.”[316] Elsewhere he reminds Luther of our Lord’s words: “By their fruits you shall know them”: To judge of the spirit from the fruits, Luther’s spirit must be a “spirit of lying”; indeed, Luther proved himself “possessed of the spirit of lies.”[317]
Not merely isolated statements, but whole series of regularly recurring assertions in Luther’s works, constitute a real problem, and, instead of challenging refutation make one ask how their author could possibly have come to utter and make such things his own.
He never tires of telling the public, or friends and supporters within his own circle, that “not one Bishop amongst the Papists reads or studies Holy Scripture”; “never had he [Luther] whilst a Catholic heard anything of the Ten Commandments”; in Rome they say: “Let us be cheerful, the Judgment Day will never come”; they also call anyone who believes in revelation a “poor simpleton”; from the highest to the lowest they believe that “there is no God, no hell and no life after this life”; when taking the religious vows the Papists also vowed they “had no need of the Blood and Passion of Christ”; I, too, “was compelled to vow this”; all religious took their vows “with a blasphemous conscience.”
He says: In the Papacy “they did not preach Christ,” but only the Mass and good works; and further: “No Father [of the Church] ever preached Christ”; and again: “They knew nothing of the belief that Christ died for us”; or: “No one [in Popery] ever prayed”; and: Christ was looked upon only as a “Judge” and we “merely fled from the wrath of God,” knowing nothing of His mercy. “The Papists,” he declares, “condemned marriage as forbidden by God,” and “I myself, while still a monk, was of the same opinion, viz. that the married state was a reprobate state.”
In the Papacy, so Luther says in so many words, “people sought to be saved through Aristotle.”[318] “In the Papacy the parents did not provide for their children. They believed that only monks and priests could be saved.”[319] “In the Papacy you will hardly meet with an honest man who lives up to his calling” (i.e. who performs his duties as a married man).[320]
But enough of such extravagant assertions, which to Catholics stand self-condemned, but were intended by their author to be taken literally. He flung such wild sayings broadcast among the masses, until it became a second nature with him. For we must bear in mind that grotesque and virulent misstatements such as the above occur not merely now and again, but simply teem in his books, sermons and conversations. It would be an endless task to enumerate his deliberate falsehoods. He declares, for instance, that the Papists, in all their collects and prayers, extolled merely the merits of the Saints; yet this aspersion which he saw fit to cast upon the Church in the interests of his polemics, he well knew to be false, having been familiar from his monastic days with another and better aspect of the prayers he here reviles. He knew that the merits of the Saints were referred to only in some of the collects; he knew, moreover, why they were mentioned there, and that they were never alleged alone but always in subordination to the merits and the mediation of our Saviour (“Per Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum,” etc.).
A favourite allegation of Luther’s, viz. that the Church of the past had regarded Christ exclusively as a stern Judge, was crushingly confuted in Denifle’s work. The importance of this brilliant and scholarly refutation lies in the fact, that it is principally founded on texts and usages of the older Church with which Luther was perfectly familiar, which, for instance, he himself had recited in the liturgy and more especially in the Office of his Order year after year, and which thus bear striking testimony against his good faith in the matter of his monstrous charge.[321]
It is a matter of common knowledge that, also in other branches of the history of theology and ecclesiastical life, Denifle has refuted with rare learning, though with too sharp a pen, Luther’s paradoxical “lies” concerning mediæval Catholicism. It is to be hoped that this may be followed by other well-grounded and impartial comments from the pen of other writers, for, in spite of their monstrous character, some of Luther’s accusations still live, partly no doubt owing to the respect in which he is held. Some of them will be examined more closely below. The principal aim of these pages is, however, to seek the psychological explanation of the strange peculiarity which manifests itself in Luther’s intellectual life, viz. the abnormal tendency to level far-fetched charges, sometimes bordering on the insane.
A key to some of these dishonest exaggerations is to be found in the need which Luther experienced of arming himself against the Papacy and the older Church by ever more extravagant assertions. Realising how unjust and untenable much of his position was, and oppressed by those doubts to which he often confessed, a man of his temper was sorely tempted to have recourse to the expedient of insisting yet more obstinately on his pet ideas. The defiance which was characteristic of him led him to pile up one assertion on the other which his rhetorical talent enabled him to clothe in his wonted language. Throughout he was acting on impulse rather than from reflection.
To this must be added—incredible as it may appear in connection with the gravest questions of life—his tendency to make fun. Jest, irony, sarcasm were so natural to him as to obtrude themselves almost unconsciously whenever he had to do with opponents whom he wished to crush and on whom he wished to impose by a show of merriment which should display the strength of his position and his comfortable sense of security, and at the same time duly impress his own followers. Those who looked beneath the surface, however, must often have rejoiced to see Luther so often blunting the point of his hyperboles by the drolleries by which he accompanies them, which made it evident that he was not speaking seriously. To-day, too, it would be wrong to take all he says as spoken in dead earnest; at the same time it is often impossible to determine where exactly the serious ends and the trivial, vulgar jest begins; probably even Luther himself did not always know. A few further examples may be given.
“In Popery we were compelled to listen to the devil and to worship things that some monk had spewed or excreted, until at last we lost the Gospel, Baptism, the Sacrament and everything else. After that we made tracks for Rome or for St. James of Compostella and did everything the Popish vermin told us to do, until we came to adore even their lice and fleas, nay, their very breeches. But now God has returned to us.”[322]
“Everywhere there prevailed the horrid, pestilential teaching of the Pope and the sophists, viz. that a man must be uncertain of God’s grace towards himself (‘incertum debere esse de gratia Dei erga se’).”[323] By this doctrine and by their holiness-by-works Pope and monks “had driven all the world headlong into hell” for “well-nigh four hundred years.”[324] Of course, “for a man to be pious, or to become so by God’s Grace, was heresy” to them; “their works were of greater value, did and wrought more than God’s Grace,”[325] and with all this “they do no single work which might profit their neighbour in body, goods, honour or soul.”[326]
A. Kalthoff[327] remarks of similar distortions of which Luther was guilty: “Hardly anyone in the whole of history was so little able to bear contradiction as Luther; it was out of the question to discuss with him any opinion from another point of view; he preferred to contradict himself or to assert what was absolutely monstrous, rather than allow his opponent even a semblance of being in the right.”—The misrepresentation of Catholic doctrine which became a tradition among Lutheran polemics was in great part due to Luther.—With equal skill and moderation Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick, in his “Fifty Reasons” for returning to the Catholic Church,[328] protests against this perversion of Catholic doctrine by Lutheran writers. He had observed that arguments were adduced by the Lutherans to prove truths which the Church does not deny at all, whilst the real points at issue were barely touched upon. “For instance, they bring forward a heap of texts to prove that God alone is to be adored, though Catholics never question it, and they teach that it is a sin of idolatry to pay divine worship to any creature.” “They extol the merits of Christ and the greatness of His satisfaction for our sins. But what for? Catholics teach the same, viz. that the merits of Christ are infinite and that His satisfaction suffices to blot out all the sins of the world, and thus they, too, hold the Bible doctrine of the appropriation of Christ’s merits by means of their own good works (1 Peter i. 10).”
Two things especially were made the butt of Luther’s extravagant and untrue charges and insinuations, viz. the Mass and the religious life. In his much read Table-Talk the chapter on the Mass is full of misrepresentations such as can be explained only by the animus of the speaker.[329] Of religious he can relate the most incredible tales. Thus: “On the approach of death most of them cried in utter despair: Wretched man that I am; I have not kept my Rule and whither shall I flee from the anger of the Judge? Alas, that I was not a sow-herd, or the meanest creature on earth!”[330] On account of the moral corruption of the Religious Orders, he declares it would be right, “were it only feasible, to destroy both Papacy and monasteries at one blow!”[331] He is fond of jesting at the expense of the nuns; thus he makes a vulgar allusion to their supposed practice of taking an image of the Crucified to bed with them, as though it were their bridegroom. He roundly charges them all with arrogance: “The nuns are particularly reprehensible on account of their pride; for they boast: Christ is our bridegroom and we are His brides and other women are nothing.”[332]
It is putting the matter rather too mildly when a Protestant historian, referring to the countless assertions of this nature, remarks, “that, in view of his habits and temper, some of Luther’s highly flavoured statements call for the use of the blue pencil if they are to be accorded historical value.”[333]
Lastly, we must point to another psychological, or, more accurately, pathological, element which may avail to explain falsehoods so glaring concerning the Church of former times. Experience teaches, that sometimes a man soaked in prejudice will calumniate or otherwise assail a foe, at first from an evil motive and with deliberate injustice, and then, become gradually persuaded, thanks to the habit thus formed, of the truth of his calumnies and of the justice of his proceedings. Instances of such a thing are not seldom met with in history, especially among those engaged in mighty conflicts in the arena of the world. Injustice and falsehood, not indeed entirely, but with regard to the matter in hand, are travestied, become matters of indifference, or are even transformed in their eyes into justice and truth.
In Luther’s case the phenomenon in question assumes a pathological guise. We cannot but perceive in him a kind of self-suggestion by which he imposed upon himself. Constituted as he was, such suggestion was possible, nay probable, and was furthermore abetted by his nervous excitement, the result of his never-ceasing struggle.[334]
It is in part to his power of suggestion that must also be attributed his success in making his disciples and followers accept even his most extravagant views and become in their turn missioners of the same.
Another explanation, this time a theological one, of Luther’s disregard for the laws of truth is to be found in the theory he set up of the permissibility of lies.
Previously, even in 1517, he, like all theologians, had regarded every kind of lie as forbidden. Theologians of earlier times, when dealing with this subject, usually agreed with Augustine and Peter Lombard, the “Magister Sententiarum” and likewise with Gratian, that all lies, even lies of excuse, are forbidden. After the commencement of his public controversy, however, strange as it may appear, Luther gradually came to assert in so many words that lies of excuse, of convenience, or of necessity were not reprehensible, but often good and to be counselled. How far this view concerning the lawfulness of lying might be carried, remained, however, a question to be decided by each one individually.
Formerly he had rightly declared: A lie is “contrary to man’s nature and the greatest enemy of human society”; hence no greater insult could be offered than to call a man a liar. To this he always adhered. But besides, following St. Augustine, he had distinguished between lies of jest and of necessity and lies of detraction. Not merely the latter, so he declared, were unlawful, but, as Augustine taught, even lies of necessity or excuse—by which he understands lies told for our own or others’ advantage, but without injury to anyone. “Yet a lie of necessity,” he said at that time, “is not a mortal sin,” especially when told in sudden excitement “and without actual deliberation.” This is his language in January, 1517,[335] in his Sermons on the Ten Commandments, when explaining the eighth. Again, in his controversy with the Zwinglians on the Sacrament (1528), he incidentally shows his attitude by the remark, that, “when anyone has been publicly convicted of falsehood in one particular we are thereby sufficiently warned by God not to believe him at all.”[336] In 1538, he says of the Pope and the Papists, that, on account of their lies the words of Chrysippus applied to them: “If you are a liar you lie even in speaking the truth.”[337]
Meanwhile, however, his peculiar reading of the Old Testament, and possibly no less the urgent demands of his controversy, had exerted an unfortunate influence on his opinion concerning lies of convenience or necessity.
It seems to him that in certain Old-Testament instances of such lies those who employed them were not to blame. Abraham’s lie in denying that Sarah was his wife, the lie of the Egyptian midwives about the Jewish children, Michol’s lie told to save David, appear to Luther justifiable, useful and wholesome. On Oct. 2, 1524, in his Sermons on Exodus, as it would seem for the first time, he defended his new theory. Lies were only real lies “when told for the purpose of injuring our neighbour”; but, “if I tell a lie, not in order to injure anyone but for his profit and advantage and in order to promote his best interests, this is a lie of service”; such was the lie told by the Egyptian midwives and by Abraham; such lies fall “under the grace of Heaven, i.e. came under the forgiveness of sins”; such falsehoods “are not really lies.”[338]
In his lectures on Genesis (1536-45) the same system has been further elaborated: “As a matter of fact there is only one kind of lie, that which injures our neighbour in his soul, goods or reputation.” “The lie of service is wrongly termed a lie, for it rather denotes virtue, viz. prudence used for the purpose of defeating the devil’s malice and in order to serve our neighbour’s life and honour. Hence it may be called Christian and brotherly charity, or to use Paul’s words: Zeal for godliness.”[339] Thus Abraham “told no lie” in Egypt (Gen. xii. 11 ff.); what he told was “a lie of service, a praiseworthy act of prudence.”[340]
According to his Latin Table-Talk not only Abraham’s lie, but also Michol’s was a “good, useful lie and a work of charity.”[341] A lie for the advantage of another is, so he says, an act “by means of which we assist our neighbour.”
“The monks,” says Luther, “insist that the truth should be told under all circumstances.”[342]—Such certainly was the teaching of St. Thomas of Aquin, whose opinion on the subject then held universal sway, and who rightly insists that a lie is never under any circumstances lawful.[343] St. Augustine likewise shared this monkish opinion, as Luther himself had formerly pointed out. Long before Aquinas’s time this Doctor of the Church, whom Luther was later on deliberately to oppose,[344] had brought his view—the only reliable one, viz. that all untruth is wrong—into general recognition, thanks to his arguments and to the weight of his authority. Pope Alexander III, in a letter to the Archbishop of Palermo, declared that even a lie told to save another’s life was unlawful; this statement was incorporated in the official Decretals—a proof of the respect with which the mediæval Church clung to the truth.[345]
Some few writers of antiquity had, it is true, defended the lawfulness of lies of necessity or convenience. For instance, Origen, possibly under the influence of pagan philosophy, also Hilary and Cassian. Eventually their opinion disappeared almost completely.
It was reserved for Luther to revive the wrong view concerning the lawfulness of such lies, and to a certain extent to impose it on his followers. Theologically this spelt retrogression and a lowering of the standard of morality hitherto upheld. “Luther here forsook his beloved Augustine,” says Stäudlin, a Protestant, “and declared certain lies to be right and allowable. This opinion, though not universally accepted in the Evangelical Church, became nevertheless a dominant one.”[346]
It must be specially noted that Luther does not justify lies of convenience, merely when told in the interests of our neighbour, but also when made use of for our own advantage when such is well pleasing in God’s sight. This he states explicitly when speaking of Isaac, who denied his marriage with Rebecca so as to save his life: “This is no sin, but a serviceable lie by which he escaped being put to death by those with whom he was staying; for this would have happened had he said Rebecca was his wife.”[347] And not only the lawful motive of personal advantage justifies, according to him, such untruths as do not injure others, but much more the love of God or of our neighbour, i.e. regard for God’s honour; the latter motive it was, according to him, which influenced Abraham, when he gave out that Sarah was his sister. Abraham had to co-operate in accomplishing the great promise made by God to him and his progeny; hence he had to preserve his life, “in order that he might honour and glorify God thereby, and not give the lie to God’s promises.” Many Catholic interpreters of the Bible have sought to find expedients whereby, without justifying his lie, they might yet exonerate the great Patriarch of any fault. Luther, on the contrary, following his own arbitrary interpretation of the Bible, approves, nay, even glories in the fault. “If,” he says, “the text be taken thus [according to his interpretation] no one can be scandalised at it; for what is done for God’s honour, for the glory and furtherance of His Word, that is right and well done and deserving of all praise.”[348]
On such principles as these, what was there that Luther could not justify in his polemics with the older Church?
In his eyes everything he undertook was done for “God’s glory.” “For the sake of the Christian Church,” he was ready, to tell “a downright lie” (above, p. 51) in the Hessian affair. “Against the deception and depravity of the Papal Antichrist,” he regarded everything “as permissible” for the salvation of souls (above, p. 95); moreover, was not the war he was waging part of his divine mission? The public welfare and the exalted interests of his work might therefore at any time call for a violation of the truth. Was he to be deterred, perhaps, by the injury his opponents might thereby suffer? By no means. They suffered no real injury; on the contrary, it all redounded to their spiritual good, for by ending the reign of prejudice and error their souls would be saved from imminent peril and the way paved for the accomplishment of the ancient promises “to the glory and furtherance of the Word.”
We do not mean to say that Luther actually formed his conscience thus in any particular instance. Of this we cannot judge and it would be too much to expect from him any statement on the subject. But the danger of his doing so was sufficiently proximate.
The above may possibly throw a new light on his famous words: “We consider everything allowable against the deception and depravity of the Papal Antichrist.”[349]
Our remarks on Luther and lying would be incomplete were we not to refer to the influence his example and theory exercised on his surroundings and on those who assisted him in establishing the new Church system.
Melanchthon not only incurred, and justly too, the reproach of frequently playing the dishonest diplomatist, particularly at the Diet of Augsburg,[350] but even advocated in his doctrinal works the Lutheran view that lying is in many cases lawful.
“The lie of convenience,” he says, “is praiseworthy, it is a good useful lie and proceeds from charity because one desires thereby to help one’s neighbour.” Hence, we may infer, where the object was to bring the Evangel home to a man, a lie was all the less reprehensible. Melanchthon appeals to Abraham’s statement that Sarah was his sister (Gen. xii. and xx.), and to the artifice of Eliseus (4 Kings vi. 19), but overlooks the fact that these instances prove nothing in his favour since there no “neighbour was helped,” but, on the contrary, untruth was dictated purely by self-love.[351]
During the negotiations carried on between England, Hesse and Saxony in view of an ecclesiastical understanding, Melanchthon, at the instance of the Elector of Saxony, drew up for him and the Landgrave, a document to be sent to Henry VIII of England, giving him information concerning the Anabaptist movement. His treatment of the matter has already been referred to (vol. iii., p. 374), but it now calls for more detailed consideration.
In this writing Melanchthon, to serve the interests of the new Evangel, had the courage to deny that the movement had made its appearance in those parts of Germany “where the pure Gospel is proclaimed,” but was only to be met with “where the people are not preserved from such errors by sound doctrine,” viz. “in Frisia and Westphalia.”[352] The fact is that the Anabaptists were so numerous in the Saxon Electorate that we constantly hear of prosecutions being instituted against them. P. Wappler, for instance, quotes an official minute from the Weimar archives, actually dated in 1536, which states, that the Elector “caused many Anabaptists to be punished and put to death by drowning and the sword, and to suffer long terms of imprisonment.”[353] Shortly before Melanchthon wrote the above, two Anabaptists had been executed in the Saxon Electorate. Beyond all doubt these facts were known to Melanchthon. The Landgrave of Hesse refused to allow the letter to be despatched. Feige, his Chancellor, pointed out the untruth of the statement, “that these errors only prevailed in places where the pure doctrine was lacking”; on the contrary, the Anabaptist error was unfortunately to be found throughout Germany, and even more under the Evangel than amongst the Papists.[354] An amended version of the letter, dated Sep. 23, 1536, was eventually sent to the King. Wappler, who relates all this fully, says: “Melanchthon was obviously influenced by his wish to warn the King of the ‘plague’ of the Anabaptist heresy and to predispose him for the ‘pure doctrine of the Evangel.’” “What he said was glaringly at variance with the actual facts.”[355]
Like Luther, Martin Bucer, too, urged the Landgrave to tell a deliberate lie and openly deny his bigamy. Though at first unwilling, he had undertaken to advocate the Landgrave’s bigamy with Luther and had defended it personally (above, p. 28). In spite of this, however, when complications arose on its becoming public, he declared in a letter of 1541 to the preachers of Memmingen, which so far has received little attention, that the Landgrave’s wrong step, some rumours of which had reached his ears, should it prove to be true, could not be laid to his charge or to that of the Wittenbergers. “I declare before God (‘coram Deo affirmo’) that no one has given the Prince such advice, neither I, nor Luther, nor Philip, nor, so far as I know, any Hessian preacher, nor has anyone taught that Christians may keep concubines as well as their wives, or declared himself ready to defend such a step.”[356] And, again calling God to witness (“hæc ego ut coram Deo scripta”), he declares that he had never written or signed anything in defence of the bigamy.[357] In the following year he appeared before the magistrates of Strasburg and, in the presence of two colleagues, “took God to witness concerning the suspicion of having advised the Landgrave the other marriage,” “that the latter had consulted neither him nor any preacher concerning the matter”; he and Capito had “throughout been opposed to it” (the bigamy), “although his help had been sought for in such matters by honourable and highly placed persons.”[358] The reference here is to Henry VIII of England, to whom, however, he had never expressed his disapproval of bigamy; in fact he, like Capito and the two Wittenbergers (above, p. 4), had declared his preference for Henry’s taking an extra wife rather than divorcing his first.
Bucer (who had so strongly inveighed against Luther’s lies, above, p. 99), where it was a question of a Catholic opponent like the Augustinian Johann Hoffmeister, had himself recourse to notorious calumnies concerning this man, whom even Protestant historians now allow to have been of blameless life and the “greatest enemy of immorality.”[359] He accused him of “dancing with nuns,” of “wallowing in vice,” and of being “an utterly abandoned, infamous and dissolute knave,” all of them groundless charges at very most based upon mere hearsay.[360]—This same Bucer, who accused the Catholic Princes of being double-tongued and pursuing dubious policies, was himself notorious amongst his own party for his wiliness, deceit and cunning.
Johann Bugenhagen, the Pastor of Wittenberg, when called upon to acknowledge his share in a certain questionable memorandum of a semi-political character also laid himself open to the charge of being wanting in truthfulness (vol. iii., p. 74 f.).
P. Kalkoff has recently made clear some of Wolfgang Capito’s double-dealings and his dishonest behaviour, though he hesitates to condemn him for them. Capito had worked in Luther’s interests at the Court of Archbishop Albert of Mayence, and there, with the Archbishop’s help, “rendered incalculable services to the Evangelical cause.” In extenuation of his behaviour Kalkoff says: “In no way was it more immoral than the intrigues” of the Elector Frederick. On the strength of the material he has collected J. Greving rightly describes Capito as a “thoroughbred hypocrite and schemer.”[361] The dealings of this “eminent diplomatist,” as Greving also terms him, remind us only too often of Luther’s own dealings with highly placed ecclesiastics and seculars during the first period of his apostasy. If, in those early days, Luther’s theory had already won many friends and imitators, in the thick of the fight it made even more converts amongst the new preachers, men ready to make full use of the alluring principle, that, against the depravity of the Papacy everything is licit.
From vituperation to the violation of truth there was but a step amidst the passion which prevailed. How Luther’s abuse—ostensibly all for the love of his neighbour—infected his pupils is plain from a letter in the newly published correspondence of the Brothers Blaurer. This letter, written from Wittenberg on Oct. 8, 1522, by Thomas Blaurer, to Ulrich Zasius, contains the following: “Not even from the most filthy and shameful vituperation [of the hateful Papacy] shall we shrink, until we see it everywhere despised and abhorred.” What had to be done was to vindicate the doctrine that, “Christ is our merit and our satisfaction.”[362] Luther, he says, poured forth abuse (“convicia”), but only to God’s glory, and for the “salvation and encouragement of the little ones.”[363]
“In Luther’s view the Middle Ages, whose history was fashioned by the Popes, was a period of darkest night.... This view of the Middle Ages, particularly of the chief factor in mediæval life, viz. the Church in which it found its highest expression, is one-sided and distorted.” Such is the opinion of a modern Protestant historian. He is sorry that false ideas of the mediæval Church and theology “have been sheltered so long under the ægis of the reformer’s name.”[364]—“It will not do,” a lay Protestant historian, as early as 1874, had told the theologians of his faith, speaking of Köstlin’s work “Luthers Theologie,” “to ignore the contemporary Catholic literature when considering Luther and the writings of the reformers.... It is indispensable that the condition of theology from about 1490 to 1510 should be carefully examined. We must at all costs rid ourselves of the caricatures we meet with in the writings of the reformers, and of the misunderstandings to which they gave rise, and learn from their own writings what the theologians of that time actually thought and taught.” “Paradoxical as it may sound, it is just the theological side of the history of the Reformation which, at the present day, is least known.”[365]
During the last fifty years German scholars have devoted themselves with zeal and enthusiasm to the external and social aspect of the Middle Ages. That great undertaking, the “Monumenta Germaniæ historica,” its periodical the “Archiv,” and a number of others dealing largely with mediæval history brought Protestants to a juster and more objective appreciation of the past. Yet the theological, and even in some respects the ecclesiastical, side has been too much neglected, chiefly because so many Protestant theologians were scrupulous about submitting the subject to a new and unprejudiced study. Hence the astonishment of so many when Johannes Janssen, with his “History of the German People,” and, to pass over others, Heinrich Denifle with his work on Luther entered the field and demonstrated how incorrect had been the views prevalent since Luther’s time concerning the doctrine and the ecclesiastical life of his age. Astonishment in many soon made way for indignation; in Denifle’s case, particularly, annoyance was caused by a certain attitude adopted by this author which led some to reject in their entirety the theologico-historical consequences at which he arrived, whilst even Janssen was charged with being biassed. Other Protestants, however, have learned something from the Catholic works which have since made their appearance in greater numbers, have acknowledged that the ideas hitherto in vogue were behind the times and have invited scholars to undertake a more exact study of the materials.