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:
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 it Luther tells how he had been sent by God that he might—
For ever and for ever it would remain true that
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]
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]