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]