Luther, vol. 2 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

At a later date he frequently depicted the peasants, quite generally, as rascals, and poured forth bitter words of anger against them. “A peasant is a hog,” he says in 1532, “for when a hog is slaughtered it is dead, and in the same way the peasant does not think about the next life, for otherwise he would behave very differently.”[600] The following date also from the same period: “The peasant remains a boor, do what you will”; they have, so he says, their mouth, nose, eyes and everything else in the wrong place.[601] “I believe that the devil does not mind the peasants”; he “despises them as he does leaden pennies”; he thinks “he can easily manage to secure them for himself, as they will assuredly be claimed by no one.”[602] “A peasant who is a Christian is like a wooden poker.”[603] To a candidate for marriage he wrote: “My Katey sends you this friendly warning, to beware of marrying a country lass, for they are rude and proud, cannot get on well with their husbands and know neither how to cook nor to brew.”[604]

“The peasants as well as the nobles throughout the country,” he complains in 1533, in a letter to Spalatin, “have entered into a conspiracy against the evangel, though they make use of the liberty of the gospel in the most outrageous manner. It is not surprising that the Papists persecute us. God will be our Judge in this matter!” “Oh, the awful ingratitude of our age. We can only hope and pray for the speedy coming of our Lord and Saviour [the Last Day].”[605]

The psychological picture presented by Luther during the whole of the year 1525 reveals more plainly than at any other time his state of morbid excitement. The nervous tension which had been increasing in him ever since 1517, together with his mental anxiety and the spirit of defiance, reached their culminating point in the year of his marriage, a year filled with the most acute struggles.

“His enemies called the temper of the strong man demoniacal,” says a Protestant historian of the Peasant-War, “and, as a matter of fact,” he adds, “the Luther we meet with in the writings of the years 1517-1525 bears but little resemblance to the earnest, but cheerful and kindly husband and father whom Protestants are wont to picture as their reformer.”[606]

This remark applies with special force to the year 1525 when he actually became a husband, though more stress should be laid upon the mental strain he was undergoing. Luther undoubtedly acted at that time, not only in the matter of the Peasant-War, but also in many other complex questions, under the influence of an overwrought temper. It was a period of combined internal and external conflict, which, so to speak, raised his troubled spirit above the normal conditions of existence. With the fanatics he had to struggle for the very existence of his evangel; the contradictions and dissensions within the new fold also caused him constant anxiety. His controversy with the learned Erasmus on the subject of Free-Will angered him beyond measure, for Erasmus, as Luther says, “held the knife to his throat”[607] by his book in defence of the freedom of the human will. Luther was also at war with the “wiseacres” who disapproved of his marriage, and had to vindicate his action also to himself. In feverish delirium he fancies he sees the jaws of death gaping for him, and feels that the devil in all his strength has been let loose to seize upon his person, as the one through whom alone, as he says, truth and salvation are to be proclaimed to the world. He marries, and then exclaims with fear: “Perhaps as soon as I am dead my teaching will be overthrown; then my example may be a source of encouragement to the weak.”[608] “I see the rabble as well as the nobles raging against me,” but this comfort remains to me, “however hostile they may be to me on account of my marriage or other matters, yet their hostility is only a sign that I am in the right”; “were the world not scandalised at me, then I should indeed fear that what we do was not from God.”[609]

The idea of his own divine mission, raising him far above the reach of his enemies, finds expression to quite a marked degree in the letters he wrote to his friends at that time. In these he is certainly not speaking of mere fancies, but of views which he was earnestly desirous of inculcating.

“God has so often trodden Satan under my feet, He has cast down the lion and the dragon beneath me, He will not allow the basilisk to harm me!” “Christ began without our counsel, and He will assuredly bring His work to its completion even contrary to what we would advise.... God works above, and against, and under, and beyond all that we can conceive.” “It is, however, a grief to me now that these blasphemous enemies [certain of the preachers] should have been raised to the ministry and the knowledge of the [Divine] Word through us. May God convert them and instruct them, or else provide for their removal. Amen.” He writes thus to his friend Nicholas Amsdorf, the later “bishop,” who, perhaps of all his friends, was the one most likely to have a real comprehension for language of this stamp.[610]

In utter contrast to the opinion Luther here expressed of himself stands the description sketched by Hieronymus Emser of his person and his work.

One of Luther’s humanistic followers, Euricius Cordus, had published in 1525, in Latin verse, the so-called “Antilutheromastix” (scourge of the antilutherans), in which he heaped scorn upon those literary men who defended the Church against Luther. Emser himself was attacked in the work for his championship of the older Church. Emser, however, replied in a work, also couched in Latin hexameters and entitled “Justification of the Catholics in reply to the invective of the physician Euricius Cordus, and his Antilutheromastix.”[611] Under the influence of the strong impression made upon him by Luther’s marriage and the Peasant-War he has therein inserted some verses expressing his indignation against Luther; from these we quote here some extracts. The language reflects plainly Luther’s personality as it appeared in the eyes of Emser and many of the Catholic controversialists of that day, and thus serves to mirror the development and progress of the intellectual struggle.[612]

“God commanded vows to be kept, but Luther tears them to pieces. Christ commended those who renounced matrimony, but Luther praises those who wantonly violate chastity. Purity is pleasing in the sight of heaven, but to this height Luther cannot raise himself. Luther at one time renounced matrimony by a sacred promise made in the presence of God, but now he plunges into it because he, the monk, has been led astray by his passion for a nun. Whereas our Saviour lived unmarried, he, the unhappy and faithless man, desires to take a wife. Christ gave an example of humility, this man is proud and even rises in impudent rebellion against the authorities. He launches out into torrents of abuse and vituperation (“Maledictorum plaustris iniurius”). He heaps up mountains of insults, he burns the sacred laws and mocks at God and man in the same way as did the old tyrants of Sicily. Christ is the friend of peace, but this fellow calls to arms. He invites the raging mob to wash their hands in the blood of the clergy. He provokes and incites the masses under the screen of a false freedom so that they audaciously refuse to pay tithes, dues and taxes, and ruthlessly conspire against the life of the lords.” In Emser’s opinion it was Luther’s word and writings which caused the conflagration. “He persuaded the people to look on him as a prophet, and to set his foolish fancies on a level with the oracles of heaven. The German people, as though stupefied with drink, rise and follow him in a terrible tumult, turning their blood-stained weapons against themselves.”