On October 11, 1531, Zwingli fell in the battle of Cappel, in which, mounted on horseback and fully armed, he was leading the men of Zürich against the five Catholic cantons. What Luther thought and felt at that time we learn both from Schlaginhaufen’s Notes of his Table-Talk in 1531 and 1532, which afford some fresh information, and from Luther’s letters and printed works.
The very first Note we have of Schlaginhaufen’s touches upon Zwingli’s untimely end. It would appear that a rumour had got abroad that Luther’s other opponents, Carlstadt and Pellicanus, had also been slain.
Luther was in high glee when news of Zwingli’s death reached him.
He said: “God knows the thoughts of the heart. It is well that Zwingli, Carlstadt, and Pellicanus lie dead on the battle-field, for otherwise we could not have retained the Landgrave, Strasburg and other of our neighbours [true to our doctrine]. Oh, what a triumph is this, that they have perished! God indeed knows His business well.”[1272]—“Zwingli died like a brigand,” he said later, when scarcely a year had elapsed since his death. “He wished to force others to accept his errors, went to war, and was slain.” “He drew the sword, therefore he has received his reward, for Christ says: ‘All who take the sword shall perish by the sword.’ If God has saved him, then He did so contrary to His ordinary ways.”[1273]—“All seek to cloak their deceitful doctrines with the name of the Evangel,” so he exclaims in 1532. From Augsburg he heard that the Sacramentarian (i.e. Zwinglian) preachers were using his name and Melanchthon’s. “Since they refused to be our friends in God’s name, let them be so in the devil’s, even as Judas was the friend of Christ.”[1274]
Because Thomas Münzer was no friend of the Evangel he was, according to Luther, destined to perish miserably and shamefully. Zwingli he placed on exactly the same footing; his death likewise was a just judgment.[1275] Zwingli, so he will have it, was a complete unbeliever. In his newly published sermons of 1530 he had shown that Zwingli, like Carlstadt, by his attacks on the Supper, had denied all the articles of the faith. “If a man falls away from one article of faith, however insignificant it may appear to reason, he has fallen away from all and does not hold any of them aright. For instance, it is certain that our fanatics who now deny the Sacrament, also deny Christ’s Divinity and all the other articles of faith, however much they protest to the contrary, and the reason of this is, that, when even one link of the chain is broken, the whole chain is in pieces.”[1276]
H. Barge, a Protestant, remarks: “After the battle of Cappel, Luther appears to have devoted his unusual gifts of eloquence to slandering Zwingli and all who remained true to him, systematically, deliberately, and maliciously, as mere heretics.”[1277]
The following delineation of Zwingli by Luther dates from 1538: “Zwingli was a very clever and upright man, but he fell [into error]; then he became so presumptuous as to dare to say and write: ‘I hold that no one in the world ever believed that the Body and Blood of Christ are present in the Sacrament.’” Luther adds: Because Zwingli ventured to speak rashly against him [Luther] and “against what is plain to the whole world, he perished miserably, just as did Egranus, that importunate fellow.”[1278]
Just as he had condemned Carlstadt and Pellicanus, and, lastly, Egranus (Johann Silvius Egranus of Zwickau), so also elsewhere he lumps together in one condemnation with Zwingli all those doctors who differed from him. Relentlessly he scourges them as he had scourged the Catholics. “The character of those who oppose the Word is fiendish rather than human. Man does what he can, but when the devil takes possession of him then ‘enmity arises between him and the woman’” (Gen. iii. 15).[1279]
Few experienced his intolerance to such an extent as Andreas Bodenstein von Carlstadt, his quondam colleague in the theological faculty of Wittenberg.