Luther, vol. 3 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

In his most severe temptations Luther found consolation in the words of comfort spoken by the pastor of Wittenberg, and he assures us he was often refreshed by such exhortations, the memory of which he was slow to lose.[1371] Bugenhagen assisted him during his severe illness in 1527, and again in the other attack some ten years later. On the latter occasion he summoned his friend to Gotha, made his confession to him, so he says, and commended the “Church and his family” to his care.[1372] When separated they were in the habit of begging each other’s prayers.

In his letters Bugenhagen recounts to Luther the success of his labours, in order to afford him pleasure, giving due thanks to God. Somewhat strange is the account he sent Luther of an encounter he had at Lübeck with a girl supposed to be possessed by the devil; through her lips the devil had given testimony to him just as at Ephesus, so the Acts of the Apostles tell us, he had borne witness to the power of Jesus and Paul.[1373] Hardly had he come to the town and visited the girl than the devil, speaking through her, called him by name (we must not forget that her parents, at least, were acquainted with Bugenhagen) and declared his coming to Lübeck to be quite uncalled for. That, in spite of his prayers and tears, he was unable to expel the devil, he himself admits.[1374] The account of the incident, written down by him soon after his arrival at Lübeck, and before he had properly inquired into the case, was soon published under a curious title.[1375] So much did Luther think of the encounter with this hysterical or mentally deranged girl,[1376] that he wrote: “Satan is giving Pomeranus a great deal to do at Lübeck with a maid who is possessed. The cunning demon is planning marvels.” This, when forwarding from the Coburg to Wenceslaus Link, preacher at Nuremberg, the account he had received.[1377] In 1536 Bugenhagen related at table, during the conciliation meetings held at Wittenberg, the encounters he had had in Lübeck and Brunswick with “delivered demoniacs.”[1378]

Luther on his side gave his friend, when busy abroad, frequent tidings of the state of things at Wittenberg. In 1537 he sent to him, at Copenhagen, an account of a nasty trick played by Paul Heintz, a professor at the University of Wittenberg, “greatly to the detriment of the town and University.” The latter, in order to possess himself of an inheritance, had given out that a youthful stepson of his was dead, and had caused a dog to be solemnly buried in his place with all the usual rites. “The Master’s drama makes me almost burst with rage.” If these lawyers (who in Luther’s opinion treated the case too leniently) “look upon the disgrace to our Church as a small matter,” he writes, to Bugenhagen, “I will show them a bit of the true Luther (‘ero, Deo volente, Lutherus in hac causa’).”[1379] He did actually write a furious letter to the Elector to secure the severe punishment of the offender, who has caused us “to be jeered at everywhere as dogs’ undertakers”; the lawyers, who in the Pope’s or the devil’s name had shown themselves lenient, he would denounce from the pulpit.[1380] To Magister Johann Saxo, who in turn related it to Bugenhagen, he declared, that, should the burial of the dog with all the rites of the Church be proved to have taken place, then “Paul would pay for it with his neck” on account of the mockery of religion involved.[1381] Even later Luther declared: “I should have liked to have written his death-sentence”; he added, however, that the culprit had really “buried the dog in order to drive away the plague.”[1382]

Possessed, like Luther, by a positive craze for seeing diabolical intervention everywhere, Bugenhagen shared his superstitions to the full. He it was who knew how to expel the devil from the churn by what Luther termed the “best” method, which certainly was the coarsest imaginable.[1383] When, in December, 1536, a storm broke over Wittenberg he vied with Luther in declaring, that since it was quite out of the order of nature, it must be altogether satanic (“plane sathanicum”).[1384]

He discerned the work of the devil just as clearly in the persistence of Catholicism and its resistance to Lutheranism. “Dear Lord Jesus Christ,” he writes, “arise with Thy Holy Angels and thrust down into the abyss of hell the diabolical murder and blasphemy of Antichrist.”[1385] Elsewhere he prays in similar fashion, “that God would put to shame the devil’s doctrines and idolatries of the Pope and save poor people from the errors of Antichrist.”[1386] Among all the qualities he had acquired from Luther, his patron and model, this hatred—which the Sectarians of the new faith who differed from Luther were also made to feel—is perhaps the most striking. In his case, however, fanaticism was tempered with greater coolness and calculation. For calm obstinacy Bugenhagen in many ways recalls Calvin.

When Superintendent of the Saxon Electorate he introduced into the Litanies a new petition: “From the blasphemy, cruel murder and uncleanness of Thine enemies the Turk and the Pope, graciously deliver us.”[1387]

With delight he was able to write to Luther from Denmark,[1388] that the Mass was forbidden throughout the country and that the mendicant Friars had been driven over the borders as “sedition-mongers” and “blasphemers” because they refused to accept the King’s offers (“some of them were hanged”).[1389] The Canons had everywhere been ordered to attend the Lutheran Communion on festivals; the four thousand parishes had now to be preserved in the new faith which had dawned upon the land. Bugenhagen, on August 12, 1537, a few weeks after his arrival, vested in alb and cope, and with great ecclesiastical pomp, had placed the crown on the head of King Christian III. who had already given the Catholics a foretaste of what was to come and had caused all the bishops to be imprisoned.

“All proceeds merrily,” Luther told Bucer on December 6, “God is working through Pomeranus; he crowned the King and Queen like a true bishop. He has given a new span of life to the University [of Copenhagen].”[1390] Bugenhagen was inexorable in his extirpation of the worship of “Antichrist” in Denmark, even down to the smallest details. To the King, concerning a statue of Pope St. Lucius in the Cathedral Church at Roskilde, he wrote, that this must be removed; it was an exact representation of the Pauline prophecy concerning Antichrist; the sword, which the Pope carried in his hand as the symbol of his death, Bugenhagen regarded as emblematic of the cruelty of the Popes, who now preferred to cut off the heads of others and to arrogate to themselves authority over all kings and rulers; if a true likeness of the Pope was really wanted, then he would have to be represented as a devil with claws and a fiendish countenance, and be decked out in a golden mantle, a staff, a sword and three crowns; from such a book the laity would be able to read the truth.[1391]

Justus Jonas, who, of all his acquaintances, remained longest with Luther at Wittenberg, like Bugenhagen, bestowed upon the master his enduring veneration and friendship. His numerous translations of Luther’s works are in themselves a proof of his warm attachment to his ideas and of his rare affinity to him. He, next to Melanchthon and Bugenhagen, was the clearest-headed and most active assistant in the affairs of Wittenberg, and his name frequently appears, together with those of Luther and the two other intimates, among the signatures appended to memoranda dealing with matters ecclesiastical.

To the close relationship between Luther and Jonas many interesting details preserved in the records remain to attest.