Especially was it Luther’s practice to load his polemics with a superabundance of filthy allusions to the baser functions of the body; at times, too, we meet therein expressions and imagery positively indecent.
In his work “Vom Schem Hamphoras” against the Jews he revels in scenes recalling that enacted between Putiphar’s wife and Joseph, though here it is no mere temptation but actual mutual sin; the tract contains much else of the same character.[884] In the notorious tract entitled “Wider Hans Worst,” which he wrote against Duke Henry of Brunswick (1541), he begins by comparing him with a “common procuress walking the street to seize, capture and lead astray honest maidens”;[885] he gradually works himself up into such a state of excitement as to describe the Church of Rome as the “real devil’s whore”; nay, the “archdevil’s whore,” the “shameless prostitute” who dwells in a “whores’ church” and houses of ill-fame, and compared with whom, as we have already heard him say elsewhere, “common city whores, field whores, country whores and army whores”[886] may well be deemed saints. In this work such figures of speech occur on almost every page. Elsewhere he describes the motions of the “Roman whore” in the most repulsive imagery.[887]
The term “whore” is one of which he is ever making use, more particularly in that connection in which he feels it will be most shocking to Catholics, viz. in connection with professed religious. Nor does he hesitate to use this word to describe human reason as against faith. In such varied and frenzied combinations is the term met with in his writings that one stands aghast. As he remarked on one occasion to his pupil Schlaginhaufen, people would come at last to look upon him as a pimp. He had been asked to act as intermediary in arranging a marriage: “Write this down,” he said, “Is it not a nuisance? Am I expected to provide also the women with husbands? Really they seem to take me for a pander.”[888]
Even holy things were not safe in Luther’s hands, but ran the risk of being vilified by outrageous comparisons and made the subject of improper conversations.
According to Lauterbach’s Diary, for instance, Luther discoursed in 1538 on the greatness of God and the wisdom manifest in creation; in this connection he holds forth before the assembled company on the details of generation and the shape of the female body. He then passes on to the subject of regeneration: “We think we can instruct God ‘in regenerationis et salvationis articulo,’ we like to dispute at great length on infant baptism and the occult virtue of the sacraments, and, all the while, poor fools that we are, we do not know ‘unde sint stercora in ventre.’”[889] Over the beer-can the conversation turns on temperance, and Luther thereupon proposes for discussion an idea of Plato’s on procreation;[890] again he submits an ostensibly difficult “casus” regarding the girl who becomes a mother on the frontier of two countries;[891] he relates the tale of the woman who “habitu viri et membro ficto” “duas uxores duxit”;[892] he dilates on a “marvellous” peculiarity of the female body, which one would have thought of a nature to interest a physician rather than a theologian.[893] He also treats of the Bible passage according to which woman must be veiled “on account of the angels” (1 Cor. xi. 11), adding with his customary vulgarity: “And I too must wear breeches on account of the girls.”[894] When the conversation turned on the marriage of a young fellow to a lady of a certain age he remarked, that at such nuptials the words “Increase and multiply” ought not to be used; as the poet says: “Arvinam quaerunt multi in podice porci,” surely a useless search.[895] The reason “why God was so angry with the Pope” was, he elsewhere informs his guests, because he had robbed Him of the fruit of the body. “We should have received no blessing unless God had implanted our passions in us. But to the spark present in both man and wife the children owe their being; even though our children are born ugly we love them nevertheless.”[896]—He then raises his thoughts to God and exclaims: “Ah, beloved Lord God, would that all had remained according to Thine order and creation.” But what the Pope had achieved by his errors was well known: “We are aware how things have gone hitherto.” “The Pope wanted to enforce celibacy and to improve God’s work.” But the monks and Papists “ ... are consumed with concupiscence and the lust of fornication.”[897]—Take counsel with someone beforehand, he says, “in order that you may not repent after the marriage. But be careful that you are not misled by advice and sophistry, else you may find yourself with a sad handful ... then He Who drives the wheel, i.e. God, will jeer at you. But that you should wish to possess one who is pretty, pious and wealthy, nay, my friend ... it will fare with you as it did with the nuns who were given carved Jesus’s and who cast about for others who at least were living and pleased them better.”[898]
Thus does Luther jumble together unseemly fancies, coarse concessions to sensuality and praise for broken vows, with thoughts of the Divine.
Anyone who regards celibacy and monastic vows from the Catholic standpoint may well ask how a man intent on throwing mud at the religious state, a man who had broken his most sacred pledges by his marriage with a nun, could be in a position rightly to appreciate the delicate blossoms which in every age have sprung up on the chaste soil of Christian continence in the lives of countless priests and religious, not in the cloister alone, but also in the world without?
Of his achievements in this field, of his having trodden celibacy under foot, Luther was very proud. To the success of his unholy efforts he himself gave testimony in the words already mentioned: “I am like unto Abraham [the Father of the Faithful] for I am the progenitor of all the monks, priests and nuns [who have married], and of all the many children they have brought into the world; I am the father of a great people.”[899]
By his attacks on celibacy and the unseemliness of his language Luther, nevertheless, caused many to turn away from him in disgust. Duke Anton Ulrich of Brunswick, who reverted to Catholicism in 1710, states in a writing on the step he had taken, that it was due to some extent to his disgust at Luther’s vulgarity. “What writer,” he says, “has left works containing more filth?... Such was his way of writing that his followers at the present day are ashamed of it.” He had compared the character of this reformer of the Church, so he tells us, with that of the apostolic men of ancient times. In striking contrast they were “pious, God-fearing men, of great virtue, temperate, humble, abstemious, despising worldly possessions, not given to luxury, having only the salvation of souls before their eyes”; particularly did they differ from Luther in the matter of purity and chastity.[900]