Connection of Luther’s Abusiveness with his Mystic Persuasion of his Special Call.
Luther had brought himself to such a pitch as to see in the existing Church the devil’s kingdom, to overthrow which, with its Antichrist, was his own sublime mission. This theological, anti-diabolical motive for his anger and boundless invective, throws all others into the shade.
“Even were I not carried away by my hot temper and my style of writing,” he says, “I should still be obliged to take the field, as I do, against the enemies of truth” (“children of the devil” he calls them elsewhere). “I am hot-headed enough, nor is my pen blunt.” But these foes “revel in the most horrible crimes not merely against me, but even against God’s Word.” Did not Christ Himself have recourse to abuse, he asks, against the “wicked and adulterous generation of the Jews, against the brood of vipers, the hypocrites and children of the devil”? “Whoever is strong in the consciousness of the truth, can display no patience towards its furious and ferocious enemies.”[1079]
The more vividly he persuaded himself of his mission, the blacker were the colours in which he painted the devil of Popery who refused to believe in it, and the more strangely did there surge up from the sombre depths of his soul and permeate his whole being a hatred the like of which no mortal man had ever known before. In such outbursts Luther thinks he is “raving and raging [’debacchari’] against Satan”; for instance, in a letter to Melanchthon, dated from the fortress of Coburg, “from the stronghold full of devils where Christ yet reigns in the midst of His foes.” Even when unable from bodily weakness to write against the devil, yet he could at least rage against him in thought and prayer; “the Pope’s enormities (‘portenta’) against God and against the common weal” supplied him with material in abundance.[1080]
God had appointed him, so we read elsewhere, “to teach and to instruct,” as “an Apostle and Evangelist in the German lands” (were it his intention to boast); for he knows that he teaches “by the Grace of God, whose name Satan shall not destroy nor deprive me of to all eternity”; therefore I must unsparingly “expose my back parts to the devil ... so as to enrage him still more.” To the wrath of all the devils, bishops, and princes he will pay as little heed as to the rustle of a bat’s wing, nor will he spare the “traitors and murderers.”[1081]
As early as 1520 he revealed to an intimate friend the morbidly exaggerated ideas which moved him: As an excuse for his dreadful vituperation he alleges his pseudo-mystic conception of the life and death struggle he was to engage in with the devil, and his sense of the “impetus Spiritus”; this he pleads in extenuation to his friend, who would appear to have reminded him of the dangers of pride. “All condemn my sarcasm,” he admits, but, now that the Spirit has moved him, he may set himself on a line with the “prophets” of the Old Law who “were so harsh in their invective,” nay, with Paul the Apostle, whose severe censures were ever present in his mind. In fact, God Himself, according to Luther, is to some extent present in these utterances by means of His power and action, and, “sure enough, intends in this way to unmask the inventions of man.”[1082]
As compared with the interior force with which the idea of his mission inspired him, all his violence, particularly in his polemics with the Catholic theologians and statesmen, appeared to him far too weak. Thus his “Wider Hans Worst” against the Catholic Duke of Brunswick, though reeking of blood and hate, seemed to him to fall short of the mark and to be all too moderate, so at least he told Melanchthon, to all appearance quite seriously.[1083] His inability ever to exhaust his indignation goes back to the idea expressed by him in the same letter with such startling candour and conviction as to remind one of the ravings of a man possessed by a fixed delusion: “It is certain that it is God Who is fighting.” “Our cause is directed by the hand of God, not by our own wisdom. The Word makes its way and prayer glows ... hence we might well sleep in peace were we not mere flesh.” His hint at the near approach of the Last Judgment, the many signs of which could not escape notice, more than confirms the pseudo-mystic character both of his confidence and of his hate.[1084]
On other occasions traces of his pet superstitions are apparent, and, when we take them together, prove beyond a doubt the unhealthy state of the mind from which they sprang. For instance, Luther professes to know particulars of the approaching end of the world concerning which the Bible says nothing; he also has that curious list of opponents miraculously slain by the Divine hand, and even fancies he can increase it by praying for the death of those who, not sharing his opinions, stood in his way: “This year we must pray Duke Maurice to death; we must slay him by our prayers, for he is likely to prove a wicked man.” On the same occasion he also attributes to himself a sort of prophetic gift: “I am a prophet.”[1085] The foretelling of future events and the fulfilment in his own person of olden prophecies and visions, and again the many miracles and expulsions of the devil which accompany the spread of his teaching, confirm his Evangel and impress the stamp of Divine approbation on his hatred of Antichrist.[1086] Divine portents, which, however, no one but Luther would have recognised as such, were also exploited: the birth of the monstrous Monk-Calf; the Pope-Ass fished from the Tiber; signs in the heavens and on the earth. The Book of Daniel and St. John’s Apocalypse supplied him when necessary with the wished-for interpretation, though his far-fetched speculations would better become a mystic dreamer than a sober theologian and spiritual guide of thousands. All this was crowned by the diabolical manifestations which he himself experienced, though what he took for apparitions of the devil was merely the outcome of an overwrought mind.[1087]
This enables us to seize that second nature of his, made up of superhuman storming and vituperation, and to understand, how, in his hands, wild abuse of the Papacy became quite a system.
“I shall put on my horns,” he wrote to a friend in 1522, “and vex Satan until he lies stretched out on the ground. Don’t be afraid, but neither expect me to spare my gainsayers; should they be hard hit by the new movement, that is not our fault, but a judgment from above on their tyranny.”[1088] Shortly after he wrote in a similar strain to reassure some unknown correspondent concerning his unusual methods of controversy: “Hence, my dear friend, do not wonder that many take offence at my writings. For it must be that only a few hold fast to the Gospel [the friend had pointed out to him that many of his followers were being scared away by his abuse].... His Highness my master has admonished me in writing, and many other friends have done the same. But my reply is ever that I neither can nor will refrain from it.”[1089]