It is true that “my conviction is, that, for a thousand years, the world has never loathed anyone so much as me. I return its hatred.”[1221]
It “is probable that my name stinks in the nostrils of many who wish to belong to us, but you [Bugenhagen] will put things right without my troubling.” Formerly the decisions of the Councils ranked above God’s Word, “but now, thank God, this would not be believed among us even by ducks or geese, mice or lice.” “God has no liking for the ‘expectants’ [those who looked for a Council], for He will have His Word honoured above all angels, let alone men or Councils, and will have no waiting or expectancy. Our best plan will be to send them to the devil in the abyss of hell, to do their waiting there.”[1222]
“So the Council is going to be held at Trent. Tridentum, however, signifies in German, ‘divided, torn asunder, dissolved,’ for God will scatter it and its Legates. I believe they do not know what they are doing or what they mean to do. God has cursed them with blindness.”[1223] “Nay, under Satan’s rule they have all gone mad; they condemn us and then want our approval.”[1224] “The Council is worthy of its monsters. May misfortune fall upon them; the wrath of God is verily at their heels.”[1225] “They look upon us as donkeys, and yet do not realise their own dense stupidity and malice.”[1226]
“Should we fall, then Christ will fall with us, the ruler of the world. Granted, however, that He is to fall, I would rather fall with Christ than stand with the Emperor.” “Put your trust in your Emperor and we will put our trust in ours [in Christ], and wait and see who holds the field. Let them do their best, they have not yet got their way.” They shall perish. “I fear they wish to hear those words of Julius Cæsar: ‘They themselves have willed it!’”[1227]
Should I be carried to the grave, for instance, as a victim of the religious war, people will say at the sight of the Popish rout that will ensue: “Dr. Martin was escorted to his grave by a great procession. For he was a great Doctor, above all bishops, monks and parsons, therefore it was fitting that they should all follow him into the grave, and furnish a subject for talk and song. And to end up, we shall all make a little pilgrimage together; they, the Papists, to the bottomless pit to their god of lying and murder, whom they have served with lies and murders; I to my Lord, Jesus Christ, Whom I have served in truth and peace; ... they to hell in the name of all the devils, I to heaven in God’s name.”[1228]
No mortal ever spoke of himself as Luther did. He reveals himself as a man immeasurably different from that insipid portrait which depicts him as one who made no claim on people’s submission to his higher light and higher authority, but who humbly advanced what he fancied he had discovered, an ordinary human being, even though a great one, who was only at pains to convince others by the usual means in all wisdom and charity. Everyday psychology does not avail to explain the language Luther used, and we are faced by the graver question of the actual condition of such a mind, raised so far above the normal level. “We have,” says Adolf Harnack, “to choose between two alternatives: Either he suffered from the mania of greatness, or his self-reliance really corresponded with his task and achievements.”[1229]
Luther, at the very commencement of the tract which he published soon after leaving the Wartburg, and in which he describes himself as “Ecclesiastes by the grace of God,” says: “Should you, dear Sirs, look upon me as a fool for my assumption of so haughty a title,” I should not be in the least surprised; he adds, however: “I am convinced of this, that Christ Himself, Who is the Master of my teaching, calls me thus and regards me as such”; his “Word, office and work” had come to him “from God,” and his “judgment was God’s own” no less than his doctrine.[1230] The bishops of the Catholic world may well have raised their eyebrows at the tone of this work, couched in the form of a Bull and addressed to all the “Popish bishops”; the following year it was even reprinted in Latin at Wittenberg in order to make it known throughout the world. Bossuet’s words on the opening lines of the tract well render the feeling of apprehension they must have created: “Hence Luther’s is the same call as St. Paul’s, no less direct and no less extraordinary!... And on the strength of this Divine mission Luther proceeds to reform the Church!”[1231]—We should, however, note that Luther, in his extraordinary demands, goes far beyond any mere claim to a Divine call. A heavenly vocation might perfectly well have been present without any such haughty treading under foot of the past, without any such conceit as to his own and his fellow-workers’ achievements, and without all this boasting of prophecies, of victories over fanatics and devils, and of world-wide fame, rather, a true vocation would dread anything of the kind. Hence, in the whole series of statements we have quoted, commencing with the title of Ecclesiastes by the Grace of God, which he adopted soon after his Wartburg “baptism,” we find not only the consciousness of a mission conferred on him at the Wartburg, but also an altogether unique idea of his own greatness which no one who wishes to study Luther’s character must lose sight of. We shall have, later on, to ask ourselves whether those were in the right who looked upon this manifestation as a sign of disease.
Luther’s language would be even more puzzling were it not certain that much that he said was not really meant seriously. With him rhetoric plays a greater rôle than is commonly admitted, and even some of his utterances regarding his own greatness are clearly flowers of rhetoric written half in jest.
Luther himself ingenuously called his art of abusing all opponents with the utmost vigour, “rhetorica mea.” This he did in those difficult days when it was a question of finding some means of escape in connection with the threatening Diet of Augsburg: “By my rhetoric I will show the Papists that they, who pretend to be the champions of the faith and the Gospel, have there [at Augsburg] made demands of us which are contrary to the Gospel; verily I shall fall upon them tooth and nail.... Come, Luther most certainly will, and with great pomp set free the eagle [the Evangel] now held caught in the snare (‘aquilam liberaturus magnifice’).”[1232] So much did he trust his rhetorical talent that on another occasion he told the lawyers: “If I have painted you white, then I can equally well paint you black again and make you look like regular devils.”[1233] Amidst the embarrassments subsequent on Landgrave Philip’s bigamy Luther’s one ray of hope was in his consciousness, that he could easily manage to “extricate” himself with the help of his pen; at the same time, when confiding this to the Landgrave, he also told him quite openly, that, should he, the Landgrave, “start a literary feud” with him, Luther would soon “leave him sticking in the mud.”[1234]
We have already heard him say plainly: “I have more in me of the rhetorician or the gossip”;[1235] he adds that his only writings which were strictly doctrinal were his commentaries on Galatians and on Deuteronomy and his sermons on four chapters of the Gospel of St. John; all the rest the printers might well pass over, for they merely traced the history of his conflict; the truth being that his doctrine “had not been so clear at first as it is now.” And yet he had formerly written much on doctrine; as he once said in a conversation recorded in Schlaginhaufen’s notes of 1532: “I don’t care for my Psalter, it is long and garrulous. Formerly I was so eloquent that I wanted to talk the whole world to death. Now I can do this no longer, for the thoughts won’t come. Once upon a time I could talk more about a little flower than I now could about a whole meadow. I am not fond of any superfluity of words. Jonas replied: The Psalter [you wrote] is, however, of the Holy Ghost and pleases me well.”[1236]