Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

In the conversations held in that same year in the intimate circle at Wittenberg, and preserved for us by Lauterbach the Deacon, Luther frequently alluded to Wicel; at that time the latter was in the midst of his successful literary labours against the Lutherans, and his proposals for reunion, though by no means wholly satisfactory, had even led Duke George of Saxony to summon him to his Court. Luther, with a hatred quite comprehensible under the circumstances, calls him, according to Lauterbach, “the most treacherous of men, insatiable in his jealousy, a scoundrel who does not even deserve an answer”; Wicel himself, he tells us, was well aware he was defending, against his better feelings, a cause altogether wrong; the ungrateful slanderer richly deserved death; only thanks to Luther’s kindness, had he found a decent means of livelihood. “Let us despise him! We must be silent, pray and bless,” so he concludes, “and not bring new faggots to feed the flames.”[1302] Luther knew perfectly well that any “new faggots” he might have brought would have burst into flame under Wicel’s ardent pen, to his own disadvantage. He does not shrink from indignantly describing Wicel elsewhere as a “sycophant and venomous traitor,”[1303] and as “a man full of malice and presumption.”[1304] He comes along and “boasts of the Fathers. I do not even read his works, for I know his Fathers well; but we have one only Father, Who is in Heaven and Who is over all Fathers.”[1305] Particularly sensitive was he to Wicel’s strictures on his doctrine of good works, that heel of Achilles of the new Evangel. Wicel, “with scorn and mockery,” says, “that we have taught that, ‘whoever has once been converted can sin no more, and whatever he does is right and good.’ But the same thing happened to St. Paul and he too had to listen to slanderers, who, because he taught that people might be saved without the works of the law and merely by faith in Christ, said: ‘Then let us do what is evil and sin lustily that good may come of it,’ etc. Let us pray against such blasphemy.”[1306]

Of the consequences of the new teaching levelled at the meritorious nature of good works, Wicel had said at the end of his “Apologia”: “The Lutheran sect has opened wide the flood-gates to immorality and disorder, so that everybody laments and sighs over it. If there be anything god-fearing, good, moral or right to be found in this sect, then it was there before, and did not originate with it. For, show me seven men in seven thousand, who, having been formerly godless and wicked, have now, because they are Lutherans, become good and full of the fear of God. I could, however, point out some, such as had previously led a devout, peaceable, inward and harmless life, who are now quite changed by this Evangel. May but the Lord grant them to see and acknowledge what misery they have excited within the German nation. Amen.”[1307]

Among Wicel’s “blasphemies,” as Luther calls them, were some that traversed the latter’s assertions that the holy works of penitents and ascetics were utterly worthless, and that the business of a house-agent or tax-collector, provided one went about it in faith, ranked higher than all the pious works of any monk or hermit.[1308] “The wretched man,” exclaims Luther, angry because of his inability to answer the objection, “most idly attacks us; he has no respect for the labours of their calling which God has commanded each man to perform in his state of life; all this he disregards and merely gapes at superstitious, grand and showy works”;[1309] “and yet Paul extols the ordinary works of the faithful and lays great stress on them.”[1310] This was one of his habitual falsehoods, viz. to make out that Wicel and his other opponents looked down on lowly and commonplace works and the unobtrusive performance of the duties of one’s calling, more particularly in the life of the world. In reality, however, they recognised in the most large-minded way the high value of the duties of any worldly calling when done in a religious spirit, and repudiated with perfect justice the charge brought against Catholicism of undervaluing the ordinary virtues of the good citizen.

The zealous Wicel was not perturbed by Luther’s attacks. He continued to damage the Lutheran cause by his writings, though the position he took up in ecclesiastical matters was not always well advised.

Another convert, Veit Amerbach (Amorbach), one of the most capable Humanists of the day, after abandoning the Catholic communion lectured first at Eisleben and then in the philosophical faculty at Wittenberg, till, owing to his patristic studies and after personal conferences with Luther and Melanchthon, he returned to the bosom of the Church in 1543, and at once found a post as lecturer at the University of Ingolstadt. As he declared in a written statement handed to Melanchthon, it was particularly the doctrines of Justification and of the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome that compelled him to side with antiquity and to oppose the innovations.

Too high-minded to abuse his former associates (he even refrained from writing against them), Luther nevertheless, on hearing of his conversion, declared that he would surely turn out later a blasphemer.

“You know,” Luther wrote to Lauterbach, “Vitus Amerbach, who left us to go to Ingolstadt, was a man who was never really one of us (1 John ii. 19); he will imitate Eck in his blasphemy of our Word, and perhaps do even worse things.”[1311] Amerbach having pointed out that the greatest authorities both of East and West had acknowledged the Pope’s leadership in the Church, Luther replies in Table-Talk in 1544: “Whence do they get the rotten argument, that the Church must have Rome for its outward head? All history is against anything of the kind. The whole of the West was never under the Pope, nor the whole of the East. It is mere pride on Amerbach’s part! O God, this is indeed a fall beyond all other falls! I am sorry about him, for he will occasion great scandal. Poor people, they think not of their last hour.”[1312] “Ah, it is said of them: They went out from us, from the Apostles. But whence came the devil? From the angels surely. Whence the prostitutes if not from virgins? Whence the knaves if not from the ranks of the pious? Evil must needs come from good.”[1313]

Amerbach’s opinion of the innovations and of the work of the devil was a different one.

In the Preface to his collection of the Capitularies of Charles the Great and Lothair,—the solitary passage in which he alludes to the upheaval he had witnessed, though he refrains from any reference to his former colleagues—he expresses his cherished hope that the Church will ultimately be restored to unity under the successor of Peter; the most pressing thing was to set some bounds to the extraordinary and utterly unrestrained abuse and vituperation, which was not a little promoted by the avarice and filthy venality of the printers, but which the authorities did nothing to prevent. “At times, when I reflect on this disorder,” he says, “it seems to me that men are not filled merely with gall and wormwood, but are verily led and set in motion by devils incarnate. But otherwise it cannot be, so long as, within the Church, the faithful are split up into opposing factions. And would that the populace alone were to blame! I am very much deceived if in any of the books of history even one other example is to be met with of such madness, such furious, poisonous railing and drunken invective.”[1314]