Luther, vol. 4 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Of the anthem “Salve Regina,” which is “sung throughout the world to the ringing of great bells,” he says, that it was a “great blasphemy against God,” for it terms Mary, the mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. “The ‘Regina Caeli’ is not much better, since it calls her Queen of Heaven.” Why should her prayers have so much value, he asks, as though unaware of the explanations given by so many ecclesiastical writers, particularly by St. Bernard. “Your prayers, O Christian, are as dear to me as hers. And why? Because if you believe that Christ lives in you as much as in her then you can help me as much as she.”[1773]

In this discourse again he ventures on the calumny on the Catholic veneration of Mary, of which he was to make such frequent use later; it is equivalent to adoration; “To seek to make of Mary an idol, that we cannot and may not do. We will not have her as a mediator, but as an advocate [to this Luther always clung] we will gladly accept her, like the other Saints. But people have put her above all the choirs of angels.”[1774] Neither here nor elsewhere does he attempt to prove her alleged adoration or the idolatry of the Catholics; when, a little further on, he launches forth against the pilgrimages made by common folk to churches and chapels of our Lady, he is straying from the subject and dealing with a practice of the faithful, quite harmless and wholesome in itself, whatever abuses it may then have involved.

The veneration for the holy Mother of the Redeemer, that high ideal of humility and purity of heart, so devoid of the slightest trace of sensuality, springs from the soil of humility, chastity and pure, unselfish love. Luther’s whole mental outlook was not too favourable to such necessary dispositions. His moral character, as exhibited more particularly during the period after his stay at the Wartburg and previous to his marriage, scarcely harmonised with the delicate blossoms of this cultus, nor can we be surprised, looking at it psychologically, that the chief alteration in his views took place just at this time.

That hostile instinct, shared by so many heretics in their attitude towards the most holy of women, outweighed in his soul the vestiges of Catholic feeling he still retained. Malice impelled him to blacken the honour which the people loved to pay to Mary; this he strove to paint as mere idolatry, seeking unceasingly to affix this stigma on Catholicism. Controversy stifled in him the impulse to that pious veneration which he himself had admitted to be so well-founded and so natural.

Purgatory.

In the Schmalkalden Articles the olden doctrine of Purgatory was rejected by Luther as follows: Purgatory, “with all its pomp, worship and traffic, must be held to be nothing more than a mere phantom of the devil,” born of “that dragon’s tail” the Mass.[1775]

Although in this condemnation Luther’s customary polemical exaggeration of abuses clearly plays a part, yet from his Indulgence Theses and “Resolutions” down to the sentence in the Articles of Schmalkalden the working of his mind can clearly be traced, expressed as it is, now in rejection on principle, and on theological or biblical grounds, now in opportunist and cynical attacks on the Church’s ancient doctrine of Purgatory. The temporal penalties which, according to the teaching of the Church, must be paid by the suffering souls notwithstanding their state of grace, found no place in Luther’s new theory of a faith which covered over everything. According to the usual view venial sins also are forgiven in the next world, thanks to the purifying pains of Purgatory. But of venial sins as distinct from grievous sins Luther refused to hear. He had nothing but evasive replies to the objection which presented itself of its own accord, viz. that mortals when they die often seem ripe neither for heaven nor for hell.[1776]

At first Luther was content to modify merely the doctrine of Purgatory which is so deeply implanted in the consciousness of the Christian, by denying that it was capable of making satisfaction while nevertheless asserting his belief in the existence of a place of purgation (“mihi certissimum est, purgatorium esse”);[1777] then he devoted himself to countering the many legends and popular tales of the appearance of ghosts, a comparatively easy task.[1778] The Pope, he went on to say, had merely made Purgatory an article of faith in order to enrich himself and his followers by Masses for the Dead, though in fact “it may be that only very few souls go there.”

Later he preferred to think, that God had in reality told us practically nothing about the existence or non-existence of Purgatory, or of the condition of the Saints in heaven; the preachers would do well, he says, gradually to wean the people from their practices in this regard; they had merely to decline to discuss the question of the dead and of the Saints in heaven. He was indeed unwilling to sever the close ties, so dear to the Catholic, binding the faithful to the deceased members of his family and to the beloved patterns and heroes of former days, yet his writings do tend in that direction.