Referring to Luther’s notorious utterance on lying, G. Ellinger, the Protestant biographer of Melanchthon, says: Luther’s readiness to deny what had taken place is “one of the most unpleasing episodes in his life and bears sad testimony to the frailty of human nature.” His statements at the Eisenach Conference “show how even a great man was driven from the path of rectitude by the blending of politics with religion. He advised a ‘good, downright lie’ that the world might be saved from a scandal.... It is sad to see a great man thus led astray, though at the same time we must remember, that, from the very start, the whole transaction had been falsified by the proposal to conceal it.”[212]
Th. Kolde says in a similar strain, in a work which is otherwise decidedly favourable to Luther, “Greater offence than that given by the ‘advice’ itself is given by the attitude which the reformers took up towards it at a later date.”[213]
“The most immoral part of the whole business,” so Frederick von Bezold says in his “Geschichte der deutschen Reformation,” “lay in the advice given by the theologians that the world should be imposed upon.... A man [Luther] who once had been determined to sacrifice himself and the whole world rather than the truth, is now satisfied with a petty justification for his falling away from his own principles.”[214] And, to conclude with the most recent biographer of Luther, Adolf Hausrath thus criticises the invitation to tell a “downright lie”: “It is indeed sad to see the position into which the ecclesiastical leaders had brought themselves, and how, with devilish logic, one false step induced them to take another which was yet worse.”[215]
This notwithstanding, the following opinion of a defender of Luther (1909) has not failed to find supporters in the Protestant world: “The number of those who in the reformation-period had already outgrown the lax mediæval view regarding the requirements of the love of truth was probably not very great. One man, however, towers in this respect above all his contemporaries, viz. Luther. He it was who first taught us what truthfulness really is. The Catholic Church, which repudiated his teaching, knows it not even to this day.” “A truthfulness which disregards all else,” nay, a “positive horror for all duplicity” is, according to this writer, the distinguishing mark of Luther’s life.
CHAPTER XXII
LUTHER AND LYING
[1. A Battery of Assertions.][216]
Luther’s frank admission of his readiness to make use of a “good big lie” in the complications consequent on Philip’s bigamy, and his invitation to the Landgrave to escape from the dilemma in this way, may serve as a plea for the present chapter. “What harm is there,” he asks, “if, in a good cause and for the sake of the Christian Churches, a man tells a good, downright lie?” “A lie of necessity, of convenience, or of excuse, all such lies are not against God and for such He will Himself answer”; “that the Landgrave was unable to lie strongly, didn’t matter in the least.”[217]