Like Luther, Martin Bucer, too, urged the Landgrave to tell a deliberate lie and openly deny his bigamy. Though at first unwilling, he had undertaken to advocate the Landgrave’s bigamy with Luther and had defended it personally (above, p. 28). In spite of this, however, when complications arose on its becoming public, he declared in a letter of 1541 to the preachers of Memmingen, which so far has received little attention, that the Landgrave’s wrong step, some rumours of which had reached his ears, should it prove to be true, could not be laid to his charge or to that of the Wittenbergers. “I declare before God (‘coram Deo affirmo’) that no one has given the Prince such advice, neither I, nor Luther, nor Philip, nor, so far as I know, any Hessian preacher, nor has anyone taught that Christians may keep concubines as well as their wives, or declared himself ready to defend such a step.”[356] And, again calling God to witness (“hæc ego ut coram Deo scripta”), he declares that he had never written or signed anything in defence of the bigamy.[357] In the following year he appeared before the magistrates of Strasburg and, in the presence of two colleagues, “took God to witness concerning the suspicion of having advised the Landgrave the other marriage,” “that the latter had consulted neither him nor any preacher concerning the matter”; he and Capito had “throughout been opposed to it” (the bigamy), “although his help had been sought for in such matters by honourable and highly placed persons.”[358] The reference here is to Henry VIII of England, to whom, however, he had never expressed his disapproval of bigamy; in fact he, like Capito and the two Wittenbergers (above, p. 4), had declared his preference for Henry’s taking an extra wife rather than divorcing his first.
Bucer (who had so strongly inveighed against Luther’s lies, above, p. 99), where it was a question of a Catholic opponent like the Augustinian Johann Hoffmeister, had himself recourse to notorious calumnies concerning this man, whom even Protestant historians now allow to have been of blameless life and the “greatest enemy of immorality.”[359] He accused him of “dancing with nuns,” of “wallowing in vice,” and of being “an utterly abandoned, infamous and dissolute knave,” all of them groundless charges at very most based upon mere hearsay.[360]—This same Bucer, who accused the Catholic Princes of being double-tongued and pursuing dubious policies, was himself notorious amongst his own party for his wiliness, deceit and cunning.
Johann Bugenhagen, the Pastor of Wittenberg, when called upon to acknowledge his share in a certain questionable memorandum of a semi-political character also laid himself open to the charge of being wanting in truthfulness (vol. iii., p. 74 f.).
P. Kalkoff has recently made clear some of Wolfgang Capito’s double-dealings and his dishonest behaviour, though he hesitates to condemn him for them. Capito had worked in Luther’s interests at the Court of Archbishop Albert of Mayence, and there, with the Archbishop’s help, “rendered incalculable services to the Evangelical cause.” In extenuation of his behaviour Kalkoff says: “In no way was it more immoral than the intrigues” of the Elector Frederick. On the strength of the material he has collected J. Greving rightly describes Capito as a “thoroughbred hypocrite and schemer.”[361] The dealings of this “eminent diplomatist,” as Greving also terms him, remind us only too often of Luther’s own dealings with highly placed ecclesiastics and seculars during the first period of his apostasy. If, in those early days, Luther’s theory had already won many friends and imitators, in the thick of the fight it made even more converts amongst the new preachers, men ready to make full use of the alluring principle, that, against the depravity of the Papacy everything is licit.
From vituperation to the violation of truth there was but a step amidst the passion which prevailed. How Luther’s abuse—ostensibly all for the love of his neighbour—infected his pupils is plain from a letter in the newly published correspondence of the Brothers Blaurer. This letter, written from Wittenberg on Oct. 8, 1522, by Thomas Blaurer, to Ulrich Zasius, contains the following: “Not even from the most filthy and shameful vituperation [of the hateful Papacy] shall we shrink, until we see it everywhere despised and abhorred.” What had to be done was to vindicate the doctrine that, “Christ is our merit and our satisfaction.”[362] Luther, he says, poured forth abuse (“convicia”), but only to God’s glory, and for the “salvation and encouragement of the little ones.”[363]
[4. Some Leading Slanders on the Mediæval Church Historically Considered]
“In Luther’s view the Middle Ages, whose history was fashioned by the Popes, was a period of darkest night.... This view of the Middle Ages, particularly of the chief factor in mediæval life, viz. the Church in which it found its highest expression, is one-sided and distorted.” Such is the opinion of a modern Protestant historian. He is sorry that false ideas of the mediæval Church and theology “have been sheltered so long under the ægis of the reformer’s name.”[364]—“It will not do,” a lay Protestant historian, as early as 1874, had told the theologians of his faith, speaking of Köstlin’s work “Luthers Theologie,” “to ignore the contemporary Catholic literature when considering Luther and the writings of the reformers.... It is indispensable that the condition of theology from about 1490 to 1510 should be carefully examined. We must at all costs rid ourselves of the caricatures we meet with in the writings of the reformers, and of the misunderstandings to which they gave rise, and learn from their own writings what the theologians of that time actually thought and taught.” “Paradoxical as it may sound, it is just the theological side of the history of the Reformation which, at the present day, is least known.”[365]
During the last fifty years German scholars have devoted themselves with zeal and enthusiasm to the external and social aspect of the Middle Ages. That great undertaking, the “Monumenta Germaniæ historica,” its periodical the “Archiv,” and a number of others dealing largely with mediæval history brought Protestants to a juster and more objective appreciation of the past. Yet the theological, and even in some respects the ecclesiastical, side has been too much neglected, chiefly because so many Protestant theologians were scrupulous about submitting the subject to a new and unprejudiced study. Hence the astonishment of so many when Johannes Janssen, with his “History of the German People,” and, to pass over others, Heinrich Denifle with his work on Luther entered the field and demonstrated how incorrect had been the views prevalent since Luther’s time concerning the doctrine and the ecclesiastical life of his age. Astonishment in many soon made way for indignation; in Denifle’s case, particularly, annoyance was caused by a certain attitude adopted by this author which led some to reject in their entirety the theologico-historical consequences at which he arrived, whilst even Janssen was charged with being biassed. Other Protestants, however, have learned something from the Catholic works which have since made their appearance in greater numbers, have acknowledged that the ideas hitherto in vogue were behind the times and have invited scholars to undertake a more exact study of the materials.
“The later Middle Ages,” says W. Friedensburg, speaking of the prevailing Protestant view, “seemed only to serve as a foil for the history of the Reformation, of which the glowing colours stood out all the more clearly against the dark background.” “As late as a few years ago the history of the close of the Middle Ages was almost a ‘terra incognita.’” Only through Janssen, Friedensburg continues, “were we led to study more carefully the later Middle Ages” and to discover, amongst other things, that the “majority of the people [sic] had not really been so ignorant of the truth of Christianity,” that “the Church had not yet lost her power over people’s minds,” that “towards the end of the Middle Ages the people had already been growing familiar with the Bible,” and that “sermons in the vulgar tongue had not been neglected to the extent that has been frequently assumed.” This author, like H. Böhmer, characterises it as erroneous “to suppose that Luther was the first to revive regard for Paul and to restore Paulinism” or “to insist upon the reform of godliness on the model of the theology of Christ.” Coming to Denifle, he says, that the latter “on account of his learning was without a doubt qualified as scarcely any other scholar of our time for the task he undertook. When he published his ‘Luther’ he could look back on many years of solid and fruitful labour in the field of mediæval Scholasticism and Mysticism.” From Denifle’s work it is clear that Luther was “but little conversant with mediæval Scholasticism, particularly that of Thomas Aquinas.”[366]