In the letter, which to say the least is very conciliatory, Melanchthon says that he will know how to keep silence on any ecclesiastical regulations, no matter how distasteful to him they may be: for he knew what it was “to endure even a truly ignominious bondage, Luther having frequently given the rein to his own natural disposition, which was not a little quarrelsome, instead of showing due consideration for his own position and the general welfare.” He goes on to explain the nature of the habit of silence he had so thoroughly mastered; it meant no sacrifice of his own doctrine and views (“non mutato genere doctrinæ”). For twenty long years, so he complains, he had been obliged to bear the reproaches of the zealots of the party because he had toned down certain doctrines and had ventured to differ from Luther; they had called him ice and frost, accused him of being in league with the Papists, nay, of being ambitious to secure a Cardinal’s hat. Yet he had never had the slightest inclination to go over to the Catholics, for they “were guilty of cruel injustice.” He must, however, say that he, who by nature was a lover of peace and the quiet of the study, had only been drawn into the movement of which Luther was the leader because he, like many wise and learned contemporaries, thought he discerned in it a striving after that truth for which he thirsted and for which he lived. Luther it was true, had, from the very first, introduced a “rougher element into the cause”; he himself, however, had made it his aim to set up only what was true and essentially necessary; he had also done much in the way of reforms, and, to boot, had waged a war against the demagogues (“multa tribunitia plebs”) which, owing to the attacks of enemies at Court, had drawn down on him the displeasure of the sovereign and had even put his life in jeopardy.
Coming finally to speak of the concessions, speculative and practical, which he was prepared to make in addition to preserving silence, he mentions “the authority to be conceded to the bishops and the chief bishop in accordance with the Augsburg Confession.” He adds: “Mayhap I am by nature of a servile turn of mind” (“fortassis sum ingenio servili”), but, after all there is a real call to be humble and open to advances. He also refers to the defeat of the Evangelical Princes, but only to assure Carlowitz that he attributes this, “not to blind fate, but rather admit that we have drawn down the chastisement on ourselves by many and great misdeeds.”[949]
This is the oft-quoted declaration which Protestant writers as a whole regret more on Melanchthon’s than on Luther’s account. It was “an unhappy hour” in which Melanchthon wrote the letter “which gives us so profound an insight into his soul”;[950] he forgot that he was “a public character”; “in this letter not only what he says of Luther and of his relations with him, but even his account of the share he himself took in the Reformation,” “is scarcely to his credit.”[951]
Another Protestant holds, however, a different view. In this letter we have, as a matter of fact, “the expression of feelings which for long years Melanchthon had most carefully kept under restraint locked up in his heart.... From it we may judge how great was the vexation and bitterness Melanchthon had to endure.... In an unguarded moment what had been so long pent up broke out with elemental force.” The historian we are quoting then goes on to plead for a “milder sentence,” especially as “almost every statement which occurs in the letter can be confirmed from Melanchthon’s confidential correspondence of the previous twenty years.”[952]
Some of Melanchthon’s Deliverances
It is quite true, that, in his confidential correspondence, Melanchthon had long before made allusions to the awkwardness of his position.
He says, for instance, in a letter to the famous physician Leonard Fuchs, who wanted him to take up his abode at Tübingen: “Some Fate has, as it were, bound me fast against my will, like hapless Prometheus,” bound to the Caucasian rock, of whom the classic myth speaks. Nevertheless, he had not lost hope of sometime cutting himself free; happy indeed would he account himself could he find a quiet home amongst his friends at Tübingen where he might devote his last years to study.[953]
On a later occasion, when bewailing his lot, the image of Prometheus again obtrudes itself on the scholar.[954]
Melanchthon’s uneasiness and discontent with his position did not merely arise from the mental oppression he experienced at Luther’s side; it was, as already pointed out, in part due to sundry other factors, such as the persecution he endured from disputatious theologians within the party, the sight of the growing confusion which met his eye day by day, the public dangers and the moral results of the religious upheaval, and, lastly, the depressing sense of being out of the element where his learning and humanistic tastes might have found full and unhampered scope. His complaints dwell, now on one, now on some other of these trials, but, taken together, they combine to make up a tragic historical picture of a soul distraught; this is all the more surprising, since, owing to the large share he had in the introduction of the new Evangel, the cheering side of the great religious reform should surely have been reflected in Melanchthon.
“It is not fitting,” writes the Protestant theologian Carl Sell, “to throw a veil over the sad close of Melanchthon’s life, for it was but the logical consequence of his own train of thought.” Luther’s theology, of the defects of which Melanchthon was acutely conscious, had, according to Sell, “already begun to break down as an adequate theory of life”;[955] of the forthcoming disintegration Luther’s colleague already had a premonition.