“To Christ’s dear Kingdom the Pope has done
What they are doing to his own crown.
Says the Spirit: Give him quits,
Fill it brimful as God bids.”
In the margin express reference is made to the solemn words of God (Apoc. xviii. 6), where the voice from heaven proclaims judgment on Babylon: “Render to her as she also hath rendered to you, and double unto her double according to her works: in the cup wherein she hath mingled, mingle ye double unto her.”
It would surely be hard to find anywhere so filthy a parody of the sacred text as Luther here permits himself.
The same must be said of the utter hatred which gleams from every one of the pictures. Into it we gain some insight from a letter of Luther’s to Jonas: To console his suffering colleague he has a fling at the Council of Trent: “God has cursed them as it is written: ‘Cursed be he who trusts in man.’” God, says he, will surely destroy the Council, legates and all.[1697] Jonas was ailing from stone, besides being tormented with “dire fancies.”[1698] Luther, who himself suffered severely from stone, exclaimed to his friend Amsdorf: Would that the stone would pass into the Pope and these Gomorrhaic cardinals![1699] A prey to anger and depression, to hatred, defiance and fear of the devil, he is yet determined to mock at Satan who is ever at his heels in small matters as well as in great. “I shall, please God, laugh at Satan though he seeks to deride me and my Church.”[1700]
Such, judging by the letters he wrote in that period, was the soil which produced both the caricatures and the “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft.”
So deeply seated in Luther’s devil-lore, not to say devil-mania, was the tendency that inspired the woodcuts, that, when once his conscience pricked him on account of the excessive coarseness of one of the scenes, he could not be moved to admit any more than that the drawing might be improved on the score of decency and be made to look ... “more diabolical.” The picture in question was that of the “Birth of the Pope-Antichrist.” Evidently some friends had protested against the cynical boldness of the birth-scene. Luther writes to Amsdorf: “Your nephew George has shown me the picture of the Pope, but Master Lucas is a coarse painter. He might have spared the female sex as the creature of God and for the sake of our own mothers. He could well design other figures more worthy of the Pope, i.e. more diabolical; but do you be judge.”[1701] Later on, when Amsdorf still betrayed some scruple, Luther promised him: “I shall take diligent steps should I survive to see that Lucas the painter substitutes for this obscene picture a more seemly one.”[1702] So far as is known, however, no such substitution took place, and still less was the caricature withdrawn from circulation; nor, again, would it have been at all easy even for the cleverest painter to produce something “more diabolical.”
For the coarseness of the drawings there exists no shred of excuse.
Luther had indeed never disdained to be coarse and vulgar when this served his purpose; as time went on, however, his love for the language of the gutter became much more noticeable, at least in his controversial writings. To some extent this was the reaction of the impression he saw produced on the masses by his words, his growing sense of the power of his tongue being in part responsible for the ever more frequent recourse he had to this “original” mode of speech; to some extent too his obscene language and imagery were simply an outcome of his devil-craze, with which, indeed, they were in perfect keeping.
Certain admirers have sought to excuse Luther by pointing out that, after all, none of his obscenities was of a nature to excite concupiscence; this we must indeed allow, but the admission affords but a small crumb of comfort. Without finding anything actually lascivious, either in the draughtsmanship of these pictures or in the filthy language to which Luther was generally addicted, one can still regret his “peculiarity” in this respect.
That, in those days, people were more inured than our refined contemporaries to the controversial use of such revolting coarseness has been stated and is indeed perfectly true. The fact is, however, that what contributed to harden the people was the frequency with which the Protestants in their polemics had recourse to the weapon of obscenity. Who had more responsibility in the decline in the sense of modesty and propriety among German folk than the Wittenberg writer whose works enjoyed so wide a circulation? It has been pointed out elsewhere that though certain Catholic writers of that age, and even of earlier times, were not entirely innocent of a tendency to indelicacy, Luther outdid them all in this respect.[1703] Nevertheless, however great the lack of refinement may have been, though the lowest classes then may have been even more prone than now to speak with alarming frankness of certain functions of the body, and though even the better classes and the writers may have followed suit, yet so far did Luther venture to go, that the humanist Willibald Pirkheimer was expressing the feeling of very many when he said, in 1529: “Such is the audacity of his unwashed tongue that Luther cannot hide what is in his heart; he seems either to have completely gone off his head or to be egged on by some evil demon.”[1704]