Luther, vol. 5 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

A gloomy, uncanny passion often glows in his words and serves to fire the fanatism of the misguided masses.

“Lo and behold how my blood boils and how I long to see the Papacy punished!” And what was the punishment he looked for? Just before he had said that the Pope, his Cardinals and all his court should have “the skins of their bodies drawn off over their heads; the hides might then be flung into the healing bath [the sea] at Ostia, or into the fire,” unless indeed they found means to pay back all the alien property that the Pope, the “Robber of the Churches, had stolen only to waste, lose and squander it, and to spend it on whores and their ilk.” Yet even this punishment fell short of the crime, for “my spirit knows well that no temporal penalty can avail to make amends even for one Bull or Decree.”[404]

Side by side with language so astonishing we must put other sayings which paint his habitual frame of mind in a light anything but favourable: “It is God’s Word! Let what cannot stand fall ... no matter what!”[405] “The Word is true, or everything crumbles into ruin!”[406] “Even if you will not follow”—such were his words to Staupitz as early as 1521, “at least suffer me to go on and be carried away [’ire et rapi’].” “I have put on my horns against the Roman Antichrists”;[407] in these words Luther compares himself to a raving bull.

This frame of mind tended to promote his natural tendency to violence, hitherto repressed. His proposal to flay all the members of the Roman Curia was not by any means his first hint at deeds of blood; such allusions occur in other shapes in earlier discourses, particularly in his predictions of the judgments to come. The Princes, nobility and towns, so he declared, must put their foot down and prevent the shameful abuses of Rome: “If we mean to fight against the Turks let us begin at home where they are worst; if we do right in hanging thieves and beheading robbers, why then do we let Roman avarice go scot free, when all the time it is the biggest thief and robber there ever has been or will ever be upon the earth.” Whoever comes from Rome bringing in his pocket a collation to a benefice ought to be warned either “to desist, or else to jump into the Rhine or the nearest pond, and give the Roman Brief—letter, seals and all, a cold bath.”[408] Not without a shudder can one read the description in his “Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” written in his last days, of the kinds of death best suited to the Pope and his Curia, of which the flaying and the “bath” at Ostia is only one example. (Cp. below, xxx., 2.) True enough he is careful to point out that such a death will be theirs only should they refuse to amend their ways and accept the Lutheran Evangel!

Ten years previously, in 1535, he had written to Melanchthon, who shrank from acts of violence with what appeared to Luther too great timidity: “Oh, that our most venerable Cardinals, Popes and Roman Legates had more Kings of England to put them to death!”[409] These words he penned soon after Henry VIII of England had sacrificed the lives of John Fisher, bishop of Rochester, and his Chancellor, Sir Thomas More, to his sensual passions and his thirst for blood. Luther adds, of the Pope and the Curia, with the object of vindicating the sentence of death he had passed on them, “They are traitors, thieves, robbers and regular devils.... They are out and out miscreants to the very bottom of their hearts. May God only grant you too to see this.”[410]

Fury had stood by the cradle of Luther’s undertaking and under its gloomy auspices his cause continued to progress. Without repeating what has already been said, it may suffice to point out how his excitement frequently led him to take even momentous steps which he would otherwise have boggled at. Only too frankly he admitted to his friend Lang in 1519 and soon after to Spalatin, that Eck had so exasperated him that he would now shake himself loose and write and do things from which he would otherwise have refrained. His early “jest” at Rome’s expense would now become a real warfare against her[411]—as though Rome was to be made to suffer for Eck and his violence. In 1521, from apprehension of his violence and out of consideration for the Court, Spalatin had kept back two of Luther’s writings which the latter wished to be printed. “I shall get into a towering rage,” so the author wrote to him, “and bring out much worse things on this subject afterwards if my manuscripts are lost, or you refuse to surrender them. You cannot destroy the spirit even though you destroy the lifeless paper.”[412]—This incident at so early a date shows how deeply seated in him was his tendency to violence; even at the outset it was to some extent personal animus which led him to shape his action as he did. Self-esteem and the plaudits of the mob had even then begun to dim his mental vision.

The part played by the first person is great indeed in Luther’s writings.

“We should all have fallen back into the state of the brute!” “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great graces on any bishop as on me.” “I, wonderful monk that I am,” have, by God’s grace, overthrown the devil of Rome; “I have stamped off the heads of more than twenty factions, as though they had been worms.” Countless other such utterances are to be found in what has gone before.[413] “He,” so he declares, “was surely far too learned to allow himself to be taught by the Swiss theologians”; this was one of the sayings that led the friends of the latter to speak of his “tyrannical pride.”[414]

Here come the fractious Sacramentarians, he says, and want a share in my fame; they want to celebrate a “glorious victory” as though it was not from me that they got everything. This is how things turn out, “one labours and some other man takes the fruit.”[415] Carlstadt comes forward and seeks to become a new doctor; “he is anxious to detract from my importance and to introduce among the people his own regulations.”[416]

A character where the first person asserted itself so imperiously could not but be a disputatious one. Down to his very last years Luther’s whole life was filled with strife: quarrels with the jurists; with his own theologians; with the Jews; with the Princes and rapacious nobility; with the Popish foemen and with his own colleagues and followers, even with the preachers and writers dearest to him.