Luther, vol. 5 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Maurice, the son of Duke Henry, who succeeded in 1541, showed himself even more violent and relentless in extirpating the olden system.

The profoundly immoral character of this reformation, the interference with the people’s freedom of conscience, the destruction of religious traditions which the peaceable inhabitants had received a thousand years before from holy missionaries and bishops, merely on the strength of the new doctrines of a man who claimed to have a better Gospel—all this was expressly sanctioned and supported by Luther.

He wrote in a memorandum on the proceedings: “There is not much room here for discussion. If my gracious Duke Henry wishes to have the Evangel, then His Highness must abolish idolatry, or not afford it protection ... otherwise the wrath of heaven will be too great.” As a “sovereign appointed by God” the ruler “owed it to Him to put down such horrible, blasphemous idolatry by every means in his power.” This was nothing more than “defending Christ and damning the devil”; an example had been given by the “former kings of Juda and Israel,” who had abolished “Baal and all his idolatry,” and later by Constantine, Theodosius and Gratian. For it was as much the duty of princes and lords as of other people to serve God and the Lord Christ to the utmost of their power. Away, therefore, with the abbots and bishops “since they are determined to remain blasphemers ... they are blind leaders of the blind; God’s wrath has come upon them; hence we must help in the matter as much as we can.”[457]

Yet the Christian emperors here appealed to could have furnished Luther with an example of forbearance towards heathen Rome and its religious works of art which might well have shamed him. He did not know that at Rome the defacing and damaging of temples, altars or statues was most strictly forbidden, and that, for instance, Pope Damasus († 384) had been formally assured by the city-prefect that never had a Christian Roman appeared before his tribunal on such a charge.[458] Elsewhere, however, such acts of violence were not unknown.

Luther’s spirit of persecution was quite different from the spirit which animated those Roman emperors who came over to Christianity. It was their desire to hasten the end of an outworn religion of superstition, immorality and idolatry. With them it was a question of defending and furthering a religion sent from heaven to renew the world and which had convincingly proved the divinity of its mission by miracles, by the blood of martyrs and by the striking holiness of so many thousands of confessors.

It was against the faithful adherents of this very religion that, on the pretext of the outward corruption under which it groaned, Luther perpetrated so many acts of violence regardless of the testimony of a thousand years of beneficent labours. His ingratitude towards the achievements of the olden Church in the education of the nations, his deliberate ignoring of the great qualities which distinguished her and in his day could still have enabled her to carry out her own moral regeneration from within, are incompatible with his having been a true moral reformer.

The Aims of the Reformation and the Currents of the Age

Looking at the state of the case from the standpoint of the olden Catholic Church a closer historical examination shows that what she needed above all was a strengthening of her interior organisation.[459]

In view of the tendency to split up into separate States, in view of the decay of that outward bond of the nations under the Empire which had once been her stay, and of the rise of all sorts of new elements of culture requiring to be exploited for the glory of God and the spiritual betterment of mankind, a consolidation of the Church’s structure was essential. The Primacy indeed was there, exercised its functions and was recognised, but what was needed was a more direct recognition of a purified Papacy. The bond of unity between the nations within the Church needed to be more clearly put in evidence. This could best be done by allowing the significance of a voluntary submission to the authority appointed by God, and of the Primacy, to sink more deeply into the consciousness of Christendom. This was all the more called for, now that the traditional devotion to Rome had suffered so much owing to the great Schism of the West, to the reforming Councils and the prevalence of Gallican ideas, and that the splendour of the Papacy seemed now on the wane. The excessive concern of the Popes in politics and the struggle they had waged in Italy in the effort to establish themselves more securely had by no means contributed to increase respect for the power of the keys in its own peculiar domain, viz. the spiritual.