Assuredly he would, had he seen them, have disapproved of many of the acts of vandalism which history tells us were perpetrated against Catholic churches, monasteries and institutions. Generally speaking the ideas of Carlstadt and Zwingli, wherever they gained the upper hand, proved far more destructive to ecclesiastical works of art than Luther’s gentler admonitions against the veneration of images. Nevertheless, his exhortations, though more guarded, made their way among both the mighty and the masses, and were productive of much harm.
He himself declared frankly, about the end of 1524, that “by his writings he had done more harm to the images than Carlstadt with all his storming and fanaticism will ever do.”[733] In the course of the next year he boasted of having “brought contempt” on the images even before Carlstadt’s time. He had repudiated the latter’s acts of violence and his ill-judged appeal to the law of Moses;[734] on the other hand, he had undermined the very foundations of image-worship by his Evangelical doctrines; this was a better kind of “storming,” for in this way those who once had bowed to images now “refused to have any made.” As much as the most fanatical of the iconoclasts, he too wished to see the images “torn out of men’s hearts, despised and abolished,” but he “destroyed them [the images] outwardly and also inwardly,”[735] and so went one better than Carlstadt, who attacked them only from the outside.
He had, so he continues, speaking to the German people, “consented” that the images should be “done away with outwardly so long as this took place without fanaticism and violence, and by the hand of the proper authorities.”[736] “We drive them out of men’s hearts until the time comes for them to be torn down by the hands of those whose duty it is to do this.”[737] Meanwhile, however, it was “every man’s duty” to “destroy them by the Evangel,” “especially the images of God and other idolatrous ones.”[738]
In his Church-sermons he makes his own the complaint, that, though these images which attracted a great “concourse of people” should be “overthrown,” the bishops were actually attaching indulgences to them and thus increasing the disorder.[739]
In his sermons against Carlstadt at Wittenberg he had said things, and afterwards disseminated them in print, little calculated to impose restraint on the zeal of the multitude: “It were better we had none of these images on account of the tiresome and execrable abuse and unbelief.”[740]
The iconoclasts at Wittenberg were anxious, he says, to set about hewing down the images. His reply was: “Not yet! For you will not eradicate the images in this way, indeed you will only establish them more firmly than ever.”[741]
Accordingly it was then his own opinion that they should be “abolished” and “overthrown,” particularly such images as were held in peculiar veneration; in 1528 he again admitted that this was his object, when once more proposing his own less noisy and more cautious policy as the more effectual; in his sermons on the Ten Commandments printed at this time he declared that the way to “hew down and stamp out the images was to tear and turn men’s hearts away from them.”[742] Then the “images would tumble down of their own accord and fall into disrepute; for they [the faithful] will say: If it is not a good work to make images, then it is the devil who makes them and the pictures. In future I shall keep my money in my pocket or lay it out to better advantage.”[743]—“The iconoclasts rush in and tear down the images outwardly. To this I do not object so much. But then they go on to say that it must be so, and that it is well pleasing to God”; this, however, is false; it is a mistake to say that such a Divine command exists to tear them down.[744]
The grounds on which he opposed the old-time use of images were the following: By erecting them people sought to gain merit in God’s sight and to perform good works; they also trusted in images and in the Saints instead of in Christ, Who is our only ground for confidence; finally—a reason alleged by him but seldom—people adored the images and thus became guilty of idolatry. Here it is plain how much his peculiar theology on good works and the worship of the saints contribute to his condemnation of the ancient Catholic practice. In his zeal against the existing abuses he overlooks the fact, that to invoke before their images the Saints’ intercession with Christ was not in the least opposed to belief in Christ as the one mediator. As for the charge of adoring the images to which he resorts exceptionally—more with the object of making an impression and shielding himself—it amounted to an act of injustice against all his forefathers to accuse them of having been so grossly stupid as to confuse the images with the divinity; even he himself had elsewhere sufficiently absolved them of the charge of adoring saints, let alone images.[745]
The real cause of this premature attack on images found in these sermons was the storm called forth by Carlstadt, which Luther hoped to divert and dominate[746] by the attitude he assumed; otherwise it is very likely he would have refrained from assailing the religious feelings of the people in so sensitive a spot for many years to come, or at any rate would not have done so in the manner he chose by way of reply to Carlstadt.