Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

“The apothecary was awakened at the third hour after midnight.… When he arrived he said to the doctors: ‘He is quite dead, of what use can an injection be?’ Count Albert and some scholars were present. The physicians, however, replied: ‘At any rate have a try with the instrument that he may come again to himself if there be any life yet in him.’ When the apothecary inserted the nozzle he noticed some flatulency given off into the ball of the syringe.”[1429] The apothecary persevered in his efforts until the physicians saw that all was useless. “The two physicians disputed together as to the cause of death. The doctor said it was a fit of apoplexy, for the mouth was drawn down and the whole of the right side discoloured.”[1430] The master, on the other hand, thought it incredible that so holy a man could have been thus stricken down by the hand of God, and thought it was rather the result of a suffocating catarrh and that death was due to choking. After this all the other Counts arrived. Jonas, however, who was seated at the head of the bed, wept aloud and wrung his hands. When asked whether Luther had complained of any pain the evening before he replied: “Dear me, no, he was more cheerful yesterday than he had been for many a day. Oh, God Almighty, God Almighty, etc.”—by this Jonas did not mean to deny the fit of heart oppression that had occurred the previous day, since he himself reports it to the Elector; distracted by grief as he was he probably only thought of the good spirits Luther had been in that evening, and of the contrast with the dead body he now saw lying before him. Or it may be that he did not regard the heart oppression as actual “pain.”

Landau’s report continues: “In the meantime the Counts brought costly scents to be applied to the body of the deceased, for on several occasions before this he had been thought to be dead when he lay for a long time motionless and giving no sign of life, as happened to him, for instance, at Schmalkalden when he was tormented with the stone.… The apothecary vigorously rubbed his nose, mouth, forehead and left side for some time with the oils. Prince Wolfgang of Anhalt came and bent over the corpse and asked the apothecary whether any sign of life remained. The latter, however, replied that there was not the least life in him seeing that the hands, nose, forehead, cheeks and ears were already stiff and cold in death.… Jonas said: It will be best now for us to send a swift rider to the Elector and for one of us to sit down and write and tell him all that has happened.”

Jonas himself wrote this first still extant account to his sovereign “about four o’clock in the morning.”

On Feb. 20 Luther’s body was taken to Halle, and early on the 22nd to Wittenberg, where it was received at the Elster Gate—the scene of the famous burning of the Bull—by the University, the Town Council and the burghers. He was buried in the Schlosskirche. There his bones still rest in the grave as was proved by an examination made on Feb. 14, 1892.[1431]

4. In the World of Legend

Barely twenty years later a report that Luther had committed suicide went the rounds among certain of his opponents, the report being subsequently grounded on the alleged statement of a servant.

The first writer who mentions the servant is the Italian Oratorian, Thomas Bozius, in a book on the marks of the Church printed in Rome in 1591. “Luther after having supped heartily that evening and gone to bed quite content,” so he writes, “died that same night by suffocation. I hear that it has recently been discovered through the confession of a witness who was then his servant and who came over to us in late years, that Luther brought himself to a miserable end by hanging; but that all the inmates of the house who knew of the incident were bound under oath not to divulge the matter, for the honour of the Evangel as it was said.”[1432]

It was not till the beginning of the 17th century that the text of the supposed letter of Luther’s servant began to be circulated, according to which, when the latter went one morning to awaken Luther “as usual” (i.e. about 7 a.m.) he found he had committed suicide; this, however, is quite at variance with the definite accounts we have of the time of death. The supposed servant claims to have been alone when he found “our Master Martin hanging from the bedpost, miserably strangled,” whereas the notes made at the time speak of the presence of witnesses both before and after the death which, moreover, was quite a natural one. The apocryphal letter bears no writer’s name nor do we know anything of its source; it seems to have made its first public appearance at Antwerp in 1606 in the work of the Franciscan Sedulius, who probably took it in good faith. It is remarkable, that, down to 1650, as Paulus has proved, only one German writer mentions this fictitious letter, though foreign polemics were busy with it. Outside of Germany such inventions found more ready credence, particularly among the zealous and more imaginative Catholics of the Latin race, who were only too willing to seize on any tale which was to the discredit of the lives of the German foes of Catholicism.[1433]

The falsehood of the legend of Luther’s suicide was most convincingly proved by N. Paulus in his special work on the subject (1898). This scholar submitted the fable to the sharp knife of criticism with a broadminded love of truth that honours his Catholicism as much as his acumen does honour to him as a critic.