Among the Protestant writers of the so-called “Enlightenment” we again find Luther under a different guise.
They disagreed with the Pietists’ renunciation both of the conclusions arrived at by reason and of worldly pleasures; in the latter respect they found in Luther a welcome advocate of enjoyment of the good things of the world. His advocacy of a cheerful addiction to earthly pleasures was summed up by them in the saying attributed to him: Who loves not women, wine and song, etc.[1621] On the other hand, by setting Luther on a rationalist plane, they blotted out his essential characteristics; they showed no comprehension for his faith though they were not disposed to minimise his labours for the amendment of religion and for the bringing of light out of darkness.
Gottfried Herder extols him, now as a church founder, now as a writer, and yet again as a great German. Luther’s doctrines seem to him of comparatively small account, but he is willing enough to depict him as a model of cheerful, “strong, free, wholesome and exalted sensibility.”[1622] He is unsparing in his criticism of Luther’s attacks on the Epistle of James and adds: “The sphere of the Spirit of God is wider than Luther’s field of vision.”[1623] In these circles critics were disposed to be bolder and more outspoken than among the orthodox and the Pietists; they also found other things to censure in Luther. Lessing condemns in the severest language his vanity and irascibility: “O God, what a terrible lesson to our pride,” he exclaims, “and how much do anger and revenge degrade even the best and holiest of men.”[1624] He nevertheless opines that Luther’s faults had been of service to him in his great task.
Those few who really perused Luther’s writings marvelled at his extravagant ideas about his divine mission and struggles with the devil, about the end of the world and Antichrist. As a general rule, however, they conveniently skipped all that Luther said against human reason and had no eye for his energetic supernaturalism and his insistence on the bare letter of Scripture.[1625]
Among those infected with the rationalism of the age, antagonism to Catholicism undoubtedly helped to shape their view of Luther. They felt their whole outlook to be at variance with that of Catholicism. Under these circumstances it was natural that Luther should be depicted first and foremost as the liberator from the Papacy; in Luther they recognised, not without some show of reason, “the opponent of all outward authority, of everything Catholic in every domain of the life of the mind”[1626]—an argument, moreover, which occasionally they turned against the Lutheran “Church” itself.
Thus was the dictator of Wittenberg, such as the Orthodox knew him, transformed into a “champion of freedom”; the rationalists made his pen the vehicle of their own ideas. Luther became the “herald of the Enlightenment.” He began what others were to carry on later. “A little longer,” so one wrote in 1797, “and the heavenly light which Luther only saw dimly as in a dream will stream in upon us in all its brightness.”[1627]
The Berlin leader of this movement, A. F. Büsching, as early as 1748, said of himself that he had seen “Luther in his true greatness and as known only to the few; how, in matters of religion, he had absolutely refused to depend on any man, but had relied simply on his own insight and convictions and what had been borne in upon him by diligent reading of the Bible.”[1628] The Halle editor of Luther’s Works, J. G. Walch, vaunted among the other services rendered by Luther that of having established freedom of conscience; in the eyes of Julius Wegscheider he was the “libertatis cogitandi assertor”; it was this which inclined even Frederick II of Prussia to respect him, though otherwise he considered him a “furious monk” and a “barbarous writer.”—Those who thus credited Luther with tolerance “had no inkling of the antithesis between this idea and the true Luther.”[1629] His wanton way of dealing with the Canon of Scripture was urged against the Orthodox in defence of a more critical treatment of Holy Writ. Lessing, referring to Luther’s whole system of Bible interpretation, wrote to J. M. Goeze, the chief pastor of St. Catherine’s church at Hamburg: “What greater authority had Luther than any other Doctor of Divinity?”[1630]
Less dangerous to Lutheranism, and in itself harmless enough, though quite characteristic of the age, was the discovery then made, that Luther was the very personification of a public benefactor and great servant of the State. The Leipzig Professor, C. H. Wieland, described him as a “scholar to whom all were indebted”; Luther, he says, “unmasked obsolete prejudices and opened up to his contemporaries in more than one direction fresh prospects of a coming enlargement of the circle of human knowledge. And this great man was a German.”[1631] From the good bourgeois point of view the fact that Luther had, as it was thought, cultivated respect for the secular authorities was a great feather in his cap. Such people readily shut their eyes to the severity with which Luther had been wont to lash the rulers, even the highest in the land, and to the fact that he had undermined the very foundations of authority. The patriotic thought that “this great man was a German” was made to cover all his failings.
This sort of patriotism gradually produced a new pattern of Luther, differing in many respects from the others. Particularly after the outbreak of the great German wars of deliverance and the burning enthusiasm for the Fatherland which they called forth many felt that they could not sufficiently extol Luther as the great German, and a typical child of his beloved country.