The “Religious” Reformer and the Hero of “Kultur”
Two other conceptions are in vogue at the present day, which are in part a reaction against the rather over-bold assertions sometimes made about Luther’s mediævalism. Some have insisted that Luther is to be taken as a “religious” teacher, without examining his actual doctrines too narrowly. To others he appears in the light of the founder of modern “Kultur,” i.e. of civilisation in its widest sense. Neither of these ideas can boast of being very clear, nor have they met with any great success.
Those who regard Luther merely as a religious teacher practically confine themselves to imputing to him the “religiousness” of modern Protestantism as the inward force which moved him; albeit, maybe, in his teaching, he did not quite come up to the modern standard. This was to all intents and purposes the view of Albert Ritschl and his school. Luther, they declared, taught first and foremost that both “piety and theology should rest on the consciousness of having in Christ a Gracious God, thanks to which consciousness we rise superior to the world with all its goods and all its duties.” With him “it was not a question of denominations but simply one of religion.” Ritschl, as another Protestant not unjustly observed, “undoubtedly fell a victim to the temptation” of “modernising” Luther.[1648] Moreover, whereas, according to Ritschl, one of Luther’s main achievements was his introduction of a new view of the Church as an institution devoid of legal jurisdiction, according to other Protestant scholars, it was “chiefly in his views regarding the Church that Luther remained under the spell of mediæval thought.”[1649] On the other hand, some few have sought to make out Luther’s religiousness to have been simply ethical. Thus Wilhelm Wundt, the philosopher, declared that Luther had taught mankind no new religion but only a new ethical system, which, however, was merely an offshoot of the Renaissance. As against this we may set the affirmation of Paul Wernle, viz. that neither Luther nor Lutheranism had a system of ethics at all.[1650]
Recently, it is true, Luther’s “religiousness” has been described by a skilful pen as consisting in an interior union with God, as something altogether “spiritual,” “personal,” as “a sentiment bringing comfort to man’s conscience.”[1651] The truth is, however, that the greatest minds, in mediæval and still more in patristic times, were also in favour of greater inwardness and were against that sort of righteousness which consists merely of words and works. This is a result borne in upon one by all the research now being conducted with so much vigour into the views prevalent in the Middle Ages and earlier.
Hence those who look upon Luther as a new preacher of religion are compelled to paint the pre-Lutheran world as absolutely heathen. Luther, “with his peasant’s pick, relentlessly attacked the vulgar polytheism of the people, the sublime polytheism of public worship and dogma, and likewise the pantheism of mysticism.” But, even if we suppose that all these dreadful things prevailed before Luther’s coming, what did he set up in their place? He induced people, so it is said, to “seek God and find Him in Jesus Christ the image of the fatherly heart of God, to fear, love and hope in God above all things, to fix our heart on God alone and there let it rest.”[1652]—But this was precisely what the olden mediæval Church had sought to do, hence, where is Luther’s peculiarity?
The state of the question to-day would almost seem to justify the words of the famous Ernst Moritz Arndt in his “Ansichten und Aussichten der teutschen Geschichte.” He wrote in 1814: “What Luther really taught and wished has hitherto been understood only by the few; his contemporaries failed to understand him, nor did he understand himself”; but “he foresaw that fiery, disembodied, formless Christianity that was to consist of nothing more than fire and spirit.” Arndt concludes with the solemn words: “But peace be with thine ashes, thou great German man, and may the earth hide thy shortcomings and Christian charity thy faults.”[1653]
The aim of other modern thinkers is to breathe new life into Luther by depicting him as the founder and the hero of modern “Kultur.” The conception of the author of Protestantism as the fount and origin of all present-day civilisation is certainly new and different from the earlier portraitures we have thus far considered. In this picture the “cultural” traits are put in so strong a light that his “religiousness” tends to vanish.
Modern civilisation is non-religious. It is perfectly true that Luther materially contributed to the expulsion of religious influences from the secular government and from public life in general; also that he intervened with a powerful hand to promote the secularisation—that had already begun—and to loosen the existing bond between the Church and the world. On the other hand, it is quite wrong to shut one’s eyes to the other powerful factors at work both before him and in his day which were also tending towards the civilisation of to-day with its estrangement from the Church and preponderance of material interests. Such a factor was the later Humanism. The whole background of the time in which he lived and the seething ferment that preceded the birth of the new world has been misunderstood. His friends indeed point to the after-effects of his undertaking as seen in the subsequent growth of education and scholarship; also to his attitude towards public morality; to the services he rendered to the German tongue; even to the benefit which, indirectly, accrued to agriculture, to the arts, to music, poetry, etc. But, even if we are disposed to allow that an improvement has taken place, it would be utterly unjust to blink the fact that many other spiritual and material influences were at work in all these spheres and were far more potent than Lutheranism. The Lutheran territories were still in a state of servitude and general backwardness when there passed over Germany a great wave of civilisation that was partly of German partly of foreign and even of Catholic growth. For the good that undoubtedly exists in modern civilisation we have to thank partly the natural sciences, which on their revival found a fertile soil even in Italy and France, partly commerce in which, however, the South of Europe was as active as any other region of the world, partly the arts, the best work being, however, cisalpine, partly the development of the State and the army, which again is certainly no indigenous product of Protestantism; hence what we now know is the result of a rivalry between varied influences and many countries. Then again all those qualities which to-day give Germany so high a place among the nations had existed in his countrymen long before Luther’s day; such were their readiness to appreciate the good in others, their openness to outside ideas, their ability to exploit foreign progress, their industry, their domesticity, their tenacity in overcoming all obstacles, and their sober outlook.
Those who make Luther the hero of “Kultur” are also apt to forget the sad ethical, social and political consequences of the schism. To these Adolf Harnack referred plainly enough in a lecture delivered in 1883: “We are well aware of what the Reformation cost us Germans and still costs us. For ages it delayed our political unity; it brought on us the Thirty Years’ War; it made it difficult for us to be just to the Church of the Middle Ages, nay, even to the Church of Antiquity—we cannot break with history without obscuring it—it brought upon us a religious schism which still hinders our growth.”[1654]
If, however, we examine those elements of the new “Kultur” which from the religious or moral standpoint are somewhat questionable (though, amongst Protestant unbelievers, writers are not wanting who are ready to justify them) we meet with many indications which lead us back to Luther. Yet, here again, on the other hand, there were other great and far-reaching causes at work which account for them, which have but little to do with Lutheranism. Such were, for instance, the English Deism which reached Germany by way of France and which helped to produce the infidelity of the Enlightenment; also the revolutionary ideas of 1789 on liberty, the Rights of Man and the lawfulness of rising in revolt, ideas to which the masses are still addicted; then again the luxury that was imported from abroad; above all the inclination of the human heart everywhere to sensuality, to egotism and to promote one’s own standing and temporal welfare even at the expense of one’s neighbour. These maladies to which human nature is prone have, by various causes, been sadly aggravated in modern times. How far Luther was responsible for some of these causes should not be difficult to determine after all that has been said above. At any rate his repudiation of authority in religious matters, his new ideas on faith and good works, and, again his whole system of subjectivism, were poor barriers against the inrush of those elements hostile to faith in God, to Christianity and to ethics, which, in modern civilisation, have a place side by side with much that is good.