John Tulloch · 11 of 27

I. Luther. · Part 6

In the spring time his heart rose to God in grateful joy as he saw the green life again appearing on the earth. “Praise be to God the Creator, that now in this time of Lent out of dead wood makes all alive again. Look at that bough, as if it were with child, and full of young things coming to the birth. It is a figure of our faith: winter is death, summer is the resurrection.”

“Look at a pair of birds,” he said; “they build a neat little nest and drop their eggs on it, and sit on them. Then come the chicks. There is the creature rolled up inside the shell. If we had never seen such a thing before, and an egg was brought from Calicut, we should be all wondering and crying out. Philosophers cannot explain how the chick was made. God spake and it was done. He commanded and so it was.”

Of music he often spoke. “I always loved music,” he said; “whoso has skill in that art is of a good temperament fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music. Neither should we ordain young men as preachers, unless they have been well exercised in music. Music is one of the best of arts; the notes give life to the text; it expels melancholy, as we see in King Saul. Satan hates music, because it drives away evil thoughts. We read in the Bible that the good and godly kings maintained and paid singers. Music is the best solace for a sad and sorrowful mind; by it the heart is refreshed and settled again in peace. It is a discipline too; for it softens us, and makes us temperate and reasonable. I have no pleasure in any man who, like the fanatics, despises music. It is a gift from God to drive away the devil, and make us forget our anger, and impurity, and pride, and evil tempers. I place music next to theology. I can see why David and all the saints put their choicest thoughts into song.”

There are many miscellaneous sayings in the ‘Table-Talk’ of great value—many serious thoughts and many wise and merry sayings. All who would know Luther must study them, and see how much more than a mere ecclesiastic or theologian he was,—how he had in him the elements of a great statesman and “dramatist,” as Mr Froude says, as well as of a large-minded Christian thinker. This latter he was too; yet clearness and rationality of thought were by no means his most characteristic powers. He was stronger in his estimates of men and religion in the concrete, as represented in the family, in society, and in the Church, than he was in any mere abstract questions. In pure thinking the medieval trappings of his mind clung to him more closely than when he looked with broad open eyes at life, and the necessities whether of political or Christian society. War he hated, although he did not shrink from it when inevitable in the interests of civil order or the defence of Christendom. “War,” he said, “is one of the greatest plagues that can afflict humanity; it destroys religion, it destroys states, it destroys families. Any scourge, in fact, is preferable to it. Famine and pestilence become as nothing in comparison with it. Pestilence is the least evil of the three, and ’twas therefore David chose it, willing rather to fall into the hands of God than into those of pitiless man.” While detesting war, he loved and admired soldiers. “A great soldier is the man; he has not many words; he knows what men are, and holds his tongue; but when he does speak, he acts also. A real hero does not go about his work with vain imagination. . . . A valiant and brave soldier seeks rather to preserve one citizen than to destroy a thousand enemies. He begins not a war lightly or without an urgent cause. . . . Certain ages seem more fruitful in great men than others. When I was a boy there were a great many—the Emperor Maximilian in Germany, Sigismund in Poland, Ladislaus in Hungary, Ferdinand, Emperor Charles’s grandfather, in Spain—pious, wise, noble princes. There were a good many bishops, too, who would have been with us had they been alive now. There was a bishop of Würzburg who used to say, when he saw a rogue, ‘To the cloister with you—thou art useless to God or man.’”

His ill feeling to Erasmus, to whom he was certainly far from just, appears in the following: “In the year 1536 Luther wrote on his tablets, Res et verba Philippus; verba sine re Erasmus; res sine verbis Lutherus; nec res, nec verba Carolostadius; that which Philip Melanchthon writes has hands and feet, the matter is good and the words are good. Erasmus Roterodamus writes many words, but to no purpose; Luther has good matter but the words are wanting; Carlstadt has neither good words nor good matter.”

His love of fun is never far away. “A student of Erfurt,” he tells, “desiring to see Nuremberg, departed with a friend on a journey thither. Before they had walked half a mile, he asked his companion whether they would soon get to Nuremberg, and was answered, ‘’Tis scarce likely, since we have only just left Erfurt.’ Having repeated the question another half mile further on, and getting the same answer, he said, ‘Let us give up the journey, and go back, since the world is so vast.’”

Again, “There are poets who affect to be carried away by their enthusiasm. There was Richius, for example. I remember him sitting with his legs out of his window pretending to be in a fit of poetic fury against the devil, whom he was abusing and vilifying with long roundabout phrases. Strigel, who chanced to pass under, for sport suddenly took hold of the brawling poet’s legs and frightened him heartily—the poor man thinking the devil had come to carry him off.”

“I am a great enemy to flies, quia sunt imagines diaboli et hæreticorum. When I have a good book they flock upon it, and parade up and down upon it, and soil it. ‘Tis just the same with the devil; when our hearts are purest, he comes and soils them.”

“An idle priest, instead of reciting his breviary, used to run over the alphabet, and then say, ‘Oh my God! take this alphabet, and put it together how you will.’”

With one other saying, the substance of which is as old as Solomon, but the application of which is ever new, we must conclude these illustrative extracts. “The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no measure nor limit to this fever for writing. Every one must be an author,—some out of vanity to acquire celebrity, others for the sake of lucre and gain. The Bible is now buried under so many commentaries, that the text is nothing regarded. I could wish all my books were buried nine ells deep underground, by reason of the ill example they will give.”

Luther’s last years were, upon the whole, peaceful, with a thread of sadness in them as he looked beyond his own happy home and Wittenberg, and saw how unsettled the prospect was for the good cause in Germany. It was well for him that he had a happy home, and good wife and children and friends, in whose society he could solace himself as he saw the gathering darkness about to descend on his country. “I love my Catherine,” he says. “I love her more than I do myself, for I would die rather than any harm should happen to her or her children.” But the long-delayed rupture in the Empire was steadily approaching. He was mercifully to be spared the sight of it, though he could not but see it coming. When the year 1544 brought peace with France, it was clear that the issue must be tried between the old and the new forces. The Pope once more began urging the Emperor to put down toleration, and compel the Protestants to a surrender. The promised “free and Christian Council,” which was to compose religious differences, after a fair hearing of both sides, had become a mere Roman council, before which the Evangelical party were summoned to appear as culprits. The Protestant princes and theologians, as may be imagined, refused to appear; and from the date of its summons at Trent, December 13, 1545, war seemed imminent, although still postponed. Luther felt himself growing old: he had begun to lose his eyesight, and he had wished to leave his work at Wittenberg and return permanently to his farm,—“old, spent, worn, weary, cold, and with but one eye to see with,” as he spoke of himself. But the perfidy of the Papacy at the last moment roused him to indignant earnestness. He was like an old lion stirred in his lair, and he gave forth his last thunders in his terrible pamphlet, ‘Against the Papacy in Rome, founded by the Devil.’ The “Aller heiligst” became the “Aller höllischst vater,” the “most holy” the “most hellish father.” So he closed his career, though in sterner tones, very much as he began it, with the exposure of the pretensions of the Papacy to represent Christendom. The conservatism of his later years had made him in no degree more tolerant of Rome. He saw the bloodthirsty designs it cherished against his native land, and he raised his last voice against it.

The circumstances of his death were befitting his noble life. On the 23d of January 1546, he left Wittenberg on a mission of conciliation between the Counts of Mansfeld, the lords of his native soil, who had long been at variance with one another, but had offered to submit their dispute to the reformer’s arbitration. For some time previously his mind had been filled with thoughts of death, and, on his journey presentiments of his approaching end haunted him. “When I come back from Eisleben, I will lay me in my coffin: the world is weary of me, and I of the world: pray God that He will mercifully grant me a peaceful death.” The prayer was granted. On the 14th of February he wrote to his “dear Ketha” that his work of peace was all but concluded. Two days after, he was overheard in earnest prayer while standing, as he was wont to do, in the window. The next day he was unwell, and the idea of death again came vividly to his mind. “I was born and baptised here in Eisleben; what if I am likewise to die here?” He was still able, however, the same day to dine and sup with his friends, and somewhat enjoy himself. During the night his illness increased. He suffered from oppression of the chest and severe pains. He was joined by his friends in alarm, a soothing draught was administered to him, and he murmured, “If I could fall asleep for half an hour, I think it would do me good.” Sleep came for a little, but did not bring him relief. During the whole of the next day, his friends, and his two sons who were with him, watched by his bedside as he gradually sank. “Do you die in the faith of Christ and the doctrine you have preached?” he was asked by Dr Jonas, as consciousness was departing. He answered “Yes,” closed his eyes, and fell asleep; and then, with one deep sigh, slept his last. By the command of the Elector his body was brought in solemn procession from Eisleben to Wittenberg, and laid in the church whose walls had so often resounded with his eloquence. Melanchthon pronounced an oration over his tomb; and sobs and tears from the congregated thousands,—men, women, and children, who had loved the great monk, mingled with the words of the admiring and faithful friend.

The character of Luther, as presented in our rapid survey, is especially distinguished for its broad and massive manliness. Everywhere and pre-eminently Luther is a man with a heart alive to all true human feeling, and burning with the most earnest and passionate aspirations after human good. When we remember that he was trained a monk, and was in fact a monk till he was about forty-two years of age—that books rather than men were his chief study during the most fresh and formative period of life—it is truly wonderful to recognise in him such a breadth and intensity, such a variety and richness of human interest and affection. Scholastic in the spirit of his theology, sacerdotal to the last in many of his convictions, he was of all the reformers the least technical and narrow and ecclesiastical in feeling. His genial and vivifying humanity broke through all conventional bounds, brushed them aside, and more than anything else, except the spiritual truth which he preached, brought him near to the heart of the German people. Had he been less of a man and more of a scholar, less animated by a common and popular sympathy, and more animated by mere intellectual impulse, he could never have achieved the work that he did. It is but a poor and one-sided criticism, therefore, which delights to expose Luther’s intellectual inconsistencies, unscholarly temper, and unphilosophical spirit. The truth is, that Luther was not characteristically a scholar, not even a divine, least of all a philosopher. He was a Hero with work to do; and he did it. His powers were exactly fitted to the task to which God called him. As it was of Titanic magnitude, he required to be a Titan in human strength, and in depth and power, and even violence of human passion, in order to accomplish it. The mere breadth and momentum of his humanity would not, indeed, have sufficed by themselves, but inspired and swayed by Divine truth they were irresistible. Both conditions were equally necessary to his success—the energy, vehemence, and pith of the man; the animation, control, and sway of the Divine Spirit. Had the instrument been less powerful and varied, less full-toned and responsive to all the rich wavering breath of human emotion, the Spirit might have breathed in vain, and the full chorus of resounding triumph from many gathering voices never have been raised. To initiate the reform movement, which was destined to renew the face of Europe, and to give a higher impulse and nobler and more enduring life to all the Saxon nations, required a strong and gigantic will like that of Luther, which, instead of being crushed by opposition or frightened by hatred, only rose in the face of both into a prouder and grander attitude of daring. As he himself said, “To clear the air and to render the earth more fertile, it is not enough that the rain should water and penetrate its surface—there needs also the thunder and lightning;” and he acknowledged himself to be the impersonation of the latter.

And yet, with all this manly energy and vehemence of character, Luther, we have already seen, was no Radical in his reforms. His moderation was at least as conspicuous as his energy, and we shall greatly misapprehend both him and his work if we do not perceive this. He was very little of a theorist. He fought for the truth as God had revealed it to him. But of all the reformers, except Latimer, none fought less for mere schemes or devices of his own to supplant the old fabric of the Church. He would rather rebuild and purify it than supersede it. In his own language, “he was never for throwing away the old shoes till he had got new ones.” Iconoclasm of every kind he abhorred. “It must be a bad spirit,” he said, “which can show its fruit only by breaking open churches and cloisters, and burning images of saints.” Of a certain preacher who was flying high, and carrying things out in a violent spirit of innovation, he writes: “What good can result from all this precipitation? I myself preached nearly three years before I touched such questions, while these people think to settle the whole business in half an hour. I beg you will enjoin the preacher to observe more moderation in future, and to begin with making his people thoroughly understand Jesus Christ.” It was this spirit of moderation that set him resolutely against Carlstadt. Innovation for its own sake—innovation for the sake of uniformity in different churches—all that marks so intensely the later history of Protestantism in Geneva and elsewhere, was unintelligible, and would have been thoroughly uncongenial to him.

So far, and as a mere practical method, his moderation appears entirely commendable; but it is impossible to deny that he carried his moderation farther than this. He not only did not like changes, but he naturally shrank from new views. His mind as well as his practice was strongly conservative; the truth only reached him at first through a struggle and wrench of his whole being so violent that he could not bear to repeat the process. After admitting one streaming flood of light, he shut himself closely against its further ingress. He possessed none of that calmly speculative and inquiring spirit, which is ever going out in search of truth in all directions, and unfolding itself more and more to the sunlight of discovery. He was both too logical and too practical, too dogmatic and too immediate in his judgments, to permit of such a consistent intellectual progress. His mind required to be girded by clear and strong convictions, within the sphere of which his activity knew no bounds; but no soaring aspirations after a higher truth than that which had first seized him, as it were, by divine violence, haunted his spiritual imagination, and he would have thought it mere idle vanity to dream of any larger and more comprehensive view than that which seemed so plain and open to himself. It is this which constitutes at once the disappointment of his later years, and his, weakness and defects as a mere theologian. He would not advance with Carlstadt; and so far he was right. He would have nothing to do with Zwingli and the Sacramentarians, and so far he was honest. We respect his independence in both cases. But he would not only not advance with others—he would not advance at all. He would not open his mind to the free air of heaven as it breathed in Scripture; and he was angry and violent with all who went beyond himself. He spoke with contemptuous dogmatism of the Swiss divines, and he had little patience even with Melanchthon’s cautious and well-balanced progress, and his more subtle and comprehensive insight into the dogmas of the Reformation. If we regard Luther, therefore, as a mere theologian, it is fair enough to object to his violence, his narrowness, his one-sidedness; but it is far from fair to regard him merely or mainly in this point of view. As a theological thinker he takes no high rank, and has left little or no impress upon human history. The very qualities, however, which made his weakness as a thinker, were so far from retarding that they helped Ms work of reform. His impatience, his intensity, and crudeness of apprehension, and his coarseness of handling, are but poor arms of reason; but they are manful and honest weapons in a struggle for life or death, and they carried him triumphantly through, when others of a less robust and hardy texture would have yielded and been overpowered.

If we add to this strong manliness the most simple and pure affectionateness, a rich and powerful humour, an exquisite tenderness of feeling under all his occasional coarseness of language, and the most vivid appreciation of life and nature, the outline of his character is only partially filled up. It is impossible to conceive any nature more frank, open, and genial than that which the domestic history of the reformer discovers. He lays bare his heart with the most guileless and winning simplicity; he has the most gay and jovial relish of all that is pure and good, however trivial, in life,—sharing in the amusements of his children, counselling with his wife how to reward an old servant, entering with the most earnest cordiality into the joys of his friends, and sharing his warm tears with them in their sorrows. None but a man of the most genuine kindliness could have ever bound fast to him so many friends as Luther did—old schoolfellows, such as Nicolas Emler and John Reinacke; brother monks, such as John Lange, whom he made Prior of Erfurt; and all his more immediate fellow-labourers in Wittenberg—Amsdorf, Justus Jonas, Bugenhagen, Lucas Cranach, and Melanchthon,—not to speak of the Electors Frederick and John, and their secretary Spalatin. It was no mere bond of interest or of accident that bound these brave men together, but above all, the great heart and diffusive kindliness of Luther, as the central figure around whom they gathered. How exquisite the kindly hilarity and tender-heartedness with which he wrote to Spalatin after his marriage! “If you will come to me, you will see some monument of our old love and friendship. I have planted a garden and built a fountain, both with great success. Come, and you shall be crowned with lilies and roses.”

Intimately allied with, and springing out of, both his affectionateness and manliness, was his humour, the rich emollient softening all his asperities, and dropping like a pleasant balm in the midst of his harshest controversies. The difference between Erasmus and him is somewhat the difference between wit and humour. Not that the author of the Colloquies can be said to want humour in his sly sallies at the follies of monkish superstition; yet that depth and richness of sympathy which is the most characteristic difference of humour from wit, is comparatively wanting in Erasmus. No contrast can be more marked than the covert and ingenious sarcasm, the subtle point and pungent dilemmas of the one, and the riotous attack, open-eyed gaiety, and hilarious laughter of the other. In Luther’s humour, powerful as it is, there mixes no bitterness. He is blunt, but never cynical. He dislikes intrusion and laughs at ignorance, but never in a harsh way. A man once came from the Low Countries to dispute with him about all sorts of things. He remarks, “When I saw what a poor ignorant creature he was, I said to him, ‘Hadn’t we better dispute over a can or two of beer?’” His heart is not pained and fretted by the contrasts which touch his imagination. They sometimes weary, but seldom chafe or vex him; more frequently they only kindle in him a wild spirit of glee, which breaks forth in sparkles of laughter or shouts of defiant jollity. But beneath all his uproarious fun there lie depths of tenderness and sadness, a passionate unrest and “unnameable melancholy.” The pathos, and distance, and gentleness of many of his allusions show that he had a saddened and shadowed heart that felt unutterably the awful mystery of life and death. The thoughts of his daring and strange career would sometimes awaken this hidden chord of grief. As he and Catherine were walking in the garden one evening, the stars shone with unusual brilliancy. “What a brilliant light!” said Luther, as he looked upward; “but it burns not for us.” “And why are we to be shut out from the kingdom of heaven?” asked Catherine. “Perhaps,” said Luther, with a sigh, “because we left our convents.” “Shall we return, then?” “No,” he replied, “it is too late to do that.”

The sights and sounds of nature all touch him, now with joy and now with pathetic aspiration. Of all the reformers, we see in him alone this elevated susceptibility to natural grandeur and beauty. In the view of these, his poetic depth and richness of feeling come strongly into play. The flowers, the birds, the “bounteous thunder shaking the earth and rousing it, that its fruits may come forth and spread a perfume;” the troubled sky, and the dark and heaving clouds poised overhead, and guided by the swift and invisible hand of God; the quiet loveliness of the harvest-fields on his return home from Leipzig; the little bird perching at sunset in his garden, and folding its wings trustfully under the care of the Almighty Father; the first song of the nightingale,—all touch him with emotion, and awaken his tender or solemn interest. The sprouting branches of his garden trees, “strong and beautiful, and big with the fruit that they shall bring forth,” make him think of the resurrection, and of the awakening of the soul after the wintry sleep of death. Luther was in truth a poet, gifted not only with the keen appreciation and life of feeling that constitute poetic sensibility, but, moreover, with that mastery of melodious expression which makes the fulness of the “gift and faculty divine.” His love of music, his love of nature and liberty, and, above all, his heroic faith, inspire his hymns with a rapture of lyrical feeling and excellence rarely reached. These beautiful and stirring utterances, escaping from him, as Heine says, “like a flower making its way between rough stones, or a moonbeam glittering amid dark clouds,” finely grace the grand and rugged life of this man, and shed a joy of harmony amid all its mighty discords.

Upon the whole, we have before us a tender as well as energetic character—softness mingling with strength—sadness with humour—gentleness with power. History presents many more complete or symmetrical characters; few greater; none more rich in diverse elements of human feeling and moral aspiration. No selfishness, nor vanity, nor mere vulgar ambition, meet us, amid all his proud consciousness of power or most high-handed dogmatism; but everywhere, even when we can least sympathise with him, we see an honest and magnanimous nature swayed by a living faith and glowing earnestness—a great soul moved by passionate conviction and sublimed by divine thought.

It remains for us to inquire concerning the main thought that moved Luther, and animated him in all his work. It requires but little penetration to discover that he was possessed by such a thought—that a profound principle—a single inspiring spiritual idea—ran through the whole of this great movement, and, more than anything else, gave direction and strength and triumph to it.

Many other influences, as we have seen, were at work. With the commencement of the sixteenth century there was a dawning life of national feeling and of literary culture all through the southern and western nations of Europe: Germany was in a special manner moved and agitated by such influences. They prepared the soil and rendered it receptive. Erasmus turned the ploughshare of his sharp intelligence into it, and cast it up, and made it quick with an unwonted movement of intellectual life. Reuchlin and his Humanist coadjutors, in their famous conflict with the monks of Cologne, not only strengthened the labours of Erasmus, but in a very clear and decisive manner proved the hopeless ignorance and incapacity of their opponents; the free secular or war party, headed by Franz von Sickingen and Hutten, and afterwards by the Landgrave of Hesse, rallied to their aid a strong political feeling, bursting forth on all sides against the ecclesiastical oppressions and unnational bigotries of Rome. These literary and political powers are all distinctly seen working throughout Germany at this time. A satirical pen was the chosen weapon of the one, a sword the proffered weapon of the other; and the fearless and hapless Ulrich von Hutten is found equally ready with his pen or with his sword. He is a strange, restless, and gallant figure, this knight of the Reformation—the co-operator both of Humanists and Secularists—and, more than any one else, the bond of connection between both and Luther. Luther could not approve of his projects, but he liked his independence and courage, and he mourned his early death, while the cold sarcasms of Erasmus cast bitter ashes over his grave. But no one nor all of these influences concurrently can be held as adequately accounting for the Reformation.

Starting from the midst of them, stimulated and no doubt greatly aided by them, it had its real origin deeper below the surface than either Humanism or Nationalism. It was characteristically a spiritual revolt—an awakening of the individual conscience in the light of the old Gospel, for centuries imprisoned and obscured in the dim chambers of men’s traditions, but now at length breaking forth with renewed radiance. This was the life and essence of Luther’s own personal struggle, and it was this which formed the spring of all his labours, and gave them such a pervading and mighty energy. The principle of moral individualism—of the free responsible relation of every soul to God—stamps the movement with its characteristic impress, and, more than any other thing, enables us to understand its power and success. In theological language this principle is known as the doctrine of justification by faith alone; but we prefer to apprehend it in this more general and ethical form of expression.

It was this element of individualism that had become especially corrupted during many centuries of ecclesiastical bondage. Scholastic subtlety on the one hand, and monkish superstition on the other, had crushed it out of sight. A vast system of traditional authority, covering with its ample and insinuating folds every sphere of thought and every phase of society, left no room for any fresh and healthy individual life. It encompassed and restrained all the movements of opinion and action within a monotonous and rigid routine. Scholasticism and monkery as its two great expressions remain, beyond doubt, among the most marvellous monuments of human energy that the world has ever witnessed,—the one a gigantic structure of logical enthusiasm, and the other a picturesque and stirring drama of missionary adventure, to which there can scarcely be said to be any modern parallels; yet in neither was there any real freedom of mental or spiritual life. The vast energies which they engaged, operated within artificial and prescribed limits—with a power and results at which we wonder—but beneath an incubus of priestly tradition, which left the soul confined, and at a distance from God. The individual was nothing, the School or the Church was everything; and during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries this moral stagnation had deadened into absolute corruption. Farther and farther the scholastic doctrine had separated itself from Scripture, and the monastic piety from the life of faith. The one, in such representatives as Eck and Emser, had degenerated into a dogmatism at once fierce and frivolous; the other, as in Luther’s brother monks at Erfurt, into an asceticism at once pretentious and ridiculous. In various forms the smouldering life of these centuries had continued to show itself; it had burst forth in the magnanimous intrepidity of Huss and of Jerome, and the beautiful mysticism of Tauler and the Theologia Germanica; but now at length the fire of a strong spiritual conviction was kindled in the convent at Erfurt, which was destined to break forth into light, and cover with its glory the face of Europe.