John Tulloch · 8 of 27

I. Luther. · Part 3

Luther’s residence in the Wartburg forms a quiet and green resting-place in his life, while it serves to mark the two great divisions into which it falls. From the fair heights of the Wartburg and the pleasant repose of his stay there, we look back with him upon a period of advancing struggle now completed, and forward upon a period scarcely less one of struggle, though of a far less consistent character. Hitherto all the interest of the movement is concentrated in his single figure. It is the monk at Erfurt and then the preacher at Wittenberg, and then the reformer at Worms, that engage our view. In all these different aspects we see the progress of a great spiritual conflict, waged almost by a solitary arm against surrounding corruptions. There is scarcely a companion figure to distract our attention. The purely religious impulse communicated by Staupitz is beheld strengthening into the earnest activity of the opponent of indulgences, and finally expanding into a clear and firm logical conviction directed against the whole hierarchical system which sought to extinguish it. The flame, kindled at the light of Scripture quietly read in the convent library, gradually burns into zeal, and at length blazes into triumphant defiance in the face of Pope and Emperor. From this point of advance Luther now looked at once backwards and forwards, and felt that he had done enough. Never was man less of an iconoclast. He fought for certain great religious principles as he apprehended them, but he had little or no wish to destroy existing institutions. Monkery, in all its shapes, had become hateful to him, and he resolved to attack it still more definitely than he had done; but the old Catholic worship and system, so far as it was national and not obviously Roman, he had no intention of subverting. To such feelings we must trace in great part the marked change in his subsequent career. The principle of revolt had exhausted itself in him with his great stand at Worms, and his naturally conservative convictions began to reassert themselves. We find, accordingly, that his life on from this point presents a far more complex and inconsistent picture than that which we have been contemplating. While many whom the spirit of the times had affected were disposed to go forward in the path on which he had entered, others had already before this begun to turn, back; and he is seen occupying a position of conflict both with the one and with the other. The Papacy on one side and his single figure on the other no longer fill up the scene; but other figures, some reactionary, and others of an impatient and violent character, crowd round, and he is beheld mingling in the crowd, rather than as any longer its controller and guide.

His publication of his translation of the Scriptures; his controversy with Carlstadt and then with Erasmus; the peasant war in 1525, and his marriage in the same year; the conference at Marburg with Zwingli in 1529; and the Diet at Augsburg and residence at Coburg in the following year, mark the most important epochs in this latter part of his life. The last sixteen years of his life are comparatively unmarked by incident or controversy; but it is the Luther of this period that, after all, in some respects, we know best, as portrayed by himself in his letters, and especially in his Table-talk, and as surrounded by his wife, children, and friends.

In the Wartburg he tarried for about a year, attired and living in all outward appearance as a knight. He let his beard grow, wore a sword, and went by the name of Younker George. He rambled among the hills and hunted, notwithstanding that the ban of the Empire was out against him. In the hunting-field, however, he was still the theologian, and thought of Satan and the Pope, with their impious troops of bishops and divines, hunting simple souls as he saw the hare pursued by the dogs. “I saved one poor leveret alive,” he says, “and tied it in the sleeve of my coat, and removed to a little distance; but the dogs scented out their victim, sprang up at it, broke its leg, and throttled it. It is thus that Satan and the Pope rage.” Although grieved to be absent from the scene, he rejoiced to know that the conflict still went on; and the old walls rang with his laughter as some satirical pamphlet of Hutten or Lucas Cranach reached him in his retreat. “I sit here the whole day idle and full of meat and drink,” he writes to Spalatin ten days after his arrival; “and read the Bible in Greek and Hebrew. I am writing a sermon in German on the liberty of auricular confession; and I shall proceed with my comments upon the Psalms and with the Bible as soon as ever I have received what I want from Wittenberg.” It was at this time he began his greatest literary achievement—the translation of the Scriptures into his native language. He had few books with him, but by the indefatigable zeal and interest with which he worked, he completed his version of the whole of the New Testament during the period of his confinement (nine months). Add to this, three treatises—on Private Confession, on the Abuse of Private Masses, and on Monastic Vows—besides his commentaries and postils, and his accusation against himself of idleness will appear sufficiently strange.

In fact, sedentary habits and hard study began to tell upon his health. He heard noises and seemed to see the devil in imaginary shapes as he sat at night in his room, or as he lay in bed. A bag of hazel nuts which had been brought to him by two noble youths who waited upon him with his food, was violently agitated by satanic power, one night after he retired to rest. The nuts rolled and struck against one another with such force that they made the beams of the room to shake, and the bed on which he was lying to rattle. The same night, although the steps leading to his solitary apartment were barred fast with iron chains and an iron door, he was roused from his sleep by a tremendous rumbling up and down the steps, which he describes as though threescore casks were rolling up and down. Nothing doubting that it was the devil at work trying to molest him, he got up and walked to the stair’s head, and called aloud, “Is it thou? be it so then! I commend me to the Lord Christ, of whom it is written in the eighth Psalm, ‘Thou hast put all things under His feet.’” On another and still more memorable occasion, as he pored keenly over the pages of his Greek Testament, the enemy assailed him in the shape of a moth buzzing round his ears and disturbing him in his sacred task. His spirit was kindled in him by the envious pertinacity of the evil one, and seizing his inkstand he hurled it at the intruder. A hole of singularly apocryphal dimensions in the wall of the chamber which he inhabited, is pointed out to the traveller who can spare a long summer’s day to visit the Wartburg and enjoy himself on its breezy slopes, as the mark made by the reformer’s inkstand in this great encounter.

It is well to smile at such incidents, but Luther lived all his days in the most real and pervading belief of a personal and visible devil haunting him in all his work, and never ceasing to disturb and hinder him. Once, in his monastery at Wittenberg, after he had celebrated matins and begun his studies, “the devil,” he says, “came into his cell and thrice made a noise behind a stove, just as though he were dragging some wooden measure along the floor” (a mouse, probably, as one has heard the little creature in the quiet night, with no other noise in the room save the creaking of the ceaseless pen). “As I found he was going to begin again,” he adds, “I gathered together my books and got into bed.” “Another time in the night I heard him above my cell, walking in the cloister; but as I knew it was the devil, I paid no attention to him and went to sleep.” There is almost an affectionate familiarity in some of his expressions—a gentleness of chiding and humorous badinage mingling with the irony and insult, which he thinks are among the best weapons for encountering his foe. “Early this morning when I awoke, the fiend came and began disputing with me. ‘Thou art a great sinner,’ said he. I replied, ‘Canst thou not tell me something new, Satan?’” Again, “When the devil comes to me in the night I say to him, ‘Devil, I must now sleep; for it is the command and ordinance of God that we labour by day and sleep by night.’ If he goes on with the old story, accusing me of sin, I say to him, to vex him, ‘Holy Spirit, Satan, pray for me.’ ‘Go,’ I say to him, ‘Physician, cure thyself.’” “The best way,” he adds, “of getting rid of the devil, if you cannot do it with the words of Holy Scripture, is to rail at him and mock him: he cannot bear scorn.” A very efficient plan also is “to turn your thoughts to some pleasant subject; to tell or hear jests or merry stories out of some facetious book. Music, too, is very good, for the devil is a saturnine spirit, and music is hateful to him, and drives him far away from it.”

This sort of belief will appear superstitious in a different degree to different minds; but there are some forms which the belief assumes not only to Luther, but to the more severe and sober mind of Calvin, so absolutely credulous and fanatical as to be matters of mere amazement to us now. And yet, in truth, it is rather the form of credulity that is changed than the spirit of it that is extinguished, as many things in our own day, bearing upon this very subject, plainly witness.

As Luther pursued his literary labours in the Wartburg, stimulating by his writings the spirit which his noble acts had kindled, unpleasant news reached his ears as to the progress of the Reformation in its home in Wittenberg. Carlstadt and some others, uncontrolled by his master-spirit, began to carry out to its natural consequences the spirit of negation involved in the Reformation. Monasteries were dissolved, and monks and nuns began to marry. All was in confusion without his presence, which was so urgently needed that he made a secret visit there in December. He appeared suddenly, and held three days’ close conference with Amsdorf and other intimate friends. But the crisis was still too perilous for him to remain, and he returned to his retreat to prosecute his Bible studies and translations.

In the spring of the following year (1522) Luther completed his translation of the New Testament, which may be pronounced his greatest literary work. It was almost entirely his own achievement, and he grudged no labour to make it perfect. Some of the MSS. of the work survive, and show the pains with which he corrected and recorrected many times. His aim was everywhere to catch the spirit of the original, and reproduce it as far as he could in simple, popular language. He chose a dialect, the Franconian, intelligible to High and Low German alike, and which has since remained the standard of the German tongue and a centre of literary unity for all the German peoples. The translation was first published on September 21, 1522. A second edition followed immediately, and no book has brought a greater glory to his name or a greater blessing to the German race. The translation of the Old Testament was a more extended and difficult undertaking, in which he called to his assistance not only the occasional advice, but the active assistance, of his friends—Melanchthon, Justus Jonas, and Bugenhagen—but even Jewish Rabbis, forming what his biographer Mathesius calls a kind of “Sanhedrim,” which met regularly once a week several hours before supper in the old Augustinian monastery at Wittenberg, which had become his house. Luther himself describes the difficulties of the task. “We are labouring hard,” he says, “to bring out the Prophets in the mother-tongue. Ach, Gott! what a great and difficult work it is to make the Hebrew writers speak German! They resist it so, and are unwilling to give up their Hebrew existence and become like Germans.” By diligent and earnest labour, however—and especially by the ever helpful and erudite co-operation of Melanchthon—this great work was also accomplished, and a translation of the whole Bible was published in 1534.

Unhappily, disturbances grew rather than abated at Wittenberg. It was only in the nature of things that the spirit of religious freedom, having rapidly spread, should burst bonds and run to excess. The popular mind, when aroused to a sense of the deceptions which had been practised upon it for centuries, broke out into extreme manifestations of hostility against the old Church system, in its forms as well as its doctrines, and a furious iconoclasm crowned the movement. It is the gift of but few minds—and never the gift of the mere popular and logical mind—to separate the form and the spirit, and to recognise that all reformation of any worth is in the latter and not in the former, which will by-and-by accommodate itself, without being violently cast down, to the improved and higher spirit. Carlstadt was merely a prominent expression of this popular and logical spirit. He was a species of German Puritan before that moral feeling had yet arisen, which in its strength and intensity was to become Puritanism. His projects were undoubtedly mistaken and out of place. Germany was then wholly unfitted for Puritanism, and never, in fact, has had any sympathy with it. Its higher minds, like Luther himself, were already beyond it in the breadth and tenderness of sentiment, and the richness and diversity of natural feeling which animated them. The ignorant mind again was far below it in the rudeness and lawlessness of its moral desires. Carlstadt, therefore, as the sequel sufficiently showed, could bring nothing but social disorder to Germany and disgrace to the Reformation; and Luther knew this with his clear, upright, and comprehensive appreciation of the national temper. After he fairly saw, therefore, that the danger was real, he made up his mind to quit his shelter in the Wartburg, come what would, and resume the direction of affairs at his old post.

He re-entered Wittenberg on the 7th of March 1522. In the course of his journey thither, he tarried a night at Jena, and a very interesting account has been preserved of his interview with two students on their way to Wittenberg to see him. The little parlour in the Black Bear, with the reformer in his knightly disguise—red mantle, trunk hose, doublet, and ridingwhip—seated at table, his right hand resting on the pommel of his sword, while his eye was directed intently to a book which turned out to be the Hebrew Psalter; the respectful demeanour of the students before the supposed knight, and their gradually opening familiarity as he offered them seats at the table, and a glass of beer; their communication to him of their intention to proceed to Wittenberg to see Martin Luther, and his pleasant fence with them on the subject; the entry of two merchants, and the free opinion which they express of Luther; the landlord’s hints and the disclosure,—all present a vivid sketch of the frank manly bearing, genuine heartiness, and humourous kindly ease of the great Augustine, that is worth a hundred descriptions.

He mounted the pulpit on the first Sunday after his return, and delivered his opinion on the principles which should guide them in the great religious changes through which they were passing—the reality of sin and salvation—the necessity of faith and love; these were the main things to be concerned about, and not mere novelties or changes for their own sake. “All things are lawful, but all things are not expedient. Some things must be, others might or might not be. Faith must be. But in such things as might or might not be, regard must be paid to the profit of others.” On Monday he again preached, particularly on the subject of the Mass. “It was bad and detestable, especially as it had claimed to be a sacrifice, and to stand between the people and God. His wish was that all private masses throughout the world were abolished, and only the common evangelical mass celebrated. But love must reign in the matter. No one must draw or tear another away by the hair, but leave God to do His own work, for the plain reason that no man has in his hand the hearts of others, and no man can make his words pass deeper than the ear. The Word of God must be freely preached, and this Word must be left to work in the heart. Then, and not till then, should the work of abolition begin.” In a similar spirit he handled the monastic life and the subject of images, the sacrament in both kinds, and confession. Earnestness of principle, moderation in practice, was the key-note of all this remarkable series of sermons, listened to by crowded audiences day after day. Carlstadt and his associates were awed for the time; such images as had not been destroyed were replaced; the Latin service continued to be used, with the omission of the words which designated it a sacrifice; and peace was restored. Luther himself earnestly desired further changes, and especially that the communion service should be in the German tongue; but he would not yield as yet to Carlstadt’s principle of this being essential. “This is carrying the thing too far,” he said; “always new laws always laying down this as a necessity, and that as a sin.” Thus the strictly Puritanical spirit was wholly alien to him; he would have nothing of it.

We cannot trace the changing relations which henceforth ensued between Luther and Carlstadt, now in fierce opposition, and now in comparative harmony, the latter ever and again returning to Wittenberg to shelter himself behind the good-nature and the really tolerant temper of the reformer. The seeds of fanaticism, which he and the Zwickau preachers had sown, soon began to ripen, and to assume a serious expression. The people, ignorant, oppressed, and unhappy, caught the free doctrines of the new preachers, translated them into the most crude and practical application to their own circumstances, and then proceeded by force of arms to carry them out and assert their rights. The armed peasantry, with Munzer at their head, hold a definite relation to the Zwickau fanaticism and Carlstadt; and yet there were distinct features of a purely political kind in the peasant insurrection, which it would take a long time to unravel. Nothing strikes one more remarkably in reading over the articles of complaint with which they began their movement, than the singularly moderate and sober spirit which characterises them. They move our sympathy now, and they moved Luther’s sympathy at the time, notwithstanding all his strong feelings of the duty of submission and of the horrors of insurrection. He is nowhere greater, indeed, than at this great crisis in the history of the Reformation, in the manner in which he threw himself between the opposing parties, and, on the one hand, set before the nobles and princes of Germany the unchristian cruelty of many of their actions; and, on the other hand, warned the peasantry of the disgrace and disaster that would attend the armed assertion of their rights. No part of Luther’s conduct was less understood or appreciated at the time. In England, by such men as Sir Thomas More, he was identified with the disorders against which he was struggling so nobly, and which, save for him, might have been tenfold more perilous to the national interests of Germany.

Words of higher wisdom than those by which he sought to restrain the approaching violence it is impossible to conceive. Addressing, in the first instance, the princes and nobles, he warns them that it was their long oppression and exactions that had roused the peasantry beyond endurance. “It is quite clear that we have no one upon earth to thank for all this disorder and insurrection but you yourselves. . . . In your capacity as secular authorities you manifest yourselves the executioners and spoilers of the poor. You sacrifice everything and everybody to your monstrous luxury, to your outrageous pride; and you have continued to do this until the people neither can nor will endure you any longer. . . . It is you, it is your crimes, that God is about to punish. If the peasants, who are now attacking you, are not the ministers of His will, others coming after them will be so. You may beat them, but you will be none the less vanquished. You may crush them to the earth, but God will raise up others in their place. It is His pleasure to strike you, and He will strike you. You fill up the measure of your iniquities by imputing this calamity to the Gospel and to my doctrine. Go on with your calumnies: you will ere long discover their injustice. You refuse to learn from me what is the Gospel, what my doctrine; there are others at your door who will teach you what both the one and the other are, in a way very different from mine, if you mend not speedily the error of your ways. Have I not at all times earnestly, zealously, employed myself in recommending to the people obedience to authority, to your authority, even tyrannous as it has been—intolerable as it has been? Who has combated sedition more energetically than I have always done? It is for this that the prophets of murder hate me as bitterly as they do you. You persecuted my Gospel by all the means in your power, yet all the while that Gospel called upon the people to pray for you, and aided you in supporting your tottering authority.”

Then, turning to the peasants, he exhorted them, under all their provocations, to desist from violence. “Nevertheless, though your complaints are just, and your demands reasonable, it behoves you to prosecute these demands with moderation, conscience, and justice. If you act with moderation, conscience, and justice, God will aid you; and even, though subdued for the moment, you will triumph in the end; and those of you who may perish in the struggle will be saved. . . . Put no trust, I pray you, in the prophets of murder, whom Satan has raised up amongst you, and who proceed directly from him, though they sacrilegiously invoke the name of the holy Gospel. They will hate me, I know, for the counsel I give you; they will call me hypocrite, but this I heed not a whit. What I desire is, to save from the anger of God the good and honest among you—I care not for the rest: I heed them not, I fear them not. I know One who is stronger than all of them put together, and He tells me, in the 3d Psalm, to do that which I am now doing. You invoke the name of God, and you say that you will act according to His Word. Has not God said, ‘They that take the sword shall perish with the sword'? And St Paul, ‘Render, therefore, honour to whom honour is due’? How can you, after reading these precepts, still pretend that you are acting according to the Gospel? Beware, beware, lest a terrible judgment fall upon you!

“But, say you, authority is wicked, cruel, intolerable; it will not allow us the Gospel; it overwhelms us with burdens beyond all reason or endurance; it ruins us, soul and body. To this I reply, that the wickedness and injustice of authority are no warrant for revolt, seeing that it befits not all men indiscriminately to take upon themselves the punishment of wickedness. Besides which, the natural law says that no man shall be the judge in his own cause, nor revenge his own quarrel. The divine law teaches us the same lesson—‘Vengeance is mine, saith, the Lord; I will repay.’ Your enterprise, therefore, is not only wrong according to Bible and Gospel law, but it is opposed also to natural law and to equity; and you cannot properly persevere in it unless you can prove that you are called to it by a new commandment of God especially directed to you, and confirmed by miracles.”

These solemn words were no doubt ineffectual, but this was not Luther’s fault. He had done his duty nobly—a duty none the less magnanimous that it failed in his object. His mortification and grief at the result were extreme; and if we detect in his final words to the peasants—when they had proved the fruitlessness of their efforts, and the day of sanguinary disaster which he had predicted had. come and gone—a bitterness almost cruel, and a 1iarshness that grates on our feelings, we must remember that he felt most acutely the disgrace which their, movement had brought upon the Reformation. He could not see the fair work of God so marred,—the religious revival, for which he wrought, thrust back and discredited before the world,—without being deeply moved and embittered.

While Luther was thus standing in the breach, in favour of social order, against the peasants, and feeling, in the odium he thereby incurred, that he was no longer the popular chieftain he had been a few years before, he was made, at the same time, somewhat painfully to feel that he was no longer in unison with the mere literary or humanistic party in the Reformation. Erasmus, the recognised head of this party, had long been showing signs of impatience at what he considered to be Luther’s rudeness and violence. He could not sympathise in the intense earnestness of the Wittenberg reformer: the religious zeal, the depth of persuasion, and especially the polemical shape which the latter’s convictions had assumed in his doctrine of grace, were all unintelligible or positively displeasing to him. No two men could be more opposed at once in intellectual aspiration and in moral temper;—Luther aiming at dogmatic certainty in all matters of faith, and filled with an overmastering feeling as to the importance of this certainty to the whole religious life, with the most vivid sense of the invisible world touching him at every point, and exciting him now with superstitious fear, and now with the most hilarious confidence;—Erasmus—latitudinarian and philosophical in religious opinion, with a strong perception of both sides of any question, indifferent or at least hopeless as to exact truth, and with a consequently keen dislike of all dogmatic exaggerations, orthodox or otherwise—well informed in theology, but without any very living and powerful faith, cool, cautious, subtle, and refined, more anxious to expose a sophism, or point a barb at some folly, than to fight manfully against error and sin. It was impossible that any hearty harmony could long subsist between two men of such a different spirit, and having such different aims. To do Erasmus justice, it must be remembered that his opposition to the Papacy had never been dogmatic, but merely critical: he desired literary freedom and a certain measure of religious freedom; he hated monkery; but he had no new opinions or “truths” for which to contend earnestly, as for life or death. He was content to accept the Catholic tradition if it would not disturb him; and the Catholic system, with its historic memories and proud associations, was dear to his cultivated imagination and taste. It is needless to blame Erasmus for his moderation; we might as well blame him for not being Luther. He did his own work, just as Luther did his; and while we can never compare his character in depth, and power, and reality of moral greatness with that of the reformer’s, we do not see in it the same exaggerations and intolerance that offend many in Luther.

Already, in 1524, Luther felt that there was a breach impending between him and the literary patriarch of the time. He was so far from courting it, however, that he used careful means to avoid it. Nothing but a direct attack of Erasmus would draw him into conflict; he was disposed to overlook the sundry sharp side-blows and cuts which had already come from the keen armoury of Basle, and to let alone for let alone, if the offence were not repeated and aggravated. He acknowledged the services of Erasmus in having contributed to the flourishing rise of letters and the right understanding of Scripture, and he did not expect any further assistance from him in the work of reform. For the Lord had meted out to him in this respect but limited gifts (so Luther said), and had not seen fit to bestow upon him the energy and direction of mind requisite to attack the monsters of the Papacy soundly and boldly. But if this was not the case, let him be entreated to remain at least a silent spectator of the tragedy. “Do not join your forces to our adversaries; publish no books against me, and I will publish none against you.” Such was the strain in which Luther addressed Erasmus in a remarkable letter of this year. We cannot tell how he received the remonstrance. It does not seem particularly calculated, as a whole, to smooth his vanity or stay his hand. At the very moment he was busy with his treatise ‘De Libero Arbitrio,’ and the complacent admonitions of the reformer were not likely to deaden any of the glancing thrusts that he was aiming at the Lutheran doctrine of grace. The treatise saw the light in the following year; and Luther, although still disinclined, saw no alternative but to come forward in defence of views which he considered to be identical with the truth of Scripture. In the course of the same year (1525) he published his counter-treatise, ‘De Servo Arbitrio,’ on which he bestowed great pains, and which he was afterwards in the habit of reckoning, along with his Catechism, as among his greatest works.