Chapter XXVI

LUTHER’S MODE OF CONTROVERSY A COUNTERPART OF HIS SOUL

1. Luther’s Anger. His Attitude towards the Jews, the Lawyers and the Princes

What above all strikes one in Luther’s mode of controversy is his utter unrestraint in his scolding and abuse. Particularly remarkable, especially in his later years, is the language which he has in readiness for two groups of foes, viz. for Jews and Lawyers; then, again, we have the invective which, throughout his career, he was fond of hurling at such Princes and scholars as did not submit to his teaching.

As, in what follows, and in studying the psychology of his anti-Papal abuse, we shall have again occasion to encounter unpleasant passages, we may well make our own the words of Sir Thomas More in his “Responsio ad convitia Lutheri,” where he trounces Luther for his handling of Henry VIII.: “The gentle reader must forgive me if much that occurs offends his feelings. Nothing has been more painful to me than to be compelled to pour such things into decent ears. The only other alternative would, however, have been to leave the unclean book untouched.”[936]

The Jews.

In his earlier days Luther had been more friendly towards the Jews, and had even cherished the childish hope that many of them would embrace the new Evangel and help him in his warfare against the Papal Antichrist. When this failed to come about Luther became more and more angered with their blasphemy against Christ, their art of seducing the faithful and their cunning literary attacks on Christian doctrine. He was also greatly vexed because his Elector, in spite of having, in 1536, ordered all Jews to leave the country, nevertheless, in 1538, granted them a conditional permit to travel through it; he was still more exasperated with Ferdinand the German King who had curtailed the disabilities of the Jews. Luther’s opinion was that the only thing to do was to break their pride; he now relinquished all hope of convincing any large number of them of the truth of Christianity; even the biblical statements, according to which the Jews were to be converted before the end of the world, appeared to him to have been shorn of their value.[937]

Hence Luther was, above all, desirous of proving to the faithful that the objections brought forward by the Jews against Christian doctrine and their interpretation of the Old Testament so as to exclude the Christian Messias were all wrong. This he did in three writings which followed each other at short intervals: “Von den Jüden und jren Lügen,” “Vom Schem Hamphoras,” both dating from 1542, and “Von den letzten Worten Davids” (1543). Owing to his indignation these writings are no mere works of instruction, but in parts are crammed with libel and scurrilous abuse.[938]

In the first of these tracts, for instance, he voices as follows his opinion of the religious learning of the Hebrews: “This passage [the Ten Commandments] is far above the comprehension of the blind and hardened Jews, and to discourse to them on it would be as useless as preaching the Gospel to a pig. They cannot grasp the nature of God’s law, much less do they know how to keep it.” “Their boast of following the external Mosaic ordinances whilst disobeying the Ten Commandments, fits the Jews just as well as ornaments do an evil woman”; “yet clothes, adornments, garlands, jewels would serve far better to deck the sow that wallows in the mire than a strumpet.”[939]

One point which well illustrates his anti-Semitism is the Talmud-Bible he invents as best suited to them: “That Bible only should you explore which lies concealed beneath the sow’s tail; the letters that drop from it you are free to eat and drink; that is the best Bible for prophets who trample under foot and rend in so swinish a manner the Word of the Divine Majesty which ought to be listened to with all respect, with trembling and with joy.” “Do they fancy that we are clods and wooden blocks like themselves, the rude, ignorant donkeys?... Hence, gentle Christian, beware of the Jews, for this book will show you that God’s anger has delivered them over to the devil.”[940]

The figure of the sow’s tail pleased him so well that he again used it later in the same year in his “Vom Schem Hamphoras.” There he alludes to the piece of sculpture which had originally supplied him with the idea: “Here, at Wittenberg, outside our parish church there is a sow chiselled in the stone; under her are piglets and little Jews all sucking; behind the sow stands a Rabbi, who lifts, with his right hand the sow’s hind leg and with his left her tail, and is intently engaged poring over the Talmud under the sow’s tail, as though he wished to read and bring to light something especially clever. That is a real image of Schem Hamphoras.... For of the sham wise man we Germans say: Where did he read that? To speak coarsely, in the rear parts of a sow.”[941]

The “devil” also is drawn into the fray the better to enable Luther to vent his ire against the Jews. At the end of the passage just quoted he says: “For the devil has entered into the Jews and holds them captive so that perforce they do his will, as St. Paul says, mocking, defaming, abusing and cursing God and everything that is His.... The devil plays with them to their eternal damnation.”[942]—And elsewhere: “Verily a hopeless, wicked, venomous and devilish thing is the existence of these Jews, who for fourteen hundred years have been, and still are, our pest, torment and misfortune. In fine, they are just devils and nothing more, with no feeling of humanity for us heathen. This they learn from their Rabbis in those devils’ aeries which are their schools.”[943]—“They are a brood of vipers and the children of the devil, and are as kindly disposed to us as is the devil their father.”[944]—“The Turk and the other heathen do not suffer from them what we Christians do from these malignant snakes and imps.... Whoever would like to cherish such adders and puny devils—who are the worst enemies of Christ and of us all—to befriend them and do them honour simply in order to be cheated, plundered, robbed, disgraced and forced to howl and curse and suffer every kind of evil, to him I would commend these Jews. And if this be not enough let him tell the Jew to use his mouth as a privy, or else crawl into the Jew’s hind parts and there worship the holy thing, so as afterwards to be able to boast of having been merciful, and of having helped the devil and his progeny to blaspheme our dear Lord.”[945] The last clause would appear to have been aimed at the Counts of Mansfeld, who had allowed a large number of Jews to settle in Eisleben, Luther’s birthplace.

The temporal happiness which the Jews looked for under the reign of their Messias, Luther graphically compares to the felicity of a sow: “For the sow lies as it were on a feather-bed whether in the street or on the manure-heap; she rests secure, grunts contentedly, sleeps soundly, fears neither lord nor king, neither death nor hell, neither devil nor Divine anger.... She has no thought of death until it is upon her.... Of what use would the Jews’ Messias be to me if he could not help poor me against this great and horrible dread and misfortune [the fear of death], nor make my life a tenth part as happy as that of the sow? I would much rather say: Dear God Almighty, keep Your Messias for Yourself, or give him to those who want him; as for me, change me into a sow. For it is better to be a live pig than a man who is everlastingly dying.”[946]

Such passages as the above are frequently to be met with in Luther’s writings against the Jews. In them his object plainly was to confute the misinterpretation of the Bible and the scoffing objections to which Jewish scholars were given. Yet so utterly ungovernable was the author’s passion that it spoiled the execution of his noble task. He scarcely knew how to conduct a controversy without introducing sows, devils and such like.

Was it really to Luther’s credit that the sty should loom so large in his struggle with his foes?

Duke George he scolds as the “Dresden pig,” and Dr. Eck as “Pig-Eck”; the latter Luther promises to answer in such a way “that the sow’s belly shall not be too much inflated.”[947] The Bishops of the Council of Constance who burnt Hus are “boars”; the “bristles of their backs rise on end and they whet their snouts.”[948] Erasmus “carries within him a sow from the herd of Epicurus.”[949] The learned Catholics of the Universities are hogs and donkeys decked out in finery, whom God has sent to punish us; these “devils’ masks, the monks and learned spectres, from the Schools we have endowed with such huge wealth, many of the doctors, preachers, masters, priests and friars are big, coarse, corpulent donkeys, decked out with hoods red and brown, like the market sow in her glass beads and tinsel chains.”[950]

The same simile is, of course, employed even more frequently of the peasants. “To-day the peasants are the merest hogs, whilst the people of position, who once prided themselves on being bucks, are beginning to copy them.”[951]—The Papists have “stamped the married state under foot”; their clergy are “like pigs in the fattening-pen,” “they wallow in filth like the pig in his sty.”[952]—The Papists are fed up by their literary men, as befits such pigs as they. “Eat, piggies, eat! This is good for you.”[953]—We Germans are “hopeless pigs.”[954]

Henry of Brunswick is “as expert in Holy Writ as a sow is on the harp.” Let him and his Papists confess that they are “verily the devil’s whore-church.”[955] “You should not write a book,” Luther tells him, “until you have heard an old sow s——; then you should open your jaws and say: Thank you, lovely nightingale, now I have the text I want. Stick to it; it will look fine printed in a book against the Scripturists and the Elector; but have it done at Wolfenbüttel. Oh, how they will have to hold their noses!”[956]

Another favourite image, which usually accompanies the sow, is provided by the donkey. Of Clement VII. and one of his Bulls Luther says: “The donkey pitched his bray too high and thought the Germans would not notice it.”[957] Of Emser and the Catholic Professors he writes: “Were I ignorant of logic and philosophy you rude asses would be after setting yourselves up as logicians and philosophers, though you know as much about the business as a donkey does about music.”[958] Of Alveld the Franciscan he says: “The donkey does not understand music, he must rather be given thistles.”[959] The fanatics too, naturally, could not expect to escape. All that Luther says of heavenly things is wasted upon them. “They understand it as little as the donkey does the Psalter.”[960]

The devil, however, plays the chief part. Luther’s considered judgment on the Zwinglians, for instance, is, that they are “soul-cannibals and soul-assassins,” are “endeviled, devilish, yea, ultra-devilish and possessed of blasphemous hearts and lying lips.”[961]

The Lawyers.

Luther’s aversion for the “Jurists” grew yearly more intense. His chief complaint against them was that they kept to the Canon Law and put hindrances in his way. Their standpoint, however, as regards Canon Law was not without justification. “Any downright abrogation of Canon Law as a whole was out of the question. The law as then practised, not only in the ecclesiastical but even in the secular courts, was too much bound up with Canon Law; when it was discarded, for instance, in the matrimonial cases, dire legal complications threatened throughout the whole of the German Empire.”[962] To this Luther’s eyes were not sufficiently open.

His crusade against the validity of clandestine engagements which he entered upon in opposition to his friend and co-religionist, Hieronymus Schurf, his colleague in the faculty of jurisprudence at the University of Wittenberg, was merely one episode in his resistance to those who represented legalism as then established.

In another and wider sphere his relations with those lawyers, who were the advisers at the Court of his Elector and the other Princes, became more strained. This was as a result of their having a hand in the ordering of Church business. Here again his action was scarcely logical, for he himself, forced by circumstances, had handed over to the State the outward guidance of the Church; that the statesmen would intervene and settle matters according to their own ideas was but natural; and if their way of looking at things failed to agree with Luther’s, this was only what might have been foreseen all along.

In a conference with Melanchthon, Amsdorf and others in Dec., 1538, he complained bitterly of the lawyers and of the “misery of the theologians who were attacked on all sides, especially by the mighty.” To Melchior Kling, a lawyer who was present, he said: “You jurists have a finger in this and are playing us tricks; I advise you to cease and come to the assistance of the nobles. If the theologians fall, that will be the end of the jurists too.” “Do not worry us,” he repeated, “or you will be paid out.” “Had he ten sons, he would take mighty good care that not one was brought up to be a lawyer.” “You jurists stand as much in need of a Luther as the theologians did.” “The lawyer is a foe of Christ; he extols the righteousness of works. If there should be one amongst them who knows better, he is a wonder, is forced to beg his bread and is shunned by all the other men of law.”[963]

On questions affecting conscience he considered that he alone, as theologian and leader of the others, had a right to decide; yet countless cases which came before the courts touched upon matters of conscience. He exclaims, for instance, in 1531: Must not the lawyers come to me to learn what is really lawful? “I am the supreme judge of what is lawful in the domain of conscience.” “If there be a single lawyer in Germany, nay, in the whole world, who understands what is ‘lawful de jure’ and ‘lawful de facto’ then I am ... surprised.” The recorder adds: “When the Doctor swears thus he means it very seriously.” Luther proceeds: “In fine, if the jurists don’t crave forgiveness and crawl humbly to the Evangel, I shall give them such a doing that they will not know how to escape.”[964]

Thus we can understand how, in that same year (1531), when representatives of the secular law interfered in the ecclesiastical affairs at Zwickau against his wishes, he declared: “I will never have any more dealings with those Zwickau people, and I shall carry my resentment with me to the grave.” “If the lawyers touch the Canons they will fly in splinters.... I will fling the Catechism into their midst and so upset them that they won’t know where they are.”[965] If they are going to feed on the “filth of the Pope-Ass,” and “to put on their horns,” then he, too, will put on his and “toss them till the air resounds with their howls.” This from the pulpit on Feb. 23, 1539.[966]

The Princes.

With what scant respect Luther could treat the Princes is shown in his work “Von welltlicher Uberkeytt, wie weyt man yhr Gehorsam schuldig sey” (1523).[967]

Here he is not attacking individual Princes as was the case, for instance, in his writings against King Henry of England, Duke George of Saxony and Duke Henry of Brunswick, hence there was here no occasion for the abuse with which these polemical tracts are so brimful. Here Luther is dealing theologically with the relations which should obtain between Princes and subjects and, according to the title and the dedicatory note to Johann of Saxony, professes to discuss calmly and judicially the respective duties of both. Yet, carried away by vexation, because the Princes and the nobles had not complied with his request in his “An den christlichen Adel” that they should rise in a body against Rome, and reform the Church as he desired, he bitterly assails them as a class.

Even in the opening lines all the Princes who, like the Emperor, held fast to the olden faith and sought to preserve their subjects in it, were put on a par with “hair-brained fellows” and loose “rogues.” “Now that they want to fleece the poor man and wreak their wantonness on God’s Word, they call it obedience to the commands of the Emperor.... Because the ravings of such fools leads to the destruction of the Christian faith, the denial of God’s Word and blasphemy of the Divine Majesty, I neither can nor will any longer look on calmly at the doings of my ungracious Lords and fretful squires.”[968]

Of the Princes in general he says, that they ought “to rule the country and the people outwardly; this, however, they neglect. They do nothing but rend and fleece the people, heaping impost upon impost and tax upon tax; letting out, here, a bear, and there, a wolf; nor is there any law, fidelity or truth to be found in them, for they behave in such a fashion that to call them robbers and scoundrels would be to do them too great an honour.... So well are they earning the hatred of all that they are doomed to perish with the monks and parsons whose rascality they share.”[969]

It is here that Luther tells the people that, “from the beginning a wise Prince has been a rare find, and a pious Prince something rarer still. Usually they are the biggest fools or the most arrant knaves on earth; hence one must always expect the worst from them and little good, particularly in Divine things which pertain to the salvation of souls. For they are God’s lictors and hangmen.”[970] “The usual thing is for Isaias iii. 4 to be verified: ‘I will give children to be their princes, and the effeminate shall rule over them.’”[971]

We have to look on while “secular Princes rule in spiritual matters and spiritual Princes in secular things.” In what else does the devil’s work on earth consist but in making fun of the world and turning it into a pantomime.

In conclusion he hints to the Princes plainly that the “mob and the common folk are beginning to see through it all.”[972]

A Protestant writer, in extenuation of such dangerous language against the rulers, recently remarked: “It never entered Luther’s head that such words might bring the Princes into contempt and thus, indirectly, promote rebellion.... If we are to draw a just conclusion from his blindness to the obvious psychological consequences of his words, it can only be, that Luther was no politician.”[973]

It may, indeed, be that he did not then sufficiently weigh the consequences. Nevertheless, in his scurrilous writings against individual Princes he was perfectly ready to brave every possible outcome of his vituperation. “What Luther wrote against the German Princes,” justly remarks Döllinger, “against Albert, Elector of Mayence, against the Duke of Brunswick and Duke George of Saxony, puts into the shade all the libels and screeds of the more recent European literature.”[974]

One of the chief targets for his shafts was the Archbishop of Mayence.

Albert, Elector of Mayence, “is a plague to all Germany; the ghastly, yellow, earthen hue of his countenance—a mixture of mud and blood—exactly fits his character; ... he is deserving of death under the First Table” (viz. because of his transgression of the first commandments of the Decalogue by his utter godlessness).[975] It was, however, not so much on account of his moral shortcomings, notorious though they were, but more particularly because he did not take his side, that Luther regarded him as a “most perfidious rogue” (“nebulo perfidissimus”). “If thieves are hanged, then surely the Bishop of Mayence deserves to be hanged as one of the first, on a gallows seven times as high as the Giebenstein.... For he fears neither God nor man.”[976] When Simon Lemnius, the Humanist, praised Archbishop Albert in a few epigrams, Luther’s anger turned against the poet, whom he soundly rated for making “a saint out of a devil.” He issued a sort of mandate against Lemnius of which the conclusion was: “I beg our people, and particularly the poets or his [the Archbishop’s] sycophants, in future not publicly to praise the shameful merd-priest”; he threatens sharp measures should anyone at Wittenberg dare to praise “the self-condemned lost priest.”[977]

The satirical list of relics which, in 1542, he published with a preface and epilogue against the same Elector amounted practically to a libel, and was described by lawyers as a lying slander punishable at law. As a “libellus famosus” against a reigning Prince of the Empire it might have entailed serious consequences for its author.

In it Luther says: The Elector, as we learn, is offering “big pardons for many sins,” even for sins to be committed for the next ten years, to all who “help in decking out in new clothes the poor, naked bones”; the relics in question, during their translation from Halle to Mayence, had, so Luther tells us, been augmented by other “particles,” enriched by the Pope with Indulgences, amongst them, “(1) a fine piece of the left horn of Moses; (2) three flames from the bush of Moses on Mount Sinai; (3) two feathers and one egg of the Holy Ghost,” etc., in all, twelve articles, specially chosen to excite derision.

Justus Jonas appears to have been shocked at Luther’s ribaldry and to have given Luther an account of what the lawyers were saying. At any rate, we have Luther’s reply in his own handwriting, though the top part of the letter has been torn away. In the bottom fragment we read: “[Were it really a libel] which, however, it cannot be, yet I have the authority, right and power [to write such libels] against the Cardinal, Pope, devil and all their crew; and not to have the term ‘libellus famosus’ hurled at me. Or have the ‘asinists’—I beg your pardon, jurists—studied their jurisprudence in such a way as to be ignorant of what ‘subjectum’ and ‘finis’ mean in secular law? [the end in his eyes was a good one]. If I have to teach them, I shall exact smaller fees and teach them unwashed. How has the beautiful Moritzburgk [belonging to the see of Mayence] been turned into a donkey-stable! If they are ready to pipe, I am quite willing to dance, and, if I live, I hope to tread yet another measure with the bride of Mayence.”[978] Thus the revolting untruths to which his tactics led him to have recourse, the better to excite the minds of the people, seemed to him a fit subject for jest; in spite of the wounds which the religious warfare was inflicting on the German Church he still saw nothing unseemly in the figure of the dance and the bridal festivity.

An incident of his controversy with the Duke of Brunswick may serve to complete the picture. In 1540, during the hot summer, numerous fires broke out in North and Central Germany, causing widespread alarm; certain alleged incendiaries who were apprehended were reported to have confessed under torture that this was the doing of Duke Henry of Brunswick and the Pope. Before even investigations had commenced Luther had already jumped to the conclusion that the real author was his enemy, the Catholic Duke, backed up by the Pope and the monks; for had not the Duke (according to Luther) explained to the burghers of Goslar that he recognised no duties with regard to heretics?[979] The Franciscans had been expelled and were now in disguise everywhere “plotting vengeance”; they it was who had done it all with the assistance of the Duke of Brunswick and the Elector of Mayence, who, of course, remained behind the scenes.[980] “If this be proved, then there is nothing left for us but to take up arms against the monks and priests; and I too shall go, for miscreants must be slain like mad dogs.”[981] Hieronymus Schurf, as the cautious lawyer he was, expressed himself in Luther’s presence against the misuse of torture in the case of those accused and against their being condemned too hastily. Luther interrupted him: “This is no time for mercy but for rage!” According to St. Augustine many must suffer in order that many may be at peace; so is it also in the law courts, “now and again some must suffer injustice, so long as it is not done knowingly and intentionally by the judge. In troublous times excessive severity must be overlooked.”[982] He became little by little so convinced of the guilt of Henry the “incendiary” and his Papists, that, in October, 1540, he refers half-jestingly to the reputation he was acquiring as “prophet and apostle” by so correctly discerning in the Papists a mere band of criminals.[983] He also informed other Courts of the supposed truth of his surmise, viz. that “Harry of Brunswick has now been convicted as an arch-incendiary-assassin and the greatest scoundrel on whom the sun has ever shone. May God give the bloodhound and werewolf his reward. Amen.” Thus to Duke Albert of Prussia on April 20, 1541.[984]

Considerably before this, in a letter to the same princely patron, he expressly implicates in these absurd charges the Pope, the chief object of his hate: After telling Albert of the report, that the Duke of Brunswick “had sent out many hundred incendiaries against the Evangelical Estates” of whom more than 300 had been “brought to justice,” many of them making confessions implicating the Duke, the Bishop of Mayence and others, Luther goes on to say that the business must necessarily have been set on foot “by great people, for there is plenty of money.”

“The Pope is said to have given 80,000 ducats towards it. This is the sort of thing we are compelled to hear and endure; but God will repay them abundantly ... in hell, in the fire beneath our feet.”[985]

“The Doctor said,” we read in the Table-Talk, taken down by Mathesius in September (2-17), 1540: “The greatest wonder of our day is that the majesty of the Pope—who was a terror to all monarchs and against whom they dared not move a muscle, seeing that a glance from him or a movement of his finger sufficed to keep them all in a state of fear and obedience—that this god should have collapsed so utterly that even his defenders loathe him. Those who still take his part, without exception do this simply for money’s sake and their own advantage, otherwise they would treat him even worse than we do. His malice has now been thoroughly exposed, since it is certain that he sent eighteen thousand crowns for the hiring of incendiaries.”[986] The perfect seriousness with which he relates this in the circle of his friends furnishes an enigma.

His consciousness of all that he had accomplished against the Pope, combined with his hatred of Catholicism, seems often to cloud his mind.

2. Luther’s Excuse: “We MUST Curse the Pope and His Kingdom”[987]

In Luther’s polemics against the Pope and the Papists it is psychologically of importance to bear in mind the depth of the passion which underlies his furious and incessant abuse.

The further we see into Luther’s soul, thanks especially to his familiar utterances recorded in the Table-Talk, the more plainly does this overwhelming enmity stand revealed. In what he said privately to his friends we find his unvarnished thought and real feelings. Far from being in any sense artificial, the intense annoyance which rings throughout his abuse seems to rise spontaneously from the very bottom of his soul. That he should have pictured to himself the Papacy as a dragon may be termed a piece of folly, nevertheless it was thus that it ever hovered before his mind, by day and by night, whether in the cheery circle of his friends or in his solitary study, in the midst of ecclesiastical or ecclesiastico-political business, when engaged in quiet correspondence with admirers and even when he sought in prayer help and comfort in his troubles.

In Lauterbach’s Diary we find Luther describing the Pope as the “Beast,”[988] the “Dragon of Hell” towards whom “one cannot be too hostile,”[989] as the “Dragon and Crocodile,” whose whole being “was, and still is, rascality through and through.”[990] “Even were the Pope St. Peter, he would still be godless.”[991] “Whoever wishes to glorify the Blood of Christ must needs rage against the Pope who blasphemes it.”[992] “The Pope has sold Christ’s Blood and the state of matrimony, hence the money-bag [of this Judas] is chock-full of the proceeds of robbery.... He has banned and branded me, and stuck me in the devil’s behind. Hence I am going to hang him on his own keys.”[993] This he said when a caricature was shown him representing the Pope strung up next to Judas, with the latter’s money-bag.

“I am the Pope’s devil,” so he declared to his companions, “hence it is that he hates and persecutes me.”[994]

And yet the chief crime of this execrated Papacy was its non-acceptance of Luther’s innovations. The legal measures taken against him agreeably with the olden law, whether of the State or of the Church, were no proof of “hatred,” however much they might lame his own pretensions.

In other notes of his conversations we read: “Formerly we looked at the Pope’s face, now we look only at his posterior, in which there is no majesty.”[995] “The city of Rome now lies mangled and the devil has discharged over it his filth, i.e. the Pope.”[996] It is a true saying, that, “if there be a hell, Rome is built upon it.”[997]

“Almost all the Romans are now sunk in Epicurism; they trouble themselves not at all about God or a good conscience. Alack for our times! I used to believe that the Epicurean doctrine was dead and buried, yet here it is still flourishing.”[998]

At the very commencement of the Diary of Cordatus, Luther is recorded as saying: “The Pope has lost his cunning. It is stupid of him still to seek to lead people astray under the pretence of religion, now that mankind has seen through the devil’s trickery. To maintain his kingdom by force is equally foolish because it is impracticable.”[999]—He proceeds in a similar strain: “The Papists, like the Jews, insist that everyone who wishes to be saved must observe their ceremonies, hence they will perish like the Jews.”[1000]—He maliciously quotes an old rhyme in connection with the Pope, who is both the “head of the world” and “the beast of the earth,” and, in support of this, adduces abundant quotations from the Apocalypse.[1001]—When Daniel declared that Antichrist would trouble neither about God nor about woman (xi. 37), this meant that “the Pope would recognise neither God nor lawful wives, that, in a word, he would despise religion and all domestic and social life, which all turned on womankind. Thus may we understand what was foretold, viz. that Antichrist would despise all laws, ordinances, statutes, rights and every good usage, contemn kings, princes, empires and everything that exists in heaven or on earth merely the better to extol his fond inventions.”[1002]—It is difficult to assume that all this was mere rhetoric, for, then, why was it persisted in? Intentionally hyperbolical utterances are as a rule brief. In these conversations, however, the tone never changes, but merely becomes at times even more emphatic.

On the same page in Cordatus we read: “Children are lucky in that they come into the world naked and penniless; for the Pope levies toll on everything there is on the earth, save only upon baptism, because he can’t help it.”[1003] And immediately after: “The Pope has ceased to be a teacher and has become, as his Decretals testify, a belly-server and speculator. In the Decretals he treats not at all of theological matters but merely pursues three self-seeking ends: First, he does everything to strengthen his domination; secondly, he does his best to set the kings and princes at loggerheads with each other whenever he wants to score off one of the great, in doing which he does not scruple to show openly his malice; thirdly, he plays the devil most cunningly, when, with a friendly air, he allays the dissensions he had previously stirred up among the sovereigns; this, however, he only does when his own ends have been achieved. He also perverts the truth of God’s Word [thus invading the theological field]. This, however, he does not do as Pope, but as Antichrist and God’s real enemy.”[1004]

The whole mountain of abuse expressed here and in what follows rests on this last assumption, viz. that the Pope perverts “the truth of God’s Word”; thanks to this the Wittenberg Professor fancied he could overthrow a Church which had fifteen centuries behind it. His hate is just as deeply rooted in his soul as his delusion concerning his special call.

According to the German Colloquies the Pope, like Mohammed, “began under the Emperor Phocas”: “The prophecy [of the Apocalypse] includes both, the Pope and the Turk.”[1005] Still, the Pope is the “best ruler” for the world, because he does know how to govern; “he is lord of our fields, meadows, money, houses and everything else, yea, of our very bodies”; for this “he repays the world in everlasting curses and maledictions; this is what the world wants and it duly returns thanks and kisses his feet.”[1006]—“He is rather the lawyers’ than the theologians’ god.”[1007]

He is determined to turn me “straightway into a slave of sin” and to force me to “blaspheme,” but instead of “denying God” I shall withstand the Pope; “otherwise we would willingly have borne and endured the Papal rule.”[1008]—“No words are bad enough to describe the Pope. We may call him miserly, godless and idolatrous, but all this falls far short of the mark. It is impossible to grasp and put into words his great infamies;”[1009] in short, as Christ says, “he is the abomination of desolation standing in the Holy Place.”[1010]

The Pope is indeed the “father of abominations and the poisoner of souls.” “After the devil the Pope is a real devil.”[1011] “After the devil there is no worse man than the Pope with his lies and his man-made ordinances”;[1012] in fact, he is a masked devil incarnate.[1013] No one can become Pope unless he be a finished and consummate knave and miscreant.[1014] The Pope is a “lion” in strength and a “dragon” in craft.[1015] He is “an out-and-out Jew who extols in Christ only what is material and temporal”;[1016] needless to say, he is “far worse than the Turk,”[1017] “a mere idolater and slave of Satan,”[1018] “a painted king but in reality a filthy pretence,”[1019] his kingdom is a “Carnival show,”[1020] and he himself “Rat-King of the monks and nuns.”[1021] Popery is full of murder;[1022] it serves Moloch,[1023] and is the kingdom of all who blaspheme God.

“For the Pope is, not the shepherd, but the devil of the Churches; this comforts me as often as I think of it.”[1024]

“Anno 1539, on May 9,” we read in these Colloquies, “Dr. Martin for three hours held a severe and earnest Disputation in the School at Wittenberg, against that horrid monster, the Pope, that real werewolf who excels in fury all the tyrants, who alone wishes to be above all law and to act as he pleases, and even to be worshipped, to the loss and damnation of many poor souls.... But he is a donkey-king [he said] ... I hope he has now done his worst [now that I have broken his power]; but neither are the Papists ever to be trusted, even though they agree to peace and bind themselves to it under seal and sign-manual.... Therefore let us watch and pray!”[1025]

The Disputation, of which all that is known was published by Paul Drews in 1895,[1026] dealt principally with the question, which had become a vital one, of armed resistance to the forces of the Empire then intent on vindicating the rights of the Pope. The Theses solve the question in the affirmative. “The Pope is no ‘authority’ ordained by God ... on the contrary he is a robber, a ‘Bearwolf’ who gulps down everything. And just as everybody rightly seeks to destroy this monster, so also it is everyone’s duty to suppress the Pope by force, indeed, penance must be done by those who neglect it. If anyone is killed in defending a wild beast it is his own fault. In the same way it is not wrong to offer resistance to those who defend the Pope, even should they be Princes or Emperors.”[1027]

A German version of the chief Theses (51-70) was at once printed.[1028]

Among the explanations given by Luther previous to the Disputation (“circulariter disputabimus”) the following are worthy of note: “We will not worship the Pope any longer as has been done heretofore.... Rather, we must fight against this Satan.”[1029] “The Pope is such a monstrous beast that no ruler or tyrant can equal him.... He requires us to worship his public blasphemy in defiance of the law; it is as though he said: I will and command that you adore the devil. It is not enough for him to strangle me, but he will have it that even the soul is damned at his word of command.... The Pope is the devil. Were I able to slay the devil, why should I not risk my life in doing so? Look not on the Pope as a man; his very worshippers declare that he is no mere man, but partly man and partly God. For ‘God’ here read ‘devil.’ Just as Christ is God-made-flesh, so the Pope is the devil incarnate.”[1030]—“Who would not lend a hand against this arch-pestilential monster? There is none other such in the whole world as he, who exalts himself far above God. Other wolves there are indeed, yet none so impudent and imperious as this wolf and monster.”[1031]

In this celebrated Disputation some of the objections are couched in scholastic language. Such is the following: According to the Bible, Antichrist is to be destroyed by the breath of God’s mouth and not by the sword; therefore armed resistance to the Pope and the Papists is not allowed. Luther replies: “That we concede, for what we say is that he will escape and remain with us till the end of the world. He is nevertheless to be resisted, and the Emperor too, and the Princes who defend him, not on the Emperor’s account, but for the sake of this monstrous beast.”[1032]—Another objection runs: “Christ forbade Peter to make use of his sword against those sent out by the Pharisees; therefore neither must we take up arms against the Pope.” The reply was: “Negabitur consequens,” and Luther goes on to explain: “The Pope is no authority as Caiphas and Pilate were. He is the devil’s servant, possessed of the devil, a wolf who tyrannically carries off souls without any right or mandate.” According to the report Luther suddenly relapsed into German: “If Peter went to Rome and slew him, he would be acting rightly, ‘quia papa non habet ordinationem,’” etc.[1033] Justus Jonas and Cruciger also took a part, bringing forward objections in order to exercise others in refuting them. This theological tournament, with its crazy ideas couched in learned terminology, might well cause the dispassionate historian to smile were it not for the sombre background and the vision of the religious wars for which ardent young students were being fitted and equipped.

What we have quoted from Luther’s familiar talks and from his disputations affords overwhelming proof, were such wanting, that the frenzied outbursts against the Pope we find even in his public writings, were, not merely assumed, but really sprang from the depths of his soul. It is true that at times they were regarded as rhetorical effusions or even as little more than jokes, but as a matter of fact they bear the clearest stamp of his glowing hate. They indicate a persistent and eminently suspicious frame of mind, which deserves to be considered seriously as a psychological, if not pathological, condition; what we must ask ourselves is, how far the mere hint of Popery sufficed to call forth in him a delirium of abuse.

In his tract of 1531 against Duke George he boasted, that people would in future say, that “his mouth was full of angry words, vituperation and curses on the Papists”; that “he intended to go down to his grave cursing and abusing the miscreants”;[1034] that as long as breath remained in him he would “pursue them to their grave with his thunders and lightnings”;[1035] again, he says he will take refuge in his maledictory prayer against the Papists in order to “kindle righteous hatred in his heart,” and even expounds and recommends this prayer in mockery to his opponent[1036]—in all this we detect an abnormal feature which characterises his life and temper. This abnormity is apparent not only in the intense seriousness with which he utters the most outrageous things, more befitting a madman than a reasonable being, but also at times in the very satires to which he has recourse. That the Papacy would have still more to suffer from him after he was dead, is a prophecy on which he is ever harping: “When I die,” he remarks, “I shall turn into a spirit that will so plague the bishops, parsons and godless monks, that one dead Luther will give them more trouble than a thousand living Luthers.”[1037]

No theological simile is too strange for him in this morbid state of mind and feeling. As in the case of those obsessed by a fixed idea the delusion is ever obtruding itself under every possible shape, so, in a similar way, every thought, all his studies, his practice, learning, theology and exegesis, even when its bearing seems most remote, leads up to this central and all-dominating conviction: “I believe that the Pope is a devil incarnate in disguise, for he is Endchrist. For as Christ is true God and true man, so also is Antichrist a devil incarnate.”[1038] And yet, in the past, so he adds with a deep sigh, “we worshipped all his lies and idolatry.”

He is very painstaking in his anatomy of the Pope-Antichrist.

“The head of Antichrist,” he said, “is both the Pope and the Turk; a living creature must have both body and soul; the Pope is Antichrist’s soul or spirit, but the Turk is his flesh or body; for the latter lays waste, destroys and persecutes the Church of God materially, just as the Pope does so spiritually.” Considering, however, that he had unduly exonerated the Pope, he corrects himself and adds: And materially also; “materially, viz. by laying waste with fire and sword, hanging, murdering, etc.” The Church, however, so he prophesies, will nevertheless “hold the field and resist the Pope’s hypocrisy and idolatry.” He then goes on to make a fanciful application of Daniel’s prophecy concerning the kingdoms of the world to the Pope’s downfall. “The text compels us” to take the prophecy (Apoc. xiii. 7) as also referring to the “Papal abomination.” “The Pope shall be broken without hands and perish and die of himself.”[1039]

That the Pope was spiritually destroying the Church he had already asserted as early as 1520 in his “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome”: “Of all that is of Divine appointment not one jot is now observed at Rome; indeed, if anyone thought of doing what is manifestly such, it would be derided as folly. They let the Gospel and the Christian faith perish everywhere and turn never a hair; moreover, every bad example of mischief, spiritual and secular, flows from Rome over the whole world as from an ocean of wickedness. All this the Romans laugh at, and whoever laments it is looked upon as a ‘bon Christian’ [’cristiano’], i.e. a fool.”[1040]

The strength of Luther’s delusion that the Pope was Antichrist and shared the diabolical nature furnishes the chief explanation of the hopelessly bitter way in which he deals with all those who ventured to defend the Papacy. On all such he heaps abuse and assails them with that worst of the weapons at his command, viz. with calumny, calling into question their good faith and denying to them the character of Christians.

Johann Eck, so he assured his friends in 1538, “when at Rome, profited splendidly by the example of Epicurus; his short stay there was quite sufficient for him. No doubt he possesses great talent and a good memory, but he is impudence itself, and, at the bottom of his heart, cares as little about the Pope as he does about the Gospel. Twenty years ago I should never have thought it possible to find such Epicureans within the Church.”[1041] Eck is “a bold-lipped and bloodthirsty sophist.”[1042] In 1532, somewhat more indulgently, Luther had said of him: “Eccius is no preacher.... He can indeed talk ad lib. of drinking, gambling, light women and boon companions”; what, however, he says in his sermons he either does not take seriously or at any rate his heart is not in it.[1043] In 1542, nevertheless, Luther was heard to say: “I believe he has made himself over to the devil and entered into a bargain with him how long he will be allowed to live.”[1044] As was but natural, the man who had “never really taken the defence of the Pope seriously” died impenitent. According to Luther he passed away without making any confession, without even saying, “God be gracious to me.”[1045]

Could we trust Luther, Johannes Fabri, another Catholic opponent, “blasphemed himself to death.” Surely, thus “to sin deliberately and of set purpose, exceeds all bounds.”[1046]

Joachim I., Elector of Brandenburg († 1535), who remained faithful to the Church, was abused by Luther as a “liar, mad bloodhound, devilish Papist, murderer, traitor, desperate miscreant, assassin of souls, arch-knave, dirty pig and devil’s child, nay, the devil himself.”

We may recall the epithets he bestowed on Henry VIII. for having presumed to criticise him: “Crowned donkey, abandoned, senseless man, excrement of hogs and asses, impudent royal windbag, mad Harry, arrant fool.”[1047]

Cardinal Cajetan, the famous theologian, was, according to Luther, “an ambiguous, secretive, incomprehensible, mad theologian, and as well qualified to understand and judge his cause as an ass would be to play upon the harp.”[1048] Hoogstraaten, the Cologne Dominican, “does not know the difference between what is in agreement with and what contrary to Scripture; he is a mad, bloodthirsty murderer, a blind and hardened donkey, who ought to be put to scratch for dung-beetles in the manure-heaps of the Papists.”

Of his attacks on Duke George of Saxony, the “Dresden Assassin,” we need only mention the parting shaft he flung into his opponent’s grave: “Let Pharao perish with all his tribe; even though he [the Duke] felt the prick of conscience yet he was never truly contrite.... Now he has been rooted out.... God sometimes consents to look on for a while, but afterwards He punishes the race even down to the children.”[1049]

No one who in any way stood up for the Papal Decrees was safe from Luther’s ungovernable abuse, not even those statesmen who followed them from necessity rather than out of any respect for the Church. Luther is determined, so he says, “not to endure the excrement and filth of the Pope-Ass.... For goodness’ sake don’t come stirring up the donkey’s dung and papal filth in the churches, particularly in this town [Wittenberg].... The Pope defiles the whole world with his donkey’s dung, but why not let him eat it himself?... Let sleeping dogs lie, this I beg of you [and do not worry me with the Pope], otherwise I shall have to give you what for.... I must desist, otherwise I shall get too angry.”[1050]

With the real defenders of the Papal Decrees, or the olden faith, he was, however, never afraid of becoming “too angry”; the only redeeming feature being, that, at times the overwhelming consciousness of his fancied superiority brings his caustic wit to his assistance and his anger dissolves into scorn. Minus this pungent ingredient, his polemics would be incomprehensible, nor would his success have been half so great.

An example of his descriptions of such Catholics who wrote and spoke against him is to be found in his preface to a writing of Klingenbeyl’s. He there jokingly congratulates himself on having been the means of inducing his opponents to study the Bible in order to refute him: “Luther has driven these blockheads to Holy Scripture, just as though a man were to bring a lot of new animals to a menagerie. Here Dr. Cockles [Cochlæus] barks like a dog; there Brand of Berne [Johann Mensing] yelps like a fox; the Leipzig preacher of blasphemy [Johann Koss] howls like a wolf; Dr. Cunz Wimpina grunts like a snorting sow, and there is so much noise and clamour amongst the beasts that really I am quite sorry to have started the chase.... They are supposed to be conversant with Scripture, and yet are quite ignorant of how to handle it.”[1051]

In a more serious and tragic tone he points out, how many of his foes and opponents had been carried off suddenly by a Divine judgment. He even drafted a long list of such instances, supplied with hateful glosses of his own, which he alleged as a proof of the “visible action of God” in support of his cause.[1052] Johann Koss, the “preacher of blasphemy,” mentioned above, was given a place in this libellous catalogue after he had been seized with a stroke of apoplexy in the pulpit (Dec. 29, 1532). At the instance of Duke George he had been appointed assistant preacher under Hieronymus Dungersheim, that, by means of his elocutionary talent, he might defend the town of Leipzig against the inroads of the new teaching. What particularly incensed Luther was the use this preacher made of his Postils to refute him by his own words. The stroke came on him while he was vindicating the Catholic doctrine of good works. This circumstance, taken in conjunction with the “place, time and individual,” was for Luther an irrefutable proof of the intervention of “God’s anger.” “Christ,” he says, “struck down His enemy, the Leipzig shouter, in the very midst of his blasphemy.”[1053] The zealous preacher died about a month later.

“None are more pitiable,” Luther says elsewhere of this incident, “than the presumptuous, such as are all the Papists.”[1054] It was impossible for him to inveigh with sufficient severity against the presumption which threatened him on all sides, despite the excessive kindliness and moderation with which he occasionally credits himself; for were not those who confronted him “the devil and his hirelings”? He was forced to combat the frightful presumption of these men who acted as though they were “steeped in holiness”; for in reality they are “dirty pig-snouts”; as Papists they are “at the very least, murderers, thieves and persecutors”; hence let all rise up against the “servers of idols.”[1055]

“We must curse the Pope and his kingdom and revile and abuse it, and not close our jaws but preach against it without ceasing. There are some now who say we are capable of nothing else but of damning, scolding and slandering the Pope and his followers.” “Yes, and so it must be.”[1056]

Elsewhere he hints which vilely vulgar terms of opprobrium were to be applied to the Pope, and, after instancing them, adds: “It is thus that we should learn to make use of these words.” The Catholic Princes were also aimed at in this instruction which occurs in one of his sermons. This discourse, pronounced on Jan. 12, 1531, at a time when the intervention of the hostile secular powers was feared, was printed ten years later under the title “Ein trostlich Unterricht wie man sich gegen den Tyrannen, so Christum und sein Wort verfolgen halten soll.”[1057]

“Our mad and raving Princes,” he says, “are now raging and blustering and planning to root out this teaching. Whoever is desirous of devoting himself to Christ must daily be ready to suffer any peril to life and limb.” Amongst the grounds for encouragement he adduces is the fact that even his very foes admitted, “that we preach and teach God’s Word; the only thing amiss being, that it was not done at their bidding, but that we at Wittenberg started it all unknown to them.” He calls the angry Princes “great merd-pots,” who are “kings and rulers of the pig-sty of the earth where the belly, the universal cesspool, reigns supreme.” “But we will be of good cheer and put our fingers to our noses at them”; because we hold fast to Christ therefore we suffer persecution from the world. “Who is the Pope, that he should be angry?... A sickly, smelly scarecrow.” “The Pope says: I will excommunicate you, thrust you down to the abyss of hell. [I tell him] Stick your tongue in my——. I am holy, am baptised, have God’s Word and His Promises to proclaim, but you are a sickly, syphilitic sack of maggots. It is thus that we should learn to make use of these words.”[1058]

3. The Psychology of Luther’s Abusive Language

Various Psychological Factors.

Psychologically to appreciate the phenomenon in question we must first of all take into account Luther’s temperament.

To every unprejudiced observer it must be clear, that, without the unusual excitability natural to him, many of his utterances would be quite inexplicable; even when we have given due weight to Luther’s ungovernable temper and all too powerful imagination they still present many difficult questions to the observer. Luther himself, as early as 1520, excuses to Spalatin his offensive language on the ground of his natural “hot-bloodedness”; as everybody knew what his temper was, his opponents ought not to annoy him as they did; yet these “monsters” only provoked him the more, and made him “overstep the bounds of modesty and decency.”[1059] It is perfectly true that some of his foes did provoke him by their mode of attack, yet on the other hand his own violence usually put theirs in the shade. (See below, xxvii., 4.)

In addition to his natural impetuosity which furnishes the chief basis of the phenomenon under consideration, several other factors must also be envisaged, depending on the objects or persons arousing his indignation.

It is clear that he was within his rights when he scourged the anti-Christian blasphemy and seductive wiles of the Jews, however much he may have been in the wrong in allowing himself to be carried away by fanaticism so far as to demand their actual persecution. The same holds good of many of the instances of his ungenerous and violent behaviour towards “heretics” in his own fold. As against the many and oftentimes very palpable defects of their position, he knew how to stand up for truth and logic, though his way of doing so was not always happy, nor his strictures untouched by his own theological errors.

Nor can it be denied that he was in the right when he assailed the real, and, alas, all too many abuses of the olden Church. The lively sense that, at least in this respect, he was in the right may quite possibly have fed the inward fire of his animosity to Catholics, all the more owing to his being in the wrong in those new doctrines which were his principal concern. To the assurance, and the offensive manner in which he insisted on a reform, his visit to Rome, a distorted recollection of which ever remained with him, no doubt contributed. His mind was ever reverting to the dismal picture—by no means an altogether imaginary one—of the immorality prevailing in even the highest ecclesiastical circles of Rome.

Rome’s unworthy treatment of the system of indulgences, which had afforded the occasion of his action in 1517, continued to supply new fuel for his indignation; to it he was fond of tracing back his whole undertaking. What increased his anger was the thought that it was this same Rome, whose ignoble practices both in the matter of indulgences and in other fields was notorious, who had called him to judgment. It is painful to the Catholic to have to confess that many of Luther’s complaints were by no means unfounded. He will, however, call to mind the better churchmen of those days, who, though indignant at the sad corruption then prevalent, never dreamt of apostasy, knowing as they did, that even far worse scandals could never justify a revolt against the institution appointed by Christ for the salvation of souls.

Even when voicing his real grievances Luther was seldom either prudent or moderate. He never seems to have quite taken to heart the scriptural injunction: “Let every man be slow to speak, slow to anger, for the anger of man worketh not the justice of God.” He expounds in his Postils the Epistle where the admonition in question occurs,[1060] but it is curious to note how cursorily he dismisses the words, with which, maybe, he felt somewhat out of sympathy, though here, as elsewhere, he refers to the evil consequences of any proneness to anger. On the other hand, he insists, that “our censures and rebukes” must be in accordance with the “right and true Word,” i.e. with theology as he understood it.[1061] He prefers to devote far the greater portion of the exposition to proving his favourite thesis, that, thanks to the Evangel now proclaimed, “we have a good and cheerful conscience, stronger than all fear, sin and temptation, and containing the sure hope of life everlasting”;[1062] “it is a Word that has power to save your souls; what more can you desire?”[1063] He seems averse to inculcating that meekness which the text requires.

One factor which frequently fanned the flames was jealousy, when, for instance, he had to deal with theological opponents who appeared to be making too small account of him. The new Evangel, he said, was endangered by none more than by the “fanatics and sacramentarians”; to defend his personal position against them had cost him the hardest struggle of his whole life; no wonder that against them he opened wide the sluice-gates of his eloquence. He was keenly sensitive to any slight. “Things are going all wrong in the world,” he sighed in 1532. “We are already looked upon with contempt, but let us gather up the fragments when they are cheapest, that is what I advise.”[1064] Of Carlstadt twelve years previous he had written: “If he has no respect for me, which of us then will he respect? And what is the good of admonishing him? I believe he reckons me one of the most learned men in Wittenberg, and yet he actually tells me to my very face that I am nobody.... He writes right and left just as he chooses and looks on poor Wittenberg as quite beneath his notice.”[1065] Luther’s vexation explains his language. A pity one of the Princes did not let him taste cold steel; if Carlstadt believed in a God in heaven, then might Christ never more be gracious to him (Luther); he was no man, but an incarnation of the evil spirit, etc.

Not merely his former friend Carlstadt but others too he accused of inordinate ambition because they wished to discredit his discoveries and his position. “It is the ‘gloria’ that does the mischief,” he said in 1540 in his Table-Talk, “Zwingli was greedy of honour, as we see from what he wrote, viz. that he had learnt nothing from me. I should indeed be sorry had he learnt from me, for he went astray. Œcolampadius thought himself too learned to listen to me or to learn from me; of course, he too, surpassed me. Carlstadt also declares: ‘I care nothing for you,’ and Münzer actually declaimed against two Popes, the new one [myself] and the old.[1066] All who shun us and attack us secretly have departed from the faith, like Jeckel and Grickel [Jakob Schenk and Johann Agricola]; they reached their understanding by their own efforts and learnt nothing from us! Just like Zwingli.” Yet twenty-five years before (i.e. previous to his great discovery in 1515) no one “knew anything,” and, twenty-one years before, he, all alone, under the Divine guidance had put the ball in motion. “Ah, κενοδοξία [vainglory], that’s the mischief.”[1067]

Jealousy played its part also, when, in 1525, he rounded so violently upon Zwingli and the Zwinglians at Strasburg. Zwingli’s crime in his eyes lay not merely in his having, like Œcolampadius, adopted a divergent doctrine on the Eucharist, but in his claim to have been before Luther in preaching the Gospel of Christ openly according to its true meaning.[1068] Both circumstances contributed to Luther’s ire, which, after finding vent in many angry words, culminated at last in the rudest abuse of Zwingli and his “devilish” crew. Already in 1525, he wrote in the instruction for the people of Strasburg which he gave to Gregory Casel, who had come to Wittenberg to negotiate:[1069] “One of the parties must be the tool of Satan, i.e. either they or we.”[1070] “Christ can have no part with Belial.” And, before this: “They [Zwingli and Œcolampadius] disturb our Church and weaken our repute. Hence we cannot remain silent. If they would be vexed to see their own reputation suffer, let them also think of ours.” “They ought to have held their tongues long ago [on the question of the Sacrament]; now silence comes too late.” He concludes with the assurance, that their error was refuted by “the Spirit,” and that it was impossible they could have any certainty concerning their doctrine, whereas he could justly boast, that he had the experience of the faith and the testimony of the Spirit (“experimentum fidei et spiritus testimonium”). “They will never win the day. It pains me that Zwingli and his followers take offence at my saying that ‘What I write must be true.’”

Apart from the doctrine on the Sacrament, the other thing which helped to annoy him stands revealed more plainly in the letter addressed on the same day to the Strasburg preachers: “We dare to boast that Christ was first made known by us, and now Zwingli actually comes and accuses us of denying Christ.”[1071] Bossuet was quite right in arguing that such petty jealousy on Luther’s part is scarcely to his credit.[1072] He quotes a criticism on Luther’s behaviour by George Calixt, the famous Lutheran professor of theology at Helmstädt: “The sweetness of vainglory is so seductive and human weakness so great, that even those who despise all things and risk their goods, yea life itself, may succumb to inordinate ambition.” Luther, too, had high aims; “we cannot be surprised that, even a man so large-minded as Luther, should have written such things to the people of Strasburg.”[1073]

Offended vanity played a part as great and even more obvious in Luther’s furious polemics against the literary defenders of the Church. One cannot help noticing how, especially when they had succeeded in making out a clear case against him, his answer was a torrent of most unsparing abuse.

The eloquence which he had at his command also constituted a temptation. He was well aware of the force with which his impassioned language carried others away. Very little was thus needed to induce him to take up this formidable weapon which at least ensured his success among the masses. He himself revelled in the unquenchable wealth of his vituperative vocabulary, and with it he caught the fancy of thousands who loved nothing more than a quarrel. If it be true that all popular orators are exposed to the temptation to exaggerate, to say things which are striking rather than correct, and, generally, to court the applause of the crowd, this danger was even greater in Luther’s case owing to the whole character of the controversy he had stirred up. In the midst of a stormy sea one does not speak softly. Luther’s abuse was, however, powerful enough to be heard above even the most furious tempest.

For his work Luther required an extraordinary stimulus. He would have succumbed under the countless and burdensome labours which devolved on him had he not constantly aroused himself anew by the exercise of a sort of violence. Vituperation thus became to him a real need. When he had succeeded thereby in working himself up into a passion his mind grew clearer and his imagination more vigorous, so that he found it all the easier to borrow from the lips of the mob that rude language of which he makes such fell use. He kindles his animation by dwelling on the “vermin and running sores of Popery.”

In the same way from time to time he found the need of unburdening himself of his ill-humour. The small success of his labours for the reform of morals and his other annoying experiences gave him many an unhappy hour. His bad humour found an outlet in abuse and vituperation, particularly against the enemies of the Evangel. He himself was unable to conceal the real grounds of the vexation which he vented on the Papacy, for, often enough, after storming against the Papists, he complains bitterly of his own followers’ contempt for the “Word” and of their evil lives.

After the utterance already recorded: “We must curse the Pope and his kingdom,” he goes on to levy charges of the worst character against those of his own party, and pours forth on them, too, all the vials of his wrath and disappointment. It was in this connection that he said, that the Evangelicals were seven times worse than before; for the one devil that had been expelled, seven worse had entered in, so horribly did they lie, cheat, gorge and swill and indulge in every vice; princes, lords, nobles, burghers and peasants alike had lost all fear of God.[1074]

Another example, taken this time from the year 1536. Full of anger against the Pope he said to a friend who held a high post: “My dear fellow, do hurl a Paternoster as a curse against the Papacy that it may be smitten with the Dance of St. Vitus.” He adds: “Don’t mind my way of speaking, for indeed you know it well; I am coarse and rough ... so sore beset, oppressed and overwhelmed with business of all kinds, that, to save my poor carcase I must sometimes indulge in a little pleasure, for, after all, man is only human”[1075]—an utterance psychologically valuable. The real reason for the depression against which he was struggling is, however, clearer in other letters dating from that time. In them we get a glimpse of his grievous vexation and annoyance with the false teachers within the Evangelical fold: “New prophets are arising one after the other. I almost long to be delivered [by death] so as not to have to go on seeing so much mischief, and to be free at last from this kingdom of the devil. I implore you to pray to God that He would grant me this.”[1076]

Lastly, his outbursts against the Papacy served to cover his own anxiety of conscience.

In the same way as others who leave their Church, fling themselves into the turmoil and distractions of the world in order to escape their scruples, Luther too, allayed the reproach of his conscience by precipitating himself into the midst of the storm he had evoked; with this advantage, that the sharp weapons of abuse and scorn he employed could be turned against the enemy both without and within. Accustomed as he was to treat the voice of conscience as the voice of Satan, he willingly clung to the doubtful consolation that the stronger his abuse of his opponents the greater his own encouragement. The evil which he detected in Popery seemed to him to load the scale in his own favour. He even admits this with the most engaging frankness.

“I am quite ready to allow that the Pope’s abomination is, after Christ, my greatest consolation. Hence those are hopeless simpletons who say we should not abuse the Pope. Don’t be slow in abuse, particularly when the devil attacks you on Justification.” He intends “to infuse courage into himself by considering the abomination and horror” of the Pope; and to “hold it up under the devil’s nose.”[1077] Döllinger remarks justly: “Here [in these anxieties of conscience] is to be found at least a partial psychological explanation of that wealth of bitter abuse which marks off Luther’s writings from all other literary products, ancient or mediæval.... Not seldom he sought to deaden the interior terrors of a reproving conscience with the noisy clamour of his vituperation.”[1078]

We have just heard Luther promise to hold up the Pope’s abomination to the devil’s nose. This saying brings us to the principal explanation of the phenomenon under consideration.

Connection of Luther’s Abusiveness with his Mystic Persuasion of his Special Call.

Luther had brought himself to such a pitch as to see in the existing Church the devil’s kingdom, to overthrow which, with its Antichrist, was his own sublime mission. This theological, anti-diabolical motive for his anger and boundless invective, throws all others into the shade.

“Even were I not carried away by my hot temper and my style of writing,” he says, “I should still be obliged to take the field, as I do, against the enemies of truth” (“children of the devil” he calls them elsewhere). “I am hot-headed enough, nor is my pen blunt.” But these foes “revel in the most horrible crimes not merely against me, but even against God’s Word.” Did not Christ Himself have recourse to abuse, he asks, against the “wicked and adulterous generation of the Jews, against the brood of vipers, the hypocrites and children of the devil”? “Whoever is strong in the consciousness of the truth, can display no patience towards its furious and ferocious enemies.”[1079]

The more vividly he persuaded himself of his mission, the blacker were the colours in which he painted the devil of Popery who refused to believe in it, and the more strangely did there surge up from the sombre depths of his soul and permeate his whole being a hatred the like of which no mortal man had ever known before. In such outbursts Luther thinks he is “raving and raging [’debacchari’] against Satan”; for instance, in a letter to Melanchthon, dated from the fortress of Coburg, “from the stronghold full of devils where Christ yet reigns in the midst of His foes.” Even when unable from bodily weakness to write against the devil, yet he could at least rage against him in thought and prayer; “the Pope’s enormities (‘portenta’) against God and against the common weal” supplied him with material in abundance.[1080]

God had appointed him, so we read elsewhere, “to teach and to instruct,” as “an Apostle and Evangelist in the German lands” (were it his intention to boast); for he knows that he teaches “by the Grace of God, whose name Satan shall not destroy nor deprive me of to all eternity”; therefore I must unsparingly “expose my back parts to the devil ... so as to enrage him still more.” To the wrath of all the devils, bishops, and princes he will pay as little heed as to the rustle of a bat’s wing, nor will he spare the “traitors and murderers.”[1081]

As early as 1520 he revealed to an intimate friend the morbidly exaggerated ideas which moved him: As an excuse for his dreadful vituperation he alleges his pseudo-mystic conception of the life and death struggle he was to engage in with the devil, and his sense of the “impetus Spiritus”; this he pleads in extenuation to his friend, who would appear to have reminded him of the dangers of pride. “All condemn my sarcasm,” he admits, but, now that the Spirit has moved him, he may set himself on a line with the “prophets” of the Old Law who “were so harsh in their invective,” nay, with Paul the Apostle, whose severe censures were ever present in his mind. In fact, God Himself, according to Luther, is to some extent present in these utterances by means of His power and action, and, “sure enough, intends in this way to unmask the inventions of man.”[1082]

As compared with the interior force with which the idea of his mission inspired him, all his violence, particularly in his polemics with the Catholic theologians and statesmen, appeared to him far too weak. Thus his “Wider Hans Worst” against the Catholic Duke of Brunswick, though reeking of blood and hate, seemed to him to fall short of the mark and to be all too moderate, so at least he told Melanchthon, to all appearance quite seriously.[1083] His inability ever to exhaust his indignation goes back to the idea expressed by him in the same letter with such startling candour and conviction as to remind one of the ravings of a man possessed by a fixed delusion: “It is certain that it is God Who is fighting.” “Our cause is directed by the hand of God, not by our own wisdom. The Word makes its way and prayer glows ... hence we might well sleep in peace were we not mere flesh.” His hint at the near approach of the Last Judgment, the many signs of which could not escape notice, more than confirms the pseudo-mystic character both of his confidence and of his hate.[1084]

On other occasions traces of his pet superstitions are apparent, and, when we take them together, prove beyond a doubt the unhealthy state of the mind from which they sprang. For instance, Luther professes to know particulars of the approaching end of the world concerning which the Bible says nothing; he also has that curious list of opponents miraculously slain by the Divine hand, and even fancies he can increase it by praying for the death of those who, not sharing his opinions, stood in his way: “This year we must pray Duke Maurice to death; we must slay him by our prayers, for he is likely to prove a wicked man.” On the same occasion he also attributes to himself a sort of prophetic gift: “I am a prophet.”[1085] The foretelling of future events and the fulfilment in his own person of olden prophecies and visions, and again the many miracles and expulsions of the devil which accompany the spread of his teaching, confirm his Evangel and impress the stamp of Divine approbation on his hatred of Antichrist.[1086] Divine portents, which, however, no one but Luther would have recognised as such, were also exploited: the birth of the monstrous Monk-Calf; the Pope-Ass fished from the Tiber; signs in the heavens and on the earth. The Book of Daniel and St. John’s Apocalypse supplied him when necessary with the wished-for interpretation, though his far-fetched speculations would better become a mystic dreamer than a sober theologian and spiritual guide of thousands. All this was crowned by the diabolical manifestations which he himself experienced, though what he took for apparitions of the devil was merely the outcome of an overwrought mind.[1087]

This enables us to seize that second nature of his, made up of superhuman storming and vituperation, and to understand, how, in his hands, wild abuse of the Papacy became quite a system.

“I shall put on my horns,” he wrote to a friend in 1522, “and vex Satan until he lies stretched out on the ground. Don’t be afraid, but neither expect me to spare my gainsayers; should they be hard hit by the new movement, that is not our fault, but a judgment from above on their tyranny.”[1088] Shortly after he wrote in a similar strain to reassure some unknown correspondent concerning his unusual methods of controversy: “Hence, my dear friend, do not wonder that many take offence at my writings. For it must be that only a few hold fast to the Gospel [the friend had pointed out to him that many of his followers were being scared away by his abuse].... His Highness my master has admonished me in writing, and many other friends have done the same. But my reply is ever that I neither can nor will refrain from it.”[1089]

Abuse becomes almost inseparable from his teaching, or at least seems entailed by it. “Whoever accepts my teaching with a right heart,” he says, “will not be scandalised by my abuse.” Indeed, he adds, emulating Hus, he was ready “to risk his life should persecution or the needs of the time demand it.” Nor have we any reason to doubt that his misguided enthusiasm would have rendered him capable of such a sacrifice.[1090]

In 1531 the Elector Johann sent him a reprimand through Chancellor Brück on account of the two violent tracts, “Warnunge an seine lieben Deudschen” and “Auff das vermeint keiserlich Edict.” George of Saxony had, it appears, complained to the Elector, that these writings “served in no small measure to incite to rebellion, and also contained much abuse both of high and low.”[1091] Hereupon Luther, with the utmost impudence, vindicated his cause to his sovereign: “That certain persons may have informed your Electoral Highness that the two writings were sharp and hasty, this is indeed true; I never meant them to be blunt and kind, and only regret that they were not more severe and violent”; for all he had said of such “lying, blasphemous, asinine” opponents—especially considering the danger in which the Electoral house stood—fell short of the mark; the Prince should bear in mind that he [Luther] had been “far too mild and soft in dealing with such evil knots and boughs.”[1092]

But “the knots and boughs” of his literary opponents did not consist entirely in coarse insults, but largely in the well-grounded vindication against his unwarranted attacks of the religion of their fathers, in which they saw the true basis of the common weal. His opponents had necessarily to take the defensive; Luther, with his furious words and actions, was in almost every case the aggressor, and forestalled their writings.

It is plain that, at the very time when he thus explained his position to the Elector Johann, i.e. about the time of the Diet of Augsburg, in 1530, he was under the influence of that inner power of which he had said: “I am carried away I know not by what spirit”; “I am not master of myself.” He exclaims: “In God’s name and at His command I will tread upon the lion and adder and trample under foot the lion and dragon [it is thus that he applies the Messianic prophecy in Ps. xc. 13]; this shall commence during my lifetime and be accomplished after my death. St. John Hus prophesied of me,” etc.[1093] More than ever he lays stress on the fact that he has a “Divine mission,” and was “called by God to a work,” not commenced “of his own initiative”; for which cause also “God was with him and assisted him.”[1094] He means to realise his earlier threat (1521): “If I live I shall never make peace with the Papacy; if you kill me you shall have twice as little peace. Do your worst, you swine and Thomists. Luther will be to you a bear in the road and a lion in the path [as Osee says]. He will meet you everywhere and not leave you in peace until your brazen front and stiff neck be broken, either by gentleness or by force. I have lost enough patience already; if you will not amend you may continue to rage against me and I to despise you, you abandoned monsters.”[1095]

He is now determined to carry out his threat of 1527 even at the cost of his life: “My teaching shall cry aloud and smite right and left; may God deny me the gifts of patience and meekness. My cry is: No, No, No, so long as I can move a muscle, let it vex King, Emperor, Princes, the devil, or whom it may.... Bishops, priests, monks, great Johnnies, scholars and the whole world are all thirsting for the gore of Luther, whose executioners they would gladly be, and the devil likewise and his crew.... My teaching is the main thing by which I defy not only princes and kings but even all the devils. I am and remain a mere sheep.... Not following my own conceit, I may have attacked a tyrant or great scholar and given him a cut and made him angry, but let him be ready for thirty more.... Let no one, least of all the tyrants and persecutors of the Evangel, expect any patience or humility from me.... What must not my wrath be with the Papists who are my avowed enemies?... Come on, all together, since you all belong to one batch, devils, Papists, fanatics, fall upon Luther! Papists from the front, fanatics from the rear, devils from every side! Chase him, hunt him down gaily, you have found the right quarry. Once Luther is down you are saved and have won the day. But I see plainly that words are of no avail; no abuse, no teaching, no exhortation, no menaces, no promises, no beseeching serve our purpose.... Well, then, in God’s name, let us try defiance. Whoever relents, let him go; whoever is afraid, let him flee; I have at my back a strong Defender.... I have well served the world and brought Holy Scripture and the Word of God to light in a way unheard of for a thousand years. I have done my part; your blood be upon your own head and not on my hands!”[1096]

Nevertheless, at times he appears to have had some slight qualms. Yet after having described the Papists as “Pope-Asses, slaves of the Mass, blasphemers, miscreants and murderers of souls,”[1097] he continues: “Should anyone here say that I confine myself to flinging coarse epithets about me and can do nothing but slander and abuse, I would reply, firstly, that such abuse is nothing compared with the unspeakable wickedness. For what is it if I abuse the devil as a murderer, miscreant, traitor, blasphemer and liar? To him all this is but a gentle breeze! But what else are the Pope-Asses but devils incarnate, who know not penance, whose hearts are hardened and who knowingly defend their palpable blasphemy.... Hence my abuse is not abuse at all, but just the same as were I to call a turnip a turnip, an apple an apple, or a pear a pear.”[1098]

A psychological explanation of Luther’s mania for invective is also to be looked for in the admixture of vile ingredients which went to make up his abuse. So frequently had he recourse to such when in a state of excitement that they must be familiar to every observer of Luther’s development and general behaviour; it is, however, our duty here to incorporate this element, so characteristic of his polemics, in our sketch of the angry Luther.

The Unpleasant Seasoning of Luther’s Abuse.

The filthy expressions, to which Luther was so prone when angry, are psychologically interesting, throwing light as they do on the depth of his passion and on the all too earthly atmosphere which pervades his abuse. Had Luther’s one object, as writer and teacher, been to vindicate spiritual treasures he would surely have scorned to make use of such adjuncts as these in his teaching or his polemics. Even when desirous of speaking forcibly, as beseemed a man of his stamp, he would have done so without introducing these disreputable and often repulsive elements of speech. He was, however, carried away by an imagination only too familiar with such vulgar imagery, and a tongue and pen much too ready to speak or write of things of that sort. Unless he places pressure on himself a man’s writings give a true picture of his inner standards, and pressure was something which Luther’s genius could never endure.

Luther had, moreover, a special motive for drawing his creations from this polluted well. He wished to arouse the lower classes and to ingratiate himself with those who, the less capable they were of thinking for themselves or of forming a true judgment, were all the readier to welcome coarseness, banter and the tone of the gutter. Amidst their derisive laughter he flings his filth in the face of his opponents, of the Catholics throughout the world, the Pope, the hierarchy and the German past.

If at Rome they had to prove that the Keys had been given to St. Peter “the Pope’s nether garments would fare badly.”[1099] Of the Papal dispensation for the clergy to marry, which many confidently expected, Luther says, that it would be just the thing for the devil; “let him open his bowels over his dispensation and sling it about his neck.”[1100]—The Princes and nobles (those who were on the other side) “soiled their breeches so shamefully in the Peasant War that even now they can be smelt afar off.”[1101]—He declares of the head of the Church of Rome: “Among real Christians no one is more utterly despicable than the Pope ... he stinks like a hoopoe’s nest.”[1102] Of those generally who opposed the Divine Word he says: “No smell is worse than yours.”[1103]—“Good-bye, beloved Rome; let what stinks go on stinking.”[1104]

“It is stupid of the Papists to wear breeches. How if they were to get drunk and let slip a motion?”[1105] This concern we find expressed in Luther’s “Etliche Sprüche wider das Concilium Obstantiense” (1535). And it is quite in keeping with other utterances in the same writing. He there speaks of the “dragons’ heads that peep and spew out of the hind-quarters of the Pope-Ass,”[1106] and on the same page ventures to address our Saviour as follows: “Beloved Lord Jesus Christ, it is high time that Thou shouldst lay bare, back and front, the shame of the furious, bloodthirsty, purple-clad harridan and reveal it to the whole world in preparation for the dawn of Thy bright Coming.”

Naturally he is no less unrestrained in his attacks on all who defended Popery. Of Eck’s ideas on chastity he remarks: “Your he-goat to your nostrils smells like balsam.”[1107] Of Cardinal Albert of Mayence and his party he wrote, during the Schönitz controversy: These “knaves and liars” “bring out foul rags fit only for devils and men to use in the closet.”[1108] The epithet, merd-priest, merd-bishop, is several times applied by him to members of the Catholic hierarchy.[1109] “The poor merd-priest wanted to ease himself, but, alas, there was nothing in his bowels.”[1110]

The Jurists who still clung to Canon Law he declares “invade the churches with their Pope like so many swine; yet there is another place whither they might more seemingly betake themselves if they wish to wipe the fundament of their Pope.”[1111] The Italians think that “whatever a Cardinal gives vent to, however vile it be, is a new article of faith promulgated for the benefit of the Germans.”[1112] To the Papists who threaten him with a Council he says: “If they are angry let them ease themselves into their breeches and sling it round their neck; that will be real balsam and pax for such thin-skinned saints.”[1113]—The fanatics who opposed his teaching on the Sacrament were also twitted on the score that “they would surely ease themselves on it and make use of it in the privy.”[1114] The Princes and scoundrel nobles faithfully followed the devil’s lead, who cannot bear to listen to God’s Word “but shows it his backside.”[1115] How are we best to answer an opponent, even the Pope? As though he were a “despicable drunkard.” “Give them the fig” (i.e. make a certain obscene gesture with the fist).[1116]—Such is his own remedy in all hostility and every misfortune: “I give them the fig.”[1117] His usual counsel is, however, to turn one’s “posterior” on them.

The Pope is the “filth which the devil has dropped in the Church”; he is the “devil’s bishop and the devil himself.”[1118]—Commenting on the Papal formula “districte mandantes,” he adds: “Ja, in Ars.”[1119] They want “me to run to Rome and fetch forgiveness of sins. Yes, forsooth, an evacuation!”[1120]

Of the Pope’s Bull of excommunication he says “they ought to order his horrid ban to be taken to the back quarters where children of Adam go to stool; it might then be used as a pocket-handkerchief.”[1121]—We must seize hold of the “vices” of the Pope and his clergy and show them up as real lechers; thus should all those who hold the office of preacher “set their droppings under the very noses of the Pope and the bishops.”[1122] “The spirit of the Pope, the father of lies,” wishes to display his wisdom by so altering the Word of God, that it “reeks of his stale filth.”[1123]—These people, who, like the Pope, are so learned in the Scripture, are “clever sophists,” experts in equine anal functions.[1124] They have “taken it upon themselves to come to the assistance of the whole world with their chastity and good works,” but, in reality, they merely “stuff our mouths with horse-dung.”[1125]

Of the alleged Papal usurpations he exclaims: “Were such muck as this stirred up in a free Council, what a stench there would be!”[1126]—The same favourite figure of speech helps him against the Sacramentarians: “What useful purpose can be served by my raking up all the devil’s filth?”[1127]—This phrase was at least more in place when Luther, referring to Philip of Hesse’s bigamy, said, that he “was not going to stir up the filth under the public nose.”[1128]—After their defeat he refused to comply with the demand of the peasants, that he should support them in their lawlessness: They want us to lend them a hand in “stirring up thoroughly the filth that is so eager to stink, till their mouths and noses are choked with it.”[1129] But it is to the Pope and his followers that, by preference, he applies such imagery. “They have forsaken the stool of St. Peter and St. Paul and now parade their filth [concerning original sin]; to such a pass have they come that they no longer believe anything, whether concerning the Gospel, or Christ, or even their own teaching.”[1130]—“This is the filth they now purvey, viz. that we are saved by our works; this is the devil’s own poisonous tail.”[1131]—Of those who awaited the decision of a Council he writes: “Let the devil wait if he chooses.... The members of the body must not wait till the filth says and decrees whether the body is healthy or not. We are determined to learn this from the members themselves and not from the urine, excrement and filth. In the same way we shall not wait for the Pope and bishops in Council to say: This is right. For they are no part of the body, or clean and healthy members, but merely the filth of squiredom, merd spattered on the sleeve and veritable ordure, for they persecute the true Evangel, well knowing it to be the Word of God. Therefore we can see they are but filth, stench and limbs of Satan.”[1132]

At the time of the Diet of Augsburg, in 1530, he informed the delegates of his party: “You are treating, not with men, but with the very gates of hell.... But they have fallen foul of the wisdom of God and [the final sentence of this Latin epistle is in German] soil themselves with their own filthy wisdom. Amen, Amen.”[1133]—The words “bescheissen” and “beschmeissen” (cp. popular French: “emmerder”) flow naturally from Luther’s pen. Neobulus, the Hessian defender of the bigamy, he describes as “a prince of darkness,” who “has ‘defiled’ himself with his wisdom”;[1134] the papal “Jackanapes” who “declare that the Lutherans have risen in revolt,” have likewise “‘defiled’ themselves with their sophistry.”[1135]

He asserts he can say “with a clear conscience that the Pope is a merd-ass and the foe of God.”[1136] “The Pope-Ass has emitted a great and horrible ordure here.... A wonder it did not tear his anus or burst his belly.” “There lies the Pope in his own dung.”[1137] “The Popes are so fond of lies and scurrilities that their paunch waxes fat on them”; they are waiting to see “whether the Pope’s motions will not ultimately scare the kings.... The Papal hypocrites—I had almost said the devil’s excrements—boast of being masters over the whole world.”[1138]

Amidst these unavoidable quotations from Luther’s unpleasant vocabulary of abuse the historian is confronted again and again with the question: What relation does this coarser side of Luther’s style bear to the manners of his times? We have already pointed out how great the distance is between him and all other writers, particularly such as treat of religious subjects in a popular or polemical vein; obviously it is with the latter category of writings that his should be compared, rather than with the isolated aberrations of certain writers of romance or the lascivious works produced by the Humanists.[1139] Various quotations from contemporaries of Luther’s, even from friends of the innovations, have shown that his language both astonished and shocked them.[1140] It was felt that none other could pretend to measure himself beside this giant of invective.

Duke George of Saxony on one occasion told Luther in no kindly way that he knew peasants who spoke just the same, “particularly when the worse for drink”; indeed they went one better and “knew how to use their fists”; among them Luther would be taken for a swine-herd.[1141]

“Their inexhaustible passion for abuse,” wrote a Catholic contemporary in 1526, “makes me not a little suspicious of the teaching of this sect. No one is accounted a good pupil of Luther’s who is not an adept in abusive language; Luther’s own abuse knows no bounds.... Who can put up with such vituperation the like of which has not been heard for ages?... Read all this man’s writings and you will hardly find a page that is not sullied with vile abuse.”[1142]

It is true that the lowest classes, particularly in Saxony, as it would appear, were addicted to the use of smutty language in which they couched their resentment or their wit; this, however, was among themselves. In the writings of the Wittenberg professor of theology, on the other hand, this native failing emerges unabashed into the light of day, and the foul sayings which Luther—in his anxiety to achieve popularity—gathered from the lips of the rabble swept like a flood over the whole of the German literary field. Foul language became habitual, and, during the polemics subsequent on Luther’s death, whether against the Catholics or among the members of the Protestant fold, was a favourite weapon of attack with those who admired Luther’s drastic ways.

As early as 1522 Thomas Blaurer, a youthful student at Wittenberg, wrote: “No abuse, however low and shameful,” must be spared until Popery is loathed by all.[1143] Thus the object in view was to besmirch the Papacy by pelting it with mire. When, in 1558, Tilman Hesshusen, an old Wittenberg student, became Professor of Theology and General Superintendent at Heidelberg and thundered with much invective against his opponents and in favour of the Confession of Augsburg, even his friends asked the question, “whether the thousand devils he was wont to purvey from the pulpit helped to promote the pure cause of the Lutheran Evangel?” At Bremen, preaching against Hardenberg, a follower of Melanchthon’s, he declared, that he had turned the Cathedral into a den of murderers.[1144] In 1593 Nigrinus incited the people to abuse the Papists with the words: “Up against them boldly and fan the flames so that things may be made right warm for them!” George Steinhausen remarks in this connection in his History of German Civilisation: “Luther became quite a pattern of violent abuse and set the tone for the anti-popish ranters, who, most of them, belonged to the lowest class. On their side the Catholics, for instance, Hans Salat of Lucern or the convert Johann Engerd, were also not behindhand in this respect.... The preachers, however, were always intent on egging them on to yet worse attacks.”[1145]