Chapter XXXI

LUTHER IN HIS DISMAL MOODS, HIS SUPERSTITION AND DELUSIONS

1. His Persistent Depression in Later Years Persecution Mania and Morbid Fancies

Among the various causes of the profound ill-humour and despondency, which more and more overshadowed Luther’s soul during the last ten years of his life, the principal without a doubt was his bitter disappointment.

He was disappointed with what he himself calls the “pitiable spectacle” presented by his Church no less than with the firmness and stability of the Papacy. Not only did the Papal Antichrist refuse to bow to the new Evangel or to be overthrown “by the mere breath of Christ’s mouth,” as Luther had confidently proclaimed would be the case, but, in the evening of his days, it was actually growing in strength, its members standing shoulder to shoulder ready at last to seek inward reform by means of a General Council.

The melancholy to which he had been subject in earlier years had been due to other thoughts which not seldom pressed upon him, to his uncertainty and fear of having to answer before the Judge. In his old age such fears diminished, and the voices which had formerly disquieted him scarcely ever reached the threshold of his consciousness; by dint of persistent effort he had hardened himself against such “temptations.” The idea of his Divine call was ever in his mind, though, alas, it proved only too often a blind guide incapable of transforming his sense of discouragement into any confidence worthy of the name. At times this idea flickers up more brightly than usual; when this happens his weariness seems entirely to disappear and makes room for the frightful outbursts of bitterness, hate and anger of a soul at odds both with itself and with the whole world.

Doubtless his state of health had a great deal to do with this, for, in his feverish activity, he had become unmindful of certain precautions. Lost in his exhausting literary labours and public controversies his state of nervous excitement became at last unbearable.

The depression which is laying its hand on him manifests itself in the hopeless, pessimistic tone of his complaints to his friends, in his conviction of being persecuted by all, in his superstitious interpretations of the Bible and the signs of the times, in his expectation of the near end of all, and in his firm persuasion that the devil bestrides and rules the world.

His Depression and Pessimism

Disgust with work and even with life itself, and an appalling unconcern in the whole course of public affairs, are expressed in some of his letters to his friends.

“I am old and worked out—‘old, cold and out of shape,’ as they say—and yet cannot find any rest, so greatly am I tormented every day with all manner of business and scribbling. I now know rather more of the portents of the end of this world; that it is indeed on its last legs is quite certain, with Satan raging so furiously and the world becoming so utterly beastly. My only remaining consolation is that the end cannot be far off. Now at last fewer false doctrines will spring up, the world being weary and sick of the Word of God; for if they take to living like Epicureans and to despising the Word, who will then have any hankering after heresies?... Let us pray ‘Thy will be done,’ and leave everything to take its course, to fall or stand or perish; let things go their own way if otherwise they will not go.” “Germany,” he says, “has had its day and will never again be what it once was”; divided against itself it must, so he fancies, succumb to the devil’s army embodied in the Turks. This to Jakob Probst, the Bremen preacher.[802] Not long after he wrote to the same: “Germany is full of scorners of the Word.... Our sins weigh heavily upon us as you know, but it is useless for us to grumble. Let things take their course, seeing they are going thus.”[803]

To Amsdorf he says in a letter that he would gladly die. “The world is a dreadful Sodom.” “And, moreover, it will grow still worse.” “Could I but pass away with such a faith, such peace, such a falling asleep in the Lord as my daughter [who had just died]!”[804] Similarly, in another letter to Amsdorf we read: “Before the flood the world was as Germany now is before her downfall. Since they refuse to listen they must be taught by experience. It will cry out with Jeremias [li. 9]: ‘We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed; let us forsake her.’ God is indeed our salvation, and to all eternity will He shield us.”[805]

“We will rejoice in our tribulation,” so he encourages his former guest Cordatus, “and leave things to go their way; it is enough that we, and you too, should cause the sun of our teaching to rise all cloudless over the wicked world, after the example of God our Father, Who makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The sun of our doctrine is His; what wonder then if people hate us.” “Thus we can see,” so he concludes, that “outwardly we live in the kingdom of the devil.”[806]

Plunged in such melancholy he is determined, without trusting in human help, so he writes to his friend Jonas, “to leave the guidance of all things to Christ alone”; of all active work he was too weary; everything was “full of deception and hypocrisy, particularly amongst the powerful”; to sigh and pray was the best thing to do; “let us put out of our heads any thought and plans for helping matters, for all is alike useless and deceitful, as experience shows.”[807]

Christ had taken on Himself the quieting of consciences, hence, with all the more confidence, “might they entrust to Him the outcome of the struggle between the true Church and the powers of Satan.” “True, Christ seems at times,” he writes to his friend Johann August, “to be weaker than Satan; but His strength will be made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor. xii. 9), His wisdom is exalted in our foolishness, His goodness is glorified in our sins and misdeeds in accordance with His wonderful and inscrutable ways. May He strengthen you and us, and conform us to His likeness for the honour of His mercy.”[808]

During such a period of depression his fears are redoubled when he hears of the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks at Stuhlweissenburg; the following is his interpretation of the event: “Satan has noticed the approach of the Judgment Day and shows his fear. What may be his designs on us? He rages because his time is now short. May God help us manfully to laugh at all his fury!” He laments with grim irony the greed for gain and the treachery of the great. “Devour everything in the devil’s name,” he cries to them, “Hell will glut you,” and continues: “Come, Lord Jesus, come, hearken to the sighing of Thy Church, hasten Thy coming; wickedness is reaching its utmost limit; soon it must come to a head, Amen.”

Even this did not suffice and Luther again adds: “I have written the above because it seems better than nothing. Farewell, and teach the Church to pray for the Day of the Lord; for there is no hope of a better time coming. God will listen only when we implore the quick advent of our redemption, in which all the portents agree.”[809]

The outpourings of bitterness and disgust with life, which Antony Lauterbach noted while a guest at Luther’s table in 1538, find a still stronger echo in the Table-Talk collected by Mathesius in the years subsequent to 1540.

In Lauterbach’s Notes he still speaks of his inner struggles with the devil, i.e. with his conscience; this was no longer the case when Mathesius knew him: “We are plagued and troubled by the devil, whose bones are very tough until we learn to crack them. Paul and Christ had enough to do with the devil. I, too, have my daily combats.”[810] He had learnt how hard it was “when mental temptations come upon us and we say, ‘Accursed be the day I was born’”; rather would he endure the worst bodily pains during which at least one could still say, “Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”[811] The passages in question will be quoted at greater length below.

But according to Lauterbach’s Notes of his sayings he was also very bitter about the general state of things: “It is the world’s way to think of nothing but of money,” he says, for instance, “as though on it hung soul and body. God and our neighbour are despised and people serve Mammon. Only look at our times; see how full all the great ones, the burghers too, and the peasants, are with avarice and how they stamp upon religion.... Horrible times will come, worse even than befell Sodom and Gomorrha!”[812]—“All sins,” he complains, “rage mightily, as we see to-day, because the world of a sudden has grown so wanton and calls down God’s wrath upon its head.” In these words he was bewailing, as Lauterbach relates, the “impending misfortunes of Germany.”[813]—“The Church to-day is more tattered than any beggar’s cloak.”[814] “The world is made up of nothing but contempt, blasphemy, disobedience, adultery, pride and thieving; it is now in prime condition for the slaughter-house. And Satan gives us no rest, what with Turk, Pope and fanatics.”[815]

“Who would have started preaching,” he says in the same year, oppressed by such experiences, “had he known beforehand that such misfortune, fanatism, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude and wickedness would be the sequel?”[816] To live any longer he had not the slightest wish now that no peace was to be hoped for from the fanatics.[817] He even wished his wife and children to follow him to the grave without delay because of the evil times to come soon after.[818]

In the conversations taken down by Mathesius in the ‘forties Luther’s weariness of life finds even stronger expression, nor are the words in which he describes it of the choicest: “I have had enough of the world and it, too, has had enough of me; with this I am well content. It fancies that, were it only rid of me, all would be well....” As I have often repeated: “I am the ripe shard and the world is the gaping anus, hence the parting will be a happy one.”[819] “As I have often repeated”; the repulsive comparison had indeed become a favourite one with him in his exasperation. Other sayings in the Table-Talk contain unmistakable allusions to the bodily excretions as a term of comparison to Luther’s so ardently desired departure from this world.[820] The same coarse simile is met in his letters dating from this time.[821]

The reason of his readiness to depart, viz. the world’s hatred for his person, he elsewhere depicts as follows; the politicians who were against him, particularly those at the Dresden court, are “Swine,” deserving of “hell-fire”; let them at least leave in peace our Master, the Son of God, and the Kingdom of Heaven also; with a quiet conscience we look upon them as abandoned bondsmen of the devil, whose oaths though sworn to a hundred times over are not the least worthy of belief; “we must scorn the devil in these devils and sons of devils, yea, in this seed of the serpent.”[822]

“The gruff, boorish Saxon,”[823] as Luther calls himself, here comes to the fore. He seeks, however, to refrain from dwelling unduly on the growing lack of appreciation shown for his authority; he was even ready, so he said, “gladly to nail to the Cross those blasphemers and Satan with them.”[824]

“I thank Thee, my good God,” he once said in the winter 1542-43 to Mathesius and the other people at table, “for letting me be one of the little flock that suffers persecution for Thy Word’s sake; for they do not persecute me for adultery or usury, as I well know.”[825] According to the testimony of Mathesius he also said: “The Courts are full of Eceboli and folk who change with the weather. If only a real sovereign like Constantine came to his Court [the Elector’s] we should soon see who would kiss the Pope’s feet.” “Many remain good Evangelicals because there are still chalices, monstrances and cloistral lands to be taken.”[826] That a large number, not only of the high officials, but even of the “gentry and yokels,” were “tired” of him is clear from statements made by him as early as 1530. Wishing then to visit his father who lay sick, he was dissuaded by his friends from undertaking the journey on account of the hostility of the country people towards his person: “I am compelled to believe,” so he wrote to the sick man, “that I ought not to tempt God by venturing into danger, for you know how both gentry and yokels feel towards me.”[827] “Amongst the charges that helped to lessen his popularity was his supposed complicity in the Peasant War and in the rise of the Sacramentarians.”[828]

“Would that I and all my children were dead,” so he repeats, according to Mathesius,[829] “Satur sum huius vitae”; it was well for the young, that, in their thoughtlessness and inexperience, they failed to see the mischief of all the scandals rampant, for else “they would not be able to go on living.”[830]—“The world cannot last much longer. Amongst us there is the utmost ingratitude and contempt for the Word, whilst amongst the Papists there is nothing but blood and blasphemy. This will soon knock the bottom out of the cask.”[831] There would be no lack of other passages to the same effect to quote from Mathesius.

Some of the Grounds for His Lowness of Spirits

Luther is so communicative that it is easy enough to fix on the various reasons for his depression, which indeed he himself assigns.

To Melanchthon Luther wrote: “The enmity of Satan is too Satanic for him not to be plotting something for our undoing. He feels that we are attacking him in a vital spot with the eternal truth.”[832] Here it is his gloomy forebodings concerning the outcome of the religious negotiations, particularly those of Worms, which lead him so to write. The course of public events threw fresh fuel on the flame of his anger. “I have given up all hope in this colloquy.... Our theological gainstanders,” so he says, “are possessed of Satan, however much they may disguise themselves in majesty and as angels of light.”[833]—Then there was the terrifying onward march of the Turks: “O raging fury, full of all manner of devils.” Such is his excitement that he suspects the Christian hosts of “the most fatal and terrible treachery.”[834]

The devil, however, also lies in wait even for his friends to estrange them from him by delusions and distresses of conscience; this knowledge wrings from him the admonition: “Away with the sadness of the devil, to whom Christ sends His curse, who seeks to make out Christ as the judge, whereas He is rather the consoler.”[835] Satan just then was bent on worrying him through the agency of the Swiss Zwinglians: “I have already condemned and now condemn anew these fanatics and puffed-up idlers.” Now they refuse to admit my victories against the Pope, and actually claim that it was all their doing. “Thus does one man toil only for another to reap the harvest.”[836] These satellites of Satan who work against him and against all Christendom are hell’s own resource for embittering his old age.

Then again the dreadful state of morals, particularly at Wittenberg, under his very eyes, makes his anger burst forth again and again; even in his letter of congratulation to Justus Jonas on the latter’s second marriage he finds opportunity to have a dig at the easy-going Wittenberg magistrates: “There might be ten trulls here infecting no end of students with the French disease and yet no one would lift a finger; when half the town commits adultery, no one sits in judgment.... The world is indeed a vexatious thing.” The civic authorities, according to him, were but a “plaything in the devil’s hand.”

At other times his ill-humour vents itself on the Jews, the lawyers, or those German Protestant Reformers who had the audacity to hold opinions at variance with his. Carlstadt, with his “monstrous assertions”[837] against Luther, still poisons the air even when Luther has the consolation of knowing, that, on Carlstadt’s death (in 1541), he had been fetched away by the “devil.” Carlstadt’s horrid doctrines tread Christ under foot, just as Schwenckfeld’s fanaticism is the unmaking of the Churches.

Then again there are demagogues within the fold who say: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin?” These, according to him, are in almost as bad case as the others. Thus, “during our lifetime, this is the way the world rewards us, for and on this account and behalf! And yet we are expected to pray and heed lest the Turk slay such Christians as these who really are worse than the Turks themselves! As though it would not be better, if the yoke of the Turk must indeed come upon us, to serve the Turkish foeman and stranger rather than the Turks in our own circle and household. God will laugh at them when they cry to Him in the day of their distress, because they mocked at Him by their sins and refused to hearken to Him when He spoke, implored, exhorted, and did everything, stood and suffered everything, when His heart was troubled on their account, when He called them by His holy prophets, and even rose up early on their account (Jer. vii. 13; xi. 7).”[838] But such is their way; they know that it is God Whose Word we preach and yet they say: “We shan’t listen. In short, the wildest of wild furies have broken into them,” etc.[839]

Thus was he wont to rave when “excited,” though not until, so at least he assures us, having first “by dint of much striving put down his anger, his thoughts and his temptations.” “Blessed be the Lord Who has spoken to me, comforting me: ‘Why callest thou? Let things go their own way.’” It grieves him, so he tells us, to see the country he loves going to rack and ruin; Germany is his fatherland, and, before his very eyes, it is hastening to destruction. “But God’s ways are just, we may not resist them. May God have mercy on us for no one believes us.” Even the doctrine of letting things go their own way—to which in his pessimism Luther grew attached in later life—he was firmly convinced had come to him directly from the Lord, Who had “consolingly” whispered to him these words. Even this saying reeks of his peculiar pseudo-mysticism.

All the above outbursts are, however, put into the shade by the utter ferocity of his ravings against Popery. Painful indeed are the effects of his gloomy frame of mind on his attitude towards Rome. The battle-cries, which, in one of his last works, viz. his “Wider das Babstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” Luther hurls against the Church, which had once nourished him at her bosom, form one of the saddest instances of human aberration.

Yet, speaking of this work, the author assures a friend that, “in this angry book I have done justice neither to myself nor to the greatness of my anger; but I am quite aware that this I shall never be able to do.”[840] “For no tongue can tell,” so he says, “the appalling and frightful enormities of the Papal abomination, its substance, quantity, quality, predicaments, predicables, categories, its species, properties, differences and accidents.”[841]

The more distorted and monstrous his charges, the more they seem to have pleased him when in this temper.

In a morbid way he now heaps together his wonted hyperboles to such an extent, that, at times, it becomes very tiresome to read his writings and letters; no hateful image or suspicion seems to him sufficiently bad. “Though God Himself were to offer me Paradise for living another forty years, I should prefer to hire an executioner to chop off my head, for the world is so wicked; they are all becoming rank devils.”[842] He compares his own times to those which went before the Flood; the “rain of filth will soon begin”; he goes on to say that he no longer understands his own times and finds himself as it were in a strange world; “either I have never seen the world, or, while I am asleep, a new world is born daily; not one but fancies he is suffering injustice, and not one but is convinced he does no injustice.”[843] With a strange note of contempt he says: “Let the world be upset, kicked over and thrust aside, seeing it not only rejects and persecutes God’s Word, but rages even against sound common sense.... Even the seven devils of Cologne, who sit in the highest temple, and who, like some of the council, still withstand us, will God overthrow, Who breaks down the cedars of Lebanon. On account of this [the actual and hoped-for successes at Cologne] we will rejoice in the Lord, because by His Word He does such great things before our very eyes.”[844]

Here, as elsewhere too, in spite of all his ill-humour, the progress of his Evangel inspires him with hope. Nor is his dark mood entirely unbroken, for, from time to time, his love of a joke gets the better of it. His chief consolation was, however, his self-imposed conviction that his teaching was the true one.

A certain playfulness is apparent in many of his letters, for instance, in those to Jonas, one of his most intimate of friends: “Here is a conundrum,” writes Luther to him, “which my guests ask me to put to you. Does God, the wise administrator, annually bestow on the children of men more wine or more milk? I think more milk; but do you give your answer. And a second question: Would a barrel that reached from Wittenberg to Kemberg be large and ample enough to hold all the wine that our unwise, silly, foolish God wastes and throws away on the most ungrateful of His children, setting it before Henries and Alberts, the Pope and the Turk, all of them men who crucify His Son, whereas before His own children He sets nothing but water? You see that, though I am not much better than a corpse, I still love to chat and jest with you.”[845]

In the Table-Talk, recently published by Kroker from the notes taken by Mathesius in the last years of Luther’s life, the latter’s irrepressible and saving tendency to jest is very apparent; his humour here is also more spontaneous than in his letters, with the possible exception of some of those he wrote to Catherine Bora.[846]

Suspicion and Mania of Persecution

A growing inclination to distrust, to seeing enemies everywhere and to indulging in fearsome, superstitious fancies, stamps with a peculiar impress his prevailing frame of mind.

His vivid imagination even led him, in April, 1544, to speak of “a league entered into between the Turks and the most holy, or rather most silly, Pope”; this was undoubtedly one of the “great signs” foretold by Christ; “these signs are here in truth and are truly great.”[847] “The Pope would rather adore the Turk,” he exclaims later, “nay, even Satan himself, than allow himself to be put in order and reformed by God’s Word”; he even finds this confirmed in a new “Bull or Brief.”[848] He has heard of the peace negotiations with the Turks on the part of the Pope and the Emperor, and of the neutrality of Paul III towards the Turcophil King of France; he is horrified to see in spirit an embassy of peace, “loaded with costly presents and clad in Turkish garments,” wending its way to Constantinople, “there to worship the Turk.” Such was the present policy of the Roman Satan, who formerly had used indulgences, annates and countless other forms of robbery to curtail the Turkish power. “Out upon these Christians, out upon these hellish idols of the devil!”[849]—The truth is that, whereas the Christian States winced at the difficulties or sought for delay, Pope Paul III, faithful to the traditional policy of the Holy See, insisted that it was necessary to oppose by every possible means the Turk who was the Church’s foe and threatened Europe with ruin. The only ground that Luther can have had for his suspicions will have been the better relations then existing between the Pope and France which led the Turkish fleet to spare the Papal territory on the occasion of its demonstration at the mouth of the Tiber.[850]

But Luther was convinced that the Pope had no dearer hope than to thwart Germany, and the Protesters in particular. It was the Pope and the Papists whom he accused to Duke Albert of Prussia of being behind the Court of Brunswick and of hiring, at a high price, the services of assassins and incendiaries. To Wenceslaus Link he says, that it will be the priests’ own fault if the saying “To death with the priests” is carried into practice;[851] to Melanchthon he also writes: “I verily believe that all the priests are bent on being killed, even against our wish.”[852]—It was the Papists sure enough, who introduced the maid Rosina into his house, in order that she might bring it into disrepute by her immoral life;[853] they had also sent men to murder him, from whom, however, God had preserved him;[854] they had likewise tried to poison him, but all to no purpose.[855] We may recall how he had said: “I believe that my pulpit-chair and cushion were frequently poisoned, yet God preserved me.”[856] “Many attempts, as I believe, have been made to poison me.”[857]

He had even once declared that poisoning was a regular business with Satan: “He can bring death by means of a leaflet from off a tree; he has more poison phials and kinds of death at his beck and call than all the apothecaries in all the world; if one poison doesn’t work he uses another.”[858] He had long been convinced that the devil was able to carry through the air those who made themselves over to him; “we must not call in the devil, for he comes often enough uncalled, and loves to be by us, hardened foe of ours though he be.... He is indeed a great and mighty enemy.”[859] Towards the end of his life, in 1541, it came to his ears that the devil was more than usually busy with his poisons: “At Jena and elsewhere,” so he warns Melanchthon, “the devil has let loose his poisoners. It is a wonder to me why the great, knowing the fury of Satan, are not more watchful. Here it is impossible any longer to buy or to use anything with safety.” Melanchthon was therefore to be careful when invited out; at Erfurt the spices and aromatic drugs on sale in the shops had been found to be mixed with poison; at Altenburg as many as twelve people had died from poison taken in a single meal. Anxious as he was about his friend, his trust was nevertheless unshaken in the protection of God and the angels. I myself am still in the hands of my Moses (Katey), he adds, “suffering from a filthy discharge from my ear and meditating in turn on life and on death. God’s Will be done. Amen. May you be happy in the Lord now and for ever.”[860]

“A new art of killing us,” so he tells Melanchthon in the same year, had been invented by Satan, viz. of mixing poison with our wine and milk; at Jena twelve persons were said to have died of poisoned wine, “though more likely of too much drink”; at Magdeburg and Nordhausen, however, milk had been found in the possession of the sellers that seemed to have been poisoned. “At any rate, all things lie under Christ’s feet, and we shall suffer so long and as much as He pleases. For the nonce we are supreme and they [the Papist ‘monsters’] are hurrying to destruction.... So long as the Lord of Heaven is at the helm we are safe, live and reign and have our foes under our feet. Amen.” Casting all fear to the winds he goes on to comfort Melanchthon and his faint-hearted comrades in the tone of the mystic: “Fear not; you are angels, nay, great angels or archangels, working, not for us but for the Church, nay, for God, Whose cause it is that you uphold, as even the very gates of hell must admit; these, though they may indeed block our way, cannot overcome us, because at the very beginning of the world the hostile, snarling dragon was overthrown by the Lion of the tribe of Juda.”[861]

The hostility of the Papists to Lutheranism, had, so Luther thought, been manifestly punished by Heaven in the defeat of Henry of Brunswick; it had “already been foretold in the prophecies pronounced against him,” which had forecasted his destruction as the “son of perdition”; he was a “warning example set up by God for the tyrants of our days”; for every contemner of the Word is “plainly a tyrant.”[862]

Luther was very suspicious of Melanchthon, Bucer and others who leaned towards the Zwinglian doctrine on the Supper. So much had Magister Philippus, his one-time right-hand man, to feel his displeasure and irritability that the latter bewails his lot of having to dwell as it were “in the very den of the Cyclopes” and with a real “tyrant.” “There is much in one’s intercourse with Luther,” so Cruciger said confidentially, in 1545, in a letter to Veit Dietrich, “that repels those who have a will of their own and attach some importance to their own judgment; if only he would not, through listening to the gossip of outsiders, take fire so quickly, chiding those who are blameless and breaking out into fits of temper; this, often enough, does harm even in matters of great moment.”[863] Luther himself was by no means unwilling to admit his faults in this direction and endeavoured to make up for them by occasionally praising his fellow-workers in fulsome terms; Yet so deep-seated was his suspicion of Melanchthon’s orthodoxy, that he even thought for a while of embodying his doctrine on the Sacrament in a formulary, which should condemn all his opponents and which all his friends, particularly those whom he had reason to mistrust, should be compelled to sign. This, according to Bucer, would have involved the departure of Melanchthon into exile. Bucer expressed his indignation at this projected “abominable condemnation” and at the treatment meted out to Melanchthon by Luther.[864]

Bucer himself was several times the object of Luther’s wrath, for instance, for his part in the “Cologne Book of Reform”: “It is nothing but a lot of twaddle in which I clearly detect the influence of that chatterbox Bucer.”[865] When Jakob Schenk arrived at Wittenberg after a long absence Luther was so angry with him for not sharing his views as to refuse to receive him when he called; he did the same in the case of Agricola, in spite of the fact that the latter brought a letter of recommendation from the Margrave of Brandenburg; in one of his letters calls him: “the worst of hypocrites, an impenitent man!”[866] From such a monster, so he said, he would take nothing but a sentence of condemnation. As for his former friend Schenk, he ironically offers him to Bishop Amsdorf as a helper in the ministry. On both of them he persisted in bestowing his old favourite nicknames, Jeckel and Grickel (Jakob and Agricola).

Luther’s Single-handed Struggle with the Powers of Evil

Owing to the theological opinions reached by some of his one-time friends Luther, as may well be understood, began to be oppressed by a feeling of lonesomeness.

The devil, whom he at least suspected of being the cause of his bodily pains,[867] is now backing the Popish teachers, and making him to be slighted. But, by so doing, thanks to Luther’s perseverance and bold defiance, he will only succeed in magnifying Christ the more.

“He hopes to get the better of us or to make us downhearted. But, as the Germans say, cacabimus in os eius. Willy-nilly, he shall suffer until his head is crushed, much as he may, with horrible gnashing of teeth, threaten to devour us. We preach the Seed of the woman; Him do we confess and to Him would we assign the first place, wherefore He is with us.”[868] In his painful loneliness he praises “the heavenly Father Who has hidden these things [Luther’s views on religion] from the wise and prudent and has revealed them to babes and little ones who cannot talk, let alone preach, and are neither clever nor learned.”[869] This he says in a sermon. The clever doctors, he adds, “want to make God their pupil; everyone is anxious to be His schoolmaster and tutor. And so it has ever been among the heretics.... In the Christian churches one bishop nags at the other, and each pastor snaps at his neighbour.... These are the real wiselings of whom Christ speaks who know a lot about horses’ bowels, but who do not keep to the road which God Himself has traced for us, but must always go their own little way.” Indeed it is the fate of “everything that God has instituted to be perverted by the devil,” by “saucy folk and clever people.” “The devil has indeed smeared us well over with fools. But they are accounted wise and prudent simply because they rule and hold office in the Churches.”[870]

Let us leave them alone then and turn our backs on them, no matter how few we be, for “God will not bear in His Christian Churches men who twist His Divine Word, even though they be called Pope, Emperor, Kings, Princes or Doctors.... We ourselves have had much to do with such wiselings, who have taken it upon themselves to bring about unity or reform.”[871] “They fancy that because they are in power they have a deeper insight into Scripture than other people.”[872] “The devil drives such men so that they seek their own praise and glory in Holy Scripture.” But do you say: I will listen to a teacher “only so long as he leads me to the Son of God,” the true master and preceptor, i.e. in other words, so long as he teaches the truth.[873]

In his confusion of mind Luther does not perceive to what his proviso “so long as” amounts. It was practically the same as committing the decision concerning what was good for salvation to the hands of every man, however ignorant or incapable of sound judgment. Luther’s real criterion remained, however, his own opinion. “If anyone teaches another Gospel,” he says in this very sermon,[874] “contrary to that which we have proclaimed to you, let him be anathema” (cp. Gal. i. 8). The reason why people will not listen to him is, as he here tells them, because, by means of the filth of his arch-knaves and liars, “the devil in the world misleads and fools all.”

Luther was convinced that he was the “last trump,” which was to herald in the destruction, not only of Satan and the Papacy, but also of the world itself. “We are weak and but indifferent trumpeters, but, to the assembly of the heavenly spirits, ours is a mighty call.” “They will obey us and our trump, and the end of the world will follow. Amen.”[875]

Meanwhile, however, he notes with many misgivings the manifestations of the evil one. He even intended to collect in book form the instances of such awe-inspiring portents (“satanæ portenta”) and to have them printed.

For this purpose he begged Jonas to send him once more a detailed account of the case of a certain Frau Rauchhaupt, which would have come under this category; he tells his friend that the object of his new book is to “startle” the people who lull themselves in such a state of false security that not only do they scorn the wholesome marvels of the Gospel with which we are daily overwhelmed, but actually make light of the real “furies of furies” of the wickedness of the world; they must read such marvellous stories, for “they are too prone to believe neither in the goodness of God nor in the wickedness of the devil, and too set on becoming, as indeed they are already, just bellies and nothing more.”[876]—Thus, when Lauterbach told him of three suicides who had ended their lives with the halter, he at once insisted that it was really Satan who had strung them up while making them to think that it was they themselves who committed the crime. “The Prince of this world is everywhere at work.” “God, in permitting such crimes, is causing the wrath of heaven to play over the world like summer lightning, that ungrateful men, who fling the Gospel to the winds, may see what is in store for them.” “Such happenings must be brought to the people’s knowledge so that they may learn to fear God.”[877] Happily the book that was to have contained these tales of horror never saw the light; the author’s days were numbered.

The outward signs, whether in the heavens or on the earth, “whereby Satan seeks to deceive,” were now scrutinised by Luther more superstitiously than ever.

Talking at table about a thunder-clap which had been heard in winter, he quite agreed with Bugenhagen “that it was downright Satanic.” “People,” he complains, “pay no heed to the portents of this kind which occur without number.” Melanchthon had an experience of this sort before the death of Franz von Sickingen. Others, whom Luther mentions, saw wonderful signs in the heavens and armies at grips; the year before the coming of the Evangel wonders were seen in the stars; “these are in every instance lying portents of Satan; nothing certain is foretold by them; during the last fifteen years there have been many of them; the only thing certain is that we have to expect the coming wrath of God.”[878] Years before, the signs in the heavens and on the earth, for instance the flood promised for 1524, had seemed to him to forebode the “world upheaval” which his Evangel would bring.[879]

Luther shared to the full the superstition of his day. He did not stand alone when he thus interpreted public events and everyday occurrences. It was the fashion in those days for people, even in Catholic circles, superstitiously to look out for portents and signs.

In 1537[880] Luther relates some far-fetched tales of this sort. The most devoted servants of the devil are, according to him, the sorcerers and witches of whom there are many.[881] In 1540 he related to his guests how a schoolmaster had summoned the witches by means of a horse’s head.[882] “Repeatedly,” so he told them in that same year, “they did their best to harm me and my Katey, but God preserved us.” On another occasion, after telling some dreadful tales of sorcery, he adds: “The devil is a mighty spirit.” “Did not God and His dear angels intervene, he would surely slay us with those thunder-clubs of his which you call thunderbolts.”[883] In earlier days he had told them, that, Dr. “Faust, who claimed the devil as his brother-in-law, had declared that ‘if I, Martin Luther, had only shaken hands with him he would have destroyed me’; but I would not have been afraid of him, but would have shaken hands with him in God’s name and reckoning on God’s protection.”[884]

According to him, most noteworthy of all were the diabolical deeds then on the increase which portended a mighty revulsion and a catastrophe in the world’s history. Everything, his laboured calculations on the numbers in the biblical prophecies included, all point to this. Even the appearance of a new kind of fox in 1545 seemed to him of such importance that he submitted the case to an expert huntsman for an opinion. He himself was unable to decide what it signified, “unless it be that change in all things which we await and for which we pray.”[885]

The change to which he here and so often elsewhere refers is the end of the world.

2. Luther’s Fanatical Expectation of the End of the World. His hopeless Pessimism

The excitement with which Luther looks forward to the approaching end of the world affords a curious psychological medley of joy and fear, hope and defiance; his conviction reposed on a wrong reading of the Bible, on a too high estimate of his own work, on his sad experience of men and on his superstitious observance of certain events of the outside world.

The fact that the end of all was nigh gradually became an absolute certainty with him. In his latter days it grew into one of those ideas around which, as around so many fixed stars, his other plans, fancies and grounds for consolation revolve. To the depth of his conviction his excessive credulity and that habit—which he shared with his contemporaries—of reading things into natural events contributed not a little.

A remarkable conjunction of the planets in 1524,[886] “other signs which have been described elsewhere, such as earthquakes, pestilences, famines and wars,” a predicted flood[887]—“all these signs agree”[888] in announcing the great day; never have “more numerous and greater signs” occurred during the whole course of the world’s history to vouch for the forthcoming end of the world.[889] “All the firmaments and courses of the heavens are declining and coming to an end; the Elbe has stood for a whole year at the same low level, this also is a portent.”[890] Such signs invite us to be watchful.[891] Over and above all this we have the “many gruesome dreams of the Last Judgment” with which he was plagued in later years.[892]

He describes to his friends quite confidently the manner of the coming of the end such as he pictures it to himself: “Early one morning, about the time of the spring equinox, a thick black cloud, three lightning flashes and a thunder-clap, and, presto, everything will lie in ruins,” etc. “I am ever awaiting the day.”[893] “Things may go on for some years longer,”[894] perhaps for “five or six years,” but no more, because “the wickedness of men has increased so dreadfully within so short a time.”[895] “We shall live to see the day”; Aggeus (ii. 7 f.) says: “Yet a little while and I will shake the heaven and the earth”; look around you; “surely the State is being shaken ... the household too, and even the very mob, item our own very sons and daughters. The Church too totters.”[896]

“All the great wonders have already taken place; the Pope has been unmasked; the world rages. Nor will things improve until the Last Day comes. I hope, however, now that the Evangel is so greatly despised, that the Last Day is no longer far distant, not more than a hundred years off. God’s Word will again decline ... and the world will become quite savage and epicurean.”[897]

Reason and Ground of Luther’s Conviction of the near End of the World

The actual origin and basis of this strange idea are plainly expressed in the statement last quoted: “The Pope is unmasked” as Antichrist, such was Luther’s starting-point. Further, “the Evangel is despised,” by his own followers no less than by his foes; this depressing sight, together with the sad outlook for religion generally, formed the ground on which Luther’s conviction of the coming cataclysm grew, particularly when the fall of the Papacy seemed to be unduly delayed, and its strength to be even on the increase. The Bible texts which he twists into his service are an outcome rather than the cause of his conviction concerning Antichrist, while the “signs” in the heavens and on earth also serve merely to confirm a persuasion derived from elsewhere.

The starting-point of the idea and the soil on which it grew deserve to be considered separately.

Luther’s views on the unmasking of Antichrist and the approaching end of the world carry us back to the early years of his career. Soon after beginning his attack on the Church, he, over and over again, declared that he had been called to reveal the Pope as Antichrist.[898] His breach with the ecclesiastical past was so far-reaching that he could not have expressed his position and indicated the full extent of his aims better than by so radical an apocalyptic announcement. Nor did it sound so entirely strange to the world. Even according to Wiclif the Papal power was the power of “Antichrist” and the Roman Church the “Synagogue of Satan”; John Hus likewise taught, that it was Antichrist who, by means of the Papal penalties, was seeking to affright those who were after “unmasking” him.

The idea of Antichrist in Luther’s mind embodied all the wickedness of the Roman Church which it was his purpose to unmask, all the religious perversion of which he wished to make an end, and, in a word, the dominion of the devil against which he fancied he was to proclaim the last and decisive combat. When, by dint of insisting in his writings, over and over again, and in the most drastic of ways, on the Papal Antichrist, the idea came to assume its definitive shape in his own mind, his announcement of the end of the world could not be any longer delayed; for, according to the generally accepted view, Antichrist was directly to precede the coming of Christ to Judgment, or at least the latter’s coming would not be long delayed after the revelation of Antichrist in his true colours.[899] As a rule Antichrist was taken to be a person; Luther, however, saw Antichrist in the Papacy as a whole. Antichrist had had a long spell of life; the last Pope would, however, soon fall, he, Luther, with Christ’s help, was preparing his overthrow, then the end would come—such is the sum of Luther’s eschatological statements during the first period of his career.

Speaking of the end of the world he often says, that the fall of the Papacy involves it. “Assuredly,” he says, the end will shortly follow on account of the manifest wickedness of the Pope and the Papists. According to him, the Bible itself teaches that, “after the downfall of the Pope and the deliverance of the poor, no one on earth would ever again be a tyrant and inspire fear.” “This would not be possible,” so Luther thinks, “were the world to go on after the fall of the Pope, for the world cannot exist without tyrants. And thus the Prophet agrees with the Apostle, viz. that Christ, when He comes, will upset the Holy Roman Chair. God grant it may happen speedily. Amen!”[900]

In his fantastic interpretation of the Monk-Calf he declares in a similar way, that the near end of the world is certain in view of the abominations of the sinking Papacy and its monkish system, which last is symbolised in the wonderful calf: “My wish and hope are that it may mean the Last Day, since many signs have so far coincided, and the whole world is as it were in an uproar,”[901] the source of the whole to-do being his triumphant contest with Antichrist. In the same way his conviction of the magnitude and success of his mission against the foe of Christ gives the key to his curious reading of Daniel and the Epistle to the Thessalonians with regard to the time of Antichrist’s advent and the end of the world, which we find set forth quite seriously in his reply to Catharinus.[902] In short, “Antichrist will be revealed whatever the world may do; after this Christ must come with His Judgment Day.”[903]

When the Papacy, instead of collapsing, began to gather strength and even proceeded to summon a Council, Luther did not cease foretelling its fall; he predicts the end of the world in terms even stronger than before, though the reason he assigns for his forebodings is more and more the “contempt shown for the Word,” i.e. for his teaching and exhortations. Disgust, disappointment and the gloomy outlook for the future of his work are now his chief grounds for expecting the end of all and for ardently hoping that the Day will soon dawn.... It is the self-seeking and vice so prevalent in his own fold which wrings from him the exclamation: “It must soon come to a head,”[904] for things cannot long go on thus.

The last temptation which shall assail the faithful, he says, will be “an undisciplined life”; then we shall “grow sick of the Word and disgusted with it.” “Not even the Word of God will they endure; ... the Gospel which they [his own people] once confessed, they now look upon as merely the word of man.” “Do you fancy you are out of the world, or that Satan, the Prince of this world, has died or been crucified in you?”[905] It is bitter experience that causes him to say: “The day will dawn when Christ shall come to free us from sin and death.”[906] “May the world go to rack and ruin and be utterly blotted out,” “the world which has shown me such gratitude during my own lifetime!”[907] “May the Lord call me away, for I have done, and seen, and suffered enough evil.”[908] “Would that the Lord would put an end to the great misery [that among us each one does as he pleases]! Oh that the day of our deliverance would come!”[909] “The people have waxed cold towards the Evangel.... May Christ mend all things and hasten the Day of His Coming.”[910]

“It is a wonder to me what the world does to-day,” he said, alluding to the turmoil in the newly acquired bishopric of Naumburg; he then goes on to complain in the words already given (p. 233), that a new world is growing up around him; no one will admit of having done wrong, of having lied or sinned; those only who meet with injustice are reputed unrighteous, liars and sinners. Verily it would soon rain filth. “The day of our redemption draweth nigh. Amen.” “The world will rage, but good-bye to it”![911]—“The world is indeed a contemptible thing,” he groans, after describing the morals of Wittenberg.[912]

The conduct of the great ones at the Saxon Court led him to surmise that “soon,” after but a few days, hell would be their portion.[913] For those who infringe the rights of his Church he has a similar sentence ready: “Hell will be your share. Come, Lord Jesus, come, listen to the groaning of Thy people, and hasten Thy coming!”—“Farewell and teach your people to pray for the day of the Lord; for of better times there is no longer any hope.”[914]

“During our lifetime,” he laments in 1545, “and under our very eyes, we see sects and dissensions arising, each one wishing to follow his own fancy. In short, contempt for the Word on our own side and blasphemy on the other seem to me to announce the times of which John the Baptist spoke to the people, saying: ‘The axe is laid to the root of the tree,’ etc. Accordingly, since the end at least of this happy age is imminent, there seems no call to bother much about setting up, or coming to an understanding regarding, those troublesome ceremonies.”[915]

In fact, he is determined not “to bother much,” not merely about the “ceremonies,” but about the whole question of Church organisation, for of what use doing so when the signs of the general end of all are increasing at such a rate? “To set up laws” is, according to him, quite impracticable; let everything settle itself “according to the law of God by means of the inspection.”[916]

“To Luther the end which Christ was about to put to this wicked world seemed so near,” so we read in Köstlin-Kawerau’s biography,[917] “that he never contemplated any progressive development and expansion of Christendom and the Church, nor was he at all anxious about the possible ups and downs which might accompany such development.... It is just in his later years that we find him more firmly established than ever in the belief, that the world will always remain the world and that it must be left to the Lord to take what course He pleases with it and with His Christendom, until the coming of the ‘longed-for Last Day.’”

At any rate, since the sectarians in his own camp and the various centrifugal forces inherent in his creation made impossible any real organisation, he was all the more ready to welcome the thought of the end of the world in that it distracted his mind from the sad state of things.

On the top of the schisms and immorality of the people there was also the avarice of those in high places, which roused his hatred and contributed to make him sigh for the coming of the Day.

“They all rage against God and His Messias.” “This is the work of those centaurs, the foes of the Church, kept in store for the latter days. They are more insatiable than hell itself. But Christ, Who will shortly come in His glory, will quiet them, not indeed with gold, but with brimstone and flames of hell, and with the wrath of God.”[918] It was his displeasure against some of the authorities which wrung from him the words: “But the end is close at hand,” the end which will also spell the end of “all this seizing—or rather thieving greed for Church property—of the Princes, nobles and magistrates, hateful and execrable that it is.”[919] Taking this in conjunction with the attitude of the Catholic rulers he could say with greater confidence than ever: “Nothing good is to be hoped for any more but this alone, that the day of the glory of our great God and our Redeemer may speedily break upon us.” “From so Satanic a world” he would fain be “quickly snatched,” longing as he does for the Day and for the “end of Satan’s raging.”[920]

The End of the World in the Table-Talk

In the above we have drawn on Luther’s letters. If we turn to his Table-Talk, particularly to that dating from his later years, we find that there, too, his frequent allusions to the approaching end of the world are as a rule connected with his experience of the corruption in his surroundings, especially at Wittenberg. The carelessness of the young is sufficient to make him long for the Last Day, which alone seemed to promise any help.

To Melanchthon, who, with much concern, had drawn his attention to the lawlessness of the students, Luther poured out his soul, as we read in Lauterbach’s Diary: As the students were growing daily wilder he hoped that, “if God wills, the Last Day be not far off, the Day which shall put an end to all things.”[921] “The ingratitude and profanity of the world,” he also says, “makes me apprehend that this light [of the Evangel] will not last long.” “The refinement of malice, thanklessness and disrespect shown towards the Gospel now revealed” is so great “that the Last Day cannot be far off.”[922]

In his Table-Talk, where Luther is naturally more communicative than in his letters, we see even more plainly how deeply the idea of the approaching Day of Judgment had sunk into his mind and under how curious a shape it there abides. “Things will get so bad on this earth,” he says, for instance, “that men will cry out everywhere: O God, come with Thy Last Judgment.” He would not mind “eating the agate Paternoster” (a string of beads he wore round his neck) if only that would make the Day “come on the morrow.”[923] “The end is at the door,” he continues, “the world is on the lees; if anyone wants to begin something let him hurry up and make a start.”[924] “The next day he again spoke much of the end of the world, having had many evil dreams of the Last Judgment during the previous six months”; it was imminent, for Scripture said so; the present hangs like a ripe apple on the tree; the Roman Empire, “the last sweet-william” would also soon tumble to the ground.[925]

In 1530 Luther was disposed to regard the Roman Empire under Charles V with a rather more favourable eye. His impression then was that the Empire, “under our Emperor Carol, is beginning to look up and becoming more powerful than it was for many a year”; yet strange to say he knew how to bring even this fact into connection with the Judgment Day; for this strengthening of the Empire “seems to me,” so he goes on, “like a sort of last effort; for when a light or wisp of straw has burnt down and is about to go out it sends up a flame and seems just about to flare up bravely when suddenly it dies out; this is what Christendom is now doing thanks to the bright Evangel.”[926] Hence all he could see was the last flicker both of the Empire and of the new teaching before final extinction.

The noteworthy utterance about the last flicker of the Lutheran Evangel occurs also in the Table-Talk collected by Mathesius dating from the years 1542 and 1543. “I believe that the Last Day is not far off. The reason is that we now see the last effort of the Evangel; this resembles a light; when a light is about to expire it sends up at the last a sudden flame as though it were going to burn for quite a long while and thereupon goes out. And, though it appears now as though the Evangel were about to be spread abroad, I fear it will suddenly expire and the Last Day come. It is the same with a sick man; when at the point of death he seems quite cheerful and on the high road to recovery, and, then, suddenly, he is gone.”[927]

The Table-Talk from the Mathesius collection recently published by Kroker, among other curious utterances of Luther’s on the end of the world, contains also the following:

In view of the dissensions by which the new Evangel was torn the speaker says, in 1542-43: “If the world goes on for another fifty years things will become worse than ever, for sects will arise which still lie hidden in the hearts of men, so that we shall not know where we stand. Hence, dear Lord, come! Come and overwhelm them with Thy Judgment Day, for no improvement is any longer to be looked for.”[928]

Here too he repeatedly declares that he himself is tired of the world: “I have had enough of the world,” he says, and goes on to introduce the ugly comparison alluded to above.[929] He adds: “The world fancies that if only it were rid of me all would be well.” He is saddened to see that many of his followers make little account of him: “If the Princes and gentry won’t do it, then things will not last long.”[930] Of the want of respect shown to his preachers he says: “Where there is such contempt of the Divine Word and of the preachers, shall not God smite with His fist?” “But if we preachers were to meet and agree amongst ourselves, as has been done in the Papacy, there would be less need for this. The worst of it is that they are not at one even amongst themselves.” He finds a makeshift consolation for the divergency in teaching in the thought that “so it always was even from the beginning of the world, preachers always having disagreed amongst themselves.” “There is a bad time coming, look you to it”; things may go on for another fifty years now that the young have been brought up in his doctrine, but, after that, “let them look out. Hence, let no one fear the plague, but rather be glad to die.”[931] Not only did he look forward to his own death, but, as we know, to that of “all his children,” seeing that strange things would happen in the world.[932]

We have heard him say, that it was a mercy for the young, that, being thoughtless and without experience, they did not see the harm caused by the scandals, “else they could not endure to live.”[933] And, that the world could “not possibly last long.” Its hours are numbered, for, thanks to me, “everything has now been put straight. The Gospel has been revealed.”[934]

“Christ said, that, at His coming, faith would be hard to find on the earth (Luke xviii. 8). That is true, for the whole of Asia and Africa is without the Evangel, and even as regards Europe no Gospel is preached in Greece, Italy, Hungary, Spain, France, England or Poland. The one little bright spot, the house of Saxony, will not hinder the coming of the Last Day.”[935]

“Praise be to God Who has taught us to sigh after it and long for it! In Popery everybody dreads it.”[936]

“Amen, so be it, Amen!” so he sighed in 1543 in a letter to Amsdorf alluding to the end of the world. “The world was just like this before the Flood, before the Babylonian captivity, before the destruction of Jerusalem, before the devastation of Rome and before the misfortunes of Greece and Hungary; so it will be and so it is before the ruin of Germany too. They refuse to listen, so they must be made to feel. I should be glad to console ourselves both, by discussing this thought [of the contempt of the Papists for us] with you by word of mouth.” “We will leave them in the lurch” and cease from attempting their conversion. “Farewell in the Lord, Who is our Helper and Who will help us for ever and ever. Amen.”[937]

“Under the Pope,” we read in the Colloquies, “at least the name of Christ was retained, but our thanklessness and presumptuous sense of security will bring things to such a pass that Christ will be no longer even named, and so the words of the Master already quoted will be fulfilled according to which, at His coming, no faith will remain on the earth.”[938]

As to the circumstances which should accompany the end of the world, he still expected the catastrophe to take place most likely about Easter time, “early in the morning, after a thunderstorm of an hour or perhaps a little more.”[939]

Here he no longer gives the world “a bare hundred years more,” nor even something “not more than fifty years”;[940] he almost expects the end to come before the completion of his translation of the Bible into German.[941] The world will certainly not last until 1548, so he declared, “for this would run counter to Ezechiel.”[942] He is not quite sure whether the Golden Age begins in 1540 or not, though such was the contention of the mathematicians; but “we shall see the fulfilment of Scripture,”[943] or at any rate, as he prudently adds elsewhere, our descendants will. But before this can come the “great light” of faith would have to be dimmed still more.[944]

Luther concludes by saying that he is unable to suggest anything further; he had done all he could; God’s vengeance on the world was so great, he declares, that he could no longer give any advice; for “amongst us whom God has treated so mercifully and on whom He has bestowed all His Graces there is nothing left that is not corrupted and perverted.”[945] “On divine authority we began to amend the world, but it refuses to hearken; hence let it crumble to ruins, for such is its fate!”[946]

In his predictions concerning the end of the world Luther did not sufficiently take to heart the mishap which befell his pupil and friend Michael Stiefel, though he himself had been at pains to reprove him. Stiefel had calculated that the end of the world would come at 8 a.m. on Oct. 19, 1533, at which hour he and his parishioners awaited it assembled in the church at Lochau. Their watch was, however, in vain; the world continued to go its way and the Court judged it expedient to remove the preacher for a while from his post.

Taking these eschatological ideas or rather ardent wishes of Luther’s later life in all their bearings, and giving due weight to the almost unbounded dominion they exercised over his mind, one might well incline to see in them signs of an unhealthy and overwrought mind. They seem to have been due to excessive mental strain, to the reaction following on the labours of his long life’s struggle in the cause of his mission. It is not unlikely that pathology played some part in the depression from which he suffered.

His early theological development also throws some light on the psychological problem, owing to a parallel which it affords.

The middle-point and mainstay of his theology, viz. his doctrine of Justification, was wholly a result of his own personal feelings; after cutting it, so to speak, to his own measure he proceeded to make it something of world-wide application, a doctrine which should rule every detail of religious life, and around which all theology should cluster if it is to be properly understood. In a similar way, after beginning by adapting to his own case the theory of the near end of the world—to which he was early addicted—he gradually came to find in it the clue wherewith to unravel all the knotty problems which began to present themselves. It became his favourite plan to regard everything in the light of the end of the world and advent of Christ. Just as he was fond of asseverating, in spite of all the contradictions it involved, that he could find in his dogma of Justification endless comfort for both himself and the faithful, so, too, he came to regard the Last Day, in spite of all its terrors, as the source of the highest, nay, of the only remaining, joy of life, for himself and for all. With a vehemence incomprehensible to sober reason he allowed himself to be carried away by this idea as he had been by others. Such was his temperament that he could rejoice in the coming of the Judge, Who should deliver him from the bonds of despair.

Hence Luther’s expectation of the end of the world was something very different from that of certain Saints of whom Church-history tells us. Pope Gregory I or Vincent Ferrer were not moved to foretell the approaching end of the world by disgust with life, by disappointment, or as a result of waging an unequal struggle with the Church of their day, nor again because they regarded the destruction of the world as the only escape from the confusion they had brought about. Nor do they speak of the end of the world with any fanatical expectation of their own personal salvation, but rather with a mixture of fear and calm trust in God’s bounty to the righteous; they have none of Luther’s pessimism concerning the world, and, far from desiring things to “take their course,”[947] they exerted every nerve to ensure the everlasting salvation of as many of their fellow-creatures as possible before the advent of the Judge; to this end they had recourse to preaching and the means of grace provided by the Church and insisted greatly on the call for faith and good works. Above all, they gave a speaking proof of their faith by their works and by the inspiring example of heroic sanctity.

3. Melanchthon under the Double Burden, of Luther’s Personality and his own Life’s Work

The personality of Luther counts for much among the trials which embittered Melanchthon’s life.

The passages already quoted witnessing thereto[948] must here be supplemented by what he himself says of his experiences at Luther’s side, in a letter he wrote in 1548 to the councillor Carlowitz and the Court of Saxony. There was some doubt as to what attitude Melanchthon would adopt towards Maurice of Saxony, the new sovereign, the victor of the Schmalkalden War, and to his demands in the matter of religion.

In the letter, which to say the least is very conciliatory, Melanchthon says that he will know how to keep silence on any ecclesiastical regulations, no matter how distasteful to him they may be: for he knew what it was “to endure even a truly ignominious bondage, Luther having frequently given the rein to his own natural disposition, which was not a little quarrelsome, instead of showing due consideration for his own position and the general welfare.” He goes on to explain the nature of the habit of silence he had so thoroughly mastered; it meant no sacrifice of his own doctrine and views (“non mutato genere doctrinæ”). For twenty long years, so he complains, he had been obliged to bear the reproaches of the zealots of the party because he had toned down certain doctrines and had ventured to differ from Luther; they had called him ice and frost, accused him of being in league with the Papists, nay, of being ambitious to secure a Cardinal’s hat. Yet he had never had the slightest inclination to go over to the Catholics, for they “were guilty of cruel injustice.” He must, however, say that he, who by nature was a lover of peace and the quiet of the study, had only been drawn into the movement of which Luther was the leader because he, like many wise and learned contemporaries, thought he discerned in it a striving after that truth for which he thirsted and for which he lived. Luther it was true, had, from the very first, introduced a “rougher element into the cause”; he himself, however, had made it his aim to set up only what was true and essentially necessary; he had also done much in the way of reforms, and, to boot, had waged a war against the demagogues (“multa tribunitia plebs”) which, owing to the attacks of enemies at Court, had drawn down on him the displeasure of the sovereign and had even put his life in jeopardy.

Coming finally to speak of the concessions, speculative and practical, which he was prepared to make in addition to preserving silence, he mentions “the authority to be conceded to the bishops and the chief bishop in accordance with the Augsburg Confession.” He adds: “Mayhap I am by nature of a servile turn of mind” (“fortassis sum ingenio servili”), but, after all there is a real call to be humble and open to advances. He also refers to the defeat of the Evangelical Princes, but only to assure Carlowitz that he attributes this, “not to blind fate, but rather admit that we have drawn down the chastisement on ourselves by many and great misdeeds.”[949]

This is the oft-quoted declaration which Protestant writers as a whole regret more on Melanchthon’s than on Luther’s account. It was “an unhappy hour” in which Melanchthon wrote the letter “which gives us so profound an insight into his soul”;[950] he forgot that he was “a public character”; “in this letter not only what he says of Luther and of his relations with him, but even his account of the share he himself took in the Reformation,” “is scarcely to his credit.”[951]

Another Protestant holds, however, a different view. In this letter we have, as a matter of fact, “the expression of feelings which for long years Melanchthon had most carefully kept under restraint locked up in his heart.... From it we may judge how great was the vexation and bitterness Melanchthon had to endure.... In an unguarded moment what had been so long pent up broke out with elemental force.” The historian we are quoting then goes on to plead for a “milder sentence,” especially as “almost every statement which occurs in the letter can be confirmed from Melanchthon’s confidential correspondence of the previous twenty years.”[952]

Some of Melanchthon’s Deliverances

It is quite true, that, in his confidential correspondence, Melanchthon had long before made allusions to the awkwardness of his position.

He says, for instance, in a letter to the famous physician Leonard Fuchs, who wanted him to take up his abode at Tübingen: “Some Fate has, as it were, bound me fast against my will, like hapless Prometheus,” bound to the Caucasian rock, of whom the classic myth speaks. Nevertheless, he had not lost hope of sometime cutting himself free; happy indeed would he account himself could he find a quiet home amongst his friends at Tübingen where he might devote his last years to study.[953]

On a later occasion, when bewailing his lot, the image of Prometheus again obtrudes itself on the scholar.[954]

Melanchthon’s uneasiness and discontent with his position did not merely arise from the mental oppression he experienced at Luther’s side; it was, as already pointed out, in part due to sundry other factors, such as the persecution he endured from disputatious theologians within the party, the sight of the growing confusion which met his eye day by day, the public dangers and the moral results of the religious upheaval, and, lastly, the depressing sense of being out of the element where his learning and humanistic tastes might have found full and unhampered scope. His complaints dwell, now on one, now on some other of these trials, but, taken together, they combine to make up a tragic historical picture of a soul distraught; this is all the more surprising, since, owing to the large share he had in the introduction of the new Evangel, the cheering side of the great religious reform should surely have been reflected in Melanchthon.

“It is not fitting,” writes the Protestant theologian Carl Sell, “to throw a veil over the sad close of Melanchthon’s life, for it was but the logical consequence of his own train of thought.” Luther’s theology, of the defects of which Melanchthon was acutely conscious, had, according to Sell, “already begun to break down as an adequate theory of life”;[955] of the forthcoming disintegration Luther’s colleague already had a premonition.

In Aug., 1536, when Melanchthon paid a visit to his home and also to Tübingen, he became more closely acquainted with the state of the Protestant Churches, both in the Palatinate and in Swabia. It was at that time that he wrote to his friend Myconius: “Had you travelled with us and seen the woeful devastation of the Churches in many localities you would undoubtedly long, with tears and groans, for the Princes and the learned to take steps for the welfare of the Churches. At Nuremberg the good attendance at public worship and the orderly arrangement of the ceremonies pleased me greatly; elsewhere, however, lack of order and general barbarism is wonderfully estranging the people [from religion; ‘[Greek: ataxia] et barbaries mirum in modum alienat animos’]. Oh, that the authorities would see to the remedying of this evil!”[956]

After he had reluctantly resumed the burden of his Wittenberg office he continued to fret about the dissensions in his own camp. “Look,” he wrote to Veit Dietrich in 1537, “how great is the danger to which the Churches are everywhere exposed and how difficult it is to govern them, when those in authority are at grips with one another and set up strife and confusion, whereas it is from them that we should look for help.... What we have to endure is worse than all the trials of Odysseus the sufferer.”[957]

In the following year he told the same friend the real evil was, that “we live like gipsies, no one being willing to obey another in any single thing.”[958]

In the name of Wittenberg University he wrote to Mohr, the Naumburg preacher, who was quarrelling with his brethren in the ministry, “What is to happen in future if, for so trivial a matter, such wild and angry broils break out amongst those who govern the Church?”[959]

The growing tendency to strife he describes in 1544 in these words: “There are at present many people whose quarrels are both countless and endless, and who everywhere find a pretext for them.”[960]

Many of his complaints concerning the morals of the time, as Döllinger remarks, sound very much like those of a “sworn Catholic criticising the state of affairs brought about by the Reformation.” Döllinger also calls attention to the saying of 1537: “The only glory remaining in this iron age is that of boldly breaking down the barriers of discipline (‘audacter dissipare vincula disciplinæ’) and of propounding to the people new opinions neatly cut and coloured.”[961] A similar dictum dates from 1538. “Our age, as you can see, is full of malice and madness, and more addicted to intrigue than any previous one. The man who is most shameless in his abuse is regarded as the best orator. Oh, that God would change this!”[962] The growing evils made him more and more downhearted. “People have become barbarians,” he exclaims twelve years later to his friend Camerarius, “and, accustomed as they are to hatred and contempt of law and order, fear lest any restraint be put on their licentiousness (‘metuunt frenari licentiam’). These are the evils decreed for the last age of the world.”[963]

Over and over again we can see how the timorous man endeavours to clear the religious innovations of any responsibility for the prevalent lawlessness, which, as he says, deserved to be bewailed with floods of tears; after all, the true Church had been revived; this edifice, this temple of God, still remained amidst all the chaos; even in Noe’s day it had been exposed to damage.[964] At times, though less frequently than Luther, he lays all the blame on Satan; the latter, by means of the scandals, was seeking to scare people away from the true Evangel now brought to light, and to vex the preachers into holding their tongues.

Pessimistic consideration of the “last age of the world” was quite in his line; the dark though not altogether unfriendly shadow of the approaching end of all was discernible in the moral disorders, in the unbelief and anti-christian spirit of the foe. He would not dwell, so he once said, on the state of things among the people towards whom he was willing to be indulgent, but it could not be gainsaid that, “among the learned open contempt for religion was on the increase; they lean either towards the Epicureans or towards universal scepticism. Forgetfulness of God, the wickedness of the times, the senseless fury of the Princes, all unite in proving that the world lies in the pains of travail and that the joyous coming of Christ is nigh.”[965] It was his hopelessness and the great solace he derived from the approaching end of all things that called forth this frame of mind. It is also plain that he saw no prospect of improvement. “In these last days,” he says, even a zealous preacher can no longer hope for success, though this does not give him the right to quit his post.[966] The poetic reference to the frenzied old age of the world (“delira mundi senecta”) is several times met with in his letters.

In 1537 he grumbled to Johann Brenz, the preacher, of the hostility of the theologians, especially of the Luther-zealots; he had seen what hatred the mitigations he had introduced in Luther’s doctrines had excited. “I conceal everything beneath the cloak of my moderation, but what shall I do eventually faced by the rage of so many (‘in tanta rabie multorum’)?”[967] “I seek for a creephole,” he continues, “may God but show me one, for I am worn out with illness, old age and sorrow.”

Of Amsdorf he learnt with pain that he had warned Luther against him as a serpent whom he was warming in his bosom.[968]

Andreas Osiander likewise wrote of Melanchthon to Besold at Nuremberg, that, since Apostolic times, no more mischievous and pernicious man had lived in the Church, so skilful was he in giving to his writings the semblance of wholesome doctrine while all the time denying its truth. “I believe that Philip and those who think like him are nothing but slaves of Satan.” On another occasion the same bitter opponent of Melanchthon inveighs against the religious despotism which now replaced at Wittenberg the former Papal authority, a new tyranny which required, that “all disputes should be submitted to the elders of the Church.”[969]—It was men such as these who repaid him for the labours he had reluctantly undertaken on behalf of the Church. Of their bitter opposition he wrote, that, even were he to shed as many tears as there was water in the flooded Elbe, he would still not be able to weep away his grief.[970]

Melanchthon’s Strictures on Luther. His “Bondage”

If we consider more closely Melanchthon’s relations with Luther we find him, even during Luther’s lifetime, indignantly describing the latter’s attacks on man’s free-will as “stoica et manichæa deliria”; he himself, he declares, in spite of Luther’s views to the contrary, had always insisted that man, even before regeneration, is able by virtue of his free-will to observe outward discipline and, that, in regeneration, free-will follows on grace and thereafter receives from on High help for doing what is good. Later, after Luther’s death, he declared, with regard to this denial of free-will which shocked him, that it was quite true that “Luther and others had written that all works, good and bad, were inevitably decreed to be performed of all men, good and bad alike; but it is plain that this is against God’s Word, subversive of all discipline and a blasphemy against God.”[971]

In a letter of 1535 to Johann Sturm he finds fault with the harshness of Luther’s doctrine and with his manner of defending it, though, from motives of caution, he refrains from mentioning Luther by name. He himself, however, was looked upon at the Court of the Elector as “less violent and stubborn than some others”; it was just because they fancied him useful as a sort of valve, as they called it, that they refused to release him from his professorial chair at Wittenberg. And such is really the case. “I never think it right to quarrel unless about something of great importance and quite essential. To support every theory and extravagant opinion that takes the field has never been my way. Would that the learned were permitted to speak out more freely on matters of importance!” But, instead of this, people ran after their own fancies. There was no doubt that, at times, even some of their own acted without forethought. “On account of my moderation I am in great danger from our own people ... and it seems to me that the fate of Theramenes awaits me.”[972] Theramenes had perished on the scaffold in a good cause—but before this had been guilty of grievous infidelity and was a disreputable intriguer. Of this Melanchthon can scarcely have been aware, otherwise he would surely have chosen some less invidious term of comparison. He was happier in his selection when, in 1544, he compared himself to Aristides on account of the risk he ran of being sent into exile by Luther: “Soon you will hear that I have been sent away from here as Aristides was from Athens.”[973]

Especially after 1538, i.e. during the last eight years of Luther’s life, Melanchthon’s stay at Wittenberg was rendered exceedingly unpleasant. In 1538 he reminds Veit Dietrich of the state of bondage ([Greek: doulotês]) of which the latter had gleaned some acquaintance while in Wittenberg (1522-35); “and yet,” he continues, “Luther has since become much worse.”[974] In later letters he likens Luther to the demagogue Cleon and to boisterous Hercules.[975]

Although it was no easy task for Luther, whose irritability increased with advancing years, to conceal his annoyance with his friend for presuming to differ from him, yet, as we know, he never allowed matters to come to an open breach. Melanchthon, too, owing to his fears and pusillanimity, avoided any definite personal explanation. Both alike were apprehensive of the scandal of an open rupture and its pernicious effects on the common cause. Moreover, Luther was thoroughly convinced that Melanchthon’s services were indispensable to him, particularly in view of the gloomy outlook for the future.

The matter, however, deserves further examination in view of the straightforwardness, clearness and inexorableness which Luther is usually supposed to have displayed in his doctrines.

When important interests connected with his position seemed to call for it, Luther could be surprisingly lenient in questions of doctrine. Thus, for instance, we can hardly recognise the once so rigid Luther in the Concord signed with the Zwinglians, and again, when, for a while, the English seemed to be dallying with Lutheranism. In the case of the Zwinglian townships of South Germany, which were received into the Union by the Wittenberg Concord the better to strengthen the position of Lutheranism against the Emperor, Luther finally, albeit grudgingly, gave his assent to theological articles which differed so widely from his own doctrines that the utmost skill was required to conceal the discrepancy.[976] As for the English, Kolde says: “How far Luther was prepared to go [in allowing matters to take their course] we see, e.g. from the fact that, in his letter of March 28, 1536, to the Elector, he describes the draft Articles of agreement with the English—only recently made public and which (apart from Art. 10, which might at a pinch be taken in the Roman sense) are altogether on the lines of the ‘Variata’—as quite in harmony with our own teaching.”[977] The terms of this agreement were drawn up by Melanchthon. As a matter of fact “we find little trace of Luther’s spirit in the Articles. We have simply to compare [Luther’s] Schmalkalden Articles of the following year to be convinced how greatly Luther’s own mode of thought and expression differed from those Articles.” “They show us what concessions the Wittenberg theologians, as a body, were disposed to make in order to win over such a country as England.”[978]

Concerning Luther’s attitude towards the alterations made by Melanchthon in the Confession of Augsburg (above, vol. iii., p. 445 f.) we must also assume “from his whole behaviour, that he was not at all pleased with Melanchthon’s action; yet he allowed it, like much else, to pass.”[979] This, however, does not exclude Luther’s violence and narrowness having caused an estrangement between them, Melanchthon having daily to apprehend outbursts of anger, so that his stay became extremely painful. The most critical time was in the summer of 1544, in consequence of the Cologne Book of Reform (vol. iii., p. 447). Luther, who strongly suspected Melanchthon’s orthodoxy on the Supper, prepared to assail anew those who denied the Real Presence. Yet the storm which Melanchthon dreaded did not touch him; Luther’s “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament,” which appeared at the end of September, failed to mention Melanchthon’s name. On Oct. 7, Cruciger was able by letter to inform Dietrich, that the author no longer displayed any irritation against his old friend.[980] Here again considerations of expediency had prevailed over dogmatic scruples, nor is there any doubt that the old feeling of friendship, familiarity and real esteem asserted its rights. We may recall the kindly sympathy and care that Luther lavished on Melanchthon when the latter fell sick at Weimar, owing to the trouble consequent on his sanction given to the Hessian bigamy.[981]

Indeed we must assume that the relations between the two were often more cordial than would appear from the letters of one so timid and faint-hearted as Melanchthon; the very adaptability of the latter’s character renders this probable. In Nov., 1544, Chancellor Brück declared: “With regard to Philip, as far as I can see, he and Martin are quite close friends”; in another letter written about that time he also says Luther had told him that he was quite unaware of any differences between himself and Melanchthon.[982]

The latter, whenever he was at Wittenberg, also continued as a rule to put in an appearance at Luther’s table, and there is little doubt that, on such occasions, Luther’s frank and, open conversation often availed to banish any ill-feeling there may have been. We learn that Magister Philip was present at the dinner in celebration of Luther’s birthday in 1544, together with Cruciger, Bugenhagen, Jonas and Major, and that they exchanged confidences concerning the present and future welfare of the new religion.[983]

When Melanchthon was away from Wittenberg engaged in settling ecclesiastical matters elsewhere he was careful to keep Luther fully informed of the course of affairs. He occasionally expressed his thanks to the latter for the charity and kindness of his replies; Luther in his turn kept him posted in the little intimacies of their respective families, in the occurrences in the town and University of Wittenberg, and almost always added a request for prayer for help in his struggles with “Satan.” This intimate correspondence was carried on until the very month before Luther’s death. Even in his last letters Luther calls the friend with whom he had worked for so many years “My Philip”; Melanchthon, as a rule, heads his communications in more formal style: “Clarissimo et optimo viro D. Martino Luthero, doctori theologiæ, instauratori puræ evangelicæ doctrinæ ac patri suo in Christo reverendo et charissimo.”[984]

The great praise which Melanchthon bestows on the deceased immediately after his death is indeed startling, but we must beware of regarding it as mere hypocrisy.

The news of Luther’s death which took place at Eisleben on Feb. 14, 1546, was received by Melanchthon the very next day. In spite of all their differences it must have come as a shock to him, the more so that the responsibility for the direction of his friend’s work was now to devolve on him.

The panegyric on Luther which Melanchthon delivered at Wittenberg boldly places him on the same footing with Isaias, John the Baptist, the Apostle of the Gentiles, and Augustine of Hippo. In it the humanistic element and style is more noticeable than the common feeling of the friend. He hints discreetly at the “great vehemence” of the departed, but does not omit to mention that everyone who was acquainted with him must bear witness that he had always shown himself kind-hearted towards his friends, and never obstinate or quarrelsome.[985] Though this is undoubtedly at variance with what he says elsewhere, still such a thing was expected in those days in panegyrics on great men, nor would so smooth-tongued an orator have felt any scruple about it. In his previous announcement of Luther’s death to the students he had exclaimed: “The chariot of Israel and the driver thereof have been taken from us, the man who ruled the Church in these days of the world’s senile decay.”[986]

Melanchthon’s Last Years

After Luther’s death Melanchthon had still to endure fourteen years of suffering, perhaps of even more bitter character than he had yet tasted. Whilst representing Lutheranism and taking the lead amongst his colleagues he did so with the deliberate intention of maintaining the new faith by accommodating himself indulgently to the varying conditions of the times. Our narrative may here be permitted to anticipate somewhat in order to give a clear and connected account of Melanchthon’s inner life and ultimate fate.[987]

His half-heartedness and love of compromise were a cause of many hardships to him, particularly at the time of the so-called Interims of Augsburg and Leipzig. It was a question of introducing the Augsburg Interim into the Saxon Electorate after the latter, owing to the War of Schmalkalden, had come under the rule of the new Elector Maurice. Melanchthon had at first opposed the provisions of this Interim, by means of which the Emperor hoped gradually to bring the Protestants back to the fold. In Dec., 1548, however, he, together with other theologians, formally accepted the Leipzig articles, which, owing to their similarity with the Augsburg Interim, were dubbed by his opponents the “Leipzig Interim,”[988] In this the “moot observances (Adiaphora), i.e. those which may be kept without any contravention of Divine Scripture,” were extended by Melanchthon so as to include the reintroduction of fasting, festivals, not excluding even Corpus Christi, images of the Saints in the churches, the Latin liturgy, the Canonical Hours in Latin and even a sort of hierarchy. Melanchthon also agreed to the demand for the recognition of the seven sacraments. By strongly emphasising his own doctrine of synergism, he brought the Wittenberg teaching on Justification much nearer to Catholic dogma; he even dealt a death-blow to the genuine doctrine of Luther by appending his signature to the following proposition: “God does not deal with man as with a block of wood, but so draws him that his will also co-operates.” In addition to this the true character of Luther’s sola fides, or assurance of salvation, was veiled by Melanchthon under the formula: “True faith accepts, together with other articles, that of the ‘Forgiveness of Sins.’”

Hence when Flacius Illyricus, Amsdorf, Gallus, Wigand, Westphal and others loudly protested against Melanchthon as though he had denied Luther’s doctrine, they were not so very far wrong. The result of their vigorous opposition and of the number of those who sided with them was that Melanchthon gradually ceased to be the head of the Lutheran Church, becoming merely the leader of a certain party.

Later on, in 1552, when the position of public affairs in Germany was more favourable to Protestantism, Melanchthon admitted that he had been wrong in his views concerning the Adiaphora, since, after all, they were not so unimportant as he had at first thought. In order to pacify his opponents he included the following proposition in his form of examination for new preachers: “We ought to profess, not the Papal errors, Interim, etc. ... but to remain faithful to the pure Divine teaching of the Gospel.”[989]

Opposition to the “Papal errors” was indeed the one thing to which he steadfastly adhered; this negative side of his attitude never varied, whatever changes may have taken place in his positive doctrines.

Nevertheless during the ensuing controversies he was regarded as a traitor by the stricter Lutherans and treated with a scorn that did much to embitter his last years. The attitude of his opponents was particularly noticeable at the conference of Worms in 1557. Even before this, they, particularly the Jena theologians, had planned an outspoken condemnation of all those who “had departed from the Augsburg Confession,” as Melanchthon had done. They now appeared at Worms with others of the same way of thinking. “I desire no fellowship with those who defile the purity of our doctrine,” wrote one of them; “we must shun them, according to the words of the Bible: ‘If any man come to you and bring not this doctrine, receive him not into the house nor say to him, God speed you.’”[990] The friends of Flacius Illyricus at the very first meeting made no secret of their unanimous demand, so that Melanchthon in his justificatory statement could well say: “I see plainly that all this is directed solely against me.” He opposed any condemnation of Zwingli or of Calvin on account of their doctrine on the Supper; this, he said, was the business of a synod.