3. Another evil feature of the brotherhoods is of a spiritual nature; it is a false opinion of themselves, in that they think their brotherhood is to be a benefit to no one but to themselves, — to those who are members and are on the roll or contribute. This damnably wicked opinion is an even worse evil than the first, and is one of the reasons why God has brought it about that the brotherhoods are becoming such a mockery and blasphemy of God through gluttony, drunkenness and the like. For there they learn to seek their own good, to love themselves, to be faithful only to one another, to despise others, to think themselves better than others and presume to stand higher before God than others. And thus perishes the communion of saints, the Christian love, and the true brotherhood, established in the holy sacrament. Thus a selfish love grows in them; that is, by these many external work-brotherhoods they oppose and destroy the one, inner, spiritual, essential, common brotherhood of all saints.
When God sees this perverted state of affairs, He perverts it still more, as is written in Psalm xviii31, “With the perverse thou wilt be perverted” [Ps. 18:26]; and He brings it to pass that they make themselves and their brotherhoods a mockery and a disgrace, and He casts them out from the common brotherhood of saints, which they oppose and do not make common cause with, into their brotherhood of gluttony, drunkenness and unchastity, so that they, who have neither sought nor thought of anything more than their own, may find their own; and then He blinds them that they do not recognize it as an abomination and disgrace, but adorn their unseemliness with the names of saints, as though they were doing right; beyond this He lets some fall into so deep an abyss that they openly boast and say whoever is in their brotherhood cannot be condemned, as though baptism and the sacrament, instituted by God Himself, were of less worth and were less certain than that which they have thought out with their darkened minds. Therefore their God will dishonor and blind those who, with their mad conduct and the swinish practices of their brotherhoods, mock and blaspheme His easts, His name, and His saints, to the injury of the common Christian brotherhood, which flowed from the wounds of Christ.
4. Therefore, for the right understanding and use of the brotherhoods, one must learn to distinguish rightly between brotherhoods. The first is the divine, the heavenly, the noblest, which surpasses all others, as gold surpasses copper or lead — the fellowship of all saints, of which we spoke above32. In this we are all brothers and sisters, so closely united that a closer relationship cannot be conceived, for here we have one baptism, one Christ, one sacrament, one food, one Gospel, one faith, one Spirit, one spiritual body, and each is a member of the other; no other brotherhood is so close. For natural brothers are, to be sure, brothers of one flesh and blood, of one heritage and home, but they must separate and join themselves to others’ blood and heritage33. Organized brotherhoods have one roll, one mass, one kind of good works, one festival day, one treasury, and, as things are now, their common beer, common feast and common debauch, but none of these binds men so closely together as to produce one spirit, for that is done by Christ’s brotherhood alone.
Since, then, the greater, broader and more embracing Christ’s brotherhood is, the better it is, therefore all other brotherhoods should be so conducted as to keep this first and noblest brotherhood constantly before their eyes, to regard it alone as great, and with all their works to seek nothing for themselves, but do them for God’s sake, to entreat God that He keep and prosper this Christian fellowship and brotherhood from day to day. Hence, when a brotherhood is formed, they should let it be seen that its members outstrip other persons in order to do Christianity some special service with their prayers, fastings, alms and good works, and not in order to seek selfish profit or reward, nor to exclude others, but to serve as the free servants of the whole community of Christians.
If men had such a correct conception, God would restore good order, so that the brotherhoods might not be brought to shame by debauchery. Then God’s blessing would follow, so that a general fund might be gathered, with which other men also might be given material aid; then the spiritual and bodily works of the brotherhoods would be done in their proper order. Whoever will not follow this method in his brotherhood I advise to flee from it and let the brotherhood alone; it will do him harm in body and soul.
But if you say, If the brotherhood is not to give me some special advantage, of what use is it to me? I answer: If you are seeking some special advantage, how can the brotherhood or sisterhood help you? Serve the community and other men by it, as is the nature of love, and you will have your reward for this love without any effort and desire on your part. But if you deem the service and reward of love too small, it is evidence that yours is a perverted brotherhood. Love serves freely and for nothing, therefore God also gives again to it every blessing freely and or nothing. Since, then, everything must be done in love, if it is to please God at all, the brotherhood must also be a brotherhood in love. It is the nature, however, of that which is done in love not to seek its own, nor its own profit, but that of others, and, above all, that of the community.
5. To return once more to the sacrament; since the Christian fellowship also is at present in a bad way, as never before, and daily grows worse, especially among the rulers, and all places are full of sin and shame, you should not consider how many masses are said, or how often the sacrament is celebrated, or this will make things worse rather than better, — but how much you and others increase in that which the sacrament signifies and in the faith it demands, — for therein alone lies improvement; and the more you find yourself being incorporated into Christ and into the fellowship of His saints, the better it is with you, — that is, if you find that you are becoming strong in the confidence of Christ and of His dear saints, and are certain that they love you and stand by you in all the trials of life and in death, and that you in turn take to heart the shortcomings and lapses of all Christians and of the whole Church, that your love goes out to everyone, and that you desire to help everyone, to hate no one, to suffer with all and pray or them: then will the work of the sacrament proceed aright, then you will often weep, lament and mourn or the wretched condition of Christendom to-day. If, however, you find no such confidence in Christ and His saints, and the needs of the Church and of every fellowman do not trouble or move you, then beware of all other good works, if in doing them you think you are godly and will be saved. Be assured they are only hypocrisy, sham and deceit, or they are without love and fellowship, and without these nothing is good. For the sum of it all is, Plenitudo legis est dilectio, “Love is the fulfilling of the law.” [Rom. 13:10] Amen.
ENDNOTES.
1 See Treatise on Baptism, Vol. I, pp. 56 ff.
2 Note the advance in The Babylonian Captivity, below, pp. 178 ff.
3 Cf. Babylonian Captivity, below, p. 186.
4 Cf. Sermo, 112, cap. 5 (Migne, xxxviii, 615).
5 See Vol. I, p. 56.
6 E. g., the danger of spilling the wine.
7 See p. 37.
5 Used here and above in the New Testament sense of true Christians, living or dead, cf. 1 Cor. 1:2.
6 See p. 11.
7 See above, pp. 12, 13, and Vol. I, pp. 59 ff.
8 The virgin Mary.
9 Cf. Enarratio in Ps. XXI (Migne, xxxvi, 178).
10 Penitential works.
11 Cf. Acts 2:46.
12 See Vol. I, p. 310.
13 In the Vulgate the Greek word “mystery” is translated by sacramentum. See below, p. 258.
14 Luther still adheres to the doctrine of transubstantiation. But see below, pp. 187 ff.
15 See p. 11.
16 Cf. below, p. 192.
17 See Luther’s explanation of the First Commandment in the Catechisms. Also the answer to the last question in Part V, Small Catechism.
18 Treatise on Penance (Weimer Ed., II, 721), where Luther exhorts the troubled conscience to pray with the father of the lunatic boy, “Lord, I believe, help Thou mine unbelief,” and with the Apostles, “Lord, increase our faith.”
19 Cf. above, p. 17.
20 The Church.
21 A transubstantiation in the communicant.
22 A work that is done without reference to the doer of it.
23 A work considered with reference to the doer of it.
24 An opus operatum.
25 An opus operantis.
26 Cf. 1 Cor. 11:30.
27 Sodalities; see Introduction, p. 8, and below, pp. 137 f.
28 On festival days of the order and on saints’ days.
29 The Carmelites are supposed to have been the first to organize sodalities, having organized in the fourteenth century the Sodality of Our Lady of Carmel. St. Anne was the mother of the Holy Virgin. Her sodalities were, as Kolde says, epidemic in 1520. Luther’s appeal to St. Anne in the thunderstorm is well known (Comp. Köstlin-Kawerau, I, 55). There was a sodality of St. Anne, besides one of St. Augustine and one of St. Catherine, in the monastery at Erfurt in Luther’s day. St. Sebastian was a martyr of the fourteenth century. His day is January 20. Comp. Arts. Anna, Sebastian and Bruderschaten in Prot. Realencyk., I, SS2; II, 534 l.
30 A trades’ guild brotherhood.
31 Douay Version, based on Vulgate, from which Luther quotes.
32 See above, p. 10.
33 I. e., in marriage.
To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520)
Translated by J. J. Schinde
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
ENDNOTES.
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CHRISTIAN NOBILITY OF THE GERMAN NATION CONCERNING THE REFORM OF THE CHRISTIAN ESTATE
I. THE THREE WALLS OF THE ROMANISTS
II. ABUSES TO BE DISCUSSED IN COUNCILS
III. PROPOSALS FOR REFORM
ENDNOTES.
INTRODUCTION
THE OPEN LETTER to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation is closely related to the tract on The Papacy at Rome: A Reply to the Celebrated Romanist at Leipzig1. In a letter to Spalatin2 dated before June 8, 1520, Luther says: “I shall assail that ass of an Alveld in such wise as not to forget the Roman pontiff, and neither of them will be pleased.” In the same letter he writes, “I am minded to issue a broadside to Charles and the nobility of Germany against the tyranny and baseness of the Roman curia.” The attack upon Alveld is the tract on The Papacy at Rome; the scheda publica grew into the Open Letter. At the time when the letter to Spalatin was written, the work on The Papacy at Rome must have been already in press, for it appeared in print on the 26th of the month3, and the composition of the Open Letter had evidently not yet begun. On the 23d Luther sent the manuscript of the Open Letter to Amsdorf4, with the request that he read it and suggest changes. The two weeks immediately preceding the publication of the work On the Papacy must, therefore, have been the time when the Open Letter was composed.
In the conclusion to the earlier work Luther had said: “Moreover, I should be truly glad if kings, princes, and all the nobles would take hold, and turn the knaves from Rome out of the country, and keep the appointments to bishoprics and benefices out of their hands. How has Roman avarice come to usurp all the foundations, bishoprics and benefices of our fathers? Who has ever read or heard of such monstrous robbery? Do we not also have the people who need them, while out of our poverty we must enrich the ass-drivers and stable-boys, nay, the harlots and knaves at Rome, who look upon us as nothing else but arrant fools, and make us the objects of their vile mockery? Oh, the pity, that kings and princes have so little reverence for Christ, and His honor concerns them so little that they allow such heinous abominations to gain the upper hand, and look on, while at Rome they think of nothing but to continue in their madness and to increase the abounding misery, until no hope is let on earth except in the temporal authorities. Of this I will say more anon, if this Romanist comes again; let this suffice for a beginning. May God help us at length to open our eyes. Amen.”
This passage may fairly be regarded as the germ of the Open Letter. The ideas of the latter work are suggested with sufficient clearness to show that its materials are already at hand, and its plan already in the author’s mind. The threat to write it is scarcely veiled. That Luther did not wait for that particular Romanist to “come again” may have been due to the intervention of another Romanist, none other than his old opponent, Sylvester Prierias. Before the 7th of June5 Luther had received a copy of Prierias’ Epitome of a Reply to Martin Luther6, which is the boldest and baldest possible assertion of the very theory of papal power which Luther had sought to demolish in his tract on the Papacy. In the preface to his reprint of the Epitome, Luther bids farewell to Rome: “Farewell, unhappy, hopeless, blasphemous Rome! The wrath of God hath come upon thee, as thou hast deserved! We have cared for Babylon, and she is not healed; let us, then, leave her, that she may be the habitation of dragons, spectres and witches, and true to her name of Babel, an everlasting confusion, a new pantheon of wickedness.”7
These words were written while the Open Letter was in course of composition. The Open Letter is, therefore, Luther’s first publication after the time when he recognized that the breach between him and the papal church was complete, and likely to be permanent. Meanwhile, the opposing party had come to the same conclusion. The verdict of the pope upon Luther had been long delayed, but on the 15th of June, midway between the letter to Spalatin, above mentioned, and the completion of the Open Letter, Leo X signed the bull of excommunication, though it was not published in Germany until later. Thus the Open Letter shows us the mind of Luther in the weeks when the permanent separation between him and Rome took place.
It was also the time when he had the highest hopes from the promised support of the German knights8, who formed the patriotic party in Germany and are included in the “nobility” to whom the Open Letter is addressed9.
The first edition of 4000 copies came off the press of Melchior Lotther in Wittenberg before the 18th of August10. It is surmised11 that the earlier portion12 of the work was not contained in the original manuscript, but was added while it was in the printer’s hands; perhaps it was added at the suggestion of Amsdorf. Less than a week later a second edition was in course of preparation13. This “enlarged and revised edition”14 contained three passages not included in the first15. They are indicated in the notes to the present edition.
He who would know the true Luther must read more than one of his writings; he must not by any chance omit to read the Open Letter to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation. In his other works we learn to know him as the man of God, or the prophet, or the theologian; in this treatise we meet Luther the German. His heart is full of grief for the affliction of his people, and grief turns to wrath as he observes that this affliction is put upon them by the tyranny and greed of the pope and the cardinals and the “Roman vermin.” The situation is desperate; appeals and protests have been all in vain; and so, as a last resort, he turns to the temporal authorities, — to Charles V, newly elected, but as yet uncrowned; to the territorial lords, great and small, who have a voice in the imperial diet and powers of jurisdiction in their own domains, — reciting the abuses of “Roman tyranny,” and pleading with them to intervene in behalf of the souls that are going to destruction “through the devilish rule of Rome.” It is a cry out of the heart of Germany, a nation whose bent is all religious, but which, from that very circumstance, is all the more open to the insults and wrongs and deceptions of the Roman curia.
Yet it is no formless and incoherent cry, but an orderly recital of the ills of Germany. There are times when we feel in reading it that the writer is laying violent hands on his own wrath in the effort to be calm. For all its scathing quality, it is a sane arraignment of those who “under the holy name of Christ and St. Peter” are responsible for the nation’s woes, and the remedies that are proposed are, many of them, practicable as well as reasonable.
The materials of the work are drawn from many sources, — from hearsay, from personal observation, from such histories as Luther had at his command, from the proceedings of counc
ils and of diets; there are passages which would seem to bear more than an accidental resemblance to similar passages in Hutten’s Vadiscus. All was grist that came to Luther’s mill. But the spirit of the work is Luther’s own.
For the general historian, who is concerned more with the practical than with the theoretical or theological aspects of the Reformation, the Open Letter is undoubtedly Luther’s greatest work. Its rank outspokenness about the true condition of Germany, the number and variety of the subjects that it treats, the multiplicity of the sources from which the subject-matter is drawn, and the point of view from which the whole is discussed make it a work of absorbing interest and priceless historical value. It shows, as does no other single work of the Reformation time, the things that were in men’s minds and the variety of motives which led them to espouse the cause of the Protestant party. Doctrine, ethics, history, politics, economics, all have their place in the treatise. It is not only “a blast on the war-trumpet,”16 but a connecting link between the thought of the Middle Ages and that of modern times, prophetic of the new age, but showing how closely the new is bound up with the old.
The text of the Open Letter is found in Weimar Ed., VI, 404-469; Erl. Ed., XXI, 277-360; Walch Ed., X, 296-399; St. Louis Ed., X, 266-351; Berlin Ed., I, 203-290; Clemen I, 363-425. The text of the Berlin Ed. is modernized and annotated by E. Schneider. The editions of K. Benrath (Halle, 1883) and E. Lemme (Die 3 grossen Reformationsschriften L’s vom J. 1520; Gotha, 1884) contain a modernized text and extensive notes. A previous English translation in Wace and Buchheim, Luther’s Primary Works (London and Philadelphia, 1896). The present translation is based on the text of Clemen.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 7