Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  227 See above, p. 140, note 1.

  228 See Kohler, L. und die Kirchengesch., 139, 151.

  229 The Archbishop of Prague was primate of the Church in Bohemia.

  230 The dioceses of these bishops were contiguous to that of the Archbishop of Prague.

  231 Bishop of Carthage, 240-258 A. D.

  232 Lass man ihn ein gut jar ha ben, literally, “Bid him good-day.”

  233 One of the chief points of controversy between the Roman Church and the Hussites. The Roman Church administered to the laity only the bread, the Hussites used both elements. See below, pp. 178 f.

  234 Luther had not yet reached the conviction that the administration of the cup to the laity was a necessity, but see the argument in the Babylonian Captivity, below, pp. 178 ff.

  235 The Bohemian Brethren, who are here distinguished from the Hussites, Cf. Realencyk., Ill, 452, 49.

  236 St. Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican theologian of the XIII. Century (1225-74), whose influence is still dominant in Roman theology.

  237 The view of the sacramental presence adopted by William of Occam. For Luther’s own view at this time, see below, pp. 187 ff.

  238 i. e., If they did not believe in the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Lord’s Supper.

  239 Places for training youths in Greek glory.

  240 The philosophy of Aristotle dominated the mediæval universities. It not only provided the forms in which theological and religious truth came to expression, but it was the basis of all scientific study in every department. The man who did not know Aristotle was an ignoramus.

  241 Or, “I have read him.” Luther’s lesen allows of either interpretation.

  242 Duns Scotus, died 1308. In the XV and XVI Centuries he was regarded as the rival of Thomas Aquinas for first place among the theological teachers of the Church.

  243 i. e., In the universities.

  244 See above, pp. 94 f.

  245 i. e., “The chamber of his heart.” Boniface VIII (1294-1303) had decreed, Romanus pontiex jura omnia in scrinio pectoris sui censetur habere, “the Roman pontiff has all laws in the chamber of his heart.” This decree was received into the canon law (c. I, de const. In VIto (I, 2)).

  246 Doctores decretorum, “Doctor of Decrees,” an academic degree occasionally given to professors of Canon Law; doctor scrinii papalis, “Doctor of the Papal Heart.”

  247 The introduction of Roman law into Germany, as the accepted law of the empire, had begun in the XII Century. With the decay of the feudal system and the increasing desire of the rulers to provide their government with some effective legal system, its application became more widespread, until by the end of the XV Century it was the accepted system of the empire. The attempt to apply this ancient law to conditions utterly different from those of the time when it was formulated, and the continual conflict between the Roman law, the feudal customs and the remnants of Germanic legal ideas, naturally gave rise to a state of affairs which Luther could justly speak of as “a wilderness.”

  248 “Sentences” (Sententiae, libri sententiarum) was the title of the text-books in theology. Theological instruction was largely by way of comment on the most famous book of Sentences, that of Peter Lombard.

  249 Cf. Vol. I, p. 7.

  250 i. e., Doctors.

  251 The head-dress of the doctors.

  252 See above, p. 118, note 2.

  253 i. e., The monasteries and nunneries.

  254 i. e.. The name of Christian.

  255 This section did not appear in the first edition; see Introduction, p. 59.

  256 Charles the Great, King of the Franks, was crowned Roman Emperor by Pope Leo III in the year 800 A. D. He was a German, but regarded himself successor to the line of emperors who had ruled at Rome. The fiction was fostered by the popes, and the German kings, after receiving the papal coronation, were called Roman Emperors. From this came the name of the German Empire of the Middle Ages, “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation.” The popes of the later Middle Ages claimed that the bestowal of the imperial dignity lay in the power of the pope, and Pope Clement V (1313) even claimed that in the event of a vacancy the pope was the possessor of the imperial power (cf. above, p. 109). On the whole subject see Bryce, Holy Roman Empire, 2d ed. (1904), and literature there cited.

  257 The city of Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410.

  258 Luther is characteristically careless about his chronology. By the “Turkish Empire” he means the Mohammedan power.

  259 So sol man die Deutschen teuschen und mit teuschen teuschenn, i.e., made Germans (Deutsche) by cheating (teuschen) them.

  260 See Cambridge Mediæval History, I (1911), pp. 244 f.

  261 Such a law as Luther here suggests was proposed to the Diet of Worms (1521). Text in Wrede, Reischstagsakten, II, 335-341.

  262 Cf. Luther’s Sermon von Kaubandlung und Wucher, of 1524. (Weim. Ed. XV, pp. 293)

  263 Spices were one of the chief articles of foreign commerce in the XVI Century. The discovery of the cape-route to India had given the Portuguese a practical monopoly of this trade. A comparative statement of the cost of spices for a period of years was reported to the Diet of Nürnberg (1523). See Wrede, op. cit., III, 576.

  264 The Zinskauf or Rentenkauf was a means or evading the prohibition of usury. The buyer purchased an annuity, but the purchase price was not regarded as a loan, or it could not be recalled, and the annual payments could not therefore be called interest.

  265 The practice was legalised by the Lateran Council, 1512.

  266 The XVI Century was the hey-day of the great trading-companies, among which the Fuggers of Augsburg (see above, p. 97, note 5) easily took first place. The effort of these companies was directed toward securing monopolies in the staple articles of commerce, and their ability to finance large enterprises made it possible for them to gain practical control of the home markets. The sharp rise in the cost of living which took place on the first half of the XVI Century was laid at their door. The Diet of Cologne (1512) had passed a stringent law against monopolies which had, however, failed to suppress them. The Diet of Worms (1521) debated the subject (Wrede, Reichstagsakten II, pp. 355 iff.) “in somewhat heated language” (ibid., 842), but failed to agree upon methods of suppression. The subject was discussed again at the Diet of Nürnberg (1523) and various remedies were proposed (ibid., Ill, 556-599).

  267 The profits of the trading-companies were enormous. The 9 per cent, annually of the Welser (Ehrenberg, Zeitalter der Fugger, I, 195), pales into insignificance beside the 1634 per cent, by which the fortune of the Fuggers grew in twenty-one years (Schulte, Die Fugger in Rom, I, 3). In 1511 a certain Bartholomew Rem invested 900 gulden in the Hochstetter company of Augsburg; by 1517 he claimed 33,000 gulden profit. The company was willing to settle at 26,000, and the resulting litigation caused the figures to become public (Wrede, op. cit., II, 842, note 4; III, pp. 574 ff.). On Luther’s view of capitalism see Eck, Introduction to the Sermon von Kaushandlungund Wucher, in Berl. Ed., VII, 494-513.

  268 The Diets of Augsburg (1500) and Cologne (1512) had passed edicts against drunkenness. A committee of the Diet of Worms (1521) recommended that these earlier edicts be reaffirmed (Wrede, op. cit., II, pp. 343 f.), but the Diet adjourned without acting on the recommendation (ibid., 737)

  269 Sie wollen ausbuben, so sich’s vielmehr hineinbubt.

  270 Cf. Müller, Luther’s theol. Quellen, 1912, ch. I.

  271 In the Confitendi Ratio Luther had set the age for men at eighteen to twenty, or women at fifteen to sixteen years. See Vol. I, p. 100.

  272 Translated in this edition, Vol. I, pp. 184 ff; see especially pp. 266 ff.

  273 These sentences did not appear in the first edition.

  274 See Letter to Staupitz, Vol. I, p. 43.

  On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520)

  Translated by A. T. W. Steinhaeuser

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY OF T
HE CHURCH

  ENDNOTES.

  INTRODUCTION

  IN THE OPEN Letter to the Christian Nobility Luther overthrew the three walls behind which Rome sat entrenched in her spiritual-temporal power; in the Babylonian Captivity of the Church he enters and takes her central stronghold and sanctuary — the sacramental system by which she accompanied and controlled her members from the cradle to the grave; only then could he set forth, in language of almost lyrical rapture, the Liberty of a Christian Man.

  The first of these three great reformatory treatises of the year 1520, as they have been called, closed with the words: “I know another little song about Rome, and if their ears itch to hear it I will sing it for them, and pitch it in a high key. Dost thou take my meaning, beloved Rome?” (See above, p. 164.) That some ears were itching to hear his little song was brought home to Luther especially by two writings, the one appearing in the summer of 1520, the other published in the previous autumn, but not reaching Wittenberg until some months later.

  The former came from the pen of Augustin Alveld, that “celebrated Romanist of Leipzig,” against whom Luther had culminated in The Papacy at Rome, promising further disclosures if Alveld “came again.” (See Vol. I, p. 393.) He came again, this time with a Tractatus de communione sub utraque specie, — date of dedication, June 23, 1520. “The Leipzig ass has set up a fresh braying against me, full of blasphemies”; thus Luther describes it in a letter to Spalatin, July 22, 1520. (Enders, Luther’s Briewechsel, II, no. 328.)

  The other work was the anonymous tract of a “certain Italian friar of Cremona,” who has only recently been identified as Isidore Isolani, a Dominican hailing from Milan, who taught theology in various Italian cities, wrote a number of controversial works and died in 1528. (See Fr. Lauchert, Die italienischen literarischen Gegner Luthers, Freiburg, 1912.) The title of his tract is, Revocatio Martini Lutheri Augustiniani ad sanctam Sedem; its date, Cremona, November 20, 1520, according to Enders, which is a mistake for November 22,1519. Its beginning and close, which have epistolary character, are printed in Enders, II, no. 366, and one paragraph from each is translated in Smith, Luther’s Correspondence, I, no. 199.

  These two treatises may be regarded as the immediate occasion for the writing of the Babylonian Captivity, which is, however, in no sense a direct reply to either of them. “I will not reply to Alveld,” Luther writes on August 5 to Spalatin, “but he will be the occasion of my publishing something by which the vipers will be more irritated than ever.” (Enders, II, no. 335; Smith, I, no. 283.) Indeed, he had promised some such work more than half a year before, in a letter to Spalatin of December 18, 1519: “There is no reason why you or any one else should expect from me a treatise on the other sacraments [besides baptism, the Lord’s supper, and penance] until I am taught by what text I can prove that they are sacraments. I regard none of the others as a sacrament, for there is no sacrament save where there is a direct divine promise, exercising our faith. We can have no intercourse with God except by the word of Him promising, and by the faith of man receiving the promise. At another time you shall hear more about their fables of the seven sacraments.” (Enders, II, no. 254; Smith, I, no. 206.)

  Thus the Prelude grows under his hand and assumes the form of an elaborate examination of the whole sacramental system of the Church. He makes short work of his two opponents, and after a few pages of delicious irony, of which Erasmus was suspected in some quarters of being the author, he turns his back on them and addresses himself to a positive and constructive treatment of his larger theme, lenient toward all non-essentials, but inexorable with respect to everything truly essential, that is, scriptural. The Captivity thus represents the culmination of Luther’s reformatory thinking on the theological side, as the Nobility does on the national, and the Liberty on the religious side. It sums up and carries forward all of his previous writings on the sacraments, just as, nine years later, the Catechisms gathered up and moulded into classic form his writings on catechetical subjects. Passage after passage, often whole pages, from the Resolutiones disp., the Treatise on Baptism, the Conitendi Ratio, the Treatise on the New Testament, the Treatise on the Blessed Sacrament, are transferred bodily to this new and definitive work, and find in it the goal toward which they had been consciously or unconsciously tending. The reader is referred to a fine comparative study in Köstlin’s Theology of Luther (English trans.), I, 388-409. The title is a reminiscence from the Resolutiones super prop, xiii., of 1519,— “absit ista plus quam babylonica captivitas!” The sense in which the work is called a “prelude” is explained on page 176; the theologian in Luther could not deny the musician, he goes into battle singing and comes back with the stanza of a hymn upon his lips.

  The Captivity marks Luther’s final and irreparable break with the Church of Rome, and it is not without a peculiar significance that in the same letter to Spalatin, of October 3d, in which he mentions the arrival in Leipzig of Eck armed with the papal bull, he announces the publication of his book on the Babylonian Captivity of the Church for the following Saturday — October 6th. (Enders, II, no. 350; Smith, I, no. 303.)

  While the Nobility, addressed to the German nation as such, was written in the language of the people, the Captivity, as becomes a theological treatise, is composed in Latin, just as later the Liberty, affecting the religious life of the individual, whether layman or theologian, is sent out in both German and Latin.

  A translation into German appeared in the following year — the work of the Franciscan, Thomas Murner (on whom see Theod. v. Liebenau, Der Franziskaner Thomas Murner, Freiburg, 1913). Luther calls the Franciscan his “venomous foe” and accuses him of making the translation in order to bring him into disrepute. This charge Luther makes in his answer to Henry VIII’s Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Mart. Lutherum (1521), the royal theologian’s reply to the Babylonian Captivity, for which he won from the pope the proud title of “Defender of the Faith.”

  The translation which follows is based on the Latin text as given in Clemen’s “student-edition” — Luthers Werke in Auswahl (Bonn, 1912-3), I, 426-512, which reproduces, though by no means slavishly, the text of the Weimar Edition (Vol. VI), which, together with the Erlangen Edition (opera var. arg., V), has been compared. The German St. Louis Edition (Vol. XIX) has been consulted, and especially the admirable German rendering of Kawerau in the Berlin Edition (Vol. II) as well as the careful literal translation of Lemme, Die drei grossen Reormationsschriten Luthers vom Jahre 1520, 2. ed. (Gotha, 1884). Like the last mentioned, Wace and Buchheim’s English translation (London, 1896) is incomplete, and besides is not always accurate; the Captivity is not contained in Cole’s Select Works. The catalogue of the British Museum notes no early English translation. Köstlin-Kawerau’s (1903) and Berger’s (1895) lives should be consulted; the former for the historical setting and full analysis, the latter for a fine appreciation of this as of the other two reformatory treatises of this year. For the theological development, beside Köstlin’s work mentioned above, and Tschackert, Entstehung der luth. und re. Kirchenlehre (1910), compare the exhaustive article Sakramente, by Kattenbusch, in Prot. Realencyklopadie, 3. ed., XVII, 349-81. The treatise is here Englished in its entirety, including those portions of the section on marriage which are frequently omitted. The homeless paragraph on page 260, whose proper location is not found even in the Weimar Edition nor in Clemen, we have placed in a foot-note, following the example of Kawerau.

  ALBERT T. W. STEINHAEUSER.

  Allentown. PA.

  THE BABYLONIAN CAPTIVITY OF THE CHURCH

  JESUS

  MARTIN LUTHER, AUGUSTINIAN,

  to his friend,

  Herman Tulich1,

  Greeting

  Willy nilly, I am compelled to become every day more learned, with so many and such able masters vying with one another to improve my mind. Some two years ago I wrote a little book on indulgences2, which I now deeply regret having published; for at the time I was still sunk in a mighty superstitious veneration for the R
oman tyranny and held that indulgences should not be altogether rejected, seeing they were approved by the common consent of men. Nor was this to be wondered at, for I was then engaged single-handed in my Sisyphean task. Since then, however, through the kindness of Sylvester and the friars3, who so strenuously defended indulgences, I have come to see that they are nothing but an imposture of the Roman sycophants by which they play havoc with men’s faith and fortunes. Would to God I might prevail upon the book-sellers and upon all my readers to burn up the whole of my writings on indulgences and to substitute for them this proposition: INDULGENCES ARE A KNAVISH TRICK OF THE ROMAN SYCOPHANTS.

  Next, Eck and Emser, with their fellows, undertook to instruct me concerning the primacy of the pope. Here too, not to prove ungrateful to such learned folk, I acknowledge how greatly I have profited by their labors. For, while denying the divine authority of the papacy, I had yet admitted its human authority4. But after hearing and reading the subtle subtleties of these coxcombs with which they adroitly prop their idol — for in these matters my mind is not altogether unteachable — I now know of a certainty that the papacy is the kingdom of Babylon5 and the power of Nimrod the mighty hunter6. Once more, therefore, that all may all out to my friends’ advantage, I beg both booksellers and readers to burn what I have published on that subject and to hold to this proposition: THE PAPACY IS THE MIGHTY HUNTING OF THE ROMAN BISHOP. This follows from the arguments of Eck, Emser and the Leipzig lecturer7 on the Holy Scriptures.

  Now they are putting me to school again and teaching me about communion in both kinds and other weighty subjects. And I must all to with might and main, so as not to hear these my pedagogues without profit. A certain Italian friar of Cremona8 has written a “Revocation of Martin Luther to the Holy See” — that is, a revocation in which not I revoke anything (as the words declare) but he revokes me. That is the kind of Latin the Italians are now beginning to write9. Another friar, a German of Leipzig, that same lecturer, you know, on the whole canon of the Scriptures, has written a book against me concerning the sacrament in both kinds, and is planning, I understand, still greater and more marvelous things. The Italian was canny enough not to set down his name, fearing perhaps the fate of Cajetan and Sylvester10. But the Leipzig man, as becomes a fierce and valiant German, boasts on his ample title-page of his name, his career, his saintliness, his scholarship, his office, glory, honor, ay, almost of his very clogs11. Here I shall doubtless gain no little information, since indeed his dedicatory epistle is addressed to the Son of God Himself. On so familiar a footing are these saints with Christ Who reigns in heaven! Moreover, methinks I hear three magpies chattering in this book; the first in good Latin, the second in better Greek, the third in purest Hebrew12. What think you, my Herman, is there for me to do but to prick up my ears? The thing emanates from Leipzig, from the Observance of the Holy Cross13.