Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Lawyers.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  The Princes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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