Johann Dietenberger, as early as 1524, in his “Against the unchristian book of Martin Luther on the abuse of the Mass,” says: “There is no doubt whatever that the horrid, damnable Lutheran doctrine has been brought into the world by the devil, otherwise it would not be so utterly beastly and contentious, quarrelsome and fickle, and so fitted for everything evil.” “These are all manifest lies, nothing but abuse, slander and blasphemy, devilish lies and works by which Luther the arch-liar has driven the world to the devil.” He calls Luther “the devil’s hired messenger” and says of his manner of writing: “Here everything reeks of devils; nothing that the devilish man writes can stand without the devil who endevils all his products.”
The Ratisbon Benedictine, Christopher Hoffmann († 1534), in his sermons to the Chapter preached before 1525 represents Luther as an apostate and as “dæmone plenus.”
The anonymous “Iudicium de Luthero” included in a German codex at Munich and dating from the early years of the controversy, also deserves to be mentioned. The author indeed praises Luther’s learning all too generously, but then goes on to say, that he looked on him as “no Christian,” and to speak of the “devil’s brood” by whom Martin Luther is possessed.
Berthold of Chiemsee in his “Tewtsche Theologey” considers that in his day false teaching has been spread abroad “by a horrid devil,” who makes use of wicked men; the “devil, with his wicked company, has stirred up heresy.”
Petrus Sylvius, in 1534, after a lengthy discourse on Luther’s “seductive and damnable” manner of “slandering and blaspheming,” says, that he was “in very truth a possessed and devilish man.”
In order the better to explain how these and many other of Luther’s contemporaries came to see a diabolical influence in his work, we may quote a few words from Johann Adam Möhler’s lectures on Church History (published posthumously): “We find Luther in 1520 and 1521 displaying a feverish literary activity that arouses in the reader a horrible misgiving. An uneasy sense of discomfort oppresses us, and a secret shudder runs through our frame when we think of the boundless selfishness and presumption which holds sway in this man; we seem to be standing within the inner circle where that sinister power rules, which, from the beginning of the world, has ever been seeking to taint the history of our race.”
Luther himself, as early as 1518, alludes to opponents of his who descried in him the influence of the devil. In a letter to Trutfetter, his old master, he says: “They speak of me from the pulpit as a heretic, a madman, a tempter and one possessed by I know not how many devils”; but “let people say, hearken to and believe what, where and as much as they will, I shall do what God inspires me to do.”
Paolo Vergerio, the Nuncio, whose detailed account of his interview with Luther has already been related (vol. iii., ff.), speaks, like Aleander, of his “strange look,” which, the longer he observed it, the more it reminded him of persons he had formerly seen whom some regarded as possessed; his eyes were restless and uncanny, and bore the stamp of rage and anger. “Whether he be possessed or not,” he says, “in his behaviour he is the personification of presumption, wickedness and indiscretion.”
The statements regarding Luther’s eyes made by various persons who knew him would appear to have furnished many with a ground for thinking him under some diabolical spell. “Luther’s dark and sparkling eyes, deep-set and keen ... must indeed have made an even greater impression than the best of Cranach’s portraits.”
While his friends, Melanchthon for instance, saw in them the expression of a high-minded and noble nature and a “leonine glance,” many Catholics, like Vergerio, saw the reflection of a spirit hostile to God. At Worms, as already related, Aleander had said, though only on the strength of hearsay, that Luther had “the eyes of a demon,” and a Spanish account from Worms also remarks: “his eyes forebode no good.” Cardinal Cajetan, in his examination of Luther at Augsburg, stated, that he would confer no more with him; “he has deep-set eyes and strange fancies in his head.” The University Professor, Martin Pollich, of Melrichstatt (Mellerstadt), seems to have let fall a similar remark during Luther’s early years at Wittenberg; he too mentioned his “deep-set eyes” and “strange fancies.” It may be, however, that Luther, who tells us this, erroneously puts into Pollich’s mouth the remark actually made by Cajetan. It was Pollich also who often declared, that this monk would one day overthrow the system of teaching which had hitherto prevailed in all the Universities. Johannes Dantiscus, a Pole, who visited Luther during a journey through Germany and who subsequently became Bishop of Culm and Ermeland, expresses himself very frankly. He says: His eyes were keen and sparkled strangely, as is sometimes the case with those possessed. Luther’s own pupil, Johann Kessler, also found something uncomfortable about his glance: He had “jet-black brows and eyes that sparkled and twinkled like stars, so that it was no easy thing to fix them.”
In the above statement concerning Luther’s look and the likelihood of his being possessed, Vergerio also has a passing allusion to a certain crude tale then current which quite befitted the taste of the age and which he gives for what it may be worth in his official report, viz. that Luther was begotten of the devil. This tale also found its way into several Catholic works written in that credulous and deeply agitated period.
It was not the first time such things had been invented concerning a person who was an object of ill-will in that age when prejudice told so strongly.
Luther himself was in the habit of speaking of the actual occurrence of diabolical births and of the “diabolus incubus”; he not only did not rise above the vulgar beliefs handed down by a credulous past, but even imparted to them, at least so far as the power of the devil went, a still worse shape. He never tired of filling the imagination of the reader with diabolical images (vol. v., xxxi., 4); and he spoke of persons possessed as though the world were replete with them.
If we could trust Cochlæus, Luther’s brother monks would seem to have partly been responsible for the report not merely of a diabolical possession (“obsessio, circumsessio”), but also of a certain wilful league with the devil entered into by the young Augustinian. They could not forget the “singularity” of the young monk, particularly that once, during his fit in choir whilst the Gospel of the man possessed was being read, he had cried out, “I am not he.” Cochlæus, who had some intercourse with the Augustinians at Nuremberg, hints in his Commentaries at the “secret intercourse with the demon” of which Luther was suspected, and immediately afterwards refers, though under a misapprehension, to Luther’s own remark about eating salt with the devil, and holding a disputation with him. The passage frequently attributed to Cochlæus, viz. that it was notorious “the devil Incubus was Luther’s father,” and son of the devil his “real name, therefore remain the devil’s son as long as you live,” was, however, never penned by him. But he was aware of the reports on this subject already in circulation and never saw fit to treat them with the contempt they deserved.
All the passages quoted above regarding Luther’s being possessed of the devil are in every instance quite independent of this stupid tale: they are based throughout on the character of Luther’s writings and on his public behaviour.
The first to relate anything concerning Luther’s diabolical parentage was, according to N. Paulus, Petrus Sylvius in his polemics of 1531-1534. He recounts with perfect seriousness the information which he says he had from an “honest, god-fearing woman,” who had heard it from some former female friends of Luther’s mother to whom the latter had herself disclosed the fact: “At night time, when the doors were locked, a beautiful youth dressed in red had frequently visited her before the Carnival,” etc. Some such idle tale may have reached the ears of the Legate Vergerio during his travels through Germany in that same decade. Possibly he may have expressed himself in private with greater credulity concerning this story than in his official report, for Contarini goes so far as to write that Vergerio “had found that Martin was begotten of the devil.”
The silly story ought to have made all Luther’s later critics more cautious, even with regard to the statements regarding Luther’s obsession by the Evil One. The few Catholic writers, who have ventured even in our own day to assert that Luther was possessed, should have been deterred from entering a region so obscure and where the danger of missing one’s way is so great. Even in the case of persons still living it is rash and often morally impossible to diagnose a case of possession; much more is this the case when the person in question has so long been dead.
2. Voices of Converts
Of the Catholic writers, those in particular were sure of a hearing amongst the educated, who for a long while and until it revealed itself in its true colours, had been inclined to Lutheranism. Such was, for instance, the case with several of the pupils and admirers of Erasmus. Among these were Ulrich Zasius and Silvius Egranus, who, though ready to criticise Luther severely, were not wanting in words of praise. The latter was a good type of the half-fledged convert.
Silvius Egranus (see vol. iii., ), for instance, wrote: “I do not deny that Luther has spirit and inventive genius, but I find him utterly wanting in judgment, learning and prudence.... Luther’s foolhardy abuse, his defiance and violence, breed nothing but unutterable confusion. Nowhere do I see Christian godliness flourishing in the hearts of men, nay, owing to Luther, it is not safe even to speak of the Gospel of Christ or of Paul.” “I declare that Luther’s doctrine is a web of sophisms, is neither ecclesiastical nor Apostolic, but closely related to that sophistical buffoonery and strong language to which he is ever having recourse.” — Ulrich Zasius, a Humanist, and at the same time learned in the law, after changing his views, publicly took the field against Luther even in official academical discourses; he maintained nevertheless that he had been led by Luther to a deeper knowledge of the spirit of Christ; his skill and talent he never even questioned; he declared: “There is something in Luther’s spirit that meets with my approval.” What alienated him from Luther was not only his attack on the authority of the Pope — with the grounds of which Zasius was well acquainted from his study of Canon Law — but his denial of the merit of good works. This contention seemed to him diametrically opposed to Holy Scripture. “You reject [meritorious] good works,” he says to Luther’s followers, “and yet I know One Who says: Their works shall follow them.” He finds it necessary to reprove Luther sharply for his unmeasured, nay, shameless boasting of his gifts, for exciting enmity, strife, dissension and factions, and for inciting to ill-will and murder. “What shall I say,” he exclaims, “of the boldness and impudence with which Luther interprets the Testaments, both Old and New, from the first chapter of Genesis to the very end, as a tissue of menaces and imprecations against Popes, bishops and priests, as though through all the ages God had had nothing to do but to thunder at the priesthood.” Elsewhere he bewails with noble indignation the fate of his beloved fatherland: “Luther, the foe of peace, and the most worthless of men, has let loose the furies over Germany so that we must regard it as a real mercy if speedy destruction does not ensue. I should have much to write upon the subject if only my grief allowed me.”
Zasius and Egranus, however, like others in a similar walk of life and who were disposed to seek a compromise, never attacked the new teachers, their reputation and their supposed wisdom as decidedly as did those whose deeper knowledge of theology taught them how dangerous the errors were.
One well equipped for the literary struggle with Luther was the convert George Wicel, a priest who had married and settled down as a Lutheran pastor and then, after a thorough study of holy Scripture and the Fathers, had resigned his post and published an “Apologia” at Leipzig in 1533 to justify his return to the Church of his Fathers.
In a multitude of polemical treatises, often couched in caustic language, he exposed the untenability and the innate contradictions of the Wittenberg doctrines. Of this hated “apostate” Luther speaks in a characteristic letter of 1535. He writes to the Mansfeld Chancellor, Caspar Müller, about a new work of Wicel’s: This Masterlet, as he hears — for he himself “read none of their books” — has again been throwing sweetmeats to his swine, the Catholics. “Such guests are well served by such a cook.”
Owing to his stay at Wittenberg and Eisleben, Wicel was well fitted to paint a reliable picture of the morals there prevailing. He utilised his experiences in his “Retectio Lutheranismi” (1538), and summed up his case against Luther as follows: “The life of the great mass of Evangelicals is so little Evangelical that I have thousands and thousands of times felt most heartily ashamed of it.... Only too quickly have most of them sucked in the poisonous doctrine, that works are of no avail and that sin is not imputed to the believer.” Concerning one phenomenon, which Luther himself bewails as a very pest, viz. the fear of death, which had become the rule since the prevalence of the new teaching, Wicel had some severe things to say; this was strangely at variance with the confidence which Luther’s Evangel was supposed to impart. “Is it not a deep disgrace,” he says, “that those who, formerly, when they were the followers of Antichrist, to use their own Lutheran phrase, did not fear the plague at all, or at any rate not much, now, as ‘Christians,’ display such abject terror when it comes? Hardly anyone visits the sick and no one dares to assist those stricken with the plague. No one will even look at them from a distance, and all are seized with a strange panic. Where is that all-prevailing faith that is now so often extolled, where is their love for their neighbour? Tell me, I adjure you in the name of Christ, whether there has ever been less trust or less charity amongst Christians?”
In the conversations held in that same year in the intimate circle at Wittenberg, and preserved for us by Lauterbach the Deacon, Luther frequently alluded to Wicel; at that time the latter was in the midst of his successful literary labours against the Lutherans, and his proposals for reunion, though by no means wholly satisfactory, had even led Duke George of Saxony to summon him to his Court. Luther, with a hatred quite comprehensible under the circumstances, calls him, according to Lauterbach, “the most treacherous of men, insatiable in his jealousy, a scoundrel who does not even deserve an answer”; Wicel himself, he tells us, was well aware he was defending, against his better feelings, a cause altogether wrong; the ungrateful slanderer richly deserved death; only thanks to Luther’s kindness, had he found a decent means of livelihood. “Let us despise him! We must be silent, pray and bless,” so he concludes, “and not bring new faggots to feed the flames.” Luther knew perfectly well that any “new faggots” he might have brought would have burst into flame under Wicel’s ardent pen, to his own disadvantage. He does not shrink from indignantly describing Wicel elsewhere as a “sycophant and venomous traitor,” and as “a man full of malice and presumption.” He comes along and “boasts of the Fathers. I do not even read his works, for I know his Fathers well; but we have one only Father, Who is in Heaven and Who is over all Fathers.” Particularly sensitive was he to Wicel’s strictures on his doctrine of good works, that heel of Achilles of the new Evangel. Wicel, “with scorn and mockery,” says, “that we have taught that, ‘whoever has once been converted can sin no more, and whatever he does is right and good.’ But the same thing happened to St. Paul and he too had to listen to slanderers, who, because he taught that people might be saved without the works of the law and merely by faith in Christ, said: ‘Then let us do what is evil and sin lustily that good may come of it,’ etc. Let us pray against such blasphemy.”
Of the consequences of the new teaching levelled at the meritorious nature of good works, Wicel had said at the end of his “Apologia”: “The Lutheran sect has opened wide the flood-gates to immorality and disorder, so that everybody laments and sighs over it. If there be anything god-fearing, good, moral or right to be found in this sect, then it was there before, and did not originate with it. For, show me seven men in seven thousand, who, having been formerly godless and wicked, have now, because they are Lutherans, become good and full of the fear of God. I could, however, poin
t out some, such as had previously led a devout, peaceable, inward and harmless life, who are now quite changed by this Evangel. May but the Lord grant them to see and acknowledge what misery they have excited within the German nation. Amen.”
Among Wicel’s “blasphemies,” as Luther calls them, were some that traversed the latter’s assertions that the holy works of penitents and ascetics were utterly worthless, and that the business of a house-agent or tax-collector, provided one went about it in faith, ranked higher than all the pious works of any monk or hermit. “The wretched man,” exclaims Luther, angry because of his inability to answer the objection, “most idly attacks us; he has no respect for the labours of their calling which God has commanded each man to perform in his state of life; all this he disregards and merely gapes at superstitious, grand and showy works”; “and yet Paul extols the ordinary works of the faithful and lays great stress on them.” This was one of his habitual falsehoods, viz. to make out that Wicel and his other opponents looked down on lowly and commonplace works and the unobtrusive performance of the duties of one’s calling, more particularly in the life of the world. In reality, however, they recognised in the most large-minded way the high value of the duties of any worldly calling when done in a religious spirit, and repudiated with perfect justice the charge brought against Catholicism of undervaluing the ordinary virtues of the good citizen.
The zealous Wicel was not perturbed by Luther’s attacks. He continued to damage the Lutheran cause by his writings, though the position he took up in ecclesiastical matters was not always well advised.
Another convert, Veit Amerbach (Amorbach), one of the most capable Humanists of the day, after abandoning the Catholic communion lectured first at Eisleben and then in the philosophical faculty at Wittenberg, till, owing to his patristic studies and after personal conferences with Luther and Melanchthon, he returned to the bosom of the Church in 1543, and at once found a post as lecturer at the University of Ingolstadt. As he declared in a written statement handed to Melanchthon, it was particularly the doctrines of Justification and of the Primacy of the Bishop of Rome that compelled him to side with antiquity and to oppose the innovations.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 753