Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Luther not only burst asunder the bond of unity, but also overthrew the altar of sacrifice. It is against the correct idea of Divine worship to deprive it of all sacrifice, and to make its principal object consist in the edification and instruction of the congregation, as Luther decreed. Here again we see Luther’s individualism and the stress he laid on the subjective side, even to the extent of robbing religion of the sacrifice of the Lamb, which had the misfortune to be independent of fortuitous piety. The very walls of his temples seemed to utter a chill protest against being given over to a worship so entirely at the mercy of the feelings of the visitor. Luther was against the abuses connected with the Mass, and so were all well-instructed Catholics. But the latter argued, that, in spite of the abuses, the Mass must be honoured as the sacrifice on which the spiritual life rests. To the many contradictions of which he was guilty Luther added a further one, viz. of advocating as a purer and higher worship, one that does not even come up to the true standard of worship. (See vol. v., xxix., 9).

  Luther’s deep-seated and almost instinctive antipathy to the Sacrifice of the Mass affords us, in its various phases, a good insight into his plan of campaign. On no other point does his hate flame forth so luridly, nowhere else is he so defiant, so contemptuous and so noisy — save perhaps when attacking Popery — as when assailing the Sacrifice of the Mass, that main bulwark of the Papacy. One thing is certain; of all the religious practices sacred to Catholics none was branded by him with such hideous and common abuse as this, the sublimest mystery of faith and of Divine Love.

  First Attacks. “On the Abomination of the Silent Mass.”

  In spite of Luther’s assurance given above of his former high regard for the Mass, he must quite early have grown averse to it, probably at the time when his zeal in the religious life first began to flag.

  Even in 1516 we learn from his correspondence that he rarely found time for its celebration or for the recitation of the Canonical Hours. At a much later date he lets fall the remark, that he had never liked saying Mass. In view of his disturbed state of soul we can readily credit what he says, viz. that, in the monastery Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass, in which the dignity of the Holy Sacrifice is extolled with the voices of antiquity, had often made his heart bleed. It is rather curious, that, according to his own account, it was on the occasion of his first Mass after ordination that his morbid state of fear showed itself strongly for the first time. No less remarkable is it that his most extravagant self-reproaches for his past life had reference to his saying Mass. He tells us how, even long after his apostasy, he had often been brought to the verge of despair by the recollection of the terrible sin of saying Mass whereby he had at one time openly defied and offended God. He morbidly persuades himself that he had been guilty of the most frightful idolatry; that, as a priest and monk, he had performed the most criminal of actions, one subversive of all religion, in spite of his having done so in ignorance and in perfect good faith.

  In his sermons on the Commandments, published in 1518, we still find a tribute to the Sacrifice of the Mass as Catholics understood it. But in his “Sermon von dem hochwirdigen Sacrament des heyligen waren Leychnams Christi” of 1519 he is curiously reticent concerning the nature of the Mass, whilst expressly recommending and praising the communion of the congregation — under both kinds — as the work of that faith “wherein strength lies.”

  The first open attack on the Holy Sacrifice was made in his “Sermon von dem newen Testament das ist von der heyligen Messe” (1520). The latter appeared almost simultaneously with his “An den christlichen Adel” and prepared the way for his subversive treatment of the Mass in his “De captivitate babylonica.” In the Sermon he declared that it was “almost the worst abuse,” that in the older Church the Eucharistic celebration had been turned into a sacrifice to be offered to God. Statements such as these predominate in the virulent chapter devoted to the Mass in the “De captivitate babylonica”: Christ’s sacrifice on the cross had been made out to be insufficient and the Sacrifice of the Mass set up in its place; the Supper was the Lord’s work for us, but, by ascribing a sacrificial value to the Mass, it becomes a work of man for God, whereby man hopes to please God.

  The close ties connecting the Sacrifice of the Mass with both the Church’s ancient traditions and the institution of Christ are here ruthlessly torn asunder. A lurid and grossly exaggerated account of the abuses which had arisen in connection with the money-offerings for Masses served to stimulate the struggle, essentials faring as badly as what was merely accidental.

  At the Wartburg the “Spirit” of the place further excited Luther’s hatred of the Mass. He poked fun at the “Mass-priest” who served the stronghold and wrote to Melanchthon: “Never to all eternity shall I say another Low Mass.” This he says in the same letter which witnesses to his inner contest with the monastic vows, and in which we find the sentence: “Be a sinner and sin boldly but believe more boldly still.” At the time of his spiritual baptism in the Wartburg he also wrote both his “De abroganda missa” and his “De votis monasticis.” The former he published in 1522, also in a German version entitled “Vom Missbrauch der Messen.”

  This was the bugle-call to the struggle he immediately commenced at Wittenberg against the continued celebration of Mass by the Catholic clergy in the Castle and Collegiate churches of the town. We have already treated of the phases of that campaign in which his impetuosity and intolerance manifested itself in all its nakedness. From the inglorious combat, thanks to the help of the mob, he was to come forth victorious. On Christmas Day, 1524, for the first time, there was no Mass, and in the following year Justus Jonas wrote of the completion of the work: “On the Saturday after the Feast of St. Matthew the Apostle and Evangelist, the whole Pope ... was flung out of All Saints’ church at Wittenberg, together with the stoles, albs, etc.; the olden ceremonies were replaced by pious ones such as accord with Scripture.”

  Luther was convinced that the “whole Pope” could not be destroyed throughout the world save by the abolition everywhere of the Mass. “When once the Mass has been put away,” he declares in 1522, in his screed against Henry VIII., “then I shall think I have overthrown the Pope completely.”

  In this writing his consciousness of his mission and his defiant insistence on the new teaching were largely directed against that palladium of the old Church: “Through me Christ has begun to reveal the abomination standing in the Holy Place” (Dn. ix. 27). It is in denying the sacrificial character of the Mass that he uses those odd words of bravado: “Here I stand, here I sit, here I remain, here I defy with contempt the whole assembly of the Papists,” etc.

  The last act in his warfare on the Mass at the Collegiate church of Wittenberg had been anticipated by Luther’s stormy sermon against the Canon of the Mass (Nov. 27, 1524). This identical sermon, taken down by his pupil George Rörer, formed the groundwork of the writing he published in 1525, “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse so man den Canon nennet.”

  Here he proceeds on the curious assumption, only to be explained by his perverted enthusiasm, that the mere bringing to light of the Canon (i.e. of the principal part of the Mass, which includes the Consecration and which the priest reads in silence) will suffice to bring about the fall of the whole Eucharistic ritual. The passionate, cynical commentary which he appended to the translation, was, however, far more effective.

  The author seems not in the least to realise that the Canon of the Mass is one of the most ancient and most authentic echoes of the early Western Church. It contains sublime religious ideas couched in the simple yet impressive language of the remotest ages of the Church when she was still in touch with classical culture. Yet Luther’s opinion is that: “It must have been composed by some unlettered monk.”

  He concludes the booklet with a specimen of his usual language: “See, there you have heard the holy, silent Mass and now know what it is, that you may stand aghast at it and cross yourself as though you saw the devil as large as life.” He exhorts the reader to th
ank God, that “such an abomination has been brought to light,” and “that the great whore of Babylon has been exposed.”

  At the same time he tells the secular authorities that it is their bounden duty to interfere “by means of the law” against such defamation of the name of God; “for when an impudent rascal openly blasphemes God in the street, or curses and swears, and the authorities permit it, they become in the sight of God partners in his wickedness. And if in some regions it is forbidden to curse or swear, much more just were it that the secular lords should here do something to prevent and to punish, because such blaspheming and defaming in the Mass is quite as public and as open as when a knave blasphemes in the street. If one is punishable, the other is surely no less so.”

  Thus Luther’s attacks on the Mass in a fatal way became one of the quicksands on which the theory of freedom of conscience and worship which he had put forth at the commencement suffered shipwreck. Even in the question of the Mass at Wittenberg he had formerly insisted, in opposition to Carlstadt’s violent proceedings, that no religious compulsion should be exercised; this he did, for instance, in the sermons he preached against Carlstadt’s undertaking and particularly in that on Low Masses, where he declared that faith cannot he held captive or bound, that each one must see for himself what is right or wrong and is not simply to fall in with the “general opinion or to yield to compulsion.” His words were an honourable declaration in favour of freedom of conscience. And now, in his warfare against his fantastic caricature of the Mass, not theoretically only but in practice too (for besides Wittenberg, there was also Altenburg and Erfurt) he placed the Mass, the most sacred centre of the Church’s worship, on a level with criminal deeds and invited the magistrates to treat it as a sacrilege, since it was the duty of authority “to check all outbreaks of wickedness.”

  When Johann Eck took up his pen to refute Luther’s “Von dem Grewel der Stillmesse” he felt it almost superfluous to prove how unfounded the latter’s assertions were, that, by the sacrifice of the Mass, Catholics “denied in deed and in their heart that Christ had blotted out sin” by His Sacrifice on Golgotha, or that they maintained, that, not the merits of Christ, but rather “our works, must effect this.” He enters at greater length into the theological proofs of the truly sacrificial character of the consecration and of the correctness and value of the Canon, supplementing the biblical passages on the Sacrifice of the New Covenant by the clear and definite witness of tradition.

  He and his Catholic readers were, however, quite prepared to find Luther refusing even to listen to such proofs taken from tradition. “Ah, bah, tradition this way, tradition that!” he had already cried, with regard to this very question, when striving to shake himself free of the fetters of the Church’s doctrine.

  Eck, however, also attacked Luther from another point. Luther had placed in the very forefront of his writing the assertion, that he had never advised the people to have recourse to violent measures, whether with regard to the Mass or the Catholic worship generally, or invited them to revolt; in the preface Eck accordingly promises to take him to task both concerning the Canon and for his responsibility in the rising. “I shall, please God, prove Luther a liar on both counts.” He convicts him of inciting to revolt on the strength of “five proofs” taken from various works of his.

  The pecuniary aspect of the Mass supplied Luther and the preachers with an effective means of exciting the people which they were not slow to seize. The abuses, real or apparent, of the system of Mass-stipends, were worked to their utmost by the demagogues.

  In Luther’s extravagant language the Sacrifice of the Mass is simply made to appear a rich field for vulgar greed of gain, discovered and exploited by the Papists because it filled their pockets. The amount brought in by Masses for the Dead was chiefly to blame for the spread of the Mass. “This invention [Masses for the Dead] has been worth money to them,” he cries, “so that they need not say Mass for nothing.” “At All Saints’, here at Wittenberg, the money is godlessly thrown away [by foundation-Masses, annual commemorations, etc.]; the three Mass-priests there, ‘three pigs or paunches,’” celebrate it “in the house of infamy simply because they worship money.”

  Many of the apostles of the new faith preached in the same strain as Luther. Others, as Stephen Agricola for instance states he did, were content to scourge “the great superstition and hindrance to the true honour of God,” i.e. the abuses. Agricola, if we may trust him, “was loath to see Masses for the dead said for money, as this should be done out of pure charity.” When, later, Flacius Illyricus made similar charges against the Catholics on the pretext of the alms given for Masses, the Dominican, Johann Fabri, replied: “What do you sectarians do gratis? People can never give enough for your preaching, your psalm-singing, your Supper, etc., so that yearly a very large sum has to be spent on your support.... Why then do you abuse the poor priests who take payment for their work and unkindly twit them for saying Mass solely for money? What answer would you make were I to say: You too, Illyricus, preach for the sake of money?”

  The charges of self-seeking and avarice had, however, in some places so strong an effect as to lead to popular risings against the celebration of Mass. This recalls the account given by Erasmus of the ready success he had noticed attended the addresses of the preachers: “The Mass has been abolished,” he writes, “but what more holy thing has been set in its place?... Their churches I have never entered. I have occasionally seen those who listened to their sermons come out like men possessed, with anger and fury writ large upon their faces.... They walked like warriors who have just been harangued by their general. When have their sermons ever produced penance and contrition? Do they not devote most of their time to abuse of the clergy and their lives?... Are risings rare amongst these evangelicals? And do they not resort to violence on the slightest provocation?”

  The peaceable union of Christians before the Altar of Sacrifice in the “Mystery of Faith” had made way for warfare. The absence of the sacrifice avenged itself, however, in the Churches given over to the new religion by the dreariness and utter desolation of the sacred buildings once so full of life; not to mention the dreadful controversies, the bare “ministry of the Word” and the one-sided effort to make of the Supper simply a source of edification and increase of faith, could not suffice to attract the multitude to the Eucharistic celebration. The great sacrifice, which by its own infinite worth and quite independently of its power to edify, glorifies God in His Temple, and so powerfully stimulates the faithful to unite their offering with the sacramental oblation, had been torn from the midst of the congregation.

  If we seek here for the connecting link between Luther’s bitter hostility to the Mass and his system as a whole, we shall find, that, granted the doctrine of the imputation of the merits of Christ by faith alone, the Eucharistic Sacrifice had no real place left. Luther said in 1540: “Where the ‘locus’ [‘iustificationis’] is rightly taught and stands, there can be nothing evil; for the antecedens, ‘faith alone justifies,’ spells the fall of the Mass,” etc.

  In the new faith everything turned on the saving and the pacification of the sinner by virtue of a sort of amnesty furnished by the merits of Christ’s death on the cross. Faith alone secures all the fulness of the Redeemer’s work of satisfaction; no ordinance of Christ, sacrament, sacrifice or priesthood can assist in the work of clothing the soul with the mantle of these Divine merits; anything of the sort would only diminish the dignity and the efficacy of the confidence of faith. Only what promotes the personal faith which saves — that master-key to the forgiveness, or better, to the cloaking of sin — is here admitted, but no work, no “opus operatum” of Christ’s institution, which, through sacrament and sacrifice, imparts grace to the faithful Christian who is duly prepared to seek salvation; on the contrary, according to Luther, such institutions, which the ancient Church looked upon as sacred, only detract from the merits of Christ.

  And since, in his view, every Christian by his faith is a priest
, the hierarchy falls, and thus sacrifice too, at least as the prerogative of a special sacerdotal class, also ceases to exist.

  Hence the warfare on behalf of the Evangel of faith alone and against sacerdotalism, naturally, and of necessity, led to the warfare against the Mass. This particular combat, in which (as in the attack on the Church’s visible head, viz. the Pope) Luther’s animosity against the Catholics reached its culminating point, necessarily occupied a place in the forefront, because the Mass, which united the congregation before the altar, was the most public and most tangible expression of Catholic life and the one most frequently seen.

  Luther’s theological perversions of the Church’s doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass, in the above works and elsewhere, are all the more astonishing, seeing that Gabriel Biel, the theologian, with whom he was so well acquainted and whose “Sacri canonis missæ expositio” he had studied with keen interest, had, in his exposition of the ancient doctrine of the Mass, forestalled these very misrepresentations, almost as though he had actually foreseen them. The respected Tübingen University-Professor, in this explanation of the Mass, which appeared in 1488, was frequently reprinted, and was much used by both parish clergy and preachers, insists, in close unison with the past, that there was but one great and atoning sacrifice of the cross, and that the sacrifice of the Mass did not in the least detract from it but rather applied it to the individual believer. He points out with great emphasis the uniquely sublime character of the sacrifice on Calvary (“unica oblatio et perfectissimum sacrificium”), in its fourfold aspect as a sacrifice of praise, thanksgiving, petition and atonement. In support of this he quotes a number of passages from the Bible: “By it [the sacrifice on the cross] our sins are blotted out (Romans iv.). Through it we have found grace whereby we are saved (Hebrews v.): for, being consummated by suffering, He (Christ) became to all who obey Him the cause of eternal life. By the one oblation of the cross He hath for ever perfected them that are sanctified (Hebrews x.),” etc. “If you seek the blotting out of sins, behold the Lamb of God that taketh away the sins of the world; if you seek thanksgiving, Christ gives thanks to the Father; if you seek for deliverance from evil, He heals and sets us free.” In several passages he dwells in detail on the idea of the saving Lamb of God, once in connection with the thrice-repeated Agnus Dei of the Mass.