Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The Reformation of the Church and Luther’s Ethics

  The defenders of the ancient faith urged very strongly that the first step towards a real moral reformation of the Church was to depict the Church as she was to be in accordance with Christ’s institution and the best traditions, and then, with the help of this standard, to see how far the Church of the times fell short of this ideal; in order to reform any institution, so they argued, we must be acquainted with its primitive shape so as to be able to revert to it.

  This they declared they had in vain asked of Luther, who, on the contrary, seemed bent on subverting the whole Church. They even failed to see that he had suggested any means wherewith to withstand the moral shortcomings of the age. In their eyes the radical and destructive changes on which he so vehemently insisted spelt no real improvement; the discontent with prevailing conditions which he preached to the people could not but create a wrong atmosphere; nor could the abolishing of the Church’s spiritual remedies, the slighting of her commands and the revolting treatment of the hierarchy serve the cause of prudent Church reform.

  Luther himself, in his so-called “Bull and Reformation,” put forth his demands for the reform of ecclesiastical conditions as they presented themselves to his mind during the days of his fiercest struggle. The “Bull” does not, however, afford any positive scheme of reformation, as the title might lead one to suppose. It is made up wholly of denials and polemics, and the same is true of his later works.

  According to this writing the bishops are “not merely phantoms and idols, but folk accursed in God’s sight”; they corrupt souls, and, against them, “every Christian should strive with body and substance.” One should “cheerfully do to them everything that they disliked, just as though they were the devil himself.” All those who now are pastors must repudiate the obedience which they gave “with the promise of chastity,” seeing that this obedience was promised, not to God, but to the devil, “just as a man must repudiate a compact he has made with the devil.” “This is my Bull, yea, Dr. Luther’s own,” etc.

  In this Luther was striking out a new road. Christ and his Apostles had begun the moral reform of the world by preaching the doing of “penance, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” True enough such a preaching can never have been so popular with the masses as Luther’s invitation to overthrow the Church.

  Luther’s “Reformation” did not, however, consist merely in the overthrow of the olden ecclesiasticism; it also strove to counteract much that was really amiss.

  His action had this to recommend it, that it threw into the full light of day the shady side of ecclesiastical life; after all, knowledge of the evil is already a step towards its betterment. For centuries few had had the courage to point a finger at the Church’s wounds so insistently as Luther; at the ills rampant in the clergy, Church government and in the faith and morals of the people. His piercing glance saw into every corner, and, assisted by expert helpers, some of them formerly officials of the Curia, he laid bare every regrettable disorder, needless to say not without exaggerating everything to his heart’s content. Practically, however, Luther’s revelations represent what was best in the movement which professed to aim at a reform of morals. Had he not embittered with such unspeakable hate the long list of shortcomings with which he persistently confronted the olden Church, had he used it as a means of amendment and not rather as a goad whereby to excite the masses, then one might have been even more thankful to him.

  It cannot be gainsaid that, particularly at the outset, ethical motives were at work in him; that he like others felt the burden of the evil, was certainly no lie.

  Yet it must not be forgotten that he attacked the Pope and the Church so violently, not on account of any refusal to amend, but in order to clear a path for his subversive views of theology and for the “Evangel” which had been condemned by ecclesiastical authority. The very magnitude of the attack he led on the whole conception of the Church, in itself proves that it was no mere question of defending the rights of Christian ethics; the removal of moral disorders from Christendom was to him but a secondary concern, and, moreover, he certainly did everything he could to render impossible any ordered abolishment of abuses and any real improvement.

  One may even ask whether he had any programme at all for the betterment of the Church. The question is made almost superfluous by the history of the struggle. He himself never set up before his mind any regular programme for his work, whether ecclesiastical, social or even ethical, when once he had come to see that the idealist scheme in his “An den christlichen Adel” was impossible of realisation. Hence, when he had succeeded in destroying the old order in a small portion of the Church’s territory, he had perforce to begin an uncertain search after something new whereby to replace it; nothing could be more hopeless than his efforts to build up from the ruins a new Church and a new society, a new liturgy and a new canon law, and to improve the morals of the adherents of his cause. In spite of Luther’s aversion to the scheme, it came about that the whole work of reformation was, by the force of circumstances, left to the secular authorities; from the Consistories down to the school-teachers, from the Marriage Courts down to the guardians of the poor, everything came into the hands of the State. Luther had been wont to complain that the Church in olden days had drawn all secular affairs to herself. Since his day, on the other hand, everything that pertained to the Church was secularised. The actual result was a gradual alienation of secular and ecclesiastical, quite at variance with the theories embodied in the faith. In this it is impossible to see a true reformation in any moral meaning of the word, and Luther’s ethics, which made all secular callings independent of the Church, failed in the event to celebrate any triumph.

  The better to appreciate certain striking contrasts between the olden Church and her ratification of morality on the one hand and Luther’s thought on the other, we may glance at his attitude towards canonisation and excommunication.

  Canonisation and excommunication are two opposite poles of the Church’s life; by the one the Church stamps her heroes with the seal of perfection and sets them up for the veneration of the faithful; by the other she excludes the unworthy from her communion, using thereto the greatest punishment at her command. Both are, to the eye of faith, powerful levers in the moral life.

  Luther, however, laughed both to scorn. The ban he attacked on principle, particularly after he himself had fallen under it; in this his action differed from that of Catholic writers, many of whom had written against the ban though only to lament its abuse and its too frequent employment for the defence of the material position of the clergy.

  The Pope, according to Luther, had made such a huge “mess in the Church by means of the Greater Excommunication that the swine could not get to the end with devouring it.” Christians, according to him, ought to be taught rather to love the ban of the Church than to fear it. We ourselves, he cries, put the Pope under the ban and declare that “the Pope and his followers are no believers.”

  Later on, however, he came to see better the use of ghostly penalties for unseemly conduct and made no odds in emphasising the right of the community as such to make use of exclusion as a punishment; in view of the increase of disorders he essayed repeatedly to reintroduce on his own authority a sort of ban in his Churches.

  As early as 1519 Luther had expressed his disapproval of the canonising of Saints by the Church, a practice which stimulated the moral efforts of the faithful by setting up an ideal and by encouraging daily worship; he added, however, that “each one was free to canonise as much as he pleased.” In 1524, however, he poured forth his wrath on the never-ending canonisations; as a rule they were “nothing but Popish Saints and no Christian Saints”; the foundations made in their honour served “merely to fatten lazy gluttons and indolent swine in the Churches”; before the Judgment Day no one could “pronounce any man holy”; Elisabeth, Augustine, Jerome, Ambrose, Bernard and Francis, even he regarded as holy, though he would not stake his life on it, se
eing there was nothing about them in Holy Scripture; “but the Pope, nay, all the angels, had not the power of setting up a new article of faith not contained in Scripture.”

  On May 31, 1523, was canonised the venerable bishop Benno of Meissen, a contemporary of Gregory VII. Luther was incensed to the last degree at the thought of the special celebration to be held in 1524 in the town — the Duchy being still Catholic — in honour of the new Saint. He accordingly published his “Against the new idol and olden devil about to be set up at Meyssen.” His use of the term “devil” in the title he vindicates as follows on the very first page: Now, that, “by the grace of God, the Gospel has again arisen and shines brightly,” “Satan incarnate” is avenging himself “by means of such foolery” and is causing himself to be worshipped with great pomp under the name of Benno. It was not in his power to prevent Duke George setting up the relics at Meissen and erecting an artistic and costly altar in their honour. The only result of Luther’s attack was to increase the devotion of clergy and people, who confidently invoked the saintly bishop’s protection against the inroads of apostasy. The attack also led Catholic writers in the Duchy to publish some bitter rejoinders. The rudeness of their titles bears witness to their indignation. “Against the Wittenberg idol Martin Luther” was the title of the pamphlet of Augustine Alveld, a Franciscan Guardian; the work of Paul Bachmann, Abbot of Alte Zelle, was entitled “Against the fiercely snorting wild-boar Luther,” and that of Hieronymus Emser, “Reply to Luther’s slanderous book.” The last writer was to some extent involved in the matter of the canonisation through having published the Legend of the famous Bishop. This he had done rather uncritically and without testing his authorities, and for this reason had been read a severe lesson by Luther.

  Luther’s opposition to this canonisation was, however, by no means dictated by historical considerations but by his hatred of all veneration of the Saints and by his aversion to the ideal of Christian self-denial, submissive obedience to the Church and Catholic activity of which the canonised Saints are models. He himself makes it easy to answer the question whether it was zeal for the moral reformation of the Church which drove him to assail canonisation and the veneration of the Saints; nowhere else is his attempt to destroy the sublime ideal of Christian life which he failed to understand and to drag down to the gutter all that was highest so clearly apparent as here. The real Saints, so he declared, were his Wittenbergers. Striving after great holiness on the part of the individual merely tended to derogate from Christ’s work; the Evangelical Counsels fostered only a mistaken desertion of the world.

  Judging others by his own standard, he attempted to drag down the Saints of the past to the level of mediocrity. Real Saints must be “good, lusty sinners who do not blush to insert in the Our Father the ‘forgive us our trespasses.’” It was “consoling” to him to hear, that the Apostles, too, even after they had received the Holy Ghost, had at times been shaky in their faith, and “very consoling indeed” that the Saints of both Old and New Covenant “had fallen into great sins”; only thus, so he fancies, do we learn to know the “Kingdom of Christ,” viz. the forgiveness of sins. Even Abraham, agreeably with Luther’s interpretation of Josue xxiv. 2, was represented to have worshipped idols, in order that Luther might be able to instance his conversion and say: Believe like him and you will be as holy as he.

  The Reformation in the Duchy of Saxony considered as typical

  In 1539, after the death of Duke George, at Luther’s instance, the protestantising of the duchy of Saxony was undertaken with unseemly haste; to this end Henry, the new sovereign, ordered a Visitation on the lines of that held in the Saxon Electorate and to be carried out by preachers placed at his disposal by the Elector. Jonas and Spalatin now became the visitors for Meissen. Before this, on the occasion of the canonisation of St. Benno, Spalatin, in a letter to Luther, had treated the canonisation as a laughing matter. On July 14, the visitors, alleging the authority of the Duke, summoned the Cathedral Chapter at Meissen to remove the sepulchre of St. Benno. On this being met by a refusal armed men were sent to the Cathedral the following night. “‘They broke into fragments the richly ornamented sepulchre of the Saint, together with the altar,’ to quote the words of the bishop’s report to the Emperor, ‘they decapitated a wooden statue of St. Benno and stuck it up outside as a butt for ridicule.’”

  Luther, for his part, in a letter to Jonas of August 14 of the same year, has his little joke about the visitors’ undoing of the canonisation of Benno. “You have unsainted Benno and have shown no fear of Cochlæus, Schmid, nor of the Nausei and Sadoleti, who teach the contrary. They are indignant with you, ultra-sensitive men that they are, knowing so little of grammar and so much less of theology.”

  Nor did the progress of the overthrow of the Church throughout the Duchy bear the least stamp of moral reform. The very violence used forbids our applying such a term to the work. The Catholic worship at the Cathedral was at once abolished and replaced by Lutheran services and preaching. The priests were driven into exile, the bishop alone being permitted to carry on “his godless papistical abominations and practices openly in his own residence” (the Castle of Stolpen). At the demand of the Wittenbergers the professors at Leipzig University who refused to conform to the Lutheran doctrine were dismissed. Melanchthon insisted, that, if they refused to hold their tongues, they must be driven out of the land as “blasphemers.” The new preachers publicly abused the friends, clerical and lay, of the late Duke to such an extent that the Estates were moved to make a formal complaint. Churches and monasteries were plundered and the sacred vessels melted down.

  Maurice, the son of Duke Henry, who succeeded in 1541, showed himself even more violent and relentless in extirpating the olden system.

  The profoundly immoral character of this reformation, the interference with the people’s freedom of conscience, the destruction of religious traditions which the peaceable inhabitants had received a thousand years before from holy missionaries and bishops, merely on the strength of the new doctrines of a man who claimed to have a better Gospel — all this was expressly sanctioned and supported by Luther.

  He wrote in a memorandum on the proceedings: “There is not much room here for discussion. If my gracious Duke Henry wishes to have the Evangel, then His Highness must abolish idolatry, or not afford it protection ... otherwise the wrath of heaven will be too great.” As a “sovereign appointed by God” the ruler “owed it to Him to put down such horrible, blasphemous idolatry by every means in his power.” This was nothing more than “defending Christ and damning the devil”; an example had been given by the “former kings of Juda and Israel,” who had abolished “Baal and all his idolatry,” and later by Constantine, Theodosius and Gratian. For it was as much the duty of princes and lords as of other people to serve God and the Lord Christ to the utmost of their power. Away, therefore, with the abbots and bishops “since they are determined to remain blasphemers ... they are blind leaders of the blind; God’s wrath has come upon them; hence we must help in the matter as much as we can.”

  Yet the Christian emperors here appealed to could have furnished Luther with an example of forbearance towards heathen Rome and its religious works of art which might well have shamed him. He did not know that at Rome the defacing and damaging of temples, altars or statues was most strictly forbidden, and that, for instance, Pope Damasus († 384) had been formally assured by the city-prefect that never had a Christian Roman appeared before his tribunal on such a charge. Elsewhere, however, such acts of violence were not unknown.

  Luther’s spirit of persecution was quite different from the spirit which animated those Roman emperors who came over to Christianity. It was their desire to hasten the end of an outworn religion of superstition, immorality and idolatry. With them it was a question of defending and furthering a religion sent from heaven to renew the world and which had convincingly proved the divinity of its mission by miracles, by the blood of martyrs and by the striking holiness of so many thousands of
confessors.

  It was against the faithful adherents of this very religion that, on the pretext of the outward corruption under which it groaned, Luther perpetrated so many acts of violence regardless of the testimony of a thousand years of beneficent labours. His ingratitude towards the achievements of the olden Church in the education of the nations, his deliberate ignoring of the great qualities which distinguished her and in his day could still have enabled her to carry out her own moral regeneration from within, are incompatible with his having been a true moral reformer.

  The Aims of the Reformation and the Currents of the Age

  Looking at the state of the case from the standpoint of the olden Catholic Church a closer historical examination shows that what she needed above all was a strengthening of her interior organisation.

  In view of the tendency to split up into separate States, in view of the decay of that outward bond of the nations under the Empire which had once been her stay, and of the rise of all sorts of new elements of culture requiring to be exploited for the glory of God and the spiritual betterment of mankind, a consolidation of the Church’s structure was essential. The Primacy indeed was there, exercised its functions and was recognised, but what was needed was a more direct recognition of a purified Papacy. The bond of unity between the nations within the Church needed to be more clearly put in evidence. This could best be done by allowing the significance of a voluntary submission to the authority appointed by God, and of the Primacy, to sink more deeply into the consciousness of Christendom. This was all the more called for, now that the traditional devotion to Rome had suffered so much owing to the great Schism of the West, to the reforming Councils and the prevalence of Gallican ideas, and that the splendour of the Papacy seemed now on the wane. The excessive concern of the Popes in politics and the struggle they had waged in Italy in the effort to establish themselves more securely had by no means contributed to increase respect for the power of the keys in its own peculiar domain, viz. the spiritual.