Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Towards the end of a career which had worked such untold disaster to the Christianity of the past he feels keenly the need of vindicating the dignity of Christ if only to soothe his own conscience; he was resolved to hammer it in with the utmost defiance, just as formerly he had clung to the idea that, by his doctrine, he was defending the rights of Christ against the Pope. He is now resolved again to take his stand on this, his efforts becoming the more violent the more the sight of the ruin wrought by his own work affrights him. Hence his eagerness to take advantage of Jewish attacks on the pillars of the faith in order, while triumphing over them, to enjoy the sense of his comradeship with Christ, the Son of God now so soon to come in Judgment. Here again he allows his vanity to mislead him and to paint his intervention on behalf of the great truth of Christianity as far more successful than that of any of the Popes; this helps him to close his eyes to the wounds which the inner voice tells him he had inflicted on the Christian truths and on the public life of Christendom. For was he not doing for Christ what the Pope was quite unable to do? Indeed, “the world, the Turk, the Jew and the Pope are all raging blasphemously against the name of the Lord, laying waste His Kingdom and deriding His Will; but ‘greater is He that is with us than he that is with the world’; He triumphs,” so he wrote at that time to some foreign sympathisers, “and will triumph in you to all eternity; may He console you by His Holy Spirit in which He has called you to oneness with His Body.”

  It is true, so he says elsewhere, that the Pope admits the existence of Christ, but, in spite of this, neither Jews nor Turks are quite so bad; the Jews have far better arguments than the Papists for themselves and their religion; the foundations of the latter are easily shaken; the Papist Church is a worse “den of murderers” than Turks, Tartars, or Jews.

  All the more glorious and creditable to the new Evangel is therefore the victory won by Luther over the Jews; it may serve to show the world that his school’s study of the Bible could furnish the weapons to bring about such a result. The Pope, with his unbiblical treatment of the Jews, had merely succeeded in making them doubly un-Christian; but to us God has unlocked the Holy Books, hence on us devolves the duty of pointing out to the Jews their errors. Luther accordingly claims, that his “Von den Jüden” was the first real work of instruction on Judaism, one which “might teach us Germans from history what a Jew is and warn our Christians against them as against veriest devils.” It was only fitting that he who had unearthed Scripture should also “wipe clean the holy old Bible from Jewish ‘Hamperes’ and ‘Judas-water.’”

  Nevertheless everything else — even his yeoman service in the cause of the Bible, and his shaming of the Papacy, which had so ineffectively struggled against the Jews — recedes into the background before his determination to crown his whole life-work by snatching from the Jewish devil the honour of Christ our one Salvation.

  This was admittedly his motive for taking up his pen yet a third time.

  The Third Work against the Jews, 1543

  As early as June, 1543, Luther was engaged on a new polemical work against the Jews entitled “On the last words of David.” It is a lengthy essay on 2 Kings xxiii. 1-7, and certain other striking passages, with the object of proving that the Messias was to be a God-man and of vindicating the mystery of the Trinity.

  He intended to show by these examples how helpful Hebrew learning and Bible study can be in defending Scripture against the attacks of unbelievers; he also wanted to establish that neither Jews nor Papists possessed the real key to the Bible, viz. the knowledge of Christ; “for in this all sticks, and lies, and rests: Whosoever has not or will not have this man called Jesus Christ, the Son of God, whom we Christians preach [the new Evangel undefiled], let him avoid the Bible; such is my conscientious advice, else he will certainly come a cropper, and become ever blinder and more crazy the more he studies.”

  In David’s final words on the Messias, Luther saw something peculiarly solemn; David, when “about to die and depart,” gives his parting injunction and adds: “This is my firm belief; on this I stand fast and immoveable.... Hence I am joyful, and will gladly live or die as and when God wills.”

  “Whoever can boast [like David] that the Spirit of the Lord speaks through him, and that His word is on his tongue, must indeed be very sure of his cause.”

  In this writing the Jews are not attacked in such unmeasured language as in the two others just considered; the tone of the whole is much calmer, indeed comparatively kind. It may be that the representations made to him concerning his violence had not been without some effect.

  The end, like the beginning, expresses the wish that, without suffering ourselves to be led astray by the false readings of the Jews, we should “plainly and clearly find and recognise our dear Lord and Saviour in Holy Writ.” This is what leads Melanchthon to praise the work as enjoyable reading, because there is nothing sweeter to the pious than to deepen their knowledge of the God-man and to learn the art of real prayer so different from that of the heathen, the Jew and the Turk.

  Against the Turks

  The honour of Christianity and of its Divine Founder was also what Luther had at heart in the two books which in his later years he was instrumental in publishing against the Turks, viz. his “Vermanunge zum Gebet wider den Türcken” (1541) and his new edition (1542) of an old work against the Koran, the “Verlegung des Alcoran Bruder Richardi.”

  In one passage of the Vermanunge he even couches this thought in the form of a prayer:

  “Yes, indeed, this is our offence against them [the Turks], that we preach, believe and confess Thee, God the Father, as the only True God, and Thy Beloved Son our Lord Jesus Christ and the Holy Ghost as one eternal God.” “Thou knowest, God the Father Almighty, that we have not sinned in any other way against the devil, Pope or Turk and that they have no right or power to punish us.” Most fervently, as in the very presence of God, he declares that he must withstand the devil who is helping the Turk to set up “his Mahmed in the stead of Jesus Christ Thy Beloved Son.” Speaking of prayer against the Turk he makes every Christian say to God: “Thou tellest, nay, compellest, me to pray in the name of Thy Beloved Son Our Lord Jesus Christ.”

  In this writing he strongly reprobates both the public disorders on the side of the new Evangel and the Papists’ obstinate resistance to the Word of God; both would be terribly punished by means of the Turks unless people set about amending their lives and giving themselves up to earnest prayer. Now, after the Evangel had been preached for so many years, “everyone knew, thank God, what each class and individual man should do or leave undone, which, alas, formerly we did not know, though we would gladly have done it.” Should our prayer fail to achieve the desired object, “then let us say a longer and a better one.” “How happy should we be were our prayers against the Turk again to prove of no avail, but, instead, the Last Day came — which indeed cannot any longer be far off — spelling the end of both Turk and Pope as I do not for a moment doubt.”

  At any rate Luther might have used better weapons against the Turks than he actually did in this so-called admonition.

  About the time he wrote it we hear Luther occasionally expressing a hope that the Turks may be converted to the Evangel, now shining so brightly and convincingly.

  “I should like to see the Evangel make its way amongst the Turks, which may indeed very well happen.” “It is quite in God’s power to work a miracle and make them listen to the Evangel.... If a ‘Wascha’ [Pasha] were to accept the Gospel we should soon see what effect it would have on the Grand Turk; and as he has many sons it is quite likely one of them might reach it.” — He despaired of the overthrow of the Turkish empire, but was fond of dreaming of the coming of a “good man who should withstand the dogma of Mohamed.”

  “The Turk rules more mightily by his religion than by arms”; such was Luther’s opinion. He had to be confronted with the belief in Christ, that belief which Luther had learnt “amidst the bitter pangs of death,” viz. “that Christ is God”;
in great temptations nothing could help us but this faith, “the most powerful consolation that is bestowed on us”; this same article of faith God was vindicating, even by miracles, against Turk and Pope. To this he too would cleave in spite of any objections of reason.

  He did not, however, patiently wait till the “good man” came who was to oppose the dogma of the Turks; he himself set about this undertaking in March, 1542. After having, shortly before, become acquainted with the Koran in a poor translation, he proceeded himself to translate into German a work against the Koran, written in 1300, by the Dominican Richardus (Ricoldus). To it he appended a preface of his own and a “Treue Warnung.”

  He had undertaken, so he says, to disclose and answer the devil-inspired “infamies” contained in the Alcoran, “the better to strengthen us in our Christian faith.” — This out-of-date book of a mediæval theologian was, however, hardly the work to furnish an insight into the Koran, particularly as it built far too much on badly read texts and doubtful stories uncritically taken for granted; from such defects the refutation was bound to suffer.

  Some of Luther’s own additions are characteristic.

  Here he gives up all hope of any conversion of the Moslem; he likewise despairs of the success of the Christian armies.— “Mahmet,” so he teaches, “leads people to eternal damnation as the Pope also did and still does.” He reigns “in the Levant” as the Pope does “in the land of the setting sun,” thanks to a system of “wilful lying.” “Oh, Lord God! Let all who can, pray, sigh and implore that of God’s anger we may see an end,” as Daniel says (Dan. xi. 36).

  Bad as Mahmet was, Luther was loath to see in him Antichrist; “the Pope, whom we have with us, he is the real Antichrist, with his ‘Drecktal,’ Alcoran and man-made doctrines.” “The chaste Pope takes no wife, but all women are his.... Obscene Mahmet at least makes no pretence of chastity.... As for the other points such as murder, avarice and pride, I will not enumerate them, but here again the Pope far outdoes Mahmet.” “May God give us His grace and punish both the Pope and Mahmet together with their devils. I have done my part as a faithful prophet and preacher.”

  Words such as these were certainly as little calculated to further the common cause of the Christians against the Turks as had been the somewhat similar thoughts which, at an earlier date, he had been wont to weave into his exhortations to resist the Turks.

  As a last straw Luther in the “Treue Warnung” goes on to declare, that, unless Christians mend their life, are converted to the Evangel and live up to it, it is to be hoped that the Turkish arms will prove victorious.

  For amongst those who “pretend to be Christians and to constitute the holy Church” there are, so he declares, so many who “knowingly and wantonly despise and persecute the known truth and vindicate their open and notorious idolatry, lying and unrighteousness.” Such Christians, of whom the forces that had been raised chiefly consisted, formed, so he thought, an army which might itself well be styled Turkish. “If then two such ‘Turkish’ armies were to advance against one another, the one called Mahmetish and the other dubbing itself Christian, then, good friend, I should suggest you might give Our Lord God some advice, for He would assuredly need it, as to which Turks He is to help and carry to victory. I, the worst of advisers, would counsel Him to give the victory to the Mahmetish Turks over the Christian Turks, as indeed He has done hitherto without any advice from us and even contrary to our prayers and complaints. The reason is, that the Mahmetish Turks have neither God’s Word nor those who might preach it.... Had they preachers of the Godly Word they might perhaps, some of them at least, be presently changed from swine into men. But our Christian Turks have the Word of God and preachers, and yet they refuse to listen, and from men become mere swine.”

  The public danger which threatened owing to the advance of the Turks caused Luther, however, about this time to promote the sale of the Latin translation and confutation of the Koran brought out under Melanchthon’s auspices by Bibliander (Buchmann) of Zürich. In a popular hymn which he composed he also took care to couple the Turkish danger with that to be apprehended from the Papists. This short hymn, “which became a favourite with the German Evangelicals” (Köstlin), begins:

  “In Thy Word preserve us, Lord,

  Ward off Pope and Turkish sword.”

  The picture which Luther incidentally paints of himself in his effusions against the Jews and the Turks, receives its final touch in his last great and solemn pronouncement against Popery which the lines just quoted may serve to introduce.

  The Hideous Caricatures of “Popery Pictured”

  One cannot contemplate without sadness Luther’s last efforts against the Papacy.

  Fortunately for literature the projected continuation of the frightful book “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft” never saw the light; Luther’s intention had been to make it even worse than the first part.

  His final labours, aimed directly at the Pope and the Council of Trent, consisted in suggesting the subjects and drafting the versified letterpress for a number of woodcuts, designed expressly to ridicule and defame the Papal office in the eyes of the lower classes. Even apart from the verses the caricatures were vulgar enough in all conscience. Nudities in the grossest postures alternate with comicalities the better to ensure success with the populace.

  An attempt has been made to exonerate him of direct responsibility for the pictures, and to set them down to the account of the draughtsman who, according to a passage in a letter of Luther’s, was believed to be his friend, the famous painter Lucas Cranach.

  That the whole was really a child of Luther’s own mind is proved, however, by the very title-page “Popery Pictured by Dr. M. Luther,” Wittenberg, 1545, as well as by his clear and outspoken statement shortly before his death to Pastor Matthias Wanckel of Halle. “I still have much that ought to be told the world concerning the Pope and his kingdom, and for this reason I have published these images and figures, each of which stands for a separate book to be written against the Pope and his kingdom. I wanted to witness before the whole world what I thought of the Pope and his devil’s kingdom; let them be my last Will and Testament.” “I have greatly vexed the Pope with these nasty pictures,” “Oh, how the sow will lift her tail! But, even should they kill me, they must gorge on the filth that the Pope holds in his hand. I have placed a golden thing in the Pope’s hands [i.e. in the picture to be described immediately] that he may pledge them in it.” — Again, in a letter to Amsdorf, he alludes to a scene in which the Furies figure, saying that he had designed them (“appingerem”), and describing in detail what he meant the figures to stand for.

  Hence it is impossible to contest Luther’s real authorship.

  It is true that, on one occasion, he speaks of Cranach the painter as the draughtsman of one of the pictures; he may, however, have simply meant that it originated in his studio. According to expert opinion the technique of the woodcuts differs so much from the master’s that they cannot be attributed to him; they may, however, have been executed by one of his pupils under his direction.

  We may now glance at the nine pictures which make up the “Abbildung des Bapstum,” commencing with that just referred to.

  The picture with the Furies to which Luther refers is that which represents the “birth and origin of the Pope,” as the Latin superscription describes it. Here is depicted, in a peculiarly revolting way, what Luther says in his “Wider das Bapstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” viz. the Pope’s being born from the “devil’s behind.” The devil-mother is portrayed as a hideous woman with a tail, from under which Pope and Cardinals are emerging head foremost. Of the Furies one is suckling, another carrying, and the third rocking the cradle of the Papal infant, whom the draughtsman everywhere depicts wearing the tiara. These are the Furies Megæra, Alecto and Tisiphone.

  Another picture shows the “Worship of the Pope as God of the World.” This, too, expresses a thought contained in the “Wider das Bapstum,” where Luther says: “We may also with a
safe conscience take to the closet his coat of arms with the Papal keys and his crown, and use them for the relief of nature.” As a matter of fact in this picture we see on a stool decorated with the papal insignia a crown or tiara set upside down on which a man-at-arms is seated in the action of easing himself; a second, with his breeches undone, prepares to do the same, while a third who has already done so is adjusting his dress.

  The picture with the title “The Pope gives a Council in Germany” shows the Pope in his tiara riding on a sow and digging his spurs into her sides. The sow is Germany which is obliged to submit to such ignominious treatment from the Papists; as for the Council which the Pope is giving to the German people it is depicted as his own, the Pope’s, excrement, which he holds in his hand pledging the Germans in it, as Luther says in the passage quoted above (). The Pope blesses the steaming object while the sow noses it with her snout. Underneath stands the ribald verse:

  “Sow, I want to have a ride,

  Spur you well on either side.

  Did you say ‘Concilium’?

  Take instead my ‘merdrum.’”

  “Here the Pope’s feet are kissed,” are the words over another picture, and, from the Pope who is seated on his throne with the Bull of Excommunication in his hand, two men are seen running away, showing him, as Köstlin says, “their tongues and hinder parts with the utmost indecency.” The inscription below runs:

  “Pope, don’t scare us so with your ban;

  Please don’t be so angry a man;

  Or else we shall take good care

  To show you the ‘Belvedere.’”

  Köstlin’s description must be supplemented by adding that the two men, whose faces and bared posteriors are turned towards the Pope, are depicted as emitting wind in his direction in the shape of puffs of smoke; from the Pope’s Bull fire, flames and stones are bursting forth.

  Of the remaining woodcuts one reproduces the scene which formed the title-page to the first edition of the “Wider das Bapstum,” viz. the gaping jaws of hell, between the teeth of which is seen the Pope surrounded by a cohort of devils, some of whom are crowning him with the tiara; another portrays the famous Pope-Ass, said to have been cast up by the Tiber near Rome; it shows “what God Himself thinks of Popery,” yet another depicts a pet idea of Luther’s, viz. the “reward of the ‘Papa satanissimus’ and his cardinals,” i.e. their being hanged, while their tongues, which had been torn out by the root, are nailed fast to the gallows. “How the Pope teaches faith and theology”; here the Pope is shown as a robed donkey sitting upright on a throne and playing the bagpipes with the help of his hoofs. “How the Pope thanks the Emperors for their boundless favours” introduces a scene where Clement IV with his own hand strikes off the head of Conradin. “How the Pope, following Peter’s example, honours the King” is the title of a woodcut where a Pope (probably Alexander III) sets his foot on the neck of the Emperor (Frederick Barbarossa at Venice). It is not necessary to waste words on the notorious falsehoods embodied in the last two pictures. Luther, moreover, further embellished the accounts he found, for not even the bitterest antagonist of the Papacy had ever dared to accuse Clement IV of having slain with his own hand the last of the Staufens. Among the ignorant masses to whom these pictures and verses were intended to appeal, there were, nevertheless, many who were prepared to accept such tales as true on the word of one known as the “man of God,” the Evangelist, the new Elias and the Prophet of Germany.