As a matter of fact, however, the great ones did not wait for the peasants to “give” anything.
They oppressed the country people and plundered them. Melanchthon wrote, particularly after 1525, of the boundless despotism of the authorities over the people on the land. Since the overthrow of the social revolution very sad changes had taken place among the agriculturists. The violent “laying of the yokels” became a general evil, and, in place of the small holdings of the peasant class — the most virile and largest portion of the nation — arose the large estates of the nobles. Not merely where the horrors of war had raged, but even elsewhere, e.g. in the north-east of Germany, the peasant found himself deprived of his rights and left defenceless in the hands of the Junkers and knights. “The reformation-age made his rights to his property and his standing more parlous than before.”
What Luther says of serfdom, the oppression and abuse of which had led to the Peasant Rising, is worthy of record: “Serfdom,” he says, “is not contrary to Christianity, and whoever says it is tells a lie!”— “Christ does not wish to abolish serfdom. What cares He how the lords or princes rule [in secular matters]?”
He makes a strict application of this in his sermons on Genesis, where he even represents serfdom as a desirable state. Luther delivered these sermons in 1524 and they were printed from notes in 1527. In his preface he declares, that he was “quite willing” they should be published because they express his “sense and mind.” He relates in one passage how Abimelech had bestowed “sheep and oxen, men-servants and maid-servants” on Abraham (xx. 14), and then goes on to say of the people made over: “They too were all personal property like other cattle, so that their owners might sell them as they liked, and it would verily be almost best that this stage of things should be revived, for nobody can control or tame the populace in any other way.” Abraham did not set free the men-servants and maid-servants given him, and yet he was accounted amongst the “pious and holy” and was “a just ruler.” He proceeds: “They [the patriarchs] might easily have abolished it so far as they were concerned, but that would not have been a good thing, for the serfs would have become too proud had they been given so many rights, and would have thought themselves equal to the patriarchs or to their children. Each one must be kept in his place, as God has ordained, sons and daughters, servants, maids, husbands, wives, etc.… If compulsion and the law of the strong arm still ruled (in the case of servants and retainers) as in the past, so that if a man dared to grumble he got a box on the ear — things would fare better; otherwise it is all of no use. If they take wives, these are impertinent people, wild and dissolute, whom no one can use or have anything to do with.”
The Psychological Background. Luther’s Estrangement from Whole Classes of Society
Both in Luther’s treatment of the peasants of his day and in his whole attitude to different classes of society, we find the traces of a profound and general depression which had seized upon him and which seems to accord ill with the sense of triumph one would have expected in him at the continued progress of his work, and at the apostasy from the Roman Church. Such expressions of dissatisfaction become more frequent as years go by and serve to some extent to explain and excuse his pessimism concerning the different classes.
This feeling had its origin, apart from other causes, in the fact that Luther little by little lost touch with whole classes of the people, while to many of the new conditions he remained a stranger. He, who had held in his hands the destiny of so many, was, in fact, becoming to a great extent isolated, particularly since the actual direction of the new Church had been taken out of his hands and vested in the princes or municipal authorities.
Not only did the rift which separated him from the peasants subsequent to 1525 become ever more pronounced, but he found hostility and dislike growing between himself and other classes of society.
Under the influence of the adverse wind blowing from Wittenberg many of the Humanists had given up their at one time enthusiastic friendship and turned against him. Catholic scholars who had once been disposed to favour the reform but had been disappointed in their hopes withdrew from him in increasing numbers. In other districts which had been recently Protestantised the country clergy remained faithful to the olden Church, as we see, for instance, from a letter of Luther’s dated Se, 1539, where he speaks of “over five hundred parsons, poisonous Papists,” who had “been left unexamined and now are raising their horns in defiance” — but who, he hopes, will soon be forcibly sent about their business. In his own camp, again, there were Anabaptists and other sectarians; there were also theologians who refused to fall into line and either failed to preach on faith and works as harshly as he wished, or, running to the opposite extreme like the Antinomians, went much further than he himself. In the Saxon Electorate Luther felt grievously the decease of those Councillors, like Pfeffinger and Feilitzsch, who had been well disposed towards him, whose places were now taken by “greedy Junkers and skinflints, who looked upon the ecclesiastical revolution as a good opportunity for increasing their family estates and for running riot at others’ expense.” Among the princes who had apostatised from the Church he also detected to his bitter vexation an ever-growing tendency to separate themselves from Wittenberg, partly owing to the influence of Zwinglianism, partly in consequence of their independent Church regulations. Such was, for instance, the action of Berlin, where the Protestant Elector, Joachim II of Brandenburg, declared in an address to his clergy: “As little as I mean to be bound to the Roman Church, so little do I mean to be bound to the Church of Wittenberg. I do not say: ‘credo sanctam Romanam’ or ‘Wittenbergensem,’ but ‘catholicam ecclesiam,’ and my Church here at Berlin or at Cöllen is just as much a true Christian Church as that of the Wittenbergers.”
In the sermon Luther preached at Wittenberg on June 18, 1531, he pours forth the vials of his wrath on the nobles and peasants of the new faith. He was then doing duty for Bugenhagen, the absent pastor, and devoting himself to preaching, though he describes himself in a letter as “old, sickly and tired of life,” and elsewhere, alluding to his many employments, says: “I am not only Luther, but Pomeranus, Vicar-General, Moses, Jethro and I know not who else besides.”
In this sermon the Gospel of Dives and Lazarus recalls to his mind the fact that, in the Saxon Electorate, he and his preachers were being treated very much as Lazarus, whom the rich man left lying at his gate and who had to get his fill of the crumbs that fell from the rich man’s table. “When we complain to the great, we get only kicks,” he exclaims indignantly; “our foes would gladly put a stop to the Evangel with the sword, whilst our own people would no less gladly cut off our head, like John the Baptist, only that the sword they use is want, misery and hunger.” If we preach against their wickedness they say we are trying to defy and contradict them! Let the devil defy them. They declare we want to set ourselves up against them, and to rule, and to bring them under our feet. For preaching against the rebellious peasants we are thanked by being called the Pope of Germany, as though we were playing the master. Not indeed that they mean this in earnest, but they are anxious to bring us to preach as they wish, otherwise they punish us with starvation. “The poor preachers they tread under foot, take the bread out of their mouths and abuse them most shamefully.” “This ingratitude is worse than any tyranny!” He tells them finally that their fate will be that of Dives, viz. hell-fire; then they will long in vain even for a drop of water.
The world hates me, we read in another sermon, for it ever “hates the good.” “They refuse to have anything to do with the ministers [of religion], there is hardly a place where they suffer the preacher, much less support him. My opponents declare that: Did I preach the truth, the people would become pious.” This is the Anabaptists’ way of concealing their own errors. “But do not wonder,” so he consoles his hearers, for “the purer the Word, the worse almost all become; only a few become good. This is a sure sign that the doctrine is true; … for Satan, who is stung by the truth, tri
es to wreck it by corruption of morals.… He it is who sets himself up in defiance of it.” “But there are some few who are faithful and in earnest.” Nevertheless, the world must heap ingratitude and bitterness upon us otherwise it would not be the world. “By my preaching I have helped several, but what can I do? If you wait till the world honours you, then you wait a long time and only prepare a cross for yourself.”
In a sermon on Jan. 22 of the same year he had quoted a saying current at that time about Rome, applying it to Wittenberg: “The nearer to Rome, the worse the Christians.” “For wherever the Evangel is, there it is despised.” “The Lord Himself says in to-day’s Gospel: ‘I have not found such faith as this in Israel.’ The chosen people do not believe, though some few do.… In other regions Christ may find adherents with a stronger faith than any in our principalities.” “At Court and elsewhere things go ill.… We tread the pearls under foot.” “So great is their shamelessness, ingratitude and hate that it is a sign that God is getting ready to show us something; the persecution of the Evangel in our principality is worse than ever. I am already sick of preaching (‘iam tædet me prædicatio’).” “Those who refuse the offered kingdom may go to the devil, etc.” The faults of the government and the increase in the prices of necessaries drew from him bitter words in a sermon of April 23 of the same year: “There is no government, the biggest criminals (‘pessimi nebulones’) rule; this we have deserved by our sins.” “When things become cheaper then war and pestilence will come upon us.”
Thus the ill will gathering within him was poured forth, as occasion offered, on the various classes indiscriminately.
It seemed to him as though little by little the whole world was becoming a hostel of which the devil was the landlord and where wickedness and lust reigned supreme — above all because it was so slow to receive his preaching. Even the supreme Court of Justice of the Empire became in 1541 a “devil’s whore,” because the judges and imperial authorities were against him and stood for the old order of things. It was also at this time that his pent-up anger broke out against the Jews. Here it will be sufficient to give a few new quotations.
He put himself in the place of a ruler in whose lands the Jews blasphemed Christianity and exclaimed: “I would summon all the Jews and ask them,” whether they could prove their insulting assertions. “If they could, I would give them a thousand florins; if not I would have their tongues torn out by the root. In short, we ought not to suffer Jews to live amongst us, nor eat or drink with them.”— “They are a shameful people,” he says on another occasion, “they swallow up everything with their usury; where they give a gentleman a thousand florins, they suck twenty thousand out of his poor underlings.” The demands with which his anger against the Jews inspires him found only too strong an echo amongst his followers. “It would be well,” wrote the Lutheran preacher Jodokus Ehrhardt in 1558, after complaining of the usury of the Jews, “if in all places they were proceeded with as Father Luther advised and enjoined when, amongst other things, he wrote: ‘Let their synagogues and schools be set on fire … and let who can throw brimstone.… Refuse them safe conduct and all freedom to travel. Let all their ready money and treasures of gold and silver, etc., be taken from them,’ etc. Such faithful counsels and regulations were given by our divinely enlightened Luther.”
After all that has been said it would be very rash to apply to Luther’s attitude towards the different callings and professions the words which St. Paul wrote of himself when considering humanity as a whole, i.e. of the power of God by which he had striven with endless patience and charity to bring home the Gospel to both Jew and Greek: “To the Greeks and to the barbarians, to the wise and to the foolish I am a debtor.” “I have become all things to all men in order to save all.”
The Merchant Class
The opening up of many previously unknown countries, the discovery of new trade routes, and the new industries called forth by new inventions brought about a sudden and quite unforeseen revival in trade and prosperity at the time of the religious schism. An alteration in the earlier ideas on political economy was bound to supervene. The upsetting of the mediæval notions which now could no longer hold and the uncertainty as to what to build on in future led to a deal of confusion in that period of transition.
What was chiefly needed in the case of one anxious to judge of things from their ethical and social side was experience and knowledge of the world joined with prudence and the spirit of charity. Annoyance was out of place; what was called for was a capacity to weigh matters dispassionately.
Among the Humanists there were some, who, because the new era of commerce turned men’s minds from learning, condemned it absolutely. Thus Eobanus Hessus of Nuremberg laments, that, there, people were bent on acquiring riches rather than learning; the world dreamt of nothing but saffron and pepper; he lived, as it were, among “empurpled monkeys” and would rather make his home with the peasants of his Hessian fatherland than in his present surroundings. — What was Luther’s attitude towards the rising merchant class and its undertakings?
In his case it was not merely the injury done to the schools and to “Christian” posterity, and the ever growing luxury that prejudiced him against commerce, but, above all, the constant infringement of the principles of morality, which, according to him, was a necessary result of the new economic life and its traffic in wares and money. He exaggerated the moral danger and failed entirely to see the economic side of the case. We do not find in him, says Köstlin-Kawerau, “a sufficient insight into the existing conditions and problems,” nevertheless he did not shrink from the harshest and most uncharitable censure.
It was his deliberate intention, so he says, “to give scandal to many more people on this point by setting up the true doctrine of Christ.” This we find in a letter he wrote after the Leipzig Disputation when putting the finishing touch to his first works on usury (1519). Because no attention was paid to his “Evangelical” ideas on usury he came to the conclusion that, “now, in these days, clergy and seculars, prelates and subjects are alike bent on thwarting Christ’s life, doctrine and Gospel.” Hence he must once again vindicate the Gospel. He, however, distorts the Christian idea by making into strict commands what Christ had proposed as counsels of perfection. There is reason to believe that the mistake he here makes under the plea of zeal for the principles of the Gospel is bound up not merely with his antipathy to the idea of Evangelical Counsels, but also with his older, pseudo-mystic tendency and with his conception of the true Christian. We cannot help thinking of his fanciful plan of assembling apart the real Christians when we hear him in these very admonitions bewailing that “there are so few Christians”; if anyone refused to lend gratis it was “a sign of his deep unbelief,” since we are assured that by so doing “we become children of the Most High and that our reward is great. Of such a consoling promise he is not worthy who will not believe and act accordingly.”
In any case it was a quite subjective and unfounded application of Holy Scripture, when, in his sermon on usury, he makes the following the chief point to be complied with:
“Christian dealings with temporal possessions,” he there says, “consist in three things, in giving for nothing, lending free of interest and lovingly allowing our belongings to be taken from us [Matt. v. 40, 42; Luke vi. 30]; for there is no merit in your buying something, inheriting it, or gaining possession of it in some other honest way, since, if this were piety, then the heathen and Turks would also be pious.”
This extravagant notion of the Christian’s duties led to his rigid and untimely vindication of the mediæval prohibition of the charging of interest, of which we shall have to speak more fully later. It also led him to assail all commercial enterprise.
Greatly incensed at the action of the trading companies he set about writing his “Von Kauffshandlung und Wucher” (1524).
Here, speaking of the wholesale traders and merchants, he says: “The foreign trade that brings wares from Calicut, India and so forth, such as spi
ces and costly fabrics of silk and cloth of gold, which serve only for display and are of no use, but merely suck the money out of our country and people, would not be allowed had we a government and real rulers.” The Old Testament patriarchs indeed bought and sold, he says, but “only cattle, wool, grain, butter, milk and such like; these are God’s gifts which He raises from the earth and distributes among men”; but the present trade means only the “throwing away of our gold and silver into foreign countries.”
Traders were, according to him, in a bad case from the moral point of view: “Let no one come and ask how he may with a good conscience belong to one of these companies. There is no other counsel than this: ‘Drop it’; there is no other way. If the companies are to go on, then that will be the end of law and honesty; if law and honesty are to remain, then the companies must cease.” The companies, so he had already said, are through and through “unstable and without foundation, all rank avarice and injustice, so that they cannot even be touched with a good conscience.… They hold all the goods in their hands and do with them as they please.” They aim “at making sure of their profit in any case, which is contrary to the nature, not only of commercial wares but of all temporal goods which God wishes to be ever in danger and uncertainty. They, however, have discovered a means of securing a sure profit even on uncertain temporal goods.” A man can thus “in a short time become so rich as to be able to buy up kings and emperors”; such a thing cannot possibly be “right or godly.”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 852