This reading would certainly cut away the ground from under the argument of the Catholics. Nevertheless Protestant scholars have repeatedly shown themselves willing to apply Christ’s promise to the person of Peter, as ecclesiastical tradition has ever done, and to defend this as the true sense of the words. Thus the Berlin exegetist, Bernhard Weiss, writes: “By using ταύτῃ for the name (Peter), signifying a rock, any application of the words either to Jesus or to the faith or confession of Peter is shut out.… It can only be understood of his person,” etc. By Holtzmann, the Strasburg exegetist, the opposite interpretation was uncharitably described as a fruit of the “school of Protestant ex parte exegesis.”
We must, however, allow that, both here and in his treatment of the promise of the keys (Matt. xvi. 19), Luther shows himself an adept in the use of language. “To speak plain German we may say this,” so he begins one of his commentaries, and indeed he knows how to speak well and in a manner calculated to impress his hearers. Of the matter, however, we may judge from the following: “To thee I will give the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” this means that, should anyone refuse to believe the apostles, on him they should pass sentence and condemn him; their “office” still remains in the Church, there always being “retaining of sins for the impenitent and unbelieving, and forgiveness for the penitent and the believing”; but, quite apart from this “office,” believers have absolute power “where two or three are gathered together in the name of Christ (Matt. xviii. 20).” Here again we have Christ’s promise misconstrued, which does not refer to spiritual authority but solely to the effect of the prayer in common of two or more of the faithful.
“Hence, let the Pope and his Peter be gone,” so he concludes … even though there were a hundred thousand St. Peters, even though all the world were nothing but Popes, and even though an angel from heaven stood beside him; for we have here [Matt. xviii. 18, where the power of binding and loosing is bestowed on all the apostles] the Lord Himself, above all angels and creatures, Who says they are all to have equal power, keys and office, even where only two simple Christians are gathered together in His name. This Lord we shall not allow the Pope and all the devils to make into a fool, liar or drunkard; but we will tread the Pope under foot and tell him that he is a desperate blasphemer and idolatrous devil, who, in St. Peter’s name, has snatched the keys for himself alone which Christ gave to them all in common. “It is the Lord Himself Who says this [John xx. 21 ff.]; therefore we care nothing for the ravings of the Pope-Ass in his filthy decretals.”
CHAPTER XXXIX. END OF LUTHER’S LIFE
1. The Flight from Wittenberg
“OLD AGE IS here,” so wrote Luther in a fit of depression to his Elector on March 30, 1544, in his sixty-first year; “old age which in itself is cold and ungainly, weak and sickly. The pitcher goes to the well until one fine day it breaks; I have lived long enough, may God grant me a happy deathbed.… Methinks, too, I have already seen the best I am like to see on earth, for it looks as though evil days were coming. May God help His own! Amen.” He recommends his sovereign to seek comfort in the “Dear Word of God” and in prayer, assuring him: “These two unspeakable treasures shall never be the portion of the devil, the Turk, or of the Pope and his followers.”
About this time he had to complain of palpitations, dizziness and calculus. His will he had already drawn up on Jan. 6, 1542. In it he refused to make use of the usual legal forms, being determined to have nothing to do with the lawyers, with whom he was always at variance. He was quite aware that lawyers still insisted on the objections to the validity of the marriages of clerics and monks and the rights of inheritance of their children, as they indeed were bound to do not only by Canon Law but also by the law of the Empire.
How cheerfully he was inclined to look forward to death even the year before is apparent from a letter to Myconius, “the bishop of the Churches of Gotha and Thuringia,” who was then lying seriously ill; here he says: “I pray our Lord Jesus not to call to everlasting rest you and our followers and leave me here among the devils to be still longer tormented by them. Truly I have been long enough plagued by them and really I deserve that my turn should come before yours. Hence my prayer is: May the Lord lay your illness upon me and rid me of my earthly habitation which is so useless, worn-out and exhausted. I see right well that I am no longer good for anything.”
After his above farewell-letter to the Elector Luther’s thoughts reverted to death more frequently than before. He cast up the books he had still to write and took stock of his powers to see whether he would have time to finish them. For his energy and spirit of enterprise were by no means yet dead, though at times they seem to be paralysed. Often enough he pulls himself together in his letters sufficiently to make jokes with his friends, the better both to banish his own gloomy thoughts and to inspire the addressees with greater courage and confidence. Nevertheless, through it all, we can detect his disquiet and suffering.
“You often importune me,” so he wrote to his pupil Anton Lauterbach about the end of 1544, “for a work on ecclesiastical discipline, but you do not tell me where I am to find the leisure and health, seeing that I am a worn-out and idle old man. I am ceaselessly snowed under with letters. I have promised the young princes a sermon on drunkenness, others and myself I have promised a book on secret marriages, others again, one against the Sacramentarians; some now want me to set all else aside and write a ‘Summa’ and running gloss on the whole Bible. Thus one thing stands in the way of the other and I get through nothing. And yet I had imagined that, as one who had already done his work, I had earned the right to some leisure, and to live quietly and in peace and so pass away. But I am compelled to pursue my restless way of life. Well, I shall do what I can, and, what I can’t, I shall leave undone.… Pray for us as we do for you.”
In Jan., 1545, when he had almost completed his long and arduous work on Genesis, he sighed: “May God put an end to this moribund and sinful life as soon as this book is finished, or even before should it please Him; do you ask God this for me.… Yes, truly, pray for my happy dissolution and that I may die a good death.” “Pray for me,” he wrote to Amsdorf in May of the same year, “that I may be set free as soon as may be from my fetters and be united to Christ, but that, if my life, or rather my sickness, is to last still longer, God may bestow on me strength of body and force of soul.” He praises God that he himself and his friends, “though unworthy sinners, had been chosen for this blessed and glorious office, viz. to hear the voice of God’s Majesty in the Word of the Evangel; on this the angels and all creation wish us luck, but the Pope is dismayed and all the gates of hell shake.”
Luther’s extant letters covering the period from May to December, 1545, afford us an insight into the emotions through which he passed.
From the month of May onwards he sank deeper and deeper into a dreary state of annoyance and sadness, and, at last, at the end of July, he shook the dust of Wittenberg from his feet. In the latter half of August, after he had allowed himself to be persuaded to return, his spirits rapidly revived, and such was the reaction that his new mystical ardour knew no bounds while his exertions seem almost incredible.
To take the period in question in its chronological order: The month of May commenced with a bitter attack on Agricola, and, on the latter’s arrival at Wittenberg, he refused even to see him. “Of this monster,” he wrote on May 2, “I will hear nothing but words of condemnation; of him and his friends may I be rid for all eternity.… Satan may rage and boast as he pleases!” His annoyance, as is usual with him, is speedily transferred to Satan. That same day, plagued with a tiresome matrimonial dispute, he asked: “Is then the devil master of the world?” Shortly after he declared the Pope to be the “monster of Satan, the end of whose days was at hand.” His joy at the approaching end (“gaudeamus omnes in Domino”) is, however, not unmixed. The thought depresses him that the devil should still be active even at Halle which had recently been won over to the Evangel, and that he had there “just ble
ssed, or rather cursed, two nuns, thereby proving how much more he fain would do.”
Annoyance at the bad treatment of his preachers also lets loose a flood of complaints. “In many places,” so he laments, “they are treated very ill so that they are minded to depart and are even compelled to take flight.” The hostility of the politicians at Court and the lawyers, was also a cause of profound grief to him.
With greater apprehension than usual he saw at the beginning of June terrifying natural portents and prayed with passionate longing for the “overthrow of all things” which he was confidently awaiting.
Already in spirit he saw the sparks of the coming conflagration which was to consume Germany for her chastisement, “before the outbreak of which may God deliver us and ours from this misery!”
In July anger at the “contempt of the Word on our side and the blasphemy of our foes,” the sad sight of the want of unity and growing number of sects in his own camp, where “each one insists on following his own ideas,” the “decline of learning” amongst his followers, where “many bellies are set only on feeding themselves,” all this combined with other experiences tended to make his depression unendurable. To be obliged to set in order the public worship spelt a positive torture to him. Even in his own household he had cause for bitter disappointment in his niece Magdalene who had insisted on making love to a man (whom she was ultimately to marry) of whom Luther did not approve, thus giving Satan an opportunity for “maliciously attacking” Luther’s good name.
Yes indeed, “Satan rules,” he said to Amsdorf, in a letter of July 9, “and all have lost their wits.” Here the cause of his vexation was the Emperor, who, so he had been told, was insisting that the Protestants should attend the Council of Trent and submit to it. It is true Luther does not give up all hope of God again making a mockery of Satan, but, in the meantime, he execrates and curses the Council. He also vents his wrath on the Emperor, Ferdinand the German King, the King of France and the Pope. And why? Because he was only too ready to give credence to a report which had reached him that they had despatched ambassadors to the Grand Turk with gifts and an offer of peace, and that, clothed in long Turkish garments, they were humbling themselves before the infidel. “Are these Christians? They are hellish idols of the devil. Yet I hope they are at the same time a glad token of the coming of the end of all things. Let them worship the Turk, but let us call upon the true God, Who will humble both them and the Turk in the Day of His Coming.”
He is still suffering from the after-effects of the excitement in which he had, as he says, penned his “book brimful of bitter wrath, against the Papal monster,” viz. his “Against the Popedom founded by the Devil.” He has not the strength left to write a sequel to it, but he tells his friend Ratzeberger: “I have not yet done justice either to myself or to the greatness of my anger; I know too that I can never do full justice to it, so great and boundless is the enormity of the Papistic monster.” In such a frame of mind he feels keenly that he is the “trump heralding the Last Judgment.”
He is conscious, however, that his trump cannot peal loud enough in the world (“parum sonamus”) owing to his state, borne down as he is by pains of body and soul. He was unable to summon up the force to write either the continuation of his work against the Pope, or even the short reply to the Swiss which he had promised Amsdorf.
The above false report of the Christian embassy to Turkey current at Wittenberg he was at once ready to accept because it was in keeping with his pessimistic outlook. The evil spirits of suspicion, distrust and the mania of persecution made his unhappy mind willing to credit everything that was unfavourable, and even embittered the life of those about him. Melanchthon in particular suffered under this mood owing to his disposition to find a modus vivendi with the Swiss, whilst all the while concealing his leanings under a prudent and timid silence.
“The wild and immoral life at Wittenberg, a town so greatly favoured by God,” and the danger this spelt to the good name of the whole of Luther’s work stung him now more keenly than ever before. Of his own remorse of conscience we hear nothing at this time; his letters even to his intimates, usually so communicative, are silent as to any temptations or inward conflicts with the devil. There is no doubt that public affairs were then weighing more heavily on him, for instance the troubles arising from the Hessian bigamy. He was now again suffering from calculus. “I would dearly like to die,” he writes, “a plague on these excruciating pains! If, however, it is the Will of God that I succumb to them, He will give me grace to endure them and to die, if not sweetly, at least bravely!”
When his physical sufferings diminished there came to his mind the recollection of how, more than a year before, early in 1544, he had determined to leave Wittenberg, of which he had sickened, in order to seek a more peaceful life elsewhere. It was only the extraordinary exertions of his friends that had then succeeded in keeping him back. Bugenhagen and the other preachers, the University and the magistrates, had besought him with tears and entreaties. On that occasion he was “incensed,” so Cruciger, his friend and pupil, says, “at some trivial matter, or rather he was full of suspicion about us all, as I believe.” Already in 1530, and again in 1539, he had declared that, owing to the annoyance given him, he would never again mount the pulpit at Wittenberg. Now, however, his chagrin was even deeper and he resolved to carry out his plan prudently and quit the town for ever.
Without acquainting even Catherine Bora of the length of his absence from the town he left Wittenberg at the end of July accompanied by his son Hans, his guest Ferdinand von Maupis, travelling with Cruciger, who was to decide a quarrel between Medler and Mohr, the two Naumburg preachers at Zeitz, on July 27. Luther also repaired to Zeitz and took part in the negotiations, but instead of returning with Cruciger to Wittenberg, he wrote a letter to Katey from Zeitz on the 28th, stating that he had no intention of returning to Wittenberg. “My heart has grown cold so that I no longer like being there; I advise you to sell the garden and courtyard, the house and stabling; then I would make over the big house [the old monastery in which Luther used to live] to my gracious Lord, and it would be best for you to settle down at Zulsdorf [i.e. on her own little property] while I am yet alive.” He hoped, he goes on, that the Elector would continue to pay him his stipend as professor, “at least during the last year of his life.”
From the letter it is plain that it was annoyance at the decline of morals in the town rather than any strained relations with his friends at Wittenberg that drove him to this sudden decision. “Let us begone out of this Sodom!” he writes and hints that, in addition to the disorders with which he was already acquainted fresh scandals had reached his ears on this journey; the “government,” i.e. the authorities, aroused his deepest indignation. “There is no one to punish or restrain, and besides this the Word of God is derided”; maybe the town “will catch the Beelzebub-dance, now that they have begun to uncover the women and girls [an allusion to the low-cut dresses] in front and behind.” “So I will wander about and rather eat the bread of charity than allow my last days to be tortured and upset by the disorderly life at Wittenberg and see all my hard work brought to nought. You may tell Dr. Pommer and Master Philip of this if you please,” he concludes, “and see whether Dr. Pommer will bid farewell to Wittenberg for me, for I can no longer contain my anger and annoyance.”
The Wittenberg notabilities were filled with consternation on hearing of what Luther had done; they could not regard it as a mere passing whim, for they knew Luther’s determination. The University made representations in writing to the Elector, begging him to intervene to prevent such a misfortune; the foes of the Evangel would rejoice at the departure of the great teacher, other professors would leave, and the result would be new dissensions. As we know, Melanchthon, by his own account, was ready “to slink away.” Luther, so the University stated, like a new Elias, was the chariot and horseman of Israel and quite indispensable; if he wished any changes made and order established this would be done even should he
find “fault with the teaching of some.” The University also sent Bugenhagen and Melanchthon to talk the matter over with Luther; the town despatched its burgomaster and the Elector sent him his own medical attendant, Ratzeberger, with a friendly letter.
In the meantime Luther had left Zeitz and gone on to Merseburg, whither he had been invited by George of Anhalt, formerly canon of the chapter there. The latter had gone over to Protestantism, and, when the bishopric was sequestrated in 1541 by a secular prince — August, the brother of Duke Maurice of Saxony — was appointed “spiritual administrator” of the see. He now wanted to be formally “consecrated” by Luther as bishop of Merseburg. To this the latter readily agreed. On Aug. 2, with the assistance of Jonas, Pfeffinger and others he reiterated the ceremonial which he had once before performed on Amsdorf at Naumburg (above, vol. v., ).
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 883