Luther hoped, by opposing such marriages, to bring about some improvement in the sad state of morals which the Visitations of 1528 and 1529 had disclosed in the Saxon Electorate. The facility with which such marriages were contracted by the Wittenberg students, and the bad effect they had on the peace of the burghers seemed to him a real blot on the New Evangel. He insisted very strongly that the consent of the parents was required as a condition for marriage; without the parents’ consent the marriages were in his eyes neither public nor valid; it was only where the parents refused their consent on insufficient grounds that he would admit that the bride had any right to enter into a real marriage contract. The decision as to whether the parents’ objections held good was, however, one on which opinions were bound to differ.
Shortly after the Visitations referred to above, in 1529, he wrote his “Von Ehesachen,” published early in 1530; in it he declared: “A secret betrothal simply constitutes no marriage whatsoever,” whilst, as a secret betrothal (i.e. invalid marriage) he regards “any betrothal which takes place without the knowledge and consent of those in authority, and who have the right and power to settle the marriage, viz. the father, mother or whoever stands in their stead.”
In 1532 he also proclaimed his views against the lawyers from the pulpit without, however, being able to alter thereby either their practice or their teaching. He lamented in 1538 the blindness of Schurf, who paid more attention to man-made laws than to God’s Word and authority.
After some new disputes he delivered a sermon on Feb. 23, 1539, in which he threatened to put on his horns. In it he called his opponents blockheads; they ought “to reverence our doctrine as the Word of God, coming from the mouth of the Holy Ghost.” He was not going to worship the Pope’s ordure for the sake of the jurists; “let them let our Church be”; but “now the lawyers are seeking to corrupt our young students of theology with their Papal filth.”
Schurf seems to have yielded so far as no longer to attempt to make his opinions public or official.
The greatest tussle, however, ensued on the establishment of the Consistories in 1539, as the lawyers who were entrusted with the matrimonial cases, treated the clandestine marriages as valid, and, in other ways, also took Schurf’s side.
Luther asserted that by countenancing the “espousals,” which were “an institution of the devil and the Pope,” the good name and the morals of Wittenberg were being undermined. “Many of the parents say that, when they send their boys to us to study, we hang wives round their necks and rob them of their children.” Not only the burghers and students but even the girls themselves “who have waxed bold” use their freedom most wantonly. In Jan., 1544, in the pulpit, he poured out his wrath in most unmeasured language, particularly on the second Sunday after the Epiphany; in his tragic delivery he said, for instance: “I, Martin Luther, preacher in this Church of Christ, take thee, secret promise and the paternal consent that follows, together with the Pope and the devil who instituted thee, I bind you all together and fling you into the abyss of hell, in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.”
His anger and annoyance had been aroused by certain concrete cases.
One of Melanchthon’s sons had contracted such a marriage as he was denouncing. In his own family circle the same thing happened, probably in the case of his nephew, Fabian Kaufmann. A student, Caspar Beier, who was on intimate terms with Luther’s household, wished to marry at Wittenberg, but was prevented by the lawyers of the Consistory on account of a previous clandestine marriage which, however, he denied; he appealed from the Consistory to the sovereign, and was supported by a letter from Luther. This quarrel kindled a conflagration at Luther’s home. Cruciger, a friend of the house, was against Beier and described his cause as “none of the best”; Catherine Bora, on the other hand, the “fax domestica” as Cruciger called her, seems to have fanned the flames of Luther’s wrath, in the interests of Beier who was a relative of hers.
To a friend Luther admitted in Jan. that he “was so indignant with the lawyers as he had never before been in all his life during all the struggle on behalf of the Evangel.”
When the controversy was at its height, viz. in Jan., 1544, the Elector arranged for an interview between Luther and the Consistory. Later, in Dec., those negotiations were followed by others, in which the members of the Wittenberg High Court took part; at last Luther’s obstinacy and violence won the day: All marriages without the knowledge or approval of the parents were to be invalid until the latter consented, or the Consistory had pronounced their opposition groundless. To the Elector, who from the first had agreed with Luther’s view, the latter then addressed the letter referred to above () where, appealing to his “Divine mission” to preach the 4th commandment, he announces his final triumph over the lawyers and their edicts.
His triumph he owed to his strong will and, also, possibly, to the fact that the Elector was on his side. The victory also affected the case of Beier, whom Luther hastened to acquaint of his freedom; it further decided to some extent, the yet more important question whether or not the lawyers were to yield to Luther in ecclesiastical matters. They accepted their humiliation with the best grace possible, but we shall not be far wrong in assuming that they were not over-pleased with Luther’s irregular and illogical handling of questions of law.
Difficulties with the State Church
The far-reaching encroachments of the secular authorities in his Church became for Luther in his later years a source of keen vexation.
Much of his Table-Talk, which turns on the lawyers, voices nothing more than his indignation at the unwarranted interference of the State in his new Church which he was powerless to prevent. Thus, according to notes made at this time by Hieronymus Besold of Nuremberg who was a guest at Luther’s table in 1545, the Master on one occasion gave free rein to his anger with the lawyers in the matter of the sequestration of Church lands: “The lawyers shriek, ‘They are Church lands.’ Give them back ‘their monasteries that they may become monks and nuns and celebrate Mass, and then they too will allow you to preach.’ [In other words their proposal was that the new faith should make its way peacefully. To this Luther’s answer is]: ‘Yes, but then where are we to get our bread and butter?’ ‘We leave that to you,’ they say. Yes, and take the devil’s thanks! We theologians have no worse enemies than the lawyers. If they are asked, ‘What is the Church?’ they reply, ‘The assembly of the Bishops, Abbots, etc. And these lands are the lands of the Church, hence they belong to the bishops.’ That is their dialectics. But we have another dialectics at the right hand of the Father and it tells us, ‘They are tyrants, wolves and robbers’ [and must accordingly be deprived of the lands]. Therefore we here condemn all lawyers, even the pious ones, for they know not what the Church is. If they search through all their books they will not discover what the Church is. Hence we are not going to take any reforms from them. Every lawyer is either a miscreant or an ignoramus (“Omnis iurista est nequista aut ignorista”).… They shall not teach us what ‘Church’ is. There is an old proverb, ‘A good lawyer makes a bad Christian,’ and it is a true one.”
It is somewhat astonishing to hear Luther in his “Table-Talk on the lawyers” declaring that it was he who had whitewashed these “bad Christians” and made them to be respected, and that consequently he also could bring them again into disrepute, in other words, that his tongue was powerful enough to do and to undo. “Do not tempt me. If you are too well off I can soon make things warm for you. If you don’t like being whitewashed, well and good, I can soon paint you black again. May the devil make you blush!” — In one of his very last letters (Feb., 1546), owing to new friction with the lawyers about the Mansfeld revenues, he overwhelms them all with the following general charges: “The lawyers have taught the whole world such a mass of artifices, deceptions and calumnies that their very language has become an utter Babel. At Babel no one could understand his neighbour, but here nobody wants to understand what the other means. Out upon you, you sycoph
ants, sophists and plague-boils of the human race! I write in anger, whether, were I calm, I should give a better report I know not. But the wrath of God is upon our sins. The Lord will judge His people; may He be gracious to His servants. Amen. If this is all the wisdom that the jurists can show then there is really no need for them to be so proud as they all are.”
Luther’s attitude towards the lawyers is of special importance from two points of view. It shows afresh the high opinion he entertained of himself, and, at the same time, it reveals his jealousy of any outside influence.
“Before my time there was not a lawyer,” he says for instance in an earlier outburst, “who knew what it meant to be righteous. They learnt it from me. In the Gospel there is nothing about the duty of worshipping jurists. Yes, before the world I will allow them to be in the right, but, before God, they shall be beneath me. If I can judge of Moses and bring him into subjection [i.e. criticise the Law in the light of the Gospel] what then of the lawyers?… If of the two one must perish, then let the law go and let Christ remain.” He was not learned in the law, but, as the proclaimer of the Evangel, he was “the supreme law in the field of conscience (‘ego sum ius iurium in re conscientiarum’).”
“When I give an opinion and have to break my head over it and a lawyer comes along and tries to dispute it, I say: ‘Do you look after the Government and leave us in peace. You men of the law seek to oppress us, but it is written: Thou art a priest for ever’” (Ps. cx. 4).— “The justice of the jurists is heathen justice,” he says; but, after all, even the justice [righteousness] of his own school of theology fell short of the mark. “Our justice is a relative justice; but if I am not pious yet Christ is pious; we are at least able to expound the commandments of God, and do so in the course of our calling. But, even if you distil a jurist five times over, he still cannot interpret even one of the Commandments.”
The other trait that comes out in his dealings with the lawyers is his distaste for any outside interference with his Church. He looked askance at the attempts of secular authorities, statesmen and Court-lawyers to have a say in Church matters, which, strictly, should have been submitted to him alone and his preachers. Yet it was he himself who had put the Church under State control; he had invited the sovereigns and magistrates to decide on the most vital questions, doing so partly owing to the needs of the time, partly as a logical result of the new system. He himself had legalised the sequestration of the Church’s lands and had helped to set up the State Consistories. So long as the secular authorities were of his way of thinking he left them a free hand, more or less. He was, however, forced to realise more and more, particularly in the evening of his days, that their arbitrary behaviour was ruining his influence and only making worse the evils that his work had laid bare to the world.
In his last utterances he is fond of calling “Centaurs” the officials and Court personages who, according to him, were stifling the Church in her growth by their wantonness, ambition and avarice. He bewails his inability to vanquish them; they are a necessary evil. “Make a Visitation of your Churches all the same,” he told his friend Amsdorf, early in January in the last year of his life; “the Lord will be with you, and even should one or other of the Centaurs forbid you, you are excused. Let them answer for it.”
We have also other utterances which testify to his deep distrust of the secular authorities, on account of their real or imaginary encroachments.
“The Princes seize upon all the lands of the Church and leave the poor students to starve, and thus the parishes become desolate, as is already the case.”— “The Princes and the towns do little for the support of our holy religion, leave everything in the lurch and do not punish wickedness. Highly dangerous times are to come.”— “The magistrates misuse their power against the Evangel; for this they will pay dearly.”— “The politicians show that they regard our words as those of men”; in this case we had better quit “Babylon” and leave them to themselves.
“I see what is coming,” he wrote in 1541, “unless the tyranny of the Turk assists us by frightening our [lower] nobles and humbling them, they will illtreat us worse than do the Turks. Their only thought is to put the sovereigns in leading-strings and to lay the burghers and peasants in irons. The slavery of the Pope will be followed by a new enslaving of the people under the nobles.” — In the same year he says: “If the nobles go on in this way,” i.e. neglecting their duty of “protecting the pious and punishing the wicked,” there will be “an end of Germany and we shall soon be worse than even the Spaniards and Turks; but they will catch it soon.” — In 1543 he indignantly told a councillor who opposed him and his followers: “You are not lords over the parishes and the preaching office; it was not you who founded it but the Son of God, nor have you ever given anything towards it, so that you have far less right to it than the devil has to the kingdom of heaven; it is not for you to find fault with it, or to teach, nor yet to forbid the administration of punishment.… There is no shepherd-lad so humble that he will take a harsh word from a strange master; it is the minister alone who must be the butt of everyone, and put up with everything from all, while they will suffer nothing from him, not even God’s own Word.” — In 1544 he even said of his own Elector: “After all, the Court is of no use, its rule is like that of the crab and snail. It either cannot get on or else is always wanting to go back. Christ did well by His Church in not confiding its government to the Courts. Otherwise the devil would have nothing to do but to devour the souls of Christians.”— “The rulers shut their eyes,” he had written shortly before, “they leave great wantonness unpunished, and now have nothing better to do than impose one tax after another on their poor underlings. Therefore will the Lord destroy them in His wrath.”
“What then is to become of the Church if the world does not shortly come to an end? I have lived my allotted span,” so he sighed in 1542, “the devil is sick of my life and I am sick of the devil’s hate.”
He often gives vent to his wounded feelings in unseemly words. A strange mixture of glowing fanaticism and coarse jocularity flows forth like a stream of molten lava from the furnace within him.
Thus we have the famous utterances recorded above (vol. iii., and vol. v., ) called forth by the decline of his Church, the carelessness of the rulers and the remissness of the preachers.
“Our Lord God sees,” he declares, “how the dogs [the princes who were against him] soil the pavements, wet every corner and smash the basins and platters; but when He begins to visit them, His anger will be terrible.”
“To these swine,” so he wrote to Anton Lauterbach of the politicians in the Duchy of Saxony, “we will leave their muck and hell-fire to boot, if they wish. But they shall leave us our Lord, the Son of God, and the kingdom of heaven as well!… With a good conscience we regard them as reprobate servants of the devil; … be brave and cheerfully despise the devil in these devil’s sons, and devil’s progeny until they drive you away. ‘The earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof’ (Ps xxiii. 1).… By your joy you will crucify them and, with them, Satan, who seeks to destroy us. To speak plain German, we shall s⸺ into his mouth. Whether he likes it or not he must submit to having his head trodden under foot, however much he may seek to snap at us with his dreadful fangs. The seed of the woman is with us, whom also we teach and confess and Whom we shall help to the mastery. Fare you well in Him and pray for me.”
The minor State-officials he also handled roughly enough. These “Junkers” take it upon them “to sing the praises of the papal filth.” “They stick to the Pope’s behind like clotted manure.” “I know better what ‘Ius canonicum’ is than you all will ever know or understand. It is donkey’s dung, and, if you want it, I will readily give you it to eat!” “If donkey’s dung be so much to your taste, go and eat it elsewhere and do not make a stench in our churches.”
The Present and the To-come
On his last birthday, which he kept on Martinmas-Eve, 1545, Luther assembled about him Melanchthon, Bugenhagen, Cruciger
, George Major and other guests, and to them opened his mind. According to the account left by his friend Ratzeberger he spoke of the coming dissensions: “As soon as he was gone the best of our men would fall away. I do not fear the Papists, he remarked; they are for the most part rude, ignorant asses and Epicureans; but our own brethren will injure the Evangel because they have gone forth from us but were not of us. This will do more harm to the Evangel than the Papists can.” The sad political outlook of Germany led him to add: “Our children will have to take up the spear, for things will fare ill in Germany.” Of the Catholics he said: “The Council of Trent is very angry and means mischief; hence be careful to pray diligently, for there will be great need of prayer when I am gone.” All, he exhorted “to stand fast by the Evangel.”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 885