Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

and impetus. When Aleander, again papal emissary, offered the Lutheran

leaders a hearing at a general council if they would promise

submission to the council's final decisions, they rejected the

proposal. A year later (1534) Philip of Hesse, disregarding Luther's

condemnation of any offensive policy, accepted French aid in restoring

the Protestant Duke Ulrich to power in Wurttemberg. Ferdinand's rule

there was ended; the churches were pillaged, the monasteries were

closed, and their property was taken by the state. `062018

Circumstances again favored the Protestants: Ferdinand was absorbed in

the east, Charles in the west; the Anabaptists were apparently

consolidating a communistic revolution in Munster; Jurgen

Wullenwever's radicals captured Lubeck (1535); the Catholic princes

now needed Lutheran aid against internal revolt as much as against the

Ottomans. Moreover, Scandinavia and England had by this time renounced

Rome, and Catholic France was seeking the alliance of Lutheran Germany

against Charles V.

Elated with this growing strength, the Schmalkaldic League voted

to raise an army of 12,000 men. When the new pope, Paul III, asked

on what terms the League would accept a general council, it replied

that it would recognize only a council held independently of the pope,

composed of the secular as well as the ecclesiastical leaders of

Germany, and receiving the Protestants not as heretics but as equal

participants. `062019 It repudiated the Imperial Chamber of Justice,

and notified the Emperor's vice-chancellor that it would not admit the

right of Catholics to retain Church property, or to carry on their

worship, in the territories of Protestant princes. `062020 The

Catholic states renewed their League, and demanded of Charles full

enforcement of the powers given to the Reichskammergericht. He

replied with gracious words, but fear of Francis I at his back kept

him at bay.

The Protestant tide continued to flow. Says a Catholic historian:

-

On the 9th of September, 1538, Aleander wrote to the Pope from

Linz that the religious condition of Germany was well-nigh ruinous;

divine worship and the administration of the sacraments had for the

most part ceased; the secular princes, with the exception of Ferdinand

I, were either entirely Lutheran, or full of hatred of the priesthood,

and greedy of church property. The prelates lived just as

extravagantly as before.... The religious orders had dwindled down

to handfuls; the secular clergy were not much more numerous, and so

immoral and ignorant that the few Catholics shunned them. `062021

-

When the Catholic Duke George of Albertine Saxony died he was

succeeded by his brother Henry, a Lutheran; Henry in turn was

succeeded by Maurice, who was to be the military savior of

Protestantism in Germany. In 1539 Joachim II, Elector of

Brandenburg, set up in his capitai at Berlin a Protestant Church

proudly independent of both Rome and Wittenberg. In 1542 the duchy

of Cleves, the bishopric of Naumburg, even Albrecht's see of Halle,

were added to the Protestant roster by timely mixtures of politics and

war; and in 1543 Count Hermann von Wied, Archbishop-Elector of

Cologne, shocked Rome by transforming himself into a Lutheran. The

Protestant leaders were so confident that in January 1540, Luther,

Melanchthon, and others issued a declaration to the effect that

peace could be had only through the renunciation, by the Emperor and

the Catholic clergy, of their "idolatry and error," and by their

adoption of the "pure doctrine" of the Augsburg Confession. And the

document proceeded: "Even if the Pope were to concede to us our

doctrines and ceremonies, we should still be obliged to treat him as a

persecutor and an outcast, since in other kingdoms he would not

renounce his errors." "It is all up with the Pope," said Luther, "as

it is with his god, the Devil." `062022

Charles almost agreed, for in April 1540, he took the religious

initiative from the Pope, and invited the Catholic and Protestant

leaders of Germany to meet in "Christian colloquy" to seek again a

peaceful settlement of their differences. "Unless the Pope

intervenes decisively," wrote a papal nuncio, "the whole of Germany

will fall a prey to Protestantism." At a preliminary conference in

Worms a long debate between Eck and Melanchthon resulted in the

tentative acceptance, by the previously intransigeant Catholic, of the

mild positions formulated in the Augsburg Confession. `062023

Encouraged, Charles summoned the two groups to Ratisbon

(Regensburg). There, under his leadership (April 5- May 22, 1541),

they made their closest approach to a settlement. Paul III was

disposed to peace, and his chief delegate, Cardinal Gasparo Contarini,

was a man of good will and high moral character. The Emperor, harassed

by threats from France and appeals from Ferdinand for help against the

returning Turks, was so anxious for an agreement that many Catholic

leaders suspected him of Protestant leanings. The conference concurred

in permitting marriage of the clergy and communion in both kinds;

but no legerdemain could find a formula at once affirming and

denying the religious supremacy of the popes, and transubstantiation

in the Eucharist; and Contarini was not amused by a Protestant query

whether a mouse that nibbled at a fallen consecrated Host was eating

bread or God. `062024 The conference failed, but Charles, hurrying off

to war, gave an interim pledge to the Protestants that there would

be no proceedings against them for holding the doctrines of the

Augsburg Confession, or for retaining confiscated Church property.

During these years of controversy and growth the new faith had

created a new Church. At Luther's suggestion it called itself

Evangelical. He had originally advocated an ecclesiastical

democracy, in which each congregation would select its own minister

and determine its own ritual and creed; but his increasing

dependence on the princes compelled him to surrender these

prerogatives to commissions appointed by, and responsible to, the

state. In 1525 Elector John of Saxony ordered all churches in his

duchy to adopt an Evangelical service as formulated by Melanchthon

with Luther's approval; priests who refused to obey lost their

benefices, and obstinate laymen, after a period of grace, were

exiled. `062025 Other Lutheran princes followed a similar procedure.

As a doctrinal guide for the new churches Luther drew up a five-page

Kleiner Katechismus (1529), consisting of the Ten Commandments,

the Apostles' Creed, and brief interpretations of each article. It

would have been considered quite orthodox in the first four

centuries of Christianity.

The new ministers were generally men of good morals, learned in

Scripture, careless of humanistic erudition, and devoted to the

tasks of their pastorates. Sunday was observed as the Sabbath; here

Luther accepted tradition rather than the Bible. "Divine service"

retained much of the Catholic ritual- altar, cross, candles,

vestments, and parts of the Mass in German; but a larger role was

given to the sermon, and there were no prayers to the Virgin or the

saints. Religious paintings and statues were discarded. Church

architecture was transformed to bring the worshipers within easier

hearing of the preacher; hence galleries became a regular feature of

Protestant churches. The most pleasant innovation was the active

participation of the congregation in the music of the ceremony. Even

the noteless long to sing, and now every voice could fondly hear

itself in the protective anonymity of the crowd. Luther became

overnight a poet, and wrote didactic, polemical, and inspirational

hymns of a rough and masculine power typical of his character. Not

only did the worshipers sing these and other Protestant hymns; they

were called together during the week to rehearse them; and many

families sang them in the home. A worried Jesuit reckoned that "the

hymns of Luther killed [converted] more souls than his

sermons." `062026 The Protestant music of the Reformation rose to

rival the Catholic painting of the Renaissance.

III. THE LION OF WITTENBERG: 1536-46

-

Luther took no direct part in the pacific conferences of these his

declining years; the princes rather than the theologians were now

the Protestant leaders, for the issues concerned property and power

far more than dogma and ritual. Luther was not made for negotiation,

and he was getting too old to fight with weapons other than the pen. A

papal envoy described him in 1535 as still vigorous and heartily

humorous ("the first question he asked me was whether I had heard

the report, current in Italy, that he was a German sot"); `062027 but

his expanding frame harbored a dozen diseases- indigestion,

insomnia, dizziness, colic, stones in the kidneys, abscesses in the

ears, ulcers, gout, rheumatism, sciatica, and palpitation of the

heart. He used alcoholic drinks to dull his pain and bring him

sleep; he sampled the drugs that the doctors prescribed for him; and

he tried impatient prayer; the diseases progressed. In 1537 he thought

he would die of the stone, and he issued an ultimatum to the Deity:

"If this pain lasts longer I shall go mad and fail to recognize Thy

goodness." `062028 His deteriorating temper was in part an

expression of his suffering. His friends increasingly avoided him, for

"hardly one of us," said a saddened votary, "can escape his anger

and his public scourging"; and the patient Melanchthon winced under

frequent humiliations by his rough-hewn idol. As for "Oecolampadius,

Calvin... and the other heretics," said Luther, "they have in-deviled,

through-deviled, over-deviled, corrupt hearts and lying

mouths." `062029

He tried hard to be reasonable in his treatise On the Councils

and the Churches (1539). He compared the various papal promises and

postponements of a general council to teasing a hungry animal by

offering food and snatching it away. With considerable learning he

reviewed conciliar history, and noted that several ecclesiastical

councils had been called and presided over by emperors- a hint to

Charles. He doubted if any council called by a pope would reform the

Curia. Before sanctioning Protestant attendance at a Church council

"we must first condemn the bishop of Rome as a tyrant, and burn all

his bulls and decretals." `062030

His political opinions in his later years suggest that silence is

trebly golden after sixty. He had always been politically

conservative, even when appearing to encourage social revolution.

His religious revolt was against practice rather than theory; he

objected to the high cost of indulgences, and later to papal

domination, but he accepted to the end of his life the most

difficult doctrines of orthodox Christianity- Trinity, Virgin Birth,

Atonement, Real Presence, hell- and made some of these more

indigestible than before. He despised the common people, and would

have corrected Lincoln's famous error on that spawn of carelessness.

Herr Omnes - Mr. Crowd- needs strong government, "lest the world

become wild, peace vanish, and commerce... be destroyed.... No one

need think that the world can be ruled without blood.... The world

cannot be ruled with a rosary." `062031 But when government by

rosaries lost its power, government by the sword had to take its

place. So Luther had to transfer to the state most of the authority

that had been held by the Church; therefore he defended the divine

right of kings. "The hand that wields the secular sword is not a human

hand but the hand of God. It is God, not man, Who hangs, and breaks on

the wheel, and decapitates, and flogs; it is God who wages

war." `062032 In this exaltation of the state as now the sole source

of order lay the seeds of the absolutist philosophies of Hobbes and

Hegel, and a premonition of Imperial Germany. In Luther Henry IV

brought Hildebrand to Canossa.

As he aged Luther became more conservative than the princes. He

approved the exaction of forced labor and heavy feudal dues from the

peasant; and when one baron had twitches of conscience Luther

reassured him on the ground that if such burdens were not imposed upon

them commoners would become overbearing. `062033 He quoted the Old

Testament as justifying slavery. "Sheep, cattle, men-servants, and

maid-servants were all possessions to be sold as it pleased their

masters. It were a good thing were it still so. For else no man may

compel nor tame the servile folk." `062034 Every man should stay

patiently in the task and walk of life to which God has assigned

him. "To serve God is for everyone to remain in his vocation and

calling, be it ever so mean and simple." This conception of vocation

became a pillar of conservatism in Protestant lands.

A prince who had been a loyal supporter of the Protestant cause

brought Luther an uncomfortable problem in 1539. Philip of Hesse was

at once warlike, amorous, and conscientious. His wife, Christine of

Savoy, was a faithful and fertile eyesore; Philip hesitated to divorce

one so deserving, but he powerfully desired Margaret of Saale, whom he

had met while convalescing from syphilis. `062035 After practicing

adultery for some time he decided that he was in a state of sin, and

must abstain from the Lord's Supper. This proving inconvenient, he

suggested to Luther that the new religion, so indebted to the Old

Testament, should, like it, allow bigamy- for which, however, the

prevailing legal penalty was death. After all, was this not more

seemly than Francis I's succession of mistresses, and more humane than

Henry VIII's executive husbandry? So anxious was Philip for his

Biblical solution that he intimated his defection to the Imperial,

even the papal, camp, if the Wittenberg theologians could not see

the Scriptural light. Luther was ready; indeed, in The Babylonian

Captivity he had preferred bigamy to divorce; he had recommended

bigamy as the best solution for Henry VIII; `062036 and many

theologians of the sixteenth century had an open mind on the

matter. `062037 Melanchthon was reluctant; he finally agreed with

Luther that their consent should be given, but that it should be

withheld from the public. Christine consented too, on condition that

Philip "was to fulfill his marital duties toward her more than ever

before." `062038 On March 4, 1540, Philip formally but privately

married Margaret as an additional wife, in the presence of Melanchthon

and Bucer. The grateful Landgrave sent Luther a cartload of wine as

a pourboire. `062039 When news of the marriage leaked out Luther

denied giving consent; "the secret Yea," he wrote, "must for the

sake of Christ's Church remain a public Nay." `062040 Melanchthon fell

seriously ill, apparently with remorse and shame, and refused to eat

until Luther threatened to excommunicate him. `062041 Melanchthon,

wrote Luther, "is terribly grieved about this scandal, but I am a

tough Saxon and a sturdy peasant, and my skin has grown thick enough

to bear such things." `062042 Most Evangelicals, however, were

scandalized. Catholics were amused and delighted, not knowing that

Pope Clement VII had himself thought of allowing bigamy to Henry

VIII. `062043 Ferdinand of Austria announced that though he had had

some inclination toward the new faith, he now abhorred it. Charles

V, as the price of not prosecuting Philip, exacted from him a pledge

of support in all future political divisions.

Luther's temper became hot lava as he neared the grave. In 1545 he

attacked the Zwinglian "Sacramentarians" with such violence that

Melanchthon mourned the widened chasm between the Protestants of the

South and the North. Asked by Elector John to restate the case against

participation in a papally directed council, Luther sent forth a

tirade Against the Papacy at Rome Founded by the Devil (1545), in

which his flair for vituperation surpassed itself. All his friends

were shocked except the painter Lucas Cranach, who illustrated the

book with woodcuts of unrestrained satire. One showed the Pope

riding on a hog and blessing a heap of dung; another chained him and

three cardinals to gibbets; and the frontispiece pictured the

Pontiff on his throne surrounded by devils and crowned with a

scavenger's bucket. The word devil peppered the text; the Pope was

"the most hellish father," "this Roman hermaphrodite" and "Sodomite

pope"; the cardinals were "desperately lost children of the Devil...

ignorant asses.... One would like to curse them so that thunder and

lightning might smite them, hell-fire burn them, the plague, syphilis,

epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack

them." `062044 He repudiated again the notion that the Holy Roman

Empire was a gift of the popes; on the contrary, he thought, the

time had come for the Empire to absorb the Papal States.

-

Fall to, now, Emperor, King, princes, lords, and whoever will fall

to along with you; God brings no luck to idle hands. And first of all,

take from the pope Rome, the Romagna, Urbino, Bologna, and all that he

has as a pope, for he got these by lies and tricks; with blasphemies

and idolatry he has shamefully filched and stolen them from the

Empire, has trampled them under foot, and therefore has led

countless souls to their reward in the eternal fire of hell....

Therefore ought he, the pope, his cardinals, and all the rabble of his

idolatry and papal holiness, to be taken and, as blasphemers, have

their tongues torn out by the backs of their necks, and nailed in rows

on the gallows. `062045

-

Perhaps his mind had begun to fail when he wrote this clarion call

to violence. The gradual poisoning of the internal organs by time

and food and drink may have reached and injured the brain. In his last

years Luther became uncomfortably stout, with hanging jowls and

convoluted chin. He had been a volcano of energy, a restless

Leviathan, saying Rast Ich, so rost Ich - "If I rest I rust." `062046

But now spells of weariness came upon him; he described himself

(January 17, 1546) as "old, decrepit, sluggish, weary, cold, with

but one good eye." `062047 "I am tired of the world, and it is tired

of me," he wrote; `062048 and when the Electress Dowager of Saxony

wished him forty more years of life, he answered, "Madam, rather

than live forty years more, I would give up my chance of

paradise." `062049 "I pray the Lord will come forthwith and carry me

hence. Let Him come, above all, with His Last Judgment; I will stretch

out my neck, the thunder will burst forth, and I shall be at

rest." `062050 To the end he continued to have visions of the Devil;

and, now and then, doubts of his mission. "The Devil assaults me by

objecting that out of my mouth great offenses and much evil have

proceeded; and with this he many times vehemently perplexes

me." `062051 Sometimes he despaired of the future of Protestantism:

"godly servants of the Most High become rarer and rarer"; `062052

sects and factions grow in number and bitterness; and "after

Melanchthon's death there will be a sad falling off" in the new

faith. `062053 But then his courage returned. "I have set Christ and

the pope together by the ears, so I trouble myself no further.

Though I get between the door and the hinges and be squeezed, it is no

matter; Christ will go through with it." `062054

His will began in full character: "I am well known in heaven, on

earth, and in hell." It told how he, "a damnable and miserable

sinner," had received from God the grace to spread the Gospel of His

Son, and how he had won recognition as "a doctor of truth, spurning

the ban of pope, emperor, kings, princes, and priests, and the

hatred of all the demons." And it concluded: "Wherefore, for the

disposition of my meager estate let the present witness of my hand

suffice; and let it be said: 'Dr. Martin Luther, notary of God and the

witness of His Gospel, wrote this.'" `062055 He did not doubt that God

was waiting to welcome him.

In January 1546 he went through wintry weather to Eisleben, the

place of his birth, to arbitrate a dispute. During his absence he sent

charming letters to his wife- as on February 1:

-

I wish you peace and grace in Christ, and send you my poor, old,

infirm love. Dear Katie, I was weak on the road to Eisleben, but

that was my own fault.... Such a cold wind blew from behind through my

cap upon my head that it was like to turn my brain to ice. This may

have helped my vertigo, but now, thank God, I am so well that I am

sore tempted by fair women, and care not how gallant I am.... God

bless you. `062056

-

He dined merrily on February 17. Early the next morning he fell

ill with violent stomach pains. He weakened rapidly, and the friends

who gathered by his bedside made it clear that he was dying. One of

them asked him, "Reverend father, will you stand steadfast by Christ

and the doctrine you have preached?" He answered, "Yes." Then an

apoplectic stroke deprived him of speech, and in its course he died

(February 18, 1546). The body was taken back to Wittenberg, and was

buried in the Castle Church on whose door he had pinned his Theses

twenty-nine years before.

Those years were among the most momentous in history, and Luther had

been their strident and dominant voice. His faults were many. He

lacked appreciation of the historic role that the Church had played in

civilizing northern Europe, lacked understanding of mankind's hunger

for symbolic and consolatory myths, lacked the charity to deal

justly with his Catholic or Protestant foes. He freed his followers

from an infallible pope, but subjected them to an infallible book; and

it has been easier to change the popes than the book. He retained

the most cruel and incredible dogmas of medieval religion, while

allowing almost all its beauty to be stamped out in its legends and

its art, and bequeathed to Germany a Christianity no truer than the

old one, far less joyous and comforting, only more honest in its

teaching and personnel. He became almost as intolerant as the

Inquisition, but his words were harsher than his deeds. He was

guilty of the most vituperative writing in the history of

literature. He taught Germany the theological hatred that incarnadined

its soil until a hundred years after his death.

And yet his faults were his success. He was a man of war because the

situation seemed to demand war, because the problems he attacked had

for centuries resisted all the methods of peace. His whole life was

a battle- against the sense of guilt, against the Devil, the Pope, the

Emperor, Zwingli, even against the friends who would have

compromised his revolt into a gentlemanly protest politely heard and

carefully forgotten. What could a milder man have done against such

handicaps and powers? No man of philosophic breadth, no scientific

mind restricting belief to the evidence, no genial nature making

generous allowances for the enemy, would have flung down so

world-shaking a challenge, or would have marched so resolutely, as

if in blinders, to his goal. If his predestinarian theology was as

repugnant to reason and human kindness as any myth or miracle in the

medieval faith, it was by this passionate irrationality that it

moved the hearts of men. It is hope and terror that make men pray, not

the evidence of things seen.

It remains that with the blows of his rude fist he smashed the

cake of custom, the shell of authority, that had blocked the

movement of the European mind. If we judge greatness by influence-

which is the least subjective test that we can use- we may rank Luther

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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