Hartmann Grisar

“ The dignity of his chair at Wittenberg is exalted by him to giddy heights. “This university and town,” he said of Wittenberg, may vie with any others. “All the highest authorities of the day are at one with us, like Amsdorf, Brenz and Rhegius. Such men are our correspondents.” In comparison, the sects are simply ludicrous in their insignificance. Woe to those within the fold who dare to run counter to Luther, “like ‘Jeckel’ and ‘Grickel’; they imagine that they alone are clever and that they, like ‘Zwingel’ also, never learnt anything from us! ”

“ It is true Luther taught that the content of the faith to which every true Christian adheres had come into the world by a revelation bestowed on mankind; he also taught that the Holy Ghost lends His assistance to every man to enable him to grasp and hold fast to this revelation: “This is a wisdom such as reason has never framed, nor has the heart of man conceived it, no, not even the great ones of this world, but it is revealed from heaven by the Holy Ghost to those who believe the Gospel.” ”

“ Even more loudly does he bewail the ruin of so many immortal souls; owing to Luther, countless numbers have been torn from the bosom of the Mother Church, founded by Christ, and set on the road to eternal damnation. No tears could suffice to bewail this the greatest of all misfortunes. Piety has declined everywhere and the new preaching of faith alone has lamed the practice of good works. “From every class and calling the former zeal for good works has fled.” ”

“ In even darker colours does he paint the sad picture of the moral decline among the Protestants: Morals are trampled under foot, reverence and fear of God have been extinguished, obedience has become a byword, boldness in sinning gains the upper hand and “freedom” of the worst kind reigns supreme. [1517]
Full of grief he comes at last to speak of the man who was responsible for all this misery. Bugenhagen had boasted of Luther’s prophecy that, if in life he had been the Papacy’s plague, in death he would be its death. ”

“ It ought no longer to be disputed that Luther and the Reformers were not the founders of the Evangelical Church—and that their ideal Protestantism was one minus a Church. It is only necessary to take the idea of the Church in its strict sense—not as the congregation, or the people of God, nor yet as a body of men holding the same opinions, nor as the kingdom of Christ—but as an independent complexus of regulations ordering the religious life, as a special institution to provide for the particular needs of the religious commonwealth within traditional limits. ”

“ The palpable exaggeration it contains, its references to the howling by day and by night, to the scourgings, to the tortures of hunger and cold, to the endless prayers and watchings, and to the ravings of the woebegone searchers after peace, do not prepossess us in favour of the truth of the account. Luther, in so much of what he says on the point, has shown us how little he is to be taken seriously, that one cannot but wonder how his statements, even when exaggerated to the verge of the ludicrous, can ever have been regarded in the light of real authorities. ”

“ When he teaches that the perception of the truth of religion penetrates into every Christian soul as the direct result of a certainty operated by God Himself we must, in order to understand him, keep in view the other points of his teaching, above all his opinion of man’s utter incapacity to do what is good, the depravity of man’s mental powers, his lack of free-will and absolute passivity under the hand of God. Above all he needed some such theory in order to justify his attack on the olden conception of the Church and to defend his own alleged certainty. ”

“ To get as close as possible to the real Luther and not to present a painted or fictitious one has been our constant endeavour in the present work. We venture to hope that the claims of objective history may be recognised even in a field which trenches so closely on religious convictions. There is so much that is purely historical and may be judged quite apart from denominational considerations, so much neutral ground where it is merely a question of facts. To construct an opinion of one’s own based on the incontrovertible facts is open to everyone. ”

“ Luther’s expectations in those early days were strange indeed and quite incapable of realisation; not only were all delusions to be excluded but everything, as he says of the enduring of opposition, was to be done “decently and piously”! If he is really speaking in earnest, then he shows himself a hermit utterly ignorant of human nature. And yet even in the seclusion of the convent walls, the greatest enthusiast should have seen that this was not the way to form a congregation on earth of believers, or anything resembling a Church. ”

“ It is to cherish too low an idea of greatness, not merely according to the Christian but also according to the merely natural standard, if strength of will or eventual success are alone taken into account and the aim and whole moral character of the work completely disregarded. In one sense of the word Catholics have never been unwilling to grant Luther a certain greatness, particularly as regards his astounding mental gifts and his powers of work. ”

“ The Orthodox derived their idea of Luther from the oldest traditions. In these there was a breath of the supernaturalism in which Luther’s own view of himself was decked out, of the inbreathing of the Spirit, of his mysterious struggles with a power unseen, and of his divinely assured victory over the Roman Babylon.
At the present day one marvels to see how cheerfully and naïvely members of the old “orthodox” school were wont to magnify the founder of their denomination on the lines sketched out by Luther himself. All that interested them was the teacher, Luther the theologian ”

“ The Church’s great men knew how to discover the good in every class, to further it with the means at their disposal and indulgently to set it on its guard against its dangers. They wished to place everything lovingly at the service of the Creator.
Had Luther in reality brought back to humanity the Gospel true and undefiled, as he was so fond of saying, then he should surely have striven, in the spirit of charity and good will, to make known its supernatural social forces to all classes of men, and to become, as the Apostle says, “All things to all men.” ”

“ He refutes the opinion of those, who “would have a Church in which there is no evil but where all are prudent and pious, and pure and holy”; thus “the Anabaptists, Münzer and such like, wish to root out and put to death everything that is not holy.” Hence “how are we to suffer the heretics and yet not to suffer them? How am I to act? If I tear up or root out the tares in one place then I spoil the wheat [according to the Parable] , and the weeds will still grow up again elsewhere. Thus if I root out one heretic, yet the same devil-sown seed springs up again in ten other places.” ”

“ Again and again he brands pride as the cause of all heresy: “This is the reason; they think much of themselves, which, indeed, is the cause and well-spring of all heresies, for, as Augustine also says, ‘Ambition is the mother of all heresies.’ Thus Zwingli and Bucer now put forward a new doctrine.... So dangerous a thing is pride in the clergy.” ”

“ Luther’s antagonism to the whole system of philosophy, which the Universities, following the example of Aristotle and the schoolmen, had been so criminal as to admit, to the liberty they allowed to crazy human reason in spiritual matters, and to their championship of natural truth and natural morality as the basis of the life of faith, all this, when carried to its logical conclusion, necessarily brought Lutheranism into fatal conflict with the learned institutions. ”

“ We know that Luther never rightly understood the nature of these ailments and that he regarded his fits of terror, his nervousness and his gloom as anything but what they really were. It would appear that, in his old age, he simply lumped all his sad experiences together as typical of the sort of poison which Popery and Monkery, owing to their false doctrines, offered to their adepts. Nothing seemed to him to show better from what horrors he had snatched mankind. ”

“ The assistance of the poor was, in fact, at that time “one of the principal social questions, poor relief being identical with social politics. To provide for the sick members of the guilds, for the serf incapable of work, for the beggar in the street, for the guest in the hostel, for the poor artisan to whom the city magistrates gave a loan free of interest, for the burgher who received cheap grain from the council, all this was, to give freely, to bestow alms and to perform works well pleasing to God.” ”

“ He casually said that, were he to die as a man of sixty-three, he would have attained a quite respectable age, “for people do not now live to be very old. Well, we old men must live so long in order to be able to look behind the devil [i.e. learn his wickedness] and experience so much malice, faithlessness and misery in the world that we may bear witness what a wicked spirit the devil is.” With the pessimism peculiar to him he concludes: “The human race is like the sheep being led to the slaughter.” ”

“ He also ruthlessly describes the effect of Luther’s doctrines and example on Catholics. “The clergy no longer do their duty in celebrating the Sacrifice of the Mass and reciting the Church’s office and Hours; to the monks and nuns their Rule is no longer as sacred as it used to be. The charity of the rich, the rulers, and the great has dried up, the people no longer flock to divine worship, their respect for the priesthood, their benevolence and pity for the poor are coming to an end. Discipline and decorum are tottering everywhere and have fared worst of all in our family life. ”

“ The reason why his doctrine had destroyed the monks was, because it had revealed how they were merely “intent upon works.” “For what else could come of it? If a conscience is intent on its works and builds on them, then it is stablished on loose sand which is ever slipping and sliding away; it must ever be seeking for works, for one and then for another and ever more and more, until at last even the dead are clothed in monks’ cowls the better to reach heaven.” [768] The last words are a caricature, a misrepresentation of a pious custom by which no one ever dreamt infallibly to win heaven. ”

“ Flacius Illyricus went to great extremes in his antagonism to Synergism. He asserted that man was powerless by means of free will to effect anything in the matter of his salvation because “original sin was a ‘substance’ for otherwise holiness too would not be a ‘substance’”; the soul was by nature a mirror or image of Satan; it was itself original sin, and original sin was no mere ‘accident.’ It was impossible for Luther’s doctrine to be carried to its legitimate conclusion more ruthlessly than in this theory of Flacius. ”

“ We cannot too much impress on those who may be inclined to assume that, at least at times, Luther was not in his right mind the huge and truly astounding powers of work displayed by the man. Only comparatively seldom do we hear of his being disinclined to labour or incapable of work, and almost always the reason is clear. Even were the advocates of intermittent insanity ready to allow the existence of lengthy lucid intervals still so extraordinary a power for work would prevent our agreeing with them any more than with Schön, Möbius, Hausrath and the older authors referred to above. ”

“ 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, tries 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.” ”

“ No one, in the least familiar with Luther’s writings, will be so foolish as to believe that it was really his intention to kill the Catholic clergy and monks. His bloodthirsty demands were but the violent outbursts of his own deep inward intolerance. They were called forth occasionally by other alleged misdeeds of Popery, of its advocates and friends, for instance, by the burdensome taxes imposed by the Church, by her use of excommunication, and by the action taken against the Lutherans, particularly by the resolutions of the Diets for the suppression of Protestantism. ”

“ The man most deeply initiated into the darker side of Luther’s temptations and struggles was the friend of his youth, the Augustinian, Johann Lang. He, too, apparently suffered severely beneath the burden of temptations regarding predestination and the forgiveness of sins. It was in a letter to him, that, not long after the nailing up of the Wittenberg Theses, Luther penned those curious words: They would pray earnestly for one another, “that our Lord Jesus may help us to bear our temptations which no one save us two has ever been through.” ”

“ To a man so full of such fiery enthusiasm for his cause and so dominated by his imagination as Luther, it seems to have been an easy task to persuade himself ever more and more firmly, that all his opponents’ doings were against their own conscience. ”

“ A man’s speech is in some sense an index to his character. Our volumes teem with samples of the filthy expressions to which Luther was addicted. No theologian or preacher had hitherto dared to speak as he did; the Franciscans Johann Pauli and Thomas Murner—albeit by no means too particular—certainly cannot compare with Luther on this score. Moreover, it should not be forgotten that Luther uses such language chiefly as a weapon against his Catholic foes without, and the Protestant “sectarians” within. ”