Chapter XL: At the Grave (3)

The spread of the new religion had at first been followed by a lamentable decline in the educational system by no means confined to those regions torn away from the old faith.[1591] The Protestants were the first to recover their balance, partly owing to Luther’s vigorous appeals on behalf of the schools, partly thanks to the active co-operation of Melanchthon, who had great experience in this sphere and on whom his co-religionists in consequence bestowed the title of “_Præceptor Germaniæ_.” The methods followed by the Lutherans were borrowed principally, as indeed was only to be expected, from the treasure-house of the humanists. Protestant effort was largely crowned with success, especially since the old Catholic endowments of the Grammar Schools, and some part of the income of the sequestrated Church properties, were applied by the sovereigns and townships to the erection and maintenance of these new educational institutions.[1592]

The Catholics indeed were angry to see that these flourishing schools were at the same time hotbeds of the New Faith. They also lamented that, owing to the sad conditions of the times, they themselves had fallen astern of the other party in the matter of education. Their best leaders exhorted them to take a lesson from their opponents and thus reconquer the position the Catholic schools had lost. “With the spread and development of the Jesuit schools a change came over the face of affairs.”[1593] Before this Archbishop Albert of Mayence had declared in 1541 that the Protestants were far ahead of Catholics in the matter of education and were drawing all the youth of Germany into their schools. In 1550 Julius Pflug, bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz, wrote to Julius III: “The Protestant schools public as well as private are in a flourishing condition; ours are crumbling into ruin; the Protestants attract men by large salaries, we do not do this.” Already in 1538 George Wicel had expressed his regret to Julius Pflug that so little was done for the schools among the Catholics as compared with the Protestants, and that already the want of men of learning was being felt.[1594]

To mention two other spheres in which Catholics received a stimulus from Luther’s example and work, we may call to mind the German translation of the Bible and the German hymns.

What was good in Luther’s translation of the Bible was very soon turned to account in Catholic circles. If Catholic writers made use of Luther’s translation in their own editions, they probably excused themselves by arguing that Luther himself was undoubtedly indebted to the Catholic translations of the past. In the same way Luther had made use of some of the old hymns of the Church, amended and popularised them and published them as his own. Catholic hymns in the German language there were already in plenty. But, after 1524, when the first Protestant hymn-books made their appearance, Catholics copied these efforts to collect and improve on the originals, and the first Catholic hymn-book brought out by Michael Vehe, Provost at Leipzig as early as 1537, contained fifty-two hymns with forty-seven tunes—though, strange to say, the old Catholic hymns were given in the new Protestant version.[1595] A much bigger hymn-book was that of Johann Leisentritt, a Dean (1567); it contained in the first edition 250 hymns and 147 tunes. In the following century hymns well known to be Protestant but of which the words were orthodox were incorporated without demur in the Catholic collections.

The Middle Ages had been too neglectful of positive studies, particularly of history and languages, both of which are of such vast importance to theology. Since the dawn of humanism, however, a good beginning had been made, and the need of meeting the demands of the new age was recognised, as, in the domain of Biblical languages, the example of Faber Stapulensis and Jodocus Clichtoveus shows.[1596] The methods of the Protestants made further progress in this field imperative.

In criticism and church-history, where much good work had been done by the Protestants, Peter Canisius was one of the first to suggest that it would be advisable to devote more pains to the study and examination of the history of the Papacy, since, as he wrote, our “people seem to be still quite asleep” and unaware of all that had been done in the opposite camp. He was anxious for books that should be in no way inferior to those of the other side, and of which “the style must be in keeping with the present method and trend of scholarship.”[1597] It is not as yet enough known generally what great success crowned the labours of Onuphrius Panvinius (1529-1568) the Augustinian Roman antiquarian and historian, who was spurred on by the labours of the Protestants, though even more by the humanist traditions of his native country. Better known is the Oratorian, Cardinal Baronius (1538-1607), whose “Ecclesiastical Annals” unquestionably laid the foundation of a new era in the writing of Church history.[1598]

Good and useful work was done by some of the Protestant scholars who edited the writings of the Fathers.

Thus Luther, for instance, encouraged Bugenhagen to edit certain works of St. Athanasius on the Trinity and himself wrote (1532) a Preface to them which is well worth reading.[1599] The Patristic labours subsequently undertaken by Catholics, even the great work of Marguérin de la Bigne,[1600] that forerunner of the French Maurists of the 17th century, had their _raison d’être_ in the very ideas which Luther had set forth in his above-mentioned Preface to Bugenhagen’s work.

The worksomeness of the Catholic Church showed that people were beginning to understand the new era and to mould themselves to its requirements. “How can one deny,” asks Adolf Harnack, “that Catholicism, as soon as it pulled itself together for the counter-reformation … was for over a century in far closer touch with the new era than Luther’s Protestantism? Hence the many converts from Protestantism to Catholicism, particularly among learned Protestants, down to the days of Queen Christina of Sweden and even after.”[1601]

* * * * *

As for the ideas, however, which constituted the essence of the religious innovations the Catholic Church could not accept them short of being untrue to herself and betraying what had been committed to her custody. Whereas she gradually found a way to comply with all just demands for betterment and progress, she was nevertheless obliged relentlessly to close her ears to proposals for the subversion of her dogma and the alteration of her constitution.

She steadfastly refused to make her own the new and mistaken conception of the Church, of Bible interpretation, of faith, justification and good works. In spite of the heart-rending sight of the growing apostasy around her, she kept her eyes fixed on the promises of her Founder and remained true to her olden conception of the Church as a visible society controlled by Chief Pastors who are the vicars of Christ.

Ulrich Zasius of Freiburg in Baden, one of the greatest lawyers and humanists of the 16th century, who had for a while dallied with some of the demands of the innovators, afterwards repudiated as follows any idea of going over to their side:

“I shall remain true to the doctrines and decisions of the Church even should all the host of heaven command me otherwise.” “Such an insult I will on no account offer to the Lord of Truth as to believe He had deceived us for so many hundreds of years”—by permitting the Church to fall into error in spite of the promise that the Spirit of truth would always remain with her.

“For more than a thousand years the Church has taught us by the voice of her Doctors who all take their stand on Holy Scripture. But you twist the Gospel about as you please. Is Luther then to be set above all the Doctors of the past? Our forefathers, who also were authorities and all the wise men, would have called such a demand sheer madness.” “You, however, argue that the Spirit leads and guides you. But what sort of Spirit is it that teaches you to scold and calumniate as you do? In the Epistle of James I have read on the contrary that wisdom is peaceable and modest.”

“Give me a man who renounces all earthly things, keeps all the precepts of Christ, loves his enemies from his heart and does them good, abuses none and is cheerful in adversity. Such a man I will call worthy of the Evangel. But among the ranks of such men you can scarcely reckon Luther.”

“You are free to censure abuses, but is it right on their account to throw the whole Church into confusion? You blame the whole for the misdeeds of some of its parts; pleading the defects you attack what is good and thus unsettle everything.” He too, so he tells his opponents, was at pains to go to the sources of Faith, but he preferred the interpretation of Jerome, Augustine and Chrysostom to theirs; and, again, unable to control his indignation, he exclaims: “What incredible arrogance is this that one man should require his reading to be accounted better than that of all the Fathers of the Church, nay, of the Church herself and the whole of Christendom?”[1602]

When passions were at their height voices such as these failed to secure a hearing. The deep chasm torn open by the wanton act of one man could no longer be bridged over; the bond of religion that had hitherto united the German nation had been rudely severed.

5. Luther as described by the Olden “Orthodox” Lutherans

It is a study that will well repay us to follow through the history of Protestantism the changes that Luther’s description underwent. The awakened historical sense of the present day has already led more than one critic to undertake this task, with a crop of interesting results.[1603]

It would be a mistake to think that Luther’s memory survived anywhere among the orthodox Protestants with that freshness and distinctness which the statements of some of his old friends might lead us to expect. Of the actual personality of the man no clear picture had been transmitted. His words and deeds were commented on according to the outlook of the different schools, needless to say, always with a certain affection and admiration, but no one troubled to leave to posterity a living picture of his unique character as a whole.

Tracing the history of the Protestant representation of Luther down to the present day three periods may be distinguished, the so-called Orthodox one, the Pietistic and Freethinking one that followed, and the last hundred years. Orthodoxy, with its rigid attachment to the formularies of Faith, with the assistance of the State was for a long while able to suppress all contrary tendencies; towards the middle of the 18th century, however, the Pietists and, at the other extreme, a free-thinking party also made their appearance on the field.

Pietism was a reaction against the hard-and-fast doctrinal system of an earlier age, which, clinging desperately to Luther’s doctrine of works, tended to be neglectful of the Christian life and of the revival of morals. If Pietism rather exaggerated the moral side of religion, the so-called “Enlightenment” erred in another direction, setting out as it did to vindicate the rights of reason and, in so doing, making scant account of subordination to the truths of Divine revelation.

On the whole, Orthodoxy retained a supernaturalist view of Luther, though it was apt to assume different colours according to the leanings of the several schools.

Pietism, in its conception of his person, frankly throws over the real Luther and seeks to “vindicate his spirit against the claims of his more orthodox adherents.”

The period of the enlightenment also presents a “sadly distorted” picture of Luther; it had “not the least comprehension of his fiery spirit” and, as was its wont, was “anxious to wipe out everything too distinctive.”[1604]

“Misunderstood and disfigured ‘beyond recognition,’ Luther steps over the threshold of the new era. But here again misfortune awaits him: ‘Sectarians, Anabaptists, Pietists, Democrats, Rationalists, Orthodox’ … all these set to work to improve upon the hero until they can stamp him as their own.”[1605] Finally, “the latest phase of theological development spells a revision of the whole idea and appreciation of Luther.” In the consciousness of having far outrun Luther on the road to a purely natural religion minus any faith, people are beginning to “emphasise more strongly the fact, that he was held captive in the bonds of mediæval feelings and ideas.”[1606]

“Who really knows him?” asked Adolf Harnack in 1883, “and who can be expected to know him? People are willing enough to worship him as what they wish him to be, as the upholder of their own ideals; but in their heart of hearts, they feel that, after all, he was really quite different. His character impresses all, but his convictions are left in the background, or else are worked up into new and more serviceable coin.”[1607]

Yet all these Protestant impressions of Luther, to be examined more in detail below, however they may differ have at least this much in common, that Luther must be acclaimed as the great opponent of the authority of the olden Church.

Maybe we shall come nearest to a correct picture of Luther if we combine the modern view of his being a “mediævalist” with the olden orthodox claim that he was a Prophet of God. Luther stood partly for the old supernaturalist Christianity, partly for a new pseudo-supernaturalism; so far those who speak of his “mediævalism” are in the right. He himself, however, summed up his own character in that of the God-sent “Prophet of Germany,” and divinely appointed conqueror of Antichrist and the devil—a point which was rightly emphasised by his orthodox followers.

To go back now to the various descriptions of Luther. 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; to them he appeared a sort of “professor of divinity of heroic dimensions.” In the century which followed his death it was the custom to exalt him “into the region of the marvellous and more-than-human.” So fond were they of “depicting his divine halo” that it became quite the usual thing to “set Luther side by side with the olden Prophets and Apostles.”

After Elias and John the Baptist, he is “the third Elias, who makes ready the way against the return of Christ to Judgment.” He is the second Noe, the second Abraham, the second Samson, the second Samuel, the second Jeremias, above all, he is the second Moses who frees the people from their bondage; the Egyptian bondage, so some one computed had come to an end in B.C. 1517 just as the Papal bondage reached its end in 1517 A.D.[1608]

Holy Scripture, so the orthodox declared, points to Luther not only where it speaks of the revelation and overthrow of Antichrist (2 Thes. ii. 8), not merely where it proclaims that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem (Zach. xiv. 8), but also in the Apocalypse of John where we are told of the angel having the eternal Gospel—flying through the midst of heaven to the mount on which is seated the Lamb with 144,000 who bear His name—“in order to preach it to them that sit upon the earth, to every nation and tribe, and tongue and people” (Rev. xiv. 6). That this angel was Luther is also plain from the fact that, if the letters of the verse quoted are reckoned by their position in the alphabet and then added together the number will be exactly the same as that of the words (in German): Martin Luther, Doctor of Holy Scripture, born at Eisleben, baptised on Martinmas-Day, viz. 819![1609] In a sermon in 1676 the flight of the angel through the midst of heaven is taken to signify the marvellously rapid spread of Luther’s Evangel, and the Gospel he preaches is termed “eternal,” because Luther’s doctrine is found even in the Fathers of the Church.[1610]

The story of Hus, the “swan,” as prophetic of the coming of Luther, was an integral part of the panegyrics even of Mathesius and Bugenhagen; it served much the same purpose as the statue of a monk with the inscription L.V.T.E.R.V.S., said to have been erected by Kaiser Frederick Barbarossa.[1611]

The recovery of Melanchthon and Myconius for whom Luther had prayed so ardently became evident miracles. The preservation of his picture in great fires was another miracle of frequent recurrence. Splinters from a beam in his house, according to Gottfried Arnold, the Pietist, in his Church-History, were deemed an efficacious cure for toothache and other ills. Arnold calls this a subtle form of idolatry. Leonard Hutter, who became professor at Wittenberg in 1596, learnedly set forth the proofs of Luther’s “being endowed with a ‘_spiritus vatidicus_’ enabling him to foresee many things of importance,” though his prophetic insight is chiefly confined by Hutter and others to his peculiar divine gift for the interpretation of Holy Writ, or to his proclamation of the destruction of contemners of the Evangel.[1612] Johannes Klai (or Claius), the German grammarian and a zealous Lutheran, expressed it as his opinion in 1578 that the German used by Luther was so pure and beautiful that he could have learnt it only by the special help of the Holy Ghost.[1613] Johannes Albertus Fabricius collected, chiefly in the interests of the orthodox party, the titles of the works dealing with Luther; the bare lists of the books setting forth the services he had rendered, the honourable epithets bestowed on him, his eminent qualities, his miracles and his own prophecies and those of others, occupy many pages.[1614]

Even as late as 1872 Carl Frederick Kahnis, the Lutheran theologian and professor at Leipzig, depicted Luther in his “Deutsche Reformation” with all the olden traits. Luther’s doctrines he regarded as the true norm, though it was necessary to understand and develop them. According to Kahnis the young monk’s experience with the devil in the refectory at night and again at the Wartburg, were real assaults of the Evil One on the chosen prophet of God, visible and audible marks of the hostility of Satan to the saviour of mankind, for Luther “was no slave to fancy or excited feelings.” “Maybe,” so he says rather incautiously, “no Father of the Church since the days of the Apostles ever had to feel so keenly the power of Satan.” The prophecy of the “bare-foot monk” and the auguries of the Eisenach Franciscan become matters of history, for had not Luther himself appealed to them? Even the tale of the Elector’s dream who saw the monk’s pen stretching even to Rome and blotting out everything there, rested, according to him, on “history.” As for the fallen Church of pre-Lutheran days, against which his wonderful pen worked, it sinks into the abyss of its own errors before the rising sun of Luther’s new doctrine.[1615]

6. Luther as seen by the Pietists and Rationalists

Luther, as pictured to themselves by the Pietists, differed widely from the Luther of the orthodox. To Pietists like Spener, Luther’s actual doctrine—regarded by them as contradictory and wavering—appealed far less than certain personal mystic traits of his. To them the inward struggles of soul to which Luther ascribes his transition from despair into the peace of the Gospel, his remarks on piety and the interior life, his realisation of the universal priesthood, and the breathing of the Spirit were very dear. They were less enamoured of Luther’s views on faith, the outward Word, or the State-Government of the Church. At any rate, the Pietists wove from the material at their disposal a new Luther who was practically a counterpart of themselves. They preferred to dwell on his earlier years, when Luther, as Gottfried Arnold said in 1699 in his “Kirchenhistorie,” yet lived “in the Spirit,” and before he had ended “in the flesh” as he did later. They either said nothing of his worldlier side or else openly censured it as the fruit of his backsliding and later errors.

Arnold complains bitterly that things had gone so far after Luther’s death that he was called a “Saint” and a divine man, and that he was made out to be the Angel foretold in the Apocalypse. Still he recognises in him “in a usual way,” an “apostolic mission” in so far as he had been the recipient of “a direct inspiration, stimulus or divine gift.” “At the first” he had “indeed been mightily directed, and utilised as a divine tool”; at any rate up to the time of his breach with Carlstadt he could boast of enjoying “the strength and illumination of the Spirit which gave him on particular points and in difficult cases a rule and true certainty.” Only with such limitations will the historian of Pietism accept Luther’s epitaph at Wittenberg where mention is made of the inbreathing of God’s spirit.[1616]

Whereas the orthodox Lutherans, owing to the abiding influence of Melanchthon’s humanism, allowed the study of philosophy and of the wisdom of the ancients, the Pietists at Leipzig, Giessen, Stargard and elsewhere rejected all philosophy, appealing to Luther who had spurned it as the offspring of that fool reason which ought to be done away with; Melanchthon, they urged, had corrupted the faith by the admixture of Plato and Aristotle, and, hence, had never been regarded by Luther “as a true, staunch theologian, but rather as a cunning Aristotelian dialectician.”[1617]

When other Lutherans taunted them with their separatist tendencies so much at variance with Luther’s view of the outward government of the Church by the State, the Pietists retorted by appealing in defence of their conventicle system and so-called “_collegia pietatis_,” to Luther’s Church-Apart of the True Believers. They quoted those passages of the “Deudsche Messe und Ordnung Gottis Diensts” (1526), where Luther lays stress on the ideal kinship of those who earnestly desire to be Christians, and characterises the services in the Church as worthless for those who “are already Christians.”[1618]

“Thus quite a struggle raged around Luther’s person.”[1619]

Books appeared on the one side with such titles as “_Lutherus Antipietista_” and on the other: “Luther the precursor of Spener who faithfully followed in the footsteps of the former.” Count L. von Zinzendorf, with his Pietistic leanings, claimed to be a perfect counterpart of Luther; he wished, as he said in 1749, to be “what Luther had been in part, and what, according to the logical sequence from given premises, he should and ought to have been.” “The Luther who still lives and teaches in Count von Zinzendorf,” was the title of a work by one of the latter’s followers. Things went so far that, in the controversies, it became necessary to ask: Which Luther do you mean, the earlier or the later? Nor was even this sufficient, for Consistorialrat J. A. Bengel of Württemberg (†1752) actually distinguished three Luthers: “the first and the last,” he said, “were all right, but the middle one, owing to the heat of controversy, was sometimes rather spoiled.”[1620]

Among the Protestant writers of the so-called “Enlightenment” we again find Luther under a different guise.

They disagreed with the Pietists’ renunciation both of the conclusions arrived at by reason and of worldly pleasures; in the latter respect they found in Luther a welcome advocate of enjoyment of the good things of the world. His advocacy of a cheerful addiction to earthly pleasures was summed up by them in the saying attributed to him: Who loves not women, wine and song, etc.[1621] On the other hand, by setting Luther on a rationalist plane, they blotted out his essential characteristics; they showed no comprehension for his faith though they were not disposed to minimise his labours for the amendment of religion and for the bringing of light out of darkness.

Gottfried Herder extols him, now as a church founder, now as a writer, and yet again as a great German. Luther’s doctrines seem to him of comparatively small account, but he is willing enough to depict him as a model of cheerful, “strong, free, wholesome and exalted sensibility.”[1622] He is unsparing in his criticism of Luther’s attacks on the Epistle of James and adds: “The sphere of the Spirit of God is wider than Luther’s field of vision.”[1623] In these circles critics were disposed to be bolder and more outspoken than among the orthodox and the Pietists; they also found other things to censure in Luther. Lessing condemns in the severest language his vanity and irascibility: “O God, what a terrible lesson to our pride,” he exclaims, “and how much do anger and revenge degrade even the best and holiest of men.”[1624] He nevertheless opines that Luther’s faults had been of service to him in his great task.

Those few who really perused Luther’s writings marvelled at his extravagant ideas about his divine mission and struggles with the devil, about the end of the world and Antichrist. As a general rule, however, they conveniently skipped all that Luther said against human reason and had no eye for his energetic supernaturalism and his insistence on the bare letter of Scripture.[1625]

Among those infected with the rationalism of the age, antagonism to Catholicism undoubtedly helped to shape their view of Luther. They felt their whole outlook to be at variance with that of Catholicism. Under these circumstances it was natural that Luther should be depicted first and foremost as the liberator from the Papacy; in Luther they recognised, not without some show of reason, “the opponent of all outward authority, of everything Catholic in every domain of the life of the mind”[1626]—an argument, moreover, which occasionally they turned against the Lutheran “Church” itself.

Thus was the dictator of Wittenberg, such as the Orthodox knew him, transformed into a “champion of freedom”; the rationalists made his pen the vehicle of their own ideas. Luther became the “herald of the Enlightenment.” He began what others were to carry on later. “A little longer,” so one wrote in 1797, “and the heavenly light which Luther only saw dimly as in a dream will stream in upon us in all its brightness.”[1627]

The Berlin leader of this movement, A. F. Büsching, as early as 1748, said of himself that he had seen “Luther in his true greatness and as known only to the few; how, in matters of religion, he had absolutely refused to depend on any man, but had relied simply on his own insight and convictions and what had been borne in upon him by diligent reading of the Bible.”[1628] The Halle editor of Luther’s Works, J. G. Walch, vaunted among the other services rendered by Luther that of having established freedom of conscience; in the eyes of Julius Wegscheider he was the “_libertatis cogitandi assertor_”; it was this which inclined even Frederick II of Prussia to respect him, though otherwise he considered him a “furious monk” and a “barbarous writer.”—Those who thus credited Luther with tolerance “had no inkling of the antithesis between this idea and the true Luther.”[1629] His wanton way of dealing with the Canon of Scripture was urged against the Orthodox in defence of a more critical treatment of Holy Writ. Lessing, referring to Luther’s whole system of Bible interpretation, wrote to J. M. Goeze, the chief pastor of St. Catherine’s church at Hamburg: “What greater authority had Luther than any other Doctor of Divinity?”[1630]

Less dangerous to Lutheranism, and in itself harmless enough, though quite characteristic of the age, was the discovery then made, that Luther was the very personification of a public benefactor and great servant of the State. The Leipzig Professor, C. H. Wieland, described him as a “scholar to whom all were indebted”; Luther, he says, “unmasked obsolete prejudices and opened up to his contemporaries in more than one direction fresh prospects of a coming enlargement of the circle of human knowledge. And this great man _was a German_.”[1631] From the good bourgeois point of view the fact that Luther had, as it was thought, cultivated respect for the secular authorities was a great feather in his cap. Such people readily shut their eyes to the severity with which Luther had been wont to lash the rulers, even the highest in the land, and to the fact that he had undermined the very foundations of authority. The patriotic thought that “this great man was a German” was made to cover all his failings.

This sort of patriotism gradually produced a new pattern of Luther, differing in many respects from the others. Particularly after the outbreak of the great German wars of deliverance and the burning enthusiasm for the Fatherland which they called forth many felt that they could not sufficiently extol Luther as the great German, and a typical child of his beloved country.

Gœthe repeatedly called Luther a “great man.” But what, above all, prepossessed him in his favour was, first, his “Struggle against priestcraft and the hierarchy,” and, then, his translation of the Bible. “By him we have been freed from the fetters of intellectual narrowness … and have once more the courage to stand upright on God’s earth and to realise our own divinely endowed nature.”[1632] The poet, himself a true child of his age, had no eye for the truths defended by Catholicism against Lutheranism. In a letter to Knebel dated August 22, 1817, when the centenary of Luther’s promulgation of his Theses was being celebrated far and wide, he said: “Between ourselves, the only interesting thing in the whole business [the Reformation] is Luther’s character; it is also the only thing that really impresses the masses. All the rest is worthless trumpery of which we still feel the burden to-day.” As for the usual view of Luther he characterises it as mythological.

7. The Modern Picture of Luther

In the so-called Romantic School the picture of Luther tends to become as shifty as the character of the age.

The Romanticists, like the poets they were, were anxious, as in other fields so also in respect of Luther, to make a stand against the shallowness of the “Enlightenment.”

Zacharias Werner, while still a Protestant, wrote in Luther’s honour his drama “Die Weihe der Kraft,” and, then, as a Catholic, the drama entitled “Die Weihe der Unkraft.”

Novalis, who was deeply read in Luther’s works, was of opinion that he, like Protestantism itself, was something democratic; to him Luther appeared a “hothead.” Disgusted with Lutheranism and vaguely conscious of the beauty of the past he was anxious to see the scattered faithful once more united in a new Christianity. “Luther,” so he wrote, “treated Christianity as he liked, failed to recognise its spirit and introduced another letter and another religion, viz. the sacred principle of the Bible over all.” A “fire from heaven” had indeed presided over the commencement of his career; later on, however, the source of “holy inspiration had run dry” and worldliness gained the upper hand in Luther.[1633]

The religious spirit which had animated the Romanticists and had led them to cast yearning eyes at the Middle Ages was soon extinguished by the new criticism, historical and Biblical, and by the spread of infidelity.

_The latest efforts to portray Luther_

Luther had now to submit to being criticised by scholars who prided themselves on being dispassionate and were not slow to pass judgment on the characteristics, whether actual or imaginary, which they seemed to discover in him. What the Göttingen Church-historian, Gottlieb Jakob Planck, representing the so-called “Pragmatic” writers had begun—much to the disgust of the then Luther devotees[1634]—was pushed forward by many other Protestants. The lengths to which independent criticism has gone of recent years is emphasised in the Göttingen theologian, Paul de Lagarde. Typical of his remarks is the following: “That great scold Luther, who could see no further than the tips of his toes, by his demagogy threw Germany into barbarism and dissension.”[1635] It was particularly with Luther’s “coarseness” and tendency to indulge in vulgar abuse that the critics were disposed to find fault. Some indeed were inclined to excuse him. Hardly any other writer, however, in seeking to exculpate Luther has used language so startling as that of Adolf Hausrath the Heidelberg scholar who, in his Life of Luther (1904), “thanks God for the barbarism of these polemics,” and goes so far as to say that, “since Luther’s road led to the goal it must have been the right one.”[1636]

Of the three comprehensive and most widely known biographies of Luther, that of Hausrath depicts Luther from the standpoint of a liberal divine. Here Luther almost ceases to be a theologian, or at any rate the theological problems amidst which Luther lived are scarcely even mentioned. On the other hand, in the biography by Theodore Kolde of Erlangen (2nd ed., 1893), the Wittenberg professor again figures as a teacher; his scholarly two-volume work is positive in tendency and regards Luther as a preacher of truth against the darkness of the Middle Ages—which, however, the author has misunderstood and fails to treat fairly. The third large modern work on Luther, also in two volumes, is by the late Julius Köstlin of Halle and Breslau; a new edition was published in 1903 with the collaboration of G. Kawerau; here the picture of Luther is a product of the so-called theology of compromise.[1637]

Wilhelm Maurenbrecher, professor of History at Bonn and Leipzig, said truly in his “Studien” (1874), that the traditional Luther “myth” the “stuff and rubbish” which the past had looked upon as true history, deserved to be cleared away. He traces back to Sleidanus the “current ‘_fable convenue_’” about Luther; this writer, in the work he published in 1555, which became a classic, had begun the process of “moderating and toning down the theological colours” of Luther’s picture, in such a way as to make Luther the living expression of the “already finished programme of the Protestant princes and theologians.” He lifted the author of the religious upheaval “out of his democratic, revolutionary setting” and stamped him as a “model” for theologians. Maurenbrecher, as a layman, is very frank in his opinion as to the central question of Bible-interpretation: “It is undoubtedly the right of every man at the present day to appeal to Luther’s own example, in favour of the unfettered freedom of Bible-research.”[1638]

By an objective portrayal of his characteristics, Protestant non-theologians such as Maurenbrecher have done good service, particularly as regards the more secular side of Luther’s picture. The historian Onno Klopp was still a Protestant when, in 1857, in his “Katholizismus, Protestantismus und Gewissensfreiheit in Deutschland,” albeit recognising Luther’s merits, he censured his “boundless confidence in the infallibility of his own judgment”; the “unstable character of the new Church, so dependent on the favour of princes”; also the blind, idolatrous veneration of his followers for him, especially the attitude of the “narrow-minded Elector and his advisers who were ready to take all the morbid drivel of a quarrelsome old man for the Word of God.” And these same authorities, so Onno Klopp declares, set up a new “Protestant Cæsarean Popedom” which year by year became more burdensome and oppressive.[1639] On the whole his portrait of Luther is the reverse of flattering.

Had the writings of Leopold von Ranke and Carl Adolf Menzel been as independent as Maurenbrecher’s or as broad-minded as Klopp’s, their picture of Luther would have been more true. Even to-day, in spite of the abundance of works on the Reformation period, an independent historian at home in all the profound and detailed studies which have recently appeared, is still lacking in Protestant circles; hence a living picture of Luther’s person has not yet been painted.

As for the Protestant theologians they have, as a rule, not contributed much to the portrait of Luther; what they have given us has been rather a sort of kaleidoscope of Luther’s dogma; they busy themselves more with crumbs from his history than with it as a whole. Dealing with some particular doctrine, writing or action of his they have sketched, so to speak, only one facet of his personality; with the help of this they have, nevertheless, built up a picture of the founder of Protestantism as he seemed to them. Hence even the fundamental conception of Luther’s message, i.e. that whereby it differs essentially from Catholicism has been very variously estimated.[1640]

Protestant theologians of more “positive” leanings have protested against the Rationalist views of those other theologians who hold that Luther banished dogma from his Christianity, and rediscovered Christianity “as a religion.”[1641] They declare that, not only did he not abrogate dogma but that he actually “revived and preserved” it. A religion without dogma was unthinkable to him.[1642]

It is true that these positive theologians who believe in the existence of Lutheran “dogmas” are at variance when it comes to stating clearly the actual dogmas which Luther “revived,” or in what his essential message consisted. Some insist above all on the ethical side; thanks to Luther there came a “deeper understanding for the idiosyncracies of the individual” than was the rule in mediæval Christianity.

Where such inveterate differences of opinion prevailed even the theology of conciliation was bound to fail. Reinhold Seeberg, the Berlin theologian, tried to promote some sort of settlement in his “Grundwahrheiten der christlichen Religion,” a work “framed on the lines of the olden Gospel and in the spirit of Paul and Luther which seeks to make the Christian standpoint understood in wider circles.” But his scheme met with a poor reception; the more orthodox looked at it “askance, and, on the other hand, the progressive party were only the more confirmed in their antagonism.”[1643]

Several Protestant theologians of late years have compared Luther to St. Paul. This, for instance, was also done by Walter Köhler of Zürich, a liberal theologian, who does not hesitate to reprehend in Luther whatever he finds amiss, and who also shows considerably more broad-mindedness than many others in his appreciation of the works of Catholics.

_The Janus-Picture of the Mediæval and Modern Luther_

Thanks to Denifle’s work Luther’s relation to the Middle Ages is now more clearly seen. The need for bestowing more attention than has hitherto been done on that side of Luther’s picture which belongs to the Middle Ages has been strongly insisted on by another liberal theologian, viz. Ernst Troeltsch of Heidelberg. In Troeltsch’s writings Luther’s features become to a great extent mediæval. His views on grace and faith, his ethics, his Churches, the stress he lays on the Word—all this, in reality, is an echo of Catholic times. All that forms the very being of Luther is mediæval and the Protestant traits are merely the wrapping.[1644] With the belief in revelation, which he still retained, he had been unable to rise above the hedge of the mediæval way of thought.

Troeltsch thus comes to the conclusion that the new era in which we live did not commence with Luther but only some two centuries ago, i.e. with the dawn of the Enlightenment. The older Protestantism, no less than Luther himself, belongs to the Middle Ages. Luther stuck fast in the Middle Ages chiefly because he clung to the belief in the “supranatural,” whereas the modern world, thanks to a mathematico-mechanical natural science, has done away with all that stands above nature.

Troeltsch also points out that Luther traces his conception of the Evangel back to Paul, and not to Jesus as the New Theology does; also that he, like the earlier Protestantism, had not completely shaken himself free of the mediæval asceticism, and that he held fast to the traditional doctrine of an original sin.

A Catholic writer has expressed himself more correctly on Luther’s false “supranaturalism,” according to which God does everything and man nothing: “The innermost kernel of his doctrinal system was more ultra-mediæval than the Middle Ages themselves.” “So far was he from desiring to make religion less unworldly or less Christian, that, according to what he was incessantly hammering into his hearers, man was to live himself ever more and more into conscience and faith, into Christ and the Gospel.”[1645]

Nevertheless the objection brought forward repeatedly of recent years against the theory of Luther’s mediævalism is also worthy of note; it is urged that, particularly in the early years of his tempestuous struggle, he threw off ideas which stamp him as thoroughly modern.

F. Loofs, for instance, says: “His leading ideas include in them a whole series of inferences which, however, he never followed up to their logical conclusion.… I may mention Luther’s dislike for all bare historical and dogmatic belief, the tendency he had caught from Erasmus to criticise even the Canon, the distinction he adumbrated between the message of salvation or ‘Word of God’ and the actual written word of Scripture.… Semler, who has been styled the father of Rationalism, in his ‘Abhandlung vom freien Gebrauch des Kanons’ has not unjustly claimed Luther as a forerunner … moreover, the services rendered by Luther to the [liberal Protestant] theology of the 19th century in many of its varied schools of thought cannot easily be overlooked.”[1646]

In these remarks there is doubtless much truth, and there are facts which go to bear out the theory that Luther indeed stands in close relations to the modern spirit. There can be no doubt that, in Luther, we find mediæval and modern features combined. What is wanting is an organic connection between the two; as explained in the foregoing volumes it was only at the expense of flagrant contradictions that he took over certain elements from the past while rejecting others; that he took one step forward towards modern infidelity and another backwards. The ancient figure of Janus with one face looking forward into the future and the other back upon the past was harmonious, at least inasmuch as the two faces were depicted as separate. In Luther, however, the two faces are one, a fact which scarcely improves his physiognomy.

From the recent studies on Luther we can now see more clearly than before that a “revision of the whole conception and appreciation of Luther” is imperative in his own household. But, in view of all the work already done, “is it not high time for us to expect an estimate of the Reformation as a whole which shall also be just to the whole Luther?” Stephan, who asks this question, answers it as follows: “We are still to-day in the midst of a new development that started more than a century since from the contrast presented by the different schools of thought.”[1647]

_The “Religious” Reformer and the Hero of “Kultur”_

Two other conceptions are in vogue at the present day, which are in part a reaction against the rather over-bold assertions sometimes made about Luther’s mediævalism. Some have insisted that Luther is to be taken as a “religious” teacher, without examining his actual doctrines too narrowly. To others he appears in the light of the founder of modern “Kultur,” i.e. of civilisation in its widest sense. Neither of these ideas can boast of being very clear, nor have they met with any great success.

Those who regard Luther merely as a religious teacher practically confine themselves to imputing to him the “religiousness” of modern Protestantism as the inward force which moved him; albeit, maybe, in his teaching, he did not quite come up to the modern standard. This was to all intents and purposes the view of Albert Ritschl and his school. Luther, they declared, taught first and foremost that both “piety and theology should rest on the consciousness of having in Christ a Gracious God, thanks to which consciousness we rise superior to the world with all its goods and all its duties.” With him “it was not a question of denominations but simply one of religion.” Ritschl, as another Protestant not unjustly observed, “undoubtedly fell a victim to the temptation” of “modernising” Luther.[1648] Moreover, whereas, according to Ritschl, one of Luther’s main achievements was his introduction of a new view of the Church as an institution devoid of legal jurisdiction, according to other Protestant scholars, it was “chiefly in his views regarding the Church that Luther remained under the spell of mediæval thought.”[1649] On the other hand, some few have sought to make out Luther’s religiousness to have been simply ethical. Thus Wilhelm Wundt, the philosopher, declared that Luther had taught mankind no new religion but only a new ethical system, which, however, was merely an offshoot of the Renaissance. As against this we may set the affirmation of Paul Wernle, viz. that neither Luther nor Lutheranism had a system of ethics at all.[1650]

Recently, it is true, Luther’s “religiousness” has been described by a skilful pen as consisting in an interior union with God, as something altogether “spiritual,” “personal,” as “a sentiment bringing comfort to man’s conscience.”[1651] The truth is, however, that the greatest minds, in mediæval and still more in patristic times, were also in favour of greater inwardness and were against that sort of righteousness which consists merely of words and works. This is a result borne in upon one by all the research now being conducted with so much vigour into the views prevalent in the Middle Ages and earlier.

Hence those who look upon Luther as a new preacher of religion are compelled to paint the pre-Lutheran world as absolutely heathen. Luther, “with his peasant’s pick, relentlessly attacked the vulgar polytheism of the people, the sublime polytheism of public worship and dogma, and likewise the pantheism of mysticism.” But, even if we suppose that all these dreadful things prevailed before Luther’s coming, what did he set up in their place? He induced people, so it is said, to “seek God and find Him in Jesus Christ the image of the fatherly heart of God, to fear, love and hope in God above all things, to fix our heart on God alone and there let it rest.”[1652]—But this was precisely what the olden mediæval Church had sought to do, hence, where is Luther’s peculiarity?

The state of the question to-day would almost seem to justify the words of the famous Ernst Moritz Arndt in his “Ansichten und Aussichten der teutschen Geschichte.” He wrote in 1814: “What Luther really taught and wished has hitherto been understood only by the few; his contemporaries failed to understand him, nor did he understand himself”; but “he foresaw that fiery, disembodied, formless Christianity that was to consist of nothing more than fire and spirit.” Arndt concludes with the solemn words: “But peace be with thine ashes, thou great German man, and may the earth hide thy shortcomings and Christian charity thy faults.”[1653]

The aim of other modern thinkers is to breathe new life into Luther by depicting him as the founder and the hero of modern “Kultur.” The conception of the author of Protestantism as the fount and origin of all present-day civilisation is certainly new and different from the earlier portraitures we have thus far considered. In this picture the “cultural” traits are put in so strong a light that his “religiousness” tends to vanish.

Modern civilisation is non-religious. It is perfectly true that Luther materially contributed to the expulsion of religious influences from the secular government and from public life in general; also that he intervened with a powerful hand to promote the secularisation—that had already begun—and to loosen the existing bond between the Church and the world. On the other hand, it is quite wrong to shut one’s eyes to the other powerful factors at work both before him and in his day which were also tending towards the civilisation of to-day with its estrangement from the Church and preponderance of material interests. Such a factor was the later Humanism. The whole background of the time in which he lived and the seething ferment that preceded the birth of the new world has been misunderstood. His friends indeed point to the after-effects of his undertaking as seen in the subsequent growth of education and scholarship; also to his attitude towards public morality; to the services he rendered to the German tongue; even to the benefit which, indirectly, accrued to agriculture, to the arts, to music, poetry, etc. But, even if we are disposed to allow that an improvement has taken place, it would be utterly unjust to blink the fact that many other spiritual and material influences were at work in all these spheres and were far more potent than Lutheranism. The Lutheran territories were still in a state of servitude and general backwardness when there passed over Germany a great wave of civilisation that was partly of German partly of foreign and even of Catholic growth. For the good that undoubtedly exists in modern civilisation we have to thank partly the natural sciences, which on their revival found a fertile soil even in Italy and France, partly commerce in which, however, the South of Europe was as active as any other region of the world, partly the arts, the best work being, however, cisalpine, partly the development of the State and the army, which again is certainly no indigenous product of Protestantism; hence what we now know is the result of a rivalry between varied influences and many countries. Then again all those qualities which to-day give Germany so high a place among the nations had existed in his countrymen long before Luther’s day; such were their readiness to appreciate the good in others, their openness to outside ideas, their ability to exploit foreign progress, their industry, their domesticity, their tenacity in overcoming all obstacles, and their sober outlook.

Those who make Luther the hero of “Kultur” are also apt to forget the sad ethical, social and political consequences of the schism. To these Adolf Harnack referred plainly enough in a lecture delivered in 1883: “We are well aware of what the Reformation cost us Germans and still costs us. For ages it delayed our political unity; it brought on us the Thirty Years’ War; it made it difficult for us to be just to the Church of the Middle Ages, nay, even to the Church of Antiquity—we cannot break with history without obscuring it—it brought upon us a religious schism which still hinders our growth.”[1654]

If, however, we examine those elements of the new “Kultur” which from the religious or moral standpoint are somewhat questionable (though, amongst Protestant unbelievers, writers are not wanting who are ready to justify them) we meet with many indications which lead us back to Luther. Yet, here again, on the other hand, there were other great and far-reaching causes at work which account for them, which have but little to do with Lutheranism. Such were, for instance, the English Deism which reached Germany by way of France and which helped to produce the infidelity of the Enlightenment; also the revolutionary ideas of 1789 on liberty, the Rights of Man and the lawfulness of rising in revolt, ideas to which the masses are still addicted; then again the luxury that was imported from abroad; above all the inclination of the human heart everywhere to sensuality, to egotism and to promote one’s own standing and temporal welfare even at the expense of one’s neighbour. These maladies to which human nature is prone have, by various causes, been sadly aggravated in modern times. How far Luther was responsible for some of these causes should not be difficult to determine after all that has been said above. At any rate his repudiation of authority in religious matters, his new ideas on faith and good works, and, again his whole system of subjectivism, were poor barriers against the inrush of those elements hostile to faith in God, to Christianity and to ethics, which, in modern civilisation, have a place side by side with much that is good.

Nietzsche laid it down that Luther was the first to free the German people from Christianity by teaching them to be un-Roman and to say: Here I stand, I cannot do otherwise.[1655] He was anxious to make Luther the patron of his newest brand of “Kultur.” But this new, antichristian and atheistic “Kultur” is largely repudiated in Protestant circles. Many, like Walter Köhler, refuse to admit that Luther was in any sense the father of modern freethought; how could he have been, asks Köhler, since he would not sanction any freedom of conscience, and did not even understand what such a thing was?[1656]