DURANTS' S o C
Vol. VI THE REFORMATION
Pgs. 447 - 453
THE LION OF WITTENBERG 1536 - 1546
Luther took no direct part in the pacific conferences of these his declining years; the princes rather then the theologians were now the Protestant leaders, for the issue 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; but his expanding frame harboured 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 stone, and he issued an ultimatum to the Deity: “If this pain lasts longer I shall go mad and fail to recognise Thy goodness.” 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.”
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 costs 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 becomes 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.” 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 wages war; who hangs and breaks on the wheel, and decapitates, and flogs;” 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 Canosa.
The aged Luther became more conservative than the princes. He approved the exaction of forced labour and heavy feudal dues from the peasants; 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. 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 if it were still so. For else no man may compel nor tame the servile folk. 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. 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? [ Henry’s executive husbandry !?! that will tickle Brian’s sense of humour] So anxious was Philip for this 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; and he had recommended bigamy as the best solution for Henry VIII.
Though Malanchthon was reluctant, he finally agreed with Luther that their consent should be given, but insisted that the details should be withheld from the public. Christine consented too, on condition that Philip “ was to fulfil his marital duties to her more than ever before.” The grateful prince sent Luther a cartload of wine as a ‘pourboire’ When news of the settlement leaked out Luther denied giving consent; “the secret Yea,” he wrote “ must for the sake of Christ’s Church remain a public Nay.” Most Evangelicals were scandalised. Catholics were amused and delighted, not knowing that Pope Clement VII had himself thought of allowing bigamy to Henry VIII.
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 widening chasm between the Protestants of the south and 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,” in which his flare for vituperation surpassed itself. 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 smite them, hell fire burn them, the plague, syphilis, epilepsy, scurvy, leprosy, carbuncles, and all diseases attack them.” 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.
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 later years Luther became uncomfortably stout, with hanging jowls and convoluted chin. He described himself as “old, decrepit, sluggish, weary, cold, with but one good eye. I am tired of the world, and it is tired of me.” Early one morning he fell ill with stomach pains. He weakened rapidly, then an apoplectic stroke deprived him of speech, and in its course, he died. ( Feb 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 civilising northern Europe, lacked understanding of mankind’s hunger for symbolic and consolatory myths, lacked the charity to deal justly with his Catholic and Protestant foes. He freed his followers from an infallible pope, but subjected them to an infallible 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.
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 with Copernicus, Voltaire, and Darwin as the most powerful personalities in the modern world. More has been written about him than any other modern man except Shakespeare and Napoleon. His influence on German literature and speech was as decisive and pervasive as that of the King James Bible on language and letters in England. No other German is so frequently or so fondly quoted.
His influence lessened as it spread; it was immense in Scandinavia, transitory in France, superseded by Calvin’s in Scotland, England, and America. But in Germany it was supreme. He was the most powerful figure in German history, and his countrymen love him not less because he was the most German German of them all.
