An Aging Reformer
In the peace conferences of these years, which coincided with Luther's old age, he played no direct or active part. Princes, rather than theologians, now led the Protestant movement, because the disputes were more about property and power than about belief and ritual. Luther was no negotiator, but age turned him from war toward the pen. Yet, as a papal envoy's report of 1535 shows, he had not lost the high spirits and wit of his youth. The envoy writes that Luther's first question was whether the fame of his drinking had reached the envoy's ears, as it was said to have done in Italy.
Even so, in these years he suffered from a weak digestion, sleeplessness, colic, kidney stones, stomach ulcers, gout, rheumatism, sciatica and palpitations. He turned to alcohol for relief, sought the help of physicians and did not stop praying, but his illness grew worse. In 1537, when he thought a kidney stone would soon put out the lamp of his life, he said to God that if this pain went on his mind would give way and he would forget God's goodness. Suffering made him irritable, so much so that his closest friends kept away from him. One of his followers said that none of those near him was safe from his public anger and abuse, and Melanchthon, though a patient man, avoided him so as not to hear the contemptuous remarks of his sour master. His bitterness reached the point of calling Oecolampadius, Calvin and other opponents of the Church all guilty, black-hearted liars.
Nevertheless, Luther took pains to make his treatise On the Councils and the Churches (1539) reasoned and sound. In it he compared the pope's repeated promises and evasions about a general council to bait used to trap an animal. Having studied the history of councils closely, he saw that several had been called and presided over by emperors, and this was a warning to Charles. He doubted that a council summoned by the pope could cleanse the papal court of corruption. Before agreeing that Protestants should sit in such a council, he said, the bishop of Rome must be condemned for his cruelty and tyranny and all his decrees burned.
Conservative in Politics
Luther's political ideas in his last years suggest that the value of silence multiplies after the age of sixty. By nature he was a conservative, and he never lost this trait even in the years when he seemed to be rousing the people to social revolution. His revolt was against religious practices more than religious beliefs. He began by opposing the sale of indulgences and then papal supremacy, yet to the end of his life he accepted the main doctrines of original Christianity, the Trinity, the virgin birth, Christ's atonement, his real presence in the Supper and the existence of hell, and in some respects made them harder to understand than before.
Luther despised the common crowd. In his view "Mr. Everyman" needs a strong government, or savagery will rule the world and peace and trade will vanish; one must not imagine that the world can be governed without bloodshed, since it cannot be ruled by prayer. In this way he transferred to the state many powers that had belonged to the Church. For the same reason he thought the commands of kings divine, saying that the hand that draws the sword is not a man's hand but God's, and that God is the one who hangs, beheads, scourges and makes war. His exaltation of the state as the sole source of law laid foundations for the absolutist philosophy of Hobbes and Hegel and for the future German empire.
Age made him more conservative than the German princes themselves, so that he favored compulsory labor for peasants and heavy rents. When a nobleman was troubled in conscience, Luther answered that gentle treatment makes common people bold and unruly. To justify slavery he appealed to the Old Testament, saying that sheep, cattle, servants and maidservants were all property and could be sold as the owner wished, and that the custom was as right in his day as in that, since otherwise the rabble could not be tamed. He held that everyone must be content with the calling to which God had assigned him, and that serving God means persevering in the task God lays on one, however small. This view of man's place and duty became the basis of conservatism in Protestant lands.
The Landgrave's Two Wives
A prince who had served the Protestant cause greatly faced Luther in 1539 with a hard problem. Philip of Hesse was a warrior, a lover and a man of lively conscience. His wife, Christine of Saxony, had no beauty but was faithful. Philip did not wish to divorce so worthy a wife, but he was deeply taken with Margaret von der Saale and, having been guilty with her, felt himself a sinner and resolved to stay away from Communion. Since this did not seem fitting for a prince, he proposed to Luther that Protestantism, so tied to the Old Testament, should, like that book, allow marriage to two wives. In Philip's day bigamy was punishable by death, but he thought it more honorable than the many mistresses of Francis I or the repeated, arbitrary marriages of Henry VIII. He was so impatient for a solution consistent with Scripture that he resolved, if the Wittenberg theologians found none, to put his problem to the emperor and even the pope.
Luther was well placed to answer him: in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church he had preferred a second wife to divorce and had named it the only remedy for Henry VIII. Many sixteenth-century theologians were as free of prejudice on this as Luther. Melanchthon, unlike Luther, opposed the marriage, but in the end agreed on condition that it be secret. Christine too consented, provided Philip would do his duties as a husband toward her more fully. On March 4, 1540, Philip married Margaret formally but secretly, in the presence of Melanchthon and Bucer, and sent Luther a cartload of wine in thanks for his consent.
When the marriage became known, Luther denied having approved it and wrote that this secret consent must be disowned for the sake of Christ's Church. Melanchthon fell ill from shame and refused food, and Luther had to force him to eat by threatening excommunication. Luther wrote that Melanchthon was deeply hurt by the scandal, but that he himself was a stubborn Saxon and a stubborn peasant whose thick skin was used to such troubles. The marriage nonetheless became a scandal for evangelical Christians. Catholics, not knowing that Clement VII had once considered letting Henry VIII take two wives, rejoiced at the Protestants' disgrace. Ferdinand of Austria declared that though he had once leaned toward Protestantism, he now loathed it. Charles V, in return for not prosecuting Philip, obtained his promise to support the emperor in future political disputes.
The Last Pamphlet
The nearer Luther came to the grave, the sharper his temper grew. In 1545 he attacked the followers of Zwingli so violently that Melanchthon was saddened by the widening split between northern and southern Protestants. When the elector John asked for his opinion on Protestant participation in a council led by the pope, Luther published a long, abuse-filled tract, Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil (1545). Its tone saddened all his friends except the painter Lucas Cranach, who adorned the book with coarse and mocking pictures, among them one showing the pope with three cardinals hanging from a gallows and another in which devils crown the pope with a rubbish heap (I omit the grosser details). The word "devil" made the whole book venomous. The pope is the "father of hell" and the "Roman" in vile terms, the cardinals are "the devil's wandering children" and "stupid asses," and the author wishes that lightning would turn them to ash, hell swallow them and every disease strike them.
Luther again called baseless the idea that the Holy Roman Empire was a gift of the popes, and said that the time had come for the empire to seize the Papal States. He urged the emperor, kings, princes and lords to act at once and take Rome, the Romagna, Urbino, Bologna and all else the pope claimed from his hands, for he had seized them by trickery and stolen them from the empire, and so had brought many souls to eternal damnation. He ended by saying that the pope, the cardinals and their idolatrous crowd should be seized and punished with the most savage penalties (the book's wording; I summarize rather than reproduce it).
When he urged war, killing and aggression in these words, Luther's faculties were probably weakening. A gradual poisoning of the system by age, overeating and drink, which had worn his body down, seemed to have reached his brain as well. In his last years he grew very stout and his face wrinkled. He, who had once been a symbol of energy and had said, "if I stop working, I rot," now suffered from weariness and weakness. On January 17, 1546, he called himself "old, infirm, tired, disgusted and blind in one eye" and wrote, "I am tired of the world, and the world of me." When the widow of the elector of Saxony wished him forty more years of life, he answered that if he lived forty more years he would lose his chance of heaven, and that he wished God would take him soon.
At last the delusions of the devil seized him and he doubted the rightness of his mission, saying that Satan was angry with him for his abuse and confused him. At times he worried about the movement's fate, saying that God's servants grow fewer and rarer, that the Christian sects and their quarrels multiply, and that after Melanchthon's death the new faith would fall into a sorrowful interregnum. Then his courage returned: now that he had made his voice heard to Christ and the pope, he would trouble himself no more; he might be crushed between door and frame, but Christ would be with him there. His will begins: "In heaven, on earth and in hell I am well known," and says that he, a wretched sinner, had defied the decrees of pope, emperor, kings, rulers, priests and devils. He concludes that for his modest property the testimony of his own hands should suffice, and let them say that Dr. Martin Luther, God's secretary and keeper of his word, said so. He had no doubt that God awaited him.
Death at Eisleben
On a cold January day in 1546 Luther set out for his birthplace, Eisleben, to arbitrate a dispute. On the journey he sent his wife affectionate letters. In one, of February 1, he wishes her Christ's peace and blessing and sends the love of his old and weary heart, tells "dear Katie" that weakness came upon him on the road, though through his own fault, and that a cold wind had nearly frozen his head. He jokes that he had recovered so well that he was weary of women, and he commends her to God's blessing.
On the evening of February 17 Luther ate supper cheerfully. The next morning a severe pain in the stomach seized him and quickly weakened him. Friends gathered at his bedside and told him his life was ebbing. One asked, "Revered father, will you remain steadfast in Christ and the doctrine you have spread in the world?" He answered, "Yes." Then he suffered a stroke and lost speech, and soon after he died (February 18, 1546). His body was taken to Wittenberg and buried in the church on whose door he had nailed his Ninety-five Theses twenty-nine years earlier.
A Final Judgment
These were among the most critical years in history, and Luther played a decisive part in them. He made many errors. He ignored the Church's role in carrying civilization to northern Europe, failed to grasp mankind's need for symbolic and consoling myth, and lacked the generosity to treat his Catholic and Protestant enemies with fairness. He freed his followers from an infallible pope and made them subject to an infallible book, and it is easier to change a pope than a book. He destroyed the grace and beauty of medieval Christianity, which lay in its myths and art, but kept its harshest and most unreasonable dogmas. The Christianity he offered Germany was no truer than the earlier one and gave people less joy and consolation; it surpassed the old faith only in the honesty of its teaching and the purity of its ministers. Like the Catholic Inquisition, Luther became intolerant, but his words were harsher than his deeds, and his writings are almost without equal in literature for their violence and abuse. His religious teaching bred in Germans a hatred that kept that land dark for a hundred years after his death.
Yet these same defects made his work succeed. Luther was a man of battle because his age demanded battle. The forces he fought stood for centuries against gentle methods of reform. His whole life was a war with a conscience tormented by sin, with the devil, the pope, the emperor, Zwingli, and even with friends who wished to soften his claims so that opponents might politely hear them and carefully forget them. What could a gentle, peace-loving man do against such stubborn opposing forces? No man of philosophic breadth, no scholar who rests his faith on evidence, and no moderate who deals gently with enemies would have attempted a work that shook the world or pressed toward his goal so resolutely. If the doctrine of predestination seems to us as unreasonable and repellent as the legends and miracles of medieval religion, we must remember that Luther conquered hearts by precisely this passionate, unreasonable method. It is hope and fear, not evidence, that drive man to God.
With his iron fist Luther broke down the bulwark of custom, tradition and power that had held European thought immobile. If influence is the measure of greatness, the most impartial test available, Luther belongs among the famous men of modern times, such as Copernicus, Voltaire and Darwin. Apart from Shakespeare and Napoleon, no man of the modern age has been written about so much. Though his direct influence on philosophy was small, his ideas indirectly shaped Schopenhauer's voluntarism, Kant's primacy of faith, Fichte's nationalism and Hegel's philosophy, which makes the human spirit obedient to the state. His influence on the German language and literature was no less than that of the King James Bible on English, and no German has been quoted so often. With Karlstadt and others he freed the German clergy from compulsory celibacy and turned the energy of the German people from monastic asceticism, idleness and piety toward work and activity, breathing a new spirit into Western man. His influence waned as it moved beyond Germany: strong in Scandinavia, brief in France, and overshadowed by Calvin in Scotland, England and America. But in Germany it was deep and rooted, and no writer or thinker has so penetrated the German mind. Luther is the greatest figure in German history, and because he was more German than all other Germans, his countrymen took him to their hearts.