The lively Southerner was not content with proving that much in Luther’s Theses was provocative, contrary to dogma, criminal, seductive, sarcastic, etc., but, even in the Dedication to Leo X, he starts off by saying that: Luther had dared to rise up against the truth and the Holy See, but that he, the writer, would see whether “his iron nose and brazen neck were really unbreakable.”[1337]Luther preferred to “snap secretly” rather than to put forward plain doctrines.[1338]“If it is in the nature of dogs to snap, then I feel sure you must have had a dog for your father, for you areever ready to bite.”[1339]Luther having in one passage put forward a statement that was true, Prierias tells him: “You mix a little truth with much that is false, and thus you are a spiritual leper, for you have a spotted skin that shines partly with true, partly with false colours.”[1340]Referring to the building of St. Peter’s at Rome, he says to Luther rather maliciously: “You blame in the case of the first church of Christendom what was extolled when other churches were being built. Had you received a fat bishopric from the Pope with a plenary indulgence for the erection of your church, then, perhaps, you would have found friendly words in plenty and have belauded the Indulgences on which now you pour contempt.”[1341]These are lapses in style which a high official of the Pope should have known better than to commit.Yet it is clear from Luther’s reply that they did not exasperate him nearly so much as did Prierias’s energetic repudiation of his teaching and his calm exposure of the untenable nature of his assertions. What alarmed him was the fact that a highly placed Papal dignitary should have shown the contrast between his innovations and the theology and practice of the Church; he now perceived clearly the practical consequences of his undertaking and the direct entanglement it would involve with Rome. Hence the frame of mind in which he composed his “Responsio ad Dialogum,” etc. (1518),[1342]was not due so much to his opponent’s personalities as to the whole aspect of affairs, to the shakiness of his own position and to his fierce determination to win respect for and to further at the expense of Rome the new doctrine which he now had ready-made in his mind. Whoever recalls the spirit which breathes in his Commentary on Romans and the violent language found in his sermons and letters even before 1518, will readily estimate at its true worth the statement, that what drove him onwards was the insolence of Prierias. Unfortunately, Prierias’s “Dialogue” shares the fate of the Latin works which appeared in Germany in defence of Catholicism in the early days of the struggle with Luther: Save by a few theologians, they are never read, and, indeed, even were they read, it is doubtful whether they would be rightly understood except by those familiar with Scholasticism; hence discretion in passing judgment is doubly necessary.In the Reply of 1518 now under consideration, Luther, in view of the person and position of his opponent, and of the possible consequences, is more restrained in his abuse than in other writings soon to follow. Yet, anxious as he was to furnish a real answer to the criticisms of an author so weighty, we find irony, rudeness and attempts to render ridiculous the “senile” objections of the “Thomaster,”the “sophist” and all his “taratantara,” intermingled with unwarrantable attacks on “Thomistic” theology, that storehouse whence his opponent purloined “his phrases and his shouting.” The reply opens with the words: “Your Dialogue, Reverend Father, has reached me; it is a rather high-flown writing, quite Italian and Thomistic.” It also ends in the same vein. “If for the future you don’t bring into the arena a Thomas armed with better weapons, then don’t expect to find again such consideration as I have just shown you. I have bridled myself so as not to return evil for evil. Good-bye.”When, in 1519, the Dominican whom he had thus insulted published, first a “Replica” in the form of a short letter addressed to Luther, and then the “Epitome” (an abstract of his investigations into the theological questions then under discussion), it was impossible for Luther to complain of any too harsh treatment; the tone of the “Replica,” although dealing with Luther’s attacks on the person of the Roman scholar, falls immeasurably short of his assailant’s in point of bitterness. It is conciliatory, indeed proffers an olive-branch, should the Wittenberg professor retract the new doctrines which Rome was determined to condemn.[1343]As for the “Epitome,” it is merely a theological review of the doctrines involved, which it clearly states and establishes whilst vigorously refuting all opinions to the contrary. It is accompanied by a grave warning to Luther not to impugn the authority of the Roman Church.[1344]This was, however, sufficient to let loose the anger of the German Reformer, who meanwhile had advanced considerably, and whose wrath now manifested itself in his rejoinders. Such was his presumption that he actually reprinted in Germany both works of Prierias as soon as they had been published; the “Replica” he introduced with the derisive remark, that, as the author had threatened to give birth to more, they must pray that he might suffer no abortions.[1345]His reprint of the “Epitome” in 1520 was accompanied by contemptuous and satirical annotations, and by a preface and postscript where he breaks out into the language already described, about Antichrist seated inthe Temple of God in the Roman Babylon, about the happiness of the separated Greeks and Bohemians and about the washing of hands in the blood of the Popish Sodom.[1346]It was the seething ferment in Luther’s own mind, not anything that Prierias had said, that was really responsible for such outbursts. The flood-gates had now been thrown open, and even from the Catholic side came many a wave of indignation to lend acrimony to the contest.Referring to Luther’s words on bloodshed, we hear, for instance, Thomas Murner speaking of “the furious bloodhound, Martin Luther of execrable memory, the blasphemous, runaway monk and murderous bloodhound, who wants to wash his hands in the blood of the priests!”[1347]How far Hieronymus Emser allowed himself to go in his hostility to Luther is plain from his first tract, “A venatione Luteriana Ægocerotis assertio,” of Nov., 1519, in which he replies to an attack of Luther’s on an epistle he (Emser) had sent to Provost Johann Zack. Luther, in the title, had addressed him as the “he-goat” (“ad Ægocerotem”) on account of the goat’s head figuring in his coat of arms. Emser retorts: “It is plainly beyond your ability to send out into the world any writing of yours that is not replete with houndish fury and bristles, as it were, with canine fangs. Your father is Belial, the ancestor of all insolent monks.” He paints a frightful picture of Luther’s career and character the better to prove that such a man had no right to sit in judgment on him.Luther’s “An den Bock zu Leyptzck,” dating from the beginning of 1520, was replied to by Emser in his “An den Stier zu Wittenberg,” whereupon Luther retorted with “Auff des Bocks zu Leypczick Antwort,” to which Emser replied in his pamphlet: “Auff des Stieres tzu Wiettenberg wiettende Replica,” and his larger work “Against the Unchristian book of M. Luther to the German Nobility”; this Luther countered by his “Auff das ubirchristlich ... Buch Bocks Emssers.”During the years 1521-1522 Emser wrote no less than eight tracts against the Wittenberg Professor. The Humanist and clever man of letters has left therein many a wittypage; a refreshing sincerity is one of his characteristics.[1348]On the whole, however, what F. A. Scharpff says applies to these and the later polemics of this zealous champion of the Church: They “are composed in a tone of violent personality, nor does either combatant seek any longer to restrain the ‘Old Adam,’ as both at the outset had pledged themselves to do.”[1349]Another of Luther’s earliest literary opponents was Johann Eck, the author of the “Obelisks,” on the Indulgence Theses. Like the works of Tetzel and Prierias, this tract is chiefly concerned in a calm discussion of the matter in dispute, though it does not refrain from occasionally describing this or that opinion of Luther’s as a “rash, corrupt, impudent assertion,” as an insipid, unblushing error, a ridiculous mistake, etc. The severest remark, however, and that which incensed Luther beyond all the rest was, that certain passages in the Indulgence Theses, owing to a confusion of ideas, made admissions “containing Bohemian poison,” i.e. savouring of the errors of Hus.[1350]Subsequent to this Eck, however, wrote to Carlstadt a letter which was intended for Luther, where he says in a conciliatory tone: “To offend Martin was never my intention.”[1351]Nor did he at first print his “Obelisks,” but merely sent the tract to his bishop and his friends. Luther, on the other hand, had the work printed in August, 1518, together with his own “Asterisks,” and, after circulating them privately among his acquaintances, finally published them together. In the “Asterisci” he speaks of the behaviour of Eck, his quondam “friend,” as most insidious and iniquitous (“insidiossissimum iniquissimum”), and mocks at his “grand, not to say high-flown,” preface. He says: “Hardly was I able to refrain from laughter”; Eck must have written his “Obelisks” during the Carnival; wearing the mask of genius he had produced a chaos. Hiswriting adduced nothing concerning the Bible, the Fathers and the Canons, but was all arch-scholastic; had he, Luther, wished to peripateticise he could, with one puff, have blown away all these musty cobwebs, etc.[1352]Johann Eck, who was professor of theology at the University of Ingolstadt and at the same time parish-priest and preacher, enjoyed a great reputation among the Catholics on account of his works against Luther, particularly those on the Primacy, on Purgatory, the Mass and other Catholic doctrines and practices, no less than on account of his printed sermons and his general activity on behalf of the Church.The indefatigable defender of the Church composed amongst other writings the “Enchiridion locorum communium adv. Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiæ” (1525). The work was of great service and formed an excellent guide to many.In this well-arranged and eminently practical book the questions then under debate are dealt with for the instruction of Catholics and the confutation of heretics; excerpts from Scripture and from the Fathers are in each instance quoted in support of the Catholic teaching, and then the objections of opponents are set forth and answered. Not only were the Church, the Papal Primacy, Holy Scripture, Faith and Works, the Sacraments, the Veneration of the Saints, Indulgences, Purgatory and other similar points of doctrine examined in this way, but even certain matters of discipline and the ecclesiastico-political questions of the day, such as payments to Rome, the ornaments of the churches and the ceremonies of Divine Worship, the use of Latin in the Mass, the disadvantage of holding disputations with heretics, and even the question of the Turkish war. Hence the work amounted to a small arsenal of weapons for use in the controversial field. The tone is, however, not always moderate and dispassionate. The author was clear-sighted enough to avoid the pitfall into which other writers lapsed who cherished undue hopes of a settlement by give and take. In much that he says he still speaks from the mediæval standpoint, for instance, concerning the death penalty due to heretics; this he defends on the strength of the identical passages from the Old Testament to which Luther and his followers appealed for the putting to death of blasphemers and apostates from the true faith.Eck had the satisfaction of seeing his “Enchiridion,” within four years, reprinted four times in Bavaria, twice at Tübingen, and at Cologne, Paris and Lyons. Before 1576 it had been reimpressed forty-five times. In the midst of his other literaryworks and his fatiguing labours as preacher and professor at the University of Ingolstadt, the scholar never forgot his useful “Enchiridion,” but amended it and added to it as occasion demanded. In 1529, in a new edition which he dedicated to Conrad von Thuengen, bishop of Würzburg, he looks back in the dedicatory preface on the ten years that had passed since his disputation at Leipzig, and voices his grief at the immense advance the apostasy had made with the course of time.“People have outgrown themselves,” Eck exclaims, “they exalt themselves against God just as Lucifer once did, but like him too they fall into the abyss and come to despise the teaching of God.” “Whoever does not hold fast to the tradition of the Church and to the unanimous consent of the Fathers and the Councils must fall into the cesspool of the worst errors.” These words are characteristic of Eck’s unwavering adherence to authority.He goes on to apply this to Luther: “Luther and those who follow him prefer to rise up in their foolish daring rather than bow to the rule of faith; they open their offensive mouth against the holy Fathers and the whole Church; they exalt their own judgment with momentous and arrogant blindness above that of the most august representatives of the teaching office.” True enough Luther had begun softly by merely publishing some theses against the system of indulgences with which many might still agree; but then he had gone on step by step and had increased his partisans by proclaiming a Christian freedom which in reality savoured more of Mohammed. It is our sins, Eck admits, that are the cause of the unhappy success of his work. “From the poisoned root new and corrupt shoots are constantly springing up, and of their new sects we see no end. In our unhappy days we have experienced the fury of the iconoclasts; Capharnaites have arisen to whom Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is a hard saying; Anabaptists, who refuse baptism to children but bestow it on adults, and, amongst these teachers, every day fresh divisions arise so that the heretics are even more prolific than rabbits. Yes, God is angry with us and allows this because we do not turn to Him with powerful and fervent prayer.”He then goes on to encourage the Bishop of Würzburg to offer vigorous resistance and points modestly to his own self-sacrificing labours.“However much heresy may gain the upper hand, the watchmen of Sion must not keep silence; their voice must ring out like a clarion against the Philistines who scoff at the hosts of the Lord. We must oppose them with all the powers of our mind and defend the Tower of David, guarded, as Scripture says, with a thousand shields. This, zealous men, equipped with holy learning, have already done. I myself, as the least of all, have also entered the arena and exposed myself to the teeth of the wild beasts. At Leipzig I stood up and disputed for twenty days with Luther, the Prince of Dragons, and with Carlstadt; at Baden [in Switzerland, in 1526] too, I had to sustain a combatfor several days with Œcolampadius the Capharnaite, and his comrades. I have also wrestled with them from a distance in several little works which I published in Germany and Italy.”Again, in 1541, in the evening of his days († 1543), in an eighth edition of the “Enchiridion” dedicated to Cardinal Alexander Farnese, while urging him to increased efforts for the bringing about of a Council, he could point to his own three-and-twenty years of incessant conflict with heresy. “O God,” he cries at the sight of the extent to which the evil had grown, “what times are ours!” “Every bulwark against arbitrary private judgment has been torn down; Luther has taught all how to dare all things. Since he has overthrown the authority of the Councils, the Popes, the Holy Fathers and all the Christian Universities, every man, no matter how mad or hair-brained he may be, is free to teach his new fancies to mankind.”[1353]Yet the author seeks to revive hope and confidence in his own mind and in that of his Catholic readers, and, to this end, quotes on the last page the saying of St. Jerome, which he applies to the misfortunes of his own day: “During the years of persecution the priests of the Church must tell the faithful boldly and confidently: Your churches will be rebuilt; have no fear, peace and unity will once more enter in.—Yes truly, by God’s Mercy there will come an end to the heresies of Luther, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Blaurer, Osiander, Schnepf and all their ilk, and the olden truth of faith will flourish again. Grant this, Good Jesus, and grant it speedily!” Invocations such as these accord well with the exhortations to pray for the erring which Eck was fond of introducing in this as well as in his other books.Eck’s writings in defence of the faith include learned as well as popular works, and he was also indefatigable in his labours in the ministry.[1354]Johann Cochlæus, who like Eck was one of the morefamous of Luther’s opponents, had a keen and versatile mind († 1552). He first made Luther’s personal acquaintance at Worms,[1355]and entered the lists against him in 1522 with his “De gratia sacramentorum”; from that time forward he kept a watch on all that Luther wrote, so as to be in readiness to reply to or refute it as occasion arose. He himself gives us the long list of his publications against Luther, in his “Commentaria de actis ... Lutheri,” the work in which he sums up his recollections of the struggles of his time.From these “Commentaria” of Cochlæus, despite the disparaging treatment accorded them by Sleidanus, “more is to be gleaned concerning the history of the Reformation than from many bungling Protestant eulogies.” Such, at least, is the opinion of C. Krafft, himself a Protestant.[1356]The writer sought after the truth and wrote with honest indignation. In spite of disappointments, and even privations, he remained faithful to the Church, making during his career many a sacrifice for his cherished convictions; he himself relates how he could not find a printer for his works against Luther and was forced himself to defray a part of the expense of publication, whereas every press was eager to print Luther’s books owing to the demand anticipated.If, in Cochlæus’s writings, too great passion is often apparent, this may well have been due to that depraved humanism and neo-classicism under the influence of which, more perhaps than any other Catholic man of letters, he stood. We have an instance of this in his “Seven-headed Luther,” which he composed in 1529 at Dresden, whither he had been summoned on Emser’s death.[1357]This book, like his later “Commentaries,” denotes the climax of his polemics. In the dedication he says that the seven-headed monster could not have been born either of God or of Nature, since neither God nor Nature was capable of such an abortion; rather, it must be an offspring of the evil one, who had deceived man and worked him harm, in Paradise under the guise of a serpent, and, often later, under the formof fauns, satyrs, Sileni and various enchantments. In Africa, according to the ancients, there had been a dragon with three or four heads, and Geryon, whom Hercules slew, had also had three heads. But a monster with seven heads, such as was Luther with his sevenfold doctrine, had never been ushered into the world by any country, but must be a creation of the devil. The wicked, perverse, insane apostate monk, long since destined to damnation, had no scruple in deceiving and assailing every upright man with lies, mockery, blasphemy and every kind of nastiness, or in pouring forth seditious falsehoods and insults like an infuriated lioness. The seven-headed hoodman, or hooded dragon, was causing all too much confusion in Germany with his seven heads and was polluting it all with his deadly poison. King Saul, he continues, had sinned in not rooting out the people of Amalek. But to whom did the name of Amalek apply more aptly than to the Lutherans? For Amalek’s was a bestial nation, living bestially according to the flesh, just as the Lutherans—particularly their idol, viz. this monk with his nun—were now doing. In this mad devil’s minister not one crumb of any kind of virtue remained, etc.[1358]Apart from his too rhetorical and acrimonious tone other unsympathetic features met with in Cochlæus are his frequent petitions to high dignitaries of the Church, in Germany and even in Rome, for material assistance; his complaints that he was not taken seriously enough; his too great eagerness, during the first years of the struggle, to hold a disputation with Luther; too much pushfulness and sometimes a certain credulity, not to speak of occasional lapses into a frivolity which, like his rhetoric, recalls the more blatant faults of Humanism and ill beseemed a man anxious to censure the morals of his opponents. He deemed it right and proper, for instance, to write under an assumed name a work against the Reformers’ wives and matrimonial relationships, where, in colloquial form and in a manner highly offensive, he introduces much that was mere tittle-tattle and quite without foundation. His authorship of this “Private Conversation” has been proved up to the hilt in recent times.[1359]Among the ranks of the opponents of Lutheranism Johann Faber and Frederick Nausea, both of them bishops of Vienna, hold a high place. The efforts of these two theologians to elucidate controverted points and to refute Luther were much appreciated in the Catholic circles of that day.In the more popular field quite a number of good speakers and writers belonging to various Religious Orders, particularly the German Dominicans, distinguished themselves for their zeal in the campaign against Lutheranism. Johann Mensing, who became a licentiate at Wittenberg in 1517 and was Luther’s best-hated opponent, was a member of the Order of St. Dominic; so also was Augustine von Getelen, of whose sermons the Lutheran preacher Martin Undermark admitted, that, “with his tongue he was able to sway the people as he pleased”;[1360]Matthias Sittardus, Johann Dietenberger and Ambrosius Pelargus were also all Dominicans, nor did they confine themselves to preaching, but were all of them authors of publications suited to the times. Michael Vehe, another Dominican, was renowned for his ability to wield the pen in German not less than for his Latin discourses from the pulpit. His brother friar, Johann Fabri, earned praise as a preacher and as a clever popular writer. The Protestant preacher H. Rocholl wrote of him: “The turn of what he writes gives proof of great eloquence and his language is oratorically fine; his exhortations are also from an homiletic point of view quite excellent.”[1361]Antonius Pirata of the Dominican friary at Constance received the following encomium from Erasmus in a letter to Laurinus: “He is a respected man of good morals and profound learning, who displays in his sermons an eloquence truly wonderful.”[1362]Conrad Köllin and Jacob Hoogstraaten also adorned the Dominican Order in Germany at that time with their learning, though their interest lay more in scholastic theology than in popular works.All the above belonged to the German province of a single Order, and, altogether, quite thirty Dominicans might be enumerated who engaged in controversy with Luther. Amongst the polemists hailing from other Orders anddeserving honourable mention was the zealous and scholarly Franciscan Caspar Schatzgeyer, also another Franciscan, Thomas Murner, to whom we shall return immediately, the Augustinian Johann Hoffmeister and the Carmelite Eberhard Billick.[1363]The reason that the old Orders, with the exception of the Dominicans, did not furnish more controversialists was in great part due to the disastrous effect of the apostasy on their houses. Many of their subjects, deluded by Lutheranism, forsook their cells, and those who remained were frequently exposed to severe persecution. Many monasteries were not only deprived of their means of subsistence, but, owing to the new spirit of the age and the material difficulties of the monastic life, the supply of novices began to run short.During this period of the German Church’s distress the secular clergy were not behindhand in furnishing tried combatants, though the influence of the new ideas and the decline in morals, particularly during the preceding thirty or forty years, had brought ecclesiastical life and learning to an even lower level than before. There were, however, still some cheering examples to be met with. Conspicuous amongst the veterans who opposed Luther’s teaching and innovations, were, in addition to those already mentioned, Michael Helding, auxiliary bishop and preacher at Mayence (later bishop of Merseburg), and Conrad Wimpina of Leipzig and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, the author of a good Latin collection of works against Luther entitled “On the sects and errors,” etc. (1528).[1364]The Lutheran cause suffered considerably at the hands of these writers.Thomas Murner, the famous Alsatian preacher and writer, a new Sebastian Brant even mightier than the former, entered the lists against Luther and made full use of the satirical style he had cultivated even earlier. Even Protestants have admitted his principal work against Luther (1522) to be a highly incisive and significant production, whilst a recent editor of his works describes him as the most weighty of Luther’s literary opponents in Germany.[1365]There is certainly no question of his “wanton, cheerful, nay, bacchantic humour,” and of his wealth of caustic irony; he enters into Luther’s arguments and proofs, and refutes them, more particularly those taken from the Bible. Murner speaks a very simple and pithy language, though not loath to have recourse occasionally to coarse words, of which an example has been given above (p. 376). Luther paid him out by “amusing his readers with an account of the lice on Murner’s cowl, and by circulating a lampoon alleged to have been sent him from the Rhine, but, at any rate, printed at Luther’s own instance.”[1366]Not one of those who took the field against Luther and pitted their strength against his was really a match for him in energy, in ability to handle the language, in wealth of fancy or in power over the people. To every clear-sighted observer it must have been apparent that truth and logic were on the side of the Catholic controversialists, but, unfortunately, not one of them was able to rival in effectiveness the writings of the Wittenberg Professor.Here and there, in certain ruder passages, we can easily see how his opponents are clumsily endeavouring to retort upon their readier and more inventive foe in language almost identical with his own. Luther, however, stands alone in the originality of his abuse. But if his adversaries, as was too often the case, overstepped the bounds of moderation of language, we must bear in mind their pain and indignation at the unspeakable injustice done to the Church of their fathers. In those rude encounters people were only too apt to forget that, according to Christ’s command, charity must be displayed even towards those who err. Yet the Church had received as part of her heirloom the injunction set by her Founder against the practice of the Jewish synagogue and its saying, “Hate thy enemy” (Mt. v. 42). “But I say to you: Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.”It was on principles such as these that, for all his glowing zeal for the glory of God, Bl. Pierre Favre (Faber) acted, that gentle and enlightened preacher of the true Catholic reformation, who, since 1540, had been labouring in thedioceses of Spires, of Mayence and of Cologne. It was on these principles that he formed his gifted pupil Bl. Peter Canisius, the first German Jesuit, who completed the Exercises under him at Mayence, and, three years before Luther’s death, on May 8, 1543, joined the Society which had now been approved by the Church. Of the followers of the new religion, Favre expresses himself as follows: “May Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men, Who knows that His written Word does not suffice to touch the human mind, soften and move their hearts by His divine Grace.” “No other arguments promote their conversion better than good works and self-sacrifice, even to laying down one’s life.”[1367]“I never cease grieving,” so he wrote to Ignatius, the General of the Order, “at the fall of the noble German nation, once the incomparable pearl of the Church and the glory of Christendom.” Through the head of the Society he sought to convince its members that his own way of dealing with the apostasy was the best. “Those who wish to be of service to the false teachers of to-day,” he writes, “must above all be distinguished by charity and real esteem for their opponents, and banish from their minds every thought that might in any way lessen their regard for them.”[1368]When Pierre Favre set about his work for the preservation of the German Church, Luther was already at the heyday of his success. Favre accompanied the Spanish ambassador Ortiz to the religious Conference at Worms in 1540, and to the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541. Those two years bore convincing witness to the fact, that the progress of the innovations could no longer be checked by the authority either of Church or State.But, before proceeding to examine Luther’s work at its zenith, we must scrutinise his doctrine a little more closely.
The lively Southerner was not content with proving that much in Luther’s Theses was provocative, contrary to dogma, criminal, seductive, sarcastic, etc., but, even in the Dedication to Leo X, he starts off by saying that: Luther had dared to rise up against the truth and the Holy See, but that he, the writer, would see whether “his iron nose and brazen neck were really unbreakable.”[1337]Luther preferred to “snap secretly” rather than to put forward plain doctrines.[1338]“If it is in the nature of dogs to snap, then I feel sure you must have had a dog for your father, for you areever ready to bite.”[1339]Luther having in one passage put forward a statement that was true, Prierias tells him: “You mix a little truth with much that is false, and thus you are a spiritual leper, for you have a spotted skin that shines partly with true, partly with false colours.”[1340]Referring to the building of St. Peter’s at Rome, he says to Luther rather maliciously: “You blame in the case of the first church of Christendom what was extolled when other churches were being built. Had you received a fat bishopric from the Pope with a plenary indulgence for the erection of your church, then, perhaps, you would have found friendly words in plenty and have belauded the Indulgences on which now you pour contempt.”[1341]These are lapses in style which a high official of the Pope should have known better than to commit.Yet it is clear from Luther’s reply that they did not exasperate him nearly so much as did Prierias’s energetic repudiation of his teaching and his calm exposure of the untenable nature of his assertions. What alarmed him was the fact that a highly placed Papal dignitary should have shown the contrast between his innovations and the theology and practice of the Church; he now perceived clearly the practical consequences of his undertaking and the direct entanglement it would involve with Rome. Hence the frame of mind in which he composed his “Responsio ad Dialogum,” etc. (1518),[1342]was not due so much to his opponent’s personalities as to the whole aspect of affairs, to the shakiness of his own position and to his fierce determination to win respect for and to further at the expense of Rome the new doctrine which he now had ready-made in his mind. Whoever recalls the spirit which breathes in his Commentary on Romans and the violent language found in his sermons and letters even before 1518, will readily estimate at its true worth the statement, that what drove him onwards was the insolence of Prierias. Unfortunately, Prierias’s “Dialogue” shares the fate of the Latin works which appeared in Germany in defence of Catholicism in the early days of the struggle with Luther: Save by a few theologians, they are never read, and, indeed, even were they read, it is doubtful whether they would be rightly understood except by those familiar with Scholasticism; hence discretion in passing judgment is doubly necessary.In the Reply of 1518 now under consideration, Luther, in view of the person and position of his opponent, and of the possible consequences, is more restrained in his abuse than in other writings soon to follow. Yet, anxious as he was to furnish a real answer to the criticisms of an author so weighty, we find irony, rudeness and attempts to render ridiculous the “senile” objections of the “Thomaster,”the “sophist” and all his “taratantara,” intermingled with unwarrantable attacks on “Thomistic” theology, that storehouse whence his opponent purloined “his phrases and his shouting.” The reply opens with the words: “Your Dialogue, Reverend Father, has reached me; it is a rather high-flown writing, quite Italian and Thomistic.” It also ends in the same vein. “If for the future you don’t bring into the arena a Thomas armed with better weapons, then don’t expect to find again such consideration as I have just shown you. I have bridled myself so as not to return evil for evil. Good-bye.”When, in 1519, the Dominican whom he had thus insulted published, first a “Replica” in the form of a short letter addressed to Luther, and then the “Epitome” (an abstract of his investigations into the theological questions then under discussion), it was impossible for Luther to complain of any too harsh treatment; the tone of the “Replica,” although dealing with Luther’s attacks on the person of the Roman scholar, falls immeasurably short of his assailant’s in point of bitterness. It is conciliatory, indeed proffers an olive-branch, should the Wittenberg professor retract the new doctrines which Rome was determined to condemn.[1343]As for the “Epitome,” it is merely a theological review of the doctrines involved, which it clearly states and establishes whilst vigorously refuting all opinions to the contrary. It is accompanied by a grave warning to Luther not to impugn the authority of the Roman Church.[1344]This was, however, sufficient to let loose the anger of the German Reformer, who meanwhile had advanced considerably, and whose wrath now manifested itself in his rejoinders. Such was his presumption that he actually reprinted in Germany both works of Prierias as soon as they had been published; the “Replica” he introduced with the derisive remark, that, as the author had threatened to give birth to more, they must pray that he might suffer no abortions.[1345]His reprint of the “Epitome” in 1520 was accompanied by contemptuous and satirical annotations, and by a preface and postscript where he breaks out into the language already described, about Antichrist seated inthe Temple of God in the Roman Babylon, about the happiness of the separated Greeks and Bohemians and about the washing of hands in the blood of the Popish Sodom.[1346]It was the seething ferment in Luther’s own mind, not anything that Prierias had said, that was really responsible for such outbursts. The flood-gates had now been thrown open, and even from the Catholic side came many a wave of indignation to lend acrimony to the contest.Referring to Luther’s words on bloodshed, we hear, for instance, Thomas Murner speaking of “the furious bloodhound, Martin Luther of execrable memory, the blasphemous, runaway monk and murderous bloodhound, who wants to wash his hands in the blood of the priests!”[1347]How far Hieronymus Emser allowed himself to go in his hostility to Luther is plain from his first tract, “A venatione Luteriana Ægocerotis assertio,” of Nov., 1519, in which he replies to an attack of Luther’s on an epistle he (Emser) had sent to Provost Johann Zack. Luther, in the title, had addressed him as the “he-goat” (“ad Ægocerotem”) on account of the goat’s head figuring in his coat of arms. Emser retorts: “It is plainly beyond your ability to send out into the world any writing of yours that is not replete with houndish fury and bristles, as it were, with canine fangs. Your father is Belial, the ancestor of all insolent monks.” He paints a frightful picture of Luther’s career and character the better to prove that such a man had no right to sit in judgment on him.Luther’s “An den Bock zu Leyptzck,” dating from the beginning of 1520, was replied to by Emser in his “An den Stier zu Wittenberg,” whereupon Luther retorted with “Auff des Bocks zu Leypczick Antwort,” to which Emser replied in his pamphlet: “Auff des Stieres tzu Wiettenberg wiettende Replica,” and his larger work “Against the Unchristian book of M. Luther to the German Nobility”; this Luther countered by his “Auff das ubirchristlich ... Buch Bocks Emssers.”During the years 1521-1522 Emser wrote no less than eight tracts against the Wittenberg Professor. The Humanist and clever man of letters has left therein many a wittypage; a refreshing sincerity is one of his characteristics.[1348]On the whole, however, what F. A. Scharpff says applies to these and the later polemics of this zealous champion of the Church: They “are composed in a tone of violent personality, nor does either combatant seek any longer to restrain the ‘Old Adam,’ as both at the outset had pledged themselves to do.”[1349]Another of Luther’s earliest literary opponents was Johann Eck, the author of the “Obelisks,” on the Indulgence Theses. Like the works of Tetzel and Prierias, this tract is chiefly concerned in a calm discussion of the matter in dispute, though it does not refrain from occasionally describing this or that opinion of Luther’s as a “rash, corrupt, impudent assertion,” as an insipid, unblushing error, a ridiculous mistake, etc. The severest remark, however, and that which incensed Luther beyond all the rest was, that certain passages in the Indulgence Theses, owing to a confusion of ideas, made admissions “containing Bohemian poison,” i.e. savouring of the errors of Hus.[1350]Subsequent to this Eck, however, wrote to Carlstadt a letter which was intended for Luther, where he says in a conciliatory tone: “To offend Martin was never my intention.”[1351]Nor did he at first print his “Obelisks,” but merely sent the tract to his bishop and his friends. Luther, on the other hand, had the work printed in August, 1518, together with his own “Asterisks,” and, after circulating them privately among his acquaintances, finally published them together. In the “Asterisci” he speaks of the behaviour of Eck, his quondam “friend,” as most insidious and iniquitous (“insidiossissimum iniquissimum”), and mocks at his “grand, not to say high-flown,” preface. He says: “Hardly was I able to refrain from laughter”; Eck must have written his “Obelisks” during the Carnival; wearing the mask of genius he had produced a chaos. Hiswriting adduced nothing concerning the Bible, the Fathers and the Canons, but was all arch-scholastic; had he, Luther, wished to peripateticise he could, with one puff, have blown away all these musty cobwebs, etc.[1352]Johann Eck, who was professor of theology at the University of Ingolstadt and at the same time parish-priest and preacher, enjoyed a great reputation among the Catholics on account of his works against Luther, particularly those on the Primacy, on Purgatory, the Mass and other Catholic doctrines and practices, no less than on account of his printed sermons and his general activity on behalf of the Church.The indefatigable defender of the Church composed amongst other writings the “Enchiridion locorum communium adv. Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiæ” (1525). The work was of great service and formed an excellent guide to many.In this well-arranged and eminently practical book the questions then under debate are dealt with for the instruction of Catholics and the confutation of heretics; excerpts from Scripture and from the Fathers are in each instance quoted in support of the Catholic teaching, and then the objections of opponents are set forth and answered. Not only were the Church, the Papal Primacy, Holy Scripture, Faith and Works, the Sacraments, the Veneration of the Saints, Indulgences, Purgatory and other similar points of doctrine examined in this way, but even certain matters of discipline and the ecclesiastico-political questions of the day, such as payments to Rome, the ornaments of the churches and the ceremonies of Divine Worship, the use of Latin in the Mass, the disadvantage of holding disputations with heretics, and even the question of the Turkish war. Hence the work amounted to a small arsenal of weapons for use in the controversial field. The tone is, however, not always moderate and dispassionate. The author was clear-sighted enough to avoid the pitfall into which other writers lapsed who cherished undue hopes of a settlement by give and take. In much that he says he still speaks from the mediæval standpoint, for instance, concerning the death penalty due to heretics; this he defends on the strength of the identical passages from the Old Testament to which Luther and his followers appealed for the putting to death of blasphemers and apostates from the true faith.Eck had the satisfaction of seeing his “Enchiridion,” within four years, reprinted four times in Bavaria, twice at Tübingen, and at Cologne, Paris and Lyons. Before 1576 it had been reimpressed forty-five times. In the midst of his other literaryworks and his fatiguing labours as preacher and professor at the University of Ingolstadt, the scholar never forgot his useful “Enchiridion,” but amended it and added to it as occasion demanded. In 1529, in a new edition which he dedicated to Conrad von Thuengen, bishop of Würzburg, he looks back in the dedicatory preface on the ten years that had passed since his disputation at Leipzig, and voices his grief at the immense advance the apostasy had made with the course of time.“People have outgrown themselves,” Eck exclaims, “they exalt themselves against God just as Lucifer once did, but like him too they fall into the abyss and come to despise the teaching of God.” “Whoever does not hold fast to the tradition of the Church and to the unanimous consent of the Fathers and the Councils must fall into the cesspool of the worst errors.” These words are characteristic of Eck’s unwavering adherence to authority.He goes on to apply this to Luther: “Luther and those who follow him prefer to rise up in their foolish daring rather than bow to the rule of faith; they open their offensive mouth against the holy Fathers and the whole Church; they exalt their own judgment with momentous and arrogant blindness above that of the most august representatives of the teaching office.” True enough Luther had begun softly by merely publishing some theses against the system of indulgences with which many might still agree; but then he had gone on step by step and had increased his partisans by proclaiming a Christian freedom which in reality savoured more of Mohammed. It is our sins, Eck admits, that are the cause of the unhappy success of his work. “From the poisoned root new and corrupt shoots are constantly springing up, and of their new sects we see no end. In our unhappy days we have experienced the fury of the iconoclasts; Capharnaites have arisen to whom Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is a hard saying; Anabaptists, who refuse baptism to children but bestow it on adults, and, amongst these teachers, every day fresh divisions arise so that the heretics are even more prolific than rabbits. Yes, God is angry with us and allows this because we do not turn to Him with powerful and fervent prayer.”He then goes on to encourage the Bishop of Würzburg to offer vigorous resistance and points modestly to his own self-sacrificing labours.“However much heresy may gain the upper hand, the watchmen of Sion must not keep silence; their voice must ring out like a clarion against the Philistines who scoff at the hosts of the Lord. We must oppose them with all the powers of our mind and defend the Tower of David, guarded, as Scripture says, with a thousand shields. This, zealous men, equipped with holy learning, have already done. I myself, as the least of all, have also entered the arena and exposed myself to the teeth of the wild beasts. At Leipzig I stood up and disputed for twenty days with Luther, the Prince of Dragons, and with Carlstadt; at Baden [in Switzerland, in 1526] too, I had to sustain a combatfor several days with Œcolampadius the Capharnaite, and his comrades. I have also wrestled with them from a distance in several little works which I published in Germany and Italy.”Again, in 1541, in the evening of his days († 1543), in an eighth edition of the “Enchiridion” dedicated to Cardinal Alexander Farnese, while urging him to increased efforts for the bringing about of a Council, he could point to his own three-and-twenty years of incessant conflict with heresy. “O God,” he cries at the sight of the extent to which the evil had grown, “what times are ours!” “Every bulwark against arbitrary private judgment has been torn down; Luther has taught all how to dare all things. Since he has overthrown the authority of the Councils, the Popes, the Holy Fathers and all the Christian Universities, every man, no matter how mad or hair-brained he may be, is free to teach his new fancies to mankind.”[1353]Yet the author seeks to revive hope and confidence in his own mind and in that of his Catholic readers, and, to this end, quotes on the last page the saying of St. Jerome, which he applies to the misfortunes of his own day: “During the years of persecution the priests of the Church must tell the faithful boldly and confidently: Your churches will be rebuilt; have no fear, peace and unity will once more enter in.—Yes truly, by God’s Mercy there will come an end to the heresies of Luther, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Blaurer, Osiander, Schnepf and all their ilk, and the olden truth of faith will flourish again. Grant this, Good Jesus, and grant it speedily!” Invocations such as these accord well with the exhortations to pray for the erring which Eck was fond of introducing in this as well as in his other books.Eck’s writings in defence of the faith include learned as well as popular works, and he was also indefatigable in his labours in the ministry.[1354]Johann Cochlæus, who like Eck was one of the morefamous of Luther’s opponents, had a keen and versatile mind († 1552). He first made Luther’s personal acquaintance at Worms,[1355]and entered the lists against him in 1522 with his “De gratia sacramentorum”; from that time forward he kept a watch on all that Luther wrote, so as to be in readiness to reply to or refute it as occasion arose. He himself gives us the long list of his publications against Luther, in his “Commentaria de actis ... Lutheri,” the work in which he sums up his recollections of the struggles of his time.From these “Commentaria” of Cochlæus, despite the disparaging treatment accorded them by Sleidanus, “more is to be gleaned concerning the history of the Reformation than from many bungling Protestant eulogies.” Such, at least, is the opinion of C. Krafft, himself a Protestant.[1356]The writer sought after the truth and wrote with honest indignation. In spite of disappointments, and even privations, he remained faithful to the Church, making during his career many a sacrifice for his cherished convictions; he himself relates how he could not find a printer for his works against Luther and was forced himself to defray a part of the expense of publication, whereas every press was eager to print Luther’s books owing to the demand anticipated.If, in Cochlæus’s writings, too great passion is often apparent, this may well have been due to that depraved humanism and neo-classicism under the influence of which, more perhaps than any other Catholic man of letters, he stood. We have an instance of this in his “Seven-headed Luther,” which he composed in 1529 at Dresden, whither he had been summoned on Emser’s death.[1357]This book, like his later “Commentaries,” denotes the climax of his polemics. In the dedication he says that the seven-headed monster could not have been born either of God or of Nature, since neither God nor Nature was capable of such an abortion; rather, it must be an offspring of the evil one, who had deceived man and worked him harm, in Paradise under the guise of a serpent, and, often later, under the formof fauns, satyrs, Sileni and various enchantments. In Africa, according to the ancients, there had been a dragon with three or four heads, and Geryon, whom Hercules slew, had also had three heads. But a monster with seven heads, such as was Luther with his sevenfold doctrine, had never been ushered into the world by any country, but must be a creation of the devil. The wicked, perverse, insane apostate monk, long since destined to damnation, had no scruple in deceiving and assailing every upright man with lies, mockery, blasphemy and every kind of nastiness, or in pouring forth seditious falsehoods and insults like an infuriated lioness. The seven-headed hoodman, or hooded dragon, was causing all too much confusion in Germany with his seven heads and was polluting it all with his deadly poison. King Saul, he continues, had sinned in not rooting out the people of Amalek. But to whom did the name of Amalek apply more aptly than to the Lutherans? For Amalek’s was a bestial nation, living bestially according to the flesh, just as the Lutherans—particularly their idol, viz. this monk with his nun—were now doing. In this mad devil’s minister not one crumb of any kind of virtue remained, etc.[1358]Apart from his too rhetorical and acrimonious tone other unsympathetic features met with in Cochlæus are his frequent petitions to high dignitaries of the Church, in Germany and even in Rome, for material assistance; his complaints that he was not taken seriously enough; his too great eagerness, during the first years of the struggle, to hold a disputation with Luther; too much pushfulness and sometimes a certain credulity, not to speak of occasional lapses into a frivolity which, like his rhetoric, recalls the more blatant faults of Humanism and ill beseemed a man anxious to censure the morals of his opponents. He deemed it right and proper, for instance, to write under an assumed name a work against the Reformers’ wives and matrimonial relationships, where, in colloquial form and in a manner highly offensive, he introduces much that was mere tittle-tattle and quite without foundation. His authorship of this “Private Conversation” has been proved up to the hilt in recent times.[1359]Among the ranks of the opponents of Lutheranism Johann Faber and Frederick Nausea, both of them bishops of Vienna, hold a high place. The efforts of these two theologians to elucidate controverted points and to refute Luther were much appreciated in the Catholic circles of that day.In the more popular field quite a number of good speakers and writers belonging to various Religious Orders, particularly the German Dominicans, distinguished themselves for their zeal in the campaign against Lutheranism. Johann Mensing, who became a licentiate at Wittenberg in 1517 and was Luther’s best-hated opponent, was a member of the Order of St. Dominic; so also was Augustine von Getelen, of whose sermons the Lutheran preacher Martin Undermark admitted, that, “with his tongue he was able to sway the people as he pleased”;[1360]Matthias Sittardus, Johann Dietenberger and Ambrosius Pelargus were also all Dominicans, nor did they confine themselves to preaching, but were all of them authors of publications suited to the times. Michael Vehe, another Dominican, was renowned for his ability to wield the pen in German not less than for his Latin discourses from the pulpit. His brother friar, Johann Fabri, earned praise as a preacher and as a clever popular writer. The Protestant preacher H. Rocholl wrote of him: “The turn of what he writes gives proof of great eloquence and his language is oratorically fine; his exhortations are also from an homiletic point of view quite excellent.”[1361]Antonius Pirata of the Dominican friary at Constance received the following encomium from Erasmus in a letter to Laurinus: “He is a respected man of good morals and profound learning, who displays in his sermons an eloquence truly wonderful.”[1362]Conrad Köllin and Jacob Hoogstraaten also adorned the Dominican Order in Germany at that time with their learning, though their interest lay more in scholastic theology than in popular works.All the above belonged to the German province of a single Order, and, altogether, quite thirty Dominicans might be enumerated who engaged in controversy with Luther. Amongst the polemists hailing from other Orders anddeserving honourable mention was the zealous and scholarly Franciscan Caspar Schatzgeyer, also another Franciscan, Thomas Murner, to whom we shall return immediately, the Augustinian Johann Hoffmeister and the Carmelite Eberhard Billick.[1363]The reason that the old Orders, with the exception of the Dominicans, did not furnish more controversialists was in great part due to the disastrous effect of the apostasy on their houses. Many of their subjects, deluded by Lutheranism, forsook their cells, and those who remained were frequently exposed to severe persecution. Many monasteries were not only deprived of their means of subsistence, but, owing to the new spirit of the age and the material difficulties of the monastic life, the supply of novices began to run short.During this period of the German Church’s distress the secular clergy were not behindhand in furnishing tried combatants, though the influence of the new ideas and the decline in morals, particularly during the preceding thirty or forty years, had brought ecclesiastical life and learning to an even lower level than before. There were, however, still some cheering examples to be met with. Conspicuous amongst the veterans who opposed Luther’s teaching and innovations, were, in addition to those already mentioned, Michael Helding, auxiliary bishop and preacher at Mayence (later bishop of Merseburg), and Conrad Wimpina of Leipzig and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, the author of a good Latin collection of works against Luther entitled “On the sects and errors,” etc. (1528).[1364]The Lutheran cause suffered considerably at the hands of these writers.Thomas Murner, the famous Alsatian preacher and writer, a new Sebastian Brant even mightier than the former, entered the lists against Luther and made full use of the satirical style he had cultivated even earlier. Even Protestants have admitted his principal work against Luther (1522) to be a highly incisive and significant production, whilst a recent editor of his works describes him as the most weighty of Luther’s literary opponents in Germany.[1365]There is certainly no question of his “wanton, cheerful, nay, bacchantic humour,” and of his wealth of caustic irony; he enters into Luther’s arguments and proofs, and refutes them, more particularly those taken from the Bible. Murner speaks a very simple and pithy language, though not loath to have recourse occasionally to coarse words, of which an example has been given above (p. 376). Luther paid him out by “amusing his readers with an account of the lice on Murner’s cowl, and by circulating a lampoon alleged to have been sent him from the Rhine, but, at any rate, printed at Luther’s own instance.”[1366]Not one of those who took the field against Luther and pitted their strength against his was really a match for him in energy, in ability to handle the language, in wealth of fancy or in power over the people. To every clear-sighted observer it must have been apparent that truth and logic were on the side of the Catholic controversialists, but, unfortunately, not one of them was able to rival in effectiveness the writings of the Wittenberg Professor.Here and there, in certain ruder passages, we can easily see how his opponents are clumsily endeavouring to retort upon their readier and more inventive foe in language almost identical with his own. Luther, however, stands alone in the originality of his abuse. But if his adversaries, as was too often the case, overstepped the bounds of moderation of language, we must bear in mind their pain and indignation at the unspeakable injustice done to the Church of their fathers. In those rude encounters people were only too apt to forget that, according to Christ’s command, charity must be displayed even towards those who err. Yet the Church had received as part of her heirloom the injunction set by her Founder against the practice of the Jewish synagogue and its saying, “Hate thy enemy” (Mt. v. 42). “But I say to you: Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.”It was on principles such as these that, for all his glowing zeal for the glory of God, Bl. Pierre Favre (Faber) acted, that gentle and enlightened preacher of the true Catholic reformation, who, since 1540, had been labouring in thedioceses of Spires, of Mayence and of Cologne. It was on these principles that he formed his gifted pupil Bl. Peter Canisius, the first German Jesuit, who completed the Exercises under him at Mayence, and, three years before Luther’s death, on May 8, 1543, joined the Society which had now been approved by the Church. Of the followers of the new religion, Favre expresses himself as follows: “May Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men, Who knows that His written Word does not suffice to touch the human mind, soften and move their hearts by His divine Grace.” “No other arguments promote their conversion better than good works and self-sacrifice, even to laying down one’s life.”[1367]“I never cease grieving,” so he wrote to Ignatius, the General of the Order, “at the fall of the noble German nation, once the incomparable pearl of the Church and the glory of Christendom.” Through the head of the Society he sought to convince its members that his own way of dealing with the apostasy was the best. “Those who wish to be of service to the false teachers of to-day,” he writes, “must above all be distinguished by charity and real esteem for their opponents, and banish from their minds every thought that might in any way lessen their regard for them.”[1368]When Pierre Favre set about his work for the preservation of the German Church, Luther was already at the heyday of his success. Favre accompanied the Spanish ambassador Ortiz to the religious Conference at Worms in 1540, and to the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541. Those two years bore convincing witness to the fact, that the progress of the innovations could no longer be checked by the authority either of Church or State.But, before proceeding to examine Luther’s work at its zenith, we must scrutinise his doctrine a little more closely.
The lively Southerner was not content with proving that much in Luther’s Theses was provocative, contrary to dogma, criminal, seductive, sarcastic, etc., but, even in the Dedication to Leo X, he starts off by saying that: Luther had dared to rise up against the truth and the Holy See, but that he, the writer, would see whether “his iron nose and brazen neck were really unbreakable.”[1337]Luther preferred to “snap secretly” rather than to put forward plain doctrines.[1338]“If it is in the nature of dogs to snap, then I feel sure you must have had a dog for your father, for you areever ready to bite.”[1339]Luther having in one passage put forward a statement that was true, Prierias tells him: “You mix a little truth with much that is false, and thus you are a spiritual leper, for you have a spotted skin that shines partly with true, partly with false colours.”[1340]Referring to the building of St. Peter’s at Rome, he says to Luther rather maliciously: “You blame in the case of the first church of Christendom what was extolled when other churches were being built. Had you received a fat bishopric from the Pope with a plenary indulgence for the erection of your church, then, perhaps, you would have found friendly words in plenty and have belauded the Indulgences on which now you pour contempt.”[1341]These are lapses in style which a high official of the Pope should have known better than to commit.Yet it is clear from Luther’s reply that they did not exasperate him nearly so much as did Prierias’s energetic repudiation of his teaching and his calm exposure of the untenable nature of his assertions. What alarmed him was the fact that a highly placed Papal dignitary should have shown the contrast between his innovations and the theology and practice of the Church; he now perceived clearly the practical consequences of his undertaking and the direct entanglement it would involve with Rome. Hence the frame of mind in which he composed his “Responsio ad Dialogum,” etc. (1518),[1342]was not due so much to his opponent’s personalities as to the whole aspect of affairs, to the shakiness of his own position and to his fierce determination to win respect for and to further at the expense of Rome the new doctrine which he now had ready-made in his mind. Whoever recalls the spirit which breathes in his Commentary on Romans and the violent language found in his sermons and letters even before 1518, will readily estimate at its true worth the statement, that what drove him onwards was the insolence of Prierias. Unfortunately, Prierias’s “Dialogue” shares the fate of the Latin works which appeared in Germany in defence of Catholicism in the early days of the struggle with Luther: Save by a few theologians, they are never read, and, indeed, even were they read, it is doubtful whether they would be rightly understood except by those familiar with Scholasticism; hence discretion in passing judgment is doubly necessary.
The lively Southerner was not content with proving that much in Luther’s Theses was provocative, contrary to dogma, criminal, seductive, sarcastic, etc., but, even in the Dedication to Leo X, he starts off by saying that: Luther had dared to rise up against the truth and the Holy See, but that he, the writer, would see whether “his iron nose and brazen neck were really unbreakable.”[1337]Luther preferred to “snap secretly” rather than to put forward plain doctrines.[1338]“If it is in the nature of dogs to snap, then I feel sure you must have had a dog for your father, for you areever ready to bite.”[1339]Luther having in one passage put forward a statement that was true, Prierias tells him: “You mix a little truth with much that is false, and thus you are a spiritual leper, for you have a spotted skin that shines partly with true, partly with false colours.”[1340]Referring to the building of St. Peter’s at Rome, he says to Luther rather maliciously: “You blame in the case of the first church of Christendom what was extolled when other churches were being built. Had you received a fat bishopric from the Pope with a plenary indulgence for the erection of your church, then, perhaps, you would have found friendly words in plenty and have belauded the Indulgences on which now you pour contempt.”[1341]
These are lapses in style which a high official of the Pope should have known better than to commit.
Yet it is clear from Luther’s reply that they did not exasperate him nearly so much as did Prierias’s energetic repudiation of his teaching and his calm exposure of the untenable nature of his assertions. What alarmed him was the fact that a highly placed Papal dignitary should have shown the contrast between his innovations and the theology and practice of the Church; he now perceived clearly the practical consequences of his undertaking and the direct entanglement it would involve with Rome. Hence the frame of mind in which he composed his “Responsio ad Dialogum,” etc. (1518),[1342]was not due so much to his opponent’s personalities as to the whole aspect of affairs, to the shakiness of his own position and to his fierce determination to win respect for and to further at the expense of Rome the new doctrine which he now had ready-made in his mind. Whoever recalls the spirit which breathes in his Commentary on Romans and the violent language found in his sermons and letters even before 1518, will readily estimate at its true worth the statement, that what drove him onwards was the insolence of Prierias. Unfortunately, Prierias’s “Dialogue” shares the fate of the Latin works which appeared in Germany in defence of Catholicism in the early days of the struggle with Luther: Save by a few theologians, they are never read, and, indeed, even were they read, it is doubtful whether they would be rightly understood except by those familiar with Scholasticism; hence discretion in passing judgment is doubly necessary.
In the Reply of 1518 now under consideration, Luther, in view of the person and position of his opponent, and of the possible consequences, is more restrained in his abuse than in other writings soon to follow. Yet, anxious as he was to furnish a real answer to the criticisms of an author so weighty, we find irony, rudeness and attempts to render ridiculous the “senile” objections of the “Thomaster,”the “sophist” and all his “taratantara,” intermingled with unwarrantable attacks on “Thomistic” theology, that storehouse whence his opponent purloined “his phrases and his shouting.” The reply opens with the words: “Your Dialogue, Reverend Father, has reached me; it is a rather high-flown writing, quite Italian and Thomistic.” It also ends in the same vein. “If for the future you don’t bring into the arena a Thomas armed with better weapons, then don’t expect to find again such consideration as I have just shown you. I have bridled myself so as not to return evil for evil. Good-bye.”
When, in 1519, the Dominican whom he had thus insulted published, first a “Replica” in the form of a short letter addressed to Luther, and then the “Epitome” (an abstract of his investigations into the theological questions then under discussion), it was impossible for Luther to complain of any too harsh treatment; the tone of the “Replica,” although dealing with Luther’s attacks on the person of the Roman scholar, falls immeasurably short of his assailant’s in point of bitterness. It is conciliatory, indeed proffers an olive-branch, should the Wittenberg professor retract the new doctrines which Rome was determined to condemn.[1343]As for the “Epitome,” it is merely a theological review of the doctrines involved, which it clearly states and establishes whilst vigorously refuting all opinions to the contrary. It is accompanied by a grave warning to Luther not to impugn the authority of the Roman Church.[1344]
This was, however, sufficient to let loose the anger of the German Reformer, who meanwhile had advanced considerably, and whose wrath now manifested itself in his rejoinders. Such was his presumption that he actually reprinted in Germany both works of Prierias as soon as they had been published; the “Replica” he introduced with the derisive remark, that, as the author had threatened to give birth to more, they must pray that he might suffer no abortions.[1345]His reprint of the “Epitome” in 1520 was accompanied by contemptuous and satirical annotations, and by a preface and postscript where he breaks out into the language already described, about Antichrist seated inthe Temple of God in the Roman Babylon, about the happiness of the separated Greeks and Bohemians and about the washing of hands in the blood of the Popish Sodom.[1346]It was the seething ferment in Luther’s own mind, not anything that Prierias had said, that was really responsible for such outbursts. The flood-gates had now been thrown open, and even from the Catholic side came many a wave of indignation to lend acrimony to the contest.
Referring to Luther’s words on bloodshed, we hear, for instance, Thomas Murner speaking of “the furious bloodhound, Martin Luther of execrable memory, the blasphemous, runaway monk and murderous bloodhound, who wants to wash his hands in the blood of the priests!”[1347]
How far Hieronymus Emser allowed himself to go in his hostility to Luther is plain from his first tract, “A venatione Luteriana Ægocerotis assertio,” of Nov., 1519, in which he replies to an attack of Luther’s on an epistle he (Emser) had sent to Provost Johann Zack. Luther, in the title, had addressed him as the “he-goat” (“ad Ægocerotem”) on account of the goat’s head figuring in his coat of arms. Emser retorts: “It is plainly beyond your ability to send out into the world any writing of yours that is not replete with houndish fury and bristles, as it were, with canine fangs. Your father is Belial, the ancestor of all insolent monks.” He paints a frightful picture of Luther’s career and character the better to prove that such a man had no right to sit in judgment on him.
Luther’s “An den Bock zu Leyptzck,” dating from the beginning of 1520, was replied to by Emser in his “An den Stier zu Wittenberg,” whereupon Luther retorted with “Auff des Bocks zu Leypczick Antwort,” to which Emser replied in his pamphlet: “Auff des Stieres tzu Wiettenberg wiettende Replica,” and his larger work “Against the Unchristian book of M. Luther to the German Nobility”; this Luther countered by his “Auff das ubirchristlich ... Buch Bocks Emssers.”
During the years 1521-1522 Emser wrote no less than eight tracts against the Wittenberg Professor. The Humanist and clever man of letters has left therein many a wittypage; a refreshing sincerity is one of his characteristics.[1348]On the whole, however, what F. A. Scharpff says applies to these and the later polemics of this zealous champion of the Church: They “are composed in a tone of violent personality, nor does either combatant seek any longer to restrain the ‘Old Adam,’ as both at the outset had pledged themselves to do.”[1349]
Another of Luther’s earliest literary opponents was Johann Eck, the author of the “Obelisks,” on the Indulgence Theses. Like the works of Tetzel and Prierias, this tract is chiefly concerned in a calm discussion of the matter in dispute, though it does not refrain from occasionally describing this or that opinion of Luther’s as a “rash, corrupt, impudent assertion,” as an insipid, unblushing error, a ridiculous mistake, etc. The severest remark, however, and that which incensed Luther beyond all the rest was, that certain passages in the Indulgence Theses, owing to a confusion of ideas, made admissions “containing Bohemian poison,” i.e. savouring of the errors of Hus.[1350]Subsequent to this Eck, however, wrote to Carlstadt a letter which was intended for Luther, where he says in a conciliatory tone: “To offend Martin was never my intention.”[1351]Nor did he at first print his “Obelisks,” but merely sent the tract to his bishop and his friends. Luther, on the other hand, had the work printed in August, 1518, together with his own “Asterisks,” and, after circulating them privately among his acquaintances, finally published them together. In the “Asterisci” he speaks of the behaviour of Eck, his quondam “friend,” as most insidious and iniquitous (“insidiossissimum iniquissimum”), and mocks at his “grand, not to say high-flown,” preface. He says: “Hardly was I able to refrain from laughter”; Eck must have written his “Obelisks” during the Carnival; wearing the mask of genius he had produced a chaos. Hiswriting adduced nothing concerning the Bible, the Fathers and the Canons, but was all arch-scholastic; had he, Luther, wished to peripateticise he could, with one puff, have blown away all these musty cobwebs, etc.[1352]
Johann Eck, who was professor of theology at the University of Ingolstadt and at the same time parish-priest and preacher, enjoyed a great reputation among the Catholics on account of his works against Luther, particularly those on the Primacy, on Purgatory, the Mass and other Catholic doctrines and practices, no less than on account of his printed sermons and his general activity on behalf of the Church.
The indefatigable defender of the Church composed amongst other writings the “Enchiridion locorum communium adv. Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiæ” (1525). The work was of great service and formed an excellent guide to many.
In this well-arranged and eminently practical book the questions then under debate are dealt with for the instruction of Catholics and the confutation of heretics; excerpts from Scripture and from the Fathers are in each instance quoted in support of the Catholic teaching, and then the objections of opponents are set forth and answered. Not only were the Church, the Papal Primacy, Holy Scripture, Faith and Works, the Sacraments, the Veneration of the Saints, Indulgences, Purgatory and other similar points of doctrine examined in this way, but even certain matters of discipline and the ecclesiastico-political questions of the day, such as payments to Rome, the ornaments of the churches and the ceremonies of Divine Worship, the use of Latin in the Mass, the disadvantage of holding disputations with heretics, and even the question of the Turkish war. Hence the work amounted to a small arsenal of weapons for use in the controversial field. The tone is, however, not always moderate and dispassionate. The author was clear-sighted enough to avoid the pitfall into which other writers lapsed who cherished undue hopes of a settlement by give and take. In much that he says he still speaks from the mediæval standpoint, for instance, concerning the death penalty due to heretics; this he defends on the strength of the identical passages from the Old Testament to which Luther and his followers appealed for the putting to death of blasphemers and apostates from the true faith.Eck had the satisfaction of seeing his “Enchiridion,” within four years, reprinted four times in Bavaria, twice at Tübingen, and at Cologne, Paris and Lyons. Before 1576 it had been reimpressed forty-five times. In the midst of his other literaryworks and his fatiguing labours as preacher and professor at the University of Ingolstadt, the scholar never forgot his useful “Enchiridion,” but amended it and added to it as occasion demanded. In 1529, in a new edition which he dedicated to Conrad von Thuengen, bishop of Würzburg, he looks back in the dedicatory preface on the ten years that had passed since his disputation at Leipzig, and voices his grief at the immense advance the apostasy had made with the course of time.“People have outgrown themselves,” Eck exclaims, “they exalt themselves against God just as Lucifer once did, but like him too they fall into the abyss and come to despise the teaching of God.” “Whoever does not hold fast to the tradition of the Church and to the unanimous consent of the Fathers and the Councils must fall into the cesspool of the worst errors.” These words are characteristic of Eck’s unwavering adherence to authority.He goes on to apply this to Luther: “Luther and those who follow him prefer to rise up in their foolish daring rather than bow to the rule of faith; they open their offensive mouth against the holy Fathers and the whole Church; they exalt their own judgment with momentous and arrogant blindness above that of the most august representatives of the teaching office.” True enough Luther had begun softly by merely publishing some theses against the system of indulgences with which many might still agree; but then he had gone on step by step and had increased his partisans by proclaiming a Christian freedom which in reality savoured more of Mohammed. It is our sins, Eck admits, that are the cause of the unhappy success of his work. “From the poisoned root new and corrupt shoots are constantly springing up, and of their new sects we see no end. In our unhappy days we have experienced the fury of the iconoclasts; Capharnaites have arisen to whom Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is a hard saying; Anabaptists, who refuse baptism to children but bestow it on adults, and, amongst these teachers, every day fresh divisions arise so that the heretics are even more prolific than rabbits. Yes, God is angry with us and allows this because we do not turn to Him with powerful and fervent prayer.”He then goes on to encourage the Bishop of Würzburg to offer vigorous resistance and points modestly to his own self-sacrificing labours.“However much heresy may gain the upper hand, the watchmen of Sion must not keep silence; their voice must ring out like a clarion against the Philistines who scoff at the hosts of the Lord. We must oppose them with all the powers of our mind and defend the Tower of David, guarded, as Scripture says, with a thousand shields. This, zealous men, equipped with holy learning, have already done. I myself, as the least of all, have also entered the arena and exposed myself to the teeth of the wild beasts. At Leipzig I stood up and disputed for twenty days with Luther, the Prince of Dragons, and with Carlstadt; at Baden [in Switzerland, in 1526] too, I had to sustain a combatfor several days with Œcolampadius the Capharnaite, and his comrades. I have also wrestled with them from a distance in several little works which I published in Germany and Italy.”Again, in 1541, in the evening of his days († 1543), in an eighth edition of the “Enchiridion” dedicated to Cardinal Alexander Farnese, while urging him to increased efforts for the bringing about of a Council, he could point to his own three-and-twenty years of incessant conflict with heresy. “O God,” he cries at the sight of the extent to which the evil had grown, “what times are ours!” “Every bulwark against arbitrary private judgment has been torn down; Luther has taught all how to dare all things. Since he has overthrown the authority of the Councils, the Popes, the Holy Fathers and all the Christian Universities, every man, no matter how mad or hair-brained he may be, is free to teach his new fancies to mankind.”[1353]Yet the author seeks to revive hope and confidence in his own mind and in that of his Catholic readers, and, to this end, quotes on the last page the saying of St. Jerome, which he applies to the misfortunes of his own day: “During the years of persecution the priests of the Church must tell the faithful boldly and confidently: Your churches will be rebuilt; have no fear, peace and unity will once more enter in.—Yes truly, by God’s Mercy there will come an end to the heresies of Luther, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Blaurer, Osiander, Schnepf and all their ilk, and the olden truth of faith will flourish again. Grant this, Good Jesus, and grant it speedily!” Invocations such as these accord well with the exhortations to pray for the erring which Eck was fond of introducing in this as well as in his other books.
In this well-arranged and eminently practical book the questions then under debate are dealt with for the instruction of Catholics and the confutation of heretics; excerpts from Scripture and from the Fathers are in each instance quoted in support of the Catholic teaching, and then the objections of opponents are set forth and answered. Not only were the Church, the Papal Primacy, Holy Scripture, Faith and Works, the Sacraments, the Veneration of the Saints, Indulgences, Purgatory and other similar points of doctrine examined in this way, but even certain matters of discipline and the ecclesiastico-political questions of the day, such as payments to Rome, the ornaments of the churches and the ceremonies of Divine Worship, the use of Latin in the Mass, the disadvantage of holding disputations with heretics, and even the question of the Turkish war. Hence the work amounted to a small arsenal of weapons for use in the controversial field. The tone is, however, not always moderate and dispassionate. The author was clear-sighted enough to avoid the pitfall into which other writers lapsed who cherished undue hopes of a settlement by give and take. In much that he says he still speaks from the mediæval standpoint, for instance, concerning the death penalty due to heretics; this he defends on the strength of the identical passages from the Old Testament to which Luther and his followers appealed for the putting to death of blasphemers and apostates from the true faith.
Eck had the satisfaction of seeing his “Enchiridion,” within four years, reprinted four times in Bavaria, twice at Tübingen, and at Cologne, Paris and Lyons. Before 1576 it had been reimpressed forty-five times. In the midst of his other literaryworks and his fatiguing labours as preacher and professor at the University of Ingolstadt, the scholar never forgot his useful “Enchiridion,” but amended it and added to it as occasion demanded. In 1529, in a new edition which he dedicated to Conrad von Thuengen, bishop of Würzburg, he looks back in the dedicatory preface on the ten years that had passed since his disputation at Leipzig, and voices his grief at the immense advance the apostasy had made with the course of time.
“People have outgrown themselves,” Eck exclaims, “they exalt themselves against God just as Lucifer once did, but like him too they fall into the abyss and come to despise the teaching of God.” “Whoever does not hold fast to the tradition of the Church and to the unanimous consent of the Fathers and the Councils must fall into the cesspool of the worst errors.” These words are characteristic of Eck’s unwavering adherence to authority.
He goes on to apply this to Luther: “Luther and those who follow him prefer to rise up in their foolish daring rather than bow to the rule of faith; they open their offensive mouth against the holy Fathers and the whole Church; they exalt their own judgment with momentous and arrogant blindness above that of the most august representatives of the teaching office.” True enough Luther had begun softly by merely publishing some theses against the system of indulgences with which many might still agree; but then he had gone on step by step and had increased his partisans by proclaiming a Christian freedom which in reality savoured more of Mohammed. It is our sins, Eck admits, that are the cause of the unhappy success of his work. “From the poisoned root new and corrupt shoots are constantly springing up, and of their new sects we see no end. In our unhappy days we have experienced the fury of the iconoclasts; Capharnaites have arisen to whom Christ’s presence in the Sacrament is a hard saying; Anabaptists, who refuse baptism to children but bestow it on adults, and, amongst these teachers, every day fresh divisions arise so that the heretics are even more prolific than rabbits. Yes, God is angry with us and allows this because we do not turn to Him with powerful and fervent prayer.”
He then goes on to encourage the Bishop of Würzburg to offer vigorous resistance and points modestly to his own self-sacrificing labours.
“However much heresy may gain the upper hand, the watchmen of Sion must not keep silence; their voice must ring out like a clarion against the Philistines who scoff at the hosts of the Lord. We must oppose them with all the powers of our mind and defend the Tower of David, guarded, as Scripture says, with a thousand shields. This, zealous men, equipped with holy learning, have already done. I myself, as the least of all, have also entered the arena and exposed myself to the teeth of the wild beasts. At Leipzig I stood up and disputed for twenty days with Luther, the Prince of Dragons, and with Carlstadt; at Baden [in Switzerland, in 1526] too, I had to sustain a combatfor several days with Œcolampadius the Capharnaite, and his comrades. I have also wrestled with them from a distance in several little works which I published in Germany and Italy.”
Again, in 1541, in the evening of his days († 1543), in an eighth edition of the “Enchiridion” dedicated to Cardinal Alexander Farnese, while urging him to increased efforts for the bringing about of a Council, he could point to his own three-and-twenty years of incessant conflict with heresy. “O God,” he cries at the sight of the extent to which the evil had grown, “what times are ours!” “Every bulwark against arbitrary private judgment has been torn down; Luther has taught all how to dare all things. Since he has overthrown the authority of the Councils, the Popes, the Holy Fathers and all the Christian Universities, every man, no matter how mad or hair-brained he may be, is free to teach his new fancies to mankind.”[1353]
Yet the author seeks to revive hope and confidence in his own mind and in that of his Catholic readers, and, to this end, quotes on the last page the saying of St. Jerome, which he applies to the misfortunes of his own day: “During the years of persecution the priests of the Church must tell the faithful boldly and confidently: Your churches will be rebuilt; have no fear, peace and unity will once more enter in.—Yes truly, by God’s Mercy there will come an end to the heresies of Luther, Zwingli, Œcolampadius, Blaurer, Osiander, Schnepf and all their ilk, and the olden truth of faith will flourish again. Grant this, Good Jesus, and grant it speedily!” Invocations such as these accord well with the exhortations to pray for the erring which Eck was fond of introducing in this as well as in his other books.
Eck’s writings in defence of the faith include learned as well as popular works, and he was also indefatigable in his labours in the ministry.[1354]
Johann Cochlæus, who like Eck was one of the morefamous of Luther’s opponents, had a keen and versatile mind († 1552). He first made Luther’s personal acquaintance at Worms,[1355]and entered the lists against him in 1522 with his “De gratia sacramentorum”; from that time forward he kept a watch on all that Luther wrote, so as to be in readiness to reply to or refute it as occasion arose. He himself gives us the long list of his publications against Luther, in his “Commentaria de actis ... Lutheri,” the work in which he sums up his recollections of the struggles of his time.
From these “Commentaria” of Cochlæus, despite the disparaging treatment accorded them by Sleidanus, “more is to be gleaned concerning the history of the Reformation than from many bungling Protestant eulogies.” Such, at least, is the opinion of C. Krafft, himself a Protestant.[1356]
The writer sought after the truth and wrote with honest indignation. In spite of disappointments, and even privations, he remained faithful to the Church, making during his career many a sacrifice for his cherished convictions; he himself relates how he could not find a printer for his works against Luther and was forced himself to defray a part of the expense of publication, whereas every press was eager to print Luther’s books owing to the demand anticipated.
If, in Cochlæus’s writings, too great passion is often apparent, this may well have been due to that depraved humanism and neo-classicism under the influence of which, more perhaps than any other Catholic man of letters, he stood. We have an instance of this in his “Seven-headed Luther,” which he composed in 1529 at Dresden, whither he had been summoned on Emser’s death.[1357]This book, like his later “Commentaries,” denotes the climax of his polemics. In the dedication he says that the seven-headed monster could not have been born either of God or of Nature, since neither God nor Nature was capable of such an abortion; rather, it must be an offspring of the evil one, who had deceived man and worked him harm, in Paradise under the guise of a serpent, and, often later, under the formof fauns, satyrs, Sileni and various enchantments. In Africa, according to the ancients, there had been a dragon with three or four heads, and Geryon, whom Hercules slew, had also had three heads. But a monster with seven heads, such as was Luther with his sevenfold doctrine, had never been ushered into the world by any country, but must be a creation of the devil. The wicked, perverse, insane apostate monk, long since destined to damnation, had no scruple in deceiving and assailing every upright man with lies, mockery, blasphemy and every kind of nastiness, or in pouring forth seditious falsehoods and insults like an infuriated lioness. The seven-headed hoodman, or hooded dragon, was causing all too much confusion in Germany with his seven heads and was polluting it all with his deadly poison. King Saul, he continues, had sinned in not rooting out the people of Amalek. But to whom did the name of Amalek apply more aptly than to the Lutherans? For Amalek’s was a bestial nation, living bestially according to the flesh, just as the Lutherans—particularly their idol, viz. this monk with his nun—were now doing. In this mad devil’s minister not one crumb of any kind of virtue remained, etc.[1358]
Apart from his too rhetorical and acrimonious tone other unsympathetic features met with in Cochlæus are his frequent petitions to high dignitaries of the Church, in Germany and even in Rome, for material assistance; his complaints that he was not taken seriously enough; his too great eagerness, during the first years of the struggle, to hold a disputation with Luther; too much pushfulness and sometimes a certain credulity, not to speak of occasional lapses into a frivolity which, like his rhetoric, recalls the more blatant faults of Humanism and ill beseemed a man anxious to censure the morals of his opponents. He deemed it right and proper, for instance, to write under an assumed name a work against the Reformers’ wives and matrimonial relationships, where, in colloquial form and in a manner highly offensive, he introduces much that was mere tittle-tattle and quite without foundation. His authorship of this “Private Conversation” has been proved up to the hilt in recent times.[1359]
Among the ranks of the opponents of Lutheranism Johann Faber and Frederick Nausea, both of them bishops of Vienna, hold a high place. The efforts of these two theologians to elucidate controverted points and to refute Luther were much appreciated in the Catholic circles of that day.
In the more popular field quite a number of good speakers and writers belonging to various Religious Orders, particularly the German Dominicans, distinguished themselves for their zeal in the campaign against Lutheranism. Johann Mensing, who became a licentiate at Wittenberg in 1517 and was Luther’s best-hated opponent, was a member of the Order of St. Dominic; so also was Augustine von Getelen, of whose sermons the Lutheran preacher Martin Undermark admitted, that, “with his tongue he was able to sway the people as he pleased”;[1360]Matthias Sittardus, Johann Dietenberger and Ambrosius Pelargus were also all Dominicans, nor did they confine themselves to preaching, but were all of them authors of publications suited to the times. Michael Vehe, another Dominican, was renowned for his ability to wield the pen in German not less than for his Latin discourses from the pulpit. His brother friar, Johann Fabri, earned praise as a preacher and as a clever popular writer. The Protestant preacher H. Rocholl wrote of him: “The turn of what he writes gives proof of great eloquence and his language is oratorically fine; his exhortations are also from an homiletic point of view quite excellent.”[1361]Antonius Pirata of the Dominican friary at Constance received the following encomium from Erasmus in a letter to Laurinus: “He is a respected man of good morals and profound learning, who displays in his sermons an eloquence truly wonderful.”[1362]Conrad Köllin and Jacob Hoogstraaten also adorned the Dominican Order in Germany at that time with their learning, though their interest lay more in scholastic theology than in popular works.
All the above belonged to the German province of a single Order, and, altogether, quite thirty Dominicans might be enumerated who engaged in controversy with Luther. Amongst the polemists hailing from other Orders anddeserving honourable mention was the zealous and scholarly Franciscan Caspar Schatzgeyer, also another Franciscan, Thomas Murner, to whom we shall return immediately, the Augustinian Johann Hoffmeister and the Carmelite Eberhard Billick.[1363]
The reason that the old Orders, with the exception of the Dominicans, did not furnish more controversialists was in great part due to the disastrous effect of the apostasy on their houses. Many of their subjects, deluded by Lutheranism, forsook their cells, and those who remained were frequently exposed to severe persecution. Many monasteries were not only deprived of their means of subsistence, but, owing to the new spirit of the age and the material difficulties of the monastic life, the supply of novices began to run short.
During this period of the German Church’s distress the secular clergy were not behindhand in furnishing tried combatants, though the influence of the new ideas and the decline in morals, particularly during the preceding thirty or forty years, had brought ecclesiastical life and learning to an even lower level than before. There were, however, still some cheering examples to be met with. Conspicuous amongst the veterans who opposed Luther’s teaching and innovations, were, in addition to those already mentioned, Michael Helding, auxiliary bishop and preacher at Mayence (later bishop of Merseburg), and Conrad Wimpina of Leipzig and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder, the author of a good Latin collection of works against Luther entitled “On the sects and errors,” etc. (1528).[1364]The Lutheran cause suffered considerably at the hands of these writers.
Thomas Murner, the famous Alsatian preacher and writer, a new Sebastian Brant even mightier than the former, entered the lists against Luther and made full use of the satirical style he had cultivated even earlier. Even Protestants have admitted his principal work against Luther (1522) to be a highly incisive and significant production, whilst a recent editor of his works describes him as the most weighty of Luther’s literary opponents in Germany.[1365]There is certainly no question of his “wanton, cheerful, nay, bacchantic humour,” and of his wealth of caustic irony; he enters into Luther’s arguments and proofs, and refutes them, more particularly those taken from the Bible. Murner speaks a very simple and pithy language, though not loath to have recourse occasionally to coarse words, of which an example has been given above (p. 376). Luther paid him out by “amusing his readers with an account of the lice on Murner’s cowl, and by circulating a lampoon alleged to have been sent him from the Rhine, but, at any rate, printed at Luther’s own instance.”[1366]
Not one of those who took the field against Luther and pitted their strength against his was really a match for him in energy, in ability to handle the language, in wealth of fancy or in power over the people. To every clear-sighted observer it must have been apparent that truth and logic were on the side of the Catholic controversialists, but, unfortunately, not one of them was able to rival in effectiveness the writings of the Wittenberg Professor.
Here and there, in certain ruder passages, we can easily see how his opponents are clumsily endeavouring to retort upon their readier and more inventive foe in language almost identical with his own. Luther, however, stands alone in the originality of his abuse. But if his adversaries, as was too often the case, overstepped the bounds of moderation of language, we must bear in mind their pain and indignation at the unspeakable injustice done to the Church of their fathers. In those rude encounters people were only too apt to forget that, according to Christ’s command, charity must be displayed even towards those who err. Yet the Church had received as part of her heirloom the injunction set by her Founder against the practice of the Jewish synagogue and its saying, “Hate thy enemy” (Mt. v. 42). “But I say to you: Love your enemies, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you.”
It was on principles such as these that, for all his glowing zeal for the glory of God, Bl. Pierre Favre (Faber) acted, that gentle and enlightened preacher of the true Catholic reformation, who, since 1540, had been labouring in thedioceses of Spires, of Mayence and of Cologne. It was on these principles that he formed his gifted pupil Bl. Peter Canisius, the first German Jesuit, who completed the Exercises under him at Mayence, and, three years before Luther’s death, on May 8, 1543, joined the Society which had now been approved by the Church. Of the followers of the new religion, Favre expresses himself as follows: “May Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all men, Who knows that His written Word does not suffice to touch the human mind, soften and move their hearts by His divine Grace.” “No other arguments promote their conversion better than good works and self-sacrifice, even to laying down one’s life.”[1367]“I never cease grieving,” so he wrote to Ignatius, the General of the Order, “at the fall of the noble German nation, once the incomparable pearl of the Church and the glory of Christendom.” Through the head of the Society he sought to convince its members that his own way of dealing with the apostasy was the best. “Those who wish to be of service to the false teachers of to-day,” he writes, “must above all be distinguished by charity and real esteem for their opponents, and banish from their minds every thought that might in any way lessen their regard for them.”[1368]
When Pierre Favre set about his work for the preservation of the German Church, Luther was already at the heyday of his success. Favre accompanied the Spanish ambassador Ortiz to the religious Conference at Worms in 1540, and to the Diet of Ratisbon in 1541. Those two years bore convincing witness to the fact, that the progress of the innovations could no longer be checked by the authority either of Church or State.
But, before proceeding to examine Luther’s work at its zenith, we must scrutinise his doctrine a little more closely.