Life of Luther. Julius Köstlin
mainly on the authority of the great Scholastic teacher Thomas Aquinas, were not adopted by other Scholastics, and had never been erected into a dogma by any decree of the Church. Theologians before Luther, and with far more acuteness and penetration than he showed in his theses, had already assailed the whole system of indulgences. And, in regard to any idea on Luther's part of the effects of his theses extending widely in Germany, it may be noticed that not only were they composed in Latin, but that they dealt largely with Scholastic expressions and ideas, which a layman would find it difficult to understand.
Nevertheless the theses created a sensation which far surpassed Luther's expectations. In fourteen days, as he tells us, they ran through the whole of Germany, and were immediately translated and circulated in German. They found, indeed, the soil already prepared for them, through the indignation long since and generally aroused by the shameless doings they attacked; though till then nobody, as Luther expresses it, had liked to bell the cat, nobody had dared to expose himself to the blasphemous clamour of the indulgence-mongers and the monks who were in league with them, still less to the threatened charge of heresy.
On the other hand, the very impunity with which this traffic in indulgences had been maintained throughout German Christendom, had served to increase from day to day the audacity of its promoters. Ranged on the side of these doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, the chief mainstay of this trade, stood the whole powerful order of the Dominicans. And to this order Tetzel himself, the sub-commissioner of indulgences, belonged. Already other doctrines of the Pope's authority, of his power over the salvation of the human soul, and the infallibility of his decisions, had been asserted with ever-increasing boldness. The mediaeval writings of Thomas Aquinas had conspicuously tended to this result. And a climax had just been reached at a so-called General Council, which met at Rome shortly after Luther's visit there, and continued its sittings for several years.
Tetzel, who hitherto had only made himself notorious as a preacher, or rather as a bawling mountebank, now answered Luther with two series of theses of his own, drawn up in learned scholastic form. One Conrad Wimpina, a theologian of the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, whom the Archbishop Albert had recommended, assisted Tetzel in this work. The university of Frankfort immediately made Tetzel doctor of theology, and thus espoused his theses. Three hundred Dominican monks assembled round him while he conducted an academical disputation upon them. The doctrines he now advanced were the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. But at the same time he took care to make the question of the Pope's position and power the cardinal point at issue; he and his patrons knew well enough, that for Luther, who in his theses had touched upon this question so significantly though so briefly, this was the most fatal blow that he could deal. 'Christians must be taught,' he declared, 'that in all that relates to faith and salvation, the judgment of the Pope is absolutely infallible, and that all observances connected with matters of faith on which the Papal see has expressed itself, are equivalent to Christian truths, even if they are not to be found in scripture.' With distinct reference to his opponent, but without actually mentioning him by name, he insists that whoever defends heretical error must be held to be excommunicated, and if he fails within a given time to make satisfaction, incurs by right and law the most frightful penalties. Furthermore, he argued—and this has always been held up against Luther and Protestantism—that if the authority of the Church and Pope should not be recognised, every man would believe only what was pleasing to himself and what he found in the Bible, and thus the souls of all Christendom would be imperilled.
Luther's theses now found another assailant, and one stronger even than Tetzel, in the person of a Dominican and Thomist, one Sylvester Mazolini of Prierio (Prierias), master of the sacred palace at Rome, and a confidant of the Pope. He too, like Tetzel, based his chief contention on the question of Papal authority, and was the first to carry that contention to an extreme. The Pope, he said, is the Church of Rome; the Romish Church is the Universal Christian Church; whoever disputes the right of the Romish Church to act entirely as she may, is a heretic. In this way he treated as contemptuously as he could the obscure German, whose theses, that 'bite like a cur,' as he expressed it, he only wished to dismiss with all despatch.
Another Dominican, James van Hoogstraten, prior at Cologne, who had already figured as the prime zealot in the affair about Reuchlin, which he was still prosecuting, now demanded, in his preface to a pamphlet on that subject, that Luther should be sent to the stake as a dangerous heretic.
But a far more important, and to Luther an utterly unexpected opponent, appeared in the person of John Eck, professor at the university of Ingolstadt, and canon at Eichstädt. He was a man of very extensive learning in the earlier and later Scholastic theology of the Church; he was a sharp-witted and ready controversialist, and he knew how to use his weapons in disputations. He was fully conscious of these gifts, and made a bold push to advance himself by their means, whilst troubling himself very little in reality about the high and sacred issues involved in the dispute. He sought to keep on friendly and useful relations with other circles than those of Scholastic theology, such as with learned Humanists, and a short time before, with Luther himself and his colleague Carlstadt, to whom he had been introduced through a jurist of Nüremberg named Scheuerl. Luther, after the publication of his theses, had written a friendly letter to Eck. What then was his surprise to find himself attacked by Eck in a critical reply entitled 'Obelisks.' The tone of his remarks was as wounding, coarse, and vindictive as their substance was superficial. They aimed a well-meditated blow, by stigmatising Luther's propositions as Bohemian poison, mere Hussite heresy. Eck, when reproached for such a breach of friendship, declared that he had written the book for his bishop of Eichstädt, and not with any view of publication.
Luther himself, loud as was his call to battle in his theses, had still no intention of engaging in a general contest about the leading principles of the Church. He had not yet realised the whole extent and bearings of the question about indulgences. Referring afterwards to the rapid circulation of his theses through Germany, and to the fame which his onslaught had earned him, he says, 'I did not relish the fame, for I myself was not aware of what there was in the indulgences, and the song was pitched too high for my voice.' People far and wide were proud of the man who spoke out so boldly in his theses, while the multitude of doctors and bishops kept silence; but he still stood alone before the public, confronting the storm which he had aroused against himself. He did not conceal the fact, that now and then he felt strange and anxious about his position. But he had learned to take his stand singly and firmly on the word of Scripture, and on the truth which God therein revealed to him and brought home to his conviction. He was only the more strengthened in that conviction by the replies of his opponents; for he must well have been amazed at their utter want of Scriptural reference to disprove his conclusions, and at the blind subservience with which they merely repeated the statements of their Scholastic authorities. The arrogant reply of Prierias, his opponent of highest rank, seemed to him particularly poor. In confident words Luther assures his friends of his conviction that what he taught was the purest theology, that what he upheld and his opponents attacked, was a revelation direct from God. He knew too, that, in the words of St. Paul, he had to preach what to the holiest of the Jews was a stumbling-block, and to the wisest of the Greeks foolishness. He was none the less ready to do so, that Jesus Christ, his Lord, might say of him, as He said once of that Apostle, 'I will show him how great things he must suffer for my name's sake.' Luther's enemies in the Romish Church have thought to see in these words an instance of boundless self-assertion on the part of an individual subject.
From henceforth Luther, while pursuing with unabated zeal his active duties at the university and in the pulpit at Wittenberg, and taking up his pen again and again to write short pamphlets of a simple and edifying kind, occupied himself untiringly with controversial writings, with the object partly of defending himself against attacks, partly of establishing on a firm basis the principles he had set forth, and of further investigating and making plain the way of true Christian knowledge. He first addressed himself to German Christendom, in German, in his 'Sermon on Indulgences and Grace.' His inward excitement is shown by the vehemence and ruggedness of expression which now and henceforth marked his polemical writings. It recalls to mind the tone then commonly met with not only among ordinary monks, but even in the controversies of theologians and learned men, and in which Luther's own opponents, especially that high Roman theologian, had set him the example. In Luther we see now, throughout his whole method of polemics, as we shall see still more