LUTHER (Vol. 1-6). Grisar Hartmann
terrible giants [my adversaries] do? During the last three years not one has been found brave enough to come forward against me here at Wittenberg, though assured of a safe-conduct and protection”; “rude and timorous at one and the same time” they would not venture “to confront him, though single-handed,” or to dispute with him. What would have happened had these weaklings been forced to face the Emperor and all-powerful foes as he had done at Worms? This he says to the Bohemian, Sebastian Schlick, Count of Passun, in the letter in which he dedicates to him his Latin work “Against Henry VIII of England.”[165] It is worth noting that Luther did not insert this dedication in the German edition, but only in the Latin one intended for Bohemia and foreign countries where the circumstances were not so well known.
Luther always adhered obstinately to the idea, which ultimately passed into a standing tradition with many of his followers, that no one had been willing to dispute with him at Worms or elsewhere during the period of his outlawry; that he had, in fact, been condemned unheard; that his opponents had sought to vanquish him by force, not by confronting him with proofs, and had obstinately shut their ears to his arguments from Holy Scripture. He finally came to persuade himself, that they were in their hearts convinced that he was right, but out of consideration for their temporal interests had not been willing or able to give in.
He expressly mentions Duke George of Saxony, as an opponent who had taken up the latter position, also the influential Archbishop Albrecht of Mayence, and, above all, Johann Eck. “Is it not obdurate wickedness,” he exclaims in one of his outbursts, “to be the enemy of, and withstand, what is known and recognised as true? It is a sin against the first Commandment and greater than any other. But because it is not their invention they look on it as nought! Yet their own conscience accuses them.”[166] In another passage, in 1528, he complains of the persecutors in Church and State who appealed to the edict of Worms; “they sought for an excuse to deceive the simple people, though they really knew better”; if they act thus, it must be right, “were we to do the same, it would be wrong.”[167]
Yet,even from the vainglorious so-called “Minutes of the Worms Negotiations” (“Akten der Wormser Verhandlungen”), published immediately after at Wittenberg with Luther’s assistance,[168] it is clear that the case was fully argued in his presence at Worms, and that he had every opportunity of defending himself, though, from a legal point of view, the Bull of Excommunication having already been promulgated, the question was no longer open to theological discussion. In these “Minutes” the speeches he made in his defence at Worms are quoted. Catholic contemporaries even reproached him with having allowed himself to be styled therein “Luther, the man of God”; his orations are introduced with such phrases as: “Martin replied to the rude and indiscreet questions with his usual incredible kindness and friendliness in the following benevolent words,” etc.[169]
In order still further to magnify the bravery he displayed at Worms, Luther stated later on that the Pope had written to Worms, “that no account was to be made of the safe-conduct.”[170] As a matter of fact, however, the Papal Nuncios at Worms had received instructions to use every effort to prevent Luther being tried in public, because according to Canon Law the case was already settled; if he refused to retract, and came provided with a safe-conduct, nothing remained but to send him home, and then proceed against him with the utmost severity.[171] It was for this reason, according to his despatches, that Aleander took no part in the public sessions at which Luther was present. Only after Luther, on the return journey, had sent back the herald who accompanied him, and had openly infringed the conditions of the Imperial safe-conduct, did Aleander propose “that the Emperor should have Luther seized.”[172]
Luther, from the very commencement, stigmatised the Diet of Worms as the “Sin of Wormbs, which rejected God’s truth so childishly and openly, wilfully and knowingly condemned it unheard”;[173] to him the members of the Diet were culpably hardened and obdurate “Pharaohs,” who thought Christ could not see them, who, out of “utterly sinful wilfulness,” were determined “to hate and blaspheme Christ at Wormbs,” and to “kill the prophets, till God forsook them”; he even says: “In me they condemned innocent blood at Wormbs; … O thou unhappy nation, who beyond all others has become the lictor and executioner of End-Christ against God’s saints and prophets.”[174] An esteemed Protestant biographer of Luther is, however, at pains to point out, quite rightly, that the Diet could “not do otherwise than condemn Luther.” “By rejecting the sentence of the highest court he placed himself outside the pale of the law of the land. Even his very friends were unable to take exception to this.” It is, he says, “incorrect to make out, as so many do, that Luther’s opponents were merely impious men who obstinately withstood the revealed truth.” This author confines himself to remarking that, in his own view, it was a mistake to have “pronounced a formal sentence” upon such questions.[175]
That Luther, at the Diet of Worms, bore away the palm as the heroic defender of entire freedom of research and of conscience, and as the champion of the modern spirit, is a view not in accordance with a fair historical consideration of the facts.
He himself was then, and all through life, far removed from the idea of any freedom of conscience in the modern sense, and would have deemed all who dared to use it against Divine Revelation, as later opponents of religion did, as deserving of the worst penalties of the mediæval code. “It is an altogether one-sided view, one, indeed, which wilfully disregards the facts, to hail in Luther the man of the new age, the hero of enlightenment and the creator of the modern spirit.” Such is the opinion of Adolf Harnack.[176]
At Worms, Luther spoke of himself as being bound by the Word of God. It is true he claimed the freedom of interpreting Holy Scripture according to his own mind, or, as he said, according to the understanding bestowed on him by God, and of amending all such dogmas as displeased him.
But he would on no account cease to acknowledge that a revealed Word of God exists and claims submission from the human mind, whereas, from the standpoint of the modern free-thinker, there is no such thing as revelation. The liberty of interpreting revelation, which Luther proclaimed at Worms, or, to be more exact, calmly assumed, marked, it is true, a great stride forward in the road to the destruction of the Church.
Luther failed to point out at Worms how such liberty, or rather licence, agreed with the institutions established by Christ for the preservation and perpetual preaching of His doctrine of salvation. He was confronted by a Church, still recognised throughout the whole public life of the nations, which claimed as her own a Divine authority and commission to interpret the written Word of God. She was to the Faithful the lighthouse by which souls struggling in the waves of conflicting opinions might safely steer their course. In submitting his own personal opinion to the solemn judgment of an institution which had stood the test of time since the days of Christ and the Apostles, the Wittenberg Professor had no reason to fear any affront to his dignity. Whoever submitted to the Church accepted her authority as supreme, but he did not thereby forfeit either his freedom or his dignity; he obeyed in order not to expose himself to doubt or error; he pledged himself to a higher, and better, wisdom than he was able to reach by his own strength, by the way of experience, error and uncertainty. The Church plainly intimated to the heresiarch the error of his way, pointing out that the freedom of interpretation which he arrogated to himself was the destruction of all sure doctrine, the death-blow to the truth handed down, the tearing asunder of religious union, and the harbinger of endless dissensions.—We here see where Luther’s path diverged from that followed by Catholics. He set up subjectivity as a principle, and preached, together with the freedom of interpreting Scripture, the most unfettered revolt against all ecclesiastical authority, which alone can guarantee the truth. The chasm which he cleft still yawns; hence the difference of opinion concerning the sentence pronounced at Worms. We are not at liberty to conceal this fact from ourselves, nor can we wonder at the conflicting judgments passed on the position then assumed by Luther.
We may perhaps be permitted to quote a Protestant opinion which throws some light on Luther’s “championship of entire freedom of conscience.” It is that of an experienced observer of the struggles of those days, Friedrich Paulsen: “The principle of 1521, viz. to allow no authority on earth to dictate the terms of faith, is anarchical; with it no Church can exist. … The starting-point and the justification of the whole Reformation consisted