x. 38); secondly, experience, which proves that the devil causes

deafness, dumbness, lameness and fever; thirdly, the fact that he can even “fill men’s minds with thoughts of adultery, murder, robbery and all other evil lusts”; all the more easily then was he able to confuse the mental powers.[1064] In the case of those possessed, the devil, according to Luther, either usurps the place of the soul, or lives side by side with it, ruling such unhappy people as the soul does the body.[1065]

Thus it is the devil alone who is at work in those who commit suicide, for the death a man fancies he inflicts on himself is nothing but the “devil’s work”;[1066] the devil simply hoodwinks him and others who see him. To Frederick Myconius he wrote, in 1544: “It is my habit to esteem such a one as killed ‘_simpliciter et immediate_’ by the devil, just as a traveller might be by highwaymen.... I think we must stick to the belief that the devil deceives such a man and makes him fancy that he is doing something quite different, for instance praying, or something of the sort.”[1067] In the same sense he wrote to Anton Lauterbach, in 1542, when the latter informed him of three men who had hanged themselves: “Satan, with God’s leave, perpetrates such abominations in the midst of our congregation.... He is the prince of this world who in mockery deludes us into fancying that those men hanged themselves, whereas it was he who killed them. By the images he brought before their mind, he made them think that they were killing themselves”—a statement at variance with the one last given.[1068] Whereas in this letter he suggests that the people should be told of such cases from the pulpit so that they may not despise the “devil’s power from a mistaken sense of security,” previously, in conversation he had declared, that it ought not to be admitted publicly that such persons could not be damned not having been masters of themselves: “They do not commit this wilfully, but are impelled to it by the devil.... But the people must not be told this.”[1069] Speaking of a woman who was sorely tempted and worried, he said to his friends, in 1543: “Even should she hang herself or drown herself through it, it can do her no harm; it is just as though it all happened in a dream.” The source of this woman’s distress was her low spirits and religious doubts.[1070]

_On all that the Devil is able to do_

Many, in Luther’s opinion, had been snatched off alive by the devil, particularly when they had made a compact or had dealings with him, or had given themselves up to him.

For instance, he had carried off Pfeifer of Mühlberg, not far from Erfurt, and also another man of the same name at Eisenach; indeed, the devil had fetched the latter away in spite of his being watched by the preacher Justus Menius and “many of his clergymen,” and though “doors and windows had been shut so as to prevent his being carried away”; the devil, however, broke away some tiles “round the stove” and thus got in; finally he slew his victim “not far from the town in a hazel thicket.”[1071] Needless to say it is a great crime to bargain with the devil.[1072] This Dr. Eck had done and likewise the Elector Joachim I of Brandenburg († 1535), who wanted to live another fifteen years; this, however, the devil did not allow.[1073] Amsdorf too was dragged into the diabolical affair; one night at an inn two dead men appeared to him, thanks to some “Satanic art,” and compelled him to draw up a document in writing and hand it over to Joachim. Two spirits assisted on the occasion, bearing candles.[1074]

During battles the devil is able to carry men off more easily, but then the angels also kill by Divine command, as the Old Testament bears witness, for there “one angel could cause the death of many persons.”[1075] In war the devil is at work and makes use of the newest weapons “which indeed are Satan’s own invention,” for these cannon “send men flying into the air” and that “is the end of all man’s strength.”[1076] It is also the devil who guides the sleep-walkers “so that they do everything as though wide awake,” “but still there is something wanting and some defect apparent.”[1077]

Elsewhere too Luther discerns the work of the devil; for instance, when Satan sends a number of strange caterpillars into his garden,[1078] pilfers things, hampers the cattle and damages the stalls[1079] and interferes with the preparation of the cheese and milk.[1080] “Every tree has its lurking demon.[1081] You can see how, to your damage, Satan knocks down walls and palings that already totter;[1082] he also throws you down the stairs so as to make a cripple of you.”[1083]

In cases of illness it is the devil who enables the Jews to be so successful in effecting cures, more particularly in the case of the “great and those of high standing”;[1084] on the other hand he is also able maliciously to hinder the good effect of any medicine, as Luther himself had experienced when he lay sick in 1537. He can alter every medicine or medicament in the boxes, so that what has served its purpose well once or twice no longer works at all; “so powerful is the devil.”[1085] Luther, as his pupils bear witness, had frequently maintained that many of his bodily ailments were inflicted on him solely by the devil’s hatred.

Satan is a great foe of marriage and the blessing of children. “This is why you find he has so many malicious tricks and ways of frightening women who are with child, and causes such misfortune, cunning, murder, etc.”[1086] “Satan bitterly hates matrimony,” he says in 1537,[1087] and, in 1540, “he has great power in matrimonial affairs, for unless God were to stand by us how could the children grow up?”[1088] In matrimonial disputes “the devil shows his finger”; the Pope gets along easily, “he simply dissolves all marriages”; but we, “on account of the contentions instigated by the devil,” must have “people who can give advice.”[1089]

Not him alone but many others had the devil affrighted by the “noisy spirits.”[1090] These noisy spirits were, however, far more numerous before the coming of the Evangel. They were looked upon, quite wrongly, as the souls of the dead, and Masses and prayers were said and good works done to lay them to rest;[1091] but now “you know very well who causes this; you know it is the devil; he must not be exorcised[1092], we must despise him and waken our holy faith against him;[1093] we must be willing to abide the ‘spooks and spirits’ calmly and with faith if God permits them to ‘exercise their wantonness on us’ and ‘to affright us.’”[1094] Nevertheless, as he adds with much truth, “we must not be too ready to give credence to everyone, for many people are given to inventing such things.”[1095]

At the present time the noisy spirits are not so noticeable; “among us they have thinned”;[1096] the chief reason is, that the devils now prefer the company of the heretics, anabaptists and fanatics;[1097] for Satan “enters into men, for instance into the heretics and fanatics, into Münzer and his ilk, also into the usurers and others”;[1098] “the fanatic spirits are greatly on the increase.”[1099] The false teachers prove by their devilish speech how greatly the devil, “clever and dangerous trickster that he is,” “can deceive the hearts and consciences of men and hold them captive in his craze.” “What is nothing but lies, idle error and gruesome darkness, that they take to be the pure, unvarnished truth!”[1100]

If the devil can thus deceive men’s minds, surely it is far easier for him to bewitch their bodily senses. “He can hoax and cheat all the senses,”[1101] so that a man thinks he sees something that he can’t see, or hears what isn’t, for instance, “thunder, pipes or bugle-calls.” Luther fancies he finds an allusion to something of the sort in the words of Paul to the Galatians iii. 1: “Who hath bewitched you before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been set forth [that you should not obey the truth]?”[1102] Children can be bewitched by the evil eye of one who is under a spell, and Jerome was wrong when he questioned whether the illness of children in a decline was really due to the evil eye.[1103] It is certain that “by his great power the devil is able to blind our eyes and our souls,” as he did in the case of the woman who thought she was wearing a crown, whereas it was simply “cow dung.”[1104] He tells how, in Thuringia, eight hares were trapped, which, during the night, were changed into horses’ heads, such as we find lying on the carrion heap.[1105] Had not St. Macarius by his prayers dispelled the Satanic delusion by which a girl had been changed into a cow in the presence of many persons, including her own parents? The distressed parents brought their daughter in the semblance of a cow to Macarius “in order that she might recover her human shape,” and “the Lord did in point of fact dissolve the spell whereby men’s senses had been misled.” Luther several times relates this incident, both in conversation and in writing.[1106]

There is certainly no lack of marvellous tales of devils either in his works or in his Table-Talk.[1107]

The toils of the sorcerer are everywhere. Magic may prove most troublesome in married life, more particularly where true faith is absent; for, as he told the people in a sermon on May 8, 1524, “conjugal impotence is sometimes produced by the devil, by means of the Black Art; in the case of [true] Christians, however, this cannot happen.”[1108]

_On the Abode of the Devil; his Shapes and Kinds_

It is worth while to glance at what Luther says of the dwelling-places of the devil, the different shapes he is wont to assume, and the various categories into which demons may be classed.

First, as to his abode. In a sermon recently published, and dating from June 13, 1529, Luther says: “The devil inhabits the forests, the thickets, and the waters, and insinuates himself amongst us everywhere in order to destroy us; sleep he never does.” Preaching in the hot weather, he warns his hearers against the cool waters in which the devil lurks: “Be careful about bathing in the cold water.... Every year we hear of people being drowned [by the devil] through bathing in the Elbe.”[1109]

In another sermon incorporated in the Church-postils he explains how in countries like ours, “which are well watered,” the devils are fond of infesting the waters and the swamps; they sometimes drown those who venture there to bathe or even to walk. _Item_, in some places Naiades are to be met with who entice the children to the water’s edge, drag them in and drown them: all these are devils.[1110] Such devils can commit fornication with the maidens, and “are able to beget children which are simply devils”;[1111] for the devil will often drag a girl into the water, get her with child and keep her by him until she has borne her baby; he then lays these children in other people’s cradles, removing the real children and carrying them off.[1112]

Elsewhere the devils prefer “bare and desolate regions,” “woods and wildernesses.”[1113] “Some are to be found in the thick black clouds, these cause hailstorms, thunder and lightning, and poison the air, the pastures, etc.” Hence “_philosophi_” ought not to go on explaining these phenomena as though they were natural.[1114] Further, the devil has a favourite dwelling-place deep down in the earth, in the mines, where he “pesters and deceives people,” showing them for instance what appears to be “solid silver, whereas it is nothing of the kind.”[1115] “Satan hides himself in the apes and long-tailed monkeys,” who lie in wait for men and with whom it is wrong to play.[1116] That he inhabits these creatures, and also the parrots, is plain from their skill in imitating human beings.[1117]

In some countries many more devils are to be found than in others. “There are many evil spirits in Prussia and also in Pilappen [Lapland].” In Switzerland the devils make a “frightful to-do” in the “Pilatus tarn not far from Lucerne”; in Saxony, “in the Poltersberg tarn,” things are almost as bad, for if a stone be thrown in, it arouses a “great tempest.”[1118] “Damp and stuffy places” are however the devils’ favourite resort.[1119] He was firmly convinced that in the moist and swampy districts of Saxony all the devils “that Christ drove out of the swine in Jerusalem and Judæa had congregated”; “so much thieving, sorcery and pilfering goes on that the Evil One must indeed be present in person.”[1120] The fact of so many devils inhabiting Saxony was perhaps the reason, so he adds quaintly enough, “why the Evangel had to be preached there, i.e. that they might be chased away.” It was for this reason, so he repeats, “that Christ came amongst the Wends [Prussians], the worst of all the nations, in order to destroy the work of Satan and to drive out the devils who there abide among the peasants and townspeople.”[1121] That he was disposed to believe that a number, by no means insignificant, of devils could assemble in one place is plain from several statements such as, that at the Wartburg he himself had been plagued by “a thousand devils,” that at Augsburg every bishop had brought as many devils with him to the Diet as a dog has fleas in hot weather, and, finally, that at Worms their number was probably not far short of the tiles on the roofs.

* * * * *

The forms the devil assumes when he appears to men are very varied; to this the accounts sufficiently bear witness.

He appeared as a goat,[1122] and often as a dog;[1123] he tormented a sick woman in the shape of a calf from which Luther set her free—at least for one night.[1124] He is fond of changing himself into cats and other animals, foxes, hares, etc., “without, however, assuming greater powers than are possessed by such animals.”[1125] The semblance of the serpent is naturally very dear to the devil. To a sick girl at Wittenberg with whom Luther happened to be, he appeared under the form of Christ, but afterwards transformed himself into a serpent and bit the girl’s ear till the blood came.[1126] The devil comes as Christ or as a good angel, so as to be the better able to tempt people. He has been seen and heard under the guise of a hermit, of a holy monk, and even, so the tale runs, of a preacher; the latter had “preached so earnestly that the whole church was reduced to tears”; whereupon he showed himself as the devil; but “whether this story be true or not, I leave you to decide.”[1127] The form of a satyr suits him better, what we now call a hobgoblin; in this shape he “frequently appeared to the heathen in order to strengthen them in their idolatry.”[1128] A prettier make under which he appears is that of the “brownie”; it was in this guise that he was wont to sit on a clean corner of the hearthstone beside a maid who had strangled her baby.[1129] From the behaviour of the devils we may infer that, “so far they are not undergoing any punishment though they have already been sentenced, for were they being punished they would not play so many roguish tricks.”[1130]

* * * * *

Amongst the different kinds of devils he enumerates, using names which recall the humorous ones common in the old folk-lore of Germany, are not merely the stupid, the playful, the malicious and the murderous fiends, but also the more sightly ones,[1131] viz. the familiar and friendly demons; then again there are the childish little devils who allure to unchastity and so forth though not to unbelief or despair like the more dangerous ones.[1132] He is familiar with angelic, shining, white and holy devils, i.e. who pretend to be such, also with black devils and the “supreme majestic devil.” The majestic devil wants to be worshipped like God, and, in this, being “so quick-witted,” he actually succeeded in the ages before Luther’s day, for “the Pope worshipped him.”[1133] The devil repaid the Pope by bewitching the world in his favour; he brought him a large following and wrought much harm by means “of lies and magic,” doing on a vast scale what the “witches” do in a smaller way.[1134]

There are further, as Luther jestingly explains, house-devils, Court-devils and church-devils; of these “the last are the worst.”[1135] “Boundless is the devils’ power,” he says elsewhere, “and countless their number; nor are they all childish little devils, but great national devils, devils of the sovereigns, devils of the Church, who, with their five thousand years’ experience, have grown very knowing ... in fact, far too cunning for us in these latter days.”[1136] “Satan knows his business and no one but Jesus Christ can cope with him.”[1137] Very dangerous indeed are the Court-devils, who “never rest,” but “busy themselves at Court, and work all the mischief in the councils of the kings and rulers, thwarting all that is good; for the devil has some fine rakehells at Court.”[1138] As for the noisy devils, they had troubled him even in his youth.[1139]

The Papists have their own devils who work supposed miracles on their behalf, for the wonders which occur amongst them at the places of pilgrimage or elsewhere in answer to their prayers are not real miracles but devil’s make-believe. In fact, Satan frequently makes a person appear ill, and, then, by releasing him from the spell, cures him again.[1140]

The above ideas Luther had to a large extent borrowed from the past, indeed we may say that the gist of his fancies concerning the devil was but part of the great legacy of credulity, folk-lore and the mistaken surmises of theologians handed down verbally and in writing from the Middle Ages. Only an age-long accumulation of prejudice, rife particularly among the Saxon people, can explain Luther’s rooted attachment to such a congeries of wild fancies.

Assisted by the credulity of Melanchthon and other of his associates Luther not only added to the number of such ideas, but, thanks to his gift of vivid portraiture, made them far more strong and life-like than before. Through his widely-read works he introduced them into circles in which they were as yet scarcely known, and, in particular, established them firmly in the Lutheran world for many an age to come.

_The Devil and the Witches_

“It is quite certain,” says Paulus in his recent critical study of the history of witchcraft, “that Luther in his ideas on witchcraft was swayed by mediæval opinion.” “In many directions the innovators in the 16th century shook off the yoke of the Middle Ages; why then did they hold fast to the belief in witches? Why did Luther and many of his followers even outstrip the Middle Ages in the stress they laid on the work of the devil?”[1141]

Paulus here touches upon a question which the Protestant historian, Walter Köhler, had already raised, viz.: “Is it possible to explain the Reformers’ attachment to the belief in witchcraft simply on the score that they received it from the Middle Ages? How did they treat mediæval tradition in other matters? Why then was their attitude different here?”[1142]

G. Steinhausen, in his “Geschichte der deutschen Kultur,” writes: “No one ever insisted more strongly than Luther on his role [the devil’s]; he was simply carried away by the idea.... Though in his words and the stories he tells of the devil he speaks the language of the populace, yet the way in which he weaves diabolical combats and temptations into man’s whole life is both new and unfortunate. Every misfortune, war and tempest, every sickness, plague, crime and deformity emanates from the Evil One.”[1143]

Some of what Luther borrowed from the beliefs of his own day goes back to pre-Christian times. The belief in witches comprised much heathen tradition too deeply rooted for the early missionaries to eradicate. Moreover, certain statements of olden ecclesiastical writers incautiously exploited enabled even the false notions of the ancient Græco-Roman world to become also current. Fear of hidden, dangerous forces, indiscriminating repetition of alleged incidents from the unseen, the ill-advised discussions of certain theologians and thoughtless sermons of popular orators, all these causes and others contributed to produce the crass belief in witches as it existed even before Luther’s day at the close of the Middle Ages, and such as we find it, for instance, in the sermons of Geiler von Kaysersberg.

The famous Strasburg preacher not only accepted it as an undoubted fact, that witches were able with the devil’s help to do all kinds of astounding deeds, but he also takes for granted the possibility of their making occasional aerial trips, though it is true he dismisses the nocturnal excursions of the women with Diana, Venus and Herodias as mere diabolical delusion. He himself never formally demanded the death-penalty for witches, but it may be inferred that he quite countenanced the severe treatment advocated in the “Witches’ Hammer.” In his remarks on witches he follows partly Martin Plantsch, the Tübingen priest and University professor, partly, and still more closely, the “_Formicarius_” of the learned Dominican Johannes Nider (1380-1438).[1144]

Concerning the witches and their ways Luther’s works contain an extraordinary wealth of information.

In the sermons he delivered on the Ten Commandments as early as 1516 and 1517, and which, in 1518, he published in book form,[1145] he took over an abundance of superstition from the beliefs current amongst the people, and from such writers as Geiler. In 1518 and 1519 were published no less than five editions in Latin of the sermons on the Decalogue; the book was frequently reprinted separately and soon made its appearance in Latin in some collections of Luther’s writings; later on it figures in the complete Latin editions of his works; six German editions of it had appeared up to 1520 and it is also comprised in the German collections of his works. In his old age, when the “evils of sorcery seemed to be gaining ground anew,” he deemed it “necessary,” as he said,[1146] “to bring out the book once more with his own hand”; certain tales, amongst which he instances one concerning the devil’s cats and a young man, might serve to demonstrate “the power and malice of Satan” to all the world. One cannot but regard it as a mistake on Luther’s part, when, in his sermons on the Ten Commandments, he takes his hearers and readers into the details of the magic and work of the witches, though at the same time emphasising very strongly the unlawfulness of holding any communication with Satan. This stricture tells, however, as much against many a Catholic writer of that day.

It is in his commentary on the 1st Commandment that he gives us a first glimpse into the world of witches which later was to engross his attention even more.

He is anxious to bring home to the “weaklings” how one can sin against the 1st Commandment.[1147] He therefore enumerates all the darkest deeds of human superstition; of their reality he was firmly convinced, and only seldom does he speak merely of their “possibility,” or say, “it is believed” that this or that took place. He also divides into groups the people who sin against the virtue of Divine love, doing so according to their age, and somewhat on the lines of a Catechism, in order that “the facts may be more easily borne in mind.”

“The third group,” he says, “is that of the old women, etc.” “By their magic they are able to bring on blindness, cause sickness, kill, etc.”[1148] “Some of them have their fireside devil who comes several times a day.” “There are _incubi_ and _succubi_ amongst the devils,” who commit lewdness with witches and others. Devil-strumpetry and ordinary harlotry are amongst the sins of these women. Luther also speaks of magic potions, desecration of the sacrament in the devil’s honour, and secret incantations productive of the most marvellous effects.

His opinion he sums up as follows: “What the devil himself is unable to do, that he does by means of old hags”;[1149] “he is a powerful god of this world”;[1150] “the devil has great power through the sorceresses.”[1151] He prefers thus to make use of the female sex because, “it comes natural to them ever since the time of Mother Eve to let themselves be duped and fooled.”[1152] “It is as a rule a woman’s way to be timid and afraid of everything, hence they practise so much magic and superstition, the one teaching the other.”[1153] Even in Paradise, so he says, the devil approached the woman rather than the man, she being the weaker.[1154]

It is worthy of note that he does not merely base his belief in witchcraft on the traditions of the past but preferably on Scripture directly, and the power of Satan to which it bears witness.

In 1519 he had attempted to prove on St. Paul’s authority against the many who refused to believe in such things, that sorcery can cause harm, omitting, however, to make the necessary distinctions.[1155] In 1538 he declares: “The devil is a great and powerful enemy. Verily I believe, that, unless children were baptised at an early age no congregations could be formed; for adults, who know the power of Satan, would not submit to be baptised so as to avoid undertaking the baptismal vows by which they renounce Satan.”[1156]

In the Commentary on Galatians he not merely appeals anew to the apostolic authority in support of his doctrine concerning the devil, but also directly bases his belief in witchcraft on the principle, that it is plain that Satan “rules and governs the whole world,” that we are but guests in the world, of which the devil is prince and god and controls everything by which we live: food, drink, clothing, air, etc.[1157] By means of sorcery he is able to strangle and slay us; through the agency of his whores and sorceresses, the witches, he is able to hurt the little children, with palpitations, blindness, etc. “Nay, he is able to steal a child and lay himself in the cradle in its stead, for I myself have heard of such a child in Saxony whom five women were not able to supply with sufficient milk to quiet it; and there are many such instances to be met with.”[1158]

The numerous other instances of harm wrought by witches with which he is acquainted, such as the raising of storms, thefts of milk, eggs and butter,[1159] the laying of snares to entrap men, tears of blood that flow from the eyes, lizards cast up from the stomach,[1160] etc., all recede into the background in comparison with the harlotry, substitution of children, etc., which the devil carries out with the witches’ help. “It is quite possible that, as the story goes, the Evil Spirit can carnally know the sorceresses, get them with child and cause all manner of mischief.”[1161] Changeling children of the sort are nothing but a “lump of flesh without a soul”; the devil is the soul, as Luther says elsewhere,[1162] for which reason he declared, in 1541, such children should simply be drowned; he recalls how he had already given this advice in one such case at Dessau, viz. that such a child, then twelve years of age, should be smothered.[1163]

It sometimes happens, so he says, that animals, cats for instance, intent on doing harm, are wounded and that afterwards the witches are found to have wounds in the same part of the body. In such case the animals were all sham.[1164] A mouse trying to steal milk is hurt somewhere, and the next day the witch comes and begs for oil for the wound which she has in the very same place.[1165] If milk and butter are placed on coals the devil, he says, will be obliged to call up the witches who did the mischief.[1166] “It is also said that people who eat butter that has been bewitched, eat nothing but mud.”[1167]

In such metamorphoses into animals it was not, however, the witches who underwent the change, nor were the animals really hurt, but it was “the devil who transformed himself into the animal” which was only apparently wounded; afterwards, however, “he imprints the marks of the wounds on the women so as to make them believe they had taken part in the occurrence.”[1168] At any rate this is the curiously involved explanation he once gives of the difficult problem.

In some passages he, like others too, is reluctant to accept the theory that afterwards grew so prevalent, particularly during the witch persecutions in the 17th century, viz. that the witches were in the habit of flying through the air. In 1540 he says that this, like the changes mentioned above, was merely conjured up before the mind by the devil, and was thus a delusion of the senses and a Satanic deception.[1169] Yet in 1538 he assumes that it was in Satan’s power to carry those who had surrendered themselves to him bodily through the air;[1170] he had heard of one instance where even repentance and confession could not save such a man, when at the point of death, from being carried off by the devil. At an earlier date he had spoken without any hesitation of the witches who ride “on goats and broom-sticks and travel on mantles.”[1171]

The witches are the most credulous and docile tools of the devil; they are his hand and foot for the harm of mankind. They are “devil’s own whores who give themselves up to Satan and with whom he holds fleshly intercourse.”[1172]

“Such persons ought to be hurried to justice (‘_supplicia_’). The lawyers want too much evidence, they despise these open and flagrant proofs.” When questioned on the rack they answer nothing, “they are dumb, they despise punishment, the devil will not let them speak. Such deeds are, however, evidence enough, and for the sake of frightening others they ought to be made an example.”[1173]

“Show them no mercy!” so he has it on another occasion. “I would burn them myself, as we read in the Law [of Moses] that the priests led the way in stoning the evildoer.”[1174] And yet here all the ado was simply about ... a theft of milk! But sorcery as such was regarded by him as “lèse majesté” [against God], as a rebellion, a crime whereby the Divine Majesty is insulted in the worst possible of ways. “Hence it is rightly punished by bodily pains and death.”[1175] He first expresses himself in favour of the death-penalty in a sermon in 1526,[1176] and to this point of view he adhered to the end.[1177]

Luther’s words and his views on witches generally became immensely popular. The invitation to persecute the witches was read in the German Table-Talk compiled by Aurifaber and published at Eisleben in 1566. It reappeared, together with the rest of the contents, in the two reprints published at Frankfurt in 1567, also in the new edition which Aurifaber himself undertook in 1568, as well as in the Frankfurt and Eisleben editions of 1569.[1178] Not only were the people exhorted to persecute the witches, but, intermixed with the other matter, we find all sorts of queer witch-stories just of the type to call up innumerable imitations. He relates, for instance, the experiences of his own mother with a neighbour who was a “sorceress,” who used to “shoot at her children so that they screamed themselves to death”; also the tale told him by Spalatin, in 1538, of a little maid at Altenburg over whom a spell had been cast by a witch and who “shed tears of blood.”

The demonological literature which soon assumed huge proportions and of which by far the greater part emanated from the pen of Protestant writers, appealed constantly to Luther, and reproduced his theories and stories, and likewise his demands that measures should be taken for the punishment of the witches. It may suffice to draw attention to the curious book entitled “Pythonissa, i.e. twenty-eight sermons on witches and ghosts,” by the preacher Bernard Waldschmidt of Frankfurt. He demonstrates from Luther’s Table-Talk that the devil was able to assume all kinds of shapes, for instance, of “cats, goats, foxes, hares, etc.,” just as he had appeared at Wittenberg in Luther’s presence, first as Christ, and then as a serpent.[1179]

Many Lutheran preachers and religious writers were accustomed to remind the people not only of the tales in the Table-Talk, but also of what was contained in the early exposition of the Ten Commandments, in the Prayer-book of 1522 and in the Church-postils, Commentary on Galatians, etc. Books of instances such as those of Andreas Hondorf in 1568 and Wolfgang Büttner in 1576 made these things widely known. David Meder, Lutheran preacher at Nebra in Thuringia, in his “Eight witch-sermons” (1605), referred in the first sermon to the Table-Talk, also to Luther’s exposition of the Decalogue, to his Commentary on Genesis and his work “Von den Conciliis und Kirchen.” Bernard Albrecht, the Augsburg preacher, in his work on witches, 1628, G. A. Scribonius, J. C. Gödelmann and N. Gryse all did the same.

In what esteem Luther’s sayings were held by the Protestant lawyers is plain from certain memoranda of the eminent Frankfurt man of law, Johann Fischart, dating from 1564 and 1567. Fischart was against the “Witches’ Hammer” and the other Catholic productions of an earlier day, such as Nider’s “_Formicarius_,” yet he expresses himself in favour of the burning of witches and appeals on this point to Luther and his interpretation of Holy Scripture.

Holy Scripture and Luther were as a rule appealed to by the witch-zealots on the Protestant side, as is proved by the writings of Abraham Saur (1582) and Jakob Gräter (1589), of the preacher Nicholas Lotichius and Nicholas Krug (1567), of Frederick Balduin of Wittenberg (1628)—whose statements were accepted by the famous Saxon criminalogist Benedict Carpzov, who signed countless death sentences against witches—and by J. Volkmar Bechmann, the opponent of the Jesuit Frederick von Spee. We may pass over the many other names cited by N. Paulus with careful references to the writings in question.[1180]

It must be pointed out, however, that an increase in the severity of the penal laws against witches is first noticeable in the Saxon Electorate in 1572, when it was decreed that they should be burnt at the stake, even though they had done no harm to anyone, on account of their wicked compact with the devil.[1181] As early as 1540, at a time when elsewhere in Germany the execution of witches was of rare occurrence, four persons were burnt at Wittenberg on June 29 as witches or wizards.[1182] Shortly before this Luther had lamented that the plague of witches was again on the increase.[1183]

Even the Catholic clergy occasionally quoted Luther’s statements on witches, as given in his widely read Table-Talk; thus, for instance, Reinhard Lutz in his “True Tidings of the godless Witches” (1571).[1184] This writing, at the very beginning and again at the end, contains a passage from the Table-Talk dealing with witches, devils’ children, incubi and succubi; on the other hand, it fails to refer either to the “Witches’ Hammer” of 1487 or to the Bull, “_Summis desiderantes_,” of Innocent VIII (1484).

Thus the making of this regrettable mania was in great part Luther’s doing.[1185] And yet a reformer could have found no nobler task than to set to work to sweep away the abusive outgrowths of the belief in the devil’s power.

We still have instructive writings by Catholic authors of that day which, whilst by no means promoting the popular ideas concerning the devil, are unquestionably rooted in the Middle Ages. Such a work is the Catechism of Blessed Peter Canisius. One particular in which the “Larger” Canisian Catechism differs from Luther’s Larger German Catechism is, that, whereas in the latter the evil power of Satan over material things is dealt with at great length, the Catechism of Canisius says never a word on the material harm wrought by the devil. While Luther speaks of the devil sixty-seven times, Canisius mentions him only ten times. Canisius’s book was from the first widely known amongst German-speaking Catholics and served down to the last century for purposes of religious instruction.[1186] Though this is true of this particular book of Canisius, the influence of which was so far-reaching, it must in honesty be added that even a man like Canisius, both in his other writings and in his practical conduct, was not unaffected by the prevailing ideas concerning the devil.

_Luther’s Devil-mania; its Connection with his Character and his Doctrine_

Had Luther written his Catechism during the last period of his life he would undoubtedly have brought the diabolical element and his belief in witches even more to the fore. For, as has been pointed out (above, pp. 227, 238), Luther’s views on the power the devil possesses over mankind and over the whole world were growing ever stronger, till at last they came to colour everything great or small with which he had to deal; they became, in fact, to him a kind of fixed idea.

In his last year (1546), having to travel to Eisleben, he fancies so many fiends must be assembled there on his account, i.e. to oppose him, “that hell and the whole world must for the nonce be empty of devils.”[1187] At Eisleben he even believed that he had a sight of the devil himself.[1188]

Three years before this he complains that no one is strong enough in belief in the devil; the “struggle between the devils and the angels” affrights him; for it is to be apprehended that “the angels whilst fighting for us often get the worst for a time.”[1189] His glance often surveys the great world-combat which the few who believe wage on Christ’s side against Satan, and which has lasted since the dawn of history; now, at the very end of the world, he sees the result more clearly. Christ is able to save His followers from the devil’s claws only by exerting all His strength; they, like Luther, suffer from weakness of faith, just as Christ Himself did in the Garden of Olives(!); they, like Luther, stumble, because Christ loves to show Himself weak in the struggle with the devil; mankind’s and God’s rights have come off second best during the age-long contest with the devil. In Jewry, for which Luther’s hatred increases with age, he sees men so entirely delivered over to the service of the devil that “all the heathen in a lump” are simply nothing in comparison with the Jews; but even the “fury of the Jews is mere jest and child’s play” compared with the devilish corruption of the Papacy.

“The devil is there; he has great claws and whosoever falls into them him he holds fast, as they find to their cost in Popery. Hence let us always pray and fear God.” This in 1543.[1190] But we must also fear the devil, and very much too, for, as he solemnly declares in 1542: “Our last end is that we fear the devil”; for the worst sins are “delusions of the devil.”[1191] “The whole age is Satanic,”[1192] and the “activity of the devil is now manifest”; the speaker longs for “God at length to mock at Satan.”[1193] “The devil is all-powerful at present, several foreign kings are his train-bearers.... God Himself must come in order to resist the proud spirit.... Shortly Christ will make an end of his lies and murders.”[1194]

The whole of his work, the struggle for the Evangel, seems to him at times as one long wrestling with the boundless might of Satan.[1195] All his life, so he said in his old age, he had forged ahead “tempestuously” and “hit out with sledge-hammer blows”; but it was all against Satan. “I rush in head foremost, but ... against the devil.”[1196] As early as 1518, however, he knew the “thoughts of Satan.”[1197]

It is not difficult to recognise the different elements which, as Luther grew older, combined permanently to establish him in his devil-mania.

Apart from his peculiar belief in the devil, of which he was never to rid himself, there was the pessimism which loomed so large in his later years;[1198] there was also his habit of regarding himself and his work as the pet aversion and chief object of Satan’s persecution, for since, according to his own contention, his great struggle against Antichrist was in reality directed against the devil, the latter naturally endeavoured everywhere to bar his way. If great scandals arise as the result of his sermons, it is Satan who is to blame; “he smarts under the wounds he receives and therefore does he rage and throw everything into confusion.”[1199] The disorderly proceedings against the Catholics at Erfurt which brought discredit on his teaching were also due to the devil. The Wittenberg students who disgrace him are instigated by the devil. Dr. Eck was incited against him by Satan. The Catholic princes who resist him, like Duke George of Saxony, have at least a “thousand devils” who inspire them and assist them. Above all, it is the devil himself who delivers his oracles through the mouthpiece of those teachers of the innovations who differ from Luther, deluding them to such an extent that they lose “their senses and their reason.”[1200] If Satan can do nothing else against the Evangel he sends out noisy spirits so as to bolster up the heresy of the existence “of a Purgatory.”[1201]

Such ideas became so habitual with him, that, in later years, the conviction that the devil was persecuting his work developed into an abiding mania, drawing, as it were, everything else into its vortex.

Everywhere he hears behind him the footsteps of his old enemy, the devil.

“Satan has often had me by the throat.... He has frequently beset me so hard that I knew not whether I was dead or alive ... but with God’s Word I have withstood him.”[1202] He lies with me in my bed, so he says on one occasion; “he sleeps much more with me than my Katey.”[1203] His struggle with him degenerates into a hand-to-hand brawl, “I have to be at grips with him daily.”[1204] His pupils related, that on his own giving, when he was an old man “the devil had walked with him in the dormitory of the [former] monastery ... plaguing and tormenting him”; that “he had one or two such devils who were in the habit of lying in wait” for him, and, “that, when unable to get the better of his heart, they attacked and troubled his head.”[1205] Whether the narrators of these accounts are referring to actual apparitions or not does not much matter.

Later on, when dealing with his delusions, we shall have to speak of the diabolical apparitions Luther is supposed to have had. There is no doubt, however, that Luther’s first admirers took his statements concerning his experiences with the devil rather more seriously than he intended, as, for instance, when Cyriacus Spangenberg in his “Theander Lutherus”[1206] relates a disputation on the Winkle-Mass which he supposed Luther to have actually held with the devil, and even goes so far as to prove from the bruises which the devil in person inflicted on him that Luther was “really a holy martyr.”[1207] Even some of his opponents, like Cochlæus, fancied that because Luther said “in a sermon that he had eaten more than one mouthful of salt with the devil, he had therefore most probably been in direct communication with the devil himself, the more so since some persons were said to have seen the two hobnobbing together.”[1208] Here we shall merely point out generally that to Luther the power of Satan, his delusions and persecutions, were something that seemed very near,[1209] an uncanny feeling that increased as he grew older and as his physical strength gave out.

“The devil is now very powerful,” he says in 1540, “for he no longer deals with us through the agency of others, of Duke George, for instance, or the Englishman [Henry VIII], or of the Mayence fellow [Albert], but fights against us visibly. Against him we must pray diligently.”[1210] “Didn’t he even ride many grand and holy prophets. Was not David a great prophet? And yet even he was devil-ridden, and so was Saul and ‘Bileam’ too.”[1211]

We must, moreover, not overlook the link which binds Luther’s devil-mania to his doctrinal system as a whole, particularly to his teaching on the enslaved will and on justification.

Robbed of free-will for doing what is good, when once the devil assumes the mastery, man must needs endure his anger and perform his works. Luther himself found a cruel rider in the devil. Again, though man by the Grace of God is justified by faith, yet the old diabolical root of sin remains in him, for original sin persists and manifests itself in concupiscence, which is essentially the same thing as original sin. All acts of concupiscence are, therefore, sins, being works of our bondage under Satan; only by the free grace of Christ can they be cloaked over. The whole outer world which has been depraved by original sin is nothing but the “devil’s own den”; the devil stands up very close (“_propinquissimus_”)[1212] even to the pious, so that it is no wonder if we ever feel the working of the spirit of darkness. “Man must bear the image either of God or of the devil.” Created to the image of God he failed to remain true to it, but “became like unto the devil.”[1213]

Hence his doctrines explain how he expected every man to be so keenly sensible of “God’s wrath, the devil, death and hell”; everyone should realise that ours is “no real life, but only death, sin and power of the devil.”[1214] It is true that in his doctrine faith affords a man sufficient strength, and even makes him master of the devil; but, as he remarks, this is “in no wise borne out by experience and must be believed beforehand.” Meanwhile we are painfully “sensible” that we are “under the devil’s heel,” for the “world and what pertains to it must have the devil for its master, who also clings to us with all his might and is far stronger than we are; for we are his guests in a strange hostelry.”[1215]

_The Weapons to be used against the Devil_

On the fact that faith gives us strength against all Satanic influences Luther insists frequently and in the strongest terms.

He tries to find here a wholesome remedy against the fear that presses on him. He describes his own attempts to lay hold on it and to fill himself with Christ boldly and trustfully. Even in his last days such words of confidence occasionally pierce the mists of his depression. “We see well,” he says, “that when the devil attacks a [true] Christian he is put to shame, for where there is faith and confidence he has nothing to gain.” This he said in 1542 when relating the story of an old-time hermit who rudely accosted the devil as follows, when the latter sought to disturb him at his prayers: “Ah, devil, this serves you right! You were meant to be an angel and you have become a swine.”[1216]

“We must muster all our courage so as not to dread the devil.”[1217] We must “clasp the faith to our very bosom” and “cheerfully fling to the winds the apparitions of the spirits”; “they seek in vain to affright men.”[1218] Contempt of the devil and awakening of faith are, according to Luther, the best remedies against all assaults of the devil.[1219] A man who really has the faith may even set an example that others cannot imitate.[1220] Luther knows, for instance, of a doctor of medicine who with boundless faith stood up to Satan when the latter, horns and all, appeared to him; the brave man even succeeded in breaking off the horns; but, in a similar case, when another tried to do the same in a spirit of boasting, he was killed by Satan.[1221] Hence let us have faith, but let our faith be humble!

But, provided we have faith and rely on Christ, we may well show the devil our contempt for him, vex him and mock at his power and cunning. He himself, as he says, was given to breaking out into music and song, the better to show the devil that he despised him, for “our hymns are very galling to him”; on the contrary, he rejoices and has a laugh when we are upset and cry out “alas and alack!”[1222] To remain alone is not good. “This is what I do”; rather than be alone “I go to my swine-herd Johann or to see the pigs.”[1223]

In this connection Luther can tell some very coarse and vulgar jokes, both at his own and others’ expense, in illustration of the contempt which the devil deserves; they cannot here be passed over in silence.

Thus, on April 15, 1538, he relates the story of a woman of Magdeburg whom Satan vexed by running over her bed at night “like rats and mice. As he would not cease the woman put her a—— over the bedside, presented him with a f—— (if such language be permissible) and said: ‘There, devil, there’s a staff, take it in your hand and go pilgriming with it to Rome to the Pope your idol.’” Ever after the devil left her in peace, for “he is a proud spirit and cannot endure to be treated contemptuously.”[1224] According to Lauterbach, who gives the story in somewhat briefer form, Luther sapiently remarked: “Such examples do not always hold good, and are dangerous.”[1225]

He himself was nevertheless fond of expressing his contempt for the devil after a similar way when the latter assailed him with remorse of conscience.

“I can drive away the devil with a single f——.”[1226] “To shame him we may tell him: Kiss my a——”,[1227] or “Ease yourself into your shirt and tie it round your neck,” etc.[1228] On May 7, 1532, when troubled in mind and afraid lest “the thunder should strike him, he said: ‘Lick my a——, I want to sleep, not to hold a disputation.’”[1229] On another occasion he exclaims: “The devil shall lick my a—— even though I should have sinned.”[1230] When the devil teased him at night, “suggesting all sorts of strange thoughts to him,” he at last said to him: “Kiss me on the seat! God is not angry as you would have it.” Of course, seeing that the devil “‘fouls’ the knowledge of God,” he must expect to be “fouled” in his turn. Luther frequently said, so the Table-Talk relates, that he would end by sending “into his a—— where they belonged” those “twin devils” who were in the habit of prying on him and tormenting him mentally and bodily; for “they had brought him to such a pass that he was fit for nothing.”[1231] The Pope had once played him (Luther) the same trick: “He has stuck me into the devil’s behind”;[1232] “for I snap at the Pope’s ban and am his devil, therefore does he hate and persecute me.”[1233]

He relates, in May, 1532, according to Schlaginhaufen’s Notes, his method of dismissing the devil by the use of stronger and stronger hints: When the devil came to him at night in order to plague him, he first of all told him to let him sleep, because he must work during the day and needed all the rest he could get. Then, if Satan continued to upbraid him with his sins, he would answer mockingly that he had been guilty of a lot more sins which the devil had forgotten to mention, for instance, he had, etc. (there follows the choice simile of the shirt as given above); thirdly, “if he still goes on accusing me of sins I say to him contemptuously: ‘_Sancte Satanas ora pro me_; you have never done a wrong and you alone are holy; be off to God and get grace for yourself.’”[1234]

The way in which Bugenhagen or Pomeranus, the pastor of Wittenberg, with Luther’s fullest approval, drove the devil out of the butter churn (vol. iii., p. 229 f.) became famous at Wittenberg, and, thanks to the Table-Talk, elsewhere too. It may here be remarked that the incident was no mere joke. For when, in 1536, the question of the harm wrought by the witches was discussed amongst Luther’s guests, and Bartholomew Bernhardi, the Provost, complained that his cow had been bewitched for two years, so that he had been unable to get any milk from her, Luther related quite seriously what had taken place in Bugenhagen’s house. (“Then Pommer came to the rescue, scoffed at the devil and emptied his bowels into the churn,” etc.). According to Lauterbach’s “Diary” Luther returned to the incident in 1538 and stamped the whole proceeding with his approval: “Dr. Pommer’s plan is the best, viz. to plague them [the witches] with muck and stir it well up, for then all their things begin to stink.”[1235] What is even more remarkable than the strange practice itself is the way in which Luther comes to speak of “Pommer’s plan.” It is his intention to show that the method of combating witches had made progress since Catholic times. For, in Lauterbach, the passage runs: “The village clergy and schoolmasters had a plan of their own [for counteracting spells] and plagued them [the witches] not a little, but Dr. Pommer’s plan, etc. (as above).”[1236] Hence not only did Luther sanction the superstition of earlier ages, but he even sought to improve on it by the invention of new practices of his own.

Luther is also addicted to the habit dear to the German Middle Ages of using the devil as a comic figure; as he advanced in age, however, he tended to drop this habit and also the kindred one of chasing the devil away by filthy abuse; the truth is that the devil had now assumed in his eyes a grimmer and more tragic aspect.

Formerly he had been fond of describing in his joking way how the devil, “though he had never actually taken his doctor’s degree,”[1237] proved himself an “able logician” in his suggestions and disputations; when he brought forward objections Luther would reply: “Devil, tell me something new; what you say I already know.”[1238] In his book on the “Winkle-Mass,” pretending to “make a little confession,” he tells how, “on one occasion, awakening at midnight,” the devil began a disputation against the Mass with the words: “Hearken, oh most learned Doctor, are you aware that for some fifteen years you said such Winkle-Masses nearly every day?”[1239] Whereupon he had “seized on the old weapons” which “in Popery he had learnt to put on and to use” and had sought an excuse. “To this the devil retorted: ‘Friend, tell me where this is written, etc.’”[1240] Formerly he had been fond of poking fun at the Papists by telling them how they “were beset merely by naughty little devils, legal rather than theological ones;[1241] that they were tempted only to homicide, adultery and fornication,” in short, to sins of the second table of the Law, by “puny fiendkins and little petty devils,” whereas we on the other hand have “by us the great devils who are _doctores theologiæ_”; “these attack us as the leaders of the army, for they tempt us to the great sins against the first table,” to question the forgiveness of sins, to doubts against faith and to despair.[1242]

He was very inventive and quite indefatigable in devising new epithets with the help of the devil’s name; his adversaries were, according to him, “full of devils, on whose backs moreover lived other and worse devils”; it seems to him to fall all too short of the truth to say they are “endevilled,” “perdevilled,” or “superdevilled” and “the children of Satan.”[1243] The devil’s mother, grandmother and brothers and sisters are frequently alluded to by Luther, particularly when in a merry mood. In hours of gloom or emotion he could, however, curse people with such words as “may the devil take you,”[1244] “May the devil pay you out,” or “May he tread you under foot!”

He was perfectly aware, nevertheless, of the failings of his tongue, and even expressed his regret for them to his friends. During his illness, in 1527, we are told how he begged pardon for and bewailed the “hasty and inconsiderate words he had often used the better to dispel the sadness of a weak flesh.”[1245]

Melancholy is “a devil’s bath” (“_balneum diaboli_”), so he remarked on another occasion, against which there is no more effective remedy than cheerfulness of spirit.[1246]

5. The Psychology of Luther’s Jests and Satire

Joking was a permanent element of Luther’s psychology. Often, even in his old age, his love of fun struggles through the lowering clouds of depression and has its fling against the gloomy anxiety that fills his mind, and against the world and the devil.

Gifted with a keen sense of the ridiculous, it had been, in his younger days, almost a second nature to him to delight in drollery and particularly to clothe his ideas in playful imagery. His mind was indeed an inexhaustible source of rich and homely humour.

Nature had indeed endowed Luther from his cradle with that rare talent of humour which, amidst the trials of life, easily proves more valuable than a gold mine to him who has it. During his secular studies at Erfurt he had been able to give full play to this tendency as some relief after the hardships of early days. His preference for Terence, Juvenal, Plautus and Horace amongst the classic poets leads us to infer that he did so; and still more does Mathesius’s description, who says that, at that time, he was a “brisk and jolly fellow.” Monastic life and, later, his professorship and the strange course on which he entered must for a while have placed a rein on his humour, but it broke out all the more strongly when be brought his marvellous powers of imagination and extraordinary readiness in the use of the German tongue to the literary task of bringing over the masses to his new ideas.

Anyone desirous of winning the hearts of the German masses has always had to temper earnestness with jest, for a sense of humour is part of the nation’s birthright. The fact that Luther touched this chord was far more efficacious in securing for him loud applause and a large following than all his rhetoric and theological arguments.

_Humour in his Writings and at his Home_

It was in his polemics that Luther first turned to account his gift of humour; his manner of doing so was anything but refined.

The first of his German controversial works against a literary opponent was his “Von dem Bapstum tzu Rome wider dem hochberumpten Romanisten tzu Leiptzk”[1247] (the Franciscan Alveld or Alfeld), dating from May and June, 1520. Here he starts with a comical description of the “brave heroes in the market place at Leipzig, so well armed as we have never seen the like before. Their helmets they wear on their feet, their swords on their heads, their shields and breastplates hang down their back, and their lances they grip by the blade.... If Leipzig can produce such giants then that land must indeed be fertile.” On the last page of the same writing he puts the concluding touch to his work by telling Alveld, the “rude miller’s beast,” that he does “not yet know how to bray his hee-haw, hee-haw”; were I, says Luther, “to permit all the wantonness of these thick-heads even the very washerwomen would end by writing against me.” “What really helps it if a poor frog [like this fellow] blows himself out? Even were he to swell himself out to bursting-point he would never equal an ox.”

In his first German booklet against Emser, viz. his “An den Bock zu Leyptzck” (1521),[1248] he plays on the motto of Emser’s coat-of-arms “Beware of the goat.” There was really no call for Emser to inscribe these words on his note-paper, for from his whole behaviour there was no doubt that he was indeed a goat, and also that he could “do no more than butt.” Luther’s reply to all his threats would be: “Dear donkey, don’t lick! But God save the poor nanny-goats, whose horns are wrapped in silk, from such a he-goat; as for me, so God wills, there is no fear. Have you never heard the fable of the ass who tried to roar as loud as the lion? I myself might have been afraid of you had I not known you were an ass,” etc.

It is certainly not easy to believe his assertion, that it was only against his will that he had recourse to all this derision which he heaped on his adversaries in religious matters of such vital importance. He has it that his words, “though maybe biting and sarcastic,” are really “spoken from a heart that is breaking with grief and has been obliged to turn what is serious into abuse.”[1249] As a matter of fact the temptation to use just such weapons was too great, and the prospect of success too alluring for us to place much reliance in such an assurance. His “grief” was of quite another kind.

At a later date his humour, or rather his caustic and satirical manner of treating his opponents, looked to him so characteristic of his way of writing, that as he said, it would be quite easy to tell at a glance which were the polemical tracts due to his pen, even though they did not bear his name. This was his opinion of his “satirical list” of the relics of the Cardinal of Mayence.[1250] Writing of this work to his friend Jonas he says: “Whoever reads it and has ever been familiar with my ideas and my pen will say: Here is Luther; the Cardinal too will say: This is the work of that scamp Luther!... But never mind; if they pipe then I insist on dancing, and, if I survive, I hope one day to tread a measure with the bride of Mayence [the Cardinal].” He had still “some sweet tit-bits” which he would like “to lay on her red and rosy lips.”[1251] This last quotation may serve as a specimen of the rough humour found in his controversial letters.

The reader already knows how the Papacy had to bear the brunt of such jests and of an irony which often descends to the depths of vulgarity. (Above, vol. iii., p. 232-235; vol. iv., pp. 295 f., 304 f, 318 ff.)

But it was not only in his polemics that his jests came in useful. The jovial tone which often characterises his domestic life, the humour that seasons his Table-talk (even though too often it oversteps the bounds of the permissible) and makes itself felt even in his business letters and intimate correspondence with friends, appears as Luther’s almost inseparable companion, with whose smile and whose caustic irony he cannot dispense.

The monotony and the hardships of his daily life were alleviated by his cheerfulness. His intercourse with friends and pupils was rendered more stimulating and attractive, and in many cases more useful. Under cover of a jest he was often able to enforce good instruction more easily and almost without its being noticed. His cheerful way of looking at things often enabled Luther lightheartedly to surmount difficulties from which others would have shrunk.

There is not the slightest doubt that his extraordinary influence over those who came into contact with him was due in no small part to his kindly addiction to pleasantry. It was indeed no usual thing to see such mighty energy as he devoted to the world-struggle, so agreeably combined with a keen gift of observation, with an understanding for the most trivial details of daily life, and, above all, with such refreshing frankness and such a determination to amuse his hearers.

In order to dispel the anxiety felt by Catherine Bora during her husband’s absence, he would send her letters full of affection and of humorous accounts of his doings. He tells her, for instance, how, in consequence of her excessive fears for him “which hindered her from sleeping,” everything about him had conspired to destroy him; how a fire “at our inn just next door to our room” had tried to burn him, how a heavy rock had fallen in order to kill him; “the rock really had a mind to justify your solicitude, but the holy angels prevented it.”[1252] In such cheerful guise does he relate little untoward incidents. “You try to take care of your God,” he writes to her in a letter already quoted, “just as though He were not Almighty and able to create ten Dr. Martins were the old one to be drowned in the Saale, suffocated in the coal-hole, or eaten up by the wolf.”[1253]

He was also joking, when, about the same time, i.e. during his stay with the Counts of Mansfeld, he used the words which recently were taken all too seriously by a Catholic polemist and made to constitute a charge against Luther’s morals: “At present, thank God, I am well, only that I am so beset by pretty women as once more to fear for my chastity.”[1254]

The irony with which he frequently speaks and writes of both himself and his friends is often not free from frivolity; we may recall, for instance, his ill-timed jest concerning his three wives;[1255] or his report to Catherine from Eisleben: “On the whole we have enough to gorge and swill, and should have a jolly time were this tiresome business to let us.”[1256] The last passage reminds us of his words elsewhere: I feed like a Bohemian and swill like a German.[1257] Among other jests at Catherine’s expense we find in the Table-Talk the threat that soon the time will come when “we men shall be allowed several wives,” words which perhaps are a humorous echo of the negotiations concerning the Hessian bigamy.[1258]

Now and again Luther, by means of his witticisms, tried to teach his wife some wholesome lessons. The titles by which he addresses her may have been intended as delicate hints that her management of the household was somewhat lordly and high-handed: My Lord Katey, Lord Moses, my Chain (Kette) (“_catena mea_”). To seek to infer from this that she was a “tyrant,” or to see in it an admission on his part that he was but her slave, would be as mistaken as to be shocked at his manner of addressing her elsewhere in his letters, e.g. “to the holy, careful lady, the most holy lady Doctor; to my beloved lady Doctor Self-martyr; to the deeply-learned Lady Catherine,” etc.

It has already been pointed out that many of the misunderstandings of which Luther’s opponents were guilty are due to their inability to appreciate his humour; they were thereby led to take seriously as indicative of “unbelief,” statements which in reality were never meant in earnest.[1259] On the other hand, however, certain texts and explanations of Luther’s have, on insufficient grounds, been taken as humorous even by Protestant writers, often because they seemed in some way to cast a slur upon his memory. For instance, his interpretation of the Monk-Calf was quite obviously never intended as a joke,[1260] nor can it thus be explained away as some have recently tried to do. Nor, again, to take an example from Luther’s immediate circle, can Amsdorf’s offer of the nuns in marriage to Spalatin[1261] be dismissed as simply a broad piece of pleasantry.

_Humour a Necessity to Luther in his Struggle with Others and with Himself_

There can be no doubt that a remarkable psychological feature is afforded by the combination in Luther of cheerfulness with intense earnestness in work, indeed the persistence of his humour even in later years when gloom had laid a firm hold on his soul constitutes something of a riddle; for even the sufferings of the last period of his life did not avail to stifle his love of a joke, though his jests become perhaps less numerous; they serve, however, to conceal his sadder feelings, a fact which explains why he still so readily has recourse to them.

First of all, a man so oppressed with inner difficulties and mental exertion as Luther was, felt sadly the need of relaxation and amusement. His jests served to counteract the strain, physical and mental, resulting from the rush of literary work, sermons, conferences and correspondence. In this we have but a natural process of the nervous system.

A further explanation of his cheerfulness is, however, to be found in the wish to prove against his own misgivings and his theological opponents how joyous and confident he was at heart concerning his cause.

He hints at this himself. I will answer for the “Word of Christ,” so he assures Alveld in his writing against him, “with a cheerful heart and fresh courage, regardless of anyone; for which purpose God too has given me a cheerful, fearless spirit, which I trust they will be unable to sadden to all eternity.”[1262] He often gives the impression of being anxious to show off his cheerfulness. He is fond of speaking of his “steadfast and undaunted spirit”; let Emser, he says, take note and bite his lips over the “glad courage which inspires him day by day.”

Seeking to display this confidence in face of his opponents he exclaims satirically in a writing of 1518: “Here I am.” If there be an inquisitor in the neighbourhood he had better hurry up.[1263]

His courage and entire confidence he expressed as early as 1522 to the Elector Frederick of Saxony who had urged him to fight shy of Duke George: “Even if things at Leipzig were indeed as bad as at Wittenberg [they think they are], I should nevertheless ride thither even though—I hope your Electoral Highness will excuse my foolish words—for nine days running it were to rain Duke Georges, each one nine times as furious as he. He actually looks upon my Lord Christ as a man of straw!”[1264] In such homely words did he speak, even to his own sovereign whose protection counted for so much, in order to make it yet clearer, that he was quite convinced of having received his Evangel, “not from man, but solely from heaven through our Lord Jesus Christ”; the Prince, his protector, should know, that God, “thanks to the Evangel, has made us happy lords over death and all the devils.” For this reason, according to his famous boast, he would still have ridden to Worms in defiance of the devils, even had they outnumbered the tiles on the roofs.[1265]

From the castle of Coburg, though himself a prey to all sorts of anxiety, he addressed the following ironical, though at the same time encouraging, admonition to faint-hearted Melanchthon: Why don’t you fight against your own self? “What more can the devil do than slay us? What then? You fight in every other field, why not then fight also against your own self, viz. your biggest enemy who puts so many weapons against you in Satan’s hands?”[1266] It was thus that Luther was wont to fight against himself and to rob the devil of his fancied weapons.

Often enough did he find salvation in humour alone, for instance, when he had to overcome serious danger, or to beat down difficulties or the censure of his friends and followers. The plague was threatening Wittenberg; hence he jokes away his own fears and those of others with a jest about his “trusty weathercock,” the governor Metzsch; the latter had a nose which could detect the plague while yet five ells below the ground; as he still remained in Wittenberg they had good reason to know that no danger existed. On the same occasion he laughs and cries in the same breath over the behaviour of the schoolboys, all the schools having been already closed as a measure of precaution; the plague had got into their pens and paper so that it would be impossible to make of them “either preachers, pastors,. or schoolmasters; in the end swine and dogs will be our best cattle, towards which end the Papists are busily working.”[1267]

Further instances of jests of this sort, made under untoward circumstances, are met with in connection with his marriage. His union with Catherine Bora, as the reader already knows, set tongues wagging, both in his own camp and outside. The resentment this aroused in him he attempted to banish by a sort of half-jesting, half-earnest defiance. “Since they are already cracked and crazy, I will drive them still madder and so have done with it!”[1268] He jests incidentally over the suddenness of his marriage, over the proof needed to convince even himself that he was really a married man, over his surprise at finding plaits of hair beside him when he awoke; he also makes merry over his not very seemly play on the words Bore and bier.[1269]

At a later date he found the arrangement of the new ritual very irksome, both on account of the difficulty of introducing any sort of uniformity and also owing to the petty outside interests which intruded themselves. Here again he tries to throw such questions to the winds by the use of humour: “Put on three copes instead of one, if that pleases you,” he wrote to Provost George Buchholzer of Berlin, who had sent him an anxious letter of inquiry; and if Joachim, the Brandenburg Elector, is not content with one procession “go around seven times as Josue did at Jericho, and, if your master the Margrave does not mind, His Electoral Highness is quite at liberty to leap and dance, with harps, kettledrums, cymbals and bells as David did before the ark of the Lord.”[1270]

During the whole of his career he felt the embarrassment of being called upon by the Catholics to produce proof of his higher mission. At times he sought to escape the difficulty, so far as miracles went, by arguing on, and straining for all they were worth, certain natural occurrences; on other occasions, however, he took refuge in jests. On one occasion he even whimsically promised to perform a manifest miracle. This was at a time when he was hard put to provide lodgings for the nuns who had fled to Wittenberg and when it was rumoured that he had undertaken a journey simply to escape the trouble. “‘I shall arm myself with prayer,’ he said, ‘and, if it is needful, I shall assuredly work a miracle.’ And at this he laughed,” so the notes of one present relate.[1271]

Luther frequently lays it down that merry talk and good spirits are a capital remedy against temptations to doubts on the faith and remorse of conscience.

He exhorts Prince Joachim of Anhalt, who had much to suffer from the “Tempter” and from “melancholy,” to be always cheerful, since God has commanded us “to be glad in His presence.” “I, who have passed my life in sorrow and looking at the black side of things, now seek for joy, and find it whenever I can. We now have, praise be to God, so much knowledge [through the Evangel] that we can afford to be cheerful with a good conscience.” It was perfectly true—so he goes on in a strangely shamefaced manner, to tell the pious but faint-hearted Prince—that, at times, he himself still dreaded cheerfulness, as though it were a sin, just as the Prince was inclined to do; “but God-fearing, honourable, modest joy of good and pious people pleases God well, even though occasionally there be a word or merry tale too much.”[1272]

“Nothing does more harm than a sadness,” he declares in 1542. “It drieth up the bones, as we read in Prov. xvii. [22]. Therefore let a young man be cheerful, and for this reason I would inscribe over his table the words ‘Sadness hath killed many, etc.’” (Eccles. xxx. 25).[1273]—“Thoughts of fear,” he insists on another occasion, “are the sure weapons of death”; “Such thoughts have done me more harm than all my enemies and all my labours.” They were at times so insistent that my “efforts against them were in vain.” ... “So depraved is our nature that we are not then open to any consolation; still, they must be fought against by every means.”[1274]

For certain spells, particularly in earlier years, Luther nevertheless succeeded so well in assuming a cheerful air and in keeping it up for a considerable while, in spite of the oppression he felt within, that those who came into contact with him were easily deceived. Of this he once assures us himself; after referring to the great “spiritual temptations” he had undergone with “fear and trembling” he proceeds: “Many think that because I appear outwardly cheerful mine is a bed of roses, but God knows how it stands with me in my life.”[1275]

In a word, we frequently find Luther using jocularity as an antidote against depression. As he had come to look upon it as the best medicine against what he was wont to call his “temptations” and had habituated himself to its use, and as these “temptations” practically never ceased, so, too, he was loath to deprive himself of so welcome a remedy even in the dreariest days of his old age. In 1530, to all intents and purposes, he openly confesses that such was the case. In a letter to Spalatin, written from the Coburg at a time when he was greatly disturbed, he describes for his friend’s amusement the Diet which the birds were holding on the roof of the Castle. His remarks he brings to a conclusion with the words: “Enough of such jests, earnest and needful though they be for driving away the thoughts that worry me—if indeed they can be driven away.”[1276]

Still deeper is the glimpse we get into his inmost thoughts when, in his serious illness of 1527, he voiced his regret for his free and offensive way of talking, remarking that it was often due to his seeking “to drive away the sadness,” to which his “weak flesh” was liable.

One particular instance in which he resorted to jest as a remedy is related in the Table-Talk; “In 1541, on the Sunday after Michaelmas, Dr. Martin was very cheerful and jested with his good friends at table.... He said: Do not take it amiss of me, for I have received many bad tidings to-day and have just read a troublesome letter. Things are ever at their best,” so he concludes defiantly, “when the devil attacks us in this way.”[1277]—It is just the same sort of defiance, that, for all his fear of the devil, leads him to sum up all the worst that the devil can do to him, and then to pour scorn upon it. During the pressing anxieties of the Coburg days at the time of the Diet of Augsburg, it really seemed to him that the devil had “vowed to have his life.” He comforts himself with the words: “Well, if he eats me, he shall, please God, swallow such a purge as shall gripe his belly and make his anus seem all too small.”[1278]

It is a matter of common knowledge that people addicted to melancholy can at certain hours surpass others in cheerfulness and high spirits. When one side of the scale is weighed down with sadness many a man will instinctively mend things by throwing humour into the other; at first, indeed, such humour may be a trifle forced, but later it can become natural and really serve its purpose well. The story often told might quite well be true: an actor consulted a physician for a remedy against melancholy; the latter, not recognising the patient, suggested that he might be cheered by going to see the performance of a famous comedian—who was no other than the patient himself.

_More on the Nature of Luther’s Jests_

The character of Luther’s peculiar and often very broad and homely humour is well seen in his letter-preface to a story on the devil which he had printed in 1535 and which made the round of Germany.[1279]

The devil, according to this “historia ... which happened on Christmas Eve, 1534,” had appeared to a Lutheran pastor in the confessional, had blasphemed Christ and departed leaving behind a horrible stench. In the Preface Luther pretends to be making enquiries of Amsdorf, “the chief and true Bishop of Magdeburg,” as he calls him, as to the truth and the meaning of the apparition. He begs him “to paint and depict the pious penitent as he deserves,” though quite aware that Amsdorf, the Bishop, would refer back the matter to him as the Pope (“which indeed I am”). He had ready the proper absolution which Amsdorf was to give the devil: “I, by the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the most holy Father Pope Luther the First, deny you the grace of God and life everlasting and herewith consign you to hell,” etc. Meanwhile he himself gives his view of the tale, which he assumes to be true, and, as so often elsewhere when he has to do with the devil, proceeds to mingle mockery of the coarsest sort with bitter earnest. When the Evil One ventures to approach so close to the Evangel, every nerve of Luther is strung to hatred against the devil and his Roman Pope, both of whom he overwhelms with a shower of the foulest abuse.

“The devil’s jests are for us Christians a very serious matter”; having a great multitude of kings, princes, bishops and clergy on his side he makes bold to mock at Christ; but let us pray that he may soil himself even as he soiled himself in Paradise; our joy, our consolation and our hope is, that the seed of the woman shall crush his head. Hence, so he exclaims, the above absolution sent to Amsdorf is amply justified. Like confession, like absolution; “as the prayer, so the incense,” with which words he turns to another diabolical apparition, which a drunken parson had in bed; he had meant to conclude the canonical hours by reciting Compline in bed, and, while doing so, “_se concacavit_,”[1280] whereupon the devil appeared to him and said: “As the prayer, so also is the incense.”[1281]

He applies the same “humorous” story to the Pope and his praying monks in his “An den Kurfursten zu Sachsen und Landgraven zu Hesse von dem gefangenen H. von Brunswig” (1545).[1282] “They neither can pray nor want to pray, nor do they know what it is to pray nor how one ought to pray, because they have not the Word and the faith”; moreover, their only aim is to make the “kings and lords” believe they are devout and holy.[1283] “On one occasion when a tipsy priest was saying Compline in bed, he heaved during the recital and gave vent to a big ‘bombart’; Ah, said the devil, that’s just right, as the prayer so also is the incense!” All the prayers of the Pope and “his colleges and convents” are not one whit better “than that drunken priest’s Compline and incense. Nay, if only they were as good there might still be some hope of the Pope growing sober, and of his saying Matins better than he did his stinking Compline. But enough of this.”[1284]

Of this form of humour we have many specimens in Luther’s books, letters and Table-Talk, which abound in unsavoury anecdotes, particularly about the clergy and the monks. He and his friends, many of whom had at one time themselves been religious, seem to have had ready an inexhaustible fund of such stories. Some Protestants have even argued that it was in the convent that Luther and his followers acquired this taste, and that such was the usual style of conversation among “monks and celibates.” It is indeed possible that the sweepings of the monasteries and presbyteries may have furnished some contributions to this store, but the truth is that in many cases the tales tell directly against the monks and clergy, and are really inventions made at their expense, some of them in pre-Reformation times. Frequently they can be traced back to those lay circles in which it was the fashion to scoff at the clergy. In any case it would be unjust, in order to excuse Luther’s manner of speech, to ascribe it simply to “cloistral humour” and the “jokes of the sacristy.” The evil had its root far more in the coarseness on which Luther prided himself and in the mode of thought of his friends and table companions, than in the monastery or among the clergy. Nearly everywhere there were regulations against foul speaking among the monks, and against frivolous conversation on the part of the clergy, though, of course, the existence of such laws does not show that they were always complied with. That Luther’s manner of speech was at all general has still to be proved. Moreover, the reference to Luther’s “monkish” habits is all the less founded, seeing that the older he gets and the dimmer his recollections become, the stronger are the proofs he gives of his love for such seasoning; nor must we forget that, even in the monastery, he did not long preserve the true monastic spirit, but soon struck out a way of his own and followed his own tastes.

Luther was in high spirits when he related in his Table-Talk the following tales from the Court of Brandenburg and the city of Florence. At the Offertory of the Mass the grandfather of Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg, attended by a trusty chamberlain, watching the women as they passed up to make their offering at the altar, amused themselves by counting up the adulteresses, supposed or real; as each passed the Margrave told the chamberlain to “draw” a bead of his rosary. The chamberlain’s wife happening to pass, the Margrave, to his courtier’s mortification, told him to draw a bead also for her. When, however, the Margrave’s mother came forward the chamberlain had his revenge and said: Now it’s your turn to draw. Upon which the Margrave gathered up his rosary indignantly with the words: “Let us lump all the whores together!”[1285]—The Florentine storiette he took from a book entitled “The Women of Florence.” An adulteress was desirous of entering into relations with a young man. She accordingly complained quite untruthfully to his confessor, that he had been molesting her against her will; she also brought the priest the presents she alleged he had brought her, and described how by night he climbed up to her window by means of a tree that stood beneath it. The zealous confessor thereupon, no less than three times, takes the supposed peccant lover to task; finally he speaks of the tree. Ah, thinks the young man, that’s rather a good idea, I might well try that tree. Having learned of this mode of entry he accordingly complies with the lady’s wishes. “And so,” concludes Luther, “the confessor, seeking to separate them, actually brought them together. Boundless indeed is the poetic ingenuity and cunning of woman.”[1286]

* * * * *

Strong as was Luther’s whimsical bent, yet we are justified in asking whether the delightful and morally so valuable gift of humour in its truest sense was really his.

“Genuine humour is ever kindly,” rightly says Alb. Roderich, “and only savages shoot with poisoned darts.” Humour as an ethical quality is the aptitude so to rise above this petty world as to see and smile at the follies and light sides of human life; it has been defined as an optimistic kind of comedy which laughs at what is funny without, however, hating it, and which lays stress on the kindlier side of what it ridicules.

Of this happy, innocent faculty gently to smooth the asperities of life Luther was certainly not altogether devoid, particularly in private life. But if we take him as a whole, we find that his humour is as a rule disfigured by a bitter spirit of controversy, by passion and by hate. His wit tends to pass into satire and derision. Here we have anything but the overflowing of a contented heart which seeks to look at everything from the best side and to gratify all. He may have delighted his own followers by his unmatched art of depreciating others in the most grotesque of fashions, of exaggerating their foibles, and, with his keen powers of imagination, of giving the most amusingly ignominious account of their undoing, but, when judged impartially from a literary and moral standpoint, his output appears more as irritating satire, as clever, bitter word-play and sarcasm, rather than as real humour.