Life of Luther by Julius Koestlin

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[Illustration: Leo X. (From his Portrait by Raphael.)]

Forgiveness of sins, it was maintained, must be gained by penance, namely,
by the so-called sacrament of penance, including the acts of private
confession and priestly absolution. In this the father-confessor promised
to him who had confessed his sins, absolution for them, whereby his guilt
was forgiven and he was freed from eternal punishment. A certain
contrition of the heart was required from him, even if only imperfect,
and proceeding perhaps solely from the fear of punishment, but which
nevertheless was deemed sufficient, its imperfection being supplied by
the sacrament. But though absolved, he had still to discharge heavy
burdens of temporal punishment, penances imposed by the Church, and
chastisements which, in the remission of eternal punishment, God in His
righteousness still laid upon him. If he failed to satisfy these penances
in this life, he must, even if no longer in danger of hell, atone for the
rest in the torments of the fire of purgatory. The indulgence now came in
to relieve him. The Church was content with easier tasks, as, at that
time, with a donation to the sacred edifice at Rome. And even this
was made to rest on a certain basis of right. The Church, it was
said, had to dispose of a treasure of merits which Christ and the
saints, by their good works, had accumulated before the righteous
God, and those riches were now to be so disposed of by Christ's
representatives, that they should benefit the buyer of indulgences.
In this manner penances which otherwise would have to be endured for
years were commuted into small donations of money, quickly paid off.
The contrition required for the forgiveness of sins was not
altogether ignored; as, for instance, in the official announcements
of indulgences, and in the letters or certificates granting
indulgences to individuals in return for payment. But in those
documents, as also in the sermons exhorting the multitude to
purchase, the chief stress, so far as possible, was laid upon the
payment. The confession, and with it the contrition, was also
mentioned, but nothing was said about the personal remission of sins
depending on this rather than on the money. Perfect forgiveness of
sins was announced to him who, after having confessed and felt
contrition, had thrown his contribution into the box. For the souls
in purgatory nothing was required but money offered for them by the
living. 'The moment the money tinkles in the box, the soul springs
up out of purgatory.' A special tariff was arranged for the
commission of particular sins, as, for example, six ducats for
adultery.

The traffic in indulgences for the building of St. Peter's was
delegated by commission from the Pope, over a large part of Germany, to
Albert, Archbishop of Mayence and Magdeburg. We shall meet with this
great prince of the Church, as now in connection with the origin of
the Reformation, so during its subsequent course. Albert, the brother
of the Elector of Brandenburg, and cousin of the Grand-Master of the
Teutonic Order in Prussia, stood in 1517, though only twenty-seven
years old, already at the head of those two great ecclesiastical
provinces of Germany; Wittenberg also belonged to his Magdeburg
diocese. Raised to such an eminence and so rapidly by good fortune,
he was filled with ambitious thoughts. He troubled himself little
about theology. He loved to shine as the friend of the new Humanistic
learning, especially of an Erasmus, and as patron of the fine arts,
particularly of architecture, and to keep a court the splendour of
which might correspond with his own dignity and love of art. For this
his means were inadequate, especially as, on entering upon his
Archbishopric of Mayence, he had had to pay, as was customary, a heavy
sum to the Pope for the _pallium_ given for the occasion. For
this he had been forced to borrow thirty thousand gulden from the
house of Fugger at Augsburg, and he found his aspirations incessantly
crippled by want of money and by debts. He succeeded at last in
striking a bargain with the Pope, by which he was allowed to keep half
of the profits arising from the sale of indulgences, in order to repay
the Fuggers their loan. Behind the preacher of indulgences, who announced
God's mercy to the paying believers, stood the agents of that commercial
house, who collected their share for their principals. The Dominican monk,
John Tetzel, a profligate man, whom the Archbishop had appointed his
sub-commissioner, drove the largest trade in this business with an
audacity and a power of popular declamation well suited to his work.

[Illustration: Fig. 10.--The Archbishop Albert. (From Durer's
engraving.)]

Contemporaries have described the lofty and well-ordered pomp with
which such a commissioner entered on the performance of his exalted
duties. Priests, monks, and magistrates, schoolmasters and scholars,
men, women, and children, went forth in procession to meet him, with
songs and ringing of bells, with flags and torches. They entered the
church together amidst the pealing of the organ. In the middle of
the church, before the altar, was erected a large red cross, hung
with a silken banner which bore the Papal arms. Before the cross was
placed a large iron chest to receive the money; specimens of these
chests are still shown in many places. Daily, by sermons, hymns,
processions round the cross, and other means of attraction, the
people were invited and urged to embrace this incomparable offer of
salvation. It was arranged that auricular confession should be taken
wholesale. The main object was the payment, in return for which the
'contrite' sinners received a letter of indulgence from the
commissioner, who, with a significant reference to the absolute
power granted to himself, promised them complete absolution and the
good opinion of their fellow-men.

[Illustration: Fig. 11--Title-page of a Pamphlet Written at the
Beginning of the Reformation, with an Illustration showing the Sale
of Indulgences.]

We have evidence to show how Tetzel preached himself, and what he
wished these sermons on indulgences to be like. Calling upon the
people, he summoned all, and especially the great sinners, such as
murderers and robbers, to turn to their God and receive the medicine
which God, in his mercy and wisdom, had provided for their benefit.
St. Stephen once had given up his body to be stoned, St. Lawrence
his to be roasted, St. Bartholomew his to a fearful death. Would
they not willingly sacrifice a little gift in order to obtain
everlasting life? Of the souls in purgatory it was said, 'They, your
parents and relatives, are crying out to you, "We are in the
bitterest torments, you could deliver us by giving a small alms, and
yet you will not. We have given you birth, nourished you, and left
to you our temporal goods; and such is your cruelty that you, who
might so easily make us free, leave us here to lie in the flames."'

To all who directly or indirectly, in public or in private, should
in any way depreciate, or murmur against, or obstruct these
indulgences, it was announced that, by Papal edict, they lay already
by so doing under the ban of excommunication, and could only be
absolved by the Pope or by one of his commissioners.

After Luther had once ventured to attack openly this sale of
indulgences, it was admitted even by their defenders and the violent
enemies of the Reformer, that in those days 'greedy commissioners,
monks and priests, had preached unblushingly about indulgences, and
had laid more stress upon the money than upon confession,
repentance, and sorrow.' Christian people were shocked and
scandalised at the abuse. It was asked whether indeed God so loved
the money, that for the sake of a few pence He would leave a soul in
everlasting torments, or why the Pope did not out of love empty the
whole of purgatory, since he was willing to free innumerable souls
in return for such a trifle as a contribution to the building of a
church. But not one of them found it then expedient to incur the
abuse and slander of a Tetzel by a word spoken openly against the
gross misconduct the fruits of which were so important to the Pope
and the Archbishop.

Tetzel now came to the borders of the Elector of Saxony's dominion,
and to the neighbourhood of Wittenberg. The Elector would not allow
him to enter his territory, on account of so much money being taken
away, and accordingly he opened his trade at Juterbok. Among those
who confessed to Luther, there were some who appealed to letters of
indulgence which they had purchased from him there.

In a sermon preached as early as the summer of 1516, Luther had
warned his congregation against trusting to indulgences, and he did
not conceal his aversion to the system, whilst admitting his doubts
and ignorance as to some important questions on the subject. He knew
that these opinions and objections would grieve the heart of his
sovereign; for Frederick, who with all his sincere piety, still
shared the exaggerated veneration of the middle ages for relics, and
had formed a rich collection of them in the Church of the Castle and
Convent at Wittenberg, which he was always endeavouring to enrich,
rejoiced at the Pope's lavish offer of indulgences to all who at an
annual exhibition of these sacred treasures should pay their
devotions at the nineteen altars of this church. A few years before
he had caused a 'Book of Relics' to be printed, which enumerated
upwards of five thousand different specimens, and showed how they
represented half a million days of indulgence. Luther relates how he
had incurred the Elector's displeasure by a sermon preached in his
Castle Church against indulgences: he preached, however, again
before the exhibition held in February 1517. The honour and
interest, moreover, of his university had to be considered, for that
church was attached to it, the professors were also dignitaries of
the convent, and the university benefited by the revenues of the
foundation.

[Illustration: FIG. l2.--THE CASTLE CHURCH. (From the Wittenberg
Book of Relics, 1509: the hill in the background is an addition by
the artist.)]

Luther was then, as he afterwards described himself, a young doctor
of divinity, ardent, and fresh from the forge. He was burning to
protest against the scandal. But as yet he restrained himself and
kept quiet. He wrote, indeed, on the subject to some of the bishops.
Some listened to him graciously; others laughed at him; none wished
to take any steps in the matter.

He longed now to make known to theologians and ecclesiastics
generally his thoughts about indulgences, his own principles, his
own opinions and doubts, to excite public discussion on the subject,
and to awake and maintain the fray. This he did by the ninety-five
Latin theses or propositions which he posted on the doors of the
Castle Church at Wittenberg, on October 31, 1517, the eve of All
Saints' Day and of the anniversary of the consecration of the
Church.

These theses were intended as a challenge for disputation. Such
public disputations were then very common at the universities and
among theologians, and they were meant to serve as means not only of
exercising learned thought, but of elucidating the truth. Luther
headed his theses as follows:--

_'Disputation to explain the virtue of indulgences._-In charity
and in the endeavour to bring the truth to light, a disputation on
the following propositions will be held at Wittenberg, presided over
by the Reverend Father Martin Luther.... Those who are unable to
attend personally may discuss the question with us by letter. In the
name of our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.'

It was in accordance with the general custom of that time that, on
the occasion of a high festival, particular acts and announcements,
and likewise disputations at a university, were arranged, and the
doors of a collegiate church were used for posting such notices.

The contents of these theses show that their author really had such
a disputation in view. He was resolved to defend with all his might
certain fundamental truths to which he firmly adhered. Some points
he considered still within the region of dispute; it was his wish
and object to make these clear to himself by arguing about them with
others.

Recognising the connection between the system of indulgences and the
view of penance entertained by the Church, he starts with
considering the nature of true Christian repentance; but he would
have this understood in the sense and spirit taught by Christ and
the Scriptures, as, indeed, Staupitz had first taught it to him. He
begins with the thesis 'Our Lord and Master Jesus Christ, when He
says Repent, desires that the whole life of the believer should be
one of repentance.' He means, as the subsequent theses express it,
that true inward repentance, that sorrow for sin and hatred of one's
own sinful self, from which must proceed good works and
mortification of the sinful flesh. The Pope could only remit his sin
to the penitent so far as to declare that God had forgiven it.

Thus then the theses expressly declare that God forgives no man his
sin without making him submit himself in humility to the priest who
represents Him, and that He recognises the punishments enjoined by
the Church in her outward sacrament of penance. But Luther's leading
principles are consistently opposed to the customary announcements
of indulgences by the Church. The Pope, he holds, can only grant
indulgences for what the Pope and the law of the Church have
imposed; nay, the Pope himself means absolution from these
obligations only, when he promises absolution from all punishment.
And it is only the living against whom those punishments are
directed which the Church's discipline of penance enjoins: nothing,
according to her own laws, can be imposed upon those in another
world.

Further on, Luther declares, 'When true repentance is awakened in a
man, full absolution from punishment and sin comes to him without
any letters of indulgence.' At the same time he says that such a man
would willingly undergo self-imposed chastisement, nay, he would
even seek and love it.

Still, it is not the indulgences themselves, if understood in the
right sense, that he wishes to be attacked, but the loose babble of
those who sold them. Blessed, he says, be he who protests against
this, but cursed be he who speaks against the truth of apostolic
indulgences. He finds it difficult, however, to praise these to the
people, and at the same time to teach them the true repentance of
the heart. He would have them even taught that a Christian would do
better by giving money to the poor than by spending it in buying
indulgences, and that he who allows a poor man near him to starve
draws down on himself, not indulgences, but the wrath of God. In
sharp and scornful language he denounces the iniquitous trader in
indulgences, and gives the Pope credit for the same abhorrence for
the traffic that he felt himself. Christians must be told, he says,
that if the Pope only knew of it, he would rather see St. Peter's
Church in ashes, than have it built with the flesh and bones of his
sheep.

Agreeably with what the preceding theses had said about the true
penitent's earnestness and willingness to suffer, and the temptation
offered to a mere carnal sense of security, Luther concludes as
follows: 'Away therefore with all those prophets who say to Christ's
people "Peace, peace!" when there is no peace, but welcome to all
those who bid them seek the Cross of Christ, not the Cross which
bears the Papal arms. Christians must be admonished to follow Christ
their Master through torture, death, and hell, and thus through much
tribulation, rather than by a carnal feeling of false security, hope
to enter the kingdom of heaven.

The Catholics objected to this doctrine of salvation advanced by
Luther, that by trusting to God's free mercy and by undervaluing
good works, it led to moral indolence. But on the contrary, it was
to the very unbending moral earnestness of a Christian conscience,
which, indignant at the temptations offered to moral frivolity, to a
deceitful feeling of ease in respect to sin and guilt, and to a
contempt of the fruits of true morality, rebelled against the false
value attached to this indulgence money, that these Theses, the
germ, so to speak, of the Reformation, owed their origin and
prosecution. With the same earnestness he now for the first time
publicly attacked the ecclesiastical power of the Papacy, in so far
namely as, in his conviction, it invaded the territory reserved to
Himself by the Heavenly Lord and Judge. This was what the Pope and
his theologians and ecclesiastics could least of all endure.

On the same day that these theses were published, Luther sent a copy
of them with a letter to the Archbishop Albert, his 'revered and
gracious Lord and Shepherd in Christ.' After a humble introduction,
he begged him most earnestly to prevent the scandalising and
iniquitous harangues with which his agents hawked about their
indulgences, and reminded him that he would have to give an account
of the souls entrusted to his episcopal care.

The next day he addressed himself to the people from the pulpit, in
a sermon he had to preach on the festival of All Saints. After
exhorting them to seek their salvation in God and Christ alone, and
to let the consecration by the Church become a real consecration of
the heart, he went on to tell them plainly, with regard to
indulgences, that he could only absolve from duties imposed by the
Church, and that they dare not rely on him for more, nor delay on
his account the duties of true repentance.

CHAPTER II.

THE CONTROVERSY CONCERNING INDULGENCES.

Anyone who has heard that the great movement of the Reformation in
Germany, and with it the founding of the Evangelical Church,
originated in the ninety-five theses of Luther, and who then reads
these theses through, might perhaps be surprised at the importance
of their results. They referred, in the first place, to only one
particular point of Christian doctrine, not at all to the general
fundamental question as to how sinners could obtain forgiveness and
be saved, but merely to the remission of punishments connected with
penance. They contained no positive declaration against the most
essential elements of the Catholic theory of penance, or against the
necessity of oral confession, or of priestly absolution, and such
subjects; they presupposed, in fact, the existence of a purgatory.
Much of what they attacked, not one of the learned theologians of
the middle ages or of those times had ever ventured to assert; as,
for instance, the notion that indulgences made the remission of sins
to the individual complete on the part of God. Moreover, the ruling
principles of the theology of the day, which defended the system of
indulgences, though resting mainly on the authority of the great
Scholastic teacher Thomas Aquinas, were not adopted by other
Scholastics, and had never been erected into a dogma by any decree
of the Church. Theologians before Luther, and with far more
acuteness and penetration than he showed in his theses, had already
assailed the whole system of indulgences. And, in regard to any idea
on Luther's part of the effects of his theses extending widely in
Germany, it may be noticed that not only were they composed in
Latin, but that they dealt largely with Scholastic expressions and
ideas, which a layman would find it difficult to understand.

Nevertheless the theses created a sensation which far surpassed
Luther's expectations. In fourteen days, as he tells us, they ran
through the whole of Germany, and were immediately translated and
circulated in German. They found, indeed, the soil already prepared
for them, through the indignation long since and generally aroused
by the shameless doings they attacked; though till then nobody, as
Luther expresses it, had liked to bell the cat, nobody had dared to
expose himself to the blasphemous clamour of the indulgence-mongers
and the monks who were in league with them, still less to the
threatened charge of heresy.

On the other hand, the very impunity with which this traffic in
indulgences had been maintained throughout German Christendom, had
served to increase from day to day the audacity of its promoters.
Ranged on the side of these doctrines of Thomas Aquinas, the chief
mainstay of this trade, stood the whole powerful order of the
Dominicans. And to this order Tetzel himself, the sub-commissioner of
indulgences, belonged. Already other doctrines of the Pope's authority,
of his power over the salvation of the human soul, and the infallibility
of his decisions, had been asserted with ever-increasing boldness. The
mediaeval writings of Thomas Aquinas had conspicuously tended to this
result. And a climax had just been reached at a so-called General
Council, which met at Rome shortly after Luther's visit there, and
continued its sittings for several years.

Tetzel, who hitherto had only made himself notorious as a preacher, or
rather as a bawling mountebank, now answered Luther with two series of
theses of his own, drawn up in learned scholastic form. One Conrad
Wimpina, a theologian of the university of Frankfort-on-the-Oder, whom
the Archbishop Albert had recommended, assisted Tetzel in this work.
The university of Frankfort immediately made Tetzel doctor of theology,
and thus espoused his theses. Three hundred Dominican monks assembled
round him while he conducted an academical disputation upon them. The
doctrines he now advanced were the doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. But at
the same time he took care to make the question of the Pope's position
and power the cardinal point at issue; he and his patrons knew well
enough, that for Luther, who in his theses had touched upon this
question so significantly though so briefly, this was the most fatal
blow that he could deal. 'Christians must be taught,' he declared,
'that in all that relates to faith and salvation, the judgment of the
Pope is absolutely infallible, and that all observances connected with
matters of faith on which the Papal see has expressed itself, are
equivalent to Christian truths, even if they are not to be found in
scripture.' With distinct reference to his opponent, but without
actually mentioning him by name, he insists that whoever defends
heretical error must be held to be excommunicated, and if he fails
within a given time to make satisfaction, incurs by right and law
the most frightful penalties. Furthermore, he argued--and this has
always been held up against Luther and Protestantism--that if the
authority of the Church and Pope should not be recognised, every man
would believe only what was pleasing to himself and what he found in
the Bible, and thus the souls of all Christendom would be
imperilled.

Luther's theses now found another assailant, and one stronger even
than Tetzel, in the person of a Dominican and Thomist, one Sylvester
Mazolini of Prierio (Prierias), master of the sacred palace at Rome,
and a confidant of the Pope. He too, like Tetzel, based his chief
contention on the question of Papal authority, and was the first to
carry that contention to an extreme. The Pope, he said, is the
Church of Rome; the Romish Church is the Universal Christian Church;
whoever disputes the right of the Romish Church to act entirely as
she may, is a heretic. In this way he treated as contemptuously as
he could the obscure German, whose theses, that 'bite like a cur,'
as he expressed it, he only wished to dismiss with all despatch.

Another Dominican, James van Hoogstraten, prior at Cologne, who had
already figured as the prime zealot in the affair about Reuchlin,
which he was still prosecuting, now demanded, in his preface to a
pamphlet on that subject, that Luther should be sent to the stake as
a dangerous heretic.

But a far more important, and to Luther an utterly unexpected
opponent, appeared in the person of John Eck, professor at the
university of Ingolstadt, and canon at Eichstadt. He was a man of
very extensive learning in the earlier and later Scholastic theology
of the Church; he was a sharp-witted and ready controversialist, and
he knew how to use his weapons in disputations. He was fully
conscious of these gifts, and made a bold push to advance himself by
their means, whilst troubling himself very little in reality about
the high and sacred issues involved in the dispute. He sought to
keep on friendly and useful relations with other circles than those
of Scholastic theology, such as with learned Humanists, and a short
time before, with Luther himself and his colleague Carlstadt, to
whom he had been introduced through a jurist of Nuremberg named
Scheuerl. Luther, after the publication of his theses, had written a
friendly letter to Eck. What then was his surprise to find himself
attacked by Eck in a critical reply entitled 'Obelisks.' The tone of
his remarks was as wounding, coarse, and vindictive as their
substance was superficial. They aimed a well-meditated blow, by
stigmatising Luther's propositions as Bohemian poison, mere Hussite
heresy. Eck, when reproached for such a breach of friendship,
declared that he had written the book for his bishop of Eichstadt,
and not with any view of publication.