Peter F. Wiener
One of the most fundamental, if not the most fundamental, principle of Christian ethics is to speak the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Absolute and complete truthfulness is demanded. Without it there can be no Christianity.
The familiar picture which we have of Luther shows us the Reformer as the upholder of truth and truthfulness. “Luther the truthful”, he has been called more than once. And many of his sayings on the subject are indeed lovely and beautiful. “To my mind,” he said once, “there is no more shameful vice on earth than lying.”
But once more a close study of his teaching and behaviour will show us that he contradicts himself, to what an extent the very opposite is true. And to my mind, this opposite attitude of Luther’s towards truth was not merely the usual one, but one which appealed most to the Germans.
Already in his early years when he was at war with the Catholic Church he frankly admitted that it was not necessary to stick to the truth. “I consider everything allowable against the deception and the depravity of the Papal antichrist,” was his excuse. “Vows have only to be kept as long as it is psychologically possible. If it is no longer possible, one is allowed to break them.”” Moreover, in order to prove his interpretation of the Scripture, he is quite prepared to falsify it. “His worst offence is that he does not resist the temptation arbitrarily and intentionally to falsify a large number of passages in support of his new doctrine,” says the historian Janssen. And he continues to speak of Luther’s “intentional perversion of the apostolic language.” It would take us too far to prove in detail that in many Bible passages he purposely inserted or omitted words, in order to suit his purpose. Besides, it has already been done in great detail by famous scholars, whose research seems to me beyond doubt, so that it would merely be the repetition of other people’s work (see, e.g., Janssen, op. Cit. Vol. 14, pages 418ff).
It may be said that one cannot expect Luther to act correctly and truthfully in such a deadly fight as that in which he was involved with the Catholic Church. Very well then, let us look in detail merely at one example of his teaching and his acting which has nothing whatever to do with his quarrel with Rome. I am referring to the marriage of the Landgrave Philip of Hesse, surnamed the Magnanimous. He was a great supporter and important patron of Luther.
Philip was married and had a number of sons and daughters. He was anything but faithful to his wife, and in the year 1539—when he was 35 years of age—he wanted to marry a lady called Margaret von der Saal. He asked Luther’s advice, and tried to obtain his permit for a bigamous marriage. He wrote to the Reformer, telling him that he (Philip) was “unable to refrain from fornication unchastity and adultery”; his own wife, he said, “he had never loved, she was rude to him, ugly, and stank.” “I am forced to commit fornication or worse with women,” he complained; and his own sister Elisabeth had “already advised him to take a concubine in place of so many prostitutes. However, he did not want yet another concubine, but desired Luther’s authorisation to take a second wife.
The Reformer was in a dilemma, for Philip wanted his permission in writing. But Dr. Martin easily found a way out. He said that there was nothing whatever against a bigamous marriage, since in this case it would help the Landgrave to get over his physical and psychological troubles. The only condition Luther imposed in his written document w s that the marriage ought to remain an absolute secret, for otherwise he himself and the Landgrave might get into trouble. This famous document was signed by Luther in December, 1539, and armed with the Reformer’s written authority, the Landgrave married bigamously and officially in March of the following year. In gratitude for the helpful testimonial, Philip sent Luther a large barrel of wine.
But too many people were in the secret, and all the parties to it got scared. According to the “Carolina”—which was a code of law—capital punishment was still prescribed for bigamists, and neither Philip nor his adviser knew at first what to do.
A contemporary chronicler reported “that Philip is much upset, and Dr. Martin full of thought.” At first it seemed that Brother Martin did not know how to extricate himself. But then he had an idea. He would point out that the advice he gave was given under confession (here he most conveniently returned to Catholic doctrine), and therefore ought to remain absolutely secret. Moreover, he argued in truly German fashion that this secret permission never implied a public permission. “A secret affirmative cannot become a public affirmative—a secret `yes’ remains a public `no’, and vice versa” (de Wette, 6, 263), is his very odd argument. “All that had passed between him and Philip on the subject of the bigamy was sacred under the rule of the confessional. He became for the occasion a Roman Catholic monk again,” remarks the Lutheran scholar Lipsky.
So far for his position. His advice to the Landgrave was something quite different. “If hard-pressed the Landgrave should deny the whole affair and declare to the Emperor that he had merely taken a concubine.” “Keep the prostitute but deny it, counselled the reformer of morals.
And here we come to Luther’s typical attitude. I am quoting the relative passages literally, as is my usual method:
“What harm could it do if aman told a good lusty lie in a worthy cause and for the sake of the Christian Churches?” (Lenz: Briefwechsel, vol. 1, page 373).
“To lie in a case of necessity or for convenience or in excuse—such lying would not be against God; He was ready to take such lies on Himself” (ibid, page 375).
This was too much even for the not too moral Philip. “I will not lie,” he wrote back to Luther, “for lying has an evil sound and no apostle or Christian has ever taught it, nay, Christ has forbidden it and said we should keep to yea and nay. I refuse to declare that the lady is a whore. I should surely have had no need of your advice to take a whore, neither does it do you credit.” Luther replied with his typical dignity: “When it comes to writing, I shall be quite competent to wriggle out of it and to leave your Grace in the lurch.”
This is all in the case which concerns us. It is dreadful. “By degrees Luther reduces the lie of convenience or necessity to a virtue,” writs Professor Grisar.
Luther’s attitude in Philip’s case is by no means unique. There are many, too many cases in his own life and his own writings where he advises a lie. “Lying is a virtue if it is indulged in for the purpose of preventing the fury of the Devil, or made to serve the honour, the life, and the welfare of one’s fellow-men.” “The lie of service is wrongly termed a lie . . . it may be called Christian and brotherly charity,” is one of many similar sayings by the Reformer. “The world will be deceived,” he used to exclaim, and he acted accordingly. I have, reluctantly, come to the conclusion that Luther’s biographer was utterly right when he said: “The general conclusion must be that Luther was a man to whom the idea of truth for truth’s sake meant nothing at all.” Luther’s theory of truth always reminds one of what Cicero said about Homer, Humana ad deos transtulit; divina mallem ad nos. (He gave human shortcomings to the gods; why did he not rather give divine qualities to human beings?)
Those who do not fully understand the history of German thought have often wondered what a strange coincidence it is that in Frederick, miscalled the Great, Bismarck (the Ems Dispatch!), William II, Hitler, and many others there has always been that love of lying, that double-dealing, that lack of truth and honesty. They have rarely thought that it might be part of a German religion, preached by the lying monk of Wittenberg for the first time over four centuries ago, supplanting Christian ethics, and putting German religious ideas in its place. “We consider everything allowable against the deception and depravity of the Papal antichrist.” I have quoted earlier. Replace the phrase “Papal antichrist” with whomever Germany happens to consider at a given moment her mortal enemy—and there is left nothing mysterious about German ethics. It all becomes clear, clear if we do not look at the isolated facts but at the underlying spiritual forces which are found first of all in Martin Luther.
I may have shocked people’s feelings a little in the picture I have given so far about the Reformer. It is a picture which in no way coincides with the one painted in legends and by wishful thinking.
The strange thing is that if one looks at actually painted pictures and reproductions of his face, one will find a still greater surprise.
Neither Holbein nor Durer ever painted Luther—which is odd since they were his contemporaries. On the other hand, we have many pictures of Luther by Lucas Cranach, who was an ardent admirer of Dr. Martin. These pictures, showing a gentle, smiling, benevolent, slender, and scholarly saint are familiar to most of us. Hundreds of thousands of reproductions exist all over the world. On German stamps and buildings we see the portrait. But the drawback is that “Cranach suppressed what he considered to be defects in his sitter.”
Let us take a glance at Luther’s death-mask, a representation that cannot be faked, obtained by a method of portraiture which has left us many a lovely picture of great men. In Luther’s case we get a shock. Funck-Brentano speaks with much restraint of Luther’s “aggressive vulgarity”. And Maritain, who certainly is not given to polemical language, says he looks “surprisingly bestial. Anger, calumny, hatred and lying, love of beer and wine, obsession with filth and obscenity—it all pours out in a flood.”
If we can judge people by their appearance—a dangerous process—Luther was anything but a saint. I would not draw attention to this fact, if his physical as well as his moral portrait had not been so greatly falsified for four centuries.
From Martin Luther: Hitler’s Spiritual Ancestor, (1945), pp. 44-48.