However, if the hearts of betty and spirited are as black as our suffering 'victim' believes then we would have massaged his ego by endorsing his belief system rather than disclosing its' fallacies and trying to point him in the direction of eternal salvation. In other words, like the malignant tailors in the Kings New Clothes, we would have received pleasure in persuading him of the "truths" of a system that will end badly.
People who are slaves of libido are emotional tyrants, totalitarians in other words.
Early Conservative intellectuals tried to warn a mostly indifferent, morally-befogged America that tyranny would overtake our society unless we turned back to the Revealed Word.
Precipitated by the nightmare of destruction and genocide in which America and scores of other nations had just participated, America's intellectual conservative movement began to take form toward the end of WW II. It was from looking upon the face of evil that these thoughtful, deeply concerned intellectuals began the arduous work of research and analysis of ideas (i.e., positivism, rationalism, atheism) responsible for unleashing evil of a magnitude unknown to man. Among its many luminaries were Richard Weaver, Eric Voegelin, John Hallowell, C.E.M. Joad, Eliseo Vivas, and Douglas Hyde.
Many early conservatives had come from backgrounds of scientistic ideologies---i.e., socialism (Communism), atheism, positivism, and liberalism. All of them ultimately rejected these thought-forms, even going so far as to label them as evil.
Evil led many of them to convert to Christianity, not liberalized Christianity and the social gospel, but the purest, most essential forms. Ex-Communist Douglas Hyde converted to Catholic Christianity, which he described as one of the strongest forces confronting the evil that is Communism:
"The sanest things on earth are those for which the allegedly reactionary, unscientific, obscurantist Church stands and for which she is doing battle."
To Richard Weaver, no concept gave "deeper insight into the enigma that is man" than original sin. Evil is not just a bad dream, an "accident of history," or the "creation of a few antisocial men." It is a "subtle, pervasive, protean force," and original sin is a "parabolical expression" of man's immemorial tendency "to do the wrong thing when he knows the right thing." Eliseo Vivas concurred. Inside every man lay "brutality" and a "natural tendency" to "define value in terms of his own interest."
In 1950, John Hallowell boldly affirmed 'unscientific' Christian theism:
"...the basic insights of the Christian faith provide the best insights we have into the nature of man and of the crisis in which we find ourselves. That crisis is the culmination of modern man's progressive attempt to deny the existence of a transcendent/spiritual reality and of his progressive failure to find meaning and salvation in some wholly immanent (i.e., monist, Buddhist, pagan)conception of reality...Only through a return to faith in God, as God revealed Himself to man in Jesus Christ, can modern man and his society find redemption from the tyranny of evil." (The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America, George H. Nash, p. 52-53)
Collectively speaking, America has rejected the warnings of these watchmen on the wall. Rather than turning back to the true Christian faith, millions of scientistically-informed Americans are in process of falling away into evolutionary theism, Wicca, New Age, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. With their libidos unfettered by transcendent moral law and unchanging truth, a tyranny of evil is advancing over our society. And this is the cause of totalitarianism, individually (i.e., Tigers Eye) and collectively.
Oh, you are such a BRUTE, dear spirited!!! LOLOL!!! (And me too.)
My takeaway: A person who resorts to ad hominum attack does not have an argument.
Time to move on....
I HOPE that I have already made it clear that I do not intend to give anything like a biography of Luther. The biographer ought to record all the known facts of a man's life, important the unimportant, pleasant and unpleasant—and then it should be the task of the reader to form his own judgment on the character of the man who has been described to him. True, especially in the case of Luther, this has often not been observed; and so-called biographers have been at pains to portray a reformer who was almost a saint, ignoring all his weaker and weakest points. There are, however, some quite excellent biographies of Luther, and to those who are concerned with getting a complete and unbiased picture, I would wholeheartedly recommend Funck-Brentano's work, “Martin Luther”, from which incidentally I shall quote quite often.
The task of the commentator is quite different from that of the biographer. The commentator does not even attempt, or pretend, to give a full picture. He takes some particular points and analyses and discusses them in detail in order to prove, or disprove—whatever the case may be—a particular theory. This is what I am trying to do. And since it is my object to trace Luther's influence on German political and social development, I shall discuss merely the factors which seem to me to be relevant.
I know of hardly any other man in history on whom it would be more difficult to talk than on Luther, for I fully realise that every statement of mine may be contradicted. First of all, this is because people find it very difficult to look at Luther in an unbiased way. Some glorify everything he has done, others vilify everything.
Take for example—quite apart from our subject—Luther's influence on the German language. Heinrich von Treitschke, the famous German historian, stated: “Luther invented the New High German in one day, at one stroke, he created it.” But the historian Janssen (who wrote sixteen volumes on German history in the Middle Ages) states quite definitely that “Luther created no new German language”, that Luther had no influence whatsoever on the development of German.
Now both these historians are scholars. But Treitschke is an ultra-national Lutheran, who sees in Luther a kind of god. Whatever Luther thinks and says is a miracle. Like God Himself he created a new language with one stroke. Janssen, on the other hand, is a Roman Catholic who sees no good whatsoever in Luther, and even the thought that the man who split the Catholic Church might have had some beneficial influence on his native tongue is abhorrent to him.
The truth lies probably, in this case, somewhere in the middle; but it will be seen how careful we have to be in accepting statements about Luther, however comment may be and will be contradicted.
Luther, admittedly, helped his commentators tremendously by his own writings. For these were a mass of contradictions. He was quite likely to affirm and to deny the same fact or phenomenon within a very short while; and thus he made it possible for “authorities” to quote whatever side they preferred. But it is just this wealth of contradictions which gives us the first clue to Luther's character. “For, like his doctrines and his writings, Luther's life was a mass of contradictions arising from the neurotic temperament” (Funck-Brentano).
From early youth, Luther was a very neurotic character. He had an extremely strict upbringing and tells us himself that “My mother flogged me until I bled on account of a single nut”. At school and university it was not much better. He was whipped by his teachers as often as fifteen times a day, all for ridiculous offences. “The undue severity of which he was the victim as a little boy left its mark on his character; he always remained somewhat timid, wild and mistrustful.” His friends already remarked then that young Luther “suffered from an uneasiness of spirit” and psychical abnormality”. He began very early in life to suffer from melancholia, and there can be no doubt that “his whole nervous system was strained”.
It is interesting to remember how he decided at this period to enter the Church. “On July 2, 1505, as the young man was returning from a visit to his parents at Magdeburg, a violent storm overtook him not far from Erfurt. As he was travelling alone near Stotterheim, a bold of lightning struck in his immediate vicinity and laid him prostrate on the ground. `Help me, help me! If thou helpest me, St. Anne, I will become a monk!'” So it was that he entered the monastery.
Nothing could have been worse for that frightened, nervous, emotional, unstable young man than the rather hard and monotonous life of a monk. Thus it is not surprising that his monastic life was full of strange incidents. “One day when Luther was present at High Mass in the monks' choir, he had a fit during the Gospel, which, as it happened, told the story of the man possessed. He fell to the ground and in his paroxysms behaved like one mad, shouting `I am not possessed, I am not possessed'.” We often hear in his later life that “hysterical weeping and sobbing overwhelmed him”. While he was still in the monastery, “the other monks often thought that he was possessed by the devil.”
Complete mental instability remained the keyword to his life. He tried to overcome his depressions by overwork or too much prayer, always overdoing things, with the result that his mental state deteriorated. There are many passages in his own writings which give us a good insight into Luther's psychological processes. Here is where he is overworking himself. “I need two secretaries. I do practically nothing all day long but write letters. . . . I am Preacher of the Convent and the Refectory; and vicar in the district, and therefore elevenfold Prior; I am responsible for the fish-ponds at Leitzkau; I am agent at Torgau in the suit for Herzberg parish church; I give lectures on St. Paul, I am collecting notes on the Psalter. I rarely have time to recite my Office and say Mass.” “Physically I am fairly well, but I suffer in spirit,” he would confess. “For more than the whole of last week I was tossed about in death and hell, so that I still tremble all over my body and am exhausted. Billows and tempests of despair and blasphemy assailed me and I had lost Christ almost entirely” (Luther's Letters, Enders Edition, vol. 1, pp. 66, 67, and vol. 6, page 71).
At other times he does nothing at all. “I am here in idleness,” he writes in 1521, “alas neglecting prayer and not sighing once for the Church of God. I burn with all the desires of my unconquered flesh. It is the ardour of the spirit that I ought to feel. But it is the flesh, desire, laziness, idleness and sleepiness that possess me” (ibid. vol. 3, page 189).
So it goes on and on; and the more we read Luther, the more we find how justified are those biographers of his who say: “It seems difficult to dismiss here the hypothesis of neuropathic disorder “(Maritain). Others describe his sufferings as “delirious hallucinations” (Funck-Grentano), “religious fanaticism” (Professor B. Schoen), or describe him simply as “mentally deranged” (ibid).
Even his greatest admirers and apologists have to admit that he suffered from “religious melancholia”, “mania for persecution”, or “a mania for greatness”(Professors A. Hausrath, J. Husslein, A. Harnack).
The older he grew, the worse he got. He suffers from “temptations” and especially from “devil-mania”. Everything he disliked, everybody who disagreed with him, was inspired by the Devil. “He was subject to numerous strange hallucinations and vibrations which he attributed invariably to the direct action of Satan. Satan become, in consequence, the dominating conception of his life.” “It is one of the chief characteristics of Luther that in his intellectual life, in his social intercourse, in speech, in writing, and in preaching he always brought in the Devil—attributed far more influence and importance to him that is warranted by Scripture, and by his writings gained for him in Germany a popularity which he had never before enjoyed. . . .All the slumbering germs of superstition both among the rude masses and the higher circles were by this means awakened and set in motion.”
Luther's sayings on the subject are too numerous to be quoted. But it certainly is true that he forced back upon Germany a belief in miracles, superstitions, mysticism, a fanatical belief in evil powers which under the influence of the Renaissance were rapidly losing ground.
Here it must be mentioned that there is something which makes it difficult to quote his sayings, not merely on the Devil, but on many other subjects. This is his language. “Satan sleeps with me much more than my wife does”, is a relatively harmless remark. Other quotations can be given only with dashes indicating unprintable indecencies.
Luther's language was indeed something quite abominable and indescribable. “He is obsessed with filth and obscenity”, writes Maritain. To call it “revolutionary journalism” is an understatement. “He would be furiously angry, and when he was angry he fairly vomited filth. He wrote things one cannot quote in decent English,” is much nearer to the mark. This again, was only the natural outcome of his neurotic character. There was nothing godlike or holy about him, there was little patience or human understanding; he loved to scream, shout and blaspheme in the manner of the most vulgar German politician, such as our generation has seen more than enough. With pride he himself exclaimed; “Rage acts as a stimulant to my whole being. It sharpens my wits, puts a stop to the assaults of the Devil and drives out care. Never do I write or speak better than when I am in a rage. If I wish to compose, write, pray and preach well, I have to be in a rage” (“Table Talk,” 1210).
It is particularly interesting to note what he understood by “praying well”. “If I can no longer pray, I can at least curse. I will no longer say `Hallowed by Thy Name', but “Curse and blast and damn the name of Papist'. I will no longer say “Thy Kingdom come', but will repeat “Curse and damn the Papacy and send it to perdition'. Yes, that is how I pray, and I do so every day of my life and from the bottom of my heart” (E25, 108).
It may be argued that the language of the Middle Ages knew different standards from that of our own time. But, “in this respect Luther went far beyond the custom among educated men of his time, shocking his friends and leaving his opponents speechless with rage and amazement at his audacity.”
It may be urged that a man who said and wrote so many lovely things, might well be entitled to overstep the limit occasionally in the other direction. But Luther's writings were rarely beautiful, and most of them display “an undignified vulgarity, spiced with sexual allusions.” I fully agree with one of his commentators (H. Hallam) who says of his language that “Its intemperance, its coarseness, its negligence, its inelegance, its scurrility, its wild paradoxes menaced the foundations of religious morality and were not compensated by much strength and acuteness and still less by any impressive eloquence” (“Introduction to the Literature of Europe”).
This mythical, mentally unbalanced, diseased character was the hero of the Reformation. His intemperance, his persecution mania, his varying moods, were the origin of his permanent contradictions. There was nothing reasonable in him. Indeed, he admitted himself that he hated reason, and that he was guided merely by his passions, by his violent temper. More than once he condemned in his violent language, reason and a reasonable approach to matters. “Reason is the Devil's greatest whore; by nature and an manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the Devil's appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom. . . . Throw dung in her face to make her ugly. She is and she ought to be drowned in baptism. . . . She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets” (E16, 142-148). There are many more sayings in the same sense, though not always so dirtily phrased. “Usury, drunkenness, adultery—these crimes are self-evident and the world knows that they are sinful; but that bride of the Devil, `Reason', stalks abroad, the fair courtesan, and wishes to be considered wise, and thinks that whatever she says comes from the Holy Ghost. She is the most dangerous harlot the Devil has.” “Reason is contrary to faith”, he writes elsewhere. “Reason is the whore of the Devil. It can only blaspheme and dishonour everything God has said or done” (E29, 241) So it goes on and on.
It is here, in Luther's teachings, in his personality, in his hatred of reason, that we find the seeds of the German belief in a romantic world, of the distrust of anything logical and reasonable. Luther's violent language and temper, his inability to speak and think like a rational being, made him distrust and dislike reason; and his nation—who accepted this new Christianity only too willingly—believed in it and welcomed it as a modern religion.
It is interesting to compare how two great scholars, utterly different in outlook and views, interpret this anti-rational hysteria of Martin Luther—Nietzsche, the free thinker, and Jacquest Maritain, who so nobly attempts to make an unchristian world more Christian.
Nietzsche quotes Luther's “If we could conceive by reason that God who shows so much wrath and malignity could be merciful and just, what use should we have in faith?"” and the philosopher continues: "“from the earliest times, nothing has ever made a deeper impression upon the German soul, nothing has ever tempted it more, than that deduction, the most dangerous of all, which for every true Latin is a sin against the intellect: credo quia absurdum est."
Maritain for his part gives quotations in which Luther expresses his dislike of reason; and the Catholic philosopher continues: “I have quoted these passages because it is instructive to discern in the beginning, in its authentic tone and quality, the false anti-intellectualist mysticism which was to poison so many minds in more subtle and less candid guises in the nineteenth century. . . . Luther delivered man from the intelligence, from that wearisome and besetting compulsion to think always and think logically.”
How few people do realise the deep and permanent connection between religion and politics, faith and world-affairs! So many English people indulge in wishful thinking. They argue according to their own logic. They assume that the Germans adopt the same logic. They try to show a light to the Germans which the Germans do not only not want, but which they despise. Their Christ, their God, their Messiah—Martin Luther—taught them to hate reason and intelligence, and they followed willingly and ever since.
Some people might be surprised, or indeed shocked, if I called Luther “Germany's Christ”—but that is just what he tried to be himself, an attempt which was only too successful.
“It was not long before Luther's pseudo-mysticism translated itself into deeds. He persuades himself that he is guided in all his actions and resolutions by a sort of Divine inspiration.” He first began to explain, in a new fashion, “God's Word”. But it soon became apparent that “by `God's Word' Luther of course always meant his own interpretation of Scripture, his own doctrine, which he prided himself has been revealed to him by God.”
“When I am angry, I am not expressing my own wrath, but the wrath of God”. Luther knew that he was superior to any man or saint. “St. Augustine or St. Ambrosius cannot be compared with me.” “They shall respect our teaching which is the word of God, spoken by the Holy Ghost, through our lips”. “Not for a thousand years has God bestowed such great gifts on any bishop as He as on me” (E61, 422). “God has appointed me for the whole German land, and I boldly vouch and declare that when you obey me you are without a doubt obeying not me but Christ” (W15, 27). “Whoever obeys me not, despises not me but Christ.” “I believe that we are the last trump that sounds before Christ is coming”. “What I teach and write remains true even though the whole world should fall to pieces over it.” (W18, 401). “Whoever rejects my doctrine cannot be saved.” “Nobody should rise up against me”.
“No mortal ever spoke of himself as Luther did”. His persecution mania turned with advancing years into a mania of self-glorification, of grandeur. He really and truly believed that he was God's representative upon earth. He did not refrain from saying and teaching, “I am Christ”; and he exclaimed, almost in the same breath, “I am the prophet of the Germans, for such is the haughty title I must henceforth assume.”
Thus I cannot thing that I said too much when I called Luther “the German Christ”—for such is what he wanted to be, what he believed himself to be, and what, unfortunately, his fellow-countrymen accepted him to be.
Luther's God and Luther's Christ had to be blamed—and this is a natural
consequence of the Reformer's character, views and manias—for every wrong Luther himself committed. “If God is concerned for the interests of His son He will watch over me; my cause is the cause of Jesus Christ. If God careth not for the glory of Christ, He will endanger His own and will have to bear the shame.”
Thus, quite naturally, Luther does not always see eye to eye with God or Christ. “I have greater confidence in my wife and my pupils than I have in Christ,” he said on one occasion quite shamelessly (“Table Talk”, 2397b). “When I beheld Christ I seemed to see the Devil”. I had a great aversion for Christ”. “Often I was horrified at the name of Christ, and when I regarded Him on the Cross, it was as if I had been struck by lightning; and when I heard His name mentioned, I would rather have heard the name of the Devil” (see Janssen **, 72; also Maritain, “Three Reformers”, p. 169). “I did not believe in Christ,” wrote Luther in 1537. The example of Jesus Christ Himself very often meant nothing to Luther (see E29, 196).
God, on the other hand, seemed to him “a master armed with a stick”. “God did mischievously blind me”; “God often acts like a madman”; “God paralyses the old and blinds the young and thus remains master”; I look upon God no better than a scoundrel”; “God is stupid” (“Table Talk”, No. 963, W1, 48)
Strange sayings from the mouth of the reformer! But stranger still are his references to God and Christ when it comes to Luther's own shortcomings. We shall see later his own attitude to sex and morality. But he excused his own adultery—to quote merely one more example—by the teachings of Christ. “Christ”, says Luther, “committed adultery first of all with the woman at the well about whom Saint John tells us. Was not everybody about Him saying: `Whatever has he been doing with her?” Secondly, with Mary Magdalene, and thirdly with the woman taken in adultery whom He dismissed so lightly. Thus even Christ, who was so righteous, must have been guilty of fornication before He died” (“Table Talk”, 1472) (W2, 107).
I have quoted chiefly Luther's own words, and have shown his character as I believe it was. To my mind this is the infinite tragedy of Luther and Germany, that he himself believed in his manias, in his mission from God, in his replacing Christ—and that his countrymen believed it, too. Who will ever decide whether a country produces her outstanding men, or whether these outstanding men have a revolutionary influence on their country? In Luther's case probably both are true. Nowhere else but in Germany, which was not yet as civilised as the Latin countries, could a man like Luther have been born and bred. And nowhere else could a man like Luther—hysterical, irrational, irreligious—have been followed by the whole nation for centuries. A nation which found it easy to accept a character like Luther as Christ, could not find it difficult to accept a man like Hitler as Messiah.