Martin Luther: Ghostbuster
David Bagchi (d.v bagchi@hull.ac.uk)
A paper read to the Hull & District Theological Society, University of Hull
Wednesday 25 January 2012
Please note that this is a work in progress and that the references are not complete, and do not quote anything in this paper without the express permission of the author.
Martin Luther and ghosts:[1] you might think that this is an odd topic to speak about. Although Luther is famous for his trenchant views on a range of different subjects, ghosts are not among them. But what I’d like to do in this talk is to demonstrate not only that Luther was indeed a ‘ghostbuster’, on several levels, but also that by examining what he has to say on this subject we can shed new light on his thought. At the same time, this topic introduces us to a wider cultural shift which took place as a result of the Reformation. This challenged a particular view of the relationship between the living and the dead which had held sway in the West for centuries. It took considerable efforts on the part of the Protestant reformers to change this view, and in fact it is questionable whether they succeeded in the long run.
But as it is such an unusual subject, I should perhaps first explain first how I came to be working on it. It started a few years ago when I was going through Luther’s early works trying to identify, from the number of known editions, which were his writings which had the greatest impact at the time. Since printing was at this time demand-led, and since print-runs themselves were usually quite small (perhaps 1000-1500 copies per impression) the number of impressions and editions a work went through is a pretty accurate guide to the volume of sales. The popular works are not necessarily the ones which subsequent historians, or confessionally-motivated editors of Luther’s selected works, have identified as being the most important, so the exercise threw up some surprises. One of these was the Sermon on the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus [SLIDE], which went through twenty editions in the three years between 1522 and 1525. On reading it, I found that it concluded with a ghost story, and I remember thinking at the time that this must have been an unusual element to include in a sermon. Of course, I have since learned that sermons for the First Sunday after Trinity, for which Dives and Lazarus was the gospel reading, often referred to ghosts, and that Luther was being quite traditional in one sense – though his purpose was in fact to subvert the traditional ghost story, as we shall see when we look at the sermon in more detail.
The second factor which led me to this subject was some work I have done on Luther’s understanding of Christ’s descent into Hell. This focussed my attention on the variety of different views there were in the sixteenth century on where people go when they die. If you thought, as I did, that there were only three options (heaven, hell, and Purgatory), then that is to underestimate the extent of what one scholar has called ‘the geography of the afterlife’.[2]
My third reason for choosing the topic of Luther and ghosts is a more idiosyncratic one. C.S. Lewis, the famous Oxford English don, once made the provocative statement that the whole of theology is based on two things: that people tell coarse jokes and that they find the dead uncanny.[3] Lewis’s dictum is appropriate tonight because in a paper I wrote a few years ago I explored Martin Luther’s theological use of coarse language.[4] It was by its very nature a rather frank and explicit paper, which had it been a DVD would have carried an ‘18’ certificate. So by a sort of Lewisian logic it seems only right for me this evening to turn my attention from Luther and coarse language to Luther and the uncanny dead, or more specifically Luther and the problem of the ghost.
Luther’s ghostly menagerie: literal and metaphorical
I hope to show that Luther was a ghostbuster in several respects. Throughout his career we see him fighting against entities which he identified as ghosts of one sort or another. Let me give you an example which I, for one, found quite striking [SLIDE OF VERMAHNUNG]. In 1530, Luther wrote a long pamphlet addressed to the lords spiritual assembled at the imperial diet, which that year met at Augsburg. In the course of it, he listed what he saw as the worst abuses that the Roman Church had introduced, and which needed to be addressed by a future church council. It is, as one might expect from Luther, quite a long list, running to no fewer than 114 items – though Luther ended the list by saying there were more but that he had run out of space. It is clearly in descending order of severity: topping the chart, at numbers 1 and 2 respectively, are the major issues of indulgences and the sacrifice of the mass; languishing at the bottom of the chart is the altogether more trivial practice of lighting candles on St Blasius’ day to ward off sore throats. So it is rather surprising to find Luther listing as the fifth worst abuse of the Roman Church – ranking higher than pilgrimages and masses for the dead, and ranking much higher even than the veneration of the saints and clerical celibacy – an entry which is as surprising as it is laconic. It reads simply: ‘Poltergeists’.[5] The fifth most serious abuse of the Roman Church, according to Martin Luther, was poltergeists. One might expect Luther to have blamed Rome for a great deal; but how and why did he hold it responsible for poltergeists?
The obvious starting-point for answering this question is to delve into the corpus of Luther’s own writings. In doing so one immediately becomes aware that poltergeists are only one element of a ghostly menagerie that quite literally haunts Luther’s works. So here is quick guide to the different sorts of ghosts to which Luther refers.[MENAGERIE SLIDE] He uses various related terms for ghosts, each with different connotations:
- Larvae – traditional Latin term, especially for malevolent spirits who haunted cemeteries. In post-Augustan Latin, it took on increasingly the added meaning of ‘masks’, one supposes of a frightening and ghoulish kind. Luther uses the term frequently, usually with the strong suggestion of deceitfulness (often with lemures).[6]
- Manes– ‘apparitions’, not obviously loaded (in classical Latin, these were the benevolent spirits as opposed to the malevolent larvae and lemures).[7]
- Gespenster– used by Luther absolutely or in compounds with ‘Luegengespenst’, ‘Teufelsgespenst’, emphasizing emptiness and deceit (= phantoms, spectres).[8]
- Geister– very common term for ‘troublesome’ spirits, especially in compounds: Poltergeister and Rumpelgeister (I’m not quite sure of the difference, and I’m not sure Luther was). Would use the same words of the Schweremer (= Sacramentarians and revolting peasants – ‘Rottengeister’), but also Polterpapstgeist.[9]
- Occasionally uses other less common German words such as Spuken but these add nothing new to the range of connotations.[10]
How do we reconcile these two aspects of Luther’s ghost-discourse – the fact that his writings are so full of the idea and that he offered such a detailed classification of the genus, but that he denied their existence?
At this point I have to come clean and admit that on many occasions Luther’s use of the terms Gespenst and larva is metaphorical. One of his favourite terms for a piece of trickery or for something that is counterfeit is a Teufelsgespenst, ‘a devil’s phantom’. (We would say ‘a will o’ the wisp’.) He applies it to what he saw as the inventions and false claims of the Roman Church. Similarly, he applied larva (with its double-meaning of mask) to officials of the Roman Church who in his view pretended to powers they did not have. This metaphorical use accounts for at least a third of all Luther’s references to ghosts – they are, as it were, ‘ghost’ ghost references – and of course in this metaphorical sense Luther was certainly a ghostbuster in his own mind, unveiling the Roman Church’s shadowy claims for what they were. But most of his references to ghosts were to literal ghosts, and it is this literal ghost discourse that I’m going to be concentrating on.
The patristic rejection of ghosts – and their medieval comeback
To understand Luther’s critique of literal ghosts, we have to go back (as one normally does with any question of Reformation theology) to the Church Fathers. The existence of ghosts had been decisively rejected as early as Tertullian; but it was St Augustine who, as it were, laid ghosts to rest for Western Christendom, in his Letter 158 to Evodius, and his treatise De cura pro mortuis gerenda addressed to Paulinus of Nola. Augustine could not accept the existence of ghosts because the Bible itself is fairly clear on the matter. The nearest thing to a ghost story in the Bible is the account of King Saul’s visit to the witch of Endor in I Sam. 28, when the ghost of Samuel is raised up. But this is almost the exception to prove the rule, for Saul was already doomed and practically a dead man walking. The definitive biblical rejection of ghosts comes in Jesus’s parable of the rich man and Lazarus in Lk 16, and the idea that not only is there a great gulf fixed between those in Hell and those in the bosom of Abraham, but also between the living and the dead. Augustine used this text to rule out the very possibility of revenance.
So what was Augustine’s explanation of ghostly phenomena? What we think are the ghosts of the dead, he said, are in fact simply visions, ‘images’ or ‘similitudes’, in just the same way that we dream about our friends and relatives (sometimes even deceased friends and relatives) but of course they are not actually with us, nor conscious of the fact that we are thinking of them. There is no reason for the dead to come and visit the living, said Augustine, and in most cases they could not anyway. Augustine allows for the possibility that this could happen in some cases (to allow for cases like the ghost of Samuel appearing to Saul); but as a rule the dead cannot visit the living, and it is only through the agency of angels that God sends us visions of the dead. Augustine’s concern, according to one influential commentator, is to use ‘all the means at his disposal … to deny the possibility of any communication between the living and the dead’.[11]
And that might have been the end of the matter, except for what Jean-Claude Schmitt has described as ‘the invasion of ghosts’ in the Middle Ages.[12] From about the end of the first millennium, ghost stories began to abound. Even contemporaries, such as the north Yorkshireman William of Newburgh, began asking themselves why the dead had apparently been so quiet in earlier generations, and why they were so active – and indeed so violent – nowadays. This ‘invasion’ of ghosts was contemporary with the development of a very elaborate liturgy of the dead. This ideally involved a sequence of masses said especially for a dead person on the third, seventh, and thirtieth day after death. The stories of the unquiet dead were in fact stories of the dead for whom the correct system of post-mortem masses had not been performed. It was therefore very clearly in the interests of the ecclesiastical establishment who benefited from this system to promote it, and this explains the explosion of ghost stories, which were circulated predominantly in the form of illustrations (exempla) in medieval sermons, preached by both parish clergy and regular clergy, especially friars – in fact, precisely by those who derived a significant part of their income from saying masses for the souls of the departed. The prototype of these stories goes back to Pope Gregory the Great, whose tales about revenants coming back to remind the living of their obligation to say masses for them, collected in Bk 4 of his Dialogues, enjoyed great popularity in the Middle Ages. An example is that of the monk Justus, who confessed on his deathbed to another monk Copiosus that he had hidden three pieces of gold and thus broken his vow of poverty. When told of this, Gregory decreed that the body not be buried in the monks’ cemetery. After thirty days, he thought that the soul of Justus had suffered enough, and decreed daily masses for him for a further thirty days. At the end of this period the dead Justus appeared to Copiosus to say that he had at last ‘received communion’.
Ghosts opposed to justification by faith alone
So we begin to see what Luther was getting at in blaming the Roman Church for poltergeists. Stories of the unquiet dead coming back from Purgatory to pester the living to do the right thing by them in terms of requiem masses had begun to circulate in large numbers in the 12th and 13th centuries under the patronage of the friars in particular. The purpose of the stories was to promote masses for the dead and the notion of the meritorious sacrifice of the mass. But Luther does not think them mere stories: he does not deny that the apparitions took place. Augustine had been quite happy to ascribe visions of the departed to the agency of angels , but Luther was not. Because, in his view, reliance on masses for the souls of the dead led people away from faith in Christ towards faith in human works, the apparitions could only be the demons masquerading as the souls of loved ones. He stated this explicitly in 1521 in what was by far his most radical theological treatise to date, The Misuse of the Mass.
Because we are Christians, we should really know henceforth the devil’s thoughts, and believe that the poltergeists are not the souls of men but simply devils who act and speak as if one could redeem them; that they make a jest and mockery out of the holy sacrament and testament of God, extinguish the faith, and try to establish and buttress that abominable flea-market of the mass (which has now taken the upper hand everywhere). Try this. Show your faith. And you will see that these spirits will immediately cease from their foolishness and spookery.[13]
Poltergeists were just one of a whole set of props designed to buttress the notion that we are justified by our works:
‘From this abomination [sc. works righteousness] have come all the other outrages (they had to come from it, too, and there was no way of warding them off), namely, the self-righteousness of so many of the monasteries and chapters, with their worship, the sacrificial masses, purgatory, vigils, brotherhoods, pilgrimages, indulgences, fasts, veneration of saints, relics, poltergeists, and the whole parade of the hellish procession of the cross. For what else is possible? If a conscience is to rely and build on its own works, it stands on loose sand which moves to and fro and continually sinks away. It must always seek works, one after the other. The longer it looks, the more it needs.’[14]
So this was the second way in which Luther saw himself as a ghostbuster: ghosts (or rather the demons who masqueraded as ghosts) had to be opposed because they in turn were opposed to what Luther saw as the most fundamental doctrine of Christianity: that we are justified by Christ, not by our good works, through faith alone.
The Sermon on the Rich Man and the Poor Lazarus (1522f.)
So let’s recap so far on Luther’s critique of ghosts up to 1521. The first point to make is that his critique is not at all a ‘modern’ or rationalistic one. He fully accepted that people saw apparitions and heard unexplained rappings and tappings. (In the pre-Rentokil age, one imagines that such phenomena were quite widely experienced!) His point is merely that these phenomena should not be attributed to ghosts, poltergeists or whatever, but to the Devil. And although you and I would probably not find it a comforting thought that we had the Prince of Darkness in our attic rather than a common-or-garden ghost, for Luther it was good news in a way, because there were tried-and-trusted remedies for getting rid of the Devil. In a moment I’ll show what advice Luther gave to those in such a situation.
The other point to make is that we should remember that in 1521 Luther had still had not completely abandoned belief in Purgatory (he would not do so until 1530). He was still agnostic about it, not seeing any biblical justification for it but not ruling it out altogether. So his ‘geography of the afterlife’ still in theory allowed for the possibility of communication between the living and the dead: the boundaries between Purgatory and the land of the living always seemed more permeable than those between Heaven, Hell, and this world. This is why the parable of Dives and Lazarus became important for him, and it is to his sermon on that parable that we now turn.
I’m sure you all remember the parable, though here’s a visual aid to remind you: [ILLUMINATION SLIDE]: a rich man who dined lavishly everyday drops dead at the same time as a leprous beggar who would wait at the rich man’s gate hoping in vain for scraps from the rich man’s table (what we used to call in the days of Mrs Thatcher ‘trickle-down economics’). The beggar, Lazarus, goes immediately to paradise, to the bosom of Abraham; the rich man (who is perhaps significantly never named, but the English have treated the Latin word for ‘rich man’ (dives) as if it were his proper name) goes to suffer in the fires of Hades. Dives begs Abraham that Lazarus might bring him the merest dab of cold water to cool his tongue; but Abraham explains that no-one may cross the ‘great gulf’ that is fixed between them. The rich man then asks that Lazarus be sent back to warn the rich man’s brothers to mend the errors of their ways. But Abraham rejects that suggestion too: the Law and the Prophets should be sufficient instruction for anyone.
This parable allowed Luther to deal with some of his characteristic themes of his in the early 1520s: the hiddenness of the Christian life, in which the righteous suffer and the ungodly prosper; the importance of works of love in the context of a faith which guards against works-righteousness. But because of the way the parable ends, it also allows Luther to give his advice on the efficacy of praying for the dead. It is instructive to note that in the original versions (1522 and 1523), when he was still agnostic towards Purgatory, Luther gave the advice that ‘if you pray for the souls of the departed, you do not sin; nor do you sin if you do not pray for them’. In his revision from the 1530s, this advice became more directive: ‘Pray two or three times, and trust that God has heard us. Anything more than that betrays lack of faith.’ (It should be noted that Luther, and other early reformers, did not rule out prayer for the dead completely, but severely curtailed it in this way.) And so the sermon ends (as I’ve mentioned) with a ghost story:
‘We read in the Historia Tripartita of a certain Bishop Gregory of Cappadocia, on a visit to the city of Corinth. There was a house there which had been completely abandoned on account of a ghost, which haunted the house and gave no-one any peace. Now the bishop came to this house, and because he had nowhere to stay, he asked those who had lived in the house if he might put up there. And he was answered that no-one was able to remain in the house because of the ghost. So he had the house opened up and he went in. And all the devils flew out of it and it was all clean because this man, who was full of strong faith, had entered it. So do as he did and confront such ghosts, fully-armed with this verse [Lk 16:29: ‘They have Moses and the prophets: let them hear them’], and also that which Moses wrote in Deuteronomy [Deut. 18:11: ‘you shall not inquire of the dead’]. Then all the rumbling and crashing will cease, for no devil can stand against this word. Amen.’
For Luther, the story was proof that these ghosts were not ghosts at all but only demons. Ghosts would not have been upset by a man of faith, but demons of course would.
Who ya gonna call? Luther’s advice on dealing with ‘ghosts’
The tagline for the 1984 film Ghostbusters was, of course, ‘Who ya gonna call?’. And this leads us to the third sense in which Luther was a ‘ghostbuster’, namely as the ‘go-to guy’, as we say nowadays, for people in Saxony suffering infestations of ghosts. We read about these cases in Luther’s letters and in the Table Talk, the dinner-table conversation taken down every night by the students and others who lodged with the Luthers. These cases are fascinating, both for the intrinsic interest they hold for students of beliefs about revenance in sixteenth-century Germany, and also for what they tell us about Luther’s status as a holy man to whom such issues were brought. I’ll mention a few of them to give you a taste of these stories.
The first case is that of The Youth Who Wouldn’t Go To Work.
[WA Tr No. 3694: January 10, 1538]
‘January 10 [1538]. A certain youth, apprenticed to a blacksmith, had been deceived and frightened by nocturnal apparitions and had been led about all the streets from six o’clock to eight o’clock in the evening. Then he was interrogated by the spectre as to whether he knew the catechism and was told that he had recently acted in an impious way, that he had received the sacrament in both kinds. Finally he was told, “If you go back to your master’s house I’ll break your neck.” Accordingly he did not enter that house for several days.
We took the youth to Doctor [Luther] and gave him an account of the case. Luther then said that one should not be too quick to believe any and everybody, for many fabricate such things; even if he saw a ghost he should not leave his calling. Thereupon Luther questioned the youth about his conversation with Satan and said to him, “See to it that you don’t lie. Fear God, hear God’s Word, return to your master’s house, and do the work of your calling. If Satan comes back, say to him, ‘I won’t obey you. I’ll obey God, who has called me to this work. Even if an angel should come from heaven [and tell me otherwise], I’ll remain in my calling.’ ”[15]
This case shows that although Luther may not have been rationalistic, he wasn’t stupid. It is clear suspects that the boy has invented the story to get out of going to work, and/or to cover up his youthful nocturnal wanderings; but as a pastor confronted with a case of conscience he is obliged to treat it seriously. His advice is in accord with his own exposition of Dives and Lazarus: ignore supernatural messengers, because Christians already have all the guidance they need.
The second case is that of the Haunted Vicarage.
[1538] WA Tr No. 3814: April 5, 1538
On April 5 [1538] a pastor came from the church in Süptitz, near Torgau, to complain of apparitions and disturbances caused by Satan. He said that Satan disturbed his peace with nocturnal tumults and the smashing of all the utensils in his house. Satan hurled pots and dishes close to his head, so that they broke in pieces, and Satan annoyed him by laughing out loud, although he saw nothing of him. For a whole year, the pastor said, he had endured these and many other trials, so that his wife and children wished to leave [the house]. Luther responded, “Dear Brother, be strong in the Lord and firm in your faith! Don’t give in to that robber! Suffer the outward things and the minor damage that comes from the breaking of pots, for it can’t harm you in body and soul, as you have found, for the angel of the Lord is with you. Let Satan play with the pots. Meanwhile pray to God with your wife and children [and say], ‘Be off, Satan! I’m lord in this house, not you. By divine authority I’m head of this household, and I have a call from heaven to be pastor of this church. I have testimony from heaven and earth, and this is what I rely on. You enter this house as a thief and robber. You are a murderer and a scoundrel. Why don’t you stay in heaven [sic]? Who invited you to come here?’ In this way you should sing him his litany and his legend and let him play as long as he pleases.
‘“I was often pestered [by the devil] when I was imprisoned in my Patmos [the Wartburg Castle], high up in the fortress in the kingdom of the birds. I resisted him in faith and confronted him with this verse: God, who created man, is mine, and all things are under his feet. If you have any power over him, just try it!”.’
An interesting feature of this case is that the pot-throwing apparition is identified as the Devil straightaway: either the pastor of Süptitz or the recorder of this Table Talk had by 1538 taken on board Luther’s teaching that poltergeists are devils. A second feature is that, like the case of the shiftless youth, Luther makes an appeal to the divinely-established order (work, duty, male household authority). Perhaps surprisingly, there is no direct appeal to Scripture in either case, although such authority could be seen as implicit.
[If more examples needed: The case of the Butter Devil:
a story in the Table Talk which Luther recounted about a diabolical manifestation in the home of his friend, Bugenhagen. His wife and maid tried to drive it out, but nothing availed until Bugenhagen told the Devil to 'Go and shit in the butter tub'. The Devil departed, but when they tasted the butter, they found it had turned to ordure. The story itself presupposes the traditional affinity between the Devil and corruption which runs counter to Luther's customary use of foul words against the Devil. Not surprisingly, Luther adds a comment which glosses the story in a more typically 'Lutheran' way: 'Then Satan departed [after Bugenhagen's outburst], for he is a proud spirit who will not be insulted’[16].
The case of the Fruitcake Ghost
A revenant story Luther recounted at table around 1530. A foul-mouthed nobleman’s dead wife returns to him, and offers to stay provided that he promises never to swear again. All goes well, in bed and at board, until one evening she is late with his pudding; he swears, and both she and the long-awaited spicy fruitcake disappear into thin air, never to be seen again. [17] The story as originally told to Luther by the Elector of Saxony, Duke John Frederick, has all the hallmarks of a humorous after-dinner ghost story. But Luther, who was obliged by the authority of Scripture (the parable of Dives and Lazarus) to believe that ghosts are impossible, but who was equally obliged by the authority of his prince to believe that the story was true, is forced to read it as an account of diabolical goings-on and cannot resist appending a theological quaestio. Were the wife and the children she bore post mortem real? No, they were devilish apparitions, for the creation of children is a divine work, which God the Creator creates by the mediation of humankind. The Devil can create nothing, he can only deceive.[18]
The case of the Flatulent Exorcist
‘Then he told a story about a woman in Magdeburg who, when Satan disturbed her, drove him away by breaking wind. “This example is not always to be followed and is dangerous,” Luther said, “because Satan, who is the spirit and author of presumption, is not easily mocked and put to flight. Reliance on such an example can prove that it’s not at all appropriate for somebody else. So it once happened that a horned spectre of Satan lost his horn when a godly man boasted of his baptism, but when another man foolishly tried to imitate this example, he was killed by Satan.”’[19]
In addition to answering specific queries, Luther also gave general advice. This very clear instruction is from a sermon for the feast of the Epiphany [Postils 1522]:
‘If you should have a poltergeist or rumpelgeist in your house, do not go and discuss it here and there, but know that it is not a good spirit and that it has not come from God. Cross yourself quietly and trust in your faith. If God has sent him to punish you, as he did with pious Job, be ready and suffer willingly. But if the spirit has his own little game with you, despise him with a strong faith and courageously put your trust in God’s word; he will not harm you or attack God’s word. Do not doubt, for in my opinion none of those poltergeists are sent by God to punish us; of their own accord and for their own sport they vainly try to frighten us because they have no power to harm men. If that spirit had the power to harm, he would not be such a noisy fellow, but would do his mischief even before you had the chance to discover who did it. If it should be a good spirit that comes to you, his coming will not occur in that same noisy and wanton way. Test it, and manifest your faith, and you will see that this empty delusion is not of God, and it will cease. If you have no faith, you make it easy for that spirit, for God’s word, which alone he fears, is absent.
‘The divine words on which you may take a courageous stand are in Luke 16[:29], where Abraham spoke to the rich man in hell after the latter had asked that dead Lazarus should be sent to his brethren who were still alive on earth and Abraham refused his request and said: “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them.” From this text it clearly follows that God does not desire to have the dead teach us, but that we should cling to his Scriptures. Therefore, wherever a spirit crosses your path, do not ask whether he is evil or good, but make short shrift of him, despise him and push this word, Habent Mosen et prophetas, “They have Moses and the prophets,” right up his nose, and he will soon know what you think. If he is a good spirit, he will like you all the more because you use the words of God, yours and his, so bravely and joyfully; if he is an evil spirit, as all of the poltergeists are, he will soon say farewell.’[20]
The ‘Habent Mosen et prophetas’ from the parable of Dives and Lazarus was for Luther the clinching authority of a triad of Bible verses which he referred to frequently in such advice.
Therefore we should with utter confidence hold up before the poltergeists these three witnesses of Scripture: first, Moses, who says: you shall not inquire of the dead [Deut. 18:11]; second, Isaiah [8:19–20]: you shall consult the law and the testimony rather than the dead; third, Abraham and Christ: “They have Moses and the prophets, let them hear them” [Luke 16:29].[21]
Martin Luther – Ghostbuster: an evaluation
Finally we have to ask how good a ghostbuster Martin Luther was. This is difficult to answer decisively. On the one hand, Luther’s attitude towards ghosts was one of very few of his doctrines to travel well, and it travelled of all places to Switzerland. In 1569, the Zurich theologian and disciple of Bullinger, Ludwig Lavater, published his comprehensive, almost scholastic, treatise on ghosts. Lavater’s general argument, together with many of his examples, was lifted directly from Luther’s own writings. There was an admixture of Zwingli and Calvin and other Reformed authorities as well, as you might expect; but it is in essence a Lutheran treatise. Lavater’s treatise was quickly translated into English [TITLE-PAGE SLIDE], but then most of Lavater’s output was englished as soon as it left the Zurich presses, as his Reformed views chimed well with the mainstream Elizabethan Church. What is more surprising was that his Gespensterbuch was cheerfully plundered by Catholic writers as well, after being shorn of its anti-papal polemic. So we know that Luther’s ghost discourse was successful to the extent that it was disseminated after his death in both Protestant and Catholic contexts.
There is another respect though in which we might adjudge Luther’s ghost discourse a failure, especially in the long-term. Some social and cultural historians like the late Bob Scribner would have pointed out that Luther was singularly unsuccessful in rooting out ghost-belief: stories of revenants in parts of Germany where masses for the dead were no longer said, prowling around until their souls were at rest, continued, and arguably helped to fuel the vampire stories of central Europe which continue to fascinate Hollywood and us. Similarly, the forms for burial which Cranmer prepared for the English Church, in which all the prayers are for the living congregation, and in which the corpse at the nominal centre of events is liturgically almost ignored, admirably reflect both Luther’s and St Augustine’s concern to separate the living and the dead [SLIDE OF AUGUSTINE’S DE CURA QUOTATION].[22] But over the centuries the lack of any official sanction, in the Church of England, for communicating with the dead has led to various practical workarounds, from the spiritualism of the late nineteenth century which peaked after the First World War, to yearly memorial services held at All Souls’ tide which have now become popular even in evangelical Anglican churches, and which are not all that easy to distinguish from services of prayers for the dead. One sees analogous developments in other Protestant churches. So it is not clear that Luther’s version of ghostbusting was all that successful in the long run.
To conclude: In this paper I have tried to show that ghosts played an important role in Luther’s theology, both as a trope and as a phenomenon. As a trope, ghosts stood for the counterfeit, devilish, and empty deceits with which the Christian was assailed, not least by the Roman Church and by Enthusiasts; as a phenomenon, ghosts were no less deceitful apparitions of the Devil, designed to trap the pious but unwary Christian. All this maps well on to two essential elements of Luther’s theology: justification by faith alone (which the mass-poltergeists opposed) and Scripture alone (‘They have Moses and the prophets’). But I should like to map this discourse on to a third and less obvious doctrine.
The noisy but empty spiritual threats offered by devilish phantoms are contrasted by Luther with the quiet but real and physical work of God in the incarnational and sacramental presence of Christ. They crash about and make a lot of noise, but they are ultimately powerless against us. God, on the other hand, goes about his work quietly, whether it is in Christ’s birth in the stable or in our hearts, or in the Holy Spirit’s silent working within us. And yet he achieves everything for us. Luther’s attitude towards ghosts can therefore be seen as [not only the revenance of an Augustinian over a Gregorian theory of the dead, but also] consistent with his dialectic between the theology of glory and the theology of the cross: the ghostly caters for the human desire for the spiritual, whereas God reveals himself through the physical and corporeal. And that in a sense brings us back to where we started: for it was to emphasize the corporeal, the bodily, as God’s peculiar sphere of activity, against a prudish devil’s preoccupation with the spiritual, that had led Luther to his therapeutic use of coarse, bodily, scatological language to ward off the Devil and devilish thoughts, which I have looked at elsewhere. So was C.S. Lewis right in thinking that all theology is based on the fact that we laugh at coarse jokes and find the dead uncanny? I don’t know. But I would argue that by considering Luther’s utterances on these two features of human existence we are taken a long way into his theology.
Notes
[1]This is a version of a paper originally given at the Church History Day Conference celebrating the work of the Revd Professor W. Ian P. Hazlett, Univ. of Glasgow, 22 Oct. 2010. I am particularly grateful to Sarah Walton for her comments on the current version.
[2] ‘Christ’s descent into Hell in Reformation controversy’, Studies in Church History 45 (2009), 228-47.
[3] C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study (London: Collins, 1980), pp. 131-2. For Lewis, the coarse joke indicates that we find our own physicality ridiculous, while the uncanniness of the dead indicates that we think that death is not the end.
[4] >The German Rabelais? Foul words and the Word in Luther=, Reformation and Renaissance Review 7 (2005), pp. 143-62.
[5] Exhortation to the Clergy Assembled at Augsburg, 1530 (LW 34:54) = Vermahnung an die Geistlichen, versammelt auf dem Reichstag zu Augsburg (1530), under the heading ‘Die stucke, so ynn der gleissenden Kirchen ynn ubung und brauch sind gewest’ (WA 30.II:347.11).
[6] Note that the number of references given in the Weimar indices is only a fraction of the number of returns obtained through a word search of the Chadwyck-Healey Luthers Werke. [Lavater calls larvae ‘umbrae’ – dead men’s souls. Lemures he calls the malevolent version of Lares]
[7] [Lavater: manes = men’s souls, or else their guardian spirits, but the overriding sense is of good (cf. ‘immanes’)]
[8] [Lavater: spectrum = the shape or form of something presenting itself to our sight]
[9] [Lavater: Lemures = ‘the souls of those who make men black and blue’]
[10] This catalogue of names deduced from Luther’s usage fades in comparison with Lavater’s ch. 1, in which he distinguishes more than three dozen names of apparitions.
[11] Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago, 1998), p. 20. The corollary of this (as for Protestant orders of burial such as the Book of Common Prayer service) is that those things we think we are doing for the dead – making sure they have a decent burial spot, ensuring that all the funeral arrangements are in order, having a proper funeral – in short, all the things that make for a good send-off, are according to Augustine really for the benefit of the living, the bereaved. The dead are beyond our help. ‘Proinde ista omnia, [id est] curatio funeris, conditio sepulturae, pompa exequiarum, magis sunt vivorum solacia quam subsidia mortuorum’ in Augustine, De cura pro mortuis gerenda (c. 425) II.4 (PL 38:936f?). The same sentence occurs in De civitate Dei I.12 (CCL 47:14) where it precedes an assertion of the efficacy of prayer and even the (eucharistic) sacrifice for the dead.
[12] Schmitt, Ghosts, the title of chapter 3.
[13] On The Misuse of the Mass. Luther, M. (1999, c1959). Vol. 36: Luther’s works, vol. 36 : Word and Sacrament II (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Vol. 36, Page 195). Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
[14] Luther, M. (1999, c1960). Vol. 34: Luther’s works, vol. 34 : Career of the Reformer IV (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Vol. 34, Page 20-21). Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
[15] Luther, M. (1999, c1967). Vol. 54: Luther’s works, vol. 54 : Table Talk (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Vol. 54, Page 258). Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
[16] WA TR 3: no. 3491 [1536]; p. 356.3-10)
[17] WA TR 3: no. 3676 (1530); p. 517:11-39.
[18] WA TR 3: no. 3676 (1530); pp. 517:40-518:7.
[19] Luther, M. (1999, c1967). Vol. 54: Luther’s works, vol. 54 : Table Talk (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Vol. 54, Page 279-281). Philadelphia: Fortress Press. This ‘woman in Magdeburg’ who drove away the Devil by farting seems to have much in common with, and is probably the same as, the nun of Magdeburg (sometimes identified as Mechthild herself) who frequently appears in Luther’s writings as able to drive away the Devil by a simple word, such as ‘I am a Christian’ or ‘I am baptized’. See Carolyn M. Schneider, I Am a Christian. The Nun, the Devil, and Martin Luther (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2010). In the same way that it was the faith behind the words, not the words themselves, which drove away the Devil (Schneider, p. 15), so here ‘this example is not always to be followed and is dangerous’.
[20] Gospel for the Feast of the Epiphany (Mt 2:1-12). Luther, M. (1999, c1974). Vol. 52: Luther’s works, vol. 52 : Sermons II (J. J. Pelikan, H. C. Oswald & H. T. Lehmann, Ed.). Luther’s Works (Vol. 52, Page 179-180). Philadelphia: Fortress Press.
[21] On the Misuse of the Mass (1521) in LW 36:198.
[22] See Eamon Duffy’s critique in The Stripping of the Altars.
