revolution,
he taught, must be overthrown, all work and all property must be shared in
common, and complete equality must be introduced. In his conception, a union of the
people was to be organised to realise this programme, not only throughout Germany, but
throughout entire Christendom. Princes and nobles were to be invited to join, and should
they refuse, the union was to overthrow or kill them, with arms in hand, at the first
opportunity.
Muenzer immediately set to work to organise the union. His preachings assumed a still
more militant character.
He attacked, not only the clergy, but with equal passion the
princes, the nobility and the patricians. He pictured in burning colours the existing
oppression, and contrasted it with the vision of the millennium of social republican equality
which he created out of his imagination. He published one revolutionary pamphlet after
another, sending emissaries in all directions, while he personally organised the union in
Allstedt and its vicinity.
The first fruit of this propaganda was the destruction St. Mary’s Chapel in Mellerbach
near Allstedt, according to the command of the Bible (Deut. 7, 5): “Ye shall break down
their altars, and dash in pieces their pillars, and hew down their Asherim,
and burn their
graven images with fire.” The princes of Saxony came in person to Allstedt quell the
upheaval, and they called Muenzer to the castle. There he delivered a sermon, which they
had never heard from Luther, “that easy living flesh of Wittenberg,” Muenzer called him.
He insisted that the ungodly rulers, especially the priests and monks who treated the
Gospel as heresy, must be killed; for confirmation he referred to the New Testament. The
ungodly have no right to live, he said, save by the mercy of the chosen ones. If the princes
would not exterminate the ungodly,
he asserted, God would take their sword from them
because the right to wield the sword belongs to the community. The source of the evil of
usury, thievery and robbery, he said, were the princes and the masters who had taken all
creatures into their private possession – the fishes in the water, the birds in the air, the
plants in the soil. And the usurpers, he said, still preached to the poor the commandment,
“Thou shalt not steal,” while they grabbed everything, and robbed and crushed the peasant
and the artisan. “When, however, one of the latter commits the slightest transgression,” he
said, “he
has to hang, and Dr. Liar says to all this: Amen.” The masters themselves created
a situation, he argued, in which the poor man was forced to become their enemy. If they did
not remove the causes of the upheaval, how could things improve in times to come? he
asked. “Oh, my dear gentlemen, how the Lord will smite with an iron rod all these old
pots! When I say so, I am considered rebellious. So be it!” (Cf. Zimmermann’s
Peasant
War, II, p. 75.)
Muenzer had the sermon printed. His Allstedt printer was punished by Duke Johann of
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Saxony with banishment. His own writings were to be henceforth subjected to the
censorship of the ducal government in Weimar. But he paid no heed to this order. He
immediately published a very inciting paper in the imperial city of Muehlhausen, wherein
he admonished the people “to widen the hole so that all the
world may see and comprehend
who our fools are who have blasphemously turned our Lord into a painted mannikin.” He
concluded with the following words: “All the world must suffer a big jolt. The game will
be such that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats and the downtrodden will rise.” As a
motto, Thomas Muenzer, “the man with the hammer,” wrote the following on the title
page: “Beware, I have put my words into thy mouth; I have lifted thee above the people
and above the empires that thou mayest uproot, destroy, scatter and overthrow, and that
thou mayest build and plant. A wall of iron against the kings, princes, priests, and for the
people hath been erected.
Let them fight, for victory is wondrous, and the strong and
godless tyrants will perish.”
The breach between Muenzer and Luther with his party had taken place long before
that. Luther himself was compelled to accept some church reforms which were introduced
by Muenzer without consulting him. Luther watched Muenzer’s activities with the nettled
distrust of a moderate reformer towards an energetic far-aiming radical. Already in the
spring of 1524, in a letter to Melanchthon, that model of a hectic stay-at-home Philistine,
Muenzer wrote that he and Luther did not understand the movement at all. They were
seeking, he said, to choke it by adherence to the letter of the Bible, and their doctrine was
worm-eaten. “Dear brethren,”
he wrote, “stop your delaying and hesitating. The time has
come, the summer is knocking at our doors. Do not keep friendship with the ungodly who
prevent the Word from exercising its full force. Do not flatter your princes in order that you
may not perish with them. Ye tender, bookish scholars, do not be wroth, for I cannot do
otherwise.”
Luther had more than once invited Muenzer to an open debate. The latter, however,
being always ready to accept battle in the presence of the people, did not have the slightest
desire to plunge into a theological squabble before the partisan public of the Wittenberg
University. He had no desire “to bring the testimony of the spirit
before the high school of
learning exclusively.” If Luther was sincere, he wrote, let him use his influence to stop the
chicaneries against his, Muenzer’s, printers, and to lift the censorship in order that their
controversy might be freely fought out in the press.
When the above-mentioned revolutionary brochure appeared, Luther openly denounced
Muenzer. In his “Letter to the Princes of Saxony Against the Rebellious Spirit,” he
declared Muenzer to be an instrument of Satan, and demanded of the princes to intervene,
and drive the instigators of the upheaval out of the country, since, he said, they did not
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