Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil

Against the Papacy at Rome, Founded by the Devil is the last and most ferocious of Martin Luther's attacks on the papal office, published in March 1545, less than a year before his death. The occasion was political. In the summer of 1544 the Diet of Speyer had granted the Protestant estates a measure of toleration pending a council, and Pope Paul III responded with a brief to Emperor Charles V sharply rebuking him for presuming to settle matters of religion that belonged to the pope alone. Paul had meanwhile summoned the council that would eventually open at Trent. When the papal brief circulated in Germany, Elector John Frederick of Saxony asked Luther to answer it. The result was a sprawling German pamphlet whose title page carried a satirical woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder, and which appeared alongside Cranach's series of grotesque images of the papacy with verses by Luther.

Beneath the invective the treatise is organized around three questions the papal brief had raised. Is the pope head of Christendom by divine right? Does he alone have authority to summon and judge councils? Does the Holy Roman Empire derive from him, so that he may transfer or revoke it? Luther answers no to each. He works through Matthew 16, John 21, and Luke 22 to argue that Christ gave the keys to the whole church and not to Peter as a monarch, and that the Roman bishop's primacy was a later human arrangement, not a divine institution. He points out that the great early councils were called by emperors, not popes, and that papal claims rest on the forged Donation of Constantine and the pseudo-Isidorian decretals. The empire, he insists, exists by God's ordering of secular government and owes the pope nothing. From these arguments he draws the conclusion announced in the title: an office that fabricates divine right for itself, forbids the free preaching of the gospel, and places itself above Scripture and council is not founded by Christ but by the devil, and the pope is the Antichrist foretold in 2 Thessalonians. The language is unrestrained. Luther addresses the pope as "Most Hellish Father," coins scatological nicknames, and calls on the emperor and princes to strip Rome of its lands.

The work has continued to matter less as theology than as evidence. It shows how completely Luther's early hope for reform had hardened into an apocalyptic reading of history in which the papacy was the final enemy, and it fixed a tone of anti-papal polemic that shaped Protestant rhetoric for generations. Modern Luther scholarship has had to reckon with it, asking whether the vulgarity reflects illness and age, deliberate rhetorical strategy, or the genuine terminus of his ecclesiology. Readers who want to understand why Lutheran confessional documents identify the papacy with Antichrist will find the reasoning laid out here more fully than anywhere else in his writings.

Who should read this: historians of the Reformation, students of Luther's doctrine of the church and of sixteenth-century polemical culture, and anyone who wants to see the old Luther unfiltered. It is not a devotional text, not a starting point for reading Luther, and not for readers who will be unable to get past the obscenity to the argument underneath it.