In September 1522, Adam Petri printed in Basel a compilation of Propositions of Luther, Melanchthon, Karlstadt, etc. It was the third such compilation of academic theses printed by Petri, and among its pages was an anonymous series of 48 Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead (Articvli de conivratione mortvorvm migrantivm).Footnote 1 The Articles represent a historically significant formulation of early evangelical arguments regarding individual eschatology:Footnote 2 they were perhaps the first public evangelical repudiation of the existence of purgatory, preceding by a full eight years Luther's Renunciation of Purgatory.Footnote 3 Even more, they contained a biblical-theological argument against the belief—then widespread among scholars, clerics, and the laity—that souls in purgatory would appear to or haunt the living, seeking the intervention of the living in order to secure their escape from purgatorial punishment.Footnote 4 The idea that the living could offer masses, pilgrimages, indulgences, and other works to God on behalf of the dead was a pillar of the relationship between the living and the dead in the Middle Ages.Footnote 5
Scholars have long attributed the Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead to Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, an early and significant academic ally of Martin Luther who was denounced by the latter in March 1522 for his supposedly legalistic and uncharitable insistence on “external” religious reforms.Footnote 6 Shortly after the Articles were published, however, Karlstadt produced his Sermon on the State of Christ-Believing Souls, on Abraham's Bosom and the Purgatory of Departed Souls (henceforth Sermon vom Stand, after the German title)—an effort to revise rather than reject the idea of purgatory.Footnote 7 Scholars have traced this alleged about-face by Karlstadt to a variety of personal contacts and intellectual sources, as well as to the theological and pastoral difficulties created by Karlstadt's conviction that baptism should be delayed until recipients could demonstrate true faith. For Karlstadt and his hearers, an intermediate state in the afterlife might have served to maintain the possibility of salvation for children who died unbaptized.Footnote 8
By pointing to extensive and substantial parallels between the Articles and several of Luther's contemporary works—particularly surrounding the use of Deuteronomy 18:10–12 and Luke 16:19–31—this essay will demonstrate that the Articles were not authored by Karlstadt but by someone firmly in Luther's sway on questions of individual eschatology; most likely, they were written by Luther himself.Footnote 9 More importantly, this essay uses the Articles as a starting point to explore the theological and pastoral difficulties that belief in the wandering dead created for early Wittenberg reformers. It shows that the Wittenbergers’ questions about the status of the dead and the existence and nature of purgatory frequently turned on the question of how the living should conduct themselves and maintain their salvation in a world filled with troubling voices from extra-natural realms.Footnote 10 Prior scholarship has assumed that the reformers’ counsel about the ghosts was derived from their thought about purgatory.Footnote 11 Often, the reverse occurred. Questions about how to deal with ghosts on the basis of the doctrinal foci of the Reformation controlled discussions of purgatory.
Accordingly, this essay argues that the Latin Articles were but one piece of an endeavor initiated by Luther himself—and also carried out in Luther's vernacular works—to focus believers’ attention on scripture as the sole source of truth and Christ as the sole source of salvation. Interpreting the appearance of “wandering spirits”Footnote 12 and, indeed, every communication from the supposed dead as a demonic distraction from the few true sources of salvation, Luther counseled Christians to look for truth in scripture alone. Luther's stance on the wandering spirits belonged to a disciplinary program seeking to realize the “normative concentrations” of the Reformation in believers’ lives.Footnote 13 As defined by Berndt Hamm, late-medieval normative centering sought “the alignment of both religion and society towards a standardizing, authoritative, regulating and legitimizing focal point.”Footnote 14 Luther's efforts to translate doctrinal centering into lived religious discipline in relation to the wandering spirits focused on believers’ sensory experiences, particularly their sight and hearing; Luther addressed physical, outward senses, while also invoking the physical senses as metaphors for inward comportment.Footnote 15 Thus, Christians who were troubled by ghosts or poltergeists—or perhaps tempted to consult the dead via the “black arts”—were instructed by Luther not to hear the supposed wandering dead. In a kindred manner, Luther instructed the dying to close their eyes when the devil assailed them with terrifying “images” of death, sin, and hell.Footnote 16
Karlstadt participated fully in Wittenberg efforts to organize doctrine around a few key loci—faith, grace, Christ, scripture—and to see this concentration realized in the daily lives of evangelicals. Yet his conception of salvation as a process of learning that might continue beyond the grave inspired a different interpretation of the wandering spirits and different advice to believers confronted by these spirits.Footnote 17 Scholars have overlooked the fact that Karlstadt's Sermon vom Stand contradicts the Articles’ contentions not only about purgatory, but also about the wandering spirits. Sermon vom Stand does not, as scholars have claimed, dismiss the wandering spirits as always demonic;Footnote 18 rather, Karlstadt argues—quite possibly in direct, critical conversation with the Articles—that these apparitions might be confused, ignorant souls who still need to learn the right way to salvation. The relevant pastoral context reveals itself to be, in part, anxiety about the fate of persons who had died before the claimed rediscovery of the gospel in Wittenberg. That said, alongside his work of consolation, Karlstadt still demanded lived concentration in the form of learning, just as Luther demanded concentration in relation to the senses.
I. The Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead
We do not know precisely when the Articles were written or debated. Barge, who was the first to argue for Karlstadt's authorship, posited that they predated Luther's return from hiding in the Wartburg Castle and his denunciation of Karlstadt in early March 1522;Footnote 19 Zorzin and Oehmig find traces of Karlstadt's response to tensions between Luther and himself after March 9.Footnote 20 This section highlights a few parallels between the Articles and Luther's thought and writings; above all, it discusses the use of Deuteronomy 18:10–12 and Luke 16:19–31 in the Articles, for it was especially in their treatment of these two texts that the Articles participated in Luther's broader efforts in 1521–1523 to instill in believers a disciplined, evangelical stance toward wandering spirits. These efforts are described in Section II.
The Articles begin with the declaration, “When it has departed from the body, the soul immediately enters heaven or hell” (Article 1).Footnote 21 Articles 2 through 8 give supporting biblical citations, along with a line from the Athanasian Creed: “Those who did good will enter into eternal life, but those who did evil into eternal fire” (3). These biblical citations correspond to a series of citations made by Luther in his 1518 Explanations of the Ninety-Five Theses, where he noted that they “militate against the whole idea of purgatory because they do not establish an intermediary state between the dead who have been condemned and those who are saved.”Footnote 22
Articles 9 and 10 turn to the topic of conjuring the dead, citing Deuteronomy 18:10–12, where the Israelites are forbidden to sacrifice their sons or daughters, consult diviners, interpret dreams or auguries, consult soothsayers, or “seek truth from the dead.” The apparitions of souls resulting from such practices are “either dreams or diabolical deceits,” the Articles assert, and the answers they dispense are false (11–12). Articles 13–19 compare the work of conjurers to the work of witches: witches and conjurers believe in the efficacy of their practices, and hence, with God's permission, they are deceived by the devil (17–19). The conjuration of the dead, moreover, has the appearance of worship (15)Footnote 23 and involves the (mis)use of divine words (16). Article 20 broadens this theme, arguing that the devil apes the divine and “mingles his deceitful signs with the sacred gospel” in order to smear his sword with honey and make his poison sweet. While the reference to the sword smeared with honey reminds of Karlstadt,Footnote 24 the Articles (especially 15–24) reflect Luther's life-long concern for the devil's mimicry of true worship and faith.Footnote 25
In addition, Articles 25–28 contain a series of assertions that Luther made often in 1521–1523. These assertions describe apparitions of souls as a profound threat to the doctrine of salvation by faith alone:
25. . . . [M]asked demons (personati daemones) desire many masses, pompous alms, public fasts, and pilgrimages. 26. Whence it happens that these attractive (speciosa) works extinguish faith and hope in God. 27. For people seeing these works now suppose that they are saved not by faith, but from these works.
Article 28 states simply that these masses, alms, fasts, and pilgrimages do not please God, while Articles 29–31 contrast the “signs of the promise” instituted by Christ, namely baptism and the Eucharist, to false signs left behind by the devil, including “holy water, consecrated herbs, sanctified salt, the words of the gospel, the signs of the cross.” “The use of these is Christian,” Article 32 explains, but “the abuse of them” desired by the devil “is wicked and stinks of idolatry.” People must not be deceived by the appearance of lost loved ones, the Articles explain, for “the devil is able to fashion the face of any person, as he wishes, from existing matter (ex materia praeiace[n]te)” (33). In so doing, the devil deceives people in the same manner that he deceived Eve (34).
The Articles, finally, cite the story of Lazarus and the rich man from Luke 16:19–31 in order to deny that tormented souls appear to the living and seek their assistance. As discussed below, on numerous occasions between 1521 and 1523, Luther used Luke 16 in connection with Deuteronomy 18 to make this point. In Luke's account, Jesus describes “a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and lived luxuriously and with pleasure every day”Footnote 26 and a poor, boil-covered man, Lazarus, who lay at the rich man's gate longing for table scraps, while the dogs came and licked his sores. Both men died, and Lazarus was carried by angels to Abraham's “bosom (Schoß),” while the rich man found himself in hell and torment. From hell, the story continues, the rich man begged Abraham to “send Lazarus, so that he might dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue,” but Abraham responded with the rebuke, “Remember, son, that you received your good things during your life, while Lazarus received evil.” Abraham also explained that “a great chasm” stood between them, so that “those who would descend from here to you cannot, and [they] also cannot cross over from there to us.” The story concludes with an exchange surrounding the rich man's plea that Lazarus be sent to his five living brothers, to warn them to avoid their sibling's fate. Abraham says that the living must listen instead to Moses and the prophets; the rich man counters that a dead person would be more convincing and move his brothers to repentance; but Abraham retorts, “If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, they also will not believe if someone were to rise from the dead.”
The Articles offer this tale as evidence that there are two possible eternal fates, and that the place of torment is impregnable and inescapable; the “captives” in hell cannot receive help from the blessed or the living, nor cross over to another realm. The Articles read:
37. Whoever receives his good things in this life, like the rich man adorned in purple, will be tormented in another place, 38. but whoever receives evil things with Lazarus will enjoy everlasting solace (solatio sempiterno) in that place. 39. Between the place of solace and the place of torment a giant chasm has been established. 40. Just as those who enjoy solace, whenever they wish to cross over from here to the wretched, cannot, 41. neither are the captives able to cross over from that place to this place. 42. Thus neither are the captives able to return into their own homes.
Here, the Articles’ reformulation of individual eschatology made an urgent demand of believers. They must not only rethink the fate of their lost loved ones, but also close their own ears to apparent messages from the tormented dead. Set in opposition to Article 10 and its citation of Deuteronomy 18 (“To seek truth from the dead is a transgression and abomination before God.”), Article 43 declares with reference to Luke 16, “The truth must be sought from Moses and the prophets, that is, from sacred scripture, not from the dead.” Those who base their faith on the dead or their belief in immortality on St. Patrick's purgatory are unbelievers (44–45). Like the casting of a spell, the conjuring of the dead is a type of idolatry (47).
The final article, “I stand before the tribunal of scripture, at which I must be judged” (48), has a defensive ring, and Zorzin—in his argument for Karlstadt's authorship of the Articles—proposes that it may reflect tensions in the theology faculty after Luther's return to Wittenberg in March 1522.Footnote 27 If Luther wrote the Articles, however, such a defensive conclusion might have reflected his well-documented uncertainty in the early 1520s about the fate of souls after death; in other words, the last article might reveal lingering doubt behind the literary form of confident assertion. Here, it is important to underline that Luther was uncertain about souls’ post-mortem condition, not about the demonic origins of the wandering spirits. Another possibility is that a close disciple of Luther wrote the Articles and wanted, in the final thesis, to defend his readiness to make bold assertions about the afterlife, even as Luther himself wavered. Whoever wrote the Articles, the parallels to the vernacular works of Luther discussed below evidence their close connection with Luther's endeavor to discipline evangelical faithful not to listen to the dead, and to arm these faithful for combat in an appropriate, evangelical manner with apparent wandering souls. The next section describes this program and connects it to Luther's instructions on facing one's own death.
II. Death, the Afterlife and the Wandering Dead in Luther's Works, 1521–1523
The model sermons (Postille) penned by Luther during his “exile” in the Wartburg from May 1521 to March 1522 occupy a place of considerable historical significance as the beginning of an ambitious effort to guide evangelical clergy in right preaching and right exegesis according to Luther's understanding of the gospel. By controlling preaching, the Postils sought to shape the faith profession and the “lived religion” of evangelical Christians.Footnote 28 Here, we are concerned with a passage from the Christmas Postils (Weihnachtspostille), which were completed by November 1521 and published in March 1522, before the Advent Postils.Footnote 29 It is thus likely that the Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead were penned after the relevant postil.Footnote 30
The wandering spirits appear in Luther's discussion of Matthew 2:4–6, where Luther begins by asking why the star brought the magi to Jerusalem rather than Bethlehem. In Jerusalem, Luther explains, the priests and scribes consulted scripture to identify the birthplace of the messiah; thus, Christ “teach[es] us to cling to Scripture and not to follow our own presumptuous ideas or any human teaching . . . It is in Scripture and nowhere else, that he permits himself to be found.” Luther supports his exegesis by citing Abraham's rebuke of the rich man's request that Lazarus be sent to his brothers. Luther complains that “our learned scholars (unßer gelerten)” have ignored this rebuke and “devised all manner of ways to learn the truth”—through human-invented laws and doctrines, through the “lives and example of the saints,” and through the scriptural interpretations of the saints and church fathers. According to Luther, Christians must regard scripture as the sole source and measure of truth; in turn, scripture teaches that faith cannot abide where a person thinks that salvation comes from any other sources.Footnote 31 Luther particularly criticizes an alleged reliance on “natural light and pagan knowledge” in the church's theology; he found this undue reliance epitomized in the belief that one must understand Aristotle to be a theologian.Footnote 32
Most important for our purposes, Luther describes the consultation of the dead as an extreme form and consequence of seeking truth outside of scripture. He writes:
they fall into the hands of the devil and follow the examples of those who have visions of departed souls and pray to them for help; without fear or trembling they believe everything that those spirits told them. That is why the mass has fallen into such abuse, with masses for departed souls and the sale of masses . . . The devil permitted himself to be adjured (beschweren) and compelled to speak the truth. So he has made a joke and game out of our faith and sacrament, just as he wanted it.Footnote 33
The final two lines here mirror arguments from the Articles. According to Luther, the learned and the laity following the former gave credence to a demonic trick—to apparent visions of the dead and stories of the same—and this misdirected belief led to a massive perversion of the faith, centered on the mass.Footnote 34 The resulting false, if apparently pious, faith and sacrament represent divine punishment “for our inquisitiveness, because we were not satisfied to have God's Scriptures alone.”Footnote 35
Importantly, Luther treats the wandering spirits here not only as historical sources for the belief that the mass was a sacrifice—and hence a possible offering to God on behalf of the dead—but also as a present threat to normative concentration on scripture: “God does not desire that you should learn from the dead and seek the truth from them,” Luther instructs with reference to Deuteronomy 18. Christians must accept the sufficiency of God's instruction in scripture, particularly in regard to the afterlife: “He knows well what he ought to tell you about the living and the dead.” Attempting to inculcate right behavior in the face of hauntings, Luther instructs Christians to despise “all this swindle of the spirits and not be afraid of them.” A “poltergeist and tapping spirit (pollter- unnd rumpellgeyst)” is never a good spirit, he argues, and Christians confronted by such noise should cross themselves and cling to faith. A poltergeist will cease when combatted with faith and God's Word.Footnote 36 The haunted can take their stand on Luke 16:29:
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 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 . . . so bravely and joyfully; if he is an evil spirit, as all of the poltergeists are, he will soon say farewell.Footnote 37
To the armament of Luke 16, Luther adds Deuteronomy 18:10–11, explaining that Abraham himself regarded this passage in rebuking the rich man. Thus, the Christian may inform spirits, “Non queras a mortuis, dicit dominus.”Footnote 38 The academic positions of the Articles are translated into practical advice for the haunted in the Christmas Postils. The question was how to live “normative concentration”:Footnote 39 how to fight with faith and the Word alone when poltergeists raged, and how to concentrate on necessary and useful truth, revealed in scripture, when evil spirits or their conjurers promised to reveal the secrets of the afterlife.Footnote 40
The doctrine of purgatory was implicated in the context of this concern for believers’ concentration. Admitting that “the scriptures know nothing of it [purgatory],” Luther strategically withholds a doctrinal decision and addresses instead belief in the effectiveness of interventions for the dead: the doctrine of purgatory has damned “innumerable souls,” he says, because they “placed their reliance on works and consoled themselves with the thought that works would bring them release.” Luther adds that he will not stop those who wish to pray for the dead, but in his opinion, “purgatory is not our common lot” and “very few souls get there.”Footnote 41
To summarize, in his discussion of Matthew 2:4–6, Luther brings together Luke 16:19–31 and Deuteronomy 18:10–12, treats all communication with the (supposed) dead as threatening to normative concentration, dismisses apparitions as demonic tricks buttressing the false religion of the mass and other works, and addresses purgatory within this context. These arguments and strategies join the discussion in the Christmas Postils to the Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead, as well as to two sermons on the rich man and Lazarus that Luther produced in 1522 and 1523; together all of these texts, Latin and vernacular, were part of a single, sustained project of refining and securing the life of faith among evangelicals. This effort to inculcate evangelical concentration in the face of wandering spirits, moreover, paralleled efforts to promote concentration in believers as they prepared for and faced their own deaths. Luther pursued the latter instruction most notably in the Sermon on Preparing to Die, which was printed often after its initial appearance in October 1519,Footnote 42 and which represents an important precursor to the 1522–23 sermons.
Christian concentration according to Luther had auditory and visual dimensions. Thus, Luther advised Christians to ignore, shut out, and despise the sounds of the spirits—whether the seductive information offered by the supposed dead or the loud clamoring of poltergeists. In the Sermon on Preparing to Die, the visual metaphor dominates. Beginning with the assumption that the saved die willingly and gladly—thus demonstrating their true faith (i.e. trust) in God's promises, signified by the sacraments—Luther teaches his hearers and readers how to close their eyes before or look away from the terrifying images of death, sin, and hell that a person faces at death. These images are hurled at the dying by the devil, who works hand-in-hand with a person's “foolish and fainthearted” nature and “fearful” conscience in order to produce fear of divine wrath and, hence, an unwilling death that brings eternal damnation. The devil's greatest conceit, wrapped up in the image of hell, is to tempt souls into seeking to penetrate God's hidden will regarding election—a searching that leads to “hatred and blasphemy of God” and to the presumption to have knowledge equal to God's.Footnote 43
For Luther, two visual exercises can save the soul in the combat of death: first, in life, “we should constantly have our eyes fixed on the image of death, sin, and hell.” In order not to despair, however, these three images are to be contemplated within counter-images of life, grace, and heaven (or salvation), all of which are embodied in Christ. The Christian must look away from the self to Christ, for on the cross, Luther says, Christ “prepared himself as a threefold picture for us, to be held before the eyes of our faith against the three evil pictures.” The second exercise, then, is to focus in the moment of death itself exclusively upon the positive, trust-producing images.Footnote 44 Christ serves as an example. According to Luther, “the Jews” assailed Christ with images of death, sin, and hell, just as the devil assails the dying; yet Christ “acts as though he does not hear or see them and makes no reply.” In the same way, Christians must forget the dread images and “only Christ's image must abide in [them].” The sacraments aid this concentration, giving concrete auditory and visual presence to the image of Christ.Footnote 45
In short, the faithful who in their lives had plugged their ears before and turned their eyes from the wandering spirits and their tales of purgatory, and who had sought Christ alone in the spoken word (auditory) and printed scripture (visual), were admonished to shut their inward eyes before terrifying images at the moment of death, and to turn their (metaphorical) heads and eyes instead to the image of Christ, made immediately present to physical, outward hearing and seeing in the sacrament.Footnote 46 The physical senses are disciplined in life according to spiritual comportment, and in turn, they aid the soul at death by receiving the sacrament.
In Luther's 1522 and 1523 sermons on Luke 16:19–31, his chief aim is to depict Lazarus and the rich man as respective exemplars of faith and unbelief, trust and distrust.Footnote 47 Yet Luther also addresses difficult questions raised by the biblical passage about the afterlife and the fate of souls. For one, Luke 16 references physical realms and physical bodies—bosoms, tongues, fingers—although bodily resurrection was believed to occur only at the end of history. Luther underlines in the 1522 sermon that the bodies of Abraham, Lazarus, and the rich man all lay in the grave. He interprets Abraham's bosom as God's Word of salvation through Christ, first pronounced to Abraham in Genesis 22:18. According to Luther, those who die with firm faith in this Word sleep secure as in a bosom until the Last Judgment. Conversely, the “hell” of the rich man is not the “true hell, which will begin at the Last Judgment,” but the rich man's “evil conscience, which is without faith and God's Word.” In this evil conscience, “the soul is buried and bound until the final day, when the person with body and soul will be cast in the true, bodily hell.”Footnote 48 Thus, finally, the conversation between the rich man and Abraham illustrates the torment of the rich man's wicked, unbelieving conscience at the moment of death.Footnote 49
In regard to the temporality of the afterlife in Luke 16:19–31, Luther again notes some vexing questions: when did the conversation described by Jesus occur? Does the rich man still suffer “daily and without ceasing until the Last Judgment”? Luther declares the latter question “subtle” and “not easy to answer for the inexperienced. For here one must put time out of his mind and know that in that world there is neither time nor hour, but all is an eternal moment.” The rich man, Luther says, is an example of the torment in conscience of all unbelievers when their eyes are opened in death; this torment may last “a moment long and afterwards cease until the final judgment, however it pleases God.” No “certain rule” can be established here; all depends on the divine will.Footnote 50
Tellingly, Luther does not dwell on the uncertain landscape of the afterlife, but instead addresses concrete questions of how the living should interact with the dead. One question was whether Christians should pray for the deceased, given that Luke 16 describes “no middle realm (standt)” between Abraham's bosom, where the dead need no prayer, and hell, where prayer cannot help. This was an urgent question for evangelical Christians, because prayer for lost loved ones had long been upheld as an important religious duty of the living. Luther answers that, because God does not command prayers for the dead, omission of such prayer is no sin; at the same time, Luther will not hinder prayers for the dead, because God leaves human beings uncertain about the state of departed souls.Footnote 51 What matters most is that praying Christians are content to remain uncertain; they should repeat their prayers only one or three times, then trust that God hears prayers, just as God has promised.Footnote 52 It is an indication of distrust of God that one “endows eternal masses, vigils, and prayers, and blabbers on (plerret) every year, as if God has not heard it for a year.”Footnote 53
What if a “rumpel geyst” or poltergeist demanded such interventions, however? Luther raises this concern and answers that such a spirit is surely the devil. Luke 16:19–31 shows that there is no intercourse between the living and the tormented dead. “No soul has ever appeared from the beginning of the world, [and] God also will not permit it,” Luther explains. Accordingly, Abraham will not permit that “a dead person teach the living, but he directs them to God's Word in scripture.” As in the postil, Luther notes that Abraham recalls and directs Christians to Deuteronomy 18. “It is certainly a mere trick of the devil that some spirits let themselves be called up and ask for however many masses, such and such pilgrimage or other work, and later appear with clarity and claim they have been delivered.” With this trick, the devil causes people to fall from faith into works-righteousness.Footnote 54 To counter the devil's deceit, according to Luther, the people should disregard a poltergeist (“achte seyn nicht”) or strike it with the words of Luke 16:29 and Deuteronomy 18:11; the poltergeist will soon withdraw, and if he does not, Luther advises, “let him rage (polter) until he becomes tired of it, and suffer his wantonness with firm faith, for God's sake.” Even if the haunting specter were “a soul or a good spirit,” one must not learn from or ask questions of it, Luther warns; the very reason behind the incarnation was that God wants the Son to “teach us everything that is necessary to know.” God demands a narrow focus on one truth source: Christ teaching and taught in scripture.Footnote 55
As an exemplum of a right response to ghosts, Luther offers a story about Gregory Thaumaturgus (d. c.270). According to the tale, Gregory once passed the night in a haunted bathhouse, in which many previous lodgers had been found dead in the morning. Gregory entered the bathhouse fearlessly, knowing “this was a trick of the devil (teuffels gespent).” Gregory had “a firm faith that Christ was lord of the devil,” and through his prayers and presence, the haunting ceased. “See,” Luther announces, “there you see that the poltergeists are devils, and that a person should not argue with them at length, but rather despise them with joyful faith, as if they were nothing.”Footnote 56
A second, longer tale about Gregory confirms the point and concludes the sermon: according to this story, Gregory once spent the night with a “heathen sexton (kirchner)” who had an idol that would answer his questions. The sexton earned a living by telling people secrets learned from the idol. Gregory knew nothing of the idol, but his prayers and presence compelled the demon to flee. Later, while the sexton was sorrowing over his loss, the demon appeared to him in a dream and revealed the cause of his flight. The sexton then pursued Gregory in complaint, and he obtained from the saint a mocking letter permitting the demon to continue its trickery. Finally, however, the sexton was more impressed by Gegory's power over the demon; he came to his senses and pursued Gregory again, this time to be taught and baptized, and he later became a bishop. Luther concludes with commendation of Gregory's simple disregard for the demons: “See how simply faith proceeds here and nevertheless it works so boldly, certainly, and powerfully. Do likewise to your poltergeists.”Footnote 57
Luther accepted the reality of the wandering spirits, but he explained their origin as demonic: they were noisy distractions from true faith or tempting sources of information about the dead and the afterlife. Thus, they were a threat to the lived religiosity demanded by the Reformation's normative concentrations on faith, scripture, and Christ alone. Christians under Luther's instruction were to be content to accept faithfully a lack of knowledge about the afterlife and the dead. Whatever Luther's own uncertainty about purgatory in 1521–1522—an uncertainty springing from seemingly contradictory biblical witnessesFootnote 58—he strategically channeled that uncertainty into a counsel of proper religious discipline.
In its interpretation of the eschatological dimensions of Luke 16, Luther's 1523 sermon on the rich man and Lazarus repeats much of the 1522 sermon: admitting his uncertainty,Footnote 59 Luther argues that the bosom of Abraham cannot be bodily, but only the Word or promise. At death, a Christian “must close his eyes and cling to God's Word alone and trust that God will accept us: he must go there courageously in the faith that nothing is there but the Word; thus he enters into the bosom of Abraham.”Footnote 60 Luther also asserts, once again, that the conversation between the rich man and Abraham occurs in the former's tormented conscience,Footnote 61 and that temporal categories do not apply to the afterlife.Footnote 62 Luther will not affirm or deny purgatory, for the matter “stands in God's power.”Footnote 63 Thus, Christians may pray for departed souls, but only once or twice; thereafter, the fate of souls should be commended to God.Footnote 64 The devil is behind the appearance of souls asking for countless masses. Scripture says nothing about wandering souls, but it does describe wandering devils that fly in the air and inhabit house and court. Addressing concrete, sensory experience, Luther advises, “If you hear something, say ‘you are the devil.’”Footnote 65
Along with these repetitions of his 1522 sermon, however, Luther in 1523 adds revealing criticism of speculation about the afterlife. This criticism may well have been a response to Karlstadt's purgatory tract, which appeared in the year between Luther's two sermons and which contained confident assertions about souls’ post-mortem experiences. Luther says:
There are several things contained there [in Luke 16] that even I do not know. They are very difficult (scharpff), and nature likes to inquire curiously about such things as what heaven, hell, and Abraham's bosom are: whatever a person says about these things, I commend to God. In summation, you have here that a Christian life should proceed and consist in devotion to one's neighbor . . . But the rest of these things are for the illuminated (erleuchten); nevertheless, I will say a little.Footnote 66
While Luther could not resist the temptation—or the pastoral necessity—to address the afterlife in conjunction with Luke 16:19–31, he nonetheless devoted more attention to explaining the passage's lessons about faith and love, and he enjoined a disciplined acceptance of limited knowledge about the afterlife.
III. The Sleep of Departed Souls and the Articles
Thus far, this essay has demonstrated Luther's call for new, evangelical discipline in relation to death, dying, and the relationship between the living and the dead. Christians were to cling in faith to scripture, the Word, and Christ alone, plugging their ears to the clamor of the poltergeists and closing their eyes to apparitions of lost loved ones. In their own deaths, moreover, they were to shut their inward eyes before fear- and distrust-inducing images of death, sin, and hell, and to gaze instead at images of life, grace, and heaven, embodied in Christ and made physically present to the outward eyes and ears in the sacraments. Luther constantly advanced this religious program by bringing together Luke 16 and Deuteronomy 18. The Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead, discussed in Section I above, belong to this program.
Luther may not have written the Articles, however. Indeed, the Articles’ seemingly assured exclusion of purgatory does not correspond to the hesitation of the two sermons on Luke 16:19–31. Furthermore, the Articles argue for a universal and immediate entry of souls into the afterlife, while Luther, from January 1522 onward, often expressed the opinion that souls sleep between death and the final judgment.Footnote 67 With that said, Luther remained inconsistent throughout his life regarding whether intermediate sleep awaited departed souls or immediate judgment and entry into heaven or hell.Footnote 68 His views were in flux in the early 1520s. Luther's January 13, 1522 letter to Nikolaus von Amsdorf, which Lohse calls an exemplary “exposition” of the soul's sleep,Footnote 69 is actually remarkably uncertain. “Concerning your souls, I have not enough [insight] to answer you,” Luther writes. “I am inclined to agree with your opinion that the souls of the just are asleep and that they do not know where they are up to the Day of Judgment.” Yet Luther must admit some exceptions due to various scriptural passages, including Luke 16.Footnote 70 In any case, Luther appears to have reconciled opposing scriptural testimonies regarding the afterlife—intermediate sleep versus immediate bliss—through his beliefs, first, that sleeping souls would not experience the passage of time and, second, that temporal categories do not apply to the afterlife.Footnote 71 It is not implausible that Luther would have spoken, in a series of academic theses from early 1522, of souls’ immediate entry into bliss or damnation.
In any case, the Articles on the Conjuration of the Wandering Dead, aside from mirroring discrete arguments and assertions made in contemporary writings by Luther, participated in Luther's overarching program of excluding conversation with the dead—of concentrating believers’ faithful attention on scripture and Christ alone in preparation for their own, decisive confrontation with death. Conversely, while Andreas Karlstadt shared in the effort to center Christian life around faith, Christ, and scripture alone,Footnote 72 his concept of faith as knowledge inspired a different approach to life, death, and the dead.
IV. Karlstadt, Thomas Müntzer, and the Articles
Karlstadt's creativity and independence vis-à-vis Luther makes him an unlikely candidate for authorship of the Articles. It is far more likely that Karlstadt's affirmation of purgatory in Sermon vom Stand was developed over several years and in a relatively consistent trajectory, inspired in part by studies of Johannes Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch begun in 1517–1518.Footnote 73 This conclusion corresponds to what we know about the relationship of Karlstadt to Thomas Müntzer, while also helping to clarify Müntzer's complaint in a March 29, 1522 letter to Philipp Melanchthon about the Wittenbergers’ denial of purgatory. Ulrich Bubenheimer has proposed that Karlstadt and Müntzer studied Tauler together during Müntzer's time as a student in Wittenberg between 1517 and 1519.Footnote 74 If so, they may have developed their kindred but distinct commitments to spiritual purgation in close conversation with one another.Footnote 75 In any case, if the analysis advanced here is correct, Müntzer's 1522 complaint about the denial of purgatory by Wittenberg theologians cannot—as the editors of the new critical edition of Müntzer's works suppose—have applied to Karlstadt as the author of the Articles. Rather, Müntzer entered with Karlstadt into a debate against the Articles and Luther.Footnote 76 Esteem for a properly-refined concept of purgatory represented important common ground between Müntzer and Karlstadt and likely played a role in motivating Müntzer's decision in December 1522 to reach out to Karlstadt as a fellow outsider vis-à-vis Wittenberg theological circles.Footnote 77
V. The Sermon vom Stand and Karlstadt's Pastoral Concerns
The radical discontinuity between life and death described by Luther did not apply to believers in Karlstadt's perspective. While Karlstadt agreed that faith in the moment of death was necessary for salvation, he taught that the faithful would continue post-mortem an experience and process of purgative learning begun in life. His teachings on the wandering spirits in Sermon vom Stand were situated within this view: the spirits might be ignorant and confused souls, destined for salvation but still needing to learn. Regrettably, scholars have largely overlooked the relevant remarks and noted only Karlstadt's statement that apparent spirits might be demonic.Footnote 78 In fact, this statement appears to be a concession to arguments made by Luther and in the Articles. At the same time, Karlstadt responded to a pastoral concern absent from the above-discussed writings by Luther—namely, to evangelical anxiety about the fate of those who died before the claimed rediscovery of true doctrine in Wittenberg. Here, the voices of the dead became for Karlstadt spurs to earthly learning, and evidences of the religious confusion surrounding works-righteousness.
Karlstadt's Sermon vom Stand was preached on All Saints’ Day (November 2) 1522, and may have been printed already in December. Taking up the lectionary text, I Thessalonians 4:13–18, Karlstadt assures his hearers and readers that they will be reunited in the resurrection with loved ones who died in Christ.Footnote 79 Christians should rejoice that these loved ones have been freed from their bodies, which imprisoned them in “the law of sin.”Footnote 80 It is foolish, Karlstadt says, to “endow masses, sing vigils and matins, and spend money” in order to free souls from a state that is better than that of the living—a state “they enjoy with heartfelt delight and wish for us [to attain].” In fact, the departed faithful ask God that the living “might come to them and rest in true yearning love and powerful desire for God.” Faithful departed souls have a “hot and burning desire for God” and desire “that their state and life become more and hotter each day.” They do not want their desire to “be lessened and become cooler.” “Oh, he would have been a friend indeed,” Karlstadt exclaims, “who wanted to rescue Lazarus from the bosom of Abraham.”Footnote 81 Those who die without faith, however, are beyond help according to Luke 16:19–31.Footnote 82
Karlstadt claims that there are three grades to “eternal life.” It begins on earth for those who believe and live in Christ, dying to their fleshly life. They attain true knowledge of God, which “does not happen in reason or in the false natural light, as the doctors [imagine who] dispute about God, but rather in the ground of the soul, in the divine undeceiving light, and makes the person a friend of God, for it unites the soul to God the Lord . . . Eternal life is a true knowledge of God and Christ, which the Spirit alone gives and teaches, for it unites and becomes one thing with the soul.”Footnote 83 According to Karlstadt, eternal life, so defined, increases when the hindrance of the flesh is left behind, and this increase is its second grade. The third grade is in heaven itself.Footnote 84 While Karlstadt declines to discuss the final grade, however, he argues at length that the second grade is the bosom of Abraham described in Luke, a “state and life of comfort.” Souls in this state surpass the living in their love, righteousness, and knowledge, and in their desire and yearning for God.Footnote 85
The final section of Karlstadt's sermon addresses “the purgatory of human beings and departed souls.” Karlstadt notes that it is customary to say that departed souls are in purgatory, but no evidence is produced from scripture. Luke 16 is contrary to the claim, showing that there are only two states in the afterlife, that the damned are tormented while believers are comforted, and that there is no fire in the bosom of Abraham. Karlstadt thus repudiates the “unbelievable” and “groundless” notion that “the souls sit in material or elemental fire.” Nonetheless, Karlstadt continues, scripture “sometimes compares evil and good people to wood and God's Word to a fire,” as in Jeremiah 5. God's Word “births yearning, love, justice, wisdom, and newness of life; should it then not burn, set fire, sweep, and purify? Accordingly, I would like to call the yearning and wounding desire for God (which come from the living Word of God) a purgatory, and say that the burning and hot desire for God burns all the wood, hay, and stubble in the soul, and sweeps away every shortcoming, rust, or infirmity. I fear that many souls after death have shortcoming and infirmity with regard to their love of God, their righteousness, their wisdom.”Footnote 86
Karlstadt's account of this purgatory sat uneasily with Luke 16:19–31, and with Karlstadt's own adoption from I Thessalonians 4:13–15 of the language of sleep to describe death and the dead.Footnote 87 Aware of the tension but refusing to resolve it, Karlstadt asserts at one point that departed souls “sleep from all outwardness, but their hearts are awake and hear what the Spirit of God speaks and teaches to them.”Footnote 88
Karlstadt claims, in short, that a burning and purgative desire for God—and an accompanying hatred of one's own “soul, the world, and everything that is worldly”Footnote 89—belongs to the experience of both the living and the deceased faithful. For Karlstadt, this desire and its growth are connected to the soul's learning from God's Word. Karlstadt emphasizes that he has described the post-mortem purgation only of souls “who learned to recognize Christ here, and who fell asleep through Christ.” He adds:
But I have said nothing about the souls who have little judgment regarding God (vrtail gotes) and who did not recognize Christ adequately. I believe that they must study and learn there (if they are otherwise predestined for blessedness) and recognize (erkennen) every true judgment or decree (sententz) that God wants them to know before he takes them into heaven . . . The unlearned souls must study there what they neglected here. But an hour for them will be more toilsome and harder than many years here, because they suffer or do everything without the hindrance of bodily circumstances, suffering, or works.Footnote 90
Karlstadt introduces here a fourth circumstance into the afterlife: there is heaven and hell, a state of blessed rest and purgation for the knowledgeable if imperfect faithful, and a state of painful learning for the ignorant but predestined. The resting and knowledgeable souls would not seek human rescue, but the ignorant might. The latter souls are the wandering dead for Karlstadt:
It may also have happened that many souls sought masses, alms, good works, pilgrimages to the saints and the like from their friends (all from the unknowing that they had here and carried with themselves [i.e. into the afterlife]), that they also finally did not come again when they recognized that neither masses nor alms nor works nor pilgrimages helped. It happened in the same way with the unlearned people here, and happens for as long as is necessary, until they learn the knowledge (kunst) of God and understand that masses and pilgrimages to saints are against God . . . [S]o long also are the stupid and foolish souls in their prison—and their conscience holds them so long in prison—until they learn the knowledge of God and recognition of the true divine speech.Footnote 91
Here, Karlstadt brings what he takes to be common experience into his exegesis and instruction. “The experience of wandering souls (vmblauffender seelen) is so widespread,” he says, “that I cannot criticize or reject it.” Karlstadt does criticize, however, the explanations for the wandering spirits offered by Luther and the Articles. More specifically, Karlstadt concedes the partial correctness of Luther and the Articles, while adding other possibilities. First, Karlstadt admits “that the devil also transforms himself into the form of a wandering spirit and cries for masses, sacrifices, lights, and the like, so that he holds the priests in their error and robs the laity of goods and life.” Karlstadt insists, however, “that souls also can move around and, out of their old error, desire misguided and useless help, until they grasp the knowledge of God, which pleases God more than sacrifices, Hosea 6.” Second, Karlstadt makes a concession regarding the purpose of the spirits’ wandering: they do not appear, he says, “to proclaim penance and improvement of our life . . . for we have Moses and the prophets. If we do not believe them, much less would we believe the souls.” Nonetheless, Karlstadt adds, the ignorant souls must announce their “need, fear, and anguish no less than the rich man enumerated his suffering and need to the father Abraham.”Footnote 92
Like Luther, Karlstadt turns to a counsel of discipline, but Karlstadt's counsel is uniquely shaped by his concept of salvation through learning. Those who prefer not to feel “terrible fear and the spirit of remorse” after death should study diligently now and “thoroughly grasp, receive, and hold God's Word.” Only “divine knowledge and wisdom”—and not works, masses, or money—can rescue a person from “unknowing.”Footnote 93
Interestingly, even though Karlstadt imagines a process of salvation continuing from earthly life into the afterlife, and even though he depicts a more porous boundary between the living and the dead than Luther, Karlstadt categorically excludes prayer for the dead in a way Luther does not. “We should ask nothing of God except what he wills,” Karlstadt argues; thus, Christians should not pray for any change to the divinely-willed state of departed souls. Moreover, while the damned are beyond the help of the living, those undergoing purgation in the bosom of Abraham neither seek nor desire help. The prayers of the living also cannot contribute to their purgation.Footnote 94
Anxiety about the death of unbaptized children may play a role in Karlstadt's Sermon vom Stand, as Zorzin has argued,Footnote 95 but more prevalent is the concern, reflected in Karlstadt's remarks on the wandering spirits, about those who died in the supposed error of works-righteousness. Just as Karlstadt responded to widespread experience in accepting the reality of the wandering spirits, he also responded to evangelical anxiety about the fate of loved ones who died before the Reformation. Karlstadt pointed to the lamentable state of the wandering spirits in order to enjoin a rigorous life of self-accusation and learning; at the same time, he sought to comfort hearers and readers about the fate of those who could not have had this learning.
VI. Conclusion
In exhorting Christians to learn, Karlstadt exhorted them to work requiring concentration, and he invoked the wandering spirits as spurs to this concentration. Luther, conversely, regarded the wandering spirits as distractions from evangelical concentration, as demonic temptations to seek truth outside of scripture, as the source of false beliefs about purgatory and the mass—beliefs that buttressed works-righteousness. Both reformers, nonetheless, sought to discipline evangelical belief and habit, doctrine and lived religiosity in reference to the wandering spirits. Like death itself, Christians’ interactions with the dead were to be remade through disciplined, faithful concentration upon scripture and Christ alone. Luther's advice was particularly striking in its attention to the senses of sight and hearing. Here, inward and outward senses worked together: not seeing and not hearing a poltergeist or apparition involved both inward comportment and outward conduct, while dying Christians could both gaze at Christ inwardly and see and hear Christ outwardly in the reception of the sacrament. The Articles belong firmly to Luther's program, which brought Deuteronomy 18:10–12 and Luke 16:19–31 together to enjoin Christians to close their ears and eyes to demonic din and trickery.
