Certain preachers of the late Middle Ages, religious and others, for instance, Geiler von Kaysersberg, when dealing with sexual matters sometimes went very far in their plain speaking on the subject, yet their words were, without exception, characterised by gravity and the desire of saving souls. Their tone excludes any levity; indeed, the honesty and simplicity of these productions of the Middle Ages impress the reader at every turn; he may perhaps be inclined to extol the greater delicacy of feeling which obtains at the present day, but he will refrain from blaming the less covert style of days gone by. Luther’s “cynical” language, however, impresses one as an attempt to pit nature, with all its brutality, with its rights and demands, against the more exalted moral aims of earlier ages; the trend of such language, as contemporary Catholics urged, was downwards rather than upwards.
One tract of Luther’s, which dates from about that time, that “Against the Clerical State falsely so called of Pope and Bishops,” contains a chapter “Concerning Vows,”[387] in which the descriptions are so coarse and the language so nasty that Staupitz might well have considered even his censure of certain earlier writings of Luther’s not sufficiently strong: “Your works are praised,” he had told him, “by those who keep houses of ill-fame,”[388] etc. Several particularly violent polemical tracts of those years, meant by Luther for his theological adversaries generally, are so brimful of words descriptive of the vilest parts and functions of the human body, that it would be impossible to match them in the writings of previous ages. His manner of speech was considered by his foes to have reached the lowest depths of thought and feeling. The vulgarity of his language was held to display the utter depravity of his mind.
In polemics Luther was not merely the “greatest, but also the coarsest writer of his century”; such is the opinion recently expressed by a Protestant historian.[389]
In the work dating from 1522, “Bulla Coenæ Domini, i.e. the Bull concerning the Evening feed of our most holy Lord, the Pope,”[390] he replies, with startling fluency, to the menaces of this Papal Bull against all heretics, including himself. Therein he describes the life and manners of the Roman “prostitutes” with the express intention of degrading all that Catholics considered most worthy of respect and veneration. The Pope and his followers he represents as indulging in every kind of sensuality, “rape, seduction and fornication” to their heart’s content.