#Heinrich Denifle

[apenitentialprayer]

Vitae Martini pseudoprophete: A Catholic tradition of polemical Luther biography

The most famous, and in many ways rightly infamous, detractor of Luther's character [was] the Dominican Heinrich Denifle, Sub-Archivar of the Holy See […]. For him such events as the fit in the choir have only an inner cause, which in no way means a decent conflict or even an honest affliction, but solely an abysmal depravity of character. To him, Luther is too much of a psychopath to be credited with honest mental or spiritual suffering. It is only the Bad One who speaks through Luther. It is, it must be, Denifle's primary ideological premise, that nothing, neither mere pathological fits, nor the later revelations that set Luther on the path to reformation, had anything whatsoever to do with divine interference. "Who," Denifle asks, in referencing the thunderstorm, "can prove, for himself, not to speak of others, that the alleged inspiration through the Holy Ghost came from above . . . and that it was not the play of conscious or unconscious self-delusion?" Lutheranism, he fears (and hopes to demonstrate) has tried to lift to the height of dogma the phantasies of a most fallible mind. [...] To [Denifle] he is an Umsturzmensch, the kind of man who wants to turn the world upside down without a plan of his own. To Denifle, Luther's protestant attitude introduced into history a dangerous kind of revolutionary spirit. Luther's special gifts, which the priest does not deny, are those of the demagogue and the false prophet — falseness not only as a matter of bad theology, but as a conscious falsification from base motives. All of this follows from the priest's quite natural thesis that war orders from above, such as the [Protestant apologist] assumes to have been issued to Luther, could only be genuine if they showed the seal and the signature of divinity, namely, signs and miracles. [...] Denifle is only the most extreme representative of a Catholic school of Luther biography, whose representatives try hard to divorce themselves from his method while sharing his basic assumption of a gigantic moral flaw in Luther's personality. The Jesuit [Hartmann] Grisar is cooler and more dissecting in his approach. Yet he too ascribes to Luther a tendency for "egomanic self-delusion" and suggests a connection between his self-centeredness and his medical history; thus Grisar puts himself midway between the approaches of the priest and of the psychiatrist. Among all of Luther's biographers, inimical or friendly, Denifle seems to me to resemble Luther most, at least in his salt-and-pepper honesty, and his one-sided anger. The Jesuit [sic?] is most admirable in his scholarly criticism of Luther's theology; most lovable in his outraged response to Luther's vulgarity. Denifle does not think that a true man of God would ever say "I gorge myself (fresse) like a Bohemian and I get drunk (sauff) like a German. God be praised, Amen" although he neglects the fact that Luther wrote this in one of his humorous letters to his wife at a time when she was worried about his lack of appetite.

- Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, pages 26, 31, 32). Italics original, bolded emphases added.