Just as the Monk-Calf had been applied to Luther himself previous to his own polemical interpretation of it, so, after the appearance of his and Melanchthon’s joint publication, both the Calf and the Ass were repeatedly taken by the Catholic controversialists to represent Luther and his innovations. The sixteenth century, as already hinted, loved to dwell upon and expound such freaks of nature. Authors of repute had done so before Luther, at least to the extent of making such the subject of indifferent compositions, as the poet J. Franciscus Vitalis of Palermo had done (“_De monstro nato_”) in the case of a monstrosity said to have been born at Ravenna in 1511 or 1512; the Humanist Jacob Locher, at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, dealt with a similar case in his “_Carmen heroicum_.” Conrad Lycosthenes published at Basle, in 1557, a compendium of the prodigies of nature (“_Prodigiorum ac ostentorum chronicon_”), in which he instances a large number of such freaks famous even before Luther’s day. Of the earlier Humanists Sebastian Brant composed some Elegies on the Marvels of Nature. The Wittenberg work on the Calf and Ass must be put in its proper setting, and judged according to the standard of its age; although, owing to its religious bias, it far exceeds in extravagance anything that had appeared so far, it nevertheless was an outgrowth of its time.
3. Proofs of the Divine Mission. Miracles and Prophecies
How was Luther to give actual proof of the reality of his call and of his mission to introduce such far-reaching ecclesiastical innovations?
Luther himself, indirectly, invited his hearers to ask this question concerning his calling. “Whoever teaches anything new or strange” must be “called to the office of preacher” he frequently declares of those new doctrines which differed from his own; no one who has not a legitimate mission will be able to withstand the devil, but on the contrary will be cast down to hell.[431] Even in the case of the ordinary and regular office, Luther demands a legitimate mission; for the office of extraordinary messenger of God, he is still more severe. For here it is a question of the extraordinary preaching of truths previously unknown or universally forgotten or questioned, and of the reintroduction of doctrine. Here he rightly requires that whoever wishes to introduce anything new or to teach something different from the common, must be able to appeal to miracles in support of his vocation. If he is unable to do this, let him pack up and depart.[432] Elsewhere, as he correctly puts it: “Where God wills to alter the ordinary ways, He ever performs miracles.”[433] (Cp. vol. i., p. 225 f.)