Unfortunately, Hutten lacked moral purity, depth, and weight. He was Frank, brave, and
bold, but full of conceit, a restless adventurer, and wild stormer; able to destroy, but unable to build
up. In his twentieth year he had contracted a disgusting disease which ruined him physically, and
was used by his Roman opponents to ruin him morally. He suffered incredibly from it and from all
sorts of quack remedies, for ten years, was attacked by it again after his cure, and yet maintained
the vigor and freshness of his spirit.^231
Hutten hailed the Wittenberg movement, though at first only as "a quarrel between two
hot-headed monks who are shouting and screaming against each other" and hoped "that they would
eat each other up." After the Leipzig disputation, he offered to Luther (first through Melanchthon)
the aid of his pen and sword, and, in the name of his noble friend the Knight Franz von Sickingen,
a safe retreat at Ebernburg near Kreuznach, where Martin Bucer, Johann Oecolampadius, and other
fugitives from convents, and sympathizers with reform, found a hospitable home. He sent him his
books with notes, that he might republish them.
But Luther was cautious. He availed himself of the literary and political sympathy, but only
as far as his theological and religious position allowed. He respected Reuchlin, Erasmus, Crotus,
Mutian, Pirkheimer, Hutten, and the other humanists, for their learning and opposition to monkery
and priestcraft; be fully shared the patriotic indignation against Romish tyranny: but he missed in
them moral earnestness, religious depth, and that enthusiasm for the pure gospel which was his
controlling passion. He aimed at reformation, they at illumination. He did not relish the frivolous
satire of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum; he called them silly, and the author a Hans Wurst (Jack
Sausage); he would grow indignant, and weep rather than laugh, over the obscurantism and secret
vices of the monks, though he had as keen a sense of the ridiculous as Crotus and Hutten. He
deprecated, moreover, the resort to physical force in a spiritual warfare, and relied on the power of
the Word of God, which had founded the Church, and which must reform the Church. His letters
to Hutten are lost, but he wrote to Spalatin (Jan. 16, 1521): "You see what Hutten wants. I would
not have the gospel defended by violence and murder. In this sense I wrote to him. By the Word
the world was conquered; by the Word the Church was preserved; by the Word she will be restored.
Antichrist, as he began without violence, will be crushed without violence, by the Word."
Hutten was impatient. He urged matters to a crisis. Sickingen attacked the Archbishop and
Elector of Trier (Treves) to force the Reformation into his territory; but he was defeated, and died
of his wounds in the hands of his enemies, May 7, 1522. Within one month all his castles were
captured and mostly burnt by the allied princes; two of his sons were banished, a third was made
prisoner. Luther saw in this disaster a judgment of God, and was confirmed in his aversion to the
use of force.^232
Hutten fled, a poor and sick exile, from Germany to Basel, and hoped to find a hospitable
reception by Erasmus, his former friend and admirer; but he was coldly refused by the cautious
scholar, and took bitter revenge in an unsparing attack on his character. He then went to Zürich,
and was kindly and generously treated by Zwingli, who provided him with books and money, and
(^231) He himself speaks very frankly of his Morbus Gallicus, or Malum Franciaeand its horrible effects, without asserting his innocence.
Strauss discusses it fully with a belief in his guilt, yet pity for his sufferings and admiration for his endurance. "Er hatte," he says(U. v.
H., p. 241),"den Jugendfehler, dessen wir ihn schuldig achten, in einem Grade zu büssen, welcher selbst des unerbittlichsten Sittenrichters
Strenge in Mitleid verwandeln muss .... Man weiss nicht was schrecklicher ist, die Beschreibung die uns Hutten von seinem Zustande,
oder die er uns von den Quälereien macht, welche von unverständigen Aerzten als Curen über ihn verhängt wurden."
(^232) E. Münch, Fr. v. Sickingen. Stuttgart, 1827 sqq. 3 vols. Strauss, l.c. p. 488. Ullmann, Franz v. Sickingen, Leipzig, 1872.