In the previous post, we looked at Luther’s use of Catullus, Carm. 64.405 in an early work on Romans. He returns to the same line in one of his last works, his 1544 preface to Georg Major’s edition of the Vitae Patrum (Lives of the Fathers), a collection of hagiography on desert monastics.

Luther devotes a good deal of space to the discussion of corruptions that entered into the saints’ biographies through the agency of Satan, making it difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff in the Lives as they existed in his day. But Major has made a major contribution to the task of winnowing. Thus Luther writes:

Since matters have come to such a state of affairs that the book called Lives of the Fathers has need of more severe sifting^[1], after “all things, lawful and unlawful alike, have been mixed together in evil insanity,”^[2] so that you don’t know what things come from Rufinus, what comes from Jerome or others,^[3], next with respect to those that certainly come from Jerome, with what spirit he wrote this or that, I have urged and almost forced Dr. Georg Major with entreaties to undertake the burden of culling and purging everything therein–doubtless a most irksome task. For in this book, as also in that of Jerome, there are many exceptional words and deeds, which we ought to gather up like fragments from the gospel table and not throw away together with the refuse that other imprudent writers have mixed in, just as those horrible birds in Vergil befouled the feast of Aeneas.

The translation is my own.

The quotation from Catullus 64 adds vividness to Luther’s description of the Lives, which, like the church itself, is a corpus mixtum, composed of good and bad elements. It is thus a quite different use of the tag from the one examined in the previous post. And yet the words are the same, a fact that demonstrates the diversity of uses to which the classical tradition can be put. And coming where it does in Luther’s output–i.e., in one of his earliest and one of his latest works–one might almost say that the Catullus quotation gives his literary career a sort of ring composition.

Catullus is not the only classical author mentioned in this preface. As you see, Vergil appears in the same paragraph.^[4] The episode referred to is found in Aeneid 3.219-29, in which Harpies attack Aeneas and his men as they hold a sumptuous meal. This episode from Vergil, like the passage from Catullus, has to do with bad things and good being mixed together. But the passage from the Aeneid seems to be combined with a reminiscence of Matthew 15:27 (“She said, ‘Yes, Lord, yet even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table'” [ESV]), thus giving the mixture a specifically theological coloring–one that is quite appropriate, given its use in describing a Christian text that has unChristian ^[5] additions that obscure and pollute its nourishing Christian substrate.