If the young monk really “kept the Rule,” then his extravagant penances for the purpose of gaining a gracious God can have had no existence outside his brain; the Rule prohibited all exaggeration in fasting and maceration, wilful loss of sleep and senseless exposure to cold. The Augustinian Rule, devised expressly as it was, to be not too severe in view of the exacting labours involved by preaching and the care of souls, had been further mitigated on the side of its penitential exercises by Staupitz’s new constitutions in 1504.[676] It was true the prior might sanction something beyond what the Rule enjoined, but it is scarcely credible that a beginner like Luther should have been allowed to exceed to such an extent the limit of what was adapted to all. His bodily powers were already sufficiently taxed by his studies, the more so since he threw himself into them with such impetuous ardour. It is all the less likely that any such special permission was given him, seeing that, as we know, Staupitz had, in consideration of his studies, dispensed the young monk from the performance of the humbler duties of the monastery.
If what has been said holds good of the years spent at Erfurt, much less can there be any question of his having indulged in excessive rigour during his Wittenberg period. Here Luther began at an early date to inveigh against what he thought was excessive strictness on the part of his brother monks, against their observance and against all so-called holiness-by-works. In his sermons and writings of that time we have an echo of his vexation at the too great stress laid on works;[677] but such a frame of mind, which was by no means of entirely new growth, surely betrays laxity rather than over-great zeal. The doctrine of the all-sufficiency of faith alone and of Christ’s Grace was already coming to the front.
Yet he continued—even after he had set up his new doctrine and completely broken with the Church—to recommend works of penance and mortification, declaring that they were necessary to withstand sinful concupiscence; nor does he even forget, agreeably with the Catholic view, to insist on the need of “discretion.” He also knows quite well what is the true purpose of works of penance in spite of all he was to say later in his subsequent caricature of the Catholic doctrine and practice. We hear him, for instance, saying in a sermon of 1519, when speaking of the fight to be waged against concupiscence: “For this purpose are watching, fasting, maceration of the body and similar works; everything is directed towards this end, nay, the whole of Scripture but teaches us how this grievous malady may be alleviated and healed.”[678] And, in his Sermon on Good Works (1520), he says: Works of penance “were instituted to damp and deaden our fleshly lusts and wantonness”; yet it is not lawful for one to “be one’s own murderer.”[679] All this militates against his own tale, that, in the convent, discretion had never been preached, and that, thanks to the trashy holiness-by-works, he had been on the highroad to self-destruction. The Sermon in question was preached some five years before the end of those “twenty years” during which, to use his later words, he had been his own “murderer” through his excessive and misguided penances.
It may, however, be, that, for a short while, e.g. in the time of his first fervour as a novice, he may have failed now and then by excess of zeal in being moderate in his exercise of penance. This would also have been the time, when, tormented by scruples, he was ever in need of a confessor. To a man in such a state of unrest, penance, however, even when practised with discretion, may easily become a source of fresh confusion and error, and, when undertaken on blind impulse and used to excess, such a one tends to find excuses for himself for disregarding the prohibition both of the Rule and of his spiritual director.
It is interesting to note the varying period during which Luther, according to his later sayings, was addicted to these excessive penances and to holiness-by-works. We already know that it was only gradually that he broke away from his calling, and that he had in reality long been estranged from it when he laid aside the Augustinian habit.
According to one dictum of his, he had been a strict and right pious monk for fifteen years, i.e. from 1505-20, during which time he had never been able “to do enough” to make God gracious to him.[680] Again, elsewhere, he assures us that the period of misery during which he sought justification through his works had lasted “almost fifteen years.”[681] On another occasion, however, he makes it twenty years (i.e. up to 1525): “The twenty years I spent in the convent are lost and gone; I entered the cloister for the good and salvation of my soul and for the health of my body, and I fondly believed … that it was God’s Will that I should abide by the Rule.”[682] What a contrast this alleged lengthy period of fifteen or even twenty years during which he kept the Rule presents to the reality must be sufficiently clear to anyone who remembers the dates of the events in his early history. To make matters worse, in one passage[683] he actually goes so far as apparently to make the period even longer during which he had “been a pious monk,” and had almost brought about his death by fasting, thus bringing us down to 1526 or 1527 if the reading in the text be correct. It certainly makes a very curious impression on one who bears in mind the dates to see Luther, the excommunicate, after his furious attack on religious vows and the laws of the Church, and after his marriage, still depicted as an over-zealous and pious monk, whose fasting is even bringing his life into jeopardy. But if Luther was so careless about his dates does not this carelessness lead one to wonder whether the rest of the statements he makes in conjunction with them are one whit more trustworthy?
“For over thirty years,” he says in a sermon of 1537, “I knew nothing but this confusion [between Law and Gospel] and was unable to believe that Christ was gracious to me, but rather sought to attain to justification before God by means of the merits of the Saints.”[684] This statement is again as strange as his previous ones, always assuming that the account of the sermon in question, which Aurifaber bases on three separate reports, is reliable. In this passage he is speaking not of the years he spent in the convent but of the whole time during which he was a member of the Popish Church. If this be calculated from his birth it brings us down to about 1515, i.e. to about the date of his Commentary on Romans where the new doctrine of how to find a Gracious God is first mooted. But what then of the other account he gives of himself, according to which, for more than ten years subsequent to 1515, his soul remained immersed in the bitter struggle after holiness-by-works? If, on the other hand, we reckon the thirty years from the first awakening of the religious instinct in his boyhood and youth, i.e. from about 1490 or 1495, we should come down to 1520 or 1525 and find ourselves face to face with the still more perplexing question as to how the darkness concerning the Law could have subsisted together with the light of his new discovery.
Luther’s versatile pen is fond of depicting the quiet, retiring monk of those days. As early as 1519 he wrote to Erasmus that it had always been his ardent wish “to live hidden away in some corner, ignored alike by the heavens and the sun, so conscious was he of his ignorance and inability to converse with learned men.”[685] These words in their stricter sense cannot, however, be taken as applicable to the period when they were written but rather to the first years of his life as a monk.
The historical features of his earlier life in the monastery deserve, however, to be examined more carefully in order better to understand the legend.
2. The Reality. Luther’s Falsification of History
The legend of Luther’s abiding misery during his life as a monk previous to his change of belief contradicts the monk’s own utterances during that period.
Monastic Days of Peace and Happiness. The Vows and their Breach
The fact is, that, for all his sufferings and frequent temptations, Luther for a long while felt himself perfectly at ease in monasticism. In the fulness of his Catholic convictions he extolled the goodness of God, who, in His loving-kindness, had bestowed such spiritual blessings on him. In 1507 he wrote that he could never be thankful enough “for the goodness of God towards him, Who of His boundless mercy had raised him, an unworthy sinner, to the dignity of the priesthood.”[686] The elderly friend to whom he thus opened his heart was the same Johannes Braun, Vicar of the Marienstift at Eisenach, to whom he again gave an account of his welfare in 1509. To him he then wrote: “God is God; man is often, in fact nearly always, wrong in his judgments. God is our God, and will guide us sweetly through everlasting ages.”[687]—The inward joy which he found in the monastery gave him strength to bear his father’s displeasure. He not only pointed out to him that it was “a peaceful and heavenly life,”[688] but he even tried so to paint the happy life he led in his cell as to induce his friend and teacher Usingen to become an Augustinian too.[689] We may also recall his praise of his “preceptor” (i.e. novice master), whom he speaks of as a “dear old man” and “a true Christian under the damned frock.” He repeats some of his beautiful, witty sayings and was always grateful to him for his having lent him a copy, made by his own hand, of a work by St. Athanasius.[690] The exhortations addressed to him by Staupitz when he was worried by doubts and fears, for instance his excellent allusion to the wounds of Christ,[691] found an echo in Luther’s soul, and, in spite of his trouble of mind, brought him back to the true ideal of asceticism. We also know how he praised Usingen, his friend at Erfurt, as the “best paraclete and comforter,” and wrote to a despondent monk, that his words were helpful to troubled souls, provided always that they laid aside all self-will.[692]
Hence, for a considerable part of his life in the monastery, Luther was not entirely deprived of consolations; apart from the darker side of his life, on which his legend dwells too exclusively, there was also a brighter side, and this is true particularly of his earlier years.
The effort to attain to perfection by the observance of poverty, chastity and obedience was at first so attractive to Luther, that, for a while, as we have already pointed out, he really allowed it to cost him something. Some years later, when he had already begun to paint in stronger hues his virtues as a monk, he said, perhaps not exaggerating: “It was no joke or child’s play with me in Popery.” His zealous observance was, however, confined to his first stay at Erfurt. A brother monk of his whom Flacius Illyricus chanced to meet in that town in 1543 also bore witness to Luther’s piety there as a monk. The “old Papist,” then still a faithful Augustinian, had told him, writes Flacius, how he had spent forty years in the Erfurt monastery where Luther had lived eight years, and that he could not but confess that Luther had led a holy life, had been most punctilious about the Rule and had studied diligently. To Flacius this was a new proof of the “mark of holiness” in the new Church.[693]
Nor are statements on the part of the young monk wanting which prove, in contradiction with the legend he invented later, that his theoretical grasp of the religious life was still correct even at a time when he had already ceased to pay any great attention to the Rule.[694]
Even as late as 1519, i.e. but two years before he wrote his book against monastic vows, he still saw in these vows a salutary institution. In a sermon he advised whoever desired “by much practice” to keep the grace of baptism and make ready for a happy death “to bind himself to chastity or join some religious Order,”[695] the Evangelical Counsels still appeared to him, according to statements he made in that same year, “a means for the easier keeping of the commandments.”[696]
It was only after this that he began to think of tampering with the celibacy of the priesthood, and that only in the hope of winning many helpers in his work of apostasy. A little later he attacked with equal success the sacred obligations freely assumed by the monks. Yet we find nothing about the legend in his writings and letters of this time, though it would have been of great service to him. Everything, in fact, followed a much simpler and more normal course than the legend would have us imagine: The spirit of the world and inordinate self-love, no less than his newly unearthed doctrine, were what led to the breaking of his vows.
Many of his brother monks had already begun to give an example of marrying when, in the Wartburg (in Sep., 1521), while busy on his work against monastic vows he put to Melanchthon this curious question: “How is it with me? Am I already free and no more a monk? Do you imagine that you can foist a wife on me as I did on you? Is this to be your revenge on me? Do you want to play the Demea [the allusion is to Terence] and give me, Mitio, Sostrata to wife? I shall, however, keep my eyes open and you will not succeed.”[697] Melanchthon was, of course, neither a priest nor a monk. Luther, who was both, was even then undoubtedly breaking away at heart from his vows. This he did on the pretext—untenable though it must have appeared even to him—that his profession had been vitiated by being contrary to the Gospel, because his intention had been to “save his soul and find justification through his vows instead of through faith.” “Such a vow,” he says, “could not possibly be taken in the spirit of the Gospel, or, if it was, it was sheer delusion.” Still, for the time being, he only sanctioned the marriage of other monks who were to be his future helpers; as for himself he was loath to give the Papists “who were jawing” him the pleasure of his marriage. He also denied in a public sermon that it was his intention to marry, though he felt how hard it was not to “end in the flesh.” All these are well-known statements into which we have already gone in detail, which militate against Luther’s later legend of the holy monk, who tormented himself so grievously solely for the highest aims.
When, nevertheless, yielding to the force of circumstances, he took as his wife a nun who had herself been eighteen years in the convent, his action and the double sacrilege it involved plunged him into new inward commotion. His statements at that time throw a strange light on the step he had taken. By dint of every effort he seeks to justify the humiliating step both to himself and to others.
In his excitement he depicts himself as in the very jaws of death and Satan. Fear of the rebellious peasants now so wroth with him, and self-reproach on account of the marriage blamed by so many even among his friends, inflamed his mind to such a degree that his statements, now pessimistic, now defiant, now humorous, now reeking with pseudo-mysticism, furnish a picture of chaos. The six grounds he alleges for his marriage only prove that none of them was really esteemed by him sufficient; for, that it was necessary for him to take pity on the forsaken nun, that the Will of God and of his own father was so plain, and that he was obliged to launch defiance at the devils, the priestlings and the peasants by his marriage, all this had in reality as little weight with him as his other pleas, such as, that the Catholics looked on married life as unevangelical, and that it was his duty to confirm the Evangel by his marriage even in the eyes of his Evangelical critics.[698] To many of his friends his marriage seemed at least to have the advantage of shutting the mouths of those who calumniated him. He himself, however, preferred to say, that he had had recourse to matrimony “to honour God and shame the devil.”[699]
When once Luther had entered upon his new state of life all remaining scruples regarding his vows had necessarily to be driven away.
As was his wont he tried to reassure himself by going to extremes. “The most successful combats with the devil,” so he tells us, are waged “at night at Katey’s side”; her “embraces” help him to quell the foe within.[700] He declares even more strongly than before, that marriage is in fact a matter of downright necessity for man; he fails to think of the thousands who cannot marry but whose honour is nevertheless untarnished; he asserts that “whoever will not marry must needs be a fornicator or adulterer,” and that only by a “great miracle of God” is it possible for a man here and there to remain chaste outside the wedded state; more and more he insists, as he had already done even before, that “nothing rings more hatefully in his ear than the words monk and nun.”[701] He seizes greedily on every tale that redounds to the discredit of the monasteries, even on the silly story of the devils dressed as spectral monks who had crossed the Rhine at Spires in order to thwart him at the Diet.
In all this we can but discern a morbid reaction against the disquieting memory of his former state of life, not, as the legend asserts, peace of mind and assurance of having won a “Gracious God,” thanks to his change of religion. The reaction was throughout attended by remorse of conscience.
These struggles of soul in order to find a Gracious God, which lasted, as he himself says (above, vol. v., pp. 334 f.; 350 f.), even down to his later years, constitute a striking refutation from his own lips, of the legend of the wonderful change which came over him in the monastery.
On the other hand, the story of his long-drawn devotion to the monastic practice of good works is no less at variance with the facts. On the contrary, no sooner did Luther begin his official career as a monk at Wittenberg, than he showed signs of his aversion to works; the trend of his teaching was never in favour of strictness and penance, which, as he declared, could only fill the heart with pride. (Above, vol. i., pp. 67 ff., 117 ff.) At a later date, however, he sought to base this teaching on his own “inner experiences” and with these the legend supplied him (above, vol. iv., p. 404, n. 2).
Some Doubtful Virtues
It is worth while to examine here rather more narrowly than was possible when giving the history of his youth, the zeal for virtue and the self-sacrificing industry for which, according to the legend, the youthful monk was so conspicuous. What in our first volume was omitted for the sake of brevity may here find a place in order to throw a clearer light on his development. Two traits are of especial importance: first humility as the crown of all virtue, on account of the piety Luther ascribes to himself, and, secondly, the exact character of his restless, feverish industry.
Luther’s humility presents some rather remarkable features. In the documents we still possess of his we indeed find terms of self-depreciation of the most extravagant kind. But his humility and forced self-annihilation contrast strangely with his intense belief in his own spiritual powers and the way in which he exalts himself above all authorities, even the highest.
This comes out most strongly at the time when, as a young professor at Wittenberg, Luther first dipped into the writings of the mystics. The latter, so one would have thought, ought rather to have led him to a deeper appreciation and realisation of the life of perfection and humility.
He extols the books of certain mystics as a remedy for all the maladies of the soul and as the well-spring of all knowledge. To the Provost of Leitzkau, who had asked for his prayers, he expressed his humility in the language of the mystics: “I confess to you that daily my life draws nigh to hell (Ps. lxxxvii. 4) because daily I become more wicked and wretched.”[702] At the same time he exhorts another friend in words already quoted, taken from the obscure and suspicious “Theologia Deutsch,” “to taste and see how bitter is everything that is ourselves” in comparison with the possession of Christ.[703] “I am not worthy that anyone should remember me,” so he writes to the same, “and I am most thankful to those who think worst of me.”[704]
Yet mystical effusions are intermingled with charges against the opponents of his new philosophy and theology which are by no means remarkable for humility. “For nothing do my fingers itch so much,” he wrote about this time,[705] “as to tear off the mask from that clown Aristotle.” The words here uttered by the monk, as yet scarcely more than a pupil himself, refer to a scholar to whom even the greatest have ever looked up, and, who, up till then, had worthily represented at the Universities the wisdom of the ancients. The young man declares, that “he would willingly call him a devil, did he not know that he had had a body.” Luther also has a low opinion of all the Universities of his day: “They condemn and burn the good books,” he exclaims, “while fabricating and framing bad ones.”[706]
Self-confidence had been kindled in the monk’s breast by a conviction of future greatness. He speaks several times of this inkling he had whilst yet a secular student at the Erfurt University; when ailing from some illness of which we have no detailed account, the father of one of his friends cheered him with certain words which sank deeply into his memory: “My dear Bachelor, don’t lose heart, you will live to be a great man yet.” In 1532 Luther related to his pupil Veit Dietrich this utterance which he still treasured in his memory.[707] How strong an impression such lightly spoken words could make on his too susceptible mind is evident from a letter of 1530 where he speaks of his vivid recollection of another man, who, when Luther was consoling him on the death of his son, had said to him: “Martin, you may be sure that some day you will be a great man.” Since, on the same occasion, he goes on to refer to the remark made by Staupitz, viz. that he was called to do great things, and declares that this prediction had been verified, it becomes even clearer that this idea had taken root and thriven in his mind even from early years.[708] But how does all this harmonise with the humility of the true religious, and with the pious self-forgetfulness of the mystic? There can be no doubt that it is more in accordance with the quarrelsomeness and exclusiveness, the hot temper and lack of consideration for others to which the testimonies already recorded have repeatedly borne witness. (Above, vol. i., passim.)
There is a document in existence, on which so far but little attention has been bestowed, which is characteristic of his language at one time. Its tone of exaggeration makes it worthy to rank side by side with the mystical passage quoted above, in which Luther professes to have himself experienced the pangs of hell which were the earthly lot of chosen souls.[709] Owing to its psychological value this witness to his humility must not be passed over.
Luther had received from Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, a learned lawyer and humanist, a letter dated Jan. 2, 1517, in which this warm partisan and admirer of the Augustinians, who was also a personal friend of Staupitz after a few words in praise of his virtue and learning, of which Staupitz had told him, expressed the wish to enter into friendly correspondence with him.[710] The greater part of Scheurl’s letter is devoted to praising Staupitz, rather than Luther. Yet the young man was utterly dumbfounded even by the meagre praise the letter contained. His answer to it was in an extravagant vein, the writer seemingly striving to express his overwhelming sense of humility in the face of such all-too-great praise.[711]
The letter of one so learned and yet so condescending, so Luther begins, while greatly rejoicing him had distressed him not a little. He rejoiced at his eulogies of Staupitz, in whom he simply extolled Christ. “But how could you sadden me more than by seeking my friendship and decking me out in such empty titles of honour? I cannot allow you to become my friend, for my friendship would bring you, not honour but rather harm, if so be that the proverb is true: ‘Friends hold all in common.’ If what is mine becomes yours then you will receive only sin, unwisdom and shame, for these alone can I call mine; but such things surely do not merit the titles you give them.” Scheurl, indeed, would say, so he goes on in the same pathetic style, that it was only Christ he admired in him; but Christ cannot dwell together with sin and folly; hence he must be mindful of his own honour and not fall so low (‘degeneres’) as to become the friend of Luther. Even the Father-Vicar Staupitz praises him (Luther) too much. He made him afraid and put him in peril by persisting in saying: “I bless Christ in you and cannot but believe Him present with you now.” Such a belief was, however, hard, and the more eulogies and friends, the greater the danger in which the soul stood (then follow three superfluous quotations from Scripture). The greater the favour bestowed by men the less does God bestow His. “For God wills to be either the only friend or else no friend at all. To make matters worse, if a man humbles himself and seeks to fly praise and favour, then praise and favour always come, to our peril and confusion. Oh, far more wholesome,” he cries, “are hatred and disgrace than all praise and love.” The danger of praise he elucidates by a comparison with the cunning of the harlot mentioned in Proverbs vii. He is writing all this to Scheurl, not by any means to express contempt for his good-will but out of real anxiety for his own soul. Scheurl was only doing what every pious Christian must do who does not despise others but only himself; and this, too, he himself would also do.
And, as though he had not yet said enough of his love of humility, the writer makes a fresh start in order to explain and prove what he has said. Not on account of learning, ability and piety does a true Christian honour his fellow-men; such a thing had better be left to the heathen and to the poets of to-day; the true Christian loved the helpless, the poor, the foolish, the sinful and the wretched. This he proves first from Ps. xli., then from the teaching of Christ and from His words: “For that which is high to men is an abomination before God” (Luke xvi. 15). “Do not make of me such an abomination,” so he goes on, “do not plunge me into such misery if you would be my friend. But, from so doing you will be furthest if you forbear from praising me either before me or before others. If, however, you are of opinion that Christ is to be extolled in me, then use His Name and not mine. Why should the cause of Christ be besmirched by my name and robbed of its own name? To everything should be given its right name; are we then to praise what is Christ’s without using His Name? Behold,” so he breaks off at last very aptly, “here you have your ‘friend’ and his flood of words; have patience friendly reader”—words which may apply to the modern reader of this effusion no less than to its first addressee. It cannot well be gainsaid that something strange lay in this kind of humility. It would be difficult to find an exact parallel to such language in the epistles of the humanists of that day, and still less in the correspondence of truly pious souls. What may, however, help us to form our opinion is the fact that, in the letters written immediately after the above, we again find the young professor condemning wholesale everything that did not quite agree with his own way of thinking.
The passion, precipitancy and exaggeration which inspired him during his monkish days is the other characteristic which here calls for consideration. His fiery and unbridled zeal was of such a character as to constitute a very questionable virtue in a monk.
We may recall what has already been said of the youthful Luther’s passionate and unmeasured abuse, even in public, of the “Little Saints” and “detractors” in his Order, for instance at the Chapter of the Order held at Gotha in 1515. Bitter exaggerations are met with even in his first lectures. In the controversy with the Observantines he goes so far as to make the bold assertion, that it was just the good works of his zealous brother monks that were sinful, though they in their blindness refused to believe it.[712] In his Commentary on the Psalms in 1513-15 he even goes so far as to denounce as “rebellion and disobedience” their vindication of strict observance in the Order.[713] His imagination makes him fancy that they are guided by a light kindled specially for them by “the devil.”[714] Such is his ardour when thundering against the abuses in the Order that he forgets to make the needful distinctions, and actually, in the presence of the young Augustinians who were his pupils, attacks the very foundations of their Mendicant Order. Yet elsewhere, in the narrowest spirit of party prejudice, he inveighs against worthy scholars who happened to belong to other Orders, for instance, against Wimpfeling, on whom he heaps angry invective.[715] The slightest provocation was enough to rouse his ire.
Soon his passion began to vent itself on the Church outside. In his lectures on the Psalms he laments that Christianity was hardly to be found anywhere, such were the abuses; he can but weep over the evil; all pious men were, according to him, full of sorrow that the Incarnation and Passion of Christ had come to be so completely forgotten. We know how the young religious, from the abyss of his inexperience, declared in the most general terms, as though he had been familiar with all classes and all lands, that the desecration of what was most sacred in the Church had gone so far that they had sunk below even the Turk; “owing to the unchastity, pomp and pride of her priests, the Church was suffering in her property, in the administration of her sacraments and of the Word of God, in her judicial authority and finally in her government,” etc., “the Sanctuary was, so to speak, being hewn down with axes,” churchmen doing spiritually what the Turk was doing both spiritually and materially; in vain was the Word of God preached “seeing that every entrance was closed to it.”
Holy men, of real zeal, had always been able to discern the good side by side with the bad. But the youthful Luther sees on every side, and everywhere nothing but false teaching (“scatet totus orbis,” etc.), nay, a very “deluge of filthy doctrines.”[716] To be made a bishop is to him tantamount to branding oneself a “Sodomite”; so full of vice is the episcopate that those wearers of the mitre were the best who had no sin on their conscience beyond avarice.[717] As for the men of learning, they rank far below Tauler, and, thanks to their narrowness, had made the age “one of iron, nay, of clay.”[718] When setting faith and grace against the alleged heathenism of the scholars he goes so far as to say, that his man is he “who outside of grace knows nothing.”[719] As early as 1515 he thinks himself qualified to attack the authorities and the highest circles because “his teaching-office lent him apostolic power to say and to reveal what was being done amiss.”[720]
Why, we may, however, ask, did not the reformer of the Church begin with himself, seeing that, in the lectures on the Psalms just mentioned, he already laments the coldness of his own religious life?[721] Even then he felt temptations pressing upon him; already in consequence of his manifold and distracting labours he had lapsed into a state in which prayer became distasteful to him, and of which he writes to an intimate friend in 1523: “In body I am fairly well but I am so much taken up with outward business that the spirit is almost extinguished and rarely takes thought for itself.”[722] These words and other earlier admissions (above, vol. i., p. 275 ff.) throw a strange light on the legend according to which he had wrestled in prayer by day and by night.
Even in his devotion to his studies and in his manner of writing on learned subjects his natural extravagance stands revealed. His love for study was all passion; his mode of thought and expression was simply grotesque. It was the young monk’s passion for learning which led him on the occasion of his visit to Rome to petition the Pope to be allowed for a term of several years to absent himself from home and devote himself in the garb of a secular priest to his studies at the Universities. At Wittenberg we find him in the refectory pen in hand in the silent watches of the night when all the other monks had gone to rest, and, in his excited state, he fancies he hears the devil making an uproar. Though, according to his admission of Oct. 26, 1516, he was so busy and overwhelmed with literary work, as “rarely to have time to recite the Hours or to say Mass,”[723] yet he still had time enough to inveigh against the “sophists of all the Universities” as he had, even then, begun to term the professors of his day. He professed his readiness, were it necessary, to find time to go to Erfurt in order to defend in a public disputation there the Theses set up at Wittenberg in his name by his pupil Franz Günther; the Erfurt Augustinians were not to denounce these propositions as “paradoxical, or actually cacodoxical,” “for they are merely orthodox.” “I wait with eagerness and interest to see what they will put forward against these our paradoxes.”[724] In April, 1517, when Carlstadt caused some commotion by publishing his erroneous views on nature and grace in 152 theses, Luther called them in one of his letters the paradoxes of an Augustine, excelling the doctrine in vogue as much as Christ excels Cicero; there were some who declared these propositions to be paradoxical rather than orthodox, but this was “shameless insolence” on the part of men who had studied and understood neither Augustine nor Paul; “to those who understand, however, the theses ring both pleasantly and beautifully, indeed to me they seem to have an excellent sound.”[725]
His restless style and love of emphasis is characteristic of his own inner restlessness and excitement. He himself was quite aware of the source of this disquiet, at least so far as it was the result of a moral failing. In 1516 he lays his finger deliberately on his besetting fault when he admits to a friend, that the “root of all our unrest is nowhere else to be found than in our belief in our own wisdom”; “I have been taught by my own experience! Oh, with how much misery has this evil eye [belief in my own wisdom] plagued me even to this very day!”[726]
And yet he takes for one of his guiding principles the curious idea that the opposition of so many confirmed the truth of what he said. His work on the Penitential Psalms, so he wrote to his friend Lang on March 1, 1517, would “then please him best if it displeased all.”[727] And, two years later, he said to Erasmus, when speaking of the system he followed in this respect: “I am wont to see in what is displeasing to many, the gifts of a Gracious God as against those of an Angry God”; hence, so he assures him, the hostility under which Erasmus himself was suffering, was, for him, a proof of his real excellence.[728]
His burning enthusiasm at the time when he thought he had discovered the sense of the passage: “The just man lives by faith,” has already been described elsewhere.[729] This and other incidents just touched upon recall those morbid sides of his character referred to in the previous chapter.
As we might expect, during the first years of his great public struggle his restlessness was even more noticeable than before. The predominance of the imagination has hardly ever been so fatally displayed by any other man, though, of course, it is not every man whose life is thrown amid times so stirring. “Because,” so he wrote in 1541, recalling his audacity in publishing the Indulgence-Theses and the fame it brought him, “all the Bishops and Doctors kept silence [concerning the abuse of indulgences] and no one was willing to bell the cat.… Luther was vaunted as a doctor, and as the only man who was ready to interfere. Which fame was not at all to my taste.”[730] This latter assertion he is fond of making to others, but his letters of that time show how greatly the charm of notoriety contributed to unbridle his stormy energy. It was his opponents’ defiance which first opened the flood-gates of his passionate eloquence. At the very outset he warns people that contradiction will only make his spirit more furious and lead him to have recourse to even stronger measures; elsewhere he has it: “The more they rage, the further I shall go!”[731]
We may recall his reference to the “gorgeous uproar,” and the passages where he assures his friends: “I am carried away and know not by what spirit,”[732] and “God carries me away, I am not master of myself.”[733]
In the light of his pathological fervour the contradictions in which he involves himself become more intelligible, for instance, what he wrote to Pope Leo X in his letter of May, 1518,[734] which so glaringly contrasted with his other words and deeds. His unrest and love of exaggeration caused him to overlook this and the many other contradictions both with himself and with what he had previously written.
The picture of the monk which we have been compelled to draw differs widely from the legendary one of the pious young man shut up in the cloister, who, according to Luther’s account at a later date, led a fanatical life of penance and, because he saw Popish piety to be all too inadequate, “sought to find a Gracious God.”
Luther’s Alterations of the Facts
It was not altogether arbitrarily that Luther painted the picture of the monk forced by his trouble of mind to forsake Popery. Rather he followed, possibly to some extent unconsciously, the lines of actual history, though altering them to suit his purpose.
He retained intact not a few memories of his youth, which, under the stress of his bitterness and violence, and with the help of a lively imagination unfettered by any regard for the laws of truth, it was no difficult task to transform. Among these memories belong those of his time of fervour during his Noviciate and early days as a priest. They it was which evidently formed the groundwork of his later statements that he had been throughout an eminently pious monk. Then again, among the remarkable traits which made their appearance somewhat later, the two elements just described have a place in his legend, viz. his extravagant self-conscious humility and his fiery zeal. In his later controversies he is disposed to represent this strange sort of humility as real humility and as a sign of genuine piety. The pious, humble monk hidden in a corner had all unwittingly grown into a great prophet of the truth. In the same way the ardour of those years which he never afterwards forgot, was transformed in his fancy into a fanatical hungering and thirsting after Popish holiness-by-works, in discipline and fasting, watching, cold and prayer.
In addition to these there were memories of the transition period of religious scruples, of temptations to doubts about predestination, of his passing paroxysms of terror, gloom and inherited timidity. These elements must be considered separately.
Scrupulosity, with the doubts and nervousness it brings in its train, probably only troubled him for a short time during the first period of his life in the cloister. The admonitions of his novice-master, given above (p. 206), may refer to some such passing condition through which the young man went, and which indeed is by no means uncommon in the spiritual life. The profound impression made by these first inward experiences seems to have remained with him down to his old age; indeed it is the rule that the struggles of one’s younger days leave the deepest impression on both heart and memory. His quondam scruples and groundless fear of sin, eked out by his ideas of the virtues of a religious, probably served as the background for the picture of the young monk “sunk” in Popish holiness-by-works and yet so profoundly troubled at heart.
But all this would not suffice to explain the legend of his mental unrest, of his sense of being forsaken by God, of his howling, etc.
What promoted this portion of the legend was the recollection of those persistent temptations to despair which arose from his ideas on predestination during the time of his mystical aberrations.
The dreadful sense of being predestined by God to hell had for many years stirred the poor monk’s soul to its lowest depths, even long before he had thought out his new doctrine. It is no matter for surprise, if, later, carried away by his polemics, he made the utmost use in his legend of his former states of fear the better to depict the utter misery of the monk bent on securing salvation by the practice of good works. The doctrine of faith alone which he had discovered and the new Evangelical freedom were, of course, supposed to have delivered him from all trouble of mind, and thus it was immaterial to him later to what causes his fears and sadness were assigned.
Yet his supposed new theological discoveries became for him, according to the testimony of the Commentary on Romans, in many respects a new source of fear and terror. The doctrine of the Divine imputation or acceptation did not sink into his mind without from its very nature causing far-reaching and abiding fears. His then anxieties, which, as a matter of fact, were in striking contrast with his later assertion of his sudden discovery of a Gracious God, together with the mystical aberrations in which he sought in vain for consolation, doubtless furnished another element for the legend of the terrors he had endured throughout his life as a monk.