CHAPTER XXXVII

LUTHER’S LATER EMBELLISHMENT OF HIS EARLY LIFE

In later life, looking back on his past, Luther was in the habit

of depicting certain of its principal phases in a way which is at

variance with the facts, and which even Protestants in recent times

have characterised, as “a picture in which he becomes a myth unto

himself.”[591]

It will be no matter for surprise to the dispassionate observer that the

memory of the vows Luther had broken and the thought of his early days

in the monastery—which presented so striking a contrast with his later

life—were subject-matters of warped and distorted images. Particularly is

this true of his monastic years which he insists on depicting as one long

night of sadness and despair.

Not merely in the fictions in which he came to shroud the more fervent

days of his life as a monk, but also in his explanations of the

various stages of his apostasy, Luther affords us fresh data for the

psychological study of his personality, and thus the present chapter

may serve to supplement the previous one. Only after having studied the

legend he wove around himself and compared it with the truth as otherwise

known, will it be possible to arrive at a considered judgment concerning

Luther’s mental states.

1. Luther’s later Picture of his Convent Life and Apostasy

What Luther says of his life as a monk is what will chiefly interest us,

but, before proceeding to consider his words and the strange problems

they present, we must first refer to the legendary traits comprised in

his statements on the first period of his struggle; how false they are

to the facts will be clearly perceived by whoever has read the detailed

accounts already given.

_The Legend about his First Public Appearance_

“Not only have the dates been altered,” says Hausrath, of Luther’s later

statements concerning his first public appearance, “but even the facts.

No sooner does the elderly man begin to tell his tale than the past

becomes as soft wax in his hands. The same words are placed on the lips,

now of this, now of that, friend or foe. The opponents of his riper years

are depicted as his persecutors even in his youth. Albert of Mayence

had never acted otherwise towards him than as a liar and deceiver. Even

previous to the Worms visit he had sought to annul his safe-conduct.… Of

Tetzel he now asserts, that, unless Duke Frederick had pleaded for him to

the Emperor Max, he would have been put in a sack and drowned in the Inn

on account of his dissolute life.… The same holds good of the [equally

untrue] statement that Tetzel had sold indulgences for sins yet to be

committed.… It is also an exaggeration of his old age when Luther asserts

that, in his youth, the Bible had been a closed book to all.… To the old

Reformer almost everything in the monastery appears in the blackest of

hues.”[592]

“The reason of my journey to Rome,” he declares, “was to make a

confession from the days of my boyhood and to become pious.”[593]

“But at Rome I came across the most unlearned of men.”[594]—God

“led me, all unwittingly, into the game [his struggle].”[595]

“I behaved with moderation, yet I brought the greatest ruin on

them all.”[596] “I thought I was doing the Pope a service yet I

was condemned.”[597]—“One, and that not the least of my joys and

consolations, is, that I never put myself out of the Papacy. For I

held fast to the Scarlet Woman and served the murderess in all things

most humbly. But she would have none of me, banished me and drove

me from her.”[598] “I only inveighed against abuses and against the

godless collectors of alms and [indulgence] commissioners from whom

even Canon Law itself protects the Pope. The Pope wanted to defend

them contrary to his own laws; this annoyed me. Had he thrown them

over I should in all likelihood have held my tongue, but the hour

had rung for his downfall; hence there was nothing to be done for

him, for when God intends to bring about a man’s fall He blinds and

hardens him.”[599] “I was utterly dead to the world until God thought

the time had come; then Junker Tetzel stung me with his indulgences,

and Dr. Staupitz spurred me on against the Pope.”[600] “Silvester

[Prierias] thereupon entered the lists and sought to overwhelm me with

the thunders of the following syllogism: Whoever raises doubts against

any word or deed of the Roman Church is a heretic; Martin Luther

doubts, etc. With that the ball began.”[601]

Generally speaking, however, Luther prefers to trace the whole of his

quarrel with the Church back to Tetzel and to his righteous censure

of the abuse of indulgences. He seems to have completely forgotten

the deep theological chasm that separated him from the Church even

before his quarrel with Tetzel. His theological attitude at that time,

the starting-point of his whole undertaking, has disappeared from his

purview; he has forgotten his burning desire to win the day for his

own doctrines against free-will, against the value of works, against

justification as taught by Catholic tradition, and for his denial

of God’s Will that all men should be saved. His early antagonism to

the theological schools and to Canon Law as a whole has lapsed into

oblivion.[602]

In the preface to the 1545 edition of his Latin works Luther asserts,

as a fact, that he had been estranged from the Church only through the

indulgence controversy.

He had, so we there read, taken his vocation as a monk quite in

earnest; he “feared and dreaded the Day of Judgment and yet had longed

with all his heart to be saved.… It was not my fault that I became

involved in this warfare, as I call God Himself to witness.”

In order to make the “beginning of the business” plain to all he goes

on to relate to the whole world, how, as a young Doctor in 1517,

relying on the Pope’s approval, he had raised his voice in protest

against the “shamelessness” of the indulgence-preachers; how, when his

small outcry passed unheeded, he had published the indulgence-theses

and, then, in the “Resolutions,” “for the Pope’s own sake,” had

advocated works of neighbourly charity as preferable to indulgences.

Here was the cause of all the world’s hostility! His teaching was

alleged “to have disturbed the course of the heavenly spheres and to

be setting the world in flames. I was delated to the Pope and then

summoned to Rome; the whole might of Popery was up in arms against

poor me.”

He records his trial at Augsburg, the intervention of Miltitz and the

Leipzig Disputation, but records it in a way all his own. At that date

he already knew almost the entire Bible by heart and “had already

reached the beginning of the knowledge and faith of Christ, to wit,

that we are saved and justified, not by works, but by faith in Christ,

and that the Pope is not the head of the Church by right Divine; but

I failed to see the inevitable consequence of all this, viz. that the

Pope must needs be of the devil.” Like the “blameless monk” that he

was, his only trouble in life was his keen anxiety as to whether God

was gracious to him and whether he could “rest assured that he had

conciliated Him by the satisfaction he had made.” The words of the

Bible on the justice of God had angered him because he had erroneously

taken this to mean His punitive justice instead of the justice

whereby God makes us just. Then, when he was setting about his second

Commentary on the Psalms (1518-19), amidst the greatest excitement

of conscience (“_furebam ita sæva et perturbata conscientia_”) the

light from above had dawned on him which brought him to a complete

understanding of the Divine justice whereby we are justified. Paul’s

words concerning the just man who lives by faith (Rom. i. 17) had

then, and only then, become clear to him (through his discovery of the

assurance of salvation).

After referring to the Diet of Worms he again reverts to his pet

subject, viz. the indulgence-controversy: “The affair of the

controversy regarding indulgences dragged on till 1520-21; then

followed the question of the Sacrament and that of the Anabaptists.”

This is how Luther wrote—confusing the events and suppressing the

principal point—when, towards the end of his life, he penned for

posterity a record of what had occurred. Otto Scheel, in a compilation of

the texts bearing on Luther’s development prior to 1519, rightly places

this later account, together with the other statements made by him in

old age, under the heading: “second and third rate authorities.”[603]

What, however, are we to think when the considered narrative, written

by a man of such eminence, of events in which he was the chief actor,

has to be relegated to the category of second-rate and even third-rate

authorities?[604]

To enumerate some other misrepresentations not connected with his monkish

days: Luther assures us that sundry opponents of his “had blasphemed

themselves to death”; men who had the most peaceful of deathbeds he

alleges to have died tortured by remorse of conscience and railing at

God. He boasts aloud that it was the Papists who made a “good theologian”

of him, since, “at the devil’s instigation,” they had so battered,

distressed and frightened him out of his wits, that he necessarily came

to obtain a more profound knowledge.[605] Boldly and exultingly he points

to the many “miracles” whereby the Evangel had been proved.[606] He says

of the Diets, that the Papists always succeeded in wriggling out of a

hole by dint of lies, so that they looked quite white and “without ever a

stain.”[607] Of his own writings he says, that he “would gladly have seen

all his books unwritten and consigned to the fire.”[608] This in 1533,

and again in 1539.[609] Before this, however, he had declared he would

not forswear any of his writings, “not for all the riches of the world,”

and that, at least as a good work wrought by God, they must have some

worth.[610]

In such wise does the picture he gives of his life vary according to his

moods. He does not hesitate to sacrifice the sacred rights of truth when

this seems to the advantage of his polemics (see above, vol. iv., p. 80

ff.), and, owing to the peculiar constitution of his mind, the fiction

he so often repeats becomes eventually stamped as a reality to which he

himself accords credence.

_The Legend about his Years of Monkish Piety_

We may now turn to Luther’s fictions regarding his monkish days,

prefacing our remarks with the words of Luther’s Protestant biographer,

Adolf Hausrath. “The picture of his youth is forced to tally more and

more with the convictions of his older years. What he now looks upon as

pernicious, he declares he had found in those days to be so by his own

experience.… The oftener he holds up to his listening guests the warning

picture of the monk sunk in the abyss of Popery, the more gloomy and

starless does the night appear to him in which he once had lived.”[611]

That the use hitherto made of Luther’s statements concerning his convent

life calls for correction has already been admitted by several Protestant

students of reformation history. As early as 1874 Maurenbrecher protested

strongly against the too great reliance placed on Luther’s own later

statements, which, however, at that time, constituted almost the only

authority for his early history. “How wrong it is to accept on faith and

repeat anew Luther’s tradition is quite obvious. Whoever wishes to relate

Luther’s early history must first of all be quite clear in his mind as to

this characteristic of the material on which he has to work.… The history

of Luther’s youth is still virgin soil awaiting the labours of the

critic.”[612] The objections recently brought forward by Catholics have

drawn from W. Friedensburg the admission that we have unreliable, and,

“in part, misleading statements of Luther’s concerning himself.”[613]

G. Kawerau also at least goes so far as to admit that the historian of

Luther at the present day “is inevitably confronted by a number of new

questions.”[614] The publication of Luther’s Commentary on Romans of

1515-16 finally proved how necessary it is to regard the theology of his

early years as the chief authority for the history of his development.

Hence, in the account of his youth given above in vol. i., we took this

Commentary as our basis.

A preliminary sketch of the picture he handed down in his later sayings

is given us by Luther himself in the following:

God had caused him to become a monk, he says, “not without good

reasons, viz. that, taught by experience, he might be able to

write against the Papacy,” after having himself most rigidly

(“_rigidissime_”) abided by its rules.[615]—“This goes on until

one grows quite weary”; “now my other preaching has come: ‘Christ

says: Take this from me: You are not pious, I have done it all for

you, your sins are forgiven you.’”[616] According to the “Popish

teaching,” however, one cannot be sure “whether he is in a state

of grace”; hence, when in the cloister, though I was such a “pious

monk,” I always said sorrowfully to myself: “I know not whether God

is well pleased or not. Thus I and all of us were swallowed up in

unbelief.”[617]

Hence churches and convents are nothing but “dens of murderers”

because they “pervert and destroy doctrine and prayer.” “Indeed no

monk or priestling can do otherwise, as I know, and have myself

experienced”; “I never knew in the least how I stood with God”;

“I was never able to pray aright.”[618] This holiness-by-works of

Popery, in which I was steeped, was nothing but “idolatry and godless

worship.”[619]

“Learn,” he says, thus unwittingly laying bare the aim of his fiction,

“learn from my example.” “The more I scourged myself, the more was I

troubled by remorse of conscience.”[620] “We did not then know what

original sin was; unbelief we did not regard as sin.”[621] Their

“unbelief,” however, consisted in that we Papists fancied “that we had

to add our own works” (to the merits of Christ).[622] “Hence, for all

my fervour, I lost the twenty years I spent in the cloister.”[623]

But I did not want to “stick fast and die in sin and in this false

doctrine”;[624] for such a pupil of the law must in the end say to

himself “that it is impossible for him to keep the Law”; indeed he

cannot but come to say: “would there were no God.”[625]

Roughly, this is the tone of the testimony he gives of himself. It is

not our intention here simply to spurn it, but to examine whether there

is any call to accept it unconditionally—simply because it comes from

Luther’s lips—and whether it comprises a certain quota of truth.[626]

First, it must be noted that he represents himself as a sort of fanatical

martyr of penance. He assures us: Even the heroic works of mortification

I undertook brought me no peace in Popery: “_Ergo_,” etc. He here opens

an entirely new page in his past. He tells his friends, for instance: “I

nearly killed myself by fasting, for often, for three days on end, I did

not take a bite or a sip. I was in the most bitter earnest and, indeed,

I crucified our Lord Christ in very truth; I was not one of those who

merely looked on, but I actually lent a hand in dragging Him along and

nailing Him. May God forgive me! … for this is true: The more pious the

monk the worse rogue he is.”[627]

“I myself,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “was such an one [a

pious monk]. I nearly brought about my death by fasting, abstinence

and penance in work and clothing; my body became dreadfully emaciated

and was quite worn out.”[628]

The menace of death is also alluded to in a sermon of 1537: “For more

than twenty years I was a pious monk,” “I said Mass daily and so

weakened my body by prayer and fasting that I could not have lived

long had I continued in this way.”[629] Elsewhere he says that he had

allowed himself only two more years of life, and that, not he alone,

but all his brethren were ripe for death: “In Popery in times bygone

we howled for everlasting life; for the sake of the kingdom of heaven

we treated ourselves very harshly, nay, put our bodies to death, not

indeed with sword or weapon, but, by fasting and maceration of the

body we begged and besought day and night. I myself—had I not been set

free by the consolation of Christ in the Evangel—could not have lived

two years more, so greatly did I torment myself and flee God’s wrath.

There was no lack of sighs, tears and lamentations, but it all availed

us nothing.”[630]

“Why did I endure such hardships in the cloister? Why did I torment my

body by fasting, vigils and cold? I strove to arrive at the certainty

that thereby my sins were forgiven.”[631] The martyrdom he endured

from the cold alone was agonising enough: “For twenty years I myself

was a monk and tormented myself with praying, fasting, watching

and shivering, the cold by itself making me heartily desirous of

death.”[632]

Besides his penances another main feature of his later picture is his

extraordinary, albeit misguided, piety and virtue.

It is not enough for Luther to say that he had been a pious monk,

“an earnest monk,” who “would not have taken a farthing without the

Prior’s permission,” and who “prayed diligently day and night”;[633]

he will have, that “if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery then I

should have got there; of this all my brother monks will bear me

witness.”[634]

He had been more diligent in his monastic exercises of piety than any

of the Papists who took the field against him.[635]

Nay, “he had been one of the very best.”[636] He “confessed daily” [Is

this a reference to the Confession made in the Mass?] and “tried hard”

to find peace, but did not succeed.[637] Daily, he tells us, he “said

Mass and imposed on himself the severest hardships,” in order, “by

his own works, to attain to righteousness.”[638] It was because the

devil had remarked his righteousness, that he tempted him when engaged

in prayer in his cell by appearing to him in the shape of Christ, as

already narrated.[639] God, however, tried him by temptations just

as He tries those of the elect through whom He intends to do great

things for the salvation of mankind.[640] He, like the other cloistral

Saints, had been so penetrated with his sanctity, that, after Mass,

he “did not thank God for the Sacrament but rather God had to thank

him.”[641] He fancied himself in “the angel-choirs,” but had all the

while been “among the devils.”[642] Cloistral life was indeed “a

latrine and the devil’s own sweet Empire.”[643]

Other characteristic lines of the picture are, first, the dreadful way

in which his mind was torn by doubts concerning his own salvation,

doubts arising simply from his works of piety, and, secondly, his speedy

deliverance from such sufferings and attainment of peace and tranquillity

as soon as he had discovered the Evangel of faith. He cannot find colours

sombre enough in which to paint his former state of misery, which is also

the inevitable experience of all pious Papists.

“In the convent I had no thought of goods, wealth or wife, but my soul

shuddered and quaked at the thought of how to make God gracious to me,

for I had fallen away from the faith and my one idea was that I had

angered God and had to soothe Him once more by my good works.”[644]

“As a young Master at Erfurt I always went about oppressed with

sadness.”[645] But, after his discovery he had felt himself “born

anew,” as though “through an open door he had passed into Paradise.”

The words Justice of God suddenly became “very sweet” to him and the

Bible doctrine in question a “very gate of heaven.” “Holy Scripture

now appeared to me in quite a new light.”[646]

He had, indeed, studied the Bible diligently in his early monkish

years, but he had, nevertheless, been greatly tempted and plagued by

the “real difficulties”; his confessors had not understood him. “I

said to myself: No one but you suffers from this temptation.” And he

had become “like a corpse,” so that his comrades asked him why he was

“so mournful and downhearted.”[647]

Particularly the doctrine of penance had, he says, so borne him down

that “it was hardly possible for him, at the price of great toil and

thanks to God’s grace, to come to that hearing that gives joy [Ps. 1.

10].” For “if you have to wait until you have the requisite contrition

then you will never come to that hearing of joy, as, in the cloister,

I often found to my cost; for I clung to this doctrine of contrition,

but the more I strove after rue, the more I smarted and the more

did the bite of conscience eat into me. The absolution and other

consolations given me by my confessors I was unable to take because

I thought: Who knows if such consolations are to be trusted.”[648]

On one occasion, however, the master of novices strengthened and

encouraged him amidst his tears by asking him: Have you forgotten that

the Lord Himself commanded us to hope?[649]

Nevertheless, according to the strange description given by Luther

in a sermon in 1531, his keen anxiety about his confessions lasted

until after his ordination. “I, Martin Luther,” so he told the people,

“when I went up to the altar after confession and contrition felt

myself so weighed down by fear that I had to beckon to me another

priest. After the Mass, again, I was no more reassured than before.”

His trouble—which was possibly caused, or at any rate heightened,

by the spirit of obstinacy and scepticism he describes—was, however

(and it is on this that he lays stress), common to all Papists whose

consciences could never be at rest. “They became its victims chiefly

at the hour of death. How much did we dread the Last Judgment!… That

was our reward for our works.”[650] The truth is, that, on his own

showing, he scarcely knew what inward contrition was, and that he

remained too much a stranger to the motive of holy fear.[651]

To the period subsequent to his ordination must be assigned assurances

such as the following, the tone of which becomes more and more crude

the older he grows. “From that time [of his first Mass] I said Mass

with great horror, and thank God that He has delivered me from

it.”[652] “When I looked on [a figure of] Christ I fancied I was

looking at the devil. That is why we say: O, Mary, pray for us to thy

beloved Son and appease His wrath.” If I follow the principles of the

monks and Papists, then “I lose Christ my Healer and Consoler and make

Him into the taskmaster and hangman of my poor soul.”[653]

“As long as I remained a Papist I should have blushed with shame to

speak of Christ; Jesus is a womanish name; we preferred to speak of

Aristotle or Bonaventure.”[654] He also says: “Often have I trembled

at the name of Jesus; when I saw Him on the cross it was like a

thunderbolt and when His Name was mentioned I would rather have heard

the devil invoked, for I raved that I had to go on doing good works

until I had thereby made Christ friendly and gracious to me.”[655]

They used to say: “Scourge yourself until you have yourself blotted

out your sin. Such is the Pope’s doctrine and belief.”[656] Thus, in

the monastery, I had “long since lost Christ and His baptism. I was of

all men the most wretched, day and night there was nothing but howling

and despair which no one was able to calm. Thus I was bathed and

baptised in my monkery and went through the real sweating sickness.

Praise be to God that I did not sweat myself to death.”[657]

Those Protestants who take Luther’s statements too readily, without

probing them to the bottom and eliminating the rhetorical and fabulous

element, are apt to urge that Luther’s descriptions of the monastic state

show that nothing but mental derangement could result from such a life.

Dr. Kirchhoff, a medical man, basing his remarks on Luther’s accounts, is

inclined to assume the existence of some severe temperamental malady. He

even goes so far as to say that, at any rate, countless numbers of monks

lost their reason. “In the course of time,” he adds, Luther “acquired a

greater power of resisting the temptations, and, possibly, in his quieter

after-life the physical causes may have diminished; it would appear that

the accompanying conditions disquieted him greatly.”[658]

The fact is that Protestant authors as a rule fight shy of undertaking

any criticism of Luther’s account of himself. They accord it far too

ready credence and usually see in it a capital pretext for attacking the

olden Church.

If Luther is to be taken literally and is right in his generalisations,

then we should have to go even further than such writers and argue that,

one and all, those who sought to be pious in the religious life were mad,

or at least on the verge of insanity; the Church, by her doctrine of

works, of satisfaction and of man’s co-operation with Grace, infects all

who address themselves zealously to the performance of good works with

the poison of a subtle insanity.

We need waste no further words here on the falsehood of Luther’s

objections against the Catholic doctrine of works.[659]

We may pass over the countless clear and authentic proofs furnished by

Luther’s elders and contemporaries, and even by Luther himself previous

to his apostasy, which place the Catholic doctrine on works in a very

different light. The Church, in point of fact, always refused to hear

of works done solely by man’s strength being efficacious for salvation,

and regarded only those works performed by the aid of God’s supernatural

Grace as of any value—and that through the merits of Christ—whether for

the purpose of preparing for justification or for winning an everlasting

reward; she always recognised faith, hope and charity as conditions for

forgiveness and justification, and as the threefold spring whereby good

works are rendered fruitful.

There can be no question that Luther’s picture of his holiness-by-works

in Popery is meant to include all his earnest brother monks and their

mistaken way of life, and the doctrine and religious practices of Popery

as such. The fiction serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, as its

author gives us to understand quite openly, it was his excuse for having

shaken off the yoke of the religious life, on the other, it was to be

used as a weapon against the olden doctrine of the importance of works

for personal salvation. To be true to history, one must judge of his

account of his Catholic life from these two standpoints. How extremely

unreliable it is will then be more apparent. The following observations

on the contrast his account presents with historical truth, particularly

with the well-authenticated incidents of his development, and even with

the elements of truth which he introduces into the legend, will place the

grave shortcomings of the latter in an even clearer light.

Since Luther would have us believe that God caused him to become a

monk, in order that, taught by his own experience, he might write

against the Papacy,[660] no sooner does he begin to speak of himself

than he includes in the same condemnation his brother monks and all

those Christians who were zealous in the practice of works.

Under the Pope’s yoke he and all other Papists had been made to feel

to their “great and heavy detriment” what it spelt when one tried

to become pious by means of works. We grew more and more despondent

concerning sin and death.… For the more they do the worse their state

becomes.[661] “Thus I, and all those in the convent, were bondsmen

and captives of Satan.”[662]—“We hoped to find salvation through

our frock.”[663]—With us all it was “rank idolatry,” for I did not

believe in Christ, etc.[664]—Because we endured so many “sufferings

of heart and conscience and performed so many works,” no one must now

come and seek to excuse Popery.[665]—“We fled from Christ as from the

very devil, for we were taught that each one would be placed before

the judgment seat of Christ with his works”[666]—a teaching which is,

indeed, almost word for word that of St. Paul (2 Cor. v. 10).

Remembering the other utterances in which he makes all Papists share

in his alleged experiences, for instance, in his “unbelief,” we soon

perceive how unreliable are all such statements of his concerning the

history of his personal development. The whole is seen to be primarily

but a new form of controversy and self-vindication; only by dint

of cautious criticism can we extract from it certain traits which

possibly serve to illustrate the course of his mental growth in the

monastery.

Again, several details of the picture—quite apart from the obvious

effort to burden the olden Church with a monstrous system of

holiness-by-works—warn us to be sceptical. First of all there is the

customary rhetoric and playing to the gallery. The palpable exaggeration

it contains, its references to the howling by day and by night, to the

scourgings, to the tortures of hunger and cold, to the endless prayers

and watchings, and to the ravings of the woebegone searchers after peace,

do not prepossess us in favour of the truth of the account. Luther, in so

much of what he says on the point, has shown us how little he is to be

taken seriously, that one cannot but wonder how his statements, even when

exaggerated to the verge of the ludicrous, can ever have been regarded in

the light of real authorities.

He is not telling the truth when he assures us that, as Doctor of

Divinity, he had never rightly understood the Ten Commandments, and

that many other famous doctors had not known “whether there were

nine, or ten, or eleven of them; much less did we know anything

of the Gospel or of Christ.”[667] After outward works, indeed, we

ran, but “what God has commanded, that we omitted … for the Papists

trouble themselves about neither the Commandments nor the promises

of God.”[668] In choir the community daily chanted Psalm li. (l.),

in which joy in the Lord is extolled, but “there was not one who

understood what joy to the pious is a firm trust in God’s Mercy.”[669]

We have, for instance, his remarkable saying, that he had looked upon

it as a deadly sin for a monk ever to come out of his cell without

his scapular, even though otherwise fully dressed. Yet no reasonable

man acquainted with the religious life, however observant he might

be, would have been capable of such fears. Luther declares that he

had seen a sin in every infringement of the rule of his Order; yet

the Rule was never intended to bind under pain of sin, as indeed was

expressly stated. He asserts that he had believed, that, had he made

but a slight mistake or omission in the Mass, he “would be lost”; yet

no educated priest ever believed such a thing, or thought that small

faults amounted to mortal sins.

As an instance of the Papal tyranny over consciences he was wont to

tell in his old age how he had tortured himself on the Saturday by

reciting the whole of the Breviary that he had omitted to say during

the week owing to his other occupations. “This is how we poor folk

were plagued by the Pope’s decretals; of this our young people know

nothing.” His account[670] of these repetitions varies considerably in

the telling. He expects us to believe he was not aware of the fact,

familiar to every beginner in theology, that the recitation of the

Hours and the Breviary is imposed as an obligation for the day, which

expires as soon as the day is over, so that its omission cannot be

afterwards made good by repetition. From his account it would on the

contrary appear that the “Pope’s decrees” had imposed such subsequent

making good. Even should he really, in his earlier days when he first

began to neglect the Breviary, have occasionally repeated the task

subsequently, yet it is too bad of him to make it part of the monkish

legend and an instance of how “we poor fellows were tormented.”[671]

“It is an astonishing and dreadful thing,” he proceeds, “that men

should have been so mad!” Those who live in the religious life and

according to man-made ordinances “do not deserve to be called men nor

even swine”;[672] a “hateful and accursed life” was it, with “all their

filth!”[673]

The young monk too—could we trust Luther’s account—must have been

seriously wanting in discretion where mortification was concerned, and

a like indiscretion was evinced by all others who took the religious

vocation in earnest. But the extravagant asceticism such as Luther would

have us believe he practised, and the theological assumption underlying

it, viz. that salvation depends on bodily mortification, are quite

against the older teaching in vogue in his time. We may quote a few

instances of the teaching to the contrary.

Thomas Aquinas declares: “Abstinence from food and drink in itself

does not promote salvation,” according to Rom. xiv. 17, where we read:

“The kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink.” He recognises only the

medicinal value of fasting and abstinence, and points out that by

such practices “concupiscence is kept in check”; hence he deduces the

necessity of discretion (“_ad modicum_”) and warns people against the

“vain glory” and other faults which may result from these practices.

Not by such works, nor by any works whatsoever, is a man saved and

justified, but “man’s salvation and justice,” so he teaches, “consist

mainly in inward acts of faith, of hope and of charity, and not in

outward ones.… Man may scorn all measure where faith, hope and charity

are concerned, but, in outward acts, he must make use of the measure

of discretion.”[674]

But perhaps the best ascetical writer to refer to in this connection

is John Gerson of Paris, who was so much read in the monasteries and

with whom Luther was well acquainted. He assigns to outward works,

particularly to severe acts of penance, the place they had, even from

the earliest times, held in the Church. He bids Religious care above

all for inward virtue, which they are to regard as the main thing, for

self-denial and for obedience out of love of God. He appeals to the

Fathers and warns his readers that “indiscreet abstinence may more

easily lead to a bad end than even over-feeding.” Discretion could not

be better practised than in humility and obedience, by forsaking one’s

own notions and submitting to the advice of the expert; such obedience

was never more in place than in a Religious.[675]

These are but two notable witnesses taken from the endless tale of those

whose testimony is at variance with the charges implied in Luther’s

legend, that the monks were regardless of discretion where penance was

concerned.

That Luther is guilty of self-contradiction in attributing to the

Catholic teachers and monks of his day such mistaken views and practices

and the doctrine of holiness-by-works generally is fairly obvious.

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.

We need only refer to the passage in the Commentary where he declares:

Our so-called good works are not good, but God merely reckons

(“_reputat_”) them as good. “Whoever thinks thus is ever in fear

(‘_semper pavidus_’), and is ever awaiting God’s imputation; hence he

cannot be proud and contentious like the proud self-righteous, who

trust in their good works.”[735]

What is curious, however, is that, here and elsewhere in the

Commentary, the so-called self-righteous, both in the cloister and

the world, appear to be quite “confident” and devoid of fear; they

at least fancy they may enjoy peace; hence, as depicted in the

Commentary, they are certainly not the howling and anxious spirits of

whom the later legend speaks. On the contrary it is Luther alone who

is sunk in sadness, and whose melancholy pessimism presents a strange

contrast to all the rest. His mysticism also veils a deep abyss.

Almost on the same page the pessimistic mystic speaks of that

resignation to hell which has a place in his new system of theology.

“Because we have sin within us we must flee happiness and take on

what is repugnant, and that, not merely in words and hypocritically;

we must resign ourselves to it with full consent, must desire to be

lost and damned. What a man does to him whom he hates, that we must

do to ourselves. Whoever hates, wishes his foe to be undone, killed

and damned, not merely seemingly but in reality. When we thus, with

all our heart, destroy and persecute ourselves, when we give ourselves

over to hell for the sake of God and His Justice, then indeed we have

already satisfied His Justice and He will deliver us.”[736] It can

hardly be considered normal that a monk should wish to live—among

brethren, who rejoiced in the promises of Christ and in the Church’s

means of grace—the life of a lonely mystic sunk in the depths of an

abyss, where “a man does not strive after heaven but is perfectly

ready never to be saved, but rather to be damned, and where, after

having been reconciled by grace, a man fears, not God’s punishments,

but simply to offend Him.”[737]

Luther’s recollections of the mental ailments he went through as a monk

also undoubtedly had their effect on the legend. We know that Luther

never rightly understood the nature of these ailments and that he

regarded his fits of terror, his nervousness and his gloom as anything

but what they really were. It would appear that, in his old age, he

simply lumped all his sad experiences together as typical of the sort of

poison which Popery and Monkery, owing to their false doctrines, offered

to their adepts. Nothing seemed to him to show better from what horrors

he had snatched mankind. Whether involuntary self-deception played a part

here, or whether, by dint of constant repetition, he came to believe in

the truth of his tale, who can now venture to say? In any case his spirit

of bitterness led him to make of his own sufferings a sort of spectre

of terror common to all, who, like himself, had raved that they were

zealously serving God whether in the monastery or in Popery at large.

Even “great Saints” had, according to him, lived amidst the “devil’s

factions and errors, under Rules and in monasteries and institutions,”

but had finally “cut themselves loose and been saved by faith in Jesus

Christ.”[738]

He completely shuts his eyes to the fact that both his fears concerning

predestination and his morbid states of terror accompanied by fainting

fits recurred in his case even in later life, and, that, after his

apostasy he had in addition to suffer from remorse of conscience on

account of his doings against the Church. Nor does he seem to see that

he himself betrays the falsity of what he says of the general depression

to which all monks were subject when he relates above, that _he alone_

had gone about in the monastery labouring under such oppression and that

no one had understood him or been able to console him (above, p. 113);

hence, according to this, his brother monks cannot have suffered from the

terrors he afterwards attributed to them.

_The Monkish Nightmare_

The strange “terrors” under which he was labouring when he first knocked

at the gate of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt were, according to

Melanchthon’s definite assurance already quoted, closely bound up with

his habitual states of fear. They were extraordinary states of mental

perturbation (“_terrores_”) and can only be explained when looked at

in the light of his other mental troubles.[739] Of the incidents that

impelled him to enter the convent[740] Luther himself says in a passage

which has also been quoted above, that (on the occasion of his first

Mass) he had tried to reassure his father Hans by pointing out that he

had been called “by terrors from heaven” (“_de coelo terrores_”); to

which his father had harshly replied: “Oh, that it may not have been a

delusion and a diabolical vision” (“_illusio et præstigium_”).[741] The

happenings immediately previous to his entering the monastery are of a

rather mysterious character. The inmates of the Erfurt convent declared

at that time in consequence of what they had gathered from Luther, that

he, like “another Paul, had been miraculously converted by Christ.”[742]

Oldecop, who began his studies at Wittenberg in 1514, speaks in his

Chronicle of “strange fears and spectres” on account of which Luther

had taken the habit.[743] Still more remarkable is the report based on

the account of Luther’s intimate friend Jonas, and dating from 1538. He

says: When Luther, as a student, was returning to Erfurt after having

been to Gotha to buy some books “there came a dreadful apparition from

heaven which he then interpreted as signifying that he was to become a

monk.”[744] If these statements were correct it would appear as though

we have here already an instance of hallucination worthy of being classed

with the “sights and visions” elsewhere mentioned. Even his earliest

monastic days would assume a suspiciously pathological character if, even

then, he was convinced of having been the recipient of heavenly messages.

It must, however, remain doubtful whether Jonas’s report means exactly

what it seems to mean and whether his sources are to be relied upon.

The possibility of his having been the victim of hallucination at such an

early date also raises the question whether his later abnormal states can

be explained by heredity or his upbringing.

By their “harsh treatment,” so Luther says on one occasion, his parents

had “driven him into the monastery”; here we have an entirely new version

of the motives of his choice of the religious life; he adds that, though

they meant well by him, yet he had known nothing but faintheartedness

and despondency.[745] Poverty still further darkened his early youth.

It is quite possible that the young monk may have suffered for some

considerable time from feelings of timidity and depression as a result of

his education and mode of life. The natural timidity which was apparent

during a part of his youth may also have contributed its quota to the

rise of the legend of the monk who was ever sad. But all this does not

explain as well as an hereditary malady would the terrors or seeming

hallucinations. Unfortunately the question of heredity is still quite

obscure, though the highly irritable temper of his father referred to

above (p. 182) may have some bearing on it. Luther, however, says very

little about his parents and even less of his manner of bidding good-bye

to the world.

The statements he makes, whether in jest or in earnest, concerning his

vow to enter a religious Order, differ widely.

He declares he made the vow to God in honour of St. Anne, but that God

had “taken it in the Hebrew meaning,” Anne signifying grace, and had

understood that Luther wished to become a monk “under grace and not

under the Law,” in fact not a monk at all.[746] Very likely it is no

jest, however, when he adds that, “he had soon regretted his vow, the

more so since many sought to dissuade him from entering the convent”;

he had, nevertheless, persisted, in spite of the objections of his

father and, after that, he had had no further thought of quitting the

convent, “until God deemed the time had come” (to thrust him out of

it).[747]

On another occasion he assures us he had entered the convent only

“because he despaired of himself.”[748] And again: “God let me become

a monk,” “though I entered forcibly and contrary to my father’s

wishes”;[749] for I had “to learn to know the Pope’s trickery.”[750]

As a rule, however, he leaves God out of the matter. He had taken the

vow only “under compulsion,” so he says in self-defence; he had not

become a monk “gladly and willingly”; he did not then know that a

father had to be obeyed, or that vows rested only on “the commandments

of men, on hypocrisy and superstition,”[751] but, during his life in

the cloister, the suspicion of his father, who had now been reconciled

with him, about the possibility of its having all been a diabolical

delusion had sunk deeply into his mind; in his father’s words he had

perforce to recognise the Voice of God.[752]

Again, the legend makes out the monk, in the time of his first fervour,

to have looked more like a corpse than a man; yet, so far as we can

judge, it was only after he had begun his public struggle, i.e.

subsequent to 1517, that he began to show signs of physical exhaustion

and emaciation, and this, too, was only owing to the way in which he went

to work. On the other hand, on March 17, 1509, i.e. nearly four years

after his entry into the religious life, when about to quit Erfurt, he

wrote, that, “as to himself, by God’s grace, all was going well.” The

expression he uses seems to imply that, not merely his spiritual, but

also his bodily, state was satisfactory.[753]

* * * * *

In his legend Luther speaks repeatedly of certain morbid states from

which he had suffered and which he duly uses to lash the Popish

conception of holiness. They are too closely bound up with other facts

in his mental life to be set aside as simple inventions, though it must

also be added that they contain an element of uncertainty.

In the case of people who have been brought up as Christians but

who suffer from certain nervous disorders, particularly when their

temperament is of the melancholy variety, a notable aversion for sacred

objects may occasionally be observed. “Many such patients cannot bear

the sight of a cross, cannot listen to prayers, stop their ears at the

ringing of the Angelus, cannot mention the word ‘sacrament,’ but use some

circumlocution instead.” “Among perfectly normal people we do not meet

with this sort of thing, still it is nothing extraordinary.”[754]

Now, oddly enough, we find Luther, in 1532, telling the people quite

seriously in his sermons on Matt. v.-vii., that, as a novice, he had not

been able to endure the sight of the crucifix. “When I saw a picture or

statue of Christ hanging on the Cross, etc., I was so affrighted that I

averted my eyes.”[755] And, again, in the same sermons: “When I looked at

Him on the Cross He seemed to me like a flash of lightning.” He also adds

that he “had often been affrighted at the name of Jesus.”[756] “The Last

Day,” he says in a sermon of 1534, he could not bear to hear spoken of,

and “my hair stood on end when I thought of it.”[757] These statements

are doubtless exaggerations, but Luther has others even stronger: He

would “rather have heard the devil spoken of than Christ”; he would

rather have seen “the devil than the Crucified”; “rather have heard of

the devils in hell than of the Last Day.” It may be queried whether the

above were simply inventions designed to vilify the monastic life and the

faith in which he had grown up. Nevertheless, whoever calls to mind the

“terrors” Luther experienced at his first Mass and in the procession with

Staupitz, whoever keeps before him the part played by Luther’s “fears”

even at a later date,[758] will certainly not think it beyond the bounds

of possibility that, at times, he should have shuddered at the sight of

the cross or at the mention of Christ or of the Last Judgment.

To all this, his bodily condition may have contributed, yet, in his

legend, Luther makes of these doubtless morbid states of his the

inevitable result of the holiness-by-works practised in the convent and

taught by Catholic doctrine. It was because they had known Christ only

as the Judge, Who must be placated by works, that he had so dreaded the

Crucifix and the very mention of the Judgment. He says that he could not

but tremble at the sight of the Crucifix, because, like the rest of the

Papists, he had been taught to think that “I must go on performing good

works until I have thereby made Christ my friend and gracious toward

me.”[759] For this reason alone he had “so often shrunk back affrighted

at the name of Jesus” and at the “Cross” as at a “flash of lightning,”

because he, like all the rest, had lost his faith; “I had fallen away

from the faith and had no other thought than that I had angered God Whom

I must once more propitiate by my works.” “But praise and thanks be to

God that now we have His Word once more, which leads us to Christ and

depicts Him as our Righteousness”; our heart need no longer “tremble and

quake.”[760]

After assuring us that he was often unable to gaze upon the Cross, he

also at once proceeds to make capital out of this against the olden

Church: “For,” so he continues, “my mind was poisoned by this Popish

doctrine,” a doctrine according to which “Christ, our Healer, had been

turned into a devil.”[761]

Nor does he hesitate to make out that the sight of the Saviour was

likewise terrifying to all the zealous and earnest “saints-by-works”

in the religious life and Popery generally.[762] In another passage he

speaks of the dreadful emotion all felt at the mention of the coming

Judgment and the Last Day: “And so we were all sunk in the filth of our

own holiness and fancied that, by our life and works, we could pacify the

Divine Judgment”; formerly they used to start “if anyone spoke of death

or of the life to come”; but, since the light of the Evangel has risen,

it is otherwise.

It is true that the way in which Luther here allows his prejudice to

exploit these terrifying experiences may raise doubts as to whether

they had ever actually existed even in his own case, or whether he did

not rather invent them with the object of afterwards ascribing them to

all. At the same time it is easier to believe in their existence than to

credit him with having deliberately evolved them out of his own fancy.

The utmost caution must indeed be exercised in accepting his assertions

on this subject. We cannot sufficiently express our amazement at the

credulity with which Luther’s rhetorical statements about his life in the

convent have often been accepted, for instance even by Köstlin. The fact

is, that the ground on which Luther’s later account rests, the elements

that he introduces into his transformation of the facts, and above all

the bitter and aggressive spirit which directs and permeates everything,

have not been adequately recognised and thus the mythological nature of

his fiction has remained undetected. Otherwise it would surely have been

impossible to assert, that, just as Paul had been through the mill of

the Law, so Luther also had been through that of the religious life, in

order, by virtue of his experience, to discover the supreme truth.

* * * * *

Various traits in the picture he drew, which, owing to its difficulties,

has puzzled many people, may, as we have seen, be explained by his

misapprehension or misinterpretation of the phenomena of his own morbid,

melancholy mind. Other moral factors have, however, also to be taken into

account.

As already pointed out, his depression of mind, due primarily to physical

causes, became so pronounced owing to his refusal to submit to proper

direction.

His dissatisfaction was increased by his growing impatience with the

religious life, by remorse of conscience arising from his tepidity and

worldliness, and by his growing antipathy to his vocation.

* * * * *

It may be said, that, had the convent been wisely governed, Luther would

never have been admitted to profession but have been quietly dismissed

while yet a novice. Both for his superiors and for himself this would

have been the better course. A morbid temperament such as his, whatever

may have been its cause, was not suited for the religious life, even

apart from the obstacles in Luther’s character. The monotony and the

penances of the monastic life, the self-discipline and obedience; also

the annoyances with which he had to put up from his brother monks, whose

habits and upbringing were not his, must necessarily have aggravated his

case, particularly as he refused to submit to guidance. His superiors

should have foreseen that this brother would be a source of endless

difficulties. Instead of this, Staupitz, the vicar, clung to his

favourite. He even gave him to understand that he would make of him a

great scholar and an ornament of the Order. Had he remained in the world,

in a different and freer sphere of action, Luther might possibly have

succeeded in shaking off his ailments and the resultant depression. But,

in the convent, particularly as he went his own way, he became the victim

of ideas and imaginations which promoted the growth of his doctrine and

helped to pave the way for his apostasy. Nevertheless, his morbid states

could not annul the vows he had taken in the Order, hence his leaving and

his breach of the vows cannot be excused on the ground of his illness,

though the latter may help to explain his step.

From all the above it is plain how unwarrantable is the assumption that

to set aside Luther’s legend is to shut one’s eyes to the severe inward

struggles through which he went previous to making his great decision.

There can be no doubt that, previous to his unhappy change of religion,

the monk had to wage a hard fight with himself. He was striving against

his conscience, and, by overcoming it, he consciously and deliberately

incurred the guilt of his apostasy. “A frightful struggle of soul,”[763]

may, and indeed must, be assumed, though a very different one from that

usually pictured by Protestants and by Luther himself. It would indeed

be “stupid” (to use the words of a Protestant biographer of Luther) to

seek to “obliterate from history” the deep-down inward struggle which,

“maybe, lasted longer than we think.” It is, however, gratifying to

find that the same author admits that, as a monk in the Erfurt priory,

Luther “found some inward contentment,” in other words, that the legend

is false in this particular; he also grants that, at least “in this

or that statement,” Luther, in his later accounts, has been guilty of

“exaggeration”; that his “development” did not proceed quite on the lines

he fancied later, at least that the “change was not quite so sudden,”

and, finally, that “physical overstrain” had something to do with his

struggles.[764]

3. The Legend receives its last touch; how it was used

It is only after 1530 that we find Luther’s legend of his monkish life

fully developed. Before this we see only the first hints of the tale.

It cannot be argued that, till then, he had been silent on his inward

experiences as a monk, or that the MSS. of the Table-Talk only commence

subsequent to 1530. That, even before this, he had frequently spoken of

his earlier spiritual experiences is evident from the passages already

quoted, and might be proved by many others; moreover the absence of any

recorded Table-Talk is a detail, since the latter is far from being our

sole source in the present question.

We are justified in assuming that the idea matured in 1530, during his

stay at the Castle of Coburg where he had to wage so severe a struggle

with himself. Amid the trials he endured during his days of retirement

at the Wartburg he had found time to pen his violent attack on monastic

vows; so also, it was in the quiet of the Coburg, amidst the ghostly

conflicts and delusions, that he wove the caricature of his own monkish

life into the web of his history. At the very time when Luther was at

the Coburg the burning question of German monasticism was being debated

at the Diet of Augsburg; the Catholic Estates hoped that recognition

might again be won for it from the Protestants, or that it might at least

secure toleration in the districts where allegiance was divided. It was

also at the Coburg that Luther penned many of the furious passages of his

“Warning to the Clergy forgathered at Augsburg.”

He there says: “For the monks I know not how to plead. For I am well

aware you would rather they were all of them given over to the devil,

please God, whether they take wives or not.”[765] In these words he

erroneously takes for granted that all ecclesiastics shared his own

hatred for the monks. He boasts in this writing that he “had destroyed

the monks by his teaching”;[766] he trusts that “the Bishops will not

allow such bugs and lice to be stuck again on their fur cappas.”[767]

The reason why his doctrine had destroyed the monks was, because it

had revealed how they were merely “intent upon works.” “For what else

could come of it? If a conscience is intent on its works and builds on

them, then it is stablished on loose sand which is ever slipping and

sliding away; it must ever be seeking for works, for one and then for

another and ever more and more, until at last even the dead are clothed

in monks’ cowls the better to reach heaven.”[768] The last words are

a caricature, a misrepresentation of a pious custom by which no one

ever dreamt infallibly to win heaven. The “loose sand” is, however, a

favourite expression with him when speaking of his teaching on works. It

is the same teaching that he wants to bring before the eyes of all by

means of his fiction. How, at that time, his thoughts were harking back

to his former life in the convent is plain from a letter of consolation

he then wrote to his “tempted” pupil Weller. He tells him that he

himself had also had his sadnesses and temptations, but that what he had

suffered as a monk had in the end proved a schooling for his present high

calling.[769]

Had he really been the butt of such “temptations” as the legend depicts

and contrived so successfully to vanquish them by his doctrine on

justification, then we might expect to find some trace of this in

his first writings subsequent to his change of outlook. Now, in the

Commentary on Romans we have a vivid document bearing on his change of

opinions, yet, full as it is of information about the author, we may seek

in vain for the legend. On the contrary it breathes a high esteem for

the religious state.[770] In the “Resolutions” to the Indulgence-Theses

likewise, Luther speaks of the phases through which he had passed and of

the mystical sufferings he had endured.[771] Yet here again the features

of the legend are wanting. Is it not somewhat remarkable that an author

usually so candid and talkative as Luther should have kept silence about

those experiences of which, just at that time, i.e. at the beginning of

his public struggle, he must have been so full?

Nor is the legend to be found in Luther’s writings dating from between

1520 and 1530. All the passages quoted above date from a later period.

Had the tale it tells been based on history he would surely have made

capital out of it during this long spell of controversy with the monks

and Papists. Thus, in his violent “_De votis monasticis_” of 1521, he as

yet has nothing to say of his supposed so pious life, of his excessive

penance, misguided holiness-by-works, and the despair he endured in the

convent, though, in the Preface, he alludes to his own life as a monk.

Nor, again, in his “_De servo arbitrio_” of 1525, does he as yet put

forward the actual legend. It is true that here, when explaining his

doctrine of Predestination, he refers to the fears from which as a monk

he had suffered regarding his election, fear which arose from his doubts

as to the fate decreed for him by God from all eternity. As it is also

here that he for the first time airs his theory that his doctrine of

absolute predestination and his dogma of justification were alone able

to give peace,[772] this would seem to have been the place to give an

account of his own life in the monastery and its attendant circumstances.

But the legend was not as yet ready. We have merely a hint of what is

to come: The Catholic doctrine that heaven may be won by works spells

the end of all peace; “this is proved by the experience of all the

holy-by-works, and this, to my cost, I also learnt by the experience

of many years.”[773] About his heroic works of penance, his vigils,

fastings, extraordinary piety, and the sudden and gratifying change, he

has not a word to say.

Heralds of the legend are certain statements met with in a sermon of

1528 where he describes himself as having been a “very pious monk,” who

was, however, wanting in constancy and like a “shaking reed,” not being

firmly rooted in Christ;[774] again at the end of his “Vom Abendmal

Bekentnis” he declares his “greatest sins” were his having “been such

a holy monk and having plagued God for more than fifteen years with so

many masses.”[775] In the latter writing he at least admits that “many

great saints had lived in the monasteries”;[776] he even thinks that “it

would indeed be a fine thing if the monasteries and foundations were

retained, to the end that young folk might there be taught God’s Word,

the Scriptures and how to live a Christian life,” in short as educational

establishments for both boys and girls. “But, to seek in them the road to

salvation, that is the devil’s own doctrine and belief.”[777]

Finally, in the sermons on John vi.-viii. which he began in 1530 after

his return from the Coburg to Wittenberg and continued till 1532 we

have the legend more or less complete: He had been a monk and had kept

the nightly watches (i.e. had chanted the usual matins), had “fasted

and prayed, scourged his body and tormented it”; he had been one of

the pious and earnest monks who took their life seriously, “who, like

me, were at some pains and examined and plagued themselves, and wanted

to attain to what Christ is in order to be saved. But what did they

gain thereby?”[778] At the same time he begins to enlarge in the most

incredible way on the beliefs and habits of the Papists with regard to

their own merits and the merits of Christ. All had held their tongues

concerning the Saviour, so he says, and he emphasises his statement by

adding: “I myself, I should have blushed to say that Christ was the

Saviour.” Thus in a sermon of Dec., 1530.[779]

In the period that follows, what he says of his piety, and especially

of his works of penance, grows more and more emphatic. The argument

at the back of his mind is this: “If even so mortified, penitent,

and holy a monk as he could find no peace in Popery but only black

despair, must not then all admit that he was in the right in

protesting against both the Church and her vows?”

So strictly had he kept his Rule, that, if ever monk got to heaven, it

should have been he; he had plagued himself to death with watching,

prayer, study and other labour.[780] This was the time when he “sought

to be a holy monk and to be reckoned among the most pious.”[781] “If

ever a monk was earnest then it was I.… I was at the utmost pains to

keep the ordinances” (of the Fathers).

He “had been one of the best”[782] and was “wholly given over” to

“fasting, watching and prayer”;[783] “I nearly killed myself with

fasting, watching and cold … so mad and foolish was I.”[784] By

fasting, sleeplessness, hard work and coarse clothing “my body was

dreadfully broken and worn out.”[785]

In short, he had “sunk deeper into the quagmire [of mortification,

obedience to the Church and monastic piety] than many an other”; so

much so that “it had been hard and bitter” to him to cut himself

adrift from the ordinances of the Pope; “God knows how hard I found

it!”[786]

As he himself gradually came to believe in his extraordinary

“holiness-by-works” it may be that his thoughts dwelt too exclusively

to his earlier days as a monk, i.e. on those passed at Erfurt, during

which he certainly was more zealous than in later years, though never

such a fanatic as he afterwards makes out. He may also have compared his

life as a monk with the small efforts after virtue he made subsequent to

his public apostasy, and the contrast may have led him to make too much

of his piety in the convent. The contrast, indeed, often troubled him,

and we find him seeking for grounds to excuse his later lukewarmness in

prayer, so different from his earlier fervour.[787] This also helps us to

explain the line of thought followed in the legend.

The true character of the legend becomes clearer when Luther begins

to exploit it in his polemics. He depicts himself as a sort of

“caricature of the monastic saint,”[788] and then complains: This

damnable life could not but keep me ever in a state of fear, and yet

the Popish Church recommends and sanctions it; the more zealous I grew

the further I withdrew from Christ—nay, brought even my baptism into

danger! He had never been able to “find comfort in it,” nay, he had

been compelled to “lose” it, to “lend a hand in denying it.” “This is

the upshot and reward of their doctrine of works.”[789] He even goes

so far as to say that the Papists “truly and indeed made nought of

the baptism” of Christ, for which reason “their doctrine is as baneful

as that of the Anabaptists”; they “make of us Jews or Turks, as though

we had never been baptised.”

Luther’s persistent and obtrusive exploitation of his legend in his

controversies must not be lost to sight.

In his new-found zeal he not only as a rule passes too confidently

from the _I_ (_I_ did so and so) to the _we_, or _they_, the better

to clap the blame attaching to himself on the monks in general, the

Pope and all the Papists, and then to conclude with the praise of the

new Evangel, but—and this reveals even more plainly the origin of the

invention,—he also follows the reverse order, speaking first of the

New Evangel, then of the senseless martyrdom endured by all the monks

with their works, and, lastly, of his own personal experiences, as

though they had been necessarily implied in his earlier premisses.

_I_ cruelly disciplined my body, he says, and goes on: “_They_ plagued

and tormented themselves”; for all that, “did they find Christ? Christ

says: ‘You shall die in your sins.’ To this they came.” “The Pope,

too, labours and seeks,” to find what Christ is; “but never will he

find it.” All this leads to the conclusion: “But now God has given His

Grace, so that every town and thorp has the Gospel.”[790]

Above we heard him speak of the “quagmire” in which he was sunk;

in the same connection he remarks: “_We_ wore out the body with

fasting,” etc., “and some even went crazy through it.” Then follows

the inference: “And, at last, _we_ lost our very souls.” For, to our

“great and notable injury,” _we_ were made to feel “in our anxious and

troubled conscience” what it means “to try to become pious by works

and so to redeem ourselves from sin.” “_We_ would gladly have had a

cheerful conscience,” but “it was all of no use, and _we_ naturally

became more and more downhearted about sin and death, so that no folk

more unhappy are to be found on earth than the priestlings, monks and

nuns who are wrapped up in their works.” “The more _they_ do, the

worse things fare with them.” But, since my doctrine has come into

the world, people have unlearnt their faintheartedness: “_We_ run to

the Man Who is called Christ and say: Yes indeed, we must take it

from the Man without any merit whatsoever [on our part].… He gives me

freely that for which formerly I had to pay a high price. He gives me,

without any works or merit, that for which formerly I had to stake

body, strength and health.”[791]

His supposed experiences as a monk are even made to do service in his

interpretation of Holy Scripture. In order to understand the Scriptures,

so he argues, deep inward experience is called for. This he maintained

when withstanding the fanatics and their system of illuminism. Here he

actually carries back the beginning of his own experience to his convent

days.

Already in the convent, so he declares, he had been compelled to bow to

the idol of scepticism, because he, and all the rest, knew nothing of any

real faith in the Gospel. Far less had he learned to pray Evangelically.

“That Christ was a mystery, as St. Paul says, I looked upon formerly,

when I had to submit to being called a Doctor of Holy Scripture, as a

lying statement which I very well understood. But now that, praise be

to God, I have once more become a poor student of Holy Writ, and that,

the longer I live, the less I know of it, I begin to see the marvel of

such sayings, and find by experience that they must necessarily remain

mysteries.… Our experience must bear witness to this, how amply, fully

and clearly we now possess this same Word of Christ.”[792] But, by the

Pope, it was “gruesomely murdered.”[793]

Of the Saints of their Order the monks made their God, and of their

miracles they made their Gospel. “For know you this, that I, Dr.

Martin Luther, who am now living and write this, was also one of

the crowd who were forced to believe and worship such things [lying

fables]. And had anyone been so bold as to doubt one whit of it, or

to raise a finger against it, he would have gone to the stake or to

some other evil end.”[794] That the latter was an exaggeration and the

merest invention Luther was perfectly well aware.

He also speaks untruthfully of the manner of prayer in the convent.

That he himself, when once he had fallen away from his vocation, no

longer prayed in a right spirit is very likely. He, however, says:

“I and all the others had not the right conception” (of prayer);

it was no true “raising of the heart to God because we fled from

God (‘_fugiebamus Deum_’).… We only prayed ‘conditionally’ and

‘hypothetically,’ not ‘categorically.’” This he said in 1537,

admitting, however, with regard to his own then family prayers,

that they “were not so fervent, because he was always forced to

protest,” i.e. to pour out his anger against the Papists; but, “in the

congregation as a whole, it comes from the heart and also serves its

purpose.”[795]

His wilful misrepresentation of the truth becomes more pronounced,

when, in the exploitation of the legend, he seeks to moderate the

monks’ practices of penance and mortification—with the help of Terence

and Aristotle.

In his Commentary on Genesis he complains: “The religious life of the

monk is so crooked that no exception (‘_epikia_’) is allowed, nor any

moderation. Hence it is all wickedness and unrighteousness. No heed is

paid to the object of the Law, or to charity.… And yet what Terence

says is still true: ‘_summum ius esse summam iniuriam_.’ God does not

wish the body to be put to death, but that it be preserved for each

one’s calling and for the service of our neighbour.”[796] “Learn,

therefore, that peace and charity must govern and direct all virtues

and laws, as Aristotle points out in the 5th book of his Ethics.”[797]

Now, as a matter of fact, the Rule of the Hermits of St. Augustine,

with which he was thoroughly conversant, enjoined consideration for

the health of the individual.[798] Brother Jordan of Saxony, whose

book was regarded as a standard work in the Order, insists on care

being taken of the body and only permits penitential exercises “in

moderation, with the superiors’ approval and without scandal to the

brethren.”[799]

His falsehoods are coupled with the outbursts of fury against Catholicism

into which he was so prone to fall when attempting to describe the

religious life he had forsaken.

Because we endured so much “pain and such martyrdom of heart and

conscience” no one must now seek to excuse the Papacy; on the contrary

“we cannot blame and scold the Pope enough”; “that he should have so

wasted the beautiful years of my youth, and martyred and plagued my

conscience is really too bad.” Popery is the “scarlet whore of Rome,

the arch-whore, the French whore, chock-full of blasphemies”; “we must

thank our Lord God that He has revealed and discovered to us the Pope

as the dragon with his head, belly and tail.”[800]—The monks are a

“devilish crew,” and monkery a “hellish cauldron”; by day and by night

Christ is to all monks a “hangman and devil”; even the best and most

learned, and St. Thomas of Aquin himself, were all driven to despair

and died of the ghostly poison.[801] The last words occur in the work

he wrote in self-defence against Duke George of Saxony (1533), who had

twitted him with having committed perjury in breaking his religious

vows.

The thought of his own infidelity and his abuse of the graces of the

religious life was at times quite enough in itself to fill him with

fury. At any rate his whole picture of his earlier years is steeped in

polemics and the spirit of hate.