Chapter XXXVII: Luther’s Later Embellishment of His Early Life (2)

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.