Chapter XXXVII: Luther’s Later Embellishment of His Early Life (3)

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.