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 [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 [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.