At Leitzkau the Augustinians possessed rights over the large fisheries and Luther was intimate with the local Cistercian Provost. When the Provost, George Maskov, asked him how he should behave towards a brother monk who had sinned grievously, seeing that he himself was a still greater offender, Luther replied, saying, among other things, that he ought certainly to punish him, for, as a rule, it was necessary to exercise discipline towards those who are better than ourselves. “We are all children of Adam, therefore we do the works of Adam.” But “our authority is not ours, but God’s.” Perhaps God desired to help that brother on the road of sin, namely, through shame. “It is God Who does all this.”[694] And in another letter he says to the Provost:[695] “If many of your subjects are on the way to moral ruin, yet you must not for that reason disquiet them all. It is better quietly to save a few.... Let the cockel grow together with the wheat ... for it is better to bear with the many for the sake of the few than to ruin the few on account of the many.” In a mystical vein he says: “Pray for me, for my life is daily drawing nearer to hell (i.e. the lower world, ‘inferno appropinquavit,’ Ps. lxxxvii. 4), as I also become worse and more wretched day by day.”[696]
Bodily infirmities were then pressing hard upon him in consequence of his many labours and spiritual trials, while much of his time was swallowed up by his lectures which were still in progress.
2. The Monk of Liberal Views and Independent Action
With regard to his own life as a religious and his conception of his calling Luther was, at the time of the crisis, still far removed from the position which he took up later, though we find already in the Commentary on Romans views which eventually could not fail to place him in opposition to the religious state.
What still bound him to the religious life was, above all, the ideal of humility, which his mystical ideas had developed. He also recognised fully the binding nature of his vows. According to him man cannot steep himself sufficiently in his essential nothingness before the Eternal God, and vows are an expression of such submission to the Supreme Being.
“To love is to hate and condemn oneself, yea even to wish evil to oneself.” “Our good is hidden so deeply that it is concealed under its opposite; thus life is hidden under death, real egotism under hatred of self, honour under shame, salvation under destruction, a kingdom under exile, heaven under hell, wisdom under foolishness, righteousness under sin, strength under weakness; indeed all our affirmation of any good is concealed under its negation in order that faith in God, Who is the negation of all, may remain supreme ... thus ‘our life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. iii. 3), i.e. in the negation of all that can be felt, possessed and apprehended.... That is the good which we must desire for ourselves,” he says to his brother monks, “then only are we good when we recognise the good God and our evil self.”[697]
He says elsewhere regarding vows: “All things are, it is true, free to us, but by means of vows we can offer them all up out of love; when this has once taken place, then they are necessary, not by their nature but on account of the vow which has been taken voluntarily. Then we must be careful to keep the vows with the same love with which we took them upon us, otherwise they are not kept at all.”[698] In many points he goes further than the Rule itself in the mystical demands he makes upon the members of the Order.
In other respects Luther’s requirements not only fall far short of what is necessary, but even the ordinary monastic duties fare badly at his hands. If it is the interior word which is to guide the various actions, and if without the “spirit” they are nothing, indeed would be better left undone, then what place is left to the common observance of the monastic Rule and the numerous pious practices, prayers and acts of virtue to which a regular time and place are assigned?
From the standpoint of his pseudo-mystical perfection he criticises with acerbity the recitation of the Office in Choir; also the “unreasonableness and superstition of pious founders of benefices,” who, as it were, “desired to purchase prayers” at certain fixed times. Founders of a monastery ought not to have prescribed the recitation of the Office in Choir on their behalf; by so doing they wished to secure their own salvation and well-being before God, instead of making their offerings purely for God’s sake.[699] Such remarks plainly show that he was already far removed in spirit from a right appreciation of his Order. He had also expressed himself against the mendicancy practised by the Augustinians, and yet the Order was a Mendicant Order and the collecting of alms one of its essential statutes.[700]
Nevertheless, again and again he speaks in lofty language of the value of the lowliness of the religious life. Now especially, he writes in the Commentary on Romans under the influence of his mystical “theologia crucis,” it is a good thing to be a religious, better than during the last two centuries. Why? Because now monks are no longer so highly esteemed as formerly, they are hated by the world and looked upon as fools, and are “persecuted by the bishops and clergy”; therefore the religious ought to rejoice in their cross and in their state of humiliation.[701]