“We fled from Christ,” he says in one of these remarkable passages, “as from the devil; for we were taught that everyone must appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ with his works and orders.... The Gospel tells us that Christ does not come as a Judge but as a Saviour; but the monks taught the contrary, namely, that He was to be our Judge.”[992] Now, he says, elsewhere, the word of God which has been rediscovered “depicts Christ as our Justice.” But in the monastery he, like all the others, had “fallen away from the faith,” and therefore his “heart trembled and palpitated for fear lest God should not be gracious” to him. “I often shuddered at the name of Jesus and when I looked at Him on the cross, He seemed to me like a lightning-flash.”[993]
He had often, he assures us, been forced to say: “I wish there were no God,”[994] “and none of them looked upon my unbelief as a sin.”[995]
It was “simple idolatry, for I did not believe in Christ but looked on Him as a stern and terrible Judge.”[996] “I did not know how I stood towards God,” “was unable to pray aright,”[997] indeed “no one knew anything” about prayer, “for we did not pray in faith in Christ.”[998]
It was a “great martyrdom and bondage from which the gospel set us free”;[999] I was, as it were, in a privy and in the kingdom of the devil.[1000] He felt the terrors of the Divine Judgment, he assures us (possibly on account of the inward wrestling with the iustitia Dei) so that his “hair stood on end” when he thought of it. “At the monastery I shuddered when they spoke of death or the other life.”[1001]
“I was the most wretched man on earth; day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to put an end to for me. Thus I was bathed and baptised and properly sweated in my monkery. Thanks be to God that I did not sweat myself to death, otherwise I should have long ago been in the depths of hell with my monkish baptism. For I knew Christ only as a stern Judge from Whom I wished to escape and was unable to do so.... Thus have they tortured many a worthy soul throughout life and at last thrown him in despair into the infernal abyss.”[1002]
“In this way I raged (‘Ita furebam’),” Luther continues in the Latin Preface where he speaks of his sudden discovery, “and my conscience caused me terror and confusion; I knocked imploringly at the verse of Paul (Rom. i. 17) with a burning thirst to know what it meant.” He now describes the actual inward experience.
“At last, while brooding day and night, by the mercy of God I noticed the connection between the words: the Justice of God is revealed therein [in the gospel], as it is written, ‘The just man liveth by faith.’ Then I began to understand the Justice of God as that by which the just man lives by the gift of God, viz. by faith; [I saw that] the sense is this: ‘By the gospel, justice, i.e. the passive justice of God, is revealed by which the merciful God justifies by faith, as it is written: ‘The just man liveth by faith.’ Then I felt myself born again and fancied I had passed through the gates of Paradise. The whole of Scripture thereupon appeared to me in quite a different light. I ran rapidly through the passages in question as they lived in my memory and compared them with other expressions, such as: ‘Work of God,’ i.e. the work which God carries on in us; ‘Power of God,’ by which He makes us strong; ‘Wisdom of God,’ by which He makes us wise; likewise the ‘Strength of God,’ ‘Salvation of God,’ and ‘Honour of God.’ Then I extolled that sweetest word, Justice, with as much love as I had previously hated it, and this passage of Paul’s became to me in very truth the gate of Paradise.” He adds that the reading of Augustine had strengthened him in his interpretation, and, “provided with better weapons by means of this experience, I set about the exposition of the Psalms for the second time”; this work was, however, interrupted by the Diet of Worms.
Luther, it is true, does not speak here of the monastery tower as the scene of his experience, but this is described quite plainly in his other statements given below. In these the privy situated above the “Hypocaustum” is mentioned as the place where the discovery took place. They at the same time complete and confirm the account given in the Preface of the antecedents of this new enlightenment, i.e. the immediately preceding terrors of God’s avenging justice, the time it happened, viz. when Luther was engaged on the Psalms, and finally, the subject-matter of the experience.
The accounts from Luther’s own lips must here be considered collectively.
Not only do they correspond exactly with Luther’s condition of mind, as described above, but also, according to the chronological account already given of the development of his teaching, with the time he recommenced his work on the Psalms, 1518-19, which period Luther expressly mentions in the Preface as the date of the incident.[1003] It is not necessary, indeed, when we consider the above description of the course of his development, not possible, to assign an earlier date to the incident, though some have recently pushed it back to a time prior to his first exposition on the Psalms. Others, on account of some minor inexactitudes which occur in the principal account given in 1545 (see below, p. 399), hold it to be a fanciful invention of Luther in his old age in which he was merely summing up the result of a long inward process. If every circumstance be calmly weighed the historian must however, in the main, support Luther’s account; he is not free to sacrifice the valuable source of knowledge, of such vast importance in arriving at an estimate of Luther’s personality, presented by these testimonies.