In Rörer the whole text has been still further polished up. He agrees with II in leaving out the “in hac turri,” but, with I, in introducing the “cloaca” at the end. The words “in horto” which are inserted in his handwriting just above would seem to be his own addition due to his knowledge of the spot (the tower really stood partly in the garden).
Other interpretations of the texts in question: Kawerau (p. 62 f.) takes Lauterbach’s “hypocaustum” to refer to Luther’s workroom in the tower, which Luther had retained since his monkish years and from which “he stormed the Papacy.” Unfortunately, in the references given by Kawerau, we find no allusion to any such prolonged residence in a room in the tower.
Luther himself once casually alludes to two different “hypocausta” (or warmed rooms) in the monastery. According to a letter dated in Nov., 1527 (“Briefwechsel,” 6, p. 117), whilst the Plague was raging, he put up his ailing son Hans in “meo hypocausto,” whilst the wife of Augustine Schurf, the professor of medicine, when she was supposed to have contracted the malady, was also accommodated in a “hypocaustum” of her own. For another sick lady, Margareta von Mochau, he found room “in hybernaculo nostro usitato,” and, with his family, took up his own lodgings “in anteriore magna aula.” Hans’s “hypocaustum” was probably the traditional room furnished with a stove still shown to-day as Luther’s (Köstlin-Kawerau, 2, p. 491). Unfortunately this room is not near the town-wall, or the tower, but on the opposite side of the building. There is another allusion elsewhere (Feb. 14, 1546, “Briefe,” 5, p. 791) to a “hypocaustum,” but, there again, no reference is made to its being situated in the tower.
An undated saying in Aurifaber’s German Table-Talk, in which Luther expresses a fear for the future of his “poor little room” “from which I stormed the Pope” (Erl. ed., 62, p. 209; Förstemann, 4, p. 474) might refer to any room. As a monk Luther is not likely to have had a warmed cell of his own but merely the use of the common-room of the community. He himself speaks of what he suffered from the cold (above, p. 194); elsewhere he tells us of the noise once made by the devil “in the chimney” of the refectory (above, p. 125) to which Luther had betaken himself to prepare his lecture, presumably for the sake of more warmth.
In vol. i. (p. 397) we perhaps too hastily assumed the “necessary building” to have been a privy which Luther, in 1519, asked permission to erect. It may even have been the “pleasant room overlooking the water” in which Luther “drank and made merry”—to the great disgust of the fanatic Ickelsamer. (See above, vol. iii., p. 302.) Being new it would no doubt have been “pleasant” and no doubt, too, it also had a fire-place. It may be conjectured that, possibly Lauterbach, with his allusion to the “tower” and the “hypocaustum” was intending to suggest this room as the scene of the revelation rather than the more ignoble locality of which Cordatus speaks.
Others have sought to escape the disagreeable meaning of the text in other ways. Wrampelmeyer interpreted it figuratively: The tower was Popery and the “hypocaustum” Luther’s spiritual “sweat bath.” Preger did much the same and even more. He says: “I hold that ‘Cl.,’ from which abbreviation the other readings seem to have sprung[!], stands for ‘Capitel’ [i.e. chapter].” Even Harnack inclines to this latter view. The meaning would then be: “This art the Holy Ghost revealed unto me on this chapter” (of the Epistle to the Romans). But, apart from the clumsiness of such a construction, as it was pointed out by Kawerau, such an abbreviation as “Cl.” for “capitel” or “capitulum” is unheard of. With even less reason Scheel tentatively makes the suggestion to read “Cl.” as “claustrum,” or “cella.”
Kawerau admits that “Cl.” stands for “cloaca,” but he urges that it arose through a misunderstanding on Schlaginhaufen’s part of Cordatus’s “secretus locus”—as though Schlaginhaufen was likely to depend on second-hand information regarding an utterance he had heard himself.
Kawerau further points out, that the locality in which the revelation was received is, after all, of no great moment, that “the stable at Bethlehem was not unworthy of witnessing God’s revelation in Christ”; Scheel, likewise, asks whether all Christians, even those of the Roman persuasion, do not believe that God is present everywhere? They certainly do, and nothing could have been further from our intentions than any wish to prejudice the case by making the locality of the incident a “capital question.” Had Luther received his supposed revelation on Mount Thabor, or on Sinai, or before the altar of the Schlosskirche we can assure our critics that we should have faithfully recorded the testimonies with the same regard for historical truth.