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]