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.