Thomas Aquinas declares: “Abstinence from food and drink in itself does not promote salvation,” according to Rom. xiv. 17, where we read: “The kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink.” He recognises only the medicinal value of fasting and abstinence, and points out that by such practices “concupiscence is kept in check”; hence he deduces the necessity of discretion (“ad modicum”) and warns people against the “vain glory” and other faults which may result from these practices. Not by such works, nor by any works whatsoever, is a man saved and justified, but “man’s salvation and justice,” so he teaches, “consist mainly in inward acts of faith, of hope and of charity, and not in outward ones.… Man may scorn all measure where faith, hope and charity are concerned, but, in outward acts, he must make use of the measure of discretion.”[674]
But perhaps the best ascetical writer to refer to in this connection is John Gerson of Paris, who was so much read in the monasteries and with whom Luther was well acquainted. He assigns to outward works, particularly to severe acts of penance, the place they had, even from the earliest times, held in the Church. He bids Religious care above all for inward virtue, which they are to regard as the main thing, for self-denial and for obedience out of love of God. He appeals to the Fathers and warns his readers that “indiscreet abstinence may more easily lead to a bad end than even over-feeding.” Discretion could not be better practised than in humility and obedience, by forsaking one’s own notions and submitting to the advice of the expert; such obedience was never more in place than in a Religious.[675]
These are but two notable witnesses taken from the endless tale of those whose testimony is at variance with the charges implied in Luther’s legend, that the monks were regardless of discretion where penance was concerned.
That Luther is guilty of self-contradiction in attributing to the Catholic teachers and monks of his day such mistaken views and practices and the doctrine of holiness-by-works generally is fairly obvious.
If the young monk really “kept the Rule,” then his extravagant penances for the purpose of gaining a gracious God can have had no existence outside his brain; the Rule prohibited all exaggeration in fasting and maceration, wilful loss of sleep and senseless exposure to cold. The Augustinian Rule, devised expressly as it was, to be not too severe in view of the exacting labours involved by preaching and the care of souls, had been further mitigated on the side of its penitential exercises by Staupitz’s new constitutions in 1504.[676] It was true the prior might sanction something beyond what the Rule enjoined, but it is scarcely credible that a beginner like Luther should have been allowed to exceed to such an extent the limit of what was adapted to all. His bodily powers were already sufficiently taxed by his studies, the more so since he threw himself into them with such impetuous ardour. It is all the less likely that any such special permission was given him, seeing that, as we know, Staupitz had, in consideration of his studies, dispensed the young monk from the performance of the humbler duties of the monastery.
If what has been said holds good of the years spent at Erfurt, much less can there be any question of his having indulged in excessive rigour during his Wittenberg period. Here Luther began at an early date to inveigh against what he thought was excessive strictness on the part of his brother monks, against their observance and against all so-called holiness-by-works. In his sermons and writings of that time we have an echo of his vexation at the too great stress laid on works;[677] but such a frame of mind, which was by no means of entirely new growth, surely betrays laxity rather than over-great zeal. The doctrine of the all-sufficiency of faith alone and of Christ’s Grace was already coming to the front.
Yet he continued—even after he had set up his new doctrine and completely broken with the Church—to recommend works of penance and mortification, declaring that they were necessary to withstand sinful concupiscence; nor does he even forget, agreeably with the Catholic view, to insist on the need of “discretion.” He also knows quite well what is the true purpose of works of penance in spite of all he was to say later in his subsequent caricature of the Catholic doctrine and practice. We hear him, for instance, saying in a sermon of 1519, when speaking of the fight to be waged against concupiscence: “For this purpose are watching, fasting, maceration of the body and similar works; everything is directed towards this end, nay, the whole of Scripture but teaches us how this grievous malady may be alleviated and healed.”[678] And, in his Sermon on Good Works (1520), he says: Works of penance “were instituted to damp and deaden our fleshly lusts and wantonness”; yet it is not lawful for one to “be one’s own murderer.”[679] All this militates against his own tale, that, in the convent, discretion had never been preached, and that, thanks to the trashy holiness-by-works, he had been on the highroad to self-destruction. The Sermon in question was preached some five years before the end of those “twenty years” during which, to use his later words, he had been his own “murderer” through his excessive and misguided penances.
It may, however, be, that, for a short while, e.g. in the time of his first fervour as a novice, he may have failed now and then by excess of zeal in being moderate in his exercise of penance. This would also have been the time, when, tormented by scruples, he was ever in need of a confessor. To a man in such a state of unrest, penance, however, even when practised with discretion, may easily become a source of fresh confusion and error, and, when undertaken on blind impulse and used to excess, such a one tends to find excuses for himself for disregarding the prohibition both of the Rule and of his spiritual director.