It is interesting to note the varying period during which Luther, according to his later sayings, was addicted to these excessive penances and to holiness-by-works. We already know that it was only gradually that he broke away from his calling, and that he had in reality long been estranged from it when he laid aside the Augustinian habit.
According to one dictum of his, he had been a strict and right pious monk for fifteen years, i.e. from 1505-20, during which time he had never been able “to do enough” to make God gracious to him.[680] Again, elsewhere, he assures us that the period of misery during which he sought justification through his works had lasted “almost fifteen years.”[681] On another occasion, however, he makes it twenty years (i.e. up to 1525): “The twenty years I spent in the convent are lost and gone; I entered the cloister for the good and salvation of my soul and for the health of my body, and I fondly believed … that it was God’s Will that I should abide by the Rule.”[682] What a contrast this alleged lengthy period of fifteen or even twenty years during which he kept the Rule presents to the reality must be sufficiently clear to anyone who remembers the dates of the events in his early history. To make matters worse, in one passage[683] he actually goes so far as apparently to make the period even longer during which he had “been a pious monk,” and had almost brought about his death by fasting, thus bringing us down to 1526 or 1527 if the reading in the text be correct. It certainly makes a very curious impression on one who bears in mind the dates to see Luther, the excommunicate, after his furious attack on religious vows and the laws of the Church, and after his marriage, still depicted as an over-zealous and pious monk, whose fasting is even bringing his life into jeopardy. But if Luther was so careless about his dates does not this carelessness lead one to wonder whether the rest of the statements he makes in conjunction with them are one whit more trustworthy?
“For over thirty years,” he says in a sermon of 1537, “I knew nothing but this confusion [between Law and Gospel] and was unable to believe that Christ was gracious to me, but rather sought to attain to justification before God by means of the merits of the Saints.”[684] This statement is again as strange as his previous ones, always assuming that the account of the sermon in question, which Aurifaber bases on three separate reports, is reliable. In this passage he is speaking not of the years he spent in the convent but of the whole time during which he was a member of the Popish Church. If this be calculated from his birth it brings us down to about 1515, i.e. to about the date of his Commentary on Romans where the new doctrine of how to find a Gracious God is first mooted. But what then of the other account he gives of himself, according to which, for more than ten years subsequent to 1515, his soul remained immersed in the bitter struggle after holiness-by-works? If, on the other hand, we reckon the thirty years from the first awakening of the religious instinct in his boyhood and youth, i.e. from about 1490 or 1495, we should come down to 1520 or 1525 and find ourselves face to face with the still more perplexing question as to how the darkness concerning the Law could have subsisted together with the light of his new discovery.
Luther’s versatile pen is fond of depicting the quiet, retiring monk of those days. As early as 1519 he wrote to Erasmus that it had always been his ardent wish “to live hidden away in some corner, ignored alike by the heavens and the sun, so conscious was he of his ignorance and inability to converse with learned men.”[685] These words in their stricter sense cannot, however, be taken as applicable to the period when they were written but rather to the first years of his life as a monk.
The historical features of his earlier life in the monastery deserve, however, to be examined more carefully in order better to understand the legend.
2. The Reality. Luther’s Falsification of History
The legend of Luther’s abiding misery during his life as a monk previous to his change of belief contradicts the monk’s own utterances during that period.
Monastic Days of Peace and Happiness. The Vows and their Breach
The fact is, that, for all his sufferings and frequent temptations, Luther for a long while felt himself perfectly at ease in monasticism. In the fulness of his Catholic convictions he extolled the goodness of God, who, in His loving-kindness, had bestowed such spiritual blessings on him. In 1507 he wrote that he could never be thankful enough “for the goodness of God towards him, Who of His boundless mercy had raised him, an unworthy sinner, to the dignity of the priesthood.”[686] The elderly friend to whom he thus opened his heart was the same Johannes Braun, Vicar of the Marienstift at Eisenach, to whom he again gave an account of his welfare in 1509. To him he then wrote: “God is God; man is often, in fact nearly always, wrong in his judgments. God is our God, and will guide us sweetly through everlasting ages.”[687]—The inward joy which he found in the monastery gave him strength to bear his father’s displeasure. He not only pointed out to him that it was “a peaceful and heavenly life,”[688] but he even tried so to paint the happy life he led in his cell as to induce his friend and teacher Usingen to become an Augustinian too.[689] We may also recall his praise of his “preceptor” (i.e. novice master), whom he speaks of as a “dear old man” and “a true Christian under the damned frock.” He repeats some of his beautiful, witty sayings and was always grateful to him for his having lent him a copy, made by his own hand, of a work by St. Athanasius.[690] The exhortations addressed to him by Staupitz when he was worried by doubts and fears, for instance his excellent allusion to the wounds of Christ,[691] found an echo in Luther’s soul, and, in spite of his trouble of mind, brought him back to the true ideal of asceticism. We also know how he praised Usingen, his friend at Erfurt, as the “best paraclete and comforter,” and wrote to a despondent monk, that his words were helpful to troubled souls, provided always that they laid aside all self-will.[692]
Hence, for a considerable part of his life in the monastery, Luther was not entirely deprived of consolations; apart from the darker side of his life, on which his legend dwells too exclusively, there was also a brighter side, and this is true particularly of his earlier years.