The effort to attain to perfection by the observance of poverty, chastity and obedience was at first so attractive to Luther, that, for a while, as we have already pointed out, he really allowed it to cost him something. Some years later, when he had already begun to paint in stronger hues his virtues as a monk, he said, perhaps not exaggerating: “It was no joke or child’s play with me in Popery.” His zealous observance was, however, confined to his first stay at Erfurt. A brother monk of his whom Flacius Illyricus chanced to meet in that town in 1543 also bore witness to Luther’s piety there as a monk. The “old Papist,” then still a faithful Augustinian, had told him, writes Flacius, how he had spent forty years in the Erfurt monastery where Luther had lived eight years, and that he could not but confess that Luther had led a holy life, had been most punctilious about the Rule and had studied diligently. To Flacius this was a new proof of the “mark of holiness” in the new Church.[693]
Nor are statements on the part of the young monk wanting which prove, in contradiction with the legend he invented later, that his theoretical grasp of the religious life was still correct even at a time when he had already ceased to pay any great attention to the Rule.[694]
Even as late as 1519, i.e. but two years before he wrote his book against monastic vows, he still saw in these vows a salutary institution. In a sermon he advised whoever desired “by much practice” to keep the grace of baptism and make ready for a happy death “to bind himself to chastity or join some religious Order,”[695] the Evangelical Counsels still appeared to him, according to statements he made in that same year, “a means for the easier keeping of the commandments.”[696]
It was only after this that he began to think of tampering with the celibacy of the priesthood, and that only in the hope of winning many helpers in his work of apostasy. A little later he attacked with equal success the sacred obligations freely assumed by the monks. Yet we find nothing about the legend in his writings and letters of this time, though it would have been of great service to him. Everything, in fact, followed a much simpler and more normal course than the legend would have us imagine: The spirit of the world and inordinate self-love, no less than his newly unearthed doctrine, were what led to the breaking of his vows.
Many of his brother monks had already begun to give an example of marrying when, in the Wartburg (in Sep., 1521), while busy on his work against monastic vows he put to Melanchthon this curious question: “How is it with me? Am I already free and no more a monk? Do you imagine that you can foist a wife on me as I did on you? Is this to be your revenge on me? Do you want to play the Demea [the allusion is to Terence] and give me, Mitio, Sostrata to wife? I shall, however, keep my eyes open and you will not succeed.”[697] Melanchthon was, of course, neither a priest nor a monk. Luther, who was both, was even then undoubtedly breaking away at heart from his vows. This he did on the pretext—untenable though it must have appeared even to him—that his profession had been vitiated by being contrary to the Gospel, because his intention had been to “save his soul and find justification through his vows instead of through faith.” “Such a vow,” he says, “could not possibly be taken in the spirit of the Gospel, or, if it was, it was sheer delusion.” Still, for the time being, he only sanctioned the marriage of other monks who were to be his future helpers; as for himself he was loath to give the Papists “who were jawing” him the pleasure of his marriage. He also denied in a public sermon that it was his intention to marry, though he felt how hard it was not to “end in the flesh.” All these are well-known statements into which we have already gone in detail, which militate against Luther’s later legend of the holy monk, who tormented himself so grievously solely for the highest aims.
When, nevertheless, yielding to the force of circumstances, he took as his wife a nun who had herself been eighteen years in the convent, his action and the double sacrilege it involved plunged him into new inward commotion. His statements at that time throw a strange light on the step he had taken. By dint of every effort he seeks to justify the humiliating step both to himself and to others.
In his excitement he depicts himself as in the very jaws of death and Satan. Fear of the rebellious peasants now so wroth with him, and self-reproach on account of the marriage blamed by so many even among his friends, inflamed his mind to such a degree that his statements, now pessimistic, now defiant, now humorous, now reeking with pseudo-mysticism, furnish a picture of chaos. The six grounds he alleges for his marriage only prove that none of them was really esteemed by him sufficient; for, that it was necessary for him to take pity on the forsaken nun, that the Will of God and of his own father was so plain, and that he was obliged to launch defiance at the devils, the priestlings and the peasants by his marriage, all this had in reality as little weight with him as his other pleas, such as, that the Catholics looked on married life as unevangelical, and that it was his duty to confirm the Evangel by his marriage even in the eyes of his Evangelical critics.[698] To many of his friends his marriage seemed at least to have the advantage of shutting the mouths of those who calumniated him. He himself, however, preferred to say, that he had had recourse to matrimony “to honour God and shame the devil.”[699]
When once Luther had entered upon his new state of life all remaining scruples regarding his vows had necessarily to be driven away.
As was his wont he tried to reassure himself by going to extremes. “The most successful combats with the devil,” so he tells us, are waged “at night at Katey’s side”; her “embraces” help him to quell the foe within.[700] He declares even more strongly than before, that marriage is in fact a matter of downright necessity for man; he fails to think of the thousands who cannot marry but whose honour is nevertheless untarnished; he asserts that “whoever will not marry must needs be a fornicator or adulterer,” and that only by a “great miracle of God” is it possible for a man here and there to remain chaste outside the wedded state; more and more he insists, as he had already done even before, that “nothing rings more hatefully in his ear than the words monk and nun.”[701] He seizes greedily on every tale that redounds to the discredit of the monasteries, even on the silly story of the devils dressed as spectral monks who had crossed the Rhine at Spires in order to thwart him at the Diet.