There is a document in existence, on which so far but little attention has been bestowed, which is characteristic of his language at one time. Its tone of exaggeration makes it worthy to rank side by side with the mystical passage quoted above, in which Luther professes to have himself experienced the pangs of hell which were the earthly lot of chosen souls.[709] Owing to its psychological value this witness to his humility must not be passed over.
Luther had received from Christopher Scheurl of Nuremberg, a learned lawyer and humanist, a letter dated Jan. 2, 1517, in which this warm partisan and admirer of the Augustinians, who was also a personal friend of Staupitz after a few words in praise of his virtue and learning, of which Staupitz had told him, expressed the wish to enter into friendly correspondence with him.[710] The greater part of Scheurl’s letter is devoted to praising Staupitz, rather than Luther. Yet the young man was utterly dumbfounded even by the meagre praise the letter contained. His answer to it was in an extravagant vein, the writer seemingly striving to express his overwhelming sense of humility in the face of such all-too-great praise.[711]
The letter of one so learned and yet so condescending, so Luther begins, while greatly rejoicing him had distressed him not a little. He rejoiced at his eulogies of Staupitz, in whom he simply extolled Christ. “But how could you sadden me more than by seeking my friendship and decking me out in such empty titles of honour? I cannot allow you to become my friend, for my friendship would bring you, not honour but rather harm, if so be that the proverb is true: ‘Friends hold all in common.’ If what is mine becomes yours then you will receive only sin, unwisdom and shame, for these alone can I call mine; but such things surely do not merit the titles you give them.” Scheurl, indeed, would say, so he goes on in the same pathetic style, that it was only Christ he admired in him; but Christ cannot dwell together with sin and folly; hence he must be mindful of his own honour and not fall so low (‘degeneres’) as to become the friend of Luther. Even the Father-Vicar Staupitz praises him (Luther) too much. He made him afraid and put him in peril by persisting in saying: “I bless Christ in you and cannot but believe Him present with you now.” Such a belief was, however, hard, and the more eulogies and friends, the greater the danger in which the soul stood (then follow three superfluous quotations from Scripture). The greater the favour bestowed by men the less does God bestow His. “For God wills to be either the only friend or else no friend at all. To make matters worse, if a man humbles himself and seeks to fly praise and favour, then praise and favour always come, to our peril and confusion. Oh, far more wholesome,” he cries, “are hatred and disgrace than all praise and love.” The danger of praise he elucidates by a comparison with the cunning of the harlot mentioned in Proverbs vii. He is writing all this to Scheurl, not by any means to express contempt for his good-will but out of real anxiety for his own soul. Scheurl was only doing what every pious Christian must do who does not despise others but only himself; and this, too, he himself would also do.
And, as though he had not yet said enough of his love of humility, the writer makes a fresh start in order to explain and prove what he has said. Not on account of learning, ability and piety does a true Christian honour his fellow-men; such a thing had better be left to the heathen and to the poets of to-day; the true Christian loved the helpless, the poor, the foolish, the sinful and the wretched. This he proves first from Ps. xli., then from the teaching of Christ and from His words: “For that which is high to men is an abomination before God” (Luke xvi. 15). “Do not make of me such an abomination,” so he goes on, “do not plunge me into such misery if you would be my friend. But, from so doing you will be furthest if you forbear from praising me either before me or before others. If, however, you are of opinion that Christ is to be extolled in me, then use His Name and not mine. Why should the cause of Christ be besmirched by my name and robbed of its own name? To everything should be given its right name; are we then to praise what is Christ’s without using His Name? Behold,” so he breaks off at last very aptly, “here you have your ‘friend’ and his flood of words; have patience friendly reader”—words which may apply to the modern reader of this effusion no less than to its first addressee. It cannot well be gainsaid that something strange lay in this kind of humility. It would be difficult to find an exact parallel to such language in the epistles of the humanists of that day, and still less in the correspondence of truly pious souls. What may, however, help us to form our opinion is the fact that, in the letters written immediately after the above, we again find the young professor condemning wholesale everything that did not quite agree with his own way of thinking.
The passion, precipitancy and exaggeration which inspired him during his monkish days is the other characteristic which here calls for consideration. His fiery and unbridled zeal was of such a character as to constitute a very questionable virtue in a monk.
We may recall what has already been said of the youthful Luther’s passionate and unmeasured abuse, even in public, of the “Little Saints” and “detractors” in his Order, for instance at the Chapter of the Order held at Gotha in 1515. Bitter exaggerations are met with even in his first lectures. In the controversy with the Observantines he goes so far as to make the bold assertion, that it was just the good works of his zealous brother monks that were sinful, though they in their blindness refused to believe it.[712] In his Commentary on the Psalms in 1513-15 he even goes so far as to denounce as “rebellion and disobedience” their vindication of strict observance in the Order.[713] His imagination makes him fancy that they are guided by a light kindled specially for them by “the devil.”[714] Such is his ardour when thundering against the abuses in the Order that he forgets to make the needful distinctions, and actually, in the presence of the young Augustinians who were his pupils, attacks the very foundations of their Mendicant Order. Yet elsewhere, in the narrowest spirit of party prejudice, he inveighs against worthy scholars who happened to belong to other Orders, for instance, against Wimpfeling, on whom he heaps angry invective.[715] The slightest provocation was enough to rouse his ire.
Soon his passion began to vent itself on the Church outside. In his lectures on the Psalms he laments that Christianity was hardly to be found anywhere, such were the abuses; he can but weep over the evil; all pious men were, according to him, full of sorrow that the Incarnation and Passion of Christ had come to be so completely forgotten. We know how the young religious, from the abyss of his inexperience, declared in the most general terms, as though he had been familiar with all classes and all lands, that the desecration of what was most sacred in the Church had gone so far that they had sunk below even the Turk; “owing to the unchastity, pomp and pride of her priests, the Church was suffering in her property, in the administration of her sacraments and of the Word of God, in her judicial authority and finally in her government,” etc., “the Sanctuary was, so to speak, being hewn down with axes,” churchmen doing spiritually what the Turk was doing both spiritually and materially; in vain was the Word of God preached “seeing that every entrance was closed to it.”
Holy men, of real zeal, had always been able to discern the good side by side with the bad. But the youthful Luther sees on every side, and everywhere nothing but false teaching (“scatet totus orbis,” etc.), nay, a very “deluge of filthy doctrines.”[716] To be made a bishop is to him tantamount to branding oneself a “Sodomite”; so full of vice is the episcopate that those wearers of the mitre were the best who had no sin on their conscience beyond avarice.[717] As for the men of learning, they rank far below Tauler, and, thanks to their narrowness, had made the age “one of iron, nay, of clay.”[718] When setting faith and grace against the alleged heathenism of the scholars he goes so far as to say, that his man is he “who outside of grace knows nothing.”[719] As early as 1515 he thinks himself qualified to attack the authorities and the highest circles because “his teaching-office lent him apostolic power to say and to reveal what was being done amiss.”[720]
Why, we may, however, ask, did not the reformer of the Church begin with himself, seeing that, in the lectures on the Psalms just mentioned, he already laments the coldness of his own religious life?[721] Even then he felt temptations pressing upon him; already in consequence of his manifold and distracting labours he had lapsed into a state in which prayer became distasteful to him, and of which he writes to an intimate friend in 1523: “In body I am fairly well but I am so much taken up with outward business that the spirit is almost extinguished and rarely takes thought for itself.”[722] These words and other earlier admissions (above, vol. i., p. 275 ff.) throw a strange light on the legend according to which he had wrestled in prayer by day and by night.
Even in his devotion to his studies and in his manner of writing on learned subjects his natural extravagance stands revealed. His love for study was all passion; his mode of thought and expression was simply grotesque. It was the young monk’s passion for learning which led him on the occasion of his visit to Rome to petition the Pope to be allowed for a term of several years to absent himself from home and devote himself in the garb of a secular priest to his studies at the Universities. At Wittenberg we find him in the refectory pen in hand in the silent watches of the night when all the other monks had gone to rest, and, in his excited state, he fancies he hears the devil making an uproar. Though, according to his admission of Oct. 26, 1516, he was so busy and overwhelmed with literary work, as “rarely to have time to recite the Hours or to say Mass,”[723] yet he still had time enough to inveigh against the “sophists of all the Universities” as he had, even then, begun to term the professors of his day. He professed his readiness, were it necessary, to find time to go to Erfurt in order to defend in a public disputation there the Theses set up at Wittenberg in his name by his pupil Franz Günther; the Erfurt Augustinians were not to denounce these propositions as “paradoxical, or actually cacodoxical,” “for they are merely orthodox.” “I wait with eagerness and interest to see what they will put forward against these our paradoxes.”[724] In April, 1517, when Carlstadt caused some commotion by publishing his erroneous views on nature and grace in 152 theses, Luther called them in one of his letters the paradoxes of an Augustine, excelling the doctrine in vogue as much as Christ excels Cicero; there were some who declared these propositions to be paradoxical rather than orthodox, but this was “shameless insolence” on the part of men who had studied and understood neither Augustine nor Paul; “to those who understand, however, the theses ring both pleasantly and beautifully, indeed to me they seem to have an excellent sound.”[725]