His restless style and love of emphasis is characteristic of his own inner restlessness and excitement. He himself was quite aware of the source of this disquiet, at least so far as it was the result of a moral failing. In 1516 he lays his finger deliberately on his besetting fault when he admits to a friend, that the “root of all our unrest is nowhere else to be found than in our belief in our own wisdom”; “I have been taught by my own experience! Oh, with how much misery has this evil eye [belief in my own wisdom] plagued me even to this very day!”[726]
And yet he takes for one of his guiding principles the curious idea that the opposition of so many confirmed the truth of what he said. His work on the Penitential Psalms, so he wrote to his friend Lang on March 1, 1517, would “then please him best if it displeased all.”[727] And, two years later, he said to Erasmus, when speaking of the system he followed in this respect: “I am wont to see in what is displeasing to many, the gifts of a Gracious God as against those of an Angry God”; hence, so he assures him, the hostility under which Erasmus himself was suffering, was, for him, a proof of his real excellence.[728]
His burning enthusiasm at the time when he thought he had discovered the sense of the passage: “The just man lives by faith,” has already been described elsewhere.[729] This and other incidents just touched upon recall those morbid sides of his character referred to in the previous chapter.
As we might expect, during the first years of his great public struggle his restlessness was even more noticeable than before. The predominance of the imagination has hardly ever been so fatally displayed by any other man, though, of course, it is not every man whose life is thrown amid times so stirring. “Because,” so he wrote in 1541, recalling his audacity in publishing the Indulgence-Theses and the fame it brought him, “all the Bishops and Doctors kept silence [concerning the abuse of indulgences] and no one was willing to bell the cat.… Luther was vaunted as a doctor, and as the only man who was ready to interfere. Which fame was not at all to my taste.”[730] This latter assertion he is fond of making to others, but his letters of that time show how greatly the charm of notoriety contributed to unbridle his stormy energy. It was his opponents’ defiance which first opened the flood-gates of his passionate eloquence. At the very outset he warns people that contradiction will only make his spirit more furious and lead him to have recourse to even stronger measures; elsewhere he has it: “The more they rage, the further I shall go!”[731]
We may recall his reference to the “gorgeous uproar,” and the passages where he assures his friends: “I am carried away and know not by what spirit,”[732] and “God carries me away, I am not master of myself.”[733]
In the light of his pathological fervour the contradictions in which he involves himself become more intelligible, for instance, what he wrote to Pope Leo X in his letter of May, 1518,[734] which so glaringly contrasted with his other words and deeds. His unrest and love of exaggeration caused him to overlook this and the many other contradictions both with himself and with what he had previously written.
The picture of the monk which we have been compelled to draw differs widely from the legendary one of the pious young man shut up in the cloister, who, according to Luther’s account at a later date, led a fanatical life of penance and, because he saw Popish piety to be all too inadequate, “sought to find a Gracious God.”