On another occasion he assures us he had entered the convent only “because he despaired of himself.”[748] And again: “God let me become a monk,” “though I entered forcibly and contrary to my father’s wishes”;[749] for I had “to learn to know the Pope’s trickery.”[750] As a rule, however, he leaves God out of the matter. He had taken the vow only “under compulsion,” so he says in self-defence; he had not become a monk “gladly and willingly”; he did not then know that a father had to be obeyed, or that vows rested only on “the commandments of men, on hypocrisy and superstition,”[751] but, during his life in the cloister, the suspicion of his father, who had now been reconciled with him, about the possibility of its having all been a diabolical delusion had sunk deeply into his mind; in his father’s words he had perforce to recognise the Voice of God.[752]
Again, the legend makes out the monk, in the time of his first fervour, to have looked more like a corpse than a man; yet, so far as we can judge, it was only after he had begun his public struggle, i.e. subsequent to 1517, that he began to show signs of physical exhaustion and emaciation, and this, too, was only owing to the way in which he went to work. On the other hand, on March 17, 1509, i.e. nearly four years after his entry into the religious life, when about to quit Erfurt, he wrote, that, “as to himself, by God’s grace, all was going well.” The expression he uses seems to imply that, not merely his spiritual, but also his bodily, state was satisfactory.[753]
In his legend Luther speaks repeatedly of certain morbid states from which he had suffered and which he duly uses to lash the Popish conception of holiness. They are too closely bound up with other facts in his mental life to be set aside as simple inventions, though it must also be added that they contain an element of uncertainty.
In the case of people who have been brought up as Christians but who suffer from certain nervous disorders, particularly when their temperament is of the melancholy variety, a notable aversion for sacred objects may occasionally be observed. “Many such patients cannot bear the sight of a cross, cannot listen to prayers, stop their ears at the ringing of the Angelus, cannot mention the word ‘sacrament,’ but use some circumlocution instead.” “Among perfectly normal people we do not meet with this sort of thing, still it is nothing extraordinary.”[754]
Now, oddly enough, we find Luther, in 1532, telling the people quite seriously in his sermons on Matt. v.-vii., that, as a novice, he had not been able to endure the sight of the crucifix. “When I saw a picture or statue of Christ hanging on the Cross, etc., I was so affrighted that I averted my eyes.”[755] And, again, in the same sermons: “When I looked at Him on the Cross He seemed to me like a flash of lightning.” He also adds that he “had often been affrighted at the name of Jesus.”[756] “The Last Day,” he says in a sermon of 1534, he could not bear to hear spoken of, and “my hair stood on end when I thought of it.”[757] These statements are doubtless exaggerations, but Luther has others even stronger: He would “rather have heard the devil spoken of than Christ”; he would rather have seen “the devil than the Crucified”; “rather have heard of the devils in hell than of the Last Day.” It may be queried whether the above were simply inventions designed to vilify the monastic life and the faith in which he had grown up. Nevertheless, whoever calls to mind the “terrors” Luther experienced at his first Mass and in the procession with Staupitz, whoever keeps before him the part played by Luther’s “fears” even at a later date,[758] will certainly not think it beyond the bounds of possibility that, at times, he should have shuddered at the sight of the cross or at the mention of Christ or of the Last Judgment.
To all this, his bodily condition may have contributed, yet, in his legend, Luther makes of these doubtless morbid states of his the inevitable result of the holiness-by-works practised in the convent and taught by Catholic doctrine. It was because they had known Christ only as the Judge, Who must be placated by works, that he had so dreaded the Crucifix and the very mention of the Judgment. He says that he could not but tremble at the sight of the Crucifix, because, like the rest of the Papists, he had been taught to think that “I must go on performing good works until I have thereby made Christ my friend and gracious toward me.”[759] For this reason alone he had “so often shrunk back affrighted at the name of Jesus” and at the “Cross” as at a “flash of lightning,” because he, like all the rest, had lost his faith; “I had fallen away from the faith and had no other thought than that I had angered God Whom I must once more propitiate by my works.” “But praise and thanks be to God that now we have His Word once more, which leads us to Christ and depicts Him as our Righteousness”; our heart need no longer “tremble and quake.”[760]
After assuring us that he was often unable to gaze upon the Cross, he also at once proceeds to make capital out of this against the olden Church: “For,” so he continues, “my mind was poisoned by this Popish doctrine,” a doctrine according to which “Christ, our Healer, had been turned into a devil.”[761]
Nor does he hesitate to make out that the sight of the Saviour was likewise terrifying to all the zealous and earnest “saints-by-works” in the religious life and Popery generally.[762] In another passage he speaks of the dreadful emotion all felt at the mention of the coming Judgment and the Last Day: “And so we were all sunk in the filth of our own holiness and fancied that, by our life and works, we could pacify the Divine Judgment”; formerly they used to start “if anyone spoke of death or of the life to come”; but, since the light of the Evangel has risen, it is otherwise.
It is true that the way in which Luther here allows his prejudice to exploit these terrifying experiences may raise doubts as to whether they had ever actually existed even in his own case, or whether he did not rather invent them with the object of afterwards ascribing them to all. At the same time it is easier to believe in their existence than to credit him with having deliberately evolved them out of his own fancy.