Luther, vol. 6 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

It is only after 1530 that we find Luther’s legend of his monkish life fully developed. Before this we see only the first hints of the tale.

It cannot be argued that, till then, he had been silent on his inward experiences as a monk, or that the MSS. of the Table-Talk only commence subsequent to 1530. That, even before this, he had frequently spoken of his earlier spiritual experiences is evident from the passages already quoted, and might be proved by many others; moreover the absence of any recorded Table-Talk is a detail, since the latter is far from being our sole source in the present question.

We are justified in assuming that the idea matured in 1530, during his stay at the Castle of Coburg where he had to wage so severe a struggle with himself. Amid the trials he endured during his days of retirement at the Wartburg he had found time to pen his violent attack on monastic vows; so also, it was in the quiet of the Coburg, amidst the ghostly conflicts and delusions, that he wove the caricature of his own monkish life into the web of his history. At the very time when Luther was at the Coburg the burning question of German monasticism was being debated at the Diet of Augsburg; the Catholic Estates hoped that recognition might again be won for it from the Protestants, or that it might at least secure toleration in the districts where allegiance was divided. It was also at the Coburg that Luther penned many of the furious passages of his “Warning to the Clergy forgathered at Augsburg.”

He there says: “For the monks I know not how to plead. For I am well aware you would rather they were all of them given over to the devil, please God, whether they take wives or not.”[765] In these words he erroneously takes for granted that all ecclesiastics shared his own hatred for the monks. He boasts in this writing that he “had destroyed the monks by his teaching”;[766] he trusts that “the Bishops will not allow such bugs and lice to be stuck again on their fur cappas.”[767] The reason why his doctrine had destroyed the monks was, because it had revealed how they were merely “intent upon works.” “For what else could come of it? If a conscience is intent on its works and builds on them, then it is stablished on loose sand which is ever slipping and sliding away; it must ever be seeking for works, for one and then for another and ever more and more, until at last even the dead are clothed in monks’ cowls the better to reach heaven.”[768] The last words are a caricature, a misrepresentation of a pious custom by which no one ever dreamt infallibly to win heaven. The “loose sand” is, however, a favourite expression with him when speaking of his teaching on works. It is the same teaching that he wants to bring before the eyes of all by means of his fiction. How, at that time, his thoughts were harking back to his former life in the convent is plain from a letter of consolation he then wrote to his “tempted” pupil Weller. He tells him that he himself had also had his sadnesses and temptations, but that what he had suffered as a monk had in the end proved a schooling for his present high calling.[769]

Had he really been the butt of such “temptations” as the legend depicts and contrived so successfully to vanquish them by his doctrine on justification, then we might expect to find some trace of this in his first writings subsequent to his change of outlook. Now, in the Commentary on Romans we have a vivid document bearing on his change of opinions, yet, full as it is of information about the author, we may seek in vain for the legend. On the contrary it breathes a high esteem for the religious state.[770] In the “Resolutions” to the Indulgence-Theses likewise, Luther speaks of the phases through which he had passed and of the mystical sufferings he had endured.[771] Yet here again the features of the legend are wanting. Is it not somewhat remarkable that an author usually so candid and talkative as Luther should have kept silence about those experiences of which, just at that time, i.e. at the beginning of his public struggle, he must have been so full?

Nor is the legend to be found in Luther’s writings dating from between 1520 and 1530. All the passages quoted above date from a later period.

Had the tale it tells been based on history he would surely have made capital out of it during this long spell of controversy with the monks and Papists. Thus, in his violent “De votis monasticis” of 1521, he as yet has nothing to say of his supposed so pious life, of his excessive penance, misguided holiness-by-works, and the despair he endured in the convent, though, in the Preface, he alludes to his own life as a monk. Nor, again, in his “De servo arbitrio” of 1525, does he as yet put forward the actual legend. It is true that here, when explaining his doctrine of Predestination, he refers to the fears from which as a monk he had suffered regarding his election, fear which arose from his doubts as to the fate decreed for him by God from all eternity. As it is also here that he for the first time airs his theory that his doctrine of absolute predestination and his dogma of justification were alone able to give peace,[772] this would seem to have been the place to give an account of his own life in the monastery and its attendant circumstances. But the legend was not as yet ready. We have merely a hint of what is to come: The Catholic doctrine that heaven may be won by works spells the end of all peace; “this is proved by the experience of all the holy-by-works, and this, to my cost, I also learnt by the experience of many years.”[773] About his heroic works of penance, his vigils, fastings, extraordinary piety, and the sudden and gratifying change, he has not a word to say.

Heralds of the legend are certain statements met with in a sermon of 1528 where he describes himself as having been a “very pious monk,” who was, however, wanting in constancy and like a “shaking reed,” not being firmly rooted in Christ;[774] again at the end of his “Vom Abendmal Bekentnis” he declares his “greatest sins” were his having “been such a holy monk and having plagued God for more than fifteen years with so many masses.”[775] In the latter writing he at least admits that “many great saints had lived in the monasteries”;[776] he even thinks that “it would indeed be a fine thing if the monasteries and foundations were retained, to the end that young folk might there be taught God’s Word, the Scriptures and how to live a Christian life,” in short as educational establishments for both boys and girls. “But, to seek in them the road to salvation, that is the devil’s own doctrine and belief.”[777]

Finally, in the sermons on John vi.-viii. which he began in 1530 after his return from the Coburg to Wittenberg and continued till 1532 we have the legend more or less complete: He had been a monk and had kept the nightly watches (i.e. had chanted the usual matins), had “fasted and prayed, scourged his body and tormented it”; he had been one of the pious and earnest monks who took their life seriously, “who, like me, were at some pains and examined and plagued themselves, and wanted to attain to what Christ is in order to be saved. But what did they gain thereby?”[778] At the same time he begins to enlarge in the most incredible way on the beliefs and habits of the Papists with regard to their own merits and the merits of Christ. All had held their tongues concerning the Saviour, so he says, and he emphasises his statement by adding: “I myself, I should have blushed to say that Christ was the Saviour.” Thus in a sermon of Dec., 1530.[779]