In the period that follows, what he says of his piety, and especially of his works of penance, grows more and more emphatic. The argument at the back of his mind is this: “If even so mortified, penitent, and holy a monk as he could find no peace in Popery but only black despair, must not then all admit that he was in the right in protesting against both the Church and her vows?”
So strictly had he kept his Rule, that, if ever monk got to heaven, it should have been he; he had plagued himself to death with watching, prayer, study and other labour.[780] This was the time when he “sought to be a holy monk and to be reckoned among the most pious.”[781] “If ever a monk was earnest then it was I.… I was at the utmost pains to keep the ordinances” (of the Fathers).
He “had been one of the best”[782] and was “wholly given over” to “fasting, watching and prayer”;[783] “I nearly killed myself with fasting, watching and cold … so mad and foolish was I.”[784] By fasting, sleeplessness, hard work and coarse clothing “my body was dreadfully broken and worn out.”[785]
In short, he had “sunk deeper into the quagmire [of mortification, obedience to the Church and monastic piety] than many an other”; so much so that “it had been hard and bitter” to him to cut himself adrift from the ordinances of the Pope; “God knows how hard I found it!”[786]
As he himself gradually came to believe in his extraordinary “holiness-by-works” it may be that his thoughts dwelt too exclusively to his earlier days as a monk, i.e. on those passed at Erfurt, during which he certainly was more zealous than in later years, though never such a fanatic as he afterwards makes out. He may also have compared his life as a monk with the small efforts after virtue he made subsequent to his public apostasy, and the contrast may have led him to make too much of his piety in the convent. The contrast, indeed, often troubled him, and we find him seeking for grounds to excuse his later lukewarmness in prayer, so different from his earlier fervour.[787] This also helps us to explain the line of thought followed in the legend.
The true character of the legend becomes clearer when Luther begins to exploit it in his polemics. He depicts himself as a sort of “caricature of the monastic saint,”[788] and then complains: This damnable life could not but keep me ever in a state of fear, and yet the Popish Church recommends and sanctions it; the more zealous I grew the further I withdrew from Christ—nay, brought even my baptism into danger! He had never been able to “find comfort in it,” nay, he had been compelled to “lose” it, to “lend a hand in denying it.” “This is the upshot and reward of their doctrine of works.”[789] He even goes so far as to say that the Papists “truly and indeed made nought of the baptism” of Christ, for which reason “their doctrine is as baneful as that of the Anabaptists”; they “make of us Jews or Turks, as though we had never been baptised.”
Luther’s persistent and obtrusive exploitation of his legend in his controversies must not be lost to sight.
In his new-found zeal he not only as a rule passes too confidently from the I (I did so and so) to the we, or they, the better to clap the blame attaching to himself on the monks in general, the Pope and all the Papists, and then to conclude with the praise of the new Evangel, but—and this reveals even more plainly the origin of the invention,—he also follows the reverse order, speaking first of the New Evangel, then of the senseless martyrdom endured by all the monks with their works, and, lastly, of his own personal experiences, as though they had been necessarily implied in his earlier premisses.
I cruelly disciplined my body, he says, and goes on: “They plagued and tormented themselves”; for all that, “did they find Christ? Christ says: ‘You shall die in your sins.’ To this they came.” “The Pope, too, labours and seeks,” to find what Christ is; “but never will he find it.” All this leads to the conclusion: “But now God has given His Grace, so that every town and thorp has the Gospel.”[790]
Above we heard him speak of the “quagmire” in which he was sunk; in the same connection he remarks: “We wore out the body with fasting,” etc., “and some even went crazy through it.” Then follows the inference: “And, at last, we lost our very souls.” For, to our “great and notable injury,” we were made to feel “in our anxious and troubled conscience” what it means “to try to become pious by works and so to redeem ourselves from sin.” “We would gladly have had a cheerful conscience,” but “it was all of no use, and we naturally became more and more downhearted about sin and death, so that no folk more unhappy are to be found on earth than the priestlings, monks and nuns who are wrapped up in their works.” “The more they do, the worse things fare with them.” But, since my doctrine has come into the world, people have unlearnt their faintheartedness: “We run to the Man Who is called Christ and say: Yes indeed, we must take it from the Man without any merit whatsoever [on our part].… He gives me freely that for which formerly I had to pay a high price. He gives me, without any works or merit, that for which formerly I had to stake body, strength and health.”[791]