His supposed experiences as a monk are even made to do service in his interpretation of Holy Scripture. In order to understand the Scriptures, so he argues, deep inward experience is called for. This he maintained when withstanding the fanatics and their system of illuminism. Here he actually carries back the beginning of his own experience to his convent days.
Already in the convent, so he declares, he had been compelled to bow to the idol of scepticism, because he, and all the rest, knew nothing of any real faith in the Gospel. Far less had he learned to pray Evangelically.
“That Christ was a mystery, as St. Paul says, I looked upon formerly, when I had to submit to being called a Doctor of Holy Scripture, as a lying statement which I very well understood. But now that, praise be to God, I have once more become a poor student of Holy Writ, and that, the longer I live, the less I know of it, I begin to see the marvel of such sayings, and find by experience that they must necessarily remain mysteries.… Our experience must bear witness to this, how amply, fully and clearly we now possess this same Word of Christ.”[792] But, by the Pope, it was “gruesomely murdered.”[793]
Of the Saints of their Order the monks made their God, and of their miracles they made their Gospel. “For know you this, that I, Dr. Martin Luther, who am now living and write this, was also one of the crowd who were forced to believe and worship such things [lying fables]. And had anyone been so bold as to doubt one whit of it, or to raise a finger against it, he would have gone to the stake or to some other evil end.”[794] That the latter was an exaggeration and the merest invention Luther was perfectly well aware.
He also speaks untruthfully of the manner of prayer in the convent. That he himself, when once he had fallen away from his vocation, no longer prayed in a right spirit is very likely. He, however, says: “I and all the others had not the right conception” (of prayer); it was no true “raising of the heart to God because we fled from God (‘fugiebamus Deum’).… We only prayed ‘conditionally’ and ‘hypothetically,’ not ‘categorically.’” This he said in 1537, admitting, however, with regard to his own then family prayers, that they “were not so fervent, because he was always forced to protest,” i.e. to pour out his anger against the Papists; but, “in the congregation as a whole, it comes from the heart and also serves its purpose.”[795]
His wilful misrepresentation of the truth becomes more pronounced, when, in the exploitation of the legend, he seeks to moderate the monks’ practices of penance and mortification—with the help of Terence and Aristotle.
In his Commentary on Genesis he complains: “The religious life of the monk is so crooked that no exception (‘epikia’) is allowed, nor any moderation. Hence it is all wickedness and unrighteousness. No heed is paid to the object of the Law, or to charity.… And yet what Terence says is still true: ‘summum ius esse summam iniuriam.’ God does not wish the body to be put to death, but that it be preserved for each one’s calling and for the service of our neighbour.”[796] “Learn, therefore, that peace and charity must govern and direct all virtues and laws, as Aristotle points out in the 5th book of his Ethics.”[797]
Now, as a matter of fact, the Rule of the Hermits of St. Augustine, with which he was thoroughly conversant, enjoined consideration for the health of the individual.[798] Brother Jordan of Saxony, whose book was regarded as a standard work in the Order, insists on care being taken of the body and only permits penitential exercises “in moderation, with the superiors’ approval and without scandal to the brethren.”[799]
His falsehoods are coupled with the outbursts of fury against Catholicism into which he was so prone to fall when attempting to describe the religious life he had forsaken.
Because we endured so much “pain and such martyrdom of heart and conscience” no one must now seek to excuse the Papacy; on the contrary “we cannot blame and scold the Pope enough”; “that he should have so wasted the beautiful years of my youth, and martyred and plagued my conscience is really too bad.” Popery is the “scarlet whore of Rome, the arch-whore, the French whore, chock-full of blasphemies”; “we must thank our Lord God that He has revealed and discovered to us the Pope as the dragon with his head, belly and tail.”[800]—The monks are a “devilish crew,” and monkery a “hellish cauldron”; by day and by night Christ is to all monks a “hangman and devil”; even the best and most learned, and St. Thomas of Aquin himself, were all driven to despair and died of the ghostly poison.[801] The last words occur in the work he wrote in self-defence against Duke George of Saxony (1533), who had twitted him with having committed perjury in breaking his religious vows.