Life of Luther

by Julius Köstlin

God was pictured to him as a Being unapproachably sublime, and of awful holiness; Christ, the Saviour, Mediator, and Advocate, whose revelation can only bring judgment to those who reject salvation, as the threatening Judge, against whose wrath, as against that of God, man sought for intercession and mediation from the Virgin and the other saints. This latter worship, towards the close of the middle ages, had increased in importance and extent. Peculiar honour was paid to particular saints, in particular places, and for the furtherance of particular interests. The warlike St. George was the special saint of the town and county of Mansfeld: his effigy still surmounts the entrance to the old school-house. Among the miners the worship of St. Anne, the mother of the Virgin, soon became popular towards the end of the century, and the mining town of Annaberg, built in 1496, was named after her. Luther records how the 'great stir' was first made about her, when he was a boy of fifteen, and how he was then anxious to place himself under her protection. There is no lack of religious writings of that time, which, with the view of preserving the Catholic faith, warn men earnestly against the danger of overvaluing the saints, and of placing their hopes more in them than in God; but we see from those very warnings how necessary they were, and later history shows us how little fruit they bore. As for Luther, certain beautiful features in the lives and legends of the saints exercised over him a power of attraction which he never afterwards renounced; and of the Virgin he always spoke with tender reverence, only regretting that men wished to make an idol of her. But of his early religious belief, he says that Christ appeared to him as seated on a rainbow, like a stern Judge; from Christ men turned to the saints, to be their patrons, and called on the Virgin to bare her breasts to her Son, and dispose him thereby to mercy. An example of what deceptions were sometimes practised in such worship came to the notice of the Elector John Frederick, the friend of Luther, and probably originated in a convent at Eisenach. It was a figure, carved in wood, of the Virgin with the infant Saviour in her arms, which was furnished with a secret contrivance by means of which the Child, when the people prayed to him, first turned away to His mother, and only when they had invoked her as intercessor, bowed towards them with His little arms outstretched.

On the other hand, the sinner who was troubled with cares about his soul and thoughts of Divine judgment, found himself directed to the performance of particular acts of penance and pious exercises, as the means to appease a righteous God. He received judgment and commands through the Church at the confessional. The Reformers themselves, and Luther especially, fully recognised the value of being able to pour out the inner temptations of the heart to some Christian father-confessor, or even to some other brother in the faith, and to obtain from his lips that comfort of forgiveness which God, in His love and mercy, bestows freely on the faithful. But nothing of this kind, they said, was to be found in the confessional. The conscience was tormented with the enumeration of single sins, and burdened with all sorts of penitential formalities; and it was just with a view that everyone should be drawn to this discipline of the Church, should use it regularly, and should seek for no other way to make his peace with God, that the educational activity of the Church, both with young and old, was especially directed.

Luther, in after life, as we have already remarked, always recognised and found comfort in the fact that, even under such conditions as the above, enough of the simple message of salvation in the Bible could penetrate the heart, and awaken a faith which, in spite of all artificial restraints and perplexing dogmas, should throw itself, with inward longing and childlike trust, into the arms of God's mercy, and so enjoy true forgiveness. He received, as we shall see, some salutary directions for so doing from later friends of his, who belonged to the Romish Church, nor was that character of ecclesiastical religiousness, so to speak, stamped everywhere, or to the same degree, on Christian life in Germany during his youth. Nevertheless, his whole inner being, from boyhood, was dominated by its influence; he, at all events, had never been taught to appreciate the Gospel as a child. Looking back in later years on his monastic days, and the whole of his previous life, he declared that he never could feel assured that his baptism in Christ was sufficient for his salvation, and that he was sorely troubled with doubt whether any piety of his own would be able to secure for him God's mercy. Thoughts of this kind he said induced him to become a monk.

Men have never been wanting, either before or since the time of Luther's youth, to denounce the abuses and corruptions of the Church, and particularly of the clergy. Language of this sort had long found its way to the popular ear, and had proceeded also from the people themselves. Complaints were made of the tyranny of the Papal hierarchy, and of their encroachments on social and civil life, as well as of the worldliness and gross immorality of the priests and monks. The Papacy had reached its lowest depth of moral degradation under Pope Alexander VI. We hear nothing, however, of the impressions produced on Luther, in this respect, in the circumstances of his early life. The news of such scandals as were then enacted at Rome, shamelessly and in open day, very likely took a long while to reach Luther and those about him. With regard to the carnal offences of the clergy, against which, to the honour of Germany be it said, the German conscience especially revolted, he made afterwards the noteworthy remark, that although during his boyhood the priests allowed themselves mistresses, they never incurred the suspicion of anything like unbridled sensuality or adulterous conduct. Examples of such kind date only from a later period.

The loyalty with which Mansfeld, his home, adhered to the ancient Church, is shown by several foundations of that time, all of which have reference to altars and the celebration of mass. The overseer of the mines, Reinicke, the friend of Luther's family, is among the founders: he left provision for keeping up services in honour of the Virgin and St. George.

A peculiarly reverential demeanour, in regard to religion and the Church, is observable in Luther's father, and one which was common no doubt among his honest, simple, pious fellow townsfolk. His conduct was consistently God-fearing. In his house it was afterwards told how he would often pray at the bedside of his little Martin,—how, as the friend of godliness and learning, he had enjoyed the friendship of priests and school-teachers. Words of pious reflection from his lips remained stamped on Luther's memory from his boyhood. Thus Luther tells us, in a sermon preached towards the close of his life, how he had often heard his dear father say, that, as his own parents had told him, the earth contains many more who require to be fed than there are sheaves, even if collected from all the fields in the world; and yet how wondrously does God know how to preserve mankind! In common with his fellow-townsmen, he followed the precepts and commands of his Church. When, in the year in which he sent his son to Magdeburg, two new altars in the church at Mansfeld were consecrated to a number of saints, and sixty days' indulgence was granted to anyone who heard mass at them, Hans Luther, with Reinicke and other fellow-magistrates, was among the first to make use of the invitation. The enemies of the Reformer, while fain to trace his origin to a heretic Bohemian, had not a shadow of a reason for suspecting his real father of any leanings to heresy. Nor do we hear a word in later years from the Reformer, after his father had separated with him from the Catholic Church, to show a trace of any hostile or critical remark against that Church, remembered from the lips of his father during childhood. Quietly but firmly the latter asserted his own judgment, and framed his will accordingly. He was firm, in particular, in the consciousness of his paternal rights and duties, even against the pretensions of the clergy. Thus, as his son Martin tells us, when he lay once on the point of death, and the priest admonished him to leave something to the clergy, he replied in the simplicity of his heart, 'I have many children: I will leave it them, for they want it more.' We shall see how unyieldingly, when his son entered a convent, he insisted, as against all the value and usefulness of monasticism, on the paramount obligation of God's command, that children should obey their parents. Luther also tells us how his father once praised in high terms the will left by a Count of Mansfeld, who without leaving any property to the Church, was content to depart from this world trusting solely to the bitter sufferings and death of Christ, and commending his soul to Him. Luther himself, when a young student, would have considered, as he tells us, a bequest to churches or convents a proper will to make. His father afterwards accepted his son's doctrine of salvation without hesitation, and with the full conviction that it was right. But remarks of his such as we have quoted, were consistent with a perfectly blameless demeanour in regard to the forms of conduct and belief as prescribed by the Church, with an avoidance of criticism and argument on ecclesiastical matters, which he knew were not his vocation, and above all with a complete abstention from such talk in the presence of his children. As to what concerns further the positive religious influence which he exercised over his children, any such impressions as he might have given by what he said of the Count of Mansfeld, were fully counterbalanced by the severity and firmness of his paternal discipline.

Concurrent with the doctrine of salvation through the intercession of the saints and the Church, and one's own good works, which Luther had been taught from his youth, were the dark popular ideas of the power of the devil—ideas, which, though not actually invented, were at least patronised by the Church, and which not only threaten the souls of men, but cast a baneful spell over all their natural life. Luther, as is well known, has frequently expressed his own opinions about the devil, in connection with the enchantments supposed to be practised by the Evil One on mankind, and, more especially, on the subject of witchcraft. Of one thing he was certain, that in God's hand we are safe from the Evil One, and can triumph over him. But even he believed the devil's work was manifested in sudden accidents and striking phenomena of Nature, in storms, conflagrations, and the like. As to the tales of sorcery and magic, which were told and believed in by the people, some he declared to be incredible, others he ascribed to the hallucinations effected by the devil. But that witches had power to do one bodily harm, that they plagued children in particular, and that their spells could affect the soul, he never seriously doubted.

From his earliest childhood, and especially at home, ideas of that kind had been instilled into Luther, and accordingly they ministered strong food to his imagination. They had just then spread to a remarkable extent among the Germans, and had developed in remarkable ways. They had affected the administration of ecclesiastical and civil law, they had given rise to the Inquisition and the most barbarous cruelties in the punishment of those who were pretended to be in league with the devil, and they had gradually multiplied their baneful effects. The year after Luther's birth, appeared the remarkable Papal bull which sanctioned the trial of witches. When a boy, Luther heard a great deal about witches, though later in life he thought there was no longer so much talk about them, and he would not scruple to tell stories of how they harmed men and cattle, and brought down storms and hail. Nay, of his own mother he believed that she had suffered much from the witcheries of a female neighbour, who, as he said, 'plagued her children till they nearly screamed themselves to death.' Delusions such as these are certainly dark shadows in the picture of Luther's youth, and are important towards understanding his inner life as a man.

But while admitting the existence of these superstitious and pseudo-religious notions, we must not imagine that they composed the whole portraiture of Luther's early life. He was, as Mathesius describes him, a merry, jovial young fellow. In his later reflections on himself and his youthful days, the very war he was waging against the false teachings of the Church, from which he himself had suffered, made him dwell, as was natural, on this side of his early life. But amidst all those trials and depressing influences, the fresh and elastic vigour of his nature stood the strain—a vigour innate and inherited, and which afterwards shone forth in a new and brighter light, under a new aspect of religious life. His childlike joy in Nature around him, which afterwards distinguished so remarkably the theologian and champion of the faith, must be referred back to his original bent of mind and his life, when a boy, amid Nature's surroundings.

How much he lived, from childhood, with the peasantry, is shown by the natural ease with which he spoke in the popular dialect, even when he was learning Latin and enjoying a higher culture, and by the frequency with which the native roughnesses of that dialect broke out in his learned discourses or sermons. In no other theologian, nay, in no other known German writer of his century, do we meet with so many popular proverbs as in Luther, to whom they came naturally in his conversations and letters. German legends also, and popular tales, such as the history of Dietrich von Bern and other heroes, or of Eulenspiegel or Markolf, would hardly have been remembered so accurately by him in later years, if he had not familiarised himself with them in childhood. He would at times inveigh against the worthless, and even shameless tales and 'gossip,' as he called it, which such books contained, and especially against the priests who used to spice their sermons with such stories; but that he also recognised their value we know from his allusion to 'some people, who had written songs about Dietrich and other giants, and in so doing had expounded much greater subjects in a short and simple manner.' The pleasure with which he himself may have read or listened to them, can be gathered from his remark that 'when a story of Dietrich von Bern is told, one is bound to remember it afterwards, even though one has only heard it once.'