Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Tauler repeatedly uses the word “spirit” for man’s native good tendency and activity. This expression Luther simply takes to mean the Divine Spirit, which must be infused into man on account of his natural helplessness. The theologian mentioned above hero also admits: “Much that Tauler intended to refer to the human syntheresis, or the created spirit, Luther has ascribed to the uncreated Divine Spirit, who imparts grace and faith”; on the other hand we may allow with the same author that Luther was probably misled by the “hermaphrodism of Tauler’s teaching, according to which the spirit longs for a metamorphosis”; Tauler’s lively description of the supernatural being and life of the soul sometimes throws into the background the independence of its action in the natural sphere, though the outcome is not really an “hermaphrodite” in the strict sense of the word. It is also true that “Luther overlooked the other side, namely, the Divine immanence which all those mystics teach with equal distinctness, or at least he did not make sufficient account of it.

  Selfishness and the “Theology of the Cross”

  Another important point on which Luther deviated from true mysticism has now been brought to light by the Commentary on Romans. According to the Strasburg mystic, and according to all good mystics generally, selfishness must be looked on as the greatest interior enemy of man. It is a leaven which readily infects the actions, even of the best, and therefore must be expelled by struggling against it and by prayer.

  Selfishness, says the “Theologia Deutsch,” “makes the creature turn away from the unchangeable good to that which is changeable.” Even in the case of the devil, it tells us, the reason of his fall was “his I and my, his mine and me”; he fancied he was something, that something belonged to him and that he had a right to something.

  In the Commentary on Romans Luther also speaks in impressive words against selfishness and its malice. He makes use of every note at his command in order to warn us against this serpent. In these passages we might fancy we hear the voices of the mystic leaders of the faithful in the Middle Ages, even of a Bernard of Clairvaux. Nor is practical advice wanting; we are exhorted to earnest, humble prayer, to a watchful resistance — to be strengthened by practice — against the desires of self-love, even in small things, to mortify and to tame our flesh. We must go out of ourselves even in spiritual matters; everything, he says, depends in the spiritual life on self-abnegation: “God’s righteousness fills those only who seek to empty themselves of their own righteousness, He fills the hungry and the thirsty ... let us then tell God, so he says with all the enthusiasm his idea of grace gives him: “how glad are we to be empty, that Thou mayest be our fulness; how glad to be weak, that Thy strength may dwell within us; how glad to be sinners, that Thou mayest be justified in us; how glad to be fools, that Thou mayest be our wisdom; how glad to be unrighteous, that Thou mayest be our righteousness.” Suffering sent by God, so the author frequently repeats almost in Tauler’s words, is to be accepted as a remedy against the disease of self-love not only with patience, but with joy. Pain, particularly inward pain, should be honoured like the cross of Christ (“tribulatio velut crux Christi adoranda”); we must bear it bravely like true children of God and not take to flight like the servant, or the hireling.

  In connection with selfishness Luther exposes his so-called “theologia crucis,” which, with the adjuncts he gives it, is quite in keeping with his ideas. He was also to advocate the theology of the cross in his disputations, endeavouring to show that it alone teaches us how to make a right use of earthly things.

  “He is not a Christian, but a Turk, and an enemy of Christ, who does not desire afflictions.” “Our theologians and popes are in fact enemies of the cross of Christ ... for no one hates pain and trouble more than the popes and the lawyers [i.e. those who insist upon laws and observances]. No one is more greedy than they for riches, comfort, idleness, honour and pomp.” “They honour the relics of the Holy Cross and yet abhor and fly from what they dislike.” “We consider Christ our helper and our support in time of trouble, but whoever does not suffer gladly, cheats Him of these titles; to such a one God even is no longer the Creator because he will not return to the nothingness from which God created all. Whoever will not suffer God in weakness, foolishness and punishment, for him God is not powerful, not wise, not merciful.” “The cross puts to death everything that is in us. Nature, it is true, desires to make itself and everything alive, but God in His love takes care, by the infliction of crosses and suffering, that even spiritual gifts shall not taste too sweet to the righteous; he must not throw himself upon them in a natural, godless impetuosity in order to enjoy them, even though they be attractive and tempt him to savour them ... he may not even love God on account of His grace and His gifts, but only for His own sake, otherwise this would be a forbidden [!] indulgence in the grace received, and he would insult the Father even more than he did before [i.e. when as yet unrighteous!]. In the Commentary on Romans Luther refuses to recognise any love save that which springs from the most perfect motive. He stigmatises the love which arises from the joy in the benefits bestowed by a gracious God, — and which the orthodox mystics allowed, — as presumption, and as an enjoyment of the creature rather than of the Creator, and goes so far as to say that if a man were to remain in this love “he would be lost eternally.”

  To these assertions we may add the following theses, defended under Luther’s auspices in 1518, which explain the new “theologia crucis.” “Whoever is not destroyed (‘destructus’) and brought back by the cross and suffering to the state of nothingness, attributes to himself works and wisdom, but not to his God, and so he abuses and dishonours the gifts of God. But whoever is annihilated by suffering (‘exinanitus’) ceases to do anything, knowing that God is working in him and doing all. Therefore, whether he himself does anything or not, he remains the same, and neither vaunts himself for doing something nor is ashamed of doing nothing, because God works in him. For himself, this he knows, it is enough that he should suffer and be destroyed by the cross, so that he may advance more and more towards annihilation. This is what Christ teaches in John iii. 3: ‘Ye must be born again.’ If we are to be born again, we must first die and be raised with the Son of God [on the cross]; I say die, i.e. taste death as though it were present.” “We may not fly from human wisdom and the law, but whoever is without the theology of the cross is making the worst use of the best things. The true theologian is not he who understands the ‘invisible things of God by the things that are made,’ but he who by suffering and the cross recognises in God the visible and the obscure.”

  The Night of the Soul and Resignation to Hell

  The better to fight against selfishness Tauler had proposed that everyone should look upon himself and his own works as evil, imitating a certain holy brother who used to say: “Know that I am the basest of sinners.” In this innocent recommendation nothing is implied of the complete corruption of nature, of a desire for hell, or of resignation to eternal separation from God. It was only as an exercise in humility and penitent love that Tauler and the other mystics wished the devout man to cultivate the habit of looking on himself as absolutely unworthy of heaven and as better fitted for a place in hell. He is urged to descend in spirit to the place of torment and acknowledge, against his egotism and arrogance, that, on account of his sins, he has deserved a place there among the damned, and not in the happy vicinity of God.

  They also depict in gloomy, mystical colours the condition of the unhappy soul who, by the consent of God and in order to try it, sees itself deprived of all comfort, and, as it were, torn away from its highest good and relegated to hell. Such pains, they teach, are intended as a way of purgation for the soul, which, after such a night, can raise itself again with all the more confidence and love to God, who has, so far, preserved it from so great a misfortune.

  The doctrine of the dark, mystical night appealed very strongly to Luther’s mind. In his theology he is fond of picturing the soul as utterly sinful and deserving of hell, meaning by this
something very different from what orthodox mystics taught. He also suffered greatly at times from inward commotion and darkening of the soul, due to fears regarding predestination, to a troubled conscience or to morbid depression, of which the cause was perhaps bodily rather than mental. These, however, bore no resemblance to the pains— “mystical exercises” as they have been called by Protestants — of which the mystics speak. In his “temptations in the monastery” he did not experience what Tauler and the “Theologia Deutsch” narrate of the consuming inner fire of Purgatory. Luther, however, erroneously applied their descriptions to his own condition. Thus his idea of the night of the soul is quite different from that of the mystics, though he describes it in almost the same words, and, thanks to his imagination and eloquence, possibly in even more striking colours.

  Several times in his Commentary on Romans he represents resignation to, indeed even an actual desire for, damnation — should that be the will of God — as something grand and sublime. Thereby he thinks he is teaching the highest degree of resignation to God’s inscrutable will; thereby the highest step on the ladder of self-abnegation has been attained. In reality it is an ideal of a frightful character, far worse even than a return to nothingness. He lets us see here, as he does so often in other matters, how greatly his turbulent spirit inclined to extremes.

  “If men willed what God wills,” he writes, “even though He should will to damn and reject them, they would see no evil in that [in the predestination to hell which he teaches]; for, as they will what God wills, they have, owing to their resignation, the will of God in them.” Does he mean by this that they should resign themselves to hating God for all eternity? Luther does not seem to notice that hatred of God is an essential part of the condition of those who are damned (“damnari et reprobari ad infernum”). Has he perhaps come to conceive of a hatred of God proceeding from love? He seems almost to credit those who think of hell, with a resolve to bear everything, even hatred of God, with loving submission to the will of Him Who by His predestination has willed it.

  He even dares to say to those who are affrighted by predestination to hell, that resignation to eternal punishment is, for the truly wise, a source of “ineffable joy” (“ineffabili iucunditate in ista materia delectantur”); for the perfect this is “the best purgation from their own will,” i.e. the way of the greatest bitterness, “because under charity the cross and suffering is always understood.” But all, he says, even the half-imperfect, see that here we have a splendid remedy for destroying “the presumptuous building upon merit; let everyone rejoice in his fear and thank God,” the more so that those who are so much afraid will certainly not go to hell; “as they make themselves entirely conformable to the will of God it is impossible that they should be delivered over to eternal punishment, as he who resigns himself entirely to God’s holy Will cannot remain separated from Him.”

  This doctrine of a wholesome fear of hell, of a saving, heroic abandonment to God, and of an exalted and pure love to be exercised by all as a “remedy” against damnation, invalidates Luther’s doctrine of absolute and undeserved predestination to hell; salvation is again made to depend upon both God and man, whose co-operation becomes necessary; it is only because “man will not will what God wills” that he is damned. Yet, according to Luther, the saving fear and resignation is only possible to the elect, and these must in the end be in doubt as to whether they are pleasing to God, just as they must be uncertain regarding all their actions.

  In confirmation of his theory of readiness for hell Luther even refers to St. Paul, who says in his Epistle to the Romans, that he had offered himself to the everlasting pains of hell for the salvation of the Jews; that, in order to save them, he had been ready to be “an anathema from Christ.” But the example does not apply. According to a more correct explanation, the Apostle, who was always in spiritual communion with Christ, speaks only of an outward separation. Luther himself says in this connection: Paul did not desire to hate Christ, but was ready to be separated from Him; in this he displayed the “most sublime degree of charity, a truly apostolic love”; “this seems, of course, incomprehensible and foolish to those who think themselves holy and love God with the ‘amor concupiscentiæ,’ i.e. on account of their salvation and for the sake of eternal rest, or in order to escape from hell, in other words, not for God’s sake but their own.... What they really desire is salvation according to their own fancy, instead of desiring their own nothingness both here and hereafter (‘suum nihil optare’), and only the will and glory of God,” whereas “all perfect saints, out of their overflowing affection, are ready to accept everything, even hell itself. By reason of this readiness, it is true, they at once escape all punishment.”

  According to Luther, even Christ offered Himself for hell whole and entire. Luther does not make the slightest distinction in the agony in the Garden between mere exterior and real interior separation from God. Christ was ever united hypostatically with God, and His human nature never ceased to enjoy the vision of God. Luther, however, merely says: “He found Himself in a state of condemnation and abandonment which was greater than that of all the saints. His sufferings were not easy to Him, as some have imagined, because He actually and in truth offered Himself to the eternal Father to be consigned to eternal damnation for us (‘quod realiter et vere se in æternam damnationem obtulit Deo patri pro nobis’). His human nature did not behave differently from that of a man who is to be condemned eternally to hell. On account of this love of God, God at once raised Him from death and hell, and so He overcame hell (‘eum suscitavit a morte et inferno et sic momordit infernum’; cp. Osee xiii. 14). All His saints must follow this example, some more, some less; and according to the degree of their perfection in love they find this harder or easier. But Christ bore the most severe form of it (‘durissime hoc fecit’), and for this reason He laments in many passages (in the Messianic Psalms) the pains of hell.”

  In the light of passages such as these we can understand to some extent the lurid, fanciful, mystic description which he gives early in 1518, clearly on the strength of his own states of mind. He tells how a man fancies himself at certain moments plunged into hell, and feels his breast pierced by all the pangs of everlasting despair, because he apprehends God’s “frightful ire” and the impossibility of ever being delivered. This grotesque picture of a soul, with which we shall deal more fully later, although it is partly taken almost word for word from the earlier descriptions of the mystics, reveals its morbid character more especially by the fact, that the hope, which, in the case of the devout, remains in the depths of the soul even throughout the most severe interior trials, seems entirely absent. God is seen as He appeared to Luther, i.e. as an inexorable, arbitrary punisher of His creature.

  Luther’s mysticism is veritably a mysticism of despair and the “humilitas,” with its love ready even for hell, which he belauds as the anchor of safety, is a forced expedient really excluded by his system, and which he himself discarded as soon as he was able to replace it by the (God-given) fides, in the shape of faith in personal justification and salvation.

  10. The Commentary on Romans as a Work of Religion and Learning

  The Commentary purports to be as much a religious as a learned work. Its religious value can be shortly summed up from the above.

  The author is as much occupied in putting forth religious ideas which appeal to him as in expounding exegetically St. Paul’s Epistle, and these ideas he supports on the text of the Epistle to the Romans or on other passages from Holy Scripture which he incessantly adduces. His intention also was to make the considerations of practical use from the religious point of view to his hearers, who were probably most of them Augustinians. He wished to give them a practical introduction to the doctrines of St. Paul, as he understood them, and at the same time to his own mysticism.

  We must, if we wish to do justice to the Commentary on Romans, admit without reserve that it does not show us the picture of a man who is morally bankrupt. The author does not make
the impression of one bent on sensuality, and seeking the means of gratifying it. The work, on the contrary, breathes a spiritual tendency, even to the point of excess, though not, indeed, without a strong admixture of the earthly element.

  The author is, however, far from having arrived at any clear religious views; after wrestling with the secrets of the Pauline Epistle with feeling and eloquence, he is unable even at the end to extricate himself from a condition of spiritual restlessness. The work testifies to an enduring state of religious ferment.

  The vivacity and fertility of thought which the author displays is noteworthy; the personal colouring in which he depicts his religious ideas, and, frequently, too, rabidly defends them against scholars and religious who think differently, is unique, and of priceless value to the biographer. Such a strong personal tone is not, it is true, quite in place in a learned work.