Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  CHAPTER XXXVII. LUTHER’S LATER EMBELLISHMENT OF HIS EARLY LIFE

  In later life, looking back on his past, Luther was in the habit of depicting certain of its principal phases in a way which is at variance with the facts, and which even Protestants in recent times have characterised, as “a picture in which he becomes a myth unto himself.”

  IT WILL BE no matter for surprise to the dispassionate observer that the memory of the vows Luther had broken and the thought of his early days in the monastery — which presented so striking a contrast with his later life — were subject-matters of warped and distorted images. Particularly is this true of his monastic years which he insists on depicting as one long night of sadness and despair.

  Not merely in the fictions in which he came to shroud the more fervent days of his life as a monk, but also in his explanations of the various stages of his apostasy, Luther affords us fresh data for the psychological study of his personality, and thus the present chapter may serve to supplement the previous one. Only after having studied the legend he wove around himself and compared it with the truth as otherwise known, will it be possible to arrive at a considered judgment concerning Luther’s mental states.

  1. Luther’s later Picture of his Convent Life and Apostasy

  What Luther says of his life as a monk is what will chiefly interest us, but, before proceeding to consider his words and the strange problems they present, we must first refer to the legendary traits comprised in his statements on the first period of his struggle; how false they are to the facts will be clearly perceived by whoever has read the detailed accounts already given.

  The Legend about his First Public Appearance

  “Not only have the dates been altered,” says Hausrath, of Luther’s later statements concerning his first public appearance, “but even the facts. No sooner does the elderly man begin to tell his tale than the past becomes as soft wax in his hands. The same words are placed on the lips, now of this, now of that, friend or foe. The opponents of his riper years are depicted as his persecutors even in his youth. Albert of Mayence had never acted otherwise towards him than as a liar and deceiver. Even previous to the Worms visit he had sought to annul his safe-conduct.… Of Tetzel he now asserts, that, unless Duke Frederick had pleaded for him to the Emperor Max, he would have been put in a sack and drowned in the Inn on account of his dissolute life.… The same holds good of the [equally untrue] statement that Tetzel had sold indulgences for sins yet to be committed.… It is also an exaggeration of his old age when Luther asserts that, in his youth, the Bible had been a closed book to all.… To the old Reformer almost everything in the monastery appears in the blackest of hues.”

  “The reason of my journey to Rome,” he declares, “was to make a confession from the days of my boyhood and to become pious.” “But at Rome I came across the most unlearned of men.” — God “led me, all unwittingly, into the game [his struggle].” “I behaved with moderation, yet I brought the greatest ruin on them all.” “I thought I was doing the Pope a service yet I was condemned.”— “One, and that not the least of my joys and consolations, is, that I never put myself out of the Papacy. For I held fast to the Scarlet Woman and served the murderess in all things most humbly. But she would have none of me, banished me and drove me from her.” “I only inveighed against abuses and against the godless collectors of alms and [indulgence] commissioners from whom even Canon Law itself protects the Pope. The Pope wanted to defend them contrary to his own laws; this annoyed me. Had he thrown them over I should in all likelihood have held my tongue, but the hour had rung for his downfall; hence there was nothing to be done for him, for when God intends to bring about a man’s fall He blinds and hardens him.” “I was utterly dead to the world until God thought the time had come; then Junker Tetzel stung me with his indulgences, and Dr. Staupitz spurred me on against the Pope.” “Silvester [Prierias] thereupon entered the lists and sought to overwhelm me with the thunders of the following syllogism: Whoever raises doubts against any word or deed of the Roman Church is a heretic; Martin Luther doubts, etc. With that the ball began.”

  Generally speaking, however, Luther prefers to trace the whole of his quarrel with the Church back to Tetzel and to his righteous censure of the abuse of indulgences. He seems to have completely forgotten the deep theological chasm that separated him from the Church even before his quarrel with Tetzel. His theological attitude at that time, the starting-point of his whole undertaking, has disappeared from his purview; he has forgotten his burning desire to win the day for his own doctrines against free-will, against the value of works, against justification as taught by Catholic tradition, and for his denial of God’s Will that all men should be saved. His early antagonism to the theological schools and to Canon Law as a whole has lapsed into oblivion.

  In the preface to the 1545 edition of his Latin works Luther asserts, as a fact, that he had been estranged from the Church only through the indulgence controversy.

  He had, so we there read, taken his vocation as a monk quite in earnest; he “feared and dreaded the Day of Judgment and yet had longed with all his heart to be saved.… It was not my fault that I became involved in this warfare, as I call God Himself to witness.”

  In order to make the “beginning of the business” plain to all he goes on to relate to the whole world, how, as a young Doctor in 1517, relying on the Pope’s approval, he had raised his voice in protest against the “shamelessness” of the indulgence-preachers; how, when his small outcry passed unheeded, he had published the indulgence-theses and, then, in the “Resolutions,” “for the Pope’s own sake,” had advocated works of neighbourly charity as preferable to indulgences. Here was the cause of all the world’s hostility! His teaching was alleged “to have disturbed the course of the heavenly spheres and to be setting the world in flames. I was delated to the Pope and then summoned to Rome; the whole might of Popery was up in arms against poor me.”

  He records his trial at Augsburg, the intervention of Miltitz and the Leipzig Disputation, but records it in a way all his own. At that date he already knew almost the entire Bible by heart and “had already reached the beginning of the knowledge and faith of Christ, to wit, that we are saved and justified, not by works, but by faith in Christ, and that the Pope is not the head of the Church by right Divine; but I failed to see the inevitable consequence of all this, viz. that the Pope must needs be of the devil.” Like the “blameless monk” that he was, his only trouble in life was his keen anxiety as to whether God was gracious to him and whether he could “rest assured that he had conciliated Him by the satisfaction he had made.” The words of the Bible on the justice of God had angered him because he had erroneously taken this to mean His punitive justice instead of the justice whereby God makes us just. Then, when he was setting about his second Commentary on the Psalms (1518-19), amidst the greatest excitement of conscience (“furebam ita sæva et perturbata conscientia”) the light from above had dawned on him which brought him to a complete understanding of the Divine justice whereby we are justified. Paul’s words concerning the just man who lives by faith (Rom. i. 17) had then, and only then, become clear to him (through his discovery of the assurance of salvation).

  After referring to the Diet of Worms he again reverts to his pet subject, viz. the indulgence-controversy: “The affair of the controversy regarding indulgences dragged on till 1520-21; then followed the question of the Sacrament and that of the Anabaptists.”

  This is how Luther wrote — confusing the events and suppressing the principal point — when, towards the end of his life, he penned for posterity a record of what had occurred. Otto Scheel, in a compilation of the texts bearing on Luther’s development prior to 1519, rightly places this later account, together with the other statements made by him in old age, under the heading: “second and third rate authorities.” What, however, are we to think when the considered narrative, written by a man of such eminence, of events in which he was the chief actor, has to be relegated to the category of sec
ond-rate and even third-rate authorities?

  To enumerate some other misrepresentations not connected with his monkish days: Luther assures us that sundry opponents of his “had blasphemed themselves to death”; men who had the most peaceful of deathbeds he alleges to have died tortured by remorse of conscience and railing at God. He boasts aloud that it was the Papists who made a “good theologian” of him, since, “at the devil’s instigation,” they had so battered, distressed and frightened him out of his wits, that he necessarily came to obtain a more profound knowledge. Boldly and exultingly he points to the many “miracles” whereby the Evangel had been proved. He says of the Diets, that the Papists always succeeded in wriggling out of a hole by dint of lies, so that they looked quite white and “without ever a stain.” Of his own writings he says, that he “would gladly have seen all his books unwritten and consigned to the fire.” This in 1533, and again in 1539. Before this, however, he had declared he would not forswear any of his writings, “not for all the riches of the world,” and that, at least as a good work wrought by God, they must have some worth.

  In such wise does the picture he gives of his life vary according to his moods. He does not hesitate to sacrifice the sacred rights of truth when this seems to the advantage of his polemics (see above, vol. iv., ff.), and, owing to the peculiar constitution of his mind, the fiction he so often repeats becomes eventually stamped as a reality to which he himself accords credence.

  The Legend about his Years of Monkish Piety

  We may now turn to Luther’s fictions regarding his monkish days, prefacing our remarks with the words of Luther’s Protestant biographer, Adolf Hausrath. “The picture of his youth is forced to tally more and more with the convictions of his older years. What he now looks upon as pernicious, he declares he had found in those days to be so by his own experience.… The oftener he holds up to his listening guests the warning picture of the monk sunk in the abyss of Popery, the more gloomy and starless does the night appear to him in which he once had lived.”

  That the use hitherto made of Luther’s statements concerning his convent life calls for correction has already been admitted by several Protestant students of reformation history. As early as 1874 Maurenbrecher protested strongly against the too great reliance placed on Luther’s own later statements, which, however, at that time, constituted almost the only authority for his early history. “How wrong it is to accept on faith and repeat anew Luther’s tradition is quite obvious. Whoever wishes to relate Luther’s early history must first of all be quite clear in his mind as to this characteristic of the material on which he has to work.… The history of Luther’s youth is still virgin soil awaiting the labours of the critic.” The objections recently brought forward by Catholics have drawn from W. Friedensburg the admission that we have unreliable, and, “in part, misleading statements of Luther’s concerning himself.” G. Kawerau also at least goes so far as to admit that the historian of Luther at the present day “is inevitably confronted by a number of new questions.” The publication of Luther’s Commentary on Romans of 1515-16 finally proved how necessary it is to regard the theology of his early years as the chief authority for the history of his development. Hence, in the account of his youth given above in vol. i., we took this Commentary as our basis.

  A preliminary sketch of the picture he handed down in his later sayings is given us by Luther himself in the following:

  God had caused him to become a monk, he says, “not without good reasons, viz. that, taught by experience, he might be able to write against the Papacy,” after having himself most rigidly (“rigidissime”) abided by its rules.— “This goes on until one grows quite weary”; “now my other preaching has come: ‘Christ says: Take this from me: You are not pious, I have done it all for you, your sins are forgiven you.’” According to the “Popish teaching,” however, one cannot be sure “whether he is in a state of grace”; hence, when in the cloister, though I was such a “pious monk,” I always said sorrowfully to myself: “I know not whether God is well pleased or not. Thus I and all of us were swallowed up in unbelief.”

  Hence churches and convents are nothing but “dens of murderers” because they “pervert and destroy doctrine and prayer.” “Indeed no monk or priestling can do otherwise, as I know, and have myself experienced”; “I never knew in the least how I stood with God”; “I was never able to pray aright.” This holiness-by-works of Popery, in which I was steeped, was nothing but “idolatry and godless worship.”

  “Learn,” he says, thus unwittingly laying bare the aim of his fiction, “learn from my example.” “The more I scourged myself, the more was I troubled by remorse of conscience.” “We did not then know what original sin was; unbelief we did not regard as sin.” Their “unbelief,” however, consisted in that we Papists fancied “that we had to add our own works” (to the merits of Christ). “Hence, for all my fervour, I lost the twenty years I spent in the cloister.” But I did not want to “stick fast and die in sin and in this false doctrine”; for such a pupil of the law must in the end say to himself “that it is impossible for him to keep the Law”; indeed he cannot but come to say: “would there were no God.”

  Roughly, this is the tone of the testimony he gives of himself. It is not our intention here simply to spurn it, but to examine whether there is any call to accept it unconditionally — simply because it comes from Luther’s lips — and whether it comprises a certain quota of truth.

  First, it must be noted that he represents himself as a sort of fanatical martyr of penance. He assures us: Even the heroic works of mortification I undertook brought me no peace in Popery: “Ergo,” etc. He here opens an entirely new page in his past. He tells his friends, for instance: “I nearly killed myself by fasting, for often, for three days on end, I did not take a bite or a sip. I was in the most bitter earnest and, indeed, I crucified our Lord Christ in very truth; I was not one of those who merely looked on, but I actually lent a hand in dragging Him along and nailing Him. May God forgive me! … for this is true: The more pious the monk the worse rogue he is.”

  “I myself,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “was such an one [a pious monk]. I nearly brought about my death by fasting, abstinence and penance in work and clothing; my body became dreadfully emaciated and was quite worn out.”

  The menace of death is also alluded to in a sermon of 1537: “For more than twenty years I was a pious monk,” “I said Mass daily and so weakened my body by prayer and fasting that I could not have lived long had I continued in this way.” Elsewhere he says that he had allowed himself only two more years of life, and that, not he alone, but all his brethren were ripe for death: “In Popery in times bygone we howled for everlasting life; for the sake of the kingdom of heaven we treated ourselves very harshly, nay, put our bodies to death, not indeed with sword or weapon, but, by fasting and maceration of the body we begged and besought day and night. I myself — had I not been set free by the consolation of Christ in the Evangel — could not have lived two years more, so greatly did I torment myself and flee God’s wrath. There was no lack of sighs, tears and lamentations, but it all availed us nothing.”

  “Why did I endure such hardships in the cloister? Why did I torment my body by fasting, vigils and cold? I strove to arrive at the certainty that thereby my sins were forgiven.” The martyrdom he endured from the cold alone was agonising enough: “For twenty years I myself was a monk and tormented myself with praying, fasting, watching and shivering, the cold by itself making me heartily desirous of death.”

  Besides his penances another main feature of his later picture is his extraordinary, albeit misguided, piety and virtue.

  It is not enough for Luther to say that he had been a pious monk, “an earnest monk,” who “would not have taken a farthing without the Prior’s permission,” and who “prayed diligently day and night”; he will have, that “if ever a monk got to heaven by monkery then I should have got there; of this all my brother monks will bear me witness.”

  H
e had been more diligent in his monastic exercises of piety than any of the Papists who took the field against him.

  Nay, “he had been one of the very best.” He “confessed daily” [Is this a reference to the Confession made in the Mass?] and “tried hard” to find peace, but did not succeed. Daily, he tells us, he “said Mass and imposed on himself the severest hardships,” in order, “by his own works, to attain to righteousness.” It was because the devil had remarked his righteousness, that he tempted him when engaged in prayer in his cell by appearing to him in the shape of Christ, as already narrated. God, however, tried him by temptations just as He tries those of the elect through whom He intends to do great things for the salvation of mankind. He, like the other cloistral Saints, had been so penetrated with his sanctity, that, after Mass, he “did not thank God for the Sacrament but rather God had to thank him.” He fancied himself in “the angel-choirs,” but had all the while been “among the devils.” Cloistral life was indeed “a latrine and the devil’s own sweet Empire.”

  Other characteristic lines of the picture are, first, the dreadful way in which his mind was torn by doubts concerning his own salvation, doubts arising simply from his works of piety, and, secondly, his speedy deliverance from such sufferings and attainment of peace and tranquillity as soon as he had discovered the Evangel of faith. He cannot find colours sombre enough in which to paint his former state of misery, which is also the inevitable experience of all pious Papists.

  “In the convent I had no thought of goods, wealth or wife, but my soul shuddered and quaked at the thought of how to make God gracious to me, for I had fallen away from the faith and my one idea was that I had angered God and had to soothe Him once more by my good works.” “As a young Master at Erfurt I always went about oppressed with sadness.” But, after his discovery he had felt himself “born anew,” as though “through an open door he had passed into Paradise.” The words Justice of God suddenly became “very sweet” to him and the Bible doctrine in question a “very gate of heaven.” “Holy Scripture now appeared to me in quite a new light.”