Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  He had, indeed, studied the Bible diligently in his early monkish years, but he had, nevertheless, been greatly tempted and plagued by the “real difficulties”; his confessors had not understood him. “I said to myself: No one but you suffers from this temptation.” And he had become “like a corpse,” so that his comrades asked him why he was “so mournful and downhearted.”

  Particularly the doctrine of penance had, he says, so borne him down that “it was hardly possible for him, at the price of great toil and thanks to God’s grace, to come to that hearing that gives joy [Ps. 1. 10].” For “if you have to wait until you have the requisite contrition then you will never come to that hearing of joy, as, in the cloister, I often found to my cost; for I clung to this doctrine of contrition, but the more I strove after rue, the more I smarted and the more did the bite of conscience eat into me. The absolution and other consolations given me by my confessors I was unable to take because I thought: Who knows if such consolations are to be trusted.” On one occasion, however, the master of novices strengthened and encouraged him amidst his tears by asking him: Have you forgotten that the Lord Himself commanded us to hope?

  Nevertheless, according to the strange description given by Luther in a sermon in 1531, his keen anxiety about his confessions lasted until after his ordination. “I, Martin Luther,” so he told the people, “when I went up to the altar after confession and contrition felt myself so weighed down by fear that I had to beckon to me another priest. After the Mass, again, I was no more reassured than before.” His trouble — which was possibly caused, or at any rate heightened, by the spirit of obstinacy and scepticism he describes — was, however (and it is on this that he lays stress), common to all Papists whose consciences could never be at rest. “They became its victims chiefly at the hour of death. How much did we dread the Last Judgment!… That was our reward for our works.” The truth is, that, on his own showing, he scarcely knew what inward contrition was, and that he remained too much a stranger to the motive of holy fear.

  To the period subsequent to his ordination must be assigned assurances such as the following, the tone of which becomes more and more crude the older he grows. “From that time [of his first Mass] I said Mass with great horror, and thank God that He has delivered me from it.” “When I looked on [a figure of] Christ I fancied I was looking at the devil. That is why we say: O, Mary, pray for us to thy beloved Son and appease His wrath.” If I follow the principles of the monks and Papists, then “I lose Christ my Healer and Consoler and make Him into the taskmaster and hangman of my poor soul.”

  “As long as I remained a Papist I should have blushed with shame to speak of Christ; Jesus is a womanish name; we preferred to speak of Aristotle or Bonaventure.” He also says: “Often have I trembled at the name of Jesus; when I saw Him on the cross it was like a thunderbolt and when His Name was mentioned I would rather have heard the devil invoked, for I raved that I had to go on doing good works until I had thereby made Christ friendly and gracious to me.”

  They used to say: “Scourge yourself until you have yourself blotted out your sin. Such is the Pope’s doctrine and belief.” Thus, in the monastery, I had “long since lost Christ and His baptism. I was of all men the most wretched, day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to calm. Thus I was bathed and baptised in my monkery and went through the real sweating sickness. Praise be to God that I did not sweat myself to death.”

  Those Protestants who take Luther’s statements too readily, without probing them to the bottom and eliminating the rhetorical and fabulous element, are apt to urge that Luther’s descriptions of the monastic state show that nothing but mental derangement could result from such a life.

  Dr. Kirchhoff, a medical man, basing his remarks on Luther’s accounts, is inclined to assume the existence of some severe temperamental malady. He even goes so far as to say that, at any rate, countless numbers of monks lost their reason. “In the course of time,” he adds, Luther “acquired a greater power of resisting the temptations, and, possibly, in his quieter after-life the physical causes may have diminished; it would appear that the accompanying conditions disquieted him greatly.”

  The fact is that Protestant authors as a rule fight shy of undertaking any criticism of Luther’s account of himself. They accord it far too ready credence and usually see in it a capital pretext for attacking the olden Church.

  If Luther is to be taken literally and is right in his generalisations, then we should have to go even further than such writers and argue that, one and all, those who sought to be pious in the religious life were mad, or at least on the verge of insanity; the Church, by her doctrine of works, of satisfaction and of man’s co-operation with Grace, infects all who address themselves zealously to the performance of good works with the poison of a subtle insanity.

  We need waste no further words here on the falsehood of Luther’s objections against the Catholic doctrine of works.

  We may pass over the countless clear and authentic proofs furnished by Luther’s elders and contemporaries, and even by Luther himself previous to his apostasy, which place the Catholic doctrine on works in a very different light. The Church, in point of fact, always refused to hear of works done solely by man’s strength being efficacious for salvation, and regarded only those works performed by the aid of God’s supernatural Grace as of any value — and that through the merits of Christ — whether for the purpose of preparing for justification or for winning an everlasting reward; she always recognised faith, hope and charity as conditions for forgiveness and justification, and as the threefold spring whereby good works are rendered fruitful.

  There can be no question that Luther’s picture of his holiness-by-works in Popery is meant to include all his earnest brother monks and their mistaken way of life, and the doctrine and religious practices of Popery as such. The fiction serves a twofold purpose. On the one hand, as its author gives us to understand quite openly, it was his excuse for having shaken off the yoke of the religious life, on the other, it was to be used as a weapon against the olden doctrine of the importance of works for personal salvation. To be true to history, one must judge of his account of his Catholic life from these two standpoints. How extremely unreliable it is will then be more apparent. The following observations on the contrast his account presents with historical truth, particularly with the well-authenticated incidents of his development, and even with the elements of truth which he introduces into the legend, will place the grave shortcomings of the latter in an even clearer light.

  Since Luther would have us believe that God caused him to become a monk, in order that, taught by his own experience, he might write against the Papacy, no sooner does he begin to speak of himself than he includes in the same condemnation his brother monks and all those Christians who were zealous in the practice of works.

  Under the Pope’s yoke he and all other Papists had been made to feel to their “great and heavy detriment” what it spelt when one tried to become pious by means of works. We grew more and more despondent concerning sin and death.… For the more they do the worse their state becomes. “Thus I, and all those in the convent, were bondsmen and captives of Satan.”— “We hoped to find salvation through our frock.” — With us all it was “rank idolatry,” for I did not believe in Christ, etc. — Because we endured so many “sufferings of heart and conscience and performed so many works,” no one must now come and seek to excuse Popery.— “We fled from Christ as from the very devil, for we were taught that each one would be placed before the judgment seat of Christ with his works” — a teaching which is, indeed, almost word for word that of St. Paul (2 Cor. v. 10).

  Remembering the other utterances in which he makes all Papists share in his alleged experiences, for instance, in his “unbelief,” we soon perceive how unreliable are all such statements of his concerning the history of his personal development. The whole is seen to be primarily but a new form of controversy and self-vindication; only by dint of cautiou
s criticism can we extract from it certain traits which possibly serve to illustrate the course of his mental growth in the monastery.

  Again, several details of the picture — quite apart from the obvious effort to burden the olden Church with a monstrous system of holiness-by-works — warn us to be sceptical. First of all there is the customary rhetoric and playing to the gallery. The palpable exaggeration it contains, its references to the howling by day and by night, to the scourgings, to the tortures of hunger and cold, to the endless prayers and watchings, and to the ravings of the woebegone searchers after peace, do not prepossess us in favour of the truth of the account. Luther, in so much of what he says on the point, has shown us how little he is to be taken seriously, that one cannot but wonder how his statements, even when exaggerated to the verge of the ludicrous, can ever have been regarded in the light of real authorities.

  He is not telling the truth when he assures us that, as Doctor of Divinity, he had never rightly understood the Ten Commandments, and that many other famous doctors had not known “whether there were nine, or ten, or eleven of them; much less did we know anything of the Gospel or of Christ.” After outward works, indeed, we ran, but “what God has commanded, that we omitted … for the Papists trouble themselves about neither the Commandments nor the promises of God.” In choir the community daily chanted Psalm li. (l.), in which joy in the Lord is extolled, but “there was not one who understood what joy to the pious is a firm trust in God’s Mercy.”

  We have, for instance, his remarkable saying, that he had looked upon it as a deadly sin for a monk ever to come out of his cell without his scapular, even though otherwise fully dressed. Yet no reasonable man acquainted with the religious life, however observant he might be, would have been capable of such fears. Luther declares that he had seen a sin in every infringement of the rule of his Order; yet the Rule was never intended to bind under pain of sin, as indeed was expressly stated. He asserts that he had believed, that, had he made but a slight mistake or omission in the Mass, he “would be lost”; yet no educated priest ever believed such a thing, or thought that small faults amounted to mortal sins.

  As an instance of the Papal tyranny over consciences he was wont to tell in his old age how he had tortured himself on the Saturday by reciting the whole of the Breviary that he had omitted to say during the week owing to his other occupations. “This is how we poor folk were plagued by the Pope’s decretals; of this our young people know nothing.” His account of these repetitions varies considerably in the telling. He expects us to believe he was not aware of the fact, familiar to every beginner in theology, that the recitation of the Hours and the Breviary is imposed as an obligation for the day, which expires as soon as the day is over, so that its omission cannot be afterwards made good by repetition. From his account it would on the contrary appear that the “Pope’s decrees” had imposed such subsequent making good. Even should he really, in his earlier days when he first began to neglect the Breviary, have occasionally repeated the task subsequently, yet it is too bad of him to make it part of the monkish legend and an instance of how “we poor fellows were tormented.”

  “It is an astonishing and dreadful thing,” he proceeds, “that men should have been so mad!” Those who live in the religious life and according to man-made ordinances “do not deserve to be called men nor even swine”; a “hateful and accursed life” was it, with “all their filth!”

  The young monk too — could we trust Luther’s account — must have been seriously wanting in discretion where mortification was concerned, and a like indiscretion was evinced by all others who took the religious vocation in earnest. But the extravagant asceticism such as Luther would have us believe he practised, and the theological assumption underlying it, viz. that salvation depends on bodily mortification, are quite against the older teaching in vogue in his time. We may quote a few instances of the teaching to the contrary.

  Thomas Aquinas declares: “Abstinence from food and drink in itself does not promote salvation,” according to Rom. xiv. 17, where we read: “The kingdom of heaven is not meat and drink.” He recognises only the medicinal value of fasting and abstinence, and points out that by such practices “concupiscence is kept in check”; hence he deduces the necessity of discretion (“ad modicum”) and warns people against the “vain glory” and other faults which may result from these practices. Not by such works, nor by any works whatsoever, is a man saved and justified, but “man’s salvation and justice,” so he teaches, “consist mainly in inward acts of faith, of hope and of charity, and not in outward ones.… Man may scorn all measure where faith, hope and charity are concerned, but, in outward acts, he must make use of the measure of discretion.”

  But perhaps the best ascetical writer to refer to in this connection is John Gerson of Paris, who was so much read in the monasteries and with whom Luther was well acquainted. He assigns to outward works, particularly to severe acts of penance, the place they had, even from the earliest times, held in the Church. He bids Religious care above all for inward virtue, which they are to regard as the main thing, for self-denial and for obedience out of love of God. He appeals to the Fathers and warns his readers that “indiscreet abstinence may more easily lead to a bad end than even over-feeding.” Discretion could not be better practised than in humility and obedience, by forsaking one’s own notions and submitting to the advice of the expert; such obedience was never more in place than in a Religious.

  These are but two notable witnesses taken from the endless tale of those whose testimony is at variance with the charges implied in Luther’s legend, that the monks were regardless of discretion where penance was concerned.

  That Luther is guilty of self-contradiction in attributing to the Catholic teachers and monks of his day such mistaken views and practices and the doctrine of holiness-by-works generally is fairly obvious.

  If the young monk really “kept the Rule,” then his extravagant penances for the purpose of gaining a gracious God can have had no existence outside his brain; the Rule prohibited all exaggeration in fasting and maceration, wilful loss of sleep and senseless exposure to cold. The Augustinian Rule, devised expressly as it was, to be not too severe in view of the exacting labours involved by preaching and the care of souls, had been further mitigated on the side of its penitential exercises by Staupitz’s new constitutions in 1504. It was true the prior might sanction something beyond what the Rule enjoined, but it is scarcely credible that a beginner like Luther should have been allowed to exceed to such an extent the limit of what was adapted to all. His bodily powers were already sufficiently taxed by his studies, the more so since he threw himself into them with such impetuous ardour. It is all the less likely that any such special permission was given him, seeing that, as we know, Staupitz had, in consideration of his studies, dispensed the young monk from the performance of the humbler duties of the monastery.

  If what has been said holds good of the years spent at Erfurt, much less can there be any question of his having indulged in excessive rigour during his Wittenberg period. Here Luther began at an early date to inveigh against what he thought was excessive strictness on the part of his brother monks, against their observance and against all so-called holiness-by-works. In his sermons and writings of that time we have an echo of his vexation at the too great stress laid on works; but such a frame of mind, which was by no means of entirely new growth, surely betrays laxity rather than over-great zeal. The doctrine of the all-sufficiency of faith alone and of Christ’s Grace was already coming to the front.

  Yet he continued — even after he had set up his new doctrine and completely broken with the Church — to recommend works of penance and mortification, declaring that they were necessary to withstand sinful concupiscence; nor does he even forget, agreeably with the Catholic view, to insist on the need of “discretion.” He also knows quite well what is the true purpose of works of penance in spite of all he was to say later in his subsequent caricature of the Catholic doctrine and practice. We h
ear him, for instance, saying in a sermon of 1519, when speaking of the fight to be waged against concupiscence: “For this purpose are watching, fasting, maceration of the body and similar works; everything is directed towards this end, nay, the whole of Scripture but teaches us how this grievous malady may be alleviated and healed.” And, in his Sermon on Good Works (1520), he says: Works of penance “were instituted to damp and deaden our fleshly lusts and wantonness”; yet it is not lawful for one to “be one’s own murderer.” All this militates against his own tale, that, in the convent, discretion had never been preached, and that, thanks to the trashy holiness-by-works, he had been on the highroad to self-destruction. The Sermon in question was preached some five years before the end of those “twenty years” during which, to use his later words, he had been his own “murderer” through his excessive and misguided penances.

  It may, however, be, that, for a short while, e.g. in the time of his first fervour as a novice, he may have failed now and then by excess of zeal in being moderate in his exercise of penance. This would also have been the time, when, tormented by scruples, he was ever in need of a confessor. To a man in such a state of unrest, penance, however, even when practised with discretion, may easily become a source of fresh confusion and error, and, when undertaken on blind impulse and used to excess, such a one tends to find excuses for himself for disregarding the prohibition both of the Rule and of his spiritual director.

  It is interesting to note the varying period during which Luther, according to his later sayings, was addicted to these excessive penances and to holiness-by-works. We already know that it was only gradually that he broke away from his calling, and that he had in reality long been estranged from it when he laid aside the Augustinian habit.