Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The letter of one so learned and yet so condescending, so Luther begins, while greatly rejoicing him had distressed him not a little. He rejoiced at his eulogies of Staupitz, in whom he simply extolled Christ. “But how could you sadden me more than by seeking my friendship and decking me out in such empty titles of honour? I cannot allow you to become my friend, for my friendship would bring you, not honour but rather harm, if so be that the proverb is true: ‘Friends hold all in common.’ If what is mine becomes yours then you will receive only sin, unwisdom and shame, for these alone can I call mine; but such things surely do not merit the titles you give them.” Scheurl, indeed, would say, so he goes on in the same pathetic style, that it was only Christ he admired in him; but Christ cannot dwell together with sin and folly; hence he must be mindful of his own honour and not fall so low (‘degeneres’) as to become the friend of Luther. Even the Father-Vicar Staupitz praises him (Luther) too much. He made him afraid and put him in peril by persisting in saying: “I bless Christ in you and cannot but believe Him present with you now.” Such a belief was, however, hard, and the more eulogies and friends, the greater the danger in which the soul stood (then follow three superfluous quotations from Scripture). The greater the favour bestowed by men the less does God bestow His. “For God wills to be either the only friend or else no friend at all. To make matters worse, if a man humbles himself and seeks to fly praise and favour, then praise and favour always come, to our peril and confusion. Oh, far more wholesome,” he cries, “are hatred and disgrace than all praise and love.” The danger of praise he elucidates by a comparison with the cunning of the harlot mentioned in Proverbs vii. He is writing all this to Scheurl, not by any means to express contempt for his good-will but out of real anxiety for his own soul. Scheurl was only doing what every pious Christian must do who does not despise others but only himself; and this, too, he himself would also do.

  And, as though he had not yet said enough of his love of humility, the writer makes a fresh start in order to explain and prove what he has said. Not on account of learning, ability and piety does a true Christian honour his fellow-men; such a thing had better be left to the heathen and to the poets of to-day; the true Christian loved the helpless, the poor, the foolish, the sinful and the wretched. This he proves first from Ps. xli., then from the teaching of Christ and from His words: “For that which is high to men is an abomination before God” (Luke xvi. 15). “Do not make of me such an abomination,” so he goes on, “do not plunge me into such misery if you would be my friend. But, from so doing you will be furthest if you forbear from praising me either before me or before others. If, however, you are of opinion that Christ is to be extolled in me, then use His Name and not mine. Why should the cause of Christ be besmirched by my name and robbed of its own name? To everything should be given its right name; are we then to praise what is Christ’s without using His Name? Behold,” so he breaks off at last very aptly, “here you have your ‘friend’ and his flood of words; have patience friendly reader” — words which may apply to the modern reader of this effusion no less than to its first addressee. It cannot well be gainsaid that something strange lay in this kind of humility. It would be difficult to find an exact parallel to such language in the epistles of the humanists of that day, and still less in the correspondence of truly pious souls. What may, however, help us to form our opinion is the fact that, in the letters written immediately after the above, we again find the young professor condemning wholesale everything that did not quite agree with his own way of thinking.

  The passion, precipitancy and exaggeration which inspired him during his monkish days is the other characteristic which here calls for consideration. His fiery and unbridled zeal was of such a character as to constitute a very questionable virtue in a monk.

  We may recall what has already been said of the youthful Luther’s passionate and unmeasured abuse, even in public, of the “Little Saints” and “detractors” in his Order, for instance at the Chapter of the Order held at Gotha in 1515. Bitter exaggerations are met with even in his first lectures. In the controversy with the Observantines he goes so far as to make the bold assertion, that it was just the good works of his zealous brother monks that were sinful, though they in their blindness refused to believe it. In his Commentary on the Psalms in 1513-15 he even goes so far as to denounce as “rebellion and disobedience” their vindication of strict observance in the Order. His imagination makes him fancy that they are guided by a light kindled specially for them by “the devil.” Such is his ardour when thundering against the abuses in the Order that he forgets to make the needful distinctions, and actually, in the presence of the young Augustinians who were his pupils, attacks the very foundations of their Mendicant Order. Yet elsewhere, in the narrowest spirit of party prejudice, he inveighs against worthy scholars who happened to belong to other Orders, for instance, against Wimpfeling, on whom he heaps angry invective. The slightest provocation was enough to rouse his ire.

  Soon his passion began to vent itself on the Church outside. In his lectures on the Psalms he laments that Christianity was hardly to be found anywhere, such were the abuses; he can but weep over the evil; all pious men were, according to him, full of sorrow that the Incarnation and Passion of Christ had come to be so completely forgotten. We know how the young religious, from the abyss of his inexperience, declared in the most general terms, as though he had been familiar with all classes and all lands, that the desecration of what was most sacred in the Church had gone so far that they had sunk below even the Turk; “owing to the unchastity, pomp and pride of her priests, the Church was suffering in her property, in the administration of her sacraments and of the Word of God, in her judicial authority and finally in her government,” etc., “the Sanctuary was, so to speak, being hewn down with axes,” churchmen doing spiritually what the Turk was doing both spiritually and materially; in vain was the Word of God preached “seeing that every entrance was closed to it.”

  Holy men, of real zeal, had always been able to discern the good side by side with the bad. But the youthful Luther sees on every side, and everywhere nothing but false teaching (“scatet totus orbis,” etc.), nay, a very “deluge of filthy doctrines.” To be made a bishop is to him tantamount to branding oneself a “Sodomite”; so full of vice is the episcopate that those wearers of the mitre were the best who had no sin on their conscience beyond avarice. As for the men of learning, they rank far below Tauler, and, thanks to their narrowness, had made the age “one of iron, nay, of clay.” When setting faith and grace against the alleged heathenism of the scholars he goes so far as to say, that his man is he “who outside of grace knows nothing.” As early as 1515 he thinks himself qualified to attack the authorities and the highest circles because “his teaching-office lent him apostolic power to say and to reveal what was being done amiss.”

  Why, we may, however, ask, did not the reformer of the Church begin with himself, seeing that, in the lectures on the Psalms just mentioned, he already laments the coldness of his own religious life? Even then he felt temptations pressing upon him; already in consequence of his manifold and distracting labours he had lapsed into a state in which prayer became distasteful to him, and of which he writes to an intimate friend in 1523: “In body I am fairly well but I am so much taken up with outward business that the spirit is almost extinguished and rarely takes thought for itself.” These words and other earlier admissions (above, vol. i., ff.) throw a strange light on the legend according to which he had wrestled in prayer by day and by night.

  Even in his devotion to his studies and in his manner of writing on learned subjects his natural extravagance stands revealed. His love for study was all passion; his mode of thought and expression was simply grotesque. It was the young monk’s passion for learning which led him on the occasion of his visit to Rome to petition the Pope to be allowed for a term of several years to absent himself from home and devote himself in the garb of a secular priest to his studies at the Universities. At Wittenberg we find h
im in the refectory pen in hand in the silent watches of the night when all the other monks had gone to rest, and, in his excited state, he fancies he hears the devil making an uproar. Though, according to his admission of Oct. 26, 1516, he was so busy and overwhelmed with literary work, as “rarely to have time to recite the Hours or to say Mass,” yet he still had time enough to inveigh against the “sophists of all the Universities” as he had, even then, begun to term the professors of his day. He professed his readiness, were it necessary, to find time to go to Erfurt in order to defend in a public disputation there the Theses set up at Wittenberg in his name by his pupil Franz Günther; the Erfurt Augustinians were not to denounce these propositions as “paradoxical, or actually cacodoxical,” “for they are merely orthodox.” “I wait with eagerness and interest to see what they will put forward against these our paradoxes.” In April, 1517, when Carlstadt caused some commotion by publishing his erroneous views on nature and grace in 152 theses, Luther called them in one of his letters the paradoxes of an Augustine, excelling the doctrine in vogue as much as Christ excels Cicero; there were some who declared these propositions to be paradoxical rather than orthodox, but this was “shameless insolence” on the part of men who had studied and understood neither Augustine nor Paul; “to those who understand, however, the theses ring both pleasantly and beautifully, indeed to me they seem to have an excellent sound.”

  His restless style and love of emphasis is characteristic of his own inner restlessness and excitement. He himself was quite aware of the source of this disquiet, at least so far as it was the result of a moral failing. In 1516 he lays his finger deliberately on his besetting fault when he admits to a friend, that the “root of all our unrest is nowhere else to be found than in our belief in our own wisdom”; “I have been taught by my own experience! Oh, with how much misery has this evil eye [belief in my own wisdom] plagued me even to this very day!”

  And yet he takes for one of his guiding principles the curious idea that the opposition of so many confirmed the truth of what he said. His work on the Penitential Psalms, so he wrote to his friend Lang on March 1, 1517, would “then please him best if it displeased all.” And, two years later, he said to Erasmus, when speaking of the system he followed in this respect: “I am wont to see in what is displeasing to many, the gifts of a Gracious God as against those of an Angry God”; hence, so he assures him, the hostility under which Erasmus himself was suffering, was, for him, a proof of his real excellence.

  His burning enthusiasm at the time when he thought he had discovered the sense of the passage: “The just man lives by faith,” has already been described elsewhere. This and other incidents just touched upon recall those morbid sides of his character referred to in the previous chapter.

  As we might expect, during the first years of his great public struggle his restlessness was even more noticeable than before. The predominance of the imagination has hardly ever been so fatally displayed by any other man, though, of course, it is not every man whose life is thrown amid times so stirring. “Because,” so he wrote in 1541, recalling his audacity in publishing the Indulgence-Theses and the fame it brought him, “all the Bishops and Doctors kept silence [concerning the abuse of indulgences] and no one was willing to bell the cat.… Luther was vaunted as a doctor, and as the only man who was ready to interfere. Which fame was not at all to my taste.” This latter assertion he is fond of making to others, but his letters of that time show how greatly the charm of notoriety contributed to unbridle his stormy energy. It was his opponents’ defiance which first opened the flood-gates of his passionate eloquence. At the very outset he warns people that contradiction will only make his spirit more furious and lead him to have recourse to even stronger measures; elsewhere he has it: “The more they rage, the further I shall go!”

  We may recall his reference to the “gorgeous uproar,” and the passages where he assures his friends: “I am carried away and know not by what spirit,” and “God carries me away, I am not master of myself.”

  In the light of his pathological fervour the contradictions in which he involves himself become more intelligible, for instance, what he wrote to Pope Leo X in his letter of May, 1518, which so glaringly contrasted with his other words and deeds. His unrest and love of exaggeration caused him to overlook this and the many other contradictions both with himself and with what he had previously written.

  The picture of the monk which we have been compelled to draw differs widely from the legendary one of the pious young man shut up in the cloister, who, according to Luther’s account at a later date, led a fanatical life of penance and, because he saw Popish piety to be all too inadequate, “sought to find a Gracious God.”

  Luther’s Alterations of the Facts

  It was not altogether arbitrarily that Luther painted the picture of the monk forced by his trouble of mind to forsake Popery. Rather he followed, possibly to some extent unconsciously, the lines of actual history, though altering them to suit his purpose.

  He retained intact not a few memories of his youth, which, under the stress of his bitterness and violence, and with the help of a lively imagination unfettered by any regard for the laws of truth, it was no difficult task to transform. Among these memories belong those of his time of fervour during his Noviciate and early days as a priest. They it was which evidently formed the groundwork of his later statements that he had been throughout an eminently pious monk. Then again, among the remarkable traits which made their appearance somewhat later, the two elements just described have a place in his legend, viz. his extravagant self-conscious humility and his fiery zeal. In his later controversies he is disposed to represent this strange sort of humility as real humility and as a sign of genuine piety. The pious, humble monk hidden in a corner had all unwittingly grown into a great prophet of the truth. In the same way the ardour of those years which he never afterwards forgot, was transformed in his fancy into a fanatical hungering and thirsting after Popish holiness-by-works, in discipline and fasting, watching, cold and prayer.

  In addition to these there were memories of the transition period of religious scruples, of temptations to doubts about predestination, of his passing paroxysms of terror, gloom and inherited timidity. These elements must be considered separately.

  Scrupulosity, with the doubts and nervousness it brings in its train, probably only troubled him for a short time during the first period of his life in the cloister. The admonitions of his novice-master, given above (), may refer to some such passing condition through which the young man went, and which indeed is by no means uncommon in the spiritual life. The profound impression made by these first inward experiences seems to have remained with him down to his old age; indeed it is the rule that the struggles of one’s younger days leave the deepest impression on both heart and memory. His quondam scruples and groundless fear of sin, eked out by his ideas of the virtues of a religious, probably served as the background for the picture of the young monk “sunk” in Popish holiness-by-works and yet so profoundly troubled at heart.

  But all this would not suffice to explain the legend of his mental unrest, of his sense of being forsaken by God, of his howling, etc.

  What promoted this portion of the legend was the recollection of those persistent temptations to despair which arose from his ideas on predestination during the time of his mystical aberrations.

  The dreadful sense of being predestined by God to hell had for many years stirred the poor monk’s soul to its lowest depths, even long before he had thought out his new doctrine. It is no matter for surprise, if, later, carried away by his polemics, he made the utmost use in his legend of his former states of fear the better to depict the utter misery of the monk bent on securing salvation by the practice of good works. The doctrine of faith alone which he had discovered and the new Evangelical freedom were, of course, supposed to have delivered him from all trouble of mind, and thus it was immaterial to him later to what causes his fears and sadness were assigned.

  Yet hi
s supposed new theological discoveries became for him, according to the testimony of the Commentary on Romans, in many respects a new source of fear and terror. The doctrine of the Divine imputation or acceptation did not sink into his mind without from its very nature causing far-reaching and abiding fears. His then anxieties, which, as a matter of fact, were in striking contrast with his later assertion of his sudden discovery of a Gracious God, together with the mystical aberrations in which he sought in vain for consolation, doubtless furnished another element for the legend of the terrors he had endured throughout his life as a monk.

  We need only refer to the passage in the Commentary where he declares: Our so-called good works are not good, but God merely reckons (“reputat”) them as good. “Whoever thinks thus is ever in fear (‘semper pavidus’), and is ever awaiting God’s imputation; hence he cannot be proud and contentious like the proud self-righteous, who trust in their good works.”

  What is curious, however, is that, here and elsewhere in the Commentary, the so-called self-righteous, both in the cloister and the world, appear to be quite “confident” and devoid of fear; they at least fancy they may enjoy peace; hence, as depicted in the Commentary, they are certainly not the howling and anxious spirits of whom the later legend speaks. On the contrary it is Luther alone who is sunk in sadness, and whose melancholy pessimism presents a strange contrast to all the rest. His mysticism also veils a deep abyss.

  Almost on the same page the pessimistic mystic speaks of that resignation to hell which has a place in his new system of theology. “Because we have sin within us we must flee happiness and take on what is repugnant, and that, not merely in words and hypocritically; we must resign ourselves to it with full consent, must desire to be lost and damned. What a man does to him whom he hates, that we must do to ourselves. Whoever hates, wishes his foe to be undone, killed and damned, not merely seemingly but in reality. When we thus, with all our heart, destroy and persecute ourselves, when we give ourselves over to hell for the sake of God and His Justice, then indeed we have already satisfied His Justice and He will deliver us.” It can hardly be considered normal that a monk should wish to live — among brethren, who rejoiced in the promises of Christ and in the Church’s means of grace — the life of a lonely mystic sunk in the depths of an abyss, where “a man does not strive after heaven but is perfectly ready never to be saved, but rather to be damned, and where, after having been reconciled by grace, a man fears, not God’s punishments, but simply to offend Him.”