Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Luther’s recollections of the mental ailments he went through as a monk also undoubtedly had their effect on the legend. We know that Luther never rightly understood the nature of these ailments and that he regarded his fits of terror, his nervousness and his gloom as anything but what they really were. It would appear that, in his old age, he simply lumped all his sad experiences together as typical of the sort of poison which Popery and Monkery, owing to their false doctrines, offered to their adepts. Nothing seemed to him to show better from what horrors he had snatched mankind. Whether involuntary self-deception played a part here, or whether, by dint of constant repetition, he came to believe in the truth of his tale, who can now venture to say? In any case his spirit of bitterness led him to make of his own sufferings a sort of spectre of terror common to all, who, like himself, had raved that they were zealously serving God whether in the monastery or in Popery at large. Even “great Saints” had, according to him, lived amidst the “devil’s factions and errors, under Rules and in monasteries and institutions,” but had finally “cut themselves loose and been saved by faith in Jesus Christ.”

  He completely shuts his eyes to the fact that both his fears concerning predestination and his morbid states of terror accompanied by fainting fits recurred in his case even in later life, and, that, after his apostasy he had in addition to suffer from remorse of conscience on account of his doings against the Church. Nor does he seem to see that he himself betrays the falsity of what he says of the general depression to which all monks were subject when he relates above, that he alone had gone about in the monastery labouring under such oppression and that no one had understood him or been able to console him (above, ); hence, according to this, his brother monks cannot have suffered from the terrors he afterwards attributed to them.

  The Monkish Nightmare

  The strange “terrors” under which he was labouring when he first knocked at the gate of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt were, according to Melanchthon’s definite assurance already quoted, closely bound up with his habitual states of fear. They were extraordinary states of mental perturbation (“terrores”) and can only be explained when looked at in the light of his other mental troubles. Of the incidents that impelled him to enter the convent Luther himself says in a passage which has also been quoted above, that (on the occasion of his first Mass) he had tried to reassure his father Hans by pointing out that he had been called “by terrors from heaven” (“de coelo terrores”); to which his father had harshly replied: “Oh, that it may not have been a delusion and a diabolical vision” (“illusio et præstigium”). The happenings immediately previous to his entering the monastery are of a rather mysterious character. The inmates of the Erfurt convent declared at that time in consequence of what they had gathered from Luther, that he, like “another Paul, had been miraculously converted by Christ.” Oldecop, who began his studies at Wittenberg in 1514, speaks in his Chronicle of “strange fears and spectres” on account of which Luther had taken the habit. Still more remarkable is the report based on the account of Luther’s intimate friend Jonas, and dating from 1538. He says: When Luther, as a student, was returning to Erfurt after having been to Gotha to buy some books “there came a dreadful apparition from heaven which he then interpreted as signifying that he was to become a monk.” If these statements were correct it would appear as though we have here already an instance of hallucination worthy of being classed with the “sights and visions” elsewhere mentioned. Even his earliest monastic days would assume a suspiciously pathological character if, even then, he was convinced of having been the recipient of heavenly messages. It must, however, remain doubtful whether Jonas’s report means exactly what it seems to mean and whether his sources are to be relied upon.

  The possibility of his having been the victim of hallucination at such an early date also raises the question whether his later abnormal states can be explained by heredity or his upbringing.

  By their “harsh treatment,” so Luther says on one occasion, his parents had “driven him into the monastery”; here we have an entirely new version of the motives of his choice of the religious life; he adds that, though they meant well by him, yet he had known nothing but faintheartedness and despondency. Poverty still further darkened his early youth. It is quite possible that the young monk may have suffered for some considerable time from feelings of timidity and depression as a result of his education and mode of life. The natural timidity which was apparent during a part of his youth may also have contributed its quota to the rise of the legend of the monk who was ever sad. But all this does not explain as well as an hereditary malady would the terrors or seeming hallucinations. Unfortunately the question of heredity is still quite obscure, though the highly irritable temper of his father referred to above () may have some bearing on it. Luther, however, says very little about his parents and even less of his manner of bidding good-bye to the world.

  The statements he makes, whether in jest or in earnest, concerning his vow to enter a religious Order, differ widely.

  He declares he made the vow to God in honour of St. Anne, but that God had “taken it in the Hebrew meaning,” Anne signifying grace, and had understood that Luther wished to become a monk “under grace and not under the Law,” in fact not a monk at all. Very likely it is no jest, however, when he adds that, “he had soon regretted his vow, the more so since many sought to dissuade him from entering the convent”; he had, nevertheless, persisted, in spite of the objections of his father and, after that, he had had no further thought of quitting the convent, “until God deemed the time had come” (to thrust him out of it).

  On another occasion he assures us he had entered the convent only “because he despaired of himself.” And again: “God let me become a monk,” “though I entered forcibly and contrary to my father’s wishes”; for I had “to learn to know the Pope’s trickery.” As a rule, however, he leaves God out of the matter. He had taken the vow only “under compulsion,” so he says in self-defence; he had not become a monk “gladly and willingly”; he did not then know that a father had to be obeyed, or that vows rested only on “the commandments of men, on hypocrisy and superstition,” but, during his life in the cloister, the suspicion of his father, who had now been reconciled with him, about the possibility of its having all been a diabolical delusion had sunk deeply into his mind; in his father’s words he had perforce to recognise the Voice of God.

  Again, the legend makes out the monk, in the time of his first fervour, to have looked more like a corpse than a man; yet, so far as we can judge, it was only after he had begun his public struggle, i.e. subsequent to 1517, that he began to show signs of physical exhaustion and emaciation, and this, too, was only owing to the way in which he went to work. On the other hand, on March 17, 1509, i.e. nearly four years after his entry into the religious life, when about to quit Erfurt, he wrote, that, “as to himself, by God’s grace, all was going well.” The expression he uses seems to imply that, not merely his spiritual, but also his bodily, state was satisfactory.

  In his legend Luther speaks repeatedly of certain morbid states from which he had suffered and which he duly uses to lash the Popish conception of holiness. They are too closely bound up with other facts in his mental life to be set aside as simple inventions, though it must also be added that they contain an element of uncertainty.

  In the case of people who have been brought up as Christians but who suffer from certain nervous disorders, particularly when their temperament is of the melancholy variety, a notable aversion for sacred objects may occasionally be observed. “Many such patients cannot bear the sight of a cross, cannot listen to prayers, stop their ears at the ringing of the Angelus, cannot mention the word ‘sacrament,’ but use some circumlocution instead.” “Among perfectly normal people we do not meet with this sort of thing, still it is nothing extraordinary.”

  Now, oddly enough, we find Luther, in 1532, telling the people quite seriously in his sermons on Matt. v.-vii., that, as a novice, he had not
been able to endure the sight of the crucifix. “When I saw a picture or statue of Christ hanging on the Cross, etc., I was so affrighted that I averted my eyes.” And, again, in the same sermons: “When I looked at Him on the Cross He seemed to me like a flash of lightning.” He also adds that he “had often been affrighted at the name of Jesus.” “The Last Day,” he says in a sermon of 1534, he could not bear to hear spoken of, and “my hair stood on end when I thought of it.” These statements are doubtless exaggerations, but Luther has others even stronger: He would “rather have heard the devil spoken of than Christ”; he would rather have seen “the devil than the Crucified”; “rather have heard of the devils in hell than of the Last Day.” It may be queried whether the above were simply inventions designed to vilify the monastic life and the faith in which he had grown up. Nevertheless, whoever calls to mind the “terrors” Luther experienced at his first Mass and in the procession with Staupitz, whoever keeps before him the part played by Luther’s “fears” even at a later date, will certainly not think it beyond the bounds of possibility that, at times, he should have shuddered at the sight of the cross or at the mention of Christ or of the Last Judgment.

  To all this, his bodily condition may have contributed, yet, in his legend, Luther makes of these doubtless morbid states of his the inevitable result of the holiness-by-works practised in the convent and taught by Catholic doctrine. It was because they had known Christ only as the Judge, Who must be placated by works, that he had so dreaded the Crucifix and the very mention of the Judgment. He says that he could not but tremble at the sight of the Crucifix, because, like the rest of the Papists, he had been taught to think that “I must go on performing good works until I have thereby made Christ my friend and gracious toward me.” For this reason alone he had “so often shrunk back affrighted at the name of Jesus” and at the “Cross” as at a “flash of lightning,” because he, like all the rest, had lost his faith; “I had fallen away from the faith and had no other thought than that I had angered God Whom I must once more propitiate by my works.” “But praise and thanks be to God that now we have His Word once more, which leads us to Christ and depicts Him as our Righteousness”; our heart need no longer “tremble and quake.”

  After assuring us that he was often unable to gaze upon the Cross, he also at once proceeds to make capital out of this against the olden Church: “For,” so he continues, “my mind was poisoned by this Popish doctrine,” a doctrine according to which “Christ, our Healer, had been turned into a devil.”

  Nor does he hesitate to make out that the sight of the Saviour was likewise terrifying to all the zealous and earnest “saints-by-works” in the religious life and Popery generally. In another passage he speaks of the dreadful emotion all felt at the mention of the coming Judgment and the Last Day: “And so we were all sunk in the filth of our own holiness and fancied that, by our life and works, we could pacify the Divine Judgment”; formerly they used to start “if anyone spoke of death or of the life to come”; but, since the light of the Evangel has risen, it is otherwise.

  It is true that the way in which Luther here allows his prejudice to exploit these terrifying experiences may raise doubts as to whether they had ever actually existed even in his own case, or whether he did not rather invent them with the object of afterwards ascribing them to all. At the same time it is easier to believe in their existence than to credit him with having deliberately evolved them out of his own fancy.

  The utmost caution must indeed be exercised in accepting his assertions on this subject. We cannot sufficiently express our amazement at the credulity with which Luther’s rhetorical statements about his life in the convent have often been accepted, for instance even by Köstlin. The fact is, that the ground on which Luther’s later account rests, the elements that he introduces into his transformation of the facts, and above all the bitter and aggressive spirit which directs and permeates everything, have not been adequately recognised and thus the mythological nature of his fiction has remained undetected. Otherwise it would surely have been impossible to assert, that, just as Paul had been through the mill of the Law, so Luther also had been through that of the religious life, in order, by virtue of his experience, to discover the supreme truth.

  Various traits in the picture he drew, which, owing to its difficulties, has puzzled many people, may, as we have seen, be explained by his misapprehension or misinterpretation of the phenomena of his own morbid, melancholy mind. Other moral factors have, however, also to be taken into account.

  As already pointed out, his depression of mind, due primarily to physical causes, became so pronounced owing to his refusal to submit to proper direction.

  His dissatisfaction was increased by his growing impatience with the religious life, by remorse of conscience arising from his tepidity and worldliness, and by his growing antipathy to his vocation.

  It may be said, that, had the convent been wisely governed, Luther would never have been admitted to profession but have been quietly dismissed while yet a novice. Both for his superiors and for himself this would have been the better course. A morbid temperament such as his, whatever may have been its cause, was not suited for the religious life, even apart from the obstacles in Luther’s character. The monotony and the penances of the monastic life, the self-discipline and obedience; also the annoyances with which he had to put up from his brother monks, whose habits and upbringing were not his, must necessarily have aggravated his case, particularly as he refused to submit to guidance. His superiors should have foreseen that this brother would be a source of endless difficulties. Instead of this, Staupitz, the vicar, clung to his favourite. He even gave him to understand that he would make of him a great scholar and an ornament of the Order. Had he remained in the world, in a different and freer sphere of action, Luther might possibly have succeeded in shaking off his ailments and the resultant depression. But, in the convent, particularly as he went his own way, he became the victim of ideas and imaginations which promoted the growth of his doctrine and helped to pave the way for his apostasy. Nevertheless, his morbid states could not annul the vows he had taken in the Order, hence his leaving and his breach of the vows cannot be excused on the ground of his illness, though the latter may help to explain his step.

  From all the above it is plain how unwarrantable is the assumption that to set aside Luther’s legend is to shut one’s eyes to the severe inward struggles through which he went previous to making his great decision.

  There can be no doubt that, previous to his unhappy change of religion, the monk had to wage a hard fight with himself. He was striving against his conscience, and, by overcoming it, he consciously and deliberately incurred the guilt of his apostasy. “A frightful struggle of soul,” may, and indeed must, be assumed, though a very different one from that usually pictured by Protestants and by Luther himself. It would indeed be “stupid” (to use the words of a Protestant biographer of Luther) to seek to “obliterate from history” the deep-down inward struggle which, “maybe, lasted longer than we think.” It is, however, gratifying to find that the same author admits that, as a monk in the Erfurt priory, Luther “found some inward contentment,” in other words, that the legend is false in this particular; he also grants that, at least “in this or that statement,” Luther, in his later accounts, has been guilty of “exaggeration”; that his “development” did not proceed quite on the lines he fancied later, at least that the “change was not quite so sudden,” and, finally, that “physical overstrain” had something to do with his struggles.

  3. The Legend receives its last touch; how it was used

  It is only after 1530 that we find Luther’s legend of his monkish life fully developed. Before this we see only the first hints of the tale.

  It cannot be argued that, till then, he had been silent on his inward experiences as a monk, or that the MSS. of the Table-Talk only commence subsequent to 1530. That, even before this, he had frequently spoken of his earlier spiritual experiences is evident from the passages a
lready quoted, and might be proved by many others; moreover the absence of any recorded Table-Talk is a detail, since the latter is far from being our sole source in the present question.

  We are justified in assuming that the idea matured in 1530, during his stay at the Castle of Coburg where he had to wage so severe a struggle with himself. Amid the trials he endured during his days of retirement at the Wartburg he had found time to pen his violent attack on monastic vows; so also, it was in the quiet of the Coburg, amidst the ghostly conflicts and delusions, that he wove the caricature of his own monkish life into the web of his history. At the very time when Luther was at the Coburg the burning question of German monasticism was being debated at the Diet of Augsburg; the Catholic Estates hoped that recognition might again be won for it from the Protestants, or that it might at least secure toleration in the districts where allegiance was divided. It was also at the Coburg that Luther penned many of the furious passages of his “Warning to the Clergy forgathered at Augsburg.”