Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Such was the solemn Vow, which, later on, he declared to have been absolutely worthless.

  2. Fidelity to his new calling; his temptations

  After making his profession the young religious was set by his Erfurt superiors to study theology, which was taught privately in the monastery.

  The theological fare served up by the teachers of the Order was not very inviting, consisting as it largely did of the mere verbalism of a Scholasticism in decay. With the exception of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, the students at the Erfurt monastery did not study the theological works of the great masters of the thirteenth century; neither Thomas of Aquin, the prince of scholastic theology and philosophy, nor his true successors, not even Ægidius Romanus, himself a Hermit of St. Augustine, were well known to them. The whole of their time at Erfurt, as elsewhere also, was devoted to the study of the last of the schoolmen who, indeed, stood nearer in point of time, but who were far from teaching the true doctrine with the fulness and richness of the earlier doctors. They were too much given to speculation and logical word-play. The older schoolmen were no longer appreciated and nominalistic errors, such as were fostered in the school of William of Occam, held the field. One of the better schoolmen of the day was Gabriel Biel. His works, which have a certain value, together with some of the writings of the Fathers of the Church, formed the principal arsenal from which Luther drew his theological knowledge, and upon which he exercised his dialectics. In addition to this, he also studied the theological tractates of John Gerson and Cardinal Peter d’Ailly, works which, apart from other theological defects, contain various errors concerning the authority of the Church and her Head; that these particular errors had any deeper influence on the direction of Luther’s mind cannot, however, be proved. What we do find is that the one-sidedness of this school, with its tendency to hairsplitting, had a negative effect upon him. At an early date he was repelled by the scholastic subtleties, for which, according to him, Aristotle alone was responsible, and preferred to turn to the reading and study of the Bible. He nevertheless made the prevalent school methods so much his own as to apply them often, in a quite surprising fashion, in his earliest sermons and writings.

  The man who exercised the greatest influence on the theological study in the Erfurt monastery was the learned Augustinian, Johann Paltz, who was teaching there when Luther entered. He was a good Churchman and a fair scholar, and was also much esteemed as a preacher. By his side worked Johann Nathin, who has already been mentioned, likewise one of the respected theologians of the Order. Luther’s teachers, full of veneration for the Holy Scriptures as the revealed Word of God, were not at all displeased to see their pupil having frequent recourse to the Bible, in order to seek in the well of the Divine Word instruction and enlightenment, by which to supplement the teachings of the schoolmen and the Fathers.

  Luther had, moreover, already become acquainted with the Bible in the library of the Erfurt University, whilst still engaged in studying philosophy. He had, however, not prosecuted his reading of the Bible, though the same library would doubtless have supplied him with numerous well-thumbed commentaries on Holy Writ. In the monastery a copy of the Bible was given him at the beginning of his theological course. It was, as we learn from him incidentally, a Latin translation bound in red leather, and remained in his hands until he left Erfurt. The statutes of the Order enjoined on all its members “assiduous reading, devout hearing and industrious study of the Holy Scriptures.”

  The young monk immersed himself more and more in the study of his beloved Bible when Staupitz, the Vicar, advised him to select the same as his special subject in order to render himself a capable “localis and textualis” in the Holy Scriptures.

  The Superior seems to have had even then the intention of making use later of Luther as a public professor of biblical lore. So ardently was the Vicar’s advice followed by Luther that, in his preference for reading the Bible and studying its interpretation, he neglected the rest of his theological education, and his teacher Usingen was obliged to protest against his one-sided study of the sacred text. So full was Luther of the most sacred of books, that he was able (at least this is what he says later) to show the wondering brothers the exact spot in his ponderous red volume where every subject, nay even every quotation, was to be found. It was with great regret that, on leaving this community, he found himself prohibited by the Rule from taking the copy away with him. Later, as an opponent of the religious life, he states that no one but himself read the Bible in the monastery at Erfurt, whilst of his foe Carlstadt, a former Augustinian, he bluntly says that he had never seen a Bible until he was promoted to the dignity of Doctor. Of course, neither assertion can be taken literally.

  When the day drew nigh for him to celebrate his first Mass as newly ordained priest, he invited not only his father but several other guests to be present at a ceremony which meant so much both to him and to his friends. Thus, in a letter of invitation to Johann Braun, Vicar in Eisenach, who had shown him much kindness and help during his early years in that town, he says that: “God had chosen him, an unworthy sinner, for the unspeakable dignity of His service at the altar,” and begged his fatherly friend to come, and by his prayers to assist him “so that his sacrifice might be pleasing in the sight of God.” He also expressed to him his great indebtedness to Schalbe’s College at Eisenach, which he would also have gladly seen represented at the ceremony. This is the first letter of Luther’s which has been preserved and with which the critical edition of his “Correspondence,” now being published, commences. The first Mass took place on Cantate Sunday, May 2, 1507. Luther relates later, with regard to his state of mind during the sacred ceremony, that he could hardly contain himself for excitement and fear. The words “Te igitur clementissime Pater,” at the commencement of the Canon of the Mass, and “Offero tibi Deo meo vivo et vero,” at the oblation, brought so vividly to his mind the Awful, Eternal Majesty, that he was hardly able to go on (“totus stupebam et cohorrescebam”); he would have rushed down from the altar had he not been held back; the fear of making some mistake in the ceremonies and so committing a mortal sin, so he says, quite bewildered him. Yet he must have known, with regard to the ceremonies, that any unintentional infringement of them was no sin, and least of all a mortal sin, although he attributes the contrary opinion to the “Papists” after his apostasy.

  His father Hans assisted at the celebration. His presence in the church and in the refectory was the first sign of his acquiescence in his son’s vocation. But when the latter, during dinner, praised the religious calling and the monastic life as something high and great, and went on to recall the vow he had made at the time of the thunderstorm, asserting that he had been called by “terrors from Heaven” (“de cœlo terrores”), this was too much for his level-headed father, who, to the astonishment of the guests, sharply interposed with the words: “Oh, that it may not have been a delusion and a diabolical vision.” He could not overcome his dislike for his son’s resolve. “I sit here and eat and drink,” he cried, “and would much rather be far away.” Luther retorted he had better be content, and that “to be a monk was a peaceful and heavenly life.” The statement with regard to the elder Luther agrees with the character of the man and with the severity which he had displayed long before to Martin.

  Here an assertion must be mentioned made by George Wicel, a well-informed contemporary; once a Lutheran, he was, from 1533-8, Catholic priest at Eisleben. Two or three times he repeats in print, that Hans Luther had once slain a man in a fit of anger at his home at Möhra. Luther and his friends never denied this public statement. In recent years attempts have been made to support the same by local tradition, and the fact of the father changing his abode from Möhra to Mansfeld has thus been accounted for. According to Karl Seidemann, an expert on Luther (1859), the testimony of Wicel may be taken as settling definitively the constantly recurring dispute on the subject.

  The following facts which have been handed down throw some light on the inward state of t
he young man at this time and shortly after.

  At a procession of the Blessed Sacrament he had to accompany Staupitz, the Vicar, as his deacon. Such was the terror which suddenly seized him that he almost fled. On speaking afterwards of this to his superior, who was also his friend, he received the following instructive reply: “This fear is not from Christ; Christ does not affright, He comforts.”

  One day that Luther was present at High Mass in the monks’ choir, he had a fit during the Gospel, which, as it happened, told the story of the man possessed. He fell to the ground and in his paroxysms behaved like one mad. At the same time he cried out, as his brother monks affirmed: “It is not I, it is not I,” meaning that he was not the man possessed. It might seem to have been an epileptic fit, but there is no other instance of Luther having such attacks, though he did suffer from ordinary fits of fainting. Strange to say, some of his companions in the monastery had an idea that he had dealings with the devil, while others, mainly on account of the above-mentioned attack, actually declared him an epileptic. We learn both these facts from his opponent and contemporary, Johann Cochlæus, who was on good terms with Luther’s former associates. He asserts positively that a “certain singularity of manner” had been remarked upon by his fellows in the monastery. Later on his brother monk, Johann Nathin, went so far as to assert that “an apostate spirit had mastered him,” i.e. that he stood under the influence of the devil.

  Melanchthon was afterwards to hear from Luther’s own lips something of the dark states of terror from which he had suffered since his youth. When he speaks of them at the commencement of his biographical eulogy on his late friend he connects Luther’s strange excitement in the days before his entrance into religion with a certain event in his later history at a time when he was engaged in public controversy. “As he himself related, and as many are aware,” says Melanchthon, “when considering attentively examples of God’s anger, or any notable accounts of His punishments, such terror possessed him (‘tanti terrores concutiebant’) as almost to cause him to give up the ghost.” He describes how, as a full-grown man, when such fears overcame him, he would actually writhe on his bed. He suffered from these terrors (terrores) either for the first time, or most severely, in the year in which he lost his friend by death in an accident, i.e. before his admission to the monastery. “It was not poverty,” Melanchthon continues, “but his love of piety which led him to choose the religious life, and, while pursuing his theological and scholastic studies, he drank with glowing fervour from the springs of heavenly doctrine, namely, the writings of the prophets and apostles (i.e. the Old and New Testament) in order to instruct his spirit in the Divine Will and to nourish fear and love with strong testimony. Overwhelmed with these pains and terrors (‘dolores et pavores’), he plunged only the more zealously into the study of the Bible.”

  According to Melanchthon’s account, the same old Augustinian who once had directed Luther’s attention in an attack of faint-heartedness to the Christian’s duty of recalling the article of the forgiveness of sins, also quoted him a saying of St. Bernard: “Only believe that thy sins are forgiven thee through Christ. That is the testimony which the Holy Ghost gives in thy heart: ‘Thy sins are forgiven.’ Such is the teaching of the apostle, that man is justified by faith.”

  Such words of Catholic faith and joyful trust in God might well have sufficed to reassure an obedient and humble spirit. Luther began to read more and more the mystic writings of the saint of Clairvaux, but as to how far they served to bring him peace of conscience no one can now say; certain it is that, at a later date, he placed a foreign interpretation upon the above-mentioned text and upon many other similar sayings of St. Bernard, which, taken in a Catholic sense, might have been of comfort to him, in order to render them favourable to the methods by which he proposed to make his new teaching a source of consolation. He accustomed himself more and more to follow “his own way,” as he calls it, in mind and sentiment. Though in later times he speaks often and at length of his spiritual trials in the monastery, we never hear of his humbling himself before God with childlike, trustful prayer in order to find a way out of his difficulties.

  If we consider the temptations of which he speaks, we might be tempted to think that he, with his promising disposition and proneness to extremes, had been singled out in a quite special manner by the tempter. During the term of novitiate, writes Luther when more advanced in years, the evil spirit of darkness, so he has learned, does not usually assail so bitterly the monk who is striving after perfection. Satan generally tempts him but slightly, and, more especially as regards temptations of the flesh, the novice is left in comparative peace, “indeed, nothing appears to him more agreeable than chastity.” But, after that time, so he tells us, he himself had to bewail not only fears and doubts, but also numberless temptations which “his age brought along with it.” He felt himself at the same time troubled with doubts as to his vocation and by “violent movements of hatred, envy, quarrelsomeness and pride.”

  “I was unable to rid myself of the weight; horrible and terrifying thoughts (‘horrendæ et terrificæ cogitationes’), stormed in upon me.” Temptations to despair of his salvation and to blaspheme God tormented him more especially.

  He had often wondered, he says on one occasion to his father Hans, whether he was the only man whom the devil thus attacked and persecuted, and later he comforted one who was in great anxiety with the words: “When beset with the greatest temptations I could scarcely retain my bodily powers, hardly keep my breath, and no one was able to comfort me. All those to whom I complained answered ‘I know nothing about it,’ so that I used to sigh ‘Is it I alone who am plagued with the spirit of sorrow!’”

  He thinks that he learned the nature of these temptations from the Psalms, and that he had by experience made close acquaintance with the verse of the Bible: “Every night I will wash my bed: I will water my couch with my tears” (Ps. vi. 7). Satan with his temptations was the murderer of mankind; but, notwithstanding, one must not despair. Luther here speaks of visions granted him, and of angels who after ten years brought him consolation in his solitude; these statements we shall examine later.

  Elsewhere he again recounts how Staupitz encouraged him and the manner in which he interpreted his advice reveals a singular self-esteem. Staupitz had pointed out to him the interior trials endured by holy men, who had been purified by temptation, and, after having been humbled, had risen to be powerful instruments in God’s hand. Perhaps, said Staupitz, God has great designs also for you, for the greater good of His Church. This well-meant encouragement remained vividly impressed upon Luther’s memory, not least because it seemed to predict a great future for him. “And so it has actually come to pass,” he himself says later, “I have become a great doctor though in the time of my temptations I could never have believed it.” Speaking later of a reference made by Staupitz to the temptations which humbled St. Paul, he says: “I accepted the words which St. Paul uses: ‘A sting of my flesh was given me lest the greatness of the revelation should exalt me’ (2 Cor. xii. 7), wherefore I receive it as the word and voice of the Holy Spirit.” Such reflections as these, to which Luther gave himself up, certainly did not tend to help him to rid himself completely of the temptations, and to vanquish his melancholy thoughts of predestination. As a result of following “his own way” and cultivating his morbid fears, he never succeeded in shaking himself free from the thought of predestination. This will appear quite clearly in his recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, written in 1515-16. In fact, the whole of the theology which he set up against that of the Catholic Church was in some sense dominated by his ideas on predestination.

  We must, however, pay him this tribute, that during the whole of his stay in the Erfurt monastery he strove to live as a true monk and to keep the Rule. Such was the testimony borne by an old brother monk, as Flacius Illyricus relates, who had lived with him at Erfurt and who always remained true to the Church.

  Though such may well
have been the case, we cannot all the same accept as reliable the accounts, exaggerated and distorted as they clearly are, which, long after his falling away, he gives of his extraordinary holiness when in the monastery. He there attributes to himself, from controversial motives, a piety far above the ordinary, and speaks of the tremendous labours and penances which he imposed upon himself in his blindness. Led away by his imagination and by party animus, he exalts his one-time “holiness by works,” as he terms it, to be the better able to assure his hearers — ostensibly from his own experience and from the bitter disappointment he says he underwent — that all works of the Papists, even those of the most pious, holy and mortified, were absolutely worthless for procuring true peace for the soul thirsting after salvation, and that the Catholic Church was quite unable by her teaching to reconcile a soul with God. History merely tells us that he was an observant monk who kept the Rule, and, for that reason, enjoyed the confidence of his superiors.

  Relying upon his ability and his achievements, Staupitz, the Vicar, summoned him in the autumn of 1508, to Wittenberg, in order that he might there continue his studies and at the same time commence his work as a teacher on a humble scale.

  As Master of Philosophy Luther gave lectures on the Ethics of Aristotle and probably also on Dialectics, though, as he himself says, he would have preferred to mount the chair of Theology, for which he already esteemed himself fitted, and which, with its higher tasks, attracted him much more than philosophy. In March, 1509, he was already the recipient of a theological degree and entered the Faculty as a “Baccalaureus Biblicus.” This authorised him to deliver lectures on the Holy Scriptures at the University.

  In the same year, however, probably in the late autumn, Luther’s career at Wittenberg was interrupted for a time by his being sent back to Erfurt. With regard to the reasons for this nothing is known with certainty, but a movement which was going forward in the Congregation may have been the cause. In the question of the stricter observance which had recently been raised among the Augustinians, and which will be treated of below, Luther had not sided with the Wittenberg monastery but with his older friends at Erfurt. He was opposed to certain administrative regulations promoted by Staupitz, which, in the opinion of many, threatened the future discipline of the Order. At any rate, he had to return to Erfurt just as he was about to become “Sententiarius,” i.e. to be promoted to the office of lecturing on the “Magister Sententiarium.” For these lectures, too, he had already qualified himself. His second stay at Erfurt and the part — so important for the understanding of his later life — which he played in the disputes of the Order, are new data in his history which have as yet received little attention.