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With regard to his own life as a religious and his conception of his calling Luther was, at the time of the crisis, still far removed from the position which he took up later, though we find already in the Commentary on Romans views which eventually could not fail to place him in opposition to the religious state.

What still bound him to the religious life was, above all, the ideal of humility, which his mystical ideas had developed. He also recognised fully the binding nature of his vows. According to him man cannot steep himself sufficiently in his essential nothingness before the Eternal God, and vows are an expression of such submission to the Supreme Being.

“To love is to hate and condemn oneself, yea even to wish evil to oneself.” “Our good is hidden so deeply that it is concealed under its opposite; thus life is hidden under death, real egotism under hatred of self, honour under shame, salvation under destruction, a kingdom under exile, heaven under hell, wisdom under foolishness, righteousness under sin, strength under weakness; indeed all our affirmation of any good is concealed under its negation in order that faith in God, Who is the negation of all, may remain supreme ... thus ‘our life is hidden with Christ in God’ (Col. iii. 3), i.e. in the negation of all that can be felt, possessed and apprehended.... That is the good which we must desire for ourselves,” he says to his brother monks, “then only are we good when we recognise the good God and our evil self.”[697]

He says elsewhere regarding vows: “All things are, it is true, free to us, but by means of vows we can offer them all up out of love; when this has once taken place, then they are necessary, not by their nature but on account of the vow which has been taken voluntarily. Then we must be careful to keep the vows with the same love with which we took them upon us, otherwise they are not kept at all.”[698] In many points he goes further than the Rule itself in the mystical demands he makes upon the members of the Order.

In other respects Luther’s requirements not only fall far short of what is necessary, but even the ordinary monastic duties fare badly at his hands. If it is the interior word which is to guide the various actions, and if without the “spirit” they are nothing, indeed would be better left undone, then what place is left to the common observance of the monastic Rule and the numerous pious practices, prayers and acts of virtue to which a regular time and place are assigned?

From the standpoint of his pseudo-mystical perfection he criticises with acerbity the recitation of the Office in Choir; also the “unreasonableness and superstition of pious founders of benefices,” who, as it were, “desired to purchase prayers” at certain fixed times. Founders of a monastery ought not to have prescribed the recitation of the Office in Choir on their behalf; by so doing they wished to secure their own salvation and well-being before God, instead of making their offerings purely for God’s sake.[699] Such remarks plainly show that he was already far removed in spirit from a right appreciation of his Order. He had also expressed himself against the mendicancy practised by the Augustinians, and yet the Order was a Mendicant Order and the collecting of alms one of its essential statutes.[700]

Nevertheless, again and again he speaks in lofty language of the value of the lowliness of the religious life. Now especially, he writes in the Commentary on Romans under the influence of his mystical “theologia crucis,” it is a good thing to be a religious, better than during the last two centuries. Why? Because now monks are no longer so highly esteemed as formerly, they are hated by the world and looked upon as fools, and are “persecuted by the bishops and clergy”; therefore the religious ought to rejoice in their cross and in their state of humiliation.[701]

Whoever takes vows imposes upon himself “a new law” out of love for God; he voluntarily renounces his own freedom in order to obey his superiors, who stand in God’s place. The vows are for him indissoluble bonds, but bonds of love.[702] “Whoever wishes to enter the cloister,” he says,[703] “because he thinks he cannot otherwise be saved, ought not to enter. We must beware of exemplifying the proverb: ‘despair makes a monk’; despair never made a monk, but only a devil.[704] We must enter from the motive of love, namely, because we perceive the weight of our sins and are desirous of offering our Lord something great out of love; for this reason we sacrifice to Him our freedom, assume the dress of a fool, and submit to the performance of lowly offices.”

His complaints are very serious and certainly somewhat prejudiced, owing partly to his new theology, partly to his wrong perception of the facts.

“Whoever keeps his vows with repugnance is behaving sacrilegiously.”[705] Even he who is animated by the best of motives scarcely acts from perfect love, but when this is entirely absent, he says, “we sin even in our good works.”[706] Many who fulfil their religious duties merely from routine and with indolence “are apostates though they do not appear to be such,” and in his excessive zeal he continues: “the religious in the Church to-day are held captive under a Mosaic bondage, and together with them the clergy and the laity because they cling to the doctrines of men (‘doctrinæ hominum’); we all believe that without these there is no salvation, but that with these salvation is assured without any further effort on our part.”[707]

On the same occasion he allows himself to be carried away from the subject of monasticism to the complaints regarding the too frequent Feasts and Fasts and the formalism pervading the whole life of the Church, to which we referred on page 227. Returning to the monks, he declares that he finds the interior man so greatly lacking in them that (without considering the many exceptions) they were the cause of the hostile attitude which the world assumed towards them. “Instead of rejoicing in shame, they are only monks in appearance; but I know that if they possessed love they would be the happiest of men, happier than the old hermits, because they are daily exposed to the cross and contempt. But to-day there is no class of men more presumptuous than they.”[708]

At the same time, however, he blames the religious who are too zealous for his liking, saying: “they are desirous of imitating the works of the Saints and are proud of their Founders and Fathers; but this is merely trumpery, because they wish to do the same great works themselves and yet neglect the spirit; they are like the Thomists and Scotists and the other sects, who defend the writings and words of their pet authors without cultivating the spirit, yea rather stifling it ... but they are hypocrites, as Saints they are not holy, as righteous they are anything but righteous, and, while ostensibly performing good works, they, in fact, do nothing.”[709]

And what sort of works do the religious perform? “In the same way that nowadays all workmen are as lazy as though they were asleep all day, so religious and priests sleep at their prayer from laziness, both spiritually and corporally; they do everything with the utmost indolence ... this fault is so widespread that there is hardly one who is free from it.”[710] “Now,” he exclaims passionately, speaking of the monks and clergy, “almost all follow their vocation against their will and without any love for it.” “How many there are who would gladly let everything go, ceremonies, prayers, rules and all, if the Pope would only dispense from them, as indeed he could.” “We ought to perform these things willingly and gladly, not from fear of remorse of conscience, or of punishment, or from the hope of reward and honour. But supposing it were left free to each one to fast, pray, obey, go to church, etc., I believe that in one year everything would be at an end, all the churches empty and the altars forsaken.”[711] He does not remember that shortly before he had been complaining that outward observances were taken too seriously so that they were looked upon as necessary means of salvation (“sine his non esse salutem”), that “the whole of religion was made to consist in their fulfilment to the neglect of the actual commandments of God, of faith and love,” and that the “lower classes observe them under the impression that their eternal salvation depends upon them.”[712] These complaints, too, he had redoubled when speaking of the religious.

According to the testimony of the religious and theological literature of that day, the monastic Orders were better instructed in the meaning and importance of outward observances than Luther here assumes. Expounders of the Rules and ascetical writers speak an altogether different language. In the monasteries the distinction between the observances which were enjoined under pain of grievous sin and were, therefore, under no circumstances to be omitted, and such as were binding under the Rule but not under pain of sin, was well understood, and a third category was allowed, viz. such as were undertaken voluntarily, for instance, the construction of churches, or their adornment. It was also known, and that not only in religious houses—for the popular manuals of that day set it forth clearly—that for an action to be good the motive of perfect love, which Luther represented as indispensable,[713] was not requisite, but that other religious motives, such as the fear of punishment of sin, were sufficient though it was, indeed, desirable to rise to a higher level. Above all, it was well known that the disinclination towards what is good, which springs from man’s sensual nature like the temptation to indolence which still held sway even in religious, are not sin but may be made the subject of a meritorious struggle.

The formalism which it is true was widely prevalent in the religious life at that time was due not so much to a faulty conception of the religious state as to the inadequate fulfilment of its obligations and its ideals. This deterioration was not likely to be remedied by the application of the mistaken idea which Luther advocated, namely, that not the slightest trace of human weakness must be allowed to enter into the performance of good works, otherwise they became utterly worthless. His stipulation that everything must be done from the highest “spiritus internus,” could only be the result of his extravagant mysticism. The Rules of no Order, not even that of the Augustinians, went so far as this. Yet the Rule of Luther’s Augustinian Congregation did not seek a merely outward, Pharisaical carrying out of its regulations, but a life where the duties of the religious state were performed in accordance with the inward spirit of the Order.

Luther’s master, the Augustinian Johann Paltz, emphasises this spirit very strongly in the instructions which he issued for the preservation of the true ideals of the Order.

“Love,” he there says, “pays more heed to the inward than to the outward, but the spirit of the world mocks at what is inward and sets great value on what is outward.” He opposed the principles tending to formalism and the deterioration of the religious life and shows himself to be imbued with a true and deep appreciation of his profession. He entitles that portion of his treatise directed against deviations from the Rule: “Concerning the wild beasts who lay waste the religious life.” He writes with so much feeling and in so vivid a manner that the reader of to-day almost fancies that he must have foreseen the approaching storm and the destruction of his Congregation. He scourges those who allow themselves to be led away by the appearance of what is good (“sub specie boni”), who introduce new roads to perfection according to their own ideas and require men to do what lies beyond them; they thus endanger the carrying out of the ordinary good works and practices of the religious life which all were able to perform. This, he says, was a temptation of the enemy from the beginning, who seduced such innovators to rely upon their own ideas and to consider themselves alone as good, wise and enlightened. “If the Babylonians [this is the name he gives to the instigators of such disturbances] force their way into the Order and if they obtain the upper hand, that will be the end of discipline, or at least it will be undermined; but if the spirits of Jerusalem [the city of Peace] retain the mastery, then the religious life will flourish and its development will not be hindered by certain defects which are, as a matter of fact, unavoidable in this life.” These words are found in a book written by the clear-sighted and zealous Augustinian and published at Erfurt the year before Luther begged for admittance at the gate of the Augustinian monastery of that town.[714] The monk of liberal views was already on the point of becoming to his Order one of the “Babylonians” above referred to.

Luther wished to introduce into the religious life the confused ideas begotten of his mysticism, at the expense of the observances which all were bound to fulfil. In this connection it should not be forgotten that Tauler, the teacher whom Luther so much admired, had shown that religious obedience if exercised in the right spirit was capable, by the observance of the Rule in small matters, of leading to greater perfection than could be arrived at by the performance of great works or by contemplation when these were self-chosen. Luther must have been acquainted with the instructive story which Tauler relates and which was often told in conventual houses, of the Child Jesus and the nun. The Divine Child appears to her during her meditation, but, on being suddenly called away to perform some allotted task and obeying the summons, as a reward she finds on her return the Divine Child wearing a still more benign and friendly countenance, and her visitor is also at pains to point out to her that the humble task for which she had left Him, pleases Him better than the meditation in which she had been engaged when He first appeared to her.[715]

Teachers of Tauler’s stamp inculcated on monks and laymen alike the highest esteem for small and insignificant tasks when performed in compliance with obedience to the duties of one’s state, whatever it might be. It was unfair to the religious life and at the same time to true Christian mysticism when Luther at a later date, after his estrangement from the Order, in emphasising the works which please God in the secular life, saw fit to speak as though this view had hitherto been unknown.

Tauler had summed up the doctrine already well known in earlier ages in the beautiful words: “When the most trivial work is performed in real and simple obedience, such a work of an obedient man is nobler and better and more pleasing to God and is more profitable and meritorious than all the great works which he may do here below of his own choice.”[716] Every artisan and peasant is able, according to Tauler, to serve God in perfect love in his humble calling; he need not neglect his work to tread the paths of sublime charity and lofty prayer. The mystic illustrates this also by a little anecdote: “I know one who is a very great friend of God and who has been all his days a farm-labourer, for more than two score years. He once asked our Lord whether he should leave his calling and go and sit in the churches. But the Lord said No, and that he was to earn his bread with the sweat of his brow and thus honour His true and noble Blood. Every man must choose some suitable time by day or by night during which he may go to the root of things, each one as best he can.”[717]

Luther, during the time of his crisis, was not only a monk of dangerously wide views, but he was also inclined to take liberties in practice.

There is a great dearth of information with regard to the way in which Luther practised at that time the virtues of the religious life, and from his own statements we do not learn much. He complains, in 1516, to his friend Leiffer, the Erfurt Augustinian: “I am sure and know from my own experience, from yours too, and, in fact, from the general experience of all whom I have seen troubled, that it is merely the false wisdom of our own ideas which is the origin and root of our disquietude. For our eye is evil, and, to speak only of myself, into what painful misery has it brought me and still continues to bring me.”[718]

Luther, whose capacity for work was enormous, flung himself into the employments which pressed upon him. He reserved little time for self-examination and for cultivating his spiritual life. In addition to his lectures, his studies, the direction of the younger monks, his sermons, whether at the monastery or in the parish church, and the heavy correspondence which devolved on him as Vicar, he also undertook various other voluntary labours. Frequently he had several sermons to preach on the same day, and with his correspondence he was scarcely able to cope. This was merely a prelude to what was to come. During the first years after his public apostasy he himself kept four printing presses at work, and besides this had a vast amount of other business to attend to. His powers of work were indeed amazing.

In 1516 in a letter he tells his friend Lang of his engagements. “I really ought to have two secretaries or chancellors. I do hardly anything all day but write letters.... I am at the same time preacher to the monastery, have to preach in the refectory and am even expected to preach daily in the parish church. I am Regent of the Studium [i.e. of the younger monks] and Vicar, that is to say Prior eleven times over [i.e. of the eleven houses under his supervision]; I have to provide for the delivery of fish from the Leitzkau pond and to manage the litigation of the Herzberg fellows [the monks] at Torgau; I am lecturing on Paul, compiling an exposition of the Psalter and, as I said before, writing letters most of the time.”

“It is seldom,” he adds, “that I have time for the recitation of the Divine Office or to celebrate [Mass], and then, too, I have my peculiar temptations from the flesh, the world and the devil.”[719]

Thus at the time he was constantly omitting Office in Choir, the Breviary and the celebration of Mass, or performing these sacred duties in the greatest haste in order to get back to his business. We must dwell a little on this confession, as it represents the only definite information we have with regard to his spiritual life. If, as he says, he had strong temptations to bewail, it should have been his first care to strengthen his soul by spiritual exercises and to implore God’s assistance in the Holy Mass and by diligence in Choir. Daily celebration of Mass had been earnestly recommended by teachers of the spiritual life to all priests, more particularly to those belonging to religious Orders. The punctual recitation of the canonical Hours, i.e. of the Breviary, was enjoined as a most serious duty not merely by the laws of the Church, but also by the constitutions of the Augustine Congregation. The latter declared that no excuse could be alleged for the omission, and that whoever neglected the canonical Hours was to be considered as a schismatic. It is incomprehensible how Luther could dispense himself from both these obligations by alleging his want of time, as, according to his Rule, spiritual exercises especially in the case of a Superior, took precedence of all other duties, and it was for him to give an example to others in the punctual performance of the same.

There was probably another reason for his omitting to celebrate Mass.

He felt a repugnance for the Holy Sacrifice, perhaps on account of his frequent fits of anxiety. He says, at a later date, that he never took pleasure in saying Mass when a monk; this statement, however, cannot be taken to include the very earliest period of his priestly life, when the good effects of his novitiate were still apparent, for one reason because this would not agree with the enthusiasm of his letter of invitation to his first Mass.

Religious services generally, he says in 1515-16 to the young monks, with a boldness which he takes little pains to conceal, “are in fact to-day more a hindrance than a help” to true piety. Speaking of the manner of their performance he says with manifest exaggeration, that it is such as to be no longer prayer. “We only insult God more when we recite them.... We acquire a false security of conscience as though we had really prayed, and that is a terrible danger!”[720] Then he goes on to explain “Almost all follow their calling at the present day with distaste and without love, and those who are zealous place their trust in it and merely crucify their conscience.” He speaks of the “superstitious exercises of piety” which are performed from gross ignorance, and sets up as the ideal, that each one should be at liberty to decide what he will undertake in the way of priestly or monastic observances, among which he enumerates expressly “celibacy, the tonsure, the habit and the recitation of the Breviary.”[721] We see from this that he was not much attached even to the actual obligations of his profession, and we may fairly surmise that such a disposition had not come upon him suddenly; these were rather the moral accompaniments of the change in his theological views and really date from an earlier period. We can also recognise in them the practical results of his strong opposition to the Observantines of the Order, which grew into an antagonism to all zeal in the religious life and in the service of God, and even to the observance of the duties, great or small, of one’s state of life.

With his mystical idealism he demands, on the other hand, what is contrary to reason and impossible of attainment. Prayer, according to him, if rightly performed, is the “most strenuous work and calls for the greatest energy”; “the spirit must be raised to God by the employment of constant violence”; this must be done “with fear and trembling,” because the biblical precept says: “work out your salvation with fear and trembling”; in short, it is, he declares, “the most difficult and most tedious affair” (“difficillima et tædiosissima”).[722] Only then is it not so “when the Spirit of God takes us beneath His wings and carries us, or when misfortune forces us to pray from our hearts.”

He can describe graphically the lukewarmness and distractions which accompany the recitation of the Divine Office, and can do so from experience if we may trust what he says in 1535 of himself: “I have in my day spent much time in the recitation of the canonical Hours, and often the Psalm or Hour was ended before I knew whether I was at the beginning or in the middle of it.”[723]

The ironical description which he gives in 1516 of those who pray with a good intention runs as follows:[724] “They form their good intention and make a virtue of necessity. But the devil laughs at them behind their backs and says: ‘put on your best clothes, Kitty, we are going to have company.’[725] They get up and go into the choir and say to themselves [under the impression that they are doing something praiseworthy]: ‘See, little owl, how fine you are, surely you are growing peacock’s feathers!’[726] But I know you are like the ass in the fable, otherwise I should have taken you for lions, you roar so; but though you have got into a lion’s skin, I know you by your ears! Soon, whilst they are praying, weariness comes over them, they count up the pages still to be gone through, and look at the number of verses to see if they are nearly at the end. Then they console themselves [for their tepidity] with their Scotus, who teaches that a virtual intention suffices and an actual intention is unnecessary. But the devil says to them: ‘excellent, quite right, be at peace and secure!’ Thus we become,” so the amusing description concludes, “a laughing-stock to our enemy.”

He thinks he has found a way out of the dualism which formerly tormented him, and has become more independent. But what has he found to replace it? Merely fallacies, the inadequacy and inconsistency of which are hidden from him by his egotism and self-deception. “This good intention,” he says of the teaching of Scotus—which was perfectly correct, though liable to be misunderstood, as it certainly was by Luther—“is not so easy and under our own control, as Scotus would have it to our undoing; as though we possessed free will to make good intentions whenever we wish! That is a very dangerous and widespread fallacy, which leads us to carelessness and to snore in false security.” We must, on the contrary, he continues, prostrate in our cell, implore this intention of God’s mercy with all our might and wait for it, instead of presumptuously producing it from within ourselves; and in the same way after doing any good works we must not examine whether we have acted wickedly by deed or omission (“neque quid mali fecimus aut omisimus”), but with what interior fervour and gladness of heart we have performed the action.[727]

As the recitation of the Hours in the monastery was one of the duties of the day in the same way as the recitation of the Breviary and Office in Choir is to-day, i.e. an obligation which expired when the day was over, it is rather surprising to hear it said of Luther that, at a later period, “after the rise of the Evangel [i.e. actually during his conflict with the Church], he frequently shut himself up in his cell at the end of the week and recited, fasting, all the prayers he had omitted, until his head swam and he became for weeks incapable of working or hearing.” This strange tale about Luther reads rather differently in Melanchthon’s version which he reports having had from Luther himself: “At the commencement it was Luther’s custom on the days on which he was not obliged to preach to spend a whole day in repeating the Hours seven times over [i.e. for the whole week], getting up at 2 a.m. for that purpose. But then Amsdorf said to him: ‘If it is a sin to omit the Breviary, then you sinned when you omitted it. But if it is not a sin, then why torment yourself now?’ Then when his work increased still more he threw away the Breviary.”[728] The latter statement may indeed be true, as Luther himself says in his Table-Talk: “Our Lord God tore me away by force ‘ab horis canonicis an. 1520’ [?] when I was already writing much.” In this same passage he again mentions how he recited the whole of the Office for the seven days of the week on the Saturday and adds the historic comment, that, owing to his fatigue from the Saturday fast and consequent sleeplessness, they had been obliged to dose him with “Dr. Esch’s haustum soporiferum.”[729] It is therefore quite possible that his statements as to the circumstances under which he dispensed himself from the Breviary may contain some truth; all the facts point to the violent though confused struggle going on in the young Monk’s mind.

Yet Luther speaks ably enough in 1517 of the urgent necessity of spiritual exercises, more particularly meditation on the Scriptures, to which the recitation of the Office in Choir was an introduction: “As we are attacked by countless distractions from without, impeded by cares and engrossed by business, and as all this leads us away from purity of heart, only one remedy remains for us, viz. with great zeal to ‘exhort each other’ (Heb. iii. 13), rouse our slumbering spirit by the Word of God, reading the same continually, and hearing it as the Apostle exhorts.” Not long after he is, however, compelled to write: “I know right well that I do not live in accordance with my teaching.”[730]

The exertions which his feverish activity entailed avenged themselves on his health. He became so thin that one could count his ribs, as the saying is. His incessant inward anxieties also did their part in undermining his constitution.

The outward appearance of the Monk was specially remarkable on account of the brilliancy of his deep-set eyes, to which Pollich, his professor at the University of Wittenberg, had already drawn attention (p. 86). The impression which this remarkable look, which always remained with him, made on others, was very varied. His subsequent friends and followers found in his eyes something grand and noble, something of the eagle, while, on the other hand, some remarks made by his opponents on the uncanny effect of his magic glance will be mentioned later. Anger intensified this look, and the strange power which Luther exerted over those who opposed him, drew many under the spell of his influence and worked upon them like a kind of suggestion.[731]

Many remarked with concern on the youthful Luther’s too great self-sufficiency.

His then pupil Johann Oldecop describes him as “a man of sense,” but “proud by nature.” “He began to be still more haughty,” Oldecop observes, when speaking of the incipient schism.[732] He will have it that at the University. Luther had always shown himself quarrelsome and disputatious. Oldecop could never forget that Luther, his professor, never held a disputation which did not end in strife and quarrels.[733] Luther’s close connection with Johann Lang, the Augustinian and rather freethinking Humanist, was also remarked upon, he says. We know from other sources that Lang encouraged Luther in his peculiar ideas, especially in his mysticism and in his contempt for the theology of the schools.