Grisar Hartmann

LUTHER (Vol. 1-6)


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out of the evangelical counsels of our Saviour, and throughout his life to combat the temptations of the world with the weapons of poverty, chastity and obedience.

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

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      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.

      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.