In addition to the authors mentioned, the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and of Gerard Groot, the founder of the Community of the Brethren of the Common Life, were known to him. That he was, or had been, fond of reading the writings of St. Bernard, we may guess from his many—often misunderstood—quotations from the same.
Luther was also well able, whilst under the influence of that inwardness which he loved so much in the mystics, to make his own their truly devotional and often moving language.
In a friendly letter he comforts, as follows, an Augustinian at Erfurt, Georg Leiffer, regarding his spiritual troubles: “The Cross of Christ is distributed throughout the whole world and each one gets a small piece of it. Do not throw yours away, but lay it, like a sacred relic, in a golden shrine, i.e. in a heart filled with gentle charity. For even the wrongs which we suffer from men, persecutions, passion and hatred, which are caused us either by the wicked or by those who mean well, are priceless relics, which have not indeed, like the wood of the cross, been hallowed by contact with our Lord’s body, but which have been blessed by His most loving heart, encompassed by His friendly, Divine Will, kissed and sanctified. The curse becomes a blessing, insult becomes righteousness, suffering becomes an aureole, and the cross a joy. Farewell, sweet father and brother, and pray for me.”
5. Excerpts from the Earliest Letters
The above letter of Luther’s is one of the few remaining which belong to that transition period in his life. His letters are naturally not devoid of traces of the theological change which was going forward within him, and they may therefore be considered among the precursors of his future doctrine.
His new theological standpoint is already apparent in the charitable and sympathetic letter of encouragement which, as Rural Vicar, he sent to one of his brother monks about that time. “Learn, my sweet brother,” he writes to George Spenlein, an Augustinian of the monastery of Memmingen, “learn Christ and Him Crucified, learn to sing to Him, and, despairing of your own self, say to Him: Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am Thy sin; Thou hast accepted what I am and given me what Thou art; Thou hast thus become what Thou wast not, and what I was not I have received.... Never desire,” he exhorts him, “a purity so great as to make you cease thinking yourself, nay being, a sinner; for Christ dwells only in sinners; He came down from heaven where He dwells in the righteous in order to live also in sinners. If you ponder upon His love, then you will become conscious of His most sweet consolation. What were the use of His death had we to attain to peace of conscience by our own trouble and labour? Therefore only in Him will you find peace through a trustful despair of yourself and your works.”[201]
A similar mystical tone (we are not here concerned with the theology it implied) shows itself also here and there in Luther’s later correspondence. The life of public controversy in which he was soon to engage was certainly not conducive to the peaceful, mystical tone of thought and to the cultivation of the interior spirit; as might have been expected, the result of the struggle was to cast his feeling and his mode of thought in a very different mould. It was impossible for him to become the mystic some people have made him out to be owing to the distractions and excitement of his life of struggle.[202]
In the above letter to Spenlein, Luther speaks of this monk’s relations to his brethren. Spenlein had previously been in the monastery at Wittenberg, where Luther had known him as a zealous monk, much troubled about the details of the Rule, and who even found it difficult to have to live with monks who were less exact in their observance. “When you were with us,” says the writer, “you were under the impression, or rather in the error in which I also was at one time held captive, and of which I have not even now completely rid myself (‘nondum expugnavi’), that it is necessary to perform good works until one is confident of being able to appear before God decked out, as it were, in deeds and merits, a thing which is utterly impossible.” Luther is desirous of hearing what Spenlein now thinks, “whether he has not at last grown sick of self-righteousness and learnt to breathe freely and trust in the righteousness of Christ.” “If, however, you believe firmly in the righteousness of Christ—and cursed be he who does not—then you will be able to bear with careless and erring brothers patiently and charitably; you will make their sins your own,” as Christ does with ours, “and in whatever good you do, in that you will allow them to participate ... be as one of them and bear with them. To think of flight and solitude, and to wish to be far away from those who we think are worse than ourselves, that is an unhappy righteousness.... On the contrary, if you are a lily and a rose of Christ, then remember that you must be among thorns, and beware of becoming yourself a thorn by impatience, rash judgment and secret pride.... If Christ had willed to live only amongst the good or to die only for His friends, for whom, pray, would He ever have died, or with whom would He have lived?”
Spenlein was then no longer living in a monastery subject to the Rural Vicar. It is even probable that he had left Wittenberg and the new Vicar’s district on account of differences of opinion on the matter of Observance. He betook himself to the imperial city of Memmingen, presumably because a different spirit prevailed in the monastery there. This would seem to explain how Luther came to speak to this doubtless most worthy religious of “unhappy righteousness,” interpreting the state of the case in his own perverse fashion.
Among the other letters despatched in 1516 that to Lang at Erfurt deserves special attention; in it Luther expresses himself in confidence, quite openly, on the disapproval of his work and of his theological standpoint which was showing itself at Wittenberg and at Erfurt.[203]
His study of St. Augustine had put him in a position to recognise, on internal grounds, that a work, “On true and false penance,” generally attributed to this African Father, was not really his. He tells his friend that his opinion of the book had “given great offence to all”; though the insipid contents of the same were so far removed from the spirit of Augustine, yet it was esteemed because it had been quoted and employed by Gratian and Peter Lombard as one of Augustine’s works. That he had been aware of this and nevertheless had stood up for the truth, that was his crime, which had aroused the enmity particularly of Dr. Carlstadt; not, however, that he cared very much; both Lombard and Gratian had done much harm to consciences by means of this stupid book.
His opinion regarding the spuriousness of the work was in the end generally accepted, even, for instance, by Bellarmine; Trithemius, moreover, had been of the same opinion before Luther’s time; in his attacks on its contents, however, Luther, led astray by his false ideas of penance, exceeded all bounds, and thus vexed, beyond measure, his colleagues who at that time still held the opposite view.
According to this letter, he had also challenged all the critics of his new ideas in a disputation held by one of his pupils under his direction. “They barked and screeched at me on account of my lectures, but their mouths were to be stopped and the opinions of others heard.” It was a question of defending his erroneous doctrine, regarding the absolute helplessness of nature, which he had meantime formulated, and to which we shall return immediately. In consequence, he says, all the “Gabrielists” (i.e. followers of the scholastic Gabriel Biel) here, as well as in the Faculty at Erfurt, were nonplussed. But I know my Gabriel quite as well as his own wonderful, wonderstruck worshippers; “he writes well, but as soon as he touches on grace, charity, hope, and faith, then, like Scotus his leader, he treads in the footprints of Pelagius.” Luther was quite free to dissent from the view, even of so good a professor as Biel, in this question of grace and virtue, but, already at that time, he had denounced as Pelagian several doctrines of the Church. Among those who were angered was the theologian Nicholas von Amsdorf, who took his licentiate at the same time as Luther, and became later on his close friend. Amsdorf secretly sent one of Luther’s theses, of which he disapproved, to Erfurt, but afterwards allowed himself to be