the best-meant criticism, with bitterness, hate and passion. Self-love, which, even in his earlier life, had held too great a place, now took complete control of him, and the spirit of contradiction closed the gates for ever against his return. Luther’s character was one which contradiction only served to stimulate and to drive to extremes.
Thus his spiritual pride was his real misfortune.[294]
In his case we find a sad confirmation of what is frequently observed in the falling away from truth of highly gifted minds; self-esteem and self-conceit suggest the first thoughts of a turning away from the truth, hitherto held in honour, and then, with fatal strength, condemn the wanderer to keep to the path he has chosen. Further concessions to the spirit of the world then follow as a consequence of the apostate’s continued enmity to the Church. Of the last moral decline so noticeable in Luther’s later life there is also no lack of similar instances, for it is the rule that after a man has been led astray by pride there should follow further moral deviations from the right path. The Monk’s subsequent breach of his vows and his marriage with a former nun was a sacrilege, which to Catholic eyes showed plainly how he who begins in the spirit of pride, even though his purposes be good, may end in the flesh.
At the earliest inception of Luther’s theological errors other elements may however be perceived which help to explain more easily his growing antipathy to so-called holiness by works. First, there was the real abuse then prevalent in the practice of works. Here we find a weak spot in the religious life of the time, nor is it unlikely that grave faults and repulsive excesses were to be found even in the Augustinian monasteries with which Luther was acquainted. We have already drawn attention to the formalism which in many cases had affected the clergy and the monastic houses. The often one-sided cultivation of exterior works, which, for instance, by the Indulgence-preachers, were proclaimed unfailing in their effects; the popular excesses in saint-worship; far-fetched legends and exhortations to imitate the extraordinary practices of saintly heroes; the stepmotherly treatment meted out in the pulpit to the regular and ordinary duties of a Christian; the self-interest, avarice and jealousy rampant in confraternities, pilgrimages and other public expressions of worship, faults which had slipped in partly owing to the petty egotism of the corporations and Orders, partly to the greed of their members, partly to a mania for false piety; all this may well have made a painful impression on the Wittenberg Professor, and have called forth his eloquent reproof. His tendency to look at the worst side of things doubtless contributed, together with the above reasons, to fill him with distaste for good works in general.
The extraordinary exaggerations of which he was guilty must, however, be imputed to himself alone. It has been said to his excuse that, as Rural Vicar, he had been able to acquire correct information regarding the state of things. But, as it happens, his frequent and unrestrained outbursts against abuses belong, at least in great part, to the time when he was a simple monk, who, apart from his journeys to Rome and Cologne and his stay at Erfurt, had seen little outside his cell beyond the adjoining walls of Wittenberg. His lectures on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans both offer strange examples of such exaggerations, though both were delivered before he had had any experience as Rural Vicar.
Finally his own morbid personal condition must be taken into account; the after-effects of his passing fit of scrupulosity, and the lasting feeling of fear which sometimes quite overmastered him. His inclination to doubts concerning his election remained, and therewith also the moral results which the fear of being predestined to hell would naturally exercise upon his peculiar temperament. He remained an outspoken predestinarian of the most violent type. (See chap. vi. 2.) He had to come to terms with this fear of hell, and his system shows the result; in many respects it appears as a reaction against the oppressive burden of the thought of eternal rejection.
His state of fear, however, as already indicated, proceeded not merely from the numerous temptations of which he himself speaks, but also from his own inward depression, from an affection, partly psychical and partly physical, which often prostrated him in terror. Only later, with the help of other facts of his inner life, will it be possible to deal with this darker side of Luther (vol. vi. xxxvi.). He imagined that during these fits, in which troubles of conscience also intervened, and which, according to his description, were akin to the pains of hell, he was forsaken by God, and sunk in the eerie night of the soul of which the mystics treat. He also considered them at an early period as a trial sent by God and intended to prepare him for higher things. In trying to escape from this feeling of terror, at the time of his change he embraced all the more readily ideas of false security which seemed to be offered by the appropriation of the merits of Christ, and the rejection of all attempt to acquire merit on one’s own account. Psychologically, it is comprehensible that this solution seemed to him to let a beam of sunlight into the darkness of his terror. Anxious to escape from fear he threw himself frantically into the opposite extreme, into a system of self-pacification hitherto unknown to theology. But even this new system did not serve to calm him in the first stage of his error. There was still something lacking, so he felt, in his doctrine, and to this he attained only in the second stage of the process by his discovery that the seal is set on inward peace by the doctrine of the absolute assurance of salvation imparted by Faith. (See chap. x.)
Morbid fears prevented any childlike trust in God taking root in a mind so inexplicably agitated as his. With what great fervour he prepared himself for his priestly ordination, and for celebrating his first Mass, may here be illustrated by his own statement, that he then read Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass (“Sacri canonis missæ expositio literalis ac mystica”) “with a bleeding heart.” So he himself says later, when he also speaks of the work, then widely used, as “an excellent book, as I then thought.”[295] From the tone of his letter of invitation to his first Mass we can judge of his state of commotion. The confusion and trouble which he experienced at his first Mass, and the fear which seized him during the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, lead us to conclude that he was readily overcome by vain apprehensions combined with physical excitement. Here also belongs Luther’s later statement concerning the fears which he (and others too) experienced when in the monastery at the smallest ritual blunders, as though they had been great sins; such an assertion, though exaggerated and untrue, is probably an echo of his own troubled state during the liturgical ceremonies.
It is possible that those fears may have been the cause of his great pessimism with regard to human works. They may have contributed to make him see sin in what was merely the result of fallen nature with its involuntary concupiscences, without any consent of the will. Such fears may have pursued him when he began to brood over the doctrine of man’s powers, original sin and grace; we speak of his “brooding,” for his inclinations at that time were to a melancholy contemplation of things unseen. The timidity which he had acquired in the early days of his boyhood and at school doubtless had its effect in keeping him in such moods, apart from his own temperament.
On close examination of Luther’s theological studies we find that his preparation for the office of professor—so far as a knowledge of the positive doctrine of the Church, of the Fathers and of good Scholasticism is concerned—was all too meagre.
He had not at his command the time necessary for penetrating deeply into dogma or into its presentment by earlier exponents. What was said above of his course of studies must, however, be supplemented by some further details.
After his ordination in Erfurt, at Easter, 1507, he began the two-year course of theology to which alone the privileges of the Augustinians obliged him. In addition to the lectures, which, as was usual, were based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, there was also the Office in Choir; the pupils of the Order were indeed on lecture days not obliged to attend Matins, Sext and Compline, but the latter had to be said by Luther privately, as he was a priest. While the lectures on the Sentences were still in progress, Luther was pursuing his scriptural studies. Before the full time had expired however, after about eighteen months of theological study, he was, as mentioned before, called to the University of Wittenberg at the commencement of the winter term, 1508, in order to deliver “Lectiones publicæ” on moral philosophy, i.e. on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. He was, it is true, expected to prosecute