History of the Reformation - Thomas M. Lindsay

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He thought little of any independent study of the Holy Scriptures. “Brother Martin,” he once said to Luther, “let the Bible alone; read the old teachers; they give you the whole marrow of the Bible; reading the Bible simply breeds unrest.”136 Afterwards he commanded Luther on his canonical obedience to refrain from Bible study.137 It was he who made Luther read and re-read the writings of Biel, d'Ailly, and Occam, until he had committed to memory long passages; and who taught the Reformer to consider Occam “his dear Master.” Nathin was a determined opponent of the Reformation until his death in 1529; but Luther always spoke of him with respect, and said that he was “a Christian man in spite of his monk's cowl.”

      Luther had not come to the convent to study theology; he had entered it to save his soul. These studies were part of the convent discipline; to engage in them, part of his vow of obedience. He worked hard at them, and pleased his superiors greatly; worked because he was a submissive monk. They left a deeper impress on him than most of his biographers have cared to acknowledge. He had more of the Schoolman in him and less of the Humanist than any other of the men who stood in the first line of leaders in the Reformation movement. Some of his later doctrines, and especially his theory of the Sacrament of the Supper, came to him from these convent studies in d'Ailly and Occam. But in his one great quest—how to save his soul, how to win the sense of God's pardon—they were more a hindrance than a help. His teachers might be Augustinian Eremites, but they had not the faintest knowledge of Augustinian experimental theology. They belonged to the most pelagianising school of mediæval Scholastic; and their last word always was that man must work out his own salvation. Luther tried to work it out in the most approved later mediæval fashion, by the strictest asceticism. He fasted and scourged himself; he practised all the ordinary forms of maceration, and invented new ones; but all to no purpose. For when an awakened soul, as he said long afterwards, seeks to find rest in work-righteousness, it stands on a foundation of loose sand which it feels running and travelling beneath it; and it must go from one good work to another and to another, and so on without end. Luther was undergoing all unconsciously the experience of Augustine, and what tortured and terrified the great African was torturing him. He had learned that man's goodness is not to be measured by his neighbour's but by God's, and that man's sin is not to be weighed against the sins of his neighbours, but against the righteousness of God. His theological studies told him that God's pardon could be had through the Sacrament of Penance, and that the first part of that sacrament was sorrow for sin. But then came a difficulty. The older, and surely the better theology, explained that this godly sorrow (contritio) must be based on love to God. Had he this love? God always appeared to him as an implacable Judge, inexorably threatening punishment for the breaking of a law which it seemed impossible to keep. He had to confess to himself that he sometimes almost hated this arbitrary Will which the nominalist Schoolmen called God. The more modern theology, that taught by the chief convent theologian, John of Paltz, asserted that the sorrow might be based on meaner motives (attritio), and that this attrition was changed into contrition in the Sacrament of Penance itself. So Luther wearied his superiors by his continual use of this sacrament. The slightest breach of the most trifling conventual regulation was looked on as a sin, and had to be confessed at once and absolution for it received, until the perplexed lad was ordered to cease confession until he had committed some sin worth confessing. His brethren believed him to be a miracle of piety. They boasted about him in their monkish fashion, and in all the monasteries around, and as far away as Grimma, the monks and nuns talked about the young saint in the Erfurt convent. Meanwhile the “young saint” himself lived a life of mental anguish, whispering to himself that he was “gallows-ripe.” Writing in 1518, years after the conflict was over, Luther tells us that no pen could describe the mental anguish he endured.138 Gleams of comfort came to him, but they were transient. The Master of the Novices gave him salutary advice; an aged brother gave him momentary comfort. John Staupitz, the Vicar-General of the Congregation, during his visits to the convent was attracted by the traces of hidden conflicts and sincere endeavour of the young monk, with his high cheek-bones, emaciated frame, gleaming eyes, and looks of settled despair. He tried to find out his difficulties. He revoked Nathin's order that Luther should not read the Scriptures. He encouraged him to read the Bible; he gave him a Glossa Ordinaria or conventual ecclesiastical commentary, where passages were explained by quotations from eminent Church Fathers, and difficulties were got over by much pious allegorising; above all, he urged him to become a good localis and textualis in the Bible, i.e. one who, when he met with difficulties, did not content himself with commentaries, but made collections of parallel passages for himself, and found explanations of one in the others. Still this brought at first little help. At last Staupitz saw the young man's real difficulty, and gave him real and lasting assistance. He showed Luther that he had been rightly enough contrasting man's sin and God's holiness, and measuring the depth of the one by the height of the other; that he had been following the truest instincts of the deepest piety when he had set over-against each other the righteousness of God and the sin and helplessness of man; but that he had gone wrong when he kept these two thoughts in a permanent opposition. He then explained that, according to God's promise, the righteousness of God might become man's own possession in and through Christ Jesus. God had promised that man could have fellowship with Him; all fellowship is founded on personal trust; and trust, the personal trust of the believing man on a personal God who has promised, gives man that fellowship with God through which all things that belong to God can become his. Without this personal trust or faith, all divine things, the Incarnation and Passion of the Saviour, the Word and the Sacraments, however true as matters of fact, are outside man and cannot be truly possessed. But when man trusts God and His promises, and when the fellowship, which trust or faith always creates, is once established, then they can be truly possessed by the man who trusts. The just live by their faith. These thoughts, acted upon, helped Luther gradually to win his way to peace, and he told Staupitz long afterwards that it was he who had made him see the rays of light which dispelled the darkness of his soul.139 In the end, the vision of the true relation of the believing man to God came to him suddenly with all the force of a personal revelation, and the storm-tossed soul was at rest. The sudden enlightenment, the personal revelation which was to change his whole life, came to him when he was reading the Epistle to the Romans in his cell. It came to Paul when he was riding on the road to Damascus; to Augustine as he was lying under a fig-tree in the Milan garden; to Francis as he paced anxiously the flag-stones of the Portiuncula chapel on the plain beneath Assisi; to Suso as he sat at table in the morning. It spoke through different words:—to Paul, “Why persecutest thou Me?”;140 to Augustine, “Put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh”;141 to Francis, “Get you no gold, nor silver, nor brass in your purses, no wallet for your journey, neither two coats, nor shoes, nor staff”;142 to Suso, “My son, if thou wilt hear My words.”143 But though the words were different, the personal revelation, which mastered the men, was the same: That trust in the All-merciful God, who has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ, creates companionship with God, and that all other things are nothing in comparison with this fellowship. It was this contact with the Unseen which fitted Luther for his task as the leader of men in an age which was longing for a revival of moral living inspired by a fresh religious impulse.144

      It is not certain how long Luther's protracted struggle lasted. There are indications that it went on for two years, and that he did not attain to inward peace until shortly before he was sent to Wittenberg in 1508. The intensity and sincerity of the conflict marked him for life. The conviction that he, weak and sinful as he was, nevertheless lived in personal fellowship with the God whose love he was experiencing, became the one fundamental fact of life on which he, a human personality, could take his stand as on a foundation of rock; and standing on it, feeling his own strength, he could also be a source of strength to others. Everything else, however venerable and sacred it might once have seemed, might prove untrustworthy without hereafter disturbing Luther's religious life, provided only this one thing remained to him. For the moment, however, nothing seemed questionable. The inward change altered nothing external. He still believed that the Church was the “Pope's House”; he accepted all its usages and institutions—its Masses and its relics, its indulgences and its pilgrimages, its hierarchy and its monastic life. He was still a monk and believed in his vocation.

      Luther's theological studies were continued. He devoted himself especially to Bernard, in whose sermons on the Song of Solomon he found the same thoughts of the relation of

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