LUTHER (Vol. 1-6). Grisar Hartmann
outsiders, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. He assumes to himself with the utmost emphasis the precedence in the discovery of the Gospel, for instance, against rivals such as Carlstadt and Zwingli; he alone had read his Bible, and Carlstadt was quite unacquainted with it; he only, with illumination from above, had discovered everything.
As we find in his writings so few allusions to outside influences—save to that of Occamism—it does not appear worth while to philosophise as to whether he had, or had not, been touched by the Gallicanism which was in the air. It is very doubtful whether he, in the comparative seclusion of his little world of Erfurt and Wittenberg, came to any extent under this influence, especially as his studies were so cursory and brief and confined within such narrow limits. The Gallican tendencies did not find in Germany anything like so fruitful a soil as in France. It is true that Luther soon after his change of opinions was capable of rivalling any Paris professor of Gallican sympathies in his depreciation of the Holy See. Hence though no immediate influence on Luther can be allowed to Gallicanism, yet the fact remains that the prevalent anti-Roman tendencies greatly contributed to the wide acceptance of the Lutheran schism in Germany, and even beyond its borders.
Again, that Luther, as has been asserted, after having tasted the food provided by Nominalism, was so disgusted as to rush to the opposite extreme in Scholasticism, making his own the very worst elements of realism, both philosophical and theological, seems to rest on fancy rather than on facts. We may likewise refuse to see in Wiclifism, with which Luther was acquainted only through the Constance Theses, any element of inspiration, and also shake our heads when some Protestants, at the other extreme, try to show that the Doctors of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Bernard, were really the parties responsible for Luther’s turning his back on the doctrines of the Church.
On the other hand, the influence of mysticism, with which we have now to deal, deserves much more attention. It cannot be denied that a very considerable part in the development of his new ideas was played by mysticism; already at an early date the mystic spirit which Augustine’s works owed to their writer’s Platonic studies, had attracted Luther without, however, making him a Neo-Platonist.[407] During the time of his mental growth he was likewise warmly attached to German mysticism. Yet, here again, it is an exaggeration, as we can already see, to state as some non-Catholics do that Luther, “as the theologian of the Reformation,” was merely “a disciple of Tauler and the Frankfort author of the German Theology,” or that “it was only through meeting with the Frankfort theologian that he was changed from a despairing swimmer struggling in the billows of a gloomy sea into a great reformer.”
CHAPTER V
THE ROCKS OF FALSE MYSTICISM
1. Tauler and Luther
John Tauler, the mystic and Dominican preacher of Strasburg, whom Luther so favoured, was quite Catholic in his teaching; to attribute to him, as has been done, any Pantheistic ideas is to do him an injustice, and it is equally wrong to imagine that he forestalled Luther’s notions regarding grace and justification. Yet his fanciful and suggestive mode of expression, his language which voiced, not the conceptual definiteness of Scholasticism, but the deep feelings of the speaker, often allows of his words being interpreted in a way quite foreign to his real meaning. It was just this depth of feeling and this obscurity which attracted Luther. As his letters show, he breathed more freely while perusing Tauler’s writings, because they responded to his natural disposition and his moods, not the least point in their favour being the absence in them of those hard-and-dry philosophical and dialectical mannerisms which were hateful to him. Without even rightly understanding it, he at once applied the teaching of this master of mysticism to his own inward condition and his new, growing opinions; he clothed his own feelings and views in Tauler’s beautiful and inspiring words. His beloved mother-tongue, so expertly handled in Tauler’s sermons, was at the same time a new means of binding him still more firmly to the mystic. In Tauler the necessity of the complete surrender of the soul to the action of God, of indifference and self-abandonment, is strongly emphasised. To free oneself as far as possible of self; to renounce all confidence in oneself in so far as this implies self-love and the pride of the sinful creature; to accept with waiting, longing, suffering confidence God’s almighty working, this, with Tauler as with all true mystics, is the fundamental condition for a union through love with the most Perfect Being. Luther, in his false interpretation of Tauler, came to dream of a certain false passivity on man’s part, which he then expanded into that complete passivity which accompanies the process of justification. He thought that Tauler repudiated the doing of good works in his own sense. He fancied that in him he had an ally in his fight against the so-called self-righteous and holy-by-works. He quite overlooked the contrary exhortations to the practice of good works and all observances of the Church which the great mystic had so much at heart.[408]
Tauler frequently speaks of the night of the soul, of the darkness in which the natural man must place himself on the way from death to life and through the cross to light; by this he means the self-humiliation which is pleasing to God, by which man fills himself with the sense of his own nothingness, and so prepares for the incoming of God into his innermost being. He often insists that the Creator, by means of the suffering and cruel inward desolation which He sends His elect, brings about that state of night, cross and death, to prove and refine the soul in order to prepare it for an intimate union with Himself. Such passages Luther referred to the states of fear and fright from which he so frequently suffered, possibly also to his want of joy in his vocation, and the state of unrest which, as he complains to his brother monk, George Leiffer, owing to his surrendering himself too much to his own excessive cleverness, pressed heavily upon him.[409] When, during the warfare he had to wage on behalf of his new doctrine, his inward unrest increased, and at times almost mastered him, he took refuge still more eagerly in the tenets of the mystic, striving to calm himself with the idea that his pangs of conscience and his mental anguish were merely a preparation for the strong, joyous faith which must spring up in his soul and those of his followers as a pledge of justification. His very doubts and difficulties became to him, with the help of his misunderstood mysticism, a sign that he was chosen for the highest things, and that God would lead him and all to peace through the new doctrine. It is in connection with his teaching concerning the night of the soul that he most frequently quotes Tauler at the commencement of his public struggle, whereas, before that, he had been wont to bring him into the field only against the so-called self-righteous, or against Scholasticism.[410]
It was known at that time that he had become a pupil of Tauler, whom he frequently quoted, but few of his adversaries seem to have recognised the above-mentioned psychological connection. Dungersheim of Leipzig on one occasion, in 1519, rightly holds up before him the teaching and example of Tauler, and tells him he might have learnt from him how useful it was to accept from others warnings and criticisms; he gloried in having learnt from Tauler many more spiritual doctrines than from any other man, but he really only understood one thing well, namely, how to kick against the pricks to his own hurt.[411]
Luther’s first mention of Tauler is not contained in his letter to Lang of the late summer of 1516,[412] as was hitherto thought, but in the Commentary on Romans, which was already finished in the summer of 1516.
It follows from this circumstance that he was already acquainted with Tauler’s sermons during the time that he was busy on this Epistle. He had come across them somewhat