MARTIN BECAME “simple monk”; in fact, “beggar monk.” This image has entrenched itself as the proper propagandistic baseline from which to chart his miraculous rise to theological prominence. Miraculous it would have been from any baseline. But the Augustinian Hermits were far from being beggars, economically speaking; nor were they hermits, monastically speaking. They were a thriving corporation of relatively wealthy monasteries; at one time, there were thirty thousand members, with a central office in Rome. In Erfurt the Augustinians occupied a campus of 7500 square meters, and owned real estate, rich fields, and vineyards. The highly educated patres, in whose ranks Martin was soon to be received, had, to serve them in manual labor, a lesser class of fratres, lay-brothers who, although pledged for life, were kept illiterate and unordained. When Martin shouldered his sack and went begging with a companion, therefore, he stepped down only symbolically to the level of the begging monks, many of whom were members of the Church’s proletariat and had brought monkhood into disrepute.
The history of monkhood displays a number of variables which may help to describe Martin’s order. Originally, of course, monks were hermits, deliberately seeking a state of radical readiness for that lonesome valley which must be crossed alone, sooner or later. Eventually they organized into groups of parallel aloneness; later, they joined in permanent convents and developed definite styles of ritual observance. By some law of opposites, which seems to govern the development of extreme positions, monkhood started with a social arrangement of total isolation and ended with one of total regimentation. The dimension of monkhood defined by the form of domicile is eremitical-conventual; the Augustinians belonged to the most progressive convents, with permanent mother-houses and regional congregations organized as in a small state.
Eremitical seclusion is, of course, the most basic asceticism. It sacrifices the ameliorating presence of the others, as well as comparison and sharing with others, and thus invites temptation in that crudest, most insane form to which painters of St. Anthony’s torment have tried to give recognizable features. Nor does eremitic existence permit that break in introspective concentration which joint ritual observances afford. One cannot ponder on the dimensions of monasticism without visualizing St. Francis in the various roles which he taught himself. He experienced all the variations, including that of founding an order; and then returned to the purity of eremitical asceticism on that wooded mesa on top of Mount Alverno.
Not far from there, in the delicious woods of Vallombrosa, monastic life reached one of its heights in the perfection of contemplation, a variable which finds its opposite extreme in hard manual labor, such as the Trappists perform in their communal life. Our clerical Augustinians observed certain hours of contemplation and did a minimum of manual work, mostly in taking care of their own premises. But they had their monastic handymen, and managed farms and vineyards rather than worked them. On the other hand, they were highly industrious in their singing and in their studies, and maintained a close association with universities.
Another variable of monkhood concerns the techniques chosen for perfecting the soul. These may range from methods of extreme self-abnegation, which reduce the body to its own shadow, to extremes of self-denying service to sick or needy human beings. The Augustinians were relatively moderate in prescribed abnegations (although Martin soon insisted on making out his own prescriptions), but highly-disciplined in observances, and well-trained for the spiritual care and the educational advancement of others.
This all clearly places them on one side of the remaining variable: mysticism versus intellectuality. Martin, as we know, had met the Brothers of Common Life in Erfurt and had heard them inveigh against intellectualism in faith. In the Augustinian monastery he studied and discussed mysticism; but he adhered to the scholastic tradition until his own original religiosity made him break out of it. The advanced course of general studies in his monastery was famous, and was said to be far superior to those of the Dominicans and Franciscans.
All in all, then, the Augustinian Hermits, while belonging to a congregation of monasteries pledged to strict observances, and generally respected for it, attempted to combine the best and the most reasonable in monastic tradition; and it is obvious at once that although Martin may have disobeyed his father by becoming a monk, quite in his father’s spirit, he chose the best school within his horizon.
He also chose something akin to a clerical upper-middle-class. All the world was Catholic; and to become a monk merely meant to find an entrance, on a defined professional level, to the Catholic empire’s hierarchy of clerical employees, which included in its duties diplomacy; the administration of social welfare in countries, counties, cities, and towns; spiritual ministration; and the more or less ascetic cultivation of personal salvation. The fact that Luther took upon himself the latent sadness of his age and the spiritual problems of its theology marks him as a member of an ideological, maybe even somewhat neurotic, minority. Among the Augustinians of his time, he was a strange, a noteworthy, and sometimes a questionable, monk.
The vast majority of the representatives of an empire are not concerned with ideology. They mouth the current line of official doctrine, and rarely know what hits them when they suddenly find themselves on the losing side of an ideological issue because they bet on the wrong protectors. Then, as now, one could live without ever making a decision of faith, if one was only cautious enough to stick to the right levels: the captains of the bishoprics and their entourage; the chief bureaucrats who kept government going while the fanatics burned; or the mindless employees who served in the manner most recently ordered from above. On the lowest level, also, the ideology of faith hardly mattered; the increasing clerical proletariat was miserably poor and totally subservient and unprincipled. Not even the scholastic intelligentsia (which always produces the most current intellectual adjustments to dogma, and therefore feels ahead of its time) was really concerned with matters of the spirit, not to speak of personal faith. Within any of these groups there was no need for embarrassing sincerity, nor for an incautious insistence on the enforcement of the dogma. As in all monopolistic enterprises, the law interfered with convenience only if some fanatic, or fool, dragged an issue into the open. Thus many bishops and priests lived in concubinage, their female companions being respectfully greeted, wie sich das gehoert, by their titles of “Mrs. Vicar,” or whatever it was. But marriage was against the law.
Only in the middle did the patrician-and-public-servant, burgher-and-scholar kind of cleric exist, who shared with the emerging middle class the search for a new sincerity, a new identity: economic, cultural, and spiritual. When Martin joined the Augustinian order he became part of that clerical middle class which corresponded to, and overlapped with, the class in which his father wanted him to find a foothold. He chose one of the best organized, most sincere, and least corrupted parts of the Church—and joined an organization, furthermore, which offered a flexible career. On the sociological surface of it, it is not entirely clear why Martin’s choice of a basic training in monasticism should have been such a scandal to his father, or such a dramatic decision on the part of the son. Only if we remember that his father wanted him to be politically ambitious in a new, a secular sense, rather than spiritually good, can we understand that Martin was choosing a negative identity when he decided to become a monk; and he soon indulged in further contrariness by trying to be a better monk than the monks.
Martin first lived in the domus hospitum, the hostelry where the guests were housed: within the walls of the compound, but not within the cloister. Here he received by letter his father’s permission, such as it was. Having found favor with the prior’s admissions committee, he was offered a reception for one probationary year. The reception began with a general confession to the prior himself, and a haircut—not yet a tonsure. Then, at an appointed hour, he was led into the Kapitelsaal where the prior was seated in front of the altar. “What is your wish?” he asked. Martin, on his knees: “God’s grace and your indulgence (Barmherzigkeit).” The prior motioned him to rise and proceeded to ascertain a few routine facts: the prospective novice was not married; he was not a slave or otherwise economically committed; and he did not suffer from any secret disease. Then the prior warns him: only a tough course could teach him to renounce his will. Food will be scarce, and clothing rough; there will be vigils in the night, and daily work. Strength will be sapped by fasting, pride by begging, spirit by isolation. The young man persists and is “received.” The convent sings Great Father Augustin and the novice is invested with the black and white Augustinian habit, the large cowl and the scapular which, falling to the feet in front and in back, encloses the monk by day and by night, and in his grave. “May God invest you with a new man,” the prior prays, postponing, as yet, the blessing of the habit. A general recitation follows and a procession of all to the choir, two by two, novice and prior last. As the final hymn is intoned, the novice lies before the altar, his arms spread away from him, like Christ’s on the cross. “Not he who began, but he who persists will be saved,” concludes the prior, and offers him the kiss of peace.1
Martin was then ready to be introduced into the microcosm of the monastery which, whatever his future in the clerical hierarchy, was to enclose him tightly and securely for a period of indoctrination. That indoctrination was not only a matter of learning new contents of thought, but a process of completely reconditioning his sensory and social responses to a minutely arranged environment. This process is familiar to us also from the modern phenomenon of thought reform, which makes cold psychological and political science out of the intuitive wisdom embodied in such an ancient procedure as the Augustinian monastery’s. For a young man of Martin’s passionate sincerity, in danger as he may have been of a malignant regression (and Luther later clearly admitted such a potential) or at any rate of most upsetting tentaziones, the immersion into a planned environment which took over from minute to minute decisions about what was good for the common cause and goal and what was bad, may have felt like a repetition on a grand style of the earliest maternal guidance. And, indeed, Luther later said, “In the first year in the monastery the devil is very quiet.”2
Here are some details of the regime, and their psychological rationale. The novice is assigned a cell a little more than three meters long, three wide. The door cannot be locked and has a large opening for inspection at any time. There is one window, too high to allow one to see the ground. There is a table, a chair, a lamp; a cot with straw and a woolen blanket. The room cannot be heated. No ornamentation of any kind, no individual touch, is permitted. Thus begins that fasting of the senses, that vacuum of impressions, that dearth of ever-changing social cues, which is the necessary milieu for indoctrination: it opens the individual wide to the contradictory voices within him, and therefore makes him grasp more avidly whatever avenue toward a new identity is offered. Not only the input, but the output must also be regulated: the future orator must, first of all, learn silence. Within his own four walls not a word must escape him, not even in prayer. The master of novices, the only human being who may enter his cell, communicates with him only by signs. Outside his cell, the whole monastery is a checkerboard of times and places where silence is or is not mandatory. Special permission is required for private conversation, and must be overheard by a superior so that it does not become an escape valve for boast or banter, flattery or gossip. Above all, laughter is to be avoided. During meals, when it is easiest to relax and fraternize (provided that the food has been apportioned fairly), the monks must listen and not talk, a lectio is fed into their ears while the food enters their mouths. Thus, not only are the customary ways of letting oneself be diverted and guided by the changing spectacle of community life carefully restricted, but the customary ways of seeking verbal contact. The achievement of giving perspective to the present by small talk about things that have happened or things that will happen—be it only the weather—is denied. All verbal and vocal energy, and all postural and gestural expression, are channelled into a very few highly emotional outlets: prayer, confession, and above all, psalmody.
Seven times in twenty-four hours (septies in die laudem dixi Tibi) the monks pray in the choir in the liturgic fashion: two choirs challenging and responding to each other in antiphonic psalmody, or a solo voice asking for a joint refrain in responsorial psalmody. This activity follows the decree in Ephesians 5:19 that better than drunkenness by wine “is making melody in your heart to the Lord” in the spirit of the psalms. The Augustinians were proud of and famous for their psalmody; and it was certainly not a coincidence that Martin, for whom song had assumed such exclusive importance, chose the order which combined the cultivation of the voice with strict observance and intellectual sincerity. Later, when he became a professor, he gave his first lectures on the psalms. This may have been a coincidence of the academic schedule; but what he did with it was not.
“Have you ever heard more profound, intimate, or enduring poetry than that of the Psalms? And the Psalms were meant to be sung when one is alone. I know they are chanted by crowds gathered under a single roof for religious services; but those who intone them are no longer members of a multitude. When one sings them, he withdraws into himself; the voices of the others resound in his ears only as an accompaniment and reinforcement of his own voice—I notice this difference between a crowd gathered to recite the Psalms and one brought together to see a play or hear a speaker: the first is a true society, a company of living souls, wherein each exists and subsists separately; the second is a shapeless mass, and each member of it only a fragment of the human swarm.”3 Thus writes de Unamuno, the Spanish philosopher and freelance Protestant.
For the first of the liturgies, the monks are awakened by a bell at about 2 a.m.—except in high summer, when this liturgy is sung at the end of the long day. The liturgy begins (as the last one ends) with prayers to Mary, sanctae dei genetrici, the mother of God, who will intercede with her sternly judging son: “For you are the sinner’s only hope.”
Food is not taken until noon, and on fast days not until early afternoon—that is, not before four liturgies have been completed; between them, there is domestic work, study, and instruction from the master of novices.
During the first year, the task of adjusting to the new cycle of wakefulness and rest superimposed on the usual alternation of day and night, and the matter of absorbing the detailed rules and observances with their traditional rationale, took enough time and attention to create a moratorium, during which individual ruminations and scruples were forgotten. This moratorium was reinforced by the community practice of cornering and labelling, and thus jointly mastering, the common devil by methodical confession. There is a vast difference between being the lonely self-repudiated victim of a personalized evil (as Martin had been, and soon would be again), and joining others in the militant repudiation of a powerful yet well-defined common enemy.
The practice and method of confession is well known. Of special interest to a clinician is the weekly Schuld capitel, the joint confession. Having jointly prostrated themselves, the monks, one after another, the oldest leading, confessed to transgressions against the rules. But they also denounced their brothers by calling on them in the third person (“may Brother X remember”) to confess certain transgressions which had been observed by others. The principles of group therapy evolved in our day explain why such mutual confessions and denunciations had a salutory effect on the group: they were all governed by complete equality and the subject matter was limited to themes of communal concern; consequently, the possible kinds of confession, and their relative appropriateness, became clearly delineated. More personal material belonged to regular confession, or to additional confession especially requested; “deadly sins were entirely and exclusively reserved for the prior,” according to one biographer.
This was the routine to which the novice was committed. Those who could not adjust to it were free to leave at any time without recrimination, to try other orders, or to rejoin public life. But it makes sense that a young man like Martin would, during the first phase of this experience, find in this whole arrangement a self-chosen prison of salutary silence; a welcome system of naming and communicating evil worries; and a devotional discipline for his singing voice (his “conflict-free” sphere of expression), all of which permitted him to postpone, as a moratorium should, decisions of utmost explosiveness. It must also be affirmed that in the cloister individuals of less explosive inner potentials could find lasting inner peace, together with a character adjustment compatible with the final limitations and the possible evasions of the monastic scheme; and unquestionably a few found true spiritual and characterological fulfillment. There is undoubted psychological wisdom in such schools of indoctrination as those of Catholic monasticism. These schools continue to this day and on occasion are clearly described in the literature; a comparison with similar methods of indoctrination used for entirely different ideologies during different periods of history reveals a common psychological rationale which is relatively independent of the beliefs to be taught. Students of the modern system of Chinese thought reform discuss the necessary elements for its success: removal from family and community and isolation from the outer-world; restriction of sensory intake and immense magnification of the power of the word; lack of privacy and radical accent on the brotherhood; and, of course, joint devotion to the leaders who created and represent the brotherhood.4
Indoctrination is charged with the task of separating the individual from the world long enough so that his former values become thoroughly disengaged from his intentions and aspirations; the process must create in him new convictions deep enough to replace much of what he has learned in childhood and practiced in his youth. Obviously, then, the training must be a kind of shock treatment, for it is expected to replace in a short time what has grown over many formative years; therefore, indoctrination must be incisive in its deprivations, and exact in its generous supply of encouragement. It must separate the individual from the world he knows and aggravate his introspective and self-critical powers to the point of identity-diffusion, but short of psychotic dissociation. At the same time it must endeavor to send the individual back into the world with his new convictions so strongly anchored in his unconscious that he almost hallucinates them as being the will of a godhead or the course of all history: something, that is, which was not imposed on him, but was in him all along, waiting to be freed.
It stands to reason that late adolescence is the most favorable period, and late adolescent personalities of any age group the best subjects, for indoctrination; because in adolescence an ideological realignment is by necessity in process and a number of ideological possibilities are waiting to be hierarchically ordered by opportunity, leadership, and friendship. Any leadership, however, must have the power to encase the individual in a spatial arrangement and in a temporal routine which at the same time narrow down the sensory supply from the world and block his sexual and aggressive drives, so that a new needfulness will eagerly attach itself to a new world-image. At no other time as much as in adolescence does the individual feel so exposed to anarchic manifestations of his drives; at no other time does he so need oversystematized thoughts and overvalued words to give a semblance of order to his inner world. He therefore is willing to accept ascetic restrictions which go counter to what he would do if he were alone—faced with himself, his body, his musings—or in the company of old friends; he will accept the sine qua non of indoctrination, lack of privacy. (The Church could never have become an ideological institution on the basis of hermitism.) Needless to say, good and evil must be clearly defined as forces existing from all beginning and perseverating into all future; therefore all memory of the past must be starved or minutely guided, and all intention focused on the common utopia. No idle talk can be permitted. Talk must always count, count for or against one’s readiness to embrace the new ideology totally—to the point of meaning it. In fact, the right talk, the vigorous song, and the radical confession in public must be cultivated.
Our bottomless incredulity in the face of Russian trials or Chinese reforms has shown us that an appreciation of the sincerity in an ideological system other than our own is extremely difficult. This is partially because our own ideology, as it must, forbids us ever to question and analyze the structure of what we hold to be true, since only thus can we maintain the fiction that we chose to believe what in fact we had no choice but to believe, short of ostracism or insanity; while we are more than eager to find the logical flaws, and particularly the insincerity and captivity, in one who operates in another system. We may therefore fail to understand that the indoctrinated individual of another era or country may feel quite at peace and quite free and productive in his ideological captivity, while we, being stimulus-slaves, ensnared at all times by a million freely chosen impressions and opportunities, may somehow feel unfree. As Luther said, a man without spirituality becomes his own exterior. On the other hand, a man deprived of opportunity to orient himself in the world can become the hallucinatory slave of inner convictions which he wants to maintain at any price because he must accept them at all cost.5
These are some of the psychological laws underlying the monastic system just described as well as newer systems of ideological conversion; all the systems are experiments in first aggravating and then curing the identity diffusion of youth.
The rationale of the rigid monastic system must be affirmed in principle, therefore, even though the clinician cannot help wondering what substitute expressions of tension, attraction, and repulsion develop, like an underground chorus competing with the pious discipline of the choir. Against the austere background of uniformity, the peculiarities of the single monk must have stood out strongly indeed. James Joyce—that literary Protestant—described how, when all the larger issues seemed to have been solved by confession and Mass, the young artist was plagued by “childish and unworthy imperfections [such as] anger at hearing his mother sneeze…. Images of the outbursts of trivial anger which he had often noted among his [Jesuit] masters, their twitching mouths, close-shut lips and flushed cheeks, recurred to his memory, discouraging him, for all his practice of humility.”6 We will soon see that even in these first years, minor and major irritations built up in Martin—irritations which later swelled to propagandistic proportions after he had broken his vow. He may well be believed, however, when later he described the very first year in the monastery as “fine, tranquil, and godly,” particularly since he also had a good, if frank, word for his master of novices: “doubtless a good Christian under his damned cowl.”7 During basic training the best comes out in many instructors and the worst in others. This seems contradictory only if one does not know how close the best and the worst are to each other in any situation in which the human conscience is called upon to combine power with righteousness. In contact with new recruits, even some of the most hard-bitten veterans want to convince themselves that the metier to which they have given a devoted and obedient life is an honorable, an inspired, one.
A year after his reception, Luther was admitted to the “profession.” Again he was led to the prior before the altar. “Now you must choose one or the other: to leave us or to renounce the world … but I must add, once you have committed yourself, you are not free, for whatever reason, to throw off the yoke of obedience. For you will have accepted it voluntarily while still free to discard it.”
Again, a new garb is brought in; this time it is officially blessed by the prior: “Him whom it was your will to dress in the garb of the order, oh Lord, invest him also with eternal life.” Now the prior undresses the novice: “The Lord divest you of the former man and of all his works”; and “The Lord invest you with the new man.” Psalmody. “I, brother Martin, profess and promise to obey the Almighty God and the Holy Virgin, and you, brother Winand, prior of this monastery, in the name of the vicar-general of this order … and to live without property and in chastity according to the rule of St. Augustan…. unto death.”8
In conclusion, the prior promised Martin, at the price of obedience, eternal life: Si ista servas, promitto tibi vitam aeternam.
Soon after his profession, Martin was told that he was destined for the priesthood. This was to be expected in the case of an M.A. of such caliber, as was also his later selection for a lectureship. In neither case could he, personally, have chosen his course, nor could he have decided against it. This was the first step beyond being a simple monk, and thus beyond his original vow. Obedience had once again brought him face to face with an authority’s ambitious scheme for a new graduation for him, with other graduations in store.
He was at this point as free from temptations as he would ever be, and at the same time, unquestionably a part of a minutely scheduled life. It makes psychiatric sense that under such conditions a young man with Martin’s smouldering problems, but also with an honest wish to avoid rebellion against an environment which took care of so many of his needs, would subdue his rebellious nature by gradually developing compulsive-obsessive states characterized by high ambivalence. His self-doubt thus would take the form of intensified self-observation in exaggerated obedience to the demands of the order; his doubt of authority would take the form of an intellectualized scrutiny of the authoritative books. This activity would, for a while longer, keep the devil in his place. However, neither Martin nor Hans could leave well enough alone for long.
The preparation for priesthood included the study of works on the basic concepts of Catholicism. Outstanding among these was Gabriel Biel’s interpretation of the Canon of the Mass, a book by which Martin was deeply moved and soon deeply troubled: reading it made “his heart bleed.” He immersed himself in the dogma; but the Canon of the Mass was disquieting to him because it became obvious to what an extent he would have to assume the supreme worthiness of the priest who transfers to others the very presence of Christ, and the very essence of His blood sacrifice. Martin’s tendency toward obsessive rumination seized on the fact that the priest’s supreme worthiness depended on the inner status with which he approached the ceremony and on his attentiveness to the procedure itself. Interestingly enough, slips of the tongue or involuntary repetitions of words or phrases were considered to mar the effectiveness of the prescribed words. Biel makes it very clear, however, that only a reasonable suspicion of an unconfessed deadly sin could prevent the priest, on any given day, from approaching the Mass; only conscious contempt of its rules should keep him from conducting it. Once he has started celebrating it, however, not even the sudden thought of a not-previously-remembered deadly sin should interfere with its completion. This liberal interpretation was quite in keeping with the general tone of the other authority on clerical procedure, Jean Gerson of the University of Paris, an Occamist like Biel. However, to Martin, all rules had gradually become torment. Monastic rules in themselves were a ritual elaboration of the scrupulousness which belongs to the equipment of our conscience; and for this reason, a monastic priest, protected as he was from many of the world’s evils, and equipped as he was with special avenues of grace by confession, was expected to master them, not to be obsessed by them. Special vestments to be worn during Mass had to be complete and correct; thoughts could not stray; important phrases had to be completed without halting, and, above all, without repeating—all of these simple rules became potential stumbling blocks for Martin’s apprehensions.
A priest’s first Mass was a graduation of unique import. Therefore a celebration was planned, and his family, according to custom, was invited to attend. “There,” Luther later said in a strange tabletalk, “the bridegroom was invested in the light of torches with horas canonicas; there the young man had to have the first dance with his mother if she was alive, even as Christ danced with his mother; and everybody cried.”9
The books do not say whether or not Luther’s mother was invited; it may well be that only male relatives were expected to attend. Martin did invite his father, who wrote back that he would come if the monastery would suit his schedule. It did. Hans arrived on the appointed day, leading a proud calvacade of twenty Mansfeld citizens, and bringing twenty Gulden as a contribution to the monastery’s kitchen. “You must have a good friend there,” one of the marveling onlookers is said to have remarked.
There are a number of versions of the two decisive events of that day: Martin’s anxiety attack during the Mass, and Hans’ attack of loud anger during the following banquet. In regard to both instances the more dramatic versions claim public commotions: they say that Martin was about to flee the ceremony, but was restrained by a superior, and that during the banquet the father denounced the assembled staff of the monastery. Luther himself later often contributed to the embellishment of the events, reporting things which had taken place only in conversation or entirely in his own mind. This is owing partially to the folksy exaggeration of his table-talk vocabulary, partially to the literalism of his listeners, and partially to his distinct tendency to retrospective dramatization, which I will call historification in order to avoid calling one more process “projection.” I mean by this that Luther may honestly have remembered as a detailed event in time and space what actually occurred only in his thoughts and emotions. It is clear that his upbringing in the miner’s world, with its reifications and rumors, facilitated this tendency, which came to full bloom when Luther had to accept his final identity as a historical personality.
First, then, the Mass. Luther may or may not have meant it literally when he said later that he had felt like fleeing the world as a Judas, and had actually made a motion to run away when he read the words, Te igitur clementissime Pater, which appeal “to the most merciful Father”; he suddenly felt that he was about to speak to God directly, without any mediator.10 The professor finds this incredible, because Luther must have known that these words are followed by the phrase, Per Jhesum Christum filium tuum Dominum nostrum supplices rogamus et petiamus, which refers to God’s Son as the transmitter of our supplications to His Father. But however it came to pass that Luther ignored this phrase, we must accept his assurance that he “almost died” from anxiety because he felt no faith (weil kein Glaube da war).11 No witness, however, reports that he really made a move to leave the altar.
As is so often the case with Luther, exaggerations and conjectures can neither enhance nor destroy the simple dramatic constellations which characterized his moments of fate. In this moment he had the presence of the Eucharist in front of him—and the presence of the father behind him. He had not yet learned to speak with God “without embarrassment,” and he had not seen his father since the visit home before the thunderstorm. At this moment, then, when he was to mediate between the father and The Father, he still felt torn in his obedience to both. I would not be willing to give exclusive precedence to the theological conflict (as the professor does) or to the personal-neurotic one (as the psychiatrist does) in this condensed, intensive experience. Martin, at this moment, faced the Great Divide of his life, as every young man must sooner or later—the divide which separates, once and for all, the contributaries to the future from the regressive rivulets seeking the past. In front of him was the Eucharist’s uncertain grace; behind him his father’s potential wrath. His faith at that moment lacked the secure formulation of the nature of mediatorship which later emerged in the lectures on the Psalms. He had no living concept of Christ; he was, in fact, mortally afraid of the whole riddle of mediatorship. Because of all this, he may well have been morbidly sensitive to some theological problems which only much later did he have the courage to face and challenge as true moral problems.
The Eucharist’s long history had served to confuse its meaning more than to clarify it. It had started in Paulinian times as a highly devotional meal to commemorate that Passover which had turned out to be the last supper. As a ritual meal, it is a supremely sublimated version of a long series of blood sacrifices and rituals culminating in the devouring of flesh, first human, then animal, for the sake of magic and spiritual replenishment. In the original Eucharistia the community “gave thanks”: they ate bread from the same loaf and drank wine from the same cup, thus remembering, as Christ had asked them to do, his sacrificial death. This is a sublimated act because Christ had not only made the supreme sacrifice, self-chosen and human (“I am the lamb”); he had also made each man’s responsibility inescapably personal: “Let a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup … for if we would judge ourselves, we should not be judged.”12 True, Paul had berated those earliest communities for not being quite able to keep competitive voraciousness out of this rite; but, alas, they were simple folk.
What those not-so-simple folk, the theoreticians and the politicians of the church, subsequently did with this rite made it as different from its original form as all totalitarian reality is different from a revolutionary idea. This difference is not accidental; it is in the psychological nature of things. What is driven out by young rebellion is always reinstated by the dogmatism of middle age. Dogma, given total power, reinstates what once was to be warded off, and brings back ancient barbaric ambiguities as cold and overdefined legalisms so unconvincing that, where once faith reigned, the law must take over and be enforced by spiritual and political terror. And when conscience and dogma once enter into an alliance with terror, man sinks below anything in nature or in his own primitive history; he creates a hell on earth, such as no god could invent elsewhere.
When those early Christian folk heard it said: “For we being many are one bread, and one body: for we are all partakers of that one bread,”13 and when they heard it said: “Take, eat; this is my body, which is broken for you: this do in remembrance of me,”14they participated in magic formulations of the kind which can only be created by a merger of the imagery of the unconscious with the poetry of the people.
Our unconscious preserves the images of our early, preverbal childhood. Before we knew the separateness of things and the differences that are in names, we experienced certain basic modes of existence. We once felt at one with a maternal matrix from which we received the substances of life—not merely food, but everything we could then experience as positive, as an affirmation of our existence: personal warmth, and the nourishment of our senses and of our anticipations. However, we also experienced incidents in which bad substances, even including substances that first felt good, seemed to choke our trusting organs of acceptance, or poison us from within our own bowels. At these times, only care, the original caritas, could save us with a new infusion of good substances. In a way, deep down, we never know better than this. This earliest stratum of experience remains effective throughout life. In primitive milieus it leads to superstitious ideas and acts of acquiring beneficial substances through the consumption of flesh and blood from significant bodies; and to ideas and acts in which evil is identified with curses inflicted by and on substances and bodies, and dealt with through sorcery.
In Childhood and Society, I reported a daily ritual of a California Indian tribe of salmon fishermen which indicates how the sanctity of intake was impressed on the children of a singularly avaricious and bitterly capitalistic tribe: “During meals a strict order of placement is maintained and the children are taught to eat in prescribed ways; for example, to put only a little food on the spoons, to take the spoons up to their mouths slowly, to put the spoon down while chewing the food—and, above all, to think of becoming rich during the process. Nobody speaks during meals so that everybody can keep his own thoughts on money and salmon, … attitudes which, to the Yurok mind, will in the end assure the salmon’s favor. The Yurok during meals makes himself see money hanging from trees and salmon swimming in the river.”15
More rational beings often cannot deal with these matters openly; they express them in more or less malignant personal quirks, or they work them out in their dreams, those gifts of nature which permit us to commune with our unconscious and emerge clear-eyed. In these unconscious ideas lies much power for personal recovery and creative activity, which cultural institutions can augment with the healing factor of artistic or ritual form. But in these ideas also lies our greatest vulnerability and exploitability, because no matter how rational we are, our unconscious seeks ways in which it can manifest itself. If we do not live in a time and a place which permit it creative manifestation, we are easy prey to the experts and the leaders who somehow know how to exploit our unconscious without understanding the magic reasons for their success; and consequently their success contributes to their being corrupted by leadership. Dogmatic leaders are the worst, for they combine a mortal scrupulosity with a deadly unscrupulousness, a mixture which permits them to take command of our conscience. They know how to dull our perception so that they can involve us in mythical realities which we can neither manage to believe completely, nor afford to quite disbelieve.
The questions of whether Christ meant it when he said, “This is my body,” and whether the version, “This cup is the new testament in my blood”16 comes closer to his meaning than “This is my blood of the new testament”17 became over the centuries questions of mortal scrupulosity. They eventually led to ritual murder as the theologians fortified their position by suppressing old and new forms of creative thought, and as the masses, sensitized by spiritual terror and by horror of the plague, stampeded for the well-guarded gates to heaven.
Symbolically enough, the name of that early and primitive communion changed from Eucharistia, which means thanksgiving, to Missa, which means (or was thought to mean) the dismissal of the unworthy. The original selection of the worthy was an introspective responsibility, fulfilled almost by “tasting” one’s inner condition: “For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body. For this cause many are weak and sickly among you, and many sleep.”18 It then developed into a matter of worthiness by mere works, by participation in more and more meaningless and idolatrous observances. True, Paul had found that more people were sickly and asleep than were capable of some introspective discipline; so that one may well argue that from a mass-psychological point of view, early Christianity demanded too much of too many. It is obvious also that our neo-Paulinian, Martin Luther, can be said to have demanded too much of his day and even of himself; and in the end, the Lutheran state-church was the best that could be had under the given historical and personal circumstances. But the greatest advances in human consciousness are made by people who demand too much, and thus invite a situation in which their overstrained followers inevitably end up either compromisers or dogmatists. It is therefore necessary constantly to reformulate those advances in human consciousness and to ask how it happens, again and again, that the best become the worst enemies of the good. A council of the best finally decreed that Christ’s body and blood are truly and substantially contained in the bread and in the wine; this decree made into a law, subject to thought control and terror, that which had begun as a moral force and might have continued so if allowed to remain an intrinsic part of perpetual communal revival.
All these ideas seem to have been far from Martin’s conscious mind and theological thought at the time of his first Mass. But his later works and acts testify that in some rudimentary form the ideas were already in his mind at that point. Most biographers claim that doubt in the Mass itself could not have contributed to Martin’s anxiety attack, for was he not, years later, still morbidly obsessed with the idea of celebrating Mass before certain altars in Rome? And so much so, that he almost wished his parents dead so that he could make the special contribution to their salvation offered by the papal chamber of commerce? To the clinical mind, however, the very obsessional, and by then utterly hopeless, preoccupation with the Mass only demonstrates that long before Luther could face the issue squarely, the Eucharist had been eroded by scruples and ambivalences of long standing.
We have quoted Luther’s statement that as he celebrated his first Mass he was overcome by the feeling that he had to face God directly without a mediator. We must now discuss his other impending encounter: the one with his earthly father. Is it not astonishing that the biographers who have tried to account for Luther’s anxiety have not considered it worth emphasizing that he had not seen his father since his impulsive visit home; and that he had not, as yet, faced him to see—yes, in his face—the result of that extracted permission? Could not Martin foresee that his father would be essentially unreconstructed and ready to remind Martin of the obedience due him, knowing, in turn, quite well that the son had never wholly relinquished his filial obedience—and that he never would, never could? In Martin’s first Mass the paradox of paternal obediences was fully propounded. Martin, who had sought the identity of a monk, had been ordered to become a priest, a dispenser as well as a partaker of the Eucharist. There is no use saying he should have been glad: like other great young men, Martin never felt worthy of the next step in his career. Later he thought and said he would surely die when he was ordered to become a professor; and still later, after his unexpectedly triumphant entrance into Worms, when it was clear that he could not escape being the people’s reformer, he stood most meekly before the emperor and was hardly audible. As always, he first had to grow into the role which he had usurped without meaning to. And this first and anxious anchorage of his future identity as a responsible churchman had to be witnessed by the father, who cursed it (and said so presently) as his son’s final escape from the identity of being most of all Hans’ son. The attempt of the biographers to separate the mystic presence of the Eucharist and the oppressive presence of the father is invalid in view of what happened later that day, and forever after.
It cannot be denied that Martin asked for it—he could not let his father go any more than the father could let him go. Martin knew that he had not won his father’s gantzen Willen, his whole will. But during the meeting which they had after the ceremony, “as we sat at the table, I started to talk with him with a childish good comportment, wanting to put him in the wrong and myself in the right, by saying: ‘Dear father, why did you resist so hard and become so angry because you did not want to let me be a monk, and maybe even now you do not like too much to see me here, although it is a sweet and godly life, full of peace?’ But there [the father] carried on, in front of all the doctors, magisters and other gentlemen: ‘You scholars, have you not read in the scriptures that one should honor father and mother?’” 19 And as others started to argue with him, Hans Luder said what was as good as a curse: “God give that it wasn’t a devil’s spook”20 (Satanae praestigium, Teuffel’s Gespenst)—referring, of course, to the thunderstorm on the road to Erfurt, Martin’s “road to Damascus.” As Luther wrote to his father publicly when he had become a great man: “You again hit me so cleverly and fittingly that in my whole life I have hardly heard a word that resounded in me more forcefully and stuck in me more firmly. But,” he added—putting the father in his place more than a decade after the event—“but I, secure in my justice, listened to you as to a human being and felt deep contempt for you; yet belittle your word in my soul, I could not.”21
What would not some of us give if, in certain decisive moments, we could have felt clearly and said calmly to a parent what the great man could write only after many years: “I listened to you as to a human being” (Te velut hominem audivi et fortiter contempsi)? But at the time, Martin, too, fell silent. As he confessed later, he heard God’s voice in his father’s words, which helped to make the fusion of presences fatefully permanent. His father, he felt, had not given his benediction “as to a betrothal,” and God had denied him the experience of the Eucharist. But for less, Martin (Hans’ son) could not settle and remain whole; he would yet find the right word “to speak to God directly.”
He was alone now; alone against his temperament, which his father had predicted would refuse submission to celibacy; and alone against his wrath, which his father had shown was indomitable in the Luders. Incredible as it seems, at this late date Martin was thrown back into the infantile struggle, not only over his obedience toward, but also over his identification with, his father. This regression and this personalization of his conflicts cost him that belief in the monastic way and in his superiors which during the first year had been of such “godly” support. He was alone in the monastery, too, and soon showed it in a behavior that became increasingly un-understandable even to those who believed in him. To be justified became his stumbling block as a believer, his obsession as a neurotic sufferer, and his preoccupation as a theologian.
2
Luther’s complaint that his father refused to “give him away,” as it were, in his new marriage is meaningful in many ways. It shows how much he had tried to believe that he, Hans’ son, would be able to settle for the passivity of professional penitence—he in whom was stored (one is tempted to say coiled) the striking power of one of the most powerful minds of his age. His childlike appeal during the festive dinner betrays the same attempt at self-deception. No wonder his father smelled a rat; and no wonder Martin heard God’s voice in the father’s angry retort: it was, at the same time, the voice of their temperamental affinity and of their joint proud conviction that their devil was too peppery for refined theology, and their temperament too strong for reformed monkishness.
This spiritually unsuccessful ordination ended Martin’s honeymoon with monasticism and doomed their marriage to an eventual divorce which confused all the retrospective information about Luther’s next phase. While he was still in the cloister nothing much was found worth recording about this excitable and yet impressive monk. Only after his dramatic separation from monasticism did he and the other monks begin to appraise his years of monkhood in bitter earnest. Whatever ends in divorce, however, loses all retrospective clarity because a divorce breaks the Gestalt of one love into the Gestalten of two hates. After divorce the vow “until death us do part” must be explained as a commitment made on wrong premises. Every item which once spelled love must now be pronounced hate. It is impossible to say how good or how bad either partner really was; one can only say that they were bad for each other. And then the lawyers take over and railroad the whole matter into controversies neither of the partners had ever thought of.
Later, when Luther had become his own best and worst lawyer, he wrote some magnificent treatises in which breathed a new spirit, a new marriage. As polemics, they pushed aside the old facts and theories rather than taking considered account of them. But Luther also, and especially in private, historified (in the sense above defined) into the old conditions whatever they had subjectively become for him, and in his historifications shows all the flippancy, plaintiveness, and vulgarity of an undisciplined divorcee. Among his statements is his assertion that his superiors had encouraged his self-torment by suggesting continuous waking, praying, and reading, so that his health had been systematically undermined. Yet he reported himself that in 1510 he was able to walk from Erfurt to Rome, which was exceptionally rainy that year, and back over the wintry Alps, without any sign of weakness worse than a fleeting cold. He also complained that the monastery’s official policy was to consider the omission of a little word like enim during Mass a sin almost as big as adultery and murder. But much of the blame for the importance which was attached to these statements—and to such grotesque historifications as that he had to fight for the right and opportunity to study the Bible which, in fact, had been put into his hands when he entered the monastery as the only personal book to remain in his possession—falls to his followers, who could not see that his justification needed no such exaggerations, and who simply did not want to see what a naively irresponsible talker their religious leader could be during his later years.
It is equally impossible to take at face value what his erstwhile colleagues said of him after his separation from the Church to which they remained true. Before he left, there seems to have been a certain willingness on their part to consider his peculiarities (“I must have been a very strange brother,”22 he said himself afterward) as what today we would dismiss as “tension.” Some were even willing to interpret his impulsivities, as long as they seemed to serve the Church, as being of the traditional Paulinian kind. After he had begun to appear to some like a new St. Paul, however, all of his activity was reevaluated by others as demonic possession and mere personal orneriness. To utilize these opinions to diagnose periodical insanity, as Luther’s medical critics have done, does not seem to be permissible even if Erasmus the All-Adjustable, in the heat of their dispute, later called Luther a raving maniac and a drunkard.
At any rate, the older Luther is not under discussion here. What attacks and hallucinations are reported of Martin seem to have been hysterical. Martin, lying in bed, might phantasy himself dwelling among angels; and then, in a rapid turn of mood, and with a reawakened identification with the miners’ suspicion of things that glitter too brazenly, would think that the angels were really devils. But we cannot recognize any of the characteristics of a true hallucination in such a phantasy. Rather, it represents, as do many of Luther’s accounts of his often very outer inner life, an obvious, obsessive self-testing of the credulity which his father had challenged. The same thing is true of such unreconstructed Mansfeldianisms as his report that one night the devil made such a big noise that Martin took his books and went to bed in pursuance of his formula that nothing checks the devil better than open contempt. Students of today might be glad if they had such a hallucinatory excuse to retire. But it seems certain, and is fully documented by his friends, that Luther in those years suffered from acute anxiety, and would wake up in a cold sweat (“the devil’s bath,” as he called it); that he developed a phobia of the devil which in the way of typical obsessive ambivalence gradually included the fear that the very highest good, such as the shining image of Christ, might only be a devil’s temptation; that he came to fear and even hate Christ, in spite of his superiors’ patient arguments, as one who came only to punish; and that he had strange fits of unconsciousness which, in one case, the fit in the choir, are suspected of having been accompanied by convulsions. Today we would feel that such an attack might be the internal result of stored rage in a young man who is trying to hold on to his obedient, pious self-restraint, and has not yet found a legitimate outer object to attack or a legitimate weapon with which to hit out about him.
It seems entirely probable that Martin’s life at times approached what today we might call a borderline psychotic state in a young man with prolonged adolescence and reawaked infantile conflicts. But the caricatures later created by both sides of the divorce, which were publicized with all the abandon of the then new yellow press, fail to explain the historical fact that Martin was promoted step by step with never a delay up the ladder of responsible positions in priesthood, administration, and teaching. By the time he became the reformer, he was by no means a simple monk but a prior, a districtvicar for eleven monasteries, and a professor of theology in the chair previously held by the provincial vicar himself. For more than a decade, then, the marriage cannot have gone so badly.
At the same time, however, that he was becoming increasingly busy, the monastic realities apparently gradually came to take second place to a fanatic preoccupation with himself. It bespeaks Luther’s general sturdiness and intellectual soundness that he could fulfill the duties required of him even while the gulf between their official meaning and his fanatic inner struggles seemed more and more ominous to him, and probably also to some of his superiors and colleagues. At the same time, a theological system of increasing self-assertiveness was founded on fragments of mood swings and of intuitive thoughts which later found their climax, as well as their conceptual unification, in the “revelation in the tower.” Such a painful and prolonged incubation is by no means rare in young great men who can give birth to a living creation only when they are ready to take care of it, which is only possible when they have found the main executive of their identity (in Martin, the Word), and have seen the potential of intimacy in the kind of friendship which Martin found only in Wittenberg, around Staupitz, and among the humanists. In the cloister all three factors—his sense of identity, his potential for intimacy, and the discovery of his generative powers—were stubbornly engaged in the life-or-death struggle for that sense of total justification which both the father and The Father had denied him, and without which a homo religiosus has no identity at all.
It would be hard, indeed, to describe the Martin of the middle monastery years as a great young man, although Protestant biographers have given their all to this impossible task. It would be easier to describe him as a sick young man who later became great—and greatly destructive; and this, too, has been done with relish. Although I am indebted to both of these schools, I will, within the limits of the task which I have set for myself, try to outline in what ways Martin was a young great man, sickness and all. Whether or not mankind can afford its great men, sickness and all, is another question. Before we can even approach it we must first learn to recognize the afflictions of our favorite heroes, as well as the madness in those great men whom we could do without. For, short as our lives are, the influence of the men we elect, support, or tolerate as great can indeed be a curse felt far beyond the third and fourth generation.
In the case of great young men (and in the cases of many vital young ones of whom we should not demand that they reveal at all costs the stigmata of greatness in order to justify confusion and conflict), rods which measure consistency, inner balance, or proficiency simply do not fit the relevant dimensions. On the contrary, a case could be made for the necessity for extraordinary conflicts, at times both felt and judged to be desperate. For if some youths did not feel estranged from the compromise patterns into which their societies have settled down, if some did not force themselves almost against their own wills to insist, at the price of isolation, on finding an original way of meeting our existential problems, societies would lose an essential avenue to rejuvenation and to that rebellious expansion of human consciousness which alone can keep pace with the technological and social change. To retrace, as we are doing here, such a step of expansion involves taking account of the near downfall of the man who took it, partially in order to understand better the origin of greatness, and partially in order to acknowledge the fact that the trauma of near defeat follows a great man through life. I have already quoted Kierkegaard’s statement that Luther lived and acted always as if lightning were about to strike directly behind him. Furthermore, a great man carries the trauma of his near downfall and his mortal grudge against the near assassins of his identity into the years of his creativity and beyond, into his decline; he builds his hates and his grudges into his system as bulwarks—bulwarks which eventually make the system first rigid and finally, brittle.
3
Monastic penitence for the sake of his own afterlife and for all mankind’s was Martin’s profession. To many of us, this seems a strange thing to be professional about, full time. Yet, in his most personal search for justification, Martin used the methods of his profession which were designed to solve spiritual problems in a particular way: the “seared, the cauterized conscience,” Luther later called that solution. At any rate, the vicissitudes of his most personal search cannot be accounted for outside of the system, which came more than half-way to meet him. No course of training invented specifically to intensify neurotic strain in a young man like Martin could have been more effective than the monastic training of his day. Luther later reported that he saw others go insane, and that he felt that he might also. But there is no reason to assume that a greater number of individuals went insane in this setting than would be slated for failure in other kinds of indoctrinations. Any indoctrination worth its ideological salt also harbors dangers, which bring about the unmaking of some and the supreme transcendence of others.
In this connection I am led to think of my own profession: let me make the most of a strange parallel. Young (and often not so young) psychoanalysts in training must undergo a training procedure which demands a total and central personal involvement, and which takes greater chances with the individual’s relation to himself and to those who up to then have shared his life, than any other professional training except monkhood. Because the reward for psychoanalytic training, at least in some countries, is a good income; because, for decades, the psychoanalyst seemed primarily preoccupied with the study of sexuality; and because psychoanalytic power under certain historical conditions can corrupt as much as any other power, an aura of licentiousness is often assumed to characterize this training.
The future psychoanalyst, however, must undergo a personal psychoanalysis. This is a “treatment” which shares fully with the treatment of patients a certain systematic interpersonal austerity. Over the decades, psychoanalysts have accepted the formal setting of the almost daily appointment as the natural arrangement for eliciting the analysand’s free associations. However, this natural setting for a spontaneous production is both an exercise in a new kind of asceticism, and a long-range experiment determining in large measure the free verbal material which it provokes.
There is, first of all, what I would like to call the asceticism of the “expendable face.” The analysand reclines on a couch at the head of which the analyst sits; both of them put, as it were, their faces aside, and give the most minute attention to the patient’s verbal productions which are interrupted by the analyst only when his technical sense demands that an interpretation be given. He, of course, can see, not the analysand’s face, but his gestures and postural changes; while the analysand sees the ceiling, maybe the top of a bookcase, or one and the same picture for hundreds of hours. (I wish to acknowledge a small fragment of an original Greek sculpture in faintly glowing marble.) The restriction of the visual field, the injunction on muscular or locomotor movement, the supine position, the absence of facial communication, the deliberate exposure to emerging thought and imagery—all these tend not only to facilitate ordinary memory and meditation; they produce (as they are supposed to do) a “transference neurosis,” that is a transfer to the analyst and the analytic situation of the irrational and often unconscious thought contents and affects which characterize the analysand’s symptoms or blindspots.
The analyst patiently continues to explain the patterns of unconscious thought, whether the material strikes him as boring or lurid, appealing or nauseating, thought-provoking or infuriating. It stands to reason, however, that when a devotional denial of the face, and a systematic mistrust of all surface are used as tools in a man’s worklife, they can lead to an almost obsessional preoccupation with “the unconscious,” a dogmatic emphasis on inner processes as the only true essence of things human, and an overestimation of verbal meanings in human life. The risks and the chances inherent in this method are analogous to those in Martin’s scruples. Into the ears of a master whose face is averted, and who refuses in any personal sense either to condemn or to justify, temptations are revealed which one never dreamt of, or never knew one dreamt of until one began to understand dreams and to recognize the maneuvers of self-deception. Impulses are communicated, some before and some after they have achieved a bit of delinquent expression; for a while, these impulses can play havoc with a candidate’s previous adjustment, including his adjustments to the individuals close to him, who cannot for the life of them see why a person has to get sick in order to learn how to cure others. Nonetheless, all that counts once the process is in motion is the candidate’s increasing ability to converse with his own unconscious well enough to recognize the unconscious motivations of others and his preparation to tolerate without flinching his patients’ transference neuroses: for they will make a good parent out of him and a bad one, and they will deify him and vilify him in language so spontaneous that not even a priest would dare to evoke or to tolerate it. His own transference neurosis, it is hoped, will be cured before he is exposed to those of his patients.
Before he sees patients, however, the subjective phase of the training, the personal analysis, must overlap with years of practical and theoretical training in the new science. Often this means training in the particular awareness and habitual conceptualization cultivated by a particular training institute, usually founded by or around the person or the ideas of a particular leader, often come from far; although unified standards are now being organized on a national scale. It is obvious, however, that no organizational rules can entirely contain, nor any existing experience invariably predict, the destructive and creative spirits which will be freed by such a combination of the personal, the professional, and the organizational. Thus psychoanalysis also has its monkhood, its monkishness, and its monkery.
My point is this: the fact that psychoanalysis was fully exposing sexuality for the first time in human history, in all its variations and transformations and its irrelations to logic and ethics, obscured the fact that a new kind of asceticism had been invented, a heroic abnegation of the kind which produces new steps in moral awareness. What man has always been most proud of—the rationalization of the irrational with esthetic, moral and logical preoccupations—became no more than a surface ripple on a body of infinitely deep water.
As a radical method of cure one can only say that psychoanalysis helps those who are well enough to tolerate it, and intelligent enough to gain by it over and above the cure of symptoms. As an intellectual experience, however, it is like other ascetic methods in specifically arousing and giving access to certain recesses of the mind otherwise completely removed from conscious mastery.
This brief reflection helps to clarify what the more thoughtful monks faced in their procedures, and what the teaching monks were up against with Martin.
Take, for example the problem of Martin’s tristitia. A certain kind and degree of tristitia was a requirement of monkhood; some individuals were more inclined to tristitia, some less, and for that very reason it was necessary to make it a disciplined and shared matter. Discipline meant not only that a monk had to be on guard against forgetting that man is mortal and constitutionally imperfect; it also meant that he could not let a constant awareness of these facts turn into melancholic rumination which would serve only itself. He therefore had to develop a methodical self-observation through systematic meditation and professional confession. For most mortals it was enough to avoid temptations or to confess them; the monk had to go toward and challenge them since they were the constant tests of true, inner firmness. He had to cultivate a systematic suspiciousness of motives, which at the same time he could not allow to become either scrupulosity or a masochistic seeking after self-condemnation.
Comparable difficulties occur in psychoanalysis in our particular method of uncovering by free association our hidden thoughts and our sleeping temptations, scanning our consciousness in order to follow freely and verbalize honestly any trend of thought without being in any way selective. This is, of course, something one can only try to approximate; anybody brash enough to say he can do it is surely not gifted for it. But not everybody could or should even try. In some, conscious control is too rigid; they may be slated for excellent performances in other fields of endeavor in which such control is paramount. In others, the impulses rushing to be realized in consciousness are too strong, and might be more productively applied were they to remain unverbalized. Furthermore, the method may make some people sicker than they ever were. The decision about whether the results to be expected will justify taking this risk is difficult; but well-trained people are usually able to make it with some confidence.
When such a responsible invention for the disciplined increase of inner freedom becomes widely used as a therapy and as a method of professional training, it is bound to become standardized so that many will be able to benefit from it who of their own accord would never have thought of such strenuous self-inspection, and who are not especially endowed for it. A standardized procedure calls for uniform application, an application which would have been much too uniform for those who initiated the method. Here training analysts are—on rare occasions, to be sure—aware of the other side of the coin: the predicament of Martin’s superiors when they found they had a young great man on their hands. If such a man, possessing the potentialities of truly original self-inspection and the fierce pride that is attached to originality—if such a man should apply to us for training, would we recognize him? Would we accept him? Could we keep him? Could he fit his budding originality into our established methods? And could we do justice to him, within a training system increasingly standardized and supervised? But these questions are directed too much to ourselves. Such a man will take care of himself, whatever our methods. Let us see how Martin managed.
In his original search for aloneness and anonymity, Martin felt that silence, discipline, worship, and confession were godly. Somehow he must have hoped to escape into a life of obedience to God which would eventually come to count also as obedience to a reconciled father. Not without provocation, the father had called whatever unconscious bluff existed in this plan; and after that the rebellion was on, albeit in the ambivalent form of overobedience. Or so I interpret the period that followed Martin’s first Mass, with all its strenuous attempts to make monkhood absurd by trying to obey its rules too scrupulously. Some extraordinary young people, who have trapped themselves in an ordinary niche of social life, as Martin had in the monastery, and barricaded themselves in with massive compulsive compensations, can escape their fortified prison only by making themselves seemingly very small, and actually very slippery. A severe abnegation may develop with a mixed neurosis—put together of fragments of a number of neuroses—which at times borders on the psychotic. This syndrome has been discussed as an acute identity diffusion; under all the wretched confusedness, one can usually recognize a certain zest in the production of problems, a rebellious mocking in dramatic helplessness, and a curious honesty (and honest curiosity) in the insistence on getting to the point, the fatal point, the true point.
And thus Martin set out to torment his preceptors. It is quite possible that this happened as they, in turn, set out to fit him for his new role of priest and his future role of scholar and teacher—all roles which at first he disavowed, although he continued to invite them with his very obedience and extraordinary talent. However, his training seems to have entered a particular austere, introspective, and studious period which he was less able to tolerate. His scruples began to eat like moths into the fabric of monkhood which before had felt like a well-woven protection against his impulses. He thus became susceptible to that alliance of erotic irritability and hypersensitivity of conscience which brings identity diffusion to a head. He attempted to counter this alliance with redoubled use of monastic methods, and consequently found himself at times estranged from all three: his upset drives (his “concupiscence”); his confused conscience; and the monastic means and ends.
In confession, for example, he was so meticulous in the attempt to be truthful that he spelled out every intention as well as every deed; he splintered relatively acceptable purities into smaller and smaller impurities; he reported temptations in historical sequence, starting back in childhood; and after having confessed for hours, would ask for special appointments in order to correct previous statements. In doing this he was obviously both exceedingly compulsive and, at least unconsciously, rebellious. And, indeed, his preceptor threatened to punish him for obstruction of confession. It must be remembered that the method of confession was traditional, and was designed to meeet ordinary requirements without upsetting monastic efficiency. Supportive methods existed to help the confessing monk keep to a system: for instance, confessing transgressions in the order of the five senses, then of the seven deadly sins, then of the ten commandments. One can see that even a sincere man, given such a formidable array of possible transgressions, would have relatively little to say, and would be able to feel relieved. But Martin, on the contrary, was inclined to make the formidable most of small things; at one time his superior Staupitz mocked him in a letter in which he said that Christ was not interested in such trifles and that Martin had better see to it that he have some juicy adultery or murder to confess—perhaps the murder of his parents.23 But nothing could drive Martin deeper into despair than his superiors’ refusal to take him seriously: at such moments he became “a dead corpse,” he said.
All this is classically compulsive; this kind of concentration on the means to an end, and such ceaseless thinking about these means, separates the seeker more than ever from his aim, which is to feel something: in Martin’s case, to feel justified in the eyes of God, and to feel there was a possibility of propitiating God. As he became more and more alienated from this aim, he remained bitterly honest about it: in his later lectures on the Psalms, when he came to discuss the effect of penitence, he directed his audience to St. Augustine’s confession for a good example, adding: “Quia extra compunctionem sum et loquor de compunctione”24 (Here I talk of penitence and cannot feel it). Instead, he felt most intensely what he wanted most desperately to discard, namely, the unworthy sexual temptations, petty rages, and debasing blasphemies—all of which, it must be remembered, confirmed his father’s suspicions, and thus constituted one of the secret weapons of his compulsion: the transformation of the open disobedience to the father (being a monk at all) into a secret obedience to the father’s prediction (being a bad monk) under the guise of being obedient to God (being a more than reasonably good monk).
At this point we must note a characteristic of young great rebels: their inner split between the temptation to surrender and the need to dominate. A great young rebel is torn between on the one hand tendencies to give in and phantasies of defeat (Luther used to resign himself to an early death at times of impending success), and the absolute need, on the other hand, to take the lead, not only over himself but over all the forces and people who impinge on him. In men of ideas, the second, the dictatorial trend, may manifest itself paradoxically at first in a seeming surrender to passivity which, in the long run, proves to have been an active attempt at liquidating passivity by becoming fully acquainted with it. Even at the time of his near downfall, he struggles for a position in which he can regain a sense of initiative by finding some rock bottom to stand on, after which he can proceed with a total re-evaluation of the premises on which his society is founded. In the lectures on the Psalms we can see that wholeness arise which became Luther’s theology; first, however, we must note examples of his early total restatements; statements which, during his ongoing crisis, were indistinguishable both from neurotic exaggerations and from delinquent deviations.
As to confession, then, which he later came to call a laboriosa illa et inutilis ars 25 he violated it with his superior honesty. He found it impossible to decide whether the reassurance gained from it was really a godly feeling or not; or whether anybody could really differentiate penitential attrition—the mere fear of punishment—from contrition, that complete penitence which culminated in a true love for God the judge, and for mankind. We can easily see the personal and neurotic reference to his own failure as a son in his indecision; indeed, one may say that by radically transferring the desperation of his filial position into the human condition vis-à-vis God, and by insisting, as it were, on a cosmic test case, he forced himself either to find a new avenue toward faith or to fail. Theologically, this later became part of his most radical re-evaluation of all works—that is, of all attempts to win a righteous God’s favor by special efforts and graduations. On the other hand, faced with a compromise advanced by Gerson, namely, that God demanded only that one do what is in one’s power (quod in se est), he rejected this less rigid requirement as an excuse for claiming weakness and an invitation to make deals with God. He called such liberalism a “Jewish, Turkish, and Pelagian” trick—his era’s equivalent of a “British, Papist, and Bolshevik danger.” The graduated differentiation between deadly and venial sins seemed particularly impossible to him. For if a deadly sin, according to its definition, is one which undermines the life principle of love, how can one who has so sinned find the way back to faith? Fides non stat cum peccato mortali: faith does not linger where there is deadly sin. He ended up with apparently total pessimism, denying man’s ability to gain God’s grace by the fulfillment of any earthly law or observance. He characterized as spiritual prostitution (fornicatio spiritus) brazen attempts to gain eternal life with “acts of love.” He thus approached an impasse which called for a resolution so total that its full implication was revealed to him only much later, in the “revelation in the tower”—namely, that faith must be there before the deed, and that all enforced or prescribed works, if they are begun with indifference or hate and lack faith, love, joy, and will (Glaub, Lieb, Lust, und Willen) are doomed to spiritual failure.
In connection with Martin’s confessional scruples, we first hear of the problem of “concupiscence”—that is, man’s natural endowment of drives which lead him into sin—and of the particular problem of “libido,” which, next to “ira” and “impatientia,” led Martin into temptation. From everything we have recorded so far, and from what we must anticipate on the basis of historical information, we can well imagine that Martin’s much suppressed, and as it were untrained, anger and hate would finally break through in a most disturbing way. It cannot surprise us that he noticed that often it was the very celebration of the Mass which put him in a state of unholy anger. On the other hand, there can be no doubt that in this excitable young man sexual tension accompanied other kinds; and that in this hyperconscientious young man, sexual tension was equated with sexual sin. Neurotic sexual tension, however, cannot be attributed to the mere pressure of natural drives. No doubt it is the more manly and less neurotic man who can endure abstinence at one time, and yet be able to function with undiminished potency at another. In Martin’s case, his father’s prediction that he would not be able to stand celibacy, and his superiors’ assumption that he could, gave the matter a connotation beyond any biological question. Furthermore, it is necessary to differentiate between temptations in the world outside—that is, occasions for sinning which can be avoided with luck and low drive—and those tentationes which beset the monk like furious beasts just because his method of training arouses them in order to see whether it can tame them. Psychoanalysts also know a distinction like this: the same systematic introspection which, at the end, is to give the individual intelligent mastery over his drives can first evoke a frenzy never encountered before. Et tandem furor fiat, as Luther put it, adding that the mere thought of libidinal matters for the sake of honest appraisal makes them intrude on your honesty. (Quando magis alignis cogitat de libidine deponenda, tanto magis incidit in cogitatione, ut altera alteram trudet.)26
Luther later, at times naively, at times shrewdly, was frank about his sex-life, revealing different aspects of the matter out of mere impulsivity or his peculiar sense of publicity. He thus provided a neat set of quotations for almost any school of interpretation. Protestant writers, in trying to depict him as a saint made in Germany, present him as a colorless young man, and restrict his masculinity so exclusively to a spiritual bass voice that the psychiatrist is right in saying that these writers make Luther appear “psychoinfantile.” Others have described him, also in his own words, as an oversexed monk with secret sins, unfit from the start for celibacy.
Most unlikely, so all authorities agree, are any irregularities with women. Luther denied them disarmingly, claiming that in all his clerical practice he had received confession from three women only; he did not even look at them, he said, although he does seem to have remembered the occasions. The conditions of his life do not make it probable that he could have strayed in this direction. His references to autoerotic experiences, on the other hand, cannot be merely personal confessions characterizing his own sexual idiosyncrasies; they are, rather, meant to throw light on the condition of celibacy and are often only dragged to the surface by theological disputes. Mostly Luther speaks of a state of sexual urge which was aggravated by the very attempts to appraise and to curb it. He mentions release through nocturnal emissions at first as a matter of natural necessity (ex necessitate corporali)27 but he indicates that in his case this permissable and seemingly biological outlet was drawn into his psychological conflict and paradoxically became aggravated by fasting (Si quando ego maxime eiunabam…. sequebatur pollutio).28 Nocturnal emissions in general were felt to be on the borderline between sinful intention and involuntariness; this is obvious from his assertion that monks frequently abstained from celebrating Mass the morning after emissions.
In one of his early lectures Luther goes into considerable detail about the voluntary methods by which “solitary emissions” can be effected, and about the involuntariness of emissions which happen in sleep and even, without one’s inner consent (prefer consensum), in the waking state and in the daytime, adding “as happens to many”29 (ut multis contingit). His discussion in this lecture seems to the psychiatrist a bit too detailed to be clerical routine; but there is a possibility that involuntary releases in the waking state, which are known to occur in young men in tension states associated, for example, with examinations, or with being late, may be more typical in a situation like the monastic one, where a state of morbid watchfulness is heightened to spiritual terror. At any rate, if any specific form of sexual transgression is to be sought in Luther’s conflicting references, it would seem clinically most likely that Martin’s general state of tension on occasion resulted in a sudden spontaneous ejaculation—an event which would leave a sensitive young man feeling guilty for what he had not intended and relieved by what he could not afford to enjoy. Most of all, however, it left him with the suspicion, or even half-knowledge, that there was more unconscious intention in it—more pleasure, and, most of all, more rebellion—than routine confession would force him to admit. I think that spontaneous ejaculation, rather than masturbation (as the psychiatrist suspects), is what Luther was talking about; although it must be granted that the young man’s whole overscrupulous make-up suggests to the clinician guilt feelings probably originating in childhood masturbation. Facts and statistics, however, matter little here; a young man like Martin will make a life of sin out of a very few occurrences and will remain preoccupied primarily with matters of principle: when and how one knows that one “willed” something which “happens” to one, even in a state of only relative consciousness.
James Joyce, in his account of the young artist’s temptations after he had renounced, under the impact of a retreat, the habit of visiting prostitutes, described the predicament which basically characterizes all these temptations, sexual and otherwise—that is, the question of active intention and passive drivenness:
This idea of surrender had a perilous attraction for his mind now that he felt his soul beset once again by the insistent voices of the flesh which began to murmur to him again during his prayers and meditations. It gave him an intense sense of power to know that he could by a single act of consent, in a moment of thought, undo all that he had done. He seemed to feel a flood slowly advancing towards his naked feet and to be waiting for the first faint timid noiseless wavelet to touch his fevered skin. Then, almost at the instant of that touch, almost at the verge of sinful consent, he found himself standing far away from the flood upon a dry shore, saved by a sudden act of the will or a sudden ejaculation: and … a new thrill of power and satisfaction shook his soul to know that he had not yielded nor undone all.30
Where such events became habitual it can well be, of course, that the peculiar condition of consciousness required for them would aggravate the nervous tension to which they testify in the first place.
All in all, then, sexuality became an acute problem to Martin in connection with the delineation of the possibilities of finding justification by doing and thinking the right things, by omitting the wrong ones, and by fulfilling the sacrament of penance by confession. All these possibilities turned into impossibilities in the shadow of what to him was the most intense tristitia of me habere deum non propitiam—of having a God whom he cannot propitiate. Only later, after he had been kidnapped to the lonely Wartburg, where, in a life of relative comfort and in the absence of monastic routine, he had to establish his own pattern of work—which, in spite of his complaints, he did magnificently—did Luther the man face fully the problem of his temperamental unfitness for what he came to call the “suicide of celibacy.” He then concluded that God made us men and women as an essential part of our sanity: ut etiam negando insanias. He has endowed us with flesh, blood, and semen so that we should marry and escape being consumed by perversion: aloque horrendis sodomis omnia complebuntur.31 As an aging man, Luther did not hesitate to tell the children and the students around his dinner table that after his marriage he used to touch specified parts of his wife’s body when he was tempted by the devil,32 and that the devil lost his greatest battles “right in bed, next to Katie.”33
In the monastery, however, it was not a question of how one should live—that was clearly defined, but how one should conceptualize things. In this area Martin, being a young great man, observed as he suffered and formulated as he met defeat. Some biographers wish to suggest that by the terms concupiscence and libido Luther for the most part referred to something as housebroken as a “general life-force”; others prefer to think that he always meant straight sex, and primarily his own. Actually, however, Martin clearly anticipated Freud in coming to the conclusion that “libido” pervades the human being at all times. He declined to accept the successful suppression of sexual acts as an evidence of the victory over libido as such. Chastity, he felt, was quite possible, although it was a rare gift, and true only if carried through gaily: “if the whole person loves chastity” (totus homo est qui chastitatem amat),34 as one might well say of St. Francis. He continued to consider this the most desirable state, but he felt that nothing was served by trying to force it, for, he continues, it is also the total person who is affected by sexual excitement (totus homo illecebris libidinis titillatur).35 “By the time it is noticed,” he observed, “it is too late. Once it burns…. the eye is blind.”36 He also realized that libido, if incited and left unsatisfied, poisons the whole person to such an extent “that it would be better to be dead.”37
It has been pointed out derisively by churchmen that in all of this rethinking Luther anticipates the pessimism of Schopenhauer’s will and the pansexualism of Freud’s libido. And it is true that, like them, he gradually came to consider it mandatory that one acknowledge the total power of drives. One can call this attitude defeatism, and Martin’s initial insight certainly is based on what he experienced as personal defeat; but one may also view it as his refusal to make his honesty in such things a matter of optimistic denial, or of small victories which serve nothing but self-deception.
Martin’s radical reformulation of the power of sexuality is only one aspect of the new baseline which he eventually formulated for the whole spiritual and psychological front; its assumed ethical pessimism and philosophical paradox is, in fact, a psychological verity: we can often actively assert our mastery over a major aspect of life only after we have fully realized our complete dependence on it. Here he becomes ruthlessly psychological: “Since, without our flesh, we would not exist, and could not operate, neither could we exist without the forces of the flesh (sine vitiis carnis), nor operate without them.”38 He thus shifts the whole question of free will from the strictly theological formulations of Pelagius and Augus-tinius to a formulation which anticipates our biological-psychological views.
In some of these quotations I have used the older Luther’s words to indicate salient points in Martin’s total rethinking; but as early as the Randnoten zu Lombardus (1508/09), he states that concupiscence, i.e., our drive endowment, is a leftover of original sin. In this statement, Martin, without seeming to be aware of it, begins to run counter to, and even to misquote, the official doctrine that, because of Christ’s sacrifice, we are born with a clean slate and our drives only set in motion a tendency to deadly sin which can be controlled by the sacrament of penance.
In anticipating some of the reformulations which very gradually appeared in Martin’s lectures I am trying to illustrate those aspects of his theological scruples which have been, I think rightly, considered part of his personal conflicts. Much of his gradual and radical rethinking achieved an inner coherence only later—when he was forced to state it explicitly in his teaching, and when he was called upon to defend it. Until the time when he listened to his own words and concluded that they sounded good, and when he observed a similar judgment in the eyes of his listeners—until that time his rethinking often seemed to him to be what it partially was when it existed only in fragments, namely, a delinquent denial of the acknowledged avenues to inner peace. At the same time that he insisted on finding his very own way to salvation, he came to formulate as his own most mortal sin (heisse Ich peccatum mortalem)39 a state of conscious and outright hatefulness, invidiousness, and contrariness toward God Himself. He was able to learn and preach the official gradations of the quantities and qualities (the quid and the quantum) of sin and the conditions necessary for the recapturing of grace; but they had no effective intelligibility for him. As Biel specified, there was, in all Occamist liberalism, a condition which could not be waived: one must continue to want God and love His creatures with all one’s heart and only for His sake. All of these formulations, so obviously designed to make the life of not too scrupulous professionals bearable and useful, were for Martin so many invitations to search in himself for wholehearted love; to despair of finding it; and then to swing to the other extreme and with totalistic abandon confess that he, on the contrary, hated God. “They teach us to doubt,”40 he said later; and indeed, it would be hard to think of a system more designed to aggravate doubting—in a doubter.
Martin also pursued his lifelong unhappy love, mysticism. All the primitive superstition and German simplicity in him should have found refuge in the mystic’s unification with God which needed no formula of justification and which, in fact, left all “thinking” aside. He did yearn for the birth of God’s “uncreated word” in his soul; he desired to be physically pervaded with the kind of assurance “that really gets under your skin”41 (senkt sich ins Fleisch). The mystic proclaims as attainable exactly that total piety which Martin desired (tota corde and tota mente; omni affectu and toto intellectu). Bonaventura “drove him nearly mad”42 with his advice that it is better to turn to grace than to dogma; to nostalgia than to intellect; and to prayer than to study. But, alas, Martin had to admit that he never “tasted” the fruits of such endeavor (ullum unquam gustum … sensi),43 sincerely as he had tried. He could not feel his way to God.
The fact is that this potentially so passionate man found he could not feel at all, which is the final predicament of the compulsive character. That is, he could not have the feelings which he so desperately wanted to feel, while on occasion (as in the fit in the choir) feelings had him in the form of phobic terrors and ugly rage.
All of which led to his final totalism, the establishment of God in the role of the dreaded and untrustworthy father. With this the circle closes and the repressed returns in full force; for here God’s position corresponds closely to the one occupied by Martin’s father at the time when Martin attempted to escape to theology by way of the thunderstorm. Meaningfully enough, when he heard Christ’s name or when he suddenly perceived the countenance of the Savior on the cross, he felt as if lightning had struck him. During his first Mass, he had only felt empty and void of all mediation; now he began to hate the sacrificial efforts of God’s son. This is what clinicians call a confession compulsion, an acknowledgment that something had been wrong with that first bolt of lightning just as his father had suspected. And so, as Martin put it, the praising ended and the blaspheming began. In the face of such contempt and wilful mistrust, God could only appear in horrible and accusatory wrath, with man prostrate in His sight (projectus a facie oculorum tuorum). Martin was further away than ever from meeting God face to face, from recognizing Him as He would be recognized, and from learning to speak to Him directly.
This point was the rock bottom on which Martin either would find the oblivion of fragmentation or on which he would build a new wholeness, fusing his own true identity and that of his time. With the luck and the cunning of a young great man, he found (or maybe we should say, he appointed) a fatherly sponsor for his identity—Dr. Staupitz, who understood his needs, refused to argue with him, and put him to work.
About a year and a half after his ordination, in the winter of 1508 (he was twenty-five years old), Martin was transferred to the Augustinian sister monastery in Wittenberg. There a new university was in the making, under the personal and highly competitive patronage of the Elector of Saxony, who wanted to outdo Leipzig, the ancient university in the other, the ducal, Saxony. It is not quite clear whether Wittenberg should be considered a Siberian desert or an important academic outpost. At any rate, the future cradle of the Reformation was, when Martin first saw it, hardly a town: its population was two thousand, of whom less than one-fifth had income enough to be taxable. The chief industry was brewing, and there was no significant trade. The castle, the chapter-house of All Saints, the lecture hall of the university, and the parish church of St. Mary’s were the main buildings, lording it over a miserable town, the marketplace of which was “a dung heap.”
In Wittenberg Martin met humanists who became his lifelong friends; he came to be regarded as a valued investment by his future princely protector, Frederic the Wise; and most important for his immediate future, he became intimately acquainted with Dr. Staupitz, the vicar-general of the province and the man who was the fatherly sponsor of Martin’s late twenties. Staupitz wanted Martin to preach and to lecture. It surely underestimates his intentions to assume, as the psychiatrist does, that Staupitz merely wanted to give Luther “something to do,” although this is exactly the way Staupitz put it in his offhand manner. For old-fashioned occupational therapy, one uses hobbies. Actually, Staupitz groomed Martin for his own chair, one of two which the Augustinians had provided for the University of Wittenberg, a chair Staupitz was neglecting because of his many administrative and diplomatic duties. Thus he acted as a true educational therapist in uniting in one plan of action the special needs of an outstanding and yet endangered member of his flock, and the special demands of a challenging communal reality. The fact that Staupitz recognized Martin’s destination as a great orator and interpreter of the Word, and overrode his almost violent objections marks him as a man of therapeutic courage as well as of administrative shrewdness. His answer to Martin’s remark made “under the pear tree,” which must have been a favorite spot for their sessions, that Staupitz was “killing him” with his demand that he prepare himself for a professorship is justly famous. “That’s all right,” he said, “God needs men like you in heaven, too.”44 He often seems to have made this kind of disarming answer to Martin’s squirming scrupulosities. With these humorous remarks, of a directness and an erudite worldliness which only a man in his dominant position could afford, Staupitz taught Martin a new art; for example, “by saying such things as that he had given up trying to be especially pious, he had lied to God long enough, and without success.”45Staupitz was an administrator and statesman more than a priest or a teacher; well-groomed and and widely-traveled, he most resembles a shrewd and kindly university president who is not very deep or erudite, but who has the rare ability of making a younger man feel that he is understood. He knew that he could trust Martin. And, indeed, Luther did occupy his chair faithfully for thirty turbulent years. The fact that in the end he also wrecked Staupitz’s whole monastic province is another matter which one may or may not choose to consider a sign of Staupitz’s shortsightedness. This comfortable man of artistic origin may also have had a certain appreciation of the unhewn and genuinely virginal in young Martin; at any rate, he did not hesitate to assure him that his particular tentationes pointed to a more than ordinary destiny. Nor did he, the confessor, hesitate to confess to Martin his own early tentationes, and his own fears about preaching and lecturing. These counterconfessions were surprising as well as therapeutic, for Staupitz, by then, felt thoroughly at home in the pulpit. He avoided the use of notes; once, getting stuck in the middle of a long list of biblical names, he said to the congregation, “Thus is pride punished.”46
Staupitz, of course, did not even vaguely anticipate the extent of the holocaust he was helping to kindle; and it is fascinating to speculate why this older man was so specifically reassuring to a younger one whom he did not really understand. It is my impression that Staupitz, like many an all too comfortable German patrician, felt a nostalgia for a creativity which he may have thought he possessed in his own late adolescence, and for potentialities, now bemoaned, which had been sacrificed to the role of church politician and statesman. He may thus have enjoyed fathering something truly religious in Luther; while Luther, in turn, responded with a complete and tenacious father transference of a positive kind, often overestimating the depth of his superior’s wit, and opening himself wide to his words so that they might counteract the evil testament of his real father’s words. What Staupitz said to him over the years never soured in Luther the way the pronouncements of every other authoritative figure did; on the contrary, Luther later on acknowledged theological debts to him which Staupitz almost certainly disavowed: “father in the evangelium,” Luther called him.
When the Reformation came, Staupitz quietly remained in the Church, transferred to another order, and died in a comfortable job in the Austrian Tyrol, while Luther was continuing to credit him not only with having saved him when he was about to drown (ersoffen) in his temptations, but also with having provided him with some specific fundamental insights on which the future wholeness of this new theology was to be based. Staupitz, he claimed, once said to him that one is not truly penitent because one anticipates God’s love, but because one already possesses it—a simple configuration of a totally reversed time perspective which Luther later thought to be strikingly confirmed in the scriptures. Staupitz may have said this—surely others have; the statement had so much prophetic meaning to Martin only because the right man happened in the right moment to support the total counterswing and the radical reversals inherent in Martin’s budding thoughts. At a time when all the traditional methods seemed to confirm only an increasingly desperate sense of isolation, Staupitz evoked enough trust so that Martin was able to experiment with ideas like those he was soon to find deep in himself. This is therapeutic leverage: the therapist knows how to say that particular right thing which, given favorable circumstances and the condition of the patient’s needy openness, strikes a deep note—in Martin’s case, undoubtedly, the long lost note of infant trust which preceded the emergence of his morbid conscience. The therapist as good father gives retroactive sanction to the efficacy of maternal trust, and thus to the good which was there from the beginning. But reality must provide the supreme ratification of the therapist’s pronouncement; and Martin’s further study of the scriptures did prove to him that the divine Word had apparently waited for a millennium to give voice to his words: “I have faith, and therefore am I justified”—words to which all the world resounded.
Staupitz made other statements equally routine, but in the context of this relationship, equally memorable. We have already quoted his denial that it could have been Christ who terrorized Martin so that he nearly fainted during the procession in which he walked behind Staupitz, who was holding high the holiest of holies. This incident may have been a neurotic symptom, a breakthrough of the infantile fear of the phallic father. Staupitz’s earlier admonition is more important and more positive: “to take a good look at the man who bears the name Christus”47 (den Mann anzusehen, der da heisst Christus)—nothing terribly original to say, as theologians have reiterated, pointing to Staupitz’s on the whole mediocre stature. But he happened to say it at the right time and in the right place, perhaps under that pear tree in whose shade he gave Martin his first feeling in a long, long time of a benevolent parental presence. This remark meant to Martin that he should stop doubting and start looking, use his senses and his judgment, grasp Christ as a male person like himself, and identify with the man in God’s son instead of being terrorized by a name, an image, a halo. Perhaps Staupitz never even said some of these things; maybe he was merely that right person of whom one likes to believe or to remember that he said the right thing.
That anxiety attack during the procession indicates that Martin felt in relation to Staupitz what clinicians call an ambivalent father transference: having learned to trust him, he could not help also weaving him into the punishing-and-revenging complex in which he had earlier involved the image of Christ. Against this complex no trust and no faith ever really quite prevailed, and in one form or another, it remained with Luther to the end. His ambivalence toward Staupitz may also have been expressed in his involvement in a political struggle within his Augustinian province in which he opposed Staupitz. Luther later was able to pass an objective judgment on Staupitz, whom he called frigidulus, somewhat cold, and parum vehemens, lacking in intensity. But Luther always and ever referred to him as the “father” of these two ideas: that faith comes first; and that we can face God’s son and look at him as a man. It should not be forgotten also that Staupitz, in his role as Martin’s superior, could afford to make Martin laugh; and humor marks the moment when our ego regains some territory from oppressive conscience. Above all, Staupitz let Martin talk, and made him preach and lecture. Luther was one of those addicts and servants of the Word who never know what they are thinking until they hear themselves say it, and who never know how strongly they believe what they say until somebody objects.
But what guided Staupitz, beside an educator’s astuteness? On his deathbed he is supposed to have said that he loved Martin with an affection “surpassing that of woman.”
Martin held the chair of Moral Philosophy for about one year (1508/09); then he was called back to Erfurt to be sent on an official errand to Rome. When he returned from Rome, he was immediately sent back to Wittenberg where, in 1512, he became a doctor of theology. But before we reach the end of Martin’s moratorium and let him become Luther, the preacher and lecturer, we must take note of that strange interlude, the future reformer’s meeting, as deadly as the quiet before the storm, with the center of Latin Christendom.