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BECOMING LUTHER (part 1): A Spiritual Diary

An imaginative reconstruction of Martin Luther’s inner life, drawn from his letters, Table Talk, and theological writings, woven with philosophical reflections on consciousness, being, and language derived from Aristotle’s ‘Metaphysics’ a text which Luther would have imbibed intensively during his University studies.

The Making of a Monk (1505-1517)

July 2, 1505 – Stotternheim

The thunder still rings in my ears. Not the thunder of the storm—that has passed—but the thunder of God’s voice that split me open like lightning splits an oak. I lie in the mud, certain I would die, and in that terror I cry out: “Help me, Saint Anne, I will become a monk!”

What have I promised? My father will be furious. He had such plans—the law, prosperity, grandchildren. But when death’s face peers into yours, what are a father’s plans? What is prosperity? I saw in that moment the great abyss between what I am and what God is. The chasm is infinite.

I think of Aristotle’s distinction between potency and act—potentia and actus. Was I always potentially a monk, and the lightning merely actualized what was latent? Or did that moment create something entirely new? Being and becoming—are they one continuous motion, or do we leap from one state to another in terrible instants?

September 15, 1506 – Augustinian Cloister, Erfurt

The daily round: Matins at two, Prime at six, Terce at nine. The bells mark time like a heartbeat. But time behaves strangely in prayer. Sometimes an hour vanishes in what feels like a moment. Other times a moment stretches into eternity—particularly when doubts assails me.

Brother Johannes says I pray too much, that I exhaust the father confessor with my scrupulosity. But how can one pray too much when one’s soul hangs in the balance? Every day I discover new sins, sins I committed without knowing, sins of thought and intention that leave no outward trace yet poison the soul nonetheless.

Aristotle would call sin a privation—the absence of good, as blindness is the absence of sight. But this seems too gentle. Sin is not mere absence but active corruption. It is not blindness but willful closing of the eyes.

The harder I try to achieve purity through my own efforts, the more acutely I become aware of my failures. It is like trying to climb a mountain of glass. Every foothold crumbles.

May 2, 1507 – Erfurt

I nearly fled the altar at my first Mass.

When the moment came to consecrate the host, when I held in my trembling hands what was about to become the body of Christ, I was seized by such terror that I could scarcely breathe. This was not holy fear. It was the terror of standing before the infinite while being utterly finite.

My father’s words afterward stung: “Would that you had obeyed your father and not left the study of law! Perhaps this storm was a temptation of the devil, not a call from God.”

Could he be right? How does one distinguish God’s voice from one’s own fears, or from demonic deception? By what criterion can I judge? I am caught in an infinite regress. To trust my judgment requires trusting my faculty of judgment, which requires trusting my faculty of judging my faculty of judgment, and so on without end.

Perhaps this is why the Church exists—to break this circle, to provide external certainty. And yet the Church is made up of men, and men err.

November 8, 1510 – Rome

I have seen the Holy City, and my soul is sick.

The priests gabble through Mass as if racing one another. I saw one priest finish seven Masses in the time it took me to complete one—rushing through the sacred words as if they were a spell to be hurriedly pronounced. When I rebuked one for such irreverence, he laughed and said, “Passa, passa!”—hurry up! His next petitioner was waiting.

The commerce in relics and indulgences is shameless. For the right price, one can see a piece of the true cross (though if all pieces were gathered, they would build a ship), a vial of Mary’s milk, countless bones of saints. Each promises remission of so many years in purgatory—as if time in the afterlife could be measured with a merchant’s scales.I climbed the Scala Sancta on my knees, praying at each step for my grandfather’s soul. Halfway up, a thought struck me: “Who knows if this is true?”

But I pushed the thought away and continued climbing. One does not overturn centuries of Church teaching because of a moment’s insight on a staircase. Yet the thought remains, like a seed planted deep.

October 19, 1512 – Wittenberg

Today I received my doctorate in theology. Doctor Staupitz arranged everything, wanting me to take his chair of biblical studies. “You have work to do for God,” he told me. “This is your calling.”

The weight of it terrifies and exhilarates me. Perhaps only those who have wrestled with God can help others in their wrestling. As Dr Staupitz said: “A theologian is made by living, nay, by dying and being damned, not by understanding, reading, or speculation.”

I have begun lecturing on the Psalms. What a book! David’s soul laid bare—his sin, his repentance, his cry for mercy, his trust in God’s faithfulness. When I read the Psalms, I read my own heart. The students seem hungry for something different from the usual scholastic distinctions. When I speak of sin as lived experience, when I speak of grace as God’s merciful disposition toward us, I see their faces change.

June 1, 1514 (or later?) – Wittenberg (The Tower Experience)

A breakthrough today in my study of Romans.

I have been circling around Romans 1:17 for months: “For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith for faith, as it is written, ‘The righteous shall live by faith.'”

The righteousness of God. Justitia Dei. For years these words filled me with dread. I understood them to mean God’s justice, His standard against which we are measured and found wanting. I hated that phrase. I hated Paul for writing it.

But today, studying in the tower, the meaning suddenly inverted like a key turning in a lock. What if the righteousness of God is not the righteousness He demands but the righteousness He gives? What if it is not righteousness before God but righteousness from God?

The righteous shall live by faith—not by achieving righteousness through works, but by trusting in the righteousness that comes from God as pure gift; this is the  unconditionally bestowed righteousness which produces another kind of righteousness, that of our obedience, that is, the righteousness of a good conscience or works, which God commands us to do, which necessarily follow reconciliation.

I felt as though I had been born again. The gates of paradise opened. The whole of Scripture took on a new face.

If righteousness is God’s gift rather than our achievement, then what becomes of all our striving, our pilgrimages, our purchases of indulgences? Are they not attempts to buy what God freely offers?

Everything has changed. The God I feared as Judge has revealed Himself as Gift-Giver.

March 15, 1516 – Wittenberg

I have found a book that speaks to my condition—Johann Tauler’s sermon on living by faith rather than works.

Tauler writes of the soul’s dark night, of God’s seeming absence, of the temptation to trust in our own religious performances rather than in God’s mercy alone. “We must despair of ourselves,” Tauler writes, “that we may hope in God alone.”

Yes! This is what I have been groping toward. I have begun to see that all my anguish over whether I have confessed every sin, whether my contrition is perfect, whether I have earned enough merit—all this is backwards. It puts me at the centre instead of God.

The question is not “Have I done enough?” but “Is God’s promise trustworthy?” The answer to the first question is always ‘no’. The answer to the second is always ‘yes’.

I am beginning to understand what it means to live by faith.

October 31, 1517 – Wittenberg

I have nailed my theses to the door of the Castle Church. Ninety-five propositions concerning indulgences and the nature of true repentance. My hand trembled as I lifted the hammer. Not from fear—though perhaps there should have been more fear—but from necessity.

The selling of grace has become monstrous. This Tetzel with his coins and his jingles: “As soon as the coin in the coffer rings, the soul from purgatory springs!” As if God’s mercy were a commodity to be purchased at market rates.

At table tonight, Philip Melanchthon asked me if I understood what I had begun. “Martin,” he said, “you have challenged Rome itself.” I laughed—not from levity, but from a strange freedom. I told him: “I dispute simply as a scholar. If I am wrong, let them show me from Scripture where I err.”

But here is what troubles my sleep: How can the human will, bound by sin, choose God? We do not choose God—He chooses us. We are not the agents of our own salvation but its recipients.

In the death of Christ, what Aristotle called “substance” and “accident” collapse into mystery—bread that is truly body, wine that is truly blood. Not by transubstantiation—that Scholastic conjuring—but by the simple, terrible word of promise: “This IS my body.”

When Christ says: “This is my body,” does the bread change in its substance while retaining its accidents? I begin to think we ask the wrong questions. We try to capture divine mystery in Aristotelian categories, but God is not bound by our philosophical systems.

The mystery remains mystery. And I must sleep.

– Nicos Kaloyirou