Hatred and the Muddling of Fact and Perspective
Only after [Luther's] 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 do us 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 [see note below] 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 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 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," he said of 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 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 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.
- Erik Erikson (Young Man Luther: A Study in Psychoanalysis and History, pages 146-147). Italics original, bolded emphases added.
