The Life of Luther
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| Partner: | buecher.de |
| Hersteller: | Forgotten Books (Michelet, M.) |
| Stand: | 2015-08-04 03:50:33 |
Produktbeschreibung
Excerpt from The Life of Luther: Gathered From His Own Writings The following work is neither the life of Luther turned into an historical romance, nor a history of the establishment of Lutheranism, but a biography, consisting of a series of transcripts from Luther´s own revolutions. With the exception of the events of the earlier years of his life, when Luther could not have been the penman, the transcriber has seldom had occasion to hold the pen himself. His task has been limited to selecting, arranging, and fixing the chronology of detached passages. Throughout the work Luther is his own spokesman - Luther´s life is told by Luther himself. Who could be so daring as to interpolate his own expressions into the language of such a man! Our business is to listen to, not interrupt him: a rule we have observed as strictly as was possible. This work, which was not published till 1835, was almost entirely written during the years 1828 and 1829. The translator of the Scienza Nuora felt at that period a lively consciousness of the necessity of tracing from theories to their application, of studying the general in the individual, history in biography, humanity in one man; and this a man who had been in the highest rank of mankind, an individual who had been both an entity and an idea; a perfect man, too - a man both of thought and action; a man, in fine, whose whole life was known, and that in the greatest detail - a man, whose every act and word had been remarked and registered. If Luther has not written his own memoirs, he has, at the least, supplied admirable materials for the task. His correspondence is scarcely less voluminous than Voltaire´s; and there is not one of his dogmatic or polemical works into which he has not introduced some unintentional detail which the biographer may turn to advantage. All his words, too, were greedily garnered by his disciples; good, bad, insignificant, nothing escaped them. Whatever dropped from Luther in his most familiar converse, at his fireside, in his garden, at table, after supper, his most trifling remark to his wife or his children, his most trivial reflection, went straightway into their note-books. A man so closely watched and followed must have been constantly letting fall words which he would have wished to recall. Lutherans have subsequently had occasion to regret their indiscreet records, and would willingly have erased this line, that page; but Quod scriptum est, scriptum est (What is written is written). In these records, then, we have Luther´s veritable confessions - careless, unconnected, involuntary, and, therefore, the more veritable confessions. Assuredly, Rousseau´s are less ingenuous; St. Augustin´s less full, less diversified. Had Luther himself written every word of this biography, it would take its rank between the two works just alluded to. It presents at once the two sides, which they give separately. In St. Augustin´s, passion, nature, and human individuality, are only shown, in order to be immolated at the shrine of divine grace. The saint´s confessions are the history of a crisis undergone by the soul, of a regeneration, of a vita nuova (a new life); he would have blushed at making us more intimately acquainted with that worldly life on which he had turned his back. The reverse is the case with Rousseau. Grace is out of the question; nature reigns with undivided, all-triumphant, and undisguised sway; so much so, as at times to excite disgust. Luther presents, not grace and nature in equilibrium, but in their most agonising strife. Many other men have suffered the struggles of sensibility, the excruciating temptations of doubt. Pascal clearly endured them all, but stifled them, and died of the effort. Luther conceals nothing: he could not contain himself. He suffers us to see and to sound the deep plague-sore inherent in our nature, and
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