Charles Beard: "Martin Luther and the Reformation in Germany," Ch. 5, 13...

Beard indicates that Luther lived “on the verge of the humanist circle,” but not in it—he breathed Catholicism from his priest-teachers at Magdeburg, Eisenach, Erfurt and the Augustinian monastery. later. He trained in the standards of philosophy, logic, dialectics, etc. Luther, it is claimed, was a self-identifying Occamist and nominalist to life’s end. Gabriel Biel was one of the last great scholastics at Erfurt. The story is told of Luther’s long hours in the library including the discovery and fascination with a Latin Bible. The oft-told story of lightning near Stotterheim as the chief prompt to enter Erfurt’s Augustinian Convent on 17 Jul 1505. His father was unhappy. Luther’s life-long “Anfechtungen” is described—"The "Anfechtungen," the temptations, the conflicts, the despairs, which play so large a part in his Life, and, to the last, never left him, were facts of his earlier years also. They were not temptations of the flesh, incident to a hot youth; they were concerned with the terrors of the divine wrath, and the abandonment of the soul by God Now, or a little later, wholly unnerved and occupied by a single thought or passion, he fell into something like trances. Naturally his distress took the form of the fear of divine judgment: the pure desire for holiness, the horror of sin for sin's sake, is not the first trouble of the saint, but his final achievement, and when it comes, breathes peace rather than inspires terror. But to Luther the Father retreated behind the Son: and the Son was an awful figure, sitting upon the rainbow to judge the earth, and moved to compassion, if at all, by the tender pleadings of His mother. And how to placate the judge? How conjure away the cloud of divine anger that overhung and darkened his life? ‘Oh, when wilt thou, only once, be pious, and do enough to get for thyself a gracious God?’ This and such as this, he says, were the thoughts that drove him into monkery. Fastings and prayers, rigid self-discipline, all mortifications of the flesh, a complete self- abandonment to wise and pious direction, were the only method of perfectness which he knew…” (147). Luther turned in his Corpus Juris (legal textbook) for the Bible and theology.