He died early, but most accounts of his life don't really describe a person who took very good care of himself (even by 16th century standards - I'm working off of his own description of how much time he spent on the toilet). Though he did pretty much live the last three decades of his life under tremendous stress, which he internalized to a large degree.

>The level of faith it took Luther to follow his instincts,
>even to his death is remarkable. As semi-functioning
>Protestant, it's affecting that his actions gave so many
>others a sense of personal Salvation that would have escaped
>them.

Death aside, this is extremely well put. This struggle was tremendously personal for Luther. My academic advisor framed his struggle in terms of a search for "certainty" that he pursued intensely and, for a long time, at the detriment of his own spiritual state. The Catholic model for salvation did not (and does not, I just want to speak historically here and keep to past tense) allow for subjective knowledge of salvation, except in the case of special revelation. What this means, effectively, is that you have no way of knowing if are holy and if you will be saved.

As I mentioned above, Luther suffered from scruples (so did his near-contemporary, Ignatius of Loyola) which was more or less the 16th century version of a psychological disorder. For a faithful Catholic, which is how Luther understood himself, this meant that he was unable to accept the efficacy of the sacrament of confession. That you enter the confessional after careful reflection and with a contrite heart, confess your sins, are forgiven, and your penance relieves you of temporal punishment. Luther was unable to accept God's forgiveness through the mediator of the confessor, and was therefore in a spiritual state of OCD - he couldn't get clean.

In the Catholic vision for salvation, this forgiveness and penance and participation in the life of the church through the sacraments were grace from God that we could participate in, gaining merit and approaching holiness. This didn't offer the certainty of salvation that Luther wanted, but your average Catholic would argue that (due to the teaching authority of the Church, guided by the Holy Spirit) you *could* be certain of Church teaching that held:

Through these works, you could be made holy and, on your death, seen as holy by God and saved.

All this hinged on your state a death, which explains the widespread medieval horror at the possibility of sudden death. It was a dangerous world and nothing good happened if you got sick, so the last thing you wanted was to die spiritually unprepared.

For Luther, the certainty of Church teaching crumbled here: confession and penance did not make him holy. As you mention above, a PERSONAL salvation requires a relationship with God based on your own subjective experience. That Luther didn't *feel* holy was absolutely essential to his theology, and to its acceptance among thousands of people who sought a similarly interior, experiential relationship with God.

What he did experience is commonly called "Anfechtung" because between theologians absolutely needed to preserve tiny, subtle distinctions and Germans piling ideas into one word, there was no way this was ever going to be translated. It basically refers to the constant and overwhelming presence of sin and the devil driving one to doubt and despair.

Luther's system then, sought to radically enhance the personal aspect of salvation by not fighting Anfechtung - which he had done due to scruples, visiting confession over and over and over and over again - but by embracing it. The despair in the face of sin and the devil is utterly reasonable to Luther because sin is that powerful, it binds us and every decision we make, tainting even our attempts to do good and act rightly in the world. This despair, though, heightens our personal relationship with Jesus Christ. To return to Augustine in Confessions briefly, it's actually fascinating how little reference there is to Christ's suffering and death in there. God as a figure immanent but confoundingly transcendent is everywhere, but God-as-son is comparatively spare. There's a couple reasons that this might be the case, but since this isn't a thread on Augustine I'll ignore both of them for the larger scope of Church history. Louis Dupre's wonderful "Passage to Modernity" talks about the importance of St. Francis in the 13th century in insisting on a Christian's personal, intimate relationship with Jesus Christ in his fully human-ness, suffering for our salvation. This is part of the continuity of Luther's work with his medieval roots, because embracing this vision of the self as:

-observable
-mutable by our will

would animate his work, even if part of that mutability would not include the inherent righteousness preached by the church. Instead, we embrace despair in the face of sin as a reasonable outcome due to our self-examination. We are then certain of our salvation when we, again experientially and interiorly, understand ourselves as helpless to sin. Christ's sacrifice is then wholly effective, and any attempt to fill that gap with our works is a blasphemy and misunderstanding of that relationship.

Interestingly, this personal relationship with Christ may be the challenge of Luther which was most thoroughly addressed by the Catholic reformation. Thinkers like Ignatius of Loyola, Francisco de Osuna, Teresa of Avila, etc. sought to heighten the intimacy of the Christian believer with Christ, but to do so while still believing in the possibility of inherent righteousness - that you can be holy.

______________________________

"Walleye, a lot of things are going to go wrong in your life that technically aren't your fault. Always remember that this doesn't make you any less of an idiot"

--Walleye's Dad