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Unfortunately for Hans’s plans, the fledgling law student began to have doubts about the status of his soul and, with them, the career his father had securely set before him. In 1505, when Luther was not yet 22, he took an officially sanctioned, yet unexplained, leave from the university. He visited his family to seek, it appears, their advice about his future. On his return to Erfurt, as Luther fought his way through a severe thunderstorm, a bolt of lightning struck the ground near him.

“Help me, St. Anne!” Luther screamed. “I will become a monk!”

After his vow to St. Anne, the familiar patroness of miners, Luther spent several weeks discussing his decision with friends. Then, in July 1505, as was the requirement upon entering monastic life, he gave away all his possessions—his lute, on which he was proficient; his many books, including the “Corpus Juris Civilis”; his clothing and eating utensils—and entered the Black Cloister of the Observant Augustinians. As was customary, he endured more than a month of examining his conscience and being interrogated by the appropriate authorities before proceeding to the novitiate (a further year of scrutiny before becoming a friar).

By all evidence, Luther was extraordinarily successful (“impeccable” was a later description) as an Observant Augustinian, just as he had been as a student. He did not simply engage in prayer, fasts, and ascetic practices (such as going without sleep, enduring bone-chilling cold without a blanket, and flagellating himself), he pursued them earnestly. As he later commented, “If anyone could have earned heaven by the life of a monk, it was I.”

He became a priest within fewer than two years of entering the Black Cloister. He was sent to Rome as the traveling companion for a senior brother on crucial business for the Observants in Germany. In addition, his superiors ordered him to undertake the study of theology so he could become one of the order’s teachers.

At this moment Luther began to be someone worthy of study in his own right. The fears and anxieties that drove him into the Black Cloister left him during his first year or so there, but then they intensified. Although he sought to love God with all his heart, soul, mind, and strength, he found no consolation. He was increasingly terrified of the wrath of God: “When it is touched by this passing inundation of the eternal the soul feels and drinks nothing but eternal punishment.”

The command to study academic theology meant he could investigate his struggles intellectually. He later commented that he went “where my temptations took me,” meaning that he dared to investigate the issues that most troubled him. But it was slow going: “I did not learn my theology all at once....but like Augustine through much study, teaching, and writing.”

In the process, Luther’s attacks of doubt about his salvation became objective realities that he studied—almost in the manner that a mathematician puzzles over a difficult problem.

As a beginning theology student, Luther was taught the prevailing orthodoxy, and parts of his early lectures as a professor show he believed it.

His teachers, following the Bible, taught that God demanded absolute righteousness, as in the passage “Be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” People needed to love God absolutely and their neighbors as themselves. They should have the unshakable faith of Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son.

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