Amidst all this inward woe there was a cheerier side of things to look at. A little daughter had been born to him at the end of 1527. He and his family had happily been spared by the plague. He had succeeded in imposing silence on most of his opponents among the preachers of the new faith. His sovereign too was more than ever resolved to support him in his work. In the German lands, and even beyond, the Evangel was daily gaining new ground. Hence there was every reason for self-gratulation. In spite of all this what he says to his friends retains a tone of bitterness and apprehension: “Help me in my agony!” “At times indeed the temptation becomes less severe, but then again it overwhelms me more relentlessly than before” (Dec. 30).—“We are all well excepting Luther himself, who, though he feels well in body, is tormented outwardly by the whole world and inwardly by the devil and all his angels.” “Satan gnashes his teeth furiously all around us” (Dec. 31).—“I have been well acquainted with such temptations from my youth upwards, but that they could assume such dimensions I had never dreamed. Christ holds His own with the utmost difficulty, yet so far He has been victorious. I commend myself to your prayers and those of your brethren. I have saved others and cannot save myself. Praised be my Christ,” he adds, convinced in spite of all that he was in the right, “praised be He in the midst of despair, death and blasphemy.... It is our glory to have lived in the world agreeably with the will of Christ, forgetful of our former very evil life. Let it suffice that Christ is our life and our righteousness, though this is indeed a hard truth and one which the flesh knows not. It is a bitter chalice that I must drink as the end of the world draws nigh” (Jan. 1, 1528).
After this sad New Year’s letter Luther’s complaints of his pains of soul cease for a while, though, not long after, they reappear at intervals in an even more startling form.
That bodily sickness was not entirely responsible is clear from his frequent allusions to his good state of health even during such spells of stress; in the end, too, he got the better of these fears, not as the result of any improvement in bodily health, but thanks to the defiant spirit with which he clung to what he deemed was his Divine mission. Everybody knows how much a forceful will is able to do, even in the profoundest depths of the soul. Nevertheless the unhappy victory he ultimately succeeded in gaining over his own self has a right to be accounted something quite out of the common, something of which few in his position would have been capable. Hardly ever has a man had such Titanic forces at his disposal as Luther. He neither could nor would go back, the gap was already too wide; the inward voices spoke in vain which urged him to put away the “hard truth” of the doctrine he had discovered, and to return to the Church which he had spurned.
On the contrary, quite in his own fashion, he declared, on Jan. 27, 1528, that “he was determined still further to provoke Satan, who was raging against him with the utmost fury,” and thus make an end once for all of his struggles and fears. “But after I am dead,” so he begs his friends, “then do you who survive me avenge me on Satan and his apostles” (Jan. 6).
In the same year, on the strength of his own experience, he gave his friend Wenceslaus Link detailed directions for those followers of the Evangel who are “tempted in faith and hope.” They are to make the “greatest efforts” against the devil who is so plainly to be discerned; they are to build blindly on the certainty that all thoughts to the contrary are mere devil’s treason. Further, they are to cling to the Word of a good man as to a voice from God in Heaven, just as he himself had often found strength by revolving in mind Bugenhagen’s simple words: “You must not despise our consolation.”[1361] Luther seems to have sent Link several such letters on the means of escaping from “despair.”[1362] He knew only too well the fears which many underwent in the new Evangel.[1363]
“Our conscience tells us,” so he says in one of his sermons, “I am a sinner, it goes ill with me, and this I have richly deserved. Then the conscience begins to quake and says: It will not be well with me when I die. Such is fear of death.”[1364]
The return of his friends to Wittenberg in 1528 and social intercourse with his own circle gradually changed his frame of mind. He was very susceptible to the influence of cheerful conversation and to the exhilarating effects of drink. The new and important tasks which confronted him also tended to take his mind from the trouble that reigned within him.
“My Satan,” he was able to write on Feb. 25, 1528, “is now rather more bearable; your prayers are taking effect.”[1365]
But, in the following year (1529), it became apparent that the storm was not yet over. As early as Feb. 12 he again asks his friend Amsdorf for the help of his prayers that he may not “be delivered into Satan’s hand.”[1366]—Curiously enough, on the very day that the famous Protest of Spires was made (April 19, 1529), Luther was again passing through one of the worst bouts of his “wrestling with the devil”; he poured out his heart and conscience to his friend Jonas: If it was really an apostolic attribute to be “in deaths often” (2 Cor. xi. 23) then indeed he was in this respect a “very Peter or Paul”; but, unfortunately, he had other less apostolic qualities, “qualities better fitting robbers, publicans, whores and sinners.”[1367]—Elsewhere he indeed compares himself with the Apostle Peter, but with Peter while still weak in the faith and wavering, as he was before the descent of the Holy Ghost: “Though I feel fairly well in body yet I am weak in the spirit, and, like Peter’s, my faith is shaky”[1368] (July 31).
When he wrote this he had already consented to take part in the Marburg Conference with Zwingli. We already know how, outwardly at least, he triumphed over Zwingli at Marburg; yet, when returning home in good health and spirits, the “temptations” suddenly came upon him again at Torgau in Oct., 1529, with such violence, that he admitted he had “only with difficulty (‘vix et ægre’) continued his journey to Wittenberg, after having given up all hope of again seeing his family.”[1369] Very likely apprehension of danger from the Turks contributed to this. He himself says: “It may be that, by this combat (‘agon’), I myself am doing my bit in enduring and conquering the Turk, or at least his god, viz. the devil.”[1370] Just before this, however, and on this very journey home, he had composed the so-called Articles of Schwabach, which contain not a trace of his doubts and self-reproaches, but, on the contrary, are full of that firm defiance which characterises his other writings. They insist most strongly on his views as against those of both Zwinglians and Catholics.
Before reaching Torgau Luther preached several sermons, including one at Erfurt.
At Erfurt, as though to relieve his fears, Luther stormed against the Evangelical fanatics, and likewise against the monks and the holy-by-works. Maybe the sight of the town where he had passed his youth set him thinking of the zealous and peaceful years he had spent in the monastery and thus added to his sense of disquiet. Nor was this the first time that his anger had gushed forth on Erfurt in one of those outbursts by which he was wont to forestall the reproaches of his conscience.
One such eruption of an earlier date may serve as an instance of the fits of rage to which he was liable when battling with his temptations.
The Erfurt Evangelicals had failed to silence the Franciscan preacher, Dr. Conrad Kling. That this valiant friar, the ablest priest at Erfurt and a powerful pulpit orator, should continue to attract large crowds, annoyed Luther exceedingly. In his writing to the “Christians at Erfurt” of Jan. or Feb., 1527, he invoked “God’s anger and judgments” upon them and threatened all with Christ’s warnings against “Capharnaum, Chorozain and Bethsaida” unless at the order of their Councillors they expelled the preacher and in this way safeguarded the “great fulness and wealth of the Word” which he himself had proclaimed to them. Satan, verily, was not asleep in their midst, as they could very well see from the working of that “doctor of darkness,” the shameless monk.[1371]
Kling, who was much esteemed by the Catholics, and was seeking to save the last remnants of the faithful, was pictured by the fanatism of his furious opponent as a glaring example of that most dreadful of all sins, viz. the sin against the Holy Ghost. Now that the world, by the preaching of the Evangel, has been delivered from the lesser sins of “blindness, error and darkness,” so Luther told the people of Erfurt, “why do we rage with the other sin against the Holy Ghost and provoke God’s wrath to destroy us in time and for all eternity? God will not forgive this sin, nor can He endure it; there is no need to say more.” “When they start wantonly fighting against the plain, known truth, then there is no further help or counsel.”[1372]
Such action can only be explained by a quite peculiar mental state. Boundless irritation, probably not unconnected with his struggles of conscience, combined with a positive infatuation for his own ideas, was the cause of the following outbursts, which almost remind us of the ravings of a maniac.
In 1528, in the preface to a book of Klingenbeyl, he inveighs against the celibacy of the clergy: “They are devils in human skins and so are all who knowingly and wilfully hold with them.” “Amongst themselves they are the worst of all whoremongers, adulterers, women-stealers and girl-spoilers, so that their shameless record of sins fills the heaven and the earth.” Their wickedness is matched only by their stupidity. “The people [the Papists] have become a Pope-Ass, so that they are and remain donkeys however much we may boil them, roast them, flay them, turn them over, baste them, or break them; all they can do is abuse Luther.... And because I have driven them to Scripture and they can neither understand nor make use of it, God help us what a wild bawling and outcry I have caused. Here one howls about the sacrament under one kind, there another bellows against the marriage of the clergy; one shrieks about the Mass, and another yells about good works.” “The vermin and the ugly crew I have rounded up understands not a bit even its own noise and howling.” “Hence you may see how they love justice, viz. their own tyranny.”
To the measure of their viciousness, stupidity and obstinacy must be added vulgar impudence of the worst sort: “They shamelessly and scandalously relieve themselves of their filth in front of all the world.” “Such rude fellows remind me of a coarse clod-hopper who would ease himself in the marketplace before everyone, all the while pointing to a house where a little child is modestly and privily relieving nature, and who would imagine that he had thereby excused himself and provoked everybody to laugh at the child.” “Ought not such rascals to be hunted down with hounds and driven out with rods.... Let them go, blind leaders of the blind that they are! God’s endless wrath has come upon them so that now they can no longer see anything.”[1373]
According to recent research it is to this trying time of inward conflict, after his recovery from his illness in 1527, that Luther’s famous Hymn “A safe stronghold our God is still” (“Ein’ feste Burg”) belongs. This “great hymn of the evangelical community,” as Köstlin termed it, proclaims, in the words of the Psalmist, that God is the strong bulwark and sure refuge of Luther’s cause.
“The ancient Prince of Hell
Hath risen with purpose fell;
Strong mail of Craft and Power
He weareth in this hour,
On Earth is not his fellow.
••••••••
And were this world all devils o’er,
And watching to devour us,
We lay it not to heart so sore,
Not they can overpower us.
••••••••
God’s Word, for all their craft and force,
Shall not one moment linger.”[1374]
“This hymn came from the very bottom of his heart,” says Köstlin, “being written with a bold faith under stress of temptation.” The first trace of the hymn is now believed to be found in a recently discovered Leipzig hymnbook, which is supposed to be a reprint of the Wittenberg “Gesangbüchlein” of 1528, in which this hymn may have figured.[1375]
A Protestant researcher, P. Tschackert, has pointed out, that, in that same year (1528), the Wittenbergers went in fear of an attack on the Evangelicals by the Catholic Estates. Luther’s attitude towards the supposed menace, intensified as it was by his inward struggles about that time, calls for some further remarks.
The alleged disclosures of Otto von Pack to the Landgrave of Hesse concerning the secret plans of the Catholics to dethrone the Protestant Princes by force of arms had proved to be a mere fabrication.[1376] Luther, nevertheless, stormed against the Duke of Saxony who was supposed to be implicated most deeply in the business. He wrote: “Duke George is a foe of my doctrine, hence he rages against the Word of God; I must therefore believe he rages against God Himself and His Christ. But if he rages against God, then, privily, I must believe him to be possessed of the devil. If he is possessed of the devil, then in my heart I must believe that he cherishes the worst of intentions.”[1377] Thanks to such dialectics, Luther again formulates the charges embodied in the Pack disclosures. As Tschackert points out, Luther persisted in crediting his opponents with all that was worst.
In 1528 he preached on John xvii.; in the tone of these sermons, printed in 1530, we find several remarkable echoes of Luther’s hymn “Ein’ feste Burg.”[1378]
The preacher speaks to his hearers both of inward temptations and of outward hardships, and uses words which recall, now his complaints of his experiences with the devil, now the trustful defiance he voices in his hymn on the “Safe stronghold.”
“We must know that there is no way of resisting the devil’s temptations than by holding fast to the plain word of Scripture and not thinking or speculating further.... Whoever does not do this will be disappointed, and err, and have a fall.”[1379] If you do not simply believe in the Word, he repeats to the people, you will “rush in headlong and be overthrown; for the devil is able to persuade our heart that he is God, and to disguise himself in great splendour and majesty”; “in the assumption of prudence, holiness and majesty no one in the world excels him”; “hence no one can cheat him better than by tying himself to the tree where God has placed him; otherwise, if he seizes you, you are lost and he will carry you off as the hawk does the chick from under the wing of the clucking hen.”[1380]
In the same sermon, however, he also prophesies the shame and destruction of “our wrathful foes who seek to stifle the Evangel and to stamp out the Christians, many of whom they have already burned and murdered; for even prouder kings and lords—in comparison with whom our princes and lords are the merest beggars[1381]—have come to grief over the Evangel and been wrecked by it.” Speaking of the Catholic princes headed by the Emperor Charles V, he exclaims: “Our furious tyrants, when they abuse the Evangel, and persecute, murder and burn all our people are termed Christian princes, and defenders of the Church; this exonerates whatever shameful and wicked practices they may commit against both God and man.”[1382]
Again he extols the Word, making Christ say: “I have given them the Word whereby Thy Name has been made known to them” (“Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn,” as the original of the hymn runs); “but neither the Papacy nor any other fanatics will accept it,” i.e. the knowledge of Christ; “for this reason we are forced unceasingly to wrangle, grapple and fight with them and the devil.”[1383] Still, “all our protection, our redemption from sin, death, the world and the devil’s power is comprised in the Word alone”; holding fast to this we have all the prophets, martyrs, apostles and the whole of Christendom on our side. But Christendom is a “powerful lady, Empress of heaven and earth, at whose feet devil, world, death and hell must fall as soon as she drops a word.” “For,” so he continues, thinking of himself, “who can check or harm a man who has so defiant a spirit?” “Whether the devil attacks singly a weak member of Christendom and fancies he has gobbled him up [cp. the use of this same word below, p. 347] or even Christendom as a whole,” he must nevertheless “tremble and fall to the ground.” “If a sin attacks him [the Christian], and seeks to affright, gnaw, and oppress his conscience and threaten him with devil, death and hell, then God and His multitude [the saints and angels] will say: ‘Good sin, let him be; death, do not slay him; hell, do not swallow him!’”[1384]
“But here faith comes in,” he at once goes on, “for, to the eyes of the world and to reason, everything seems just the reverse.” [“And were the world all devils o’er,” sings the hymn on the “Safe stronghold.”]
The outside menace from the Papists and their princes, and the inward, “sudden, baneful attacks of the devil in our conscience,” Luther writes in his interpretation of John xviii. (v. 28), all “this is written to put to blush our high-priests and elders, viz. the bishops and princes who go about the world with noses in the air as though they were pious and holy, whereas they drive out of their land the pious, God-fearing Christians and preachers. Who in the devil’s name gave them power to pass judgment on the teaching of the Evangel?” But the devil, too, persecutes us with his machinations. “When he finds some poor conscience that would fain be pious, he attacks it with trifles.... Amongst us Evangelicals there is not one who has not great, big sins and difficulties, such as doubts, and waverings in the faith, and other awkward knots. But such big sins and great difficulties the devil is willing to discard while he attacks us about some paltry thing ... and torments and plagues our conscience.” But when thereby we are “upset and become troubled” we ought to “console ourselves and say: ‘If Our Lord God can have patience with me even though my faith in Him be not firm, but often wavering and doubtful, why then do you torment me, you devil, with other petty matters and sins? I can see through all your artfulness and wicked malice; you cloak over the great sins and big difficulties so that I may not heed them, or make any conscience of them, nor seek forgiveness for them....’ Therefore a Christian must learn not to allow himself to be too easily troubled with remorse of conscience; but if he believes in Christ, wishes to be pious, strives against sin as far as he is able and yet occasionally makes mistakes, stumbles and falters, he must not allow such stumbling to upset him in conscience, but rather he must say: Away with this error and this stumbling! Let it join my other faults and crimes and be included among the other sins of which the Creed teaches us the forgiveness.”[1385]
The further course of Luther’s inner history will show more clearly how far the article of the forgiveness of sins served its purpose in his own case and how he contrived to prop up a faith, which, during the years 1527 and 1528, was so distressingly inclined to “doubt and wavering.”
During the time when the Diet of Augsburg was in preparation Luther’s complaints about his inward struggles recede somewhat into the background, outward events engrossing all his attention.
Matters changed, however, when the Diet actually began its sessions and he himself took up his residence in the fortress of Coburg. There he was a prey to overwhelming suffering both of body and of mind.
His nervous ailments, particularly the noises in his head, became much worse at that time, owing partly to his deep concern for his cause, partly to his too great literary output during his sojourn in the solitude. Against his inner anxieties he tried the weapon of humour.[1386] But all in vain. The “spiritual temptations” set in, and his loneliness made them even worse. It was at the beginning of May that he received Satan’s famous “embassy.” Because he had been left quite alone (in the absence of Veit Dietrich and Cyriacus Kaufmann), so he says, Satan had so far got the better of him that he had been obliged to flee from the room and to seek the society of men. When writing to Melanchthon about this he uses some strange-sounding words: “Hardly can I await the day when I shall at last behold the tremendous power of this spirit and his majesty, which, in its kind, is quite divine (‘planeque divinam maiestatem quandam’).”[1387] Here he is presumably alluding to the time of his death and of the judgment when he would behold Satan. He had, however, not to wait so long, for, in the following month and while still at the Coburg, he was vouchsafed a glimpse of the Enemy under a certain shape; at least such was his belief; the actual vision will be described later (vol. vi., xxxvi., 3).
He must have suffered grievously from his fears whilst in the castle; he compares himself to the parched country surrounding it, so greatly was he tried inwardly by storms and heat;[1388] but “our cause is safe if our Word is true, and that it is true is sufficiently demonstrated by the ferocity and frenzy of our foes.”[1389] He was visited by thoughts of death, and, during these, he sought, as he related later, the spot in the castle chapel where he would be laid to rest.[1390] Then, when his disquiet of mind began to abate, intense bodily weakness again made him think of death; this too, in his opinion, was Satan’s doing. When ultimately he left the Coburg he felt himself a broken man and began to sigh more and more over his burden of years, though, as a matter of fact, he was still comparatively young.
Nevertheless, in a letter to Melanchthon of June 29, 1530, he praised the comfort of his place of residence. Above all he was able to report that “the spirit who formerly beat me with fists [in mind] seems to be losing heart.”[1391] Yet, alluding to his bodily pains, he says sadly: “I fancy that another has taken his [the other tormentor’s] place and plagues my body; but I prefer to endure this torture of the body rather than that hangman of the spirit. But he has sworn to have my life, this I feel plainly, and will never stop until he has gobbled me up.”[1392]
But when he had returned safe and sound to Wittenberg he was disposed to look back with utter horror on what he had gone through, physically and mentally, when at the Coburg. “Now my shoulders are really beginning to feel the weight of my years,” he writes to trusty Amsdorf; “and my powers are going. The angel of Satan has indeed dealt hardly with me.”[1393]
“My thoughts did me more harm than all my work,” he said, in May, 1532, speaking of those which came by night (“curæ nocturnæ”).[1394] Nothing, so he says elsewhere, had brought him so nigh to death as these; with them all his labours, to which the great numbers of letters he received bore witness, were not to be compared.[1395] To young Schlaginhaufen Veit Dietrich related, as a memory of the Coburg days, how Luther had said to him there: “Were I to die now and be cut open, my heart would be found all shrivelled up in consequence of my distress and sadness of spirit.”[1396]
His having to wrestle with such moods is also in great part responsible for the stormy and extravagant tone of the works he wrote during, or shortly after, his stay at the Coburg.[1397]
In 1537, in his second serious illness, at Schmalkalden, and on the return journey from this town to Wittenberg, Luther displayed the same stubborn spirit as in 1527. In 1537 it was an attack of stone which brought him to the brink of the grave. Later on he himself declared of this crisis, that he would have died quite easily and trustfully. Into his deepest feelings at that time we have, of course, no means of probing, but it may be, that, by dint of persistently repressing his earlier scruples, he had indeed reached the state of calm resignation he depicts. At the same time his great bodily exhaustion will probably have reacted on his spirit, his very weakness thus explaining the silence of the inward voices.
“At Gotha [on my way back],” so he told his friends in 1540, “I was quite certain I was to die; I said good-bye to all, called Bugenhagen, commended to him the Church, the school, my wife and all else, and begged him to give me absolution.... Thus I should have died in Christ with a perfectly quiet soul and without a struggle. But the Lord wished to preserve me in life. My ‘Catena’ [Katey] too,” so he goes on to speak of one of his wife’s illnesses, “when once we had already given up all hopes for her life, would have died gladly, and readily, and with a quiet soul; she merely repeated a thousand times over the words: ‘In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped, I shall not be confounded for ever.’” From such experiences in her case and in his own Luther draws the conclusion, that “at times the devil desists from tempting to blasphemy.” “At other times God allows him,” so he thinks, “to try us thereby, so that we may not become indolent but may learn to fight. At the end of our life, however, all such temptations cease; for then the Holy Spirit is at the side of the faithful believer, restrains the devil by force and pours into the heart perfect peace and security.”[1398]
Such was his interpretation of the case.
At other times Luther expresses wonder at the wrong-headed sectarians who can with such confidence look even death itself in the face. He refuses to apply to them what has just been said; it is no real peace that they die in, rather they are blinded by Satan’s delusions. “This new sect of the Anabaptists,” he says indignantly, “grows marvellously, they live with a great show [of the spirit] and boldly face death by fire and water.”[1399] He is thinking of the Anabaptists who were executed in 1527—“May God have mercy on these poor captives of Satan.... They cannot be coerced either by fire or by the sword; so greatly does Satan rage in this hour because it is his last.” And yet the whole thing was little more than a joke of Satan’s.
“With me, however, he certainly does not jest; I believe that I am pleasing to God and displeasing to Satan.”[1400]
He overlooks the fact that the Anabaptists, too, fancied they were pleasing Christ, nay, were passionately convinced that they were living for Christ and not for Satan; they even exposed themselves of their own accord to the worst torments of the executioner before they passed out of life, obstinately declaring that it was impossible for them to recant. The words in which Luther complains of their obstinacy are a two-edged sword.
He is fond of bewailing the stubbornness of the heretics; it was a subject of wholesome fear for all; it penetrated “like water into their inward parts and like oil into their bones”: so far do they go that they see “salvation and blessing” in their own doctrine alone; few are they who “come right again,” “the others remain under their own curse.” “Neither have I ever read,” he assures us, “of any teacher who originated a heresy being converted”; “the true Evangel which teaches the contrary of their doctrine is and always will be to them a devil’s thing.”[1401]—“No heretic,” he cries, “will let himself be talked over.... A man is soon done for when the devil thus lays hold of him.”[1402] Such a one boasts that, “he is quite certain of things”; “No Christian ever held so fast to his Christ as a Jew or a fanatic does to his pet doctrine.”[1403] He also believes his opponent to be a liar “as surely as God is God.”[1404] And yet, so Luther argues, the sectarian or fanatic can never be certain at all; not one of his gainsayers is sure of his cause; not one has “felt the struggle and been at grips with the devil” like himself.[1405]
But I, “I am certain that my word is not mine but the word of Christ,” and “every man who speaks the word of Christ is free to boast that his mouth is the mouth of Christ.”[1406]—“Had not the devil attacked us with such power and cunning during all these years,” he says in his second exposition of the 1st Epistle of Peter (published in 1539), “we should never have acquired this certainty on doctrine.”[1407] It is to his awful “temptations,” that, as we have heard him repeatedly assure us, he owes the strength of his faith.[1408] Unceasingly did he strive to acquire a feeling of strong certainty in defiance of the devil, as indeed his theology demanded: We must by fiducial faith have made our position secure against the devil, otherwise we have no stay at all.[1409]
“Even though I stumble yet I am resolved to stand by what I have taught.” And, as though to falter in this way was inevitable, he continues: “for although a Christian holds fast until death to his doctrine, yet he often stumbles and begins to doubt; but it is not so with the fanatics, they stand firm.”[1410] And yet, according to Luther, everyone must “stand firm,” for in theology there is no room for “fears and doubts. And we must have certainty concerning God. But in conversing with other men we must be modest and say, ‘If anyone knows better let him say so.’”[1411]
Hardly had Luther recovered from his second bout of illness than the gloomy thoughts once more emerged from their hiding-place and began again to dog his footsteps, though perhaps not quite so persistently as after his recovery from his previous sickness ten years earlier. It is as though on both occasions the sight of the gaping jaws of death had set free the troubled spirits within, and as though the spell which momentarily restrained his terrors of soul had been loosed as soon as his bodily powers returned. This was the last great attack he had to endure, or at least from this time onward definite allusions to his struggles of conscience are not forthcoming as before.
In 1537 he lay for a fortnight under the stress of that “spiritual malady” (above, p. 319), during which he “disputed with God,” was scarcely able to take food, to sleep or to preach, in spite of his “understanding a little” “the Psalter and its consolation,” viz. that one must be patient.[1412]—On Oct. 7, 1538, he bewails his “daily agony.”[1413] In the same year he wrings some comfort out of Paul, who also had been unable to “lay hold of” what was right;[1414] he also has a poke at the devil: “Why arraign us so sternly before God as though you were quite holy, and the highest judge!”[1415]
He then realised in his own person how one thus oppressed with terrors of soul could be tempted, like Job (iii. 1 ff.), to curse the day of his birth. After having, during the night of Aug. 1, 1538, suffered severe pains in the joints of the arm, he said next day, that such pains were tolerable in comparison with others: “The flesh can get used to this sort of thing. But when the spiritual temptations come and the ‘Cursed be the day I was born’ follows, that is a harder matter. Christ was tried in a similar way in the Garden of Olives.... He, on account of His temptations, is our best advocate in all temptations.... Let us but cling fast to hope!”[1416]
It cannot be established that he was speaking seriously or was prompted by despair when he wished that “he had died as a child,” nay, “had never been born,” and stated that he would gladly see “all his books perish.” We must beware of laying too great stress on occasional deliverances spoken in moments of irritation, or on little tricks of speech such as his depreciatory remarks concerning his books.[1417]
It may be to the purpose to quote here some undated statements of Luther’s which paint in lurid style his frequent struggles of mind and his manner of resistance.
Jerome, Augustine and Ambrose had “carnal and childish temptations”; “these are nothing compared with Satan who strikes us, the [Greek: skolops], that, as it were, fastens us to the gallows; then Jerome’s and the others’ child-temptations are chased away entirely.”[1418]—“On one occasion I was greatly tempted in my garden near the bush of lavender, whereupon I sang the hymn ‘Now praise we Christ the Holy One,’ otherwise I should have expired on the spot. Hence, when you feel such a thought, say, ‘This is not Christ.’ ... This I preach and write, but I am not yet at home in this art when tempted in this way.”[1419]
The worst temptations of all are those when “one does not know whether God is the devil or the devil God.”[1420] “The Apostle Judas, when the hour [of temptation] came, walked into the snare and knew not how to get out. But we who have taken the field against him [the devil] and are at grips with him know, by God’s grace, how to meet and resist him.”[1421]—“The devil can affright me to such an extent that in my sleep the sweat breaks out all over me; otherwise I do not trouble about dreams or signs.... Sad dreams are the work of the devil. Often has he driven me from prayer and put such thoughts into my head that I have run away; the best fights I have had with him were in my bed by the side of my Katey.”[1422]
Elsewhere, however, he says: “I have found the nocturnal encounters far harder than the daylight ones”; “but, that Christ is master, this I can show not merely by Holy Scripture but also by experience”; “God gives richly of both. But all has become bitter to me through these temptations.”[1423]—“I know from my own experience what we read of in the Psalms (vi. 7): ‘Every night I will wash my bed: I will water my couch with my tears.’ In my temptations I have often wondered and asked myself whether I had any heart left in my body, so great a murderer is Satan; but he will not long keep the upper hand, for he has indeed burnt his fingers on Christ.”[1424]
To add to the terrors of such struggles came thoughts of suicide. When Leonard Beyer, an Augustinian, who had become pastor of Guben, spoke to Luther of his temptations to take his own life, and of the voice which occasionally whispered to him “Stick a knife into yourself,” Luther answered: “This used to be the same with me. No sooner did I take a knife in my hand, than such thoughts came to me; nor could I kneel down to pray without the devil driving me out of the room. We have to suffer from the great devils, the ‘theologiæ doctores’; but the Turks and Papists have only the little devils” to tempt them.[1425] It would indeed be no wonder if Luther in his excited frame of mind was for a while troubled by such thoughts of suicide. By thoughts of the sort sufferers of gloomy disposition are often tormented quite involuntarily and without any fault of their own. It is hardly worth our while to prove that another passage, which occurs in Cordatus, is not at all to the point though it has been quoted against Luther as showing his inclination to suicide. There, in his usual vein of exaggeration, he says that he “would hang himself on the nearest tree” were Satan to succeed in dragging down Christ from heaven. Surely there was just as little likelihood of his being his own hangman as of the enemy succeeding in this.[1426] And yet some Catholic polemists who believed in the fable that Luther killed himself, seized on such passages in order to show that Luther had long been bent on suicide.
If, towards the end of the ‘thirties, Luther was more successful in countering his inward anxieties, this may have been due to the means he used and the efficacy of which he frequently extols. Some of the remedies to which he had recourse appear comparatively innocent, and had even been recommended by Catholic spiritual writers to be used when the circumstances demanded. Others, however, must be described as doubtful and even dangerous, particularly considering what his moral position was.
Above all he recommends distraction; people tempted should engage in cheerful intercourse, or in games; in his own case he had urgently desired the return of his friends, “in order that Satan may no longer rejoice that we are so far apart.”[1427] He also bears witness to the improvement which resulted from cheerful, animated conversation.
He also advises people to awaken some “stronger emotion so as to counteract the disquieting thoughts.”[1428] For instance, it is a good thing “to break out into scolding,”[1429] or to give vent to a “brave outburst of anger.”[1430]
Further, animal pleasures are, according to him, of advantage; he himself, on his own admission, sought to distract his thoughts by sensual joys of the most material kind.[1431] In the case of gloomy thoughts “a draught of beer” was, so he avers, of much greater use than, e.g. astrology.[1432]
Sensuality, however, is not always sufficiently powerful or effective. It is better to have recourse from the beginning to religious remedies. “If I but seize the Scripture [text] I have gained the day,”[1433] but, unfortunately, the verse wanted often won’t come. In general, what is required is prayer, much patience and the arousing of confidence.[1434] One’s patience may be fortified by the thought that “perhaps, thanks to these temptations, I shall become a great man,” as he himself had actually become, thanks largely to his temptations.[1435]
Further, the words of “great and learned men to one who is tempted may serve him as an oracle or prophecy, which indeed they may really be.”[1436] To hold fast to a single word spoken by a stranger had often proved very helpful. We may recall how he compared Bugenhagen’s words to him: “You must not despise our consolation,” to “a voice from heaven.”[1437] Another saying of his same friend and confessor, had, so he declares, greatly strengthened him. “Surely enough, God thinks: ‘What more can I do for this man [Luther]? I have given him such excellent gifts and yet he despairs of my grace!’”[1438]
In these “temptations,” whether in his own case or in that of others, he hardly gives a thought to penance and mortification, such as olden Churchmen had always recommended and employed. On the contrary, ascetic remedies of the sort would, according to him, only make things worse. Needless to say, even Catholics were anxious that such remedies should not be applied without discretion, since lessening of the bodily powers might conceivably weaken the resistance of the spirit, nay, even promote fears and temptations. Luther says, in 1531: “Were I to follow my inclination I should [when in this state] go three days without eating anything. This then is a double fasting, to eat and drink without the least appetite. When the world sees it, it looks on it as drunkenness, but God will judge whether it is drunkenness or fasting. They will have fasts, but not as I fast. Therefore keep head and belly full. Sleep also helps.”[1439] Sleep seemed to him especially important, not merely as a condition for hard work, but also to enable one to resist low spirits. It was when unable to sleep, that, as he tells us, “the devil had annoyed him until he said: ‘Lambe mihi nates,’ etc. We have the treasure of the Word; God be praised.”[1440]
His practice and teaching with regard to inward sources of troubles were indeed miles apart from those of earlier Catholic times, and even from what in his own day Catholic masters of the first rank in the spiritual life had written for the benefit of posterity. Everybody knows how these writers are, above all, desirous to provide their readers with a method whereby they may discern between, on the one hand, the voice of conscience, whether it warns us to desist from wrong or encourages us to do what is good, and, on the other, the promptings of the Evil Spirit. They say that it is the devil’s practice alternately to disquiet and to cheer, though in a way very different from that of the spirits from above. It was unfortunate for Luther that he chose to close his eyes to any such “discerning of the spirits.” He resolutely steeled his conscience once for all against even wholesome disquietude and anxiety, and of set purpose he bore down all misgivings. Of one thing he was determined to be convinced: “Above all hold fast to this, that thoughts bad and sad come, not from God, but from the devil;” “make it your wont at once to tell all inward reproaches: ‘You were not sent by God.’”
“At first,” he adds, as though describing his own case, “this struggle is hard, but practice makes it easier.”[1441]
He claimed that, owing to the amount of practice he had had in inward combats, his “faith had been much strengthened”; the “temptations” had won for him a “wealth of Divine gifts,” had taught him humility and qualified him for his task, nay, had set a Divine seal on his mission;[1442] his “theologia” he had learnt in the school of the devil’s temptations; without such a devil to help, one remains a mere speculative theologian.[1443]
Such sayings lead us to ask whether his life of faith really underwent a strengthening as he advanced in years.
Whoever would judge correctly of the remarkable statements made by Luther which we are now about to consider must measure them, at least in the lump, by the standard of his doctrine on faith. If anything in him calls for explanation and consideration in the light of the views on doctrine which he held, surely this is especially the case with the mental state now under discussion to which he alludes so frequently in both public and private utterances. At the same time it must not be overlooked that occasionally he is speaking with his wonted hyperbole and love of paradox, and that sometimes what he says is not meant quite seriously; moreover, that sometimes, when apparently blaming himself, he is really only trying to describe the heights which he fain would attain; the true standard by which to judge all these many statements which are yet so remarkably uniform must, however, be sought in the theological groundwork of his attitude towards faith.
As we already know, by faith he understands on the one hand the accepting of all the verities of revelation as true; more often, however, he means by it simply a believing trust in salvation through Christ, a certainty of that justification by faith which constitutes his “Evangel.”[1444]
For faith in the former sense he rightly appeals to the firm and immovable foundation of God’s truth. But, as regards the source whence mankind obtains its knowledge of revealed truth, he practically undermines the authority of Scripture—which he nevertheless esteems so highly—first, by his wanton rejection of whole books of the Bible and by his neglect of the criteria necessary for determining which books belong to Holy Scripture and for recognising which are canonical;[1445] secondly, by his interpretation of the Bible, more particularly in ascertaining the Divine truths therein contained, he flings open the door to subjectivism and leaves each one to judge for himself, refusing even to furnish him with any sure guidance.[1446] He set aside the teaching office of the Church, which had been for the Catholic the authentic exponent of Scripture, and at the same time had guaranteed the canonicity of each of its parts. Of the Church’s olden creeds he retained only a fragment, and even this he interpreted in his own sense.[1447]
Thus, under the olden name of faith in revelation he had really introduced a new objective faith, one utterly devoid of any stay.
It is sufficient to consider certain of his quite early theses to appreciate the blow dealt at the Church’s traditional view of faith. To these theses he was moved by his polemics against certain, to him, distasteful dogmas of the ancient Church, but from the very outset his attack was, at bottom, directed against all barriers of dogma, and, even later, continued to threaten to some extent the very foundations of that religious knowledge which he held in common with all other Christians.[1448] The unrestrained freedom of opinion which many Protestants claim to-day as part of the heirloom of Christianity they are wont to justify by citing passages from Luther’s writings, e.g. from his work of 1523, “Das eyn Christliche Versamlung odder Gemeyne ... Macht habe, alle Lere zu urteylen,” etc.[1449]
The fact of having taught faith in the second sense mentioned above, and of having put it in the place of faith in the first and olden sense is, according to many moderns, the achievement that more than any other redounds to Luther’s credit.—He made an end of the “unevangelical idea of faith as a mere holding for true, and of the submission of the most inward and tender of questions to the decision of courts of law”;[1450] in the trustful belief in Christ he rediscovered the only faith deserving of the name and thereby brought back religion to mankind.
This trusting faith, however, by its very nature and according to Luther’s express admission is, as has already been pointed out in detail, also devoid of any true stay, is ever exposed to wavering and uncertainty and is wholly dependent on feeling; above all, for a conscience oppressed with the sense of guilt to lay hold on the alien righteousness of Christ by faith alone is a task scarcely within its power; it admittedly involves an unceasing struggle;[1451] lastly, true faith, according to Luther, comes only from God, from whom man, who has no free-will, can only passively look for it,[1452] nay, it belongs in the last instance only to the Revealed God, for of the dispensations of the Hidden Will of God concerning our future in heaven or in hell we are entirely ignorant.[1453]
Here too, then, we have a new kind of faith.
This explains how it is that in Luther’s statements concerning his personal faith, his preaching, his absorption in the religious point of view he has discovered, his doubts and his fears, we meet with so much that sounds strange. We say strange, for they cannot but unpleasantly surprise anyone accustomed to regard faith in the truths of religion as a firm possession of the mind and heart, above all a Catholic believer. Before Luther’s day scarcely can a single Christian teacher be instanced who was so open in speaking of the weakness of his own faith or who so frequently and so persistently insisted on pitting his own experience against the calm inward certainty with which God ever rewards a humble and heartfelt faith, even in those most beset with temptations.
When, in spite of this, we find Luther throughout his life plainly and indubitably accepting as true a large portion of the common body of faith (as we have repeatedly admitted him to have done),[1454] then it is easy to see that in so doing he is not taking his stand on his new and shaky foundations, but on the old and solid basis to which he reverts with a happy want of logic, often perhaps unconsciously. We should see him taking his stand on this foundation even more frequently had not his sad breach with the whole past moved his soul to its very depths. There can be no doubt that his terrors of conscience, or “struggles with the devil,” had much to do in inducing the condition in which he reveals himself to the reader of what follows.
It is clear that, in order to judge of Luther’s life of faith, stress must not be laid on isolated statements of his torn from their context, but that they must be taken in the lump.