At a time when mysticism and the study of Tauler still exercised a powerful influence over him he was wont in his fits of terror to revert to Tauler’s misapprehended considerations on the inward trials of the soul.
In pursuance of this idea and hinting at his own mental state he declares in his “Operationes in psalmos” (1519-21), that, according to St. Paul (Rom. v. 3 f.), tribulations work in us patience and trial and hope, and thus the love of God and justification; tribulation, however, consisted chiefly of inward anxiety, and trial called for patience and calm endurance of this anxiety; the greater the tribulation, the higher would hope rise in the soul. “Thus it is plain that the Apostle is speaking of the assurance of the heart in hope,[366] because, after anxiety cometh hope, and then a man feels that he hopes, believes and loves.” “Hence Tauler, the man of God, and also others who have experienced it, say that God is never more pleasing, more lovable, sweeter and more intimate with His sons than after they have been tried by temptation.”[367] It is quite true that Tauler said this; he also teaches that the greater the desolation by which God tries the souls of the elect, the higher the degree of mystical union to which He wishes to call them; for death is the road to life. It is quite another thing, however, whether Tauler would have approved of Luther’s application of what he wrote.
Luther also refers both to Tauler and to himself elsewhere in the “Operationes,” where he speaks of the fears of conscience regarding the judgment of God which no one can understand who had not himself experienced them; Job, David, King Ezechias and a few others had endured them; “and finally that German theologian, Johannes Tauler, often alludes to such a state of soul in his sermons.”[368] Tauler, however, when speaking of such afflictions, is thinking of those souls who seek God and are indeed united to Him in love, but who are tried and purified by the withdrawal of sensible grace, and by being made to feel a sense of separation from Him and the burden of their nature.
In his church-postils he again summons Tauler to his aid in order to depict the fears with which he was so familiar, seeking consolation, as it were, both for himself and for others. In his sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Advent (1522) he speaks of “those exalted temptations concerning death and hell, of which Tauler wrote.” Evidently speaking from experience he says: “This temptation destroys flesh and blood, nay, penetrates into the marrow of the bones and is death itself, so that no one can endure it unless marvellously borne up. Some of the patriarchs tasted this, for instance, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Moses, but, towards the end of the world, it will become more common.” Finally, he assures his hearers, that, there were such as were “still daily tried” in this way, “of which but few people are aware; these are men who are in the agony of death, and who grapple with death”; still Christ holds out the hope that they are not destined to death and to hell; on the other hand, it is certain that the “world, which fears nothing, will have to endure, first death, and, after that, hell.”[369]
Other temptations that assailed Luther must be taken into account. Unfortunately he does not say what “new” form of temptation it was of which he wrote to Johann Lang in 1519. He says: A temptation had now befallen him which showed him “what man was, though he had fondly believed that he was already well enough aware of this before”; he felt it even more severely than the trials he had to endure before the Leipzig Disputation; he would discuss it with him only by word of mouth when Lang came to see him.[370] Is he here referring to temptations of the flesh of an unusual degree of intensity? We have already heard him bewail his temptations to ambition and hate. Moreover, in this very year he speaks of temptations against chastity in his Sermon on Marriage: It is a “shameful temptation,” he says; “I have known it well, and I imagine you too are acquainted with it; ah, I know well how it is when the devil comes and excites and inflames the flesh.… When one is on fire and the temptation comes I know well what it is; then the eye is already blind.”[371] Already before this he had had to fight against “very many temptations” of the sort, which are “wont to attend the age of youth.”[372] Later on they startled him by their waxing strength. Of the temptations of the senses (“titillatio”) to which he was exposed he had complained, for instance, in the same year (1519) in a letter to his superior Staupitz,[373] and the worldly intercourse into which he was drawn, “the social gatherings, excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the table, and general lukewarmness,” of which he speaks on the same occasion, make such temptations all the more likely in the case of a young man of a temper so lively and impressionable, especially as his lukewarmness took the shape of neglect of prayer and the means of grace, and of the help he might have derived from the exercises of the Order.
Such fleshly temptations he bewailed even more loudly when at the Wartburg. There, as we may recall, he became the plaything of evil lust (“libido”) and the “fire of his untamed flesh.” “Instead of glowing in spirit, I glow in the flesh.”[374] Admitting that he himself “prayed and groaned too little for the Church of God,” he exclaims: “Pray for me, for in this solitude I am falling into the abyss of sin!”[375] Though in bodily health and well cared for, he is “being well pounded by sins and temptations,” so he wrote to his old friend Johann Lang.
To all this was still added great trouble of conscience concerning his undertaking as a whole. When he was passionately declaring that his misgivings were from the devil and resolving never to flinch in his antagonism to the hated vow of chastity he was himself falling into the state which he himself describes: “You see how I burn within (‘quantis urgear æstibus’).” This to Melanchthon, after having explained to him the struggle waging within between his feelings and his knowledge of the Bible in the matter of the vow of chastity. He is being carried away to take action, and yet is unable, as he here admits, to prove his object by means of the text of Scripture.[376] He feels himself to be “the sport of a thousand devils” in the Wartburg on account of this and other temptations; he falls frequently, yet the right hand of God upholds him.[377] The castle is full of devils, so he wrote from within its walls, and very cunning devils to boot, who never leave him at peace but behave in such a way that he “is never alone” even when he seems to be so.[378] Hence he was writing “partly under the stress of temptation, partly in indignation.” What he was writing was his “De votis monasticis,” by means of which, as he here says, he is about “to free the young folk from the hell of celibacy.”[379]
Ten years later he still recalls the “despair and the temptation concerning God’s wrath” which had then been raging within him.[380]
His temptations at that time must have been rendered even worse by the morbid conditions then awakening in him, by the dismal, racking sense of fear that peopled his imagination with thousands of devils, and the mental confusion resulting from his state of nervous overstrain.
It would carry us too far to pursue the diabolical temptations to despair (or what he held to be such) throughout the rest of his life, and to examine their connection with his maladies. We shall only remark, that, even at a later date, when we find him the butt of severe temptations of this sort, an under-current of other trouble is frequently to be detected. The “terrors” he endured in his youthful years indeed moderated but never altogether disappear. The “spiritual sickness” of 1537 of which he speaks, when for a whole fortnight he could scarcely eat, drink or sleep, shows the degree to which these thoughts of despair and struggles of conscience could reach.
To sum up what we have said of Luther’s temptations, a distinction must be made between the temptations of the Evil One, which Luther himself regarded as such, and certain other things the real nature of which he failed to grasp. Moreover, there are those “temptations” which bore on his work and doctrines and which he wrongly regarded as temptations of the devil, whereas they were no more than the prick of conscience. All three are at times reacted on by a morbid state which he likewise failed rightly to understand, but which was made up of that predisposition to anxiety to which his nature was so prone and a kind of nervous irritability due to his struggles and over-great labours. Only those of the first and second class have any title to be regarded as temptations.
To the first class, i.e. to the temptations he felt and described as such, belongs first of all that despair which often disquieted him even in his later years; then again the temptations of the flesh of which we have also heard him speak. Though he ascribes both to the machinations of the Evil One, yet his method of fighting them was fatally mistaken. The temptations to despair he withstood by his erroneous doctrine of grace and faith alone, and, the more such thoughts torment him, the more defiantly does he stand by this doctrine. In the case of the temptations against chastity he failed to make sufficient use of the remedies of Christian penance and piety; on the contrary, under the stress of their allurements, he finally saw fit to demolish even the barrier raised by solemn vows made unto God.
The second class of temptations, which to him, however, did not seem to be such, includes all the mental aberrations we have had occasion to note during the course of his life story, particularly at the beginning of his apostasy. Here we shall only indicate the more important. It may be allowed that many of them masqueraded under specious pretexts and the appearance of good (“sub specie boni”). Thus, e.g. there was something fine and inspiring in his plans of exalting the grace of Christ at the expense of the mere works of the faithful; of giving the religious freedom of the Christian full play, regardless of unwarranted human ordinances; of improving the cut-and-dry theology of the day by a deeper and more positive study of the Bible; and of stopping the widespread decline in ecclesiastical learning and ecclesiastical life by stronghanded reforms. He allowed himself, however, to be altogether led astray in both the conception and the carrying out of these plans.
There was grave peril to himself in that sort of spiritualism, thanks to which he so frequently attributes all his doings to the direct inspiration and guidance of Almighty God; real and enlightened dependence on God is something very different; again, there was danger in his perverted interpretation of the teaching of the mystics of the past, in his exaggeration of the strength of man’s sinful concupiscence and neglect of the remedies prescribed in ages past, particularly of the practices of his own Order, also in his passionate struggles against the so-called holiness-by-works prevalent among the Augustinians, in his characteristic violence and tendency to pick a quarrel, and, above all, in the working of his inordinate self-esteem and unbounded appreciation of his own achievements as the leader of the new movement, which led him to exalt himself above all divinely appointed ecclesiastical authority.
In the above we were obliged to hark back to Luther’s earlier days, and this we shall again have to do in the following pages. The truth is, that many of the secrets of his earlier years can be explained only in the light of his later life, whilst, conversely, his youth and years of ripening manhood assist us in solving some of the riddles of later years. Hence we cannot be justly charged with repeating needlessly incidents that have already been related.
Just as the Wartburg witnessed the strongest temptations that Luther had ever to bear, so, too, it formed the stage of certain of those manifestations from the other world of which he fancied himself the recipient. Such manifestations, which lead one to wonder whether Luther suffered from hallucinations, are of frequent occurrence in his story. We shall now proceed to review them in their entirety.
In investigating the many ghostly apparitions with which Luther believed he had been favoured, our attention is perforce drawn to the Wartburg. We must, however, be careful to distinguish the authentic traditions from what has been unjustifiably added thereto. As to the explaining and interpreting of such testimonies as have a right to be regarded as historical, that will form the matter of a special study. In order that the reader may build up an opinion of his own we shall meanwhile only set on record what the sources say, the views of those concerned being given literally and unabridged. This method, essential though it be for the purposes of an unbiassed examination, has too often been set aside, recourse being had instead to mere assertions, denials and pathological explanations.
On April 5, 1538, Luther, in the presence of his friends, spoke of the personal “annoyance” to which the devil had subjected him while at the Wartburg by means of visible manifestations. The pastor of Sublitz, then staying at Wittenberg, had complained of being pestered at his home by noisy spooks; they flung pots and pans at his head and created other disturbances. Referring to such outward manifestations of the spirit-world, Luther remarked: “I too was tormented in my time of captivity in Patmos, in the castle perched high up in the kingdom of the birds. But I withstood Satan and answered him in the words of the Bible: God is mine, Who created man and ‘set all things under his feet’ (Ps. viii. 7). If thou hast any power over them, try what thou canst do.”[381]
On another occasion he related before his friend Myconius and in the presence of Jonas and Bugenhagen, “how the devil had twice appeared at the Wartburg in the shape of a great dog and had tried to kill him.” It is Myconius who relates this, mentioning that it had been told him by Luther at Gotha in 1538,[382] “in the house of Johann Löben, the Schosser.”
Of one of these two apparitions, the physician Ratzeberger, Luther’s friend, had definite information. He, however, quotes it only as an instance of the many ghostly things which Luther had experienced there: “Because the neighbourhood was lonely many ghosts appeared to him and he was much troubled by disturbances due to noisy spooks. Among other incidents, one night, when he was going to bed, he found a huge black bull-dog lying on his bed that refused to let him get in. Luther thereupon commended himself to our Lord God, recited Ps. viii. [the same as that mentioned above], and when he came to the verse ‘Thou hast set all things under his feet’ the dog at once disappeared and Luther passed a peaceful night. Many other ghosts of a like nature visited him, all of whom he drove off by prayer, but of which he refused to speak, for he said he would never tell anyone how many spectres had tormented him.”[383]
According to the account of his pupil Mathesius, Luther often “called to mind how the devil had tormented him in mind and caused him a burning pain which sucked the very marrow out of his bones.”[384] Of visible apparitions Mathesius has, however, very little to say: “The Evil Spirit,” so we read in his account of Luther’s sayings, “most likely wished to affright me palpably, for on many nights I heard him making a noise in my Patmos, and saw him at the Coburg under the form of a star, and in my garden in the shape of a black pig. But my Christ strengthened me by His Spirit and Word so that I paid no heed to the devil’s spectre.”[385] Mathesius, in his enthusiasm, actually goes so far as to compare such things to Satan’s tempting of Christ in the wilderness.
The encounter with the great black dog in the Wartburg is related in an old edition of Luther’s Table-Talk with a curious addition, which tells how Luther, on one occasion, calmly lifted from the bed the dog, which had frequently tormented him, carried him to the window, and threw him out without the animal even barking. Luther had not been able to learn anything about it afterwards from others, but no such dog was kept in the Castle.[386]
Of the strange din by which the devil annoyed him within those walls Luther speaks more in detail in the German Table-Talk. “When I was living in Patmos … I had a sack of hazel nuts shut up in a box. On going to bed at night I undressed in my study, put out the light, went to my bedchamber and got into bed. Then the nuts began to rattle over my head, to rap very hard against the rafters of the ceiling and bump against me in bed; but I paid no attention to them. After I had got to sleep there began such a din on the stairs as though a pile of barrels was being flung down them, though I knew the stairs were protected with chains and iron bars so that no one could come up; nevertheless, the barrels kept rolling down. I got up and went to the top of the stairs to see what it was, but found the stairs closed. Then I said: ‘If it is you, so be it,’ and commended myself to our Lord Christ of Whom it is written: ‘Thou shalt set all things under his feet,’ as Ps. viii. says, and got into bed again.” All this, so the account proceeds, had been related by Luther himself at Eisenach in 1546.[387] Cordatus, however, must have heard the story of the nuts from his own lips even before this. He tells it in 1537 as one of the numerous instances of the persecution Luther had had to endure from the spooks of the Wartburg: “Then he [the devil] took the walnuts from the table and flung them up at the ceiling the whole night long.”[388]
It also happened (this supplements an incident touched upon above in vol. ii., p. 95), so Luther related on the above occasion, in 1546, that the wife of Hans Berlips, who “would much have liked to see [Luther], which was, however, not allowed,” came to the Castle. His quarters were changed and the lady was put into his room. “That night there was such an ado in the room that she fancied a thousand devils were in it.”[389] This story is not quite so well authenticated as the incidents which Luther relates as having happened to himself, for it is clear that he had it directly, or indirectly, only from this lady’s account. Her anxiety to see Luther would seem to stamp her as a somewhat eccentric person, and it may also be that she went into a room, already reputed to be haunted, quite full of the thought of ghosts and that her imagination was responsible for the rest.
Luther goes on to allude to another ghostly visitation, possibly a new one. He says: “On such occasions we must always say to the devil contemptuously: “If you are Christ’s Master, so be it!” For this is what I said at Eisenach.”[390] Nothing further is known, however, of any such occurrence having taken place at Eisenach. He may quite well have taken Eisenach as synonymous with the Wartburg.
To pass in review the other ghostly apparitions which occurred during his lifetime, we must begin with his early years.
When still a young monk at Wittenberg Luther already fancied he heard the devil making a din. “When I began to lecture on the Psalter, and, after we had sung Matins, was seated in the refectory studying and writing up my lecture, the devil came and rattled in the chimney three times, just as though someone were heaving a sack of coal down the chimney. At last, as it did not cease, I gathered up my books and went to bed.”[391] “Once, too, I heard him over my head in the monastery, but, when I noticed who it was, I paid no attention, turned over and went to sleep again.”[392]
Luther can tell some far more exciting stories of ghosts and “Poltergeists,” of which others, with whom he had come in contact in youth or manhood, had been the victims. Since, however, he seems to have had them merely on hearsay, they may be passed over. Of himself, however, he says: “I have learnt by experience that ghosts go about affrightening people, preventing them from sleeping and so making them ill.”[393]
We find also the following statement: “The devil has often had me by the hair of my head, yet was ever forced to let me go”;[394] from the context this, however, may refer to mental temptations.
He says, however, quite definitely of certain experiences he himself had gone through in the monastery: “Oh, I saw gruesome ghosts and visions.” This was probably at the time when “no one was able to comfort” him.[395] He was referring to incidents to which no definite date can be assigned, when, anxious to refute their claim to illumination by the spirits, he told the fanatics: “Ah, bah, spirits … I too have seen spirits!”
The Table-Talk relates how on one occasion Luther himself, in a strange house, was witness of a remarkable spectral visitation. He is said to have related the incident and to “have seen it with his own eyes as did also many others.”[396] A maiden, a friend of the old proctor [at the University], was lying in bed ill at Wittenberg. She had a vision; Christ appearing to her under a glorious form, whereupon she joyfully adored her visitor. A messenger was at once sent “from the college to the monastery” to fetch Luther. He came and exhorted the young woman “not to allow herself to be deceived by the devil.” She thereupon spat in the face of the apparition. “The devil then disappeared and the vision turned into a great snake which made a dash at the maiden in her bed and bit her on the ear so that the drops of blood trickled down, after which the snake was seen no more.” This story was introduced into the German Table-Talk by Aurifaber (1566).[397] The young woman was probably hysterical and was the only beholder of the vision. In all likelihood what the others saw was merely the blood, which might quite well have come from a scratch otherwise caused. The story has been quoted as a proof of the dispassionate way in which Luther regarded visions.
As a further proof of the “sobriety which he coupled with a faith so ardent and enthusiastic” Köstlin quotes the following:[398] “He himself related this tale,” the Table-Talk says [the date is uncertain but it was after he had already begun to preach the “Word”]; “he was once praying busily in his cell, and thinking of how Christ had hung on the cross, suffered and died for our sins, when suddenly a bright light shone on the wall, and, in the midst, a glorious vision of the Lord with His five wounds appeared and gazed at him, the Doctor, as though it had been Christ Himself. When the Doctor saw it he fancied at first it was something good, but soon he bethought him it must be a devilish spectre, because Christ appears to us only in His Word and in a lowly and humble form, just as He hung in shame upon the cross. Hence the Doctor adjured the vision: ‘Begone thou shameless devil! I know of no other Christ than He Who was crucified, and Who is revealed and preached in His Word,’ and soon the apparition, which was no less than the devil in person, disappeared.”[399]—This story told by his pupils must refer to some statement made by Luther, though the dramatic liveliness of its imagery may well lead us to suspect that it has been touched up. Some natural effect of light and shade might well account for the appearance which the young monk so “busy” at his prayers thought he saw.
ed., 58, p. 129.
It is hardly possible to suppress similar doubts concerning other accounts we have from his lips; his statements also refer to events which occurred long previous. At any rate, in a select circle of his pupils, the opinion certainly prevailed that Luther was tried by extraordinary other-world apparitions, and this conviction was the result of remarks dropped by him.
Greater stress must be laid on those statements of his which bear on inward experiences, where the most momentous truths were concerned and which occurred at certain crises of his life.
In Nov., 1525, he assured Gregory Casel, the Strasburg theologian, in so many words, that “he had frequently had inward experience that the body of Christ is indeed in the Sacrament; he had seen dreadful visions; also angels (‘vidisse se visiones horribiles, sæpe se angelos vidisse’), so that he had been obliged to stop saying Mass.”[400]
He spoke in this way in the course of the official negotiations with Casel, the delegate of the Protestant theologians of Strasburg. The words occur in Casel’s report of the interview published by Kolde. It is true that Luther also speaks here of the outward “Word” as the support of his doctrine, particularly on the Sacrament. “We shall,” he says, “abide quite simply by the words of Scripture—until the Spirit and the unction teach us something different.” He avers that the Strasburgers who denied the Sacrament come with their “Spirit” and wish to explain away the words of the Bible concerning the body of Christ in the Bread. This, however, is not the “light of the Spirit,” but the “light of reason”; he himself had long since learnt to reject reason in the things of God. They were not convinced of their cause as he was, otherwise they would defend their teaching publicly as he did, for he would rather the whole world were undone than be silent on God’s doctrine, because it was God’s business to watch over it.
His opponents declared they had their own inward experience. “How many inward experiences have I not had,” he replies, “at those times when my mind was idle (‘cum eram otiosus’)! All sorts of things came before my mind and everything seemed as reasonable as could be. But, by God’s grace, I addressed myself to greater and more earnest matters and began to distrust reason. I too, like them, was ‘in dangers’ [2 Cor. xi. 26], and in even greater ones. And if it is a question of piety of life, I hope that there, too, we are blameless.” Coming back once more to the spirit which the Strasburgers had set up against the Word of God, he describes in his own defence the “terrors of death he himself had been through (‘mortis horrorem expertus’)” and then speaks of the angelic visions referred to above which had disturbed him even at the Mass.[401]
He also will have it that at other times he had been consoled by angels, though he does not tell us that he had seen them. In 1532 he said to Schlaginhaufen: “God strengthened me ten years ago by His angels, in my struggles and writings.”[402]
Luther, repeatedly and in so many words, appeals to his realisation of the divine truths, and it may be assumed he imagined he felt something of the sort within him, or that he thus interpreted certain emotions. “I am resolved to acknowledge Christ as Lord. And this I have not only from Holy Scripture but also from experience. The name of Christ has often helped me when no one was able to help. Thus I have on my side the deed and the Word, experience and Scripture. God has given both abundantly. But my temptations made things sour for me.”[403]
The Table-Talk assures us that, “Dr. Martin proved it from his own experience that Jesus Christ is truly God; this he also confessed openly; for if Christ were not God then there was certainly no God at all.”[404] It was no difficult task for him to include himself in the ranks of those “who had received the first fruits of the spirit.”[405]
In addition to this, however, as will be shown below,[406] he thinks his doctrine has been borne in upon him by God through direct revelation. More than once, without any scruple, he uses the word “revelatum”; he is also fond of setting this revelation in an awesome background: it had been “strictly enjoined on him (‘interminatum’) under pain of eternal malediction” to believe in it.[407]
In fact a certain terror is the predominating factor in this gloomy region where he comes in touch with the other world. He has not merely had experience that there are roving spirits who affright men,[408] but, in a letter from the Wartburg, he insists quite generally, that, “the visions of the Saints are terrifying.” Of course, as we well know, delusions and hallucinations very often do assume a terrifying character.
Luther also asserts that “divine communications” are always accompanied by inward tortures like unto death, words which give us a glimpse into his own morbid state.[409] And yet he fully admits elsewhere the very opposite, for he is aware that God is, above all things, the consoler. “It is not Christ Who affrights us”;[410] and “it is Satan alone who wounds and terrifies.”[411] But, in practice, according to him, things work differently; there the fear from which he and others suffer comes to the fore. “We are oftentimes affrighted even when God turns to us the friendliest of glances.”[412]
This change of standpoint reminds us of another instance of the same sort. Luther’s teaching on the terrifying character of the divine action is much the same as his theological teaching that fear is the incentive to good deeds. While, as a rule, he goes much too far in seeking to rid the believer of any fear of God as the Judge, preaching an unbounded confidence and even altogether excluding fear from the work of conversion, yet, elsewhere, he emphasises most strongly this same fear, as called for and quite indispensable; this he did in his controversies with the Antinomians and, even earlier, as on the occasion of the Visitations, on account of its religious influence on the people.
No change or alteration is, however, apparent in the accounts he gives above of the cases in which he came in touch with the other world; he sticks firmly by his statement that he had experienced such things both mentally and palpably. Hence the difficulty of coming to any decision about them.
But there are further alleged experiences, also detailed at length, which have a place here, viz. the apparitions of the devil himself.
In 1530 Luther was thrown into commotion by a glimpse of the devil, under the shape of a fiery serpent, outside the walls of the Coburg. One evening in June, about nine o’clock, as his then companion Veit Dietrich relates, Luther was looking out of the window, down on the little wood surrounding the castle. “He saw,” says this witness, “a fiery, flaming serpent, which, after twisting and writhing about, dropped from the roof of the nearest tower down into the wood. He at once called me and wanted to show me the ghost (‘spectrum’) as I stood by his shoulder. But suddenly he saw it disappear. Shortly after, we both saw the apparition again. It had, however, altered its shape and now looked more like a great flaming star lying in the field, so that we were able to distinguish it plainly even though the weather was rainy.” Here the pupil undoubtedly did his best to see something. On his master, however, the firm conviction of having seen the devil made a deep impression. He had just enjoyed a short respite after a bout of ill-health. The night after the apparition he again collapsed and almost lost consciousness. On the following day he felt, so Dietrich says, “a very troublesome buzzing in the head”; the apparition leads the narrator to infer that Luther’s bodily trouble, which now recommenced in an aggravated form, had been entirely “the work of the devil.”[413] So certain was Luther of having seen the devil that he mentioned the occurrence in 1531 at one of the meetings held for the revision of his translation of the Psalms. The words of the Psalmist concerning “sagittæ” and “fulgura,” etc. (Ps. xviii. (xvii.) 15), he applies directly to his own personal experiences and to the incident in question, “Just as I saw my devil flying over the wood at the Coburg.”[414] He means by this the fading away and disappearance of the above-mentioned fiery shape; this psalm speaks of a “materia ignita,” which no doubt suggested his remarks.—Later, as Mathesius relates, he said he had seen the “evil spirit at the Coburg, in the form of a star.”[415] Kawerau terms the apparition an “optical hallucination.”[416]
By the word hallucination is understood an apparent perception of an external object not actually present. That the “apparition” at the Coburg and other similar ones already mentioned or yet to be referred to were hallucinations is quite possible though not certain. It is true that the excessive play Luther gave to his imagination, particularly at the Wartburg and, later, at the Coburg, was such that it is quite within the bounds of possibility that he fancied he saw or heard things which had no real existence. On the other hand, moreover, we know what a large share his superstition had in distorting actual facts. Hence, generally speaking, most of the ghosts or visions he is said to have seen can be explained by a mistaken interpretation of the reality, without there being any need to postulate an hallucination properly so-called. Much of what has been related might come under the heading of illusions, though, probably, not everything. To analyse them in detail is, however, impossible as the circumstances are not accurately known. Certainly no one, however much inclined to the supernatural, who is familiar with Luther and his times, will be content, as was once the case, to believe that the devil sought to interfere visibly and palpably with his person and his teaching.
As to the apparition of the devil at the Coburg in the shape of a flame, a serpent and a star, we may point out that the whole may well have been caused simply by a lantern or torch carried by somebody in that lonely neighbourhood. We might also be tempted to think of St. Elmo’s fire, except that the form of the apparition presents some difficulty.—So, too, the black dog in the Wartburg was most likely some harmless intruder. The noise of the nuts flying up against the ceiling may have been produced by the creaking of a weather-cock, or of a door or shutter in the wind [or by the rats]. Other tales again may be rhetorical inventions, simple fictions of Luther’s brain, not involving the least suggestion of any illusion or hallucination, for instance, when he speaks of the angels who appeared to him at Mass. Such an apparition was a convenient weapon to use against opponents who alleged they were under the influence of the “Spirit.” Moreover, some of these tales were told so long after the event as to leave a wide scope to the imagination.
To proceed with the accounts of the apparitions of the devil: About the reality of two of such, Luther is quite positive.
One of these took place close to his dwelling. The devil he then espied in the shape of a wild-boar in his garden under his window. “Once Martin Luther was looking out of the window,” so an account dating from 1548 tells us, “when a great black hog appeared in the garden.” He recognised it as a diabolical apparition and jeered at Satan who appeared in this guise, though he had once been a “beautiful angel.” “Thereupon the hog melted into nothing.”[417] He himself refers to this apparition in the words already recorded, in which he classes it with the work of the noisy spirits in the Wartburg and the “appearance of the star” at the Coburg.[418]
Indeed the hog and the flaming vision at the Coburg even found their way into his printed sermons. We read in the home-postils: “The devil is always about us in disguise, as I myself witnessed, taking, e.g. the form of a hog, of a burning wisp of straw, and such like”[419] (cp. above, vol. v., p. 287 ff.).
The other apparition, the one which possibly suggests most strongly an hallucination, was that which he experienced at Eisleben at the time he was trying to adjust the quarrels between the Counts of Mansfeld, i.e. just before his death. We have accounts of this from two different quarters, based on statements made by Luther; first that of Michael Cœlius, a friend who was present at his death, in the funeral oration he delivered immediately after at Eisleben on Feb. 20, and, secondly, that of Luther’s confidant, the physician Ratzeberger. The former in his address recounts for the edification of the people how Luther “during his lifetime” had suffered trials and persecutions at the hands of the devil before going to his eternal rest; hence in this world he had been “disturbed and troubled in his peace of mind” by Satan. It was true that latterly he had “enjoyed some happiness” at Eisleben, but “that had not lasted long; one evening indeed,” so Cœlius continues, “Luther had lamented with tears, that, while raising his heart to God with gladness and praying at his open window, he had seen the devil, who hindered him in all his labours, squatting on the fountain and making faces at him. But God would prove stronger than Satan, that he knew well.”[420]—Ratzeberger’s account quite agrees with this as to the circumstances; he had learnt that Luther “related the incident to Dr. Jonas and Mr. Michael Cœlius.” His information is not derived from the funeral oration just mentioned, but clearly from elsewhere. He is right in implying that it was Luther’s habit to say his night prayers at the window; he has, however, some further particulars concerning the behaviour of the devil: “It is said that when Dr. Martin Luther was saying his night prayers to God at the open window, as his custom was before going to bed, he saw Satan perched on the fountain that stood outside his dwelling, showing him his posterior and jeering at him, insinuating that all his efforts would come to nought.”[421] The first place, however, belongs to the account of Cœlius, who, by his mention of the tears Luther shed, sets vividly before the reader the commotion into which the apparition, which had occurred shortly before, had thrown him.
Excitement and trouble of mind were then pressing heavily on the aging man. His frame of mind was caused not merely by the quarrel between the “wrangling Counts” of Mansfeld with whom “no remonstrances or prayers brought any help,”[422] not merely by his usual “temptations,” but also, as Ratzeberger tells us, by the healing up of the incision in the left leg, he (Ratzeberger) had made, and which now led to bodily disorders. The disorders now made common cause with his “annoyance melancholy and grief.” The “violent mental excitement,” together with the bad effects of the healing up of the artificial wound, were, according to this physician, what “brought about his death.” Ratzeberger was not, however, then at Eisleben and we are in possession of more accurate accounts of the circumstances attending Luther’s death.
In explanation of Luther’s singular delusion regarding the jeering devil we may remark that he is fond of attributing the obstacles in the way of peace to the devil’s wrath and envy. “It seems to me that the devil is mocking us,” he writes of the difficulties on Feb. 6, “may God mock at him in return!”[423] The Eisleben councillor, Andreas Friedrich, writes to Agricola on Feb. 17 (18) of these same concerns, that Luther, when he found there was still no prospect of a settlement, had complained: “As I see, Satan turns his back on me and jeers as well.”[424] Here, curiously enough, we have exactly what occurred at the fountain. If the apparition, as is highly probable, belongs somewhat later, then we may assume that the vivid picture of the devil under this particular shape with which Luther was so familiar led finally to some sort of hallucination. His extravagant ideas of Satan generally might, in fact, have been sufficient. Everything that went against him was “Satanic,” and his only hope is that “God will make a mockery of Satan.”[425]
The account Luther gives in his Table-Talk of the two devils who, in his old age, accompanied him whenever he went to the “sleep-house” may be dealt with briefly. In this passage he is alluding in his joking way to his bodily infirmities.[426] Hence the “one or two” devils who dogged his footsteps are here described as quite familiar and ordinary companions, which is not in keeping with the idea of true apparitions; they were the nicer sort, i.e. pretty, well-mannered devils; they “attacked his head” and thus caused the malady to which he was most subject, hence in his usual style he threatens to “bid them begone into his a—,” in short he is here merely jesting. This forbids our taking the statement as meant in earnest though it is twice quoted in the German Table-Talk quite seriously. In the early days, immediately after Luther’s death, the statements concerning the “two devils” were, strange to say, reverently repeated by his pupils as an historic fact; in reality they were all too eager to unearth miraculous incidents in his life.
At a later period, when rationalism had made some headway, Protestant biographers of Luther as a rule preferred to say nothing about the apparitions Luther had met with, or to treat them as pious, harmless jests misinterpreted by his pupils. This, however, is not at all in accordance with historic criticism. Luther admirers of an earlier date, on the other hand, went too far in the contrary direction and showed themselves only too ready to follow their master into the other world, or to represent him as holding intercourse with it. Cyriacus Spangenberg (1528-1604), a Luther zealot, is an instance in point. In his “Theander Lutherus,” speaking of Luther “the real holy martyr,” he says: He deserved to be termed a martyr on account of the visible hostility of the devil; one or two devils had been in the habit of accompanying him in his walks in the dormitory in order to attack him, and his illnesses were caused simply by the devil. Needless to say, he does not allow the incidents mentioned above to escape him: Satan had tormented him at the Coburg in the shape of a fiery star and in the garden under that of a hog; he had tried to deceive him in his cell under the dazzling image of Christ, had affrighted him in the Wartburg by making a devilish noise with the nuts, and, finally, even in his monkish days had driven the student at a late hour from his studies by the din he made.[427]
It is a fact worthy of note that the older Protestant writers, when speaking of the apparitions Luther had, never mention any such or any revelations of a consoling character, but merely terrifying stories of devils and diabolical persecutions. This agrees with the observation already made above (p. 128 f.). It is evident that as good as nothing was known of any consoling apparitions; nor would the mild and friendly angels have been in place in the warlike picture which his friends transmitted of Luther. That he did not think himself a complete stranger to such heavenly communications has, however, been proved above, and it may be that his imagination would have had more to relate concerning this friendlier world above had he not had particular reasons for being chary about speaking of such visions.
In Spangenberg even Luther’s famous disputation with the devil on private Masses is also made to do duty among the other apparitions. He, like many others, takes it as an actual occurrence and represents it as further proof of the “real martyrdom” of his hero.[428] As, conversely, this disputation also plays a part in the works of Luther’s adversaries, it may be worth while to examine it somewhat more narrowly. It is urged that Luther admits he had been instructed by the devil regarding the falsity of the Catholic doctrine of the Mass, and, that, by thus tracing it back to the devil, he stamps with untruth an important portion of his teaching, seeing, that, from the father of lies, nothing but lies can be expected.
What then are we to believe concerning this disputation, judging from Luther’s own words which constitute our sole source? The only possible answer is, that Luther is merely making use of a rhetorical device.