Chapter XXXII

A LIFE FULL OF STRUGGLES OF CONSCIENCE

1. On Luther’s “Temptations” in General

An account given by Luther himself in 1537 and taken down by his pupils from his own lips is the best introduction to the subject now to be considered.

“He spoke of his spiritual sickness (‘morbus spiritualis’). For a fortnight he had tasted neither food nor drink and had had no sleep. ‘During this time,’ so he said, ‘I wrestled frequently with God and impatiently upbraided Him with His promises.’” While in this state he had been forced to complain, with the sick and troubled Job, that God was killing him and hiding His countenance from him; like Job, however, he had learnt to wait for His assistance, for here too his case was like that of the “man crushed, and delivered over to the gates of death” and on whom the devil had poured forth his wrath. How many, he adds, have to wrestle like he and Job until they are able to say “I know, O God, that Thou art gracious.”[1287]

Other statements of Luther’s at a later period supply us with further information. Lauterbach notes, on Oct. 7, 1538, the complaint already quoted: “I have my mortal combats daily. We have to struggle and wrangle with the devil who has very hard bones, till we learn how to crack them. Paul and Christ had hard work enough with the devil.”[1288] On Aug. 16 of the same year Lauterbach takes down the statement: “Had anyone else had to undergo such temptations as I, he would long since have expired. I should not of my own have been able to endure the blows of Satan, just as Paul could not endure the all-too-great temptations of Christ. In short, sadness is a death in itself.”[1289]

With the spiritual sickness above mentioned was combined, as has been already pointed out (above, p. 226 f.), a growing state of depression: “I have lived long enough,” he said in 1542; “the devil is weary of my life and I am sick of hating the devil.”[1290] Terrible thoughts of the “Judgment of God” repeatedly rose up before him and caused him great fear.[1291]

Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”;[1292] that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.”[1293] “The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.”[1294] “When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”[1295]

To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.”[1296]—A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!”[1297] Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need of this; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”[1298]

After all these remarkably frank admissions there can remain no doubt that a heavy mist of doubts and anxieties overshadowed Luther’s inner life.

A closer examination of this darker side of his soul seems to promise further information concerning his inner life. Here, too, it is advisable to sum up the phenomena, retracing them back to their very starting-point. Though much of what is to be said has already been mentioned, still, it is only now, towards the end of his life, that the various traits can in any sense be combined so as to form something as near a complete picture as possible. We have to thank Luther’s communicativeness, talkativeness and general openness to his friends, that a tragic side of his inner life has been to some extent revealed, which otherwise might for ever have been buried in oblivion.

It is true that, to forestall what follows, few nowadays will be disposed to follow Luther and to look on the devil as the originator of his doubts and qualms of conscience. His fantastic ideas of the “diabolical combats” he had to wage, form, as we shall see (below, p. 329 ff.), part of his devil-mania. Nevertheless his many references to his ordinary, nay, almost daily, inward combats or “temptations,” as he is accustomed to style them, are not mere fabrications, but really seem to come from a profoundly troubled soul. In what follows many such utterances will be quoted, because only thus can one reach a faithful picture of his changing moods which otherwise would seem barely credible. These utterances, though usually much alike, at times strike a different note and thus depict his inner life from a new and sometimes surprising side.

2. The Subject-matter of the “Temptations”

The spiritual warfare Luther had to wage concerned primarily his calling and his work as a whole.

“You have preached the Evangel,” so the inner voice, which he describes as the devil’s tempting, says to him; “But who commanded you to do so, ‘quis iussit?’ Who called upon you to do things such as no man ever did before? How if this were displeasing to God and you had to answer for all the souls that perish?”[1299]

“Satan has often said to me: How if your own doctrine were false which charges the Pope, monks and Mass-priests with such errors? Often he so overwhelmed me that the sweat has poured off me, until I said to him, go and carry your complaints to my God Who has commanded me to obey this Christ.”[1300]—“The devil would often have laid me low with his argument: ‘Thou art not called,’ had I not been a Doctor.”[1301]—“I have had no greater temptation,” he said after dinner on Dec. 14, 1531, “and none more grievous than that about my preaching; for I have said to myself: You alone are at the bottom of this; if it’s all wrong you have to answer for all the many souls which it brings down to hell. In this temptation I have often myself descended into hell till God recalled me and strengthened me, telling me that it was indeed the Word of God and true doctrine; but it costs much until one reaches this comfort.”[1302]—“Now the devil troubles me with other thoughts [than in the Papacy], for he accuses me thus: Oh, what a vast multitude have you led astray by your teaching! Sometimes amidst such temptation one single word consoles me and gives me fresh courage.”[1303]

Not merely does he say this in the Table-Talk but even writes it in his Bible Commentaries. In his exposition of Psalm xlv. he speaks of an “argumentation and objection” which the devil urges against him: “Lo, you stand all alone and are seeking to overthrow the good order [of the Church] established with so much wisdom. For even though the Papacy be not without its sins and errors, what about you? Are you infallible? Are you without sin? Why raise the standard of revolt against the house of the Lord when you yourself can only teach them what you yourself are full of, viz. error and sin? These thoughts,” he continues, “upset one very much.... Hence we must learn that all our strength lies in hearing God’s Word and laying hold on it, in seeing God’s works and believing in them. Whoever does not do this will be taken captive by the devil and overthrown.” He is fully cognisant of the strength of the objection which dogs his footsteps: Though sins and faults are to be met with in individual members of the hierarchy, still we must honour their “office and authority.”[1304]

Among Luther’s peculiar doctrines the principal ones which became the butt of “temptations” were his fundamental theses on Justification, on the Law and on good works.

With regard to his doctrine of Justification, on Dec. 14, 1531, he gave his pupil Schlaginhaufen, who also failed to find comfort in it, some advice as to how he was to help himself. The devil was wont “to come to him” [Luther] with righteousness and to “insist on our being actively righteous,” and since none of us are, “no one can venture to stand up to him”; what one should do was, however, resolutely to fall back on passive righteousness and to say to Satan: Not by my own righteousness am I justified, but by the righteousness of the man Christ. “Do you know Him?” In this way we vanquish him by “the Word.” Another method, also a favourite one of his,[1305] so he instructs his anxious pupil, was to rid oneself of such ideas by “thinking of dancing, or of a pretty girl; that also is good, eating and drinking are likewise helpful; for one who is tempted, fasting is a hundred times worse than eating and drinking.”[1306]—“This is the great art,” he repeats at the beginning of the following year, looking back upon his own bitter experiences, “to pass from my sin to Christ’s righteousness to know that Christ’s righteousness is mine as surely as I know that this body is mine.... What astonishes me is that I cannot learn this doctrine, and yet all my pupils believe they have it at their finger-tips.”[1307]

The doctrine of the Law in its relation to the Gospel, a point which he was never able to make quite clear to himself, constituted in his case an obstacle to peace of mind.[1308] In consequence of his own experience he warns others from the outset against giving way to any anxious thoughts about this: “Whoever, Law in hand, begins to dispute with the devil is already a beaten man and a prisoner.... Hence let no one dare to dispute with him about the Law, or about sin, but let him rather desist in good time.”[1309] “When Satan reproaches me and says: ‘The Law is also the Word of God,’ I reply: ‘God’s Word is only the promise of God whereby He says: Let me be Thy God. In addition to this, however, He also gives the Law, but for another purpose, not that we may be saved thereby.”[1310]

But God, as Luther was well aware, will, as He threatens, judge people by their fulfilment of the Law and only grant salvation to those who keep it.

The stern and clear exhortations of Scripture on fidelity to the Law and on penance for its transgression often filled his soul with the utmost terror, and so did the text: “Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish” (Luke xiii. 3). Even in one of his sermons he confessed to the people in this connection, that he was acquainted from experience “with the cunning of the devil and his malicious tricks, how he is wont to upbraid us with the Law ... to make a real hell for us so that the wide world seems all too narrow to hold us”; the devil depicts Christ “as though He were angry with sinners”; “he grabs a text of Holy Scripture, or one of Christ’s warnings, and suddenly stabs us so hard in the heart ... that we actually believe it, nay, our conscience would swear to it a thousand times,” that “it was indeed Christ Who inspired such thoughts, whereas all the while it was the devil himself.” “Of what I say I have had some experience myself.”[1311] He then goes on to quote the above exhortation to penance as an instance of the sort of warning on which the devil seizes, though these words have ever been regarded by God-fearing Christians as a powerful incentive to religion and not at all as productive of excessive fear, at least in those who put their trust in grace. Luther, however, thinks it right to add: “By fear the devil fouls and poisons with his venom the pure and true knowledge of Christ.”

Hence it is useless, or at best but a temporary expedient, to refrain from disputing with Satan on the Law. Nor is Luther’s invitation much better: “When a man is tempted, or is with those who are tempted, let him slay Moses and throw every stone at him on which he can lay hands.”[1312]

His doctrine of good works was no less a source of disquietude to Luther. He declared that Satan was sure of an “easy victory” “once he gets a man to think of what he has done or left undone.” What one had to do was to retort to the devil, strong in one’s fiducial faith: “Though I may not have done this or that good work, still I am saved by the forgiveness of sins, as baptised and redeemed by the flesh and blood of Christ”; beyond this he should not go: “Faith ranks above deeds”; still, so he adds, before a man reaches this point, all may be over for him. “It is hard in the time of temptation to get so far; even Christ found it difficult”; “it is hard to escape from the idea of works,” i.e. from believing that they as much as faith are required for salvation and that they are meritorious.[1313]

The “devil” also frequently twitted Luther, so he declares, with the consequences of his doctrines.

“Often he tormented me,” he says, “with words such as these: ‘Look at the cloisters; formerly they enjoyed a delightful peace, of which you have made an end; who told you to do such a thing?’” On one occasion, when making some such admissions concerning the effect of his teaching on the religious vows, one interrupted him and tried to show that he had merely insisted that God was not to be worshipped by the doctrines and commandments of men (Mt. xv. 9), and that the dissolution of the monasteries was not so much his work as a consequence ordained by God; Luther replied frankly: “My friend, before such a thought would have occurred to me during such temptations I should indeed have been in a fine sweat.”[1314]

“When Satan finds me idle and not armed with the Word,” so we read in the notes made of one of his sermons,[1315] “he puts it into my conscience that I am a disturber of the public order, a preacher of false doctrines and a herald of revolt. This he often does. But as soon as I make use of the Word as a weapon I get the best, for I answer him.... It is written you must hear this man [the Son of God] or everything falls. God heeds not the world, even were there ten rebellious worlds. It was thus that Paul, too, had to console himself when accused of preaching sedition against God and the Emperor.”[1316] In this wise does Luther seek to fall back on Christ and on his divine commission.

He frequently, indeed usually, appeals to this source of consolation, and it is therefore due to him to quote a few more such statements. He struggles, in spite of all his fears, not to relinquish his peculiar trust in Christ.

Yet, as he often complains in this connection, “the devil knows well how to get me away.”[1317]

“He says to me: See how much evil arises from your doctrine. To which I reply: Much good has also come of it. Oh, says he, that is a mere nothing! He is a fine talker and can make a great beam of a little splinter, and destroy what is good and dissolve it into thin air. He has never been so angry in his life.... I must hold fast to Christ and to the Evangel. He frequently begins to dispute with me about this, and well knows how to get me away. He is very wroth, I feel it and understand it well.”[1318]—The moral consequences of the religious innovations, and the disunion so rife undoubtedly weighed heavily on Luther. “We, who boast of being Evangelical,” so he is impelled to exclaim in 1538, “fling the most holy Gospel to the winds as though it were but a quotation from Terence.” “Alas, Good God, how bitter the devil must be against us, to incite the very ministers of the Word against each other and to inspire them with mutual hatred!”[1319]

Misgivings as to his own salvation also constituted a source of profound anxiety for Luther.

So repeatedly did he hear in fancy the devil announcing to him in a voice of thunder his eternal damnation, that he was, as he confesses, almost reduced to despair and to blasphemy.

“When we are thus tempted to blasphemy on account of God’s judgment,” so he said on June 18, 1540, “we fail to see either that it is a sin, or how to avoid it,” “such abominable thoughts does the prince of this world suggest to the mind: Hatred of God, blasphemy, despair; these are the devil’s own fiery darts; St. Paul understood them to some extent when he felt the sting of the devil in his flesh [2 Cor. xii. 7]. These are the high temptations [which, as he explains elsewhere, were reserved for himself and for his preachers]. No Pope has known them. These stupid donkeys were familiar with no other temptations than those of carnal passion.... To such they capitulated, and so did ‘Jeronimus.’ Yet such temptations are easily to be remedied while virgins and women remain with us.”[1320]—But in that other sort of temptation it is hard to “keep cheerful” and to tell the devil boldly: “God is not angry as you say.”[1321]

On one occasion Melanchthon watched him during such a struggle, when he was battling against despair and the appalling thought that he had been delivered over to the “wrath of God and the punishment of sin.” Luther, he says, was in “such sore terror that he almost lost consciousness,” and sighed much as he wrestled with a text of Paul on unbelief and grace.[1322]

Several incidents and many utterances noted down from Luther’s own lips give us an even better insight into the varying character of his “temptations” and into their nature as a whole.

3. An Episode. Terrors of Conscience become Temptations of the Devil

Schlaginhaufen and Luther

Johann Schlaginhaufen, the pupil of Luther whom we have had so frequent occasion to mention, complained to his master in the winter of 1531 of the deep anxiety from which he could not shake himself free, which led him to fear for the salvation of his soul. Luther sought in vain to comfort the troubled man by pointing to his own case.[1323] The fact that the master attributed the whole matter to the devil only added to the confusion of his unfortunate pupil. So much was Schlaginhaufen upset, that on one occasion, on New Year’s Eve, 1531, he actually swooned whilst on a visit to Luther’s house. Luther, nothing abashed, promptly exorcised the devil who had brought on the fainting-fit, using thereto the Bible words: “The Lord rebuke thee, Satan” (Zach. iii. 2: “Increpet te Dominus”); he added: “He [the devil], who should be an angel of life, is an angel of death. He tries us with lying and with murder.”

Schlaginhaufen, after having been put to bed, began to come to, whereupon Luther consoled him thus: “David suffered such temptations; I too have often experienced similar ones, though to-day I have been free from them and have had nothing to complain of save only a natural weakness of the head. Let the godless, Cochlæus, Faber and the Margrave [Joachim I of Brandenburg] be afraid and tremble. This is a temptation of the spirit; it is not meant for us, for we are ministers and vicars of God.” Here Schlaginhaufen groaned: “Oh, my sins!” Luther now tried to make him understand that he must turn to the thought of grace and forget all about the Law. “Oh, my God,” replied the young man, echoing his master’s own thoughts, “the tiniest devil is stronger than the whole world!” But Luther pointed out that there were even stronger good angels present for the Christian’s protection. He went on, “Satan is as hostile as can be to us. Were we only to agree to worship the Pope, we should be his dear children, enjoy perfect peace and probably become cardinals. It is not you alone who endure such temptations; I am inured to them, and Peter too and Paul were acquainted with them.... We must not be afraid of the miscreant.” When Schlaginhaufen had sufficiently recovered to return to his lodgings close by, Luther paternally admonished him to mix more freely with others and, for the rest, to trust entirely in his teacher. His own waverings did not prevent him from giving the latter piece of advice.[1324]

Of the temptations by which he himself was visited, “to despair, and to dread the wrath of God,” he had already said to Schlaginhaufen, on Dec. 14, 1531: Had it not been for them he would never have been able to do so much harm to the devil, or to preserve his own humility; now, however, he knew to his shame that “when the temptation comes I am unable to get the better of a single venial sin. Thanks to these temptations I have attained to such knowledge and to such gifts, that, with the help of God, I won that glorious victory (‘illam præclaram victoriam’), vanquishing my monkish state, the vows, the Mass and all those abominations.” “After that I had peace,” he says, speaking of those earlier years, “so that I even took a wife, such good days had I.”[1325]—Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.[1326]

An incident related of Luther by Schlaginhaufen shows how a single text of Scripture, and the train of ideas it awakened, could reduce him, and Bugenhagen too, to a state verging on distraction. “The devil on one occasion,” so Luther said to him, “tormented and almost slew me with Paul’s words to Timothy [1 Tim. v. 11-12], so that my heart melted in my bosom; the reason was the abandoning by so many monks and nuns of the religious state in which they had vowed to God to live.” (Paul, in the passage cited, has strong things to say of widows who prove unfaithful to the widowhood in which they had promised to live.) “The devil,” he continues concerning his attitude towards the devil at that time, “hid from my sight the doctrine of Justification so that I never even thought of it, and obtruded on me the text; he led me away from the doctrine of grace to dispute on the Law, and then he had me at his mercy. Bugenhagen happened to be near at the time. I submitted it to him and went with him into the corridor. But he too began to doubt, for he did not know that I was so hard put about it. Thereupon I was at first much upset and passed the night with a heavy heart. Next day Bugenhagen came to me. ‘I am downright angry,’ he said, ‘I have now looked into that text more closely, and, right enough, the argument is ridiculous!’ Thus he [the devil] is always on the watch for us. But nevertheless we have Christ!”[1327]—We are not told why the argument from this Bible-passage, which insists so solemnly on the sacred character of vows, was regarded as “ridiculous.”

The last incident reminds us of the scene between Luther and Bugenhagen on June, 1540, narrated in the Table-Talk; there Luther declares: “No sooner am I assailed by temptation than the flesh begins to rebel even though I understand the spirit.... Gladly would I be formally just, but I do not find it in me.” And Bugenhagen chimed in: “Herr Doctor, neither do I.”[1328]

From Remorse of Conscience to Onslaughts of the Devil

The actual cause of Luther’s anxiety, as is plain from the above, was a certain quite intelligible disquiet of conscience. Yet, he chose to regard all reproaches from within as merely the sting of the Evil One. As time went on this became more and more his habit; it is always the evil spirit who is at his heels, at whose person and doings, Luther, following his bent, pokes his jokes.

Hieronymus Weller, another pupil tormented with inner pangs, once, without any beating about the bush, put down all his sadness to his conscience; he declared in Luther’s presence in the spring of 1532: “Rather than endure such troubles of conscience I would willingly go through the worst illnesses.”[1329] Luther tried his best to pacify him with the assurance that the devil was “a murderer,” and that “God’s Mercy endureth for ever and ever.”

Yet Luther himself had admitted to his friend Wenceslaus Link, that “it is extremely difficult thoroughly to convince oneself that such thoughts of hopelessness emanate from Satan and are not our very own, but the best help is to be found in this conviction. One must by a supreme effort contrive to turn one’s mind to other things and chase such thoughts away.” “But you can guess how hard it is,” he continues, “when the thoughts refer to God and to our eternal salvation; they are of such a nature that our conscience can neither tear itself away from them nor yet despise them.”[1330] Simply to tear itself away from such disquieting thoughts was certainly not possible for a conscience in so luckless a position as Luther’s, oppressed as it was with the weight of a world catastrophe.

Luther once, in 1532, says quite outspokenly and not without a certain reference to himself: “The spirit of sadness is conscience itself”; here, however, he probably only means that we are always conscious within ourselves of a painful antagonism to the Law, for he at once goes on: “This we must ever endure,” we must necessarily be ever in a state of woe because in this life we “lie amidst the throes of childbirth that precede the Last Day;” but the devil who condemns us inwardly “has not yet condemned” Christ. Those who are thus tempted “do not feel those carnal temptations, which are so petty compared with the spiritual.”[1331]

At any rate, so he will have it, there was a call to struggle most earnestly against all the inward voices that make themselves heard against the new teaching and the apostasy, just as though they came from the devil.[1332]

He was helped in this, on the one hand, by his terrible energy, and, on the other, by a theological fallacy: “God has commanded that we should look to Christ for forgiveness of our sins; hence whoever does not do so makes God a liar; I must therefore say to the devil: Even though I be a scamp, yet Christ is just.”[1333]

Thus we find him declaring, for instance, in July, 1528: “to yield to such disquiet of conscience is to be overcome by Satan, nay, to set Satan on the throne!” “Such thoughts may appear to be quite heavenly and called for, but they are nevertheless Satanic and cannot but be so.” When they refuse to depart, even though spurned by us, and we endure them patiently, then do we indeed “present a sublime spectacle to God and the angels.”[1334]—“Away with the devil’s sadness!” so, at a later date, in 1544, he exhorts his old friend Spalatin; “conscience stands in the cruel service of the devil; a man must learn to find consolation even against his own conscience.”[1335]

4. Progress of his Mental Sufferings until their Flood-tide in 1527-1528

If we glance at the history of Luther’s so-called “temptations” throughout the whole course of his career, we shall find that they were very marked at the beginning of his enterprise. Before 1525 they had fallen off, but they became again more frequent during the terrors of the Peasant War and then reasserted themselves with great violence in 1527. After abating somewhat for the next two years they again assumed alarming proportions in 1530 in the solitude of the Coburg and thus continue, with occasional breaks, until 1538. From that time until the end of his life he seemed to enjoy greater peace, at least from doubts regarding his own salvation, though, on the other hand, gloomy depression undoubtedly darkened the twilight of his days, and he complains more than ever of the weakness of his own faith; we miss, however, those vivid accounts of his struggles of conscience which he had been wont to give.

The Period Previous to 1527

Let us listen first of all to Luther’s self-reproach in the early days of his public labours; we may recall those words of 1521 where he confesses, that, before he had grown so bold and confident, “his heart had often quaked with fear,” when he thought of the words of his foes: “Are you alone wise and are all others mistaken? Is it likely that so many centuries were all in the wrong? Supposing, on the contrary, you were in the wrong and were leading so many others with you into error and to eternal perdition!”[1336] He admits similarly that he had still to fight with his conscience even after having passed through the storm in which, “amidst excitement and confusion of conscience,” he had discovered the true doctrine of salvation.[1337] That discovery did not bring him into a haven of rest even though we have his word that, for a while, he was quite overcome with joy. “Oh, what great trouble and labour did it cost me, even though grounded on Holy Scripture, to convince my conscience that I had a right to stand up all alone against the Pope, and denounce him as Antichrist, the Bishops as his Apostles and the Universities as his brothels.”[1338]

The days he spent in the Wartburg and the opportunity they afforded him to look back on his past, awakened anew these self-reproaches; whilst in the solitude, we hear him complaining, that his “distress of soul still persisted and that his former weakness of spirit and of faith had not yet left him.”[1339] Later on he remembered having had to battle with every kind of despair (“omnibus desperationibus”) for three long years.[1340] At a much later date, in 1541, he reminds his friends of the many inward struggles (“tot agones”) the first proclamation of the Evangel and his crusade against the word of man had cost him.[1341]

About 1521 he must have arrived at a pitch of “despair and temptation regarding the wrath of God” such as he never before had tasted; for he told one of his pupils, on Dec. 14, 1532, that it was “about ten years since he had felt this struggle so severely; after that better days had dawned, but later the difficulties began anew.”[1342]

But, as he often admits, he was all too addicted to thoughts of despair, thanks to the devil who was ever lying in wait for him; as for the “better days” they might easily be counted. “When these thoughts come upon me I forget everything about Christ and God, and even begin to look upon God as a miscreant”; the “Laudate” stops, so he says, and the “Blasphemate” begins as soon as we begin to think of the fate to which from all eternity we are predestined.[1343]

Subsequent to 1525 his new state of life with its domestic cares and distractions, added to his satisfaction with the growing damage inflicted on the Papacy, appear to have contributed to diminish his trouble of mind.

Later, however, in 1527, it “began anew.”

Atrocious suffering of mind and bitter anxiety concerning the abuses in the new Church—“a vinegar sourer than all other vinegars, as he calls it,”—immediately preceded his illness which began about July 7, 1527.[1344] Mental uneasiness and self-reproaches accompanied the fainting-fits which at that time seemed to threaten his life. His inward struggles were so severe that Bugenhagen, who tried to comfort him, compares them with the darkness of the soul “so frequently mentioned in the Psalms as illustrative of the spiritual pangs of hell.” “Dr. Martin,” writes the latter, who was pastor at Wittenberg and Luther’s “confessor,” “had in all likelihood been through other such temptations, but none had ever been so severe; this he admitted on the following day to Dr. Jonas, to Dr. Christian [Schurf] and to me. He said they were worse and more dangerous than the bodily ailment which befell him on that same Saturday evening about five o’clock and which was so serious that we feared he would succumb under it.” Luther himself, in those critical days, declared “that he would not retract his doctrine,” and, after making his confession to Bugenhagen as the latter relates, “spoke at considerable length of the spiritual temptation he had been through the same morning, with such fear and trembling as could not be described in words.”[1345] It was then that the curious complaint was involuntarily wrung from him that those who saw his outward behaviour fancied he “lay on a bed of roses, though God knew how it stood with him.” Bugenhagen and Jonas have embellished their accounts of this illness of their friend with many pious utterances supposed to have been spoken by him then.[1346]

The Height of the Storm, 1527-28

The worst struggles, lasting over many months, followed upon Luther’s illness of 1527.

Hardly had he recovered his normal health than we find his letters full of sad allusions to his abiding state of despair and to his fears concerning the faith, probably the most melancholy outpourings of his whole life.

“For more than a week I have been tossed about between death and hell,” he writes to Melanchthon, “so that I still tremble in every limb and feel utterly broken. Waves and storms of despair and blasphemy against God broke over me and I lost Christ almost entirely. But, at the intercession of the saints [his friends] God has begun to take pity on me and has delivered my soul from the lowest hell.”[1347]—“This struggle,” he writes to Justus Menius, “goes beyond my strength.... I am tried not only in body but still more, and worst of all, in soul. God allows Satan and his angels thus to torment me.”[1348]

In a letter of Aug. 21, addressed to Johann Agricola, then still his friend, he informed him that the fight was not yet at an end. “Satan rages against me with all his might. Like another Job (Job xvi. 12), God has set me up as a mark, and He tempts me with intolerable weakness of spirit. The prayers of holy men indeed save me from remaining in his hands, but the wounds I have received in my heart will be hard to heal. I trust that my strivings will turn to the salvation of many.” He concludes by saying that those in power (the Catholics) were unable to get at him, but that so much the more was he plagued in spirit “by the Prince of this world.”[1349] He writes in much the same vein on Aug. 26 to Nicholas Hausmann.

Truly, so he again wrote to Johann Agricola, on Aug. 31, “neither world nor reason can understand how hard it is to realise that Christ is our righteousness, so deeply rooted in us is the doctrine of works, which has grown up with us and become part of us. That Christ may strengthen me I commend myself to your prayers.”[1350] Hence it was his chief dogma, the very rock of his Evangel, that “Satan” was then tampering with. The call for good works was, as he felt, beyond even his power to deny.

“For wellnigh three months I have been feeling wretched,” he wrote on Oct. 8, “not so much in body as in soul, so that I have written little or nothing, so greatly has Satan tossed me in the sieve [Luke xxii. 31]”[1351]—“God has not yet completely restored me to health,” he announces on Oct. 19, “but in His wisdom leaves me a prey to Satan who assails me and buffets me; but God also sends help and protection.”[1352]

He speaks of himself, on Oct. 27, as “a wretched and abject worm, harassed by the spirit of sadness,” “I seek and thirst for nought else than for a gracious God, for as such He reveals Himself even to His enemies and contemners.”[1353] Luther had claimed, that, through his new doctrine and through flinging aside his monkish frock he had found “a gracious God,” and proclaimed Him to men for their reconciliation; this has been extolled as the greatest gain achieved by the Lutheran schism; yet here we have his word for it that the solace of a Gracious God was still withheld from him.—“I have always been in the habit of comforting others,” he says in a letter to Amsdorf on Nov. 1; “and now I myself stand in desperate need of such consolation; only one thing, however, do I wish, viz. never to be the foe of Christ, although I have offended Him by many and great sins. Satan tries to make a Job of me; he would like to sift me like Peter and his brethren. Oh, that God would say to him: ‘Yet spare his life’ [Job ii. 6], and to me: ‘I am thy salvation’ [Ps. xxxiv. 3]. Even now I still hope that His anger at my sins will not last for ever.... Meanwhile fighting goes on outside and fears reign within, yea, very bitter ones indeed.”[1354]

Thus in spite of everything he tries to buoy himself up with hope.

Yet his lamentations continue. “Hardly can I breathe for storms and faintheartedness.... My Katey, however, is strong in faith and in good health.... As for me, my body is whole but I am tempted” (Nov. 4).[1355]—“From several sides at once fears rush in on me. My temptations torment me ... for months storms and faintness of spirit have never left me; pray that my faith may not fail” (Nov. 7).—“I have surely troubles enough already, please do not add to them by crucifying me with your dissensions” (Nov. 9).—“Erasmus and the Sacramentarians are now come to stamp me under foot, to persecute a man already utterly worn out in spirit!”[1356]—“I endure God’s wrath because I have sinned against Him. My sins, death, and Satan with his angels all rage against me without a break; and now Pope and Emperor, Princes, Bishops and the whole world too storms in upon me, making common cause with the crew who vex me”; everything would be endurable provided only Christ—for Whose sake he, the “most abject of all sinners,” was hated—did not desert one “whom God has smitten”[1357] and whom they persecute (Nov. 10).—“I believe that it is no mere fiend from the ranks of the devil’s hosts who fights with me, but the Prince of the demons himself; so powerful is he and so armed to the teeth with Bible-texts that my knowledge of the Bible is left stranded and I am obliged to have recourse to the words of others; from this you may get some idea of the devil’s height, as they say” (Nov. 17).

“I am well in body, but as to how it stands with me in spirit I am not certain.... I seek only for a gracious Christ.... Satan wants to prevent me from writing and to drag me down with him to hell. May Christ tread him under foot, Amen!” (Nov. 22).[1358]

His work and his doctrine must, according to him, be pleasing to heaven; the difficulties and the attacks from without and from within, all these he attributes to Satan’s raging and sees in them proofs “that our word is the Word of God; this alone it is that makes him so furious against us” (Dec. 30).—It has been said that Luther held fast to this with a “bold faith”; it would, however, be more correct to say that he catches at such thoughts as a drowning man does at a straw, a phenomenon which of itself throws a lurid light on his delusions and the misty trend of his thoughts. He is determined to be sure of his cause—and at this very time, with the help of the State, he has a Coburg Zwinglian put to silence, because the latter “neither is nor can be sure of his cause.”[1359]

“I myself am weak and in wretchedness,” he again confesses. “If only Christ does not forsake me.... Satan expends his fury on me because I have attacked him by deed, and word, and writing; but I feel consoled when I boldly believe (‘fortiter credo’) that what I did was pleasing to the Lord and to His Christ. I am tossed about between the two warring princes [Christ and Satan] till all my bones are sore. Many works of Satan have I done and still do, nevertheless I hope to please my Christ Who is merciful and inclined to forgive; but from Satan I desire no forgiveness for what I have done against him and for Christ. He is a murderer and the father of lies.... I feel in the depths of my soul how, with unbelievable wrath, he plots against me, assuming even the guise of Christ, to say nothing of that of the angel of light” (Nov. 27, 1527).—The “guise of Christ” and of the “angel of light,” to which he here alludes, are sufficient to show those who look below the surface that what was troubling him was something not very different from the inner voice of conscience.

How far he could go in deluding himself the better to appease his conscience is plain from what he says in his letter “to the Christians at Erfurt”: During the whole time he had spent at Erfurt in his Catholic days he had longed in vain to hear “a Gospel or even a little Psalm”; there, as was everywhere the case in Popery, Holy Scripture lay buried deep, and “no one had even thought of preaching a really Christian sermon.”[1360]

No less vain than this consolation from the past was that which he sought in the future. He clung wildly to his delusion that the end of all was at hand; “Satan,” he cries, “has but a short respite before being completely overthrown, therefore does he make such furious and incredible efforts” (Dec. 31).

“Now that the Word is preached Satan plainly comes off second best; hence he persecutes me secretly; he is unchained, and, with all his engines he seeks to tear Christ from me.” Thus (on Nov. 28).—“I am the wretched ‘off-scourings of Christ’” (Nov. 29).—“I am to all intents and purposes dead, as the Apostle calls it, yet still I live” (Dec. 10).

The long and terrible year was drawing to a close. He had almost grown accustomed to his inward troubles. “I have not yet shaken off my temptation, nor do I desire to be free if it is to God’s glory. The devil rages against me simply because Christ has vanquished him through me, his most wretched of vessels” (Dec. 14).—“Well in body, in soul I am as Christ wills, to Whom I am now bound only by a slender thread. The devil on the other hand is moored to me with mighty cords, nay, real cables; he drags me down into the depths, but the weak Christ has still the upper hand owing to your prayers, or at least He puts up a brave fight” (Dec. 29).

The Trouble Continues

Even his lectures on the 1st Epistle of St. John testify to Luther’s inward excitement during that unhappy year (1527). The Preface to the commentary as preserved in the Vatican MS. (Palat., 1825) is dated Aug. 19, and begins: “You know that we are so placed by God in this life as to be exposed to all the darts of Satan. And not Satan alone storms against us, but also the world, and our heart, and our flesh. Hence we must despair of peace so long as we remain here below. Against all these evils God has given us no other weapon than His Word which He commands us to preach, who live in the midst of wolves.... Thus, since we are exposed to all these dangers, to death, sin, heretics and the whole might of Satan, I have undertaken to expound this Epistle.”

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.

Outbursts and Relief

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.”

5. The Ten Years from 1528-38. How to win back Peace of Conscience

The Years Previous to 1537

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]

“I should have Died without any Struggle”

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]

The “Struggles by Day and by Night” gradually Wane

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.

How to find Peace of Conscience

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.

6. Luther on his Faith, his Doctrine and his Doubts, particularly in his Later 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.

Luther’s Notion of 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.