Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Thus the making of this regrettable mania was in great part Luther’s doing. And yet a reformer could have found no nobler task than to set to work to sweep away the abusive outgrowths of the belief in the devil’s power.

  We still have instructive writings by Catholic authors of that day which, whilst by no means promoting the popular ideas concerning the devil, are unquestionably rooted in the Middle Ages. Such a work is the Catechism of Blessed Peter Canisius. One particular in which the “Larger” Canisian Catechism differs from Luther’s Larger German Catechism is, that, whereas in the latter the evil power of Satan over material things is dealt with at great length, the Catechism of Canisius says never a word on the material harm wrought by the devil. While Luther speaks of the devil sixty-seven times, Canisius mentions him only ten times. Canisius’s book was from the first widely known amongst German-speaking Catholics and served down to the last century for purposes of religious instruction. Though this is true of this particular book of Canisius, the influence of which was so far-reaching, it must in honesty be added that even a man like Canisius, both in his other writings and in his practical conduct, was not unaffected by the prevailing ideas concerning the devil.

  Luther’s Devil-mania; its Connection with his Character and his Doctrine

  Had Luther written his Catechism during the last period of his life he would undoubtedly have brought the diabolical element and his belief in witches even more to the fore. For, as has been pointed out (above, p, 238), Luther’s views on the power the devil possesses over mankind and over the whole world were growing ever stronger, till at last they came to colour everything great or small with which he had to deal; they became, in fact, to him a kind of fixed idea.

  In his last year (1546), having to travel to Eisleben, he fancies so many fiends must be assembled there on his account, i.e. to oppose him, “that hell and the whole world must for the nonce be empty of devils.” At Eisleben he even believed that he had a sight of the devil himself.

  Three years before this he complains that no one is strong enough in belief in the devil; the “struggle between the devils and the angels” affrights him; for it is to be apprehended that “the angels whilst fighting for us often get the worst for a time.” His glance often surveys the great world-combat which the few who believe wage on Christ’s side against Satan, and which has lasted since the dawn of history; now, at the very end of the world, he sees the result more clearly. Christ is able to save His followers from the devil’s claws only by exerting all His strength; they, like Luther, suffer from weakness of faith, just as Christ Himself did in the Garden of Olives(!); they, like Luther, stumble, because Christ loves to show Himself weak in the struggle with the devil; mankind’s and God’s rights have come off second best during the age-long contest with the devil. In Jewry, for which Luther’s hatred increases with age, he sees men so entirely delivered over to the service of the devil that “all the heathen in a lump” are simply nothing in comparison with the Jews; but even the “fury of the Jews is mere jest and child’s play” compared with the devilish corruption of the Papacy.

  “The devil is there; he has great claws and whosoever falls into them him he holds fast, as they find to their cost in Popery. Hence let us always pray and fear God.” This in 1543. But we must also fear the devil, and very much too, for, as he solemnly declares in 1542: “Our last end is that we fear the devil”; for the worst sins are “delusions of the devil.” “The whole age is Satanic,” and the “activity of the devil is now manifest”; the speaker longs for “God at length to mock at Satan.” “The devil is all-powerful at present, several foreign kings are his train-bearers.... God Himself must come in order to resist the proud spirit.... Shortly Christ will make an end of his lies and murders.”

  The whole of his work, the struggle for the Evangel, seems to him at times as one long wrestling with the boundless might of Satan. All his life, so he said in his old age, he had forged ahead “tempestuously” and “hit out with sledge-hammer blows”; but it was all against Satan. “I rush in head foremost, but ... against the devil.” As early as 1518, however, he knew the “thoughts of Satan.”

  It is not difficult to recognise the different elements which, as Luther grew older, combined permanently to establish him in his devil-mania.

  Apart from his peculiar belief in the devil, of which he was never to rid himself, there was the pessimism which loomed so large in his later years; there was also his habit of regarding himself and his work as the pet aversion and chief object of Satan’s persecution, for since, according to his own contention, his great struggle against Antichrist was in reality directed against the devil, the latter naturally endeavoured everywhere to bar his way. If great scandals arise as the result of his sermons, it is Satan who is to blame; “he smarts under the wounds he receives and therefore does he rage and throw everything into confusion.” The disorderly proceedings against the Catholics at Erfurt which brought discredit on his teaching were also due to the devil. The Wittenberg students who disgrace him are instigated by the devil. Dr. Eck was incited against him by Satan. The Catholic princes who resist him, like Duke George of Saxony, have at least a “thousand devils” who inspire them and assist them. Above all, it is the devil himself who delivers his oracles through the mouthpiece of those teachers of the innovations who differ from Luther, deluding them to such an extent that they lose “their senses and their reason.” If Satan can do nothing else against the Evangel he sends out noisy spirits so as to bolster up the heresy of the existence “of a Purgatory.”

  Such ideas became so habitual with him, that, in later years, the conviction that the devil was persecuting his work developed into an abiding mania, drawing, as it were, everything else into its vortex.

  Everywhere he hears behind him the footsteps of his old enemy, the devil.

  “Satan has often had me by the throat.... He has frequently beset me so hard that I knew not whether I was dead or alive ... but with God’s Word I have withstood him.” He lies with me in my bed, so he says on one occasion; “he sleeps much more with me than my Katey.” His struggle with him degenerates into a hand-to-hand brawl, “I have to be at grips with him daily.” His pupils related, that on his own giving, when he was an old man “the devil had walked with him in the dormitory of the [former] monastery ... plaguing and tormenting him”; that “he had one or two such devils who were in the habit of lying in wait” for him, and, “that, when unable to get the better of his heart, they attacked and troubled his head.” Whether the narrators of these accounts are referring to actual apparitions or not does not much matter.

  Later on, when dealing with his delusions, we shall have to speak of the diabolical apparitions Luther is supposed to have had. There is no doubt, however, that Luther’s first admirers took his statements concerning his experiences with the devil rather more seriously than he intended, as, for instance, when Cyriacus Spangenberg in his “Theander Lutherus” relates a disputation on the Winkle-Mass which he supposed Luther to have actually held with the devil, and even goes so far as to prove from the bruises which the devil in person inflicted on him that Luther was “really a holy martyr.” Even some of his opponents, like Cochlæus, fancied that because Luther said “in a sermon that he had eaten more than one mouthful of salt with the devil, he had therefore most probably been in direct communication with the devil himself, the more so since some persons were said to have seen the two hobnobbing together.” Here we shall merely point out generally that to Luther the power of Satan, his delusions and persecutions, were something that seemed very near, an uncanny feeling that increased as he grew older and as his physical strength gave out.

  “The devil is now very powerful,” he says in 1540, “for he no longer deals with us through the agency of others, of Duke George, for instance, or the Englishman [Henry VIII], or of the Mayence fellow [Albert], but fights against us visibly. Against him we must pray diligently.” “Didn’t he even ride many grand and holy prophets. Was not David a great prop
het? And yet even he was devil-ridden, and so was Saul and ‘Bileam’ too.”

  We must, moreover, not overlook the link which binds Luther’s devil-mania to his doctrinal system as a whole, particularly to his teaching on the enslaved will and on justification.

  Robbed of free-will for doing what is good, when once the devil assumes the mastery, man must needs endure his anger and perform his works. Luther himself found a cruel rider in the devil. Again, though man by the Grace of God is justified by faith, yet the old diabolical root of sin remains in him, for original sin persists and manifests itself in concupiscence, which is essentially the same thing as original sin. All acts of concupiscence are, therefore, sins, being works of our bondage under Satan; only by the free grace of Christ can they be cloaked over. The whole outer world which has been depraved by original sin is nothing but the “devil’s own den”; the devil stands up very close (“propinquissimus”) even to the pious, so that it is no wonder if we ever feel the working of the spirit of darkness. “Man must bear the image either of God or of the devil.” Created to the image of God he failed to remain true to it, but “became like unto the devil.”

  Hence his doctrines explain how he expected every man to be so keenly sensible of “God’s wrath, the devil, death and hell”; everyone should realise that ours is “no real life, but only death, sin and power of the devil.” It is true that in his doctrine faith affords a man sufficient strength, and even makes him master of the devil; but, as he remarks, this is “in no wise borne out by experience and must be believed beforehand.” Meanwhile we are painfully “sensible” that we are “under the devil’s heel,” for the “world and what pertains to it must have the devil for its master, who also clings to us with all his might and is far stronger than we are; for we are his guests in a strange hostelry.”

  The Weapons to be used against the Devil

  On the fact that faith gives us strength against all Satanic influences Luther insists frequently and in the strongest terms.

  He tries to find here a wholesome remedy against the fear that presses on him. He describes his own attempts to lay hold on it and to fill himself with Christ boldly and trustfully. Even in his last days such words of confidence occasionally pierce the mists of his depression. “We see well,” he says, “that when the devil attacks a [true] Christian he is put to shame, for where there is faith and confidence he has nothing to gain.” This he said in 1542 when relating the story of an old-time hermit who rudely accosted the devil as follows, when the latter sought to disturb him at his prayers: “Ah, devil, this serves you right! You were meant to be an angel and you have become a swine.”

  “We must muster all our courage so as not to dread the devil.” We must “clasp the faith to our very bosom” and “cheerfully fling to the winds the apparitions of the spirits”; “they seek in vain to affright men.” Contempt of the devil and awakening of faith are, according to Luther, the best remedies against all assaults of the devil. A man who really has the faith may even set an example that others cannot imitate. Luther knows, for instance, of a doctor of medicine who with boundless faith stood up to Satan when the latter, horns and all, appeared to him; the brave man even succeeded in breaking off the horns; but, in a similar case, when another tried to do the same in a spirit of boasting, he was killed by Satan. Hence let us have faith, but let our faith be humble!

  But, provided we have faith and rely on Christ, we may well show the devil our contempt for him, vex him and mock at his power and cunning. He himself, as he says, was given to breaking out into music and song, the better to show the devil that he despised him, for “our hymns are very galling to him”; on the contrary, he rejoices and has a laugh when we are upset and cry out “alas and alack!” To remain alone is not good. “This is what I do”; rather than be alone “I go to my swine-herd Johann or to see the pigs.”

  In this connection Luther can tell some very coarse and vulgar jokes, both at his own and others’ expense, in illustration of the contempt which the devil deserves; they cannot here be passed over in silence.

  Thus, on April 15, 1538, he relates the story of a woman of Magdeburg whom Satan vexed by running over her bed at night “like rats and mice. As he would not cease the woman put her a —— over the bedside, presented him with a f —— (if such language be permissible) and said: ‘There, devil, there’s a staff, take it in your hand and go pilgriming with it to Rome to the Pope your idol.’” Ever after the devil left her in peace, for “he is a proud spirit and cannot endure to be treated contemptuously.” According to Lauterbach, who gives the story in somewhat briefer form, Luther sapiently remarked: “Such examples do not always hold good, and are dangerous.”

  He himself was nevertheless fond of expressing his contempt for the devil after a similar way when the latter assailed him with remorse of conscience.

  “I can drive away the devil with a single f —— .” “To shame him we may tell him: Kiss my a — —”, or “Ease yourself into your shirt and tie it round your neck,” etc. On May 7, 1532, when troubled in mind and afraid lest “the thunder should strike him, he said: ‘Lick my a —— , I want to sleep, not to hold a disputation.’” On another occasion he exclaims: “The devil shall lick my a —— even though I should have sinned.” When the devil teased him at night, “suggesting all sorts of strange thoughts to him,” he at last said to him: “Kiss me on the seat! God is not angry as you would have it.” Of course, seeing that the devil “‘fouls’ the knowledge of God,” he must expect to be “fouled” in his turn. Luther frequently said, so the Table-Talk relates, that he would end by sending “into his a —— where they belonged” those “twin devils” who were in the habit of prying on him and tormenting him mentally and bodily; for “they had brought him to such a pass that he was fit for nothing.” The Pope had once played him (Luther) the same trick: “He has stuck me into the devil’s behind”; “for I snap at the Pope’s ban and am his devil, therefore does he hate and persecute me.”

  He relates, in May, 1532, according to Schlaginhaufen’s Notes, his method of dismissing the devil by the use of stronger and stronger hints: When the devil came to him at night in order to plague him, he first of all told him to let him sleep, because he must work during the day and needed all the rest he could get. Then, if Satan continued to upbraid him with his sins, he would answer mockingly that he had been guilty of a lot more sins which the devil had forgotten to mention, for instance, he had, etc. (there follows the choice simile of the shirt as given above); thirdly, “if he still goes on accusing me of sins I say to him contemptuously: ‘Sancte Satanas ora pro me; you have never done a wrong and you alone are holy; be off to God and get grace for yourself.’”

  The way in which Bugenhagen or Pomeranus, the pastor of Wittenberg, with Luther’s fullest approval, drove the devil out of the butter churn (vol. iii., f.) became famous at Wittenberg, and, thanks to the Table-Talk, elsewhere too. It may here be remarked that the incident was no mere joke. For when, in 1536, the question of the harm wrought by the witches was discussed amongst Luther’s guests, and Bartholomew Bernhardi, the Provost, complained that his cow had been bewitched for two years, so that he had been unable to get any milk from her, Luther related quite seriously what had taken place in Bugenhagen’s house. (“Then Pommer came to the rescue, scoffed at the devil and emptied his bowels into the churn,” etc.). According to Lauterbach’s “Diary” Luther returned to the incident in 1538 and stamped the whole proceeding with his approval: “Dr. Pommer’s plan is the best, viz. to plague them [the witches] with muck and stir it well up, for then all their things begin to stink.” What is even more remarkable than the strange practice itself is the way in which Luther comes to speak of “Pommer’s plan.” It is his intention to show that the method of combating witches had made progress since Catholic times. For, in Lauterbach, the passage runs: “The village clergy and schoolmasters had a plan of their own [for counteracting spells] and plagued them [the witches] not a little, but Dr. Pommer’s plan, etc. (as a
bove).” Hence not only did Luther sanction the superstition of earlier ages, but he even sought to improve on it by the invention of new practices of his own.

  Luther is also addicted to the habit dear to the German Middle Ages of using the devil as a comic figure; as he advanced in age, however, he tended to drop this habit and also the kindred one of chasing the devil away by filthy abuse; the truth is that the devil had now assumed in his eyes a grimmer and more tragic aspect.

  Formerly he had been fond of describing in his joking way how the devil, “though he had never actually taken his doctor’s degree,” proved himself an “able logician” in his suggestions and disputations; when he brought forward objections Luther would reply: “Devil, tell me something new; what you say I already know.” In his book on the “Winkle-Mass,” pretending to “make a little confession,” he tells how, “on one occasion, awakening at midnight,” the devil began a disputation against the Mass with the words: “Hearken, oh most learned Doctor, are you aware that for some fifteen years you said such Winkle-Masses nearly every day?” Whereupon he had “seized on the old weapons” which “in Popery he had learnt to put on and to use” and had sought an excuse. “To this the devil retorted: ‘Friend, tell me where this is written, etc.’” Formerly he had been fond of poking fun at the Papists by telling them how they “were beset merely by naughty little devils, legal rather than theological ones; that they were tempted only to homicide, adultery and fornication,” in short, to sins of the second table of the Law, by “puny fiendkins and little petty devils,” whereas we on the other hand have “by us the great devils who are doctores theologiæ”; “these attack us as the leaders of the army, for they tempt us to the great sins against the first table,” to question the forgiveness of sins, to doubts against faith and to despair.