Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  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.”

  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, 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.”— “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.”

  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. 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.” “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.”

  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.” 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.”

  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.

  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.”

  “When Satan finds me idle and not armed with the Word,” so we read in the notes made of one of his sermons, “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.” 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.”

  “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.” — 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!”

  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.” — 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.”

  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.

  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. 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.

  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.” — Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.

  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!” — 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.”

  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.” 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.” 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.”