Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  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.” Luther seems to have sent Link several such letters on the means of escaping from “despair.” He knew only too well the fears which many underwent in the new Evangel.

  “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.”

  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.”

  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.” — 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.” — 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” (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.” 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.” 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.

  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.”

  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.”

  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 strongho
ld 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.”

  “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.

  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. 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.” 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.”

  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.” 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.”

  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 — 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.”

  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.” 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, ] 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!’”

  “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.”

  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 hi
mself 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. 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’).” 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; 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.” 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. 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.