Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Other maladies and indispositions, of which the effects were sometimes lasting, also deserve to be alluded to. Of these the principal and worst was calculus of which we first hear in 1526 and then again in 1535, 1536 and 1545. In Feb., 1537, Luther was overtaken by so severe an attack at Schmalkalden that his end seemed near. — In 1525 he had to complain of painful hæmorrhoids, and at the beginning of 1528 similar troubles recurred. The “malum Franciæ,” on the other hand, cursorily mentioned in 1523, is not heard of any more. The severe constipation from which he suffered in the Wartburg also passed away. Luther was also much subject to catarrh, which, when it lasted, caused acute mental depression. The “discharge in his left leg” which continued for a considerable while during 1533 had no important after-effects.

  The maladies just mentioned, to which must be added an attack of the “English Sweat,” in 1529, do not afford sufficient grounds for any diagnosis of his physical and mental state in general. On the other hand, the oppression in the præcordial region and his nervous excitability are of great importance to whoever would investigate his general state of health.

  The so-called Temptations no Mere Morbid Phenomena

  Anyone who passes in review the startling admissions Luther makes concerning his struggles of conscience (above, vol. v., p-75), or considers the dreadful self-reproaches to which his apostasy and destruction of the olden ecclesiastical system gave rise, reproaches which lead to “death and hell,” and which he succeeded in mastering only by dint of huge effort, cannot fail to see that these mental struggles were something very different from any physical malady. Since, however, some Protestants have represented mere morbid “fearfulness” as the root-cause of the “temptations,” we must — in order not to be accused of evading any difficulties — look into the actual connection between natural timidity and the never-ending struggles of soul which Luther had to wage with himself on account of his apostasy.

  Luther’s temptations, according to his own accurate and circumstantial statements, consisted chiefly of remorse of conscience and doubts about his undertaking; they made their appearance only at the commencement of his apostasy, whereas the morbid sense of fear was present in him long before. Of such a character were the “terrores” which led him to embrace monasticism, the unrest he experienced during his first zealous years of religious life, and the dread of which he was the victim while saying his first Mass and accompanying Staupitz in the procession; this morbid fear is also apparent in the monk’s awful thoughts on predestination and in his subsequent temptations to despair. Moreover, such crises, characterised by temptations and disquieting palpitations ending in fainting fits, were in every case preceded by “spiritual temptations,” and only afterwards did the physical symptoms follow. Likewise the bodily ailments occasionally disappeared, leaving behind them the temptations, though Luther seemed outwardly quite sound and able to carry on his work.

  Hence the “spiritual temptations” or struggles of conscience were of a character in many respects independent of this morbid state of fear.

  They occur, however, on the one hand, in connection with other physical disorders, as in the case of the attack of the “English Sweat” or influenza which Luther had in 1529, and which was accompanied by severe mental struggles; on the other hand, they appear at times to excite the bodily emotion of fear and in very extreme cases undoubtedly tended to produce entire loss of sleep and appetite, cardiac disturbance and fainting fits. Luther himself once said, in 1533, that his “gloomy thoughts and temptations” were the cause of the trouble in his head and stomach; in his ordinary language the temptations were, however, “buffets given him by Satan.” He is fond of clothing the temptations in this Pauline figure and of depicting them as his worst trials, and only quite exceptionally does he call his purely physical sufferings “colaphi Satanæ,” they, too, coming from Satan. Now we cannot of course entirely trust Luther’s own diagnosis — otherwise we should have to reduce all his maladies to a work of evil spirits — yet his feeling that the “temptations” were on the one hand a malady in themselves and on the other a source of many other ills, should carry some weight with us.

  It is also clear that, in the case of an undertaking like Luther’s, and given his antecedents, remorse of conscience was perfectly natural even had there been no ailment present. It was impossible that a once zealous monk should become faithless to his most solemn vows and, on his own authority and on alleged discoveries in the Bible, dare to overthrow the whole ecclesiastical structure of the past without in so doing experiencing grave misgivings. Add to this his violence, his “wild-beast fury” (J. von Walther), his practical contradictions and the theological mistakes which he was unable to hide. Hence we need have no scruple about admitting what is otherwise fairly evident, viz. that his ghostly combats stand apart and cannot be attributed directly to any bodily ailment.

  It remains, however, true that such struggles and temptations throve exceedingly on the morbid fear which lay hidden in the depths of his soul. It must also be granted that neurasthenia sometimes gives rise to symptoms of fear similar to those experienced by Luther, as we shall hear later on from an expert in nervous diseases, whom we shall have occasion to quote (see section 5 below). Consideration for such facts oblige the layman to leave the question open as to how much of Luther’s fear is to be attributed to nervousness or to other physical drawbacks.

  We do not think it desirable here to enter further into the views of the older Catholic polemics, already referred to, who looked upon Luther as possessed (as labouring under an “obsessio” or at least a “circumsessio”). The fits of terror he endured both before and after his apostasy seemed to them to prove that he was really a demoniac. As already pointed out above (vol. iv., ), this field is too obscure and too beset with the danger of error to allow of our venturing upon it. Quite another matter is it, however, with regard to temptations, with which, according to Holy Scripture and the constant teaching of the Church, the devil is allowed to assail men, and to discuss which in Luther’s case we will now proceed, using his own testimonies.

  2. Psychic Problems of Luther’s Religious Development

  From the beginning of his apostasy and public struggle we find in Luther no peace of soul and clearness of outlook; rather, he is the plaything of violent emotions. He himself complains of having to wrestle with gloomy temptations of the spirit. It is these that we now propose to investigate more narrowly. In so doing we must also examine how his nervous state reacted on these temptations, whereby we shall, maybe, discern more clearly than before the connection of Luther’s doctrine with his distress of soul.

  Temptations to Despair

  As to the temptations admitted by Luther to be such, we must first of all recall the involuntary thoughts of despair which occurred to him in the convent and the inclination he felt, against his will, to abandon all hope of his salvation and even to blaspheme God. Everybody in the least acquainted with the spiritual life knows that such darkening of the soul may be caused by the Spirit of Evil and often accompanies certain morbid conditions of the body. When the two, as is often the case, are united, the effects are all the more far-reaching. Now, on his own showing, this was precisely the case with the unhappy inmate of the Erfurt monastery. Luther felt himself compelled, as he says, to lay bare his temptations (the “horrendæ et terrificæ cogitationes”) to Staupitz in confession. The latter comforted him by pointing out the value of such temptations as a mental discipline. Staupitz, and others too, had, however, also told him that his case was to some extent new to them and beyond their comprehension. Hence, understood by none, he passed his days sunk in sadness. All to whom he applied for consolation had answered him: “I do not know.” His fancy must, indeed, have strayed into strange bypaths for both Pollich, the Wittenberg professor, and Cardinal Cajetan expressed amazement at the oddness of his thoughts.

  His theological system finally became the pivot around which his thoughts revolved; to it he looked for help. He had created it under the in
fluence of other factors to which it is not here needful to refer again; particularly it had grown out of his own relaxation in the virtues of his Order and religious life. His system, however, had for its aim to combat despair, overmastering concupiscence and the consciousness of sin by means of a self-imposed tranquillity. He was determined to arrive by main force at peace and certainty. Only little by little, so he wrote in 1525, had he discovered, “God leads down to hell those whom He predestines to heaven, and makes alive by slaying”; whoever had read his writings “would understand this now very well”; a man must learn to despair utterly of himself, and allow himself to be helplessly saved by the action of God, i.e. by virtue of the forgiveness won by fiducial faith. How he himself was led by God down to hell he sets forth in his “Resolutiones,” in the account of his mental sufferings given above ( f.), a passage which transports the reader into the midst of the pains which Luther endured in his anxiety.

  The man most deeply initiated into the darker side of Luther’s temptations and struggles was the friend of his youth, the Augustinian, Johann Lang. He, too, apparently suffered severely beneath the burden of temptations regarding predestination and the forgiveness of sins. It was in a letter to him, that, not long after the nailing up of the Wittenberg Theses, Luther penned those curious words: They would pray earnestly for one another, “that our Lord Jesus may help us to bear our temptations which no one save us two has ever been through.” Shortly before this Luther had commended to the care of his friend, then prior at Erfurt, a young man, Ulrich Pinder of Nuremberg, who had opened his heart to him at Wittenberg; on this occasion he wrote that Pinder was “troubled with secret temptations of soul which hardly anyone in the monastery with the exception of yourself understands.” He also alludes to the temptations peculiar to himself in that letter to Lang, in 1516, in which he describes his overwhelming labours, which “seldom leave him due time for reciting the hours or saying Mass.” On the top of his labours, he says, there were “his own temptations from the world, the flesh and the devil.” To this same recipient of his confidences Luther was wont regularly to give an account of the success attending his attacks on the ancient Church and doctrine; he kindled in him a burning hatred of those Augustinians at Erfurt who were well disposed towards scholasticism and Aristotle, and forwarded him the controversial Theses for the Disputations at the Wittenberg University embodying his new doctrine of the necessity of despairing of ourselves and of mystically dying, viz. the new “Theology of the Cross.”

  Some mysterious words addressed to Staupitz, in which Luther hints at his inward sufferings, find their explanation when taken in conjunction with the above. He assured Staupitz (Se, 1518) in a letter addressed to him at Salzburg, that the summons to Rome and the other threats made not the slightest impression on him: “I am enduring incomparably worse things, as you know, which make me look upon such fleeting, shortlived thunders as very insignificant.” His temptations against God and His Mercy were of a vastly different character. By the words just quoted he undoubtedly meant, says Köstlin, “those personal, inward sufferings and temptations, probably bound up with physical emotions, to which Staupitz already knew him to be subject and which frequently came upon him later with renewed violence. They were temptations in which, as at an earlier date, he was plunged into anxiety concerning his personal salvation as soon as he started pondering on the hidden depths of the Divine Will.”

  The Shadow of Pseudo-Mysticism

  In this connection it will be necessary to return to Luther’s earlier predilection for a certain kind of mysticism.

  As we know, at an early date he felt drawn to the writings of the mystics, for one reason, because he seemed to himself to find there his pet ideas about spiritual death and wholesome despair. Their description of the desolation of the soul and of its apparent abandonment by God appeared to him a startling echo of his own experiences. He did not, however, understand or appreciate aright the great mystics, particularly Tauler, when he read into them his own peculiar doctrine of passivity.

  To a certain extent throughout his whole life he stood under the shadow of this dim, sad mysticism.

  He will have it that he, like the mystics, had frequently been plunged in the abyss of the spirit, had been acquainted with death and with states weird and unearthly. He refuses to relate all he has been through and actually gives as his ground for silence the very words used by St. Paul when speaking of his own revelations: “But I forbear, lest any man should think of me above that which he seeth in me, or anything he heareth from me” (2 Cor. xii. 6). When speaking thus of the mystic death he fails to distinguish between such thoughts and feelings as may have been the result solely of a morbid state of fear, or of remorse of conscience, and the severe trials through which the souls of certain great and holy men had really to pass.

  It is indeed curious to note how he was led astray by a combination of fear, mysticism and temptation.

  He was deluded into seeing in his own states just what he desired, viz. the proof of the truth of his own doctrine and exalted mission to proclaim it; he will not hear of this being a mere figment of his own brain. On the contrary, he is convinced that he, like the inspired Psalmist, has passed through every kind of the terrors which the latter so movingly describes. Like the Psalmist, he too must pray, “O Lord, chastise me not in thy wrath,” and like him, again, he is justified in complaining that his bones are broken and his soul troubled exceedingly (Ps. vi.). He even opines that those who have endured such things rank far above the martyrs; David, according to him, would much rather have perished by the sword than have “endured this murmuring of his soul against God which called forth God’s indignation.”

  There is no doubt that Johann Lang might have been able to tell us much about these gloomy aberrations of Luther’s, for he had a large share in Luther’s development.

  It is worthy of note that it was to this bosom friend that Luther sent his edition of “Eyn Deutsch Theologia.” “Taulerus tuus” (“Your Tauler”) so he calls the German mystic when writing to his friend, and in a similar way, in a letter to Lang, he speaks of the new theology built entirely on grace and passive reliance as “our theology.” “Our theology and St. Augustine,” he says, “are progressing bravely at our University and gaining the upper hand, thanks to the working of God, whereas Aristotle is now taking a back seat.” We must not be of those who, “like Erasmus, fail to give the first place to Christ and grace,” so he writes to Lang, knowing that here he would meet with a favourable response. The man who “knows and acknowledges nothing but grace alone” judges very differently from one “who attributes something to man’s free-will.”

  It was not long before Luther’s pseudo-mysticism translated itself into deeds. He persuades himself that he is guided in all his actions and resolutions by a sort of Divine inspiration. A singular sort of super-naturalism and self-sufficiency gleams in the words he once wrote to Lang. After reminding him of the unquestioned truth, that “man must act under God’s power and counsel and not by his own,” he goes on to explain defiantly, that, for this reason, he scorns once and for all any objections the Erfurt Augustinians might urge against the “paradoxical theses” he had sent them a little earlier, also their charge that he had shown himself hasty and precipitate: God was enough for him; of their counsel and instruction he stood in no need. As though real wisdom and true mysticism did not teach us to welcome humbly the opinion of well-meaning critics, and not to trust too implicitly our own ideas, particularly in fields where one is so liable to trip. But the “Theology of the Cross,” sealed by his fears, now seemed to him above all controversy. During his temptations he had come to see its truth, and it also fell in marvellously with his changed views on the duties of a religious and with his renunciation of humility and self-denial.

  At a time when mysticism and the study of Tauler still exercised a powerful influence over him he was wont in his fits of terror to revert to Tauler’s misapprehended considerations on the inward trials of the soul.
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  In pursuance of this idea and hinting at his own mental state he declares in his “Operationes in psalmos” (1519-21), that, according to St. Paul (Rom. v. 3 f.), tribulations work in us patience and trial and hope, and thus the love of God and justification; tribulation, however, consisted chiefly of inward anxiety, and trial called for patience and calm endurance of this anxiety; the greater the tribulation, the higher would hope rise in the soul. “Thus it is plain that the Apostle is speaking of the assurance of the heart in hope, because, after anxiety cometh hope, and then a man feels that he hopes, believes and loves.” “Hence Tauler, the man of God, and also others who have experienced it, say that God is never more pleasing, more lovable, sweeter and more intimate with His sons than after they have been tried by temptation.” It is quite true that Tauler said this; he also teaches that the greater the desolation by which God tries the souls of the elect, the higher the degree of mystical union to which He wishes to call them; for death is the road to life. It is quite another thing, however, whether Tauler would have approved of Luther’s application of what he wrote.