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.[349] 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.[350] 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.”[351] 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 influence 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.[352] 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.[353] 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 (p. 101 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.”[354] 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.”[355] 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.”[356] 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 (Sep. 1, 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.”[357] 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.”[358]
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.[359]
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.”[360]
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.”[361] “Taulerus tuus” (“Your Tauler”[362]) 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.”[363] 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.”[364]
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.[365] 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.
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,[366] 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.”[367] 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.
Luther also refers both to Tauler and to himself elsewhere in the “Operationes,” where he speaks of the fears of conscience regarding the judgment of God which no one can understand who had not himself experienced them; Job, David, King Ezechias and a few others had endured them; “and finally that German theologian, Johannes Tauler, often alludes to such a state of soul in his sermons.”[368] Tauler, however, when speaking of such afflictions, is thinking of those souls who seek God and are indeed united to Him in love, but who are tried and purified by the withdrawal of sensible grace, and by being made to feel a sense of separation from Him and the burden of their nature.
In his church-postils he again summons Tauler to his aid in order to depict the fears with which he was so familiar, seeking consolation, as it were, both for himself and for others. In his sermon for the 2nd Sunday in Advent (1522) he speaks of “those exalted temptations concerning death and hell, of which Tauler wrote.” Evidently speaking from experience he says: “This temptation destroys flesh and blood, nay, penetrates into the marrow of the bones and is death itself, so that no one can endure it unless marvellously borne up. Some of the patriarchs tasted this, for instance, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, David and Moses, but, towards the end of the world, it will become more common.” Finally, he assures his hearers, that, there were such as were “still daily tried” in this way, “of which but few people are aware; these are men who are in the agony of death, and who grapple with death”; still Christ holds out the hope that they are not destined to death and to hell; on the other hand, it is certain that the “world, which fears nothing, will have to endure, first death, and, after that, hell.”[369]
Other Ordeals
Other temptations that assailed Luther must be taken into account. Unfortunately he does not say what “new” form of temptation it was of which he wrote to Johann Lang in 1519. He says: A temptation had now befallen him which showed him “what man was, though he had fondly believed that he was already well enough aware of this before”; he felt it even more severely than the trials he had to endure before the Leipzig Disputation; he would discuss it with him only by word of mouth when Lang came to see him.[370] Is he here referring to temptations of the flesh of an unusual degree of intensity? We have already heard him bewail his temptations to ambition and hate. Moreover, in this very year he speaks of temptations against chastity in his Sermon on Marriage: It is a “shameful temptation,” he says; “I have known it well, and I imagine you too are acquainted with it; ah, I know well how it is when the devil comes and excites and inflames the flesh.… When one is on fire and the temptation comes I know well what it is; then the eye is already blind.”[371] Already before this he had had to fight against “very many temptations” of the sort, which are “wont to attend the age of youth.”[372] Later on they startled him by their waxing strength. Of the temptations of the senses (“titillatio”) to which he was exposed he had complained, for instance, in the same year (1519) in a letter to his superior Staupitz,[373] and the worldly intercourse into which he was drawn, “the social gatherings, excessive indulgence in the pleasures of the table, and general lukewarmness,” of which he speaks on the same occasion, make such temptations all the more likely in the case of a young man of a temper so lively and impressionable, especially as his lukewarmness took the shape of neglect of prayer and the means of grace, and of the help he might have derived from the exercises of the Order.
Such fleshly temptations he bewailed even more loudly when at the Wartburg. There, as we may recall, he became the plaything of evil lust (“libido”) and the “fire of his untamed flesh.” “Instead of glowing in spirit, I glow in the flesh.”[374] Admitting that he himself “prayed and groaned too little for the Church of God,” he exclaims: “Pray for me, for in this solitude I am falling into the abyss of sin!”[375] Though in bodily health and well cared for, he is “being well pounded by sins and temptations,” so he wrote to his old friend Johann Lang.
To all this was still added great trouble of conscience concerning his undertaking as a whole. When he was passionately declaring that his misgivings were from the devil and resolving never to flinch in his antagonism to the hated vow of chastity he was himself falling into the state which he himself describes: “You see how I burn within (‘quantis urgear æstibus’).” This to Melanchthon, after having explained to him the struggle waging within between his feelings and his knowledge of the Bible in the matter of the vow of chastity. He is being carried away to take action, and yet is unable, as he here admits, to prove his object by means of the text of Scripture.[376] He feels himself to be “the sport of a thousand devils” in the Wartburg on account of this and other temptations; he falls frequently, yet the right hand of God upholds him.[377] The castle is full of devils, so he wrote from within its walls, and very cunning devils to boot, who never leave him at peace but behave in such a way that he “is never alone” even when he seems to be so.[378] Hence he was writing “partly under the stress of temptation, partly in indignation.” What he was writing was his “De votis monasticis,” by means of which, as he here says, he is about “to free the young folk from the hell of celibacy.”[379]
Ten years later he still recalls the “despair and the temptation concerning God’s wrath” which had then been raging within him.[380]
His temptations at that time must have been rendered even worse by the morbid conditions then awakening in him, by the dismal, racking sense of fear that peopled his imagination with thousands of devils, and the mental confusion resulting from his state of nervous overstrain.
It would carry us too far to pursue the diabolical temptations to despair (or what he held to be such) throughout the rest of his life, and to examine their connection with his maladies. We shall only remark, that, even at a later date, when we find him the butt of severe temptations of this sort, an under-current of other trouble is frequently to be detected. The “terrors” he endured in his youthful years indeed moderated but never altogether disappear. The “spiritual sickness” of 1537 of which he speaks, when for a whole fortnight he could scarcely eat, drink or sleep, shows the degree to which these thoughts of despair and struggles of conscience could reach.
Summary
To sum up what we have said of Luther’s temptations, a distinction must be made between the temptations of the Evil One, which Luther himself regarded as such, and certain other things the real nature of which he failed to grasp. Moreover, there are those “temptations” which bore on his work and doctrines and which he wrongly regarded as temptations of the devil, whereas they were no more than the prick of conscience. All three are at times reacted on by a morbid state which he likewise failed rightly to understand, but which was made up of that predisposition to anxiety to which his nature was so prone and a kind of nervous irritability due to his struggles and over-great labours. Only those of the first and second class have any title to be regarded as temptations.
To the first class, i.e. to the temptations he felt and described as such, belongs first of all that despair which often disquieted him even in his later years; then again the temptations of the flesh of which we have also heard him speak. Though he ascribes both to the machinations of the Evil One, yet his method of fighting them was fatally mistaken. The temptations to despair he withstood by his erroneous doctrine of grace and faith alone, and, the more such thoughts torment him, the more defiantly does he stand by this doctrine. In the case of the temptations against chastity he failed to make sufficient use of the remedies of Christian penance and piety; on the contrary, under the stress of their allurements, he finally saw fit to demolish even the barrier raised by solemn vows made unto God.
The second class of temptations, which to him, however, did not seem to be such, includes all the mental aberrations we have had occasion to note during the course of his life story, particularly at the beginning of his apostasy. Here we shall only indicate the more important. It may be allowed that many of them masqueraded under specious pretexts and the appearance of good (“sub specie boni”). Thus, e.g. there was something fine and inspiring in his plans of exalting the grace of Christ at the expense of the mere works of the faithful; of giving the religious freedom of the Christian full play, regardless of unwarranted human ordinances; of improving the cut-and-dry theology of the day by a deeper and more positive study of the Bible; and of stopping the widespread decline in ecclesiastical learning and ecclesiastical life by stronghanded reforms. He allowed himself, however, to be altogether led astray in both the conception and the carrying out of these plans.
There was grave peril to himself in that sort of spiritualism, thanks to which he so frequently attributes all his doings to the direct inspiration and guidance of Almighty God; real and enlightened dependence on God is something very different; again, there was danger in his perverted interpretation of the teaching of the mystics of the past, in his exaggeration of the strength of man’s sinful concupiscence and neglect of the remedies prescribed in ages past, particularly of the practices of his own Order, also in his passionate struggles against the so-called holiness-by-works prevalent among the Augustinians, in his characteristic violence and tendency to pick a quarrel, and, above all, in the working of his inordinate self-esteem and unbounded appreciation of his own achievements as the leader of the new movement, which led him to exalt himself above all divinely appointed ecclesiastical authority.
In the above we were obliged to hark back to Luther’s earlier days, and this we shall again have to do in the following pages. The truth is, that many of the secrets of his earlier years can be explained only in the light of his later life, whilst, conversely, his youth and years of ripening manhood assist us in solving some of the riddles of later years. Hence we cannot be justly charged with repeating needlessly incidents that have already been related.
Just as the Wartburg witnessed the strongest temptations that Luther had ever to bear, so, too, it formed the stage of certain of those manifestations from the other world of which he fancied himself the recipient. Such manifestations, which lead one to wonder whether Luther suffered from hallucinations, are of frequent occurrence in his story. We shall now proceed to review them in their entirety.