Those people who find it difficult to suppose that God so loves man that He occasionally suspends the operation of the principle of the conservation of energy in order that He may interfere in purely human affairs on this tiny planet will also find it difficult to believe in a personal devil who roams the world seeking whom he may devour and haunting people. Yet Martin Luther, who started the movement that ultimately led the world back to science and reason, had no difficulty whatever in believing this nonsense, and an infinity of other nonsense that to us nowadays seems little short of stark staring crazydom. Surely the poor gentleman must have been deranged, one thinks. Not at all, for Luther had the evidence of his own senses that he was haunted. He heard the foul fiend whistle and roar in his ears; the devil so gripped his heart that Luther never knew that the next moment might not be his last; sometimes he would cause him to be so giddy that when quietly sitting at work Luther was forced to fall from his stool. What was the matter with Martin Luther?
To begin with, most assuredly he was never mad; at the most one could fairly say that, like most of the great leaders of thought, Luther was probably of the manic-depressive temperament, with that strange mixture of apparently insane egotism and gloomy pessimism that so marks people of that temperament. In his famous prayer he orders his God about in a way that one can only compare to that of the Presbyterian divine who cried in a moment of irritation, “Noo, Lord, that’s fair ridic’lous.” If you read Luther’s Table-talk, you will at once be struck with his curious temperament, which could combine a certain amount of shrewd common sense, such as you would expect from a man of Saxon peasant stock, with profound belief in the supernatural, a good deal of disbelief in his fellow-man, virulent hatred of the Pope and all his works, and a good deal of what looks uncommonly like sheer mysticism. En passant I found therein the solution of a problem that has long puzzled me. What was the mysterious “sin against the Holy Ghost” that nobody seems to understand? Let Luther explain it to us himself. Many persons have imagined that it represented one of those sexual perversions against which primitive races have so often launched a fierce tabu, simply because they knew nothing of sexual pathology. But really, according to Luther, it was nothing of the kind.
“Sins against the Holy Ghost are: first, presumption; second, despair; third, opposition to and condemnation of the known truth; fourth, not to wish well but to grudge one’s brother and neighbour the grace of God; fifth, to be hardened; sixth, to be impenitent.”
The only fault one has to find with this is that Luther does not tell us how to recognise the truth when one sees it. What is the criterion of truth? Otherwise it would seem to be a fairly good description of a certain type of neurasthenia. Many neurasthenics must go in mortal sin every day of their lives, for it is well known that the devil is particularly on the lookout for sins against the Holy Ghost.
Probably Luther’s devil merely represented symptoms due to his wretched health. There is an excellent description of his dystrophy in Hartmann and Grisar’s monumental Life of Luther, and Dr. Cabanes went over it again from the point of view of modern medicine; while nearly fifty years ago Dr. W. W. Ireland of Edinburgh reviewed it from the point of view of an alienist of that time. But Ireland did not perceive the immense influence of Luther’s physical ailments on his mental condition. How could you expect him to, fifty years ago? From these three sources, therefore, I draw the material for this essay. A précis of Dr. Cabanes’ essay appeared in the St. Louis Urologic and Cutaneous Review for November, 1924.
Those fanatic Protestants who still believe that Luther was a meek and mild sort of monk who was driven to revolt by the sins of the “Whore of Babylon” should read his Table-talk in order that they may learn what manner of man he really was; and it will be surprising if they rise from it without an insight into Luther’s character that may possibly change their whole conception of the Reformation. Far from being a gentle and Christlike son of the Church, he was, so far as I can gather from his own words, perhaps the most frenzied theologian of that dark century of theologians. In sheer outrageous superstition he could outdistance even the most ignorant peasant; his fear of the devil amounted to possession, because he attributed to the action of the foul fiend every single thing that he could not understand. An hour spent in reading Luther’s Table-talk gives a better insight into the mind of man during that most terrible of all centuries than a year spent in reading an ordinary history. The most reasonable excuse that we can make for him is that he was ill during the greater part of his life, suffering from one of the most distressing of all ailments.
From about the age of thirty he suffered from dreadful noises in the head, banging, whistling, thumping, and crashing. These were accompanied by terrible attacks of giddiness, which sometimes actually caused him to fall from his stool, and rendered work impossible. Towards middle life he became so neurasthenic that his mental condition became almost that of a lunatic—and indeed the Catholics did not miss the opportunity to say that he had actually become mad; but probably this was but a tit for Luther’s own tat of extraordinary theological violence, and was certainly never true. But what is true is that he began to suffer from pains in the region of the heart, accompanied by a sense of dreadful oppression, so that sometimes he thought himself to be dying. As he grew older he became very deaf, and his cardiac distress became still more terrible.
All these things were to Luther certain evidence that his personal devil was attacking him; it is said that once he threw a pot of ink at the fiend, and the marks of it are still shown. All these things can be explained easily—as Dr. Cabanes suggested—if we suppose that Luther was suffering from Ménière’s disease of the labyrinth, a disease of the inner ear that occasionally attacks middle-aged and gouty people, and is supposed to have added its tragedy to Dean Swift’s already tragic life. The labyrinth is composed of the semi-circular canals, structures which are directed longitudinally and laterally to the axis of the body, and assist us in maintaining our equilibrium; if anything goes wrong in these tiny tubes an unconquerable feeling of giddiness overwhelms us, and it is thought that it is the washing this way and that of the fluid in these canals that causes the deathly feeling of giddiness in seasickness. And the fact that Luther’s deafness steadily increased as he grew older seems to show that it was really caused by Ménière’s disease. In 1541 he seems to have suffered from middle-ear disease, accompanied by dreadful earaches and discharge from the ear; while this lasted he became temporarily quite deaf, but all the time the labyrinthine disorder was going on.
Although he never seems actually to have suffered from gout, there seems to be no doubt that he was of the gouty diathesis, and that uric acid was constantly circulating in his blood, which, added to his manic-depressive temperament, would undoubtedly increase his tendency to gloom. If there can be any worse devil than frightful noises in the head, neurasthenia and uric acid in the blood, it would be interesting to learn what it is. Many a man has been driven to suicide by nothing worse. That Luther seems to have resisted any temptation to suicide that he may have had, speaks volumes for the strength of his purpose.