[4. A Malady of the Age: Doubts and Melancholy]
One of the phenomena which accompanied the religious revulsion and which it is impossible to pass over, was, as contemporary writers relate, the sadness, discontent and depression, in a word “melancholy,” so widespread under the new Evangel even amongst its zealous promoters.
Melanchthon, one of Luther’s most intimate friends, furnished on many occasions of his life a sad spectacle of interior dejection. Of a weaker and more timid mental build than Luther, he appeared at times ready to succumb under the weight of faint-heartedness and scruples, doubts and self-reproaches. (Cp. vol. iii., p. 363 ff.) We may recall how his anxieties, caused by the scandal subsequent on his sanctioning of Philip’s bigamy, almost cost him his life. So many are the records he left behind of discouragement and despondency that his death must appear in the light of a welcome deliverance. Luther sought again and again to revive in him the waning consciousness of the Divine character of their work. It is just in these letters of Luther to Melanchthon that we find him most emphatic in his assertion that their common mission is from God. It was to Melanchthon, that, next to himself, Luther applied the words already quoted, spoken to comfort a dejected pupil: “There must be some in the Church as ready to slap Satan as we three; but not all are able or willing to endure this.”[725]
Spalatin, who has so frequently been referred to as Luther’s go-between at the Electoral Court, and who afterwards became pastor of Altenburg, towards the end of his life fell into incurable despondency.[726] Justus Jonas, likewise, was for a considerable time a prey to melancholy.[727] Hieronymus Weller, one of Luther’s best friends, confessed to having suffered at times such violent doubts and fears as would have driven a heathen to commit suicide.[728] The preachers George Mohr[729] and Nicholas Hausmann (a very intimate friend of Luther’s[730]) had to endure dreadful pangs of soul; the same was the case with Johann Beltzius, Pastor at Allerstedt in Thuringia,[731] and with Simon Musæus, who died at Mansfeld in 1576 as Superintendent and who composed two works against the devil of melancholy.[732] Nicholas Selnecker, who died Superintendent at Leipzig, was responsible for the rearranged edition of Luther’s Table-Talk; according to the title his hope was to produce a work “which it might console all Christians to read, especially in these wretched last days.” Elsewhere he confirms the need of such consolation when he says: “We experience in our own selves” that sadness is of frequent occurrence.[733]
Wolfgang Capito, the Strasburg preacher, wrote in 1536 to Luther that his experience of the want of agreement in doctrine had caused him such distress of mind that he was on the verge of the “malady of melancholia”; he trusted he would succeed in reaching a better frame of mind; the burden of gloom, so he comforts himself, was, after all, not without its purpose in God’s plan in the case of many under the Evangel. With Capito, too, melancholy was a “frequent guest.”[734] Bucer wrote in 1532 to A. Blaurer that Capito had often bemoaned “his rejection by God.”[735]
Joachim Camerarius, the celebrated Humanist and writer, confessed in a letter to Luther, that he was oppressed and reduced to despair by the sight of the decline in morals “in people of every age and sex, in every condition and grade of life”; everything, in both public and private life, was so corrupt that he felt all piety and virtue was done for. Of the Schools in particular he woefully exclaimed that it would perhaps be better to have none than to have “such haunts of godlessness and vice.” At the same time, however, he makes admissions concerning faults of his own which may have served to increase his dejection: He himself, in his young days, had, like others, disgraced himself by a very vicious life (“turpissime in adolescentia deformatum”).[736]
The Nuremberg preacher, George Besler, fell into a state of melancholia, declared “in his ravings that things were not going right in the Church,” began to see hidden enemies everywhere and finally committed suicide with a “hogspear” in 1536.[737] William Bidembach, preacher at Stuttgart, and his brother Balthasar, Abbot of Bebenhausen, both became a prey to melancholia towards the end of their life.[738]
It would, of course, be foolish to think that many good souls, in the simplicity of their heart, found no consolation in the new teaching and in working for its furtherance. Of the preachers, for instance, Beltzius, who has just been mentioned, declares, that, amidst his sadness Luther’s consolations had “saved him from the abyss of hell.”[739] Amongst those who adhered in good faith to the innovations there were some who highly lauded the solace of the Evangel. But, notwithstanding all that may be alleged to the contrary, we cannot get over such testimonies as the following.
Felix, son of the above-mentioned William Bidembach, and Court preacher in Würtemberg, declared in a “Handbook for young church ministers”: “It happens more and more frequently that many pious people fall into distressing sadness and real melancholia, to such an extent that they constantly experience in their hearts fear, apprehension, dread and despair”; in the course of his ministry he had met with both persons of position and common folk who were oppressed with such melancholia.[740] Nicholas Selnecker (above, p. 220) assures us that not only were theologians perplexed with many “melancholy and anxious souls and consciences whom nothing could console,” but physicians, too, “never remembered such prevalence of evil melancholia, depression and sadness, even in the young, and of other maladies arising therefrom, as during these few years, and such misfortune continues still to grow and increase.”[741]