Luther, vol. 5 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

Of the temptations by which he himself was visited, “to despair, and to dread the wrath of God,” he had already said to Schlaginhaufen, on Dec. 14, 1531: Had it not been for them he would never have been able to do so much harm to the devil, or to preserve his own humility; now, however, he knew to his shame that “when the temptation comes I am unable to get the better of a single venial sin. Thanks to these temptations I have attained to such knowledge and to such gifts, that, with the help of God, I won that glorious victory (‘illam præclaram victoriam’), vanquishing my monkish state, the vows, the Mass and all those abominations.” “After that I had peace,” he says, speaking of those earlier years, “so that I even took a wife, such good days had I.”[1325]—Yet his own contemporary statements show that inward peace was not his at the time when he took a wife.[1326]

An incident related of Luther by Schlaginhaufen shows how a single text of Scripture, and the train of ideas it awakened, could reduce him, and Bugenhagen too, to a state verging on distraction. “The devil on one occasion,” so Luther said to him, “tormented and almost slew me with Paul’s words to Timothy [1 Tim. v. 11-12], so that my heart melted in my bosom; the reason was the abandoning by so many monks and nuns of the religious state in which they had vowed to God to live.” (Paul, in the passage cited, has strong things to say of widows who prove unfaithful to the widowhood in which they had promised to live.) “The devil,” he continues concerning his attitude towards the devil at that time, “hid from my sight the doctrine of Justification so that I never even thought of it, and obtruded on me the text; he led me away from the doctrine of grace to dispute on the Law, and then he had me at his mercy. Bugenhagen happened to be near at the time. I submitted it to him and went with him into the corridor. But he too began to doubt, for he did not know that I was so hard put about it. Thereupon I was at first much upset and passed the night with a heavy heart. Next day Bugenhagen came to me. ‘I am downright angry,’ he said, ‘I have now looked into that text more closely, and, right enough, the argument is ridiculous!’ Thus he [the devil] is always on the watch for us. But nevertheless we have Christ!”[1327]—We are not told why the argument from this Bible-passage, which insists so solemnly on the sacred character of vows, was regarded as “ridiculous.”

The last incident reminds us of the scene between Luther and Bugenhagen on June, 1540, narrated in the Table-Talk; there Luther declares: “No sooner am I assailed by temptation than the flesh begins to rebel even though I understand the spirit.... Gladly would I be formally just, but I do not find it in me.” And Bugenhagen chimed in: “Herr Doctor, neither do I.”[1328]

From Remorse of Conscience to Onslaughts of the Devil

The actual cause of Luther’s anxiety, as is plain from the above, was a certain quite intelligible disquiet of conscience. Yet, he chose to regard all reproaches from within as merely the sting of the Evil One. As time went on this became more and more his habit; it is always the evil spirit who is at his heels, at whose person and doings, Luther, following his bent, pokes his jokes.

Hieronymus Weller, another pupil tormented with inner pangs, once, without any beating about the bush, put down all his sadness to his conscience; he declared in Luther’s presence in the spring of 1532: “Rather than endure such troubles of conscience I would willingly go through the worst illnesses.”[1329] Luther tried his best to pacify him with the assurance that the devil was “a murderer,” and that “God’s Mercy endureth for ever and ever.”

Yet Luther himself had admitted to his friend Wenceslaus Link, that “it is extremely difficult thoroughly to convince oneself that such thoughts of hopelessness emanate from Satan and are not our very own, but the best help is to be found in this conviction. One must by a supreme effort contrive to turn one’s mind to other things and chase such thoughts away.” “But you can guess how hard it is,” he continues, “when the thoughts refer to God and to our eternal salvation; they are of such a nature that our conscience can neither tear itself away from them nor yet despise them.”[1330] Simply to tear itself away from such disquieting thoughts was certainly not possible for a conscience in so luckless a position as Luther’s, oppressed as it was with the weight of a world catastrophe.

Luther once, in 1532, says quite outspokenly and not without a certain reference to himself: “The spirit of sadness is conscience itself”; here, however, he probably only means that we are always conscious within ourselves of a painful antagonism to the Law, for he at once goes on: “This we must ever endure,” we must necessarily be ever in a state of woe because in this life we “lie amidst the throes of childbirth that precede the Last Day;” but the devil who condemns us inwardly “has not yet condemned” Christ. Those who are thus tempted “do not feel those carnal temptations, which are so petty compared with the spiritual.”[1331]

At any rate, so he will have it, there was a call to struggle most earnestly against all the inward voices that make themselves heard against the new teaching and the apostasy, just as though they came from the devil.[1332]