Some of the Grounds for His Lowness of Spirits
Luther is so communicative that it is easy enough to fix on the various reasons for his depression, which indeed he himself assigns.
To Melanchthon Luther wrote: “The enmity of Satan is too Satanic for him not to be plotting something for our undoing. He feels that we are attacking him in a vital spot with the eternal truth.”[832] Here it is his gloomy forebodings concerning the outcome of the religious negotiations, particularly those of Worms, which lead him so to write. The course of public events threw fresh fuel on the flame of his anger. “I have given up all hope in this colloquy.... Our theological gainstanders,” so he says, “are possessed of Satan, however much they may disguise themselves in majesty and as angels of light.”[833]—Then there was the terrifying onward march of the Turks: “O raging fury, full of all manner of devils.” Such is his excitement that he suspects the Christian hosts of “the most fatal and terrible treachery.”[834]
The devil, however, also lies in wait even for his friends to estrange them from him by delusions and distresses of conscience; this knowledge wrings from him the admonition: “Away with the sadness of the devil, to whom Christ sends His curse, who seeks to make out Christ as the judge, whereas He is rather the consoler.”[835] Satan just then was bent on worrying him through the agency of the Swiss Zwinglians: “I have already condemned and now condemn anew these fanatics and puffed-up idlers.” Now they refuse to admit my victories against the Pope, and actually claim that it was all their doing. “Thus does one man toil only for another to reap the harvest.”[836] These satellites of Satan who work against him and against all Christendom are hell’s own resource for embittering his old age.
Then again the dreadful state of morals, particularly at Wittenberg, under his very eyes, makes his anger burst forth again and again; even in his letter of congratulation to Justus Jonas on the latter’s second marriage he finds opportunity to have a dig at the easy-going Wittenberg magistrates: “There might be ten trulls here infecting no end of students with the French disease and yet no one would lift a finger; when half the town commits adultery, no one sits in judgment.... The world is indeed a vexatious thing.” The civic authorities, according to him, were but a “plaything in the devil’s hand.”
At other times his ill-humour vents itself on the Jews, the lawyers, or those German Protestant Reformers who had the audacity to hold opinions at variance with his. Carlstadt, with his “monstrous assertions”[837] against Luther, still poisons the air even when Luther has the consolation of knowing, that, on Carlstadt’s death (in 1541), he had been fetched away by the “devil.” Carlstadt’s horrid doctrines tread Christ under foot, just as Schwenckfeld’s fanaticism is the unmaking of the Churches.
Then again there are demagogues within the fold who say: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin?” These, according to him, are in almost as bad case as the others. Thus, “during our lifetime, this is the way the world rewards us, for and on this account and behalf! And yet we are expected to pray and heed lest the Turk slay such Christians as these who really are worse than the Turks themselves! As though it would not be better, if the yoke of the Turk must indeed come upon us, to serve the Turkish foeman and stranger rather than the Turks in our own circle and household. God will laugh at them when they cry to Him in the day of their distress, because they mocked at Him by their sins and refused to hearken to Him when He spoke, implored, exhorted, and did everything, stood and suffered everything, when His heart was troubled on their account, when He called them by His holy prophets, and even rose up early on their account (Jer. vii. 13; xi. 7).”[838] But such is their way; they know that it is God Whose Word we preach and yet they say: “We shan’t listen. In short, the wildest of wild furies have broken into them,” etc.[839]
Thus was he wont to rave when “excited,” though not until, so at least he assures us, having first “by dint of much striving put down his anger, his thoughts and his temptations.” “Blessed be the Lord Who has spoken to me, comforting me: ‘Why callest thou? Let things go their own way.’” It grieves him, so he tells us, to see the country he loves going to rack and ruin; Germany is his fatherland, and, before his very eyes, it is hastening to destruction. “But God’s ways are just, we may not resist them. May God have mercy on us for no one believes us.” Even the doctrine of letting things go their own way—to which in his pessimism Luther grew attached in later life—he was firmly convinced had come to him directly from the Lord, Who had “consolingly” whispered to him these words. Even this saying reeks of his peculiar pseudo-mysticism.
All the above outbursts are, however, put into the shade by the utter ferocity of his ravings against Popery. Painful indeed are the effects of his gloomy frame of mind on his attitude towards Rome. The battle-cries, which, in one of his last works, viz. his “Wider das Babstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” Luther hurls against the Church, which had once nourished him at her bosom, form one of the saddest instances of human aberration.
Yet, speaking of this work, the author assures a friend that, “in this angry book I have done justice neither to myself nor to the greatness of my anger; but I am quite aware that this I shall never be able to do.”[840] “For no tongue can tell,” so he says, “the appalling and frightful enormities of the Papal abomination, its substance, quantity, quality, predicaments, predicables, categories, its species, properties, differences and accidents.”[841]