1. The Flight from Wittenberg
“Old age is here,” so wrote Luther in a fit of depression to his Elector on March 30, 1544, in his sixty-first year; “old age which in itself is cold and ungainly, weak and sickly. The pitcher goes to the well until one fine day it breaks; I have lived long enough, may God grant me a happy deathbed.… Methinks, too, I have already seen the best I am like to see on earth, for it looks as though evil days were coming. May God help His own! Amen.” He recommends his sovereign to seek comfort in the “Dear Word of God” and in prayer, assuring him: “These two unspeakable treasures shall never be the portion of the devil, the Turk, or of the Pope and his followers.”[1272]
About this time he had to complain of palpitations, dizziness and calculus. His will he had already drawn up on Jan. 6, 1542.[1273] In it he refused to make use of the usual legal forms, being determined to have nothing to do with the lawyers, with whom he was always at variance. He was quite aware that lawyers still insisted on the objections to the validity of the marriages of clerics and monks and the rights of inheritance of their children, as they indeed were bound to do not only by Canon Law but also by the law of the Empire.
How cheerfully he was inclined to look forward to death even the year before is apparent from a letter to Myconius, “the bishop of the Churches of Gotha and Thuringia,” who was then lying seriously ill; here he says: “I pray our Lord Jesus not to call to everlasting rest you and our followers and leave me here among the devils to be still longer tormented by them. Truly I have been long enough plagued by them and really I deserve that my turn should come before yours. Hence my prayer is: May the Lord lay your illness upon me and rid me of my earthly habitation which is so useless, worn-out and exhausted. I see right well that I am no longer good for anything.”[1274]
After his above farewell-letter to the Elector Luther’s thoughts reverted to death more frequently than before. He cast up the books he had still to write and took stock of his powers to see whether he would have time to finish them. For his energy and spirit of enterprise were by no means yet dead, though at times they seem to be paralysed. Often enough he pulls himself together in his letters sufficiently to make jokes with his friends, the better both to banish his own gloomy thoughts and to inspire the addressees with greater courage and confidence. Nevertheless, through it all, we can detect his disquiet and suffering.
“You often importune me,” so he wrote to his pupil Anton Lauterbach about the end of 1544, “for a work on ecclesiastical discipline, but you do not tell me where I am to find the leisure and health, seeing that I am a worn-out and idle old man. I am ceaselessly snowed under with letters. I have promised the young princes a sermon on drunkenness, others and myself I have promised a book on secret marriages, others again, one against the Sacramentarians; some now want me to set all else aside and write a ‘Summa’ and running gloss on the whole Bible. Thus one thing stands in the way of the other and I get through nothing. And yet I had imagined that, as one who had already done his work, I had earned the right to some leisure, and to live quietly and in peace and so pass away. But I am compelled to pursue my restless way of life. Well, I shall do what I can, and, what I can’t, I shall leave undone.… Pray for us as we do for you.”[1275]
In Jan., 1545, when he had almost completed his long and arduous work on Genesis, he sighed: “May God put an end to this moribund and sinful life as soon as this book is finished, or even before should it please Him; do you ask God this for me.… Yes, truly, pray for my happy dissolution and that I may die a good death.”[1276] “Pray for me,” he wrote to Amsdorf in May of the same year, “that I may be set free as soon as may be from my fetters and be united to Christ, but that, if my life, or rather my sickness, is to last still longer, God may bestow on me strength of body and force of soul.” He praises God that he himself and his friends, “though unworthy sinners, had been chosen for this blessed and glorious office, viz. to hear the voice of God’s Majesty in the Word of the Evangel; on this the angels and all creation wish us luck, but the Pope is dismayed and all the gates of hell shake.”[1277]
Luther’s extant letters covering the period from May to December, 1545, afford us an insight into the emotions through which he passed.
From the month of May onwards he sank deeper and deeper into a dreary state of annoyance and sadness, and, at last, at the end of July, he shook the dust of Wittenberg from his feet. In the latter half of August, after he had allowed himself to be persuaded to return, his spirits rapidly revived, and such was the reaction that his new mystical ardour knew no bounds while his exertions seem almost incredible.
To take the period in question in its chronological order: The month of May commenced with a bitter attack on Agricola, and, on the latter’s arrival at Wittenberg, he refused even to see him. “Of this monster,” he wrote on May 2, “I will hear nothing but words of condemnation; of him and his friends may I be rid for all eternity.… Satan may rage and boast as he pleases!”[1278] His annoyance, as is usual with him, is speedily transferred to Satan. That same day, plagued with a tiresome matrimonial dispute, he asked: “Is then the devil master of the world?”[1279] Shortly after he declared the Pope to be the “monster of Satan, the end of whose days was at hand.”[1280] His joy at the approaching end (“gaudeamus omnes in Domino”) is, however, not unmixed. The thought depresses him that the devil should still be active even at Halle which had recently been won over to the Evangel, and that he had there “just blessed, or rather cursed, two nuns, thereby proving how much more he fain would do.”[1281]