What first claims our attention, even in the early days of Luther’s life as a monk, are the attacks of what he himself calls fears and trepidations (“terrores, pavores”). It seems fairly clear that these were largely neurotic,—physical breakdowns due to nervous worry.
According to Melanchthon, the friend in whom he chiefly confided, Luther gave these sufferings a place in the forefront of his soul’s history. The reader may remember the significant passage where Melanchthon says, that, when oppressed with gloomy thoughts of the Divine Judgments, Luther “was often suddenly overwhelmed by such fits of terror (‘subito tanti terrores’)” as made him an object of pity. These terrors he had experienced for the first time when he decided to enter the monastic life, led to this resolution by the sudden death of a dearly loved friend.[306]
We hear from Luther himself of the strange paroxysms of fear from which he suffered as a monk. On two occasions when he speaks of them his words do not seem to come under suspicion of forming part of the legend which he afterwards wove about his earlier history (see below, xxxvii.). These statements, already alluded to once, may be given more in detail here. In March, 1537, he told his friends: “When I was saying Mass [his first Mass] and had reached the Canon, such terror seized on me (ita horrui) that I should have fled had not the Prior held me back; for when I came to the words, ‘Thee, therefore, most merciful Father, we suppliantly pray and entreat,’ etc., I felt that I was speaking to God without any mediator. I longed to flee from the earth. For who can endure the Majesty of God without Christ the Mediator? In short, as a monk I experienced those terrors (horrores); I was made to experience them before I began to assail them.”[307] Incidentally it may be noted that “Christ the Mediator,” whom Luther declares he could not find in the Catholic ritual, is, as a matter of fact, invoked in the very words which follow those quoted by Luther: “Thee, therefore, most merciful Father, we suppliantly pray and entreat through Jesus Christ Thy Son our Lord to accept and bless these gifts,” etc. Evidently when Luther recorded his impressions he had forgotten these words and only remembered the groundless fear and inward commotion with which he had said his first Mass.
Something similar occurred during a procession at Erfurt, when he had to walk by the side of Staupitz, his superior, who was carrying the Blessed Sacrament. Fear and terror so mastered Luther that he was hardly able to remain. Telling Staupitz of this later in Confession, the latter encouraged him with the words: “Christ does not affright, He comforts.” The incident must have taken place after 1515, the Eisleben priory having been founded only in that year.[308]
If we go back to the very beginning of his life in the monastery we shall find that the religious scruples which assailed him at least for a while, possibly also deserve to be reckoned as morbid. We shall return below to the voice “from heaven” which drove him into the cloister.
Unspeakable fear issuing in bodily prostration was also at work in him on the occasion of the already related incident in the choir of the Erfurt convent, when he fell to the ground crying out that he was not the man possessed. Not only does Dungersheim relate it, on the strength of what he had heard from inmates of the monastery,[309] but Cochlæus also speaks of the incident, in his “Acta,” and, again, in coarse and unseemly language in the book he wrote in 1533, entitled “Von der Apostasey,” doubtless also drawing his information from the Augustinian monks: “It is notorious how Luther came to be a monk; how he collapsed in choir, bellowing like a bull when the Gospel of the man possessed was being read; how he behaved himself in the monastery,” etc.[310] We may recall, how, according to Cochlæus, his brother monks suspected Luther, owing to this attack and on account of a “certain singularity of manner,” of being either under diabolical influence or an epileptic.[311] The convulsions which accompanied the fit may have given rise to the suspicion of epilepsy, but, in reality, they cannot be regarded as sufficient proof. Epilepsy is well-nigh incurable, yet, in Luther’s case, we hear of no similar fits in later life. In later years he manifested no fear of epileptic fits, though he lived in dread of an apoplectic seizure, such as, in due course, was responsible for his death. A medical diagnosis would not fail to consider this seeming instance of epileptic convulsions in conjunction with Luther’s state of fear. For the purpose of the present work it will be sufficient to bring together for the benefit of the expert the necessary data for forming an opinion on the whole question, so far as this is possible.
From the beginning Luther seems to have regarded these “states of terror” as partaking to some extent of a mystic character.
To what a height they could sometimes attain appears from the description he embodied in his “Resolutiones” in 1518, and of which Köstlin opines that, in it Luther portrayed the culminating point to which his own fears had occasionally risen. It is indeed very probable that Luther is referring to no other than himself when he says in the opening words of this remarkable passage: “I know a man who assures me that he has frequently felt these pains.”[312] G. Kawerau also agrees with Köstlin in assuming that Luther is here speaking of himself,[313] a view which is, in fact, forced upon us by other similar passages. Walter Köhler declares: “Whether Luther intended these words to refer to himself or not, in any case they certainly depict his normal state.”[314]
Luther, after saying that, “many, even to the present day,” suffer the pangs of hell so often described in the Psalms of David, and [so Luther thinks], by Tauler, goes on to describe these pangs in words which we shall now quote in full, as hitherto only extracts have been given.[315]
“He often had to endure such pains, though in every instance they were but momentary; they were, however, so great and so hellish that no tongue can tell, no pen describe, no one who has not felt them believe what they were. When at their worst, or when they lasted for half an hour, nay, for the tenth part of an hour, he was utterly undone, and all his bones turned to ashes. At such times God and the whole of creation appears to him dreadfully wroth. There is, however, no escape, no consolation either within or without, and man is ringed by a circle of accusers. He then tearfully exclaims in the words of Holy Scripture: ‘I am cast away, O Lord, from before Thy eyes’ [Ps. xxx. 23], and does not even dare to say: ‘Lord, chastise me not in Thy wrath’ [Ps. vi. 1]. At such a time the soul, strange to tell, is unable to believe that it ever will be saved; it only feels that the punishment is not yet at an end. And yet the punishment is everlasting and may not be regarded as temporal; there remains only a naked longing for help and a dreadful groaning; where to look for help the soul does not know. It is as it were stretched out [on the cross] with Christ, so that ‘all its bones are numbered.’ There is not a nook in it that is not filled with the bitterest anguish, with terror, dread and sadness, and above all with the feeling that it is to last for ever and ever. To make use of a weaker comparison: when a ball travels along a straight line, every point of the line bears the whole weight of the ball, though it does not contain it. In the same way, when the floods of eternity pass over the soul, it feels nothing else, drinks in nothing else but everlasting pain; this, however, does not last but passes. It is the very pain of hell, is this unbearable terror, that excludes all consolation!… As to what it means, those who have experienced it must be believed.”[316]