In Jan., so his anxious pupil Veit Dietrich writes, Luther had a foreboding of some illness impending and fancied it would come in March; in reality it came on on Jan. 22. “Very early, about four o’clock, he felt a violent buzzing in his ears followed by great weakness of the heart.” His friends were summoned at his request as he did not wish to be alone. “When, however, he had recovered and had his wits about him (‘confirmato animo’), he proceeded to storm against the Papists, who were not yet to make gay over his death.” “Were Satan able,” he says, “he would gladly kill me; at every hour he is at my heels.” “The physician declared,” so the account goes on, “after having examined the urine, that Luther stood in danger of an attack of apoplexy, which indeed he would hardly escape.” The prediction was, however, not immediately verified and the patient was once more able to leave his bed. On Feb. 9, however (if the date given in the Notes be correct),[336] after assisting at a funeral in the church of Torgau, he was again seized with such a fit of giddiness as hardly to be able to return to his lodgings. When he recovered he said: “Do not be grieved even should I die, but continue to further the Word of God after my death.… It may be we are still sinners and do not perform our duty sufficiently; if so we shall cloak it over with the forgiveness of sins.” This time again he was not able to work for a whole month.
What he at times endured from the trouble in his head we learn from a statement in the Notes of the Table-Talk made by Cordatus: “When I awake and am unable to sleep again on account of the noise in my ears, I often fancy I can hear the bells of Halle, Leipzig, Erfurt and Wittenberg, and then I think: Surely you are going to have a fit. But God frequently intervenes and gives me a short sleep afterwards.”[337]
No notable improvement took place until the middle of 1533.
The noises in the head began again in 1541. He fancied then that he could hear “the rustling of all the trees and the breaking of the waves of every sea” in his head.[338] When he wrote this he was also suffering from a discharge from the ear, which, for the time, deprived him of his hearing; so great was the pain as to force tears from him. Alluding to this he says that his friends did not often see him in tears, but that now he would gladly weep even more copiously; to God he had said: “Let there be an end either of these pains or of me myself,” but, now that the discharge had ceased, he was beginning to read and write again quite confidently.[339]
From the commencement of his struggle, however, until the end of his life his extreme nervous irritability found expression in the violence of what he said and wrote. There can be no question that, had he not been in a morbidly nervous state, he would never have given way to such outbursts of anger and brutal invective. “There was a demoniacal trait,” says a Protestant Luther biographer, “that awakened in him as soon as he met an adversary, at which even his fellow-monks had shuddered, and which carried him much further than he had at first intended.” He became the “rudest writer of his age.” In his controversy with the Swiss Sacramentarians he “was domineering and high-handed.” “His disputatiousness and tendency to pick a quarrel grew ever stronger in him after his many triumphs.”[340]—But, even among his friends and in his home, he was careless about controlling his irritation. We find him exclaiming: “I am bursting with anger and annoyance”; as we know, he excited himself almost “to death” about a nephew and threatened to have a servant-maid “drowned in the Elbe.”[341] (Cp. the passages from A. Cramer quoted below, towards the end of section 5.)
Other maladies and indispositions, of which the effects were sometimes lasting, also deserve to be alluded to. Of these the principal and worst was calculus of which we first hear in 1526 and then again in 1535, 1536 and 1545. In Feb., 1537, Luther was overtaken by so severe an attack at Schmalkalden that his end seemed near.—In 1525 he had to complain of painful hæmorrhoids, and at the beginning of 1528 similar troubles recurred. The “malum Franciæ,” on the other hand, cursorily mentioned in 1523,[342] is not heard of any more. The severe constipation from which he suffered in the Wartburg also passed away. Luther was also much subject to catarrh, which, when it lasted, caused acute mental depression. The “discharge in his left leg” which continued for a considerable while[343] during 1533 had no important after-effects.
The maladies just mentioned, to which must be added an attack of the “English Sweat,” in 1529, do not afford sufficient grounds for any diagnosis of his physical and mental state in general.[344] On the other hand, the oppression in the præcordial region and his nervous excitability are of great importance to whoever would investigate his general state of health.
The so-called Temptations no Mere Morbid Phenomena
Anyone who passes in review the startling admissions Luther makes concerning his struggles of conscience (above, vol. v., pp. 319-75), or considers the dreadful self-reproaches to which his apostasy and destruction of the olden ecclesiastical system gave rise, reproaches which lead to “death and hell,” and which he succeeded in mastering only by dint of huge effort, cannot fail to see that these mental struggles were something very different from any physical malady. Since, however, some Protestants have represented mere morbid “fearfulness” as the root-cause of the “temptations,” we must—in order not to be accused of evading any difficulties—look into the actual connection between natural timidity and the never-ending struggles of soul which Luther had to wage with himself on account of his apostasy.
Luther’s temptations, according to his own accurate and circumstantial statements, consisted chiefly of remorse of conscience and doubts about his undertaking; they made their appearance only at the commencement of his apostasy, whereas the morbid sense of fear was present in him long before. Of such a character were the “terrores” which led him to embrace monasticism, the unrest he experienced during his first zealous years of religious life, and the dread of which he was the victim while saying his first Mass and accompanying Staupitz in the procession; this morbid fear is also apparent in the monk’s awful thoughts on predestination and in his subsequent temptations to despair. Moreover, such crises, characterised by temptations and disquieting palpitations ending in fainting fits, were in every case preceded by “spiritual temptations,” and only afterwards did the physical symptoms follow. Likewise the bodily ailments occasionally disappeared, leaving behind them the temptations, though Luther seemed outwardly quite sound and able to carry on his work.[345]