The man most deeply initiated into the darker side of Luther’s temptations and struggles was the friend of his youth, the Augustinian, Johann Lang. He, too, apparently suffered severely beneath the burden of temptations regarding predestination and the forgiveness of sins. It was in a letter to him, that, not long after the nailing up of the Wittenberg Theses, Luther penned those curious words: They would pray earnestly for one another, “that our Lord Jesus may help us to bear our temptations which no one save us two has ever been through.”[354] Shortly before this Luther had commended to the care of his friend, then prior at Erfurt, a young man, Ulrich Pinder of Nuremberg, who had opened his heart to him at Wittenberg; on this occasion he wrote that Pinder was “troubled with secret temptations of soul which hardly anyone in the monastery with the exception of yourself understands.”[355] He also alludes to the temptations peculiar to himself in that letter to Lang, in 1516, in which he describes his overwhelming labours, which “seldom leave him due time for reciting the hours or saying Mass.” On the top of his labours, he says, there were “his own temptations from the world, the flesh and the devil.”[356] To this same recipient of his confidences Luther was wont regularly to give an account of the success attending his attacks on the ancient Church and doctrine; he kindled in him a burning hatred of those Augustinians at Erfurt who were well disposed towards scholasticism and Aristotle, and forwarded him the controversial Theses for the Disputations at the Wittenberg University embodying his new doctrine of the necessity of despairing of ourselves and of mystically dying, viz. the new “Theology of the Cross.”
Some mysterious words addressed to Staupitz, in which Luther hints at his inward sufferings, find their explanation when taken in conjunction with the above. He assured Staupitz (Sep. 1, 1518) in a letter addressed to him at Salzburg, that the summons to Rome and the other threats made not the slightest impression on him: “I am enduring incomparably worse things, as you know, which make me look upon such fleeting, shortlived thunders as very insignificant.”[357] His temptations against God and His Mercy were of a vastly different character. By the words just quoted he undoubtedly meant, says Köstlin, “those personal, inward sufferings and temptations, probably bound up with physical emotions, to which Staupitz already knew him to be subject and which frequently came upon him later with renewed violence. They were temptations in which, as at an earlier date, he was plunged into anxiety concerning his personal salvation as soon as he started pondering on the hidden depths of the Divine Will.”[358]
The Shadow of Pseudo-Mysticism
In this connection it will be necessary to return to Luther’s earlier predilection for a certain kind of mysticism.[359]
As we know, at an early date he felt drawn to the writings of the mystics, for one reason, because he seemed to himself to find there his pet ideas about spiritual death and wholesome despair. Their description of the desolation of the soul and of its apparent abandonment by God appeared to him a startling echo of his own experiences. He did not, however, understand or appreciate aright the great mystics, particularly Tauler, when he read into them his own peculiar doctrine of passivity.
To a certain extent throughout his whole life he stood under the shadow of this dim, sad mysticism.
He will have it that he, like the mystics, had frequently been plunged in the abyss of the spirit, had been acquainted with death and with states weird and unearthly. He refuses to relate all he has been through and actually gives as his ground for silence the very words used by St. Paul when speaking of his own revelations: “But I forbear, lest any man should think of me above that which he seeth in me, or anything he heareth from me” (2 Cor. xii. 6). When speaking thus of the mystic death he fails to distinguish between such thoughts and feelings as may have been the result solely of a morbid state of fear, or of remorse of conscience, and the severe trials through which the souls of certain great and holy men had really to pass.
It is indeed curious to note how he was led astray by a combination of fear, mysticism and temptation.