His opponents declared they had their own inward experience. “How many inward experiences have I not had,” he replies, “at those times when my mind was idle (‘cum eram otiosus’)! All sorts of things came before my mind and everything seemed as reasonable as could be. But, by God’s grace, I addressed myself to greater and more earnest matters and began to distrust reason. I too, like them, was ‘in dangers’ [2 Cor. xi. 26], and in even greater ones. And if it is a question of piety of life, I hope that there, too, we are blameless.” Coming back once more to the spirit which the Strasburgers had set up against the Word of God, he describes in his own defence the “terrors of death he himself had been through (‘mortis horrorem expertus’)” and then speaks of the angelic visions referred to above which had disturbed him even at the Mass.[401]
He also will have it that at other times he had been consoled by angels, though he does not tell us that he had seen them. In 1532 he said to Schlaginhaufen: “God strengthened me ten years ago by His angels, in my struggles and writings.”[402]
Luther, repeatedly and in so many words, appeals to his realisation of the divine truths, and it may be assumed he imagined he felt something of the sort within him, or that he thus interpreted certain emotions. “I am resolved to acknowledge Christ as Lord. And this I have not only from Holy Scripture but also from experience. The name of Christ has often helped me when no one was able to help. Thus I have on my side the deed and the Word, experience and Scripture. God has given both abundantly. But my temptations made things sour for me.”[403]
The Table-Talk assures us that, “Dr. Martin proved it from his own experience that Jesus Christ is truly God; this he also confessed openly; for if Christ were not God then there was certainly no God at all.”[404] It was no difficult task for him to include himself in the ranks of those “who had received the first fruits of the spirit.”[405]
In addition to this, however, as will be shown below,[406] he thinks his doctrine has been borne in upon him by God through direct revelation. More than once, without any scruple, he uses the word “revelatum”; he is also fond of setting this revelation in an awesome background: it had been “strictly enjoined on him (‘interminatum’) under pain of eternal malediction” to believe in it.[407]
In fact a certain terror is the predominating factor in this gloomy region where he comes in touch with the other world. He has not merely had experience that there are roving spirits who affright men,[408] but, in a letter from the Wartburg, he insists quite generally, that, “the visions of the Saints are terrifying.” Of course, as we well know, delusions and hallucinations very often do assume a terrifying character.
Luther also asserts that “divine communications” are always accompanied by inward tortures like unto death, words which give us a glimpse into his own morbid state.[409] And yet he fully admits elsewhere the very opposite, for he is aware that God is, above all things, the consoler. “It is not Christ Who affrights us”;[410] and “it is Satan alone who wounds and terrifies.”[411] But, in practice, according to him, things work differently; there the fear from which he and others suffer comes to the fore. “We are oftentimes affrighted even when God turns to us the friendliest of glances.”[412]
This change of standpoint reminds us of another instance of the same sort. Luther’s teaching on the terrifying character of the divine action is much the same as his theological teaching that fear is the incentive to good deeds. While, as a rule, he goes much too far in seeking to rid the believer of any fear of God as the Judge, preaching an unbounded confidence and even altogether excluding fear from the work of conversion, yet, elsewhere, he emphasises most strongly this same fear, as called for and quite indispensable; this he did in his controversies with the Antinomians and, even earlier, as on the occasion of the Visitations, on account of its religious influence on the people.
No change or alteration is, however, apparent in the accounts he gives above of the cases in which he came in touch with the other world; he sticks firmly by his statement that he had experienced such things both mentally and palpably. Hence the difficulty of coming to any decision about them.