Almost on the same page the pessimistic mystic speaks of that resignation to hell which has a place in his new system of theology. “Because we have sin within us we must flee happiness and take on what is repugnant, and that, not merely in words and hypocritically; we must resign ourselves to it with full consent, must desire to be lost and damned. What a man does to him whom he hates, that we must do to ourselves. Whoever hates, wishes his foe to be undone, killed and damned, not merely seemingly but in reality. When we thus, with all our heart, destroy and persecute ourselves, when we give ourselves over to hell for the sake of God and His Justice, then indeed we have already satisfied His Justice and He will deliver us.”[736] It can hardly be considered normal that a monk should wish to live—among brethren, who rejoiced in the promises of Christ and in the Church’s means of grace—the life of a lonely mystic sunk in the depths of an abyss, where “a man does not strive after heaven but is perfectly ready never to be saved, but rather to be damned, and where, after having been reconciled by grace, a man fears, not God’s punishments, but simply to offend Him.”[737]
Luther’s recollections of the mental ailments he went through as a monk also undoubtedly had their effect on the legend. We know that Luther never rightly understood the nature of these ailments and that he regarded his fits of terror, his nervousness and his gloom as anything but what they really were. It would appear that, in his old age, he simply lumped all his sad experiences together as typical of the sort of poison which Popery and Monkery, owing to their false doctrines, offered to their adepts. Nothing seemed to him to show better from what horrors he had snatched mankind. Whether involuntary self-deception played a part here, or whether, by dint of constant repetition, he came to believe in the truth of his tale, who can now venture to say? In any case his spirit of bitterness led him to make of his own sufferings a sort of spectre of terror common to all, who, like himself, had raved that they were zealously serving God whether in the monastery or in Popery at large. Even “great Saints” had, according to him, lived amidst the “devil’s factions and errors, under Rules and in monasteries and institutions,” but had finally “cut themselves loose and been saved by faith in Jesus Christ.”[738]
He completely shuts his eyes to the fact that both his fears concerning predestination and his morbid states of terror accompanied by fainting fits recurred in his case even in later life, and, that, after his apostasy he had in addition to suffer from remorse of conscience on account of his doings against the Church. Nor does he seem to see that he himself betrays the falsity of what he says of the general depression to which all monks were subject when he relates above, that he alone had gone about in the monastery labouring under such oppression and that no one had understood him or been able to console him (above, p. 113); hence, according to this, his brother monks cannot have suffered from the terrors he afterwards attributed to them.
The Monkish Nightmare
The strange “terrors” under which he was labouring when he first knocked at the gate of the Augustinian convent at Erfurt were, according to Melanchthon’s definite assurance already quoted, closely bound up with his habitual states of fear. They were extraordinary states of mental perturbation (“terrores”) and can only be explained when looked at in the light of his other mental troubles.[739] Of the incidents that impelled him to enter the convent[740] Luther himself says in a passage which has also been quoted above, that (on the occasion of his first Mass) he had tried to reassure his father Hans by pointing out that he had been called “by terrors from heaven” (“de coelo terrores”); to which his father had harshly replied: “Oh, that it may not have been a delusion and a diabolical vision” (“illusio et præstigium”).[741] The happenings immediately previous to his entering the monastery are of a rather mysterious character. The inmates of the Erfurt convent declared at that time in consequence of what they had gathered from Luther, that he, like “another Paul, had been miraculously converted by Christ.”[742] Oldecop, who began his studies at Wittenberg in 1514, speaks in his Chronicle of “strange fears and spectres” on account of which Luther had taken the habit.[743] Still more remarkable is the report based on the account of Luther’s intimate friend Jonas, and dating from 1538. He says: When Luther, as a student, was returning to Erfurt after having been to Gotha to buy some books “there came a dreadful apparition from heaven which he then interpreted as signifying that he was to become a monk.”[744] If these statements were correct it would appear as though we have here already an instance of hallucination worthy of being classed with the “sights and visions” elsewhere mentioned. Even his earliest monastic days would assume a suspiciously pathological character if, even then, he was convinced of having been the recipient of heavenly messages. It must, however, remain doubtful whether Jonas’s report means exactly what it seems to mean and whether his sources are to be relied upon.
The possibility of his having been the victim of hallucination at such an early date also raises the question whether his later abnormal states can be explained by heredity or his upbringing.
By their “harsh treatment,” so Luther says on one occasion, his parents had “driven him into the monastery”; here we have an entirely new version of the motives of his choice of the religious life; he adds that, though they meant well by him, yet he had known nothing but faintheartedness and despondency.[745] Poverty still further darkened his early youth. It is quite possible that the young monk may have suffered for some considerable time from feelings of timidity and depression as a result of his education and mode of life. The natural timidity which was apparent during a part of his youth may also have contributed its quota to the rise of the legend of the monk who was ever sad. But all this does not explain as well as an hereditary malady would the terrors or seeming hallucinations. Unfortunately the question of heredity is still quite obscure, though the highly irritable temper of his father referred to above (p. 182) may have some bearing on it. Luther, however, says very little about his parents and even less of his manner of bidding good-bye to the world.
The statements he makes, whether in jest or in earnest, concerning his vow to enter a religious Order, differ widely.
He declares he made the vow to God in honour of St. Anne, but that God had “taken it in the Hebrew meaning,” Anne signifying grace, and had understood that Luther wished to become a monk “under grace and not under the Law,” in fact not a monk at all.[746] Very likely it is no jest, however, when he adds that, “he had soon regretted his vow, the more so since many sought to dissuade him from entering the convent”; he had, nevertheless, persisted, in spite of the objections of his father and, after that, he had had no further thought of quitting the convent, “until God deemed the time had come” (to thrust him out of it).[747]