Chapter XXXI: Luther in His Dismal Moods, His Superstition and Delusions (1)

1. His Persistent Depression in Later Years Persecution Mania and Morbid Fancies

AMONG the various causes of the profound ill-humour and despondency, which more and more overshadowed Luther’s soul during the last ten years of his life, the principal without a doubt was his bitter disappointment.

He was disappointed with what he himself calls the “pitiable spectacle” presented by his Church no less than with the firmness and stability of the Papacy. Not only did the Papal Antichrist refuse to bow to the new Evangel or to be overthrown “by the mere breath of Christ’s mouth,” as Luther had confidently proclaimed would be the case, but, in the evening of his days, it was actually growing in strength, its members standing shoulder to shoulder ready at last to seek inward reform by means of a General Council.

The melancholy to which he had been subject in earlier years had been due to other thoughts which not seldom pressed upon him, to his uncertainty and fear of having to answer before the Judge. In his old age such fears diminished, and the voices which had formerly disquieted him scarcely ever reached the threshold of his consciousness; by dint of persistent effort he had hardened himself against such “temptations.” The idea of his Divine call was ever in his mind, though, alas, it proved only too often a blind guide incapable of transforming his sense of discouragement into any confidence worthy of the name. At times this idea flickers up more brightly than usual; when this happens his weariness seems entirely to disappear and makes room for the frightful outbursts of bitterness, hate and anger of a soul at odds both with itself and with the whole world.

Doubtless his state of health had a great deal to do with this, for, in his feverish activity, he had become unmindful of certain precautions. Lost in his exhausting literary labours and public controversies his state of nervous excitement became at last unbearable.

The depression which is laying its hand on him manifests itself in the hopeless, pessimistic tone of his complaints to his friends, in his conviction of being persecuted by all, in his superstitious interpretations of the Bible and the signs of the times, in his expectation of the near end of all, and in his firm persuasion that the devil bestrides and rules the world.

_His Depression and Pessimism_

Disgust with work and even with life itself, and an appalling unconcern in the whole course of public affairs, are expressed in some of his letters to his friends.

“I am old and worked out—‘old, cold and out of shape,’ as they say—and yet cannot find any rest, so greatly am I tormented every day with all manner of business and scribbling. I now know rather more of the portents of the end of this world; that it is indeed on its last legs is quite certain, with Satan raging so furiously and the world becoming so utterly beastly. My only remaining consolation is that the end cannot be far off. Now at last fewer false doctrines will spring up, the world being weary and sick of the Word of God; for if they take to living like Epicureans and to despising the Word, who will then have any hankering after heresies?... Let us pray ‘Thy will be done,’ and leave everything to take its course, to fall or stand or perish; let things go their own way if otherwise they will not go.” “Germany,” he says, “has had its day and will never again be what it once was”; divided against itself it must, so he fancies, succumb to the devil’s army embodied in the Turks. This to Jakob Probst, the Bremen preacher.[802] Not long after he wrote to the same: “Germany is full of scorners of the Word.... Our sins weigh heavily upon us as you know, but it is useless for us to grumble. Let things take their course, seeing they are going thus.”[803]

To Amsdorf he says in a letter that he would gladly die. “The world is a dreadful Sodom.” “And, moreover, it will grow still worse.” “Could I but pass away with such a faith, such peace, such a falling asleep in the Lord as my daughter [who had just died]!”[804] Similarly, in another letter to Amsdorf we read: “Before the flood the world was as Germany now is before her downfall. Since they refuse to listen they must be taught by experience. It will cry out with Jeremias [li. 9]: ‘We would have cured Babylon, but she is not healed; let us forsake her.’ God is indeed our salvation, and to all eternity will He shield us.”[805]

“We will rejoice in our tribulation,” so he encourages his former guest Cordatus, “and leave things to go their way; it is enough that we, and you too, should cause the sun of our teaching to rise all cloudless over the wicked world, after the example of God our Father, Who makes His sun to shine on the just and the unjust. The sun of our doctrine is His; what wonder then if people hate us.” “Thus we can see,” so he concludes, that “outwardly we live in the kingdom of the devil.”[806]

Plunged in such melancholy he is determined, without trusting in human help, so he writes to his friend Jonas, “to leave the guidance of all things to Christ alone”; of all active work he was too weary; everything was “full of deception and hypocrisy, particularly amongst the powerful”; to sigh and pray was the best thing to do; “let us put out of our heads any thought and plans for helping matters, for all is alike useless and deceitful, as experience shows.”[807]

Christ had taken on Himself the quieting of consciences, hence, with all the more confidence, “might they entrust to Him the outcome of the struggle between the true Church and the powers of Satan.” “True, Christ seems at times,” he writes to his friend Johann August, “to be weaker than Satan; but His strength will be made perfect in our weakness (2 Cor. xii. 9), His wisdom is exalted in our foolishness, His goodness is glorified in our sins and misdeeds in accordance with His wonderful and inscrutable ways. May He strengthen you and us, and conform us to His likeness for the honour of His mercy.”[808]

During such a period of depression his fears are redoubled when he hears of the atrocities perpetrated by the Turks at Stuhlweissenburg; the following is his interpretation of the event: “Satan has noticed the approach of the Judgment Day and shows his fear. What may be his designs on us? He rages because his time is now short. May God help us manfully to laugh at all his fury!” He laments with grim irony the greed for gain and the treachery of the great. “Devour everything in the devil’s name,” he cries to them, “Hell will glut you,” and continues: “Come, Lord Jesus, come, hearken to the sighing of Thy Church, hasten Thy coming; wickedness is reaching its utmost limit; soon it must come to a head, Amen.”

Even this did not suffice and Luther again adds: “I have written the above because it seems better than nothing. Farewell, and teach the Church to pray for the Day of the Lord; for there is no hope of a better time coming. God will listen only when we implore the quick advent of our redemption, in which all the portents agree.”[809]

The outpourings of bitterness and disgust with life, which Antony Lauterbach noted while a guest at Luther’s table in 1538, find a still stronger echo in the Table-Talk collected by Mathesius in the years subsequent to 1540.

In Lauterbach’s Notes he still speaks of his inner struggles with the devil, i.e. with his conscience; this was no longer the case when Mathesius knew him: “We are plagued and troubled by the devil, whose bones are very tough until we learn to crack them. Paul and Christ had enough to do with the devil. I, too, have my daily combats.”[810] He had learnt how hard it was “when mental temptations come upon us and we say, ‘Accursed be the day I was born’”; rather would he endure the worst bodily pains during which at least one could still say, “Blessed be the Name of the Lord.”[811] The passages in question will be quoted at greater length below.

But according to Lauterbach’s Notes of his sayings he was also very bitter about the general state of things: “It is the world’s way to think of nothing but of money,” he says, for instance, “as though on it hung soul and body. God and our neighbour are despised and people serve Mammon. Only look at our times; see how full all the great ones, the burghers too, and the peasants, are with avarice and how they stamp upon religion.... Horrible times will come, worse even than befell Sodom and Gomorrha!”[812]—“All sins,” he complains, “rage mightily, as we see to-day, because the world of a sudden has grown so wanton and calls down God’s wrath upon its head.” In these words he was bewailing, as Lauterbach relates, the “impending misfortunes of Germany.”[813]—“The Church to-day is more tattered than any beggar’s cloak.”[814] “The world is made up of nothing but contempt, blasphemy, disobedience, adultery, pride and thieving; it is now in prime condition for the slaughter-house. And Satan gives us no rest, what with Turk, Pope and fanatics.”[815]

“Who would have started preaching,” he says in the same year, oppressed by such experiences, “had he known beforehand that such misfortune, fanatism, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude and wickedness would be the sequel?”[816] To live any longer he had not the slightest wish now that no peace was to be hoped for from the fanatics.[817] He even wished his wife and children to follow him to the grave without delay because of the evil times to come soon after.[818]

* * * * *

In the conversations taken down by Mathesius in the ‘forties Luther’s weariness of life finds even stronger expression, nor are the words in which he describes it of the choicest: “I have had enough of the world and it, too, has had enough of me; with this I am well content. It fancies that, were it only rid of me, all would be well....” As I have often repeated: “I am the ripe shard and the world is the gaping anus, hence the parting will be a happy one.”[819] “As I have often repeated”; the repulsive comparison had indeed become a favourite one with him in his exasperation. Other sayings in the Table-Talk contain unmistakable allusions to the bodily excretions as a term of comparison to Luther’s so ardently desired departure from this world.[820] The same coarse simile is met in his letters dating from this time.[821]

The reason of his readiness to depart, viz. the world’s hatred for his person, he elsewhere depicts as follows; the politicians who were against him, particularly those at the Dresden court, are “Swine,” deserving of “hell-fire”; let them at least leave in peace our Master, the Son of God, and the Kingdom of Heaven also; with a quiet conscience we look upon them as abandoned bondsmen of the devil, whose oaths though sworn to a hundred times over are not the least worthy of belief; “we must scorn the devil in these devils and sons of devils, yea, in this seed of the serpent.”[822]

“The gruff, boorish Saxon,”[823] as Luther calls himself, here comes to the fore. He seeks, however, to refrain from dwelling unduly on the growing lack of appreciation shown for his authority; he was even ready, so he said, “gladly to nail to the Cross those blasphemers and Satan with them.”[824]

“I thank Thee, my good God,” he once said in the winter 1542-43 to Mathesius and the other people at table, “for letting me be one of the little flock that suffers persecution for Thy Word’s sake; for they do not persecute me for adultery or usury, as I well know.”[825] According to the testimony of Mathesius he also said: “The Courts are full of Eceboli and folk who change with the weather. If only a real sovereign like Constantine came to his Court [the Elector’s] we should soon see who would kiss the Pope’s feet.” “Many remain good Evangelicals because there are still chalices, monstrances and cloistral lands to be taken.”[826] That a large number, not only of the high officials, but even of the “gentry and yokels,” were “tired” of him is clear from statements made by him as early as 1530. Wishing then to visit his father who lay sick, he was dissuaded by his friends from undertaking the journey on account of the hostility of the country people towards his person: “I am compelled to believe,” so he wrote to the sick man, “that I ought not to tempt God by venturing into danger, for you know how both gentry and yokels feel towards me.”[827] “Amongst the charges that helped to lessen his popularity was his supposed complicity in the Peasant War and in the rise of the Sacramentarians.”[828]

“Would that I and all my children were dead,” so he repeats, according to Mathesius,[829] “_Satur sum huius vitae_”; it was well for the young, that, in their thoughtlessness and inexperience, they failed to see the mischief of all the scandals rampant, for else “they would not be able to go on living.”[830]—“The world cannot last much longer. Amongst us there is the utmost ingratitude and contempt for the Word, whilst amongst the Papists there is nothing but blood and blasphemy. This will soon knock the bottom out of the cask.”[831] There would be no lack of other passages to the same effect to quote from Mathesius.

_Some of the Grounds for His Lowness of Spirits_

Luther is so communicative that it is easy enough to fix on the various reasons for his depression, which indeed he himself assigns.

To Melanchthon Luther wrote: “The enmity of Satan is too Satanic for him not to be plotting something for our undoing. He feels that we are attacking him in a vital spot with the eternal truth.”[832] Here it is his gloomy forebodings concerning the outcome of the religious negotiations, particularly those of Worms, which lead him so to write. The course of public events threw fresh fuel on the flame of his anger. “I have given up all hope in this colloquy.... Our theological gainstanders,” so he says, “are possessed of Satan, however much they may disguise themselves in majesty and as angels of light.”[833]—Then there was the terrifying onward march of the Turks: “O raging fury, full of all manner of devils.” Such is his excitement that he suspects the Christian hosts of “the most fatal and terrible treachery.”[834]

The devil, however, also lies in wait even for his friends to estrange them from him by delusions and distresses of conscience; this knowledge wrings from him the admonition: “Away with the sadness of the devil, to whom Christ sends His curse, who seeks to make out Christ as the judge, whereas He is rather the consoler.”[835] Satan just then was bent on worrying him through the agency of the Swiss Zwinglians: “I have already condemned and now condemn anew these fanatics and puffed-up idlers.” Now they refuse to admit my victories against the Pope, and actually claim that it was all their doing. “Thus does one man toil only for another to reap the harvest.”[836] These satellites of Satan who work against him and against all Christendom are hell’s own resource for embittering his old age.

Then again the dreadful state of morals, particularly at Wittenberg, under his very eyes, makes his anger burst forth again and again; even in his letter of congratulation to Justus Jonas on the latter’s second marriage he finds opportunity to have a dig at the easy-going Wittenberg magistrates: “There might be ten trulls here infecting no end of students with the French disease and yet no one would lift a finger; when half the town commits adultery, no one sits in judgment.... The world is indeed a vexatious thing.” The civic authorities, according to him, were but a “plaything in the devil’s hand.”

At other times his ill-humour vents itself on the Jews, the lawyers, or those German Protestant Reformers who had the audacity to hold opinions at variance with his. Carlstadt, with his “monstrous assertions”[837] against Luther, still poisons the air even when Luther has the consolation of knowing, that, on Carlstadt’s death (in 1541), he had been fetched away by the “devil.” Carlstadt’s horrid doctrines tread Christ under foot, just as Schwenckfeld’s fanaticism is the unmaking of the Churches.

Then again there are demagogues within the fold who say: “I am your Pope, what care I for Dr. Martin?” These, according to him, are in almost as bad case as the others. Thus, “during our lifetime, this is the way the world rewards us, for and on this account and behalf! And yet we are expected to pray and heed lest the Turk slay such Christians as these who really are worse than the Turks themselves! As though it would not be better, if the yoke of the Turk must indeed come upon us, to serve the Turkish foeman and stranger rather than the Turks in our own circle and household. God will laugh at them when they cry to Him in the day of their distress, because they mocked at Him by their sins and refused to hearken to Him when He spoke, implored, exhorted, and did everything, stood and suffered everything, when His heart was troubled on their account, when He called them by His holy prophets, and even rose up early on their account (Jer. vii. 13; xi. 7).”[838] But such is their way; they know that it is God Whose Word we preach and yet they say: “We shan’t listen. In short, the wildest of wild furies have broken into them,” etc.[839]

Thus was he wont to rave when “excited,” though not until, so at least he assures us, having first “by dint of much striving put down his anger, his thoughts and his temptations.” “Blessed be the Lord Who has spoken to me, comforting me: ‘Why callest thou? Let things go their own way.’” It grieves him, so he tells us, to see the country he loves going to rack and ruin; Germany is his fatherland, and, before his very eyes, it is hastening to destruction. “But God’s ways are just, we may not resist them. May God have mercy on us for no one believes us.” Even the doctrine of letting things go their own way—to which in his pessimism Luther grew attached in later life—he was firmly convinced had come to him directly from the Lord, Who had “consolingly” whispered to him these words. Even this saying reeks of his peculiar pseudo-mysticism.

All the above outbursts are, however, put into the shade by the utter ferocity of his ravings against Popery. Painful indeed are the effects of his gloomy frame of mind on his attitude towards Rome. The battle-cries, which, in one of his last works, viz. his “Wider das Babstum vom Teuffel gestifft,” Luther hurls against the Church, which had once nourished him at her bosom, form one of the saddest instances of human aberration.

Yet, speaking of this work, the author assures a friend that, “in this angry book I have done justice neither to myself nor to the greatness of my anger; but I am quite aware that this I shall never be able to do.”[840] “For no tongue can tell,” so he says, “the appalling and frightful enormities of the Papal abomination, its substance, quantity, quality, predicaments, predicables, categories, its species, properties, differences and accidents.”[841]

The more distorted and monstrous his charges, the more they seem to have pleased him when in this temper.

In a morbid way he now heaps together his wonted hyperboles to such an extent, that, at times, it becomes very tiresome to read his writings and letters; no hateful image or suspicion seems to him sufficiently bad. “Though God Himself were to offer me Paradise for living another forty years, I should prefer to hire an executioner to chop off my head, for the world is so wicked; they are all becoming rank devils.”[842] He compares his own times to those which went before the Flood; the “rain of filth will soon begin”; he goes on to say that he no longer understands his own times and finds himself as it were in a strange world; “either I have never seen the world, or, while I am asleep, a new world is born daily; not one but fancies he is suffering injustice, and not one but is convinced he does no injustice.”[843] With a strange note of contempt he says: “Let the world be upset, kicked over and thrust aside, seeing it not only rejects and persecutes God’s Word, but rages even against sound common sense.... Even the seven devils of Cologne, who sit in the highest temple, and who, like some of the council, still withstand us, will God overthrow, Who breaks down the cedars of Lebanon. On account of this [the actual and hoped-for successes at Cologne] we will rejoice in the Lord, because by His Word He does such great things before our very eyes.”[844]

Here, as elsewhere too, in spite of all his ill-humour, the progress of his Evangel inspires him with hope. Nor is his dark mood entirely unbroken, for, from time to time, his love of a joke gets the better of it. His chief consolation was, however, his self-imposed conviction that his teaching was the true one.

A certain playfulness is apparent in many of his letters, for instance, in those to Jonas, one of his most intimate of friends: “Here is a conundrum,” writes Luther to him, “which my guests ask me to put to you. Does God, the wise administrator, annually bestow on the children of men more wine or more milk? I think more milk; but do you give your answer. And a second question: Would a barrel that reached from Wittenberg to Kemberg be large and ample enough to hold all the wine that our unwise, silly, foolish God wastes and throws away on the most ungrateful of His children, setting it before Henries and Alberts, the Pope and the Turk, all of them men who crucify His Son, whereas before His own children He sets nothing but water? You see that, though I am not much better than a corpse, I still love to chat and jest with you.”[845]

In the Table-Talk, recently published by Kroker from the notes taken by Mathesius in the last years of Luther’s life, the latter’s irrepressible and saving tendency to jest is very apparent; his humour here is also more spontaneous than in his letters, with the possible exception of some of those he wrote to Catherine Bora.[846]

_Suspicion and Mania of Persecution_

A growing inclination to distrust, to seeing enemies everywhere and to indulging in fearsome, superstitious fancies, stamps with a peculiar impress his prevailing frame of mind.

His vivid imagination even led him, in April, 1544, to speak of “a league entered into between the Turks and the most holy, or rather most silly, Pope”; this was undoubtedly one of the “great signs” foretold by Christ; “these signs are here in truth and are truly great.”[847] “The Pope would rather adore the Turk,” he exclaims later, “nay, even Satan himself, than allow himself to be put in order and reformed by God’s Word”; he even finds this confirmed in a new “Bull or Brief.”[848] He has heard of the peace negotiations with the Turks on the part of the Pope and the Emperor, and of the neutrality of Paul III towards the Turcophil King of France; he is horrified to see in spirit an embassy of peace, “loaded with costly presents and clad in Turkish garments,” wending its way to Constantinople, “there to worship the Turk.” Such was the present policy of the Roman Satan, who formerly had used indulgences, annates and countless other forms of robbery to curtail the Turkish power. “Out upon these Christians, out upon these hellish idols of the devil!”[849]—The truth is that, whereas the Christian States winced at the difficulties or sought for delay, Pope Paul III, faithful to the traditional policy of the Holy See, insisted that it was necessary to oppose by every possible means the Turk who was the Church’s foe and threatened Europe with ruin. The only ground that Luther can have had for his suspicions will have been the better relations then existing between the Pope and France which led the Turkish fleet to spare the Papal territory on the occasion of its demonstration at the mouth of the Tiber.[850]

But Luther was convinced that the Pope had no dearer hope than to thwart Germany, and the Protesters in particular. It was the Pope and the Papists whom he accused to Duke Albert of Prussia of being behind the Court of Brunswick and of hiring, at a high price, the services of assassins and incendiaries. To Wenceslaus Link he says, that it will be the priests’ own fault if the saying “To death with the priests” is carried into practice;[851] to Melanchthon he also writes: “I verily believe that all the priests are bent on being killed, even against our wish.”[852]—It was the Papists sure enough, who introduced the maid Rosina into his house, in order that she might bring it into disrepute by her immoral life;[853] they had also sent men to murder him, from whom, however, God had preserved him;[854] they had likewise tried to poison him, but all to no purpose.[855] We may recall how he had said: “I believe that my pulpit-chair and cushion were frequently poisoned, yet God preserved me.”[856] “Many attempts, as I believe, have been made to poison me.”[857]

He had even once declared that poisoning was a regular business with Satan: “He can bring death by means of a leaflet from off a tree; he has more poison phials and kinds of death at his beck and call than all the apothecaries in all the world; if one poison doesn’t work he uses another.”[858] He had long been convinced that the devil was able to carry through the air those who made themselves over to him; “we must not call in the devil, for he comes often enough uncalled, and loves to be by us, hardened foe of ours though he be.... He is indeed a great and mighty enemy.”[859] Towards the end of his life, in 1541, it came to his ears that the devil was more than usually busy with his poisons: “At Jena and elsewhere,” so he warns Melanchthon, “the devil has let loose his poisoners. It is a wonder to me why the great, knowing the fury of Satan, are not more watchful. Here it is impossible any longer to buy or to use anything with safety.” Melanchthon was therefore to be careful when invited out; at Erfurt the spices and aromatic drugs on sale in the shops had been found to be mixed with poison; at Altenburg as many as twelve people had died from poison taken in a single meal. Anxious as he was about his friend, his trust was nevertheless unshaken in the protection of God and the angels. I myself am still in the hands of my Moses (Katey), he adds, “suffering from a filthy discharge from my ear and meditating in turn on life and on death. God’s Will be done. Amen. May you be happy in the Lord now and for ever.”[860]

“A new art of killing us,” so he tells Melanchthon in the same year, had been invented by Satan, viz. of mixing poison with our wine and milk; at Jena twelve persons were said to have died of poisoned wine, “though more likely of too much drink”; at Magdeburg and Nordhausen, however, milk had been found in the possession of the sellers that seemed to have been poisoned. “At any rate, all things lie under Christ’s feet, and we shall suffer so long and as much as He pleases. For the nonce we are supreme and they [the Papist ‘monsters’] are hurrying to destruction.... So long as the Lord of Heaven is at the helm we are safe, live and reign and have our foes under our feet. Amen.” Casting all fear to the winds he goes on to comfort Melanchthon and his faint-hearted comrades in the tone of the mystic: “Fear not; you are angels, nay, great angels or archangels, working, not for us but for the Church, nay, for God, Whose cause it is that you uphold, as even the very gates of hell must admit; these, though they may indeed block our way, cannot overcome us, because at the very beginning of the world the hostile, snarling dragon was overthrown by the Lion of the tribe of Juda.”[861]

The hostility of the Papists to Lutheranism, had, so Luther thought, been manifestly punished by Heaven in the defeat of Henry of Brunswick; it had “already been foretold in the prophecies pronounced against him,” which had forecasted his destruction as the “son of perdition”; he was a “warning example set up by God for the tyrants of our days”; for every contemner of the Word is “plainly a tyrant.”[862]

Luther was very suspicious of Melanchthon, Bucer and others who leaned towards the Zwinglian doctrine on the Supper. So much had Magister Philippus, his one-time right-hand man, to feel his displeasure and irritability that the latter bewails his lot of having to dwell as it were “in the very den of the Cyclopes” and with a real “tyrant.” “There is much in one’s intercourse with Luther,” so Cruciger said confidentially, in 1545, in a letter to Veit Dietrich, “that repels those who have a will of their own and attach some importance to their own judgment; if only he would not, through listening to the gossip of outsiders, take fire so quickly, chiding those who are blameless and breaking out into fits of temper; this, often enough, does harm even in matters of great moment.”[863] Luther himself was by no means unwilling to admit his faults in this direction and endeavoured to make up for them by occasionally praising his fellow-workers in fulsome terms; Yet so deep-seated was his suspicion of Melanchthon’s orthodoxy, that he even thought for a while of embodying his doctrine on the Sacrament in a formulary, which should condemn all his opponents and which all his friends, particularly those whom he had reason to mistrust, should be compelled to sign. This, according to Bucer, would have involved the departure of Melanchthon into exile. Bucer expressed his indignation at this projected “abominable condemnation” and at the treatment meted out to Melanchthon by Luther.[864]

Bucer himself was several times the object of Luther’s wrath, for instance, for his part in the “Cologne Book of Reform”: “It is nothing but a lot of twaddle in which I clearly detect the influence of that chatterbox Bucer.”[865] When Jakob Schenk arrived at Wittenberg after a long absence Luther was so angry with him for not sharing his views as to refuse to receive him when he called; he did the same in the case of Agricola, in spite of the fact that the latter brought a letter of recommendation from the Margrave of Brandenburg; in one of his letters calls him: “the worst of hypocrites, an impenitent man!”[866] From such a monster, so he said, he would take nothing but a sentence of condemnation. As for his former friend Schenk, he ironically offers him to Bishop Amsdorf as a helper in the ministry. On both of them he persisted in bestowing his old favourite nicknames, Jeckel and Grickel (Jakob and Agricola).

_Luther’s Single-handed Struggle with the Powers of Evil_

Owing to the theological opinions reached by some of his one-time friends Luther, as may well be understood, began to be oppressed by a feeling of lonesomeness.

The devil, whom he at least suspected of being the cause of his bodily pains,[867] is now backing the Popish teachers, and making him to be slighted. But, by so doing, thanks to Luther’s perseverance and bold defiance, he will only succeed in magnifying Christ the more.

“He hopes to get the better of us or to make us downhearted. But, as the Germans say, _cacabimus in os eius_. Willy-nilly, he shall suffer until his head is crushed, much as he may, with horrible gnashing of teeth, threaten to devour us. We preach the Seed of the woman; Him do we confess and to Him would we assign the first place, wherefore He is with us.”[868] In his painful loneliness he praises “the heavenly Father Who has hidden these things [Luther’s views on religion] from the wise and prudent and has revealed them to babes and little ones who cannot talk, let alone preach, and are neither clever nor learned.”[869] This he says in a sermon. The clever doctors, he adds, “want to make God their pupil; everyone is anxious to be His schoolmaster and tutor. And so it has ever been among the heretics.... In the Christian churches one bishop nags at the other, and each pastor snaps at his neighbour.... These are the real wiselings of whom Christ speaks who know a lot about horses’ bowels, but who do not keep to the road which God Himself has traced for us, but must always go their own little way.” Indeed it is the fate of “everything that God has instituted to be perverted by the devil,” by “saucy folk and clever people.” “The devil has indeed smeared us well over with fools. But they are accounted wise and prudent simply because they rule and hold office in the Churches.”[870]

Let us leave them alone then and turn our backs on them, no matter how few we be, for “God will not bear in His Christian Churches men who twist His Divine Word, even though they be called Pope, Emperor, Kings, Princes or Doctors.... We ourselves have had much to do with such wiselings, who have taken it upon themselves to bring about unity or reform.”[871] “They fancy that because they are in power they have a deeper insight into Scripture than other people.”[872] “The devil drives such men so that they seek their own praise and glory in Holy Scripture.” But do you say: I will listen to a teacher “only so long as he leads me to the Son of God,” the true master and preceptor, i.e. in other words, so long as he teaches the truth.[873]

In his confusion of mind Luther does not perceive to what his proviso “so long as” amounts. It was practically the same as committing the decision concerning what was good for salvation to the hands of every man, however ignorant or incapable of sound judgment. Luther’s real criterion remained, however, his own opinion. “If anyone teaches another Gospel,” he says in this very sermon,[874] “contrary to that which we have proclaimed to you, let him be anathema” (cp. Gal. i. 8). The reason why people will not listen to him is, as he here tells them, because, by means of the filth of his arch-knaves and liars, “the devil in the world misleads and fools all.”

Luther was convinced that he was the “last trump,” which was to herald in the destruction, not only of Satan and the Papacy, but also of the world itself. “We are weak and but indifferent trumpeters, but, to the assembly of the heavenly spirits, ours is a mighty call.” “They will obey us and our trump, and the end of the world will follow. Amen.”[875]

Meanwhile, however, he notes with many misgivings the manifestations of the evil one. He even intended to collect in book form the instances of such awe-inspiring portents (“_satanæ portenta_”) and to have them printed.

For this purpose he begged Jonas to send him once more a detailed account of the case of a certain Frau Rauchhaupt, which would have come under this category; he tells his friend that the object of his new book is to “startle” the people who lull themselves in such a state of false security that not only do they scorn the wholesome marvels of the Gospel with which we are daily overwhelmed, but actually make light of the real “furies of furies” of the wickedness of the world; they must read such marvellous stories, for “they are too prone to believe neither in the goodness of God nor in the wickedness of the devil, and too set on becoming, as indeed they are already, just bellies and nothing more.”[876]—Thus, when Lauterbach told him of three suicides who had ended their lives with the halter, he at once insisted that it was really Satan who had strung them up while making them to think that it was they themselves who committed the crime. “The Prince of this world is everywhere at work.” “God, in permitting such crimes, is causing the wrath of heaven to play over the world like summer lightning, that ungrateful men, who fling the Gospel to the winds, may see what is in store for them.” “Such happenings must be brought to the people’s knowledge so that they may learn to fear God.”[877] Happily the book that was to have contained these tales of horror never saw the light; the author’s days were numbered.

The outward signs, whether in the heavens or on the earth, “whereby Satan seeks to deceive,” were now scrutinised by Luther more superstitiously than ever.

Talking at table about a thunder-clap which had been heard in winter, he quite agreed with Bugenhagen “that it was downright Satanic.” “People,” he complains, “pay no heed to the portents of this kind which occur without number.” Melanchthon had an experience of this sort before the death of Franz von Sickingen. Others, whom Luther mentions, saw wonderful signs in the heavens and armies at grips; the year before the coming of the Evangel wonders were seen in the stars; “these are in every instance lying portents of Satan; nothing certain is foretold by them; during the last fifteen years there have been many of them; the only thing certain is that we have to expect the coming wrath of God.”[878] Years before, the signs in the heavens and on the earth, for instance the flood promised for 1524, had seemed to him to forebode the “world upheaval” which his Evangel would bring.[879]

Luther shared to the full the superstition of his day. He did not stand alone when he thus interpreted public events and everyday occurrences. It was the fashion in those days for people, even in Catholic circles, superstitiously to look out for portents and signs.

In 1537[880] Luther relates some far-fetched tales of this sort. The most devoted servants of the devil are, according to him, the sorcerers and witches of whom there are many.[881] In 1540 he related to his guests how a schoolmaster had summoned the witches by means of a horse’s head.[882] “Repeatedly,” so he told them in that same year, “they did their best to harm me and my Katey, but God preserved us.” On another occasion, after telling some dreadful tales of sorcery, he adds: “The devil is a mighty spirit.” “Did not God and His dear angels intervene, he would surely slay us with those thunder-clubs of his which you call thunderbolts.”[883] In earlier days he had told them, that, Dr. “Faust, who claimed the devil as his brother-in-law, had declared that ‘if I, Martin Luther, had only shaken hands with him he would have destroyed me’; but I would not have been afraid of him, but would have shaken hands with him in God’s name and reckoning on God’s protection.”[884]

According to him, most noteworthy of all were the diabolical deeds then on the increase which portended a mighty revulsion and a catastrophe in the world’s history. Everything, his laboured calculations on the numbers in the biblical prophecies included, all point to this. Even the appearance of a new kind of fox in 1545 seemed to him of such importance that he submitted the case to an expert huntsman for an opinion. He himself was unable to decide what it signified, “unless it be that change in all things which we await and for which we pray.”[885]

The change to which he here and so often elsewhere refers is the end of the world.

2. Luther’s Fanatical Expectation of the End of the World. His hopeless Pessimism

The excitement with which Luther looks forward to the approaching end of the world affords a curious psychological medley of joy and fear, hope and defiance; his conviction reposed on a wrong reading of the Bible, on a too high estimate of his own work, on his sad experience of men and on his superstitious observance of certain events of the outside world.

The fact that the end of all was nigh gradually became an absolute certainty with him. In his latter days it grew into one of those ideas around which, as around so many fixed stars, his other plans, fancies and grounds for consolation revolve. To the depth of his conviction his excessive credulity and that habit—which he shared with his contemporaries—of reading things into natural events contributed not a little.

A remarkable conjunction of the planets in 1524,[886] “other signs which have been described elsewhere, such as earthquakes, pestilences, famines and wars,” a predicted flood[887]—“all these signs agree”[888] in announcing the great day; never have “more numerous and greater signs” occurred during the whole course of the world’s history to vouch for the forthcoming end of the world.[889] “All the firmaments and courses of the heavens are declining and coming to an end; the Elbe has stood for a whole year at the same low level, this also is a portent.”[890] Such signs invite us to be watchful.[891] Over and above all this we have the “many gruesome dreams of the Last Judgment” with which he was plagued in later years.[892]

He describes to his friends quite confidently the manner of the coming of the end such as he pictures it to himself: “Early one morning, about the time of the spring equinox, a thick black cloud, three lightning flashes and a thunder-clap, and, presto, everything will lie in ruins,” etc. “I am ever awaiting the day.”[893] “Things may go on for some years longer,”[894] perhaps for “five or six years,” but no more, because “the wickedness of men has increased so dreadfully within so short a time.”[895] “We shall live to see the day”; Aggeus (ii. 7 f.) says: “Yet a little while and I will shake the heaven and the earth”; look around you; “surely the State is being shaken ... the household too, and even the very mob, item our own very sons and daughters. The Church too totters.”[896]

“All the great wonders have already taken place; the Pope has been unmasked; the world rages. Nor will things improve until the Last Day comes. I hope, however, now that the Evangel is so greatly despised, that the Last Day is no longer far distant, not more than a hundred years off. God’s Word will again decline ... and the world will become quite savage and epicurean.”[897]

_Reason and Ground of Luther’s Conviction of the near End of the World_

The actual origin and basis of this strange idea are plainly expressed in the statement last quoted: “The Pope is unmasked” as Antichrist, such was Luther’s starting-point. Further, “the Evangel is despised,” by his own followers no less than by his foes; this depressing sight, together with the sad outlook for religion generally, formed the ground on which Luther’s conviction of the coming cataclysm grew, particularly when the fall of the Papacy seemed to be unduly delayed, and its strength to be even on the increase. The Bible texts which he twists into his service are an outcome rather than the cause of his conviction concerning Antichrist, while the “signs” in the heavens and on earth also serve merely to confirm a persuasion derived from elsewhere.

The starting-point of the idea and the soil on which it grew deserve to be considered separately.

Luther’s views on the unmasking of Antichrist and the approaching end of the world carry us back to the early years of his career. Soon after beginning his attack on the Church, he, over and over again, declared that he had been called to reveal the Pope as Antichrist.[898] His breach with the ecclesiastical past was so far-reaching that he could not have expressed his position and indicated the full extent of his aims better than by so radical an apocalyptic announcement. Nor did it sound so entirely strange to the world. Even according to Wiclif the Papal power was the power of “Antichrist” and the Roman Church the “Synagogue of Satan”; John Hus likewise taught, that it was Antichrist who, by means of the Papal penalties, was seeking to affright those who were after “unmasking” him.

The idea of Antichrist in Luther’s mind embodied all the wickedness of the Roman Church which it was his purpose to unmask, all the religious perversion of which he wished to make an end, and, in a word, the dominion of the devil against which he fancied he was to proclaim the last and decisive combat. When, by dint of insisting in his writings, over and over again, and in the most drastic of ways, on the Papal Antichrist, the idea came to assume its definitive shape in his own mind, his announcement of the end of the world could not be any longer delayed; for, according to the generally accepted view, Antichrist was directly to precede the coming of Christ to Judgment, or at least the latter’s coming would not be long delayed after the revelation of Antichrist in his true colours.[899] As a rule Antichrist was taken to be a person; Luther, however, saw Antichrist in the Papacy as a whole. Antichrist had had a long spell of life; the last Pope would, however, soon fall, he, Luther, with Christ’s help, was preparing his overthrow, then the end would come—such is the sum of Luther’s eschatological statements during the first period of his career.

Speaking of the end of the world he often says, that the fall of the Papacy involves it. “Assuredly,” he says, the end will shortly follow on account of the manifest wickedness of the Pope and the Papists. According to him, the Bible itself teaches that, “after the downfall of the Pope and the deliverance of the poor, no one on earth would ever again be a tyrant and inspire fear.” “This would not be possible,” so Luther thinks, “were the world to go on after the fall of the Pope, for the world cannot exist without tyrants. And thus the Prophet agrees with the Apostle, viz. that Christ, when He comes, will upset the Holy Roman Chair. God grant it may happen speedily. Amen!”[900]

In his fantastic interpretation of the Monk-Calf he declares in a similar way, that the near end of the world is certain in view of the abominations of the sinking Papacy and its monkish system, which last is symbolised in the wonderful calf: “My wish and hope are that it may mean the Last Day, since many signs have so far coincided, and the whole world is as it were in an uproar,”[901] the source of the whole to-do being his triumphant contest with Antichrist. In the same way his conviction of the magnitude and success of his mission against the foe of Christ gives the key to his curious reading of Daniel and the Epistle to the Thessalonians with regard to the time of Antichrist’s advent and the end of the world, which we find set forth quite seriously in his reply to Catharinus.[902] In short, “Antichrist will be revealed whatever the world may do; after this Christ must come with His Judgment Day.”[903]

When the Papacy, instead of collapsing, began to gather strength and even proceeded to summon a Council, Luther did not cease foretelling its fall; he predicts the end of the world in terms even stronger than before, though the reason he assigns for his forebodings is more and more the “contempt shown for the Word,” i.e. for his teaching and exhortations. Disgust, disappointment and the gloomy outlook for the future of his work are now his chief grounds for expecting the end of all and for ardently hoping that the Day will soon dawn.... It is the self-seeking and vice so prevalent in his own fold which wrings from him the exclamation: “It must soon come to a head,”[904] for things cannot long go on thus.

The last temptation which shall assail the faithful, he says, will be “an undisciplined life”; then we shall “grow sick of the Word and disgusted with it.” “Not even the Word of God will they endure; ... the Gospel which they [his own people] once confessed, they now look upon as merely the word of man.” “Do you fancy you are out of the world, or that Satan, the Prince of this world, has died or been crucified in you?”[905] It is bitter experience that causes him to say: “The day will dawn when Christ shall come to free us from sin and death.”[906] “May the world go to rack and ruin and be utterly blotted out,” “the world which has shown me such gratitude during my own lifetime!”[907] “May the Lord call me away, for I have done, and seen, and suffered enough evil.”[908] “Would that the Lord would put an end to the great misery [that among us each one does as he pleases]! Oh that the day of our deliverance would come!”[909] “The people have waxed cold towards the Evangel.... May Christ mend all things and hasten the Day of His Coming.”[910]

“It is a wonder to me what the world does to-day,” he said, alluding to the turmoil in the newly acquired bishopric of Naumburg; he then goes on to complain in the words already given (p. 233), that a new world is growing up around him; no one will admit of having done wrong, of having lied or sinned; those only who meet with injustice are reputed unrighteous, liars and sinners. Verily it would soon rain filth. “The day of our redemption draweth nigh. Amen.” “The world will rage, but good-bye to it”![911]—“The world is indeed a contemptible thing,” he groans, after describing the morals of Wittenberg.[912]

The conduct of the great ones at the Saxon Court led him to surmise that “soon,” after but a few days, hell would be their portion.[913] For those who infringe the rights of his Church he has a similar sentence ready: “Hell will be your share. Come, Lord Jesus, come, listen to the groaning of Thy people, and hasten Thy coming!”—“Farewell and teach your people to pray for the day of the Lord; for of better times there is no longer any hope.”[914]

“During our lifetime,” he laments in 1545, “and under our very eyes, we see sects and dissensions arising, each one wishing to follow his own fancy. In short, contempt for the Word on our own side and blasphemy on the other seem to me to announce the times of which John the Baptist spoke to the people, saying: ‘The axe is laid to the root of the tree,’ etc. Accordingly, since the end at least of this happy age is imminent, there seems no call to bother much about setting up, or coming to an understanding regarding, those troublesome ceremonies.”[915]

In fact, he is determined not “to bother much,” not merely about the “ceremonies,” but about the whole question of Church organisation, for of what use doing so when the signs of the general end of all are increasing at such a rate? “To set up laws” is, according to him, quite impracticable; let everything settle itself “according to the law of God by means of the inspection.”[916]

“To Luther the end which Christ was about to put to this wicked world seemed so near,” so we read in Köstlin-Kawerau’s biography,[917] “that he never contemplated any progressive development and expansion of Christendom and the Church, nor was he at all anxious about the possible ups and downs which might accompany such development.... It is just in his later years that we find him more firmly established than ever in the belief, that the world will always remain the world and that it must be left to the Lord to take what course He pleases with it and with His Christendom, until the coming of the ‘longed-for Last Day.’”

At any rate, since the sectarians in his own camp and the various centrifugal forces inherent in his creation made impossible any real organisation, he was all the more ready to welcome the thought of the end of the world in that it distracted his mind from the sad state of things.

On the top of the schisms and immorality of the people there was also the avarice of those in high places, which roused his hatred and contributed to make him sigh for the coming of the Day.