“Nothing does more harm than a sadness,” he declares in 1542. “It drieth up the bones, as we read in Prov. xvii.. Therefore let a young man be cheerful, and for this reason I would inscribe over his table the words ‘Sadness hath killed many, etc.’” (Eccles. xxx. 25).— “Thoughts of fear,” he insists on another occasion, “are the sure weapons of death”; “Such thoughts have done me more harm than all my enemies and all my labours.” They were at times so insistent that my “efforts against them were in vain.” ... “So depraved is our nature that we are not then open to any consolation; still, they must be fought against by every means.”
For certain spells, particularly in earlier years, Luther nevertheless succeeded so well in assuming a cheerful air and in keeping it up for a considerable while, in spite of the oppression he felt within, that those who came into contact with him were easily deceived. Of this he once assures us himself; after referring to the great “spiritual temptations” he had undergone with “fear and trembling” he proceeds: “Many think that because I appear outwardly cheerful mine is a bed of roses, but God knows how it stands with me in my life.”
In a word, we frequently find Luther using jocularity as an antidote against depression. As he had come to look upon it as the best medicine against what he was wont to call his “temptations” and had habituated himself to its use, and as these “temptations” practically never ceased, so, too, he was loath to deprive himself of so welcome a remedy even in the dreariest days of his old age. In 1530, to all intents and purposes, he openly confesses that such was the case. In a letter to Spalatin, written from the Coburg at a time when he was greatly disturbed, he describes for his friend’s amusement the Diet which the birds were holding on the roof of the Castle. His remarks he brings to a conclusion with the words: “Enough of such jests, earnest and needful though they be for driving away the thoughts that worry me — if indeed they can be driven away.”
Still deeper is the glimpse we get into his inmost thoughts when, in his serious illness of 1527, he voiced his regret for his free and offensive way of talking, remarking that it was often due to his seeking “to drive away the sadness,” to which his “weak flesh” was liable.
One particular instance in which he resorted to jest as a remedy is related in the Table-Talk; “In 1541, on the Sunday after Michaelmas, Dr. Martin was very cheerful and jested with his good friends at table.... He said: Do not take it amiss of me, for I have received many bad tidings to-day and have just read a troublesome letter. Things are ever at their best,” so he concludes defiantly, “when the devil attacks us in this way.” — It is just the same sort of defiance, that, for all his fear of the devil, leads him to sum up all the worst that the devil can do to him, and then to pour scorn upon it. During the pressing anxieties of the Coburg days at the time of the Diet of Augsburg, it really seemed to him that the devil had “vowed to have his life.” He comforts himself with the words: “Well, if he eats me, he shall, please God, swallow such a purge as shall gripe his belly and make his anus seem all too small.”
It is a matter of common knowledge that people addicted to melancholy can at certain hours surpass others in cheerfulness and high spirits. When one side of the scale is weighed down with sadness many a man will instinctively mend things by throwing humour into the other; at first, indeed, such humour may be a trifle forced, but later it can become natural and really serve its purpose well. The story often told might quite well be true: an actor consulted a physician for a remedy against melancholy; the latter, not recognising the patient, suggested that he might be cheered by going to see the performance of a famous comedian — who was no other than the patient himself.
More on the Nature of Luther’s Jests
The character of Luther’s peculiar and often very broad and homely humour is well seen in his letter-preface to a story on the devil which he had printed in 1535 and which made the round of Germany.
The devil, according to this “historia ... which happened on Christmas Eve, 1534,” had appeared to a Lutheran pastor in the confessional, had blasphemed Christ and departed leaving behind a horrible stench. In the Preface Luther pretends to be making enquiries of Amsdorf, “the chief and true Bishop of Magdeburg,” as he calls him, as to the truth and the meaning of the apparition. He begs him “to paint and depict the pious penitent as he deserves,” though quite aware that Amsdorf, the Bishop, would refer back the matter to him as the Pope (“which indeed I am”). He had ready the proper absolution which Amsdorf was to give the devil: “I, by the authority of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the most holy Father Pope Luther the First, deny you the grace of God and life everlasting and herewith consign you to hell,” etc. Meanwhile he himself gives his view of the tale, which he assumes to be true, and, as so often elsewhere when he has to do with the devil, proceeds to mingle mockery of the coarsest sort with bitter earnest. When the Evil One ventures to approach so close to the Evangel, every nerve of Luther is strung to hatred against the devil and his Roman Pope, both of whom he overwhelms with a shower of the foulest abuse.
“The devil’s jests are for us Christians a very serious matter”; having a great multitude of kings, princes, bishops and clergy on his side he makes bold to mock at Christ; but let us pray that he may soil himself even as he soiled himself in Paradise; our joy, our consolation and our hope is, that the seed of the woman shall crush his head. Hence, so he exclaims, the above absolution sent to Amsdorf is amply justified. Like confession, like absolution; “as the prayer, so the incense,” with which words he turns to another diabolical apparition, which a drunken parson had in bed; he had meant to conclude the canonical hours by reciting Compline in bed, and, while doing so, “se concacavit,” whereupon the devil appeared to him and said: “As the prayer, so also is the incense.”
He applies the same “humorous” story to the Pope and his praying monks in his “An den Kurfursten zu Sachsen und Landgraven zu Hesse von dem gefangenen H. von Brunswig” (1545). “They neither can pray nor want to pray, nor do they know what it is to pray nor how one ought to pray, because they have not the Word and the faith”; moreover, their only aim is to make the “kings and lords” believe they are devout and holy. “On one occasion when a tipsy priest was saying Compline in bed, he heaved during the recital and gave vent to a big ‘bombart’; Ah, said the devil, that’s just right, as the prayer so also is the incense!” All the prayers of the Pope and “his colleges and convents” are not one whit better “than that drunken priest’s Compline and incense. Nay, if only they were as good there might still be some hope of the Pope growing sober, and of his saying Matins better than he did his stinking Compline. But enough of this.”
Of this form of humour we have many specimens in Luther’s books, letters and Table-Talk, which abound in unsavoury anecdotes, particularly about the clergy and the monks. He and his friends, many of whom had at one time themselves been religious, seem to have had ready an inexhaustible fund of such stories. Some Protestants have even argued that it was in the convent that Luther and his followers acquired this taste, and that such was the usual style of conversation among “monks and celibates.” It is indeed possible that the sweepings of the monasteries and presbyteries may have furnished some contributions to this store, but the truth is that in many cases the tales tell directly against the monks and clergy, and are really inventions made at their expense, some of them in pre-Reformation times. Frequently they can be traced back to those lay circles in which it was the fashion to scoff at the clergy. In any case it would be unjust, in order to excuse Luther’s manner of speech, to ascribe it simply to “cloistral humour” and the “jokes of the sacristy.” The evil had its root far more in the coarseness on which Luther prided himself and in the mode of thought of his friends and table companions, than in the monastery or among the clergy. Nearly everywhere there were regulations against foul speaking among the monks, and against frivolous conversation on the part of the clergy, though, of course, the existence of such laws does not show that they we
re always complied with. That Luther’s manner of speech was at all general has still to be proved. Moreover, the reference to Luther’s “monkish” habits is all the less founded, seeing that the older he gets and the dimmer his recollections become, the stronger are the proofs he gives of his love for such seasoning; nor must we forget that, even in the monastery, he did not long preserve the true monastic spirit, but soon struck out a way of his own and followed his own tastes.
Luther was in high spirits when he related in his Table-Talk the following tales from the Court of Brandenburg and the city of Florence. At the Offertory of the Mass the grandfather of Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg, attended by a trusty chamberlain, watching the women as they passed up to make their offering at the altar, amused themselves by counting up the adulteresses, supposed or real; as each passed the Margrave told the chamberlain to “draw” a bead of his rosary. The chamberlain’s wife happening to pass, the Margrave, to his courtier’s mortification, told him to draw a bead also for her. When, however, the Margrave’s mother came forward the chamberlain had his revenge and said: Now it’s your turn to draw. Upon which the Margrave gathered up his rosary indignantly with the words: “Let us lump all the whores together!” — The Florentine storiette he took from a book entitled “The Women of Florence.” An adulteress was desirous of entering into relations with a young man. She accordingly complained quite untruthfully to his confessor, that he had been molesting her against her will; she also brought the priest the presents she alleged he had brought her, and described how by night he climbed up to her window by means of a tree that stood beneath it. The zealous confessor thereupon, no less than three times, takes the supposed peccant lover to task; finally he speaks of the tree. Ah, thinks the young man, that’s rather a good idea, I might well try that tree. Having learned of this mode of entry he accordingly complies with the lady’s wishes. “And so,” concludes Luther, “the confessor, seeking to separate them, actually brought them together. Boundless indeed is the poetic ingenuity and cunning of woman.”
Strong as was Luther’s whimsical bent, yet we are justified in asking whether the delightful and morally so valuable gift of humour in its truest sense was really his.
“Genuine humour is ever kindly,” rightly says Alb. Roderich, “and only savages shoot with poisoned darts.” Humour as an ethical quality is the aptitude so to rise above this petty world as to see and smile at the follies and light sides of human life; it has been defined as an optimistic kind of comedy which laughs at what is funny without, however, hating it, and which lays stress on the kindlier side of what it ridicules.
Of this happy, innocent faculty gently to smooth the asperities of life Luther was certainly not altogether devoid, particularly in private life. But if we take him as a whole, we find that his humour is as a rule disfigured by a bitter spirit of controversy, by passion and by hate. His wit tends to pass into satire and derision. Here we have anything but the overflowing of a contented heart which seeks to look at everything from the best side and to gratify all. He may have delighted his own followers by his unmatched art of depreciating others in the most grotesque of fashions, of exaggerating their foibles, and, with his keen powers of imagination, of giving the most amusingly ignominious account of their undoing, but, when judged impartially from a literary and moral standpoint, his output appears more as irritating satire, as clever, bitter word-play and sarcasm, rather than as real humour.
CHAPTER XXXII
A LIFE FULL OF STRUGGLES OF CONSCIENCE
1. On Luther’s “Temptations” in General
An account given by Luther himself in 1537 and taken down by his pupils from his own lips is the best introduction to the subject now to be considered.
“He spoke of his spiritual sickness (‘morbus spiritualis’). For a fortnight he had tasted neither food nor drink and had had no sleep. ‘During this time,’ so he said, ‘I wrestled frequently with God and impatiently upbraided Him with His promises.’” While in this state he had been forced to complain, with the sick and troubled Job, that God was killing him and hiding His countenance from him; like Job, however, he had learnt to wait for His assistance, for here too his case was like that of the “man crushed, and delivered over to the gates of death” and on whom the devil had poured forth his wrath. How many, he adds, have to wrestle like he and Job until they are able to say “I know, O God, that Thou art gracious.”
Other statements of Luther’s at a later period supply us with further information. Lauterbach notes, on Oct. 7, 1538, the complaint already quoted: “I have my mortal combats daily. We have to struggle and wrangle with the devil who has very hard bones, till we learn how to crack them. Paul and Christ had hard work enough with the devil.” On Aug. 16 of the same year Lauterbach takes down the statement: “Had anyone else had to undergo such temptations as I, he would long since have expired. I should not of my own have been able to endure the blows of Satan, just as Paul could not endure the all-too-great temptations of Christ. In short, sadness is a death in itself.”
With the spiritual sickness above mentioned was combined, as has been already pointed out (above, f.), a growing state of depression: “I have lived long enough,” he said in 1542; “the devil is weary of my life and I am sick of hating the devil.” Terrible thoughts of the “Judgment of God” repeatedly rose up before him and caused him great fear.
Before this, according to other notes, he had said to his table companions, that he was daily “at grips with Satan”; that during the attacks of the devil he had often not known whether he were “dead or alive.” “The devil,” so he assures them, “brought me to such a pitch of despair that I did not even know if there was a God.” “When the devil finds me idle, unmindful of God’s Word, and thus unarmed, he assails my conscience with the thought that I have taught what is false, that I have rent asunder the churches which were so peaceful and content under the Papacy, and caused many scandals, dissensions and factions by my teaching, etc. Well, I can’t deny that I am often anxious and uneasy about this, but, as soon as I lay hold on the Word, I again get the best.”
To the people he said, in a sermon in 1531: “The devil is closer to us than we dream. I myself often feel the devil raging within me. Sometimes I believe and sometimes I don’t, sometimes I am cheerful and sometimes sad.” — A year later he describes in a sermon how the devil, who “attacks the pious,” had often made him “sweat much and his heart to beat,” before he could withstand him with the right weapon, viz. with God’s Word, namely, the office committed to him and the service he had rendered to the world, “which it was not his to belie!” Some ten years before this he had spoken still more plainly to his hearers at Wittenberg, telling them, strange to say, of his experience in early days of the good effects of confession: “I would not for all the treasures of the world give up private confession, for I know what strength and comfort it has been to me. No one knows what it can do unless he has fought often and much with the devil. Indeed, the devil would long ago have done for me, had not confession saved me.” In fact whoever tells his troubles to his brother, receives from him, as from God, comfort “for his simple conscience and faint heart”; seldom indeed did one find a “strong, firm faith” which did not stand in need of this; hardly anyone could boast of possessing it. “You do not know yet,” he concludes, “what labour and trouble it costs to fight with and conquer the devil. But I know it well, for I have eaten a mouthful or two of salt with him. I know him well, and so does he know me.”
After all these remarkably frank admissions there can remain no doubt that a heavy mist of doubts and anxieties overshadowed Luther’s inner life.
A closer examination of this darker side of his soul seems to promise further information concerning his inner life. Here, too, it is advisable to sum up the phenomena, retracing them back to their very starting-point. Though much of what is to be said has already been mentioned, still, it is only now, towards the end of his life, that the various traits can in any sense be combined so as to fo
rm something as near a complete picture as possible. We have to thank Luther’s communicativeness, talkativeness and general openness to his friends, that a tragic side of his inner life has been to some extent revealed, which otherwise might for ever have been buried in oblivion.
It is true that, to forestall what follows, few nowadays will be disposed to follow Luther and to look on the devil as the originator of his doubts and qualms of conscience. His fantastic ideas of the “diabolical combats” he had to wage, form, as we shall see (below, ff.), part of his devil-mania. Nevertheless his many references to his ordinary, nay, almost daily, inward combats or “temptations,” as he is accustomed to style them, are not mere fabrications, but really seem to come from a profoundly troubled soul. In what follows many such utterances will be quoted, because only thus can one reach a faithful picture of his changing moods which otherwise would seem barely credible. These utterances, though usually much alike, at times strike a different note and thus depict his inner life from a new and sometimes surprising side.
2. The Subject-matter of the “Temptations”
The spiritual warfare Luther had to wage concerned primarily his calling and his work as a whole.
“You have preached the Evangel,” so the inner voice, which he describes as the devil’s tempting, says to him; “But who commanded you to do so, ‘quis iussit?’ Who called upon you to do things such as no man ever did before? How if this were displeasing to God and you had to answer for all the souls that perish?”
“Satan has often said to me: How if your own doctrine were false which charges the Pope, monks and Mass-priests with such errors? Often he so overwhelmed me that the sweat has poured off me, until I said to him, go and carry your complaints to my God Who has commanded me to obey this Christ.”— “The devil would often have laid me low with his argument: ‘Thou art not called,’ had I not been a Doctor.”— “I have had no greater temptation,” he said after dinner on Dec. 14, 1531, “and none more grievous than that about my preaching; for I have said to myself: You alone are at the bottom of this; if it’s all wrong you have to answer for all the many souls which it brings down to hell. In this temptation I have often myself descended into hell till God recalled me and strengthened me, telling me that it was indeed the Word of God and true doctrine; but it costs much until one reaches this comfort.”— “Now the devil troubles me with other thoughts [than in the Papacy], for he accuses me thus: Oh, what a vast multitude have you led astray by your teaching! Sometimes amidst such temptation one single word consoles me and gives me fresh courage.”
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 810