Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The Table-Talk relates how on one occasion Luther himself, in a strange house, was witness of a remarkable spectral visitation. He is said to have related the incident and to “have seen it with his own eyes as did also many others.” A maiden, a friend of the old proctor [at the University], was lying in bed ill at Wittenberg. She had a vision; Christ appearing to her under a glorious form, whereupon she joyfully adored her visitor. A messenger was at once sent “from the college to the monastery” to fetch Luther. He came and exhorted the young woman “not to allow herself to be deceived by the devil.” She thereupon spat in the face of the apparition. “The devil then disappeared and the vision turned into a great snake which made a dash at the maiden in her bed and bit her on the ear so that the drops of blood trickled down, after which the snake was seen no more.” This story was introduced into the German Table-Talk by Aurifaber (1566). The young woman was probably hysterical and was the only beholder of the vision. In all likelihood what the others saw was merely the blood, which might quite well have come from a scratch otherwise caused. The story has been quoted as a proof of the dispassionate way in which Luther regarded visions.

  As a further proof of the “sobriety which he coupled with a faith so ardent and enthusiastic” Köstlin quotes the following: “He himself related this tale,” the Table-Talk says [the date is uncertain but it was after he had already begun to preach the “Word”]; “he was once praying busily in his cell, and thinking of how Christ had hung on the cross, suffered and died for our sins, when suddenly a bright light shone on the wall, and, in the midst, a glorious vision of the Lord with His five wounds appeared and gazed at him, the Doctor, as though it had been Christ Himself. When the Doctor saw it he fancied at first it was something good, but soon he bethought him it must be a devilish spectre, because Christ appears to us only in His Word and in a lowly and humble form, just as He hung in shame upon the cross. Hence the Doctor adjured the vision: ‘Begone thou shameless devil! I know of no other Christ than He Who was crucified, and Who is revealed and preached in His Word,’ and soon the apparition, which was no less than the devil in person, disappeared.” — This story told by his pupils must refer to some statement made by Luther, though the dramatic liveliness of its imagery may well lead us to suspect that it has been touched up. Some natural effect of light and shade might well account for the appearance which the young monk so “busy” at his prayers thought he saw.

  ed., 58, .

  It is hardly possible to suppress similar doubts concerning other accounts we have from his lips; his statements also refer to events which occurred long previous. At any rate, in a select circle of his pupils, the opinion certainly prevailed that Luther was tried by extraordinary other-world apparitions, and this conviction was the result of remarks dropped by him.

  Greater stress must be laid on those statements of his which bear on inward experiences, where the most momentous truths were concerned and which occurred at certain crises of his life.

  In Nov., 1525, he assured Gregory Casel, the Strasburg theologian, in so many words, that “he had frequently had inward experience that the body of Christ is indeed in the Sacrament; he had seen dreadful visions; also angels (‘vidisse se visiones horribiles, sæpe se angelos vidisse’), so that he had been obliged to stop saying Mass.”

  He spoke in this way in the course of the official negotiations with Casel, the delegate of the Protestant theologians of Strasburg. The words occur in Casel’s report of the interview published by Kolde. It is true that Luther also speaks here of the outward “Word” as the support of his doctrine, particularly on the Sacrament. “We shall,” he says, “abide quite simply by the words of Scripture — until the Spirit and the unction teach us something different.” He avers that the Strasburgers who denied the Sacrament come with their “Spirit” and wish to explain away the words of the Bible concerning the body of Christ in the Bread. This, however, is not the “light of the Spirit,” but the “light of reason”; he himself had long since learnt to reject reason in the things of God. They were not convinced of their cause as he was, otherwise they would defend their teaching publicly as he did, for he would rather the whole world were undone than be silent on God’s doctrine, because it was God’s business to watch over it.

  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.

  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.”

  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.”

  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.” It was no difficult task for him to include himself in the ranks of those “who had received the first fruits of the spirit.”

  In addition to this, however, as will be shown below, 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.

  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, 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. 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”; and “it is Satan alone who wounds and terrifies.” 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.”

  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 a
ccount 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.

  But there are further alleged experiences, also detailed at length, which have a place here, viz. the apparitions of the devil himself.

  In 1530 Luther was thrown into commotion by a glimpse of the devil, under the shape of a fiery serpent, outside the walls of the Coburg. One evening in June, about nine o’clock, as his then companion Veit Dietrich relates, Luther was looking out of the window, down on the little wood surrounding the castle. “He saw,” says this witness, “a fiery, flaming serpent, which, after twisting and writhing about, dropped from the roof of the nearest tower down into the wood. He at once called me and wanted to show me the ghost (‘spectrum’) as I stood by his shoulder. But suddenly he saw it disappear. Shortly after, we both saw the apparition again. It had, however, altered its shape and now looked more like a great flaming star lying in the field, so that we were able to distinguish it plainly even though the weather was rainy.” Here the pupil undoubtedly did his best to see something. On his master, however, the firm conviction of having seen the devil made a deep impression. He had just enjoyed a short respite after a bout of ill-health. The night after the apparition he again collapsed and almost lost consciousness. On the following day he felt, so Dietrich says, “a very troublesome buzzing in the head”; the apparition leads the narrator to infer that Luther’s bodily trouble, which now recommenced in an aggravated form, had been entirely “the work of the devil.” So certain was Luther of having seen the devil that he mentioned the occurrence in 1531 at one of the meetings held for the revision of his translation of the Psalms. The words of the Psalmist concerning “sagittæ” and “fulgura,” etc. (Ps. xviii. (xvii.) 15), he applies directly to his own personal experiences and to the incident in question, “Just as I saw my devil flying over the wood at the Coburg.” He means by this the fading away and disappearance of the above-mentioned fiery shape; this psalm speaks of a “materia ignita,” which no doubt suggested his remarks. — Later, as Mathesius relates, he said he had seen the “evil spirit at the Coburg, in the form of a star.” Kawerau terms the apparition an “optical hallucination.”

  By the word hallucination is understood an apparent perception of an external object not actually present. That the “apparition” at the Coburg and other similar ones already mentioned or yet to be referred to were hallucinations is quite possible though not certain. It is true that the excessive play Luther gave to his imagination, particularly at the Wartburg and, later, at the Coburg, was such that it is quite within the bounds of possibility that he fancied he saw or heard things which had no real existence. On the other hand, moreover, we know what a large share his superstition had in distorting actual facts. Hence, generally speaking, most of the ghosts or visions he is said to have seen can be explained by a mistaken interpretation of the reality, without there being any need to postulate an hallucination properly so-called. Much of what has been related might come under the heading of illusions, though, probably, not everything. To analyse them in detail is, however, impossible as the circumstances are not accurately known. Certainly no one, however much inclined to the supernatural, who is familiar with Luther and his times, will be content, as was once the case, to believe that the devil sought to interfere visibly and palpably with his person and his teaching.

  As to the apparition of the devil at the Coburg in the shape of a flame, a serpent and a star, we may point out that the whole may well have been caused simply by a lantern or torch carried by somebody in that lonely neighbourhood. We might also be tempted to think of St. Elmo’s fire, except that the form of the apparition presents some difficulty. — So, too, the black dog in the Wartburg was most likely some harmless intruder. The noise of the nuts flying up against the ceiling may have been produced by the creaking of a weather-cock, or of a door or shutter in the wind [or by the rats]. Other tales again may be rhetorical inventions, simple fictions of Luther’s brain, not involving the least suggestion of any illusion or hallucination, for instance, when he speaks of the angels who appeared to him at Mass. Such an apparition was a convenient weapon to use against opponents who alleged they were under the influence of the “Spirit.” Moreover, some of these tales were told so long after the event as to leave a wide scope to the imagination.

  To proceed with the accounts of the apparitions of the devil: About the reality of two of such, Luther is quite positive.

  One of these took place close to his dwelling. The devil he then espied in the shape of a wild-boar in his garden under his window. “Once Martin Luther was looking out of the window,” so an account dating from 1548 tells us, “when a great black hog appeared in the garden.” He recognised it as a diabolical apparition and jeered at Satan who appeared in this guise, though he had once been a “beautiful angel.” “Thereupon the hog melted into nothing.” He himself refers to this apparition in the words already recorded, in which he classes it with the work of the noisy spirits in the Wartburg and the “appearance of the star” at the Coburg.

  Indeed the hog and the flaming vision at the Coburg even found their way into his printed sermons. We read in the home-postils: “The devil is always about us in disguise, as I myself witnessed, taking, e.g. the form of a hog, of a burning wisp of straw, and such like” (cp. above, vol. v., ff.).

  The other apparition, the one which possibly suggests most strongly an hallucination, was that which he experienced at Eisleben at the time he was trying to adjust the quarrels between the Counts of Mansfeld, i.e. just before his death. We have accounts of this from two different quarters, based on statements made by Luther; first that of Michael Cœlius, a friend who was present at his death, in the funeral oration he delivered immediately after at Eisleben on Feb. 20, and, secondly, that of Luther’s confidant, the physician Ratzeberger. The former in his address recounts for the edification of the people how Luther “during his lifetime” had suffered trials and persecutions at the hands of the devil before going to his eternal rest; hence in this world he had been “disturbed and troubled in his peace of mind” by Satan. It was true that latterly he had “enjoyed some happiness” at Eisleben, but “that had not lasted long; one evening indeed,” so Cœlius continues, “Luther had lamented with tears, that, while raising his heart to God with gladness and praying at his open window, he had seen the devil, who hindered him in all his labours, squatting on the fountain and making faces at him. But God would prove stronger than Satan, that he knew well.” — Ratzeberger’s account quite agrees with this as to the circumstances; he had learnt that Luther “related the incident to Dr. Jonas and Mr. Michael Cœlius.” His information is not derived from the funeral oration just mentioned, but clearly from elsewhere. He is right in implying that it was Luther’s habit to say his night prayers at the window; he has, however, some further particulars concerning the behaviour of the devil: “It is said that when Dr. Martin Luther was saying his night prayers to God at the open window, as his custom was before going to bed, he saw Satan perched on the fountain that stood outside his dwelling, showing him his posterior and jeering at him, insinuating that all his efforts would come to nought.” The first place, however, belongs to the account of Cœlius, who, by his mention of the tears Luther shed, sets vividly before the reader the commotion into which the apparition, which had occurred shortly before, had thrown him.

  Excitement and trouble of mind were then pressing heavily on the aging man. His frame of mind was caused not merely by the quarrel between the “wrangling Counts” of Mansfeld with whom “no remonstrances or prayers brought any help,” not merely by his usual “temptations,” but also, as Ratzeberger tells us, by the healing up of the incision in the left leg, he (Ratzeberger) had made, and which now led to bodily disorders. The disorders no
w made common cause with his “annoyance melancholy and grief.” The “violent mental excitement,” together with the bad effects of the healing up of the artificial wound, were, according to this physician, what “brought about his death.” Ratzeberger was not, however, then at Eisleben and we are in possession of more accurate accounts of the circumstances attending Luther’s death.

  In explanation of Luther’s singular delusion regarding the jeering devil we may remark that he is fond of attributing the obstacles in the way of peace to the devil’s wrath and envy. “It seems to me that the devil is mocking us,” he writes of the difficulties on Feb. 6, “may God mock at him in return!” The Eisleben councillor, Andreas Friedrich, writes to Agricola on Feb. 17 (18) of these same concerns, that Luther, when he found there was still no prospect of a settlement, had complained: “As I see, Satan turns his back on me and jeers as well.” Here, curiously enough, we have exactly what occurred at the fountain. If the apparition, as is highly probable, belongs somewhat later, then we may assume that the vivid picture of the devil under this particular shape with which Luther was so familiar led finally to some sort of hallucination. His extravagant ideas of Satan generally might, in fact, have been sufficient. Everything that went against him was “Satanic,” and his only hope is that “God will make a mockery of Satan.”

  The account Luther gives in his Table-Talk of the two devils who, in his old age, accompanied him whenever he went to the “sleep-house” may be dealt with briefly. In this passage he is alluding in his joking way to his bodily infirmities. Hence the “one or two” devils who dogged his footsteps are here described as quite familiar and ordinary companions, which is not in keeping with the idea of true apparitions; they were the nicer sort, i.e. pretty, well-mannered devils; they “attacked his head” and thus caused the malady to which he was most subject, hence in his usual style he threatens to “bid them begone into his a⸺,” in short he is here merely jesting. This forbids our taking the statement as meant in earnest though it is twice quoted in the German Table-Talk quite seriously. In the early days, immediately after Luther’s death, the statements concerning the “two devils” were, strange to say, reverently repeated by his pupils as an historic fact; in reality they were all too eager to unearth miraculous incidents in his life.