Those people who find it difficult to suppose that God so loves man
that He occasionally suspends the operation of the principle of the
conservation of energy in order that He may interfere in purely human
affairs on this tiny planet will also find it difficult to believe
in a personal devil who roams the world seeking whom he may devour
and haunting people. Yet Martin Luther, who started the movement that
ultimately led the world back to science and reason, had no difficulty
whatever in believing this nonsense, and an infinity of other nonsense
that to us nowadays seems little short of stark staring crazydom. Surely
the poor gentleman must have been deranged, one thinks. Not at all, for
Luther had the evidence of his own senses that he was haunted. He heard
the foul fiend whistle and roar in his ears; the devil so gripped his
heart that Luther never knew that the next moment might not be his last;
sometimes he would cause him to be so giddy that when quietly sitting at
work Luther was forced to fall from his stool. What was the matter with
Martin Luther?
To begin with, most assuredly he was never mad; at the most one could
fairly say that, like most of the great leaders of thought, Luther was
probably of the manic-depressive temperament, with that strange mixture
of apparently insane egotism and gloomy pessimism that so marks people of
that temperament. In his famous prayer he orders his God about in a way
that one can only compare to that of the Presbyterian divine who cried
in a moment of irritation, “Noo, Lord, that’s fair ridic’lous.” If you
read Luther’s _Table-talk_, you will at once be struck with his curious
temperament, which could combine a certain amount of shrewd common sense,
such as you would expect from a man of Saxon peasant stock, with profound
belief in the supernatural, a good deal of disbelief in his fellow-man,
virulent hatred of the Pope and all his works, and a good deal of what
looks uncommonly like sheer mysticism. _En passant_ I found therein the
solution of a problem that has long puzzled me. What was the mysterious
“sin against the Holy Ghost” that nobody seems to understand? Let Luther
explain it to us himself. Many persons have imagined that it represented
one of those sexual perversions against which primitive races have so
often launched a fierce tabu, simply because they knew nothing of sexual
pathology. But really, according to Luther, it was nothing of the kind.
“Sins against the Holy Ghost are: first, presumption; second, despair;
third, opposition to and condemnation of the known truth; fourth, not to
wish well but to grudge one’s brother and neighbour the grace of God;
fifth, to be hardened; sixth, to be impenitent.”
The only fault one has to find with this is that Luther does not tell
us how to recognise the truth when one sees it. What _is_ the criterion
of truth? Otherwise it would seem to be a fairly good description of
a certain type of neurasthenia. Many neurasthenics must go in mortal
sin every day of their lives, for it is well known that the devil is
particularly on the lookout for sins against the Holy Ghost.
Probably Luther’s devil merely represented symptoms due to his wretched
health. There is an excellent description of his dystrophy in Hartmann
and Grisar’s monumental _Life of Luther_, and Dr. Cabanes went over it
again from the point of view of modern medicine; while nearly fifty years
ago Dr. W. W. Ireland of Edinburgh reviewed it from the point of view
of an alienist of that time. But Ireland did not perceive the immense
influence of Luther’s physical ailments on his mental condition. How
could you expect him to, fifty years ago? From these three sources,
therefore, I draw the material for this essay. A précis of Dr. Cabanes’
essay appeared in the _St. Louis Urologic and Cutaneous Review_ for
November, 1924.
Those fanatic Protestants who still believe that Luther was a meek and
mild sort of monk who was driven to revolt by the sins of the “Whore of
Babylon” should read his _Table-talk_ in order that they may learn what
manner of man he really was; and it will be surprising if they rise from
it without an insight into Luther’s character that may possibly change
their whole conception of the Reformation. Far from being a gentle and
Christlike son of the Church, he was, so far as I can gather from his
own words, perhaps the most frenzied theologian of that dark century of
theologians. In sheer outrageous superstition he could outdistance even
the most ignorant peasant; his fear of the devil amounted to possession,
because he attributed to the action of the foul fiend every single
thing that he could not understand. An hour spent in reading Luther’s
_Table-talk_ gives a better insight into the mind of man during that
most terrible of all centuries than a year spent in reading an ordinary
history. The most reasonable excuse that we can make for him is that he
was ill during the greater part of his life, suffering from one of the
most distressing of all ailments.
From about the age of thirty he suffered from dreadful noises in the
head, banging, whistling, thumping, and crashing. These were accompanied
by terrible attacks of giddiness, which sometimes actually caused him to
fall from his stool, and rendered work impossible. Towards middle life
he became so neurasthenic that his mental condition became almost that
of a lunatic—and indeed the Catholics did not miss the opportunity to
say that he had actually become mad; but probably this was but a tit for
Luther’s own tat of extraordinary theological violence, and was certainly
never true. But what is true is that he began to suffer from pains in the
region of the heart, accompanied by a sense of dreadful oppression, so
that sometimes he thought himself to be dying. As he grew older he became
very deaf, and his cardiac distress became still more terrible.
All these things were to Luther certain evidence that his personal devil
was attacking him; it is said that once he threw a pot of ink at the
fiend, and the marks of it are still shown. All these things can be
explained easily—as Dr. Cabanes suggested—if we suppose that Luther
was suffering from Ménière’s disease of the labyrinth, a disease of the
inner ear that occasionally attacks middle-aged and gouty people, and
is supposed to have added its tragedy to Dean Swift’s already tragic
life. The labyrinth is composed of the semi-circular canals, structures
which are directed longitudinally and laterally to the axis of the body,
and assist us in maintaining our equilibrium; if anything goes wrong
in these tiny tubes an unconquerable feeling of giddiness overwhelms
us, and it is thought that it is the washing this way and that of the
fluid in these canals that causes the deathly feeling of giddiness in
seasickness. And the fact that Luther’s deafness steadily increased as he
grew older seems to show that it was really caused by Ménière’s disease.
In 1541 he seems to have suffered from middle-ear disease, accompanied by
dreadful earaches and discharge from the ear; while this lasted he became
temporarily quite deaf, but all the time the labyrinthine disorder was
going on.
Although he never seems actually to have suffered from gout, there seems
to be no doubt that he was of the gouty diathesis, and that uric acid was
constantly circulating in his blood, which, added to his manic-depressive
temperament, would undoubtedly increase his tendency to gloom. If there
can be any worse devil than frightful noises in the head, neurasthenia
and uric acid in the blood, it would be interesting to learn what it is.
Many a man has been driven to suicide by nothing worse. That Luther seems
to have resisted any temptation to suicide that he may have had, speaks
volumes for the strength of his purpose.
Probably the pains in his heart and accompanying fear of death
represented a gigantic rise in his blood-pressure that would naturally
occur in a man of such furious polemic zeal. And it may be that it
possibly went so far as to cause angina pectoris. The accompanying fear
of death certainly looks like angina, for there is no disease more
frightful than angina; the patient feels as though the very grave were
yawning for him.
Luther seems to have ultimately become on almost friendly terms with his
devil. One night at the castle of Wartburg he heard a dreadful noise on
the stair which woke him up—probably it represented noises in his own
ears. He got out of bed in a rage with the insolent fiend.
“Is that thou, devil?” he shouted, but Satan said not a word. Then
Luther, seeing that Auld Hornie was not to be drawn, got back into bed,
piously commended himself to the care of the Lord Jesus Christ, and
ultimately got off to sleep again. And this is the sort of thing that
went on day and night with the Reformer. What a difference a course
of salicylates and bromides might have made to Luther, and possibly
through him to the whole Reformation, for there can be little doubt that
Luther’s devil played a great part in spurring him to yet more furious
religious zeal. Sometimes even he began to despair, and admitted that
it was impossible to make peace with the Pope so long as the papacy
was the papacy and Luther was Luther. Viewed in this light, that in
a sense he was Athanasius _contra mundum_, Luther’s dictatorial and
egotistical prayer to his God becomes almost pathetic, for he felt
himself alone on the side of God against the mighty power whom he frankly
calls anti-Christ, with hardly a soul helping him; it may have been
during those passionate appeals to God for guidance before he made the
break that his blood-pressure began to rise, for nothing causes the
blood-pressure to rise like passionate emotion of any kind. Perhaps forty
years later it killed him. Rising blood-pressure kills with exceeding
slowness; let excitable politicians beware, for the same rules apply to
them to-day as applied to poor Martin Luther, who was really less a man
of God than a most furious politician.
Both Hartmann and Grisar and Dr. Cabanes give substantially the same
accounts of his sudden death; so probably it is assured in spite of
the Catholic story that he committed suicide. For two years a stone in
the bladder had added to the tortures of his Ménière’s disease, and on
February 17th, 1546, his last seizure attacked him. While at Eisleben
he became very restless. “Here at this little village I was baptised,”
he said. “It may be that I shall remain here.” In the evening he felt
that oppression in the chest of which he had so often complained, so he
got his attendants to rub him down with hot flannels, and as soon as he
felt better sat down to a light supper. In the middle of the night he
awoke, feeling deadly ill. “O my God,” he said, “I do feel so ill; I
feel as though I were dying,” and complained of a terrible oppression
in his chest. His doctors found him bathed in a cold sweat and without
perceptible pulse. He murmured his favourite text from St. John, “God
so loved the world that He gave his only begotten son that whosoever
believeth in him shall not perish, but shall have life everlasting.” Then
he became unconscious and his friends shouted into his deaf ears the
question whether he remained steadfast in his faith in Christ and his
doctrine, to which they thought they heard him say “Yes,” though probably
he did not hear them. At three in the morning his breathing suddenly
became audible, and after a deep sigh he died. Probably this is a true
account, for we often see the breathing of a dying man assume the up and
down character that we call “Cheyne-Stokes.”
For some extraordinary reason Messrs. Hartmann and Grisar attributed this
obvious death from heart-failure to apoplexy. One can only suppose that
they had never seen a man die of apoplexy; and Dr. Cabanes is undoubtedly
right when he attributes it to heart-defeat after a long period of high
blood-pressure. Probably a certain amount of angina pectoris also entered
into the picture, which is much the same thing put into other language.
But it may be that Dr. Cabanes was too materialistic in supposing
that the cause of Luther’s high blood-pressure was drink, in spite of
Melanchthon’s explicit statement that Luther was only a moderate drinker.
Probably he was no worse than other Germans of the time; and it seems
to be undoubtedly true that intense emotion can permanently so put up
the blood-pressure that the patient ultimately dies even if only after
a great many years; and surely no man ever strained his vascular system
more terribly than Martin Luther.
Luther was not a nice man; but nice men do not revolutionise the world.