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By his own admission, Martin Luther was unkind to those who opposed his reforms. “I cannot deny that I am more vehement than I should be….” he wrote. “But they assail me and God’s Word so atrociously and criminally that … these monsters are carrying me beyond the bounds of moderation.”

Thus, Luther demanded that “We should take him—the pope, the cardinals, and whatever riffraff belongs to His Idolatrous and Papal Holiness—and (as blasphemers) tear out their tongues from the back, and nail them on the gallows.” On another occasion, he asked, “Why should we hesitate to use arms against these teachers of perdition, the cardinals, popes, and the whole Roman Sodom, which corrupts the Church of God without end, and wash our hands in their blood?”

Luther also admitted he could be rude. He considered foul language an appropriate weapon to combat evil. For example, he dismissed the Jewish rabbis’ interpretations of Scripture as “Jewish piss and sh—.”

By anyone’s standards, Luther was bull-headed, coarse-tongued, and intemperate, at times. In many ways, Luther behaved like other people of his time. But his speech and actions were always more intense. No matter how high or low the cause, he seemed to rise or sink to any occasion. How can we understand this person who has been called “a man of grand contradictions”?

Luther’s life can be read like an open book, for he spoke freely and unguardedly about himself and others.

Luther’s view of himself was shaped by his life as a monk, priest, and professor; by his environment and by historical events; and also by his physical problems. As a monk he developed digestive difficulties, probably from the ascetic lifestyle of the rigorous Augustinian Hermits. He suffered from kidney and gall stone attacks, for which there were no effective treatments, not even aspirin. He complained of headaches, insomnia, and what he called “night wars”—nightmares, anxiety attacks, and Anfechtung, meaning “inner turmoil” or “temptation.” An open sore on one of his legs refused to heal, and physicians decided to drain the wound with an arrangement of bandages, uncomfortable and quite visible. At age 62, Luther was nearly blind in one eye, hard of hearing, and subject to attacks of angina pectoris, from which he died in 1546.

Luther took all of this as the Devil’s way of plaguing him and tempting him to give up. The Devil made a good theologian out of him, he mused. But, as he grew older, Luther also became convinced his suffering was increasing because he lived near the end of the world. He told his wife, Katie, in the winter of 1542–43, “I am fed up with the world, and it is fed up with me.… I am like a ripe stool, and the world is like a gigantic anus, and so we’re about to let go of each other.”

By 1545, Wittenberg had become for him like Sodom. Under the influence of Italian Renaissance fashion, women were wearing dresses that revealed more of their bodies. Dances had become “immoral.” After visiting friends outside Wittenberg, Luther decided not to return home to such a secular city. He wrote to Katie to sell all their possessions and join him. It took the Saxon court and physicians much effort to change his mind. When he finally returned, Luther was an angry old man still fuming about the changes occurring.

As he grew older, Luther became increasingly convinced that Satan had rallied many forces against him and the gospel’s cause. Papists, Turks, other Protestants (whom he called Schwaermer because they were like swarming bees), and Jews were to him Satan’s agents attacking the gospel he had rediscovered.

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