Grace Saved His Sanity, Too

Martin luther was insane.

That is the verdict of some, at least, who would practice psychoanalysis. There is much available for the probing mind doing a case study in retrospect concerning Luther’s strange and abnormal personality. His own writings, as well as anecdotes and legends that surround him, bear testimony to the complexities of the Reformer’s psychological profile.

First of all, consider Luther’s intemperate speech patterns. Though he wrote in an age accustomed to a polemical style, Luther exceeds his own contemporaries in acerbic rhetoric. When his opponents spoke against him, he said, “The dogs are beginning to bark.” He said to Erasmus, “Your book struck me as so worthless and poor that my heart went out to you for having defiled your lovely, brilliant flow of language with such vile stuff. I thought it outrageous to convey material of so low a quality in the trappings of such rare eloquence; it is like using gold or silver dishes to carry garden rubbish or dung.” One pundit remarked of Luther that he didn’t call a spade a spade, but a manure shovel!

But salty speech is hardly enough to convict a man of lunacy, even when the expletives are left undeleted. The apostle Paul occasionally was given to biting criticism, and Jesus himself likened some persons to members of the animal kingdom—Herod, for example, as “fox,” and the Syrophoenician woman as a dog (certainly by implication).

Luther’s phobias qualify him at least for classification as neurotic. How many times did he predict his own imminent demise from various maladies only to be proven wrong by Providence? His own obituaries were as exaggerated as those reported about the still vibrant Mark Twain. But Luther was clearly phobic about disease and death. His alleged moment of terror when thrown from a horse spooked by a bolt of nearby lightning produced the anguished cry—“Saint Anne, I will become a monk” and the subsequent implementation of that vow. How unlike golfer Lee Trevino, who, when asked his reaction to a close call with death by lightning on a golf course, quipped, “I learned from that experience that if the Almighty wants to ‘play through’ you’d better get out of the way.”

Luther’s “stage fright” at his ordination has been fodder for some critics. When the sacred moment came for the prayer of consecration, during which it was believed the miracle of transubstantiation took place, Luther, noted as an eloquent public speaker, was paralyzed. His legs moved, but no words came out as he trembled at what he thought he was holding, the veritable body and blood of Christ.

His behavior at Worms signals again an uncommon, indeed rare, style of individualism: that Luther would stand virtually alone against the power centers of his time—the princes of the church and the princes of the state—has provoked charges of monomania and megalomania. The accretions of the apocryphal have obscured the events of that time. When Luther was asked to recant before the Diet we are usually led to believe that he responded with the bold “Here I stand” recital, ending with a triumphal departure from the hall with fists raised in the air like “Rocky” at the top of the steps to the Philadelphia Museum. In reality, his not-so-heroic reply was simply, “May I have 24 hours to think it over?”

Luther’s agony between the first day at Worms and his appearance on the following day may be seen by reading his prayer penned in the interim.

When the assembly reconvened and the question of recanting was put again to Luther, the exact words of his reply are uncertain. The traditional version is this: “Unless I am convinced by Holy Scripture, or by evident reason, I cannot recant. My conscience is held captive by the Word of God, and to act against conscience is neither right nor safe. Here I stand, I can do no other. God help me.”

Luther’s apparently staged “kidnapping” after the Diet led to his period of underground “exile” at the castle of Wartburg. There he worked furiously on the translation of the Bible into German. During this period he assumed a disguise, wearing the garments of a knight and acquiring the pseudonym “Sir George.” This episode has raised questions of an acute identity crisis, possibly even manifestation of a schizoid personality.

Luther’s tempestuous behavior was evident later at Marburg, where, in the midst of dialogue on the Lord’s Supper, he pounded his fist on the table, stridently repeating again and again, “Hoc est corpus meum, hoc est corpus meum.” His behavior at this meeting calls to mind the shoepounding antics of Nikita Khrushchev at the United Nations.

And there’s more. Luther’s love for his bride, Katherine Van Bora, produced a host of Luther quotes, some of them quite offensive to the modern feminist. One such comment reads, “If God wanted me to many a meek woman, He’d have to hew one out of stone!”

But all these facets of Luther’s personality and behavior are but trivia when compared with the most bizarre episodes of his career development. It was during the days of his tenure in the monastic society that he exhibited the most unusual symptoms. He was a man of extraordinarily troubled conscience, a man with a morbid sense of guilt with which he was preoccupied. Noteworthy are his repeated outbursts of borderline blasphemy such as, “You ask me if I love God? Love God? Sometimes I hate him!” Or, “I see Christ as a stern Judge,” or “To the gallows with Moses!”

His days of penance were matched in rigor only by the intensity of his torments by night. Some reports declare that Luther would wear out the patience of his confessors by staying hours in the confessional, reciting the number of his sins for one day. Most monks completed the daily ritual in minutes and were off to complete the tasks assigned them for the day. After all, how much trouble can a monk get into inside a monastery? Confessions of coveting another monk’s food or daydreaming during chapel didn’t consume much confessional time. But Luther’s approach was far more exact and far more intense. At first his superiors suspected him of “goldbricking”—of being a priestly malingerer seeking to avoid his daily tasks. But the countenance of the young cleric revealed a genuine terror that would be freshly kindled when he returned to his cell and would recall a sin he forgot to confess.

This morbid guilt syndrome is the favorite target of the critics. His troubled conscience could not be explained by the oppression of a Victorian ethic or Puritan morality. Luther’s struggle antedated both the queen and the New England divines. Hence some have sought probable cause not in culture but in lunacy.

The cliché states that there is a thin line between genius and insanity. Perhaps Luther had a round trip ticket on that line. What is often overlooked is that young Luther, before distinguishing himself as a theologian, had already reached prominence as an acute student of European jurisprudence. He was an expert in law. When the legal mind was turned to the Old Testament Law it approached the divine commands stripped of the fuzzy interpretations most mortals use to fend off the demands of God. Luther took the law of God seriously and it was driving him crazy. At this point he manifested rational madness—a normal abnormality, as insanity is the only appropriate destiny of a man naked before the law without the benefit of Christ.

It was out of the law that Luther was driven to Christ. It was out of this agony that he rediscovered the gospel of justification by faith. His sanity was saved—his genius resolved when, in preparation for lectures at Wittenberg, he pondered the text, “The just shall live by faith.” As the full import of the words from Romans dawned on him he cried out, “The doors of paradise opened … and I walked through!”

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