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“If men willed what God wills,” he writes, “even though He should will to damn and reject them, they would see no evil in that [in the predestination to hell which he teaches]; for, as they will what God wills, they have, owing to their resignation, the will of God in them.” Does he mean by this that they should resign themselves to hating God for all eternity? Luther does not seem to notice that hatred of God is an essential part of the condition of those who are damned (“damnari et reprobari ad infernum”). Has he perhaps come to conceive of a hatred of God proceeding from love? He seems almost to credit those who think of hell, with a resolve to bear everything, even hatred of God, with loving submission to the will of Him Who by His predestination has willed it.

He even dares to say to those who are affrighted by predestination to hell, that resignation to eternal punishment is, for the truly wise, a source of “ineffable joy” (“ineffabili iucunditate in ista materia delectantur”);[627] for the perfect this is “the best purgation from their own will,” i.e. the way of the greatest bitterness, “because under charity the cross and suffering is always understood.” But all, he says, even the half-imperfect, see that here we have a splendid remedy for destroying “the presumptuous building upon merit; let everyone rejoice in his fear and thank God,”[628] the more so that those who are so much afraid will certainly not go to hell; “as they make themselves entirely conformable to the will of God it is impossible that they should be delivered over to eternal punishment, as he who resigns himself entirely to God’s holy Will cannot remain separated from Him.”[629]

This doctrine of a wholesome fear of hell, of a saving, heroic abandonment to God, and of an exalted and pure love to be exercised by all as a “remedy” against damnation, invalidates Luther’s doctrine of absolute and undeserved predestination to hell; salvation is again made to depend upon both God and man, whose co-operation becomes necessary; it is only because “man will not will what God wills” that he is damned. Yet, according to Luther, the saving fear and resignation is only possible to the elect, and these must in the end be in doubt as to whether they are pleasing to God, just as they must be uncertain regarding all their actions.

In confirmation of his theory of readiness for hell Luther even refers to St. Paul, who says in his Epistle to the Romans, that he had offered himself to the everlasting pains of hell for the salvation of the Jews; that, in order to save them, he had been ready to be “an anathema from Christ.”[630] But the example does not apply. According to a more correct explanation, the Apostle, who was always in spiritual communion with Christ, speaks only of an outward separation.[631] Luther himself says in this connection: Paul did not desire to hate Christ, but was ready to be separated from Him; in this he displayed the “most sublime degree of charity, a truly apostolic love”; “this seems, of course, incomprehensible and foolish to those who think themselves holy and love God with the ‘amor concupiscentiæ,’ i.e. on account of their salvation and for the sake of eternal rest, or in order to escape from hell, in other words, not for God’s sake but their own.... What they really desire is salvation according to their own fancy, instead of desiring their own nothingness both here and hereafter (‘suum nihil optare’), and only the will and glory of God,” whereas “all perfect saints, out of their overflowing affection, are ready to accept everything, even hell itself. By reason of this readiness, it is true, they at once escape all punishment.”

According to Luther, even Christ offered Himself for hell whole and entire. Luther does not make the slightest distinction in the agony in the Garden between mere exterior and real interior separation from God. Christ was ever united hypostatically with God, and His human nature never ceased to enjoy the vision of God. Luther, however, merely says: “He found Himself in a state of condemnation and abandonment which was greater than that of all the saints. His sufferings were not easy to Him, as some have imagined, because He actually and in truth offered Himself to the eternal Father to be consigned to eternal damnation for us (‘quod realiter et vere se in æternam damnationem obtulit Deo patri pro nobis’). His human nature did not behave differently from that of a man who is to be condemned eternally to hell. On account of this love of God, God at once raised Him from death and hell, and so He overcame hell (‘eum suscitavit a morte et inferno et sic momordit infernum’; cp. Osee xiii. 14). All His saints must follow this example, some more, some less; and according to the degree of their perfection in love they find this harder or easier. But Christ bore the most severe form of it (‘durissime hoc fecit’), and for this reason He laments in many passages (in the Messianic Psalms) the pains of hell.”[632]

In the light of passages such as these we can understand to some extent the lurid, fanciful, mystic description which he gives early in 1518, clearly on the strength of his own states of mind. He tells how a man fancies himself at certain moments plunged into hell, and feels his breast pierced by all the pangs of everlasting despair, because he apprehends God’s “frightful ire” and the impossibility of ever being delivered. This grotesque picture of a soul, with which we shall deal more fully later, although it is partly taken almost word for word from the earlier descriptions of the mystics, reveals its morbid character more especially by the fact, that the hope, which, in the case of the devout, remains in the depths of the soul even throughout the most severe interior trials, seems entirely absent. God is seen as He appeared to Luther, i.e. as an inexorable, arbitrary punisher of His creature.[633]

Luther’s mysticism is veritably a mysticism of despair and the “humilitas,” with its love ready even for hell, which he belauds as the anchor of safety, is a forced expedient really excluded by his system, and which he himself discarded as soon as he was able to replace it by the (God-given) fides, in the shape of faith in personal justification and salvation.