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The solitude of the Wartburg afforded Luther a refuge for almost ten months, to him a lengthy period.

Whereas but a little while before he had been inspirited by the loud applause of his followers and roused by the opposition of those in high places to a struggle which made him utterly oblivious of self, here, in the quiet of the mountain stronghold, the thoughts born of his solitude assailed him in every conceivable form. He was altogether thrown upon himself and his studies. The croaking of the ravens and magpies about the towers in front of his windows sounded like the voices which spoke in the depths of his soul.

Looking back upon his conduct at Worms, he now began to doubt; how, indeed, could an outlaw do otherwise, even had he not undertaken so subversive a venture as Luther? To this was added, in his case, the responsibility for the storm he had let loose on his beloved native land. His own confession runs: “How often did my heart faint for fear, and reproach me thus: You wanted to be wise beyond all others. Are then all others in their countless multitude mistaken? Have so many centuries all been in the wrong? Supposing you were mistaken, and, owing to your mistake, were to drag down with you to eternal damnation so many human creatures!”[193]

He must often have asked himself such questions, especially at the beginning of the “hermit life,” as he calls it, which he led within those walls. But to these questionings he of set purpose refused to give the right answer; he had set out on the downward path and could not go back; of this he came to convince himself as the result of a lengthy struggle.

This is the point which it is incumbent on the psychologist to study beyond all else. Luther’s everyday life and his studies at Worms have been discussed often enough already.

It is unheard of, so he says in the accounts he gives of his interior struggles in those days, “to run counter to the custom of so many centuries and to oppose the convictions of innumerable men and such great authorities. How can anyone turn a deaf ear to these reproaches, insults and condemnations?” “How hard is it,” he exclaims from his own experience, “to come to terms with one’s own conscience when it has long been accustomed to a certain usage [like that of the Papists], which is nevertheless wrong and godless. Even with the plainest words from Holy Scripture I was scarcely able so to fortify my conscience as to venture to challenge the Pope, and to look on him as Antichrist, on the bishops as the Apostles of Antichrist and the Universities as his dens of iniquity!” He summoned all his spirit of defiance to his aid and came off victorious. “Christ at length strengthened me by His words, which are steadfast and true. No longer does my heart tremble and waver, but mocks at the Popish objections; I am in a haven of safety and laugh at the storms which rage without.”[194]

From the Catholic point of view, what he had done was violently to suppress the higher voice which had spoken to him in his solitude. Yet this voice was again to make itself heard, and with greater force than ever.

Luther had then succeeded so well in silencing it that he was able to write to his friends, as it seems, without the slightest scruple, that, as to Worms, he was only ashamed of not having spoken more bravely and emphatically before the whole Empire; were he compelled to appear there again, they would hear a very different tale of him. “I desire nothing more ardently than to bare my breast to the attacks of my adversaries.” He spent his whole time in picturing to himself “the empire of Antichrist,” a frightful vision of the wrath of God.[195] With such pictures he spurs himself on, and encourages Melanchthon, with whose assistance he was unable to dispense, to overcome his timidity and vacillation. In many of his letters from the Wartburg he exhorts his friends to courage and confidence, being anxious to counteract by every possible effort the ill-effects of his absence. In these letters his language is, as a rule, permeated by a fanatical and, at times, mystical tone, even more so than any of his previous utterances. He exhibits even less restraint than formerly in his polemics. “Unless a man scolds, bites and taunts, he achieves nothing. If we admonish the Popes respectfully, they take it for flattery and fancy they have a right to remain unreformed. But Jeremias exhorts me, and says to me: ‘Cursed be he who does the work of the Lord deceitfully’ (xlviii. 10), and calls for the use of the sword against the enemies of God.”[196]

Two phenomena which accompanied this frenzy render it still graver in the eyes of an onlooker. These were, on the one hand, certain occurrences which bordered on hallucination, and, on the other, frightful assaults of the tempter.

Concerning both, his letters of that time, and likewise his own accounts at a later date, supply us with definite information. It is, indeed, a dark page on which they direct our attention. All the circumstances must carefully be borne in mind. First, much must be attributed to the influence of his new and unaccustomed place of abode and the strange nature of his surroundings. His gloomy meditations and enforced leisure; a more generous diet, which, in comparison with his former circumstances, meant to the Monk, now metamorphosed into “Squire George,” an almost luxurious mode of living; finally, bodily discomfort, for instance, the constipation to which he frequently refers as troubling him,[197] all this tended to develop an abnormal condition of soul to which his former psychological states of terror may also have contributed. He fancied, and all his life maintained, that in the Wartburg he had suffered bodily assaults of the devil.

Luther believed that he had not only heard the devil tormenting him by day, and more particularly by night, with divers dreadful noises, but that he had seen him in his room under the form of a huge black dog, and had chased him away by prayer. His statements, to which we shall return in detail in another connection (vol. vi., xxxvi. 3; cp. vol. v., xxxi. 4), are such as presuppose, at the very least, the strangest illusions. Some have even opined that he suffered from real hallucinations of hearing and sight, though they have adduced no definite proof of such. The disputes with the devil, of which he speaks, are certainly nothing more than a rhetorical version of his own self-communings.

If Luther brought with him to the Wartburg a large stock of popular superstition, he increased it yet more within those dreary walls, thanks to the sensitiveness of his lively imagination, until he himself became the plaything of his fancy. “Because he was so lonely,” writes his friend the physician Ratzeberger, on the strength of Luther’s personal communication, “he was beset with ghosts and noisy spirits which gave him much concern.” And after quoting the tale of the dog he goes on: “Such-like and many other ghosts came to him at that time, all of which he drove away by prayer, and which he would not talk about, for he said he would never tell anyone by how many different kinds of ghosts he had been molested.”[198]

The temptations of the flesh which he then experienced Luther also attributed, in the main, to the devil. They fell upon him with greater force than ever before. Their strength displeased him, according to his letters, and he sought to resist them, though it is plain from his words that he realised the utter futility of his desire to rid himself of them. In this state of darkness he directed his thoughts more vigorously than heretofore to the question of monastic vows and their binding power. He seems to be clanking the chains by which he had by his own vow freely pledged himself to the Almighty.