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.
In July, 1521, in a letter from the Wartburg to his friend Melanchthon, while repudiating, in the somewhat bombastic fashion of the Humanists, Melanchthon’s praise, he makes the following confession: “Your good opinion of me shames and tortures me. For I sit here [instead of working for God’s cause as you fondly imagine] hardened in immobility, praying, unhappily, too little instead of sighing over the Church of God; nay, I burn with the flames of my untamed flesh; in short, I ought to be glowing in the spirit, and instead I glow in the flesh, in lust, laziness, idleness and drowsiness, and know not whether God has not turned away His face from me because you have ceased to pray for me. You, who are more rich in the gifts of God than I, are now holding my place. For a whole week I have neither written, prayed nor studied, plagued partly by temptations of the flesh, partly by the other trouble.” The other trouble was the painful bodily ailment mentioned above, to which he returns here in greater detail. “Pray for me,” he concludes this letter--in which he seeks to confirm his friends in the course upon which they had set out,--“pray, for in this solitude I am sinking into sin.”[199] And in another letter, in December, we again have an allusion to his besetting temptations: “I am healthy in body and am well cared for, but I am also severely tried by sin and temptations. Pray for me, and fare you well.”[200] He here speaks of sins _and_ temptations, but it may well be that under “sins” he here, as elsewhere, comprehends concupiscence, which he, in accordance with his teaching, looked upon as sin.