Martin Luther's devil (part ii)

Luther recalled later:

It is not a unique, unheard-of thing for the Devil to thump about and haunt houses. In our monastery in Wittenberg I heard him distinctly. For when I began to lecture on the Book of Psalms and I was sitting in the refectory after we had sung matins, studying and writing my notes, the Devil came and thudded three times in the storage chamber as if dragging a bushel away. Finally, as it did not want to stop, I collected my books and went to bed. I still regret to this hour that I did not sit him out, to discover what else the Devil wanted to do. But when I realized that it was Satan, I rolled over and went back to sleep again.

Here he sounds almost jaunty, blasé, as if there was nothing unusual about the Devil poking around in the dining-room. He talks about the Devil as if he was some rat or some other animal making an unwanted noise. Though he hear him talk in this flip way about his encounters with the Devil, we can also infer what night-time torments for the Luther in his monkish cell must have been like:

When I awoke last night, the Devil came and wanted to debate with me; he rebuked and reproached me, arguing that I was a sinner. To this I replied: Tell me something new, Devil! I already know that perfectly well; I have committed many a solid and real sin. Indeed there must be good honest sins - not fabricated and invented ones - for God to forgive for His beloved Son’s sake, who took all my sins upon Him so that now the sins I have committed are no longer mine but belong to Christ. This wonderful gift of God I am not prepared to deny [in my response to the Devil], but want to acknowledge and confess.

The Devil visited him not to frighten him by simply being a creature from the underworld or some kind of cartoonish monster with horns on his head and a pointed tail. That in the end is laughable. The Devil – or to give him one of his biblical names, Satan, literally ‘the accuser’ – has his real power in telling us the truth about ourselves. He prosecutes the case against us, drawing up a record of what we will and what we do, reminding us of our moments of remorse and telling us things about ourselves we had only begun to realise.

For an Erikson or a Freud, the notion of ‘sin’ is as superstitious as the rest of religion. Guilt appears as a symptom of a disease – as a sickness of the psyche in need of the soothing balm of analysis. The impact of this view has been pervasive. As the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor points out, with this shift in framework ‘what was formerly sin is often now seen as sickness’. The results of this culture-wide shift in thinking has been ambivalent at best. On the one hand, it appears as if it elevates human dignity by describing its problems not in moral or spiritual terms but in therapeutic ones. The response to the human plight is care and cure, not condemnation. Surely that is an uplifting alternative?

But – and this seems counter-intuitive to us perhaps – a great deal is lost if the notion of sin and evil is thought to have been superseded. Being sick is simply something that happens to you as an organism, and of which you are almost always the victim. Even an addict who injects herself repeatedly with a poisonous drug is considered to be in the grip of an illness, and merely pitiable. There is nothing put before the human person that challenges her to take responsibility for her actions or to seek change through great wisdom, or a personal conversion. The much-vaunted freedom that was promised to individuals by the polemic against the ideas of sin, evil and guilt proves to be an illusion. Telling us that our troubles are because we are actually sick introduces us to a kind of fatalism in which we have to accept that we are incapacitated by our lack of health and should submit to treatment by the growing barrage of experts ready on hand with the newest pharmaceutical and therapeutical solutions. Psychoanalysis, like the other proposed therapies, proves to be of limited diagnostic value because it explains guilt and remorse and shame away. These are not pointers to something wrong, but only to something ill. As Taylor says, ‘evil has the dignity of an option for an apparent good; sickness has not’.

That is not to say that there is nothing in psychoanalysis. At the very least it has the virtue of inviting the individual to describe at least some of the aspects of the inward person. The Christian understanding of the human person as created good and for the fulfilment of sublime purpose in the service of the Creator, but distorted through a fall for which all are to blame, does not mean that the problem of sin and evil is purely a spiritual one. On the contrary; we understand from this account that we are both the perpetrators and the victims of evil; and that the call remains for us to aspire to a better form of life. Freudian accounts of the human psyche may very well trace my aberrant desires or my violent temper to my relationship with my father or to some event in my anal retentive phase that hampered by growth to full mature personhood. They may even thereby gain some purchase on my problems to the extent that they are addressed. But none of this removes the necessity of treating me as a responsible agent, a person who acts and who potentially acts and who has ultimately to be able to explain why he did what he did.

Explain? To whom must I explain myself? Ultimately, talk about human morality or ‘spirituality’ must pose this question. It implies a court; a bar of judgement. There must be a standard against which human life is to be judged; and indeed, a judge. If we are ‘responsible’ beings, we must finally be called upon to give an answer. We cannot within ourselves contain the means of our own judgement. Even the invitation to ‘do what seems best to you’ implies the concept of a ‘best’ learnt from somewhere outside of oneself. There must be reference points, a horizon against which the best or the good or the most authentic human life can be measured.

Ironically, Luther’s very description of sin – the self turned in upon itself (incurvatio in se ipsum) – implies that the sinful self actually turns in upon itself as a closed system. It turns itself in the knots of self-loving and self-loathing. Contemporary Luther scholar Oswald Bayer puts it this way:

The human being, who is made by nature to respond by looking outward, ends up entrapped now in the endless downward spiral of a circle, talking to himself ceaselessly and to those who are like him…

The denial of the moral or spiritual element in the human person is, it turns out, exactly what sin is. And it highlights the problem that has dogged the human inward quest since at least the time of Augustine of Hippo in his Confessions: that the problem of the self cannot ever be resolved by turning further and further inwards.

There is another paradox that you may have noticed. I lauded ‘evil’ with Taylor because it actually allows for a great human dignity. It introduces the notion of a responsible agent – a human being answerable for their life and so accorded the worth of a being who is capable of change. And yet, on Luther’s account, the human person is not so ‘free’. The human will is terribly bound, making the individual a prisoner under the power of sin, tragically unable to do the good they ought to do or even to be the creature it is given them to be. In his marvellous diatribe The Bondage of the Will, Luther wrote:

The human will if thus place into the middle as a beast of burden; if God sits on it, it desires to go where God wants to go….If Satan sits on it, it desires and goes where Satan wants to go. And it does not have it in its power to consider that it will go to one of the two riders or seek on out, but the riders themselves do battle in order to hold fast to it and to possess it.

Luther’s critics, the eirenic scholar Erasmus among them, have chided him for so demeaning the glory and dignity of man that he should be depicted in such a way. And they have argued that this description is simply deterministic and fatalistic – that, like the Messiah, ethics can have no place to rest his head on such an account. But at the same time as he spoke so colourfully against the freedom of the will as an illusion, Luther spoke of the way in which this situation was not determined by some distant necessity, but rather than sin is under the complete ownership of the sinner himself. It is not God who sinned, nor even (from one point of view) the devil; but it is we who sinned and fell, and it is we who stand in the path of the just wrath of God that is coming on those who rebel. We are the slaves of sin; but as such we are those who put ourselves on the market to be bought. We have the privilege of judgement on our actions which makes them consequential and meaningful; but also the terrible fear that this might be the case.