The doctrine of the dark, mystical night appealed very strongly to Luther’s mind. In his theology he is fond of picturing the soul as utterly sinful and deserving of hell, meaning by this something very different from what orthodox mystics taught. He also suffered greatly at times from inward commotion and darkening of the soul, due to fears regarding predestination, to a troubled conscience or to morbid depression, of which the cause was perhaps bodily rather than mental. These, however, bore no resemblance to the pains—“mystical exercises” as they have been called by Protestants—of which the mystics speak. In his “temptations in the monastery” he did not experience what Tauler and the “Theologia Deutsch” narrate of the consuming inner fire of Purgatory. Luther, however, erroneously applied their descriptions to his own condition.[625] Thus his idea of the night of the soul is quite different from that of the mystics, though he describes it in almost the same words, and, thanks to his imagination and eloquence, possibly in even more striking colours. Several times in his Commentary on Romans he represents resignation to, indeed even an actual desire for, damnation—should that be the will of God—as something grand and sublime. Thereby he thinks he is teaching the highest degree of resignation to God’s inscrutable will; thereby the highest step on the ladder of self-abnegation has been attained. In reality it is an ideal of a frightful character, far worse even than a return to nothingness. He lets us see here, as he does so often in other matters, how greatly his turbulent spirit inclined to extremes.[626] “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.