As to how far what Cramer says is applicable to Luther’s mental
states may here be left open. The same holds good of what we shall
quote below from C. Wernicke and H. Friedmann. What the former says
of “autochthonous” ideas may conceivably be applicable to Luther’s
conviction of the private revelations he had received and of which he
speaks so strongly above (p. 142 ff.) as even to suggest actual auditory
hallucination; that there was no real hallucination seems more likely
for the reason that Luther elsewhere is disposed to regard the incidents
as of an inward character and is not quite so wholly under their sway as
would have been the case had they been strictly speaking hallucinatory.
As to “exalted ideas,” of which both speak, they put us in mind of some
of Luther’s ideas concerning his own person, position, achievements and
persecutions (cp. our summary in vol. iv., pp. 329-41).
It must, however, be noted that “exalted ideas” can be present in a mind
otherwise perfectly sound, and that, consequently, even if Luther had
such ideas it would not prove him to have been mentally deranged; the
same holds good of “autochthonous” ideas, which, occurring singly, are no
warrant of insanity.
Again, even should Luther’s idea of his revelations turn out to be
originally “autochthonous,” yet the reception he accorded it, the
interpretation he placed on it and the use he made of it seem, as we have
already set forth, to have been both deliberate and responsible. This
is confirmed by the circumstance that, in time, his keen sense of such
impressions waned under the objections brought against them, and that his
insistence on the “revelations” and his interpretation of them no longer
found quite the same vigorous expression as before. Nevertheless, we
repeat it once more: It is for experts to pass a definite judgment, but,
in order to do so fairly, they must not submit to the microscope merely
one class of Luther’s mental manifestations, but consider him as a whole,
as monk no less than as Reformer, and examine his mentality on all its
sides.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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