The Madman and the merciful one – Luther, torment, and God who judges hearts.

Charles Brammall examines Luther for Reformation Day

A commissioned a friend to knit a beautiful Martin Luther hat, which I wore to church this morning. We celebrated the day with a related sermon, staff wearing robes and collars (not frequent), and old hymns on the organ. I was like a pig in mud.

Happy Reformation Day Martin!

Luther’s theology was born not in the library but in the storm. It was in the Anfechtungen— that untranslatable German word for spiritual assault, terror, and interior siege— that the Reformation first took breath. “Ich bin der Staub unter Christi Füßen,” he once said: I am the dust beneath Christ’s feet.That dust shook the world.

The figure who stood before the Emperor at Worms (pron. Vorms)— Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders— was not a triumphal saint, but a man who had spent years walking the border between sanctity and sanity/madness. His mind was a battlefield where doctrine and psychology, glory and eternal aloneness, God-dependence and despair, met in mortal combat.

Faith’s Psychomachia.

Father Martin’s religious anxiety had physiological form. He suffered what we might today diagnose as obsessive scrupulosity, major medication resistant depression, and intrusive suicidal ideation. His letters speak of tiefste Schwermut— deep melancholy— and Todesfurcht, the dread of death.

In the monastery at Erfurt, he fasted to fainting, confessed for hours, self-whipped, and still found no peace. (I was Student Chaplain at an Opus Dei residential college at uni, and one of the priest was known to self-flagellate, by his cries. Astonishing.)

The God of late medieval Catholicism— majestic, juridical, and remote— was to Martin a consuming fire, actually an accurate description of one of His  traits, Heb 12:29 and Deut 4:24.

The Latin Church of C15 had elevated guilt to the metaphysical. Its penitential system was exquisitely calibrated to sustain uncertainty: timor servilis (the fear of punishment) masquerading as timor filialis(the fear of offending the Father). The result was spiritual paralysis— what our priest later described as desperatio sub specie pietatis, despair in the guise of piety.

This spiritual economy produced minds like Luther’s: men who feared they could never confess enough, believe enough, or feel enough contrition to be safe. Incurvatus in se— bent in on oneself— was his diagnosis of sin, and also of his own neurosis. The law of God, meant to lead to repentance, instead crushed the conscience to self-absorption.

Scripture’s Madmen- 

Saul, Nebuchadnezzar.

Luther found himself mirrored in the haunted figures of Scripture. King Saul, tormented by a “ruaḥ ra‘ah me’ēt YHWH” (ר֣וּחַ רָעָ֔ה מֵאֵ֖ת יְהוָֽה)—“an evil spirit from the LORD”— embodies the paradox of divine sovereignty over mental disorder. 

Saul’s jealousy and paranoia led him to ruin, inwardly divided, double-minded, hearing in every footstep of David, God’s echo. Likewise Nebuchadnezzar, expelled from society to consume herbage as a bovine, becomes the archetype of imperial derangement— power unmoored from reason.

I “get” this, personally. In a year of frightfully deep depression, I had neither the energy nor the will to perform any normal personal hygiene. I didn’t have haircuts, shave, or nailclip. Getting up off my mattress on the floor was almost impossible, as was showering and teeth brushing.

And forget about walking our dog Manuel- I was pretty much unable to drag my leaden legs across the floor. Talking to humans, hanging the washing, or eating properly were likewise nigh outside my ability. I lost multiple kilos, and for a time feared I would become Anorexic. In hindsight I believe it wasn’t far from a kind of madness.

Luther saw such madness not as divine abandonment but as divine pedagogy. “Deus absconditus”—  the hidden God— meets the soul, not in serenity, but in its dissolution. 

When he wrote that tentatio facit theologum (“trial makes the theologian”), he meant precisely that: theology arises from the dark night where reason collapses and faith alone clings. ὁ δίκαιος ἐκ πίστεως ζήσεται— “the just shall live by faith” (Rom 1:17)— wasn’t a doctrinal slogan but a cry for sanity in the storm.

The Economy of Fear and Roman Guilt.

In late medieval piety, salvation was a ledger. Grace was dispensed in measurable quantities through sacramental performance. The confessional, meant to be a balm, became a bureaucratic theatre of anxiety. The question that haunted Luther— Wie bekomme ich einen gnädigen Gott? (“How can I find a gracious God?”)— wasn’t rhetorical but existential.

Catholicism, in its most devotional form, had perfected what psychologists now call “learned helplessness.” The believer internalised an unending debt to divine perfection. Shame and uncertainty were sanctified as virtues. The imago Dei was not obliterated, but smothered under a cloud of endless introspection.

Luther’s sola fide— faith alone saves- was thus not merely a theological correction, but a psychological exorcism. The Reformation was in part a revolt against pathological guilt. By insisting that justification was extra nos— outside of us, and imputed not infused— Luther released the mind from its self-devouring piety. Grace was no longer a divine transaction but a divine declaration.

Jesus’ Incarnate Sanity.

At the heart of Luther’s recovery stood not an idea but a Person. Christus pro me (Christ for me) became the organising principle of reality. Against the spectre of divine arbitrariness stood the enfleshed Logos, the τέκτων (τέκτων, “carpenter”) of Nazareth.

The childhood of Jesus— puer Iesus, the laughing boy in the woodshed, restored the humanity that scholastic piety had sublimated away. In the enfleshing God entered not the cloister but the stone feed trough, not the intellect but the nervous system of creation.

When Luther preached that “God became a child to save children,” he was not sentimental. He meant that divinity descended into psychological fragility. The Christ who wept, hungered, sniggered and sweated blood, sanctified mankind’s neurosis.

His Ascension (ἀνέβη εἰς τὸν οὐρανόν) was not an escape from embodiment, but its exultation and enthronement. Its coronation. Eat your heart out Westminster Abbey. Humanity, with all its trembling synapses, sits now at the right hand of Majesty.

So when Paul writes, “οὐκ οἴδατε ὅτι ἀγγέλους κρινοῦμεν;”, (“Do you not know that we shall judge angels?”- Cor 6:3), Luther hears the ultimate reversal: the creature who once despaired under accusation will one day sit in judgment over the accuser. Grace does not abolish judgment; it transfers it to the forgiven.

Michael Polanyi and the Tacit Structure of God-Reliance.

I believe Polyani is an outstanding Christian philosopher. I’m a fan. His C20 insights illuminate Luther’s medieval soul. Polyani argued that all knowing is personal – and beneath explicit propositions lies tacit knowledge, a way of indwelling truth that involves the whole person:

“We know more than we can tell,” he wrote. For Polanyi faith is not the absence of reason but its prerequisite: every act of understanding begins in trust.

Luther, centuries earlier, intuited the same epistemic structure. The mind under Anfechtung cannot reason its way to peace; it must indwell the promise. Faith is not the conclusion of logic but the surrender of logic to the Person of Christ.

Credo ut intelligam (“I believe in order to understand”- my school’s motto was “To your faith, add knowledge”). Luther’s faith is not fideism but realism: reality itself is relational. To trust the Word (Verbum Dei) is to participate in truth through love.

Polanyi’s idea of indwelling corresponds marvellously to Luther’s notion of Christus in nobis; Christ in us. The believer does not merely assent to propositions, but inhabits them, as one inhabits a melody, and “listens to music with one’s body”, (my wife’s phrase). The structure of faith is the structure of sanity: to live by an internalised and yet transcendent centre.

Despair’s Theology.

Luther’s depression never entirely lifted. His later letters still vibrate  between cosmic confidence and dark self-loathing. Yet even this instability became theological. He saw in his oscillations the pattern of the Cross itself: crux probat omnia—the Cross tests all things.

Some modern Psychiatrists can at times seek to eliminate despair (as an antidote to this, think Acceptance and Compassion Therapy- ACT, practised by an increasing number all these days). But instead of expunging despair, Luther baptised it. He was the original ACT self-Psychiatrist.

For him, despair (Verzweiflung) was not the enemy of faith but its womb. Only the soul that has descended into its own dereliction can be resurrected into grace.

In this he parallels the Hebrew tehom (תְּהוֹם)- the deep, chaotic abyss over which the Spirit hovers in Genesis 1:2). The mind in darkness is that primordial void into which the Word still speaks: yehi or (יְהִי אוֹר), “Let there be light.”

To suffer mentally in this reformer’s view to participate in the creative tension of Divine love, the agōnof redemption enacted in every conscience.

God Hidden and Mind’s Healing.

Luther’s Deus absconditus

 (the God who hides Himself) is the theological articulation of his own inner labyrinth. Yet the hiddenness is medicinal. The Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? (אֵלִי אֵלִי לָמָה שְׁבַקְתַּנִי) of Messiah n the tree is the eternal echo of every psychotic break, every silent heaven. But…

the cry is heard. The absence of God becomes the form of His presence.

If medieval Catholicism offered an omniscient Judge, Luther discovered in the crucified Christ a Mitleidender Gott: the God who suffers with you and me: “He who descended into hell is the one who sits above all heavens.” The descent is the diagnosis; the ascension, the cure.

Mentally Healthy Eschatology.

To say that we “shall judge angels” is to affirm that redeemed humanity will one day discern reality without distortion. The final judgment is not a celestial court scene but the restoration of perception, the healing of epistemology (the philosophical question of HOW we know WHAT we know).

The mad will become the wise, the guilty the gracious. Luther’s vision of justification is therefore psychiatric as well as soteriological: it is the restoration of the mind’s good and right friendship with God and itself.

The Reformation began with one man’s nervous breakdown before the face of a God he could not appease. It ended with a Church singing Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott – “A mighty fortress is our God.” The transition from terror to trust, from Anfechtung to sola fide, was not merely doctrinal but therapeutic: an apocalypse of sanity.

Epilogue: Mercy as Knowledge

In the end Luther’s torment was the crucible of a new epistemology of grace. Against the scholastic vision of detached intellect, he offered a trembling but total trust in the Word made flesh. Polanyi would later echo him: “To know is to submit to reality.” For Luther, reality had a name – Jesu.

And so the man who once feared that God hated him, died whispering, Wir sind Bettler. Hoc est verum (“We are beggars. This is true.”) Between the madness of Saul and the bestiality of Nebuchadnezzar stands a beggar who dared to believe that mercy could be known.

Quoniam tu solus sanctus, tu solus Dominus, tu solus Altissimus.

(For Thou only art holy, Thou only art the Lord, Thou only art the Most High.)

It is a confession, and a heuriskow, a therapy, a cure. THE cure.

Afterword – Postmodern Minds and the Mercy of Knowing.

Luther’s dark nights find strange resonance in C21. Modern psychiatry names what he felt – major depression, intrusive ideation, existential anxiety— but rarely asks what such anguish means.

The post-postmodern self is pathologised but not interpreted: we medicate symptoms but neglect the soul’s metaphysics. Luther, for all his medieval terrors, saw further. He knew that the mind’s collapse may be not only chemical but theological

 —a crisis of meaning, not merely of mood.

Here Michael Polanyi offers a bridge across centuries. His personal knowledge reminds us that the knower and the known are never detached. All cognition begins in fiducia, trust – and ends in communio, participation.

Some branches of the West’s therapeutic culture has at times been tempted to treat sanity as the restoration of autonomy. But Polanyi, like Luther, saw that healing lies in indwelling a reality larger than oneself.

Depending on the dependable One, in this sense, is not anti-psychiatric; it is existential reorientation of my ontos. It teaches my mind to inhabit coherence rather than to construct it.

In Luther’s idiom is Der Glaube ist ein lebendiges, verwegens Vertrauen auf die Gnade Gottes (faith is a living, daring trust in the grace of God).

Such reliance doesn’t dissolve depression or silence fear, but it transforms their geometry. The sufferer is no longer trapped within the echo chamber of self-analysis, but held— ἐν Χριστῷ— in Christ, within the sanity of God Himself.

Where modern psychology seeks stability through self-integration, Luther’s gospel (the ONLY one) offers it through God’s self-surrender.

To be justified by faith is to be reconnected to the Only Real, to be restored to what Polanyi calls tacit coherence, ith the Logos of creation. In that light, even despair becomes sacramental: a cracked vessel through which the mercy of knowing may yet shine.

And so the final word of theology, psychology, and philosophy alike converges on one Lutheran paradox:

“Sanitas mentis est misericordia Dei.”

The sanity of the mind is the mercy of God.

Image: David and Saul by Ernst Josephson 1878, illustrates the madness of Saul and David’s calming influence. Image credit: National Gallery Stockholm