Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World

by Eric Metaxas

Who knew what steep and half-infinite climb one might face? We know that Luther was too smart not to consider these things deeply and soberly and too sensitive not to have been bothered by them, often to the point of debilitating depression, which he called Anfechtungen. In fact, the word Anfechtung really has no English equivalent. It has as its root the verb fechten, which means “to fence with” or “to duel with.” Fecht is also obviously etymologically related to the word “fight.” So Luther’s Anfechtungen meant to do battle with one’s own thoughts and with the devil. But for him this was something so horrible that it’s difficult for us to fully comprehend. Anyone who has experienced depression may have an idea. For Luther, it seems to have manifested itself as a widening hole of sheerest hopelessness, an increasing cacophony of devils’ voices accusing him of a thousand things, and all of them true or true enough—and no way out of it. This is the very thing that has driven people to suicide through the centuries. It is hopelessness made real, or to use Milton’s famous phrase, it is “darkness visible,”15 a description that the author William Styron used as a title for his own poignant memoir on depression.16 We may also think of the words graven on the gate of Dante’s Inferno, “Abandon All Hope, Ye Who Enter Here.”17 So for Luther, this Anfechtungen was a vivid picture of the nightmare of hell itself, a place in which one had indeed been utterly forsaken by God, with no end...