CHAPTER VITHE CHANGE OF 1515 IN THE LIGHT OF THE COMMENTARY ON ROMANS (1515-16)1. The New PublicationsLuther’slectures on the Epistle to the Romans which, as mentioned above (p. 93), he delivered at Wittenberg from April, 1515, to September or October, 1516, existed till recently (1904-8) only in MS. form. To Denifle belongs the merit of having first drawn public attention to this important source of information, which he exploited, and from the text of which he furnished long extracts according to the Vatican Codex palatinus lat. 1826.[447]The MS. referred to, containing the scholia, is a copy by Aurifaber of the lectures which Luther himself wrote out in full, and once belonged to the library of Ulrich Fugger, whence it came to the Palatina at Heidelberg, and, ultimately, on the transference of the Palatina to Rome, found its way to the Vatican Library. It was first made use of by Dr. Vogel, and then, in 1899, thoroughly studied by Professor Joh. Ficker.[448]While the work was in process of publication the original by Luther’s own hand was discovered in 1903 in the Codex lat. theol. 21,4º of the State Library in Berlin, or rather rediscovered, for it had already been referred to in 1752 in an account of the library.[449]According to this MS., which also contains the glosses,[450]the Commentary, after having been collated with the Roman MS., which is frequently inaccurate, was edited with a detailed introductionat Leipzig in 1908 by Joh. Ficker, Professor at Strasburg University; it forms the first volume of a collection entitled “Anfänge reformatorischer Bibelauslegung.”Denifle’s preliminary excerpts were so ample and exact that, as a comparison with what has since been published proves, they afforded a trustworthy insight into a certain number of Luther’s doctrinal views of decisive value in forming an opinion on the general course of his development.[451]But it is only now, with the whole work before us, scholia and glosses complete, that it is possible to give a fair and well-founded account of the ideas which were coming to the front in Luther. The connection between different points of his teaching appears in a clearer light, and various opinions are disclosed which were fresh in Luther’s mind, and upon which Denifle had not touched, but which are of great importance in the history of his growth. Among such matters thus brought to light were Luther’s gloomy views on God and predestination, with which we shall deal in our next section.The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans ranks first among all his letters for the depth of thought and wealth of revelation which it contains. It treats of the most exalted questions of human thought, and handles the most difficult problems of Christian faith and hope. Its subject-matter is the eternal election of the Gentile and Jewish world to salvation in Christ; the guidance of the heathen by the law of nature, and of the Jews by the Mosaic law; the powers of man when left to himself, and of man supernaturally raised; the universality and potency of the saving grace of Christ, and the manner of its appropriation in justification by faith; finally the life, death and resurrection in which the Christian, through faith, unites himself with Christ.[452]We may doubt whether the young Doctor of Wittenberg was qualified to grapple with so great a task as the explanation of this charter of faith, especially bearing in mind his comparatively insignificant knowledge of the Fathers of the Church and the theological literature of the past, his impetuosity in dealing with recondite questions, and his excitable fancy which always hurried in advance of his judgment. At any rate, he himself thought his powerssufficient for a work on which the most enlightened minds of the Church had tested their abilities. He immediately followed up this Commentary with other lectures on certain epistles of St. Paul, wherein the Apostle discloses the depths of his knowledge.On perusing the lengthy pages of the Commentary on Romans we are amazed at the eloquence of the young author, at his dexterity in description and his skill in the apt use of biblical quotations; but his manner of working contrasts very unfavourably with that of the older Commentators on the Epistle, such as Thomas of Aquin with his brevity and definiteness and, particularly, his assurance in theological matters. Luther’s mode of treating the subject is, apart from other considerations, usually too rhetorical and not seldom quite tedious in its amplitude.The work, with its freedom both in its language and its treatment of the subject, reveals many interesting traits which go to make up a picture of Luther’s inward self.He starts with the assumption that the whole of the Epistle was intended by its author to “uproot from the heart the feeling of self-righteousness and any satisfaction in the same,” and—to use his own odd expression—“to implant, establish and magnify sin therein (‘plantare, ac constituere et magnificare peccatum’).”[453]“Although there may be no sin in the heart or any suspicion of its existence,” he declares, we ought and must feel ourselves to be full of sin, in contradistinction to the grace of Christ from Whom alone we receive what is pleasing to God.In his passionate opposition to the real or imaginary self-righteous he allows himself, in these lectures, to be drawn into an ever deeper distrust of man’s ability to do anything that is good. The nightmare of self-righteousness never leaves him for a moment. His attack would have been justifiable if he had merely been fighting against sinful self-righteousness which is really selfishness, or against the delusion that natural morality will suffice before God. Nor does it appear who is defending such erroneous ideas against him, or which school upheld the thesis Luther is always opposing, viz. that there is a saving righteousness which arises, is preserved, and works without the preventingand accompanying grace of God. It is, however, clear that there was in his own soul a dislike for works; so strong in fact is his feeling in this regard that he simply calls all works “works of the law,” and cannot be too forcible in demonstrating the antagonism of the Apostle to their supposed over-estimation. Probably one reason for his selection of this Epistle for interpretation was that it appeared to him to agree even better than other biblical works with his own ideas against “self-righteousness.” We must now consider in detail some of the leading ideas of the Commentary on Romans.2. Gloomy Views regarding God and PredestinationThe tendency to a dismal conception of God plays, in combination with his ideas on predestination, an incisive part in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, which, so far, has received too little attention. The tendency is noticeable throughout his early mental history. He was never able to overcome his former temptations to sadness and despair on account of the possibility of his irrevocable predestination to hell, sufficiently to attain to the joy of the children of God and to the trustful recognition of God’s general and certain will for our salvation. The advice which Staupitz, among others, gave him was assuredly correct, viz. to take refuge in the wounds of Christ, and Luther probably tried to follow it. But we do not learn that he paid diligent heed to the further admonitions of the ancient ascetics, to exert oneself in the practice of good works, as though one’s predestination depended entirely on the works one performs with the grace of God. On the contrary, of set purpose, he avoided any effort on his own part and preferred the misleading mystical views of Quietism.The melancholy idea of predestination again peeps out unabashed in the passage in his Commentary on the Psalms, where he says, that Christ “drank the cup of pain for His elect, but not for all.”[454]If he set out to explain the Epistle to the Romans with a gloomy conception of God, in which we recognise the old temptations regarding predestination, owing to his misapprehension of certain passages of the Epistle concerningGod’s liberty and inscrutability in the bestowal of grace, his ideas, as he advances, become progressively more stern and dismal. The editor of the Commentary remarks, not without reason, on the forcible way in which Luther, “even in chapter i., emphasises the sovereignty of the Will of God.”[455]It is true of many, Luther says there, that God gives them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness (cp. Rom. i. 24), nor is this merely a permission, but an appointment and command (“non tantum permissio, sed commissio et iussio”).[456]In such a case God commands the devil or the flesh to tempt a man and conquer him. It is true that when God chooses to act graciously He prevents the evil; but He also wills to be severe and to punish, and “then He makes the wicked to sin more abundantly (‘facit abundantius peccare’)”; then “He forsakes a man so that he may not be able to resist the devil, who carries out the order and the Will of God in bringing about his fall.”The youthful University Professor believes that he is here teaching a “more profound theology.” No one was to come to him, he says, with the shallow and hackneyed assertion that, on the above hypothesis, man’s free will was destroyed; only narrow minds (“rudiores”) take exception at this “profundior theologia.”[457]The teaching of this new theology was the following:“This man may do what he pleases, it is God’s will that he should be overcome by sin.” “It is true that God does not desire the sin, although He wills that it shall take place (‘non sequitur quod Deus peccatum velit, licet ipsum velit fieri’); for He only wills that it shall happen, in order to manifest in man the greatness of His anger and His severity by punishing in him the sin which He hates.” “It is therefore on account of the punishment that God wills that the sin shall be committed.... God alone may will such a thing” (“Hoc autem soli Deo licitum est velle”),[458]and he repeats fearlessly: “in order that all misery and shame may be heaped upon the man, God wills he should commit this sin.”[459]He fancies he is communicating to his pupils “the highest secrets of theology,” meant only for the perfect, when he assures them that both statements are right: God wills to oblige me and all men [to do what is good] and yet He does notgive His grace to all, but only to whom He will, reserving to Himself the choice. Some it does not please Him to justify because He manifests so much the more through them His honour in the elect; in the same way He also wills sin, though only indirectly, viz. “that He may be glorified in the elect.” Hence we must not make it a mere matter of permission, for “how would God permit it unless it were His will?” “Senseless chatter,” thus he describes the unanimous contrary teaching of theologians, “such is the objection they raise that man would thus be damned without any fault on his part, because he could not fulfil the law and was expected to do what was impossible.”—We can only ask how his own method is to be described when he contents himself with this solution: “If that objection had any weight it would follow that it was not necessary to preach, to pray, to exhort, and Christ’s death would also not be necessary. Yet by means of all this God has chosen to save His elect.”[460]Luther, as this somewhat lengthy passage shows, had, at any rate at that time, no bright, kindly idea of God’s Nature, Goodness and inexhaustible Mercy, which wills to make every creature here on earth happy and to save them in eternity; his mind was imprisoned within the narrow limits to which he had before this accustomed himself; a false conception of God’s essence—perhaps a remainder of his Occamist training—was already poisoning the very vitals of his theology.His melancholy conception of God comes to light not only in the various passages where he speaks of predestination, but also in the dark pictures, which, in his morbid frame of mind, he paints of the wickedness and sin of man pitting his unquenchable concupiscence against God, the All Holy.[461]In order to adore this stern and cruel God inhis own way he had already built up on his false mysticism a practical theory of resignation and self-surrender to whatever might be the Divine Will, even should it destine him to damnation. In the first pages of the Commentary on Romans his idea of God enables him to proclaim loudly and boldly, and with full knowledge of what he is doing, his opposition to the religious practice of his many zealous contemporaries, whether clerics or laymen.Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462]Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463]“Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]Such is the perilous position he reaches under the influence of his distaste for works, viz. a violent antagonism to free will. Man is unable to do the least thing to satisfy this Holy God.[465]The Occamist theology of the school in which he was trained here serves him in good stead, as the following sentences, whichare closely akin to Occam’s acceptation-theory, show: “We must always be filled with anxiety, ever fear and await the Divine acceptance”; for as all our works are in themselves evil, “only those are good which God imputes as good; they are in fact something or nothing, only in so far as God accepts them or not.” “The eternal God has chosen good works from the beginning that they should please Him,”[466]“but how can I ever know that my deed pleases God? How can I even know that my good intention is from God?”[467]Hence, away with the proud self-righteous (“superbi iustitiarii”) who are so sure of their good works!Fear, desponding humility and self-annihilation, according to Luther, are the only feelings one can cherish in front of this terrible, unaccountable God.[468]“He who despairs of himself is the one whom God accepts.”[469]He also speaks of a certain “pavor Dei,” which is the foundation of salvation: “trepidare et terreri” is the best sign, as it is said in Psalm cxliii.: “Shoot out Thy arrows and Thou shalt trouble them,” the “terrens Deus” leads to life.[470]True love does not ask any enjoyment from God, rather, he here repeats, whoever loves Him from the hope of being made eternally happy by Him, or from fear of being wretched without Him, has a sinful and selfish love (“amor concupiscentiæ”); but to allow the terrors of God to encompass us, to be ready to accept from Him the most bitter interior and exterior cross, to all eternity, that only is perfect love. And even with such love we are dragged into thick interior darkness.[471]All these gloomy thoughts which cloud his mind, gather, when he comes to explain chapters viii. and ix. of the Epistle to the Romans, where the Apostle deals with the question of election to grace.Luther thinks he has here found in St. Paul the doctrine of predestination, not only to heaven, but also to hell, expressed, moreover, in the strongest terms. At the same time he warns his hearers against faint-heartedness, being well aware how dangerous his views might prove to souls.“Let no one immerse himself in these thoughts who is not purified in spirit, lest he sink into an abyss of horror and despair; the eyes of the heart must first be purified by contemplating the wounds of Christ. I discourse upon these matters solely because the trend of the lectures leads up to them, and because they are unavoidable. It is the strongest wine there is, and the most perfect food, a solid nourishment for the perfect; it is that most exalted theology of which the Apostle says (1 Cor. ii. 6): ‘wespeak wisdom among the perfect’ ... only the perfect and the strong should study the first book of the Sentences [because predestination is dealt with at the end of Peter Lombard’s first book]; it should really be the last and not the first book; to-day many who are unprepared jump at it and then go away blinded in spirit.”[472]Luther teaches that the Apostle’s doctrine is: God did not in their lifetime exercise His mercy towards the damned; He is right and not to be blamed when He follows herein His own supreme will alone. “Why then does man murmur as though God were not acting according to the law?” His will is, for every man, the highest good. Why should we not desire, and that with the greatest fervour, the fulfilment of this will, since it is a will which can in no way be evil? “You say: Yes, but for me it is evil. No, it is evil for none. The only evil is that men cannot understand God’s will and do it”; they should know that even in hell they are doing God’s will if it is His wish that they should be there.[473]Hence the only way he knows out of the darkness he has himself created is recognition of, and resignation to, the possibility of a purely arbitrary damnation by God. The expressions he here makes use of for reprobation, “inter reprobos haberi,” “damnari,” “morte æterna puniri” make it plain that he demands resignation to actual reprobation and to being placed on a footing with the damned. Yet, as he always considers this resignation as the most perfect proof of acquiescence in the Will of God, it does not, according to him, include within itself a readiness to hate God, but, on the contrary, the strongest and highest love.[474]With such an exalted frame of mind, however, the actual penalty of hell would cease to exist. “It is impossible that he should remain apart from God who throws himself so entirely into the Will of God. He wills what God wills, therefore he pleases God. If he pleases God, then he is loved by God; if he is loved by God, then he is saved.”[475]That he is thus cutting the ground from under his hypothesis of an inevitable predestination to hell by teaching how we can escape it, does not seem to strike him. Or does he, perhaps, mean that only those who are not predestined to hell can thus overcome the fear of hell? Will such resignationbe possible to him who really believes himself destined to hell, and who sees even in his resignation no means whereby he can escape it?To such a one even the “wounds of Christ” offer no assurance and no place of refuge. They only speak to man of the God of revelation, not of the mysterious, unsearchable God. The untenable and insulting comparison between the mysterious and the revealed Supreme Being which Luther was later on to institute is here already foreshadowed.He explains in detail how the will of man does not in the least belong to the person who wills, or the road to the runner. “All is God’s, who gives and creates the will.” We are all instruments of God, who works all in all. Our will is like the saw and the stick—examples which he repeatedly employs later in his harshest utterances concerning the slavery of the will. Sawing is the act of the hand which saws, but the saw is passive; the animal is beaten, not by the stick, but by him who holds the stick. So the will also is nothing, but God who wields it is everything.[476]Hence he rejects most positively the theological doctrine that God foresees the final lot of man as something “contingenter futurum,” i.e. that he sees his rejection as something dependent on man and brought about by his own fault. No, according to Luther, in the election of grace everything is preordained “inflexibili et firma voluntate,” and this, His own will, is alone present in the mind of God.Luther speaks with scorn of “our subtle theologians,” who drag in their “contingens” and build up an election by grace on “necessitas consequentiæ, sed non consequentis,” in accordance with the well-known scholastic ideas. “With God there is absolutely no ‘contingens,’ but only with us; for no leaf ever falls from the tree to the earth without the will of the Father.” Besides, the theologians—so he accuses the Scholastics without exception—“have imagined the case so, or at least have led to its being so imagined, as though salvation were obtained or lost through our own free will.”[477]We know that here he was wrong. As a matter of fact, true Scholasticism attributed the work of salvation to grace together with free will, so that two factors, the Divine and the human, or the supernatural and the natural, are mutually engaged in the same. But Luther, when here reporting the old teaching, does not mention the factor of grace, but only “nostrum arbitrium.”He then adds: “Thus I once understood it.” If he reallyever believed salvation to be exclusively the work of free will, then he erred grievously, and merely proves how defective his study, even of Gabriel Biel, had been.He also interpreted quite wrongly the view of contemporary and earlier scholastic theologians on the love of God, and, again, by excluding the supernatural factor. He reproaches them with having, so he says, considered the love in question as merely natural (“ex natura”) and yet as wholesome for eternal life, and he demands that all wholesome love be made to proceed “ex Spiritu Sancto,” a thing which all theologians, even the Occamists, had insisted on. He says: “they do not know in the least what love is,”[478]“nor do they know what virtue is, because they allow themselves to be instructed on this point by Aristotle, whose definition is absolutely erroneous.”[479]It makes no impression upon him—perhaps he is even ignorant of the fact—that the Scholastics consider, on good grounds, the love which loves God’s goodness as goodness towards us, and which makes personal salvation its motive, compatible with the perfect love of friendship (amicitiæ, complacentiæ).[480]According to him, this love must be extirpated (“amor exstirpandus”) because it is full of abominable self-seeking.[481]In its place he sets up a most perfect love (which will be described below), which includes resignation to, and even a desire for, hell-fire, a resignation such as Christ Himself manifested (!) in His abandonment to suffering.Luther had now left the safe path of theological and ecclesiastical tradition to pursue his own ideas.It is true that, notwithstanding his exhortation to be resigned to the holy will of God in every case, he looks with fear at the flood of blasphemies which must arise in the heart of one who fears his own irrevocable, undeserved damnation. Anxious to obviate this, or to arm the conscience against it, when pointing to the wounds of Christ he adds these words: “Should anyone, owing to overmastering temptation, come to blaspheme God, that would not involve his eternal damnation. For even towards the godless our God is not a God of impatience and cruelty. Such blasphemies are forced out of a man by the devil, therefore they may be more pleasing to God’s ear than any Alleluia or song of praise. The more terrible and abominable a blasphemy is, the more pleasing it is to God when the heart feels that it does not acquiesce in it, i.e. when it is involuntary.”[482]Involuntary thoughts, to which alone he sees fit to refer, are, of course, not deserving of punishment; but are the murmurs and angry complaints against predestination to hell of which he speaks always only involuntary? The way to resignation which he mentions in the same connection is no less questionable. Itconsists largely in “not troubling about such thoughts.”[483]But will all be able to get so far as this?He again repeats with great insistence that “everything happens according to God’s choice”; “he upon whom God does not have mercy, remains in the ‘massa’” [perditionis].[484]“For whom it is, it is,” he adds elsewhere in German, “whom it hits, him it hits.”[485]God permits at times even the elect to be reduced, as it were, to nothingness,[486]but only in order that His sole power may be made manifest and that it may quench all proud boasting; for man is so ready to believe that he can by the exercise of his free will rise again, and waxes presumptuous; but here he learns that grace exalts him before and above every choice of his own (“ante omne arbitrium et supra arbitrium suum”).[487]We shall not here examine more closely his grave misapprehension of the teaching of the Apostle in the Epistle to the Romans, on which he tries to prop up his glaring theory concerning predestination. Suffice it to say that the principal passage to which he refers (Rom. ix. 11 ff.), according to the exegetist Cornely, is not now taken by any expositor to refer to predestination, i.e. to the selection by grace of each individual.[488]The passage treats of the promises made to the Jewish people (as a whole) which were given without desert and freely; but Israel, as St. Paul explains, has, by its fault, rendered itself unworthy of the same and excluded itself (as a whole) from the salvation which the heathen obtain by faith—a reward of Israel’s misdeeds, which, in itself, is incompatible with Luther’s doctrine of an undeserved predestination to hell.[489]Luther also quotes St. Augustine, but does not interpret him correctly. He even overlooks the fact that this Father, in one of the passages alleged, says the very opposite to his new ideas on unconditional predestination to hell, and attributes in every case the fate of the damned to their own moral misdeeds. Augustine says, in his own profound, concise way, in the text quoted by Luther: “the savedmay not pride himself on his merits, and the damned may only bewail his demerits.”[490]In his meditations on the ever-inscrutable mystery he regards the sinner’s fault as entirely voluntary, and his revolt against the eternal God as, on this account, worthy of eternal damnation. Augustine teaches that “to him as to every man who comes into this world” salvation was offered with a wealth of means of grace and with all the merits of Christ’s bitter death on the cross.[491]Luther also quoted the Bible passages regarding God’s will for the salvation of all men, but only in order to say of them: “such expressions are always to be understood exclusively of the elect.” It is merely “wisdom of the flesh” to attempt to find a will of God that all men be saved in the assurance of St. Paul: “God wills that all men shall be saved” (1 Tim. ii. 4), or “in the passages which say, that He gave His Son for us, that He created man for eternal life, and that everything was created for man, but man for God that he might enjoy Him eternally.”[492]Other objections which Luther makes he sets aside with the same facility by a reference to the thoughts he has developed above.[493]Thus the first: Why did God give to man free will by means of which he can merit either reward or punishment? His answer is: Where is this free will? Man has no free will for doing what is good. Then a second objection: “God damns no one without sin, and he who is forced to sin is damned unjustly.” The answer to this is new: God ordains it so that those who are to be damned are gladly, even though of necessity, in sin (“dat voluntarie velle in peccato esse et manere et diligere iniquitatem”). Finally, the last objection: “Why does God give them commandments which He does not will them to keep, yea hardens their will so much that they desire to act contrary to the law? Is not God in this case the cause of their sinning and being damned?” “Yes, that is the difficulty,” he admits, “which, as a matter of fact, has the most force; it is the weightiest of all. But to it the Apostle makes a special answer when he teaches: God so wills it, and God Who thus wills, is not evil. Everything is His, just as the clay belongs to the potter and waits on hisservice.” Enough, he continues, “God commands that the elect shall be saved, and that those who are destined for hell shall be entangled in evil in order that He may show forth His mercy and also His anger.”It makes one shudder to hear how he cuts short the sighs of the unhappy soul which sees itself a victim of God’s harshness. It complains: “It is a hard and bitter lot that God should seek His honour in my misery!” And Luther replies: “See, there we have the wisdom of the flesh!Mymisery; ‘my,’ ‘my,’ that is the voice of the flesh. Drop the ‘my’ and say: Be Thou honoured, O Lord.... So long as you do not do that, you are seeking your own will more than the will of God. We must judge of God in a different manner from that in which we judge of man. God owes no man anything.”“With this hard doctrine,” he concludes, “the knife is placed at the throat of holiness-by-works and fleshly wisdom and therefore the flesh is naturally incensed, and breaks out into blasphemies; but man must learn that his salvation does not depend upon his acts, but that it lies quite outside of him, namely, in God, Who has chosen him.”He attempts, however, to mingle softer tones with the voices of despair, which, he admits, these theories have let loose. This he can only do at the expense of his own teaching, or by fining it down. He says: whoever is terrified and confused, but then tries to abandon himself with indifference to the severity of God, he, let this be his comfort, is not of the number of those predestined to hell. For only those who are really to be rejected are not afraid[?], “they pay no heed to the danger and say, if I am to be damned, so be it!” On the other hand, confusion and fear are signs of the “spiritus contribulatus,” which, according to his promise, God never rejects (Ps. 1.).After all, then, we are forced to ask, according to this, is not man to be saved by his own act, namely, the act of heroic indifference to his eternity? For this act remains an act of man: “Whoever is filled with the fear of God, and, taking courage, throws and precipitates himself into the truth of the promises of God, he will be saved, and be one of the elect.”[494]3. The Fight against “Holiness-by-Works” and the Observantines in the Commentary on RomansHis ideas on predestination were not the direct cause of Luther’s belittling of human effort and the value of good works; the latter tendency was present in him previous to his adoption of rigid predestinarianism; nor does he ever attribute to election by grace any diminution of man’s powers or duties, whether in the case of the chosen or of thereprobate. The same commandments are given to those whom God’s terrible decree has destined for hell as to the elect; they possess the same human abilities, the same weaknesses. It was not predestination which led him in the first instance to attribute such strength to concupiscence in man, and to invest it, as he ultimately did, with an actually sinful and culpable character.His ideas concerning the absolute corruption of the children of Adam, even to the extinction of any liberty in the doing of what is good, had another origin, and, in their development, were influenced far more by false mysticism than by the predestinarian delusion.He approached the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans in the conviction that, in this Epistle, he would find the sanction of his earlier efforts against the self-righteous and “holy-by-works,” against whom his peculiar mysticism had still further prejudiced him. From the very outset he interprets the great Apostolic document on the calling of the heathen and the Jews to salvation as directed exclusively against those who, according to him, were imperilling the Church; against those who (whether in his own Order or in Christendom generally) laid stress on the importance of works, on the duty of fulfilling observances and the merit of exercises of virtue for gaining heaven, and who were unmindful of the righteousness which Christ gives us. This is not the place to point out how Paul is speaking in quite another sense, against those Jewish Christians who still adhered to the works of the Mosaic Law, of the merely relative value of works, of the liberty which Christianity imparts and of the saving power of faith.Luther, however, in the very first lines, tells the “holy-by-works” that the whole purpose of the Epistle to the Romans is a driving back and rooting out of the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh. Among the heathen and the Jews were to be found those who, though “devoted in their hearts to virtue,” yet had not suppressed all self-satisfaction in the same, and looked upon themselves as “righteous and good men”; in the Church, according to Paul, all self-righteousness and wisdom must be torn out of the affections, and self-complacency. God willed to save us not by our own righteousness but by an extraneous righteousness (“non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam vult salvare”), viz. by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and, owing to the exterior righteousness which Christ gives (“externa quæ ex Christo in nobis est iustitia”), there can beno boasting, nor must there be “any depression on account of the sufferings and trials which come to us from Christ.”[495]“Christ’s righteousness and His gifts,” he says, “shine in the true Christian.... If any man possesses natural and spiritual advantages, yet this is not considered by God as being his wisdom, righteousness and goodness (‘non ideo coram Deo talis reputatur’), rather, he must wait in humility, as though he possessed nothing, for the pure mercy of God, to see whether He will look upon him as righteous and wise. God only does this if he humbles himself deeply. We must learn to regard spiritual possessions and works of righteousness as worthless for obtaining the righteousness of Christ, we must renounce the idea that these have any value in God’s sight and merit a reward, otherwise we shall not be saved” (“opera iusta velint nihil reputare,” etc.).[496]Any pretext, or even none at all, serves to bring him back again and again in the work to the “Pelagian-mindediustitiarii.” It is possible that amongst these the “Observantines” ranked first. Our thoughts revert to those of his brother monks, whose cause he had at first defended in the internal struggle within the Congregation, only to turn on them unmercifully afterwards. On one occasion he mentions by name the “Observants,” reproaching them with trying to outshine one another in their zeal for God, while at the same time they had no love of their neighbour, whereas, according to the passage he is just expounding, “the fulness of the law is love.”[497]He would also appear to be referring to them, when, on another occasion, he rails at such monks, who by their behaviour bring their whole profession into disgrace.“They exalt themselves against other members of their profession,” he cries, “as though they were clean and had no evil odour about them,”[498]and continues in the style of his monastic discourse on the “Little Saints” mentioned above (p. 69 f.). “And yet before, behind and within they are a pig-market and sty of sows ... they wish to withdraw from the rest, whereas they ought, were they really virtuous, to help them to conceal their faults. But in place of patient succour there is nothing in them but peevishness and a desire to be far away (‘quærunt fugam ... tediosi sunt et nolunt esse in communione aliorum’). They will not serve those who are good for nothing nor be their companions; theyonly desire to be the superiors and companions of the worthy, the perfect and the sound. Therefore they run from one place to another.”[499]The struggle of which this is a picture continued among the German Augustinians. In the spring, 1520, a similar conflict broke out in the Cologne Province, one side having the sympathy of the Roman Conventuals.[500]We can well understand how the General of the Order in Rome was not disposed to grant the exemptions claimed by the Observantines of the Saxon Congregation against his own Provincials.Luther brandishes his sharp blade against the “spiritually minded, the proud, the stiff-necked, who seek peace in works and in the flesh, theiustitiarii,”[501]without making any sharp distinction between the actual Observantines and the “self-righteous.”With regard to himself, he admits that he is so antagonistic to the “iustitiarii,” that he is opposed to all scrupulous observance of “iustitia,” to all regulations and strict ordinances:“The very word righteousness vexes me: if anyone were to steal from me, it would hurt me less than being obliged to listen to the word righteousness. It is a word which the jurists always have on their lips, but there is no more unlearned race than these men of the law, save, perhaps, the men of good intention and superior reason (‘bonæ-intentionarii seu sublimatæ rationis’); for I have experienced both in myself and in others, that when we were righteous, God mocked at us.”[502]4. Attack on Predisposition to Good and on Free WillThe assertion of the complete corruption of human nature owing to the continuance of original sin and the inextinguishable tinder of concupiscence, arose from the above-mentioned position which Luther had taken up with regard to self-righteousness.Man remains, according to what Luther says in the Commentary on Romans, in spite of all his veneer of good works, so alienated from God that he “does not love but hates the law which forces him to what is good and forbids what is evil; his will, far from seeking the law, detests it. Nature persists in its evil desires contrary to the law; it is always full of evil concupiscence when it is not assisted from above.” This concupiscence, however, is sin. Everything that is good is due only to grace, and grace must bring us to acknowledge this and to “seek Christ humbly and so be saved.”[503]The descriptions of human doings which the author gives us in eloquent language are not wanting in fidelity and truth to nature, though we cannot approve his inferences. He has a keen eye on others and is unmerciful in his delineation of the faults which he perceived in the pious people around him.
CHAPTER VITHE CHANGE OF 1515 IN THE LIGHT OF THE COMMENTARY ON ROMANS (1515-16)1. The New PublicationsLuther’slectures on the Epistle to the Romans which, as mentioned above (p. 93), he delivered at Wittenberg from April, 1515, to September or October, 1516, existed till recently (1904-8) only in MS. form. To Denifle belongs the merit of having first drawn public attention to this important source of information, which he exploited, and from the text of which he furnished long extracts according to the Vatican Codex palatinus lat. 1826.[447]The MS. referred to, containing the scholia, is a copy by Aurifaber of the lectures which Luther himself wrote out in full, and once belonged to the library of Ulrich Fugger, whence it came to the Palatina at Heidelberg, and, ultimately, on the transference of the Palatina to Rome, found its way to the Vatican Library. It was first made use of by Dr. Vogel, and then, in 1899, thoroughly studied by Professor Joh. Ficker.[448]While the work was in process of publication the original by Luther’s own hand was discovered in 1903 in the Codex lat. theol. 21,4º of the State Library in Berlin, or rather rediscovered, for it had already been referred to in 1752 in an account of the library.[449]According to this MS., which also contains the glosses,[450]the Commentary, after having been collated with the Roman MS., which is frequently inaccurate, was edited with a detailed introductionat Leipzig in 1908 by Joh. Ficker, Professor at Strasburg University; it forms the first volume of a collection entitled “Anfänge reformatorischer Bibelauslegung.”Denifle’s preliminary excerpts were so ample and exact that, as a comparison with what has since been published proves, they afforded a trustworthy insight into a certain number of Luther’s doctrinal views of decisive value in forming an opinion on the general course of his development.[451]But it is only now, with the whole work before us, scholia and glosses complete, that it is possible to give a fair and well-founded account of the ideas which were coming to the front in Luther. The connection between different points of his teaching appears in a clearer light, and various opinions are disclosed which were fresh in Luther’s mind, and upon which Denifle had not touched, but which are of great importance in the history of his growth. Among such matters thus brought to light were Luther’s gloomy views on God and predestination, with which we shall deal in our next section.The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans ranks first among all his letters for the depth of thought and wealth of revelation which it contains. It treats of the most exalted questions of human thought, and handles the most difficult problems of Christian faith and hope. Its subject-matter is the eternal election of the Gentile and Jewish world to salvation in Christ; the guidance of the heathen by the law of nature, and of the Jews by the Mosaic law; the powers of man when left to himself, and of man supernaturally raised; the universality and potency of the saving grace of Christ, and the manner of its appropriation in justification by faith; finally the life, death and resurrection in which the Christian, through faith, unites himself with Christ.[452]We may doubt whether the young Doctor of Wittenberg was qualified to grapple with so great a task as the explanation of this charter of faith, especially bearing in mind his comparatively insignificant knowledge of the Fathers of the Church and the theological literature of the past, his impetuosity in dealing with recondite questions, and his excitable fancy which always hurried in advance of his judgment. At any rate, he himself thought his powerssufficient for a work on which the most enlightened minds of the Church had tested their abilities. He immediately followed up this Commentary with other lectures on certain epistles of St. Paul, wherein the Apostle discloses the depths of his knowledge.On perusing the lengthy pages of the Commentary on Romans we are amazed at the eloquence of the young author, at his dexterity in description and his skill in the apt use of biblical quotations; but his manner of working contrasts very unfavourably with that of the older Commentators on the Epistle, such as Thomas of Aquin with his brevity and definiteness and, particularly, his assurance in theological matters. Luther’s mode of treating the subject is, apart from other considerations, usually too rhetorical and not seldom quite tedious in its amplitude.The work, with its freedom both in its language and its treatment of the subject, reveals many interesting traits which go to make up a picture of Luther’s inward self.He starts with the assumption that the whole of the Epistle was intended by its author to “uproot from the heart the feeling of self-righteousness and any satisfaction in the same,” and—to use his own odd expression—“to implant, establish and magnify sin therein (‘plantare, ac constituere et magnificare peccatum’).”[453]“Although there may be no sin in the heart or any suspicion of its existence,” he declares, we ought and must feel ourselves to be full of sin, in contradistinction to the grace of Christ from Whom alone we receive what is pleasing to God.In his passionate opposition to the real or imaginary self-righteous he allows himself, in these lectures, to be drawn into an ever deeper distrust of man’s ability to do anything that is good. The nightmare of self-righteousness never leaves him for a moment. His attack would have been justifiable if he had merely been fighting against sinful self-righteousness which is really selfishness, or against the delusion that natural morality will suffice before God. Nor does it appear who is defending such erroneous ideas against him, or which school upheld the thesis Luther is always opposing, viz. that there is a saving righteousness which arises, is preserved, and works without the preventingand accompanying grace of God. It is, however, clear that there was in his own soul a dislike for works; so strong in fact is his feeling in this regard that he simply calls all works “works of the law,” and cannot be too forcible in demonstrating the antagonism of the Apostle to their supposed over-estimation. Probably one reason for his selection of this Epistle for interpretation was that it appeared to him to agree even better than other biblical works with his own ideas against “self-righteousness.” We must now consider in detail some of the leading ideas of the Commentary on Romans.2. Gloomy Views regarding God and PredestinationThe tendency to a dismal conception of God plays, in combination with his ideas on predestination, an incisive part in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, which, so far, has received too little attention. The tendency is noticeable throughout his early mental history. He was never able to overcome his former temptations to sadness and despair on account of the possibility of his irrevocable predestination to hell, sufficiently to attain to the joy of the children of God and to the trustful recognition of God’s general and certain will for our salvation. The advice which Staupitz, among others, gave him was assuredly correct, viz. to take refuge in the wounds of Christ, and Luther probably tried to follow it. But we do not learn that he paid diligent heed to the further admonitions of the ancient ascetics, to exert oneself in the practice of good works, as though one’s predestination depended entirely on the works one performs with the grace of God. On the contrary, of set purpose, he avoided any effort on his own part and preferred the misleading mystical views of Quietism.The melancholy idea of predestination again peeps out unabashed in the passage in his Commentary on the Psalms, where he says, that Christ “drank the cup of pain for His elect, but not for all.”[454]If he set out to explain the Epistle to the Romans with a gloomy conception of God, in which we recognise the old temptations regarding predestination, owing to his misapprehension of certain passages of the Epistle concerningGod’s liberty and inscrutability in the bestowal of grace, his ideas, as he advances, become progressively more stern and dismal. The editor of the Commentary remarks, not without reason, on the forcible way in which Luther, “even in chapter i., emphasises the sovereignty of the Will of God.”[455]It is true of many, Luther says there, that God gives them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness (cp. Rom. i. 24), nor is this merely a permission, but an appointment and command (“non tantum permissio, sed commissio et iussio”).[456]In such a case God commands the devil or the flesh to tempt a man and conquer him. It is true that when God chooses to act graciously He prevents the evil; but He also wills to be severe and to punish, and “then He makes the wicked to sin more abundantly (‘facit abundantius peccare’)”; then “He forsakes a man so that he may not be able to resist the devil, who carries out the order and the Will of God in bringing about his fall.”The youthful University Professor believes that he is here teaching a “more profound theology.” No one was to come to him, he says, with the shallow and hackneyed assertion that, on the above hypothesis, man’s free will was destroyed; only narrow minds (“rudiores”) take exception at this “profundior theologia.”[457]The teaching of this new theology was the following:“This man may do what he pleases, it is God’s will that he should be overcome by sin.” “It is true that God does not desire the sin, although He wills that it shall take place (‘non sequitur quod Deus peccatum velit, licet ipsum velit fieri’); for He only wills that it shall happen, in order to manifest in man the greatness of His anger and His severity by punishing in him the sin which He hates.” “It is therefore on account of the punishment that God wills that the sin shall be committed.... God alone may will such a thing” (“Hoc autem soli Deo licitum est velle”),[458]and he repeats fearlessly: “in order that all misery and shame may be heaped upon the man, God wills he should commit this sin.”[459]He fancies he is communicating to his pupils “the highest secrets of theology,” meant only for the perfect, when he assures them that both statements are right: God wills to oblige me and all men [to do what is good] and yet He does notgive His grace to all, but only to whom He will, reserving to Himself the choice. Some it does not please Him to justify because He manifests so much the more through them His honour in the elect; in the same way He also wills sin, though only indirectly, viz. “that He may be glorified in the elect.” Hence we must not make it a mere matter of permission, for “how would God permit it unless it were His will?” “Senseless chatter,” thus he describes the unanimous contrary teaching of theologians, “such is the objection they raise that man would thus be damned without any fault on his part, because he could not fulfil the law and was expected to do what was impossible.”—We can only ask how his own method is to be described when he contents himself with this solution: “If that objection had any weight it would follow that it was not necessary to preach, to pray, to exhort, and Christ’s death would also not be necessary. Yet by means of all this God has chosen to save His elect.”[460]Luther, as this somewhat lengthy passage shows, had, at any rate at that time, no bright, kindly idea of God’s Nature, Goodness and inexhaustible Mercy, which wills to make every creature here on earth happy and to save them in eternity; his mind was imprisoned within the narrow limits to which he had before this accustomed himself; a false conception of God’s essence—perhaps a remainder of his Occamist training—was already poisoning the very vitals of his theology.His melancholy conception of God comes to light not only in the various passages where he speaks of predestination, but also in the dark pictures, which, in his morbid frame of mind, he paints of the wickedness and sin of man pitting his unquenchable concupiscence against God, the All Holy.[461]In order to adore this stern and cruel God inhis own way he had already built up on his false mysticism a practical theory of resignation and self-surrender to whatever might be the Divine Will, even should it destine him to damnation. In the first pages of the Commentary on Romans his idea of God enables him to proclaim loudly and boldly, and with full knowledge of what he is doing, his opposition to the religious practice of his many zealous contemporaries, whether clerics or laymen.Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462]Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463]“Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]Such is the perilous position he reaches under the influence of his distaste for works, viz. a violent antagonism to free will. Man is unable to do the least thing to satisfy this Holy God.[465]The Occamist theology of the school in which he was trained here serves him in good stead, as the following sentences, whichare closely akin to Occam’s acceptation-theory, show: “We must always be filled with anxiety, ever fear and await the Divine acceptance”; for as all our works are in themselves evil, “only those are good which God imputes as good; they are in fact something or nothing, only in so far as God accepts them or not.” “The eternal God has chosen good works from the beginning that they should please Him,”[466]“but how can I ever know that my deed pleases God? How can I even know that my good intention is from God?”[467]Hence, away with the proud self-righteous (“superbi iustitiarii”) who are so sure of their good works!Fear, desponding humility and self-annihilation, according to Luther, are the only feelings one can cherish in front of this terrible, unaccountable God.[468]“He who despairs of himself is the one whom God accepts.”[469]He also speaks of a certain “pavor Dei,” which is the foundation of salvation: “trepidare et terreri” is the best sign, as it is said in Psalm cxliii.: “Shoot out Thy arrows and Thou shalt trouble them,” the “terrens Deus” leads to life.[470]True love does not ask any enjoyment from God, rather, he here repeats, whoever loves Him from the hope of being made eternally happy by Him, or from fear of being wretched without Him, has a sinful and selfish love (“amor concupiscentiæ”); but to allow the terrors of God to encompass us, to be ready to accept from Him the most bitter interior and exterior cross, to all eternity, that only is perfect love. And even with such love we are dragged into thick interior darkness.[471]All these gloomy thoughts which cloud his mind, gather, when he comes to explain chapters viii. and ix. of the Epistle to the Romans, where the Apostle deals with the question of election to grace.Luther thinks he has here found in St. Paul the doctrine of predestination, not only to heaven, but also to hell, expressed, moreover, in the strongest terms. At the same time he warns his hearers against faint-heartedness, being well aware how dangerous his views might prove to souls.“Let no one immerse himself in these thoughts who is not purified in spirit, lest he sink into an abyss of horror and despair; the eyes of the heart must first be purified by contemplating the wounds of Christ. I discourse upon these matters solely because the trend of the lectures leads up to them, and because they are unavoidable. It is the strongest wine there is, and the most perfect food, a solid nourishment for the perfect; it is that most exalted theology of which the Apostle says (1 Cor. ii. 6): ‘wespeak wisdom among the perfect’ ... only the perfect and the strong should study the first book of the Sentences [because predestination is dealt with at the end of Peter Lombard’s first book]; it should really be the last and not the first book; to-day many who are unprepared jump at it and then go away blinded in spirit.”[472]Luther teaches that the Apostle’s doctrine is: God did not in their lifetime exercise His mercy towards the damned; He is right and not to be blamed when He follows herein His own supreme will alone. “Why then does man murmur as though God were not acting according to the law?” His will is, for every man, the highest good. Why should we not desire, and that with the greatest fervour, the fulfilment of this will, since it is a will which can in no way be evil? “You say: Yes, but for me it is evil. No, it is evil for none. The only evil is that men cannot understand God’s will and do it”; they should know that even in hell they are doing God’s will if it is His wish that they should be there.[473]Hence the only way he knows out of the darkness he has himself created is recognition of, and resignation to, the possibility of a purely arbitrary damnation by God. The expressions he here makes use of for reprobation, “inter reprobos haberi,” “damnari,” “morte æterna puniri” make it plain that he demands resignation to actual reprobation and to being placed on a footing with the damned. Yet, as he always considers this resignation as the most perfect proof of acquiescence in the Will of God, it does not, according to him, include within itself a readiness to hate God, but, on the contrary, the strongest and highest love.[474]With such an exalted frame of mind, however, the actual penalty of hell would cease to exist. “It is impossible that he should remain apart from God who throws himself so entirely into the Will of God. He wills what God wills, therefore he pleases God. If he pleases God, then he is loved by God; if he is loved by God, then he is saved.”[475]That he is thus cutting the ground from under his hypothesis of an inevitable predestination to hell by teaching how we can escape it, does not seem to strike him. Or does he, perhaps, mean that only those who are not predestined to hell can thus overcome the fear of hell? Will such resignationbe possible to him who really believes himself destined to hell, and who sees even in his resignation no means whereby he can escape it?To such a one even the “wounds of Christ” offer no assurance and no place of refuge. They only speak to man of the God of revelation, not of the mysterious, unsearchable God. The untenable and insulting comparison between the mysterious and the revealed Supreme Being which Luther was later on to institute is here already foreshadowed.He explains in detail how the will of man does not in the least belong to the person who wills, or the road to the runner. “All is God’s, who gives and creates the will.” We are all instruments of God, who works all in all. Our will is like the saw and the stick—examples which he repeatedly employs later in his harshest utterances concerning the slavery of the will. Sawing is the act of the hand which saws, but the saw is passive; the animal is beaten, not by the stick, but by him who holds the stick. So the will also is nothing, but God who wields it is everything.[476]Hence he rejects most positively the theological doctrine that God foresees the final lot of man as something “contingenter futurum,” i.e. that he sees his rejection as something dependent on man and brought about by his own fault. No, according to Luther, in the election of grace everything is preordained “inflexibili et firma voluntate,” and this, His own will, is alone present in the mind of God.Luther speaks with scorn of “our subtle theologians,” who drag in their “contingens” and build up an election by grace on “necessitas consequentiæ, sed non consequentis,” in accordance with the well-known scholastic ideas. “With God there is absolutely no ‘contingens,’ but only with us; for no leaf ever falls from the tree to the earth without the will of the Father.” Besides, the theologians—so he accuses the Scholastics without exception—“have imagined the case so, or at least have led to its being so imagined, as though salvation were obtained or lost through our own free will.”[477]We know that here he was wrong. As a matter of fact, true Scholasticism attributed the work of salvation to grace together with free will, so that two factors, the Divine and the human, or the supernatural and the natural, are mutually engaged in the same. But Luther, when here reporting the old teaching, does not mention the factor of grace, but only “nostrum arbitrium.”He then adds: “Thus I once understood it.” If he reallyever believed salvation to be exclusively the work of free will, then he erred grievously, and merely proves how defective his study, even of Gabriel Biel, had been.He also interpreted quite wrongly the view of contemporary and earlier scholastic theologians on the love of God, and, again, by excluding the supernatural factor. He reproaches them with having, so he says, considered the love in question as merely natural (“ex natura”) and yet as wholesome for eternal life, and he demands that all wholesome love be made to proceed “ex Spiritu Sancto,” a thing which all theologians, even the Occamists, had insisted on. He says: “they do not know in the least what love is,”[478]“nor do they know what virtue is, because they allow themselves to be instructed on this point by Aristotle, whose definition is absolutely erroneous.”[479]It makes no impression upon him—perhaps he is even ignorant of the fact—that the Scholastics consider, on good grounds, the love which loves God’s goodness as goodness towards us, and which makes personal salvation its motive, compatible with the perfect love of friendship (amicitiæ, complacentiæ).[480]According to him, this love must be extirpated (“amor exstirpandus”) because it is full of abominable self-seeking.[481]In its place he sets up a most perfect love (which will be described below), which includes resignation to, and even a desire for, hell-fire, a resignation such as Christ Himself manifested (!) in His abandonment to suffering.Luther had now left the safe path of theological and ecclesiastical tradition to pursue his own ideas.It is true that, notwithstanding his exhortation to be resigned to the holy will of God in every case, he looks with fear at the flood of blasphemies which must arise in the heart of one who fears his own irrevocable, undeserved damnation. Anxious to obviate this, or to arm the conscience against it, when pointing to the wounds of Christ he adds these words: “Should anyone, owing to overmastering temptation, come to blaspheme God, that would not involve his eternal damnation. For even towards the godless our God is not a God of impatience and cruelty. Such blasphemies are forced out of a man by the devil, therefore they may be more pleasing to God’s ear than any Alleluia or song of praise. The more terrible and abominable a blasphemy is, the more pleasing it is to God when the heart feels that it does not acquiesce in it, i.e. when it is involuntary.”[482]Involuntary thoughts, to which alone he sees fit to refer, are, of course, not deserving of punishment; but are the murmurs and angry complaints against predestination to hell of which he speaks always only involuntary? The way to resignation which he mentions in the same connection is no less questionable. Itconsists largely in “not troubling about such thoughts.”[483]But will all be able to get so far as this?He again repeats with great insistence that “everything happens according to God’s choice”; “he upon whom God does not have mercy, remains in the ‘massa’” [perditionis].[484]“For whom it is, it is,” he adds elsewhere in German, “whom it hits, him it hits.”[485]God permits at times even the elect to be reduced, as it were, to nothingness,[486]but only in order that His sole power may be made manifest and that it may quench all proud boasting; for man is so ready to believe that he can by the exercise of his free will rise again, and waxes presumptuous; but here he learns that grace exalts him before and above every choice of his own (“ante omne arbitrium et supra arbitrium suum”).[487]We shall not here examine more closely his grave misapprehension of the teaching of the Apostle in the Epistle to the Romans, on which he tries to prop up his glaring theory concerning predestination. Suffice it to say that the principal passage to which he refers (Rom. ix. 11 ff.), according to the exegetist Cornely, is not now taken by any expositor to refer to predestination, i.e. to the selection by grace of each individual.[488]The passage treats of the promises made to the Jewish people (as a whole) which were given without desert and freely; but Israel, as St. Paul explains, has, by its fault, rendered itself unworthy of the same and excluded itself (as a whole) from the salvation which the heathen obtain by faith—a reward of Israel’s misdeeds, which, in itself, is incompatible with Luther’s doctrine of an undeserved predestination to hell.[489]Luther also quotes St. Augustine, but does not interpret him correctly. He even overlooks the fact that this Father, in one of the passages alleged, says the very opposite to his new ideas on unconditional predestination to hell, and attributes in every case the fate of the damned to their own moral misdeeds. Augustine says, in his own profound, concise way, in the text quoted by Luther: “the savedmay not pride himself on his merits, and the damned may only bewail his demerits.”[490]In his meditations on the ever-inscrutable mystery he regards the sinner’s fault as entirely voluntary, and his revolt against the eternal God as, on this account, worthy of eternal damnation. Augustine teaches that “to him as to every man who comes into this world” salvation was offered with a wealth of means of grace and with all the merits of Christ’s bitter death on the cross.[491]Luther also quoted the Bible passages regarding God’s will for the salvation of all men, but only in order to say of them: “such expressions are always to be understood exclusively of the elect.” It is merely “wisdom of the flesh” to attempt to find a will of God that all men be saved in the assurance of St. Paul: “God wills that all men shall be saved” (1 Tim. ii. 4), or “in the passages which say, that He gave His Son for us, that He created man for eternal life, and that everything was created for man, but man for God that he might enjoy Him eternally.”[492]Other objections which Luther makes he sets aside with the same facility by a reference to the thoughts he has developed above.[493]Thus the first: Why did God give to man free will by means of which he can merit either reward or punishment? His answer is: Where is this free will? Man has no free will for doing what is good. Then a second objection: “God damns no one without sin, and he who is forced to sin is damned unjustly.” The answer to this is new: God ordains it so that those who are to be damned are gladly, even though of necessity, in sin (“dat voluntarie velle in peccato esse et manere et diligere iniquitatem”). Finally, the last objection: “Why does God give them commandments which He does not will them to keep, yea hardens their will so much that they desire to act contrary to the law? Is not God in this case the cause of their sinning and being damned?” “Yes, that is the difficulty,” he admits, “which, as a matter of fact, has the most force; it is the weightiest of all. But to it the Apostle makes a special answer when he teaches: God so wills it, and God Who thus wills, is not evil. Everything is His, just as the clay belongs to the potter and waits on hisservice.” Enough, he continues, “God commands that the elect shall be saved, and that those who are destined for hell shall be entangled in evil in order that He may show forth His mercy and also His anger.”It makes one shudder to hear how he cuts short the sighs of the unhappy soul which sees itself a victim of God’s harshness. It complains: “It is a hard and bitter lot that God should seek His honour in my misery!” And Luther replies: “See, there we have the wisdom of the flesh!Mymisery; ‘my,’ ‘my,’ that is the voice of the flesh. Drop the ‘my’ and say: Be Thou honoured, O Lord.... So long as you do not do that, you are seeking your own will more than the will of God. We must judge of God in a different manner from that in which we judge of man. God owes no man anything.”“With this hard doctrine,” he concludes, “the knife is placed at the throat of holiness-by-works and fleshly wisdom and therefore the flesh is naturally incensed, and breaks out into blasphemies; but man must learn that his salvation does not depend upon his acts, but that it lies quite outside of him, namely, in God, Who has chosen him.”He attempts, however, to mingle softer tones with the voices of despair, which, he admits, these theories have let loose. This he can only do at the expense of his own teaching, or by fining it down. He says: whoever is terrified and confused, but then tries to abandon himself with indifference to the severity of God, he, let this be his comfort, is not of the number of those predestined to hell. For only those who are really to be rejected are not afraid[?], “they pay no heed to the danger and say, if I am to be damned, so be it!” On the other hand, confusion and fear are signs of the “spiritus contribulatus,” which, according to his promise, God never rejects (Ps. 1.).After all, then, we are forced to ask, according to this, is not man to be saved by his own act, namely, the act of heroic indifference to his eternity? For this act remains an act of man: “Whoever is filled with the fear of God, and, taking courage, throws and precipitates himself into the truth of the promises of God, he will be saved, and be one of the elect.”[494]3. The Fight against “Holiness-by-Works” and the Observantines in the Commentary on RomansHis ideas on predestination were not the direct cause of Luther’s belittling of human effort and the value of good works; the latter tendency was present in him previous to his adoption of rigid predestinarianism; nor does he ever attribute to election by grace any diminution of man’s powers or duties, whether in the case of the chosen or of thereprobate. The same commandments are given to those whom God’s terrible decree has destined for hell as to the elect; they possess the same human abilities, the same weaknesses. It was not predestination which led him in the first instance to attribute such strength to concupiscence in man, and to invest it, as he ultimately did, with an actually sinful and culpable character.His ideas concerning the absolute corruption of the children of Adam, even to the extinction of any liberty in the doing of what is good, had another origin, and, in their development, were influenced far more by false mysticism than by the predestinarian delusion.He approached the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans in the conviction that, in this Epistle, he would find the sanction of his earlier efforts against the self-righteous and “holy-by-works,” against whom his peculiar mysticism had still further prejudiced him. From the very outset he interprets the great Apostolic document on the calling of the heathen and the Jews to salvation as directed exclusively against those who, according to him, were imperilling the Church; against those who (whether in his own Order or in Christendom generally) laid stress on the importance of works, on the duty of fulfilling observances and the merit of exercises of virtue for gaining heaven, and who were unmindful of the righteousness which Christ gives us. This is not the place to point out how Paul is speaking in quite another sense, against those Jewish Christians who still adhered to the works of the Mosaic Law, of the merely relative value of works, of the liberty which Christianity imparts and of the saving power of faith.Luther, however, in the very first lines, tells the “holy-by-works” that the whole purpose of the Epistle to the Romans is a driving back and rooting out of the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh. Among the heathen and the Jews were to be found those who, though “devoted in their hearts to virtue,” yet had not suppressed all self-satisfaction in the same, and looked upon themselves as “righteous and good men”; in the Church, according to Paul, all self-righteousness and wisdom must be torn out of the affections, and self-complacency. God willed to save us not by our own righteousness but by an extraneous righteousness (“non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam vult salvare”), viz. by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and, owing to the exterior righteousness which Christ gives (“externa quæ ex Christo in nobis est iustitia”), there can beno boasting, nor must there be “any depression on account of the sufferings and trials which come to us from Christ.”[495]“Christ’s righteousness and His gifts,” he says, “shine in the true Christian.... If any man possesses natural and spiritual advantages, yet this is not considered by God as being his wisdom, righteousness and goodness (‘non ideo coram Deo talis reputatur’), rather, he must wait in humility, as though he possessed nothing, for the pure mercy of God, to see whether He will look upon him as righteous and wise. God only does this if he humbles himself deeply. We must learn to regard spiritual possessions and works of righteousness as worthless for obtaining the righteousness of Christ, we must renounce the idea that these have any value in God’s sight and merit a reward, otherwise we shall not be saved” (“opera iusta velint nihil reputare,” etc.).[496]Any pretext, or even none at all, serves to bring him back again and again in the work to the “Pelagian-mindediustitiarii.” It is possible that amongst these the “Observantines” ranked first. Our thoughts revert to those of his brother monks, whose cause he had at first defended in the internal struggle within the Congregation, only to turn on them unmercifully afterwards. On one occasion he mentions by name the “Observants,” reproaching them with trying to outshine one another in their zeal for God, while at the same time they had no love of their neighbour, whereas, according to the passage he is just expounding, “the fulness of the law is love.”[497]He would also appear to be referring to them, when, on another occasion, he rails at such monks, who by their behaviour bring their whole profession into disgrace.“They exalt themselves against other members of their profession,” he cries, “as though they were clean and had no evil odour about them,”[498]and continues in the style of his monastic discourse on the “Little Saints” mentioned above (p. 69 f.). “And yet before, behind and within they are a pig-market and sty of sows ... they wish to withdraw from the rest, whereas they ought, were they really virtuous, to help them to conceal their faults. But in place of patient succour there is nothing in them but peevishness and a desire to be far away (‘quærunt fugam ... tediosi sunt et nolunt esse in communione aliorum’). They will not serve those who are good for nothing nor be their companions; theyonly desire to be the superiors and companions of the worthy, the perfect and the sound. Therefore they run from one place to another.”[499]The struggle of which this is a picture continued among the German Augustinians. In the spring, 1520, a similar conflict broke out in the Cologne Province, one side having the sympathy of the Roman Conventuals.[500]We can well understand how the General of the Order in Rome was not disposed to grant the exemptions claimed by the Observantines of the Saxon Congregation against his own Provincials.Luther brandishes his sharp blade against the “spiritually minded, the proud, the stiff-necked, who seek peace in works and in the flesh, theiustitiarii,”[501]without making any sharp distinction between the actual Observantines and the “self-righteous.”With regard to himself, he admits that he is so antagonistic to the “iustitiarii,” that he is opposed to all scrupulous observance of “iustitia,” to all regulations and strict ordinances:“The very word righteousness vexes me: if anyone were to steal from me, it would hurt me less than being obliged to listen to the word righteousness. It is a word which the jurists always have on their lips, but there is no more unlearned race than these men of the law, save, perhaps, the men of good intention and superior reason (‘bonæ-intentionarii seu sublimatæ rationis’); for I have experienced both in myself and in others, that when we were righteous, God mocked at us.”[502]4. Attack on Predisposition to Good and on Free WillThe assertion of the complete corruption of human nature owing to the continuance of original sin and the inextinguishable tinder of concupiscence, arose from the above-mentioned position which Luther had taken up with regard to self-righteousness.Man remains, according to what Luther says in the Commentary on Romans, in spite of all his veneer of good works, so alienated from God that he “does not love but hates the law which forces him to what is good and forbids what is evil; his will, far from seeking the law, detests it. Nature persists in its evil desires contrary to the law; it is always full of evil concupiscence when it is not assisted from above.” This concupiscence, however, is sin. Everything that is good is due only to grace, and grace must bring us to acknowledge this and to “seek Christ humbly and so be saved.”[503]The descriptions of human doings which the author gives us in eloquent language are not wanting in fidelity and truth to nature, though we cannot approve his inferences. He has a keen eye on others and is unmerciful in his delineation of the faults which he perceived in the pious people around him.
THE CHANGE OF 1515 IN THE LIGHT OF THE COMMENTARY ON ROMANS (1515-16)
Luther’slectures on the Epistle to the Romans which, as mentioned above (p. 93), he delivered at Wittenberg from April, 1515, to September or October, 1516, existed till recently (1904-8) only in MS. form. To Denifle belongs the merit of having first drawn public attention to this important source of information, which he exploited, and from the text of which he furnished long extracts according to the Vatican Codex palatinus lat. 1826.[447]The MS. referred to, containing the scholia, is a copy by Aurifaber of the lectures which Luther himself wrote out in full, and once belonged to the library of Ulrich Fugger, whence it came to the Palatina at Heidelberg, and, ultimately, on the transference of the Palatina to Rome, found its way to the Vatican Library. It was first made use of by Dr. Vogel, and then, in 1899, thoroughly studied by Professor Joh. Ficker.[448]While the work was in process of publication the original by Luther’s own hand was discovered in 1903 in the Codex lat. theol. 21,4º of the State Library in Berlin, or rather rediscovered, for it had already been referred to in 1752 in an account of the library.[449]According to this MS., which also contains the glosses,[450]the Commentary, after having been collated with the Roman MS., which is frequently inaccurate, was edited with a detailed introductionat Leipzig in 1908 by Joh. Ficker, Professor at Strasburg University; it forms the first volume of a collection entitled “Anfänge reformatorischer Bibelauslegung.”
Denifle’s preliminary excerpts were so ample and exact that, as a comparison with what has since been published proves, they afforded a trustworthy insight into a certain number of Luther’s doctrinal views of decisive value in forming an opinion on the general course of his development.[451]But it is only now, with the whole work before us, scholia and glosses complete, that it is possible to give a fair and well-founded account of the ideas which were coming to the front in Luther. The connection between different points of his teaching appears in a clearer light, and various opinions are disclosed which were fresh in Luther’s mind, and upon which Denifle had not touched, but which are of great importance in the history of his growth. Among such matters thus brought to light were Luther’s gloomy views on God and predestination, with which we shall deal in our next section.
The Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans ranks first among all his letters for the depth of thought and wealth of revelation which it contains. It treats of the most exalted questions of human thought, and handles the most difficult problems of Christian faith and hope. Its subject-matter is the eternal election of the Gentile and Jewish world to salvation in Christ; the guidance of the heathen by the law of nature, and of the Jews by the Mosaic law; the powers of man when left to himself, and of man supernaturally raised; the universality and potency of the saving grace of Christ, and the manner of its appropriation in justification by faith; finally the life, death and resurrection in which the Christian, through faith, unites himself with Christ.[452]
We may doubt whether the young Doctor of Wittenberg was qualified to grapple with so great a task as the explanation of this charter of faith, especially bearing in mind his comparatively insignificant knowledge of the Fathers of the Church and the theological literature of the past, his impetuosity in dealing with recondite questions, and his excitable fancy which always hurried in advance of his judgment. At any rate, he himself thought his powerssufficient for a work on which the most enlightened minds of the Church had tested their abilities. He immediately followed up this Commentary with other lectures on certain epistles of St. Paul, wherein the Apostle discloses the depths of his knowledge.
On perusing the lengthy pages of the Commentary on Romans we are amazed at the eloquence of the young author, at his dexterity in description and his skill in the apt use of biblical quotations; but his manner of working contrasts very unfavourably with that of the older Commentators on the Epistle, such as Thomas of Aquin with his brevity and definiteness and, particularly, his assurance in theological matters. Luther’s mode of treating the subject is, apart from other considerations, usually too rhetorical and not seldom quite tedious in its amplitude.
The work, with its freedom both in its language and its treatment of the subject, reveals many interesting traits which go to make up a picture of Luther’s inward self.
He starts with the assumption that the whole of the Epistle was intended by its author to “uproot from the heart the feeling of self-righteousness and any satisfaction in the same,” and—to use his own odd expression—“to implant, establish and magnify sin therein (‘plantare, ac constituere et magnificare peccatum’).”[453]“Although there may be no sin in the heart or any suspicion of its existence,” he declares, we ought and must feel ourselves to be full of sin, in contradistinction to the grace of Christ from Whom alone we receive what is pleasing to God.
In his passionate opposition to the real or imaginary self-righteous he allows himself, in these lectures, to be drawn into an ever deeper distrust of man’s ability to do anything that is good. The nightmare of self-righteousness never leaves him for a moment. His attack would have been justifiable if he had merely been fighting against sinful self-righteousness which is really selfishness, or against the delusion that natural morality will suffice before God. Nor does it appear who is defending such erroneous ideas against him, or which school upheld the thesis Luther is always opposing, viz. that there is a saving righteousness which arises, is preserved, and works without the preventingand accompanying grace of God. It is, however, clear that there was in his own soul a dislike for works; so strong in fact is his feeling in this regard that he simply calls all works “works of the law,” and cannot be too forcible in demonstrating the antagonism of the Apostle to their supposed over-estimation. Probably one reason for his selection of this Epistle for interpretation was that it appeared to him to agree even better than other biblical works with his own ideas against “self-righteousness.” We must now consider in detail some of the leading ideas of the Commentary on Romans.
The tendency to a dismal conception of God plays, in combination with his ideas on predestination, an incisive part in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, which, so far, has received too little attention. The tendency is noticeable throughout his early mental history. He was never able to overcome his former temptations to sadness and despair on account of the possibility of his irrevocable predestination to hell, sufficiently to attain to the joy of the children of God and to the trustful recognition of God’s general and certain will for our salvation. The advice which Staupitz, among others, gave him was assuredly correct, viz. to take refuge in the wounds of Christ, and Luther probably tried to follow it. But we do not learn that he paid diligent heed to the further admonitions of the ancient ascetics, to exert oneself in the practice of good works, as though one’s predestination depended entirely on the works one performs with the grace of God. On the contrary, of set purpose, he avoided any effort on his own part and preferred the misleading mystical views of Quietism.
The melancholy idea of predestination again peeps out unabashed in the passage in his Commentary on the Psalms, where he says, that Christ “drank the cup of pain for His elect, but not for all.”[454]
If he set out to explain the Epistle to the Romans with a gloomy conception of God, in which we recognise the old temptations regarding predestination, owing to his misapprehension of certain passages of the Epistle concerningGod’s liberty and inscrutability in the bestowal of grace, his ideas, as he advances, become progressively more stern and dismal. The editor of the Commentary remarks, not without reason, on the forcible way in which Luther, “even in chapter i., emphasises the sovereignty of the Will of God.”[455]It is true of many, Luther says there, that God gives them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness (cp. Rom. i. 24), nor is this merely a permission, but an appointment and command (“non tantum permissio, sed commissio et iussio”).[456]In such a case God commands the devil or the flesh to tempt a man and conquer him. It is true that when God chooses to act graciously He prevents the evil; but He also wills to be severe and to punish, and “then He makes the wicked to sin more abundantly (‘facit abundantius peccare’)”; then “He forsakes a man so that he may not be able to resist the devil, who carries out the order and the Will of God in bringing about his fall.”
The youthful University Professor believes that he is here teaching a “more profound theology.” No one was to come to him, he says, with the shallow and hackneyed assertion that, on the above hypothesis, man’s free will was destroyed; only narrow minds (“rudiores”) take exception at this “profundior theologia.”[457]The teaching of this new theology was the following:
“This man may do what he pleases, it is God’s will that he should be overcome by sin.” “It is true that God does not desire the sin, although He wills that it shall take place (‘non sequitur quod Deus peccatum velit, licet ipsum velit fieri’); for He only wills that it shall happen, in order to manifest in man the greatness of His anger and His severity by punishing in him the sin which He hates.” “It is therefore on account of the punishment that God wills that the sin shall be committed.... God alone may will such a thing” (“Hoc autem soli Deo licitum est velle”),[458]and he repeats fearlessly: “in order that all misery and shame may be heaped upon the man, God wills he should commit this sin.”[459]He fancies he is communicating to his pupils “the highest secrets of theology,” meant only for the perfect, when he assures them that both statements are right: God wills to oblige me and all men [to do what is good] and yet He does notgive His grace to all, but only to whom He will, reserving to Himself the choice. Some it does not please Him to justify because He manifests so much the more through them His honour in the elect; in the same way He also wills sin, though only indirectly, viz. “that He may be glorified in the elect.” Hence we must not make it a mere matter of permission, for “how would God permit it unless it were His will?” “Senseless chatter,” thus he describes the unanimous contrary teaching of theologians, “such is the objection they raise that man would thus be damned without any fault on his part, because he could not fulfil the law and was expected to do what was impossible.”—We can only ask how his own method is to be described when he contents himself with this solution: “If that objection had any weight it would follow that it was not necessary to preach, to pray, to exhort, and Christ’s death would also not be necessary. Yet by means of all this God has chosen to save His elect.”[460]
Luther, as this somewhat lengthy passage shows, had, at any rate at that time, no bright, kindly idea of God’s Nature, Goodness and inexhaustible Mercy, which wills to make every creature here on earth happy and to save them in eternity; his mind was imprisoned within the narrow limits to which he had before this accustomed himself; a false conception of God’s essence—perhaps a remainder of his Occamist training—was already poisoning the very vitals of his theology.
His melancholy conception of God comes to light not only in the various passages where he speaks of predestination, but also in the dark pictures, which, in his morbid frame of mind, he paints of the wickedness and sin of man pitting his unquenchable concupiscence against God, the All Holy.[461]In order to adore this stern and cruel God inhis own way he had already built up on his false mysticism a practical theory of resignation and self-surrender to whatever might be the Divine Will, even should it destine him to damnation. In the first pages of the Commentary on Romans his idea of God enables him to proclaim loudly and boldly, and with full knowledge of what he is doing, his opposition to the religious practice of his many zealous contemporaries, whether clerics or laymen.
Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462]Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463]“Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]Such is the perilous position he reaches under the influence of his distaste for works, viz. a violent antagonism to free will. Man is unable to do the least thing to satisfy this Holy God.[465]The Occamist theology of the school in which he was trained here serves him in good stead, as the following sentences, whichare closely akin to Occam’s acceptation-theory, show: “We must always be filled with anxiety, ever fear and await the Divine acceptance”; for as all our works are in themselves evil, “only those are good which God imputes as good; they are in fact something or nothing, only in so far as God accepts them or not.” “The eternal God has chosen good works from the beginning that they should please Him,”[466]“but how can I ever know that my deed pleases God? How can I even know that my good intention is from God?”[467]Hence, away with the proud self-righteous (“superbi iustitiarii”) who are so sure of their good works!Fear, desponding humility and self-annihilation, according to Luther, are the only feelings one can cherish in front of this terrible, unaccountable God.[468]“He who despairs of himself is the one whom God accepts.”[469]He also speaks of a certain “pavor Dei,” which is the foundation of salvation: “trepidare et terreri” is the best sign, as it is said in Psalm cxliii.: “Shoot out Thy arrows and Thou shalt trouble them,” the “terrens Deus” leads to life.[470]True love does not ask any enjoyment from God, rather, he here repeats, whoever loves Him from the hope of being made eternally happy by Him, or from fear of being wretched without Him, has a sinful and selfish love (“amor concupiscentiæ”); but to allow the terrors of God to encompass us, to be ready to accept from Him the most bitter interior and exterior cross, to all eternity, that only is perfect love. And even with such love we are dragged into thick interior darkness.[471]
Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462]
Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463]“Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]
Such is the perilous position he reaches under the influence of his distaste for works, viz. a violent antagonism to free will. Man is unable to do the least thing to satisfy this Holy God.[465]The Occamist theology of the school in which he was trained here serves him in good stead, as the following sentences, whichare closely akin to Occam’s acceptation-theory, show: “We must always be filled with anxiety, ever fear and await the Divine acceptance”; for as all our works are in themselves evil, “only those are good which God imputes as good; they are in fact something or nothing, only in so far as God accepts them or not.” “The eternal God has chosen good works from the beginning that they should please Him,”[466]“but how can I ever know that my deed pleases God? How can I even know that my good intention is from God?”[467]Hence, away with the proud self-righteous (“superbi iustitiarii”) who are so sure of their good works!
Fear, desponding humility and self-annihilation, according to Luther, are the only feelings one can cherish in front of this terrible, unaccountable God.[468]“He who despairs of himself is the one whom God accepts.”[469]
He also speaks of a certain “pavor Dei,” which is the foundation of salvation: “trepidare et terreri” is the best sign, as it is said in Psalm cxliii.: “Shoot out Thy arrows and Thou shalt trouble them,” the “terrens Deus” leads to life.[470]True love does not ask any enjoyment from God, rather, he here repeats, whoever loves Him from the hope of being made eternally happy by Him, or from fear of being wretched without Him, has a sinful and selfish love (“amor concupiscentiæ”); but to allow the terrors of God to encompass us, to be ready to accept from Him the most bitter interior and exterior cross, to all eternity, that only is perfect love. And even with such love we are dragged into thick interior darkness.[471]
All these gloomy thoughts which cloud his mind, gather, when he comes to explain chapters viii. and ix. of the Epistle to the Romans, where the Apostle deals with the question of election to grace.
Luther thinks he has here found in St. Paul the doctrine of predestination, not only to heaven, but also to hell, expressed, moreover, in the strongest terms. At the same time he warns his hearers against faint-heartedness, being well aware how dangerous his views might prove to souls.
“Let no one immerse himself in these thoughts who is not purified in spirit, lest he sink into an abyss of horror and despair; the eyes of the heart must first be purified by contemplating the wounds of Christ. I discourse upon these matters solely because the trend of the lectures leads up to them, and because they are unavoidable. It is the strongest wine there is, and the most perfect food, a solid nourishment for the perfect; it is that most exalted theology of which the Apostle says (1 Cor. ii. 6): ‘wespeak wisdom among the perfect’ ... only the perfect and the strong should study the first book of the Sentences [because predestination is dealt with at the end of Peter Lombard’s first book]; it should really be the last and not the first book; to-day many who are unprepared jump at it and then go away blinded in spirit.”[472]Luther teaches that the Apostle’s doctrine is: God did not in their lifetime exercise His mercy towards the damned; He is right and not to be blamed when He follows herein His own supreme will alone. “Why then does man murmur as though God were not acting according to the law?” His will is, for every man, the highest good. Why should we not desire, and that with the greatest fervour, the fulfilment of this will, since it is a will which can in no way be evil? “You say: Yes, but for me it is evil. No, it is evil for none. The only evil is that men cannot understand God’s will and do it”; they should know that even in hell they are doing God’s will if it is His wish that they should be there.[473]
“Let no one immerse himself in these thoughts who is not purified in spirit, lest he sink into an abyss of horror and despair; the eyes of the heart must first be purified by contemplating the wounds of Christ. I discourse upon these matters solely because the trend of the lectures leads up to them, and because they are unavoidable. It is the strongest wine there is, and the most perfect food, a solid nourishment for the perfect; it is that most exalted theology of which the Apostle says (1 Cor. ii. 6): ‘wespeak wisdom among the perfect’ ... only the perfect and the strong should study the first book of the Sentences [because predestination is dealt with at the end of Peter Lombard’s first book]; it should really be the last and not the first book; to-day many who are unprepared jump at it and then go away blinded in spirit.”[472]
Luther teaches that the Apostle’s doctrine is: God did not in their lifetime exercise His mercy towards the damned; He is right and not to be blamed when He follows herein His own supreme will alone. “Why then does man murmur as though God were not acting according to the law?” His will is, for every man, the highest good. Why should we not desire, and that with the greatest fervour, the fulfilment of this will, since it is a will which can in no way be evil? “You say: Yes, but for me it is evil. No, it is evil for none. The only evil is that men cannot understand God’s will and do it”; they should know that even in hell they are doing God’s will if it is His wish that they should be there.[473]
Hence the only way he knows out of the darkness he has himself created is recognition of, and resignation to, the possibility of a purely arbitrary damnation by God. The expressions he here makes use of for reprobation, “inter reprobos haberi,” “damnari,” “morte æterna puniri” make it plain that he demands resignation to actual reprobation and to being placed on a footing with the damned. Yet, as he always considers this resignation as the most perfect proof of acquiescence in the Will of God, it does not, according to him, include within itself a readiness to hate God, but, on the contrary, the strongest and highest love.[474]With such an exalted frame of mind, however, the actual penalty of hell would cease to exist. “It is impossible that he should remain apart from God who throws himself so entirely into the Will of God. He wills what God wills, therefore he pleases God. If he pleases God, then he is loved by God; if he is loved by God, then he is saved.”[475]That he is thus cutting the ground from under his hypothesis of an inevitable predestination to hell by teaching how we can escape it, does not seem to strike him. Or does he, perhaps, mean that only those who are not predestined to hell can thus overcome the fear of hell? Will such resignationbe possible to him who really believes himself destined to hell, and who sees even in his resignation no means whereby he can escape it?
To such a one even the “wounds of Christ” offer no assurance and no place of refuge. They only speak to man of the God of revelation, not of the mysterious, unsearchable God. The untenable and insulting comparison between the mysterious and the revealed Supreme Being which Luther was later on to institute is here already foreshadowed.
He explains in detail how the will of man does not in the least belong to the person who wills, or the road to the runner. “All is God’s, who gives and creates the will.” We are all instruments of God, who works all in all. Our will is like the saw and the stick—examples which he repeatedly employs later in his harshest utterances concerning the slavery of the will. Sawing is the act of the hand which saws, but the saw is passive; the animal is beaten, not by the stick, but by him who holds the stick. So the will also is nothing, but God who wields it is everything.[476]
Hence he rejects most positively the theological doctrine that God foresees the final lot of man as something “contingenter futurum,” i.e. that he sees his rejection as something dependent on man and brought about by his own fault. No, according to Luther, in the election of grace everything is preordained “inflexibili et firma voluntate,” and this, His own will, is alone present in the mind of God.
Luther speaks with scorn of “our subtle theologians,” who drag in their “contingens” and build up an election by grace on “necessitas consequentiæ, sed non consequentis,” in accordance with the well-known scholastic ideas. “With God there is absolutely no ‘contingens,’ but only with us; for no leaf ever falls from the tree to the earth without the will of the Father.” Besides, the theologians—so he accuses the Scholastics without exception—“have imagined the case so, or at least have led to its being so imagined, as though salvation were obtained or lost through our own free will.”[477]We know that here he was wrong. As a matter of fact, true Scholasticism attributed the work of salvation to grace together with free will, so that two factors, the Divine and the human, or the supernatural and the natural, are mutually engaged in the same. But Luther, when here reporting the old teaching, does not mention the factor of grace, but only “nostrum arbitrium.”He then adds: “Thus I once understood it.” If he reallyever believed salvation to be exclusively the work of free will, then he erred grievously, and merely proves how defective his study, even of Gabriel Biel, had been.He also interpreted quite wrongly the view of contemporary and earlier scholastic theologians on the love of God, and, again, by excluding the supernatural factor. He reproaches them with having, so he says, considered the love in question as merely natural (“ex natura”) and yet as wholesome for eternal life, and he demands that all wholesome love be made to proceed “ex Spiritu Sancto,” a thing which all theologians, even the Occamists, had insisted on. He says: “they do not know in the least what love is,”[478]“nor do they know what virtue is, because they allow themselves to be instructed on this point by Aristotle, whose definition is absolutely erroneous.”[479]It makes no impression upon him—perhaps he is even ignorant of the fact—that the Scholastics consider, on good grounds, the love which loves God’s goodness as goodness towards us, and which makes personal salvation its motive, compatible with the perfect love of friendship (amicitiæ, complacentiæ).[480]According to him, this love must be extirpated (“amor exstirpandus”) because it is full of abominable self-seeking.[481]In its place he sets up a most perfect love (which will be described below), which includes resignation to, and even a desire for, hell-fire, a resignation such as Christ Himself manifested (!) in His abandonment to suffering.Luther had now left the safe path of theological and ecclesiastical tradition to pursue his own ideas.It is true that, notwithstanding his exhortation to be resigned to the holy will of God in every case, he looks with fear at the flood of blasphemies which must arise in the heart of one who fears his own irrevocable, undeserved damnation. Anxious to obviate this, or to arm the conscience against it, when pointing to the wounds of Christ he adds these words: “Should anyone, owing to overmastering temptation, come to blaspheme God, that would not involve his eternal damnation. For even towards the godless our God is not a God of impatience and cruelty. Such blasphemies are forced out of a man by the devil, therefore they may be more pleasing to God’s ear than any Alleluia or song of praise. The more terrible and abominable a blasphemy is, the more pleasing it is to God when the heart feels that it does not acquiesce in it, i.e. when it is involuntary.”[482]Involuntary thoughts, to which alone he sees fit to refer, are, of course, not deserving of punishment; but are the murmurs and angry complaints against predestination to hell of which he speaks always only involuntary? The way to resignation which he mentions in the same connection is no less questionable. Itconsists largely in “not troubling about such thoughts.”[483]But will all be able to get so far as this?He again repeats with great insistence that “everything happens according to God’s choice”; “he upon whom God does not have mercy, remains in the ‘massa’” [perditionis].[484]“For whom it is, it is,” he adds elsewhere in German, “whom it hits, him it hits.”[485]God permits at times even the elect to be reduced, as it were, to nothingness,[486]but only in order that His sole power may be made manifest and that it may quench all proud boasting; for man is so ready to believe that he can by the exercise of his free will rise again, and waxes presumptuous; but here he learns that grace exalts him before and above every choice of his own (“ante omne arbitrium et supra arbitrium suum”).[487]
Luther speaks with scorn of “our subtle theologians,” who drag in their “contingens” and build up an election by grace on “necessitas consequentiæ, sed non consequentis,” in accordance with the well-known scholastic ideas. “With God there is absolutely no ‘contingens,’ but only with us; for no leaf ever falls from the tree to the earth without the will of the Father.” Besides, the theologians—so he accuses the Scholastics without exception—“have imagined the case so, or at least have led to its being so imagined, as though salvation were obtained or lost through our own free will.”[477]
We know that here he was wrong. As a matter of fact, true Scholasticism attributed the work of salvation to grace together with free will, so that two factors, the Divine and the human, or the supernatural and the natural, are mutually engaged in the same. But Luther, when here reporting the old teaching, does not mention the factor of grace, but only “nostrum arbitrium.”
He then adds: “Thus I once understood it.” If he reallyever believed salvation to be exclusively the work of free will, then he erred grievously, and merely proves how defective his study, even of Gabriel Biel, had been.
He also interpreted quite wrongly the view of contemporary and earlier scholastic theologians on the love of God, and, again, by excluding the supernatural factor. He reproaches them with having, so he says, considered the love in question as merely natural (“ex natura”) and yet as wholesome for eternal life, and he demands that all wholesome love be made to proceed “ex Spiritu Sancto,” a thing which all theologians, even the Occamists, had insisted on. He says: “they do not know in the least what love is,”[478]“nor do they know what virtue is, because they allow themselves to be instructed on this point by Aristotle, whose definition is absolutely erroneous.”[479]It makes no impression upon him—perhaps he is even ignorant of the fact—that the Scholastics consider, on good grounds, the love which loves God’s goodness as goodness towards us, and which makes personal salvation its motive, compatible with the perfect love of friendship (amicitiæ, complacentiæ).[480]According to him, this love must be extirpated (“amor exstirpandus”) because it is full of abominable self-seeking.[481]In its place he sets up a most perfect love (which will be described below), which includes resignation to, and even a desire for, hell-fire, a resignation such as Christ Himself manifested (!) in His abandonment to suffering.
Luther had now left the safe path of theological and ecclesiastical tradition to pursue his own ideas.
It is true that, notwithstanding his exhortation to be resigned to the holy will of God in every case, he looks with fear at the flood of blasphemies which must arise in the heart of one who fears his own irrevocable, undeserved damnation. Anxious to obviate this, or to arm the conscience against it, when pointing to the wounds of Christ he adds these words: “Should anyone, owing to overmastering temptation, come to blaspheme God, that would not involve his eternal damnation. For even towards the godless our God is not a God of impatience and cruelty. Such blasphemies are forced out of a man by the devil, therefore they may be more pleasing to God’s ear than any Alleluia or song of praise. The more terrible and abominable a blasphemy is, the more pleasing it is to God when the heart feels that it does not acquiesce in it, i.e. when it is involuntary.”[482]
Involuntary thoughts, to which alone he sees fit to refer, are, of course, not deserving of punishment; but are the murmurs and angry complaints against predestination to hell of which he speaks always only involuntary? The way to resignation which he mentions in the same connection is no less questionable. Itconsists largely in “not troubling about such thoughts.”[483]But will all be able to get so far as this?
He again repeats with great insistence that “everything happens according to God’s choice”; “he upon whom God does not have mercy, remains in the ‘massa’” [perditionis].[484]“For whom it is, it is,” he adds elsewhere in German, “whom it hits, him it hits.”[485]God permits at times even the elect to be reduced, as it were, to nothingness,[486]but only in order that His sole power may be made manifest and that it may quench all proud boasting; for man is so ready to believe that he can by the exercise of his free will rise again, and waxes presumptuous; but here he learns that grace exalts him before and above every choice of his own (“ante omne arbitrium et supra arbitrium suum”).[487]
We shall not here examine more closely his grave misapprehension of the teaching of the Apostle in the Epistle to the Romans, on which he tries to prop up his glaring theory concerning predestination. Suffice it to say that the principal passage to which he refers (Rom. ix. 11 ff.), according to the exegetist Cornely, is not now taken by any expositor to refer to predestination, i.e. to the selection by grace of each individual.[488]The passage treats of the promises made to the Jewish people (as a whole) which were given without desert and freely; but Israel, as St. Paul explains, has, by its fault, rendered itself unworthy of the same and excluded itself (as a whole) from the salvation which the heathen obtain by faith—a reward of Israel’s misdeeds, which, in itself, is incompatible with Luther’s doctrine of an undeserved predestination to hell.[489]
Luther also quotes St. Augustine, but does not interpret him correctly. He even overlooks the fact that this Father, in one of the passages alleged, says the very opposite to his new ideas on unconditional predestination to hell, and attributes in every case the fate of the damned to their own moral misdeeds. Augustine says, in his own profound, concise way, in the text quoted by Luther: “the savedmay not pride himself on his merits, and the damned may only bewail his demerits.”[490]In his meditations on the ever-inscrutable mystery he regards the sinner’s fault as entirely voluntary, and his revolt against the eternal God as, on this account, worthy of eternal damnation. Augustine teaches that “to him as to every man who comes into this world” salvation was offered with a wealth of means of grace and with all the merits of Christ’s bitter death on the cross.[491]
Luther also quoted the Bible passages regarding God’s will for the salvation of all men, but only in order to say of them: “such expressions are always to be understood exclusively of the elect.” It is merely “wisdom of the flesh” to attempt to find a will of God that all men be saved in the assurance of St. Paul: “God wills that all men shall be saved” (1 Tim. ii. 4), or “in the passages which say, that He gave His Son for us, that He created man for eternal life, and that everything was created for man, but man for God that he might enjoy Him eternally.”[492]
Other objections which Luther makes he sets aside with the same facility by a reference to the thoughts he has developed above.[493]Thus the first: Why did God give to man free will by means of which he can merit either reward or punishment? His answer is: Where is this free will? Man has no free will for doing what is good. Then a second objection: “God damns no one without sin, and he who is forced to sin is damned unjustly.” The answer to this is new: God ordains it so that those who are to be damned are gladly, even though of necessity, in sin (“dat voluntarie velle in peccato esse et manere et diligere iniquitatem”). Finally, the last objection: “Why does God give them commandments which He does not will them to keep, yea hardens their will so much that they desire to act contrary to the law? Is not God in this case the cause of their sinning and being damned?” “Yes, that is the difficulty,” he admits, “which, as a matter of fact, has the most force; it is the weightiest of all. But to it the Apostle makes a special answer when he teaches: God so wills it, and God Who thus wills, is not evil. Everything is His, just as the clay belongs to the potter and waits on hisservice.” Enough, he continues, “God commands that the elect shall be saved, and that those who are destined for hell shall be entangled in evil in order that He may show forth His mercy and also His anger.”It makes one shudder to hear how he cuts short the sighs of the unhappy soul which sees itself a victim of God’s harshness. It complains: “It is a hard and bitter lot that God should seek His honour in my misery!” And Luther replies: “See, there we have the wisdom of the flesh!Mymisery; ‘my,’ ‘my,’ that is the voice of the flesh. Drop the ‘my’ and say: Be Thou honoured, O Lord.... So long as you do not do that, you are seeking your own will more than the will of God. We must judge of God in a different manner from that in which we judge of man. God owes no man anything.”“With this hard doctrine,” he concludes, “the knife is placed at the throat of holiness-by-works and fleshly wisdom and therefore the flesh is naturally incensed, and breaks out into blasphemies; but man must learn that his salvation does not depend upon his acts, but that it lies quite outside of him, namely, in God, Who has chosen him.”He attempts, however, to mingle softer tones with the voices of despair, which, he admits, these theories have let loose. This he can only do at the expense of his own teaching, or by fining it down. He says: whoever is terrified and confused, but then tries to abandon himself with indifference to the severity of God, he, let this be his comfort, is not of the number of those predestined to hell. For only those who are really to be rejected are not afraid[?], “they pay no heed to the danger and say, if I am to be damned, so be it!” On the other hand, confusion and fear are signs of the “spiritus contribulatus,” which, according to his promise, God never rejects (Ps. 1.).After all, then, we are forced to ask, according to this, is not man to be saved by his own act, namely, the act of heroic indifference to his eternity? For this act remains an act of man: “Whoever is filled with the fear of God, and, taking courage, throws and precipitates himself into the truth of the promises of God, he will be saved, and be one of the elect.”[494]
Other objections which Luther makes he sets aside with the same facility by a reference to the thoughts he has developed above.[493]Thus the first: Why did God give to man free will by means of which he can merit either reward or punishment? His answer is: Where is this free will? Man has no free will for doing what is good. Then a second objection: “God damns no one without sin, and he who is forced to sin is damned unjustly.” The answer to this is new: God ordains it so that those who are to be damned are gladly, even though of necessity, in sin (“dat voluntarie velle in peccato esse et manere et diligere iniquitatem”). Finally, the last objection: “Why does God give them commandments which He does not will them to keep, yea hardens their will so much that they desire to act contrary to the law? Is not God in this case the cause of their sinning and being damned?” “Yes, that is the difficulty,” he admits, “which, as a matter of fact, has the most force; it is the weightiest of all. But to it the Apostle makes a special answer when he teaches: God so wills it, and God Who thus wills, is not evil. Everything is His, just as the clay belongs to the potter and waits on hisservice.” Enough, he continues, “God commands that the elect shall be saved, and that those who are destined for hell shall be entangled in evil in order that He may show forth His mercy and also His anger.”
It makes one shudder to hear how he cuts short the sighs of the unhappy soul which sees itself a victim of God’s harshness. It complains: “It is a hard and bitter lot that God should seek His honour in my misery!” And Luther replies: “See, there we have the wisdom of the flesh!Mymisery; ‘my,’ ‘my,’ that is the voice of the flesh. Drop the ‘my’ and say: Be Thou honoured, O Lord.... So long as you do not do that, you are seeking your own will more than the will of God. We must judge of God in a different manner from that in which we judge of man. God owes no man anything.”
“With this hard doctrine,” he concludes, “the knife is placed at the throat of holiness-by-works and fleshly wisdom and therefore the flesh is naturally incensed, and breaks out into blasphemies; but man must learn that his salvation does not depend upon his acts, but that it lies quite outside of him, namely, in God, Who has chosen him.”
He attempts, however, to mingle softer tones with the voices of despair, which, he admits, these theories have let loose. This he can only do at the expense of his own teaching, or by fining it down. He says: whoever is terrified and confused, but then tries to abandon himself with indifference to the severity of God, he, let this be his comfort, is not of the number of those predestined to hell. For only those who are really to be rejected are not afraid[?], “they pay no heed to the danger and say, if I am to be damned, so be it!” On the other hand, confusion and fear are signs of the “spiritus contribulatus,” which, according to his promise, God never rejects (Ps. 1.).
After all, then, we are forced to ask, according to this, is not man to be saved by his own act, namely, the act of heroic indifference to his eternity? For this act remains an act of man: “Whoever is filled with the fear of God, and, taking courage, throws and precipitates himself into the truth of the promises of God, he will be saved, and be one of the elect.”[494]
His ideas on predestination were not the direct cause of Luther’s belittling of human effort and the value of good works; the latter tendency was present in him previous to his adoption of rigid predestinarianism; nor does he ever attribute to election by grace any diminution of man’s powers or duties, whether in the case of the chosen or of thereprobate. The same commandments are given to those whom God’s terrible decree has destined for hell as to the elect; they possess the same human abilities, the same weaknesses. It was not predestination which led him in the first instance to attribute such strength to concupiscence in man, and to invest it, as he ultimately did, with an actually sinful and culpable character.
His ideas concerning the absolute corruption of the children of Adam, even to the extinction of any liberty in the doing of what is good, had another origin, and, in their development, were influenced far more by false mysticism than by the predestinarian delusion.
He approached the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans in the conviction that, in this Epistle, he would find the sanction of his earlier efforts against the self-righteous and “holy-by-works,” against whom his peculiar mysticism had still further prejudiced him. From the very outset he interprets the great Apostolic document on the calling of the heathen and the Jews to salvation as directed exclusively against those who, according to him, were imperilling the Church; against those who (whether in his own Order or in Christendom generally) laid stress on the importance of works, on the duty of fulfilling observances and the merit of exercises of virtue for gaining heaven, and who were unmindful of the righteousness which Christ gives us. This is not the place to point out how Paul is speaking in quite another sense, against those Jewish Christians who still adhered to the works of the Mosaic Law, of the merely relative value of works, of the liberty which Christianity imparts and of the saving power of faith.
Luther, however, in the very first lines, tells the “holy-by-works” that the whole purpose of the Epistle to the Romans is a driving back and rooting out of the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh. Among the heathen and the Jews were to be found those who, though “devoted in their hearts to virtue,” yet had not suppressed all self-satisfaction in the same, and looked upon themselves as “righteous and good men”; in the Church, according to Paul, all self-righteousness and wisdom must be torn out of the affections, and self-complacency. God willed to save us not by our own righteousness but by an extraneous righteousness (“non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam vult salvare”), viz. by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and, owing to the exterior righteousness which Christ gives (“externa quæ ex Christo in nobis est iustitia”), there can beno boasting, nor must there be “any depression on account of the sufferings and trials which come to us from Christ.”[495]“Christ’s righteousness and His gifts,” he says, “shine in the true Christian.... If any man possesses natural and spiritual advantages, yet this is not considered by God as being his wisdom, righteousness and goodness (‘non ideo coram Deo talis reputatur’), rather, he must wait in humility, as though he possessed nothing, for the pure mercy of God, to see whether He will look upon him as righteous and wise. God only does this if he humbles himself deeply. We must learn to regard spiritual possessions and works of righteousness as worthless for obtaining the righteousness of Christ, we must renounce the idea that these have any value in God’s sight and merit a reward, otherwise we shall not be saved” (“opera iusta velint nihil reputare,” etc.).[496]
Luther, however, in the very first lines, tells the “holy-by-works” that the whole purpose of the Epistle to the Romans is a driving back and rooting out of the wisdom and righteousness of the flesh. Among the heathen and the Jews were to be found those who, though “devoted in their hearts to virtue,” yet had not suppressed all self-satisfaction in the same, and looked upon themselves as “righteous and good men”; in the Church, according to Paul, all self-righteousness and wisdom must be torn out of the affections, and self-complacency. God willed to save us not by our own righteousness but by an extraneous righteousness (“non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam vult salvare”), viz. by the imputed righteousness of Christ, and, owing to the exterior righteousness which Christ gives (“externa quæ ex Christo in nobis est iustitia”), there can beno boasting, nor must there be “any depression on account of the sufferings and trials which come to us from Christ.”[495]
“Christ’s righteousness and His gifts,” he says, “shine in the true Christian.... If any man possesses natural and spiritual advantages, yet this is not considered by God as being his wisdom, righteousness and goodness (‘non ideo coram Deo talis reputatur’), rather, he must wait in humility, as though he possessed nothing, for the pure mercy of God, to see whether He will look upon him as righteous and wise. God only does this if he humbles himself deeply. We must learn to regard spiritual possessions and works of righteousness as worthless for obtaining the righteousness of Christ, we must renounce the idea that these have any value in God’s sight and merit a reward, otherwise we shall not be saved” (“opera iusta velint nihil reputare,” etc.).[496]
Any pretext, or even none at all, serves to bring him back again and again in the work to the “Pelagian-mindediustitiarii.” It is possible that amongst these the “Observantines” ranked first. Our thoughts revert to those of his brother monks, whose cause he had at first defended in the internal struggle within the Congregation, only to turn on them unmercifully afterwards. On one occasion he mentions by name the “Observants,” reproaching them with trying to outshine one another in their zeal for God, while at the same time they had no love of their neighbour, whereas, according to the passage he is just expounding, “the fulness of the law is love.”[497]He would also appear to be referring to them, when, on another occasion, he rails at such monks, who by their behaviour bring their whole profession into disgrace.
“They exalt themselves against other members of their profession,” he cries, “as though they were clean and had no evil odour about them,”[498]and continues in the style of his monastic discourse on the “Little Saints” mentioned above (p. 69 f.). “And yet before, behind and within they are a pig-market and sty of sows ... they wish to withdraw from the rest, whereas they ought, were they really virtuous, to help them to conceal their faults. But in place of patient succour there is nothing in them but peevishness and a desire to be far away (‘quærunt fugam ... tediosi sunt et nolunt esse in communione aliorum’). They will not serve those who are good for nothing nor be their companions; theyonly desire to be the superiors and companions of the worthy, the perfect and the sound. Therefore they run from one place to another.”[499]
The struggle of which this is a picture continued among the German Augustinians. In the spring, 1520, a similar conflict broke out in the Cologne Province, one side having the sympathy of the Roman Conventuals.[500]We can well understand how the General of the Order in Rome was not disposed to grant the exemptions claimed by the Observantines of the Saxon Congregation against his own Provincials.
Luther brandishes his sharp blade against the “spiritually minded, the proud, the stiff-necked, who seek peace in works and in the flesh, theiustitiarii,”[501]without making any sharp distinction between the actual Observantines and the “self-righteous.”With regard to himself, he admits that he is so antagonistic to the “iustitiarii,” that he is opposed to all scrupulous observance of “iustitia,” to all regulations and strict ordinances:“The very word righteousness vexes me: if anyone were to steal from me, it would hurt me less than being obliged to listen to the word righteousness. It is a word which the jurists always have on their lips, but there is no more unlearned race than these men of the law, save, perhaps, the men of good intention and superior reason (‘bonæ-intentionarii seu sublimatæ rationis’); for I have experienced both in myself and in others, that when we were righteous, God mocked at us.”[502]
Luther brandishes his sharp blade against the “spiritually minded, the proud, the stiff-necked, who seek peace in works and in the flesh, theiustitiarii,”[501]without making any sharp distinction between the actual Observantines and the “self-righteous.”
With regard to himself, he admits that he is so antagonistic to the “iustitiarii,” that he is opposed to all scrupulous observance of “iustitia,” to all regulations and strict ordinances:
“The very word righteousness vexes me: if anyone were to steal from me, it would hurt me less than being obliged to listen to the word righteousness. It is a word which the jurists always have on their lips, but there is no more unlearned race than these men of the law, save, perhaps, the men of good intention and superior reason (‘bonæ-intentionarii seu sublimatæ rationis’); for I have experienced both in myself and in others, that when we were righteous, God mocked at us.”[502]
The assertion of the complete corruption of human nature owing to the continuance of original sin and the inextinguishable tinder of concupiscence, arose from the above-mentioned position which Luther had taken up with regard to self-righteousness.
Man remains, according to what Luther says in the Commentary on Romans, in spite of all his veneer of good works, so alienated from God that he “does not love but hates the law which forces him to what is good and forbids what is evil; his will, far from seeking the law, detests it. Nature persists in its evil desires contrary to the law; it is always full of evil concupiscence when it is not assisted from above.” This concupiscence, however, is sin. Everything that is good is due only to grace, and grace must bring us to acknowledge this and to “seek Christ humbly and so be saved.”[503]
The descriptions of human doings which the author gives us in eloquent language are not wanting in fidelity and truth to nature, though we cannot approve his inferences. He has a keen eye on others and is unmerciful in his delineation of the faults which he perceived in the pious people around him.