Chapter II: Harbingers of Change (2)

His attacks on Scholasticism and the philosophical and theological schools up to that day, were soon employed to cover his attacks on dogma and the laws of the Church. In 1518 he places Scholasticism and Canon Law on the same footing, both needing reform.[196]

The learned Martin Pollich, who was teaching law at the University of Wittenberg, looked at the young assailant with forebodings as to the future. He frequently said that this monk would overthrow the teaching which yet prevailed at all the universities. “This brother has deep-set eyes,” he once remarked, “he must have strange fancies.”[197] His strange eyes, with their pensive gleam, ever ready to smile on a friend, and, in fact, his whole presence, made an impression upon all who were brought into close contact with him. It is an undoubted fact, true even of his later days, that intercourse with him was pleasant, especially to those whom he honoured with his friendship or whom he wished to influence. Not only were his pupils at Wittenberg devoted admirers of the brave critic of the Schoolmen, but, little by little, he also gained an unquestioned authority over the other professors, the more so as there was no one at the University able or willing to take the risks of a challenge.

The psychological reaction on himself of so high a position at the University must not be under-estimated as a factor in his development. He felt himself to be a pioneer in the struggle against Scholasticism, and one called to reinstate a new theology.

His attitude to mysticism was absolutely different from that which he assumed with regard to Aristotle and Scholasticism.

Luther speaks in praise of Tauler for the first time in 1516, though he had probably become acquainted with him earlier. At about that same time a little booklet, “_Theologia Deutsch_,” exercised a great influence upon him.

In a letter to Lang—who was also inclined to look with favour on Tauler, the master of German mystic theology—Luther betrays how greatly he was attracted by this writer. In his sonorous, expansive language, he speaks of him as a teacher whose enlightenment was such, that, though utterly unknown in the theological schools, he contains more real theology than all the scholastic theologians of all the universities put together. He also repeatedly assured his hearers that Tauler’s book of sermons had “led him to the spirit.”[198]

At that time Luther showed great preference for the exhortations of the German mystics on self-abasement, apathy and abnegation of self. “_Theologia Deutsch_,” that little work of an unknown Frankfort priest of the fourteenth century, which he came across in a MS., so fascinated him that, adding to it a preface and his own name, “Martinus Luder,” he published it in 1516 at Wittenberg. It was the first occasion of his making use of the press; this first edition was, however, incomplete, owing to the state of the MS.; the work was finally reissued complete and under the title which Luther himself had selected, viz. “A German Theologia,” in 1518. In the sub-title of the first edition he had called it a “noble spiritual booklet,” and in the preface had praised it, saying that it did not float like foam on the top of the water, but that it had been brought up from the bottom of the Jordan by a true Israelite.[199] In the first edition he had erroneously attributed the booklet to Tauler; in the second he says it is equal in merit to Tauler’s own writings. Yet, to tell the truth, it is far from reaching Tauler’s high standard of thought. Luther, however, assures us that, next to the Bible and St. Augustine, he can mention no book from which he has learned more of the nature of God, Christ, man and all other things, than from this work. When he forwarded a printed copy of the first edition to Spalatin (December 14, 1516), he wrote, that Tauler offered a solid theology which was quite similar to the old; that he was acquainted with no theology more wholesome and evangelical. Spalatin should saturate himself with Tauler’s sermons; “taste and see how sweet the Lord is, after you have first tasted and seen how bitter is everything that is ourselves.”[200]

In addition to the authors mentioned, the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and of Gerard Groot, the founder of the Community of the Brethren of the Common Life, were known to him. That he was, or had been, fond of reading the writings of St. Bernard, we may guess from his many—often misunderstood—quotations from the same.

Luther was also well able, whilst under the influence of that inwardness which he loved so much in the mystics, to make his own their truly devotional and often moving language.

In a friendly letter he comforts, as follows, an Augustinian at Erfurt, Georg Leiffer, regarding his spiritual troubles: “The Cross of Christ is distributed throughout the whole world and each one gets a small piece of it. Do not throw yours away, but lay it, like a sacred relic, in a golden shrine, i.e. in a heart filled with gentle charity. For even the wrongs which we suffer from men, persecutions, passion and hatred, which are caused us either by the wicked or by those who mean well, are priceless relics, which have not indeed, like the wood of the cross, been hallowed by contact with our Lord’s body, but which have been blessed by His most loving heart, encompassed by His friendly, Divine Will, kissed and sanctified. The curse becomes a blessing, insult becomes righteousness, suffering becomes an aureole, and the cross a joy. Farewell, sweet father and brother, and pray for me.”

5. Excerpts from the Earliest Letters

The above letter of Luther’s is one of the few remaining which belong to that transition period in his life. His letters are naturally not devoid of traces of the theological change which was going forward within him, and they may therefore be considered among the precursors of his future doctrine.

His new theological standpoint is already apparent in the charitable and sympathetic letter of encouragement which, as Rural Vicar, he sent to one of his brother monks about that time. “Learn, my sweet brother,” he writes to George Spenlein, an Augustinian of the monastery of Memmingen, “learn Christ and Him Crucified, learn to sing to Him, and, despairing of your own self, say to Him: Thou, Lord Jesus, art my righteousness, but I am Thy sin; Thou hast accepted what I am and given me what Thou art; Thou hast thus become what Thou wast not, and what I was not I have received.... Never desire,” he exhorts him, “a purity so great as to make you cease thinking yourself, nay being, a sinner; for Christ dwells only in sinners; He came down from heaven where He dwells in the righteous in order to live also in sinners. If you ponder upon His love, then you will become conscious of His most sweet consolation. What were the use of His death had we to attain to peace of conscience by our own trouble and labour? Therefore only in Him will you find peace through a trustful despair of yourself and your works.”[201]

A similar mystical tone (we are not here concerned with the theology it implied) shows itself also here and there in Luther’s later correspondence. The life of public controversy in which he was soon to engage was certainly not conducive to the peaceful, mystical tone of thought and to the cultivation of the interior spirit; as might have been expected, the result of the struggle was to cast his feeling and his mode of thought in a very different mould. It was impossible for him to become the mystic some people have made him out to be owing to the distractions and excitement of his life of struggle.[202]

In the above letter to Spenlein, Luther speaks of this monk’s relations to his brethren. Spenlein had previously been in the monastery at Wittenberg, where Luther had known him as a zealous monk, much troubled about the details of the Rule, and who even found it difficult to have to live with monks who were less exact in their observance. “When you were with us,” says the writer, “you were under the impression, or rather in the error in which I also was at one time held captive, and of which I have not even now completely rid myself (‘_nondum expugnavi_’), that it is necessary to perform good works until one is confident of being able to appear before God decked out, as it were, in deeds and merits, a thing which is utterly impossible.” Luther is desirous of hearing what Spenlein now thinks, “whether he has not at last grown sick of self-righteousness and learnt to breathe freely and trust in the righteousness of Christ.” “If, however, you believe firmly in the righteousness of Christ—and cursed be he who does not—then you will be able to bear with careless and erring brothers patiently and charitably; you will make their sins your own,” as Christ does with ours, “and in whatever good you do, in that you will allow them to participate ... be as one of them and bear with them. To think of flight and solitude, and to wish to be far away from those who we think are worse than ourselves, that is an unhappy righteousness.... On the contrary, if you are a lily and a rose of Christ, then remember that you must be among thorns, and beware of becoming yourself a thorn by impatience, rash judgment and secret pride.... If Christ had willed to live only amongst the good or to die only for His friends, for whom, pray, would He ever have died, or with whom would He have lived?”

Spenlein was then no longer living in a monastery subject to the Rural Vicar. It is even probable that he had left Wittenberg and the new Vicar’s district on account of differences of opinion on the matter of Observance. He betook himself to the imperial city of Memmingen, presumably because a different spirit prevailed in the monastery there. This would seem to explain how Luther came to speak to this doubtless most worthy religious of “unhappy righteousness,” interpreting the state of the case in his own perverse fashion.

Among the other letters despatched in 1516 that to Lang at Erfurt deserves special attention; in it Luther expresses himself in confidence, quite openly, on the disapproval of his work and of his theological standpoint which was showing itself at Wittenberg and at Erfurt.[203]

His study of St. Augustine had put him in a position to recognise, on internal grounds, that a work, “On true and false penance,” generally attributed to this African Father, was not really his. He tells his friend that his opinion of the book had “given great offence to all”; though the insipid contents of the same were so far removed from the spirit of Augustine, yet it was esteemed because it had been quoted and employed by Gratian and Peter Lombard as one of Augustine’s works. That he had been aware of this and nevertheless had stood up for the truth, that was his crime, which had aroused the enmity particularly of Dr. Carlstadt; not, however, that he cared very much; both Lombard and Gratian had done much harm to consciences by means of this stupid book.

His opinion regarding the spuriousness of the work was in the end generally accepted, even, for instance, by Bellarmine; Trithemius, moreover, had been of the same opinion before Luther’s time; in his attacks on its contents, however, Luther, led astray by his false ideas of penance, exceeded all bounds, and thus vexed, beyond measure, his colleagues who at that time still held the opposite view.

According to this letter, he had also challenged all the critics of his new ideas in a disputation held by one of his pupils under his direction. “They barked and screeched at me on account of my lectures, but their mouths were to be stopped and the opinions of others heard.” It was a question of defending his erroneous doctrine, regarding the absolute helplessness of nature, which he had meantime formulated, and to which we shall return immediately. In consequence, he says, all the “Gabrielists” (i.e. followers of the scholastic Gabriel Biel) here, as well as in the Faculty at Erfurt, were nonplussed. But I know my Gabriel quite as well as his own wonderful, wonderstruck worshippers; “he writes well, but as soon as he touches on grace, charity, hope, and faith, then, like Scotus his leader, he treads in the footprints of Pelagius.” Luther was quite free to dissent from the view, even of so good a professor as Biel, in this question of grace and virtue, but, already at that time, he had denounced as Pelagian several doctrines of the Church. Among those who were angered was the theologian Nicholas von Amsdorf, who took his licentiate at the same time as Luther, and became later on his close friend. Amsdorf secretly sent one of Luther’s theses, of which he disapproved, to Erfurt, but afterwards allowed himself to be pacified.

The humanistic tendency which was at that time beginning to make its way had, as we see from the letters, little part in the rise of the Lutheran movement at Wittenberg.

The view that Luther’s new teaching was due to the direct influence of the mode of thought of such men as Hutten, Crotus and Mutian is incorrect. On the contrary, Luther, full as he was of his one-sided supra-naturalism, was bound to disapprove of the Humanist ideal and made no secret of his disapproval. In his letters in 1516 he also found fault with the satirical and frivolous attacks of the Humanists on the state of the Church and the theological learning of the day. He considered the “_Epistolæ obscurorum virorum_” impudent, and called the author a clown.[204] A similar work by the same group of Humanists against the “Theologasters,” entitled “_Tenor supplicationis Pasquillianæ_”—as he informs Spalatin, himself a Humanist—he had held up to the ridicule of his colleagues, as it richly deserved on account of the invective and slanders which it contained.[205]

He appealed to Spalatin to draw the attention of Erasmus to his misapprehension of righteousness as it appears in the Epistle to the Romans; he says that Erasmus overrates the virtues of heathen heroes, whereas even the most blameless of men, even Fabricius and Regulus, were miles away from righteousness; outside of faith in Christ there is, according to him, no righteousness whatever; Aristotle, whom everybody follows, likewise knew nothing of this righteousness; but Paul and Augustine teach it; what Paul calls self-righteousness is not merely, as Erasmus says, a righteousness founded on the observances of the Mosaic Law, but any righteousness whatever which springs out of works, or out of the observance of any law; Paul also teaches original sin in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, a fact which Erasmus wrongly denies. With regard to Augustine, he could unfold to him (Erasmus) St. Paul’s meaning better than he thinks, but he should diligently read the writings against the Pelagians, above all the _De Spiritu et littera_. Augustine there takes a firm stand on the foundation of the earlier Fathers (Luther’s quotations from his authorities show how much the study had fascinated him). But after Augustine’s day, dead literalism became the general rule. Lyra’s Bible Commentary, for instance, is full of it; the right interpretation of Holy Scripture is also wanting in Faber Stapulensis, notwithstanding his many excellencies. Hence, he writes, we must fall back on Augustine, on Augustine rather than on Jerome to whom Erasmus gives the preference in Bible matters, for Jerome keeps too much to the historical side; he recommends Augustine not merely because he is an Augustinian monk, for formerly he himself did not think him worthy of consideration until he “fell in” (_incidissem_) with his books.[206]

Augustine’s “On the Spirit and the Letter,” a work dedicated to Marcellinus, and dating from the end of 412, with which Luther had become acquainted in 1515, had a lasting influence on him. In this book the great Doctor of the Church strikes at the very root of Pelagianism and shows the necessity, for the accomplishment of supernatural good works (“_facere et perficere bonum_”), of inward grace which he calls “_spiritus_” in contradistinction to outward grace which he terms “_littera_.” Luther, however, referred this necessity more and more to everything good, even to what is purely natural, hence his loud accusations soon after against the theology of the Church as savouring of Pelagianism.

Humanism at that time stood for a Pelagian view of life and therefore could not be altogether sympathetic to Luther. Its influence on him, especially in his youth, cannot, however, be altogether disregarded; he had been brought into too close contact with it in his student days and also during his theological course at Erfurt, and his mind was too lively and too open to the currents of the time for him not to have felt something of its effects. The very extravagance of his criticism of things theological may, in part, be traced back to the example of the Humanists.

From Luther’s lectures on the Psalms, as well as from his sermons and letters till 1516 inclusive, we have adduced various elements which may be considered to forebode the greater and more important change yet to come. They are, indeed, not exactly precursors of what one designates usually as the Reformation, but rather of the new Lutheran theology which was responsible for that upheaval in the ecclesiastical, ethical and social sphere which became known as the Reformation.

6. The Theological Goal

Before continuing in a more systematic form the examination of the origin of Luther’s new theology, of which we have just seen some of the antecedents, we must cast a glance at the erroneous theological result which Luther had already reached in 1515-16, and which must be considered as the goal of his actual development.

Several of the above passages, from sermons and letters of the years 1515-16, have already in part betrayed the result. It appears, however, in full in the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans delivered between the autumn, 1515, and the summer, 1516, already several times referred to.[207] Everyone who has followed the course of Luther research during the last decade will recall the commotion aroused when Denifle announced the discovery in the Vatican Library of a copy hitherto unknown of Luther’s youthful work (Palat. 1826). Much labour has since been expended in connection with the numerous passages quoted from it by this scholar. A popular Protestant history of dogma even attempted to arrange Denifle’s quotations so as to form with them a complete picture.[208] Meanwhile a complete edition of the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans has been brought out by Johann Ficker which will serve as the foundation for a proper treatment of the new material. It may, however, be of interest, and serve to recall the literary movement of the last few years, if we here sum up Luther’s errors of 1516 according to the extracts from the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans adduced by Denifle. The present writer, on the ground of his study of the Vatican copy undertaken previous to the appearance of Ficker’s edition, can assure the reader that the extracts really give the kernel of the lectures. Some additions which he then noted as elucidating Denifle’s excerpts are given in the notes according to the MS. and alongside of the quotations from Denifle; everywhere, however, Ficker’s new edition has also been quoted, reference being made to the scholia, or to the glosses, on the Epistle to the Romans, according as the passages are taken from the one or the other part of Luther’s Commentary.

The Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans really represents the first taking shape of Luther’s heretical views. From the very beginning he expresses some of them without concealment. It is clear that during his preparation for these lectures in the summer and early autumn of 1515 things within him had reached a climax, and, overcoming all scruples, he determined to take the decisive step of laying the result of his new and quite peculiar views before his audience at the University. At the very commencement his confident theses declare that the commentator will deduce everything from Paul, and as we proceed we see more and more clearly how his immersion in his mistaken interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans—that deep well of apostolic teaching—led him to propound the false doctrines born of his earlier antipathy for Scholasticism and liking for pseudo-mysticism.

In the very first pages Luther endeavours to show how imputed righteousness is the principal doctrine advocated by St. Paul in the Epistle to the Romans. Justification by faith alone and the new appreciation of works is expressed quite openly.

“God has willed to save us,” this he represents as the sum total of the Epistle, “not by our own but by extraneous righteousness and wisdom, not by such as is in us or produced by our inner self, but by that which comes to us from elsewhere.” “We must rest altogether on an extraneous and foreign righteousness,” he repeats, “and therefore destroy our own, i.e. our homely righteousness” (“_non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam_,” etc.).[209] So fascinated is he by the terrifying picture of self-righteousness and holiness by works, that he is more than inclined to weaken the inclination for good works, though he indeed declares them necessary: according to him they produce in man a self-consciousness which prevents him regarding himself as unrighteous and as needing the justification of Christ. The truly righteous, such are his actual words, always believe “that they are sinners ... they sigh until they are completely cured of concupiscence, a release which takes place at death.” Everyone must be distrustful even of his good intentions, he tells his adversaries, i.e. “those who trust in themselves, who, thinking they are in possession of God’s grace, cease to prove themselves, and sink daily into greater lukewarmness.” He asks ironically whether “they acted from the pure love of God,” for now, erroneously, he will allow only the purest love of God as a motive.[210] He writes: “he who thinks, that the greater his works, the more sure he is of salvation shows himself to be an unbeliever, a proud man and a contemner of the word. It does not depend at all on the multitude of works [in the right sense this was admitted by the old theologians]; it is nothing but temptation to pay any attention to this.” It is mere “wisdom of the flesh,” he thinks, for anyone to pay attention to the “difference of works” rather than to the word, particularly the inward word and its impulses.[211]

Here in his mystical language he states the following paradoxical thesis: “the wisdom of the spiritually minded knows neither good nor evil (“_prudentia spiritualium neque bonum neque malum scit_”); it keeps its eyes fixed always on the word, not on the work.”[212] He concludes: “let us only close our eyes, listen in simplicity to the word, and do what it commands whether it be foolish or evil or great or small” (“_sive stultum sive malum, sive magnum sive parvum præcipiat, hoc faciamus_”).[213] As righteousness does not proceed from works we must so much the more cling to imputation. “Our works are nothing, we find in ourselves nothing but thoughts which accuse us ... where shall we find defenders? Nowhere but in Christ ... the heart, it is true, reproves a man for his evil works, it accuses him and witnesses against him. But he who believes in Christ turns at once [from himself] to Christ and says: He has done enough, He is righteous, He is my defence, He died for me, He has made His righteousness mine and my sin His. But if He has made my sin His, then it is no longer mine and I am free. If He has made His righteousness mine, then I am righteous through the same righteousness as He.”[214]

Here then the sinner, as Luther teaches in his letter to Spenlein (see above, p. 88 ff.), simply casts himself upon Christ and hides himself just as he is “under the wings of the hen” (p. 80), comforting himself with the doctrine of imputation. The old Church, on the contrary, not only pointed to the merits of Christ (see above, pp. 10, 18) but also to the exhortations of St. Paul where he calls for zealous, active co-operation with the Divine grace, for inward conversion in the spirit, for works of penance and for purification from sin by contrition in order that our reconciliation with God and real pardon may become possible. Hence, while the Catholic doctrine conceives of justification as an interior, organic process, Luther is beginning to take it as something exterior and mechanical, as a process which results from the pushing forward of a foreign righteousness, as if it were a curtain. He turns away from the Catholic doctrine according to which a man justified by a living and active faith is really incorporated in Christ as the shoot is grafted into the olive tree, or the branch on the vine, i.e. to a new life, to an interior ennobling through sanctifying grace and the infused supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity.

Nevertheless Luther himself was affrighted at the theory of faith alone, and imputation. He feared lest he should be reproached with setting good works aside with his doctrine of imputed merit. He therefore explains in self-defence that he did not desire a bare faith; “the hypocrites and the lawyers” thought they would be saved by such a faith, but according to Paul’s words a faith was requisite by which we “approach Christ” (“_per quem habemus accessum per fidem_,” Rom. v. 2). Those are therefore in error who go forward in Christ with over-great certainty, but not by faith; as though they would be saved by Christ, for not doing anything themselves and giving no sign of faith. These possess too much faith, or, better still, none at all. Both must exist: “by faith” and “by Christ”; we must do and suffer gladly all that we can in the faith of Christ, and yet account ourselves in all things unprofitable servants, and only through Christ alone think ourselves able to go to God. For the object of works of faith is to make us worthy of Christ and of the refuge and protection of His righteousness.”[215] With this is connected Luther’s insistence on the necessity of invoking God’s grace in order that we may be able to fight against our passions and to bring forth good works, and in order that the passions, which in themselves are sin, may not be imputed by God.[216] Thus can “the body of sin be destroyed” and the “old man overcome.”[217] Luther admits, though with hesitation and in contradiction with himself, works which prepare us for justification.[218]

In spite of everything, in this first stage of his development, justification appears to him uncertain. He declares in so many words: “We cannot know whether we are justified and whether we believe”; and he can only add rather lamely: “we must look upon our works as works of the Law and be, in humility, sinners, hoping only to be justified through the mercy of Christ.”[219] He has no “joyful assurance of salvation”—which, in fact, had no place whatever in the new teaching as expounded by Luther himself—and its name is always drowned by the loud cry of sin. Even saints, on account of the sin which still clings to them, do not know whether they are pleasing to God. If they are well advised, they beg solely for the forgiveness of their sin which lies like lead on their conscience. “That is,” the mystic explains, “the wisdom which is hidden in secret” (“_abscondita in mysterio_”), because our righteousness “being entirely dependent on God’s decree remains unknown to us.”[220]

Luther cannot assure us sufficiently often that man is nothing but sin, and sins in everything. His reason is that concupiscence remains in man after baptism. This concupiscence he looks upon as real sin, in fact it is the original sin, enduring original sin, so that original sin is not removed by baptism, remains obdurate to all subsequent justifying grace,[221] and, until death, can, at the utmost, only be diminished. He says expressly, quite against the Church’s teaching, that original sin is only covered over in baptism, and he tries to support this by a misunderstood text from Augustine and by misrepresenting Scholasticism.[222]

Augustine teaches with clearness and precision in many passages that original sin is blotted out by baptism and entirely remitted;[223] Luther, however, quotes him to the opposite effect. The passage in question occurs in _De nuptiis et concupiscentia_ (l., c. xxv., n. 28) where Luther makes this Father say: sin (_peccatum_) is forgiven in baptism, not so that it no longer remains, but that it is no longer imputed.[224] Whereas what Augustine actually says is: the concupiscence of the flesh is forgiven, etc. (“_dimitti concupiscentiam carnis non ut non sit, sed ut in peccatum non imputetur_”). And yet Luther was acquainted with the true reading of the passage—which is really opposed to his view—as he had annotated it in the margin of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, where it is correctly given.[225] Luther, after having thus twisted the passage as above, employs it frequently later.[226] In the original lecture on the Epistle to the Romans he has, it is true, added to the text, after the word “_peccatum_,” the word “_concupiscentia_,” as the new editor points out, in excuse of Luther.[227] But on the preceding page Luther adds in exactly the same way in two passages of his own text where he speaks of “_peccatum_,” the word “_concupiscentia_,” so that his addition to Augustine cannot be regarded as a mere correction of a false citation, all the less since the incorrect form is found unaltered elsewhere in his writings.[228]

As regards Scholasticism, Luther holds that its teaching on original sin was very faulty, because it “dreamt” that original sin, like actual sin, was entirely removed (by baptism).[229] This is one of his first attacks on a particular doctrine of Scholasticism, his earlier opposition having been to Scholasticism in general. The blame he here administers presupposes the truth of his view that concupiscence and original sin come under the same category, and that the former is culpable. Almost all the Scholastics had made the essence of original sin to consist in the loss of original justice, whilst allowing that its “_materiale_,” as they called it, lay in concupiscence, so that without any “dream” it was quite easy to conceive of original sin as blotted out, while the “_materiale_” or “_fomes peccati_” or concupiscence remained.[230] Other examples of how Luther, partly owing to his ignorance of true Scholasticism, came to bring the most glaring charges against that school, will be given later.

Actual sins remain, according to Luther, even after forgiveness, for they too are only covered over. Formerly, it is true, he admits having believed that repentance and the sacrament of penance removed everything (“_omnia ablata putabam et evacuata, etiam intrinsece_”), and therefore in his madness he had thought himself better after confession than those who had not confessed.[231] “Thus I struggled with myself, not knowing that whilst forgiveness is certainly true, yet there is no removal of sin.”

Not only does real sin continue to dwell in man through concupiscence, but, according to a further statement of Luther, the keeping of God’s law is impossible to man. “As we cannot keep God’s commandments we are really always in unrighteousness, and therefore there remains nothing for us but to fear and to beg for remission of the unrighteousness, or rather that it may not be imputed, for it is never altogether remitted, but remains and requires the act of non-imputation.[232]

But how, then, he must have asked himself in following out the train of thought of his new system, if, owing to the depravity of human nature as the result of original sin there remains in man no freedom in the choice of good? “Where does the freedom of the will come in?” he asks, as it follows from the Apostle’s teaching that “the keeping of the law is simply impossible” (“_sæpius dixi, simpliciter esse impossibile legem implere?_”).[233] He hesitates, it is true, to deny free will, but only for a moment, and then tells us boldly that the will has been robbed of its freedom (of choosing) good. “Had I said this, people would curse me,” but, according to him, it is St. Paul who advocates the doctrine that without grace there is no freedom of the will in the choice of good which can please God.[234] Here we have a foretaste of the doctrine Luther was to express at the Leipzig disputation and elsewhere, viz. that the freedom of the will for good is merely a name (“_res de solo titulo_”),[235] and of that later terrible thesis of his that free will in general is dead (“_liberum arbitrium est mortuum_”),[236] a thesis he defended more particularly against Erasmus.

The young Monk was thus prepared to admit all the consequences of his new ideas, whereas the Apostle Paul, more particularly in his Epistle to the Romans, recognises the ability of man for natural goodness, and speaks of the law of nature in the heathen world and the possibility and actuality of its observance. “They do by nature the things of the law” (Rom. ii. 14). Luther will only allow that they do such things by means of grace, and the word grace again he uses merely for the grace of justification. His opinion with regard to the virtues of the heathen sages is noteworthy. He says that the philosophers of olden time had to be damned, although they may have been virtuous from their very inmost soul (“_ex animo et medullis_”), because they had at least experienced some self-satisfaction in their virtue, and, in consequence of the sinfulness of nature, must necessarily have succumbed to sinful love of self.[237] Not long after, i.e. as early as 1517, he declares in his MS. Commentary on the Epistle to the Hebrews their virtues to be merely vices (“_revera sunt vitia_”).[238]

But what place is given to the virtues of the righteous in Christianity? “As even the righteous man is depraved by sin he cannot be inwardly righteous without the mercy of God.... In the believers and in those who sigh unrighteousness is absent only because Christ comes to their assistance with the fulness of His sinlessness, and covers over their imperfections.”[239] Even when we “do good, we sin” (“_bene operando peccamus_”), so runs his paradoxical thesis; “but Christ covers over what is wanting and does not impute it.” And why do we always sin in doing good? “Because owing to concupiscence and sensuality we do not perform the good with the intensity and purity of intention which the law demands, i.e. not with all our might (‘_ex omnibus viribus_,’ Luke x. 27), the desires of the flesh being too strong.”[240] The Church, on the other hand, teaches that good works done in the state of sanctifying grace are pleasing to God in spite of concupiscence, which, it is true, remains after baptism and after the blotting out of original sin which ensued, but which is not sinful so long as there is no consent to its enticements.

As regards the distinction between mortal and venial sin, we find Luther’s doctrine has already reached its later standpoint, according to which there is no difference between them. In the same way he already denies the merit of good works. “It is clear,” he writes, “that according to substance and nature venial sin does not exist, and that there is no such thing as merit.”[241] All sins, in his opinion, are mortal, because even the smallest contains the deadly poison of concupiscence. With regard to merit, according to him, even “the saints have no merit of their own, but only Christ’s merits.”[242] Even in their actions the motive of perfect love was not sufficiently lively. “If it might be done unpunished and there were no expectation of reward, then even the good man would omit the good and do evil like the bad.”[243]

With this pessimistic view of Luther’s we conclude our preliminary glance at the theological goal to which his development had led him. We will not at present pursue further the theme of pessimism which might be brought out more clearly in the light of the doctrine contained in his Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans regarding absolute predestination to hell, and resignation to hell as the highest act of virtue.[244] All the new doctrines we have passed in review may be regarded as forerunners of the great revolution soon to come; we see here in these questions of doctrine the utter lack of respect and the boldness which the originator of this revolutionary theology will, later on, manifest against the Church, when it became clear that, without being untrue to herself, she could not approve his teaching. Meanwhile the connection of these doctrines among themselves and with the coming world-historic movement calls for further elucidation. We need offer no excuse for attempting this in detail in the following pages. The history of Luther’s development has passed into the foreground of literary interest by reason of the works which have appeared within the last few years, and, owing to the numerous sources and particular studies recently published, the historian is now in the fortunate position of being able to offer a sure solution of much that has hitherto been doubtful on a subject which has always exercised, and doubtless will continue to exercise, people’s minds.