Chapter XXIX: Ethical Results of the New Teaching (3)

4. The good works which are performed where there is no “faith” amount to sin. This strangely unethical assertion Luther is fond of repeating in so extravagant a form as can only be explained psychologically by the utter blindness of his bias in favour of the “_fides specialis_” by him discovered. True morality belongs solely to those who have been justified after his own fashion, and no others have the slightest right to credit themselves with anything of the sort.

When, in 1528, in his “Great Confession” he expounded his “belief bit by bit,” declaring that he had “most diligently weighed all these articles” as in the presence of death and judgment, he there wrote: “Herewith I reject and condemn as rank error every doctrine that exalts our free-will, which is directly opposed to the help and grace of our Saviour Jesus Christ. For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments.”[179] Even the most pious of the Papists, he goes on to say, since they lack Christ and the “Faith,” have “merely a great semblance of holiness,” and although “there seem to be many good works” among them, “yet all is lost”; chastity, poverty and obedience as practised in the convents is nothing but “blasphemous holiness,” and “what is horrible is that thereby they refuse Christ’s help and grace.”[180]

This, his favourite idea, finds its full expression in his learned Latin Commentary on Galatians (1535): “In the man who does not believe in Christ not only are all sins mortal, but even his good works are sins”;[181] for the benefit of the people he enunciates the same in his Church-Postils. “The works performed without faith are sins ... for such works of ours are soiled and foul in God’s eyes, nay, He looks on them with horror and loathing.” As a matter of course he thinks that God looks upon concupiscence as sin, even in its permissible manifestations, e.g. in the “_opus conjugalis_.” Amongst the heathen even virtues such as patriotism, continence, justice and courage in which, owing to the divine impulses (“_divini motus_”), they may shine, are tainted by the presence in them of original sin (“_in ipsis heroicis virtutibus depravata_”).[182] As to whether such men were saved, Luther refuses to say anything definite; he holds fast to the text that without faith it is impossible to please God. Only those who, in the days of Noe, did not believe may, so he declares, be saved in accordance with his reading of 1 Peter iii. 19 by Christ’s preaching of salvation on the occasion of His descent into hell. He is also disposed to include among those saved by this supposed course of sermons delivered “_in inferis_,” such fine men of every nation as Scipio, Fabius and others of their like.[183]

In general, however, the following holds good: Before “faith and grace” are infused into the heart “by the Spirit alone,” “as the work of God which He works in us”—everything in man is the “work of the Law, of no value for justification, but unholy and opposed to God owing to the unbelief in which it is performed.”[184]

_Annulment of the Supernatural and Abasement of the Natural Order_

From the above statements it is clear that Luther, in doing away with the distinction between the natural and supernatural order, also did away with the olden doctrine of virtue, and without setting up anything positive in its place. He admits no naturally good action different from that performed “by faith and grace”; no such thing exists as a natural, moral virtue of justice. This opinion is closely bound up with his whole warfare on man’s natural character and endowments in respect of what is good. Moreover, what he terms the state of grace is not the supernatural state the Church had always understood, but an outward imputation by God; it is indeed God’s goodness towards man, but no new vital principle thanks to which we act justly.[185]

Not only does he deny the distinction between natural and supernatural goodness, essential as it is for forming an ethical estimate of man, but he practically destroys both the natural and supernatural order. Even in other points of Luther’s doctrine we can notice the abrogation of the fundamental difference between the two orders; for instance in his view of Adam’s original state, which, according to him, was a natural not a supernatural one, “no gift,” as he says, “apart from man’s nature, and bestowed on him from without, but a natural righteousness so that it came natural to him to love God [as he did], to believe in Him and to acknowledge Him.”[186] It is, however, in the moral domain that this peculiarity of his new theology comes out most glaringly. Owing to his way of proceeding and the heat of his polemics he seems never to have become fully conscious of how far-reaching the consequences were of his destruction of all distinction between the natural and the supernatural order.

Natural morality, viz. that to which man attains by means of his unaided powers, appears to him simply an invention of the pagan Aristotle. He rounds on all the theologians of his day for having swallowed so dangerous an error in their Aristotelian schools to the manifest detriment of the divine teaching. This he does, for instance, at the commencement of his recently published Commentary on Romans. He calls it a “righteousness of the philosophers and lawyers” in itself utterly worthless.[187] A year later, in his manuscript Commentary on Hebrews, he has already reached the opinion, that, “the virtues of all the philosophers, nay, of all men, whether they be lawyers or theologians, have only a semblance of virtue, but in reality are vices (‘_vitia_’).”[188]

But what would be quite incomprehensible, had he actually read the scholastic theologians whose “civil, Aristotelian doctrine of justice” he was so constantly attacking, is, that he charges them with having stopped short at this natural justice and with not having taught anything higher; this higher justice was what he himself had brought to light, this was the “Scriptural justice which depended more on the Divine imputation than on the nature of things,”[189] and was not acquired by deeds but bestowed by God. The fact is, however, that the Schoolmen did not rest content merely with natural justice, but insist that true justice is something higher, supernatural and only to be attained to with the help of grace; it is only in some few later theologians with whom Luther may possibly have been acquainted, that this truth fails to find clear expression. Thomas of Aquin, for instance, distinguishes between the civil virtue of justice and the justice infused in the act of justification. He says expressly: “A man may be termed just in two ways, on account of civil [natural] justice and on account of infused justice. Civil justice is attained to without the grace which comes to the assistance of the natural powers, but infused justice is the work of grace. Neither the one nor the other, however, consists in the mere doing of what is good, for not everyone who does what is good is just, but only he who does it as do the just.”[190]

With regard to supernatural (infused) justice, the Church’s representatives, quite differently from Luther, had taught that man by his natural powers could only attain to God as the Author of nature but not to God as He is in Himself, i.e. to God as He has revealed and will communicate Himself in heaven; it is infused, sanctifying grace alone that places us in a higher order than that of nature and raises us to the status of being children of God; in it we love God, by virtue of the “habit” of love bestowed upon us, as He is in Himself, i.e. as He wills to be loved; sanctifying grace it is that brings us into a true relation with our supernatural and final end, viz. the vision of God in heaven, in which sense it may be called a vital principle infused into the soul.[191]

This language Luther either did not or would not understand. On this point particularly he had to suffer for his ignorance of the better class of theologians. He first embraced Occam’s hypothesis of the _possibility_ of an imputation of justice, and then, going further along the wrong road, he changed this possibility into a reality; soon, owing to his belief in the entire corruption of the natural man, imputed justice became, to him, the only justice. In this way he deprived theology of supernatural as well as of natural justice; for imputed justice is really no justice at all, but merely an alien one. “With Luther we have the end of the supernatural. His basic view, of justifying faith as the work of God in us performed without our co-operation, bears indeed a semblance of the supernatural.... But the supernatural is ever something alien.”[192]

What he had in his mind was always a foreign righteousness produced, not by man’s own works and acts performed under the help of grace, but only by the work of another; this we are told by Luther in so many words: “True and real piety which is of worth in God’s sight consists in alien works and not in our own.”[193] “If we wish to work for God we must not approach Him with our own works but with foreign ones.” “These are the works of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” “All that He has is ours.... I may attribute to myself all His works as though I had actually done them, if only I believe in Christ.... Our works will not suffice, all our powers together are too weak to resist even the smallest sin.... Hence when the Law comes and accuses you of not having kept it, send it to Christ and say: There is the Man who has fulfilled it, to Him I cling, He has fulfilled it for me and bestowed His fulfilment of it upon me; then the Law will have to hold its tongue.”[194]

_The Book of Concord on the Curtailment of Free-Will._

When orthodox Lutheranism gained a local and temporary victory in 1580 with the so-called Book of Concord, the authors of the book deplored the inferences drawn from Luther’s moral teaching, particularly from his denial of free-will, the dangers of which had already long been apparent.

“It is not unknown to us,” they say, “that this holy doctrine of the malice and impotence of free-will, the doctrine whereby our conversion and regeneration is ascribed solely to God and in no way to our own powers, has been godlessly, shamelessly and hatefully abused.... Many are becoming immoral and savage and neglectful of all pious exercises; they say: ‘Since we cannot turn to God of our own natural powers, let us remain hostile to God or wait until He converts us by force and against our will.’” “It is true that they possess no power to act in spiritual things, and that the whole business of conversion is merely the work of the Holy Ghost. And thus they refuse to listen to the Word of God, or to study it, or to receive the Sacraments; they prefer to wait until God infuses His gifts into them directly from above, and until they feel and are certain by inward experience that they have been converted by God.”

“Others,” they continue, speaking of the case as a possibility and not as a sad reality, “may possibly give themselves up to sad and dangerous doubts as to whether they have been predestined by God to heaven, and as to whether God will really work His gifts in them by the help of the Holy Ghost. Being weak and troubled in mind they do not grasp aright our pious doctrine of free-will, and they are confirmed in their doubts by the fact that they do not find within themselves any firm and ardent faith or hearty devotion to God, but only weakness, misery and fear.” The authors then proceed to deal with the widespread fear of predestination to hell.[195]

We have as it were a sad monument set up to the morality of the enslaved will and the doctrine of imputation, when the Book of Concord, in spite of the sad results it has just admitted, goes on in the same chapter to insist that all Luther’s principles should be preserved intact. “This matter Dr. Luther settled most excellently and thoroughly in his ‘_De servo arbitrio_’ against Erasmus, where he showed this opinion to be pious and irrefutable. Later on he repeated and further explained the same doctrine in his splendid Commentary on Genesis, particularly in his exposition of ch. xxvi. There, too, he made other matters clear—e.g. the doctrine of the ‘_absoluta necessitas_’—defended them against the objections of Erasmus and, by his pious explanations, set them above all evil insinuations and misrepresentations. All of which we here corroborate and commend to the diligent study of all.”[196]

Melanchthon’s and his school’s modifications of these extreme doctrines are here sharply repudiated, though Luther himself “never spoke with open disapproval” of Melanchthon’s Synergism.[197]

“From our doctrinal standpoint,” we there read, “it is plain that the teaching of the Synergists is false, who allege that man in spiritual things is not _altogether_ dead to what is good but merely badly wounded and _half_ dead.... They teach wrongly, that after the Holy Spirit has given us, through the Evangel, grace, forgiveness and salvation, then free-will is able to meet God by its natural powers and ... co-operate with the Holy Ghost. In reality the ability to lay hold upon grace (‘_facultas applicandi se ad gratiam_’) is solely due to the working of the Holy Ghost.”

What then is man to do, and how are the consequences described above to be obviated, on the one hand libertinism, on the other fear of predestination to hell?

Man still possesses a certain freedom, so the Book of Concord teaches, e.g. “to be present or not at the Church’s assemblies, to listen or close his ears to the Word of God.”

“The preaching of the Word of God is however the tool whereby the Holy Ghost seeks to effect man’s conversion and to make him ready to will and to work (‘_in ipsis et velle et perficere operari vult_’).” “Man is free to open his ears to the Word of God or to read it even when not yet converted to God or born again. In some way or other man still has free-will in such outward things even since Adam’s Fall.” Hence, by the Word, “by the preaching and contemplation of the sweet Evangel of the forgiveness of sins, the spark of ‘faith’ is enkindled in his heart.”[198]

“Although all effort without the power and work of the Holy Spirit is worthless, yet neither the preacher nor the hearer must doubt of this grace or work of the Holy Spirit,” so long as the preacher proceeds according to God’s will and command and “the hearer listens earnestly and diligently and dwells on what he hears.” We are not to judge of the working of the Holy Ghost by our feelings, but “agreeably with the promises of God’s Word.” We must hold that “the Word preached is the organ of the Holy Ghost whereby He truly works and acts in our hearts.”[199]

With the help of this queer, misty doctrine which, as we may notice, makes of preaching a sort of Sacrament working “_ex opere operato_,” Luther’s followers attempted to construct a system out of their master’s varying and often so arbitrary statements. At any rate they upheld his denial of any natural order of morality distinct from the order of grace. It was to remain true that man, “previous to conversion, possesses indeed an understanding, but not of divine things, and a will, though not for anything good and wholesome.” In this respect man stands far below even a stock or stone, because he resists the Word and Will of God (which they cannot do) until God raises him up from the death of sin, enlightens and creates him anew.[200]

Nevertheless several theses, undoubtedly Luther’s own, are here glossed over or quietly bettered. If, for instance, according to Luther everything takes place of absolute necessity (a fact to which the Formula of Concord draws attention), if man, even in the natural acts of the mind, is bound by what is fore-ordained,[201] then even the listening to a sermon and the dwelling on it cannot be matters of real freedom. Moreover the man troubled with fears on predestination, is comforted by the well-known Bible texts, which teach that it is the Will of God that all should be saved; whilst nothing is said of Luther’s doctrine that it is only the revealed God who speaks thus, whereas the hidden God acts quite otherwise, plans and carries out the very opposite, “damns even those who have not deserved it—and, yet, does not thereby become unjust.”[202] Reference is made to Adam’s Fall, whereby nature has been depraved; but nothing is said of Luther’s view that Adam himself simply could not avoid falling because God did not then “bestow on him the spirit of obedience.”[203] But, though these things are passed over in silence, due prominence is given to those ideas of Luther’s of which the result is the destruction of all moral order, natural as well as supernatural. According to the Formula of Concord the natural order was shattered by Adam’s Fall; as for the supernatural order it is replaced by the alien, mechanical order of imputation.

_Christianity merely Inward. The Church Sundered from the World_

Among the things which Luther did to the detriment of the moral principle must be numbered his merciless tearing asunder of spiritual and temporal, of Christian and secular life.

The olden Church sought to permeate the world with the religious spirit. Luther’s trend was in a great measure towards making the secular state and its office altogether independent; this, indeed, the more up-to-date sort of ethics is disposed to reckon among his greatest achievements. Luther even went so far as to seek to erect into a regular system this inward, necessary opposition of world and Church. Of this we have a plain example in certain of his instructions to the authorities.[204] Whereas the Church had exhorted people in power to temper with Christianity their administration of civil justice and their use of physical force—urging that the sovereign was a Christian not merely in his private but also in his official capacity,—Luther tells the ruler: The Kingdom of Christ wholly belongs to the order of grace, but the kingdom of the world and worldly life belong to the order of the Law; the two kingdoms are of a different species and belong to different worlds. To the one you belong as a Christian, to the other as a man and a ruler. Christ has nothing to do with the regulations of worldly life, but leaves them to the world; earthly life stands in no need of being outwardly hallowed by the Church.[205] Certain statements to a different effect will be considered elsewhere.

“A great distinction,” Luther said in 1523, “must be made between a worldling and a Christian, i.e. between a Christian and a worldly man. For a Christian is neither man nor woman ... must know nothing and possess nothing in the world.... A prince may indeed be a Christian, but he must not rule as a Christian, and when he rules he does so not as a Christian but as a prince. As an individual he is indeed a Christian, but his office or princedom is no business of his Christianity.” This seems to him proved by his mystical theory that a Christian “must not harm or punish anyone or revenge himself, but forgive everyone and endure patiently all injustice or evil that befalls him.” The theory, needless to say, is based on his misapprehension of the Evangelical Counsels which he makes into commands.[206] On such principles as these, he concludes, it was impossible for any prince to rule, hence “his being a Christian had nothing to do with land and subjects.”[207]

For the same reason he holds that “every man on this earth” comprises two “practically antagonistic personalities,” for “each one has at the same time to suffer, and not to suffer, everything.”[208] The dualism which Luther here creates is due to his extravagant over-statement of the Christian law. The Counsels of Perfection given by Christ in the Sermon on the Mount, with which Luther is here dealing (not to resist evil, not to go to law, etc., Mt. v. 19 ff.), are not an invitation addressed to all Christians, and if higher considerations or some duty stands in the way it would certainly denote no perfection to follow them. Luther’s misinterpretation necessarily led him to make a cleavage between Christian life and life in the world.

The dualism, however, in so far as it concerned the authorities had, however, yet another source. For polemical reasons Luther was determined to make an end of the great influence that the olden Church had acquired over public life. Hence he absolves the secular power from all dependence as the latter had itself sought to do even before his time. He refused to see that, in spite of all the abuses which had followed on the Church’s interference in politics during the Middle Ages, mankind had gained hugely by the guidance of religion. To swallow up the secular power in the spiritual had never been part of the Church’s teaching, nor was it ever the ideal of her enlightened representatives; but, for the morality of the great, for the observance of maxims of justice and for the improvement of the nations the principle that religion must not be separated from the life of the State and from the office of those in authority, but must permeate and spiritualise them was, as history proved, truly vital. Subsequent to Luther’s day the tendency to separate the two undoubtedly made unchecked progress. He himself, however, was not consistent in his attitude. On the contrary, he came more and more to desiderate the establishment of the closest possible bond between the civil authorities and religion—provided only that the ruler’s faith was the same as Luther’s. Nevertheless, generally speaking, the separation he had advocated of secular from spiritual became the rule in the Protestant fold.

“Lutheranism,” as Friedrich Paulsen said on the strength of his own observations in regions partly Catholic and partly Protestant, “which is commonly said to have introduced religion into the world and to have reconciled public worship with life and the duties of each one’s calling has, as a matter of fact, led to the complete alienation and isolation of the Church from real life; on the contrary, the older Church, despite all her ‘over-worldliness,’ has contrived to make herself quite at home in the world, and has spun a thousand threads in and around the fabric of its life.” He thinks himself justified in stating: “Protestantism is a religion of the individual, Catholicism is the religion of the people; the former seeks seclusion, the latter publicity. In the one even public worship bears a private character and appears as foreign to the world as the pulpit rhetoric of a Lutheran preacher of the old school; the [Protestant] Church stands outside the bustle of the workaday world in a world of her own.”[209]

We may pass over the fact, that, Luther, by discarding the so-called Counsels reduced morality to a dead level. In the case of all the faithful he abased it to the standard of the Law, doing away with that generous, voluntary service of God which the Church had ever approved and blessed. We have already shown this elsewhere, more particularly in connection with the status of the Evangelical Counsels and the striving after Christian perfection in the monastic life. According to him there are practically no Counsels for those who wish to pass beyond the letter of the Law; there is but one uniform moral Law, and, on the true Christian, even the so-called Counsels are strictly binding.[210]

Life in the world, however, according to his theory has very different laws; here quite another order obtains, which is, often enough, quite the opposite to what man, as a Christian, recognises in his heart to be the true standard. As a Christian he _must_ offer his cheek to the smiter; as a member of the civil order he may not do so, but, on the contrary, must everywhere vindicate his rights. Thus his Christianity, so long as he lives in the world, must perforce be reduced to a matter of inward feeling; it is constantly exposed to the severest tests, or, more accurately, constantly in the need of being explained away. The believer is faced by a twofold order of things, and the regulating of his moral conduct becomes a problem which can never be satisfactorily solved.

“Next to the doctrine of Justification there is hardly any other doctrine which Luther urges so frequently and so diligently as that of the inward character and nature of Christ’s kingdom, and the difference thus existing between it and the kingdom of the world, i.e. the domain of our natural life.”[211]

Let us listen to Luther’s utterances at various periods on the dualism in the moral life of the individual: “The twin kingdoms must be kept wide asunder: the spiritual where sin is punished and forgiven, and the secular where justice is demanded and dealt out. In God’s kingdom which He rules according to the Gospel there is no demanding of justice, but all is forgiveness, remission and bestowal, nor is there any anger, or punishment, but nothing save brotherly charity and service.”[212]—“No rights, anger, or punishment,” this certainly would have befitted the invisible, spiritual Church which Luther had originally planned to set up in place of the visible one.[213]

“Christ’s everlasting kingdom ... is to be an eternal spiritual kingdom in the hearts of men by the preaching of the Gospel and by the Holy Spirit.”[214] “For your own part, hold fast to the Gospel and to the Word of Christ so as to be ready to offer the other cheek to the smiter, to give your mantle as well as your coat whenever it is a question of yourself and your cause.”[215] It is a strict command, though at utter variance with the civil law, in which your neighbour also is greatly concerned. In so far, therefore, you must resist. “Thus you manage perfectly to satisfy at the same time both the Kingdom of God and that of the world, both the outward and the inward; you suffer evil and injustice and yet at the same time punish evil and injustice; you do not resist evil, and yet at the same time you resist it; for according to the one you look to yourself and to yours, and, according to the other, to your neighbour and to his rights. As regards yourself and yours, you act according to the Gospel and suffer injustice as a true Christian; as regards your neighbour and his rights, you act in accordance with charity and permit no injustice.”[216]

If, as is but natural, we ask, how Christ came so strictly to enjoin what was almost impossible, Luther replies that He gave His command only for Christians, and that real Christians were few in number: “In point of fact Christ is speaking only to His dear Christians [when He says, ‘that Christians must not go to law,’ etc.], and it is they alone who take it and carry it out; they make no mere Counsel of it as the Sophists do, but are so transformed by the Spirit that they do evil to no one and are ready willingly to suffer evil from anyone.” But the world is full of non-Christians and “them the Word does not concern at all.”[217] Worldlings must needs tread a very different way: “All who are not Christians belong to the kingdom of the world and are under the law.” Since they know not the command “Resist not evil,” “God has given them another government different from the Christian estate, and the Kingdom of God.” There ruleth coercion, severity, and, in a word, the Law, “seeing, that, amongst a thousand, there is barely one true Christian.” “If anyone wished to govern the world according to the Gospel ... dear heart, what would the result be! He would be loosening the leashes and chains of the wild and savage beasts, and turning them astray to bite and tear everybody.... Then the wicked would abuse the Christian freedom of the Gospel and work their own knavery.”[218]

Luther clung to the very end of his life to this congeries of contradictory theories, which he advocated in 1523, in his passionate aversion to the ancient doctrine of perfection. In 1539 or 1540 he put forth a declaration against the “Sophists” in defence of his theory of the “Counsels,” directed more particularly against the Sorbonne, which had insisted that the “_consilia evangelica_,” “were they regarded as precepts, would be too heavy a burden for religion.”[219] “They make out the Counsels,” he says, “i.e. the commandments of God, to be not necessary for eternal life and invite people to take idolatrous, nay, diabolical vows. To lower the Divine precepts to the level of counsels is a horrible, Satanic blasphemy.” As a Christian “you must rather forsake and sacrifice everything”; to this the first table of the Law (of Moses, the Law of the love of God) binds you, but, on account of the second table (the law of social life), you may and must preserve your own for the sake of your family. As a Christian, too, you must be willing to suffer at the hands of every man, “but, apart from your Christian profession, you must resist evil if you wish to be a good citizen of this world.”[220]

“Hence you see, O Christian brother,” he concludes, “how much you owe to the doctrine which has been revived in our day, as against a Pharisaical theology which leaves us nothing even of Moses and the Ten Commandments, and still less of Christ.”

“Such honour and glory have I by the grace of God—whether it be to the taste or not of the devil and his brood—that, since the days of the Apostles, no doctor, scribe, theologian or lawyer has confirmed, instructed and comforted the consciences of the secular Estates so well and lucidly as I have done by the peculiar grace of God. Of this I am confident. For neither St. Augustine nor St. Ambrose, who are the greatest authorities in this field, are here equal to me.... Such fame as this must be and remain known to God and to men even should they go raving mad over it.”[221]

It is true that his theories contain many an element of good and, had he not been able to appeal to this, he could never have spoken so feelingly on the subject.

The good which lies buried in his teaching had, however, always received its due in Catholicism. Luther, when contrasting the Church’s alleged aversion for secular life with his own exaltation of the dignity of the worldly calling, frequently speaks in language both powerful and fine of the worldly office which God has assigned to each one, not only to the prince but even to the humble workman and tiller of the field, and of the noble moral tasks which thus devolve on the Christian. Yet any aversion to the world as he conceives it had never been a principle within the Church, though individual writers may indeed have erred in this direction. The assertion that the olden Church, owing to her teaching concerning the state of perfection and the Counsels, had not made sufficient allowance for the dignity of the secular calling, has already been fully dealt with.

It is true that Luther, to the admiration of his followers, confronted the old Orders founded by the Church with three new Orders, all Divinely instituted, viz. the home, the State and the Church.[222] But, so far from “notably improving” on the “scholastic ethics” of the past, he did not even contrive to couch his thoughts on these “Orders” in language as lucid as that used long before his day by the theologians and moralists of the Church in voicing the same idea; what he says of these “Orders” also falls short of the past on the score of wealth and variety.[223] Nevertheless the popular ways he had of depicting things as he fain would see them, proved alluring, and this gift of appealing to the people’s fancy and of charming them by the contrast of new and old, helped to build up the esteem in which he has been held ever since; his inclination, moreover, to promote the independence of the individual in the three “Orders,” and to deliver him from all hierarchical influence must from the outset have won him many friends.

_Divorce of Religion and Morals_

Glancing back at what has already been said concerning Luther’s abasement of morality and considering it in the light of his theories of the Law and Gospel, of assurance of salvation and morality, we find as a main characteristic of Luther’s ethics a far-reaching, dangerous rift between religion and morals. Morality no longer stands in its old position at the side of faith.

Faith and the religion which springs from it are by nature closely and intimately bound up with morality. This is shown by the history of heathenism in general, of modern unbelief in particular. Heathenism or unbelief in national life always signifies a moral decline; even in private life morality reacts on the life of faith and the religious feeling, and _vice versa_. The harmony between religion and morality arises from the fact that the love of God proceeds from faith in His dominion and Fatherly kindness.

Luther, in spite of his assurances concerning the stimulus of the life of faith and of love, severed the connection between faith and morality and placed the latter far below the former. His statements concerning faith working by love, had they been more than mere words, would, in themselves, have led him back to the very standpoint of the Church he hated. In reality he regards the “Law” as something utterly hostile to the “pious” soul; before the true “believer” the Law shrinks back, though, to the man not yet justified by “faith,” it serves as a taskmaster and a hangman. The “Law” thus loses the heavenly virtue with which it was stamped. In Luther’s eyes the only thing of any real value is that religion which consists in faith in the forgiveness of sins.

“This,” he says, “is the ‘_Summa Summarum_’ of a truly Christian life, to know that in Christ you have a Gracious God ready to forgive you your sins and never to think of them again, and that you are now a child of everlasting happiness, reigning with Christ over heaven and earth.”

It is true he hastens to add, that, from this saving faith, works of morality would “assuredly” flow.[224]

“Assuredly”? Since Albert Ritschl it has been repeated countless times that Luther did no more than “assert that faith by its very nature is productive of good works.” As a matter of fact “he is wont to speak in much too uncertain a way of the good works which follow faith”; with him “faith” is the whole man, whereas the Bible says: “Fear God _and_ keep His commandments [i.e. religion _plus_ morality]; this is the whole man.”[225]

Luther’s one-sided insistence on a confiding, trusting faith in God, at the cost of the moral work, has its root in his theory of the utter depravity of man and his entire lack of freedom, in his low esteem for the presuppositions of morality, in his conviction that nature is capable of nothing, and, owing to its want of self-determination, is unable on its own even to be moral at all. If we desire, so he says frankly, to honour God’s sublime majesty and to humble fallen creatures as they deserve, then let us recognise that God works all in all without any possibility of any resistance whatsoever on man’s part, God’s action being like to that of the potter on his clay. Just as Luther was unable to recognise justification in the sense in which it had been taught of yore, so also he entirely failed to appreciate the profounder conception of morality.

His strictures on morality—which had ever been esteemed as the voluntary keeping of the Law by man, who by a generous obedience renders to God the freedom received—point plainly to the cause of his upheaval of the whole field of dogma. At the outset he had set himself to oppose self-righteousness, but in doing so he dealt a blow at righteousness itself; he had attacked justice by works, but justice itself had suffered; he declared war on the wholly imaginary phantom of a self-chosen morality based on man-made ordinances and thereby degraded morality, if he did not indeed undermine its very foundations.

What Möhler says of the reformers and their tendency to set aside the commands of morality applies in particular to Luther and his passionate campaign. It is true he writes, that “the moral freedom they had destroyed came to involve the existence of a freedom from that moral law which concerns only the seen, bounded world of time, but fails to apply in the eternal world, set high above all time and space. This does not mean, however, that the reformers were conscious of what lay at the base of their system; on the contrary, had they seen it, had they perceived whither their doctrines were necessarily leading, they would have rejected them as quite unchristian.”[226]

The following reflection of the famous author of “Catholic Symbolism” may also be set on record, the better to safeguard against misapprehension anything that may have been said, particularly as it touches upon a matter to which we repeatedly have had occasion to allude.

“No one can fail to see the religious element in Protestantism,” he says, “who calls to mind the idea of Divine Providence held by Luther and Melanchthon when they started the work of the Reformation.... All the phenomena of this world [according to it] are God’s own particular work and man is merely His instrument. Everything in the history of the world is God’s invisible doing which man’s agency merely makes visible. Who can fail to see in this a truly religious outlook on all things? All is referred back to God, Who is all in all.... In the same way the Redeemer also is all in all in the sense that He and His Spirit are alone active, and faith and regeneration are solely due to Him.”[227]

Möhler here relates how, according to Luther, Staupitz had said of the new teaching at its inception, “What most consoles me is that it has again been brought to light how all honour and praise belong to God alone, but, to man, nothing at all.” This statement is quite in keeping with the vague, mystical world of thought in which Staupitz, who was no master of theology or philosophy, lived. But it also reflects the impression of many of Luther’s contemporaries who, unaware of his misrepresentation of the subject, were attracted by the advantage to religion and morality which seemed to accrue from Luther’s effort to ascribe all things solely to God.

Where this tendency to subordinate all to God and to exalt the merits of Christ finds more chastened expression in Luther’s writings, when, in his hearty, homely fashion, he paints the love of the Master or His virtues as the pattern of all morality, or pictures in his own peculiar realistic style the conditions of everyday life the better to lash abuses, then the reader is able to appreciate the better side of his ethics and the truly classic example he sometimes sets of moral exhortations. It would surely be inexplicable how so many earnest Protestant souls, from his day to our own, should have found and still find a stimulus in his practical works, for instance, in his Postils, did these works not really contain a substratum of truth, food for thought and a certain gift of inspiration. Even the man who studies the long list of Luther’s practical writings simply from the standpoint of the scholar and historian—though he may not always share Luther’s opinions—cannot fail to acknowledge that the warmth with which Luther speaks of those Christian truths accepted by all, leaves a deep impression and re-echoes within the soul like a voice from our common home.

On the one hand Luther rightly retained many profoundly religious elements of the mediæval theology, indeed, owing to his curious way of looking at things, he actually outdid in mediævalism the Middle Ages themselves, for he merged all human freedom in the Divine action, a thing those Ages had not dared to do.

And yet, on the other hand, to conclude our survey of his “abasement of practical Christianity,” he is so ultramodern on a capital point of his ethics as to merit being styled the precursor of modern subjectivism as applied to morals. For all his new ethical precepts and rules, beyond the Decalogue and the Natural Law, are devoid of objective obligation; they lack the sanction which alone would have rendered them capable of guiding the human conscience.

_The Lack of Obligation and Sanction_

Luther’s moral instructions differed in one weighty particular from those of the olden Church.

As he himself insists at needless length, they were a collection of personal opinions and exhortations which appeared to him to be based on Holy Scripture or the Law of Nature—and in many instances, though not always, actually did rest on this foundation. When he issued new pronouncements of a practical character, for instance, concerning clandestine espousals, or annulled the olden order of public worship, the sacraments, or the Commandments of the Church, he was wont to say, that, it was his intention merely to advise consciences and to arouse the Evangelical consciousness. He took this line partly because he was conscious of having no personal authority, partly because he wished to act according to the principles proclaimed in his “Von der Freyheyt eynes Christen Menschen,” or, again, in order to prevent the rise of dissent and the resistance he always dreaded to any attempt to lay down categorical injunctions. Thus his ethical regulations, so far as they differed from the olden ones, amounted merely to so many invitations to act according to the standard set up, whereas the character of the ethical legislation of Catholicism is essentially binding. Having destroyed the outward authority of the Church, he had nothing more to count upon than the “ministry of the Word,” and everything now depended on the minister’s being able to convince the believer, now freed from the ancient trammels.

He himself, for instance, once declared that he would “assume no authority or right to coerce, for I neither have nor desire any such. Let him rule who will or must; I shall instruct and console consciences as far as I am able. Who can or wants to obey, let him do so; who won’t or can’t, let him leave it alone.”[228]

He would act “by way of counsel,” so he teaches, “as in conscience he would wish to serve good friends, and whoever likes to follow his advice must do so at his own risk.”[229] “He gives advice agreeably to his own conscience,” writes Luthardt in “Luthers Ethik,” “leaving it to others to accept his advice or not on their own responsibility.”[230]

Nor can one well argue that the requisite sanction for the new moral rules was the general sanction found in the Scriptural threats of Divine chastisements to overtake transgressors. The question is whether the Law laid down in the Bible or written in man’s heart is really identical with Luther’s. Those who were unable of themselves to prove that this was the case were ultimately (so Luther implies) to believe it on his authority and conform themselves to his “Evangelical consciousness”; thus, for instance, in the matter of religious vows, held by Luther to be utterly detestable, and by the Church to be both permissible and praiseworthy.

In but few points does the purely subjective character of the new religion and morality advocated by Luther stand out so clearly as in this absence of any objective sanction or higher authority for his new ethics. Christianity hitherto had appealed to the divine, unchangeable dignity of the Church, which, by her infallible teaching, her discipline and power to punish, insured the observance of law and order in the religious domain. But, now, according to the new teaching, man—who so sadly needs a clear and definite lead for his moral life—besides the Decalogue, “clear” Bible text and Natural Law, is left with nothing but “recommendations” devoid of any binding force; views are dinned into his ears the carrying out of which is left solely to his feelings, or, as Luther says, to his “conscience.”

Deprived of the quieting guidance of an authority which proclaims moral obligations and sees that they are carried out, conscience and personality tend in his system to assume quite a new rôle.

6. The part played by Conscience and Personality. Luther’s warfare with his old friend Caspar Schwenckfeld

Protestants have confidently opined, that “Luther mastered anew the personal foundation of morality by reinstating conscience in its rights”; by insisting on feeling he came to restore to “personality the dignity” which in previous ages it had lost under the ban of a “legalism” devoid of “morality.”

To counter such views it may be of use to give some account of the way in which Luther taught conscience to exercise her rights. The part he assigns to the voice within which judges of good and evil, scarcely bears out the contention that he really strengthened the “foundation of morality.” The vague idea of “personality” may for the while be identified with conscience, especially as in the present connection “person” stands for the medium of conscience.[231]

_On Conscience and its Exercise in General_

To quiet the conscience, to find some inward support for one’s actions in the exercise of one’s own will, this is what Luther constantly insists on in the moral instructions he gives, at the same time pointing to his own example.[232] What was the nature of his own example? His rebellion against the Church’s authority was to him the cause of a long, fierce struggle with himself. He sought to allay the anxiety which stirred his soul to its depths by the reassuring thought, that all doubts were from the devil from whom alone all scruples come; he sternly bade his soul rest secure and as resolutely refused to hearken to any doubts regarding the truth of his new Evangel. His new and quite subjective doctrines he defended in the most subjective way imaginable and, to those of his friends whose consciences were troubled, he recommends a similar course of action; he even on several occasions told people thus disturbed in mind whom he wished to reassure, that they must listen to his, Luther’s, voice as though it were the voice of God. This was his express advice to his pupil Schlaginhaufen[233] and, in later days, to his friend Spalatin, who also had become a prey to melancholy.[234] He himself claimed to have been delivered from his terrors by having simply accepted as a God-sent message the encouraging words of Bugenhagen.[235]

“Conscience is death’s own cruel hangman,” so he told Spalatin; from Ambrose and Augustine the latter should learn to place all his trust not in conscience but in Christ.[236] It scarcely needs stating that here he is misapplying the fine sayings of both these Fathers. They would have repudiated with indignation the words of consolation which not long after he offered the man suffering from remorse of conscience, assuring him that he was as yet a novice in struggling against conscience, and had hitherto been “too tender a sinner”; “join yourself to us real, big, tough sinners, that you may not belittle and put down Christ, Who is the Saviour, not of small, imaginary sinners, but of great and real ones”; thus it was that he, Luther, had once been consoled in his sadness by Staupitz.[237] Here he is applying wrongly a perfectly correct thought of his former Superior. Not perhaps quite false, but at any rate thoroughly Lutheran, is the accompanying assurance: “I stand firm [in my conscience] and maintain my attitude, that you may lean on me in your struggle against Satan and be supported by me.”

Thus does he direct Spalatin, “who was tormented by remorse, to comfort himself _against_ his conscience.”[238]

“To comfort oneself against one’s conscience,” such is the task which Luther, in many of his writings, proposes to the believer. Indeed, in his eyes the chief thing of all is to “get the better of sin, death, hell and our own conscience”; in spite of the opposition of reason to Luther’s view of Christ’s satisfaction, we must learn, “through Him [Christ] to possess nothing but grace and forgiveness,” of course, in the sense taught at Wittenberg.[239]

A former brother monk, Link, the apostate Augustinian of Nuremberg, Luther also encourages, like Spalatin the fallen priest, to kick against the prick of conscience: “These are devil’s thoughts and not from us, which make us despair,” they must be “left to the devil,” the latter always “keeps closest to those who are most pious”; to yield to such despairing thoughts “is as bad as giving in and leaving Satan supreme.”[240]

When praising the “sole” help and consolation of the grace of Christ he does not omit to point out, directly or otherwise, how, “when in despair of himself,” and enduring frightful inward “sufferings” of conscience, he had hacked his way through them all and had reached a firm faith in Christ minus all works, and had thus become a “theologian of the Cross.”[241]

Even at the commencement of the struggle, in order to encourage wavering followers, he allowed to each man’s conscience the right to defy any confessor who should forbid Luther’s writings to such of his parishioners who came to him: “Absolve me at my own risk,” they were to say to him, “I shall not give up the books, for then I should be sinning against my conscience.” He argues that, according to Rom. xiv. 1, the confessor might not “urge them against their conscience.” Was it then enough for a man to have formed himself a conscience, for the precept no longer to hold? His admonition was, however, intended merely as a counsel for “strong and courageous consciences.” If the confessor did not prove amenable, they were simply to “go without scruple to the Sacrament,” and if this, too, was refused them then they had only to send “Sacrament and Church” about their business.[242] Should the confessor require contrition for sins committed, this, according to another of his statements, was a clear attack on conscience which does not require contrition for absolution, but merely faith in Christ; such a priest ought to have the keys taken out of his hands and be given a pitchfork instead.[243]

In the above instances the Catholic could find support for his conscience in the infallible authority of the Church. It was this authority which forbade him Luther’s writings as heretical, and, in the case of contrition—which Luther also brings forward—it was likewise his religious faith, which, consonantly with man’s natural feeling, demanded such sorrow for sin. In earlier days authority and faith were the reliable guides of conscience without which it was impossible to do. Luther left conscience to itself or referred it to his own words and his reading of Scripture, though this again, as he himself acknowledged, was not an absolute rule; thus he leaves it a prey to a most unhappy uncertainty—unless, indeed, it was able to “find assurance” in the way he wishes.