Already in the Christmas sermons of 1515 Luther does not scruple to place himself, as it were, on the same footing with the prophets, wise men and those learned in the Scriptures, whose persecution Christ foretold, more particularly among the last of the three groups. Even then his view was unorthodox.
“There are some,” he says, “who by the study of Holy Scripture form themselves into teachers and who are taught neither by men nor directly by God alone.” These are the learned in the Scriptures. “They exercise themselves in the knowledge of the truth by meditation and research. Thus they become able to interpret the Bible and to write for the instruction of others.” But such men are persecuted, he continues, and, as the Lord prophesied of the prophets and wise men and scribes that they would not be received, but attacked, so is it also with me. They murmur against my teaching, as I am aware, and oppose it. They reproach me with being in error because “I preach always of Christ as the hen under whose wings all who wish to be righteous must gather.” Thus his ideas with regard to righteousness must have been looked upon as importunate or exaggerated, and, by some, in all probability, as erroneous. He immediately launches out into an apology: “What I have said is this: We are not saved by all our righteousness, but it is the wings of the hen which protect us against the birds of prey, i.e. against the devil ... but, as it was with the Jews, who persecuted righteousness, so it is to-day. My adversaries do not know what righteousness is, they call their own fancies grace. They become birds of prey and pounce upon the chicks who hope for salvation through the mercy of our hen.”
Such rude treatment meted out to those who found fault with him (and one naturally thinks of clergy and religious, perhaps even of his very brethren, as the culprits), the denouncing them from the pulpit as “birds of prey,” and his claim to lay down the law, this, and similar passages in the sermons, throw a strong light on his disputatious temper.
In a well-ordered condition of things the Superiors of the Augustinians or the diocesan authorities would have intervened to put a stop to sermons so scandalously offensive; at Wittenberg, however, the evil was left unchecked and allowed to take deeper root. The students, the younger monks and some of the burghers, became loud and enthusiastic followers of the bold preacher. Staupitz was altogether on his side, and, owing to him, also the Elector of Saxony. The Prince was, however, so little of an authority on matters theological that Luther once writes of him that he was “in things concerning God and the salvation of the soul almost seven times blind.”
Luther’s notes on his Sunday sermons during the summer of 1516 — a time when he had already expressed his errors quite plainly in his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans — afford us a glimpse of an acute controversy. At this time his sermons dealt with the first Commandment.
The Gospel for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost with the words: “Beware of false prophets” gives him an all too tempting opportunity for a brush with his adversaries, and, on July 6, he attacks them from the standpoint of his new ideas on righteousness. “Much fasting, and long prayers,” he cries, “study, preaching, watching, and poor clothing, these are the pious lambskins under which ravening wolves hide themselves.” In their case these are only “works done for show.” These Observantines, for all their great outward display of holiness, are “heretics and schismatics.” Thus does he storm, evidently applying his words to his brother monks of the Observantine party, who probably had been among the first to criticise him. The following remarks on rebellion and defamation make this application all the clearer. “The true works by which we may recognise the prophets are done in the inner and hidden man. But these proud men are wanting above all in patience and the charity which is forgetful of self, but concerned for others.” “When they have to do works which are not to their liking they are slow, rebellious, obstinate, but they well know how to take away the name of others and to pass judgment on them.... There is no greater plague in the Church to-day than these men with the words: ‘Good works are necessary’ in their mouths; men who refuse to distinguish between what is good and evil because they are enemies of the Cross, i.e. of the good things of God.”
Such a daring challenge on Luther’s part did not fail in its effect. Within as well as outside the Order united preparations were being made for a strong resistance, his foes working both openly and in secret.
Luther’s adversaries were again made the object of his public vituperation in two sermons preached on the same day a little later. This was on July 27, the 10th Sunday after Pentecost. In one sermon the passionate orator attempted to show the danger of the times; he describes how powerful the devil had become and how under the appearance of good works he was making certain persons “fine breakers” of the first Commandment. “And these venture,” he says, “to shoot arrows secretly against those who are right of heart.” In the other sermon his opponents had to submit to being called — in allusion to the Sunday’s Gospel of the Pharisee and the Publican — real “Pharisees, who by reason of their assumed holiness and merits seek the praise of men,” whereas in reality, with their self-righteousness, they have merely erected an idol in their hearts.
Even this was not enough however. The continuous complaints of those who thought differently from himself called Luther into the field again the very next Sunday (August 3). They heard what they might have anticipated, as soon as the fiery preacher, whose appearance was doubtless greeted by his pupils and adherents with looks of joy, got to work on his thesis: To place our hope in anything but God, even in the merit of our good works, is to have false idols before God. Then the stream of words flowed apace against the “proud saints,” against the presumptuous assurance of salvation on the part of the servitors of works, against the fools who make the narrow way to heaven still narrower, against the A B C pupils, who know nothing outside their own works. “These are old stagers,” he cries, because, like certain horses who only go along one track, they know only the one path of their own works. As though he recollected his own short-lived zeal for the work of the Order, he adds: “At the commencement, when a man first enters on the path of the religious life he has to exercise himself in many good works, fasts, vigils, prayers, works of mercy, submission, obedience and other such-like.” But to remain permanently stuck fast in these, that is what makes a man a Pharisee. “The truly pious who are led by the Spirit,” he continues, in a vein of peculiar mysticism, “once initiated into these things, do not trouble much more about them. Rather they offer themselves to God, ready for any work to which He may call them, and are led through many sufferings and humiliations without knowing whither they are going.”
Luther frequently spoke at that time in the language of a certain school of mysticism with which he was much enamoured. The following extract from the sermon under consideration, together with some thoughts on similar lines, from his synodal address at Leitzau, belong here.
“The man of God leaves himself entirely in God’s hands and does not attach himself to any works. His works are nameless at the commencement, though not at the end, because he does not act, but remains passive; he does not calculate with his own cleverness, or make projects, but allows himself to be led and does differently from what he had intended; thus he is calm and at rest in God. Whereas the self-righteous who abound in their own sense (‘sensuales iustitiarii’) are apt to despair of their own works — for they want to determine and name every word beforehand, and with them the name is the first thing and this they follow up with their works — the man of God on the contrary hurries forward in advance of every name.”
In the discourse which Luther wrote, probably in the autumn or winter months of 1515, for Georg Mascov, provost of Leitzau (see above, ), and which was intended for a synodal meeting of the clergy, he says, in his most exaggerated fashion: “The whole world lies as it were under a deluge of false and filthy teaching.” The Word of God like a tiny flame is barely kept alive. Egoism, worldliness and vice are predominant. And the remedy? He will cry it aloud over the whole world: the onl
y remedy is to preach “the word of truth” with much greater zeal. The greatest, “nay almost the only sin of the priests” is the neglect of the “word of truth” and it is much to be deplored, according to him, “that priests who fall into sins of the flesh make more account of them than of the neglect of the preaching of the word of truth.”
The address deals further at great length with the holy regeneration of man in God. This is something which God works in us while we remain altogether passive: a man’s seeking, praying, knocking has nothing to do with it because mercy alone effects it. Man does nothing (“ipso nihil agente, petente, merente”); in this mystical regeneration by God, it is as with the natural generation of man: “he who is generated in both cases does not count, and can do nothing by his work or merits towards his begetting, but lies wholly in the will of the Father.”
As sons of God we must bear fruit — here the discourse becomes quite practical — and the purpose of this meeting is to demand it of the clergy. “We must not expose our Synod to the scorn of our enemies.” It is more important that chastity and every virtue should dwell in the priests than that statutes should be made with regard to readings, prayers, festivals, and ceremonies.
The vague, obscure mysticism which played a part in Luther’s spiritual development at that time, as well as his wrong, one-sided interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, had, as already stated, led him into a heterodox by-way.
A cursory glance at the influence of Scholasticism and Mysticism on his mental progress, may perhaps be here in place.
4. Preliminary Remarks on Young Luther’s Relations to Scholasticism and Mysticism
In the years of Luther’s development the two great intellectual forces of the Middle Ages, Scholasticism and Mysticism, no longer exercised quite so powerful an influence as of yore, when they ruled over the world of intellect. Their influence on Luther’s views and his career was diverse. Scholasticism in its then state of decay, with its endless subtilties and disputatiousness, which, moreover, he knew only under the form of Occam’s nominalism, repelled him, to his own great loss. As a result he never acquired those elements of knowledge of true and lasting value to be found in the better schools, of which the traditions embodied the work of centuries of intellectual effort on the part of some of the world’s greatest minds. Mysticism, on the other hand, attracted him on account of his natural disposition, so full of feeling and imagination. He had been initiated into it at the monastery by the works of Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure and Gerson, and, later, by the sermons of Tauler and the so-called German Theology. This study had been recommended him by Staupitz and also by his brother monks, especially by Johann Lang. It was, however, the more obscure and ambiguous writings and extracts from mystic works which appealed to him most, owing to his being able to read into them his own ideas.
As regards Scholasticism, his character predisposed him against it. Scholastic learning is founded on conceptual operations of reason; it aims at clear definitions, logical proofs and a systematic linking together of propositions. Luther’s mind, on the other hand, inclined more to a free treatment of the subject, one which allowed for feeling and imagination, and to such descriptions as offered a field for his eloquence. One of the chief reasons, however, for his lifelong dislike of Scholasticism was his very partial acquaintance with the same. He had, as we shall see, never studied its great representatives in the thirteenth century; he had made acquaintance only with its later exponents, viz. the Nominalists of Occam’s school, who gave the tone to his theological instructions and whose teachings were very prevalent in the schools in that day. He speaks repeatedly of William of Occam as his teacher. Of Luther’s relations to his doctrines we shall have to speak later: some of Occam’s views he opposed, others, which happened to be at variance with those of St. Thomas of Aquin, he approved. He would not have attributed to the latter and to other exponents of the better school of Scholasticism such foolish theses as he did — theses of which they never even dreamt — had he possessed any clear notion of their teaching. There can be no doubt that he also imbibed during his first years as a student at Erfurt, the spirit of antagonism against Scholasticism which Humanism with its craving for novelty displayed, an antagonism based ostensibly on disgust at the unclassic form of the former.
Already during the earliest period of his career at Wittenberg, as soon, indeed, as he began to preach and lecture, he commenced his attacks against Scholasticism.
He considers that Aristotle, on whom in the Middle Ages both theologians and philosophers had set such store, had been grossly misunderstood by most of the scholastics; all the good there is in Aristotle, he says, he has stolen from others; whatever in him is right, others must understand and make use of better than he himself.
He often passes judgment on the theology of the Middle Ages from the point of view of the narrow, one-sided school of Occam, and then, with his lively imagination, he grossly exaggerates the opposition between it and St. Thomas of Aquin and the more classic schoolmen. The whole herd of theologians, he says, has been led astray by Aristotle; nor have they understood him in the least; according to him, Thomas of Aquin — the Doctor whom the Church has so greatly honoured and placed at the head of all theologians — did not expound a single chapter of Aristotle aright; “all the Thomists together” have not understood one chapter. Aristotle has only led them all to lay too much stress upon the importance and merit of human effort and human works to the disadvantage of God’s grace. Here lay Aristotle’s chief crime discovered by Luther, thanks to his own new theology.
In his lectures on the Psalms Luther already tells his hearers that the bold loquacity of theology was due to Aristotle; he makes highly exaggerated remarks regarding the disputes between the Scotists and Occam and between Occam and Scotus. Peter Lombard, no less than Scotus and St. Thomas, comes in for some harsh criticism. But Luther ever reverts to Aristotle. He wishes, so he writes to his friend Lang in February, 1516, to tear off “the Greek mask which this comedian has assumed to pass himself off in the Church as a philosopher; his shame should be laid bare to all.”
Such audacious language had probably never before been used against the greatest minds in the history of human thought by a theological professor, who himself had as yet given no proof whatever of his capacity.
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.
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.” 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.
Collected Works of Martin Luther Page 581
