Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Further, if we consider those passages in Luther’s earlier writings alleged as proofs of his belief in the irresistibility of concupiscence, we find that in every case they merely emphasise the inevitable continuance of concupiscence in man, without in any way implying the necessity of our acquiescing in the same, and without excluding grace. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 he says for instance, “Why do we hold concupiscence to be irresistible? Well, try and do something without the interference of concupiscence. Naturally you cannot. So then your nature is incapable of fulfilling the law.” Elsewhere also Luther lays much stress upon the indestructibility and the impossibility of rooting out of man the smouldering fire of evil, the “fomes peccati,” though he is wrong in making this condition equivalent to a culpable non-fulfilling of the law by man; he is mistaken not only in his common statement that man’s evil inclination, even though involuntary, is sinful in God’s sight, that it is in fact original sin, and that it would carry man to damnation were God not to impute to him Christ’s righteousness; he also errs by unduly magnifying the power of concupiscence, as though the practice of virtue, prayer and the reception of the Sacraments did not weaken it much more than he is willing to admit.

  In 1515 he declares that evil concupiscence or sin “cannot be removed from us by any counsel or work,” and that “we all recognise it to be quite invincible (“invincibilem esse concupiscentiam penitus”); invincible, i.e. in the sense of ineradicable, for which reason, as he again repeats here, it must at least be rendered innocuous by humble prayer for God’s help. In spite of the strong expression “invincibilis,” and in spite of the comparison he makes elsewhere between the evil inclination and Cerberus or Antæus, he does not go further here than in another assertion in the Commentary on the Psalms which has also been urged against him: “the passion of anger, pride, sensuality, when it is aroused, is strong, yea invincible (‘immo invincibilis’), as experience teaches,” i.e. it appears so to the person attacked by it. He had just remarked that in such a case we must hope in God and despair of ourselves. He describes in the strongest terms, in the Commentary on the Psalms, the strength of concupiscence in habitual sinners who are not accustomed to turn to God’s grace: “the sinner who is oppressed by vice, and feels the devil and his body of sin forcing him to evil, allows the inner voice to speak constantly against sin, and severely blames himself in his conscience ... reason and the moral sense, remnants left over from the ruin of original sin, awaken in him and cry without ceasing to the Lord, even though the will sins, forced thereto by sin.” We repeat, that in his Commentary on the Psalms he does not yet actually deny natural freedom in the doing of what is good.

  The view that man, without God’s grace, is entirely lacking in freedom with regard to his passions — a view which, it is true, permeates Luther’s Commentary on Romans — was not the starting-point of Luther’s theological development. It was the end of the first stage through which he had passed. This doctrine reached later on its culminating point in his book, “De servo arbitrio,” against Erasmus. Here, at the head of his proofs, he openly confesses himself a determinist, admitting that God has decreed beforehand all man’s actions; any such determinism is, however, wanting in his earlier life, nor is it to be found in his Commentary on Romans; Luther does not yet show himself to be led by determinist ideas. Even in his work against Erasmus there are no forcible grounds for attributing the origin of his new teaching to his inward corruption. Therein he merely denies the freedom of the will for good without grace, though he allows it to be free in indifferent matters, a somewhat inconsistent theory owing to the difficulty of determining exactly the limitations of these indifferent things.

  Neither the Commentary on the Psalms nor that on Romans gives us the impression of being the work of an immoral man, a fact which should also carry some weight. An author who at the first assault had capitulated to his evil desires would hardly have been able to conceal his low moral standard; he would rather have been tempted to join the Epicureans or the Sceptics, or the unbelieving ranks of the Humanists. Of anything of the kind there is no trace in the books last mentioned.

  Their characteristic is rather — there is no harm in mentioning it now — a certain false spiritualism, a mysticism, which, especially in the interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, frequently follows quite devious paths. In consequence of his unceasing opposition to self-righteousness, of his poor idea of God and of human strength, and of his false mystical train of thought, Luther came to dismiss human freedom and to set up the power of sin on the throne. Aristotle’s teaching regarding the natural righteousness which arises from good actions is particularly distasteful to Luther, and equally distasteful to the nominalistic critic is the doctrine of supernatural righteousness through infused sanctifying grace, which he prefers to replace by the imputation of the merits of Christ.

  3. The Real Starting-point and the Co-operating Factors

  The real origin of Luther’s teaching must be sought in a fundamental principle which governed him, which was fostered by the decline in his life as a religious and a priest, and more particularly by his inordinate love of his own opinion and by the uncharitable criticisms he passed upon others. This was his unfavourable estimate of good works, and of any effort, natural or supernatural, on the part of man.

  This opposition to a principle, common to the Church and to monasticism, as to the necessity in which men generally and religious in particular stand of performing good works if they wish to please God, is the first deviation from the right path which we notice in him. He called it a fight against “holiness by works” and self-righteousness, and in this fight he went still further. He made his own the deadly error that man by his natural powers is unable to do anything but sin. To this he added that the man who, by God’s grace, is raised to justification through divinely infused faith and trust must, it is true, perform good works, but that the latter are not to be accounted meritorious. All works avail nothing as means for arriving at righteousness and eternal salvation; faith alone effects both. Not at the outset, but gradually, did he make his antagonism to good works the foundation of a doctrine built up under the influence of a lively imagination, a powerful and undisciplined self-confidence and other factors which will be mentioned below. In his controversy with the “holy by works” he had exclaimed () “there is no greater pest in the Church to-day than those men who go about saying ‘we must do good works.’” His real enemies were soon the traditional Catholic belief and practice regarding good works and personal activity in general; he did not confine himself to expressing his dissatisfaction with the Observantines in his own Order or the possible excesses of other supporters of outward works.

  It is easy to recognise how this opposition to works runs like a dark thread through the first beginnings of his teaching of the new doctrine and onward through the whole course of his life. We may here, starting at the commencement, anticipate his history somewhat.

  “At the first,” so he says himself in later years, “my struggle was against trust in works,” and this is confirmed by the MS. Commentary on Romans which he commenced in 1515 (see below, chap. vi. 3). The first occasion in his correspondence in which he allows his new views to appear is in 1516, in a recommendation to a friend that “he should cultivate disgust with his own righteousness and despair of himself,” that this was better than to do as “those who plague themselves with their works until they think they are fit to stand in God’s sight.” He expresses himself in a similar strain on self-righteousness in sermons preached at this time.

  The same line of thought also appears in a paradoxical form, as the basis of a disputation held at Wittenberg in 1516 under his presidency. Man sins, so we find it said, “when he does what is in him” (“quod est in se”), and those who are “righteous in their own eyes” by reason of their good works, i.e. all who do not simply “despair of themselves,” are condemned. This ruling thought also pervades another disputation of one of his pupils in 1517, where we read: “ev
ery good work must needs at once make nature proud and puffed up,” and “hope is not given us by our merits, but by suffering [painful interior struggles], which root out merit,” i.e. which destroy every feeling of self-satisfaction grounded on merit. He tells one of his confidants in the same year that his great aim was “to grant nothing to human works, but to know only God’s grace.”

  In his first German work, printed in 1517, the Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, he opposes “all proud living and work and righteousness” and bewails the “spiritual pride, the last and deepest of all vices,” with which, according to him, those are filled who seek for “safety and false consolation” in their works instead of simply embracing the “word of grace.” He places works so much in the background in his teaching at that time, that he brings forward this objection against himself, whether, instead of always speaking of grace, he should not speak more of “human righteousness, wisdom and strength.” Instead of defending himself he declares “a good life does not consist in many works”; to feel oneself “a miserable, damned, forsaken sinner” is better, even when God sends trouble of soul, which is “a drop or foretaste of the pains of hell,” and which renders the human corpse quite ill and weak; such suffering makes a man like Christ who also bore the same.

  When in 1518 he published his Latin sermon on Penance, its chief thesis was that man’s part in his reconciliation with God counted for nought; we must despair in order to attain contrition, at least from the motive of fear of God; we must merely submit with faith to the action of grace. “Whoever trusts to his contrition when receiving absolution, builds on the sand of his works and is guilty of shameless presumption.”

  He writes in the same year that blinded adversaries accuse him of condemning good works, more especially that he dared to declare war against rosaries, the Little Office, and other prayers, and yet the sum of his sermon was only this: “that we must not place our confidence in our own work.”

  Thus the depreciation of works is the prevailing note, even in his first public utterances; this it also remains.

  When he began his attack on religious vows, he supported his campaign by preference on the ostensible worthlessness of human works for obtaining merit in heaven; vows were to be rejected because the heart must not seek its stay in works, and in his attacks on the celibacy of the clergy and religious, he again declared that he was attacking the “false saints” who intrench themselves behind the holiness of the works accomplished by them in a state superior to that of family life, but that faith makes all outward things free. This prejudice against works is the principal feature in his polemics; for instance, he explains to King Henry VIII in a rejoinder directed against him that the enemy he was called upon to overcome was the pestilential doctrine of the necessity of appearing before God with works (“velle per opera coram Deo agere”), whereas works were good only in the eyes of man. In season and out of season, he pours forth his rage against the works in the Papacy with such words as these: Away with masses, pilgrimages, Office in Choir, saint-worship, cowls, virginity, confraternities, rules, and such-like, away with “the lousy works”; and so he preached to his very end in 1546.

  It is not, however, sufficient to take as Luther’s starting-point his opposition to good works, though this always remains the chief feature in his doctrine. Further fresh light may be thrown on the enigmatical process of his inner change if we consider various influences which contributed to lead him to his new doctrine and to develop the same.

  A preliminary glance at the case shows us, first of all, that Luther in his youth was trained in the theological school of Occam, i.e. in a form of theology showing great signs of decadence. The nominalistic, and more particularly the false anthropological speculations of Occam, d’Ailly and Biel, which did not allow its full rights to grace, called forth his opposition, and he soon lost all confidence in the old theology; in his exaggeration he went to the theological extreme contrary to Occamism and declared war against the ability of nature to do good. This was a negative effect of Occamism. This view encouraged him in his opposition to the “self-righteousness” which he fancied he saw everywhere, even in the zeal of the Observantines for their rule, especially when he had already fallen away from the ideals of his profession, from monastic piety and the spirit of the priesthood. A boundless self-reliance began to possess him, and led him forward regardless of all. This was the “wisdom of his own mind” of which he accuses himself in 1516 in a letter to a friend in the Order, speaking of it as the “foundation and root” of much unrest; bitterly he exclaims: “Oh, how much pain has the evil eye [this self-conceit] already caused me, and how much does it continue to plague me.” We may take these words more seriously than they were probably meant. His egotism and pride were flattered to such an extent by his imagination that he seemed to find everywhere confirmation of his own preconceived notions. Having read Tauler he at once considered him as the greatest of writers, because he was able to credit him with some of his own sentiments. Then again in Augustine, the Doctor of the Church, he found, as he imagined, a true reflection of his new doctrine. Devoid of the necessary intellectual and moral discipline, he allowed himself to be blinded by a fanatic attachment to his own opinion.

  Carried away by his own judgment and regardless of the teaching of all the schools, yea, even of the Church herself, he passed into the camp of the enemy, perhaps without at first being aware of it; he came to deny entirely the merit of good works as though they were of no importance for our salvation as compared with the power of faith, an idea in which he fortified himself by his one-sided study of Holy Scripture and by his misinterpretation of the Epistles of St. Paul, that preacher of the power of faith and of the grace of Christ. He was always accustomed to consider the Bible as his special province, and, given his character, it was not difficult for him to identify himself with it, and to ascribe to himself the discovery of great Scriptural truths till then misunderstood or forgotten; for instance, the destruction of man’s powers by original sin and their renewal by faith and grace. The false doctrine of the outward imputation of the merits of Christ came next. The school of Occam here prepared the way for him by its views on sanctifying grace and “acceptation” (imputation). Luther found in Occam’s views on this subject no obstacle, but rather a support. This positive influence on him of Occam will be dealt with below (chap. iv. 3), together with other positive effects which decadent Scholasticism exercised upon him. Just as it suited his violent character to declare in no gentle words the renunciation of personal merit of every kind for the imputation of the merits of Christ, so the tendency of his own religious life, which had become alienated from the ideals of his Order, encouraged him to make the whole moral task consist in a simple, trustful appropriation of the saving merits of Christ, in confidence, comfort and safety, notwithstanding the dissentient inner voices.

  Further, his study of false mysticism (see below, chap. v.) helped to clothe his new ideas in the deceptive dress of piety. To himself he seemed to be fulfilling perfectly the precepts of the mystics to seek everywhere the spirit and make small account of outward things: he imagined that Christ would be truly honoured, and the importance of Divine grace effectually made manifest, by despair of our own works, yea, even of ourself. The power which a mysticism gone astray exercised in those early stages upon a mind so full of imagination and feeling cannot be overestimated.

  The oldest letter we have of Luther to Staupitz is in itself a witness to its writer’s self-deception; to his fatherly friend he speaks quite openly and even appeals to his sermons “on the Love of God” in support of his own errors. Staupitz had warned him in a friendly manner that in many places his name stood in very bad repute. Luther admits in this letter, written four months after he had affixed the well-known Wittenberg Theses, that his doctrine of justification, his sermons on the worthlessness of works, and his opposition to the theology in vogue in the schools had raised a storm against him. People said that he rejected pious practices and all good works.
And yet he was merely a disciple of Tauler’s theology, and, like Staupitz, had taught nothing else but that “we should place our confidence in none other than Jesus Christ, not in any prayers and merits and good works, because we are saved not by our works, but by God’s mercy.” If God were working in him, so he concludes enthusiastically, then no one can turn him aside; but if it was not God’s work, then, indeed, no one can advance his cause.

  We must assume that at the beginning of his alienation from the Church among other motives he was largely deceived by the appearance of good; there is, in any case, nothing decisive to show the process as purely material, as a result of his efforts to relieve himself from his moral obligations, or as due to a worldly spirit. His responsibility, of course, became much greater when, as he advanced and was able to review things more calmly, he obstinately adhered to his new views, and, as his sermons and writings prove, defended them, even against the best-meant criticism, with bitterness, hate and passion. Self-love, which, even in his earlier life, had held too great a place, now took complete control of him, and the spirit of contradiction closed the gates for ever against his return. Luther’s character was one which contradiction only served to stimulate and to drive to extremes.

  Thus his spiritual pride was his real misfortune.

  In his case we find a sad confirmation of what is frequently observed in the falling away from truth of highly gifted minds; self-esteem and self-conceit suggest the first thoughts of a turning away from the truth, hitherto held in honour, and then, with fatal strength, condemn the wanderer to keep to the path he has chosen. Further concessions to the spirit of the world then follow as a consequence of the apostate’s continued enmity to the Church. Of the last moral decline so noticeable in Luther’s later life there is also no lack of similar instances, for it is the rule that after a man has been led astray by pride there should follow further moral deviations from the right path. The Monk’s subsequent breach of his vows and his marriage with a former nun was a sacrilege, which to Catholic eyes showed plainly how he who begins in the spirit of pride, even though his purposes be good, may end in the flesh.