Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  His acquaintance with the master he owed, moreover, more to Occam’s disciples, i.e. to the later theologians of the Occamist school, more especially Gabriel Biel, than to his own reading of the voluminous and unwieldy works of Occam himself. We are already aware that, of the disciples and intellectual heirs of Occam, he studied more particularly the two well-known writers d’Ailly, Cardinal of Cambrai — whom Luther usually calls quite simply the Cardinal — whose ideas were very daring, and the humble Gabriel Biel, Professor at Tübingen, whose writings, clear, and rich in thought, possessed many good qualities.

  Their one-sided Nominalism unfortunately led these Occamists to an excessive estimate of the powers of nature and an undervaluing of grace, and also to a certain incorrect view of the supernatural. We must add that they were disposed to neglect Holy Scripture and to set too much store on their speculations, and that, with regard to the relations between reason and faith, they did not abide by the approved principles and practice of the earlier Schoolmen.

  The Occamist theology strongly influenced the talented and critical pupil, though diversely. Most of the elements of which it was made up repelled him, and as he regarded them as essential parts of Scholasticism, they filled him with a distaste for Scholasticism generally. Other of its elements attracted him, namely, those more in conformity with his ideas and feeling. These he enrolled in the service of his theological views, which — again following Occam’s example — he developed with excessive independence. Thus the tendency to a false separation of natural and supernatural commended itself to him; he greedily seized upon the ideas of Nominalism with regard to imputation after he had commenced groping about for a new system of theology. His greatest objection was for the views of his teachers regarding the powers of man and grace. This it was, more especially, which raised in him the spirit of contradiction and set him on a path of his own. To one in his timorous state such views were unsympathetic; he himself scented sin and imperfection everywhere; also he preferred to see the powers of the will depreciated and everything placed to the account of grace and Divine election. Thus, what he read into Holy Scripture concerning faith and Christ seemed to him to speak a language entirely different from that of the subtleties of the Occamists.

  His unfettered acceptance or rejection of the doctrinal views submitted to him was quite in accordance with his character. He was not one to surrender himself simply to authority. His unusual ability incited him to independent criticism of opinions commonly received, and to voice his opposition in the public disputations against his not overbrilliant Nominalist professors; the strong appeal which he made to the Bible, with which the others were less well acquainted, and to the rights of faith and the grace of Christ, was in his favour.

  2. Negative Influence of the Occamist School on Luther

  Besides the recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans various statements in his sermons, disputations and letters prove the opposition that existed between Luther and his own school. In the Disputation of 1517 entitled “Contra scholasticam theologiam,” for instance, he expressly names, as the opponents against whom his various theses are aimed, Scotus, Occam, the Cardinal, Gabriel, and, generally, “omnes scholastici” or “communis sententia,” “dictum commune,” “usus multorum,” “philosophi” or “morales.”

  Before we proceed to examine the individual points of Luther’s conflict with Occamism and with what he considered the teaching of Scholasticism as a whole, two general points of this opposition must be mentioned. His first grievance is the neglect of Holy Scripture.

  A sensible want in the Divinity studies of that time lay, as a matter of fact, in the insufficient use of the positive foundations of theology, i.e. above all of Holy Scripture, and also of the tradition of the Fathers of the Church and the decisions of the Church in her office as teacher. “Luther had rightly recognised,” says Albert Weiss, “what harm resulted from the regrettable neglect of Holy Scripture on the part of so many theologians, and therefore he chose as his watchword the cry for the improvement of theology by a return to the Bible.” “That Luther was moved to great anger by the Nominalists’ neglect of the Bible is not to be wondered at.” “He would not have been Luther,” the same author rightly says, “had he not soon veered round to the other extreme, i.e. to the battle-cry: Scripture only, and nothing but the Scripture, away with all Scholasticism.”

  This abuse, however, had already been reproved and bewailed by the Church before Luther’s time; there is no dearth of statements by the very highest authorities urging a remedy, though it is true more should have been done. Pope Clement VI wrote reprovingly to the University of Paris, on May 20, 1346: “Most theologians do not trouble themselves about the text of Holy Scripture, about the actual words of their principal witnesses, about the expositions of the Saints and Doctors, i.e. concerning the sources from which real theology is taken, a fact which is bitterly to be deplored.... In place of this they entangle themselves in philosophical questions and in disputes which merely pander to their cleverness, in doubtful interpretations, dangerous doctrines and the rest.” But “with the prevalent spirit of formalism and disorder, embodied chiefly in Nominalism,” “a healthy and at the same time fruitful treatment of Holy Scripture had become impossible.... These were abuses which had long been calling for the reintroduction of a positive and more scriptural treatment of theology.” Though the judgment passed by Luther in his later years on the neglect of Holy Scripture was somewhat too general (for it was historically untrue to say that Scripture had ever been altogether given up by the Church), yet contemporaries agree with him in blaming the too extensive use of Aristotle’s philosophy in the schools to the detriment of the Bible-text. Long before, Gerson, whose books were in Luther’s hands, had laid stress on the importance of Holy Scripture for theology. “Holy Scripture,” he says, “is a Rule of Faith, which it is only necessary to understand aright; against it there is no appeal to authority or to the decisions of human reason: nor can custom, law or practice have any weight if proved to be contrary to Holy Scripture.”

  Luther, with palpable exaggeration, lays the charge at the door of theology as a whole, even of the earlier school, and would have us believe that the abuse was inseparable from ecclesiastical science. He speaks to this effect more and more forcibly during the course of his controversies. Thus in 1530 he says of the Scholastics, that they “despised Holy Scripture.” “What! they exclaimed, the Bible? Why, the Bible is a heretic’s book, and you need only read the Doctors to find that out. I know that I am not lying in saying this, for I grew up amongst them and saw and heard all about them.” And so they had arrived at doctrines about which one must ask: “Is this the way to honour Christ’s blood and death?” Everything was full of “idle doctrines which did not agree among themselves, and strange new opinions.” Occam, he declares in his Table-Talk in 1540, “excelled them all in genius and has confuted all the other schools, but even he said and wrote in so many words that it could not be proved from Scripture that the Holy Ghost is necessary for a good work.” “These people had intelligence, had time for work and had grown grey in study, but about Christ they understood nothing, because they esteemed Holy Scripture lightly. No one read the Bible so as to steep himself in its contents with reflection, it was only treated like a history book.

  It is true that the scholastic treatment of the doctrines of faith, as advocated by Occam against the more positive school, disregarded Holy Scripture to such an extent that, in the master’s subtle Commentaries, it hardly finds any place; even in the treatment of the supernatural virtues — faith, hope and charity — Scripture scarcely intervenes. But it was unjust of Luther, on this account, to speak of the Schoolmen’s contempt for the Bible, or to say, for instance in his Table-Talk, about his master, Gabriel Biel, whose Commentary on the Sentences had become, so to speak, a hand-book: “The authority of the Bible counted for nothing with Gabriel.” Biel esteemed and utilised the Bible as the true Word of God, but he did not satisfy young Luther
, who desiderated in him much more of the Bible and a little less of philosophy. The “word,” he declares, was not cherished by the priests, and this he had already shown in his Leitzkau discourse to be the reason of all the corruption.

  The preponderance of philosophy, and more particularly the excessive authority of Aristotle, in the theological method of his circle offered Luther a second point of attack. Here also it was a question of a rather widely spread abuse which the better class of Schoolmen had prudently avoided. The Nominalistic schools, generally speaking, showed a tendency to a rationalistic treatment of the truths of faith, which affrighted Luther considerably. General ideas, according to the Nominalists, were merely “nomina,” i.e. empty words; Nominalists concerned themselves only with what was actual and tangible. Nominalism was fond of displaying its dialectic and even its insolence at the expense of theology on the despised Universal ideas. We can understand the invective with which Luther gives expression to his hatred of Scholasticism, though his right to do so arose only from his limited acquaintance with those few Scholastics whom he had chosen, or, rather, who had been allotted to him, as his masters; the schools he attended were at that time all following the method of the Nominalists, then usually known as “modern.”

  Already, in 1509 (see above, ), a severe criticism of Aristotle appears in Luther’s marginal notes. This is in a gloss on Augustine’s work “On the City of God” which he was then devouring as a sort of antidote: “Far more apparent is the error of our theologians when they impudently chatter (‘impudentissime garriunt’) and affirm of Aristotle that he does not deviate from Catholic truth.”

  Luther’s later exaggerations need not be refuted, in which he complains so loudly of the idolatrous Aristotelian worship of reason on the part of all the Scholastics. It was in general perfectly well known regarding Aristotle that he had erred, and also where he erred; books had even been written dealing with his deviations from the faith. This, however, did not prevent many from over-estimating him. We must set against this, however, the fact that Luther’s own professor of philosophy in the University of Erfurt, Bartholomew Arnoldi of Usingen, had declared, like others before him, that those who represented the Stagirite as without errors were “not worthy of the name of philosophers, for they were not lovers of the truth but mocked at philosophy; they should just read their hero more carefully and they would find that, for instance, he made out the world to be without any beginning, a view which Moses, the prophet of truth, had shown to be an error; Scotus, too, wrote in the first book of his Commentary on the Sentences, that the works of Aristotle were more in agreement with the law of Mohammed than with that of Christ.” Usingen was an earnest and moderate man, who did not shrink, even in his philosophical writings, from preferring Divine Revelation to the exaggeration of the rights of reason. “The inadequacy of philosophers is as apparent as the great value of the Sacred Books. The latter rise far above the knowledge attained by mere human reason and natural light.” Owing to the fact that he had made no secret of his views in his intercourse with Luther, especially when they became more intimate on Luther’s entering the Order to which he himself belonged, we can understand and explain the sympathy and respect with which Luther long after cherished his memory, though the path he followed was no longer that of his old teacher. Usingen was a Nominalist, but his example shows that there were some enlightened men who belonged to this school, and who did it honour.

  In the course of time, regardless of the numerous examples giving him the lie, Luther came ruthlessly to condemn all the Schoolmen and the whole Middle Ages ostensibly on the ground of the pretended poisoning of the faith by Aristotle, but really because he himself had set up a contradiction between faith and reason. He says in 1521 that the Scholastics, headed by Aquinas, “solus aristotelicissimus ac plane Aristoteles ipse,” had smuggled philosophy into the world, though the Apostle had condemned it; thus it became too powerful, made Aristotle equal to Christ in dignity and trustworthiness, and darkened for us the Sun of righteousness and truth, the Son of God. Three years before he had declared in writing to his other professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Jodocus Trutfetter, who was vexed with his theses Contra scholasticam theologiam, that he daily prayed to God that in place of the perverse studies in vogue, the wholesome study of the Bible and the Fathers might again be introduced (“ut rursum bibliæ et s. patrum purissima studia revocentur”). Yet three years earlier, in his first lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, he had said to his pupils: “let us learn to know Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” and urged them not to waste their time in the study of the foolish whims of metaphysicians, but at most, to treat philosophy as a subject which one must be acquainted with in order to be able to refute it, and on the other hand to throw themselves with all their might into the study of Holy Scripture.

  There can therefore be no question, as we have seen, that his idea that philosophy was the ruin of the Church, an idea present in his mind even in his earliest public life, was founded on the many actually existing abuses, though his own ultra-spiritualism and his gloomy mistrust of man’s nature led him to feel the evil more than others, so that, in reacting against it, he lost his balance instead of calmly lending his assistance towards improving matters.

  Luther’s reaction was not only against Occamism in general, but also against various particular doctrines of that school, especially, as stated before, against such doctrines as exalted the powers of nature at the expense of grace.

  Here again he committed his first fault, the indefensible injustice of blindly charging Scholasticism and theology generally with what he found faulty in his own narrow circle, though these errors had been avoided by St. Thomas and the best of the Schoolmen. It has been pointed out that he was not acquainted with this real Scholasticism, nevertheless, in 1519, he had the assurance to say: “No one shall teach me scholastic theology, I know it.” “I was brought up amongst them (Thomas, Bonaventure, etc.), I am also acquainted with the minds of the most learned contemporaries and have saturated myself in the best writings of this sort.”

  He, all too often, gives us the means to judge the value of this assertion of his. In the same year, for instance, he sums up the chief points of the theology which alone he had learnt, and calls it in all good faith the scholastic theology of the Church, though it was merely the meagre theology of his own Occamist professors.

  In order to show all he had had to struggle with he says: “I had formerly learned among the monstrous things (‘monstra’) which are almost accounted axioms of scholastic theology ... that man can do his part in the acquiring of grace; that he can remove obstacles to grace; that he is able to oppose no hindrance to grace; that he can keep the commandments of God according to the letter, though not according to the intention of the lawgiver; that he has freedom of choice [personal freedom in the work of salvation] between this and that, between both contradictories and contraries; that his will is able to love God above all things through its purely natural powers and that there is such a thing as an act of charity, of friendship, by merely natural powers.”

  We are to believe that these were the “axioms of scholastic theology!”

  Such was not the case. For all acts necessary for salvation true Scholasticism demanded the supernatural “preventing” grace of God. Yet as early as 1516 Luther had elegantly described all the scholastic theologians as “Sow theologians,” on account of their pretended “Deliria” against grace. His first fault, that of unwarranted generalisation, comes out clearly.

  The second, more momentous, fault which Luther committed was to fly to the extreme even in doctrine, abolishing all that displeased him and setting up as his main thesis, that man can do nothing, absolutely nothing, good. Not only did he say: “I learnt nothing in scholastic theology worth remembering; I only learnt what must be unlearnt, what is absolutely opposed to Holy Scripture” (“omnino contraria divinis litteris”). He also asserted at a very early period that Holy Scripture teaches that God’s grace does e
verything in man of itself alone without his vital participation, without liberty, without resolve, without merit. Such a statement does not indeed appear in the Commentary on the Psalms, but it will be found in his academic lectures on the Pauline Epistles, more especially in the Commentary on Romans. For a moment he thought he had discovered in St. Augustine the necessary weapons against the formalism of his school of theology, but now St. Paul appeared to him to give the loudest testimony against it; the Apostle is so determined in his denunciation of the pride of human reason and human will, and in presenting the Gospel of the Son of God, faith and grace, as the only salvation of mankind. Luther imagined he had found in Paul the doctrines which appealed to him: that all human works were equally useless, whether for eternal salvation or for natural goodness; that man’s powers are good for nothing but sin; if grace, which the Apostle extols, is to come to its rights, then we must say of original sin that it has utterly ruined man’s powers of thinking and willing so far as what is good in God’s sight is concerned; original sin still lives, even in the baptised, as a real sin, being an invincible attraction to selfishness and all evil, more particularly to that of the flesh; by it the will is so enslaved that only in those who are justified by grace can there be any question of freedom for good.

  As regards Occam’s teaching concerning man, his Fall and his powers, so far as this affects the question of a correct understanding of Luther’s development: in the matter of original sin it agreed with that of Aquinas and Scotus, according to which its essence was a carentia iustitiæ debitæ, i.e. originalis; likewise it asserted the existence of concupiscence in man, the fomes or tinder of sin, as Occam is fond of calling it, as the consequence of original sin; on the other hand it minimised too much the evil effects of original sin on the reason and on the will, by assuming that these powers still remain in man almost unimpaired. This was due to the nominalistic identification of the soul with its faculties; as the soul remained the same as before, so, they said, the powers as a whole also remained the same. The “disabling” of these powers of which St. Thomas and the other Scholastics speak, i.e. the weakening which the Council of Trent also teaches (“liberum arbitrium viribus attenuatum et inclinatum”), was not sufficiently emphasised.