Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  Gabriel Biel, whose views are of some weight on account of his connection with Luther, finds the rectitude of the natural will (rectitudo) in its liberty, and this, he says, has remained intact because it is, as a matter of fact, the will itself, from which it does not differ. In other passages, it is true, he speaks of “wounds”; for owing to concupiscence the will is “inconstant and changeable”; but he nevertheless reverts to “rectitudo,” erroneously relegating the results of original sin to the lower powers alone. Following Occam, and against St. Thomas and Scotus, he makes of concupiscence a “qualitas,” viz. a “qualitas corporalis.” Again, following his master and d’Ailly, Biel asserts — and this is real Occamism — that the will is able without grace to follow the dictates of right reason (“dictamen rectæ rationis”) in everything, and is therefore able of itself to keep the whole law of nature, even to love God purely and above all things. An example of how inaccurate Biel is in the details of his theological discussions has been pointed out by Denifle, who shows that in quoting three various opinions of the greater Scholastics on a question of the doctrine of original sin (“utrum peccatum originale sit aliquid positivum in anima vel in carne”) “not one of the opinions is correctly given,” and yet this “superficial and wordy author was one of Luther’s principal sources of information regarding the best period of Scholasticism.”

  The Nominalists doubtless recognised the supernatural order as distinct from the natural, and Occam as well as Biel, d’Ailly and Gerson do not here differ materially from the rest of the Scholastics; but the limits of natural ability, more particularly in respect of keeping the commandments and loving God above all, are carried too far. Luther’s masters had here insisted with great emphasis on the argument of Scotus which they frequently and erroneously made to prove even more than was intended, viz. that as reason is capable of realising that man is able to fulfil the law and to render such love, and as the will is in a position to carry out all that reason puts before it, therefore man is able to fulfil both requirements. In this argument insufficient attention has been paid to the difficulties which interior and exterior circumstances place in the way of fallen man. Theologians generally were very much divided in opinion concerning the possibility of fulfilling these requirements, and the better class of Scholastics denied it, declaring that the assistance of actual grace was requisite, which, however, they held, was given to all men of good will. Against the doctrine which Biel made his own, that man is able, without grace, to avoid all mortal sin, keep all the commandments and love God above all things, not only Thomists, but even some of the Nominalists protested.

  Here again, according to Denifle, a serious error, committed by Biel regarding St. Thomas, must be pointed out, one, too, which may have had its effect upon Luther. Biel erroneously makes the holy Doctor say the opposite of what he really teaches when he ascribes to him the proposition: “Homo potest cavere peccata mortalia [omnia] sine gratia.” As Denifle reminds us again, it was “from this author that Luther drew in great part his knowledge of the earlier Scholastics.” Biel, however, in his sermons and instructions to preachers restricts the thesis of the possibility of loving God above all things through our natural powers. This, man is able to do, he says, “according to some writers, more especially in the state of paradisiacal innocence, but the act is not so perfect and not so easy as with God’s grace and is without supernatural merit. God has so ordained that He will not accept any act as meritorious for heaven excepting only that which is elicited by grace” (“ex gratia elicitum”).

  The views of the Occamists or “Moderns” exhibited yet other weak points. Man, so they taught, is able to merit grace “de congruo.” They admitted, it is true, that grace was a supernatural gift, “donata” and “gratuita,” as they termed it, but they saw in man’s natural love of God, and in his efforts, an adequate disposition for arriving at the state of saving grace. The great Schoolmen on the contrary taught with St. Thomas, that the preparation and disposition for saving grace, i.e. all those good works which precede justification, do not originate in us but are due to the grace of Christ.

  As for the teaching regarding natural and supernatural love of God, the keeping of the commandments and the predisposition for grace, Luther, in 1516, appears to have scarcely been acquainted with the opinion of any of the better representatives of Scholasticism, to whom he had access. It was only in 1518 that his attention was directed to Gregory of Rimini (General of the Augustinian Hermits in 1357), an eclectic whose views were somewhat unusual, and in this case, Luther, instead of making use of the good which was to be found in him in abundance, preferred to disregard his real opinion and to set him up as opposed to the teaching of the Schoolmen. In 1519, labouring under a total misapprehension of the truth as regards both Gregory and the Schoolmen, he wrote: “the ‘Moderns’ agree with the Scotists and Thomists concerning free will and grace, with the one exception of Gregory of Rimini, whom they all condemn, but who rightly and effectively proves them to be worse than the Pelagians. He alone among all the Scholastics agrees with Augustine and the Apostle Paul, against Carlstadt and all the new Schoolmen.” As though all Scholastics, old and new, had taught what Luther here attributes to them, viz. that “it is possible to gain heaven without grace,” because, according to them, “a good though not meritorious work can be done” without grace. On the contrary, not the Thomists only, but also many other theologians were opposed to the thesis that the will could, of itself, always and everywhere, conform itself to the dictates of right reason and thus arrive at grace, but Gregory of Rimini, whom Luther favours so much as a Doctor of his own Order, declares that the keeping of the whole law was only possible through grace, and that therefore God had, with His law, imposed nothing impossible on man. According to Luther, however, God had demanded of human nature what was impossible.

  Occam and his school deviate somewhat from the rest of the Scholastics in the application of the well-known axiom: “Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam.”

  While the better class of Scholastics understood it as meaning that God allows the man to arrive at saving grace and justification, who does his part with the help of actual grace, the schools of the decline interpreted the principle as implying that God would always give saving grace where there was adequate human and natural preparation; they thus came to make this grace a mere complement of man’s natural effort; the effect of grace was accordingly purely formal; man’s effort remained the same as before, but, by an act of favour, it was made conformable with God’s “intention”; for it was God’s will that no man should enjoy the Beatific Vision, without such grace, which, however, He never failed to bestow in response to human efforts. Some modern writers have described this view of grace to which the Nominalists were inclined, as a stamp imprinting on purely human effort a higher value. At any rate, according to the Occamists, man prepares for grace by natural acts performed under the ordinary concurrence of God (concursus generalis), whereas, according to the better Scholastics, this preparation demanded, not only the ordinary, but also the particular concurrence of God, namely, actual grace; they maintained that ordinary concurrence was inadequate because it belonged to the natural order.

  Actual grace was entirely neglected by the Occamists; the special help of God is, according to most of them, saving grace itself; actual grace, i.e. the divinely infused intermediary between man’s natural and supernatural life, finds no place in their system. This explains, if we may anticipate a little, how it is that Luther pays so little attention to actual grace; he has no need of it, because man, according to him, cannot keep the law at all without the (imputed) state of grace. It is unfortunate that Biel, in whom Luther trusted, should have misrepresented the actual teaching of true Scholasticism concerning the necessity and nature of grace, whether of actual or saving grace.

  As early as 1515 Luther, with the insufficient knowledge he possessed, accused the Scholastics generally of teaching that “man by his natural powers is able to love God above all
things, and substantially to do the works commanded, though not, indeed, according to the ‘intention’ of the lawgiver, i.e. not in the state of grace.” “Therefore, according to them,” he says, “grace was not necessary save by a new imposition demanding more than the law (‘per novam exactionem ultra legem’); for, as they teach, the law is fulfilled by our own strength. Thus grace is not necessary to fulfil the law, save by reason of God’s new exaction which goes beyond the law. Who will put up with these sacrilegious views?” Assuredly his indignation against Scholasticism would have been righteous had its teaching really been what he imagined. In the same way, and with similarly strong expressions, he generalises what he had learnt in his narrow world at Erfurt and Wittenberg, and ascribes to the whole of Christendom, to the Popes and all the schools, exactly what the Occamists said of the results of original sin being solely confined to the lower powers. Here, and in other connections too, he exclaims: “the whole Papacy has taught this, and all the schools of Sophists [Scholastics].” “Have they not denied that nature was ruined by sin when they assert that they are able to choose what is good according to the dictates of right reason?”

  From his antagonism to such views, an antagonism we find already in 1515, when he was preparing for his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, sprang his own gloomy doctrine of the death of free will for good, and the poisoning of human nature by original sin. With its first appearance in the lectures mentioned we shall deal later.

  Here a more general question must first receive an answer. How came the youthful Luther to absorb into his life the views above described without apparently shrinking in the least from the opposition to the Church’s teaching manifest in them?

  Various answers are forthcoming. In the first place, in consequence of his training which consisted too exclusively in the discussion of speculative controversies, he had come to see in the theological doctrines merely opinions of the schools, on which it was permissible to sit in judgment. He had forgotten that there existed a positive body of unassailable doctrine. Even when engaged in mercilessly attacking this body of doctrine he still appears to have been unaware of having outstepped the lines of permissible disputation. We cannot, however, altogether exonerate him from being in some degree conscious that in his attack on the Church he was treading dangerous ground. In the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans he goes so far as to declare, that the Church was almost destroyed (“pene subversa”) by the teaching of the Scholastics, and that everything was full of Pelagian errors, because grace for the support of the will had been abolished. Things such as these and others of a like nature he could assuredly not have uttered without, in his calmer hours, asking himself how he could reconcile such a standpoint with his duty to the Church. It is true, however, that such quiet hours were exceptional in his case. There can be no doubt also that his idea of the Church and of the binding character of her doctrine was confused. In 1519 he had no hesitation in pointing to the action of other Doctors, who, before that date, had engaged in controversy with each other, in vindication of the tremendous struggle he had just commenced. I am only doing what they did; “Scotus, single-handed, opposed the opinions of all the schools and Doctors and gained the victory (?). Occam did the same, many others have done and are doing likewise up to the present day (?). If then these are at liberty to withstand all, why not I?”

  The second answer to the above question lies in the outward circumstances existing in his monastic home at the time of the beginning of his struggle. The members of his Congregation, most of whom were of Occam’s school, were still greatly excited and divided by the quarrel going on in their midst regarding organisation and discipline. The Observantines with their praise of the old order and exercises were a thorn in the flesh of the other Augustinians, more lax and modern in their views, especially for Luther, who was at their head. A spirit of antagonism existed not merely between the different houses of the Order, but even in the houses themselves a struggle seems to have been carried on. On the one side there was a tenacious adherence to the older practices of the Order, on the other suspicion and reproaches were levelled against the innovations of the Observantines. The result was that the fiery young Professor, while inveighing against the Occamist theory of self-righteousness, thundered at the same time against the Observantines as living instances of the self-righteous and holy-by-works. Some of the reasons for this supposition have already been given, and more will be forthcoming when we consider the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.

  War was to the Wittenberg Doctor even then an element of life. He found it going on, and encouraged it amongst the wearers of the Augustinian habit. The first and second “factions” in the Order, as Usingen calls them, i.e. the first division caused by the question of observance, and the second by the great controversy concerning faith, were, we may be sure, closely allied in Luther’s mind; the controversy concerning observance may assuredly be reckoned amongst the outward causes which carried him along with them into the greater struggle and contributed for a time to hide from him the danger of his position. Though details are lacking of the resistance to Luther’s first challenge to the theologians of his Order, to Scholasticism and the Church’s doctrine, yet, as already said, we can see from the Commentary on Romans, from other unprinted early lectures, and also from the disputations and sermons, that the Order continued in a state of commotion, and that, as a matter of fact, the second “faction” was an outgrowth of the first. The Observantines had to put up with hearing themselves styled by Luther “iustitiarii” and Pharisees; but probably there were others, even members of the Wittenberg University, perhaps some of those jurists and philosophers to whom he refers in his Commentary on Romans, and whom he so cordially detested, who also were counted amongst the “iustitiarii,” in fact all whom the outrageous assertions of their young colleague regarding the observance of precepts and regulations and against human freedom, roused to opposition.

  To these two answers a third must be added, which turns upon the character of Luther in his youth. His extreme self-sufficiency blinded him, and his discovery of real errors in the theology in which he had been trained drove him in his impetuosity to imagine that he was called, and had the right, to introduce an entirely new theology. His searching glance had spied out real mistakes; his strength and boldness had resulted in the bringing to light of actual abuses; his want of consideration in the pointing out of blemishes in the Church had, in some degree, been successful and earned for him the applause of many; his criticism of theology was greeted as triumphant by his pupils, the more so as the Doctors he attacked were but feeble men unable to reply to so strong an indictment, or else living at a distance (in Erfurt). The growing self-consciousness, which expresses itself even in the form of his controversial language, must not be disregarded as a psychological fact in the problem, one, too, which also helped to blind him to the real outcome of his work.

  Only the most extreme spirit of antagonism could have led the Monk to make, in addition to his other harsh exaggerated charges against Scholasticism, the following assertion, to which, as it is important for the origin of Lutheranism, some attention must be paid. He says the doctrine is false that righteousness which can be acquired by means of good works (of the natural order) is even conceivable; this was invented by Aristotle; this righteousness of the philosophers and jurists has penetrated into the Church, while, as a matter of fact, owing to the naughtiness, nay, corruption of mankind, resulting from original sin, it was a monstrosity and an abomination in God’s sight; the scholastic distinctions of distributive and commutative justice, etc., “were also due to blindness of spirit and mere human wisdom”; the Scholastics have put this infamous, purely human righteousness in the place of righteousness by grace, which is of value in God’s sight; they have said there is no original sin, and have acted as though all men did not feel concupiscence within themselves very strongly; they have represented righteousness as the fruit of our natural efforts, and in consequence of this people now believe tha
t righteousness may be had through Indulgences costing two pence, i.e. through works of the very slightest worth! But “the Apostle teaches,” he says, “Corde creditur ad iustitiam, i.e. not by works, or wisdom, or study, not by riches and honours can man attain to righteousness.... That is a new way to righteousness, against, and far above, Aristotle ... and his political, God-forsaken righteousness.” Yet, according to him, the Scholastics knew no better. “They speak like Aristotle in his ‘Ethics,’ who makes ... righteousness consist in works, as also its attainment and its loss.”

  Is it possible that the writer of the above sentences was really incapable of distinguishing between the natural and the supernatural in moral good according to the fundamental principle of true Scholasticism? Was Luther really ignorant of the theses which run through the whole of Scholasticism such as this of St. Thomas: “Donum gratiæ excedit omnem præparationem virtutis humanæ”? The great lack of discrimination which underlies the above attack is characteristic of Luther in his youth and of his want of consideration in the standpoint he assumed. He starts from some justifiable objection to the nominalistic theology — which really was inadequate on the subject of the preparation for supernatural righteousness — sets up against it his own doctrine of fallen man and his salvation, and, then, without further ado, ascribes an absolutely fanciful idea of righteousness to the Church and the whole of Scholasticism. What he failed to distinguish, St. Thomas, Thomism, and all true Scholastics distinguished with very great clearness. Aquinas draws a sharp line of demarcation between the civil virtue of righteousness and the so-called infused righteousness of the act of justification. He anticipates, so to speak, Luther’s objection and his confusion of one idea with another, and teaches that by the repeated performance of exterior works an inward habit is without doubt formed in consequence of which man is better disposed to act rightly, as Aristotle teaches in his “Ethics”; “but,” he says, “this only holds good of human righteousness, by which man is disposed to what is humanly good (‘iustitia humana ad bonum humanum’); by human works the habit of such righteousness can be acquired. But the righteousness which counts in the eyes of God (i.e. supernatural righteousness) is ordained to the Divine good, namely, to future glory, which exceeds human strength (‘iustitia quæ habet gloriam apud Deum; ordinata ad bonum divinum’) ... wherefore man’s works are of no value for producing the habit of this righteousness, but the heart of man must first of all be inwardly justified by God, so that he may do the works which are of worth for eternal glory.”