Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  The religious “experience,” so often supposed to stand in the forefront of his development, is not to be found there.

  If the so-called spiritual “experience” had actually taken place Luther would certainly have alluded to it, for he has much to say of his own state and observations. Why does he say nothing here of the experiences he afterwards relates in such detail? Of the excessive, almost suicidal, monastic practices to which, as a Catholic-minded monk, he surrendered himself, seeking God’s grace, until through Divine intervention he recognised that the path of works and strictness of life, in fact the Catholic road generally, was incapable of leading one to peace with God here below and to union with God in eternity? There is nothing here of that sudden leap from weary, self-righteous seeking after God — ostensibly a delusion cherished by all Catholics — to the joyous consciousness of a gracious God, based on the recognition of justification. Luther, on the other hand, gives a seemingly accurate description of his own spiritual development, though without mentioning himself, at the end of his exposition of Romans iii., a passage to which we shall return later.

  The author frequently allows his fancied religious interests to spoil his exegesis.

  Often enough he does not even make an attempt to follow up the thoughts of the Apostle and arrive at their sense. His character is too impatient of restraint and too predisposed to rhetoric. Thus he descends to the religious and political questions then being debated at Wittenberg and says by way of excuse: “I will explain the meaning of the Apostle to you in its practical sense, in order that you may understand the matter better by the help of some comparisons.” These words occur in the passage in which he admonishes Duke George of Saxony regarding his quarrels with Edgard, Count of East Frisia (1514-15), telling him he ought to have recognised the Will of God in the Count’s “malicious revolt” and have patiently suffered himself to be vanquished by his foe — as though it were the duty of princes to become mystics like himself.

  If we now examine the actual value of the Commentary, we find much that is excellent and calculated to elucidate the Pauline text.

  It is especially praiseworthy in Luther that he should have made the Greek text edited by Erasmus the basis of his work as soon as it was published during the course of his lectures. He also makes frequent, diligent and intelligent use of the “exegetical ability” of Nicholas of Lyra, following him for the text as well as for the interpretation and division of the subject; this was the author whose assistance he had formerly declined with far too much contempt. Other authorities whom he also consults are Paul of Burgos, Peter Lombard, for his explanations of the Epistle to the Romans, and, for the division of the matter, particularly the Schemata of Faber Stapulensis. His own linguistic training and his knowledge of ancient literature were of great service to him, as also was his natural quickness of judgment combined with sagacity. He frequently quotes passages from St. Augustine, and through him, i.e. at secondhand, from Cyprian and Chrysostom; in his interpretations the mediæval authorities of whom he makes most use are the Master of the Sentences and St. Bernard. The way in which Aristotle and the Scholastics are handled is already plain from what we have said. Reminiscences of the works of his own professors, Paltz, Trutfetter and Usingen, are merely general, and he freely differs from them. As an Occamist he feels himself in contradiction to the Thomists and to some extent also to the Scotists; in addition to Occam, d’Ailly, Gerson and Biel have a great influence on him, even in his interpretation of the Bible. Tauler, who has so frequently been mentioned, also left deep traces of his influence not only in the matter of the Commentary, but also in the language, which is often obscure, rich in imagery and full of feeling, while here and there we seem to find reminiscences of the “Theologia Deutsch” which Luther was to publish at the close of his lectures. The latter was, “to his thinking, the most exact expression of the great thoughts of the Epistle to the Romans.”

  From a learned point of view his exegesis would probably have been different and far more reliable had he consulted the famous Commentary of St. Thomas Aquinas on the Epistle to the Romans, not merely for the division of his subject, but also for the matter. This Commentary held the first place, as regards clearness and depth of thought, among previous expositions, yet not once does Luther quote it, and, probably, he had never opened the work for the purpose of study. “It is most remarkable,” Wilhelm Braun says, speaking of Luther’s Commentary and of his whole development, “that Luther never came to understand Thomas of Aquin. We meet with some disparaging remarks [elsewhere than in the Commentary on Romans]; he is doubtful as to whether St. Thomas was really saved, because he wrote some heretical stuff and brought Aristotle, the corrupter of pious doctrine, into prominence in the Church; but he never understood him from the theological point of view.” We might well go further and say, that he did not even do what must certainly precede any “understanding” — study his writings with the intention of carefully examining them.

  How greatly does Luther in his method, his manner of delivery and his spirit differ from St. Thomas, from the latter’s quiet precision and trustworthiness in following the great traditions of learning and theology. Luther so often speaks without due thought, so often in his impetuosity sees but one side of things, he contradicts himself without remarking it, falls into grotesque exaggeration, and, in many passages, is not merely impulsive in his manner of speech, but even destructive. The rashness with which he lays hands on the generally accepted teaching of the best tried minds, his assumption of supremacy in the intellectual domain, the boundless self-confidence which peeps out of so many of his assertions, gave cause for fearing the worst from this professor, to whose words the University was even then attentive.

  He knew well how to hold his listeners by the versatility of his spirit and his ability to handle words. His language comprises, now weighty sentences, now popular and taking comparisons. He speaks, when he is so inclined, in the popular and forcible style he employs at a later date; he borrows from the lips of the populace sayings of unexampled coarseness with which he spices his harangues, more especially with a view to emphasising his attitude to his opponents. We may be permitted to quote one such passage in which he is speaking against those who hold themselves to be pure: “I look on them as the biggest fools, who want to forget how deeply they stick in the mire.... Did you never ... in your mother’s lap, and was not the smell evil? Is your perfume always so sweet? Is there nothing about your whole person which has an unpleasant odour? If you are so clean, I am surprised that the apothecaries have not long ago got hold of you to use you in making their balsams, for surely you must reek of balm. Yet had your mother left you as you are and were, you would have perished in your own filth.”

  Immediately after this he proceeds with a more pleasing thought: “Truly to please oneself, one must be utterly displeased with self. No one can please himself and others at the same time.”

  He is fond of startling antitheses and frequently loses himself in paradoxes. “God has concealed righteousness under sin, goodness under severity, mercy under anger.” “He who does not think he is righteous, is for that very reason righteous before God.” “To be sinners does not harm us, if we only strive earnestly for justification.”

  It may serve to give a better idea of the exegetical value of the whole work, and thereby increase our knowledge of its author, if we consider some of the other peculiarities which permeate it.

  Luther frequently engages with great zest in philosophical argument and has skirmishes in dialectics with his adversaries, after the custom of the school of Occam. In such cases he often becomes scarcely intelligible owing to his utter neglect of the rules of logic. The answer he gives to the proofs alleged by “modern philosophers” for the possibility of a natural love of God is very characteristic. They had urged: The will is able to grasp all that reason proposes to it as right and necessary; but reason proposes that we must love God, the cause of all things, and the Highest Good above all. Against this Luther philos
ophises as follows: “That is decidedly a bad conclusion. The conclusion should be: If the will is able to will everything that reason prescribes shall be willed and performed, then the will may will that God is to be loved above all, as reason says. But it does not follow that the will can love God above all, but merely that it can feebly will that this be done, i.e. the will has just that tiny little bit of will (‘voluntatulam voluntatis habere’) which reason orders it to have.” To this Luther adds: “Were that proof correct, then the common teaching would be erroneous that the law [of God in Revelation] has been given in order to humble the proud who presumptuously build on their own powers.” And immediately, with supposedly scriptural proofs, he proceeds to show that no power for doing what is good can be ascribed to the will.

  In what he says of the position of philosophy to saving grace — a point we mentioned above — we have another example of his faulty method.

  It is well known that the old Scholastics, far from drawing their profound teaching concerning sanctifying grace from the “mouldy” stores of Aristotle, advocated, with regard to justification, regeneration and bestowal of sanctifying grace (“gratia sanctificans”) by the infusion of the Holy Spirit, simply the views contained in Holy Scripture and in the Fathers; but, in order to make her teaching more comprehensible and to insure it against aberrations, the Church clothed it as far as necessary in the language of the generally accepted philosophy. The element which Scholasticism therewith borrowed from Aristotle — or to be accurate not from him only, but, through the Fathers, from ancient philosophy generally — was of service for the comprehension of revealed truth. Luther, however, was opposed to anything which tended to greater definition because he was more successful in expressing his diverging opinions in vague and misapprehended biblical language than in the stricter and more exact language of the philosophical schools.

  The Church, on the other hand, has given Scholasticism its due. In the definitions of the Council of Trent on the points of faith which had been called into question, the Church to a certain degree made her own the old traditional expressions of the schools on the doctrine of grace, teaching, for instance, that the “only formal cause of our righteousness lies in the righteousness of God, not in that by which He Himself is just, but that by which He makes us just.” She declared that, with justifying grace, the “love of God becomes inherent in us,” and that with this grace man “receives the infusion (‘infusa accipit’) of faith, hope and charity”; she also speaks of the various causes of justification, of the final, efficient, meritorious, instrumental and formal cause. All these learned terms were admirably fitted to express the ancient views vouched for by the Bible or tradition, and the same may be said, for instance, of the formula sanctioned by the Council of Trent, that “by the sacraments grace is bestowed ‘ex opere operato,’” and that the sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Order impart “a ‘character,’ i.e. a spiritual and ineradicable mark on account of which they cannot be repeated.” When the Church expresses herself in such terms with regard to sanctifying grace, she implies thereby no more than what is stated in the various biblical excerpts quoted in detail by the Council of Trent to which Luther had paid too little heed. Her teaching is that man is signed and anointed with the spirit of promise which is the pledge of our inheritance; that he is renewed through the Spirit, and that by the Spirit the love of God is poured forth in his heart; that he becomes a living member of Christ; that because he is made the heir and child of God he has a right to heaven; that he is born again by the Holy Ghost to a new life, and thus is translated into the Kingdom of the Love of His Son where he has redemption and forgiveness of sins; as such he is a friend and companion of God; yet he must go on from virtue to virtue and, as the Apostle says, be renewed from day to day by constantly mortifying the members of his flesh and offering them as the weapons of righteousness for sanctification.

  In his Commentary on Romans Luther already breaks away from tradition, i.e. from the whole growth of the past, even on matters of the utmost moment, and this not at all to the advantage of theology; not merely the method and mode of expression does he oppose, but even the very substance of doctrine.

  Protestant theology, following in his footsteps, went further. Many of its representatives, as we shall see, honestly expressed their serious doubts as to whether the Bible teaching of sanctification by grace — that process which, according to the scriptural descriptions just quoted, takes place in the very innermost being of man — is really expressed correctly by the Lutheran doctrine of the imputation of a purely extraneous righteousness. But even to-day there are others who still support Luther’s views in a slightly modified form, and who will have it that the scholastic and later teaching of the Church is a doctrine of mere “magic,” as though she made of saving grace a magical power, of which the agency is baptism or absolution. It is true that the process of sanctification as apprehended by faith is to a large extent involved in impenetrable mystery, but in Christianity there is much else which is mysterious. It is perhaps this mysterious element which gives offence and accounts for Catholic doctrine being described by so opprobrious a word as “magic.” Some Protestants of the same school are also given to praising Luther — in terms which are also, though in another sense, mysterious and obscure — for having from the very outset arrived at the great idea of grace peculiar to the Reformed theology, viz. at the “exaltation of religion above morality.” He was the first to ask: “How do I stand with regard to my God?” and who made the discovery, of which his Commentary on Romans is a forcible proof, that it is “man’s relation to God through faith which creates the purer atmosphere in which alone it is possible for morality to thrive.” He arrived, so we are told, at an apprehension of grace as “a merciful consideration of the abiding sinner,” and a true “consolation of conscience”; he at the same time recognised grace as an “educative and moulding energy,” which, as such, imparts “strength for sanctification.”

  To return to the exegetical side of the Commentary on Romans, the confusion in which the ideas are presented lends to much of it a stamp of great imperfection. There is a general lack of cautious, intelligent comprehension of the material, which sometimes is concerned with the tenderest questions of faith, sometimes with vital points of morals. The impartial observer sees so many traces of passion, irritation, storm and stress that he begins to ask himself whether the work has any real theological value.

  The passage, Romans vii. 17, regarding the indwelling of sin in man (“habitat in me peccatum”) Luther, in the interests of his system, makes use of for an attack upon the Scholastics (“nostri theologi”). He attributes to them an interpretation of the passage which was certainly not theirs, and, from his own interpretation, draws strange and quite unfounded inferences. According to the interpretation commonly admitted by almost all exegetists, whether Catholic or Protestant, St. Paul is here speaking of the unregenerate man in whom sin dwells, preventing him from fulfilling the law. Luther, on the contrary, asserts that the Apostle is alluding to himself and to the regenerate generally, and he quotes from the context no less than twelve proofs that this is the correct interpretation. Scholastics either referred the passage, like St. Augustine, to the righteous — in whom on account of the survival of the “fomes peccati” sin in some sense dwells, even the righteous being easily led away by the same to sin — or they left the question open and allowed the verse to refer to those who are not justified.

  Luther, delighted by his discovery of the survival of original sin in man after baptism, could not allow the opportunity to slip of dealing a blow at the older theologians: “Is it not a fact that the fallacious metaphysics of Aristotle — the philosophy which is built up on human tradition — has blinded our theologians? They fancy that sin is destroyed in Baptism and in the sacrament of Penance, and they declare it absurd that the Apostle should speak of sin dwelling within him [as a matter of fact the Schoolmen did nothing of the sort]. The words ‘habitat in me peccatum’ were a fearful scanda
l to them. They fled to the false and pernicious assertion that Paul is speaking merely in the person of the carnal man [unregenerate], whereas he is, in truth, speaking of his own person [and of the righteous]. They say foolishly that in the righteous there is no sin, and yet the Apostle obviously teaches the contrary in the plainest and most open fashion.”

  Of this passionate reversal of the old exegesis, Denifle, after having pointed out the real state of the question by quoting the commentators, says: “Luther merely exhibits his ignorance, prejudice and prepossession ... he was not acting in the interests of learning at all.” Of Luther’s twelve arguments in favour of his interpretation he remarks: “in order to convince oneself that the [opposite] view, now almost universally held, is the correct one, it is only necessary to glance at Luther’s twelve proofs. They are utterly fallacious, beg the question and take for granted what is not conceded.” This judgment is amply justified. Yet Luther, at the end of his long demonstration, exclaims: “It is really surprising that anyone could have imagined that the Apostle was speaking in the person of the old and carnal man.” “No, the Apostle teaches regarding the justified that they are at the same time righteous and sinners, righteous because Christ’s righteousness covers them and is imputed to them, sinners because they do not fulfil the law and are not without concupiscence.” We can only say of Luther’s remarks on the Scholastics that, without really being acquainted with them, he here again blindly abuses them because they were opposed to his new theological views.

  It was merely his prejudice against the Scholastics which led him to continue: “Their stupid doctrine has deceived the world and caused untold mischief, for the consequence was, that whoever was baptised and absolved at once looked upon himself as free from sin, became sure of his righteousness, folded his arms, and, because he was unconscious of any sin, considered it superfluous to trouble to struggle or to purify himself by sighs and tears, by sorrow for sin and efforts to conquer it. No, sin remains even in the spiritual man,” etc. He appeals to St. Augustine, indeed to the very passage to which the Scholastics were indebted for their interpretation of St. Paul’s words concerning the righteous. As remarked before (), Augustine is, however, very far from teaching that there is in the righteous real guilt and sin, when, following St. Paul, he speaks of the sinful concupiscence which dwells in the regenerate.