Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  So speaks the most eminent of the Schoolmen in the name of the true theology of the Middle Ages.

  For Luther, who brings forward the above arbitrary objection in his Commentary on Romans, it would have been very easy to have made use of the explanation just given, for it is found in St. Thomas’s Commentary on this very Epistle. Luther, one would have thought, would certainly have consulted this work for his interpretation of the Epistle, were it only on account of its historical interest, and even if it had not been the best work on the subject which had so far appeared. But no, it seems that he never looked into this Commentary, nor even into the older glosses of Peter Lombard on the Epistle to the Romans, then much in use; in the latter he would at once have found the refutation of the charge he brought against the Scholastics of advocating the doctrine of Aristotle on righteousness by works, as the gloss to the classic passage (Romans iii. 27) runs as follows: “For righteousness is not by works (‘non ex operibus est iustitia’), but works are the result of righteousness, and therefore we do not say: ‘the righteousness of works, but the works of righteousness.’”

  He does not even trouble to uphold the frivolous accusation that the Schoolmen had been acquainted only with Aristotelian righteousness, but actually refutes it by another objection. He finds fault with the “scholastic theologians” for having, as he says in the Commentary on Romans, “held the doctrine of the expulsion of sin and the infusion of grace” to be a single change. He hereby admits that they were familiar with something more than mere Aristotelian righteousness, for in Aristotle there is certainly no question of any infusion of grace. But Luther frequently speaks in this way of the distinction which the Scholastics made between acquired and infused righteousness.

  The changeableness and inconstancy of his assertions regarding the doctrines of the Scholastics is quite remarkable. He makes no difficulty about admitting later, against his previous statements, that the Scholastics did not teach that man was able to love God above all things merely by his own strength; this was the teaching only of the Scotists and the “Moderns” (i.e. Nominalists or Occamists). At that time he was perhaps better acquainted with Biel, who instances Thomas and Bonaventure in opposition to this doctrine. Luther was also careless in the accounts he gave even of the theology of his own circle, viz. that of the Occamists, and the injustice he does Scholasticism as a whole, he repeats against his own school by exaggerating its faults or suppressing the necessary distinctions in order to be the better able to refute its theses by the Bible and St. Augustine. As therefore it is impossible to form an opinion on Scholasticism as a whole from Luther’s assertions, so we cannot trust his account even of his own masters, in whose works he thinks himself so well versed.

  He is, for instance, neglecting a distinction when he repeatedly asserts that Occam, his “Master,” denied the biblical truth that the Holy Ghost is necessary for the performance of a good work. As a matter of fact, the Occamists, like the Scotists, did not here differ essentially from the Thomists, although differences are apparent in their teaching on the supernatural habit, and on the preparation for the attainment of this supernatural righteousness, i.e. for justification. He is wronging his own “factio occamica” when, from its teaching that man could, by his natural powers, acquire a love of God beyond all things, he at once infers that it declared infused grace to be superfluous, and further, when, for instance, he asserted that the axiom quoted above, and peculiarly beloved of the Occamists, “Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam,” was erroneous, as though it placed a “wall of iron” between man and the grace of God. No Occamist understood the axiom in the way he wishes to make out.

  Luther went so far in his gainsaying of the Occamist doctrine of the almost unimpaired ability of man for purely natural good, that he arrived at the opposite pole and began to maintain that there was no such thing as vitally good acts on man’s part; that man as man does not act in doing what is good, but that grace alone does everything. The oldest statements of this sort are reserved for the quotations to be given below from his Commentary on Romans. We give, however, a few of his later utterances to this effect. They prove that the crass denial of man’s doing anything good continued to characterise him in later life as much as earlier.

  In the Gospel-homilies contained in his “Postils,” he teaches the people that it was a “shameful doctrine of the Popes, universities, and monasteries” to say “we ought by the strength of our free will to begin [exclusive of God’s help?] by seeking God, coming to Him, running after Him and earning His grace.” “Beware, beware,” he cries, “of this poison; it is the merest devil’s doctrine by which the whole world is led astray.... You ask: How then must we begin to become pious, and what must we do that God may begin in us? Reply: What, don’t you hear that in you there is no doing, no beginning to be pious, as little as there is any continuing and ending? God only is the beginning, furthering and ending. All that you begin is sin and remains sin, let it look as pretty as it will; you can do nothing but sin, do how you will ... you must remain in sin, do what you will, and all is sin whatever you do alone of your free will; for if you were able of your own free will not to sin, or to do what is pleasing to God, of what use would Christ be to you?”

  Elsewhere, on account of the supposed inability of man, he teaches a sort of Quietism: “Is anyone to become converted, pious and a Christian, we don’t set about it; no praying, no fasting assists it; it must come from heaven and from grace alone.... Whoever wants to become pious, let him not say: ‘I will set about doing good works in order to obtain grace,’ but, ‘I will wait to see whether God by His word will give me His grace and His spirit.’”

  And on another occasion his words are still stronger: “The gospel tells us only to open our bosom and take, and says: ‘Behold what God has done for you, He made His Son become flesh for you.’ Believe this and accept it and you will be saved.”

  Seen in the light of such passages, it becomes clear that the following must not be taken as a mere expression of humility, but as a deprecation of good deeds. Already, in 1519, Luther says: “Man, like a cripple with disabled hands and feet, must invoke grace as the artisan of works (‘operum artificem’).” The difficulty is that this very invocation is itself a vital, though surely not a sinful, action. Would not a man have been justified in saying even of this preliminary act: I will wait, I may not begin? “Luther was scarcely acquainted with the doctrine of a wholesome Scholasticism and with that of the Church concerning the mysterious reciprocal action of grace and free will in man. He was qualified to oppose the Occamist teaching, but was incapable of replacing it by the true doctrine.”

  Against the prevalent doctrine on the powers of man, Luther, among other verses from the Bible, brought forward John xv. 5: “Without me ye can do nothing.” A remark on his use of this supposed scriptural proof may serve to conclude what we have said of the far-reaching negative influence of Occamism on the youthful Luther.

  The decisive words of the Redeemer: “Without me ye can do nothing,” so Luther says to his friend Spalatin, had hitherto been understood quite wrongly. And, in proof of this, he adduces the interpretation which he must have heard in his school, or read in the authors who were there in repute: “Our masters,” he says, “have made a distinction between the general and the particular concurrence of God” (concursus generalis and concursus specialis or gratia); with the general concurrence man was able, so they taught, to do what is naturally good, i.e. what they considered to be good; with the particular, however, that which is beyond nature (“quæ gratiæ sunt et supra naturam”), and meritorious for heaven. To this statement of the perfectly correct teaching of his masters he adds, however, the following: they taught that “with our powers we are able, under the general Divine concurrence, to prepare ourselves for the obtaining of grace, i.e. for the obtaining of the particular concurrence, hence that we can ‘inchoative’ do something, to gain merit and the vision of God, notwithstanding the express teaching of Christ, though we are in
deed unable to do this ‘perfective,’ without the particular assistance of grace.”

  What Luther says here applies at most to the Nominalists; according to Occam’s school the preparation for sanctifying grace takes place by purely natural acts, and accordingly this school was not disposed to take Christ’s words about eternal life too literally. Although healthy Scholasticism knows nothing of this and holds fast to the literal meaning of the words “Without me ye can do nothing,” viz. nothing for eternal life (the absolute necessity of the general concurrence is taken for granted), yet Luther, in all simplicity, assures his friend that the whole past had taken the words of Christ in the sense he mentions (“Sic est hucusque autoritas ista exposita et intellecta.”) This doctrine he detests so heartily, that he sets up the very extreme opposite in his new system. The general Divine concursus, he says in his letter to Spalatin quoted above, certainly leads nature on to work of itself, but it cannot do otherwise than “seek its own and misuse the gifts of God.” Nature merely provides stuff for the “punishing fire,” however “good and moral its works may appear outwardly.” Hence, according to him, there is no distinction between general and particular concurrence, between the inchoative and the perfective act; without Christ, and “before we have been healed by His grace,” there is absolutely nothing but mischief and sin.

  By “grace,” here and elsewhere, he means the state of justifying grace. Whereas true Scholasticism recognises actual grace, which assists man even before justification, this is as good as excluded by Luther already in the beginning of his theological change. Why? Partly because he cannot make use of it as he refers everything to justifying faith, partly because the Occamists, his masters, erroneously reduced the particular influence of God almost entirely to sanctifying grace, and neglected or denied actual grace.

  In the latter respect we perceive one of the positive effects of Occamism on Luther. This leads us to another aspect of the present theme.

  3. Positive Influence of Occamism

  We have so far been considering the precipitate and excessive antagonism shown at an early date by Luther towards the school of Occam, especially towards its anthropological doctrines; we have also noted its influence on his new heretical principles, particularly on his denial of man’s natural ability for good. Now we must turn our attention to the positive influence of the Occamist teaching upon his new line of thought, for Luther’s errors are to be ascribed not only to the negative, but also to the positive effects of his school.

  His principal dogma, that of justification, must first be taken into consideration.

  This he drew up entirely on the lines of a scheme handed down to him by his school. It is no uncommon thing to see even the most independent and active minds tearing themselves away from a traditional train of thought in one particular, and yet continuing in another to pursue the accustomed course, so great is the power which a custom acquired at school possesses over the intellect. The similarity existing between Luther’s and Occam’s doctrine of the imputation of righteousness is quite remarkable. Occam had held it, at least as possible, that a righteousness existed which was merely imputed; at any rate, it was only because God so willed it that sanctifying grace was necessary in the present order of things. He and his school had, as a matter of fact, no clear perception of the supernatural habit as a supernatural principle of life in the soul. According to the Occamist Peter d’Ailly, whom Luther repeatedly quotes in his notes on Peter Lombard, reason cannot be convinced of the necessity of the supernatural habit; all that this is supposed to do can be done equally well by a naturally acquired habit; an unworthy man might be found worthy of eternal life without any actual change taking place in him; only owing to an acceptation on God’s part (“a sola divina acceptatione”) does the soul become worthy of eternal life, not on account of any created cause (therefore not on account of love and grace). “The whole work of salvation here becomes external; it is mechanical, not organic.”

  If Luther, in consequence of his study of these Occamist doctrines, fell into error regarding the supernatural, the consequences were even worse when, with his head full of such Occamistic ideas, he proceeded to expound the most difficult of the Pauline Epistles, with their dim and mysterious handling of grace, and, at the same time, to ponder on the writings of St. Augustine, that deep-thinking Doctor of grace. Such studies could only breed fresh confusion in his mind.

  The result was as follows: regarding imputation, i.e. one of the foundations of his theology, Luther quotes Occam in such a way as to represent him as teaching as a fact what he merely held to be possible. He declares sanctifying grace to be not merely superfluous, but also non-existent, and erects the theory of Divine acceptation into a dogma. This alone would be sufficient to demonstrate his positive dependence on Occamism.

  The theories of acceptation, which were peculiar to the Occamists and which Luther took over — though what they called by this name he prefers to call imputation — had not only met with approval, but had also been widely applied by this school.

  According to d’Ailly, evil is not evil on account of its special nature, but only because God forbids it (“præcise, quia lege prohibitum”); a law or rule of conduct does not exist by nature, for God might have willed otherwise (“potest non esse lex”); He has, however, decreed it in the present order of things. Similar views appear in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, where little regard is paid to the objective foundation of the moral law.

  According to Occam, God acts according to whim. D’Ailly actually discovers in him the view that it is not impossible to suppose that the created will might deserve well by hating God, because God might conceivably command this. In Luther we at least find the opinion that God knows of no grounds for His action and might therefore work what is evil in man, which then, of course, would not be evil in God in consequence of His not imputing it to Himself as such.

  The Divine imputation or pactum plays its part in the Occamistic sense in Luther’s earliest theological lectures on the Psalms. “Faith and Grace,” he there says, “by which we are justified to-day, would not justify us of themselves save as a consequence of the ‘pactum Dei.’” In the same place he teaches that, as a result of such an “agreement and promise,” those who, before Christ, fulfilled the law according to the letter, acquired a supernatural merit de congruo.

  Luther’s dependence on Occamism caused him, as Denifle expresses it, to be always “on bad terms with the supernatural”; we must not, however, take this as meaning that Luther did not do his best, according to his own lights, to support and to encourage faith in revelation, both in himself and in others.

  We shall see how in the case of justification he regards faith, and then his particular “faith only” as the one factor, not, however, the faith which is animated by charity, and this because, with the Occamists, he rejects all supernatural habits. He extols the value of faith on every occasion at the expense of the other virtues.

  The positive influence of Occam on Luther is also to be traced in the domain of faith and knowledge. Luther imagines he is fortifying faith by laying stress on its supposed opposition to reason, a tendency which is manifest already in his Commentary on Romans. In this Occam and his school were his models.

  The saying that there is much in faith which is “plainly against reason and the contrary of which is established by faith” comes from d’Ailly. Occam found the arguments for the existence of one God inadequate. Biel has not so much to say against these proofs, but he does hold that the fact that one only God exists is a matter of faith not capable of being absolutely proved by reason.

  Occam, whom Biel praises as “multum clarus et latus,” made faith to know almost everything, but the results achieved by reason to be few and unreliable. He employed the function of reason, of a caustic reason to boot, in order to raise doubts, or to exercise the mind at the expense of the truths of revelation; yet in the positive recognition of articles of faith he allowed reason to recede into the background. In any case he prepare
d the way for the saying, that a thing may be false in theology and yet true in philosophy, and vice versa, a proposition condemned at the 5th Lateran Council by the Constitution Apostolici Regiminis of Leo X.

  Luther came to state clearly that “it was quite false to say the same thing was true in philosophy and also in theology”; whoever taught this was fettering the articles of faith “as prisoners to the judgment of reason.” We shall have to speak later of many examples of the violent and hateful language with which he disparages reason in favour of faith. His love for the Bible at an early period strengthened in him the idea — one which the Occamists often advanced in the course of the dialectic criticism to which they subjected the truths of religion — that after all, the decisions of faith are not the same as those of the mind, and that we must make the best of this fact. Luther even in his Commentary on Romans is ever ready to decry the “wisdom of the flesh,” which is there described as constantly interfering with faith.