Collected Works of Martin Luther

by Martin Luther

  When prescribing the remedy, he begins to use the first person plural. “Therefore there is nothing for us to do but to make the best of things and to remain in sin. We must sigh to be set free, hoping in God’s mercy. When a man desires to be cured he may, if in too great a hurry, have a worse relapse. His cure can only take place slowly and many weaknesses must be borne with during convalescence. It is enough that sin be displeasing, though it cannot be altogether expelled. For Christ bears everything, if only it is displeasing to us; His are the sins not ours, and, here below, His righteousness is our property.”

  We may take that portion of the description where the first person is used as an account of his own state. Here he is describing his own practice. This passage, which in itself admits of a good interpretation and might be made use of by a Catholic ascetic, must be read in connection with Luther’s doctrine that concupiscence is sin. Looking at it in this light, the sense in which he understands displeasure with sin becomes clear, also why, in view of the ineradicable nature of concupiscence, he is willing to console himself with the idea that “Christ bears it all.” His dislike of concupiscence is entirely different from contrition for sin. The young Monk frequently felt himself oppressed by an aversion for concupiscence, but of contrition for sin he scarcely ever speaks, or only in such a way as to raise serious doubts with regard to his idea of it and the manner in which he personally manifested it, as the passages about to be quoted will show. The practice of making Christ’s righteousness our own, saying, “His are the sins,” etc., he does not recommend merely in the case of concupiscence, but also in that of actual sins; it should, however, be noted that the latter may quite well be displeasing to us without there being any contrition in the theological sense, particularly without there being perfect contrition.

  Luther is here describing the remedy which he himself applies in place of real penance, wholesome contrition and compunction. It is to replace all the good resolutions which strengthen and fortify the will, and all penitential works done in satisfaction for the guilt of sin, and this remedy he begins to recommend to others.

  His contempt for good works, for zeal in the religious life and for any efforts at overcoming self encourage him in these views. His new ideas as to man’s inability to do anything that is good, as to his want of free will to fight against concupiscence and the sovereign efficacy of grace and absolute predestination, all incline him to the easy road of imputation; finally, he caps his system by persuading himself that only by his new discoveries, which, moreover, are borne out by St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, can Christ receive the honour which is His due and His Gospel come into its rights. Such was Luther’s train of thought.

  The characteristic position which Luther assumed in his early days with regard to penance and the motive of fear, must be more closely examined in order to complete the above account.

  The Monk frankly admits, not once but often, that inward contrition for sin was something foreign, almost unknown, to him. The statements he makes concerning his confessions weigh heavily in the scale when we come to consider the question of his spiritual life.

  In a passage of his Commentary on the Psalms where he would in the ordinary course have been obliged to speak of contrition he refrains from doing so on the plea that he has had no experience of it, and refers his hearers to the Confessions of St. Augustine.

  He admits in his Commentary on Romans that he had struggled with himself (“ita mecum pugnavi”) because he could not believe that contrition and confession really cleansed him from sin, as he had always been conscious of sin, viz. concupiscence, still continuing within him.

  In 1518 he writes: because the evil inclination to sin always remains in man “there are none, or at least very few, in the whole world who have perfect contrition, and I certainly admit this in my own case.”

  According to the statements he made in later years concerning his fruitless attempts to awaken contrition within himself, and concerning his relations with his confessor, he must have taken the wrong road at an early period in his religious life; the more earnestly he sought to conceive contrition, he says, the greater was his trouble of mind and remorse of conscience. “I was unable to accept (‘non poteram admittere’) the absolutions and consolations of my confessors, for I thought to myself, who knows whether I can put faith in these words of comfort?” This sentence occurs in the passage mentioned above, where he states how he had been tranquilised by the repeated exhortations of his preceptor to recall God’s command and cultivate the virtue of hope. It is true he here ascribes the original cause of his trouble of mind to the teaching he had received “in the schools, which had such a bad effect on him that he could not endure to hear the word joy mentioned.” It is clear that he is here speaking with an ulterior purpose, namely, with a view to supporting his polemic against the Catholic Church (“meo exemplo et periculo moniti discite!”). But it is highly probable that his idea of concupiscence as sin tended to confuse his conception of contrition, and made confession and contrition painful to him.

  At a later date he opposed the Catholic doctrine of contrition on account of his aversion to the motive of fear of the judgments of God.

  The Church had always taught that perfect contrition was that which proceeded from a real love of God, but that contrition from a holy fear of God was salutary because it involved a turning away from sin and a beginning of love. Luther, however, at the very commencement of his new teaching, was at pains to exclude fear as an inspiring motive. He was determined to weed it out of the religious life as unworthy of the service of God, quite unmindful of the fact that it was expressly recommended by reason, by the Fathers of the Church and by the very words of the Bible.

  He says, for instance, in 1518 in his sermon on the Ten Commandments, that in contrition for sin no place is to be assigned to fear. The contrition which must be aroused is, he says, to proceed from love alone, because that which is based on fear is always outward, hypocritical and not lasting.

  In an earlier sermon he mentions the two kinds of contrition, namely, that which, according to him, is the only true one, “out of love of justice and of punishment,” or which, in other words, hates sin from the love of God, and that which springs from fear, which he says is artificial and not real, and to which he gives the nickname “gallows grief.” The latter, he says, does not make us abhor sin, but merely the punishment of sin, and were there no punishment for sin it would at once cease. Hence he misapprehends the nature of imperfect contrition, for this in reality does not desire a return to sin.

  He begins his tract on Penance in 1518 with the assertion, that contrition from the motive of fear makes a man a still greater sinner, because it does not detach the will from sin, and because the will would return to sin so soon as there was no punishment to be feared. This contrition, he says, his opponents among the theologians defend; they could not understand that penance is sweet and that this sweetness leads to an abhorrence and hatred of sin.

  As he had banished contrition from a motive of fear, he should have laid all the more stress upon that which springs from love. But here he was met by a difficulty, namely, that concupiscence still exists in man and draws him towards sin, or rather, according to Luther’s ideas, of itself makes him a real sinner, so that no actual turning away from sin can take place in the heart. What then was to be done? “You must,” he says, “cast yourself by prayer into God’s hands so that He may account your contrition as real and true.” “Christ will supply from His own what is wanting in yours.” Thus we again arrive at imputation, at a mere outward covering over of the defect of inward change.

  If he looked upon penance and confession in this light, then, indeed, they were not of a nature to satisfy and tranquilise him. We may, however, remark that in the time of his great crisis an earnest and devout fear of God the Judge would have availed him more than all his extravagant mysticism with its tendency to cast off the bonds of fear and abolish the keeping of the law.

  We shall not be wr
ong if we assume that the frequent states of terror — of which the cause lay in his temperament rather than in his will — had their part in his aversion to fear and to the idea of God’s judgment. He felt himself impelled to escape at any cost from their dominion.

  Other passages which Luther wrote at a later date on fear and contrition read rather differently and seem to advocate fear as a motive. We see thereby how hard he found it to cut himself adrift from the natural and correct view taught by theology. He declares, for instance, later, with great emphasis, that “true penance begins with the fear and the judgment of God.”

  He betrays in this, as in other points, his confusion and inconsequence.

  He is utterly unfair to the Church and to her theology when he falsely asserts that she had admitted contrition from fear alone, i.e. to the utter exclusion of love; every kind of fear, he says maliciously, was recognised as sufficient for receiving absolution, even that “gallows grief” which abhorred sin solely from fear of punishment and with the intention of returning to it if no punishment existed (timor serviliter servilis, as it was subsequently termed by theologians). This reproach did not strike home to the theologians or to the Church. Theological and moral treatises there were in plenty, which, like the Fathers of the Church and the mediæval Doctors, taught in express terms the advantage of perfect contrition and exhorted the faithful to it. Indeed, most of the popular manuals merely taught that sin must be repented of for God’s sake, from love of God, without even mentioning simple attrition. It was not only generally recognised and taken for granted that the lower, imperfect contrition, i.e. that which arises from fear, in order to be a means of forgiveness in the Sacrament of Penance, must include a firm resolution of not returning to sin, but it was set down as requisite that this so-called “servile” fear (timor servilis) must be coupled with a commencement of love of God, or else be of such a nature as to lead up to it. It is sufficient to open the works in circulation in the theological schools at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to see at what length and with what care these questions were discussed. It cannot, however, be denied that some few of the later scholastic theologians — among them, significantly enough, Johann Paltz, preceptor in the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt at the time Luther entered — did not express themselves clearly, and that some other theologians defended views which were not correct.

  But whether such theologians exerted a positive or negative influence on Luther we do not know. One thing is certain, however, namely, that he was influenced chiefly by his own desire to free himself from what he looked upon as an oppressive yoke and that his self-sufficiency and ignorance speedily led him to fancy it his duty to confront the theology of previous ages with his epoch-making discovery regarding the doctrine of fear and penance.

  This process is confirmed by a letter of his addressed to Staupitz, his esteemed Superior, at a time when the commotion caused by his Indulgence theses was in full swing, which gives us a picture of his mental state. In it he says:

  “The word which I hated most in all the Scriptures was the word penance. Nevertheless [when performing penance and going to confession], I played the hypocrite bravely before God, attempting to wring out of myself an imaginary and artificial love.” He also grumbles here about the “works of penance and the insipid satisfactions and the wearisome confession”; such a prominent position ought not to be assigned to them; the ordinary instructions and the modus confitendi contained nothing but the most oppressive tyranny of conscience. He had always felt this, and in his trouble it had been to him like a ray from heaven when Staupitz once told him: “True penance is that only which begins with the love of God and of justice, and what the instructions represent as the last and crown of all is rather the commencement and the starting-point of penance, namely, love.” This precious truth he had, on examination, found to be absolutely confirmed by Holy Scripture (“s. scripturæ verba undique mihi colludebant”) — Luther had a curious knack of finding in Scripture everything he wanted — even the Greek term for penance, metanoia, led up to the same conclusion, whereas the Latin “pœnitentiam agere” implied effort and was therefore misleading. Thus Staupitz’s words had turned the bitter taste of the word penance into sweetness for him. “God’s commandments always become sweet to us when we do not merely content ourselves with reading them in books; we must learn to understand them in the wounds of our Sweetest Saviour.”

  The Monk was well aware that such mystical utterances were sure of finding a welcome echo with the influential Vicar of the whole Augustinian Congregation, himself a mystic. He sends him with the same letter his long Latin defence of his Indulgence theses (Resolutiones), which Staupitz was to forward to the Pope.

  He at the same time expresses some of his thoughts concerning the connection between his doctrine of penance and the controversy on Indulgences which had just commenced, probably hoping that Staupitz would also acquaint Rome with them. These we cannot pass over without remark in concluding our consideration of Luther’s doctrine on penance. The Indulgence-preachers, he says, must be withstood because they are overturning the whole system of penance; not only do they set up penitential works and satisfaction as the principal thing, but they extol them, solely with a view to inducing the faithful to secure the remission of satisfaction by their rich offerings in return for Indulgences. Therefore he has been obliged, though unwillingly, to emerge from his retirement in order to defend the doctrine that it is better to make real satisfaction than merely to have it remitted by securing an Indulgence.

  Staupitz, a shortsighted man, was not to be convinced that, by Luther’s teaching and the commotion which it was arousing, the very existence of the Augustinian Congregation was endangered and the Catholic Church herself menaced in her dogma and discipline.

  Instead of watching over the communities committed to his care he spent his days in travelling from place to place, a welcome and witty guest at the tables of great men, devoting his spare time to writing pious and learned books. The sad instances of disobedience, dissension and want of discipline which became more and more prevalent in his monasteries did not induce him to lay a restraining hand upon them. Too many exemptions from regular observance and the common life had already been permitted in the Congregation in the past, and of this the effect was highly pernicious. Luther himself had scarcely ever had the opportunity of acquiring any practical experience of the monastic life at its best during his conventual days; it offered no splendid picture which might have roused his admiration and enthusiasm. This circumstance must be taken into account in considering his growing coldness in his profession and his gradually increasing animosity towards the religious life. He and Staupitz helped to destroy the fine foundation of Andreas Proles at a time when it already showed signs of deterioration.

  On one occasion, when referring to his administration, Staupitz told Luther, that at first he had sought to carry out his plans for the good of the Order, later he had followed the advice of the Fathers of the Order, and, then, entrusted the matter to God, but, now, he was letting things take their course. Luther himself adds when recounting this: “Then I came on the scene and started something new.” It is a proof of the weakness which was coming upon the institution, that a man holding principles such as Luther was advocating in his lectures and sermons should have been allowed to retain for three years the position of Vicar with jurisdiction over eleven monasteries. When he laid down his office in the Chapter at Heidelberg in 1518 we do not even learn that the Chapter carried out the measures which had meanwhile been decreed against Luther by the General of the Augustinians at Rome. The election of the Prior of Erfurt, Johann Lang, Luther’s friend and sympathiser, as his successor, and the Heidelberg disputation in the Augustinian monastery of that town, of which the result was a victory for the new teaching, show sufficiently the feelings of the Chapter. This election was the final triumph of the non-Observantine party.

  A later hand has added against Lang’s name in the Register of the University
of Erfurt the words “Hussita apostata,” intended to stigmatise his falling away to the Lutheran heresy comparable only with that of Hus. On leaving the Order he wrote an insulting vindication of his conduct, in which among other things he says all the Priors are donkeys. While he was Prior at Erfurt, a Prior was appointed at Wittenberg whom Luther, as Rural Vicar, raised to this dignity almost before he had finished his year of noviceship. Only Luther’s strange power over men can account for the fact that so many of the monks were convinced that he was animated by the true Spirit of God in his new ideas with regard to conventual life and religion generally, and even in his overhauling of theology. Later, when the Catholic Church had spoken, they did not see their way to retract and submit, but preferred to marry. Staupitz himself, the inexperienced theologian, deceived by his protégé’s talents, often said to him: “Christ speaks through you.” It is true, that, at a later date, he sternly represented to Luther that he was going too far. After most of the monks had ranged themselves under the new standard, their apathetic and disappointed Superior withdrew to a Catholic monastery at Salzburg, where he expired in peace in 1524 as a Benedictine Abbot.

  At that period Church discipline in Germany was already ruined. The man who was responsible for the downfall reveals a mental state capable of going to any extreme when in 1518 he writes to his fatherly friend Staupitz in almost fanatical language: “Let Christ see to it whether the words I have hitherto spoken are mine or His. Without His permission no Pope or Prince can give a decision (Cp. Prov. xxi. 1).... I have no temporal possessions to lose, I have only my weak body, tried by many labours. Should they desire to take my life by treachery or violence they will but shorten my existence by a few hours. I am content with my sweetest Saviour and Redeemer, our Lord Jesus Christ. Him I will praise as long as life lasts (Ps. ciii. 33). Should others refuse to sing with me, what matters it? Let them howl alone if it pleases them. May our Lord Jesus Christ ever preserve you, my sweetest father.”