Luther, vol. 1 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

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.”[639] 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.[640]

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.”[641]

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.”[642] “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.”[643]

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 philosophises 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.[644]

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.[645] 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.”[646] 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.