Luther, vol. 1 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

The Occamist theology strongly influenced the talented and critical pupil, though diversely. Most of the elements of which it was made up repelled him, and as he regarded them as essential parts of Scholasticism, they filled him with a distaste for Scholasticism generally. Other of its elements attracted him, namely, those more in conformity with his ideas and feeling. These he enrolled in the service of his theological views, which—again following Occam’s example—he developed with excessive independence. Thus the tendency to a false separation of natural and supernatural commended itself to him; he greedily seized upon the ideas of Nominalism with regard to imputation after he had commenced groping about for a new system of theology. His greatest objection was for the views of his teachers regarding the powers of man and grace. This it was, more especially, which raised in him the spirit of contradiction and set him on a path of his own. To one in his timorous state such views were unsympathetic; he himself scented sin and imperfection everywhere; also he preferred to see the powers of the will depreciated and everything placed to the account of grace and Divine election. Thus, what he read into Holy Scripture concerning faith and Christ seemed to him to speak a language entirely different from that of the subtleties of the Occamists.

His unfettered acceptance or rejection of the doctrinal views submitted to him was quite in accordance with his character. He was not one to surrender himself simply to authority. His unusual ability incited him to independent criticism of opinions commonly received, and to voice his opposition in the public disputations against his not overbrilliant Nominalist professors; the strong appeal which he made to the Bible, with which the others were less well acquainted, and to the rights of faith and the grace of Christ, was in his favour.

2. Negative Influence of the Occamist School on Luther

Besides the recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans various statements in his sermons, disputations and letters prove the opposition that existed between Luther and his own school. In the Disputation of 1517 entitled “Contra scholasticam theologiam,” for instance, he expressly names, as the opponents against whom his various theses are aimed, Scotus, Occam, the Cardinal, Gabriel, and, generally, “omnes scholastici” or “communis sententia,” “dictum commune,” “usus multorum,” “philosophi” or “morales.”[310]

Before we proceed to examine the individual points of Luther’s conflict with Occamism and with what he considered the teaching of Scholasticism as a whole, two general points of this opposition must be mentioned. His first grievance is the neglect of Holy Scripture.

A sensible want in the Divinity studies of that time lay, as a matter of fact, in the insufficient use of the positive foundations of theology, i.e. above all of Holy Scripture, and also of the tradition of the Fathers of the Church and the decisions of the Church in her office as teacher. “Luther had rightly recognised,” says Albert Weiss, “what harm resulted from the regrettable neglect of Holy Scripture on the part of so many theologians, and therefore he chose as his watchword the cry for the improvement of theology by a return to the Bible.”[311] “That Luther was moved to great anger by the Nominalists’ neglect of the Bible is not to be wondered at.”[312] “He would not have been Luther,” the same author rightly says, “had he not soon veered round to the other extreme, i.e. to the battle-cry: Scripture only, and nothing but the Scripture, away with all Scholasticism.”

This abuse, however, had already been reproved and bewailed by the Church before Luther’s time; there is no dearth of statements by the very highest authorities urging a remedy, though it is true more should have been done. Pope Clement VI wrote reprovingly to the University of Paris, on May 20, 1346: “Most theologians do not trouble themselves about the text of Holy Scripture, about the actual words of their principal witnesses, about the expositions of the Saints and Doctors, i.e. concerning the sources from which real theology is taken, a fact which is bitterly to be deplored.... In place of this they entangle themselves in philosophical questions and in disputes which merely pander to their cleverness, in doubtful interpretations, dangerous doctrines and the rest.”[313] But “with the prevalent spirit of formalism and disorder, embodied chiefly in Nominalism,” “a healthy and at the same time fruitful treatment of Holy Scripture had become impossible.... These were abuses which had long been calling for the reintroduction of a positive and more scriptural treatment of theology.”[314] Though the judgment passed by Luther in his later years on the neglect of Holy Scripture was somewhat too general (for it was historically untrue to say that Scripture had ever been altogether given up by the Church),[315] yet contemporaries agree with him in blaming the too extensive use of Aristotle’s philosophy in the schools to the detriment of the Bible-text. Long before, Gerson, whose books were in Luther’s hands, had laid stress on the importance of Holy Scripture for theology. “Holy Scripture,” he says, “is a Rule of Faith, which it is only necessary to understand aright; against it there is no appeal to authority or to the decisions of human reason: nor can custom, law or practice have any weight if proved to be contrary to Holy Scripture.”[316]

Luther, with palpable exaggeration, lays the charge at the door of theology as a whole, even of the earlier school, and would have us believe that the abuse was inseparable from ecclesiastical science. He speaks to this effect more and more forcibly during the course of his controversies. Thus in 1530 he says of the Scholastics, that they “despised Holy Scripture.” “What! they exclaimed, the Bible? Why, the Bible is a heretic’s book, and you need only read the Doctors to find that out. I know that I am not lying in saying this, for I grew up amongst them and saw and heard all about them.” And so they had arrived at doctrines about which one must ask: “Is this the way to honour Christ’s blood and death?” Everything was full of “idle doctrines which did not agree among themselves, and strange new opinions.”[317] Occam, he declares in his Table-Talk in 1540, “excelled them all in genius and has confuted all the other schools, but even he said and wrote in so many words that it could not be proved from Scripture that the Holy Ghost is necessary for a good work.”[318] “These people had intelligence, had time for work and had grown grey in study, but about Christ they understood nothing, because they esteemed Holy Scripture lightly. No one read the Bible so as to steep himself in its contents with reflection, it was only treated like a history book.[319]

It is true that the scholastic treatment of the doctrines of faith, as advocated by Occam against the more positive school, disregarded Holy Scripture to such an extent that, in the master’s subtle Commentaries, it hardly finds any place; even in the treatment of the supernatural virtues—faith, hope and charity—Scripture scarcely intervenes.[320] But it was unjust of Luther, on this account, to speak of the Schoolmen’s contempt for the Bible, or to say, for instance in his Table-Talk, about his master, Gabriel Biel, whose Commentary on the Sentences had become, so to speak, a hand-book: “The authority of the Bible counted for nothing with Gabriel.”[321] Biel esteemed and utilised the Bible as the true Word of God, but he did not satisfy young Luther, who desiderated in him much more of the Bible and a little less of philosophy. The “word,” he declares, was not cherished by the priests, and this he had already shown in his Leitzkau discourse to be the reason of all the corruption.[322]