The preponderance of philosophy, and more particularly the excessive authority of Aristotle, in the theological method of his circle offered Luther a second point of attack. Here also it was a question of a rather widely spread abuse which the better class of Schoolmen had prudently avoided. The Nominalistic schools, generally speaking, showed a tendency to a rationalistic treatment of the truths of faith, which affrighted Luther considerably. General ideas, according to the Nominalists, were merely “nomina,” i.e. empty words; Nominalists concerned themselves only with what was actual and tangible. Nominalism was fond of displaying its dialectic and even its insolence at the expense of theology on the despised Universal ideas. We can understand the invective with which Luther gives expression to his hatred of Scholasticism, though his right to do so arose only from his limited acquaintance with those few Scholastics whom he had chosen,[323] or, rather, who had been allotted to him, as his masters; the schools he attended were at that time all following the method of the Nominalists, then usually known as “modern.”
Already, in 1509 (see above, p. 22), a severe criticism of Aristotle appears in Luther’s marginal notes. This is in a gloss on Augustine’s work “On the City of God” which he was then devouring as a sort of antidote: “Far more apparent is the error of our theologians when they impudently chatter (‘impudentissime garriunt’) and affirm of Aristotle that he does not deviate from Catholic truth.”[324]
Luther’s later exaggerations need not be refuted, in which he complains so loudly of the idolatrous Aristotelian worship of reason on the part of all the Scholastics. It was in general perfectly well known regarding Aristotle that he had erred, and also where he erred; books had even been written dealing with his deviations from the faith. This, however, did not prevent many from over-estimating him. We must set against this, however, the fact that Luther’s own professor of philosophy in the University of Erfurt, Bartholomew Arnoldi of Usingen, had declared, like others before him, that those who represented the Stagirite as without errors were “not worthy of the name of philosophers, for they were not lovers of the truth but mocked at philosophy; they should just read their hero more carefully and they would find that, for instance, he made out the world to be without any beginning, a view which Moses, the prophet of truth, had shown to be an error; Scotus, too, wrote in the first book of his Commentary on the Sentences, that the works of Aristotle were more in agreement with the law of Mohammed than with that of Christ.”[325] Usingen was an earnest and moderate man, who did not shrink, even in his philosophical writings, from preferring Divine Revelation to the exaggeration of the rights of reason. “The inadequacy of philosophers is as apparent as the great value of the Sacred Books. The latter rise far above the knowledge attained by mere human reason and natural light.”[326] Owing to the fact that he had made no secret of his views in his intercourse with Luther, especially when they became more intimate on Luther’s entering the Order to which he himself belonged,[327] we can understand and explain the sympathy and respect with which Luther long after cherished his memory, though the path he followed was no longer that of his old teacher. Usingen was a Nominalist, but his example shows that there were some enlightened men who belonged to this school, and who did it honour.
In the course of time, regardless of the numerous examples giving him the lie, Luther came ruthlessly to condemn all the Schoolmen and the whole Middle Ages ostensibly on the ground of the pretended poisoning of the faith by Aristotle, but really because he himself had set up a contradiction between faith and reason.[328] He says in 1521 that the Scholastics, headed by Aquinas, “solus aristotelicissimus ac plane Aristoteles ipse,” had smuggled philosophy into the world, though the Apostle had condemned it; thus it became too powerful, made Aristotle equal to Christ in dignity and trustworthiness, and darkened for us the Sun of righteousness and truth, the Son of God.[329] Three years before he had declared in writing to his other professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Jodocus Trutfetter, who was vexed with his theses Contra scholasticam theologiam, that he daily prayed to God that in place of the perverse studies in vogue, the wholesome study of the Bible and the Fathers might again be introduced (“ut rursum bibliæ et s. patrum purissima studia revocentur”).[330] Yet three years earlier, in his first lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, he had said to his pupils: “let us learn to know Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” and urged them not to waste their time in the study of the foolish whims of metaphysicians, but at most, to treat philosophy as a subject which one must be acquainted with in order to be able to refute it, and on the other hand to throw themselves with all their might into the study of Holy Scripture.[331]
There can therefore be no question, as we have seen, that his idea that philosophy was the ruin of the Church, an idea present in his mind even in his earliest public life, was founded on the many actually existing abuses, though his own ultra-spiritualism and his gloomy mistrust of man’s nature led him to feel the evil more than others, so that, in reacting against it, he lost his balance instead of calmly lending his assistance towards improving matters.
Luther’s reaction was not only against Occamism in general, but also against various particular doctrines of that school, especially, as stated before, against such doctrines as exalted the powers of nature at the expense of grace.
Here again he committed his first fault, the indefensible injustice of blindly charging Scholasticism and theology generally with what he found faulty in his own narrow circle, though these errors had been avoided by St. Thomas and the best of the Schoolmen. It has been pointed out that he was not acquainted with this real Scholasticism, nevertheless, in 1519, he had the assurance to say: “No one shall teach me scholastic theology, I know it.”[332] “I was brought up amongst them (Thomas, Bonaventure, etc.), I am also acquainted with the minds of the most learned contemporaries and have saturated myself in the best writings of this sort.”[333]
He, all too often, gives us the means to judge the value of this assertion of his. In the same year, for instance, he sums up the chief points of the theology which alone he had learnt, and calls it in all good faith the scholastic theology of the Church, though it was merely the meagre theology of his own Occamist professors.
In order to show all he had had to struggle with he says: “I had formerly learned among the monstrous things (‘monstra’) which are almost accounted axioms of scholastic theology ... that man can do his part in the acquiring of grace; that he can remove obstacles to grace; that he is able to oppose no hindrance to grace; that he can keep the commandments of God according to the letter, though not according to the intention of the lawgiver; that he has freedom of choice [personal freedom in the work of salvation] between this and that, between both contradictories and contraries; that his will is able to love God above all things through its purely natural powers and that there is such a thing as an act of charity, of friendship, by merely natural powers.”[334]
We are to believe that these were the “axioms of scholastic theology!”