Luther, vol. 1 of 6

by Hartmann Grisar

While the better class of Scholastics understood it as meaning that God allows the man to arrive at saving grace and justification, who does his part with the help of actual grace, the schools of the decline interpreted the principle as implying that God would always give saving grace where there was adequate human and natural preparation; they thus came to make this grace a mere complement of man’s natural effort; the effect of grace was accordingly purely formal; man’s effort remained the same as before, but, by an act of favour, it was made conformable with God’s “intention”; for it was God’s will that no man should enjoy the Beatific Vision, without such grace, which, however, He never failed to bestow in response to human efforts. Some modern writers have described this view of grace to which the Nominalists were inclined, as a stamp imprinting on purely human effort a higher value. At any rate, according to the Occamists, man prepares for grace by natural acts performed under the ordinary concurrence of God (concursus generalis),[354] whereas, according to the better Scholastics, this preparation demanded, not only the ordinary, but also the particular concurrence of God, namely, actual grace; they maintained that ordinary concurrence was inadequate because it belonged to the natural order.

Actual grace was entirely neglected by the Occamists; the special help of God is, according to most of them, saving grace itself; actual grace, i.e. the divinely infused intermediary between man’s natural and supernatural life, finds no place in their system. This explains, if we may anticipate a little, how it is that Luther pays so little attention to actual grace;[355] he has no need of it, because man, according to him, cannot keep the law at all without the (imputed) state of grace. It is unfortunate that Biel, in whom Luther trusted, should have misrepresented the actual teaching of true Scholasticism concerning the necessity and nature of grace, whether of actual or saving grace.

As early as 1515 Luther, with the insufficient knowledge he possessed, accused the Scholastics generally of teaching that “man by his natural powers is able to love God above all things, and substantially to do the works commanded, though not, indeed, according to the ‘intention’ of the lawgiver, i.e. not in the state of grace.” “Therefore, according to them,” he says, “grace was not necessary save by a new imposition demanding more than the law (‘per novam exactionem ultra legem’); for, as they teach, the law is fulfilled by our own strength. Thus grace is not necessary to fulfil the law, save by reason of God’s new exaction which goes beyond the law. Who will put up with these sacrilegious views?” Assuredly his indignation against Scholasticism would have been righteous had its teaching really been what he imagined. In the same way, and with similarly strong expressions, he generalises what he had learnt in his narrow world at Erfurt and Wittenberg, and ascribes to the whole of Christendom, to the Popes and all the schools, exactly what the Occamists said of the results of original sin being solely confined to the lower powers. Here, and in other connections too, he exclaims: “the whole Papacy has taught this, and all the schools of Sophists [Scholastics].” “Have they not denied that nature was ruined by sin when they assert that they are able to choose what is good according to the dictates of right reason?”[356]

From his antagonism to such views, an antagonism we find already in 1515, when he was preparing for his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, sprang his own gloomy doctrine of the death of free will for good, and the poisoning of human nature by original sin. With its first appearance in the lectures mentioned we shall deal later.

Here a more general question must first receive an answer. How came the youthful Luther to absorb into his life the views above described without apparently shrinking in the least from the opposition to the Church’s teaching manifest in them?

Various answers are forthcoming. In the first place, in consequence of his training which consisted too exclusively in the discussion of speculative controversies, he had come to see in the theological doctrines merely opinions of the schools, on which it was permissible to sit in judgment. He had forgotten that there existed a positive body of unassailable doctrine. Even when engaged in mercilessly attacking this body of doctrine he still appears to have been unaware of having outstepped the lines of permissible disputation. We cannot, however, altogether exonerate him from being in some degree conscious that in his attack on the Church he was treading dangerous ground. In the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans he goes so far as to declare, that the Church was almost destroyed (“pene subversa”) by the teaching of the Scholastics, and that everything was full of Pelagian errors, because grace for the support of the will had been abolished. Things such as these and others of a like nature he could assuredly not have uttered without, in his calmer hours, asking himself how he could reconcile such a standpoint with his duty to the Church. It is true, however, that such quiet hours were exceptional in his case. There can be no doubt also that his idea of the Church and of the binding character of her doctrine was confused. In 1519 he had no hesitation in pointing to the action of other Doctors, who, before that date, had engaged in controversy with each other, in vindication of the tremendous struggle he had just commenced. I am only doing what they did; “Scotus, single-handed, opposed the opinions of all the schools and Doctors and gained the victory (?). Occam did the same, many others have done and are doing likewise up to the present day (?). If then these are at liberty to withstand all, why not I?”[357]

The second answer to the above question lies in the outward circumstances existing in his monastic home at the time of the beginning of his struggle. The members of his Congregation, most of whom were of Occam’s school, were still greatly excited and divided by the quarrel going on in their midst regarding organisation and discipline. The Observantines with their praise of the old order and exercises were a thorn in the flesh of the other Augustinians, more lax and modern in their views, especially for Luther, who was at their head. A spirit of antagonism existed not merely between the different houses of the Order, but even in the houses themselves a struggle seems to have been carried on. On the one side there was a tenacious adherence to the older practices of the Order, on the other suspicion and reproaches were levelled against the innovations of the Observantines. The result was that the fiery young Professor, while inveighing against the Occamist theory of self-righteousness, thundered at the same time against the Observantines as living instances of the self-righteous and holy-by-works. Some of the reasons for this supposition have already been given, and more will be forthcoming when we consider the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.[358]

War was to the Wittenberg Doctor even then an element of life. He found it going on, and encouraged it amongst the wearers of the Augustinian habit. The first and second “factions” in the Order, as Usingen calls them, i.e. the first division caused by the question of observance, and the second by the great controversy concerning faith, were, we may be sure, closely allied in Luther’s mind; the controversy concerning observance may assuredly be reckoned amongst the outward causes which carried him along with them into the greater struggle and contributed for a time to hide from him the danger of his position. Though details are lacking of the resistance to Luther’s first challenge to the theologians of his Order, to Scholasticism and the Church’s doctrine, yet, as already said, we can see from the Commentary on Romans, from other unprinted early lectures, and also from the disputations and sermons, that the Order continued in a state of commotion, and that, as a matter of fact, the second “faction” was an outgrowth of the first.[359] The Observantines had to put up with hearing themselves styled by Luther “iustitiarii” and Pharisees; but probably there were others, even members of the Wittenberg University, perhaps some of those jurists and philosophers[360] to whom he refers in his Commentary on Romans, and whom he so cordially detested, who also were counted amongst the “iustitiarii,” in fact all whom the outrageous assertions of their young colleague regarding the observance of precepts and regulations and against human freedom, roused to opposition.