Elsewhere, on account of the supposed inability of man, he teaches a sort of Quietism: “Is anyone to become converted, pious and a Christian, we don’t set about it; no praying, no fasting assists it; it must come from heaven and from grace alone.... Whoever wants to become pious, let him not say: ‘I will set about doing good works in order to obtain grace,’ but, ‘I will wait to see whether God by His word will give me His grace and His spirit.’”[373]
And on another occasion his words are still stronger: “The gospel tells us only to open our bosom and take, and says: ‘Behold what God has done for you, He made His Son become flesh for you.’ Believe this and accept it and you will be saved.”[374]
Seen in the light of such passages, it becomes clear that the following must not be taken as a mere expression of humility, but as a deprecation of good deeds. Already, in 1519, Luther says: “Man, like a cripple with disabled hands and feet, must invoke grace as the artisan of works (‘operum artificem’).”[375] The difficulty is that this very invocation is itself a vital, though surely not a sinful, action. Would not a man have been justified in saying even of this preliminary act: I will wait, I may not begin? “Luther was scarcely acquainted with the doctrine of a wholesome Scholasticism and with that of the Church concerning the mysterious reciprocal action of grace and free will in man. He was qualified to oppose the Occamist teaching, but was incapable of replacing it by the true doctrine.”[376]
Against the prevalent doctrine on the powers of man, Luther, among other verses from the Bible, brought forward John xv. 5: “Without me ye can do nothing.” A remark on his use of this supposed scriptural proof may serve to conclude what we have said of the far-reaching negative influence of Occamism on the youthful Luther.
The decisive words of the Redeemer: “Without me ye can do nothing,” so Luther says to his friend Spalatin, had hitherto been understood quite wrongly. And, in proof of this, he adduces the interpretation which he must have heard in his school, or read in the authors who were there in repute: “Our masters,” he says, “have made a distinction between the general and the particular concurrence of God” (concursus generalis and concursus specialis or gratia); with the general concurrence man was able, so they taught, to do what is naturally good, i.e. what they considered to be good; with the particular, however, that which is beyond nature (“quæ gratiæ sunt et supra naturam”), and meritorious for heaven. To this statement of the perfectly correct teaching of his masters he adds, however, the following: they taught that “with our powers we are able, under the general Divine concurrence, to prepare ourselves for the obtaining of grace, i.e. for the obtaining of the particular concurrence, hence that we can ‘inchoative’ do something, to gain merit and the vision of God, notwithstanding the express teaching of Christ, though we are indeed unable to do this ‘perfective,’ without the particular assistance of grace.”[377]
What Luther says here applies at most to the Nominalists; according to Occam’s school the preparation for sanctifying grace takes place by purely natural acts,[378] and accordingly this school was not disposed to take Christ’s words about eternal life too literally. Although healthy Scholasticism knows nothing of this and holds fast to the literal meaning of the words “Without me ye can do nothing,” viz. nothing for eternal life (the absolute necessity of the general concurrence is taken for granted), yet Luther, in all simplicity, assures his friend that the whole past had taken the words of Christ in the sense he mentions (“Sic est hucusque autoritas ista exposita et intellecta.”)[379] This doctrine he detests so heartily, that he sets up the very extreme opposite in his new system. The general Divine concursus, he says in his letter to Spalatin quoted above, certainly leads nature on to work of itself, but it cannot do otherwise than “seek its own and misuse the gifts of God.” Nature merely provides stuff for the “punishing fire,” however “good and moral its works may appear outwardly.” Hence, according to him, there is no distinction between general and particular concurrence, between the inchoative and the perfective act; without Christ, and “before we have been healed by His grace,” there is absolutely nothing but mischief and sin.
By “grace,” here and elsewhere, he means the state of justifying grace. Whereas true Scholasticism recognises actual grace, which assists man even before justification, this is as good as excluded by Luther already in the beginning of his theological change. Why? Partly because he cannot make use of it as he refers everything to justifying faith, partly because the Occamists, his masters, erroneously reduced the particular influence of God almost entirely to sanctifying grace, and neglected or denied actual grace.
In the latter respect we perceive one of the positive effects of Occamism on Luther. This leads us to another aspect of the present theme.