Luther’s dependence on Occamism caused him, as Denifle expresses it, to be always “on bad terms with the supernatural”;[385] we must not, however, take this as meaning that Luther did not do his best, according to his own lights, to support and to encourage faith in revelation, both in himself and in others.
We shall see how in the case of justification he regards faith, and then his particular “faith only” as the one factor, not, however, the faith which is animated by charity, and this because, with the Occamists, he rejects all supernatural habits. He extols the value of faith on every occasion at the expense of the other virtues.[386]
The positive influence of Occam on Luther is also to be traced in the domain of faith and knowledge. Luther imagines he is fortifying faith by laying stress on its supposed opposition to reason, a tendency which is manifest already in his Commentary on Romans. In this Occam and his school were his models.
The saying that there is much in faith which is “plainly against reason and the contrary of which is established by faith”[387] comes from d’Ailly. Occam found the arguments for the existence of one God inadequate.[388] Biel has not so much to say against these proofs, but he does hold that the fact that one only God exists is a matter of faith not capable of being absolutely proved by reason.[389]
Occam, whom Biel praises as “multum clarus et latus,” made faith to know almost everything, but the results achieved by reason to be few and unreliable.[390] He employed the function of reason, of a caustic reason to boot, in order to raise doubts, or to exercise the mind at the expense of the truths of revelation; yet in the positive recognition of articles of faith he allowed reason to recede into the background. In any case he prepared the way for the saying, that a thing may be false in theology and yet true in philosophy, and vice versa, a proposition condemned at the 5th Lateran Council by the Constitution Apostolici Regiminis of Leo X.[391]
Luther came to state clearly that “it was quite false to say the same thing was true in philosophy and also in theology”; whoever taught this was fettering the articles of faith “as prisoners to the judgment of reason.”[392] We shall have to speak later of many examples of the violent and hateful language with which he disparages reason in favour of faith. His love for the Bible at an early period strengthened in him the idea—one which the Occamists often advanced in the course of the dialectic criticism to which they subjected the truths of religion—that after all, the decisions of faith are not the same as those of the mind, and that we must make the best of this fact. Luther even in his Commentary on Romans is ever ready to decry the “wisdom of the flesh,” which is there described as constantly interfering with faith.
The union of faith and knowledge, of which true Scholasticism was proud, never appealed to Luther.
The Occamists had also been before him in attacking Aristotle. The fact that many esteemed this philosopher too highly gave rise in their camp to bitter and exaggerated criticism, and to excessive abuse of the Stagirite. Against the blind Aristotelians d’Ailly had already written somewhat unkindly: “In philosophy, i.e. in the teaching of Aristotle, there are no, or but few, convincing proofs ... we must call the philosophy or teaching of Aristotle an opinion rather than a science.”[393] Gregory of Rimini, whom Luther made use of and who was not ignorant of Occamism, says that Aristotle had shockingly gone astray (“turpissime erravit”) on many points, and, in some, had contradicted himself.
Such were the minds that inspired Luther at the time when he was already making for a theological goal different from that of the “rationalists,” wise ones of this world, and loquacious wiseacres, as he calls all the Scholastics indiscriminately in his Commentary on Romans. Wherever theology has made a right and moderate use of philosophical proofs, philosophy has always shown itself as the ancilla theologiæ, and has been of assistance in theological development. After expelling reason from the domain of supernatural knowledge Luther was forced to fall back on feeling and inward experience, i.e. on elements, which, owing to their inconstancy and variability, did not deserve the place he gave them. This was as harmful to faith as the denial of the rights of reason.
Gerson had lamented, concerning the misuse of philosophical criticism in religious matters, that the methods of the Nominalists made faith grow cold,[394] and it may be that Luther had experienced these effects in himself, since, in his lectures on the Psalms, he acknowledges and regrets the cooling of his life of faith.[395] But, surely, in the same way the predominance of feeling and so-called religious experience was also to be regretted, as it crippled faith and deprived it of a sure guide.