Staupitz spoke from feeling and not from a clear perception of facts when, in his admiration, he praised Luther as exalting Christ and His grace. He applauded Luther, as the latter says “at the outset of his career”: “This pleases me in your teaching, that it gives honour and all to God alone and nothing to man. We cannot ascribe to God sufficient honour and goodness, etc.”[396] Staupitz sought for enlightenment in a certain mysticism akin to Quietism, instead of in real Scholasticism. On such mystic by-ways Luther was sure to fall in with him, and, as a matter of fact, from the point of view of a false mysticism, Luther was to denounce “rationalising wisdom” and to speak in favour of religious feeling even more strongly than he had done before.
Under the influence of both these elements, a quietistic mysticism and an antagonism to reason in matters of faith, his scorn for all natural works grew. This made it easier for him to regard the natural order of human powers as having been completely upset by original sin. More and more he comes to recognise only an appearance of natural virtues; to consider them as the poisonous blossoms of that unconquerable selfishness which lies ever on the watch in the heart of man, and is only to be gradually tamed by the justifying grace of God. The denial of all freedom, under the ban of sin, little by little becomes for him the principal thing, the “summa causa,” which, as he says in so many words, he has to defend.[397] Beside the debasement of reason and the false fancies of his mysticism, stood as a worthy companion the religion of the enslaved will; this we find present in his mind from the beginning, and at a later period it obtained a lasting monument in the work “De servo arbitrio,” which Luther regarded as the climax of his theology.[398]
But there are other connecting-links between Occamism and the errors of the young Monk.
According to Occam’s school the purely spiritual attributes of God cannot be logically proved; it does not consider it as proved merely by reason that God is the last and final end of man, and that outside of Him there is no real human happiness, nor even, according to Occam himself, that “any final cause exists on account of which all things happen”;[399] not only, according to him, must we be on our guard against any idea that reason can arrive at God as the origin of happiness and as the end of salvation, but even His attributes we must beware of examining philosophically. God’s outward action knows no law, but is purely arbitrary. Thus Occamism, with its theory of the arbitrary Divine Will, manifesting itself in the act of “acceptation” or imputation, was more likely to produce a servile feeling of dependence on God than any childlike relationship; with this corresponded the feeling of the utter worthlessness of man’s own works in relation to imputation, which, absolutely speaking, might have been other than it is.
It is highly probable that the bewildered soul of the young Augustinian greedily lent an ear to such ideas, and laboured to make them meet his own needs. The doubts as to predestination which tormented him were certainly not thereby diminished, but rather increased. How could the idea of an arbitrary God have been of any use to him? In all likelihood the apprehensiveness and obscurity which colours his idea of God, in the Commentary on Romans, was due to notions imbibed by him in his school. Luther was later on to express this conception in his teaching regarding the “Deus absconditus,” on whom, as the source of all predestination (even to hell), we may not look, and whom we may only timidly adore. Already in the Commentary referred to he teaches the absolute predestination to hell of those who are to be damned, a doctrine which no Occamist had yet ventured to put forward.
Among the other points of contact between Luther’s teaching and Occamism, or Nominalism, we may mention, as a striking example, his denial of Transubstantiation, which he expressly associates with one of the theses of the Occamist d’Ailly. Here his especial hatred of the school of St. Thomas comes out very glaringly.
Luther himself confesses later how the Occamist school had led him to this denial.[400] When studying scholastic theology he had read in d’Ailly that the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament of the Altar would be much more comprehensible could we but assume that He was present with the bread, i.e. without any change of substance, but that this was impossible owing to the unassailable contrary teaching of the Church on Transubstantiation. The same idea is found in Occam, but of this Luther was unaware. Luther criticises d’Ailly’s appeal to the Church, and then proceeds: “I found out later on what sort of Church it is which sets up such a doctrine; it is the Thomistic, the Aristotelian. My discovery made me bolder, and therefore I decided for Consubstantiation. The opinions of the Thomists, even though approved by Pope or Council, remain opinions and do not become articles of faith, though an angel from heaven should say the contrary; what is asserted apart from Scripture and without manifest revelation, cannot be believed.”[401] Yet in point of fact the term “Transsubstantiatio” had been first used in a definition by the Œcumenical Lateran Council of 1215 to express the ancient teaching of the Church regarding the change of substance. According to what Luther here says, St. Thomas of Aquin (whose birth occurred some ten years later) was responsible for the introduction of the word and what it stood for, in other words for the doctrine itself. A little later Luther solemnly reaffirmed that “Transubstantiation is purely Thomistic” (1522).[402] “The Decretals settled the word, but there is no doubt that it was introduced into the Church by those coarse blockheads the Thomists” (1541).[403] Hence either he did not know of the Council or its date, or he did not know when St. Thomas wrote; in any case he was ignorant of the relation in which the teaching of St. Thomas on this point stood to the teaching of earlier ages. He was unaware of the historical fact of the general adoption of the term since the end of the eleventh century;[404] he was not acquainted with the theologians who taught in the interval between the Lateran Council and St. Thomas, and who used both the name and the idea of Transubstantiation, and among whom were Albertus Magnus and Alexander of Hales; he cannot even have noted the title of the Decretal from which he derived the knowledge of the existence of the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages, for it is headed: “Innocentius tertius in concilio generali.”