“The very word righteousness vexes me: if anyone were to steal from me, it would hurt me less than being obliged to listen to the word righteousness. It is a word which the jurists always have on their lips, but there is no more unlearned race than these men of the law, save, perhaps, the men of good intention and superior reason (‘bonæ-intentionarii seu sublimatæ rationis’); for I have experienced both in myself and in others, that when we were righteous, God mocked at us.”[502]
4. Attack on Predisposition to Good and on Free Will
The assertion of the complete corruption of human nature owing to the continuance of original sin and the inextinguishable tinder of concupiscence, arose from the above-mentioned position which Luther had taken up with regard to self-righteousness.
Man remains, according to what Luther says in the Commentary on Romans, in spite of all his veneer of good works, so alienated from God that he “does not love but hates the law which forces him to what is good and forbids what is evil; his will, far from seeking the law, detests it. Nature persists in its evil desires contrary to the law; it is always full of evil concupiscence when it is not assisted from above.” This concupiscence, however, is sin. Everything that is good is due only to grace, and grace must bring us to acknowledge this and to “seek Christ humbly and so be saved.”[503]
The descriptions of human doings which the author gives us in eloquent language are not wanting in fidelity and truth to nature, though we cannot approve his inferences. He has a keen eye on others and is unmerciful in his delineation of the faults which he perceived in the pious people around him.
He spies out many who only act from a desire for the praise of men, and who wish to appear, but not really to be, good. How ready are such, he says, to depreciate themselves with apparent humility. Others only do what is right because it gives them pleasure, i.e. from inclination and without any higher motive. Others do it from vain self-complacency; yea, selfishness is present in almost all, and mars their works. Outward routine and a business-like righteousness spoils a great deal. It is to be deplored that, like the Pharisees, they only keep what is commanded in view and long for the rewards of a busy and petty virtue.[504]
In such descriptions he is easily carried too far and is sometimes even obviously unjust. Thus, for instance, of evil practices he makes conscious theories, in order the more readily to gain the upper hand of his adversaries. “They teach,” he cries, “that it is only necessary to keep the law by works and not with the heart ... their efforts are not accompanied with the least inward effort, everything is wholly external.”[505]
In respect of the doctrine of original sin and its consequences in man, he not only magnifies enormously the strength of the concupiscence which remains after baptism, without sufficiently taking into account the spiritual means by which it can be repressed, but gives the most open expression to his belief that concupiscence is actually sin; it is the persistence of original sin, rendering every man actually culpable, even without any consent of the will. The “Non concupisces” of the Ten Commandments—which the Apostle emphasises in his Epistle to the Romans, though in another sense—Luther makes out to be such a prohibition that, by the mere existence of concupiscence, it is daily and hourly sinfully transgressed. He pays no attention to the theology of the Church, which had hitherto seen in the “Non concupisces” a prohibition of any voluntary consent to a concupiscence existing without actual sin.
His attack on free will is very closely bound up with his ideas on concupiscence.
“Concupiscence with weakness is against the law ‘Thou shalt not covet,’ and it is deadly imputat’) it as mortal sin to the man whom he chooses to perfect and render whole.”[506]