We can well understand that he needed St. Augustine to assist him to cover all this. And yet, as though to emphasise his own devious course, he quotes, among other passages, one in which Augustine confutes the view of any sin being present in man simply by reason of concupiscence.
“If we do not consent to concupiscence,” Augustine says, “it is no sin in those who are regenerate, so that, even if the ‘Non concupisces’ is infringed, yet the injunction of Jesus Sirach (xviii. 30) ‘Go not after thy lusts’ is observed. It is merely a manner of speaking to call concupiscence sin (“modo quodam loquendi”), because it sprang from sin, and, when it is victorious, causes sin.”[522] To this statement of the Father of the Church, which is so antagonistic to his own ideas, Luther can only add: that, certainly, concupiscence is in this way merely the cause and effect of sin, but not formally sinful (“causaliter et effectualiter, non formaliter”); Augustine himself had taught in another passage,[523] that owing to the mere existence of concupiscence, we are able to do what is good only in an imperfect way, not well and perfectly (“facere, non perficere”; cp. Rom vii. 18); that we ought, however, to strive to act well and perfectly “if we wish to attain to the perfection of righteousness” (“perficere bonum, est non concupiscere”).[524]
St. Augustine’s words, which are much to the point if taken in the right sense, only encouraged Luther in his opposition to the Scholastics; he points out to them that Augustine’s manner is not theirs, and that at least he supports his statements by Holy Scripture when speaking of the desires which persist without the consent of the will; they on the other hand come along without Bible proofs and thus with less authority; those old Doctors quieted consciences with the voice of the Apostle, but these new ones do not do so at all, rather they force the Divine teaching into the bed of their own abstractions; for instance, they derive from Aristotle their theory as to how virtues and vices dwell in the soul, viz. as the form exists in the subject; all comprehension of the difference between flesh and spirit is thus made impossible.
The question which here forces itself upon Luther, viz. how virtue and vice exist in the soul, is of fundamental importance for his view of ethics, and, as it frequently occurs in the Commentary, it must not be passed over.
When he says that virtues and vices do not adhere to the soul, he means the same as what he elsewhere expresses more clearly, viz. that “it depends merely on the gracious will of God whether a thing is good or bad.”[525]
“Nothing is good of its own nature, nothing is bad of its own nature; the will of God makes it good or bad.”[526]
This is the merest Nominalism, akin to Occam’s paradox that “hatred of God, theft and adultery might be not merely not wicked, but even meritorious were the will of God to command them.”
From such ideas of Occam Luther advanced to the following: “The will of God decides whether I am pleasing to Him or not.”[527]
This explains the proposition which frequently appears, in the Commentary on Romans and elsewhere, that man is at the same time righteous and a sinner, that the righteous man has the left foot still in sin and the right in grace.[528]