Luther, vol. 5 of 6 - Hartmann Grisar

[1856] P. 896. Harnack takes great care to prevent his criticism of Luther giving rise to any impression that he himself is favourably disposed or indifferent towards Catholic dogma and Catholic life. He is shocked at the attitude of Erasmus, the defender of the Catholic view of man’s free will even under Divine Grace, and declares his Diatribe against the “servum arbitrium” a “profoundly irreligious work,” whereas Luther “had restored religion to religion” (see above, vol. ii., p. 292, n. 4).—He asks: “What does original sin represent to Catholics?” (“Dogmengesch.,” 3⁴, p. 749), as though Catholic dogma discarded it. He mocks at the “whole, half and quarter dogmas” of Catholics (ib., p. 764) and at their handbooks of theology (p. 763). The Catholic “system of religion,” so Harnack teaches, gave rise to “a perversion of the moral principles” (p. 749); “this system still works disaster both in theology and in ethics.... Since the 17th century the imparting of forgiveness of sins has been made a regular art.” “But conscience is able to discover God even in its idol” (ib.). In other passages he places “devotion to the Sacred Heart” and “Mariolatry” on a par with the veneration of idols, though he admits that in Catholics “the Christian sense is not actually stifled by their idols” (p. 748). Only in these devotions and in the anxiety-breeding confessional does piety still live (ib.).

Of the Pope he exclaims: “The Church has an infallible master, she has no need to trouble about her history, the living voice alone is right.” He asks whether “the mediæval doctrine, now condemned to insignificance, would not gradually disappear,” whether in time the Pope would not be credited “with a peculiar miraculous power,” and whether ultimately he would not be regarded as a “sort of incarnation of the Godhead,” etc. (p. 759).

“The saintly and so holy Liguori is the very opposite of Luther.... All his mortifications only entangled him more and more in the conviction that no conscience can find rest save in the authority of a confessor.... Thanks to Liguori, absolute ethical scepticism now prevailed, not only in morals but even in theology.... In a number of questions, adultery, perjury and murder inclusive, he had known how to make light of what was really most serious” (p. 755). The doctrine of Probabilism was to blame for this, according to Harnack. Cp. J. Mausbach, “Die kath. Moral und ihre Gegner,” 1911, p. 163 ff., and the “Kölnische Volksztng.,” 1910, Nos. 485 and 571. The latter passage contains further proofs from Harnack’s “Dogmengesch.” of his insulting language and his lamentable ignorance of Catholic doctrines, practices and institutions.

[1857] Of the Church-Postils the first half of the winter part up to the Epiphany had been published by Luther as early as 1522, and then continued down to Easter. The second part (summer portion) had been brought out in 1527 by his friend Stephen Roth. The sermons on the Epistles were only included in the collection in 1543, when the new edition appeared. W. Köhler begins his critical edition of the book of Church-Postils in Weim. ed., 10 (1911).