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The real origin of Luther’s teaching must be sought in a fundamental principle which governed him, which was fostered by the decline in his life as a religious and a priest, and more particularly by his inordinate love of his own opinion and by the uncharitable criticisms he passed upon others. This was his unfavourable estimate of good works, and of any effort, natural or supernatural, on the part of man.

This opposition to a principle, common to the Church and to monasticism, as to the necessity in which men generally and religious in particular stand of performing good works if they wish to please God, is the first deviation from the right path which we notice in him. He called it a fight against “holiness by works” and self-righteousness, and in this fight he went still further. He made his own the deadly error that man by his natural powers is unable to do anything but sin. To this he added that the man who, by God’s grace, is raised to justification through divinely infused faith and trust must, it is true, perform good works, but that the latter are not to be accounted meritorious. All works avail nothing as means for arriving at righteousness and eternal salvation; faith alone effects both. Not at the outset, but gradually, did he make his antagonism to good works the foundation of a doctrine built up under the influence of a lively imagination, a powerful and undisciplined self-confidence and other factors which will be mentioned below. In his controversy with the “holy by works” he had exclaimed (p. 81) “there is no greater pest in the Church to-day than those men who go about saying ‘we must do good works.’” His real enemies were soon the traditional Catholic belief and practice regarding good works and personal activity in general; he did not confine himself to expressing his dissatisfaction with the Observantines in his own Order or the possible excesses of other supporters of outward works.

It is easy to recognise how this opposition to works runs like a dark thread through the first beginnings of his teaching of the new doctrine and onward through the whole course of his life. We may here, starting at the commencement, anticipate his history somewhat.

“At the first,” so he says himself in later years, “my struggle was against trust in works,”[278] and this is confirmed by the MS. Commentary on Romans which he commenced in 1515 (see below, chap. vi. 3). The first occasion in his correspondence in which he allows his new views to appear is in 1516, in a recommendation to a friend that “he should cultivate disgust with his own righteousness and despair of himself,” that this was better than to do as “those who plague themselves with their works until they think they are fit to stand in God’s sight.”[279] He expresses himself in a similar strain on self-righteousness in sermons preached at this time.[280]

The same line of thought also appears in a paradoxical form, as the basis of a disputation held at Wittenberg in 1516 under his presidency. Man sins, so we find it said, “when he does what is in him” (“quod est in se”), and those who are “righteous in their own eyes” by reason of their good works, i.e. all who do not simply “despair of themselves,” are condemned. This ruling thought also pervades another disputation of one of his pupils in 1517, where we read: “every good work must needs at once make nature proud and puffed up,” and “hope is not given us by our merits, but by suffering [painful interior struggles], which root out merit,”[281] i.e. which destroy every feeling of self-satisfaction grounded on merit. He tells one of his confidants in the same year that his great aim was “to grant nothing to human works, but to know only God’s grace.”[282]

In his first German work, printed in 1517, the Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, he opposes “all proud living and work and righteousness” and bewails the “spiritual pride, the last and deepest of all vices,”[283] with which, according to him, those are filled who seek for “safety and false consolation” in their works instead of simply embracing the “word of grace.” He places works so much in the background in his teaching at that time, that he brings forward this objection against himself, whether, instead of always speaking of grace, he should not speak more of “human righteousness, wisdom and strength.” Instead of defending himself he declares “a good life does not consist in many works”; to feel oneself “a miserable, damned, forsaken sinner” is better, even when God sends trouble of soul, which is “a drop or foretaste of the pains of hell,” and which renders the human corpse quite ill and weak; such suffering makes a man like Christ who also bore the same.[284]

When in 1518 he published his Latin sermon on Penance, its chief thesis was that man’s part in his reconciliation with God counted for nought; we must despair in order to attain contrition, at least from the motive of fear of God; we must merely submit with faith to the action of grace. “Whoever trusts to his contrition when receiving absolution, builds on the sand of his works and is guilty of shameless presumption.”[285]

He writes in the same year that blinded adversaries accuse him of condemning good works, more especially that he dared to declare war against rosaries, the Little Office, and other prayers, and yet the sum of his sermon was only this: “that we must not place our confidence in our own work.”[286]

Thus the depreciation of works is the prevailing note, even in his first public utterances; this it also remains.

When he began his attack on religious vows, he supported his campaign by preference on the ostensible worthlessness of human works for obtaining merit in heaven; vows were to be rejected because the heart must not seek its stay in works,[287] and in his attacks on the celibacy of the clergy and religious, he again declared that he was attacking the “false saints” who intrench themselves behind the holiness of the works accomplished by them in a state superior to that of family life, but that faith makes all outward things free.[288] This prejudice against works is the principal feature in his polemics; for instance, he explains to King Henry VIII in a rejoinder directed against him that the enemy he was called upon to overcome was the pestilential doctrine of the necessity of appearing before God with works (“velle per opera coram Deo agere”), whereas works were good only in the eyes of man.[289] In season and out of season, he pours forth his rage against the works in the Papacy with such words as these: Away with masses, pilgrimages, Office in Choir, saint-worship, cowls, virginity, confraternities, rules, and such-like, away with “the lousy works”;[290] and so he preached to his very end in 1546.[291]

It is not, however, sufficient to take as Luther’s starting-point his opposition to good works, though this always remains the chief feature in his doctrine. Further fresh light may be thrown on the enigmatical process of his inner change if we consider various influences which contributed to lead him to his new doctrine and to develop the same.

A preliminary glance at the case shows us, first of all, that Luther in his youth was trained in the theological school of Occam, i.e. in a form of theology showing great signs of decadence. The nominalistic, and more particularly the false anthropological speculations of Occam, d’Ailly and Biel, which did not allow its full rights to grace, called forth his opposition, and he soon lost all confidence in the old theology; in his exaggeration he went to the theological extreme contrary to Occamism and declared war against the ability of nature to do good. This was a negative effect of Occamism. This view encouraged him in his opposition to the “self-righteousness” which he fancied he saw everywhere, even in the zeal of the Observantines for their rule, especially when he had already fallen away from the ideals of his profession, from monastic piety and the spirit of the priesthood. A boundless self-reliance began to possess him, and led him forward regardless of all. This was the “wisdom of his own mind” of which he accuses himself in 1516 in a letter to a friend in the Order, speaking of it as the “foundation and root” of much unrest; bitterly he exclaims: “Oh, how much pain has the evil eye [this self-conceit] already caused me, and how much does it continue to plague me.”[292] We may take these words more seriously than they were probably meant. His egotism and pride were flattered to such an extent by his imagination that he seemed to find everywhere confirmation of his own preconceived notions. Having read Tauler he at once considered him as the greatest of writers, because he was able to credit him with some of his own sentiments. Then again in Augustine, the Doctor of the Church, he found, as he imagined, a true reflection of his new doctrine. Devoid of the necessary intellectual and moral discipline, he allowed himself to be blinded by a fanatic attachment to his own opinion.

Carried away by his own judgment and regardless of the teaching of all the schools, yea, even of the Church herself, he passed into the camp of the enemy, perhaps without at first being aware of it; he came to deny entirely the merit of good works as though they were of no importance for our salvation as compared with the power of faith, an idea in which he fortified himself by his one-sided study of Holy Scripture and by his misinterpretation of the Epistles of St. Paul, that preacher of the power of faith and of the grace of Christ. He was always accustomed to consider the Bible as his special province, and, given his character, it was not difficult for him to identify himself with it, and to ascribe to himself the discovery of great Scriptural truths till then misunderstood or forgotten; for instance, the destruction of man’s powers by original sin and their renewal by faith and grace. The false doctrine of the outward imputation of the merits of Christ came next. The school of Occam here prepared the way for him by its views on sanctifying grace and “acceptation” (imputation). Luther found in Occam’s views on this subject no obstacle, but rather a support. This positive influence on him of Occam will be dealt with below (chap. iv. 3), together with other positive effects which decadent Scholasticism exercised upon him. Just as it suited his violent character to declare in no gentle words the renunciation of personal merit of every kind for the imputation of the merits of Christ, so the tendency of his own religious life, which had become alienated from the ideals of his Order, encouraged him to make the whole moral task consist in a simple, trustful appropriation of the saving merits of Christ, in confidence, comfort and safety, notwithstanding the dissentient inner voices.

Further, his study of false mysticism (see below, chap. v.) helped to clothe his new ideas in the deceptive dress of piety. To himself he seemed to be fulfilling perfectly the precepts of the mystics to seek everywhere the spirit and make small account of outward things: he imagined that Christ would be truly honoured, and the importance of Divine grace effectually made manifest, by despair of our own works, yea, even of ourself. The power which a mysticism gone astray exercised in those early stages upon a mind so full of imagination and feeling cannot be overestimated.

The oldest letter we have of Luther to Staupitz is in itself a witness to its writer’s self-deception; to his fatherly friend he speaks quite openly and even appeals to his sermons “on the Love of God” in support of his own errors. Staupitz had warned him in a friendly manner that in many places his name stood in very bad repute. Luther admits in this letter, written four months after he had affixed the well-known Wittenberg Theses, that his doctrine of justification, his sermons on the worthlessness of works, and his opposition to the theology in vogue in the schools had raised a storm against him. People said that he rejected pious practices and all good works. And yet he was merely a disciple of Tauler’s theology, and, like Staupitz, had taught nothing else but that “we should place our confidence in none other than Jesus Christ, not in any prayers and merits and good works, because we are saved not by our works, but by God’s mercy.” If God were working in him, so he concludes enthusiastically, then no one can turn him aside; but if it was not God’s work, then, indeed, no one can advance his cause.[293]

We must assume that at the beginning of his alienation from the Church among other motives he was largely deceived by the appearance of good; there is, in any case, nothing decisive to show the process as purely material, as a result of his efforts to relieve himself from his moral obligations, or as due to a worldly spirit. His responsibility, of course, became much greater when, as he advanced and was able to review things more calmly, he obstinately adhered to his new views, and, as his sermons and writings prove, defended them, even against the best-meant criticism, with bitterness, hate and passion. Self-love, which, even in his earlier life, had held too great a place, now took complete control of him, and the spirit of contradiction closed the gates for ever against his return. Luther’s character was one which contradiction only served to stimulate and to drive to extremes.

Thus his spiritual pride was his real misfortune.[294]

In his case we find a sad confirmation of what is frequently observed in the falling away from truth of highly gifted minds; self-esteem and self-conceit suggest the first thoughts of a turning away from the truth, hitherto held in honour, and then, with fatal strength, condemn the wanderer to keep to the path he has chosen. Further concessions to the spirit of the world then follow as a consequence of the apostate’s continued enmity to the Church. Of the last moral decline so noticeable in Luther’s later life there is also no lack of similar instances, for it is the rule that after a man has been led astray by pride there should follow further moral deviations from the right path. The Monk’s subsequent breach of his vows and his marriage with a former nun was a sacrilege, which to Catholic eyes showed plainly how he who begins in the spirit of pride, even though his purposes be good, may end in the flesh.

At the earliest inception of Luther’s theological errors other elements may however be perceived which help to explain more easily his growing antipathy to so-called holiness by works. First, there was the real abuse then prevalent in the practice of works. Here we find a weak spot in the religious life of the time, nor is it unlikely that grave faults and repulsive excesses were to be found even in the Augustinian monasteries with which Luther was acquainted. We have already drawn attention to the formalism which in many cases had affected the clergy and the monastic houses. The often one-sided cultivation of exterior works, which, for instance, by the Indulgence-preachers, were proclaimed unfailing in their effects; the popular excesses in saint-worship; far-fetched legends and exhortations to imitate the extraordinary practices of saintly heroes; the stepmotherly treatment meted out in the pulpit to the regular and ordinary duties of a Christian; the self-interest, avarice and jealousy rampant in confraternities, pilgrimages and other public expressions of worship, faults which had slipped in partly owing to the petty egotism of the corporations and Orders, partly to the greed of their members, partly to a mania for false piety; all this may well have made a painful impression on the Wittenberg Professor, and have called forth his eloquent reproof. His tendency to look at the worst side of things doubtless contributed, together with the above reasons, to fill him with distaste for good works in general.

The extraordinary exaggerations of which he was guilty must, however, be imputed to himself alone. It has been said to his excuse that, as Rural Vicar, he had been able to acquire correct information regarding the state of things. But, as it happens, his frequent and unrestrained outbursts against abuses belong, at least in great part, to the time when he was a simple monk, who, apart from his journeys to Rome and Cologne and his stay at Erfurt, had seen little outside his cell beyond the adjoining walls of Wittenberg. His lectures on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans both offer strange examples of such exaggerations, though both were delivered before he had had any experience as Rural Vicar.

Finally his own morbid personal condition must be taken into account; the after-effects of his passing fit of scrupulosity, and the lasting feeling of fear which sometimes quite overmastered him. His inclination to doubts concerning his election remained, and therewith also the moral results which the fear of being predestined to hell would naturally exercise upon his peculiar temperament. He remained an outspoken predestinarian of the most violent type. (See chap. vi. 2.) He had to come to terms with this fear of hell, and his system shows the result; in many respects it appears as a reaction against the oppressive burden of the thought of eternal rejection.

His state of fear, however, as already indicated, proceeded not merely from the numerous temptations of which he himself speaks, but also from his own inward depression, from an affection, partly psychical and partly physical, which often prostrated him in terror. Only later, with the help of other facts of his inner life, will it be possible to deal with this darker side of Luther (vol. vi. xxxvi.). He imagined that during these fits, in which troubles of conscience also intervened, and which, according to his description, were akin to the pains of hell, he was forsaken by God, and sunk in the eerie night of the soul of which the mystics treat. He also considered them at an early period as a trial sent by God and intended to prepare him for higher things. In trying to escape from this feeling of terror, at the time of his change he embraced all the more readily ideas of false security which seemed to be offered by the appropriation of the merits of Christ, and the rejection of all attempt to acquire merit on one’s own account. Psychologically, it is comprehensible that this solution seemed to him to let a beam of sunlight into the darkness of his terror. Anxious to escape from fear he threw himself frantically into the opposite extreme, into a system of self-pacification hitherto unknown to theology. But even this new system did not serve to calm him in the first stage of his error. There was still something lacking, so he felt, in his doctrine, and to this he attained only in the second stage of the process by his discovery that the seal is set on inward peace by the doctrine of the absolute assurance of salvation imparted by Faith. (See chap. x.)

Morbid fears prevented any childlike trust in God taking root in a mind so inexplicably agitated as his. With what great fervour he prepared himself for his priestly ordination, and for celebrating his first Mass, may here be illustrated by his own statement, that he then read Gabriel Biel’s book on the Mass (“Sacri canonis missæ expositio literalis ac mystica”) “with a bleeding heart.” So he himself says later, when he also speaks of the work, then widely used, as “an excellent book, as I then thought.”[295] From the tone of his letter of invitation to his first Mass we can judge of his state of commotion. The confusion and trouble which he experienced at his first Mass, and the fear which seized him during the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, lead us to conclude that he was readily overcome by vain apprehensions combined with physical excitement. Here also belongs Luther’s later statement concerning the fears which he (and others too) experienced when in the monastery at the smallest ritual blunders, as though they had been great sins; such an assertion, though exaggerated and untrue, is probably an echo of his own troubled state during the liturgical ceremonies.

It is possible that those fears may have been the cause of his great pessimism with regard to human works. They may have contributed to make him see sin in what was merely the result of fallen nature with its involuntary concupiscences, without any consent of the will. Such fears may have pursued him when he began to brood over the doctrine of man’s powers, original sin and grace; we speak of his “brooding,” for his inclinations at that time were to a melancholy contemplation of things unseen. The timidity which he had acquired in the early days of his boyhood and at school doubtless had its effect in keeping him in such moods, apart from his own temperament.

On close examination of Luther’s theological studies we find that his preparation for the office of professor—so far as a knowledge of the positive doctrine of the Church, of the Fathers and of good Scholasticism is concerned—was all too meagre.

He had not at his command the time necessary for penetrating deeply into dogma or into its presentment by earlier exponents. What was said above of his course of studies must, however, be supplemented by some further details.

After his ordination in Erfurt, at Easter, 1507, he began the two-year course of theology to which alone the privileges of the Augustinians obliged him. In addition to the lectures, which, as was usual, were based on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, there was also the Office in Choir; the pupils of the Order were indeed on lecture days not obliged to attend Matins, Sext and Compline, but the latter had to be said by Luther privately, as he was a priest. While the lectures on the Sentences were still in progress, Luther was pursuing his scriptural studies. Before the full time had expired however, after about eighteen months of theological study, he was, as mentioned before, called to the University of Wittenberg at the commencement of the winter term, 1508, in order to deliver “Lectiones publicæ” on moral philosophy, i.e. on the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle. He was, it is true, expected to prosecute his theological studies at the same time by attending lectures, but for this he can scarcely have found much time, seeing that he had himself to give a daily lecture of one hour on so difficult a subject as the Ethics in the Faculty of Philosophy. A capable young man was needed by Staupitz to supply the requirements of the University, which was largely under his care, for the former lecturer on Ethics, Wolfgang Ostermayr, had, so it appears, suddenly left, and dire necessity caused the incompleteness of Luther’s philosophical training to be overlooked. Staupitz was the more willing to shut his eyes to what was wanting, as he was personally much attached to the highly promising lecturer, about whom moreover he had already his plans. That Luther was not particularly pleased at the way in which he was employed, we learn from his Table-Talk: “At Erfurt I was reading nothing but the Bible, when God, in a wonderful manner, and contrary to everyone’s expectations, sent me from Erfurt to Wittenberg; that was a nice come down for me.”[296] The word actually made use of in the last sentence was a slang expression of the students and implied that his new position was not to his liking. It was less the overwork than his antipathy to philosophy and Aristotle that made him feel uncomfortable; he himself complains: “violentum est studium, maxime philosophiæ” in his letter from Wittenberg to Johann Braun in Eisenach (March 17, 1509). In this letter he also confesses that he is longing to exchange philosophy for theology.[297] After a single term his professors thought him worthy of the degree of “Bacularius (Baccalaureus) Biblicus.” This was the lowest theological degree, and was conferred on him by Staupitz the Dean on March 9, 1509, according to the Dean’s Register of the Theological Faculty. Thus did he pass the two years of his course of theology.

Besides the lecture on philosophy he had now also to discourse daily for one hour on portions of Holy Scripture, teaching being then considered a part of the course of studies. In addition to this he was obliged to attend the theological lectures and disputations. “Indeed a colossal task,” says a Protestant Luther-scholar, “which shows what great demands Staupitz made on the powers of his pupils.”[298]

The next degree in theology, that of “Sententiarius” was to have been conferred on Luther, as we know, in the autumn of 1509, when suddenly, owing to internal disputes, he was recalled from Wittenberg to his monastery at Erfurt. What prospect of quiet theological study opened out before him there? At Erfurt his preparation again consisted principally in teaching and in disputing in his own peculiar way. As soon as the University had accepted him as “Sententiarius,” he had at once to give theological lectures on the Sentences. He was also employed in the monastery, together with Dr. Nathin, as sub-regent of house studies, i.e. in the instruction of the novices in the duties of their profession. At the same time he not only continued his accustomed biblical reading, but, in order to be able to prosecute it more thoroughly, began to study Greek and Hebrew, in which Johann Lang, an Augustinian who has been frequently mentioned and who was a trained Humanist, rendered him appreciable service. The eighteen months he spent in the Erfurt monastery were distracted by the dissensions within the Order, by his journeys to Halle and then to Rome and his intercourse with Erfurt Humanists, such as Petrejus (Peter Eberbach). After his return from five months’ absence in Rome, the dispute in the Order continued to hinder his studies and finally drove him to the friends of Staupitz at Wittenberg, as soon as he had declared himself against the Erfurt Observantines. Thence the affairs of the Order carried him in May, 1512, to the Chapter at Cologne, where the degree of Doctor of Divinity was conferred upon him. During his preparation for his doctorate he already began, urged on by Staupitz, to preach in the monastery church at Wittenberg, where the Elector once heard him and was filled with admiration. He was also always ready to assist others with their work, as for instance when he prepared for the Provost the address to be delivered before the Synod at Leitzkau. And when at thirty years of age, in October, 1515, he undertook, as Doctor, to deliver the lectura in biblia at the University of Wittenberg, this was not in his case the commencement of a career of learned leisure, but the filling of a position encumbered with the cure of souls, with preaching and much monastic business.

In view of his defective education in theology properly so called, we may well raise the question how, without any thorough knowledge of the subject, he could feel himself summoned to undertake such far-reaching theological changes.

“At the parting of the ways,” says Denifle, regarding Luther’s knowledge of theology, “and even when he had already set up his first momentous theses and declared war on Scholasticism, he was still but half-educated.... He knew nothing of the golden age of Scholasticism, and was even unacquainted with the doctor of his own Order [who followed the greater Schoolmen] Ægydius of Rome.” “He was a self-taught, not a methodically trained, man.”[299] In spite of his self-reliance, a feeling of the insufficiency of his education seems to have tormented him at the outset. We should not perhaps be justified in accepting what he said in later years, that he had at first “been greatly afraid of the pulpit” even when (in his second stay at Wittenberg) it was only a question of preaching “in the Refectory before the brethren.”[300] But according to his own statement, he expressed very strongly to Staupitz his fear of taking the degree of Doctor of Divinity, and two years later he declared that he had only yielded to pressure.[301] But Staupitz, who urged him forward with excessive zeal, had said in his presence when Luther preached before the Elector: “I will prepare for Your Highness in this man a very special Doctor, who will please you well,” words which the Elector did not forget and of which he reminded Staupitz in 1518.[302]

The fact that Staupitz made such slight demands in Luther’s case regarding theological preparation may be explained from his own course of studies. His previous history shows his studies to have been anything but deep, and this is a matter worth noting, because it is an example of how a solid study of theology was at that time often wanting even in eminent men in the Church. After he had been entered at Tübingen in 1497 as Master of Arts, he commenced (October 29, 1498), the biblical course, and, a little more than two months later (January 10, 1499), began to deliver theological lectures on the Sentences. Half a year of this qualified him for the Licentiate, and, a day after, he became Doctor of Divinity. “These untrained theologians,” says Denifle, after giving the dates just mentioned, “wanted to reform theology, and looked with contempt on the theology of the Middle Ages, of which they were utterly ignorant.”[303]