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Besides the recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans various statements in his sermons, disputations and letters prove the opposition that existed between Luther and his own school. In the Disputation of 1517 entitled “Contra scholasticam theologiam,” for instance, he expressly names, as the opponents against whom his various theses are aimed, Scotus, Occam, the Cardinal, Gabriel, and, generally, “omnes scholastici” or “communis sententia,” “dictum commune,” “usus multorum,” “philosophi” or “morales.”[310]

Before we proceed to examine the individual points of Luther’s conflict with Occamism and with what he considered the teaching of Scholasticism as a whole, two general points of this opposition must be mentioned. His first grievance is the neglect of Holy Scripture.

A sensible want in the Divinity studies of that time lay, as a matter of fact, in the insufficient use of the positive foundations of theology, i.e. above all of Holy Scripture, and also of the tradition of the Fathers of the Church and the decisions of the Church in her office as teacher. “Luther had rightly recognised,” says Albert Weiss, “what harm resulted from the regrettable neglect of Holy Scripture on the part of so many theologians, and therefore he chose as his watchword the cry for the improvement of theology by a return to the Bible.”[311] “That Luther was moved to great anger by the Nominalists’ neglect of the Bible is not to be wondered at.”[312] “He would not have been Luther,” the same author rightly says, “had he not soon veered round to the other extreme, i.e. to the battle-cry: Scripture only, and nothing but the Scripture, away with all Scholasticism.”

This abuse, however, had already been reproved and bewailed by the Church before Luther’s time; there is no dearth of statements by the very highest authorities urging a remedy, though it is true more should have been done. Pope Clement VI wrote reprovingly to the University of Paris, on May 20, 1346: “Most theologians do not trouble themselves about the text of Holy Scripture, about the actual words of their principal witnesses, about the expositions of the Saints and Doctors, i.e. concerning the sources from which real theology is taken, a fact which is bitterly to be deplored.... In place of this they entangle themselves in philosophical questions and in disputes which merely pander to their cleverness, in doubtful interpretations, dangerous doctrines and the rest.”[313] But “with the prevalent spirit of formalism and disorder, embodied chiefly in Nominalism,” “a healthy and at the same time fruitful treatment of Holy Scripture had become impossible.... These were abuses which had long been calling for the reintroduction of a positive and more scriptural treatment of theology.”[314] Though the judgment passed by Luther in his later years on the neglect of Holy Scripture was somewhat too general (for it was historically untrue to say that Scripture had ever been altogether given up by the Church),[315] yet contemporaries agree with him in blaming the too extensive use of Aristotle’s philosophy in the schools to the detriment of the Bible-text. Long before, Gerson, whose books were in Luther’s hands, had laid stress on the importance of Holy Scripture for theology. “Holy Scripture,” he says, “is a Rule of Faith, which it is only necessary to understand aright; against it there is no appeal to authority or to the decisions of human reason: nor can custom, law or practice have any weight if proved to be contrary to Holy Scripture.”[316]

Luther, with palpable exaggeration, lays the charge at the door of theology as a whole, even of the earlier school, and would have us believe that the abuse was inseparable from ecclesiastical science. He speaks to this effect more and more forcibly during the course of his controversies. Thus in 1530 he says of the Scholastics, that they “despised Holy Scripture.” “What! they exclaimed, the Bible? Why, the Bible is a heretic’s book, and you need only read the Doctors to find that out. I know that I am not lying in saying this, for I grew up amongst them and saw and heard all about them.” And so they had arrived at doctrines about which one must ask: “Is this the way to honour Christ’s blood and death?” Everything was full of “idle doctrines which did not agree among themselves, and strange new opinions.”[317] Occam, he declares in his Table-Talk in 1540, “excelled them all in genius and has confuted all the other schools, but even he said and wrote in so many words that it could not be proved from Scripture that the Holy Ghost is necessary for a good work.”[318] “These people had intelligence, had time for work and had grown grey in study, but about Christ they understood nothing, because they esteemed Holy Scripture lightly. No one read the Bible so as to steep himself in its contents with reflection, it was only treated like a history book.[319]

It is true that the scholastic treatment of the doctrines of faith, as advocated by Occam against the more positive school, disregarded Holy Scripture to such an extent that, in the master’s subtle Commentaries, it hardly finds any place; even in the treatment of the supernatural virtues—faith, hope and charity—Scripture scarcely intervenes.[320] But it was unjust of Luther, on this account, to speak of the Schoolmen’s contempt for the Bible, or to say, for instance in his Table-Talk, about his master, Gabriel Biel, whose Commentary on the Sentences had become, so to speak, a hand-book: “The authority of the Bible counted for nothing with Gabriel.”[321] Biel esteemed and utilised the Bible as the true Word of God, but he did not satisfy young Luther, who desiderated in him much more of the Bible and a little less of philosophy. The “word,” he declares, was not cherished by the priests, and this he had already shown in his Leitzkau discourse to be the reason of all the corruption.[322]

The preponderance of philosophy, and more particularly the excessive authority of Aristotle, in the theological method of his circle offered Luther a second point of attack. Here also it was a question of a rather widely spread abuse which the better class of Schoolmen had prudently avoided. The Nominalistic schools, generally speaking, showed a tendency to a rationalistic treatment of the truths of faith, which affrighted Luther considerably. General ideas, according to the Nominalists, were merely “nomina,” i.e. empty words; Nominalists concerned themselves only with what was actual and tangible. Nominalism was fond of displaying its dialectic and even its insolence at the expense of theology on the despised Universal ideas. We can understand the invective with which Luther gives expression to his hatred of Scholasticism, though his right to do so arose only from his limited acquaintance with those few Scholastics whom he had chosen,[323] or, rather, who had been allotted to him, as his masters; the schools he attended were at that time all following the method of the Nominalists, then usually known as “modern.”

Already, in 1509 (see above, p. 22), a severe criticism of Aristotle appears in Luther’s marginal notes. This is in a gloss on Augustine’s work “On the City of God” which he was then devouring as a sort of antidote: “Far more apparent is the error of our theologians when they impudently chatter (‘impudentissime garriunt’) and affirm of Aristotle that he does not deviate from Catholic truth.”[324]

Luther’s later exaggerations need not be refuted, in which he complains so loudly of the idolatrous Aristotelian worship of reason on the part of all the Scholastics. It was in general perfectly well known regarding Aristotle that he had erred, and also where he erred; books had even been written dealing with his deviations from the faith. This, however, did not prevent many from over-estimating him. We must set against this, however, the fact that Luther’s own professor of philosophy in the University of Erfurt, Bartholomew Arnoldi of Usingen, had declared, like others before him, that those who represented the Stagirite as without errors were “not worthy of the name of philosophers, for they were not lovers of the truth but mocked at philosophy; they should just read their hero more carefully and they would find that, for instance, he made out the world to be without any beginning, a view which Moses, the prophet of truth, had shown to be an error; Scotus, too, wrote in the first book of his Commentary on the Sentences, that the works of Aristotle were more in agreement with the law of Mohammed than with that of Christ.”[325] Usingen was an earnest and moderate man, who did not shrink, even in his philosophical writings, from preferring Divine Revelation to the exaggeration of the rights of reason. “The inadequacy of philosophers is as apparent as the great value of the Sacred Books. The latter rise far above the knowledge attained by mere human reason and natural light.”[326] Owing to the fact that he had made no secret of his views in his intercourse with Luther, especially when they became more intimate on Luther’s entering the Order to which he himself belonged,[327] we can understand and explain the sympathy and respect with which Luther long after cherished his memory, though the path he followed was no longer that of his old teacher. Usingen was a Nominalist, but his example shows that there were some enlightened men who belonged to this school, and who did it honour.

In the course of time, regardless of the numerous examples giving him the lie, Luther came ruthlessly to condemn all the Schoolmen and the whole Middle Ages ostensibly on the ground of the pretended poisoning of the faith by Aristotle, but really because he himself had set up a contradiction between faith and reason.[328] He says in 1521 that the Scholastics, headed by Aquinas, “solus aristotelicissimus ac plane Aristoteles ipse,” had smuggled philosophy into the world, though the Apostle had condemned it; thus it became too powerful, made Aristotle equal to Christ in dignity and trustworthiness, and darkened for us the Sun of righteousness and truth, the Son of God.[329] Three years before he had declared in writing to his other professor of philosophy at the University of Erfurt, Jodocus Trutfetter, who was vexed with his theses Contra scholasticam theologiam, that he daily prayed to God that in place of the perverse studies in vogue, the wholesome study of the Bible and the Fathers might again be introduced (“ut rursum bibliæ et s. patrum purissima studia revocentur”).[330] Yet three years earlier, in his first lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, he had said to his pupils: “let us learn to know Jesus Christ, and him crucified,” and urged them not to waste their time in the study of the foolish whims of metaphysicians, but at most, to treat philosophy as a subject which one must be acquainted with in order to be able to refute it, and on the other hand to throw themselves with all their might into the study of Holy Scripture.[331]

There can therefore be no question, as we have seen, that his idea that philosophy was the ruin of the Church, an idea present in his mind even in his earliest public life, was founded on the many actually existing abuses, though his own ultra-spiritualism and his gloomy mistrust of man’s nature led him to feel the evil more than others, so that, in reacting against it, he lost his balance instead of calmly lending his assistance towards improving matters.

Luther’s reaction was not only against Occamism in general, but also against various particular doctrines of that school, especially, as stated before, against such doctrines as exalted the powers of nature at the expense of grace.

Here again he committed his first fault, the indefensible injustice of blindly charging Scholasticism and theology generally with what he found faulty in his own narrow circle, though these errors had been avoided by St. Thomas and the best of the Schoolmen. It has been pointed out that he was not acquainted with this real Scholasticism, nevertheless, in 1519, he had the assurance to say: “No one shall teach me scholastic theology, I know it.”[332] “I was brought up amongst them (Thomas, Bonaventure, etc.), I am also acquainted with the minds of the most learned contemporaries and have saturated myself in the best writings of this sort.”[333]

He, all too often, gives us the means to judge the value of this assertion of his. In the same year, for instance, he sums up the chief points of the theology which alone he had learnt, and calls it in all good faith the scholastic theology of the Church, though it was merely the meagre theology of his own Occamist professors.

In order to show all he had had to struggle with he says: “I had formerly learned among the monstrous things (‘monstra’) which are almost accounted axioms of scholastic theology ... that man can do his part in the acquiring of grace; that he can remove obstacles to grace; that he is able to oppose no hindrance to grace; that he can keep the commandments of God according to the letter, though not according to the intention of the lawgiver; that he has freedom of choice [personal freedom in the work of salvation] between this and that, between both contradictories and contraries; that his will is able to love God above all things through its purely natural powers and that there is such a thing as an act of charity, of friendship, by merely natural powers.”[334]

We are to believe that these were the “axioms of scholastic theology!”

Such was not the case. For all acts necessary for salvation true Scholasticism demanded the supernatural “preventing” grace of God.[335] Yet as early as 1516 Luther had elegantly described all the scholastic theologians as “Sow theologians,” on account of their pretended “Deliria” against grace.[336] His first fault, that of unwarranted generalisation, comes out clearly.

The second, more momentous, fault which Luther committed was to fly to the extreme even in doctrine, abolishing all that displeased him and setting up as his main thesis, that man can do nothing, absolutely nothing, good. Not only did he say: “I learnt nothing in scholastic theology worth remembering; I only learnt what must be unlearnt, what is absolutely opposed to Holy Scripture” (“omnino contraria divinis litteris”).[337] He also asserted at a very early period that Holy Scripture teaches that God’s grace does everything in man of itself alone without his vital participation, without liberty, without resolve, without merit. Such a statement does not indeed appear in the Commentary on the Psalms, but it will be found in his academic lectures on the Pauline Epistles, more especially in the Commentary on Romans. For a moment he thought he had discovered in St. Augustine the necessary weapons against the formalism of his school of theology, but now St. Paul appeared to him to give the loudest testimony against it; the Apostle is so determined in his denunciation of the pride of human reason and human will, and in presenting the Gospel of the Son of God, faith and grace, as the only salvation of mankind. Luther imagined he had found in Paul the doctrines which appealed to him: that all human works were equally useless, whether for eternal salvation or for natural goodness; that man’s powers are good for nothing but sin; if grace, which the Apostle extols, is to come to its rights, then we must say of original sin that it has utterly ruined man’s powers of thinking and willing so far as what is good in God’s sight is concerned; original sin still lives, even in the baptised, as a real sin, being an invincible attraction to selfishness and all evil, more particularly to that of the flesh; by it the will is so enslaved that only in those who are justified by grace can there be any question of freedom for good.

As regards Occam’s teaching concerning man, his Fall and his powers, so far as this affects the question of a correct understanding of Luther’s development: in the matter of original sin it agreed with that of Aquinas and Scotus, according to which its essence was a carentia iustitiæ debitæ, i.e. originalis; likewise it asserted the existence of concupiscence in man, the fomes or tinder of sin, as Occam is fond of calling it, as the consequence of original sin; on the other hand it minimised too much the evil effects of original sin on the reason and on the will, by assuming that these powers still remain in man almost unimpaired. This was due to the nominalistic identification of the soul with its faculties; as the soul remained the same as before, so, they said, the powers as a whole also remained the same.[338] The “disabling” of these powers of which St. Thomas and the other Scholastics speak, i.e. the weakening which the Council of Trent also teaches (“liberum arbitrium viribus attenuatum et inclinatum”),[339] was not sufficiently emphasised.

Gabriel Biel, whose views are of some weight on account of his connection with Luther, finds the rectitude of the natural will (rectitudo) in its liberty, and this, he says, has remained intact because it is, as a matter of fact, the will itself, from which it does not differ.[340] In other passages, it is true, he speaks of “wounds”; for owing to concupiscence the will is “inconstant and changeable”; but he nevertheless reverts to “rectitudo,” erroneously relegating the results of original sin to the lower powers alone. Following Occam, and against St. Thomas and Scotus, he makes of concupiscence a “qualitas,” viz. a “qualitas corporalis.”[341] Again, following his master and d’Ailly, Biel asserts—and this is real Occamism—that the will is able without grace to follow the dictates of right reason (“dictamen rectæ rationis”) in everything, and is therefore able of itself to keep the whole law of nature, even to love God purely and above all things.[342] An example of how inaccurate Biel is in the details of his theological discussions has been pointed out by Denifle, who shows that in quoting three various opinions of the greater Scholastics on a question of the doctrine of original sin (“utrum peccatum originale sit aliquid positivum in anima vel in carne”) “not one of the opinions is correctly given,” and yet this “superficial and wordy author was one of Luther’s principal sources of information regarding the best period of Scholasticism.”[343]

The Nominalists doubtless recognised the supernatural order as distinct from the natural, and Occam as well as Biel, d’Ailly and Gerson do not here differ materially from the rest of the Scholastics; but the limits of natural ability, more particularly in respect of keeping the commandments and loving God above all, are carried too far. Luther’s masters had here insisted with great emphasis on the argument of Scotus which they frequently and erroneously made to prove even more than was intended, viz. that as reason is capable of realising that man is able to fulfil the law and to render such love, and as the will is in a position to carry out all that reason puts before it, therefore man is able to fulfil both requirements.[344] In this argument insufficient attention has been paid to the difficulties which interior and exterior circumstances place in the way of fallen man. Theologians generally were very much divided in opinion concerning the possibility of fulfilling these requirements, and the better class of Scholastics denied it, declaring that the assistance of actual grace was requisite, which, however, they held, was given to all men of good will. Against the doctrine which Biel made his own, that man is able, without grace, to avoid all mortal sin,[345] keep all the commandments and love God above all things, not only Thomists, but even some of the Nominalists protested.[346]

Here again, according to Denifle, a serious error, committed by Biel regarding St. Thomas, must be pointed out, one, too, which may have had its effect upon Luther. Biel erroneously makes the holy Doctor say the opposite of what he really teaches when he ascribes to him the proposition: “Homo potest cavere peccata mortalia [omnia] sine gratia.” As Denifle reminds us again, it was “from this author that Luther drew in great part his knowledge of the earlier Scholastics.”[347] Biel, however, in his sermons and instructions to preachers restricts the thesis of the possibility of loving God above all things through our natural powers. This, man is able to do, he says, “according to some writers, more especially in the state of paradisiacal innocence, but the act is not so perfect and not so easy as with God’s grace and is without supernatural merit. God has so ordained that He will not accept any act as meritorious for heaven excepting only that which is elicited by grace” (“ex gratia elicitum”).[348]

The views of the Occamists or “Moderns” exhibited yet other weak points. Man, so they taught, is able to merit grace “de congruo.” They admitted, it is true, that grace was a supernatural gift, “donata” and “gratuita,” as they termed it, but they saw in man’s natural love of God, and in his efforts, an adequate disposition for arriving at the state of saving grace.[349] The great Schoolmen on the contrary taught with St. Thomas, that the preparation and disposition for saving grace, i.e. all those good works which precede justification, do not originate in us but are due to the grace of Christ.

As for the teaching regarding natural and supernatural love of God, the keeping of the commandments and the predisposition for grace, Luther, in 1516, appears to have scarcely been acquainted with the opinion of any of the better representatives of Scholasticism, to whom he had access. It was only in 1518 that his attention was directed to Gregory of Rimini (General of the Augustinian Hermits in 1357), an eclectic whose views were somewhat unusual, and in this case, Luther, instead of making use of the good which was to be found in him in abundance, preferred to disregard his real opinion and to set him up as opposed to the teaching of the Schoolmen.[350] In 1519, labouring under a total misapprehension of the truth as regards both Gregory and the Schoolmen, he wrote: “the ‘Moderns’ agree with the Scotists and Thomists concerning free will and grace, with the one exception of Gregory of Rimini, whom they all condemn, but who rightly and effectively proves them to be worse than the Pelagians. He alone among all the Scholastics agrees with Augustine and the Apostle Paul, against Carlstadt and all the new Schoolmen.”[351] As though all Scholastics, old and new, had taught what Luther here attributes to them, viz. that “it is possible to gain heaven without grace,” because, according to them, “a good though not meritorious work can be done” without grace. On the contrary, not the Thomists only, but also many other theologians were opposed to the thesis that the will could, of itself, always and everywhere, conform itself to the dictates of right reason and thus arrive at grace, but Gregory of Rimini, whom Luther favours so much as a Doctor of his own Order, declares that the keeping of the whole law was only possible through grace, and that therefore God had, with His law, imposed nothing impossible on man.[352] According to Luther, however, God had demanded of human nature what was impossible.

Occam and his school deviate somewhat from the rest of the Scholastics in the application of the well-known axiom: “Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam.”[353]

While the better class of Scholastics understood it as meaning that God allows the man to arrive at saving grace and justification, who does his part with the help of actual grace, the schools of the decline interpreted the principle as implying that God would always give saving grace where there was adequate human and natural preparation; they thus came to make this grace a mere complement of man’s natural effort; the effect of grace was accordingly purely formal; man’s effort remained the same as before, but, by an act of favour, it was made conformable with God’s “intention”; for it was God’s will that no man should enjoy the Beatific Vision, without such grace, which, however, He never failed to bestow in response to human efforts. Some modern writers have described this view of grace to which the Nominalists were inclined, as a stamp imprinting on purely human effort a higher value. At any rate, according to the Occamists, man prepares for grace by natural acts performed under the ordinary concurrence of God (concursus generalis),[354] whereas, according to the better Scholastics, this preparation demanded, not only the ordinary, but also the particular concurrence of God, namely, actual grace; they maintained that ordinary concurrence was inadequate because it belonged to the natural order.

Actual grace was entirely neglected by the Occamists; the special help of God is, according to most of them, saving grace itself; actual grace, i.e. the divinely infused intermediary between man’s natural and supernatural life, finds no place in their system. This explains, if we may anticipate a little, how it is that Luther pays so little attention to actual grace;[355] he has no need of it, because man, according to him, cannot keep the law at all without the (imputed) state of grace. It is unfortunate that Biel, in whom Luther trusted, should have misrepresented the actual teaching of true Scholasticism concerning the necessity and nature of grace, whether of actual or saving grace.

As early as 1515 Luther, with the insufficient knowledge he possessed, accused the Scholastics generally of teaching that “man by his natural powers is able to love God above all things, and substantially to do the works commanded, though not, indeed, according to the ‘intention’ of the lawgiver, i.e. not in the state of grace.” “Therefore, according to them,” he says, “grace was not necessary save by a new imposition demanding more than the law (‘per novam exactionem ultra legem’); for, as they teach, the law is fulfilled by our own strength. Thus grace is not necessary to fulfil the law, save by reason of God’s new exaction which goes beyond the law. Who will put up with these sacrilegious views?” Assuredly his indignation against Scholasticism would have been righteous had its teaching really been what he imagined. In the same way, and with similarly strong expressions, he generalises what he had learnt in his narrow world at Erfurt and Wittenberg, and ascribes to the whole of Christendom, to the Popes and all the schools, exactly what the Occamists said of the results of original sin being solely confined to the lower powers. Here, and in other connections too, he exclaims: “the whole Papacy has taught this, and all the schools of Sophists [Scholastics].” “Have they not denied that nature was ruined by sin when they assert that they are able to choose what is good according to the dictates of right reason?”[356]

From his antagonism to such views, an antagonism we find already in 1515, when he was preparing for his lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, sprang his own gloomy doctrine of the death of free will for good, and the poisoning of human nature by original sin. With its first appearance in the lectures mentioned we shall deal later.

Here a more general question must first receive an answer. How came the youthful Luther to absorb into his life the views above described without apparently shrinking in the least from the opposition to the Church’s teaching manifest in them?

Various answers are forthcoming. In the first place, in consequence of his training which consisted too exclusively in the discussion of speculative controversies, he had come to see in the theological doctrines merely opinions of the schools, on which it was permissible to sit in judgment. He had forgotten that there existed a positive body of unassailable doctrine. Even when engaged in mercilessly attacking this body of doctrine he still appears to have been unaware of having outstepped the lines of permissible disputation. We cannot, however, altogether exonerate him from being in some degree conscious that in his attack on the Church he was treading dangerous ground. In the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans he goes so far as to declare, that the Church was almost destroyed (“pene subversa”) by the teaching of the Scholastics, and that everything was full of Pelagian errors, because grace for the support of the will had been abolished. Things such as these and others of a like nature he could assuredly not have uttered without, in his calmer hours, asking himself how he could reconcile such a standpoint with his duty to the Church. It is true, however, that such quiet hours were exceptional in his case. There can be no doubt also that his idea of the Church and of the binding character of her doctrine was confused. In 1519 he had no hesitation in pointing to the action of other Doctors, who, before that date, had engaged in controversy with each other, in vindication of the tremendous struggle he had just commenced. I am only doing what they did; “Scotus, single-handed, opposed the opinions of all the schools and Doctors and gained the victory (?). Occam did the same, many others have done and are doing likewise up to the present day (?). If then these are at liberty to withstand all, why not I?”[357]

The second answer to the above question lies in the outward circumstances existing in his monastic home at the time of the beginning of his struggle. The members of his Congregation, most of whom were of Occam’s school, were still greatly excited and divided by the quarrel going on in their midst regarding organisation and discipline. The Observantines with their praise of the old order and exercises were a thorn in the flesh of the other Augustinians, more lax and modern in their views, especially for Luther, who was at their head. A spirit of antagonism existed not merely between the different houses of the Order, but even in the houses themselves a struggle seems to have been carried on. On the one side there was a tenacious adherence to the older practices of the Order, on the other suspicion and reproaches were levelled against the innovations of the Observantines. The result was that the fiery young Professor, while inveighing against the Occamist theory of self-righteousness, thundered at the same time against the Observantines as living instances of the self-righteous and holy-by-works. Some of the reasons for this supposition have already been given, and more will be forthcoming when we consider the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.[358]

War was to the Wittenberg Doctor even then an element of life. He found it going on, and encouraged it amongst the wearers of the Augustinian habit. The first and second “factions” in the Order, as Usingen calls them, i.e. the first division caused by the question of observance, and the second by the great controversy concerning faith, were, we may be sure, closely allied in Luther’s mind; the controversy concerning observance may assuredly be reckoned amongst the outward causes which carried him along with them into the greater struggle and contributed for a time to hide from him the danger of his position. Though details are lacking of the resistance to Luther’s first challenge to the theologians of his Order, to Scholasticism and the Church’s doctrine, yet, as already said, we can see from the Commentary on Romans, from other unprinted early lectures, and also from the disputations and sermons, that the Order continued in a state of commotion, and that, as a matter of fact, the second “faction” was an outgrowth of the first.[359] The Observantines had to put up with hearing themselves styled by Luther “iustitiarii” and Pharisees; but probably there were others, even members of the Wittenberg University, perhaps some of those jurists and philosophers[360] to whom he refers in his Commentary on Romans, and whom he so cordially detested, who also were counted amongst the “iustitiarii,” in fact all whom the outrageous assertions of their young colleague regarding the observance of precepts and regulations and against human freedom, roused to opposition.

To these two answers a third must be added, which turns upon the character of Luther in his youth. His extreme self-sufficiency blinded him, and his discovery of real errors in the theology in which he had been trained drove him in his impetuosity to imagine that he was called, and had the right, to introduce an entirely new theology. His searching glance had spied out real mistakes; his strength and boldness had resulted in the bringing to light of actual abuses; his want of consideration in the pointing out of blemishes in the Church had, in some degree, been successful and earned for him the applause of many; his criticism of theology was greeted as triumphant by his pupils, the more so as the Doctors he attacked were but feeble men unable to reply to so strong an indictment, or else living at a distance (in Erfurt). The growing self-consciousness, which expresses itself even in the form of his controversial language, must not be disregarded as a psychological fact in the problem, one, too, which also helped to blind him to the real outcome of his work.

Only the most extreme spirit of antagonism could have led the Monk to make, in addition to his other harsh exaggerated charges against Scholasticism, the following assertion, to which, as it is important for the origin of Lutheranism, some attention must be paid. He says the doctrine is false that righteousness which can be acquired by means of good works (of the natural order) is even conceivable; this was invented by Aristotle; this righteousness of the philosophers and jurists has penetrated into the Church, while, as a matter of fact, owing to the naughtiness, nay, corruption of mankind, resulting from original sin, it was a monstrosity and an abomination in God’s sight; the scholastic distinctions of distributive and commutative justice, etc., “were also due to blindness of spirit and mere human wisdom”; the Scholastics have put this infamous, purely human righteousness in the place of righteousness by grace, which is of value in God’s sight; they have said there is no original sin, and have acted as though all men did not feel concupiscence within themselves very strongly; they have represented righteousness as the fruit of our natural efforts, and in consequence of this people now believe that righteousness may be had through Indulgences costing two pence, i.e. through works of the very slightest worth! But “the Apostle teaches,” he says, “Corde creditur ad iustitiam, i.e. not by works, or wisdom, or study, not by riches and honours can man attain to righteousness.... That is a new way to righteousness, against, and far above, Aristotle ... and his political, God-forsaken righteousness.”[361] Yet, according to him, the Scholastics knew no better. “They speak like Aristotle in his ‘Ethics,’ who makes ... righteousness consist in works, as also its attainment and its loss.”[362]

Is it possible that the writer of the above sentences was really incapable of distinguishing between the natural and the supernatural in moral good according to the fundamental principle of true Scholasticism? Was Luther really ignorant of the theses which run through the whole of Scholasticism such as this of St. Thomas: “Donum gratiæ excedit omnem præparationem virtutis humanæ”?[363] The great lack of discrimination which underlies the above attack is characteristic of Luther in his youth and of his want of consideration in the standpoint he assumed. He starts from some justifiable objection to the nominalistic theology—which really was inadequate on the subject of the preparation for supernatural righteousness—sets up against it his own doctrine of fallen man and his salvation, and, then, without further ado, ascribes an absolutely fanciful idea of righteousness to the Church and the whole of Scholasticism. What he failed to distinguish, St. Thomas, Thomism, and all true Scholastics distinguished with very great clearness. Aquinas draws a sharp line of demarcation between the civil virtue of righteousness and the so-called infused righteousness of the act of justification. He anticipates, so to speak, Luther’s objection and his confusion of one idea with another, and teaches that by the repeated performance of exterior works an inward habit is without doubt formed in consequence of which man is better disposed to act rightly, as Aristotle teaches in his “Ethics”; “but,” he says, “this only holds good of human righteousness, by which man is disposed to what is humanly good (‘iustitia humana ad bonum humanum’); by human works the habit of such righteousness can be acquired. But the righteousness which counts in the eyes of God (i.e. supernatural righteousness) is ordained to the Divine good, namely, to future glory, which exceeds human strength (‘iustitia quæ habet gloriam apud Deum; ordinata ad bonum divinum’) ... wherefore man’s works are of no value for producing the habit of this righteousness, but the heart of man must first of all be inwardly justified by God, so that he may do the works which are of worth for eternal glory.”[364]

So speaks the most eminent of the Schoolmen in the name of the true theology of the Middle Ages.

For Luther, who brings forward the above arbitrary objection in his Commentary on Romans, it would have been very easy to have made use of the explanation just given, for it is found in St. Thomas’s Commentary on this very Epistle. Luther, one would have thought, would certainly have consulted this work for his interpretation of the Epistle, were it only on account of its historical interest, and even if it had not been the best work on the subject which had so far appeared. But no, it seems that he never looked into this Commentary, nor even into the older glosses of Peter Lombard on the Epistle to the Romans, then much in use; in the latter he would at once have found the refutation of the charge he brought against the Scholastics of advocating the doctrine of Aristotle on righteousness by works, as the gloss to the classic passage (Romans iii. 27) runs as follows: “For righteousness is not by works (‘non ex operibus est iustitia’), but works are the result of righteousness, and therefore we do not say: ‘the righteousness of works, but the works of righteousness.’”[365]

He does not even trouble to uphold the frivolous accusation that the Schoolmen had been acquainted only with Aristotelian righteousness, but actually refutes it by another objection. He finds fault with the “scholastic theologians” for having, as he says in the Commentary on Romans, “held the doctrine of the expulsion of sin and the infusion of grace” to be a single change.[366] He hereby admits that they were familiar with something more than mere Aristotelian righteousness, for in Aristotle there is certainly no question of any infusion of grace. But Luther frequently speaks in this way of the distinction which the Scholastics made between acquired and infused righteousness.

The changeableness and inconstancy of his assertions regarding the doctrines of the Scholastics is quite remarkable. He makes no difficulty about admitting later, against his previous statements, that the Scholastics did not teach that man was able to love God above all things merely by his own strength; this was the teaching only of the Scotists and the “Moderns” (i.e. Nominalists or Occamists).[367] At that time he was perhaps better acquainted with Biel, who instances Thomas and Bonaventure in opposition to this doctrine.[368] Luther was also careless in the accounts he gave even of the theology of his own circle, viz. that of the Occamists, and the injustice he does Scholasticism as a whole, he repeats against his own school by exaggerating its faults or suppressing the necessary distinctions in order to be the better able to refute its theses by the Bible and St. Augustine. As therefore it is impossible to form an opinion on Scholasticism as a whole from Luther’s assertions, so we cannot trust his account even of his own masters, in whose works he thinks himself so well versed.

He is, for instance, neglecting a distinction when he repeatedly asserts that Occam, his “Master,” denied the biblical truth that the Holy Ghost is necessary for the performance of a good work. As a matter of fact, the Occamists, like the Scotists, did not here differ essentially from the Thomists, although differences are apparent in their teaching on the supernatural habit, and on the preparation for the attainment of this supernatural righteousness, i.e. for justification.[369] He is wronging his own “factio occamica” when, from its teaching that man could, by his natural powers, acquire a love of God beyond all things, he at once infers that it declared infused grace to be superfluous,[370] and further, when, for instance, he asserted that the axiom quoted above, and peculiarly beloved of the Occamists, “Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam,” was erroneous, as though it placed a “wall of iron” between man and the grace of God.[371] No Occamist understood the axiom in the way he wishes to make out.

Luther went so far in his gainsaying of the Occamist doctrine of the almost unimpaired ability of man for purely natural good, that he arrived at the opposite pole and began to maintain that there was no such thing as vitally good acts on man’s part; that man as man does not act in doing what is good, but that grace alone does everything. The oldest statements of this sort are reserved for the quotations to be given below from his Commentary on Romans. We give, however, a few of his later utterances to this effect. They prove that the crass denial of man’s doing anything good continued to characterise him in later life as much as earlier.

In the Gospel-homilies contained in his “Postils,” he teaches the people that it was a “shameful doctrine of the Popes, universities, and monasteries” to say “we ought by the strength of our free will to begin [exclusive of God’s help?] by seeking God, coming to Him, running after Him and earning His grace.” “Beware, beware,” he cries, “of this poison; it is the merest devil’s doctrine by which the whole world is led astray.... You ask: How then must we begin to become pious, and what must we do that God may begin in us? Reply: What, don’t you hear that in you there is no doing, no beginning to be pious, as little as there is any continuing and ending? God only is the beginning, furthering and ending. All that you begin is sin and remains sin, let it look as pretty as it will; you can do nothing but sin, do how you will ... you must remain in sin, do what you will, and all is sin whatever you do alone of your free will; for if you were able of your own free will not to sin, or to do what is pleasing to God, of what use would Christ be to you?”[372]

Elsewhere, on account of the supposed inability of man, he teaches a sort of Quietism: “Is anyone to become converted, pious and a Christian, we don’t set about it; no praying, no fasting assists it; it must come from heaven and from grace alone.... Whoever wants to become pious, let him not say: ‘I will set about doing good works in order to obtain grace,’ but, ‘I will wait to see whether God by His word will give me His grace and His spirit.’”[373]

And on another occasion his words are still stronger: “The gospel tells us only to open our bosom and take, and says: ‘Behold what God has done for you, He made His Son become flesh for you.’ Believe this and accept it and you will be saved.”[374]

Seen in the light of such passages, it becomes clear that the following must not be taken as a mere expression of humility, but as a deprecation of good deeds. Already, in 1519, Luther says: “Man, like a cripple with disabled hands and feet, must invoke grace as the artisan of works (‘operum artificem’).”[375] The difficulty is that this very invocation is itself a vital, though surely not a sinful, action. Would not a man have been justified in saying even of this preliminary act: I will wait, I may not begin? “Luther was scarcely acquainted with the doctrine of a wholesome Scholasticism and with that of the Church concerning the mysterious reciprocal action of grace and free will in man. He was qualified to oppose the Occamist teaching, but was incapable of replacing it by the true doctrine.”[376]

Against the prevalent doctrine on the powers of man, Luther, among other verses from the Bible, brought forward John xv. 5: “Without me ye can do nothing.” A remark on his use of this supposed scriptural proof may serve to conclude what we have said of the far-reaching negative influence of Occamism on the youthful Luther.

The decisive words of the Redeemer: “Without me ye can do nothing,” so Luther says to his friend Spalatin, had hitherto been understood quite wrongly. And, in proof of this, he adduces the interpretation which he must have heard in his school, or read in the authors who were there in repute: “Our masters,” he says, “have made a distinction between the general and the particular concurrence of God” (concursus generalis and concursus specialis or gratia); with the general concurrence man was able, so they taught, to do what is naturally good, i.e. what they considered to be good; with the particular, however, that which is beyond nature (“quæ gratiæ sunt et supra naturam”), and meritorious for heaven. To this statement of the perfectly correct teaching of his masters he adds, however, the following: they taught that “with our powers we are able, under the general Divine concurrence, to prepare ourselves for the obtaining of grace, i.e. for the obtaining of the particular concurrence, hence that we can ‘inchoative’ do something, to gain merit and the vision of God, notwithstanding the express teaching of Christ, though we are indeed unable to do this ‘perfective,’ without the particular assistance of grace.”[377]

What Luther says here applies at most to the Nominalists; according to Occam’s school the preparation for sanctifying grace takes place by purely natural acts,[378] and accordingly this school was not disposed to take Christ’s words about eternal life too literally. Although healthy Scholasticism knows nothing of this and holds fast to the literal meaning of the words “Without me ye can do nothing,” viz. nothing for eternal life (the absolute necessity of the general concurrence is taken for granted), yet Luther, in all simplicity, assures his friend that the whole past had taken the words of Christ in the sense he mentions (“Sic est hucusque autoritas ista exposita et intellecta.”)[379] This doctrine he detests so heartily, that he sets up the very extreme opposite in his new system. The general Divine concursus, he says in his letter to Spalatin quoted above, certainly leads nature on to work of itself, but it cannot do otherwise than “seek its own and misuse the gifts of God.” Nature merely provides stuff for the “punishing fire,” however “good and moral its works may appear outwardly.” Hence, according to him, there is no distinction between general and particular concurrence, between the inchoative and the perfective act; without Christ, and “before we have been healed by His grace,” there is absolutely nothing but mischief and sin.

By “grace,” here and elsewhere, he means the state of justifying grace. Whereas true Scholasticism recognises actual grace, which assists man even before justification, this is as good as excluded by Luther already in the beginning of his theological change. Why? Partly because he cannot make use of it as he refers everything to justifying faith, partly because the Occamists, his masters, erroneously reduced the particular influence of God almost entirely to sanctifying grace, and neglected or denied actual grace.

In the latter respect we perceive one of the positive effects of Occamism on Luther. This leads us to another aspect of the present theme.