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We have so far been considering the precipitate and excessive antagonism shown at an early date by Luther towards the school of Occam, especially towards its anthropological doctrines; we have also noted its influence on his new heretical principles, particularly on his denial of man’s natural ability for good. Now we must turn our attention to the positive influence of the Occamist teaching upon his new line of thought, for Luther’s errors are to be ascribed not only to the negative, but also to the positive effects of his school.

His principal dogma, that of justification, must first be taken into consideration.

This he drew up entirely on the lines of a scheme handed down to him by his school. It is no uncommon thing to see even the most independent and active minds tearing themselves away from a traditional train of thought in one particular, and yet continuing in another to pursue the accustomed course, so great is the power which a custom acquired at school possesses over the intellect. The similarity existing between Luther’s and Occam’s doctrine of the imputation of righteousness is quite remarkable. Occam had held it, at least as possible, that a righteousness existed which was merely imputed; at any rate, it was only because God so willed it that sanctifying grace was necessary in the present order of things. He and his school had, as a matter of fact, no clear perception of the supernatural habit as a supernatural principle of life in the soul. According to the Occamist Peter d’Ailly, whom Luther repeatedly quotes in his notes on Peter Lombard, reason cannot be convinced of the necessity of the supernatural habit; all that this is supposed to do can be done equally well by a naturally acquired habit; an unworthy man might be found worthy of eternal life without any actual change taking place in him; only owing to an acceptation on God’s part (“a sola divina acceptatione”) does the soul become worthy of eternal life, not on account of any created cause (therefore not on account of love and grace).[380] “The whole work of salvation here becomes external; it is mechanical, not organic.”[381]

If Luther, in consequence of his study of these Occamist doctrines, fell into error regarding the supernatural, the consequences were even worse when, with his head full of such Occamistic ideas, he proceeded to expound the most difficult of the Pauline Epistles, with their dim and mysterious handling of grace, and, at the same time, to ponder on the writings of St. Augustine,[382] that deep-thinking Doctor of grace. Such studies could only breed fresh confusion in his mind.

The result was as follows: regarding imputation, i.e. one of the foundations of his theology, Luther quotes Occam in such a way as to represent him as teaching as a fact what he merely held to be possible. He declares sanctifying grace to be not merely superfluous, but also non-existent, and erects the theory of Divine acceptation into a dogma. This alone would be sufficient to demonstrate his positive dependence on Occamism.

The theories of acceptation, which were peculiar to the Occamists and which Luther took over—though what they called by this name he prefers to call imputation—had not only met with approval, but had also been widely applied by this school.

According to d’Ailly, evil is not evil on account of its special nature, but only because God forbids it (“præcise, quia lege prohibitum”); a law or rule of conduct does not exist by nature, for God might have willed otherwise (“potest non esse lex”); He has, however, decreed it in the present order of things. Similar views appear in Luther’s Commentary on Romans, where little regard is paid to the objective foundation of the moral law.[383]

According to Occam, God acts according to whim. D’Ailly actually discovers in him the view that it is not impossible to suppose that the created will might deserve well by hating God, because God might conceivably command this. In Luther we at least find the opinion that God knows of no grounds for His action and might therefore work what is evil in man, which then, of course, would not be evil in God in consequence of His not imputing it to Himself as such.

The Divine imputation or pactum plays its part in the Occamistic sense in Luther’s earliest theological lectures on the Psalms. “Faith and Grace,” he there says, “by which we are justified to-day, would not justify us of themselves save as a consequence of the ‘pactum Dei.’” In the same place he teaches that, as a result of such an “agreement and promise,” those who, before Christ, fulfilled the law according to the letter, acquired a supernatural merit de congruo.[384]

Luther’s dependence on Occamism caused him, as Denifle expresses it, to be always “on bad terms with the supernatural”;[385] we must not, however, take this as meaning that Luther did not do his best, according to his own lights, to support and to encourage faith in revelation, both in himself and in others.

We shall see how in the case of justification he regards faith, and then his particular “faith only” as the one factor, not, however, the faith which is animated by charity, and this because, with the Occamists, he rejects all supernatural habits. He extols the value of faith on every occasion at the expense of the other virtues.[386]

The positive influence of Occam on Luther is also to be traced in the domain of faith and knowledge. Luther imagines he is fortifying faith by laying stress on its supposed opposition to reason, a tendency which is manifest already in his Commentary on Romans. In this Occam and his school were his models.

The saying that there is much in faith which is “plainly against reason and the contrary of which is established by faith”[387] comes from d’Ailly. Occam found the arguments for the existence of one God inadequate.[388] Biel has not so much to say against these proofs, but he does hold that the fact that one only God exists is a matter of faith not capable of being absolutely proved by reason.[389]

Occam, whom Biel praises as “multum clarus et latus,” made faith to know almost everything, but the results achieved by reason to be few and unreliable.[390] He employed the function of reason, of a caustic reason to boot, in order to raise doubts, or to exercise the mind at the expense of the truths of revelation; yet in the positive recognition of articles of faith he allowed reason to recede into the background. In any case he prepared the way for the saying, that a thing may be false in theology and yet true in philosophy, and vice versa, a proposition condemned at the 5th Lateran Council by the Constitution Apostolici Regiminis of Leo X.[391]

Luther came to state clearly that “it was quite false to say the same thing was true in philosophy and also in theology”; whoever taught this was fettering the articles of faith “as prisoners to the judgment of reason.”[392] We shall have to speak later of many examples of the violent and hateful language with which he disparages reason in favour of faith. His love for the Bible at an early period strengthened in him the idea—one which the Occamists often advanced in the course of the dialectic criticism to which they subjected the truths of religion—that after all, the decisions of faith are not the same as those of the mind, and that we must make the best of this fact. Luther even in his Commentary on Romans is ever ready to decry the “wisdom of the flesh,” which is there described as constantly interfering with faith.

The union of faith and knowledge, of which true Scholasticism was proud, never appealed to Luther.

The Occamists had also been before him in attacking Aristotle. The fact that many esteemed this philosopher too highly gave rise in their camp to bitter and exaggerated criticism, and to excessive abuse of the Stagirite. Against the blind Aristotelians d’Ailly had already written somewhat unkindly: “In philosophy, i.e. in the teaching of Aristotle, there are no, or but few, convincing proofs ... we must call the philosophy or teaching of Aristotle an opinion rather than a science.”[393] Gregory of Rimini, whom Luther made use of and who was not ignorant of Occamism, says that Aristotle had shockingly gone astray (“turpissime erravit”) on many points, and, in some, had contradicted himself.

Such were the minds that inspired Luther at the time when he was already making for a theological goal different from that of the “rationalists,” wise ones of this world, and loquacious wiseacres, as he calls all the Scholastics indiscriminately in his Commentary on Romans. Wherever theology has made a right and moderate use of philosophical proofs, philosophy has always shown itself as the ancilla theologiæ, and has been of assistance in theological development. After expelling reason from the domain of supernatural knowledge Luther was forced to fall back on feeling and inward experience, i.e. on elements, which, owing to their inconstancy and variability, did not deserve the place he gave them. This was as harmful to faith as the denial of the rights of reason.

Gerson had lamented, concerning the misuse of philosophical criticism in religious matters, that the methods of the Nominalists made faith grow cold,[394] and it may be that Luther had experienced these effects in himself, since, in his lectures on the Psalms, he acknowledges and regrets the cooling of his life of faith.[395] But, surely, in the same way the predominance of feeling and so-called religious experience was also to be regretted, as it crippled faith and deprived it of a sure guide.

Staupitz spoke from feeling and not from a clear perception of facts when, in his admiration, he praised Luther as exalting Christ and His grace. He applauded Luther, as the latter says “at the outset of his career”: “This pleases me in your teaching, that it gives honour and all to God alone and nothing to man. We cannot ascribe to God sufficient honour and goodness, etc.”[396] Staupitz sought for enlightenment in a certain mysticism akin to Quietism, instead of in real Scholasticism. On such mystic by-ways Luther was sure to fall in with him, and, as a matter of fact, from the point of view of a false mysticism, Luther was to denounce “rationalising wisdom” and to speak in favour of religious feeling even more strongly than he had done before.

Under the influence of both these elements, a quietistic mysticism and an antagonism to reason in matters of faith, his scorn for all natural works grew. This made it easier for him to regard the natural order of human powers as having been completely upset by original sin. More and more he comes to recognise only an appearance of natural virtues; to consider them as the poisonous blossoms of that unconquerable selfishness which lies ever on the watch in the heart of man, and is only to be gradually tamed by the justifying grace of God. The denial of all freedom, under the ban of sin, little by little becomes for him the principal thing, the “summa causa,” which, as he says in so many words, he has to defend.[397] Beside the debasement of reason and the false fancies of his mysticism, stood as a worthy companion the religion of the enslaved will; this we find present in his mind from the beginning, and at a later period it obtained a lasting monument in the work “De servo arbitrio,” which Luther regarded as the climax of his theology.[398]

But there are other connecting-links between Occamism and the errors of the young Monk.

According to Occam’s school the purely spiritual attributes of God cannot be logically proved; it does not consider it as proved merely by reason that God is the last and final end of man, and that outside of Him there is no real human happiness, nor even, according to Occam himself, that “any final cause exists on account of which all things happen”;[399] not only, according to him, must we be on our guard against any idea that reason can arrive at God as the origin of happiness and as the end of salvation, but even His attributes we must beware of examining philosophically. God’s outward action knows no law, but is purely arbitrary. Thus Occamism, with its theory of the arbitrary Divine Will, manifesting itself in the act of “acceptation” or imputation, was more likely to produce a servile feeling of dependence on God than any childlike relationship; with this corresponded the feeling of the utter worthlessness of man’s own works in relation to imputation, which, absolutely speaking, might have been other than it is.

It is highly probable that the bewildered soul of the young Augustinian greedily lent an ear to such ideas, and laboured to make them meet his own needs. The doubts as to predestination which tormented him were certainly not thereby diminished, but rather increased. How could the idea of an arbitrary God have been of any use to him? In all likelihood the apprehensiveness and obscurity which colours his idea of God, in the Commentary on Romans, was due to notions imbibed by him in his school. Luther was later on to express this conception in his teaching regarding the “Deus absconditus,” on whom, as the source of all predestination (even to hell), we may not look, and whom we may only timidly adore. Already in the Commentary referred to he teaches the absolute predestination to hell of those who are to be damned, a doctrine which no Occamist had yet ventured to put forward.

Among the other points of contact between Luther’s teaching and Occamism, or Nominalism, we may mention, as a striking example, his denial of Transubstantiation, which he expressly associates with one of the theses of the Occamist d’Ailly. Here his especial hatred of the school of St. Thomas comes out very glaringly.

Luther himself confesses later how the Occamist school had led him to this denial.[400] When studying scholastic theology he had read in d’Ailly that the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament of the Altar would be much more comprehensible could we but assume that He was present with the bread, i.e. without any change of substance, but that this was impossible owing to the unassailable contrary teaching of the Church on Transubstantiation. The same idea is found in Occam, but of this Luther was unaware. Luther criticises d’Ailly’s appeal to the Church, and then proceeds: “I found out later on what sort of Church it is which sets up such a doctrine; it is the Thomistic, the Aristotelian. My discovery made me bolder, and therefore I decided for Consubstantiation. The opinions of the Thomists, even though approved by Pope or Council, remain opinions and do not become articles of faith, though an angel from heaven should say the contrary; what is asserted apart from Scripture and without manifest revelation, cannot be believed.”[401] Yet in point of fact the term “Transsubstantiatio” had been first used in a definition by the Œcumenical Lateran Council of 1215 to express the ancient teaching of the Church regarding the change of substance. According to what Luther here says, St. Thomas of Aquin (whose birth occurred some ten years later) was responsible for the introduction of the word and what it stood for, in other words for the doctrine itself. A little later Luther solemnly reaffirmed that “Transubstantiation is purely Thomistic” (1522).[402] “The Decretals settled the word, but there is no doubt that it was introduced into the Church by those coarse blockheads the Thomists” (1541).[403] Hence either he did not know of the Council or its date, or he did not know when St. Thomas wrote; in any case he was ignorant of the relation in which the teaching of St. Thomas on this point stood to the teaching of earlier ages. He was unaware of the historical fact of the general adoption of the term since the end of the eleventh century;[404] he was not acquainted with the theologians who taught in the interval between the Lateran Council and St. Thomas, and who used both the name and the idea of Transubstantiation, and among whom were Albertus Magnus and Alexander of Hales; he cannot even have noted the title of the Decretal from which he derived the knowledge of the existence of the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages, for it is headed: “Innocentius tertius in concilio generali.”

That he should have made St. Thomas responsible for the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and that so rudely, appears to be a result of his ever-increasing hatred for Aquinas. In the first period of his change of view, his opposition was to the Scholastics in general, but from 1518 onwards his assaults are on St. Thomas and the Thomists. Why was this? A Thomist, Prierias of Rome, was the author of the first pamphlet against him; another Thomist, Cardinal Cajetan, had summoned him to appear before his tribunal; both belonged to the Dominican Order, in which Thomas, the great Dominican Saint, was most enthusiastically studied. Tetzel, too, was a Dominican and a Thomist. Any examination of Luther’s development cannot but pay attention to this circumstance, though it is true it does not belong to his earliest period. It makes many of the outbreaks of anger to which he gave way later more comprehensible. In 1522 Luther pours out his ire on the “asinine coarseness of the Thomists,” on “the Thomist hogs and donkeys,” on the “stupid audacity and thickheadedness of the Thomists,” who “have neither judgment, nor insight, nor industry in their whole body.”[405] His theology, we may remark, largely owed its growth to this quarrel and the contradiction it called forth.

Luther’s tendency to controversial theology and his very manner of proceeding, in itself far less positive than negative, bore the Occamist stamp. It is true he was predisposed this way by nature, yet the criticism of the nominalistic school, the acuteness and questioning attitude of Occam and d’Ailly, lent an additional impulse to his putting forth like efforts. We shall not be mistaken in assuming that his doctrinal arbitrariness was, to a certain extent at least, a result of the atmosphere of decadent theology in which his lot had been cast. The paradoxes to which he so frequently descends are manifestly modelled on the antilogies with which Occam’s works abound; like Occam, he frequently leaves the reader in doubt as to his meaning, or speaks later in quite a different way from what he did before. Occam’s garrulity was, so it would appear, infectious. Luther himself, while praising his acuteness, blames Occam for the long amplifications to which he was addicted.[406] On more than one occasion Luther reproaches himself for his discursiveness and superabundance of rhetoric. Even the Commentaries he wrote in his youth on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans prove to the reader that his self-reproof was well deserved, whilst the second Commentary also manifests that spirit of criticism and arbitrariness, bold to overstep the barriers of the traditional teaching of the Church, which he had likewise received from his Occamist masters.

Various attempts have been made to point out other theological influences, besides those considered above, as having worked upon Luther in his earlier years.

It would carry us too far to discuss these opinions individually, the more so that there are scarcely sufficient data to hand to lead to a decision. Luther himself, who should be the principal witness, is very reticent concerning the authors and the opinions he made use of in forming his own ideas. He would rather give the impression that everything had grown up spontaneously from his own thought and research; that his teaching sprang into being from himself alone without the concurrence of outsiders, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. He assumes to himself with the utmost emphasis the precedence in the discovery of the Gospel, for instance, against rivals such as Carlstadt and Zwingli; he alone had read his Bible, and Carlstadt was quite unacquainted with it; he only, with illumination from above, had discovered everything.

As we find in his writings so few allusions to outside influences—save to that of Occamism—it does not appear worth while to philosophise as to whether he had, or had not, been touched by the Gallicanism which was in the air. It is very doubtful whether he, in the comparative seclusion of his little world of Erfurt and Wittenberg, came to any extent under this influence, especially as his studies were so cursory and brief and confined within such narrow limits. The Gallican tendencies did not find in Germany anything like so fruitful a soil as in France. It is true that Luther soon after his change of opinions was capable of rivalling any Paris professor of Gallican sympathies in his depreciation of the Holy See. Hence though no immediate influence on Luther can be allowed to Gallicanism, yet the fact remains that the prevalent anti-Roman tendencies greatly contributed to the wide acceptance of the Lutheran schism in Germany, and even beyond its borders.

Again, that Luther, as has been asserted, after having tasted the food provided by Nominalism, was so disgusted as to rush to the opposite extreme in Scholasticism, making his own the very worst elements of realism, both philosophical and theological, seems to rest on fancy rather than on facts. We may likewise refuse to see in Wiclifism, with which Luther was acquainted only through the Constance Theses, any element of inspiration, and also shake our heads when some Protestants, at the other extreme, try to show that the Doctors of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Bernard, were really the parties responsible for Luther’s turning his back on the doctrines of the Church.

On the other hand, the influence of mysticism, with which we have now to deal, deserves much more attention. It cannot be denied that a very considerable part in the development of his new ideas was played by mysticism; already at an early date the mystic spirit which Augustine’s works owed to their writer’s Platonic studies, had attracted Luther without, however, making him a Neo-Platonist.[407] During the time of his mental growth he was likewise warmly attached to German mysticism. Yet, here again, it is an exaggeration, as we can already see, to state as some non-Catholics do that Luther, “as the theologian of the Reformation,” was merely “a disciple of Tauler and the Frankfort author of the German Theology,” or that “it was only through meeting with the Frankfort theologian that he was changed from a despairing swimmer struggling in the billows of a gloomy sea into a great reformer.”