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That the will is free is one of the most indisputable facts of our inner consciousness. Where there is reason there must needs be a corresponding freedom, i.e. freedom from interior necessity.

Freedom is the basis of all worship of God, and if external compulsion is rightly excluded from the idea of religion, surely still more opposed to it is the assumption that the will lacks freedom when it seeks and serves God. The true dignity of the soul’s worship of God consists in the voluntary payment of homage to the highest of all beings in the natural as well as the supernatural order. “God has made you without your co-operation,” says Augustine, “but He will not save you without it.”[616] God’s greatness and omnipotence are enhanced by His creation of beings gifted with the power of self-determination, who can will or not, who are free to choose this or that and are in a position to embrace what is good instead of what is evil.

The consensus of the human race as a whole in the belief in free-will finds its expression in the acknowledgment of the sense of duty. Virtue and vice, command and prohibition are written on every page of history since the world began. If however there is such a thing as a moral order, then free-will must exist. The misuse of the latter is followed, owing to the spontaneous protest on the part of nature, by a feeling of guilt and remorse, whence Augustine, the champion of grace and free-will, could say: “The feeling of remorse is a witness both to the fact that the individual who feels it has acted wrongly and that he might have acted aright.”[617]

The doctrine of the Church before Luther’s time was, that free-will had not been destroyed by original sin, and that, in one who acts aright, it is not interfered with by God’s grace. The fall of our first parents did not obliterate but merely weakened and warped the freedom of moral choice by giving rise to concupiscence and the movements of passion. Among the many proofs of this appealed to in Holy Scripture were the words spoken by God to Cain: “Why art thou angry? … If thou do well, shalt thou not receive? but if ill, shall not sin forthwith be present at the door? but the lust thereof shall be under thee, and thou shalt have dominion over it.”[618] It was well known that Scripture always credited even the fallen will with power over the lower impulses, as well as with the choice between good and evil, life and death, the service of God and the service of idols.

Seeing that Luther, in teaching the contrary, appealed to the power of divine grace which ostensibly does all, obliterating every free deed, it is worth our while to point out the scriptural proofs by which the Church vindicated man’s liberty even under the action of grace.

Ecclesiastical writers, even in the days immediately before Luther’s time, were fond of laying stress on the words of the Apostle of the Gentiles: “We exhort you that you receive not the grace of God in vain”; or, again, on that other passage where he says of himself: “His grace in me was not void, but I laboured more than they all, yet not I, but the grace of God in me.” It was because he was conscious of freedom and of the power of abusing grace that the Apostle exhorted the Philippians as follows: “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.”[619] Catholic writers likewise pointed out that the same inspired teaching concerning the liberty of choice in those called to the state of grace was also to be found in the Old Testament: “Choose therefore life that thou mayst love the Lord thy God,” an exhortation prefaced by the most solemn assurance: “I call heaven and earth to witness this day, that I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing.”[620]

True Catholic mysticism also laid great stress on free-will, and if some mystical writers, led astray by semi-pantheistic or quietistic ideas, erred from the right path, at any rate their views were never sanctioned by the Church. Some mystics also were not rightly understood and the denial of free-will was attributed to them, whereas all there is to censure in them is their vague mode of expression. This is the case with the “Theologia Deutsch,” which Luther esteemed so highly but did not rightly comprehend. What the Frankfurt knight of the Teutonic Order says in this work, viz.: “When a man is in the state of grace and agreeable to God, he wills and yet it is not he who wills, but God, and there the will is not its own,” may sound equivocal, though it really is perfectly harmless, for the words which follow show that he does not deny man’s will, and that when he says that God Himself wills in man he is merely emphasising the harmony between the human and the Divine will: “And there nothing else is willed but what God wills, for there God wills and not man, the will being united to the Eternal Will.”[621] The will which thus acts in union with the Eternal Will is the free-will of man on earth.

If Luther, instead of endeavouring to find support for his opinions on such misunderstood passages, had examined with an open mind the teaching of the Church as expressed by Augustine, the greatest teacher on grace, he would have found, that Augustine holds fast to the liberty of the will notwithstanding that in his defence of grace he had to lay greater stress on the latter than on free-will. This Doctor of the Church brilliantly refutes the assertion of the Pelagians, that the Catholic doctrine did not allow to free-will its full rights. “We also, teach freedom of choice (‘liberum in hominibus esse arbitrium’),” he says, for instance. “On this point at least there is no difference between us and you. It is not on account of this doctrine that you are Pelagians, but because you exclude from free-will the co-operation of grace in the performance of good works.”[622]

The Catholic doctrine represented all good-doing on man’s part—by which he rendered himself pleasing to God, attained to the state of justification and the right to an eternal reward—as an act organically one, effected equally by God’s Grace and by man’s free co-operation. Even in the preparation for the state of grace both elements were held to be essential, actual grace, and human effort supported and carried on by such grace. Concerning such preparation, theology taught that man thereby made himself in some way worthy of justification and of heaven, that he merited both, though not indeed in the strict sense, rather that, so to speak, he rendered himself deserving of justification as an unmerited reward, bestowed through the bountiful goodness of God (i.e. not “de condigno” but “de congruo”). Further examination of the scholastic teaching on this point would here be out of place, nor can we discuss the principle to which the Church ever adhered so firmly, viz. that God gives His grace to all without exception, because He wills to make all without exception eternally happy, according to the assurance of Holy Scripture: “God wills that all men be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.” But as regards man’s free-will or want of free-will under the action of grace, which is the background of the present phase of Luther’s history, according to the Church and her Doctors man’s freedom of choice, far from being deranged by the action of God’s grace, is, on the contrary, thereby assisted to arrive at a wholesome and unfettered decision. “Free-will,” says Augustine, in his striking and thoughtful way, “is not destroyed because it is assisted by grace; it is assisted because it has not been destroyed.”[623]

The position which Luther had assumed in the Commentary on Romans in 1515–1516 concerning the doctrine of human free-will has already been discussed in detail (vol. i., p. 202 ff.). It is of the utmost importance to follow up his other statements on free-will dating from that period, and the subsequent advance in his views during his public struggle till the publication of the decisive book “De servo arbitrio” in 1525. It not only affords a deep, psychological and theological insight into his train of thought, but also shows how his denial of free-will was the central point of his whole teaching. At the same time we shall notice certain emphatic statements which he makes, but which do not usually occupy a due place in descriptions of his theology and which accordingly might easily be regarded by our readers as not his at all, were they not attested conscientiously and in detail by Luther’s own writings. We refer to such assertions as the following: “Everything happens of necessity”; “Man, when he does what is evil, is not master of himself”; “Man does evil because God ceases to work in him”; “By virtue of His nature God’s ineluctable concursus determines everything, even the most trivial,” hence “inevitable necessity” compels us in “all that we do and everything that happens,” “God alone moves and impels all that He has made” (“movet agit, rapit”), nay, “He decrees all things in advance by His infallible will,” including the inevitable damnation of those who are damned.—We shall hear these views expounded below by Luther himself as the core and kernel of his teaching (“summa causæ”); with spirit and energy he advocates them through some hundred pages in one of his principal works, against the greatest of the Humanists, who had dared to attack him; to question his fundamental dogma was, says Luther, to “place the knife at his throat.”