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Formerly, and even in recent times, many writers on the Catholic side have endeavoured to prove that the principal motive for Luther’s new opinions lay in worldliness, sensuality, and more especially sins of the flesh. In order to explain his teaching attempts were made to establish the closest connection between Luther’s views with regard to the survival of sin in man without his consent, the covering over of man’s guilt by the merits of Christ and the worthlessness of good works on the one hand, and on the other a nature ravaged by sinful habits, such as was attributed to the originator of these doctrines. The principal argument in favour of this view was found in the not unusual experience that intellectual errors frequently arise from moral faults. When, however, we come to examine Luther’s character more narrowly, we at once perceive that other factors must be taken into consideration in his inward change, so that, in his case, it is not easy to decide how far his new ideas were produced under the pressure of his own sensuality. It was taken for granted that, owing to habitual moral faults, and through constant indulgence in the concupiscence of the flesh, he had been reduced to a state of utter inward degradation. Now, in point of fact, beyond what has been already quoted nothing can be found regarding his moral conduct previous to his change of view. No other circumstances are known concerning Luther than those already mentioned and those to be given later. It is true that history does not possess the all-seeing eye of Him who searches the heart and the reins; the sources containing information concerning the youth of Luther, before and after his profession, are also very inadequate; nevertheless, we must admit that the only arguments upon which the assertion of his great inward corruption could historically be based, namely, actual texts and facts capable of convincing anyone, are not forthcoming in the material at our command.[262]

If Luther did actually teach the fatal invincibility of concupiscence (of this we shall have more to say later), yet he might well have arrived at this view by some other way than that of constant falls and the abiding experience of his own weakness and sinfulness. It is at least certain that sad personal experience is not the only thing which gives rise to grave errors of judgment.

Nor does the manner in which Luther represents concupiscence prove his own inward corruption. He does not make it to consist merely in the concupiscence of the flesh, and when he says that it is impossible to conquer concupiscence he is not thinking merely of this. When he speaks of concupiscence, and of a “fomes peccati” in man, he usually means concupiscence in the wide theological sense, i.e. as the attraction to every transgression which flatters our imperfect and evil nature, in particular to selfishness, as the centre around which clusters all that is sinful—pride, hatred, sensuality, etc.

Luther certainly teaches, even at the outset, as we shall point out later, that the will of man, by Adam’s Fall, has lost in our ruined nature even the power to work anything that is good or pleasing to God, and therefore that it is impossible for man, in his own strength, to withstand sin and its lusts.

But he does not bring forward this doctrine under circumstances and in words which give us to understand that he was guided by the intention of showing any indulgence to concupiscence; on the contrary, he would like to encourage everyone to oppose concupiscence by means of grace and faith. Numerous texts might be quoted which clearly show this to have been the case.

In what sense then does he allow the irresistibility of concupiscence? We shall find the answer in what follows.

He frequently expresses the truth, taught by faith and experience alike, regarding the continuance of concupiscence in man, even in the most perfect, and he does so in terms so strong that he seems to make concupiscence invincible. We can also see that he has a lively sense of the burden of concupiscence, that he cherishes a certain gloomy distrust of God’s readiness to come to man’s assistance—a distrust connected with his temptations on predestination—and that he undervalues the helps which the Church offers against evil desires. Finally, he sees in the very existence of concupiscence a culpable offence against the Almighty, and declares that, without grace, man is an unhappy prisoner, who in consequence of original sin is in the fullest sense incapable of doing what is good.

In his Commentary on the Psalms (1512-15-16) he still, it is true, upholds the natural freedom of man as opposed to his passions. In the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (1515-16), and frequently in the sermons of that period, he indeed sacrifices this freedom, but even there he insists that the grace of God will in the end secure the victory to those who seek aid and pray humbly, and he also instances some of the means which, with the efficacious assistance of God, may help to victory in the religious life. To this later standpoint of the possibility of resistance with the assistance of grace he adhered to his end. Exhortations to struggle not only against actual sins, but also against the smouldering fire of concupiscence—which must be extinguished more and more in the righteous until at length death sets him free—occupy many pages of his writings. The jarring notes present in the above teaching do not seem to have troubled him at any time; he seeks to conceal them and to pass them over. Never once does he enter upon a real theological discussion of the most difficult point of all, the relation of grace to free will.

Luther also speaks of our freedom and our responsibility for our personal salvation in his Commentary on the Psalms: “My soul is in my own keeping; by the freedom of my will I can make it eternally happy or eternally unhappy by choosing or rejecting Thy law.” Therefore Psalm cxviii. 109 says, “My soul is always in my hands,” and although I am free to do either, yet I have not “forgotten Thy law.”[263] He defends the principle of the theologians, that God does not refuse His grace to him who does his best (“facienti quod est in se, Deus non denegat gratiam”).[264] He teaches also that it is possible to prepare for grace which is always at hand.[265]

“Whoever keeps the law,” he writes in the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, at a time when he had already denied the freedom of the will for good, “is in Christ, and grace is given him according as he has prepared himself for it to the best of his power.”[266] Without grace man is, it is true, unable to do anything that is good in God’s sight, but “the law of nature is known to everyone, and therefore no one is excusable” who does not follow it and fight against evil.[267] Grace, according to him, sets the enslaved will in the righteous free again to work for his salvation. “After he has received grace, he has been set free, at least to work for his eternal salvation.”[268] This remarkable passage together with its continuation will be considered later when we deal more fully with the Commentary on Romans. We may also draw attention to the fact, that in his Notes on Tauler’s sermons, written about the same time as the Commentary, quite against the supposed utter inability of the will for good, he acknowledges the natural inclination in man towards good—the so-called Syntheresis, or moral good conscience.[269]

In his lectures on Romans he insists that, “by means of works of penance and the cross,” concupiscence must be fought against without intermission, forced back and diminished; “the body of sin” must, according to the Apostle, be destroyed.[270] Luther must therefore certainly have regarded man as capable of resisting his evil passions, at any rate with assistance from above.

Of his later statements it will suffice to mention the following: “If I will not leave sin and become pious,” he says of the struggle against evil, “I may indeed strive to become the master, and God’s property, and to be free, but nothing will come of it.”[271] Or again: “As long as we live here, evil desires and passions remain in us which draw us to sin, against which we must strive and fight, as St. Peter says (1 Peter ii. 11 f.). We must therefore always exercise ourselves and pray always and fight against sin ... as often as you feel yourself tempted to impatience, pride, unchastity or other sins ... you must forthwith think how best to withstand these arrows, and beg the Lord Jesus that your sin may not gain the upper hand and overcome you, but that it may be conquered by His grace.”[272] “Do you wish to keep all the commandments,” he says later, “to be free from your evil desires and from sin, as the commandments require and demand, then see you believe in Christ.”[273]

Further, if we consider those passages in Luther’s earlier writings alleged as proofs of his belief in the irresistibility of concupiscence, we find that in every case they merely emphasise the inevitable continuance of concupiscence in man, without in any way implying the necessity of our acquiescing in the same, and without excluding grace. In the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 he says for instance, “Why do we hold concupiscence to be irresistible? Well, try and do something without the interference of concupiscence. Naturally you cannot. So then your nature is incapable of fulfilling the law.”[274] Elsewhere also Luther lays much stress upon the indestructibility and the impossibility of rooting out of man the smouldering fire of evil, the “fomes peccati,” though he is wrong in making this condition equivalent to a culpable non-fulfilling of the law by man; he is mistaken not only in his common statement that man’s evil inclination, even though involuntary, is sinful in God’s sight, that it is in fact original sin, and that it would carry man to damnation were God not to impute to him Christ’s righteousness; he also errs by unduly magnifying the power of concupiscence, as though the practice of virtue, prayer and the reception of the Sacraments did not weaken it much more than he is willing to admit.

In 1515 he declares that evil concupiscence or sin “cannot be removed from us by any counsel or work,” and that “we all recognise it to be quite invincible (“invincibilem esse concupiscentiam penitus”);[275] invincible, i.e. in the sense of ineradicable, for which reason, as he again repeats here, it must at least be rendered innocuous by humble prayer for God’s help. In spite of the strong expression “invincibilis,” and in spite of the comparison he makes elsewhere between the evil inclination and Cerberus or Antæus,[276] he does not go further here than in another assertion in the Commentary on the Psalms which has also been urged against him: “the passion of anger, pride, sensuality, when it is aroused, is strong, yea invincible (‘immo invincibilis’), as experience teaches,” i.e. it appears so to the person attacked by it. He had just remarked that in such a case we must hope in God and despair of ourselves. He describes in the strongest terms, in the Commentary on the Psalms, the strength of concupiscence in habitual sinners who are not accustomed to turn to God’s grace: “the sinner who is oppressed by vice, and feels the devil and his body of sin forcing him to evil, allows the inner voice to speak constantly against sin, and severely blames himself in his conscience ... reason and the moral sense, remnants left over from the ruin of original sin, awaken in him and cry without ceasing to the Lord, even though the will sins, forced thereto by sin.”[277] We repeat, that in his Commentary on the Psalms he does not yet actually deny natural freedom in the doing of what is good.

The view that man, without God’s grace, is entirely lacking in freedom with regard to his passions—a view which, it is true, permeates Luther’s Commentary on Romans—was not the starting-point of Luther’s theological development. It was the end of the first stage through which he had passed. This doctrine reached later on its culminating point in his book, “De servo arbitrio,” against Erasmus. Here, at the head of his proofs, he openly confesses himself a determinist, admitting that God has decreed beforehand all man’s actions; any such determinism is, however, wanting in his earlier life, nor is it to be found in his Commentary on Romans; Luther does not yet show himself to be led by determinist ideas. Even in his work against Erasmus there are no forcible grounds for attributing the origin of his new teaching to his inward corruption. Therein he merely denies the freedom of the will for good without grace, though he allows it to be free in indifferent matters, a somewhat inconsistent theory owing to the difficulty of determining exactly the limitations of these indifferent things.

Neither the Commentary on the Psalms nor that on Romans gives us the impression of being the work of an immoral man, a fact which should also carry some weight. An author who at the first assault had capitulated to his evil desires would hardly have been able to conceal his low moral standard; he would rather have been tempted to join the Epicureans or the Sceptics, or the unbelieving ranks of the Humanists. Of anything of the kind there is no trace in the books last mentioned.

Their characteristic is rather—there is no harm in mentioning it now—a certain false spiritualism, a mysticism, which, especially in the interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, frequently follows quite devious paths. In consequence of his unceasing opposition to self-righteousness, of his poor idea of God and of human strength, and of his false mystical train of thought, Luther came to dismiss human freedom and to set up the power of sin on the throne. Aristotle’s teaching regarding the natural righteousness which arises from good actions is particularly distasteful to Luther, and equally distasteful to the nominalistic critic is the doctrine of supernatural righteousness through infused sanctifying grace, which he prefers to replace by the imputation of the merits of Christ.