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In his Commentary on Romans Luther enters upon the domain of theological and philosophical discussion regarding the questions of natural and supernatural morality, the state of grace and the infused habit, sometimes with subtilty, sometimes with coarse invective, but owing to the limits of the present work we are unable to follow him except quite cursorily.

The manner in which he flings his “curses” at the doctrines of Scholasticism is distinctive of him; he says they are entirely compounded of pride and ignorance with regard to sin, to God and the law;[516] “cursed be the word ‘formatum charitate,’ and also the distinction between works according to the substance of the deed and the intention of the Lawgiver.”[517] There is perhaps no previous instance of a learned, exegetical treatise intended for academic consumption being thus spiced with curses.

Certain of Luther’s remarks on his practical experience call for consideration. Such is the following: “Everywhere in the Church great relapses after confession are now noticeable. People are confident that they are justified instead of first awaiting justification, and therefore the devil has an easy task with such false assurance of safety, and overthrows men. All this is due to making righteousness consist in works. But whoever thinks like a Christian can find this out for himself.”[518]

He gives the following exhortation with great emphasis and almost as though he had made an astounding discovery: “Whoever goes to confession, let him not believe that he gets rid of his burden and can then live in peace.”[519] His new doctrine of sin, which he discloses in the same passage, lies at the bottom of this; the baptised and the absolved must on no account forthwith consider themselves free from sin, on the contrary “they must not fancy themselves sure of the righteousness they have obtained and allow their hands to drop listlessly as though they were not conscious of any sin, for they have yet to fight against it and exterminate it with sighs and tears, with sadness and effort.”[520]

“Sin, therefore, still remains in the spiritual man for his exercise in the life of grace, for the humbling of his pride, for the driving back of his presumption; whoever does not exert himself zealously in the struggle against it, is in danger of being condemned even though he cease to sin any more (‘sine dubio habet, unde damnetur’). We must carry on a war with our desires, for they are culpable (‘culpa’), they are really sins and render us worthy of damnation; only the mercy of God does not impute them to us (‘imputare’) when we fight manfully against them, calling upon God’s grace.”[521]

There are few passages in the Commentary where his false conception of the entire corruption of human nature by original sin and concupiscence comes out so plainly as in the words just quoted. We see here too how this conception leads him to the denial of all liberty for doing what is good, and to the idea of imputation.

We can well understand that he needed St. Augustine to assist him to cover all this. And yet, as though to emphasise his own devious course, he quotes, among other passages, one in which Augustine confutes the view of any sin being present in man simply by reason of concupiscence.

“If we do not consent to concupiscence,” Augustine says, “it is no sin in those who are regenerate, so that, even if the ‘Non concupisces’ is infringed, yet the injunction of Jesus Sirach (xviii. 30) ‘Go not after thy lusts’ is observed. It is merely a manner of speaking to call concupiscence sin (“modo quodam loquendi”), because it sprang from sin, and, when it is victorious, causes sin.”[522] To this statement of the Father of the Church, which is so antagonistic to his own ideas, Luther can only add: that, certainly, concupiscence is in this way merely the cause and effect of sin, but not formally sinful (“causaliter et effectualiter, non formaliter”); Augustine himself had taught in another passage,[523] that owing to the mere existence of concupiscence, we are able to do what is good only in an imperfect way, not well and perfectly (“facere, non perficere”; cp. Rom vii. 18); that we ought, however, to strive to act well and perfectly “if we wish to attain to the perfection of righteousness” (“perficere bonum, est non concupiscere”).[524]

St. Augustine’s words, which are much to the point if taken in the right sense, only encouraged Luther in his opposition to the Scholastics; he points out to them that Augustine’s manner is not theirs, and that at least he supports his statements by Holy Scripture when speaking of the desires which persist without the consent of the will; they on the other hand come along without Bible proofs and thus with less authority; those old Doctors quieted consciences with the voice of the Apostle, but these new ones do not do so at all, rather they force the Divine teaching into the bed of their own abstractions; for instance, they derive from Aristotle their theory as to how virtues and vices dwell in the soul, viz. as the form exists in the subject; all comprehension of the difference between flesh and spirit is thus made impossible.

The question which here forces itself upon Luther, viz. how virtue and vice exist in the soul, is of fundamental importance for his view of ethics, and, as it frequently occurs in the Commentary, it must not be passed over.

When he says that virtues and vices do not adhere to the soul, he means the same as what he elsewhere expresses more clearly, viz. that “it depends merely on the gracious will of God whether a thing is good or bad.”[525]

“Nothing is good of its own nature, nothing is bad of its own nature; the will of God makes it good or bad.”[526]

This is the merest Nominalism, akin to Occam’s paradox that “hatred of God, theft and adultery might be not merely not wicked, but even meritorious were the will of God to command them.”

From such ideas of Occam Luther advanced to the following: “The will of God decides whether I am pleasing to Him or not.”[527]

This explains the proposition which frequently appears, in the Commentary on Romans and elsewhere, that man is at the same time righteous and a sinner, that the righteous man has the left foot still in sin and the right in grace.[528]

In the Commentary he attacks self-complacency in the performance of good works with the cry: “Good works are not something that can please because they are good or meritorious, but because they have been chosen by God from eternity as pleasing to Himself,” words which presuppose that only the imputation matters. “Therefore,” he continues, “works do not render us good, but our goodness, or rather the goodness of God, makes us good and our works good; for in themselves they would not be good, and they are or are not good in so far as God accounts them, or does not account them good (‘quantum ille reputat vel non reputat’). Our own accounting or not accounting does not matter in the least. Whoever keeps this before him is always filled with fear, and waits with apprehension to see how God’s sentence will fall out. This puts an end to all that puffing up of self and quarrelling, so beloved of the proud ‘iustitiarii,’ who are so sure of their good works.”

“Even the very definition of virtue which Aristotle gives,” he concludes, “is all wrong, as though, forsooth, virtue made us perfect and its work rendered us worthy of praise. The truth is simply that it makes us praiseworthy in our own eyes and commends our works to us; but this is abominable in God’s sight, while the contrary is pleasing to Him.”[529]

As a matter of fact, Scholasticism, basing its teaching on Aristotle, considered virtue and vice as something real and objective, as qualities of the soul which adhere to it inwardly and “inform” it, i.e. impart to it a spiritual form and become part of it in the same way as material things have their special qualities, for instance, their natural colour without which they do not exist. These, as a matter of fact, were merely learned ways of expressing the fundamental truth naturally perceived by all, viz. that evil deeds and vices render a man evil, and good deeds and virtues render him good; no sane mind could conceive of a theory of imputation by which good is made evil or evil good.

Luther was naturally obliged by his new theology of imputation to declare war on the older theological view of the existence of virtue and vice in the soul.[530] It was in so doing that, in his excitement, he uttered the curses above referred to (p. 209). It was no mere question of words, but of the very foundation of his new theology, a fact which makes his excitement comprehensible.

As a matter of fact, by his application of the theory of imputation he was heading for a “transformation of all values” and drifting towards the admission of a “future life of good and evil” long before modern philosophy had confidently opened up a similar perspective.