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On looking back in later years upon the course of his spiritual progress in the monastery, Luther was unable to distinguish clearly between the various stages of his development. The incident in the tower, which had left the strongest impression on his memory, drew the first stage more and more into the foreground in his imagination, so that in his accounts he assigns to it an undue prominence to the disadvantage of the two others. Hence the want of clearness noticeable in his statements with regard to the same.

We find not merely obscurity, but actual error, particularly in his account of the traditional interpretation and that which he had himself begun to advocate of the Iustitia Dei (Rom. i. 17). Luther is, in this matter, the originator of the great legend still current even in our own day, which represents him as a Columbus discovering therein the central truth set forth by Paul; no one had been able to find the key to the passage before his glance penetrated to the truth. All the learned men of earlier times had said that iustitia there meant the avenging Justice of an angry God. As a matter of fact, in Luther’s lectures on Genesis in 1540-41,[1031] it is asserted that all the doctors of the Church, with the exception of Augustine, had misunderstood the verses Romans i. 16 f.; Luther’s Preface to his Latin works to some extent presupposes the same, for he says that he had, “according to the custom and use of all doctors” (“usu et consuetudine omnium doctorum doctus”), understood the passage as meaning that justice “by which God is Just and punishes sin,” and only Augustine, with whom he had made common cause, had found the right interpretation (“iustitiam Dei interpretatur, qua nos Deus induit”), although even the latter did not teach imputation clearly (see above, p. 392).[1032]

“As a matter of fact, however, the exact opposite is the case: all the mediæval doctors whom he studied as a monk, Peter Lombard, Lyra and Paul of Burgos, gave, as can be proved, the same interpretation as Augustine. Thus Luther was completely at sea as to the handling of this, to him most important, passage.”[1033] Luther in his Preface says that contrary to all expectation (“praeter spem”) he had, after his own discovery, found in St. Augustine’s “De spiritu et littera” an interpretation which agreed with his own, and that this caused him fresh joy, although Augustine expresses himself imperfectly with regard to the same. Denifle, on the other hand, proves by the testimony of more than sixty interpreters of antiquity, that all are unanimous in taking the iustitia Dei in St. Paul in the same sense as St. Augustine, viz. as the Justice by which God renders men just.[1034] The demonstration is conducted with “commendable accuracy and fulness.”[1035]

Luther himself, strange to say, at an earlier date and previous to the Tower incident, had repeatedly employed the correct interpretation. We can only suppose that it then made no impression on him, at any rate, no such impression as the incident on the Tower. He makes use of it with special reference to its older representatives, in the marginal notes to the Sentences of Peter Lombard, 1509-10,[1036] then in the Commentary on the Psalms, and finally even in the Commentary on Romans, where he twice quotes Augustine and even the “De spiritu et littera.”

It is true that on these occasions he passes over the passage in the Epistle without displaying any particular interest, i.e. without laying on it the stress he does at a later date. Another difference is also noticeable. Luther has introduced since 1518 an entirely new idea, which he had not before, into his interpretation of the iustitia Dei. In it he finds not only that the justice which comes from God justifies us, but that it is bestowed upon us solely and directly by means of a trusting faith, and that thus a “life” in grace is opened up to man of which he must be infallibly certain in his innermost consciousness.

In his accounts, says Loofs, “we have documentary proof of impaired memory.” “It is plain that Luther’s memory, in the course of years, and owing to his ‘odium papæ,’ had, as we can well understand, become inaccurate with regard to pre-Reformation conditions.”[1037] The “odium papæ” would certainly seem to have been concerned in his placing in the forefront his supposed re-discovery of an exegesis which Popery had forgotten.

Merely in order to throw light on the sequel of the great legend in our own times, we may here remark that it is difficult to understand the displeasure expressed by a modern Church historian and admirer of Luther, when some Protestants dared to agree with Denifle’s lengthy demonstration of the real exegetical history of Romans i. 17. An impartial theologian, amongst others, expressed himself as follows in a periodical: “Denifle has proved beyond a doubt that Luther was wrong when he asserted that the earlier doctors had almost without exception taken the iustitia Dei, Rom. i. 17, in the sense of the Divine anger.”[1038] These words roused the admirer we have in mind to reply immediately as follows in the “Theologisches Literaturblatt” of Leipzig: “Does then the writer not perceive what the result must be for Luther’s character?” Of two things, one, he says, either Luther lied, or he acted most unscrupulously and never consulted the earlier doctors.[1039]

The new discovery not only filled Luther with blind courage and defiant presumption in the defence of his previous teaching, but also lent a giant strength to his action as a reformer of ecclesiastical conditions against Rome’s abuses. He now begins to act as a spokesman of the nation and to constitute himself the leader of the already existing anti-Roman movement in Germany.

He now persuades himself more strongly than ever that he is in possession of a truth which is to be suppressed by Italian trickery and imperiousness, if not by “poison and the dagger,” as was being planned in Italy. Rome had ravaged Scripture and the Church, her name should be Babylon: this (Apocalyptic) Beast, this Antichrist, must be exposed before the world, otherwise he might as well surrender his theology and allow it to perish; “I do not care if even my friends say I have lost my reason; it must be so; I have awaited this hour when they should be offended in me, as the disciples and friends of Christ were in Christ (Matt. xxvi. 31; Mark xiv. 27); truth must stand by its divine strength, not by mine or yours or that of any man.”[1040]

“It is only we Germans on whom the Empire descended, who have strengthened the power of the Popes so far as we could. For our punishment we have had to endure them as masters in cursing and abuse, and now as robbers also by means of pallium-fees and taxes on the bishoprics.”[1041]

In the Preface to the Commentary on Galatians he sent forth a call to the Germans and their Princes, which anticipates his later pamphlet “To the Nobility of the German Nation,” in the same way as the ideas contained in his work on the Twofold Justice serve as a prelude to the booklet “On the Freedom of a Christian Man.” “Those godless windbags, Prierias, Cajetan and their fellows, abuse us as German clowns, simpletons, beasts, barbarians, and mock at the incredible patience with which we allow ourselves to be deceived and robbed. All praise therefore to the German Princes for recently [1518], at Augsburg, refusing the tenths, twentieths and fiftieths to the Roman Curia, notwithstanding that they knew the cursed Roman Council [5th of the Lateran] had sanctioned these taxes. They recognised that the Pope and the Council had erred ... that the legates of the Curia are only after gold and more gold. The example of these lay theologians is especially worthy of imitation.... It is a proof of greater piety when the Princes and other folk of any degree oppose the Curia than if they were to take up arms against the Turk.”[1042]

As we shall see, it was not Ulrich von Hutten who first roused Luther to such language against Rome, and to the stirring up of a false patriotism. Hutten’s letters to him, and those of the other Humanists, are of later date, as also the congratulations and exhortations of the Humanist Crotus Rubeanus. It is a legend to attribute the raising of the standard of the Reformation principally to the Humanists and revolutionary knights. The fact that its origin may be traced back to 1521 does not make it one whit more credible historically. The air, in any case, was full of the anti-Roman spirit of revolt breathed by the Humanists and knights. The Wittenberg Monk had become acquainted with this spirit and found it sympathetic. How well it suited his purpose will be shown in the next chapter.

The subversive doctrines which he had now at length fully developed in the quiet of his monastery held the first place among the factors which drove him onwards; in so far as these doctrines were in very truth his own production, born of his own heart and brain amid incredible anxieties and struggles, we may, nay must, say that it was a new and independent task which he undertook, and that his was the labour and his the results. What Luther with his subversive theology propounded from that time forward, what he, with his chief doctrine of justification by faith and the appropriation of salvation, began to set in the place of the old teaching, was “in no way the necessary product of the various factors which had assisted in his education, but rather something new, original and never before known, only to be accounted for by Luther’s own extraordinary genius.”[1043] In this sense the entire lack of originality with which he has frequently been reproached must also be relegated to the domain of legend. In attacking him to-day, the tactics which commended themselves to the older theologians, who knew little of his history, or at any rate of the course of his interior development, should no longer be resorted to. Their plan was to range all his doctrines under some one or other of the older heresies—even though only the germ of his errors was to be found in former ages—and then sapiently to declare he had merely gone about collecting his errors from the various olden heretics. It is quite a different matter that like errors are so frequently met with in history even in most unexpected quarters; it is due to their many-sidedness and to their windings and aberrations. The truth which is vouched for by the Church pursues its own straight, undeviating path, from the earliest disciples of Christ down to our own times, and in its quiet, immutable splendour is infinitely more original than any error, however new and modern it may claim to be.

END OF VOL. I.