The Gospel for the 7th Sunday after Pentecost with the words: “Beware of false prophets” gives him an all too tempting opportunity for a brush with his adversaries, and, on July 6, he attacks them from the standpoint of his new ideas on righteousness. “Much fasting, and long prayers,” he cries, “study, preaching, watching, and poor clothing, these are the pious lambskins under which ravening wolves hide themselves.” In their case these are only “works done for show.” These Observantines, for all their great outward display of holiness, are “heretics and schismatics.” Thus does he storm, evidently applying his words to his brother monks of the Observantine party, who probably had been among the first to criticise him. The following remarks on rebellion and defamation make this application all the clearer.[184] “The true works by which we may recognise the prophets are done in the inner and hidden man. But these proud men are wanting above all in patience and the charity which is forgetful of self, but concerned for others.” “When they have to do works which are not to their liking they are slow, rebellious, obstinate, but they well know how to take away the name of others and to pass judgment on them.... There is no greater plague in the Church to-day than these men with the words: ‘Good works are necessary’ in their mouths; men who refuse to distinguish between what is good and evil because they are enemies of the Cross, i.e. of the good things of God.”[185]

Such a daring challenge on Luther’s part did not fail in its effect. Within as well as outside the Order united preparations were being made for a strong resistance, his foes working both openly and in secret.

Luther’s adversaries were again made the object of his public vituperation in two sermons preached on the same day a little later. This was on July 27, the 10th Sunday after Pentecost. In one sermon the passionate orator attempted to show the danger of the times; he describes how powerful the devil had become and how under the appearance of good works he was making certain persons “fine breakers” of the first Commandment. “And these venture,” he says, “to shoot arrows secretly against those who are right of heart.”[186] In the other sermon his opponents had to submit to being called—in allusion to the Sunday’s Gospel of the Pharisee and the Publican—real “Pharisees, who by reason of their assumed holiness and merits seek the praise of men,” whereas in reality, with their self-righteousness, they have merely erected an idol in their hearts.[187]

Even this was not enough however. The continuous complaints of those who thought differently from himself called Luther into the field again the very next Sunday (August 3).[188] They heard what they might have anticipated, as soon as the fiery preacher, whose appearance was doubtless greeted by his pupils and adherents with looks of joy, got to work on his thesis: To place our hope in anything but God, even in the merit of our good works, is to have false idols before God. Then the stream of words flowed apace against the “proud saints,” against the presumptuous assurance of salvation on the part of the servitors of works, against the fools who make the narrow way to heaven still narrower, against the A B C pupils, who know nothing outside their own works. “These are old stagers,” he cries, because, like certain horses who only go along one track, they know only the one path of their own works. As though he recollected his own short-lived zeal for the work of the Order, he adds: “At the commencement, when a man first enters on the path of the religious life he has to exercise himself in many good works, fasts, vigils, prayers, works of mercy, submission, obedience and other such-like.” But to remain permanently stuck fast in these, that is what makes a man a Pharisee. “The truly pious who are led by the Spirit,” he continues, in a vein of peculiar mysticism, “once initiated into these things, do not trouble much more about them. Rather they offer themselves to God, ready for any work to which He may call them, and are led through many sufferings and humiliations without knowing whither they are going.”[189]

“The man of God leaves himself entirely in God’s hands and does not attach himself to any works. His works are nameless at the commencement, though not at the end, because he does not act, but remains passive; he does not calculate with his own cleverness, or make projects, but allows himself to be led and does differently from what he had intended; thus he is calm and at rest in God. Whereas the self-righteous who abound in their own sense (‘sensuales iustitiarii’) are apt to despair of their own works—for they want to determine and name every word beforehand, and with them the name is the first thing and this they follow up with their works—the man of God on the contrary hurries forward in advance of every name.”

In the discourse which Luther wrote, probably in the autumn or winter months of 1515, for Georg Mascov, provost of Leitzau (see above, p. 65), and which was intended for a synodal meeting of the clergy, he says, in his most exaggerated fashion: “The whole world lies as it were under a deluge of false and filthy teaching.” The Word of God like a tiny flame is barely kept alive. Egoism, worldliness and vice are predominant. And the remedy? He will cry it aloud over the whole world: the only remedy is to preach “the word of truth” with much greater zeal. The greatest, “nay almost the only sin of the priests” is the neglect of the “word of truth” and it is much to be deplored, according to him, “that priests who fall into sins of the flesh make more account of them than of the neglect of the preaching of the word of truth.”[190]

The address deals further at great length with the holy regeneration of man in God. This is something which God works in us while we remain altogether passive: a man’s seeking, praying, knocking has nothing to do with it because mercy alone effects it. Man does nothing (“ipso nihil agente, petente, merente”); in this mystical regeneration by God, it is as with the natural generation of man: “he who is generated in both cases does not count, and can do nothing by his work or merits towards his begetting, but lies wholly in the will of the Father.”

As sons of God we must bear fruit—here the discourse becomes quite practical—and the purpose of this meeting is to demand it of the clergy. “We must not expose our Synod to the scorn of our enemies.” It is more important that chastity and every virtue should dwell in the priests than that statutes should be made with regard to readings, prayers, festivals, and ceremonies.

He considers that Aristotle, on whom in the Middle Ages both theologians and philosophers had set such store, had been grossly misunderstood by most of the scholastics; all the good there is in Aristotle, he says, he has stolen from others; whatever in him is right, others must understand and make use of better than he himself.[191]

He often passes judgment on the theology of the Middle Ages from the point of view of the narrow, one-sided school of Occam, and then, with his lively imagination, he grossly exaggerates the opposition between it and St. Thomas of Aquin and the more classic schoolmen. The whole herd of theologians, he says, has been led astray by Aristotle; nor have they understood him in the least; according to him, Thomas of Aquin—the Doctor whom the Church has so greatly honoured and placed at the head of all theologians—did not expound a single chapter of Aristotle aright; “all the Thomists together” have not understood one chapter. Aristotle has only led them all to lay too much stress upon the importance and merit of human effort and human works to the disadvantage of God’s grace. Here lay Aristotle’s chief crime discovered by Luther, thanks to his own new theology.[192]

In his lectures on the Psalms Luther already tells his hearers that the bold loquacity of theology was due to Aristotle;[193] he makes highly exaggerated remarks regarding the disputes between the Scotists and Occam and between Occam and Scotus.[194] Peter Lombard, no less than Scotus and St. Thomas, comes in for some harsh criticism. But Luther ever reverts to Aristotle. He wishes, so he writes to his friend Lang in February, 1516, to tear off “the Greek mask which this comedian has assumed to pass himself off in the Church as a philosopher; his shame should be laid bare to all.”[195]

In a letter to Lang—who was also inclined to look with favour on Tauler, the master of German mystic theology—Luther betrays how greatly he was attracted by this writer. In his sonorous, expansive language, he speaks of him as a teacher whose enlightenment was such, that, though utterly unknown in the theological schools, he contains more real theology than all the scholastic theologians of all the universities put together. He also repeatedly assured his hearers that Tauler’s book of sermons had “led him to the spirit.”[198]

At that time Luther showed great preference for the exhortations of the German mystics on self-abasement, apathy and abnegation of self. “Theologia Deutsch,” that little work of an unknown Frankfort priest of the fourteenth century, which he came across in a MS., so fascinated him that, adding to it a preface and his own name, “Martinus Luder,” he published it in 1516 at Wittenberg. It was the first occasion of his making use of the press; this first edition was, however, incomplete, owing to the state of the MS.; the work was finally reissued complete and under the title which Luther himself had selected, viz. “A German Theologia,” in 1518. In the sub-title of the first edition he had called it a “noble spiritual booklet,” and in the preface had praised it, saying that it did not float like foam on the top of the water, but that it had been brought up from the bottom of the Jordan by a true Israelite.[199] In the first edition he had erroneously attributed the booklet to Tauler; in the second he says it is equal in merit to Tauler’s own writings. Yet, to tell the truth, it is far from reaching Tauler’s high standard of thought. Luther, however, assures us that, next to the Bible and St. Augustine, he can mention no book from which he has learned more of the nature of God, Christ, man and all other things, than from this work. When he forwarded a printed copy of the first edition to Spalatin (December 14, 1516), he wrote, that Tauler offered a solid theology which was quite similar to the old; that he was acquainted with no theology more wholesome and evangelical. Spalatin should saturate himself with Tauler’s sermons; “taste and see how sweet the Lord is, after you have first tasted and seen how bitter is everything that is ourselves.”[200]

In addition to the authors mentioned, the mysticism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite and of Gerard Groot, the founder of the Community of the Brethren of the Common Life, were known to him. That he was, or had been, fond of reading the writings of St. Bernard, we may guess from his many—often misunderstood—quotations from the same.

Luther was also well able, whilst under the influence of that inwardness which he loved so much in the mystics, to make his own their truly devotional and often moving language.

In a friendly letter he comforts, as follows, an Augustinian at Erfurt, Georg Leiffer, regarding his spiritual troubles: “The Cross of Christ is distributed throughout the whole world and each one gets a small piece of it. Do not throw yours away, but lay it, like a sacred relic, in a golden shrine, i.e. in a heart filled with gentle charity. For even the wrongs which we suffer from men, persecutions, passion and hatred, which are caused us either by the wicked or by those who mean well, are priceless relics, which have not indeed, like the wood of the cross, been hallowed by contact with our Lord’s body, but which have been blessed by His most loving heart, encompassed by His friendly, Divine Will, kissed and sanctified. The curse becomes a blessing, insult becomes righteousness, suffering becomes an aureole, and the cross a joy. Farewell, sweet father and brother, and pray for me.”

His study of St. Augustine had put him in a position to recognise, on internal grounds, that a work, “On true and false penance,” generally attributed to this African Father, was not really his. He tells his friend that his opinion of the book had “given great offence to all”; though the insipid contents of the same were so far removed from the spirit of Augustine, yet it was esteemed because it had been quoted and employed by Gratian and Peter Lombard as one of Augustine’s works. That he had been aware of this and nevertheless had stood up for the truth, that was his crime, which had aroused the enmity particularly of Dr. Carlstadt; not, however, that he cared very much; both Lombard and Gratian had done much harm to consciences by means of this stupid book.

His opinion regarding the spuriousness of the work was in the end generally accepted, even, for instance, by Bellarmine; Trithemius, moreover, had been of the same opinion before Luther’s time; in his attacks on its contents, however, Luther, led astray by his false ideas of penance, exceeded all bounds, and thus vexed, beyond measure, his colleagues who at that time still held the opposite view.

According to this letter, he had also challenged all the critics of his new ideas in a disputation held by one of his pupils under his direction. “They barked and screeched at me on account of my lectures, but their mouths were to be stopped and the opinions of others heard.” It was a question of defending his erroneous doctrine, regarding the absolute helplessness of nature, which he had meantime formulated, and to which we shall return immediately. In consequence, he says, all the “Gabrielists” (i.e. followers of the scholastic Gabriel Biel) here, as well as in the Faculty at Erfurt, were nonplussed. But I know my Gabriel quite as well as his own wonderful, wonderstruck worshippers; “he writes well, but as soon as he touches on grace, charity, hope, and faith, then, like Scotus his leader, he treads in the footprints of Pelagius.” Luther was quite free to dissent from the view, even of so good a professor as Biel, in this question of grace and virtue, but, already at that time, he had denounced as Pelagian several doctrines of the Church. Among those who were angered was the theologian Nicholas von Amsdorf, who took his licentiate at the same time as Luther, and became later on his close friend. Amsdorf secretly sent one of Luther’s theses, of which he disapproved, to Erfurt, but afterwards allowed himself to be pacified.

He appealed to Spalatin to draw the attention of Erasmus to his misapprehension of righteousness as it appears in the Epistle to the Romans; he says that Erasmus overrates the virtues of heathen heroes, whereas even the most blameless of men, even Fabricius and Regulus, were miles away from righteousness; outside of faith in Christ there is, according to him, no righteousness whatever; Aristotle, whom everybody follows, likewise knew nothing of this righteousness; but Paul and Augustine teach it; what Paul calls self-righteousness is not merely, as Erasmus says, a righteousness founded on the observances of the Mosaic Law, but any righteousness whatever which springs out of works, or out of the observance of any law; Paul also teaches original sin in the fifth chapter of the Epistle to the Romans, a fact which Erasmus wrongly denies. With regard to Augustine, he could unfold to him (Erasmus) St. Paul’s meaning better than he thinks, but he should diligently read the writings against the Pelagians, above all the De Spiritu et littera. Augustine there takes a firm stand on the foundation of the earlier Fathers (Luther’s quotations from his authorities show how much the study had fascinated him). But after Augustine’s day, dead literalism became the general rule. Lyra’s Bible Commentary, for instance, is full of it; the right interpretation of Holy Scripture is also wanting in Faber Stapulensis, notwithstanding his many excellencies. Hence, he writes, we must fall back on Augustine, on Augustine rather than on Jerome to whom Erasmus gives the preference in Bible matters, for Jerome keeps too much to the historical side; he recommends Augustine not merely because he is an Augustinian monk, for formerly he himself did not think him worthy of consideration until he “fell in” (incidissem) with his books.[206]

Augustine’s “On the Spirit and the Letter,” a work dedicated to Marcellinus, and dating from the end of 412, with which Luther had become acquainted in 1515, had a lasting influence on him. In this book the great Doctor of the Church strikes at the very root of Pelagianism and shows the necessity, for the accomplishment of supernatural good works (“facere et perficere bonum”), of inward grace which he calls “spiritus” in contradistinction to outward grace which he terms “littera.” Luther, however, referred this necessity more and more to everything good, even to what is purely natural, hence his loud accusations soon after against the theology of the Church as savouring of Pelagianism.

Humanism at that time stood for a Pelagian view of life and therefore could not be altogether sympathetic to Luther. Its influence on him, especially in his youth, cannot, however, be altogether disregarded; he had been brought into too close contact with it in his student days and also during his theological course at Erfurt, and his mind was too lively and too open to the currents of the time for him not to have felt something of its effects. The very extravagance of his criticism of things theological may, in part, be traced back to the example of the Humanists.

“God has willed to save us,” this he represents as the sum total of the Epistle, “not by our own but by extraneous righteousness and wisdom, not by such as is in us or produced by our inner self, but by that which comes to us from elsewhere.” “We must rest altogether on an extraneous and foreign righteousness,” he repeats, “and therefore destroy our own, i.e. our homely righteousness” (“non per domesticam sed per extraneam iustitiam,” etc.).[209] So fascinated is he by the terrifying picture of self-righteousness and holiness by works, that he is more than inclined to weaken the inclination for good works, though he indeed declares them necessary: according to him they produce in man a self-consciousness which prevents him regarding himself as unrighteous and as needing the justification of Christ. The truly righteous, such are his actual words, always believe “that they are sinners ... they sigh until they are completely cured of concupiscence, a release which takes place at death.” Everyone must be distrustful even of his good intentions, he tells his adversaries, i.e. “those who trust in themselves, who, thinking they are in possession of God’s grace, cease to prove themselves, and sink daily into greater lukewarmness.” He asks ironically whether “they acted from the pure love of God,” for now, erroneously, he will allow only the purest love of God as a motive.[210] He writes: “he who thinks, that the greater his works, the more sure he is of salvation shows himself to be an unbeliever, a proud man and a contemner of the word. It does not depend at all on the multitude of works [in the right sense this was admitted by the old theologians]; it is nothing but temptation to pay any attention to this.” It is mere “wisdom of the flesh,” he thinks, for anyone to pay attention to the “difference of works” rather than to the word, particularly the inward word and its impulses.[211]

Here in his mystical language he states the following paradoxical thesis: “the wisdom of the spiritually minded knows neither good nor evil (“prudentia spiritualium neque bonum neque malum scit”); it keeps its eyes fixed always on the word, not on the work.”[212] He concludes: “let us only close our eyes, listen in simplicity to the word, and do what it commands whether it be foolish or evil or great or small” (“sive stultum sive malum, sive magnum sive parvum præcipiat, hoc faciamus”).[213] As righteousness does not proceed from works we must so much the more cling to imputation. “Our works are nothing, we find in ourselves nothing but thoughts which accuse us ... where shall we find defenders? Nowhere but in Christ ... the heart, it is true, reproves a man for his evil works, it accuses him and witnesses against him. But he who believes in Christ turns at once [from himself] to Christ and says: He has done enough, He is righteous, He is my defence, He died for me, He has made His righteousness mine and my sin His. But if He has made my sin His, then it is no longer mine and I am free. If He has made His righteousness mine, then I am righteous through the same righteousness as He.”[214]

Here then the sinner, as Luther teaches in his letter to Spenlein (see above, p. 88 ff.), simply casts himself upon Christ and hides himself just as he is “under the wings of the hen” (p. 80), comforting himself with the doctrine of imputation. The old Church, on the contrary, not only pointed to the merits of Christ (see above, pp. 10, 18) but also to the exhortations of St. Paul where he calls for zealous, active co-operation with the Divine grace, for inward conversion in the spirit, for works of penance and for purification from sin by contrition in order that our reconciliation with God and real pardon may become possible. Hence, while the Catholic doctrine conceives of justification as an interior, organic process, Luther is beginning to take it as something exterior and mechanical, as a process which results from the pushing forward of a foreign righteousness, as if it were a curtain. He turns away from the Catholic doctrine according to which a man justified by a living and active faith is really incorporated in Christ as the shoot is grafted into the olive tree, or the branch on the vine, i.e. to a new life, to an interior ennobling through sanctifying grace and the infused supernatural virtues of faith, hope and charity.

Nevertheless Luther himself was affrighted at the theory of faith alone, and imputation. He feared lest he should be reproached with setting good works aside with his doctrine of imputed merit. He therefore explains in self-defence that he did not desire a bare faith; “the hypocrites and the lawyers” thought they would be saved by such a faith, but according to Paul’s words a faith was requisite by which we “approach Christ” (“per quem habemus accessum per fidem,” Rom. v. 2). Those are therefore in error who go forward in Christ with over-great certainty, but not by faith; as though they would be saved by Christ, for not doing anything themselves and giving no sign of faith. These possess too much faith, or, better still, none at all. Both must exist: “by faith” and “by Christ”; we must do and suffer gladly all that we can in the faith of Christ, and yet account ourselves in all things unprofitable servants, and only through Christ alone think ourselves able to go to God. For the object of works of faith is to make us worthy of Christ and of the refuge and protection of His righteousness.”[215] With this is connected Luther’s insistence on the necessity of invoking God’s grace in order that we may be able to fight against our passions and to bring forth good works, and in order that the passions, which in themselves are sin, may not be imputed by God.[216] Thus can “the body of sin be destroyed” and the “old man overcome.”[217] Luther admits, though with hesitation and in contradiction with himself, works which prepare us for justification.[218]