A man, who, owing to his wife’s illness was prevented from matrimonial intercourse, wished, on the strength of Carlstadt’s advice, to take a second wife. Luther thereupon wrote to Chancellor Brück, on Jan. 27, 1524, telling him the Prince should reply as follows: “The husband must be sure and convinced in his own conscience by means of the Word of God that it is lawful in his case. Therefore let him seek out such men as may convince him by the Word of God, whether Carlstadt [who was then in disgrace at Court], or some other, matters not at all to the Prince. For if the fellow is not sure of his case, then the permission of the Prince will not make him so; nor is it for the Prince to decide on this point, for it is the priests’ business to expound the Word of God, and, as Zacharias says, from their lips the Law of the Lord must be learned. I, for my part, admit I can raise no objection if a man wishes to take several wives since Holy Scripture does not forbid this; but I should not like to see this example introduced amongst Christians.... It does not beseem Christians to seize greedily and for their own advantage on everything to which their freedom gives them a right.... No Christian surely is so God-forsaken as not to be able to practise continence when his partner, owing to the Divine dispensation, proves unfit for matrimony. Still, we may well let things take their course.”[258]
On the occasion of his own marriage with Bora we may remember how he had declared with that defiance of which he was a past master, that he would take the step the better to withstand the devil and all his foes. (Vol. ii., p. 175 ff.)
A curious echo of the way in which he could set conscience at defiance is to be met with in his instructions to his assistant Justus Jonas, who, as soon as his first wife was dead, cast about for a second. Luther at first was aghast, owing to Biblical scruples, at the scandal which second marriages on the part of the regents of the Church would give and entreated him at least to wait a while. When he found it impossible to dissuade Jonas, he warned him of the “malicious gossip of our foes,” “who are ever eager to make capital out of our example”; nevertheless, he goes on to say that he had nothing else to urge against another union, so long as Jonas “felt within himself that spirit of defiance which would enable him, after the step, to ignore all the outcry and the hate of all the devils and of men, and not to attempt, nay, to scorn any effort to stop the mouths of men, or to crave their favour.”[259]
The “spirit of defiance” which he here requires as a condition for the step becomes elsewhere a sort of mystical inspiration which may justify an action of doubtful morality.
Granted the presence of this inspiration he regards as permissible what otherwise would not be so. In a note sent to the Elector of Saxony at the time of the Diet of Augsburg regarding the question whether it was allowed to offer armed resistance to the Emperor, we find this idea expressed in remarkable words. Till then Luther had looked upon resistance as forbidden. The predicament of his cause, now endangered by the warlike threats of the Emperor, led him to think of resistance. He writes: If the Elector wishes to take up arms “he must do so under the influence of a singular spirit and faith (‘vocante aliquo singulari spiritu et fide’). Otherwise he must yield to superior force and suffer death together with the other Christians of his faith.”[260] It is plain that there would have been but little difficulty in finding the peculiar mystical inspiration required; no less plain is it, that, once this back door had been opened “inspiration” would soon usurp the place of conscience and justify steps, that, in themselves, were of a questionable character.
The new method of dealing with conscience is more closely connected with Luther’s new method of inducing faith than might at first sight appear.
The individualism he proclaimed in matters of faith embodied the principle, that “each one must, in his own way, lay hold on religious experience and thus attain religious conviction.”[261] Luther often says, in his idealistic way, that only thus is it possible to arrive at the supreme goal, viz. to feel one’s faith within as a kind of inspiration; our aim must ever be to feel it “surely and immutably” in our conscience and in all the powers of our soul.[262] Everything must depend on this experience, the more so as to him faith means something very different from what it means to Catholics; it is, he says, “no taking it all for true”; “for that would not be Christian faith but more an opinion than faith”; on the contrary, each one must believe that “he is one of those on whom such grace and mercy is bestowed.”[263] Now, such a faith, no matter how profound and immutable the feeling be, cannot be reached except at the cost of a certain violence to conscience; such coercion is, in fact, essential owing to the nature of this faith in personal salvation.
What, according to Luther, is the general character of faith? Fear and struggles, so he teaches, are not merely its usual accompaniments, but are also the “sure sign that the Word has touched and moved you, that it exercises, urges and compels you”; nay, Confession and Communion are really meant only for such troubled ones, “otherwise there would be no need of them”—i.e. they would not be necessary unless there existed despair of conscience and anxiety concerning faith. It was a mistaken practice, he continues, for many to refrain from receiving the Sacrament, “preferring to wait until they feel the faith within their heart”; in this way all desire to receive is extinguished; people should rather approach even when they feel not at all their faith; then “you will feel more and more attracted towards it”[264]—though this again, according to Luther, is by no means quite certain.
The “inward experience of faith” too often becomes simply the dictate of one’s whim. But a whim and order to oneself to think this or that does not constitute faith as the word is used in revelation, nor does a command imposed on the inward sense of right and wrong amount to a pronouncement of conscience.
Though Luther often held up himself and his temptations regarding faith, as an example which might comfort waverers, Protestants have nevertheless praised him for the supposed firmness of his faith and for his joy of conscience. But was not his “defiant faith” really identical with that imposition he was wont to practise on his conscience and to dignify by the name of inspiration?
Yet, in spite of all, he never found a secure foundation. “I know what it costs me, for I have daily to struggle with myself,” he told his friends in 1538.[265] “I was scarcely able to bring myself to believe,” he said in a sermon of the same year, “that the doctrine of the Pope and the Fathers was all wrong.”[266] His faith was as insecurely fixed, so he quaintly bewailed on another occasion, “as the fur trimming on his sleeve.”[267] “Who believes such things?” he asks, wildly implicating all people in general, at the conclusion of a note jotted down in a Bible and alluding to the hope of life everlasting.[268] In 1529 he repeatedly describes to his friends how Satan tempts him (“Satanas fatigat”) with lack of faith and despair, how he was sunk in unspeakable “bitterness of soul,” and, how, for this reason as he once says, he was scarce able “with a trembling hand” to write to them.[269]
Calvin, too, was aware of the frequent terrors Luther endured. When Pighius, the Catholic writer, alleged Luther’s struggles of conscience and temptations concerning the faith as disproving his authority, Calvin took good care not to deny them. He boldly replied that this only redounded to Luther’s honour since it was the experience of all devout people, and particularly of the most famous divines.[270]
Was it possible, according to Luther, to be conscientiously opposed to his teaching on faith and morals? At least in theory, he does go so far in certain statements as to recognise the possibility of such conscientious scruples. In these utterances he would even appear to surrender the whole weight and authority of his theological and ethical discoveries, fundamental though they were to his innovations. “I have served the Church zealously with what God has given me and what I owe to Him. Whoever does not care for it, let him read or listen to others. It matters but little should they feel no need of me.”[271] With regard to public worship, it is left “to each one to make up his conscience as to how he shall use his freedom.” “I am not your preacher,” so he wrote to the “Strasburg Christians,” who were inclined to distrust his exclusiveness; “no one is bound to believe me; let each man look to himself”;[272] all are to be referred “from Luther,” “to Christ.”[273]
Such statements, however, cannot stand against his constant insistence on his Divine mission; they are rather of psychological interest as showing how suddenly he passes from one idea to another. Moreover, his statement last mentioned, often instanced by Protestants as testifying to his breadth of mind, is nullified almost on the same page by the solemn assurance, that, his “Gospel is the true Gospel” and that everything that contradicts it is “heresy,” for, indeed, as had been foretold by the Apostle Paul (1 Cor. xi. 19), “heresies” must needs arise.[274]
And, in point of fact, those teachers who felt themselves bound in conscience to differ from him and go their own way—for instance, the “Sacramentarians” in their interpretation of the words of consecration—were made to smart. Of this the example of Schwenckfeld was a new and striking proof.
The contradiction presented on the one hand by Luther’s disposition to grant the most absolute freedom of conscience, and on the other by his rigid exclusiveness, is aptly described by Friedrich Paulsen: “In the region of morals Luther leaves the decision to the individual conscience as instructed by the Word of God. To rely on human authority in questions of morals appeared to him not much better than blasphemy.... True enough, however, this very Luther, at a later date, attacked those whose conscience found in God’s Word doctrines at all different from those taught at Wittenberg.”[275]
Hence, neither to the heretics in his own camp nor to the adherents of the olden faith would he allow the right of private judgment, so greatly extolled both by himself and his followers. Nothing had been dearer to the people of mediæval times, who for all their love of freedom were faithful children of the Church, than regard and esteem for the rights of personality in its own domain. Personality, denoting man’s unfettered and reasonable nature stamped with its own peculiar individuality, is assuredly something noble. The Catholic Church, far from setting limits to the development of personality, promoted both its real freedom and the growth of individuality in ways suited to man’s nature and his supernatural vocation. Even the monastic life, so odious to Luther, was anything but “hostile to the ideal of personality.” An impartial observer, prepared to disregard fortuitous abuses, could have seen even then, that the religious life strives after the fairest fruits of ethical personality, which are fostered by the very sacrifice of self-will: Obedience is but a sacrifice “made in the interests of personality.”[276] Mere wilfulness and the spirit of “defiance,” ever ready to overstep the bounds set by reason and grace, creates, not a person, but a “superman,” whose existence we could well spare; of such a being Luther’s behaviour reminds us more than once.
After all we have said it would be superfluous to deal in detail with the opinion expressed above (p. 66) by certain Protestant judges, viz. that Luther reinstated conscience, which had fallen into the toils of “legalism,” and set it again on its “true basis,” insisting on “feeling” and on real “morality.” Nor shall we enquire whether it is seriously implied, that, before Luther’s day, people were not aware that the mere “legality” of a deed did not suffice unless first of all morality was recognised as the true guide of conduct.
We may repeat yet once again that Luther was not the first to brand “outward holiness-by-works” in the sphere of morality.[277] Berthold of Ratisbon, whose voice re-echoed through the whole of Germany, summing up the teaching of the mediæval moral theologians, reprobates most sternly any false confidence in outward deeds. No heaping up of external works, no matter how eager, can, according to him, prove of any profit to the soul, not even if the sinner, after unheard-of macerations, goes loaded with chains on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and there lays himself down to die within the very sepulchre of the Lord; all that, so he points out with an eloquence all his own, would be thrown away were there lacking the inward spirit of love and contrition for the sins committed.
The doctrine on contrition of the earlier Catholic theologians and popular writers, which we have already had occasion to review, forms an excellent test when compared with Luther’s own, by which to decide the question: Which is the outward and which the inward morality? Their doctrine is based both on Scripture and on the traditions of antiquity. Similarly the Catholic teaching on moral self-adaptation to Christ, such as we find it, for instance, in St. Benedict’s Prologue to his world-famous Rule, that textbook of the mediæval ascetics, in the models and examples of the Fathers and even in the popular Catholic works of piety so widely read in Luther’s day, strikingly confutes the charge, that, by the stress it laid on certain commandments and practices, Catholicism proved it had lost sight of “the existence of a living personal morality” and that it fell to Luther once more to recall to life this ideal. The imitation of Christ in the spirit of love was undoubtedly regarded as the highest aim of morality, and this aim necessarily included “personal morality” in its most real sense, and Luther was not in the least necessity of inaugurating any new ideals of virtue.
Caspar Schwenckfeld, a man of noble birth hailing from Ossig near Lüben in Silesia, after having studied at Cologne, Frankfurt-on-the-Oder and perhaps also at Erfurt, was, in 1519, won over by Luther’s writings to the religious innovations. Being idealistically inclined, the Wittenberg preaching against formalism in religion and on the need of returning to a truly spiritual understanding of the Bible roused him to enthusiasm. He attempted, with rather more logic than Luther, to put in practice the latter’s admonitions concerning the inward life and therefore started a movement, half pietist, half mystic, for bringing together those who had been really awakened.
Schwenckfeld was a man of broad mind, with considerable independence of judgment and of a noble and generous disposition. His good position in the world gave him what many of the other Lutheran leaders lacked, viz. a free hand. His frank criticism did not spare the faults in their preaching. The sight of the sordid elements which attached themselves to Luther strengthened him in his resolve to establish communities—first of all in Silesia—modelled on the very lines roughly sketched by Luther, which should present a picture of the apostolic age of the Church. The Duke of Silesia and many of the nobility were induced to desert Catholicism, and a wide field was won in Silesia for the new ideals of Wittenberg.
In spite of his high esteem for Luther, Schwenckfeld wrote, in 1523: It is evident “that little improvement can be discerned emerging from the new teaching, and that those who boast of the Evangel lead a bad and scandalous life.... This moves us not a little, indeed pierces our heart when we hear of it.”[278] To the Duke he dedicated, in 1524, a writing entitled: “An exhortation regarding the misuse of sundry notable Articles of the Evangel, through the wrong understanding of which the common man is led into the freedom of the flesh and into error.” The book forms a valuable source of information on the religious state of the people at the time of the rise of Lutheranism. Therein he laments, with deep feeling and with an able pen, that so many Lutherans were being influenced by the most worldly of motives, and that a pernicious tendency towards freedom from social restrictions was rife amongst them.[279]
Though Schwenckfeld was all his life equally averse to the demagogue Anabaptist movement and to Zwinglianism with its rationalistic tendency, yet his fate led him into ways very much like theirs. Together with his associate Valentine Krautwald, a former precentor, he attacked the Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament, giving, however, a new interpretation of the words of Institution., different from that of Zwingli and Œcolampadius. To the fanaticism of the Anabaptists he approximated by his opposition to any organised Church, to the sacraments as means of grace, and to all that appeared to him to deviate from the spirit of the Apostolic Church.
He besought Luther in a personal interview at Wittenberg, on Dec. 1, 1525, to agree to his doctrine of the Sacrament, explaining to him at the same time its affinity with his supposedly profounder conception of the atonement, the sacraments and the life of Christ as followed in his communities; he also invited him in fiery words to throw over the popular churches in which all the people received the Supper and rather to establish congregations of awakened Christians. Luther, though in no unfriendly manner, put him off; throughout the interview he addressed him as “Dear Caspar,” but he flatly refused to give any opinion. According to Schwenckfeld’s own account he even allowed that his doctrine of the Sacrament was “plausible” ... if only it could be proved, and, on parting, whispered in his ear: “Keep quiet for a while.”[280]
When, however, the Sacramentarian movement began to assume alarming dimensions, and the Swiss started quoting Schwenckfeld in favour of their view of the Sacrament, Luther was exasperated and began to assail his Silesian fellow-worker. His indignation was increased by certain charges against the nobleman which reached him from outside sources. He replied on April 14, 1526, to certain writings sent him by Schwenckfeld and Krautwald by an unconditional refusal to agree, though he did so briefly and with reserve.[281] On Jan. 4, of the same year, referring to Zwingli, Œcolampadius and Schwenckfeld in a writing to the “Christians of Reutlingen” directed against the Sacramentarians he said: “Just behold and comprehend the devil and his coarseness”; in it he had included Schwenckfeld, though without naming him, as a “spirit and head” among the three who were attacking the Sacrament.[282]
From that time onward the Silesian appeared to him one of the most dangerous of heretics. He no longer admitted in his case the rights of conscience and private judgment which Luther claimed so loudly for himself and defended in the case of his friends, and to which Schwenckfeld now appealed. It was nothing to him that on many occasions, and even till his death, Schwenckfeld expressed the highest esteem for Luther and gratitude for his services in opening up a better way of theology.
“Dr. Martin,” Schwenckfeld wrote in 1528, “I would most gladly have spared, if only my conscience had allowed it, for I know, praise be to God, what I owe to him.”[283]
It was his purpose to pursue the paths along which Luther had at first striven to reach a new world. “A new world is being born and the old is dying,” so he wrote in 1528.[284] This new world he sought within man, but with the same mistaken enthusiasm with which he taught the new resurrection to life. The Divine powers there at work he fancied were the Holy Ghost, the Word of God and the Blood of the all-powerful Jesus. The latter he wished to reinstate in person as the sole ruler of the Church; in raising up to life and in supporting it, Jesus was ministering personally. According to him Christ’s manhood was not the same as a creature’s; he deified it to such an extent as to dissolve it, thus laying himself open to the charge of Eutychianism. Regeneration in baptism to him seemed nothing, compared with Christ’s raising up of the adult to life.
He would have it that he himself had passed, in 1527, through an overwhelming spiritual experience, the chief crisis of his life, when God, as he says, made him “partaker of the heavenly calling, received him into His favour, and bestowed upon him a good and joyful conscience and knowledge.”[285] On his “conscience and knowledge” he insisted from that time with blinded prejudice, and taught his followers, likewise with a joyful conscience to embrace the illumination from on high. He adhered with greater consistency than Luther to the thesis that everyone who has been enlightened has the right to judge of doctrine; no “outward office or preaching” might stand in the way of such a one. To each there comes some upheaval of his earthly destiny; it is then that we receive the infusion of the knowledge of salvation given by the Spirit, and of faith in the presence of Christ the God-man; it is a spiritual revelation which fortifies the conscience by the absolute certainty of salvation and guides a man in the freedom of the Spirit through all the scruples of conscience he meets in his moral life. His system also comprises a theory of practically complete immunity from sin.[286]
No other mind has given such bold expression as Schwenckfeld to the individualism or subjectivism which Luther originally taught; no one has ever attempted to calm consciences and fortify them against the arbitrariness of religious feeling in words more sympathetic and moving.
Carl Ecke,[287] his most recent biographer, who is full of admiration for him, says quite truly of the close connection between Schwenckfeld and the earlier Luther, that the chief leaders of the incipient Protestant Church, estimable men though some of them were, nevertheless misunderstood and repulsed one of the most promising Christians of the Reformation age. When he charged them with want of logic in their reforming efforts they regarded it as the fanaticism of an ignoramus.... In Schwenckfeld 16th-century Protestantism nipped in the bud the Christian individualism of the early ages rediscovered by Luther, in which lay the hope of a higher unity.[288]
In 1529, two years after his great interior experience, Schwenckfeld left his home, and, on a hint from the Duke of Silesia, severed his connection with him, being unwilling to expose him to the risk of persecution. Thereafter he led a wandering existence for thirty years; until his seventy-second year he lived with strangers at Strasburg, Esslingen, Augsburg, Spires, Ulm and elsewhere. After 1540, when the Lutheran theologians at Schmalkalden published an admonition against him, his history was more that of a “fugitive” than a mere “wanderer.”[289]
Still, he was untiringly active in furthering his cause by means of lectures and circular letters, as well as by an extensive private correspondence. He scattered the seeds of his peculiar doctrines amongst the nobility in particular and their dependents in country parts. Many people of standing either belonged or were well-disposed to his school, as Duke Christopher of Würtemberg wrote in 1564; according to him there were many at Augsburg and Nuremberg, in the Tyrol, in Allgäu, Silesia and one part of the Mark.[290] “The well-known intolerance of the Reformation and of its preachers,” remarks the Protestant historian of Schwenckfeld, “could not endure in their body a man who had his own views on the Sacraments and refused for conscience sake to take part in the practices of their Church.... He wandered, like a hunted deer, without hearth or home, through the cities and forests of South Germany, pursued by Luther and the preachers.”[291] As late as 1558 Melanchthon incited the authorities against him, declaring that “such sophistry as his requires to be severely dealt with by the princes.”[292]
Not long after Schwenckfeld departed this life at Ulm in 1561. His numerous following in Silesia migrated, first to Saxony, then to Holland and England, and finally to Pennsylvania, where they still exist to this day.
Luther’s indignation against Schwenckfeld knew no bounds. In conversation he spoke of him as Swinesfield,[293] and, in his addresses and writings, still more commonly as Stinkfield, a name which was also repeatedly applied by his followers to the man they so disliked.[294]
In his Table-Talk Luther refers to that “rascal Schwenckfeld,” who was the instigator of numerous errors and deceives many people with his “honeyed words.”[295] He, like the fanatics, so Luther complains, despises “the spoken word,” and yet God willed “to deal with and work in us by such means.”[296]
In 1540 he told his friends that Schwenckfeld was unworthy of being refuted by him, no less unworthy than Sebastian Frank, another gifted and independent critic of Luther and Lutheranism.[297]
In 1543, when Schwenckfeld attempted to make advances to Luther and sent him a tract together with a letter, Luther sent down to the messenger a card on which he acknowledged the receipt of the book, but declared that “the senseless fool, beset as he is by the devil, understands nothing and does not even know what he is talking about.” He had better leave him, Luther, alone and not worry him with his “booklets, which the devil himself discharges through him.” In the last lines he invokes a sort of curse on Schwenckfeld, and all “Sacramentarians and Eutychians” of whom it had been said in the Bible (Jer. xxiii. 21): “I did not send prophets, yet they ran: I have not spoken to them, yet they prophesy.”[298]
When giving vent to his grudge against Schwenckfeld in his Table-Talk shortly after this, he declared: “He is a poor creature, with neither talent nor an enlightened spirit.... He bespirts the people with the grand name of Christ.... The dreamer has stolen a few phrases from my book, ‘De ultimis verbis Davidis’ [of 1543], and with these the poor wretch seeks to make a great show.” It was on this occasion that Catherine Bora took exception to a word used by her husband, declaring that it was “too coarse.”[299]
In his “Kurtz Bekentnis vom heiligen Sacrament” (1545) Luther again gives vigorous expression to his aversion to the “Fanatics and foes of the Sacrament, Carlstadt, Zwingli, Œcolampadius and ‘Stinkfield’”; they were heretics “whom he had warned sufficiently” and who were to be avoided.[300] He had refused to listen to or to answer that “slanderer Schwenckfeld” because everything was wasted on him. “This you may well tell those among whom, no doubt, Stinkfield makes my name to stink. I like being abused by such slanderers.” If by their attacks upon the Sacrament they call the “Master of the house Beelzebub, how should they not abuse His household?”[301]
Self-betterment, by the leading of a Christian life and, particularly, by striving after Christian perfection, had in Catholic times been inculcated by many writers and even by first-rank theologians. In this field it was usual to take for granted, both in popular manuals and in learned treatises, as the general conviction, that religion teaches people to strive after what is highest, whether in each one’s ordinary duties of daily life, or in the ecclesiastical or religious state. The power of the moral teaching was to stand revealed in the struggle after the ideal thus set forth.
Luther, of set purpose, refused to make any attempt to found, in the strict sense of the term, a spiritual school of Christian life or perfection. He ever found it a difficult matter even to give any methodical instructions to this end.
Though he dealt fully and attractively with many details of life, not only in his sermons and commentaries, but also in special writings which still serve as inspirations to practical Christianity, yet he would never consent to draft anything in the shape of a system for reaching virtue, still less for attaining perfection. On one occasion he even deliberately refused his friend Bugenhagen’s request that he would sketch out a rule of Christian life, appealing to his well-known thesis that “the true Christian has no need of rules for his conduct, for the spirit of faith guides him to do all that God requires and that brotherly love demands of him.”[302]
It may indeed be urged that his failure to bequeath to posterity any regular guide to the spiritual life was due to lack of time, that his active and unremitting struggle with his opponents left him no leisure, and, in point of fact, it is quite true that his controversy did deprive him of the requisite freedom and peace of mind. It may also be allowed that no one man can do everything and that Luther had not the methodical mind needed for such a task, which, in his case, was rendered doubly hard by his revolution in doctrine. The main ground, however, is that there were too many divergent elements in his moral teaching which it was impossible to harmonize; so much in it was false and awry that no logical combination of the whole was possible. Hence his readiness to invoke the theory, which really sprung from the very depths of his ethics, viz. that the true Christian has no need of rules because everything he has to do is the natural outcome of faith.
In his “Sermon von den guten Wercken” (1520), he expressed this in a way that could not fail to find a following, though it could hardly be described as in the interests of moral effort. Each one must take as his first rule of conduct, not on any account to bind himself, but to keep himself free from all troublesome laws. The very title of the tract in question, so frequently reprinted during Luther’s lifetime, would have led people to expect to find in it his practical views on ethics. Characteristically enough, instead of attempting to define the exact nature and value of moral effort, Luther penned what, in reality, was merely an appendix to his new doctrine on faith. He himself, in his dedication of it to Duke Johann of Saxony, admits this of the first and principal part: “Here I have striven to show how we must exercise and make use of faith in all our good works and consider it as the chiefest of works. If God allows me I shall at some other time deal with faith itself, how we must each day pray and speak it.”[303]
As, however, no other of Luther’s writings contains so many elements of moral teaching drawn from his theology, some further remarks on it may here be in place, especially as he himself set such store on the sermon, that, while engaged on it, referring evidently to the first part, he wrote to Spalatin, that, in his opinion it “would be the best thing he had yet published.”[304] Köstlin felt justified in saying: “The whole sermon may be termed the Reformer’s first exposition and vindication of the Evangelical teaching on morals.”[305]
Starting from his doctrine that good works are only those which God has commanded, and that the highest is “faith, or trust in God’s mercy,”[306] he endeavours to show, agreeably to his usual idea, that from faith the works proceed, and for this reason he lingers over the first four commandments of the Decalogue. He explains the principle that faith knows no idleness. By this faith the believer is inwardly set free from the laws and ceremonies by which men were driven to perform good works. If faith reigned in all, then of such there would no longer be any need. The Christian must perform good works, but he is free to perform works of any kind, no man being bound to one or any work, though he finds no fault with those who bind themselves.[307] “Here we see, that, by faith, every work and thing is lawful to a Christian, though, because the others do not yet believe, he bears with them and performs even what he knows is not really binding.”[308] Faith issues in works and all works come back to faith, to strengthen the assurance of salvation.[309]
His explanation of the 3rd Commandment, where he speaks of the ghostly Sabbath of the soul and of the putting to death of the old man, seems like an attempt to lay down some sort of a system of moral injunction, and incidentally recalls the pseudo-mystic phase through which Luther had passed not so long before. Here we get just a glimpse of his theory of human unfreedom and of God’s sole action, so far as this was in place in a work intended for the “unschooled laity.”[310]
In man, because he is “depraved by sin, all works, all words, all thoughts, in a word his whole life, is wicked and ungodly. If God is to work and live in him all these vices and this wickedness must be stamped out.” This he calls “the keeping of the day of rest, when our works cease and God alone acts within us.” We must, indeed, “resist our flesh and our sins,” yet “our lusts are so many and so diverse, and also at times under the inspiration of the Wicked One so clever, so subtle and so plausible that no man can of his own keep himself in the right way; he must let his hands and feet go, commend himself to the Divine guidance, trusting nothing to his reason.... For there is nothing more dangerous in us than our reason and our will. And this is the highest and the first work of God in us, and the best thing we can do, for us to refrain from work, to keep the reason and the will idle, to rest and commend ourselves to God in all things, particularly when they are running smoothly and well.” “The spiritual Sabbath is to leave God alone to work in us and not to do anything ourselves with any of our powers.”[311] He harks back here to that idea of self-surrender to the sole action of God, under the spell of which he had formerly stood: “The works of our flesh must be put to rest and die, so that in all things we may keep the ghostly Sabbath, leaving our works alone and letting God work in us.... Then man no longer guides himself, his lust is stilled and his sadness too; God Himself is now his leader; nothing remains but godly desires, joy and peace together with all other works and virtues.”[312]
Though, according to the peculiar mysticism which speaks to the “unschooled laity” out of these pages, all works and virtues spring up of themselves during the Sabbath rest of the soul, still Luther finds it advisable to introduce a chapter on the mortification of the flesh by fasting.
Fasting is to be made use of for the salvation of our own soul, so far but no further, as or than each one judges it necessary for the repression of the “wantonness of the flesh” and for the “putting to death of our lust.”[313] We are not to “regard the work in itself.” Of corporal penance and mortification, and fasting in particular, he will have it, that they are to be used exclusively to “quench the evil” within us, but not on account of any law of Pope or Church. Luther dismisses in silence the other motives for penance recommended by the Church of yore, in the first place satisfaction for sins committed and the desire to obtain graces by reinforcing our prayers by self-imposed sacrifices.[314]
He fancies that a few words will suffice to guard against any abuse of the new ascetical doctrine: “People must beware lest this freedom degenerate into carelessness and indolence ... into which some indeed tumble and then say that there is no need or call that we should fast or practise mortification.”[315]
When, in the 3rd Commandment, he comes to speak of the practice of prayer one would naturally have expected him to give some advice and directions concerning its different forms, viz. the prayer of praise, thanksgiving, petition or penitence. All he seems to know is, however, the prayer of petition, in the case of temporal trials and needs, and amidst spiritual difficulties.[316]
Throughout the writing Luther is dominated by the idea that faith in Christ the Redeemer, and in personal salvation, must at all costs be increased. At the same time he is no less certain that the Papists neither prayed aright, nor were able to perform any good works because they had no faith.
His exhortations to a devout life (some of them fine enough in themselves, for instance, what he says on the trusting prayer of the sinner, on the prayers of the congregation which cry aloud to heaven and on patience under bitter sufferings), are, as a rule, intermingled to such an extent with polemical matter, that, instead of a school of the spiritual life, we seem rather to have before us the turmoil of the battlefield.[317] To understand this we must bear in mind that he wrote the book amidst the excitement into which he was thrown by the launching of the ban.
In the somewhat earlier writing on the Magnificat, which might equally well have served as a medium for the enforcing of virtue and which in some parts Luther did so use,[318] we also find the same unbridled spirit of hatred and abuse. Nor is it lacking even in his later works of edification. The most peaceable ethical excursus Luther contrives to disfigure by his bitterness, his calumnies and, not seldom, by his venom.
In the Sermon on Good Works as soon as he comes to speak of prayer he has a cut at the formalism of the prayer beloved of the Papists;[319] he then proceeds to abuse the churches and convents for their mode of life, their chanting and babbling, all performed in “obstinate unbelief,” etc. At least one-half of his instruction on fasting consists in mockery of the fasting as practised by the Papists. His anger, however, reaches its climax in the 4th Commandment, where he completely forgets his subject, and, losing all mastery over himself, wildly storms against the spiritual authorities and their disorders.[320] The only allusion to anything that by any stretch of imagination would be termed a work, is the following:[321] The rascally behaviour of the Church’s officers and episcopal or clerical functionaries “ought to be repressed by the secular sword because no other means is available.” “The best thing, and the only remaining remedy, would be, that the King, Princes, nobles, townships and congregations should take the law into their hands, so that the bishops and clergy might have good cause to fear and therefore to obey.” For everything must make room for the Word of God.
“Neither Rome, nor heaven, nor earth” may decree anything contrary to the first three Commandments.
In dealing with these first three Commandments the booklet releases the reader at one stroke from all the Church’s laws hitherto observed. “Hence I allow each man to choose the day, the food and the amount of his fasting.”[322] “Where the spirit of Christ is, there all is free, for faith does not allow itself to be tied down to any work.”[323]
“The Christian who lives by faith has no need of any teacher’s good works.”[324] Here we can see the chief reason why Luther’s instructions on virtue and the spiritual life are so meagre.
Even from Protestant theologians we hear the admission that Luther’s Reformation failed to make sufficient allowance for the doctrine of piety; he neglected, so they urge, the question of man’s “emancipation from the world,” so that, even to the present day, Protestantism, and traditional Lutheran theology in particular, lacks any definite rule of piety. According to these critics, ever since Luther’s day practical and adequate instructions had been wanting with regard to what, subsequent to the reconciliation with the Father brought about by Justification, still remains “to be done in the Father’s house”; nor are we told how the life in Christ is to be led, of which nevertheless the Apostle Paul speaks so eloquently, though this is in reality the “main question in Christianity” and concerns the “vital interests of the Church.”