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]
Luther frequently spoke at that time in the language of a certain school of mysticism with which he was much enamoured. The following extract from the sermon under consideration, together with some thoughts on similar lines, from his synodal address at Leitzau, belong here.
“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.
The vague, obscure mysticism which played a part in Luther’s spiritual development at that time, as well as his wrong, one-sided interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, had, as already stated, led him into a heterodox by-way.
A cursory glance at the influence of Scholasticism and Mysticism on his mental progress, may perhaps be here in place.
4. Preliminary Remarks on Young Luther’s Relations to Scholasticism and Mysticism
In the years of Luther’s development the two great intellectual forces of the Middle Ages, Scholasticism and Mysticism, no longer exercised quite so powerful an influence as of yore, when they ruled over the world of intellect. Their influence on Luther’s views and his career was diverse. Scholasticism in its then state of decay, with its endless subtilties and disputatiousness, which, moreover, he knew only under the form of Occam’s nominalism, repelled him, to his own great loss. As a result he never acquired those elements of knowledge of true and lasting value to be found in the better schools, of which the traditions embodied the work of centuries of intellectual effort on the part of some of the world’s greatest minds. Mysticism, on the other hand, attracted him on account of his natural disposition, so full