“invincibilis,” and in spite of the comparison he makes elsewhere between the evil inclination and Cerberus or Antæus,[276] he does not go further here than in another assertion in the Commentary on the Psalms which has also been urged against him: “the passion of anger, pride, sensuality, when it is aroused, is strong, yea invincible (‘immo invincibilis’), as experience teaches,” i.e. it appears so to the person attacked by it. He had just remarked that in such a case we must hope in God and despair of ourselves. He describes in the strongest terms, in the Commentary on the Psalms, the strength of concupiscence in habitual sinners who are not accustomed to turn to God’s grace: “the sinner who is oppressed by vice, and feels the devil and his body of sin forcing him to evil, allows the inner voice to speak constantly against sin, and severely blames himself in his conscience ... reason and the moral sense, remnants left over from the ruin of original sin, awaken in him and cry without ceasing to the Lord, even though the will sins, forced thereto by sin.”[277] We repeat, that in his Commentary on the Psalms he does not yet actually deny natural freedom in the doing of what is good.
The view that man, without God’s grace, is entirely lacking in freedom with regard to his passions—a view which, it is true, permeates Luther’s Commentary on Romans—was not the starting-point of Luther’s theological development. It was the end of the first stage through which he had passed. This doctrine reached later on its culminating point in his book, “De servo arbitrio,” against Erasmus. Here, at the head of his proofs, he openly confesses himself a determinist, admitting that God has decreed beforehand all man’s actions; any such determinism is, however, wanting in his earlier life, nor is it to be found in his Commentary on Romans; Luther does not yet show himself to be led by determinist ideas. Even in his work against Erasmus there are no forcible grounds for attributing the origin of his new teaching to his inward corruption. Therein he merely denies the freedom of the will for good without grace, though he allows it to be free in indifferent matters, a somewhat inconsistent theory owing to the difficulty of determining exactly the limitations of these indifferent things.
Neither the Commentary on the Psalms nor that on Romans gives us the impression of being the work of an immoral man, a fact which should also carry some weight. An author who at the first assault had capitulated to his evil desires would hardly have been able to conceal his low moral standard; he would rather have been tempted to join the Epicureans or the Sceptics, or the unbelieving ranks of the Humanists. Of anything of the kind there is no trace in the books last mentioned.
Their characteristic is rather—there is no harm in mentioning it now—a certain false spiritualism, a mysticism, which, especially in the interpretation of the Epistle to the Romans, frequently follows quite devious paths. In consequence of his unceasing opposition to self-righteousness, of his poor idea of God and of human strength, and of his false mystical train of thought, Luther came to dismiss human freedom and to set up the power of sin on the throne. Aristotle’s teaching regarding the natural righteousness which arises from good actions is particularly distasteful to Luther, and equally distasteful to the nominalistic critic is the doctrine of supernatural righteousness through infused sanctifying grace, which he prefers to replace by the imputation of the merits of Christ.
3. The Real Starting-point and the Co-operating Factors
The real origin of Luther’s teaching must be sought in a fundamental principle which governed him, which was fostered by the decline in his life as a religious and a priest, and more particularly by his inordinate love of his own opinion and by the uncharitable criticisms he passed upon others. This was his unfavourable estimate of good works, and of any effort, natural or supernatural, on the part of man.
This opposition to a principle, common to the Church and to monasticism, as to the necessity in which men generally and religious in particular stand of performing good works if they wish to please God, is the first deviation from the right path which we notice in him. He called it a fight against “holiness by works” and self-righteousness, and in this fight he went still further. He made his own the deadly error that man by his natural powers is unable to do anything but sin. To this he added that the man who, by God’s grace, is raised to justification through divinely infused faith and trust must, it is true, perform good works, but that the latter are not to be accounted meritorious. All works avail nothing as means for arriving at righteousness and eternal salvation; faith alone effects both. Not at the outset, but gradually, did he make his antagonism to good works the foundation of a doctrine built up under the influence of a lively imagination, a powerful and undisciplined self-confidence and other factors which will be mentioned below. In his controversy with the “holy by works” he had exclaimed (p. 81) “there is no greater pest in the Church to-day than those men who go about saying ‘we must do good works.’” His real enemies were soon the traditional Catholic belief and practice regarding good works and personal activity in general; he did not confine himself to expressing his dissatisfaction with the Observantines in his own Order or the possible excesses of other supporters of outward works.
It is easy to recognise how this opposition to works runs like a dark thread through the first beginnings of his teaching of the new doctrine and onward through the whole course of his life. We may here, starting at the commencement, anticipate his history somewhat.
“At the first,” so he says himself in later years, “my struggle was against trust in works,”[278] and this is confirmed by the MS. Commentary on Romans which he commenced in 1515 (see below, chap. vi. 3). The first occasion in his correspondence in which he allows his new views to appear is in 1516, in a recommendation to a friend that “he should cultivate disgust with his own righteousness and despair of himself,” that this was better than to do as “those who plague themselves with their works until they think they are fit to stand in God’s sight.”[279] He expresses himself in a similar strain on self-righteousness in sermons preached at this time.[280]
The same line of thought also appears in a paradoxical form, as the basis of a disputation held at Wittenberg in 1516 under his presidency. Man sins, so we find it said, “when he does what is in him” (“quod est in se”), and those who are “righteous in their own eyes” by reason of their good works, i.e. all who do not simply “despair of themselves,” are condemned. This ruling thought also pervades another disputation of one of his pupils in 1517, where we read: “every good work must needs at once make nature proud and puffed up,” and “hope is not given us by our merits, but by suffering [painful interior struggles], which root out merit,”[281] i.e. which destroy every feeling of self-satisfaction grounded on merit. He tells one of his confidants in the same year that his great aim was “to grant nothing to human works, but to know only God’s grace.”[282]
In his first German work, printed in 1517, the Commentary on the Seven Penitential Psalms, he opposes “all proud living and work and righteousness” and bewails the “spiritual pride, the last and deepest of all vices,”[283] with which, according to him, those are filled who seek for “safety and false consolation” in their works instead of simply embracing the “word of grace.” He places works so much in the background in his teaching at that time, that he brings forward this objection against himself, whether, instead of always speaking of grace, he should not speak more of “human righteousness, wisdom and strength.” Instead of defending himself he declares “a good life does not consist in many works”; to feel oneself “a miserable, damned, forsaken sinner” is better, even when God sends trouble of soul, which is “a drop or foretaste of