“I AM OF OCCAM’S PARTY”

1. A closer examination of Luther’s Theological Training

It was not time only which was wanting in Luther’s case for a deep course of theological study, he was even denied what was equally essential, namely, a really scholarly presentment of theology such as is to be found in the best period of Scholasticism.

The great Schoolmen of the Middle Ages, with their finished system, combining a pious veneration for the traditions of the Fathers with high flights of thought, were almost unknown to him; at least, he never esteemed or made any attempt to penetrate himself with the learning of Albertus Magnus, Thomas of Aquin or Bonaventure, notwithstanding the fact that in the Church their teaching, particularly that of Aquinas, already took the first place, owing to the approval of the Holy See. Luther frequently displayed his utter ignorance of Thomism, as we shall show later.[304]

The nominalistic philosophy and theology offered him by the schools he attended has, with reason, been described as a crippled parody of true Scholasticism. In this, its latest development, Scholasticism had fallen from its height, and, abandoning itself to speculative subtleties, had opened a wide field to Nominalism and its disintegrating criticism. The critical acumen demonstrated by John Duns Scotus, the famous Franciscan Doctor (Doctor Subtilis), who died at Cologne in 1308, the late-comers would fain have further emphasised. Incapable as they were of producing anything great themselves, they exercised their wits in criticising every insignificant proposition which could possibly be questioned in philosophy and theology. The Franciscan, William of Occam (Ockham, Surrey), called Doctor Singularis, or Invincibilis, also Venerabilis Inceptor Nominalium, was one of the boldest and most prolific geniuses of the Middle Ages in the domain of philosophy and theology. His great works, composed during his professorship, especially his Commentary on the Sentences, his “Centifolium” and his “Quodlibeta,” are proofs of this. On theological questions concerning poverty he came into conflict with the Pope, his Sentences were condemned by the University of Paris, he appealed from the Holy See to a General Council, was excommunicated in 1328, protested against the decisions of the General Chapter of the Order, and then took refuge with Lewis of Bavaria, the schismatic, whose literary defender he became. He wrote for him, among other things, his ecclesiastico-political “Dialogus,” and even after his protector’s death continued to resist Clement VI. Occam died at Munich in 1349, reconciled with his Order, though whether the excommunication had already been removed or not is doubtful.

He revived Nominalism in philosophy and theology. His teaching was so much that of the schools through which Luther had been that the latter could declare: “sum occamicÆ factionis,”[305] and speak quite simply of Occam as “magister meus.”[306] It cannot, however, be said, as it recently has been, that Luther “prided himself on being Occam’s disciple,” and that he “would not give a refusal to his beloved master”; for it was more in irony than in earnest that he spoke when he said: “I also am of Occam’s party”; and when, as late as 1530, he still speaks of “Occam, my beloved master,”[307] this is said in jest only in order to be able to accuse him more forcibly as an expert with the greatest of errors; nevertheless, he places Occam in point of learning far above Thomas of Aquin, the “so-called Doctor of Doctors,” whom he despised. Regarding, however, the esteem in which Occam was held in his youth, he afterwards said: “We had to give him the title Venerabilis huius sectÆ [scholÆ] primus repertor,” but adds: “Happy are you [my table-companions] in not having to learn the dung which was offered me.”[308] He felt compelled, nevertheless, to praise Occam’s dialectic skill and his inexhaustible acuteness, and for his part considered him the most gifted of the Schoolmen (“summus dialecticus, scholasticorum doctorum sine dubio princeps et ingeniosissimus”).[309] It was not only at a later period that he was ready to admit his weaknesses, for even at the beginning of his course, in the Commentary on Romans (1515-16), he attacks certain essential errors of Occam and his school.

His acquaintance with the master he owed, moreover, more to Occam’s disciples, i.e. to the later theologians of the Occamist school, more especially Gabriel Biel, than to his own reading of the voluminous and unwieldy works of Occam himself. We are already aware that, of the disciples and intellectual heirs of Occam, he studied more particularly the two well-known writers d’Ailly, Cardinal of Cambrai—whom Luther usually calls quite simply the Cardinal—whose ideas were very daring, and the humble Gabriel Biel, Professor at TÜbingen, whose writings, clear, and rich in thought, possessed many good qualities.

Their one-sided Nominalism unfortunately led these Occamists to an excessive estimate of the powers of nature and an undervaluing of grace, and also to a certain incorrect view of the supernatural. We must add that they were disposed to neglect Holy Scripture and to set too much store on their speculations, and that, with regard to the relations between reason and faith, they did not abide by the approved principles and practice of the earlier Schoolmen.

The Occamist theology strongly influenced the talented and critical pupil, though diversely. Most of the elements of which it was made up repelled him, and as he regarded them as essential parts of Scholasticism, they filled him with a distaste for Scholasticism generally. Other of its elements attracted him, namely, those more in conformity with his ideas and feeling. These he enrolled in the service of his theological views, which—again following Occam’s example—he developed with excessive independence. Thus the tendency to a false separation of natural and supernatural commended itself to him; he greedily seized upon the ideas of Nominalism with regard to imputation after he had commenced groping about for a new system of theology. His greatest objection was for the views of his teachers regarding the powers of man and grace. This it was, more especially, which raised in him the spirit of contradiction and set him on a path of his own. To one in his timorous state such views were unsympathetic; he himself scented sin and imperfection everywhere; also he preferred to see the powers of the will depreciated and everything placed to the account of grace and Divine election. Thus, what he read into Holy Scripture concerning faith and Christ seemed to him to speak a language entirely different from that of the subtleties of the Occamists.

His unfettered acceptance or rejection of the doctrinal views submitted to him was quite in accordance with his character. He was not one to surrender himself simply to authority. His unusual ability incited him to independent criticism of opinions commonly received, and to voice his opposition in the public disputations against his not overbrilliant Nominalist professors; the strong appeal which he made to the Bible, with which the others were less well acquainted, and to the rights of faith and the grace of Christ, was in his favour.

2. Negative Influence of the Occamist School on Luther

Besides the recently published Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans various statements in his sermons, disputations and letters prove the opposition that existed between Luther and his own school. In the Disputation of 1517 entitled “Contra scholasticam theologiam,” for instance, he expressly names, as the opponents against whom his various theses are aimed, Scotus, Occam, the Cardinal, Gabriel, and, generally, “omnes scholastici” or “communis sententia,” “dictum commune,” “usus multorum,” “philosophi” or “morales.”[310]

Before we proceed to examine the individual points of Luther’s conflict with Occamism and with what he considered the teaching of Scholasticism as a whole, two general points of this opposition must be mentioned. His first grievance is the neglect of Holy Scripture.

The preponderance of philosophy, and more particularly the excessive authority of Aristotle, in the theological method of his circle offered Luther a second point of attack. Here also it was a question of a rather widely spread abuse which the better class of Schoolmen had prudently avoided. The Nominalistic schools, generally speaking, showed a tendency to a rationalistic treatment of the truths of faith, which affrighted Luther considerably. General ideas, according to the Nominalists, were merely “nomina,” i.e. empty words; Nominalists concerned themselves only with what was actual and tangible. Nominalism was fond of displaying its dialectic and even its insolence at the expense of theology on the despised Universal ideas. We can understand the invective with which Luther gives expression to his hatred of Scholasticism, though his right to do so arose only from his limited acquaintance with those few Scholastics whom he had chosen,[323] or, rather, who had been allotted to him, as his masters; the schools he attended were at that time all following the method of the Nominalists, then usually known as “modern.”

Luther’s reaction was not only against Occamism in general, but also against various particular doctrines of that school, especially, as stated before, against such doctrines as exalted the powers of nature at the expense of grace.

Here again he committed his first fault, the indefensible injustice of blindly charging Scholasticism and theology generally with what he found faulty in his own narrow circle, though these errors had been avoided by St. Thomas and the best of the Schoolmen. It has been pointed out that he was not acquainted with this real Scholasticism, nevertheless, in 1519, he had the assurance to say: “No one shall teach me scholastic theology, I know it.”[332] “I was brought up amongst them (Thomas, Bonaventure, etc.), I am also acquainted with the minds of the most learned contemporaries and have saturated myself in the best writings of this sort.”[333]

We are to believe that these were the “axioms of scholastic theology!”

Such was not the case. For all acts necessary for salvation true Scholasticism demanded the supernatural “preventing” grace of God.[335] Yet as early as 1516 Luther had elegantly described all the scholastic theologians as “Sow theologians,” on account of their pretended “Deliria” against grace.[336] His first fault, that of unwarranted generalisation, comes out clearly.

The second, more momentous, fault which Luther committed was to fly to the extreme even in doctrine, abolishing all that displeased him and setting up as his main thesis, that man can do nothing, absolutely nothing, good. Not only did he say: “I learnt nothing in scholastic theology worth remembering; I only learnt what must be unlearnt, what is absolutely opposed to Holy Scripture” (“omnino contraria divinis litteris”).[337] He also asserted at a very early period that Holy Scripture teaches that God’s grace does everything in man of itself alone without his vital participation, without liberty, without resolve, without merit. Such a statement does not indeed appear in the Commentary on the Psalms, but it will be found in his academic lectures on the Pauline Epistles, more especially in the Commentary on Romans. For a moment he thought he had discovered in St. Augustine the necessary weapons against the formalism of his school of theology, but now St. Paul appeared to him to give the loudest testimony against it; the Apostle is so determined in his denunciation of the pride of human reason and human will, and in presenting the Gospel of the Son of God, faith and grace, as the only salvation of mankind. Luther imagined he had found in Paul the doctrines which appealed to him: that all human works were equally useless, whether for eternal salvation or for natural goodness; that man’s powers are good for nothing but sin; if grace, which the Apostle extols, is to come to its rights, then we must say of original sin that it has utterly ruined man’s powers of thinking and willing so far as what is good in God’s sight is concerned; original sin still lives, even in the baptised, as a real sin, being an invincible attraction to selfishness and all evil, more particularly to that of the flesh; by it the will is so enslaved that only in those who are justified by grace can there be any question of freedom for good.

Here a more general question must first receive an answer. How came the youthful Luther to absorb into his life the views above described without apparently shrinking in the least from the opposition to the Church’s teaching manifest in them?

Various answers are forthcoming. In the first place, in consequence of his training which consisted too exclusively in the discussion of speculative controversies, he had come to see in the theological doctrines merely opinions of the schools, on which it was permissible to sit in judgment. He had forgotten that there existed a positive body of unassailable doctrine. Even when engaged in mercilessly attacking this body of doctrine he still appears to have been unaware of having outstepped the lines of permissible disputation. We cannot, however, altogether exonerate him from being in some degree conscious that in his attack on the Church he was treading dangerous ground. In the lectures on the Epistle to the Romans he goes so far as to declare, that the Church was almost destroyed (“pene subversa”) by the teaching of the Scholastics, and that everything was full of Pelagian errors, because grace for the support of the will had been abolished. Things such as these and others of a like nature he could assuredly not have uttered without, in his calmer hours, asking himself how he could reconcile such a standpoint with his duty to the Church. It is true, however, that such quiet hours were exceptional in his case. There can be no doubt also that his idea of the Church and of the binding character of her doctrine was confused. In 1519 he had no hesitation in pointing to the action of other Doctors, who, before that date, had engaged in controversy with each other, in vindication of the tremendous struggle he had just commenced. I am only doing what they did; “Scotus, single-handed, opposed the opinions of all the schools and Doctors and gained the victory (?). Occam did the same, many others have done and are doing likewise up to the present day (?). If then these are at liberty to withstand all, why not I?”[357]

The second answer to the above question lies in the outward circumstances existing in his monastic home at the time of the beginning of his struggle. The members of his Congregation, most of whom were of Occam’s school, were still greatly excited and divided by the quarrel going on in their midst regarding organisation and discipline. The Observantines with their praise of the old order and exercises were a thorn in the flesh of the other Augustinians, more lax and modern in their views, especially for Luther, who was at their head. A spirit of antagonism existed not merely between the different houses of the Order, but even in the houses themselves a struggle seems to have been carried on. On the one side there was a tenacious adherence to the older practices of the Order, on the other suspicion and reproaches were levelled against the innovations of the Observantines. The result was that the fiery young Professor, while inveighing against the Occamist theory of self-righteousness, thundered at the same time against the Observantines as living instances of the self-righteous and holy-by-works. Some of the reasons for this supposition have already been given, and more will be forthcoming when we consider the Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans.[358]

War was to the Wittenberg Doctor even then an element of life. He found it going on, and encouraged it amongst the wearers of the Augustinian habit. The first and second “factions” in the Order, as Usingen calls them, i.e. the first division caused by the question of observance, and the second by the great controversy concerning faith, were, we may be sure, closely allied in Luther’s mind; the controversy concerning observance may assuredly be reckoned amongst the outward causes which carried him along with them into the greater struggle and contributed for a time to hide from him the danger of his position. Though details are lacking of the resistance to Luther’s first challenge to the theologians of his Order, to Scholasticism and the Church’s doctrine, yet, as already said, we can see from the Commentary on Romans, from other unprinted early lectures, and also from the disputations and sermons, that the Order continued in a state of commotion, and that, as a matter of fact, the second “faction” was an outgrowth of the first.[359] The Observantines had to put up with hearing themselves styled by Luther “iustitiarii” and Pharisees; but probably there were others, even members of the Wittenberg University, perhaps some of those jurists and philosophers[360] to whom he refers in his Commentary on Romans, and whom he so cordially detested, who also were counted amongst the “iustitiarii,” in fact all whom the outrageous assertions of their young colleague regarding the observance of precepts and regulations and against human freedom, roused to opposition.

To these two answers a third must be added, which turns upon the character of Luther in his youth. His extreme self-sufficiency blinded him, and his discovery of real errors in the theology in which he had been trained drove him in his impetuosity to imagine that he was called, and had the right, to introduce an entirely new theology. His searching glance had spied out real mistakes; his strength and boldness had resulted in the bringing to light of actual abuses; his want of consideration in the pointing out of blemishes in the Church had, in some degree, been successful and earned for him the applause of many; his criticism of theology was greeted as triumphant by his pupils, the more so as the Doctors he attacked were but feeble men unable to reply to so strong an indictment, or else living at a distance (in Erfurt). The growing self-consciousness, which expresses itself even in the form of his controversial language, must not be disregarded as a psychological fact in the problem, one, too, which also helped to blind him to the real outcome of his work.

Only the most extreme spirit of antagonism could have led the Monk to make, in addition to his other harsh exaggerated charges against Scholasticism, the following assertion, to which, as it is important for the origin of Lutheranism, some attention must be paid. He says the doctrine is false that righteousness which can be acquired by means of good works (of the natural order) is even conceivable; this was invented by Aristotle; this righteousness of the philosophers and jurists has penetrated into the Church, while, as a matter of fact, owing to the naughtiness, nay, corruption of mankind, resulting from original sin, it was a monstrosity and an abomination in God’s sight; the scholastic distinctions of distributive and commutative justice, etc., “were also due to blindness of spirit and mere human wisdom”; the Scholastics have put this infamous, purely human righteousness in the place of righteousness by grace, which is of value in God’s sight; they have said there is no original sin, and have acted as though all men did not feel concupiscence within themselves very strongly; they have represented righteousness as the fruit of our natural efforts, and in consequence of this people now believe that righteousness may be had through Indulgences costing two pence, i.e. through works of the very slightest worth! But “the Apostle teaches,” he says, “Corde creditur ad iustitiam, i.e. not by works, or wisdom, or study, not by riches and honours can man attain to righteousness.... That is a new way to righteousness, against, and far above, Aristotle ... and his political, God-forsaken righteousness.”[361] Yet, according to him, the Scholastics knew no better. “They speak like Aristotle in his ‘Ethics,’ who makes ... righteousness consist in works, as also its attainment and its loss.”[362]

The changeableness and inconstancy of his assertions regarding the doctrines of the Scholastics is quite remarkable. He makes no difficulty about admitting later, against his previous statements, that the Scholastics did not teach that man was able to love God above all things merely by his own strength; this was the teaching only of the Scotists and the “Moderns” (i.e. Nominalists or Occamists).[367] At that time he was perhaps better acquainted with Biel, who instances Thomas and Bonaventure in opposition to this doctrine.[368] Luther was also careless in the accounts he gave even of the theology of his own circle, viz. that of the Occamists, and the injustice he does Scholasticism as a whole, he repeats against his own school by exaggerating its faults or suppressing the necessary distinctions in order to be the better able to refute its theses by the Bible and St. Augustine. As therefore it is impossible to form an opinion on Scholasticism as a whole from Luther’s assertions, so we cannot trust his account even of his own masters, in whose works he thinks himself so well versed.

He is, for instance, neglecting a distinction when he repeatedly asserts that Occam, his “Master,” denied the biblical truth that the Holy Ghost is necessary for the performance of a good work. As a matter of fact, the Occamists, like the Scotists, did not here differ essentially from the Thomists, although differences are apparent in their teaching on the supernatural habit, and on the preparation for the attainment of this supernatural righteousness, i.e. for justification.[369] He is wronging his own “factio occamica” when, from its teaching that man could, by his natural powers, acquire a love of God beyond all things, he at once infers that it declared infused grace to be superfluous,[370] and further, when, for instance, he asserted that the axiom quoted above, and peculiarly beloved of the Occamists, “Facienti quod est in se Deus non denegat gratiam,” was erroneous, as though it placed a “wall of iron” between man and the grace of God.[371] No Occamist understood the axiom in the way he wishes to make out.

Luther went so far in his gainsaying of the Occamist doctrine of the almost unimpaired ability of man for purely natural good, that he arrived at the opposite pole and began to maintain that there was no such thing as vitally good acts on man’s part; that man as man does not act in doing what is good, but that grace alone does everything. The oldest statements of this sort are reserved for the quotations to be given below from his Commentary on Romans. We give, however, a few of his later utterances to this effect. They prove that the crass denial of man’s doing anything good continued to characterise him in later life as much as earlier.

Seen in the light of such passages, it becomes clear that the following must not be taken as a mere expression of humility, but as a deprecation of good deeds. Already, in 1519, Luther says: “Man, like a cripple with disabled hands and feet, must invoke grace as the artisan of works (‘operum artificem’).”[375] The difficulty is that this very invocation is itself a vital, though surely not a sinful, action. Would not a man have been justified in saying even of this preliminary act: I will wait, I may not begin? “Luther was scarcely acquainted with the doctrine of a wholesome Scholasticism and with that of the Church concerning the mysterious reciprocal action of grace and free will in man. He was qualified to oppose the Occamist teaching, but was incapable of replacing it by the true doctrine.”[376]

By “grace,” here and elsewhere, he means the state of justifying grace. Whereas true Scholasticism recognises actual grace, which assists man even before justification, this is as good as excluded by Luther already in the beginning of his theological change. Why? Partly because he cannot make use of it as he refers everything to justifying faith, partly because the Occamists, his masters, erroneously reduced the particular influence of God almost entirely to sanctifying grace, and neglected or denied actual grace.

In the latter respect we perceive one of the positive effects of Occamism on Luther. This leads us to another aspect of the present theme.

3. Positive Influence of Occamism

We have so far been considering the precipitate and excessive antagonism shown at an early date by Luther towards the school of Occam, especially towards its anthropological doctrines; we have also noted its influence on his new heretical principles, particularly on his denial of man’s natural ability for good. Now we must turn our attention to the positive influence of the Occamist teaching upon his new line of thought, for Luther’s errors are to be ascribed not only to the negative, but also to the positive effects of his school.

His principal dogma, that of justification, must first be taken into consideration.

This he drew up entirely on the lines of a scheme handed down to him by his school. It is no uncommon thing to see even the most independent and active minds tearing themselves away from a traditional train of thought in one particular, and yet continuing in another to pursue the accustomed course, so great is the power which a custom acquired at school possesses over the intellect. The similarity existing between Luther’s and Occam’s doctrine of the imputation of righteousness is quite remarkable. Occam had held it, at least as possible, that a righteousness existed which was merely imputed; at any rate, it was only because God so willed it that sanctifying grace was necessary in the present order of things. He and his school had, as a matter of fact, no clear perception of the supernatural habit as a supernatural principle of life in the soul. According to the Occamist Peter d’Ailly, whom Luther repeatedly quotes in his notes on Peter Lombard, reason cannot be convinced of the necessity of the supernatural habit; all that this is supposed to do can be done equally well by a naturally acquired habit; an unworthy man might be found worthy of eternal life without any actual change taking place in him; only owing to an acceptation on God’s part (“a sola divina acceptatione”) does the soul become worthy of eternal life, not on account of any created cause (therefore not on account of love and grace).[380] “The whole work of salvation here becomes external; it is mechanical, not organic.”[381]

If Luther, in consequence of his study of these Occamist doctrines, fell into error regarding the supernatural, the consequences were even worse when, with his head full of such Occamistic ideas, he proceeded to expound the most difficult of the Pauline Epistles, with their dim and mysterious handling of grace, and, at the same time, to ponder on the writings of St. Augustine,[382] that deep-thinking Doctor of grace. Such studies could only breed fresh confusion in his mind.

The result was as follows: regarding imputation, i.e. one of the foundations of his theology, Luther quotes Occam in such a way as to represent him as teaching as a fact what he merely held to be possible. He declares sanctifying grace to be not merely superfluous, but also non-existent, and erects the theory of Divine acceptation into a dogma. This alone would be sufficient to demonstrate his positive dependence on Occamism.

The theories of acceptation, which were peculiar to the Occamists and which Luther took over—though what they called by this name he prefers to call imputation—had not only met with approval, but had also been widely applied by this school.

We shall see how in the case of justification he regards faith, and then his particular “faith only” as the one factor, not, however, the faith which is animated by charity, and this because, with the Occamists, he rejects all supernatural habits. He extols the value of faith on every occasion at the expense of the other virtues.[386]

The positive influence of Occam on Luther is also to be traced in the domain of faith and knowledge. Luther imagines he is fortifying faith by laying stress on its supposed opposition to reason, a tendency which is manifest already in his Commentary on Romans. In this Occam and his school were his models.

Such were the minds that inspired Luther at the time when he was already making for a theological goal different from that of the “rationalists,” wise ones of this world, and loquacious wiseacres, as he calls all the Scholastics indiscriminately in his Commentary on Romans. Wherever theology has made a right and moderate use of philosophical proofs, philosophy has always shown itself as the ancilla theologiÆ, and has been of assistance in theological development. After expelling reason from the domain of supernatural knowledge Luther was forced to fall back on feeling and inward experience, i.e. on elements, which, owing to their inconstancy and variability, did not deserve the place he gave them. This was as harmful to faith as the denial of the rights of reason.

Gerson had lamented, concerning the misuse of philosophical criticism in religious matters, that the methods of the Nominalists made faith grow cold,[394] and it may be that Luther had experienced these effects in himself, since, in his lectures on the Psalms, he acknowledges and regrets the cooling of his life of faith.[395] But, surely, in the same way the predominance of feeling and so-called religious experience was also to be regretted, as it crippled faith and deprived it of a sure guide.

Staupitz spoke from feeling and not from a clear perception of facts when, in his admiration, he praised Luther as exalting Christ and His grace. He applauded Luther, as the latter says “at the outset of his career”: “This pleases me in your teaching, that it gives honour and all to God alone and nothing to man. We cannot ascribe to God sufficient honour and goodness, etc.”[396] Staupitz sought for enlightenment in a certain mysticism akin to Quietism, instead of in real Scholasticism. On such mystic by-ways Luther was sure to fall in with him, and, as a matter of fact, from the point of view of a false mysticism, Luther was to denounce “rationalising wisdom” and to speak in favour of religious feeling even more strongly than he had done before.

Under the influence of both these elements, a quietistic mysticism and an antagonism to reason in matters of faith, his scorn for all natural works grew. This made it easier for him to regard the natural order of human powers as having been completely upset by original sin. More and more he comes to recognise only an appearance of natural virtues; to consider them as the poisonous blossoms of that unconquerable selfishness which lies ever on the watch in the heart of man, and is only to be gradually tamed by the justifying grace of God. The denial of all freedom, under the ban of sin, little by little becomes for him the principal thing, the “summa causa,” which, as he says in so many words, he has to defend.[397] Beside the debasement of reason and the false fancies of his mysticism, stood as a worthy companion the religion of the enslaved will; this we find present in his mind from the beginning, and at a later period it obtained a lasting monument in the work “De servo arbitrio,” which Luther regarded as the climax of his theology.[398]

But there are other connecting-links between Occamism and the errors of the young Monk.

According to Occam’s school the purely spiritual attributes of God cannot be logically proved; it does not consider it as proved merely by reason that God is the last and final end of man, and that outside of Him there is no real human happiness, nor even, according to Occam himself, that “any final cause exists on account of which all things happen”;[399] not only, according to him, must we be on our guard against any idea that reason can arrive at God as the origin of happiness and as the end of salvation, but even His attributes we must beware of examining philosophically. God’s outward action knows no law, but is purely arbitrary. Thus Occamism, with its theory of the arbitrary Divine Will, manifesting itself in the act of “acceptation” or imputation, was more likely to produce a servile feeling of dependence on God than any childlike relationship; with this corresponded the feeling of the utter worthlessness of man’s own works in relation to imputation, which, absolutely speaking, might have been other than it is.

It is highly probable that the bewildered soul of the young Augustinian greedily lent an ear to such ideas, and laboured to make them meet his own needs. The doubts as to predestination which tormented him were certainly not thereby diminished, but rather increased. How could the idea of an arbitrary God have been of any use to him? In all likelihood the apprehensiveness and obscurity which colours his idea of God, in the Commentary on Romans, was due to notions imbibed by him in his school. Luther was later on to express this conception in his teaching regarding the “Deus absconditus,” on whom, as the source of all predestination (even to hell), we may not look, and whom we may only timidly adore. Already in the Commentary referred to he teaches the absolute predestination to hell of those who are to be damned, a doctrine which no Occamist had yet ventured to put forward.

Among the other points of contact between Luther’s teaching and Occamism, or Nominalism, we may mention, as a striking example, his denial of Transubstantiation, which he expressly associates with one of the theses of the Occamist d’Ailly. Here his especial hatred of the school of St. Thomas comes out very glaringly.

Luther himself confesses later how the Occamist school had led him to this denial.[400] When studying scholastic theology he had read in d’Ailly that the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament of the Altar would be much more comprehensible could we but assume that He was present with the bread, i.e. without any change of substance, but that this was impossible owing to the unassailable contrary teaching of the Church on Transubstantiation. The same idea is found in Occam, but of this Luther was unaware. Luther criticises d’Ailly’s appeal to the Church, and then proceeds: “I found out later on what sort of Church it is which sets up such a doctrine; it is the Thomistic, the Aristotelian. My discovery made me bolder, and therefore I decided for Consubstantiation. The opinions of the Thomists, even though approved by Pope or Council, remain opinions and do not become articles of faith, though an angel from heaven should say the contrary; what is asserted apart from Scripture and without manifest revelation, cannot be believed.”[401] Yet in point of fact the term “Transsubstantiatio” had been first used in a definition by the Œcumenical Lateran Council of 1215 to express the ancient teaching of the Church regarding the change of substance. According to what Luther here says, St. Thomas of Aquin (whose birth occurred some ten years later) was responsible for the introduction of the word and what it stood for, in other words for the doctrine itself. A little later Luther solemnly reaffirmed that “Transubstantiation is purely Thomistic” (1522).[402] “The Decretals settled the word, but there is no doubt that it was introduced into the Church by those coarse blockheads the Thomists” (1541).[403] Hence either he did not know of the Council or its date, or he did not know when St. Thomas wrote; in any case he was ignorant of the relation in which the teaching of St. Thomas on this point stood to the teaching of earlier ages. He was unaware of the historical fact of the general adoption of the term since the end of the eleventh century;[404] he was not acquainted with the theologians who taught in the interval between the Lateran Council and St. Thomas, and who used both the name and the idea of Transubstantiation, and among whom were Albertus Magnus and Alexander of Hales; he cannot even have noted the title of the Decretal from which he derived the knowledge of the existence of the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages, for it is headed: “Innocentius tertius in concilio generali.”

That he should have made St. Thomas responsible for the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and that so rudely, appears to be a result of his ever-increasing hatred for Aquinas. In the first period of his change of view, his opposition was to the Scholastics in general, but from 1518 onwards his assaults are on St. Thomas and the Thomists. Why was this? A Thomist, Prierias of Rome, was the author of the first pamphlet against him; another Thomist, Cardinal Cajetan, had summoned him to appear before his tribunal; both belonged to the Dominican Order, in which Thomas, the great Dominican Saint, was most enthusiastically studied. Tetzel, too, was a Dominican and a Thomist. Any examination of Luther’s development cannot but pay attention to this circumstance, though it is true it does not belong to his earliest period. It makes many of the outbreaks of anger to which he gave way later more comprehensible. In 1522 Luther pours out his ire on the “asinine coarseness of the Thomists,” on “the Thomist hogs and donkeys,” on the “stupid audacity and thickheadedness of the Thomists,” who “have neither judgment, nor insight, nor industry in their whole body.”[405] His theology, we may remark, largely owed its growth to this quarrel and the contradiction it called forth.

Luther’s tendency to controversial theology and his very manner of proceeding, in itself far less positive than negative, bore the Occamist stamp. It is true he was predisposed this way by nature, yet the criticism of the nominalistic school, the acuteness and questioning attitude of Occam and d’Ailly, lent an additional impulse to his putting forth like efforts. We shall not be mistaken in assuming that his doctrinal arbitrariness was, to a certain extent at least, a result of the atmosphere of decadent theology in which his lot had been cast. The paradoxes to which he so frequently descends are manifestly modelled on the antilogies with which Occam’s works abound; like Occam, he frequently leaves the reader in doubt as to his meaning, or speaks later in quite a different way from what he did before. Occam’s garrulity was, so it would appear, infectious. Luther himself, while praising his acuteness, blames Occam for the long amplifications to which he was addicted.[406] On more than one occasion Luther reproaches himself for his discursiveness and superabundance of rhetoric. Even the Commentaries he wrote in his youth on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans prove to the reader that his self-reproof was well deserved, whilst the second Commentary also manifests that spirit of criticism and arbitrariness, bold to overstep the barriers of the traditional teaching of the Church, which he had likewise received from his Occamist masters.

Various attempts have been made to point out other theological influences, besides those considered above, as having worked upon Luther in his earlier years.

It would carry us too far to discuss these opinions individually, the more so that there are scarcely sufficient data to hand to lead to a decision. Luther himself, who should be the principal witness, is very reticent concerning the authors and the opinions he made use of in forming his own ideas. He would rather give the impression that everything had grown up spontaneously from his own thought and research; that his teaching sprang into being from himself alone without the concurrence of outsiders, like Minerva from the head of Jupiter. He assumes to himself with the utmost emphasis the precedence in the discovery of the Gospel, for instance, against rivals such as Carlstadt and Zwingli; he alone had read his Bible, and Carlstadt was quite unacquainted with it; he only, with illumination from above, had discovered everything.

As we find in his writings so few allusions to outside influences—save to that of Occamism—it does not appear worth while to philosophise as to whether he had, or had not, been touched by the Gallicanism which was in the air. It is very doubtful whether he, in the comparative seclusion of his little world of Erfurt and Wittenberg, came to any extent under this influence, especially as his studies were so cursory and brief and confined within such narrow limits. The Gallican tendencies did not find in Germany anything like so fruitful a soil as in France. It is true that Luther soon after his change of opinions was capable of rivalling any Paris professor of Gallican sympathies in his depreciation of the Holy See. Hence though no immediate influence on Luther can be allowed to Gallicanism, yet the fact remains that the prevalent anti-Roman tendencies greatly contributed to the wide acceptance of the Lutheran schism in Germany, and even beyond its borders.

Again, that Luther, as has been asserted, after having tasted the food provided by Nominalism, was so disgusted as to rush to the opposite extreme in Scholasticism, making his own the very worst elements of realism, both philosophical and theological, seems to rest on fancy rather than on facts. We may likewise refuse to see in Wiclifism, with which Luther was acquainted only through the Constance Theses, any element of inspiration, and also shake our heads when some Protestants, at the other extreme, try to show that the Doctors of the Church, St. Augustine and St. Bernard, were really the parties responsible for Luther’s turning his back on the doctrines of the Church.

On the other hand, the influence of mysticism, with which we have now to deal, deserves much more attention. It cannot be denied that a very considerable part in the development of his new ideas was played by mysticism; already at an early date the mystic spirit which Augustine’s works owed to their writer’s Platonic studies, had attracted Luther without, however, making him a Neo-Platonist.[407] During the time of his mental growth he was likewise warmly attached to German mysticism. Yet, here again, it is an exaggeration, as we can already see, to state as some non-Catholics do that Luther, “as the theologian of the Reformation,” was merely “a disciple of Tauler and the Frankfort author of the German Theology,” or that “it was only through meeting with the Frankfort theologian that he was changed from a despairing swimmer struggling in the billows of a gloomy sea into a great reformer.”

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