  LUTHER’S PROGRESS IN THE NEW TEACHING 1. The Second Stage of his development. Assurance of SalvationTwo elements were still wanting to Luther’s teaching—the very two which, at a later date and till the end of his life, he regarded as the corner-stone of the truth which he had discovered—viz. Faith alone as the means of justification, and the assurance of Divine favour, which was its outcome. Both these elements are most closely connected, and go to make up the Lutheran doctrine of the appropriation of salvation, or personal certainty of faith. In accordance therewith justifying faith includes not only a belief in Christ as the Saviour; I must not merely believe that He will save and sanctify me if I turn to Him with humility and confidence—this the Church had ever taught—but I must also have entire faith in my justification, and rest assured, that without any work whatsoever on my part and solely by means of such a faith, all the demands made upon me are fulfilled, the merits of Christ appropriated, and my remaining sins not imputed to me; such is personal assurance of salvation by faith alone. The teaching of the Catholic Church, we may remind our readers, never recognised in its exhortation to faith and confidence in God, the existence of this “faith alone” which justifies without further ado, nor did it require that of necessity there must be a special faith in one’s state of salvation. In place of faith alone the Church taught what the Council of Trent thus sums up: “We are said to be justified by faith because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justification, without which it is impossible to please God and reach the blessed company of His children.” And instead of setting up a special faith in our own state Such was the doctrine which Luther had learnt in his early days as a monk; it animated his youthful zeal for the religious life and did not interfere with his contented and happy frame of mind, as expressed in the letter of invitation to his first Mass and his conversations with Usingen. Luther, after forsaking the Catholic standpoint, had hitherto been tormented by anxiety as to how we can be assured of the Grace of God. Having left the secure footing of the Church’s views on nature, grace and predestination, he was now in search of a certainty even more absolute. His Commentary on Romans had concluded with the anxious question: “Who will give me the assurance that I am pleasing God by my works?” As yet he can give no other answer than that, “we must call upon God’s grace with fear and trembling and seek to render Him gracious to us by humility and self-annihilation, because all depends upon His arbitrary Will (above, p. 217 ff.). In these lectures, In the act of resignation he perceived various signs of predestination. He says in the Commentary on Romans: “There are three degrees in the signs of predestination. Some are content with God’s Will, but are confident they are among the elect and do not wish to be damned. Others, who stand on a higher level, are resigned and contented with God’s Will, or at least wish to be so, even though God should not choose to save them but to place them amongst the lost. The third, i.e. the last and highest degree, is to be resigned in very deed to hell if such be the Will of God, which is perhaps the case with many at the hour of death. In this way we become altogether purified from self-will and the wisdom of the flesh.” “Terrible pride prevails among the hypocrites and men of the law, who, because they believe in Christ, think themselves already saved and sufficiently righteous,” these claim to attain to grace and the Divine Sonship “by faith alone” (“ex fide tantum”), “as though we were saved by Christ without the performance of any works or acts of our own” (“sic ut ipsi nihil operentur, nihil exhibeant de fide”). Such men possess too much faith, or rather none at all. While he was thus wavering between reminiscences of the Catholic teaching and his own pseudo-mystical ideas on justification and imputation, his mind must indeed have been in a state of incessant agitation, so that uneasiness and fear became his natural element. “As we are unable to keep God’s commandments and are therefore always unrighteous, there remains nothing for us but to be in constant fear of the Judgment (‘ut iudicium semper timeamus’), and to pray for pardon, or rather for the non-imputing of our unrighteousness.” “We are to rejoice, according to the Psalmist (ii. 11), before God on account of His Mercy, but with trembling on account of the sin which deserves His Judgment.” In 1525 he wrote: To leave man no free will for what is good and to make him altogether dependent on God’s predestination “seems, it is true, cruel and intolerable; countless of the greatest minds of previous ages have taken offence at this. And who, indeed, is there whom the idea does not offend? I myself have more than once been greatly scandalised at it and plunged into an abyss of despair so that I wished I had never been created. But then I learned how wholesome despair is and how close it lies to grace.” This he “learned,” or thought he learned, through his doctrine of assurance of salvation through faith. “The forgiveness offered us by God in His Word” (if we may here anticipate his later teaching), became for him a definite object of sanctifying and saving faith, to the extent that faith came to be identical in his eyes with fiducia. Faith is, as he says, “a real heartfelt confidence in Christ.” Fiducial faith, with its assurance of salvation was the way which Luther discovered out of all his troubles about two years after the termination of his Commentary on Romans, in 1518, or the beginning of 1519. This discovery is a remarkable event, which stands alone, and with which we must concern ourselves after first examining what led up to it. From the place where it was made, viz. the tower belonging to the monastery, it might be styled the Tower Experience. The incident remained imbedded in Luther’s mind till his old age; he frequently alludes to it, and though in some of its details his memory did not serve him aright and his apprehension of it may have been somewhat modified by party prejudice, yet the main elements of the story appear to be historically quite credible. He fixes not merely the What is indirectly no less certain, from the unanimity of the testimonies, and from the course of his development as vouched for by his writings, is that the discovery in question was really that of the assurance of salvation. The various opinions which have been expressed on the account of the event given by Luther (see below, p. 388 ff.) in 1545, and the numerous attempts which have been made to fix a date for the same, render it necessary to trace chronologically the development of the doctrine of faith and salvation in Luther’s mind till the year 1519. We shall see that his statement as to the time when the event took place (1518-19) not only presents no difficulty, but that such a termination to his experiences was naturally to be expected. Prior to 1518-19 the absolute assurance of salvation which appears afterwards is nowhere distinctly expressed in Luther’s doctrine on faith and salvation. Passages to the contrary, which have been quoted from the imprinted lectures on Hebrews delivered previous to the autumn of 1517, need not be interpreted in the sense of fiducial faith and assurance of salvation. They refer rather indistinctly to the effects of faith without the works which Luther had now come to detest, and attack “self-righteousness,” as in the Commentary on Romans (“sola fides ... quÆ non nititur operibus illis [orationibus et prÆparatoriis”]). They only hint vaguely at the road he will follow later. Again, in the Indulgence theses of October 31, 1517, directed against Tetzel, the assurance of salvation is not expressed, and we find a recommendation “to trust rather to enter heaven by Neither do the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation in April, 1518, contain the assurance of salvation, although theses 25-8 touch upon justification and, as against the law, extol the great effects of the faith which Christ works in us. On the other hand, the Resolutions to the Indulgence theses which appeared shortly after (1518) treat to a certain extent of the subject and attempt to give a solution. Because the man who is justified is still “without peace and consolation,” not trusting his own judgment, he begs the priest for comfort in Confession. “He is led to cling to the judgment of another not because he is a spiritual superior, or because he possesses any power, but on account of the words of Christ Who cannot lie: ‘Whatsoever thou shalt loose,’ etc. Faith in these Such words of gratitude do not disguise the fact, that the sacrament of penance is stripped of its meaning by the assurance, that “the remission of guilt takes place by the infusion of grace before the priest has given absolution.” Above all it is plain we have not yet here that assurance of salvation, as Luther held it at a later date: “Whoever seeks peace in another way [than through the absolution of the priest],” he says in the same passage, “say, by his own inward experience, appears to be tempting God, and not seeking peace by faith.” With this denial of the validity of personal inward experience (“experientia intus”) he brushes aside an element which, scarcely a year later, he represents as essential. He says still more definitely: “The remission of guilt is not assured to us, as a general rule, except by the sentence of the priest, and not even by him unless we believe Christ’s promise with regard to loosing. But so long as we are not certain of the remission it is no remission.” “As the infusion of grace is hidden under the appearance of anger, man is still more uncertain of grace when it is present than when it is absent.” That Luther could rest satisfied with so shadowy and insufficient a conception can only be attributed to his state of mind at the time. He lays great stress on absolution in the Disputation of the year 1518 “For the calming of troubled consciences” (above, p. 319). His state of uncertainty with regard to the appropriation of salvation caused Luther great disquietude. Other circumstances, particularly his feverish excitement at the outset of his public struggle, also contributed towards his inward unrest. The morbid fear of which he had never rid himself was also powerfully stirred. The supreme degree of this painful torment of soul may be gathered from the description he gives in the Resolutions. In this work, which appeared in August, 1518, in dealing with the 15th Indulgence thesis, he tries to prove that the punishment of Purgatory may be made up merely by fear and terror. Many of those living even now, he says, had experienced how high the flood of such interior sufferings can rise and how close they bring a man to despair. He would not quarrel with any who did not believe this, but those who had been through such trials were in a position to speak of them. Tauler treated of such pains in his German sermons and brought forward some examples; of course, to the Scholastics Tauler was unknown; they did not appreciate him, but he had found more real theology in this theologian who wrote in German than “among the whole of the Scholastics of all the universities.” He then proceeds, beginning with the very formula with which Paul introduces the account of his raptures: “I know a man” (Novi hominem), to describe the mystical interior sufferings which he had “frequently” experienced; though they had never persisted long, they were so “hellish,” that whoever had not undergone them himself was quite unable to speak of them. Had this consuming fire lasted only for the tenth part of an hour all a man’s bones were reduced to ashes. “God then appears to be horribly angered and with Him all creation. There is no possibility of flight, no comfort whether within or without, only a hollow accusing voice. The soul laments, according to the words of Scripture: ‘Lord I am cast away from Thy face,’ she dares not even say: ‘Chastise me not in Thy wrath.’ At this moment—inexplicable as it is—the soul is unable even to believe in its possible liberation, but only feels that the punishment is not at an end. It appears everlasting and unceasing. The soul finds nothing in its whole being but a bare longing for The above so strange and fantastic description incorporated in a Latin work written for the learned, in the interests of Luther’s psychology, calls for further consideration. Particular stress must here be laid on the false mysticism in which Luther was then entangled, and his free use of the fanciful language of certain of the mystics. Luther’s states had, however, nothing in common with those described in somewhat similar words by the healthier mystics, viz. the sore trial of the Mount of Olives through which the soul passes owing to the complete withdrawal of consolation. He, however, imagines he sees himself portrayed not only in such descriptions of the mystics, but also in mystical passages in the Psalms over which, at this time of change, he was fond of brooding. David’s cries ring in his ears; his experience of the hell in which the soul must dwell, of the life which draws nigh to hell, of the bones which are banished to the gate of hell, of the sinking into a dark sea, into the bowels of the earth under the heaped-up weight of endless misery. It must also be borne in mind that the Monk, with his pseudo-mystical ideas, cherished a gloomy conception of God, and held the terrible doctrine of the absolute predestination of the damned. Having wandered away from the Catholic teaching, with his views on man’s lack of free will, and the theory of arbitrary imputation by God, he found no answer in his troubled conscience to the question which weighed him down, namely, how to arrive at the assurance of a Gracious God. Confusion and interior pangs of conscience for a while gained the upper hand. Lastly, his peculiar morbid tendency to fear must also be taken into account, for it afforded an opportunity to the Tempter to add to his confusion by raising difficulties regarding the deficiencies of his new, self-chosen theology. Adolph Hausrath in his Life of Luther even speaks of periodical mental disturbances from which he suffered during the time he was a monk; the disturbing power inherent in the monastic practices, so he says, took possession of his sensitive nature with its strong feelings; Luther only escaped the danger of going mad by bravely bursting the fetters of the monastic Rule and the Popish Faith. In the strong inward combats which Luther endured at a later date Hausrath recognises a return of this affliction. In his second edition he has toned down this view of Luther’s periodical attacks of mental illness out of regard for the objections which had, not without reason, been urged against his statement. In Luther’s case, however, there is no reason for assuming any “monkish mental disease,” nor can he be proved to have suffered from any disturbance whatever of his mental functions at any time of his life. At any rate, the fundamental new dogma of the assurance of salvation was not the product of a clear, quiet, calm atmosphere of soul. It was born amidst unbearable inward mental confusion, and was a frantic attempt at self-pacification It is of interest and helps us to reach a right understanding of the Tower Experience, to follow the change of view regarding assurance of salvation which is apparent in Luther’s statements and writings in the latter months of 1518 and beginning of 1519. At the time when, in October, 1518, Luther, a prey to other anxieties, stood before Cardinal Cajetan at Augsburg, he was already making great strides towards the new and consoling dogma of faith alone, moved thereto by indignation at the censure which one of his propositions had called forth. He says to Cardinal Cajetan in his explanation of the second of the assertions which he was required to withdraw, that it was incorrect to speak of it as “a new and false theology that no one can be justified except by faith, and that it is necessary to hold it as certain in faith that one is justified, and not in any way to doubt the obtaining of grace, because whoever doubts or is uncertain is no longer justified, but is rejecting grace.” He attempts to prove this first as regards Confession. The principal thing is to believe the words of Christ: “Whatsoever thou shalt loose,” etc., i.e. by applying the words to oneself; “under pain of eternal damnation and to avoid committing a sin of unbelief,” it is necessary to believe this; this faith is the only disposition for the sacrament and no work whatever serves as a preparation. What is remarkable is, however, that, during his trial at Augsburg, he allows Confession and Absolution to recede further The appeal he made to a General Council in November and his “conjecture” of December, 1518, that the Pope might be Antichrist, We may well ask what event, what development, had led up to this. Salvation by faith alone and the absolute assurance of one’s state of grace, were taught by Luther quite openly in the second course of lectures on the Psalms, which he had commenced in 1518 (perhaps at the end of the year), and the beginning of which he published in 1519 with a preface addressed to the Elector Frederick, dated March 27, 1519 (see above, p. 285). This was the “Operationes in Psalmos,” upon the publication of which he was engaged until 1521, and which was finally left unfinished. This work he, even at a later date, described as an entirely true exposition of his actual teaching on justification. Other lectures, delivered at an earlier period, received no such praise from him; on the contrary, he never took the trouble of having them printed, and does not even mention them. Although the Commentary on Romans, which we have already studied, had advanced a considerable distance along the new lines of thought, nevertheless, at a later date its tone appeared too Catholic to please him; it did not contain the new creed “Credo me esse salvum.” The same is true of the earlier course on the Psalms, of the lectures on Galatians, on Hebrews and on the Epistle to Titus. Luther, as a rule, was very ready to have his writings printed, but these, after he had entered upon the second stage of his development, he plainly looked upon as unripe and incomplete. Simultaneously with the printing of the new Commentary on the Psalms he commenced that of another Commentary, also consisting of lectures. This is the shorter of the two works on Galatians which he has left us in print (above, p. 306 f.). This Commentary on Galatians, together with the “Operationes in Psalmos” is the earliest witness to his new and definitive conception of sola fides as an entire confidence in one’s justification. To these must be added the almost contemporary “Sermo de triplici iustitia” delivered towards the end of 1518, and the “Sermo de duplici iustitia” dating from the commencement of 1519. The righteousness of Christ, he says in the sermon on the threefold righteousness In the sermon on the twofold righteousness one of the first quotations from the Bible on which the same idea is based and yet more strongly expressed is again Romans i. 17: “The justice of God is revealed in the gospel,” etc. His teaching, even then, was against the law. According to him, says Loofs, “the law, even as ‘explained’ in the New Testament, which renders assurance of salvation possible only after the fulfilment of demands impossible to the natural man, At these fundamental views regarding the appropriation of salvation, or righteousness by faith, Luther had accordingly already arrived in 1518-19 when engaged on his second exposition of the Psalms. 2. The Discovery in the Monastery Tower (1518-19)Luther describes, in an important passage of the Preface to the Latin edition of his works in 1545, how he finally arrived at his ideas of faith and the assurance of salvation. The reader is at once struck by what Luther relates of the gloom and confusion of his mind previous to the discovery in the tower. In the preface, he says: “The passage, Romans i., ‘The Justice of God is revealed in the Gospel,’ had, till then, been an obstacle to me. For I hated the words In his Table-Talk, as reported by Heydenreich, he says in the winter of 1542-43 in a quite similar way: “These words were always in my mind. Wherever the ‘Justice of God’ occurs in Scripture I was only able to understand this to mean the justice by which He Himself is just and judges according to justice.... I stood there and knocked for someone to open to me, but no one came to undo the door; I did not know what to make of it.... Before finding the solution I shuddered with horror, I hated the Psalms and the Scripture where the justice of God occurs, which I took to mean that He was just and the Judge of sinners, but not that He was our Justification and our imputed righteousness.” “The whole of Scripture stood like a wall in front of me.” “As often as I read that the Justice of God was revealed in the Gospel,” he says in his Commentary on Genesis, “I wished that God had never revealed the Gospel, for who could love an angry God Who judges and condemns?” “This word Justice,” he says in another Commentary in 1532, “cost me much sweat (‘magno sudore mihi constitit’). To interpret this as though it meant the justice according to which God damns the wicked is not merely unfounded but very dangerous; it awakens in the heart great hatred of God and His Justice; for who can love Him Who treats the sinner according to justice? That in truth it “cost him much sweat” before he was able to overcome the objections suggested by the justice of God itself, is proved by other and stronger allusions of Luther to the interior storms he underwent at this crisis. We refer to other statements in which, as above, he is speaking of Bible passages containing the expression Justice of God. Thus for instance: “The words just and Justice of God were like a lightning-flash in my conscience (‘fulmen in conscientia’); when I heard them, they at once filled me with terror. I thought God is Just and therefore He punishes.” Here we may mention some statements, which, though they belong to his later, fictitious portrayal of his spiritual development, “We fled from Christ,” he says in one of these remarkable passages, “as from the devil; for we were taught that everyone must appear before the Judgment-seat of Christ with his works and orders.... The Gospel tells us that Christ does not come as a Judge but as a Saviour; but the monks taught the contrary, namely, that He was to be our Judge.” He had often, he assures us, been forced to say: “I wish there were no God,” It was “simple idolatry, for I did not believe in Christ but It was a “great martyrdom and bondage from which the gospel set us free”; “I was the most wretched man on earth; day and night there was nothing but howling and despair which no one was able to put an end to for me. Thus I was bathed and baptised and properly sweated in my monkery. Thanks be to God that I did not sweat myself to death, otherwise I should have long ago been in the depths of hell with my monkish baptism. For I knew Christ only as a stern Judge from Whom I wished to escape and was unable to do so.... Thus have they tortured many a worthy soul throughout life and at last thrown him in despair into the infernal abyss.” “In this way I raged (‘Ita furebam’),” Luther continues in the Latin Preface where he speaks of his sudden discovery, “and my conscience caused me terror and confusion; I knocked imploringly at the verse of Paul (Rom. i. 17) with a burning thirst to know what it meant.” He now describes the actual inward experience. “At last, while brooding day and night, by the mercy of God I noticed the connection between the words: the Justice of God is revealed therein [in the gospel], as it is written, ‘The just man liveth by faith.’ Then I began to understand the Justice of God as that by which the just man lives by the gift of God, viz. by faith; [I saw that] the sense is this: ‘By the gospel, justice, i.e. the passive justice of God, is revealed by which the merciful God justifies by faith, as it is written: ‘The just man liveth by faith.’ Then I felt myself born again and fancied I had passed through the gates of Paradise. The whole of Scripture thereupon appeared to me in quite a different light. I ran rapidly through the passages in question as they lived in my memory and compared them with other expressions, such as: ‘Work of God,’ i.e. the work which God carries on in us; ‘Power of God,’ by which He makes us strong; ‘Wisdom of God,’ by which He makes us wise; likewise the ‘Strength of God,’ ‘Salvation of God,’ and ‘Honour of God.’ Then I extolled that sweetest word, Justice, with as much love as I had previously hated it, and this Luther, it is true, does not speak here of the monastery tower as the scene of his experience, but this is described quite plainly in his other statements given below. In these the privy situated above the “Hypocaustum” is mentioned as the place where the discovery took place. They at the same time complete and confirm the account given in the Preface of the antecedents of this new enlightenment, i.e. the immediately preceding terrors of God’s avenging justice, the time it happened, viz. when Luther was engaged on the Psalms, and finally, the subject-matter of the experience. The accounts from Luther’s own lips must here be considered collectively. Not only do they correspond exactly with Luther’s condition of mind, as described above, but also, according to the chronological account already given of the development of his teaching, with the time he recommenced his work on the Psalms, 1518-19, which period Luther expressly mentions in the Preface as the date of the incident. In what follows Luther’s other testimonies to the same effect as that contained in the Preface, will be duly brought forward and their peculiarities noted. The first testimony is to be found in Johann Schlaginhaufen’s notes and speaks of the fears which the thought of God’s avenging justice habitually caused Luther and from which the discovery delivered him. The fear of the Divine Justice also appears in the foreground in the account of the incident in Luther’s Table-Talk in September, 1540, as preserved by Johann Mathesius. The notes on Luther’s Table-Talk made by his friend Master Caspar Heydenreich, dating from the winter 1542-43, and edited by Kroker in 1903 from the collection of Mathesius, must also be considered. Mathesius records them under the descriptive title: “Evangelii occasio renascentis per Doctorem.” He plainly thought, agreeably with Luther’s own opinion and that of his pupils, that the enlightenment he had received on the text “The just man liveth by faith” was the most important, or at least one of the most important causes of “the new birth of the Gospel through the Doctor”—Luther. And, as a matter of fact, Luther’s conviction, which was shared by his pupils, that this saving interpretation had been infused by the Holy Spirit, sufficiently explains why so much stress should be laid on this incident, and also why the recipient of the said illumination so frequently recurs to it. Under the above title we find Heydenreich’s lengthy account, taken from Luther’s own lips, which agrees entirely with the statements of the Preface and, in particular, dwells on Luther’s In several of the accounts the Psalms are represented as the primary cause of the struggles that went on in Luther’s soul, and the correct comprehension of them as one of the first fruits of his new discernment. Then “I first relished the Psalter,” Luther says in Mathesius’s account, and in Heydenreich’s notes he declares: “Whereas I formerly hated the Psalms and the Scripture where mention was made of the Justice of God, the way was now clear to me when I read in the Psalms: ‘Deliver me in Thy Justice’ and ‘Deliver me in Thy mercy,’” for God’s mercy, by which He justifies us with His grace, had, from that time onward, come to mean the same to him as “the righteousness of God.” In Anton Lauterbach’s Diary of 1538 two passages from the Psalms are likewise quoted as the cause of Luther’s trouble of conscience, Another passage in the Psalms which caused him trouble is quoted by Luther when referring to the event in his Commentary on Psalm l. (li.), which he wrote in 1532: “Exsultabit lingua mea iustitiam tuam” (verse 16); as the biblical view of Justice had been obscured in his mind and in that of all, he had been unable to understand how it was possible to praise the avenging Justice in the Psalms. Thus, there is no doubt that the Psalms were the actual occasion of his discovery and his statement in the Preface of 1545 with regard to the time it occurred is thereby confirmed. Luther’s pupil, Conrad Cordatus, in recording the matter in his diary is quite right in emphasising, in Luther’s own words, that the knowledge gained by the incident was: “Ergo ex fide est iustitia et ex iustitia vita”; In the reference made to the event in the Commentary on Genesis (1540), the fact that the just man lives by faith is also placed in the foreground, and in this case we may safely rely on the Commentary though it was not printed till after Luther’s death. Luther’s utterances so far have referred more to the inward occasion, to the time and the subject-matter of the experience from which the dogma of absolute assurance of In Lauterbach’s “Colloquia” (ed. by Bindseil) the account commences with the words: “By the grace of God while thinking on one occasion on this tower [he seems to be pointing with his finger to the very spot] and hypocaustum, over those words: Iustus ex fide vivit ... the Holy Ghost revealed the Scripture to me in this tower.” The mention of the cloaca explains the entry of Johann Schlaginhaufen in his notes of Luther’s own words in 1532: “This art the Spiritus sanctus infused into me in this Cl.” We know from Luther’s letters that there was a question in 1519 of allotting some other place outside the walls to the previously existing privy, or of rebuilding it. In the name of the community, Luther, in the middle of May, 1519, requested the Elector for permission to erect a “necessary building outside the walls on the moat,” because the “gentlemen of the Wittenberg Council” delayed giving their sanction. We must, therefore, represent the scene of the discovery as the secret chamber, which Luther expressly mentions, situated in a tower on the walls, probably on the eastern flank of the monastery. Constructed against the outer side of the tower, it probably projected over the moat, and, below, or in front of it, was the so-called hypocaustum. As regards the revelation mentioned in the above passages, it is certain that Luther always traced back the knowledge so acquired to a special revelation, though not indeed to anything like a vision. Those verses on faith composed his “evangel,” and he always declared with regard to this “evangel” that his discovery, made at the cost of so much labour, had been accompanied by a “revelation of the Holy Ghost.” He speaks, for instance, of the time when he began to advocate his favourite doctrine as being the time of the “revelation of the evangel.” “Such self-reliance almost fills us with anxiety,” says Adolf Harnack, of the latter and other writings. “... We seek in vain in the whole history of the Church for examples of men who could write such letters as that to the Elector, and the writings which Luther composed on the Wartburg. I can quite understand how Catholic critics see in these letters a ‘delirious pride.’ There is no choice except to judge Luther thus or to recognise that his place was an entirely peculiar one in the history of the Christian religion.” Luther’s claim to special illumination must, as hinted before, be restricted to the domain of the aforesaid doctrine of assurance of salvation; the whole of his doctrine did not come to him from God, or at least only by way of the inspiration of the Spirit, which, according to his own statements to be afterwards considered, is common to all well-disposed Christians who make use of Holy Scripture. DÖllinger, also, says: This doctrine was the “only one which he really believed he had received by a special revelation of the Holy Ghost.” Here again we perceive the fundamental importance attaching to the assurance of salvation as the corner-stone of his development. Unconsciously he had been driven forward to this extremity. Protestants quite rightly have often pointed out that the decisive question for him was: “How can I, a mere single individual, be assured of the forgiveness of sins and thereby of the mercy of God?” “He ventured, The fact cannot be concealed, that in the above passages concerning the discovery on the tower, which for the most part date from a later period of Luther’s life, there is some obscurity and confusion as to the subject. He says first: the Justice of God, by which God (Christ) is Just, is taught in the New Law and is also indicated in the Psalms, and this Justice of God is reckoned to us as our Justice. Secondly, we lay hold upon it only by faith, and thus our life comes from faith (fiducial faith with assurance of salvation), of which fact we must be joyfully confident. Thirdly: The difficulty caused by the idea of God’s avenging Justice, which weighs down the soul, must therefore be fought against with determination. Of the first of these three elements Luther had made personal experience long before this time; its earliest expression is at the commencement of the Commentary on Romans, also in the well-known letter to Spenlein of April 7, 1516. He had therefore no right to speak of it as forming the subject of his newly acquired knowledge. The second element on the other hand was really new, and gave him the answer to the anxious question: How is the imputed Justice of God to become mine? Not by self-annihilation, not by humilitas, not by yearning prayer and other works which hitherto he had proposed as the means, but by faith only which had assured him of “regeneration,” of heavenly revelations, etc. Concerning the third element no more need be said here, however greedily he may have seized the semblance of comfort which The illusory talisman of absolute assurance of salvation was the result of the second stage of his development. 3. Legends. Storm SignalsOn looking back in later years upon the course of his spiritual progress in the monastery, Luther was unable to distinguish clearly between the various stages of his development. The incident in the tower, which had left the strongest impression on his memory, drew the first stage more and more into the foreground in his imagination, so that in his accounts he assigns to it an undue prominence to the disadvantage of the two others. Hence the want of clearness noticeable in his statements with regard to the same. We find not merely obscurity, but actual error, particularly in his account of the traditional interpretation and that which he had himself begun to advocate of the Iustitia Dei (Rom. i. 17). Luther is, in this matter, the originator of the great legend still current even in our own day, which represents him as a Columbus discovering therein the central truth set forth by Paul; no one had been able to find the key to the passage before his glance penetrated to the truth. All the learned men of earlier times had said that iustitia there meant the avenging Justice of an angry God. As a matter of fact, in Luther’s lectures on Genesis in 1540-41, “As a matter of fact, however, the exact opposite is the case: all the mediÆval doctors whom he studied as a monk, Peter Lombard, Lyra and Paul of Burgos, gave, as can be proved, the same interpretation as Augustine. Thus Luther was completely at sea as to the handling of this, to him most important, passage.” Luther himself, strange to say, at an earlier date and previous to the Tower incident, had repeatedly employed the correct interpretation. We can only suppose that it then made no impression on him, at any rate, no such impression as the incident on the Tower. He makes use of it with special reference to its older representatives, in the marginal notes to the Sentences of Peter Lombard, 1509-10, It is true that on these occasions he passes over the passage in the Epistle without displaying any particular interest, i.e. without laying on it the stress he does at a later date. Another difference is also noticeable. Luther has introduced since 1518 an entirely new idea, which he had not before, into In his accounts, says Loofs, “we have documentary proof of impaired memory.” “It is plain that Luther’s memory, in the course of years, and owing to his ‘odium papÆ,’ had, as we can well understand, become inaccurate with regard to pre-Reformation conditions.” Merely in order to throw light on the sequel of the great legend in our own times, we may here remark that it is difficult to understand the displeasure expressed by a modern Church historian and admirer of Luther, when some Protestants dared to agree with Denifle’s lengthy demonstration of the real exegetical history of Romans i. 17. An impartial theologian, amongst others, expressed himself as follows in a periodical: “Denifle has proved beyond a doubt that Luther was wrong when he asserted that the earlier doctors had almost without exception taken the iustitia Dei, Rom. i. 17, in the sense of the Divine anger.” The new discovery not only filled Luther with blind courage and defiant presumption in the defence of his previous teaching, but also lent a giant strength to his action as a reformer of ecclesiastical conditions against Rome’s abuses. He now begins to act as a spokesman of the nation and to constitute himself the leader of the already existing anti-Roman movement in Germany. He now persuades himself more strongly than ever that he is in possession of a truth which is to be suppressed by Italian trickery and imperiousness, if not by “poison and the dagger,” as was being planned in Italy. Rome had ravaged Scripture and the Church, her name should be Babylon: this (Apocalyptic) Beast, this Antichrist, must be exposed before the world, otherwise “It is only we Germans on whom the Empire descended, who have strengthened the power of the Popes so far as we could. For our punishment we have had to endure them as masters in cursing and abuse, and now as robbers also by means of pallium-fees and taxes on the bishoprics.” In the Preface to the Commentary on Galatians he sent forth a call to the Germans and their Princes, which anticipates his later pamphlet “To the Nobility of the German Nation,” in the same way as the ideas contained in his work on the Twofold Justice serve as a prelude to the booklet “On the Freedom of a Christian Man.” “Those godless windbags, Prierias, Cajetan and their fellows, abuse us as German clowns, simpletons, beasts, barbarians, and mock at the incredible patience with which we allow ourselves to be deceived and robbed. All praise therefore to the German Princes for recently [1518], at Augsburg, refusing the tenths, twentieths and fiftieths to the Roman Curia, notwithstanding that they knew the cursed Roman Council [5th of the Lateran] had sanctioned these taxes. They recognised that the Pope and the Council had erred ... that the legates of the Curia are only after gold and more gold. The example of these lay theologians is especially worthy of imitation.... It is a proof of greater piety when the Princes and other folk of any degree oppose the Curia than if they were to take up arms against the Turk.” As we shall see, it was not Ulrich von Hutten who first roused Luther to such language against Rome, and to the stirring up of a false patriotism. Hutten’s letters to him, and those of the other Humanists, are of later date, as also the congratulations and exhortations of the Humanist Crotus Rubeanus. It is a legend to attribute the raising of the standard of the Reformation principally to the Humanists and revolutionary knights. The fact that its origin may be traced back to 1521 does not make it one whit more credible historically. The air, in any case, was full of the anti-Roman spirit of revolt breathed by the Humanists and knights. The Wittenberg Monk had become acquainted with this spirit and found it sympathetic. How well it suited his purpose will be shown in the next chapter. The subversive doctrines which he had now at length fully developed in the quiet of his monastery held the first place among the factors which drove him onwards; in so far as these doctrines were in very truth his own production, born of his own heart and brain amid incredible anxieties and struggles, we may, nay must, say that it was a new and independent task which he undertook, and that his was the labour and his the results. What Luther with his subversive theology propounded from that time forward, what he, with his chief doctrine of justification by faith and the appropriation of salvation, began to set in the place of the old teaching, was “in no way the necessary product of the various factors which had assisted in his education, but rather something new, original and never before known, only to be accounted for by Luther’s own extraordinary genius.” END OF VOL. I. |
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