| #### 3. LUTHER |

| #### #### In no part of Europe was this flood of Christian life more turbulent than in Germany. Here indeed the waters were stormy, swirling over rocks scarcely hidden, and over deeps that no one suspected. Germany was tormented by its own special political problems: the fact of the hundreds of petty independent sovereigns who divided up the vast territories between the Meuse and the Vistula, and, its necessary consequence, the ceaseless ambitious rivalry of the half-dozen leading princely families to dominate the whole. In the countrysides there was the old social problem of an economy still based on serf labour; [ ] and in the towns the new social problem of a growing urban proletariat. In Germany, as in Italy and in the Low Countries, the new estate of the capitalist was rising rapidly to a place of first importance. [ ] Humanism was in its lusty springtide, a practical Humanism, impatient of old ways, eager -- with some -- to refashion the world by re-educating mankind after the model of the ancients, and in full emancipation from Christian restraints; while -- with others -- Humanism was going the way of Erasmus, planning a Christian revival in which the scandals that everywhere disfigured religious life should be made for ever impossible. #### Nowhere, however -- so a practical man might have thought -- were the chances of religious revival more slender. Nowhere, for example, was there such anarchy in the lives of churchmen as in Germany. Here were two worlds of clerics, clearly marked off by a chasm hardly ever to be bridged: the bishops, abbots, prelates and beneficiaries of the innumerable chapters, princes and nobles always -- and the vast horde of the clerical proletariat. If we judged the lives of the generality of all these clerics by what, for hundreds of years now, has been the standard practice of the average cleric, we might feel it impossible to find words too black to describe its disorder. Certainly the situation was worse than in contemporary England or France, and even more dangerous than in Italy because it lacked the Italian levity about sacred things. In Germany all were in deadly earnest: the good men earnest against the wicked indifference of the ecclesiastical rulers, against their greed and their simony; the bad men earnest against the system which held them to obligations they had for years neglected and broken through. As to the German attitude towards the Holy See, the whole nation, for generations now, had been consumed with resentment at what, seemingly, was now almost Rome's sole interest in Germany, its possibilities as a source of revenue for curial dignitaries. And if the German effort to reform the Roman Curia by shaking off its hold on Church revenues and Church appointments had ended long ago, so, too, the papacy had had to abandon, for the time, its long effort to break the monopoly of the German princes over nominations to high ecclesiastical office -- a first and main obstacle to religious reform, and one never finally overcome until the armies of the French Revolution swept away for ever all the last decayed remnants of the old medieval world. #### When, from the depths of such a world, Martin Luther in 1517 came forth to address the Church universal, he also brought a new strength to the growing movement of Germany's consciousness of itself as a nation with a unique destiny; to the princes he offered not only the chance of taking to themselves, once and for all, the vast properties of the Church and its many states, but all the opportunity that must come to the State when religion ceases to be universal and supra-national and becomes a local thing; most of all was his appearance appropriate to the condition of German politics in that he brought a new kind of support and propaganda for a theory about the place of the Church in the State that offered advantages to all -- except to the clergy -- and to none more than to the princes. No setting could have been more appropriate for the appearance of the great anarch; nor could any man living have better typified the most serious aspects of the general disorder and decadence of Catholicism at that time than this Austin Friar, professor of theology in a Catholic university, and now about to offer the Church as a solution for its troubles a version of Christian teaching that would empty it of all Christian significance, making man, not God, the real focus of religious activity, divorcing morality from piety, and present conduct from the prospects of future salvation. Luther as a Christian force was to prove sterile; there would not follow upon his activities any betterment of the moral lives of his disciples, any advance in learning, any new peace through social renewal. Here again, the heresiarch is true to the forces that bred him, and to his generation. [ ] #### The occasion of the false prophet's appearance in the public life of his time was a scandal that derived directly from Rome and the curia of Leo X, the preaching of a plenary indulgence proclaimed in aid of the fund to rebuild the Roman basilica over St. Peter's tomb. The uproar about indulgences which now, by reason of Luther's act, suddenly filled all central Germany in the winter of 1517, was not due to any one single cause. Luther's fire fell upon a train long laid. With the bishops of Germany, for example, the preaching of Roman indulgences within their jurisdiction had long been a sore subject; more than once, during the previous hundred years, this matter had brought them into conflict with the Holy See. And the particular indulgence which now proved Luther's great opportunity, was one which bishops outside Germany too had opposed, even before the indulgence had been made available to Germany; the primate of Spain, for example, the great reforming Franciscan, Cardinal Ximenes, had forbidden it to be preached there. #### Indulgences -- it perhaps needs to be said -- are not a forgiveness of sins, nor have they ever been understood to be such; it was not as though this was claimed for them that they were criticised by these bishops or attacked by Luther. Indulgences are a remission of punishment justly due to sin, punishment to which sinners may remain liable even when the mercy of God has forgiven the sin. According to Catholic teaching such punishment would in part be "worked off" by the sinner's willing performance of good actions that went beyond the goodness to which he was bound. In the indulgence system the Church associated herself officially and solemnly with a man's willingness to make such special and "unobliged" exertions; the Church made these good actions her own, and making over to the forgiven sinner, to supply for his own deficiency, some part of the treasure of the infinite merits of the Passion of our Lord and of the satisfaction made by the saints, [ ] declared him relieved, by the authority divinely committed to her, from some of the punishment due. Indulgences -- remissions only of temporal [ ] punishment due for sin, and never of eternal punishment -- are also "applicable" to the souls in Purgatory; that is to say, they can profit the dead who, preparatory to entering Heaven, are purging the imperfections in which they died. But the Church has only authority to remit guilt and punishment over those of its members who are still alive. Indulgences, therefore, are not applied to the dead by a judicial act of direct absolution from punishment; they are profitable to the dead as an official suffrage on the part of the Church, an intercession in which the Church offers for the dead the treasury of merits just described. Indulgences indeed -- so far as the dead are concerned -- are then, truly, no more than "a solemn form of prayer for the dead." [ ] #### Now, although it is the whole point of the system that, by means of it, man profits from the infinite merits of Our Lord and the goodness of his brethren the saints, realising thereby (in the most literal sense) "the communion of saints," man does not so profit without an exertion that is also his own activity; and this exertion, in the nature of things, cannot be any merely material, or purely natural exertion. It must be the act of a man united and reconciled to God by repentance and forgiveness and his own determination to persevere as God's friend; an act informed and enlivened by the supernatural virtue of charity - - whence the condition generally laid down explicitly in grants of plenary indulgences that the good act to the performance of which the indulgence is attached shall be accompanied by a sacramental confession of sins and the receiving of Holy Communion. #### That "good act," the work of super-erogation -- to give it its technical name -- varies with the indulgence. It may be the recitation of prescribed prayers, or a pilgrimage, or some act of penitential austerity such as fasting, or it may be -- what since the Council of Trent it has never been -- the giving of a money alms to some specified work of piety. #### The Council of Trent, some forty-six years after the Lutheran explosion, [ ] reformed the practical working of the indulgence system. Had one, at least, of the practices then reprobated been abolished a century earlier, Luther would have lacked his great opportunity. For the scandal of the great indulgence of 1517 arose in part from its association with money, though also, in part, from a wrong theory about indulgences held and taught by the priest commissioned to preach that indulgence. #### Wittenberg -- the little town in whose newly-founded university [ ] Luther was already, in 1517, a great figure -- lay in the diocese of Brandenburg and in the ecclesiastical province of Magdeburg. The Archbishop of Magdeburg was Albrecht of Hohenzollern, [ ] a young and dissolute prince of the reigning family of Brandenburg. He was, at the same time, Bishop of Halberstadt, and he had also managed to acquire the greatest Church dignity in Germany, the archiepiscopal see of Mainz, which made him not only the titular primate of Germany but one of the seven prince-electors of the empire. #### The expenses cf. this last success had, however, been enormous. For his dispensation to hold the see of Mainz while retaining Magdeburg and Halberstadt, Albrecht had had to pay the Roman Curia 10,000 golden ducats, and for the appointment to Mainz another 14,000. For these immense sums [ ] the young archbishop turned to the great banking house of the Fugger. [ ] And when he then had to face the problem how to pay the banker, it was a simple expedient to come to terms with the Holy See about the indulgence for the rebuilding of St. Peter's. Albrecht had, so far, not allowed this to be preached in his jurisdiction. This, now, covered a good third of Germany, [ ] and when the archbishop offered to lift the ban, on condition that he received one half the alms offered -- which half should go to the Fugger in repayment of the money borrowed to settle Albrecht's account with the Roman Curia -- the pope, Leo X, agreed. Presently the new indulgence began to be preached throughout central Germany. #### But it was not yet preached in Wittenberg. Here there stood in its way another vested interest, another complication of popular piety and revenues accruing by reason thereof. The ruler in Wittenberg was the Elector of Saxony, Frederick III called the Wise, and when the cavalcade of the indulgence preacher reached the frontiers of his state it found them barred against it. In the castle church at Wittenberg, which was also the university church, there was preserved one of the most famous of all collections of relics. The Elector -- like the Archbishop of Mainz -- was, in fact, a keen collector of relics and the church was a great centre of pilgrimages; for Frederick had secured for the relics rich indulgences, that amounted [ ] up to 127,000 years. For the Elector -- Luther's sovereign -- the new indulgence was simply a rival attraction against which local interests must be strongly protected. However, by the end of October 1517, the rival attraction was in the neighbourhood of Wittenberg, just across the frontier in fact; the indulgence was the burning topic of the hour, and the greatest feast in the Wittenberg calendar was fast approaching, All Saints' Day, the patronal feast of the castle-church, when the pilgrims would come in to the city in their thousands. This church served also, as has been said, as the church of the university; it was here that degrees were conferred and the great university sermons preached. When, therefore, on the eve of the feast, October 31, 1517, Luther, Professor of Theology in the university, nailed to the door of the church a sheet challenging all comers to dispute a series of ninety-five theses [ ] on the subject of indulgences, his routine professorial gesture -- an academic contribution to the morrow's festivities -- summed up and brought to a point, and symbolised, a whole complex of exciting events and interests, local, general, social, political, religious. #### There were local circumstances about the preaching of this particular indulgence which might have shocked many at the time, which gave any critic of the system an obvious opportunity, and which certainly shock the Catholic of later days as he looks back upon them. Great indulgences [ ] were so preached -- at that time -- that the affair closely resembled what later times have called a "mission." The actual announcement of the indulgence was preceded by a series of sermons calling sinners to repentance, sermons on the moral evils of the time, on God as the reward of the good and the vindicator of unrepented sin, on hell and heaven, on prayer and the means of persevering in grace. Then came an explanation of the doctrine of indulgences, the details of the indulgence now offered and an invitation to make use of it. What was shocking about the indulgence of 1517 was that upon the preacher's platform, by the side of the great coffer into which the alms were placed, there was also placed the desk where sat the representative of the bank, noting down what went into the chest and the appropriate amount due to the Fugger. And also, the archbishop lent his authority to a theory of the day about indulgences which was false; and the official preacher of the indulgence, a Dominican John Tetzel, published this theory broadcast. If the indulgence was to be gained for one who was dead it was not necessary -- according to this theory -- that the person who gained it should be in a state of grace; [ ] again, it was said that nothing but an offering of money was required to gain the indulgence for the dead; and Tetzel also taught [ ] that indulgences gained by the living for the benefit of the dead were gained infallibly -- that is to say, once the specified indulgenceact was accomplished, the soul of the deceased profited from it to the full, infallibly and immediately. [ ] #### Conditions could hardly have been more favourable for such a public onslaught on the indulgence-system as now began. But the famous ninety-five theses were not, by any means, the starting point of Lutheranism. They were little more than a kind of particular practical conclusion to propositions already advanced as true, and already the subject of violent discussion in the narrow world of two minor German universities. And to those fundamental propositions Luther had come, not by any activity of pure speculation, but as one driven to speculate by his own inner conflicts. The private lives of great men have scarcely any place in text books of general history, but exception needs to be made for the Augustinian Friar who now accomplished the revolution of the ages by producing a version of Christianity in which piety was divorced from morality. On that day of the memorable gesture, October 31, 1517, Luther was within eleven days of his thirty-fourth birthday; he had been a professed religious for something more than eleven years, a priest for something more than ten. How he came to enter the monastery, the way in which he lived the monastic life, the whole character and temperament of the man who gave himself to religion, the intellectual formation he had then -- at twenty-one years of age -- achieved, and the quality of that which followed: some knowledge of all these is vital to the understanding of what was now about to begin. For although Luther did not create the conditions [ ] that made possible the dramatic success of his great assault, that assault, like others before it, would have been no more than a great historical incident, had it not been that the rebel, this time, was one of the Titans of history. The question what manner of man the Titan was is all important; and for more than fifty years now a vast new literature has been endeavouring to answer it. #### At the time of Luther's birth [ ] his father, Hans Luther, was only a poor copper miner; but long before the son had found his monastic vocation, the father had left poverty behind and was a flourishing mine-owner. Nevertheless, Martin Luther really knew poverty as a child, and hardship and, the greatest hardship of all, an over-severe parental discipline. Nowhere, it is believed, does he ever speak of his mother with affectionate reminiscence. He was sent to various schools, and at one time to the school kept by the Brothers of the Common Life at Eisenach, which gives him a certain kinship with Nicholas of Cusa and with Erasmus too. In 1501 he was entered at the university of Erfurt, his father resolute to make his son a lawyer. Here, for a while, he continued his education in polite letters, reading Ovid and Virgil and Horace, Juvenal and Terence and Plautus, but no Greek. And he now made his first acquaintance with Aristotle, studying the works on logic, the physics and the De Anima. In August 1502, Luther took his bachelor's degree; and then, in preparation for the master's degree, he spent a further two years in philosophical study, ethics now and politics, metaphysics, natural philosophy and general mathematics -- all according to the Via moderna, as might be expected in one of the new universities. Luther has come down to us reputed a good, hard-working student, moody, and something of a musician. In January 1505 he took his M.A. and entered the Law School. #### Of Luther's studies in the Corpus Iuris Civilis we know nothing, except that they were to him uncongenial studies. They did not last long however, for in the July of that same year, to the dismay of his family and friends, and despite their strong opposition, Luther became a novice in the Erfurt house of the Austin Friars. It was, perhaps, the rashest act of his whole life, and certainly the most serious. There is not, so far as we know, anywhere, any hint of an inclination in Luther, either to the priesthood or to the monastic life, prior to July 2, 1505, on which day as this young law-scholar of twenty-one was riding back to Erfurt, after a visit to his home, now in Magdeburg, there was a sudden violent thunderstorm, and a bolt falling in a nearby field threw him to the ground. The moody, highly-strung Luther vowed to St. Anne in his terror that if he lived he would become a monk. The Augustinians, at that time, dominated the university of Erfurt. It was natural enough that Luther should offer himself to them, and -- incredible as the thing sounds to modern ears -- just fifteen days after the rash, and certainly invalid vow, they accepted the promising young man as a novice. #### Luther, says the sympathetic and experienced religious who is one of the greatest of his biographers, [ ] was not made for the monastic life. He was, indeed, highly-gifted, he was generous, impulsive and his life as a student had been good and orderly and pious. But there was about him a permanent inclination to melancholy; he was fear-ridden, guilt-haunted, a natural depressive. It is the last temperament to find the monastic life congenial, let alone helpful; and what if the motive for embracing that life is the wholly mistaken motive of fear, and fear that is natural and temperamental only? How long would such a subject last in the novitiate of any order to-day? How long would any order be willing to retain him? #### Luther entered the novitiate dominated by his recent terrible, psycho-physical experience. His life-long agitation did not cease; the terrors that afflicted him did not disappear; the friar's habit worked no miracle of changing the material fabric of the unfortunate man. The moody, highly-strung student was a moody, highly-strung novice, with the violent alternations of hope and despair, of joy and depression, which characterise the type; and, always, his anxieties about himself were the main activity of his inner life. #### One year after his reception the novice took the solemn vows that bound him for life (July 1506); in the autumn following he received the subdiaconate, and, on April 3, 1507, he was ordained priest, nine months after his profession, and less than two years after his first reception as a novice. He then began his theological studies. [ ] They really lasted no longer than eighteen months, for in the autumn of 1508 Luther was sent to Wittenberg, where, only six years before, a university had been founded, to lecture on Aristotle's Ethics, continuing to study theology at the same time. He was, however, given his bachelor's degree in theology in March 1509; and in the autumn of that same year he began himself to lecture in theology, as an assistant to the professor. He thus lectured as a bachelor for twelve months (1509-1510), first at Erfurt and then at Wittenberg. In the winter of 1510-1511 he made his famous visit to Rome, and upon his return he took up once more his Wittenberg appointment. On October 19, 1512, he received his doctor's degree, and was given entire charge of the Wittenberg school of divinity: he was now twenty-nine. #### We are approaching the decisive moment of Luther's life. He is about to lecture, as a doctor, not on the text of Peter Lombard in the spirit of the via moderna but, according to his commission and in imitation of his predecessor and fellow- religious -- Johann Staupitz -- upon the text of Holy Scripture. It is not Ockhamist theology that will occupy him now, but more practical matters. Luther had found law uncongenial and philosophy too, and also theology in the technical sense of the term -- sciences, all of them, which call for an activity that is intellectual. Luther, however, is the artist, the poet, the musician; he is the orator, the fascinating lecturer, the man of impulse and creative imagination. He has turned from the repugnant intellectualism, shirked the discipline by which alone man's mind can come to a knowledge of natures and essences, and of reasons why. And, like every other rational and sentient being, he has his difficulties and perplexities, fruit of his rational and sentient nature. Like many another Catholic thinker [ ] who is deaf to theology he is now about to look to a mysticism divorced from theology for the answers he stands in need of. His reading, henceforth, is the text of Holy Scriptures and the writings of the mystics, the one interpreted by the other, and the whole read, studied and understood by the light of the conflicting fires burning within his own breast; they are researches, also, where it is urgent for the student to have his answer quickly. The personal contrast with -- say -- St. Thomas could not be greater. #### The way out, it seems to Luther, is through "mysticism", the "mystical" use of Holy Scripture. The amateur theologian -- for so, by any standard, Luther must surely be judged -- is about to use the mystics as a guide to life, and, inevitably, he is about to make a mess of the business. He will not use the only key, the theologian's explanation of the doctrines the mystics express in their own personal and more vivid fashion; and so, with the characteristic first vice of the imprudent man, he precipitates himself into Gerard Groote and the Theologia Germanica, [ ] into Tauler and pseudo-Denis. There will result a mysticism in which the cross has no place, a mysticism ordered to Luther's own most burning need, namely assurance and consolation felt and experienced in the heart; and ultimately -- the inevitable end of any such system -- he will fall victim to the spiritual fallacy called presumption, to the belief and even obsession that "I am called by a special way." It was with such an attention to "my special case" that the great and anxious research began. It is with this that it ends. But now what was at first an anxiety has been discovered to be, in reality, the foundation of God's system to save mankind; Luther's case is the case of all mankind, and the saved all pass through the same set of crises, viz., conviction of sin, temptation to despair, conviction and assurance: "I am saved". #### By 1517, when the indulgence crisis arose, Luther's religious position was all but complete. It is gradually worked out in his Wittenberg lectures of the previous five years, lectures on the Psalms, on the Epistle to the Romans and on the Epistle to the Galatians. Before we come to the great principles in which that position is summed up, it needs to be pointed out against what a background of active life they were developed. Always one of the most striking characteristics of Luther is his tireless energy, the way in which he throws himself into a host of simultaneous and often unrelated activities. It was so in these critical last years of his Catholic life. As a student of theology he can never be said to have enjoyed over-much leisure to reflect on what he was learning; as a commentator discovering the true meaning of some of the stiffest books of Holy Scripture he was in no better case. The letter in which Luther himself describes the multiplicity of occupations with which his witless Augustinian superiors allowed this popular figure to burden himself, may be quoted once more. " I really ought to have two secretaries or chancellors. I do hardly anything all day but write letters. . . . I am at the same time preacher to the monastery, have to preach in the refectory, and am even expected to preach daily in the parish church. I am regent of the house of studies and vicar, that is to say prior eleven times over; I have to provide for the delivery of the fish from the Leitzkau pond and to manage the litigation of the Herzberg friars at Torgau; I am lecturing on Paul, compiling lectures on the Psalter, and, as I said before, writing letters most of the time. . . . It is seldom that I have time for the recitation of the Divine Office or to celebrate Mass, and then, too, I have my peculiar temptations from the flesh, the world, and the devil." [ ] #### Luther is not, here, writing a statement meant for the critical examination of a hostile court. It is a friendly letter to a friend, in which there is room for the exaggeration that will not deceive and that is not meant to deceive. Luther was, no doubt of it, as active as he was capable, but the groans are not, therefore, all to be taken at their full face-value. Nor need we fasten on the reference to the flesh, and, oversimplifying a very complex business, see in this the key that explains all. Luther was, later on, to coin the phrase Concupiscentia invincibilis and to say Pecca Fortiter, and to marry in despite of his monastic vow, and to speak with the most revolting coarseness of sex life in general and of his own relations with his wife. [ ] Nevertheless, in his life as an Austin Friar, it was not in his body [ ] that the trouble was seated which, at times, all but drove him crazy, nor in his intelligence, but rather in his intensely active imagination. What never ceased to haunt him, seemingly, was the thought of eternal punishment; and not so much the thought that he might in the end lose his soul, as that he was already marked out for hell by God. Here was the subject of the long, often-repeated, discussions with Staupitz, his friend and one-time master and present superior. And it is, once again, a measure of the theological decadence in certain university circles that this professor was not able to dispel the young monk's fears by an exposition of the traditional teaching that no man loses his soul except by his own free deliberate choice, that God is not and cannot be the cause of the sin that merits hell. All Staupitz could do was to remind Luther of the infinite mercy won for man by the merits of the passion of Christ. But to the mind which, unaware of the nature of the problem, was wrestling, unequipped, with the mystery of man's predestination to grace and to glory, these counsels availed little. To one whose mind held the notion of a divine reprobation -- that those who went to hell went there, in ultimate analysis, because God destined them to hell when He created them -- the very thought of the Passion was an additional torture, and Luther has told us how, at times, he could not look upon the crucifix. #### Here too, no doubt, is the secret of those terrible scenes, the convulsive panics that seized on him from time to time as a friar: the attempted flight from his first mass; the horror and terror in which he said mass, or walked in procession beside the priest who carried the Blessed Sacrament. [ ] It became the great anxiety and need of Luther's life that he should know that he was among those predestined to be saved, be free from all doubt that he could not lose his soul. #### Once again, we must beware of over-simplifying. The genesis of the specifically Lutheran doctrines is, no doubt, not wholly to be sought in this dominant characteristic. But Luther's own needs -- which he came to see as the common problem of all mankind -- went undoubtedly for much, as he studied and put together the lectures on such classic treatises about God's grace as the Epistles of St. Paul to the Romans and to the Galatians. And once he had found his doctrine, if it was as an emancipator of mankind that he published it, it was, at the same time, with his great cry of personal liberation that he gave it to the world. #### Luther did not, of course, come to his study of St. Paul with a mind devoid of theological notions. His conception of God for example -- as a Being omnipotent and arbitrary -- he derived from his Ockhamist masters. [ ] And what they stated and discussed as ways through which God might have arranged the work of sanctification and salvation, Luther proposed as the ways God actually chose. " From the moment when Luther learnt Ockham's doctrine, he necessarily lost all definite notion of what the supernatural is, all understanding of the necessity, the essence and the efficaciousness of sanctifying grace and, in a general way, of the supernatural virtues." [ ] Nor could it have been otherwise. The whole of Ockham's influence is the history of the disappearance of certitude; of the end of all grasp of reality, and of clear, distinct thought. And it was from Ockham, also, that Luther derived one of the two main elements of his own peculiar system, the idea, namely, that the whole work of grace and of salvation is something altogether external to man -- in cause and in effect. It is, for Luther, wholly and purely the act of God. Man's action can have no share in it, except in so far as God accepts that action as meritorious. As things are, so Ockham declares, such human acts must be the acts of a personality united to God by supernatural charity, acts of a soul possessed by sanctifying grace; but only as things are. For God could, in His Omnipotence, just as well accept as meritorious acts done by his enemies, the acts of souls devoid of sanctifying grace, the acts of souls given over to unrepented mortal sin. From Ockham the tradition had come down through a succession of masters. Gregory of Rimini has the same teaching, so has Peter d'Ailly, so has Gabriel Biel. [ ] It is not inherently impossible for man -- so they all concur -- to be accepted by God as meriting, even though he does not possess charity. Man could, on the other hand, be God's enemy even though he does possess charity. And he could pass from the state of enmity to friendship without any change in himself -- for the whole basis of man's relations with God is God's arbitrary attitude of acceptance or non-acceptance of his acts. #### All this -- said the Ockhamist tradition -- was possible; this could be the way in which all would happen. Luther, meditating the mystery, and his own problem, thought he saw that, if this possible way were indeed the actual way, his problem was solved. He first seized on the notion of sanctification as a thing external to the soul; it resolved the difficulty arising from his position that man, by original sin, was wholly and for ever corrupted in his essence, [ ] incapable therefore for ever of any works really good. How could fallen man -- if this were his state -- do aught towards his sanctification? But, were sanctification something external to man's action, the cloak of the infinite merits of Christ thrown in pity around man's infinite wretchedness, to cover over his truly hopeless state -- did this indeed suffice, then the problem of man's own condition under the cloak would cease to be. Man's own sinfulness, the necessary effect of the poison of original sin working in him, can have no effect upon his eternal destiny once, clad in the robe of Christ's merits, he is accepted by God as justified. No sin, committed by such a man, would give the devil any hold upon him. #### The Lutheran theory is not yet complete -- the all-important element is lacking which shall give man assurance, from outside the theory, that it is something more than a theory that seems to solve the terrible problem. But, even so, the logical, practical consequences of the theory are evident. If this doctrine be true, then the whole elaborate fabric of the theory and practice of good works as necessary for salvation is but a sham. Works of penance, in particular, are not only useless but blasphemous; they are acts based on a false theory, they are a standing contradiction to the saving truth. There is no point in prayer as a petition, and the whole sacramental system goes -- except as a sign or gesture affirming belief in God as Saviour. With the sacramental system there must disappear too, the clerical body, as a priesthood; as propagandists and teachers they may yet survive individually, and be organised. The very Church ceases to have any raison d’etre as such. #### Not all these consequences were immediately drawn out, either by Luther or by his opponents. The immediate discussion centred around the fundamental principles, and in the twelve months that preceded the appearance of Tetzel and the great indulgence drive, Wittenberg was filled with conflict. There was, for example, the disputation of September 1516, when a pupil of Luther officially defended theses to the effect that man's nature is utterly powerless to do good; there were the lectures on Galatians in which Luther developed his views, and more lectures on the Epistle to the Hebrews; there was, above all, the great disputation of September 4, 1517, on ninety-seven theses directed against Scholasticism, when " the bitterness of innumerable priests, monks, preachers and university professors that, for two centuries at least, had been accumulating against the Scholastic philosophy found at last its complete expression." [ ] Luther was carrying all before him; none could compete with him as a speaker, and the publication of the theses against Indulgences, only eight weeks later, is a measure of his success, no less than it is a testimony to his boldness; their publication also served, and it is the real importance of the event, to bring Luther's new version of the Christian dispensation before the whole Christian world. Long before Rome's solemn condemnation of it (June 15, 1520) [ ] Luther's theory was discussed and fought over in every university of Christendom. #### And long before that -- within a few months, indeed, of the move against the doctrine of Indulgence -- Luther had found the last vital element for his teaching. How shall a man know whether he is accepted of God, predestined, and not marked for hell? This acceptation is something external to him; justification does not change him; he is not any better, once he has gained it. That he is no better is, indeed, no proof that he is not justified. But how can man know with certainty that he is justified, accepted? The test is simple; the touchstone is his possession of faith. For the just man lives by faith alone -- not by faith which is the assent of the intelligence to God revealing the sacred doctrines, but by faith which is a firm confident belief that God has predestined one to glory as one of the accepted. It is this faith alone, so Luther henceforth held, [ ] which makes man accepted by God. Possession of this faith is the proof that one is accepted. Possessed of this faith man lives. For those who so believe, salvation is certain. And all men who come to attain this belief come to it through a stage of anxious tormenting doubt and temptations to despair. Luther's case is the case of all mankind. The religious reflection of his almost congenital phobia is a stage in his understanding that he is saved. The "dark night" has not issued in any purification of sense, but in an assurance that impurities do not matter, in the certitude that whatever happens one is saved. The great discovery is complete. "Christianity is nothing but a perpetual exercise in feeling that you have no sin, although you committed sin, but that your sins are attached to Christ" -- Luther's own summary of the matter. [ ] #### This is not an attempt to sketch even the outline of Protestantism, the religion of the churches that issued from the Reformation [ ] -- still less, of course, is it meant as a critique of Protestants. It is no more than an endeavour to explain Luther's own personal doctrinal invention; [ ] the starting point of his career as a destroyer of Catholicism and as one of the founders of the later Reformed Churches, the source of his strength and confidence and courage. The history of what he accomplished, of the evolution of a new church, of its immediate and willing subordination to the state, of the development of Lutheranism into Protestantism, cannot be separated from the later story of Catholicism, the story of the Catholic revival, of the Council of Trent and of the movement that has been called -- not too happily -- the Counter-Reformation; nowhere does the seamless web of history suffer greater harm than when the story of Luther is separated from that of our own modern age. It must therefore find its place in the concluding volume of this work. But something also needs to be said about Luther as the last of the medievals -- none the less truly a medieval man for being a great heretic. #### There has never been any disposition, whether among Luther's critics or his supporters, from the reformer's time down to our own, to deny that he did much more than change people's purely religious beliefs and practices. Never, in fact, has there been a more striking demonstration than the Reformation that religion is the central activity of all human life. There is a lyrical description of Luther's accomplishment in one of the greatest of modern German historians, [ ] that will serve as an example of this view. It will also serve to introduce what still needs to be said in order to explain the monstrosity which Lutheranism seemed to the Catholics of Luther's time. "A new world," says this historian, "has come into being. One of the twin peaks of Christendom has crumbled away. . . . The spiritual power has disappeared. . . . Never before did man see such an overturning of political and juridical ideas. . . . All those ideas from which the State of modern times derives -- autonomy of the State's law, final sovereignty of the lay authority, the State's recognised exclusive hold on public action -- find in the Lutheran reformation their religious foundation and, thereby, their power to spread. The Reformation was not only a renewal of religion: it was a rebirth of the world in every respect." #### The final importance of Luther, indeed, did not lie in the new theological ideas he invented, but in the fact that by combining with them existing theologico-social ideas he gave to these last the authority proper to religious belief; they are as fatal to the full natural development of the human personality, as the theological invention was fatal to Christianity itself. The anti- Christian social ideas and ideals of the last two hundred years and more were now presented as Christianity itself, and were presently organised in a new Christian Church, which was the active rival and bitter foe of the traditional Church whose president was the Roman pope. To that new conception of Christianity first of all, and then to that new Church, Luther rallied the greater part of Germany and Scandinavia; in the next generation -- under other reformers of kindred spirit, attached to the same fundamental theological discovery -- Switzerland and Holland and Scotland and England were likewise "reborn," while a powerful attempt was made to secure France also for the new world. #### What were the distinguishing principles of this world, what was the* relation to the essence of Lutheranism, and what was the first appeal of the system to the nation among which it was first published? #### That appeal was something much more lasting than any implied mere general invitation to monks and nuns and priests to throw over their religious obligations, something much more fundamental than the prospect of unhindered moral licence; to such saturnalia -- and, of course, there followed in Germany an indescribable saturnalia [ ] -- there always succeeds a period of reaction; even the loosest of mankind is in the end too bored to keep it up. Nor was it by publishing broadcast his theological lectures on the Epistles of St. Paul, that Luther roused Germany to his support. He did it by attacking, with new skill, with humour, and new boldness, the pope's hold on Germany as a source of income; he satirised the pope's claim to be the Holy Father of Christendom while presiding over such an establishment as the Roman Curia and Court of those days could be made to seem, and in great part actually was; and he offered the ruling classes of Germany a practical programme that would make them supreme in German life, and that appealed explicitly to the notion that it is Germany's destiny to rule mankind for mankind's greater good and happiness. It was in half a dozen writings put out chiefly in the years 1520 and 1521, that Luther laid the foundation of all that construction which the historian just quoted sees to have been built by later times. In the Sermon on Good Works, for example, the pope is denounced as the real Turk, exploiting the simplicity of Germans and sucking the marrow out of the national life. The Church, Luther explained in another tract -- On the Roman Papacy -- cannot need a visible head, for it is itself an invisible thing. That "power of the keys," possession of which is the basis of the pope's position, is in reality the common possession of all true believers; nor is it at all a power of government, but the assurance which Christians give to one another that their sins are not held against them, and thereby administer to one another the consolation and encouragement that sinners need as they face the fact of the divine moral law which it is beyond man's power to observe. This tract, like almost everything that Luther was now writing, is salted with vigorous, crude invective. But the classic instruments of this first propaganda were three pamphlets which appeared in 1520, the Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and the Liberty of the Christian Man. [ ] #### The first of these [ ] sketches the main lines which the needed Reformation ought to follow. Annates are to be abolished and no more money sent out of Germany to Rome; no more foreigners are to be named to German benefices, and all papal jurisdiction in Germany, spiritual or temporal, is to be abolished; pilgrimages to Rome are to be abolished also, along with religious guilds, indulgences, dispensations, holidays that are feasts, and masses for the dead. All believers are priests -- Scripture says so -- and this principle is developed to show that the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and the clerical state, are merely human inventions and have no real place in the Christian Church. Excommunication, therefore, is but a meaningless word. Again, since the special institution of ecclesiastical authority has no justification (is, indeed, contrary to Scripture), it is the prince who must preside over the believers. It is the prince who will protect the true interests of the Church, reforming and correcting as is found necessary, and taking over the property held by the usurped authority of the self-styled ecclesiastical power. For centuries this ecclesiastical power, in the person of the popes, has claimed certain rights over the emperors. The truth is that the empire alone is a reality, and the pope ought to surrender to it even Rome itself. If Christendom and the empire are, indeed, one, it is the emperor who is supreme and the imperial power is the heritage of the German race. The noble princes then must regain by force those benefices which the popes have " unjustly " taken to themselves; the monks must free themselves from their vows; the priests must "steal from the pope" their right to marry and live like laymen. Here we can see how Luther, the reformer of abuses in religion, incidentally makes provision for "all those immense, disorderly dreams which, for more than a hundred years, have been troubling the German heart: reform of the Church in head and members in the sense of a return to its spiritual, purely evangelical principle; reform of the empire in the sense of a State which shall be stronger, more organic, and capable, if not of dominating Europe, at least of guaranteeing to Germany full economic and cultural independence." [ ] #### The Babylonian Captivity, subject of the second pamphlet named, [ ] is the tyranny of the papacy over the Church of Christ. Its origins lie in the long falsification of Christian doctrine; and Luther sets out, in systematic opposition, his own teaching on the meaning of the Sacraments and their place in a Christian's life. There are but three sacraments in the real sense of the word, Baptism, the Holy Eucharist, and Penance, and their effectiveness is wholly a matter of the faith of the recipient. There is no sacrifice in the second of these sacraments, and the Mass is simple devilish wickedness. #### More important, however, than the detail either of the abuses which Luther recommends the nobles to sweep away, or of the traditional doctrines and practices he now repudiates, is the teaching of the third and shortest of these tracts, The Liberty of a Christian Man. [ ] This is an eloquent plea for the central Lutheran doctrine that one thing alone is needed for justification-faith; [ ] that without this faith nothing avails. Luther's first target had been good works done in a Pelagian spirit, done, that is to say, with the idea that the mere human mechanic of the action secures of itself deliverance from sin. No one had had more to say about the spiritual worthlessness of such works than Luther's own contemporary and adversary Cajetan, and what Cajetan had to say was no more than a commonplace with Catholic preachers and writers then as now, and indeed always. [ ] But Luther went far beyond this. Although the just man would do good works -- as a good tree brings forth good fruit [ ] -- there was not, and there could not be, any obligation on the justified believer to do good works. He did good works -- but freely, out of love for his neighbour, or to keep his body subject to his soul; he did them as the natural acts of a soul that was justified. To omit them -- a possibility which Luther, in this part of his theory, did not envisage -- would not have entailed sin: "It is solely by impiety and incredulity of heart that a man becomes guilty, and a slave of sin, deserving condemnation; not by any outward sin or work." [ ] This goes far beyond any mere reaction against such a false theory as that mechanical religious activities are sufficient to reconcile a sinner with God whom he has offended. #### Here we touch again what one of Luther's German editors [ ] has called the divorce between piety and morality; for "Sin we must, while we remain here; this life is no dwelling place of justice. The new heavens and earth that shall be the dwelling place of righteousness we yet await, as St. Peter says. It is enough that we confess through the riches of God's glory the Lamb that taketh away the sins of the world; from Him sin will not tear us away, even if thousands and thousands of times a day we fornicate or murder." [ ] Here is a truly revolutionary mischief, and it has its reflection in the new theory which Luther came to put out -- in the name of religion and as a part of Christian teaching -- about the kind of thing the State is, about man's relation to the State and the obedience he owes it; for in this theory there is a divorce between law and morality. #### Luther is impatient of the old distinction between the spheres of what is known naturally and what can be known only by a divine revelation, as he is impatient of the careful scholastic delimitation of the spheres of nature and grace. He would, indeed, abolish the philosophical study of natures and causes and ends; Aristotle, because the chief inspiration here of such thinkers as were Christians, was the greatest of all mischiefs, "an accursed, proud, knavish heathen. . . . God sent him as a plague for our sins." [ ] His ethics, and his metaphysics, ought to be everywhere destroyed. [ ] The Christian, for an answer to his questionings about these matters, should go to Sacred Scripture and to Sacred Scripture only. Thither now went Luther. [ ] Like every other Catholic who has committed the blunder of refusing the natural reason its proper place, and its rights within that place, he fell into the most egregious confusion between the natural and the supernatural and so, necessarily, proceeded to a catastrophic misunderstanding of the supernatural. Taking the Bible as a divinely meant source of knowledge about natural reality, and consulting it about that natural thing, the State Luther proceeded to apply what it had to say about the religious law of the ancient Hebrews to the civil affairs of Germany in his own time. He read in St. Paul that "The law is not made for the just man, but for the unjust and the wicked" [ ] and, combining what he thought to be the application of this text with his own theory about man becoming just by faith alone, he henceforth saw the state as made up of two kinds of men: the believers who were just, the good men, subject to no authority but that of the Holy Spirit -- and the unbelieving wicked. It was because of these last that there had to be princes and States and civil government. The good would always remain good, because justified. The wicked would never be anything else but wicked, and they would be in the majority always. Wickedness, in fact, is for Luther supreme in human life, and must be so; it is the very nature of things, mankind having by original sin become the possession of the devil and human nature wholly corrupt. States, then, there must be, not only for the protection of the good against the wicked, but for the conservation of some external moral order amongst the unbelieving wicked upon whom the Holy Spirit has no effect. The State is, in fact, God's agent -- His sole agent -- for the work of ruling mankind and keeping it from growing morally worse; [ ] it is the divinely founded guide of man in morals, and it is divinely authorised to punish man for his infractions of morality as the State proclaims it. If we look closer at this Lutheran State, it closely resembles the state of Marsiglio's ideal, in this at least that power is its very essence. The State is Authority; whatever it decrees is, by the fact, right and must not ever be resisted; and wherever there is power, there is authority. Authority is always right; the fact of punishment is a proof of guilt; and the prince has a duty to be habitually merciless, since his role is that of "God's executioner." The most fitting symbol of his authority is the naked sword: ". . . Christians are rare people on earth. Therefore stern, hard, civil rule is necessary in the world, lest the world become wild, peace vanish, and commerce and common interests be destroyed. . . . No one need think that the world can be ruled without blood. The civil sword shall and must be red and bloody." [ ] Here, in all its simplicity, is the theory of the State as essentially a policeman, [ ] with its whole activity concentrated between the courthouse and the gallows; it is a theory that will dominate the political thought of all the Reformers. [ ] #### Let it be said that Luther did not work out this theory, which so exalts the State that its subjects must fall below the human level of responsible freedom, merely as so much compliment and flattery to the princes his protectors; any more than he worked it out as believing these princes to be men of personally holy, or even reputable, lives. It is all disinterested; it flows from the new truth; Luther is "sincere." And if the tiny minority of the just, almost lost among the wicked subjects for whom this monstrous power has been divinely devised, suffer from the severity of the prince -- it is always unjust in regard of the just -- they must be content to suffer, and reverently to see in it a manifestation of the just anger of God. #### This is a barbarous notion of the State indeed; and what a regression it represents by comparison with the theories of Luther's contemporaries Erasmus and More. Its effect, in practice, must be the same as the effect of Machiavelli, but, in one highly important respect, Luther is more effective by far than the Italian atheist. For Luther is, in his own mind, and in the mind of the century that follows, a religious teacher. He does not so much devise political theories as present Christians with a new notion of their civic obligations as Christians, and present the princes with a new religious conception of their office as rulers. Once Luther saw all this as a main truth of religion, a truth closely related to and in part flowing from the doctrines he held to be central, he riveted it on all his people, as he won them over to the new conception of Christianity. #### What will be the nature and office of law, in the Christian State as Luther conceives this? The new doctor will have nothing to do with the traditional Catholic conception of earthly justice as the reflection of -- and man's share in -- the objective eternal order of the Divine Intelligence, an order first communicated to man's intelligence through the natural law. The Lutheran doctrine that Original Sin has wholly corrupted man's nature makes any such sharing an impossibility: man is nothing but sin, enmity towards God and, moreover, his will is not a free will but a will definitely enslaved, and captive to the devil. For such a being, the law in the Divine Intelligence is something too perfect ever to be fulfilled. #### The order of justice divinely established is not an objective reality, not an actual equilibrium of actions objectively considered, belonging ad esse rei. [ ] And because it is wholly a matter of divine acceptation, the centre of all morality is the arbitrary will of God directing as it pleases the passive human hand. This notion of the will of God, as no less arbitrary than supreme, is reflected in Luther's ideas about human positive law. #### Law is not subject to any consideration of morals or of reason. What it commands cannot be wrong nor unreasonable. Law only needs to be stated to have, immediately, all its power to oblige. As justice is whatever God likes, so law is whatever the prince likes; and, because it is the prince's act as prince, law is always an expression of the divine action upon the world, and so, sacrosanct -- although it remains no more than "a power to command and to compel" [ ], and cannot ever oblige a man in conscience. It can never be wrong for the prince to command wrongdoing, and to his commands the subject must always render external obedience at any rate. There is -- in this system -- no means by which the human reason can relieve the human subject of his obligations to submit to whatever the State decrees. Ius divinum quod est ex gratia non tollit ius humanum quod est ex lege naturali -- so the great synthesis of St. Thomas had proclaimed. Luther denied that there was such a thing as natural law; there could not exist any human right deriving therefrom. And as for the role, in human affairs, of the divine, Luther roundly stated the very converse of St. Thomas's liberating concept, declaring that "the Gospel does nothing to lighten human law." [ ] #### What we are now given, in fact, is a theory of the divine right of the fait accompli in public affairs, and of the duty of Christian man to put up with whatever is ordained for him. What an answer -- and a final one -- in the name of the newly- discovered evangelical Christianity, to the long claim of religion to fix a standard for princely conduct ! The ghosts of the Ghibelline legists must have rejoiced at the triumph of the new servitude, and smiled to see the State freed now from the control of Christian morality in the very name of Christian revelation ! The religious peculiarities of Luther's revolution would, in the course of the centuries, suffer more than a sea change. They would pass, and be accounted of no importance, even to those heirs of Luther who continued, gratefully, to reverence his work and even his personality. But this at least would endure, the notion namely that the State, a lay thing, is exclusively sovereign because it stands alone as an authority representing the social order. As such the State has a moral and religious character and role, rendering needless the Church as a public thing. Here is the Reformation's essential political idea, [ ] the sole positive idea to we that vast transformation any real unity. #### Throughout the fifteenth century the demand for the reformation of the Church had, in Germany, gone hand in hand with desire for political change. It was, then, in keeping with the spirit of the time, that the prophet, when ultimately he appeared, should be also something of a political philosopher. Quite apart from the undoubted fact that Luther, brought face to face with the papacy as a force bound to work for his destruction, realised that in the State was the papacy's own born enemy, [ ] there was a kind of inevitability in this development. #### The State also could serve -- and could alone serve -- as an agent for the reform of religion. Here is the last element that completes the Lutheran new world, the subjection of religion to the State, the transformation of the State, indeed, into a kind of Church. To understand it we need to recall a distinction which Luther made between the real Church which is invisible (and subject to none but God) and all that organisation which comes into existence from the moment when a score of believers meet for worship, and by the very fact of their meeting, if only for the time of their meeting. #### So far, down to these opening years of the sixteenth century, religion, in spite of many defeats and the constant hostility of the princes, had successfully maintained its place as the rightful, ultimate inspiration of the whole social order -- And by religion is meant an institution whose rights and supremacy as an institution were acknowledged by all princes, in all states, the Catholic Church; an independent, sovereign thing, to which all belonged, by which all were effectively ruled. This independence of religion was bound up with the admitted real distinction between the two authorities, the temporal and the spiritual, both of them sovereign over mankind, each in its own domain; and although the conflicts between the two were frequent, even continuous along the frontier where they met, no State ever contested the principle that the Church, within its own sphere, was as truly sovereign as the State itself. In practice this meant that the State could never claim a sovereignty that was absolute; it must always take account of the rights of religion, and avoid action that would trespass on functions considered as indispensable to the Church's spiritual mission. [ ] It is this sovereign independence of religion as a visible public power, this place of the Church in the life of the community, that Luther attacks and, wherever his theories gain a hold, destroys. And he does this by denying the validity of the traditional distinction between the two authorities, and by his new theory that the State is absolute by right divine. #### The real Church, for Luther, is an invisible thing and purely spiritual. It is subject to God alone and within it there is no law but only love. True enough, the Church is made up of men and women who are visible, and these come together and perform each his own appointed ritual part. But since all believers are priests, those who officiate are not clergy in the Catholic sense but only a corps of preachers and ministers of sacraments, chosen for convenience's sake to do for all what, in fact, each could do for himself. All believers are equal in their freedom to follow grace as they understand it, all are equal in control of their inner life. There is none who is the spiritual sovereign of his fellows, nor is the whole body a sovereign body. The Church -- as an external organisation -- does not possess authority; it cannot even make laws, still less enforce them. The control needed to keep it in being must come from some other source than the fact that the Church is thus organised; and this control is the business of the prince, part of his general duty to care for morality and good order. The Church -- in this new scheme of things -- really does quit this world, except as an indefinite number of individual believers. It has no existence as such, no authority of its own, no rights, no property. For all these matters it is the State which will now function; the great era of secularisation of Church property and usurpation of Church jurisdiction opens, the State lays hands on the monasteries, for example, and on all that relates to marriage. The State also controls worship and ritual, teaching and preaching; these are but external manifestations of the Spirit. What about heretics? can there be such? Undoubtedly there can be those who openly contradict the articles of faith. Such men are public criminals, and it is the duty of the prince to punish them. As to the standard of orthodoxy -- what is the meaning of the faith -- it is for the prince to say what accords with Scripture and what does not. Who else, indeed, can decide, what other public authority is there but the State which, in virtue of its temporal power, is the temporal guardian of the divine law. Also, it is explained -- this will be readily understood -- that the State does the Church a service in undertaking these cares, for all these charges are material things, attention to which is fatal to the spirit. #### So much, then, for the role of the prince as prince. But the prince has also his place in religion as an individual believer. He too is, thereby, a priest with the rest; and as all are priests in the measure of their gifts, the prince -- who has the unique gift, to wit his divine charge of ruling the State -- is most of all a priest, and in all crises and unusual circumstances it is he who will take the lead. He is not, indeed, the head of the Church -- no human being can be that -- but he is its principal member. [ ] As such, yet once again, it is for him to inaugurate needed reforms, and to organise the external appearance of the Church. In practice, the ancient maxim of St. Ambrose that sums up the whole long Christian tradition is wholly reversed, imperator enim intra ecclesiam, non supra ecclesiam est, and the dream of countless Ghibellines and legists is realised at last, "The State is the only legitimate authority the world knows. The State is truly sovereign." [ ] #### Below all the forces that make the Reformation a success is the powerful swell of the lay revolt against the cleric; it is wholly victorious wherever the Reformation triumphs, and in those other countries where, for yet another two centuries, the Catholic Church retains its precarious hold as a recognised sovereign power, the lay revolt is greatly heartened by that triumph. This hold of the State on the religious life of man is the most valuable conquest of all, and the last which any of these States will ever relinquish. [ ] The Reformation does bring freedom from the rule of the pope and his bishops and his clergy, from the sovereign spiritual state which the Catholic Church is. But, ultimately, the main freedom it establishes is the freedom of the State to do what it likes with man: and all in the name of God. In place of the Catholic dogmas man must now accept -- wherever the Reformers triumph -- the new reformed dogmas; even the morality of private life will be brought under public control. In his heart man is indeed free to function as priest and prophet and consciously chosen and elected, justified, the friend whom no sin can separate from his Saviour -- and he is free to be faithful in his heart while yet, in obedience to the divinely established prince, going the other way to all appearances. It is the only freedom he does enjoy. Everywhere man is soon grouped in new churches; his religious life is as much regimented as ever; [ ] and in his life as a citizen he is -- unless he be wealthy -- little more than a pawn, whether the sovereign be the absolute Lutheran prince or the absolute Calvinist oligarchy. Of all who benefit from the destruction inaugurated by Luther's explosive thought, it is the prince who benefits most, and most lastingly. "None since the Apostles," said the Reformer, speaking of himself, "has done so much to give the civil authority a conscience; none, whether teacher or writer, theologian or jurist, has spoken so clearly, or in so masterly a fashion." [ ] The brag is characteristic, and not least in the naive innocent simplicity apparently all unconscious that the speaker comes at the end of four hundred years of the most intense discussion of human rights and political theory. And in the very years while Luther's exegesis is thus riveting the absolute State on Protestant Germany as a part of divine revelation, the Dominican Vittoria, in the absolute Spain of Charles V, is freely lecturing on the limitations of princely power, a task to be just as freely continued, a generation later, in that same country, under the absolutist Philip II by the Jesuit Suarez. [ ] In the most unlikely places, and at the most unlikely seasons, the true Church of Christ never ceases to battle for the real independence of the Gospel from every human fetter. #### Luther, undoubtedly, scored a great initial victory. Then he was, definitely, checked. But not before that victory had produced an effect that still endures -- still dividing western Europe, and into two kinds of men, [ ] whom for convenience's sake we may call Protestants and Catholics. The story of the fortunes of the Reformation must be told elsewhere, and nowhere will any such impossible task be undertaken as to compare these Protestants and Catholics, in their lives at least. But at the risk of digressing into a much controverted theological matter, something needs to be said of Lutheranism as being the very inversion of Christianity and of this as providing the main source of difference between Protestants and Catholics. The kind of difference this was must be stated, for it explains why henceforth they never really understood each other, and why with Luther all previous Christian history is brought up sharp; it explains how, to Catholics, Luther is most of all a revolutionary, and the new reformed religion not religion at all in the sense that Catholicism is a religion. #### Briefly, what Luther did was to make man and not God the centre of those activities to the sum of which we give the term religion -- man's need of God and not God's glory. And the Scriptural paradox was once again fulfilled that he who would save his life must lose it. From the beginning of his own career as a friar at least, the human subject was to Luther of more concern than God -- not as a theory, but practically, that is to say in the order of mystical experience, in the conduct of what is called, in the special technical sense, the spiritual life. Luther's great achievement, from this point of view, was, in effect, the translation of his own, more or less native, " mystical egocentreism" into a foundation dogma of Christian belief. #### His first mystical awakening was anxiety about the judicial wrath of the Almighty (as Luther misconceived Almighty God), a practical anxiety how, despite the invincible concupiscence that poisons -- wholly corrupts -- human nature itself and not merely Martin Luther, (again an enormous misconception of the effect of Original Sin) man can escape that wrath. The reformer's first pre-occupation is to work out a theological doctrine of salvation, and in the new scheme of things theological the main purpose of religion is precisely this, that it is the means by which man escapes from the devil. "Saving faith", and not charity, is now the first, principal, and characteristic virtue of the model Christian. And this faith -- an instrument divinely provided, by which man takes hold of the imputed justice of Christ our Saviour -- is not presented as (and it cannot ever be) a real participation in the Divine Life such as is sanctifying grace. Man's life is not thus grafted on to the Divine Life, in the Lutheran scheme of things; it remains a thing apart, and man is forever locked within himself. Man cannot make God the centre of his life, if he cannot believe that his life is actually one with God's life. From all possibility of such a union man is also cut off by his own ineradicable sinfulness, that fatal, inevitable state of corruption, the effect of Original Sin, which not even divine grace can cure. And God being barred out from man's innermost self, who there is ruler and supreme if not man himself? #### Of the resulting principle that a man's self is the ultimate standard by which all else must be judged, who better than Luther is the classic example? The exaltation of self bred in his contemporaries by that Renaissance of letters and the arts for which Luther had such bitter words, [ ] is as nothing to the exaltation of self bred by his own new theology. To the spirit of man justified by saving faith, found free as none was ever free before, all external constraint or law is an unendurable wrong. There is posited an essential opposition between the liberty newly revealed in Luther, between the interior life, between the " spirit" -- and all that comes to man from without himself. And so all those things which are in reality links between the inner man and the truth outside him, must henceforth be barriers -- or not realities, except with such reality as the inner man chooses to confer upon them. The Church and the sacraments, the hierarchy, the teaching papacy, the objective doctrine -- these are considered as so many barriers between the inner man and God. Faith and works are in opposition for Luther, the Gospel and the law, the inner spirit and the external authority. From without there is, then, no hope; and once the emotional alternations cease of spiritual terror and spiritual exaltation, or once they are seen for what they are, merely temperamental reactions, acts not wholly human, what remains? The intelligence was long ago expelled by the prophet from the garden of spirituality, with bitter curses indeed, and the most obscene revilings. Faith, true faith, the assent of the intelligence to truth divinely made known, has no place there. #### And what when man is through with the tragi-comedy of the interior emotional gymnastic? It is the deepest criticism of Luther's famous theory -- and the explanation of the unending, ever-developing miseries that have come from it, and were bound to come from it -- that it goes against the nature of things, and against nothing more evidently than against the nature of the spiritual. The new religion introduced, or rather established as part of the permanent order of things, a whole series of vital antagonisms to perplex and hinder man already only too tried by his own freely chosen wrong-doing, to fill his soul with still blacker thoughts about the hopeless contradiction and futility of all existence, to set him striving for centuries at the hopeless task of bringing happiness and peace out of a philosophy essentially pessimistic and despairing. It cut him off from all belief in the possibility of external aids, and in the very generation when Christian man needed nothing so evidently as a delivery that was divine, it handed him over to his own corrupt self, endowed now, for the task of self correction, with an innate omniscience and infallibility such as no cleric or pontiff or church had ever devised. [ ] #### For the many terrible evils from which Christian life was suffering, Luther brought not a single remedy. He could do no more than exhort and denounce and destroy. There was the problem of clerical worldliness: Luther, heir to the long line of faux mystiques for whom clerical ownership was sinful, abolished the cleric altogether. There was the problem of the scandal caused by rival philosophies and the effect of the rivalry on theology and mysticism: Luther, again the term of a long development, drove out all philosophy, and theology with it. The very purpose of the intelligence is knowledge, to enquire is its essential act: but in the sphere of all but the practical and the concrete and the individual, Luther bade the Christian stifle its promptings as a temptation and a snare; once again Luther is not a pioneer in the solution he offers. There was the problem of the Church itself; how it could best be kept unspotted, despite its contacts with the world: Luther's solution is to abolish the Church. #### It is the surrender to despair -- in the name of greater simplicity, which "simplicity" is presented as the road back to primitive truth and the good life; to despair: as though true religion was incompatible with the two great natural necessities, the ownership of material goods and the activity of the speculative intelligence; as though material destitution and contented, uncritical ignorance were conditions sine quibus non for the preservation on earth of the work of that Incarnate Wisdom through Whom the Creator called the earth into being. #### All those anti-intellectualist, anti-institutional forces that had plagued and hindered the medieval Church for centuries, whose chronic maleficent activity had, in fact, been the main cause why -- as we are often tempted to say -- so little was done effectively to maintain a generally higher standard of Christian life; all the forces that were the chronic distraction of the medieval papacy, were now stabilised, institutionalised in the new reformed Christian Church. Enthronement of the will as the supreme human faculty; hostility to the activity of the intelligence in spiritual matters and in doctrine; the ideal of a Christian perfection that is independent of sacraments and independent of the authoritative teaching of clerics; of sanctity attainable through one's own self-sufficing spiritual activities; denial of the truth that Christianity, like man, is a social thing; -- all the crude, backwoods, obscurantist theories bred of the degrading pride that comes with chosen ignorance, the pride of men ignorant because unable to be wise except through the wisdom of others, now have their fling. Luther's own special contribution -- over and above the key doctrines which set all this mischief loose -- is the notion of life as radically evil. #### When all has been said that can be said in Luther's favour, (and admittedly there is an attractive side to the natural man) [ ] the least harmful of all his titanic public activities was his vast indignation roused by abuses -- and by the sins of others. He gave it full expression and he did so very courageously. But the time needed more than this from one who was to restore it to health and to holiness, to holiness indeed first of all, in order that it might have health. |