Hartmann Grisar

“ To swallow up the secular power in the spiritual had never been part of the Church’s teaching, nor was it ever the ideal of her enlightened representatives; but, for the morality of the great, for the observance of maxims of justice and for the improvement of the nations the principle that religion must not be separated from the life of the State and from the office of those in authority, but must permeate and spiritualise them was, as history proved, truly vital. Subsequent to Luther’s day the tendency to separate the two undoubtedly made unchecked progress. ”

“ Disputatiousness and love to pick a quarrel, faults which simply represented the other side of his firm faith, and which some had already deplored in the young monk at Erfurt, Wittenberg and Leipzig, had naturally not been abated by his many victorious combats, and, now, more than ever, Oldecop’s words were true: ‘He wanted to be in the right in all the disputations and was fond of quarrelling.’ The fact is that Luther was no exception to the rule, that man finds nothing harder to bear well than success. ”

“ His doctrine of good works was no less a source of disquietude to Luther. He declared that Satan was sure of an “easy victory” “once he gets a man to think of what he has done or left undone.” What one had to do was to retort to the devil, strong in one’s fiducial faith: “Though I may not have done this or that good work, still I am saved by the forgiveness of sins, as baptised and redeemed by the flesh and blood of Christ”; beyond this he should not go: “Faith ranks above deeds”; still, so he adds, before a man reaches this point, all may be over for him. ”

“ Even the man who studies the long list of Luther’s practical writings simply from the standpoint of the scholar and historian—though he may not always share Luther’s opinions—cannot fail to acknowledge that the warmth with which Luther speaks of those Christian truths accepted by all, leaves a deep impression and re-echoes within the soul like a voice from our common home. ”

“ If we desire, so he says frankly, to honour God’s sublime majesty and to humble fallen creatures as they deserve, then let us recognise that God works all in all without any possibility of any resistance whatsoever on man’s part, God’s action being like to that of the potter on his clay. Just as Luther was unable to recognise justification in the sense in which it had been taught of yore, so also he entirely failed to appreciate the profounder conception of morality. ”

“ Luther’s followers attempted to construct a system out of their master’s varying and often so arbitrary statements. At any rate they upheld his denial of any natural order of morality distinct from the order of grace. It was to remain true that man, “previous to conversion, possesses indeed an understanding, but not of divine things, and a will, though not for anything good and wholesome.” In this respect man stands far below even a stock or stone, because he resists the Word and Will of God (which they cannot do) until God raises him up from the death of sin, enlightens and creates him anew. ”

“ Luther, it is true, laughs to scorn the Popish doctrine of merit which makes God Himself our debtor. Yet long before St. Augustine had answered the objection: “God has become our debtor, not as though He has received something from us, but because He has promised what pleased Him. It is a different thing when we say to a man: You are my debtor because I have given you something, and when we say to God: Give us what Thou hast promised, for we have done what Thou didst command.” ”

“ His statements concerning faith working by love, had they been more than mere words, would, in themselves, have led him back to the very standpoint of the Church he hated. In reality he regards the “Law” as something utterly hostile to the “pious” soul; before the true “believer” the Law shrinks back, though, to the man not yet justified by “faith,” it serves as a taskmaster and a hangman. The “Law” thus loses the heavenly virtue with which it was stamped. In Luther’s eyes the only thing of any real value is that religion which consists in faith in the forgiveness of sins. ”

“ Already during our lifetime we have seen sects and dissensions enough under our very noses, how each one follows his own way. In short, contempt for the Word on our side and blasphemy on the other [Catholic] side proclaim loudly enough the advent of the Last Day. Hence, above all, let us have pure and abundant preaching of the Word! The ministers of the Word must first of all become one heart and one soul. For if we make laws our successors will lay claim to the same authority, and, fallen human nature being what it is, the result will be a war of the flesh against the flesh. ”

“ Simply to tear itself away from such disquieting thoughts was certainly not possible for a conscience in so luckless a position as Luther’s, oppressed as it was with the weight of a world catastrophe. ”

“ For it will turn against yourselves so that the sparks and cinders will fly into your eyes. Yes, indeed, this is God’s fire, Who calls Himself a consuming fire. You know and are convinced in your own conscience that your cause is wicked and lost and that you are striving against God. ”

“ Praise be to God Who has chosen us unworthy sinners to be thus honoured by His Son and has permitted us to hearken to His Majesty through the Word of the Evangel. The angels and the whole of God’s creation wish us luck; but the Pope, Satan’s own monster, grieves and is affrighted, and all the gates of hell shake. ”

“ Glancing back at what has already been said concerning Luther’s abasement of morality and considering it in the light of his theories of the Law and Gospel, of assurance of salvation and morality, we find as a main characteristic of Luther’s ethics a far-reaching, dangerous rift between religion and morals. Morality no longer stands in its old position at the side of faith. ”

“ To lower the Divine precepts to the level of counsels is a horrible, Satanic blasphemy.” As a Christian “you must rather forsake and sacrifice everything”; to this the first table of the Law (of Moses, the Law of the love of God) binds you, but, on account of the second table (the law of social life) , you may and must preserve your own for the sake of your family. As a Christian, too, you must be willing to suffer at the hands of every man, “but, apart from your Christian profession, you must resist evil if you wish to be a good citizen of this world.” ”

“ According to Luther such contempt for the Law is often impossible, hence he determined to conquer the “dualism of the old-new man” of which we like St. Paul (Gal. ii. 20) are conscious: I live, and yet I do not; I am dead, and yet I am not; a sinner, and yet no sinner; I have the Law and yet I have it not. We ought, according to Luther, to say to ourselves: There is a time to die and a time to live, a Law to be obeyed and a Law to be despised. “Even during the Antinomian controversy,” concludes Loofs, “Luther did not abandon such thoughts.” ”

“ He may have delighted his own followers by his unmatched art of depreciating others in the most grotesque of fashions, of exaggerating their foibles, and, with his keen powers of imagination, of giving the most amusingly ignominious account of their undoing, but, when judged impartially from a literary and moral standpoint, his output appears more as irritating satire, as clever, bitter word-play and sarcasm, rather than as real humour. ”

“ Let us listen to Luther’s utterances at various periods on the dualism in the moral life of the individual: “The twin kingdoms must be kept wide asunder: the spiritual where sin is punished and forgiven, and the secular where justice is demanded and dealt out. In God’s kingdom which He rules according to the Gospel there is no demanding of justice, but all is forgiveness, remission and bestowal, nor is there any anger, or punishment, but nothing save brotherly charity and service.” ”

“ Everybody knows how much a forceful will is able to do, even in the profoundest depths of the soul. Nevertheless the unhappy victory he ultimately succeeded in gaining over his own self has a right to be accounted something quite out of the common, something of which few in his position would have been capable. Hardly ever has a man had such Titanic forces at his disposal as Luther. ”

“ As to subjectivism, the dominant evil of the age, he himself carried it to its furthest limits, relentlessly condemning everywhere whatever did not appeal to him and exalting his personal views and feelings into a regular law; subjectivism pervades and spoils his whole theology, and, in the domain of ethics, puts both personality and conscience on a new and very questionable basis. ”

“ Self-betterment, by the leading of a Christian life and, particularly, by striving after Christian perfection, had in Catholic times been inculcated by many writers and even by first-rank theologians. In this field it was usual to take for granted, both in popular manuals and in learned treatises, as the general conviction, that religion teaches people to strive after what is highest, whether in each one’s ordinary duties of daily life, or in the ecclesiastical or religious state. The power of the moral teaching was to stand revealed in the struggle after the ideal thus set forth. ”

“ No, a good moral life is essential for salvation! The strongest Bible texts would have been there to back such a statement, and, to his powerful eloquence, it should have proved an attractive task to crush his frivolous opponents by so weighty an argument. Yet we find never a word concerning the necessity of good works for salvation, but merely an account of the wonders worked by faith of its own accord alone after it has laid hold on the heart. ”

“ Protestants have found the essential difference between Protestantism and Catholicism to consist in the fact, that, according to Luther’s directions, Protestantism separates “religion and theology, faith and knowledge, morality and politics, Christianity and art,” whereas Catholicism, according to the motto of Pius X, seeks to “renew all things in Christ.” “We know that revelation has only an inward mission to the individual soul; the Catholic believes in its public mission for universal civilisation.” ”

“ Joking was a permanent element of Luther’s psychology. Often, even in his old age, his love of fun struggles through the lowering clouds of depression and has its fling against the gloomy anxiety that fills his mind, and against the world and the devil. ”

“ Religious writers before Luther’s day, when dealing with distrust and unbelief, had been careful to distinguish between the involuntary acts of man’s lower nature which do not rise above the realm of feeling, and those which have the definite consent of the will and which alone they regarded as grievous sins against faith or the virtue of hope. With Luther everything is sin; he bewails the actual distrust, and real weakness of faith springing from a fault of the will ”

“ In Jewry, for which Luther’s hatred increases with age, he sees men so entirely delivered over to the service of the devil that “all the heathen in a lump” are simply nothing in comparison with the Jews; but even the “fury of the Jews is mere jest and child’s play” compared with the devilish corruption of the Papacy.
“The devil is there; he has great claws and whosoever falls into them him he holds fast, as they find to their cost in Popery. Hence let us always pray and fear God.” ”

“ The human race is so depraved that no one can be found who does not transgress all God’s commandments even though the wrath of God and his eternal damnation be held up before him and preached to him daily ”

“ Thus, when Lauterbach told him of three suicides who had ended their lives with the halter, he at once insisted that it was really Satan who had strung them up while making them to think that it was they themselves who committed the crime. “The Prince of this world is everywhere at work.” “God, in permitting such crimes, is causing the wrath of heaven to play over the world like summer lightning, that ungrateful men, who fling the Gospel to the winds, may see what is in store for them.” “Such happenings must be brought to the people’s knowledge so that they may learn to fear God.” ”

“ How did Luther square his system of morality with his principal doctrine of Faith and Justification, and where did he find any ground for the performance of good works?
In the main he made everything to proceed from and rest upon a firm, personal certainty of salvation. The artificial [26] system thus built up, so far as it is entitled to be called a system at all, requires only to be set forth in order to be appreciated as it deserves. It will be our duty to consider Luther’s various statements, and finally his own summary, made late in life, of the conclusions he had reached. ”

“ Luther’s original doctrine of Penance, to which frequent allusion has already been made, started, according to Loofs, (1906) with the assumption that contrition is produced solely by the “love of righteousness,” and that true penance “does not come from the Law,” because the latter does nothing but “kill, curse, render guilty and pronounce judgment”; penance produced by the Law led only to hypocrisy. “Thus, before one has faith, to think of sin and of the Law is harmful.” ”

“ For seeing, that, outside of Christ, death and sin are our masters and the devil our God and sovereign, there can be no power or might, no wit or understanding whereby we could make ourselves fit for, or could even strive after, righteousness and life, but on the contrary we must remain blind and captive, slaves of sin and the devil, and must do what pleases them and runs counter to God and His Commandments. ”

“ Not Paul alone, according to Luther, but all the other Apostles too had been assailed by doubts.
He was always consoled to find new and illustrious companions in his misery. Christ, he declares, had foretold this to the Apostles; He had also spoken to them of this sort of persecution: “Your conscience will grow weak so that you will often think: ‘Who knows whether I have been right? Alas, have I not gone too far?’ Thus in the eyes of the world and to your own conscience you will seem to be in the wrong” ”

“ Modern research, not seldom carried out by open-minded Protestants, has furnished some surprising results in this respect, so that one of the most recent and diligent of the Protestant workers in this field could write: “If everything be taken into account it will no longer be possible to say as the old polemics did, that the Bible was a sealed book to both theologians and laity. The more we study the Middle Ages, the more does this fable tend to dissolve into thin air.” “The Middle Ages concerned themselves with Bible translation much more than was formerly supposed.” ”

“ Luther frequently lays it down that merry talk and good spirits are a capital remedy against temptations to doubts on the faith and remorse of conscience.
He exhorts Prince Joachim of Anhalt, who had much to suffer from the “Tempter” and from “melancholy,” to be always cheerful, since God has commanded us “to be glad in His presence.” “I, who have passed my life in sorrow and looking at the black side of things, now seek for joy, and find it whenever I can. We now have, praise be to God, so much knowledge [through the Evangel] that we can afford to be cheerful with a good conscience.” ”

“ They prove “before the world and before his own conscience” that a Christian really has the “faith.” This is what Luther expressly teaches in his Church-Postils: “Therefore hold fast to this, that a man who is inwardly a Christian is justified before God solely by faith and without any works; but outwardly and publicly, before the people and to himself, he is justified by works, i.e. he becomes known to others as, and certain in himself [40] that, he is inwardly just, believing and pious. Thus you may term one an open or outward justification and the other an inward justification.” ”

“ Luther’s one-sided insistence on a confiding, trusting faith in God, at the cost of the moral work, has its root in his theory of the utter depravity of man and his entire lack of freedom, in his low esteem for the presuppositions of morality, in his conviction that nature is capable of nothing, and, owing to its want of self-determination, is unable on its own even to be moral at all. ”

“ Luther’s rules for the guidance of conscience in other matters were quite similar. Subjectivism becomes a regular system for the guidance of conscience. In this sense it was to the person that the final decision was left. But whether this isolation of man from man, this snatching of the individual from dutiful submission to an authority holding God’s place, was really a gain to the individual, to religion and to society, or not rather the reverse, is only to be settled in the light of the history of private judgment which was the outcome of Luther’s new principle. ”

“ To the man who had become sensible of the ensnaring influence of the world and of its evil effects upon himself, or who on account of his mental build felt himself endangered by it, Catholic moralists advised retirement, recollection, self-examination and solitude. Luther was certainly not furthering the cause of perfection when he repeatedly insisted, with an emphasis that is barely credible, that solitude must be avoided as the deadly foe of the true life of the soul, and that what should be sought was rather company and distraction. Solitude was a temptation to sin. ”

“ But from this it does not follow that you are without sin, although it is already forgiven; for in yourself you feel no hearty desire to obey God, to go to the sacrament or to hear God’s Word. Do you perhaps imagine that this is no sin, or mere child’s play?” Hence, he concludes, we must pray daily “for forgiveness and never cease to fight against ourselves and not give the rein to our sinful inclinations and lusts, nor obey them contrary to the dictates of conscience, but rather weaken and deaden sin ever more and more; for sin must not merely be forgiven but verily swept away and destroyed.” ”