LUTHER (Vol. 1-6). Grisar Hartmann
his mysticism, stood as a worthy companion the religion of the enslaved will; this we find present in his mind from the beginning, and at a later period it obtained a lasting monument in the work “De servo arbitrio,” which Luther regarded as the climax of his theology.[398]
But there are other connecting-links between Occamism and the errors of the young Monk.
According to Occam’s school the purely spiritual attributes of God cannot be logically proved; it does not consider it as proved merely by reason that God is the last and final end of man, and that outside of Him there is no real human happiness, nor even, according to Occam himself, that “any final cause exists on account of which all things happen”;[399] not only, according to him, must we be on our guard against any idea that reason can arrive at God as the origin of happiness and as the end of salvation, but even His attributes we must beware of examining philosophically. God’s outward action knows no law, but is purely arbitrary. Thus Occamism, with its theory of the arbitrary Divine Will, manifesting itself in the act of “acceptation” or imputation, was more likely to produce a servile feeling of dependence on God than any childlike relationship; with this corresponded the feeling of the utter worthlessness of man’s own works in relation to imputation, which, absolutely speaking, might have been other than it is.
It is highly probable that the bewildered soul of the young Augustinian greedily lent an ear to such ideas, and laboured to make them meet his own needs. The doubts as to predestination which tormented him were certainly not thereby diminished, but rather increased. How could the idea of an arbitrary God have been of any use to him? In all likelihood the apprehensiveness and obscurity which colours his idea of God, in the Commentary on Romans, was due to notions imbibed by him in his school. Luther was later on to express this conception in his teaching regarding the “Deus absconditus,” on whom, as the source of all predestination (even to hell), we may not look, and whom we may only timidly adore. Already in the Commentary referred to he teaches the absolute predestination to hell of those who are to be damned, a doctrine which no Occamist had yet ventured to put forward.
Among the other points of contact between Luther’s teaching and Occamism, or Nominalism, we may mention, as a striking example, his denial of Transubstantiation, which he expressly associates with one of the theses of the Occamist d’Ailly. Here his especial hatred of the school of St. Thomas comes out very glaringly.
Luther himself confesses later how the Occamist school had led him to this denial.[400] When studying scholastic theology he had read in d’Ailly that the mystery of Christ’s presence in the Sacrament of the Altar would be much more comprehensible could we but assume that He was present with the bread, i.e. without any change of substance, but that this was impossible owing to the unassailable contrary teaching of the Church on Transubstantiation. The same idea is found in Occam, but of this Luther was unaware. Luther criticises d’Ailly’s appeal to the Church, and then proceeds: “I found out later on what sort of Church it is which sets up such a doctrine; it is the Thomistic, the Aristotelian. My discovery made me bolder, and therefore I decided for Consubstantiation. The opinions of the Thomists, even though approved by Pope or Council, remain opinions and do not become articles of faith, though an angel from heaven should say the contrary; what is asserted apart from Scripture and without manifest revelation, cannot be believed.”[401] Yet in point of fact the term “Transsubstantiatio” had been first used in a definition by the Œcumenical Lateran Council of 1215 to express the ancient teaching of the Church regarding the change of substance. According to what Luther here says, St. Thomas of Aquin (whose birth occurred some ten years later) was responsible for the introduction of the word and what it stood for, in other words for the doctrine itself. A little later Luther solemnly reaffirmed that “Transubstantiation is purely Thomistic” (1522).[402] “The Decretals settled the word, but there is no doubt that it was introduced into the Church by those coarse blockheads the Thomists” (1541).[403] Hence either he did not know of the Council or its date, or he did not know when St. Thomas wrote; in any case he was ignorant of the relation in which the teaching of St. Thomas on this point stood to the teaching of earlier ages. He was unaware of the historical fact of the general adoption of the term since the end of the eleventh century;[404] he was not acquainted with the theologians who taught in the interval between the Lateran Council and St. Thomas, and who used both the name and the idea of Transubstantiation, and among whom were Albertus Magnus and Alexander of Hales; he cannot even have noted the title of the Decretal from which he derived the knowledge of the existence of the doctrine of Transubstantiation in the Middle Ages, for it is headed: “Innocentius tertius in concilio generali.”
That he should have made St. Thomas responsible for the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and that so rudely, appears to be a result of his ever-increasing hatred for Aquinas. In the first period of his change of view, his opposition was to the Scholastics in general, but from 1518 onwards his assaults are on St. Thomas and the Thomists. Why was this? A Thomist, Prierias of Rome, was the author of the first pamphlet against him; another Thomist, Cardinal Cajetan, had summoned him to appear before his tribunal; both belonged to the Dominican Order, in which Thomas, the great Dominican Saint, was most enthusiastically studied. Tetzel, too, was a Dominican and a Thomist. Any examination of Luther’s development cannot but pay attention to this circumstance, though it is true it does not belong to his earliest period. It makes many of the outbreaks of anger to which he gave way later more comprehensible. In 1522 Luther pours out his ire on the “asinine coarseness of the Thomists,” on “the Thomist hogs and donkeys,” on the “stupid audacity and thickheadedness of the Thomists,” who “have neither judgment, nor insight, nor industry in their whole body.”[405] His theology, we may remark, largely owed its growth to this quarrel and the contradiction it called forth.
Luther’s tendency to controversial theology and his very manner of proceeding, in itself far less positive than negative, bore the Occamist stamp. It is true he was predisposed this way by nature, yet the criticism of the nominalistic school, the acuteness and questioning attitude of Occam and d’Ailly, lent an additional impulse to his putting forth like efforts. We shall not be mistaken in assuming that his doctrinal arbitrariness was, to a certain extent at least, a result of the atmosphere of decadent theology in which his lot had been cast. The paradoxes to which he so frequently descends are manifestly modelled on the antilogies with which Occam’s works abound; like Occam, he frequently leaves the reader in doubt as to his meaning, or speaks later in quite a different way from what he did before. Occam’s garrulity was, so it would appear, infectious. Luther himself, while praising his acuteness, blames Occam for the long amplifications to which he was addicted.[406] On more than one occasion Luther reproaches himself for his discursiveness and superabundance of rhetoric. Even the Commentaries he wrote in his youth on the Psalms and the Epistle to the Romans prove to the reader that his self-reproof was well deserved, whilst the second Commentary also manifests that spirit of criticism and arbitrariness, bold to overstep the barriers of the traditional teaching of the Church, which he had likewise received from his Occamist masters.
Various attempts have been made to point out other theological influences, besides those considered above, as having worked upon Luther in his earlier years.
It would carry us too far to discuss these opinions individually, the more so that there are scarcely sufficient data to hand to lead to a decision. Luther himself, who should be the principal witness, is very reticent concerning the authors and the opinions he made use of in forming his own ideas. He would rather give the impression that everything had grown up spontaneously from his own thought and research; that his teaching sprang into being from