LUTHER (Vol. 1-6). Grisar Hartmann
Luther, as this somewhat lengthy passage shows, had, at any rate at that time, no bright, kindly idea of God’s Nature, Goodness and inexhaustible Mercy, which wills to make every creature here on earth happy and to save them in eternity; his mind was imprisoned within the narrow limits to which he had before this accustomed himself; a false conception of God’s essence—perhaps a remainder of his Occamist training—was already poisoning the very vitals of his theology.
His melancholy conception of God comes to light not only in the various passages where he speaks of predestination, but also in the dark pictures, which, in his morbid frame of mind, he paints of the wickedness and sin of man pitting his unquenchable concupiscence against God, the All Holy.[461] In order to adore this stern and cruel God in his own way he had already built up on his false mysticism a practical theory of resignation and self-surrender to whatever might be the Divine Will, even should it destine him to damnation. In the first pages of the Commentary on Romans his idea of God enables him to proclaim loudly and boldly, and with full knowledge of what he is doing, his opposition to the religious practice of his many zealous contemporaries, whether clerics or laymen.
Many have, according to him, an idea of God different from his: “Oh, how many there are to-day who do not worship God as He is, but as they imagine Him to be. Look at their singularities and their superstitious rites, full of delusions. They give up what they ought to practise, they choose out the works by which they will honour Him, they fancy that God is such that He looks down upon them and their works.” “There is spread abroad to-day a sort of idolatry by which God is not served as He is. The love of their own ideas and their own righteousness entirely blinds mankind, and they call it ‘good intention.’ They imagine that God is thereby graciously disposed to them, whereas it is not so: and so they worship their phantom God rather than the true God.”[462]
Neither do they understand how to pray, because they do not know the awfulness of God. Does not the Scripture say; he asks them: “Serve ye the Lord with fear and rejoice unto Him with trembling” (Ps. ii. 11), and “with fear and trembling work out your salvation” (Phil. ii. 12)? Not wanting to look at their own works as “bad and suspicious” in the eyes of this God, “they do not assiduously call upon His grace.” They assume that their good intention arises out of themselves, whereas it is a gift of God, and desire to prepare themselves for the infusion of grace.[463] “Pelagian notions are at the bottom of all this. No one acknowledges himself now to be a Pelagian, but many are so unconsciously, with their principle that free will must set to work to obtain grace.”[464]
Such is the perilous position he reaches under the influence of his distaste for works, viz. a violent antagonism to free will. Man is unable to do the least thing to satisfy this Holy God.[465] The Occamist theology of the school in which he was trained here serves him in good stead, as the following sentences, which are closely akin to Occam’s acceptation-theory, show: “We must always be filled with anxiety, ever fear and await the Divine acceptance”; for as all our works are in themselves evil, “only those are good which God imputes as good; they are in fact something or nothing, only in so far as God accepts them or not.” “The eternal God has chosen good works from the beginning that they should please Him,”[466] “but how can I ever know that my deed pleases God? How can I even know that my good intention is from God?”[467] Hence, away with the proud self-righteous (“superbi iustitiarii”) who are so sure of their good works!
Fear, desponding humility and self-annihilation, according to Luther, are the only feelings one can cherish in front of this terrible, unaccountable God.[468] “He who despairs of himself is the one whom God accepts.”[469]
He also speaks of a certain “pavor Dei,” which is the foundation of salvation: “trepidare et terreri” is the best sign, as it is said in Psalm cxliii.: “Shoot out Thy arrows and Thou shalt trouble them,” the “terrens Deus” leads to life.[470] True love does not ask any enjoyment from God, rather, he here repeats, whoever loves Him from the hope of being made eternally happy by Him, or from fear of being wretched without Him, has a sinful and selfish love (“amor concupiscentiæ”); but to allow the terrors of God to encompass us, to be ready to accept from Him the most bitter interior and exterior cross, to all eternity, that only is perfect love. And even with such love we are dragged into thick interior darkness.[471]
All these gloomy thoughts which cloud his mind, gather, when he comes to explain chapters viii. and ix. of the Epistle to the Romans, where the Apostle deals with the question of election to grace.
Luther thinks he has here found in St. Paul the doctrine of predestination, not only to heaven, but also to hell, expressed, moreover, in the strongest terms. At the same time he warns his hearers against faint-heartedness, being well aware how dangerous his views might prove to souls.
“Let no one immerse himself in these thoughts who is not purified in spirit, lest he sink into an abyss of horror and despair; the eyes of the heart must first be purified by contemplating the wounds of Christ. I discourse upon these matters solely because the trend of the lectures leads up to them, and because they are unavoidable. It is the strongest wine there is, and the most perfect food, a solid nourishment for the perfect; it is that most exalted theology of which the Apostle says (1 Cor. ii. 6): ‘we speak wisdom among the perfect’ ... only the perfect and the strong should study the first book of the Sentences [because predestination is dealt with at the end of Peter Lombard’s first book]; it should really be the last and not the first book; to-day many who are unprepared jump at it and then go away blinded in spirit.”[472]
Luther teaches that the Apostle’s doctrine is: God did not in their lifetime exercise His mercy towards the damned; He is right and not to be blamed when He follows herein His own supreme will alone. “Why then does man murmur as though God were not acting according to the law?” His will is, for every man, the highest good. Why should we not desire, and that with the greatest fervour, the fulfilment of this will, since it is a will which can in no way be evil? “You say: Yes, but for me it is evil. No, it is evil for none. The only evil is that men cannot understand God’s will and do it”; they should know that even in hell they are doing God’s will if it is His wish that they should be there.[473]
Hence the only way he knows out of the darkness he has himself created is recognition of, and resignation to, the possibility of a purely arbitrary damnation by God. The expressions he here makes use of for reprobation, “inter reprobos haberi,” “damnari,” “morte æterna puniri” make it plain that he demands resignation to actual reprobation and to being placed on a footing with the damned. Yet, as he always considers this resignation as the most perfect proof of acquiescence in the Will of God, it does not, according to him, include within itself a readiness to hate God, but, on the contrary, the strongest and highest love.[474] With such an exalted frame of mind, however, the actual penalty of hell would cease to exist. “It is impossible that he should remain apart from God who throws himself so entirely into the Will of God. He wills what God wills, therefore he pleases God. If he pleases God, then he is loved by God; if he is loved by God, then he is saved.”