3

THE CATHOLIC LUTHER

It was very much as a devout Catholic that Luther took up his appointment as professor of scripture at the University of Wittenberg in 1512. His intellectual interests were thoroughly conventional. By his own account, his curiosity at this time had been piqued by one of the most widely read of fourteenth-century devotional texts, the Revelations of Saint Bridget of Sweden.1 Bridget’s Revelations, which had been printed a few times, embodied the deeply Christocentric concerns that mark so much late medieval piety, as well as reformist urges that made as much sense in the context of the Renaissance papacy at Rome as they had in the context of the Avignon papacy of her own time. Luther would later dismiss the reported visions and revelations of nuns such as Bridget as mere ravings, but his interest in them in the early 1510s was very much part of the Catholic mainstream.

In 1513, Luther decided that his main lectures in the coming year would deal with the Psalms. There was nothing untoward in this. The book of Psalms was generally considered by Christian theologians the most obviously “Christological” book in the Old Testament, and was therefore a favored subject for commentary throughout the Middle Ages. Notwithstanding Luther’s insinuation that the Bible was unknown to professional theologians, lecturing on a part of the Bible (especially this part) was not at all unusual. The academic pursuit of theology from the thirteenth century onwards had been based on one particular textbook, the Sentences of Peter Lombard, on which dozens, if not hundreds, of medieval commentaries and lecture series survive. But this textbook was the starting point for the study of theology, not its be-all and end-all. Scholars lectured on the Sentences, as Luther had done, by way of apprenticeship, to prove themselves as theologians, and theology students started by attending lectures on the Sentences, but the Bible was by no means ignored.

The invention of print in the fifteenth century permitted a major step forward in the study of theology, by enabling the complete text of the Bible to be made available in far greater quantity and at a far lower price than ever before. “Bibles,” as such, were relatively rare until the arrival of print. They were by no means unknown, but it was far more common for the scriptures to be copied and owned and read in discrete portions than to be found as a single book, or even as a coherent set of volumes. The New Testament, the Gospels, the Epistles, even individual gospels, were more common, as were the Pentateuch and the Prophets, often divided between the major prophets and the (twelve) minor prophets, and many individual books such as Genesis, Exodus, or the Psalms (the most widely copied book, because of its devotional use). One-volume bibles, such as Gutenberg’s, remained somewhat unwieldy items for several decades, but were common by the close of the fifteenth century. But by the time Luther was teaching at Wittenberg, a standard scholar’s Bible was being widely produced in four- or six-volume sets. In these sets, the Latin text of the so-called “Vulgate” (i.e., common) Bible was presented along with a sophisticated body of commentary comprising the ancient interlinear “gloss” (brief explanatory notes, usually presented between the printed lines of the text), the “postils” (or comments) of the fourteenth-century French theologian Nicholas of Lyra, and later annotations by the converted Jew Paul of Burgos and the German theologian Mathias Thoring. These more substantial commentaries were presented in four separate blocks of text printed around a small section of glossed scriptural text that occupied the center of each page. Bibles of this kind, often known as “Lyras” for short, still survive in large numbers, and Luther probably owned one himself. Equipped as they were with excellent indexes, these new printed bibles made it vastly easier to carry out the sort of complex research that Luther practiced, cross-referencing texts across the entire body of the scriptures in order to tease out its full theological significance.

It was the printed Vulgate, not the Greek New Testament of Erasmus or the slowly rising tide of scholarship on the Hebrew Old Testament, that made possible not only Luther’s theological achievement but also its wide assimilation by other scholars, who could retrace the steps of his arguments through the pages of their own bibles. It also underpinned the achievements of his opponents, who could thumb through their own bibles in search of the contrary texts and contexts that showed the limitations, biases, and idiosyncrasies of his new doctrines. The impact of this can be seen in the development by the mid-sixteenth century of the new level of division of the Christian scriptures into individual numbered verses, which was fixed thanks to the work of the French Protestant printer Robert Estienne. The division of the books of the Bible into numbered chapters went back to the thirteenth century and to the birth of the universities and of theology as an academic discipline. The scholarly need for a still more precise and direct reference system, to enable scholars to check texts even more efficiently, was itself a product partly of the proliferation of printed bibles and partly of the theological squabbling of the Reformation era.

Luther himself later recalled, perhaps with some element of exaggeration, that when he was a student at Erfurt, not one professor of theology owned a bible.2 One might legitimately doubt this claim, because printed scholarly bibles survive in very substantial numbers. Nevertheless, his remark points us towards an important truth: the printed Bible changed the basis upon which Christian theologians worked. Thanks to print, for the first time in Christian history scholars anywhere in Latin Europe could have ready access to the entire scriptural text.

Luther took advantage of the new technology in his first major lecture series, commissioning from the Wittenberg printer Johann Grunenberg a cheap printed version of the Psalms, with the text set out in such a way as to leave students (and indeed himself) plenty of white space to write glosses between the lines and fuller notes in the ample margins. His own copy still survives, replete with the notes he made as the basis for his lectures, given between 1513 and 1515. At some time, probably after he had finished that course, he seems to have decided to turn his first lecture course into a more formal commentary, almost certainly intended for publication. This task, to which he alludes in a few letters written in 1516, was never completed, but the substantial albeit unfinished manuscript also survives, and this fuller exposition of the text, supplemented by his earlier rough notes, offers an intriguing insight into his theological views prior to his emergence as a public dissident in the years just before 1520.3 Although some scholars have sought to find in this work evidence that he had already formulated the crucial insights that characterize his mature teaching, such efforts are misplaced, and depend either on misunderstanding the distinctive character of Luther’s mature theology or on misunderstanding late medieval Catholic theology (or both).

Luther’s first psalm commentary is nevertheless of considerable interest in assessing his emergence as an original theologian. Although its frame of reference is unmistakably Catholic, it already touches on a number of features, more or less distinctive, that would preoccupy the author throughout his life. And it is also remarkable for what it fails to do. Most medieval expositions of the psalms would expatiate upon familiar theological concepts and categories such as the seven sacraments, the four cardinal virtues, the seven deadly sins, and other such handy enumerations so useful in preaching and teaching. Such topics might not seem at first sight very evident in the texts of these ancient Hebrew songs, but a long tradition of allegorical interpretation licensed theologians to find them there. Luther’s overwhelming concern, however, arising from the very first psalm, was with the central theological issue of justice. It was to the understanding and explanation of justice and justification that he returned throughout the commentary—and it is this focus that has led some scholars to conclude that, because the words are there, his later and very distinctive understandings of justice and justification are also already present.

The most striking feature of the commentary, at least to the modern eye, is its stridently anti-Jewish tone. Although there was then a clear Christian consensus that, at the time of Christ, the Jews had (with some exceptions) willfully and culpably rejected his Messianic claims and brought about his crucifixion, calling down upon themselves and their descendants the chastisement of divine providence, and although this consensus underpinned a general hostility towards Jews that ranged from a reluctant and grudging (though highly discriminatory) toleration by way of moral panic to sporadic mob violence and, ultimately, the option of forced conversion or expulsion, anti-Jewish rhetoric did not usually run right through Christian theological reflection. Most commentators on the Psalms did their work without indulging in incessant anti-Jewish polemic. Luther’s near contemporary and later opponent John Fisher also produced an unpublished psalm commentary, and he too invokes the familiar ideas and tropes of anti-Jewish rhetoric, blaming the Jews for unbelief and for killing Christ, and classifying them (as Luther does) with tyrants and heretics as the classic triad of the “persecutors” of the Christian Church. (Christians at the time seem to have been entirely oblivious to the realities of persecution around the year 1500.) But in Fisher’s commentaries these allusions are occasional, testifying to an uncomplicated acceptance of widely shared assumptions.4 In Luther’s commentaries, anti-Jewish rhetoric is well-nigh omnipresent, surfacing in almost every psalm, indeed on almost every page. Anti-Jewish ideas are not only endemic, but are systemically integral to the text, in that Luther construes the Jews and their interpretation of the “law” (i.e., the Old Testament scriptures, the Hebrew Bible) as the wrong end of a stark polarity between true and false justice. The Jews and their theology embody a complete inversion of the divine justice that is, for Luther, the crucial theme of the book of Psalms.⁵ They seek to justify themselves.⁶

What does most to lend credence to the erroneous notion that Luther was already, so to speak, a “Lutheran” at the time of this early commentary is precisely its overwhelming concern with justice and justification. While these concepts were certainly familiar to late medieval theologians, Luther was already distinctive in focusing so heavily upon them. It is evident that the question of how it might be possible for sinful human beings to be “justified” in the eyes of God, that is, how they could be saved from sin and made fit for the “beatific vision” of God in the world to come, was a cause of far more intellectual perplexity and a matter of far more existential urgency for the young Luther than it was for most other theologians. This, however, is not enough to show that the distinctively Lutheran doctrine of “justification by faith alone” was already in his mind.⁷

That this classically “Lutheran” doctrine had not yet taken shape is evident not only from the absence of any of the lapidary formulae that would encapsulate his later views but also from simple statements of unselfconsciously traditional positions that were utterly incompatible with his mature theology. Thus the mere passing comment that “we are co-workers with God” demonstrates that Luther was still well within the boundaries of medieval Catholicism.8 The concept of “cooperative grace” implicit in the claim that the faithful are co-workers (cooperatores) is worlds away from the strictly passive or instrumental role ascribed to human action and even volition in Luther’s later understanding of salvation. Faith, grace, and justice (three pretty much interchangeable terms) are “given”—data—not (as much later) “imputed.”⁹ Justification is continuous and progressive, not instantaneous. His understanding of salvation is entirely traditional: “The first root of all good is to put one’s will into the law of the Lord.” Far from believing in “justification by faith alone,” Luther’s first reference to faith in this commentary is his quotation from the Epistle of James: “Faith without works is dead.”¹⁰ Indeed, he censures the “stupid confidence” of those who think that they are saved because they are members of the people of God, because they are baptized believers, without any good works. Faith was a prerequisite for everything.¹¹ But it was not everything. Christian justice came through faith in Christ, but it was still about works of justice. Christians, unlike Jews, “work towards God and fulfil the works of the Law before God.”¹² Salvation for the early Luther, as for the late medieval Church, was ultimately about imitating Christ. The deeds of Christ, and of his saints, done in humility, poverty, and affliction, were examples set before the faithful for emulation.¹³

Justification is, moreover, a process, not—as in Luther’s mature theology—an event. It was scalar, not binary: “Those who are just are still to be justified. Those who stand must watch that they do not fall down.” Most significantly of all, justice itself was still envisaged, in Aristotle’s classical formulation, as “rendering to each their due.” This was a definition Luther would later exclude altogether from the domain of theology. For Luther, as for the medieval consensus, Christ had brought a new law to replace the old. Far from being distinct from the Law, the Gospel was nothing other than the Law spiritually understood.14 Luther’s analysis of the problem with the Jews followed conventional lines: they adhered to the flesh rather than the spirit, to the letter rather than the spirit. They therefore clung to a literal and “carnal” understanding of the Law, without penetrating to its true “spiritual meaning.”¹⁵ For the later Luther, a series of new dichotomies entirely restructured his understanding of these traditional dichotomies. He would come to identify the “law” with the “letter,” a very different perception.

Reliance on their own justice was for Luther the characteristic of the Jews: reliance on God’s justice, that of faithful Christians. Taking up a familiar contrast, he argued that “As the just starts out as his own accuser, the unjust starts out as his own defender.”¹⁶ The comment has the ring of Lutheran paradox about it, but is a traditional enough idea—familiar from John Chrysostom, and used by many Catholic spiritual writers, as it was easily applied to the practice of sacramental confession. As the commentary progresses, Luther’s conception of justice divides increasingly sharply between an illusory human justice, a vain confidence in justification by one’s own personal works and merits, and the true justice of God, attained by faith and obedience.¹⁷ But this theological position was squarely in line with the teachings of Augustine, the most widely respected theologian and “authority” of the Latin tradition. And it was widely shared among contemporary Catholic theologians. Salvation was from Christ alone and by grace alone. But for all that, Christians—unlike Jews, he insisted—“worked for God and fulfilled the works of the Law for God.”¹⁸ His later theology would offer a very different view.

Showing his hand as a disciple of the “Nominalist” school of theology derived from William of Ockham, he regarded justification by faith and grace as operative not per se, but by a divine covenant or contract (pactum).¹⁹ On a number of future occasions Luther would avow himself a follower, or former follower, of the Ockhamist school (Occamicae factionis, meae sectae). It was Ockham, “without doubt the most ingenious and chief among the scholastic doctors,” to whom he affiliated himself, as “my master.” Luther thought him supreme among the scholastics, a master of dialectic, albeit devoid of any rhetorical skill.20 His own frank avowal of his Ockhamist training calls into question more sweeping interpretations of Staupitz’s theological influence upon him. Staupitz’s favorite scholastic authorities, as we have seen, were Thomas Aquinas and his pupil, Giles of Rome. Luther’s encounter with the scholastic tradition was not mediated by Staupitz, however much he may have been affected by Staupitz’s personality and pastoral care.

Nor was Luther’s Ockhamism without significance for his subsequent theological development. It is a truism that the “Nominalist” philosophical tradition, often known as the via moderna, of which Ockham was the most eminent exponent, differed from the via antiqua, the so-called “Realist” tradition most eminently represented by the figure of Thomas Aquinas, in the priority it gave to the will over the intellect or being in the understanding of the divine nature and operation. This is too deep a question to explore here, but to skate over the thin ice on top of these depths, one might say that while, for Thomas, goodness and justice were what they were by virtue of the nature of the order that God had created, so that goodness and justice were intrinsically rational, for William of Ockham, that which was good or just was so simply because God said so. The good and the just were extrinsically rather than intrinsically rational. The conceptions of “forensic justification” and “imputed justice” that would be crucial elements of Lutheranism made sense only within the context of the “voluntarist” tradition of Ockham as opposed to the “Realist” or “intellectualist” tradition of Aquinas.

Luther was moreover a solidly hierarchical Christian in these years. By his own account, he was “such a papist that he might have written against Erasmus for disparaging the papacy.”21 The psalm commentary shows him to have been a loyal clergyman who regarded bishops as the backbone of the Church and urged wholehearted obedience to them. “The order of the prelates is the strength of the Church, so the whole heart and intention must be focused on their welfare. If the prelates are safe, then the Church is safe, and vice versa.”²² This was mainstream clerical reformism, the sort of thing being proclaimed the length and breadth of Europe by deans and dons such as John Colet (Dean of Saint Paul’s Cathedral in London) or Josse Clichtove (professor of theology at the Sorbonne).²³ Those who called loudest for reform within the late medieval church envisaged reform as starting with and from the episcopate. Of course, like most educated Catholic contemporaries, Luther felt there was a real need for reform. He spoke scathingly of those clergymen who neglected their priestly duties and lusted after women or wealth. “Nowhere today is there anything more pompous, arrogant, and vainglorious than the princes and priests of the Church.”²⁴ He decried the corruption endemic in the system of church benefices and appointments, though he also had harsh words for the laity in the matter of profaning holy days.²⁵ Likewise, he averred that he had little time for the petty quarrels between and within religious orders.²⁶

Luther’s position on clerical reformism was thoroughly consistent with his disdain for dissidents and heretics. Those who set themselves up against the church authorities, such as the “Bohemians” (that is, the followers of Jan Hus, who had established an alternative church in parts of what is now the Czech Republic), were puffed up with pride, and were therefore to be shunned as heretics. They came in for particular censure on account of their repudiation of the Church of Rome and of its primacy.²⁷ Although Luther’s commentary was not, as many such late medieval commentaries were, an exercise in tracking and tracing Catholic theology in the Psalms through intricate allegorical interpretation, it was nonetheless transparently founded on an orthodox understanding of the Catholic faith. The Mass was for him a sacrifice, in accord with Catholic teaching.28 There were seven sacraments.²⁹ His understanding of the “concupiscence of the flesh” was entirely traditional—in contrast to the radically harsher understanding of that concept that he developed in 1518–19.³⁰ Good works, however exiguous they might be, and however useless for purposes of salvation without grace, were nevertheless acknowledged as of some kind of good.³¹ Although he felt that the use of indulgences perhaps made Christianity seem too easy (this was where he would begin his critique in 1517), he still acknowledged their validity.³² At some point in these years, probably early on, Luther became entangled in a disputation with Andreas Carlstadt over the latter’s claim that the indulgences available in the Castle Church could only be acquired by those who made their confession in that church—a claim that Luther dismantled easily enough, but without for a moment calling indulgences into doubt.³³ Even his concept of preaching was impeccably conventional: every word of the priest, he wrote, should be a judgment teaching that “evil is to be avoided and good to be done.”³⁴ The focus of the preacher was to be on moral instruction in the virtues and vices, just as it said in all the medieval preaching handbooks. The shift from the medieval hermeneutic of virtue and vice to the later Lutheran hermeneutic of “Law and Gospel” was the crossing of a chasm.

There are, particularly in the commentary (as opposed to the lecture notes), some features and traits that would characterize the mature Luther, though these do not represent the core of his mature theology. While he acknowledged his own training in the school of Ockham, he was beginning to voice a modish contempt for the internecine quarrels that preoccupied late medieval theologians, with Scotists and Ockhamists fighting each other tooth and nail. Thus a fairly gentle critique of needlessly subtle theologizing (reminiscent of the critique offered by Thomas à Kempis in the fifteenth-century devotional classic The Imitation of Christ) bloomed into a fiercer indictment of the pernicious influence of Aristotle on medieval theology by way of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus.35 There was an anti-intellectual note to his aside against those who, “these days, prefer the opinions of philosophers and the fables of poets and the wranglings of lawyers to the holy gospel of God, which they disdain along with all study of scripture.”³⁶ With unwitting irony, he also censured “heretics and suchlike,” who “call into question everything that has been observed for centuries, and for which so many martyrs have given their lives.” Instead, he urges, “humbly learn to be wise; don’t be a newfangled author—don’t overstep the limits that your fathers have laid down.” He warns people that “not to want to believe, but to call everything into doubt and thus to expect a new learning—that is the gravest temptation.”³⁷ It was a temptation that he was yet to face.

Luther’s penchant for paradox, which remained with him throughout his life, and is one of the most attractive aspects of his thought and his style, is also evident in this early commentary.³⁸ All through his life he loved the scriptural tag “Omnis homo mendax,” “All men are liars” (Ps 115:11), and he mentions it several times. As yet, though, his purpose in citing it is simply to emphasize that all people are sinners, rather than, as in his later writings, to undercut any possible human or ecclesiastical authority in matters of faith.³⁹ His theory of obedience is as stern and unbending here as it would be in any of his later writings, though in this text his concern is chiefly with ecclesiastical obedience, particularly to bishops and other prelates, but ultimately to the Bishop of Rome. Not that he ignores the duty of obedience to secular rulers as well, denouncing rebels in no uncertain terms.

The most deeply traditional feature of Luther’s early psalm commentary was its unselfconscious fidelity to the medieval and indeed ancient conception of scripture as a peculiar kind of text that, thanks to its divine and inspired character, carried multiple, perhaps even infinite, meanings. The Lutheran Luther was to take a very different view. The very notion of multiplicity or fluidity or uncertainty of meaning in scripture was to become abhorrent to him. Yet in these early years his very approach to scripture was traditional. This went further than the mere affirmation of the “fourfold interpretation” beloved of medieval commentators, which he set out at the very start.40 Traditional interpretation founded itself on a scriptural text, “the letter kills, but the spirit gives life” (2 Cor 3:6), which was taken, as Luther takes it throughout this commentary, as a charter for searching beneath the superficial meanings of literal statements for deeper spiritual truths. As he put it, “In the holy scriptures, the key thing is to distinguish the spirit from the letter, for it is this that really makes a theologian.”⁴¹ By this time, the range of scriptural meanings had been systematized by medieval thinkers into four broad categories: the literal itself; and then the “tropological,” the “allegorical,” and the “anagogical.” These last three represented the “spirit” rather than the “letter,” and were all varieties of metaphorical or allegorical interpretation. But “fourfold interpretation” was a cliché of medieval theology, and the Luther of the early psalm commentary was a keen exponent of it.

Later in this text Luther was to set out the doctrine of the multiplicity of meaning in an even more striking way. Suitably enough, he did this in the course of an allegorical exposition of Ps 74: 9, “In the hand of the Lord there is a cup of pure wine.” “Everyone,” he observed, “who wants to make progress in the Bible and the holy scriptures should ponder this verse as attentively as they can,” because, he went on, its point was that scripture was not within the grasp of the human intellect. Because scripture was “in the hand of the Lord,” the student needed to approach God in all humility and beg for enlightenment. The holiness of scripture, though, he maintained, was such that it should not be allowed to become the raw material of scholarly rivalry and conflict.

Holy scripture is not to be handled like Aristotle, where it is fine for one expert to contradict another. There the teacher is like the teaching: both are profane. But here it is a sacred teacher and a sacred teaching. Wheresoever and by whomsoever any interpretation is advanced, if it does not contradict the rule of faith, then no one ought to censure it or to prefer their own interpretation, even if their own is far more obvious and far more consonant with the letter.42

Any meaning, in other words, which could be teased out from the text might be allowed to stand, as long as it was not contrary to accepted dogma. This was the polar opposite of his later “literalism.”

This Luther, the Luther of the early 1510s, thus permitted a plurality, even a profusion, of meaning, and was hesitant to exclude other people’s interpretations. It was a matter of humility to acknowledge that others, too, might uncover truth. The final traditional element in his early theory of scripture was precisely an emphasis on the respective roles of authority and humility in attaining understanding: “Thus the understanding of scripture is not enough for someone unless they also submit themselves to the magisterial authority of some discreet person or superior.”⁴³ The whole point of the later hermeneutic usually summed up as “scripture alone” was to emphasize that truth came only from scripture, that no human authority could mediate that truth (although human means, such as preaching, could and did mediate truth, that preaching itself had to be conditioned and controlled entirely by scripture, not by human authority). Therefore, he later affirmed, any Christian armed with scripture could withstand any authority or interpretation that was not so armed. It is no surprise that the early Luther had an essentially conventional approach to the Bible. But it is remarkable to see, in these words, just how far the early Luther was from his later self. He would always maintain that he was merely a humble interpreter. But that interpretative humility was originally oriented towards human hierarchical superiors. Later on it was oriented solely towards the scriptural text itself, divine rather than human. For Luther this was still humility. But his earlier theory of scripture should help us understand why his opponents saw his later position as arrogance.

It was in the middle of the decade, once Luther had settled into his new role, that more distinctive themes began to appear in his thought. The context for this was his decision to move on from lecturing on the Psalms to lecturing on the Epistles of Paul. This, too, was far from revolutionary in itself. Paul’s rich seams of theology had long made him a favorite among scriptural commentators and, since about 1200, among university lecturers. Thomas Aquinas, for example, had produced a major commentary on Paul back in the thirteenth century. Luther’s own decision to set to work on Paul may have been immediately inspired by one of the less well known, though still significant, publishing events of a decade which saw the printing of a series of epoch-making books. This event was the publication in 1512 of a new commentary on Paul by the French humanist Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples. Something of an obscure figure today, Lefèvre was a prominent scholar of that era who continually reinvented and renewed himself throughout an astonishingly long career. Having perhaps helped inspire Luther’s theological path in the 1510s, in the 1520s he himself fell to some extent under Luther’s spell, and the French humanist became something of an evangelical reformer. Back in 1512 his commentary on Paul was seriously innovative in making some attempt to engage with the original Greek behind the Latin.44 It sold sufficiently well, despite its considerable bulk, to warrant a second edition in 1515. The chief reason for thinking that Luther took his lead from Lefèvre is that he based his lectures on the slightly revised text of the Vulgate which Lefèvre used in his commentary. For his lectures on Paul (Romans in 1515–16, Galatians in 1516–17, and Hebrews in 1517–18), Luther once more had Johannes Grunenberg run off copies of the epistles in pamphlet form, for the convenience of his students and Luther. His early lecture notes on Paul survive as marginalia on these cheap and cheerful printings.⁴⁵

Like the lectures on the Psalms, the lectures on Romans have been seen by some scholars as the matrix for the gestation of Luther’s mature teaching. There is more to be said in favor of this position, because these lectures saw not only a deepening of his earlier concern with justice and an increasing emphasis on the role of faith, but also some crucial advances in his thinking, leading him to challenge the tradition of scholastic theology and on one particular point taking him outside the existing consensus of Catholic doctrine. Luther himself later recalled that through the Epistle to the Romans he had come to “some knowledge of Christ”—some, but not all.⁴⁶ Luther’s critique of abuses and deviations in the contemporary Church also become a little sharper in tone, especially towards the end. Nevertheless, the lectures on Romans, which remained unpublished and largely unknown until they were rediscovered about a hundred years ago, do not display the new understanding of faith which he would present to the reading public in 1518.

If the context of Luther’s development in these years was his wrestling with the letters of Saint Paul, the catalyst was his encounter with the vigorous and voluminous anti-Pelagian writings of Saint Augustine of Hippo. The lectures and other materials on Romans certainly show an increasing engagement with the thought of this patriarch of Latin theology. Luther’s reading of Augustine engendered in him a profound alienation from the Aristotelian methodology and assumptions that had characterized scholastic theology since the “christening of Aristotle” by Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. Luther’s grappling with the notions of justice and justification in Romans drew him ineluctably to the works of Augustine, whose lengthy and bitter controversy with Pelagius had hammered out much of the vocabulary that was still used to discuss the question of how sinful human beings were “put right” with God. Pelagius, at least as Augustine represented him, taught that human free will was in itself adequate to that task. Thanks to Augustine, all scholastic theologians knew that Pelagius was a heretic, and they were therefore all duly and dutifully “anti-Pelagian”—though some more markedly and successfully than others. But Luther’s consuming interest in the subject of justification led him to take on more and more of Augustine’s suspicion of human effort and free will, and more and more of his emphasis on the sheer gratuitousness and primacy of divine grace in human salvation. In his scholia on Romans, which amount to a virtually complete commentary and look like a text produced in the wake of the lectures rather than for them, Luther cites from over a dozen separate works of Augustine’s. Most of these citations are from just half a dozen of his anti-Pelagian writings. Towards the end, Luther voices his concern that his times are awash with an unwitting but deep-rooted Pelagianism:

For although there are no professed or avowed Pelagians today, there are a great many in practice and in theory, albeit unwittingly, such as those who think that, unless they attribute to free will the power to do what lies in it before grace, they are driven to sin by God and therefore sin by necessity.47

This growing concern with Pelagianism accompanies a diminution in anti-Jewish comment. For Luther, Jews are still labelled as arrogantly trusting in their own unaided observance of the letter of the law to achieve salvation, in culpable ignorance of the flaws in fallen human nature which render that trust futile. But rather than the simple dichotomy between “us” and “them,” between Christians and Jews, that was on show in the psalm commentary, the deeper dichotomy that now concerns Luther is within the Christian body itself: the same arrogant self-reliance which vitiated Judaism has spread throughout Christendom. From this time on, for Luther, the real threat is within the church rather than outside it.

The scholia on Romans have one real sign of things to come: a definite break with medieval tradition over the complex issue of original sin, concupiscence, and baptism. But this discussion takes place within a lengthy digression on Romans 4, in which Luther steps aside to offer commentary on Psalm 31, the second of the so-called “Seven Penitential Psalms,” because he notices similar Latin verbs (reputare and imputare) being used in the Vulgate versions of Romans 4:1 and Psalm 31:2. Here, for the first time, we see Luther working with Augustine on the subject of concupiscence, baptism, and sin in such a way as to conclude that baptism did not take away all sin. This conclusion, as we shall see, was an integral part of Luther’s emerging Reformational thought. What is not clear is just how early this insight came to him. There is no sign of it in his early psalm commentary, nor is there any hint of it in the scantier lecture notes on Romans. Nor, finally, is it found in Luther’s earliest published work, his little meditation on the Seven Penitential Psalms published early in 1517. This is particularly noteworthy in that Psalm 31 is one of those seven psalms. Given the importance of this insight in Luther’s thought, it is hard to see why it does not appear in this early text if it had already occurred to him.48

The root of what might have remained simply a trivial misunderstanding lay in Luther’s authentic appreciation of Augustine’s conception of human sin and sinfulness as a profoundly systemic problem rather than a mere sequence of regrettable events. Luther, like Augustine and indeed Saint Paul, was more concerned with “sin” than with “sins,” with the underlying state of mind rather than with physical or even mental acts. The key scriptural texts here were Romans 6 and 7, especially 7:7, “Nay, I had not known sin, but by the law; for I had not known lust, except the law had said, Thou shalt not covet.” Paul, here discussing sin in general but taking adultery as the test case, wanted to make a point similar to that made by Jesus, namely that the thought or desire of committing adultery was just as sinful as the act itself. Paul anchored this observation to the Ten Commandments, which of course stipulated, “Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife.” Without this divine revelation, Paul says, the sinfulness of mere unfulfilled desire, as opposed to effectual action, would have been unknown to him. Building on hints in this section of Paul, Augustine further developed this analysis, defining Paul’s “infirmity of the flesh” (Rom 6:19) as the “concupiscence of the flesh” (concupiscentia carnis), an indwelling liability or predisposition to commit sin rooted in the reality of every person’s bodily existence (to use a modern analogy, like a genetic flaw or weakness which would nevertheless require environmental actualization to become a disease). This concept was an integral part of Augustine’s elaborate theory of original sin. For him, this “concupiscence of the flesh” was in and of itself sin in every person descended from Adam and Eve.⁴⁹ However, in the light of the universal early Christian teaching that baptism washed away all sins, Augustine maintained that in those who had been baptized, while this concupiscence continued to function as an abiding provocation to sin, it was nevertheless no longer properly called sin in and of itself. He acknowledged that Paul sometimes referred to this indwelling weakness in the faithful as “sin,” but argued that this usage was figurative rather than literal.50 Augustine actually developed his sophisticated account of sin and concupiscence in the course of his polemics against the Pelagians, whose main objection to his theory was that it contradicted the dogma that baptism took away all sin. He was therefore very careful to emphasize that he accepted this dogma (to have done otherwise would have been to rule himself entirely out of court), that baptism did indeed take away all sin, but that concupiscence definitely survived baptism even though it was no longer properly to be labelled “sin.”

Luther pursued this trajectory one step further. Like Augustine, he was beset by a sense of the permeation of human life by sin. By a simple misreading of one crucial text of Augustine’s, however, he came to the conclusion that the concupiscence of the flesh was in and of itself sin both before and after baptism. This misreading is first seen in his scholia on Romans, where it is introduced with becoming modesty, as Luther acknowledges at least the abstract possibility that he might be mistaken in adopting a position which, he realizes, contradicts almost all previous medieval theologians:

Either I have never got it, or the scholastic theologians have not spoken well enough about sin and grace. They imagine that original sin is wholly taken away, just like actual sin, as if they could both be removed in the blink of an eye, the way darkness is by light. But the ancient Fathers Augustine and Ambrose spoke very differently, according to the manner of scripture, while the scholastics spoke according to the manner of the Ethics of Aristotle, who located sin and justice entirely in works and in their presence or absence. But Saint Augustine put it excellently, saying that “the sin concupiscence is remitted in baptism not so that it does not exist, but so that it is not imputed.”51

This insight, as Luther realized, was entirely out of line with the understanding of sin and original sin offered by the scholastics. What he did not realize was that their understanding of sin and original sin was entirely in line with Augustine’s, and was indeed predicated upon it. By misreading Augustine’s claim that concupiscence after baptism remained rooted in the flesh but was no longer counted as sin in itself (though it could become sinful if it received the deliberate consent of the will), he reached the deeply paradoxical conclusion that this concupiscence of the flesh somehow both remained sin after baptism and yet was no longer counted as sin. This small but intricate point represented a radical innovation. When eventually noised abroad, from 1518, it became for his opponents one of the most disturbing elements of his thought. For him a paradox, for them it was a contradiction in terms.

The paragraph just cited, in which Luther first voiced his suspicions about the scholastic understanding of original sin, grace, and concupiscence, simultaneously alerts us to the other crucial, and closely related, development in his thought at this time. Luther’s engagement with Romans and Augustine led him to complete disenchantment with Aristotle, whose philosophy was fundamental to the method of scholastic theology. Aristotle, who had been a dominant figure in European intellectual life for nearly three hundred years, was coming under attack from at least two other angles in the early sixteenth century. The quickening stream of thought known to modern historians as “Christian humanism” deprecated the late medieval focus on Aristotelian logic or dialectic as the engine of intellectual inquiry, urging instead that rhetoric, the art of persuasion, was the art of arts. Alongside it ran the gentler and more traditional current of fideism, harking back to the pre-scholastic era of monastic and contemplative learning, allergic to logic-chopping and suspicious of the arrogance of the human intellect. Luther’s own anti-Aristotelianism drew rhetorically from both these other veins of thought, but was itself fundamentally theological, rooted in his conviction that naturalistic Aristotelian ethics was utterly incompatible with the Christian understanding of divine grace.

Near the start of his scholia on Romans, where Paul talks of the revelation of the justice of God (Rom 1:17), Luther cites a central text of Augustine’s, “It is called God’s justice because, by imparting it, he makes people just,” and then contrasts this with human justice, which is taken to arise from human effort: “As Aristotle plainly states in Ethics III … justice follows and arises from actions.” But the human justice defined by Aristotle was, for Luther, a mere sham. True justice, divine justice, did not arise from human good works, but gave rise to them.52

By the time Luther had finished with Romans, he had finished with Aristotle, and with the medieval theology that blended Aristotelianism with Christianity. This was openly proclaimed in an event he staged in Wittenberg at the end of summer 1517, the “Disputation against Scholastic Theology.” The 97 theses disputed on 4 September 1517 have a fair claim to be more radical in nature than the better known Ninety-Five Theses penned a couple of months later. The earlier theses, too, were printed, though presumably for the convenience of those attending the disputation rather than for any serious purpose of publication. Nothing else is recorded of the disputation, but the 97 theses were a pithy summary of themes that had emerged during Luther’s engagement with Paul and Augustine over the previous two years.

  4.  The truth is that the human being, corrupted to the root, can neither desire nor perform anything but evil.

41.  Almost all of Aristotle’s Ethics is completely opposed to grace.

43.  It is an error to say that one cannot become a theologian without Aristotle.

76.  Every work of the law performed without the grace of God appears good outwardly, but inwardly is sin.53

The theses are variously labelled as contrary to Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Gabriel Biel, or “the scholastics.”⁵⁴ The anti-Pelagian thrust of the whole exercise is spelled out in the first two theses, which uphold Augustine explicitly against Pelagius. The point of what follows is to repudiate scholastic theology as inherently Pelagian. This conviction evidently reflected Luther’s increasing exposure to the anti-Pelagian writings of Saint Augustine during his prolonged engagement with the Epistles of Paul. Augustine insisted, against Pelagius, that truly virtuous actions could not be performed by human beings purely by means of their intellect and will. For Luther, Pelagius’s emphasis on human will and effort in training for virtue was much the same as Aristotle’s theory that one could attain virtue by training and forming habits of virtuous action.

Scholastic theology had gone profoundly wrong, therefore, from the thirteenth century, when Thomas Aquinas had transplanted Aristotle’s ethical theories into the corpus of Christian theology. For Luther, this “christening” of Aristotle was not a successful synthesis of nature and grace, but a pollution and profanation of divine truth with a merely human “wisdom.” He brushed aside the subtleties with which Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and the other scholastics integrated the operation of divine grace with the activity of human nature, offering in place of that complex system a sheer dichotomy between divine grace and a human nature permeated with sin thanks to the fall of Adam and Eve.

The Luther in Wittenberg on the eve of All Saints in 1517 was thus a teacher profoundly disenchanted with the scholastic tradition in which he had been trained. In his view, it was vitiated through and through by the unacknowledged Pelagianism that had crept into the Church since the thirteenth century. The emphasis in popular preaching on the Aristotelian virtues and vices obscured from Christians the true reality of sin, which Luther now envisaged in a deeply Augustinian way as an endemic undercurrent of even the holiest life. Indeed, his understanding of sin was already “hyper-Augustinian,” in that his misreading of Augustine’s conception of the “concupiscence of the flesh” took the debate onto a new level. Moreover, his antipathy to scholastic theology was leading him to misrepresent it. The understanding of justice and justification among scholastic theologians was for the most part formulated with careful attention to the teachings of Augustine, to whom almost all medieval Catholic theologians looked back as supreme among the “Fathers” of the Church. Luther, careless as ever of subtle distinctions, bundled them all together in a box, labelled it “Pelagians,” and henceforth paid them even less attention. This antischolastic positioning was over the next few years to help win him friends and supporters from among the Christian humanists, who themselves often expressed suspicion of scholastic theology, albeit on rather different grounds. But Luther’s positive new theology of justification was not yet in place. It would emerge only in the wake of the Ninety-Five Theses, as the notoriety brought to him by that provocative leaflet encouraged him to pursue his ideas further and emboldened him to believe himself divinely called to the task of purifying theology and renewing the gospel.