4

THE QUEST FOR CERTAINTY

It was 1518, not 1517, that saw Luther burst onto the scene as a public figure. That year also saw the decisive moment in his theological development. His Ninety-Five Theses may have leaked out here or there before Christmas 1517, but it was only in January 1518 that they really hit the market, as they were reprinted in one town after another, in Latin first and then also in German. The Luther phenomenon in this period was very much a German rather than a European phenomenon. The Ninety-Five Theses did not appear at this time in any other language. News would reach Rome by spring 1518, but it would be 1519 before the name of Luther was widely known beyond the Germanic cultural sphere. But within it, Luther and his theses were being talked about, in the Netherlands, the Rhineland, Switzerland, and throughout the cultural heartlands of Germany.

Far more important than Luther’s graduation to the status of German celebrity was the next, and crucial, step on his theological path. It is not possible to put a precise date on this event, which Luther himself described only later, in varying terms, on different occasions, and for a variety of purposes (none of them including the convenience of future historians or biographers). Long afterwards, though, he dropped one especially helpful hint about the nature and timing of his breakthrough. Preaching on a favorite story from Genesis, that of Abraham (who failed for years to conceive a child with his wife Sara, but found no such problem with his servant Hagar), Luther interpreted the Christian life in general, and his own life in particular, in terms of Abraham’s two sons, Ishmael, son of Hagar, and Isaac, born of Sara in her old age. Isaac, as the son of grace, promised by God, was the reward for Abraham’s faith, which had never wavered, not even when Sara was long past all apparent hope of motherhood. Abraham’s trust in God’s promise was, for Luther as for Saint Paul (and indeed for all Christian theologians), the supreme exemplar and pattern of faith. In this particular sermon, Luther wished to draw out another moral or theological lesson from the narrative, namely the contrast between the children of God and the children of this world (and thus of the flesh and ultimately of the devil). In medieval allegory, these two groups, the elect and the reprobate, the sheep and the goats, were respectively symbolized in the persons of Isaac and Ishmael. Such was the interpretative context within which Luther offered the following fragment of autobiography:

For thirty-five years I was a son of Hagar. I desired to be saved by works through the monastic life. There was no promise there, where I confessed, fasted, and celebrated mass. I was not certain that I was saved…. But when Sarah became my mother, I grasped the promise, that we are saved without works, by the promise.1

The account of the timing and nature of the decisive shift in his theological understanding is more precise here than in any of his other occasional recollections. The distinctively new note in Luther’s theology was certainty, certainty that he was “saved.” Never before in the history of Christianity was such personal certainty, which medieval theologians called “certainty of grace” or “certainty of salvation,” deemed normative, rather than exceptional, in Christian life.

For centuries, scholastic theologians, in their inquisitive way, had from time to time addressed the question of whether a Christian could be certain, at any given moment, of being definitely in a “state of grace”—that is, certain that their sins had definitely been forgiven and that they therefore definitely enjoyed, at that moment, the grace and favor of God. By certainty they meant, as Luther meant, certainty—not near certainty, moral certainty, or any other more or less distant approximation to certainty, but absolute and infallible certainty. Their answer, one and all, was “no,” at least in relation to the ordinary course of a Christian’s life. The one exception they allowed for was what they called a “special revelation,” a direct and unmistakable irruption by God into an individual’s life, such as Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus. For the scholastics, Paul’s own certainty of salvation, which shines through his writings, was not a normative expectation for the Christian life, but a privileged illumination underpinning his providential role as the “Apostle to the Gentiles.”

This understanding of certainty of grace as normally impossible was a commonplace across the diverse schools of medieval theology, Thomist, Scotist, and the rest. Thomas Aquinas had summed it up with his usual lucidity.2 Even while Luther was still an obscure lecturer in Wittenberg the familiar consensus was being restated in university towns such as Cambridge and Cologne. Luther’s own mentor, Johann von Staupitz, was as firm as anyone in his exclusion of such a certainty of grace from the normal run of the Christian life.³ Luther himself knew how unusual his position was, observing in 1518 that certainty of grace was something which his opponents “all deny.”⁴ Instead of certainty, scholastic theologians and preachers offered hope, trust, and sometimes “moral certainty,” a reasonable confidence, a sort of working hypothesis of forgiveness and salvation based on divine mercifulness.

It was with this hitherto complete consensus that Luther broke in 1518, in his thirty-fifth year. There was perhaps an ironic inevitability about this step, though not about Luther’s taking it. If enough academics asked often enough whether it was possible to be certain of grace, it was arguably only a matter of time before one of them decided that it might be. The first signs of Luther’s démarche are found in the lectures he was giving that year, on the Epistle to the Hebrews (which, despite some challenges from humanists such as Erasmus, was traditionally attributed to Saint Paul, an attribution Luther loyally upheld). Expounding the text which declares how Christ “appears in the presence of God for us” (Heb 9:24), he urged upon Christians an absolute certainty regarding the efficacy of Christ’s intercession with the Father not merely in general but also in their own particular case:

For this reason the Christian must be certain, absolutely certain, that Christ appears before God as a priest for him.5

He buttressed this demand with a clutch of New Testament texts that demanded unhesitating faith (Mark 11:23, Matt 8:12, James 1:6) before turning to address the crucial Old Testament text (from Eccles 9:1) which every scholastic theologian who tackled the question of certainty of grace cited as the clincher. The traditional argument made this the premise of a straightforward syllogism, as in the following formulation by Thomas Aquinas:

But against this is what is said in Ecclesiastes 9, that “no one knows whether they are deserving of love or hatred.” But justifying grace renders a person deserving of the love of God. Therefore no one can know whether they possess justifying grace.⁶

Luther himself had cited precisely the same text in his earlier lectures on Romans (1515–16) to make precisely the same point: “we can never know whether we are justified, whether we believe.”7 In his lectures on Hebrews, however, he read this same text very differently, warning that one must

treat with the utmost caution the opinion of those who apply this text … to the circumstances of the present moment so as to make people uncertain about the mercy of God and trust of salvation. For this is to overthrow Christ and his faith completely.⁸

Instead, Luther maintained, Ecclesiastes 9:1 should be referred not to present grace but to future perseverance. You could not know that you might not, at some future date, spurn God’s grace through some sin: faith, and therefore grace, could be thrown away. But that did not mean that you could not know for sure, in the here and now, that you were in receipt and in possession, by faith, of God’s saving grace. This immediate certainty was itself the essence of faith, its defining characteristic.

It is impossible to exaggerate the importance of this move in Luther’s theological development. Certainty of grace, based on faith alone, indeed commutable with faith alone, became the acid test by which he judged all Christian doctrine and practice. Certainty of grace conferred upon believers, or at least upon Luther and his disciples, that “peace of conscience” (pax conscientiae, another of the slogans with which his mature teaching was summed up for the public) which was the practical fruit and objective of belief and worship, of prayer and preaching. Certainty of grace was the revolutionary concept which would lead Cardinal Cajetan later that year to see in Luther’s teaching a new doctrine for a new church.⁹ It is much harder to observe and analyze the understanding and impact of this doctrine among converts and followers than it is to trace its emergence and elaboration in the writings of a single individual. But “certainty” (certitudo, Sicherheit) and “assurance” would become catchwords of the new “evangelical” or, as it was later known, “Protestant” movement. The offer of certainty dispelled the sort of anxiety over sin and grace that motivated what often seems like the frenetic and almost industrial “ritual performance” of late medieval Catholicism, with its votive masses commissioned in their hundreds and thousands, its indulgences denominated in hundreds of thousands of years, and its complex, protracted, and repeated cycles of prayers.

Putting a precise date on Luther’s intuition is impossible. But the range of dates can be narrowed down quite closely. As late as the compilation of the Ninety-Five Theses in October 1517, there is no hint of this idea in his writings. One of his greatest objections to the practice and soon also to the theory of indulgences was that they imbued their devotees (or, as he came to see it, their dupes) with a false sense of security, leading them to believe that the acquisition of indulgences entailed in itself the complete forgiveness of sins. In the cover letter with which he had sent his theses to the Archbishop of Mainz, Luther opposed to this false sense of security the a fortiori argument that “not even the infused grace of God” could confer the kind of assurance people falsely derived from indulgences.10 The “infused grace of God” was scholastic jargon for the operation of the seven sacraments, especially those of confession and communion. The sacraments conferred grace upon those suitably predisposed to receive and benefit from them. But indulgences were not among the seven sacraments, and did not confer grace. So if even the sacraments could not give their recipients certainty of grace, there was no way that indulgences could. This is the diametrical opposite of what he was to say in 1518 in his lectures on Hebrews and in various minor publications.

The range of dates can be narrowed down a little further thanks to the appearance of Luther’s new ideas about certainty of grace in a couple of his earliest publications, his Instructions for Confession and his Sermon on the Proper Preparation of the Heart for the Reception of Communion.11 While neither of these texts can be precisely dated, both of them had been frequently reprinted by the end of 1518, and their content shows that they were composed for Lent that year (Lent in 1518 commenced on 17 February, Ash Wednesday, and ended on 4 April, Easter Sunday). It was a requirement of the Church that Catholics should go to confession and receive communion at least once a year. Because the real presence of Jesus in the consecrated eucharistic host was believed so firmly by medieval Catholics, taking communion was seen as an awe-inspiring encounter with God, for which full confession of sins to a priest was the indispensable prerequisite. So while Catholics attended mass at least weekly (every Sunday and on all major feast days, such as Christmas or the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary), they were more trepidatious about taking communion. The norm throughout Western Europe was to take communion once a year, at Easter, after one had prepared by going to confession in Lent (usually late in Lent), thus fulfilling the expectations of canon law. Priests routinely instructed their flocks during Lent on how to make their confession and prepare for communion. Luther’s two texts of 1518 stand within that tradition and encapsulate the pastoral guidance he was offering that year.

Both the Instructions and the sermon emphasize that those who come forward to communion should do so relying not on the fact that they had previously made a good confession, but on the certain confidence that they would indeed receive in communion the grace available therefrom by faith alone. The relevant passage in the Instructions follows a passage in the lectures on Hebrews almost word for word in developing an argument that seeks to wean hearers or readers from their traditional reliance on confession per se as preparation for communion. Displaying that love of the shocking and paradoxical that would characterize both his theology and his rhetoric, Luther informed them that reliance on confession as such was a preparation not for communion but for damnation. Those who took communion relying on having made a good confession “eat and drink judgment upon themselves” (invoking Saint Paul’s sentence upon those who receive the sacrament unworthily).12 In his sermon, he developed his counterintuitive proposition into a striking paradox:

The best preparation is none other than that by which you are least prepared. And, contrariwise, you are worst prepared when you are most prepared.¹³

It was essential, he added, that someone who approaches the sacrament should do so in absolute certainty of being without mortal sin:

Make sure that you come forward with full faith (or at least as full as possible) trusting with complete certainty that you will acquire grace.¹⁴

The Instructions evidently drew upon the lecture notes on Hebrews, as it is far more likely that Luther copied lecture notes into a text designed for publication than that he copied from a published text into his lecture notes. The chances are that the relevant section of his lectures on Hebrews was delivered just before or early in Lent, and that we should therefore see early 1518 as the time when Luther first took a firm grip on the fundamental axiom of his theology—which came to be described as “justification by faith alone.”

Notoriously, Luther later described the crucial moment of his career as having occurred in cloaca—in the privy, on the bog or crapper, in this shit-hole (one picks one’s translation to taste, or lack of it—Luther inclined towards the earthier options: the Latin cloaca was a standard term for a latrine, but it had a slangy ring).¹⁵ Quite what he meant by this is not immediately apparent and may never be known for certain. It led in the twentieth century to a rather fanciful “psychoanalytical” interpretation of the man and his work, focused on their allegedly “anal” characteristics, themselves fancifully derived from his supposed struggles with constipation, taken as having led him to spend a good deal of his time at the latrine. This absurd but not unamusing reductionism was popularized in the dramatization of Luther’s life by John Osborne.16

It is true that Luther was occasionally troubled by constipation, but there is no reason to believe that his digestive afflictions were anything out of the ordinary or had any special place in his life. The best evidence for his sufferings comes from 1521, when, as we shall see, Luther had to go into hiding as an outlaw on the run from the authorities of church and empire. Disguised as a Junker, a knightly German landowner, and living among a group of military retainers in the Thuringian castle of the Wartburg, overlooking Eisenach, he may well have found the change of diet and lifestyle, no doubt vastly different from those of the friary, something of a shock to his system. But his letters that year show that the agony abated as his system adapted.¹⁷ Such evidence as survives gives us no reason to surmise that he had problems of this nature in the 1510s, still less that his creative insights came upon him as he was straining for relief or release of a more fundamental kind.

Various alternative explanations have been offered for Luther’s allusions to the cloaca. The least satisfactory of these is that he was referring to his study, reputedly located in the same corner turret of the friary as the latrine. But this is probably to attribute far too literal a significance to what sounds like a figure of speech. Luther was a plainspoken man who readily resorted to coarseness for effect. He was probably just talking loosely about the world in general, or Wittenberg in particular, as “this shit-hole,” deploying such language partly in order to make his listeners sit up and pay attention, but also to highlight the contrast between the purity of the Gospel with which God had illuminated him and the darkness and sinfulness of human life without the life of grace. For Luther, what mattered about his Reformational insight was its content.

What Luther does tell us in later years about this formative period in his life is that he had indeed suffered, not so much physically as spiritually. His Anfechtungen, as he called them, his trials or temptations or tribulations, might have been characterized in the modern world as mental illness: depression or some other disorder. For a medieval friar these afflictions were seen as being of a spiritual nature. Luther’s troubles seem to have consisted primarily of anxiety over his own spiritual status and condition. He had a profound and abiding sense of sin and unworthiness which found little relief in the usual treatment for such a condition, the sacrament of confession and the sophisticated spiritual direction which, at least in a learned environment such as a religious order, could accompany it. Temptations to despair arising from these feelings had troubled him since his childhood. He would look back ruefully on the way that he had repeatedly pestered his confessors with trivial sins.18 His career as a friar only fed his anxieties, as his conscience could be troubled by his inevitable failure to live up to the ritual demands of the rule of his order. Neither frequent confession nor fasting to the point of self-harm brought him relief.¹⁹ It was only with the transformation of his theological perspective in 1518 that he realized that true peace was not to be found through such strenuous exertion:

Works never make someone’s soul secure, nor do they render the conscience joyous and at peace with God.²⁰

Only after Easter 1518, however, was Luther’s new theology brought before a wider audience than the students and parishioners of Wittenberg. Thanks to the controversy generated that year by the explosive dissemination of his Ninety-Five Theses, he was invited to give an account of himself before the provincial chapter (or regional assembly) of his religious order, the Austin Friars, which that year was to meet under the supervision of his old friend and patron, Johann von Staupitz, at Heidelberg, seat of one of Germany’s oldest and most prestigious universities. The opportunity was framed as a scholastic disputation, in which one of the senior theological students of Wittenberg, Friar Leonhard Beier, would advance a set of theses drafted by Luther, with Luther himself offering the authoritative doctoral resolution or summing up after each thesis had been debated. Provincial “chapters” of this kind were routine administrative meetings, and it was not uncommon to enliven proceedings with an academic disputation when they took place in a university town. In many ways, this appearance at Heidelberg was precisely the sort of opportunity to perform before a more illustrious audience that he had been seeking when he sent out the Ninety-Five Theses to the nearby bishops.

The propositions that Luther put up for debate at Heidelberg were startling paradoxes, none more so than the first:

The Law of God, the most healthsome doctrine of life, cannot lead anyone to justice but rather blocks their way.

The next dozen or so propositions set an extremely low value on the “good works” that people strive to perform in accordance with this law, and conclude in effect that even their best efforts remain, in themselves, sins. This paves the way for his second bombshell:

Free will, after sin, exists in name only, and, when it does what it can, commits mortal sin.21

The denial of free will was in itself a direct affront to medieval theology, which, even in its most predestinarian modes (as for example in the theology of Thomas Aquinas), insisted that the human will was in some sense irreducibly free. At this moment, Luther’s denial of free will was perhaps more rhetorical than literal. Even as he explained himself, invoking biblical and Augustinian testimonies to the “captivity” and “slavery” of the human will (concepts which, of course, assume that selfsame theoretical existential freedom which they proceed to declare enslaved or taken captive) with respect to sin, he observed that “it is not that it is nothing, but that it is not free except to sin.” Without grace, he continued, citing Augustine, free will was capable only of sinning. Thomas Aquinas would not have disagreed, but Luther’s hyperbolic and provocative formulation of his ideas raised hackles.

The connection between the question of free will and the issue of certainty at the core of Luther’s theology becomes apparent in his discussion of the second clause of this article, concerning free will “when it does the best it can.” The Latin of this, dum facit quod in se est (literally, when it does what is within itself; that is, what is within its power), alludes to a familiar tag in the theology of late medieval Catholicism: facienti quod in se est, deus non denegat gratiam—God does not deny his grace to someone doing their best. This was an idea that confessors deployed to comfort and reassure those who became anxious about their spiritual condition, a kind of anxiety to which Luther himself was prey, and which he seems to have believed was normal among Christians. Staupitz may well have used this idea in dealing with Luther. It certainly appears in his own writings.22 Notwithstanding Luther’s opinion, such anxiety does not seem to have been widespread. Indeed, the astonishing vogue for indulgences is testament not so much to spiritual anxiety as to a relative spiritual confidence. For it shows that most Christians were confident enough that they would meet the entry requirement for purgatory, namely, to die in a state of grace, having made the proper deathbed confession and received the last rites. Luther himself complained that indulgences left people unhealthily blasé about their spiritual state. But equally there was enough anxiety around to have elicited facienti quod in se est as a strategy for pastoral care.

Luther’s objection to facienti quod in se est was precisely that it failed as a pastoral strategy, when measured against his novel demand that Christians should experience a “peace of conscience” which only certainty of grace could confer. In a somewhat incoherent but nonetheless revealing statement from Heidelberg we begin to see both the limitations of Luther’s logical capacity and the crucial importance to him, in his new world of justification by faith, of the sense of certainty about receiving the grace of God. For, he argues,

if grace is given to people who do their best, then they can know that they are in a state of grace. This is proved as follows. People either know, or do not know, that they are doing their best. If they know, then they also know that they have grace, since it is generally acknowledged that grace is given to those who do their best. But if they don’t know, then the doctrine is handed down in vain and its consolation evaporates, because if, whatever works they have done, people still do not know whether they have done their best, then they will remain in doubt forever.23

By the time he reached the end of his chain of reasoning, Luther had lost sight of its start, which was an effort to impale his opponents on the horns of a dilemma. His starting point was his intention to demonstrate that, even on the basis of traditional theology, his principle about certainty of grace was demonstrable. However, his argument led not to that conclusion, but to the conclusion that either one knows one is in a state of grace or one is doubtful about it, a conclusion that hardly requires elaborate demonstration. What matters about this argument is its unstated assumption that doubt on this subject is unacceptable. What Luther showed was simply how much importance he now attached to attaining a sense of certainty about being in a state of grace. For him, any doctrine that did not produce such certainty was pastorally worse than useless. From his point of view, if one could not know one was doing one’s best, then the proverb was not in fact offering a solution to the anxiety it was designed to address, namely over whether one was in receipt of the grace of God. Therefore, for him, the doctrine really was “handed down in vain.”

Besides introducing Luther’s new ideas, the Heidelberg Disputation also recapitulated the anti-Aristotelian rhetoric which he had developed over the preceding three years, most pointedly in the Disputation against Scholastic Theology (4 September 1517). His anti-Pelagian insistence that, contrary to Aristotle’s ethical principle, “the justice of God is not acquired by the frequent repetition of actions” was complemented by the affirmation that “it is infused through faith,” an affirmation buttressed by his favorite text from Romans, “The just person lives by faith.” It was all summed up in his proposition 25, “The just person is not the one who works hard, but the one who, without works, believes firmly in Christ.” It is not surprising to find Luther reporting that the “opinionated” theologians had largely rejected his ideas. But it is significant that he received a warmer welcome from the younger scholars.24

The emphasis placed here on the role of certainty of grace in Luther’s thought may perhaps seem misplaced, as it is well known that the core of his theology was the doctrine of “justification by faith alone.” There may also be unease over the confident identification of early 1518 as the decisive phase in his theological development, because many critics place the decisive moment earlier (some as early as 1513, most around 1515–16), while a few place it as late as 1519.²⁵ The reason for these disagreements is that attempts to attain a clear understanding of the nature and timing of the crucial step in Luther’s theological development have long been bedeviled, ironically enough, by one of his own most serious attempts to clarify it for us. Towards the end of his life, Luther was paid the supreme academic compliment of seeing a plan to publish his “complete works” in his lifetime, and he lived to see the first fruits of this plan, the first volume appearing early in 1545. He marked this signal distinction by contributing an autobiographical preface in which he looked back on the hectic events of thirty years before.26

In the course of these sketchy reminiscences, Luther makes two points about his theological development which seem to point in different directions. On the one hand, he places his discussion of an almost revolutionary transformation in his understanding of justification in the context of an account of his activities in 1519. On the other hand, his account of the content of his theological breakthrough focuses so closely on the concept of iustitia dei, the justice of God, that many scholars, especially those within the Lutheran tradition (within which most Luther scholarship has been conducted), have been led to conclude that his fundamental insights had been attained as early as 1515–16 (in the lectures on Romans) or even as early as 1513–14 (in his first lectures on the Psalms). For both those lecture courses, as we have seen, exhibit a profound concern with divine justice.

Many of the conclusions drawn from Luther’s comments in this preface, however, misunderstand the distinctive element in his theology and therefore misdate the moment when that distinctive element first took shape.²⁷ To identify iustitia dei as per se the crucial element in Luther’s thought is liable to mislead. For, as a cursory skim through his early lecture notes makes unmistakably clear, Luther had always been deeply concerned, one might even say obsessed, with divine justice. Even in the early lectures on the Psalms, as we have seen, he had drawn a strong distinction between human justice (or self-justification), the human aspiration to be just or to become just by one’s own unaided efforts, on the one hand; and on the other, divine justice, the mysterious and mystical quality by which alone the salvation of the sinner was made possible. Such was the subsequent success of Luther’s portrayal of Roman Catholicism as a religion preaching “justification by works,” as a religion of “works righteousness”—in stark contrast to his own religion of “righteousness by faith”—that it has been all too easy for scholars, especially those in the specifically Lutheran and generally Protestant traditions, to assume that his early emphasis on divine justice, on grace, on the gratuitous character of salvation, already constituted some kind of radical departure from medieval Catholic theology.28 This was not the case. Roman Catholicism, especially medieval Roman Catholicism, believed just as firmly as any Protestant tradition in “justification by faith,” and insisted just as unequivocally that salvation came by grace.

A more careful reading of the 1545 preface leads to the realization that Luther himself is alerting us explicitly to his longstanding concern with iustitia dei precisely in order to emphasize the transformative significance of the new understanding of that concept which he ultimately attained. He gives us a clear terminus ad quem, a time by which this transformation had definitely taken place, by telling us that it was only when he was equipped with this new understanding that he turned for a second time to the exposition of the Psalms in 1519. This was, he states, “after” he had lectured on Romans, Galatians, and Hebrews. He then describes in rather general terms his intellectual struggle with the concept of divine justice, which he presents as intimately bound up with his profound personal anxieties over sin, guilt, and confession. This struggle culminated in the insight that this justice was primarily “that by which the just person lives, thanks to God’s gift, namely by faith.” Putting it another way, he accounts for it as the realization that the justice of God was for human beings something that God gave, and not something that they could win by their own efforts (from about 1525 he would therefore call this justice passive). It was not something they did, but something that was done to them. He does not spell out in 1545, as he had so often done before, the contrast between passive and active justice, but his readers would by that time have grasped this intuitively. This distinction, endlessly reiterated in Luther’s mature writings, is crucial, for the concept of “passive justice” excluded not only the “Pelagian” theory of an active justice by which human beings might work out their own salvation, but also the Augustinian and Catholic conception of “cooperative” grace, by which sinners were enabled, through grace, to collaborate with that grace in the process of justification and salvation—a conception which Luther himself evidently shared when first lecturing on the Psalms and indeed on Romans.29

The key to Luther’s breakthrough about justice therefore resides less in the idea of justice itself than in the coda “through faith” (nempe ex fide). It is the appropriation of the justice of God by faith, entirely passively, that is what matters, and here faith means—as Luther and his disciples stated on countless occasions—no merely general faith in God nor even a merely “historical” faith (fides historica) in the theological facts of the incarnation, passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, but the specific, personal faith that the saving work of Christ had been made actual and effective in one’s own case (pro nobis, pro me).³⁰

To focus too exclusively on Luther’s anti-Pelagian understanding of divine justice therefore risks missing the point. Luther believed right from the start that it was the justice of God that effected the justification of sinners, not some justice that they developed or manufactured by their own efforts and on their own account. But such an understanding was mainstream Catholic theology and entailed no breach whatsoever with medieval Catholic doctrine or practice. Thus it is that, in the early lecture notes on the Psalms and Paul’s epistles, an emphasis on divine justice sits happily alongside unhesitating endorsement of the seven sacraments, the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the Mass, the cult of the saints, and prayer for the dead. This is perhaps why those early writings were not included in the Complete Works. Luther’s increasingly strident anti-Aristotelianism set him on the margins of orthodoxy, but he was not altogether alone there, and he was not outside.

It was his new conception of faith, faith now modulated to the key of personal certainty of grace, that constituted Luther’s most important and most original contribution in the field of Christian theology. On this faith, on this certainty, everything else hinges. There is not a trace of this in his writings until 1518. From 1518 it is all over them. This fundamental shift in focus was even reflected in his attitude towards Augustine. At first, Luther remarked, he did not so much read Augustine as devour him. But once he had learned from Paul what justification by faith was, “it was all over with me and Augustine.”31 Augustine, he remarked on another occasion, got closer to Paul than all the scholastics, but he still did not get Paul, and did not adequately explain or understand justification.³²

Upon his return from Heidelberg (15 May 1518) Luther embarked upon a publishing spree. He was already notorious throughout Germany as the “hammer of indulgences,” and he was on the way to becoming, in modern terms, a celebrity brand.³³ Anything with his name on it would sell, and his substantial sermons on the Ten Commandments, preached to the laity of Wittenberg some time before the indulgences controversy, therefore now found their way rapidly into print. The sermons were published in Latin, and were not translated into German until some years later. There is no reason to think that they had not originated as popular preaching, but they had perhaps undergone some level of expansion and editing before they appeared in print. Their largely traditional ethical content and the absence of the main themes of Luther’s mature theology (most notably that of certainty of grace) indicate that they were pulled out of the drawer to meet the sudden consumer demand for “Luther.” There is a note of moral rigorism about the project which smacks more of medieval Catholicism than of Reformation preaching, though salvation is, as ever in Luther, by grace, and he offers an extremely Augustinian account of justification with occasional attacks on “Pelagians.” This relatively heavy text, which ran to four editions and was widely read by clergy and humanists, did much to secure Luther’s reputation in the early years of his fame as a sound if demanding Christian teacher.

Among the first fruits of what was to be a heavy harvest was his Resolutions on Indulgences, a lengthy written-up version of the Ninety-Five Theses, arguing for them in detail, as though in a lecture-hall debate. The Resolutions had been in preparation for some months, and were not through the press until mid-August, even though the dedication to Staupitz had been written on 30 May. They give clear indications of Luther’s new thinking about faith and personal certainty of the forgiveness of sins, and inculcated his theory that forgiveness depended not on an individual’s contrition (as in medieval Catholic pastoral theology) but on their faith and trust in the truth of the words of absolution pronounced in the name of Christ by the priest in confession.34

In the dedication of this work, Luther recalled how Staupitz once said to him that true penance began from the love of God and of justice, and that this love was the origin of penance, not its objective. That observation, he added, had always remained with him. Since then, having reflected further on the scriptures, he had found that where once “penance” was bitter to his ears, now no word was sweeter, for he had learned the true meaning of “metanoia” from Grecians and Hebraists.³⁵ It is not long before the explanation of this change of attitude is revealed. Certainty of grace, founded on an absolute trust in the promise of Christ, is clearly set out, and this is the substance of “faith alone.”36 There had been no hint of such a doctrine in the Ninety-Five Theses themselves, so this new theology comes as something of a surprise in what was billed as a defense of those theses. The doctrine is presented under the seventh thesis (“Conclusion VII”), which concerned sacramental confession, the context within which Luther had first formulated his doctrine of certainty. This was its first airing before a sophisticated and potentially international audience, in a treatise intended for scholars: “Faith in Christ, the gratuitous donor of forgiveness, is to be taught first of all.”³⁷ Already some of the implications of this new principle were becoming clear. The power of the priest to forgive sins was traditionally rooted in a clutch of New Testament texts such as John 20:23, “Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven.” Luther’s new conception of faith shifted the focus from the action or power of the priest to the faith of the penitent:

Why did Christ say, “Whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven,” if not because they are not forgiven to anyone unless he believes himself to be forgiven by the absolving priest?³⁸

The person seeking absolution must therefore take every care that they should not doubt that their sins are forgiven before God, so that they may be at peace in their hearts.³⁹

The traditional understanding of the sacraments was therefore called into question. For Luther, they could no longer be seen as supplying grace to those who put no obstacle in their way. That was a view he now stigmatized as heretical, rejecting a two-hundred-year tradition stemming from the theology of Duns Scotus, the theological guiding light of the Franciscan friars. Instead, for Luther, grace functioned only for those who believed in the faith of the sacrament.40 This certainty of deriving grace from participation in the sacraments was so essential that anyone lacking it was better advised to abstain from the sacraments completely, for fear of the harm they would do their own soul and the offence they would give to God and his Word.⁴¹ The customary invocation of Ecclesiastes 9:1 against the possibility of certainty of grace now horrified him. If that argument were valid, then it would follow that “I doubt whether the merits of Christ granted and applied to me are adequate to the remission of sins. And what could be more loathsome than such a doubt?”⁴² The faith that he taught was, in his view, the essence of the Gospel message, and in the light of his new understanding he faced the awful prospect of the near total corruption of the contemporary Church, for “the Gospel of God is pretty much unknown in the greater part of the Church.”⁴³

Luther was a moving target in 1518, and his earliest opponents found themselves shooting at shadows as he raced ahead onto new ground. Even as the ramifications of his theology were reaching far beyond the narrow issue of indulgences which had brought him into the public eye, the Ninety-Five Theses themselves began to come under hostile scrutiny as far away as Rome. Archbishop Albrecht had sent the theses to Rome around the turn of the year, and they worked their way slowly through the administrative machinery there. Not long after Luther’s order had held its provincial chapter at Heidelberg, the Dominican friars, to which Johannes Tetzel belonged, were gathering for their general chapter at Rome. It may have been this event, which brought together Dominican friars from all over Europe, that first drew the serious attention of the Holy See to the indulgences controversy. For it was a Dominican theologian, the pope’s official theological adviser as the “Master of the Sacred Palace” (a post invariably held by a Dominican friar), who made the first recorded Roman response to Luther.

Silvestro Mazzolini, known as Prierias from his place of birth (Priero, in northern Italy), held the office of Master of the Sacred Palace from 1515 until his death in 1527. And it was he who was asked by curial officials to take a view on the Ninety-Five Theses. The outcome was a brief treatise printed at Rome in June 1518, which, he claimed, was dashed off in three days, as an unwelcome distraction from his more serious theological work. Prierias brought to the task a mind at once analytical and inquisitorial (he had previously served as an inquisitor, or investigator, into heresy in several regions of northern Italy).44 His inquisitorial temperament led him to focus on what was wrong with Luther’s ideas, and his analytical capacity led him to reduce this to the fundamental issue of papal power. Hence the rather odd but revealing title he gave to his report when it was printed in June: A Dialogue on the Impertinent Propositions of Martin Luther concerning Papal Power.⁴⁵ His report was anything but a dialogue, and it was Prierias, not Luther, who chose to make papal power the central issue, although Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses had certainly offered a substantial critique of what he saw as the abuse of papal power. While this could be seen as impressive insight into Luther’s theology on Prierias’s part, there is more than a hint in his work of a defensive attitude conditioned by the recent experience of the Roman curia, most notably of the Gallican challenge to papal authority launched around 1510, when Louis XII of France sought to convene a general council of the Church with a view to deposing Pope Julius II. (There may also have been memories of Savonarola’s defiance of papal authority in the late 1490s.) Thanks to that recent controversy, curial theologians were perhaps too ready to see any criticism as a challenge to papal authority, and, conversely, to seek to deploy that authority to silence unwelcome criticism.

Prierias evidently found the Ninety-Five Theses little more than a jejune nuisance. The document made little sense to him, devoid as it was of any contextualizing information. He starts out equably enough, but evidently read the theses with mounting annoyance, reacting to the increasingly heightened rhetoric of the text itself. At first he managed to reserve his condemnation for Luther’s words rather than for Luther himself, but he gradually worked himself into a splenetic temper in which, even when Luther expressed a perfectly orthodox (if somewhat tendentious) view, he responded by trying to find fault. Thus Luther’s thesis 40 stated that “Apostolic indulgences should be preached carefully, in case people erroneously infer that they are preferable to other good works of charity.” Prierias could hardly argue with that, and started his response “True enough.” But he had to find fault, so he added, “but similar caution should be shown in criticizing or curtailing them, to the prejudice of the apostolic power and of the privilege conferred by God upon Saint Peter.”46 In the end he descended to vulgar abuse and argument ad hominem, denouncing Luther’s arguments as vain and puerile, and Luther himself as a trasher, not a teacher. Luther would talk about indulgences differently, Prierias claimed, if he had a comfortable bishopric and a plenary indulgence to rebuild his cathedral.⁴⁷ However, in a telling and unguarded aside he not only conceded that indulgences rested on papal authority rather than on holy scripture, but then characterized papal authority as “greater” than that of scripture.⁴⁸

What Prierias did was to raise the stakes. And Luther was never a man to fold, but would always raise again. Those conciliatory humanist commentators, such as Erasmus, who later blamed Prierias for escalating the situation with his snap judgments about heresy and his reduction of the debate to an argument about papal authority, had a point: Prierias’s response did not help. But Luther himself was already imputing heresy to those with whom he disagreed,49 and was prompt to outbid his opponents in invective. In his Resolutions, going through the press while Prierias was still writing his Dialogue, he described traditional penitential theology as little more than the torture of consciences.⁵⁰

Luther received a copy of Prierias’s Dialogue on 7 August 1518, and the very next day reported that he had already embarked on a rebuttal, which was rushed into print by the end of the month.⁵¹ It certainly reads like something thrown together in a hurry, lacking obvious or sophisticated structure. The Response is a hasty and intemperate work. His opponent’s occasional intimations of heresy are met with countercharges of heresy, idolatry, superstition, and blasphemy. Almost every page denounces Thomas Aquinas, the scholastics in general, or their forerunner, Aristotle. He was well aware of just how violent his rhetoric was, half apologizing for it when he sent copies to his friend Staupitz.⁵² But he could not help himself. Vitriolic vilification and indiscriminate invective were his default reactions to theological disagreement. His focus on Thomas Aquinas, however, was calculated. Prierias was one of the foremost living authorities on Thomas. By making denunciation of Thomism and scholasticism run through the text (to the extent that the Response has a theme, this is it), Luther was seeking to cast himself, like the great Johannes Reuchlin, as the innocent victim of mean-spirited and obscurantist Dominican persecutors. Dominican theologians at Cologne and Rome, including Prierias, had been the leading figures in the campaign against Reuchlin, which was still grinding its way through the glacially slow processes of ecclesiastical litigation in the curia. Aligning himself with Reuchlin was a shrewd way for Luther to canvass for the sympathy of the German reading public. It may just be a coincidence, but the month which saw Luther make this move in his reply to Prierias was the same month that saw the arrival in Wittenberg of Philip Melanchthon, who happened to be Reuchlin’s nephew as well as a rising star of German humanism in his own right. It may have been this connection that emboldened Luther to write a friendly letter to Reuchlin towards the end of the year.53

Discursive and discourteous though it is, the Response is not without theological interest. Luther not only reiterated his views on indulgences and purgatory but also took up some of Prierias’s objections. In particular he addressed the objection that he had not set out his methodological foundations, in a way which would hardly satisfy his opponent, but which is nonetheless revealing. For Luther, Prierias’s theological foundation was Thomas Aquinas. Augustine, he said, would have been a wiser choice, but Luther himself then named Paul as his own “first foundation.”⁵⁴ That was all he had to say about methodology, a subject on which his views would develop rapidly over the next two years. His opponent’s hints aroused his understandable concern about the prospect of a heresy trial, and Luther was quick to repudiate the imputation of heresy, on the somewhat disingenuous grounds that his views had not been condemned by any council of the Church.

But most importantly, Luther returned to his big idea: certainty. His original and uncontroversial denial that indulgences conferred certainty of grace was now modified by an insistence that certainty of the forgiveness of sins was available to believers through faith. Without that certainty, he went on, Christian faith itself was evacuated of all meaning. “What else, I ask, is an uncertain gift, but no gift at all? … a Christ who gave nothing certain to the Church would seem to have given her nothing at all.”⁵⁵ His ensuing rhapsody on certainty and doubt left no room for misapprehension over the crucial role of certainty of faith in his emerging theology. For Luther, doubt as to one’s standing before God was tantamount to doubting the very power of God to save sinners. This has often been called a “subjective” doctrine of justification, and there is some merit in this old-fashioned Catholic analysis of Luther’s teaching. However, it is fairer to say that Luther collapsed the distinction between the objective and the subjective. For the sense of certainty as to one’s own salvation, a sense which it is not altogether unjust to label “subjective,” was not to be achieved by the traditionally subjective means of introspection and examination of conscience. He had already stipulated in the Resolutions on Indulgences that peace of conscience was not to be attained “by inward experience” (by which he seems to mean the kind of mystical experience that might be sought through the cultivation of meditative prayer).56 This sense of certainty was attained by an entirely objective and external engagement with the saving promise of Christ. Experience was the fruit of faith rather than its cause.⁵⁷ For Luther, the focus of this mental operation was emphatically outside rather than inside the self. The focus was Christ, not self. Through that focus on Christ one attained inner peace by means of the realization that Christ’s saving work applied to oneself—and that this work, because it was God’s work, was utterly certain and beyond all doubt.

The crucial discovery of 1518 was the decisive turning point in Luther’s theological development. That discovery was of a complete spiritual certainty that he was in what Catholics would call “a state of grace,” complete spiritual certainty that, in the words of the modern evangelicals, “he was saved.” This is not to claim that spiritual certainty rather than “justification by faith alone” was the theological heart of Luther’s theology. The point is that “justification by faith alone” is itself spiritual certainty. The received wisdom about Luther, that his doctrine is all about “justification by faith alone,” is correct as far as it goes. The problem is that it is rarely understood. It is a complex and counterintuitive doctrine, deeply paradoxical, as Luther delighted in emphasizing. Catholic opponents found it not so much paradoxical as self-contradictory (the boundary between paradox and self-contradiction is always awkward to police). For Luther and his followers it was a paradox that brought the troubled soul to the haven of a conscience at peace with God and itself.