THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION
BY KARL ADAM
Translated by Cecily Hastings
CANTERBURY BOOKS
SHEED AND WARD INC.
840 BROADWAY
NEW YORK 3
NIHIL OBSTAT: MICHAEL P. NOONAN, S.M., CENSOR DEPUTATUS
IMPRIMATUR: + RICHARD J. CUSHING, ARCHBISHOP OF BOSTON
BOSTON, MARCH 22, 1951
This book is a large part of "One and Holy," a translation of
"Una Sancta in katholischer Sicht," published by Patmos-
Verlag, Dusseldorf.
CONTENTS
I. WEAKNESS IN THE CHURCH
Rome
Germany
II. LUTHER
The Final Break
The Mystery of Luther
The Doctrine of Justification
Christendom Divided
The New Rule of Faith
Salvation by Faith Alone
Priesthood and Sacraments
The Papacy
III. THE CENTRAL QUESTION TO-DAY
I. WEAKNESS IN THE CHURCH
Rome
MODERN historians are agreed that the roots of the Reformation
reach far back into the high Middle Ages. The former monk of
Cluny, Gregory VII, in his zeal for the liberty and reform of
the Church, so interpreted the papal claims formulated by
Augustine, Gregory the Great and Nicholas I that right up into
the late Middle Ages they excited repeated resistance from the
secular powers, shook the prestige of the Papal See and so
prepared the way for Luther's Reformation. Gregory's "Dictatus
Papae," in which he claimed for the Pope a direct authority
even over secular affairs, with the right to depose unworthy
princes and release their subjects from their oath of
allegiance, inspired papal policy all through the Middle Ages.
This certainly added a corrosive bitterness and a devastating
violence--a violence which did not stop short of the Papal See
itself--to the conflicts which in any event would have been
bitter enough between Regnum and Sacerdotium, the struggle
between the Emperor Henry IV and the Pope over investitures,
the battles with the Hohenstaufen, Frederick Barbarossa and
Frederick II, the conflicts with Philip the Fair of France and
Ludwig of Bavaria. In Frederick II's Manifesto of 1230 Gregory
IX is already branded as "the great Dragon and Antichrist of
the last days". In 1301 Philip the Fair had Boniface VIII's
Bull "Ausculta" publicly burned, and in 1303 had the Pope
himself taken into custody as a "heretic, blasphemer and
simoniac". Ludwig of Bavaria, supported by the Franciscan
Spirituals, declared Pope John XXII a "formal heretic" in the
Reichstag at Nuremberg in 1323.
The counter-attack of the "spiritual sword" was a series of
excommunications, extending to the fourth degree of kindred,
and years of interdict over whole countries. Germany alone was
under interdict for twenty years, which meant that no public
religious service could be held, no sacrament could be
publicly administered, no bell could sound. The more often
these ecclesiastical penalties were imposed, the blunter grew
the spiritual sword. Inevitably the religion and morality of
the people suffered serious damage, their sense of the Church
was weakened, their sympathies were alienated from Christ's
vicar. In due course there arose theologians amongst the
Franciscan Spirituals, particularly their General Michael of
Cesena, and William of Ockham, who in numerous writings
questioned the founding by Christ of the Papacy as the Church
knows it. And Marsilius of Padua in 1324 drew up a
revolutionary programme entitled "Defensor Pacis," with a
theory of Church and State which broke completely with
existing ecclesiastical constitutions--"a significant prelude
to the Reformation".[1]
Anti-papal feeling in Germany gained ground when, in 1314, the
See of Rome moved to Avignon and was thus brought completely
under French influence, and again when the financial burdens
arising out of the double establishment at Rome and Avignon
compelled the Pope to build up a system of taxation which,
when expanded, weighed heavily both on spiritual and on
economic life. The Camera Apostolica covered the whole Church
with a net of taxation called the Census. Besides the revenues
of the Papal State, this included pallium-money (the tax paid
by newly appointed archbishops, bishops and abbots), spolia
(the total assets of deceased prelates), the numerous
administrative taxes and procurations for papal visitations;
above all, the taxes on the revenues of vacant benefices, and
annates (payment of the first year's income, or at least half
of it, from all ecclesiastical appointments made by the Pope).
Since Clement IV had claimed for the Pope unlimited authority
over all ecclesiastical appointments in Christendom, the
number of benefices reserved to the Pope had risen beyond
computation. This aroused general opposition, especially when
John XXII, in the course of his conflict with Ludwig of
Bavaria, tried to fill all the vacant sees and offices in
Germany with his own supporters.
In a similar spirit, but contrary to prevailing ecclesiastical
law, the Papal Chancellery in the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries encouraged cumulus beneficiorum, i.e., the holding
of many benefices by one person, and commendation, by which a
benefice could be conferred simply for the income derived from
it, without the holder's having any spiritual obligations to
fulfil. Moreover, the Pope could promise to provide a person
to a benefice even before its present occupant had actually
died. The spirit of mammon had won such an ascendancy in the
Curia that Pope Clement VII, for example, at the very height
of the Reformation storm, was trying to make money from the
sale of Cardinals' hats. It is against this background that we
must understand the denunciation of the great Catholic
preacher Geiler von Kaisersberg: "It is no longer the Holy
Ghost who appoints the rulers of the Church, but the devil,
and for money, for favour and by bribery of the Cardinals."[2]
It is easily understandable that the Curia's irresponsible
policies in matters of taxation and appointments, together
with the arbitrary occupation of ecclesiastical offices in
Germany by foreigners, gravely limited orderly diocesan
government, and that they aroused on all sides uncertainty in
regard to the law and consequent discontent amounting to
unrest and resistance. There were expensive lawsuits that had
to be taken to the highest papal court, the Roman Rota. The
German nation had its public grievances (gravamina nationis
Germanicae). They were raised for the first time in 1456 by
Archbishop Dietrich of Mainz at the Furstentag at Frankfurt.
From then on they came up again and again in the Reichstag in
the form in which the humanist Jakob Wimpfeling had
consolidated them. But the abuses, so far from being removed,
mounted from year to year as the papal requirements increased.
The Pope's yearly income was greater than that of any German
Emperor. John XXII, for instance, died leaving three-quarters
of a million gold coins in his treasury: a figure so high,
considering the values and conditions of the time, that it was
bound to have a catastrophic effect on the believer when he
pictured against this background the poor tent-maker Paul, or
the still poorer fisherman Peter, coming with dusty sandals to
Rome and bringing nothing with them but a deep and noble
desire to preach Christ and to die for Christ.
If the fiscal policy of Avignon, where the Popes had their
court for sixty-five years, seriously damaged the political
and economic interests of German Christianity and so at least
indirectly undermined the religious authority of the Pope, the
great Schism of the West, from 1378 to 1417, threatened the
prestige of the Papacy with final extinction.
In opposition to Urban VI, elected under pressure from the
Roman people and disliked for various reasons, the French
Cardinals in Avignon, the so-called "ultramontani", declaring
the election unfree and invalid, raised a cousin of the French
King to the papal chair as Clement VII, and Christendom was
split into two camps. The division went right through the
Christian body. Whole Orders, such as the Cistercians,
Carthusians, Franciscans, Dominicans and Carmelites, fell into
two halves. And since both Popes excommunicated each other and
each other's supporters, the whole of Christendom was at least
nominally excommunicated. The split did not come to an end
with the deaths of the two Popes, for the Cardinals in Rome
and Avignon all obstinately held their own papal elections.
Matters grew worse when the Council of Pisa, in 1409, deposed
both the Rome and the Avignon Popes as "notorious schismatics
and heretics" and elected a third, Alexander V, who soon died,
and was followed by John XXIII. Since both the deposed Popes
obstinately maintained the validity of their elections this
led, not to unity, but "from wicked duality to accursed
triplicity". It was only in 1417, with the election of Martin
V at the Council of Constance, that the Church could
acknowledge one single head again in place of the three
previously elected claimants.
It was inevitable that this schism of nearly forty years
should shake the Church to her foundation; that radicals of
the type of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua should
formulate a democratic theory of the Church, taking the
plenitude of ecclesiastical authority to rest in the body of
the faithful, not in a single head; that thoughtful
theologians such as Peter d'Ailly and the distinguished John
Gerson should construct the so-called conciliar theory, making
the Pope subordinate to a General Council and giving the
Church a parliamentary instead of a monarchical constitution.
The idea of the Church received from the Fathers--in which
there was but one Rock, one Keeper of the Keys, one Shepherd--
began to weaken. Trust in the Father of Christendom was gone.
In this sense, the experience of the Great Schism had
impressed its decisive stamp on the minds of the faithful
(Lortz).
Hard upon the dogmatic attack on papal authority inevitably
conjured up by the Great Western Schism, there followed its
moral collapse; the Renaissance Popes seem to have carried out
in their own lives that cult of idolatrous humanism, demonic
ambition and unrestrained sensuality which was in many ways
bound up with the reawakening of the ancient ideal of manhood.
The most sober ecclesiastical historians agree that the reigns
of the Popes from Sixtus IV to Leo X "represent, from the
religious and ecclesiastical point of view, the lowest level
of the Papacy since the tenth and eleventh centuries"
(Bihlmeyer, vol. ii, p. 477). The unbridled nepotism of Sixtus
IV, which threatened to degrade the Papacy to "a dynastic
heritage and the Patrimonium Petri to a petty Italian state"
(Lortz, vol. i, p. 75), was followed by the fateful Bull
against witches issued by Innocent VIII, a man of scandalous
life. Worse still was the conduct of Alexander VI, stained
with murder and impurity, and the demonic lust for blood and
power of his son Cesare Borgia. Then came the burning of the
Dominican Savonarola at Alexander's orders, the sheer
political jugglery of Julius II, whose pontificate was
dissipated in campaigns and wars, and finally the pleasure-
loving worldliness of Leo X, who found the chase and the
theatre more important than Martin Luther and his religious
aspirations. The reputation of the Papacy was dragged not
merely in the dust but in the mud. It is especially
significant of the mentality of Leo X and of the Renaissance
Popes in general, that in the solemn procession at his
enthronement in the papal chair, the Most Blessed Sacrament
was accompanied by statues of naked pagan gods, with the
inscription "First Venus reigned [the age of Alexander VI],
then Mars [in the time of Julius II], and now [under Leo X]
Pallas Athene holds the sceptre" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 86).
The news of these scandalous doings, of course, soon crossed
the Alps and stripped the last vestige of credit from the
Mother of Christendom. The humanist circles at Erfurt and
Florence took care of that, and so later did Ulrich von Hutten
and the Dunkelmanner letters. Nor was Luther himself far
behind them. Even when he was translating the Bible in 1522,
before he had reached the hey-day of his hatred for Rome, he
depicted the great Harlot of the Apocalypse as wearing the
triple papal crown.
Germany
Let us turn now from the crying scandals surrounding the
highest ecclesiastical authority to the abuses which marred
the German Church and her spiritual life before Luther's
advent.
It is certainly not true to say that the German Church which
witnessed these scandals in the Roman government was herself
ripe for destruction. The constant urge for reform and the
tremendous response when Luther raised the alarm would be
incomprehensible if Christian life had died out completely. We
can even assert that German Christianity in the last phase of
the Middle Ages was, in spite of all, more devout than it is
to-day. For to-day a denunciation of abuses by a Martin Luther
would cause no revolution. It was the age of the three
Catherines, of Siena, Bologna and Genoa; the age when St.
Bridget scourged the abuses of the Avignon Curia with the
flames of her wrath. when Thomas a Kempis wrote his immortal
"Imitation of Christ", when an unknown priest wrote the
"Theologia Germanica" first published by Luther. It was the
age in which German mysticism flowered in Eckhardt, Tauler and
Suso, and the devotio moderna of the "Brothers of the Common
Life" was aspiring to revivify, spiritualize and personalize
benumbed Christianity.
The evidence grows greater and greater that even the common
people of the Church, so long as they had not fallen a prey to
sectarianism or been touched by radical humanism, were
genuinely devoted to their Catholic faith despite all the
abuses, and that daily life remained embedded in religious
usage right up to the end of the Middle Ages. Even the simple
people then knew how to distinguish between the office and the
person's own piety and to apply our Lord's words to the gloomy
contemporary scene: "All things therefore whatsoever they
shall say to you, observe and do; but according to their works
do ye not" (Matt. xxiii. 3).
During this same second half of the fifteenth century, there
was an abundance of pious works ad remedium animae (for the
welfare of souls): new churches were built, new parishes
opened, new appointments of preachers made and charitable
institutions set up. New religious and charitable brotherhoods
were formed, and even new devotions introduced, such as the
Angelus and the Way of the Cross. There was more catechetical
and devotional literature than ever. Booklets and examinations
of conscience for Confession, catechism tables, Bible story-
books, rhymed Bibles, poor men's Bibles, appeared in the
service of religious instruction. Before 1518 a translation of
the Bible into High German had run into fourteen editions and
one in Low German into four editions. All in all one can
fairly speak of an increase of piety in this period. Yet it
was seriously lacking in the inner spirit, in the living
penetration of pious practices with the spirit of the Gospel.
There was too much externalism, too much mere automatism and
superficiality, and also far too much unhealthy emotionalism
in this piety.
The shepherds and teachers who might have directed and
deepened the stream of faith were lacking. The higher clergy
were mostly noblemen who had entered the priesthood from
material rather than spiritual motives. Bishoprics, prelacies
and abbacies had for long been the preserve of the nobility.
At the outbreak of the Reformation eighteen bishoprics and
archbishoprics in Germany were occupied by the sons of
princes. Proof of proficiency in the tourney was an absolutely
requisite qualification for most canonries. It is evident that
prelates so immersed in worldliness and pleasure had neither
the ability nor the desire to break the Bread of Life to the
people.
Over against these prelates, "God's Junkers", we see the lower
clergy. They seldom had benefices of their own and were
compelled either to carry out the duties of a benefice for a
pittance from some member of the higher clergy, or earn their
living by helping to serve Mass and doing odd jobs about the
church. Their economic position was therefore extremely
precarious. Their theological training was no better.
Excepting the handful of the clergy who were educated at the
universities, most of them contented themselves with a modest
smattering of religion, Latin and liturgy. Their morals were
not much better than their theological knowledge. One could
hardly expect a higher moral standard from them than the
example set by their superiors. Documentary evidence indicates
that there was amongst them much brutality, drunkenness,
gambling, avarice, simony and superstition. To secure a living
for themselves they exacted almost insupportable fees for the
slightest exercise of their priesthood, even from the poor and
destitute. The charge for the administration of the Last
Sacraments was so high that Extreme Unction was called "the
Sacrament of the rich". Concubinage was so general that at the
Councils of Constance and Basel the Emperor Sigismund proposed
the abolition of the law of celibacy.
Amidst the general decline there were still of course plenty
of morally upright priests. The humanist Jakob Wimpfeling, a
severely critical observer of the life of the Church, vouched
"before God" to knowing in the six dioceses of the Rhine
"many, nay innumerable, chaste and learned prelates and
clergy, of unblemished reputation, full of piety, liberality
and care for the poor" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 90). We need only
call to mind the illustrious figure of the saintly Nicholas of
Cusa, the herald of the modern age and tireless reformer, who
sought over and over again by visitations, by word of mouth,
and in his writings, to communicate his own spirit of piety to
the German Church. But to most of the clergy we must apply the
words of Pope Adrian VI in his first consistorial address,
quoting from St. Bernard: "Vice has grown so much a matter of
course that those who are stained with it are no longer aware
of the stink of sin."
The regular clergy were no better than the seculars. Here too
we must, of course, beware of false generalizations. It was
precisely in this second half of the fifteenth century that
almost all the older Orders made an effort to reform. In the
case of the Benedictines there were, for example, the reforms
of Kastl, Melk and Bursfeld. All the Mendicant Orders still
had houses in which the original lofty spirit of the love of
God and neighbour was alive. And again and again a saint would
arise somewhere in the Church, like Bernardino of Siena, John
Capistran the lover of souls, and the noble Caritas
Pirkheimer, who were shining examples of Christian piety.
Luther's account of his own experiences in the Augustinian
Priory at Erfurt gives the lie to the statement that monastic
discipline was in a universal decline. It is also significant
that later on it was ex-monks in particular who were among
Luther's best co-operators--who were among the most impatient,
in fact, of current abuses.
Nevertheless, we have from within the Church enough official
and unofficial testimony to give us a gloomy picture of life
in the Orders. Amongst the more ancient Orders only the
Carthusians and in part the Cistercians really maintained
their original standard. In the other monasteries there was a
tragic decline in discipline. The great Benedictine abbeys had
become a mere convenience of the nobility. But in the
Mendicant Orders, too, the foundations of the religious life
had begun to totter--not least on account of the irresponsible
caprice with which the officials of the Curia at Avignon
dispensed religious from the existing rules of the Order or
abolished them altogether. Monks and nuns outside the cloister
were already a familiar sight in the fifteenth century, and in
the sixteenth the begging friars obtained general permission
from Rome to live outside their priories. Community life, and
especially community prayer, fell into disuse. So did
voluntary poverty. Many of the monks retained their inherited
estates and bought or inherited their own cells in the
monastery. Erasmus of Rotterdam in his "Enchiridion" singles
out for blame their lovelessness and their avarice. Other
moral transgressions must be added. The Beguines, for
instance, had won for themselves the nickname of "the Friars'
cellaresses". The sister of Duke Magnus was known among the
rich Clares of Ribnitz as impudicissima abbatissa.
It is not to be wondered at that the "Shavenheads", as the
monks were called, were despised and hated by the people, all
the more because they were patently increasing in numbers.
Together with the lower clergy and the wandering scholars, the
"stormy petrels of the revolution", they formed a clerical
proletariat. Johannes Agricola estimated the total number of
clergy and religious in Germany at the time--in a small total
population--at one million four hundred thousand (Lortz, vol.
i, p. 86). It cannot be doubted that the majority of this
clerical proletariat had neither the intellectual nor the
moral capacity to so much as guess the profundity of the
questions raised by Luther, let alone fully to realize the
gravity of the challenge and to counter it with an adequate
response.
Omne malum a clero--every evil comes from the clergy. As early
as 1245 at the Council of Lyons, Pope Innocent IV had called
the sins of the higher and lower clergy one of the five wounds
in the Body of the Church, and at the second Council of Lyons
in 1274 Gregory X declared that the wickedness of many
prelates was the cause of the ruin of the whole world (cf.
Bihlmeyer, vol. ii, p. 336). Machiavelli, again, speaks
volumes in the sarcastic remark that "We Italians may thank
the Church and our priests that we have become irreligious and
wicked" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 119).
In this waste of clerical corruption it was impossible for the
spirit of our Lord to penetrate into the people, take root
there and bring true religion to flower. Since there was at
this time no catechism of infants, the sermons on Sundays and
feast-days were the chief sources from which the laity drew
their religious education. And these sources were often choked
up. Since at this time, moreover, as during the whole of the
Middle Ages, Communion was very infrequent outside the ranks
of the mystics, there was no sacramental impulse towards an
interiorizing and deepening of religion. So the attention of
the faithful was directed towards externals. Religion was
materialized. Pious interest was focused more on the "holy
things"--relics--than on the sacraments, more on pilgrimages
and flagellations than on attending the services of the
Church, and most of all on indulgences.
The cult of relics and indulgences had grown to gigantic
proportions since Leo X had attached indulgences of a
thousand, ten thousand and a hundred thousand years to the
veneration of relics. Erasmus criticized this kind of piety in
the bitter words: "We kiss the shoes of the saints and their
dirty kerchiefs while we leave their writings, their holiest
and truest relics, to lie unread" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 108).
Frederick the Wise, the famous protector of Luther, had built
up his treasury of relics in the Castle Church at Wittenburg
to 18,885 fragments. Anyone who believed in and venerated them
could gain indulgences amounting to two million years. When
Boniface IX made of ecclesiastical indulgences what looked
like a commercial traffic, even secular princes and cities
became eager to take part in the distribution of them, so as
to assure for themselves a generous share of the inflowing
money.[3]
From the middle of the fifteenth century the Popes began to
distribute indulgences for the dead. The Legate Peraudi, in
connection with an indulgence granted by Pope Sixtus IV to
Louis XI for the whole of France, announces that the
indulgence could be made certainly effective for any soul in
purgatory, even if the person gaining it were in a state of
mortal sin, so long as the indulgenced work (i.e., money
payment) were performed. Pope Sixtus IV did indeed correct his
legate's declaration to the extent of saying that the
application of the indulgence to the dead could only be a
matter of petition, not of certainty. But Peraudi's other
statement--that the indulgence could be gained for the dead by
people living in mortal sin--was never censured. In the
prevailing low state of clerical education, preachers of the
indulgence (such as the Dominican Tetzel for instance) eagerly
seized on Peraudi's pronouncement, so that many preachers
really did adopt as their favourite tag: "Your cash no sooner
clinks in the bowl than out of purgatory jumps the soul." Some
of the papal decrees themselves were in great measure
responsible for this crude interpretation of indulgences. They
employed a misleading formula current from the thirteenth
century onwards which spoke of a remissio a poena et culpa
(remission of pain and guilt) or even of a remissio peccatorum
(remission of sins),[4] whereas an indulgence is not concerned
with the forgiveness of the guilt of sin, nor with the
remission of eternal punishment, but only with the remission
of temporal punishment, that is, a mitigation or shortening of
that penitential suffering which the sinner must undergo
either here or in purgatory.
It is unnecessary to emphasize how much this hideous
simoniacal abuse of indulgences corrupted true piety, and how
indulgences were perverted to a blasphemous haggling with God.
Night fell on the German Church, a night that grew ever deeper
and darker as other abuses attached themselves to the
excessive cult of relics and the practice of indulgences. The
latter was encouraged by the current mass-pilgrimages which
were positively epidemic. Associated with them, especially at
the time of the Great Schism, was the movement of the
flagellants, in which pilgrimage was combined with public
self-scourging. Though condemned alike by Pope Clement VI and
the Council of Constance they constantly reasserted
themselves, uprooted the faithful from their proper situation
in parochial and domestic life, and threw them into a state of
hysterical excess and unhealthy mysticism.
Behind all these excesses was the driving power of rampant
superstition. Allying itself with religion, it had taken
possession of the broad mass of the people. It is probably
true to say that this superstition had made itself even more
at home in the German soul than elsewhere, and developed, even
amongst educated people, a vast obsession with the devil. It
was a lingering heritage from Germanic and Roman paganism.
Since the Inquisition's campaign against the Catharists, who
had acknowledged Evil as a first principle, this devil-
obsession had begun to ruin daily living and social
intercourse. In particular, there was a totally uncritical
acceptance of every kind of improbable horror charged against
witches. The witch-trials and witch-burnings went on--by
inquisitors, secular governments, the reformers (Luther
himself taught that witches must be destroyed): and the
official Church did not shield the victims of these atrocities
with the bulwark of clear Gospel teaching. On the contrary,
Innocent VIII, in his Bull "Summis desiderantes" (1484), gave
the Dominicans in Constance plenary powers in the matter of
witch-burning, and threatened with ecclesiastical punishments
anyone who opposed the prosecution of witches. He thus did all
that the highest ecclesiastical authority could do to
encourage and legalize the obsession. Christ had healed those
possessed by devils, but now, in the name of the same Christ,
they were to be burnt.
It was night indeed in a great part of Christendom. Such is
the conclusion of our survey of the end of the fifteenth
century: amongst the common people, a fearful decline of true
piety into religious materialism and morbid hysteria; amongst
the clergy, both lower and higher, widespread worldliness and
neglect of duty, and amongst the very Shepherds of the Church,
demonic ambition and sacrilegious perversion of holy things.
Both clergy and people must cry mea culpa, mea maxima culpa!
Yes, it was night. Had Martin Luther then arisen with his
marvellous gifts of mind and heart, his warm penetration of
the essence of Christianity, his passionate defiance of all
unholiness and ungodliness, the elemental fury of his
religious experience, his surging, soul-shattering power of
speech, and not least that heroism in the face of death with
which he defied the powers of this world--had he brought all
these magnificent qualities to the removal of the abuses of
the time and the cleansing of God's garden from weeds, had he
remained a faithful member of his Church, humble and simple,
sincere and pure, then indeed we should to-day be his grateful
debtors. He would be forever our great Reformer, our true man
of God, our teacher and leader, comparable to Thomas Aquinas
and Francis of Assisi. He would have been the greatest saint
of the German people, the refounder of the Church in Germany,
a second Boniface . . .
But--and here lies the tragedy of the Reformation and of
German Christianity--he let the warring spirits drive him to
overthrow not merely the abuses in the Church, but the Church
Herself, founded upon Peter, bearing through the centuries the
successio apostolica; he let them drive him to commit what St.
Augustine calls the greatest sin with which a Christian can
burden himself: he set up altar against altar and tore in
pieces the one Body of Christ.
How did this come about? And must we continue for ever to join
in that lament of contemporary Christendom which St. Augustine
sounded in his work against the Donatists, "Ego laceror valde"
(cruelly am I torn)? These are questions which I shall seek to
answer.
II. LUTHER
WHEN WE pass in review these abuses in the government and
people of the Church, the conviction is borne in upon us that
everything points to an imminent storm. The angry clamour for
a reform in Head and members could be silenced no longer.
But to speak of a reform of the Head was an unmistakable
indication that people in Germany were not thinking of
discarding the Head of the Church, but of improving him. Apart
from a few groups of radical humanists and sectarians, the
universal detestation was not for the Pope as the divinely
instituted guarantee of the Church's unity, not for the
religious authority of the Papal See, but only for the utter
worldliness of the Popes and the Curia. The desire of all was
to have at Rome a real representative of Christ, breathing the
spirit of Christ in his person and activity.
And when speaking of a reform of the members, no one thought
for a moment of revolutionary changes in the nature of the
Church. There was no desire to alter the substance of dogma,
cult or ecclesiastical government, only to abolish all the
obvious aberrations and distortions of the Church's inner life
and devotion. If we avoid being distracted by merely
incidental phenomena, and fix our attention on the whole
climate of opinion which determined the spirit of the time, we
see that the cry for reform was not anti-papal in any dogmatic
sense, nor anti-ecclesiastical.
It was a simple, elementary cry for conversion, for total
renewal. The conviction had penetrated to the lowest levels of
the Christian community that this state of affairs could not
go on, that the very heart of the Church was disordered, that,
one way or another, a re-formation must come. One way or
another! As soon as the possibility was admitted that the
change might come some other way than that which loyalty to
the Church would demand, rebellious and threatening voices
mingled with the chorus of the reformers, voices which
announced, in the manner of Joachim of Flora, the approach of
an apocalyptic visitation and the violent overthrow of all
things.
But all these voices went unheard. The Lateran Council of 1513
might energetically deplore the evil state of the Church in
Head and members, but a really effective will to reform was
lacking. In the next body of cardinals to be created, those
who were to be confronted by the Lutheran movement, it was
still the prince-prelates of the Renaissance who dominated the
picture (Lortz, vol. i, p. 193), not determined men of
reforming spirit. And amongst the Popes of the succeeding
period, except for Adrian VI, from Clement VII until we arrive
at Pius V, there was not one who seriously considered a reform
in Head and members. What followed was therefore inevitable.
Instead of a reform there was a revolution, a radical change
in the fundamental substance of the Church and Christianity.
The Final Break
The man who kindled the revolution and pushed on relentlessly
towards a final break with the Church was Martin Luther. He
was not merely the creator and head of the new movement. He
was that movement. For that which the Protestant confessions
of to-day have in common--what we call to-day the "material
principle" of Protestantism, its dogma of the exclusive
activity of God and salvation by faith alone, and what we call
its "formal principle", its acknowledgment of no other
authority than that of Holy Writ--grew out of Luther's whole
personal experience and is in its deepest origins his own
personal invention. However much Luther may have resisted the
dubbing of his own followers "Lutherans", Protestantism is
nevertheless in its fundamental substance Lutheran through and
through, Luther himself extended and developed.
How did Luther arrive at his new gospel?
The abuses in the Church were not the real cause but only the
occasion of the Reformation. They found their culmination in
the shameful deal in indulgences between the Hohenzollern
Prince Albert of Brandenburg, the Archbishop of Magdeburg and
Mainz and the Papal Curia.[5] The preaching of the special
indulgence for the building of St. Peter's was allowed by the
Archbishop of Magdeburg and Mainz in his dioceses only on
condition that the net profit was to be halved between himself
and the fund for St. Peter's. The Archbishop made an
arrangement with the great German banking family, the Fuggers,
whereby they collected the money. He thus repaid them the sums
advanced to him to cover his fees to the Curia for his
appointment to the See of Mainz and for the privilege of
retaining the Sees of Halberstadt and Magdeburg contrary to
Canon Law. Undoubtedly such abuses aroused Luther to the point
of coming forward publicly. They explain too why it was that
the theses he nailed to the door of the Castle Church at
Wittenburg, "De Virtute Indulgentiarum" (concerning the power
of indulgences), unleashed such tremendous forces in the
German people. Most important of all, they made it possible
for Luther to put the Church in the wrong and to justify his
own doctrine as the one gospel of salvation before the mass of
the people and before his own conscience. Indeed, the longer
the strife continued, the more violent became the clash of
spirits, the more passionately Luther's hatred of the Pope's
Church flamed up; and as he grew older, the confusion in his
eyes between the abuses in the Church and the essence of the
Church increased, his belief in himself and his mission
deepened, and he developed an ever more convinced and more
triumphant assurance that he was being summoned by God to
overthrow Antichrist in the shape of the Pope.
Thus the abuses within the medieval Church certainly unleashed
Luther upon the path of revolution, and justified him in the
eyes of the masses and in his own judgment. But they were not
the actual ground, the decisive reason for Luther's falling
away from the doctrine of the Church. He himself, even, later
emphasized that one should not condemn a man's teaching
"merely because of his sinful life". "That is not the Holy
Spirit. For the Holy Spirit condemns false doctrine and is
patient with the weak in faith, as is taught in Romans xiv.
15, and everywhere in Paul. I would have little against the
Papists if they taught true doctrine. Their evil life would do
no great harm." (Lortz, vol. i, p. 390.)
It was not ecclesiastical abuses that made him the opponent of
the Catholic Church, but the conviction that she was teaching
falsely. And this conviction dates from long before the fatal
17th October, 1517. He had interiorly abandoned the teaching
of the Church long before he outwardly raised the standard of
revolt. Certainly, as early as 1512, without as yet knowing or
wishing it, he had grown away from the Church's belief (Lortz,
vol. i, p. 191). How did this come about? In asking this
question, we are confronted by the mystery of Luther, by the
problem of his whole personal development.
The Mystery of Luther
In reaching a judgment on his development it is necessary to
remember that Luther, doubtless very strictly brought up in
his father's house at Eisleben, was early imbued with a strong
central experience of fear, an extraordinary terror of sin and
judgment. This alone accounts for the fact that when he was
caught in a thunderstorm near Stotternheim and nearly struck
by lightning he cried out: "Help me, Saint Anne! I will become
a monk." He was overcome by a similar spiritual crisis at his
first Mass. It was so violent that he almost had to leave the
celebration unfinished. It is also significant that once, when
at the conventual Mass the Gospel of the man possessed by the
devil was being read, he cried out: "It is not I!" and fell
down like a dead man (Lortz, vol. i, p. 161, n.).
These accesses of terror betray an unusual degree of
sensitivity, stimulated by his deeply rooted fear in the face
of the tremendum mysterium of God, which for him reached its
most shattering clarity in the Crucifixion of the Son of God.
Since his attitude to life was determined at its very roots by
this fear, Luther was radically subjectivist. That is to say,
he was naturally inclined to take into the tension of his own
subjective consciousness all objective truths and values
presented to him from without, and only then to evaluate their
importance and significance. If any truth or value could not
be thus assimilated to the thoughts already in the depths of
his fearful soul, he had no great interest in it. Thus his
religious thought was from the start eclectic, one-sidedly
selective. From the start it was thought overcharged with
feeling, enveloped by a secret fear and labouring under the
tormenting question: how am I to find a merciful God? From the
start the primary object of his thought was to release the
tension in his own soul, to deliver himself, to bring
tranquillity to his distraught spirit. Always the stress was
on I, everything pivoting on his own experience. On the other
hand, it cannot be doubted, in face of Luther's tremendous
achievements in thought, decision and action, that despite
this tension he was psychically healthy to the core. In
everything that he thought, preached and wrote Luther betrays
a robust vitality, an overflowing energy, an inexhaustible
originality, an elemental creative power which raised him far
above the level of common humanity.
With these predispositions, Luther entered the priory of
barefooted Augustinians at Erfurt, probably against his
father's will. Here he was to prepare himself, by strict
spiritual discipline and hard study, for his future entry into
the Order and the priesthood. The system of thought, the form
in which all philosophical knowledge was then presented, both
in the priory and in the neighbouring University of
Wittenberg, was the "new way" of Scotism, with the stamp of
its later Ockhamist development. Ockhamism had a decisive
influence on Luther. He described himself as a member of the
Ockhamist school (sum occamicae factionis). More precisely, he
counted himself a Gabrielist, i.e., a follower of the Tubingen
theologian Gabriel Biel, who had adapted Ockhamism, bringing
it more into line with the teaching of the Church.
From Ockhamism Luther received his anti-metaphysical
tendencies, his dislike of the Aristotelian and Scholastic
doctrine founded on the objective validity of universal
concepts. From Ockham too he took his concept of God. God is
God precisely because of His absolute, unconditioned will, His
sovereign freedom and dominion, which is beyond any scale of
values and by whose arbitrary choice alone this order of
values was created. God is a God of arbitrary choice. He can
therefore predestine some in advance to eternal salvation,
others in advance to eternal damnation.
Particularly important for Luther's inner development is the
Ockhamist doctrine of justification. Pre-Lutheran Thomism, the
Church's classical doctrine of grace, presents grace as a
movement of divine love entering into the penitent soul and
delivering it from the bonds of its fallen nature. In contrast
with this, grace in Ockhamism remains strictly transcendent.
Justification consists solely in a relatio externa, a new
relationship of mercy between man and God established by God's
love, by means of which all a man's religious and moral acts,
though remaining in themselves human and natural, are
accounted as salvific acts in the eyes of a merciful God. In
Ockhamism, it is true, justification is still God's work of
grace, in so far as human activity only becomes salvific by
God's recognition of it, by His act of acceptance. But this
recognition and validation does not in any way affect man's
spiritual powers. It remains completely outside him and is
simply seen and assented to by faith. Thus for practical
purposes on the psychological plane it is as though nothing
were involved but purely human activity, and as if devotion
were only a matter of human acts.
Thus the intellectual situation in which Luther found himself
was insecure and threatened on all sides. Natural reality was
not a harmony of truths and values, accessible to knowledge
and fundamentally intelligible, but an ultimately unknowable
multiplicity of concrete singulars, a world of confusion and
riddles. And supernatural reality, the living God of
revelation, is a hidden God (deus absconditus), far removed
from any kind of tie, sheer creative omnipotence to which we
are completely delivered up. There is but one way of escape
from this overwhelming combined threat from above and below:
blind fulfilment of the arbitrary commands of this arbitrary
God as they are shown to us in revelation, the way of good
works. It is a way crowded at each moment with moral activity,
but for this very reason a perilous way, a way of stumbling
and falling.
It is easy to see that the perilous and menacing situation
thus resulting from the ideas of Ockhamism was bound to have a
seriously disturbing effect on a religious sensibility already
as troubled with fear as Luther's. The consequence was a
series of crises, struggles and temptations. The readings from
the Bible and from the writings of St. Augustine upon which
his Order laid particular stress again helped to increase
Luther's religious terror. It was in fact St. Augustine who,
in his disputes with the Semi-Pelagians, pushed the Biblical
doctrine of predestination to the furthest extreme, going so
far as to speak of a "reprobate mass" from which only a few
just would be chosen. Luther's first years in the priory were
thus a time of interior tension, spiritual struggle and
suffering. The hopeless feeling that he was not numbered among
the elect but among the reprobate overcame him and grew
stronger as he grew more and more conscious that he did not
fulfil God's commandments in all things. Since he began early
to condemn as sin every movement of natural appetite, even
though unwilling, and since, with his exuberant vitality, such
movements kept recurring, he supposed himself to be full of
sin, and no prayer, fasting or confession could free him of
this terror.
For many years Luther was thus visited by scruples. "I know a
man who believes that he has often experienced the pains of
Hell" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 174), a sign of the seriousness with
which he regarded his vocation as a Christian and a religious,
and on the other hand an indication of how far Ockhamism had
obscured the Christian gospel of grace. The strange and tragic
thing in Luther's development was that, in his Ockhamist
aversion from all metaphysics and especially from the "old
way" of Scholasticism, he remained closed to the traditional
Catholic doctrine of grace as represented by the great masters
of Scholasticism, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and
Bonaventure. It suffered indeed a temporary decline in the
late Middle Ages, but was taken up again by the "Prince of
Thomists" Johannes Capreolus and re-established in all its
ancient purity by Luther's contemporary, Cardinal Cajetan.
Ockhamist optimism, in fact, in its practical, living results,
bordered close on the Pelagian denial of Original Sin.
In contrast to this the Catholic teaching sets fallen man, man
burdened with Original Sin and its consequences, in the centre
of the divine plan of salvation. It does not present salvation
as a pronouncement by God's free graciousness of the justice
of our purely human efforts to reach the redemptive riches of
Christ. Salvation consists on the contrary in the grace and
love of Christ, merited by the sacrifice of the Cross and
penetrating fallen man, constantly washing away our guilt and
supplying for our weakness by the sacraments and awakening us
to new life in Christ. The fundamental attitude of redeemed
man, according to the Church's doctrine, is thus not the fear
of sin and terror of damnation but trusting faith in the grace
of Christ, which constantly snatches us away from all guilt
and gives us Christ for our own.
If Luther had entrusted himself to this traditional Catholic
doctrine of Grace, which his friend Johann von Staupitz, the
Augustinian Provincial, constantly laid before him, he would
not have had that experience in the tower which laid the
foundation for his abandonment of the doctrine of the Church.
The Doctrine of Justification
Luther describes this experience in 1545, one year before his
death--fairly late, in fact. His other recollections were also
made late in life, and contain a number of "foreshortenings"
of various kinds (Lortz, vol. i, p. 178). So it is likely
enough that a whole series of thoughts and impressions of a
similar kind led up to this decisive experience in the
monastery tower at Wittenburg, which was merely the final
precipitation of them. In any case, a fundamental departure
from the Catholic doctrine of justification is settled once
for all in this experience in the tower in 1512.
As Luther himself expressed it, it was concerned with a deeper
understanding of the Epistle to the Romans, starting with the
Pauline concept of the "justice of God". St. Paul had written:
"The justice of God is revealed therein"--i.e., in the Gospel
(Rom. i. 17). Hitherto he had not been able to make anything
of the scriptural words "the justice of God". "I did not love
this just God, the punisher of sins, rather I hated Him." Only
after pondering a long while "both day and night" did he
perceive that the Apostle of the Gentiles did not mean by the
"justice of God" active, judicial, primitive justice, but
passive justice, i.e., that by which the merciful God
justifies us by faith, as it is written: "The just man liveth
by faith." Luther immediately re-examined in this light all
the related texts in Holy Scripture which he remembered at the
time, and found that they were all to be understood in this
sense. "Then truly I felt that I had been born again and had
entered through open gates into the highest heaven."
Thus his experience in the tower laid the foundation of
Luther's theology of consolation: Christianity is pure grace,
not the work of man. It is in this sense that he interprets
the words of the Apostle (Rom. iii. 28): "For we account a man
to be justified by faith, without the works of the law." It is
strange that Luther should have considered that this
interpretation of the "justice of God" was a completely new
discovery, differentiating his exegesis from that of "all the
doctors". In actual fact practically all the medieval exegetes
proposed the same meaning for it. They all took "the justice
of God" in the passive sense, as meaning a justice by which we
are justified, which makes us just. But they did not draw from
this the catastrophic conclusion that Luther drew and which,
in his 1515-16 lectures on the Epistle to the Romans, he
claimed as the true meaning and content of the Epistle: "In
the Epistle to the Romans Paul teaches us the reality of sin
in us and the unique justice of Christ."
This is the culminating point of his new discovery: man is
sin, nothing but sin. Even the man who is justified remains
peccator. What justifies him is the sole justice of Christ,
imputed to him on the ground of his trusting faith. There is
thus no question of the justice of any work of man. Man's part
is merely to recognize his sinfulness in true repentance and,
in this terror-stricken awareness (conscientia pavida), to
reach out towards the Cross of Christ. It is God's grace alone
which delivers him. As Christ Himself was at once "accursed
and blessed", living and dead, suffering and rejoicing, so the
believing Christian is at once a sinner and justified. From
now on Luther delights in thus putting the inexpressible in
the form of a paradox: the believing Christian is at once a
sinner and justified, at once condemned and absolved, at once
accursed and blessed.
From the psychological point of view, Luther's total denial of
any justice in works and his unconditional assent to grace
alone constituted an act of self-liberation from the fearful
oppression which his moral life had suffered under Ockhamist
theology and its exclusive emphasis on the human factor in the
process of justification. From now on he resolutely cast
himself loose from all justice in works, from all human
activity, and threw himself upon the justifying grace of
Christ, thus getting rid once and for all of all scrupulosity
and terror of sin. Now he is spiritually free: free not only
from the exaggerations of the Ockhamist School with its over-
emphasis on works, but free from any form of justice in works,
including that which the Catholic Church had always taught,
free, as he was later to say, from the captivitas babylonica.
He won this freedom through a series of arduous battles and
defeats, in hard struggles by day and night. It is this that
gives his new experience its inner validity and its tremendous
explosive power. If he had attained to this new interpretation
of justification by a purely speculative process, as a mere
intellectual conclusion, an exegetical discovery, the matter
might have rested there. He might have remained unmolested
within the Church, since there were other Catholic
theologians, of the Augustinian school, teaching something
similar, and since no Tridentine dogma had yet authoritatively
defined the relation between faith and works, or the process
of justification. His new theses would perhaps have been
attacked here and there, perhaps have been censured. He might
have been regarded as a theological outsider, but he would
still have remained a Catholic theologian.
But his expositions were more than mere academic treatises;
for him, those ninety-five theses nailed to the door of the
Castle Church at Wittenberg mirrored the Evangelium, the sole
hope of salvation, upon which one could stake one's life; and
the source of this feeling is to be found in those nights in
the monastery, those hours of fear and agony when he burned
with the fierce heat of his struggles for his soul's
salvation. His new interpretation of the justice of God was
sealed with his heart's blood, born of the dire need of his
conscience--and for this reason it was infinitely dear to him.
All the defiance of his passionate temperament, all the
unrepressed impetuosity of his robust peasant nature, the rich
endowments of his mind, his heroic readiness to commit himself
to the full, his immense creative power in observation,
thought and writing, and not least his wonderful power of
speech, beating upon the hearer in climax after climax and
"fairly overwhelming him" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 147)--all these
powers united now in a tremendous sense of mission, a
conviction that he, he alone, had rediscovered the Gospel and
was called to proclaim it to the whole world. Armed with this
sense of mission, which asserted itself ever more strongly and
triumphantly as the years went by, he, barefooted Augustinian
friar of Wittenberg, went forth against a whole world, against
the Christian Middle Ages, against the weight of the world-
wide Catholic Church, against Pope and Emperor, and, not the
least formidable, against the bronze ring of sacred custom
with which men's consciences had for centuries been
inextricably bound.
Christendom Divided
Let me stress it once again: Luther's abandonment of belief in
the Church was not a conclusion reached in the cold, clear
light of critical thought, but in the heat of religious
experience; indeed, his whole development was less a matter of
intellectual insights than of emotional impressions. From the
sheer intellectual point of view, Luther never abandoned the
idea of the one true Church. His theological thought did not
touch on the erection of a new Church, but on the renewal of
the old. Even in 1518, when he had to give an account of
himself to the Cardinal-Legate Cajetan, he declared: "If any
man can show me that I have said anything contrary to the
opinion of the holy Roman Church, I will be my own judge, and
recant" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 393), and in the "Commentary on a
Certain Article" in 1519 he commits himself, entirely
according to the mind of St. Augustine, to the principle that
one may not "for any sin or evil whatever that man may think
or name, sever love and divide spiritual unity, for love can
do all things".
But the world of feeling within him had been stirred to its
depths; the violence of his experience overwhelmed all these
rational considerations. The harder his Catholic opponents
pressed him; the more he let himself be swept into a
declaration of war against the whole Church. In his ninety-
five theses on indulgences he had already questioned the power
of the Church over the riches of salvation; in his Leipzig
Disputation in 1519 he attacked the infallible authority of
General Councils and of the Church's doctrinal tradition and
admitted as religious truth only what can be deduced from Holy
Scripture.
From 1520 onwards he openly attacked the Pope as Antichrist.
His address, "To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation,"
which appeared in the same year, was, as Karl Muller expresses
it, "a trumpet-call to seize all the possessions of the
Papacy". And in his later polemical writing, "De Captivitate
Babylonica," of the Church's seven sacraments he admitted only
Baptism, the Lord's Supper, and, partially, Penance, branding
the other sacraments, together with the Church's teaching on
transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Mass, as
captivitas babylonica, a miserable imprisonment of the
faithful. In the work which was the third main statement of
the Reformation, "Of the Freedom of a Christian Man," he
portrayed the ideal of Christian life in the light of his new
doctrine and sent it to the Pope. In this same year, 1520, as
the public expression of his complete abandonment of the
Church, he burned the volumes of the Canon Law and the Papal
Bull threatening him with excommunication before the Elster
Gate of Wittenberg. The Pope's answer was sentence of
excommunication.
His break with the Church was complete. He went forward in the
midst of a mass-apostasy of princes and cities, secular and
regular clergy, nobles and humanists, burghers and peasants.
There followed the Protestation of the Lutheran Princes and
Cities against the decision of the Reichstag at Speier in
1529, which gave the new religionists the name of
"Protestants". And then came the Reichstag at Augsburg in
1530, which, with its rejection of Melanchthon's mediatory
"Confessio Augustana," destroyed the last hope of a
reconciliation of minds. Christianity in Germany was divided,
and has remained so until this very day.
The New Rule of Faith
We must first reiterate the fact, admitted by all modern
scholars, that Luther's departure from the Church's rule of
faith was brought about by a subjective experience--his
experience in the tower in 1512. As we have already said,
abuses in the Church certainly strengthened Luther in this
experience. They certainly armed him with his best weapons
against Rome, and accounted to no small extent for the
tremendous response of the German nation to his new Gospel.
But they did not create this gospel; Luther did not arrive at
his new interpretation of the gospel by looking at the
deplorable abuses in the Church around him. He arrived at it
by looking at the crying need of his own soul, the result of
the conflict between the terror of sin which had oppressed him
from his youth and the rigorous demands made on him by the
Ockhamist doctrine of atonement. He was delivered from these
straits by his experience of all-sufficient saving faith, the
experience of grace alone.
It was a completely subjective experience arising out of the
acute anxiety of his own individual mind, and it was so
elemental in character that it not only drew into itself all
similar religious impressions and dominated them, but also
spread out over all his thinking and compelled him to see and
accept only those truths which came in some way within the
orbit of this central experience, and to ignore all the truths
of Scripture which lay outside it. Only thus can we explain,
for instance, his calling the Epistle of St. James, because of
its emphasis on the justice of works, an "epistle of straw".
Only thus can we explain the fact that he does not go in the
first instance to Christ our Lord Himself, speaking to us in
the Gospels, but to the written testimony of St. Paul, the
last of the Apostles to be called, who was never an eye- or
ear-witness of the life of Jesus. And only thus can we explain
his complete failure to realize what interpretations and
rearrangements need to be made to derive that doctrine of
grace which Luther thought he could find in St. Paul from the
most profound passages of Jesus' own teaching, the Sermon on
the Mount, with its clear theme of works and rewards.
The subjectivity of his central experience can be said to have
dominated his theology, determining the special way in which
he read and commented the Bible. It is a theology of
subjective selection. Luther was certainly not a religious
individualist in the ordinary sense, trusting exclusively to
the emanations of his own thought and to his own experiences
when dealing with theological issues. On the contrary, his
trembling spirit was confronted by the colossal reality of the
God of Revelation, and the shattering impact of His Gospel. He
knew himself bound to this mightiest of objectives, in the
same way that he continued to accept ancient and medieval
cosmology as final truth. To this extent Luther was, as
Troeltsch puts it ("Collected Writings," 1922, vol. iv, p.
286), "a completely conservative revolutionary". The word of
revelation laid down in the Bible remained for him the unique
source of all religious knowledge. But it was not the
objective spirit of the Church's tradition speaking and
witnessing in the Church's teaching which interpreted this
objective word of revelation, but his own spirit alone; not
the We of the members of Christ inspired by a common faith and
love, but his own unique, individual I. In this formal, though
not material, sense Luther was always a subjectivist.
It is true that this subjectivism arose largely from truly
religious depths, rooted, ultimately, in an elementary
experience of the uncertainty and the helpless need for
salvation of fallen human nature. There could be no greater
mistake than to see, in the religious movement which had
Luther as its origin, nothing but the product of a completely
personal fear-psychosis. Luther's fear is the fear of all of
us, the guilty fear of human nature enmeshed in the
consequences of Original Sin. This alone explains why the
Reformer's experience was, and is, capable of creating a
communion. But on the other hand, neither can it be doubted
that the special structure of this experience, its depth and
comprehensiveness and its theological and sociological
developments, bear always those marks of subjectivism which
belong to Luther's singular, exceptional spiritual development
alone, and are in no way common to humanity.
"Luther's great mistake in constituting his doctrine was that
he took his own highly personal convictions, based on a very
exceptional experience and perhaps valid for himself
personally, and made them into a binding requirement for all"
(Lortz, vol. i, p. 408). It was to be expected from the start
that this subjectivist basis would be far too narrow and
scanty to remain the standard interpretation of Christ for a
whole world with its thousands of individual characters. Thus
even in Luther's own lifetime divisions arose over essential
points. Before his very eyes there took place a certain
loosening and weakening of his doctrine, a loosening which
left open at least the possibility that even the most
differing sects might be able to meet each other in
discussion.
The scholarly side of Lutheran Christianity, as much as its
individual and even individualist origin, offers many things
favourable to an understanding with Catholic Christianity. We
must, of course, make it clear first that we are not
considering the emasculated Christianity produced by the
Enlightenment and German Idealist philosophy but Luther's
Christianity, the original Lutheranism which he himself
founded and built up. In a stimulating lecture entitled "What
are Catholic Tendencies?" a leading Lutheran Bishop, Wilhelm
Stahlin of Oldenburg, has made a determined attack on that
modern perversion of Lutheran belief which considers the
"banalities of unbridled liberalism" born of the Enlightenment
as the true essence of Protestantism. It is an attitude which
thinks that the difference between Protestant and Catholic is
simply that the Protestant "feels that he is only responsible
to his own conscience", so that for him there is "no binding
dogma and no compulsory creed", or at any rate, that he
"pushes certain aspects of the Bible message out of sight or
at least to the very edge of his field of vision". Anyone who
speaks of the binding nature of a dogma, of the presence of
Christ in the cult of the Church or of a necessary
ecclesiastical order is at once--so Stahlin complains-accused
of Catholic tendencies. In fact, he says with emphasis, dogma,
cult and the Church's constitution belong to the "true
heritage of the Reformation". And in reality it was "a sign of
decline, a morbid symptom" when these ordinances were set
aside in the name of the individual conscience. "If a man
believes," Stahlin goes on to say, "that he can sacrifice the
fullness of the Christian revelation to some vague formless
religious feeling or vague belief in Providence, he may hold
himself to be a good Protestant, but in the true Reformation
sense of the word, he is simply not a Christian."
To some extent this condemnation of Stahlin's falls also on a
type of Lutheran theology and a mental attitude which regards
the liberation of the individual's conscience from despair as
the essence of Christianity, and entirely ignores the
sacramental framework in which this conscience has its roots,
the holy ordinances of the Church. Of such a Protestantism it
is true to say what Nietzsche believed to be true of
Protestantism in general--that it was "a one-sided laming" of
Christianity (Antichrist, viii, 225).
Luther himself did not leave the matter in doubt; for him the
Confession of Augsburg in 1530 was compulsory doctrine,
acknowledgment of which was a condition of membership of the
Church (cf. Loofs, "History of Dogma," 4th ed., p. 748). So we
are confronted, in Lutheran Christianity, with the recognition
of an objective ecclesiastical teaching authority, with which
every individual Christian conscience must come to terms. It
is true that the Protestant conscience is more loosely bound
to this authority than a Catholic's is, because the authority
does not, as in the Catholic Church, rest upon the visible
rock of Peter and is not visibly guaranteed by the apostolic
succession of bishops. Looking at it closely, the Protestant
conscience is bound to the collective mind of the Church as a
whole, not to those visible authorities in particular who are
the bearers and sustainers of that collective mind.
Nevertheless, in Lutheranism too, Christian consciences are
not simply sovereign, but obliged to submit to the teaching
voice of their Church.
Indeed we might go further, and say that though Protestant
consciences may be more loosely bound, the tie is not
essentially any different from that binding the Catholic. For
the Catholic, too, it is not ultimately the objective norm of
the teaching voice but the subjective decision of conscience
which has finally to decide on a believing acceptance of the
revealed truth laid down by the authority of the Church. It is
really not the case that the faith of a Catholic is entirely
accounted for by slavish obedience to the rigid law of the
Church. He, too, is making a personal act, an act of
reflective thought and moral decision springing from the deep
centre of his freedom, an act of choice. For him too it is an
act that can only be performed in the conscience itself.
Indeed, if his conscience, on subjectively cogent grounds,
becomes involved in invincible error and he finds himself
compelled to refuse his assent to the Church's teaching, he
is, in the Catholic view, bound to leave the Church. The most
eminent of Catholic theologians, St. Thomas Aquinas, expressly
declares that a man is bound in conscience to separate himself
from the Christian body if he is unable to believe in the
divinity of Christ.[6] Thus the two confessions meet each other
both in their recognition of an ecclesiastical teaching
authority and in the decisive place they give to the judgment
of the individual conscience.
Furthermore, in their attitude to the Sacred Scriptures they
are not nearly so opposed to each other as might appear from
the formal Lutheran principle of "the Scripture alone". The
Catholic Church re-affirmed and reformulated in the Councils
of Trent and of the Vatican the ancient truth of the Christian
faith that Scripture is inspired by the Holy Ghost, whereas
modern Protestant theology tends more and more to admit only
Revelation, not Scripture, as inspired, the bearers of the
Revelation being themselves enlightened by the Holy Ghost, but
not their writings. So that one can say that the authority of
Holy Scripture is fundamentally better safeguarded and more
strongly emphasized in Catholicism than in Protestantism.
Because they are inspired by the Holy Ghost, the Scriptures,
and especially the New Testament, are always, for the Catholic
too, the classical source of Christianity. They present, so to
speak, the conscious mind of the Church. But the Catholic is
convinced that the Church has also what might be called a
subconscious mind. It consists of those remembrances,
ordinances and traditions of primitive Christianity received
directly from Christ but handed on only orally by the
Apostles, which were not expressly formulated in Holy
Scripture, although in the strictest sense they embody a
primitive Christian deposit of faith. This extra-Biblical
stream of tradition must have existed from the beginning,
since the first disciples, like their Divine Master, at first
spread the Good News only orally, and it was by oral teaching
alone that they aroused the faith of the first Christian
communities. When they wrote the Gospels and Epistles, they
already took for granted the existence of a living
Christianity in the various communities, as the writings
themselves show.
Nor is it of course the case that the Apostles and Evangelists
were trying to achieve in their writings a comprehensive,
exhaustive survey of the Christian message, a sort of early
catechism. It would be hard even to-day to piece together a
single, unselfcontradictory system of thought from the Bible
without reference to the oral tradition. The aim of the
Apostles and Evangelists was rather to inspire and deepen the
religion of the Christian communities, always according to the
different circumstances in which they wrote and with reference
to the growing problems which they encountered--not in any
true sense to establish it. Thus not all the Apostles wrote;
and again several of St. Paul's Epistles are lost to us. What
brought the Christian communities to life in the first place
was oral preaching, not the Scriptures. Again, we only know of
the very existence of the Scriptures, and of what is included
in them, by oral tradition. To this extent their authority is
ultimately dependent upon that of the Church's teaching.
In the light of this overwhelming importance attaching to the
Church's tradition, the Lutheran scriptural principle cannot
any longer be upheld in its original form. On the other hand,
we must remark on the Catholic side a reawakening of interest
in the Bible, which has not only affected professional
theologians but has become a widespread movement among the
common people of the Church. Nor is there any lack of voices
acknowledging Luther's translation of the Bible, with its
vigorous language tingling with the violence of religious
experience, as a classical example worthy of emulation.
It cannot be over-emphasized that those truths which are
uniquely Christian, distinguishing Christianity from all other
religions: the mysteries of the Three-Personed God, of the Son
of God made man, of our redemption by the Cross, of the
sanctification of the faithful by Baptism, Penance and
Eucharist, of the coming of the Judge of all the world, of the
Last Things--it is just this ground-plan and centre of the
Christian message which forms the core of both our Christian
confessions. Will it not be possible to find paths radiating
from this centre which will bring us to unity in those things
which are less central? What divides us is not so much what we
believe as the various different ways in which we take into
ourselves and realize this one gift of Faith--problems about
the nature of saving faith, the process of justification, the
relation between faith and sacrament, the teaching, pastoral
and priestly office of the Church. These are certainly matters
of importance, and, for the sake of revealed truth, we cannot
neutralize them or indeed yield anything concerning them. But
they are nevertheless questions which would not, in the light
of early Lutheran piety, be so involved and utterly insoluble
as would appear from the religious situation to-day.
We must consider, for example, the fact that Confession and
the honouring of the Blessed Virgin--two forms of devotion
which a modern Protestant condemns as specifically Catholic--
occupied an important position in Luther's own devotional
life. Right up to his death he paid homage in his sermons to
the Mother of God; right up to his death he went to confession
to his friend Bugenhagen. "I should long ago have been
strangled by the Devil," he acknowledges, "if I had not been
upheld by private confession." It was the orthodox Lutheran
theology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that
eliminated devotion to Mary and Confession from Protestant
practice.
We should be even more struck by the fact that the "Confession
of Augsburg" (Confessio Augustana), drawn up by Melanchthon
and approved by Luther, which in evangelical Christianity
ranks even to-day as an authoritative confession of faith,
makes no mention in its first part of any fundamental dogmatic
difference, not even of the primacy of the Pope or
indulgences, and in fact expressly declares that the whole
dispute is concerned only with certain abuses (tota dissensio
est de paucis quibusdam abusibus). And in the second part,
where it enumerates these abuses, it names simply: Communion
under one kind, celibacy, private Masses (i.e., the current
commercial traffic in hole-and-corner Masses), compulsory
confession, the laws of fasting, monastic vows and the abuse
of episcopal authority; in other words, only things which in
the Catholic view do not belong to the unalterable regula
fidei, the sphere of faith, but to the regula disciplinae, the
sphere of ecclesiastical discipline, which the Church could,
if she saw fit, alter.
And even these abuses, as Melanchthon notes them, take on
their repulsive, scandalous aspect only against the background
of late medieval practice. Celibacy, monastic vows, compulsory
confession and the so-called commercial hole-and-corner Masses
had been perverted from the glorious truth that underlay them.
These detestable perversions will never return. The reforming
Council of Trent tore them up by the roots. The evangelical
historian Karl August Meissinger made some significant remarks
in this connection in his essay on "Luther's Day": "If Luther
returned to-day . . . he would find to his astonishment a
Roman Church which he would never have attacked in her present
aspect . . . Above all he would see . . . that not one of the
abuses which were the actual occasion of his break with Rome
remains in existence."
It is true that Melanchthon, starting from his urgent wish for
an understanding, seems to have been too optimistic when he
spoke in the Confession simply of "certain abuses" which must
be removed. For it cannot be doubted that Luther regarded some
at least of his objections as fundamental. But here too we
must not overlook the fact that in taking up this radical
position he still started from the abuses within the Church,
and that ultimately it was his total opposition, born of his
deep religious experience, to everything unholy, together with
his volcanic impetuosity, which led him to make a clean sweep,
to be done completely with all these abuses, and then to
provide his destructive beginnings with a theoretical basis.
Salvation by Faith Alone
We have already shown how even his principal doctrine of
salvation by faith alone is largely accounted for by his
resentment against the stress laid by Ockhamism on the human
factor in justification. Since he was insufficiently
acquainted with the great masters of Scholasticism, he simply
identified the radically un-Catholic Ockhamist doctrine of
justification with the teaching of the Catholic Church. When
we look into it we see that his phrase "faith alone" is
directly aimed only against the Ockhamist supposition that a
man, once he is called to salvation by God's grace, can and
must work out his own salvation by his own power and his own
self-mastery. It was aimed, then, against the Pelagianism
lurking in the Ockhamist doctrine of justification, which made
salvation dependent solely on human power. But it was not
directly aimed against that other supposition, that man can
and must work out his salvation by the power of Christ, that
all human choice and action only becomes salvific when it is
caught up by the grace of Christ. It is a cleavage of ideas
going right through to the heart of our conception of God:
whether man is to be thought of as a completely autonomous,
independent co-operator or, if he wishes, opponent--of God in
the scheme of redemption, or simply as passive in His hand,
unable to work out his salvation except in grace and through
grace. It is the latter which has always been the clear,
unambiguous teaching of the Catholic Church. It was first
actually formulated at the Second Council of Orange in 529
against the Semi-Pelagians, and repeated at Trent, illuminated
by our Lord's image of the branch which can only flourish and
bring forth fruit in the vine. Looking at it truly and
profoundly, it was not against this that Luther raged and
fought. His doctrine of faith and grace alone would have had
its right place, its true significance, within the framework
of Catholic dogma; so long as he meant by "faith alone" that
faith which is active through love.
In fact, the phrase "salvation by faith alone" has never been
alien to Catholic theology. It was in fact always Catholic
teaching that we can only be saved by Christ alone, that it is
only God's unmerited, unmeritable grace that lifts us out of
the state of sin and death into that of divine sonship, and
that even the so-called "meritorious acts" which the redeemed
perform in a state of justice are only "meritorious by grace",
attributable, that is, to the love of Christ working in us and
through us. In so far as the justification of man is God's
work alone, we could speak with Luther of "extrinsic" justice.
It is indeed also interior and personal. Luther too, in that
same commentary on the Epistle to the Romans, affirms that
this extrinsic justice "dwells in us by faith and hope", that
it is "in us" though it does not belong to us (in nobis est,
non nostra), that it thus, according to the Council of Trent,
"inheres" in justified man (atque ipsis inhaeret, sess. 6,
cap. 7, can. 11).
In the same way Luther's other doctrine, that the justified
man is at once a sinner and just (simul peccator et justus),
can bear a Catholic interpretation if we do not take it
theologically but psychologically, if we regard justification
not from God's point of view but from man's. In the first case
it is indeed always a matter of Yes or No, election or
reprobation, but in the second, it is a question of Yes and
No, in so far as our hardest striving is always accompanied by
some secret attachment to sin (cf. R. Grosche, "Pilgernde
Kirche," 1938, pp. 150 ff.). The Catholic too must pray day by
day "forgive us our trespasses". Throughout his liturgy echoes
the cry: "Lord, have mercy on us. Regard not my sins! Give us
peace!" Even when the justified soul is no longer in a state
of sin, it is still sinful. Every serious Catholic will wish
and have to pray with St. Therese of the Child Jesus: ". . . I
do not ask You to count my good works, Lord. All our justice
is full of imperfection in Your eyes. So I will clothe myself
in Your justice and receive from Your love eternal possession
of Yourself."
It was the Thomistic school itself which anticipated Luther's
pessimistic view of humanity, since it taught that the
capacity of fallen man to receive God's action is purely
passive, which grace alone can arouse to activity and freedom.
We can affirm absolutely that Luther's battle, fundamentally
and essentially, was only with the Ockhamist perversion of the
Catholic doctrine of justification, with an abuse within the
Church, as Melanchthon rightly saw, an abuse which was never
accepted by the Church. Ockham himself was arraigned before a
court of the Holy Office at Avignon[7] and kept in custody,
until he fled to the protection of Ludwig of Bavaria; though
the fact that the subsequent spread of his doctrine was
tolerated gave the hot-blooded Reformer a seeming
justification in identifying Ockhamism with Catholicism and in
denying, along with the abuse itself, its primitive Christian
and Catholic background.
Priesthood and Sacraments
A similar reaction against public abuses within the Church
accounts for Luther's radical discarding of the seven
sacraments and the separate priesthood. In his polemic "De
Captivitate Babylonica" he expressly speaks of the multitude
of human regulations with which the Church had made of the
sacraments a miserable captivity for the faithful.
His own master, Gabriel Biel, had taught him, entirely in
accordance with the Catholic interpretation, that in the Mass
there is no question of a fresh immolation of Christ, but only
of a ritual re-presentation of the one sacrifice of Golgotha,
and thus that through the Mass the one sacrifice of Christ is
brought out of the past into our present moment, into our Here
and Now. Nevertheless Luther's violent rejection of the
sacrifice of the Mass can only be understood in relation to
that crude externalization, secularization even, which had
penetrated even to the innermost sanctuary of the Church and,
as Luther complained, made "the Altar of the All Highest into
an altar of Baal" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 399). When the clergy
were not paid sufficiently for saying Mass they used to say a
"missa sicca," i.e., they broke off the Mass before the
Consecration. And when the faithful had a Mass said for them
they often saw in it not so much the memorial of the death of
the Lord as a kind of magic protecting them from earthly harm.
As in the former case, Luther here identified a vulgar
perversion of current practice with Catholicism itself, and
made a clean sweep, rejecting the Mass as sacrifice and
accepting only the Supper.
As the logical consequence of all this, Luther rejected along
with the sacraments those who dispensed them; he would have
nothing of an official priesthood. It is true that his view of
the priesthood of the laity was directly in line with his key-
doctrine of salvation by faith alone. But it was not in fact
because of such speculative theological considerations that he
adopted this line and pursued it--he was not speculatively
inclined, it was the rage of the reformer, wounded in his
deepest religious sensibilities by the frightful degradation
of the secular and regular clergy, that convinced him that the
priesthood and the religious state were in themselves the
origin and the bulwark of abuse, and that they must therefore
be torn up by the roots.
But precisely because it was the abuses in the sacramental
life that Luther had before his eyes, he never intended to
attack the essence of the sacraments themselves, the idea of
the sacraments in the Church. In other words, he did not mean
to undermine the belief that heavenly gifts are exhibited to
us and imparted to us in simple, earthly symbols. His
confidence in the objective efficacy of the sacraments is all
the more striking in that the subjectivity of his belief
concerning salvation must have exerted pressure on him in the
opposite direction. And yet he clung to their objective
efficacy. He made it clear that he believed that the miracle
of grace by which saving faith is imparted is performed in the
act of Baptism itself. For this reason he accepted infant
Baptism from the Church's tradition, although infants cannot
have trusting faith.
Similarly, in deliberate opposition to the "Sacramentarians",
as he called Zwingli's followers, he associated the presence
of the glorified Christ with the elements of the Eucharist;
not, that is, directly with the subjective faith of the person
receiving the Sacrament but with the objective faith of the
Church, acknowledging the presence of Christ in these
elements. When Luther, in his dispute with the Swiss
Protestants, expressly taught that even those who are
personally unbelieving or unworthy receive the very Body of
the Lord, he was testifying in the clearest way to the ancient
Catholic belief in the physical as well as spiritual presence
of our glorified Lord. It is something independent of the
faith within the soul of the communicant.
By retaining the Church's Sacrament of Penance--though without
the obligation to confess and without the performance of
satisfaction--by separating repentance from justification and
holding that justification was only completed in the act of
receiving the Sacrament, he was again giving decisive
importance not to the trusting faith of the person alone but
also to the extra-personal, impersonal outward sign. Thus a
roundabout way was opened for the reintroduction of a kind of
Sacrament of Penance, and as Harnack sarcastically says: "A
practice was created which was even worse, because laxer, than
the Roman confessional" ("History of Dogma," 6th ed., p. 472).
In all these sacraments it is a simple, visible sign that
objectively guarantees the presence of the Holy One, the
blessing of the Redeemer. Thus through them the Church's
functionary who performs this sign in the name of Christ and
by the Church's commission, necessarily in some sense re-
enters the domain of the supernatural, and acquires in some
sense full powers whose ultimate basis can only be an express
decision of our Lord's will and a special commission from Him.
Thus the old character of the Catholic priesthood still clings
to Luther's lay priesthood, in so far as an objectively
efficacious sign of grace necessarily implies a minister
objectively and effectively empowered to carry out this sign.
We cannot escape from the fact that wide tracts of Luther's
thought were simply Catholic. The people who eliminated these
Catholic elements from his message were the Lutheran
theologians of the period of orthodoxy, especially in the late
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. There have always been on
both sides theologians who, instead of protecting and
promoting living religion, have endangered it. On both sides
it has always been their habit to entangle living beliefs in
bloodless abstractions, concepts and ideologies, and then to
use the result as a ball to juggle with in polemic dispute.
And when, having elaborated their systems of thought, they
commit them to paper, it is usually with a bitter and choleric
pen, and love is not in them. So it has always been. So it was
then.
Luther himself, as we have seen, judged the doctrines,
ordinances and usages of the Church according to their fitness
for survival as he saw it: that is, according to whether they
appeared to him to be loaded with gross abuses, or not. He
suffered personally from the festering wounds in the Church
and sought in his own fashion to heal them. It is true that he
went about it, especially in the latter part of his life, with
a self-assuredness and a cheerful readiness to assume
responsibility which sometimes bordered on irresponsibility
(Lortz, vol. i, p. 427). He was sometimes too ready simply to
cut off the diseased limb instead of healing it. But his
fundamental intention remained the healing and renewal of the
ancient Church, not her dissolution and destruction. In the
midst of his most violent attacks on Rome he said: "I may be
mistaken; I am not a heretic" (Lortz, vol. i, p. 393). In the
depths of his soul he was still, despite everything, bound to
the Church, and that means to the Church as he then saw her,
ecclesia, una, sancta, catholica et apostolica.
We find a very different attitude in the orthodox theology
which gradually developed and established itself. It took the
Lutheran doctrines out of their historical context, separated
them from the ecclesiastical abuses with which they were bound
up and presented them simply in themselves, as an abstract
system of ideas, as the new Gospel in fundamental opposition
to the old Gospel. Their expositions no longer envisaged the
suffering Church, labouring under abuses, but simply the
Church that had been. They were concerned to found and
establish a completely new Church. Lutheran theology became
radically anti-Catholic. It was therefore a special aim of
their polemical writing to seize on all the Catholic elements
which Luther had tolerated, and even expressly affirmed, and
in the interests of the stylistic purity of their Lutheran
doctrinal edifice ruthlessly to eliminate them. This de-
Catholicizing process was pushed so far that to-day, as we
have seen, Lutheran theologians who wish to bring their people
back to Luther's own vision of the Church are accused of
Catholicizing tendencies. Now indeed altar was set up against
altar and Church against Church.
The Papacy
But did not Luther himself, with unequalled savagery, attack
the essential foundation of the Catholic Church, the "Rock" on
which she is built? As early as the Leipzig Disputation in
1519 Luther had disputed the divine institution of the Papacy
and its necessity for salvation, and from 1520 onwards he
never tired of branding it as "the most poisonous abomination
that the chief of devils has sent upon the earth".
That is indeed so. Papacy had no bitterer, no more determined
foe than the barefoot friar of Wittenberg. He converted
opposition and even hatred towards the Papacy into an
essential element of Protestantism. The Rock which supports
and safeguards the unity of the Church became in his teaching
a rock on which that unity splits.
It is so to-day. There is no greater barrier to the union of
German Christianity than the Roman Pope and his claim to have
been called by God to be the Vicar of Christ and the Shepherd
of all the faithful. All the theological difficulties that we
have seen so far admit of at least a possible solution. But in
this matter any such possibility seems excluded from the
start. Why? Because in this matter not only men's minds but
their very blood rise in revolt.
For centuries it was Germans who suffered most from the
detestable strife which arose between the Papacy and the
Emperors because of an unhappy confusion of religious and
ecclesiastical issues with political and economic ones. The
onset of externalism and worldliness which accompanied the
Avignon captivity was and is felt by those of the Lutheran
faith in a far deeper sense than by us Catholics. We make a
sharp distinction between the person and the office. They see
the crying scandal of a prolonged outrage against the majesty
of the Holy One, against the spirit of Christianity. Because
their creed was born of the struggle against abuses identified
with Catholicism, protest against the Catholic Church is an
essential element of their whole religious attitude, the
necessary foundation of their independent existence. But even
in those Protestant circles where religion no longer speaks
with the accents of Luther, opposition to the Papacy is firmly
rooted. There is no sense in hiding this. That passion for
independent thought, for the autonomy of the intellect, which
was engrafted into the German soul by nineteenth-century
idealist philosophy, sees in every papal command, every Roman
decree, every book placed on the Index, a relapse into the
Middle Ages and a threat to the basic rights of the human
spirit.
As we have already stated, there is no possibility of any
Christian rapprochement with the prophets or believers of
"free thought". They are too small and narrow for us, and,
however much they rave about the freedom of the intellect,
they are not free enough for us. They are too small and narrow
for us because they shut themselves up from the start in the
limited world of phenomena, the world of appearances. They put
artificial blinkers on eyes open to unconditioned, eternal
reality, because they will not see the real world, the world
of God, which brings forth the visible world and maintains it
in being. Plato would say that one of their eyes is missing,
the eye that perceives what is above and beyond the senses,
the Reality of realities, the Mind of all mind.
We Christians cannot be content to share the vision of such
moles. Even if the unfettered human intellect had attained to
an understanding of all the forces and all the phenomena of
this narrow little visible world and co-ordinated them in one
system, we should feel in that system as in a cage. Again and
again we should thrust our way through its bars to cry our
Sursum Corda! For we Christians believe in a final, supreme
meaning of all being and becoming. This Meaning is the living
God. And we believe that the living God has opened Himself to
us, in certain homines religiosi, the Patriarchs and Prophets,
and at last in His Only-begotten Son, that He has opened to us
the very depths of His being and of His inconceivable love.
Standing within this love our souls can grow to their height
and breadth. They grow free, incomparably freer than the
purveyors of human freedom can ever become. For it is only in
faith in the living God that we know that we are more
excellent than the stream of cosmic forces and powers. We are
above this stream, not below it. And it is only if we start
from faith that we can read the riddle of existence and attain
to a satisfactory understanding of the world and of ourselves.
It is only because we are children of God that we are really
free.
Union is only possible, then, where faith in the living God
and His Incarnate Son still binds and strengthens consciences.
It is only with believing Protestants that we can discuss this
final decisive question: whether the Papacy was founded by the
will of Christ, or whether it is Antichrist who has achieved
an historical embodiment in it. For believing Christians this
question can only be solved in the light of Revelation, only,
that is, by listening in reverent fear to the Word of God, and
to His Word alone, not to personal preferences and feelings.
No anti-Roman sentiment should be allowed to decide the
question for us or accompany our consideration of it. Ulrich
von Hutten's diatribes against "foreign priests" are
understandable against the background of the contemporary
situation. All Germany was completely "anti-Roman" then, as
the Papal Nuncio Aleander was himself compelled to report. The
policy of the Curia in matters of finance and official
appointments, and other things besides, had exasperated
national instincts in the highest degree.
To-day there is no longer any just excuse for regarding the
religious question from the point of view of national politics
and giving it an answer in those terms. The Renaissance
tendency in Rome came to an end, broadly speaking, with the
frightful visitation of the sacco di Roma, when the Eternal
City was laid waste in May 1527. The Council of Trent and the
great reforming Popes, Pius V, Gregory XII and Sixtus V,
finally eradicated the abuses within the Church. Not one of
Luther's accusations could justly be made to-day. Even the
political dealings of the Roman See with secular princes have
become impossible. No sober theologian would to-day accept
Gregory VII's "Dictatus papae." The Gregorian system, resting
on presuppositions completely alien to our own, can be finally
relegated to the past. It was the result of the medieval view
of the world. On a deeper level, it resulted from the fact
that the unity of Western Christendom was created by Rome
alone, that its maintenance through the centuries was due
solely to the authority of the Roman Pope, that the Emperor
himself owed his numinous aspect entirely to his coronation by
the Pope, and that it was common Christian belief that all
matters of political, economic and cultural policy were from
the moral point of view (ratione peccati) subject to the
authority of the Roman See. The rise of the principle of
nationality and the national states cut away a considerable
area from the Gregorian system, and it was finally superseded
by the new idea of the world and humanity introduced by the
Renaissance. In consequence it is not possible nowadays for a
Lutheran to keep his eyes on the abuses of the late Middle
Ages and speak of the papal Antichrist as a mainstay for his
own religious position.
Since the Council of Trent the idea of the Papacy has been
tremendously spiritualized. It has become strictly religious,
strictly Christian, strictly ecclesiastical, and the glorious
image of the Vicar of Christ shines out from all the
illustrious figures that have adorned the Papal throne since
the great reforming Popes. As things are now, the question of
the divine rights of the Papacy can be decided for the
faithful only in the light of Revelation. Since the believing
Protestant, with the overwhelming majority of modern
theologians, cannot entertain doubts concerning the
authenticity of Matt. xvi. 18-19, his conscience is clearly
and seriously confronted by our Lord's words to Peter: ". . .
I say to thee, that thou art the rock and upon this rock I
will build my church, and the gates of hell shall not prevail
against it, and I will give to thee the keys of the kingdom of
heaven." He must face up to these words.
From the purely Biblical point of view it is indeed possible
for him to think here of Peter only, not his successors or in
particular his successors in Rome. But he will not wish nor be
able to deny that there is another possible interpretation.
For Christ's words are valid for all time. They are words of
eternity. If the first generation had need of a rock if it was
not to be defeated by the gates of hell, how much more would
later centuries, threatened from all sides by schisms and
heresies! Could Christ really have been considering only the
few years in which Peter was to live? Would Christ not rather
have been thinking of the Last Times which would be cut short
by His coming and for which He wished to build an
unconquerable Church? It is in any case only in this sense
that Christianity afterwards understood Jesus' words
concerning the rock and therefore called the See of Rome even
from early Christian times the "See of Peter" (cathedra
Petri). For it was convinced that Peter died as a martyr in
Rome and was buried there, and that he lived on in his
successors. It was in any case precisely the Church of Rome
which from the time of Cyprian (d. 258), Irenaeus (d. 202) and
even Ignatius of Antioch (d. circ. 110), was regarded as the
chief Church of Christendom, as its true and unique centre of
unity, creating and guaranteeing that unity.
As in the course of centuries the Church spread all over the
world and the centrifugal forces, the forces of schism, grew
stronger, so the inexhaustible vitality of the Church
liberated centripetal forces too, and theologians understood
more and more unambiguously and univocally the meaning of the
Rock upon which Christ founded His Church. There is a great
significance in the change which took place in the attitude of
the greatest of the theologians of the end of the Middle Ages,
the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa. Like many of the theologians of
the time, at the Councils of Constance and Basle he had, both
in speech and in writing, supported Conciliarism, i.e., the
superiority of a General Council to the Pope. But the lessons
of Basle, the depressing realization that even the strongest
religious desires do not prove themselves strong enough to
create a unity of spirits, that there are situations so
charged with explosive matter that even a General Council is
no longer capable of reaching a united decision--all this
drove him to the conclusion that amid the fluctuations of
opinion there must be a last resort, a rock, to protect unity
under all circumstances; a final, supreme religious authority,
which ex sese, i.e., independently of the judgment of the
bishops, can decide questions of faith and morals, and to
which the whole Church is bound.
What Nicholas of Cusa discovered was to be learnt in the
course of time by the whole of Christendom. We find ourselves
confronted by the facts that alongside Luther appear Zwingli,
Calvin and Thomas Munzer; that soon after Melanchthon's death
the Lutheran Church was shaken by the crypto-Calvinists and
Pietists; that in England, alongside the Anglican Church,
Puritans, Presbyterians and Independents founded religious
communions; and that to-day in America we can count more than
three hundred sects tearing the Body of Christ to pieces.
These facts practically force upon us the Catholic
interpretation of Matt. xvi. 18, as finally developed at the
Vatican Council in 1870.
It is the inner necessity of the Church, the constant threat
and peril to her unity from human subjectivism, that
necessitates this interpretation. For the sake of the unity of
the Church the Rock of Peter's office must remain through the
centuries, so that the Gates of Hell may not prevail. Seen
from this viewpoint, the Roman Papacy and its claim to
Apostolic authority cannot be an insuperable obstacle to the
Christian confessions' coming together. For it is this Papacy
alone which makes possible and realizes what all of us
Christians must strive for, spiritual unity amongst ourselves.
III. THE CENTRAL QUESTION TO-DAY
WE CAN only speak in the full sense of unity in the Church if
she stands upon one rock in submission to one shepherd. In the
light of the development of the Western Church, this rock and
this shepherd can only be the Bishop of Rome, whose See was
hailed in the earliest Christian times as the cathedra Petri.
Even distinguished Protestant historians like Salin and Kaspar
do not attempt to deny that belief in the primacy, if not the
doctrine of the primacy, goes back to the earliest Christian
ages for which we have any evidence. The root of this belief
is ultimately to be found in the early Christian view of the
Church, in the conviction of the faithful that it was not they
themselves, not their own Christian conscience nor their own
interpretation of the Bible, but the authority of the Church
alone that decided the question of salvation.
We have already pointed out that the first Christian
communities were not founded by the written word but by the
living teaching of the Apostles and their disciples, and that
Christianity was already alive and flourishing before any
Epistle or Gospel was written. From the beginning it was the
oral teaching of the Apostles, not its crystallization in the
Bible, which guaranteed the truth and clarity of the
revelation.
From the literary point or view the Bible is a chance
collection of missionary writings, inspired indeed by the Holy
Ghost, but a chance collection nevertheless. It does not give
a general view of revealed truths, a Summa sacrae doctrinae in
the scholastic sense. Only in the Epistles to the Romans, the
Ephesians and the Hebrews do we find a comprehensive
development of ideas. But not even these Epistles give the
whole of the Christian Gospel. Several of the apostolic
letters have been lost, so that we have, for example, almost
no information about the first eleven years of Paul's
missionary activity.
The whole of revelation, the legacy of faith (depositum
fidei), was entrusted from the beginning not to literary
chance but to the personal responsibility of the Apostles and
their successors. "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to
thy trust," Paul exhorts his pupil (I Tim. vi. 20). When the
Gnostics appealed to mutilated or invented written texts, the
decision against them did not come from Holy Writ but from the
"rule of faith" (regula fidei), that is from the living,
believing consciousness of the Church as preserved and
transmitted by the bishops. Luther's exclusive esteem and
reverence for Holy Writ is in contradiction with the facts of
history. From the beginning we find, welling up between Christ
and the Scriptures, the living teaching of the Church,
guarding and explaining the truth. Through every gap and rift
in the Biblical message gleam the clear waters of the stream
of tradition, coursing through the Christian communities,
guided and preserved by the bishops.
It is indeed Christ-alone from whom all the Church's teaching
proceeds and to whom it all points. Christianity is Christ.
The teaching authority of the Church can do no more than draw
on the riches of Christ. The Church has only to testify to the
Lord's truth, not to create it. She is not herself the Light
but is to give testimony of the Light. The Church's teaching
activity is thus not creative. She generates no new truths of
herself. She only takes the old truths, objectively given in
Christ's revelation (explicitly or at the least in germ), and
brings them into the subjective consciousness of the faithful.
We have arrived here at something essential which
differentiates the Catholic from the Lutheran concept of the
Church, and which provides the ultimate basis for the
exclusiveness of the Catholic Church, her claim to be the one
means of salvation. The believing Lutheran also recognizes
that he is bound to his Church's confession of faith, to the
ancient Christian creeds, to the Confession of Augsburg,
perhaps to Luther's "Schmalkald Articles" and to the formula
of 1580. But there is nothing absolute about this tie: the
believing Lutheran does not simply and directly hear the word
of Christ in the teaching of his Church.
It is truer to say that he does without the formularies of his
Church in his own experience of Christ, when he encounters Him
in his own conscience. And in so far as this experience of
Christ in each separate believer necessarily remains dominated
by subjective impressions, it is in the last analysis the
individual conscience that determines the form and colour of
each man's Christianity. His religious life does indeed gain
something from this subjectivity--an interior dynamism,
pressure and intensity, on the other hand, it lacks any
ultimate assurance, any unconditional guarantee that it is
really Christ and His Truth to whom the believer has given
himself.
It is a quite different matter with the certainty of the
believing Catholic. He is unconditionally bound to the
teaching of the Church, because he is penetrated with the
certainty that in the teaching of the Church he hears the word
of Christ. He thus identifies the Church's message with the
Gospel of our Lord. However humanly inadequate, however
conditioned by the times the formularies of the Church's
teaching may be, they are yet for the Catholic conscience, in
their deepest content, in their substance, brought out from
the treasure of Christ.
In the strict sense this applies only to those truths which
the Church expressly proclaims as truths of revelation. In the
strict sense, then, it applies only to the realm of the
Church's dogmas. But in so far as these dogmas do not exist in
intellectual isolation but are connected both with each other
and with truths in the natural order, the light of faith
shines also upon their whole logical and historical context,
and guarantees its certainty with varying degrees of intensity
and logical strength according to the degree with which it is
bound up with the dogmas themselves.
The other truths of faith which have been formulated in the
course of centuries by the Church, though not clearly
expressed in the Bible, are all contained at least in germ
(implicite) in a revealed truth already clearly held and
proclaimed by the teaching Church. They can all be shown to
stand in an essential relationship to the Church's original,
central dogma concerning Jesus the Christ. They have all,
therefore, their assured place in the Christian message. They
all had and have a salutary and creative effect upon the whole
Christian body. They are all charged to-day with the devotion,
the reverence and the atmosphere of living Christian faith.
And we know that what lies behind all these dogmas is not the
caprice of emotional piety nor mere historical chance but the
clear teaching intention of the Church and behind her the
message of Christ bearing testimony of Himself in her
teaching.
We have come back to our starting point. We pointed out that
the special character of the Catholic concept of the Church
and the content of the Catholic faith lay in the
identification of the Church's authority with the authority of
Christ. The Church does not receive this authority indirectly,
as though from the faith of the Christian communities
honouring their Church as the teacher and witness of that
faith. Before there were any communities with personal faith,
and independently of them, when Christ founded His Church upon
Peter, He constituted in Peter and with Peter the fullness of
His own Messianic power. The Catholic sees in the office of
teacher, priest and shepherd built upon Peter the continuation
through the centuries of the Messianic authority of Christ
Himself.
We must realize that, according to the testimony of the
earliest sources, Christ did not attach this Messianic
authority simply to the personal "pneuma" of His disciples, to
their abundance of the Spirit. They were not His Apostles
simply by virtue of being His disciples. For this they needed
a special commission from our Lord. "As the Father hath sent
me, I also send you" (John xx. 21). This commission was given
in the solemn act by which our Lord chose twelve from the
multitude of His disciples to be His Apostles, exactly twelve,
no more and no less, who were to transmit His Gospel to the
twelve tribes of Israel. Thus our Lord organized the first
Christian mission by the special call of the Twelve, the
establishment of the college of Apostles. This college of
Apostles is so much the one and only organ of the full powers
of Christ that after Judas' suicide the election of Matthias
had to take place to fill up the number of the Twelve. The
fact that within this college, as we are shown in the Acts of
the Apostles, Simon the son of John occupied a supereminent
position, and that even in the Pauline communities he was
referred to simply as "Rock", is not due to his personal
qualities, to the strength of his faith, for instance, but
again to a particular, explicit call by our Lord, which took
place, as a consequence of the strength of his faith, in that
solemn act at Caesarea Philippi (Matt. xvi. 18).
The very first Christian mission, the first preaching to the
Jews, was not only a matter of the outpouring of the Spirit
but of institutional means established by our Lord Himself--
the college of the Twelve and the office of Rock. And, in the
same way, later on it was not simply to all Christians filled
with the Spirit of the Lord, to all the men of the new faith
and love, that the office of preaching the Gospel fell. On the
contrary, unless an extraordinary charismatic gift gave
evidence of their prophetic vocation, they must first receive
the laying on of hands from the Apostles. It was only by this
laying on of hands that they were numbered among the appointed
witnesses of Christ (cf. Acts vi. 6; xiii. 3, etc.).
Thus from the beginning the spiritual basis of Christianity,
its striving for the fullness of the spirit and interior
perfection, was bound up with an institutional element, the
connection of the plenitude of apostolic power with an
impersonal super-personal act, the laying on of hands. This
turns our attention away from the Self, from the personal
qualities of the believer, and directs them to the authority
of Christ, who alone sends labourers into the vineyard and
from whom alone comes all redemption. What was later called
the mission of the Church (missio canonica) was from the very
beginning an essential element in the Christian message. "How
shall they preach unless they be sent?" (Rom. x. 15). Only by
the form of the laying on of hands did the believing Christian
become a missionary, a witness of the word, a steward of the
mysteries. He bears the full powers of Christ, but not so as
to be in any sense autonomous and dependent on himself. He is
in no sense the creative cause of our salvation, but only, as
theology expresses it, the "instrumental cause" (causa
instrumentalis) and visible tool chosen by the Lord of the
Church, with which He, our divine human Redeemer, invisibly
communicates to the faithful the salvation which proceeds from
the Trinity. The laying on of hands simply but effectively
expressed the fact that the missionary had his place within
the whole mission of Christ and partook of His powers. By this
means he entered the "apostolic succession", entered into
physical and historical contact with the first disciples and
with Christ Himself, from whom every mission proceeds and who
alone is its meaning and its object.
It is thus with reverent pride that the Catholic looks back on
the long line of his bishops, for he knows that there is not
one among them who could not historically show that he had
been received into that apostolic lineage and so had entered
into direct contact with Christ Himself. It is this apostolic
succession of his bishops which guarantees to him that the
stream of Christian tradition which brought forth and sustains
the Bible is no wild torrent to break its banks and mingle
with alien currents but that it was received at the beginning
and conducted on its way by a strictly constituted channel,
the unbroken unity of this same apostolic succession, leading
straight back to Christ and guaranteeing the purity of the
tradition received from Him.
Seen thus from within, the Church is primarily an institution
for salvation. She is not simply a community of salvation, a
community, that is, which receives in faith the salvation of
Christ and carries it out in herself. It is she who gives this
salvation and makes the faithful members of Christ. Thus she
stands not only in a passive but also in an active
relationship to Christ and the salvation He gives--always of
course only as instrumental cause, as the visible earthly tool
with which the Lord of the Church, who won her by His Blood,
pours the treasures of grace and love proceeding from the
Trinity into the body of the Church.
It is only because the Church is in this sense an institution
for salvation that she can at the same time be a community of
salvation. Her institutional, impersonal office constantly
merges into the personal, the establishment of the Kingdom of
God in the hearts of the faithful. The official side of the
Church is never an end in itself, never self-idolatry, but
always only a means and a ministry, a ministry to immortal
souls. Simply because the Catholic sees in the Church's
activity not the Church alone but ultimately Christ Himself at
work, still teaching, still giving grace, still governing, his
relationship to the official Church is a living religious
thing, saturated with the same faith and the same love which
he gives to Christ. What Eucken said of St. Augustine's
concept of the Church is still true to-day of the life and
experience of the Catholic: "All authority and every
development of ecclesiastical power is sustained and embraced
in intense personal living. The person in his direct
relationship with God remains the animating spirit of the
whole. Out from this life with God and into the order of the
Church flows a constant stream of power, warmth and fervour
which keeps it from sinking into a soulless automatism of
ceremonial practice and activism. It is not the brute force of
authority working by the sheer weight of its mere existence;
there is an inner necessity insisting upon authority and
sustaining it. It is chiefly out of these deep wells of life
that the Church draws the immense power over consciences which
she exercises down to this present day." ("Die
Lebensansehauungen der grossen Denker," 9th ed., p. 241.)
Catholicism means the closest possible fusion of the
institutional and the personal, objective and subjective,
office and spirit. And it is contrary to the essence of
Catholicism when either of the two elements, whether the
institutional or the personal, becomes exaggerated. In the
balance of the two, in their organic relationship and
interpenetration, lie the strength and life of the Catholic
Church.
We must speak in more detail of this fundamental character of
Catholicism if what follows is to be intelligible. The
Catholic Church lives and breathes in the consciousness that
by her apostolic succession founded upon Peter she stands in
that stream of tradition which leads straight from Christ
through the Apostles down to the present day. With this before
her eyes she knows herself as divine tradition incarnate, as
the visible embodiment of those powers of our Lord's
Resurrection which are forever penetrating the world whether
they were set down by the finger of God in Holy Writ or not.
The Church has no need of witnesses. She witnesses to herself
by the "divine tradition" in which she stands and by which she
lives, indeed which she is.
Because of the way in which the message of Christ is thus
united with her own tradition, the Catholic Church feels and
knows herself as the Church of Christ in the emphatic,
exclusive sense: as the visible revelation in space and time
of the redemptive powers which proceed from Christ her Head,
as the Body of Christ, as the one means of salvation. Because
she is aware of this she is bound to condemn all other
churches which have arisen or may arise--in so far as they are
churches, i.e., sociological phenomena, and not merely a group
of believers--as extra-Christian and indeed un-Christian and
anti-Christian creations. To admit even the possibility that
the final union of Christendom could take place other than in
her and through her would be a denial and betrayal of her most
precious knowledge that she is Christ's own Church. For her
there is only one true union, reunion with herself.
For the Catholic the immediate object of all effort at reunion
can only be that each according to his powers should help to
remove the obstacles which are keeping those who do not
believe in her from the Mother Church.
For these obstacles are his responsibility as well. It is not
as though it were only the non-Catholic Christian who was the
guilty party while the Catholic could think of himself as
completely innocent and magnanimously proffering forgiveness.
We made ourselves clear in our first section: both are at
fault, and this fault extends to Rome itself.
Pope Adrian VI made public confession of this through his
legate Chieregato before the German Princes assembled at the
Reichstag at Nuremberg on the 3rd January 1523: "We freely
acknowledge that God has allowed this chastisement to come
upon His Church because of the sins of men and especially
because of the sins of priests and prelates.... We know well
that for many years much that must be regarded with horror has
come to pass in this Holy See: abuses in spiritual matters,
transgressions against the Commandments; indeed, that
everything has been gravely perverted." And therefore he
authorizes his legate to promise that "we will take all pains
to reform, in the first place, the court of Rome, from which
perhaps all these evils take their origin". When therefore the
Holy See regards as one of its gravest and most urgent tasks
the restoration of unity to Christendom--not only with the
Orthodox Churches, which already have the essentials of dogma,
cult and organization in common with it, but also with the
Protestant communions--it is thereby fulfilling not only the
duty of the Good Shepherd setting out in pursuit of the lost
sheep but also the special duty of common penance and
expiation.
ENDNOTES
1. Since Luther can only be understood against the background
of the ecclesiastical abuses of the late Middle Ages, I could
not avoid dealing with these abuses in detail. I have
deliberately taken my evidence exclusively from Catholic
sources, especially from Karl Bihlmeyer's history of the
Church (the objectivity and thoroughness of which have made it
the standard work on the subject), and Josef Lortz's brilliant
and psychologically penetrating "Reformation in Deutschland".
In the light of recent researches it should hardly be
necessary to emphasize that these abuses do not give the whole
picture of the medieval Church. Its darker aspects are
relieved by so many bright lights that it is not possible to
take a pessimistic view of it as a whole.
The quotation is from the second volume of Bihlmeyer's work,
p. 356.
2. A less severe judgment on this matter is given by
Barraclough, "Papal Provisions." (Trans.)
3. The Jubilee Indulgence of 1390 was extended to various
cities besides Rome. A condition for gaining it was a money
payment, collected by hankers appointed in the different towns
who retained half the sum collected as a commission. see
Vansteenberghe, article "Boniface IX" in the "Dictionnaire d'
histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique," vol. ix (1937) p.
919. (Trans.)
4. These phrases were intended to refer, not only to the
indulgence, but to the repentance and absolution that went
before it as well. But from the jubilee of 1390 onwards
confessors and preachers of indulgences often failed entirely
to refer to the necessity of repentance. See Vansteenberghe,
loc. cit. (Trans.)
5. See Philip Hughes, "A History of the Church," vol. iii, pp.
501-2. (Trans.)
6. Summa Theologica, 1-11, 19, 5.
7. But nor for his teaching on justification. (Trans.)
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