THE ROOTS OF THE REFORMATION B

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 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 ctivity, 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.