I. Introduction
In the past two decades, Luther’s studies have striven ever more intensely to reposition the great reformer’s theology within broader currents of late medieval religious thought.Footnote 1 The somewhat belated nature of this breakthrough was determined in part by a reluctance among Protestant scholars to recognize points of contact between medieval spirituality and authentic Lutheran theology.Footnote 2 As recently as 2017, Volker Leppin was calling for a renewed hermeneutic grounded in the historical rediscovery of the “medieval Luther.”Footnote 3 Specifically, recent literature has stressed the formative influence of medieval mysticism, especially of Johannes Tauler (c. 1300–1361),Footnote 4 whose sermons Luther is known to have thoroughly meditated upon in 1515/1516, heeding the advice of his superior within the Augustinian order, Johann von Staupitz.Footnote 5 Yet oftentimes, when expounded by those very same commentators, the theology of faith developed during Luther’s formative period (c. 1510–c. 1520) strikes as far removed from late medieval spirituality. The quest for the medieval origins of Lutheran thought ultimately tends to highlight Luther’s clear-cut breakaway from earlier modes of thinking.Footnote 6 Conversely, such research also views the late Middle Ages as a potential source for Lutheran doctrine. Consequently, it singles out elements from medieval texts that are deemed to announce Lutheran theology, such as Tauler’s conception of penance and of “passive justice” (iustitia passiva), the Theologia Deutsch’s opposition between the inner and outer person, and Staupitz’s union of the bride with the bridegroom.Footnote 7 In particular, by starkly emphasizing human passivity in late medieval German mysticism, such interpretations focus on the specific strands of mystical thought that appear most compatible with Luther. Unusual insistence on the extreme debasement of the human being and the ultimate annihilation of the human will: within this perspective, such were the key aspects of the Eckhartian tradition that attracted the young Luther.Footnote 8
While I do not intend to make an overarching revisionist claim regarding Luther’s doctrine of justification, I propose that at least one of Luther’s mature works – the famous tract De libertate christiana (1520) – does not neatly fit within the paradigm of radical human passivity purportedly reinforced by mystical readings.Footnote 9 Although the presence of human activity in Luther is hardly controversial in itself, it is typically construed as the mere consequence of God’s prior and gratuitous infusion of faith. In such readings, it is thus devoid of any causal effect on salvation.Footnote 10 Scholars such as Anna Vind and Ilmari Karimies have recognized a greater role for human agency in Luther, yet one which remains rather restricted: the Christian must actively avoid squandering God’s prior gift of faith by succumbing to temptation.Footnote 11 Beyond such negative agency, Leppin’s analysis of the Lectures on Romans provides evidence that the young Luther integrated some measure of human effort within the preparatory stages leading to the imparting of faith.Footnote 12 In the following, I argue that the Freedom of a Christian goes even further by endowing a significant role to the movement of the believer toward God within the very process of faith’s infusion. Despite Luther’s rejection of good works as a means of justification, the causal role ascribed to interior human agency alongside divine operation emerges as a remarkable point of contact with medieval views on salvation. With respect to this fundamental problem – the extent to which a person may positively contribute to her or his salvation – Freedom represents a less radical break with medieval conceptions than would appear from classical interpretations of Luther’s theology of faith. Furthermore, an initial section focusing on Tauler’s sermon on Luke 5:3 (Vetter no. 41) argues that a preponderant focus on human passivity in Tauler likewise offers an inadequately partial account of the Dominican’s message. This contribution further contends that the place of agency in Freedom, widely regarded as the most influential vulgarization of Luther’s theology of faith, grounds this treatise even more firmly within the medieval mystical framework than had been previously perceived.Footnote 13 Finally, the comparison with Tauler illustrates how Luther’s understanding of faith radically simplified the mystical ascent. In this renewed mystical framework, one may identify a structural foundation for Luther’s well-known “democratization of mysticism.”Footnote 14
I retain three criteria to qualify a line of thought as “mystical”: the ultimate goal is union with God, one at least partially achievable on earth, before the afterlife; some degree of human agency contributes to spiritual progress; the ascent results from a gradual, inchoative process. While “mysticism” is notoriously difficult to define, and some may take issue with the present attempt, the adoption of explicit criteria enables a stronger argument as to the mystical nature of Freedom. Footnote 15 They are not intended as a true definition, one that would exclude from the mystical corpus texts failing to meet such requirements, but merely suggest that works possessing all such characteristics may be deemed mystical. The first criterion of “union” does not necessarily equate full-blown deification but includes “unmediated proximity” to God and the “direct presence of God.”Footnote 16 Regardless, the exact nature of the mystical union in Luther remains a complex problem that lies beyond the scope of this article.Footnote 17
The importance of human passivity in mysticism scholarship owes much to William James and his focus on mystical states of consciousness during union. Though Jamesian theories remain influential, recent research has emphasized the various processes mystics themselves identified as essential components of the mystical quest, and within these processes, the fundamental role of human activity.Footnote 18 While the process-based approach characterizes much feminist readings of mysticism, its relevance has been recognized well beyond feminist historiography.Footnote 19 Within the typical monastic structure of reading-meditation-prayer-contemplation (lectio-meditatio-oratio-contemplatio), not only are the initial stages clearly active but also preparation becomes an eternally recommencing reality of the mystical life.Footnote 20 Furthermore, in affective forms of medieval mysticism, the reciprocity of human and divine love precludes full passivity of the subject. Such is the case in Bernard, and even more clearly so in the writings of William of Saint-Thierry, Hadewijch, and Ruusbroec.Footnote 21 And as Christina Van Dyke reminds us, even for apophatic mystics such as Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart, and Heinrich Suso, preparatory exercises served to stimulate “active receptivity” of the divine and to “perfect the act of self-annihilation.”Footnote 22
Beyond rarified apophaticism, widely read late medieval mystics recognized the significance of human agency. For Jean Gerson, arguably the most influential mystical thinker of his time, mystical theology was an ars that could be acquired through devotional practices (industriae), both external and internal.Footnote 23 The fifteenth-century German Carthusians Jacobus de Paradiso and Johannes de Indagine, building upon Hugh of Balma and Gerson, developed even further the theory of the industriae. Paradiso viewed mystical practice as a key component of church reform – a bottom-up conception that stressed the importance of individual activity.Footnote 24 Furthermore, Cusanus and his opponents in the Tegernsee Debates disagreed as to which faculties contributed to the ascent toward God, not on the contribution of human faculties per se. Footnote 25 Such ideas shaped common notions of mystical theology held by Luther’s contemporaries. In the preface to his 1519 Commentary on Dionysius’s Mystical Theology, Johannes Eck distinguishes “affective” from “mystical or negative theology.” Drawing on Gerson, Eck explains that the former involves the movement of the creature toward the Creator through “the devout practice of [the creature’s] interior abilities.”Footnote 26 Conversely, mystical theology is apophatic. Only once the soul realizes divine incommensurability does God manifest himself and allow union.Footnote 27 And yet, affective and mystical theologies operate hand in hand.Footnote 28 Seeking to harmonize Gerson and Cusa, Eck states that the intellectual grappling with God’s unknowability triggers love of the divine, hence Gerson is justified in calling mystical theology an “art of loving God.”Footnote 29 Eck portrays the mystical ascent as a dialectical collaboration involving God, human intellect, and human love.Footnote 30 The Vocabulary of Theology, published by Johannes Altenstaig in 1517 and prefaced by his fellow Augustinian Staupitz, equally testifies to the centrality of human agency. A work of lesser intellectual import, it nonetheless aptly represents mainstream contemporary spirituality. Quoting Richard of Middleton, Altenstaig defines contemplation as an “action” (actus contemplandi), itself prepared by the “act of living spiritually.”Footnote 31 Entries for “meditation” (meditatio) and “union” (unio) reproduce quotes from Gerson stressing the role of human faculties.Footnote 32 Finally, the dictionary again follows Gerson in defining “mystical theology” as the “extension of the soul toward God” through love, one enabled by the “vehement practice of moral virtues.”Footnote 33
In the following, the concept of “agency” is employed to sidestep a basic opposition between passivity and activity viewed as good works or meritorious behavior.Footnote 34 Exerting patience in the face of tribulations can require effort. Freeing oneself from earthly affects and annihilating one’s faculties may likewise entail a learning process involving human work. As such, the Theologia Deutsch’s conception of the spiritual ascent has been described as the process of “willingly becoming passive.”Footnote 35 Ultimately, the fundamental question may be put as follows: do the decisive moments of the spiritual ascent consist in a pure awaiting of God’s operation within the human being? I look to show that this is the case, neither in Tauler nor in De libertate christiana. Even in Luther, the tension between pure divine agency and internal effort is never completely dismissed.Footnote 36
II. Johannes Tauler’s Sermon 41
In the preface to the first book of his True Christianity, the Lutheran mystic Johann Arndt anticipated that fellow Lutherans might object to his reliance on authors such as Tauler, “who may seem to ascribe more than is due to human ability and works.”Footnote 37 Arndt pushed back against this “erroneous” interpretation of Tauler. He reaffirmed the Lutheran tenet according to which human progress, including the mystical ascent, was accomplished through God’s work alone. At the same time, he appropriated Taulerian concepts such as the “working way,” and operated, according to Bernard McGinn, “a shift from […] justification by faith” to “the deepening of union through the life of prayer and sanctification.”Footnote 38 Similar tensions run through Tauler’s modern scholarly reception. Studies by Alois Haas and Louise Gnädinger, while not fully denying human activity, have strongly argued for the primacy of divine agency in Tauler. For Haas, not only does Tauler conceive the person as fully passive during union: preparatory exercises characteristic of the initial stages of purification (via purgativa) are themselves accomplished through the working of the Holy Spirit in the soul.Footnote 39 Gnädinger, despite granting a slightly greater role to human agency, restricts the latter to preparatory phases.Footnote 40 Quoting the Taulerian image of Christ as a magnet attracting the human heart, she likewise upholds the preponderant role of divine operation within the soul.Footnote 41 By contrast, scholars such as Steven Ozment and Bernard McGinn, while recognizing the constant and fundamental nature of divine working in Tauler, allow for much greater human effort toward union. Reflecting on the dual nature of Tauler’s “ground of the soul” (grund) as the locus of God’s indwelling and as a created entity, Ozment concludes that the Dominican understood all soteriological activity as simultaneously human and divine.Footnote 42 McGinn’s balanced discussion of Tauler quotes numerous passages dwelling upon the necessity of human activity without categorizing them as secondary.Footnote 43
The following analysis focuses on Tauler’s Sermon 41 (the second sermon for the fifth Sunday after Trinity), first, because this eloquent depiction of the mystical ascent received an unusually ample gloss from the young Luther; second, because it provides concrete insights into how Tauler conceived the mystical interaction between the person and the divine.Footnote 44 The entire structure of the sermon follows from its biblical thema: And going into one of the ships that was Simon’s [Luke: 5:3]. The tossing to-and-fro of Simon’s small boat (navicula) by a tempestuous sea represents the tribulations of the soul ascending toward the divine. The navicula itself designates the gemuete, the Taulerian (and Eckhartian) equivalent of the scholastic mens (rendered here by “spirit”), a concept that encompasses all the faculties of the soul – memory, intellect, and will – yet that refers in Tauler’s mind to something superior to the sum of all such faculties.Footnote 45 The “net” stands for thought and memory. Jesus enters the boat, sits next to Simon, then orders him to lead the vessel onto the high sea. Tauler closely follows the Gospel text to delineate an asymmetrical cooperation between Christ and the believer. Jesus takes the first step, then remains alongside Simon to provide instructions. Yet Simon is the one who steers the vessel ever further into the deep and casts the net. While divine operation is the first mover and remains active throughout, the sermon identifies the proximal cause of mystical progress in the human person and its faculties.
At first, the Christian who embarks on the mystical path must lead (fueren) the navicula onto the high sea, meaning that he must divest his gemuete from any concerns which do not pertain directly to God.Footnote 46 Hence, the first stage is one of elimination and purification. Initially, Tauler emphasizes the emotional and volitional components, as the faithful must direct “his love, his affections and his inclinations” toward God.Footnote 47 The phrasing implies that the individual begins his ascent through his own initiative and effort. Such exhortations echo the preparatory work described by Tauler in Sermons 24 and 81.Footnote 48 Just as the farmer, in March, must weed out and plow his field, Sermon 24 instructs the disciple to remove all vices and earthly attachments from his grund, so that the divine sunlight renders it fruitful.Footnote 49 Such spiritual cultivation strongly recalls the “agriculture of the self” (agricultura suiipsius) in Luther’s Lectures on Romans. A necessary precondition for grace being granted to the faithful, the young Luther’s “agriculture of the self” consisted, much like Tauler’s, “in constant prayer, constant learning, acting, castigating, until the old is eradicated and the new appears in the will.”Footnote 50 Since Luther penned his Lectures on Romans at the very time he was reading Tauler (1515/1516), it seems most likely that his remarkable appeal to human agency was inspired by the Dominican.
Tauler’s Sermon 41 further conveys the idea of progress resulting from one’s inner labor by bringing into play intellectual faculties (gedank; gehúgnisse), here symbolized by the fisherman’s net. The disciple is told to “apply himself fully to seize for himself all the subjects that may incite and incline him to holy devotion.” The casting of the net – expressed through an active verb, werfen – refers to constant meditation on the life and passion of Jesus. Such devotion, construed as an instance of interior work, amounts to an internalized imitation of Christ, which enflames the soul with divine love: “and he must so entirely fill his mind with such representations that love and charity penetrate all his faculties and all his senses and imbue them with charity, and joy too intense to hide which shall erupt into jubilation.”Footnote 51
So far, Jesus has rewarded the disciple’s efforts by imparting spiritual gifts. Yet all notion of straightforward progress vanishes in the third step, during which the soul seemingly loses all appetite for the divine. Love of God suddenly disappears. In this state of great indecision and anxiety brought about by the pernicious scheming of demons, the disciple must exert patience, so that, ultimately, the exterior person comes out of this ordeal purified and the inner person transfigured: “When all the devils and all humans would be conjured against you, the more they would attack you and press you in your tiny vessel, the higher would you ascend toward the summit.”Footnote 52 The dialectical efficacy of tribulations depends, however, on the attitude of the disciple. In this third stage, progress relies less on personal initiative than on steadfast awaiting, as all that he or she had previously achieved seems momentarily taken away.Footnote 53 Only by letting go of all anxieties and confidently entrusting tribulations to God may the believer avoid sinking into the abyss.Footnote 54 Such statements bear an unmistakable familiarity with Luther’s urging the believer to give up all sins to Christ, so that the Son of God alone may redeem them. At the same time, Tauler characterizes the disciple’s necessary patience as resistance. Not-doing is framed as heroic refraining, an act of voluntary passivity following from a choice: “Only remain within yourself, do not run about, be patient till the end and do not seek anything else. […] Remain in this ordeal without any anxiety […] Beware, as if your life depended on it, to strive toward nothing but waiting.”Footnote 55 Gnädinger has evidenced the prevalence in Tauler of negative human agency amidst tribulations.Footnote 56 As shall become clear, the theme also plays a significant role in Luther.
Having overcome this arduous pass, the soul is further led on to the next stage, which Tauler names the “peace of the true friends of God.”Footnote 57 As if to encourage the disciple, the Dominican recapitulates the causal link whereby human striving leads to spiritual benefit:
No matter how modestly a person practices piety, if he [er] possesses in the ground [von grunde] the intention and desire to be a great lover of God, if he perseveres in this intent, if he loves this quality in those who are already so, if he remains in such an intent in a simple manner, without being led astray by obstacles along the way, and if he does for God all that he accomplishes, he shall obtain it [the peace we just mentioned], rest assured, be it solely at the hour of death.Footnote 58
External good works play but a small role in the disciple’s endeavor to reach God, for Tauler stresses the inner transformation of the soul. All the while, the passage affirms that advancing along the spiritual path depends on the disciple adopting an appropriate mindset. Further, it implies that, even in the later stages of the ascent, progress still relies in part on personal effort. Assuredly, other texts by Tauler emphasize to a greater extent human passivity and divine agency.Footnote 59 Nevertheless, the treatment of human working in Sermon 41 is by no means an outlier within Tauler’s corpus. In Sermon 37, for instance, the Dominican evokes the human “searching” (suochung) being answered by the divine searching.Footnote 60 Sermon 24 makes an even stronger appeal to human activity, as it rails against lazy Christians who, out of a sense of false security, rely on God’s agency alone instead of putting their own faculties to work.Footnote 61 These passages suggest that Tauler embraced a not insignificant measure of bidirectional agency within the spiritual quest. He envisioned cooperation between God and the person, unequal as that collaboration may have been.
The “peace of the friends of God,” which characterizes the fourth step, falls short of true perfection. Even the authentic friend of God may grapple with residual angst, for she or he has not yet attained the “essential peace,” which follows the “essential conversion.”Footnote 62 Quoting from Pseudo-Denys the Areopagite, the text boldly states that the ultimate union with God in the fifth and final stage leads the person to become literally “deiform [gotformig]” and “of a divine color [gotvar].”Footnote 63 Only in this last stage does human agency recede in the face of God’s all-powerful operation. Here at last, the boat, the net, and its human captain all break apart and sink into the depths of the sea.Footnote 64 As the “overflowing” of the divine overruns the person’s faculties, the human element is overwhelmed and experiences “infirmity.”Footnote 65 Describing this process, Tauler resorts to apophatic terminology. Touching upon the individual’s ultimate annihilation, he recognizes the profound mystery surrounding the nature of the mystical union: “At this moment, the human being sinks so deeply into his unfathomable nothingness, it becomes so small, so reduced to nil, that it loses all that it ever received from God; it merely sends back all of this to God who is its author. […] Thus, created nothingness sinks into uncreated nothingness, but that is something which cannot be understood nor expressed.”Footnote 66 Although Tauler deems reaching such a state an extraordinarily difficult exploit, the sermon’s final paragraph evokes the qualities of those who have attained this state of “essential peace” and their virtuous behavior toward their brethren.Footnote 67 More important for the present argument is the way the Dominican phrases the final turning point, which immediately precedes annihilation: “when what is unnamable and nameless in the soul fully turns toward God, all that bears a name in the human being follows and likewise converts itself. To this conversion always answers all that is nameless and unnamable in God, and all that in God bears a name.”Footnote 68 In this advanced stage, specific human faculties no longer play an important role but merely follow. Nonetheless, Tauler outlines a movement of the creature toward its Creator. Contrary to Eckhart, Tauler conceived the ground of the soul as created.Footnote 69 The fact finds confirmation in the penultimate quote, which distinguishes “created” and “uncreated nothingness” before the first “sinks into” the second. In the second quote, deification and annihilation come about when God responds to the soul’s turning. Though the human and the divine are just about to merge, Tauler preserves a distinction, if tenuous, between the nameless in the soul and the nameless in God.Footnote 70 Despite the extreme proximity between the two “unnamables,” technically, it is still the creature who must convert. Hence, beyond the role ascribed to internal activity in the initial phases, Sermon 41 illustrates how Tauler did not fully eliminate human agency even from the final steps of the mystical ascent.
III. De libertate Christiana: Faith in a Mystical Context
Before turning to De libertate, a brief summary of Luther’s theology of faith according to classical interpretations and of the basic contrasts Lutheran scholars such as Berndt Hamm posit between Luther and medieval mystical commonplaces appears in order. Since the twelfth century at least, the mystical relationship between the human being and the divine had been essentially determined by love of God (caritas) and hope (spes).Footnote 71 Whereas, in the scholastic tradition, faith (fides) pertained to the intellectual apprehension of divine truth, caritas and spes referred to intuitive and emotional properties of the soul, which enabled it to fully receive and embrace God.Footnote 72 Certainly, owing to the dominant place occupied by faith in Luther’s theology, fides does not always remain constrained by the bounds of purely intellectual understanding, and may, under Luther’s pen, assume a more affective character.Footnote 73 Yet its emotional dimension tends to be portrayed as secondary.Footnote 74 Importantly, the scholastics conceptualized faith as passive intellection, while caritas entailed effort and active spiritual labor. Thus, the ability of the soul to achieve union with the deity relied not only on God, but also on its own merit–on internal works, so to speak.Footnote 75 For Bernard of Clairvaux and others, this active process involving caritas could not be set into motion without the initial infusion of divine grace, while the action of caritas could be equated with the operation of the Holy Spirit within the human soul.Footnote 76 Nonetheless, the spiritual ascent resulted from the cooperation between God and his creature. According to Hamm’s broad generalization, as mysticism gradually made its way out of the cloister and reached ever wider sections of the lay public, the importance of this initial sending of grace tended to wane and the spiritual ascent to depend ever more heavily on the meritorious characteristics of the interior man.Footnote 77 This view applies more easily to the mysticism of Paradiso, Indagine, or Altenstaig, with its emphasis on devotional exercises (industriae) and its highly practical character, than to the Eckhartian apophatic tradition. Thus, the critique operated by Lutheran historiography targets the transposition of salvation through good works to the internal world of the soul, a trend it identifies chiefly in middle-brow late medieval mysticism.
Luther, by retaining scholastic definitions yet placing fides, instead of spes and caritas, at the heart of his theology of salvation, turned the human being into a purely passive receiver of God’s gratuitous gift.Footnote 78 The individual’s radical lack of agency is further enhanced by the notion that faith operates from the outside (extra nos): through God’s working, “man is led out of himself.” The radical emphasis on utter passivity even leads Philipp Stoellger to refute as overly active the possibility that Luther’s believer may “allow” the divine infusion of Word and faith.Footnote 79 Hence, Luther would have rejected even the voluntary letting-go and turning toward God that he encountered in Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch. Another fundamental difference with medieval conceptions lies in the immediacy and unconditionality of justification. As soon as God bequeaths faith to the sinner, the latter is instantly and unequivocally saved, independently from, and prior to any internal renewal that may take place thereafter as a mere consequence of faith’s presence.Footnote 80 For Luther, justification is “credited in advance,” whereas in pre-Reformation mysticism, union with God and salvation, far from being guaranteed, depended in part on the soul’s own ability to achieve an arduous spiritual ascent.Footnote 81 According to this model, while Luther does not deny the reality of human activity, positive human actions, whether interior or exterior, remain always derivative, as they necessarily follow from the initial infusion of the Word. Luther operates a decisive causal inversion: though human sin, on its own, may lead to damnation, justification precedes and causes the believer’s good behavior, not the reverse. In such accounts, beyond the rejection of emotional piety in favor of an intellectual understanding of scripture liberated from artificial exegesis, more so than the opposition between divine grace and good works as means of salvation, the most profound divergence between Luther and late medieval spirituality lies in the degree of agency endowed to the inner person.Footnote 82
As Hamm aptly remarked, late medieval mystics saw themselves ascending the rungs of Jacob’s Ladder with divine assistance, or despite divinely imposed obstacles. In classical Lutheran theology, on the other hand, the faithful does not move; God alone uses the ladder to make his way to him.Footnote 83 Yet many developments within De libertate christiana, in particular its treatment of faith, cannot be easily construed within such a framework. Indeed, if the short treatise is read on its own without Luther’s broader theology of faith applied to it as an interpretative grid, interactions between God and the faithful appear, to some extent, bidirectional. God’s descent does not preclude the faithful’s voluntary ascent. True, the text initially makes statements in straightforward agreement with the tenets outlined above. Justification rests on faith alone, defined as “the saving and efficacious use of the word of God.”Footnote 84 Christian freedom cannot be attained by works, and Luther includes within this category the works of the soul: “inner scrutiny, meditation, and whatever else can be done by the soul’s efforts–all of this has no benefit.”Footnote 85 But shortly thereafter, this coherent picture begins to blur.
Repeatedly, Luther describes faith not as implying sheer passive reception, but as requiring cognitive effort. Paradoxically, this phenomenon appears precisely in the turning point where the individual suddenly grasps the radical sinfulness that prevents her or him from attaining the divine by human means: “By this knowledge [radical sinfulness] you will realize that you need Christ, who suffered and rose again for you, in order that, believing in him, you may become another human being by this faith, because all your sins are forgiven and you are justified by another’s merits, namely, by Christ’s alone.”Footnote 86 The main thrust of the passage expresses the individual’s hopelessness; in Christ’s intervention lies his only possibility of salvation. Still, faith is framed as a mental act – that of “believing” – which follows from the subject’s own prior intellectual realization (radical sinfulness). The wording underemphasizes the passive, receptive element, as belief is not actually said to descend from Christ to the faithful’s mind. From this sentence, one can understand faith as a movement of the human soul toward Christ, as an act of self-abandonment triggered by the realization of our inherently sinful nature. In the second part of the treatise, Luther repeats with great force the futility of good works as a means of salvation and contrasts them with faith. Yet, once again, his use of gerundives and his placing of “doing” side by side with “believing” point to faith as a state of mind which should be actively pursued by the Christian, not solely awaited.Footnote 87 To henceforth perform only good deeds, “let [the faithful] start (incipiat) with believing,” hardly an exhortation to passively receive faith sent from above. This idea is expressed nowhere as explicitly as in paragraph 32, where Luther calls on every Christian to proactively reinforce their faith: “It follows that the primary concern [cura] of each and every Christian ought to be that, by putting aside the supposition about works, they strengthen [roboret] faith alone more and more and through that faith “grow in knowledge” not of works but “of Christ Jesus,” who suffered and rose again for them, as Peter in 2 Pet. 3:18 teaches. For no other work makes a Christian.”Footnote 88 Here, Luther affirms each and every Christian’s personal responsibility to augment and fortify his or her faith. In particular, the terms roborare and cura, both implying mental exertion, appear incompatible with pure passivity. Hence, faith is portrayed as a working process involving at least some degree of human agency. The quote’s final sentence even equates such efforts with internal work, in sharp contrast with classical interpretations of Luther’s doctrine of faith. This could be read as a chiefly rhetorical device aiming to deprecate actual, material good works. It remains nonetheless significant, for it squarely frames faith as something the individual can and must act upon. In a similar manner, Luther resorts to active verbs to describe the concrete workings of faith within the human soul, which is instructed to “believe firmly,” elsewhere to “adhere with a firm faith” to God’s promises.Footnote 89 At the verbal level, much (internal) doing may be discerned in De libertate. To the very least, such formulations are compatible with active belief as a proximally causing the person’s interior transformation through faith.
Equally apparent is Luther’s deliberate effort to highlight faith’s relation to human emotions, to the extent that faith’s original intellectual definition seems to lose clear primacy. Comparing the freedom of the believer renewed by the presence of faith to that of Adam before the Fall, Luther mentions the perfection of “faith” and “love” in prelapsarian Paradise, further stressing the germaneness and inter-relatedness of both concepts.Footnote 90 Elsewhere in Freedom, one finds a more traditional relationship between the two notions, with faith acting as the purifying force that prepares the soul to love the divine.Footnote 91 Even here, however, both concepts appear tightly connected. Moreover, with the phrase “the faith of the heart,” Luther underlines faith’s emotional component: “But works cannot do this–only faith of the heart [fides cordis] can. For not by working but by believing do we glorify God and confess that God is truthful. […] This faith of the heart is the source and substance of all our righteousness.”Footnote 92 Such statements broaden the meaning of faith beyond its strict intellectual definition, endowing it with a function comparable to that of caritas. Because the affective properties of the soul were conceived in scholastic thought as actively working faculties, the underlining of faith’s emotional quality becomes all the more meaningful. Far from a linguistic innovation, the phrase fides cordis directly refers to a venerable tradition that viewed the heart as the prime locus of faith within the human being. For Augustine, sincere faith amounted to seeing God through the “eye of the heart.” Ian Forrest has shown that, by the fifteenth century, such imagery was commonplace in vernacular devotional and mystical literature. As movements of the heart were thought to be steered by the will and associated with “conscious intentional action,” invoking the “faith of the heart” entailed a volitional concept of faith.Footnote 93 Resorting to this specific phrase, Luther could not have ignored its volitional connotations.Footnote 94
As in the previously quoted injunction to “strengthen the faith,” Luther describes fides as a mental state that can be heightened or diminished. The positing of degrees of faith or of a gradient of faith proves doubly relevant to the present argument. First, by adopting a progress-based outlook, it preserves and adapts the widespread medieval scheme of the various ascending stages leading to perfection, thus firmly grounding De libertate within a mystical framework. Second, a gradient of faith renders the Christian’s personal involvement in fostering fides easier to conceive. As shall soon become clear, in De libertate, the two do, in fact, go hand in hand. In the opening lines of De libertate, seeking to set himself above those who remain inexperienced in faith because they have not been sufficiently tested by tribulations, Luther metaphorically refers to fides as the “spring of water” from John 4:14. While he does not claim for himself “abundance” nor a “large supply” of faith, he wishes that the “few drops” he has “obtained” from the spring shall help him write more cogently about faith than his adversaries.Footnote 95 Although Luther expresses a quantitative approach to fides through metaphor, it should not be dismissed as a gratuitous literary effect. As subsequent passages of De libertate reveal, the conception of faith as a variable quantity plays an important part within the text’s pastoral message. Despite the immediacy of justification, which is granted as if in advance, actual perfection is but the result of a long process. As such, it can hardly be attained during terrestrial life: “in this life we will have received only a tenth but in the future life the fullness of the spirit.”Footnote 96 The opening lines of the following paragraph (no. 71) make the inchoative nature of the process self-evident: “To be sure, as I have said, the inner person is in the spirit fully and completely justified through faith. Such a one has what he or she ought to have, except of course that this very faith and its riches ought to increase day by day toward the future life.”Footnote 97 In the aforementioned reference to Adam before the Fall, Luther specified that total justification does not imply a state of perfection, as the Christian is “not yet fully recreated.” She or he shall fully return to the prelapsarian state only once faith and love of God have “increase[d] not through works but through themselves.”Footnote 98 True, the latter remark, by evoking faith and love’s growth as autonomous phenomena at work within the soul, frames the process as somewhat outside human volition. And the syntax employed in paragraph 71: “faith ought to increase” (oportet fidem augescere), remains noncommittal as to the origins of the required increase in faith. But when Luther turns to the dangers posed by faith’s decline, he once again plainly affirms the idea of active personal involvement in fostering fides. In the following, one cannot discern any autonomous process operating externally: “You may harm your faith, which alone offers you all things. For this reason, let faith be your sole concern, so that faith may be increased by exercising it either through works [!] or suffering.”Footnote 99 The quote appears in the second section of the treatise, where Luther discusses the utility of bodily discipline, and thus relates to the phase of temptations that follows the initial gift of faith. As such, the passage deals with resistance amidst tribulations, an idea we have already seen at play in Tauler. Its significance in Luther has been highlighted by Anna Vind and Ilmari Karimies.Footnote 100 Karimies, in particular, recognizes the role of the will in pushing back against temptations, and questions whether such volitional concessions are “able to guarantee the human passivity usually so important for Luther in the process of justification.”Footnote 101 He then works around the problem by invoking the constant operation of the Spirit within the assailed believer.Footnote 102 Not only does the quote from De libertate make no mention of divine activity, but it hardly restricts the person’s agency to a defensive posture. Specifically, that faith must be “increased” through “exercise” implies something more than merely protecting it from diabolical assaults by the negative act of not succumbing. Regardless of what one makes of the presence of “works,” Luther’s injunction remains centered on growth and personal responsibility: “let faith be your sole concern” ([tibi fides] curanda ut augeatur).
Unconditionality is held to be one of the core features of Luther’s theology of salvation. And yet, several statements on salvation in De libertate christiana precisely adopt a conditional form. For instance: “Believe in Christ, in whom grace, righteousness, peace, freedom, and all things are promised to you. If you believe, you will have these things; if you do not believe, you will lack them.”Footnote 103 Conditional propositions do not, on their own, contradict the theological principle of unconditionality. If one grants a priori that faith depends on God alone, conditional syntax may be understood within the classical version of unconditional salvation. Throughout Luther’s corpus, one finds, indeed, developments that combine verbal conditionality and the pure operation of divine grace.Footnote 104 The previous quote differs, however, in that an imperative precedes the conditional statement: En tibi, crede! Luther lays out the crucial alternative and urges the reader to choose the correct option. Furthermore, in the pivotal section dealing with the three “powers of faith,” logical conditionality is supported by positive textual evidence. The second “power of faith” reads thus:
But when God sees that we ascribe truthfulness to him and by our heart’s faith honor him as is his due, then in return God honors us, ascribing to us truthfulness and righteousness on account of this faith. For faith produces truthfulness and righteousness, giving to God his own. Thus, in return God gives glory to our righteousness. […] As 1 Samuel 2[:30] states: ‘For the ones who honor me I will honor, and those who despise me shall be treated with contempt’.Footnote 105
Stoellger reads this passage as entirely predetermined by the “first power” of faith, namely the divine infusion of the Word into the passive human vessel. Accordingly, human agency in the “second power” would amount to a derivative, if not mechanical, consequence of God’s initial gift.Footnote 106 Human activity in this second stage would flow out from the already glorified person, just as good works follow from the primary infusion of faith. De libertate, however, does not state that the “second power” is chronologically consecutive nor logically subordinate to the first. Both “powers” can be read as complementary aspects of a single process. The opening of the “first power,” indeed, portrays the soul as actively adhering to God’s promises while simultaneously being swallowed by them.Footnote 107 Moreover, the thesis of radical logical subordination would imply a double glorification of the person: first, stemming from divine initiative alone; second, from God’s response to the faithful’s positive answer. Even if God remains ultimately the first mover, the “second power” introduces a distinct causal step. God notices faith within the soul, then, consequently (rursus), rewards the faithful with justification. The movement of the believer toward God (reddens Deo suum) strongly suggests Luther had more in mind than the merely negative agency of non-interference with God’s working. As God observes such movement within the person, he is made the subject of passive verbs (tribui; honorari). Strikingly, Luther twice repeats the formula “in return” (rursus) when speaking of God’s giving, a phrase which, alongside the biblical quote, removes all ambiguity regarding causal order within this second stage. Such statements are not unique in Luther. As we have seen, precedents may be found, for instance, in the early Lectures on Romans (1516/1517).Footnote 108 Still, the presence of this idea in De libertate seems nothing short of remarkable.
To conclude with the best-known aspect of Freedom’s mystical bent, Luther frames the ultimate spiritual goal in characteristically mystical manner. Speaking of the “Third Power (or Benefit) of the Faith,” he identifies salvation as a mystical union, a spiritual wedding of the soul with Christ: “The third incomparable benefit of faith is this: that it unites the soul with Christ, like a bride with a bridegroom. By this “mystery” (as Paul teaches), Christ and the soul are made one flesh.”Footnote 109 Despite his unwillingness to proclaim literal deification of man, Luther waxes poetical on the heart’s “melt[ing] in love with Christ” and being “saturated and intoxicated” by divine words – formulas which belong to the most typical vocabulary of medieval mysticism.Footnote 110 Unsurprisingly, in the mystical commerce between the soul and the divine, by which Christ “swallows” and devours all human sins, the divinity plays the dominant role. Nonetheless, such inequality does not challenge the argument of bidirectionality.
Beyond precise terminological parallels between the Freedom of a Christian and Tauler’s Sermon 41, such as the emphasis on the Pauline dichotomy of the exterior and interior person (2 Corinthians 4:16) and the vocabulary of annihilation, more fundamental analogies have emerged.Footnote 111 For both Luther and Tauler, the faithful in tribulations must voluntarily resist the assaults of the lower faculties. Beyond such negative agency, Sermon 41 and De libertate contain similar conditional-causal structures whereby the soul turns toward the divine and then receives an answer from God. For all their insistence on passivity, Tauler and Luther in De libertate both call for the voluntary self-abandonment of the soul and of all human faculties into God. Alongside passivity, they preserve a measure of human agency, one that neither text restricts to the secondary stages of preparation.
Comparing both works also reveals significant divergence. When it comes to human faculties that contribute to the spiritual ascent, Tauler places greater emphasis on affects, emotions (love of God), and volition. We have seen, however, that within the opposition between feeling and intellection, De libertate does not lie at the opposite end of the spectrum. Second, the concrete modalities by which spiritual progress is achieved differ markedly. In Tauler, a great plurality of human faculties are involved in the process, a fact reflected by the complex construct of gemuete that captures the entirety of the soul’s faculties.Footnote 112 For Luther, only clear comprehension of the Word and unconditional belief and trust in its truth, namely, faith, lead to union with God – a decidedly simpler proposition from a formal standpoint, and one arguably easier to comprehend intuitively. Another key difference lies in the structure of the path leading to God. De libertate stresses one pivotal dialectical moment – when the sinner understands his inability to fulfill the law on his own – followed by a gradual increase in faith. Tauler, by contrast, ascribes to the negative a dialectical working function all the way to the end. Each step toward union is highly particularized, and each transition is depicted as a distinct ordeal. Tauler’s mystical ascent stands out as non-linear, if not torturous. In the exceptionally arduous character of the mystical path, one may furthermore identify a residual elitist element in Tauler. Hence, the need for each Christian to attach himself or herself to a spiritual master and, more broadly, to follow the way outlined by the initiated. In Sermon 41, Tauler suggests that, to become God’s friend, one must “befriend” those who have acquired such a status.Footnote 113 Luther achieved a radical simplification of the late medieval mystical framework. This structural transformation corresponds, from a formal standpoint, to his democratization of what had been formerly the preserve of the initiated, numerous as they may have been. De libertate famously declares that all Christians, provided they have faith, may be regarded as “kings and priests.”Footnote 114
IV. Conclusion
To illustrate the distinction between “theological correctness” and simpler, more intuitive religious concepts, Justin Barrett invokes the case of a Calvinist friend who fully believed in the predetermined nature of individual conversions, yet, simultaneously, in her proselytizing mission, “[tried] to persuade others to follow Jesus – acting and representing the people she worked with as if they actually ha[d] any freedom in the matter.”Footnote 115 Could something similar be at play here? Several aspects of Freedom seem peculiarly at odds with classical Lutheran “theological correctness.” To make sense of such discrepancies, several hypotheses must be discussed.
It would be misguided to attribute the idiosyncratic traits of Freedom entirely to its relatively early composition date and to the survival of “Catholic” or “medieval” traits in the young Luther. As mentioned earlier, Luther’s Randbemerkungen on Tauler, written in 1516, strongly emphasize exclusive divine activity and human passivity.Footnote 116 The lack of human agency in the Marginal notes, including those on Sermon 41, challenges the possibility that such a theme in Freedom stemmed from a temporary influence exerted by the Strasburg Dominican. More famously, theses 25–27 of the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) firmly declare the utter primacy of divine operation within the passive believer. All subsequent human activity amounts to God’s working.Footnote 117 Moreover, in his Commentary of the Magnificat, a treatise roughly contemporary of Freedom (1520–1521), Luther praises the Virgin as the ultimate example of a human being whose humility ascribed all her good actions to God, and nothing to herself.Footnote 118
It also appears unlikely that Luther’s treatment of faith in Freedom followed from a desire to placate the pope and ecclesiastical authorities by rendering his doctrine of justification more palatable.Footnote 119 As the history of the tract’s immediate diffusion testifies, Luther’s main goal was less to influence the Supreme Pontiff than to reach the widest audience possible in German-speaking lands.Footnote 120 This supposition is further confirmed by internal evidence from the core of the treatise itself, which is clearly addressed not to a small group of theologians but to the universal community of the faithful. Scholars have even questioned whether the pope ever received the short work at all.Footnote 121
One may postulate the existence of an authentic ambiguity within Luther’s thought between the doctrine of justification through God’s election and operation alone (sola gratia and sola fide) and the idea that the believer ought to contribute, in some way or another, to her or his eschatological destiny. Such a tension already permeated Tauler’s writings, thus stimulating somewhat contradictory modern accounts of his thought. In Luther’s case, a similar situation cannot be discarded a priori. This hypothesis is congruent with Barrett’s theory of “theological correctness.”Footnote 122 According to such a line of thinking – for which Barrett was able to produce some measure of experimental evidence – complex theological concepts, such as the ubiquity of God or the Trinity, contain too many violations of basic cognitive assumptions for the correct doctrine to be upheld in all circumstances. Specifically, when someone is involved in a task divesting attention and mental resources from the pure reflexive apprehension of the correct doctrine (such as narrating a story involving God instead of answering a question on the nature of the Trinity), “errors” are bound to crop up. In such situations, people tend to revert to intuitive religious notions that entail less struggle against realist cognitive biases. This phenomenon may be counteracted in part by disciplined theological training, yet high levels of theological proficiency by no means eliminate it.Footnote 123 Hence, we should expect contradictions and dissonance even within texts produced by theologians. Applied to the present subject, such an interpretation posits that the general principle underlying Pelagianism proves too intuitively attractive to be stamped out fully at all times.
A distinct possibility involves the nature of the text and the type of audience Luther had in mind. Freedom enjoyed a massive and rapid diffusion, as demonstrated by multiple reprints of the German version in 1521, 1522, and 1524. A study of the diffusion of Luther’s printed works finds that, in the first 2 years after publication, 13,000 copies of the tract may have been issued.Footnote 124 Moreover, popular preachers are known to have accelerated even further the diffusion of Freedom’s message.Footnote 125 The extent of this short work’s editorial success led the same scholar to call it a “remarkable best-seller,” and no less than “the turning point that led to the Reformation movement and the eventual foundation of Protestantism.”Footnote 126 In light of its wide-reaching target readership, Luther could have intentionally modified the presentation of his doctrine ever so slightly to appeal to his audience by rendering it more compatible with familiar forms of late medieval spirituality. This explanation relies on Freedom’s function as a pastoral work chiefly formulating practical advice to help readers achieve an authentically Christian life. As such, it does not presuppose any inner contradictions within Luther’s theology of faith.
Given the speculative quality of the two hypotheses, a decisive argument in favor of one or the other appears unlikely. Further, it is possible that some combination of both factors was involved. Consciously or not, Luther may have adapted the form and wording of his discourse to his specific aims. At a primary level, Freedom calls upon the believer to cease pursuing good works so as to obtain divine rewards. To persuade the reader to abandon such a misguided course of action, Luther highlights, at least rhetorically, the simplicity of the task at hand. The programmatic nature of the work may have partly determined a tendency to present faith as the alternative, correct form of doing. Simplified to the extreme, Luther’s message in Freedom may be summarized thus: “You have but one thing to do: believe!”
Although brushing away all difficulties encountered in theological systems as mere contradictions would be absurd, one should caution against automatically prioritizing explanations based on internal systemic coherence. Such interpretations, indeed, tend to erase inconsistencies or minimize their importance, while taking discordant facts seriously often leads to fruitful psychological insights. This study has attempted less to modify our understanding of Luther’s doctrine of justification sola fide than to draw attention to the extraordinary resilience of certain appealing modes of thinking. Subtle traces of residual Pelagianism, that “highly powerful and logical force within religious history,” were certainly difficult to suppress in all contexts.Footnote 127
Acknowledgments
The author wishes to thank Volker Leppin and Carlos Eire for their valuable advice and sustained encouragement.
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