"Chesterton and Luther" by Tom

Many of us are aware of the praise that Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas receives for making a brilliant summary of the philosophy of St. Thomas, and the defects of modern philosophy—this has been the subject of more than one talk at this conference in past years: St. Thomas thought it important to think about reality, Descartes and the moderns thought it more important to think about thinking. St. Thomas’ philosophy focused on the world around us, and modern philosophy replaced metaphysics with logic and burrowed deeper and deeper into the mind itself. As Chesterton said: "the madman has not lost his reason, he has lost everything except his reason." I believe that, along with his summations about modern philosophy in the biography of St. Thomas, Chesterton also seemed to intuit some arcane difficulties with Luther’s epistemology and theology; in particular, his doctrine of justification.

I quote from the ending of the biography of St. Thomas:

"He [Luther] had a peculiar horror and loathing of the great Greek philosophies, and of the Scholasticism that had been founded on those philosophies. He had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology, which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the super-natural help of Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. . . . It is not, as the moderns delight to say, a question of theology. The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge pole. That Protestantism was pessimism; it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell."

Those are harsh things to say about the great reformer; and if it is misunderstood, it may even be thought that Chesterton is suggesting that creation is just fine without God, but that is not the case. If anything it is a stab at what Chesterton perceives to be a type of philosophical Manecheism within the mind of Luther that sees creation as completely contemptible.

How the Reformation Happened

It is popular misconception that Martin Luther was reading the Epistle to the Romans one day when suddenly he discovered justification by faith alone and then started the Reformation based on this new discovery. This is simply not the case. It is more accurate to say that Luther simply got upset—and rightly so—about abuses surrounding the practice of indulgences. Ironically, he set out to stress that good works and penance are more important than obtaining indulgences without interior repentance—which is true. After his public opposition of these abuses, he found himself the unwitting figurehead of a popular disdain for the scandalous behavior of the clergy of the time, and the decay of the popular practice of the faith into superstition and Phariseeism.

The Reformation was, for Luther, a theological matter, but for the vast majority of people, it was a political upheaval looking for its justification in theology. And as time went on, Luther could not keep the reigns on the movement that used his "Ninety Five Thesis" as a take-off point. The average peasant had no idea of the theological questions at stake; he was just looking for a way to stop the Pope from financially bleeding him dry in order to build St. Peter’s. Most Princes, likewise, did not understand the theology; they were looking to profit from Church loot and power that would suddenly become available once the Pope was out of the picture. Luther had no intention of starting anything, much less a movement that would divide Christendom. He was a simple monk, the son of a copper miner; he had no early ambitions of knocking a layer off of the Papal tiara. But once the ball started rolling, a comedy of errors perpetuated a disastrous chain of events—not the least of which were the high pressure tactics and intimidation on the part of high ranking officials in the Catholic Church who wanted to shut Luther up instead of rectify the abuses that Luther correctly attacked. In that, there is as much blame on members of the Catholic hierarchy for the division of Christendom, as there is on the Reformers. Political pressures within Christendom, as well as the threat of Islam without, gave the powers that be enough problems without having to deal with some pesky monk with a theological hang-up.

Nonetheless, there have been many a saint in the history of the Church who were unjustly condemned by members of the hierarchy when they were in fact correct (not the least of which includes St. Thomas Aquinas himself), and these saints waited in patient endurance for their vindication by the Church; and in that Luther seems an even more tragic figure, for I believe he could have been one of the great saints in the history of the Catholic Church had it not been for his doctrinal rebellion against the Episcopacy.

What was different in the case of Luther from these other saints? Why did Luther rebel instead of suffer for his bride? And when he was vindicated on the abuses surrounding indulgences by the papal bull "Cum Postquam" of 1518, why was he not satiated? The answer is complex, but I believe it lies in large part in the fact that Luther was reared in the philosophy of a degenerate form of late scholasticism that had risen up in the previous century and was destined to rock the Church at some point. That philosophy, of which a 14^th century Franciscan by the name of William of Ockham is the figurehead, is called Nominalism. You will recall that Chesterton said that Luther had a theory that was the destruction of theories, and a theology that was the destruction of theology. That theory, that theology, is Nominalism. Luther had been indoctrinated into the philosophical theology of Ockham and his followers, known as the "Via Moderna," in his training at Erfurt, and his doctrine takes the shape of their underlying philosophy.

Luther and Ockham

William of Ockham, whose dates are 1285-1349, was primarily a theologian, but he was also a philosopher, and even Luther said that he was the only philosopher that was any good. Ockham’s overriding philosophical goal is the complete omnipotence of God. Ockham and the Via Moderna posited a radical distinction between the ordained order—that is, the world we know—and the absolute order—that is, all of the other options open to God. This distinction between the possibilities open to God, and the order that God did in fact choose, is derived from his belief that God is completely extrinsic from his creation and is therefore completely unknowable by deduction based on the world around us. St. Thomas’s philosophy, by contrast, is based on the assumption that the natural order points to the essence of the Creator; Ockham’s philosophy will not allow God to be discovered so easily. Ockham denied that the existence of God could be philosophically proven; it is to be accepted only by faith. He regarded discussions about the attributes of God, such as mercy and justice, to be mere discussions about the correct meaning of words. Nature has no discernable intelligibility or order of its own, because this would impose restrictions on God’s omnipotence. Discussions about the essence of things have no real cognitive meaning. Since there is no real nature to things, and thus no real relation between them, it follows that causality is to be rejected: It cannot be philosophically proven that any effect follows from a cause. Fire accompanies heat, not because it is in the nature of fire to produce heat, but because God directly wills each and every occurrence of the one following the other. The natural order depends solely on the arbitrary will of God. It seems that God became incarnate in His creation only to have Ockham kick Him out again. Ockham’s radical distinction between faith and reason makes faith extraneous; there is no real reason for the faith.

In Ockham’s world, our knowledge is certain, but does not convey any information about reality. And our empirical observations are never really certain, for they depend on the arbitrary will of God, and not on the metaphysical nature of the subject. For example: God could cause an object to appear that isn’t really there, or He could have decreed that adultery is a virtuous act; in which case it would be. The only way to know what God has decreed is by revelation; it isn’t inscribed in us by nature. In doing this, Ockham felt that he was freeing the Christian faith from the influence of pagan philosophy. Ironically, Ockham also believed that the pagan without revelation could act virtuously by following his conscience; but how these two ideas can be squared is not clear.

Ockham’s extrinsic God, excluded from real interaction with His creation, is perfectly suited to a Deist like Descartes, or even an agnostic like David Hume. Etienne Gilson, in his work "Unity of Philosophical Experience" writes:

"Finally, I fully agree that it is an overstatement to call Ockham a 'mediaeval Hume'. . . But, nevertheless, it would be just as great a mistake not to quote Hume in relation to William of Ockham, for there is a close affinity between their philosophical doctrines. St. Thomas Aquinas could not have accepted Hume’s Empiricism without completely wrecking his own theology, whereas Hume’s philosophy could have dwelt with Ockham’s theology without doing it much harm. As a matter of fact, an inarticulate world such as Hume’s was most suitable to the arbitrary will of Ockham’s God . . .Having expelled from the mind of God the intelligible world of Plato, Ockham was satisfied that no intelligibility could be found in any one of God’s works.   Instead of being an eternal source of that concrete order of intelligibility and beauty, which we call nature, Ockham’s God was expressly intended to relieve the world of the necessity of having any meaning of its own . . . As a philosopher, however, it was Ockham’s privilege to usher into the world what I think is the first known case of a new intellectual disease."

Luther's Mistake

With the philosophy just described, one might expect the Via Moderna to have a theology of justification that would make God a despot who winds up robots, but the opposite is actually the case. Ockham and his followers believed that the subject for justification must do his very best by his own natural powers, in order to then merit God’s grace. The Via Moderna, then, obviously had a very high estimation of the natural powers of man. The fall into Original Sin did little more than mess up our psychology, and grace was little more than God providing us with correct information. The Via Moderna’s theology lumbers along without Christ, because they could not really fit Him into our salvation: Christ’s action on the cross is reduced to merely providing a good example, and grace is conditional on our following that example (conditional grace is, of course, a contradiction in terms).

While the young Luther was an adherent of the scheme of the Via Moderna, over time he came to despise the idea that man had to do his very best first, in order to merit grace; and he was right. But, Luther went so far as to deny that man possessed free will and a renewed nature even after grace—though confessional Lutheranism, following Melancthon, departed from Luther on this point, and the Reformed tradition actually followed Luther more closely than the Lutherans did.

Ockham and the Via Moderna also believed—as Luther would later—that justification is a declarative act that does not correspond to anything in the essence of the subject. Luther makes his epistemological Nominalism evident by this rejection of the idea that human righteousness is somehow analogous to Divine qualities. The righteousness of God is not merely beyond man, but is something alien to human understanding; and a concept of grace as a property of God that is somehow part of us, is antithetical to the Nominalist insistence that only ontologically separate things exist with no common essence. Luther, following Ockham, thought that it is a perversion of theology to see the created order as hinting at the Divine; true theology seeks God exclusively in Revelation (incidentally, this gives birth to Sola Scriptura). Chesterton expressed this earlier when he said that Luther had a loathing of the great Greek philosophies; it’s because those philosophies taught that creation carries some hint of the Creator.

The correct understanding of the effects of grace and justification, as defined by the Second Council of Orange in 529 and approved by Pope Bonifice II, is that grace is a property that is infused into us by God, and empowers free-will. Justification, then, is—as the council of Trent put it—a transformation from being a child of Adam, to the state of being a child of God. All our salvific actions, desires, and inclinations proceed from a prior empowerment by God; the natural man is completely unable to help himself or merit grace. But once enlivened by grace, man becomes a new creation, a child of God, a "partaker of the Divine nature" (2 Peter 1:4). In the words of the Council of Trent, the gifts of God are our merits, and we are not left to our nature, but lifted above it.

The Church’s official teaching is then in direct contradiction to the Via Moderna; but the Second Council of Orange seems to have been unknown to medieval theologians. There was a large amount of confusion about the doctrine of justification at the time of Luther, and many high-ranking and esteemed prelates and theologians in the Catholic Church held a view of justification that was heretical. Even the Council of Trent—and some of you will find this shocking—did not condemn it in an unambiguous way. When Trent said that grace precedes our salvific actions, the Via Moderna read that as God first providing the correct information for us to act upon—which is heresy. The theology of the Via Moderna was a cancer in the medieval Church that many Catholic apologists are unaware of; they therefore, do not correctly understand the Protestant charge. And from the start, those who debated Luther did and said things that exacerbated the problem rather than help it. If we look at some of the things that Eck, Usigen, and even Cardinal Cajetan said to Luther in debate, its hard to imagine how they could have said anything worse.

But, the Church’s teaching is opposed to Luther also, because once man receives grace he is elevated to something more than he was before. Luther’s over-arching goal was to stress that salvation is pure gift, and does not originate in man’s initiative. Protestantism, from the beginning sought to make it clear that God is not to be dealt with as an equal, and without God’s grace we are helpless. This is true, but Luther attacked the Catholic Church for a position it did not hold. I believe that the recent "Joint Declaration on Justification" between the Vatican and the Lutheran World Federation illustrates that Luther’s theological battle with the Catholic Church on justification was in part, a mistake.

The Problem of the Protestant Formula

The problem with the Protestant formulation of justification is not salvation by grace, or even the use of the expression "faith alone" when it is meant in the sense that it is more than intellectual assent only and includes hope and charity. The problem is that the Reformers insisted that justification is a "forensic," "imputation" of the "alien righteousness of Christ" that does not change the believer inwardly; Luther illustrated this by the image of a dung heap covered by snow. Amazingly, Luther also believed that justification is a process by which the Holy Spirit indwells the believer, but how those two concepts intersect without contradicting, is a problem that Protestantism has never resolved.

The question the Catholic has about the Protestant formulation, therefore, is "if justification is a forensic declaration that does not inwardly change the sinner, how can I produce a saving faith by my own power?" Now Protestants will not deny that the sinner is inwardly transformed, but they insist that this transformation is called "regeneration," not "justification." We can call the inward change whatever we wish—"justification," "regeneration," or "chop suey" for all I care—the point is that it happens. And if we all agree that it happens, why do we keep fighting about it?

In any case, the Reformation neglected an adequate theology of what man is after the reception of grace. So fearful are the Reformed in particular, that a good work might be attributed to man, that they forget that salvation itself is the work of a man: the God-man. Following Luther, Protestant academic theology pits the work of man against the work of God without considering that in Christ the two things are in fact one. When man becomes adopted into Christ he shares His Sonship and so shares His redemptive work through the power of being recreated in Christ. This is why Protestant theology has no place for Mary, the communion of saints, Purgatory, Indulgences, etc., etc. Because, if justification is a forensic, legal declaration, devoid of ontological content, then Catholic Marian doctrines, prayers to saints, and Indulgences, are unintelligible at best. It is only if we are adopted into God’s family, and that has a real ontological content, that our connection to each other in the Body of Christ can be understood.

We could say that Ockham committed the heresy of saying that before grace, man is too much. Luther, in an overreaction, committed the heresy of saying that after grace, man is too little. What Luther, rightly, wanted to stress was that mindlessly enduring the "machinery" of sacraments, rote devotions, ossified rituals, and prayers to saints, cannot replace an interior and personal relationship with Christ. This is a noble and worthy concern, and any Catholic who thinks otherwise would do well to heed the Protestant warning. But it is a false dichotomy to pit sacrament against faith in Christ; for the sacraments are the work of Christ applied to us. The Protestant warning is good as far as it goes, but it errs when it goes to the extreme of denying any concrete, sacramental expression of grace in the natural order. The objective signs of grace—the sacraments—are replaced by a subjective assertion of faith. Private judgment becomes the sole arbiter of truth, and judge of the Church; which is therefore smaller than the individual. The Church possesses no ontological reality of its own, but is nothing more than the sum of its members; and her sacraments become a mere psychological assistance to a faith that is completely subjective and individualistic.

History and the Church become obstacles to be overcome in the search for the "real Jesus," and the individual bestows onto the church an authority of which he is the real possessor. Since the Church is seen as a mere abstraction of various scriptural texts, the individual is left to decide by the strength of his own knowledge, whether or not the historic decisions of the Church are "Biblical." The objectivity of the faith, manifest concretely by the Church and her sacraments, is replaced by a steady diet of the particular pastor’s personal devotions and interpretations, and the worth of church attendance is measured by the quality of the sermon. All of this is the exact opposite of the Reformation's intention of extolling the sovereignty of God. It is in the objective, sacramental expression of grace, not dependent on subjective knowledge, intention or creativity, that God’s sovereignty is truly made manifest.

Protestants and Catholics:  Understanding the Divide

As the Joint Declaration on Justification makes clear, there is a substantial consensus between Protestants and Catholics on the issue of justification. There are plenty of other issues on which we do not agree—the goal posts have indeed moved since the Reformation—but we should confine our squabbles to those things that we do in fact disagree on and not invent divisions that are not there. Anglican theologian J. I. Packer, in his book "Knowing God," laments that a theology of adoption has been neglected in Protestant history. But what Packer is calling "adoption," Catholics call "justification." Despite this, there are any number of Protestant theologians and apologists who continue to churn out books that condemn any agreement with the Catholic Church as a compromise of the Gospel. Reformed theologian R.C. Sproul continues to write books that say that any agreement that does not stress that justification is forensic is guilty of betraying the Gospel. But how can we make sense of the insistence that the sinner is not inwardly changed, along side of the affirmation that he was already inwardly changed in order that he could believe in the first place? And even the Reformed "Second Helvetic Confession" affirms that grace enables free will! Chesterton, in reference to his own conversion, wrote that it was no longer a question of maintaining the Protestant faith, but of maintaining the Protestant feud.

Remember that Chesterton said in the opening quote that the Protestantism of Luther was a despair of all human virtue as an attempt to escape Hell, and that no modern Protestant accepts the pessimism of Luther’s doctrine. The fact that Protestants do not adhere in practice to a doctrine that man is still wretched after grace, and do, and in some cases heroically, believe and live out in their daily lives a faith that is life-transforming and filled with an awareness of the work of the Holy Spirit in their lives, enlivens a hope that the problems of academic expositions of doctrinal disputes between Catholics and Protestants may not be intractable. If a consensus can be reached on justification, which was the material cause of the Reformation, then one can hope that the Holy Spirit has more in store for us. I sure hope so because we need each other desperately.

Conclusion

In Chesterton’s biography of St. Thomas Aquinas, he compares St. Thomas and St. Francis. We could just as easily posit a meaningful comparison between Luther and Chesterton: Their life spans were the same within two months; both men were prolific writers; both men were mystics in their own right: Luther’s spiritual writings are comparable in many ways to the writing of St. John of the Cross. Chesterton had that intense enthusiasm for life that could be termed mystical in its own right. Both men saw themselves as champions of the common man, and in some respects Luther was just that. He wanted to get the Gospel out of ivory towers and give it to the common man; the second Vatican Council expressed that same concern. Finally, both Luther and Chesterton were brave men: Chesterton in taking on the great minds of his time, Luther for facing the possibility of a heretic’s death—a very unpleasant prospect at the time.

But while there are some similarities, it is not hard to see why the pessimistic and despairing element of Luther’s theory was repulsive to Chesterton. From the "Well and the Shallows" Chesterton writes: "It is difficult to imagine any doctrine that could make man more base, describe human nature as more desperately impotent, blacken the reason and the will of man with a more utterly bottomless and hopeless despair than did the real doctrine of Luther." Chesterton could never accept a sterile god severed from creation. For Chesterton, life itself was sacramental: every fiber of the created world announced the glory of the Creator. His was a world of mystery and magic; a world charged with wonder and grace. We are talking, after all, about a man who believed that the reason a river runs downhill is because of magic; and the reason the sun comes up every morning is because God, like an excited child, says "do it again, do it again." Chesterton could never accept the bondage of liberty that was the ironic prison of Luther’s "grace;" he could never tolerate the idea that man is only a dung heap when God gets through with him, no matter how much snow he wears as a disguise.

I am grateful to have come upon the life and works of Gilbert Keith Chesterton. He taught me how to think; and he taught me that I have not yet learned to think. I cannot capture him; he is a greater man than I. It is more than his good arguments (of which there are plenty) and his artistic style, it is the sheer exhilaration with life that is Chesterton’s true worth. And like the grace of justification itself, the delight of Chesterton, which is itself the import and consequence of a right standing before God, is an infused grace that cannot be merited.

CHURCH BELIEFS & ISSUES

WHAT THE EARLY CHURCH BELIEVED

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