Luther’s whirlwind love affair with St Augustine
What was the turning point that set Luther against the Catholic Church? Not the nailing up of the Ninety-five Theses on the door of Wittenberg castle church, says the historian Richard Rex in his new book The Making of Martin Luther.
He sees the reformer’s driving motive as a pursuit of certainty, principally the certainty of being saved. A crossroads came through his reading – or misreading – of St Augustine.
In 1517, the year of the Ninety-five Theses, there was no sign that Luther had formed the idea that baptism failed to take away all sin. Dr Rex traces the origins of this idea to a literal misreading of a work by Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence.
Since the fourth century Augustine had been the dominant influence on the Western Church. Luther said he did not just read Augustine, he devoured him. The crux is in a passage where Augustine considers how it is that sin (whether the guilt of actual sins or the state of original sin inherited from Adam, the first human) is removed by baptism, and yet there is a concupiscence – a tendency towards sinful acts – that remains in humanity even after baptism. If you want to look up the passage, it is online in volume 56 of the standard edition of Luther’s works, the Weimarer Ausgabe on page 273 (WA 56.273). It’s in Latin, not German.
There, in his so-called Scholia, or commentary, on St Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, Luther notes Augustine’s opinion thus: “The sin concupiscence is remitted in baptism, not so that it does not exist, but so that it is not imputed.” Here Luther got hold of the wrong end of the stick. The word “sin”, peccatum, should not have been attached to “concupiscence” but placed at the other end of the sentence: “Concupiscence is remitted in baptism, not so that it does not exist, but so that it is not imputed [or reckoned] as sin.”
Dr Rex remarks: “In countless later references, doubtless working from memory, he omitted the word concupiscence and spoke only of sin. Thus, for Luther, sin (rather than concupiscence) was what was said by Augustine to be forgiven but not entirely removed in baptism.” In fact, Augustine always maintained that concupiscence of the flesh was not sin in the baptised, since baptism took away sin.
Augustine, in the same book, had even faced the difficulty of why St Paul himself had sometimes called this indwelling weakness in the faithful “sin”. His conclusion was that Paul was using a figure of speech. Augustine, the trained rhetorician, identified the figure of speech as metonymy, by which the name of the cause or effect of a thing is used in place of the name of the thing itself. Since the concupiscence of the flesh was both a cause and an effect of sin, it could be described by Paul metonymically as “sin”.
Why should Luther’s point, about sin remaining after baptism, matter? Because he was aware that in making it he set himself against 1,000 years of theology. “When eventually noised abroad, from 1518,” writes Dr Rex, “it became for his opponents one of the most disturbing elements of his thought.”
Luther dismissed ideas about sin and grace by scholastic theologians such as the 13th century Thomas Aquinas, blaming them for regurgitating Aristotle’s ungraced philosophy. But it would not be long before he was sure that Augustine too had misunderstood St Paul’s teaching on justification by faith alone. After that, Luther, looking back in his Table Talk, remarked, “It was all over with me and Augustine.”