The Thomist 62 (1998): 163-91 MARTIN LUTHER ON GRACE, LAW, AND MORAL LIFE: PROLEGOMENA TO AN ECUMENICAL DISCUSSION OF VERITATIS SPLENDOR DAVID S. YEAGO Lutheran Theological Southern Seminary Columbia, South Carolina I. INTRODUCTION E VERY DISCUSSION of the relationship of Martin Luther's thought to moral life and moral discourse necessarily lies under the shadow of a long-standing tendency of the Lutheran theological tradition that has been well described by the Anglican moral theologian Oliver O'Donovan: The Lutheran tradition, which of all theological traditions has most strongly cherished the Pauline dialectic of law and gospel, has usually found it difficult to accept that an ordered moral demand can be, in and of itself, evangelical. The antithesis between Moses and Christ has been widened to encompass a total opposition between order and transcendence. The liberating activity of God is marked by its insusceptibility to characterization in terms of order, while order, even the order of creation, has been classed with law rather than gospel, and so assigned a purely provisional and transitory significance. 1 The outcome is, as O'Donovan shows, that for most Lutheran theologians morality and grace are disjointed and even opposed themes; even when a normative moral order is affirmed-and most Lutheran theologians have in fact affirmed a normative moral order-that order is viewed as having nothing to do with the gospel. Moral order is necessary where grace is absent: it subjects the unruly flesh to a needful rough governance, and 1 0 liver O'Donovan, Resurrectionand Moral Order:An Outline for EvangelicalEthics (Grand Rapids, 1986), 153. 163 164 DAVID S. YEAGO prepares the heart for grace by the stringency of its demands. But when grace arrives on the scene, moral order has reached its limit and termination; the gospel initiates a relationship between God and human beings which is not only more than moral, but altogether other than moral. O'Donovan rightly pinpoints the divergence between grace and morality with the concept of order: for most Lutheran theologians, grace is grace precisely because it in no way seeks to put the life of the sinner "in order"-if it did so, it would be law, not grace. On the contrary, grace simply embraces the sinner in God's unconditional favor, an acceptance and affirmation that are wholly indifferent to right and wrong, good and evil, order and disorder. It seems apparent, on the face of it, that between such a Lutheranism and Veritatis Splendor there can be no dialogue, only fundamental, principled opposition. The Pope declares that the gift of God's grace "does not lessen but reinforces the moral demands of love .... One can 'abide' in love only by keeping the commandments." 2 It seems clear that a Lutheranism that defines grace by its disconnection from and indifference to the moral could have no very interesting conversation with this teaching. I want to suggest, however, that on this point, as on many others, Lutheranism's reception of Martin Luther's theology has been only partial, and in this case profoundly misleading. It is possible, and I shall argue preferable, to read Luther as proposing not the separation of grace from moral order, but their thorough integration. The morality that grace terminates, the law that the gospel overcomes, is precisely and specifically a moral order alienated from grace, a morality which is therefore alienated from the true end of human existence and can only issue in the twin evils of presumption and despair. Far from being indifferent to good and evil, order and disorder, the bestowal of God's grace through the gospel is for Luther the only true formation of the human heart, that which alone sets the heart truly in order. Read in this way, I would suggest, Luther becomes an ecumenical resource and challenge for Lutherans and Catholics alike, 2 Veritatis Splendor §24. LUTHER AND VERITAIIS SPLENDOR 165 neither the patron saint of Lutheranism-as-usual nor the antithesis of authentic Catholicism. Despite his undeniable and extraordinary creativity, he stands in a tradition, with deep roots in the Fathers and especially, though not exclusively, the monastic writers of the Latin Middle Ages. We should read him as a highly original representative of this older theological tradition, who contributes to Lutheran-Catholic convergence precisely as a critic of the separation of grace and moral life that has more recently been persistent in both traditions, although in different ways. The opposition between grace and moral order in standard Lutheranism has a dear historical origin: the tendency of Lutherans to take a particular existential situation, the situation of the penitent seeking absolution, as the exclusive interpretive context within which notions such as grace and commandment, law and gospel, are to be understood. It is easy to see how grace and moral order can be construed as antithetical to one another against this background. The penitent comes overtaxed by the demands of moral order, conscious of failure, anxious and selfcondemning. What the penitent seeks is precisely to be absolved, that is, "cut loose" from the unmanageable burden imposed by the law, set free from the unendurable pressure of a demand which he or she cannot satisfy. In this context, the gospel, the word of absolution, the word of grace, inevitably appears as a word that forbids the law to destroy the conscience of the penitent. That is, the gospel is the word that sets a limit to the sway of the moral order and its demands, and just so brings the penitent into a relationship with God that is not defined by issues of demand and deserving, reward and punishment. This is, of course, the famous "problem of the troubled conscience" which looms so large in nearly all modern Protestant interpretations of the Reformation. There is no doubt that there was a real pastoral problem of this sort in the sixteenth century, and that Luther's reforming theology owed much of its persuasiveness to its success in addressing it. The question is whether Luther in fact addresses this problem by developing the theology of grace in terms that are exhaustively defined by the experience of the troubled conscience. Lutheran theology has often assumed so, which is why the increasingly short supply of troubled 166 DAVID S. YEAGO consciences in the twentieth century has seemed so threatening to Lutheran theologians. I want to suggest an alternative possibility: Luther addresses the problem of the troubled conscience, not by making it the defining framework of his theology of grace, but by placing it within a broader framework, within a reading of the biblical story of creation, fall, and redemption. Luther's understanding of the relationship of grace and moral order, gospel and law, is not, therefore, exhausted by the simple conflict between the two in the experience of the penitent; that experience is itself part of a larger narrative, a complex story of divine purpose and its realization, and it is to this narrative context that we must look to understand his account of divine law and its place in the work of the gracious God. Grace and moral order within a narrative of creation, fall, and redemption: what this most obviously adds to the picture is the dimension of creation, which is entirely absent from standard Lutheran oppositional accounts of law and gospel, moral order and grace. It is, I want to argue, from the perspective of creation, specifically the human being's creation in the image of God, that Luther affirms the unity of grace and the moral life, a unity that transcends and embraces the penultimate bitter opposition of law and gospel in the experience of the penitent sinner. It is only from this perspective, moreover, that we can make sense of the full complexity of Luther's account of the relationship between faith and good works in the life of the justified, a complexity which has not often been fully appreciated. II. SIN, GRACE, AND ORIGINAL RIGHTEOUSNESS Luther's most extensive exposition of the first three chapters of Genesis is found in the great Commentary on Genesis which occupied his teaching in the last decade of his life; the lectures on the first three chapters date from 15 35. 3 In his exegesis of Genesis 3 Except where otherwise noted, the citations of Luther are taken from D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe (Weimar, 1883ff.), hereafter referred to as WA. In a table-talk from the beginning of November 1536, Luther says that he must lecture in the morning on Noah's drunkenness (Genesis 9:21); this suggests that he must have finished the first three chapters in 1535. On dating, cf. LUTHER AND VERITAIIS SPLENDOR 167 1 :26, "Let us make the human creature to our image and likeness," Luther defines the "image" in terms of the "spiritual life" for which Adam was created: he was created "having a twofold life, animal and immortal, but the latter not yet revealed in full clarity, but in hope.''4 Adam lived a spiritual life from the moment of his creation, a spiritual life whose consummation would have been an ultimate transcending of the "animal" plane of existence altogether: "Moreover, the theologians rightly say that if Adam had not fallen through sin, then when the number of the saints had been completed, God would have translated them from an animal life to a spiritual life."5 While "spiritual life" thus contained within itself the certain hope of immortality, its heart was communion with God, the total attunement of all Adam's powers to love for God and trust in God: Therefore, I understand the image of God in this way: that Adam had it in his substance that he not only knew God and believed him to be good, but that he also lived a life that was entirely divine [vitam vixerit plane divinam], that is, he was without fear of death and all dangers, content with the grace of God. 6 Two points about this definition need a bit more comment. First, Luther's talk of the image of God in terms of "an entirely divine life" and the grace of God is by no means merely incidental. There is more than sufficient evidence in the text that Luther is quite deliberately describing the image of God as theosis, the deification of the human creature by God's gracious love. 7 Thus the editor's preface to WA 42:vii-xviii. The Lectures on Genesis, which were published in full only after Luther's death, are controversial; there have been (in my opinion exaggerated) claims in modern scholarship of tampering by the editors. But the exegesis of Genesis 1-11 was published in Luther's lifetime with his approval (and with a preface from his own hand); the exegesis of Genesis 1-3 may therefore be taken unproblematically as his own. 'WA 42:43. 'WA42:42. 6 WA 42:47. 7 On this text in the broader context of Luther's thought, see Simo Peura, "Die Teilhabe an Christus bei Luther," in Simo Peura and Antti Raunio, eds., Luther und Theosis: Vergottlichungals Thema der abendliindischenTheologie (Helsinki and Erlangen, 1990), 121-61. The contemporary Helsinki school of Luther interpreters has drawn attention to the importance of the theosis-theme in Luther; see Tuomo Mannermaa, "Theosis as a Subject of Finnish Luther Research," Pro Ecclesia:A Journalof Catholicand EvangelicalTheology 4:37-48. I have examined the Christological roots of theosis in Luther's thought 168 DAVID S. YEAGO immediately following this definition, Luther presents God as saying to our first parents: "Adam and Eve, you now live secure, you neither experience death nor see it; this is my image, by which you live as God lives. But if you sin, you shall lose this image and you shall die." 8 Likewise, says Luther, the special divine deliberation over the creation of Eve shows "that the human being is a unique creature, and is meant for fpertinere ad] participation in deity and immortality." 9 This becomes even clearer when Luther interprets the image of God in which Adam and Eve were created by reference to the restoration of the image in Christ. Adam's life in the image of God already looked forward to a final consummation when the animal life he shared with the beasts would have been transcended in his translation to a purely spiritual life in God; in Christ, the hope of this consummated spiritual life has been restored to us, and thus we have begun to recover the imago dei. We may therefore understand the image of God at the beginning in terms of the beatitude now promised us in Christ, and this means understanding the image of God in terms of theosis, shared life with God by grace: However, the gospel now brings it about that the image is repaired. Intellect and will have indeed survived, but both have been exceedingly corrupted. Therefore the gospel brings it about that we are re-formed to that image, or rather to a better one, because we are reborn by faith to eternal life, or rather to the hope of eternal life, that we may live in God and with God, and be one with him, as Christ says. 10 This is the heart of the image: "to live in God and with God, and to be one with him," and therefore, as Luther also says, "to be like God in life, righteousness, holiness, wisdom, etc." 11 A second point may require somewhat more extended exposition: Luther's ecumenically notorious claim that Adam had this spiritual life, this deification by grace, "in his substance." in "The Bread of Life: Patristic Christology and Evangelical Soteriology in Martin Luther's Sermons on John 6," The St. Vladimir'sTheologicalQuarterly 39:257-79. 8 WA 42:47; my emphasis. 9 WA42:87. 10 WA 42:48. 11 WA42:49. LUTHER AND VER/TATIS SPLENDOR 169 Luther discusses this claim at length in terms of the traditional notion of original righteousness, which he identifies with the imago dei; his contention is that original righteousness was "truly natural" to Adam, so that "it was Adam's nature to love God, to trust God, to acknowledge God, etc. " 12 This claim is ecumenically notorious because of its apparent implications for the significance of original sin, the loss of original righteousness: if original righteousness was part of Adam's nature, then original sin would seem to involve a transformation of the original created humanness into something else, in which what it means to be human has come to be defined by sin. Protestants have often applauded this as authentic seriousness about human corruption, while Catholics have denounced it as Manichaean. Both parties have badly misunderstood Luther's position, because neither has been willing to entertain the possibility that Luther is thinking in essentially traditional terms. Luther's polemic against certain later medieval Scholastic views has been taken as evidence that his view is an innovation over against the whole preceding Christian tradition; thus certain of his formulae have been seized on and developed with very little attention to the detail of his own exposition of them. This is indeed, I believe, a crucial juncture in Luther's thought, and the failure of subsequent Protestant and Catholic polemics to grasp its significance has had catastrophic consequences precisely for the way in which the ecumenical problem of law and gospel, moral order and grace, has been defined. The crucial question is surely in what sense Luther describes original righteousness, deification by grace, as part of Adam's "nature." Once this question is asked, moreover, as it almost never has been, the answer is not in fact difficult to determine. Luther writes: These things [loving, trusting, and acknowledging God] were natural in Adam just as it is natural for the eyes to receive light. But because, if you render an eye defective by the infliction of a wound, you would rightly say that its nature has been damaged, so after the human being has fallen from righteousness into sin, it is rightly and truly said that the nature is not whole [integral but 12 WA42:124. DAVID S. YEAGO 170 corrupted by sin. For as it is the nature of the eye to see, so it was the nature of reason and will in Adam to know God, to trust God, to fear God. Now since it is agreed that these things are lost, who would be so crazy as to say that things belonging to the nature [naturalia] are still whole? 13 It should be sufficiently clear what Luther is doing here: he is speaking of Adam's "nature" in terms of its finality, in terms of the acts that are its telos, its fulfillment. "For as it is the nature of the eye to see, so it was the nature of reason and will in Adam to know God, to trust God, to fear God." The act of seeing is the finality proper to the eye, and in that sense its "nature"; in the same way, the acts of knowing, trusting, and fearing God constitute the finality proper to the human mind and will, and in this sense original righteousness was "Adam's nature." Luther's habit of speaking about natures in terms of their finality is, it should be noted, quite deliberate; we do not need merely to infer that this is what he is doing, he tells us so. In his exegesis of Genesis 2:21, the story of Eve's creation from Adam's rib, Luther argues that the distinctively theological knowledge of creatures, the knowledge of creatures provided by Holy Scripture, is a knowledge precisely in terms of efficient and final causality. Apart from Holy Scripture, he says, "all our understanding or wisdom is located exclusively in the knowledge of the material and formal cause, although with respect to these too we are subject to many shameful delusions." 14 The philosophers have some knowledge of the formal principles of human nature, and some understanding of the material substance of the human body. But the source and purpose of our lives can only be known from the word of God: Therefore let us learn that true wisdom is in the Holy Scripture and in the word of God. For it teaches not only about the matter, not only about the form, of the whole creation, but also about the efficient and final cause, about the origin and goal of all things: who has created us and to what end he has created. Without the knowledge of these two causes, our wisdom is not much different from that of the animals, who also make use of their eyes and ears, but are entirely ignorant of their origin and goal. 15 13 Ibid. 14 WA42:93. 15 WA42:94. LUTHER AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 171 This is a constant view of Luther's, from as early as the Lectures on Romans of 1515-16; 16 thus when Luther talks about what is "natural" to the human creature in terms of finality, in terms of that for which God created humankind, he is being consistent with his own settled and explicit view of the theological knowledge of creatures. The interpretation of Luther's thought on this point needs, therefore, to be brought out from under the shadow of the Flacian controversy. In the generation after Luther's death, the Lutheran theologian Matthias Flacius Illyricus taught that since the Fall, original sin has become the nature of the human creature, a position condemned in the Formula of Concord. 17 It is fair to suggest that Luther's account of original righteousness and original sin has almost always been read with primary reference to the controversy over Flacius's views. But if the reading of Luther given here is correct, then Luther and Flacius use the term "nature" in essentially different ways. Flacius does indeed seem to have taught that original righteousness was part of the substantial form of human nature, so that its loss left humankind with a different nature, one for which original sin is constitutive. Luther, by contrast, speaks of nature in terms of final, not formal, causality: the loss of the grace of original righteousness leaves humankind not with a different nature, formally considered, but with a nature permanently frustrated, unable to attain its own proper telos. Human nature is damaged and corrupted by original sin just as the nature of the eye is damaged and corrupted by a blinding wound: it cannot do what it was created to do, it cannot do what it is good for it to do. This account, it should be noted, only makes sense if the formal principles of human nature remain unchanged: one would not say that an eye was "damaged" by blindness if it was so transformed that it was no longer an organ intended to receive light. WA 56:371ff. "If one wants to speak properly, a distinction must be made between our nature, as it has been created and preserved by God, in which sin dwells, and original sin itself, which dwells in our nature" (Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, art. 1, para. 33, in Die Bekenntnisscbriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche, 11th ed. [Giittingen, 1992], 854-55). Hereafter cited as BSELK. 16 Cf. the exegesis of Romans 8:19, 17 172 DAVID S. YEAGO Flacius's view, that original sin is a constitutive principle of the nature of fallen humanity, leaves us with no reason to regret the loss of original righteousness except the external threat of damnation; if sin is an essential principle of our nature, then we cannot say that our nature is frustrated or corrupted by our inability to love and trust God. Luther's account is quite different: "The nature remains, to be sure, but it is corrupted in many ways, since confidence towards God is lost, and the heart is full of diffidence, fear, and shame." 18 We can also see, from this perspective, why Luther rejects so vigorously the definition of original righteousness as a donum superadditum, a "gift added on" to created nature. Here again, it is important to pay close attention to the precise terms of his critique and not get sidetracked into misleading generalities about Luther and "Scholasticism." Luther describes the view he is rejecting in these terms: The Scholastics argue that original righteousness was not connatural, but a sort of ornament added to the human being as a gift, as though someone placed a wreath on a pretty girl. The wreath is certainly not part of the nature of the maiden, but something separate from her nature, which accrued from without and can be taken away again without damage to her nature. Thus they argue concerning human beings and demons that even if they have lost original righteousness, still the things that pertain to nature have remained pure, as they were constituted in the beginning. But this view, because it mitigates original sin, should be avoided like poison. 19 What Luther is rejecting is the late medieval use of the notion of original righteousness as a "gift added on" in the service of extrinsicist views of nature and grace. That is, he is rejecting views according to which the communion with God granted by the grace of original righteousness is only extrinsically related to human nature, so that when original righteousness is lost, human nature simply returns to normal functioning. On the contrary, Luther wants to say, human nature "as it was constituted in the beginning" has and can have no other fulfillment, no other finality, than communion with God by grace. Losing grace, "WA 42:125. 19 WA 42:123-124. LUTHER AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 173 therefore, we do not simply lose an adventitious and artificial ornamentation, like a girl losing a wreath; we lose precisely the normal and "natural" actualization of our human capacities, and are condemned to a life of futility. As Luther's view of the relationship of created human nature and the grace of original righteousness emerges from this reading of the Commentary on Genesis, those who are familiar with the history of twentieth-century Roman Catholic theology may find themselves experiencing a bit of deja vu. Luther argues that the finality of human nature, the end for which we were created and in which we find our only possible fulfillment, is deifying communion with God: "to live in God and with God and to be one with him." The natural telos of our created nature cannot, therefore, be reached except by God's grace, for only grace can bring us into deifying communion with God. For this reason, the loss of the grace of original righteousness cannot be viewed as merely the loss of an extrinsic addition to normal human existence; it is the loss of the very possibility of normal human existence, since for the human creature normal existence is existence by grace. It is surprising to begin with to find that Luther actually has an account of the relationship of nature and grace, since this whole pattern of thinking is widely assumed to be alien to his thought. But even more surprising, perhaps, is the character of his account: it turns out to be largely identical in substance with the teaching recovered in our own century, and described as the classical teaching of the western Augustinian tradition, by the great Roman Catholic scholar Henri Cardinal de Lubac.20 Three points of comparison are especially important. First, Luther's theology of the human creature in the image of God is plainly a version of what de Lubac called "the Christian paradox of the human creature": the finality or goal of our created nature cannot be attained by the innate powers of our nature but only by the help of God's merciful and undeserved grace, since the only 20 See Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed 1967). York: Herder, 174 DA YID S. YEAGO goal which is actually appointed for us is to be deified, to be one with God, to love and trust God and thus to cling to him. 21 Second, de Lubac's description of Augustine's way of talking about human nature, in terms of finality rather than form, matches Luther's procedure to the letter; as St. Thomas already pointed out, "Augustine speaks of human nature considered not with respect to its natural being [in esse naturali] but insofar as it is ordered to blessedness. " 22 Third, Luther and de Lubac are in a sense fighting the same opponent: a late-medieval construal of the relationship of nature and grace as purely extrinsic, so that the loss of original grace would in principle leave nature in a state of intact and indeed "normal" function. It is interesting that the villain of de Lubac's historical narrative tends to be Luther's old adversary, Cardinal Cajetan; for de Lubac, Cajetan is the most important originator of a catastrophic misreading of St. Thomas on nature and grace that led much of post-Reformation Scholasticism down essentially barren paths. At the same time, it is striking that de Lubac pays no sustained attention to the nominalist writers in whom Luther probably encountered this view, even though the via moderna surely seems a more likely seedbed for extrinsicism than the via antiqua. In any event, if such commentators as de Lubac and Otto Herman Pesch are right about the authentic teaching of St. Thomas, then he and Luther are materially much closer at this crucial starting point than either Catholic or Protestant scholars have typically imagined. Luther does indeed reject certain conceptual moves that are to be found in Aquinas, but these moves arguably function quite differently in St. Thomas's thought than in the late-medieval extrinsicism that Luther has in view. Ill. LAW IN THE CONTEXT OF NATURE AND GRACE Now we are now in a position to consider how Luther's understanding of the law of God, the divine commandment, is related to and shaped by this underlying theology of nature and 21 Ibid., chap. 6, entitled 22 "The Christian Paradox of Man." St. Thomas Aquinas, De spiritua/ibus creaturis, a. 8, ad 1. LUTHER AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 175 grace. We can begin to see this by considering his exegesis of Genesis 2:9 and 16, which deal with the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and God's command that Adam not eat of it. Luther is well aware of the importance of the issues implicit in these verses: here we have divine law, divine commandment, prior to the entry of sin into the world, and this raises fundamental questions about the very idea of law, especially for a theology in which the accusing law that exposes sin plays such a large role. Indeed, Luther writes that he was once "harassed" by a "fanatic spirit" who argued thus: St. Paul says that no law is laid down for the righteous. Adam was righteous. Therefore this was not a law or commandment but only an admonition: God urged but did not command Adam to refrain from eating of the tree of knowledge. But St. Paul also says that where there is no law, there is no transgression; therefore Adam and Eve did not sin when they ate of the fruit of the tree. Thus there is no original sin. Notice that this is precisely the sort of antinomian logic to which modern Lutherans have been especially attracted. Law has no role except as the accuser and tormentor of the sinful conscience; there could thus be no place for law and commandment in the sinless and grace-filled relationship of God to unfallen humanity. The further ironical consequence, that, since a gracious God would never impose commandments on us in the first place, the notion of sin finally falls altogether by the wayside, has perhaps also not been unfamiliar to either Catholics or Protestants in recent times. It is important therefore that Luther simply rejects the logic of this argument, which fails to make the proper distinctions: "Adam after sin is not the same person as before sin in the state of innocence, and yet they make no distinction between the law promulgated before and after sin." 23 We will return to this connection between the change in Adam and the change in the law, but what is immediately significant is Luther's affirmation that there was law and commandment, properly so-called, in the state of innocence, before sin's entry on the scene. Luther points out 23 WA 42:82. DAVID S. YEAGO 176 that according to Scripture commandments are given even to the good angels: These are truly commandments which are proposed to an innocent nature. In the same way, Adam here is given a commandment by the Lord before sin, not to eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil; he would have done this willingly and with the greatest pleasure, if he had not been deceived by Satan. 24 The notion of law is, in effect, analogical; the concept does not have exactly the same meaning before and after sin, but in either case it is used properly. What was the purpose of the law given to innocent Adam? Luther's answer is of considerable importance for his theology of the law as a whole: And so when Adam had been created in such a way that he was, so to speak, drunk with joy towards God, and rejoiced also in all other creatures, then there was created a new tree for the distinction of good and evil, so that Adam might have a definite sign of worship and reverence towards God. For since all things had been handed over to him, so that he might enjoy them at his will, whether for necessity or pleasure, God finally required of Adam that at this tree of the knowledge of good and evil he demonstrate reverence and obedience towards God, and that he observe this as an exercise of the worship of God, that he not taste anything from this tree. 25 The commandment is not given to Adam so that he might become a lover of God by keeping it; Adam already is a lover of God, "drunk with joy towards God," by virtue of his creation in the image of God, by the grace of original righteousness. The commandment is given, rather, in order to allow Adam's love for God to take form in an historically concrete way of life. Through the commandment, Adam's joy takes form in history as cultus Dei, the concrete social practice of worship. Thus Luther begins his comment on the commandment not to eat of the tree of knowledge "Haec est institutio ecdesiae" ("This is the foundation of the church"). 26 That is, the commandment makes possible the concrete enactment in visible social practice of 24 WA 42:83. 25 26 WA 42:71. WA 42:79. LUTHER AND VERITAIIS SPLENDOR 177 Adam's identity as lover of God. Indeed, Luther imagines that, had our first parents not fallen, the tree of knowledge would have been the church of paradise in quite a literal sense. The tree of knowledge, or perhaps a grove of trees of that kind, would have been the gathering-place for Adam and his descendants on the Sabbath, where "Adam would have proclaimed the supreme blessing that he was created along with his descendants in the image of God." The commandment conferred on unfallen humanity an "external place, ritual, word, and cult" which would have given human life a historically embodied focal point "until the predetermined time was fulfilled, when they would have been translated into heaven with the greatest pleasure. " 27 The importance of this cannot be overstated, particularly in view of conventional Lutheran assumptions: here Luther is describing a function of divine law, divine commandment, which is neither correlative with sin nor antithetical to grace; indeed, it presupposes the presence of grace and not sin. This function of the divine commandment is, moreover, its original and proper function. The fundamental significance of the law is thus neither to enable human beings to attain righteousness nor to accuse their sin, but to give concrete, historical form to the "divine life" of the human creature deified by grace. It is from this perspective that we can begin to understand Luther's statement that the meaning of the law changes before and after sin, precisely because Adam changes: "Adam after sin is not the same person as before sin in the state of innocence." The commandment is given originally to a subject deified by the grace of original righteousness, a subject living as the image of God; it calls for specific behaviors as the concrete historical realization of the spiritual life of the deified, God-drunken human being. What happens after sin comes on the scene is simply that this subject presupposed by the commandment is no longer there; the commandment no longer finds an Adam living an "entirely divine life," "drunk with joy towards God," but rather an Adam who has withdrawn from God, who believes the devil's lies about God and therefore flees and avoids God. It is precisely the anomaly of this 27 WA 42:80. 178 DAVID S. YEAGO situation that causes the commandment to become, in Luther's terms, "a different law" (alia lex). 28 IV. How THE LAw BECOMES A PRISON ... What happens when the law, which originally proposed certain patterns of behavior as the appropriate historical concretion of grace-given love for God and all creatures, now encounters a human being who has departed from God and flees God? 29 Luther suggests that there are two possibilities. On the one hand, it is possible in this situation for the sinful human creature to separate the commandments of God from their larger context in God's gracious purpose; more specifically, this means focusing on the particular behaviors called for or forbidden in the law, while forgetting or ignoring the fact that the law presupposes a graced and deified subject. When the law is thus abstracted from its place within the relationship of nature to grace, it becomes what Luther calls the lex literae, the law understood as "letter" or external code. The law thus understood is a law fundamentally misunderstood, a law fundamentally distorted by the distorted perceptions of sinful human beings. This distortion of the law into an external code has three dimensions. 3° First, the commandment of God came to Adam in the state of innocence as a gift of a concrete form of life appropriate to his existence as a deified lover of God and all creatures; in a surprisingly "Barthian" turn of phrase, Luther says that the commandment was "gospel and law" for Adam and Eve in the state of innocence. When sinful humans distort the law into an external code, however, the commandments are experienced as sheer demands which simply stand over against us; in the Pope's language, we no longer discern the relationship between the WA 42:83. "For a very different departure, which nonetheless seems to me to undergird the basic conclusions reached here, see the Finnish scholar Antti Raunio's study of Luther's understanding of the Golden Rule: Sum me des christlichen Lebens: Die "Go/dene Regel" als Gesetz der Liebe in der Theologie Martin Luthers von 1510 bis 1527 (Helsinki, 1993). 30 Here I draw on Otto Hof's excellent description of the lex literae in "Luthers Lehre von Gesetz und Evangelium," in Hof, Schriftauslegung und Rechtfertigungslehre: Aufsiitze zur Theologie Luthers (Karlsruhe, 1982), 75-108, here 79-82. 28 LUTHER AND VERITAIIS SPLENDOR 179 commandments and our freedom, precisely because we have rejected the grace that orients our freedom to its true goal, the love of God and all his creatures. Second, because the law understood as external code loses its connection with grace, it loses both its unity and its inner dimension of depth. It appears as a mere bundle of demands and prohibitions related to external behavior: do this, don't do that. Understood in this way, Luther says, it is perfectly possible for sinners to fulfill the law: none of the external behaviors commanded in the law are impossible for us. "There is no human being on earth who cannot keep all the commandments in some degree." 31 God uses the law thus misconstrued to prevent the human community from falling into utter destruction; the law understood as external code is the basis of the so-called civic or political use of the law. But it is nonetheless clear that this is a mode of observance of the commandments that is fundamentally irrelevant to the real purpose and point of the divine law, because it ignores the relationship of the law to the perfection of nature by grace. Third, because the law understood as external code presents us with a mere bundle of injunctions, it is inevitably abused as a means of self-justification. The commandment was originally addressed to a human subject who was already righteous by grace; when this is forgotten, the notion is almost irresistible that we can make ourselves righteous by fulfilling the "letter" of the law, by conforming our bodily and mental behavior externally to its demands. What this means is a catastrophic misunderstanding of the very idea of "righteousness." For Adam in the state of innocence, as for the redeemed in Christ, "righteousness" means grace-given, deifying friendship and communion with God; it means being drunk with joy towards God and rejoicing in all God's creatures. By contrast, says Luther, the works-righteous "think that righteousness is only a moral matter [tantum rem moralem]." 32 Note that Luther does not deny that righteousness contains a moral dimension; what he objects to is its definition in terms that are only moral, in terms of a morality abstracted from 31 WA 1:399. 32 WA 40/1:413. 180 DAVID S. YEAGO grace and from the deifying fulfillment of human existence by grace. This reception of the law of God as a mere external code is typical for sinful humanity; not only the law of Moses (as in Jesus' critique of the Pharisees), but also the natural law, is subject to this distortion. Following St. Paul and much of the Christian tradition, Luther believes that the law of God is inscribed in the heart of every human being, but it is written in the heart of the sinner only objective, "objectively," that is, it is present as a objective moral given with which we must reckon. Luther distinguishes this from the Holy Spirit's inscription of the law in our hearts formaliter, which should probably be translated "formatively," that is, in such a way that the will of God expressed in the law actually becomes the form of our existence. 33 Thus the natural law inscribed in the sinful heart is likewise distorted into an interior "letter," a kind of code that remains "external" to us even when it is inscribed within the heart. The alternative to this distortion of the law into an external code is what Luther calls the "spiritual" understanding of the law. When the law is understood spiritually, it is understood truthfully, that is, in its relationship to the perfection of nature by grace. This means that one who understands the law spiritually remembers that all God's commandments presuppose a subject deified by grace, a human being who is drunk with joy toward God and rejoices in all God's creatures. This is after all precisely what Jesus teaches: the law and the prophets hang on the double commandment of love, the commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength and our neighbor as ourselves. Luther's usual way of making this point is to talk of the relationship of all the commandments to the first commandment of the Decalogue: "I am the Lord your God; you shall have no other gods before me." Luther presents this as so to speak the primal commandment, the inner form and meaning of every commandment. Thus in the Large Catechism he writes, "The first commandment should shine and give its splendor to all the others. Thus you must let this one penetrate all the com33 Cf. Raunio, Summe des christlichen Lebens, 297-304, and the texts assembled there. Raunio's treatment of Luther's theology of the natural law breaks important new ground. LUTHER AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 181 mandments like the clasp and the hoop in a wreath which joins the end to the beginning and holds everything together, so that it is always repeated and not forgotten. " 34 Following precisely the pattern which we have seen in his exegesis of Genesis, therefore, Luther argues that every other commandment is designed to give concrete historical form to the fear, love, and trust towards God called for in the first commandment. This is constitutive of the meaning of every commandment: we cannot rightly understand what is called for by any commandment of God except in terms of the first commandment. Thus it is in a certain sense a misunderstanding of the divine commands to say that they demand particular behaviors; it is more accurate to say that they demand a heart that fears, loves, and trusts God, and that they offer such a heart the concrete form of life appropriate to it. This is by no means to say that the concrete behaviors are therefore optional; it is hardly possible to fear, love, and trust God and at the same time refuse to enact this fear, love, and trust as he enjoins. Luther's point is rather that talk of particular behaviors, though necessary, is never sufficient to describe the content of any divine commandment. Every commandment implicitly but also intrinsically calls for a particular sort of person, a particular mode of human existence within which the specific behaviors also called for can play their proper role. 35 Or as Luther likes to put it, God's law demands not only "works," but hearts: You must not understand the little word "law" in a human way, as though it taught what sort of works to do or not do, as in the case of human laws, where one can satisfy the law with works even though the heart is not engaged. God judges according to the ground of the heart [des hertzen grund], and so his law also calls for the ground of the heart and cannot be satisfied with works, but " BSELK, 64 3. 35 The nominalists also held that grace was required to keep the law in a way that pleases God. But for Biel and others, the infusion of grace does not change the species of acts performed by the human subject; grace is thus not intrinsically called for by what the law enjoins but is required by God as a consequence of sin. Indeed, in a sense, the necessity of grace is part of the punishment of sin, a consequence of the nominalist view that Luther thought abominable. Luther holds by contrast that each of the commandments demands a subject who loves and trusts God secundum substantiam facti, with respect to the substance of the act enjoined, not simply secundum intentionem legislatoris, as an additional stipulation of the lawgiver. 182 DAVID S. YEAGO rather punishes works done without the ground of the heart as hypocrisy and deceit. 36 Three further points about the spiritually understood law are of particular importance. First, the law understood spiritually is the law that accuses, the law that terrifies. The law as mere code does not terrify in any deep sense, for the bundle of injunctions with which it presents us is not beyond our power to fulfill. The spiritually understood law is what accuses and damns us, because it calls for a subject, an agent, who is no longer available. That is, it calls for an certain kind of person, a human creature who is drunk with joy towards God and rejoices in all God's creatures. As the German Lutheran scholar Otto Hof has put it, "The law demands from us a mode of being in which we do not stand and into which we cannot enter of ourselves. " 37 I can, to be sure, refrain from particular crimes and perform particular works, but I do not even know how to begin becoming an entirely different person, a person who lives, moreover, in a way that I cannot imagine; yet it is this, finally, that God's commandment requires of me. In a very real sense, then, the spiritually understood law also encounters me as "letter," as external code--only in this case it is the "letter that kills" of which Paul speaks. That is, the spiritually understood law also stands over against me and imposes on me a demand that I cannot begin to satisfy: "Die and live again in an entirely different way. Become an entirely different sort of person." Second, the reason we cannot enter of ourselves, by our own strength, into the mode of being which the law calls for is that the law calls for a person who lives and is deified by God's grace. There is thus a catch-22 here for the works-righteous. It is not that it would be a good thing in principle for us to be righteous by our own works, but that we have gotten too weak to pull it off; according to Luther, the term "righteous" in Christian theology means "dependent on God's grace." To be righteous by our own strength is thus a contradiction in terms; "righteousness" 36 "Vorrede auf die Epistel S. Pauli an die Romer," in Martin Luther: Studienausgabe, vol. 1, ed. Hans-Ulrich Delius (Berlin, 1979), 391. 37 Hof, "Luthers Lehre von Gesetz und Evangelium," 85. LUTHER AND VERITA11S SPLENDOR 183 means friendship and communion with God by grace, and it would mean this even if we had not fallen into sin. Thus, according to Luther, the law of God says to us, "I am spiritual, that is, I require a pure and spiritual heart. I am not satisfied by anything less than a cheerful heart and a spirit renewed by the Holy Spirit." 38 Here again we see Luther's refusal to define law and righteousness in moral terms alone; the moral dimension is present, but must be integrated into the larger context of human nature's elevation and fulfillment by God's grace. The meaning of the moral is to give concrete social form to the deified life of God's images in space and time; morality abstracted from grace can only invite presumption or impose despair. 39 But, third, we must press this line of thought one step further. What does it mean concretely to say that the law of God calls for a subject who is drunk with the love of God and the creatures of God? Luther answers: within the concrete order of salvation, it means that the law of God calls for Jesus Christ. In his 1525 Postil for Epiphany and Lent, Luther writes that the law "calls for more than we are capable of, and it wants to have another person than we are, who can keep it." That is, it calls for Christ, and presses us towards him, so that we first become different people through his grace in faith, and become like him, and then do genuine good works. Therefore this is the authentic understanding and point of the law, that it leads into knowledge of our incapacity and presses us away from ourselves to another, to Christ, to seek grace and help. 40 Jesus Christ is the only actual doer of the spiritually understood law; that is, he is the only human being whose obedience to God's commandments simply gives historical form to the sort of person he is, a person consumed with love of God and neighbor. Christ is the impletor legis, the fulfiller of the law, and so, as Luther put it in the Lectures on Romans, what the law says to us in the actual WA 39/1:460. The more-than-moral dimension of the law is, to so speak, marked by the hilaritas cordis which it demands in addition to recta vo/untas, according to St. Paul's saying, "hilarem enim datorem diligit Deus" (2 Cor 9:7). This is, it should be noted, why Luther insisted that postbaptismal concupiscence was properly to be called sin: because it inhibits perfect hilaritas in the obedience even of the faithful. The likely Augustinian/Bernardine roots of this teaching need further study. 40 WA 17/2:70. 38 39 184 DAVID S. YEAGO order of salvation is, "You must have Christ and his Spirit!" 41 For Luther, this is as much as to say that the law calls for faith, since faith is precisely the New Testament name for the bonding of our lives with Christ and the Spirit. V.... AND THE PRISON BECOMES A PALACE This brings us finally to the point at which we can see the rationale for the claim with which this paper began, that for Luther the bestowal of God's grace through the gospel is the only true formation of the human heart, that which alone sets the heart truly in order. Clearly everything depends on what faith is, on what it means to "have" Christ and the Spirit. Here I must simply contradict a misreading of Luther, widely shared by Protestants and Catholics, which it would require at least another article to refute properly. It is not the case, for Luther, that the relationship to Christ established by faith is essentially forensic, a relationship in which I merely gain legal title to the merit of Christ promised me in the gospel. That is a rough description of Philip Melanchthon's understanding of faith, not Luther's. For Luther, the forensic relationship is secondary to a relationship of union, the union of the believer to the person of Christ as a living member of Christ's body, the church. As he puts it in the great Commentary on Galatians, true faith is that "through which we become members of his body, of his flesh and bones." Therefore in him we live and move and are. Thus vain is the speculation about faith on the part of the sectarians, who dream that Christ is in us "spiritually," that is, speculatively, but that he is really in heaven. It is necessary that Christ and faith be joined together utterly [omnino coniungi], it is necessary that we dwell in heaven and that Christ be, live, and work in us; however, he lives and works in us not speculatively, but really [realiter], most presently and most efficaciously. 42 For Luther, what is called "justification" is just this utter joining-together of Christ and the believer, by virtue of which we 41 42 WA 56:338. WA 40/1:546. LUTHER AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 185 live in heaven and Christ is, lives, and works in us. The righteousness by which we are saved is Christ himself, living in us; the forensic relationship, in which God forgives our sins "for Christ's sake" is dependent on this primary relation of union: Therefore faith justifies because it grasps and possesses this treasure, the present Christ .... Therefore the Christ who is grasped by faith and dwells in the heart is the Christian righteousness on account of which God reckons us righteous and gives us eternal life. 43 God reckons believers righteous because they become, in certain significant respects, one reality with the Righteous One, Jesus Christ; "imputation" does, in Luther at least, have that ontological basis the absence of which in certain kinds of Protestant theology has always seemed so incomprehensible to Catholics. 44 It is because faith is union with Christ that it is the true ordering of the human heart. For Luther, grace is not, as it is for many Lutherans, antithetical to order; on the contrary, grace is the merciful bestowal on our hearts of their true formation, the formation for which they were created. The faith that receives God's grace is not only release from accusation and fear; it is also the constitution of a new human subject, a new person existing in a new way. As Luther writes in his exposition of Galatians 2:20 ("it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me"): 43 WA 40/1:229. 44 This is especially clear in the following from the 1519 Commentary on Galatians: Because he has said that we have put on Christ and become one with Christ, therefore the same thing [idem] that has been said about Christ is also understood to be said about us on account of Christ. For Christ cannot be separated from us, nor we from him, since we are one reality [unum] with him and in him, as the members are one reality [unum] in the head and one reality [unum] with the head. Therefore, just as the promise of God cannot be understood of any other than Christ [de alio quam Christo],so, since we are not something other than Christ [aliud quam Christus], it is necessary that it also be understood of us. Truly therefore we are the seed of Abraham and heirs, not according to the flesh, but according to the promise, since we are they of whom mention is made in the promise, namely the Gentiles who are in the seed of blessed Abraham. (WA 2:5 31 ). 186 DAVID S. YEAGO The person [of the believer] indeed lives, but not in himself or by virtue of his own person, but "Christ lives in me." But who is this "I" of whom he says "Yet not 'I'"? This "I" is one who has the law and is obligated to perform works, and who is a certain person separated from Christ. It is this "I" which Paul rejects, because "I" as a person distinct from Christ belongs to death and hell. Therefore he says, "Yet not I, but Christ lives in me": he is my form, adorning my faith as color or light adorn a wall. ... Therefore Christ, he says, thus inhering in me and glued to me and abiding in me lives in me this life which I carry on, or rather, the life by which I thus live is Christ himself. 45 Thus faith is both the death of the old subject, defined as a subject "separated from Christ," and the birth of the new, whose "form" is the present Christ himself; the believer is one in whose life Christ lives and in whose actions Christ acts, and therefore one whose life and actions are formed by Christ's presence in the Spirit. Thus Luther paraphrases Paul: He says: However insignificant this life I live in the flesh may be, I live it in faith in the Son of God. That is, this word which I sound forth bodily is not the word of the flesh, but of the Holy Spirit and of Christ. This vision which goes in and out of my eyes does not come from the flesh, that is, my flesh does not govern it, but the Holy Spirit. So too my hearing is not of the flesh, although it is in the flesh, but it is in and of the Holy Spirit .... [The Christian's true life is hidden from the world, Luther says, because] that life is in the heart by faith, where the flesh has been rooted out and Christ reigns with his Holy Spirit and now sees, hears, speaks, works, suffers, and in sum does all things in the believer, even though the flesh fights back.46 Luther speaks about this new life in Christ, it should be noted, in the same terms in which he speaks about Adam's creation in the image of God: "'There is a twofold life,' says Paul, 'my natural or animal life, and another person's life, that is, Christ's life in me. I am dead according to my animal life, and now I live another person's life."' 47 The spiritual life given to Adam at the beginning is, after the Fall, "the life of another person" (aliena vita), the life of Jesus Christ; faith, by which we share in that life, is thus the beginning of the restoration of God's image. 45 WA 40/1 :283. 46 47 WA 40/1:289-90. WA 40/1:287. LUTHER AND VERITATIS SPLENDOR 187 It follows, therefore, that the new person constituted by faith relates to God's law and commandments quite differently from the sinner who flees and distrusts God. Luther summed this up most succinctly in an epigram in his first Commentary on Galatians from 1519: "Thus to live to the law is to fail to fulfill the law, while to die to the law is to fulfill the law; the latter takes place by faith in Christ, the former through works of the law." 48 We live to the law by works and thus fail to fulfill the law; we die to the law by faith in Christ and thus succeed in fulfilling the law. How is it that dying to the law by faith is the fulfillment of the law? When Luther says that we die to the law by faith, what he has in mind is the law in the forms in which we encounter it after the Fall, the law as mere code and the accusing, spiritually interpreted law. By faith, through the grace bestowed by the gospel, we die to the law misunderstood as a manageable collection of injunctions through which we might achieve righteousness, and we likewise die to the law as the inexorable, accusing demand for a total personal transformation that we cannot begin to accomplish. The gospel puts an end to these forms of the law, which we might collectively call the "old law," simply by bestowing on us what the law demands; it gives us the new and deified mode of being for which all of God's commandments call when it brings Christ to us, whom we grasp by faith when we trust the gospel's promise. To cite another epigram, and to complete a quotation, Luther says in the Lectures on Romans: "The old law says to the proud in their righteousness: You must have Christ and his Spirit! The new law" -that is, the gospel-"says to those who have been humbled in their poverty: Look! Here is Christ and his Spirit! 49 Thus faith, which dies to the law, fulfills the law, because by faith there comes into being the graced and deified subject that God's law most deeply demands. This is the point at stake in Luther's apparently paradoxical insistence that we cannot fulfill the commandments by doing good works; on the contrary, the commandments must already be fulfilled before we can do the good works they enjoin: "WA 2:499. 49 WA 56:338. 188 DAVID S. YEAGO For works, since they are mindless things, cannot glorify God, although they may be done to God's glory if faith is present. But now we are asking not what things are to be done, what sort of works they are; we are asking about the doer, the one who glorifies God and produces works. This is the faith of the heart, which is the head and substance of all our righteousness. Thus it is a blind and dangerous doctrine which teaches that the commandments are fulfilled by works, since it is necessary for the commandments to be fulfilled before all works and for the works to follow the fulfillment. 50 The commandments are fulfilled when the doer for which they call is present; the only such doer is, in Augustinian terms, the totus Christus, Jesus Christ in his unity with his people, head and body together. If dying to the law is fulfilling the law, however, then the believer who dies to the law is not lawless; to die to the law is not to transcend the very idea of an order of life, nor is it the happy discovery of a God with no intentions that bear on us. On the contrary, the believer really does fulfill the law, not merely by imputation but because his existence really does begin to be formed and ordered as the law intends. In an exegesis of Galatians 3 from 1522, Luther makes this point rather strikingly with a parable. Suppose that some great lord had thrown you in prison, a prison that you loathed exceedingly. There are, says Luther, two possible ways in which you might be liberated. The first is the obvious, "bodily" way: "the lord might break down the prison and make you free bodily, and let you go where you will." The other, less obvious way is the spiritual way; in this case the lord would so bless you in the prison, make it so pleasing, bright, spacious, and richly decorated for you that no royal dwelling or kingdom was so desirable; in this way he would so break down and transform your perceptions [mutt] that you would not leave that prison for all the world's treasure. Instead you would pray that the prison might remain standing and that you might remain in it, for to you it would no longer be a prison, but would have become a paradise. 51 ' 0 WA 51 7:56. WA 10/1/1:459. LUTHER AND VER/TATIS SPLENDOR 189 It is this sort of freedom Christ has given us in relation to the law; he has not "broken down and done away with the law, but has so transformed our heart, which was at first unhappy under the law, and so blessed it, and made the law so delightful to it, that the heart has no greater pleasure or joy than in the law. "52 The law is thus the prison that becomes a paradise to those who believe in Christ. In light of Luther's theology of grace and original righteousness, moreover, we should perhaps take this reference to paradise quite seriously: for believers, the commandments begin to become once again what they were for Adam in the state of innocence, neither a means of self-justification nor a terrifying accusation, but a divinely granted opportunity to give concrete historical form to their identity as God's children and images. Just as the law became a word of deadly accusation because Adam changed, so now in Christ we are changed once again and the law becomes something delightful, a paradise that we would not leave for all the world's treasure. This is surely the principled opposite of the antinomian suspicion and resentment of order and commandment in which Protestant tradition, in modern times, has so often been so deeply ensnared. Christians can delight in God's commandments in this way because they have been changed by faith in Christ; it is central to this change that they now know God's law in a new form, in the form of the "law of Christ" or the "law of the Spirit of life" of which Paul speaks in Romans 8. This form of the law, Luther writes, is faith itself, as the bond of our hearts to Christ and his Spirit; faith is, he says, that living and spiritual flame inscribed by the Spirit in human hearts, which wills, does, and indeed is that which the law of Moses commands and requires verbally .... And so the law of Christ is properly not teaching but living, not word but reality, not sign but fulfillment. And it is the word of the gospel which is the ministry of this life, reality, and fulfillment and the means by which it is brought to our hearts. 53 This is from a fairly early text (1521); later on, Luther is less willing to use the term "law" to talk about faith and the gospel, 52 53 Ibid. WA 8:458. 190 DAVID S. YEAGO even though it is unarguably Pauline. This pastorally motivated decision left him with fewer resources for making dear his understanding of the relationship of grace and law, but it did not change that understanding. It is important to see that he could in principle describe that relationship in this perfectly traditional formulation which he shares with St. Thomas and Pope John Paul II: the notion of the "new law" which is "primarily the very grace of the holy Spirit which is given to those who believe in Christ. "54 VI. CONCLUSION This article is only a prolegomenon to dialogue between the Reformation traditions and Veritatis Splendor; it is enough, therefore, that we have identified a point of profound and startling consensus between Luther and Pope John Paul II as a starting-point for future discussion. This point is the project shared by both of integrating the moral and the mystical, and therefore of relocating the notion of divine law within the context of the perfection of nature by grace. Thus the Holy Father writes: Only in the mystery of Christ's redemption do we discover the "concrete" possibilities of man .... God's command is of course proportioned to man's capabilities, but to the capabilities of the man to whom the Holy Spirit has been given; of the man who, though he has fallen into sin, can always obtain pardon and enjoy the presence of the Holy Spirit. (Veritatis Splendor, §103) This consensus reaches very far, and includes fundamental agreement concerning the intrinsically more-than-moral scope of divine law: "But if God alone is the good, no human effort, not even the most rigorous observance of the commandments, succeeds in 'fulfilling' the law, that is, acknowledging the Lord as God and rendering Him the worship due to Him alone. This 'fulfillment' can only come from a gift of God: the offer of a share in the divine goodness revealed and communicated in Jesus" (Veritatis Splendor, §11). 55 54 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 1-11, q. 106, a. 1. 55 The dialogue with Luther could be even more fruitful if the remarkable Trinitarian theology of conscience and moral objectivity which the Pope sketched in Dominum et Vivificantem (1986) were more fully brought into play than it is in Veritatis Splendor (see Dominum et Vivificantem, §33-38). It is LUTHER AND VER/TATIS SPLENDOR 191 The discovery that Martin Luther and John Paul II struggle together from a shared starting-point against the twin foes of legalism and antinomianism could and should finally bring to birth an ecumenical discussion of fundamental moral theology, a parturition long overdue. The power of Veritatis Splendor to provoke new readings of the Christian tradition, even of so unlikely-seeming a conversation partner as Martin Luther, is not the least part of its significance. understandable, but perhaps regrettable, that in the controversial third section of Veritatis Splendor the Pope has chosen only to call the contemporary disciplines of "moral theology" and "religious ethics" to order, rather than call their very foundations into question, which is the unmistakable tendency of the earlier encyclical. The Thomist 62 (1998): 193-215 THE LIBERTARIAN FOUNDATIONS OF SCOTUS'S MORAL PHILOSOPHY THOMAS WILLIAMS The University of Iowa Iowa City, Iowa C ONTEMPORARY LIBERTARIANS typically claim that their conception of freedom is necessary to safeguard our commonsense understanding of moral responsibility, but beyond that claim little is said about the implications of libertarianism for moral philosophy. Perhaps philosophers generally do not think it has any other such implications. Duns Scotus, however, made his libertarianism the cornerstone of his system of ethics. Unfortunately, commentators have failed to show how his theory of freedom unites various elements of his thought. They have failed to trace (and consequently, they have failed to defend) the inferences that Scotus drew from his account of freedom. They have, in short, failed to treat Scotus's moral philosophy as a system at all, and have written as if Scotus had nothing more to offer than disjointed observations about the will and a few other subjects of interest to moral philosophers. 1 1 Not only have commentators sometimes written as if they believed this, they have occasionally stated it outright. In the recent Scotus number of the American Catholic PhilosophicalQuarterly (67 [1993]), for example, Mary Elizabeth Ingham says flatly that "It is well known that Scotus presents nowhere in his writings a full-blown ethical theory" (128). Gilson says of his book on Scotus, "On n'y trouvera pas non plus un 'systeme' de Duns Scot ... la seule raison est que nous ne l'avons pas trouve nous meme"