Despite their agreement on sola Scriptura, almost from the
start the Reformers found it as hard (or harder, since each was in effect his
own pope) to agree among themselves on the exegetically correct readings of the
Bible as had the bad old logic-choppers of the schools. Luther himself became an
(ultimately ineffectual) enforcer of theological ‘orthodoxy’ when in 1528 he
realized the seriousness of the problem. The more radical wing of the Reform
movement, led by Karlstadt, the ‘Zwickau Prophets’, Thomas Münzer and others,
had produced not only religious chaos but, in the form of the Peasants’ Revolt
(1524–5), the likelihood that the Lutherans would lose the princely support on
which they relied for personal as well as theological survival. Because those
who so obviously misinterpreted Scripture could only be diabolically inspired,
Luther concluded that the devil – already hugely more present in his writings
than in those of Augustine – was in this instance too working from within to
overthrow the kingdom of the godly.
Still more ‘diabolical’, however, were John of Leyden and the other
Anabaptist leaders of the commune established in Munster in 1534–5. Apart from
their abolition of commerce and private property, their establishment of
communal meals and eventually of polygamy, more important theologically was
their denial of infant baptism: precisely the move which had prompted
Augustine’s first attack on the ‘Pelagian’ Caelestius in Carthage in 411. For
to deny infant baptism, as Augustine saw it, was to deny our vita communis
in Adam, and with it the guilt and effects of Adam’s original sin. As we shall
see, original sin was fading fast among those whose work pointed to secularism
during the seventeenth century; it is important to recognize a similar trend –
signalling what is to come – among religious fanatics a hundred years earlier.
It had become obvious to Luther that not only such ‘Ockhamist’
followers of the ‘modern way’ as Gabriel Biel should be indicted as Pelagian
(at least in their accounts of the power – however limited – of the human will
to merit salvation ex puris naturalibus) but that the whole medieval
tradition had become tainted, not least those ‘intellectualists’ about human
action like Aquinas against whose claimed errors extreme voluntarism had been
largely developed. According to Luther – a nominalist in dialectic,
anti-nominalist in theology – extreme voluntarism, while wholly appropriate in
accounts of the hidden God, had spawned blasphemous accounts of man’s fallen
nature and moral capacities. (John M. Rist, Augustine Deformed: Love, Sin
and Freedom in the Western Moral Tradition [Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2014], 178-80)
By the time of his comments on the Leipzig disputations (1519) Luther
was clear in his own mind that not only Biel (and the moderni) but also the
Scotists and Thomists were infected by Pelagianism. Only Gregory of Rimini was
free of it. The rest held that man can follow the dictates of right reason to
which the will can naturally conform (WA 2, 384ff.). On Luther’s
ignorance of Aquinas’ work see Janz (1983: 32) and (with very substantial
bibliography) McSorley (1969: 139–43). Janz identifies the source of much of
Luther’s confusion in the ex-Thomist Karlstadt’s misrepresentations, in his 151
(Augustinian) Theses, both of Aquinas himself and of his own former
‘master’ Capreolus. These theses were published in 1517, only four months
before Luther’s Disputation against Scholastic Theology. Janz cites as
evidence for Karlstadt’s willingness to lie about his opponents a passage of Against
the Heavenly Prophets (WA 18, 190) where Luther is even prepared to
defend the pope against Karlstadt’s ‘lies’ (Janz 1983: 120–2). Unfortunately,
he seems never to have asked himself whether Karlstadt might also have lied
about Aquinas and Capreolus. (Ibid., 179-80 n. 8)
