“That faith which worketh by love” in Augustine’sOn the Spirit and the Letter(412)
Written in the early fifth century, Saint Augustine’s biblical commentary on II Corinthians and Romans, On the Spirit and the Letter, became an important interpretive work for Luther and other Protestant writers. All who followed Augustine in the West sought to secure their allegiance to his ORTHODOXY. On the Spirit and the Letter was crucial in establishing this important genealogy for the REFORMATION, perhaps in part because it is more obviously scriptural than some of his neo-platonic works. In Augustine’s distinction between a letter that is “inculcating and threatening” and a spirit that is “assisting and healing,” early Protestant writers found a strong emphasis on the necessity of GRACE. Although the Reformation reading of On the Spirit and the Letter is not uncontested, it serves to set a tone of humility and gratitude for a Protestant understanding of ethics. Inasmuch as some Western Christians had earlier come to see the law as either a specific task to be duly achieved or a particular failing about which properly to repent, Augustine’s words on “the holy law” served to reformulate the question.
From Chapter 9 of On the Spirit, the following passage well exemplifies the humbling and edifying use to which the Reformation put Augustine’s work:
For there was need to prove to man how corruptly weak he was, so that against his iniquity, the holy law brought him no help towards good, but rather increased than diminished his iniquity; seeing that the law entered, that the offence might abound; that being thus convicted and confounded, he might see not only that he needed a physician, but also God as his helper so to direct his steps that sin should not rule over him, and he might be healed by betaking himself to the help of the divine mercy; and in this way, where sin abounded grace might much more abound—not through the merit of the sinner, but by the intervention of his Helper.
Augustine breaks from some earlier interpretations of II Corinthians to read “the law” that heightens “iniquity” not merely as the “old law” of Israel before Christ, but any law that functions apart from God’s mercy. Reading II Corinthians and Romans together, Augustine finds a new way to interpret the relation between precept and mercy. The law, whether spoken by Christ or through Moses, becomes “the letter that killeth” if humans seek through the law’s guidance to avoid conviction and confusion and to live by their own will and their own wits. One of Augustine’s chief rhetorical aims in the treatise is therefore to create “an ardent desire to cleave to [our] Maker”—to create in us a longing for “the intervention of [our] Helper”—and he judges as fatal a use of holy precepts that allows one to eschew the aid of our maker and physician. Only through the grace of God, written by the Holy Spirit as “the finger of God” in our hearts, are we “repaired” of the effects of SIN and “liberated” to receive the law in doxological joy rather than in fear or pride.
In this way, Augustine reads Paul as striving “with much courage and earnestness against the proud and arrogant…in order that he may commend the grace of God.” This well characterizes Augustine’s own task, as he continually reads Romans, II Corinthians, Galatians, and the Psalms as a commendation of grace, reading each text through a hermeneutic wrought by his own argument with those who encourage holiness without continual reference to and praise of the one who heals, writes, and liberates. In this answer to futile striving, Augustine might have placed the accent on original sin and perpetual depravity. But his stress is slightly different, as he commends, continually, the grace of God. He contrasts Pelagian pride with Christian humility not merely to force his interlocutors to bow, but ultimately to encourage doxology. The various strands of his argument in the text return, again and again, to the refrain of praise for the power of God’s grace. For example, in treating a verse like Psalm 36:10—“For He extendeth His mercy to them that know Him, and His righteousness to the upright of heart”—Augustine warns that we avoid a reading whereby we might make ourselves “the chief end of living.” Rather, we must continue reading that same Psalm to hear “Let not the foot of pride come against me,” a word that beckons us toward “that fountain of life, from the draughts of which alone is imbibed the holiness which is itself the good life.” It is to this “fountain of life” that Augustine finally returns the reader, as he considers the possibility of a Christian who lives on earth in accordance with all of God’s precepts. In the closing lines of the treatise, Augustine suggests that perhaps God has a reason to not yet grant such a thing as complete compliance, for with perfection, the congregation of believers might be led astray to praise ourselves. We are called to rather open our mouths continually to praise the one by whose mercy and goodness we live.
Augustine endeavors to discredit those who would read and attempt to live the law apart from the Spirit that gives life. The alternative, doxological life to which Augustine calls his readers in On the Spirit found one bold adherent who sought to define discipleship as perpetual praise and service.
It is to Martin Luther and The Freedom of a Christian (1520) that we now turn.
Should he grow so foolish, however, as to presume to become righteous, free, saved, and a Christian by means of some good work, he would instantly lose faith and all its benefits, a foolishness aptly illustrated in the fable of the dog who runs along a stream with a piece of meat in his mouth and, deceived by the reflection of the meat in the water, opens his mouth to snap at it and so loses both the meat and the reflection. (Martin Luther, The Freedom of a Christian)
In The Freedom of a Christian, Luther begins working through I Corinthians 9:19 and Romans 13:8 with the aim of avoiding the dog’s foolishness. The statements “For though I am free from all men, I have made myself a slave to all,” and “Owe no one anything, except to love one another,” intertwine to reveal the liberty and slavery of faithful love. For Luther, the servitude that marks Christian ethics requires a radical freedom, a freedom owing to Christ’s payment for humankind’s sins. Reading The Freedom of a Christion is crucial to understanding Luther’s Augustinian emphasis on the centrality of grace and praise in a truly Christian life. In this treatise, Luther considers JUSTIFICATION and ethics as interwoven, indeed almost indistinguishable. What Augustine holds inextricably together—the Christian life and doxology—Luther binds again. The Christian life is distinguished as grateful praise, and all that is worthy of our doing is worthy only inasmuch as it is formed by gratitude.
Luther’s rhetorical strategy in the text involves first our recognition that we have nothing, but precisely that we might receive life from another. This dire predicament of nothingness is universal, Luther insists, whether we look to the Old or the New Testament: “As we fare with respect to one commandment, so we fare with all, for it is equally impossible for us to keep any one of them.” Luther’s primary use of the law, what is at times called his “theological use,” brings the reader to the point of sheer need:
Now when a man has learned through the commandments to recognize his helplessness and is distressed about how he might satisfy the law—since the law must be fulfilled so that not a jot or tittle shall be lost, otherwise man will be condemned without hope—then, being truly humbled and reduced to nothing in his own eyes, he finds in himself nothing whereby he may be justified and saved.”
We would misread Luther to discover in his rhetoric merely condemnation without hope, for only through finding ourselves “reduced to nothing” are we prepared to receive the “one thing, and only one thing,” that is “necessary for Christian life, righteousness and freedom.” Luther preaches the reader into a corner so that he or she might not find a way around the Word: “For if [one] could be justified by anything else, [one] would not need the Word, and consequently [one] would not need faith.” To use Luther’s own metaphor, we receive all of Christ’s benefits only if we run, panting with desperation, to the marital bed, and only if we remain in that bed into our old age, like an eager newlywed. As he puts it in another treatise, Concerning the Letter and the Spirit, “Grace is only given to those who long for it.”
Only after longing for Christ and all his benefits do individuals receive them.. And for Luther, the benefits are not ephemera. The fable of the foolish dog (quoted earlier) provides a helpful entrée to this aspect of Luther’s treatise. Found at the crux of his argument, the story of the lost meat and reflection points to a central concern for Lutheran ethics. The dog loses the steak and the image of the steak, because the image remains only inasmuch as the dog resists the urge to snap hungrily at it. The image of the meat glistening in the water is not an illusion, but neither is it real in and of itself. Works of love for one’s neighbor are not illusory, but neither do they exist in and of themselves. Loving works exist as loving works only inasmuch as one perpetually recalls this and avoids the temptation to consider the reflection to be the real meat.
To put this differently, for us truly to be freed for the sake of our neighbor, we must be bound by infinite gratitude for all that Christ is giving us, “unworthy and condemned” as we are. Only as we are bound to Christ, subject to Him in humble receptivity, can we become subject to our neighbor in love. Luther here joins Paul’s letter to the Romans, with which he began the treatise, to Paul’s letter to the Philippians. By being bound to Christ through our condemnation before the law and through relinquishing of ourselves to Christ, we take on the form of a servant. This “emptying” is crucial if we are truly to love our neighbor as Christ intends. Our graced descent becomes the recurring pattern for our life of discipleship—our reflection, if you will, of the meat of FAITH. For us to love our neighbor, we must come to that neighbor as those who are nothing outside our marriage to Christ. As Luther puts it, we become “Christs to one another,” inasmuch as we know ourselves saved only by Christ. By this kind of faith, the Christian “descends” to love the neighbor as he or she is also in need.
The metaphors in this treatise are rhetorically rich, as Luther claims that a faithful soul does not merely “share” in the goodness of Christ, but becomes “saturated and intoxicated” with the promises fulfilled in him. There is a kind of union Luther strains to describe whereby those who wed Christ become truly embodied with Christ’s goodness. For Luther, the transformation of the faithful to obedient servants has the form of kenosis, but this emptying results in a joyful abundance that enables “the freest service, cheerfully and lovingly done.” Because Christ gives all that a soul needs, the life of a Christian is a “surplus,” an act of doxology given unreservedly. Through Christian kenosis and receptivity, life itself becomes sheer gift and hardly belonging to one individual to hoard, protect, or navigate with precision. Lutheran “ethics” are, quite literally, gratuitous; the Christian life is a life freely given. If service becomes instead a mapped plan for reward or a strategy to avoid punishment, then it is not Christian service. The Christian, “caught up beyond himself into God,” is freed to consider “nothing except the need and advantage of the neighbor.”
The whole problem of ethics is so delicate, so dubious, that the addition of one word too much is far more disastrous than the omission of one word which might have been said.
Luther insists in Freedom of a Christian that “ethics” per se is a dangerous concept, a temptation to lose faith and, paradoxically, to lose the self-giving activity reflective of true faith. Luther’s recurring emphasis is therefore on soteriology, on the gift of Christ, rather than on the particular nuances of the Christian life. But at least one aspect of his emphasis has abiding implications for Lutheran ethics: All Christians are eligible for this MARRIAGE to Christ. By liberally using the holy wedding imagery previously reserved for the cloistered, Luther both levels and elevates the life of faithful service. The barber, the midwife, and the blacksmith are all as bereft of true Christian virtue as the ordained priest—all are condemned, and all are saved, through the same Christ to whom they may be wed in faith. The previously insignificant lives of the masses are just as open to God’s holy use as the lives of those who preside over the Mass. Thus Luther brings about what William Lazareth has called “the emancipation of the common life.” The daily toils of the common Christian are sanctified through Christ; whether changing diapers, washing dishes, cutting hair, or baking bread, according to Luther each aspect of the embodied life is potentially crucial to the kingdom.
But by freeing the daily lives of the prince and the pauper for Christian service, Luther also entangles sacred living with the daily minutia of trade, community schooling, care of children, and the execution of criminals. The service for which one is joyfully freed by faith can take forms heretofore considered beneath the calling of a true man or woman of faith. How is such seemingly mundane, or even profane, work transformed by the holy freedom to love one’s neighbor? Is the difference merely formal, or does Christ’s presence in the sinner also bring a material change? In an attempt to explicate scriptural tensions, as well as tensions pressed by those living in the first generation of the Reformation, Luther tries a complicated and somewhat confusing heuristic: that of the two realms, or kingdoms. In his writings, the knife-edge of ethics rests perilously between these realms: one realm ruled by law and order, and another realm ruled by faith and forgiveness. God institutes both, Luther affirms, but the activity of God is different in each. Through one realm, God preserves the stability of creation; through the other, God saves His people, bringing them to grateful, free service for others.
Luther’s writings on the interplay of these two realms in the life of the Christian are sufficiently complex to have troubled his followers since. If the Christian lives in both realms, how does this not lead to a split moral personality? How can forgiveness, grace, and mercy coexist alongside judgement, justice, and punishment? Luther’s writings on such questions were occasioned by particular questions in the heat of rebellion, DIVORCE, or ecclesial crisis, and his resolutions are less than systematic. At times, the reader is reminded that Luther’s true passion is soteriology, not ethics. Yet there are points of beautiful clarity, such as at the end of Two Kinds of Righteousness, where he goes into detail to answer the question: “Is it not proper [for a Christian] to punish sin?” The answer, he says, depends on whether the query comes from a private citizen or from a public servant. The public servant must at times “defend the oppressed” by punishing offenders. But the private citizen may seek the punishment of a wrongdoer only if he is certain that he is not “doing from anger and impatience that which he believes he is doing from love of justice.” Luther here and elsewhere presses the faithful to suspect our quests for justice over clemency.
But some who heard Luther’s call to a liberated priesthood of holy believers thought his double-edged morality a sham (see PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS). They took offense in particular to his resolution on the question of faithful service and ordered violence. Does not participation in the life of Christ preclude bodily harm of another? It is to Michael Sattler, who sought so to reform the early Reformation, that we now turn.
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