A Primer For a Theory of Unintended Consequences; Or, Freedom, Equality, and Totalitarianism in the Mind of Martin Luther
Is there a connection between the Reformation doctrine of justification by faith alone and the political order of the modern West? Might the Western love of freedom and equality, as well as the emergence of Western totalitarianism, have a theoretical forerunner in the modern West’s fundamental theological doctrine of salvation, Martin Luther’s notion of justification by faith alone? Examining the religious experience that led Luther to formulate his doctrine of justification, we find freedom, equality, and totalitarian law held together such that the last is intrinsic to the realisation of the former two. Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I show how the divine law in Luther’s experience is totalitarian, while describing the arc of his experience with that law as one in which a more basic equality underlies his proclamation of freedom from the law’s demands. I then compare the pattern of Martin Luther’s experience of the divine law with the historical pattern of Marxist communism, noting that both began with great hope in the law, only to find it transform into a totalitarian monster.
Instances involving unintended consequences in Western history sometimes share a pattern that might help explain how they occur. To say that ‘events occur according to a pattern’ in an age that has all but abandoned such patterns will meet skepticism, but I urge my readers to withhold their judgment until the argument has concluded. The facts, as I shall state them, fuse two apparently unrelated circumstances in which the highest expectations meet the lowest results, in which dreams of the good, of prosperity, harmony, and salvation, encounter anguished realities as a result of efforts to achieve their ends. In these cases people followed a path that seemed right, but that brought them hurt. Given the juxtaposition of positive expectations and negative outcomes, it should perhaps be less surprising that the path followed in both cases is in important respects the same.
The first of the instances that I intend to draw together concerns Martin Luther, the initiator of the Reformation and the father of Protestantism. His story of unexpected consequences proceeds as follows: Luther believed that by following the law and his monastic rule that he would acquire salvation; he later found the law a source of unremitting tyranny; and he finally discovered a grace that he did not originally foresee, a justification by faith alone that liberated him from the law and transformed Western Christianity. This religious tale of unexpected consequences has a political cousin. The latter story involves nineteenth century optimism surrounding the vision of a society grounded in the state.[1] Many in that age believed that centralizing social life in the government would usher in an era of freedom, equality, and unity unlike any yet seen. Karl Marx exemplifies this view as powerfully as any other philosopher, though the optimism of the era extended beyond Marx and his following. This hope in the state found expression in the twentieth century in horrific ways, as the crystallization of life in and through the state emerged as totalitarianism in communist Russia. The high expectations for organizing society through the state met with results that contradicted those expectations, unleashing a wave of blood in the process.
I fuse these two occurrences by arguing that the religious law in Martin Luther’s mind, and from which he found escape in his doctrine of justification, bears a striking resemblance to the political law of totalitarianism. Luther endured an inner totalitarian force, one religious in nature but no less totalitarian in spirit. I secondly argue that totalitarianism, though apparently opposed to freedom and equality, is intrinsic to their practical achievement. Just as Luther demands that the Christian who would receive grace must first cower under the law’s terror, the society that would achieve freedom and equality must first endure tyranny and oppression, even a totalitarian authority. Champions of freedom and equality like Marx did not foresee this necessary step to reaching their goals, but their blindness does not make it any less intrinsic to their vision. I thirdly point out that the ‘salvation’ achieved in the case of both Luther and the communist state at length differs from early expectations, transforming into escape from the law originally thought to be saving. I conclude by offering additional considerations linking Luther and Marx, and briefly suggesting how Orthodox theologians should respond to Luther’s experience.
Some readers will look askance on my comparison of an interior, religious form of law with an exterior, political one. They might claim that the comparison manifests methodological naivety because it overlooks the complex socio-historical process typically supposed to drive historical development. They will scoff at my sidestepping of this complexity in order to focus on a pattern that links the political and the spiritual orders.
With regard to the connection between the spiritual and the political orders the skeptics should attend to noted legal historian Harold Berman:
The [medieval] Roman Catholic belief in the infusion of divine and natural law into legal institutions was carried on by Lutheranism, but only into secular legal institutions and not into ecclesiastical…For Protestantism, in both its Lutheran and Calvinist forms, God remained a God of justice, and the body of ecclesiastical and secular law of “medieval” Europe (as it came to be called in the sixteenth century), was to a large extent carried over into the law of the “modern’ state.[2]
Berman finds the origin of the Western legal tradition in the canon law of the medieval Catholic Church, which influenced marriage, inheritance, property, and contracts. More importantly, canon law marked the first attempt in the West at a systematic law, a law both comprehensive and exact. This method amounted to the ‘infusion of divine and natural law into legal institutions’, or the introduction of the law into the church as the latter matured into a distinctly legal apparatus in addition to its liturgical and theological functions. Berman asserts both the content and the form of this medieval Catholic law as the forerunner of the modern political-legal order, with the shift from religious institutions to secular ones occurring at the Reformation.[3]
Berman’s conclusions allow space for comparisons between the medieval Catholic Church and modern political institutions, including the examination of connections between the way of life of those under Catholic canon law and those under modern political systems. Luther provides the paradigmatic case for those who suffered under the Catholic law as the way to salvation, enduring the law in all its harshness as a monk. He also stands out due to his critical religious role in the transition of medieval Catholic law into the modern political order. Luther’s experience is therefore of singular importance for studying the deeper resonances between the effects of medieval Catholic law, particularly its capacity to produce anxiety in those who relied upon it to be saved, and the modern state that produced an overwhelming fear among peoples who had trusted it for a better life.
Experience and Doctrine in Martin Luther
Luther joined the Augustinian order of monks as a young man deeply concerned about his salvation, throwing himself into the life prescribed by his rule in an effort to attain peace of conscience. Trusting in his religious practice as the way of salvation, Luther was careful in his obedience to his superiors, diligent in praying, fasting, and study, earnest in preaching, and austere in controlling his body. Yet the inner peace for which Luther hoped seemed to move further away with the increasingly meticulous character of his obedience. ‘The divine imperative’, Gordon Rupp notes of Luther, ‘became something which withered all joy, and brought him a torment of doubt and uncertainty and guilt, an inner skepticism which ate corrosively through all the offices of consolation which were offered to him’.[4] Luther’s view of himself as oppressed by the wrath of God and doomed to perdition for the slightest imperfections came to taint his obedience, worship, and prayer with a shrill fear occasionally heard in his sermons.[5] The way of justification through the law brought on anxiety, straining Luther under the conviction that he had never done enough and that he stood with the damned rather than the saved.
During these times Luther continued to trust in his rule and awaited the breakthrough in which he would receive the grace of God, but he began to hate the spiritual road that he was travelling. Looking back on this way of life in the Commentary on Galatians, Luther observes that ‘those who perform the works of the Law with the intention of being justified through them not only do not become righteous but become twice as unrighteous… I have experienced this both in myself and in many others’.[6] A paragraph later Luther explains in depth the dynamic of the conscience that seeks justification via obedience. This passage, as a reflection of Luther’s personal development and his later doctrine concerning the law, is critical for the following analysis (italics added):
Therefore anyone who seeks righteousness through the Law does nothing by his repeated actions but acquire the habit of this first action, which is that God in His wrath and awe is to be appeased by works. On the basis of this opinion he begins to do works. Yet he can never find enough works to make his conscience peaceful; but he keeps looking for more, and even in the ones he does perform he finds sin. Therefore his conscience can never become sure, but he must continually doubt and think this way: “You have not sacrificed correctly; you have not prayed correctly; you have omitted something; you have committed this or that sin.” Then the heart trembles and continually finds itself loaded down with wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely, so that it deviates further and further from righteousness, until it finally acquires the habit of despair. Many who have been driven to such despair cried out miserably in the agony of death: “Miserable man that I am! I have not observed the rules of my monastic order. Where shall I flee from the countenance of Christ, the wrathful Judge? If only I had been a swineherd or the most ordinary of men!” Thus at the end of his life a monk is weaker, more beggarly, more unbelieving, and more fearful than he was at the beginning, when he joined the order…The Law or human traditions or the rule of his monastic order were supposed to heal and enrich him in his illness and poverty, but he became weaker and more beggarly than the tax collectors and harlots…Therefore neither past nor present works are enough for him, regardless of their quantity or quality; but he continually looks at and looks for ever-different ones, by which he attempts to appease the wrath of God and to justify himself, until in the end he is forced to despair…Therefore it is impossible for men who want to provide for their salvation through the Law, as all men are inclined to do by nature, ever to be set at peace. In fact, they only pile laws upon laws, by which they torture themselves and others and make their consciences so miserable that many of them die before their time because of excessive anguish of heart. For one law always produces ten more, until they grow to infinity.[7]
Luther originally saw the law as a boon that would ‘heal and enrich’ the wearied soul, but then discovered the law as an oppressor and a tyrant. The law’s growth to infinity bridges these opposing perspectives. As the commands multiply, pressing down upon the believer by their uncontrolled expansion, he or she perceives that the law has lost its limit. In light of the law’s unbounded severity in the application of its commands, good deeds required but undone inevitably and mercilessly swallow up obedience performed. The law mutates from a way of justification into a tomb and a prison because it lays an unlimited demand upon a finite and fallen creature, driving him to despair at nature’s ‘wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely’ under a law that has itself increased ‘to infinity’. This unlimited growth is not necessarily to be taken literally, but it points to a terror of conscience that is very real for those who suffered under it like Luther.
The law’s growth to infinity undergirds its role in the ‘conflict of conscience’ or spiritual trial central to Luther’s understanding of religious experience. ‘It is the devil’s habit’ in this conflict, Luther says, ‘to frighten us with the Law and to set against us the consciousness of sin, our wicked past, the wrath and judgment of God, hell and eternal death, so that thus he may drive us into despair’.[8] As the product of its increasing boundlessness, the law’s tendency to annul its own offer of justification looms over the individual’s consciousness in the moment of angst, so that when the Christian considers the law he immediately perceives its terror. At these times it seems ‘that the devil is roaring at us terribly, that heaven is bellowing, that the earth is quaking, that everything is about to collapse…that hell is opening up in order to swallow us’, in other words, that perdition is sure because nature has no available means to secure grace against its sin.[9] Nature endures its ‘reduction to nothing’ under an unforgiving law experienced as a ‘true taste of death’. This anxiety under the law, however, presupposes the promise of justification via obedience; the law’s ability to terrify depends upon its apparent validity as the way to salvation, a way that the believer endures as the progressive revelation of anguish.
Grace as ‘the righteousness of God’ shatters this process for Luther by announcing a way of righteousness completely apart from works and by faith alone, trusting in the righteousness of Christ given freely by the Savior and received in total passivity by the believer. Discovering this grace in his ‘tower experience’, Luther believed that he had entered ‘through open gates into paradise itself.’[10] This new way of justification rescues the believer from the torment of the infinite law because it successfully negates the necessity of taking up the law as the way of redemption. Interpreting St Paul, Luther affirms that Christ’s grace accuses the accusing law and damns the law that damns, establishing a new ‘law of liberty’, which Luther understands not as a new set of commands but as freedom from the burden that the law lays upon the conscience. Liberty means the undoing of the law’s claim to justify and, by extension, the torture imposed on the believer through that claim. By the law of liberty the believer announces that he has no business with the law, that by putting the curse to death Christ has liberated the conscience for peace.[11] Christ frees the individual to regard the law with indifference in matters of justification, so that the believer makes the transition from the law as justifying, which was experienced as slavery and anguish, to grace as the antithesis of the law and a true justification. By grasping Christ the entire law is made abrogate, destroyed as an object of fear.[12]
The law nonetheless has an important place in Luther’s conception of the Christian life, which he outlines through two steps. In the first, one sees oneself as a sinner, acknowledging the inability to perform good works. The believer comes before the law after Luther’s example, encountering its innumerable and unfulfillable commands. By the inability to obey the believer becomes aware of sin in its intensity and permanence, so that one is ‘truly humbled and reduced to nothing in [one’s] own eyes’, acknowledging that one is ‘an evil tree’, and that ‘everything you think, speak, or do is opposed to God’.[13] Trying to gain grace by works exacerbates this acknowledgment until the person ‘finds in himself not one spark of the love of God; thus he justifies God in His Word and confesses that he deserves death and eternal damnation’.[14] At the same time, the intractability of the believer’s sin drives him to Christ. Recognizing the futility of human effort, the individual turns to Jesus without mention of works or merit, falling upon Christ alone as the rock of salvation. This constitutes the second step, the proper honoring of God by accepting his mercy without attempting to share in God’s glory by works. Rather than trying to earn merit through obedience, and like Luther in his realisation of the righteousness of God given through faith alone, the believer receives it freely through Christ.[15] The second step culminates in the joy of grace received, an experience not unlike the breakthrough in which Luther felt liberation from the law and the opening of the gates of heaven.
Freedom, Equality, and Totalitarianism in Luther’s Experience
The motif of freedom in Luther’s religious experience is relatively straightforward, referring to the believer’s liberation from the threats that the law hurls at the conscience. It consists in the realisation that the law has no positive part in justification and cannot curse the believer who clings to the grace of God. The liberty in which the believer regards the law with indifference, as Luther argues in the Galatians commentary, found a voice in his thought as early as the 1520 essay Freedom of a Christian, where he proclaims the Christian’s freedom from the works that had so troubled him in the years prior to his climactic experience of grace through faith. This freedom does not imply the freedom of the will by which it might contribute to the individual’s pursuit of justification, but only liberation from inward anxiety. Indeed, in the following considerations of totalitarianism and equality in Luther’s experience, the denial of free will holds an important if not central place.
Luther encountered the law as a horrifying and relentless force, but can one call this law totalitarian? Drawing on the work of Hannah Arendt, I will point out three important characteristics of totalitarian law before arguing that each is present in the experience of Luther.[16]
Arendt notes two ways in which totalitarian law is limitless. One of these ways I refer to as external, while the other is internal. The drive of totalitarian governments toward world domination defines the external limitlessness of totalitarian law.[17] Such law recognises no boundaries of nation or geography that might rein it in, seeking at least in theory to assert its power over every person on the planet. Though Arendt criticizes aspirations to world domination as a fiction used to charm and distract those under totalitarian rule, she argues that the idea of world domination is intrinsic to the totalitarian ethos. The internal limitlessness of totalitarianism, which Arendt calls its ‘shapelessness’, has to do with the lack of organisation within totalitarian government. Far from the top-down hierarchy of authoritarian systems, totalitarianism shifts power willy-nilly from one government bureau or party organisation to another, often without informing the executors of the agencies that power has shifted to another outfit. The haphazard use of ministries and party organisations to accomplish the aims of the political power results in a government without a predictable or coherent structure of authority, and bereft of recognisable mechanisms of accountability. Combined with the perception of constant surveillance that dogs totalitarianism’s subjects, this exercise of power creates the impression that the will of the Leader is always directly present.[18] With every government or party official if not with every other individual one encounters the full and unhindered force of the totalitarian leader, who is directly present in any number of public and private interactions.
The limitlessness of the totalitarian application of law extends to accomplish the law’s primary purpose, the destruction of freedom. Comparing totalitarianism with authoritarianism, Arendt assesses that authoritarianism seeks only to restrain freedom no matter how tyrannical the restraint, whereas totalitarianism is uniquely determined to obliterate freedom entire.[19] The category of the ‘objective enemy’ admirably illustrates this denial of liberty. Totalitarian governments identify a class of persons as fit for eradication because of who or what they are (e.g., racially or as physically disabled) rather than for crimes committed. Police information and the whispering of seditious or otherwise ‘dangerous thoughts’ have no relevance to the guilt of the suspects, who deserve punishment because the rulers have pegged them as bearers of bad tendencies analogous to carrying a disease.[20] In such circumstances the free will of the suspects is meaningless because they are guilty whether or not they act. They consequently have no room to defend themselves. Totalitarianism as a movement thrives on the identification and liquidation of such objective enemies. When it dispenses with one it must find another, until all persons under its dominion have regressed into a single objective threat to the totalitarian advance.
The law of totalitarianism is terror, but this terror is specifically that of the unhindered motion of a power that crushes the liberties of persons arbitrarily perceived to stand in its way. Totalitarianism thus presents an odd combination of law and lawlessness: it has no concept of its limits, but in denying this concept it obeys a progressive and uninterrupted law of movement, a law whose meaning is to advance without limits. The essence of the movement is the terror that it always and everywhere imposes on those in its domain. Often concealed under terms like justice and freedom, totalitarian terror is the collective and dominating motion whose universal liberty means the destruction of any and all freedom that individuals might claim against it.[21]
These three characteristics of totalitarian law—its limitlessness, its destruction of freedom, and its terror—find a spiritual forerunner in Luther’s experience of the divine law as it drove him to the grace of Christ. The limitlessness of the divine law first possesses external and internal aspects parallel to those of its totalitarian counterpart. Like the political law that would extend to global domination, theoretically striving to bring every person on earth under its rule, the law in Luther’s mind sought to control not only every deed but every thought, every feeling, and every inclination without respite. It appears in the quote above to ‘pile laws upon laws’, extending ‘to infinity’ and causing Luther to postulate a monk who cries out in exasperation that he wishes to flee from Christ. Ostensibly good works provide no relief from this predicament as the law dogs their performance. ‘You have not sacrificed correctly; you have not prayed correctly; you have omitted something; you have committed this or that sin’, Luther says in describing his believer. The law so understood towers over Christians by leaving no space uninvaded in the conscience, applying itself always and everywhere to their outer and inner lives. It executes a global domination of the person that has a cousin in totalitarian aspirations.[22]
The internal limitlessness of the divine law finds expression in Luther’s depiction of the overwhelming consequences of individual sins. Just as the individual under totalitarian rule encounters the unmediated power of the leader in any number of public and private interactions, always sensing the judgment of the ruling authority in the presence of others, so Luther’s believer feels the full force of damnation with every thought and action. Every thought falls under the law’s judgment, every judgment means sin, and every sin condemns the believer to everlasting perdition. Thus Luther’s believer would exclaim in despair, ‘Where shall I flee from Christ, the wrathful Judge?’ While I noted this exclamation above to emphasise the ubiquity of Christ’s presence as judge, here I point out the immediacy of that judgment. Like the individual always in direct encounter with the authority of the totalitarian leader, Luther’s sinner lives always and everywhere under an unmediated condemnation unto eternity.
The limitlessness of the law burdens the Christian with ‘wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely’, negating the single good of obedience performed with the multitude of good deeds left undone while interrogating the supposedly good work.[23] Under these conditions the believer feels guilty regardless of good works completed as well as works that one might perform in the future. None of these begin to fulfill the law’s requirement, while sin inevitably distorts one’s best efforts. Inasmuch as the quantity and quality of one’s attempts at obedience make no difference to salvation, human nature is necessarily damned because of what it is rather than what it does, taking on a peculiarly objective character reminiscent of the totalitarian ‘objective enemy’. In both cases the law reduces the freedom manifest in particular actions performed or omitted into meaninglessness, for that freedom has nothing to do with the sentence of condemnation just as the condemned have no substantive free will of which to speak. Both totalitarian law and its divine forerunner in Luther intend to eradicate freedom, with Luther preaching that the individual is reduced ‘to nothing’ by a law that teaches the bankruptcy of nature’s powers.[24] Luther penned The Bondage of the Will in defense of this point, arguing at length that human nature has no soteriologically relevant free will. [25]Though the divine law in Luther’s conscience abolishes soteriological freedom while totalitarian law abolishes freedom in the political sphere, then, both laws simultaneously annul human freedom and redefine human nature as objectively sinful or guilty. Luther’s law thus provides a spiritual expression of totalitarian rule.
Luther’s experience of divine law thirdly corresponds to totalitarianism in the unrestricted terror that it provokes. Luther observes that the law produces torture, misery, and anguish of heart, while interpreting St Paul to understand the law as a tormentor.[26] The practical experience of the law’s conviction of sin is a terror so powerful that it must convince Christians that they are destined for eternal damnation, bringing them to the precipice of despair. Luther describes this terror with special vigor in his account of the Christian’s conflict of conscience: it seems, ‘as long as the trial continues, that the devil is roaring at us terribly, that heaven is bellowing, that the earth is quaking, that everything is about to collapse, that all the creatures are threatening us with evil, and that hell is opening up in order to swallow us’.[27] The believer senses ‘a true taste of death’, an emotional recognition of the inevitability of doom under the law’s condemnation.[28] The law must achieve this intensity as the prelude to grace, and without this intensity it fails to achieve its function of eradicating the Christian’s confidence in natural powers as an aid to justification. From this perspective the essence of Luther’s divine law, like that of its totalitarian counterpart, consists in the terror that it inspires in its subjects.
Like totalitarian law, Luther’s divine law similarly proceeds according to a principle of uninterrupted motion. In pushing believers toward the recognition that no human power can add to justification, so that they abdicate claims to natural righteousness and turn to Christ alone for salvation, the law simultaneously strives toward the point in which its terror meets no opposition from a will that believes it has the power to obey. The divine law flattens the will’s capacity to resist until its movement advances unhindered. The believer’s turn from trust in the law to Christ alone for justification signals the success of the law in this venture, its total domination over the will whose power has been reduced to nothing.[29] At this point the law enjoys a universal liberty of motion not unlike the freedom of totalitarian power over its subjects. The law in Luther’s conscience and as executed by the totalitarian state share this universal motion as the goal of their internal development.
Both Luther’s experience of the divine law in his conscience and totalitarian political law evince certain forms of limitlessness. Both also aim at the destruction of freedom, and both imply terror as intrinsic to the individual’s encounter with their rule. On these grounds I submit that one can reasonably understand the law that tortured Luther’s conscience as an inward and spiritual version of totalitarianism.
To discern the theme of equality in Luther’s experience, one must consider more carefully the experiential arc implied in the block citation and its culmination in Luther’s discovery of ‘the righteousness of God’, the cornerstone behind his doctrine of justification. Luther began the monastic life with confidence in the law as the way of salvation, viewing it as a means that would ‘heal and enrich’ his soul and provide assurance of pardon. Under this assumption he threw himself into his habit with determination and strictness in the hope of finding peace of conscience. Yet Luther endured a progressive and unremitting anguish under the law’s demands, arriving at the brink of despair under the law before discovering the righteousness that liberated him from its tyranny.
The citation describes a spiritual life in which the believer’s interaction with the law moves in contrary directions. On one hand, the law appeared to Luther as the way to justification and he clung to it as such. The hope that the law should lead him to justification remains present despite the contrary pressure exerted by the expansion of commands ‘to infinity’, whereby Luther found that the law undermines its own lure toward justification and crushes confidence in huma nature’s power to procure it via obedience. The law thus held out assurance of salvation and peace of conscience only to pull them back, submitting Luther to a deadly teasing from which he appeared to have no escape.
Luther’s discovery of Christ’s grace rescued him from the torment of the infinite law because it successfully negated that law’s presupposition, that he should take it up as the way of redemption. In the wake of justification grasped by faith alone, the law has lost all power to frighten because it has lost all power to tempt, with its validity as a path to heaven decisively denied. Faith accomplishes what the law’s expansion to infinity could not, overcoming the apparent righteousness via the law by the realisation of the total lack of righteousness, and thus the utter insufficiency for justification, of nature as well as the law. In another sense, though, justification by faith alone fulfills the law’s movement of self-annulment, completing the nullification of the law as a way to justification with a power greater than its own unbounded expansion. The total annulment of the law, and therefore the quieting of its terrors, is the passive righteousness that struck Luther as though he had entered ‘through open gates into paradise itself’. He subsequently theorised this experience as the sigh of faith in the midst of spiritual trial: ‘In every temptation and weakness, therefore, just cling to Christ and sigh! He gives you the Holy Spirit, who cries “Abba! Father!” Then the Father says: “I do not hear anything in the whole world,” neither the terrors of the devil nor the threats of hell, “except this single sigh”’ that is the Christian’s acknowledgment that justification belongs to Christ alone, and that nature and the law play no part.[30]
Figure 1 depicts the arc of Luther’s encounter with the law prior to the realisation of the righteousness of God. The upward movement of the line represents Luther’s trust in the law’s promise to ‘heal and enrich’ as the way to righteousness and his consequent attempt to gain justification through obedience. At some point the multiplication of commands sabotages this upward movement, so that the law begins to lose its allure as the way to salvation. The decline represents both the law’s self-annulment and Luther’s growing anxiety, for as he continued to trust in the law, he desperately wanted it to help him toward justification at the same time that he felt its asymptotic return to zero as the burden of an infinitely expanding demand. The infinitesimal proximity between the arc as it extends to the right and the x-axis represents Luther in the heat of the conflict of conscience, feeling damned because the law cannot give the justification it once promised while it wields increasing threats and accusations. The asymptote also represents Luther’s growing conviction that he could not possibly obey to the extent needed to grasp salvation. What matters here, though, is that the law’s self-annulment has not yet completely undermined its authority, not returning the asymptote fully to the x-axis. The law’s movement to infinity lacks the power to totally annul its positing as a way of righteousness, and thereby the authority underlying its tyranny.
Figure 1. The Law expands to Infinity in Luther
The final deforming of the law, in which it decisively loses its authority as justifying at the same time that it relinquishes all limits, must occur at the hands of a new and different power. Grace as ‘the righteousness of God’ received in total passivity and gained as the gift of Christ through faith alone is this power, irrefutably annulling the law as the way of righteousness. Only through the realisation of this new path of assurance, this justification grounded solely in the work of Christ, does the sabotage of the law’s authority begun in its infinite expansion reach its consummation. The law loses all authority as a way of justification in the believer’s acknowledgment of Christ’s grace, the sigh of ‘Abba! Father!’ that indicates the believer’s turn exclusively to Christ in abdication of the righteousness of the law. In that moment, the law’s movement ‘to infinity’ gains an equal footing with its supposed ability to ‘heal and enrich’, annulling the law’s claim to justify and thereby its claim to compel. The starburst on the graph below signifies the equality between the ascending and descending portions of the arc, an equality accomplished as the line completes its return to the x-axis. The starburst further signifies the exuberance of Luther’s liberation from the law as annulled, the delight that he described as an entrance through the gates of paradise.
Figure 2. Grace: An Equality that Annuls the Law
The motifs of freedom, equality, and totalitarianism in Luther’s thought converge in the dialectical movement through which the Christian receives the grace of Christ. The moment of grace is one of freedom inasmuch as the believer gains Christ’s blessing as liberty from the law’s condemnation. As Luther writes, ‘the law that once bound me and held me captive is now bound and held captive by grace or liberty, which is now my law’.[31] The believer lives by a new and liberating law applied not to the conscience but to the law that would damn it, a new law that releases the conscience from the old unto justification in Christ. The moment of grace is also one of equality in as much as the law’s growth to infinity culminates in the nullification of its positing as a way of justification, negating the supposition that the law can ‘heal and enrich’ by aiding the Christian toward salvation. The annulment of the law executes the ‘death of death’ upon the accusing law that is the flip side of the law of liberty in Christ: ‘Thus in my flesh I find a death that afflicts and kills me’—the law and its punishment for sin—‘but I also have a contrary death, which is the death of my death and which crucifies and devours my death’, that is, the death of Christ, appropriated by the believer in faith, that vanquishes the law’s terrors.[32] The equality between the positing of the law and its annulment frees the believer from its power of compulsion, rendering the law an object of indifference at the same time that it liberates the conscience for assurance in its savior.
The realisation of this freedom and equality depends on the law’s expansion into a totalitarian force, for without the law’s limitless oppression the Christian never arrives at an earnest appraisal of his sin. The law must reach the pitch in which the terror of eternal damnation forms its essence, it must subject the believer to the immediate judgment of a holy God, it must drive the believer to despair of any meaningful human freedom. Otherwise the spiritual trial does not come, the believer does not see nature’s powers reduced to nothing, and one’s confidence in obedience as a means of justification remains intact. Otherwise the conscience will not acknowledge that its only hope belongs in Christ while relinquishing all trust in works. In short, the freedom and equality implied in the reception of grace by faith alone will not accomplish itself until the Christian has passed through a psychological hell. Though it seems the antithesis to grace experienced as the gates of paradise opened, the totalitarian domination of the law is both intrinsic to and necessary for that grace’s emergence. The promise of grace as freedom and equality must move through its opposite in order to transition from a promise into reality.
The Lutheran Dialectic and the Denouement of Hope in the State
Before addressing the convergences between Luther’s experience and the theology built upon it on one hand and the trajectory of modern optimism regarding a society grounded in the state on the other, it is worth reviewing that optimism. Marx’s philosophy helps here inasmuch as it captures the spirit of the latter nineteenth century, envisioning a social world of profound freedom and equality centralised in political life. Marx proclaims the liberation of the economically enslaved to exist as free beings, expressing their individuality through personally chosen productive activity. In Marx’s words, the individual can ‘hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, [and] criticise after dinner’, without the division of labor forcing the person to become solely hunter, fisherman, cattle rancher, or critic.[33] This freedom of productive activity eradicates the alienation of individuals from their natures as economic and physical beings, while it overcomes the distance between persons fostered by the division of labor. It also coincides with a society of remarkable equality, in which class antagonisms have been abolished and private property is turned over to the commonwealth. The exploitation of one part of society by another fades into the past as individuals enjoy an equal material and political standing within a communist economic and political organisation.[34] Marx advanced and his followers accepted this vision as the near utopian culmination of humanity’s social life.
For Marx’s adherents and others hopeful in the state, the latter is a law unto social salvation much like the divine law was a means toward spiritual salvation for the early Luther. ‘Grace’ in the form of egalitarian social and political conditions would appear to occur, according to this understanding, somewhere along the path of obedience to the law. Applying this trajectory to Figure 2, one would think that the starburst representative of grace would appear along the line’s ascent. The nations who threw their energies into the law of statist governments hoped in this way to inaugurate a better society.
Luther and those who hoped in the state thus begin along similar paths. Both trust in a law or way of activity that they believe will bring them salvation. Luther’s law possessed a religious and psychological character and the salvation he sought both rewarded the soul and would pacify his anxiety. The later law possessed a political and outward character and promised ‘salvation’ in terms of a social order of pure freedom and equality and bereft of oppression and alienation. Both Luther and those who trusted in the state, however, found their aspirations contradicted by the transformation of their law into a totalitarian monster. In this way, the later hope in the state, followed as a path to social betterment and the end of economic ills, mirrored the optimism of the young Luther that eventually encountered the law as a source of horror. The promised improvement of the social order arrived fleetingly if at all, and in its place persons suffered under a brutal and all-encompassing dictatorship in Russia.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn captures the unexpected turn of events involved in the development of the communist state in the following passage:
If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed with iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the ‘secret brand’); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.
Yes, not only Chekhov’s heroes, but what normal Russian at the beginning of the century, including any member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party, could have believed, would have tolerated, such slander against the bright future?[35]
This passage gives examples of the stunning barbarity of the Soviet regime, which Solzhenitsyn immediately compares to the governments that preceded it. These governments did not practice such cruelty, having regarded it as ‘barbarism’ or ‘impossible’ from the reigns of Peter the Great to Catherine the Great. The communists, on the other hand, practiced cruelty ‘not by one scoundrel alone in one secret place only, but by tens of thousands of specially trained human beasts standing over millions of defenseless victims’. The suffering, as Solzhenitsyn vividly describes throughout The Gulag Archipelago, was incalculable and inhumane. Yet it occurred in a society propped up by high expectations, a society that saw itself moving toward the fulfilment of history. The irony between what the revolutionaries sought in the decades preceding the Bolshevik seizure of power and the reality of the path the communists trod can hardly be more severe.
The litany of depravities detailed by Solzhenitsyn speaks for itself, and I do not intend to delve into it here. It suffices to point out that the law thought to be ‘salvific’ in the political sense metastasised into a gargantuan terror. The meaning of salvation for those under such a law, who feel its brutality and its pressure, cannot but change from obedience to its commands to escape from its clutches. This is not to say that every person under communism sought to escape or saw the law as a tyrannical threat (of course there were those who benefited from Communist Party rule). It is to emphasise the character of a law that intentionally chooses innocents for punishment in order to terrorise the general populace,[36] that fabricates accusations and sentences its victims to hard labor for a decade or more, and which sought to turn every citizen into an informer against every other. Such totalitarian law, whether experienced at the highest intensity of its cruelty or a lower rung, inspires escape as deliverance from its rule. Solzhenitsyn dedicates a chapter of The Gulag Archipelago to escapes from the labor camps, noting that ‘The continual escapes in one or another place, even those that did not succeed, were a true proof’ that the prisoners had not yet entirely given up.[37] He later summarises that ‘The history of all the escapes from the Archipelago would be a list too long to read, too long to be leafed through’, adding that any author who wrote a book ‘solely about escapes…would be forced to omit hundreds of cases’ in order to spare his reader.[38] Referring again to Figure 2, then, grace comes to mean the annulment of the unlimited law, now understood as an unlimited political authority, instead of a social harmony achieved through collective obedience to that authority. Rather than progressing toward a starburst along the line’s ascent, the subject seeks the line’s return to the x-axis, here symbolising the annulment of communism’s totalitarian law for that individual.
The experience of those who hoped in the state follows the pattern of Luther to this extent: both parties originally hoped in the law, whether religious or political; both embarked upon its path, only to find it morph into a source of terror; and the understanding of ‘salvation’ for both Luther and those under the modern state subsequently shifted from peace through the law to escape from the law (in the political case, this shift did not necessarily occur for the original optimists, but for their heirs). These comparisons provide an intriguing link between the religious realities of the early modern world and the political realities of late modernity.
Conclusion
Given the preceding argument, for those who continue to consider the distance between Luther’s religious experience and the political reality of Marxist communism to be substantial, I offer the following considerations:
First, and despite their differences, the dialectical form lies at the heart of the thought of both Luther and Marx. Luther experienced and taught the dialectic in which the believer who receives God’s grace must first endure its opposite, the profound tyranny of the law. By moving through this antithesis, the believer comes to experience grace personally in the heart. Luther did not set out to experience this dialectic, as at first he thought the law would heal and enrich the Christian, but it later became fundamental to his exposition of the Christian faith. Marx also relies on the dialectical form. He asserts that materialist history progresses in a dialectical fashion, as the propertied and oppressive classes set the conditions for their own dissolution as they create the oppressed multitude. The latter eventually carries out the revolution that drives the historical process forward, or in the case of the proletariat, brings the historical process to its end. Marx believed in this dialectic, but one can ask whether his thought implies a dialectic that he did not recognise. His philosophy, according to my argument, bears a dialectic in which the freedom and equality supposedly provided by the state dissolves into freedom from the state (and in this sense, equality with the state), and in which the state takes the role of the antithesis needed for freedom and equality to properly develop. Like the law for Luther, the state becomes the dialectical middle-term, the antithesis needed for the achievement of progress. Dialectical thinking thus characterises Luther and Marx, and, according to the argument, both facilitate dialectical realities that diverged from their expectations.
Second, this argument does much to illumine the relation between the modern religious and social orders. Sociologists often point out that religiously-grounded ways of seeing the cosmos harmonise with attendant forms of social order, as in the premodern West Christian theological claims of cosmic hierarchy matched a hierarchically-structured political world.[39] In the modern era religion has receded in much of Europe, but the ‘spirit’ of Protestant religion has continued to influence the social world in various ways.[40] Michael Walzer, in particular, argues that the first early modern political revolutionaries were Puritan reformers.[41] It could be the case, then, that the ‘salvation’ of justification by faith alone, the central Protestant doctrine, contains the DNA for the ‘salvation’ of Marxist communism, despite Marx’s rejection of religion and communist persecution of religious believers.
Third, the theory that a tyrannical law is intrinsic to communist efforts toward freedom and equality contains an attractive explanatory power. Where communism has gained power, so has terror and oppression. Such occurred under Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, and during the Chinese Revolution under Mao, in addition to Soviet repression. In light of the repetition of communist horrors in various countries, observers can inquire whether communism bears their necessity within itself. My argument provides reason to see this as the case, and to be wary of any party that promises to improve society on communist principles. The party will set out, it seems, on a dialectic of terror opposed to the ideas that inform its social vision and its rhetoric.
But do calls for freedom and equality per se presume a totalitarian law that mediates their realisation? This is obviously not always the case. Several modern liberal governments have embraced freedom and equality for centuries without (or without yet) embracing a totalitarian law (e.g., England, the United States). In response to this reality, I offer a lesson drawn from recent political philosophy.
In The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies, Ryszard Legutko describes the ‘paradox of equality’. Writing on ideology in both communist and liberal-democratic societies, he observes that ‘the more equality one wants to introduce, the more power one must have; the more power one has, the more one violates the principle of equality; the more one violates the principle of equality, the more one is in a position to make the world egalitarian’.[42] The accumulation of power needed to enforce equality depends on the level of equality one wishes to introduce. The more equal one wishes to make society, the more power one must arrogate to oneself, one’s party, or one’s government. To establish a total equality (an equality of outcome or distribution), I would add, one must establish a total power. This communism has done, morphing into a totalitarian law. Those nations that have not sought total equality, on the other hand, have not centralised power to the same extent nor imposed a similar law on their citizens. Their governments and their laws have arguably grown to an extent commensurate with the level of equality pursued, and not beyond this.
Finally, what theological lesson can the Orthodox draw from this analysis of justification by faith alone? Mainly, that the way of salvation handed down from the Fathers describes an experience of the law strikingly different from that espoused by Luther. The Fathers do not teach that the law’s commands expand ‘to infinity’, nor do they describe the law as a tyrant or an oppressor. While the law cannot save, and while it condemns as it points out sin, it does not annihilate the Christian’s freedom of will and it does not terrify or approach the believer in mercilessness, as if purposed for anguish. Nor does the believer encounter the law as limitless, as if there were no rest from its commands in grace. The Orthodox encounter with the law sees it as the path of struggle unto salvation, which the Christian undertakes as aided by the grace of God, without the hairsplitting anxiety characteristic of Luther’s experience of the unbounded divine command. This difference in the experience of the law leads one to ask whether similar differences exist in the experience of grace. What is the spiritual and ontological meaning of Luther’s tower experience, we might inquire, when compared with the grace-filled experiences of Orthodox saints?[43]
Despite five centuries of influence, the implications of the doctrine of justification by faith alone—the idea of salvation at the heart of the modern West’s religious culture—remain obscure. Nor has the threat of totalitarianism disappeared from the West. If what I have proposed rings true, the struggle against these superficially diverse phenomena might ultimately be one. They might each require, in their own way, a statement of Christian salvation that is not of freedom and equality, but of rest and mercy.
[1] I occasionally refer to the nineteenth century ‘optimists’ or those who hoped in the state. This term points to a zeitgeist best exemplified by intellectuals, revolutionaries, and political operatives who worked first-hand to change the state, but also by rank-and-file members of statist political parties and citizens inclined toward the views of such parties.
[2] Law and Revolution, Volume 1 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983), 197.
[3] The development of Catholic canon law into a systematic corpus has a long history, beginning in the late eleventh century into Luther’s time. The law attained its systematic character between the Third Lateran Council in 1179 and the major systematic statements of canon law that appeared from then until the 1230s. This period covers the pontificate of Innocent III (1198–1216), the most powerful of the medieval popes. He oversaw the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215, which ratified hundreds of new laws in three days.
[4] Gordon Rupp, Luther’s Progress to the Diet of Worms (New York, NY: Harper Torchbooks, 1964), 27.
[5] Rupp, Luther’s Progress, 29–31.
[6] Luther’s Works, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan and Walter A. Hansen (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House and Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1955–1986), 26.404. Hereafter LW.
[7] LW, 26.404–406.
[8] LW 26.10.
[9] LW 26.382.
[10] From the Latin preface to Luther’s Works, quoted in Rupp, Luther’s Progress, 33.
[11] LW 26.157–158.
[12] One should not interpret the believer’s grasping of Christ for Luther as an active acceptance of the savior, but as being overpowered by the presence of God.
[13] LW 26.126.
[14] Ibid.; cf. LW 26.348.
[15] LW 26.126–127
[16] Arendt’s work on totalitarianism has provoked an enormous literature in the decades since its publication in 1951, generating criticism over her lack of a well-defined methodology, errors in historical analysis, and the emotional tone in which she tended to write. Despite the objections of Eric Voegelin, Russell Jacoby, and Walter Laqueur to Arendt’s corpus and her cult-like following, The Origins of Totalitarianism is recognised as a classic text on its subject (London, UK: George Allen and Unwin, 1967).
[17] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 392–419.
[18] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 405.
[19] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 404–405.
[20] Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 423–424.
[21] For Arendt’s full discussion of totalitarian terror as a law of movement, see The Origins of Totalitarianism, 460–467.
[22] Such a consciousness of the law does not necessarily follow from biblical injunctions to keep ‘every thought captive’ to Christ (2 Cor. 10:5). In contrast to Luther, St Augustine struggled under the condemning power of the law but did not construe that power in terms of a limitless and tyrannical demand. He rather saw the problem in his flesh’s entrenchment in bad habits and its inability to convert to obedience apart from God’s grace. That the Bible exhorts Christians to keep their thoughts captive does not make the law an oppressor but encourages a rhythm of thought oriented to heavenly things. The experience of the law as a limitless seeker of the Christian’s inner thoughts arose through the later Middle Ages before finding its most intense expression in Luther, but this does not entail that believers ought to encounter the law in this way. See James F. McCue, “Simul iustus et peccator in Augustine, Aquinas, and Luther: Toward Putting the Debate in Context”, Journal of the American Academy of Religion 48 no. 1: (81–96).
[23] LW 26.406; see the block quote above.
[24] LW 26.127; Freedom of a Christian, LW 31.348.
[25] Luther denies free will to humans only with reference to salvation. They possess free choice in mundane affairs.
[26] LW 26.406; on Luther’s reading of Paul, see 26.164.
[27] LW 26.382.
[28] LW 26.145.
[29] The Bondage of the Will, LW 33.6667.
[30] LW 26.382, 384; cf. Freedom of a Christian, LW 31.355.
[31] LW 26.161.
[32] LW 26.126; cf. 26.162.
[33] Karl Marx, “The German Ideology,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, ed. Robert C. Tucker, 2nd ed. (New York, NY: W.W. Norton, 1978), 160.
[34] Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party”, 489–491.
[35] The Gulag Archipelago, 1918–1956: An Experiment in Literary Investigation, translated by Thomas P. Whitney and Harry Willets (New York: Harper Perennial, 2007), 39.
[36] Mason, Gary Saul, “How The Great Truth Dawned,” The New Criterion 38, 1 (September 2019): https://newcriterion.com/issues/2019/9/how-the-great-truth-dawned.
[37] Page 254.
[38] Page 257.
[39] For example, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2006), 25–61.
[40] In his discussion of David Vogel’s work, sociologist Robert Bellah summarises: ‘Max Weber’s argument was, it seems, even more general than he thought: not only is there a correlation of Protestant heritage with modern economic prosperity, but with successful democracy, and, as Vogel discovered, strong environmentalism as well’ (“Flaws in the Protestant Code”, in The Robert Bellah Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 334–335).
[41] The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics, (Cambridge, Mass: 1982).
[42] (New York, NY: Encounter Books, 2018), 133.
[43] I have addressed this question in 1 John: On Docetism and Resurrection (Wipf & Stock, 2021), where I attempt to elucidate the ontological principle of division at the heart of the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith alone.