“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. This is shown by the innumerable Summae that collect and expound such laws . . . ”
Though in it Luther describes the way of perdition by sustained trust in the law rather than justification as the transition from law to grace, this passage informally outlines the law’s transformation from presenting a temptation to seek one’s righteousness through it, which Luther elsewhere refers to as its abuse by the believer, to what he calls the law’s proper theological use, that of bringing the Christian to a robust knowledge of sin, reducing nature’s powers to nothing and denying their contribution to justification while nourishing despair of the law as the way of righteousness. Applied to Luther’s own experience and given a voice in the passage, the mediating term between man’s approach to the law as that meant to “heal and enrich” and its eventual terminus in despair is the recognition of the law’s infinite demands. Everywhere the Christian looks, good deeds required but undone swallow obedience performed. As the commands multiply, pressing down upon man by their uncontrolled expansion, he perceives that the law has become limitless, even infinite. The law mutates from a promised way of justification into a tomb and a prison because it lays an unlimited demand upon a finite creature. Yet in this movement the law also begins to perform its right theological use in convincing the believer of the utter insufficiency of works for justification, driving him to despair at nature’s “wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely.” So long as man continues to trust in the law despite this despair, a sinful agony consumes him. This is the docetic tyranny of the law over the Christian, the inward manifestation of an ecclesiastical power that transgresses its limits without restraint.
The passage implies an interaction between law and nature that moves in contrary directions. The law initially appears as the way to justification and man clings to it as such. This hope in the law remains present despite the contrary pressure exerted by the expansion of the commands to infinity, whereby the Christian finds that the law undermines its own lure toward justification and destroys confidence in nature’s power to procure that justification via obedience. The law holds out assurance of salvation and peace of conscience only to pull them back, submitting Luther and his believer to a deadly teasing from which there appears to be no escape.
The law’s growth to infinity undergirds its role in the “conflict of conscience” or spiritual trial, in which the contradictory vectors of the law attain their highest intensity. “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.” As the product of its increasing boundlessness, the law’s tendency to annul its apparent offer of justification loomed over Luther’s consciousness in moments of angst, so that when he considered the law he immediately perceived 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. Nature endures its “reduction to nothing” under a merciless law, experiencing its wrath as a “true taste of death.” This anxiety under the law presupposes the promise of justification via obedience toward whose annulment the law itself tends; the law’s ability to terrify depends upon its apparent validity as the way to salvation, a way that the believer endures as the limitless revelation of anguish.
The law’s limitlessness in application to a finite creature means likewise its limitlessness in the realm of being, an infinity achieved by the eradication of its limit in nature’s freedom of will. The law’s commands everywhere convincing man that he is under the curse, allowing no respite from their assaults and convicting him of multiple sins for each single act of righteousness, condemn nature before it acts. This ubiquitous and inescapable condemnation renders human freedom meaningless; it is the law as a tyrannical infinite victimizing the finite will that would hold its boundary. It is also the experiential source of Luther’s dictum that the will is powerless with respect to justification, which is to say that the will suffers the curse no matter what it has done or will do. The insufficient righteousness that the will might claim for itself dwindles into no righteousness at all, just as the individual in the midst of spiritual trial endures the law’s infinity as the roaring of hell and the devil. As the law progressively expands, squeezing its limit into insignificance, it simultaneously abdicates its form, casting off its definition in the believer’s experience as the loss of mercy. The law as a direction toward righteousness given for nature’s benefit transforms into something cold and cruel, a terror to the conscience.
Grace as “the righteousness of God” shatters this process by announcing a way of righteousness completely apart from works and by faith alone, with Luther turning to the righteousness of Christ given freely and received in total passivity. This new way of justification rescued Luther 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 acquisition of righteousness via the law by the realization of the total lack of righteousness, and thus the utter insufficiency for justification, of nature as well as the law. But in another sense 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,