What appears as his freedom and his exaltation unto universality belies the ontology of formlessness. The man of possibility is man scattered, a man celebrated in the Renaissance by those who lacked a consciousness of his deeper meaning. That new depth’s bottom, however, would not be touched until the Reformation, where man’s religious orientation suffered perhaps its profoundest blow. It was not the Renaissance but the Reformation that catapulted man into formlessness, that launched the scattering into domination of man and his world. There, and there alone, came the revelation of the Christ-Idol.
II
Docetism’s Grand Dialectic undermined the papacy as a channel of divine law in a number of ways. The collapse under Boniface VIII diminished the popes into puppets of French kings in the same era that John of Paris defined papal legitimacy in terms of the pope’s administrative responsibility to Catholic believers, suggesting a novel theory of ecclesiastical constitutionalism. While the church relinquished spiritual authority under the supervision of a particular nation and as its partisan, on the level of theory the grounding of the pope’s legal authority in substantive appeals to the people based his right in the collective as an entity subtly distinguished from the law and granted the power to judge it. These two challenges to a Catholic law grounded in the supreme rule of God joined hands in the early fourteenth century with the silent and more stunning transformation in which the practice of confession grew to require the enumeration of absolutely all of one’s sins in order for one to receive assurance of pardon. If in the prior two developments Docetism lay coiled and ready to strike, in the latter it delivered the venom. For the infinite law imposed upon the conscience in confession, the inward parallel to the multiplication of the church’s legal canons, served only to undermine that law’s viability. From the Christian’s imprisonment in this confessional cocoon would be born the Christ-Idol as the god of man liberated and universalized, indifferent toward and without the law. Thus Docetism unveiled the dagger supposed to bear the name and power of Christ, a weapon that executed its first strike in the Reformation.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries Western man grew increasingly anxious over the state of his soul, fomenting that anxiety through a progressively burdensome requirement in confession. Theologians and church officials deemed it necessary that man count what lies beyond counting, that he present each and every sin to God so that the Savior might wipe it away, cleansing the conscience and relieving guilt. The Christian pursuing salvation embarked upon the most stringent inner examination, holding up the smallest sin as much as the greatest in order to expose and eliminate it in the grace of God. This trajectory flowered as the infinitizing of the law in the conscience and the consequent demolition of natural righteousness, and at its apex it dominated the minds of two men. Towering above the preceding age as its paradigmatic product is Martin Luther, the melancholy monk who obliterated the bonds of man’s spiritual being. Luther brought the docetic dialectic to a new pitch, redefining the spiritual freedom of man as the necessary maturation of inner tyranny under the law. At his side stands John Calvin, the mastermind who applied the dialectic of the liberated conscience to man as such, energizing powers that have alienated him from his neighbor, his society, his natural environment, and from the law of his being qua man.
As a young monk, Luther took up the law with unusual vigor, trusting in it as a way of righteousness. His years of confidence in devotion, fasts, ceremonies, and worship as if these could save defined his early efforts toward salvation, in which he sought justification via the law. When this way of justification brought on anxiety, Luther felt the temptation to continue to trust in the law, promising God that he would fulfill all of the law’s commands while doubling his determination along that course. Looking back on this way of life in the Commentary on Galatians (1531), 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.” He then explains in some depth the dynamic of the conscience that seeks justification via obedience. This passage, a reflection of Luther’s personal development, hints at the docetic innovation in which the oppression of the conscience under the law precedes its liberation in the grace of the Christ-Idol:
“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
