Annotatio CXXXIV
”And [that] man was simple and upright.” — Job 1:1
The commentaries wrongly ascribed to Origen, in the exposition of this passage, have two propositions,1 the former of which Erasmus judges to savour of something Arian, on this account, that its words run thus: “All things whatsoever men do, they do in vain, if they have not done [them] in faith; they act without cause, save in the acknowledgment of the one unbegotten God the Father, and in the confession of the one only-begotten Son of him, our Lord Jesus Christ, and in the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the glorious and venerable Paraclete,” etc. In these words the name of God is added to the Father alone, and he alone is called unbegotten, because he alone had no beginning; the Son is called Lord, not God; but the Spirit [is called] neither God nor Lord, but the venerable Paraclete: for by these expressions the Arians were wont to signify, in the Trinity, that the Holy Spirit is great, the Son greater, but the Father greatest.
The second proposition Luther took up in the articles disputed by him, when he asserted that all the virtues of unbelievers are sins.2 The words of this proposition are these: “That I may say [it] briefly and boldly: All things whatsoever men do — whether in virginity, or in abstinence, or in chastity of body, or in the distribution of their goods — they do all in vain, if they have failed in faith. For all the sanctity, and all the justice, which anyone does outside the true faith of God, he does in vain, he does unto perdition; it profits him not, it aids him not in the day of wrath: to which Paul is witness, saying, ‘Everything which is not of faith is sin.’”3 Of the same opinion seem to be Ambrose, Augustine, and Anselm — whose mind, catholically expressed, you have in Annotation 255 of the book which next follows this.