Therefore, the certainty on which all unions are based does not have the same qualities as in a moral union. In the latter it is a joyful and at the same time humble hope; in the former, it is rather the assurance that the ally cannot deceive, since there is a certain guarantee by which he is in some way compelled to fulfill the obligation. There confidence rests on the free desire of the individual, and hence constant gratitude to him; here it is on something third, which compels the personality, and hence there is no gratitude, but only a selfish feeling of security. Man loses "that freedom of the child of God," which is his highest possession, but for self-love this freedom is too heavy for him not to exchange it for slavery, if only it would leave him at his desires.

Man's Relation to God from a Legal Point of View

It is not difficult to see what can happen if a person considers his relationship to God from a legal point of view.

The main danger of this point of view is that in it a person may consider himself entitled not to belong to God with all his heart and mind: in a legal union, such intimacy is not assumed and is not required; Only the external conditions of the union must be observed there. A person may not love the good, he may remain the same selfish, he must only fulfill the commandments in order to receive a reward. This, as well as possible, favors that mercenary, slavish mood that does good only because of the reward, without inner attraction and respect for it. True, this state of involuntary good deeds is necessarily experienced by every ascetic of virtue, and more than once in his earthly life, but this state should never be elevated to a rule, it is only a preliminary stage, and the goal of moral development is in perfect, voluntary good deeds. The legal point of view sins precisely because it sanctifies this preliminary, preparatory state as complete and perfect. And since the mercenary attitude to the will of God is sanctified, the door is also opened for all those conclusions that necessarily follow from this attitude.

In a legal union, a person does not stand before the face of God in the position of an unrequited sinner, who owes him everything: he is inclined to present himself as more or less independent, he expects to receive the promised reward not by God's mercy, but as a matter of due for his labors. The object of hope here, strictly speaking, is not God's mercy, but man's own powers; and the guarantee, the third which binds the Ally without making Him a Benefactor at the same time, is man's own affairs. Deeds thus become something valuable in themselves, something worthy of reward, a conclusion that could not be more appropriate for a selfish nature that has lost its original purity, which reluctantly forces itself to fulfill the commandments and therefore values its involuntary good at the highest price. Moreover, the dignity of merit is not ascribed to virtues, or to the constant dispositions of the soul, but to individual external actions, which, in turn, the mercenary mood tries to reduce as much as possible and make as formal as possible, according to the natural desire in the mercenary to achieve his payment with the least possible expenditure of effort. Man's life from free moral growth turns into soulless fulfillment of particular prescriptions.

The Development of a Legal View of Salvation in Catholicism

The mechanism developed in the Western Church did not fail to affect theological science, which, under the influence of the epoch, completely submitted to it and, in turn, contributed to its further development and, so to speak, to its formation. Scholasticism, with its worship of Aristotle, cared more about the formal harmony of its systems and coped little (not at all) with spiritual experience, with life. It is not surprising if it (scholasticism) adopted a legal point of view. Could a scholasticist reflect on its truth, when under each of its points he saw excerpts, let us add, taken out of connection with speech? And in this way, so to speak, typographical method of proof, scholasticism justified all the extreme conclusions of the legal worldview. The quite natural teaching about the mutual aid of the members of the Church was transformed under the pen and in the mind of the scholastic into a completely mechanical record of the actions of one person (saint) to another. The uncertain situation of souls who died in repentance, but did not bear fruit, worthy of repentance, not established in good, turned into purgatory, where man pays God with his torments for crimes committed on earth, and not yet paid. Pastoral guidance during confession took the absurd form of payment for sins and indulgences - absolution of sins without moral tension, without penitential feats. The sacraments turned into magical actions (opus operatum), in which bodily participation was needed rather than spiritual participation, etc. Sinful fear of moral work, using a successful pretext, invented many necessary teachings for itself and so polluted Western Christianity with all outsiders that it was difficult even to recognize the truth of Christ in it. It is not without reason that when the German reformers came to the idea that faith alone saves a person, this one, so common in Christianity and constantly on the lips of Sts. The expression of the Fathers seemed so unusual and terrible that some considered it to be heresy and the destruction of all morality, while others took it almost as some new revelation and finally distorted its meaning. - Such fruits were brought to the West by its legal point of view on salvation. Its main danger, we repeat, was that it made it possible for a person to limit himself to one appearance; moral work was forgotten, as it were. Hence the good Catholic was often a very bad Christian inside, but in spite of this he thought that he was being saved, and in this self-deception he perished.

The human soul, which in its best part always thirsts for true life and salvation, can only be satisfied with the described teaching through misunderstanding, it will certainly feel its falsity. This feeling of a living soul was expressed, albeit unsuccessfully, in innumerable sects, in many attempts to correct Catholicism, such as we see throughout the entire course of Western Church history, and finally broke out in that terrible upheaval which is called the Reformation, and which still stands before Catholicism as a living denunciation of its untruth.

Protest of the Reformation

The Reformation came out with a merciless denunciation of all Catholic imitations in life and teaching, the soulless formalism that reigned in it, and demanded life and truth for man. Protestants both wrote and said that the source of Catholic wisdom is not the Gospel, not the teaching of Christ, but the considerations of reason, which stands on its own point of view and judges these things exclusively in a human way [2]. Without penetrating into the inner work of those who are being saved, reason stops at the external side and bases its conclusions on this alone. It is not surprising if in this way he arrives at propositions that are absurd from the point of view of spiritual experience and before the judgment of human conscience [3]; and then, feeling falsehood and at the same time seeing no other way than the existing one, he is forced against his will to resort to various artificial constructions in order to somehow drown out the tormenting voice of his conscience. "In this way, people, under the pressure of great danger, have invented various deeds, various liturgical rites, in order only to somehow calm their troubled conscience" [4]. In order to avoid this sad and terrible fate, it is necessary to break off all connection with the philosophical views that have been accepted, but are not reconciled to the truth of Christ, to turn to the truth of Christ itself, to investigate it, listening to the inner voice of one's conscience, trying to grasp what the Word of God and the Church's tradition are saying not only to the mind, but to the whole soul [5], and to be concerned not only with faithfulness to logic, but about fidelity to the truth, which is essentially living and active, and not formal.

Apparently, the time has come for a radical renewal in Western Christianity. Indeed, Protestantism began to refute with fury the main dogma of the legal view - the doctrine of deeds as merits before God. This teaching is untenable for the very reason that it fundamentally contradicts the very foundation of the Christian faith – salvation by the one Jesus Christ. "Whoever confesses that he has deserved grace by works, despises the merit of Christ and grace, and seeks the way to God besides Christ, by human powers" [6]. And even if there were no such contradiction, the deeds of man, taken in themselves, by their very essence cannot be merit before God: man does good deeds only with the help of the grace of God [7], yet everything he does himself inevitably bears the stamp of sin [8]. Wherefore all who boast of the merits of their works, or hope for works which are superfluous, boast of vanity, and hope for idolatry, which is to be condemned, we read in the Scottish Confession. - Thus resolutely and mercilessly were exposed all those conclusions which necessarily followed from Catholic teaching: purgatory, indulgences, etc.

Why Protestantism Could Not Restore the True Doctrine of Salvation

But... Protestantism was a child of its time and school. The first reformers learned to speak and think in the same Aristotle and Cicero as their Catholic opponents. Therefore, indignant at the blatant distortion of Christ's truth which they saw in Catholicism, they thought to explain it only by accidental causes: the wickedness of the hierarchy, etc., and did not suspect that instead of these conclusions there would necessarily appear others, equally false, because the falsehood is not in the conclusions, but in the very basis, in the very point of view on the subject. Instead of rejecting this basic lie, the Protestants were able to reject only some of its offspring, and thus only replaced some distortions with others.

For this reason, the Reformation, in the sense of the restoration of Christ's truth, ended in complete failure.