 Luther is here contrasting his own account of justification through faith with the idea of justification through works, which he associates with the Aristotelian tradition and traces back to Aristotle’s Ethics. For here, Luther argued, one can find the idea that virtue is something to be developed through our own efforts and instilled in us through habituation, thus making the idea of good works central to the idea of moral improvement. While perhaps plausible in a secular context, once this idea is transposed into understanding our relation to God, Luther took it to be disastrous as it led to the view both that we could act rightly without God’s grace, and that we could to some extent earn his good judgement by doing so, without seeing this grace as unmerited. This, however, is to generate a sense of pride in our own abilities which precisely negates the possibility of good action, for reasons we will consider further in the next section. Luther thus sets his own view in opposition to the Aristotelian one in the Disputation Against Scholastic Philosophy when he writes that “We do not become righteous by doing righteous deeds but, having been made righteous, we do righteous deeds”, so that as a result “Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace” (1517, WA 1:226/LW 1:12). Luther’s criticisms of Duns Scotus, Gabriel Biel and William of Ockham on these issues elsewhere in the Disputation make clear how he sees them as relating to this fundamental Aristotelian error, while his reference to Augustine’s anti-Pelagianism in the first two theses equally makes clear the theological mistake that Luther sees in all such views. And while Luther does not mention him explicitly in the Disputation, not surprisingly he elsewhere occasionally but strongly criticizes Aquinas for also falling under the baleful influence of Aristotle on this  issue.[22]