Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 378 - Faith, No More - Martin Luther.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Faith, No More, Martin Luther. It seems like a perfectly reasonable assumption that the most impactful figures in the history of philosophy would be, well, philosophers. Figures like Plato, Confucius, Nagarjuna, Avicenna, and Kant, they are the ones who divert the course of human thought. But there are lots of ways to affect the development of philosophy and writing about philosophy is probably not the most effective one. If you change the language people speak, the books they read, and the art they enjoy, throw their political arrangements into upheaval, challenge their institutions of learning, make them question their fundamental beliefs and even the meaning of their lives on earth, you are definitely going to influence the way they do philosophy. Martin Luther did all of these things. Indeed, I'm tempted to say that he's one of the most influential non-philosophers in the history of philosophy, except that it's not quite clear whether or not he was a philosopher. By his own terms, he certainly wasn't. He mentions the philosophers as an enemy group whose views he wants to correct in light of Holy Scripture. But he received a solid education in scholasticism as a student in Erfurt and was able to draw on that training in his frequent polemics, including his attacks on scholasticism itself. Having received his bachelor's degree from Erfurt in 1502, his legend really began in July of 1505, when he was almost hit by lightning. All but literally thunderstruck, he wasted no time, or actually he wasted about two weeks, before joining an Augustinian monastery. His life from then on was not all that dissimilar from that of other intellectuals in this time. He gained a degree in theology, taught at a university, wrote books, engaged in public disputations, except that Luther used these activities to express increasingly radical criticism of the church, arguing that the whole fabric of European Christendom needed to be rewoven, or, as we usually put it, reformed. His critique of Catholicism began with his legendary decision to nail a list of 95 theses to the door of the castle church in Wittenberg in the year 1517. This sounds like a dramatic gesture, if in fact he really did it, but it was actually a typical way to propose a set of propositions for a debate. His target was the practice of offering indulgences, agreements by which the church would forgive sins in exchange for a generous donation. Luther was certainly not the first to lament this practice. Indeed, it's been argued that the 95 theses grow quite naturally out of a medieval culture of criticism aimed at the worldly ways and wealth of the church. But Luther's intervention was made in a different context, owing to factors we've already discussed, notably the widespread use of printing to disseminate texts and the new humanist approach to scripture. The resonances between Luther and humanism sound out at the very beginning of his list, where the opening salvo of propositions allude to the debate over the meaning of the term penance in the Bible. Even if Luther's overall theme in his 95 theses was not that revolutionary, they did hint at what was to come. Most obviously, Luther was concerned to constrain the scope of what can be accomplished by the church, and in particular by papal authority. He said that the pope can only relieve punishments he himself imposed, and that souls in purgatory are beyond his power to forgive. The following year, Luther would deny the doctrine of purgatory entirely, saying it was fabricated by goblins. Even here, early in his career as a theologian, Luther wanted to focus on the individual believer's repentance in this life. This would become the central concept in his mature thought. Humans are deeply and permanently sunk in sin, and there is only one hope for avoiding the just penalty for this sin. Which is not, of course, to hand over some money to the church, or indeed to seek intercession from the church in any way. Rather, we must beg God for forgiveness, in all humility, but also in the awareness that He has generously offered us grace. Thus, the Christian enters into a direct and ongoing relationship with God. We will not be saved by engaging in rituals or following rules. Justification is by faith alone, not by works. Luther said that this principle of justification by faith, no more, was the basis of all we teach and practice against the pope, the devil, and the world. It seems like a pretty simple idea, but as we'll see shortly, it gave rise to many implications and complications. Luther would work through these implications over his whole career until his death in 1546. He did so by trying to set a good example himself, by preaching, and above all, by writing. For someone who wanted to minimize the importance of works, he sure wrote a lot of them. It's been calculated that he wrote about 1800 pages per year, with the result that the standard edition of Luther takes up more than 100 volumes. These contain disputations, sermons, polemical works, statements of belief, letters, and informal remarks called table talk that by themselves take up six volumes. Explaining his prolific output, Luther candidly said, I have a swift hand and a quick memory. When I write, it just flows out. I do not have to press and squeeze. Among his many writings, the single work with the greatest impact was his German translation of the Bible, first of the New and then eventually also the Old Testament, the latter despite the fact that, as Luther admitted, his Hebrew skills were modest. He picked up some Hebrew as a young student, but in the 1530s could still remark, If I were younger, I would want to learn this language. From the very beginning, this outpouring of words incited alarm and outrage from the church authorities. They did their best to shut him up, putting him on trial for heresy already in 1518, with the interrogation carried out by Cardinal Thomas de Villeau, also known as Cajetan. As we'll see in a later episode, Cajetan was one of the leading exegetes of Thomas Aquinas in this period. Luther's ideas were condemned, but he received protection from Frederick the Wise, the ruler who established the university at Wittenberg. The church and Luther would have to agree to disagree, though disagreement was the more dominant note, what with the pope excommunicating Luther and Luther coming around to the view that the papacy was the Antichrist. He sarcastically credited this realization to the Catholic apologists, who rose to the defense of the church and its corrupt practices. Men like Johann Eck and Jerome Emse. Reading their arguments in favor of the papacy, said Luther, was what really turned him against it. Let's turn, though, to Luther's arguments in his own favor, in hopes of seeing what all the fuss was about. We can begin with another set of propositions which he proposed for debate in 1517, within a few weeks of the 95 Theses on Indulgence. Here he took aim at the scholastic tradition he'd been studying at Erfurt. He makes his target very clear in the text, following many of his claims with phrases like this in opposition to the philosophers, this in opposition to the scholastics, or this in opposition to the views of Scotus and Gabriel Biel. The contrast with Biel is particularly illuminating. As we saw in the last episode, Biel was a nominalist theologian who believed that God is under no obligation to save anyone from damnation. If that was the bad news, the good news was that God has generously promised to give grace and salvation to those who do their best to deserve it. Though we do suffer from original sin, we retain freedom of choice, and if we choose to pursue righteousness, God will acknowledge the effort and reward us. Luther rejects this whole theory, except for the bad news at the beginning. To his mind, it is ridiculous to suppose that God and the human cooperate in achieving salvation. Either divine grace is sufficient by itself, or its presence means nothing. More fundamentally, before the bestowal of grace, the human can never perform a meritorious action, that is, act in such a way as to earn God's favor. Absolutely everything we do without grace is sinful, even if what we do adheres to God's law. Given our corrupt nature, we'll only be doing it for our own selfish advantage. Imagine for instance that Beale sees a little old lady who needs to cross the street. Admittedly, in the 15th century when he was alive, there were no cars. Still, Beale hastens to help her, thinking that through this and other good turns for his neighbors, he will merit God's grace. But this is itself sin, Luther will cry. The action stems from Beale's hope of salvation for himself, not from his hope of getting the lady across the way without her being hit by a slow-moving ox cart. But surely, you might argue on Beale's behalf, we do perform selfless deeds sometimes. Surely it's possible to act in a genuinely altruistic way, even if we only manage it on rare occasions. Luther would disagree. Being corrupted by sin, we would always prefer to satisfy our own desires without the constraint of moral requirements. As Luther puts it, if it were up to the will, there would be no law. This is the meaning of a passage in a letter of St. Paul, which tells us that everything that does not come from faith is sin. So when Beale thought he could merit grace by freely doing his best to be a very good boy, he was sinning twice over. The actions that resulted were sinful, and it was a further sin when he presumed to solicit grace through these actions. And there's yet another more subtle error here. It's wrong to understand sin only in terms of wicked individual actions. This leads to a view like Beale's in which you express contrition for your mistakes and try to merit God's help by avoiding them. But for Luther, sinfulness is a permanent and pervasive condition of fallen nature. We should repent for our sinfulness in general, not only for particular misdeeds. This continues to be the case even for the faithful Christian who has received grace as a generous and unprompted gift from God. Even nature will remain corrupt throughout this life, so that, as Luther liked to put it, we are at best both righteous and sinful at the same time. Luther is well aware that his analysis of sin might sound like a counsel of despair. It sounds like we should just give up on trying to be good. He draws the opposite conclusion though. Once we take the full measure of our sinfulness, the correct response is hope and faith, but faith in God, not in ourselves. We do good when our actions flow from faith in God, rather than from prideful belief in our own power to do good or from our interest in being saved. In fact, Luther thinks that all actions done out of faith are good, whether great or small. Good works are thus an outcome of grace. They are not, as Beale thought, a trigger for the bestowal of grace, like a decent performance on a difficult test, which God rewards with the ultimate smiley face. Or as Luther somewhat more soberly puts it in the Disputation from 1917, Luther elsewhere explains this in terms of a contrast between the inner and the outer person. When the will within us is made righteous by God, our outer actions can also be righteous. We can never be sure that we are inwardly righteous. As Luther already said in his 95 Theses, no one is sure of the integrity of his own contrition. But if someone fails to perform good actions on the outside, that's a reliable indication that they are still rotten on the inside. As Luther says, if good works do not follow, our faith is false. This is an important point. We might have had the impression that Luther just doesn't care about what Christians actually do. After all, faith justifies, not works. But he can adhere to that position without saying that works are totally irrelevant. They are not a cause of justification, but a result, and hence a sign of justification. Luther offers useful analogies to explain this. A bishop carries out a variety of tasks, like when he consecrates a church. But it is not his doing these things that makes him a bishop, rather it's the other way around. It's because he's a bishop that he can do them. Likewise, a good or a bad house does not make a good or a bad builder, but a good or bad builder makes a good or bad house. The upshot is that being made good or evil by works only means that the man who is good or evil is pointed out and known as such, a teaching that Luther again thinks can be confirmed by scripture, as when it says at Matthew 7 verse 20, you will know them by their fruits. It must be said though that Luther sometimes makes outer actions sound like an irrelevant afterthought, not so much fruits as fruitless. He writes that, A Christian has all that he needs in faith, and needs no works to justify him. And if he has no need of works, he has no need of the law. And if he has no need of the law, surely he is free from the law. Or if that doesn't sound alarming enough, how about this quotation? Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe and rejoice in Christ even more boldly. Such passages sound like an invitation to anarchy. No wonder that when anarchy actually did break out in the form of the Peasants' War, plenty of people thought it was Luther's fault. As we'll be seeing in a later episode, Luther was at pains to correct this as a misapprehension. His goal was not to tear apart the whole hierarchical apparatus of 16th century society. At least not all of it. While he did rise to the defense of the secular authorities, who were challenged by the revolt of the peasants, he had no interest in defending the authority, or traditional role, of the Church. He argued that the papacy was a human invention, and the pope merely the bishop of Rome. The Catholic version of the mass was also a human, and strictly unnecessary practice. There's a rather amusing passage where Luther says that, For all the sins he committed as a young man, the one he regrets most is that he was constantly pestering God by performing pointless masses. All this constituted a direct assault on the role of the priesthood. Christians need no specially qualified clerics to mediate between them and God. Rather, all believers are priests, and anyone can assume the office of ministering to others. This may remind us of what humanists like Erasmus were saying about the Bible. It was an ancient text in need of careful philological effort, yet also a book that is largely plain in its meaning, so you didn't need advanced degrees in theology to expound upon that meaning. Luther's approach as translator and exegete of the Bible was similar. He rendered it into German with an eye to popular speech, and encouraged readers to adopt the plain or obvious meaning of the text, unless this was ruled out by outright absurdity. In that case, one might resort to a more figurative or metaphorical reading. Where Luther's defense of secular authority may seem conservative, and his assault on clerical authority was certainly radical, his views on social issues tended towards moderate reform. This is well shown by his disagreement with Andreas von Kallstadt, who had been one of his examiners for his theology degree. In the early 1520s, von Kallstadt was calling for rapid and radical changes in Wittenberg. Luther tried to rein him in, concerned about the disorder it was causing in the city. Despite this caution, some of Luther's most influential ideas lie in the area of social reform. For example, he discouraged the notion that poverty was a kind of holy state that brings one closer to God. Rather, poor people are just unfortunate souls who need the help of the community, a doctrine put into practice when Wittenberg set up a common chest for charity in 1522. Another example along the same lines is Luther's attitude towards family life. Thanks to his letters and the table talk, we know a good deal about his relationship to his own wife, Katarina von Bora, who shared Luther's background in having had a cloistered youth. They rejected this life of chastity in favor of marriage and child-rearing, a decision Luther most certainly did not regret. He admitted the pressures of family life, remarking wryly that these almost compel one to put one's faith in God. But he saw sexuality as a God-given and natural thing, albeit one always mixed up with sin given our fallen condition. To demand chastity was like expecting that people refrain from eating or moving their bowels. While some lofty spirits might be able to live without sex, it was a doctrine of demons to make this a requirement laid upon priests. Child-rearing, too, is holy work. There is a striking passage in which Luther pays due respect to fathers who are willing to change diapers, and another where he favorably compares parenthood to going on pilgrimage. While this sounds pretty forward-thinking, as concerns the duties of men, Luther unsurprisingly takes a fairly traditional view about the duties of women. He says that bearing children is their purpose on earth, that the broad backsides of women show that they were made to sit at home, that it is never a good idea to be led by women, and that his own wife is a more talented speaker than he is, which he considers a pity, since it is more fitting for women to be silent. Still, Luther has no patience for authors who wrote diatribes against the vices of women, remarking that, if women were to write books, they would say exactly the same thing about men. As it happens, we already know that in the Italian Renaissance women did write such books, and later on in the current series, we'll be returning to this battle of the sexes, and seeing how it was waged in other parts of Europe around this time. If Luther allowed so much to be known about his intimate relationships, it was because he wanted other people to take an example. This is what a marriage based on faith looks like. It's yet another example of the far-reaching influence of Luther on 16th century society and beyond, which brings us back to the question of his impact on philosophy. Intimate is certainly not the word you'd use for his relationship with the philosophers. As we've already seen, he castigated them, or the scholastics, for their teachings. At a more abstract level, his critique of human nature led him to a rather skeptical attitude towards reason. He said, for instance, that blind reason gropes about in matters which pertain to God, seeking consolation in its own works, according to its own inventions, without being able to consider Christ and faith. But this might itself be a debt he owed to scholasticism. Remember, he was a student at Erfurt, where nominalism was in the ascendancy, and nominalism is usually famed for the limitations it places on reason. From the nominalist point of view, the structures of the mind do not necessarily match those of the real world. Notably, we have universal concepts, but there's nothing universal outside the mind. Then too, as voluntarists, the nominalists believe that all things are decided arbitrarily by God's will, not by the dictates of rationality. Of course, Luther agreed with them about this, but he thought that even the nominalists trusted too much in their natural powers of will and rationality. As we've seen, he rejected Gabriel Beal's appeal to the ordained power of God, in which God's freedom to do absolutely anything is constrained by his promise to give grace to those who do what is in them. On Beal's account, God could have made faith alone and not human effort the sole basis of justification. On Luther's account, this is exactly what God has in fact done. How do we know this? Not of course through rational argument, but by reading scripture. In this sense, Luther can be called a Phaedest. The most central truths of Christianity, which are the most central truths of all, are accessible to us only through faith in the revelation, and we must accept them even if they seem to fly in the face of reason. So discussing the resurrection of Christ, he says, Against everything reason proposes, we must learn to cleave to the word, and to judge entirely according to it. Elsewhere, he adds that, Faith alone, and not reason, is able to think rightly about God. Still, Luther is willing to use reason when he has to. As we'll see later, he let himself be drawn into a rather scholastic debate over the nature of the Eucharist, calling upon his nominalist training as he argues that it is indeed possible for the substance of Christ and the substance of bread to coexist in one and the same place. So while he wants faith and not reason to lead the way, he allows reason to defend and clarify the principles of faith. Some have suggested a parallel between Luther's attitude and that of Thomas Aquinas. Both thought that God reveals truths inaccessible to reason, that reason can then step in to carry on the project of theology from there. Luther himself would probably not appreciate this comparison, given that he once called Aquinas the source and the basis of all heresy, error, and destruction of the gospel. But this was typical exaggeration. He thought that other scholastic authors like Scotus, Ockham, and Beale had done a lot of harm too. If we're looking for medieval precursors to Luther, then apart from the obvious case of Reformers like Wycliffe and Huss, we might instead consider the tradition of German mysticism, as found in figures like John Towler. Like the mystics, Luther challenged the idea that the Christian is working towards righteousness throughout life by striving to avoid sin and calling upon the intercession of the church. In both cases, the alternative is an unmediated, personal relationship with the divine. But where the mystic ambitiously aims for a union with God, Luther is content simply to trust in a God who remains distant and inscrutable. He thus speaks of a hidden God in the context of the free will debate, a topic we'll be revisiting soon. The only appropriate attitude towards such a God is faith, another reason to be suspicious of rationalist theology, especially when it comes to such mysteries as the Trinity. Yet while he certainly thinks that faith outstrips reason, Luther does not seem to think that it overturns reason, in the sense of requiring us to believe flat impossibilities. Here Luther is apt to remind us of Nicholas of Cusa. Like Cuzanus, Luther loves a good paradox, as in that phrase, righteous and sinful at the same time. But also like Cuzanus, he steers clear of embracing outright contradiction. A nice example is his famous claim that the Christian is perfectly free Lord of all, subject to none, perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all. Luther goes on to explain this paradoxical remark in a manner worthy of a scholastic arts master. The human is twofold, and while our inner nature is justified by grace and free, we must outwardly seek to serve other people by helping our neighbors. Admittedly, Luther is not always so forthcoming in resolving the paradoxical formulations scattered through his writings. Then too, his teachings don't necessarily remain consistent across all his writings, which is hardly surprising given their quantity and the fact that they appeared over several decades. It's been nicely remarked that he is self-contradictory, but never ambiguous. Some of the further developments of his reformation, including developments that appalled Luther, can be seen as attempts to embrace just one side of the contradiction found in his writings. Another source of inconsistency was Luther's need to reply to critics who attacked him from a variety of viewpoints. The torrent of words that flowed from his pen were aimed at fellow Protestants as well as the Catholics. We'll be getting into some of these controversies in episodes to come, but before we wrap up for today, a word must be said concerning his invective against non-Christians. Luther was notoriously hostile to the Jews. This hostility grew during his career. A work of 1523 reminded readers that Christ had been born a Jew and accordingly recommended a relatively benign approach. But the later Luther used harsh, even obscene and violent language against the Jews, in a fashion that has only come to seem more shocking in the light of the subsequent history of anti-Semitism in Germany. We can find him, for instance, imagining the devil filling up Jews with excrement until it pours out of their every orifice. He was also paranoid about what the Jews might do to him personally. In one letter to his wife, he blames their evil magic for a bout of impotence. This is nasty stuff, and scholars have tried variously to contextualize it within his larger body of work or treat it as a lamentable feature of his thought that can be detached from his other teachings. I'm rather skeptical about the prospects of the latter strategy. His hostility to Judaism certainly affected his approach to Scripture, for example by making him reject the tradition of rabbinical exegesis of the Hebrew Bible, and as Luther would surely be the first to say, there was nothing more central to his thought than his reading of the Bible. Perhaps this is one of the few cases where Luther can still move the modern-day reader in the way that he moved his contemporaries. They might find him to be amusing or infuriating, reassuring or frightening, inspiring or insidious, but they certainly couldn't ignore him. This has been an unusually long episode, in part because of the centrality of the topic for this series, and in part because, as usual, I'll be taking the rest of August off, so I wanted to leave you with a substantial meal to tide you over during the weeks of podcast hunger to come. Nonetheless, I still haven't done justice to Luther, and not only because justification is by faith alone. We'll be coming back to him numerous times as we discuss his controversies with figures like Erasmus and Zwingli. Our first episode when the series resumes will be an interview with one of the world's leading experts on this founder of the Reformation, Linda Roper. That's all coming up starting on September 12th, so unlike Luther, do not lament, but instead look forward to the fall, here on The History of Philosophy, without any gaps. you