We are pleased to host a guest essay by Korey D. Maas (DPhil, University of Oxford), who is an associate professor of history at Hillsdale College in Hillsdale, Michigan.
The original Protestants can be excluded from the natural law tradition only by means of misreading or misrepresentation. Context—and charity—should prevent both.
In recent years a number of Protestant scholars have endeavored to recall their co-religionists to the natural law tradition preserved and embraced by their early modern forebears. Even Catholic scholars, including Matthew Gaetano right here at The Regensburg Forum, have contributed to this project of Protestant ressourcement. It was not entirely surprising, then, that various Catholic colleagues expressed appreciation for my own recent attempt to clarify some of the confusion regarding natural law in the thought of Martin Luther himself. One added that I might also have taken the opportunity to point out that a common affirmation of natural law allows Catholics and Protestants more effectively to work together in the public realm, rather than simply engaging in sectarian bickering. Though it was too late to incorporate the suggestion, I thought it good advice.
Others apparently do not, and would prefer instead to ramp up the partisan polemics in such a way as to ensure that Protestants are well and truly excluded from an ideologically pristine coterie of “true natural law advocates.” Thus, in a response to the above-mentioned essay, Timothy Gordon repeatedly insists that Luther can only be understood as either a schizophrenic or a sophist on the subject of natural law, and he questions the sanity of those, such as myself, who forward “irritating” arguments to the contrary.
Gordon’s agitation is understandable. Should it actually be the case that Protestants and other non-Catholics embrace natural law teaching, this would fatally compromise the argument of his newly published book, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish without Rome. (An Augustinian aside: America will perish even with Rome. The thing about any temporal polity is that it is, well, temporal.) That argument might be summarized as follows: natural law teaching is necessary for the preservation of America; only Catholicism has a natural law teaching; therefore, only Catholicism is capable of preserving America.
(Re)defining Natural Law
Whatever one makes of this line of thought, its book-length formulation does have the benefit of illuminating a point otherwise obscured in his recent essay. What that essay simply refers to as “natural law,” Gordon’s book consistently and more narrowly calls “Catholic Natural Law.” While perhaps clarifying in some respects, this equation of a specifically Catholic natural law with natural law simpliciter is obviously problematic in a number of others.
By the same logic with which it is claimed that Luther has no natural law doctrine because he has no Catholic natural law doctrine, one would have to conclude, for example, that he has no doctrine of justification since he does not embrace the Catholic doctrine of justification. If the qualifying adjective is meant simply to deny a doctrine of natural law to any outside the Catholic fold, one must also conclude that such giants of the tradition as Cicero and Ulpian had no natural law doctrine.
Moreover, given the manner in which Gordon implicitly equates an already narrow Catholic natural law with an even more specifically Thomistic natural law, he runs the risk of excluding even a great many natural law theorists within the Catholic Church. In our own day alone these might include the leading lights of the New Natural Law Theory, which Michael Pakaluk argues is “on every major point at odds with Aquinas” and “involves a rejection of the classical and Catholic traditions of natural law.” For that matter, Tony Burns argues that even Aquinas is at odds with Aquinas on natural law. I mention Burns and Pakaluk not by way of endorsing their conclusions, but simply to highlight, once again, that matters are not quite as tidy as some polemical presentations would lead one to believe.
If Gordon chooses to recognize only a tightly circumscribed “true natural law,” perhaps I should simply leave Luther to console himself with fellow exiles such as Cicero and Germain Grisez. But Gordon’s errors are so many—and so typical of such polemic—that they deserve at least a brief reply.
Context, Continuity, and Caritas
He complains, for example, that I accuse him of cherry-picking evidence to establish his case against Luther. In fact I did not accuse him of selective quotation; nor could I have done so since his original essay included no quotations of Luther at all. My criticism of that essay was that, rather than addressing anything Luther wrote on the subject of natural law itself, an unwarranted inference was made about what Luther “must be said” to have thought, on the basis of other doctrines he presumably held. I simply pointed out the oddity of insisting that he “must be said to have rejected natural law,” when in fact he explicitly and repeatedly affirmed it throughout the corpus of his writings.
Gordon now admits that he actually had no idea how frequently Luther affirmed the natural law. Yet he not only doubles down on his original assertion, he amplifies it. Rather than merely inferring that Luther “must” have rejected natural law, he now starkly asserts that Luther, at least sometimes, forwarded an “absolute denial of natural law.” What he does not do is offer the slightest evidence of Luther ever having done so. Indeed, of the quotations he now provides, the only one even to mention natural law refers to it as “this natural law, which cannot be unknown to anyone.” This is perhaps not quite as pithy as J. Budziszewski’s reference to “What We Can’t Not Know,” but the sentiment is precisely the same.
The few other quotations Gordon offers serve primarily to shore up his previous suggestion that Luther, despite repeated affirmations, simply must have rejected natural law “on the basis of his Protestant view of sin, will, and intellect.” Here I must indeed accuse him of cherry-picking, as well as misconstruing even the few quotations he’s hand selected. Further, I can’t help but voice the suspicion that he does so because he refuses to read Luther with even a modicum of charity. Rather than asking—as one might with a “hermeneutic of continuity”—how ostensibly conflicting statements might in fact be harmonized, he immediately levels charges of sophistry or schizophrenia.
Admittedly, given Luther’s own bombast and hyperbole, it can be difficult to read him charitably. Moreover, because he was an “occasional” author, rather than a “systematic” author such as Aquinas or Calvin, his position on a given subject cannot swiftly be located in a mature or definitive summa. Finally, since many of his writings were both polemical and occasional, it is undeniably (and understandably) the case that his theology develops as different emphases come to the fore in different contexts.
But all of this Gordon should understand since, as he rightly asserts, “Context matters.” It’s unfortunate, then, that he so blithely ignores context precisely where it matters for understanding Luther’s “Protestant view of sin, will, and intellect.”
Human Will and Human Intellect
With respect to the human will, for example, he describes Luther as “an in toto denier of free will,” and thus a “determinist.” He reaches this conclusion because “Luther wrote and proudly defended On the Bondage of the Will,” the title of which “alone gives the reader enough information.” Except it doesn’t, because even within the pages of that work—and subsequently throughout his life—Luther insisted upon an important distinction. He grants that man does have free choice “with respect to what is beneath him,” that is, in temporal affairs. What he denies is that one can choose freely “in matters pertaining to salvation.”
A faithful Catholic cannot of course be expected to endorse Luther’s denial of free will in matters of salvation. But he can be expected to acknowledge and understand the qualifying distinction Luther is here making. The distinction is especially important because the work in question was written in response to Erasmus, who had explicitly set the terms of the debate: “By free choice in this place we mean a power of the human will by which a man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation.” Context does indeed matter.
A similar neglect of context mars Gordon’s understanding of Luther on the intellect. He notes Luther’s claim that, subsequent to the fall into sin, “the intellect has become darkened, so that we no longer know God and His will and no longer perceive the works of God.” From this he concludes that Luther understood the intellect to be “completely darkened,” such that he “repudiates nature’s intelligibility” and even “the knowability of existence” (whatever that might mean, exactly).
Perhaps most immediately noteworthy by way of context is that, as an exegete, Luther often employs terms such as “knowing” and “knowledge” as they are used in Scripture—in a relational and even soteriological sense—rather than as they are employed colloquially and in philosophy. But he recognizes the difference, and so frequently employs the distinction made, for example, in commenting upon Galatians 4:8-9. “If all men know God, why does Paul say that before the proclamation of the Gospel the Galatians did not know God?” He answers:
There is a twofold knowledge of God: the general and the particular. All men have the general knowledge, namely, that God is, that He has created heaven and earth, that He is just, that He punishes the wicked, etc. But what God thinks of us, what He wants to give and to do to deliver us from sin and death and to save us—which is the particular and true knowledge of God—this men do not know.
Indeed, so frequently does Luther clarify this point that second-generation Lutherans could rightly state that “Luther has urged this distinction with especial diligence in nearly all his writings.”
These frequent and explicit distinctions—rather than sophistry or schizophrenia—explain why Luther can praise reason and free will with one breath and deny them with another. Natural reason is sufficient to know God’s existence and his will as expressed via the natural law. But God’s natural revelation of himself and his will, Luther insists, remain utterly insufficient for salvation. Similarly is a free exercise of the human will incapable of effecting salvation. Yet even the unregenerate will is capable of that which Luther and his colleagues call “civil righteousness” in earthly affairs—the sort necessary, for instance, to the founding and preserving of republics, Catholic or otherwise.
Divine Will and Divine Nature
Finally, then, what of Gordon’s claim that Luther simply could not have embraced “true natural law” because he was obviously a voluntarist? It is well known that Luther’s university training was in the voluntarist-oriented nominalist tradition. It is equally well known that his early broadside against “scholastic” theology was aimed specifically at this tradition and that his own theology developed largely in reaction to it. Gordon is correct, however, to note that Luther could still sometimes speak in such a way as to sound like an unreconstructed voluntarist.
He quotes again from Bondage of the Will, where Luther writes that God’s will is ruled by “no cause or reason”; thus, God is not “obliged” to will what is right, but what happens is right because God “himself so wills.” Gordon deems this nonsense because “God cannot and would not change his own nature.” But the very context of the cited quotation reveals that, however awkwardly expressed, this is Luther’s own point.
Luther there addresses the question of why God did not cease hardening Pharaoh’s already hardened heart. The answer is not an arbitrary “because he didn’t want to.” Instead, he says, any wish that God had acted differently is “wanting God to cease to be God,” which “implies that he should cease to be good.” God wills as he does because the divine will, Luther had already explained, is “the power of the divine nature itself.” It is “immutable, eternal, and infallible” precisely because “his nature never changes.”
Why, then, does Luther dislike talk of the divine will being “ruled” or “obliged” by any kind of “necessity”? He notes that such language (perhaps especially as popularly understood) “suggests a kind of compulsion,” which might further suggest the even more untenable implication that God is compelled to act contrary to the manner in which he desires to act.
Beyond this, though, it must be emphasized how utterly traditional is Luther’s allegedly voluntarist claim that “there is no cause” for God’s will. This was precisely the conclusion of Peter Lombard, whose Sentences remained the standard textbook in university theology faculties from the twelfth century through the sixteenth. It was his conclusion, in large part, because it was also the conclusion of Augustine. Lombard quotes from no fewer than three separate works of Augustine, who regularly and emphatically proclaimed that “the will of God is the first and highest cause”; “nothing is greater than God’s will, and so its cause is not to be sought”; “if the will has a cause, then there is something which precedes God’s will—which it is iniquitous to believe” (Bk 1, Dist. XLV, Ch. 4). Unless one wants to throw Augustine and the whole of high medieval theology under the same voluntarist bus, this is not a promising line of argument.
Luther, Protestantism, and the Enlightenment
By way of conclusion, it is worth emphasizing that the above questions were originally raised in view of the popular belief that Luther’s ideas determined broader Protestant ideas, which in turn determined those of the Enlightenment. If Luther’s “view of sin, will, and intellect” were what Gordon believes it to be, one would therefore expect to see this same view reiterated by his immediate expositors. What one in fact sees in the Lutheran dogmaticians, beginning with Luther’s colleague Philip Melanchthon and continuing through the next two centuries, are the traditional arguments of natural theology (including the teleological argument) and a continuing affirmation and explication of natural law.
This continuing affirmation informs Carl Braaten’s conclusion, in the very article from which Gordon quotes, that “none of the confessional documents of the Reformation, neither those of the Lutheran nor of the Calvinist tradition, rejected the notion of natural law.” It likewise explains the broader conclusion reached by J. Daryl Charles in a subsequent article of the same name and in the same journal: a rejection of natural law “cannot be attributed to the Reformers of the sixteenth century.”
If one wants to make the case that the first six generations of Lutheran theologians entirely misunderstood or completely rejected Luther on these points, this would certainly be an argument worth hearing. It would be a strange sort of historical causation, however, that has Luther leaving an indelible imprint on the Catholic Descartes and the Anglican Bacon while failing to make even the slightest impression on those fellow Lutherans consciously attempting to preserve, systematize, and advance his theology.
Still, if it remains Gordon’s desire to drum Protestants and others out of the natural law club so that he and a small band of “true natural law advocates” can save America all by themselves, more power to him. I’m sure he’ll not begrudge the rest of us if, in the meantime, we continue working for the common good, even across denominational lines, on the shared basis of “what we can’t not know.”