by Matthew Gaetano

TRF has discussed the Protestant engagement with ancient philosophy and scholasticism quite a number of times (here, here, here, here). But we have not directly discussed Martin Luther’s engagement with the question of philosophy and its study by Christians. Luther’s famous contempt for Aristotle, especially early in his reforming career, is on display in the 97 Theses, the Disputation against Scholastic Theology (September 1517):

It is an error to maintain that Aristotle’s statement concerning happiness does not contradict Christian doctrine (thesis 42).

Even the more useful definitions of Aristotle seem to beg the question (theses 53).

Virtually the entire Ethics of Aristotle is the worst enemy of grace (thesis 41).

And Luther targets the scholastic theologians – while using elements of the scholastic approach to disputation as a university professor – when he writes that

The whole Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light (thesis 50).

No one can become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle (thesis 44).

It is very doubtful whether the Latins comprehended the correct meaning of Aristotle (thesis 51).

Luther’s concern was largely with the relationship between Aristotelian ethics and the Pelagian tendency (“works-righteousness”) that he saw among the theologians, churchmen, and ordinary Christians of his day. As he says in the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation, “the righteousness of God is not acquired by means of acts frequently repeated, as Aristotle taught, but is imparted by faith.” But Luther did not totally reject ancient philosophy in 1518; in Heidelberg Luther has some generous things to say about Plato and even Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Anaxagoras in the too-often-ignored philosophical theses (here, p. 240).

And Luther did not even reject all of Aristotle in these early years. In the proposal for the reform of the universities in his Address to the Christian Nobility (1520), Luther counsels the abandonment of the Physics, Metaphysics, De anima, and Ethics (the last of which he calls “the worst of all books”), but says that he “should be glad to see Aristotle’s books on logic,” the Rhetoric, and the Poetics “retained or used in an abridged form” (146-147 in this easily available edition). Of course, his friend and colleague, Philipp Melanchthon, was one of the most important commentators on Aristotle in the sixteenth century (here, here, and here). And Luther has a variety of things to say about Aristotelian philosophy later in his career.

But this morning, I had a fascinating conversation with a student about Luther’s conception of nature and reason in his early lectures. Some of her findings led us to wonder about what he would say about Romans 8:19-25 in his 1515-1516 Lectures on Romans:

¹⁸ For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worth comparing with the glory that is to be revealed to us. ¹⁹ For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. ²⁰ For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope ²¹ that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. ²² For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. ²³ And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. ²⁴ For in this hope we were saved. Now hope that is seen is not hope. For who hopes for what he sees? ²⁵ But if we hope for what we do not see, we wait for it with patience.

What we found went beyond our expectations. And this is of special interest because of our attention in previous posts to a cosmic vision of religion in Philo, Paul, and later Christian Platonism. Luther rightly points out the tendency of exegetes (which would include quite a few of the scholastics) to associate the “creation” or “creature” here (particularly in v. 20) more with man than with the whole of the cosmos (237 of this edition). Luther sees that Paul is up to something much deeper in this passage:

The apostle philosophizes and thinks about the things of the world in another way than the philosophers and metaphysicians do, and he understand them differently from the way they do. For the philosophers are so deeply engaged in studying the present state of things that they explore only what and of what kind they are, but the apostle turns our attention away from the consideration of things as they are now, and from what they are as to essence and accidents, and directs us to regard them in terms of what they will be. He does not speak of the “essence” of the creature, and of the way it “operates,” or of its “action” or “inaction,” and “motion,” but, using a new and strange theological word, he speaks of “the expectation of the creature.” By virtue of the fact that his soul has the power of hearing the creature waiting, he no longer directs his inquiry toward the creature as such but to what it waits for. But alas, how deeply and painfully we are caught up in categories and quiddities, and how many foolish opinions befog us in metaphysics! (235-36, emphasis added)

Luther here is not attacking the apparently Pelagian tendencies found in Christian engagements with Aristotle’s Ethics. Luther is not merely turning people towards Scripture and way from ancient philosophy, though he certainly does that sort of thing (“I believe that I owe this duty to the Lord of crying out against philosophy and turning men to Holy Scripture” (236)). He is pointing out the failure of much Aristotelian philosophy as being rooted in its attention to things as they are – the nature of material substances – without any real concern about what they will be. Luther seems to be drawing on Paul to call for an eschatological approach to nature, one that attends to what nature is waiting for and what we should be hoping for.

There is a rejection of philosophy in one sense but a call to become “the best philosophers and the best explorers of nature” once we have learned “Jesus Christ ‘and him crucified'” (1 Cor. 2:2). For Luther,

you will be the best philosophers and the best explorers of nature if you learn from the apostle to consider the whole creature as it waits, groans, and travails in pain, i.e., as it turns with disgust from what now is and yearns for what is to come. Then the science of the essence of things and of their accidental qualities and differences will soon become worthless. Thus, the foolishness of the philosophers is like that of a man who stands by a builder and marvels at the way the pieces and boards of wood are being cut and hewn and measured and who remains stupidly content with it all, utterly unconcerned about what the builder finally plans to accomplish by all his labors. In the same way, the fools of philosophers look at God’s creature: it is constantly being prepared for the glory that is to come, but they see only what it is in itself and how it is equipped but have no thought whatsoever for the end for which it was created. (236-37, emphasis added)

It is not simply that our eyes are blinded by sin and that we cannot see the fullness of Creation as God intended; Luther adds that Creation itself is being prepared for greater glory, which should be a central concern as we explore the cosmos. (Does Luther say anything about the “essences” of things in this state of glory?) Failing to take this eschatological standpoint is basically absurd: “We take pleasure and we glory in our knowledge of the created world and yet it mourns over itself and is dissatisfied with itself!” (237). It is almost insulting to nature to “derive a happy science from the mourning things of the world and laughingly gather knowledge from the sighings of creation.”

After mentioning Colossians 2:8 and its reference to being cheated or spoiled by “philosophy and vain deceit according to the tradition of men,” Luther offers his summary of this whole line of reflection: “We conclude, therefore, that anyone who searches into the essences and functionings of the creatures rather than into their signings and earnest expectations is certainly foolish and blind. He does not know that also the creatures are created for an end” (237, emphasis original).

Luther’s critique of Aristotelian philosophy goes far beyond his challenge to an ethics based upon frequent repetition of virtuous actions or to a logic that does not capture the fullness of Scripture. In his 1515-1516 lectures on Romans, he saw the Aristotelian attention to stable essences, operations, and accidents as obscuring the groaning and sighing of creation, as it awaited a glory yet to come. Hearing the Word of God might lead to the rejection of quite a lot of conventional philosophy, but it should also help one to recognize how Paul philosophizes and to listen to the apostle’s “new and strange theological word.” Only then will one become a great “explorer of nature.”