Jaroslav Pelikan - From Luther to Kierkegaard

Lutheranism has had to face the problem of its relationship to philosophy ever since the Reformation. But if we begin our examination of the interrelations between Lutheranism and philosophy with the period of the Reformation, we must be perfectly clear about the fact that Luther was not a philosopher; nor, for that matter, did he want to be one. Luthers great accomplishment was not philosophical, nor yet theological, but evangelical.

It was Martin Luthers divinely appointed task to restore to its proper centrality the assertion that in the forgiveness of sins Jesus Christ has become the Lord and the Savior, to bear personal testimony to that lordship, and thus to reassert in all its strength the true Christian Gospel. This is not theology as that word is usually understood; for theology in the usual sense of the word does not come until after this personal relationship has been established, until the Christian man gets down to thinking it over.

Nevertheless, like it or not, Luther was faced by philosophy and was forced to take account of it. For, regardless of his own theological or religious stand, one cannot escape the fact that after all these years philosophy seems to be here to stay and that the connection between Christianity and philosophy is probably here to stay, too. Etienne Gilson has taught us to speak of Christian philosophy as an historical fait accompli and has shown that without at least an historical appreciation of Christian precept and dogma no one can understand or interpret the history of European philosophy since Marcus Aurelius. and at least since his time there has been a relationship between Christianity and philosophy that neither the secularism of John Dewey nor the isolationism of Karl Barth has been able to eradicate. Whether that relationship has been beneficial or detrimental to either Christianity or philosophy is an important question for both to answer. But for our purposes it is more important to note that every major Christian teacher has inherited a Christianity that was tinged with philosophy and a philosophy that was colored by Christian thought.

And so it was with Luther. As a man of the sixteenth century, however, he inherited a tradition in which Christianity and philosophy were much more closely intertwined than they are today. This was particularly true of classical medieval theology and philosophy, as represented by Thomas Aquinas. It was characteristic of the synthesis which medieval piety and thought effected between the agape of the New Testament and the eros of ancient Greece that philosophy and theology should have interacted as much as they did. But what Gilson does not point outand what, as a Roman Catholic, he cannot be expected to point outis that the magnificent combination of faith and reason in the Middle Ages was effected at the expense of faith, and that the impact of the divine agape in the Cross of Christ was too often weakened in the caritas synthesis of the medieval Church.

It was primarily against this aspect of medieval theology that Luther revolted. Precisely because his was an evangelical concern, as has already been mentioned, he violently objected to the fact that philosophy had been permitted to mollify theology to the extent that it had. In this objection Aquinas was the particular target of his attacks. The extent of Luthers

But what he did know of Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Peter Lombard he did not like, and that primarily for religious reasons. Though he does accuse them of being poor philosophers as well as incompetent theologianshis expressions, characteristically, were much stronger Thus it is clear that it was because of what they had done to free grace, and not principally because of what they had done with Aristotle, that Luther repudiated the systems of the medieval thinkers.

Yet another factor involved in Luthers attack upon medieval thought was the general weariness with scholasticism that characterized much of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. One has only to read the works of John Hus or of Nicholas of Cusa

How strongly Luther was affected by the via moderna we can judge from his cosmology. The doctors of the thirteenth century had developed an elaborate doctrine of the universe, based partly upon Aristotle and mostly upon the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy. It is this cosmology that is so beautifully dramatized in Dante Alighieris Divine Comedya universe which, as Anatole France puts it, was so simple that it was represented in its entirety with its true shape and motions in certain great painted clocks run by machinery.