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Today Joe examines why it’s probably not a good idea to look to Martin Luther in matters of faith and reason. We look at Luther’s call to ban Aristotle from the Church, arguably the most important contributor to Western ethics and phenomenology. And Joe examines Luther’s absolutely wild claim that he is the “new Noah,”….yes, like the ark.
Transcript:
Joe:
Welcome back to Sam Popery. I’m Joe Smar and I want to unpack a fascinating writing from the father of Protestantism, Martin Luther, and to show why I think you should probably change how you view Luther. Now, one of the things that Martin Luther and Taylor Swift have in common besides having large bands of devoted followers, is a tendency to make implausible claims about how well they know Aristotle. Now in Swift defense, she may want us to recognize how embarrassing the line you know how to ball. I know Aristotle is, I mean, being massively overconfident in how well you understand a great thinker is so high school as if, but it’s also less defensible when it’s coming from Martin Luther who’s a grownup and a monk and a priest, and yet we find him doing the same thing. He seems to have fancied himself quite the scholar of Aristotle.
In fact, I think it’s fair to say he thought of himself as the greatest expert on Aristotle who ever lived. Now you might be saying, but Joe, why should I care about Aristotle at all? Well, I won’t offer two reasons. One, the battle over Aristotle is in many ways a battle over faith and reason. Do faith and reason work together as gifts from God, or do we view them as enemies so that faith becomes irrational and reason leads us away from God? The second reason is that Luther’s attacks on Aristotle really reveals something about Luther himself, something, which I think helps to make sense of his attacks on the Catholic Church of his day or on the faith of the early Christians. But for now, I’d simply suggest to you that when you read Martin Luther’s 1520 open letter to the Christian nobility where he argues that many of Aristotle’s best books should be banned from universities by the secular authorities, that this should ring some alarm bells.
Now, one of the things I find most alarming is how many of you haven’t signed up over on shameless joe.com, I kid of course, or do I for as little as $5 a month, you can get ad free episodes and have access to livestream q and as a community of people who care deeply about the faith. And since Shameless popery doesn’t take sponsors, your direct financial support is what keeps this channel going. So a huge thank you to all of you who do support this ministry. And if you’d like to help us too, please visit shameless joe.com and sign up today. Okay, so surprisingly enough for a Catholic priest, Luther had a longstanding hatred of Aristotle as early as 1517. We find him arguing that a man cannot become a theologian unless he becomes one without Aristotle. And that compared with the study of theology, the whole of Aristotle is as darkness is to light, as well as arguing that logic and syllogisms have no place when reasoning about God.
But in his open letter to the Christian nobility, the letter I referenced earlier, he actually goes beyond this writing to the secular authorities in Germany, in part to try to get Aristotle’s books banned. Specifically, he warns against Aristotle’s physics, his metaphysics, his de anima on the soul, and his Nico McKean ethics. He says they should be completely discarded claiming that nothing can be learned from any of these books, and that no one has so far understood his meaning. And many souls have been burdened with prophetess labor and study at the cost of much precious time. Okay, so wait a second. Obviously, if Luther thinks nobody understands the meaning of Aristotle’s writings, he’s implicitly conceding, but he doesn’t understand Aristotle. Right? And since he can’t understand him, he sort of concludes that therefore nobody can, and the book should just be banned. He actually blames Aristotle for all of this, saying that any Potter has more knowledge of nature than is written in these books.
And he curses Aristotle as a damned conceited, rascally heathen, whose false words have diluted and made fools of so many of the best Christians. He even goes so far as to say that God has sent him as a plague upon us for our sins. Martin Luther is basically a real life venini from the Princess Bride. Have you ever heard of Plato, Aristotle? Socrates, yes, morons that more or less is Luther’s real life view. He thinks that Christians have nothing to learn from Aristotle since Aristotle, who by the way, lived before the time of Christ wasn’t a Christian. Luther had a particularly hatred for Aristotle’s Nick McKen ethics claiming that his book on ethics is the worst of all books. Notice here Luther isn’t just saying it’s Aristotle’s worst book. He’s claiming it’s the worst book ever written. To give you some context for how wild this claim is, Yale’s Brad Inwood is putting out in his own book, ethics After Aristotle that the Nick McCain ethics, the book that Luther is raging against here is the single most consistently studied treatise in the history of ethics.
So while Luther may not have understood the book, seems that a lot of people have understood it and continue to understand it today, in fact, the book is of increasing importance today as the Stanford encyclopedia philosophy points out. Plato and Aristotle are the godfathers of the field of what’s called virtue ethics, which recognizes that ethics isn’t about the ends justifying the means as inconsequential, and it’s not about blindly following deontological rules, as in Tism ethics is about building moral character. And Christians should agree with and affirm this. So the works of Aristotle were and are massively important to Christians and to Western culture in general. And this has been true for thousands of years now, but Luther thinks that they’re garbage because he doesn’t understand them. So you might be wondering, well, why then should we listen to Luther rather than somebody who does understand them?
Well, Luther has a response. Let no one accuse me of exaggeration or of condemning what I do not understand, my dear friend, I know Well, where of I speak? I know my Aristotle as well as you or the likes of you. I have lectured on him and heard lectures on him, and I understand him better than do St. Thomas or Scotus. Okay, I think this bears repeating. I understand Aristotle better than St. Thomas Aquinas or Dun Scotus did leave aside Luther’s attacks on Aristotle, a man who’s writings he finds inscrutable and pointless. The utter hubris of claiming that you understand Aristotle better, not only than your readers, but better than even St. Thomas Aquinas or Dun Scotus is outrageous because make no mistake, St. Thomas Aquinas is the greatest Aristotelian in the history of at least Western philosophy. And that’s not just my judgment. Ralph McInerney makes this point, and he points out that Thomas’s commentaries on Aristotle are famous for how well Thomas can get into Aristotle’s mind and thinking despite being separated by different religions and cultures and centuries.
Now that view is widely accepted. Just as a simple example, I asked Chachi pt, who the greatest Aristotelian was, and right away Thomas Aquinas was the top answer followed by a roiz and then Aristotle himself. So yeah, St. Thomas Aquinas literally beat Aristotle out as best Aristotelian Luther’s name strangely never came up. So Luther’s claim that he understands Aristotle better than St. Thomas Aquinas or blessed Dun Scotus should be regarded as if I went down to the YMCA and claimed everyone there. I actually play basketball better than Michael Jordan or LeBron James did in their primes. Okay, Ryan, you have Darryl. I have Roy. Really? I thought I’d think Roy. No, actually, I think Roy’s our best player, not Lonnie. But again, the point here isn’t really about Aristotle, it’s about the kind of man Luther is because many Christians today have this idea that the church in the 16th century was just horrible.
That basically everybody besides Luther was either stupid or ignorant or evil. And they often don’t realize that this view of the world comes largely from Martin Luther himself, who is by all appearances from his own writings, something of a delusional narcissist. Now, look, that’s a big claim. So let me back it up. By even appealing to his allies, even people like Thomas Cranmer who would go on to lead the Church of England, Indo Schism from the Catholic Church, Cranmer responded upon reading Martin Luther’s writings, Luther Wantonly attacks and raves against the pontiff. That’s the Pope. He accuses a whole counsel of madness. It is he who is insane, oh, the arrogance of a most wicked man. And so it wasn’t just that Luther thought that the pope was the antichrist or that he lightly dismissed, ecumenical counsel is that throughout so many of his writings, we come away with this idea that he thinks everyone besides him is evil and wrong.
Now, even Protestant scholars like Michael Parson and Eric Grech have acknowledged that Luther saw himself as the new Noah, the lone righteous man in an evil world, come to save his followers. Now, you can see this clearly from Luther’s commentary on Genesis in which he compares himself to Noah directly commenting on Genesis six. Well, really, Luther creates kind a fan fiction version of Genesis six. He imagines a conversation in which Noah’s neighbors rebuke him by saying, art thou alone wise, does thou alone please God? Are the rest of us all in error? Shall we all be damned thou alone? Does not air, thou alone shall not be condemned. Now, that doesn’t happen anywhere in scripture, but Luther explains why he imagines the conversation because Catholics were making those arguments to him asking Luther if he really believes that all the church fathers had been an error, including Augustine and Ambrose and the great Christians of old, and that only Luther himself is wise.
But rather than saying, wow, you’re right. That is a wild claim to make about all Christians throughout history or something like that. The Noah of Luther’s imagination responds to these questions by being convinced that this proves that all of those people and everyone else is damned while only he and his people are going to be saved. Now, strikingly Luther says in part that this is because Noah follows another doctrine and another worship. But remember the contrast here is Luther’s relationship to the church fathers. He thus appears to be conceding that he doesn’t follow ancient Christian doctrine and he doesn’t follow ancient Christian worship, and he’s perfectly comfortable with this. So if you’re a Protestant and you believe that you’re practicing the original real form of Christianity, this should absolutely give you pause. The first Protestant reformer knows he’s breaking away from the early Christian religion, and he’s fine with that.
After all Luther reasons, one cannot conceive how difficult it is for one man to oppose himself alone to the unanimity of all churches, to impugn the judgment of the best and the most amicable of men, to condemn them, to teach, to live, and to do everything in opposition to them. This he says, is what Noah did, but of course, the reference to the churches shows he’s really talking about himself. He sees the Christian Church for the 1500 years preceding him as if it were the same as the wicked and godless men of Noah’s day, while Luther alone is the one man who needs to come into the world and to lead true Christians away from the church onto a new arc with new doctrines and a new worship. Now, there are many reasons why this is disturbing, but one of the worst is that many Christians today have so little knowledge of church history that they’re inclined to just assume that Luther’s version of events is basically right, that maybe the church of Luther’s Day is so corrupt that Luther is the only one who believes the true gospel, and he has to go into a schism.
When you actually read Luther, you start to notice that he constantly claims to be the only one who has the truth regardless of the context. He’s the only one who understands Aristotle better than Aquinas does. He’s the only one who understands the gospel better than Saint Augustine does. When we read these things together, we should really reconsider just how much we trust Luther as a philosopher and a theologian and even an accurate witness to what’s going on around him, because these sound more like the delusions of a narcissist rather than the sober insights of a humble saint. And you see this, and it’s worth asking the very question that the Catholics of Luther’s day were asking Luther. After all, there’ve been a lot of seemingly holy Christians throughout the ages, indeed saints throughout the ages, who seemed far holier than Luther himself ever did. Even Luther’s allies like John Calvin conceded that despite his obvious gifts, he labors at the same time under serious faults, choosing to surround himself by flatterers who only make his arrogance worse.
So Luther’s acknowledging the stakes, if you’re going to take his side, you seemingly have to say that all of the saints were wrong, that the unanimity of Christian churches throughout the ages was wrong. That Luther alone was wise. Or I would suggest might it instead be the case that Luther, the guy who thought himself the world’s greatest Aristotelian and scripture scholar, was instead something of a raving narcissist. Now, look, delusions of grandeur like this paired with cries of revolution and perceived freedom from tyranny, those are extremely powerful and dangerous forces, and it’s no wonder that he was able to marshal a movement around him and garner a substantial following. People would hear tales of his deeds. Those tales would become legends, and the legends would eventually get confused for history. So I’d ask you this. Do you really think Martin Luther, what if I told you for instance, that Martin Luther never nailed the 95 thesis to the door of the church in Wittenberg? It’s totally made up. Or what if I told you Martin Luther never gave a speech where he said, here I stand. I can do no other. It’s a made up tale. Would you imagine? I’m stretching the truth? Well click here to learn the true history of Martin Luther. For Seamus Pop, I’m Joe Hess Meyer. God bless you.