G.K. Chesterton on St. Thomas and Martin Luther

* "IT will not be possible to conceal much longer from anybody the fact that St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the great liberators of the human intellect. The sectarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were essentially obscurantists, and they guarded an obscurantist legend that the Schoolman was an obscurantist. This was wearing thin even in the nineteenth century; it will be impossible in the twentieth. It has nothing to do with the truth of their theology or his; but only with the truth of historical proportion, which begins to reappear as quarrels begin to die down. Simply as one of the facts that bulk big in history, it is true to say that Thomas was a very great man who reconciled religion with reason, who expanded it towards experimental science, who insisted that the senses were the windows of the soul and that the reason had a divine right to feed upon facts, and that it was the business of the Faith to digest the strong meat of the toughest and most practical of pagan philosophies. It is a fact, like the military strategy of Napoleon, that Aquinas was thus fighting for all that is liberal and enlightened, as compared with his rivals, or for that matter his successors and supplanters. Those who, for other reasons, honestly accept the final effect of the Reformation will none the less face the fact, that it was the Schoolman who was the Reformer; and that the later Reformers were by comparison reactionaries. I use the word not as a reproach from my own stand-point, but as a fact from the ordinary modern progressive standpoint. For instance, they riveted the mind back to the literal sufficiency of the Hebrew Scriptures; when St. Thomas had already spoken of the Spirit giving grace to the Greek philosophies. He insisted on the social duty of works; they only on the spiritual duty of faith. It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy."

* "WE must be just to those huge human figures, who are in fact the hinges of history. However strong, and rightly strong, be our own controversial conviction, it must never mislead us into thinking that something trivial has transformed the world. So it is with that great Augustinian monk, who avenged all the ascetic Augustinians of the Middle Ages; and whose broad and burly figure has been big enough to block out for four centuries the distant human mountain of Aquinas. It is not, as the moderns delight to say, a question of theology. The Protestant theology of Martin Luther was a thing that no modern Protestant would be seen dead in a field with; or if the phrase be too flippant, would be specially anxious to touch with a barge-pole. That Protestantism was pessimism; it was nothing but bare insistence on the hopelessness of all human virtue, as an attempt to escape hell. That Lutheranism is now quite unreal; more modern phases of Lutheranism are rather more unreal; but Luther was not unreal. He was one of those great elemental barbarians, to whom it is indeed given to change the world. To compare those two figures hulking so big in history, in any philosophical sense, would of course be futile and even unfair. On a great map like the mind of Aquinas, the mind of Luther would be almost invisible. But it is not altogether untrue to say, as so many journalists have said without caring whether it was true or untrue, that Luther opened an epoch; and began the modern world."

~G.K. Chesterton: St. Thomas Aquinas.

Martin Luther's contempt for logic, philosophy and reason itself

Martin Luther

Excerpt from 3 Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau, by Jacques Maritain

WITH LUTHER…the will has the primacy [over reason], truly and absolutely; it is the very conception of life that is affected. We can say he is the first great Romantic. 

That attitude of soul would naturally go with a profound anti-intellectualism, which was besides helped by the Occamist and nominalist training in philosophy Luther received. Let me quote here a few characteristic passages. Let us first hear him speak of Aristotle and St. Thomas.

“Aristotle is the godless bulwark of the papists. He is to theology what darkness is to light. His ethics is the worst enemy of grace.” He is a “rank philosopher,” an “urchin who must be put in the pig-sty or donkey’s stable,” “a shameless slanderer, a comedian, the most artful corrupter of minds. If he had not lived in flesh and bones, I should not scruple to take him for a devil.” As for St. Thomas, “he never understood a chapter of the Gospel or Aristotle.” […] “In short, it is impossible to reform the Church if Scholastic theology and philosophy are not torn out by the roots with Canon Law.”

“The Sorbonne, that mother of all errors,” he says in 1539, “has defined, as badly as could be, that if a thing is true, it is true for philosophy and theology; it is godless in it to have condemned those who hold the contrary.” So too the faculty of Paris is “the damned synagogue of the devil, the most abominable intellectual prostitute under the sun, the true gate of hell, etc.” The theologians of Louvain fare no better; they are “coarse donkeys, cursed sows, bellies of blasphemers, epicurean swine, heretics and idolators, putrid puddles, the cursed broth of hell.”

Has he a grudge against any particular system? No. He is attacking philosophy itself. “Barking against philosophy is a homage he thinks to give to God . . . One should learn philosophy only as one learns witchcraft, that is to destroy it; as one finds out about errors, in order to refute them.”

From him Carlstadt, as early as 1518, borrowed that fine thought, that “logic is nowhere necessary in theology because Christ does not need human inventions.” What? Dare to tie down Dr. Luther to the principle of contradiction? Argument was never for him anything but a boxing-match, in which he was past master, and where the thing was to knock out his opponent by any means. “When I care to start writing,” he said cynically to Philip of Hesse, “shall be able to get out of the difficulty easily and leave your Grace to stick in the mud.” Finally, the Reformer declares war not only on philosophy, but essentially on reason. Reason has an exclusively pragmatic value, it is for use in earthly life. God has given it to us only “to govern on earth, that is to say that it has power to legislate and order everything regarding this life, like drinking, eating, and clothes, as well as what concerns external discipline and a respectable life.” But in spiritual things it is not only “blind and dark,” it is truly the whore of the devil. It can only blaspheme and dishonour everything God has said or done.” “The Anabaptists say that reason is a torch. . . . Does reason shed light? Yes, like that which filth would shed if it were set in a lantern.” And in the last sermon preached at Wittenberg, towards the end of his life: “Reason is the devil’s greatest whore; by nature and manner of being she is a noxious whore; she is a prostitute, the devil’s appointed whore; whore eaten by scab and leprosy who ought to be trodden under foot and destroyed, she and her wisdom . . . Throw dung in here face to make her ugly. She is, and she ought to be drowned in baptism . . . She would deserve, the wretch, to be banished to the filthiest place in the house, to the closets.”

Luther’s contempt for reason is, moreover, in harmony with his general doctrine about human nature and original sin. According to Luther, sin has vitiated the very essence of our nature, and this evil is final; grace and baptism cover over, but do not efface, original sin. So that the most that reason could be granted would be a wholly practical part in life and human business. But it is incapable of knowing first truths; all speculative knowledge, all metaphysics is a snare: “omnes scientiae speculativae non sunt verae . . . scientiae, sed errores,” –and the use of reason in matters of faith, the claim to establish a coherent science of dogma and of the revealed deposit by reasoning and the use of philosophy, in short, theology, as the scholastics understood it, is an abominable scandal. In a word, this corrupted Christian takes with gross literalism and in absolutely opposite sense the passages in which spiritual writers speak of the annihilation of the natural faculties, debases the thought of Tauler and the German mystics as well as the texts of St. Paul and the Gospel, and declares that faith is against reason. “Reason is contrary to faith,” he wrote in 1536. And a little later: “Reason is directly opposed to faith, and one ought to let it be; in believers it should be killed and buried.”

I have quoted these passages because it is instructive to discern in the beginning, in its authentic tone and quality, the false ant-intellectualist mysticism which was to poison so many minds in a more subtly and less candid guises in the nineteenth century. Luther in a word, brought a deliverance and an immense relief to humanity two hundred and thirty years before Jean-Jacques. He delivered man from the intelligence, from that wearisome and besetting compulsion to think always and think logically. Yet this liberation has constantly to be begun again. For, as he wrote in his commentary on the Epistle to the Galatians, “Alas, in this life reason is never completely destroyed.”

[Maritain’s numerous references for this selection have been omitted here.]