Introduction
Introduction
Philip Melanchthon is today remembered primarily as the colleague and ally who stood alongside Martin Luther. It is well known that with his humanist skills Melanchthon helped Luther to interpret Greek passages, and assisted him in supporting justification by faith alone as the true message of the Gospel. It was Melanchthon who composed the first systematic treatise of Reformed theology, the Loci communes, which underwent several editions and revisions. He proved to be a formidable exegete, despite not taking a doctorate in divinity. He took part in numerous visitations across German lands to ensure that Luther's message of the Gospel was taught correctly, travelled to diets and colloquies to defend Luther's cause, and undertook various diplomatic missions on behalf of the Electors of Saxony. In 1530 he penned the Augsburg Confession, the first Protestant manifesto. He reformed the arts curriculum of the University of Wittenberg, and revived classical learning in schools and universities across Germany. He wrote textbooks on most of the subjects in the arts curriculum: Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, moral philosophy and natural philosophy. For subjects on which he did not write, such as geometry, arithmetic, astronomy and astrology, he wrote commendatory prefaces to textbooks by others. For classroom use, he edited and commented upon texts of numerous classical authors such as Cicero, Demosthenes, Virgil, Ovid, Hesiod and Ptolemy. These texts and textbooks were used well into the seventeenth century, and he trained and inspired a vast number of students who in their turn passed on the message of their teacher to the next generation. For his educational reforms, Melanchthon was accorded the title of Praeceptor Germaniae, the teacher of Germany.
Despite the major rôle he played in the Reformation, and despite the lasting influence he exerted on German schools and universities, Melanchthon's
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philosophical views have remained curiously unfamiliar to those in the English-speaking world, though recent translations of his work have begun to redress the balance. In particular, Ralph Keen's Melanchthon Reader (New York, 1988), a selection of his writing aimed at presenting several different aspects of his life, has included some extracts from Melanchthon's philosophy textbooks and a few orations on philosophical topics, amongst others.1 However, there has been no attempt to translate and present systematically Melanchthon's philosophical views. The aim of this volume, therefore, is to supplement and augment earlier efforts to make Melanchthon's work available to the English-speaking world, but to concentrate, at the same time, on presenting the breadth and scope of Melanchthon's philosophy as a whole.
Melanchthon's philosophy, however, cannot be studied in isolation from his career as a teacher of classics or as a Reformer. It is difficult to appreciate his passion for Homer without acknowledging his vocation as a Professor of Greek. It is impossible to understand his use of moral philosophy without his concerns with the claims of the radical evangelicals. And his natural philosophy is inconceivable without recognising that the natural world and the universe meant God's Creation for Melanchthon. Most importantly, he expressed his philosophical views within the context of his teaching — in his textbooks and academic orations. Thus, all the writings presented in this volume were composed by Melanchthon in an academic and didactic context, and as such reflect the concerns of the Praeceptor. Since Melanchthon understood all branches of the arts to be connected to each other and to serve one another (orations 1 and 2), it seemed more appropriate to present, so far as was possible, the broad range and scope of what Melanchthon considered as philosophy, rather than to concentrate on translating just one edition of his philosophy textbook out of several other, equally important, textbooks. I have therefore chosen shorter pieces — the orations, prefaces and disputations — on a variety of topics, disciplines and authorities. These orations help illustrate the scope of Melanchthon's philosophy and the interrelationship of the various parts of philosophy education he considered essential. It is through these orations that he promoted the importance of studying philosophy and it is in this form of writing that students in German schools would have
1 Three of my selected orations (‘On philosophy’, ‘On Aristotle’ and ‘At Luther's funeral’) overlap with those selected by Keen; such an overlap, however, was inevitable in order to ensure a representative coverage of topics. For English translations of Melanchthon's texts, see ‘Further Reading’.
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first come across his ideas. Orations were, in fact, the most influential form of his writings.
Through his offices of teacher, rector or dean, Melanchthon composed a vast number of orations which were often delivered by others, as was customary at the time.2 From the many orations and prefaces of Melanchthon that are extant, those that illustrate the breadth and depth of Melanchthon's thought have been chosen and arranged in order to resemble closely the structure of the arts curriculum Melanchthon promoted. The first section, ‘the scope of education’, contains orations which elucidate the relationship between philosophy and religion as well as the importance of philosophical education. In the second section, ‘the arts course’, virtually all of the disciplines taught in the arts curriculum are discussed so that the scope and rôle of philosophy in the arts faculty could be properly understood. The relevance of philosophy to the higher disciplines of medicine, law and theology was the theme for the next section, ‘the higher faculties’. The last section, ‘authorities’, is intended to show the relative merits of classical and contemporary authors for Melanchthon. I have chosen three classical figures (Plato, Aristotle and Galen), one Arabic commentator (Avicenna), and four contemporaries of Melanchthon: the astronomer and mathematician Johannes Regiomontanus, the humanists Rudolf Agricola and Desiderius Erasmus, and his colleague Martin Luther.
Melanchthon's career
Just over 500 years ago, in 1497, Philip Schwarzerd was born in the town of Bretten to an armourer, Georg Schwarzerd, and Barbara Reuter, the niece of the renowned humanist, Johann Reuchlin. It was this great-uncle who in 1509 hellenised the surname Schwarzerd (‘black earth’) into ‘Melanchthon’ for the boy who had shown proficiency in Latin and Greek. Melanchthon went on to obtain his BA from the University of Heidelberg in 1511 and his MA from the University of Tübingen in 1514. While at Tübingen, he learnt Aristotelian dialectics from Franciscus Stadianus, astronomy from Johannes Stöffler and read Rudolf Agricola's Dialectics. He worked as corrector for the Tübingen printer Thomas Anshelm who published Melanchthon's edition of Terence's Comedies (1516) in which he
2 For Melanchthon's authorship of the orations, see H. Koehn, ‘Philipp Melanchthons Reden. Verzeichnis der im 16. Jahrhundert erschienenen Drucke’, Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens 25 (1984),1289–92.
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praised Erasmus. Erasmus, in turn, recognised and publicly praised Melanchthon's talents. The two humanists never met, but kept up a cordial correspondence. Each held great respect for the other's works on the classics, but disagreed on matters of religion.
In 1518, at the age of twenty-one and on the recommendation of his great-uncle, Melanchthon was appointed to the Greek professorship at the University of Wittenberg which had been founded by Frederick the Wise in 1502. The inaugural speech, ‘On correcting the studies of youth’, in which Melanchthon declared his commitment to restore pure, classical learning, impressed Luther, the professor of theology there who had just begun his battle to purify the teaching of Christ. Melanchthon was soon co-operating wholeheartedly with Luther to abolish scholastic teachings at Wittenberg, and writing pamphlets and treatises against Luther's opponents. His Loci communes and biblical commentaries were clear and powerful expositions which underpinned Luther's doctrine of justification by faith alone.
When Luther went into hiding on the way back from the Diet of Worms, Melanchthon was expected to assume the leadership of reform in Wittenberg. However, he was unnerved at the speed with which the movement for reform was gathering momentum. Riots and iconoclasm by those impatient for reform followed in Wittenberg, and attendance at the university plummeted. Luther returned to Wittenberg to quell the rioters and resume control.
Meanwhile, more radical and even seditious messages began to be advocated amongst Luther's erstwhile followers, such as Thomas Müntzer and Andreas Carlstadt, while others, such as the peasants in Swabia, Thuringia and the Black Forest, saw in Luther's opposition to the Pope an inspiration for relieving their own grievances. In the spring of 1525 the peasants took up arms, only to be quashed cruelly. Thomas Müntzer, who took part in the uprising, was captured, tortured and executed. Luther publicly distanced himself from the series of insurrections with a tract, Against the Heavenly Prophets and Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of the Peasants. This was the series of tumultuous events which led both Luther and Melanchthon to turn towards the ‘Magisterial Reformation’ — from then on, they argued that the initiative for Reform had to come from the ruling princes and governments, not from the populace.
Melanchthon saw an answer to these troubles in education, and he began to rebuild university learning with the arts curriculum at its foundation. His
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curricular reforms reflect his humanist values: students first had to attain a good grasp of Latin, Greek, dialectics and rhetoric. Twice a month, declamations took place: one by the teacher of rhetoric or grammar, another by a student whose declamation had been checked and authorised by the teacher. Students then learnt mathematics: first from Euclid's Elements, arithmetic and Sacrobosco's De Sphaera, followed by the Theorica planetarum and the Almagest. The students were also introduced to elements of natural philosophy through the second book of Pliny's Natural History. They then learnt Aristotelian natural philosophy and moral philosophy. Twice a month, disputations by the teacher of natural philosophy or mathematics were held. The teaching of Aristotle's Metaphysics was dropped at Wittenberg, since it was considered primarily as the ‘divine science’ which studied the various modes of God's being and thus formed the bulwark of scholastic theology.
Melanchthon also wrote textbooks on several arts subjects for use in the classroom: Latin grammar, Greek grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, moral philosophy and natural philosophy. These works were influential in spreading the format of the textbook, designed specifically for classroom use, which paraphrased and summarised several works of Aristotle and other authors into a small quarto or octavo booklet.3 Instead of the traditional quaestio method by which all seeming inconsistencies within the texts of Aristotle and amongst authorities were resolved through logical distinctions, Melanchthon adopted in his textbook a topical method, dealing with principal topics (loci) which were mainly explicated in a question-and-answer form. Thus, Melanchthon designed a new arts curriculum for the University of Wittenberg, wrote new textbooks for it, and taught them himself. He also advised on educational reforms for the universities of Tübingen, Leipzig and Heidelberg, as well as other secondary schools.
On 18 February 1546 Luther died, and soon afterwards the Elector John Frederick was defeated by Charles V in the Schmalkaldic War, and Wittenberg fell into the hands of Maurice of Saxony. Melanchthon persuaded Maurice to re-open the university, and negotiated the Leipzig Interim which allowed Saxony to retain Protestant doctrine under conservative rites. For the remaining years of his life Melanchthon sought dialogue with Roman Catholics and other evangelicals. He was, however, dogged with attacks from his previous colleagues and students such as Nicholas
3 For the development of the philosophical textbook, including Melanchthon's contribution, see C. B. Schmitt, ‘The Rise of the Philosophical Textbook’, The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 792–804.
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Amsdorff and Matthias Flaccius Illyricus (the ‘gnesio-Lutherans’), for having departed too far from Luther's original message and for having conceded too much to the opposition. Yet even those who turned against him on doctrinal matters could not shake off the humanist education he had instilled in them. His students, both friends and foes alike, owed him a great debt for their classical heritage.
Melanchthon's use of Aristotelian philosophy
One of the puzzling issues in the scholarship on Melanchthon and Luther has been the seeming contradiction between the two in their attitudes towards the use of Aristotelian philosophy. As is well known, Aristotle's works comprised a substantial and essential part of the arts curricula in late medieval universities. The Categories, the Prior Analytics and the Posterior Analytics were the basis of logical training; the Nicomachean Ethics was used for moral philosophy; and for the mastery of natural philosophy, the Physics, On the Soul, the Meteorology and On Generation and Corruption were essential. Natural philosophy was an important subject in which the nature of being, insofar as it was natural, was studied. This was a necessary preparation for studying Aristotle's Metaphysics, which was regarded as the study of being qua being, which led to the study of the modes of being of the divinity. Natural philosophy was thus often called a ‘handmaiden’ to theology. Hence natural philosophy had little to do with observing nature and performing experiments in this period. Rather, it was based on reading and understanding Aristotle's texts and was studied with rigorous logical reasoning, reconciling on the way seeming inconsistencies within Aristotle's texts, amongst scholastic commentators of Aristotle, and between philosophy and the doctrine of the Church.4
Luther's famous attack on Aristotle was levelled at such scholastic uses of Aristotle for theology and at the underlying assumption that human reason on its own could scrutinise essential modes of the divinity — as Luther thundered, ‘the whole of Aristotle is to theology as darkness is to light’.5
4 For the study of metaphysics, see Charles Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. C. B. Schmitt et al. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 537–638, and for the nature of medieval natural philosophy see John Murdoch, ‘The Analytical Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature’, in Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages, ed. L. D. Roberts (New York, 1982), pp. 171—213.
5 Martin Luther, ‘Disputation against Scholastic Theology’, trans. H. J. Grimm, in Luther's Works, ed. J. Pelikan and H. T. Lehman (55 vols., St Louis, 1955–76), vol. 31, p. 12.
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Melanchthon, fourteen years junior to Luther, initially supported his move at the University of Wittenberg to abolish the teaching of Aristotle.
Historical circumstances, however, forced Melanchthon to re-evaluate the importance of Aristotle. He began to feel keenly the threat of evangelical radicals who advocated (among other things) the right to disobey civil governments. During the riots in Wittenberg in 1521 and 1522 he had come across the ‘Zwickau Prophets’, who claimed to hold direct colloquies with the Holy Spirit, and who interpreted the Bible freely. Thomas Müntzer preached evangelical and seditious messages, and perished with the peasants in 1525. In 1527 and 1528 Melanchthon had a first-hand encounter with the Anabaptists in Thuringia. All these people seemed to claim some special access to the Holy Spirit or sacred knowledge, imposed arbitrary human interpretations on the Bible, and drew out radical messages of action which would have resulted in resisting or overturning the existing political order. Melanchthon saw poor education and confusion of philosophy and theology as the root of the problem. And this is when he turned to Aristotelian philosophy for a solution to the problem of the evangelical radicals. He needed to establish the distinction between theological truths and truths attainable through human reason alone. He needed to establish proper ways of philosophical demonstration. Above all, he needed to prove that everybody, both believers and unbelievers alike, had to obey civil authority. To this end, Melanchthon was to find Aristotle's philosophy, especially his teleology, a powerful tool. Melanchthon's revaluation of philosophy and of Aristotelian philosophy was therefore not undertaken in defiance of Luther's programme for Reform. Rather, Melanchthon's was a reform of philosophy carried out in order to defend Luthers cause.
Philosophy as knowledge of law
In order to appreciate the transformation Melanchthon effected on Aristotelian philosophy as it was traditionally taught in universities, it is important to heed the distinction he himself employed time and again between Law and Gospel. Melanchthon explained that, at best, philosophy was knowledge of Law, and could never prove or teach the central saving message of the Gospel, justification by faith alone (oration 3). Philosophy may indeed confirm certain theological ideas, such as the providential care of God towards humans, but it would never prove or affirm the truth of such concepts. This was an important distinction to maintain in the face of
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Luther's distrust of human reasoning in understanding God's will. Melanchthon's definition of philosophy as knowledge of Law is particularly apposite, as he was intent on demonstrating the moral philosophical point that civil magistrates and rules had to be obeyed.
There are three areas of philosophy Melanchthon developed in order to render it a proper knowledge of Law: dialectics, moral philosophy and natural philosophy. In his dialectics textbooks (Four Books on Dialectics; Questions on Dialectics), Melanchthon affirmed, in opposition to Aristotle, that there was innate knowledge given by God to all human beings, namely natural light. Drawing on Stoic ideas, Melanchthon explained that there were three criteria of certainty. Moral principles (e.g. killing one's parents is wrong) and scientific principles (e.g. two plus two equals four); universal experience (e.g. fire is hot), the opposite of which would lead to destruction of the thing concerned; and understanding of the procedures of syllogism. A fourth criterion of certainty was available for believers only, namely divine revelation.6 The first three criteria, divinely endowed innate knowledge, guaranteed the validity of demonstrative knowledge in philosophy. Such innate knowledge would ensure the certainty needed to compel every human being, regardless of their faith, to acquiesce to philosophically derived consequences, such as the rightness of obeying civil governments. Proper dialectical procedures would thus force all people to agree to demonstrated conclusions, and this is why Melanchthon calls dialectics a ‘chain of concord’ (oration 9).
For moral philosophy, Melanchthon used parts of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (especially book V) in order to argue that humans were created for a purpose and that that purpose was to obey the divinely instituted order, such as civil governments. Indeed, Melanchthon was adamant that, even at times of war, laws had to be upheld (orations 17 and 22). Following the Aristotelian definitions of demonstrative science, however, Melanchthon explained that the first principle of moral philosophy — that humans were created for a definite purpose — could not be demonstrated within moral philosophy itself.7 This first principle had to be demonstrated elsewhere, and he allotted this rôle to natural philosophy.
Melanchthon's immediate aim was to prove this principle by using Aristotle's On the Soul, and he produced a commentary on it in 1540
6 Liber de anima, in Philip Melanchthon, Corpus Reformatorum Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae super-sunt omnia, ed. C. B. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil (28 vols., Halle, 1834–52, Brunswick, 1853–60) (CR hereafter), vol. 13, 150f.
7 Ibid., 650.
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(Commentary on the Soul), and a revised edition in 1552 (Book on the Soul). He then gradually expanded the scope of natural philosophy by drawing on Aristotle's other books on nature (such as the Physics, On the Heavens and Meteorology), so that he could prove that the entire universe, with the earth and humans at its centre, was created by God with wonderful providential care. This culminated in his textbook, the Elements of Natural Philosophy (1549).
These textbooks on natural philosophy are well known to historians of science because they incorporate findings from the two most famous books in the history of science, printed in 1543 — On Fabric of the Human Body of Andreas Vesalius, and On the Revolutions of Nicholas Copernicus. Melanchthon's references to Vesalius may be found in his Book on the Soul, and those to Copernicus in the Elements of Natural Philosophy. Rather than singling out these cases as ‘progressive’ moments in Melanchthon's thought, they should be understood in the light of an ethically orientated natural philosophy designed to address the political problems faced by Luther.
Melanchthon's aim in his natural philosophy was to demonstrate that absolutely everything in this world was created by God. His belief, which was shared by Luther, that God's providence was at work in this physical world led to his promotion of two important areas of natural philosophy — human anatomy and astrology. The importance of human anatomy was underlined in the Commentary on the Soul (oration 18). At the outset Melanchthon explains that his commentary is about the human soul, rather than about a generic definition of the soul for all ‘ensouled’ beings, which was Aristotle's original programme. Melanchthon explains, furthermore, that by the human soul he means both the human body and soul. This is consistent with Luther's position that the entire human being, both body and soul, rather than the rational soul alone, is the object of grace.8 Melanchthon therefore devotes almost two-thirds of his textbook on the soul to human anatomy based on Galen before tackling the standard topics of the nutritive, sensitive and rational souls. He explained that one should examine the human body as if one were in a ‘temple or sacred place’ in order to praise the wondrous care and skill of the Maker.9 By showing that every single part of the human body is designed to fulfil a specific purpose, Melanchthon argues that the study of human anatomy reveals the
8 Martin Luther, Dr. Martin Luthers Werke, kritische Gesamtausgabe (63 vols. Weimar, 1883–1987), vol. 2, p. 415.
9 Philip Melanchthon, Commentarius de anima (Wittenberg, 1540), sigs. 44v — 45r.
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admirable skill, foresight and care of the Creator. It is similarly for the unravelling of the teleological structure of the human body that Melanchthon found Vesalius' findings10 important and worth including in the revised edition of 1552, the Book on the Soul (oration 19).
Alongside the praise of the skill of the Creator, Melanchthon presented a view of the human body which was strikingly passive in the section on medical spirits. Medical sprits were considered to be very fine vapours squeezed out of the blood, and were believed in standard medical theories to be the instrument by which heat was conveyed throughout the body and by which knowledge was transmitted in the ventricles of the brain. Melanchthon argued that the Holy Spirit or the Devil could mix with these medical spirits. In pious men, the Holy Spirit would mix with the medical spirits and render knowledge of God clearer; evil spirits on the other hand could also mix with the medical spirits and impede judgement and cause the limbs to perform the cruellest of deeds, such as when Medea killed her own children.11 The presence of the Holy Spirit as well as the Devil thus became a physical reality for Melanchthon, but the human body itself was a mere passive recipient unable to control these spirits.12 The best one could do was pray for help. The human anatomy which praised the skill of the Creator thus also taught that, in stark contrast, humans were incapacitated in controlling their spiritual welfare (oration 20).
The second part of Melanchthon's commentary on the soul dealt with the traditional topics of Aristotle's On the Soul. What is noticeable in Melanchthon's commentary, however, is the preponderance of biblical quotations in the discussion of the human will and the image of God in man. When defining the object of the human will, Melanchthon points out that had knowledge of humans not been clouded by Original Sin, then we would know that the object of our will was God. But Fallen Man does not have perfect knowledge, so Fallen Man cannot know the true object of his will. That is, philosophical arguments cannot define the true object of the human will. Thus, Melanchthon had recourse to the Bible: Deuteronomy 6:5: ‘you shall love the lord your God with all your heart’. This quotation is the basis on which Melanchthon affirms that the object of will should be God. Similarly, when discussing the immortality of the soul it is simply
10 For Vesalius' teleology, see Nancy Siraisi, ‘Vesalius and the Reading of Galen's Teleology’, Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (1997), 1–33.
11 Melanchthon, Liber de anima, CR XIII, 88f.
12 D. P. Walker, ‘Medical Spirits and God and the Soul’, in Spiritus, ed. M. Fattori and M. Bianchi (Rome, 1984), p. 228.
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treated as given and unproblematic by Melanchthon.13 He shows no interest in dealing with the extensive and sophisticated philosophical arguments brought to bear on the subject by the Italian philosophers, such as Pomponazzi, of a generation earlier. In fact, Melanchthon's strategy here is a deliberate one: to use biblical arguments whenever defining or discussing spiritual issues or theological truths. This, of course, is consistent with the Lutheran position that human reason cannot discover theological truths unaided. Such truths have to be found in the Bible. It thus indicates the limit of philosophy as knowledge of Law.
In the textbook The Elements of Natural Philosophy Melanchthon taught how the entire physical universe was created by God's providential design. Astronomy and astrology showed the orderliness of Creation. The studies of astronomy and astrology were inseparable for him, since the one taught how the planets moved and what positions they would take, and the other what effects the planets in certain positions would have. Melanchthon believed that God was at work physically through the planets and that astrology would yield knowledge about the physical effects of planets (oration 14). Geography also became a study in which traces of the providence of God could be investigated, rather than a study of the process of God's creation (orations 12 and 13). These areas of study were all considered part of natural philosophy. According to Melanchthon, astrology was useful for another reason, because it provided moral guidance. By consulting horoscopes, individual humans could become aware of their weaknesses and thus could better avoid temptation and the devil. It is particularly important to note that Melanchthon's use of Copernicus' findings was restricted to the data that offered improved predictions of planetary positions (such as the apogees of the sun and of the three superior planets). They therefore improved astrological knowledge.
The ways in which Melanchthon incorporated the findings of Vesalius and of Copernicus thus illustrate well the nature of Melanchthon's natural philosophy. They were integrated into a natural philosophy that demonstrated that God's providence was at work in this universe. This reformed philosophy became the core of the arts curriculum for Melanchthon, and other humanistic studies were promoted as necessary preparations for studying this reformed philosophy. The classical languages, rhetoric and dialectic were all essential for the good citizen as well as for the good theologian (orations 4–9). Compared to earlier humanists who had promoted
13 Melanchthon, Liber de anima, CR XIII, 154, 172–8.
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the mathematical arts as useful for sharpening one's natural intelligence, Melanchthon provided a much stronger reason for studying them. For Melanchthon the studies of both arithmetic and geometry were necessary preparations for his kind of natural philosophy (orations 10 and 11), while the studies of astronomy and astrology were integral parts of natural philosophy. For Melanchthon, therefore, to study philosophy meant to study the whole of the arts curriculum, and such a study was necessary for all good Christians, be they statesmen or theologians (oration 2). In essence, Melanchthon's philosophy was Aristotelian in that he saw in Aristotle's works a coherent method of philosophising, whereas he found Plato's style of writing rather obscure and unhelpful (orations 24 and 25).
A Lutheran philosophy
Melanchthon thus reformed traditional Aristotelian philosophy in order to provide a world-view in which civil disobedience had to be refuted conclusively. In the sense that this reform was instigated by the need to defend Luther's cause against the threat of the evangelical radicals, one can interpret Melanchthon as trying to create a Lutheran philosophy. Melanchthon's philosophy may be understood as Lutheran in another sense in that it was reformed according to the principle of the Lutheran distrust of human reason. By drawing on traditional concepts from logic, philosophy and medicine and providing them with new emphases and distinctions, Melanchthon redefined the scope of philosophy so that human reason on its own could not discover theological truths.
For instance, Melanchthon preserved the scholastic distinction between intuitive and abstract cognition: intuitive knowledge was knowledge of an object which was present in front of oneself and perceived by the senses and the mind simultaneously. Melanchthon explained that the ancients called it ‘intuitive definition’, and he illustrated this point by saying that there was no better way of knowing the plant called wormwood than by having one shown to you directly. Intuitive cognition was such a direct apprehension of the singular, while abstract cognition was knowledge of things which were not necessarily present, such as absent friends, universals or thoughts which cannot be perceived by the senses.
Of these two kinds of knowledge, Melanchthon indicated that intuitive knowledge of God was not available to humans any more. Due to the Fall, he pointed out that humans now have less knowledge of God, as well as
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of spiritual natures and of substances of other bodies, and that at best one recognised these things rather obscurely and tenuously. This is an obvious reference to the passage in 1 Corinthians 13: 12: ‘for now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face’. A ‘face-to-face’ knowledge of God, Melanchthon is quite clear, is something which is allowed only when one enters heaven. As he explained, we may hear his Word in this life, but we may see him only in the life after.14 Intuitive cognition of God, which was often considered possible by scholastic thinkers as beatific visions by holy men, is a path now firmly closed by Melanchthon to every Fallen Man.15
Thus only abstract cognition of God, which was at best dark and tenuous, was now available to humans. This obscure and tenuous, abstract knowledge of God, spirits and substances was, Melanchthon further explained, acquired through a posteriori reasoning, namely by tracing causes from their effects. This form of reasoning is best observed in Melanchthon's natural philosophy: the beautiful orderliness of nature proves that it cannot have come into existence by chance, but that it came into being because of a skilful creator who cared for humankind (oration 16). The limitation placed on human knowledge of God in this life also explains why, at Luther's funeral, Melanchthon so enviously refers to the state of Luther's knowledge: what beautiful vision he must be beholding, face to face with God (oration 31).
The fact that Fallen Man was now restricted to an abstract knowledge of God also meant for Melanchthon that Fallen Man necessarily needed his internal senses. Internal senses were considered the faculties of the sensitive soul, such as common sense, imagination and memory, which functioned in the ventricles of the brain: They were the functions that retained and manipulated the sensible species received from the five external senses. These sensible species were then abstracted into intelligible species, which could then in turn be manipulated by the intellect. The concept of internal senses was fully developed by Arabic commentators of Aristotle who found his explanations somewhat vague and unsystematic. The humanist tendency of the Renaissance was to concentrate on the Greek text of Aristotle and therefore to gloss over the extensive medieval
14Ibid., 145,172.
15 For the scholastic treatment of intuitive and abstract cognition, see Leen Spruit, Species Intelligibilis (2 vols., Leiden, 1994–6); S. J. Day, Intuitive Cognition: a Key to the Significance of the Later Scholastics (New York, 1947).
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discussions on these interior senses of Arabic origin.16 Indeed, there are some humanist commentaries on the On the Soul of this period, such as the one by Johannes Lonicer, which refused even to mention the internal senses (On Aristotle's Physics … On the Soul, Marburg, 1540). In spite of his humanist training, Melanchthon went against this trend and retained the concept of internal senses, because it was a corollary to the limited scope of human rational knowledge.
In addition to the traditional concept of intuitive cognition, Melanchthon closed another traditional path of attaining knowledge of God by reason, namely analogy. As is well known, ‘analogy’ was considered to be the third mode of supposition, half way between univocation and equivocation, mentioned by Aristotle in the opening passage of the Categories. The original term used there by Aristotle, namely ‘amphibolous’, did not carry the sense of transferring the meaning of a predicate in a manner proportionate to the relation of the two subjects involved. For Aristotle, the term in fact meant ‘ambiguous’ supposition. It was the Arabic and Jewish commentators who reinterpreted the section of the Categories and developed the concept of ‘analogy’ as something between univocation and equivocation. The medieval scholastic commentators, especially Aquinas, considered analogy an important and powerful way to infer something about the Creator from his Creation.17 Melanchthon completely ignores this sense of the term ‘analogy’. For Melanchthon, analogy instead meant proportionality, namely similarity of two proportions, which in turn are ratios between two quantities. In other words, for Melanchthon analogy was now restricted to mean an arithmetic relation. And meanwhile Melanchthon uses the term ‘amphibolous’ to mean an error generated by ambiguous phrases or syntax (rather than an error generated by ambiguity of a single word, which is classed under ‘equivocation’), and it occurs in a discussion of how to refute false arguments.18
16 Melanchthon, Liber de anima, CR XIII, 145. For the medieval commentary tradition on the internal senses, see H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Internal Senses in Latin, Arabic and Hebrew Philosophic Texts’, Harvard Theological Review 27 (1935), 69–133, and for Renaissance trends, see K. Park, ‘The Organic Soul’ in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Quentin Skinner et al. (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 464—84.
17 Something close to analogy is Aristotle's use of paradigm, for which see G. E. R. Lloyd, ‘Metaphor and the Language of Science’, in his The Revolutions of Wisdom: Studies in the Claims and Practice of Ancient Greek Science (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London, 1987), pp. 172–214. For Arabic commentators, see H. A. Wolfson, ‘The Amphibolous Terms in Aristotle, Arabic Philosophy and Maimonides’, in his Studies in the History of Philosophy and Religion, ed. I. Tuersky and G. H. Williams (Cambridge, MA, 1973), vol. 1, pp. 455–77.
18 Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices, CR XIII, 696, 727–9.
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Melanchthon's use of the term ‘amphibolous’ may at first sight seem to indicate his humanist leanings to be faithful to the original Greek text of Aristotle, but, as we have seen earlier, he was equally happy to retain medieval concepts such as the internal senses. It is important to note, therefore, his effort to incorporate the Lutheran distrust for human reason if we are to establish a coherent strategy behind what seems like a mixture of humanist and non-humanist tendencies in his philosophy. Analogy, for Melanchthon, now cannot be a path by which essential modes of the Creator may be inferred from his Creation. Significantly, neither Calvin nor Luther found use for analogy in their theology either.19
Such modifications of traditional scholastic concepts based on the Lutheran distrust of human reason meant that Melanchthon indeed had transformed the character of philosophy. And this transformation is nowhere seen more clearly than in his natural philosophy, which can be characterised by the Aristotelian, a posteriori arguments of tracing causes from the effects in nature, and an almost obsessive reiteration that such arguments confirmed God's providence in this creation. A posteriori arguments for the providence of God in nature using Aristotle's teleology were not new, and indeed they remind us of one of Thomas Aquinas' proofs for the existence of God. Melanchthon's natural philosophy, however, is narrower than that of Aquinas in the sense that Melanchthon's aim was to confirm one point only: the providence of God in nature. Moreover, this point was confirmed with only one kind of causality, an a posteriori one. That is, Melanchthon's natural philosophy narrowed down the range of arguments that may be validly employed therein and focused on just one aspect of the divinity which was knowable even to the pagans. These characteristics were the results of Melanchthon's reorganisation of philosophy based on the Lutheran distrust of human reason.
It may seem that confirming one theological truth with one kind of causal argument was a weak raison d'être for a natural philosophy; especially once demonstrated, such a natural philosophy would only have a function as a theoretical justification for moral philosophy and not much else. Melanchthon, however, explained that there was a point in repeatedly confirming the providence of God in this world. And this was for times of adverse conditions and hardship: a knowledge of the providence of
19 The scholastic idea of ‘analogia entis’ is not found either in Luther or Calvin; see B. Mondin, The Principle of Analogy in Protestant and Catholic Theology (The Hague, 1968, end edn originally published 1963).
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God in such circumstances built trust and hope that one day the wicked will be punished by God and the just saved. Indeed, as Robert Kolb has argued, a proclamation of the providence of God became one of the most important marks of martyrdom and witnesses to faith among Lutherans.20 Melanchthon often called nature a theatre of God, a theatre which men were created to watch. Humans, in their wretched spiritual incapacity, are here passive onlookers, but at least they can watch and what they watch is the plan of God unfolding in the universe. To trace the providential design of God in nature was essentially a tracing of the footprints of God, and it became the most prominent theme running through the studies of nature pursued by Melanchthon and his followers.
Not only did Melanchthon transform traditional philosophy into an inspirational, Lutheran one, but he also provided further ways in which philosophical studies could be enriched. Particularly important in this context is his view on non-essential predication. Traditionally, a definition was constructed with a genus and attribute which was essential to or part of the essence of the substance in question, such as ‘man is a rational animal.’ A mode of definition by listing non-essential accidents, such as ‘a crow is a bird with black feathers, yellow beak and so on’, was considered the weakest form of definition and more useful for rhetorical purposes. Specifying such accidental attributes was considered a weak form of definition because the attributes were related to substances in a non-essential way and could be shared by other substances. Hence this definition was often called ‘description’.
Melanchthon nevertheless pointed out that this description was useful when, for instance, one could indicate what sort of a person Thersites (Iliad 1. 225–45) was by defining him as a man who was squint-eyed, pointy-headed, hump-backed, garrulous and scurrilous. More importantly, Melanchthon said that it is with such description that one often had to content oneself, because Fallen Man could have knowledge of substancesonly through their accidents.21 By allowing inferences from non-essential accidents, Melanchthon broadened the ways in which one may attain understandings of substances. This was a dialectical and epistemological
20 Melanchthon, Initia doctrinae physicae, CR XIII, 339. R. Kolb, For All the Saints: Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation (Macon, GA, 1987).
21 Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices, CR XIII, 522–9; note that Melanchthon was aware of the shortage of propria, as was Agricola, for whom see Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Traditions of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, 1993).
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position that had important implications for his followers. For instance, it enabled the Professor of Medicine at the University of Tübingen, Leonhard Fuchs, to justify his use of pictures in his commentary on plants.22
Fallen Man for Melanchthon was thus a human being who needed the internal senses and the intelligible species generated by them in order to gain some knowledge, albeit obscure, of God. There was now no direct way that human reason could catch even a glimpse of divine truth in this life. As knowledge by abstraction, philosophy started with the effects of nature or accidents of substances and sought to establish the cause or the nature of a substance. This and only this type of cognition was available to humans for gaining an understanding of God, spirits or substances. Although this knowledge may be obscure and limited, philosophy was an important and positive knowledge for Fallen Man. It could demonstrate the rightness of civil obedience; it could demonstrate that the whole of nature was created by God; it could prove God's providence for humans; and above all it was necessary for a true Christian (oration 15).
Melanchthon's legacy
Melanchthon's philosophical legacy was vast: his Aristotelian philosophy was taught and re-taught in numerous universities and schools across Protestant Germany. This tradition has sometimes unfortunately been characterised as the ‘second Scholastic’, due to its reliance on the Aristotelian corpus, but it is a legacy which was neither rigid nor monolithic. Indeed, during the last quarter of the sixteenth century several of his followers found ways to forge a fertile synthesis with the works of Petrus Ramus (the ‘Philippo-Ramists’), whilst other Lutherans, such as Nicholas Taurellus, saw that metaphysics could be used profitably in their controversy with the Calvinists. Natural philosophy as a study of God's providential plan was taken into new areas by his followers. A large number of botanists were associated with the teaching at Wittenberg; a new tradition of studying geography was established at Wittenberg; astrology and anatomy were studied by students in the arts faculty who did not necessarily become medics; while astronomy, as part of a natural philosophy of
22 See my ‘Leonhard Fuchs on the Importance of Pictures’, Journal of the History of Ideas, 58:3 (1997), 403–27.
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Creation, was an important element in the teaching at the University of Tübingen, which Kepler attended.23
Melanchthon's commentary on the soul was also influential. His way of reading Aristotle's On the Soul for a Christian knowledge of the human body and soul was taught at Jena by Johannes Stigelius (Commentaries on the Soul, Wittenberg, 1570) and Victorinus Strigelius (On Philip Melanchthon's Booklet on the Soul, Leipzig, 1590). Strigelius and Stigelius, both students of Melanchthon, argued that only abstract knowledge of God was possible. At the turn of the century, Melanchthon's commentary on the On the Soul also attracted much attention amongst mainly Calvinist teachers associated with the Marburg professor, Rudolph Goclenius Sr: Bruno Seidel,Instructive Commentary on the Body and Soul of Man (Hanau, 1594); Rudolph Snell, On Philip Melanchthon's On the Soul (Frankfurt, 1596); and Otto Casmannus, Psychological Anthropology (Frankfurt, 1594) and Anthropology, the Second Part (Frankfurt, 1596). Casmannus called Melanchthon's doctrine of the human soul and body an ‘anthropologia’, which was to be subdivided into a study of the soul (‘psychologia’), and a study of the human body (‘somatologia’). The term ‘anthropologia’ was also used in the same vein by Johannes Magirus, another Marburg professor (1560–96), to refer to his commentary on Melanchthon's On the Soul (Anthropology, that is, a Commentary on Melanchthon's Booklet on the Soul, Frankfurt, 1603). It is in this context of studying Melanchthon's commentary on On the Soul that Goclenius and his circle are credited with the promotion of the term ‘psychology’.24
The Calvinist philosopher Goclenius himself, following Strigelius (who in turn was drawing on Melanchthon), explained in his Philosophical Lexicon that only abstract knowledge of the divine was available in this life. Goclenius then gave his famous tripartite distinction of abstraction: physical, mathematical and transnatural. Physical abstraction was abstraction from individuals, as one extracted the signified from this or that body. Mathematical abstraction abstracted from both individual and universal things, such as simple or mixed bodies. Finally, transnatural abstraction was abstraction from all things. The second abstraction, the mathematical
23 For the ‘Philippo-Ramists’, see Joseph S. Freedman, ‘The Diffusion of the Writings of Petrus Ramus in Central Europe, c. 1570-c. 1630’, Renaissance Quarterly 46 (1993), 98–152. For Nicholas Taurellus, see Charles Lohr, ‘Metaphysics’, pp. 623f. For Melanchthon's legacy in other fields of inquiry, see ‘Further Reading’.
24 F. H. Lapionte, ‘The Origin and Evolution of the Term ‘‘Psychology”’, Rivista Critica di Storia della Filosofia, 28 (1973), 138–60.
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one, which was also defined as a study of being and transcendental things, Goclenius named, for the first time, ontological.25 Thus new philosophical concepts developed out of Melanchthon's philosophical legacy, which eventually formed the philosophical background to important philosophers such as Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz.
By the time Melanchthon died, the emphasis on the proper grasp of Latin and Greek, the promotion of the mathematical arts, and the extensive use of dialectical and rhetorical methods — the humanistic values he extolled repeatedly in his orations — were taking root in schools and universities across German Protestant lands. Melanchthon had been instrumental in introducing these values into Germany, just as the Jesuits elsewhere were similarly engaged in establishing those humanistic values as the bedrock of university education. It is important to note, however, that philosophy was the core of Melanchthon's humanistic curriculum. The way he reformed philosophy also indicates how his Lutheran beliefs affected the way he utilised his humanistic, as well as scholastic, heritage. He saw the works of classical authors as excellent models for reforming the arts curriculum and scholastic philosophy, but he was also prepared to draw on contemporary authors, such as Copernicus or Vesalius, so long as they provided useful improvements to his reformed philosophy. His attitude towards Erasmus (oration 30) sums up well his attitude to the studies of the humanists; he has the highest respect for the scholarly achievements of Erasmus in the classics, and in some ways Erasmus even anticipates Luther; yet he is no Luther.
It would, of course, be misleading to associate any particular philosophy or ideology with humanism itself, but the new humanist attitude towards the text, the author and the past in some ways gave rise to, it seems, a renewed way of philosophising. With the passionate zeal of the first generation of humanists to recover the texts of classical authors, the range of philosophical authors and sects in classical antiquity one could draw upon had expanded dramatically. The humanist paraphrases, summaries, topical treatments and philological analyses in fact approached statements by classical authors in a way fundamentally different from the traditional quaestio method, by which inconsistencies within the same author or amongst established authorities were resolved through logical distinctions. The humanist approach, as argued by Kessler, eventually relativised the
25 Rudolph Goclenius, Lexicon Philosophicurn (Frankfurt 1613), pp. 770, 16.
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importance of the words of a single philosophical authority.26 The question of how humanism affected the history of Western European philosophy is still open and requires further research. I hope nevertheless that with this volume we are now in a position to appreciate the historical context in which at least one humanist, Philip Melanchthon, found the need and positive use for philosophy.
Melanchthon's style of writing: the demonstrative oration
Most of Melanchthon's orations and prefaces follow the style of demonstrative speeches. As is well known, classical rhetoricians and their followers distinguished three kinds of rhetorical speeches according to the attitude of the listeners (Aristotle, Rhetoric I.iii.9). The deliberative speech urges the listener to make a decision about a future action. The forensic speech, attacking or defending somebody as in legal cases, urges the listener to make judgements on past events. The demonstrative speech praises or censures somebody, and is concerned to present a case to listeners as if they were spectators. Speeches eulogising various disciplines and persons thus follow the style of the demonstrative genre of praise and blame. As many historians have pointed out, the sixteenth century saw the rise of the use of the demonstrative speech to unprecedented scales: from papal courts to student class-rooms, demonstrative orations were written and delivered frequently.
Melanchthon himself made the demonstrative genre the central format of his teaching. In his Three Books on Rhetoric (1519), he explained how the demonstrative speech was the fundamental type of speech: it gave rise to topics of invention and the entire method of judgement, and ensured the way to the other genre of speeches. The first function of demonstrative speeches was to teach, and the second to praise or blame. According to Melanchthon, many rhetoricians had dealt amply with the second function, but hardly with the first; the first function of teaching by demonstrative speech was explained properly in his dialectics. As Schneider has pointed out, the demonstrative genre is what united Melanchthon's rhetoric and dialectics.27
26 Eckhard Kessler, ‘Introducing Aristotle to the 16th Century: the Lefèvre Enterprise’, in Conversations with Aristotle, ed. Constance Blackwell and Sachiko Kusukawa, forthcoming.
27 ‘Nos a genere demonstrativo vel hoc maxime ordimur, quod ex ipso loci omnes inventionis, iudicandi ratio tota nascitur, et ad reliqua genera viam munit.’ De rhetorica libri tres (Cologne, 1523), a2r. R. Schneider, Philip Melanchthon's Rhetorical Construal of Biblical Authority: Oratio Sacra, Text and Studies in Religion 5 (Lewiston, NY and Lampeter, Wales, 1990), pp. 65–85.
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By 1529, in his Elements of Rhetoric, Melanchthon had made this first function of demonstrative speech into an independent, fourth kind of speech alongside the traditional three, and called it the didactic genre. The didactic speech was considered particularly useful for his time, for suasory meetings of the Church and to teach dogma correctly. It was centred on a dialectical definition, which was then further amplified by rhetoric in order to teach effectively to the uninitiated. Demonstrative speech as praise or blame still closely resembled the didactic genre: if somebody wished to praise the laws or to speak on the authority of laws, he should define the laws and amplify on their definition.28
Melanchthon further explained in his rhetorical manuals what an exemplary oration should contain. For instance, when praising or blaming a person, the entire narratio should be devoted to relating a person's entire history in order: the person's native country, sex, family, talent, education, learning, teaching, deeds, distinctions in such deeds, death, and reputation after death. When praising something like philosophy, eloquence or peace, the reputation of the thing may be taken from its efficient causes or inventors, for example, philosophy is the gift of God; and the utility of the thing from its purpose, for example, philosophy shows important things about life, civil behaviour, law and medicine.29
In practice, Melanchthon taught rhetoric by analysing numerous Ciceronian orations as well as central biblical texts such as Romans. Rhetorical study of these texts was important because he believed that a methodical analysis of a text by uncovering its logical coherence was to reconstruct the actual process of creating a text and thus to disclose the author's intention. As Meerhoff has argued, rhetorical analysis of a text was for Melanchthon tantamount to composing the text.30 Melanchthon's own rhetorical manuals are thus excellent keys to understanding how his orations were composed and structured.
During the course of the sixteenth century Melanchthon's orations themselves became examples by which students learnt rhetoric. The following collection therefore presents Melanchthon's philosophy in his most influential form of writing and in his most inspirational office as a teacher.
28 CR XIII, 421.
29Ibid., 449f.
30 For Melanchthon's rhetoric, see Kees Meerhoff, ‘The Significance of Philip Melanchthon's Rhetoric in the Renaissance’ in Renaissance Rhetoric, ed. Paul Mack (Basingstoke, 1994), pp. 46–62.
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