The evocation of the Roman summepiscopate was intimately connected with the unchallenged evocation of the Western empire. With the disintegration of the imperial evocation through the internal and external changes of the historical scene, the Romanitas of the spiritual power could not remain an unchallenged symbol as if nothing had happened. With the finality of the imperial idea, the finality, not of Christianity, but of its Roman ecclesiastical form would pale. With the historical relativation of the imperial idea, the Romanitas of Christianity would become a historical accident. And the leadership of the church would be faced with the task of spiritualizing the idea of the universal church in such a manner that it would be independent of the Roman accident.¹¹

Christianity has been prone, about the respect in which intellectual trespassing--which is not to be confused with philosophy proper-empties symbols of their meaning in the very act of "clarifying" them.

If Voegelin is a Thomist, the manner in which this is so remains to be demonstrated, his apparent sympathies notwithstanding.

A more fruitful way of approaching the question of Voegelin's generally sensitive rendering of St. Thomas and overt condescension toward Luther is to attend, not to their respective theological ruminations, but rather to Luther's judgment about the philosophical enterprise as a whole and its place in the economy of salvation. In this Voegelin is correct: Luther is anti-philosophical,¹⁴while St. Thomas is not. For Voegelin, this rejection sets the stage for the brutality of thought that would follow in the works of Comte and Marx, among others. Here we have a form of guilt by association, in which all anti-philosophical thought is assumed to be alike. A morphological similarity is taken

¹³ Voegelin, pp. 226-28.
¹⁴Voegelin, pp. 237-38,passim.

to indicate genetic kinship. Were Voegelin to have been a biologist he might have said that because both birds and insects have wings they must be closely related. Luther's rejection of philosophy, unlike Comte and Marx's rejection, was not intended to close off the soul to the Transcendent dimension, but rather to make it "available" again. Voegelin seems not to have understood this at all. So let us reopen the question, and consider in a more sensitive light why Luther rejected philosophy, and chose instead "faith."

§1. Luther and the Problem of Faith

Any curious reader of Luther will notice that his arguments against the Roman Catholic Church amount to a reconceptualization of the locus of faith. In historical Judaism, as Hobbes reminds us, the carrier of faith was the body Israel, in which there was no separation of spiritual and temporal power.¹⁵ In the Roman Catholic tradition, there is a subtle relationship between these two domains, wherein the carrier of faith is not the body of a nation, but rather the Church itself. The nation is separated off, theoretically, at least. (In the Eastern Orthodox Church this separation is less evident.) In Lutheran thought the carrier of faith--in principle, though not yet in actuality~4s not the church, but rather persons, individuals.

¹⁵ See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edwin Curley ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co., 1994), Part III, Ch. 39,15, p. 316: "Temporal and spiritual government, are but two words brought into the world, to make men see double, and mistake their lawful sovereign." Hobbes's project in Leviathan can be understood as an attempt to show how Judaism prior to Saul understood temporal government rightly, while from the period of Saul forward into the present Christian age men have separated what should be unified.

Now I recognize that any one of these three statements-about Judaism, Roman Catholicism, and Lutheranism-would need to be modified in order to do justice to the traditions to which they pertain. Nevertheless, the general historical pattern suggests that in the West the locus of faith becomes successively differentiated, "smaller," in a way: from the nation, to the church, to the individual. I should add before proceeding any further that each of these formulations is still being wrestled with today-in Israel under the form of the question, "who is a member of this nation"¹⁶; in the Roman Catholic Church under the form of the question, "what is the relationship of the Church to the nations"¹⁷; in Protestantism under the form of the question, "what does it mean to be an individual"¹⁸--and no one of the formulations at which these traditions arrive seem entirely adequate as a way of locating faith within the pluralistic horizon stipulated by cosmopolitan society today. It is, however, Luther's formulations of this new personal locus of faith with which we are concerned here, and with a view to explaining why this new locus entailed a rejection of philosophy.

¹⁶ See Yossi Shain

¹⁷ See St. Augustine, City of God, Henry Bettenson trans. (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), Bk. XIX, Ch. 17, pp. 877-79.

¹⁸ See Ernst Troeltsch, Vie Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, Olive Wyon trans. (New York: Harper & Row, 1931), Conclusion, pp. 1005-06: "The Christian Ethos alone possessed, in virtue of its personalistic Theism, a conviction of personality and individuality, based on metaphysics, which no Naturalism or Pessimism can disturb. That personality which, rising above the natural order of life, is only achieved through a union of the will and the depths of being with God, alone transcends the finite, and alone can defy it. Without this support, however, every kind of individualism evaporates into thin air." Cf. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, Howard V. and Edna H. Hong ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), Part 1, A; p. 13: A human being is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity, in short, a synthesis. A synthesis is a relation between the two. Considered in this way, a human being is still not a self' (emphasis added).

Since we are investigating the meaning of faith, let us start with Luther's rejection of "works." For it is in contradistinction to works that faith achieves its coherence-or rather, it is in contradistinction to faith that the problem of works comes into view. (Above all, let us move beyond Voegelin's assertion that in rejecting works, Luther did not understand that he had stumbled into a "racket of international high finance."¹⁹)

It would to correct, though inadequate, to say that Luther's hostility toward works derived from his suspicion of the Church's claim that it held the keys to salvation. Where works are said to be necessary for salvation, there the Church derives great power over the faithful. Luther thought this to be an abuse. Yet over and above this point, his rejection of works must be understood to follow from his much deeper rejection of the Church's theoretical reliance on the analogical vision of the relationship between the orders of reality, in favor of one based on what can be called a dialectical vision of history-one in which the Old Testament prefigures and is fulfilled by the New.

Not analogy, but rather history, is the key to understanding the relationship between the orders of reality: this is Luther's great break with the Roman Catholic Church.²⁰ His thinking about works must be understood in this context.

¹⁹ Voegelin, p. 230.

²⁰ See Martin Luther, "Lectures on Isaiah," in Luther's Works, Helmut T. Lehmann ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967), Vol. 16, p. 237: faith must be based on the basis of history, and we ought to stay with it alone and not so easily slip into allegories."

In contradistinction to ideas of resemblance and completion that are the tropes of analogical reasoning, Luther believed that there were only two realms, carnal and spiritual; that the carnal realm, "the world," was steeped in sin (about which more shortly); and that the relationship between the two realms can only be understood in terms of Christ's atonement. Christ's fulfillment, His advent in history, superceded what was prefigured in the Old Dispensation; and history acquires its epochal character by virtue of the centrality of this Divine event. The Divine irruption into history renders works obsolete, for it reconfigures the location where the wound of man may be healed by the love of God. Ante adventurn Christi there had been other provisional possibilities. Now neither the unity of the nation nor the apostolic authority of the church regarding what must be believed and what must be done are enough; the location of atonement---the "place of propitiation"²¹--has shifted to the interior of each and every believer.

²¹ In the Old Testament the place of reconciliation of man before God is understood spatially; for Roman Catholics it is understood institutionally; for Protestants it is understood internally-which is not to say solipsistically. See Karl Barth, 7heologian of Freedom, Clifford Green ed. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 199 1), Part 2, p. 138: "In the Old Testament cultus the covering of propitiation was the sheet of gold, overshadowed by the wings of the two-angel-figures (cherubim), which covered and marked the place where the contents of the ark, the oracles of God, were deposited (Exod. 25:17-21). In I Sam. 4:4, 2 Sam. 6:2, Ps. 80: 1, it is the place above which God himself dwells; in Exod. 25:22, Num. 7:89, it is the place from which God speaks to Moses; it is pre-eminently, however, the place, where, on the great Day of Atonement, the people were reconciled to God by the sprinkling of blood (Lev. 16:14-15). The analogy with Jesus is especially appropriate, because the mercy seat is no more that a particular, though very significant, place. By the express counsel of God, Jesus has been appointed from eternity as the place of reconciliation above which God dwells and from which he speaks; now, however, he occupies a position in time, in history, and in the presence of humanity" (emphasis in original).

understanding that a new, spiritual, dimension of existence is revealed by the advent of Christ's irruption into history. While under the Old Dispensation works were necessary; under the New they are not sufficient, and this, because what is required now is passive righteousness--through which, and only through which, the interiority of faith may be revealed. To give the matter in a succinct formulation: the active righteousness of works (about which more shortly) is to the Old Dispensation as the passive righteousness of faith is to the New Dispensation.

Since faith can rule only the inner man [it is] clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with the inner man.²²

One may complain, as Voegelin does,²³ about all the problems that that creates, but it is not at all clear that the interior, personal, locus of faith about which Luther writes was the cause of the wreckage that followed, or a formulation of human experience that was able to render the social transformations that were already well underway endurable and perhaps even meaningful.

We are still concerned with the Luther's rejection of philosophy---a move Voegelin comprehends in light of the subsequent developments of the thought of Comte and Marx,

²² Martin Luther, "The Freedom of a Christian," in Luther's Works, Vol. 3 1, p. 347. Hegel understood, as Voegelin did not, that Luther's rejection of works could only be understood in the context of this new historical situation, one in which freedom reveals itself to-or rather as--the interior life of man. See G.W.F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History (New York: Dover, 1956), Part IV, Sec. III, Ch. I, p. 415: "Luther's simple doctrine is that the specific embodiment of the Deity-4nfinite subjectivity, that is true spirituality, Christ is in no way present in an outward form, but as essentially spiritual is obtained only in being reconciled to God--in faith and spiritual enjoyment, (emphasis in original).

²³ Voegelin, pp. 262-63, passim.

but which Luther defends²⁴ in light of the rupture wrought by the Incarnation. In view of Voegelin's scant attention to the Incarnation of Christ,²⁵ it is not surprising that he should disregard this critical aspect of Luther's thought. For Luther, the Incarnational irruption was, following St. Paul, the counterpoint to Adam's defection.

Therefore as by the offense of one judgment can upon all men to condemnation; even so by the righteousness of one the free gift came upon all men unto justification of life.

For as by one man's disobedience many were made sinners, so by the obedience of one shall many be made righteous .²⁶

The Gospel--the Good News-shows itself to man only in and through this relationship, where man takes upon himself the part of Adam as sinner, that Christ may take man up before God as worthy of Life. In sin, in the experience of condemnation and fault, the spiritual dimension, man's true home, appears. Of this home "the world" knows nothing. Luther's polemic against the Roman Catholic Church is often couched in terms of its foreclosure of this dimension; yet it would be misguided to presume that the problem was simply an institutional one. It was deeper than that, rooted in the fact of man's defection from God. )While grace ultimately accomplishes the turn toward the spiritual dimension, man's temptation is to remain imprisoned within the carnal realm, where he presumes to save himself through works of his own devising, through what Luther called active righteousness.

It is evident that no external thing has any influence in producing Christian righteousness or freedom, or in producing unrighteousness or servitude.... None of these things touch either the freedom or servitude of the soul.³⁵

Faith is only underneath the everydayness of factual history and in authenticity-if I may invoke somewhat Heideggerian language. The horizon of factual history within which most of philosophy operates knows nothing of this dimension .³⁶

Importantly for our analysis here, this experience of powerlessness is the precondition for the "appearance" of Christ--an appearance made possible only when

³³ Luther, "Lectures on Galatians," in Works, Vol. 26, p. 5.

³⁴ In Hegel's estimation this insight was a portentous one that signaled a grasping of the truth of Christianity, which the Roman Church had not achieved. Above all, what was necessary was that "a brokenness of the heart [be] experienced, and that Divine Grace [enter] into the heart thus broken" (G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of History [New York: Dover, 1956], Part IV, Sec. III, Ch. 1, p. 424).

³⁵ Luther, "Freedom," in Works, Vol. 3 1, pp. 344-45 (emphasis added).

³⁶ See Joshua Mitchell, Not By Reason Alone: Religion, History, and Identity in Early Modern Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), Conclusion, pp. 147-52.

man is in another "world," far from disputes about works. Only then "[do we hear] the Gospel . . . that Christ died for US."³⁷ This Gospel can only be grasped "with other eyes [than] carnal reason doth [have]."³⁸ For man to come unto this other dimension he must, like Christ, experience the abandonment of God that is confirmed in the call, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"³⁹ In this depth of abandonnient Christ appears. (What, we may provisionally ask, can philosophy know of this abandonment?)

The great noetic and pneumatic differentiations do not occur among Paleolithic hunters and fishers, but in ages of cities and empires; some social and cultural situations appear to be more favorable to differentiating responses than others. The structure of man's existence in society, thus, is somehow involved in the process of differentiating consciousness. Such observations must not be misunderstood as inchoate constructions of a casual relationship between civilization and unconsciousness. The thinkers of the Ecumenic Age who observe these configurations do not intend to determine a Marxian Consciousness by a Marxian Being. They are not immanentist speculators who degrade their consciousness into epiphenomenona of technical discoveries; on the contrary, they are quite aware of their consciousness as the primary instance that transforms their discoveries into historical events. "

Any number of instances could be adduced to confirm Voegelin's reversal of Marx's formulation-Plato, Aristotle, Paul, John, and St. Thomas, among others. And because

50 Voegelin, Order and History, Vol. IV, Ch. 7, p. 306 (emphasis added). Cf. Karl Marx, "The Communist Manifesto," in The Marx-Engels Reader, Robert Tucker ed. (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), p. 489. "From the start", Marx says, "the 'spirit' is afflicted with the curse of being "burdened' with matter" ('The German Ideology," in The Marx-Engels Reader), p. 158.

such a list can be adduced, the three questions that Voegelin poses remain as important as they are unanswerable:

In the aristocratic ages, as the attention of historians is constantly drawn to individuals, the connection between events escapes them, or rather they do not believe in such a connection. It seems to them that the thread of history is being constantly broken as man crosses its path.  

But the historian of democratic epochs, seeing the actors less and the events more, can easily string facts together in methodical order.

Because Voegelin adheres to the formulation that man's existence is perennially "Between," and that what pre-modem history shows are different variants of this insight, he cannot but conclude that the philosophical and theological registrations of the emergent modem experience of individuation are perversions of this primordial datum of human existence. Insofar as such modem registrations attend only to the nodal point of man, without reference to the relationship with the Divine in which man participates, they are indicted with the charge of Gnosticism.

⁶⁰ Karl Marx, "T'he Grundrisse," in The Marx Engels Reader, p. 224.

⁶¹ See Freidrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, Walter Kaufinann trans. (New York: Random House, 1967), First Essay, §

There are problems with this typology, which I will consider momentarily. First, however, let us consider Tocqueville's assessment of this emergent individuation--of man, alone, cut off, and homeless in the world. More specifically, consider what he says about Luther, Bacon, and Descartes:

The sixteenth-century reformers subjected some of the dogmas of the ancient faith to individual reason, but they still refused to allow all the others to be discussed by it. In the seventeenth century Bacon, in the natural sciences, and Descartes, in philosophy strictly so-called, abolished accepted formulas, destroyed the dominion of tradition, and upset the authority of the masters.

The eighteenth-century philosopher turned this same principle into a general rule and undertook to submit the object of all his beliefs to each man's individual examination.⁶²

⁶² Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 11, Part 1, Ch. 1, pp. 430-3 1.

they were "discovered." Thus, Luther could assert the equality of all Christians before God but condemn the peasants for their revolt.⁶³ Thus, Descartes could conduct his radical thought experiment without seeing its implications for the subversion of political authority based on tradition.⁶⁴ In democratic ages "[men are] continually brought back to their own judgment as the most apparent and accessible test of truth,"⁶⁵ Tocqueville says. We see this beginning in these formulations.

⁶³ See Martin Luther, "Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants," in Luther's Works, Vol. 46, pp. 49-55.

⁶⁴ "The power of judging well and of distinguishing the true from the false ... is naturally equal in all men, and consequently ... the diversity of our opinions does not arise because some of us are more reasonable than others but solely because we direct out thoughts along different paths and do not attend to the same things' (Rene Descartes, Discourse on the Method, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch trans. [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985], Vol. 1, Part One, p. I 11).

⁶⁵ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part 1, Ch. 1, p. 430. In the democratic age, Tocqueville says, "each man, is narrowly shut in himself, and from that basis makes the pretension to judge the world" (Ibid.).

⁶⁶Voegelin, p. 259.

experience and its imposition as an order of existence on mankind at large . "⁶⁶ Because Voegelin's point of reference is the ideal-type of the individuated soul that arrives on the historical scene much later, his analysis of its earliest expositions is, at the very least, prone to exaggeration, and more often is simply gratuitous.

Let us note the obvious derailments to which this central idea [of justification by faith alone] is exposed. With the atrophy of faith, the idea will degenerate in practice into the aggressive, utilitarian welfare society without culture of intellect and spirit that we know all to well. And theoretically, the tenuous connection with Christian tradition may be dropped altogether, and Luther's world-immanent love will become the altruism of Comte and his positivist successors.⁶⁷

Voegelin's typology, as I noted a short while ago, is predicated on claim that the modernity has immanentized the divine pole of existence, that it has collapsed the delicate pairing of man and the divine, expressed most eloquently in the Platonic idea of Metaxy, into the one pole that remains when man becomes willful and modem. The first problem with this typology is that it proceeds by what might be called "exposition by extrapolation." Because Voegelin is unwilling to concede that the ideas of modernity develop in concert with the changing historical situation, he is unable to see, for example, that the more radical ideas of Luther are checked by a series of tacit assumptions made by himself and others around him that render it impossible for his ideas to be a proto-Marxist or Proto-Comtean. What Luther is is said to be revealed by what the inner kernel-or fragments,-of his ideas become. As a consequence, a perhaps well-warranted skepticism about how far the individuation of man has proceeded in our own day becomes the occasion for an unbalanced, and sometimes nearly hysterical, treatment of the modem author in question, in which the intellectual task becomes one of genealogical faultfinding rather than of sympathetic rendition.

⁶⁶ Voegelin, p. 259.
⁶⁷ Voegelin, p. 259.

The second problem of Voegelin's typology I take to be graver than the first. Where the first problem leads to an unbalanced analysis of modem authors, the second leads to a misunderstanding about the challenges o f the democratic age in which we find ourselves. The first problem is analytical; the second is political.

Voegelin and Tocqueville are in agreement, formally, that man cannot long live without being drawn beyond himself. Voegelin's manner of addressing this problem is to become involved in an aniamnetic act, which supposes that human health may be restored through a philosophical act of recovery. Yet in some measure this philosophical task achieves its very nobility and purity against the background of the inexorable movement of modernity from its alternatingly na1ve and audacious beginnings to the "civilizational destruction"⁶⁸ that follows. For all of Voegelin's protestations against the idea of historical necessity--say, as in Marx-there is, lurking within his indictment of Luther, a similar sentiment: once set in motion by its founders, modernity cannot stop itself from its rendezvous with disaster. In this light, the existential drama of the philosopher is to

⁶⁸ Voegelin, p. 238.
69 Plato, Republic, Bk. V1, 496d.

seek "a sheltering wall against the storm and blast of dust and rain,"⁶⁹ even while he attends to his task of recovery. In the democratic age, Tocqueville says, "each man is forever thrown back on himself alone, and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart."⁷⁰ There is more than a little irony in the fact that Voegelin's largely solitary anamnetic project of recovery--intended, if you will, to save the democratic age from itself--4s itself implicated in the very disease it seeks to avert.

Tocqueville, like Voegelin, recognizes that individuation is a decisive fact of the democratic age. It is, moreover, a fact that must be modified if we are to survive. Unlike Voegelin, however, Tocqueville does not believe that anamnetic reflection can provide the corrective for the problem. There is, rather, a political antidote that must be administered to draw men out of themselves, namely, the presence of those mediational layers: local government and civil society.⁷¹ He proposed this resolution because he knew that going back was no longer possible: democratic man could barely imagine the enchanted world in which aristocratic man lived.⁷² Or, to put the matter in Voegelin's terms, democratic man cannot conceive of the idea of Metaxy, because the individuation

⁶⁹Plato, Republic, Bk. VI, 496d.
⁷⁰ Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. II, Part II, Ch. 2, p. 508.
⁷¹ See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 11, Part H, Chs. 2-8, pp. 506-28.
⁷²See Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Vol. 1, Author's Introduction, p. 13: "When royal power supported aristocracies governed the nations of Europe in peace, society, despite all its wretchedness, enjoyed several types of happiness which are difficult to appreciate or conceive today."

that has occurred supposes already a sundered relationship. The moral vocabulary of man had shifted; recovery was impossible- except perhaps for a few. If man was to be saved it would be through institutional mechanisms that transposed self-interest into self interest rightly understood. While more might be desired, no more than that was possible--though this was, in Tocqueville's view, enough.

§3. Concluding Thoughts

Voegelin's assessment of Luther illuminates his intellectual program as a whole. His insistence that the object of philosophy was the Metaxy invites modem man to wonder about the alternatives that he has wittingly or unwittingly lost. Yet the primordiality of this formulation in Voegelin's corpus, its universal application as the silent measure of all other formulations, leads him to misunderstand the new modality of faith that Luther exposits, one that comports with the individuation of man accomplished by the social transformations of his age. To be sure, there is reason to be concerned about the excesses to which such an experience is prone. Voegelin is everywhere intent on exposing these excesses. Yet it seems more plausible to believe that no univocal judgment can be rendered about individuation, for it can comprehend a range of phenomenon from solipsism and arrogance, on the one hand, to responsible liberty and human dignity, on the other. In the post-War climate in which Voegelin writes perhaps his zealous attempt at diagnosing the pathologies that he witnessed was understandable. But as we move forward into a new century, it is more helpful, I think, for historians of political thought to attempt to discern the manner in which philosophy and theology comes to grips with this datum of individuation in the modem age, all with a view to attenuating its worst aspects, and cultivating its best features-for these do exist. Luther was not the cause of a "civilization disaster," but like thinkers in every generation he sought to give intellectual form to the swirl of historical forces that neither he, nor us, could fully understand.

Was Eric Voegelin Fair to Martin Luther?

Reflections on Voegelin's treatment of Luther in the History of

Political Ideas

Copyright 2000 Henrik Syse & Asbjorn Bjornes

Introduction

Eric Voegelin's treatment of Martin Luther in the History of Political Ideas (henceforth History; page references when not otherwise noted are to vol. IV of the History) is a tour de force in spirited and, indeed, angry writing. For those not familiar with this material, let us begin by giving some examples:

Firstly, the chapter devoted to Luther and Calvin is entitled "The Great Confusion", in itself something of an indication of what is to come.² Early on in the text, to describe the debates between Luther, the Hussites, Zwingli, and their adversaries Voegelin says that the "conversio had sunk to the level of a pseudometaphysical squabble between intellectuals who did not master the issue" (p. 227). Later in the discussion we find such fiery descriptions of Luther and his movement as

¹The authors would like to thank Ellis Sandoz for helpful comments. 

[t]he very Aristotle whom Luther had labeled "this damned, conceited, rascally heathen" when considering his influence on theology [cf. Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation], becomes a most respectable authority when the question at issue is one of politics.¹⁰

 The same point can be applied to one of Luther's most famous works, De servo arbitrio, which seemingly attacks the notion of free choice per se, but which is essentially concerned with free choice as it pertains to salvation.¹¹ Even the turn away from thefides caritateformata must be seen in this light, as Bernhard Lohse points out:

⁹ See Oberman [ 1982]1992, p. 192.
¹⁰ Forrester 1987, p. 331. See also Oakley 1991, pp. 170-171, on the importance and use of natural-law
arguments and appeals to reason in Luther's political theology, with reference especially to Whether
Soldiers, too, Can be Saved and Temporal Authority: To "at Extent it Should be Obeyed.
¹¹ See Lohse [1995]1999, pp. 160-168, for a good summary.

We need to realize, however, that this scholastic distinction [between fides informis (unformed faith) and fides caritate formata (faith formed by love)] had once been drawn in order by means of Aristotelian philosophy to express the causative effect of grace respecting the believer's renewal, while Luther had in mind the situation at the last judgment. ¹²

While Lohse may be over-emphasizing the Aristotelian motivation of the scholastics, he is surely right in pointing out that Luther was concerned primarily with the doctrine of faith in relation to the final judgment. Luther follows Augustine in stressing that human beings are utterly incapable of the kind of love and meritorious works that count as good in the eyes of God. This does not mean that good works and ethical behavior are impossible, merely that they do not bring us closer to salvation.¹³

In light of Luther's famous Cathecisms, as well as his Biblical commentaries (e.g., his Commentary on the Galatians), it is quite clear that Luther is indeed an ethicist who strongly emphasizes not least the meaning and consequences of the Ten Commandments. The fact that man is saved by faith alone does not imply that ethics disappears or that the tradition of Christian ethics becomes unimportant to Luther. In other words, one must distinguish between Luther's teaching on salvation through faith alone, and his ethics. His point is that ethics, no matter how good, does not lead to any ultimate perfection or salvation; he does not say that ethics is superfluous or of no consequence to the Christian.

It is almost remarkable that Voegelin, for all his clarity of vision, does not consider this point more fully. In the section immediately preceding the chapter on Luther and Calvin, Voegelin describes the so-called perfectus of Dante's Convivio, and points out how Dante evokes an ideal of a realization of the imago Dei in mundane existence (p. 2 10). Voegelin emphasizes that Dante in this context is not

¹²Ibid., p. 202.
¹³For more on Luther's teaching on "good works", see his Treatise on Good Works, usefully commented on in Pelikan 1984, p. 147. See also Bainton 1950, pp. 178-179, and Bainton's connnents on Luther's On the Freedom of the Christian, a work in which the effects of faith on good works are detailed. The strong connection between faith and the quality of works challenges the common claim that Luther totally rejected thefides caritateformata. Something actually happens, positively, to the person who comes to faith in Christ.

concerned with salvation and the transcendental destiny of the soul (although he may be so elsewhere). Luther's concern can be described as being diametrically opposed to Dante's, and it thus constitutes a fine juxtaposition to the latter. The mundane sphere of existence is exactly the one we should not pin our hopes on. Together with the tradition from Augustine, we should come to see our limitations in all their starkness.

In short, debating Luther right after his treatment of Dante's (and others') ideals of inner-worldly fulfillment, Voegelin could have been expected to bring out the contrast to Luther more clearly. That could also have made it easier to appraise Luther's ethics more positively, and it would have made it easier to read Luther's doctrine on good works in a different light. As it stands, Voegelin believes that ethics, including the whole teaching of virtue and of a law of nature available to all human beings, disappears. But, as readers of Luther will know, that is not the case. The law of nature is still invoked, and Luther holds on to the need for reason in order to appraise actions in this world. But, in the face of salvation and God's eternal punishment, none of these works deserve the name of "good". Augustine had in effect said much the same thing.¹⁴

(b) Luther and the Augustinian heritage

This brings us to another important point that Voegelin may be under-emphasizing. It is a fact that Luther was - in priestly practice as well as theological fact - a disciple of St. Augustine, and that he indeed understood himself as returning to the wisdom of the bishop of Hippo. Luther's attacks on works-righteousness and on die Schwarmerei (meaning primarily the extremism) of the radical Reformation are the results of a truly Augustinian brand of deep-seated skepticism toward radical and millenarian political action in this world. This constitutes part of the core of Luther's religious and political beliefs. While he was a radical in both speech and deed, he never wished to create an earthly paradise of the elect. (Calvin may, on one interpretation, have come closer to such an idea.) He did not believe that the political sphere could be ruled by the Gospel; the "priesthood of all believers" did not take away the need for a well-educated clergy and sound institutional authority; and, significantly, Luther created or supported no utopian political schemes - the radical action he demanded did not aim to create new institutions or rebellious factions, although they aimed to reform the state of Christendom quite radically and thoroughly.

¹⁴ See McNeill 1946 for a fine and thorough, albeit debated, overview of the many references to natural-law ethics in Luther and other reformers. See also Oakley 1991.

In all this, not least in his view of the necessity of temporal authority, Luther was decisively influenced by Augustine. That Voegelin does not emphasize this deep Augustinianism that runs through Luther's works, constitutes a weakness in his account - especially since Voegelin in general puts so much emphasis, implicitly if not always explicitly, on the Augustinian legacy in Western thought. While Luther indeed departed from Augustine on important points - for instance, in seeing grace as external and not so much as a transforming process (cf. the fides caritate formata), and in changing the highest priority among the theological virtues from love to faith - he did take Augustine's teaching on sin and human limitations seriously, in all its radicality, and he did maintain a strong skepticism towards millennial political expectations. ¹⁵

We may say that by devoting most of his attention to Luther's relatively early Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation (1520), Voegelin comes to treat the most radical version of the "priesthood of all believers" as the prototype of Lutheran politics, and downplays the more subdued, Augustinian strain running through Luther.

It is not as if Voegelin is not aware of Luther's rejection of radical sectarianism. He goes so far as to portray Luther as the first major instance of a political thinker who wants to create a new social order through the partial destruction of the existing civilizational order and then is appalled when more radical men carry the work of destruction far beyond the limits that he had set himself (p. 23 8). Voegelin, in short, charges Luther with being someone who wants to solve "complicated social and intellectual problems through limited destruction" (p. 239, our emphasis), but who should have known that the destructive forces thereby unleashed can hardly be held back.

The question is whether even the qualifications "partial" and "limited" make this a good and fitting description of Luther's aim. It is quite clear from Luther's 95

¹⁵For a useful summary of the debate about Luther's Augustinianism, see Pelikan 1984, pp. 251-253.

Theses and other early works of the Reformation that he was out to debate and criticize what he saw as the Church's teaching about faith and works, aggravated by the practice of indulgences. But he did not see an institutional upheaval as called for, although he surely wished to change local dependence on the papacy (but he was far from the first Christian thinker to want that!). It is a historical fact that the Church met and answered him poorly, if at all (which is a point we will come back to). The lack of proper replies and decent discussion about the actual matters at hand in the earliest years of the Reformation, led to impatience and fervent reactions in many circles - indeed also in Luther himself. But however radical these reactions were, to see his reform program as "destruction" (pp. 238-239), as a call to "civilizational upheaval" (p. 245), and as a seminal, almost unequaled, piece of "political mischief' (ibid.) must be taking Luther too far, since Luther's stated intention was to bring the Church "back" and "out"; back to its Augustinian teaching on faith, and out to a people which had been misled by an uneducated clergy and a partly corrupt Church bureaucracy.

Voegelin does admit this restraint in Luther when he speaks of the Lutheran and Calvinistic idea of a terrestrial paradise as, after all, a "respectable eschatology" (p. 259),¹⁶ in contradistinction to other more chiliastic and revolutionary ideas. But here it seems to us that Voegelin lumps together Luther and Calvin too easily. It cannot be inferred from Luther's writings that he believed in any ideal, Christian terrestrial society whatsoever. He was too deeply imbued with Augustinian skepticism towards mundane existence to immerse himself in such utopian dreaming. )while Calvin had more of a philosophical foundation than Luther, and drew more explicitly on especially Stoic and to a certain extent Aristotelian notions of politics and law, Luther is closer to the Augustinian fear of "political theology", and thus actually more open than Calvin to a "non-scriptural" politics, which in turn allows for more versatility and openness than Calvin's ultimately dreary Geneva ever could.

(c) "The affirmation of ordinary life" A further, connected point that deserves attention is Voegelin's discussion of Luther's this-worldly ethics, which we also touched on above. Whereas Voegelin sees Luther's teaching as implying a "lack of ethics", instead creating a new and anti-authoritarian  individualism that tears down the fine medieval balance between the individual and authority, it is possible to see Luther's turn toward the spirituality and conscience of the common man in another and more favorable ethical light.

¹⁶ The expression is repeated in Voegelin 1998b, p. 20.

Our point may be explained in the following way: Voegelin draws a historical line from the Protestant Reformation to a German pietism with "the propensity to insulate an existence understood as Christian from the profane, impure sphere of the political" - in contrast to the Anglo-Saxon development, deeply influenced by the "Second Reformation" of John Wesley, which "carried Christendom ... to the people ... and thereby virtually immunized them against later ideological movements". ¹⁷ According to Voegelin, the German development, with roots in the 161-century Reformation, had torn politics and Christianity apart, leaving no spiritual resources to combat extremism and, in the 20d, century, totalitarianism.

While such an image has considerable historical plausibility, it is important to ask whether and to what extent Luther is to blame. Luther could, after all, be said to be responsible for a very different trend in the Western history of ideas, namely, that which Charles Taylor has called "the affirmation of ordinary life";¹⁸ in one sense the very antithesis to that extreme pietism that some of Luther's followers came to espouse, and that Voegelin indicts for creating fertile ground for nihilistic and totalitarian movements (by creating a radical separation between the religious and the mundane spheres of life, thus allowing for no true dialogue between the two). ¹⁹ After all, we find the Wittenberg reformer being as abhorred as Voegelin by that ignorance of the masses which so easily leads to uncritical acceptance of ideological dogma. Simultaneously, and also quite parallel to Voegelin, Luther expresses fear of an elitism that denies true spirituality and dignity to everyday people in ordinary life. The life of a shoemaker or an innkeeper, married life with children, everyday life with its worries and joys - these have as much grace and nobility as the life of reflection or political grandeur, according to Luther. This does not mean that reflection is

¹⁷ The quotes are from a lecture on "Freedom and Responsibility in Economy and Democracy" (1960), reprinted in Voegelin 2000, pp. 70-82; for these quotes, see p. 72.
¹⁸Taylor 1989, pp. 211 ff.
¹⁹As Taylor points out pietism and puritanism - in themselves broad concepts which encompass many thinkers and groups - were indeed part of the movement that criticized medieval monasticism and spiritual elitism; thus they are part and parcel of the modem movement toward the "affirmation of ordinary life". However, Luther's variant is much more down-to-earth and less ascetic than what we often associate with pietism and puritanism.

unimportant, or that political life is without dignity, which is the unwarranted conclusion that may be drawn from Luther's often fiery remarks. His point is that these forms of life may all be combined. Spiritual or political life is not out of reach for the common man .²⁰

Thus, Luther undoubtedly helps lay the foundation of the modem idea of mass education and democratic self-government, not least through his Bible translations and his Cathecisms. Luther can be accused of being both naive and inconsistent in his ambitions, but his aim is at least not "chiliastic" or "millenarian"; rather he can be seen as following up on the Augustinian teaching about the limited, but important tasks of government in this world, and the inevitable limitations and shortcomings of all schemes intended to create an inimanentized sort of "gospel perfection", available only to the "Gnostic" elite. This could possibly have been brought out more explicitly by Voegelin, creating the basis for a more nuanced picture of the reformer.

(d) Luther's problematic personality - and the Church's reply This brings us to a final point not without relevance for Voegelin's discussion; namely, Luther's personality.²¹ Clearly, Voegelin is right in singling out Luther as a problematic personality whose bold writings and sayings could be - and indeed were - taken out of context and used as pretexts for extreme and radical action. He lacked a balance, an acute sense of moderation in speech (and, to a certain extent, deed), which we expect of great thinkers and heroic political and religious actors. Yet, as Voegelin himself so ably points out, Luther had a keen eye for those ills that needed immediate correction. His were "the talents that one should like to see in an influential cabinet member of a democratic welfare state" (p. 248), as Voegelin amusingly puts it.

We would like to claim that it is plausible - if only partially true - that Luther's proposals and reactions, theologically and politically, were indeed quite healthy and called-for, and that it was the reply that was sadly lacking. A stronger Church institution would have managed to contain the shock of a Martin Luther, and


²⁰ Possibly the clearest exposition of this point in Lutheran teaching can be found in the Augsburg Confession, art. 16; see Villa-Vicencio 1986, p. 47. In both Cathecisna the same emphasis is evident in connection with Luther's comments and explanations of the Commandments.

²¹ See John Dillenberger, in Luther 1961, p. xiii, for a brief but useful discussion of the relationship between Luther's personality and the many attacks on him.


 even exploit the shock to a useful purpose. Luther's call to a reform of Christendom could have been contained had the Church itself shown willingness to reform. Undoubtedly, many spiritual and religious people were willing to listen to and support the calls to change. But the papal institution and many of those dependent on it for their living did not show the same kind of willingness to engage in serious debate and unselfish soul-searching.²² When Voegelin, in a striking and funny sentence, holds that "if anything is characteristic of the Reformation, it is that nobody could keep quiet, or could be kept quiet" (p. 230), one lamentfully thinks of the fact that the Roman Church initially did keep too quiet, that its replies to Luther's challenges were woefully lacking, and that this contributed to a situation that got out of hand and ended in a century of bloodshed the European continent did not see the like of until the 20" century. If nothing else, the blame for the tragedies that followed in the wake of the Reformation must be shared, a conclusion Voegelin would certainly not have disagreed with (to judge from the general treatment of this period in Voegelin's History), but which - we suggest - could have been emphasized more clearly in the chapter on Luther and Calvin.

Conclusion

Any reader who finds Voegelin's treatment of Luther too harsh, should just look at those polemical tracts that were written in Luther's own day. Luther was attacked from the left and right, and all kinds of slander were heaped on him. The radical reformer Thomas Muntzer customarily referred to him as Doctor Liar (Doctor Lugner; a word-play on Doctor Luther),²³ and a balanced thinker such a Francisco de Vitoria referred to Luther as "the most imprudent of all",²⁴ and said that he had "left no nook untainted with his heresies"." Closer to our own time, a moderate Catholic thinker such as Jacques Maritain said tersely that Luther was "not intelligent, but limited - stubborn especially", and totally marked by "egocentrism ... a metaphysical

22See Bokenkotter 1990, p. 193; see also Lohse [1995]1999, pp. 110-117, for a summary and discussion of the unsuccessful encounter with Cajetan in 1518, and the following contact between Luther and Rome, reinforcing the impression of a failure of communication and true dialogue. 

²³See Muntzer, A Highly Provoked Defense, in Baylor 199 1, pp. 74-94. 

²⁴Vitoria, On the Power of the Church, qu. 2, art. 1; in Vitoria 199 1, p. 126. 21 

²⁵Vitoria, On the Law of War, qu. 1, art. 1; in Vitoria 1991, p. 296. 16 

²⁶Maritain 1929, pp. 5, 14. We thank our friend Gregory Reichberg for making us aware of this interesting early work by Maritain.

egoism".²⁶ Much has happened over the previous half-century, however. Catholic writers have come to treat Luther much more sympathetically,²⁷ and official documents and declarations, most recently in 1999, have managed to reconcile Catholics and Lutheran Protestants to an unprecedented degree. There is little doubt that Voegelin would have rejoiced at such progress, to the extent he saw it as engaging the two sides in the real questions and not quasi-problems.

These remarks notwithstanding, Voegelin's discussion of Luther in the History is indeed brutal. And Luther understood, of course, that such would be the attacks on him. After all, and without any doubt, Luther is himself one of the most polemical and fiery writers of Western history, much like Eric Voegelin himself. In style, if not in substance, they are probably more similar than Voegelin would have cared to admit.


²⁷ See Bokenkotter 1990, pp. 186-200 for a balanced exposition from a Catholic viewpoint.


Works Cited

Bainton, Roland H. (1950). Here I Stan& A Life of Martin Luther. Nashville: Abingdon Press.

Baylor, Michael G., ed. (199 1). The Radical Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Bokenkotter, Thomas (1990). A Concise History of the Catholic Church, rev. & expanded ed. New York: Image Books.

Forrester, Duncan (1987). "Martin Luther and John Calvin", in History of Political Philosophy, 3^rd ed., eds. Leo Strauss & Joseph Cropsey. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lohse, Bernhard ([1995]1999). Martin Luther's Theology, trans. & ed. Roy A. Harrisville. Edinburgh: T & T Clark.

Luther, Martin (1961). Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger. New York: Doubleday.

Maritain, Jacques (1929). Three Reformers: Luther, Descartes, Rousseau. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell.

McGrath, Alister (1994). Christian Theology: An Introduction. Cambridge, MA Oxford: Blackwell.

McNeill, John T. (1946). "Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers", Journal of Religion, vol. XXVI, no. 3, pp. 162-182.

Oakley, Francis (1991). "Christian Obedience and Authority, 1520-1550", in The Cambridge History of Political Thought, 1450-1700, ed. J. H. Bums. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.

Oberman, Heiko  [1982]1992). Luther: Man between God and Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart. New York: Image Books.

Pelikan, Jaroslav (1984). Reformation of Church and Dogma. (Vol. 4 of The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine.) Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Taylor, Charles (1989). Sources of the Self( Cambridge: Cambridge University Press -

Villa-Vicencio, Charles (1986). Between Christ and Caesar. Cape Town: David Philip.

Vitoria, Francisco de (199 1). Political Writings, eds. Andiony Pagden & Jeremy Lawrance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Voegelin, Eric (1952). New Science of Politics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

--- (1968). Science, Politics, and Gnosticism. Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway.

--- (I 998a). History of Political Ideas, vol. IV.- Renaissance and Reformation, eds. David L. Morse & William A Thompson. (Vol. 22 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, series ed. Ellis Sandoz). Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

--- (1 998b). History of Political Ideas, vol. V.- Religion and the Rise of Modernity, ed. James L. Wiser. (Vol. 23 of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, series ed. Ellis Sandoz). Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

--- (2000). Published Essays 1953-1965, ed. Ellis Sandoz. (Vol. I I of The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, series ed. Ellis Sandoz). Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

I. Introduction
The Reformation movements of fifteenth-century Europe have been variously described as a cultural advance, a civilizational disruption with continuities, a religious revival, a heresy of "invincible error and [perhaps] perfect good faith," and a schism and "calamity." In Karl Holl's estimation, for example, it "enriched all areas of [European] culture," from theology and philosophy to art, from history to literature. It similarly "deepened" a theory of the state and produced a clearer delimitation of state powers. For Frederick Copleston, on the other hand, the contribution of the Reformation to philosophy generally and political philosophy specifically appears to have been slight and mostly derivative, except in one instance--the development of the notion of the state as a distinct and autonomous entity. Quentin Skinner sees this particular development as laying the foundations for modem political thought. For Roland Bainton, the Reformation was "an age of upheaval," but not of disintegration. The "culture of the West" remains a coherent phenomenon that is a kind of post-Reformation Christendom whose ecclesiastical structure has been shattered, but whose internal, cohesive meaning abides. "Above all else "a revival of religion," the Reformation was a movement for the recovery of first principles, the restoration of an "uncorrupted Christianity."

For Eric Voegelin, the Reformation marked "a clear epoch in Western History," to be "understood as the successful invasion of Western Institutions by gnostic movements." Such an assessment seems harsh and idiosyncratic in view of even the most strident critiques of the Reformation from its religious opponents. Voegelin's analysis of the Puritan revolution in England is an example of how he comes to his severe conclusion. Having shown the basic programmatic contours and underlying motivation of this revolution to be gnostic, and knowing that the formative theology of the Puritans stemmed from Calvin's writings, Voegelin traced the outlines of Puritan gnosticism back to the reformer from Picardy. A brief review of Calvinist doctrines of revolt, Voegelin argued, showed the easy transition from being a group that bears the "consciousness of being the representative[s] of a new truth" to a conducting a revolt against the crown. Examples of this "trend in political speculation, nourished from various sources, but converging toward the idea of an autonomous, intramundane polity that derives its governmental authority from 'the people'"... include John Knox and the French Huguenots. Whereas some evaluators may see this anti-monarchical development as a positive one toward modem conceptions of individual freedom, Voegelin's assessment was far less optimistic. The Reformation spelled for him the decisive downward turn in the history of Western Civilization whose final chapter has not yet been written.

This paper undertakes a two-part task. First, with specific focus on Calvin, it will consider Voegelin's argument that the obnoxious features of post-Reformation Protestantism are to be traced directly to the writings and practical reforming activities of Luther and Calvin themselves. It is their anti-philosophism and Calvin's gnosticism, according to Voegelin, that shape modernity to an unprecedented degree. As R. H. Tawney observed, and as Voegelin seemed independently to concur, it is ultimately an "active and radical" Calvinism--and not the much more socially conservative, politically deferential, and religiously quietistic Lutheranism--that wends a path "strewn with revolutions" through the history of modem Europe. Friedrich Heer argues further that "the inner history of Europe" in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries "was an attempt to overcome the attitudes fixed by the Calvinists," who were the "pioneers of the modem world" in almost every sense. Therefore, despite the early dependence of Calvin and his followers on Lutheran political doctrines, this paper will focus on Voegelin's evaluation of Calvin and his writings for their later import in European civilization.

Second, in view of Voegelin's polemical treatment, this paper will consider whether his evaluation of Calvin is fair. Voegelin's claim is unusual enough--even within a tradition of declaring Protestantism heretical--and his scholarship of a quality that a careful consideration of such a charge seems warranted in its own right. Oddly enough, Voegelin is not explicit about what, precisely, he finds, that is gnostic in Calvin's work. The reason for this gap is that The New Science of Politics, where Voegelin makes the charge, is a short text that is in some ways a summary of the results of the earlier eight-volume History of Political Ideas. In the History, Voegelin uses neither "koranic" nor "gnostic" to describe Calvin's work, but his exegesis of the Institutes shows the way to his summary conclusion in New Science. This paper explicates that conclusion by taking into consideration both of Voegelin's works while examining Calvin's texts.

II. Voegelin's Contextualization and Judgment of the Reformation

a. sacrum imperium

Voegelin's critique of the Reformation generally and of Jean Calvin's theology specifically must be understood in light of his interpretation of various political and ecclesiastical developments and responses to them in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This period begins with a
 spiritual dissolution revealed in the institutional corruption of late medieval Europe and in the spiritual alienation of writers like Dante, and it ends in the Reformation. These two centuries spell the beginning of the breakdown of Western civilization, characterized as the dissolution of the corpus Christianum that is institutionally expressed in the sacrum imperium into particularistic national and eventually religious spheres. The breakdown was finalized in the Reformation and religious wars of the sixteenth century. This medieval sacrum imperium or "holy empire" was a singular civilizational achievement of the West. In the mind of Calvin, at least, it was an achievement less to be superseded than to be refounded on new principles. Calvin's efforts at refounding led not to a new Christendom, however, but to counter-foundings, savage wars and eventual efforts to extirpate spiritual concerns from the public sphere altogether in many European polities.

The sacrum imperium, according to Voegelin, is the focal evocation of political ideas in the Middle Ages toward which all other political ideas are oriented. An evocation is a symbol that expresses the rationality or legitimacy or moral and emotional coherence of the "shelter function of the cosmion, the little word of order" that human beings create to preserve themselves in community and to give their lives "a semblance of meaning.&q