Jean louis vincent biography of martin luther

Jean-Louis VINCENT, MD, PhD

Dr Vincent is Professor of intensive care at University of Brussels. Monastic life made him aware of the theology of mysticism, which deeply shaped his further development.

However, Luther did not find this life an easy one, later recalling that while he tried to live without reproach and made full use of confession, he still felt that he “was a sinner before God with an extremely disturbed conscience” (“Preface to the Complete Edition of Luther’s Latin Writings”, 1545, WA 54:185/LW 34:336), in spite of the reassurances given him by his mentor Johann von Staupitz (1468–1524), then vicar-general of the observant wing of the Augustinians.

Humankind was split into two empires, he argued, the believers and those who did not follow Christ. While the Church father had his “garden experience”, Luther’s experience is named after the tower of the monastery in Wittenberg where it is said to have occurred (1532, WA TR 3 no 3232a–c/LW 54:193–4).

Knowledge, Will and Metaphysics, Waco: Baylor University Press.

Theology and Philosophy

Primary texts

• Luther, Martin, 1518, The Heidelberg Disputation (WA 1:353–74/LW 31:35–70).
• –––, 1536, Disputation Concerning Man (WA 39.1:175–80/LW 34:133–44).
• –––, 1539, Disputation Concerning the Passage: “The Word Was Made Flesh” (John 1:14) (WA 39.2:3–30/LW 38:235–77).

Secondary texts

• Barone, Marco, 2017, Luther’s Augustinian Theology of the Cross, Eugene, OR: Resource Publications.
• Becker, Sigbert W., 1999, The Foolishness of God: The Place of Reason in the Theology of Martin Luther, second edition, Milwaukee, WI: Wisconsin Publishing House.
• Bielfeldt, Dennis, 1990, “Luther, Metaphor, and Theological Language”, Modern Theology, 6(2): 121–135.

  doi:10.1093/jts/XX.1.164

• –––, 1984, The Political Thought of Martin Luther, Brighton: Harvester Press.
• Carty, Jarrett A., 2017, God and Government: Martin Luther’s Political Thought, Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
• Couenhoven, Jesse, 2017, “The Protestant Reformation”, in The Cambridge History of Moral Philosophy, Sacha Golob and Jens Timmermann (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 208–220.

  Luther thus poses a question to Erasmus which he thinks could also be posed to the Scholastics (who are labelled as Sophists throughout this text):

  If anyone told you that a thing was free which could operate by its own power only in one direction (the bad one), while in the other (the good one) it could of course operate, though not by its own power, but only by the help of another—would you be able to keep a straight face my friend?

  1537, First Disputation Against the Antinomians, WA 39.1:389–91, translated in Sonntag (ed. For a fuller discussion, see the entry on Luther’s influence on philosophy.

Bibliography

Abbreviations for references to Luther’s works

• [WA] D. Translated as Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church, 1532–1546, James L.

  Schaaf (trans.), Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 1993.

• Carlyle, Thomas, 1841, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History, London: James Fraser. White 1994: 60–81 for criticisms of Ebeling). doi:10.1017/9781108560702
• Mikkola, Sini, 2024, Body and Gender in Martin Luther’s Anthropology, Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
• Popkin, Richard H., 1979, The History of Scepticism from Erasmus to Spinoza, Berkeley: University of California Press.
• Rex, Richard, 2017b, “Luther Among the Humanists”, in Melloni 2017: 203–220.

  Rather, it would be more accurate to say that he was keen to keep reason within its proper boundaries and under the right tutelage.

  One text that brings out some of the complexities of Luther’s position on these issues is Disputatio de homine (“The Disputation Concerning Man”, 1536). Privately, he read mystical authors, like late medieval preacher John Tauler (d.

  As Luther puts it in Disputation Concerning the Passage: “The Word Was Made Flesh”:

  St. Ambrose has rightly said that the dialecticians have to give way where the apostolic fishermen are to be trusted. As a result, he wrote his ninety-five theses against indulgences in 1517, intended for debate or disputation on the topic, criticising this widespread practice as selling the remission of sins; this practice had been intensified by the efforts of Pope Leo X to raise funds for a new basilica of St Peter in Rome, efforts that were spearheaded locally by a Dominican friar Johann Tetzel.

  Luther thus proceeds to the first main part of Erasmus’s text, in which Erasmus had offered a number of biblical passages that he claimed to support the idea of free choice.

  At the beginning of Part Three of his own work, before getting on to these passages, Luther begins with an important critique of the definition of free choice with which Erasmus had started his discussion:

  By free choice in this place we mean a power of the human will by which a man can apply himself to the things which lead to eternal salvation, or turn away from them.

  It now became clear to his audience that Luther (who to mark this change in perspective had just previously started signing himself “Luther” in short for “eleutherios” or the “freed one”, instead of his family’s actual name of “Luder”) was attempting not merely to confront the Church on the issue of indulgences, but also to question what he perceived to be its misguided theological outlook.

  Luther’s position on indulgences, and his challenge to the Pope, had now begun to draw the attention of higher authorities in the Church, and in 1518 he was summoned to Augsburg to meet with the papal legate Cardinal Tommaso de Vio, known as Cajetan, who was investigating the matter.

  Keep them away from Christians. Luther also makes a diagnostic point, that underlying Erasmus’s confusion here is the idea that while the will cannot will the good unaided, it is not necessarily therefore committed to willing the bad but still has some choice, as it could remain in a “neutral” position between the two; but Luther rejects this picture, as once the will has turned away from the good, it is willing the bad, rather than being in some “middle” or “unqualified” state.

  Luther then returns to the passage from Ecclesiasticus 15:14–17 with which Erasmus had prefaced his discussion, to consider how Erasmus uses it to support his view.

  

  He thus argues that Aristotle’s Physics, Metaphysics, De anima, and Ethics should all be removed from the curriculum, while his Logic, Rhetoric and Poetics should be retained in an abridged form without commentary, as aids to speaking and preaching.

  (WA 18:715/LW 33:186)

  Luther thus rejects Erasmus’s attempt to leave any space for free choice, given divine foreknowledge (for Erasmus’s response, see Erasmus 1527 [1999: 493–520]):

  If God foreknows that Judas will turn traitor, or that he will change his will to betray, whichever God has foreknown will necessarily come about, or else God will be mistaken in his foreknowing and predicting, which is impossible.

  In considering this issue, Erasmus had made use of the scholastic distinction between the necessity of the consequence and the necessity of the consequent, arguing that while it may be that if God wills something it happens necessarily (necessity of the consequence), it does not follow that this happening is necessary (necessity of the consequent), thus leaving space for free choice (Erasmus 1524 [1969: 66–8]).