16
March/April 2022
R E F O R M AT I O N O U T TA K E S
Luther’s Marginal Thoughts on Melanchthon by Zachary Purvis
to his Wittenberg colleague Philip Melanchthon. He had just finished reading Melanchthon’s latest manuscript, published in 1538 as On the Authority of the Church and the Writings of the Ancient Fathers. As he thumbed through it, he told Melanchthon that his head swirled with thoughts of Aristotle and his chest, in turn, with indigestion. What made him dyspeptic was the manuscript’s material cause. In Aristotle’s philosophy, the stuff out of which a thing is made is the material cause. For example, timber is the material cause of a house, or marble is the material cause of a sculpture. “The material cause! So much paper has been consumed by you!” he complained. “Several times you filled one sheet with only three words, crossing out all the letters in between.” Luther’s comment about the length of the document and the logic of Aristotle is a bad joke—the kind that appeals only to seminarians. (Though, it also helps bust the pernicious myth that Luther rejected Aristotle wholesale.) In truth, he came up smiling from each inky page. Few texts of the period stated so clearly whether and in what sense the fathers and councils of the church could be considered sources for Christian doctrine. In fact, the answer to that question represented one of Luther and Melanchthon’s greatest collaborations: soon Luther finished his own work on the nature of the church, and both men intended their tracts to be read together. But Luther’s feeble punchline is also striking. For almost no one wrote more than Melanchthon; certainly no one did with such careful deliberation. Melanchthon’s name calls to mind a lost world of Renaissance and Reformation learning. He was both a great humanist and a great reformer. He first appeared in print in 1510 when he barely a teenager and enrolled at the University of Heidelberg. He never stopped writing. He authored some of the most important books in the early modern period on Latin and Greek grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, and history; influential studies in physics, psychology, and astronomy; the first summary of Protestant theology in his Loci communes and the first Protestant commentaries on Romans (five on the book alone), 1 and 2 Corinthians, and the Gospel of John; the Augsburg Confession and its defense in the Apology—and so much more. When he died in 1560, he left behind some ten thousand letters, reflecting an extensive network of correspondents and a remarkable degree of LATE IN 1538, MARTIN LUTHER WROTE
1
2
