## 1. Luther and Early Modern Philosophy



At a general level, in this period Luther's ideas had a role in
shaping two key philosophical disputes of a broadly epistemological
kind, one concerning the relation between philosophy and theology as
disciplines, and the other concerning the possibility of religious
certainty. The first can be illustrated by the so-called
"Hofmann-streit" (or "Hofmann Controversy")
which took place at the University of Helmstedt in 1598, in which
Daniel Hofmann (1538-1621) cited Luther to attack his
philosophical colleagues, which brought a response from the Scottish
mathematician and physician Duncan Liddel (1561-1613) amongst
others (for further discussion, see Antognazza 1996 and Hunter 2006;
for the link to Liddel, see Regier 2016). Throughout the seventeenth
century, the controversy had a major impact on the debate between
theology and philosophy and, in particular, on discussions surrounding
the so-called doctrine of double truth (see
 Luther entry SS2).
 Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) devoted an article of his
*Dictionaire historique et critique* to the controversy, and
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) discussed it repeatedly,
including in the *Nouveaux Essais* and in the
*Theodicy*.



A second epistemological issue was also raised by Luther's
claims for the priority of scripture over ecclesiastical authority,
which Luther had argued (for example in *The Bondage of the
Will* against Erasmus; see WA 18:603-14/LW 33:19-36)
would make possible a certainty that such authority lacked--but
which as a method had itself proved problematic in settling disputes
between Luther and those who challenged his scriptural interpretations
(see
 Luther entry SS2).
 As Richard Popkin (1979) has argued, this impasse led to significant
debates between subsequent Reformers and Catholics concerning which
approach, if any, could avoid scepticism, or indeed if faith required
accommodation with scepticism in some form (which Luther himself had
vehemently denied against Erasmus: see
 Luther entry SS4).



As well as providing an important context for these general debates,
at a more individual level another prominent early modern philosopher
who responded to Luther's thought was not only Leibniz, but also
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), where one concern that is central to
both is the question of free will, but other issues are also relevant.
This influence will now be considered in more detail, beginning with
Hobbes and then turning to Leibniz.



While generally expressing admiration for Luther's role in the
Reformation against what Hobbes saw as the evils of the Catholic
 Church,[4]
 the most direct use Hobbes makes of Lutheran ideas is in his
controversy with John Bramhall, Bishop of Derry, over the issue of
free will. The two men were led into debate by the Marquess of
Newcastle when the three were in exile in Paris in 1645, but following
the unauthorized publication of Hobbes's contribution in 1654 as
*On Liberty and Necessity*, Bramhall himself published his own
earlier strongly-worded contribution as *A Defence of True Liberty
from Antecedent and Extrinsical Necessity* in the following year,
to which Hobbes then replied in similarly strident terms, in his
*Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance* of 1656,
to which Bramhall published a further response in 1658:
*Castigations of Mr Hobbes His Last Animadversions in the Case
Concerning Liberty, and Universal
 Necessity*.[5]



Bramhall makes his objections to Hobbes abundantly clear in the
following passage from his *Defence of True Liberty*:



> 
> 
> I hate this Doctrin from my heart and I believe both I have reason so
> to do, and all others who shall seriously ponder the horrid
> consequences which flow from it. It destroyes liberty, and dishonours
> the nature of man. It makes the second causes and outward objects to
> be the Rackets, and Men to be but the Tennis-Balls of destiny. It
> makes the first cause, that is, God Almighty, to be the introducer of
> all evill, and sin into the world, as much as Man, yea more than Man,
> by as much as the motion of the Watch is more from the Artificer, who
> did make it and wind it up, than either from the springs, or the
> wheels, or the thred, if God by his special influence into the second
> causes, did necessitate them to operate as they did. (Bramhall 1655:
> 60) 
> 
> 
> 



Bramhall's central concern was thus two-fold: first,
Hobbes's determinism "dishonours the nature of man"
by making him into nothing more than a "Tennis-Ball of
destiny", while secondly it creates theological difficulties by
entailing that God is as much the author of evil and sin as of good, a
conclusion so abhorrent that if taken seriously, it could not but push
right thinking people into atheism.



Faced with this challenge, and fully accepting that his position
treated God as a first cause from which all else happens with
necessity, Hobbes appealed in his defence to the Reformation tradition
in general, and Luther in particular, thus fighting a theological
critic with theological authorities. As we have seen from the
discussion of *The Bondage of the Will*
 (Luther entry SS4),
 Luther had faced similar forms of criticism from Erasmus, and so
Hobbes was able to make use of some of Luther's replies to
Erasmus in responding to Bramhall. In particular, he employed
Luther's distinction between the necessity of immutability and
the necessity of constraint to argued that while human beings lack
free will, they are nonetheless not forced to sin *against*
their will, and so can still have sin imputed to them (Hobbes 1656:
SS19(a), 1841: 259-60, 1999: 77-8; 1656: SS20 (n),
1841: 298, 1999: 79-80; see also WA 18:616 note/LW 33:39). And
in response to the question that if God has power over us and so can
determine our will, why he does not just use this power to make us
good, but instead punishes us when we are not, Hobbes makes the
Lutheran point that this is to try to hold God to human standards of
justice and rightness; but it is a mistake to assume that these can
can be applied in this
 context.[6]
 While obviously dialectically effective to use Luther in this way to
refute a Bishop, and while the question of the nature of
Hobbes's own religious commitments remains a matter of
 controversy,[7]
 Hobbes's appeal to Luther in this manner is no mere
opportunism, and shows an understanding of and familiarity with
Luther's writing on free will which is more than purely
superficial.



However, it can still be questioned whether by transposing these
Lutheran considerations into the context of his own mechanistic
materialism, Hobbes could do them proper justice; and of course, for
Luther the philosophical issues surrounding such materialism were of
little concern, and nor is his conception of God merely that of the
kind of "first mover" that he is taken to be by
 Hobbes.[8]
 There is thus no place in Hobbes's account for what we have
seen is so distinctive to Luther's, namely that there is a kind
of spiritual comfort to be found in the abandonment of the idea of
free choice, both in the way that the predestination that comes with
it can make us more certain of God's promises, and in the way it
liberates us from the kind of anxiety we would feel if salvation
depended on our proper exercise of this choice. Moreover, as discussed in Luther entry SS4, Luther has arguments against free choice that are
independent of any commitment to materialism, which rest instead on
his claim that there can be no "neutral" normative space
for the free will to exercise its choices as Erasmus had claimed: for
it is either a good will which will see the good as its only option
and so not be faced with any choice, or a bad will which thinks that
the bad is also an option it should consider, but then *qua*
will it is always turned away from the good and so has no choice in
this direction
 either.[9]
 As others have noted, these deeper aspects of Luther's
position, which have nothing to do with Hobbes's materialism, in
the end make their respective approaches to these questions very
different (see Damrosch 1979, Overhoff 1997).



As well as this issue of free will, it is also intriguing to consider
another point of connection between the two thinkers, namely the
influence of Luther on Hobbes's political and social philosophy,
though this issue is less explicitly documented through Hobbes's
works than the previous one. Nonetheless, both shared a belief in the
need for a powerful state if the precariousness of life in a state of
nature is to be avoided, given the lack of community between fallen
individuals, so that both can be said to offer similar justifications
for state authority, while then perhaps as a result being guilty of
tending towards authoritarianism in their political thought. (For
further comparison, see Kodalle 1990.)



If Hobbes's materialism and (consequently) suspected atheism
adds an interesting complexity to his relation to Luther, in
Leibniz's case a complexity is added through the latter's
commitment to ecumenism (reflected in his *Catholic
Demonstrations* project of 1668-69 and subsequent works),
and his rationalism, on which some of his ecumenical plans were based,
as he hoped that common ground between doctrinal differences might be
based on fresh insights made possible by new developments in
philosophy and the sciences. Nonetheless, as with Hobbes,
notwithstanding these divergences in Leibniz's case, a clear
Lutheran influence and context is still to be found, traceable to his
upbringing and education (see Goldenbaum 1988: 171; Antognazza 2009:
Chap 1), which drew him towards Lutheranism in a moderate form.



As Leibniz himself writes, from his "very tender youth
onwards", even before he went to university, he "came
across a part of Luther's book *De servo
arbitrio*", while going on to study works written on this
issue not only by other Lutherans and by Reformed writers, but also
those in the Catholic tradition (see Backus 2016: 257, notes 10 and
11). Leibniz's interest in this debate was later to lead him to
contribute belatedly to the controversy between Hobbes and Bramhall
outlined above, which he discusses in an appendix to his
*Theodicy* (1710): "Reflexions on the Work that Mr.
Hobbes Published in English on 'Freedom, Necessity and
Chance'". Leibniz notes that Hobbes's view that
"divine foreknowledge would be sufficient to establish an
absolute necessity of events" resembles that of Luther in *De
servo arbitrio*, or at least Luther there "spoke so";
but then Leibniz suggests this Lutheran position goes further than it
needs to do, as 



> 
> 
> it is sufficiently acknowledged today that the kind of necessity which
> is termed hypothetical, and springs from foreknowledge or from other
> anterior reasons, has nothing in it to arouse one's alarm:
> whereas it would be quite otherwise if the thing were necessary of
> itself, in such a way that the contrary implied contradiction.
> (Leibniz 1710 [1985: Appendix SS3, p. 393]) 
> 
> 
> 



In embracing and developing this Scholastic distinction, between a
certainty based on the knowledge of causes, and a logical necessity
that means that things could not have been otherwise, Leibniz is
therefore arguing that it would have been quite possible for Luther to
preserve his commitment to divine foreknowledge on the one hand,
without playing into the hands of a hard determinist like Hobbes on
the other.



The *Theodicy* also contains discussion of another key Lutheran
issue, namely the relation between faith and reason, which is
specifically raised in a "preliminary dissertation" at the
start of the text. In reviewing the history of debates on this
question, Leibniz admits that Luther "spoke sometimes as if [he]
rejected philosophy and deemed it inimical to faith", but he
then seeks to qualify Luther's position, arguing that by
"philosophy" Luther meant our understanding of nature, or
the philosophy of the schools, so that it is only philosophy in this
narrow sense that cannot comprehend matters of faith. Leibniz likewise
notes Luther's early hostility to Aristotle, but that 



> 
> 
> at last he curbed his vehemence and in the *Apology for the
> Augsburg Confession* allowed [Melanchthon to include] a favourable
> mention of Aristotle and his Ethics. (1710 [1985: SS12, p. 81])
> 
> 
> 
> 



Leibniz also offers a moderate reading of Luther's claims
concerning the differences between revealed truths and the mysteries
of the Gospel on the one hand, and reason on the other (1710 [1985:
SS49, p. 101; SS67, pp. 110-11]). Rather than
attributing this view to Luther, therefore, Leibniz goes on to suggest
that it is later theologians in various traditions, as well as figures
such as Pierre Bayle, who had made the opposition of faith and reason
into a sharp one. Leibniz himself tries to blunt this opposition by
appealing to a distinction between what is *above* reason in
the sense that reason cannot fully comprehend it, and what is
*contrary* to reason, arguing that while matters of faith may
fall into the former category, they cannot fall into the latter, so
that 



> 
> 
> once a dogma has been disputed and refuted by reason, instead of its
> being incomprehensible, one may say that nothing is easier to
> understand, nor more obvious, than its absurdity. (1710 [1985:
> SS23, p. 88]) 
> 
> 
> 



(For further discussion of Leibniz's approach, see Antognazza
2008: Introduction, 2018a; Goldenbaum 1998; Hillman 2013; Schweitz
2011.)



Leibniz's writings on theology thus become focused on
establishing what he seems to have viewed as this moderate Lutheran
position, of showing across a range of issues that what might appear
contrary to reason is often merely above it (see Antognazza
 2018b).[10]
 One central theological issue which Leibniz deals with in this way,
and which as we have seen concerned Luther (see
 Luther entry SS2)
 and became a crucial matter of dispute within the later Reformation,
was the question of the Eucharist. Unsurprisingly, therefore, this
issue becomes central for Leibniz too, both in his ecumenical attempts
to find common ground between the various Christian traditions, and to
show how a reason informed by new developments in philosophical
thinking (most especially his own) can find a way forward in these
apparently intractable debates (see Backus 2016: Chapters 1 and 2;
Mercer 2002: 82-89; Fouke 1992). Nonetheless, despite his
ecumenical endeavours, it has been noted (Adams 1994: 354-5;
Antognazza 2018b: 746-48) that Leibniz's metaphysics works
best as an attempt to make sense of the Eucharist when this is
conceived along the lines of the Lutheran position of real presence
rather than the Catholic conception of
 transubstantiation.[11]
 To this extent his metaphysics more generally may be said to operate
within a broadly Lutheran outlook, though one which (thanks to the
influence of Melanchthon and others) had more room in it than Luther
himself may have liked for Aristotelian ideas of the sort Leibniz
employed to deal with these issues, such as substantial form (see
Mercer 2002:
 101).[12]


## 2. Luther, Kant, and the Post-Kantians



By virtue of their education and background, Luther continues to have
an impact on the thought of significant philosophers after Leibniz,
such as Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) and Christian Wolff
(1679-1754). However, a more interesting point of contact can be
found with the crucial thinker who was not in fact brought up as a
mainstream Lutheran but as a Pietist, namely Immanuel Kant
 (1724-1804).[13]
 This impact continues in the work of the Lutheran idealists who
followed him, namely J. G. Fichte (1762-1814), F. W. J.
Schelling (1775-1854) and G. W. F. Hegel (1770-1831), as
well as in the work of those who responded to Kant in a different way,
namely Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729-1781), J. G. Hamann
(1730-1788), F. H. Jacobi (1743-1819) and J. G. Herder
(1744-1803), in addition to Arthur Schopenhauer
(1788-1860) and thinkers associated with Romanticism such as
Friedrich von Hardenberg (aka Novalis) (1772-1801) and Friedrich
Schlegel (1772-1829), and the convert Jewish writer and essayist
Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). For reasons of space, it will not be
possible to trace all these connections here, so I will focus mainly
on Kant and Hegel, with a brief mention of Fichte and Schelling. (A
more comprehensive study, which contains excerpts from key primary
texts, can be found in Bornkamm 1955; a brief overview can be found in
Assel 2014. For discussions that extend into the twentieth century,
see Hampson 2017, Podmore 2017 and Rota 2017.)



While Kant's upbringing and education came from within Pietism
rather than the orthodox Lutheran
 Church,[14]
 Pietism was still a reform movement within the Lutheran tradition,
and in certain respects saw itself as returning to the views of Luther
himself, and away from what that Church had become (see Lindberg 2005
and Shantz 2013 for further discussion). One issue this re-opened was
the role of reason in relation to faith, and the limitations of reason
and hence academic theology in religious matters, while also taking
seriously the fallenness of human beings, and the need for spiritual
rebirth. As has been emphasised recently (see Kanterian 2017),
Kant's adoption of this so-called "weakness motif"
may be seen as an importantly Lutheran theme in his work, and is
reflected in the limitations he places on human reason and on our
capacities for moral goodness; nonetheless, Kant does not use his
claims concerning the constraints on reason to prioritise theology
over philosophy, or to give revelation or scripture a special status,
while he also departs from Luther over the issue of free will and of
grace.



That the human intellect is limited is a central theme in what Kant
called his "critical philosophy", which precisely aims to
set out those limits. Moreover, as is suggested by his famous claim to
have "found it necessary to deny knowledge in order to make room
for faith" (*Critique of Pure Reason*, Bxxx), there is a
religious impetus behind this project of a sort that Luther might have
recognized, which is also reflected in Kant's hostility to
rationalistic attempts to prove the existence of God. Kant may also be
said to share Luther's Augustinian pessimism regarding human
nature, where he frequently remarks on our evident self-concern, and
in *Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason* (1793)
attributes the propensity to radical evil to all human beings, namely




> 
> 
> the propensity of the power of choice to maxims that subordinate the
> incentives of the moral law to others (not moral ones). (6:30) 
> 
> 
> 



This conception of human moral weakness may also be said to lead Kant
to adopt a Lutheran conception of the law, which only becomes binding
on us and takes the form of duty given our resistance to the good,
whereas for the holy will there is no such necessitation or constraint
(cf. *Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals*,
4:412-4).



However, there are also limits on how far Kant is prepared to follow
these Lutheran themes. Firstly, while he is willing to accept that
theoretical reason may both lead itself astray and find itself
cognitively impoverished in some respects, in a way that leaves room
for faith, he is not willing to allow that this means that theology
can eclipse philosophy, or that revelation or scripture can simply
replace the latter, as he took it that religion must remain compatible
with morality and thus stay within practical reason, out of which a
philosophical theology can arise (see *Religion*, Preface, and
*The Conflict of the Faculties*, Part 1). Secondly, Kant offers
a distinctive conception of the idea of free choice
(*Willkur*) as involving the choice or adoption of our
maxims (see *Metaphysics of Morals* 6: 213-4, 226;
*Religion Within the Limits of Mere Reason* 6:23-4),
while he also argues for our freedom on the basis that "ought
implies can", which puts him at odds with Luther's
position as articulated in *The Bondage of the Will* (see,
e.g., *Religion* 6:45, and White 1990 for more general
discussion). Finally, in *Religion Within the Limits of Mere
Reason*, Kant rejects the Lutheran conception of grace, again on
moral grounds, arguing that we will be discouraged in our moral
efforts unless we believe that we can do something to make ourselves
deserving of grace and hence of divine assistance to be good, while
again Kant appeals to the principle that "ought implies
can" to argue that we must have some capacity in this direction,
however limited (see *Religion* Part 1). Thus, while there are
some affinities between Kant and Luther, there are important
divergences too.



Hegel's reception of Luther contrasts with Kant's in
various ways. First, Kant never offers any significant discussion of
Luther in his writings, and is implicitly critical of him in important
respects, while Hegel is more explicit in his engagement with Luther,
and frequently lavish in his praise of the Reformer--though Hegel
quickly dropped his youthful plans to be a Lutheran pastor, and was
critical of aspects of the Lutheran education he received as a student
at the seminary (or *Stift*) in Tubingen. Secondly,
Kant's relation to Luther is made more complex by his Pietistic
upbringing; but while Hegel's upbringing may also have involved
some Pietistic aspects (see Macgee 2001: 71-72), in later life
Hegel avowed his Lutheran orthodoxy, writing to the Pietistic
theologian Friedrich August Tholuck in 1826: "I am a Lutheran,
and through philosophy have been at once completely confirmed in
Lutheranism" (Hegel 1984: 520). Thirdly, the two philosophers
are almost diametrically opposed in what they accepted and what they
rejected in Luther: while Kant followed Luther's doubts
concerning reason and our capacities for moral goodness, Hegel was
more optimistic on both scores; but while Kant rejected Luther's
scepticism regarding free choice, Hegel used it to draw his
dialectical connection between freedom and necessity. However, both
Kant and Hegel agree in standing against any attempt to prioritise
theology over philosophy on Lutheran grounds. After briefly outlining
the key texts for understanding Hegel's engagement with Luther,
this third point will then be developed further.



The majority of Hegel's references to Luther occur in the
lectures on the philosophy of religion, and on philosophy of history,
and on the history of philosophy, where in the case of the last two,
these are largely in the sections on the Reformation more generally.
The context therefore means that in these explicit discussions, Hegel
is considering Luther's place in subsequent historical developments. In
general, Hegel presents Luther as ushering in a new era of internality
and individuality, as religion becomes less a matter of unthinkingly
following established authorities and rituals that are external and
alien, and more a matter of grasping the truth for oneself and feeling
at one with it, thus ushering in a distinctive form of
"Christian freedom": 



> 
> 
> Subjective spirit comes to itself through this self-negation because
> it is absolutely at home with itself [*bei sich*]. Thus
> subjective spirit gains freedom in the truth, negates its
> particularity and comes to itself in its truth. In this way Christian
> freedom is actualized. (1822-23 [Hegel 2011: 505]) 
> 
> 
> 



And in his "Address on the Tercentenary of the Submission of the
Augsburg Confession" (1830), Hegel even goes so far as to
present his own work as a "second reformation": while
Luther was the "*trumpet* which now proclaimed the
wondrous sound of Christian freedom", and that "the things
which our Luther set in motion were truly new", nonetheless
"if religion is reformed, the political, legal, and ethical
system [*ratio civitatis et legum morumque*] should also be
reformed" (Hegel 1830 [1999: 189])--which thus connects
Luther's religious project to Hegel's political one, as
Hegel also did in the Preface to the *Philosophy of
 Right*.[15]
 Heine, in his account of the development of German philosophy written
for a French audience in 1834 and published in book form a year later
(Heine 1835 [2007]), tells a similar story, which begins with Luther
and culminates in Hegel--indeed, its original title was *De
L'Allemagne depuis Luther*. Heine's work also reflects
the role that Hegel gave Luther, as a quintessentially
"German" figure, which was to become a common trope in his
subsequent
 reception.[16]



As well as this focus on religious and political freedoms for the
individual, the emphasis on the relation between Lutheranism and
freedom in Hegel may be seen to have four more fundamental aspects,
which reveal Luther's influence on Hegel's conception of
freedom, which is a central theme in the latter's philosophy.
First, as we have seen Hegel took Christian freedom to involve finding
oneself in the other, which may reflect Luther's turn from God
as an alien and forbidding judge, to God as forgiving and loving, in
which a freedom as reconciliation can be achieved--albeit a unity
that must be achieved through a prior sense of alienation.
 [17]
 In Luther this alienation involves an element of hiddenness which is
not so evident in Hegel. Nonetheless, It could be added that just as
Luther's conception of divine hiddenness can involve the idea
that God's nature is concealed under its contrary
(*abscondita sub contrario*) (such as his mercy under his
wrath, his strength under his weakness and suffering in Jesus
 Christ),[18]
 so there is a further connection here to Hegel's conception of
the dialectic, where what appears one way to the understanding can be
seen to be otherwise by reason, such as necessity really being
freedom, in a way that the former will find incomprehensible.
Moreover, Hegel's conception of freedom and self-knowledge as
requiring recognition by the other may be said to reflect
Luther's conception of our relational dependence on
 God.[19]
 Second, Hegel takes up the idea that this reconciliation with the
other requires a kind of self-surrender, where he writes that: 



> 
> 
> Subjective certainty, i.e. the subject's knowledge of the true,
> which should be for it an objective truth, subsisting in and for
> itself, only becomes authentic when, in relation to this content,
> particular subjectivity is surrendered; and this happens only by
> making the objective truth one's own truth. (1822-23
> [Hegel 2011: 505]) 
> 
> 
> 



As Stephen Houlgate has
 noted,[20]
 this emphasis on the passivity is an important feature of
Hegel's own method of inquiry, for example where Hegel remarks
that 



> 
> 
> [p]hilosophical thinking proceeds analytically in that it simply takes
> up its object, the Idea, and lets it go its own way, while it simply
> watches the movement and development of it, so to speak. To this
> extent, philosophising is wholly passive. (*Encyclopaedia
> Logic* SS238 Addition)
> 
> 
> 



Third, Hegel takes up the Lutheran (and Pauline) view concerning the
relation between the Christian and the law, according to which the Christian should not require constraint by law, as



> 
> 
> true freedom...is a freedom to do good with pleasure and to live
> well without compulsion of the law. (*Preface to St Paul's
> Epistle to the Romans*, WA DB 7:18-19/LW 35:376) 
> 
> 
> 



It could be
argued that this view is reflected in Hegel's preference for
love over law, which is a particular feature of his early
 writings.[21]
 Finally, in *The Bondage of the Will*, Luther questions a
conception of freedom as free choice (see
 Luther entry SS4),
 arguing instead that the presence of this choice involves a lack of
freedom as the agent is no longer guided by the good; this view may
also be said to be echoed in Hegel's own critique of free choice
(*Willkur*), which underpins his claim that there is a way
in which true freedom and necessity can be reconciled, as the truly
free agent only sees one option available to them, namely what is
required by the good. In these respects, therefore, it can be argued
that there is a fundamentally Lutheran cast to this fundamental aspect
of Hegel's thought. However, Hegel surely departs from Luther in
championing the role of reason in his speculative philosophy (albeit
reason of a distinctive kind, which goes beyond the understanding),
which is able to "sublate" Christianity within
it--but this very sublation means that his philosophy takes up
structures of theological thinking, some of which are also Lutheran,
so that in turn Hegel remains an important influence within Lutheran
 theology.[22]



There are interesting points of similarity and difference between
Hegel's response to Luther, and that of the other post-Kantian
German idealists such as Fichte and Schelling. Like Hegel, Fichte
treats Luther as a significant national figure, and associates him
with freedom, giving him prominence in his *Addresses to the German
Nation* which were written in 1808 as a rallying call in the wake
of Napoleonic invasion. Both also praise Luther's contribution
to the German language through his translations of the Bible, though
Fichte is critical of the doctrine of *sola scriptura*, which
was to put too much value on "the printed
 letter".[23]
 Moreover, if Luther can be said to have an influence of Hegel's
conception of recognition (see above), the same may be said of
Fichte's account of recognition which foreshadowed
Hegel's, though in neither case is this link made explicit.
Schelling also gives Luther's account of freedom a philosophical
role, appealing to Luther's *Bondage of the Will* in his
*Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human
Freedom* (1809), to draw a distinction between compulsion and
necessity, and more broadly arguing that 



> 
> 
> religiosity does not permit any choice between opposites, and
> *aequilibrium arbitrii* (the plague of all morality), but
> rather only the highest resoluteness in favour of what is right
> without any choice. (1809 [2006: 57]) 
> 
> 
> 



Moreover, in appealing in his later work to the significance of
revelation, it has been argued that Schelling is more consistently
Lutheran than Hegel, in thereby placing limits to the latter's
rationalism (see Wirth 2017).


## 3. Luther, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche



Two other significant nineteenth century philosophers who engaged with
Luther are Soren Kierkegaard (1813-55) and Friedrich
Nietzsche (1844-1900). For Kierkegaard, this engagement came in
the context of his attempts to renew the nature of Christian faith,
while for Nietzsche it came from someone standing outside that
faith.



Kierkegaard's relation to Luther and Lutheranism is complex, and
remains a matter of some
 controversy.[24]
 On balance, though, it seems that while Kierkegaard was clearly a
critic of the established Danish Lutheran Church, he was not so
critical of Luther himself, and partly returned to him in order to
challenge his Lutheran contemporaries, even suggesting that he might
turn out to be Luther's "true
 successor".[25]
 At the same time, he held that some of Luther's original
doctrines were partly responsible for the contemporary malaise, and so
must be re-thought in the context of new challenges to genuine
Christian life and spirituality as conceived by Kierkegaard, thereby
applying "a corrective to Luther's own corrective",
as Kim and Rasmussen nicely put it (2009: 197). His attitude is
therefore well-summarized in his remark: 



> 
> 
> I have wanted to prevent people in Christendom from existentially
> taking in vain Luther and the significance of Luther's life.
> (1850 [1998:
>  17])[26]
> 
> 
> 
> 



Thus while by his own admission Kierkegaard was not a systematic
reader of
 Luther,[27]
 his engagement with his writings nonetheless relates to deep themes
in Kierkegaard's own thinking, so that Luther provides an
important context for his thought.



One such issue concerned the question of justification, and the
central Lutheran view that this comes through unmerited grace as
forgiveness rather than through works. While expressing sympathy with
Luther's central claim, Kierkegaard was fearful that in his
contemporary world, it had become an excuse for an ethical and
spiritual indolence, so that people now "applied *grace*
in such a way that they freed themselves from works"
(Kierkegaard 1851 [1990a: 17]). Relatedly, Kierkegaard acknowledged
and respected the spiritual seriousness of the anxieties
(*Anfechtungen*) and sense of sin which had led Luther himself
to adopt this position (see Podmore 2006 and 2013); but this was a
seriousness which Kierkegaard's contemporaries had lost, so that
for them the turn to grace becomes a superficial optimism rather than
a renewal of hope in the face of anxiety and despair. Moreover, like
Luther, Kierkegaard closely connected our relation to God in faith
with our relation to the neighbour, so that it is through the former
that the latter as works of love are made
 possible.[28]
 In this way, Kierkegaard could claim to be correcting an exaggeration
of Luther's position, which tried to do away with works
altogether--much as Luther himself had rejected this exaggeration
in his *Treatise on Good Works*. In re-affirming the importance
of works, Kierkegaard gave a greater role to the *imitatio
Christi* tradition, again arguing that while Luther had been
rightly critical of this idea in his own context as feeding works
righteousness and a kind of pseudo-piety, it nonetheless needs
reviving in Kierkegaard's context, to provide a challenge to the
complacent self-conception of his contemporaries by raising Christ up
as an ideal, and to re-focus our attention on him as a radical figure
(Kierkegaard 1876 [1990: 192-209]).



However, another obstacle to a proper life of faith for Kierkegaard
was the kind of worldliness to be found in his contemporaries, for
which he claimed that Luther needed to take a more direct
responsibility, insofar as he had allowed the Reformation to become a
political programme (see Kierkegaard KJP: 3, frag. 2469 [p. 66,
1848]), and had also presented an account of social orders as a model
of Christian life, which had been taken up by Hegelians and others as
an ethic of vocation. For Kierkegaard, this had led to a relation
between the religious on the one hand and the ethical and social on
the other that tended to reduce the former to the latter, and which he
sought to challenge in his own more radical conception of their
relation, which could include the Christian having to live at odds
with any social order, and suffering exclusion from it as a
result--or at the very least, active faith may require feeling
distanced from the world, while living within it. Again, while
Kierkegaard acknowledges that Luther may have intended something
 similar,[29]
 the result of his teachings had led people in a different direction;
as Slok puts it: 



> 
> 
> Life, serving one's neighbour through one's calling, had
> been transformed into one of bourgeois complacency in which relative
> duties and relative rights had obliterated the awareness of an
> unconditional obligation upon man. (Slok 1962: 100) 
> 
> 
> 



In this context, while recognizing that it could not be revived and
critical of it in some
 respects,[30]
 Kierkegaard expresses some preference for the monastic life over that
of the married life of the Lutheran pastor, and the worldliness that
had come to
 involve.[31]



A final theme to note concerns the relation between reason and faith,
which also forms part of Kierkegaard's critical engagement with
Hegelianism. As discussed above, Hegel may be seen to have taken
Lutheranism in a more rationalistic and philosophical direction, to
which Kierkegaard's emphasis on the "paradox" of the
incarnation, which underlies Christian faith, as well as his emphasis
on divine hiddenness, may be seen as a corrective. For Kierkegaard,
this was essential to properly appreciate Luther's theology of
the cross, which because it is alien to rational comprehension, makes
religious commitment a matter of individual faith and existential
risk, as typified in the story of Abraham to which he and Luther both
 refer[32]--though
 in his own way, Kierkegaard like Leibniz suggests that while this
puts faith above reason, it does not put it contrary to it and so
render it irrational in that
 sense.[33]



While Kierkegaard's criticisms of Luther come from within the
Christian tradition, those of Nietzsche come from a thinker who put
himself outside
 it.[34]
 However, it took some time for this critique of Luther to develop,
and in his earlier period until 1876 Nietzsche's writings are
highly favourable towards Luther himself and the Reformation
generally; but from this point on, his view of both becomes
increasingly negative and hostile (see Bluhm 1943, 1950, 1953 for a
detailed account of this trajectory; this is also discussed in Large
2003). For Nietzsche, Luther came to represent the paradigm of the
non-aristocratic man, who rather than accepting and overcoming
himself, instead despised himself and tried to flee from himself by
turning to God. Thus, while Nietzsche may have seen in Luther a
prefiguring of his own attempts to get beyond a morality of law in the
name of
 freedom,[35]
 ultimately he came to view this liberating impetus as something
Luther himself betrayed. More positively, however, while no direct
references to Luther are made, and while any such influence would be
mediated by other figures such as Schopenhauer, it is arguable that
some elements in Nietzsche's rejection of the idea of the free
will might be found in Luther, not with respect to Nietzsche's
causal determinism, but at the level of his doubts concerning the
power of free choice to occupy a neutral position between the agent
and their actions--for example, in Nietzsche's well known
criticism of "popular morality" which 



> 
> 
> separates strength from the manifestation of strength, as though there
> were an indifferent substratum behind the strong which had the
> *freedom* to manifest strength or not. (1887: First Essay,
> SS13) 
> 
> 
> 



In a somewhat similar way (see
 Luther entry SS4),
 Luther is critical of Erasmus's conception of the idea that
there is any "pure will" (*purum velle*) standing
above desire (*studium*) or striving (*conatus*) which can thus decide
whether to go one way or another (cf. WA 18:669/LW
33:114-5).


## 4. Luther, Feuerbach, and Marxism



In the nineteenth century, Luther also plays a prominent role in the
thought of the key post-Hegelian thinker Ludwig Feuerbach
(1804-1872), and to a lesser degree in that of Karl Marx
(1818-1883) and Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), as well as
in later thinkers in the twentieth century Marxist tradition such as
Ernst Bloch (1885-1977), and Herbert Marcuse
 (1898-1979).[36]



Feuerbach's primary engagement with Luther comes in the second
edition of his *The Essence of Christianity* (1843), and in
*The Essence of Faith According to Luther* (1844). Among his
motivations was Feuerbach's desire in the face of Protestant
critics to establish that the view of religion proposed in the first
edition of *The Essence of Christianity* applied not only to
the Catholic faith (which such critics were happy to concede), but
also to Protestantism--and of course there could be no better way
for Feuerbach to establish this than to demonstrate that Luther
himself could be encompassed within Feuerbach's analysis, which
is what he therefore proposed in these works (see Glasse 1972 and Erdozain 2016: 223-45 for
further discussion). Put briefly, Feuerbach's central thesis was
that religious beliefs are nothing more than the expressions of human
desires, and God is a being on whom our aspirations for ourselves are
projected, so that in worshipping God we are worshipping ourselves. As
Feuerbach allows at the outset of *The Essence of Faith*, this
may seem not to apply to Luther's conception, insofar as Luther
insists on the fundamental discontinuity between God and human beings,
placing all value in the former and none in the latter. On the
surface, therefore, 



> 
> 
> Luther's doctrine is divine but inhuman, indeed barbaric--a
> hymn to God, but a lampoon on man. (Feuerbach 1844 [1967: 41]) 
> 
> 
> 



In response, however, Feuerbach argues that is a superficial reading,
as the role of God is to restore to us what we have lost: "Man
in himself is and can do nothing, but in God (that is through faith)
he is and can do everything" (1844 [1967: 46]). This can be
seen, Feuerbach argues, in the way that Luther (in his opposition to
Catholicism) emphasises the way in which he takes Christ's
suffering to be *for us*, so that what appeared to be a
divergence becomes a radical convergence. Feuerbach's
appropriation of Luther (which of course remains controversial) is
therefore summarized when he writes: 



> 
> 
> "If God sat in heaven for Himself alone", says Luther,
> "like a block, He would not be God" 
> 
> 
> 



from which Feuerbach takes Luther to be agreeing with him, that
"God is a word the sole meaning of which is
'man'" (1844 [1967: 50]), and thus to be
foreshadowing Feuerbach's own anthropological turn.



Turning now to Marx, Engels and others in the broadly Marxist
tradition, their central concern was a focus on Luther's
historical impact as a revolutionary and social reformer, which seemed
to be compromised by Luther's role in the Peasants'
Revolt (see sections 1 and 5 of the entry on 
 Luther). In his study of the Revolt, Engels in particular drew
parallels with the situation leading up to the German revolutions of
1848-49, casting Luther as a "middle-class" reformer
unable to sustain the radicalism he had unleashed, which Engels (and
later Bloch) took to be better represented in "plebeian
revolutionary" Thomas Muntzer (c. 1489-1525), who
Luther had declared to be an instrument of Satan, and who was tortured
and executed after the battle of Frankenhausen in 1525. A similar
suspicion of Luther can also be found in Marcuse, in an essay from
1936 written after Marcuse's exile from Germany to the United
States, and so this time against the background of the growing
authoritarianism of Nazism (which itself often glorified Luther).
Without explicitly making the connection, in this context Marcuse
accuses Luther of relegating Christian freedom to the inner
 sphere,[37]
 leaving the outer world of politics and society as a realm of
unfreedom to which the Christian must submit, in deference to worldly
authorities which Luther argued could not be challenged--a
political quietism which in Marcuse's context was of course
particularly troubling, and which after the war became a source for
much criticism (and self-criticism) directed towards the Lutheran
Church.


## 5. Luther, Heidegger, and Logstrup



While the other major twentieth century figures to engage with Luther
were primarily theologians (such as Rudolf Bultmann (1884-1976),
Karl Barth (1886-1968), Paul Tillich (1886-1965) and
Friedrich Gogarten (1887-1967)), one significant philosopher in
this period to often be associated with Luther is Martin Heidegger
(1889-1976). Raised originally as a Catholic and aspiring
initially to be a Catholic philosopher, after the First World War
Heidegger shifted his allegiances and began to engage seriously with
Luther's works, as well as with Augustine, Schleiermacher, and
Kierkegaard, though ultimately he was to break with theism and
Christianity altogether. In this period in the 1920s, Heidegger took
up Luther's distinction between the "theology of
glory" and the "theology of the cross", and argued
that original or "primordial" Christianity
(*Urchristentum*) had been distorted into the former by an
"ontotheology" wrongly influenced by the scholastic
misappropriation of Aristotle; this now needed to be overturned in a
way that was yet more radical than Luther himself, to avoid what
Heidegger saw as the "Protestant scholasticism" of
Luther's later period and that of his followers. It can also be
said that what he perceived as Luther's struggle provided the
inspiration for Heidegger's own attempts to overturn the
metaphysical tradition within philosophy. However, with the
publication of *Being and Time* in 1927, this connection to
Luther becomes obscured in the wake of other allegiances, and Luther
is hardly mentioned in this text, though it can still be argued that
certain Lutheran assumptions remain throughout this and later
works--such that one commentator has called *Being and
Time* a "Lutheran phenomenology of Dasein" (McGrath
2006:
 12).[38]



Luther also plays a significant role in the thought of the Danish
philosopher and theologian K. E. Logstrup (1905-1981),
who interacted with Heidegger and Bultmann both before and after the
Second World War, as well as with contemporary Kierkegaardians in
Denmark. Logstrup used Luther to develop his own distinctive
natural law position in ethics, while also incorporating in his ethics
the fundamental Lutheran view that goodness is not achievable through
our own efforts; but for Logstrup, this goodness is brought
about through the encounter with another person that is made possible
through life itself, rather than divine grace, thereby secularizing
this central aspect of the Lutheran position. At the same time, he
allows that the very fact that life makes this possible may suggest
that it is created. Logstrup argued, moreover, that forgiveness
must remain a theological matter, as our sinfulness means that human
beings are in no position to forgive each other with any kind of
authority, in this way retaining an important element of
Luther's theology of the cross.


## 6. Luther and "Modernity"



Leaving aside Luther's influence on individual philosophers,
there has also been some philosophical interest in considering his
wider cultural and historical impact on "modernity", and
his role in shaping the modern world as we now understand
it.[39] Of
course, this is a highly complex matter (for a helpful overview, see
Zachhuber 2017), but broadly five approaches have been adopted. On
some accounts (such as Hegel's outlined above, as well as
Heine's) Luther's impact is seen as both decisive and
positive, alongside a largely positive conception of modernity itself,
where here the emphasis might lie on his resistance to religious
authority, and his prioritising of the conscience of the individual.
On other accounts, this impact is accepted, but seen instead as an
object of criticism, as the relevant features of modernity are
deplored, so that for example Luther is blamed for the rise of modern
individualism, of voluntarism, and of the secularism that is said to
go along with both (see for example Maritain 1925). A third approach
(as we also saw above in relation to the Marxist tradition and to
Marcuse, for example) may also blame Luther for unequivocally
problematic aspects of modernity, such as authoritarianism and
anti-Semitism. A fourth approach is to see Luther as in fact standing
in contrast to certain key positive features of modern thought, such
as rationalism, freedom, and religious tolerance; for example, the
juxtaposition between his views and those of Erasmus's humanism
is sometimes portrayed in this light (see for example Gillespie 2008;
Massing 2018). And of course, if one adopts certain views of the
development of Luther's thought, one may attribute different
influences as coming from different phases, and treat some as more
positive than others (by distinguishing, for example, between a
"radical" earlier Luther and a more
"conservative" later Luther), so that Luther's
impact may be understood as taking more than one (and even
contradictory) form (see for example Erdozain 2016). A final approach
is to criticise all attempts to link Luther too closely with such
debates concerning "the modern", arguing that this is
historically anachronistic, as he is more essentially a medieval
figure, so that to focus myopically on his impact on modernity will be
to distort our understanding of Luther himself, and also perhaps of
his distinctiveness and originality, while also neglecting the way
Luther's own thinking changed over time (for a recent example of
this approach, see Helmer 2019). This is not the occasion to
adjudicate such debates, but it is hoped that the account of Luther
given previously will make it possible to give proper consideration to
some of the issues they raise. For in discussing how far Luther shaped
the modern world, some consideration of how far he shaped philosophy
surely deserves a place.