Left: Martin Luther in 1532 portrait; right: G.K. Chesterton in his study, date unknown (Wikipedia) Left: Martin Luther in 1532 portrait; right: G.K. Chesterton in his study, date unknown (Wikipedia)
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Further thoughts on Luther, the Reformation—and G. K. Chesterton – Catholic World Report
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Left: Martin Luther in 1532 portrait; right: G.K. Chesterton in his study, date unknown (Wikipedia)
Left: Martin Luther in 1532 portrait; right: G.K. Chesterton in his study, date unknown (Wikipedia)
So, I took some heat from my previous article on the Reformation—“The Bible, the Reformation, and G.K. Chesterton”—because I implied that the Reformation was started by Protestants. Apparently I did not spend enough time attacking the Catholic Church, which, as everyone knows, was responsible for the creation of Martin Luther and company.
But since we are still in the midst of our year long observance of Luther’s Halloween treat at the door of the Wittenburg Cathedral and all that followed, we can certainly afford to draw out this discussion a bit longer.
So let’s make it clear. There was plenty of corruption in the Catholic Church five hundred years ago. Bishops and Abbots openly kept money and mistresses and used their ecclesiastical privilege to gain political power. The sales of indulgences were going unchecked and did untold damage not only to true piety but to the correct understanding of Purgatory and prayers for the dead. It was a far-reaching scandal throughout Christendom.
But it was not just Martin Luther who spoke out against it. St. Catherine of Siena and St. Bridget of Sweden and others fearlessly and sometimes very effectively confronted the hierarchy. And it wasn’t as if this had not happened before. Three and half centuries earlier a little friar named Francis of Assisi turned a worldly Church around simply by choosing to live out his own life according to what Jesus preached in the Gospels. The result? Genuine Reform.
Martin Luther had the opportunity to become one of the greatest saints in the history of the Church. But he did not believe he was reforming a Church simply because it needed some house cleaning. He said explicitly that one should not condemn a doctrine on the basis that the man who holds it lives a sinful life. On the contrary, “The Holy Spirit… is patient with the weak in faith, as is taught in Romans 14:15… I would have very little against the Papists if they taught true doctrine. Their evil life would do no great harm.”
There you have it from the Reformer’s mouth. He did not part ways with the Catholic Church because of ne’er-do-well priests and bishops. He thought and taught that Catholic doctrine was false. He rejected the Magisterium, the teaching authority of the Church.
If the bishops had rent their robes and donned sackcloth and ashes, it might have done great good for the Church and the world, but there is no evidence it would have changed Luther’s mind, because what was in his mind was a new theology.
Hypocrites who have turned away potential followers of Christ throughout the history of the Church. Still happens. But that argument only goes so far. If the unbeliever wants to blame corrupt bishops for his own doubts about the truth of the Catholic faith, why is he not drawn back to the Church by the witness of the saints? Why isn’t St. Francis of Assisi or St. Catherine of Siena, or more recently, St. Teresa of Calcutta, enough to make him overcome his misgivings about the Church? Saints inspire holiness because they are holy. Rebels inspire rebellion. Even against themselves. Sainthood is always a better option than breaking away from the Church founded by Jesus Christ and set into motion by his chosen Apostles. It was that Church that built Christendom.
But as one observer has pointed out, what Martin Luther’s rebellion was not against a corrupt Pope, it was against a quiet Dominican friar who had been dead for over 200 years. St. Thomas Aquinas.
G.K. Chesterton says, “It was the very life of the Thomist teaching that Reason can be trusted: it was the very life of Lutheran teaching that Reason is utterly untrustworthy.”
St. Augustine, a true saint and a giant among converts, was limited in one respect. The only philosophy he knew was that of Plato. St. Thomas Aquinas introduced Aristotle into Christian philosophy, and the Augustinian Platonists never really accepted it. They had a different approach to objective reality. One of those Augustinians was a monk named Martin Luther. Chesterton argues that the Reformation was really the revenge of the Platonists. You could say it started with a difference in emphasis, you could say it started as a quarrel among monks, but Luther’s emphasis on emotion rather than reason, on subjective truth rather than objective truth, and most unfortunately, on Determinism rather than Free Will, opened the door for an attack not just on Scholasticism but on all philosophy.
Lutheranism, says Chesterton, “had one theory that was the destruction of all theories; in fact it had its own theology which was itself the death of theology. Man could say nothing to God, nothing from God, nothing about God, except an almost inarticulate cry for mercy and for the supernatural help of
Christ, in a world where all natural things were useless. Reason was useless. Will was useless. Man could not move himself an inch any more than a stone. Man could not trust what was in his head any more than a turnip. Nothing remained in earth or heaven, but the name of Christ lifted in that lonely imprecation; awful as the cry of a beast in pain.”
St. Thomas and Luther are “the hinges of history,” and Luther managed to loom large enough to block out the huge figure of Aquinas. “Luther did begin the modern mood of depending on things not merely intellectual.” He was a forceful personality. He was a bully. He claimed Scripture as his authority and then altered Scripture itself, adding a word here and there in his own translation to accommodate his own theology. When confronted with the act,”he was content to shout back at all hecklers: ‘Tell them that Dr. Martin Luther will have it so!’ That is what we now call Personality… He destroyed Reason; and substituted Suggestion.”
Luther and every other Reformer cannot blame the Church for the consequences of their own actions. It is typical to talk about the corruption of certain bishops in Germany, but no one seems to want to discuss the actual heresy of Martin Luther and all that happened in its wake, from the splintering of Christianity into thousands of different denominations to the disintegration of philosophy into one detached and narrow and bizarre speculation after another because we lost the plain common sense, the reason and reality that was once so clearly articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas.�
