Brad: Here is how I decided to spend my evening ... composing an answer to your question that got out of hand (my reply, not your question). > I don't know much about Luther or Calvin, but am I > wrong to think they were anti-intellectuals?
Oh yes, quite wrong in any ordinary sense of the term. After all, Luther has a real PhD, is a Professor at the new non-Catholic Univerity at Wittenberg, and the first translator of the Bible into German. He taught Biblical hermeneutics for ages and published alot of research. If ever a theology professor was an intellectual - Hans Kung? - Dr Luther is one. Indeed, he is a *public intellectual* - just like Noam Chomsky! Now, he is also aggressively and resolutely NOT a "humanist" - not at all "liberal" like Erasmus - and this might disqualify him in some eyes. But surely you don't have to be a tolerant liberal to be an intellectual. Luther is a tough-as-nails absolutist about his understanding of the human condition. I can't resist - esp. since I have it handy - passing along a paragraph from Luther's diatribe against Erasmus's views of human freedom and church politics. Stuff like this would surely boost the sales of the New York Review any day. "In a word, what you [Erasmus] say comes to this: that you do not think it matters a scrap what anyone believes anywhere, so long as the world is at peace... You would encourage [us] to treat Christian doctrines as no better than the views of human philosophers -- about which, of course, it is stupid to wrangle and fight and assert, since nothing results but bad feeling and breaches of outward peace... But, as I said, let the words go; for the moment, I acquit your heart; but you must write no more in this strain. Fear the Spirit of God who searches the reins and heart and is not deceived by stupid speeches... You may applaud your Sceptics and Academics -- till Christ calls you too! The Holy Ghost is no Sceptic, and the things He has written in our heart are not doubts or opinions, but assertions -- surer and more certain than sense or life itself." [from *Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings* (John Dillenberger, ed.) (N.Y.: Doubleday/Anchor, 1961)] CALVIN is more plainly a mainstream intellectual: having received a very humanist education at U-Paris, he did a PhD in Law at Orleans and at the same time began his career as the architect of a *reformed* church. His *Institutes of the Christian Religion* still is counted as one of the great scholarly expositions of a theological institution. Calvin, too, chose to be a public intellectual, putting Scripture into French (and setting a standard for the modern language, just as Luther had done for German), and even more so by putting his conclusions into practice, turning the City of Geneva into a theological state - a "presbyterian Sparta" one commentator has called it. Needless to say, Calvin was no humanist either. [see Calvin entry in the *Catholic Encyclopedia*: <http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03195b.htm>] Since you mention it, it is relevant to observe that one of the major reasons Galileo gets into trouble with his church is his crypto-Protestantism. For example, he very much annoys the Catholic authorities with his polemically charged insistence that knowledge of nature - natural philosophy or science - has got *nothing* to do with salvation, that science and religion are two completely separate spheres (with science entirely in charge of nature). Here - without ever exactly saying so - Galileo is siding with Luther against the Scholastic philosophers and theologians and their favourite philosopher by way of Aquinas, Aristotle. In his most charged anti-scholastic diatribes, Galileo cannot hold a candle to Luther who described Aristotle as that "damnable, arrogant, blind, defunct pagan rascal" whose teachings have been introduced into the universities "by the Evil One ... on account of our sins." Since the Scholastics are "natural theologians" who believe that the order of nature reveals the nature of 'man' and God (the "Book of Nature"), Galileo's dismissal of all this superstitious nonsense - they believe this stuff because of their child-like fear of death, he says - very much gets up their nose. While Galileo is busy demonstrating that the scripture teaches how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go, Cardinal Bellarmine is working on his little tract, *The Mind's Ascent to God Up the Ladder of Created Beings*. Galileo is blindly striding across an intellectual minefield. ... there ... aren't you glad you asked??? best wishes, eh? Stephen Straker Vancouver, B.C. _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://scribe.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
