Читать книгу Martin Luther's Two Ways of Viewing Life and the Educational Foundation of a Lutheran Ethos - Leonard S. Smith - Страница 5

This essay was originally written as a separate chapter for a larger historical inquiry called Religion and the Rise of History: Martin Luther and the Cultural Revolution in Germany, 1760–1810 (Eugene, OR: Cascade Books, 2009). Although the present essay is a complete story in itself, as the title indicates, the reader will note that from the beginning the question of the relationship between religion and the rise of history has been of central importance for both inquiries. One of the reasons that this inquiry is published here as a separate story is because of the nature of the audience for which both inquiries were written.

Like the original study, this essay is written primarily for a general audience—students, teachers, professors, pastors, priests, and anyone interested in Western intellectual history, religion, and historical thought and/or in the Lutheran tradition from the time of Martin Luther (1483–1546) and Philip Melanchthon (1497–1560). Unlike the larger study, however, this study focuses just on these two scholars, one religious tradition, and one time period. Therefore it can more easily be used by students, teachers, professors, religious leaders, and others as a text or supplemental reading for a class, seminar, or group discussion.

Like the original historical inquiry, this essay is based on two main personal experiences from the early 1970s. The first personal experience took place when I was reading a passage from a young Leopold von Ranke (1795–1886) who was answering (in 1828) a critic of his first work, his epoch-making Histories of the Latin and Germanic Nations from 1494 to 1514 (1824). “This passage,” Ranke said, “is part of the attempt I have made to present the general directly through the particular without long digression. Here I have sought to approach no J. Müller or no ancient writer but the appearance itself, just as it emerges, only externally particularity, internally—and so I understand Leibnitz—a generality, significance, spirit . . . In and with the event I have sought to portray its course and spirit, and I have strained to ascertain its characteristic traits.”1

When I first read this passage in 1971, the reference to the general and the particular, generality and particularity, external and internal, appearance and spirit, and especially the way he used the prepositions in and with sounded very Lutheran to me. Was it possible, I asked myself, that the connected prepositions (especially for Lutherans)—“in, with, and under”—could be a key to understanding not only Ranke’s way of writing history but also the Lutheran tradition as a whole? Could Ranke’s way of writing history be called not only an at-the-same-time way of viewing and writing history but also an in-with-and-under way? Did not Ranke always try to present the general or the universal in, with, under, and through the particular? But why did Ranke refer to Leibniz in this passage?

The answer to the latter question soon came to me (1972) when a colleague was introducing Leibniz and the Monadology to a select group of first-year college students in a team-taught, interdisciplinary (history, literature, philosophy, and religion) honors course called “Humanities Tutorial.” As he helped those young minds picture those unique soul-like substances called monads, each programmed to do its thing in and through the composite body that it directed and within an organic, pluralistic, harmonius, and God-given universe that was the best of all possible worlds, the connection suddenly became clear!

At that moment I became quite excited, for now—for the first time—I could see the origins of the German idealist tradition and the main link between Luther and Melanchthon, on the one hand, and Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1783), Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), Ranke, and the German idealist tradition through Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923) and Friedrich Meinecke (1862–1954) on the other. Now I could see how, at least is some respects, the Lutheran religious tradition was conducive to the rise of German “historicism” and to a distinctly modern type of Western historiography. Thus this passage from the young Ranke and these two experiences were the starting point of this decades-long historical inquiry.

The word “Historismus,” usually translated as “historicism,” became a word of central importance in Western historical thought primarily through the work of three great scholars at the University of Berlin during and after World War I: Ernst Troeltsch, Friedrich Meinecke, and Otto Hintze (1861–1940). Although each of these great scholars defined historicism in a different way, they agreed (1) that this new historical consciousness or this “sense of the basic historizing of all our thought about man, his culture, and his values”2 was one of the most important intellectual changes in Western history, (2) that it arose first in Germany during the last decades of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, (3) that it reached a high point in the work of Leopold von Ranke, and (4) that it was based on the concepts of individuality (Individualität) and development (Entwicklung).

In the larger work Religion and the Rise of History, I raised two questions that cannot be dealt with here: (1) Is the period term—“the Cultural Revolution in Germany, 1760–1810”—a useful designation for capturing and teaching the formative stage in the development of modern German education, thought, and culture? (2) Since the rise of historicism and the rise of a distinctly modern type of Western historiography were important aspects of this Cultural Revolution, and since they arose first in Protestant Germany, was the Lutheran religious tradition especially conducive for the rise of these aspects of this revolution and of modern life?

The two questions that were dealt with in chapter two of this larger work, however, are the basic ones behind this essay: (1) Did Martin Luther have a second basic way of thinking and viewing life in addition to his well-known paradoxical, simul, or “at-the-same-time” way? (2) If so, how have these two ways shaped a distinctively Lutheran ethos and sense of calling?

Like each of the chapters in the original work, this essay begins with an introductory statement of the problems behind the inquiry. Here the reader will find not only the basic questions that I am trying to answer, but also some background material and literature so that he or she does not have to be an expert in any of these subjects or refer to other sources. To aid the reader, here and throughout this essay, I have made extensive use of quotations from primary works, as well as helpful secondary studies, so that he or she can be directly engaged with the thought not only of Martin Luther but also with specialists on Luther and the Protestant Reformation in Germany whose research, knowledge, and insights are particularly helpful.

Here I also want to acknowledge my debt and gratitude to those kind souls who read all or parts of my larger work and who offered helpful corrections, improvements, and suggestions: Luther S. Luedtke, Walter K. Stuart, Carlyle A. Smith, Richard Cole, Dale A. Johnson, Peter Hanns Reill, Eric W. Gritsch, Heiko A. Oberman, Richard W. Solberg, Robert Guy Erwin, James J. Sheehan, and Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Their kindness, however, should not be construed to mean agreement either in general or in many particulars.

I also want to express gratitude to my father, the Rev. A. Leonard Smith (1894–1960). I am indebted to him not only for the traditional kind of religious education that I received and that is portrayed in this essay, but also because he—more than anyone else I have known—personified the Lutheran idea of a “calling.”

Most of all, however, I want to thank my wife Sharon Faye Ronning Smith not only for reading and correcting the various versions of this and many other manuscripts, but also for all the advice, helpful criticisms, and unflagging support that she has provided for all of my academic endeavors.

1. Ranke, “Erwiderung auf Heinrich Leo’s Angriff,” 664–65.

2. Troeltsch, Der Historismus und seine Probleme, 102.