Table Of ContentA Humanist in Reformation Politics
Early Modern Natural Law
STUDIES & SOURCES
Series Editors
Frank Grunert (Martin- Luther- Universität Halle- Wittenberg)
Knud Haakonssen (University of St Andrews and Universität Erfurt)
Diethelm Klippel (Universität Bayreuth)
Board of Advisors
Maria Rosa Antognazza (King’s College London)
John Cairns (University of Edinburgh)
Thomas Duve (Max- Planck- Institut für Europäische
Rechtsgeschichte, Frankfurt am Main)
Ian Hunter (University of Queensland)
Martin Mulsow (Universität Erfurt)
Barbara Stollberg- Rilinger (Westfälische Wilhelms- Universität
Münster and Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin)
Simone Zurbuchen (Université de Lausanne)
VOLUME 3
The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ emnl
A Humanist in
Reformation Politics
Philipp Melanchthon on Political
Philosophy and Natural Law
By
Mads Langballe Jensen
LEIDEN | BOSTON
Cover illustration: Portrait of Philipp Melanchthon, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1537. © bpk- Bildagentur/
Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe. Image 70170781.
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Contents
Preface: Melanchthon’s Natural Law as a Combative Concept vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction: Melanchthon, Political Philosopher of the Protestant
Reformation 1
1 Melanchthon and the Political thought of the Protestant
Reformation 2
2 Melanchthon: a Humanist in the Reformation 10
3 Protestant Wittenberg in Imperial Politics 17
1 Sedition, Tyranny, and Law in the Early 1520s 22
1 The Wittenberg Movement and the Split with Karlstadt 23
2 Melanchthon’s Humanist Conception of Politics 29
3 Melanchthon’s Early Ciceronian Political Thought 32
4 Humanists on Law 35
5 Melanchthon’s Oratio De Legibus 41
6 Conclusion: Melanchthon’s Distinctiveness 51
2 “The Causes That Lead Us to Institute Government and Obey
Rulers” 53
1 Melanchthon’s Turn to Aristotle’s Moral Philosophy: the 1529
Commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics 55
2 The Identifiable Targets of Melanchthon’s Politics 62
3 Ockhamists and Radical Preachers: “Imperium Ex Consensu
Populi” 63
4 Rebelling Peasants and Radical Preachers 70
5 Melanchthon’s Reassessment: Aristotelian Natural Law, State and
Government 75
6 Property 81
7 Forms of Kingship 82
8 Wycliffe 86
9 Justice and Rule Limited by Law 89
10 Conclusion 94
3 A True and Learned Philosophy according to the Law of God 97
1 Cura Religionis, Tertius Usus Legis, and the Law of Nature in the
1530s 101
vi Contents
2 Natural Law and the Decalogue in the Philosophiae Moralis
Epitome 108
3 Political Authority as a Divine Ordination 116
4 Justice and the Best Order of the State 123
5 Divine Law, Natural Law, the Law of Nations, and Positive Law 127
6 The Limits on Political Power 134
7 Conclusion 136
4 Liberty, Tyranny, and Defence of the True Religion 139
1 Resistance and Defence, or Rebellion? 143
2 The Schmalkaldic War: Political Legitimacy and the True Christian
Faith 157
3 Melanchthon’s Editing of Von der Notwehr Unterricht 166
4 Melanchthon’s Philosophical Theory of Resistance in the nuii 170
5 The Magdeburg Confession 181
6 Conclusion 184
Conclusion: Melanchthonian Moral Philosophy and the Beginnings of
Protestant Natural Law 188
Bibliography 199
Subject Index 217
Name Index 220
Preface: Melanchthon’s Natural Law
as a Combative Concept
The Wittenberg reformer Philipp Melanchthon (1497–1 560) was the first Prot-
estant natural law theorist. His credentials as a first- generation Protestant
reformer are well established: he was a close colleague and collaborator of
Martin Luther and the author of key Lutheran theological works including the
Confessio Augustana. Likewise, it is well-r ecognised that he wrote theological
and philosophical works in which discussions of natural law played a signif-
icant role. In so far, Melanchthon can be entered as the founding father in a
genealogy of Protestant natural lawyers that stretches from his contemporar-
ies, such as Johann Oldendorp and Niels Hemmingsen, over Benedikt Winkler
and Johannes Althusius to Hugo Grotius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Samuel
Pufendorf and Christian Wolff.
However, while this much may be generally agreed, the question is how
much it tells us about the meaning of Protestant natural law and about Mel-
anchthon’s role in its history. According to some, Melanchthon ranks as a pre-
cursor of Grotius considered in his conventional role as the initiator of “mod-
ern,” so- called “rationalist” natural law. For others, Melanchthon stands in the
long tradition of classical and medieval natural law from Aristotle and Cicero
to Thomas Aquinas and scholasticism. For some, natural law theories are in-
tegral to the social teachings of the Lutheran churches, for others such the-
ories (and even Melanchthon himself) constitute a fundamental betrayal of
Luther’s reformation theology.
Common to most discussions of Melanchthon’s theory of natural law is
that they take a doctrinal approach. They are concerned with the coherence
of natural law with his larger theological system or with its place in the wider
history of natural law as a philosophical, theological or juridical concept. How-
ever, this runs the risk of misjudging both the theory and its history. For even if
Melanchthon drew on a larger tradition of natural law, he did so in the course
of fighting specific religious and political battles. His natural law was not just
a theoretical proposition but fundamentally a combat concept. Furthermore,
such grander narratives are themselves imprinted by a contested reception
history.
Melanchthon and his natural law theory quickly became the subject of con-
troversies within the Protestant communities. The conflicts started during his
lifetime, most prominently between the “Philippists” (followers of Melanch-
thon) and the “Gnesio-L utherans” (or “True-L utherans”) such as Matthias
viii PREFACE
Flacius Illyricus, and they continued until after his death. While these contro-
versies concerned primarily theological topics, such as the Eucharist and the
role of free will and good works in salvation, they also came to include Mel-
anchthon’s conception of natural law as he had drawn on it to address some of
these issues. Controversies around Melanchthon’s conception of natural law
continued into the seventeenth century. It was criticised and employed by the
various parties in the so- called Hofmann- dispute in Helmstedt around 1600
about whether an ethics for Christians could be based on reason or should rely
exclusively on Scripture. Both controversies cemented the idea that Melanch-
thon’s natural law primarily was of significance for theology.
Modern conceptions of Melanchthon’s natural law are also shaped by the
history of Protestant moral philosophy in the century following his death. In
the establishment of Protestant orthodoxy, natural law was not central to mor-
al philosophy, a fact which influenced the reception of Melanchthon. Much
Lutheran moral philosophy became focused on Aristotelian virtue ethics and,
to a lesser extent, practical politics, with natural law playing a subsidiary role at
best. Melanchthon himself did employ a concept of natural law centrally in his
moral and political philosophy, but it was primarily in theological works that
it was taken up, including by John Calvin, and it was in this form it figured in
discussions by later lawyers, such as Benedikt Winkler. Here too, then, the his-
torian will not find Melanchthon’s natural law in its own right but as a conduit
for specific other purposes.
It was only from the middle of the seventeenth century that natural law
became firmly established as an independent topic and academic discipline.
Much of this was due to the publication of Hugo Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis
(1625), which was quickly awarded a central place in later histories of natu-
ral law, but also to Samuel Pufendorf’s works and teaching. By then, a specif-
ic “Melanchthonian natural law” was becoming canonical in Protestant dis-
cussions, both in the burgeoning histories of natural law and in polemics on
which later scholarship has largely relied. As in the preceding generations,
the received Melanchthonian natural law was a version developed in his later
theological and moral philosophical works, which focused on the Decalogue as
a summary of the law of nature and on the persistence of the “image of God”
in man. This version of Melanchthon’s natural law was used prominently by
the Saxon theologian Valentin Alberti to attack Pufendorf and support a highly
confessionalised theory of natural law. This is the “Melanchthon” that we com-
monly meet in histories of natural law in general and of Melanchthon’s own
works in particular.
The effect has been that the discussion has focussed almost exclusively
on Melanchthon’s theological works and the theological questions which he
PREFACE ix
addressed by means of natural law. This has again occluded a different “Mel-
anchthonian natural law” developed for other purposes in other writings, and
neglected central purposes for which he had developed his theories of natural
law. This makes for a one- sided and incomplete picture of Melanchthon’s the-
ories of natural law, their genesis, and historical significance.
How do we reach behind the various inscriptions and receptions that find
expression in the figure of Melanchthon that we meet in the scholarship? This
book differs in at least two regards from existing work on Melanchthon’s moral
philosophy and natural law. One is to focus on Melanchthon’s moral and po-
litical philosophical works, reading him as a humanist and political philoso-
pher rather than a theologian who wrote about ethics and politics. Another is
to read Melanchthon’s development of natural law theories, and the political
thought they informed, as responses to specific political, philosophical, reli-
gious and theological challenges which he faced, rather than as an element in
a coherent theological system and its consequences.
This approach changes our understanding not only of Melanchthon’s natu-
ral law but of the political thought of the Protestant Reformation and of Prot-
estant natural law more generally. One significant insight, which has eluded
existing scholarship, is that Melanchthon in fact developed two very different
theories of natural law, and that their distinct characteristics become apparent
only when we consider the polemical purposes for which they were developed.
Another result is to show that it was to a very great extent as a renaissance
humanist that Melanchthon responded to the religious and political challeng-
es that faced the emerging reformation. His political thought does not fit the
conception of the Lutheran “politica christiana” as fundamentally theological,
Biblicist and apocalyptical. Instead he harnessed the classical heritage and
the intellectual and scholarly resources of humanism in scholarly polemics to
defend the reformation, engaging critically with fellow humanists, scholastic
theologians, and rival reformers alike.
By drawing on these resources Melanchthon developed his first substantive
political argumentation in the early 1520s to defend the Wittenberg reforma-
tion against its detractors. This was a distinctive Ciceronian conception of law
and political order, and one significantly devoid of a theory of natural law.
This allowed Melanchthon to present his opponents as tyrants whilst deflect-
ing criticism from himself and his fellow Wittenberg reformers by presenting
them as committed to fundamental humanist values such as patriotism, con-
cord and liberty.
It was also by means of these intellectual resources that Melanchthon de-
veloped his first fully-f ledged natural law theory for political purposes. He did
so not in theological works, but in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Ethics and
x PREFACE
Politics. This does not mean that Melanchthon’s theory of natural law can be
straightforwardly characterised as Aristotelian, for it also drew on distinctively
stoic and scholastic elements. In fact, these categories do not get us very far.
Rather, we have to consider Melanchthon’s argumentative purposes, viz. to un-
dermine scholastic political theology and natural law, which he saw as ammu-
nition for sedition and rebellion. This led him to a conception of moral philos-
ophy as a discipline distinct from theology, furthermore confining natural law
and political philosophy to worldly, political order in explicit criticism not only
of scholastics but also of contemporary humanists. On this basis Melanchthon
could present his own moral philosophy as in accordance with the Gospel, and
his humanist, scholastic, and radical opponents as led astray by the Devil.
Paying attention to the political uses of Melanchthon’s ideas also reveals
that his theory of natural law did not develop, it was replaced. What has com-
monly been seen as its full formulation in the 1530s, in fact amounted to a fun-
damentally different idea of natural law that supplanted his earlier position.
The new idea is found in the later philosophical and theological works, where
it provided ammunition for a confessional conception of politics and political
authority and informed Melanchthon’s later arguments for resistance. Natural
law here became a central plank in the argument for the ruler’s duty to uphold
true evangelical doctrine, confirming the concurrence of Melanchthon’s own
moral philosophy with divine truth, and denigrating his opponents as world-
ly Epicureans or servants of the Papal Antichrist. Rather than an implication
of Melanchthon’s theological system, then, his later theory of natural law was
formulated in service of political purposes and against specific philosophical
and theological arguments. This version found the most immediate reception
in posterity, doubtless due to its defence of the Lutheran confessional state,
but it hung on in most modern scholarship thus submerging a history of con-
tested use.
This book, then, presents an account of Melanchthon’s moral philosophy
and natural law not primarily as contributions to progressive theoretical de-
velopments. Instead, it presents a contextual history in which Melanchthon
drew on the intellectual resources available to him, not least the full arsenal
of renaissance humanism and the classical heritage, in defence of his religious
and political commitments. He contested not only with opponents but with
rivals engaged in the same endeavour, and the result was the first formulations
of Protestant political philosophy and theories of natural law, as recounted in
the following pages.
