Luther and Descartes: How Intellectual History does (somewhat) come in epochs

As long as there have been intellectual historians, there have been attempts to compartmentalize all thought into certain categories. Will and Ariel Durant, for example, tend to characterize Medieval thought as the Age of Faith or Enlightenment thought as the Age of Reason. While I think such compartmentalization is often too simplistic and often not kind enough to the nuances of a particular thinker, I do oblige that there do seem to be currents in intellectual history which characterize certain periods of time in fascinating ways. When this becomes most fascinating is when two thinkers who seem to have nothing in common actually share a very critical notion unique to their times.

Martin Luther

One example is between two big Western thinkers around roughly the same epoch: Rene Descartes and Martin Luther. Now, at first glance it would appear that these two have nothing in common. Descartes was a patriarch of reason, championing the first attempt in the history of the West to form a worldview built from undeniable premises leading to certain knowledge through reason and argument. Luther was patriarch of faith, a man who scorned attempts at autonomous reason apart from divine revelation and who attacked any syntheses of reason and faith. Rene Descartes was the philosopher and mathematician, Martin Luther the pastor and theologian.

However, upon a closer examination, things get a little more complicated. One thing that you find in both Luther and Descartes' biographies is a nervousness, an anxiety of sorts. When Descartes was a young student, he struggled with the inability of Medieval Philosophy or even pure logic and mathematics to provide certainty of the truths of reality. Luther, on the other hand, as a young monk in the Augustinian Order, struggled with doubts about whether or not he had attained salvation, always worried that he had not confessed everything at confession or not done enough to make himself worthy in the eyes of God.

Both thinkers responded to this anxiety in their respective ways. Descartes crafted a philosophical system that inferred from the existence of the personal ego (i.e. his famous cogito ergo sum- I think, therefore I am) the existence of a God that would make my external reality reliable. Luther, on the other hand, crafted his doctrine of "sola fide- by faith alone" which would assure salvation to the believer by allowing God to impart an alien righteousness upon them through the reception of faith that would assure them of salvation apart from works or merit of any kind.

Now, what we get here from both Luther and Descartes' mutual anxieties and responses to those anxieties are the seeds of a distinctively modern anxiety, compelled by a loss of certainty in the ability of tradition to impart truth. For Luther, this was the Roman Catholic Church. For Descartes, this was Medieval scholastic philosophy. But regardless their differences, both of them shared this

Rene Descartes

common, proto-modern distrust of the abilities of traditional institutions and belief structures to impart truth and both of them shared a common response in attempting to find absolute certainty from individual inquiry to make up for what they, as forerunners of modernity, saw as the failure of traditional institutions. They both saw it as necessary to return to the foundations in order to find truth. Descartes thought the only way to establish truth was to go through his entire sequence of methodological doubt to get certainty about the nature of reality. Luther thought, less radically, that the only way a religious teaching was trustworthy was whether it was found in the Biblical revelation and hence, Biblical data was the foundation necessary to establish certainty of Christian belief. In sum, there is a proto-modern anxiety about the uncertainties present in traditional assumptions (whether about the nature of the Church or about the nature of reality), which propels an attempt to ground truth in some sure foundation divorced of tradition, and leads to a distinctive system of thought in which foundation as opposed to tradition becomes the criterion for establishing validity. A view that would later evolve into the more radical philosophical skepticism of people like David Hume and Immanuel Kant from Descartes' side and into the more radical religious reductionism of liberal Protestantism that did not share Luther's convictions about the Word of God being the foundation on Luther's side. Both of them then, laid some unintentional seeds for later roots in intellectual history that continue to affect us today. And both of them did so in much the same ways.

So even when thinkers see themselves as reacting against the general ethos of their time, they oftentimes are playing right into it.