This monograph provides a compact thematic overview of an understudied and often misunderstood terrain, the ethical and political thought of early modern Protestant Aristotelians. Indeed, the topic might appear to many readers as a contradiction in terms: didn’t the Reformation throw out Aristotle along with the whole baggage of medieval scholasticism? After all, Martin Luther not only wrote a “Disputation against Scholastic Theology,” but in it called Aristotle himself “the worst enemy of grace” (46). Even for well-informed readers, aware that Luther’s younger colleague Philipp Melanchthon quickly returned Aristotle to his central place in higher education, there is likely a subsequent blank space of about one or two centuries, until someone (say, Leibniz or Kant) decidedly more modern, less Aristotelian, and less blatantly Protestant bursts on the scene.
Manfred Svensson’s study of Protestant commentaries on Aristotle not only provides rich content to this blank space; it also refutes pervasive misconceptions about the consequences of Protestant soteriology for ethics and politics. Here he sets his sights on interpretations of Reformation thought as a profound break with the Christian philosophical tradition, such as arguments by Alasdair MacIntyre and, building on MacIntyre, Brad Gregory (MacIntyre 1984; Gregory 2012). More generally, the scholarly literature on education and philosophy in the Reformation period is shot through with assumptions, suggestions, or claims of a latent tension between the purportedly pessimistic, “Augustinian” views held by Protestants and the alleged optimism inherent in Aristotle’s writings on virtue and the good life. As Svensson amply demonstrates, Protestant thinkers cohered within the broad spectrum of the Christian philosophical tradition, for which labels such as “Augustinian,” “Aristotelian,” and “Platonic” are not mutually exclusive, but rather capture different facets of the whole. What is more, with regard to key ethical and political issues, Protestants explicitly took their cue from Aristotle’s writings on the topic, often with little or no sign of distinctively Protestant reservations.
Svensson’s book contributes not only to a more accurate assessment of Protestant Aristotelianism but also to “a broader movement of Protestant ressourcement” (xi): the attempt to rejuvenate contemporary Protestant thought by a return to early modern sources. In this context, the book provides a helpful introduction to the ideas and personnel of Protestant Aristotelianism for researchers from advanced undergraduates on up. While its content is of special interest to historians of philosophy and scholars in adjacent fields, the Aristotelian concepts at play usually receive sufficient explanation, making the book accessible for those without philosophical expertise. It is at the same time a richly detailed survey, from which even members of that “tiny circle” well acquainted with Protestant Aristotelianism can learn much (6). But, though such specialists will likely welcome Svensson’s main intervention, the book also contains some clear weaknesses, including technical flaws, an underdeveloped engagement with confessional theology, and a normative approach to its subject matter.
In his introduction, Svensson explains that despite the patent importance of Protestant Aristotelianism for multiple strands of intellectual history, there remains a pervasive narrative of Protestants as enemies of Aristotle. The relatively few existing studies on the topic tend to focus on individuals or single universities, thus failing to provide a larger picture or to replace the standard one. In contrast, Svensson ambitiously aims to articulate the Aristotelian character of the tradition as a whole. To render the task manageable, he takes as his object of analysis Protestant commentaries on the Ethics and Politics, a source-base somewhat loosely defined as texts that demonstrate both a self-understanding as following the Stagirite’s views and substantial engagement with his texts (12). This scope remains considerable: “fifty-five commentaries on the Ethics and around fifteen on the Politics” published between 1529 and 1670 at fairly consistent intervals, almost evenly split between Lutherans and Reformed Protestants (14).
Chapter 1 discusses the influence of medieval scholasticism, Renaissance humanism, and sixteenth-century anti-Aristotelianism on the Protestant interpretation of Aristotle. Svensson emphasizes the extent to which Protestant commentators drew on medieval authors, especially Thomas Aquinas among the Latins and Eustratius of Nicaea among the Greeks. He also highlights the fact that neither Luther’s nor Petrus Ramus’s criticisms of Aristotle altered the long-term centrality of Ethics and Politics within Protestant thought. Chapter 2 provides a (mostly) chronological survey of the authors and commentaries treated in the remaining chapters.
Chapters 3 and 4 delve into key ethical questions surrounding the status of practical knowledge, virtue as habituation, the idea of the good, and natural law. Here Svensson points out the endurance and progression of a spectrum of Aristotelian positions from the Middle Ages, and he perceptively notes that Aristotle’s variably understood relationship to Plato often played a key differentiating role within this spectrum of interpretation. The middle section of Chapter 3 reflects on Protestant understandings of the relationship between philosophy and Christianity, particularly their perpetuation of the medieval “handmaid” analogy and their deployment of the distinctively Protestant division between law and gospel. The middle section of Chapter 4, meanwhile, argues that habituation-based formation in virtue and faith-based salvation by grace—leading to earthly and heavenly beatitude, respectively—were seen not as fundamentally incompatible but rather as non-competing truths within Protestant Aristotelianism. Together, these two sections make up a distinctive and important part of Svensson’s intervention.
Turning from commentaries on the Ethics to those on the Politics, Chapter 5 considers the relationship between ethics and politics (particularly as expressed in Protestant responses to Machiavelli), the naturalness of political authority, and the telos of political society. Here again Svensson emphasizes that Protestant commentators—apart from some notable, “modernizing” outliers such as Hermann Conring (137)—remained within the broad Aristotelian tradition by affirming a close connection between ethics and politics, the natural status of political association, and its aim of fostering not merely life but the good life. Chapter 6 examines the relationship between theory and practice in two senses: both between theoretical and practical knowledge and between the contemplative and the active life. Beyond the further affirmation that the Aristotelian spectrum of opinion endures within Protestant commentaries, the most valuable and novel insight of this chapter is the commentaries’ high estimation of the contemplative life, over and above the life of action. Svensson concludes his treatment by reflecting on Protestant Aristotelianism’s coherence with the Aristotelian tradition as a whole, and by placing early modern Protestants in continuity with twentieth-century and contemporary ones as valuable resources for a renewed Christian Aristotelianism.
There is much to praise in Svensson’s analysis. For one thing, he absolutely refutes the simplistic yet persistent assumption of Protestant anti-Aristotelianism or of an inherent incompatibility between Protestant theology and Aristotelian ethics, a view based principally on Luther’s early polemics. He demonstrates that most Protestants held to positions within the standard spectrum constituted by the pre-Reformation commentary tradition. This included key points such as the role of philosophy in relation to Christianity, the possibility of moral habituation, the natural law’s existence and character, the naturalness of political authority, and the eudaimonistic goal of politics. Revealing the continuities between Protestant commentators and their medieval forebearers is one of Svensson’s distinctive contributions. The book also rightly emphasizes the diversity of Protestant Aristotelianism, which often comes across in the literature as synonymous with Melanchthon’s thought, carried forward by mere epigones; this breadth also helps contextualize later figures such as the much-studied Hermann Conring.
While the book accomplishes its essential goals, it also exhibits some unfortunate weaknesses. There are a handful of factual mistakes, either from haste or from taking secondary scholarship at face value. Melanchthon died in 1560, not 1564 (61). Johannes Caselius’s In Aristotelis de vita et moribus librorum interpretationem programma of 1593 is simply the lecture advertising his course on the Ethics in that year—as programma in an academic context generally signifies—not an Aristotelian “manifesto” or “programmatic” text (64), a claim appearing in earlier scholarship (Dreitzel 1970). Several translations from Latin are awkward, some even incorrect or misleading. The most blatant example regards Conring’s understanding of politics. Svensson translates conveniat with the false cognate “convenient for”: “civil philosophy concerns itself with the things that are convenient for a lord prince” (146). What Conring actually says is merely that politics concerns “what is fitting” for the prince (quid Principi hero conveniat). Svensson, however, doubles down on this mistranslation by concluding that “Conring’s position in a nutshell” is its concern “with the convenient” (146). Other instances of exegesis also fail to inspire confidence—for example, the argument that English Aristotelian John Case’s Platonizing and anti-Machiavellian inclinations made it “difficult for Case to accept (or perhaps even understand)” Aristotle’s positions (170, see also 140–142).
Beyond technical issues, the book also gives less attention than one would hope to the role of theology and confession in Protestant Aristotelianism. One conclusion from Svensson’s analysis is that the Lutheran vs. Reformed distinction did not play a substantial role in the reception of Aristotle’s moral philosophy (14). Yet, he provides little positive evidence for this claim, and some of his evidence seems to run counter to it, as when he adduces only Lutheran authors deploying the Law–Gospel distinction to explain the relationship between philosophy and Christianity (98–101). He repeatedly touches on theological points without further development: for example, the surprisingly positive association made by Joachim Camerarius between the imago Dei and moral formation (106). In some places, glaringly relevant theological topics go unmentioned: the discussion of religion’s relationship to politics includes no reference to the concept of “Two Kingdoms” or “Three Estates” (162–164).
A final, related issue concerns the book’s approach. Svensson aims to find a normative “Aristotelianism” in the early modern period; as he makes clear only in the book’s conclusion, he is following the proposal of another scholar that one can trace “a distinctively Aristotelian” “vision of the unity, aim, and method of ethics and politics,” though capacious enough to contain a high degree of diversity (182; citing Nederman 1996). This search for a normative Aristotelian core clearly serves Svensson’s refutation of those who claim that no real Aristotelian ethics existed in Protestantism. But, it also limits the depth of his account, as section after section centers on showing that Protestants basically got Aristotle right (or, more fairly: remained within the traditional spectrum of rightness) on a given topic. As a result, the book delivers less substantial analysis than one would hope for from a scholar with Svensson’s broad learning—a weakness that affects both individual commentators and the larger tradition’s contours and changes over time. For instance, while Chapter 2 surveys an impressive number of “Faces and Institutions,” it does little to analyze or describe them; many characterizations remain vague (see “pedagogical,” 66–67; “modernizing,” 81), and the subsequent chapters do little to remedy this (e.g., 156).
Of course, one can readily forgive sins of omission in a book surveying so broad and understudied a terrain as early modern Protestant Aristotelianism. Yet, this issue does raise the question of what we mean by the “ressourcement” of early modern thought. Does it consist in proving that Reformation-era thinkers agreed with us about what Aristotle means, or that they had a version of our virtue ethics? I think that is ultimately an impoverished approach. In my view, the real project of ressourcement demands that we have our own views and readings challenged by those of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century scholars, who knew nearly the whole corpus of classical texts and the commentary traditions on them far better than essentially anyone today. In defending the Aristotelian character of Protestant moral and political thought and clearing away persistent misunderstandings, the book does prepare the way for such a project, and that is a great virtue. For anyone interested in engaging Protestant Aristotelianism, Svensson has provided a clear place to start.
REFERENCES
Dreitzel, Horst. Protestantischer Aristotelismus und absoluter Staat. Die „Politica“ des Henning Arnisaeus, ca. 1575–1636. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1970.
Gregory, Brad S. The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012.
MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd ed. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984.
Nederman, Cary. “The Meaning of ‘Aristotelianism’ in Medieval Moral and Political Thought.” Journal of the History of Ideas 57, no. 4 (1996): 563–585.
Reviewed by Tomás Antonio Valle, University of Hamburg