Philipp Melanchthon

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Philipp Melanchthon was the humanist scholar who turned Martin Luther’s preaching into a system. Born on 16 February 1497 in Bretten, in the Palatinate, a grand-nephew of the Hebraist Johann Reuchlin, he was a prodigy of the new classical learning — schooled at Heidelberg and Tübingen, and appointed professor of Greek at Wittenberg at twenty-one, where he met Luther and stayed for the rest of his life. The name is his own coinage: a Greek translation of his German surname Schwartzerdt, “black earth,” in the humanist fashion of the day. Reuchlin, who had pressed the case for Hebrew learning against those who wanted the rabbinic books burned, gave the boy his Greek name and steered him toward the chair that would make him; the gift was a kind of dedication, and the young man carried it as one.

He came to Wittenberg in August 1518, twenty-one years old and physically slight, and delivered an inaugural oration on reforming the studies of youth that announced the whole program of his life — a return to the sources, Greek and Hebrew and the purified Latin of the ancients, against the thicket of late-medieval scholastic commentary. Luther, eleven years older and already in the thick of his quarrel with Rome, heard it and was won over at once. The two became the central partnership of the German Reformation: Luther the volcanic preacher and translator, Melanchthon the ordering intellect who could state in clean Latin what Luther had thrown out in sermons and pamphlets. The friendship held, with strains, until Luther’s death in 1546, and Melanchthon taught Greek to a generation.

The documents the Reformation needed

His standing rests on the documents the early Reformation needed and could not otherwise have produced. In 1521 he wrote the Loci Communes, the first ordered statement of Lutheran doctrine — a book built around the “commonplaces” of Paul’s letter to the Romans (sin, law, grace, justification) rather than around the older scholastic frame, and a book Luther praised above almost anything of his own, judging it worthy of a place in the canon. It went through edition after edition in Melanchthon’s lifetime, each revision softening or recasting earlier positions, so that the Loci became less a fixed creed than a record of a careful mind thinking in public over forty years. To read its first and last versions side by side is to watch Lutheran theology decide what it was.

At the Diet of Augsburg in 1530 it was Melanchthon, not the outlawed Luther — under imperial ban since the Diet of Worms in 1521, and so unable to appear before the Emperor — who drafted the Augsburg Confession, presented to Charles V on 25 June 1530 as the formal statement of the evangelical estates. When Catholic theologians answered it with a Confutation, Melanchthon wrote the long reply, the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, the following year. Both texts remain confessional standards for Lutheran churches across the world, gathered later into the Book of Concord; the Confession in particular is the foundational document by which a church calls itself Lutheran. He had drafted, almost single-handedly, the charter of a confession. His later willingness to revise even this — the altered Variata edition of 1540, softening the article on the Lord’s Supper toward a sacramental language that other Protestants could accept — was prized by those who hoped to mend the breach with the Reformed and resented by those who would not have the standard touched, and it became one more grievance laid at his door after Luther was gone.

He also reorganized German schooling so thoroughly that he was called Praeceptor Germaniae, the Teacher of Germany — a title used of him already in his own lifetime. He wrote school ordinances for one territory after another, drew up the statutes of new and reformed universities, composed the Greek and Latin grammars and the textbooks of rhetoric, dialectic, ethics, and physics that taught the Protestant lands for a century, and trained the schoolmasters who used them. The Lutheran Gymnasium, with its graded classes and its diet of classical languages, is largely his design. Where Luther was thunder, Melanchthon was the careful, conciliatory mind, forever trying to hold the Protestant cause together and to keep a door open toward Rome and toward the Reformed — a temper that won him distrust from harder partisans on every side.

That temper had its bitter harvest after Luther was gone. When the Emperor’s armies broke the Protestant princes in the Schmalkaldic War, Melanchthon helped frame the Leipzig Interim of 1548, conceding certain Catholic rites and ceremonies as adiaphora — matters indifferent, neither commanded nor forbidden — in the hope of preserving the substance of the gospel under a hostile settlement. His harder former students were appalled. Matthias Flacius and the party that called themselves the genuine Lutherans charged him with betrayal, and with a softening of doctrine they named synergism — the suggestion that the human will cooperated, however faintly, in its own conversion. The movement split into Philippists, who claimed his mantle, and Gnesio-Lutherans, who claimed Luther’s against him, and the quarrel outlasted Melanchthon’s life and was settled only after his death by the Formula of Concord. The conciliator had become the most contested man in his own church.

The stars in the curriculum

Less often remembered is the place astrology held in that learning. Melanchthon was among the most prominent defenders of the art in sixteenth-century Europe, and he built it into the Wittenberg curriculum. Astronomy and astrology were not yet cleanly divided in the schools — the one supplied the positions of the planets, the other read their meaning — and Melanchthon raised the standing of the mathematical disciplines together, treating skill with the heavens as part of a liberal education and a duty of the educated Christian. In 1531 he furnished a new Wittenberg edition of the De sphaera of Johannes de Sacrobosco, the standard medieval primer of the heavens, with a preface arguing that the study of the sky led the devout mind to the order and providence of its Maker; the textbook was reprinted again and again, his preface traveling with it across Protestant Europe. He wrote prefaces in the same vein for editions of Ptolemy and for the ephemerides and astronomical handbooks that issued from the Wittenberg presses, and he pressed the discipline on his students through the orations he composed for them to deliver.

The circle that gathered around him made Wittenberg the center of astronomical and astrological learning in the German lands — dozens of scholars, mathematicians, and physicians for whom reading the sky was ordinary scholarly work. From it came Georg Joachim Rheticus, the young professor who traveled to Frauenburg, became the sole pupil of Nicolaus Copernicus, and published the first account of the new heliocentric astronomy; and Erasmus Reinhold, whose Prutenic Tables of 1551 put Copernican mathematics to work in the calculation of planetary positions. The men of this circle adopted Copernicus’s geometry as a superior calculating device while declining, for the most part, to believe that the Earth actually moved — the cautious settlement historians have named the Wittenberg interpretation, in which the mathematics of the De revolutionibus could be used without its cosmology being conceded.

Melanchthon practiced what he taught. He cast and consulted horoscopes — for himself, for his children, for friends and the great — and timed undertakings by the heavens. He worked closely with the Brandenburg court astrologer Johann Carion, recasting Carion’s world chronicle into the Chronicon Carionis, a universal history that plotted the ages of the world against the prophecies and the signs and ran through the Protestant schoolroom for generations. When his friend the scholar Joachim Camerarius — later his first biographer — pressed him about the worth of Carion’s art, Melanchthon defended it. Comets, eclipses, and conjunctions he read as warnings hung in the sky by God for those with the learning to construe them. He took a particular, charged interest in the horoscope of Luther himself, a chart fought over by the age: Catholic astrologers such as Luca Gaurico moved the reformer’s birth to 1484, where a massing of planets in Scorpio could be read as the nativity of the Antichrist, while Melanchthon and others held to 1483 and argued the hour, Melanchthon insisting Luther had been born before midnight. The founder of the Reformation had his stars contested like a prince’s.

Faith alone and the secondary causes

The two commitments are harder to square than later Lutheranism preferred. The reformer who insisted that salvation came by faith alone also taught that the planets carried real, if limited, influence over human affairs — and saw no contradiction, since both belonged to one providentially ordered world. His doctrine was the old and careful one: the stars incline but do not compel. The heavens worked upon the body and its humors, upon temperament and the disposition of nations, upon the bent of the will — but they did not bind it, and the soul under grace was free. God governed the world through secondary causes, the heavens among them, so that reading the sky was a way of reading providence rather than evading it. To deny that the stars signified anything was, on this view, to deny that the visible order spoke of its Author at all; nature was legible because it was made by a mind, and the astronomer who read it rightly was a kind of pious philosopher.

It was a defense that drew the obvious fire. The great humanist refutation of judicial astrology had already been written by Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, whose Disputationes adversus astrologiam divinatricem argued that the heavens acted only through their general light and heat and could carry no message about particular human fates; Erasmus, whom Melanchthon revered, had no patience for star-reading either. Against that current Melanchthon stood closer to Marsilio Ficino, who had folded the influence of the heavens into a Neoplatonic medicine of the soul, and he kept company, in this one conviction, with a strand of Renaissance learning that read the cosmos as a single ordered book. He distinguished, as the careful did, between the licit science of natural influence and the forbidden arts — the demonic divination and the conjuring magic that trafficked with spirits — and placed his astrology firmly on the licit side of that line, a reading of God’s own handwriting in the sky.

Luther was skeptical of the stars and said so. He thought astrology no science but a tissue of guesses, mocked its practitioners, and could not see why his learned friend wasted his subtlety on it; the disagreement was old and friendly and never healed. That a founding architect of Protestant theology was also a working astrologer is one of the reasons the line between Renaissance learning and what a later age would file under “occult” runs less cleanly through this period than the textbooks suggest — and it placed Melanchthon, the Lutheran systematizer, in unexpected company with men of other confessions and other schools, with the Christian-Kabbalist cardinal Egidio da Viterbo and the long line of those who held that creation was a cipher written by God. The settlement he reached between faith and the firmament would not survive him intact: a generation later Johannes Kepler, laboring inside the same Lutheran world, would try to keep the providential reading of the heavens while stripping away the technical apparatus he judged worthless, reforming the art rather than abolishing it.

Texts and scholarship

Melanchthon’s enormous output — orations, commentaries, textbooks, letters by the thousand — was gathered in the nineteenth century into the Corpus Reformatorum (vols. 1–28, ed. Carolus Gottlieb Bretschneider and Heinrich Ernst Bindseil, Halle and Brunswick, 1834–1860), still the foundational edition, with the modern critical Melanchthons Briefwechsel cataloging the correspondence in full. The Loci Communes of 1521 survives in many digitized witnesses; the Augsburg Confession and its Apology are hosted, with the rest of the Lutheran confessions, at the Book of Concord. The standard English biography remains Clyde L. Manschreck’s Melanchthon: The Quiet Reformer (Abingdon, 1958), and Sachiko Kusukawa’s The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1995) is the authoritative study of how his theology reshaped the teaching of the natural world, astrology included.

The astrological dimension has its own scholarship. Claudia Brosseder’s The Writing in the Wittenberg Sky: Astrology in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Journal of the History of Ideas 66, 2005) reconstructs the network of scholars around Melanchthon for whom astrology was ordinary learning; Anthony Grafton’s Cardano’s Cosmos (Harvard, 1999) sets the practice in its wider Renaissance frame. Robert S. Westman’s The Melanchthon Circle, Rheticus, and the Wittenberg Interpretation of the Copernican Theory (Isis 66, 1975) is the classic account of how that circle handled Copernicus, and Jürgen Hoppmann’s The Lichtenberger Prophecy and Melanchthon’s Horoscope for Luther (Culture and Cosmos 1, 1997) follows the long fight over Luther’s nativity. The contested birth-charts, the prefaces, the chronicle co-authored with a court astrologer: these are not marginalia but the working furniture of a learned Protestant life.

He died in Wittenberg on 19 April 1560, having outlived Luther by fourteen years and spent most of them defending a settlement that satisfied no one entirely, himself included. They buried him in the Castle Church beside Luther, the two of them under the same floor where the Reformation had begun — the preacher and the schoolmaster who had given the preaching its grammar, and who had read, in the same sky that troubled Luther not at all, the legible providence of God.

→ Related: Apologetics · John Napier · Divination · Martin Luther · Astrology · Johann Reuchlin · The Reformation · Erasmus · Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola · Marsilio Ficino · Johannes Kepler · Egidio Da Viterbo