Troy Southgate

Dec 25, 2024

WHILST I have always been a critic of the Protestant Reformation, I was reading some of Søren Kierkegaard’s thoughts on Martin Luther. The latter, as many of you will recall, became a fierce opponent of early sixteenth-century Catholicism and went from being a monk at a strict Augustinian monastery to marrying a former nun and fathering no less than six children.

Although most of us are familiar with the story of Luther posting his Ninety-five Theses on the door of the Schlosskirche in Wittemburg, notwithstanding the fact that the actual details of this particular event in Protestant history have often been contested, the local university’s Professor of Moral Philosophy never intended to provoke a Reformation or set into motion the earth-shattering process that would lead to an irrevocable split within the Church itself. Kierkegaard, who drew upon the work of his German counterpart as a means of questioning the sincerity of Denmark’s own nineteenth-century ministers, wrote in one of his private journals that

“Luther certainly possessed the inner truth to dare to venture doing opposite things and yet be quite free in doing them: married and yet as if not married, within worldliness and yet as if alien to it despite partaking of everything, etc. Ah, but it was dangerous simply to teach this in a straightforward manner, because it made things altogether too easy for the whole of worldliness.”

Whilst Luther had acted on principle, and he did have some justifiable concerns about the everyday corruption into which Catholicism was rapidly beginning to slide, his reforms opened the door to the kind of ‘worldliness’ that went hand in hand with the secular mentality of the so-called Enlightenment. In other words, Kierkegaard notes – rightly, in my opinion – that Luther inadvertently hastened the advance of spiritual decline.

We can, in a more contemporary regard, learn a great deal from this episode and there are various examples in which those with honest or well-meaning attitudes can actually do more harm than good. One thinks of modern environmentalists, for example, who correctly perceive that the natural world is under threat and yet fail to see that supporting the ‘greening of capitalism’ will allow the despoilers of nature to regroup and bring about the next phase of global exploitation. One also thinks of the Right-wing populists who wish to see the banning of the burkha as a means of defending European identity when, in actual fact, suppressing the values of outsiders will lead to their wider integration within consumer society and present even more of a threat to European identity. We also have those on the Left who call for the governmental silencing of their political enemies and, by doing so, make it far easier for the Establishment to frame repressive laws against free speech as a whole.

The case of Luther, therefore, even though I am not suggesting that he was wrong to raise some very important issues, is a classic example of how some people unwittingly strengthen the hand of the enemy. Conversely, therefore, we must create our own tipping-point and one which travels in an entirely different direction to those who are trying to steer world events towards their own dystopian vision. Actions have consequences.