“The Empiricists: Locke: An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Abridged); Berkeley: Principles of Human Knowledge & Three Dialogues; Hume: An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding & Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”, by John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume, edited by Richard Taylor

528 pages, Anchor, ISBN-13: 978-0385096225

The rise and fall of British Empiricism is philosophy’s most dramatic example of pushing premises to their logical – and fatal – conclusions. Born in 1689 with the appearance of Locke’s An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, Empiricism flourished as the reigning school until 1739 when Hume’s Treatise strangled it with its own cinctures after a period of Berkeley’s optimistic idealism. In a nutshell, Empiricism is the theory that the origin of all knowledge is sense experience as it emphasizes the role of experience and evidence – especially sensory perception – in the formation of ideas and argues that the only knowledge humans can have is based on experience. Most empiricists also discount the notion of innate ideas or Innatism, a philosophical doctrine that holds that the mind is born with ideas/knowledge, and that therefore the mind is not a “blank slate” at birth.

The Empiricists collects the key writings on this important philosophy, perfect for those interested in learning about this movement with just one book. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding by John Locke concerns the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. Locke describes the mind at birth as being a blank slate (tabula rasa, although he did not use those actual words), filled later through experience. A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge by George Berkeley, published in 1710, argues that while we are having experiences, regardless of whether material objects exist, the outside world (the world which causes the ideas one has within one’s mind) is also composed solely of ideas. Berkeley did this by suggesting that “Ideas can only resemble Ideas”; that is, the mental ideas that we possess can only resemble other ideas (not material objects) and thus the external world consists not of physical form, but rather of ideas. This world is (or, at least, was) given logic and regularity by some other force, which Berkeley concludes is God. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, likewise by Berkeley and written in 1713, discusses perceptual relativity, the conceivability/master argument (“master argument” was coined by André Gallois), and Berkeley’s Phenomenalism. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding published by John Hume in 1751 states that very little of what we think we know can actually be derived from any idea that there are actual necessary connections between observed phenomena. We assume that certain things are connected just because they commonly occur together, but a genuine knowledge of any connection is mere habit of thought. So, a severe skepticism is the only rational view of the world. Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, likewise by Hume, concerns a debate between three philosophers – Demea, Philo, and Cleanthes – on the nature of God's existence. While all three agree that a god exists, they differ sharply in opinion on God’s nature or attributes and how, or if, humankind can come to knowledge of a deity.

“Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World”, by Eric Metaxas

496 pages, Viking, ISBN-13: 978-1101980019

Having been raised Lutheran (for a little while, at least), it was with some curiosity, and then considerable delight, that I began to read Eric Metaxas’ Martin Luther: The Man Who Rediscovered God and Changed the World. I knew some of the basics about Luther’s life and works, but the Martin Luther I found on the pages of Metaxas’ book was not the man of Protestant and Catholic myth, but a living, breathing human being, both brilliant and difficult (but then I repeat myself); indeed, I knew I was in good hands when the first thing Metaxas did was to enumerate and then sweep away the legends that have grown up about Luther over the centuries: he didn’t come from a family of peasants; he didn’t have a hardscrabble upbringing; there was no literal bolt of lightning that led him to become a monk (although there was a thunderstorm involved); his trip to Rome did not convince him of the need for a reformation; he didn’t literally hurl a pot of ink at the devil; the nun who eventually became his wife didn’t escape the convent hidden in an empty herring barrel; and he most likely did not nail his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg on October 31^st, 1517 (that probably happened two weeks later); instead, what he did do on that fateful day was to send a letter to the Archbishop of Mainz, and it was that letter that officially began the process we came to know as the Reformation.

Perhaps the most critical thing Metaxas tells us about Luther is that he was a passionate reader of the Bible, and that this, in turn, made him the member of a tiny minority, not only amongst the great mass of Christians – who, let’s not forget, couldn’t read the Bible, as they were Latin illiterates – but also amongst nobles, priests, archbishops, cardinals and even popes, none of whom any like excuses. And it was his understanding of Scripture that framed the Reformation. The church’s practice of selling indulgences (allowing people to pay money for time off in purgatory, for themselves and departed family members) was the flashpoint, but it was Luther’s knowledge of Scripture that propelled what could only be called the most significant revolution in human understanding and development of the last 500 years; perhaps longer. The church had become comfortable with the teachings of Aristotle, but Luther (who also knew his Augustine) saw the inherent contradictions the church had either missed or glossed over. The church taught that only the priests could drink the wine in communion; Luther made the startling claim, based on the Bible that all people were equal in God’s eyes and all people should partake of both the bread and the wine. That shocking idea of the equality of all people would find political expression more than 250 years later in a document called the Declaration of Independence. Luther articulated the ideas of each person being free subject to none, and each person being a servant subject to all. He understood that anyone could and should understand Scripture; it wasn’t only church officials who should have the magic power to read and interpret the Word of God. And to that point, as he stayed hidden in the castle of Wartburg while church and state looked high and low for him, spending his time in translating the New Testament into German to better spread the Gospel to the common folk and, incidentally, practically inventing the modern German language, to boot, taking only 11 weeks in which to do so. Damn.

Metaxas tells this story of Luther extraordinarily well as the man has a gift for storytelling. Never would I have imagined that I would become fascinated with the account of the theological debate between Luther and Johannes Eck at Leipzig in 1519, but I was – and that’s due entirely too how well the author tells the story. Martin Luther, then, is not only an outstanding biography; it is an incredible reminder of what one man accomplished, often in the face of great personal and professional peril. And it is a reminder that the Reformation was only something that happened 500 years ago, but something that is still happening, and needs to continue to happen, especially in our increasingly godless and hopeless world.

“The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation”, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

304 pages, St. Martin’s Press, ISBN-13: 978-0312238308

A full redressing of Edward VI and his reformation has been long overdue, which makes Diarmaid MacCulloch’s The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation all the more notable in its arrival. Precocious, opinionated, and infused with the spirit of a new Josiah, Edward VI was nevertheless a cipher-king, important not so much for his own contributions, but more for the energies and ambitions he unleashed in those around him. Standing at the enigmatic center of a theological revolution (and dead at the age of fifteen), Edward embodied promise both fulfilled and unfulfilled, and anyone who wishes to come to terms with the English reformation(s) must pass through him – or rather, the characters who claimed to represent him. Based on a series of lectures delivered in 1998 at the University of Cambridge, The Boy King incorporates not only MacCulloch’s own work, but also a rich body of recent scholarship in the field; as such, it is also sure to provoke further debate among historians on the nature of the reformation as it was disseminated, received or experienced by men and women across the realm.

MacCulloch goes to great lengths to show how most events which make the pace of the reign of Edward VI seem frantic were, in fact, prepared during the last years of Henry VIII but had to be postponed upon his death. Even during his first year, Edward’s establishment under the Duke of Somerset’s protectorate was reluctantly forced to appease the Emperor Charles V, the majority of lay politicians, and conservative bishops as powerful as Stephen Gardiner of Winchester. After Somerset’s disgrace, John Dudley, Earl of Warwick and later Duke of Northumberland, maintained a more consensual relationship with the Lords, made peace with France and Scotland, and inaugurated a phase of political reconstruction at home, thus permitting the evangelical revolution to recover its pace. MacCulloch shows us that in England (as on the Continent) the cost of being too specific on the Lord’s Supper was contrary to one’s well-being, since the matter was admittedly of more importance to traditionalists and evangelicals alike than justification by faith alone – and also produced more martyrs. This helped to determine a very gradual, even stealthy, accumulation of arguments and liturgical reforms up to 1550, although at least Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and Thomas Cranmer had much earlier become convinced that the Lutheran doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist was as blasphemous as the Roman doctrine of transubstantiation (if any of this sounds Greek to you, you’re not alone; MacCulloch does a pretty good job in explaining what-is-what so as you don’t go to hell).

I found that one of this book’s main attractions was that it conveyed a sense of indebtedness to a very young and serious boy, a great promise that flickered brightly for a while before dying before his time. Edward is portrayed as a real believer, not just an immature tool of vested interests. Since he appears to have been gifted with a more thoughtful and less egotistical character than his father, it’s very possible that he would have grown up to be a great leader of the Reformation and Cranmer could have finally convened the General Council of Reformed Churches of which he dreamt. Regardless of how much Anglo-Catholicism and theological liberalism alike have done to demolish the Edwardian heritage, it’s possible that in a critical juncture – such as the one Anglicans worldwide find themselves in today – MacCulloch’s closing lines might awaken their concern: “Perhaps the Anglican Communion, most enigmatic member of the Christian family of Churches, might show more gratitude for Edwardian mischief – or at the very least, some remembrance and understanding”.

While he may at times place too high an assessment on the positive qualities of Edward’s reformation and their long-term influence, MacCulloch has written an engrossing and vivid account of the Edwardian period, and one which must be read by all who are interested in early modern England and the subsequent development of its church. His is a correction of sorts – and a necessary one, too – to the subsequent historiography which viewed the revolution unleashed over the course of six years as negative, destructive and cynical. Much of this assessment, as mentioned, has come from Anglicans, whose sacramentalist and clericalist/episcopalist elements would in turn have been deplored by Cranmer, Latimer and Ridley. But Anglicans nevertheless owe those six years of revolution a debt, MacCulloch writes, for the “genuine idealism, the righteous anger, and the excitement” which infused a movement and pointed the way, however chaotically, to a different world.