Luther’s introductory remarks on Psalm 127 are worth continuing with, even though he does not mention Aristotle in what I translate below, because they are quite important for understanding Luther’s political thought, and the role of classical philosophy and theology in a theistic fourfold causal scheme of political order. It is clear from Luther’s comments here that, for Luther, a (merely) secular account of politics does not suffice.

Especially worthy of note in this excerpt is Luther’s characteristic treatment of reason (ratio): What it can, and can’t, do.

Translation (WA 40/3:204-5)

He therefore speaks not only according to the Holy Spirit, but also according to experience, because he spent his time in the greatest business and had a great deal of practice in the most weighty affairs. And this Psalm ought to be more valued by us due to this name, because a man so great in political and family governance wrote it. Although it is brief (for it is only six verses long), it is still stuffed full of excellent teaching; and it does not press upon us the formal and the material cause, for he sees that households are already present and that commonwealths have been established and fortified by the best laws and magistracies. But are these things enough? Not at all: for two principal causes are still missing. For as far as the formal cause is concerned, it is possible that there were better laws among the gentiles than among the Jews. And it is possible that some magistracies of the gentiles were better than those that the people of God had. But these things are only the material and the form. For that reason, we must come to understand the principal causes of the governance of commonwealths and households: who it is who creates the commonwealth and the household,^[1] and likewise why he creates it.^[2] These causes the gentiles and reason do not see, but reason looks only to the material and the form and, because it does not know the efficient cause, it tries to govern these things according the the end that it has established itself according to its own virtue, as if it is itself the thing that can establish such great matters. What happens, therefore, is that it stumbles and is deceived.

It is in this way that Demosthenes approaches the governance of the commonwealth, which he finds well constructed in laws and morals. He therefore shoves his way into it with unwashed hands and feet and tries to become the efficient cause for the Athenian commonwealth–that is, he wants to govern it as a wise man by his own counsels. To what end? Obviously, in order to establish public peace and get glory and tranquility for himself and his country and in order for everything to turn out in just the way he sees it to have been prudently thought out and deliberated by himself. But God, because he hates proud counsels, does things differently. Therefore, there is no vice in the material and the form. But on the matter of the end and the efficient cause, the man, though very wise, is deceived.^[3]