In this post, I continue with Luther’s introductory remarks on Psalm 127. Again, though Aristotle is not mentioned, the text illuminate’s Luther’s political philosophy and theology.

In ignorance of the efficient and final causes of government, and in frustration at not being able to attain the end that they set up for themselves (presumably peace, prosperity, and dominion) by their own reason, they invented fortune as a cause to explain the apparent irrationality in a world they had thought to be rational. It is fortune that accounts for the inconstance seen in the world of flux–that acts as spoiler to the statesman’s best laid plans.

It would be possible, and even easy, to make a connection here to a Platonic distinction between the intelligible and sensible realms, their respective stability, and what accounts for their difference, though Luther does not do so. Given the opposition he is setting up between biblical and classical wisdom, he presumably would have thought that not even the Platonists could get this quite right.

Translation (WA 40/3:205)

It turned out the same in the Roman Republic for Cicero, one of their best men; it turned out the same for Julius Caesar. What happens, therefore, is that, since they neither discern the efficient cause, nor attain to the final cause, they cry out that everything happens by chance and fortune, which are almost always opposed to correct deliberation. For, because they could attain to the end that they were desiring neither by virtue nor by wisdom nor by diligence, and because they see, too, that men’s ignorance and malice harms commonwealths more than they are sometimes helped by correct deliberation, they fashioned some third and mediating thing, viz., fortune, which would be a cause of uncertain outcome, and would sometimes help correct deliberation with success, and at other times would hinder it; and they were forced to say that the administration of commonwealths was a greater matter than what could be guided by human deliberation. For (they said) fortune was necessary in addition to deliberation, which came from God now to this man, now to that man. And this is the reason why the best men among the gentiles could teach rightly neither about household governance nor about political governance.^[1]