[Image: Melanchthon with Luther behind, by Schadow, Melanchthon House Museum, Wittenberg, licensed under CC BY SA 4.0. No changes made.]
Commentary on Proverbs by Philip Melanchthon. Edited by Derek Cooper and Timothy J. Wengert. Grand Rapids: CLP Academic. 2023. 282pp. Hardcover. $24.00.
In June of 1528, Philip Melanchthon wrote to his dear friend and fellow humanist Joachim Camerarius in Nuremberg about how he was spending his time:
I now devote a good part of the day to reviewing Isaiah as translated by Luther. I use up the rest of the day commenting on the Proverbs of Solomon…. at present I am editing the Ethics of Aristotle, which cannot be corrected without great toil due to the printers’ extraordinary negligence. And I am adding scholia, so that they can be of some aid to the reader in so obscure and difficult a discussion.[1]
The fact that Melanchthon was working on Aristotle’s Ethics and Solomon’s Proverbs simultaneously is not a coincidence, for he thinks that Aristotelianism and biblical ethics are in many respects mutually illuminating and supporting. The connections between classical and Christian wisdom are ubiquitous and thorough, though the overlap is not total.
The work to which Melanchthon refers in the letter quoted above must be the Nova scholia in Proverbia Salomonis (New Scholia on the Proverbs of Solomon) of 1529, Melanchthon’s second of four works on Proverbs that he published over the course of his career. His progression on Proverbs is clearly delineated by Derek Cooper and Timothy J. Wengert in their introduction to Melanchthon’s Commentary on Proverbs (Grand Rapids: CLP Academic, 2023), an annotated translation of Melanchthon’s fourth and final work on the book, the Explicatio Proverbiorum Salomonis of 1555.
If one comes to a work like this with the expectations to which we have been habituated by the modern genre of commentary, he is bound to be surprised—and disappointed (if he likes the conventions of contemporary commentary); or refreshed (if he does not); or at least edified and challenged (if he holds a middle position).
For what does the modern commentary prize? Exhaustiveness (on the part of the author) and, one can sometimes almost be forgiven for thinking, exhaustion (on the part of the reader). The modern commentary demands multiple lemmata for every verse or line of text, with close attention to every, or almost every, word, in the original language, fortified by lexical data regarding usage and semantics, further ensconced in contextual minutiae about the text’s historical and cultural Sitz im Leben, sometimes in relation to neighboring or cognate societies, and finally crenelated with an imposing armory of bibliography in several modern languages.
The author of a modern commentary seems often to be looking over his shoulder, worried that he is being pursued by someone who knows more than he does, a hunter whom he wards away with his talismanic erudition. The modern commentary has learning, to be sure. And it is not worn lightly. Whatever the intentions of any given commentator, the result of contemporary conventions can often be to move the reader farther from the text (now veiled in a fog of obscurity only the Biblical Studies clerisy can penetrate), not closer to it.
Melanchthon does none of this. He does not comment on every verse in the text; he does not even comment on every chapter.[2] He does not have much to say about the language, though, as a vir trilinguis, he was conversant in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and made his own Latin rendering of the text beginning “[p]erhaps as early as 1524” (xiv). He does give some attention to terms for “proverbs” and “maxims” in the three languages in his preface (17-20), and discusses the Hebrew text in, for instance, his treatment of chapter 8. But he does not do a whole lot with the languages beyond this.
Likewise, Melanchthon uses material from other societies, but it comes, not from the Ancient Near East, but from classical Greece and Rome (on which more in a moment). As the editors put it, “[H]e takes many of the examples for particular aphorisms from ancient Greek and Roman history as well as from the history of Israel. The astounding breadth of his knowledge of the ancient world and its stories may be seen on every page of this commentary—perhaps more so than in his other biblical works” (xx). Melanchthon, then, like the modern commentator, demonstrates his learning; but it is not an exhibition of showmanship. Instead, he uses it to elucidate both the overlap between human and divine wisdom and the gulf that separates them: or, put another way, both the worldliness of the Scriptures and their otherworldliness. In brief, Melanchthon in the Commentary on Proverbs is not writing a modern critical commentary, but one that must be interpreted in light of his “unique blend of Renaissance methods and Evangelical (Lutheran) theology” (xviii).[3]
Paramount in this endeavor are two Melanchthonian leitmotifs which undergird the commentary conceptually and rhetorically and which the editors ably discuss in their introduction (xxi-xxv): the organizational method of loci communes, or “commonplaces,” and the distinction between the law and the gospel.
First, what are loci? Loci are topics that can be used to house materials of different kinds, particularly the materials of Scripture; Melanchthon “viewed [them] as the central, connected themes of Scripture” (xxii), and he derived them particularly from the Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans.[4] They are things like (to limit ourselves to the first era of the Loci communes) the aforementioned “law” and “gospel,” as well as “grace,” “signs,” and “magistrates.”
Second, what is the law-gospel distinction? The “law” and the “gospel” are God’s “two words”: the former tells us what we must do—philosophy fits in here as an outworking of our natural and rational grasp of the basic dictates of the moral law—and the latter tells us that God has purposed to forgive us for Christ’s sake despite what we have done, and that he freely grants us a righteousness apart from works through faith in Christ. The discussion of Cooper and Wengert here is somewhat confused. Typically, the law is divided into at least two uses (political and theological), and more often into three (external discipline, knowledge of one’s own sins, and a rule of life for the regenerate).[5]
For some reason, however, Cooper and Wengert have reduced this distinction to that “between civil law and the gospel” (xxiv, emphasis mine), and thus we are left with a somewhat distorted picture of how pagan wisdom fits into Melanchthon’s schema: “[T]his same distinction… permitted Melanchthon to match Solomon’s maxims about life in this world with similar statements by pagan thinkers, and even to use traditional terms from Latin and Greek ethics to explain them” (xxv).
This claim is true: Melanchthon employs a dizzying array of classical thinkers to illustrate Solomon’s teaching. A non-exhaustive list of figures referred to or quoted includes Claudian, Homer, Vergil, Ovid, Juvenal, Sallust, Seneca the Younger, Lucan, Martial, Theognis, Simonides, Demosthenes, Empedocles, Cicero, Catullus, Horace, Persius, Sophocles, Terence, Thucydides, and Herodotus.
So, to repeat: This claim is true. But it is incomplete. The wisdom of the pagans is not equivalent to “law” simpliciter, even if it is equivalent to what the editors call the “civil law” (or the political use of the law). Instead, (pagan) philosophy (philosophia) is, Melanchthon says, “a small part of the law” (particulam legis) (22). The admission that it is part of the law means by necessary consequence that it is not the totality of the law that Melanchthon distinguishes from the gospel. The law also includes the “hidden affections of the heart” (arcanis affectibus) (21) and teaches “about the true knowledge and invocation of God as well as the remaining virtues pertaining to the first table of the law” (de vera agnitione et invocatione Dei, et de caeteris virtutibus ad primam tabulam pertinentibus) (22).
A more fine-grained distinction, then, allows one to replace a simple dichotomy (that is, pagan wisdom = [political] law, over against the gospel) with a hierarchical one (pagan wisdom = [political] law, subordinate to biblical wisdom = political and theological law [in the sense of revealing one’s sins], both over against the gospel, which then sanctifies the theological law for Christian use [in the sense of the pattern for one’s life). This point is not a quibble. It is at the heart of why Melanchthon considers Solomon superior to the ancient Greeks and Romans, while also acknowledging the ways in which the latter lend support to the former. More briefly, Solomon is superior to Athens and Rome because the book of Proverbs is theocentric, and even Christocentric (24-25), which the pagans are not.
The foregoing can be illustrated from Melanchthon’s treatment of Proverbs 8, a chapter whose discussion of wisdom was interpreted Christologically in the patristic age and thus became a lodestar in the debates between the Arians and the orthodox. Melanchthon, too, endorses a Christological reading of the text (59-60), but as refracted through a distinctively Lutheran lens:
[B]ecause the eternal and immovable wisdom, which alone is in God himself, is revealed both in the voice of the Law and the Gospel and also in the Son himself through whom the Father has decreed both the order of creation and the restoration of humankind, the ancients understood that the wisdom that is the Son speaking (that is, speaking to the church) was in view in this passage. I approve of this view if understood correctly. (59, modified)
This is Melanchthon in a nutshell: not a patrologist, but a patristic Lutheran. Melanchthon’s Nicene wisdom-as-Christ speaks the dialect of Law and Gospel.
And because Christ is the cosmic wisdom of the eternal Father, he is categorically superior to the wisdom of Greece and Rome; their sages are subordinated to Christ, the personification of wisdom itself, and to Solomon, Christ’s spokesman. Melanchthon states this two different times in his brief treatment of Proverbs 8. First, he says:
Solomon is not speaking here of the wisdom of a Pericles or of an Alcibiades or of anyone whose wisdom is mere shrewdness in the accumulation of power and wealth for any occasion whatsoever, whether accumulated in a just or unjust way. (59)
Second, he writes:
Thus Solomon distinguishes this guiding, divine wisdom promulgated through the Word from human shrewdness. For divine wisdom is fruitful, effective, and redemptive, ultimately bringing delightful results, even though they are deferred for some time. But the shrewdness of Pericles, Alcibiades, Demosthenes, and the like is fatal both to their country and to themselves. Therefore the wisdom of God proclaims: “Under my command are counsel and success.” (61-62, modified)
There are riches here—not just these, but many others—waiting to be rediscovered by and for today’s churches.
Unfortunately, however, this translation’s usefulness in making these riches available is balanced by a number of mistakes, some more serious than others, as is demonstrated by the fact that I had to modify two of the three passages that I just quoted. Thus to illustrate my claim in more detail, I will again restrict myself to Proverbs 8.
Consider Melanchthon’s remarks on the Christological reading of Proverbs 8 in antiquity. Here is Melanchthon’s Latin:
Vetustas intellexit hoc loco sapientiam quae est Filius loquens scilicet ad Ecclesiam. Hanc sententiam recte intellectam probo.[6]
Cooper and Wengert render this as:
[T]he church fathers therefore understood this section about wisdom to be referring to the Son speaking to the church. I approve their interpretation as correct. (59-60)
But what it actually says is:
The ancients understood that the wisdom that is the Son speaking (that is, speaking to the church) was in view in this passage. I approve of this view if understood correctly.
There is no “therefore” in the Latin; scilicet has been omitted, though it ties the phrase to the (characteristically Lutheran) comment Melanchthon had just made about how the Word is spoken in the church (viz., as law and gospel); and he only approves of the interpretation of “the ancients” or “antiquity” (not “the church fathers”) if or as correctly understood: The point of this last remark is to contrast two different interpretations, both of which are ancient: a correct one (that is, the Nicene one) and an erroneous one (that is, the Arian interpretation that the Son is a creature), which Melanchthon is about to argue against.
Right after, in that very discussion of the Arians, Melanchthon writes:
Ubi enim Salomon inquit: Dominus possedit me initio viae suae, legerunt Arriani: Dominus creavit me initio viarum suarum.[7]
Here is Cooper and Wengert’s version:
For instance, when Solomon wrote that “The Lord took possession of me in the beginning of his way,” the Arians claimed instead, “The Lord created me in the beginning of their ways.” (60, emphasis original)
But enim indicates that an explanation is about to be given, not an example; and viarum suarum does not refer to “their” ways but, as in the case of viae suae just above, “his” ways. The rendering of Cooper and Wengert (“their”) could be taken to imply that Melanchthon has a kind of Arian tritheism in view with this expression, but he does not.
In the next sentence, the superlative dulcissime (“very sweetly”) is translated as positive (“sweetly”). In the same sentence, Melanchthon says:
Item: Ante secula ordinata sum.[8]
Cooper and Wengert:
And also: “Before the ages were established.” (60, emphasis original)
But ante is a preposition, not a conjunction, and the verb is ordinata sum, not ordinata sunt. What it says, then, is: “I [referring to sapientia, ‘wisdom’] was established before the ages.” That is, Melanchthon is making a pro-Nicene and anti-Arian point: Christ existed before creation, and therefore cannot be part of creation.
Two sentences later, Melanchthon has:
Item Ebrae. 1: Gestans omnia verbo potentiae suae. Quia idem Filius est, per quem dicitur decretum de ordine creationis et reparationis hominis. Ideo hic eodem nomine sapientiam creantem et edentem legem et Evangelium nominat.[9]
Cooper and Wengert:
We likewise read in Hebrews 1: “Sustaining all things through the power of his word.”The person mentioned in these passages is the same Son through whom we are told that the order of creation and the restoration of humankind were decreed. Therefore here, using the same name, Solomon refers to this Wisdom as creating and bringing to light the Law and Gospel. (61)
But what he actually says is:
Likewise in Hebrews 1: “Sustaining all things by the word of his power,” because it is the same Son through whom the decree concerning the order of creation and of the restoration of man is spoken. For that reason, [Solomon] here uses the same name to name the wisdom that creates and the wisdom that proclaims the law and the gospel.
The issues are as follows: (1) The biblical expression, quoted accurately by Melanchthon, is “the word of his power,” not “the power of his word.” (2) For some reason, Cooper and Wengert begin a new paragraph after the quotation where Melanchthon does not, and omit the causal connection that indicates why Hebrews 1:3 is cited. (3) Dicitur does not mean “we are told,” (4) decretum is not a participle and (5) it does not agree with ordine. It is a nominative noun and is the subject of the verb. The point is that creation and redemption come through the same agent, Christ. This point is then connected to the use of “wisdom” in Proverbs: Solomon uses “wisdom” as the author of Hebrews uses “Son” (and [6] there is no “this” before “wisdom” in the Latin), to refer both to the agent of creation and to the agent of redemption, once again phrased in a markedly Lutheran key.
Two sentences later, postea is rendered as “finally,” when it really means “afterwards.” In the next sentence after that, we find this:
Haec omnia miranda opera nominat hic ludos et delectationes sapientiae Dei.[10]
Cooper and Wengert:
Solomon refers here to all of these marvelous works that are to be marveled upon—the “play” and “delights” of God’s wisdom. (61)
But aside from the infelicity of “marvelous works… to be marveled upon,” which does not have a basis in the text—it reads to me like two different draft translations of miranda, both of which were accidentally left in instead of one being deleted—their translation obscures the point, which is to gloss Prov. 8:31, thus: “[Solomon] here names all these wondrous works [viz., those just mentioned in the preceding catalog] the ‘games’ and ‘delights’ of the wisdom of God.”
In the next sentence, the subject changes from “Wisdom” to “Son” part of the way through, and subsequently the Son should remain the subject for the rest of the sentence (as is proven by the masculine ipso), but Cooper and Wengert revert to (the feminine) “Wisdom.”
Two sentences later, the translators add “Thus” at the beginning of the sentence that reads “Thus, Solomon distinguishes this guiding, divine wisdom promulgated through the Word from human shrewdness” (61), indicating that it follows logically or inferentially from what has gone before. But it does not, and there is therefore no corresponding word in Melanchthon’s Latin. Instead, he is beginning a new thought that follows afterwards, the distinction between the wisdom of God and the cleverness of man.
Finally, in the passage about the results of divine wisdom cited above, Melanchthon has:
Sapientia divia est felix, efficax et salutaris, et tandem adfert laetos exitus, etiamsi aliquandiu differuntur.[11]
Cooper and Wengert render this as:
For divine wisdom is fruitful, effective, and redemptive, ultimately bringing delightful results, even though they are deferred for some time. (61)
Here, they mischaracterize the phrase aliquandiu differuntur as “[the results] differ to some degree” (roughly the equivalent of “your mileage may vary”), when what it actually means is that “[the results] are deferred for some time” (a remark about God working according to his own timeline).
All of this is found within the space of a few pages. Such mistakes could be multiplied from the rest of the commentary. Again, some are of greater moment than others, and readers of Latin will have to judge for themselves. Those without Latin, however, must rely on versions in their own language. And if much of the foregoing seems somewhat pedantic, I can only say in my defense that pedantry is a large part of accurate translation. It cannot be omitted when creating a text that many readers will be unable to check against the original.
This is perhaps doubly so in the case of Lutheran sources, since the Lutheran tradition is nothing if not a tradition of translation, going all the way back to the work of its namesake (as indicated in the first paragraph above) and his right-hand man, as well as a tradition committed to worrying about inaccurate translations: See the very first lines of what is usually heralded as the starting bell of the Reformation, Luther’s Ninety-five Theses. (Around the same time, Melanchthon was complaining about the state of Aristotelian studies in a Latin tradition that had drifted away from the Greek sources.)[12] While the drift of Melanchthon’s meaning is generally clear in the work of Cooper and Wengert, it is to be hoped that a second edition will rectify the mistakes in this first one. In the meantime, Anglophone readers will be grateful to have this previously inaccessible text in their hands.
E.J. Hutchinson is Associate Professor of Classics and Chairman of the Collegiate Scholars Program at Hillsdale College.
Corpus Reformatorum [hereafter CR] 1,983. The translation is my own. ↑
The editors note how exceptional this is (xxvii). ↑
One might put this a bit differently. It is not that there is no one else who writes from the perspective of both Renaissance humanism and Evangelical theology. But a claim to Melanchthon’s “uniqueness” might at least be staked in relation to his role as the fountainhead for such an outlook in Protestant northern Europe. ↑
Cf. Philip Melanchthon, Commonplaces: Loci Communes 1521, trans. Christian Preus (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2014), 95. ↑
For a convenient summary of these three uses roughly contemporary with the text under discussion, see Philip Melanchthon, The Chief Theological Topics: Loci Praecipui Theologici 1559, trans. J.A.O. Preus, 2nd ed. (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2011, 120-24. ↑
CR 14,19. ↑
CR 14.19. ↑
CR 14.19. ↑
CR 14,19. ↑
CR 14.19. ↑
CR 14.19. ↑
See Melanchthon’s inaugural address at the University of Wittenberg, De corrigendis adulescentiae studiis (CR 11,15-25), delivered in August 1518 (translated into English as “On Correcting the Studies of Youth” in Ralph Keen, A Melanchthon Reader [New York: Peter Lang, 1988], 47-57), and cf. his comments earlier in that same year at the conclusion of his Greek grammar, published while still in Tübingen, about the effort of himself and others “to restore the study of Aristotle” (ad instauranda Aristotelica) (CR 1,26-17). Recent discussion can be found in Günter Frank, “Melanchthons Tübinger Plan einer neuen Aristoteles-Ausgabe,” in Vom Schüler der Burse zum “Lehrer Deutschlands”: Philip Melanchthon in Tübingen, ed. Sönke Lorenz et al. (Tübingen: Stadtmuseum Tübingen, 2010), 105-15. ↑