Hi, I'm Peter Adams, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought

to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College, London, and the

LMU in Munich, online at historyofilosovie.net.

Today's episode, more Lutheran than Luther, Philip Melanchthon.

By this point, it should be clear that humanism had quite a bit to do with the reformation.

We've seen how humanists and reformers joined in attacking both the style and the substance

of scholastic philosophy, and how the great humanist Erasmus shared many priorities and beliefs

with Luther, even if they disagreed over the issue of free will. But it's only now that we're

reaching the best example of a reformer who was also a humanist, Philip Melanchthon.

If Erasmus and Luther had had a child together, which admittedly is hard to imagine for all kinds

of reasons, then Melanchthon might have been that child. Inspired by a curricula and Erasmus,

he wrote on rhetoric and lamented the barbarisms of the schoolmen, even going so far as to

compose a reply to Pico de la Mirandolas, ironically eloquent letter in defense of bad scholastic Latin.

Even his name was a humanist joke. It seems to have been his great uncle Johannes Reuchlin,

the humanist famously maligned for his expertise in Hebrew, who suggested the name Melanchthon as a

Greek version of the family name Schwarz-Ed, meaning Black Earth. Yet Erasmus called this fellow

humanist, more Lutheran than Luther himself, and not without reason. Melanchthon taught for many

years at Bittenberg and was thus a close colleague and ally of Luther's. Melanchthon used his lectures

and writings to promote the teachings of the Reformation. He unhesitatingly adopted such court doctrines

as the priesthood of all believers, the grounding of theology and scripture alone, and the merely

customary status of church rituals like the Mass. Like Luther, he was willing to direct criticism

at ancient religious authorities. Instead Luther and Melanchthon, in effect, set themselves up as the

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