MELANTONE, FILIPPO. — Collaborator and friend of Luther, born at Bretton (Palatinate) on 16 February 1497, died at Wittenberg on 16 April 1560.
Of a prosperous family and related to the humanist Reuchlin, who persuaded him to grecize the name Schwarzerde as Melanchthon, he received an intensely humanistic education at Heidelberg and Tübingen. He soon applied himself not only to the editing of Latin classics (Terence, 1516), but also to the study of the Fathers and of the Greek text of the New Testament; in the controversy between Reuchlin and the professors of Cologne, he took Reuchlin’s side. In 1518, at only twenty-one years of age, he obtained the chair of Greek at the recently founded University of Wittenberg, and began teaching with a programmatic address, De corrigendis adolescentiae studiis, which also touched on theology. Here he came under Luther’s influence, taking his place beside him by polemicizing decisively against Eck and formulating, even before Luther, the thesis of the Bible as the supreme doctrinal authority. In 1519 he became a bachelor of theology; he never wished, however, to accept a doctorate in theology, considering himself fundamentally a philologist and grammarian.
Nevertheless, M. was to become the author of the first treatise of Lutheran theology, his Loci communes rerum theologicarum seu hypopioses theologiae (1520–21), which deals with sin, Grace, free will, the law, the Gospel, faith, justification, and regeneration, and which was greatly expanded in subsequent editions (cf. in vol. XXI of the Corpus Ref., the 2nd ed. [Halle 1535], and the 3rd [ibid. 1543]).
In 1522 M. had to confront at Wittenberg the iconoclastic radicalism of the Anabaptists, coming from Zwickau, and of Carlostadius, who tended to push the reform as far as the overthrow of traditional worship; it was M. who summoned Luther from his refuge in the Wartburg so that he might intervene with his authority and energy. On this occasion M.’s conservative tendency became apparent, as did his concern to preserve, as far as possible, ecclesiastical institutions—especially worship and organization—in continuity with tradition. This conservative tendency is also particularly significant in the Confessio augustana (1530), signed by the Protestant princes but drafted by him at the commission of the Elector of Saxony. In it, the doctrinal points of divergence from Catholicism are either omitted or concealed, and the reform is presented essentially as practical in nature, as the elimination of abuses supposedly introduced by scholastic terminology and canon law. The conservative character of the document, and therefore of M.’s thought, emerges with complete clarity when it is compared with the tone of intransigence and violence in the Smalcald Articles drafted by Luther (1537). It is true that in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession (the response to the Confutatio catholica), likewise drafted by M. and published under his name, the polemical note is heightened, as it is also in the De potestate Papae of 1537, written and disseminated by him in view of the Council convened at Vicenza for that year. M.’s conciliatory tendency re-emerged in the religious colloquies of 1540–41, in which, representing the reformers, he sought to support Charles V’s policy of mediation and, for example, on the points concerning the effects of original sin, man, and the nature of justification, accepted the formulas proposed by Pighius and Contarini. Even after 1548, during the Augsburg interim, in the lively controversy concerning the adiaphora, he supported a policy favoring Catholicism, maintaining that the practices of worship reimposed by Charles V in Saxony after the defeat suffered by the Smalcald League at Mühlberg were to be regarded as “indifferent,” and as binding neither on the conscience nor on Lutheran conviction.
M. was above all an organizer and a humanist. As an organizer, he gave structure to the Church of Electoral Saxony in the Instructions to the Visitors of the Parish Priests (1528), for which Luther wrote the preface. In this and other similar writings, M. took care to restore discipline, order, and uniformity in teaching and in the practice of worship; he recommended respect for constituted authority in the Church, laid down rules to avert the laxist consequences of the principle of salvation by faith alone, and insisted on the practice of good works insofar as they are commanded by God, even though they are to be considered devoid of meritorious value.
As a humanist and philologist, he collaborated with Luther in his German translation of the Bible, vigorously upheld the decisive preeminence of its literal sense against the four senses recognized by traditional scholastic exegesis, edited many ancient authors, wrote manuals for the study of Latin and Greek, as well as commentaries on works of rhetoric, dialectic, physics, and ethics and politics, school manuals for these disciplines, and numerous academic disputations on the subject. An introduction to universal history encompassing ecclesiastical history is the Chronicon Curionis. He promoted the creation and reorganization of many Latin schools, often determining their structure, as, for example, in the reorganization of the churches and schools of Wittenberg (1533). The guiding principle of this organization of studies, which is also significant for his conception of the study of theology, was that philosophy and the sciences should constitute the foundations of properly theological study. It emerges clearly in the reorganization of the universities, where M. left his deepest imprint. The faculties of arts became thoroughly humanistic: logic, which at that time predominated in teaching, had to yield to languages—namely, in addition to classical Latin, Greek and Hebrew, which were granted outright preeminence because they are the languages in which the original text of the Bible was written. The classics displaced the medieval grammarians in the study of Latin; philosophy, embracing the various branches of knowledge, was taught on the basis of Aristotle, but also of Cicero and other ancient writers. Theology retained its preeminence even in the study of the “bonae litterae.” It was, however, above all an exegesis of Sacred Scripture, according to the principle affirmed by Luther; the same dogmatic principles had to be developed and defended in an exegetical and scriptural setting. Only at a later stage could systematic expositions of dogma be added. The old universities to which the Melanchthonian reform was applied were Frankfurt, Leipzig, Rostock, and Heidelberg; the new ones, created with structures inspired by him, were Marburg (1527), Königsberg (1544), and Jena. It was for this extensive pedagogical work that M. was called “Praeceptor Germaniae.” In this orientation of studies, M. appears as an advocate of Christian humanism, that is, of the subordination of the methods and results of philosophy to the requirements of theology, understood as exegesis of Sacred Scripture and as the conceptual elaboration of the biblical Revelation contained therein.
In this sense, the foremost characteristic of M.’s personality ultimately proves to be that of the theologian: and this not only because theological activity quantitatively (controversial works, commentaries on the books of the Old Testament and the New Testament, especially on the Letters of St. Paul, letters referring to theological problems) predominates in his literary output, but because it was precisely in the theology of the innovators that M. introduced motifs which gave it a distinctive imprint, in part in antithesis to Luther’s intentions. His theological conception may be recognized in the 1535 edition of the Loci, which precisely reveal his distancing from certain positions of his teacher and the influence of humanistic demands upon M. Thus the radical divine determinism concerning salvation is mitigated; a certain capacity of human free will to do good is affirmed, thereby establishing the premises of the “synergistic” position concerning the relationship between Grace and free will; God is not the cause of sin, and man is responsible for his acts. Man’s salvation requires his cooperation, although one cannot speak of merits on his part. Similarly, M. emphasized, also in the theological sphere, the necessity of good works, even if he referred above all to the ethical-social and ecclesiastical point of view; they are necessary for eternal life, insofar as they must follow the reconciliation of the sinner, or, in other words, insofar as a new spiritual life must manifest itself in the Christian.
On three points M.’s conception diverged more sharply from that of Luther, giving rise among the disciples (called “Philippists,” whereas Luther’s followers, following Flacius, defined themselves as “Gnesio-Lutherans” and challenged M. over the modifications he introduced into the Augsburg Confession [the 1541 ed. variata]) to a lively and prolonged controversy which at certain moments even seemed to endanger the unity of the new Churches. First of all, concerning the conception of the consequences of original sin for man’s natural powers: in this regard, as has already been mentioned, M. rejected Luther’s radical pessimism, and M.’s point of view ultimately triumphed in the Formula of Concord of 1578. Secondly, concerning the manner of understanding justification, which M. regarded as the mere, purely extrinsic, “forensic” imputation of Christ’s merits; hence, in no way sanctification, which he clearly distinguished from it as a second moment—positive justification, the infusion of the Holy Spirit, inner regeneration; this conception too prevailed in the Formula of Concord. Thirdly, in the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper, in which M. inclined toward the idea of a merely spiritual presence of Christ among the faithful, and hence toward Calvinist symbolism, provoking from the Lutherans against him and his disciples the persistent and serious accusation of “crypto-Calvinism.” The Lutheran confessional formulas explicitly maintained on this point the principle of the real presence of Christ’s Body in the Eucharistic elements.
M.’s influence, though contested, became more pronounced after Luther’s death (1546), through the particular motifs of his theology, but even more through his concept of the function of theology, as right thinking concerning the word of God, in the life of the faithful and in that of the Church: it is M. who laid the foundations of Lutheran orthodoxy as a requirement of the Church, with reference to the professions of faith, to be regarded as the genuine formulation of the thought of Sacred Scripture, and as the norm and limit of teaching. M. thus imposed his personality within the framework of the Lutheran reform as that of the systematizer, alongside the figure of Luther, who represented that of the awakener.