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Shiavault - a Vault of Shia Islamic Books A Short History of Ethics: a History of Moral Philosophy From the Homeric Age To the Twentieth Century CHAPTER 10: LUTHER, MACHIAVELLI, HOBBES, AND SPINOZA MACHIAVELLI AND LUTHER are morally influential authors about whom books on moral philosophy rarely contain discussions.

This is a loss, because it is often in books such as these, rather than in those by more formally philosophical writers, that we discover the concepts which philosophers treat as the given objects of their discussion in the course of manufacture. Machiavelli and Luther were authors much in vogue among the Victorians. Hegel and Carlisle, Marx and Edward Caird, all recognized in them the masters of their own society; and in this they were right.

Machiavelli and Luther mark in their different ways the break with the hierarchical, synthesizing society of the Middle Ages, and the distinctive moves into the modern world. In both writers there appears a figure who is absent from moral theories in periods when Plato and Aristotle dominate it, the figure of “the individual.” In both Machiavelli and Luther, from very different points of view, the community and its life are no longer the area in which the moral life is lived out.

For Luther the community is merely the setting of an eternal drama of salvation; secular affairs are under the rule of the prince and the magistrate, whom we ought to obey. But our salvation hangs on something quite other than what belongs to Caesar. The structure of Luther’s ethics is best understood as follows.

The only true moral rules are the divine commandments; and the divine commandments are understood in an Occamist perspective-that is to say, they have no further rationale or justification than that they are the injunctions of God. To obey such moral rules cannot be to satisfy our desires; for our desires are part of the total corruption of our nature, and thus there is a natural antagonism between what we want and what God commands us to perform.

Human reason and will cannot do what God commands because they are enslaved by sin; we therefore have to act against reason and against our natural will. But this we can do only by grace. We are saved not by works, for none of our works are in any way good. They are all the product of sinful desire.