The names of Martin Luther, Immanuel Kant and John Henry Newman do not go unnoticed in the history of philosophy and theology in recent centuries. Each of them, with their own peculiarities, contributed ideas or gave rise to currents that have marked history in its broadest sense.
Martin Luther
Before Descartes and Pascal is the German Martin Luther (1483/1546), a native of Eisleben (Saxony).
On July 2, 1505, surprised by a storm, after feeling how lightning struck very close to him, he made a promise to become a friar. Fifteen days later he entered an Augustinian convent.
In the convent she recalled, years later, "we paled at the name of Christ alone, because he had always presented himself to us as a severe, irritated judge against us all".
A Doctor of Theology, he was a great reader of the Bible, although, because of his markedly subjective way of being, he did not accept it in its entirety as the Word of God, rejecting entire books, such as the Epistle of James and the Apocalypse.
The dark features of his subjective vision of God induced him to a serious fear for his salvation. He wanted to take refuge in the reading of the New Testament, but he did not succeed, for he stumbled upon the text of the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans 1, 17; his reading at first irritated him, for he saw that, in the Gospel itself, a justice of God was manifested behind which Luther saw the choleric Judge who frightened him so much.
After some time, in the middle of the academic year 1513-14, he calmed down and felt secure in understanding the righteousness of God as a righteousness that God gives to those who have faith, in which the righteous live.
In the course of his dispute over indulgences, which began in 1517, Luther went so far as to assert that the only norm of the faith is the sola scripturaHe also proclaimed the free examination of the Scriptures, apart from the Magisterium and Tradition of the Church, maintaining also that Christianity, as a congregation of the faithful, is not a visible gathering, nor does Christ have a Vicar on earth.
Immanuel Kant
A couple of centuries later, Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in the German town of Konigsberg, where he spent his life until his death in 1804.
From a modest pietist Lutheran family, when he became a young man, distancing himself from the faith of his parents, he began to orient himself towards secular ethics. From 1770 he was an ordinary professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of his hometown.
According to his thought, there is in man, in addition to his psycho-physical structure - linked to the laws of nature -, a rational spirit governed by the law of freedom: but the human being has a conscience of duty and this makes it possible to assure that man is a moral being, a being, in addition to being free, responsible.
In 1781 he published his Critique of pure reason where he affirms that we know things as our intelligence presents them to us, but not as they are in themselves. Consequently, the three great realities - the soul, the world and God - are presented to Kantian thought only as ideas, since there is no sensible experience of the soul, the world or God, and only this experience guarantees the effective existence of the objects of our thinking.
Subsequently, in its Critique of practical reason (1788), he wrote: "Two things fill my soul with an admiration and respect which are constantly renewed and increased the more assiduously the thought occupies itself with them: the starry sky above my head and the moral law within me... The first glance at this incalculable multitude of worlds destroys my importance as an animal creature, whose matter, of which it is formed, after having enjoyed for a short time a vital force, must be returned to the planet it inhabits which, in its turn, is but a point in the totality of the universe. The second look, on the contrary, enhances my value through my personality, and the moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality and of the whole sentient world..."
Kant also thought that the complete human good is composed of virtue and happiness; and, since in this world, complete happiness does not follow virtue, the voice of conscience demands the existence of someone who puts things in their place: that someone, for Kant, is God, who, in order to grant happiness to virtuous people, arranged eternal life for them.
John Henry Newman
At the beginning of the 19th century, John Henry Newman was born in 1801 in London, the son of John, a British businessman, and Jemina, a descendant of a family of French Calvinists who had taken refuge in the United Kingdom.
At the age of fifteen his first conversion took place in which he discovered the only two beings that, according to the young Newman, can be known in an evident way: oneself and the Creator (Apology, I).
In 1824 he was ordained a priest of the Anglican Church to which he belonged until the age of forty-four. At the end of his study of the Development of Christian doctrineHe came to the conclusion that it is in the Catholic Church that the faith of the first Christians is maintained. On October 9, 1845, he was received into the Catholic Church.
Ordained a Catholic priest in 1847, he was appointed Rector of the newly constituted Catholic University of Dublin, a position he held for about ten years. In 1870 he published his work An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent (trans. esp. Religious assent. Essay on the rational motives of faith).
In 1879 he was made a cardinal by Pope Leo XIII, and Newman chose the motto Cor ad cor loquitur. He died on August 11, 1890. He was beatified in 2009, during the pontificate of Benedict XVI and canonized in 2019 by Pope Francis.
In his work Apology pro vita suaHe says that certainty is the consequence of the cumulative force of certain given reasons which, taken one by one, would be only probabilities. That he believed in God on the basis of probability, he believed in Christianity on the basis of probability, he believed in Catholicism on the basis of probability. He also believed that He who created us has willed that in mathematics we should reach certainty by rigorous demonstration, but that in religious inquiry we should reach certainty by means of accumulated probabilities; and that this certainty leads us, if our will cooperates with His, to a conviction which rises higher than the logical force of our conclusions.
In the same work he says: I am compelled to speak of the infallibility of the Church as a disposition willed by the mercy of the Creator to preserve religion in the world and to restrain that freedom of thought which is one of our greatest natural gifts, to rescue it from its own self-destructive excesses.
