The mature Luther built upon and expanded the views of beauty (pulchritudo, decus, species, or forma) established in his earlier research in the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–15), the Lectures on Romans (1515–16), and the Heidelberg Disputation (1518). Following Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysius, Luther’s medieval forebears believed that beauty is to be discerned in proper proportion and light. Likewise, they believed that all beautiful things actually participate not only in truth and goodness but also in beauty itself, a perspective called pancalism. Thomas Aquinas expanded the Augustinian and Pseudo-Dionysian criteria of proportion and light by adding a third criterion for beauty: completeness or perfection. By no means did Luther reject these three criteria for beauty, at least when beauty is seen not with respect to God’s evaluation of sinful humans, but instead with respect to the evaluation of beauty as it exists in the world (coram mundo). As we shall see, these criteria are integral to the Reformer’s view of the first humans’ original righteousness (iusticiae originalis) as he portrayed it in his late Lectures on Genesis.1 However, the Reformer broke with these criteria when examining beauty as claimed for sinners in the presence of God (coram deo). There the gospel subverts such standards: Christ who is beauty itself became ugly by identifying with sinners so that those made ugly through sin might become beautiful in God’s eyes.
Luther’s view requires a distinction between a law perspective and a gospel perspective on beauty. So he maintained that proportion, brightness, and completeness are appropriate standards coram mundo by which to assess beauty. But coram deo these criteria of beauty do not apply. Why? Unrepentant sinners view Christ as ugly because they are offended by his association with the lowly; they do not believe that they need his mercy. However, repentant sinners glory in Christ’s beauty, which is his compassion, because they are hungry, even desperate, for God’s forgiveness and mercy. Repentant sinners are adorned in Christ’s beauty as a gift given externally to them. Forensically speaking, God judges the ugly to be beautiful for Jesus’s sake. For Luther, in the words of the Heidelberg Disputation (1518), sinners are not loved because they are attractive (beauty as merit they could claim before God); instead, they are attractive because they are loved (God’s love beautifies them by claiming them).2 Luther thus subverts medieval views of beauty.
The early Luther ruled out any beauty in the sinner because, before God, sinners can claim nothing of either goodness or beauty for themselves, which, of course, is exactly what sinners want to do. Instead, such claims are shattered by God’s accusing law. Instead of riding on their claims, sinners are placed wholly into God’s hands. Medieval theologians appropriated beauty as the property or distinctive characteristic of the Second Person of the Trinity. In essence, Luther agrees here with his forebears: “He who sees the use of a thing sees the Holy Spirit, he who discerns the form or beauty of a thing sees the Son, and he who considers the substance and continuing existence of things sees the Father. These three—substance, form, and goodness—cannot be separated.”3 Christ as beauty, however, is not beautiful to sinners because he is a threat to their defense mechanisms. He makes those beautiful in their own eyes to be ugly, and those made ugly through the accusations of God’s law he makes beautiful. Christ thereby subverts any and all systems governed by self-justification. As God’s justifying word of forgiveness establishes new life within sinners, they more and more are conformed to the image of the crucified; that is, their fear, love, and trust in God above all things deepen.
A wider consequence of Luther’s establishing beauty as an expression of God’s overflowing love to accused sinners threatened by God’s wrath is to extinguish the centrality of desire as the core of human identity. Instead, for Luther, faith in God or lack thereof (which is tantamount to faith in oneself) replaces desire as the key to human nature. But, no doubt, humans are creatures of desire, and ultimately their desire will be fulfilled in their future with God. Speaking of eternal life, Luther affirmed, “But in Him [God] all our needs and wants will be satisfied.”4 Desire in the first place is established in the faith of the heart. That to which the heart clings is the key to human desire. In this chapter, we will examine a few of Luther’s later Psalms lectures (1530s and 1540s), the Lectures on Galatians (1535), and the Lectures on Genesis (1535 and following years) to see how Luther developed his mature outlook on beauty, specifically the beauty of Christ who rescues sinners, the beauty of the new life that God establishes for those of faith, and the sheer, unblemished beauty of prelapsarian humanity.
Beauty Sub Contrario in Selected Psalms (1530s)
Luther’s early perspectives on beauty came to the fore by means of his exegesis of the Psalter in the Dictata super Psalterium. The book of Psalms often claims that both God and the Messiah are beautiful and hence trustworthy and desirable. Luther’s early exegesis of Psalms 45, 51, and 112 made him think about the nature of beauty and its application to how humans should render God his due. At this early stage of the Reformer’s career, his perspective has been designated a “theology of humility,” because for Luther those closest to God are those who actively humble themselves before God or who are passively humbled through various crosses and trials. Increasingly in the Dictata and his Lectures on Romans (1515–16) Luther moved toward this passive role for humanity coram deo and, conversely, an active role of God as accuser or granter of mercy. The upshot of his work with respect to beauty is a paradoxical approach: “Whoever makes himself beautiful [pulchrum], is made ugly [fedatur]. On the contrary, he who makes himself ugly, is made beautiful.”5 It is to the humble that God gives his grace. For any human to claim any divine trait, name, or attribute for oneself, such as goodness, beauty, or freedom, is to take from God what properly belongs to God.
As Luther moved away from a theology of humility and toward a theology of the cross in which humans’ active role in humbling themselves before God is consistently exchanged for a passive role of being humbled by God through the accusations of the law, such paradoxical themes about beauty are reinforced. God kills sinners just so that he can make them alive through the risen Christ. But such a dynamic sets up a discrepancy between appearance and reality. Christ appears ugly, if not physically, then in his person, at least to sinners, who detest his mercy because they trust in their self-sufficiency before God; in reality Christ is beautiful—indeed beauty itself. Similarly, sinners appear beautiful to themselves but in reality are ugly to God, whose judgment instead of sinners’ ugliness is definitive and final. Finally, Christians are in no position to claim beauty for themselves; rather, they can claim beauty only as it is imputed to them by Christ. These themes are set forth and expanded in the mature Luther’s commentaries on various psalms in the 1530s and 1540s. Most importantly, righteousness by faith, in the Reformer’s judgment, is simply an expression of God’s beauty. God’s beauty is an expression of his righteousness. Coram deo, justification is beauty and God’s imputed beauty (Christ himself) is justification. With respect to the imputation of beauty: the beauty outside the eye of the beholder is created by the eye of the beholder. That is the nature of God’s beholding.6
The most pertinent material about beauty in Luther’s later Psalm commentaries is found in his remarks on Psalms 8 and 45. The commentary on Psalm 8 is a sermon that Luther preached on November 1, 1537. In addressing Psalm 8:5, the Reformer asserts God’s vindication of Jesus Christ as the true and faithful witness in the face of opposition and adversity. Based on the description in Isaiah (53:2) of the suffering servant (Christ) having “no form nor comeliness,”7 Luther both early and late acknowledged Christ’s “ugliness” as due either to the fact that Christ was not actually physically handsome or to the fact that sinners are simply hardwired to see him as ugly. Here the assessment of Christ’s ugliness is repeated, particularly in relation to his rejection by his opponents. Luther assails Christ’s opponents, who include all unrepentant sinners. However, he also comforts repentant sinners who align themselves with Christ’s sufferings and who, with Christ, share in persecution when they confess the gospel. The Reformer develops a theme related to that of persecution, which ties beauty to the eschatological consummation of God’s purpose for his people. Thus Luther provides hope for those undergoing adversity, as Luther himself and many evangelical Christians had been.
Him [Christ] whom no one will support, who is forsaken by God and the whole world, Him thou [God] wilt snatch from suffering to peace, from anguish to consolation and joy. Because of the contempt, mockery, and shame He has endured Thou wilt adorn [zieren] Him with honor. Because of the ugly form [hesliche Gestalt] He had on earth Thou wilt dress [kleiden] Him preciously, so that He will be dressed, adorned, and crowned on all sides. Not only will He be beautiful [schoen] in body and soul for His own person, full of eternal salvation, wisdom, power, and might, full of heavenly majesty and deity, so that all creatures will regard and adore Him; He will also be gloriously adorned and decorated with His Christians and believers on earth and with the elect angels in heaven, in this world and in the world to come.8
At its core, this passage accentuates the distinction between appearance and reality with respect to beauty, the paradox that constitutes the core of Christ’s beauty and subverts the medieval affirmation of beauty as perfection, proportion, and light. As rejected by sinners, Christ’s beauty is hidden, is not apparent, and thus is not available for any to see. Nevertheless, Christ, along with his faithful, will be vindicated and honored by God. This assuring theme, which eschatologically ties beauty to hope, is repeated later in Luther’s Lectures on Genesis:
These reproaches she [the church] endures; they are her beautiful precious stones [schöne Edlestein] which she wears on earth, her jewels and golden chain. These are her gems and her most beautiful and precious [pulcherrima et preciosissima] jewels, with which God adorns [ornat] her in this life. So in this example a picture is drawn of how God tempts us privately and the whole church according to the example of Jacob. For He wrestles with her and conducts Himself like an adversary and enemy who wishes to forsake, cast away, and indeed destroy her.9
Appealing to comfort that martyrs long to hear, Luther claims that persecution is not to be avoided, for through such suffering God will establish the very marks of Christ’s identity in believers who constitute his church. Human reproach does not define the church’s identity, but instead God’s assessment of one’s fidelity to Christ is on trial. Steadfast while under assault, Christians will grow more in their faith and look less to themselves and so become more like Christ, who is the epitome of beauty itself. For Luther, behind such adversity God himself is present—albeit hidden—so that, again, in time of need believers may learn to flee to Christ.
Based on lectures given in 1532, Luther’s commentary on Psalm 45 clarifies that Christ’s beauty is to be looked for not in his physical but in his spiritual traits. This bears on gospel beauty: if beauty is a spiritual trait—for example, faithfulness—then beauty is found not in an Aristotelian golden mean but in God’s own self-giving and in trust in God’s promise. The Reformer repeats his conviction originally forged in the early theology of humility that sinners who claim beauty for themselves ignore their own ugliness coram deo. Again, the appearance of beauty, with its boastful attempt to claim merit before God, results in an ugliness before God and is ever at work in sinners’ lives. Sinful humans are blind to such ugliness and, even worse, to the beauty of Christ. Elsewhere, Luther notes that sinners can only see their nothingness coram deo through the Holy Spirit’s enlightenment. It is Christ alone who is truly beautiful.
It could perhaps be that some were fairer in form than Christ, for we do not read that the Jews especially admired His form. We are not concerned here with His natural and essential form, but with His spiritual form. That is such that He is simply the fairest in form among the sons of men, so that finally He alone is finely formed [solus formosus] and beautiful. All the rest are disfigured, defiled, and corrupted by an evil will, by weakness in their resistance to sin, and by other vices that cling to us by nature. This ugliness of man [turpitudines] is not apparent to the eyes; it makes no impression on the eyes, just as spiritual beauty makes no visual impression. Since we are flesh and blood, we are moved only by the substantial form and beauty that the eyes see. If we had spiritual eyes, we could see what a great disgrace it is that man’s will should be turned from God.10
But what makes up Christ’s beauty? Is it that, unlike sinners, he is truly righteous on the basis of the law? The Reformer does not indicate this. On the contrary, he claims that Christ’s beauty is his identifying and becoming one with sinners, all for the sake of helping and saving them. Christ “did not keep company with the holy, powerful, and wise, but with despicable and miserable sinners, with those ruined by misfortune, with men weighed down by painful and incurable diseases; these He healed, comforted, raised up, helped. And at last he even died for sinners.”11 So, what makes Christ beautiful simply violates the standard medieval criteria of proportion, clarity, and perfection. In aligning himself with sinners of all sorts, Christ associates with the disproportionate, the dark, and the imperfect, and he himself becomes all this ugliness. Hence, Christ’s beauty is one which is “hidden under the opposite appearance” (sub contraria specie).12
Instead of the three standard criteria of beauty as applying to Christ, Luther’s new criterion for beauty is Christ’s compassionate, self-originating love that reaches out to the lost and outcast, those who do not register as important, mighty, or valuable on the scale of law. Indeed, those in power, those with proportion, clarity, and perfection, threatened by such compassion, can only reject Christ and deem him ugly. It would seem then that the medieval criteria for beauty are constituted by law, not gospel. Luther’s quest then is to resituate beauty as gospel, if any beauty is to be had coram deo. Speaking of the righteous upholders of the law, the Pharisees, and their rejection of Christ, Luther notes:
[The Pharisees and priests] were so inflamed with hatred for Christ that they could not even bear to look at Him. While He was present and speaking among them, there still proceeded from His mouth rays—in fact, suns—of wisdom, and from His hands beams of divine power, and from his entire body suns of love and every virtue. But whatever of His beauty [pulchritudinum] He showed them was nauseating and an abomination to them, not through Christ’s fault but through their own.13
In Jesus Christ, God gives his beauty as compassion and his compassion as beauty to those oppressed by law, but such a gift threatens the power structures sustaining human self-righteousness. “That is the manner and nature of the world; it judges this King to be shameful beyond all the sons of men, and it holds His most beautiful gifts and virtues to be diabolical villainy and malice. We encounter the same thing today.”14
Divine beauty can appear only under the sign of its opposite (sub contrario) because it is a threat to human power, which insists on assigning people value based on what they offer or contribute to defend social order or growth. In contrast, God’s beauty is compassion, which makes no such distinctions between those worthy and those unworthy, and in fact undermines and destroys all such distinctions, at least with respect to God. Hence, a paradoxical approach to beauty is unavoidable: those who claim their own beauty are in fact ugly before God, while those who are ugly before other humans are in fact endeared to God. Jesus Christ, who is God’s beauty, is ugly to sinners and put to death by them because he is a threat to their ways of maintaining power and their own defense structures. For that reason, sinners are condemned and in need of mercy. In summary, Luther writes,
This King is hidden under the opposite appearance: in spirit He is more beautiful [pulcher] than the sons of men; but in the flesh all the sons of men are more beautiful than He, and only this King is ugly, as He is described in Isaiah 53:2, 3. . . . Therefore we see that delightful and pleasant things are stated of this King in the Psalm, but they are enveloped and overshadowed by the external form of the cross. The world does not possess or admire these gifts; rather it persecutes them because it does not believe. These things are spoken to us, however, to let us know that we have such a king. All men are damned. Their beauty [pulchritudinem] is nothing in God’s eyes. Their righteousness is sin. Their strength is nothing either. All we do, think, and say by ourselves is damnable and deserving of eternal death. We must be conformed to the image of this King.15
If humans are to have a beauty coram deo, they must receive it forensically and externally as a gift from God. Only as other than nature can grace permit nature to be nature, restore humans to nature. “Then you are beautiful [decora] not by your own beauty, but by the beauty of the King, who has adorned [ornavit] you with His Word, who has granted you His righteousness, His holiness, truth, strength, and all gifts of the Holy Spirit.”16 In other words, for the Reformer, beauty coram deo is another way of saying righteousness coram deo, and it is quite consistent to say that God’s righteousness is likewise beauty. Justification by faith alone is God imparting his beauty to sinners, clothing them in his beauty. To be justified by faith is to be made beautiful. In Christ humans are made both “lovely” and “acceptable to God.”
Our beauty [pulchritudinem] does not consist in our own virtues nor even in the gifts we have received from God, by which we exercise our virtues and do everything that pertains to the life of the Law. It consists in this, that if we apprehend Christ [Christum apprehendamus] and believe in Him, we are truly lovely [vere formosi], and Christ looks at that beauty [decorum] alone and at nothing besides. Therefore it is nothing to teach that we should try to be beautiful by our own chosen religiousness and our own righteousness. To be sure, among men and at the courts of the wise these things are brilliant, but in God’s courts we must have another beauty [aliam pulchritudinem]. There this is the one and only beauty [sola pulchritudo]—to believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.17
Defined not by law but by Christ, sinners are deemed beautiful. Perhaps to be consistent, we must say they are simultaneously beautiful and ugly, just as they are simul iustus et peccator (simultaneously just and sinful).
Beauty in the Lectures on Galatians (1535)
Unlike the later commentaries on the Psalms, which deal directly with Luther’s view of beauty, the Lectures on Galatians (1535) do not directly broach the theme of beauty. Even so, there are important challenges to the medieval view that proportion, clarity, and perfection apply to beauty coram deo. Likewise, a critique of these three factors coram deo can help clarify passages to which the late Tuomo Mannermaa has appealed in support of his view that human justification before God is a result of God’s indwelling believers, seen as divinization or theosis, instead of a forensic approach to justification as is traditionally maintained. And it is this latter task that we will attend to first. A passage in dispute is the following:
Such are the dreams of the scholastics. But where they speak of love, we speak of faith. And while they say that faith is the mere outline but love is its living colors and completion [vivos colores et plenitudinem ipsam], we say in opposition that faith takes hold of Christ and that He is the form [forma] that adorns and informs [ornat et informat] faith as color does the wall. Therefore Christian faith is not an idle quality or an empty husk in the heart, which may exist in a state of mortal sin until love comes along to make it alive. But if it is true faith, it is a sure trust and firm acceptance in the heart. It takes hold of Christ [Christus apprehenditur] in such a way that Christ is the object of faith [obietum fidei], or rather not the object but, so to speak, the One who is present in the faith itself. Thus faith is a sort of knowledge or darkness that nothing can see. Yet the Christ of whom faith takes hold is sitting in this darkness as God sat in the midst of darkness on Sinai and in the temple. Therefore our “formal righteousness” is not a love that informs faith; but it is faith itself, a cloud [nebula] in our hearts, that is, trust in a thing we do not see, in Christ, who is present especially when He cannot be seen.18
Luther offered an alternative to the Scholastic position that love is the form of faith. Catholic opponents feared that for Luther faith meant sheer intellectual assent alone; therefore, they reaffirmed the Scholastic conviction that faith must be formed or shaped as works of love that help one attain merit before God. Luther made it clear that faith is not reducible to intellectual assent alone. Instead, Christ is the form of faith.
Christ as the form of faith bears on beauty and vice versa in a number of important ways. Since we are dealing with a matter of “form,” we are dealing with something that medieval thinkers associated with beauty. For Alexander of Hales (ca. 1185–1245) and subsequent thinkers, “truth and beauty were then both defined in terms of form: truth was the disposition of form in relation to the internal character of a thing; beauty was the disposition of form in relation to its external character. In this way, beauty was given a new foundation, for the true, the good, and the beautiful were convertible. They differed only ratione—conceptually, logically.”19 More specifically, with respect to the difference between goodness and beauty, matters of goodness deal with final causality or affection while matters of beauty deal with formal causality or apprehension.20 We need not conjecture that Luther maintained the convertibility of the transcendentals in any metaphysical way. That would be inconsistent on his part, since from early to late in his career, Luther resists metaphysics as a comprehensive enterprise. If Luther were to maintain a convertibility between truth, beauty, and goodness, it is because Christ is all three and defines all three. It is through Christ that we experience God as truthful, beautiful, and good. It would seem that this position is exactly what he maintained.
To get to the heart of the argument in this passage, Luther notes that when Scholastic theologians maintain that love is faith’s “living colors and completion,” these theologians appealed to two medieval criteria of beauty: brightness and perfection. As we have seen, Luther rules out such criteria for beauty coram deo and instead maintains the paradox that Christ made ugly through sinners’ rejection is, as God’s compassion or overflowing goodness and mercy, the true beauty that transforms sinful humans apart from and independent of proportion, brightness, or perfection. It is not human effort that reflects the true brightness of beauty coram deo, but Christ himself, who as beauty is the “color” that informs, indeed “adorns,” faith.
Likewise, Luther’s appeal to Christ as the “form of faith” undermines the Scholastic assumption of an entelechy in which acts of love generate more goodness and beauty and thus achieve a higher level of perfection of its form. However, such thinking saturates the theology of divinization. In contrast, the Reformer builds on his earlier work in the Lectures on Romans where he indicates that God destroys an “old form” and grants humans a “new form,” which is nothing other than the agency of Christ himself in believers, of Christ who secures the conscience but also empowers the faithful for service.21 Without a sense of entelechic growth, it is awkward if not inaccurate to speak of this passage as advocating deification. Indeed, if such a text were viewed as advocating deification, then Luther would be contradicting what he later indicates in the Lectures on Galatians, where he writes that those attempting to “keep the law” are striving for their own deification:
They not only do not keep it, but they also deny the first Commandment, the promises of God, and the blessing promised to Abraham. They deny faith and try to bless themselves by their own works, that is, to justify themselves, to set themselves free from sin and death, to overcome the devil, and to capture heaven by force—which is to deny God and to set oneself up in place of God. For all these are exclusively works of the Divine Majesty, not of any creature, whether angelic or human.22
No doubt, the language of “form” indicates that Christ is no mere object of one’s apprehension but indeed is the agent of faith itself in believers’ lives. But this would seem to be hardly different from his earlier perspective in The Freedom of a Christian (1520), where he maintained that a Christian is a perfectly free lord over all, subject to none, and a perfectly dutiful servant, subject to all.23 Christ as the form of faith naturally includes both of his natures as divine and human. So on the one hand, Christians as kings and priests are elevated to a divine status of lordship, but on the other hand, Christians as servants are fitted for humble service to those in need. In a sense, the paradox that exists in Christ who is lord and servant, divine and human, is duplicated in that of his disciples. Regarding Luther’s occasional use of the idiom “deification,” William F. Schumacher notes:
[It] is not so much a term to describe the believer’s restored and renewed relationship to God, but rather refers to the resultant relationship to other people, expressed by a zeal to help the neighbor and pray for him. . . . For Luther the Christians’ vocation in the world, far from being a distraction or an obstacle to their spiritual life, is precisely the place where they show themselves to be truly spiritual and “vergottet.”24
Hence, in the Lectures on Galatians Luther describes faith itself as the “divinity of works [divinitatis operum], diffused throughout the works in the same way that the divinity is throughout the humanity of Christ.”25
When Luther uses the term “apprehension” (e.g., in Christus apprehenditur), here as elsewhere he is not indicating that faith is an exercise in seeking understanding, as the Augustinian and Anselmian traditions would have it. Its context instead is that of a guilty sinner harassed by the accusations of the law and needing freedom from both sin itself and God’s accusation, or that of a dead person needing new life. It is not a mere intellectual exercise, but something upon which one’s whole being and salvation rest. This is not to say there is no intellectual dimension to faith. Instead, it is to acknowledge that notitia (information) is enveloped in an overall portrait of faith as trust. In this Galatians commentary and elsewhere, Luther repeatedly urges those oppressed by sin and harassed by God’s accusing law to take hold of or apprehend Christ. One can do this because God makes himself to be a graspable God. The Reformer’s language is designed to help sinners undergoing Anfechtungen (spiritual attacks) to find relief from such harassment by clinging to Christ and finding reconciliation with God and attendant tranquility in him. In his “Commentary on Psalm 45” (1532), Luther illustrates this by presenting Christ as one who rescues such a guilty and harassed sinner: “It is like a man who has fallen into the middle of a stream. He catches the branch of a tree somehow to support himself above the water and be saved. So in the midst of sins, death, and anxieties we, too, lay hold on Christ with a weak faith. Yet this faith, tiny though it may be, still preserves us and rules over death and treads the devil and everything under foot.”26
With respect to the medieval criterion of brightness, Christ himself is the brightness of faith; that is, he establishes color for faith, but faith itself must be content with nothing other than a “darkness,” an apprehending of Christ in the “clouds.” Sinful humans can claim no brightness or color of their own. It must be granted them externally. Indeed, in this world human apprehension or “knowledge” or sight is beset by darkness. A clue for Luther’s way of thinking can be found in his earlier Commentary on the Magnificat (1521), where he advocates a tripartite view of human life: spirit, soul, and body. While we need not maintain that this tripartite view of human nature is Luther’s definitive perspective, it underscores his understanding of how we know God—specifically, how we know that God is for us. Of “spirit,” Luther writes that it, “the first part,” “is the highest, deepest, and noblest part of man. By it he is enabled to lay hold on things incomprehensible, invisible, and eternal. It is, in brief, the dwelling place of faith and the Word of God.”27 In other words, apart from faith in God’s word we can have no apprehension or knowledge of God or know God’s disposition toward us. We have no Christ or gospel apart from its proclamation. That our faith is a “cloud in our hearts” harkens all the way back to the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–15). The Psalter often presents the clouds as an abode of God’s presence or a symbol of how God comes to humans. In the Dictata, Luther noted, “For who sees Christ in His preachers and believers? No one, but He is believed to be in them and is understood by the light of the words and works which He sends through them as from the cloud. Hence He is in the cloud, that is, in the dim recognition of Him, by which He is recognized to be in others.”28
In a word, this passage in the Lectures on Galatians acknowledges Christ himself as truly beautiful for sinners in contrast to any good or beautiful deeds that sinners may wish to contribute to God. It urges repentant sinners to apprehend Christ and thus to know God’s mercy. Such apprehension is an expression of faith. It is “knowledge” because Christ as the “form” of faith and not sin or self-justification is the truth granted externally to the believer’s life. Faith itself is a “darkness” because it clings to the invisible (though audible, preached) Christ and not to its own visible works. But such apprehension implies that prior to it there must be one who mediates Christ: a preacher. Christian faith implies that the self is by no means a mediation of oneself by means of oneself, as an existentialist might put it; it claims that Christ himself takes over the core of a person through the word of God and that, thus, every Christian “self” is in reality not merely “decentered” but in fact is dead and buried with Christ. Indeed, in faith Christ himself is the proper agent in the Christian’s activities. The passage upon which we are commenting is about how a Christian is united with Christ. Such unity is established not by means of a continuous self-absorption into the divine, as many mystics would have it,29 but through the self’s being co-opted by Christ, who himself takes up his alien residency and agency within the believer. Again, with faith ascending into the darkness30 and having Christ in the cloud we deal with a beauty sub contrario, not one established in transparency or luminosity.
The early Luther affirmed that God is beauty and that all things are beautiful.31 However, in light of his overall theology we must qualify such metaphysical statements. In the Lectures on Galatians it is clear that a metaphysical approach to God as beauty is foreign to Luther. Indeed, the Reformer indicates that God is not beautiful outside of Christ and indeed is a threat. As he says,
For as in His own nature God is immense, incomprehensible, and infinite, so to man’s nature he is intolerable. Therefore if you want to be safe and out of danger to your conscience and your salvation, put a check on this speculative spirit. . . . Therefore begin where Christ began—in the Virgin’s womb, in the manger, and at His mother’s breasts. For this purpose he came down, was born, lived among men, suffered, was crucified, and died, so that in every possible way He might present Himself to our sight. He wanted us to fix the gaze of our hearts upon Himself and thus to prevent us from clambering into heaven and speculating about the Divine Majesty.32
The project of metaphysics fails as a road that grants access into God’s being independently of God’s self-giving in Jesus Christ. Luther rules out a metaphysical approach to divine beauty because it provides no security. Reason is capable of generating many machinations when it is not tethered to the Scriptures. Hence, contemplation is no journey beyond faith or other than faith. Instead, we are called to fix our gaze on Christ as he is presented in the preached word. Christ alone bridges God’s utter transcendence, which is insurmountable by either human thinking or doing. So Luther admonishes us to “take hold of Him [Christ]; cling to Him with all your heart, and spurn all speculation about the Divine Majesty; for whoever investigates the majesty of God will be consumed by His glory.”33 Like Moses, outside of Christ we are given only the backside of God. Luther supposes that metaphysics assumes a safe, neutral, scientific stance but that it proves to be an illusion. The more one attempts to dissect God, the more one ends up becoming dissected by God. Hence, the metaphysical path offers no assurance with respect to divine beauty but instead creates just its opposite. Its way grants no tranquility; that would be found in the promise alone. This is not to say that there are no metaphysical implications to Christology; instead it is to say that such metaphysical implications are guided by the grammar of Scripture and not vice versa.
Finally, that Christ is the bridge between God and humans rather than reason or law is reinforced through Luther’s designation of Christ as the “jewel” and faith as the “ring” that encircles and encloses this jewel: “Faith takes hold of Christ and has Him present, enclosing Him as the ring encloses the gem. And whoever is found having this faith in the Christ who is grasped in the heart, him God accounts as righteous.”34 This metaphor reinforces the importance of beauty because a jewel is something that is rare, precious, and desirable. Christ is desirable for those completely laid low and brought to nothingness. No longer looking to or counting on their own resources, nor seeking to affirm their own goodness or beauty, they can see Christ for the beauty that he is. Sinners reduced to nothing are in a position to receive Christ as their being, life, or identity. To be clear, however, this alien righteousness that justifies a person before God is due to the fact that “God accepts you or accounts you righteous only on account of Christ, in whom you believe,” and not because Christ indwells the Christian.35 Indeed, his beauty is apprehended just in the fact that he rescues sinners. Hence, Luther describes those justified by faith as able to bear all things easily since “everything within is sweet and pleasant” (suavia et dulcia).36
Lectures on Genesis (1535 and Following)
Luther’s commentary on the creation of humans and their “original righteousness” (iusticiae originalis) has extensive references to beauty. While his paradoxical understanding of Christ, who appears ugly but is in truth beautiful, and of people, who appear beautiful to themselves but are in fact ugly, undermines the medieval criteria for beauty as proportion, clarity, and completeness, these criteria that are excluded coram deo find a place coram mundo as Luther presents the fitness of human ability to care for creation as it originally comes directly from God’s hand. For this reason, we can draw a distinction between beauty associated with the gospel and beauty associated with the law. The former is not apparent to reason or the senses. Instead, it is claimed only on the basis of God’s imputing Christ’s righteousness to sinners. The latter has a place for these three medieval criteria. If anything, for Luther, when we deal with the creation of Adam, the problem with the medieval criteria coram mundo is that they say far too little. Indeed, the Reformer’s overall perspective on Adam’s qualities is similar to Albert the Great’s (ca. 1193–1280) view of beauty as “resplendence of form”:
Just as corporeal beauty requires a due proportion of its members and splendid colours . . . so it is the nature of universal beauty to demand that there be mutual proportions among all things and their elements and principles, and that they should be resplendent with the clarity of form.37
It is hard not to view Luther’s portrait of the prelapsarian Adam’s physical and mental traits as hyperbolic. Speaking of the image of God in Adam, and using the Augustinian trio of memory, intellect, and will, Luther notes:
Both his inner and his outer sensations were all of the purest kind. His intellect was the clearest, his memory was the best, and his will was the most straightforward—all in the most beautiful tranquility of mind [pulcherrima securitate], without any fear of death and without any anxiety. To these inner qualities came also those most beautiful and superb [pulcherrima et excellentissima] qualities of body and of all the limbs, qualities in which he surpassed all the remaining living creatures. I am fully convinced that before Adam’s sin his eyes were so sharp and clear that they surpassed those of the lynx and eagle. He was stronger than the lions and the bears, whose strength is very great; and he handled them the way we handle puppies. Both the loveliness and the quality of the fruits he used as food were also far superior to what they are now.38
No doubt Luther accentuated the sufficiency of Adam’s physical and mental prowess to serve as a just lord over the other creatures in Eden. Likewise, Luther heightened the contrast between humanity in a state of integrity and fallen humanity. Pivotal to this contrast is the peace of mind and security that the prelapsarian Adam experiences, unlike the postlapsarian Adam, who fears death. The prelapsarian Adam wholly living in filial fear, love, and trust in God, and thus in right relationship with God, has nothing to fear of death, or anything else for that matter. Hence, “before sin Adam had the clearest eyes, the most delicate and delightful odor, and a body very well suited and obedient for procreation. But how our limbs today lack that vigor!”39 Even stronger, the Reformer notes that through the fall, humans have lost
a most beautifully enlightened reason [pulcherrime illuminatam rationem] and a will in agreement with the Word and will of God. We have also lost the glory of our bodies, so that now it is a matter of the utmost disgrace to be seen naked, whereas at that time it was something most beautiful and the unique prerogative [pulcherrimum et singularis praerogativa] of the human race over all the other animals. The most serious loss consists in this, that not only were those benefits lost, but man’s will turned away from God.40
In fact, for Luther, due to the pervasiveness and perversion of sin, we are not able to comprehend the nature of the imago dei, the image of God in humans. For Augustine and the Scholastics, the image of God consisted of (1) memory, which should blossom in hope in God; (2) intellect, which should lead to faith in God; and (3) will, which should exercise itself in loving God. Indeed, God’s image would be perfected by means of humans exercising the gracious gifts of hope, faith, and love.41 For Luther, the definitive traits ascribed to the image of God—memory, intellect, and will—are presently “utterly leprous and unclean”42 due to sin. However, such convictions serve not just to chastise human disobedience but to accentuate the beauty and power of humans in their state of original righteousness. It is clear that the proportions of Adam’s members were commensurate with his needs and the task of taking care of Eden, “a garden of delight and joy” (deliciarum et voluptatis),43 and thus his sight stood superior to that of eagles or lynxes while his strength was greater than that of lions and bears. Luther makes it clear that in Eden, Adam and the other animals were not competitors for food or, least of all, planning to make a meal out of one another. Instead, Adam and the beasts ate from a “common table,” and would have lived on rye, wheat, and other products of nature had there been no sin.44
No doubt the human in original righteousness is complete or perfect in every way. It is only the criterion of color that Luther passes over—strange, since the name “Adam” in Hebrew seems to imply the redness of the soil out of which he was taken. While the Reformer does not examine the applicability of light as a criterion of beauty with respect to Adam and Eve, he had earlier described the creation of light as the most beautiful adornment of creation45 and the sun and moon as “most beautiful.”46 Even so, his overall portrait of Adam’s creation seems to reinforce medieval standards of beauty and make them to be viable criteria for evaluating the beauty of created things.
The affirmation of proportion (at least coram mundo) is likewise reinforced in the Lectures on Genesis as Luther agrees with Peter Lombard (ca. 1100–1160) that humans were “created for a better life in the future than this physical life would have been, even if our nature had remained unimpaired.” Repeatedly the Reformer states that “at a predetermined time, after the number of saints had become full, these physical activities would have come to an end; and Adam, together with his descendants, would have been translated to the eternal and spiritual life.”47 Indebted at this point to Augustine and the Pythagorean tradition in which Augustine stood, which so highly valued mathematics as the key to unlocking the meaning of reality, the cosmos, human nature, as well as the criterion of beauty itself, Luther writes,
When the body has gained strength, and mind and reason are fully developed in a sound body—only then does there come a gleam of the life of the intellect, which does not exist in other earthly creatures. With the support of the mathematical disciplines—which no one can deny were divinely revealed—the human being, in his mind, soars high above the earth; and leaving behind those things that are on the earth, he concerns himself with heavenly things and explores them. Cows, pigs, and other beasts do not do this; it is man alone who does it. Therefore man is a creature created to inhabit the celestial regions [terra coelestia] and to live an eternal life when, after a while, he has left the earth. For this is the meaning of the fact that he can not only speak and form judgments (things which belong to dialectics and rhetoric) but also learns all the sciences thoroughly.48
For Luther, the human ability to do mathematics, which in terms of harmony and rhythm of course includes music, indicates human destiny, which is more than physical—and indeed is properly spiritual. Humanity’s eternal destiny most certainly involves thought and contemplation. Presently sinners “have become deaf toward what Pythagoras aptly terms this wonderful and most lovely music coming from the harmony of the motions that are in the celestial spheres. But because men continually hear this music, they become deaf to it, just as the people who live at the cataracts of the Nile are not affected by the noise and roar of the water which they hear continually.”49
Finally, the beauty of Adam and Eve’s original righteousness indicates that nature and grace were not external to each other, as they are since the fall, but instead interpenetrated each other.
Let us rather maintain that righteousness was not a gift which came from without, separate from man’s nature, but that it was truly part of his nature, so that it was Adam’s nature to love God, to believe God, to know God, etc. These things were just as natural for Adam as it is natural for the eyes to receive light. But because you may correctly say that nature has been damaged if you render an eye defective by inflicting a wound, so, after man has fallen from righteousness into sin, it is correct and truthful to say that our natural endowments are not perfect but are corrupted by sin [non integra sed corrupta]. For just as it is the nature of the eye to see, so it was the nature of reason and will in Adam to know God, to trust God, and to fear God. Since it is a fact that this has now been lost, who is so foolish as to say that our natural endowments are still perfect?50
Certainly such a characterization of the relation between nature and grace indicates the depth of beauty, the “resplendence of form,” with which Adam and Eve were created. Adam’s nature as such was graced so that he lived in harmony with God, his wife, Eve, and his fellow creatures. It was natural for him to love God. Indeed, similar to a metaphor of Augustine’s, that God “fills us to the brim,”51 Luther’s Adam was “intoxicated with rejoicing toward God.”52 It is into such a state that God’s people and the world are being renewed. In his commentary on 1 Corinthians 15, Luther repeatedly indicates that the resurrection body will be beautiful.53 And, recalling his description of the happy exchange in The Freedom of a Christian, we find the same metaphor of intoxication to describe the properties of Christ shared by the Christian:
Since these promises of God are holy, true, righteous, free, and peaceful words, full of goodness, the soul which clings to them with a firm faith will be so closely united with them and altogether absorbed by them that it not only will share in all their power but will be saturated and intoxicated by them. If a touch of Christ healed, how much more will this most tender spiritual touch, this absorbing of the Word, communicate to the soul all things that belong to the Word.54
Comparing this passage with that of the Genesis passage immediately above, it is clear that grace restores human nature to its original righteousness. The promise of God is able to intoxicate the soul, making it love God, in a way that is reminiscent of original righteousness. In other words, nature needs not a self-driven perfection, but liberation. Through such liberation God will bring humans to their fulfillment. Healing the wounds of sin inflicted on the intellect and will and elevating them by means of a superadded gift of the Holy Spirit are insufficient for human need in light of sin. Instead, God remakes believers to be new creations. The upshot is: “In this life we lay hold of this goal [the likeness of God] in ever so weak a manner; but in the future life we shall attain it fully.”55 In other words, as our salvation, God is leading his people toward beauty.
Conclusion
What can be said of beauty in the mature Luther? In a word, beauty is not an insignificant concept in Luther’s thinking—unless one regards the doctrine of justification as insignificant. In fact, not only can one not understand Luther’s view of beauty apart from his doctrine of justification as God’s imputed righteousness to believers, which also calls them from death to life, it would seem that one also cannot fully understand God’s justification apart from beauty. God’s beauty in its most proper form is revealed as mercy granted in Christ. To assume that the topic of beauty is insignificant to Luther is to go against Luther’s own conviction that the question of beauty is crucial to human life with God: God loves sinners not because they are beautiful, but they are beautiful because they are loved.
Now, obviously, Luther’s predecessors did not make the distinction between God’s accusing and killing law and God’s promising and life-imparting gospel. For them, beauty remains on a continuum: God is beauty itself, and all created things are beautiful to some degree by participating in this beauty. Luther cannot affirm this view of beauty as it stands, and this is where he distinguishes himself from his predecessors. He certainly acknowledges that God and his creatures are beautiful. But he notes that sinful creatures are apt to claim matters like goodness or beauty (and freedom too)—which properly are names or traits belonging to God and not to creatures—for themselves. Indeed, ultimately they claim such traits so that they might claim righteousness in the presence of God. Thus they do not think they need God’s generosity or mercy, but instead believe they are entitled to God’s grace. Luther will have none of that and ends up distinguishing a creation beauty from a gospel beauty. Beauties in creation do not exist for securing one’s status coram deo. They do not serve as stepping-stones on which one can jump on the way to establishing eternal life. But that sinners would misuse creatures in no way jeopardizes creatures’ beauty. It is the gospel that allows sinners to drop their guards and appreciate the wonder, mystery, and dignity of creation as a gift from God.
The creation beauty, which is appropriate as a way to evaluate creaturely things as creaturely, includes the traditional medieval standards for beauty such as proportion, brightness, and perfection or integrity, even though they are hardly adequate for assessing beauty in creation. But these criteria are inappropriate when acknowledging the beauty of Christ. His beauty is instead compassion, mercy, and forgiveness, and it is hidden to the eyes of sinners because they refuse to live by God’s mercy alone. They want their own righteousness; indeed, they want to establish themselves as gods and to be done altogether with God’s divinity in their lives. So Christ is seen not as beautiful to them, but as ugly. And God’s law exposes human emptiness coram deo—sinners have no “beauty” that they can offer to God. Instead, as sinners they are ugly. The only beauty they can claim is to be clothed or adorned in Christ’s righteousness, given to them from without. The beauty of Christ is imputed to them and that is their righteousness coram deo. It is the basis for their identity as Christians: God’s children who are loved not because they are beautiful but instead are beautiful because they are loved.
In a sense, Luther affirms the pancalism of his predecessors, but not on the basis of establishing the convertibility of the transcendentals of goodness and beauty on metaphysical grounds. Indeed, God is hidden because what humans experience is often not God’s beauty, but what appears to be God’s indifference or downright antagonism. If there is to be any certainty with respect to beauty, it will be had in Christ alone. Christ is goodness and beauty, and through Christ humans can understand and appreciate the world as creation, as gift and as God’s communication to us. In other words, the gospel opens creation as beautiful and confirms the human intuition of its beauty, again, not on the basis of an intellectual argument but because faith resituates humanity away from its tendency to claim some divine status for itself and toward a childlike trust that receives the goodness of creation as it comes to humanity from the Creator.
Briefly, it needs to be said that the fact that Luther’s view of beauty coram deo is paradoxical does not entail that it is ambiguous. All too often, theologians misread Luther’s use of paradox to think that it undermines clarity of doctrine. Such is not the case at all. A parallel case would be when Christ tells us that whoever would save their life must lose it and whoever loses their life for his sake will find it (Mark 8:35). There is no ambiguity involved here whatsoever. With respect to Luther it is simply the fact that sinners invariably claim a status of divinity for themselves—such as claiming their own beauty or freedom, which are themselves properly divine names—and that they will be opposed by God’s law and will experience death. Yet it is to such nothings that God, who properly as Creator is to create ex nihilo, calls them into new life through trusting Christ Jesus. Far from implying ambiguity, Luther’s paradoxical approach to beauty reinforces his conception of original sin and God’s activity as Creator.
Finally, how might human life be different in light of Luther’s views of beauty? Very simply, that sinners are clothed with an alien righteousness that makes them beautiful is a trait that they can claim before both God and the world. Believers have a new identity in Christ—beauty. Likewise, enjoying this beauty in Christ, they can be open to the beauty with which God surrounds them in the world and thus “thank, praise, serve, and obey” God.56 In a word, parents always think of their children as beautiful, even more so in the case of God. And children are struck with awe and wonder at all sorts of things that they perceive as beautiful, things that adults have learned to take for granted. How much more then should men and women of faith be open to that beauty that God has fashioned in the world.57
1. LW 1:164 (WA 42:123.37).
2. Consider the upshot of thesis 28: “The love of God does not find, but creates, that which is pleasing [diligibile] to it. The love of man comes into being through that which is pleasing to it” (LW 31:57 [WA 1:354.35]).
3. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 4:196 (WA 43:276.33–36).
4. Commentary on 1 Corinthians 15 (1532–33), in LW 28:144 (WA 36:596.25).
5. Dictata super Psalterium (1513–15), in LW 11:263 (WA 4:111.7, 15).
6. Insight received from Robert Kolb, correspondence in spring 2014.
7. See, for example, “Commentary on Psalm 45” (1532), in LW 12:208 (WA 40/2:487.9).
8. “Commentary on Psalm 8” (1537), in LW 12:128 (WA 45:241.35–242.10).
9. LW 6:147 (WA 44:110.6–11).
10. “Commentary on Psalm 45” (1532), in LW 12:207 (WA 40/2:485.5–11).
11. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:208 (WA 40/2:486.11–12).
12. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:208 (WA 40/2:487.26). That beauty is “hidden under the opposite appearance” would influence Luther’s later preaching:
The world cannot and does not want Christ in the way He shows Himself, in the cross and an offensive form, not bringing what they desire: the power, honor, riches, glory, and praise for their own wisdom and holiness, etc. The world is completely sunk and drowned in its own desires and love for earthly goods. If it does not see and find such things, then it understands, sees, and knows nothing further, and its desire and love, hope and comfort cease; moreover, it cannot have the desire to be in danger of being robbed of such goods. But it especially cannot tolerate that its praise and glory for high gifts—its wisdom, virtue, and holiness—should be taken away and become sin and shame before God.
See “Gospel for Pentecost Sunday [John 14:23–31]” (1544), in LW 77:352 (paragraph 67) (WA 21:466.8–17).
13. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:208 (WA 40/2:487.15–20).
14. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:208 (WA 40/2:487.22–25).
15. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:208–9 (WA 40/2:487.26–39).
16. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:278 (WA 40/2:580.28–30).
17. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:280 (WA 40/2:583.19–27).
18. Lectures on Galatians (1535), in LW 26:129–30 (WA 40/1:228.27–229.21).
19. Umberto Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 23–24.
20. Eco writes the following regarding John of La Rochelle (ca. 1200–1245):
[He] simply took it for granted that the good and the beautiful were identical in objects themselves, and subscribed to the Augustinian view that honor or nobility (honestum) belonged in the realm of intelligible beauty. None the less, the good and the beautiful were different, “For beauty is a disposition of the good in so far as it pleases the apprehension, whereas the good strictly speaking has to do with the disposition in which it pleases our affections.” He goes on to add that God is related to final causes, beauty to formal causes. (ibid., 23)
21. Lectures on Romans (1515–16), in LW 25:204 (WA 56:218.18–219.2).
22. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:257–58 (italics added) (WA 40/1:404–5). See also the “Disputation against Scholastic Theology” (1517), thesis 17 (LW 31:10; WA 1:225), his exposition on Ps. 5:3 (WA 5:128.39–129.4), and the Treatise on Good Works (LW 44:32; WA 6:211) for his argument that the heart of sin is tantamount to self-deification.
23. LW 31:344 (WA 7:49.22–25).
24. Schumacher, Who Do I Say That You Are? Anthropology and the Theology of Theosis in the Finnish School of Tuomo Mannermaa (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2010), 124–25. Vergottet is the German term for “divinized.”
25. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:266 (WA 40/1:417.15–17).
26. “Commentary on Psalm 45,” in LW 12:262 (WA 40/2:559.37–560.2 and 560.15–19).
27. Commentary on the Magnificat (1521), in LW 21:303 (WA 8:550.28–31).
28. Dictata super Psalterium, on Ps. 104, in LW 11:321 (WA 4:175.33–35).
29. “This is not an ontological absorption into the other, as some medieval mystics envisioned salvation, but a union as mysterious as husband and wife becoming ‘one flesh’ . . . in which each preserves his/her own identity and delights in the other being different from oneself. In this kind of union self-seeking disappears into mutual commitment and devotion to the other” (Robert Kolb, Martin Luther: Confessor of the Faith [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009], 79).
30. Lectures on Galatians (1535), in LW 26:113 (WA 40/2:204.5).
31. Dictata super Psalterium, in LW 11:317–18 (WA 4:173.12–18).
32. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:29 (WA 40/2:77.20–78.13).
33. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:29 (WA 40/2:78.16–17).
34. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:132 (WA 40/2:233.17–19).
35. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:132 (WA 40/2:233.22–24).
36. Lectures on Galatians, in LW 26:133 (WA 40/2:234.27).
37. Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, 25.
38. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:62 (WA 42:46.18–27).
39. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:100 (WA 42:76.15–18).
40. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:141 (WA 42:106.12–17).
41. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:60 (WA 42:45.11–17).
42. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:61 (WA 42:46.7).
43. “The world was most beautiful [pulcherrimus] from the beginning; Eden was truly a garden of delight and joy” (Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:90 [WA 42:68.35–36]).
44. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:38 (WA 42:29.4).
45. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:39 (WA 42:29.25–26).
46. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:40 (WA 42:30.16).
47. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:56 (WA 42:42.24–27).
48. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:46 (WA 42:34.37–35.7).
49. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:126 (WA 42:94.33–37).
50. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:165 (WA 42:124.4–13).
51. Augustine, Confessions 1.5.
52. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:94 (WA 42:71.31).
53. Luther writes of the resurrection life, “You will always be strong and vigorous, healthy and happy, also brighter and more beautiful than sun and moon, so that all the garments and the gold bedecking a king or emperor will be sheer dirt in comparison with us when we are illumined by but a divine glance” (LW 28:142; WA 36:593.34–38); and he notes, “This will make the whole body so beautiful, vigorous, and healthy, indeed, so light and agile, that we will soar along like a little spark, yes, just like the sun which runs its course in the heavens” (LW 28:143; WA 36:494.40–495.1).
54. The Freedom of a Christian, in LW 31:349 (WA 7:53.15–20).
55. Lectures on Genesis, in LW 1:131 (WA 42:98.22–24).
56. BC 355 (BSELK: 870:16–18).
57. Again, I am grateful to Robert Kolb for this insight.