be established and secured through the legitimate power of the state” (PTA, 398–99). This habit of nondialectical thinking drives the French to conceive of freedom only as “the abstract faculty of choosing between contrary options, as the hypothetical independence of each citizen taken individually” (PTA, 383). The French “tend to treat each will abstractly, as if an individual could be separated and isolated from broader patterns of events, as if each were sufficient to himself, power for power, so that we then claim that all men are equally free. From this comes the economic maxim ‘Each for himself.’”55 This idea of freedom, Jaurès writes, is ghostly, otherworldly, immaterial, cut off from life. It is not a picture of substantive justice (PTA, 389). The French, as much as any nation, needed to learn something from the German tradition.
Jaurès proposes that everything really distinctive in German socialism, including its dialectic method of thought, comes from Luther. No political radical, Luther wanted “not to change society but to reform the realm of conscience and faith,” and he distanced himself from the peasant rebellions he helped to inspire. Despite Luther’s own intentions, however, his insistence on “the liberty to interpret and to comment” on Scripture, his doctrine of the priesthood of all Christians, and his conviction that “the sacraments only have merit when Christians have perfect equality and communion” helped to open a new era in which political life would be shaped by recurring waves of protest and reform. Luther never “wholly embraced the social question” even when he did find something to say about economic matters, as in his pamphlet on usury (PTA, 385–87, 397). But what interests Jaurès most is the idea at the heart of Luther’s theology: the doctrine of salvation by grace. Here Jaurès finds a paradigm for understanding matters far removed from Luther’s principal concerns.
In Luther’s theology, human beings are weak, fallen, distorted by humanity’s original sin. Under our own power, through our own merit, we are unable to fulfill God’s commandments. Our judgment is flawed, and we cannot reliably carry out our own intentions. We cannot simply decide to do what we should. We can only do good “with the grace and help of God.” Thus the source of freedom—of our capacity to make our actions follow our own wills—is not found within the individual self. The doctrine of free will, for Luther, is dangerous not only because it is incorrect, but because it “isolates man from God.” Jaurès worries that there is something punishingly lonely in the idea that freedom is rooted in some quality of the individual person, and he thinks that Luther has captured something about free will, something of interest to socialists. If the individual person were already fully free, as advocates of a simplistic notion of free will would claim, then there would be no need for any change in the human condition. But we do not find ourselves, on our own, to be free, and so we know that the freedom of the human being to judge and to decide requires the establishment of a new context outside the individual. For Luther, whose concern is spiritual freedom, that context is God’s grace, revealed in God’s Word. For Jaurès, the political analogy to Luther’s doctrine is the idea that the political freedom of the individual is possible only on a foundation of social justice. Freedom for the individual citizen, Jaurès wants to say, is possible when justice has been established in and by the society that stands outside the individual, and when the individual is not isolated from that society. Thus Jaurès argues that Luther’s theology prepared thinkers in the German tradition to understand that “man is free only when truth illumines him and justice shapes him” (PTA, 387–88).
In Luther’s soteriology, God’s grace appears as the mediation between human weakness and divine perfection—an opposed pair not unrelated to the Being in actuality and Being in potentiality of Jaurès’s French thesis. What Jaurès finds most interesting in Luther’s doctrine of grace, in other words, is its dialectical quality. Glossing Luther, Jaurès writes:
We must distinguish between the revealed God and the hidden God, that is to say between the Word of God and God himself. God by his Word calls all men to salvation; but God, by his will, pushes some toward salvation, some toward death. And this is not injustice, because it is not ours to judge God or to truly account for the rules of his justice. There are three levels of truth, like three kinds of light: the light of nature, the light of grace, and the light of divine glory. In the light of nature, we are offended to see how often liars and impious men succeed in this worldly life. But in the light of grace, we see that life on earth is only a part of human life, and that beyond this a reward has been reserved for the just, a punishment for the impious. Why has God predestined some to what is good and others to what is bad? In the light of grace, we still cannot comprehend clearly, and we can only stammer unthinkingly that justice has been violated. But when we are allowed to enter into the heart of the radiant glory of the invisible God, then the divine will appear fully just and good to us. (PTA, 388)
For Luther, the world of suffering, of injustice, of sin and alienation that is immediately present before us is not utterly disconnected from the complete joy, perfect justice, and absolute unity of divine glory that is hidden from us. But the brokenness of the world is not the only truth about the world: human beings can experience grace. For Luther, grace—the content of the revealed Word of God—is something we experience here, within the world, although we can only comprehend that grace if we understand it as the mediation of that which remains beyond our sight and grasp. Grace is an intimation of the divine. It shapes and illuminates life in this world, even while the world remains broken and sinful. This is not so different from saying that Being’s potentiality grounds Being’s actuality. What Luther contributes here is the emphatically dialectical notion of a mediation between two poles, whatever names we might give them. Luther’s doctrine of grace suggests to Jaurès that, in politics as in religion, the ideal for which we long can be continually present with us despite its perpetual absence from us.
This dialectic—or, better, this paradox—of the presence of the absent is what fascinates Jaurès about Luther’s moments of biblical literalism. Luther insists that the Garden of Eden was a real place in the Middle East containing an actual Tree of Life because he wants to hold on to the idea that “it is not in unknown or fictional places but in the world itself” that the “struggle for good or evil” happens. Thus the centrality for Luther of the doctrine of incarnation: “What is Christ if not God himself present within the nature of things and of the visible world?” Luther believes that “human life renewed in Christ is impelled toward immortality, permeated with immortality, as if with a divine infection,” writes Jaurès (PTA, 391). This means that
just as Luther does not want to abstract and isolate the human will from divinity, so he refuses to separate and isolate justice from the nature of things and from the nature of the visible world. Justice will not be accomplished outside nature or outside the things of the visible world, but in the world itself, corrected and amended. Justice will not shine forth in the cold regions of death, but in life itself; it will blend into the light of the visible sun. Justice is wrapped up in and interwoven with the things of the world. . . . Heaven will be made anew, earth will be formed anew—not a theological heaven, not a phantasmagoric image of the earth, but a real heaven, a true earth. We need not say: Justice is in the other world and outside this world. Justice will shine one day under the sun of the living, and under the visible sky. Truly, can we not recognize here the spirit of socialism, which works to bring justice into life itself? (PTA, 390–91)
Jaurès has introduced a curious ambiguity here. It is not clear whether the shining justice that he anticipates will be perfect justice. Will the establishment of socialism be like the creation of a new heaven and a new earth, or is socialism the mediation of an ideal that remains as distant as Luther’s hidden God? Jaurès’s reading of Luther up to this point would suggest the latter. But when he turns to the political implications of Luther’s theology, Jaurès chooses not to remind his readers of what he has elsewhere written: that the battle is never wholly won.
Jaurès writes considerably more about Luther than about Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Lassalle, or Marx.56 The essential ideas of his Latin thesis have already been developed in the section on Luther; he has now to show the way those ideas were worked out through the tradition as a whole.
