 And thank you especially for again inviting me to this wonderful conference. My topic today is about the reformation, which was actually a question that Hans sent to me earlier this year, asking what exactly did the reformation reform? Now the short answer to that question is it reformed nothing but it changed everything. That's the very short answer and you'll get a 10 for that if you answer that on the examination paper. But the explanation takes a bit longer. Now first of all, I'd like to say that this topic for me is a bit off course because unlike David, I have no worn memories or even cold memories, indeed any memories of a religious education. I'm a product of the 20th century secularism 100%. So what I, my interest in religious matters, theological matters is an outsider's interest. I know that this qualifies me in the eyes of all insiders on all sides from opening my mouth. But well, apparently the insiders in the circle of outsiders is growing bigger every day. So I have my outsider's view here in the open. Now why speak about reformation as a libertarian, there is an obvious answer which I do not share and there is a less obvious answer which I'd like to explain shortly. As you know, or at least those who attended my previous speech here, which was 2015 or something like that. It was about the notion of conscience and how the reformation changed the notion of the human conscience as if there is any other conscience, but it changed the notion of the human conscience. And that to me is very important because I am with Hans Hoppe in the corner of those who associate libertarianism thinking about freedom and liberty with argumentation ethics or as I used to call it in my more innocent days, the ethics of dialogue. Now what is argumentation if not constantly appealing to the other person's conscience? Intimidation is different from negotiation, it's different from intimidation, it's different from coercion and in what way is it different from all those things in that it appeals to conscience that is to the things you already share. So literally common knowledge, conscience, and you build upon this common basis to try to expand the range of things on which you can agree. So argumentation ethics is not just a technique, it is a way of life so to speak. And in that regard or concerning that I have a project which is probably too big for the remainder of my life, but it's called Conscientious Libertarianism. So putting back libertarianism together with conscience as it were in a pre-reformation mold because the reformation initiated a period in which one speaker could say to another, that's my opinion, you have your own opinion and this is where it ends. So there is no need for arguing. I have my truth and you have your truth. This kind of separation which amounts to anti-intellectualism, which amounts to irrationalism or anti-rationalism very much came to the fore with reformation. It had been present, of course, before that. It's a general attitude, so to speak, that can be found in all times, but it received a sort of official accreditation in the context of the reformation. So conscience is for me and here in this speech the central notion and it has to, let me just explain that there is a huge literature on conscience as there is on everything else. So you have to accord me the favor of accepting my definition if only for the sake of the argument. And conscience for me is basically before you start filling in what's in there, it is to be understood in a sort of platonic way as a common memory, what is there at the bottom of every human being and can be brought to the surface again in human discourse, human argumentation. If that would be impossible, then, of course, there is no basis for argumentation. You have to prepare the ground, so to speak, by bringing up all those things which are really undeniable for any serious speaker. Of course, a jester can always deny everything and we are in a society where gestures set the tone. But the idea of speaking conscientiously implies that you try to make yourself understood by the other. So trying to speak in terms the other can understand that you mean what you say, that you do not invent meanings and you are not empty-dumpty giving words, meanings they never had before, and that you take responsibility for your sayings, both within the context of speech and outside of it. So there is conscientiousness, which refers to conscience, is a very thick concept. It's not just a formal thing, a box that you can check up, are you a conscientious person? Yes. It takes more than that. Now if we turn to the reformation proper, which is the subject here, you will find that the reformation starting with Luther, Martin Luther, virtually made it impossible to give the idea of conscience any meaning apart from the literal meaning of the Bible to the extent that he accepted the Bible. And that is already the indication of the big problem with the Protestant reformation. Because Luther was followed by Calvin and many others, Protestants, they're all Protestants, and then after them, after this what is called the doctrinal phase of Protestantism, all these Protestantism which had a guru, a main teacher, and there were all these movements which had no doctrine but still spread like wildfire throughout the West, especially the English-speaking and the German-speaking world, where the reformation had first taken hold. Now in saying this, I will be speaking about Protestants and Protestantisms. Of course Protestants are people, and many Protestants are better people than many Catholics and vice versa, and you can say that for any group, Jews, Muslims, pagans, you can always say many of them are better than many of the others and vice versa. So this is not a judgment on personal character, but it is a, what I try to do is an assessment of the atmosphere, the climate of thinking that is generated by certain ideas. Now the different Protestantisms can all be summarized in the Western context certainly as anti-Catholicism. So to understand Protestantism you have to understand Catholicism. But also if you are looking for a common point apart from the non-Catholicism, the question is what is Protestantism if it is not just anti-Catholicism? I cannot find anything, but one of the more famous American Protestant theologians, Benjamin Warfield, who I think as an authority on the subject said this, before all else Protestantism is in its very essence an appeal from all other authority to the divine authority of Holy Scripture. That's the direct reference to the Sola Scriptura, only Scripture of Martin Luther. Problem is by the time Warfield wrote, there were already so many different appeals to the authority of the Bible that it was nearly impossible to give any belief to his statement that you could appeal above all, from all other authorities to the one authority of the Bible. He tried to do that, but even what happened since he died, which was in the early 1920s, apparently his counsel was not followed or was not effective because there was no great unification of Protestantism on the authority of the Bible. On the contrary, it sealed all these controversies, it sealed the lack of authority of the Bible, which became certainly in many circles in the Anglo-American world, a term of derision you have the Bible thumpers and you have intelligent people. Now this can easily be extrapolated to the emergence of atheism, not just as an intellectual stance, but as a general attitude for most people in the West. Luther, to come back to him, turned against the church, claiming that he did not need to justify his position on the matters that divided him from the church, but he could just say, okay, you do what you have to do, but I'm out of here, and luckily for him there was a welcome home in Germany, we could easily imagine in other times that there would have been no one to grant him asylum, so he could return home and be safe, and of course the details of his life explain perhaps why Protestantism had a very different attitude to worldly power than the church, because the church was always a rival to the secular powers, even if she was well aware that she could not in battle face them, she had to rely on a different authority, but Luther knew that without the princes there would be no future for him, the German Protestant princes. Now switching from these probably well known historical moments to the philosophical point, Luther did more than just turn against the church, he turned against a long-running tradition in Western philosophy, which was the tradition that there is something above the world of opinions, namely the world of knowledge or truth, and that is a tradition that goes back in philosophy to the early sixth century BC, when you have figures like Heraclitus or Armenides who were writing about the probably the most intriguing fact that launched philosophy, namely how can it be that people disagree about everything and do that with such a glee, whereas on the other hand it should be clear to any intelligent person that there is something a unifying thing behind the phenomena, so we are looked locked in the phenomena, but beyond that there is a reality that is not subject to that kind of yes or no opinions, you have to go in it and find what is true and what is not true and for the Greeks this idea that there is truth behind or beneath or above the phenomena, this came to be called the Logos, the thing that there is a logical aspect to being, not just psychology, not just sociology, not just shouting, but the sort of truth that has to be grasped by the mind and this grasping by the mind was taught increasingly by the Greeks, certainly if you followed the next generations up to Plato, they realized that this truth could be as it were explored in a systematic way, philosophy became a disciplined undertaking precisely because it had developed this idea that the Logos consist of ideas, ideas with a capital I, so not just things in the mind or things in words, but things that are real in themselves and this is what launched philosophy as a separate discipline and gave it at least the hope of leaving the way of opinion, as Parmenides had called it, and to go switch over to the way of truth and the difference between the way of opinion, the logical difference between the two is that the way of opinion has no direction, as Heraclitus so beautifully and succinctly expressed it, the way up is also the way down, so you're always right, is this road going up, is it going down, you're always right because there is no sense of direction in opinions, but in the way of truth there is a fixed direction, so you can go with it or you can go against it, if you go with it, that is by thinking rigorously and conscientiously, you will arrive at ever more stable truth, whereas if you go the other way, you will arrive at something that cannot be true, so that cannot be real, so there is no interest in going in that direction. Now let me add the religious component here, the world of ideas became in classical Greek philosophy something like, but not quite like the later conceptions of God, the word God in its different variations has two basic meanings, the Indo-German tradition going back to the old Sanskrit, the Indo-German languages, they emphasize the aspect of shining things, the divine things are the shining things, they are the beautiful things, so they are, as it were, praiseworthy for their intrinsic characteristics, there's also a another Semitic tradition which we translate, the words of which we translate with the term God and then it means the mighty one or the overpowering one or the force and that is of course a very different set of ideas coming out of that, you have the religions of the beautiful things and with the Greeks that became the religion of reason and goodness, of wisdom and you have religions of force, so that was in classical Greece obviously the religion of goodness and reason, wisdom, so religion was the philosophical goal, wisdom seeking and that was also the thing that kept everything together because the religious aspect, how things go together, hang together for the Greeks was the wisdom encapsulated in the unity of the ideas, now for Plato this was obvious but it created a problem for him, namely what do these ideas have to do with the world we live in, below the line up on top of the line above the line we have the realm of knowledge, truth and all these things, below you have opinion, so how do the ideas work in the darkness of the world of opinion and more importantly the world of nature, the world of facts and his answer was that there had to be a demi-urge, a sort of God, not himself a divine thing because this God was not an idea but it was something that was so motivated by love for the ideas that it wanted to communicate this love to everything in the in nature that had the capacity for responding in kind to this love, so this demi-urge became the animating spirit of the of the world as we know it because animating it was a something strange to the dead nature that it was an animation by the love of the divine things, now there are all sorts of problems connected with this but I'm not going into that, I just jump to the next great Greek philosopher that has to be Aristotle made really a mess of things in a way because he said no we do not need a demi-urge through the divine ideas they're there but the divine ideas themselves are God there is no need for a lesser God to act so how does it happen that this God is of relevance to people and animals and the answer given by Aristotle was God is relevant because everything loves him so the love is no longer the work of the demi-urge right a sort of thing that is given it is something that is already there in all in all of nature and that was the religious or theological if you wish basis for the general the teleological approach of Aristotle everything has this inherent motion which is directed toward a particular object then suddenly the classical period in Greek thinking was over and there was a period when the Stoics and Epicureans set the tone and both of them were very much against the notion of ideas the Stoics thought of God as a force imminent in nature it was a force diffused through nature but it was just as material as any other force so it was not something from above it was something inside and this became an important I will not discuss Epicureans because he loved the gods he simply thought that they were irrelevant so there's nice irrelevancies the Stoics left a mark in Rome because the Romans liked this idea of an omnipotent God they had there's of course their capital and the traditional gods but they began when they were making up their empire they began to feel the need for gods that were more than just another set of local tribes so to justify the empire they needed to have gods that represented the world rather than just Rome historical traditional Rome so they turned for some reason to Stoicism and to other notions inherited from the from the east mainly but very soon they had to answer the question more or less on a philosophical ground what is God and already in the early first century so the beginning of the empire under Nero Roman aristocrats Seneca came up with a formula that would make history he said God is a quantity a magnitude greater than which cannot be thought and that modified that formula would become the foundation of Christian theology in the middle ages there was a clear problem with Seneca's formula this magnitude though there can be no magnitude such that no greater magnitude can be thought because like force you can think of a force well I can think of a force that is slightly or much greater than the one you are thinking of and anybody can do that these magnitudes what makes them scientifically interesting is that they can be measured that is expressed in numbers but there simply is no greatest number so you can always go in thought beyond that so if you remove this logical problem what remains of the Roman idea of the universal God that is he is the strongest the highest the greatest being but not necessarily greater than can be thought so there can be you can imagine that something else will someday appear which will be greater so it was not really a very strong foundation for a religion that was to bear an empire so you know what happened with Christianity in the early empire but it was in the empire that Christianity grew up right so and a lot of the culture culture atmosphere of the Roman Empire penetrated Christian communities and Christian thinking and Christian intellectuals and as they became more and more established within the empire parts of the Roman elites many of which were to some extent Christianized so Christianity was on the way so to speak of becoming a religion of magnitudes especially force and power because this was acceptable within the world of the the empire force and power was essential to the existence and the functioning of the empire although this made it very difficult to explain or accept the sayings reported in the New Testament of Jesus mainly that he refused all the kingdoms of the world and in the glory of them so he had nothing to do with these kinds of powers now luckily for Christianity and shawm will probably disagree but the western empire collapsed leaving in the west had this mosaic of well not mosaic kaleidoscope of moving tribes or looking for a place to settle down no political authority to keep them in check but miraculously a rather effective amazingly effective spiritual power which was a church although she had very little means except she could talk to people or thunder at people as it was not all gentle talk these early missionaries were no pushovers but anyway the the church got in at the grass roots in the woods covering what later became Europe and from there with the help of a few rather unsavory characters such as Charles Charlemagne as a butcher in his own right but also a man who had sufficient understanding of the role of religion as a binding factor that he promoted the works of the church for example by founding institutions of learning all over Europe so that there was a common language Latin language and a common script the shortened script that he invented specifically for the purpose of facilitating communication and this led to a flourishing of the Christian faith as a common element in Europe when Charlemagne's heritage and the reign of his sons came to an end and you ended up with the feudal periods now in the 11th century which is the century when the medieval civilization as it were began to establish itself after Charlemagne the peace of God movement took hold it merged with the the monastery movements have been from the 6th century monasteries and at the time the monasteries were the as it were the first phase of the church in the west far more important than the pope the bishops or the priests the monks were the holy the holy men whereas the bishops were members of rich powerful families who always had a double faced identity they were members of the elite but they were also holy in holy orders but for them the monks it was different they had a the role of an example they were really devoting their lives to God and in that sense they had an authority far beyond that of the priests now one of the monks probably one of the greatest minds in the middle ages was an Italian born in Aosta and moved then to northern France monastery of Bec and later became art bishop of Canterbury so Anselm of Canterbury Anselm of Aosta Anselm of Bec it's all the same but I'm interested in Anselm of Bec because it was as prior of the monastery in Bec that Anselm turned this idea its its its mind for the very first time really in Christendom to the question how to understand God he wanted a faith based on understanding faith seeking understanding why because he was convinced that without faith no understanding is possible so you see faith and understanding are really two sides of the of the same coin and he set out to discover a God in in his monastery no electricity it gets early dark dark very early in winter so it was a very poor life luckily there was a library but for the rest the accommodations in in Bec were not very great proof he had to write on clay tablets so the monastery was not rich enough to provide parchment or even whatever a good pass as paper it was clay tablets so he wrote he gave his lectures oral lectures and when his novices and the monks asked him to explain in writing he said okay I'll do it it's not easy to do this but he did and when it was finished rather clumsy novice broke all the tablets problem if you drop clay tablets they break so had to rewrite them and as he was doing that he got very uncomfortable with what he had written because he had noticed that he had always been talking about the greatest being the highest being this sort of absolute greatness in fact or in power or in whatever and he felt that he had not made a convincing case at all one reason why he felt that was that the the poor monks in Bec had enormous trouble following his very intricate and convoluted arguments this was not just here is a b and c and now we have conclusion e and this was going all over the place very difficult so instead of showing them the way to God he felt that he had been misleading them or rather confusing them not a very good feeling for a teacher if at the end of the semester you have to say what have I done and he reported being in a existential crisis even to the point know this for a monk in the 11th century even to the point of losing his faith so this was a very deep crisis and he got out of it I think that's my interpretation precisely because he was in such a deep crisis we would say he was on the point of becoming an atheist and what did he do he addressed the atheist so that the next little work he wrote much shorter than the original monologian and the proslogan began with an argument against the atheist now in the 11th centuries you could look far and wide there were no atheists there were all Christians or if you went to Spain you could find a few Jews and or you could find Muslims and if you went to the to the woods in the north you could find some remaining pagans but they were all people who believed in God so luckily for Anselm he could point to a a psalm in the in the bible which is which starts with the words of the fool the fool who says there is no god so he that's how he begins and he said if I can convince the fool that there is a god then I am in the clear again because then at least what I have written will have an object and how did he start to address the fool well he changed Seneca's formula from a magnitude greater than which cannot be thought to the more neutral something greater than which cannot be thought but the examples he gives and the explanations he make it clear that he means not quality and not quantity but quality so he's talking about things like truth truth wisdom reason intelligence mindfulness conscientiousness mercy justice knowledge all these things about which no conscientious persons can say to have less of these is better than to have more of these so he defined God as that greater than which cannot be thought which translates in platonic language as the good itself so goodness itself became God and this redefinition of God which made no mention of power or forces became as it were the launch launch path for the christian theology which had been on a backburner since the the days of saint augustine so after more than 500 years there was a revival of theological thinking now unfortunately this theory of ensign was very platonic just plotters theory but as it were purified no possibility of putting inside it the third man problem or whichever of the classical objections made against platos theory of ideas because in the unsalamic version it was all about certain qualities and just to give a small example you have the quality of redness things are red some things are rather than other things some things are not red at all but and this is the platonic move there can be nothing rather than the redness itself and this if you think about it logically this already means that redness is not a red thing it is a thing in itself but it's not a thing that is red like a person's red trousers over there it's trousers trousers and they are red but redness itself is nothing but red so that means that if you try to have an idea of non-redness itself you have something that is non-red and nothing else so we end up with nothing so we have here a tapestry of things and their oppositions which is logically very tightly organized and one of the things let me go quickly to that one of the qualities that Anselm introduced although I must admit not in so many words but as it were in the way he presented his theory was the qualities of personhood and community this is important I think to any future libertarian philosophy because one of the problems with current Americanized post-reformation libertarianism is that the person the idea of the person is not really present you have the individual but the individual is unlike the the notion of the person bereft of a higher dimension so to speak a horse is an individual a cat is an individual even a spider is an individual no way you can cut them up and end up with two individuals so the physical integrity individual does not even begin to compare with the personal integrity of the person which involves the commitment to these higher things in themselves like truth and what is a person who does not know or does not want to know truth who has no sense of justice no sense of mercy even an evil person has a sense of justice even if it takes pleasure in being unjust you need to if it does not understand what justice is then he cannot take opposition to it so to speak he becomes like an alligator like beyond good and evil so Anselm's theology naturally I would say almost naturally involved in the ideas of person personhood and community the difference between person and individual individual is that to become a person you need to be in communion with other persons and you cannot become a person on your own that's why if you look at children and you you drop them in the woods and they miraculously survive they will not come back out of the woods as persons they will be if they survive they will be surviving animals but you would then still have to start from nothing in turning them into persons with which you can speak and communicate and have a conscience and of course to imply these things are for Anselm quite natural because they make it possible to add the Trinitarian ideas God is a community of three divine persons but God himself is not a person the the triunity is not a person but the three persons are so his theology solved a number of problems there another idea that is very much present in him is freedom personal freedom and he noted that the idea of freedom is the same whether you apply it to God or to man and that is interesting because God is free in the same sense that man is or rather man is free in the same sense that God is free now in what sense is God free he is free in the sense that he cannot do anything against his own nature and what is his own nature this Anselm had explained and is at the bottom of his proof for the existence of God God is all the things all the divine things rolled into one so to speak he is love he is truth he is wisdom he is reason he is intelligence and so on he is personhood he is community but in in saying this he had also implied that all these things which is also already implied in in Plato that all these things are really logically compatible so you cannot use justice to justify lying so to speak or truth telling to become to justify injustice or mercilessness or foolishness all these things have to be taken in account into account at all times and this means that the theology which Anselm developed was really a more a theology of the moral law taking law in the same general sense of order it is an order of moral things where moral isn't an happy word because it's really the an order of the shining things of the things good and excellent in themselves so if you have that before you you realize immediately that the moral law which became a very famous expression later cannot be a set of rules the moral law is rather the right is a question of having the right attitude through life so a moral education is not instruction in certain rules it is teaching your children to behave with the right attitude in the unpredictable multitude of circumstances that may arrive in life so an education is different from an instruction right and the the legalization of the notion of the moral law which came after Anselm in fact in modern times with the idea that the commandments are the essence of moral teaching this medieval idea has been lost and I think that's not so very good because it it created lots of confusion about the relationship between rules and attitudes now going to the final stage the reformation this is what Luther as it were disavowed the idea that there is anything other than the biblical revelation that connects man and God so the very idea that you can think about reason and goodness and intelligence and so on from the right perspective is anathema to the Protestants if you do if you think like that you are not one of us because man is nothing god is everything and reason in the immortal words of Martin Luther in his last sermon in Wittenberg reason is a pretty whore it's it's it's something to be despised it can only leave you lead you astray so what remains of religion in the reformation this is the word of God and of the word of God as rightly interpreted by the right Protestant authority that's a recipe for disaster right because it can go anywhere and it went everywhere so what happened to freedom many people think that by destroying the idea of a common conscience that unites all men to the principles of rightness to God right the common conscience between God and man was with a Luther as it were disassembled into a common conscience of each individual individual privately with God my conscience tells me he could say to the pope you have no conscience of God because my conscience is with God and your conscience is not you are the Antichrist Christ so this destruction of the common conscience that is of the the common element in common logic in common knowledge led to the modernistic embrace of subjectivism and relativism but if you want to learn more about that read Joseph Ranziner who made a profession out of decrying the rise and the dominance of relativistic and subjectivistic ideas subjectivism is okay when it we're talking about tastes and colors but if you are talking about things like truth and justice and beauty and others things like that you cannot simply say it doesn't matter we all have our own tasting proof injustice that is the recipe for chaos okay with the destruction of conscience many people and I've known some said hey this is really freedom I no longer have to justify myself I can do what I want and then the yeah soon there was a problem and there was not really a problem because you can do what you want but your actions your physical actions should be regulated to the extent that they do not cause harm or violence to another that made for the kind of libertarian thinking that's so high so formal that it doesn't convince anybody because people think rarely from this academic standpoint of we are making creating a new world right people think from within their own situation from where they are and what it does it mean for us and when you start thinking from that you need a richer canvas or rather a richer tool than merely to say you can do what you want as long as you do not do harm to your neighbor because defining our or defining property these are things which happen very much later stage and if before you reach that stage there has not been inculcated a very profound attitude of brightness and respectful rightness for the goodness and for reason and intelligence one then of course all these different solutions that may be offered property is this harm is that and so on no no it's it no it's that they will come to nothing because the argument that will resolve these problems have to be appeals to the others conscience so unless you have first worked on having a common conscience your arguments will not amount to anything and if this is not perhaps the brightest point on which to to end this is where I've had thank you