“It pains me to the heart,” Luther wrote, “that this damnable arrogant pagan rascal has seduced and fooled so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings,” especially the Physics and Metaphysics and On the Soul. It was time to shove these works aside and start over with Holy Scripture, and Holy Scripture alone. Time to clean house, intellectually and spiritually. Gazing at the volumes on his shelf, “I cannot avoid believing,” Luther mused, “that it was Satan himself who introduced the study of Aristotle.”7
