Two themes through this chapter:
1) Thomistic/Franciscan optimism vs. Augustinian/Lutheran pessimism;
2) tensions between countercultural, cultural movements.
Jones points out that there were both secular and religious Humanists:
These Christian Humanists, as they are called, naturally applied the techniques they used in reading and editing Cicero to their reading of the Christian classics, above all the Bible. This brought them into direct conflict with Scholasticism and its carefully worked out method of reaching the rational truth. In particular, the Christian Humanists deprecated the Scholastic practice of taking a line of Scripture out of context and using it to "prove" some thesis already adopted on other grounds. The Humanists held that one ought to study a text as a whole, in its historical setting. [....]
All this implied a new definition of Christianity. The Church had managed to reconcile its view of itself as the interpreter of a once-for-all revelation with its changing historical life only by insisting on the authority of tradition. In and through tradition the timeless and eternal communicated itself to,and took on the form of, the changing and the historical. To put this differently, for the medieval Church, Christianity was the tradition, codified and systematized by the method of Scholasticism. Thomas and the other medieval doctors never asked themselves whether a doctrine or a practice had originated in the primitive Church; they were satisfied if it had come, in the course of time, to be generally accepted. [....]
Hence, to want to go back to sources, to claim that the doctrines of the original, primitive Church were wiser and truer than the gradually accumulated mass of interpretation and comment, was to strike at the root of Catholic Christendom. (51)
Erasmus (1466-1536) as representative.
His scholarship was directed first toward establishing the correct text of the New Testament and then toward rendering it into the national language for the use of the ordinary man. Erasmus held God's word to be so plain and simple, once divested of the encrustations of later commentators, that one needed by to read it to understand, but to understand to be convinced, and but to be convinced to experience that inward change that was salvation. (52)
Note here as well the countercultural dimension of this appeal -- a dimension tied, as the German mystics bring out most forcefully, to the emphasis on first-hand experience of Divine.
An "enlightenment" fellow:
...it was his fond belief that enlightenment -- the kind of reasonableness classical scholarship inculcated -- would gradually effect the reformation that all sought. This was why the work of editing and translating the New Testament seemed to him of supreme importance. For these reasons, when the outbreak finally came, Erasmus sided with Church, papacy, and tradition. (52)
GERMAN MYSTICS :
..advocated a return to the simple life of primitive Christianity, abandonment of the worldliness and corruption that had infected the Church, and a moderate asceticism. They were no more interested in the new Humanism than in the old Scholasticism. They were mystics, and like all mystics, they held that the way to God was personal, requiring neither the apparatus of rational theology nor the elaborate organization of the Church.
[....] they were important because, though loyal and Catholic themselves, their feeling for the privacy of religion and the directness of man's relation to God contained the seeds of Protestantism. (53)
Luther (1483-1546):
Had little interest in the Humanistic circle at University of Erfurt -- joined instead the Augustinian friars.
It is clear that, like Augustine and so many other Christians, Luther was oppressed by a sense of sin and convinced that his primary need was to find God. (54)
[Somewhat like the early Buddha, however, his excelling at "monkly ardor" taught him only the futility of asceticism. 55]
As Luther now studied St. Paul, and especially that letter to the Romans that St. Augustine had read many centuries earlier in the garden at Milan, it seemed to him that all the commentators and Scholastics were mistaken. What Luther found in Paul was the doctrine of salvation, or justification, by faith alone, rather than by the "works" of penance, almsgiving, or monkish asceticism. He had been oppressed (as Augustine had been) by the appalling gulf that separated depraved man from his God. How could sinful man achieve union with God? Luther himself had tried in every conceivable manner, and he had failed. He now realized that it was the most damnable pride to suppose that man could bring about his own salvation. Is the human predicament, then, hopeless as well as helpless? No, God is not only just; He is merciful: He sent His only begotten Son to save us....the mediator, by whose aid we cross the gulf [between a perfect God and depraved humanity] is Christ, not the Church and its works. What, then, must we do to be saved? Believe in the Lord Jesus and have faith in the mercy of God, as Christ's gospel teaches. (55)
...the doctrine of justification by faith undermined the whole sacerdotal system of the Church and, with it, the institutions that administered, licensed, and perpetuated it.(55)
--> universal priesthood of all believers; everyone can be his or her own priest/ess (56)
--> collapse of the institution in the face of the individual.
--> notice the logic attendant upon all this -- i.e., the dualistic, either-or logic which tends to dominate Augustinian thought --> especially in the doctrine of Original Sin;
this logic, along with renewed emphasis on Original Sin, emphasizes the sharp contrast between Franciscan/Thomistic optimism and the pessimism of the Augustinian/Lutheran tradition.
Luther's attack on the Church as mediator between humanity and the Divine (SEE p. 56f.) --> the anti-hierarchical, and thus countercultural dimension of his insistence on the individual standing in direct relationship with the Divine.
Optimism regarding agreement upon text: as Jones puts it, "Let every man read his Bible for himself; he will find therein, Luther was persuaded, the same doctrine. It is unnecessary, therefore, to have the word of God interpreted for us by the Church." Quoting directly:
The Holy Ghost is the all-simplest writer and speaker that is in heaven or on earth. Therefore His words can have no more than one simplest sense which we call the scriptural or literal meaning. (57)
--> comment on need for literalism as an authority in the battle against the prevailing culture.
In the face of the attack against him, Luther was constrained to found a new church, one which would give
...the dissidents a strength they lacked as individuals. Though it was essential for the preservation of the movement, the new church created a painful dilemma for Luther. For it naturally required a new confession of faith to distinguish its members, and the defense of this faith required a new theology. Thus Luther found himself in the position of the earliest Christians, who had had to choose between individual religion and the requirements of institutionalism.
The new theology soon became as inflexible and as orthodox as the old. Those who opposed it by even a hair's breadth were cast into outer darkness along with the Catholics. The Anabaptists, for instance, who denied the need for infant baptism (on the reasonable ground that "God would not damn a little child for the sake of a drop of water"), were treated without mercy. (59f.)
Notice the corner Luther is pushed into: while he insists on the justification by faith and the priesthood of all believers, because it is in Paul -- he is also constrained by:
the demands of institutionalism: members must be marked by a sacrament -- e.g., baptism; and
his literalist reading of Scripture: Jesus does say, after all, "This is my body" --> insistence on the real presence of Christ's body in Communion, and thus the importance of the Sacrament of Communion. (60)
Justification by faith also forces Luther into a doctrine of Predestination: "If man was incapable of helping himself, it followed that his destiny was completely in God's hands:" [quoting Luther]:
Since the fall of Adam....free will exists only in name....
Such teachings [as the official, Thomistic conception of free will] are invented only to insult and overthrow the grace of God, to strengthen sin and increase the kingdom of the devil....
Therefore I wish that the word[s] "free will" had never been invented.
[An Argument in Defense of All the Articles of Dr. Martin Luther Wrongly Condemned in the Roman Bull, translated by C. M. Jacobs, in Works of Martin Luther (A.J. Holman, Philadelphia, 1915), Vol. III, pp. 108-111; in Jones, 60f.]
--> Franciscan/Thomistic optimism vs. Augustine/Luther
Of course, "This revives all the difficulties of Augustine's position. If God is to get the credit for man's salvation, must He not be blamed for another's damnation?" (61)
His effort to avoid the conclusion that, since works have no effect on one's salvation and thus, it would seem, we can do anything we please, is to claim that faith manifests itself in active works. "The true Christian does good works, not in order to acquire merit, but merely from the love of God that He infuses into the believer's heart." [quoting Luther]
So a Christian... undertakes all things that are to be done, and does everything cheerfully and freely; not that he may gather many merits and good works, but because it is a pleasure for him to please God thereby, and he serves God purely for nothing, content that his service pleases God.... (Jones, 61)
Jones comments: "Although this formulation had the advantage of providing a basis for the development of an ethics that was in harmony with the new spirit of enterprise and initiative, it hardly satisfies the logical requiement of reconciling good works with justification by faith." (62)
POLITICAL THEORY -- Hobbesian, authoritarian: human beings are so depraved that without a sovereign to enforce order, they would "quickly despatch oneanother out of this world." (see p.62)
Second argument: since the only serious business of the Christian is seeking the salvation of the soul, "even the worst of rulers can do no serious harm to the believing Christian." (63)
Ambiguity: on the one hand, Luther concludes that "Men sin... if they lie to the government, deceive it, and are disloyal, [or if they disobey what] it has ordered and commanded, whether with their bodies or their possessions" -- a view, we should note, that is "poles apart from the medieval ideal of the limited monarchy and fully underwrites even the most extreme claims of the new-type sovereign: 'Wicked authority is still always authority in the sight of God.'" (63) And so, as Jones notes, Luther can thus side with the nobles against the peasants in the peasants' revolt (1525).
--> Franciscan/Thomistic optimism vs. Augustine/Luther
At the same time, however, Luther needs to find an argument which justifies the Protestant princes in disobeying the Pope.
Jones points out that this ambiguity is not simply the result of the exigencies of politics:
They also reflect the difficulty of reconciling the essentially mystical doctrine of justification by faith with the facts of social life. It is not an accident that Protestantism has never produced a theology comparable to the achievements of Scholasticism: The very core of the Protestant insight is the certainty of every individual conscience, a belief that is incompatible with theological system-building. Protestantism rests on the immediate, felt data of conscience, not on the accumulated, sifted, public data of tradition. (64)
--> cf. earlier stresses between mysticism, institutionalism -- between counterculture and culture.
--> anticipates modern dilemmas of the same sort -- e.g., the emphasis on individual experience in existentialism, etc. and the concommitant collapse of systematic philosophy.
Further ambiguity in Luther's attitude towards reason -- roughly, both for and against. (Recall comment on burning Aristotle --> the difficulty Luther faces as attempting to define himself in opposition to medieval Scholasticism, which stresses precisely the synthesis between faith and reason.
Jones characterizes both Renaissance and Reformation as essentially romantic (my term) insofar as both look back to a past -- the classical, "Pagan" past and the primitive Christian church. Both need such a past as springboards for their critique of current institutions; both, however, are more than romantic in their effort not to escape into an allegedly superior past -- instead, they look forward, optimistically, to the foundation of a better future on the basis of alternative views.
--> what becomes the Enlightenment project of establishing a new social and political order.
--> essentially modern in the emphasis on the individual above the institution
--> also associated with Renaissance interest in magic, alchemy: power in human hands over the elements of nature (--> theomorphism --> natural science.