§2 Contrast (part 2 of 3)

So much from the first and negative train of thought. What is

47. WA 1, 224ff,, 353ff.

48. Respectively, ibid., 224, 13f; 225f.; 225, 29f.; 225, 37; 226f; 226, 16; 227, 20; 227,9513 228,28:

49. Ibid., 353, 19f; 354, 1f
50. Ibid., 359, 20f.
51. Ibid., 354, 11f.

typically and decisively nonmedieval here is not the content in detail but the harsh one-sidedness with which Luther pursued the thought that in all circumstances we stand under judgment. He left no place for an “also” or a “but” or a “nevertheless.” He did not look ahead to any higher stage of the way or any further possibility. The last and supreme possibility is that we are sinners. This was not an expression of humility before the eternal God. The Middle Ages knew that, too. By rudely stopping at such humility, Luther’s thinking was an assault upon Scholasticism, upon its very heart. What was questioned was not just an aberration or subsidiary teaching of a Thomas, a Dante, or an Eckhardt, but what was best and highest and most inward and vital in them, if Luther’s protest was right.

The second train of thought in the Luther of that period was positive, a proclamation or affirmation about God. And what a one it was, of course! Its content is that we live by the grace of God. In itself this is not surprising. It is no more new than the negation. Scholasticism was in truth aware of it, too. But it was suspect and dangerous and even more non-Catholic than the first line of thinking because of its association with the negation, namely, because here the grace of God is taken seriously, with bitter yet saving seriousness, only in connection with that radical protest against us humans as sinners. Sét in that context, the proclamation of the mercy of God became the heart of the new Reformation theology.

Listen to Luther himself. At Wittenberg in 1517 he said that the best and infallible preparation for grace, the only disposition for it, is God’s eternal election and predestination (29), that the presence of grace is enough to make works meritorious, yet grace is not idly present but present as a living, moving active spirit (54f.), that blessed are those who do the works of grace (81), that the good and life-giving law is the love of God shed abroad in our hearts by the Holy Spirit (85), and that to love God is to hate self and to know nothing outside him (95).°2

Then at Heidelberg in 1518 he said that the works of God, no matter how hidden they are or how evil they might seem to be, are in truth immortal benefits (“merits”).5> In explanation Luther gave the following important exposition. The Lord humbles and terrifies us by the law and the sight of our sins, so that to others and to ourselves we seem to be empty, foolish, and evil, and truly are so. When we see and confess this, we have no form nor comeliness but live in the hidden God, in the

52. Respectively, ibid., 225, 27f; 226, 32-227, 2; 228, 4; 228, bee Bales, 25)

53. Ibide.dae; at,

Reformation and. Middle Ages

concealment of God, that is, in naked trust in his mercy; and in and of ourselves we can appeal to nothing but sin, folly, death, and hell according to the apostolic saying in 2 Cor. 6 [vv. 9-10]: As sorrowful, but always rejoicing, as dying, and behold we live. That is what Isa. 28 [v. 21] calls God’s opus alienum, his strange work, for his work has to take place (in us), that is, he humbles us in ourselves by reducing us to despair in order to exalt us in virtue of his mercy, and by bringing us hope, as Hab. 3 [v. 2] says: When you chide, you remember your mercy. When this happens to us, we have no pleasure in ourselves and see no beauty in us but only deformity. Indeed, we do outwardly what must seem foolish and perverted to others.>4 Human existence of this kind under humility and the fear of God is what Luther calls the work of God that is eternally beneficial (“meritorious”) in spite of appearances. (It need hardly be said that Luther's use of the category of merit here casts a special light.) We then read that this kind of talk is no reason for despair but is a reason for humility and a spur to the seeking of the grace of Christ (17).°> For, says Luther in explanation, it is hope and not despair that is preached when the preaching is that we are sinners.>© Nevertheless, we have to despair of ourselves if we are to be able to receive the grace of Christ (18).°” For, the explanation adds, if we do not, we still rely on doing what we can, and we remain presumptuous. *8 The good theologian is the one who sees in the cross and passion the visible side of God that is turned to us and does not look directly at the invisible things of God, his majesty and glory, by way of profound spiritual vision.>?

To support this thesis Luther argues that it helps no one to see God in his glory and majesty if he is not seen in the lowliness and shame of the cross.69 Along the lines of a theology of glory Philip in John 14 [v. 8] says: “Lord, show us the Father,” and he receives the answer: “Philip, whoever sees me sees also my Father.” True theology and the true knowledge of God lie, then, in the crucified Christ.! A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil, but the theologian of the cross calls things by

54. Ibid., 356, 37-357, 17.
55. Ibid., 354, 13f.
56. Ibid., 361, 12f
57. Ibid., 354, 15f.
58. Ibid., 361, 28-30.
59. Ibid., 354, 17-20.
60. Ibid., 362, 11f.
61. Ibid., 362, 15-19.

their right names (21). For, Luther explains, the theologian of glory does not see God hidden in the passion and thus prefers works to suffering, glory to the cross, power to weakness, wisdom to folly; in sum, evil to good. Such are enemies of Christ’s cross.63 Friends of the cross, however, call the cross good and works evil. For the cross demolishes works, and Adam, who is built up by works, is crucified.o4 The wisdom that would know the invisible glory of God by the way of human works puffs up, blinds, and hardens (22). In itself, of course, it is not bad, but without the theology of the cross we make the best worst by ascribing wisdom and works to ourselves (24).°6 We are not righteous by doing much, but by believing much in Christ without works (25).°7 The law says, “Do this,” and nothing happens. Grace says, “Believe in him,” and all is done already (26).68 The love of God does not find its object present but creates it (28).69 For the love of God that is alive in us loves sinners, the wicked, the foolish, the weak, to make them righteous, good, wise, and strong. It overflows and lavishes good on them. Sinners are good, then, because they are loved; they are not loved because they are good.”°

What we have in these theses of Luther is truly and literally a theology of the cross. Luther, too, sees a horizontal line before him,”! our human striving, knowing, willing, and doing. The theology of glory thinks that somewhere on an extension of this line it will reach the goal of infinity, the invisible things of God. Its slogan is that grace does not destroy nature but perfects it.72 Luther does not deny that there is this wisdom, this beatific vision, much, much further along that line. His objection is that one thing is overlooked, namely, that at the center, where each of us stands, we willing and knowing humans with our works, there is a break that throws everything into question.’3 To say human is to say sin, rebellion

62. Ibid., 354, 21f.
63. Ibid., 362, 23-26.
64. Ibid., 362, 29f.
65. Ibid., 354, 23f.
66. Ibid., 354, 27f.
67. Ibid., 354, 29f.
68. Ibid., 354, 31f.
69. Ibid., 354, 35f
70. Ibid., 365, 8-12.
71. Barth has a graph in the margin here.
72. Thomas, S.Th. I, q. 1 a. 8 ad 2; cf. n. 30 above.
73. Barth has a graph in the margin here.

‘against grace, invincible ignorance of God, irreconcilable hostility to his law. What is radically set in question by this break in the middle of the line is not simply our banal everyday willing and doing, but just as much what we regard as our love of God, not simply our “sensuality” and reason but just as much our “simple intelligence,” as Gerson would put it, at the heart of which, sunk in contemplation, we see God face-to-face.74

The theology of glory boldly pushes on beyond the gap that makes all this problematical. It storms ahead without a halt on the horizontal line toward the invisible things of God, not considering how seriously it is threatened in the rear and how much it increases the damage with its striving. In contrast Luther tries to draw attention to the vacuum, to the fact that passion (suffering) stands at the heart of life and speaks of sin and folly, death and hell. These fearful visible things of God, his strange work, the crucified Christ

— these are the theme of true theology. A preaching of despair? No, of hope! For what does that break in the center mean? Who is the God hidden in the passion with his strange work, and what does he desire? Explaining Heidelberg Thesis 16, Luther pointed out that the strange work leads on to the proper work, that God makes us sinners in order to make us righteous.”> The gap in the horizontal line, the disaster of our own striving, is the point at which God’s vertical line intersects our lives,” where God wills to be gracious. Here where our finitude is recognized is true contact with infinity. He who judges us is he who shows mercy to us, he who slays us is he who makes us live, he who leads us into hell is he who leads us into heaven. Only sinners are righteous, only the sad are blessed, only the dying live. But sinners ave righteous, the sad are blessed, the dying do live. The God hidden in the passion is the living God who loves us, sinful, wicked, foolish, and weak as we are, in order to make us righteous, good, wise, and strong. It is because the strange work leads to the proper work that there can be no theology of glory, that we must halt at the sharply severed edges of the broken horizontal line where what we find is despair, humility, the fear of God. For despair is hope, humility is exaltation, fear of God is love of God, and nothing else. The center of this theology, then, is the demand for faith as naked trust that casts itself into the arms of God’s mercy; faith that is the last word that can be humanly said about the possibility of justification before God;

74. J. Gerson, Considerationes de theologia mystica, X, quoted in Hagenbach, 324.

75. WA 1, 361, 4f.

76. Barth has a graph in the margin here. a faith that is sure of its object — God — because here there is resolute renunciation of the given character of scholastic faith (infused, implicit, and formed) as an element of uncertainty; faith viewed not as itself a human work but as an integral part of God’s strange work, sharing in the whole paradox of it.

We see now why this theology was so basically polemical and militant. Without a constant critical debate with the infinitely attractive tendency, represented with such virtuosity by the scholastics, to press on to the goal, with the help of grace, by works, by “high-flying thoughts” (57, 208),’” the demand for faith cannot possibly be made. Hence a second focal point of this theology was a constantly repeated reference to Christ as God’s visible word and work in contrast to the lofty invisible things of the theology of glory. Luther admonished and warned us all to leave off speculating and not to float too high but to stay here below by the cradle and diaper in which Christ lies, in whom dwells all the fullness of the deity bodily (57, 211).78 This reference to Christ is truly necessary here, grounded in the matter itself, for here Christ does not simply bring grace as a second thing, so that we can then go on without him, as mysticism in particular has blabbed, but he is himself grace, the proper work of God, the promise of the mercy of God that is grasped in faith, the one God who makes us righteous, even as he is the Crucified, the scandal, the strange work of God, which threatens our works at their very root, the same God who makes us sinners in order to make us righteous.

It was this theology of the cross as a theology of the justification of sinners that Luther rediscovered in Romans and the Psalms, and Augustine as the word which finally routs completely even the true longings of mysticism and Nominalist Scholasticism. That this word should be loudly proclaimed and thoroughly heard was for him the Reformation once he became aware that with this concept a reformation of Christendom, the church, and theology had in fact begun. Initially Luther had no other concern than to refer to the forgotten cross at the beginning of our human way, or rather, this one concern basically included all others, though pursuing them could not be for him a matter of incisive or decisive importance. We are forced to say that this one concern in all its one-sidedness is indeed the true essence of the Reformation. Where people have

77. WA TR 6, 38 (no. 6558) refers to high-flying thoughts in the attempt to get to heaven without the ladder of Christ’s humanity.

78. WA TR 1, 108 (no. 257). this concern, there is Protestantism; where they do not, or have moved on past it, there is a prolongation of the Middle Ages!

From all this we derive two insights. First, we see why there had to be the sharp clash between the Reformation and the Middle Ages that I have just intentionally depicted for you with almost futuristic vividness. Schwenckfeld was right when he said that two worlds dash against one another here.7? We cannot both believe with Luther and also engage in mysticism with its devotional excesses, even though it be the finest and most insightful mysticism of an Eckhardt and his school. Medieval mysticism seeks with all its powers to move away from what Luther called God, though it could certainly speak a great deal about the cross and darkness and Christ. Luther turned his back with increasing resoluteness on what mysticism called God, although at first he thought he found his own outlook in the glorious little book of the German Theology and in Tauler.80 We will come back to the connection, which was undoubtedly there. But at the very point where it is there we see clearly that a choice has to be made: Luther or Eckhardt. Once we realize that the Middle Ages also knew the vertical line but lived wholly and utterly on the horizontal, whereas Luther also knew the horizontal but lived wholly and utterly on the vertical, or, more accurately, at the point of the intersecting of the vertical by the horizontal, we need no longer be surprised by the harsh either-or that had to arise there, nor by the shattering of security that the Reformation entailed, nor by the incomplete and fissured nature of its theological presentations, nor by the paucity of its metaphysics, nor by the atmosphere of anger that lay over the whole of the first half of the 16th century and that began to dissipate only when the spirit of the Reformation also fled, nor by the much-noted coarseness of Luther, nor by the cold virulence of Calvin, nor indeed by Ignatius Loyola and the pyres of the Counter-Reformation. When the theology of the cross really becomes part of the theological problem, when theologians begin really to note what is the true theme of their generally peaceful vocation, it is inevitable that something primal, wild, undomesticated, and demonic in religion will be aroused as between friend and foe. It had to be so then, and it might be that if the Creator Spirit brings on the stage another theology of the cross it will have to be so again. Insight into the ineluctability of these consequences will keep us straight when we assess certain

79. See above, 20f.

80. Cf. Loofs, 701, 709 (524). secondary phenomena of Reformation history with which we might have little sympathy. It will also keep us from looking for the essence of the Reformation in these secondary phenomena when we might well be in sympathy with them, as can happen.

The second insight clearly arises out of our account of Luther's starting point, where we have to look for what is problematic in the Reformation itself. We obviously turn to the horizontal line of human thought and action in time that is so sharply broken by the vertical line of the knowledge of God in Christ. The problem of human life and striving as the Middle Ages unbrokenly pursued it cannot be simply cut off by being put under the shadow of its finitude, that is, in the light of its origin. What does the attack of the vertical mean for what takes place horizontally? What becomes of all that we will and work here below on the line of death that is suddenly made visible,8! that we have to will and work because as people in time we are always here below on that line of death? What becomes of all this when we confront the absolute beyond that meets the present world in a way that crushes it but is also full of promise, when we arrive at the sharp edges of despair, humility, and fear of God which, as we saw yesterday, still have their positive side, when we face God the Judge who all the same is none other than the merciful God? The Middle Ages died with Luther’s discovery, but their problem, the problem of the active life, of ethics in the broadest sense, did not die with them. Nor can it be put to death. From the very first Luther was aware of this problem in his theology of the cross. Remember Thesis 55 at Wittenberg in 1517: Grace is not idle but a living, moving, active spirit.8 On innumerable occasions he tried with great seriousness to solve the problem. Simply to make Luther a Quietist is an illegitimate simplifying of the situation. We may at least say that this question was not primarily A7zs question. Luther's great concern was for the pure content and free course of the Word, no matter what might become of works. Here, however, in the matter of establishing the positive relation between the vertical and horizontal lines — the cross has to be left open in Luther’ — we find the point at which the second turn in the Reformation, the Reformed theology of Zwingli and Calvin, had to enter and did in fact do so.

81. The expression “line of death” was an important one for Barth at this period; cf. Romans.

82. See above, n. 52.

83. Barth has a graph in the margin here.

What I have said raises the question of features common to the Middle Ages and the Reformation despite the sharpness of their differences. At the beginning of the section I argued that the new thing in the Reformation in the serious sense is something eternally new, and closer investigation confirmed the insight that the new thing then discovered was something so great that it is a priori impossible to assume that it was simply not present at all previously; conversely, the old thing that the reformers vanquished was so all-encompassing and universally human that it could not possibly disappear completely.

The Reformation was the expression of a crisis that secretly ran through all the Middle Ages. I have referred already to the tensions and contradictions that the medieval church was able to reconcile, but in truth the tensions were serious. The Middle Ages were in self-contradiction long before Luther came along and made the contradiction irreconcilable. But the Middle Ages could always find a way victoriously through the tensions to the triumph of the theology of glory. They did not finally accept their own self-contradiction. In spite of every shock, they could always restore equilibrium. We see the existence of that crisis of the medieval spirit at the most varied points.

In this regard we recall especially the problem of monasticism that was always present in the church from Benedict of Nursia by way of the Cluny! reform to Francis of Assisi. Originally we had here a real protest of the first order against the theology of glory even though later precisely the Franciscans and Dominicans became that theology’s most brilliant champions. Initially monasticism questioned and even attacked a self-assured and worldly Christianity. It was an uplifted finger to remind people that we cannot have the kingdom of God so cheaply. The world took notice and caused the finger to drop. It made a place for asceticism. It offered this hard and dangerous function to the brave who were ready for it. It celebrated a new triumph by putting this possibility too, this highest level of human action, on the church’s horizontal line. Thus the ascetics, though often with great pain, as in the case of a Francis, became protagonists of the triumphing world church instead of protesting against it. That does not alter the fact, however, that the Reformation was at least also an extension of the monastic line. The question of true penitence that brought the theology of the cross to the fore was a

1. The MS by mistake had Clugny. variation on a typically monastic question. Monasticism now mounted its most powerful offensive. With full seriousness and with no holding back it now broke out of the cloister and became a universal matter. It would now question the world, not as before,from outside, but from inside, not in the form of the ascetic lifestyle of the few, but in that of a cross lifted up in the life of all. It achieved perhaps its greatest victory in the man in whom it finally went bankrupt.

To do justice to the new thing that was already concealed in the old we must also look at the innumerable traces that Augustine left in the Western church, and along with Augustine examine Paul’s epistles and the philosophy of Plato.2 Wherever Augustine made an impact, no matter how faintly, there still glowed under the ashes some recollection of the vertical line. In almost every century during the Middle Ages Augustine won over some resolute disciples for himself, and if they were strong enough, also for his own teachers, Paul and Plato. As regards the transcendental knowledge of God, John Scotus Erigena followed in his steps in the 9th century, Anselm in the 11th, Bonaventura in the 13th, and Eckhardt in the 14th. As regards predestination, we find an echo of his teaching in Isidore of Seville in the 7th century, an extreme and defiant proponent in Gottschalk in the 9th, a renaissance in the 14th century in Bradwardine (the profound doctor, who wanted to defend it as “the cause of God” against a Christian world that had fallen into Pelagianism, Elijah against the 450 priests of Baal), and also in Gregory of Rimini, in whose formulas some have sought a source of the theology of Luther.3 Again, at least as a restraining force, Augustine played a decisive part in the development of the scholastic doctrine of the appropriation of salvation. If at this point the doctrines of free will, of the possibility of earning merit, of infused grace and making righteous were hemmed about by so many distinctions that even in typical representatives of Scholasticism one might at a pinch expound them in better part along Reformation lines, or at least find in them a starting point for Luther’s revolution, then unmistakably this was due, if not to the spirit, at least to the shadow, of Augustine.

2. For Barth’s evaluating of Plato along with Paul cf. Barth’s Epistle to the Romans (Oxford, 1933), p. 111; also his essay “The Christian’s Place in Society,” in The Word of God and the Word of Man (reprinted New York, 1957), 272-327; and Romans.

3. On Bradwardine cf. Hagenbach, 393f; and Bradwardine, De causa dei contra Pelagium, Praefatio, according to Tschackert, 27 n. 1. On the influence of Gregory of Rimini on Luther's view of concupiscence and original sin cf., e.g., Tschackert, 38f.

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Augustine’s spiritual emphasis played a similar role in eucharistic teaching, though here the last powerful opposition to the theology of glory, that of Berengar of Tours, was broken already in the 11th century.4 Finally medieval theology took over from Augustine something that it found congenial, his mystical devotion and his attachment to the church, while quietly ignoring his less congenial Platonism and Paulinism. Nevertheless, it could no more prevent the latter elements than the former from retaining their vitality. Those latter elements had only to be reasserted, which is precisely what happened with great force.

Along with monasticism and Augustinianism, a third Reformation element in the Middle Ages was undoubtedly the anti-Thomistic theology of Duns Scotus (d. 1308) and the so-called modern way of William of Occam (d. 1349), which had a similar orientation but went even further. With special reference to Calvin we must devote a few moments to these two British thinkers. A first distinctive feature in both was the questioning of the unity of the path of knowledge, of the stairway from reason to revelation. Not metaphysically but methodologically the statements of reason and revelation were for them irreconcilable. We are unable to mount up from reason to revelation. Theology is a practical, not a speculative, discipline, said Duns,? and Occam agreed that we cannot know God’s existence, essence, or reality intuitively from ourselves or from the things of nature. God cannot be an object for us.6 Occam went further, however, when he showed that our reason not only cannot prove dogma but might make it appear absurd.” Reality consists only of individual things, said Duns, and again Occam went further with his even sharper thesis that this is the reality originating in the idea of God, whereas the terms or names or concepts out of which reason constructs science exist only in the soul of the knowing subjects, so that logic is the only real science.8 This thesis

4. Cf. Hagenbach, 416f.; Loofs, Leitfaden, 500-503 (7th ed. 403ff.).

5. For Duns see Loofs, 591 (486).

6. William of Occam, Super IV libros Sententiarum, sent. 1, dist. 3, qu. 2, in Hagenbach, 332.

7. Cf. Seeberg, III, 609-21.

8. Ibid., 569, in which it is pointed out that for Duns individualitas is a reality, the individual entity that constitutes the individual, Aaecceitas as the later expression has it (Duns metaph. VII, q. 13, 9). See Ficker and Hermelink, Das Mittelalter, 187£., with reference to Occam’s agnosticism and Nominalism, or, better, Terminism (the individual thing originating in the idea of God produces a terminus in the soul of those who know it, and this is then universalized).

Dy

explains the historical use of the term Nominalism for the Occamist school, though the name by no means exhausts the significance of the school.

Something like the gap in the middle to which we referred in connection with Luther was undoubtedly the result of this agnosticism, and it seems to me totally out of the question that Luther, who could call himself an Occamist,? was not methodologically influenced at this point. But the difference comes to light at once when we note to what end the Nominalists made the rent. Unfortunately, at least so far as we can detect their theological purpose, they did not seek like Luther to humble us humans and to make way for the unique self-glory of God. Instead, as apologetics likes to do in every age when it is very refined, they were aiming to bring about a total subjection to all church doctrines, even though these might be as contrary to reason as they are! Occam expressly advocated implicit faith,!9 and their purpose was to make this seem to be the only possible means of rescue from the sea of doubt. If, as they believed, there was no direct path to the theology of glory by way of reason, they would attain to it by the sacrifice of reason.

This maneuver is certainly not the same as Luther’s theology of the cross, which simply bids us halt before God himself and appeal to his mercy. We should not fail to see, of course, how insightful and significant it still was from a formal standpoint. We need only look at a saying like that of Occam to the effect that faith is a free gift by which the mind believes on account of God and against itself (Tschackert, 36).!! Were it not for the fatal knowledge that this believing against the intellect does not lead to pure negation and hence to a true transcendental grounding of natural knowledge, but to the paradoxical superstructure of an additional supranatural knowledge that is not in pure antithesis to the natural; were it not for the knowledge that this believing is simply a secret understanding of a higher type, its object not being the origin of all that may be known, not the crucified Christ, but the hinterland of church dogma that is accepted for all the skepticism, one might say that here an insight into the relation to infinity that takes place precisely in an awareness of human finitude as such (the mind against itself),

an insight into the

9. Luther, WA 6, 600, 11f., in his 1520 work against the papal bull.

10. Seeberg, III, 614, a reference to Occam's De sacr. alt. 1.16; quodl. IV, g 35; and cf. 616f.; also Ficker and Hermelink, Das Mittelalter, 188.

11. Tschackert, 36, ascribes this statement to the Occamist Pierre d’Ailly; cf. Gersonii opera, I, 68 A. freedom of this relation from any discursive basis (“on account of God”), an insight into its origin by creation (“free gift”), had been wonderfully achieved.

That fundamentally nonmedieval insight did hover before those thinkers even though they did not develop it but were encysted and incapable of the grim seriousness with which Luther proceeded at this point. To see how it hovered before them we need look only at their distinctive doctrine of God.!2 Over against the whole system of causal necessity that we call the world God stands contingently as himself an indeterminate first cause, as free will in the absolute, as will that has its norm only in itself. In virtue of the absolute power of this will the whole world might have been different. In fact, of course, God simply acts in accordance with his plan that aims at the saving of the elect, in accordance with his ordained power. He thus wills everything as it actually is. Nevertheless, and this is the decisive point, the possibility remains, and has to be considered, that God might have willed and acted differently. God is not a prisoner of his own plan that we see worked out in the church, or of the logical and moral orders in which he executes the plan. It might happen, said Duns, that people attain to glory that do not receive the grace, the knowledge of God, that Scotists and Occamists, like other scholastics, think of as infused faith (Seeberg, HI, 578). It might be, Occam ventured to say, that God could have made the morally good other than it is in fact, that hatred of God, theft, and adultery could be meritorious, had not God’s command ordained the opposite (Loofs, 612).13 In both the religious and the moral sphere we thus have to consider that things are pleasing to God only because of his acceptance of them on the basis of his free will (Ischackert, 36), and that when we speak of God in the forms of the age, when we speak of what he did, does, or will do, the now of eternity that we mean is the truth of what we say.!4 Only God’s own essence is the proper object of his will. To all else he stands in a basically contingent relation; he is free relative to it (Loofs, 593-94).!5 Even Christ’s passion is meritorious only by God’s “acceptation.” An angel or another

12. For what follows cf. Seeberg, III, 577ff.

13. Occam, Super IV Libros Sententiarum, 2, q., 9 litt. O, quoted in Loofs, 612 n. 2 (507).

14. Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, I, dist. 9, q. unica no. 6, quoted in Loofs, 594 (488).

15. Ibid., I, dist. 39, q. unica no. 22; Loofs, 594 n. 2 (489). human might have made reconciliation for the world just as well (Hagenbach, 387).!© On this path that leads to Luther Occam put out such powerful ideas as that forgiveness of sins is not a making righteous but nonimputation.!7 4

Most church historians and histories of doctrine tell us that the God of Duns and Occam was a capricious God,!8 but I believe with Seeberg that this view is wrong. As these theologians studied and deepened the concept of power, their unsettling reminder of God’s absolute power was meant to anchor the more firmly the authority of the truth that holds good by God’s ordained power.!9 They. knew very well that one cannot establish a thing better or more effectively than by taking it back to its premise by the sharpest criticism of the way it is. The premise of all that God has ordained, however, is deity, God’s freedom and majesty. What good is all our zeal toward God, or with God, or even for God, if we do not consider at all who and what God is, if there is no basic interruption of our zeal by the recollection that God’s thoughts are not our thoughts nor his ways ours [cf. Isa. 55:8]?

To give a sure place to that recollection Duns and Occam introduced into theology a final uncertainty as to God’s will and work. They did-so. for the very same reason — and this is why I deal with the point so fully as that Which Would HF

f Téad Calvin to think he had found in the doctrine of double ‘predestination the core and lodéstar of the doctrine of God. Against the concept of God in Duns and Occam we aré not to bring ‘the charge of arbitrariness that has equally wrongly been made against Calvin, but rather — and this is what produced the misunderstanding —that of a charming and playful intellectualism, the lack of seriousness with which, unlike Calvin, they handled these necessary but dangerous ideas. They had no intention at all of using the critical principle of absolute power that they had discovered to call into question the given factor of the church that rests on the ordained power, to subject the church to this

16. Ibid., III, dist. 19, quoted in Hagenbach, 387, with the comment that Duns undercuts Anselm, for if Christ suffered only according to his human nature, an angel or another man might have suffered just as well.

17. Occam, Super quattuor libros sententiarum, IV, q. 8, according to Loofs, 620 (513).

18. Cf. the judgment of Loofs, 594 n. 2 (with a reference to F. C. Baur, Lehre von der Dreieinigkeit, II, 654f.); also 689 (409, 504); and Ficker and Hermelink, 187; Tschackert, 35.

19. Seeberg, III, 578f., in express opposition (in a note) to Baur, Lehre, Il, 654¢f. critical insight, and in this way actually to destroy the whole theology of glory. Instead they used the insight as a paradoxical means to make a free path for scholastic dogmatics, ethics, and mysticism, for the whole titanic striving of the Middle Ages of immediacy. With this great caveat of the divine freedom they established the validity of such distinctive medieval ideas as infused and implicit faith, free will, merit, grace as habitus, justification as infusion, opus operatum in sacramental administration, eucharistic transubstantiation, and penance as.a sure and easy path. They could advocate all these things precisely in a more vital way, and by reason of the piquant critical background in a more ingenious way, than the earlier and in the last resort naiver scholastics. Occam was the most important medieval advocate of the inspiration of the Bible and Duns Scotus was the hero of his Franciscan order as the highly regarded pioneering defender of the immaculate conception of Mary.?°

That matters could take this course naturally forces the word “treason” upon our lips. We recall with shame and anger how 19th-century theologians sat at the feet of Kant in order that with the help of his critique of reason they might justify instead of challenge modern Christianity. Theologians have always been adept at ingeniously toying with the most radical and dangerous thoughts and feelings and then devaluing them in an attempt to justify and confirm contemporary religious thoughts and feelings. But who are we to complain in this regard? It makes no sense to doubt the personal sincerity of those who acted thus in the 14th and 19th centuries. Who among us do not have to complain of ourselves in this regard? Nominalism was a great theological possibility. If for a moment we look beyond the confusing interrelation of excellent intention and lamentable execution, in spite of everything we cannot fail to see how hopeful this theology was. It rendered its historical reforming service and is definitely part of the new thing in the old to the extent that it had a destructive effect on the proud structure of Scholasticism and at least greatly undermined the towers that it was neither able nor willing to overthrow. It is not in vain that we think the thought of God’s freedom and majesty, the great and solemn thought of the critical negation of everything given, even though we take the thought no more seriously than did Duns and Occam. If the thought cannot work as a remedy, then it works as a poison. If it does not lay a foundation, then it creates uncertainty. If it does not equip theology for rethinking and renewal, then it

20. Loofs, 596f. (490f) results in culpable obduracy. If the Reformation found theology in a state of disarray and uncertainty, of poisoning and hardening; if it found its way easier as a result; if it could succeed in doing what an Anselm or Bonaventura or Thomas perhaps could not do, then that is the tragic merit of Duns, to whom contemporaries gave the honorary title of the subtle doctor, while the frank but crude Gottfried Arnold (Kirchengeschichte, |, 421) called him the foremost eccentric,?! and perhaps he was both. This was also the tragic merit of Occam, whose contemporary honorary title of venerable inceptor was no less ambivalent. Luther called himself an adherent of this school.?? Calvin, and perhaps also Zwingli,?3 studied in Paris, its main center, and must have been greatly stimulated by it. Yet as an Occamist neither could have become a reformer.

As a fourth line leading to the Reformation we may cite mysticism. You will have noted in the last hours that I regard mysticism only as one factor among others on the soil of the basic common view of the relation of God to us in the Middle Ages, and that I thus see it along with Scholasticism as the latter’s finest flower, so that of almost no medieval theologian can we say where the scholastic leaves off and the mystic begins. All of them were to some extent both. We may rightly count many of them as mystics in the narrower sense and then trace a line from Hugh of St. Victor and Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century to Bonaventura in the 13th, Meister Eckhardt and his school, Tauler, Seuse, and the author of the German Theology in the 14th, and if one will Thomas 4 Kempis in the 15th.

Yet we should not lose sight of the scholastic element in these mystics, or of the mystical element in the other scholastics, or of the medieval problem common to both. The common factor in medieval mysticism, the human striving for immediacy, Luther was already calling the theology of glory in his 1516 lectures on Romans at the very time when he was also speaking in friendly terms about mysticism and had come into contact especially with German mysticism. He both knew it and rejected it as the

21. G. Arnold, Unpartheyische Kirchen- und Ketzer-historie.

_» parts | and 2 (Frankfort, 1729), 421.

22. See n. 9 above.

23. The reference to Zwingli studying in Paris is based on a note of his friend Gregorius Mangold. It was possible in the years 1499-1500, but a saying of Zwingli’s quoted by H. Bullinger refutes the idea. Cf. on the whole question G. W. Locher, Die Zwinglische Reformation im Rahmen der europdischen Kirchengeschichte (Gottingen, 1979), 6lf.

D7

theology of glory. He said in the lectures that mystics wish “to hear and contemplate only the uncreated Word Himself, not having first been justified and purged in the eyes of the heart by the incarnate Word” (Tschackert, 41).24 Remember what we were speaking of yesterday. By the “uncreated Word” understand the invisible things of God that the enemies of the cross, as Luther calls them, contemplate, by justification of “the eyes of the heart” understand the strange work of God in which is hidden the proper work of his mercy, and by the “incarnate Word” understand the crucified Christ. Then this critical saying will make sense to you.

Our present task, however, is to trace the positive relations of mysticism to the Reformation. We face the fact that in spite of that and similar sayings Luther did speak in very favorable tones about mysticism, in tones that he never used for Nominalists, and elsewhere only for Augustine and the Bible. He drew from the same source as Bonaventura and Eckhardt, namely, Augustine, and historically the element in Augustine that had the most influence in the Middle Ages was his Neoplatonic mysticism. In later life Luther once expressly confessed that for a long time, and to his hurt, he had been occupied with the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite (Loofs, 724).2° In the middle of 1516, as we see from the Romans lectures, he was acquainted with Tauler and the German Theology, and he was deeply influenced by them, so that a modern scholar could speak of an “acute mystification” of Luther’s theology at this time.?7 But what kind of union could there be between the Reformation and mysticism when it obviously could not include what is most striking in mysticism, its striving for immediacy, which Luther here at once perceived and attacked as an enemy? | think I see the unity of the two at three points.

1. It is understandable that Luther should at first unconcernedly greet mysticism as a precious treasure of knowledge even though he was unsympathetic from the outset with its striving for immediacy, its desire to hear and contemplate the uncreated Word. For this desire, this fundamental desire of the Middle Ages, contained within itself a problem that could not be

24. WA 56, 300, 1ff.

25. See above, 43ff.

26. Disputatio prima contra Antinomos (1537), WA 39 1, 390, 3-390, quoted in Loofs, 714 n. 2.

27. Cf. Tschackert, 39f. For a first reference to Tauler cf. the 1516 Romans lectures, WA 56, 378, 13f; LW 25, 368. Cf. A. W. Hunzinger, “Luther und die deutsche Mystik,” Neue kirchliche Zeitschrift 19 (1908), 972-88, quoted in Tschackert, 40. dismissed out of hand even though the desire might be viewed critically. Certainly Bernard of Clairvaux and innumerable followers of his depicted the union of the soul with God in the far too vivid similitude of the union of the bridegroom and the bride in the Song of Songs, and Eckhardt spoke of the ground of the soul in us where we are one with God, or of the birth of God in the soul, just as he also plainly translated the Trinity into the various aspects of the religious process in the soul, or made it our goal to become by grace what God is by nature.28 What we find in these statements as they stand is the spirit of a religious shamelessness that takes what does not belong to it. We have to see, however, that the more perspicacious of the mystics recognized the danger and warned against the misunderstanding to which the statements can so easily give rise.

Seuse once spoke sharply about the mystic who in his flourishing rationality wanted to see in himself and in all things a part of the eternal, uncreated rationality: “He hurriedly addresses the matter in an unseasonable way, he blossoms out in his mind like fermenting fruit that even so is not yet ripe.”2? We are not to take literally the exaggerated way in which the mystics speak. It is evident that they speak in this way, using extreme and audacious similes and comparisons, because they face the difficulty of wanting to say things that cannot be said even in the strongest terms, and yet are calling out to be said: the actualizing, the taking place, the coming into being, and the actual being of the relation between us and God. The problem that oppresses the mystics is that of dealing seriously with the known truth of God, of the actuality of the revelation of God to us. For all their sharper insight into the difficulty of this problem, the British Nominalists did not feel it or live it out as existentially as the German mystics. If the former were the head of the later Middle Ages, the latter were the heart.

Luther was closer to the heart than to the head. He saw that the problem of the Middle Ages could not be solved with German exaggeration, Roman rationalism, or British skepticism and ingenuity. But he derived from the first of these the great sense of urgency, the profound and heartfelt seriousness, that underlay the whole medieval concern. The word that defied speech had to be spoken. The impossible possibility had to become an event. The very thing that had never been present,?° that

28. On the former see Loofs, 522 (425). On the latter see ibid., 628-30 (521f)

29. Hagenbach, 334.

30. Cf. the last lines of E von Schiller’s An die Freunde (1802).