§2 Contrast (part 3 of 3)

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as a human thought or action could be described only as mad folly, that very thing had to come into our lives as the thought and action of God. The Reformation did not ignore the underlying difficulty and hope but for the first time gave it the sharpest expression. It totally rejected and reversed the concern in its existing form, but in reality it still took it quite seriously. Yes, was Luther’s reply to the medieval question embedded in mysticism, yes indeed, immediacy, but God’s immediacy to us and not vice versa. Yes, life in God, but in the power of his creative Word, not of what is creative in us. Yes, God and the soul, the soul and its God,3! but God, or else it is all error and idolatry. Luther heard what the school of Eckhardt was saying. He understood it. It was alive in him. But because he heard and understood it, he turned aside from the path of Eckhardt as such. There can be no success along that path in terms of the theology of glory, but there is success a hundredfold in terms of the theology of the cross for those who have ears to hear what medieval mystics must surely grasp when they let themselves be taught.

2. Mysticism differs from Scholasticism by stressing the historical person of Jesus. There is, of course, a strange paradox here. None made it more clear than the mystics that the Middle Ages at root did not know what to do with Christ. From the days of Bernard of Clairvaux they anticipated the modern Protestant cult of the gentle, humble, mild, and merciful man Jesus of Nazareth, adorned with all the virtues that they themselves highly rated, and Bernard has often been praised precisely on this account because something particularly evangelical has been seen in it? Neither Bernard, Tauler, nor Thomas 4 Kempis could really get beyond the picture of Jesus as the model of our seeking of God and as the invisible head of all those like-minded with him. It is obvious that at this point, as the Reformation saw it, a misunderstanding had to be set aside. The ideal of medieval piety that mysticism equated with Christ, and that it enthusiastically used schematically in its spiritual direction, could not coexist with the theology of the cross, which summoned precisely this ideal of piety to judgment and sought to bring freedom from preoccupation with the self.

31. Cf. A. von Harnack, What Is Christianity? (New York, 1902), 61, where it is argued that if religious individualism, “God and the soul, the soul and its God,” and subjectivism, if all such things are Greek, then Jesus was in the context of Greek development.

32. Loofs, 528 (427).

But a problem still remained at this point, in short, the problem of the historical element in Christianity, of revelation. The one and only historical Jesus had become important for medieval believers precisely because they came up against historicity, individuality, and uniqueness in their striving for immediacy. They suspected that this was the category under which alone they could grasp the revelation they sought. They ran up hard against the limits of their own individuality within which they finally could not find revelation. They sensed that they could find it precisely where they could not reach, namely, in the historicity, individuality, and uniqueness of the other. The other is the one in whom is revelation, and only as the other speaks directly to me and ceases to be the other, only as33 he becomes an I, can I have a part in revelation. This other is Jesus Christ as the quintessence of the historical, the individual, and the unique, and therefore as the bearer of revelation. The Bible responds to the search for immediacy, when this seeks clarity about itself, with the wonderful message: The Word became flesh [John 1:14]. Revelation took place in the other, in Jesus Christ. The intersecting of the human horizontal line by the divine vertical line zs a fact. Time is related to eternity, this world to the next, I to Thou.

The Middle Ages, too, heard this message. At first, of course, they misheard it — when and by whom is it not misheard? What they heard was that the Word became a pious man, and this went well with their basic view. But the Word that was truly sought and meant was not that. How can a pious man be revelation to me, set me before God, speak directly to me, cease to be another to me? He is and remains a he, the more so the more pious he is. He can demand that I imitate him, but if I try to do that I admit that my supposed finding has again become a seeking. He can be to me only a companion in my striving for immediacy. But he cannot bring this to completion by himself achieving immediacy.

In contrast to the medieval picture of Jesus, the Christ of Luther is not the pious man but the man who is set in the ranks of sinners under judgment, in the shadow of hell and death, the crucified Christ. Not the crucified Christ of edification, who kindles our admiration as a martyr and hero, whom we are to imitate in his submission to the will of God, whom we can depict and tolerate in his tragic beauty, but the nonedifying crucified Christ of Griinewald, who, when painted, proclaims the strange work of God; who has no form nor comeliness [cf. Isa. 53:2]; in face of

33. The MS had dass here, changed by the editor to indem. whom love, the affection lavished so remarkably freely on this Savior in his piety, becomes an offering that we no longer resolve so easily to make; in whose lostness ‘and mortal plight we are forced to see a pointer to God himself and his demand for saving despair, humility, and fear of God. This incarnate Word, the Crucified, can speak directly to me. In him the barrier that makes him another is torn down. In him, if I bow under his judgment, I can see myself, be set before God, be cast into the arms of sheer mercy. Here it is not at all a matter of imitation but of faith, not of a further search for immediacy but of revelation. Here it really happens that a hole is made in the Gothic vault, and God’s heaven is seen high above. He who sees me sees the Father [John 14:9].

This incarnate Word then, and not, as we are sometimes told, the so-called historical Jesus, is what Luther rediscovered. Rediscovered? Yes, he was always there. He does not have to come and go with the shifts in understanding or nonunderstanding to which he is subject in the course of history. We hear at least, whether we understand or not; the problem of the human situation as such bears witness to him. This Word is known even when not known. Mystics, too, had no other Christ in view even though they almost always spoke about another. Their love of Jesus, which in the last resort was no other than a special form of their pressing on to the event, was something that Luther could let speak to him. It perhaps spoke more strongly in him than in all of them, and if in him, and in the Reformation in general, the rather thin water of the imitation of Christ with its poetry of blood and wounds became the strong wine of the message of judgment and forgiveness, we simply have here further testimony how seriously what was at issue was the new thing that was also already the old.

3. The third point of contact between Reformation thinking and that of medieval mysticism was the methodological principle of mysticism that we might sum up under the term “abnegation.” In infinite variations the mystics tried to describe the outworking of this principle. They spoke of the need for separation, resignation, quiet isolation, simplicity of heart, calm, obedience that gives up all that is one’s own, or conversely of entry into the inner ground that is the least we have (Eckhardt), of denying oneself, of imitating the passion of Christ with patient suffering and loving humility, of pressing oneself into this (Tauler), of surrender to God as a captive, of making the transition from creatures to God, of seeking God in pious ignorance and mental darkness (Luther),*4 of laying aside all that

34. On Eckhardt see F. Pfeiffer, Meister Eckhart, Deutsche Mystiker des 14. Jahris created, I-ness, selfhood, every “me,” “to me,” or “mine,” of not wanting to be something but nothing, and so on.

We can take all that these expressions denote in two ways. First, we might see them as the description of a temporal process that takes place, or ought to take place, in individuals, and that consists of the achieving — no matter how we think of it — of the greatest possible passivity of the conscious soul with the aim of effecting the souls’ union with the deity represented as an event in time. Or, second, we might see them as the description of a timeless transcendental relation of the life of the soul, whether conscious or unconscious, active or passive, to its origin in God. In the first case abnegation is a pastoral injunction, a recipe, a method, a proposal how to proceed. In the second case, in the form of a psychological direction, it is a demand for contemplation or recollection of the truth that is the truth quite apart from any possible or impossible processes in the soul. We need hardly say that the first interpretation is more natural and closer to the text, as it were, than the second. If we read the works of Seuse, for example,>> we see at once that this man fashioned his whole life upon a constant following of the recipe of abnegation, and with more or less strictness and success almost all mystics did in fact view abnegation as a definite and specific practice. Insofar as mystical abnegation is no more than practice of this kind, it has naturally nothing whatever to do with the Reformation. Instead, it is the supreme and most refined form of what the Reformation combated as works righteousness. How can one more distinctively pursue a theology of glory than by going beyond striving for it and making the negation of all striving itself a striving? (Cf. Gogarten, Offenbarung und Mystik.)>®

We might see here a parallel to the way in which Duns Scotus and Occam made the dangerous dynamite of the doctrine of absolute power a smooth stone in the foundation of church dogmatics. At this third point, however, I think we do mysticism an injustice if we do not look beyond the historical kernel and note how once again it points ahead of itself. Here again dynamite is always dynamite. Note how Eckhardt in his sermons unequivocally negates not just position after position but ultimately negation itself, that is, the psychological path to which he himself

hunderts, vol. II (Leipzig, 1857), 155, 21f., quoted in Loofs, 629 (522). See Tauler’s sermon on Luke 10:23, quoted in’ Hagenbach, 388. See Luther’s Romans lectures, WA 56, 413, 18£; LW 25, 404; Barth was using Tschackert, 41.

35. Barth had Seuse’s Deutsche Schriften, ed. W. Lehmann, 2 vols. (Jena, 1911).

36. Cf. Gogarten’s essay in Die religidse Entscheidung (Jena, 1921), O5ff. previously pointed. Note how he finally seeks a resignation that is not psychological resignation or passivity as a way of life any longer, but that is just as well, or even better as he often says, an active manner of life, so that paradoxically Martha, the busy one, is set above Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet.37 This means, however, that he sees the transcendental character of the principle of mystical abnegation that is truly meant. He does not cease to be a theologian of glory. He uses the thought of death in the sense of Plato's Phaedon (chs. 9-13), which says of the philosopher that at root his only aim is to die and be dead, his work being no other than that of detaching and separating the soul from the body.38 In my view abnegation for Eckhardt was in the last resort simply Platonic purification, the strongest critical means of clarifying the relation between God and us in which the greatest distance is precisely the greatest proximity. We must insist on this if we are to do full justice to mysticism. In this regard we cannot uphold an absolute antithesis between Luther and Eckhardt, between revelation and mysticism. Luther must have found something related, instructive, and illuminating when he recommended Tauler and the German Theology; while Calvin, even though in the latter work seeing and repudiating only medieval spiritualizing,>? could not refrain, under pressure of the logic of the matter, from himself at a decisive point in the Institutes (III, 7-8) depicting the Christian life from the mystical standpoint of self-denial and bearing the cross.

As a fifth force preparing the way for the Reformation, along with monasticism, Augustinianism, Nominalism, and mysticism, we must finally refer, of course, to the 15th- and 16th-century Renaissance. Its positive relation to the Reformation is naturally on a different level from that of the other factors. From the latter, as we have seen, a straight if for long stretches broken line leads to Luther’s view of the vertical intersecting the horizontal, to the theology of the cross. We certainly cannot say that of the Renaissance, though technically and formally the new interest in antiquity meant among other things that the original text of the Bible and Augustine, and through Augustine Plato, came into focus and played a part in the Reformation. The result of this rediscovery, especially in Luther,

37. See n. 33 on 34.

38. See esp. Phaedon 67de.

39. On Tauler see n. 27; and on the German Theology see Luther’s prefaces to his 1516 and 1518 editions, WA 1, 153, 378f. Cf. Calvin's letter to the French refugee congregation in Frankfort, 2.23.1559, CO 17, 441f. in which he notes in the German Theology, if no major errors, at any rate an obscuring of the simplicity of the gospel. See 85 below. was not intended, however, by the Renaissance, nor was it integral to its own logic. The theologically most interested champions of the Renaissance, those great lovers, editors, and expositors of the Bible, Erasmus and Lefévre d’Etaples (Faber Stapulensis), were completely terrified by the spirits they conjured up,*° by the bondage of the will and the break with church tradition, and they gave approval and support to the Reformation in neither its Lutheran nor its Reformed manifestation. The interest of the Renaissance was wholly in the direction of the horizontal. It continued the basic classical medieval view, or perhaps translated and reformulated it into the basic classical modern view, which for all the differences has more in common with the Middle Ages than with the Reformation. Common to the Middle Ages and the modern period is the idea of aiming at a goal in step-by-step progress. The goal for both is on the horizontal line. It is a goal of human willing and knowing. The concept alone stood in need of translation. The Middle Ages located the goal somewhere in one of the real or imagined upper worlds, in the so-called hereafter. It sought to mount up to paradise. It wanted to look upon pure deity, as Tauler put it.4! It wanted ecstasy, as we might put it rationalistically today. Our own age thinks it is much cleverer by not shooting the arrow of longing too far. Impartially we might say: It is more weary and resigned. With a skepticism that is partly more questioning and partly more dogmatic it halts at the gates of the upper worlds. For some centuries the spiritual world has been unknown territory on the suspicion of being unreal. The gaze has been all the keener for what can be perceived directly in time and space, for what is called this world. With the same absoluteness and emphasis the goal is set in nature as we know it and history as we know it. The enthusiasm of pressing on to the immediate that once created the Gothic vault has changed into the enthusiasm for the concrete, for what has come into being, for what can be measured and controlled, for the colorful world of visible things that we can happily attain to without scholastic profundity or mystical abnegation. Goethe once gave classical formulation to the distinction and the common factor when he said that if we want to stride on into the infinite we must simply go on in the finite on every hand.#2 But in my view the difference between the two methods

40. Cf. Goethe’s Der Zauberlehrling (1797), V, 91f.

41. Barth recalls here the quotation from Seuse in Hagenbach, 448, which he used earlier; cf. 29 n. 16.

42. Cf. Goethe’s Gott, Gemiit und Welt (1815), V, vv. 29f. is usually overrated. In the modern age we simply have the Middle Ages _ now become clever and also weary. The sleep has become half sleep, and who knows, perhaps we might put it the other way round. The Middle Ages could throw back at the modern age the charge of excessive enthusiasm, for the modern age with its rationalism is simply enthusiastic to the point of excess on a different level. The modern age can throw back at the Middle Ages the charge of intellectualism, for the Middle Ages were truly intellectualistic, but on a higher level. The two levels are steps on the same ladder. In principle the distinction in both cases is from the Reformation insight, from Plato and Paul, and therefore from the medieval trends that point back to Plato and Paul and forward to the Reformation.43 The Reformation and all that is part of it in the Middle Ages and the modern period are both antimodern and antimedieval. The Reformation front cuts right across the opposite contrasting fronts of these two opponents.

This is an insight that I do not find clearly in Troeltsch, Loofs, or Seeberg.44 In the Renaissance, at first in the form of a rebirth of the rationalism of antiquity, the modern spirit of an emphatic this-worldliness was born and took its first steps. There came to life a strong interest in nature, in the social and political order, in history, in the nation as such, and last but by no means least in the individual human personality. Outstanding Renaissance figures along with Erasmus, the first modern theologian, were Paracelsus, the student of medicine, for whom God did miracles but only human miracles through humans; Machiavelli, who has been called the scientist of the state; Giordano Bruno, who by equating God and the form and matter of the world challenged the reality of the upper world of the Middle Ages,4> and who was one of the first and rare martyrs of the modern spirit. At root the Renaissance did not take part in Luther’s Reformation. Its controversy with the Middle Ages completely bypassed that Reformation. To the degree that it hailed it as a comrade, it misunderstood it. Due to the same misunderstanding the spiritualistic Enthusiasts combined the Reformation with Renaissance aspirations. For all the apparently great contradictions, the Roman Catholic Counter- Reformation was better able to adopt, use, and amalgamate the Renais-

43. See above, 51 n. 2.

44, See 13. nn. 1 and 2 above.

45. Seeberg, IV, 12, who quotes Paracelsus but does not give the source. On Machiavelli see Seeberg ad loc. On Bruno cf. K. Vorlander, Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. I, PhB 105 (Leipzig, 2nd ed. 1908), 301. sance with itself than the young Protestantism that opposed it. The positive significance of the Renaissance for the Reformation was that apart from it, and even against it, it put to it the fateful question: What, in spite of everything, did the Lutheran vertical mean for the horizontal, the theology of the cross for unavoidable human striving? The Renaissance with its most emphatic this-worldliness was needed to put this question to the Reformation, and in this way to bring the crisis to a head, to close the circle of the Reformation movement.

From what has been said it is clear, however, that through the voice of the Reformation the Middle Ages were also calling for a new answer to their own distinctive problem, the problem of ethics, of lifestyle, of the way. With the posing of this fateful question the second turn in the Reformation came that eventually, by a higher curve in the path, would lead back to the beginning and tragically enough, though in a way that is historically understandable, would lead it back onto a newly repaired stretch of the old horizontal highway, to the Christian secularity from which it had once broken free. But those who put the question were not spectators like Erasmus, but Zwingli and Calvin, children of the Renaissance, who, whether dependently or independently, shared the insight of Luther, the born scholasticand mystic. This second development and completion of the Reformation movement in its subsequent controversy with the newly arrived spirit of the modern age as we find that controversy in the theology of Calvin, the man who was both totally the reformer and totally the Renaissance man, which we cannot say of either Luther or Zwingli, will be the main theme, quiet but yet explicit, of our present lectures.

As a sixth group of advocates of the new thing in the old we must finally, for the sake of completeness, mention the Catholic reforming theologians of the 14th and 15th centuries, Bradwardine, Wycliffe, Huss, Gerson, J. Goch, J. von Wesel, Wessel Gansfort, and Savonarola being the best known. There is a book by C. Ullmann, Reformatoren vor der Reformation (1st ed. 1841, 2nd ed. 1866), whose title aroused lively opposition especially from Ritschl and his disciples.4° Those who honor such men with the name of pre-reformers are not uninfluenced — and this is no disgrace — by the heroic, the tragic, and the sympathetic aspects of their stories. These men were fighters for an insight whose time had not yet

46. Ullmann’s work was printed in two volumes (Hamburg, 1841 and 1842; 2nd ed. Gotha, 1866). See A. Ritschl, Die christliche Lehre von der Rechtfertigung und Versohnung, vol. I, 4th ed. (Bonn, 1909), 129, 132. Cf. Loofs, ⁶³⁴(527f.); and Seeberg, III, 640f. come. By their work they did in fact stir up the unrest that became a movement at the Reformation. All of them, with more or less energy and insight, stood at one of the points mentioned from which the prospect of the Reformation insight was a possibility, Bradwardine, for example, as a Neo-Augustinian, Gerson as the champion of a noble and modified mysticism, Savonarola as a proponent of ancient monastic ideals, and Wycliffe as the forerunner of an attempted Christian renaissance, and precisely for that reason the most problematical of all these figures. Nevertheless, these pre-reformers have relatively less systematic interest as we try to elucidate the Reformation than do an Occam or an Eckhardt, for, so far as I can judge, none of them can be hailed as a classical advocate of one of the forward-looking possibilities. The medieval period with its possibilities was inwardly exhausted. The Reformation had not yet come. Why did Bradwardine or Gerson not become a Luther, Savonarola a Zwingli, Wycliffe a Calvin? Why did not the whole Reformation come a hundred years earlier? Who can say? The elements of Reformation were present at the time of the pre-reformers. But their presence alone was not enough. Passionate emphasizing of this or that new approach, passionate negation of the old that was perishing, clever and devout conservation and combination of the balance between the two, but without the will or the power to force through a decision, these were the possibilities for which the pre-reformers worked and suffered. Such possibilities were relative, very relative even within the great relativity of history. The pre-reformers were children of an age of transition, as perhaps we ourselves are again today.47 A feature of such ages, at least in the judgment of history, is that they cannot achieve more than honorary results. The reformers could always speak of the pre-reformers with respect and admiration, but without owing them anything. This fact gives us cause to reflect, perhaps to our own comfort, that in history bridges of this kind, and not only those that carry it forward, may not be famous but are still of value. And value is the only thing we may strive for at the forum of history, the only thing we can be concerned about. The rest is neither a goal nor a task but grace.

47. Cf. Barth’s letter to Thurneysen and other friends dated 1.22.1922 (Bw.Th., II, 30), in which he spoke of being in the corner between Nominalism, Augustinianism, mysticism, Wycliffe, etc., which was not itself the Reformation but from which the Reformation sprang, and then asked whether this was not their own place, in the shadow cast ahead by the Reformation, where there is still no assurance of salvation, no evangelical freedom, etc.

Zz i) SS

Calvin, Luther, and Zwingli

Loofs, Leitfaden, 684ff., 792ff., 875f£.; Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, IV, 55ff., 355ff., 551ff.; Tschackert, Lutherische und reformierte Kirchenlehre, 33ff., 228ff., 381ff£.; Troeltsch, “Protestantisches Christentum und Kirche in der Neuzeit,” B; idem, Social Teaching, vol. II (Louisville, 1992), 515ff., 576ff.; Hermelink, Kirchengeschichte, OOfF., 85ff., 158ff.; W. Dilthey, “Das natiirliche System der Geisteswissenschaften im 17. Jahrhundert,” Archiv fir Geschichte der Philosophie (1893); normative for Luther: Holl, Kirchengeschichtliche Aufsitze, vol. 1 (1921) (correcting Troeltsch’s view of Luther). On Reformed theology in general the following is not yet outdated: A. Schweizer, Glaubenslehre der evangelisch reformierten Kirche, vol. | (1844), 1-79. Normative for Zwingli is E. Staehelin, Huldreich Zwingli (1895). On Calvin see H. Bauke, Die Probleme der Theologie Calvins (1922); K. Frohlich, Die Reichsgottesidee Calvins (1922) (both to be used with caution). Finally, see PR

Wernle, Luther, Zwingli, Calvin (1918-1919).!

1. Loofs, Leitfaden, 684ff., ch. I; 792ff., ch. II, $81; 875f£, ch. III, $88; Seeberg, Dogmengeschichte, 55ff., $74; 355ff., $87; 381ff, $88; Tschackert, Kirchenlehre, 33ff-: part 1, section 1, ch. 2; 228ff.: part 2; 381ff: part 4, sections 1 and 2; Troeltsch, in Die Kultur der Gegenwart (Berlin and Leipzig, 1906), 229ff.; Troeltsch, Soziallehren, 512ff., 605ff; Hermelink, Reformation und Gegenreformation, 60ff., §§8-11; 85ff, $14; 158ff., §§31-33; W. Dilthey, “Das natiirliche System der Geisteswissenschaften im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Archiv fiir Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. V (Berlin, 1892), GOFF, 225f. 347fF., 509fF., reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 11 (Gottingen, 1957), 90FF; Holl, Gesammelte Aufstitze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 1 (Tiibingen, 1921); A. Schweizer, Die Glaubenslehre der evangelisch reformierten Kirche..., 2 vols. (Zurich, 1844 and 1847);

Whether it makes any sense to single out Calvin from among all the reformers we shall see only as we complete the work of the semester. It is possible, however, and is part of our task, that we may find the direction in which we have to travel by comparing Calvin with Luther and Zwingli. In this way we can perhaps fix the place where Calvin stands in the Reformation as a whole. The decisive and representative figures by which to define and assess phenomena of this period, apart from Calvin himself, are Luther and Zwingli. Men like Erasmus, Sebastian Franck, and Martin Bucer are by no means as significant, important though they are to fill out the picture.