§2 Contrast (part 1 of 3)
Let us look first at the relation between the Reformation and the Middle Ages as that of opposites, realizing that while the antithesis is great, important, and significant, it cannot in any case be clear-cut or absolute. The spirit of the Middle Ages is hard to grasp and especially to judge. Incredibly often and easily on the Protestant side (even the learned Protestant side; cf. Loofs, 498-99!),! efforts are made to characterize the essence of Scholasticism. Terms, highly critical terms, such as “formalism,” “pedantry,” “credulity,” “artificial reconciliation of reason and revelation,” and the like,2 come almost automatically into our minds and on our lips when we hear the word “scholastic.” Though there is naturally some truth in them, they are polemically crude, reminding us with some aptness of the foxes who could not get at the grapes. We can hardly complain of formalism if we ourselves have no form at all, nor of pedantry if we want to establish our supposedly better truth no less perspicaciously or simply than the scholastics could do, nor of credulous submission to authority if we are not to ignore the serious problem of authority but be willing to think it out to the end, nor of the way of combining reason and revelation
1. Cf. Loofs, Leitfaden, 498f. (7th ed., 402), for the charge of formalism.
2. For this evaluation cf. G. Ficker and H. Hermelink, Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. II, Das Mittelalzer (Tiibingen, 1911), 186; also p. 185 on Occam.
3. Cf. Aesop’s Fables 33. unless we have better counsel to offer on the relation. We have here presuppositions that in general are missing among modern Protestants. Semler was right when he once observed that the poor scholastics have laid themselves open to too much derision, often on the part of those who cannot use them (Hagenbach, 297).4 Those older theologians had the ability to think and they took pleasure in thinking. They had dialectical courage and consistency. Their academic tradition has had four hundred years of vitality. Once the reformers were no longer present, Protestant theology could do no better than adopt that tradition, and yet comparatively quickly it came to grief, while the older branch from Trent to our own time entered upon a second period of remarkable fruitfulness. All these are things that ought above all to give us respect for medieval theology if we do not already have it. The situation is the same with Scholasticism as with the Roman Catholic church in general. Those who do not admire them, those who are not in danger of becoming scholastics themselves, simply have no inner right to pass judgment on them. We cannot dismiss historical entities of this power by simply tossing around catchwords.
If we are to catch the essence of Scholasticism I would like to propose that we first pursue the direct impression one gets of it when speaking about it unconfused by modern preconceptions. If you ask me how and where to get this direct impression, I would suggest the following indirect way. Go to Cologne cathedral and study it well. Then from a good compendium of the history of philosophy acquaint yourselves with what Aristotle had in mind. Then by means of Dante’s Divine Comedy learn to know poetically the path of the medievals, as taught by Thomas Aquinas, from hell through purgatory to paradise. You may then take up a dogmatic presentation such as that of Seeberg or Loofs, though I would advise you that in so doing you should check the sources of all the quotations — a history of dogma that consists almost entirely of quotations is that of Hagenbach, 1888.° Then perhaps you may try to read a work from the great age of Scholasticism like Bonaventura’ Breviloquium (ed. Hefele, 1845), supplementing this on the right hand with an ascetic work like the Analecta on the history of Francis of Assisi (ed. Boehmer, 1904), and on
4. K. R. Hagenbach, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, rev. K. Benrath (Leipzig, 1888).
5. See ibid. Barth commended this work in a circular letter dated 3.26.1922 because the author modestly did not intrude himself but gave many well-chosen and instructive quotations from the sources. He found Loofs less rewarding for his purpose. the left hand with a mystical work like the sermons of Meister Eckhardt (Diederichs, 1911).¢
The impression that I have gained of medieval theology may be summed up in a phrase coined, believe, by Luther at the 1518 Heidelberg Disputation: it is a theology of glory.’ It attempts and achieves a knowledge of God in his glory, purity, and majesty. In the word of the Bible and the theology of the church it does not simply find denoted and described the mystery as such but signposts marking a dialectical path to the heart of the mystery, so that for those who take this path there is no longer any mystery. It recognizes no barrier, no command that it should stop at the object intended in the word of the Bible or in dogma. In the difficulty and obscurity that first conceal the object it simply hears a challenge in some way, notwithstanding the problems, to lay hold of the object. It is venturesome in the way in which it sets its goals and tries to reach them. It is youthfully fresh and healthy and robust and sparkling in all that it does. As readers we feel that we are in the hands of guides who with absolute certainty and confidence know what they want.
Some kind of unequivocal and direct communication of the depths of deity, and perhaps a well-arranged system of such depths, is in any case the goal of our journey if we entrust ourselves to them. In these theologians there is no place for banalities, generalities, or obscurities. Nor is there any place for the basic uncertainty, which oppresses many other theologies, whether theology itself is necessary or useful, nor for the related teethchattering question whether and how far theology is a science. Thomas teaches us that esse is intellegere (to be is to know), that God's essence is his knowledge, that the universal and absolute epitome of all that is known, of all being, is actuality, the first cause in all things.’ To a lesser degree
6. Barth used Bonaventura’ Breviloquium in the edition of C. J. Hefele (Tübingen, 1845). In a circular letter dated 4.2.1922 he said that he was reading this work so as not to know the Middle Ages only from excerpts. A note in PR. Tschackert’s Die Entstehung der lutherischen und der reformierten Kirchenlehre (Gottingen, 1910), 21, to the effect that the Breviloquium represented the church teaching of the time perhaps led Barth to engage in an intensive study of the work, though there are no visible fruits of the study in the lectures. On Francis see Analekten zur Geschichte des Franciscus von Assisi, ed. H. Boehmer (Tubingen and Leipzig, 1904). On Eckhardt see Meister Eckeharts Schrifien und Predigten, tr. and ed. H. Biittner, 2 vols. (Jena, 1909f.).
7. WA 1, 362, 15 and 21.
8. Cf. Loofs, 535 (437). The quotations are from S. 7h. I, q. 14a. 8 i.c., a. 4 Lc. a. 13 i.c.s q. 44 a. 3 ic. They may be found in Hagenbach, 340and 354, though in part in incorrect form.
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Reformation and ‘Middle Ages
angels, and to an even lesser degree humans, have a share in this eternal knowledge of God.? That is theology. How can it not be a science when it is participation in the knowledge of God,! in the a priori of all science? And how can it not be necessary? It is the one thing necessary; it is our blessedness.!! We have to read the descriptions of heaven that this theology gives!2 if we are to understand what it meant for the people of the Middle Ages.
At this point the academic theology of all the schools is at one with both orthodox mystics and heretical, pantheistic sects. “To have life is to see life,” said Peter Lombard.!3 Two hundred years later Tauler, whom Luther greatly honored, said the same thing even more clearly: “Those who see the glory of God, that is paradise” (Hagenbach, 445).14 According to the Elucidarium, an eschatological work of the 12th century, there is a triple heaven: the visible, which is the firmament; the spiritual, where saints and angels dwell; and the intellectual, where the blessed enjoy the vision of the triune God, drink from the fount of God’s wisdom, and have knowledge of all things, simply all things and all relations (Hagenbach, 444, 447).15 Listen to the way Heinrich Seuse, a contemporary of Tauler, puts it: “Look up to the ninth heaven, which is much more than a hundred thousand times bigger than the whole earth, and there is another heaven above, the Coelum empyreum, the fiery heaven, not called this because of fire, but because of the immeasurably sparkling clarity that it has by nature, unmovable and unchangeable, the glorious court where the heavenly Lord dwells and the stars praise God together and all God’s children rejoice. See around you the countless throng, how they drink from the living, murmuring fountain to their hearts’ desire; see how they fix their gaze on
9. For angelic knowledge in Thomas cf. Hagenbach, 258; and for human knowledge, Sa lPehadey A, gel 2 ae 12 We
LO. Che Sotpo I cealoaeosicc:
11. Loofs, 534 (436), points out that since God is our goal and the goal has to be known, but perfect knowledge of God consists of eternal beatitude and is beyond the grasp of human reason — there has to be revelation and revealed knowledge; he gives citations from S. 1h, I, q..1 a. 4 ice. and a. Kise.
12. Cf. Hagenbach, 444f.: topography (heaven, hell, and intermediate states).
13. Peter Lombard, Libri quattuor sententiarum, lib. IV, dist. 49A, quoted by Hagenbach, 447.
14. Good Friday Sermon in Tauler, Predigten, vol. I (Leipzig, 1826), 291f.
15. Hagenbach, 436-50. For the second part of Barth’s statement cf. Elucidarium, ch. 79, in Hagenbach, 447. the pure and clear reflection of naked deity, on the mirror in which all things are open and manifest” (Hagenbach, 447ff.).16 Or read the classic description in the final song of Dante’s Paradise:
Such keenness from the luring ray I met
That if mine eyes had turned away, methinks,
I had been lost, and so emboldened, on
I passed, as I remember, till my view
Hover'd the brink of dread infinitude.
O grace, unenvying of thy boon! that gavest
Boldness to fix so earnestly my ken
On the everlasting splendour, that I look’d
While sight was unconsumed, and in that depth
Saw in one volume clasp of love, whate’er
The universe unfolds, all properties
Of substance and of accident, and beheld
Confounded, yet one individual light
The whole.
It may not be
That one who looks upon that light
Can turn to other object, willingly, his view
For all the good, that will may covet, there
Is summd, and all, elsewhere defective, found
Complete. !7
That is what Thomas calls the fruition of God and Eckhardt the supraforming of the soul with God, or even the birth of God in the soul.!8 That is the theology of glory, the fiery living heart, the essence of medieval theology. On this vision of God from face to face [1 Cor. 13:12] — and think of the ecstatic portrayal of the faces of the blessed as you surely know it from pre-Renaissance art — that theology counted as on an unheard-of possibility to which it had access by a steep but direct path. Here is the essence of celestial bliss, and for that reason all the medievals, or at least
16. Hagenbach quotes from H. Seuse, Von der unméissigen Freude des Himmelreiches in his Leben und Schriften, ed. M. Diepenbrock (Regensburg, 1840), 205.
17. Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, Harvard Classics, vol. 20, tr. H. F. Cary, “Paradise,” canto XXXIII.
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all the more free and profound among them, never spoke of it except with a certain awe and restraint. But it was also part of our human essence, the supreme possibility of the human soul, which in exact parallel to the idea of a triple heaven is depicted in three divisions, as sensuality with the capacity for cogitation, as reason with a capacity for meditation, and finally and supremely as simple intelligence with the capacity for contemplation. This is how Gerson saw it at the beginning of the 15th century and Hugh of St. Victor three hundred years before him.!?
This basic view of the fundamental accessibility of the mystery and glory (doxa) of God is what stamps medieval theology. It changes, of course, in keeping with the teaching of the later schools of Duns Scotus and William of Occam, and especially that of Eckhardt and his followers. Access became extraordinarily difficult,2° but all the difficulties with which it was seen to be surrounded simply made it higher and more precious and caused it to be lauded more fervently. In a disturbing parallel the cathedral pillars became improbably more lofty and the naked eye had reason to fear they might not ever meet. Yet with unerring certainty they converge in the Gothic arch, even if only in the semidarkness of the vault. The basic concept of the theology remains intact. It is the serious and final thing in all medieval thoughts about God and the world. It does not rule out sharp antitheses. On the contrary, it evokes them. Triunity as the solution of all puzzles, how can that not be the source of all theses and antitheses? But it also embraces the antitheses. It is always also a synthesis. It stands on both this side and the far side of the tensions of intuitive and dialectical thinking, of world denial and world affirmation, of Aristotelianism and Augustinian Neoplatonism, of devotion and skepticism. It contains all these within itself, ejects them all, and takes back again that which is developed into a unity. For Thomas evil was a lack of good, a corruption of the good, which in the long run could only increase perfection.?!
18. For Thomas cf. Loofs, 537 (439), and the text of S. Th. Suppl, q. 96 a. 1 i.ci in Hagenbach, 447 (with some deviation). For Eckhardt see the bull Jz agro dominico, 10, quoted in Hagenbach, 398, with reference to Eckehart, Predigten, vol. Il, ed. F. Pfeiffer (Leipzig, 1857), 103, 11ff., quoted in Loofs, 628 (521).
19. Hagenbach, 361, refers to Gerson’s (Considerationes de theologia mystics, X-XXV) concept of the two basic powers of the soul, the cognitive and affective, and his arrangement of the former as simple intelligence, reason, and sensuality corresponding to contemplation, meditation, and cogitation. For Hugh of St. Victor see Hagenbach, 361 (no examples).
20. Hagenbach, 330f.
21 Spd lara. 10 ie.
The theology includes various individual thinkers and groups of thinkers, an Anselm and an Abelard, and later the Dominican and Franciscan schools, and later still the via antiqua and via moderna, but all in an invisible discipline and fellowship that only seldom needed the corrective hand of church authority and in relation to which one had to be an outsider like Amalrich of Bena (d. 1205)22 to be really a heretic, that is, not to be able finally to think the most extreme thoughts under the protection of the same vault along with less radical investigators. Most of the 15th- and 16th-century Humanists saw no good reason to leave that shelter. What nonsense to assume that only the outward, rigid concept of the authority of church dogma had the power to set in motion this host of youthfully fresh seekers and thinkers in its defense, and for half a millennium to keep it in step. It was the basic thought of open and direct access to the final mystery, the conviction as to the necessity and possibility of immediate knowledge of God, that made that possible, and the concept of church authority was simply an outgrowth of the basic perception, and for that reason was not felt to be an alien body that fettered thought.
That this theology was a theology of glory, a bold and confident theology sensing victory, is what we have to remember when we look at the decisions it reached on the individual problems that gave it its characteristic features and over against which the basic contradiction of the Reformation revolted (but only revolted!). If we adopt the same approach as that with which the scholastics tackled these problems, seeing and feeling them in all their unequivocal seriousness and beauty, then we cannot really be surprised that their decisions were so Catholic, but we can also see that the transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation was not in truth as simple and self-evident as it might often seem if we look only at the polemical positions and counterpositions of individual thinkers and their adversaries.
In the light of that basic concept it was natural that the relation of God, the world, and humanity should be seen at every point as a graded structure of possibilities that are clearly different yet no less clearly in continuity, all leading up to the final possibility of a
pure vision of God,
22. Hagenbach quotes two passages from Amalrich of Bena, who was condemned posthumously in 1210, to the effect that we are members of Christ by bearing his sufferings on the cross (388) and that having the knowledge of God we have paradise in ourselves, but that if we commit mortal sin we have hell in ourselves like a rotten tooth in the mouth (446f.). and all experiencing their relative consecration and dignity from that supreme pinnacle and in virtue of their continuous connection with it. It was thus that the relation between reason and revelation was fundamentally regulated. They could not really contradict one another. They flowed from the same source, namely, the wisdom of God. So said John Scotus Erigena in the 9th century.23 On the eve of the Reformation age, as though time had stood still, the Humanist Pico della Mirandola could say similarly: “Philosophy seeks the truth, theology finds it.”24 Between them, of course, lay a whole ocean of possibilities stretching the bow to the very limit. In any case one has to see two sides, not just one, even though one might be called William of Occam, who went as far as is humanly possible in exploring the problems of theology.2? There was no serious or sharp opposing of reason to revelation or revelation to reason. All along the line the result was a kind of pyramid, the possibility, no matter how paradoxical, of striding across from the one to the other, the supplementing of reason by revelation, the understanding of revelation by means of reason.
Nor could there be any real antithesis between the authority of the Bible and that of the church, problematic though their unity might often appear to be. The authority of the church embodied the idea of the theology of glory, the unbroken possibility of a path to God. No medieval teacher contested the truth that the church's authority rests on that of the biblical revelation, but in the scales against this they all set the dictum of Augustine: “I would not believe the gospel if the authority of the church did not move me to do so,”26 a saying that caused endless difficulties for his faithful followers, the reformers. Unlike the reformers, the medievals really saw no antithesis between a greater and lesser or a more distant and more immediate authority. Reconciliation was always possible.
In the knowledge of God, too, we have the bold ascent from the demonstrable existence of God to his essence, which is accessible to us humans only by revelation, though in the very same movement from us to God. In mystical terms we have here the movement from the finite to
23. John Scotus Erigena, De divisione naturae, I, ch. 68, p. 38, in Hagenbach, 320.
24. Pico della Mirandola, Epistola ad Aldum Manutium, Opera, Basel ed., p. 243, quoted in Hagenbach, 319.
25. Cf. R. Seeberg, Lehrbuch der Dogmengeschichte, vol. III (Leipzig, 1913; 2nd and 3rd ed.), 604-21.
26. Augustine, Contra epistolam quam vocant fundamenti, 5, 6 (CSEL 25/1, 197, 228).
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rest in the infinitude of the ground of the soul that is one and the same as God. Either way the step that can be taught and taken is bold but also one that can be envisioned methodically. Thus in the doctrine of God and the world we find the brave thesis that God as first cause is present in second causes, a thesis that leaves the possibility of miracle open but also makes it basically superfluous.
Similary we have the ingenious and meaningful doctrinal structure of the first estate, the fall, original sin, freedom, grace, and justification, a structure which I cannot in this context depict in detail but relative to which, before we dismiss it with the catchword semi-Pelagianism,27 we need to consider its basic and helpful and consistently observed practical aim of showing there really is a path from earth to heaven, of giving visibility to eternal paradoxical truth, expounded in time and basically divested of its paradoxical character. Those who want this — and where are the Protestant theologians who are sure they can really do without it? — must at least examine closely the minute scholastic distinctions to see whether they contain just what they seek, or whether, if they despise them, they can truly do without a new and probably much worse semi- Pelagianism. For the Catholic doctrine of the appropriation of grace is truly remarkable in the way it considers all the elements, neglecting none and exaggerating none: nature and grace, humanity and God, freedom and dependence, a justifiable sense of self and humility before God, doing and receiving, meriting and being given, time and eternity. The later Reformation doctrine of salvation hardly contains anything that does not somewhere find a place in scholastic teaching in a heavily emphasized and underlined way.
At the same time there is nowhere any one-sidedness, any ultimate either/or. We always find the way, the possibility, the method, the theology of glory, which knows no final difficulty and is never at a loss vis-a-vis the object before which it stands. Human innocence before the fall consists of a sure combination, free of all friction, between sensuality, understanding, and reason with its vision. Original sin is the absence of righteousness; we have been dealt a wound that is in need of healing. But we can become healthy — that is the famous freedom of the will (iberum arbitrium); we can be redeemed if are diligently concerned, and when love from above,
27. Loofs, 539 (443), where he points out that to accuse even later Scholasticism of Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism needs elucidation, though he himself on pp. 613f. (507ff.) describes Nominalism as “the crassest semi-Pelagianism.”
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gratia gratis data, as Goethe said wholly in the spirit of the Middle Ages, plays its part in us.28 For grace can make what we do meritorious, or, according to Duns Scotus, God in his grace can accept what we humans do as meritorious.2? If this happens, then the prior grace that aids and disposes us becomes gratia gratum faciens or infusa, which is wholly God’s work in us but is even so a wholly real and objective event, for grace does not abolish nature but perfects it (Scotus).3° By it human nature becomes capable of faith, which is zmfusa in terms of its origin and implicita in terms of its scope: it orients itself wittingly or unwittingly to what the authority of the church commands us to believe, being formed by love (caritate formata) in order that there should be no question as to its efficacy or merit. For the justification of sinners is real factio iustitiae (Thomas).>! It coincides with the infusion of grace.32 From the work of Christ on the cross that procures forgiveness of sins an unbroken chain of equations leads to the love that is the work of the Spirit of grace. Or, as Eckhardt put it, the conceiving of God in the soul, that triumph of the theology of glory, is the blossom that contains within itself, and will never fail to do so, the action of Martha, the desire and love of virtue, producing them out of itself.33 I ask again where in Protestant theology we find all this described in a way that is better or more illuminating or credible?
For this reason, too, the church in the Middle Ages was a real saving institution in which something was set up and achieved. As we have seen, the knowledge of God that marked the community of the elect was as such a possessing of God. This community not only had something to
28. J. W. von Goethe, Faust, II, lines 11934-11941. On the phrase gratia gratis data cf. Hagenbach, 395f. This grace effects our first estate of original righteousness, while gratia gratum faciens has an effect oriented directly to justification.
29. Loofs, 596 (490): For Duns merit is only by divine acceptation. Cf. Seeberg, II, 587.
30. Hagenbach, 396, states that for Duns there was more human cooperation than for Thomas; cf. Sent., lib. III, dist. 34, 5. We have not to think of grace being infused into us as fire is into a piece of wood, i.e., as if grace were destroying nature.
31. S.Th. Ta, Hae, q. 100 a. 12, in Hagenbach, 395.
32. Hagenbach, 395, says that by justification Thomas understood not only remission of guilt but at the same time the infusion of grace by which God gives us a share in his own life.
33. See n. 18 above; also Eckhardt’s sermon on Mary and Martha at Luke 10:38 in Schriften und Predigten, ed. H. Biittner (Jena, 1909), vol. II, 119f., where it is shown that the double mention of Martha’s name indicates first her perfection in temporal works and then what is needed for eternal salvation, that she might not lack this also. show but something to give. In virtue of the infinite merit of Christ’s sacrificial death which was its basis, it was the place where grace is present and is dispensed, and outside it was no salvation.34 We cannot contest this concept by urging against it the usual slogans. It was a bold and titanic concept, significant in its titanism. To overcome it we have to understand it. It explains the dominant position of the sacraments in that church. The sacraments were the visible form of invisible grace,35 but as Scholasticism laid down with increasing decisiveness and consistency, they were not just signs. As signs they were the thing signified. They were not just signs of power but direct, real, sanctifying power. That is the difference between OT circumcision and NT baptism, taught Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas. The one merely signifies and takes its course with faith on the part of the recipient. The other, in the new covenant, has sacramental force (virtus sacramenti) by which the recipients are irresistibly given (ex opere operato) a sacramental character.>°
We can see precisely from a study of the doctrine of the Lord’s Supper how the principle of a theology of glory gradually established itself in this field that is so important in practice, first in the ideas of Gregory the Great, then in the debates focused on Radbert in the 9th century and Berengar in the 11th, then in the as yet uncertain definitions of Anselm, Hugh of St. Victor, and Peter Lombard, and finally in the full and unequivocal doctrine of transubstantiation proclaimed by Lateran IV in 1215. Later thinkers like Durandus of St. Pourgain, William of Occam, or Peter d’Ailly might express the victorious principle, in this case the equation of bread and wine with Christ’s body and blood, in new forms, but in no instance did they question the principle itself.” The principle is that of our immediacy to God. That is what triumphed To less in the scholastic doctrine of the Lord’s Supper than in Dominican mysticism, and any who are concerned about this principle should ask whether it does not really find
34. Cf. Cyprian, Epistolae, 73, 21 (CSEL 2/II, 795, 3f.) and Augustine, De baptismo contra donatistas, 4, 17, 24 (CSEL 51, 250, 25).
35. Augustine, Epistolae, 105, 3, 12 (CSEL 34/II, 604, 12f.).
36. Lombard, Sententiarum, IV, 1E, in Hagenbach, 408: The OT sacraments promise grace, the NT sacraments give it; cf. also Thomas, S. TA. Il, q. 62 a. 6 i.c., in Hagenbach, 408. Hagenbach, 409, found the phrase ex opere operato in Gabriel Biel, Collectorium circa quattuor libros Sententiarum, IV, dist. 1, q. 3.
37. On the medieval dogma of the Lord’s Supper cf. Hagenbach, 413-23; for Occam and Durandus of St. Pourcgain §196, 425-27, divergent views being noted on 426. For Pierre d’Ailly cf. Loofs, 618 (511), directly after Occam. justice done to it in the best and most appropriate way in the Roman Catholic church.
In the history of the sacrament of penance again the valleys were filled in and the hills laid low [cf. Isa. 40:4] as obligatory confession developed out of a pious monastic practice, as priestly absolution, which was originally intended to recognize and crown preceding works of satisfaction, became a means of liberation from guilt and of reconciliation to God, to be followed by imposed duties that would make satisfaction and free from sin’s penalties, whether in this life or under purgatorial stress in the next life. Irritation at the well-known indulgence system that was meant to soften and regulate the later penitential exercises should not blind us to the intention underlying the whole doctrine. Here again we have something that is often regarded as specifically evangelical, namely, the making of a simple and direct way to God, the principle of immediacy. What Scotus would finally proclaim as the essence of this sacrament was precisely the exclusion of preceding works of merit, even a meritorious heart’s attrition, and the immediate relation of the soul to God by grace, the only point being that we have to be aliqualiter attriti, that we must not put anything in the way of grace, that we have to receive it. For that reason it could be said of this sacrament — the most personal and incisive, we have to say — that no other way is as simple or as sure.38 It would not be too hard to express this concept of penance in the language of a modern philosophy of immediacy, the only point being that the scholastics had at the outset the foresight to link the counterweight of works to be done after penance to the boldness of laying hold of what is immediate with such assurance of salvation.
If we try to listen to the whole of medieval theology from which I have selected a few typical details, we are surprised again and again by the great harmony, the mixture of boldness and sagacity, of profundity and common sense, that we find there. It is the harmony of the monastery garden with its rows of cherry trees and its splashing fountains and its surrounding walls that remind us of the world with its joy and grief? but also shut it out. Or again, this is the harmony of the Gothic cathedral with its high altar, its soaring pillars, its roomy transepts, its hidden
38. Duns Scotus, Opus Oxoniense, 4, 17, q. un. no. 13f., XVIII, 510f. in Loofs, 600 (493).
39. Cf. the beginning of the third strophe of J. E von Eichendorff’s Morgengebet: “Die Welt mit ihrem Gram und Gliicke... .” penitential stools, its eternal light, the dark glow of the windows of the choir — the cathedral where sinners and saints, worldlings and penitents, may all join together in common reconciling worship, where the last and deepest things may take place, where the donkey of Palm Sunday and the laughter of Easter are not out of |
place, where earth and heaven do indeed seem to touch. A “complex of opposites” is what Harnack called this church,“ and that is also true of its theology.
Let us come back with a few general characteristics to the direct impression that it makes. We are astonished at the certainty about life that the authors display and spread abroad in spite of opposing symptoms. They stand with both feet on the earth precisely because they stride on up to the world above, for that world is also for them a wonderful but attainable possibility. It is only a step between the kingdom of the world and the kingdom of God, between the trivial and the ecstatic, and good care is taken to see that balance is constantly achieved between the two extremes. Even the most broken of these people seem to be able to take the step from below to above and to put the two worlds together. We are astonished at the completeness and subtlety with which this theology handles all its problems no less carefully than radically. What a waltz it dances in its investigations out from the center to every side! Everything is important, everything has to be elucidated and discussed, everything has to be at least prepared for further treatment by means of meaningful divisions and subdivisions in which the numbers three, four, and seven are particular favorites. The question of the hierarchical ranking of angels and the question what happens to Christ’s body if the host is accidentally eaten by a mouse come under discussion with equal seriousness.*!
We come away with the happy impression that we have really heard everything that we might want. We are also astonished at the definite way in which we are told about things regarding which we might at first ask with surprise how the authors can possibly know about them, but then have to admit shamefacedly that they have simply expounded to us in a meaningful and often very poetic way a dialectical possibility that is by no means obvious. Thomas, for example, assures us that the blessed ones in heaven are adorned with a golden crown (corona aurea), which, being
40. Cf. A. von Harnack’s What Is Christianity? (New York, 1912), 264.
41. Cf. Hagenbach, 257, 357£, on the hierarchy of angels. Cf. also Seeberg, III, 201 n. 1, on the problem whether a mouse eating the host receives Christ’s body (with many examples). Cf. also the reference to S. Th. II, q. 80, a. 3ad 3on p. 468of Seeberg.
} Reformation and Middle Ages
both golden and circular, signifies the perfection of the fruitio Dei in the contemplation and love of which they share. Superadded for martyrs and saints, however, and especially for monks and nuns, is an aureola (diminutive of aurea) because that essential thing cannot be transcended by anything greater but only by something less.42 Or listen to what Heinrich Seuse has the damned in hell say about their punishment being eternal: “Woe on us, we did not want anything but this; if a millstone were so broad that it covered the whole earth, and if in the beginning it were so big that it even touched heaven, and if a little bird came every 100,000 years and bit out of it as much as the tenth part of a little millet seed, we wretches would wish nothing more than that when the stone was gone our eternal torment would have an end, and that cannot be.”49
We are surely barren thinkers if we cannot see what insight is everywhere concealed in the imagery, yet we are no less astounded by the confidence with which these authors translate their insights into imagery that may often be striking. We must also be astounded at the remarkable peace that breathes over their discussions. It is true that here and there, for example, in Abelard or in scholastics of the age of the gathering 14thand 15th-century storm, we detect highly existential inner conflicts and a hard struggle for composure before things can be as certain and unequivocal on paper as they now are. No doubt Scholasticism is renowned for its controversies and even conflicts. But what distinguishes it is the obvious rule that people spoke only when they were clear about things, only when what they had to say was ripe, so that there was no need to air abroad inner problems or unsolved questions or doubts, only at most to give an account of conflicts that had been ended. Hence, bitter though the quarrels between school and school might be, they took place within the same fellowship and on the same basic premises. The anger and tone of voice that we find in Reformation battles were alien to the Middle Ages. As we have to admit, Reformation contests were like peasant brawls compared to the elegant fencing of the scholastics. As I said yesterday, one could then make very radical assertions unhindered without going over the line or really getting out of step. When getting out of step finally began to
42. Hagenbach, 446f., on the corona aurea and the aureola for martyrs and saints, monks and nuns, a superadded prize in S. Th. Suppl., q. 96, a. 1 i.c., according to Hagenbach, 447.
43. H. Seuse, Biichlein von der Weisheit, ch. XI, on the never-ending pains of hell; Hagenbach, 450. happen, when a Bradwardine or Wycliffe or Huss began to say really bad things to others, the Middle Ages were at an end. In the best classical age, that was not done, and the stake did not come into action as a theological argument.
But we must stop and ask what all this meant compared to Reformation theology. In relation to Scholasticism, as we have generally described it, that theology was obviously something “wholly other,” if we may again put it thus, though we are agreed that there was no real breach of historical continuity. Within the continuity, however, we find first the emergence of a totally new style, the outbreak of a total restlessness, we must say, for along with the intellectual habitus that medieval theology had developed, and in contrast with it, the theological attitude of the Reformation, so long as it was in flux as a true countermovement, was so as a deliberate and angry rejection of that habitus, as a wild and elemental event at the heart of a cultivated land. The harmony of the monastery garden was broken and instead we seem to be in the virgin wilderness of mountain forests, if not in the terrors of the Wolfsschlucht.44 The harmony of the Gothic cathedral was at an end. The parallel lines to which we referred yesterday no longer intersected in the finite sphere no matter how high they might reach. No, they now relentlessly strove upward to a point of unity and rest in the infinite, the result being that the vault was broken open and heaven’s daylight shone in from above. All was sober, nondevout, secular. The glory of God itself brought disaster to the theology of glory.
In saying this we have already disclosed the secret of the new theology. It made the discovery that theology has to do with God. It made the great and shattering discovery of the real theme of all theology. The secret was simply this, that it took this theme seriously in all its distinctiveness, that it names God God, that it lets God be God, the one object that by no bold human grasping or inquiry or approach can be simply one object among many others. God is. He lives. He judges and blesses. He slays and makes alive [cf. 1 Sam. 2:6]. He is the Creator and Redeemer and Lord. The Reformation did not really engender any new thoughts about God. It did the simple thing of underlining the He. And that put an end to the Middle Ages. For all the building stone by stone, all the mounting up step by step, all the moving from conclusion to conclusion, all this action in which the Middle Ages found its answers, had to become a question when it was underlined and understood that He, God, is the point of the whole
44, An allusion to act 2 of Weber’s opera Der Freischiitz (1821). enterprise. The basic Reformation view is God himselfand God alone, He the way, He the possibility; and therefore all our action, even though oriented to God, is vain even in the very best life;4> all humanity, the whole world, even in its supreme possibilities, is guilty, lost, but still justified, yet saved only by sheer mercy. The Reformation, too, knew of the glory of God and could speak about it. But it said: To God alone be the glory! That put an end to the theology of glory.
Let us find out first, however, what the emergence of this insight had to involve externally relative to our final survey of the Middle Ages. What are we to say in this regard precisely when we have taken pains to do justice impartially to Scholasticism, precisely when we have learned to like the medieval thinkers, precisely when we have perhaps recognized in them our own deepest longings and desires? May it not be that much of what we have thus far regarded as our supremely modern striving, our whole modern style of religion even with its Christian coloring, is at its deepest level medieval? Who is Goethe closer to, Dante or Luther? That is a question we may at least raise. Where do we belong with our Romanticism, with our drive for immediacy, with our urgent concern to be shown a path that we can tread? Can we stay on those heights on which the reformers ventured, no, on which they were set against their own wishes or expectations, and where an immovable barrier arrests all striving for immediacy, where steps are possible but no path opens up before us, where we can live but only as the dying [cf. 2 Cor. 6:9]? Would we not do better to turn back? Instead of Calvin might we not take Thomas as the one we can really understand better?46
If we want the security that we find in the scholastics, then it might be as well for us not to turn to the reformers. Certainty about God, indeed, we may expect that here, but a certainty that entails a supreme lack of security, that makes of life a problem, a question, a task, a need, that makes of the Christian life an unceasing battle: a battle for existence itself in which we constantly confront the impossible and the intolerable that Scholasticism, at least in its teaching, could always adroitly sidestep; a battle in which in truth God wills to be and can be the only helper.
We may well ask whether we are wise to leave the solid Catholic ground of balance and to launch out on the wild sea of Reformation thinking. Even the symmetrical completeness of subtle responses to all
45. From strophe 2 of Luther’s Aus tiefer Not (1524).
46. Cf. Goethe's Faust, I, lines 512f. that we might want to know is something we cannot seek in Reformation theology. That theology is an emergency structure, not a well-appointed house. It offers no answers at all, or only incidental answers, to many interesting questions. The symmetry of the numbers three, four, and seven, the ladder to heaven that gives us confidence, the theological interplay, the highly intellectual feast
— we find none of these things. The only concern in thinking here is to be serious and to keep the real theme in view. What a pile of ruins we have in Melanchthon’s Loci, what a dark and threatening forest in Calvin’s Institutes! Not everyone surely can have to tread these desolate places.
Nor may we seek in the reformers what is at least in part such reassuring and profound information about invisible things of which I gave you a couple of examples. The reformers were astonishingly eloquent on those relations between God and us about which one can speak, but astonishingly silent when it came to matters about which one can only be imaginative. They did not deny the possibility of speaking about such things but used the possibility sparingly.
And as for the peacefulness and decorum and good manners that might allow for disagreement but not quarreling, I have told you already that we cannot see these in the reformers. In them we do find quarreling. All the evil spirits of discord seem to have come to life. All the possibilities of quiet academic discussion between one view and another seem to have been excluded. Everything is so much a matter of principle, everything is in such deadly earnest, everything is so angry. Last things are always at issue. Innermost feelings are always exposed. Attacks on opponents are always pressed to the uttermost. For this reason the more delicate like Erasmus who found this hard stayed clear of the tumult so far as possible. Even Calvin would rather have passed his days as a private scholar than as a reformer, and he knew why. As a reformer, he found his life filled with conflicts on every hand concerning which we today can only with difficulty, if at all, convince ourselves that they had to be fought, or had to be fought in the way they were. Lovers of peace cannot possibly approve of this kind of life and this kind of theology in which there was constant hewing and stabbing on all sides. Is that really what the Reformation age involves? we might ask. But we do better to ask why it was that it had to be so and could not be otherwise in this new age.
The slogan that Luther used in the theses of the Heidelberg Disputation to distinguish his own theology from that of the scholastics was “theology of the cross.” In what he said then, and in a similar situation
, Reformation and Middle Ages
and on the same front in his Disputation against Scholastic Theology a year earlier (EOL V, Arg. 1, 315ff., 387ff.),4” we can see how it was that the reformers did.not just cause an incidental disturbance but attacked the basic view of the Middle Ages. In essence we find two trains of thought in the records of Luther’s initial attack on medieval theology, the first more apparent in the earlier Wittenberg Disputation (1517), the latter more so in the later Heidelberg Disputation (1518), but both deeply involved in one another and both pointing to one another.
The first is a negation, a protest, a sharp offensive. It contains what seemed to those outside the surprising and scandalous theses of the nexus of thought with which the reformers broke out of the circle of medieval possibilities. At Wittenberg we are told that once a person becomes a bad tree then that person can will and do only what is bad (4); or that by nature we cannot will that God be God but will always will that we be God and God not God (17); or that on our part there is no preceding disposition for grace but only the opposite, or even rebellion against grace (30); or that nature knows no righteous command or goodwill (34); or that by nature we cannot overcome our ignorance of God, of ourselves, or of the doing of the good (36); or that we cannot become theologians unless we do so without Aristotle (44); or that the law and the will are two foes that cannot be reconciled apart from grace (72); or that every work done according to the law is outwardly good but inwardly sin (77); or that love for God cannot coexist with love, even the highest love, for the creature (94).48 Then from the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 we read that human works, no matter what worth they have or how good they seem, are to'be judged as mortal sins (3), or that arrogance is unavoidable, and true hope impossible, if in every human work the sentence of condemnation (God’s) is not feared (11).49 For, as Luther said in explanation, it is not possible to hope in God if one does not despair of all creatures.°° We read again that those who do what they can to attain to grace heap up sin upon sin and become doubly guilty.>!