Passion of the Western Mind

by Tarnas, Richard

  All the accretions brought into Christianity by the Roman Church that were not found in the New Testament were now solemnly questioned, criticized, and often expelled altogether by the Protestants: the centuries’ accumulation of sacraments, rituals, and art, the complex organizational structures, the priestly hierarchy and its spiritual authority, the natural and rational theology of the Scholastics, the belief in purgatory, papal infallibility, clerical celibacy, the eucharistic transubstantiation, the saints’ treasury of merits, the popular worship of the Virgin Mary, and finally the Mother Church herself. All these had become antithetical to the individual Christian’s primary need for faith in Christ’s redemptive grace: Justification occurred by faith alone. The Christian believer had to be liberated from the obscuring clutches of the old system, for only by being directly responsible to God could he be free to experience God’s grace. The only source of theological authority now lay in the literal meaning of Scripture. The complicated doctrinal developments and moral pronouncements of the institutional Church were irrelevant. After centuries of possessing relatively indisputable spiritual authority, the Roman Catholic Church, with all its accoutrements, was suddenly no longer considered mandatory for humanity’s religious well-being.

  In defense of the Church and its continued unity, Catholic theologians argued that the Church’s sacramental institutions were both valuable and necessary, and that its doctrinal tradition, which interpreted and elaborated the original revelation, held genuine spiritual authority. Moral and practical reforms in the present Church certainly needed to be made, but its inherent sanctity and validity were still sound. Without Church tradition, they held, God’s Word would be less potent in the world and less understood by the Christian faithful. Through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit invested in the institutes of the Church, the latter could draw out and affirm elements of Christian truth not fully explicit in the biblical text. For indeed, the Church in its earliest apostolic stages had preceded the New Testament, produced it, and later canonized it as God’s inspired Word.

  But the reformers countered that the Church had replaced faith in the person of Christ with faith in the doctrine of the Church. It had thereby vitiated the potency of the original Christian revelation and placed the Church opaquely in the middle of man’s relation to God. Only direct contact with the Bible could bring the human soul direct contact with Christ.

  In the Protestant vision, true Christianity was founded on “faith alone,” “grace alone,” and “Scripture alone.” While the Catholic Church agreed that those indeed were the fundaments of the Christian religion, it maintained that the institutional Church, with its sacraments, priestly hierarchy, and doctrinal tradition, was intrinsically and dynamically related to that foundation—faith in God’s grace as revealed in Scripture—and served the propagation of that faith. Erasmus also argued against Luther that man’s free will and virtuous actions were not to be entirely discounted as elements in the process of salvation. Catholicism held that divine grace and human merit were both instrumental in redemption and did not have to be viewed in opposition, with exclusively one or the other operative. Most important, the Church argued, institutional tradition and the Scripture-based faith were not in opposition. On the contrary, Catholicism provided the living vessel for the Word’s emergence in the world.

  But for the reformers, the Church’s actual practice too much belied its ideal, its hierarchy was too manifestly corrupt, its doctrinal tradition too remote from the original revelation. To reform such a degenerate structure from within would be both practically futile and theologically erroneous. Luther argued persuasively for God’s exclusive role in salvation, man’s spiritual helplessness, the moral bankruptcy of the institutional Church, and the exclusive authority of Scripture. The Protestant spirit prevailed in half of Europe, and the old order was broken. Western Christianity was no longer exclusively Catholic, nor monolithic, nor a source of cultural unity.

  The peculiar paradox of the Reformation was its essentially ambiguous character, for it was at once a conservative religious reaction and a radically libertarian revolution. The Protestantism forged by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin proclaimed an emphatic revival of a Bible-based Judaic Christianity—unequivocally monotheistic, affirming the God of Abraham and Moses as supreme, omnipotent, transcendent, and “Other,” with man as fallen, helpless, predestined for damnation or salvation, and, in the case of the latter, fully dependent on God’s grace for his redemption. Whereas Aquinas had posited every creature’s participation in God’s infinite and free essence, and asserted the positive, God-given autonomy of human nature, the reformers perceived the absolute sovereignty of God over his creation in a more dichotomous light, with man’s innate sinfulness making the independent human will inherently ineffective and perverse. While Protestantism was optimistic concerning God, the gratuitously merciful preserver of the elect, it was uncompromisingly pessimistic concerning man, that “teeming horde of infamies” (Calvin). Human freedom was so bound to evil that it consisted merely in the ability to choose among different degrees of sin. For the reformers, autonomy suggested apostasy. Man’s true freedom and joy lay solely in obedience to God’s will, and the capacity for such obedience arose solely from God’s merciful gift of faith. Nothing man did on his own could bring him closer to salvation. Nor could his illumination be achieved through the rational ascents of a Scholastic theology contaminated by Greek philosophy. Only God could provide genuine illumination, and only Scripture revealed the authentic truth. Against the Renaissance’s dalliance with a more flexible Hellenized Christianity, with pagan Neoplatonism and its universal religion and human deification, Luther, and more systematically Calvin, reinstituted the more strictly defined, morally rigorous, and ontologically dualistic Augustinian Judaeo-Christian view.

  Moreover, this reassertion of “pure” traditional Christianity was given further impetus throughout European culture by the Catholic Counter-Reformation when, beginning in the mid-sixteenth century with the Council of Trent, the Catholic Church finally awakened to the crisis and vigorously reformed itself from within. The Roman papacy again became religiously motivated, often austerely so, and the Church restated the basics of Christian belief (while maintaining the Church’s essential structure and sacramental authority) in just as militantly dogmatic terms as the Protestants it opposed. Thus on both sides of the European divide, in the Catholic south and the Protestant north, orthodox Christianity was energetically reestablished in a conservative religious backlash against the Renaissance’s pagan Hellenism, naturalism, and secularism.

  Yet for all the Reformation’s conservative character, its rebellion against the Church was an unprecedentedly revolutionary act in Western culture—not only as a successful social and political insurgency against the Roman papacy and ecclesiastical hierarchy, with the reformers supported by the secular rulers of Germany and other northern countries, but first and foremost as an assertion of the individual conscience against the established Church framework of belief, ritual, and organizational structure. For the fundamental question of the Reformation concerned the locus of religious authority. In the Protestant vision, neither the pope nor the Church councils possessed the spiritual competence to define Christian belief. Luther taught instead the “priesthood of all believers”: religious authority rested finally and solely in each individual Christian, reading and interpreting the Bible according to his own private conscience in the context of his personal relationship to God. The presence of the Holy Spirit, in all its liberating, directly inspirational, noninstitutional freedom, was to be affirmed in every Christian against the quenching constrictions of the Roman Church. The individual believer’s interior response to Christ’s grace, not the elaborate ecclesiastical machinery of the Vatican, constituted the true Christian experience.

  For it was the very unflinchingness of Luther’s individual confrontation with God that had revealed both God’s omnipotence and his mercy. The two contraries characteristic of Protestantism, indepe
ndent human self and all-powerful Deity, were inextricably interconnected. Hence the Reformation marked the standing forth of the individual in two senses—alone outside the Church, and alone directly before God. Luther’s impassioned words before the imperial Diet declared a new manifesto of personal religious freedom:

  Unless I am convinced by Scripture and plain reason—I do not accept the authority of popes and councils, for they have contradicted each other—my conscience is captive to the Word of God. I cannot and I will not recant anything, for to go against conscience is neither right nor safe. God help me. Amen.

  The Reformation was a new and decisive assertion of rebellious individualism—of personal conscience, of “Christian liberty,” of critical private judgment against the monolithic authority of the institutional Church—and as such further propelled the Renaissance’s movement out of the medieval Church and medieval character. Although the conservative Judaic quality of the Reformation was a reaction against the Renaissance in the latter’s Hellenic and pagan aspects, on another level, the Reformation’s revolutionary declaration of personal autonomy served as a continuation of the Renaissance impulse—and was thus an intrinsic, if partially antithetical, element of the overall Renaissance phenomenon. An era that saw both Renaissance and Reformation was revolutionary indeed, and it was perhaps on account of this Promethean Zeitgeist that the force of Luther’s rebellion rapidly amplified far past what he had anticipated or even desired. For in the end, the Reformation was but one particularly salient expression of a much larger cultural transformation taking place in the Western mind and spirit.

  Here we encounter the other extraordinary paradox of the Reformation. For while its essential character was so intensely and unambiguously religious, its ultimate effects on Western culture were profoundly secularizing, and in multiple, mutually reinforcing ways. By overthrowing the theological authority of the Catholic Church, the internationally recognized supreme court of religious dogma, the Reformation opened the way in the West for religious pluralism, then religious skepticism, and finally a complete breakdown in the until then relatively homogeneous Christian world view. Although various Protestant authorities would attempt to reinstitute their particular form of Christian belief as the supreme and exclusively correct dogmatic truth, the first premise of Luther’s reform—the priesthood of all believers and the authority of the individual conscience in the interpretation of Scripture—necessarily undercut the enduring success of any efforts to enforce new orthodoxies. Once the Mother Church had been left behind, no new claims to infallible insight could long be regarded as legitimate. The immediate consequence of the liberation from the old matrix was a manifest liberation of fervent Christian religiosity, permeating the lives of the new Protestant congregations with fresh spiritual meaning and charismatic power. Yet as time passed, the average Protestant, no longer enclosed by the Catholic womb of grand ceremony, historical tradition, and sacramental authority, was left somewhat less protected against the vagaries of private doubt and secular thinking. From Luther on, each believer’s belief was increasingly self-supported; and the Western intellect’s critical faculties were becoming ever more acute.

  Moreover, Luther had been educated in the nominalist tradition, leaving him distrustful of the earlier Scholastics’ attempt to bridge reason and faith with rational theology. There was for Luther no “natural revelation,” given by the natural human reason in its cognition and analysis of the natural world. Like Ockham, Luther saw the natural human reason as so far from comprehending God’s will and gratuitous salvation that the rationalist attempts to do so by Scholastic theology appeared absurdly presumptuous. No genuine coherence between the secular mind and Christian truth was possible, for Christ’s sacrifice on the cross was foolishness to the wisdom of the world. Scripture alone could provide man with the certain and saving knowledge of God’s ways. These assertions held significant and unanticipated consequences for the modern mind and its apprehension of the natural world.

  The Reformation’s restoring of a predominantly biblical theology against a Scholastic theology helped to purge the modern mind of Hellenic notions in which nature was permeated with divine rationality and final causes. Protestantism thus provided a revolution of theological context that solidified the movement begun by Ockham away from the outlook of classical Scholasticism, thereby supporting the development of a new science of nature. The increased distinction made by the reformers between Creator and creature—between God’s inscrutable will and man’s finite intelligence, and between God’s transcendence and the world’s contingency—allowed the modern mind to approach the world with a new sense of nature’s purely mundane character, with its own ordering principles that might not directly correspond to man’s logical assumptions about God’s divine government. The reformers’ limiting of the human mind to a this-worldly knowledge was precisely the prerequisite for the opening up of that knowledge. God had graciously and freely created the world, fully distinct from his own infinite divinity. Hence that world could now be apprehended and analyzed not according to its assumed sacramental participation in static divine patternings, in the manner of Neoplatonic and Scholastic thought, but rather according to its own distinct dynamic material processes, devoid of direct reference to God and his transcendent reality.

  By disenchanting the world of immanent divinity, completing the process initiated by Christianity’s destruction of pagan animism, the Reformation better allowed for its radical revision by modern science. The way was then clear for an increasingly naturalistic view of the cosmos, moving first to the remote rationalist Creator of Deism, and finally to secular agnosticism’s elimination of any supernatural reality. Even the Reformation’s renewal of the biblical subjection of nature to man’s dominion as found in Genesis contributed to this process, encouraging man’s sense of being the knowing subject against the object of nature, and of being divinely authorized to exercise his sovereignty over the natural—hence nonspiritual—world. As God’s magnitude and distinctness relative to his creation was affirmed, so too was man’s magnitude and distinctness relative to the rest of nature. Subduing nature for man’s benefit could be seen as a religious duty, eventually taking on a secular momentum of its own as man’s sense of self-worth and autonomy, and his powers of dominion, continued to increase in the course of the modern era.

  A further and similarly ambiguous effect of the Reformation on the modern mind involved a new attitude to truth. In the Catholic view, the deepest truths were first divinely revealed as recorded in the Bible, and these then became the basis for a continuing growth of truth through Church tradition—each generation of Church theologians inspired by the Holy Spirit, creatively acting upon that tradition and forging a more profound Christian doctrine. Much as Aquinas’s active intellect took sense impressions and from them formed intelligible concepts, so did the Church’s active intellect take the basic tradition and from it render more penetrating formulations of spiritual truth. But from the Protestant perspective, the truth lay finally and objectively in the revealed Word of God, and fidelity to that unalterable truth alone could render theological certainty. In this view, the Roman Catholic tradition was a long and ever-worsening exercise in subjective distortion of that primal truth. Catholic “objectivity” was nothing other than the establishment of doctrines conforming to the subjective demands of the Catholic mind, not to the external sacrosanct truth of the Word. And the Catholic mind had become especially distorted by its theological integration of Greek philosophy, a system of thought intrinsically alien to biblical truth.

  Protestantism’s reclamation of the unalterable Word of God in the Bible thus fostered in the emerging modern mind a new stress on the need to discover unbiased objective truth, apart from the prejudices and distortions of tradition. It thereby supported the growth of a critical scientific mentality. To confront entrenched doctrines courageously, to subject all beliefs to fresh criticism and direct testing, to come face-to-face with objective reality unmediated by tradition
al preconceptions or vested authorities—such a passion for disinterested truth informed the Protestant mind and thence the modern mind generally. But in time, the Word itself would become subject to that new critical spirit, and secularism would triumph.

  Indeed, the very foundation for the reformers’ appeal to objective truth would provoke its dialectical collapse. Luther’s stress on the literal meaning of Scripture as the exclusive reliable basis for knowledge of God’s creation was to present the modern mind with an impossible tension as it confronted the distinctly unbiblical revelations soon to be established by secular science. Two apparently contradictory—or at least incongruent—truths had to be maintained simultaneously, one religious and one scientific. The fundamentalist’s Bible was to hasten the long-developing schism between faith and reason experienced by the Western mind as it attempted to accommodate science. The Christian faith was far too deeply ingrained to be readily sloughed off altogether, but neither could the scientific discoveries be denied. Eventually the latter would far outweigh the former in both intellectual and practical significance. In the process of that shift, the West’s “faith” would itself be radically realigned and transferred to the victor. In the long term, Luther’s zealous reinstatement of a Scripture-based religiosity was to help precipitate its secular antithesis.