2021/10/11

3] A History of Christian Thought Paul Tillich Trends in the Middle Ages

 A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism by Paul Tillich | Goodreads





A History of Christian Thought: From its Judaic and Hellenistic Origins to Existentialism

by
Paul Tillich,
Carl E. Braaten (Editor)
4.17 · Rating details · 245 ratings · 14 reviews
Previously published in two separate volumes entitled 
A history of Christian thought and Perspectives on 19th and 20th century Protestant theology.

Paperback, 550 pages
Published November 15th 1972 by Touchstone 
(first published January 1st 1968)
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URL  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Tillich

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 The Concept of Dogma xxxvi

I]The Preparation for Christianity 1
A. The Kairos 1
B. The Universalism of the Roman Empire 2
C. Hellenistic Philosophy 3
1. Skepticism 3
2. The Platonic Tradition 6
3. The Stoics 7
4. Eclecticism 9
D. The Inter-Testamental Period 9
E. The Mystery Religions 13
F. The Method of the New Testament 14

II Theological Developments in the Ancient Church 17
A. The Apostolic Fathers 17
B. The Apologetic Movement 24
1. The Christian Philosophy 27
2. God and the Logos 29
C. Gnosticism 33
D. The Anti-Gnostic Fathers 37
1. The System of Authorities 38
2. The Montanist Reaction 40
3. God the Creator 41
4. The History of Salvation 43
5. Trinity and Cliristology 46
6. The Sacrament of Baptism 48
E. Neo-Platonism 50
F. Clement and Origen of Alexandria 55
1. Christianity and Philosophy 55
2. The Allegorical Method 57
3. The Doctrine of God 59
vi Contents
4. Christology 61
5. Eschatology 63
G. Dynamic and Modalistic Monarchianism 64
1. Paul of Samosata 65
2. Sabellius 66
H. The Trinitarian Controversy 68
1. Arianism 69
2. The Council of Nicaea 71
3. Athanasius and Marcellus 73
4. The Cappadocian Theologians 76
I. The Christological Problem 79
1. The Antiochean Theology 80
2. The Alexandrian Theology 84
3. The Council of Chalcedon 86
4. Leontius of Byzantium 88
J. Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite 90
K. Tertullian and Cyprian 98
'L. The Life and Thought of Augustine 103
1. The Development of Augustine 104
2. Augustine's Epistemology 111
3. The Idea of God 115
4. The Doctrine of Man 119
5. Philosophy of History 121
6. The Pelagian Controversy 122
7. The Doctrine of the Church 131

III Trends in the Middle Ages 134
A. Scholasticism, Mysticism, Biblicism 135
B. The Scholastic Method 137
C. Trends in Scholasticism 140
1. Dialectics and Tradition 140
2. Augustinianism and Aristotelianism 141
3. Thomism and Sootism 141
4. Nominalism and Realism 142
5. Pantheism and Church Doctrine 144
D. The Religious Forces 145
E. The Medieval Church 149
F. The Sacraments 154
G. Anselm of Canterbury 158
H. Abelard of Paris 167
I. Bernard of Clairvaux 172
J. Joachim of Floris 175

K. The Thirteenth Century 180
L. The Doctrines of Thomas Aquinas 192
M. William of Ockham 198
N. German Mysticism 201
0. The Pre-Reformers 203

IV Roman Catholicism from Trent to the Present 210
A. The Meaning of Counter-Reformation 210
B. The Doctrine of Authorities 211
C. The Doctrine of Sin 212
D. The Doctrine of Justification 213
E. The Sacraments 215
F. Papal Infallibility 218
C. Jansenism 221
II. Probahilism 223
1 11ccent Developments 224

V Ilir Iiiiiiigy iI Ihi Protestant Reformers 227
/\ Niiiiiiii I .iitIiii 227
I. Tho Itrukt Iiroiigii 227
2. I ,iiIlii'i ( iilirisrn of the Church 234
:i. I lh ( oiilIlit vlIIi iiiis,niis 237
I. Ilk Coidlicl wit ii tile Ivangelical Radicals 239
5. liii liii N I )O(t rules 242
a. iiie iihiical Principle 242
b. Sin and Faith 245
c. The Idea of God 247
d. The Doctrine of Christ 249
e. Church and State 251
B. Huldreich Zwingli 256
C. John Calvin 262
1. The Majesty of God 262
2. Providence and Predestination 264
3. The Christian Life 270
4. Church and State 272
5. The Authority of Scripture 274

VI The Development of Protestant Theology 276
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 276
1. Reason and Revelation 278
2. The Formal and Material Principles 280
B. Pietism 283
C. The Enlightenment 287

PART II
Introduction: Problem and Method 297

I Oscillating Emphases in Orthodoxy, Pietism,
and Rationalism 305
A. The Period of Orthodoxy 305
B. The Reaction of Pietism against Orthodoxy 311
C. The Rise of Rationalism 313

II The Enlightenment and its Problems 320
A. The Nature of Enlightenment 320
1. The Kantian Definition of Autonomy 320
2. Concepts of Reason 325
a. Universal Reason 326
b. Critical Reason 327
c. Intuitive Reason 328
d. Technical Reason 329
3. The Concept of Nature 330
4. The Concept of Harmony 332
B. The Attitude of the Enlightened Man 341
1. His Bourgeois Character 341
2. His Ideal of a Reasonable Religion 342
3. His Common-sense Morality 344
4. his Subjective Feeling 348
C. Intrinsic Conflicts of Enlightenment 349
1. Cosmic Pessimism 350
2. Cultural Vices 352
3. Personal Vices 353
4. Progress Based on Immorality 355
D. The Fulfillers and Critics of Enlightenment 356
1. Rousseau, The French Revolution, and Romanticism 356
1. Hume, The History of Religion, and Positivism 357
1. Kant, Moral Religion, and Radical Evil 360

III The Classic-Romantic Reaction against the
Enlightenment 367
A. Lessing, Historical Criticism, and the Rediscovery of Spinoza 367
B. The Synthesis of Spinoza and Kant 370

C. The Nature of Romanticism 372
1. The Infinite and Finite 372
2. The Emotional and the Aesthetic Elements in Romanticism 378
3. The Turn to the Past and the Valuation of Tradition 379
4. The Quest of Unity and Authority 382
5. The Negative and the Demonic in Romanticism 383

D. The Classical Theological Synthesis: Friedrich Schleiermacher 386
1. The Background of Schleicrmacher's Thought 388
2. His Concept of Religion as Feeling 391
3. His Positivistic Definition of Theology 398
4. His Interpretation of Christianity 405

E. The Universal Synthesis: Georg W. F. Hegel 410
1. The Greatness and the Tragic Hybris of Ilegels System 411
2. The Synthesis of God and Man (Mind and Person) 414
3. The Synthesis of Religion and Culture (Thought and  Imagination) 419
1. The Synthesis of State and Church 424
Providence, History, and Theodicy 426
The Christ as Reality and Symbol 430
Eternity against Immortality 431


IV The Breakdown of the Universal Synthesis 432

A. The Split in the Hegelian School 432
1. The Historical Problem: Strauss and Baur 423
1. The Anthropological Problem: Ludwig Feuerbach 435

B. Schelling's Criticism of Hegel 437

C. The Religious Revival and Its Theological Consequences 448
1. The Nature of the European Revival 449
2. The Theology of Repristination 453
1. Natural Science and the Fight over Darwinism 454

D. Kierkegaard's Existential Theology 458
1. Kierkegaard's Criticism of Hegel 460
2. Ethical Existence and the Human Situation (Anxiety, Despair) 462
3. The Nature of Faith (The Leap and Existential Truth) 464
4.  Criticism of Theology and Church 472

E. Political Radicalism and its Theological Significance 476
1. The Bourgeois Radicals 477
2. Marx's Relation to Hegel and Feuerbach 478
3. Marx's View of the Human Situation (Alienation) 480
4. Marx's Doctrine of Ideology and His Attack on Religion 481
5. Marx's Political Existentialism 484
6.    The Prophetic Element in Marx 485

F. Voluntarism and the Philosophy of Life 487
1. Schopenhatier's Idea of the Will 488
2. Nietzsche's Idea of Will-To-Power 493
3. Nietzsche's Doctrine of Resentment 494
1. The "Death of God" and the New Ideal of Man 497

V New Ways of Mediation 504
A. Experience and the Biblical Message 506
1. The Erlangen School 506
2. Martin Kähler 509
B. The "Back to Kant" Movement 511
C. Adolf von Harnack 515
D. Miscellaneous Movements in Theology 520
1. The Luther-Renaissance 520
2. Biblical Realism 520
3. Radical Criticism 521
4. Rudolf Bultmann 523
5. The History-of-Religions Approach 524
6. Ernst Troeltsch 526
7. Religious Socialism 530
8. Karl Barth 535
9. Existentialism 539
Index of Names 543
Index of Subjects 547
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CHAPTER III Trends in the Middle Ages

FIRST we shall present a survey of the main ideas and trends of the Middle Ages from beginning to end, and only after that take up a few of the leading figures.

The basic problem of the Middle Ages, one which we find in all its periods, is that of a transcendent reality, manifest and embodied in a special institution, in a special sacred society, leading the culture and interpreting the nature. If you keep this in mind, you can understand everything going on in the Middle Ages. Without it you cannot understand anything, because then you would measure the Middle Ages by your own standards of today. The Middle Ages do not permit this. If you consider the distorted pictures of the Middle Ages, a common judgment is that they were the "Dark Ages"; the implication is that we Jive in the age of illumination, so we look back upon this period of terrible superstition with a kind of contempt. But nothing of this sort is true. The Middle Ages were one form in which the great problem of human existence in the light of the eternal was solved. The people who lived during this thousand-year period did not live worse than we live in many respects, and in other respects they lived better than we do. There is no reason to look back upon the Middle Ages with any form of contempt. On the other hand, I am not a romanticist; I do not want to measure our own situation by standards taken from the Middle Ages as romanticism does.

The Middle Ages were not so uniform as our ignorance about them allows us to believe. They were very much differentiated. We can distinguish the following periods:

(I) The period of transition, A.D. 600-1000. The year 600 marks the papacy of Gregory the Great, a man -in whom the ancient

Trends in the Middle Ages     135

tradition was still alive, but in whom the Middle Ages had already begun. During this period we have the years of preserva-tion—as much as could be was preserved, which was compara­tively little—and of reception; the tribes which ruled Europe, the Germanic-Romanic tribes, were taken in. It was the period of transition from the ancient to the medieval world, a transitional period which is sometimes called the "Dark Ages", particularly the ninth and tenth centuries. But they were not so dark as they seem. Great things happened then which prepared a new world out of which we all have come, even though we have forgotten it.

(2)The early Middle Ages, A.D. 1000-1200. During this time new and original forms developed which were decisively differ­ent from the ancient world. This is a creative and profound period, represented by Romanesque art.

(3)The high Middle Ages, A.D. 1200-1300. Here all the basic motifs are elaborated and brought into the great systems of the scholastics, of Gothic art, and of feudal life.

(4)The late Middle Ages, A.D. 1300-1450. From 1300 on we enter the period in which the Middle Ages disintegrate. But if we speak of "disintegration" we do not wish to depreciate the tre­mendous surge of new motifs which developed during this period and which made both the Renaissance and the Reformation pos­sible.

A. SCHOLASTICISM, MYSTICISM, BIBLIcIsM

The first series of problems we shall di,cuss are the main cogni­tive attitudes, or the main theological attitudes. There were three of them that were always present and influential: scholasticism, mysticism, and biblicism.

Scholasticism was the determinative cognitive attitude of the whole Middle Ages. It is the methodological explanation of Chris­tian doctrine. This term is derived from "school" and means "school philosophy"—philosophy as it was treated in the school. Today "school" has connotations of separation from life and "scholasticism" even more so. When we hear this word we think of lifeless systems—"as heavy as a horse", as was said by one of the scholastics. No one can read them, since they have nothing to do with reality. Scholasticism became distorted in the late Middle Ages; but the real intention of scholasticism was the

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theological interpretation of all problems of life. We have an extremely rich scholastic literature that had a tremendous influ­ence on the spiritual life of the Middle Ages.

There was one limit to this: a scholastic education was given only to a small upper class. All the scholastic books were written in Latin, a language which only the educated of that time knew. Of course, the masses could not even read or write. So the ques­tion was how to bring the message discussed in these scholastic systems to the people. There were two ways: participation in the church services, the liturgies, pictures, hearing the music, and receiving other sense impressions, which do not require much intellectual activity but give the feeling of the numinous and some kind of moral guidance. However, this does not mean that these objective things were really personal experiences. This is what mysticism meant in the Middle Ages; it introduced personal experience into the religious life.

The meaning of mysticism has been misinterpreted by Protestant theology which began with Ritschl and is still alive in Barthian theology. It is misleading when people identify this mysticism with either Asiatic mysticism of the Vedanta type, or with Neo-Platonic mysticism (Plotinus). Forget about this when you approach the Middle Ages. Every medieval scholastic was a mystic; that is, he experienced what he was talking about as personal experience. This is what mysticism originally meant in the realm of scholasticism. There was no opposition between mysticism and scholasticism. Mysticism was the experience of the scholastic message. The basis of the dogma was unity with the divine in devotion, prayer, contemplation, and ascetic practices. If you know this, it may be hoped that you will not fall into the trap of removing mysticism from Christianity, which would mean to reduce the latter to an intellectualized faith and a moralized love. This is what has happened since the Ritschlian school became dominant in Protestantism. Do not make the mistake of identifying this type of mysticism with the absolute or abstract mysticism in which the individual disappears in the abyss of the divine. Mysticism—the Protestant Orthodox theologians called it unio mystica—is the immediate union with God in his presence. Even for the people of Orthodoxy this was the highest form of the relationship to God. In the Middle Ages mysticism and scholasticism belonged together.

Trends in the Middle Ages     137

The third attitude besides scholasticism and mysticism is biblicism. Biblicism is strong in the later Middle Ages and helps to prepare the way for the Reformation. Biblicism is not some­thing exclusively Protestant, for there were always biblicistic reactions during the Middle Ages. These reactions were some­times very critical of the scholastic systems and also of mysticism. Usually, however, these biblicistic reactions were united with mysticism, and often also with scholasticism. Biblicism was an attempt to use the Bible as the basis for a practical Christianity, especially a lay Christianity. Biblicism in the later Middle Ages was predominant and made it possible for many laymen even to read the Bible before the Reformation.

These three attitudes, scholasticism, mysticism, and biblicism, were in most cases united in the same person. They could also stand in tension with each other. For example, scholasticism and mysticism were in tension in the conflict between Bernard of Clairvaux and Abelard. But neither of these attitudes prevailed. Both gave what they had to give to the medieval church. And the biblicistic criticisms were simply appropriated as the biblical foundation of the scholastic system and the mystical experiences. Scholasticism was the theology of that time; mysticism was the personal experiential piety, and biblicism was the continuous critical reaction coming from the biblical tradition and entering the two other attitudes, finally overcoming both of them in the Reformation.

B. THE SCHOLASTIC METHOD

Scholasticism had one basic problem, that of authority and reason. What was the medieval authority? It was the substantive tradi­tion on which medieval life was based. Authority was first of all the tradition of the church as it was expressed in the acknow­ledged church fathers, in the creeds and councils, and in the Bible. When we hear of "authority" today, we tend to think of it in terms of a tyrant, be it a father, a king, a dictator, or even a teacher. We should not read this meaning into the word auctori-tas (authority) when we see it in the medieval sources; nor should we identify it with the pope at that time, which is a much later development, toward the end of the Middle Ages. In the earlier and high Middle Ages authority is the living tradition. The

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question arose: What was the relation of reason to the living trad­ition of the church in which everyone was living? There was no other tradition. This living tradition was as natural to them as the air we breathe is to us. This analogy may help us understand what living tradition meant in the Middle Ages.

The tradition, however, was composed of many elements, not all of which said the same thing. Upon inquiry into them, it became necessary to choose from among them. The Middle Ages experienced this first of all in the realm of practical decisions, that is, of canon law. Canon law was the basis of medieval life; the dogma was one of the canon laws, and this gave it its legal authority within the church. Thus, practical needs created a class of people whose task it was to harmonize the different authorities on the meaning of the canon laws, as they appear in the many collections of canon law. This harmonizing method was a dia­lectical method, the method of "yes and no", as it was called. Reason in the Middle Ages was the tool for this purpose. Reason combines and harmonizes the sentences of the fathers and of the councils, first practically and then in the theoretical realm of theological statements. The function of reason was thus to collect, to harmonize, and to comment on the given sentences of the fathers. The man who did this most successfully was Peter the Lombard, whose Four Books of Sentences was the handbook of all medieval scholasticism. His Sentences were commented on by others when they wrote their own systems.

The next function of reason was to interpret the meaning of the given tradition which was expressed in the sentences. This means that the contents of faith had to be interpreted, but faith was presupposed. Out of this situation came the slogan; credo ut intelligam, I believe in order to know. This means that the sub­stance of faith was given; it was something in which one partici­pated. In the Middle Ages one did not exert a will-to-believe. The creed was given just as nature is given. Natural science does not create nature; instead, the natural scientist calculates the struc­tures and movements of the given nature. Similarly, reason has the function of interpreting the given tradition; it does not create the tradition. This analogy can help us to understand the Middle Ages much better.

The next step was carried through, less speculatively and very cautiously, by those thinkers who took Aristotle into their theology,

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especially Thomas Aquinas. They held that reason is adequate to interpret authority. At no point is reason against authority; the living tradition can be interpreted in rational terms. Reason does not have to be destroyed in order to interpret the meaning of the living tradition. This is the Thomistic position even today.

The final step was the separation of reason from authority. Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, the nominalist, asserted that reason is inadequate to the authority, the living tradition; reason is not able to express it. This was stated very sharply in later nominalism. However, if reason is not able to interpret the tradition, the tradition becomes authority in a quite different way; it becomes the commanding authority to which we have to subject ourselves even though we do not understand it. We call this" positivism". The tradition is given positivisticlly; there it is, we simply have to look at it, accept it, and subject ourselves to it as it is given by the church. Reason can never show the meaning of the tradition; it can only show different possibilities which can be derived from the decisions of the church and the living tradition. Reason can develop probabilities and improba­bilities, but never realities. It cannot show how things should be. They are all dependent on the will of God. The will of God is irrational and given. It is given in nature, sio, we must be empiri­cists in order to find out how the natural laws are. We are not in the center of nature. We are in the orders of the church, in canon law, so we must subject ourselves to these decisions in a posi­tivistic way; we must take them as positive laws, for we cannot understand them in rational terms.

In Protestantism both things came to an end, the authority of the church and to a certain extent reason. Then reason elaborated itself completely and became creative in the Renaissance. In the Reformation, tradition was transformed into personal faith. But the Counter-Reformation tried to keep reason in bondage to tradition, only this tradition was not so much living as formulated tradition, tradition which became identical with the authority of the pope. This is very important for our present situation. All of us have to deal even today with the problem of living trodition. Living tradition is often confused with authority, and this is wrong. Authority can be natural and factual, without involving a break within ourselves, disrupting our autonomy and subjecting us to a foreign law or heteronomy. In the early Middle Ages

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authority was natural, so to speak, as our relation to nature is natural. By the end of the Middle Ages the situation was changed. Then that concept of authority arose against which we must fight, an authority which demands subjection to one tradition against other traditions. Today dictators even go to the extreme of excluding all other traditions. The so-called "iron curtains" which we build to a certaira extent by not admitting books from the East, etc., are attempts to keep the people in one definite tradition and to prevent it from touching other traditions, because every authoritarian system knows that nothing is more dangerous for a given tradition than contact with other traditions. This places the individual at the point of decision with respect to other traditions. The "iron curtain" method was not necessary in the early Middle Ages because there was no other tradition; one lived in this tradition as naturally as we live in nature.

C. TiIENDS IN SCHOLASTICISM 1. Dialectics and Tradition

The first form in which autonomous thinking arose in the Middle Ages was dialectics. This word "dialectics" is difficult to use today because of its innumerable meanings; its original meaning had been lost. The original meaning in Creek is "con­versation", talking to each other about a problem, going through "yes and no", one representing the "yes" and the other the "no". We have already mentioned how the jurists, who represented the canon law, had to harmonize for practical reasons the different authorities, councils, and theologians. Out of this need there arose the method of dialectics, of "yes and no". This method was applied to theological problems. However, the dialectical method of "yes and no" is something of which the guardians of tradition are afraid, because once a "no" is permitted, one cannot know where it may lead. This is as true today, when you think of our fundamentalists and traditionalists, as it was in the early Middle Ages.

The early Middle Ages were not able to stand many "no's", in view of the primitive peoples to which they had to speak, in view of the fact that the church tradition was the only one in which people lived at that time, and in view of the fact that everything

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was in the process of transformation and consolidation. So the pious traditionalists arose against the dialectical theologians. Here I am thinking, for example, of Bernard of Clairvaux as the representative of the pious traditionalists, and of Abelard's dia­lectics. The question was whether dialectics can produce some­thing new in theology, or was it to be used only for the sake of explaining the given, namely, the tradition and the authorities?

2.Augustinianism and Aristotelianism

When dealing with Augustine we pointed out that Aristotle was missing in his development. Now in the high Middle Ages the Augustinians came into conflict, or at least into contrast, with the newly arising Aristotelians. The Augustinians were repre­sented by the Franciscan order; the Aristotelians were repre­sented by the Dominican order. We have Augustinians against Aristotelians, or Franciscans against Dominicans. One of the heads of the Franciscan order was Bonaventura, a cardinal of the church, who opposed Thomas Aquinas, the great Dominican theologian. One of the fundamental problems of the philosophy of religion was developed when Augustine and Aristotle, or when Plato and Aristotle—sirice Augustine was Neo-Platonic in his thinking—met again and continued their eternal conversation, a conversation which will never cease in the history of human thought because they represent points of view which are always valid and which are always in conflict with each other. We have the more mystical point of view in Plato, Augustine, Bonaventura, and the Franciscans, and the more rational, empirical point of view in the line from Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas. From the point of view of the foundation of religion and theology this is perhaps the most important of the trends in the Middle Ages. Almost all the problems of our present-day philosophy of religion were discussed in this conflict which was especially strong in the thirteenth century.

2.     Thomism and Scotism

A third contrast or conflict was between Thomism and Scotism. In a sense this is a continuation of the other struggle, since Duns

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Scotus was a Franciscan and Thomas a Dominican. Yet, it was a new problem, also decisive for the modern world, involving the conflict between intellect and will as ultimate principles. For the Dominicans, for Thomism, that is, for the Aristotelian rationality which Thomas introduced into the church, the intellect is the predominant power. Man is man qua intellect. For the Augus­tinian line which leads to Duns Scotus will is the predominant power which makes man man, and God Cod. Cod is first of all will, and only secondarily intellect. And will is the center of man's personality, and intellect is secondary. The world is originally created by will and is for this reason irrational and to be taken empirically. On a secondary level it is intellectually ordered, but this order is never final and cannot be taken in by us in deductive terms. In the modern world this same conflict goes on, for ex­ample, when thinkers like Henri Bergson and Brand Blanshard of Yale present contrasting systems in terms of the will and intellect.

4. Nominalism and Realism

The fourth of the conflicting trends is nominalism against the so-called realism. In order to make this conflict understandable we must know what realism is. If you want to understand what medieval realism was, then simply translate it by "idealism". Medieval realism is what we call idealism, if we are not thinking of idealism in a moral sense or in a special epistemological sense, but in terms of the ideas or essences of things which have reality and power of being. Medieval realism is almost the exact opposite of what we call realism today, and realism today is almost identi­cal with what medieval people called nominalism. For medieval man the universals, the essences, the nature of things, the nature of truth, the nature of man, etc., are powers which determine what every individual thing, such as a tree, or every individual man will always become when he or it develops. This could be called mystical realism or idealism. Universalia realia—the uni­versals are realities; this is medieval realism. Of course, the universals are not things in time and space. That is a misunder­standing which makes it a little too easy to reject universals by saying: "I have never seen manhood; I have only seen 'Paul' and 'Peter." This is something medieval people knew as well. How­ever, they maintained, all "Pauls" and "Peters" always have noses

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and eyes and feet and language. This is a phenomenon which can be understood only in terms of the universal, the power of being, which we call manhood, which makes it possible for every man to become a man with all these potentialities. These potentialities may be undeveloped or even destroyed, but every individual has them.

Nominalism holds the opposite view: Only Peter and Paul, only this particular tree at the corner of 116th Street and River­side Drive exists, and not "treehood", not the power of treehood, which makes it become a tree. Here you have an example of the difference in feeling. If as a nominalist you look at a tree, you feel: "This is a real thing; if I run against it, I will hurt my head." But it is also possible in looking at it to be astonished that with all the seeds sown in the soil, this particular structure of a tree develops, shooting up and spreading its branches. Then in this big tree you can see "treehood", and not just a big tree. And in Peter and Paul you can see not only these particular individuals, but also the nature of man, manhood, as a power which makes it possible for all men to have this character. This is an important discussion which was carried on in logical terms, and is still being carried on. There is hardly a day that I do not fight against nominalism on the basis of my comparatively medieval realistic kind of thinking, which conceives of being as power of being. That is a sin against the "holy spirit" of nominalism, and thus also very much against the "unholy spirit" of logical positivism and many other such spirits. And I fight this fight because I believe that although extreme realism is wrong, namely, that realism against which Aristotle was fighting in Plato which regards universals as special things somewhere in heaven, there are never­theless structures which actualize themselves again and again. So I can say, the power of being always resists non-being. For this reason I believe that we cannot be nominalists alone, although the nominalist attitude, the attitude of humility toward reality, of not desiring to deduce reality, is something which we must maintain.

The immediate importance of nominalism was that it dis­rupted the universals, which were understood not only in terms of abstract concepts but also of embracing groups, such as family, state, friends, craftsmen, all groups which precede the individual. At the same time, the danger of medieval realism was that the individual was prevented from developing his potentialities.

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Therefore, nominalism was an important reaction, so important that I would say that without it the estimation of the personality in the modern world—the real basis of democracy—could not have developed. While I am usually critical of our being nomi­nalists, I do praise its emphasis on the fully developed individual and his potentialities, which withstands any danger of our becoming Asiatic. In face of such a danger medieval nominalism must be understood as positively as medieval realism. Medieval realism maintains the powers of being which transcend the indi­vidual; medieval nominalism preserves or emphasizes the value of the individual. The fact that the radical realism of the early Middle Ages was rejected saved Europe from Asiatization, that is, from collectivization. The fact that at the end of the Middle Ages all universals were lost resulted in the imposition of the power of the church on individuals, making Cod himself into an individual who, as a tyrant, gives laws to other individuals. This was the distortion which nominalism brought along with itself, whereas the affirmation of the personal was its creative contribution. Thus, when you read about nominalism and realism in text-books of logic, do not be betrayed into the belief that this is in itself a basically logical problem. Of course, it must be discussed in terms of the science of logic as well, but it really has to do with the attitude toward reality as a whole which expresses itself also in the logical realm.

. Pantheism and Church Doctrine

Partly connected with realism in the Middle Ages is pantheism, the tendency toward the complete extinction of the individual. This was done in different ways. First, it was expressed in what is called Averroism. Averroes, the greatest of the Arabian philo­sophers, said that the universal mind which produces culture is a reality in which the individual mind participates. But the individual mind is not something independent. This was in line with Asiatization, and Avenues was rejected. Secondly, pantheis­tic elements were expressed in German mysticism of the type of Meister Eckhart. This was able to dissolve all the concreteness of medieval piety, and led to the philosophy of the Renaissance. The church rejected it in the name of the individual authoritarian God.

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D. THE RELIGIOUS FORCES

Next we shall consider the religious forces of the Middle Ages. The greatest and most fundamental of these religious forces was the hierarchy. The hierarchy represented the sacramental reality on which the existence of the church, state, and culture as a whole depended. It administered the Mass which was the central sacra­mental event. Then the hierarchy carried through the work of educating the Germanic-Romanic tribes which entered the church from their barbaric state. In doing so the hierarchy tried to influ­ence not only the individual through the sacrament of penance, but also the social status of reality. The sacrament of penance was the correlate to the sacrament of the Mass; the Mass is objective, penance subjective. The ecclesiastical hierarchy wanted to control the world. Civil powers, or the secular hierarchies with the emperor at the top, arose and came into conflict with the church hierarchy. The emperor aspired to do the same thing from the secular point of view which the church tried to do from the religious, namely, to establish one body of Christian secular life, a life which is always at the same time both secular and religious, instead of having two separate realms as we do.

By assuming secular functions the hierarchy was always in danger of becoming secularized itself. Other religious forces resisted this tendency, one of which was monasticism. Monasti­cism represents the uncompromising negation of the world, but this negation was not a quietistic one. It was a negation coupled with activity directed to transforming the world—in labor, science, and other forms of culture, church architecture and building, poetry and music. It was a very interesting phenome­non and has little to do with the deteriorated monasticism against which the Reformers and humanists were fighting. On the one hand, it was a radical movement of resignation from the world, leaving the control of the world to the secular clergy, but on the other hand, it did not fall merely into a mystical form of asceti­cism, or into a ritualistic form as the Eastern church was in danger of doing; it applied itself to the transformation of reality.

The monks produced the great medieval aesthetic culture, and even today some of the monastic orders represent the highest form of culture in the Catholic Church. The Benedictines, in

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particular, have preserved this tradition until the present time. The monks were also the real bearers of theological science, per­haps even of all science. The Franciscans and especially the Dominicans produced the greatest theologians. Other monks did agricultural work, irrigation of land, drying up swamps, and all sorts of things needed in the newly conquered countries in central and northern Europe where conversions had been made. These monastic groups were, as we might say today, the active, ascetic vanguard of the church. They were free to perform cultural activities and yet were bound to the fundamentals of the church. Later on attempts were made to introduce this monas­tic spirit into other groups as well. We can mention two groups, the knights and the crusaders. The knights fought against the pagans and conquered eastern Germany. If you want a sweep­ing historical statement, consider that these chivalric orders which fought for the Christianization, and also Germanization, of eastern Europe a thousand years ago have now been conquered in this twentieth century, with the help of the Christian nations of the West. That is to say, the Slavic groups have retaken what was taken from them by the military monastic orders of the Middle Ages, and Christianity is now suppressed for the sake of the Communist form of a non-Christian secularism. It was a great world-historical event, as great as the baffles of the knights in the Middle Ages, when in the twentieth century, especially in the Berlin Conference of 1945, eastern Europe was surrendered and the Germanic population which had lived there for a thousand years was thrown out. If this situation is seen in perspective, you see a little of the importance of these medieval orders.

The crusades, and the spirit of the crusaders, can be seen as the result of the introduction of the monastic spirit into the lower aristocracy. They were to conquer Palestine and the Byzantine Empire in the East. But in the end they were also repelled.

Sectarianism was another religious force; it should not be understood so much from a dogmatic point of view, as is usually done. Of course, the sects sometimes did have strange doctrines and for this reason left the church. But the real reason was psy­chological and sociological and much less theological. Sectarian­ism is the criticism of the church for the gap between its claim and its reality. It is the desire of special groups to represent ideals of consecration, sanctification, and holiness. It is an attempt to carry

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through some of the monastic radicalism in terms which are anti-hierarchical. To a certain extent the sectarian movements were lay movements. As the word sectare means, they "cut" themselves off from the body of the church. However, the non-sectarian way of introducing monastic ideals, at least in part, into secular life was through the so-called tertiarii, the "third orders". There was a first order of St. Francis (the order for men), a second order for women, the nuns, and later on a third order was created for the laymen. They did not enter the cloister, nor were they celibate. They subjected themselves partly to the discipline of the monas­tic orders, and as such produced a kind of lay piety which became stronger toward the end of the Middle Ages, and prepared the way for the Reformation.

Then we must mention the great individuals of church history as bearers of medieval piety. They were not great individuals in the sense of the Renaissance. Rather, they were great individuals as representatives of something objective, namely, of the "holy legend". The holy legend starts with the Bible and continues through all the centuries. "Legend" does not simply mean "un­historical"; it is a mixture of history and interpretation, involving stories which are attached usually to great individuals who them­selves had no connection with them. Thus, legendary history is a history of representatives of the spirit of the church. This meant that the Catholic Christian of the Middle Ages was aware of a continuity through all history, going back to biblical times, even back to Noah and Adam in the Old Testament period. This con­tinuity in history was represented by great individuals who are interesting, however, not as individuals but as representatives of the tradition and the spirit in which the people lived. This seems to me more important than the superstitious use of the indivi­duals, for example, by praying to those who had become saints. The holy legend was a reality which, like nature, was something within which one lived. It is a reality in which the living tradition expresses itself symbolically. Those who study religious art will see that up to Giotto the great figures of medieval art are not so much individuals as representatives of the divine presence in a special event or form or character.

Another of the religious forces was the popular superstitions of daily life. The forms of daily life can be called superstitions, if by "superstition" we have in mind the identification of a finite reality

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with the divine. Such superstitions permeate the entire Middle Ages; for example, the relics of the saints, or from the life of Christ. Another superstition was expressed in the ever-repeated miracles or in the attitude toward holy objects, which were used not so much as pointers to the divine but as powers which con­tain the divine in themselves. The positive side of this was that it consecrated the daily life. Let me show you this by a picture. Take a medieval town, the town of Chartres, for instance. Not only its cathedral is important—which you must look at to under­stand the Middle Ages—but also the very way in which it stands on the hill in the middle of a small town. It is a tremendous cathedral, overlooking the whole surrounding country. In it you find symbols of the daily life—the nobility, the craftsmen, the guilds, and the different supporters of the church. The whole daily life is within the walls of the cathedral in consecrated form. When people went into it, their daily life was represented in the sphere of the holy; when they left it, they took with them the consecration they had received in the cathedral back into their daily lives. This is the positive side of it. The negative side is that all this is expressed in superstitious forms of poor pictures, sculptures, relics, and all kinds of holy objects.

Something else of great importance in the daily life of the medieval man was the experience of the demonic. This was a reality for these people. The vertical line which leads up to the divine also leads down to the demonic. And the demonic is a power which is present in the cathedral as something already conquered. Exorcism, expelling the demonic, was one of the daily practices in the cathedral. When entering the cathedral one sprinkled oneself with holy water. This had the effect of purifying oneself from the demonic forces which had been brought along from the daily life. Baptism was primarily exorcism of the demonic forces before forgiveness of sins could be received. Demonic figures are seen supporting the weight of the churches. This is perhaps the greatest symbol—the power of the divine conquers the power of the demonic within the daily life. Toward the end of the Middle Ages, when the Renaissance brought in the demonic symbolism and reality of the later ancient world, the demonic prevailed over against the divine in terms of anxiety. The church of this period lived in a constant anxiety about the presence of the demonic within itself and in others. This is the background

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to the trials of witches and in part also to the persecution of heretics. It is the basis for the demonic persecution of the demonic; there is no better way to describe these witchcraft trials. It is the feeling for the "underground" in life which could erupt any moment in many individuals in terms of neurotic anxiety. At first the churches were able to conquer it, but not at the end of the Middle Ages. So they started the great persecu-tionsof sorcerers, which were even more cruel and bloody than those of the heretics. As in every persecution fear was behind this hostile attitude toward oneself and others, the tremendous anxiety about non-being in terms of demonic symbols.

E. THE MEDIEVAL CHURCH

It is interesting that in the systems of the medieval theologians there is no special place for the doctrine of the church This indi­cates, among other things, that the church was self-evident; it was the foundation of all life and not a matter of a special doc­trine. Of course, in the discussions about the hierarchy, the sacra­ments, and the relation to the civil power, a doctrine of the church was implicitly developed.

Our first consideration is: What was the relation of the church to the kingdom of God in medieval thinking? The answer to this question is the basis on which the other questions about the relation of the church to the secular power, to culture, etc., can be answered. The background to this is what we said about Augus-tine's interpretation of history. We must review this in order to understand the situation.

In the Augustinian interpretation of history we have a partial identification and partial non-identification of the church with the kingdom of God. They are never completely identified be­cause Augustine knew very well that the church is a mixed body. It is full of people who formally belong to it but who in reality do not belong to it. On the other hand, he identified the church with the kingdom of God from the point of view of the sacramental graces present in the hierarchy. Now, either this identification or this non-identification could become the point of emphasis. This was always the problem of the Middle Ages. The church, of course, tried to identify itself with the kingdom of God in terms of the hierarchical graces. However, it is not

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correct to think that any medieval representative, whether theo­logian, pope, or bishop, identified his own goodness or holiness with the kingdom of God, but always his sacramental holiness, his objective sacramental power. The objectivity of this sacra­mental reality is decisive for understanding medieval thought. On the other hand, the actual church was a mixed body and the representatives of the sacramental graces were distorted. So from this point of view it was possible to attack the church. The discus­sion in the Middle Ages was carried on in continuous oscillation between these two poles.

Parallel to this there was in Augustine also a partial identifica­tion and a partial non-identification of the state with the kingdom of earth, which was also designated as the kingdom of Satan. The partial identification was based on the fact that in Augustine's interpretation of history states are the result of compulsory power. He called them "robber states", states produced by groups of gangsters, who are not considered criminals only because they are powerful enough to take the state into their own hands. This consideration, which reminds one of the Marxist analysis of the state, is contrasted, however, to the idea of natural law that the state is necessary to repress the sinful powers which would lead to chaos if left unchecked.

Here again the emphasis could be either on the identity of the state with the kingdom of Satan, or at least the kingdom of the sin­ful world, or on the non-identification of the two, stressing the possibility that the state has a divine function to restrain chaos. All of this is understandable only in the kind of period in which Augustine lived, when the Roman Empire, and later the Germanic-Romanic kingdoms, were realms of non-Christian power. Even when Constantine accepted Christianity, the power play was still going on, the substance of the ancient culture still existed, and was not yet replaced by the religious substance of the church. But then the situation changed. With the expansion of Christianity westward the church became the cultural sub­stance of life, the power which determined all the individual relations, all the different expressions of art, knowledge, ethics, social relations, relation to nature, and all other forms of human life. The ancient substance was partly received by Augustine and partly removed, and what was left in it was subjected to the theonomous principles of the church.

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In such a situation one oould no longer say that the state is the kingdom of Satan because now the substance of the state is the church. So a new situation arose which had consequences not only for the relation of the church to the state, but also for the state itself. How was the Germanic system related to the church? Before the Germanic tribes were Christianized, they had a religi­ous system in which the princes, the leaders of the tribes, repre­sented not only the earthly but also the sacred power. They were automatically representing both realms. This was continued in the Germanic states insofar as the clergy belonged to the feudal order of these tribes. A rfian like Hinchmar, the great bishop of Rheims in France, represented the feudal protest of a sacred political power—political and sacred at the same time against the universality of the church. The German kings, who had to give political power to the higher feudal lords, also had to give power to the bishops as higher feudal lords. The church called this simony, from the story of Simon who wanted to buy the divine power. This was connected with the fact that these feudal lords had to give something for what they received. All of this was bound up with the territorial system of the Germanic-Romanic tribes, a system which stood in opposition to the uni­versality of the church.

Opposition against the feudal bishops and the local kings or princes came from three quarters: (1) from the lower clergy; (2) from the popes, especially Gregory VII; (3) from the proletarian masses, which were anti-feudal, especially in northern Italy. The pope used the lower bishops who were nearer to the lower clergy than the pope himself, so in the name of the pope they could resist the feudal clergy in their own territories. This was the situation which finally led to the great fight between Gregory VII and Henry IV. Usually this is called the struggle between church and state, but this is misleading. "State" in our modern sense is a concept which comes from the eighteenth century. Thus, when we speak of the "state" in Greece, in Rome, or in the Middle Ages, we should always put it in quotation marks. What did exist were legal authorities, with military and political power.

The conflict was not due to the state's encroaching upon the rights of the church, as was often the case later. It was a much more fundamental thing. Since the church was the representative

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of the spiritual substance of everyone's daily life, of every function, craft, business, profession, there was no separation of realms as developed after the Reformation. There was -one reality with different sides. Then the question arose as to who should head this one reality. There must be a head, and it is dangerous to have two heads. So both sides, the clergy and the princes or feudal lords, claimed to he the head of this one reality. The "state" represented by the feudal order was conscious of also representing the Christian body as a whole, and the church represented by the pope was conscious of playing the same role. The same position was claimed by both sides, a position which embraced the secular as well as the religious realms. The king aspired and claimed to represent and be the protector of all Christendom. This was especially true when the king became the German emperor and as such the continuation of the Holy Roman Empire. On the other hand, Pope Gregory VII claimed the same thing from the hierarchical side. He made claims which surpassed everything which had been done before. He identified himself with all bishops as the universal bishop. All episcopal grace comes from the pope; in him Peter is present, and in Peter Christ himself is present. There is no bishop who is not dependent on the pope for his episcopal sacramental power. The pope is the universal monarch in the church. But he even went beyond this: the church is the soul of the body, and the body is the secular life. Those who represent the secular life are related to him who represents the spiritual life, as the limbs of the body are related to the inner self which is the soul. As the soul shall govern the limbs of the body, so the pope shall govern the kingdoms and all feudal orders.

This was expressed by the famous doctrine of the "two swords". There are two swords, the earthly and the spiritual. As the bodily existence is subjected to the spiritual existence, so the earthly sword of the king and of the feudal lords is subjected to the spiritual sword of the pope. Therefore, every being on earth has to be subject to the pope at Rome. This was the doctrine of Pope Boniface VIII, in whom the papal aspirations were radically expressed. The emperors fought against this, and compromises were made, but generally speaking the popes prevailed, at least as long as there was this one reality of Christendom about which popes and emperors were fighting.

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However, new forces arose in the Middle Ages. First and fore­most among them were the national states. The national states claimed independence from both the pope and the emperor. National feeling was behind them. The importance of Joan of Arc was that in her French nationalism first arose and came into direct conflict with the pope. At the end of the Middle Ages the national states had taken over much of the papal power. Again France was leading: Philip the Fair took the papacy to Avignon in France, and the resulting schism between the two popes radically undercut the papal authority. The princes and kings, who gradu­ally became independent and who created the national states, were at the same time religious lords. Thus in England the theory arose that the king represents Christ for the Church of England, as the pope is the vicar of Christ.

Another theory arose which was directed against the pope. The bishops of these developing national states did not want to be simply subjects of the pope; they wanted to regain the position the bishops had at the time, let us say, of the Council of Nicaea. They developed the Idea of conciliarism; the council of bishops is the ultimate authority of the church. This idea is in contrast to curialism (from curia, the papal court); the papal court is the monarchic power over church and state. Thus, in alliance with the nationalist reaction against empire and papacy, conciliarism was a radical movement which threatened the pope. In the long run, however, the pope finally had the power to destroy the reform councils in Basle and Constance, where conciliarism had triumphed for a while. The national separations and splits of all kinds, plus the desire of the later Middle Ages to have a unity in spite of everything, made it possible for ecclesiasticism and monarchism to prevail in the Roman Church.

There were also important movements of criticism against the church, the sectarian and lay movements at the end of the Middle Ages. The greatest critic of the church in the theoretical realm was William Ockham, who fought for the German national state against the universal monarchy of the pope. But the most effec­tive was Wyclif of England. Wyclif criticized the existing church in a radical way from the point of view of the lex evangelica, the evangelical law, which is in the Bible. He translated the Bible and fought against the hierarchy with the support of the national king. Already at that time the relationship between the king of

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England and the pope became very precarious. The pope did not succeed in inducing the king to persecute Wycif and his fol­lowers.

Finally the hierarchy (i.e., as a universal reality) came to an end in the revolutionary movement of the Reformation. The Pro­testant churches took the form of the territorial church which had long before been prepared under the princes. With the power of the pope and the hierarchy vanishing it happened that the church no longer had a backbone. So the prince received the title of "highest bishop". This means that he replaced the hierarchical, sacramental bishops, and became the highest administrator with­in the church, as a lay member at that; he was the predominant lay member who could keep the church in order. In this way the Protestant churches became subjected to the earthly powers, and to this day they have this problem. In Lutheranism it was the problem of the church's relation to the princes, their cabinets, and authoritarian governments. in the Calvinist countries, and also in America, it is the socially ruling classes which are decisive for the church and make up its administrative backbone.

F. THE SACRAMENTS

From the point of view of the actual religious life the sacraments were perhaps the most important thing in medieval church history. When we discuss the sacraments in the Middle Ages, if we are Protestants, we must forget everything we have in our immediate experience of the sacraments. in the Middle Ages the sacraments were not things which happened at certain times during the year and which were merely regarded as compara­tively solemn acts. The preached word did not need to accompany the sacraments. Thus Troeltsch could call the Catholic Church the greatest sacramental institution in all world history.

Previously we have said that the Middle Ages were dominated by one problem, namely, to have a society which is guided by a present reality of a transcendent divine character. This is different from the period in which the New Testament was written, where the salvation of the individual soul was the problem. It is different from the period of Byzantium (ca. 450-950) where mysteries interpret all reality in terms of the divine ground, but not much is changed. It is different from the post-Renaissance period, end‑

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ing in the nineteenth century, in which the world is directed by human reason, by man as the center of reality. It is different also from the early Greek period in which the mind was looking for the eternal Immovable. All of these periods had their particu­lar problem. The problem of the Middle Ages, accordingly, was the problem of the world (society and nature) in which the divine is present in sacramental forms. In the light of this we can ask: What does "sacramental" mean? It means all kinds of things in the history of the church. It means the deeds of Christ, the suf­ferings of Christ (the stations of the cross); it means the Gospels, which can be called sacraments; it means symbols in the Bible; it means the symbolic character of the church buildings, and all the activities going on in the church, in short, everything in which the holy was present. This was the problem of the Middle Ages—to have the holy present.

The sacraments represent the objectivity of the grace of Christ as present in the objective power of the hierarchy. All graces—"graces" may be translated as substantial powers of the New Being—are present in and through the hierarchy. The sacraments are the continuation of the basic sacramental reality of God's manifestation in Christ. In every sacrament there is present a substance of a transcendent character. Water, bread, wine, oil, a word, the laying on of hands—all these things become sacra­mental if a transcendent substance is poured into them. This substance is like a fluid which heals. One of the definitions of a sacrament is: "Against the wounds produced by original and actual sin, God has established the sacraments as remedies." Here in medical symbolism what is meant is clearly expressed: the healing power is poured into the substances.

The question often raised in Protestantism is how many sacra­ments there are. Up to the twelfth century there were many sacramental activities. It was always more or less clear which of them were the most important, namely, baptism and the Lord's Supper. It took more than a thousand years of church history to discover that seven sacraments are the most important. After this discovery the term "sacrament" in a special sense became re­served for just these seven sacraments. This is unfortunate for the understanding of what a sacrament is. We must keep in mind the universal concept of the sacrament: the presence of the holy. Therefore, sacramentalia are being performed in the churches all

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the time; these are activities in which the presence of the divine is experienced in a special way. The fact that there are seven sacraments has many reasons behind it—traditional, practical, church-political, psychological, and many others. There are seven sacraments in the Roman Church; for a long time there were five. In Protestant churches there are two; in some groups, at least, of the Anglican Church there are actually and theoreti­cally three sacraments. But the number does not matter. The question is: What does sacramental thinking mean? This is what Protestants have to learn; they have forgotten it.

In the Roman Church the main sacraments are baptism and the eucharist; but there is also penance as the center of personal piety. There is ordination which is the presupposition for the administration of all the other sacraments. There is marriage as the control of the natural life. Confirmation and extreme unction are supporting sacraments in the life of the individual. Thus, we see that the raison d'être for some of the sacraments is "bio­graphical", while other sacraments stem from the establishment of the church.

Now what is a sacrament? A sacrament is a visible, sensuous sign instituted by God as a medicament in which under the cover of a visible thing the power of God is hiddenly working. The basic ideas are: divine institution, visible sign, medicament (the medical symbol is very important), the hidden power of God under the cover of the sensuous reality. A sacrament is valid if it has a material substance, a form, that is, the words by which it is instituted, and the intention of the minister to do what the church intends to do. These three elements are necessary. The sign (we would say, the symbol) contains the matter. Therefore, the sacrament has causality; it causes something in the inner part of the soul, something divine. But it does not have ultimate causality. It is dependent on God as the ultimate causality. The sacraments mediate the grace. "Grace" should always be trans­lated as divine power of being, or power of New Being, which justifies or sanctifies—these two words being identical in Catholicism, while in Protestantism quite distinct from each other. Grace, or the divine power of the new being, is poured by the sacraments into the essence of the soul, into its very inner­most center. And there is no other way to receive justifying and sanctifying grace than through the sacraments. The substance

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which is poured into the center of the soul has effects upon the different functions of the soul, or mind, as we would say. The intellect is driven toward faith by the sacramental grace; the will is driven toward hope; and the whole being is driven toward love.

The decisive statement is that the sacrament is effective in us ex opere operato, by its mere performance, not by any virtue. There is only one subjective presupposition, namely, the faith that the sacraments are sacraments, but not faith as a special rela­tionship to God. It is a "minimum" theory; those who do not resist the divine grace can receive it even if they are not worthy, if only they do not deny that the sacrament is the medium of the divine grace. The theory of ex opere operato (by its very per­formance) makes the sacrament an objective event of a quasi-magical character. This was the point at which the Reformers were most radical.

The whole life stood under the effects of the sacraments. Baptism removes original sin; the eucharist removes venial sins; penance removes mortal sins; extreme unction removes what is still left over of one's sins before death; confirmation makes a person a fighter for the church; ordination introduces one into the clergy, and marriage into the natural vocation of man or wife. However, above them all is the sacrament of the Mass. This is the sacrifice of Christ repeated every day in every church in Chris­tendom, in terms of the transubstantiation of bread and wine into body and blood. This sacrifice is the foundation of the presence of the divine and of the sacramental and hierarchical power of the church. This was, therefore, the sacrament of sacra­ments, so to speak. Officially it was a part of the Lord's Supper, but objectively it was and is the foundation of all sacraments, for here the priest has the power to produce Cod, facere deum; making God out of the bread and wine is the fundamental power of the church in the Middle Ages.

Penance was in a kind of tension with all the others. It was the sacrament of personal piety. There was much discussion about it. What are the conditions of the forgiveness of sins in the sacra­ment of penance? Some made them very easy, some more heavy. All believed that a person's repentance is necessary—light or heavy—and, on the other hand, that a sacrament is necessary. But no scholastic gave an answer as to how the sacrament and the personal element are related to each other. It was just at this

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point that the medieval church exploded, that is, by the intensi­fication of the subjective side in the sacrament of penance. This was the experience of Luther and, therefore, he became the reformer of the church.

G. ANSELM OF CANTERBURY

Next we shall take up two men of the twelfth century, Anseim of Canterbury and Abelard of Paris. The basis of Anseim's theo­logical work was the same as for all the scholastics, the assertion that in the Holy Scriptures and their interpretation by the fathers all truth is directly or indirectly enclosed. His phrase credo Ut intelligam (I believe in order to understand, not I understand in order to believe) must be understood in the light of how he understood faith and tradition. Faith is not belief as a special act of an individual, but is participation in the living tradition. This living tradition, the spiritual substance in which one lives, is the foundation, and theology is interpretation built on this founda­tion.

The content of eternal truth, of principles of truth, is grasped by the subjection of our will to the Christian message and the consequent experience arising from this subjection. This experi­ence is given by grace; it is not produced by human activities. Here the term "experience" becomes important. "Experience" must be distinguished from what we mean by it today, if we mean anything at all, since the term is used so widely that it has become most questionable and almost meaningless. In any case, at that time experience did not mean "religious" experience, generally speaking; such a thing did not exist then. Rather, experience meant participation in the objective truth implicit in the Bible and authoritatively explained by the church fathers. Every theologian must participate in this experience. Then this experience can become knowledge, but not necessarily so. Faith is not dependent on knowledge, but knowledge is dependent on faith. Again we can use the analogy we have used before: Natural science presupposes participation in nature, but participation in nature does not necessarily lead to natural science. On this basis reason can act with complete freedom to transform experience into knowledge. Anseim was a great speculative thinker at a time when the word "speculation" did not yet have the meaning

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of gazing into the clouds; instead, it meant analyzing the basic structures of reality.

Knowledge based on experience leads to a system. Here we come to one of the features of all medieval thinking. The medieval thinkers knew that in order to think consistently, you must think systematically. In the term "systematic theology" which we use in our teaching there is a remnant of this insight that knowledge must have the character of a system in order to be consistent. On the other hand, people are often attacked today when they use the word "system", just because they want to think systematically, and not sporadically and fragmentarily. But the church cannot afford—as an individual thinker can—to have here an insight and there an insight which have nothing to do with each other or even contradict each other. What would be bad in systematic theology is the derivation of consequences from principles which have no foundation in experience. But this is not the meaning of "system". Its meaning is the ordering of experience cognitively in such a way that the contents of experience do not contradict each other and the whole truth is reached. As Hegel rightly said, the truth is the whole.

Thus, reason can elaborate all religious experiences in rational terms. Even the doctrine of the trinity can be dealt with by reason on the basis of experience. In other words, autonomous reason and the doctrine of the church are identical. Again this is to be compared with our relationship to nature when we say that mathematical structure and natural reality belong to each other. Mathematical reason is able to grasp nature, to order and to make understandable natural movements and structures. In the same way theological reason is able to make understandable and to connect with each other the different religious experiences. This is the courageous way in which Anselm attacked the prob­lems of theology. In saying that even the trinity can be under­stood in rational terms, he is following the Augustinian heritage. We can call it dialectical monotheism, a monotheism in which movement is seen in God himself. God is a living God; therefore, there is a "yes" and a "no" in himself. There is not a dead identity of God with himself, but a living separation and reunion of his life with himself. In other words, the mystery of the trinity is understandable for dialectical thought. This mystery is included in reason itself and is not against reason. How could it be, since,

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according to classical theology, God has reason in himself as his Son, the Logos? Reason, therefore, is valid so far as God and the world are essentially considered. Autonomy is not destroyed by the mystery. On the other hand, autonomy is not empty and formalistic. It does not empty the mysteries of the divine life, but only points to it in dialectical terms. The content, the substance and the depth of reason, is a mystery which has appeared in revelation.

This means that Anseim was neither autonomous in an empty formalistic sense, nor heteronomous in subjecting his reason to a tradition which he did not understand, which was almost a magical mystery. Anseim's attitude is what I call theonomous. This is a concept I often use in my own writings and discussions. Whenever you are asked, "What do you mean by theonomy?" then you can answer, "Anseim's way of philosophizing, or Augus-tine's way, or. .."--now I hesitate to say it—" Hegel's". I mention Hegel in spite of all my criticism of him. This tlieonomous way means acknowledging the mystery of being, but not believing that this mystery is an authoritarian transcendent element which is imposed upon us and against us, which breaks our reason to pieces. For this would mean that God would be breaking his Logos to pieces, which is the depth of all reason. Reason and mystery belong together, like substance and form.

There is one point, however, at which I deviate from Hegel and go along with Anselm. Actually, it is more than a point, but a total turning of the whole consideration: the Logos becoming flesh! This is not a matter of dialectical reason. This is not only dialectical, not only mystery, but paradoxical. Here we are in the sphere of existence, and existence is noted in the freedom of God and man, in sin and grace. Here reason can only acknow­ledge and not understand. The existential sphere, reason itself, is ruled by will and decision, not by rational necessity. Therefore, it can become anti-reason, anti-structure, anti-divine, anti-human. This means that it is not mystery and revelation which place a limitation upon rational necessity. The mystery of being is pre­served by good dialectics, and destroyed by bad dialectics. But beyond mystery and dialectics there is something paradoxical. This means that although man has contradicted himself and always does so, there is a possibility of overcoming this situation because a new reality has appeared under the conditions of

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existence, conquering it. This is the Christian paradox! It is a matter of serious concern that we do not create a gap between the divine mystery and the divine Logos. Again and again the church has affirmed that they belong together. If one denies that the structure of reason is adequate to the divine mystery, he is completely dualistic in his thinking; then God would be split in himself.

Anseim's theonomoiis thought is expressed in his famous argu­ments for the existence of Cod, or as I like to say, his so-called arguments for the so-called existence of Cod, because I want to show that they are neither "arguments" nor do they prove the "existence" of God. But they do something much better than this. There are two arguments, the cosmological and the onto­logical. The cosmological argument is given in his Monologion and the ontological argument in his Proslogion. I want to show that these arguments are not arguments for the existence of an unknown or doubtful piece of reality, even if it is called "Cod". They are quite different from this.

The cosmological argument says: We have ideas of the good, of the great, of the beautiful, of the true. These ideas are realized in all things. We find beauty, goodness, and truth everywhere, but, of course, in different measures and degrees. But if you want to say that something has a higher or lower degree of participa­tion in the idea of the good or the true, then the idea itself must be presupposed. Since it is the criterion by which you measure, it is not itself a matter of measure and degree. The good itself, or the unconditionally good—being or beauty—is the idea which is always presupposed. This means that in everything finite or relative, there is implied the relation to an unconditioned, an absolute. Conditionedness and relativity imply and presuppose something absolute and unconditioned. This means that the meaning of the conditioned and the unconditioned are insepar­able. If you analyze reality, especially your own reality, you always discover in yourself elements which are finite, but in­separably related to something infinite. This is a matter of con­clusion from the conditional to the unconditional, yet it is a matter of analysis which shows that both elements correspond to each other. Reality by its very nature is finite, pointing to the infinite to which the finite belongs and from which it is separated.

That is the first part of the cosmological argument. So far it is

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an existential analysis of finitude, and to this extent it is good and true, and the necessary condition for all philosophy of religion. Actually, it is the philosophy of religion. However, this idea is mixed with a metaphysical realism which identifies universals with the degrees of being. As we discussed before, medieval realism attributes power of being to the universals. In this way a hierarchy of concepts is constructed in which the uncondition­ally good and great, and being, is not only an ontological quality, but becomes an ontic reality, a being besides others. The highest being is that which is most universal. It must be one, otherwise another one could be found; it must be all-embracing. In other words, the meaning or quality of the infinite suddenly becomes a higher infinite being, the highest or unconditionally good and great being. The argument is right as long as it is a description of the way in which man encounters reality, namely, as finite, imply­ing and being excluded from infinity. The argument is doubtful and yields a conclusion which can be attacked if it is supposed to lead to the existence of a highest being.

In the Proslogion Anseim himself criticizes this argument be­cause it starts with the conditional and makes it the basis of the unconditional. His criticism is right with respect to the second part of his argument, but not with respect to the first, for in the first part of his argument he does not base the infinite on the finite, but analyzes the infinite within the finite. But Anseim wanted more than this; he wanted a direct argument which does not need the world in order to find God. He wanted to find God in thought itself. Before thought goes outside itself to the world, it should he certain of Cod. This is what I really mean by theonomous thinking.

This is the argument; it is difficult to follow because it is extremely scholastic and far from our modes of thought. AiseIin says: "Even the fool is convinced that there is something in the intellect than which nothing greater can be thought, because as soon as he (the fool) hears this, he understands it; and whatever is understood is in the understanding. And certainly, that than which nothing greater can be thought cannot be only in the intellect. If, namely, it were in the intellect alone, it could be thought to be in reality also, which is more. If, therefore, that than which nothing greater can be thought is in the intellect alone, that than which nothing greater can be thought is some‑

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thing than which something greater can be thought. But this is certainly impossible. Therefore, beyond doubt, something than Which nothing greater can be thought exists in intellect as well as in reality. And this art Thou, our Lord." Now, this last sentence is remarkable because I have not read such a sentence in any of our logical treatises in the last few hundred years. After going through the most sophisticated logical argumentation, it ends with "And this art Thou, our Lord." This is what I call theonomy. It is not a thinking which remains autonomous in itself, but a thinking which goes theonomously into the relationship of the mind to its divine ground.

I shall now attempt a point-by-point analysis of the meaning of this argument.

(1)Even the fool—the fool of Psalm 53, who says in his heart, "there is no God"—understands the meaning of the term "God". He understands that the highest, the unconditional, is conceived of in the term "God".

(2)If he understands the meaning of God as something un­conditional, then this is an idea which exists in the human mind.

(3)But there is a higher form of being, that is, being not only in the human mind, but being in the real world outside of the human mind.

(4)Since being both within and outside of the human mind is higher than being merely in the intellect, it must be attributed to the unconditional.

Each step in this argument is such that it can be easily refuted, and refutations were given already in Anseirn's time. For instance, the refutation is that this argument would be equally valid for every highest thing, say, for a perfect island. It is more perfect for it to exist in reality than only in the mind. Moreover, the term "being in the mind" is ambiguous. It means actually being thought, being intended, being an object of man's intentionality. But "in" is metaphorical and should not be taken literally.

To the first criticism Anselm answered that a perfect island is not a necessary thought, but the highest being, or the uncondi­tioned, is a necessary thought. To the second criticism he could argue that the unconditional must overcome the cleavage between subjectivity and objectivity. It cannot be only in the mind; the power of the meaning of the unconditional overcomes subject and object, embracing them both. If Anselm had answered in

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this way, the fallacious form of the argument would have been abandoned. Then the argument is not an argument for a highest being, but an analysis of human thought. As such the argument says: There must be a point at which the unconditional necessity of thinking and being are identical, otherwise there could be no certainty at all, not even that degree of certainty which every skeptic always presupposes. This is the Augustinian argument that God is truth, and truth is the presupposition which even the skeptic acknowledges. God is identical, then, with the experience of the unconditional as true and beautiful and good. What the ontological argument really does is to analyze in human thought something unconditional which transcends subjectivity and ob­jectivity. This is necessary, otherwise truth is impossible. Truth presupposes that the subject which knows truth and the object which is known are in some way in one and the same place.

However, it is impossible to conclude from this analysis to a separate existence. This touches on the second part of the argu­ment. At this point we cannot follow medieval realism. The so-called ontological argument is a phenomenological description of the human mind, insofar as the human mind by necessity points to something beyond subjectivity and objectivity, and points to the experience of truth. If you go beyond this, you are open to a devastating criticism, as the whole history of the ontological argument proves. The history of this argument is dependent on the attitude toward form or content. If the content of the argu­ment is emphasized, as all great Augustinians and Franciscans until Hegel have done, the ontological argument is acceptable. If the argumental form is emphasized, as equally great thinkers from Thomas Aquinas to Kant have done, the argument must collapse. It is very interesting that this is an argument which has continued from Plato to the present. And its most classical formu­lation is that of Anselm.

How is it possible for the greatest of thinkers to be divided on this argument? One can hardly say that Thomas was more clever than Augustine, and Kant more clever than Hegel, or vice versa; they are all supreme minds, and yet they contradict each other. How can the phenomenon be explained that this argument is passionately accepted and rejected by the greatest thinkers? The reason can only be that each side is looking at something different. Those who accept the argument look at the fact that in the

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human mind, in spite of its finitude, something unconditional is present. The description of this unconditional element is not an argument. I am among those who affirm the ontological argu­ment in this descriptive sense. On the other hand, people like Thomas, Duns Scotus, and Kant reject the argument because they say the conclusion is not valid. And certainly they are right. I try to find a way out of this world-historical conflict—whose consequences are greater than indicated by the scholastic form of it—by showing that these people are doing different things. Its advocates have the correct insight that the human mind, even before it turns to the world outside, has within itself an experi­ence of the unconditional. Its opponents are right when they say that the second part of the argument is invalid because it cannot lead to a highest being who exists. Kant's argument that existence cannot be derived from the concept is absolutely valid against it. So one can say: Anseim's intention has never been defeated, namely, to make the certainty of God independent of any en­counter with our world, and to link it entirely to our self-consciousness.

I would say that at this point the two ways of the philosophy of religion part company. The one type looks at culture, nature, and history theonomously, that is, on the basis of an awareness of the unconditional. I believe this is the only possible philosophy of religion. The other type looks at all this—nature, history, and the self—in terms of something which is given outside, from which through progressive analysis one might finally come to the exis­tence of a highest being called God. This is the form which I deny; I think it is hopeless and ultimately ruinous for religion. In a religious statement I could say that where God is not the prius of everything, he can never be reached. If one does not start with him, one cannot reach him. This is what Anseim himself felt when he realized the incompleteness of the cosmological argu­ment.

Anselm is famous in theology also for the application of his principles to the doctrine of the atonement. In his book, Cur Deus Homo? (Why a God-man?), he tries to understand the rational adequacy of the substitutional suffering of Christ in the work of salvation. The steps in the doctrine are as follows:

(1) The honor of God is violated by human sin. It is necessary for the sake of his honor for him to react in a negative way.

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(2)There are two possible ways to react, either by way of punishment, which would mean eternal separation from God, or by way of satisfaction, giving satisfaction to God so that he can overlook the sins. This is the way in which God in his mercy has decided to solve the problem.

(3)Man is unable to fulfill this satisfaction because he has to do what he can do anyhow, and he cannot do more. Besides, his guilt is infinite, which makes it impossible by its very nature for man to solve the problem. Only Cod is able to give satisfaction to himself.

(4)On the other hand, because man is the sinner, it is man, not God, who must give the satisfaction. Therefore, someone who is both God and man must do it, who as God can do it and who as man must do it. The God-man alone is able to do this.

(5)But the God-man could not make satisfaction through his deeds, since he had to do these anyhow out of full obedience to God. He could do it only through his sufferings, because he did not have to suffer; he was innocent. Thus, voluntary suffering is the work through which Christ makes satisfaction to God.

(6)Although our sin is infinite, this sacrifice—.-since it is made by God himself—is an infinite one; it makes it possible for God to give Christ what he now deserves because of his sacrifice, namely, the possession of man. Christ himself does not need anything; what he needs and wants to have is man, so God gives him man.

Behind this legalistic, quantitative thinking there is a profound idea, namely, that sin has produced a tension in God himself. This tension was felt. Anselm's theory became so popular because everyone felt that it is not simple for God to forgive sins, just as it is not simple for us to accept ourselves. Only in the act of suffering, of self-negation, is it possible at all. Here lies the power of this doctrine of the atoning work of Christ. The church has never dogmatized Anselm's theory. It has wisely restricted itself from doing so, because there is no absolute theory of atonement. Abelard, as we shall see, and Origen as well as others have had different theories of the atonement. The church has never decided, but it is obvious that it liked Anselm's most, probably because it has the deepest psychological roots. This is the feeling that a price must be paid for our guilt, and that since we cannot pay it, God must do it.

Then the question arose: How can man participate? To this the

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juristic mind of Anseim had no answer. At this point Thomas Aquinas said: It is the mystical union between head and mem­bers, between Christ and the church, which lets us participate in all the steps of Jesus himself.

H. ABELARD OF PARIS

We have discussed Anselm of Canterbury as a typically theo-nomous thinker, theonomous in the sense that he does not crush reason by heteronomous authority, and theonomous in the sense that he does not leave it empty and unproductive, but filled with the divine substance as it is given through revelation, tradition, and authority. Anseim represents the more objective pole in medieval thought, objective in the sense that the tradition is the given foundation, but not exclusive of an intensive personal kind of thinking and searching. On the other hand, in Ahelard of Paris we have a representative of the subjective side, if "subjective" does not mean willful but taking into the personal life, as sub­jective reality. It is unfortunate that the words "objective" and "subjective" have become so indefinite and distorted in all respects. We should not think that if something is objective, it is real and true, whereas if it is subjective, it is willful. "Objective" here refers to the reality of the given substance of the Bible, tradition, and authority. "Subjective" refers to something which is taken into the personal life, and as such experienced and discussed.

Abelard was a philosopher and theologian in the twelfth cen­tury, who lived in the shadow of the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. Subjectivity, which characterizes his spiritual attitude and character, is visible in the following points:

(1) Abelard was enthusiastic about dialectical thinking, show­ing the "yes" and "no" in everything. He was full of contempt for those who accept the mysteries of the faith without understand­ing what the words mean through which the mysteries are expressed. He did not wish to derive the mysteries from reason, but to make them understandable to reason. Of course, there is always the danger that the mystery will be emptied, but this danger is inherent in thinking itself. Thinking unavoidably des­troys the immediacy of life, once it is begun. The question is whether a higher immediacy can be re-established. This is also true of the theological lectures you hear here. To hear them means

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being endangered. This is the reason some of the more funda-mentalistic people would be very much afraid if their future theologians would be educated in a place like Union Theological Seminary in New York, which likes—as Abelard did—dialectical thinking. But if this danger is not risked, faith can never become a real power.

(2)Abelard represents the type of jurisprudential thinking which was introduced into Western Christianity by Tertuflian. He was, so to speak, the lawyer who defended the right of the tradition by showing that the contradictions in its sources—which no one can deny—can be solved. In doing this he was supporting the church; but, of course, the same dialectics which have the power to defend also have the power to attack. Some of the tradi­tional theologians sensed this danger in dialectics, even before the danger became actual. This is also the reason some more or less orthodox theologians do not like apologetics; the same means by which you defend Christianity can be used to attack it.

(3)Abelard was a person of strong self-reflection. This was almost a new event in a period which was so objective in the sense of being related to the contents and not to oneself. In Abelard there was not merely a commitment to truth or good­ness, but at the same time to a reflection about his being com­mitted. We all know about this; we have a feeling of repentance and we reflect on having this feeling. We have an experience of faith and we reflect on this experience. This is characteristically modern, and it first appeared in Abelard. From this perspective we can understand his famous autobiography, Historia Calami-tatum (History of My Misfortunes). The title is in line with Augustine's Confessions, but the important difference is that his self-analysis is not made in the face of God, as with Augustine. The self-analysis is done in relation to himself, in relation to what he has experienced. The title reveals the danger in which we all live as modern men. When Augustine spoke of confessions, he related himself to God as he looked at himself. If we speak of "misfortunes" or "calamities", there always remains a feeling of resentment, and resentment is a sign of subjectivity. This in Abelard was supported by his tremendous ambition, his lack of consideration for others, for instance, his teachers, and his con­tinuous attacks on authorities.

(4)This subjectivity is visible also in the realm of feeling.

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Abelard was one of those who discovered this as a special realm. An example of this was his romance with Heloise, an event with all the tragedy and greatness of the romantic form of love, al­though this was much earlier than its development in the period of romanticism. It represents the discovery of eros against two things which had been predominant, first, paternalistic authority, and secondly, simple sexuality, which has nothing to do with the personal relationship, but which the church had allowed and limited and which was used as an element in the paternalistic family. Instead of this, we have in the romance of Abelard and Heloise a relationship in which the sexual and the spiritual dimen­sions are united. This was something new and threatening in a period in which the barbaric tribes were just becoming educated and receptive of the Christian gospel. Abelard was, so to speak, ahead of his time.

Abelard's book Sic et Non (Yes and No) used a dialectical method which was older than Abelard. It came from the canon­istic literature (the sacred law literature) in ecclesiastical juris­prudence. The papal lawyers tried to harmonize the decrees of the various popes and synods. The practical problem was that the pope and his advisers had to make decisions, and they wanted these to be based on the tradition of law. So the law had to be harmonized. However, the dogmatic decisions of the popes and synods were a part of canon law, so they too had to be harmonized through "yes and no". When Abelard wrote his book, he tried to harmonize the doctrines, not to show dogmatic differences in order to arouse doubt and skepticism. On the contrary, he wanted to show that a unity is maintained in the tradition which can be proved by methods of harmonization. This was also accepted by the church authorities because they needed it; in fact, all scholas­tics accepted the "yes and no" method of Abelard. They asked questions, put opposing views against the answers, discussed the opposing views, and finally came to a decision.

The first step in this method is the attempt to deal historically with the texts of the fathers, the synods, the decrees, and the Bible. The question whether the texts in question are authentic had to be raised. Further, one had to show in what historical situation and under what psychological conditions these texts were written. Any changes in the texts had to be examined. The sphere and the configuration in which these changes occur in the

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same author had to be investigated and described. If all this has been done, then it might be shown that what seemed to be con­tradictions are not such at all, but only different forms in which the very same idea is expressed. It happens often in the history of thought that statements contradict each other only when taken as isolated statements out of the Gestalt, the structure, to which they belong. While appearing contradictory, they may actually say one and the same thing.

The second step is the elaboration of the literal meaning of a word—the philological task. This may lead to the discovery of different senses of a word, even in the same writer. In my lectures I continuously discover that the semantic problem is predominant, that if we use words like "faith" or "Son of Cod", they have as many meanings as there are people in the room, each with a different nuance. Now, if we ask ourselves: Is there any danger in this method of semantic analysis, or more widely, to what degree can logical calculus, semantic purification and reduction, be applied to the contents of the Christian message?—then I would say there is no absolute possibility of applying it, because when we deal with the existential things of life, every word has an edge which makes it what it is, which gives it its color and power; if that is removed, you leave a bone—a conceptual bone—without flesh and skin. This is why I am not convinced by the criticisms of logical positivists, in spite of my interest in semantics, because I believe that if they have their way completely, all words in realms like theology, metaphysics, ontology, art theory, or history will lose their full meaning and be reduced to mathematical signs from which the real power and meaning of such words escape.

The application of the authority of the Bible as the ultimate criterion is the next step. This sounds very Protestant, like so much biblicism in the Middle Ages, but it really is not. It was not a new experience of the Bible out of which Abelard spoke, as was the case with Luther. It was rather the application of the Bible as a law, as the ultimate legal judge. This is quite different from the Protestant interpretation of the Bible as the place where the message of justification can be found. The legal relationship to the tradition in Abelard is different from the creative traditional­ism of Anseim. Though he was less dialectical than Abelard, Anseim was more creative and even more courageous, and at the same time more sensitive to the substance of the tradition.

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Abelard shows subjectivity in all his doctrines, ethical and theological. His doctrine of ethical autonomy is connected with the subjective reason. He was a predecessor of Kant, in spite of the tremendous difference in time and situation. He taught that it is not an act in itself that is good or bad, but the intention makes it so. Kant expressed the same idea—nothing is good except a good will. So for Abelard the act itself is indifferent; only the intention is decisive. "In the intention consists the merit." Therefore, what makes us sinful is not nature itself, not even the desire itself, but the intention, the will. The contents of a moral system are not the important thing, but whether or not the conscience follows them. The contents of the moral system are always questionable when applied to a concrete situation. They can never be taken as absolutes, but the conscience must be the guide. The perfect good, of course, is an exact correspondence between the objective norm and the subjective intention, pro­vided the conscience shows what is actually right. But often this is not the case. When it is not, it is better to follow our con­science, even if it is objectively wrong. He says: "There is no sin except against our conscience." In one sense even Thomas Aquinas accepted this notion. Aquinas said: If a superior in my order, to whom I have sworn obedience, asks me to do some­thing which is against my conscience, I shall not do it, although I am obliged to be obedient to him. The conscience was regarded as ultimate judge, though it may be objectively erroneous. The Protestants and Kant were anticipated by these formulations, but in Abelard's time they could not work, because he neglected the educational element. If the uneducated masses are told that they should follow their conscience, but they have no sufficiently strict objective norms, they will wander and go astray. In this respect, as in so many others, Abelard anticipated ideas which later became actual, for example, in eighteenth-century France.

Abelard denied that in Adam all have sinned. Sin is not sensu­ality, but an act of the will. There is no sin without an agreement of the will, and since we did not agree with our will when Adam sinned, it is not sin for us. Here we see how subjectivity, exactly as in the eighteenth century, dissolves the doctrine of original sin, because this doctrine shows the tragic side of sin, the objec­tive and not the personal, subjective side.

In christology Abelard emphasized the human activity of

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Christ, and denied in a radical way that Christ was a transformed God or Logos or higher divine being. For him the personal activity of Christ is decisive, not his ontological origin in God.

He is best known to Protestants and most often quoted for his idea of salvation. As we have seen, Anseim in his doctrine of atonement makes a deal between God and Christ, out of the situa­tion produced by human sin. He describes atonement in quantita­tive terms of satisfaction. For Abelard, however, it is the love of God which is visible in the cross of Christ; this produces our love. It is not an objective mechanism between transcendent powers which enables God to forgive, as it is in Anselm, but it is the subjective act of divine love which evokes in us a love for him. Salvation is man's ethical.—in the sense of personal—res-ponse to the forgiving act of divine love. This is one of the types of the doctrine of atonement. It is a doctrine of atonement in the personal center. The mechanism of atonement through substitu­tionary suffering is ruled out. Anselm's doctrine lies in the mytho­logical realm in which God and Christ trade with each other; Christ sacrifices and gets something back from God in return. In this respect Abelard is pre-Protestant and pre-autonomous. This is subjectivity in the sense of reason and centered personality. Many of these ideas in Abelard were rejected; he was too early for the educational situation in which the church found itself. For instance, if you tell someone whom you want to educate that the act of confession (i.e., repentance) is valid only if it arises out of love toward God, and not from fear, then you undercut the educational effect of the preaching of the law. Abelard as a theo­logian did not think in terms of what is good for the people, but in terms of what is ultimately true, and what is good for those who are autonomous. Although some of his doctrines were rejected, he became one of the most influential people in the development toward scholasticism, because of the greatness of his dialectical method.

I. BERNARD OFCLAIRVAUX

Bernard of Clairvaux, a man of the same century as Abelard, fought with him over the possibility of applying dialectics to Christian beliefs. Bernard is the most eminent representative of Christian mysticism. As the foe of Abelard he succeeded in

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bringing Abelard before a council which rejected him. let, it is only half-true to call him an adversary of Abelard, because Bernard was also in favor of the subjective side, subjectivity in terms of mystical experience. He wanted to make the objective Christian doctrines, the decisions of the fathers and the church councils, matters of personal appropriation. The difference was that while Abelard did this in terms of reason, Bernard did it in

terms of mystical experience. This experience is based on faith, as with every medieval theolcgian, and faith is described as an anticipation of the will. This is Augustinian voluntarism which Bernard is expressing. Faith is daring and free, an anticipation of something which can become real personally only through full experience. Certainty is not given in the act of faith; it is a daring anticipation of a state to which one may attain. Faith is created by the divine Spirit, and the experience which follows confirms it.

However, Bernard's mysticism was even more important and influential than these ideas which foreshadow the Franciscan school and much of later medieval thought about faith. In a seminar on Christian mysticism we have dealt with the question, "Can mysticism be baptized?" Can it be Christian? Mysticism is much older than Christianity, and much more universal. What about the relation of Christianity to mysticism? In our seminar we have come to the conclusion that mysticism can be baptized if it becomes a concrete Christ-mysticism, very similar to the way it is in Paul—a participation in Christ as Spirit. This is just what Bernard of Clairvaux did. The importance of Bernard is that he is the "baptizing father" in the development of Christian mysticism. Whenever it is said, as some Barthians do, that Christianity and mysticism are two different things, that either one is a Christian or a mystic, that the attempt of almost two thousand years to baptize mysticism is wrong, then one must point to Bernard in whom a mysticism of love is expressed. Only if you have a mysti­cism of love can you have a Christian mysticism.

Mysticism has two types of content in Bernard. First, there is the picture of Jesus as it is given in the biblical record, through which the divine is transparent. The stress is on participation in his humility, not on an ethical command, although this follows after it. We participate in the reality of God in Jesus. The mystical following of Jesus is participating in him. When we read about

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how Francis of Assisi and Thomas a Kempis tried to follow Jesus, we should never forget that this was not the way in which a Jew follows Moses; it was not another law, but it was meant as a participation in the meaning of what Jesus is. In this way the mystics of the Middle Ages overcame a legal interpretation of obedience to Christ. We cannot really follow him exctpt we participate in him mystically. This participation is dynamic, not static and legalistic. This concrete, active mysticism of love to Christ is the presupposition of the second type of content in Bernard's mysticism. This is the abstract mysticism; it is called "abstract" because it abstracts from anything concrete. It is a mysticism of the abyss of the divine. This side of the mystical experience is that which Christian mysticism has in common with all other forms of mysticism. There are three steps, according to Bernard:

(1) Consideration (you look at things from outside; they remain objects for your subjectivity).

(2) Contemplation (participating in the "temple", going into the holiness of the holy).

(3) Excessus (going outside oneself, an attitude which exceeds the normal existence, one in which man is driven beyond himself without losing himself, it is also described as raptus, being grasped).

In the third stage man goes over into the divinity, like a drop of wine which falls into a glass of wine. The substance remains, but the form of the individual drop is dissolved into the all-embracing divine form. One does not lose one's identity, but it becomes a part of the divine reality.

These two forms of mysticism must always be distinguished: concrete mysticism, which is mysticism of love and participating in the Savior-God, and abstract mysticism, or transcending mysti­cism, which goes beyond everything finite to the ultimate ground of everything that is. When we examine these two forms, we can say that at least for this life Bernard's mysticism stands within the Christian tradition. As for the second type, we can say that this makes love in eternity impossible. But then we must add that Paul said something similar in his statement that God will be all in all. This means that when we come to the ultimate, we cannot think simply in terms of separated individuals, although we must still think in terms of love. And this is no easy task. In any case,

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the decisive thing is that in Bernard there is something different than in Pseudo-Dionysius, and this is his concrete mysticism, Christ mysticism, love mysticism. It is still mysticism, because mysticism is participation, and participation involves partial identification.

In coming to the end of this discussion on the early Middle Ages, we must briefly consider Hugh of St. Victor, the most influ­ential theologian of the twelfth century. More than Anselm, Abelard, or Bernard, he was a fulfiller of systematic thinking. He wrote a book, On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith. The term "sacrament" is used in the broadest sense; all the works of God and everything in which the divine becomes visible are sacraments. He distinguishes two groups of the works of God. He calles them the opera conditionis, the works of condition, and the opera reparationis, the works of reparation. This offers a deep insight into medieval life. All things are visible embodiments of the invisible ground behind them. Nevertheless, this does not lead to a pantheistic form of theology, because although all the works of God are sacraments, they are concentrated into seven sacraments. If not only bodily realities, but also activities of Cod are called sacraments, then the idea of sacrament becomes full of dynamism. Thus, we have an interpretation of the world in dynamic sacramental form, centered around the seven sacra­ments of the church, particularly around the Mass and penance.

J. JOAC}{IM OF FLORIS

In Joachim of Floris we have an interpretation of history which became extremely influential upon the Middle Ages as well as upon modern thought. Joachim was an abbot of a monastery in Calabria in southern Italy. He wrote a number of books in which he developed a philosophy of history which became an alterna­tive to the Augustinian interpretation of history and formed the background to most of the revolutionary movements in the Middle Ages and in modern times. Augustine's interpretation of history was the basis for most conservative movements during the same time. I want to confront the Joachimist interpretation of history with the Augustinian.

The Augustinian view places the reign of Christ, the thousand-year period, in the present time and identifies it with the control

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of this period by the hierarchy and its divine graces. The sacra­mental power of the hierarchy makes it the immediate medium of Christ, so that the thousand-year period, the monarchy of Christ, is the monarchy of the church. Since this is the last period, accord­ing to Daniel, there is no future any more; the thousand years are here and we live in them. Criticism can only be directed to the church so far as it is a mixed body, not to its foundation, which is final. In this way Augustine removed the threat of millenari-anism—the doctrine of the thousand years—which holds that the millennium is still to come in the future, and in the light of which the church and its hierarchy could be criticized.

Joachim renewed the idea of the thousand years of Christ which still lie in the future. He spoke about the three dispensa­tions which unfold in history and which are characterized by historical figures. The first period runs from Adam to John the Baptist, or to Jesus Christ; it is the age of the Father, This age is overcome by the very fact of the Christ. The second period runs from King Uzziah (Isaiah 6) to the year A.D. 1260. This way of figuring is arrived at by the fact that according to the genealogies of the Old Testament, this age is supposed to embrace forty-two generations. The third dispensation runs from Benedict in the sixth century after Christ, when Western monasticism started; it is called the age of the Spirit. It has twenty-one generations after Christ, which lead up to the year 1260.

This construction seems to be very artificial. The ages overlap; the second overlaps with the first age from King Uzziah to the birth of Christ, or to John the Baptist. The second is overlapped by the third from Benedict to 1260. What does this overlapping mean? It represents a profound insight into historical develop­ments. Historical periods never start sharply but always unfold with some overlapping. There is no such thing as "the end of the Gothic period" and "the beginning of the Renaissance", no "end of the Renaissance" and "beginning of the Baroque", no "end of the Baroque" and "beginning of the Rococo", etc. Every new period is conceived and born in the womb of the previous one. No one was more aware of this than Karl Marx when he con­structed his interpretation of history, describing how each new period was prepared in the womb of the preceding one—for instance, the socialist in the womb of the bourgeois period, and the latter in the womb of the late feudal period. It is like birth,

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there is a certain period in which mother and child are together in the same body. According to this idea of overlapping, the germs of the new period are prior to what he called fructificatio (fructification), mature realization. A period is never mature when its first beginnings become visible. In this trinitarian scheme applied to history, the succeeding period is always present for a certain amount of time in the preceding one. In this way Christ is one moment in the three periods of history, and history goes beyond him. This is the same problem we have in the Fourth Gospel, whether or not the Spirit goes beyond the Christ. The Fourth Gospel decides in a double way: on the one hand, it decides partly for the Spirit going beyond the Christ when it says that many things cannot be said now, but the Spirit will come and help you; and, on the other hand, the Spirit does not take of its own but from Christ, who is present in the second period, the period of the Son.

These ideas about the meaning of historical development should be taken seriously. They should not be rejected just be­cause of these names in the Old Testament, which are certainly arbitrary. Every historian knows about the arbitrariness of every periodization of history. Historians will tell you that the period which we call the "Renaissance" was shared in by only a few people—artists, scholars, and politicians in Italy, and later by some people in England, Holland, and Germany. The masses of people still lived under the conditions which had prevailed for the past century.

What are the characteristics of these stages? Being a profound observer Joachim knew that the first stage was to be determined sociologically. This is a period in which marriage is the decisive sociological form, work and servitude (slavery, feudalism, etc.) are economically decisive, and which religiously can be identified as the period of law. In the second period the clergy and the organized church are decisive. The sacramental reality makes the law unnecessary; because of grace it is a time for faith instead of good works. It is not an age of autonomy, but one in which the clergy represent for everyone the presence of the divine. The third period is monasticism, when the monastic ideal will grasp all mankind and the birth of new generations will cease. This is, therefore, by necessity the last period. The graces given by the Holy Spirit in this period are higher than the sacramental graces

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of the second period, and still higher than the law of the first period. Whereas the second period was prepared already in Judaism, which had some sacramental graces, the third period was prepared in church history, with the foundation in monas­ticism. The inner part of this period is freedom, that is, autonomy, not being subject any more to state or church authorities. The appropriate attitude is contemplation instead of work, and love instead of law.

So we have here a sociological understanding of the different periods of history, but sociology is not the "cause" of everything, as it is in Marxism but it is a necessary condition. At the same time it is an interpretation of religion which shows the difference between works (under the law), grace accepted by faith, and autonomous freedom in contemplation and love. The scheme is trinitarian; the dynamic element which is always implied in trinitarian theology has become horizontal, transferred to the movement of history. It is the historization of the trinitarian idea: Father, Son, and Spirit have different functions in history. Of course, all three are always present—God cannot be divided—but they are present with a different emphasis. This means that something is still ahead. The perfect society, the monastic society, will still come, and when measured by it not only the Old Testa­ment society but also the New Testament society, the church, must be criticized.

Another idea is that truth is not absolute, but is valid for its time—bonurn et necessarium in suo tern pore—the good and necessary according to its time. This is a dynamic concept of truth, the idea that truth changes in history according to the situation. The early church had to apply this principle always to the Old Testament. The truth of the Old Testament is different from that of the New Testament, and yet it also is the divinely inspired Word of God. To account for this theologians spoke about dispensations or covenants. The idea of the kairos was used, which means that as the time is different, so the truth is different. This idea was placed against the absolutism of the Catholic Church, which identified its own being with the last period of history, that is, with the ultimate truth. For Joachim there is a higher truth than that of the church, namely, the truth of the Spirit. From this it follows that the church is relative. It is inter utrumque, between both the period of the Father and the

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period of the Spirit. Its shortcomings are due not only to distor­tions, but also to its relative validity. In this scheme the church is relativized. Only the third period is absolute; it is not authori­tarian any more, but autonomous. Every individual has the divine Spirit within himself. This means that the ideal for Christianity lies in the future and not in the past. He called it intellectus spiritualis and not literalis, that is, a spiritually formed intellect and not an intellect dependent on literalistic laws.

From this it follows that in the future the hierarchy as well as the sacraments will come to an end. They will not be needed because everything will be directly related to God spiritually, and no authoritarian intervention will be necessary. Joachim spoke of a papa angelica, an angelic pope, which is more a prin­ciple than a man. It is a pope who represents the presence of the Spirit without authority. The hierarchy will be transformed into monasticism, and so will the laity. When this happens the last period will have been reached. In this third stage there will be perfection, contemplation, liberty, and Spirit. This will happen in history. For Augustine the final end is only transcended; nothing new will happen in history any more. For Joachim the new is in history.

Joachim also spoke of the "eternal gospel", which is not a book. The gospel is the presence of the divine Spirit in every individual, according to the prophecy of Joel, which is often used in this context. It is a simplex intuitus veritatis, a simple intuition of truth which all can have without intermediate authority. Free­dom means the authority of the divine Spirit in the individual. This is theonomy, not rationalistic autonomy, theonomy which is filled with the presence of the divine Spirit. History produces freedom in the course of its progress. The idea is progressivistic; the goal is ahead.

These were revolutionary ideas which understattdably Thomas Aquinas fought against in the name of the church. The church has its classical period in the past, not in the future. The classical period of the church is the apostolic age. The church is based on history; history has brought the church about, but the church is itself not in history. It is beyond it because it is at the end of history. Joachim's ideas are important because they had a dynamic, revolutionary, explosive power. The extreme Franciscans used his prophecies and applied them to their own order, and on

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that basis they revolted against the church. Many sectarian move­ments, including the sects of the Reformation on which much of American life is dependent, were directly or indirectly dependent on Joachim of Floris. The philosophers of the Enlightenment who taught that there will be a third period of history in which every­one will be taught directly by the inner light—the light of reason —were dependent on Joachim's ideas. The socialist movement rests on the same idea when in its classless society everybody will be directly responsible to the ultimate principles. It is not the case, of course, that all these people knew Joachim and his ideas directly, but there was a tradition of revolutionary thinking in Western Europe, some of the fundamental ideas of which first appeared in Joachim. Much of American utopianism must be understood in the light of this movement in the West. So far as I know none of this revolutionary thinking can be found in the Eastern religions, because by definition they are non-historical religions. In Joachim a new insight into the dialectics of history appeared. His influence was mediated by the radical Franciscan monks.

K. THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY

The thirteenth century is the high point of the Middle Ages. The whole destiny of the Western world was decided at this time in a very definite way. All the scholastics were dependent on Peter Lombard, whom we have not yet discussed, although he belongs to the twelfth century. He was not as original as the others, but he represents the systematic, didactic type of the Middle Ages. He organized the statements of the fathers in a book entitled The Four Books of Sentences, which became the text-book of the Middle Ages, if there ever was a text-book. Every great scholastic started by writing a commentary on Lombard's Sentences.

The thirteenth century can be described theologically in three steps, represented by three names: Bonaventura, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus. There are others between them whom we will mention occasionally. Duns Scotus was the greatest of them all as a scholar, and he was also the starting point of new developments on which the whole modern period is dependent. Thomas Aquinas is the classical theologian of the Roman Church, and was established as such again in modern times by the pope.

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Bonaventura represents the spirit of Augustine and St Francis, in his being, in his mysticism, and in his theology.

What are the presuppositions of the thirteenth century which made it the high point of the Middle Ages? First, I want to mention the crusades, not because of their political and military significance but because they brought about the encounter of Christianity with two highly developed cultures, the original Jewish and the Islamic cultures. One could perhaps even say that a third culture was encountered at that time, namely, the classical culture of ancient Greece, which was mediated into the medieval world by the Arabian theologians. The fact of an encounter with an­other, if it is serious enough, always involves a kind of self-reflection. Only if you encounter someone else are you able to reflect on yourselves. As long as you go ahead without resistance, you are not forced to look back upon yourselves. When you en­counter resistance, you reflect. This is what Christianity had to do. It began to reflect on itself in a much more radical way. The second presupposition was the appearance of the complete Aristotle in his genuine writings, and with him the appearance of a scientific philosophical system which was methodologically superior to the Augustinian tradition. Thirdly, there was the rise of several new types of monastic orders, the preaching and mendicant orders, which both intensified and popularized the religious substance. They produced world-wide organizations through all countries and contended with each other theologi­cally. Since they were not nationally provincial, they could com­pete on a world-wide scale and produce theological systems of the highest significance in conflict with each other. Since the thirteenth century these two orders became the bearers of the theological process. They both used Aristotle, but they used him differently. They used the new knowledge of Judaism and Islam, but they used it differently.

This leads us to a description of the two types of orders, the Franciscan and the Dominican, named after two personalities, Francis of Assisi and Dominic. Francis continued the monasti­cism of Augustine and Bernard. Like them he emphasized per­sonal experience, but he introduced the idea of the active life in contrast to the contemplative life. From the beginning this was always nearer to the Western mind than to the East. Francis also produced a new relationship to nature; not only human

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hierarchical orders, but also sun and stars and animals and plants belong to the power of the divine life. The best thing to do to understand him is to look at the pictures of Giotto, who painted almost nothing else than the story of St. Francis, who had become the new holy legend. Thus, Francis became the father of the Renaissance; by his feeling of fraternity with all beings, he opened up nature for religion. He opened up nature with respect to its ground of being, which is the same as it is in man.

Francis introduced also the idea that the lay people must be brought into the circle of the holy. In the sacramental system the clergy and the monks were the real representatives, while the laymen were only passive. To bring the laity into the circle he created the so-called "third order", the tertiaries. The first is the male order, the monks; the second is the corresponding female order, the nuns; the third is the laymen who remain married and subject themselves to some of the principles of the monastic orders. All of this was placed by Francis under the authority of the pope. Giotto's famous picture, in which Innocent III, the greatest pope, and Francis, the greatest saint of the Roman Church, met each other, depicts a classical moment in world history. Nevertheless, this represented a threat to the hierarchical system. The danger became actual in the revolution of the Fran­ciscan radicals who tried to unite Francis and Joachim, and who became the prototypes of many later anti-ecclesiastical and anti-religious movements. The lay principle was also dangerous because it could spell the end of the absolute authority of the hierarchy. Dangerous also was the new relationship to nature and the vision of the divine ground in it which in the long run would undermine Catholic supernaturalism. Generally speaking, Francis belonged to the Augustinian-Anselmian-Bernardian tradition of the mystical union of Christianity with the elements of culture and nature.

In contrast to Francis, Dominic was not such an original per­sonality. He assumed the task of preaching to the people and of defending the faith. This was something new—defending either by mediation or by conversion or by persecution, that is, either in terms of apologetics or in terms of missions or in terms of church power. In all three ways the Dominicans became the order of the Inquisition and of the Counter-Reformation until, at a later time, the Jesuits took over. The Dominican order pro‑

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duced the classical system of mediation, of apologetic theology that of Thomas Aquinas, and the greatest preachers, among whoff

was Meister Eckhart. More than any other school, they brought Aristotle into the West. Their instrument was the intellect, even in their mysticism, whereas the Franciscan-Augustinian tradition laid stress more on the will. Finally, the voluntarism of the Fran­ciscans broke down the intellectualism of the Dominicans, thus opening the way for Duns Scotus, Ockham, and the nominalists.

This was the spiritual background for the tremendous develop­ment of the thirteenth century. Without constant reference to these movements, the theology of this period cannot be under­stood. When we think of Thomas Aquinas, we must understand him as a mediating theologian. He understood, better than any­one else, the mediating function of theology. In German theology the term Vermittlungstheologie has been used of the nineteenth century in a derogatory sense. I have come to its defense by say­ing that all theology is mediation, the mediation of the message of the gospel with the categories of the understanding as they exist in any given period of history.

The dynamics of the high Middle Ages are determined by the conflict between Augustine and Aristotle, or between the Fran­ciscans who were Augustinians and the Dominicans who were Aristotelian. This contrast, however, should not be taken too exclusively. For all medieval theologians were Augustinian in substance. And since the thirteenth century they were all Aristo­telian with respect to their philosophical categories. Yet, these schools did have different emphases which have been reflected ever since in the philosophy of religion.

Let us make clear what Aristotle meant for the Middle Ages the moment he was discovered at the beginning of the thirteenth century, with the help of the Arabian philosophers.

(1) Aristotle's logic had always been known, but it was used as a tool and had no direct influence on the content of theology. When the whole work of Aristotle was rediscovered, it was found to be a complete system in which all realms of life were discussed—observations about nature, politics, and ethics. It represented an independent secular world-view, including a system of values and meanings. The question was: How could a world which had been educated in the Augustinian ecclesiastical tradition deal with this secular system of ideas and meanings? It

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was similar to the question theology has raised in recent centuries: How can the scientific revolution since the seventeenth century be mediated with the Christian tradition?

(2)Aristotle offered basic metaphysical categories, such as form and matter, actuality and potentiality. He came with a new doctrine of matter, of the relation of God to the world, and on this basis an ontological analysis of reality.

(3)Perhaps the most important thing he gave was a new ap­proach to knowledge. The soul has to receive impressions from the external world. Experience is always the beginning in Aris­totle, whereas in the Augustinian tradition immediate intuition was the point of departure. The Augustinians stood, so to speak, in the divine center, and judged the world from there. The Aristotelians looked at the world, and concluded to the divine center.

The whole movement of Augustinianism in relation to Aristotelianism must be viewed in the light of this question of knowledge. The question is: Is our knowledge a participation in the divine knowledge of the world and himself, or must we on the contrary recognize God by approaching the world from the out­side? Is God the last or the first in our knowledge? The Augus-tinians answered that the knowledge of God precedes all other knowledge; it comes first and we must start with it. We have the principles of truth within ourselves. God is the presup­position even of the question of God, as he is the presupposition of every quest for truth. "He is", says Bonaventura, "most truly present to the soul and immediately knowable." The principles of truth are the divine or eternal light within us. We start with them; we begin with our knowledge of God, and from this we go to the world, using the principles of the divine light within us, This divine light or these principles are the universal categories, especially the transcendentalia, those things which transcend everything concrete and given, such as being, the true, the good, the one. These are ultimate concepts of which we have immediate knowledge, and this knowledge is the divine light in our soul. Only on the basis of this immediate knowledge of the ultimate principles of reality can we find truth in the empirical world. These principles are present in every act of knowing. Whenever we say what something is, whenever we make a logical judgment about something, the ideas of the true, of the good, of being itself,

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are present. Bonaventura can say: "Being itself is what first appears in the intellect", and being itself is the basic statement about God. This means that every act of cognition is made in the power of the divine light. The Franciscans said that this divine light and these principles within us are uncreated, and we parti­cipate in them. Somehow this means that there is no such thing as secular knowledge. All knowledge is in some way rooted in the knowledge of the divine within us. There is a point of identity in our soul, and this point precedes every special act of know­ledge. Or, we could say that every act of knowledge—about animals, plants, bodies, astronomy, mathematics—is implicitly religious. A mathematical proposition as well as a medical dis­covery is implicitly religious because it is possible only in the power of these ultimate principles which are the uncreated divine light in the human soul. This is the famous doctrine of the inner light, which was also used by the sectarian movements and by all the mystics during the Middle Ages and the Reformation period, and which in the last analysis underlies even the rational­ism of the Enlightenment. The rationalists were all philosophers of the inner light, even though this light later on became cut off from its divine ground.

This attitude we call theononious. The Franciscans tried to maintain a theonomous outlook in spite of the fact that they had to use such Aristotelian concepts as form and matter, potentiality and actuality. So from Augustine to Bonaventura we have a philosophy that is implicitly religious, or theonomous, in which God is not a conclusion from other premises, but prior to all conclusions, making them possible. This is the philosophy which in my article, "The Two Types of Philosophy of Religion" (in Theology of Culture), I call the ontological type; it can also be called the mystical type, the type of immediacy. I also like to call it the theonornous type in which the divine precedes the secular.

The opposite type is the Thomist philosophy of religion. Thomas Aquinas cuts off the immediate presence of God in the act of knowing. Of course, he acknowledges that God is the first in himself, but he is not the first for us. Our knowledge cannot start with God, although everything starts with him; but our knowledge must reach him by starting with his effects—the finite world. In starting with the effects of God we can conclude to

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their cause. In other words, man is separated from being itself, from truth itself, and from the good itself. Of course, Thomas could not deny that these principles are in the structure of man's intellect, but he calls them created light, not uncreated light. They are not the divine presence in us; instead, they are the works of God in us; they are finite. Thus, in the act of knowledge, we do not have God, but with these principles we can attain to God. It is not that we start with the divine principles in us and then discover the finite world, as the Franciscans; but we start with the finite world and then perhaps we can discover God in our acts of cognition.

In opposing this Thomist theory the Franciscans said that this method which must start—in a good Aristotelian way—with sense experience is good for scientia (for "science" in the broadest sense of the word) but it destroys sapientia, wisdom. Sapientia means the knowledge of the ultimate principles, the knowledge of God. One of l3onaventura's followers made the prophetic statement that the moment you pursue the Aristotelian-Thomist method and start with the external world, you will lose the prin­ciples. You will gain the external world—he agreed with that because he knew that empirical knowledge can be acquired in no other way—but you will lose the wisdom which is able to grasp intuitively the ultimate principles within yourself. Thomas answered that the knowledge of God, like all knowledge, must begin with sense experience and reach God on this basis in terms of rational conclusions.

The divergence between these two approaches to the know­ledge of God is the great problem of the philosophy of religion, and, as I will row show, it is the ultimate cause of the secu­larization of the Western world—I am using "cause" in the cogni­tive realm, for there are other causes too. The Aristotelian method is placed against the Augustinian, and gradually this method of starting with the external world prevailed. Thomas knew that the conclusions reached in this way, though they are logically correct, do not produce a real conviction about God. Therefore, they must be completed by authority. In other words, the church guarantees the truth which can never be fully reached merely by an empiri­cal approach to God. The situation is clear: In Bonaventura we have a theonomous knowledge in all realms of life; we have no knowledge whatsoever without beginning with God. In Thomas

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we have autonomous knowledge, reached by the scientific method, as far as it goes. But Thomas knew that it does not go far enough, so it must be completed by authority. This is the mean­ing of the heated struggle between the Augustinians and the Aristotelians in the thirteenth century. There was a gap in the Thomist approach, but at that time the gap was not yet visible. By his genius, his power to take in almost everything, his power to mediate, his personal, even mystical, piety, Thomas was able to cover the gap, but the gap was there and had consequences reaching far beyond what Thomas himself realized. This came out in Duns Scotus,

Dims Scotus was not a mediating but a radical thinker. He was one of those who tear up what seems to be united. He fought against the mediations of Thomas Aquinas. On the other hand, he did not follow his own Franciscan predecessors. He followed Thomas by accepting Aristotle, but he realized the consequences which Thomas was able to cover. For Duns Scotus there is an infinite gap between the finite and the infinite. Therefore, the finite cannot reach God cognitively at all, either in terms of im-mediacy—as the older Franciscans wanted—nor in terms of demonstrations, as Thomas and the Dominicans wanted. He criticized—and insofar as you are nominalists, you will like this criticism—even the transcendentalia, the ultimate principles. He says: Being itself (esse ipsum) is only a word; it points to an analogy between the infinite and the finite, but only an analogy. The word "being" does not cover God as well as the world. The gap is such that you cannot cover both of them with one word, not even in terms of the verum, bonum, unum (the true, good, and one), and that means in terms of being itself. Therefore, there is only one way that is open to receive Cod, the way of authority, the way of revelation received by the authority of the church.

The result is that in Duns Scotus we have two positivisms: the religious or ecclesiastical positivism, which means that we must simply accept what is given to us by the church since we cannot reach God cognitively, and the positivism of the empirical method, which means we must discover what is positively given in nature by the methods of induction and abstraction. Now the gap of which I spoke has become visible. In Thomas it was closed; in Duns Scotus it was opened up and has never been

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closed again. It is still our problem, as it was the problem of the thirteenth century.

The gap opened up by Dims Scotus became very large a cen­tury later in Ockham, the real father of nominalism. In his view God cannot be approached at all through autonomous know­ledge; he is out of reach. Everything could be the opposite of what it is. Therefore, God can be reached only by subjecting our­selves to the biblical and ecclesiastical authorities. And we can subject ourselves to them only if we have the habitus, the habit, of grace. Only if grace is working in us can we receive the author­ity of the church. Cultural knowledge, the knowledge of science, is completely free and autonomous, and religious knowledge is completely heteronomous. The original theonomy of the Augustinian-Franciscan tradition has been broken into complete scientific autonomy on the one side, and complete ecclesiastical heteronomy on the other side. This is the situation which prevailed at the end of the Middle Ages. Since the Middle Ages were based on a system of mediation, they came to an end when these mediations broke down.

If we compare these positions on the traditional question of reason and revelation, we can say: In Boriaventura reason itself is revelatory insofar as in its own depths the principles of truth are given. This does not, of course, refer to the historical revela­tion in Christ, but to our knowledge of God. In Thomas reason is able to express revelation. In Duns Scotus reason is unable to express revelation. In Ockham revelation stands alongside of reason, even in opposition to it. At the end of the Middle Ages the religious and secular realms are separated, but not in the way in which they are today, for the Middle Ages still wanted to maintain its traditional unity. Therefore, the church developed its radical heteronomous claim to rule over all realms, and thus to control them from the outside. Then the desperate fight between autonomous secularism and religious heteronomy developed. The late Middle Ages should not be confused with the earlier Middle Ages. As long as the tradition retained its force, the Middle Ages were not heteronomous; they were theonomous. But by the end of the Middle Ages, an independent secular realm became estab­lished. This led to the question whether the church could control this independent realm. The Renaissance and the Reformation were the means by which the church was deprived of this power.

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The theory of double truth appeared at this time. Some people seriously believed—they were not merely being diplomatic, to hide themselves—that in reality a statement on the same matter can be both theologically true and philosophically false, and vice versa. Thus, they could accept the whole heteronomous system of the church and, at the same time, continue to develop their autonomous thought. If a philosophical proposition con­flicted with the theological tradition, they could take refuge in the "double truth" theory. For many this was a way of evasion, but it was also a belief that these realms are so separated that you can say in one realm the opposite of what you say in the other.

We have been dealing with the epistemological problem, but behind it there is the problem of God. The medieval idea of God has three levels.

(1)The first and fundamental level is the idea of God as primum esse, the first being, or prima causa, the first cause. The word "cause" here is not meant in the sense of "cause and effect" in the realm of finitude. And the word prima does not mean first in a temporal way, but in the sense of the "ground" of all causes. So the term "cause" is here used more symbolically than literally. God is the creative ground in everything, creatrix urzi-versalium substantia, the creative substance of everything that is. This is the first statement about God. God is the ground of being, as I like to express it, or being-itself, or the first cause; all these terms point to the same meaning.

(2)This substance cannot be understood in terms of the in­organic realm—as fire or water, as the ancient physicists did—nor in the biological realm as a life process. It must be understood as intellect. The first quality of God as the ground of being is intel­lect. Intellect does not mean intelligence; it means the point in which God is for himself subject and object at the same time; it means God knowing himself and knowing the world as that which he is not. The ground of being, or in other words, the creative substance, is the bearer of meaning. The consequence is that the world is meaningful; it can be understood in words which have meaning. The logos, the word, can grasp it. To understand reality, we must presuppose that it is understandable. Reality is under­standable because its divine ground has the character of intellect. Knowledge is possible only because the divine intellect is the ground of everything.

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(3) The third point is that God is will. This comes from the Christian Augustinian tradition, whereas the emphasis on intellect comes from the Greek Aristotelian tradition. If the concept of will is applied to God and the world, it refers to the dynamic ground of everything, not to the psychological function which we ob­serve in ourselves. Will is the productive power of the ground of being. This will has the nature of love—in good Augustinian tradition. The creative substance of the world has meaning and love; it is intellect and will, symbolically speaking. Just as we said that God knows himself, so now we must say that God wills or loves himself as the absolute good, indeed, as the ultimate aim of everything. He loves the creatures in giving them in a graded way the good of which he is the ultimate ground. Therefore, all the creatures long for him; he is the object of their love, the love toward that in which every being sees its ultimate good.

That is the medieval idea of God. This God is not called a person. The Word "person" was never applied to God in the Middle Ages. The reason for this is that the three members of the trinity were called personae ("faces" or "countenances"): the Father is per­sona, the Son is persona, and the Spirit is persona. Persona here means a special characteristic of the divine ground, expressing itself in an independent hypostasis. Thus, we can say that it was the nineteenth century which made God into a person, with the result that the greatness of the classical idea of God was destroyed by this way of speaking. Of course, this personal structure, in­cluding being, intellect, and will, is analogous to our experience of our own being, so if we call ourselves "persons", we must also speak of God as "person". But this is quite different from calling God a person. First of all, he is being itself; he is the ground of being in everything. The personal side is expressed in intellect and will, and their unity. But to speak of God as a person would have been heretical for the Middle Ages; it would have been to them a Unitarian heresy, because it would have conflicted with the statement that God has three personae, three expressions of his being.

On the question of the relationship between intellect and will in God the same controversy took place as on the epistemo­logical problem. For the Thomist tradition, intellect is char­acteristic of God and man. Thomas argues that man can be distinguished from an animal only because he has intellect. An

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animal would be human if it could intellectually place purposes before the will. But the animal only wills without purposes, in the sense in which we ascribe that ability to man. Thus, for Thomas it is the intellect which makes man human, and which is the primary characteristic of God. Intellect is the power of in­sight into the universally true and good. Duns Scotus opposed this doctrine. For him God and man are will. Will is universally creative. There is no reason for the divine will other than the divine will itself. There is nothing which determines the will. The good is good because God so wills it. There is no intellectual necessity for the world to be as it is, that salvation should happen as it does. Everything is possible for God except that he cease to be God. Duns Scotus spoke of God's potentia absoluta, the abso­lute power of God. God uses his absolute power only in order to create a given world in which there are definite orders. On this level he spoke of God's potestas ordinata, the ordered power of God. He distinguishes these two things. The world as we know it, as well as the plan of salvation as we know it by revelation, is not necessarily as it happens to be; it is as it is by the ordered power of God. Implied in this distinction is something threatening. The world is not as it is from eternity; there is no real necessity that it be as it is. The absolute power of God stands threateningly behind the ordered power, and may change everything. Duns Scotus did not believe that this would happen, but it could happen.

What does such an idea mean? It means that we have to accept the given, that we cannot deduce it, that we have to be humble toward reality. We cannot deduce the world or the process of salvation in terms of necessity. Compare this to Anselm's doctrine of atonement, in which he tried to deduce in terms of necessity the way of salvation between God and Christ and man. Duns Scotus would say there is no such necessity; instead, this is a positive order of God. In this idea of the absolute power of God we have the root of all positivism, in science as well as in politics, in religion as well as in psychology. The moment that God be­came defined as will—determined by his will and not by his intellect—the world became incalculable, uncertain, unsafe. So we are compelled to subject ourselves to what is positively given. All the dangers of positivism are rooted in this concept of Duns Scotus. So I consider him the turning point in the history of Western thought.

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L. THE DOCTRINES OF THOMAS AQUINAS

We shall discuss a few of the most important doctrines of Thomas Aquinas. The first is his doctrine of nature and grace. His famous statement reads: "Grace does not remove nature, but fulfills it." This important principle means that grace is not the negation but the fulfillment of nature. The radical Augustinians, or more exactly, the Manichaean distorters of Augustine, would not accept this statement. They would say that grace removes nature. For Thomas Aquinas, with whom I am in agreement on this point, nature and grace are not two contradictory concepts. Grace con­tradicts only estranged nature, but not nature as such. But now Thomas says that nature is fulfilled in supernature, and super-nature is grace. This is the structure of reality which has existed from creation. God gave to Adam in paradise not only his natural abilities, but beyond these a donum superadditum, a gift added to his natural gifts. This is the gift of grace by virtue of which Adam could persist in a state of union with God.

This a point at which Protestantism deviated completely from Thomas Aquinas. Protestantism said that the perfect nature does not need any additional grace; if we are perfect in our created status, there is no need for any grace to come from above. There­fore, Protestantism removed the idea of a donum superadditum. This sounds like a mythological story about whether Adam did or did not get this grace, but that is not the interesting point. These mythological stories express a profound vision about the structure of reality. In Thomism the structure of reality has two levels. For Protestantism creation is complete in itself; the created forms of reality are sufficient. God does not need to add anything to them. This is the same basic feeling toward life that we find in the Renaissance, which sees creation as good in itself, with man and his created potentialities in the center, without a supernatural gift added to him. Thomas has two degrees, nature and super-nature. Protestantism says that only because nature is distorted by man's fall, by his estrangement from God, is there a need for another power, the power of grace, whose center is forgiveness. Forgiveness is the restitutio ad integrum, the restitution of nature to its full potentialities. This idea is ultimately monistic. The created world is perfect in itself; God does not need

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to give additional graces to his fulfilled creation. Yet, God must come down into existence to overcome the conflicts in it, and this is what grace does. So in Protestantism grace is the acceptance of that which is unacceptable. In Catholicism grace is a substance, which stands in analogy to the natural sub­stances.

The Thomist principle is valid also for the relationship of revelation and reason. Revelation does not destroy reason but fulfills it. Here again I agree with Thomas. I believe that revela­tion is reason in ecstasy, that in revelation the depth of reason breaks into the form of reason, driving it beyond itself without destroying it. But I would not accept the Thomist form of the doctrine in which reason exists in one realm and revelation in another realm in which reason is completed. Thus we have two forms here. The Catholic world-view is essentially dualistic—nature and supernature. Catholicism defends supernaturalism with all its power. Protestantism, on the other hand, is united with the Renaissance in the monistic tendency—monistic in the sense of having one divine world and having salvation and re­generation (one and the same thing) as the answer of God to the disruption of this world. But this answer is not the negation of the created structure of this world.

In some sense the Protestant dualism is deeper, but it is not a dualism of substances. It is a dualism of the kingdom of God and the demonic powers which stand against it. It is not an identifica­tion of the created with the fallen world. The fallen world is the distortion of the created world. Therefore, the new being is not another creation, but the re-establishment of the original unity. One of the consequences of this is that in Protestantism the secular world is immediate to God. In Catholicism the secular world needs the mediation through the supernatural substance, which is present in the hierarchy and their sacramental activities. Here again you have a fundamental difference. Protestantism is emphatically for secularity. This is clearly expressed in Luther's words about the value of the housemaid's work in contrast to the monk's. If it is done in fear of God, the maid's work is more valuable than the asceticism of the monks, even if that is done in the fear of God. Here the emphasis is on the secular act as such, which is the revelation of God if done in the right way. One does not have to become a monk, but if in trying it one claims to be in

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a supernatural realm, this contradicts the paradox of justification, that as a sinner you are justified.

From his epistemology it follows that Thomas would reject the ontological argument for the existence of God. The ontological argument holds that in the center of the human mind there is an immediate awareness of something unconditional. There is an a priori presence of the divine in the human mind expressed in the immediate awareness of the unconditional character of the true and the good and of being itself. This precedes every other knowledge, so that the knowledge of God is the first knowledge, the only absolute, sure, and certain knowledge, the knowledge not about a being, but about the unconditional element in the depths of the soul. This is the nerve of the ontological argument. However, as I said in connection with Anselm, the ontological argument was also elaborated in terms of a rational argument which concluded from this basis to the existence of a highest being. Insofar as this was done, the argument is not valid, as all its critics—Thomas, Scotus, Kant—have clearly shown. As an analysis of the tension in man between the finite and the infinite, it is valid; it is a matter of immediate certainty.

Thomas Aquinas belongs to those who reject the ontological argument because he saw that as an argument it is invalid. The same is true of Duns Scotus. But now in order to fill the empty space created by the collapse of the ontological argument and of the immediate awareness of the divine in man, Thomas had to find a way from the world to God. The world, although not the first in itself, is the first which is given to us. This is just the oppo­site of what the Augustinian Franciscans said: the first which is given to us is the principle of truth in us, and only in its light can we exercise the function of doubt. So Thomas had to show an­other way, the way of the cosmological argument. According to this way, God must be found from outside. We must look at our world and find that by logical necessity it leads to the conclusion of a highest being. Thomas had five arguments for it, which appear again and again in the history of philosophy.

(1) The argument from motion. Motion demands a cause. This cause itself is moved. So we have to go back to an unmoved mover, which we call "God". This is an argument from move­ment in terms of causality. To find a cause for the movement in the world, we must find something which itself is not moved.

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(2)There is always a cause for every effect, but every cause itself is an effect of a prior cause. So we go back from cause to cause, but to avoid an infinite regression, we must speak of a first cause. This cause is not first in a temporal sense, according to Thomas, but it is first in dignity; it is the cause of all causes.

(3)Everything in the world is contingent. It is not necessary that something is as it is. It might have been otherwise. But if everything is contingent, if everything that is can disappear into the abyss of nothing, because it has no necessary existence, this must lead us back to something which has ultimate necessity, from which we can derive all the contingent elements.

(4)There are purposes in nature and man. But if we act in terms of purpose, what is the purpose? When we reach that, we must again ask what that is for. So we need a final purpose, an ultimate end behind all the means. The preliminary purposes become means when they are fulfilled. This leads to the idea of a final purpose, of an ultimate meaning, as we would perhaps say today.

(5)The fifth argument is dependent on Plato. It says that there are degrees of perfection in everything that is. Some things are better or more beautiful or more true than others. But if there are degrees of perfection, there must be something absolutely perfect by which we can distinguish between the more or less of perfection. Whenever we make value judgments, we presuppose an ultimate value. Whenever we observe degrees, we presuppose something which is beyond degree.

In all these arguments there is the category of causality. They conclude from characteristics of this world to something which makes this world possible. I believe that these arguments are valid as analysis. Each of them is true as long as it is not an argument but an analysis. In the doctrine of the arguments for the existence of God we have probably the most adequate analy­sis of the finitude of reality that has appeared in the writings from the past. They include the existential analysis of man's finitude, and as such they have truth. Insofar as they go beyond this and establish a highest being which as a being is infinite, they draw conclusions which are not justified.

In Thomas Aquinas we have the concept of predestination which combines several motives. Predestination was an Augus­tinian idea taken over by Thomas on the basis of his principle of

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intellect, which understands the necessities, and can by neces­sity derive consequences from what has preceded. On the other hand, Duns Scotus emphasized the will so much that the divine as well as the human will become ultimate realities, ontological ultimates, not determined by anything other than themselves. So Thins Scotus and the Franciscans introduced the element of free-dom—the Pelagian element. These Franciscan Augustinians intro­duced a crypto-Pelagianism into medieval theology, whereas Thomas Aquinas, on the basis of his intellectualism, thought in deterministic terms. This shows that Thomas was religiously much more powerful than the Protestant criticism of Scholastic theology admits. It seems that Luther did not know Thomas Aquinas 'at all. He knew the late nominalistic theologians, who can rightly be said to have been distortions of scholasticism. So Luther fought against them. But he could have found both his and Calvin's predestinarian thinking in Thomas Aquinas.

The ethical teachings of Thomas Aquinas correspond to his system of grades, as do all the realms of his thought. In his ethics there is a rational substructure and a theological superstructure. They are related to each other exactly as nature and grace are related. The substructure contains the four main pagan virtues, taken from Plato: courage, temperance, wisdom, and the all-embracing justice. These produce natural happiness. Happiness does not mean having a good time or having fun, but the fulfill­ment of one's own essential nature. In Greek the word for happi­ness is eudaimonia, and there is a philosophical school called eudaemonism. Christianity has often attacked it on the grounds that happiness is not the purpose of human existence, but the glory of God is. I think this is a completely mistaken interpreta­tion of eudaimonia. This is exactly what Christian theology calls blessedness, except that this is blessedness on the basis of the natural virtues, and Thomas knew this. Therefore, Thomas was not anti-eudaemonistic. Eudaimonia is derived from two Greek words, eu and daimön, meaning "well" and "demon"—a divine power which guides us well. (Cf. Socrates' daimon.) The result of this guiding is eudaimonia, being led in the right way toward self-fulfillment.

According to Thomas Aquinas, the four natural virtues of philo­sophy can give natural blessedness, eudaimonia in the Greek sense. Virtue was not a term with the bad connotations it has

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today, for example, abstinence from sexual relations. It meant what the Latin term indicates: vir, meaning "man", hence, manli‑

ness, power of being. In all these different virtues power of being

expresses itself, the right power of being, the power of being which is united with justice. What Thomas did was to combine

Christian ethics with the ancient ethics of self-fulfillment, with its natural virtues: the courage to be, the temperance which expresses the limits of finitude, the wisdom which expresses the knowledge of these limits, and finally the all-embracing justice which gives to each virtue the right balance in relation to the others.

On this natural basis the Christian virtues of faith, love, and hope are seen. They are supernatural, because they are given not

by nature but by grace. So Thomas' ethical system has these two

stories, the natural ethic and the spiritual ethic. This is something more than a theoretical speculation; it was an expression of the

sociological situation. The acceptance of the virtues of Plato and

Aristotle meant that a city culture had developed. The pagan and the Christian virtues had been combined in the period in which

the orders of the knights developed, and they had a great influ­ence on the high Middle Ages. They united pagan courage with Christian love, pagan wisdom with Christian hope, pagan modera­tion with Christian faith. Humanistic and classical ideals were taken in and developed within the universally Christian culture.

The ethical purpose of man is the fulfillment of what is essential for him. For Thomas what is essential for man is his intellect,

which means his ability to live in meanings and in structures of reason. Not the will but the intellect makes him human. Man has the will in common with animals; the intellect, the rational struc­ture of his mind, is peculiar to man.

Thomas combined ethics with aesthetics. He was the first one in the Middle Ages to create a theological aesthetics. "The beauti‑

ful is that kind of the good in which the soul rests without pos‑

session." You can enjoy a picture without possessing it. By their sheer form you can enjoy the woods or ocean or houses or men

depicted in pictures without having to possess them. In art, also in music, there is disinterested enjoyment of the soul. Beautiful is that which is pleasurable in itself. This is a motif which leads in the direction of humanism, but it is not an autonomous humanism, but one which is always but the first step toward something which transcends human possibilities.

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In similar fashion he dealt with the problem of church and state. There are the values represented by the state, and the higher, supernatural values embodied in the church. The church has authority over the states, the different national governments, because it represents something higher. If necessary the church can ask the people to he disobedient. The Thomistic ethics which we have been discussing have been fully as influential in the Western world as his dogmatic statements. They can be found in the second part of the second section of his Summa Theologica.

M. WILLIAM OF OCICRAM

William of Ockham is the father of nominalism. The conflict be­tween nominalism and realism was the destiny of the Middle Ages and is still today the destiny of our own time. Today it continues, at least in part, as a conflict between idealism and realism, whereby realism today is what nominalism was in the Middle Ages, and idealism is what medieval realism was. Ockham criticized the mystical realism of the Middle Ages for regarding the universals as real things, as having an independent existence. If the universals exist apart from things, they simply reduplicate the things. If they exist in the mind only, they are not real things. Therefore, realism is nonsense. Realism is meaningless because it cannot say what kind of reality the universals have. What is the reality of "treehood"? Ockham says it is only in the mind, and so has no reality at all; it is something which is meant, but it is not a reality. The realists of that time said the universal "bee-hood" which directs every tree in a special way is a power of being in itself. It is not a thing—no realist ever said that—but it is a power of being. The nominalists said that there are only individual things and nothing else. It is against the principle of economy in thinking to augment the principles (cf. Ockhm's razor). If you can explain something like the universals in the simplest way, for instance, by saying that they are meant by the-mind,

h&mind, then you should not establish a heaven of ideas as Plato did.

This criticism was rooted in the development toward indivi­dualism which became increasingly powerful in late medieval life. It was a change from the Greek and medieval moods. The Greek feeling toward the world starts with the negation of all

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individual things; the medieval subordinates the individual to the collective. So this was not simply a logical game which the nominalists won for the time being. Rather, it represented a change of attitude toward reality in the whole of society. You will find nominalism and realism discussed in books on the history of logic, and rightly so, but that does not give the full impact of what this controversy meant. This was a debate between two attitudes towardlife. Today these attitudes are expressed in terms of collectivism and individualism. However, the collectivism of the Middle Ages was only partly tiotali nan; it was basically mystical. This mystical collectivism—basically the church as the mystical body of Christ—is different from our present-day colt lectivism. Yet, it was collectivism. The realists fought for it, while the nominalists dissolved it. And as soon as nominalism became successful, this was the actual dissolution of the Middle Ages.

Now, if only individual things exist, what are the universals, according to Ockham? The universals are identical with the act of knowing. They rise in our minds, and we must use them, otherwise we could not speak. They are natural. He called them the universalia naturalia. Beyond them are the words which are the symbols for these natural universals which arise in our minds. They are the conventional universals. Words can be changed; they exist by convention. The word is universal because it can be said of different things. Thus, these people were also called "terminists" because they said the universals are merely "terms". They were also called "conceptualists" because they said the universals are mere "concepts", and have no real power of being in themselves. The significance of a universal concept is that it indicates the similarity of different things, but that is all it can do. All of this boils down to the point that only individual things have reality. Not man as man, but Paul and Peter and John have reality as individuals. Not treehood, but this particular tree on the corner has reality, and all other particular trees. We call them trees because we discover some similarity between them.

This nominalistic approach was applied also to God. God is

lled by Ockham ens s'ingulczrissimum., the most single being. This means that God himself has become an individual. As such he is separate from all other individuals. He looks at them and they look at him. God is no longer in the center of everything, as he was in the Augustinian way of thinking. He has been removed

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from the center to a special place at a distance from other things. The individual things have become independent. The substantial presence of God in all of them has no more meaning, because such a notion presupposes some kind of mystical realism. Hence, Cod has to know things, so to speak, empirically, from the out­side. Just as man approaches the world empirically, because he is no longer thought to he in the center, so also God knows every­thing empirically from the outside, not immediately by being the center in which all reality is united. This is a pluralistic philo­sophy in which there are many individuals, of which God is one, although the most important one. In this way the unity of all things in God has come to an end. The consequence of their individual separation is that they cannot participate in each other immediately in virtue of their common participation in a universal. Community, such as we have in the Augustinian type of thinking, is replaced by social relations, by society. As a con­sequence of this nominalism we live today in a society in which we relate to each other in terms of co-operation and competition, but neither of these has the meaning of participation. Com­munity is a matter of participation; society is a matter of common interests, of being separated from each other and working with or against each other.

We do not know each other except by the signs, the words, which enable us to communicate and to have common activities. This was an anticipation of our life in a technological society which developed first in those countries in which nominalism was predominant, as in England and America. Attitudes concerning the relations between man and man, and between man and things, are nominalistic in America and in the traditions of American philosophy, as is largely the case in England and in some West European countries. The substantial unity which was preserved by realistic thinking has disappeared. This means that we have knowledge of each other not through participation but only by sense perceptions—seeing, hearing, touching. We deal with our sense perceptions and the reflections of them in our minds. This, of course, produces positivism; we have to look at what is positively given to us.

Many things follow from all this. A rational metaphysics be­comes impossible. For example, it is impossible to construct a rational psychology which proves the immortality of the soul, its

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pre- or post-existence, its omnipresence in the whole body, etc. If such things are affirmed, they are matters of faith, not of philo­sophical analysis. Similarly all aspects of rational theology be­come impossible. God does not appear to our sense perceptions. He remains unapproachable since we have no direct or immedi­ate relationship to him, as we do in Augustinian thought. We cannot have direct knowledge of God. We can have only indirect reflections, but they never lead to certainty, only to probability of a lower or higher degree. This probability can never be elevated to certainty; instead it is very doubtful. It is quite possible that there is not one cause of the world, but many causes. The most perfect being—the definition of God—is not necessarily an in­finite being. A doctrine like the trinity which is based on mystical realism—the three personae participate in the one divinity—is obviously improbable. These things are all matters of irrational belief. Science must go its way and faith must guarantee all that is scientifically irrational and absurd.

If this is the case, it is easy to see that authority becomes the most important thing. Faith is subjection to authority. For Ock-ham the authority he has in mind is more the authority of the Bible than that of the church. Ockham dissolved the realistic unity not only in thought but also in practice. He sided with the German king against the pope. He produced autonomous economics as well as autonomous national politics. In all realms of life he was for the establishment of independent spheres. This means that he contributed radically to the dissolution of medieval unity.

N. GERMAN MYSTICISM

Meister Eckhart was the most important representative of Ger­man mysticism. What did these mystics try to do? They tried to interpret the Thomistic system for practical purposes. They were not speculative monks sitting alongside of the world, but they wanted people to have the possibility of experiencing what was expressed in the scholastic systems. Thus, the mysticism of Meister Eckhart unites the most abstract scholastic concepts—especially that of being—with a burning soul, with the warmth of religious feeling and the love-power of religious acting. He says: "Nothing is so near to the beings, so intimate to them, as being-itself. But Cod is being-itself." The identity of God and

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being is affirmed. "Esse est deus"—being-itself is God. This is not a static concept of being. When I have used the concept of being, I have often been attacked for making God static. This is not even true of Meister Eckhart's mysticism. Being is a con­tinuous flux and return; he calls it Fluss und Wiederfiuss, a stream and a counter-stream. It always moves away from and back to itself. Being is life and has dynamic character.

In order to make this clear he distinguishes between the divinity and God. The divinity is the gound of being in which everything moves and counter-moves. God is essentia, the principle of the good and the true. From this he can even develop the idea of the trinity. The first principle is the being which is neither horn nor giving birth; the second is the process of self-objectivation, the Logos, the Son; the third is the self-generation, the Spirit, which creates all individual things. For the divinity he uses the terms of negative theology. He calls it the simple ground, the quiet desert. It is the nature of the divinity not to have any nature. It is beyond every special nature. The trinity is based on God's going out and returning back to himself. He re-cognizes himself, he re-sees him­self, and this constitutes the Logos. The world is in God in an archetypical sense. "Archetype" is a word which has been revived today by Jung; it is the Latin translation of the Platonic "idea". The essences, the archetypes of everything, are in the depths of the divine. They are the divine verbum, the divine Word. Therefore, the generation of the Son and the eternal creation of the world in God himself are one and the same thing. Creaturely being is receiving being. The creature does not give being to itself; God does. But the creature receives being from Cod. This is a divine form of being. The creature, including man, has reality only in union with the eternal reality. The creature has nothing in separation from God. The point in which the creature returns to God is the soul. Through the soul what is separated from God returns to him. The depths of the soul in which this happens Eckhart called the "spark", or the innermost center of the soul, the heart of the soul, or the castle of the soul. It is the point which transcends the difference of functions in the soul; it is the uncreated light in man. In this way the Son is born in every soul. This universal event is more important than the particular birth of Jesus.

However, all this is in the realm of possibility. Now it must be

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brought into the realm of actuality. God must be born in the soul. Therefore, the soul must separate itself from its finitude. Some­thing must happen, which he calls entwerden, the opposite of becoming, going away from oneself, losing oneself. The process of salvation is that man gets rid of himself and of all things.

Sin and evil show the presence of God, as everything does. They push us into a situation of awareness of what we really are. This is an idea which Luther took over from Meister Eckhart. Cod is the nunc aeternum, the eternal now, who comes to the individual in his concrete situation. He does not ask that the individual first develop some goodness before he will come to him. Cod comes to the individual in his estrangement. To receive the divine substance, serenity or patience, not moving, is needed. Work is not the means of coming to God; it is the result of our having come to him. Eckhart fought against making the religious relationship a matter of purposing. All this is a strange mixture between quietism—being quiet in one's soul—and a tremendous activism. The inner feeling must become work, and vice versa. This also removes the difference between the sacred and the secular worlds. They are both expressions of the ground of being in us.

This mysticism was very influential in the church for a long time, and is still influential in many people. This Dominican mysticism is a counter-balance to the nominalistic isolation of individuals from each other. One could say that in the religious realm the impulses of German mysticism prevailed. In the secu­lar realm the nominalistic attitude prevailed. Both nominalism and German mysticism were to some degree preparations for the Reformation.

0. THE PRE-REFORMERS

The period prior to the Reformation is quite different from the high Middle Ages. During this period the lay principle becomes important and biblicism begins to prevail over church tradition. Perhaps the most important expression of this situation is the Englishman, John Wyclif. He had a large number of ideas which the Reformers used, and he certainly prepared the soil in England for the Reformation. What the pre-Reformers all lacked was the one fundamental principle of the Reformation—Luther's

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breakthrough to the experience of being accepted in spite of being unacceptable, which in Pauline terms is called justification by grace through faith. This principle does not appear before Luther. Almost everything else in the Reformation can be found in the so-called pre-Reformers. Thus, when we speak of the pre-Reformers, we have in mind mainly those critical ideas applied against the Roman church which were later also used by the Reformation. If it is argued that they should not be called pre-Reformers, what is meant is that they lacked the main principle of the Reformation, the real breakthrough to a new relationship to God.

Wyclif was dependent on Augustine, but also on Thomas Brad-wardine in England who represented an Augustinian reaction against the Pelagian ideas connected with nominalism. Thomas Bradwardine was an important link between Augustine and the English Reformation. The title of his book is characteristic, Dc Causa Dci contra Pelagium, which means the cause of Cod against Pelagius, not the Pelagius who was Augustine's enemy, but the Pelagianism which he found in nominalistic theology and in the practice of the church. Against this he followed Augustine and Thomas Aquinas with respect to the doctrine of predestina­tion. He says: "Everything that happens, happens by necessity. God necessitates whatever act is done. Every act or creature which is morally evil is an evil only accidentally." This means that God is the essential cause of everything, but evil cannot be derived from him. From this it follows, as for Augustine, that the church is the congregation of the predestined. The true church is not the hierarchical institution of salvation. This true church is in opposition to the mixed body in the church, to the hierarchical institution which, as it now exists, is nothing else than a distortion of the true church. The basic law of the church is not the law of the pope, but the law of the Bible; this is the law of God or of Christ. These ideas were not meant to be anti-Catholic. Neither Bradwardine nor Wyclif thought of leaving the Roman Church. There was only one church, and even Luther needed much time before he separated himself.

There were dangers for the Roman Church in the Augustinian principles. After Augustine a semi-Pelagianism removed the dangers of Augustinianism from the Roman Church. Now these dangers appear again in the name of Augustine, as represented

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by Thomas Bradwardine and John Wyclif. The idea of pre­destination means that many people are not predestined, many of the hierarchs, for example. This provides a basis for looking for symptoms in the hierarchy which show that they are not pre­destined. These symptoms are discovered by applying the law of Christ, such as the Sermon on the Mount, or the sending of the disciples—all ideas and laws which are dangerous in an organized hierarchical church.

From his criticism of the hierarchy Wyclif revised the doctrines of the church and its relationship to the state. This also has a long tradition. Since the twelfth century there had been in England a movement represented by one who was called the Anonymous of York, a man who wrote on behalf of the king, making the king the Christ for the British nation. There was an anti-Roman tendency which favored having a British territorial church, similar to the Byzantine situation. The king is the Christ for the nation, depicted in hymns and in pictures as the Christ, just as Constantine in Byzantium was the Christ for the whole Eastern church. These analogies are preparations for the revolt of the crown of England against the pope.

Wyclif differentiated between two forms of human domination or government, the natural or evangelical domination, which is the law of love, and the civil domination, which is a product of sin and a moans of force for the sake of the bodily and spiritual goods. On the one hand, we have the natural law, which in the classical tradition is always the law of love, and all that it includes. This is the law which should rule. On the other hand, there is un­fortunately a need for civil government, which is necessary because of sin. Force and compulsion are inescapable means to maintain the goods of the nation, bodily and spiritually. The first law, the law of love, is sufficient for the government of the church. Since the church is the body of the predestined, force is not needed here. Its content is the rule which Jesus gave, the rule of serving. The law of Christ is the law of love, which expresses itself in service. From this it follows that the church must be l)00r; it must not be economically and politically in control. It must be the church which is poor, the church as it was anti­cipated by the radical Franciscans and originally by Joachim of Floris.

The church, however, is not entirely holy. For ministers to be

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wealthy is an abuse which should be removed, by the power of the king, if necessary. If the church responds with excommunica­tion, the king should not fear this, for it is impossible to excom­municate a man unless he has first excommunicated himself. The real excommunication of a Christian is severing himself from communion with Christ. This means that the hierarchy has lost its chief power; it can no longer decide about the salvation of the individual. It can be criticized when it acts against the law of Christ, which is the law of poverty, the law of spiritual rule. From this it follows, further, that there is no dogmatic necessity to have a pope. This was also in the line of Joachim of Floris, who spoke of a papa angelica, an angelic pope, which is really a spiritual principle. Wyclif says that if we are ruled by a spiritual principle, it is all right to have a pope, but not necessary. These ideas are in line with the sectarian protest against the rich and powerful church, yet they remain on the whole within the frame­work of official doctrine. They are not the same as the Reforma­tion protest, because they are based on the principle of law—not the law of the church but the law of Christ—and not on the gospel.

Since the basis of Wyclif's attack was the law of Christ as given in the Bible, he developed the authority of Scripture against that of the tradition and against the symbolic interpreta­tion of the Bible. He even reaches the point, also on biblical grounds, that the predicatio verbi, the preaching of the Word, is more important than all the ecclesiastical sacraments. The transi­tion in the Middle Ages from realism to nominalism is accom­panied by a transition from the predominance of the eye to the ear. In the early centuries of the Christian Church the visual function was predominant in religious art and in the sacraments. Since Duns Scotus, and even more since Oekham, the hearing of the Word becomes most important, and not the seeing of the sacramental embodiment of the reality. Even before the Reforma­tion the emphasis on the word develops; it came to the fore­ground in nominalism. Why? Because realism sees the essences of things. "Idea" comes from idein, "seeing". Eidos, "idea", means picture, the essence of a thing which we can see in every indi­vidual thing. Of course, this is an intuitive spiritual seeing, but it is still seeing, and it is expressed in the great art. The great art shows the essence of things, visible to the eye. In nominalism we

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have individuals. How can they communicate? By words. There­fore, if God has become the most individual being, the ens sin gulari ssi mum in Ockham's language, then we receive a com­munication from him not through a kind of intuition of his divine essence, as expressed in all his creations, but by his word which he speaks to us. Thus, the word became decisive in contrast to the visual function. The importance of the word as over against the sacraments appears already in Wyclif. This is not yet Refor­mation theology, because here the word is the word of the law; it is not yet the word of forgiveness. This is the difference be­tween the Reformation and the pre-Reformation.

If there is to be a pope, he must be the spiritual leader of the true church, the church of the predestined, otherwise he is not really the vicar of Christ, the spiritual power from which all spiritual power is derived. But the pope is a man who falls into error. He is not able to give indulgences; only God can do that. This is the first statement against the system of indulgences—before Luther's Ninety-five Theses. If the pope is not living in humility, charity, and poverty, he is not the true pope. When the pope accepts the dominion over the world, as he has done, then he is a permanent heretic. The pope did just that by means of the "Donation of Constantine", which was the great foundation of the political power of the pope, making him the prince of Rome and sovereign over the Western half of the empire, in spite of the fact that this document was historically a falsification. It is heretical for the pope whose power is spiritual to become a prince. If he does this, he is the Antichrist. This is a term which comes from the Bible and was used during the Reformation. It has been used in church history especially by sectarians in their criticism of the church. They said that if the pope claims to represent Christ, but is actually a ruler of this world opposed to Christ, then he is the Antichrist.

I once spoke with Visser 't Hooft, general secretary of the World Council of Churches, about, the Hitler period in Holland. He said: We Dutch people, and many other Christians, at first had the feeling that Hitler might be the Antichrist because of all the anti-divine things he did. But then we realized that he is not good enough to be the Antichrist. The Antichrist must maintain at least some of the religious glory of the real Christ, so that it would be possible to confuse them and to adore him. But Hitler

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had none of this. Then we knew, he said, that the end of time had not yet come, and Hitler is not the Antichrist.

This was not a question about a dogma concerning the Anti­christ. In these ideas Visser 't Hooft was standing in the real tradition of the sectarian movements. Today if we call someone the Antichrist, it is understood simply as name-calling. But when Luther called the pope the Antichrist, he was not name-calling, but speaking dogmatically; that is, in the very place where Christ is supposed to be represented, everything is done which stands against Christ.

The church's involvement in big business is further evidence of its Antichrist character. The Vatican had become the banking house of the world, especially in Luther's time, but before also. The bishops were bankers in a lesser way, but all this, Wyclif insisted, must he abolished. Even the monks had lost their ideal of poverty and accommodated themselves to the general desire of the church to be wealthy.

These criticisms brought Wycif to even more radical conclu­sions. He attacked transubstantiation by saying that the body of Christ is, spatially speaking, in heaven. He is actually, or vir-tualiter (i.e., with his power) in the bread, but not spatially. This contradicts the idea of transubstantiation completely. When the church rejected him, although he knew he was right on biblical grounds, he came to realize that the official church can err with respect to articles of faith. This was also Luther's great experi­ence, that the church rejected a true criticism of its errors. On the basis of the Bible as the real law of Christ, he was able to criticize any decision of the church which was unbelievable. He criticized the number of sacraments and particular sacraments, such as marriage. He criticized the idea in Catholicism that the sacraments have the character indelebilis (indelible character), according to which a special character which cannot be lost adheres to those who are baptized, confirmed, or ordained. He even criticized the celibacy of the priests. He criticized the idea of the treasury of the saints, and the superstitious elements in the popular religion. Monasticism should be abolished because it introduces division in the one church. There should not be a division in the status of Christians. There should be a communis religio, a common religion, to which everyone belongs. What the Catholic Church calls monastic counsels, such as love of the

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enemies, should be fulfilled by all Christians. In terms of the negative side, one could say that Wyclif anticipated nearly all the positions of the Reformers. He was supported by the king, be­cause the English crown had for a long time opposed the inter­ference of Rome in the affairs of the nation, not only religiously but also politically. Wyclif was attacked very much, but always protected. After his death his movement slowly ebbed away, but the seeds were in the soil and became fertile when the real Reformation broke through.

This shows that the Roman Church could not be reformed on the basis of a sectarian criticism, radical as it was in Wyclif. A reform could occur only by the power of a new principle, the power of a new relationship to God. And this is what the six­teenth-century Reformers did.