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Scholasticism, Prostestantism, and Modernity
Paul Gottfried
Protestantism rose on the downfall of scholasticism, and Protestantism, in turn, led to the demise of hierarchy and the rise of individualism.
A curious but significant byproduct of the Protestant
Reformation was moral support for what became middle-class modernity. This connection is
particularly remarkable inasmuch as reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin sought to
restore a Christian community, not to build a new civilization. What they found
objectionable about the medieval church was not its traditionalism but its pagan and
nonbiblical character. They attacked the attempt by Catholic philosophers Albertus Magnus
(1200--1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225--1274) to import Aristotelian philosophy into what
should have been biblically based Christianity.
The reformers objected to the scholastic view
that people, despite Original Sin, could improve their character through moral effort.
Indeed, they insisted on the bondage of the will to man's natural state of depravity, a
condition that could only be improved through the infusion of divine grace. And this grace
was given not in response to human exertion but as an outside work (opus extrinsecum) for
which fallen beings could only wait and pray. Though this apparently fatalistic
understanding of redemption underpinned Calvin's theology more explicitly than Luther's,
it was nonetheless present in both. A radical conception of human sinfulness, partly
derived from Saint Augustine, pervaded Reformation thinking. Total human corruptness
necessitated a dramatic form of divine redemption, which each individual had to experience
to know that he was saved.
Scholasticism and Modern Rationalism
In some ways the scholastic thinking
characteristic of European universities in the twelfth and thirteen centuries seems closer
to modern rationalism than does Reformation theology. The schoolmen believed that the good
was knowable through right reason, that knowledge about the existence of God was
accessible to human understanding, and that pagan rhetoric and philosophy were appropriate
for the education of Christians. Although medieval schoolmen did not deny the doctrine of
Original Sin or the need for grace to move toward a Christian life, they considered the
sacraments and instruction of the church sufficient for that end. The sin of Adam did not
irreparably destroy human character, but once washed away with baptism, inborn sin would
not prevent us from developing our moral capacities, through learning and useful habits.
Understandably, critics of scholastic thought,
which reached its greatest influence in the late thirteenth century, accused its
proponents of pagan, rationalist tendencies. From Franciscan mystics like Saint
Bonaventure through Nominalist philosophers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries down
to the great thinkers of the Reformation, the criticism was heard that the schoolmen
minimized the experience of faith and ascribed excessive importance to theological
reasoning. Though Thomas Aquinas, for example, argued in the Summa Theologica that belief
in God might result purely from faith (credibilia), he nonetheless also provided five
proofs for God's existence, one of which derived from Aristotelian physics. Like other
schoolmen, Aquinas insisted that "the philosopher" could lead Christians to some
if not all theological truths.
Even more important for the history of ethics,
Aquinas and other schoolmen related rules of conduct to moral reasoning. God as the source
of all being, as underlined in Thomas' Expositio super librum Boethii, provided both
natural cognition (lumen naturale) and supernatural revelation (lumen supernaturale). Each
was made available to clarify divine truth, and by the operation of universal reason as
well as by biblical morality, humans were capable of forming proper ethical decisions,
outside as well as inside a Christian society. Moreover, despite the fall of Adam, both
the natural and social worlds gave evidence of an order (ordo mundi) that pointed back to
a divine Author. Following Aristotle's notion of design, Aquinas insisted that the world
was intelligible to our intellects because both were products of divine Reason. Human
minds trained to think could apply "right reason" to moral questions, arrive at
"prudential judgment" regarding the social good, and grasp the interrelatedness
of the physical world.
Despite the apparent entry point that some have
found here into a modern, scientific rationalist culture, there are qualifications to be
made before assuming such links exist. As the German social thinker Ernst Troeltsch
explains in Protestantism and Progress (English translation 1912), the scholastic
worldview most fully articulated by Aquinas was inextricably linked to medieval society.
It assumed ranks and an order of authority characterized by ecclesiastical and temporal
hierarchies, both of which were seen as necessary for human well-being. The Thomistic ordo
was not a collection of individuals in search of divine and rational truths. It was held
together by organic social relationships based on statuses. The temporal served the
ecclesiastical, the physical laborer the contemplative, and the knight his lord.
Economic transactions, like other social
transactions, were fixed in terms of hierarchical design perceived to be present
throughout creation. Commerce was to be regulated by its assigned purpose, satisfying
specific material needs: It was to be practiced in accordance with a "just
price" that could be calculated with regard to cost factors but that prohibited the
taking of interest (prodesse faenore).
The Deconstruction of Scholasticism
What happened in the postscholastic West
culminating in the Reformation was the progressive deconstruction of this scholastic
outlook. Particularly in the Nominalist tracts of the Oxfordian Franciscan monk William of
Ockham (1280--1349), whose thinking marked Luther and other Protestant reformers, the
scholastic ordo is subjected to relentless criticism. For Nominalists like Ockham, there
is no harmonious synthesis of reason and faith, nor necessary correspondence between God's
mind and the social order. If religious propositions or ethical precepts were held to be
true, one had to accept them finally on faith. For critical reason, maintained Ockham, was
there to challenge and discredit received truths, and the unconditional reality that the
schoolmen had attached to justice, goodness, and other ideals to which they appealed were
merely names (nomina) awarded to the objects of our perception.
God Himself, as conceptualized by the
Nominalists, was essentially absolute will. Those laws or regularities through which He
controlled creation were the products of divine volition. What was perceived as rational
or moral truths, according to Ockham, flowed from this will. But here, too, one had to
accept the possibility that what was thought to be certain would turn out to be a figment
of our minds upon further examination. Nominalist thinking encouraged both skepticism and
faith to the extent that it presupposed a yawning gulf between divine truth and human
reasoning.
The Reformation added to this deconstructed
scholasticism two critical elements, a positive theology and implied social teachings that
were incompatible with the Thomastic-Aristotelian order. Drawing on Saint Paul's Letter to
the Romans, Luther and Calvin both proclaimed that Christians are justified by faith,
independently of any work or sacrament. Nor was reason essential to this process inasmuch
as the believer is saved from damnation by faith alone, as the inner certainty of divine
election. This Reformation view of the Christian life, as an attempt to find evidence of
divine favor from within, was conducive to modernization in ways that could not have been
fully grasped in the sixteenth century.
Protestantism's Attack on Hierarchy
Looking at Protestantism's modernizing effect
over a period of centuries, Presbyterian theologian and political thinker James Kurth
observes (Orbis, Spring 1998): "All religions are unique, but Protestantism is more
unique than all others. No other is so critical of hierarchy and community, or of the
traditions and customs that go with them."
Already in Luther's germinal writings as a
reformer in 1520--21 were stated Protestant ideas that would bring forth cataclysmic
social consequences. The "priesthood of all believers," the repudiation of a
spiritual difference between clergy and laity, the need for each individual to develop a
personal relationship with Christ, the irrelevance of the sacramental and legal structure
of the church in gaining salvation, the equal sanctity of all honorable vocations, and the
demand that all Christians have access to the Bible as God's proffered word were more than
religious stands. They were points of departure for a social and cultural transformation.
However much Luther opposed social disobedience and denounced a peasant's revolt in
Germany that cited his work, the Reformation was, as later Catholic counterrevolutionaries
described it, an invitation to level down. Or, as James I of England responded to a
suggestion that the Presbyterians be allowed to form the state church in England, "no
bishop no king."
But the revolution advanced by Protestant
thought did not lead to perpetual revolution. Rather, Protestantism contributed to the
bourgeois civilization out of which constitutional republics, limited monarchies, and
free-market economies all came, directly or indirectly. Numerous scholars have explored
this relationship, and one distinction to be made among them is between those who argue
from unintended consequences and those who do not. Clearly in the first category is the
great German sociologist Max Weber, who in 1893 examined the connection between Calvinist
moral theology and the "capitalist spirit." According to Weber, Calvinists did
not set out to accumulate wealth or to reinvest it for profit. They moved in this
direction because their search for signs of divine grace, together with their belief in
the equal dignity of all vocations, predisposed them toward commercial and banking
activities. By serving God selflessly in their work and prospering, they were able to
convince themselves of their predestined grace. And instead of practicing monastic
discipline, as in Catholic cultures, Calvinists carried ascetic habits into middle-class
roles, living abstemiously and cultivating the Protestant work ethic.
Protestantism and Subjectivism
Against this view of unintended consequence,
others have contended that Protestants laid the foundations of modern society more
deliberately. Thus Hegel argued that Protestants created a modern consciousness by
stressing the "subjectivity" found in the New Testament. Although individual
self-awareness was always present as a value in that text, historical conditions did not
favor its emergence as a dominant religious value until the sixteenth century.
More recently, American social historian
Benjamin Nelson has linked the beginnings of sustained banking capitalism to the rejection
of the Hebraic ban on taking interest. Nelson finds this view emphatically stated in
Calvin's Institutes and presents Calvin as the first biblical exegete to distinguish
commercial investment from loans made to the destitute. It was only the latter, Calvin
properly observed, that is forbidden in Deuteronomy. On a similar note, Troeltsch had
ready commented on the opening of society to commercial activity caused by the Protestant
assault on medieval Christendom. Not the result of any single theological
reinterpretation, this change occurred because of a general attack on the
Christian-Aristotelian worldview and on the sacramental hierarchy it undergirded.
In a detailed study of Protestantism's
unintended consequences, Weber noted the changed view of nature and work produced by the
Reformation, particularly by the Calvinist teachings of, among others, Weber's own French
Protestant ancestors. The Calvinist search for signs of divine election, maintained Weber,
not only nurtured the psychology and practice of capitalism but enforced the belief that
the world existed for the sake of the elect, who could both comprehend and exploit nature
and society. Weber saw rationalism and secularism as two consequences of Calvinist moral
theology. Confronting a divinely created world that, according to Genesis, was placed at
the disposal of mankind, and hoping to relate that world to one's personal spiritual
experience, Weber's Calvinist tried to make the outside world fit his own needs as one of
the elect. The Calvinist observer felt no sense of mystery in the presence of nature but
rather viewed it as something to be mastered in glorifying God and enhancing his own
certainty of salvation.
Moreover, the Protestant stress on reading and
discussing the Bible did not lead to the contempt for intellectual analysis shown by
Luther when he referred to Reason as the "Devil's whore." On the contrary,
Protestant biblicism contributed to mass literacy and democratically organized churches
that would define their own doctrines. A frequently heard opinion among historians is that
the Russians never underwent political modernization, because they neither experienced nor
were significantly influenced by the Protestant Reformation. This opinion seems highly
plausible if one looks at the unintended as well as intended results of that development.
A Momentum for Change
On the other hand, it may be argued that
Protestantism has included a momentum of change that by now may be hard to stop. In The
Sociology of Religion, Weber explored this problem almost a century ago. The forces
created or intensified by the Reformation that had resulted in a bourgeois commercial
society would continue to promote change, not all of it congenial to the middle-class
beneficiaries of an older Protestant culture. The exploration of a demystified nature, the
shift of religious life from the community to the individual, and a general suspicion of
hierarchy eventually led in a direction hostile to bourgeois institutions.
All of this, it might be concluded, has indeed
come to pass in Protestant societies, as can be inferred from family disintegration, the
cult of technology, and the rise of modern bureaucracies and states as family planners and
providers. Such observations must be qualified by pointing out that the Protestant
reformers would have been as horrified by this situation as the medieval schoolmen. Until
recently Protestants stressed moral rigor and family virtue at least as strongly as did
Catholics. But Protestant societies were less organic, while Protestant morality centered
more on individuals than on families and inherited community. And the believer's view of
his life as the "pilgrim's progress," to borrow the title of the most important
Protestant classic, helped give birth to a specifically modern doctrine of progress,
associated with the subduing of nature and the spread of moral and technical knowledge.
The Protestant's world went from being a test of the elect to a material object that one
feels free to tamper with.
In the face of these unintended Protestant
consequences, Catholic philosophers Nicholas Capaldi and Nino Lingiulli have made the
ironic observation that American ethnic Catholics may be closer to bourgeois Protestantism
than anyone else. Having absorbed Protestant attitudes as a result of Americanization,
Catholic peasants who came to the United States--and even more their descendants--took
over distinctly Weberian values. The Calvinist work ethic, a more individual and more
interior religiosity than that present among their ancestors, and uneasiness with the
formalities of Catholic worship are all characteristic of these Protestantized Catholics.
But unlike the members of the Protestant majority culture, such Catholics have still not
completely abandoned their communal sense--nor their fascination with bourgeois virtues.
Still, one may wonder how much longer this
American Catholic insulation will work. If the Latin and Slavic Catholic character of
American immigrants could be modified once, by Protestant characteristics, why can't the
same process continue to work change? Why should those who have been exposed to it and
absorbed part of it resist Protestant culture in its later radicalized phase? Likewise,
why should millions of Asians who converted to Protestantism and often represent a stern
Victorian form of it remain embedded in that particular form? Why shouldn't Chinese and
Korean Presbyterians and Methodists be overtaken by the forces that have already
overwhelmed Western Protestantism? Cultural lags do get overcome--and not always for the
best..
Paul Gottfried is a senior editor of the Modern Thought section of The World & I
and author of The Search for Historical Meaning: Hegel and the Postwar American Right.
[The World and I (New York), February, 1999]