Are You Alone Wise?: The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era (Oxford Studies in Historical Theology)

Are You Alone Wise? OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor David C. Steinmetz, Duke University Editorial...

Author: Susan Schreiner

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Are You Alone Wise?

OXFORD STUDIES IN HISTORICAL THEOLOGY Series Editor David C. Steinmetz, Duke University Editorial Board Irena Backus, Université de Genève Robert C. Gregg, Stanford University George M. Marsden, University of Notre Dame Wayne A. Meeks, Yale University Gerhard Sauter, Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn Susan E. Schreiner, University of Chicago John Van Engen, University of Notre Dame Geoffrey Wainwright, Duke University Robert L. Wilken, University of Virginia THE UNACCOMMODATED CALVIN Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition Richard A. Muller

REFORMING MARY Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century Beth Kreitzer

THE CONFESSIONALIZATION OF HUMANISM IN REFORMATION GERMANY Erika Rummell

TEACHING THE REFORMATION Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 Amy Nelson Burnett

THE PLEASURE OF DISCERNMENT Marguerite de Navarre as Theologian Carol Thysell

THE PASSIONS OF CHRIST IN HIGH-MEDIEVAL THOUGHT An Essay on Christological Development Kevin Madigan

REFORMATION READINGS OF THE APOCALYPSE Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg Irena Backus WRITING THE WRONGS Women of the Old Testament among Biblical Commentators from Philo through the Reformation John L. Thompson

GOD’S IRISHMEN Theological Debates in Cromwellian Ireland Crawford Gribben REFORMING SAINTS Saint’s Lives and Their Authors in Germany, 1470–1530 David J. Collins

THE HUNGRY ARE DYING Beggars and Bishops in Roman Cappadocia Susan R. Holman

GREGORY OF NAZIANZUS ON THE TRINITY AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF GOD In Your Light We Shall See Light Christopher A. Beeley

RESCUE FOR THE DEAD The Posthumous Salvation of Non-Christians in Early Christianity Jeffrey A. Trumbower

THE JUDAIZING CALVIN Sixteenth-Century Debates over the Messianic Psalms G. Sujin Pak

AFTER CALVIN Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition Richard A. Muller

THE DEATH OF THE SCRIPTURE AND THE RISE OF BIBLICAL STUDIES Michael C. Legaspi

THE POVERTY OF RICHES St. Francis of Assisi Reconsidered Kenneth Baxter Wolf

ARE YOU ALONE WISE? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era Susan E. Schreiner

Are You Alone Wise? The Search for Certainty in the Early Modern Era

SUSAN E. SCHREINER

2011

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With ofﬁces in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2011 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Schreiner, Susan Elizabeth. Are you alone wise? : the search for certainty in the early modern era / Susan E. Schreiner. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-0-19-531342-0 1. Certainty. 2. Philosophy, Modern. 3. Philosophy, Renaissance. 4. Church history—Middle Ages, 600–1500. 5. Church history—Modern period, 1500– I. Title. BD171.S3265 2010 121′.6309031—dc22 2009040886

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

This book is dedicated to George W. Schreiner (1915–1996) “We always knew that you stood for something.”

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Preface Certainty: A Contemporary Question

Within the span of one month three major U.S. news magazines wrote on the topic of certitude. In the May 2, 2005, edition of the New Republic, Andrew Sullivan advocated a “conservatism of doubt” in our “time of religious certainty.” A conservatism of doubt, he argued, would promote religious humility, civil discourse, and a restraint on governmental power. In the June 11 edition of Time, Charles Krauthammer’s essay, “In Defense of Certainty,” responded to Sullivan by asking, “Why this panic about certainty and the people who display it?” He answered this question by concluding, “It is weariness with the responsibilities and the nightmares that come with clarity—and the demands that moral certainty make on us as individuals and as a nation.” Krauthammer recalled his readers to the “moral clarity” felt on 9/11 and urged us to return to this state of mind. Meanwhile, in “The Oddness of Everything” in the May 23 edition of Newsweek, George Will argued, “The greatest threat to civility—and ultimately to civilization—is an excess of certitude.” According to Will, “America is currently awash in an unpleasant surplus of clanging, clashing certitudes.” He concluded, “It has been well said that the spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure you are right.” These three examples are but the tip of the iceberg regarding concerns about certainty in the latter twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries. What is striking about these pieces is that they raise questions similar to those of the sixteenth century. Both the desire for certainty, especially religious certainty, and the warnings against

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certainty permeated this earlier era. This book analyzes the pervading questions about certitude and doubt in the terms and contexts of a wide variety of thinkers during this earlier era of competing truths. In the early modern era we ﬁnd these questions articulated in terms of epistemology, salvation, authority, the rise of skepticism, the outbreak of religious violence, the discernment of the spirits, and the ambiguous relationship between appearance and reality. Repeatedly, we ﬁnd the recurring fear of deception. These competing truths and claims to authority intensiﬁed, of course, because of the Reformation. This means that our study also concerns the history of theological polemics. Nonetheless, it can be argued, I think, that within Reformation studies, the history of theology has fallen on hard times. This is not to say that the study of the Reformation has been stagnant. We have an increasingly sophisticated understanding of the cultural and social issues of this period. However, as Ian Hazlett noted in his Kerr lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow, “the modern striving for a holistic presentation of a historical set of waves like the Reformation, taking account of contingent political, social, economic, and cultural dimensions, can ironically downgrade and even eliminate the conceivably primary religious and theological ones.” That being the case, the following chapters reiterate some aspects of the history of theology that every self-respecting Reformation scholar should know. These theological issues, however, cannot be relegated to the hoary annals of intellectual history. Indeed, I want to pursue the profound implications of earlier scholarship in order to probe the manner in which the expressions of key theological loci profoundly inﬂuenced the debates about certitude. Moreover, the study of the Reformation must come to encompass the wider early modern era. Consequently, this study includes such genres as Occam’s epistemology and critique of species; the humanist concern with dialectics; the growth of historical thinking; Montaigne’s Essais; the mystical writings of Teresa of Avila; the diary, letters, and treatises of St. Ignatius; and the drama of Shakespeare’s tragedies, as well as the theological works of Protestant and Catholic thinkers. In the following chapters I will examine, in some detail, the exposition of Scripture, claims made about the Holy Spirit, the appeal to experience, the concern with salvation, and attitudes toward doubt. Then, and only then, I believe, will we truly understand how the now-assumed “abstract principles” of Reformation theology had such serious appeal. In doing so, we recognize with Hazlett the salutary corrective such historiography might offer at this moment: “that concentrating on the half-hidden and semi-articulate makes no sense if it is divorced from the educated utterances and writings of the thinkers.” This is a book not about theology but about the way in which the concern with certitude determined the theology, polemics, and literature of the age. The following chapters cover ﬁgures ranging from Occam to Shakespeare. Chapter 1 seeks to treat a number of issues, including the current debate about the beginning of modernity. Scholars have struggled to ﬁnd a uniﬁed

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interpretive scheme for explaining the years from 1400 to 1600. While no such explanation will ever fully sufﬁce, I argue that a unifying question of this period was that of certainty. Whereas most scholars point to the late Renaissance or, more typically, the seventeenth century as a time preoccupied with the quest for certainty, I argue that it was primarily in the Reformation and developments within the sixteenth century that we ﬁnd the ﬁrst early modern search for certitude. But the sixteenth century did not merely bequeath the problem of certainty to the seventeenth century when Descartes and Pascal tried to ﬁnd answers. The sixteenth century was itself a time of “clanging, clashing certitudes.” In short, this century both expressed the overwhelming need for certitude and supplied its own answers or certainties. This chapter also analyzes precedents in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries that contributed to or presaged this concern with certainty, including those in epistemology, the controversy between humanists and scholastics, the role of rhetoric, and the growing interest in perspective. We then turn to the key theological battles about certitude in the sixteenth century. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the certitude of salvation and the certitude of authority. To a large extent, these chapters are a kind of “history” of the Holy Spirit. Because the Spirit became the agent of certainty, the reformers often appealed to an experiential spiritual certitude. In these discussions we ﬁnd the increasing use of pneumatological language. The passages about the “spirit of adoption” and the ability to cry “Abba! Father!” in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 became central to the certainty of salvation. The claim that “the spiritual man judges all things,” in I Corinthians 2:15, became one of the foundations for the certitude of exegetical or hermeneutical authority. Chapter 4 discusses the Catholic response to Protestant claims of certainty. Catholic polemicists did not simply deny or dismiss Protestant arguments. They offered an alternative route to certitude. The centrality of certainty in this age is evident in the fact that Catholics, too, made the Spirit the source of certainty. However, Catholicism insisted that the Spirit belonged only to the true church. We have masterful studies on the issue of authority in the sixteenth century, including those by G. R. Evans and David Bagchi. My task in this chapter is to show how the Catholic response to Protestantism argued the issue of ecclesiastical authority in terms of certainty. The writings by such polemicists as John Eck, Cajetan, and Thomas More demonstrate that the claim to certitude has now moved into debates about ecclesiology, providence, history, visibility, and invisibility. Chapter 5 tries to place experiential language in the larger context of the spirituality of the age. The appeal to experience, so prominent in the sixteenth century, should be viewed from a longer perspective that begins with Jean Gerson. However, this analysis also reveals that ultimately the experiential language, inherited from pre-Reformation spirituality, ﬁnally imploded and failed to satisfy the need for an authoritative basis for certitude.

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Chapter 6 returns to the problems caused by competing claims to truth, all of which appealed to the Spirit. Which spirit is actually inspiring such certainty? Was it the Holy Spirit or Satan? The discernment of the spirits became a critical issue because, as II Corinthians 11:14 states, “Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” Moreover, the problem of discernment encompassed both Protestant and Catholic thinkers, including Luther, Thomas Müntzer, Ignatius of Loyola, and Teresa of Avila. Finally, chapter 7 examines the overarching problem of discerning the real from the unreal. How does one penetrate the falsity of appearances and ﬁnd the reality of truth? This, too, was a concern that crossed all religious boundaries. Luther discussed this problem in terms of idolatry. Montaigne approached the issue in his arguments against essentialism. And Shakespeare’s great tragedies powerfully dramatized the problem by lifting the veil of deceptive appearances to an underworld of evil and chaos. For Shakespeare, skepticism was not the answer. His tragic heroes do, indeed, ﬁnd reality and truth, but it is a tragic reality and a fatal truth. The conclusion addresses those voices that questioned the value and access to the various sixteenth-century; claims to certainty did not go unquestioned. The focus is on only those protests that argued for the impossibility and dangers of certitude as well as the salutary effects of doubt. However, the thesis that skepticism led to toleration has been seriously challenged by historians such as Geoffrey Elton and R. Tuck. The ﬁeld of toleration studies is a growing one and beyond the scope of this study. My discussion does not claim that sixteenth-century skepticism was a part of some triumphant march toward the victory of toleration. In fact, any such claim overestimates the effects of all pleas for toleration. The situation is much more complex. As Tuck has shown, the ideal of unity as a necessary condition for peace in the state could outweigh the tolerant implications of skepticism.1 The relationship between skepticism and toleration was very much an individual issue. Moreover, it is worth noting that some pleas for toleration were not based on skepticism at all; arguments for toleration also found expression among conservatives who wanted to preserve traditional Catholic religious teaching and practices. The purpose is to demonstrate that there were signiﬁcant voices in the sixteenth century that saw the dangers involved in certainty. Such voices called for toleration because of the limitations of human knowledge. The “skepticism” of this age functioned as a corrective and a warning, but not as a “doctrine” for toleration. Such warnings were not ultimately successful. They were, however, eloquent voices that once again brought the problem of certitude to the fore. No book can cover all the thinkers, debates and problems of this important era. In terms of Reformation ﬁgures, I concentrate primarily on the earlier reformers; that is, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin as well as such radical reformers as Müntzer, Denck, and Franck. Of course there are numerous other signiﬁcant ﬁgures who contributed to the debates about certainty. Furthermore,

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the rise of confessionalization and the emergence of the “second scholasticism” were undeniably a part of the early modern search for certainty. The need for religious identity with clear and certain convictions was a response to the yearning for certitude that permeated this era. The rise of confessionalization is a topic of growing interest in Reformation studies and one that is still undergoing deﬁnition. As the studies on this issue continue, I believe that scholars will perceive certitude to be a central concern. The emergence of the “second scholasticism” in both Protestant and Catholic writers also reﬂects the need for deﬁnition and certainty. There are other areas that could also yield further nuance and evidence for the centrality of certitude during this period. These areas include the rise of Protestant scholasticism, the controversy over Aristotle, and the effects of missionary work in “New Spain,” especially in the writings of men such as Las Casas. The work of Cervantes is a rich source for studying the problem of appearance and reality. And, as William Bouwsma has demonstrated so carefully, the ﬁgures of the late Renaissance give evidence of the growing anxiety about uncertainty, disorder, and “a creativity without limits.”2 Therefore, this book does not claim the ﬁnality of thoroughness. This may be a good thing. As Castellio and Montaigne warned us, such claims to ﬁnality can be deceptive and dangerous. For many readers, the issues of this era will sound both alien and strangely familiar. The desire for unchanging, universal, and certain truths is one that permeates any era of change and transition. Future historians will be able to capture the spirit of the latter twentieth and early twenty-ﬁrst centuries by focusing on the gradual loss of certainty. Even in the present we can see that both our intellectual and our popular cultures manifest the disintegration of traditional understandings of behavior and ideas, the continual struggle with the specter of relativism, the feeling that we have lost our bearings, the outbreak of religious violence, and the accompanying search for unshakeable certainty in ethics and religion. We, too, are experiencing the situation William Bouwsma attributed to early modernity; namely, the “inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning.”3 The sixteenth century has bequeathed to us profound insights into the human hunger for certitude. If we wish to beneﬁt from this history, we will use these insights as a lens through which we may question our own age. Occasionally historians come upon a topic that allows them to act as diagnosticians of both past and present cultures. The issue of certainty is one such topic. To be sure, we may well seek different types of certainty or react differently to the loss of certitude. Nonetheless, like early modernity, we, too, are consumed with the breakdown of traditional certain beliefs. Like the early modern era, our own time is, in Stephen Greenblatt’s words, a time of “great unmooring.”4 Many contemporary movements reveal our present disquiet about the loss of certitude. The worldwide rise of fundamentalism, the growth of nationalism,

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the increase of religious and racial identity groups, the appeal to traditional family values, the growth of the politically religious right, the interest in historicism and the defense of positivism, and even the resurgence of such beliefs as creationism or the gnosticism of Scientology, all give evidence of the current search for certainty. Widely varying in beliefs and practices, these phenomena all share one common characteristic: they look backward to the past, or to tradition, for a certainty that will anchor values and ideas that once seemed solid and unshakeable. History can offer us a cautionary perspective. An argument can be made that, for all their intensity and sincerity, these movements are actually, to use Arthur Ferguson’s phrase, the “Indian summer” of late modernity.5 Various historical eras demonstrate that an age often talks most frequently and most stridently about that which it is already in the process of losing. The ﬁfteenth century witnessed a revival of the chivalric code at a time when chivalry had long lost its meaning and function in society. Likewise, our age speaks most anxiously about beliefs and values that have long eroded. While still in the midst of our own Indian summer, we may be able to determine whether traditional religions, including Christianity, are among the phenomena that are dying. At the present time, however, we can only dimly see that our age is undergoing a painful “shift in paradigms” that threatens to render older beliefs no longer tenable. However, the differences between early and late modernity must also be respected. As Montaigne demonstrated so well, the study of history is important and useful because it gives us a way to see the otherness and contingency of our own culture. History frees us from the tyranny of the present and makes us more self-critical and suspicious of our own assumptions. In terms of this study, the contrast between past and present is most instructive in the case of skepticism. By appreciating the differences between the skepticism of the sixteenth century and that of our own time, we are able to detect a present mode of thinking that is more radical than anything found in our past. Consider the following “diagnosis” of our intellectual situation by the pre-eminent theologian David Tracy: “The reign of epistemology has ended in European philosophy and theology. The belief of the great moderns from Descartes through Husserl that philosophy can secure some sure, certain presuppositionless ‘foundation’ for all thought, and thereby for all of reality, has collapsed.”6 The epistemological dilemma that Tracy describes is evident both in the realms of philosophy and theology as well as in the more popular form of skepticism found in society as a whole. The sixteenth century had questioned the certainty of traditional beliefs and the certainty of those convictions held by one’s opponents. To a large extent, sixteenth-century skepticism functioned as a cautionary corrective, an attempt to halt various forms of religious violence. Clearly skepticism might be able to provide a similar service today in many parts of the world. As George Will reminds us, “The spirit of liberty is the spirit of not being too sure you are right.” Nonetheless, most early modern thinkers

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did not doubt that there existed an objective truth and reality. In the skeptical thought of Castellio and Montaigne, ultimate truth and reality always lay beyond, above, or beneath surface appearances. Nevertheless, truth did exist. The skeptical problem of early modernity was that human epistemological abilities did not seem able to penetrate or reach that very real truth. Our situation is very different. Our age not only reveals the attempt to recapture certitude by looking to the past but also exposes a fundamental questioning about the sheer existence of any objective truth and reality. In fact, the more conservative approaches from fundamentalism to Scientology are, in part, reactions against a vague but threatening sense that objective reality has dissolved. The contemporary loss of transcendence carries in its wake an exhaustion of all conﬁdence in anything beyond ourselves. At the same time, our attempts to re-establish certainty only betray our widespread, underlying anxiety about the precariousness of all human knowledge. Reality, value, and truth have become a matter of perception, a social construct that is dependent on the cultural human mind. And yet, as in the early modern era, our own expertise in history and our new discoveries about the world have caused a deeply felt ambiguity about the power of human understanding. The result is that reality itself has become unstable and threatens to dissolve into a mass of swirling and contradictory perceptions. Every aspect of our culture reveals this anxiety that truth and reality are ephemeral. From deconstructionism to contemporary cultural expressions found in modern ﬁlm, our age is suspicious that truth, including religious truth, is fragile, ﬁnite, and contingent. The result is not the sixteenth-century desire to “rise above ourselves” but, rather, a sense of vertigo and weariness. Historians may function as diagnosticians but they are not healers; they do not offer solutions to the cultural dilemmas they uncover. Nevertheless, historians have an important function as “gadﬂies” of a sort. They can call their own age away from illusory and facile answers. Our diagnosis requires honesty about the difﬁculty of living in an era of uncertainty. But perhaps as gadﬂies historians can urge us, as did Montaigne, to ﬁnd a way to live “between the times.” History can show us how to live unblinkingly through times of inconstancy and uncertainty without turning to false and inauthentic answers. In short, by looking at the birth pangs of early modernity, we might ﬁnd a humane way of living at the end of modernity.

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Acknowledgments

Any book that has taken so long to write owes a debt of gratitude to more people than can be named. In brief, therefore, I want to thank the Luce Foundation for their fellowship, which gave me a year to envision the full scope of this study. Cynthia Read was endlessly patient, a fact that was very important in relieving the pressure and that allowed me to examine the many subjects and ﬁgures involved in this book. I also could never have completed the manuscript without the help, encouragement, and expertise of B. Preetha. The same is true about Liz Smith to whom I also owe a debt of gratitude. Bernard McGinn was gracious in answering annoying questions. I also want to thank David Steinmetz both for being a great teacher and for all of his support, comments, and encouragement throughout the writing of this book. In the nick of time Vince Evener, Ph.D. candidate at the University of Chicago, stepped in and applied his mastery of history and languages in order to help me complete this book. I will be forever grateful for his help and generosity. I owe a special thanks to David Tracy, whose ideas, questions, suggested readings, and stimulating conversations were indispensable in helping this book take shape. Many friends and colleagues must be acknowledged for their constant support: Cathy Brekus, Chris Gamwell, Gregory Robbins, Clark Gilpin, Willemien Otten, Wayne Bornholdt, Dean Rosengarten, Nancy Tamulewicz, Daniel Nicholas, Winni Sullivan and Kathy Waller. I also want to thank my research assistant, Marsaura Shukla, for all her help in bringing this book to completion. Their friendship and conﬁdence in this project have meant more to me in these recent years than they will ever know.

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Finally, this book is dedicated to my father, who died in 1996. At one time my mother, quite understandably, begged my father to take an appointment in a church with greater wealth and a better salary. Refusing to leave the west side of the inner city of Chicago, he replied, “At least my children will know that I stood for something.” He was a man who demonstrated all of his life, whether it be in the civil rights movement, work with the poor, opposition to the Vietnam War, devotion to his parish, or love of his family, that a life of integrity was always more important than the contemporary desire for incessant happiness.

Contents

1. Beginnings Questions and Debates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, 3 2. “Abba! Father!” The Certainty of Salvation, 37 3. “The Spiritual Man Judges All Things” The Certainty of Exegetical Authority, 79 4. Are You Alone Wise? The Catholic Response, 131 5. Experientia The Great Age of the Spirit, 209 6. Unmasking the Angel of Light The Discernment of the Spirits, 261 7. “Men Should Be What They Seem” Appearances and Reality, 323 Conclusion, 391 Notes, 395 Index, 477

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Are You Alone Wise?

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1 Beginnings Questions and Debates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

Historians of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries have rather suddenly found themselves to be popular. Social, cultural, and intellectual historians have long been toiling away in their scrutiny of the social, political, economic, and religious fabric of this age. They have rewarded us with increasingly sophisticated depictions of the piety, family life, education, regional and political conditions, societal roles, warfare, and the effect of new technologies. Intellectual historians have analyzed the interlocking patterns created by these ﬁndings and the theological, scientiﬁc, and philosophical movements that gained ascendancy in this era. Hence we know more about the epistemological debates, the developments of the via antiqua and the via moderna, the hegemony of the Fransciscans, the rise of vernacular mysticism, the importance of confessionalization, the role and writings of women, the apocalyptic atmosphere, the evolution of conciliarism, the rise and nature of humanism, the exegesis of the Bible, and the ideas of both the “common man” and the major thinkers of this historical period. All of this is the outcome of highly skilled, learned, and imaginative work by historians of all eras. What has made this age so recently important is the appeal of “early modernity.” As soon as historians and others claim allegiance to the notion of “early modernity,” the reader understands immediately the implications of the term. Should this period be characterized as late medieval or early modern? What particular elements can be identiﬁed as belonging to early modernity? The reason for these questions stems

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today primarily from critiques of post-modernity. As philosophers and theologians attempt to diagnose the problems of modernity, they are looking to early modernity for the multiplicity of early modern ideas and forms in the wake of what is often seen as the “reifying” of modernity. Early modernity helps contemporary thinkers think about the developments of the modern age and provides a source for new ideas and formulations precisely because of its ﬂuidity. Still, early modernity has been both praised and blamed. Some thinkers see this period as the beginning of the withdrawal of the transcendent, the fragmentation of the former synthesis, and the division between form and content. Nonetheless, contemporary theologians and philosophers also urge a return to early modernity, where “questions were not yet answered,” ideas were still in movement and ﬂexible, and there was still evidence of a non-dualistic relationship between the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite. Early modernity beckons back contemporary thinkers who are hungry for a time of creativity and openness. To understand this heightened interest in the thought of early modernity, we must begin with the monumental work of Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (ﬁrst published in 1966), which opened the debate regarding the legitimacy of an age called “modernity.” Challenging Karl Löwith’s thesis of secularization, Blumenberg argued that this period was sufﬁciently independent of the Middle Ages to merit its own “legitimate” epoch. According to Blumenberg, modernity was far more than merely secularization; modernity was an age in its own right, with particular identifying characteristics such as self-assertion, efﬁciency, technique, and modern science. The modern sensibility, Blumenberg contended, was the result of the unleashing or liberating of curiositas. The process of legitimating theoretical curiosity was a basic feature in the beginning of the modern age; the human cognitive appetite was unleashed.1 The “trial of theoretical curiosity” ended with the victory of human curiosity; that which was once considered a vice became a virtue for the modern age. Moreover, the project of modernity was a collective one that transcended individual happiness or salvation. This collective mentality was exempliﬁed in the idea of scientiﬁc method, which began with Frances Bacon and Descartes.2 The scientiﬁc method placed the individual within a process that created knowledge in a trans-subjective manner. This process was also distinctly human instead of divine. In Blumenberg’s thesis, that which essentially deﬁned the modern era was the belief that it could base itself on human self-assertion rather than divine intervention or dispensation.3 Modernity also turned away from the search for objective and absolute truth and embraced technique or efﬁciency as the highest value. The result of these various factors was a world whose purpose was carried out through human self-assertion, which led to an experimental rather than contemplative understanding of theory.4 Furthermore, the beginning of modernity, as exempliﬁed by Copernicus and especially Bruno, was characterized by the interest in inﬁnite worlds, the transfer of inﬁnity from the divinity to the universe, the rejection of centering, and the

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“encouragement of the consciousness to begin absolutely anew.” Rejecting the thesis of mere “secularization,” Blumenberg argued for the “legitimacy” of the modern age in terms of the newly releasled cognitive drive: The initial success of theoretical curiosity in the modern age would have been inconceivable without the transition from “naïve” to “self-conscious” curiosity. The latter had not only emerged through its competition with the concern for salvation and its argument with the transcendent reservation [of realms of knowledge]; once people had presumed to peek behind the back cloth [behind the scenes] of creation, it had also been able to translate the results, as conﬁrmation of its suspicions as well as its right to what was withheld. . . . This dynamic of self-conﬁrmation freed curiosity from the connotations of a “base instinct” that bound man’s attention to inessential and superﬁcial matters, to prodigies, monstrosities-in fact to curiosa. . . .5 The triumph of humanity’s cognitive drive resulted in a justiﬁcation of knowledge that renounced medieval presuppositions about the human relationship to the divine. In modernity, “knowledge has no need of justiﬁcation; it justiﬁes itself; it does not owe thanks for itself to God; it no longer has any tinge of illumination or graciously permitted participation but rests in its own evidence, from which God and man cannot escape.” Blumenberg goes on to explain that in the age of high Scholasticism, reality was conceived as “a triangular relation mediated by the divinity. Cognitive certainty was possible because God guaranteed man’s participation in His creative rationality when He brought him into the fellowship of His world idea and wanted to furnish him, according to the measure of his grace, with insight into the conception of nature.” The triangular relationship dissolved in modernity so that “human knowledge is commensurable with divine knowledge, on the basis, in fact, of the object itself and its necessity. Reality has its authentic, obligatory rationality and no longer has need of a guarantee of its adequate accessibility.”6 Finally, Blumenberg maintained that it was the concept of “reoccupation” that best characterized the transition to the modern epoch. “The concept of ‘reoccupation’ designates, by implication, the minimum of identity that it must be possible to discover, or at least to presuppose and to search for, in even the most agitated movement of history. In the case of systems of ‘notions of man and the world’ [Welt-und Menschenansicht: Goethe], ‘reoccupation’ means that different statements can be understood as answers to identical questions.”7 Thus he reminded his opponents, “It is enough that the reference-frame conditions have greater inertia for consciousness than do the contents associated with them, that is, that the questions are relatively constant in comparison to the answers.”8 Presupposing and acknowledging his great debt to Blumenberg’s work, Karsten Harries strives to “place greater emphasis on understanding the limits

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of that legitimacy, on understanding how modernist self-assertion is necessarily shadowed by nihilism and pointing to what it might mean to step out of that shadow.”9 In his magisterial work, Inﬁnity and Perspective, Harries argues that the crucial intellectual moment separating the pre-modern from the modern world was the awareness of perspective and the consequent reﬂections on inﬁnity. Blumenberg had discussed the interest in perspective and inﬁnity in terms of Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno, an approach shared by Harries. For Blumenberg, Cusa broke with traditional hierarchical thinking by arguing that the geocentric worldview coupled with the idea of hierarchy was a “cosmological illusion.” Blumenberg explained that Cusa demonstrated the “position and pretension of the observer” in any attempt to understand God’s relation to the cosmos. In Bruno, Blumenberg argued, there was the argument for the actual or full inﬁnity of the world. For Bruno, creation exhausted divinity. Thus in Bruno’s thought there occurred a radical decentering and newness with no privileged space or time.10 According to Harries, “a passionate interest in perspective and point of view” helps to characterize our self-understanding and “offers a key to the shape of modernity.”11 Harries explains that the “space of perspective has its center in the perceiving eye, more generally in the perceiving subject.” Moreover, the growing interest in perspective characteristic of this age resulted in the awareness that whatever presents itself is “no more than subjective appearance. To get to ‘actuality’ or objective reality we have to reﬂect on perspectival appearance.” Consequently, Harries argues, “Reality cannot in principle be seen as it is. Such distrust of the eye is one of the deﬁning characteristics of the emerging modern understanding of reality. . . . ”12 Nicholas of Cusa is also a major ﬁgure for Harries. Unlike Blumenberg, Harries does not see Cusanus as a thoroughly medieval ﬁgure. The work of Cusanus shows that the interest in perspective could not be separated from reﬂection and speculation about the inﬁnity of God. According to Harries, Cusanus elaborated a principle of perspective that could be expressed in the following: “to think a perspective as such is to be in some sense already beyond it, to have become learned about its limitations.” Consequently, Harries explains, “to think the essential ﬁnitude of all we can comprehend presupposes an awareness of the inﬁnite.”13 After his analysis of ﬁgures stretching from Cusanus to Bruno, Harries concludes by considering the beneﬁt of self-transencence. He shows that “the attempt to actually seize what such self-transcendence promises must leave behind that world in which we ﬁrst of all and still most of the time feel at home. But the pursuit of truth demands this attempt. . . . If human beings by their very nature desire to know, then it is their own nature that calls them again and again beyond the points of view and perspectives assigned to them by whatever happens to be their place in the world, calls them away from what they once called home.”14

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In Cosmopolis, Steven Toulmin argues for a “revised narrative of the origins of Modernity.”15 Toulmin argued for two distinct origins of the modern world. The ﬁrst was the literary or humanistic phase that began in sixteenth-century Europe; the second origin, a century later, was the scientiﬁc and philosophical phase that began in 1630. This latter phase, Toulmin maintains, led many Europeans to turn their backs on the most powerful themes of the ﬁrst literaryhumanistic phase. After 1600, intellectual attention focused on the rigorous pursuit of a strict rationality, a direction more rigorous and even dogmatic than the humane preoccupation of the Renaissance.16 Toulmin recalls his readers to the importance of such ﬁgures as Erasmus, Rabelais, Montaigne, and Shakespeare. The reading of ancient texts emancipated these thinkers from medieval conservatism without taking them into the “modern” world of logic and rationality. The story of modernity as an “onward march of human rationality,” is distorted since it “hides ambiguities and confusions.” Toulmin concluded by saying: Whether the 17th-century enthronement of ‘rationality’ was a victory or a defeat for humanity depends on how we conceive of ‘rationality’ itself: instead of the successes of the intellect having been unmixed blessings, they must be weighed against the losses that came from abandoning the 16th-century commitment to intellectual modesty, uncertainty, and toleration.17 Louis Dupré’s seminal work, Passage to Modernity, traces the breakdown of what he calls the “ontotheological synthesis.”18 “Modernity,” Dupré argues, “is an event that has transformed the relation between the cosmos, its transcendent source, and its human interpreter.”19 According to Dupré, the fragmentation of this synthesis was due largely to Nominalist thought. Prior to the early modern era, the ﬁnite participated in the inﬁnite through form. But with late Nominalist theology, form lost this function, and the link with the divine became an external one. Nominalist theology removed God from creation so that there was no causal link between God and nature. The “trust in the essentially rational quality of nature that had supported traditional epistemology has collapsed. Henceforth ideality belongs exclusively to the mind.” Dupré goes on to say, “The transcendent factor ceases to function as an active constituent of the ontotheological synthesis. For it had been precisely through the form that the ﬁnite participated in the inﬁnite.”20 Dupré seeks to demonstrate how this removal of transcendence affected the conveyance of meaning. In the era from 1400–1600, the creation of meaning increasingly fell upon the human mind. The mind had to interpret the cosmos; instead of being an integral part of the intelligible cosmos, the person became its source of meaning. Mental life separated from cosmic being: as meaning-giving “subject,” the mind became the spiritual substratum of all reality.21 Dupré maintains that “when modern thought distinguished the real as it is in itself from the real as it exists for itself,

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it initiated a new epoch in being as much as a new stage of reﬂection. Indeed, it opened a gap in the very nature of the real that will never be closed again.” This “fateful separation” affected all areas of life, including the religious sphere.22 According to Dupré, only spiritualist theologies survived, while theology lost its hold on a culture whose substance it had once shaped: “[Theology] became reduced to a science among others, with a method and object exclusively its own.”23 The “passage” to modernity was characterized by the “deﬁnitive withdrawal of the transcendent dimension from Western culture.” Around 1600, “the last comprehensive integration of our culture began to break down into the fragmentary synthesis of a mechanistic world picture, a classical aesthetics, and a theological scholasticism.”24 To explain the present age, Tracy, of course, recognizes the importance of the Enlightenment. In that “second revolution” a reifying or hardening occurred of that which had remained more open and ﬂuid in the earlier modern period. At the present time, we are engaged in a critique of the dogmatic certainties of the Enlightenment. To do so, Dupré urges a return to an “earlier stage of modern culture when questions had not yet become principles.”25 In his discussion of Dupré’s work, David Tracy concurs that the early modern era produced a “crisis of form.” Tracy explains that for the pre-moderns “what appears or manifests itself through form is not our subjective construction but the very showing forth, through form, of the real.”26 This understanding is difﬁcult to comprehend for contemporary thinkers who stand as heirs of the fragmentation of the pre-modern syntheses. As Tracy argues, it is “difﬁcult for us as inheritors of a hermeneutics of suspicion that every form may merely mask indeterminacy and every appearance or manifestation may always hide a strife involving both disclosure and concealment.” According to Tracy, “what modernity (in its dogmatic, reiﬁed Enlightenment form) broke was the pre-modern syntheses of form and content, feeling and thought, practice and theory.” Late or post-modern thinkers now face a seemingly hopeless impasse, namely the devastating cultural and social consequences of an impoverished philosophical notion of the self aligned to a social condition of increasing possessive individualism; a pervasive mechanistic and scientistic understanding of nature united to a still dominative attitude expressed in an often unbridled technology; a marginalization of any philosophical concern with transcendence, either as a general and central philosophical category or as the religious-theological question of God, united to a marginalization and privatization of religion; a reifying of a once emancipatory Enlightenment reason as a modern rationality which either continues to build, at its worst, an ‘iron cage’ (Weber) or, at the least, an increasing ‘colonization of the life-worlds’ (Habermas).27

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And yet, Tracy adds, the study of early modernity furnishes us with many forms worthy of retrieval; namely, “many early modern images, symbols, hymns, myths; the Renaissance retrieval of rhetoric and poetics; the forms Cusanus and Bruno forged by developing formal, not efﬁcient, causality to show the non-dualistic relationship between the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite; new forms for the use of light as form in Duccio and Giotto; form as individuating in Dante; Ficino’s aesthetical philosophy; Erasmus’s narrative theology; Luther’s dialectical theology so expressive of modern unresolved tensions and oppositions; Ignatius of Loyola’s rendering anew a form for ancient spiritual exercises” and many more, including the “moving, transient, elusive modern form of Baroque culture.”28 Thus, like Dupré, Tracy argues that one cannot understand the present without rethinking our culture’s history, particularly its original passage to modernity. The relationship of this period to modernity has long been a controversial issue among both intellectual and social historians. Was Luther’s reformation the “dawn” of the modern era, as Karl Holl and his students claimed, or basically the continuation of the Middle Ages, as Troeltsch maintained?29 Does the “legitimacy” of the modern age depend on the identiﬁcation of theology with that which is medieval? Was Luther an epochal ﬁgure or marginal to Descartes? Was the Reformation(s) continuous or discontinuous with late-medieval theology and philosophy? If this era is denoted “modern” or “early modern,” what is its unifying force? Leopold von Ranke’s Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (1881) presented the Reformation as the great birth of the modern age.30 Twentiethcentury scholarship, however, increasingly recognized the Reformation as comprehensible primarily as a late-medieval phenomenon. Oberman’s work in the early 1960s was instrumental in demonstrating the importance of studying the late Middle Ages in their own right and the context out of which the Reformation developed.31 This approach was carried on by many scholars who examined the Reformation from the perspective of late medieval theology, exegesis, and preaching. Recently the thesis of continuity has been examined from the perspectives of social and cultural historians. The essays edited by Thomas A. Brady in Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit exemplify some of the best of these discussions. In his essay Oberman maintains his pursuit of “continuity in order to identify more accurately the innovative dimension of early modern Europe, including the Reformation.”32 The formation of the state or nation plays a prominent role in these analyses. Schubert argues that the institutionalizing tendencies found in the German lands were part of a single process, which began around the year 1500. Challenging contemporary thinking, Schubert maintains that confessionalism played no role in the emergence of the state. Hamm’s study of secretaries in Northern Free Cities concludes that there was no ﬁrm break between the medieval and modern eras.33 The Reformation only “intensiﬁed” existing values

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without radical changes. Susan Karant-Nunn further examines the interplay between tradition and innovation. Her research reveals both the survival of Catholic practices within Evangelical services as well as the force of the new practices.34 Perhaps the most daring of all the essays is Constantine Fasolt’s argument that pushes the perspective of the Reformation back to the postCarolingian era. In this earlier period, Fasolt explains, we ﬁnd the development of features central to the Reformation era. The Reformation is then the “second act” of a process that began when Europe emerged from the ruins of late antiquity. The long-term result was the rise of the “nation.” As Fasolt so eloquently writes, “the nation is the true church of modernity.”35 From this longer perspective, the Reformation loses its uniqueness and represents a continuation of Europe’s past.36 These representative studies reveal not a break with the past or a negation of the importance of the Reformation. Rather they demonstrate the complexity of an “in-between era,” a time of the interpenetration of the old with the new. The work of Berndt Hamm demonstrates this complexity as he has examined both the continuity and the discontinuity between the late Middle Ages and the Reformation.37 He points out that the answer is determined by what type of history the scholar examines; the history of the natural sciences will give a different result than the history of confessionalization. From the perspective of medieval Scholasticism and the theology of piety, Hamm concludes that the “Reformation of Luther, Karlstadt, Zwingli, and Calvin, as opposed to many late-medieval reformationes,” was a “breach in the system or a far-reaching shift in the matrix of standards and rules in Christendom.” The understanding of holiness, the reformation doctrine of justiﬁcation, and Luther’s view of Christian freedom do represent signiﬁcant breaks with the medieval tradition.38 In his careful and nuanced analysis, Hamm works with several categories that depict the innovations and changes brought about by the Reformation: “radical change,” “intensiﬁcation” or “acceleration,” and “continuation” with late medieval trends that involved a “qualitative leap.” For Hamm, the late Middle Ages and the Reformation “together constitute the era of a religious transformation.” Certain threads, Hamm argues, of late medieval developments are taken up, while others are discarded. Consequently, “the stimuli which are taken up acquire a different character in a changed framework.”39 In some ways, this analysis is similar to Blumenberg’s theory of “re-occupation.” The very complexity to which Hamm points returns us to Oberman’s characterization of these years as the “cradle theory,” according to which each “period gives birth to the next in a way that its birthpangs will precede its coming of age.”40 For Oberman, the “cradle theory” accounted for the coexistence of both the continuities and discontinuities with the past. Gerhard Ebeling addressed this question by pointing out that “no age is sufﬁcient to itself. Every age transcends its boundaries in a threefold respect.” According to Ebeling every era

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is part of its past because it depends on what has been transmitted. Every age moves into the future because, occupied with change, it strives beyond itself and consciously or unconsciously prepares changes which will eventually consolidate into a new epoch. And ﬁnally, every age transcends its own concrete time “and becomes a part of history as such.”41 The very existence of these debates demonstrates that this was indeed a “dawn” or a time of “passage,” an era in transition; it was both late medieval and the beginning of modernity. The changes, ﬂuidity of ideas, and the many controversies are evidence of its transitional and ambiguous character. The transitional nature of this period also accounts for one recurring theme: namely, the concern for certitude. Scholars have usually characterized the seventeenth century as that age most concerned with certainty. Toulmin designates the era of Descartes as the “Quest for Certitude.” According to Toulmin, Descartes personiﬁed one beginning of modernity because he abandoned the modest skepticism of the humanists and sought rationalistic proofs that would provide intellectual foundations which were clear, distinct, and certain.42 William Bouwsma’s recent book, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640, covers much of the same time period and many of the same ﬁgures and issues discussed by Toulmin. In this important study, Bouwsma argues that the era of the late Renaissance was one of “conﬂicting impulses” that were often “simultaneously at work, without a clear resolution yet, between the creativity and spontaneity of cultural freedom and a growing tendency toward order and restraint.”43 According to Bouwsma, the forces of freedom included a number of “liberations” from the customary ways of thinking about self, knowledge, time, space, politics, and religion. These liberations broke open earlier modes of thinking about these subjects (including those formulated by the earlier Renaissance) and produced a creative expansion of human knowledge, ways of conceiving the cosmos, and the abilities of the human mind. Creativity, the imagination, the feelings of the “heart,” the rise of historical consciousness and freedom from the idealization of antiquity as well as the indeﬁnite expansion of the cosmos all produced an era of cultural freedom and diversity.44 However, these “novelties of freedom” also caused a “cultural crisis” evident in a pervasive “anxiety” about change, boundaries, order, and identity. In Bouwsma’s analysis, the freedoms produced by Renaissance thinkers also eroded patterns of order that were equally necessary. This was an era that was “ambivalent,” poised in an “uneasy equilibrium” between the “fundamental needs for both freedom and order.”45 In reaction to what seemed an unintegrated and chaotic intellectual universe, there developed a counterreaction (sometimes found even in the same writer) toward a “culture of order.”46 This reaction involved a desire for boundaries, a seeking for method and system, including Scholasticism, the reform of dialectic, the ascendancy of mathematics in science, the turn toward the universal and the decline of the historical

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consciousness, the restoration of the papacy, the striving for religious uniformity and the restoration of order in the arts, society, and government. Bouwsma identiﬁes the need for certainty with the development of this culture of order.47 In fact, this drive toward order, in all of its various aspects, was itself the need to establish certainty in the wake of the anxiety produced by the various “freedoms” created by the Renaissance. Therefore, Bouwsma sees the role of certitude in a way similar to Toulmin. According to Bouwsma, the search for certainty primarily manifested itself in the later sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. This certainty was an answer or reaction against “what were increasingly seen as the frightening excesses of the freedom traditionally associated with Renaissance creativity.”48 While the seventeenth century was clearly an age that sought rationalistic answers to the question of certainty, the crisis of certainty and the “quest” for certitude were dominant themes in the early modern period stretching from the fourteenth through the sixteenth century. It is misleading to characterize the seventeenth-century quest for certainty as a contrast to the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. Referring to the years from 1630 onward, Toulmin asks, “Why was the Quest for Certainty so enticing not a century or so earlier or later but at just this time?”49 The historical evidence is abundant that the search for certainty came to be a driving force in European thought long before Descartes and the Thirty Years War. Richard Popkin was clearly correct to include the “Intellectual Crisis of the Reformation” as an important chapter in his history of skepticism during the era stretching from Savonarola to Bayle.50 This search for certitude stemmed from late-medieval concerns about epistemology, immediacy, and experience, as well as humanist historical and legal scholarship, and the religious debates of the sixteenth century. To be sure, the methods changed. The sixteenth-century preoccupation with certitude was not the rationalistic “decontextualizing” of problems, nor was it characterized by the use of logic and mathematics as a way of providing secure foundations for science and philosophy. This earlier era did more than simply bequeath the problem of certitude to the late Renaissance and the seventeenth century. This era both created and tried to answer the problem of certainty. In these earlier centuries, and particularly throughout the sixteenth century, the attempt to ground one’s thought in certainty permeated nearly all of the discussions. In the era of the Reformation, the issue of certainty was expressed primarily, though not exclusively, in religious terms; namely, in the analysis of sin and justiﬁcation as well as in heated debates about the sacraments, tradition, authority, Scripture, the inspiration of the Spirit, the discernment of the spirits, and Scriptural interpretation. Armed with the question of certainty, the historian of this era can approach almost any topic or group: the Hussites, the radicals, the Catholic polemicists, the Protestant theologies of justiﬁcation, the reaction of the skeptics, the appeal to the Spirit, and the concern with the wily deceptions of the devil. Late-medieval discussions about epistemology, optics, experience, the

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church hierarchy, and the assurance of salvation reveal a common concern with certitude. It was a concern that was to become critical and urgent in the course of the sixteenth century. If the issue of certainty is not the “unifying force” of this era, at least it came to serve as a unifying question. The importance of certitude inevitably leads to a discussion regarding the difﬁcult idea of crisis as an interpretive historical tool. The notion of crisis is, perhaps, one too easily invoked. Those who look deeply and critically at their own times commonly conclude that their age is in a crisis. Some historians have rightly questioned the usefulness of the idea of crisis as a historical category because it is subjective and is often used to cover far too extensive periods of time, thereby making crisis the norm. Moreover, historians such as Rainer Wohfeil remind us to distinguish between a “crisis” and the conditions necessary for a widespread “Krisenbewusstsein.”51 The utility and the problems inherent in seeing “crisis” as a useful historical category have been discussed in a sophisticated and extensive literature.52 Nonetheless, when historians have attempted to deﬁne this era (or particular parts of this era) they have had recourse to the language of anxiety and crisis. Historians such as Oberman, Bouwsma, Graus, Greenblatt, MacIntyre, Hamm, and Bast have found that these concepts best reﬂect this period.53 Thus we ﬁnd that this was a time that manifested “the many faces of crisis.”54 It was an age of “anxiety” when “no objective system of boundaries could supply either security or effective guidance.”55 Everywhere boundaries were collapsing. The age from 1400 to 1600 was a period when the “crisis consciousness” becomes a widespread perception, a time when people sensed that those values and structures that had seemed ﬁxed were now shifting, cracking, crumbling, and the inherited form of civilization was disintegrating. This era has been called a time of “epistemological crisis” when traditional ways of knowing and relating to reality were beginning to break down. Inherited modes of ordering existence revealed “too many rival possibilities of interpretation.”56 Scholars of the early modern period have carefully examined the growing uneasiness about changing roles in society, the ambivalence about the traditional system of patronage, and transitions in social and political power as well as professional identities. This was a time when there seemed to be no ﬁxed roles.57 Political, social, and economic limits that once seemed self-evident were no longer ﬁrm and secure. As Bouwsma has eloquently explained: The distinction between the sacred and profane was dissolving with the growing responsibility and dignity of lay activity and the secular state. The psychological boundaries by which the old culture had sought to understand the nature of man and predict his behavior were useless when he was no longer inhibited by the pressures of traditional community; and, experienced concretely in a more complex setting, human acts proved too ambiguous for neat ethical

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classiﬁcation. Even the boundaries of the physical universe, so intimately linked to those in society and the human personality, were collapsing. No objective system of boundaries could now supply either security or effective guidance. When man still clung to the old culture, he seemed to have become, in spite of himself, a trespasser against the order of the universe, a violator of its sacred limits, the reluctant inhabitant of precisely those dangerous borderlands— literally no man’s land—he had been conditioned to avoid. But his predicament was even worse if this experience had taught him to doubt the very existence of boundaries. He then seemed thrown, disoriented, back into the void from which it was the task of culture to rescue him. And this, I suggest, is the immediate explanation for the extraordinary anxiety of this period. It was an inevitable response to the growing inability of an inherited culture to invest experience with meaning.58 The perception of crisis was evident in works written during the early decades of the sixteenth century. In his classic work, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, Stephen Greenblatt analyzed the same sentiment expressed by Bouwsma. According to Greenblatt, the most signiﬁcant writings of the early sixteenth century suggest “the ‘great unmooring’ that men were experiencing, their sense that ﬁxed positions had somehow become unstuck, their anxious awareness that the moral landscape was shifting.”59 This was an era experiencing the unsettling of man’s sense of reality and a continual uneasiness about the way of “constituting reality.” It was a vertiginous world where one had to make one’s way between truth and ﬁction, dream and wakefulness, illusion and reality.60 As one of the ﬁnest theorists of crisis explained, it is indeed fair to characterize “crisis” as a ground-swell facet of experience, which is truly manifest in both the thought of a great many persons and in the feeling of the whole period. As such its effects can be seemingly ambiguous since crisis gives rise to a general feeling of uncertainty as well as the most strained attempts to grasp security of any kind or some abstract certitude.61 These words by František Graus refer to late-medieval culture, particularly to the Hussite crisis. For Graus, one of the main factors causing this crisis was the impact of the Great Schism. With good reasons—which go beyond the various disasters of plague, inﬂation, and famine—the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries have been designated as a time of crisis. This book, however, focuses on the era of the Reformation and argues that the problem of certitude, so noticeable in Graus’s analysis of crisis, became central and urgent in the sixteenth century as the traditional assumptions about God, salvation, the church, authority, the sacraments, and reality itself were undermined and continually shifting into ever-changing forms. Greenblatt’s words regarding Shakespeare

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are profoundly applicable to the age as a whole: “truth itself is radically unstable.” As Graus noted about an earlier century of this era, “It was an age in which the old was coming apart and disappearing, or an age in which the foundations of later times were being laid.”62 Nonetheless, the problem of ﬁnding certitude did not originate in the heated religious debates of the Reformation. In signiﬁcant ways and contexts, the question of certitude emerged repeatedly in the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. The era of the Reformation, however, transformed the questions about certitude into the central issue of the age. Before turning to the pervasive debates about certainty in the sixteenth century, I must brieﬂy highlight several currents of thought that characterized the earlier formulations about the possibilities of certainty. Clearly each of these selected topics has received extensive study, and I do not pretend to do them justice here. Moreover, the warnings of Quentin Skinner are still important to remember. In his penetrating article, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” Skinner identiﬁed the “mythology of coherence” as a major failing of intellectual historians who try to reconcile everything within a text or within the corpus of an author’s writing. Such historians try to harmonize contradictions or abolish tensions in order to arrive at a “uniﬁed interpretation” or a “coherent view” of an author’s thought.63 The same danger is even more present in any attempt to describe an “era” or “age.” By omitting some matters and including others, the historian can characterize a period of time as a “crisis,” or “decline,” or time of “anxiety.” Not everyone felt himself or herself in a crisis, and the various disasters of the late Middle Ages were experienced only seriatim, not by anyone or any generation at the same time. However haunted I am by the fear of committing the “mythology of coherence,” I offer the following analysis of selected issues in the late Middle Ages only as a sampling of the ways in which the question of certitude surfaced during these years. By doing so, I hope to show both that the issue of certainty did not arise ex nihilo in the sixteenth century and to provide a means of comparison with that which was to come. The following examples evince a drive toward immediacy, the appeal to experience, and the search for the reliability of knowledge. I leave for the later chapters further late medieval developments in piety, the desire for experiential religion, the visibility or invisibility of the church, and the impact of historical thinking and knowledge. The issues discussed in this chapter occurred in the phenomena of “Nominalism” and the humanist-Scholastic debates. In the narratives that attempt to account for the origin or nature of modernity, Nominalism plays a central role. For Blumenberg, the value of self-assertion could be re-evaluated only when the medieval synthesis unraveled. This occurred with Ockham’s Nominalism. The decisive change occurred when Nominalism called into question the provident, intelligible, and essentially rational cosmos of the Scholastics. According to Blumenberg, Nominalism

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posited a God with a “groundless will” and an unchecked voluntarism.64 Such voluntarism meant that the cosmos was not grounded in a divine rationality in which the human mind could participate. The human mind no longer saw its purpose in the reconstruction of an order already given and present in nature. Rather, Ockham’s principle of economy, or “Ockham’s Razor,” enabled the human being to “reduce nature forcibly to an order imputed to it by man.”65 This began what Blumenberg called the “second overcoming of Gnosticism.”66 Furthermore, as modernity came into existence the traditional alternatives to the question of evil were no longer possible. Escape from the world into transcendence or Epicurean ataraxis were not sufﬁcient. Rather, “only insofar as physics could be thought of as producing real human power over nature could natural science potentially serve as the instrument by which to overcome the new radical insecurity of man’s relation to reality.”67 In his analysis of early modernity, Dupré charged the Nominalists with being largely responsible for shattering the “organic unity of the Western view of the real.”68 Dupré attributed to Nominalist epistemology the breaking of the link between thinking and reality. Rejecting the idea of impressed species, Ockham severed the traditional bond between reality and the mind. “Even the assumption that in knowledge the mind shares a universal form with the real, however deeply entrenched in the tradition, is abandoned. . . . Nowhere does the distance between mind and reality appear more clearly than in the Nominalist rejection of the so-called impressed species.” According to Dupré, the consequence of this epistemology was an emphasis on the independent nature of the cognitive act, an independence that furthered the isolation of the mind from extra-mental reality. Furthermore, the emphasis on the notitia intuitiva removed God from creation and relegated the divine to a supernatural sphere separated from nature and the reaches of evident human knowledge. With the link between mind and reality gone, the seeds of skepticism also appeared. Thus Dupré argued, “To know by means of contact with physical reality, however, is essentially a process of efﬁcient causality, wherein no form is transferred from that reality to the mind. Indeed God may directly infuse an intuition without sense impressions.”69 Dupré concluded, The argument against the theory of species, ﬁrst formulated by the Dominican Durandus and later adopted by Ockham and the Nominalists, discloses the different assumption that underlies the modern conception of knowledge . . . By the same token, the transcendent factor ceases to function as an active constituent of the ontotheological synthesis. For it had been precisely through the form that the ﬁnite participated in the inﬁnite. Christian theologians had always succeeded in maintaining the link between the forms and the realm of the divine through God’s eternal image, the divine archetype of all created reality.

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In late Nominalist theology, the form lost this function and the link with the divine became a more external one. Modern thought increasingly deﬁned the relation between the ﬁnite and inﬁnite being in terms of efﬁcient causality. If form was no more than a construction of the human mind, it could no longer secure the intrinsic union between the ﬁnite and the inﬁnite.70 Dupré may have overemphasized the effect of Ockham’s thought. Katherine Tachau has demonstrated that Ockham did not establish a school of Ockhamists and did not succeed in displacing visible species from the accounts of cognition. According to Tachau, “most scholars defended such mediators precisely because they thought the perspectivist account of vision, and of the psychological processes originating in vision, more adequately accounted for the observed phenomena than did the alternative that Ockham posed.”71 Eventually, Nominalism did gain important ground in the ﬁelds of logic, dialectics, physics, theology, and natural philosophy. Nominales became established as the via moderna in the academic institutions of the late fourteenth and early ﬁfteenth centuries. In Paris, Nominalism was represented by Jean Buridan, Nicholas Oresme, and Pierre d’Ailly. At Heidelberg, nominalism was associated with the name of Marsilius van Inghen and in Wittenberg with Gregory of Rimini.72 When the proscription against Ockham in 1339 was reinforced at Paris in 1473, a dispersal of the members of the via moderna ensued. As the via moderna grew and developed, the questions about the speculative reaches of the human mind became more and more pronounced.73 While Dupré sees Ockham’s epistemology, especially the rejection of the impressed species, as breaking the ontotheological synthesis and severing the link between mind and reality, other scholars have argued that Ockham was actually trying to afﬁrm a more direct and dependable contact with reality.74 Ockham’s epistemology had its origin in the criticism of Duns Scotus’s doctrine of cognition. Moreover, his teaching on intuitive cognition was primarily an instrument to ﬁght skepticism. Ockham’s emphasis on intuitive cognition was intended to establish the very source of certitude. Ockham explained that there are two types of non-complex knowledge; namely, of intuitive and abstractive cognition. In this context the problem of certainty clearly emerges as the purpose of intuitive cognition. Ockham was asking how one could be certain of contingent propositions. If the intellect abstracts from the material thing, how does it combine terms in a contingent proposition such that the intellect judges with certainty that this proposition represents the facts as they really are and not simply as the intellect imagines them to be? For Ockham, intuitive knowledge would secure the certainty of contingent propositions. Intuitive cognition, which precedes abstractive cognition, is deﬁned

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as “that cognition by means of which a thing is known to be when it exists or does not exist, in such a way that, if the thing exists, then the intellect immediately judges that it exists and evidently knows that it exists, unless the judgment happens to be impeded through the imperfection of this cognition.”75 In the ﬁfth question of the ﬁfth Quodlibeta, Ockham again distinguishes between intuitive and abstractive cognition, saying that “through an intuitive cognition I judge not only that a thing exists when it exists, but also that it does not exist when it does not exist; I do not judge in either of these ways through an abstractive cognition.”76 Ockham establishes intuitive cognition as the main mode of cognition that enables one to know with certitude that an object does or does not exist. He also argues that this cognition gives us certitude about the existential relations of things from which contingent propositions are formed. Intuitive cognition tells us whether one thing inheres in another, is distant from another or “stands in some other relation to the other.”77 Moreover, intuitive cognition provides certitude for both sensible and intelligible objects. Consequently one can have an intuitive—and abstractive—cognition of objects of the intellect such as sorrow or love.78 In these discussions Ockham’s concern was to defend the dependability of intuitive cognition, a dependability based on the clarity, directness, or immediacy of the cognition. He insisted that intuitive cognition was temporally and logically prior to any abstractive cognition, stating, “I claim that a cognition that is simple, proper to the singular, and the ﬁrst by the sort of primacy in question is an intuitive cognition. Now it is evident that this sort of cognition is ﬁrst, since an abstractive cognition of a singular presupposes an intuitive cognition with respect to the same object and not vice versa.”79 Ockham is most well known for his rejection of species. To Ockham’s mind this rejection was necessary in order to guarantee the direct and simple cognition of the object as a prerequisite for all other knowledge. To preserve this directness he abandoned species as mediators between the object and the intellect. The theory of species stemmed from the explanation of perception and cognition based on vision. In the West this theory owed its existence largely to the “intromission” theory of the tenth-century thinker Alhazen (Ibn al-Haytham) as elaborated in his treatise De aspectibus.80 The ﬁrst scholar in the Latin West to assimilate Alhazen’s work thoroughly was Roger Bacon, who was also responsible for the doctrine of the multiplication of the species.81 This theory became the standard explanation both for the understanding of perception and the knowledge based on perception. Put simply, the species were posited as a way to explain how the object became united with the intellect. In the Reportatio, Ockham analyzed the ﬁve different reasons for advancing the existence of species, namely, to explain: (1) how the intellect assimilates the object; (2) how the object is represented to the intellect; (3) how intellection is caused; (4) how the potentiality of the possible intellect is reduced to act; and (5) the union between intellect and object in terms of “that which is moved”

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and “that which moves.”82 By repudiating the necessity of species in each of these cases, Ockham rejected all species, be they in the medium, in the senses, or in the intellect. Throughout his epistemological writings, Ockham frequently employed the appeal to experience saying, “sicut per experientiam patet.” For example, experience teaches that if species existed we would know them by an intuitive cognition. However, experience shows that this is not the case.83 However, it is Ockham’s purpose for eliminating species that is crucial. He was determined to eradicate species because they posed a medium or mediator between the intellect and object.84 According to Ockham such mediators would destroy direct contact between intellect and the object of perception, thereby weakening the all-important certainty of knowledge. Ockham believed that if we cannot grasp reality immediately, then we cannot be sure that we have grasped reality at all. As Tachau succinctly stated, “In immediacy lay reliability.”85 We will see that in its theological form, this principle came to haunt the sixteenth century. Ockham’s epistemology sought to secure two things. By rejecting species he tried to guarantee the certainty of existence, nonexistence, and existential judgments. Ockham also sought to secure the primacy of the singular. As Oberman stated, “We ﬁnd the characteristics of Nominalism in an epistemology engendered by the new logic which relates experience and experiment (the so-called notitia intuitiva) in such a way that the individual—be it an inanimate object, a human being or an event—is understood in its own context as potentially new, original, and unique before it is identiﬁed by classiﬁcation into species.”86 Okham’s epistemology stressed both the primacy of direct experience and the importance of the singular. He decisively rejected the idea that the universal was the ﬁrst and proper object of the intellect and therefore the ﬁrst thing known in the origin of cognition. Ockham contended that if we are speaking “of the origin of cognition, a singular thing is the ﬁrst object of the senses.”87 For Ockham, everything was singular. Here again, Dupré ﬁnds that with Ockham the “entire ontotheological synthesis began to disintegrate.”88 According to Dupré, Nominalism meant that in knowledge the human mind no longer shared a universal form with the real. Ockham, of course, did not deny that universals were needed for human cognition. He did reject the theory that such universals existed in an extra-mental realm. Nominalists denied the widely held idea of the “moderate realists” that universals inhered in singular reality.89 For Ockham, there was no abstraction of an essential intelligible element from the phantasm or the individual object. The questions we must ask, however, remain: What was the purpose of this rejection? What was the appeal of emphasizing the experienced singular? Again we return to the fact that the immediacy of experience guarantees certainty. Oberman caught the heart of the matter when he wrote, “This epistemological stance, which one may well characterize as born out of hunger for reality, is part of a more embracing revolt against the meta-world of heteronomous authority and canonized speculation

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obfuscating, overlaying and distorting reality.”90 The “hunger for reality,” and the certainty of knowing that reality, lay at the heart of Nominalism: Against the implication that our world is a mere reﬂection and shadow of higher levels of being, the Nominalist insists on the full reality of our experienced world. Hunger for reality is so much the mark of Nominalism that it is a perhaps humorous but certainly a misleading tradition that bequeathed upon its opponents the name “realists.” What is often called Ockham’s razor is the slashing away of the hierarchy of being of ideas, and concepts, which sheer speculation had invented.91 Ockham was neither the ﬁrst nor the last thinker to worry about the role of species in cognition. All of the prominent medieval Scholastics worried about the implications of the theory of “representationalism.”92 They did not want to end up being committed “to the claim that what we primarily perceive are our inner likenesses of the world.”93 Tachau argues, “As far as a defense of his own epistemological theory is concerned, Ockham’s critique of the intentional apparent being exposes lacunae in his own theory that would generally dissuade his medieval readers from adopting it. Most of the problems stem from what is evidently the Venerable Inceptor’s primary epistemological concern to establish the direct, propositional nature of cognition against any theory relying on representation.”94 The objection to species as representations had become standard at Oxford in the early fourteenth century. As Tachau writes, “It had become virtually de rigueur to object—as likely for instance, Olivi and Ockham had—that a species would ﬁrst lead to a knowledge of itself rather than directly to a knowledge of the object.”95 Ockham, however, sought to guarantee the direct knowledge of the object by eradicating both sensible and intelligible species. Why, then, was he suspected of being a skeptic? Ockham did admit the possibility of deception, a deception that may even be caused by God. He recognized that existential judgments could be erroneous.96 But then how were true judgments to be distinguished from false ones? Ockham did not seem to believe that these erroneous judgments really threatened certitude. Thus Ockham intended primarily to preserve the centrality of propositional knowledge. But as Tachau’s study has shown, Ockham’s medieval readers were not satisﬁed that he did in fact protect the infallibility of scientiﬁc knowledge.97 The area where Ockham was most vulnerable to the charge of skepticism was the question of whether God can produce intuitive knowledge of that which does not exist. Can God produce in our mind a cognition by which the object seems to be present but is really absent? As Philotheus Böhner has argued, this problem and its solution was for Ockham a theological issue.98 Ockham did argue that, according to God’s absolute power, it was logically possible for God to cause us to believe what is false.99 According to the natural process of cognition, no such problem exists. According to our natural powers,

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within the realm of God’s ordained power, intuitive knowledge of a nonexistent cannot be caused or preserved naturally. As Ockham explains: So far as natural causes are in question, an intuitive cognition cannot be caused or preserved if the object does not exist. The reason is this: a real effect cannot be caused, or brought from nothing into being, by that which is nothing. Hence, if we are speaking of the natural mode of causation it requires for its existence both a productive and a preservative cause.100 Nonetheless, Ockham admits, “Intuitive cognition of a non-existent object is possible by divine power.”101 He proves this ﬁrst by recourse to God’s power. “To say ‘I believe in God the Father Almighty,’ I understand this to mean that whatever does not involve an obvious contradiction is to be attributed to the divine power.” Furthermore, “every effect that God is able to produce by mediation of a secondary cause he is able to produce immediately by himself. But he is able to produce an intuitive cognition of a corporeal thing by the mediation of an [corporeal] object. Therefore, he is able to produce this cognition immediately by himself.”102 The centrality of the problem of certitude emerges even in this discussion regarding nonexistents. Ockham argues that this supernatural action by God’s absolute power would not be known by an evident cognition. God can cause an act of belief, a subjective conviction, without factual evidence. We would then believe that an absent thing is present.103 However, as Böhner argues, the cognitive basis for such a belief would not be the notitia intuitiva but only a notitia abstractiva.104 Eleonore Stump has clearly shown that Ockham’s discussion of an intuitive cognition of nonexistents relies on Ockham’s conviction that God “in his omnipotence could cause in a human being an intuitive cognition of a cup (for example) when there is no cup present.” However, she carefully points out that statements such as “by nature there cannot be intuitive knowledge without the existence of a thing which is truly the efﬁcient cause of the intuitive knowledge,” and “intuitive cognition cannot be naturally caused except when [its] object is present at a determinate distance,” depend on the term naturally. According to Stump, There is no limitation on God’s power on his own view, Ockham says, because he holds that God can cause a false belief directly in us, although this will not be a case in which the judgment is formed in virtue of an intuitive cognition. . . . For Ockham, the reliability of the cognitive powers responsible for intuitive cognition is built into those powers themselves; it is not possible for them to produce false judgments.105 Regarding the perception of nonexistent objects, Ockham insisted that the assent of the mind was only the assent of belief or conviction, not one of

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evidence. Abstractive knowledge did not imply the existence or presence of its object. When it comes to evident cognition, the mind would always judge that the thing does not exist. Therefore, “if the divine power were to conserve a perfect intuitive cognition of a thing no longer existent, in virtue of this noncomplex knowledge the intellect would know evidently that this thing does not exist.”106 An “evident cognition” required “that things are in reality as they are asserted to be by the proposition to which the assent is given.”107 Ockham, therefore, strives to protect the infallibility or certitude of intuitive cognition.108 While a “belief-cognition” can be in error, an evident cognition based on intuitive knowledge that cannot deceive. As Böhner concluded: Evident assent, therefore, never can fail, for it is based on intuitive knowledge whether it is naturally or supernaturally produced. And since an error in this case necessarily includes a contradiction in terms, it is impossible for God to deceive anybody by intuitive knowledge. Everyday knowledge, therefore, is safe from any intrusion of natural or supernatural skepticism.109 Whether Ockham was completely successful in safeguarding against skepticism is beyond the scope of this study. Tachau has demonstrated that for some of his readers Ockham did not provide certainty regarding the correspondence between extra-mental and mental propositions. Thus the species theory remained necessary for those who were unconvinced.110 That which is important for our purposes are those concerns which preoccupied Ockham, concerns that will reemerge in very different contexts in the years to come. Ockham stressed the signiﬁcance of experience and made immediacy the guarantee of certainty. At the heart of his epistemology was the desire to know concrete reality with certitude. This “hunger for reality” placed the human being in direct contact with his home: namely, the created or ordained realm. However, while the human being was closer to his world, he was further from God. Ockham’s use of the distinction between the ordained and absolute power of God was a principle that would gain increasing importance. As the via moderna advanced, this distinction made more pronounced the restriction on the speculative reaches of the human mind. Ockham had argued for the centrality of this distinction, primarily in order to stress the ontological contingency of creation. His use of this traditional distinction had ramiﬁcations, however, for the possibilities of natural theology and the knowledge of theological truth. As Marilyn McCord Adams has shown, Ockham distinguished between evident knowledge of theological truth available to the blessed and that truth known by the viator.111 The evident knowledge that the blessed have about God is extensive and based on intuitive cognition, known per se, or derivable by some non-syllogistic inference from these two forms of knowledge. The blessed will have, for example, intuitive cognition of the divine essence. The emphasis is, once again, on the immediacy of this knowledge.

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For the viator, evident knowledge of theological truths (those truths necessary for salvation) is available either naturally or supernaturally. The fact of God’s existence is naturally known. The Incarnation is known only supernaturally, that is, through revelation in Scripture. The viator, by deﬁnition, has no intuitive or abstractive knowledge of the Godhead. In comparison to his predecessors, Ockham greatly limited the scope of natural theology.112 The importance placed on experience and the notitia intuitiva meant that the theological knowledge of the viator was limited to Scripture, the fathers, and the doctrinal decrees of the church. It was Pierre d’Ailly who identiﬁed the ordained power of God with the divine will as revealed in Scripture.113 The distinction between the absolute and ordained power of God came to be the argument used to contend that any speculation that went beyond or bypassed God’s self-revelation was “vain curiosity.”114 Such speculation left reality behind and tried to pierce the realm of inﬁnite possibilities of God’s absolute power. Hence the Nominalists voiced the attack contra vanam curiositatem by challenging the attempt to make philosophy penetrate the secrets unknown to human reason. Theological “speculation” and metaphysics were impediments to the knowledge available in the proper realm of human reason within the ordained sphere. Therefore, while the Nominalists limited the scope of theology, they elevated the importance of experiential knowledge of the concrete, contingent, and historical world.115 In his loneliness Nominalistic man is anxious to keep close to the reality of the world around him: an anxiety quite naturally accompanied by secularization of his interests. Man is still the viator to the heavenly Jerusalem, but his newly won freedom gives him the heavy responsibility of guarding against hallucinations. He can no longer afford to keep his eyes constantly on his ultimate goal, as did the Augustinian man, nor to trust his reason to the same extent as did the Thomistic man.116 The issue of illusions or “hallucinations” was fated to resurface later. Within the present context, the role of experience and immediacy, the emphasis on historical life within the real of the potentia ordinata, the concern with the limits of human reason, the attack on “vain curiosity,” the interest in the relationship between reason and revelation, and the pervasiveness of the quest for certainty are the important elements in the spectrum of epistemological and theological Nominalism that point forward to the things to come. In the course of the ﬁfteenth century, the resurgence of interest in Thomism and Augustinianism and the impact of humanism tended to overshadow Nominalism, at least as a force of academic renewal. Nonetheless, debates about the nature and certainty of knowledge did not abate. Questions about human knowledge reemerged most prominently in the debates between humanists and scholastics. It is to these debates from the late fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries that we now turn.

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Scholars of the controversies between scholastics and humanists have cautioned that their division not be over-exaggerated. In 1906, Cassirer had pointed to the deeper intellectual differences between humanists and scholastics. According to Cassirer, the language used by the scholastics reﬂected an entire world of thought that expressed their view of the mind, nature, and the substances or essences underlying sensible things. Humanist criticism of the scholastics’ barbarous style came to form a critique of cognition itself. In Valla, for example, Cassirer saw the growing appreciation for the psychological knowledge of human nature. For such humanists as Valla, this form of knowing placed rhetoric above the arid formulations of scholasticism.117 Kristeller argued that humanism and scholasticism were not two irreconcilable movements or philosophies. According to Kristeller, the humanist attacks by ﬁgures such as Petrarch and Bruni were “episodes in a long period of peaceful coexistence” between humanism and scholasticism.118 Spitz contended that the “battle of the viae in the universities in late medieval times and the struggle between scholasticism and humanism during the Renaissance period have been widely exaggerated.”119 Nauert recognized the need for caution in labeling the various disputants but still concluded that Northern humanists did indeed frequently express contempt for scholasticism.120 Steven Ozment also noted the continuity between humanism and scholasticism. While pointing out the very real differences between Protestantism, humanism and scholasticism, Ozment argued that there was a “fundamental and lasting kinship between humanism and Protestantism. Neither had been able to ﬁnd in the dominant late medieval scholastic traditions either attractive personal models or an educational program appropriate to the changed society of the sixteenth century.” However, he cautioned, “Humanism and scholasticism not only defy simple, solitary deﬁnitions, but also resist a prevalent scholarly tendency to depict them as mortal enemies. The two movements actually originated together in Italy in the thirteenth century and developed side by side throughout and beyond the Renaissance. . . .”121 In her research on the Spanish Renaissance, Lu Ann Homza tempered the distinction between humanists and scholastics by arguing that they were not two rival cultures. According to Homza, Spanish “ecclesiastics-cum-humanists, like European humanists in general, executed their critical and historical concerns within a scholastic heritage”122 James Overﬁeld argued that there were difﬁculties at the University of Vienna in the 1490s. Elsewhere in Germany, however, the reception of humanism in the universities was “much less threatening.” However, by the late 1520s, “the academic and intellectual atmosphere had fundamentally changed, not only at this [Ingolstadt] Bavarian institution but throughout Germany. Nor should the examples of peaceful coexistence be allowed to cloud the condition of most German universities in the early 1500s, which at best can be described as one of uneasy tension between traditionalists and humanist innovators.”123

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Erika Rummel has called for careful distinctions in chronology and geography. The idea of “peaceful coexistence” had some validity for the early Renaissance, which was characterized by “doctrinal and academic latitudinarianism.” Nonetheless, the prospect of such coexistence came to an end in the era of the Reformation. She concludes that “the traditional interpretation of the humanist-scholastic debate as a fundamental rift” is appropriate for the latter phase of the controversy. No one denies the innovative force of humanism in early modern Europe, even if it did not try to destroy scholasticism altogether or claim to represent the whole of culture. However, these debates, which do appear to have had growing fundamental importance, draw into focus the growing awareness that ﬁnding certitude was an ever-increasing problem. By concentrating on the issue of certainty, we can safely point to the centrality of method and curriculum in these controversies. Kristeller deﬁned Renaissance humanism as a movement that emphasized what Cicero called the “humanities”: namely, grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and moral philosophy.124 They preferred this curriculum to the traditional subjects such as arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, and above all else, dialectic. Scholastics stressed the importance of dialectical reasoning because it alone could ﬁnd the truth in doctrine and thereby protect the church from heresy.125 The emphasis was on rational and orderly argumentation. Language or terminology had to be very carefully deﬁned and used with precision. Scholastics argued for restrictive terms in theology because, as Rummel has shown, they equated precision with mental rigor. They also advocated a restriction or narrowing of the range of questions to be investigated.126 Analyzing well-deﬁned topics by means of strict deﬁnitions and the rules of dialectic, the scholastic could respect tradition, overcome heresy, and establish certitude. Aristotle had never equated dialectics with certainty. Distinguishing dialectics from logic, Aristotle believed that only the latter dealt with necessarily true propositions. For Aristotle, dialectics was related to rhetoric, as it enabled the orator to argue, via the topics, different points of view; dialectics, therefore, concerned itself with non-necessary propositions. However, the identiﬁcation of dialectics and certainty had become frequent by the early modern era. Since the premises were divinely revealed, theological truths could be established with certitude. Thus, as Rummel shows, in 1502 Conrad Wimpina argued that the scholastic thinker ﬁrst makes use of “rational argumentation and strives to defend faith against garrulous challengers who show more bluster than ability. Should the certainty of rational argumentation fail us, we do not take refuge in poetry . . . but in Holy Scripture, which is our basic authority and from which we draw certainty in argumentation.”127 The differentiation and evaluative ranking of dialectics and poetry revolved precisely around the issue of certitude. Poetry, Wimpina insisted, could not determine anything with certainty because it could only provide impressions of things through ﬁgurative language. Poetry, therefore, produces only belief rather than knowledge.128

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Humanists did not universally concede certitude to the dialectic of the scholastics. Some argued for the power of poetry and the certainty of divine inspiration in both poetry and theology.129 Rummel cites the defense of rhetoric by Lucio Flaminio Siculo in an oration delivered in 1504. Assigning ﬁrst place to rhetoric, Siculo maintained that the other arts were “handmaidens of eloquence and serve her; without her splendor and ornament they would be mean. . . . And there would be uncertainty in the mind about everything and matters would remain unknown.” Rhetoric, he insisted, was the discipline “more suited to discover the truth than that which they call . . . dialectic.”130 Humanists did not completely reject dialectics. However, their vision of dialectic reveals their discomfort with the “speculative” claims to certitude made by the scholastics. Scholastic dialectic was committed to formal validity as the focus for the study of logic. In this dialectical training there were ﬁxed patterns of argumentation, which guaranteed that from any true premise one could infer only a true conclusion. Humanist dialectics, advocated by thinkers such as Valla and Agricola, gave more attention to non-deductive inference, to “good arguments” that were persuasive and could win in a debate.131 They wrestled with the problematic nature of the validity of such arguments. The concern was that the oratio must be persuasive without necessarily being formally valid. Not all compelling or persuasive arguments were amenable to analysis within traditional formal logic. The interest was in the active and persuasive nature of dialectic as debate between two speakers rather than formal logic. Valla’s Repastinatio was a seminal work in the formation of humanist dialectics and one that demonstrated the new attitude toward certainty in argument.132 His tripartite critique of scholastic logic is beyond our purposes, but several issues are illustrative of the concern with different forms of argument that forego absolute certitude. Valla’s attack on transcendentals, directed primarily against the Latin Aristotelian tradition, was an attack on the misuse of language. He wanted to abolish words such as ens, entitas, quidditas, and identitas because these words were not sanctioned by classical usage and because they enabled useless and meaningless speculation. As Valla argued, “I show that the whole of metaphysics consists in a few words, that it does not deal with things at all, but with words, and that these same words were unknown to Aristotle, thanks to his incredible dullness. I show that all these words, ‘concrete,’ ‘abstract,’ ‘quidditas,’ ‘essence,’ ‘esse,’ and ‘ens,’ are clearly mad and have no force.”133 Like Petrarch, Valla criticized empty dialectical disputes. In doing so, he wanted to return to ordinary experience and to a simpliﬁed vocabulary. He tried to use words in their ordinary usage and maintained that such usage was perfectly adequate to express the structure of the world and the experience of that world.134 Valla’s rejection of technical philosophical terms reﬂects his insistence on the importance of everyday life. Oratory—and philosophy— should concern itself with politics, military affairs, history, and morals. As Seigel has argued, Valla assured “that dialectic kept its proper place in relation

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to rhetoric,” by tying “the dialectician ﬁrmly to the linguistic standards of the orator.” Both had to respect ordinary common sense, usage, and custom.135 In his attempt to keep close to everyday life and language, Valla strove to abolish all attempts to create hierarchies of concepts outside of reality. Expression in language must correspond to experienced reality.136 In short, language must reﬂect reality. Equally important was the realization and the afﬁrmation that language was not primarily a part of metaphysics but an aspect of the historical and social world.137 Valla’s work also lessened the importance of the syllogistic form of argument. The syllogism did not alone guarantee valid arguments. In fact, Valla sought to dislodge validity from its central position in ratiocination and argumentation.138 As did other humanists, he privileged the invention of topics or loci over the syllogism, a method drawn from rhetoric and especially from Quintilian. Now formal validity was only one of a number of possible guides to the choice of a ﬁtting argument.139 He wanted to establish the importance of “good” or “apt” arguments that could persuade but might fall short of formal validity. Thus Valla argued against the supremacy of the strict syllogistic form, thereby making room for that which is plausible and credible. He drew upon both Cicero and Quintilian to argue that there were two kinds of proof: necessary and non-contradictory or credible. The necessary argument, he said, belongs to the logician, but both kinds belong to the orator. In all cases, the arguments should aim at conclusions that are true or credible.140 Here again we see the inﬂuence of the ancient rhetorical tradition. Cicero had acknowledged that the subject matter of oratory could not be placed “outside the control of mere opinion and within the grasp of exact knowledge.” According to Cicero, oratory could not, and should not, try to become a science of certitude. The orator must be content with probable arguments and demonstrations.141 As Mack argues, Valla insisted that everything in the argument must be “true” in order to avoid the charge that “rhetoric and dialectic are immoral because they can teach you how to deceive.”142 There must be a choice among a number of possible arguments depending on topic and context. Lisa Jardine cites several important issues that emerged from the shift away from Aristotelian discussions of syllogisms and their associated scholia to topics-theory. First, demonstrative inference ceases to be privileged over non-demonstrative inference. Secondly, formal validity ceases to preoccupy the dialectician. The emphasis turns to how good or effective the argument is for the purpose at hand.143 Rudolf Agricola’s De inventione dialectica lucubrationes, written in 1480 and published in 1515, became one of the most important texts for teaching in universities across Europe. His was a “topics-logic” which marked a move toward a systematic account of reasoning, including reasoning that fell short of certainty.144 His work revealed the limitations in traditional notions of certainty and absolute truth; he assigned only a subsidiary role to formal validity and the syllogistic forms of ratiocination. Like Valla, he was interested in argumentation

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that persuaded and inﬂuenced the hearer, thereby commanding assent. In his challenge to Aristotelian logic, he emphasized the case for “likelihood” or “probability” over certainty.145 According to Agricola, dialectic was concerned with speaking convincingly (probabiliter), in a way suitable for creating belief in the given situation or context.146 Thus both Valla and Agricola challenged the supremacy of the syllogistic form of reasoning and its sole claim to validity and certitude. Both men were interested in forms of reasoning or argumentation that convinced or persuaded rather than proved. Furthermore, both Valla and Agricola interjected a skeptical streak into their dialectics. Valla’s use of sorites and dilemma highlighted his general approach to reasoning; that is, the acknowledgement that arguments always fall short of certitude.147 So, too, Agricola argued strongly that in actual debating, “likelihood” should be the real object of the dialectician’s attention.148 In his preface to De inventione dialectica, Agricola stated that a “very small portion of what we know is certain and unalterable, so that, if we believe the Academy, we only know that we know nothing.” In Book VI he continued by explaining that such things as the persuasion of the people or senate about peace and war and other business of a city, including matters dealing with the law, and teaching justice, religion, and piety were the subject of dialectic and are spoken about probabiliter. For almost everyone speaks probabiliter on the subject which they have undertaken to teach. For there is not a great supply of things known to us which can be necessary and undoubted: and if we believe the Academy, nothing at all. No one denies this about things which belong to life and to norms of behavior. Similarly, in what belongs to the knowledge of the nature of things, there is nothing which is not argued about and debated on all sides with great ingenuity. On all these subjects, then, probable things are discussed as best one can, since necessary things cannot be. If probable things could not be discussed, no one would either learn or teach those subjects.149 Throughout this era the discussion was about likelihood, degrees of certainty, and the importance of persuasion. In the debate with the scholastics, ﬁfteenthcentury humanists tried to make room for other forms of ratiocination than formal validity, syllogistic demonstration, and claims to certitude. However, a further complication should be noted in evaluating the extent of the opposition between scholastics and humanists. This complication regards the identiﬁcation of “scholastic.” By the ﬁfteenth century the Wegestreit was well established.150 There was not only an opposition between “scholastics” and “humanists” but also a rift within scholasticism itself. Nominalism or the via moderna stressed, as we have seen, particular or singular reality as the basis for human cognition. The via moderna also sought to clarify the speculative reach of human reason when dealing with artiﬁcially constructed sets of problems. Like all scholastics, the moderni insisted on a “disciplined and puritanical use of language in which

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a clearly established meaning veriﬁed by the respective context may be ascribed to a term [proprietas dicendi].”151 When the humanists mocked the barbarity of language, the verbal games, and the useless quibbles of the scholastics, they were often referring to the Nominalists. John Murdoch has described the shift toward a methodology that engendered a new critical temper in the fourteenth century as that which “brought not too few humanists to the very brink of apoplexy.”152 In the course of fourteenth-century scholasticism, a narrowing of problems becomes evident, a narrowing that was related to a greater awareness of exactly which assumptions were at stake in a problem and its solution. “The determinatio of a given question increasingly ﬁnds itself stocked with the systematic display of needed deﬁnitiones, distinctiones, notabilia, suppositiones, and other praemittenda. And from these, of course, there follow, in equally systematic fashion, the appropriate bevy of conclusiones.”153 As Murdoch explains, the discussion by Ockham and later thinkers demonstrates a tendency “to analyze almost any problem metalinguistically. In place of speaking directly about the events or entities relevant to a given problem, one analyzed matters by operating with and upon the propositions and terms within propositions that stood for, respectively, those events or entities.”154 The “particularist ontology” was examined in terms of a propositional analysis, the logica moderna, or from a “second intentional point of view.”155 Thus while the Nominalists had once rebuked the via antiqua for vain speculation, now the humanists charged the Nominalists and all of scholasticism with “vain curiosity” and the obfuscation of reality. A further distinction is needed regarding the “humanists.” Like scholasticism, Renaissance humanism exhibited a fundamental distinction that transcended individual differences in philosophy or ethics. Ernesto Grassi called attention to this important distinction between a purely rhetorical humanism and a humanism that stood within the rationalist ontological tradition.156 The Platonism of Ficino and the Platonic Academy exempliﬁed the latter tradition. Grassi’s work draws attention to those humanists who fundamentally challenged the rationalist understanding of truth. In so doing, he adds a further dimension and clariﬁcation to the humanistic tradition so ably analyzed by thinkers such as Rummel and Trinkaus. It is important to recognize that this challenge displayed concerns common to those Nominalists whom they criticized so harshly. They also inﬂuenced attitudes toward the attainment of certitude. Those humanists who emphasized “rhetoric as philosophy” discounted the inherited understanding of the knowledge of being. According to this philosophic tradition, every being that is mediated to the mind through the senses has an essence through what Grassi called the “rational determination [or deﬁnition] of being.”157 By means of this rational process, the mind reaches the essence of beings by removing through abstraction everything that is particular to that being: namely, the variable, relative, concrete, contextual,

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changeable, particular, and accidental. As Grassi argues, “Essential reality, the nature of things, stands above (or behind) the manifold, particular, different or relative as the general or universal truth that must be puriﬁed through cognition from all those qualities.”158 In this traditional philosophy, the starting point of which is ontology, true knowledge is of the non-historical. The rational process that “determines being” lifts the mind to the eternal. Moreover, Grassi argues, this philosophy “proceeds from the problem of the rational deﬁnition of being, in accord with which knowledge endeavors to attain ‘surety’ or ‘certainty’ by anchoring these in abstractions, as universals, in the non-historical.”159 This rational procedure enables the mind to discard anything that would deprive reason of certitude; that is, anything that is variable, empirical, particular, and temporal. In this ontological deﬁnition of being, the singular, relative, and historical are simply not as “real” or as certain as the universal. Rejecting particularity, the mind discovers the eternal truth valid in all times and all places. The consequence is that the world of becoming, the changing realm of history, is far removed from the certitude of true and unchangeable being. Grassi’s argument is that the purely rhetorical movement within humanism bore within itself its own philosophical assumptions. These humanists took seriously the “historicity of being.”160 They sought to justify the preeminence of rhetorical language such as metaphor and poetry. In so doing, they tried to give value to that realm of existence that they considered to be more fundamental or primary than that of rational deductive logic and philosophy. This rhetorical mode of thought located reality in the particular, situational, concrete, changing, and historical world.161 As Seigel has shown, this emphasis on the historical, changing, and concrete world was a harkening back to the ancient model embodied by Cicero. Cicero had disapproved of the SocraticPlatonic separation between rhetoric and philosophy. Rhetoric should be joined to philosophy and address the study of vitam et mores. In Cicero, who was such an important model for the humanists, the most important point of combining wisdom and eloquence was the commitment to the “life of man in society.” Hence Cicero argued that one must never depart from the language of ordinary life and usage. The orator was one who, above all else, shared the common life of community.162 Therefore, the disputed relationship between rhetoric and philosophy, which preoccupied the thinkers of the Renaissance era, was a dispute regarding where reality and truth lay. In this realm the source of truth found expression ﬁrst in the imaginative act and the rhetorical nature of “primal” or “original” speech.163 Most importantly, the rhetorical tradition called into question the certitude of absolute, eternal, rational truth. The foregrounding of experience was characteristic of this era. It was in the experienced world that one looked for certainty, not in the abstract, unchanging, and eternal. Leonardo di Vinci, who called himself the “disciple of experience,” claimed that “certainty [certezza] derives from experience.”164

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Grassi’s analysis accounts for the challenge by more purely rhetorical humanists to both the Platonism of ﬁgures such as Pico and Ficino and to the assumptions of moderate realists within the scholastic tradition. However, just as Oberman did not distinguish between the Platonic and non-Platonic views within humanism in his brief comparison of Nominalism and humanism,165 so, too, Grassi underestimated the thought of the via moderna. Nominalism also contested the attempt to ﬁnd a universal unchanging essence within the singular thing. As we have seen, by rejecting the theory of species, Ockham rejected the traditional link between the rational core of being and the mind, the link that would have provided for the “rational determination” or abstraction of being. So, too, both the Nominalists and humanists placed a renewed emphasis on the particular and on experience. The experiential, concrete, and historical world was not “a mere reﬂection and shadow of higher levels of being.” Ockham’s famous razor was a “slashing away of the hierarchy of being, of ideas, of concepts which sheer speculation had invented.”166 While the humanists analyzed by Grassi would often see Nominalism as yet another form of scholasticism, guilty of barbarism in language and of obfuscating reality, nonetheless, there were signiﬁcant parallels between the two movements. Both groups attacked the obfuscation of reality. Whether it was concepts, categories, or overly technical language, both movements decried anything that blocked access to the real and to what Murdoch called the “particularist ontology.” They emphasized the singular and the concrete, and they sought to validate the reliable experience of the world. Both the Nominalist and the humanist lived in the sphere of the potentia ordinata, or the historical and sensibly experienced world. Within this realm, human beings exercised free will, scrutinized nature, and focused on the historicity of being. More so than the Nominalists, the humanists explored the implications of living and belonging to history. They focused on the study and writing of history and the assumptions of living within history. They began to recognize the historicity of truth. In particular, they understood the ramiﬁcations of human knowledge as appropriate to the ever-changing historical realm: The historical aspects of the realization of the mind are never eternally valid, never absolutely “true,” because they always emerge within limited situations bound in space and time; i.e. they are probable and seem to be true [verisimile], probably only within the conﬁnes of “here” and “now,” in which the needs and problems that confront human beings are met.167 In this worldview, the objects of contemplation were not eternal and unchangeable ﬁrst principles. Rather, the object of thought was the changing, contextual, and societal world. Throwing human concerns into the realm of the historical had important consequences for the issue of certainty. Downgrading the claim of certitude based on rational syllogistic demonstration and the elevation of the mind

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through abstraction, humanists developed a signiﬁcant consciousness of what it meant to live within the partial and incomplete realm of history.168 Ethical, political, and historical issues became the primary subjects of debate and discussion. This focus expressed itself in several genres, including the dialogue, the essay, and the paradox.169 The most important may have been the argumentation known as in utramque partem. The scholastic method was well known for the sic et non method of analysis. The goal was to argue both sides of a question and to pronounce a settled and certain judgment. In humanism the sic-et-non method gave way to the argument in utramque partem.170 Humanist reform of education emphasized the use of loci to establish arguments “on both sides” of the question. By arguing in this way, the student was rhetorically trained and concerned with probability instead of certitude. The student focused on persuasion rather than proof. Moreover, the student was encouraged to explore all aspects of the question by manipulating words, ideas, and examples in order to construct persuasive or convincing arguments.171 In addition to argument in utramque partem, the dialogue also was a favored form of reasoning that allowed the writer to examine many sides of a question through the mouthpieces of different characters.172 The dialogue, like the method of arguing both sides of the question, permitted the writer to end in suspended judgment rather than with a certain conclusion. These developments reinforce Harries’s emphasis on the importance of perspective and perspectival thinking. The emergence of perspectival thought also had profound implications for the possibility of establishing certainty, a phenomenon that we will see in both Montaigne and Shakespeare. The awareness of perspective brought to the fore important consequences, particularly the issues of partiality and appearances. One knows something according to where one “stands” or experiences those things. Moreoever, the objects of knowledge may appear to us differently from their existence in reality. As Harries has demonstrated, the central philosopher of the early modern era who examined the nature of perspective was Nicholas of Cusa. Cusa, however, was no skeptic. After exploring the ﬁnite perspectives of the human mind, Cusa concluded that the intellect that failed to seek after the truth “with certitude and face to face” would be separated from God at death. This intellect would be turned away from the truth “toward the corruptible, it falls away toward a corruptible object of desire, towards uncertainty and confusion, and into the dark chaos of pure possibility, where nothing is certain.”173 Uncertainty, therefore, was equated with hell. Cusa’s thought did point ahead to something deeply inﬂuential in the age to come. The interest in perspective and in inﬁnity continued to advance. But in changed circumstances these issues also came to ﬁnd further expression in the struggle to live within limits and the haunting possibility that the transcendence of perspective may not be possible—or even desirable. In the years to come, the essay emerged as a way of “assaying” any given subject from

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various perspectives. As did the dialogue and the argument in utramque partem, the essay also allowed the writer to explore a topic from different perspectives but without a deﬁnitive conclusion. But before this genre came to express the the inevitability of living within the realm of change, perspective, and partiality, several further developments had to take place—that is, the study of history and the competing and challenging claims to absolute exclusive religious truth. The fruits of historical interest and expertise were bequeathed to the coming century by the humanists. These accomplishments all indicated the interest in what Grassi called “the historicity of being.” The ﬁeld of history itself contributed signiﬁcantly to a profound recognition of the partial and contingent nature of human knowledge, a point that would come to full expression in the later sixteenth century. The science of philology, the humanist approach to the study of law, and the recovery of ancient philosophical and historical texts all threw into relief the reality of change and the importance of historical context.174 Scholars began to see that law and language had a history and could be understood only in terms of their own historicity. Polybius was the ﬁrst to have an impact on the West. Polybius, Livy, and Tacitus formed the nucleus of the revival of political history. Petrarch, Bruni, and others were instrumental in reviving the study of Greek.175 The revival of Greek fueled the interest in the recovery and correction of ancient manuscripts. During this period we see an increased interest in the reliability and comparison of such manuscripts. Translation of the Greek historians also took place in the ﬁfteenth century. Commissioned by Pope Nicholas V, Valla ﬁrst translated Herodotus and Thucydides in the mid-ﬁfteenth century. As early as 1453, Leonardo Bruni had translated parts of Plutarch, Xenophon, and Demosthenes. By the end of the ﬁfteenth century, the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Strabo, and Appian were becoming available in Latin translation. Commenting on these translations of Greek historians commissioned by Nicholas V, Fryde declared “the whole series of translations was potentially the most revolutionary event in historiography since Fabius Pictor introduced Greek historiography into Rome at the end of the III century B. C.”176 The writing of history was also increasingly popular. The rise of national histories, in imitation of Livy, was particularly important. Leonardo Bruni composed his Historiarum Florentini populi Libri XII by 1439. Sabellico and Bembo wrote histories of Venice. Enea Silvio Picolomini wrote the history of Bohemia. Lucio Marineo Siculo wrote the history of Spain. The history of England was written by Polydore Vergil. Paolo Emilio wrote the history of France, and Flavio Biondo did the same for the history of Rome and the Roman curia. Jacob Wimpheling authored a history of Germany, while Hector Boece wrote the history of his native Scotland. Following Biondo’s model, Camden authored the Britannia. And, ﬁnally, Machiavelli wrote the Istorie f iorentine by 1525.177 By the late Renaissance, the growth of historical knowledge sometimes functioned to accentuate the sense of perspectivism, and “custom” came to be

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recognized as a dominant force. The study of philology and law also exerted enormous impact on the development of a historicist and relativist consciousness.178 Petrarch’s discovery in 1350 of part of Cicero’s correspondence brought to light the realities of political and literary life in the ﬁnal years of the Roman Republic. His emulation of ancient Rome continued to dominate humanist thought in Italy; however, it became increasingly clear that this was a distant and vanished civilization. The sack of Rome in 1527 proved this unsettling fact once and for all. The development of a historical viewpoint, however, is most commonly attributed to Valla. His work, Elegantiae linguae latinae, was one of the most inﬂuential books of the Renaissance both in terms of teaching classical usage and in terms of historical method. Valla defended the superiority of history over poetry and philosophy by arguing that history moved men to virtue by concrete examples. As we shall see, this Ciceronian exhortation regarding examples was to ﬂounder in the sixteenth century. But this appeal to example was not as important as his philological studies. Valla’s work as a textual critic included not only his critique of the Donation of Constantine and Roman law but also the emendations of Livy and of the New Testament. Hoping to resurrect the texts and spirit of classical antiquity, Valla demonstrated that language, like all phenomena, had a history.179 Identifying errors and anachronisms made the Renaissance philologist aware of the growth of language and its contextual meaning. This sensitivity to historical change was particularly clear in Valla’s study of Roman law. Attempting to rescue the Digest from the “barbarian” hands of the scholastic doctors, Valla wanted to restore the true sense of the Justinian Code. In the course of his research, Valla came to see that law arose gradually from custom and that ancient legal terms had to be interpreted in their original context, a context that might be very alien to the present.180 Angelo Poliziano continued Valla’s enterprise by arguing that philological techniques must be applied to the text of Roman law. He, too, was deeply aware of the speciﬁcity of historical texts. Like Valla, he was a founder of legal humanism and insisted on attention to context, chronology, and such instruments as inscriptions and monuments. He was intrigued with the details found in biographies. More so than Valla, Poliziano’s thought was rooted in the singular, the concrete, and the particular.181 He also set history above both philosophy and poetry. As one scholar has observed, “The criterion of universalia is jettisoned as summarily as the form and pretensions of universal history. The wood is relegated to the background; at center stage stand the trees—the dual and the detail meticulously observed.”182 This interest in the concrete and the particular was a part of that deepening awareness of the “historicity of being” that characterized so many intellectual movements of this era. Nonetheless, it would be wrong to assume that universalia were completely forgotten. The reason that the study of history was often elevated to a central role in the humanist curriculum was that history promised to supply examples universally worthy of imitation. Thus Salutati recommended history because historians “handed down to posterity” the memory of

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examples by kings and nations, the knowledge of which “warns princes, teaches people, and instructs individuals.”183 The rebirth of the interest in history was originally animated by an optimism regarding the maxim of Dionysius of Halicarnassus and Cicero that “history was philosophy teaching by example.” History had a universal appeal as the magistra vitae. The study of history provided a storehouse of exempla for moral and political instruction. These examples from the past were believed to be universally applicable in quite different times and places. Despite his growing awareness of anachronisms, Petrarch still believed that history could provide a basis for contemporary moral criticism. The lessons of virtue and vice, handed down through histories, should be imitated or rejected in the present. As Renaissance historians have argued, the call for ad fontes was accompanied by the belief that these sources would be relevant to present concerns.184 Like so many other earlier humanist beliefs, this conviction was to run aground in the sixteenth century. As a consequence of this historical work, the sense of historical change and an acute awareness of historical distance were to increase in the century to come. These currents of thought indicate the impact that the historicity of being had on the status of knowledge. The interest in perspective, experience, history, and the limits and reliability of human knowledge leads to the heart of this study—that is, the wider sixteenth-century debates about certitude. The emphasis on limits will resurface in this century amid competing and challenging claims to absolute religious truth. Theologically the question of certainty revolved around questions regarding salvation and authority. There was a closing of ranks with exclusivity, tradition, and experience characterizing the search for the certainty of truth. The Holy Spirit would be drafted as the great determiner of truth and the guarantor of certitude. In fact, the great question of the sixteenth century can be seen as “where is the Spirit?” Whether one argued from the Scriptural text, the consensus of the church, the oral and written traditions, or from direct illumination, the Spirit everywhere became the source of authority. Moreover, the search for certainty became linked both to direct experience and to the demonic. The demonic appeared as the other side of certainty; that is, the demonic became identiﬁed with deception. We will see a transformation of the dictum that in immediacy lay reliability. The quest for certitude became inextricably linked to the problem of visibility and invisibility, surface and depth. In the latter half of the century, the plea for the recognition of limits, skepticism, partial knowledge, and humility emerged. The centrality of the contingent, changing, and partial realm of being once again came into focus as the danger of certitude gradually becomes apparent. We will also witness throughout this century the haunting suspicion that the truth or the reality behind appearances may be permanently elusive, absent, or even directly contrary to all that one once believed and trusted.

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2 “Abba! Father!” The Certainty of Salvation

“For what is more miserable than uncertainty?”1 This declaration by Luther leads the historian to the very heart of sixteenth-century religious controversies. The debates that were to tear this century apart would be fueled by the passion for certainty, a passion Luther shared with many of his fellow reformers as well as his many opponents. For the reformers the problem of certitude began with the question of salvation. In this chapter we will analyze the way in which the certainty of salvation opened the sixteenth-century debates about knowledge, the sacraments, the Spirit, scriptural interpretation, and eventually, the rise of skepticism. First, however, we must recall why the certitude of salvation was such a controversial “discovery.” This issue requires a brief analysis of medieval theories of justiﬁcation. Several fundamental assumptions determined these theories, including the position that would be declared orthodox at the Council of Trent. These assumptions include the ethic of holiness or purity and the knowability of salvation. Discussions about justiﬁcation had always involved complex analyses regarding such issues as the preparation for grace, the role of infused grace, the necessity for caritas, the sacrament of penance, the necessity for contrition, the abilities or inabilities of the Christian both in a state of sin and a state of grace, the effect of sin on the freedom or bondage of the will, the nature and power of concupiscence and the loss of original righteousness, the possibilities of congruous and condign merits, and the nature of predestination. The underlying theological anthropology of the

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particular theologian was the determining factor in explaining these various issues. However, regardless of profound differences, medieval theologians agreed that justiﬁcation required a process or pilgrimage from sin to grace, from death to purgatory, and ﬁnally the reward of eternal life. Having been incorporated into the church by the sacrament of baptism, the infant was thereby forgiven the guilt of original sin but, due to the continued presence of concupiscence, the viator would fall again into mortal sin. Through the repeatable sacrament of penance, the sinner was reinstated into a state of grace. The sacrament of penance required contrition and confession on the part of the sinner, absolution spoken by the priest, and the performance of works of satisfaction. Absolution changed the penalty for mortal sin by canceling the guilt and commuting the eternal into temporal punishment. The works of satisfaction must be completed in this life or (circa 1170) in purgatory. Moreover, in the sacrament of penance the viator received the infusion of justifying grace or caritas (gratia gratum faciens). By means of this faith now formed by love, the Christian was able to earn merits, be they congruous or condign, in a state of grace. The viator would attain eternal life if he persevered to the end and died in a state of grace. At the end of one’s earthly life, the Christian faced judgment. Medieval theologians conceived of two forms of judgment.2 At the moment of death, one faced the individual judgment, at which time God would decide whether the soul went to paradise, purgatory, or hell. If one’s temporal satisfactions were not completed and further payment and puriﬁcation were necessary, the believer could expect a stay of varying amounts of time in purgatory. This time could be quite lengthy if, as one late medieval preacher claimed, a single mortal sin would require 2,548 years of satisfaction in purgatory!3 The second judgment was the last judgment. In this ﬁnal judgment, the body and soul would be reunited and Christ, as judge of the world, would ratify the decision handed down at the individual judgment. The process of justiﬁcation presupposed both the necessity for satisfying the justice of God and the requirement that one must become holy before one could stand before God. This ordo salutis had as its aim the puriﬁcation, healing, and return of the sinner to a state of inherent righteousness. Metaphors about “water” and “cleansing” frequently described this process. The preacher would explain that baptism washed away the stain of original sin while the sacrament of penance cleansed and puriﬁed the soul that had fallen into mortal sin. As one medieval preacher explained, the penitential process brought the sinner back to baptism.4 As Steven Ozment stated, “For the medieval theologian, it is axiomatic that the viator-status of Christian life is suspended only in direct proportion to the degree to which the Christian is no longer sinful in re.”5 Since “like is known by like,” a holy God can accept only a holy creature. Only the soul that has been puriﬁed by the infusion of justifying grace would be transformed into the likeness of God. The sacramental system of the church

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had for its raison d’être the transformation into holiness through grace and ﬁdes caritate formata. The unitive principle between God and creature was similitudo, a likeness or transformation into holiness through the unitive bond and power of caritas. It is important to note the role of the Spirit in medieval theologies of justiﬁcation. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Holy Spirit was identiﬁed primarily (though never exclusively) with the theological virtue of love. Peter Lombard identiﬁed the caritas infused into the soul with the Holy Spirit itself. Thomas Aquinas challenged this view by arguing that the uncreated Holy Spirit could not be in union with the created human spirit because it was necessary to maintain the ontological distinction between the divine and the human.6 By the late Middle Ages, many conceived of caritas as a gift of the Holy Spirit. However, these years also witnessed the critique of the habitus theory. Thinkers such as Gerson and Staupitz reafﬁrmed that the Holy Spirit could be present directly within the soul.7 In any event, the infused Spirit or habit of grace gradually transformed the believer whose faith was now formed by love. The virtue of love formed faith and raised it to a new spiritual quality. Caritas formed and directed all other virtues in their loving orientation toward God.8 The infused caritas in the soul expressed itself in the works of love that enabled the viator to attain salvation. The fundamental condition for one’s salvation was “being made righteous” through some form of cooperation with this grace of God. The believer is an active participant in this process of transformation. The sinner must make satisfaction by cooperating with grace and earning a continuation of the state of grace. As Berndt Hamm has explained, “The nature of justiﬁcation, its forma, is the new quality of grace shown in love, a quality that is acquired by man, and here indeed the giving and working of God has become so much his own that they are the well-spring of his own free movement and a self-realization resulting from his actions, with the aim of achieving eternal life.” As Hamm concluded, the medieval doctrine of salvation was “an ontology of righteousness determining man’s righteous conduct and relation to salvation from the viewpoint of his moral quality, and ideologically relating that morality in action to man’s ﬁnal acceptance into sanctiﬁcation. . . . the justiﬁcation of the sinner, his pardon and acceptance as a child of God, are expressed when he is made righteous and his soul transformed through the quality of grace.”9 As the Council of Trent was to make clear, the “single formal cause” of justiﬁcation is the “justice of God, not that by which he himself is just but that by which he makes us just.” At ﬁrst glance this sentence could be read as Luther’s discovery of the meaning of the phrase “the righteousness of God.” However, Trent proceeded to distinguish carefully between Luther’s interpretation of “the righteousness of God” and the orthodox reading that rejected any notion of imputation. According to the decree at Trent, God “makes us just” because justiﬁcation includes inner renewal, that is, “receiving justice within us.”10 The caritas, poured forth by the

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Holy Spirit, inheres in the soul of the Christian. To be justiﬁed, one must become truly or inherently righteous. This inherent righteousness, when complete, is that which allows the believer to stand before a holy God. The necessity for holiness bore important consequences for the issue of certitude. In Catholic theology, the need for holiness meant that, absent a special revelation, the viator could not know with absolute certitude that he was saved. Anyone claiming the personal or subjective certitude of salvation would have to be claiming to be holy, a claim that would make a person guilty of the sin of pride or presumption. In medieval theology, including Trent, the individual could not know with subjective certitude whether he was in a state of grace or whether he would be saved at the time of judgment. The pivotal biblical text was Ecclesiastes 9:1: “No one knows whether he is worthy of God’s love or hatred.” The continual presence of sin was the proof of one’s lack of holiness and, therefore, kept one in a state of uncertainty. The viator, therefore, quite rightly experienced a “pious doubt” because as Trent would decree, “so each one when he considers himself and his own weakness and disposition may have fear and apprehension concerning his own grace, since no man can know with the certainty of faith which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God.”11 Two phrases in these citations deserve special attention. By referring to the activity of “considering oneself and his own weakness and disposition,” Trent articulated the continual need for holiness. Since such consideration or selfexamination would always uncover sin, the “certainty of faith” was not possible with regard to one’s salvation. Medieval theologians agreed that holiness and certitude canceled each other out. However, Catholic teaching did allow other forms of certitude. The viator should have the objective certitude of salvation; that is, the ﬁrm belief that God will, indeed, save the elect.12 This certainty was based on the will of God and not on the knowledge or disposition of the human being. Consequently, while one could be certain that God would save the elect, no one could know whether he or she would be among that chosen group. Still, the viator could have a conjectural certainty that he was saved.13 Two thinkers, Gabriel Biel and Johann von Staupitz, both decisive in Luther’s development, discussed this conjectural or suppositional certainty. According to Gabriel Biel, such things as experiencing the light of truth, delighting in good works, and feeling peace of the conscience could provide conjectural certainty. Biel warned, however, that such signs might also be tricks of the devil.14 Suspended between hope and fear, Biel’s Christian could have no ﬁnal certitude of grace or of salvation. As David Steinmetz explained regarding Johannes von Staupitz, “The basic uncertainty of grace was not simply an intellectual problem engaged by the academic theologian in the classroom; it was an existential problem encountered by the pastor in the parish.”15 Although we do not know the extent of this

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problem, we do know that thinkers such as Staupitz addressed this pastoral dimension in his writings by discussing the signs of conjectural certainty. These signs included the consideration of the nature of God as a merciful Father, the love demonstrated by Christ’s cruciﬁxion, the transforming work of grace in one’s own soul, the sacraments working ex opere operato and received by one who presented no obstacle, and the struggle against temptation. Nonetheless, these very real means to certainty of salvation were only presumptive; one could still fall into mortal sin or die in a state of sin.16 Ultimately one could not know whether he or she was “worthy of love or hatred.” The foregoing sketch of the various discussions of justiﬁcation raises the question about the nature of late medieval religion. Luther’s reﬂections in his 1545 Preface to the Psalms has fueled the debate as to whether the religion of the late Middle Ages was characterized by anxiety over sin. In this preface Luther portrayed himself as a monk striving for perfection but plagued by the guilt of sin and the fear of God.17 The question then arises as to whether the religion of this age can be characterized by such anxiety. The ﬂexibility and diversity of late medieval religion deﬁes efforts to brand this piety in any one way. For historians of this period, one of the most hotly debated topics is the importance and effect of the sacrament of penance. Johan Huizinga and, more recently, Steven Ozment, Jean Delumeau, and others have stressed the pessimism and darkness of late medieval religion. For Huizinga, the vision of death was prominent in the preaching and piety of the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries. According to Huizinga, this vision of death was truly “macabre” in the modern sense of the term. It was in the fourteenth century that the strange word macabre appeared. The danse macabre originated in France; its most famous depiction was in the 1424 wall painting in the Hall of Columns in the Cemetery of the Innocents in Paris. The ars moriendi was the creation of the ﬁfteenth century; it gained wide circulation through printing and the woodcut. The horror of the hour of death was depicted with great dread in the ﬁgure of Lazarus and the fear of the death struggle where the sinner had to confront the “Four Last Things.”18 Ozment argued that the late medieval penitential system and practices had terrorized the conscience. According to Ozment, “traditional church authority and piety no longer served the religious needs of large numbers of people and had become psychologically and ﬁnancially oppressive.”19 Delumeau found sin, guilt, and fear to be among the dominant religious themes of the late Middle Ages.20 Some historians have challenged this portrait of the late medieval world. Lawrence Duggan rejected Ozment’s thesis that the late medieval penitential process was burdensome and repressive. Duggan argued that lay people were quite capable of avoiding the “tough” priests and ﬁnding lenient confessors in order to fulﬁll their Easter duty. Duggan also astutely pointed out that many early Protestants were scandalized by the shockingly “easy” way in which Catholics could cleanse their consciences by simply confessing on Saturday

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they could receive the body and blood of Christ on Sunday.21 According to this criticism, the confessional actually encouraged complacency, not anxiety. Thomas Tentler’s examination of confessional practices and manuals demonstrated that the ideal was not to inspire guilt and anxiety but to strike a balance between guilt and comfort; as an instrument of discipline, the confessor tried to balance the confession of guilt with the comfort inspired by the words of absolution.22 John Bossy has maintained that the penitential system possessed important and beneﬁcial elements, particularly the lessening of social hostility and the encouragement of communal reconciliation.23 From his examination of the pamphlet literature, Euan Cameron has argued that “the confessional did not ﬁgure as the one supremely important grievance against the old Church; it was only ever (at most) one issue among many.”24 Noting the infrequency of the sacrament of penance, W. David Myers concluded, “the evidence indicates that spiritual anxiety caused by the penitential system was not a widespread phenomenon in pre-Reformation Latin Christendom.” Agreeing with Duggan, Myers argued, “Confession was too easy, not too hard.”25 These ﬁndings reafﬁrm the earlier study of sermons in late medieval and reformation France by Larissa Taylor: While the reports of the preachers conﬁrm a general reluctance among the population to avoid more than minimal confessional requirements, this is not to say that people felt an intolerable Angst about the status of their salvation. There is very little in the sermons to support the idea that a majority of people felt that, despite their best efforts, they could not do what God—and the Catholic Church— required of them. Fear there may have been, but it was of a more mundane sort.26 There has been a renewed interest in penitence both on the eve of, and during, the Reformation. As Tentler observes, for many scholars the skeptical voices “will not go away.”27 Recent research on sermons, city ordinances, and archival documents reveal that penance did “loom large” in the era of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. According to Katherine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer, “penitence reached beyond a concern for individual sin and salvation to the heart of Catholic and Protestant self-deﬁnition and communal identity.”28 Scholars have also recognized the importance of preaching as essential to the study of late medieval piety. Richard Kieckhefer has noted that the late Middle Ages “was a preached culture.” Many preachers drew multitudes. Both Franciscans and Dominicans devoted themselves to the mission of preaching and “hearing them preach constituted an important part of later medieval devotional practice.”29 Moreover, we are able to gauge the popularity of certain sermon collections by the number of times they were printed and reprinted. In her study of late medieval sermons, Anne Thayer maintained that penitence

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was “central to late medieval Catholicism and . . . a pervasive concern of popular preachers.”30 Thayer divided the “relentless” preaching on penance into three types of sermons: “rigorist,” “moderate,” and “absolutionist.” “Rigorist” preachers emphasized true contrition and rigorist satisfaction. The confessor was primarily the one who both discerned and, above all, judged sins.31 “Moderate” preachers promoted confession and contrition. They stressed the sacramental powers of the priest and, therefore, were strong proponents of the institutional church and the spiritual help it offered. The confessor was both the judge of sin and the giver of absolution. Confessors also taught that contrition and satisfaction were the responsibility of the penitent and required signiﬁcant effort.32 The “absolutionist” preachers stressed confession to such an extent that contrition and satisfaction became minimal. The confessor was primarily the giver of absolution that should result in peace of mind. Such preachers emphasized the mercy of God and the limited abilities of humanity. These preachers advocated only very moderate satisfactions.33 Thayer’s thesis is that the regional popularity of these various forms of preaching had an important impact on the success or failure of the Reformation. In those parts of France and Italy where absolutionist preaching was prominent, the relief offered by the doctrine of sola ﬁde found little acceptance. However, rigorist preaching in Germany was important for Luther’s formation and rebellion against the medieval penitential system. In such places as Germany, the Netherlands, and certain areas in France, reaction against rigorist preaching helped further the success of the Reformation.34 Several scholars have studied late medieval piety in its numerous interrelated aspects. Kieckhefer places penitence in the wider context of “devotionalism.” Among the major themes of this devotional piety in which he ﬁnds a major penitential element are the passion of Christ, the importance of Mary, and the rise in Eucharistic devotion. The devotion to the Passion, he explains, “was ubiquitous in late medieval piety.”35 Popularized by the Franciscans, this devotional theme found expression in pilgrimages, major developments in the art of the period, (especially the Pietà and the focus on the wounds of Christ), and the development of the Stations of the Cross. In these devotions Kieckhefer sees a “violence of emotion.” German cruciﬁxes frequently portrayed Christ’s body in “grotesquely distorted fashion with blood gushing profusely from his wounds.” As Kieckhefer has noted, there is a parallel to be found in Julian of Norwich’s visions of the Cruciﬁxion and in the depiction of “barbaric cruelties” inﬂicted on Christ in the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch and his followers.36 The importance of Marian devotion was evident in the development of the Rosary as well as in the emphasis on her exaltation to regal status. Mary was the “universal patroness” who was usually seated on a throne and wearing a crown. Above all, she was a protectress who was sought for the pardon of sin. Devotion to Mary was an integral part of the “penitential element” in late medieval piety. Her most important function was to protect sinners, mitigate their guilt, and to

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obtain mercy for them at the throne of judgment.37 As a “co-redemptrix” she participated in Christ’s salviﬁc work. Finally, the Eucharistic devotions of the late Middle Ages gave evidence of a “rapidly increasing fascination for the consecrated Host itself.” The custom of elevating the Host (begun in the early thirteenth century) quite suddenly became widespread. According to Kieckhefer, “By the middle of the [thirteenth] century the custom had spread widely throughout Western Christendom, and it clearly answered a popular craving to see the miraculously transubstantiated Host.” By the end of the century bishops were granting indulgences for veneration to the elevated Host. Kieckhefer astutely observes that while few people received communion more than annually, “To the end of the Middle Ages the Eucharist was used perhaps more as a focus for devotion than as a sacrament.”38 It was the visible elevation, display, and veneration of the Eucharist that captured the imagination of the late Middle Ages. As we will see, the requirements for confession and a worthy disposition necessary for partaking of the Eucharist bore, for some people, a signiﬁcant penitential aspect. In his extensive study of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation, Berndt Hamm has taken account of the sermons as well as the art, devotional literature, and theological works of this era. Hamm has argued that two central concepts help bring into focus the dizzying variety and complexity of late medieval religion: “Normative Zentrierung”39 and “Frömmigkeitstheologie.”40 We focus here on the latter. Frömmigkeitstheologie is Hamm’s term for the late medieval concern with piety and the theology of pastoral care. He ﬁnds much of this literature to be concerned with penance or leading the proper penitential life. Analyzing urban preaching in the ﬁfteenth century, Hamm distinguished three kinds of preachers. Savonarola emphasized the relentless severity of the Deus iudex. His sermons exempliﬁed the menacing and terrifying type of penitential preaching that focused on God’s punishing justice. He prophesied the time of judgment when, in 1494, Charles VIII became the “sword of the Lord.” After 1494, however, Savonarola changed his goal from saving a small remnant to saving the city of Florence. Nonetheless, the possibility of renewal and mercy was always determined by the avenging righteousness of a wrathful God. The puriﬁcation of Florence was the project of a devastating judgment and a terrifying compassion of God (terriﬁca misericordia). Divine mercy, Savonarola explained, was discharged according to the measurement of his punishing and rewarding justice. In Savonarola we ﬁnd an unrelenting demand for righteousness that required puriﬁcation by repentance and penance.41 According to Hamm, Johannes von Staupitz was a preacher of mercy with no trace of God’s terrifying and threatening justice. In Staupitz, Hamm ﬁnds not the demand for purity and perfection but the gift of God’s mercy to those who were still unclean. In Hamm’s analysis, Staupitz challenged “a fanaticism

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of puriﬁcation.” Like Steinmetz, Hamm ﬁnds the core of Staupitz’s message to be the Misericordia Dei. The key concepts of his preaching were mercy, trust, and conﬁdence.42 Hamm’s last ﬁgure is Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg, who serves as the type of preacher, in the nominalist tradition of Gabriel Biel who tried to ﬁnd a balance between justice and mercy.43 When speaking to a lay audience, he stressed both humility and the reality of God’s just verdict on sin. When speaking to monastic circles, Geiler concentrated on hope and the boundlessness of God’s mercy and forgiveness. Geiler always wanted to motivate his listeners to moral excellence and, consequently, stressed ethical strictness. The believer must achieve a pure love of God and true contrition for sins. By their natural powers, human beings can bring forth this highest love of God as well as the sorrow of contrition. In doing so, the Christian must keep in mind the severity of divine judgment. However, Geiler assured his hearers that God would not reject those who “did their very best.”44 Believers who are spiritually anxious must trust in God’s mercy and remember that they have powerful advocates and intercessors in Christ and Mary. In Geiler we see a message that stressed both the mercy and the awe-inspiring righteousness of God. Most importantly, Hamm sees that the late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie in its diverse forms responded to a central concern; namely, what must the penitent feel? What must the penitent be capable of spiritually? In such late medieval ﬁgures as Jean Gerson and Johannes von Paltz, Hamm ﬁnds the “minimalization” of spiritual requirements on the part of the penitent to be a central theme.45 In an effort to offer a theology of comfort, many late medieval preachers and theologians taught that “at least” (saltem) one should have a good will and should desire true contrition. Because vera contritio was perceived by many to be too difﬁcult and uncertain, Paltz reduced the requirements and assured the maximi peccatores that if they “desired to desire” or grieved over not being able to grieve properly, they would be saved.46 According to Hamm, late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie addressed an “increasingly pervasive spiritual malady, the weakness of the human heart to feel what it should.” The spirituality of this age is marked by “a sense of spiritual disillusionment, a critical observation of how widespread, even among those in monastic orders, is the inability to love and feel regret—let alone to experience the blissful sensation of sweet proximity to God.”47 The “external” and “more secure” way taught by Paltz was to rely on the help found in the sacriﬁce and merit of Christ’s passion, the intercession of the saints, and the means of grace available through the institutional church.48 Paltz thereby reduced the required human abilities to a minimum in order to assure the fearful that God would indeed save them. This “pastoral method of minimalization” was shared by other late medieval ﬁgures. Sven Grosse had depicted this phenomenon in the thought of Jean Gerson. According to Grosse, Gerson also stressed the need to unburden sinners. God, he taught, did not overburden those weakened by sin. God only

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requires that which lies within our power. Gerson placed the facere quod in se est in the context of this theology of comfort and assurance.49 For Gerson, the height of spiritual ability lies in mystical theology, where one attains a transcendence of one’s own spiritual capabilities. Bowing in total humility and doubting one’s spiritual capacities, the sinner feels the compassion or mercy of God and ﬁnds the all-important “certainty of hope.”50 The certainty of hope rests solely on God’s promise to be merciful. Coram Deo, sinners see only their emptiness and despair of any adequate merit, contrition, or satisfaction. Hope allows the sinner to pass beyond the uncertainty of his own abilities and provides assurance of salvation. Staupitz also recognized the need for assurance, especially regarding the spiritual deﬁciencies of true repentance and contrition. He, too, placed the facere quod in se est within a theology of comfort.51 If the sinner does the best he can and entrusts himself to the efﬁcacy of Christ’s passion, God will show mercy. With regard to the need for true contrition, Staupitz did not adopt the Scotist solution that the grace infused in the sacrament of penance would transform attrition into contrition. For Staupitz, it is God’s preceding grace that allows the sinner to repent of his or her sins. If one did not feel true repentance of the heart then he should “be sorrowful that he is not sorrowful” or “grieve that he does not grieve.”52 He must implore God to supplement his spiritual deﬁciency through the suffering of Christ. Staupitz assured the penitent not to doubt that God would be satisﬁed by whatever he was capable of doing and would give his grace. Thus we see the Passion piety, so characteristic of this age, put at the service of a theology of comfort that was the center of the pastoral concern. Larissa Taylor found the same to be true in the popular preaching in France. Most preachers stressed God’s goodness and love for humanity. They encouraged the sinner to see the loving and consoling face of the Holy Spirit.53 The sinner is encouraged to repent and confess because God will not demand the impossible. Sinners have at their disposal the grace dispensed by the church as well as the intercessory activity of Mary and the saints. The image of Christ shedding blood is a favorite image in these sermon collections and once again this Passion piety is put into the service of consolation, gentleness, and comfort. According to Taylor, God’s compassion was a dominant theme in the sermons of this period. In the period from 1460–1560, Catholic preachers taught a theology aimed at helping the ordinary person conform to God’s will and the church’s teaching. Both in its theoretical and practical formulations, popular theology was, on balance, comforting and consolatory, stressing that if a man did everything in his power must he would be saved. Despite a pessimistic anthropology, the preachers put forward a hopeful and optimistic soteriology, which stressed God’s goodness

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and omnipotence. The man or woman who turned to God for solace could conﬁdently expect forgiveness and eternal glory. God was realistic in his expectations, and would not even turn away at failure, for as Jesus promised in the Gospel of Matt. (9:13), “I have come to call, not the self-righteous, but sinners.”54 However, both Taylor and Hamm caution that the theologies of comfort in late medieval piety coexisted with themes of wrath and judgment. Huizinga and Delumeau were not wrong in pointing to the dark side of piety during this era. Death was, indeed, a “ubiquitous theme” in late medieval sermons. The signs of the judgment, including wars, plagues, and famines, were described in detail by the preacher who frequently invoked hell and punishment. Taylor portrays Catholic preaching in terms of both the “God of Judgment, God of Love.”55 Hamm notes that the same preachers who stressed exoneration and comfort also wanted the sinner to remember the dies irae, the fearful consequence of deadly sin, the severity of the divine judgment, the torments of purgatory, and the horror of eternal damnation.56 Late medieval piety was both a theology of judgment and a theology of comfort. In fact, the very need to help the spiritually weak presupposed the anticipation of the Last Judgment. It should be no surprise that these two themes were inseparable. If God were not so demanding and his justice so severe, there would be no need to offer mercy, consolation, and assurance. These studies demonstrate the daunting task of trying to characterize the wide spectrum of late medieval spirituality. They do, however, indicate certain important trends. The stress on the Passion and on the intercession of Mary show the preoccupation with sin, judgment, and the need for intercession. The need for true contrition and the concern over the lack of spiritual feelings reveal an emphasis on interiority, experience, and affectivity. For thinkers such as Gerson and Staupitz, the offer of assurance went hand in hand with the requirement that the penitent measure and analyze interior experiences of shame, sorrow, and love–or the lack thereof. The ideal of true contrition required a sorrow for sins that surpassed the fear of hell that evoked a feeling of a genuine loving sorrow for offending God. We also ﬁnd in this material that although the severity of the divine judgment was always presupposed, the devotional, sermonic, and pastoral piety often aimed at consolation. The pervasiveness of penance as a theme did not result necessarily in the promotion of spiritual dread and anxiety. Nonetheless, we should also be aware that the consistent concern to offer assurance must have, for many, assumed what Hamm calls the “intensiﬁed seeking for guarantees regarding grace and salvation.”57 Moreover, in this literature we discover that medieval theology and piety offered something other than objective and conjectural certitude. By turning to the Frömmigkeitstheologie of this era, we ﬁnd frequent expressions of a further kind of certitude—that is, the certitude of hope.

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Therefore, we cannot simply conclude that Luther’s statements in 1545 reﬂected late medieval society in its entirety. As Euan Cameron has warned, “To treat the soul-searching remarks of an observant eremite and theologian not only as accurate autobiography, but also as typical of the spirituality of the mass of lay people in pre-Reformation Europe is, therefore, to say the least, imprudent.”58 Of course, none of the studies discussed above rely on Luther’s soul-searching comments of 1545; these scholars based their arguments on church records, devotional practices, late medieval art, pastoral treatises, and sermonic literature. They do not unanimously support any one single idea, let alone a dominant wide-ranging spiritual anguish about the confessional. They do show that the concern with penance cannot be derived from the infrequency of the sacrament alone. The study of sermons and treatises on pastoral theology and piety examined above do indicate a widespread concern with penitence. Furthermore, the concern with penitence is one that continued into Protestant and Catholic Europe. Luther’s comments in the 1545 Preface may reﬂect what Thayer has termed the rigorist approach in preaching about penitence. However, it is worth noting that other reformers such as Zwingli and Calvin, who also strenuously emphasized the certainty of salvation, did not emphasize a preceding spiritual anguish over sin and penance. The claim to the certainty of salvation, which came to characterize Reformation theology, did not always originate in the personal preoccupation with sin and damnation. Nevertheless, regardless of the ﬁnal verdict that scholars may someday reach on penance and late medieval spirituality, the unequivocal and stubborn fact remains that the problem of certainty that came to permeate sixteenthcentury debates began with Luther’s writings on sin and salvation. Therefore, it is here that we, too, must begin. Bengt Hägglund was clearly correct in stating that the certainty of salvation was for Luther the “Herzstűck der Theologie.”59 Scholars have long recognized that, on the issue of subjective certitude of salvation, the magisterial reformers decisively parted with Catholicism. There is an august body of research that has focused on the development of Luther’s thought in an attempt to “date” and to explain his discovery of justiﬁcation by faith and the certitude of salvation. I want to pursue the profound implications of this earlier scholarship by probing, in some detail, the manner or way in which the well-documented concern for the certainty of salvation was argued, expressed, and maintained by Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. In so doing, I will concentrate on the exposition of Scripture, the work of the Holy Spirit, and the role of doubt. Luther’s early writings reveal the way in which certitude gradually came to deﬁne his theology.60 By looking brieﬂy at some of these texts we can perceive how Luther struggled to deﬁne the certainty of faith. However, it is important to observe, especially in comparison to his statements in the 1545 Preface to the Psalms, that in his earliest writings Luther did not at all champion the certitude of salvation.61 His Lectures on Romans and his initial treatment of indulgences

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depicted a deep-seated concern over the question of certainty but in terms of a deceptive or false spiritual security. The warnings against such security revolved around Luther’s preoccupation with self-deception. For Luther, self-deception characterized the fallen human condition and deﬁned our stance before God. Furthermore, as a part of his lifelong concern with the devil, Luther argued that Satan was the cause of human self-deception. Such deception was a “trick” of the devil that caused human beings to fail to recognize the true depth and power of sin. Throughout the Lectures on Romans, Luther distinguished between the “inexperienced” and the “more discerning.” Satan deceives the inexperienced so that “they do not see their own weaknesses and the inclination of their wicked will.” Such “inexperienced” people “think they are doing enough” and “must therefore be regarded as righteous before God.”62 These are the sinners who, thinking they have been “purged by confession,” proceed to “go their own way smug and in no way anxious to cleanse their inner sin by crying to God that it may not be imputed to them.” Such a person looks only at his “actual sin” and is “concerned that it be purged quickly.” He becomes “presumptuous and smug, because through the sacrament of Confession he knows he is purged and thus goes on his way without any fear and is no longer aware of any sin in him.”63 These statements do not depict a widespread anxiety over salvation. Rather they support the view that some reformers believed it was, indeed, too easy to get rid of sin, not too hard. Luther always expressed this concern in terms of the powerful web of deception that imprisoned the fallen human mind. These people were, in Luther’s view, “inexperienced” in the true pain of sin and in the true fear that one should have before a righteous God. They were “smug,” “lazy,” “presumptuous,” “lukewarm,” and “secure.”64 Luther also discussed the “more discerning” or “experienced” people whom Satan deceives by means of a “subtler delusion.” Satan causes these people “to do their good works with joy and happiness,”65 thereby concealing their weakness from them. They begin to believe that they have grace and “with a most hidden subtlety they come to be more pleased with themselves than with others and are proud until they have become completely taken up with their own uniqueness and superstition as is often the case with heretics and stubborn people under the appearance of truth and righteousness in a ‘zeal which is not enlightened.’”66 Such persons would always be more fascinating to Luther. Their honestly good intentions and their drive toward holiness more deeply masked their self-deception. This group would fuel Luther’s preoccupation with the ambiguous and dangerous nature of appearances, a concern that would preoccupy Luther throughout his life. These people, acting with the always-deluding character of “zeal,” live their lives “under the appearance of obedience and fear of God.” Consequently, they “feverishly engage in works” and “burn with great zeal for the Law.” Luther repeatedly characterized them as “zealous” and “pious.”67

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Luther’s fascination with this group was rooted in the deceptive nature of goodness, experience, and affectivity. We will see that this preoccupation with deception grew deeper and deeper in Luther’s thought. His interest in such persons was based on the belief that they did not know that they were acting “under the appearance” of something good. As we will see in the course of this study, the deception of such people is so deep that they mistake appearances, including “psychological” or spiritual appearances, for reality. They are not hypocrites who know they are faking their true intentions; rather, they genuinely believe in their piety and their obedience to the Law. Luther described them by saying, “They are people who are bewitched by the messenger of Satan under the appearance of some spiritual good, for which they long more ardently, indeed more tenaciously, than any adulterer for a woman or a miser for his money.” Luther concluded that such people, “love righteousness, prayers, studies, readings, devotions, meditations, and other good works.”68 They believe themselves to be healthy when, in reality, they are sick. In Luther’s view, they “tenaciously believe” that they are acting in a pious manner and doing truly good works. Hence they are like those who “bowed the knee to Baal.” Luther noted that the passage about Baal depicted the idolaters as acting “with a pious intent” and with “zeal” for the worship of God. However, as Luther never tired of reminding his audience, “zeal is the mind, the head of the old serpent.” It was with “unenlightened zeal” that they killed the prophets.”69 Satan keeps deceiving these “more discerning” persons by “urging them on to ever greater works.” Although the early Luther was concerned with the temptation of a false security, the problem of real certitude also permeated his work. Karl Holl addressed the ambiguity of Luther’s thought on this subject in the Lectures on Romans. Holl argued that, for Luther, the person who truly believed in the forgiveness of sins had a genuine peace of conscience. God reveals his desire to save and thereby creates a communion between himself and the sinner. The believer knows that he is accepted by God and therefore advances to a new relationship with God. The believer then becomes subject to divine judgment. In this subjection, humility is the most important and fundamental Christian virtue. Because of this new relationship, God turns the sinner in a new direction, and the sinner is thereby truly made righteous through a process of healing and the gradual expulsion of sin. This constituted the progression of the sinner into the state of righteousness. Like a sculptor, God sees the ﬁnal end that motivates him as he begins to apply his tools to a block of crude marble. Just as the sculptor sees the ﬁnal shape of the object, so, too, God sees the sinner’s future righteousness. God promises that this process of renewal toward righteousness will end in completion. According to Holl, this sanative concept of justiﬁcation places the state of the sinner between present sinfulness in re and ﬁnal sanctiﬁcation in spe.70 The new relationship of the sinner and God consists primarily in the continual movement of hope and the longing for blessedness.

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Since Holl’s work, many scholars have recognized that the certainty of salvation is central in Luther’s thought. However, they see the shift toward certainty occurring around the year 1518. Thus Grisar argued that Luther developed the idea that saving or justifying faith consisted of complete certitude of one’s personal salvation.71 Bizer saw 1518 as the decisive year when Luther came to understand faith as justiﬁcation and the assurance of one’s own forgiveness.72 Jared Wicks has argued meticulously that, in the Lectures on Romans, Luther developed only the “ﬁrst indications of a shift of emphasis . . . toward concentration on faith as the consoling certainty of one’s own forgiveness.”73 Much like Axel Gyllenkrok, Wicks contends that in Luther’s early works the themes of humility and the constant seeking for grace were still dominant “over the great theme of certitude of justiﬁcation in Luther’s works of 1518.”74 In the Lectures on Romans, Luther did express an intensified certitude of hope.75 This hope was rooted in the continual movement of the sinner as one who was advancing, yearning, and progressing.76 Commenting on Romans 1:17, Luther defined the righteous of God as “completely from faith.” But he explained this righteousness “in such a way that through its development [righteousness] does not make its appearance but becomes a clearer faith.” 77 The biblical passages cited in support of his argument were depictions of the human being in motion; namely, II Corinthians 3:18 (“We are being changed . . . from one degree of glory to another”), and Revelation 22:11 (“He that is righteous, let him be made righteous still”). On the basis of these passages Luther concluded, “In other words, no one should be of the opinion that he has already obtained (Phil. 3:12) and thus stops growing, that is, starts declining.”78 Luther emphasized that the life of the Christian “is not a static thing, but in movement from good to better, just as a sick man proceeds from sickness to health.”79 Repeatedly, Luther emphasized this continual motion: “Thus a man is in sin as the terminus a quo and righteousness as the terminus ad quem.” 80 The point Luther drove home again and again is that one must continually advance, never stopping, never ceasing to make progress. In a near-contemporary passage in the first Lectures on Galatians, Luther wrote, “It is clear that the Christian life does not consist in being but in becoming, not in victory but in a struggle, not in justice but in justification, not in attaining but in moving onward, not in purity but in purification. . . .”81 During this period Luther still operated under the assumption that the required holiness canceled the subjective certitude of salvation. Luther always remained true to the idea that the life of faith was one of constant movement. However, he came to define that movement not as progress from good to better but from uncertainty to certainty. Luther’s foray into the debate with Rome was also a criticism of false pax et securitas. In fact, his critique of indulgences again lends support to Duggan’s

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thesis that the early reformers were shocked that the required penance was too easy. For Luther, the buying of indulgence letters signaled a dangerous indifference to the power of sin and the need for true contrition and repentance. In his letter to Cardinal Albrecht, Archbishop of Mainz (1517), Luther argued passionately against a false sense of security about one’s salvation that was based on indulgences. He warned that “the poor souls believe that when they have bought indulgence letters they are then assured of their salvation . . . they assume that the grace obtained through these indulgences is so completely effective that there is no sin of such magnitude that it cannot be forgiven.”82 These false assurances, Luther continued, are directing souls to their death, for “no man can be assured of his salvation by any Episcopal function. He is not even assured of his salvation by the infusion of God’s grace, because the Apostle orders us to work out our salvation constantly ‘in fear and trembling.’”83 Since Scripture everywhere proclaimed the difﬁculty of salvation, Luther asked, “How can [the indulgence preachers] then make the people feel secure and without fear by means of those false stories and promises of pardons?”84 Underlying Luther’s warning about a deceptive false security was the assumption that true contrition and the progressive interior cleansing of the soul were necessary for the forgiveness of sins and salvation. Instead of seeking indulgences, the viator should wage war against concupiscence, live the life of penance by bearing the cross, and embrace both suffering and death. In his Tractatus de indulgentiis (1517) Luther argued that since indulgences could not grant the infused grace of justiﬁcation necessary to root out concupiscence and affect the progressive holiness of the soul, they could not provide security of salvation.85 Indulgences, he said, could neither lessen the “infection of our nature” nor increase charity and interior virtue. Luther warned that indulgences must never become “a cause of security, laziness, and neglect of interior grace.” Infused grace was “necessary for the extirpation of concupiscence until it is completely rooted out.”86 Throughout these early texts Luther assumed that justiﬁcation was a process of puriﬁcation, a gradual healing and purging of the soul. Here, too, we see that for Luther the viator always had to be in movement by sighing, repenting, and striving earnestly for the grace of interior healing. Anything that cut that process short was a deceptive security and actually sent the viator back into deeper and more deceptive sin.87 Trust in indulgences created this false security and resulted in spiritual apathy, inactivity, and lack of progress. The continual presence of concupiscence meant that believers must necessarily seek after God’s healing grace. At this point Luther could cite Revelation 21:27, (“nothing deﬁled will enter,”) in order to insist on the increase of charity and interior virtue. Therefore, Luther insisted that plenary indulgences were insufﬁcient, “for thereby you receive neither interior grace, nor do you advance . . . you must still make efforts to advance and you must take care not to grow lethargic and snore away thinking you are puriﬁed

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and secure.” We see in this last sentence that only purity could provide security. Because purity and certainty were inseparable, Luther, in a thoroughly traditional manner, had to deny the certitude of salvation.88 Nonetheless, issues involving certitude and doubt did permeate Luther’s thought throughout his early writings. He continually worried about such problems as self-deception, the issue of deceptive intentions and motives, and the ambiguous character of appearances and experiences. These are all themes that will recur and deepen in Luther’s thought as he increasingly wrestled with, and defended the reality of, certitude. Moreover, as Wicks correctly states, “echoing in every line of Luther’s treatise [on indulgences] is the incessant question about the degree of certitude with which one may speak of indulgences having an effect.”89 Can indulgences guarantee immediate entrance into heaven? Do we know “without any doubt” that God accepts the intercession of the whole church for all or part of the interior healing of the soul? Can we be certain that we are “worthily contrite” and therefore have grounds for the certainty of salvation? Can we be certain that God releases the contrite sinner through indulgences? Is it certain that indulgences release a person from purgatory? Luther made allowance only for the idea that God would accept the prayer of the church when one obtained an indulgence for the dead. He answered all the other questions in the negative.90 Indulgences could neither make one contrite nor could they purify the soul. Consequently, they could not provide certainty. In this treatise Luther was consistent with the marginal gloss on Romans 8:38, where he argued that without a special revelation no one could be sure of his personal salvation. However, in the scholia on Romans Luther could say, “But you still must add: That you do believe this [ forgiveness], because through him you are given the forgiveness of sins. This is the testimony which the Holy Spirit produces in our hearts, saying, ‘Your sins are forgiven you.’ For in this way the apostle believes that a man is justiﬁed by faith (that you believe this both of yourself and also of the elect, that Christ died and made satisfaction for your sins.” Another phrase that would come to play a crucial role in Luther’s thought is found in the marginal gloss on Romans 8:16 where Luther says, “For we are and have only as much as we believe [Tantum enim sumus et habemus, quantum credimus]. Thus he who believes with full faith and trusts that he is a son of God is truly a son of God because in Mark 11:24 we read: ‘Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you receive it, and you will,’ and in Matthew 9:29: ‘According to your faith be it done to you.’” In this passage Luther opposed Matthew 9:29 and Mark 11:24 to the critical verse, Ecclesiastes 9:1.91 The idea of “having as much as you believe” played a critical role in Luther’s developing thought about the sacrament, especially the sacrament of penance. And yet, the gloss on Romans 8:38 shows that Luther did not yet hold to the subjective certitude of salvation. When Paul said, “I am sure” he was referring to a “sure faith.” However, this did not include the personal certainty of salvation. The transitional nature of

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this text becomes evident in his struggles with Ecclesiastes 9:1. In the following gloss Luther still assumed that one could have the certitude of salvation only by a special revelation. “I am sure” in opposition to Eccl. 9:1, “Man does not know whether he is worthy of love or hatred.” The answer is that the Apostle is speaking in his own person and in that of all the elect, because he was certain by revelation that he was a “chosen instrument” (Acts 9:15) and we are all certain of the elect and of all of us. For even though it is certain that the elect of God are saved, yet no one is sure that he has been chosen because of the general rule.92 Thinking about the sacrament of penance, Luther came closer to the certitude of salvation. In scholastic theology or terminology, the words of consecration and absolution were the “form” that constituted the sacrament. In 1518 Luther formulated his argument that the ﬁdes sacramenti, or faith in the words addressed by the priest to the penitent, could provide a true spiritual conﬁdence, peace, and security.93 In thesis 7 of the Resolutiones, on indulgences, Luther explained that only faith in the pro nobis quality of the words of absolution could bring peace. In this same discussion, Luther also rejected the scholastic teaching that unless one had true contrition he could not receive the forgiveness of sins.94 “Gallows repentance” was not sufﬁcient; one had to feel a true and loving sorrow over sins because one has offended God. True repentance was an “inner ache,” a sighing and weeping of the heart arising from the love for God.95 But Luther has come to reject the idea that the fallen human being could ever experientially produce such a sufﬁcient contrition. In fact, he warned against even trying to produce this feeling of sorrow. Instead of going the route of “minimalization” that Hamm found in many late medieval texts, Luther replaced contrition with the ﬁdes sacramenti—that is, a certainty of faith in the sacrament. To be sure, the person who is to be absolved must guard himself very carefully from any doubt that God has remitted his sins in order that he may ﬁnd peace of heart. For if he is uncertain of the anguish of his conscience (as it must always be if it is a true sorrow), yet he is constrained to abide by the judgment of another, not at all on account of the prelate himself or his power, but on account of the word of Christ who cannot lie when he says “Whatever you loose on earth,” [Matt. 16:19]. For faith born of the word will bring peace of conscience, for it is according to this word that the priest shall loose. Whoever seeks peace in another way, for example, inwardly through experience, certainly seems to tempt God and desires to have peace in fact rather than in faith.96

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Luther reasoned that as long as we remained uncertain there could be no remission of sins since there “is not yet remission for us.” We see here Luther’s growing awareness of the ambiguity of human experiences. Objective certitude is totally insufﬁcient in this new ﬁdes sacramenti. Thus Luther concluded, “Indeed one would perish woefully unless it [the remission of guilt] should become certain, for he would not believe that remission had taken place in him.” In thesis 15 Luther repeated the earlier insight expressed in the commentary on Romans that “as a person believes, so it is with him.”97 In thesis 38 he elaborated further by arguing that faith was necessary at all times because “you receive as much as you believe.”98 The sacrament is efﬁcacious pro nobis not because it was performed but “because it is believed.”99 In these discussions, Luther’s purpose was to replace trust in anything subjectively human, including the experience of one’s own disposition, with the certainty of the ﬁdes sacramenti. Faith in the sacrament provided a certainty that rested on something far more reliable than one’s own experience, disposition, and spiritual abilities. This faith was in the word of the sacrament, not one’s own sufﬁcient contrition: “Take care, therefore, that you do not in any manner trust in your own contrition but completely and only in the word of your kindest and most faithful savior Jesus Christ! Your heart may deceive you, but he will not deceive you. . . .”100 Luther realized that none of the traditional solutions solved what was for him the problem of sin: namely, the certainty of forgiveness. Such things as indulgences only made people feel falsely secure and prevented them from recognizing the true and radical depth of their sin. Even the certitude of hope was not enough. By 1518 Luther focused on the question of sufﬁcient contrition and concluded that no such contrition was possible on the part of the human being. He now concerned himself speciﬁcally with the anxiety of the conscience over sin. “More recent theologians,” he wrote, “contribute entirely too much to this torment of conscience by treating and teaching the sacrament of penance in such a way that people learn to trust in the delusion that it is possible to have their sins canceled by their contrition and satisfactions.”101 For Luther, the traditional teaching about the sacrament of penance not only made certainty impossible but contributed to the ever-dangerous abyss of self-deception. Nothing demonstrates more clearly the centrality of certitude in Luther’s early debates with Rome than the controversy with Cajetan.102 In his explanation of the relationship between certitude and the sacrament, Luther had come to see that “the one who approaches the sacrament must believe. Therefore it is not the sacrament but faith in the sacrament that justiﬁes.”103 When Cajetan read such statements, he thought that Luther was creating a new teaching that was contrary to the tradition of the church. He immediately turned his attention to the question of certitude because he detected that this was the pervading concern of Luther’s arguments. Holding the traditional view, Cajetan insisted that contrition did make one worthy to receive the sacrament. However, since no one could be certain that his contrition was sufﬁcient, the penitent could not

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know with certainty that he was in a state of grace. Therefore, Cajetan also concentrated on deﬁning the extent and degree of certainty available to the viator. To clarify this issue he distinguished infused faith from acquired faith. Moreover, he made this distinction precisely by differentiating between the kinds of certainty that the two faiths could provide. Acquired faith was a human work and was directed to “the particular” in the sacrament, such as whether the host was rightly consecrated, whether one was properly disposed, and whether the effect of the sacrament takes effect in me. The all-embracing principle excluding particular facts of this kind from the ambit of infused faith is that infused faith cannot embrace error. Its ground is divine truth. Its object is truth, no less than any acquired knowledge concerns only what is true. But if infused faith were extended to include these particulars, it would at times be embracing error, as is evident from the countless further examples we could cite. Consequently it is not part of infused faith to believe in the effect of absolution in this particular person, that is, in myself. What is of infused faith is rather the belief that absolution rightly given by the church’s minister is efﬁcacious in granting grace to a worthy recipient. This latter faith entails no error, but I can err if I believe in the effect in myself or in this particular individual, since in either of us there could be some obstacle.104 According to Cajetan, acquired faith could never “be infallibly certain of its object.”105 In the case of penance, that “object” is the certainty of forgiveness. This lack of certainty troubled Cajetan not at all. Rather, he insisted, “On this everyone remains in doubt in this life, in accord with the ordinary norm that one does not know whether he is in God’s grace or not.”106 He continued by saying, “There is no problem in contrition being uncertain, for God himself has commanded us to approach the sacraments in just this kind of uncertainty.”107 The “ordinary norm,” Cajetan explained, has always prescribed that one approach the sacrament with a humble uncertainty or a pious doubt. Thus Cajetan argued, “But in view of the one praying, or of that for which one prays, there must at times be a pious doubt about the effect sought. Otherwise, faith would often prove to be mistaken.”108 Cajetan concluded, “Clearly, almost all come to the sacraments of penance and the Eucharist in reverent fear of the Lord and uncertain of being in a state of grace. In fact theologians praise their continuing uncertainty and ordinarily attribute its opposite to presumption or ignorance.”109 Cajetan cited biblical passages such as I Corinthians 11:28 and 11:31 in order to support the traditional view that contrition was necessary in order to receive “worthily” and that this contrition was always uncertain. After his meeting with Cajetan, Luther composed the Acta Augustana (1518) in which he further strengthened his conviction that faith meant certainty. He

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again made clear that this certainty was required for the reception of grace in the sacrament as well as for justiﬁcation. In fact, to participate in the sacrament without the certainty of faith would be to eat to one’s own condemnation.110 To go to the sacrament with doubt was to accuse Christ of lying: “And with your doubt you make Christ a liar, which is a horrible sin.”111 He thoroughly rejected the contritionist view because it relied on an essentially subjective or human ability and was therefore uncertain.112 Luther argued that true presumption was the reliance on one’s own contrition, attitude, disposition, and good works. By now Luther believed that there could never be such a thing as a “sufﬁcient contrition” and, therefore, that assurance and certainty had to lie elsewhere: “Without faith all other things are acts of presumption and desperation. The just person lives not by his attitude but by faith. For this reason you should not harbor any doubt on account of your unworthiness.”113 Luther continued to reafﬁrm the centrality of certainty in his teaching on justiﬁcation by faith. Defending thesis 7, he argued, “I stated that no one could be justiﬁed except by faith. Thus it is clearly necessary that a man must believe with ﬁrm faith that he is justiﬁed and in no way doubt that he will obtain grace. For if he doubts and is uncertain, he is not justiﬁed but rejects grace.” Uncertainty is no longer a “pious doubt” but, rather, the sin of unbelief or a distrust of God’s promises. Referring to prayer, Luther stated, “Therefore we must listen to Christ when he says, ‘Believe that you receive it, and you will.’ Otherwise, all things in the church waver and nothing would stand for certain, which is absurd.”114 It is crucial to see that Luther’s mature view of faith after 1518 was inseparable from his pneumatology. The certitude that was now a part of faith was the work only of the Holy Spirit. The most important biblical verses that expressed this certitude of faith were those in Romans 8:15–16 and Galatians 4:6, both of which referred to the cry of “Abba! Father!” Luther scholars have long identiﬁed Romans 1:17 as the crucial verse for Luther’s theological breakthrough. However, the discussions of justiﬁcation and the righteousness of God that grew out of Luther’s exegesis of Romans 1:17 are not complete without the dimension added by Romans 8:15–-16 (“When we say ‘Abba! Father!’ it is the Spirit himself bearing witness to our spirit that we are children of God,”) and Galatians 4:6 (“And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts, crying ‘Abba! Father!’”). Luther used these verses to oppose the “misinterpretation” of Ecclesiastes 9:1. His various interpretations of the latter verse demonstrate his growing conviction that justiﬁcation by faith inevitably required the certitude of salvation given by the Spirit.115 By the time he wrote his Annotations on Ecclesiastes (1526), Luther ﬁnally removed this verse completely from discussions about salvation by saying that the verse referred only to the world and the administration of political affairs.116 Relying primarily on the “Abba! Father!” passages, Luther identiﬁed the Holy Spirit as the agent of certitude. He emphasized that this certainty about one’s own salvation was never within the power or abilities of the human

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being. The certitude of faith was a gift whereby the Holy Spirit testiﬁes to our hearts “that we are the sons of God.” Luther warned that when the believer asks if this really can be true, he should not turn to his own inner disposition or experience but had to rely on the Spirit who will “inscribe this knowledge and faith deep in our hearts.”117 The Spirit “must bear witness to our spirits and say yea and Amen to the fact that we have become and eternally remain the children of God through faith in Christ.”118 The verse “Abba! Father!” is crucial. Only the Spirit could bring forth this cry from our hearts and grant the soul certitude and peace. The importance of the “Abba! Father!” passages also demonstrates Luther’s conviction that the faith wrought by the Spirit transformed the perception of the human mind. Luther’s understanding of human sin was least innovative in his doctrine of the bondage of the will. On this subject, Luther stood in the Augustinian tradition. His real interest was in the noetic effect of sin in all of its various ramiﬁcations.119 One of the most critical results of the noetic fall was the mind’s misperception of God. Not knowing the true God, fallen humanity created an idol to be appeased. This idol took on the nature of a god whose main characteristic was anger over sin. The primary function of this god was judgment. According to Luther, faith breaks through this false conception and reveals the truly inﬁnite mercy of God. Once again the phrase “Abba! Father!” becomes a radically new epistemological reality. To be able to see God as a “Father” means to be able to perceive God’s mercy and benevolence rather than his anger. To call God “Father” is to see God’s proper work and to take hold of God through Christ. Human reason, which aligns itself with the Law, has an “innate evil” in it that makes us doubt God’s forgiveness and promise.120 Therefore, the fallen mind cannot attain the perception of God as merciful. Because of the inner work of the Spirit, the believer gains the new understanding of God as a Father who wills to save his children. To be able to express certainty through the cry of “Abba! Father!” was, for Luther, to have an entirely new perception of God and of the relationship between God and the soul. This was the noetic healing, effected by the Spirit, which allowed for the certitude of salvation. Luther’s interpretation of Galatians 4:6 (1535) is typical of how he conceived of the Spirit as working in those who confronted despair and were able to utter the cry “Abba! Father!” It is the Spirit of Christ that instills the certainty of one’s salvation in the soul. Because our natural state of mind was to doubt, only the divine Spirit could give this certainty to the human spirit. In addition, God has sent the Son into our hearts, as Paul says here. Now Christ is completely certain that in his Spirit he is pleasing to God. Since we have the same spirit of Christ, we, too, should be certain that we are in a state of grace, on account of him who is certain.121

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We have this innate evil in us that we are in doubt about the favor of God toward us and we cannot believe with certainty that we are pleasing to God . . . Meanwhile, however, the Spirit is helping us in our weakness and interceding for us with sighs too deep for words (Rom. 8:26), and he is bearing witness to our spirit that we are the children of God (Rom. 8:16).122 The Gospel of John also provided Luther with numerous opportunities to identify the Spirit as the giver of certainty. The most important passage was John 14:16, which states, “And I will pray to the Father that He will give you another Comforter to be with you forever.” According to Luther, the term “Comforter” could only mean that the Spirit brought the believer the certainty of salvation. The Spirit “comforts” the soul so that it does not fear and despair over sin. The Spirit brings peace, joy, and certitude. In the face of one’s own sin, the Spirit tells the conscience to remember, “He who is true God who suffered and died for me, and also that this same true man rose from the dead, ascended into heaven etc.; then I can conclude with certainty that my sin was erased and death was conquered by Him and that God no longer views me with anger and disfavor. . . .”123 The Spirit, Luther noted, “is not a Spirit of anger and terror but a Spirit of grace and consolation and that the entire Deity reﬂects sheer comfort.” For Luther, the unity of the three persons in the Trinity became a guarantee that just as the Spirit is a spirit of Comfort, the Father and Son must be the same Comforter.124 Because of the certainty granted by the Spirit the Christian was able to say, “Such power I did not have in me before; for without it I would have had to remain subject to the devil’s power and to the terror and power of death. . . . But now I have a new courage, which Christ gives me through his Spirit and by which I perceive that He is with me and in me.”125 Luther continued to place an unrelenting emphasis on the certainty of salvation given in faith. He also stated repeatedly that such certainty could only come from the Holy Spirit. According to Luther, the “chief point of all Scripture is that we should not doubt but hope with certainty, trust and believe that God is merciful, kind, and patient and that he does not lie and deceive but is faithful and true.”126 Consequently, there can be “no doubt” whether the hatred and wrath of God have been removed. In Luther’s view, the Christian must strive to root out all uncertainty and doubt in order to remain faithful to God’s promise. Even if all the other teachings of Catholicism were true, Luther argued, the teaching that one must be in doubt about salvation would render its teachings blasphemous. If everything else were sound [in the papacy], still this monster of uncertainty [monstrum incertitudinis] is worse than all the other monsters. And although it is obvious that the enemies of Christ teach what is uncertain, because they command consciences to be in doubt,

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still they are so ﬁlled with the madness of Satan that in their smugness they condemn and kill us who disagree with them as though we were the heretics and they were completely certain of their doctrine. Let us thank God, therefore, that we have been delivered from this monster of uncertainty and that now we can believe with certainty that the Holy Spirit is crying and issuing that sigh too deep for words in our hearts. . . . Thus we are overwhelmed with endless evidence of the favor of God toward us. Now that the plague of uncertainty [peste incertitudinis] with which the entire church of the Pope is infected, is driven away, let us believe with certainty that God is favorably disposed toward us, that we are pleasing to him and of concern to him on account of Christ, and that we have the Holy Spirit who intercedes for us with a crying and a sighing too deep for words. . . . Then there is emitted a little sigh, which silences and drowns out that violent roaring [of uncertainty and doubt]; and nothing remains in your heart but the sigh that says: “Abba!” Father!”127 As he did in 1517, Luther still saw the Christian life as one of continual striving and movement. However, this movement was no longer the life of puriﬁcation. Now this movement was understood in terms of certitude. Certainty was never a static reality for Luther. He understood that the believer must constantly make every effort to abolish uncertainty and increase the certitude of faith. Consequently, the yearning and sighing that characterizes the life of the Christian was now seen as a yearning for deeper and deeper certainty. Therefore we should strive daily to move more and more from uncertainty to certainty; and we should make an effort to wipe out completely that most wicked idea that has consumed the entire world; namely, that a man does not know whether he is in a state of grace.128 Most frequently, Luther spoke about the certainty of being in a state of grace. In the exegesis of Hebrews 9:4 (1518), Luther was still somewhat ambiguous about the distinction between the certainty of grace and the future ﬁnal certitude of salvation.129 The problem of perseverance was still a real one. In his mature works, however, no such distinction exists. Andrea Schrimm-Heins is clearly correct in stating that, despite his lack of a ﬁrm terminology, Luther meant the same thing by the certainty of forgiveness, the certainty of justiﬁcation, and the certainty of God’s good will.130 All of these phrases meant the subjective certainty of salvation. There are occasions, however, when Luther spoke explicitly about the certainty of predestination. As the Bondage of the Will

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demonstrates, the topic of the predestination moved Luther to warn against any speculation about God’s hidden will. Elsewhere, however, Luther more carefully distinguished between prying into God’s hidden will and relying on the revealed certainty of predestination. Luther always maintained that the reason for predestination was inaccessible within the hidden will of the unrevealed God. Nonetheless, the fact of predestination was revealed in Scripture. However, Luther went beyond this general revelation of predestination to argue that the certainty of one’s own predestination was also revealed. The believer could be certain of salvation without inquiring into the “secret counsels of God.” John 14:9–10 (“Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me Phillip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father. . . . Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father in Me?”) demonstrated to Luther that one must never separate God from Christ. To separate or divorce Christ from God was to “soar into the clouds,” and to “seek God up in heaven,” and to ask, “Surely I can hear Christ talking to me. But who knows how God up in heaven is minded toward me or what he has resolved to do with me?” For Luther, this was a “vain and uncertain ﬂuttering about” that “tears Christ from God.”131 Luther explained that only the “spiritual vision” or “eyes of faith” can see God, and only by clinging to Christ and his Word. This spiritual vision perceives that God is not angry but gracious and offers “sweet and comforting words.” In the Bondage of the Will, Luther arrived at the edge of the abyss regarding the reason for predestination. At that point he recoiled and told the reader to ﬂee the hidden God and run to Christ alone. He argued that if we restrain our curiosity about the hidden will of God and limit our thoughts to Christ, then we can know and worship the true God as he is clothed and set forth in his Word.132 Commenting on Genesis 26:9, Luther returned to the theme of the hidden God. In this text he explicitly tied the theme of God’s hiddenness to the problem of certainty. “Inquisitiveness,” Luther wrote, was the “original sin.” This inquisitiveness or curiosity is precisely the prying into God’s secret unrevealed will. Luther argued that presuming to know the divine will outside of Christ only destroyed certainty altogether. Moreover, thoughts about the uncertainty of salvation are now seen as “delusions of the devil” because, as Luther explained, “Christ came into the world to make us completely certain.”133 Referring to such Johannine passages as John 6:65 (“No one comes to the Father except by me”), Luther insisted that the certitude of salvation is found exclusively in the revealed God. I [God] will reveal my foreknowledge and predestination to you . . . in an extraordinary manner, but not by this way of reason and carnal wisdom, as you imagine. This is how I will do so. From an unrevealed God I will become a revealed God. Nevertheless, I will remain the same God. I will be made ﬂesh, or send my Son. He shall die for your sins and shall rise again from the dead. And in this way I

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will fulﬁll your desire, in order that you may be able to know whether you are predestined or not. . . . For “He who sees me,” says Christ, “also sees the Father himself.” If you listen to him, are baptized in his name, and love his word, then you are surely predestined and are certain of your salvation.134 In this same commentary, Luther went on to say that the divine purpose in the incarnation and the sacraments was certainty itself: “God did not come down from heaven to make you uncertain about your predestination, to despise the sacraments. . . . Indeed he instituted them to make you completely certain and to remove the disease of doubt from your heart.”135 According to Luther, God said, “Behold you have My Son. Listen to him and receive him. If you do this you are already certain about your faith and salvation.”136 The question of perseverance, however, might still linger. Thus Luther answered the question of the believer who said, “But I do not know whether I will remain in faith.” His counsel was simply to “accept the present promise and predestination,”137 indicating thereby that the two were the same thing. However, he now goes on to speak of the hidden God and the certainty of salvation. He wrote, “If you believe in the revealed God and accept his word, he will gradually also reveal the hidden God; for ‘He who sees Me also sees the Father.’”138 Luther further explained that if the believer clings to the revealed God with a ﬁrm faith, “then you are most assuredly predestined and you will understand the hidden God.”139 To my knowledge, this is one of the very few places where Luther enabled the believer to have both knowledge and certainty of the hidden God. In any case, his purpose was to stop “speculation” so that the believer would listen to the “Son who appeared in order to destroy the work of the devil and to make you certain about predestination.”140 Luther further supported these statements by references to such verses as John 6:44–45, 10:27, and 14:9–10. Clearly he had come to equate the work of Christ with the complete certitude of salvation. The call to the certainty of salvation was shared by many of Luther’s fellow reformers. The reformers may have disagreed on the role of sanctiﬁcation or regeneration in the Christian life or the formulation of the doctrine of predestination, but most welcomed and preached the certitude of salvation. As historians we often concentrate on the debates and disagreements that tore Protestantism apart at the expense of appreciating their shared presuppositions, terminology, and concerns. Among the most important reformers who emphasized the certainty of salvation were Zwingli and Calvin. Unlike Luther, Zwingli was only too happy to talk explicitly about predestination. His defense of the certainty of salvation has its starting point in the doctrine of God’s sovereignty and immutable election.141 For Zwingli, the believer ﬁnds the certainty of salvation by directly contemplating the relationship between faith and election. Zwingli’s argument for the certitude of election was also based in part on his theological anthropology. His basic assumption in

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both his soteriology and sacramental theology was a kind of Erasmian Platonism which taught that the lower could not inﬂuence the higher. Likewise, for Zwingli, the external could not directly affect the internal. These assumptions made the drive toward immediacy emphatic in Zwingli’s thought. Pneumatology lay at the heart of Zwingli’s concern with certainty. Like Luther, Zwingli saw the Spirit as the agent or giver of certitude. Fundamental to his repeated use of passages about the Holy Spirit was the conviction that since the human spirit was the highest part of the soul, it could receive the truth only from that which was directly above it; namely, the divine Spirit. For Zwingli the biblical verse that supported this view of human nature was Isaiah 54:13, as cited in the Gospel of John, “It is written in the prophets ‘and they shall be taught by God.’” In Zwingli’s understanding, this verse proved that the “Spirit teaches spirit [spiritus spiritum docet].”142 . . . each part of man retains the character of its own level. The mind, therefore, has to be inspired from above in order to be maintained in its appropriate life, that is, in light and the knowledge of God. So, too, the body has to be supplied by the power of the same deity with its being, existence, and life. In order, therefore, that man should be man and not beast, he must be illumined by the divine Spirit just as the pure dew drops from above in pearls.143 Equally important was the Zurich reformer’s view of human nature as completely fallen into sin. Having fallen through self-love, the human being is now totally alienated from God.144 The wretchedness of human nature is so deep and so thorough that the individual cannot even know the extent and reality of his sinfulness unless he is taught this directly by God.145 One must be illumined, so to speak, about sin. Totally sinful and turned away from the Creator, human beings have no free will and no ability to respond to God by their own natural powers. Consequently, the response of faith cannot be within the capacities of human nature. Consequently, Zwingli contended that faith comes into existence only by the Spirit of God acting directly on the soul. “Faith,” Zwingli insisted, “is not a matter of human power but of the divine Spirit.”146 Referring to Galatians 5:22, he argued, “But this power is not from man . . . since not all have faith, but it is from God alone. Paul attributes it to the Holy Spirit . . . Surrender man to himself and whence will he acquire faith and get it for himself since his thoughts and desires are of the earth? It is, therefore, God’s gift alone.”147 Zwingli then cited John 6:44, “For no one comes to the Father unless the Father who sent me draws him.” This verse was indispensable because it proved that faith could be only the work or “drawing” and “free gift of God.”148 Moreover, this “drawing” depicted the immediacy of God’s work in the soul, an immediacy or directness that guaranteed certitude.

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With these assumptions Zwingli could argue that the very existence of faith was due to election and he could also deﬁne faith as the subjective certitude of that election. Reasoning backward from the presence of faith in the heart, Zwingli maintained that the believer experienced proof of election. Crucial to his argument was the strict inseparability between election and faith. “Faith,” he wrote, “is the sign of election.”149 The “order” of election and faith was also signiﬁcant. Zwingli argued that “faith is given to those who have been elected and ordained to eternal life but in such a way that election precedes faith and faith follows election.”150 The sequence of election, calling, and faith was a “chain” that led irrevocably to the certitude of salvation. Arguing against the Anabaptists, Zwingli wrote: For who has faith is called, who is called is predestined, who is predestined is elected, who is elected is foreordained. But God’s election remains ﬁrm. Therefore, they who have faith are justiﬁed. For faith is not of all the elect, . . . but faith is the fruit of election, predestination, and calling, a fruit which is given in its ﬁt time. Therefore as the verse says, “He who believes shall be saved,” does not exclude those who are elect, and who, before they arrive at the maturity of faith, join the company of those who are elect. . . . But the words have the “sense of consequence:” Be assured that he who believes has been elected by the Father and predestined and called. He believes, therefore, because he has been elected and predestined to eternal salvation, and he who does not believe has been rejected by the free election of God.151 Gone is the problem of perseverance, as well as the idea that faith is an assent to the teachings of the church. Such ideas too readily allowed for the possibility that one may fall out of a state of grace and therefore not be certain of salvation. By securing the link between election and faith, Zwingli could equate faith with the individual certitude of predestination. For Zwingli, the nature and essence of the faith that justiﬁes was certitude. Deﬁning faith on the basis of Hebrews 11:1, Zwingli explained that faith was not some cursory idea that “pops lightly into a mind that wavers and believes or thinks now this, and then, now something else, as that which is uncertain.”152 Rather, faith was the “ﬁrm and real conﬁdence of the soul by which it trusts wholly in the things to be hoped for.”153 According to Zwingli, the word “evidence” in the phrase, “evidence of things not seen,” meant that faith was a “certainty, clear, undoubted, and plain to us.”154 Faith was such “unshaken evidence” that it was the “clear light and certainty of the soul.”155 Moreover, faith is a “full, clear, and sure knowledge of God and hope in him.”156 Most important, however, is Zwingli’s conclusion that “Those who have faith know they are elect.”157 As Zwingli said, faith tells the believer, “You know that God is yours.”158

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This certainty is rooted in the immediacy between the Divine Spirit and the human spirit. In Zwingli we see the return, in theological terms, of the late medieval epistemological principle that immediacy provided certainty. One can have this certainty in the soul only when it is pressed directly on the heart. The believer must never stop “crying until God has made it known to you in your heart and you are certain that he has forgiven you through Jesus Christ. Do not stop until you say with joy and believe with certainty, ‘Indeed, I know well that God cannot deny me anything since he has given his son for me.’”159 As Zwingli explained, “faith exists in our hearts through the Spirit of God and we feel it.”160 The certainty of salvation is given by the “seal of the Spirit,” which in turn gives security and certitude. Faith, Zwingli said, produces an “inward change of heart” that the believer directly experiences.161 Thus Zwingli’s believer experiences the certitude of salvation immediately from “above,” that is, from the Spirit, and feels this certainty of faith in the heart. The “inner baptism” of the Holy Spirit directly affects an “inward ﬂooding” of the Spirit that creates an experiential certainty of salvation.162 Like Luther, Zwingli found particular biblical passages or terminology to express the experiential knowledge of certainty. Language about “being in” God or “in Christ” such as 1 John 4:16 means that “inward teaching” by which we discover the “conﬁdence” that we have “God in us.”163 Therefore, “whosoever has faith, God is in him and he is in God.” Galatians 2:20 (“I do not live but Christ lives in me”) shows that although we still sin while in the ﬂesh, “the unquestioning faith that we place in Christ our salvation, brings it about that Christ lives in us; for whosoever has the Spirit of Christ, is Christ’s.”164 Zwingli concluded by saying “Thus one must be drawn to God and deiﬁed so that we might be fully emptied and cleansed . . . For thus we are being transformed into God. This is not a work of the ﬂesh but of the Spirit of God.”165 According to Zwingli, Romans 8:16 tells us that “God’s Spirit informs our spirit so that we are sons of God.” This work of the Spirit “assures us in our hearts that we are the children of God.”166 The Spirit also tells us that God is not a tyrant but a “Father.” Like Luther, Zwingli stressed that we have this radically new perception of God only through the Spirit. By the work of the Spirit we know “that our God is to be considered by us as a Father before whom we may pour out all of our needs. . . . God, by the grace of his Spirit, teaches our soul that we have a God who is kinder than a physical father.”167 As a “Father,” God is “so accessible that we may dare come to him.”168 Having God as a “Father” means we can pray to a “safe and sure helper.”169 Ephesians 1:13 was also important to Zwingli: “In him you have also heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and have believed in him, and were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit which is the guarantee of our inheritance.” The “seal” given by the Holy Spirit is precisely the “certain surety of salvation.”170 It was the Gospel of John that became Zwingli’s favorite text for talking about the certainty of salvation. The language about the Spirit in this Gospel provided

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the Zurich reformer with ample opportunity to speak about the spiritual experience of certainty. John 3:8, 4:24, 6:44–-45, 14:16–17, 26, 16:7–11, and 20:22 all inspired Zwingli to discuss the internal testimony of certitude inspired in the heart by the Spirit. John 6:63 tells us that faith comes not by the external things of the senses but only by the Spirit, the same Spirit that “brings us certainty.”171 In John 14:26, Zwingli explained that we could attribute “comforting” only to the Spirit because “to strengthen the heart” was the true “mission of the Spirit.”172 John 6:44–45 was Zwingli’s chief text: “For no one can come to the Father unless the Father who sent me draws him. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’” This “drawing” is the work of the Spirit acting immediately or directly on the human spirit. “Drawing” refers to the “inward teaching,” “inward calling” or that “faith” by which one knows he is elect. No one, Zwingli insisted, can “come back” to God of his own accord. The preacher expounds Scripture in vain unless the Spirit inwardly “draws” the believer, giving him peace of mind. While the external work of preaching is from man, the true “internal drawing” and “internal teaching” belong only to the immediate effect of the Spirit.173 Turning to Calvin, we see that the concern with certitude embraces every aspect of the Reformer’s theology. At this point in our study we concentrate on the issue of soteriology. Scholars have exhaustively analyzed Calvin’s understanding of faith.174 Consequently, we are free to discuss only several points that bear directly on the certainty of salvation. Like Luther and Zwingli, Calvin consistently viewed the nature of saving faith as the experiential certitude of one’s own salvation. In the 1539 Institutes, Calvin identiﬁed faith with a certainty of knowledge that surpassed all human understanding. “Faith,” he wrote, “consists in certainty [certitudine] rather than in comprehension [apprehensione].” His most well-known deﬁnition of faith also highlighted the role or importance of certainty: Now we shall possess a right deﬁnition of faith if we call it a ﬁrm and certain knowledge [ﬁrmam certamque cognitionem] of God’s benevolence toward us, founded on the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed [obsignatur] upon our hearts by the Holy Spirit.175 We add the words “certain” and “ﬁrm” in order to express a more solid constancy of persuasion. For, as faith is not content with a doubtful and changeable opinion [dubia et versatili opinione], so it is not content with an obscure and confused conception; but requires full and ﬁxed certainty such as men are wont to have from things experienced and proved [plenam et ﬁxam, qualis de rebus compertis et probatis esse solet, certitudinem requirit].176 Dismissing the traditional notion of unformed faith, Calvin insisted that faith was a more robust and vigorous reality that had the power to assure the soul of

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its salvation. In particular, Calvin argued, believers should not be in doubt about whether God will be merciful to them.177 In short, Calvin went beyond the idea of an objective certitude of salvation by arguing that faith is directed pro nobis, and must inform the “heart” of one’s own salvation.178 Without this component, faith gives no consolation and leaves people “constrained with miserable anxiety at the same time as they are in doubt about whether God will be merciful to them because they conﬁne that very kindness of which they seem utterly persuaded within too narrow limits.” Moreover, to say only that God will save the elect is a watered-down faith that lacks the central characteristic of individual certitude. The certitude of hope is not sufﬁcient because it also leaves the person uncertain of his ﬁnal end. Calvin admitted that these notions of faith may seem to glorify God and even to acknowledge God’s mercy, but they were not the real saving faith that justiﬁes because they left the Christian unsure of salvation. Calvin wrote, “For among themselves they ponder that it [God’s mercy and kindness] is indeed great and abundant, shed upon many, available and ready for all; but that it is uncertain whether it will ever come to them or rather, whether they will come to it.”179 Such a view of faith, Calvin replied, stops “mid-course” because it fails to penetrate the heart. This view of faith and grace “does not so much strengthen the spirit in secure tranquility as trouble it with uneasy doubting.”180 But there is a far different feeling of full assurance that in the Scriptures is always attributed to faith. It is this that puts beyond doubt [extra dubium ponat] God’s goodness clearly manifested to us. But that cannot happen without our truly feeling its sweetness and experiencing it in ourselves [Id autem ﬁeri nequit, quin eius suavitatem vere sentiamus, et experiamur in nobis ipsis]. For this reason the apostle derives conﬁdence [ﬁduciam] from faith and from conﬁdence, in turn, boldness [audaciam] . . . There is no right faith except when we dare with tranquil hearts to stand in God’s sight.181 Calvin did not expound the certainty of salvation in the Institutes alone. All of the elements of certainty found in the Institutes are also found throughout his sermons. Preaching on Galatians 4:6, Calvin told his congregation that when we “cry” through the Spirit, we do so “with full certainty that we know and acknowledge that we are members of [God’s] Son and by means of Christ we are accepted by God into his celestial kingdom; the gate is open to us and access is given to us personally.”182 He explained to his hearers that the great conﬂict between “the Papists” and the church of the Reformation was that the former insisted that believers could not be certain whether God loved them and that they were to remain “in suspense as to whether God loved or hated us.” To be uncertain, Calvin maintained, meant that we could not truly pray and call upon or “cry to God.” Through the Spirit, however, we know that God “is our Father

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and that we have our refuge in him.” Calvin explained to his congregation that the Apostle Paul tells us that we are fully reassured and content, knowing that God is propitious to us. The Spirit gives us a “certitude so full” that we know we belong to Christ. Moreover, Calvin insisted in this sermon that the certainty of the love of God toward the believer was not the sin of presumption as the Papists claimed.183 Calvin even distinguished the “ancient fathers” of the Old Testament from those who have the light of Christ in terms of certitude; the Church of the New Testament has a clearer certainty and, therefore, can issue this cry of “Abba! Father!” through the work of the Spirit.184 As did Luther, Calvin believed that the knowledge of God as a loving “Father” cannot, by nature, “take root” in us, and our natural sense cannot comprehend that God loves us. Such trust can proceed only from the Spirit. Therefore such certainty “surmonte toute vertu humaine. It faut donc que Dieu nous esleve pardessus le monde, car cela n’est pas en nostre capacité d’estre certiﬁez de nous-mesmes de son amour.”185 These citations, which could be multiplied endlessly throughout Calvin’s writings, demonstrate those now-familiar components necessary to the certitude of faith, namely, faith as experiential knowledge, the role of the Spirit, and the external source of certitude.186 True faith, Calvin explained, cannot ﬂit about “at the top of the brain” but must “take root in the depth of the heart.”187 Book III. 2. 10–11 of the Institutes reveals Calvin’s concentrated effort to emphasize the affective nature of faith. In these passages Calvin felt forced to distinguish true from false faith. This problem arose in the correspondence between Calvin and Laelius Socinus regarding the merits of Christ. As David Willis has noted, the discussion of Christ’s merits led to questions about the sufﬁciency of God’s will, God’s faithfulness for salvation, and the phenomenon of false faith. Willis reconstructed the question of Socinus in the following manner: “If one begins with the afﬁrmation that only the predestined have saving faith and feel the efﬁcacy of the Gospel, then how can one assign faith to the reprobate without implying that God is one who takes back what he has once given and therefore cannot be counted on?”188 Calvin’s answer, repeated in the Institutes III. 2. 11– 12, was to admit that “experience shows that the reprobate are sometimes affected by the same feeling as the elect.”189 In order to separate genuine from false faith, Calvin proceeded to set one “experience” against another “experience.” He searched for expressions that would explain why the reprobate sometimes experience faith but not the “solid reality of faith.”190 It is this “solidity” that Calvin strove to express and deﬁne. He made clear that this “solid reality” must include, above all, an inward penetrating character. Thus he wrote about faith as something that must “penetrate” [penetrat] and put down “roots” [radices egisse] in the heart.191 Such a faith is a mark “engraved” [insculpi] on the hearts of believers.192 Most importantly, only the elect have the “spirit of adoption” and the ability to call on God as “Father.”193 In short, this is a faith of the heart, an experiential knowledge and certitude.

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Calvin’s emphasis on the oneness between Christ and the believer further served to accentuate the penetrating and inward nature of faith. In the Institutes, Calvin set out to destroy the traditional belief that one could have only conjectural but not the ﬁnal certainty of salvation. Like Luther, he argued that the schoolmen had misinterpreted Ecclesiastes 9:1.The doctrine of conjectural certitude, he reasoned, mixes assurance with doubt. Consequently it leaves the Christian wavering between hope and fear when one looks at his own sinfulness. For Calvin, nothing was more adverse to faith than either conjecture or anything akin to doubt.194 According to Calvin, the fundamental error of this teaching was that it failed to recognize the nearness or “indwelling” of Christ within the believer. About this error Calvin exclaimed, “as if we ought to think of Christ, standing far away and not rather dwelling in us.”195 For we await salvation from him not because he appears to us as far away [eminus] but because he makes us, engrafted [insitos] into his body, participants not only in all his beneﬁts but also in himself. . . . Christ is not outside us but dwells within us [sed in nobis habitat]. Not only does he cleave to us by an indivisible bond of fellowship but with a wonderful communion, day by day, he grows more and more into one body with us, until he becomes completely one with us.196 This oneness with Christ creates the experiential certainty of faith in the soul of the believer. Language about “oneness,” “indwelling,” “engrafting,” “imparting,” “engraving,” “interiority,” “partaking,” and “penetrating” describes the true depth of the certitude of faith. Throughout these discussions Calvin tried repeatedly to guarantee certitude by driving the experience of faith and certainty more and more deeply into the soul where it takes “living root.”197 It is as if the deeper and more inward faith is, the more certain, real, and reliable is the experience of certainty. Calvin argued by opposing the “Abba! Father!” passages to the “schoolmen’s” interpretation of Ecclesiastes 9:1. Having made faith as “solid and real” as possible, Calvin concluded with the daring statement based on II Corinthians 13:5, “Unless one knows that Christ dwells in him, he is reprobate.”198 Not surprisingly, this experiential knowledge of the certitude of faith is the work of the Spirit. The issue of certainty permeated Calvin’s pneumatology. Like Luther and Zwingli, Calvin identiﬁed the Spirit as the giver of the certainty of salvation. Just as faith is the “work of God” and the “principal work of the Holy Spirit,” so, too, the certainty of faith is the gift of the Spirit.199 The “secret efﬁcacy of the Spirit”200 is the key to predestination and the explanation for how some are united with Christ in faith. It is the Spirit who “is that bond by which Christ effectually unites us to himself” producing the assurance or conﬁdence of salvation. Calvin equated the Spirit with that “inner teacher” by whose effort “the promise of salvation penetrates into our minds.” He cited John 6:44 repeatedly

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to describe this penetrating effort of the Spirit. Preachers, Calvin wrote, would shout to no avail unless the Spirit “draws” believers “to the certain and ﬁrm promises of Christ.” This “drawing” explains why some are effectively called or elected and why some are damned. God “effectively teaches” those whom he has elected by this inner drawing of the Spirit. Calvin employed several terms and images to impress upon the reader that the certainty of salvation came from a source outside the human being—that is, the Spirit. As did Zwingli, Calvin spoke repeatedly of the “seal” or “guarantee” mentioned in Ephesians 1:13–14 and II Corinthians 1:22, 5:5 as common terms that depict the work of the Spirit. Calvin emphasized that the hearts of believers “have been sealed” with the Spirit. This “seal” is equated with the “guarantee of the Spirit” that produces boldness, assurance, and the certainty of salvation. Calvin wrote, “For the Spirit, strictly speaking, seals forgiveness of sins in the elect alone so that they apply it by a special faith, to their own use.”201 The Spirit of God is, for the elect, the “sure guarantee and seal” of their salvation. This seal of certainty is “engraved” upon the heart in such a way that it cannot be erased.202 As we have seen, Calvin commonly associated this “seal” or “guarantee” with the “spirit of adoption” in Romans 8:15 and the ability to cry “Abba! Father!” in Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6. This was a natural association for Calvin because, like his fellow reformers, he believed that the certainty given by the Spirit found its basis in a new perception of God. In Calvin’s view, the gift of faith changed human perception and healed the noetic effect of sin. Through the “eyes of faith,” the Christian is able ﬁnally to perceive “the will of God toward us.” To know God’s will pro nobis is to understand that God is not a wrathful judge but, rather, a benevolent and merciful “Father.”203 Here again the term “Father” bears crucial epistemological implications. When the Holy Spirit illumines our hearts, we perceive an aspect of God to which we were formerly blind. The noetic breakthrough created by the Spirit in faith ﬁnally allows the believer to know the fatherly mercy of God. As did Luther, Calvin argued that only such a believer was able to cry “Abba! Father!”204 Calvin discussed this crucial Reformation verse in the Institutes by once again trying to distinguish true from false faith. As we have seen, the reprobate do, at times, “have almost the same feeling as the elect.” The transitory faith of the reprobate never lasts or penetrates deeply enough to feel that “conﬁdence ﬂourish which Paul extols so that they loudly proclaim ‘Abba! Father!’”205 The reprobate may experience a “confused awareness of grace” by means of which they “only grasp a shadow rather than the body of it.” Only the elect “taste” the “spirit of adoption,” the “solid” faith that takes “living root” in the heart.206 Neither Zwingli’s nor Calvin’s understanding of certitude would be complete without recognizing the role played by good works; that is, the so-called “syllogismus practicus.” According to Zwingli, the “third use of the Law” has as

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its purpose the sanctiﬁcation of the believer, a sanctiﬁcation that consisted in obedience to God. The good works that result from faith and conform to the Law are the necessary results or fruits of faith. In terms of the doctrine of certitude, such good works function as testimonies of both faith and election. Zwingli explained that only the Spirit could be the source of these good works and therefore the latter could serve as a testimony of the presence of the Spirit in the soul.207 Zwingli approached the meaning of good works from Romans 6:1, “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound?” Zwingli answered by saying that only an “inexperienced” person who had “never felt the Spirit of God” would even ask such a question. He went on to say that even the desire to guard against sin was evidence of the Spirit in the heart. Not only good works but also the “ﬁerce battle” between ﬂesh and spirit were testimony of the Spirit because, as Paul said, the very desire to live according to the will of God was due to the work of the Spirit. Moreover, since certainty can only come from outside the self, good works can offer a testimony to the certainty of faith because they, too, stem only from God. You should easily see by the fact that God’s works do not in any way please you, that it is not within a person’s power to like the good or to be able to do it. Whose then is it? It is solely within the power of the Spirit of God. But how can I receive this Spirit? Call on God to give you understanding. As soon as you call, he says, “I am here.” Indeed, he even causes you to call. As soon as he is present you will believe his word. As soon as you believe his word, you are assured of his grace and certain of salvation [Sobald du sinem wort glouben gibst, so bist du ietz siner gnaden versichret und des heils gewüß]. From then on the Spirit of God, which has effected this in you, will never again let you go idly and he will cause you to love the works which please God and you shall never again ascribe such works to yourself, for you have seen quite well that you were unable to do them before.208 Just as Zwingli traces faith back to the proof of election, so, too, he traces good works back to faith and thereby to election. Good works are a sign of faith, just as faith is a sign of election. . . . Thus those who perform works of faith provide practical proof that they serve God, that is, that they have faith. They show this ﬁrst to themselves and then to others when they act with generosity out of love to God and their neighbor, and not out of vainglory.209 Calvin also argued that good works, which are the fruit of justiﬁcation, serve as a means of comfort and as a way to strengthen one’s faith. For the elect, good works can never establish the certainty of faith, but they are

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“testimonies” or “signs” of election.210 He allowed that for believers, good works functioned by “undergirding and strengthening this faith by signs of the divine benevolence toward them.”211 Good works cannot be done without the “Spirit of regeneration.” Since they have this divine origin or source, such works are “proof of the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.”212 So, too, they are “signs” of that inner calling by which believers “realize their election.” Hence Calvin explained, “It is as if [James] said, ‘Those who by true faith are righteous prove their righteousness by obedience and good works, not by a bare and imaginary mask of faith.’”213 These claims to certainty had a far-reaching impact on sixteenth-century religious debates. Of the various issues in these discussions, several should be distilled and reviewed before moving on to an analysis of future controversies. These issues involve the main implications regarding the manner in which Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin expressed and defended the certitude of salvation. The ﬁrst issue of note is that in order to declare the subjective certainty of salvation, the reformers who taught justiﬁcation by faith alone had to reject every element that traditionally led to the uncertainty of salvation. They did so by eliminating the viator status of the Christian. Oberman demonstrated that, in his discovery of the meaning of the phrase “righteousness of God,” Luther found that the iustitia Christi and the iustitia Dei were granted simultaneously. This reuniﬁcation of the righteousness of Christ and the righteousness of God meant that the believer was justiﬁed “now” and not at the end of the long process of justiﬁcation. Having discovered the unity of God’s justice and mercy in Christ, Luther believed that the Christian was no longer en route on an uncertain pilgrimage toward ﬁnal judgment. Luther had suspended the viator status of the Christian.214 Ozment also argued that Luther most decisively separated himself from the medieval tradition overcoming the viator status of the Christian. Unlike his medieval predecessors, Luther suspended the viator status of the Christian by leaving the believer sinful in re. By rejecting the ethic of holiness, which was effected by the ﬁdes caritate formata, Luther eliminated that which made justiﬁcation a process and the existence of sin a legitimate, even pious, cause for doubt.215 Both the reuniﬁcation of the iustitia Christi with the iustitia Dei and the doctrine of simul iustus et peccator had profound consequences for the issue of certitude. By denying that justiﬁcation was a process, believers could be certain “now” of their salvation. In particular, the simul doctrine meant that the continuing state of sin could no longer threaten one’s salvation. We have seen that because Catholicism retained the ethic of holiness, it could grant only objective and conjectural certitude. Since the Christian did not experience holiness in this life, he could never be certain of salvation. Sin and certitude could not coexist. When the reformers rejected the necessity for holiness, they made room for the subjective certitude of salvation. Just as Luther counseled the Christian not

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to depend on the worthiness of contrition, so, too, he told the believer not to look to his motives, good works, or his love of God as a basis for certainty. The less the human being contributed to salvation, the more certain he could become regarding his salvation. Luther cast the argument in The Bondage of the Will in terms of certainty and concluded by saying, “even if it were possible, I should not wish to have free choice given to me, or to have anything left in my own hands by which I might strive toward salvation.” If one did have such freedom, Luther said, he would have “to labor under such perpetual uncertainty” that his “conscience would never be assured and certain how much it ought to do to satisfy God. For whatever work may be accomplished, there would always remain an anxious doubt. . . . God has taken my salvation out of my hands into his, making it depend on his choice and not mine, and has promised to save me, not by my own work or exertion but by his grace and mercy. I am assured and certain both that he is faithful and will not lie to me, and also that he is too great and powerful for any demons or any adversaries to be able to break him or to snatch me from him.”216 Calvin also argued, “We accordingly teach that in the saints, until they are divested of mortal bodies, there is always sin for in their ﬂesh there resides that depravity of inordinate desiring which contends against righteousness.” Life on earth, he said, was a constant advancing and progressing in holiness.217 However, Calvin explained, this sin is no longer “imputed to us.” In answer to the question, “But I can see that everyone sins. . . . How then can I help not being anxious about sin, since sin leads to damnation?” Zwingli answered, “Because of this inﬁrmity [of sin] we are incapable of doing anything by ourselves; for we are children of wrath even though we know of the one true God. However, by the free gift of God we have been redeemed from death and made alive through the Lord Jesus Christ; for he is true life. Sin has been robbed of its power and sting so that it can no longer destroy us; we have been reconciled to God and have become friends.” Although both Zwingli and Calvin stressed that good works were a testimony of one’s salvation, they did not allow the sin remaining in the believer to be an obstacle of one’s growth in holiness. Casting aside the holiness ethic, these reformers made it possible for certainty and sinfulness to exist simultaneously. Equally important is the fact that both Catholics and the Reformers agreed that certainty was a supernatural knowledge. In his debate with Luther, Cajetan could only attribute certainty to infused faith and not to acquired faith because only the former had its source in the divine. This was also true of the certainty of salvation, since it could only be known by a special revelation from God. Rejecting the distinction between acquired and infused faith, the reformers attributed the certainty of faith in one’s salvation directly to the inner work of the Holy Spirit. Therefore, Luther could write, “And this is why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves; that is, on the promise

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and truth of God which cannot deceive.”218 Zwingli’s endless references to being “taught” by God, to the “inner teacher” and the “inner illumination” of the Spirit also demonstrate his conviction that certainty could have its source only from outside the fallen self. All comprehension of divine things, including the certainty of salvation, came “from above.” So, too, Calvin’s descriptions of the inner teaching and inner illumination of the elect express his belief that certainty cannot be attained by human powers. For all these reformers, the fundamental assumption that faith is not within human ability is the foundation for the belief that certitude comes from outside the self. Since faith is a gift, and faith is certitude, they could believe that this certainty of the soul must be true and from God. This meant that in both the Catholic and the Reformation arguments, uncertainty about God and the divine will was the natural state of the fallen human soul. Certitude could never be obtained by one’s natural powers of reason or will because it required a source outside the human being. A further important consequence of these teachings by the reformers was that a different function emerged for the Holy Spirit. We have seen that in medieval theology one of the primary roles of the Holy Spirit was to infuse caritas into the soul. In the sixteenth century the Spirit was clearly still associated with love, grace, and union with God. Nonetheless, the primary work of the Spirit came to include the giving of certitude. In the medieval period the central biblical verse describing the action of the Holy Spirit was Romans 5:5: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us.” For the reformers, the verses that became central were Romans 8:16 and Galatians 4:6, that is, the passages depicting the cry of “Abba! Father!” In the interpretation of the reformers, this cry was the experience of certainty uttered in the believer by the Spirit. Another very important conclusion of the doctrine of certitude concerns the role of doubt. As the Spirit became identiﬁed with certitude, doubt came to be understood as a temptation. We can actually see the sixteenth-century controversies encapsulated in the new roles of the Spirit and the devil. If the Spirit gives certainty, the devil causes doubt. Doubt is externalized as something that “attacks” and assails us from without. Luther was the reformer who most often demonized doubt. More and more frequently he came to equate doubt about one’s salvation with a “satanic delusion” or a “temptation” of the devil. No longer do we have the Catholic “pious doubt” that results from recognizing one’s sinfulness. Rather, the devil attacks the conscience and uses the awareness of sin to make the Christian doubt salvation. For Luther, such doubt became the great temptation that the devil exercised through the Law. Luther told his readers, “In the hour of temptation it can suddenly happen by a trick of the devil that all comfort disappears and God again seems to be threatening.”219 The question in Galatians 3:1 (“Who has bewitched you?”) meant that the devil, in the disguise of Christ, convinces believers that they are accursed and that God is against them. For Luther, Satan brought with him, “the poison of despair

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and tries to infect us with it.”220 It is striking to note how Luther conceived of the devil’s work and power. Satan, he said, “deceives” and sends “delusions.” By instilling “delusive thoughts and ideas into our minds,” the devil “bewitches” us spiritually.221 In short, the devil always acts in a way that is the very opposite of the Spirit. The Spirit gives the certainty of God’s will toward the believer, while Satan deceives us by saying that Christ is standing against us and that we are damned.222 In the following chapters we will also see that Luther was deeply concerned with the fact that the devil accomplishes this spiritual bewitchment by disguising himself as Christ or an “angel of light.” By making doubt a temptation and a deadly deception, Luther portrayed the world as a battle not just between “God and the devil” but also between truth and deception. This was the warfare between the Spirit of truth and the Father of Lies. The “Comforter,” referred to in John 14:16–17, has as his primary purpose to comfort us by taking away all doubt about salvation. In Luther’s view, the Spirit engages in a great battle against the “evil spirit.” The latter makes one fear God and doubt his promise of salvation. When the devil tells the believer “Oh you must go to hell” because of his sin, the “Comforter” comes to his aid by giving him boldness and assurance.223 The Comforter “slays death” and ﬁlls the saddened heart with joy. Throughout his writings Luther emphasized this lifelong battle with the temptation of doubt and the eventual triumph of faith. Only the Spirit, however, can win this ﬁght against the Tempter. Luther was so concerned with this spiritual struggle that he could say, “For there is no difference at all between one who doubts and one who is damned.”224 Doubt about salvation became the temptation par excellence among many sixteenth-century reformers. Doubt about salvation was the temptation of the devil. At times Calvin equated doubt with the “ﬂesh” that rises up and attacks faith. Such anxiety and doubt about salvation resulted from the division within our fallen nature between ﬂesh and spirit. For Calvin, faith is so identiﬁed with certainty that doubt is equated with “unbelief.”225 According to Calvin, the believer continually experiences an inner conﬂict in the soul between faith and doubt, certainty and fear, belief and unbelief. These are times of temptation when the faithful become like David, who cried, “Has God forgotten to be merciful? . . . Will he turn away forever?”226 The believer is also like Job, whose worst temptation was the fear that God had “become his enemy” and had “abandoned him. . . .”227 To cast doubt as something demonic was to place the certainty of faith in a pitched battle with a demonically inspired anxiety over salvation. Even if the temptation was said to arise from “the ﬂesh,” it was still sinful, equated with unbelief, and opposed to the certainty of faith. Believers were, therefore, continually ﬁghting off the temptation of doubt or the fear that sin could damn them. According to Calvin, “We cannot imagine any certainty that is not tinged with doubt or any assurance that is not assailed by some anxiety. On the other hand, we say that believers are in perpetual conﬂict with their own unbelief.”228

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Zwingli also stated, “Let the devil accuse us: faith will charge forward with all its strength and will not only rout the enemy, but so turn him to ﬁght so that, however often he returns, accompanied by seven others worse than himself, he cannot win the day. For he who has real faith trusts the Lord and fears not what all the assaults of the ﬂesh will do to him.”229 We must brieﬂy note that the doctrine of the certitude of salvation was not at all relegated to these reformers. We can ﬁnd afﬁrmations of this certainty in thinkers including Melanchthon, Bucer, Bullinger, Beza, and others. There was no one exact doctrine of justiﬁcation shared by all the reformers. Nonetheless, there was often a shared concern about the nature of faith and, among many, a shared concern with the certitude of salvation. Melanchthon, who was concerned with certitude on many issues, wrote in the 1551 Loci communes, “God in his great mercy wants the grace that he has offered to men in his promise to stand certain, ﬁrm, and immovable, for the promise is called an eternal testament. This comfort is certain if it is grounded only on the Son of God and not on our merit. For this reason we say that only through faith may the heart be assured that God is gracious for the sake of Christ.”230 In answer to the Catholic teaching that Christians must remain uncertain as to whether they are pleasing to God, Melanchthon answered that terriﬁed consciences “are not to remain mired in doubt.” According to Melanchthon, “Doubt in the terriﬁed heart is a deep, terrible anger against God. . . .”231 The case of Bucer is particularly instructive. Bucer taught the doctrine of double justiﬁcation in which the primary justiﬁcation is by forgiveness and imputation. The secondary justiﬁcation is that process by which the believer is truly made righteous. The iustiﬁcatio impii is, in Bucer’s thought, followed by the iustiﬁcatio pii.232 Nevertheless, the faithful are able to base the certainty of salvation only on the former. Signiﬁcantly, that certainty is, once again, the work of the Holy Spirit. As Bucer explained, “Moreover, by his Spirit he gives them such assurance of this reconciliation with God, and so of justiﬁcation, that with every fear of the divine judgment at last forbidden, since they now esteem and revere God as Father, so, too, they ﬂourish in genuine love towards all men, and every mark of the true holiness of life.”233 The passages analyzed in this chapter were chosen to reﬂect the original concern with soteriology. The certitude brought by the Spirit is, in these texts, a certainty about salvation and the awareness that God’s mercy was pro nobis. The effects of this kind of certainty are evident in the positive words used to describe it: rest, peace, gladness, sweetness, assurance, happiness, joy, and the ability to cry “Abba! Father!” The reformers expressed their beliefs about justiﬁcation and certainty in pneumatological and experiential language.234 Nonetheless, although that language began as descriptive of salvation, we will see that it became fused with language about authority. It is to this shift toward authority that we now turn. In the following chapters we will watch how the category of experience and the role of the Spirit

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became increasingly problematic as the reformers shifted the use of this pneumatological language toward the defense of their beliefs. We will examine the consequences of the way in which certainty about salvation became inseparable from the certainty of doctrine and scriptural interpretation. And, ﬁnally, we will discover that certainty itself became a test of authority, especially the doctrinal, or what I shall call “hermeneutical authority.”

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3 “The Spiritual Man Judges All Things” The Certainty of Exegetical Authority

In 1526 William Tyndale published his ﬁrst English translation of the New Testament. He continued his translation work until his execution in 1535. Defending his right to translate the Scriptures, he wrote: Christ commandeth to search the scriptures (John 5). . . . When Paul preached (Acts 17), the others searched the scriptures daily, whether they were as he alleged them. Why shall not I likewise, whether it be the scripture that thou allegest? Yea why shall I not see the scripture and the circumstances and what goeth before and after, that I may know whether thine interpretation be the right sense, or whether thou jugglest and drawest the scripture violently unto thy carnal and ﬂeshy purpose? Or whether thou be about to teach me or to deceive me?1 Tyndale’s words expressed the hope of a wholly biblical Reformation. The reading of the Bible became the central and often dangerous activity for people of all educational and social classes in the sixteenth century. It is difﬁcult for the modern reader to understand the revolutionary impact of this activity. The eloquent words of David Steinmetz help us to capture the importance of reading Scripture in the world of the sixteenth century: I hope not to be misunderstood when I say that the Bible was in the fullest sense of the term, a sixteenth-century book. It inﬂuenced European attitudes towards war and peace, the structure of civil government and the family, the process of

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human growth and development, theories of child-rearing and education, as well as attitudes toward economic relations and policies of taxation. The Bible was appealed to by people who loved the Church and who hated it. . . . The Bible was on the lips of religious martyrs—Roman Catholic, Protestant, and Anabaptist—and on the lips of their executioners. In the judgment of the sixteenth-century European, the Bible was worth both the dying and the killing for.2 To read or hear the Scripture directly in one’s own language was a major focal point of reform. Nor was this a purely Protestant activity. In his treatise Enchiridion militis Christiani, Erasmus argued that Scripture should be available to everyone in their vernacular. This desire gradually became reality in the course of the century. Erasmus himself challenged the traditional authority of the Latin Vulgate with the publication in 1516 of his Novum Instrumentum, a translation of the New Testament into Greek. The original Greek was printed alongside the Latin, providing later reformers with a Greek New Testament for translation. In 1522, Luther’s “September Testament,” or German New Testament, was published. The complete edition of Luther’s German Bible was published in 1534. In that same year a revision of Tyndale’s 1526 translation of the New Testament into English was published. In 1530 he had published his English translation of the Pentateuch. In 1523 Jacques Lefèvre d’Etaples translated the Latin New Testament into French. He then translated the Psalms in 1525 and the Old Testament in 1528. Olivétan published his French translation of the Bible in 1535. And in 1559 Protestant exiles received a new English translation known as the Geneva Bible. Ideally these translations would give all readers and hearers direct access to the whole Bible, access unhindered by intermediaries and free of all “human traditions.” Tyndale expressed the optimism of the early Reformation; the Scriptures are plain and clear to everyone who reads them and, therefore, the Bible can act as the judge of doctrine for all who “search” them.3 As G. R. Evans has stated, when the reformers “called for a return to ‘Scripture alone’ as the source of the Christian truth, this implied that Scripture could be thought of as a relatively monolithic and verbally quite secure piece of evidence.” As she also demonstrates, “It is a supreme irony that it was at the time when Scriptura sola became a reforming slogan that it became unprecedentedly difﬁcult to point unequivocally to the Sacred Page and say, ‘That is Holy Scripture.’”4 Even the claim to Scriptura sola was never simple or straightforward as it often seems. For most of the reformers the scriptural norm of Scriptura sola did not mean the mere reading of the scripture. The reformers did not envision an individual sitting alone reading scripture and interpreting the text. They deeply pondered the nature of the authority of Scripture and the proper principles of interpretation. They agreed that the church did not grant authority to Scripture. In the ﬁrst of his Sixty-Seven Articles, Zwingli addressed the assertion “that the

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Gospel is nothing without the sanction of the Church.” Zwingli answered by saying that nothing earthly or human could have recognized the divine origin and truth of the Scripture. This was accomplished only through the illumination by God. Without illumination, “human approval contributes nothing to the knowledge of Christ.” Zwingli made clear that the authority of Scripture was beyond and prior to the authority of the church. Calvin discussed this issue in terms of Augustine’s famous statement, “I would not have believed the gospel unless the authority of the church had moved me.” For Calvin, these words meant that the church only recognized the authority of Scripture but did not establish that authority. In Calvin’s view, this issue was clearly about certitude. He argued that the attribution of authority to human beings would actually render the authority of Scripture uncertain. Only the self-authenticating nature of Scripture could give the mind the certainty it craved. The priority of Scripture was reafﬁrmed by the other reformers, including Bucer, Bullinger, Musculus, Myconius, and numerous confessional statements.5 The reformers also articulated certain rules or principles of biblical interpretation. Zwingli, for example, advocated the knowledge of the original languages as well as knowledge of grammar and attention to context and historical background. One must be able to recognize tropes in Scripture. He also stated that there could be no contradictions in the Bible. The different parts of Scripture were to be gathered together and interpreted according to the “same rule of faith.” These were principles upon which all the reformers could agree. Moreover, they agreed on the primacy of the literal or natural sense, thereby moving away from the quadriga.6 The reformers also relied on the exegetical and creedal tradition of the church. Bullinger, for example, was determined to prove the catholicity of the Reformation and, therefore, began the Decades with an exposition on the four general councils of the ancient church as well as the rules of faith by the church fathers. Historians of exegesis have recently explored how widely the reformers referred to the exegetical tradition as a source for their task of interpretation. As Richard Muller has argued, “It is, thus, entirely anachronistic to view the sola Scriptura of Luther and his contemporaries as a declaration that all of theology ought to be constructed anew, without reference to the church’s tradition of interpretation, by the lonely exegete confronting the naked text.”7 We now have an increasingly sophisticated understanding of those whom the reformers read and how they used this tradition, particularly the tradition of the church fathers.8 But the exegetical tradition was never absolutely authoritative in the Reformation, nor, it should be noted, in the Middle Ages. As Scott Hendrix has argued, the use of the fathers was always selective and eclectic. Their authority was below that of Scripture. Hendrix cites the principle articulated by Caspar Hedio who, on the basis of the Marburg Colloquy, described the regula Lutheri: “When the Fathers speak, receive them according to the canon of Scripture. If they appear to contradict that canon, either help them out with glosses or reject

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them.”9 So, too, Calvin formulated carefully the place of the tradition in his response to Sadoleto: “Even though we consider the Word of God alone to be beyond all judgment, we do wish to give to councils and to the Fathers a certain degree of authority as long as they hold to the Word as a norm; and thus we grant to councils and to the Fathers such honor and stature as they rightfully deserve under Christ.”10 In his Antidote to the Paris Articles, Calvin again argued that, “whatever our Masters lack by way of Scriptural witness, they compensate for by other authority which they have . . . which is equal to that of Scripture, or even according to learned men, exceeds it in certainty.” The Paris theologians, he complained, were willing to describe Scripture as simply “rudis materia” which was to be shaped by theologians in their attempt to formulate doctrine. Such a conception was to make Scripture into the proverbial “nose of wax.”11 The Second Helvetic Confession (1566) reiterated the selective use of the tradition, “Wherefore we do not despise the interpretation of the holy Greek and Latin fathers, nor reject their disputations and treatises, as far as they agree with the Scriptures; but we do modestly dissent from them when they are found to set down things differing from, or altogether contrary to, the Scriptures.” Clearly such statements left the exegete with the task of deciding when the fathers conformed to Scripture and when they did not. Throughout the treatises of the sixteenth-century reformers we ﬁnd the insistence that the “word of God” be distinguished from the “words of men.” Zwingli, for example, railed constantly against human traditions as idolatrous and as foreign elements added to God’s word in Scripture.12 The result was that the Bible was to be the judge so that the rites and many of the decrees and biblical interpretations of the Catholic church became “merely human traditions.” As Richard Muller explains, the principle of sola Scriptura meant that “Scripture judged tradition and church, rather than tradition and church judged Scripture.”13 However, the interpretation of Scripture required one more crucial element: the illumination of the Holy Spirit. As Zwingli was bold to pronounce, “For no heart and soul can understand the word of God and his deeds unless they be illumined and taught by God. Whenever that happens, a person becomes so sure, courageous, and certain with regard to the Word of God that he will depend more surely on its truth than upon any seal and letter. On the basis of the words of Christ, I assert the following: Everyone who would speak truth as coming from God on the basis of the teaching that comes from heaven, which is the Gospel, must have been taught, assured, and conﬁrmed by God.” Zwingli concluded, “Thus it follows that a sure understanding of the gospel depends on no one, but on the drawing and illumination by God alone.”14 Before long, the Holy Spirit cropped up everywhere. The explosive potential of identifying the Holy Spirit with certainty soon erupted on the Reformation scene. If the controversy between the reformers and their Catholic opponents had been limited to issues of justiﬁcation and the certainty of salvation, arguments regarding authority might not have taken the problematic turn that came

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to characterize sixteenth-century polemics. But as the pneumatic language of certainty was transferred to the realm of authority, Reformation arguments followed a critical and often disturbing trajectory. One of the most fascinating features of this growing crisis is that disputes about authority were propelled along this new course by the use of shared theological-heuristic principles, many of the same texts, and much of the same vocabulary marshaled in the debates about the certainty of salvation. However, when used to buttress a claim for authority, the recourse to pneumatic texts and language led the reformers along a path that ultimately missed its mark. The issue of authority encompassed diverse problems and included all religious parties of the era. Catholic controversialists attacked Luther on this issue as early as 1518, and the 1525 Peasants’ War seemed to prove their point. The eruption of sacramental and spiritualist debates only exacerbated the problem. The crisis of authority clearly reﬂected theological, social, and political dimensions.15 However, in this chapter we will continue to examine the exegetical and theological nature of the debates and focus on the way in which the appeal to the Spirit fueled a speciﬁcally hermeneutical crisis of certainty. In short, the following discussion analyzes, from the perspective of certainty, the decline of what Steinmetz has called the “exegetical optimism of early Protestantism.”16 Trouble within Protestantism surfaced in Wittenberg as early as 1522, when the Zwickau prophets emerged, protesting infant baptism, claiming to have been called directly by God, and declaring that the Holy Spirit inspired their teachings. This episode, which so agitated Melanchthon, presaged things to come as various radical leaders claimed that their message was authoritatively inspired. Controversies over images, the Eucharist, baptism, ecclesiology, and the Trinity were to split the reformers apart. The warring parties eventually appealed to the Spirit in their preaching and Scriptural interpretation. Claims to the Spirit were accompanied by reliance on a direct inner experience of being taught by the “inner Word,” the “wisdom of God,” and the “inner witness” of Christ. This continual appeal to the Spirit points to the centrality of certitude. Despite their complexity and variety, the differing views of the radical and mainline reformers regarding the relationship of Word and Spirit expressed the essential and inescapable role of certainty in the deepening crisis of authority. From the perspective of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, as well as many other reformers, the problem of certainty crystallized around two interrelated problems: the certainty of salvation and the certainty of authority. As we have seen, the former involved the appeal to an inward, spiritual, and experiential certainty of one’s salvation. This soteriological certainty was the gift and the work of the Holy Spirit. That certainty, however, was always associated with the word of Scripture and was based on biblical verses denoting the direct activity of the Spirit or the immediacy of God to the soul. The certainty of authority, on the other hand, concerned the attempt to legitimize one’s teachings exegetically.

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To ground the certitude of doctrine in the Bible necessitated the concomitant claim for the authority of one’s interpretation of Scripture. We shall show that as the religious crisis grew, the sixteenth-century polemicists relied on the Spirit as the agent of certainty in all areas of argumentation. The Spirit, therefore, came to sanction both the inward experience of one’s own salvation and the inward illumination that granted the authoritative exegesis of the Bible. The frequent claims to the Spirit were due not only to the inﬂuence of leaders such as Luther and Zwingli. As Gordon Rupp noted, the “Protestant left” drew its inspiration from many sources, including the Waldensians, Eckhart, and Suso (via Tauler), as well as Augustine and Staupitz.17 Ozment’s study on the relationship between mysticism and dissent demonstrated the central importance of the Theologia Deutsch.18 Nonetheless, the statement by George Williams still holds true: “But these vagaries [regarding the relationship between Word and Spirit] should not obscure from view the fact that a large element in the spiritualism of the Radical Reformation goes back to Luther himself, and to a lesser degree, Zwingli.”19 Williams’s point is clear in the following early writing from Luther; namely, the Magniﬁcat (1521): In order to understand correctly this sacred hymn of praise, we need to bear in mind that the Blessed Virgin Mary is speaking on the basis of her own experience, in which she was enlightened and instructed by the Holy Spirit. No one can correctly understand God or his Word unless he has received such an understanding immediately from the Holy Spirit. But no one can receive it without experiencing, proving, and feeling it. In such experience the Holy Spirit instructs us as in his own school, outside of which nothing is learned but empty words and prattle.20 In the sermon On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word of God, Zwingli expressed conﬁdence in the hope that the reader or hearer could “put away” all his own views and opinions so as not to impose them on Scripture. According to Zwingli, the “inner man” is made and renewed into the image of God. This divine image gives us a divine likeness that enables us to come to the knowledge of God and to understand Scripture by the illumination of the Holy Spirit. If the Christian ﬁrst consulted “the mind of the Spirit of God” (Psalm 84/85), he would hear only what the Lord spoke. Such people have “received the Spirit of God,” and are, therefore, theodidacti, or “taught by God.” Repeatedly, Zwingli hammered home the point that all other teachers, including popes and councils, have fallen into error. Zwingli insisted that we must admit, “if they erred once there is always the fear that they will err again, and, therefore, we cannot trust in them with any certainty.” Since “all men are liars,” they deceive and “are being deceived.” In order to escape deception with any certitude, the believer must see that “only God can teach us the truth with such certainty that all doubts are removed.” Consequently, Zwingli believed that “When the Word of

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God shines on the human understanding, it enlightens it in such a way that it understands and confesses the Word and knows the certainty of it.”21 For Zwingli, it was the immediacy of God’s teaching that guaranteed the certitude of its truth and its divine origin. Zwingli posed the question, asked by Catholics, “How can I know that my belief is of the Spirit of God unless it is known and recognized to be of God or to be the teaching of God by those whose ofﬁce it is to do this?” Zwingli replied, How are you ever to overcome your obtuseness that causes you not to believe the Spirit of God who offers you the truth but, rather, put your trust in fallible men? . . . You believe that men can give you certainty, which is no certainty, and you do not believe that God can give it to you. Do you not know that the mind and understanding of every man must be brought into captivity to the obedience and service of God? And this is not done by men. . . . You do not know that it is God himself who teaches a man nor do you know that when God has taught him, that man has an inward certainty and assurance.22 Zwingli continued by saying that the Spirit causes the divine word to produce certainty in the soul: “When the word of God shines on human reason it enlightens in such a way that the mind understands and confesses the word and knows the certainty of it.” Thus, he argued, Noah, Abraham, Moses, and Jacob all knew that it was God himself who was speaking to them. No judge, scholastic system, oral tradition, doctor, or father is needed for the interpretation of Scripture because the experience of being “taught by God” authenticates itself.23 Zwingli recounted his own experience in terms of this direct and immediate authentication: Again, I know for certain that God teaches me, because I have experienced the fact of it. To prevent misunderstanding, this is what I mean when I say that I know for certain that God teaches me: when I was younger I, like others of my day, gave myself over too much to human teaching. About seven or eight years ago I undertook to devote myself completely to the Scriptures but was always prevented by philosophy and theology. However, eventually I came to the point where, led by the Word and Spirit of God, I saw the need to set aside all of these things and to learn the doctrine of God directly from his own Word. Then I began to ask God for light and, even though I read nothing else, the Scriptures became far clearer to me than if I had studied many commentators and expositors.24 In answer to the charge that it is a great mistake to think that one understands a matter perfectly without accepting advice from others, Zwingli cited I Corinthians 2:14–15.

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Hear the words of Paul (I Corinthians 2): “But the natural man receives not the things of the Spirit of God: for they are foolishness to him; neither can he know them, because they are spiritually discerned. But he that is spiritual judges all things, yet he himself is judged by no one. For who has known the mind of the Lord that he may instruct him?” . . . The natural man is he that brings his own mind to the Scriptures. The spiritual man is he who does not trust any mind but that which is given by God. . . . The spiritual man judges all things; that is, he sees at once whether the doctrine is from God or not.25 Several points should be noted at this juncture. These early appeals to the Spirit are about the Johannine “Spirit of truth.” The Biblical verse that became crucial was John 14:16–17, “And I will pray to the Father and he will give you another Comforter to be with you forever, even the Spirit of truth, whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him, for he dwells with you and will be in you.” The Holy Spirit now provides both the certainty of salvation and the certainty of doctrine or “truth.” As the “Comforter,” the Spirit granted the inward certitude of salvation. As the “Spirit of truth,” the Spirit enabled the believer to read Scripture and determine the truth of doctrine with certainty. The Spirit came to sanction both the inward experience of one’s own salvation as well as the enlightenment that gave one exegetical authority. Moreover, the experiential and pneumatological language has now been transferred from the realm of soteriology to the issue of hermeneutical or Scriptural authority. Furthermore, as the religious crisis grew, the sixteenth-century reformers appealed to the Spirit as the agent of the certainty of doctrinal truth. The following verses served as the decisive exegetical basis for these dual claims to certitude: And because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying “Abba! Father!” (Galatians 4:6) When we cry “Abba! Father!” it is the Spirit himself bearing witness to our Spirit that we are the children of God. (Romans 8:15–16) It is the spirit that gives life, the ﬂesh proﬁts nothing; the words I have spoken to you are spirit and life. (John 6:63) He who is of God hears the words of God; the reason you do not hear them is that you are not of God. (John 8:47) And it is written in the prophets, “And they shall be taught by God.” (John 6:45, citing Isaiah 54:13) “When the Spirit of Truth comes, he will teach you all the things that you have heard from me.” (John 14:26)

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By far the most important verses were John 14:16–17 and I Corinthians 2:15: And I will pray the Father and he will give you another Comforter, to be with you forever. Even the Spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive because it neither sees him nor knows him; you know him for he dwells in you and will be in you. (John 14:16–17) The spiritual man judges all things, but is himself judged by no one. (I Corinthians 2:15) Reformation scholars have traced in great theological and historical detail the growing differences between Luther and the spiritualists or “fanatics” and “enthusiasts.”26 As Luther engaged in these controversies, statements such as those cited above from the Magniﬁcat became more cautious and precise. The major controversy about the relationship between Word and Spirit became evident by 1524 and 1525. While Luther was in hiding at the Wartburg, Carlstadt became a leader of the Wittenberg reform movement. In 1521 he joined in the attempt to introduce more radical measures into Wittenberg. Concerned with the danger of idolatry, Carlstadt abolished all images from the church and forbade the wearing of vestments. Luther returned to Wittenberg in order to correct the dangers posed by the iconoclastic movement. After Luther rebuked Carlstadt and his followers in his Invocavit Sermons, Carlstadt gave up the academic life, moved to Orlamünde, and composed several treatises on both spirituality and the sacraments.27 In 1523 he composed a treatise on the meaning of and necessity for Gelassenheit. In 1524 he wrote on the Eucharist and on the extent to which more radical reforms should be undertaken. Also in 1524, Luther and Carlstadt confronted each other in Jena at the Black Bear Inn. This famous encounter ended with Luther throwing a golden guilder at Carlstadt, signaling that from that point on the two men were to be known as enemies. In 1524 and 1525 Luther responded to Carlstadt’s writings in his treatise Against the Heavenly Prophets on the Matter of Images and Sacraments. Scholars commonly refer to two important passages in order to illustrate the evolving controversy regarding Word and Spirit and to demonstrate the decisive difference between Luther and his more “spiritualist” opponents. Luther wrote against Carlstadt, Now when God sends forth his holy Gospel, he deals with us in a twofold manner, ﬁrst outwardly, then inwardly. Outwardly he deals with us through the oral word of the gospel and through material signs, that is, baptism and the sacrament of the altar. Inwardly he deals with us through the Holy Spirit, faith, and other gifts. But whatever their measure or order, the outward factors should and must precede. The inward experience follows and is effected by the

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outward. God has determined to give the inward to no one except by the outward.28 Luther argued that while Carlstadt claimed to have reverence for the Word, he actually inverted God’s order and “wants to get to the Spirit ﬁrst.” In his treatise On the Abominable Misuse of the Most Blessed Sacrament of Jesus Christ, Carlstadt did express the position opposite that of Luther: As far as I am concerned, I do not need the external testimony. I want to have the testimony of the Spirit as it was promised by Christ in my innermost self. Do you not know that Christ speaks as follows: “The Spirit, the Comforter, shall testify for you and you also shall testify of me?” This is the way it was with the apostles who were assured inwardly through the testimony of the Spirit, and who afterward preached Christ outwardly, conﬁrming through the Scriptures that Christ had to suffer for us and that the same Christ Jesus of Nazareth was the cruciﬁed.29 Luther’s view of the Word and Spirit clearly became distinct from those who viewed the Scripture as witness to a prior spiritual enlightenment. In the face of both Catholic and Protestant opponents, Luther tried valiantly to ensure the “objectivity” of his message. He came to stress, for example, the importance of his being a “Doctor” of Holy Scripture. To his opponents Luther replied that he must be faithful to his “ofﬁce” of expounding the Bible; his doctorate not only qualiﬁed him but also compelled him to interpret the Scriptures. However, the doctorate alone did not give Luther the safety of objectivity. According to Luther, for the person who was given the Spirit, Scripture was “simple and clear.” If a passage appeared difﬁcult or obscure, the meaning would emerge by comparing that passage with the biblical message as a whole and in the light of Christ. No one, not even a “Doctor of Holy Scripture” should try to understand the Bible by means of his own views or spirit: the Scripture was its own interpreter.30 Luther maintained that Scripture must always be understood only by faith. This meant that the interpreter must “submit” to the Word. Finally, however, Luther was operating with a particular view regarding the power of truth. Truth had a “captive” and objective power over the mind; truth was self-authenticating. In the following passage, Luther was interpreting Augustine’s statement that he would not have believed the Gospel unless the authority of the church had so moved him.31 This statement, Luther argued, could not be used to say that the authority of the church was above that of Scripture. In his argument, Luther tried to describe the power of truth, a power analogous to the certainty and force of mathematics. Explaining this power, Luther spoke for all the reformers: Rather, as Augustine says elsewhere, the mind is so laid hold of by the truth itself that, by virtue of that truth, it is able to reach certainty

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in any judgment. Nevertheless, the mind is unable to judge the truth as such, although it is compelled to say, when entirely conﬁdent, “this is true.” For example, the mind declares with infallible assurance that three and seven make ten, yet it cannot adduce any reason why it is true, although it cannot deny its truth. The fact is that, rather than being itself the judge, the mind has been taken captive and has accomplished a verdict pronounced by Truth herself, sitting on a tribunal. In a similar manner, the church, by the illumination of the Spirit, possesses a “sense” whose presence is certain, although it cannot be proved. Just as no philosopher attempts to appraise the conceptions of common sense but, rather, is appraised by them, so, too, among ourselves there is a spirit of which we are all aware, which judges all things but is judged by none [I Cor. 2:15].32 The problem, of course, was that the overpowering truth of Scripture was not so clear. Consequently, different interpretations began to emerge early in the 1520s regarding such topics as the Eucharist. A relatively minor event illustrates perfectly the problems that were to beset Protestantism. As indicated above, by 1524 the reformers were embroiled in the Eucharistic controversy, sparked in part by Carlstadt’s writings against the idea of the real presence. He was joined by Zwingli, who also challenged the doctrine of the real presence in several treatises published in 1525. In December of that same year, Caspar Schwenckfeld met in Wittenberg with Luther and Bugenhagen to discuss the Eucharist. Schwenckfeld reported that earlier in the summer the Lord had revealed to him that John 6:54 (“He who eats my ﬂesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I will raise him up at the last day”) proved that the body and blood of Christ were not to be identiﬁed with the bread and the wine. Schwenckfeld sent Luther his treatise Twelve Questions or Arguments against Impanation and hoped that through prayer and discussion he and the Wittenberg theologians could come to an agreement. The fact that they failed to do so actually illuminates the issue of certainty.33 Luther did not initially dismiss Schwenckfeld’s opinion. Luther agreed to read his treatise and discuss it with Melanchthon, but he also demanded “solid grounds” or a “revelation” in order to convince him to change his Eucharistic beliefs. Exhorting Schwenckfeld to wait and pray about the issue, Luther reportedly said, “God has promised not to let me err.”34 Luther further noted that he had encountered three opinions on the Eucharist; namely, those of Zwingli, Carlstadt, and, now Schwenckfeld. “In two cases,” he said, “a revelation is claimed. One must be in error. The Spirit of the Lord is not a spirit of dissension.”35 He then explained, “Carlstadt assailed me hard with strong protestation that he was certain of his opinion. But I know that I also am certain [sonder ich můβ gewiβ sein].”36 When Luther asked how he could be so certain of his opinion, the Silesian reformer answered,

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I will not keep this from you for I am certain of what I wrote in my article; Christ did not leave his ﬂesh and blood, etc. and that the former interpretation is not correct. But concerning the words, you will remember that I cannot be so certain, since I am not so learned in languages. However, Zwingli’s “signiﬁcat” always seems distant and strange. I have become more and more certain of our interpretation and I know that it cannot be understood in any other way.37 Both men were certain. Schwenckfeld claimed a revelation from the Lord, while Luther argued that God had promised not to let him err. Revelations notwithstanding, Luther could not budge on a “matter of faith” unless he could “have and feel it in my conscience.” Luther only knew that Ich bin auch gewiβ. So, too, was Schwenckfeld who wrote of his own revelation regarding John 6:54 by saying, “The spirit of the Lord came to my aid with his teaching in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. . . . Then I was helped by God’s grace so that I was quite sure in my heart that the traitor Judas . . . was by no means fed with the body and blood of Christ.”38 Schwenckfeld was not, however, Luther’s gravest or only opponent. Carlstadt had moved to Orlamünde and had tried to continue the reform program that Luther had stopped at Wittenberg. In 1524, however, Carlstadt was exiled from Orlamünde and in 1525 was in Rothenburg ob der Tauber. During the year of 1524, Carlstadt wrote on the Eucharist and rejected the doctrine of the real presence found both in Catholicism and in Luther’s writings. He defended his own understanding on the basis of Scripture, especially by interpreting the pronoun “this” as the physical body of Jesus present at the Last Supper. When Jesus stated, “This is my body,” he was not referring to the cup or chalice but to his cruciﬁxion, which was yet to come.39 Carlstadt continued to insist throughout his writings that the necessity of the Spirit sufﬁced for the true understanding of Scripture, and claimed that he had received that Spirit. If we were not to be like the apostles, why, then, does Peter say of Cornelius that he had received the Spirit as they had? Why does Paul say that we ought to be his followers? And did not Christ promise his Spirit to us as he did to the apostles? The Spirit alone leads us to an understanding of what God says. It follows, therefore, that all those cannot understand what God says who do not hear God’s Spirit speak.40 Carlstadt’s claims about the Spirit allowed him to maintain that he could speak with certainty about the meaning of Scripture. Indeed, he argued, he understood Paul “more thoroughly than Dr. Luther.” In chapter 5 we will analyze the experiential spirituality of Gelassenheit. Presently, however, we should note how the role of Gelassenheit corresponds to Carlstadt’s understanding of the relationship between Word and Spirit. A spirituality grounded in Gelassenheit

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meant, for Carlstadt, that the self was so completely yielded or emptied that one could never impose the self or one’s own views on Scripture. With “I-ness” or “self-ness” destroyed, the Christian was “wholly yielded.” This meant that the self was divested and the Christian became unable to “see, hear, taste, desire, understand and will anything other than what God wills.” Carlstadt explained, “When we are thus opened up, we too are prepared, empty, and free to be ﬁlled with God, as he himself has promised.” He likened this state to pouring water into a glass, “From Christ Jesus living waters ﬂow down into us. They pervade our souls and well up unto eternal life. . . . Then we lose ourselves in the snowwhite cloth which comes from heaven and enfolds us mightily so that we can no longer ﬁnd ourselves either in will, desire, strength, or soul when surrender of self [Gelassenheit] is complete.”41 Gelassenheit, therefore, ensured that God alone was acting in the person’s mind and will. Carlstadt often spoke of the inner call that would ensure certitude. While Luther talked about his doctorate, the ofﬁce of the minister, or the need for a proper call, Carlstadt claimed a spiritual “inward call” that compelled and drove him to speak. This “inward call” spoke to the emptied soul, guaranteeing that one preached only the truth of Christ. Carlstadt counseled that the Christian must wait for the inner calling when the Spirit “kindles” and “uplifts” the soul. No one can rightly write or preach about God, unless the spirit of God has ﬁrst led him into the truth and has compelled him to write, speak, or testify . . . it is better for me . . . to wait until I am wonderfully kindled and uplifted by the Spirit that works within unto such public proclamation—the Spirit which holds all hearts in hand and moves every shepherd to speak or be silent, as he wills. Scripture indicates that no one must think himself a shepherd or pastor unless he discerns such power of the word of God within himself, Ezek. 3; Jer. 1:33, Jn. 10. . . . The inner call is precious, certain, and essential, for it gives truthful testimony that the one who is called is a servant of the Lord.42 Congregations, Carlstadt argued, must discern and understand who has God’s inner call before choosing a pastor. By inquiring rigorously and praying about the secret divine calling, “God will inform his people inwardly and outwardly to know whom he has given to them and sent into his harvest.” Carlstadt trusted that the ability to discern God’s grace in another person was possible because the person judging would also have both the Spirit and the Scripture. In short, the believer would only be “recognizing” the same Spirit in someone else.43 The “inner call” given by the Spirit authorized the preacher to expound the Scriptures with certitude. Once again we ﬁnd the reference to I Corinthians 2:15: Those who are carnal cannot understand God’s will and grace as do those who are spiritual. Therefore, only those are to choose, call, and

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appoint those whom God’s Spirit compels to do so and who have the Spirit of Christ, the supreme Shepherd. . . . It is difﬁcult to probe the depth of another person. . . . Some, however, are driven by God’s Word, which compels them and leaves them no rest until they confess it openly. . . . But human knowledge can be false and deceptive, for there are many raving wolves who come dressed in sheep’s clothing. . . . And some bear fruit as if they were sound trees. All of these will be revealed at the completion of their work, which an experienced spiritual person, who discerns and judges all things, can understand.44 Several familiar elements emerge in these statements. The Spirit, working directly and immediately within the soul, compels one to speak God’s word. As cited above, “No one, can truly write or preach about God, unless the Spirit of God has ﬁrst led him into all truth and has compelled him to write, speak, or testify.” The Spirit alone grants truth and certainty, while human knowledge is likely to be false and deceptive. Equally important was the belief that the “spiritual man” knew how to judge between that which was true and that which was deceptive. The difﬁculty in discerning such a person also emerges from this statement. While Carlstadt assured his hearers that God would inwardly reveal to them who this spiritual person was, he also indicated that this revelation would be clear at the “completion” of their work. And ﬁnally, the reference to I Corinthians 2:15 is prominent; the “spiritual man” is also the experienced man who discerns the mind of God and “judges all things.” Besides Carlstadt, it was Thomas Müntzer who most vehemently challenged Luther’s claim to the correct understanding of Scripture.45 While serving as confessor at a Cistercian nunnery in 1520, he was invited by Egranus to be his temporary replacement at Zwickau. During his stay at Zwickau, Müntzer developed a spiritualistic and mystical theology. His alliance with Wittenberg grew strained, as did his relationship with Egranus and the local Franciscans. He was repeatedly expelled from various cities where he attempted to install his version of the Reformation. In 1521 he went to Prague, where he took on a prophetic role. In 1523 he became pastor in Allstedt, where he formed the “Christian League” in order to defend the elect against Catholic persecution. Because of Luther’s warning to the Protestant Saxon princes, Müntzer was expelled from Allstedt late in 1524. After causing civil unrest in the city of Mülhausen, Müntzer went to southwest Germany in September 1524. There he encountered the heart of the peasant rebellion. Returning to Mülhausen in 1525, Müntzer shaped the governing council of the city as an eternal council that was pledged to the Word of God. As the peasants’ revolt moved closer to Mülhausen, Müntzer became convinced that the great struggle of the elect against the ungodly had begun. After the peasants were defeated on May 15, 1525, at Frankenhausen, Müntzer was executed. Müntzer’s writings against Egranus, the Franciscans, and Luther are fascinating for the light they shed on the central importance of certainty. From the

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beginning of his ministry in Zwickau, Müntzer attacked what he perceived to be an inauthentic faith; that is, an inexperienced faith that manifested itself in purely external ways. He attacked both the Franciscans and Egranus for holding to such an “easy” and insincere faith. He accused Egranus for defending the following erroneous proposition: The only experience of faith we can have in this world is derived from books. This is why neither the layman nor the unlearned—however much they have been put to the test—can make any judgments on matters of faith, but judgment of all such matters pertains to those with mitres but no experience at all.46 The emphasis on experience continued to dominate Müntzer’s view of faith. Luther clearly had stressed the importance of such experiences as anxiety, despair, trust, and joy in his explanations of justiﬁcation by faith alone. These experiential themes recur, in a transformed way, throughout Müntzer’s writings. Nevertheless, Müntzer challenged Luther to a contest, so to speak, about experience. He accused the “self-indulgent biblical scholars” of coming “to faith lightly” and wanting only the merciful, “honeysweet” words of Christ. Such faith is “unbelief” and purely “external,” “hypocritical,” and “untried.” The Christian must, through deep spiritual suffering, ﬁrst become aware of his unbelief. To recognize that one’s faith was inauthentic was an arduous process that required God’s testing, a testing or suffering that purged the soul. Then one understood that he could not “storm the heavens” with a vain conﬁdence. We cannot, Müntzer preached, have recourse to a “counterfeit faith and a ﬁctitious picture of God’s mercy” by trusting in the help of some “natural” promise or assurance. The only real certitude of faith was born out of suffering; the illusion of untried faith had to be destroyed before one experienced the certainty of true faith. To cry “Believe! Believe!” is a complete misunderstanding and a dangerous appeal to a “counterfeit” or false faith.47 The elect, of course, “experience” the nature of real faith because they have “tasted” the “bitter Christ” and have endured the suffering that faith requires. What is of importance here is that this understanding of “experienced faith” is also the crucial element in the authority to interpret Scripture with certainty. Unless one has experienced the breaking through of unbelief, the suffering of faith, and the teaching by the Spirit, the believer cannot ﬁnd the true meaning of the Bible. According to Müntzer, only the “key of David” can open the Scriptures. Müntzer interpreted this key (a reference to Isaiah 22:22) to mean the immediacy of God’s teaching that comes after one has endured suffering. The scholar cannot grasp the meaning of Scripture, although the whole of it has been expounded to him in a human way, and although he may be about to burst apart [with all his knowledge]; he has to wait until the key of David has revealed it to him, until he has

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been trodden underfoot with all his habitual ways in the wine press. There he will attain such poverty of spirit as to acknowledge that there is no faith in him at all. . . . Then man must see how he is to endure the work of God in order that he may grow from day to day in the knowledge of God. He will be taught by God alone, person to person, not by any created thing.48 Müntzer repeatedly stressed this need for immediacy; the believer must be “taught by God” directly in the soul before he can have any knowledge of God or Scripture. To read the text of Scripture left one with only the “outward” or external meaning. As Müntzer always made clear, the external could not create the internal reality. The Bible remained an external thing until God revealed himself and taught the soul directly. O no, most beloved Christians, let us use the holy Scriptures as they were meant to be used; to do us death . . . ! For the living word which brings us to life is heard only by the soul which has been purged. Through experiencing unbelief the elect leaves behind him all the counterfeit faith he has learnt, heard or read from Scripture; for he sees that an outward testimony cannot create inward reality.49 Consequently, Müntzer insisted that “all true priests need revelation if they are to speak with conviction.” For those without the Spirit, the Scripture is a “closed book.” Such people “lock Scripture up” and deny that God can speak “to man in his own person.” For Müntzer, if God could not directly teach the soul, there could be no certainty of truth because the individual would be thrown back to rely on human teachers. The reformers commonly taught that the Christian had to be free of “human traditions” or “human teachings,” as exempliﬁed by Catholicism. Men such as Carlstadt and Müntzer applied this argument to both Catholic and Reformation teachers. All teachers, especially the “biblical scholars” at Wittenberg, were only human teachers who instructed externally. Only the Spirit of God could speak in an unmediated manner to the soul and in so doing enabled one to use Scripture safely as testimony of the truth. In short, to rely on externals, including Scripture and human teachers, leaves one open to uncertainty and deception. But where the seed falls on the good ﬁeld, that is, in the hearts full of the fear of God, then they become the parchment on which God writes the real holy Scripture with his living ﬁnger, not with ink. It is to this that the outward books of the Bible bear true testimony. And there is no surer testimony to authenticate the Bible than the living speech of God when the Father addresses the Son in the heart of man. Thus Scripture can be read by all elect men, who seek interest for their talent. But the

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damned will surely fail to do that. . . . for they are the people to whom Jeremiah speaks in VIII; for they have no experience of their own which they could employ in the explanation of Holy Scripture.50 Such people, including priests and biblical scholars, “gulp down the dead words of Scripture and then pour out the mere letter and untried faith.” The person who has “been tested,” Müntzer argued, “can preach and if the listener has previously heard Christ preaching in his heart through the spirit of the fear of God, then a preacher can provide testimony enough.” Scripture, Müntzer insisted, gives testimony but not faith. The elect “friends of God” were those who had been “taught by God” and felt God working within them. But, Müntzer insisted, God must ﬁrst cause consternation or temptation, otherwise all preaching and writing would be in vain. Most importantly, however, “a person who has been continually trained in this [suffering] can pronounce on everything with ﬂawless judgment.”51 Equating the “experience of faith,” or being “taught by God,” with the certainty of “ﬂawless judgment,” Müntzer also had to defend the authenticity of such spiritual experiences. We shall return to this issue in chapter 6, but at this point it is necessary to note that, for Müntzer, revelation authenticated one’s authority and hermeneutical certainty. Those taught directly by the “mouth of God” can “know with complete certainty that the teaching of Christ was not devised by any man, but comes to us from the living God without any shadow of deception. For Christ himself wants us to have the judgment over his teaching.” Furthermore, this assurance given by God “enables him to distinguish by divine revelation between the work of God and that of malignant spirits.”52 Those who deny that God still reveals his will through “genuine visions or direct words” contradict the whole of Scripture. Müntzer told the Princes of Saxony that such scholars as those at Wittenberg “arrogate to themselves the interpretation of the mysteries of God.” In reality, however, they only obstruct the work of the Spirit. Therefore Müntzer reasoned, “In his eighth chapter, Jeremiah turns these points most cogently against all those who cannot understand that all of Scripture must be complemented by the experience of faith and that this is altogether infallible.” According to Müntzer, if the Christian does not experience God’s revelation in the “heart” or the “abyss of the soul,” then “no man can make any judgment which he can justify before his conscience.” God must write on the heart with the “stylus of his spirit in the abyss of the soul.” Therefore, the elect “learn true judgments from the mouth of God himself.” The salient point here is that one can attain to an “infallible” certainty of “ﬂawless judgment” when expounding Scripture.53 In Müntzer’s thinking we can discern a crucial theological move that connects the certainty of salvation with the certainty of authority. Müntzer distinguished the elect from the damned in terms of certainty and uncertainty. God opened only the minds of the elect so that they received the

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testimony that is “not uncertain but an invincible one from the holy spirit which then gives our spirit ample testimony that we are the children of God.”54 Müntzer repeatedly emphasized that those who did not have the experience of faith were those who denied the possibility of revelation or illumination by the Spirit. But only such illumination could provide the certainty of truth: “They set themselves up as instructors to the whole world, and anything which does not suit their academic approach is at once branded as devilish, although they themselves are not assured of their own salvation, essential as that is, Rom. 8.”55 The reference to Romans 8 was, of course, the familiar appeal to the “Abba! Father!” passage—the passage that, as we have seen, was crucial to the certainty of salvation. This was the central verse for Müntzer because it expressed the absolute necessity for both the inner testimony of the Spirit and the need to suffer with Christ. Only the presence of the Spirit, as testiﬁed to in Romans 8:16, qualiﬁed a person to be heard and believed. Those who “boast about Christ,” Müntzer warned, should not “be believed unless they have his Spirit.” The use of Deuteronomy 30:14 helped him explain the necessity for the inner teaching of the Spirit, “The word is not far from you. Look into your hearts. . . .” Thus Müntzer argued, “Now anyone who has not become conscious and receptive to this inner word which is to be heard in the abyss of the soul through the revelation of God, Rom. 8, may have devoured a thousand Bibles, but he can say nothing about God which has any validity.” He complained that the “biblical scholars” wanted to have “the testimony of the spirit of Jesus brought within the walls of the university” because they wanted to reserve for themselves the “right to judge on matters of faith.”56 The “Abba! Father!” passages were now being fused with the certitude of truth and authority. In order to understand and expound Scripture, Müntzer demanded the authority of the faith given by the Spirit: “For you will never have faith unless God himself gives it to you, and instructs you in it. If that is to happen, then at ﬁrst, my dear biblical scholar, the book will be closed to you. For even if you burst in the effort, neither reason nor any created being can open it for you too. God has to gird your loins; yes, you must let God, working in you, strip off all the clothing of creaturely origin. . . .”57 We can see the argument clearly forming: The Holy Spirit who granted the certainty of salvation is now merged into the certitude of hermeneutical authority. Without the former, one cannot have the latter. In response to the crisis of Word and Spirit and the problem of conﬂicting interpretations, Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin had to defend and articulate their own certainty of authority. Luther frequently observed that the whole world claimed to have “Christ, Baptism, the Sacrament of the Altar and Holy Scripture.” He also recognized that the problem concerned the numerous claims to the Spirit, complaining that all he ever heard was “Geist! Geist! Geist!” Referring to Catholics, Anabaptists, as well as the ancient Montanists, Luther said, “Their one boast is of nothing but the Spirit. . . . Our whole quarrel with all

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these teachers revolves around their claim that they have the Holy Spirit and therefore should be believed.”58 The challenge for the mainline reformers was to establish a hermeneutical certainty that distinguished them from their opponents. To address this unwanted problem, they made the same connection we saw earlier in Müntzer; that is, they combined those verses once interpreted as guarantees for the certitude of salvation with biblical references to the authority of “spiritual judgments.” The latter included such verses as I John 4:1, I Corinthians 2:11–13, and, I Corinthians 2:14–15. This connection between verses about salvation (Romans 8:16 and Galatians 4:6) and verses about “judgments” was decisive. For Luther, the Word and the Spirit together formed a sure ground upon which to stand.59 According to Luther, the text of Scripture was inspired, infallible, and certain. Nonetheless, heretics could misuse and misinterpret this divine text. When “testing the spirits,” Luther’s authoritative verse was repeatedly I Corinthians 2:15: “The spiritual man judges all things.” He moved effortlessly between the certainty of salvation and the certainty of authority. On Luther’s view, “anyone who is enlightened concerning himself and his own salvation, judges and discerns with the greatest certainty the dogmas and opinions of all men. Of this it is said in I Corinthians 2:15, ‘The spiritual man judges all things, but is judged no one.’” The connection is clear; the certainty of one’s own salvation leads to the certainty of judging “the dogmas and opinions of all men.” The same form of argumentation permeates his discussion of Galatians 4:6. He began by vindicating the right of the faithful to judge. Commenting on the words, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into your hearts,” Luther argued that the believer has been re-created with a new judgment, new sensations, and new drives. Such changes, he wrote, are the gift and accomplishment of the Holy Spirit, who comes with the preached Word, puriﬁes our hearts by faith and produces spiritual motivation in us. Therefore, there is the greatest possible difference between us and the enemies and perverters of the Word. We . . . are able to declare and judge with certainty, on the basis of the Word, about the will of God toward us, about all laws and doctrines, about our lives and those of others. On the other hand, the papists and the fanatic spirits are unable to judge with certainty about anything.60 For Luther, the dividing line was between those who were certain about salvation and could judge with certainty and those who were uncertain about their salvation and could not therefore judge anything correctly. For those granted the certainty of salvation, the Spirit also cured the noetic effect of sin. The deception caused by the Fall was healed so that the mind now literally had a new perception. We have noted that in the soteriological context, this new perception allowed the believer to see God as a merciful Father

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instead of an angry judge. But this new perceptual ability extended further and brought with it the certitude necessary to “judge all laws and doctrines, about our lives and those of others.” Luther frequently discussed this redeemed mind in terms of certitude. He wrote about a “new frame of mind” that comes not from our natural powers but “from the judgment of the Spirit.” It is not, he said, “within the power of our perception or judgment to recognize this [truth] much less to confess it; but we have it all from the Spirit whom God has given us.” Luther made it clear that it is never the natural fallen reason that is exercising decisions but the “judgment of the Spirit.” He referred to the “vision of the Spirit” and the new “spiritual eyes” that resulted from this new perception. He stated clearly that one could not think correctly about God unless God’s Spirit was within him. Luther spoke of this new perceptual reality in terms of the heart acquiring a “new light, new motivation” and “new judgment.” These changes, wrought by the Spirit, produced a new mind and a new will, “so that the eyes, the ears, the lips, and the tongue not only see, hear, and speak otherwise than they used to, but the mind itself evaluates things and acts upon them differently from the way it did before.”61 This newly healed or re-created perception was the work of the Johannine “Spirit of truth” (John 14:16). As we have seen, because the Spirit was now both the “Comforter” and the “Truth,” Luther could draw the connection between the experiential certitude of salvation and the certainty of truth. In fact, the comforting aspect of the Spirit emboldened the believer to defend the truth: “This must be called a genuine, true comfort, a courage that is not false or futile; for it does not rely on anything uncertain but is thoroughly reliable and puts its trust in things that do not fail or deceive.” The courage given by the “Spirit of truth” enabled the faithful to judge what is “of the truth” without fear of any deception. Luther promised that whatever Christ does through his Christians would be “completely true and certain.”62 Luther continually condemned false doctrine on the basis that, through the Word, the Spirit had given him the certitude of truth. According to Luther, those who rejected justiﬁcation by faith and were therefore uncertain of salvation simply could not see or understand because “they do not have the testimony of the Spirit, as our believers do.” These believers can “decide all present-day controversies and disputes” precisely because they believe with certainty that they have eternal life. The Spirit will not let believers be led astray into deception.63 The result is an enlightened man who is able to judge all works and doctrine, including the schismatic spirits and the fanatics who teach love and good works but not the main article of faith in Christ. Then we are competent to judge these and say, “Your doctrine is not correct.”64

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Defending the certainty of authority, Luther argued that, “where the sun shines and illumines the heart, there is found a true and certain understanding of all things. Then one can take and maintain a ﬁrm position on all doctrines. . . . And if someone assails one doctrine or another, a Christian is able to repel the attacks; for he has on his side the true teacher, the Holy Spirit, who alone reveals this doctrine from heaven.” Luther insisted that Christ would never let a true Christian fall into error. Therefore, he who “believes may be certain that he will proclaim the articles of faith correctly and will not preach falsehood.”65 Luther also encouraged the congregation to test the doctrine preached to them. In so doing, he was careful to distinguish between preaching and judging. While Luther was clear that not everyone was authorized to preach, nonetheless, he maintained that the hearer must test the doctrine taught by the authorized preacher in order to see if it agreed with the Word of God.66 Preaching and “testing” were two different things. The former belonged to the “ofﬁce” of the preacher, but the latter was the duty of everyone. “The will of the Father,” Luther said, “was to judge teaching, to keep silent, to give ear only to the fact that [Christ] was sent by the Father.”67 If the believer listened only to the Word, God would make disciples and true teachers out of them so that they could judge rightly. If you do this, I will make disciples, yes, real teachers out of you, so that you can judge all doctrines by my [Christ’s] Word. A Christian soon smells from afar which is God’s teaching and which is human teaching. He sees from afar that the schismatic spirits are speaking their own mind and opinion. They cannot escape me, Dr. Luther. I can soon judge and say whether their doctrine is of God or of man; for I am doing the will of the God who sent Christ. A Christian can differentiate between doctrine and doctrine, and state, “This is what God said and this is what He did not say. This is from God and this is from the devil.”68 Luther ﬁnished this passage with the most important verse of all: “Therefore St. Paul says that the spiritual man, equipped with God’s Word, judges all doctrine, yes, all spirits, but he cannot be judged by teachers and spirits.” I Corinthians 2:15 continually authorized the certitude of doctrine or authority. Throughout his writings, Luther asserted the right of the “spiritual man” to make judgments. He did not authorize every spiritual man to claim the ofﬁce of preaching, but he did believe such a person could judge the correctness of exegesis and doctrine. As early as 1520, in his treatise To the Nobility of the German Nation, Luther maintained that Christians were to follow anyone, even the most obscure person, to whom God has revealed true understanding. The priesthood of all believers meant that all the faithful had the “power to test and

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judge what is right or wrong in matters of faith.”69 Luther continued to argue in his later writings that the believer had the authority to judge the purity of doctrine and all forms of heresy and unbelief, including those of the Turks as well as opponents such as Faber, Eck, Oecolampadius, Zwingli, and the “fanatics.” Commenting on Deuteronomy 17:8, Luther explained that “the tabernacle” referred to the place chosen by God: There is one place common to all Christians; that is the Spirit and truth. So Christ himself deﬁnes it, “In Spirit and in truth,” he says, God is adored and worshipped. And in this very place questions of faith must be resolved. In this place the pope is no more than a maid in a mill nor does his decree mean more in this place than that of a farmer in the ﬁeld. For faith is the property of all, and “he that is spiritual judges all things” (I Corinthians 2:15).70 The faithful, Luther argued, could see through the falsity of the world and its religion. They judge the world and the world, in turn, judges them. However, “the correct judgment is on the side of the believer because ‘the spiritual man judges all things.’”71 According to Luther, the true believer should oppose everything written and done against him with the certainty that he has the true teaching. Believers must condemn heretical books because “the spiritual man judges all things,” while the enemy exercises only a “carnal judgment” that is of no avail.72 Against Erasmus, Luther explained that through the Holy Spirit, the believer “enjoys complete certainty of judging and deciding between the doctrines and opinions of all men as they affect oneself and one’s salvation.” Luther always defended these judgments on the ground that “the spiritual man judges all things, but he himself is judged by no one.” Such judgment, Luther added, belongs to faith and was necessary for every Christian, “even for a layman.”73 The Spirit who is needed for understanding Scripture grants the certainty of that understanding. Discernment of true judgment is critical because, as Luther warned, not every claim to be God’s people is true. Consequently, it was up to the believer or the true church to exercise judgment. The church, Luther said, prevails against heresies as “it judges and thus separates from itself all false doctrine and all opposition, even though the devil becomes an angel of light and appears in a form as beautiful and resplendent as God Himself. . . .”74 Such references to I Corinthians 2:15 can be multiplied, but these citations are sufﬁcient to show the centrality of this verse in issues concerning doctrinal or hermeneutical certainty. The Spirit tells the believer that he has been saved or justiﬁed by faith. The Spirit then turns that same believer into the “spiritual man who judges all things.” The Spirit, again acting as the agent of certainty, provides the believer with both the true understanding of Scripture as well as the certitude that his understanding is true.

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Luther was not alone among the “mainline” reformers in confronting dissenters. Nor was he alone in attributing to the Spirit the dual certainties of both salvation and authority. As did Luther, Zwingli moved effortlessly from the former to the latter. For Zwingli, the “Abba! Father!” passage in Romans 8:16 served to explain this shift between the two certainties: And when someone speaks what is of God, he does not need to conﬁrm that person’s word, but rather say, “This is to be believed since it is of God.” And everything will be clear to him through faith in the gospel, provided he clings to Christ. For God’s Spirit informs our spirit that we are the sons of God (Romans 8:16). How are we to know that we are sons except that God assures us in our hearts through the Spirit of his grace? How are we, who are full of lies, to know the truth, except by the breath of the Spirit?75 This passage reveals a recurring form of argumentation in Zwingli’s writings. Because the Spirit has testiﬁed that we are the “sons of God,” we also are qualiﬁed to judge something to be true or false. Here again, the Spirit who is the Comforter is also the Spirit of truth. The certainty of authority to interpret Scripture derives from the experience of salvation. Zwingli further assumed that the believer was able to understand Scripture because of the likeness established between the divine and human spirit. To interpret Scripture correctly, one must be illumined by the same Spirit who wrote that Scripture. The believer must have the Spirit of Christ in order to understand the words of Christ. Zwingli, therefore, defended his interpretations of the Bible against Eck, Emser, Luther, and the Anabaptists by arguing that ﬁrst the Christian had to receive faith from the Spirit and then test his understanding by the Scripture. This principle was not individualistic. Zwingli, for example, made clear that it was “each church that judges of the word that is set before it.”76 As scholars have demonstrated, Luther and Zwingli disagreed on the relationship between Word and Spirit. While that disagreement is well known, the defense of their views in terms of certitude has often been overlooked. In his treatise on the Eucharist, addressed to Luther, Zwingli cited Luther’s statement, “But he who drinks in true faith from the words themselves believes this, whether Christ creeps into the bread or cup, whatever he wants to do, as long as I have these words, I ask nothing further.” Zwingli replied, We think faith cannot be drunk in from words, but the words put forth are understood by the direction of faith. “Unless you believe, you will not understand,” and “No person comes to me, unless the Father who sent me draws him. . . .” Faith is the arbiter and interpreter of the Word. How, therefore, could we wait to drink in

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faith from words, when we ought not to approach the interpretation of Scripture unless fortiﬁed by faith?77 For Zwingli, words were external and, therefore, could not affect or grant certainty to the soul. Certainty can only come from immediacy or directness. Zwingli’s emphasis on John 6:45 (“to be taught by God,” or theodidacti) derives from this need for the immediacy required by certitude. In his relentless campaign against “human teachings,” Zwingli argued that the certainty of doctrine, like the certainty of salvation, comes only to the soul that is directly “taught by God.” In searching for the true meaning of Scripture, the believer must receive this “drawing” and “teaching” immediately from above the soul—that is, from the Spirit of God. Now the inner “drawing” of John 6:45 is associated with the certainty of understanding Scripture. With this “right understanding” given by the Spirit, the believer is ﬁnally able to understand the mind and intention of God in Scripture.78 Zwingli connected the knowledge of oneself as a “son of God” with the phrase, “He that is of God, hears the words of God (John 8:47).”79 By making this connection, Zwingli joined salvation with authority. Only those, he said, who are “born of God” can hear, interpret, and understand God’s words. Replying to Emser, Zwingli’s cited I Corinthians 2:15 to explain his point: It is clear, therefore, that we are rendered faithful only by that Word which the heavenly Father proclaims in our hearts, by which also he illumines us so that we understand and draws us in such a way that we follow. . . . Those who are imbued with this Word judge the word which in a discourse sounds forth and strikes our ears. Nevertheless, the Word of faith, which resides in the mind of the faithful, is judged by no man, but itself judges the external word. However, the faithful judges not by his own judgment but by the divine Spirit.80 Zwingli did not leave this spiritual judgment to individual discretion. The crucial test was the conformity of one’s judgment to Scripture. Only faith, which was the gift of the Spirit and the sign of election, could interpret Scripture correctly. But Zwingli admitted that anyone could pretend to have faith. He asked what one should do about those who are “constantly boasting of the Spirit.” The “barriers” within which one must keep the Spirit are the “walls of Scripture.” Therefore, he argued, “Scripture is the touchstone of our spirit. By this we must prove all spirits.” The Scripture, Zwingli insisted, was the “rope, fetter, reins, yoke, straps, and the draught animal of the Spirit.” While the Spirit was always superior, nonetheless, it is restrained by the “reins and ropes of Scripture.”81 As did Luther, Zwingli defended the ofﬁce of preaching as a task only for particular chosen people. The one who is called to “prophesy” or interpret Scripture is one who must know the biblical languages and the rules of interpretation.

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Moreover, he must be called either by a miracle or by election. The “prophet” must be “sent by God” and was never to appropriate the ofﬁce to himself. Zwingli explained that God chose Paul both by directly teaching his heart and then externally marking him by a “wonderful conversion.” Matthias was chosen through the election of the entire congregation. Hence the preacher must be “marked by God inwardly and externally.”82 Like Luther, Zwingli distinguished between the ofﬁce of preaching and that of judging the words of the preacher. The right of judging, Zwingli stated, belonged to “every believing person” because “the spiritual man judges all things” Once again, Zwingli connected John 8:47 (“He that is of God hears the words of God”) with I Corinthians 2:15; those who know themselves to be the “sons of God” also “know the things of God.”83 [The Spirit] dwelling within them shows them all things and tells them whether what they hear is of the ﬂesh or of the Spirit. Hence it comes about that “he that is spiritual judges all things,” recognizes all things, “Yet he himself is judged by no man,” for it is not the ﬂesh or blood that judges but the Spirit.84 By the middle of the sixteenth century, these claims to certitude had become commonplace. Calvin, too, inherited these forceful, but often problematic, defenses of certainty. As we have noted, Calvin also understood faith as bearing within itself the individual certainty of salvation. The cry “Abba! Father!” denoted the experiential certitude of salvation. Calvin also believed that the testimonium internum Spiritus Sancti was necessary for the understanding and interpretation of Scripture. Turning to Calvin’s defense of his exegetical and doctrinal authority, we can see similarities with Luther and Zwingli. However, we also can discern a kind of reserve that seems to reﬂect the awareness of past difﬁculties posed by claiming the Spirit as the source of certainty. Calvin was much more reticent to cite the familiar passages from Romans, Galatians, and the Gospel of John in order to validate his interpretations. As we have seen, Calvin clearly understood Romans 8:15 and Galatians 4:6 as expressing the certitude of salvation. The Spirit, through whom one cries “Abba! Father!,” was the spirit of adoption. That Spirit who “bears witness to our spirit,” gives us “the testimony of our salvation.” John 6:44–45 brought to Calvin’s mind not so much spiritual understanding of Scripture, but, rather, spiritual understanding about God’s will in predestination. In the Institutes he referred to John 6:44 as meaning that God governed the hearts of the pious so effectively “that they follow him with unwavering intention.” In his dispute with Albert Pighius, Calvin essentially repeated what he argued in the 1539 Institutes. Claiming the authority of Augustine, Calvin interpreted John 6:44–45 as meaning that God draws us “without force and not unwillingly, and therefore as those who follow of their

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own accord—but with a will that he has made.” Nonetheless, Calvin by no means renounced the Spirit as the giver of certitude in debates about the interpretation of Scripture. This is evident from the fact that in the debate with Pighius he added on the basis of John 6:45: Everyone who has heard and learned from my Father comes to me. Learning, [Pighius] says, is here understood as assenting. So not everyone whom the Father teaches comes to Christ, but only he who allows himself to be persuaded. I will leave to my readers to reckon on how much weight this interpretation ought to have, once I have, in a couple of words, reminded them of what Christ is driving at in that passage. It is simply of course to show how big a difference there is between the outward preaching of a human being which strikes only the ears, and that secret, more inward instruction of the Holy Spirit by which the mind is enlightened and the heart touched . . . teaching is fruitful only when both the light of understanding and the disposition to obey are given by God. And this is the relevance of the passage which he quotes from Isaiah to the effect that all will be taught by God. For in that passage the prophet indicates a special kind of teaching of which the Lord deems his elect to be worthy.”85 In his attack on the “fanatics” who claimed the inspiration of the Spirit, Calvin did not cite Galatians or Romans. He was quick, however, to cite John 16:3 to argue the inseparability of Word and Spirit: “[The Spirit] would speak not from himself but would suggest to and instill into their minds what he had handed on through the Word [John 16:13]. Therefore the Spirit, promised to us, has not the task of inventing new and unheard of revelations, or of forging a new kind of doctrine, to lead us away from the received doctrine of the gospel, but of sealing our minds with that very doctrine which is commended by the gospel.” According to Calvin, the Holy Spirit so inheres in God’s truth, which he expresses in Scripture, that only when its proper reverence and dignity are given to the Word does the Holy Spirit show forth His power. . . . For by a kind of mutual bond the Lord has joined together the certainty of his Word and of his Spirit so that the perfect religion of the Word may abide in our minds when the Spirit, who causes us to contemplate God’s face, shines; and that we in turn may embrace the Spirit with no fear of being deceived when we recognize him in his own image.86 In his references to the relationship between Spirit and Scripture, Calvin relied on God’s unchangeability to guarantee certitude. God must “ever remain the same as he once revealed himself [in Scripture].” God “sent down the same Spirit by whose power he had dispensed the Word, to complete his work by the

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efﬁcacious conﬁrmation of the Word.”87 In his commentary on John 14:17, he explained that the Spirit of truth was the Teacher of Truth, from which “it follows that until we have been inwardly taught by him all our minds are held by vanity and falsehood.” Calvin did not emphasize that the believer was free to pass judgment on all things; his point was that nothing relating to the Holy Spirit could be learned by human reason, because “God is known only by the experience of faith.” In John 16:13, Calvin returned to his usual concern that nothing could ever be added to the Scriptures.88 Although he was somewhat more restrained, Calvin did insist that the Spirit “opened the eyes of the mind” so that the believer could understand the meaning of the biblical text.89 He stated that the Spirit of truth must “pour” truth and the understanding of doctrine into the mind. In the 1559 Institutes, Calvin commented on John 14:16 by fusing the certainty of salvation with the certainty of truth. Faith, he explained, is the principal work of the Spirit. Paul taught that the Spirit is to be the “inner teacher by whose effect the promise of salvation penetrates into our minds.” I John 4:13 tells us that “we abide in [Christ] and he is in us because he has given us his Spirit.” Calvin then proceeded to talk about the interpretation or meaning of Christ’s words. Commenting on John 14:17, he wrote, Therefore, Christ promised to his disciples the Spirit of truth that the world cannot receive in order that they might be capable of receiving heavenly wisdom. And, as the proper ofﬁce of the Spirit, he assigned the task of bringing to mind what he had taught by mouth. For light would be given to the sightless in vain if the Spirit of discernment had not opened the eyes of the mind. Consequently, the Spirit may rightly be called the key that unlocks for us the treasures of the kingdom of Heaven. . . . Teachers would shout to no effect if Christ himself, the inner Schoolmaster, did not by his Spirit draw to himself those given to him by the Father.90 The Spirit, Calvin repeated, is the “master” or “teacher” of truth. The Spirit provides an “inward instruction” by which the “mind is enlightened and the heart is touched.” To be “taught by God” referred to this “light of understanding” given by the Spirit. For Calvin, the Spirit was a “wonderful and singular power” who “forms our ears to hear and our minds to understand.” As did Luther, Calvin depicted the work of the Spirit as curing the noetic effect of sin and granting a new perception and understanding. Therefore, we cannot come to Christ unless we are drawn by the Spirit of God. When we are drawn, we are lifted in mind and heart above our understanding [ita ubi trahimur, mente et animo evehimur supra nostram ipsorum intelligentiam]. For the soul, illumined by him, takes on a new keenness, as it were [ab eo illustrata anima novam

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quasi aciem sumit], to contemplate the heavenly mysteries, whose splendor had previously blinded it. And man’s understanding, thus enlightened [irradiatus] by the light of the Holy Spirit, then at last truly begins to taste [gustare] those things that belong to the kingdom of God, having formerly been quite foolish and dull in tasting them. For this reason, Christ, in clearly interpreting the mysteries of his kingdom to his two disciples, still makes no headway until he opens their minds to understand the Scriptures.91 Such statements recur throughout Calvin’s writings. However, he rarely cited I Corinthians 2:15. Occasionally he invoked this verse in opposition to “natural reason” or “philosophy.” This verse played no role in his polemical treatises against the Libertines or Anabaptists. Nor do we ﬁnd any emphasis on the judgment of the “spiritual man” in his letter to Sadoleto or his Eucharistic writings against Westphal. When commenting on I Corinthians 2:15, Calvin did repeat the familiar assertion that “the Spirit of God, from whom the teaching of the Gospel comes, is the only true interpreter for opening it up to us.” Human minds are in darkness “until they are enlightened by the Spirit of God.” The “natural man” with his human reason has no “taste” for the teaching of the Gospel. Therefore, “it is the spiritual man alone who has such a ﬁrm and sound knowledge of the mysteries of God, that he distinguishes with certainty the truth from falsehood, the teaching of God from the fabrications of men, and he is deluded very little.” But even in this exegetical comment, Calvin was reticent to attribute infallibility to spiritual discernment. The ﬁnal words say it all. Unlike Luther and Zwingli, Calvin added that little phrase saying that the “spiritual man” was “deluded very little” [minimeque hallucinetur].92 As we have seen, Calvin, like many of his predecessors, insisted that the Spirit was always anchored in the Word. He perceived the dangers of spiritualism not only in the Libertines but also in Catholicism. For Calvin, both groups claimed the guidance of the Spirit but had forsaken the Word. In Calvin’s view, both groups exempliﬁed the danger of the “unbridled” or “runaway” mind. According to Calvin, the Quintinists believed Scripture was a “dead and killing letter,” so that “they abandon [Scripture] in order to come to the life-giving Spirit.” In the process, Calvin jeered, they “stroll amid the clouds” and fail to understand that “God does not promise his apostles a spirit that will create new doctrines for them; rather the Spirit only conﬁrms them in the gospel which was preached to them.”93For Calvin, Catholics and the Libertines tore apart that “inviolable bond” between Scripture and the Spirit. In his answer to Sadoleto, Calvin linked the Anabaptists with the Catholics because both had abandoned the Word in favor of the Spirit: “We are assailed by two sects, which seem to differ very widely from one another. For what similarity is there in appearance between the Pope

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and the Anabaptists? And yet, you may see that Satan never transforms himself so cunningly as not in some measure to betray himself, the principal weapon with which they both assail us is the same. For when they boast excessively of the Spirit, the tendency clearly is to sink and bury the Word of God, so that they may make room for their own falsehoods. And you, Sadoleto, by stumbling on the very threshold, have paid the penalty of that affront which you made to the Holy Spirit when you separated Him from the Word.” According to Calvin, Sadoleto left Christians “who seek the way of God” standing where “two roads meet and destitute of any certain sign” because he denied that the Word must test all doctrines. Therefore, Sadoleto should learn that “it is no less unreasonable to boast of the Spirit without the Word than it would be absurd to bring forth the Word itself without the Spirit.”94 The passage from Luke 24:45 served Calvin well for explaining the role of Word and Spirit. In this verse, the risen Jesus returned to the disciples and “opened their minds to understand the scriptures.” The “Word of God is like a lantern, but it shines in the darkness among the blind until the inner light is shed upon their eyes by the Lord whose ofﬁce it is to enlighten the minds of the blind.” However, Calvin added that in this verse the Spirit was given to the disciples only in order “to understand the Scriptures.” He insisted that the disciples did not “have the eyes of their minds opened so that they could comprehend the mysteries of God without assistance, but to see these mysteries as they are found in the Scriptures.” The Lord, Calvin argued, did not grant his Spirit so that one “may abolish the use of the Word, but rather to make it bear fruit.”95 So, too, throughout his commentary on the Psalms, Calvin made clear that the power of the Word was experienced only by those who were granted the “spirit of understanding.” Moreover, in Psalm 119:64, Calvin noted that “God does not treat here external teaching, but the secret illumination of the mind, which is the gift of the Holy Spirit.”96 Nonetheless, the knowledge of the Word must precede the experiential knowledge of that Word. Only through the Word does the experience of grace or providence conﬁrm the faith of the believer. For many reformers, verses such as John 6:45, or Luke 24:45 elicited descriptions of God’s immediacy to the soul. For Calvin, however, these verses were usually warnings about the necessity of remaining within the boundaries of the Word. To shun the Word was dangerous. Therefore if faith turns away even in the slightest degree from this goal toward which it should aim, it does not keep its own nature, but becomes uncertain credulity and vague error of mind [sed incerta est credulitas, et vagus mentis error]. The same Word is the basis whereby faith is supported and sustained; if it turns away from the Word it falls.97

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For Calvin, the “unbridled mind” was always a threat. Lacking the “bridle of Scripture,” even the redeemed mind would wander off into “uncertain speculation” and various forms of idolatry. Only those who were both illumined by the Spirit and bridled by the Word could say with John 3:11, “We speak of what we know.” Unlike philosophers and those who have wandered off into frivolities, dreams, and conjectures, the true believer would “deliver no doctrine except what is certain.” Calvin concluded that in this passage Christ commended “us to the certainty of his doctrine.” Consequently, “let every man regard what the Lord has revealed to him so that no one goes beyond the limits of his faith.”98 Those who remained within the bounds of Scripture were, indeed, raised above what reason could comprehend, but this did not happen by “appeals to the Spirit.” In opposition to those who would “wander off” or “mount higher than the Word,” Calvin recalled believers to “safety.” It is better, Calvin advised, “to limp along this path [of Scripture] than to dash with all speed outside it.”99 Only the “spiritual man” who was enlightened by the Spirit and stayed strictly within the limits of the Word could attain certainty of doctrine from the interpretation of Scripture. In his many references and discussions of the interpretation of Scripture, Calvin sought an anchor that provided certainty. If the Spirit was anchored in the Word, then the mind could ﬁnd the truth. Even Calvin’s doctrine of the church provided such stability and security. Suspicious of all appeals to the Spirit alone, to the Spirit-guided church or an invisible church, Calvin attempted to establish certitude in the visibility of the church. For Calvin, the interpretation of Scripture was an ecclesial event. In Book I.6–9 of the Institutes, Calvin analyzed only the authority of Scripture. With the exception of his chapter against the “fanatics,” this section contains no discussion of the dilemma posed by the conﬂicting interpretations of biblical passages. The issue of the authority to interpret Scripture occurs in Book IV.8–9. Moreover, it is in Book IV where the concept of the illumination by the Spirit recurs. This section on the church is where again Calvin warned that the interpreter was never free to go beyond the Word. The church itself was not infallible, but it was the sphere in which truth was found, if one recognized that the Spirit and the Word were always inseparable. Citing the reference to the “spirit of truth” in John 14:16, as well as I Corinthians 2:12, Calvin explained that believers who “wander far according to their own predilection stray quite out of the way, insomuch as they are devoid of the Spirit by whose teaching alone truth is distinguished from falsehood.”100 However, since the Spirit was anchored in the Word, there was no danger that the church would invent new doctrines or “put forth an oracle beyond that which the Lord has revealed in his Word.” All teachings and councils must, therefore, be judged according to the standard of Scripture. When explaining the authority of the church in the interpretation of Scripture, Calvin carefully laid out the parameters: a synod of bishops should meet and examine the issue. The members should “invoke the Spirit” and “examine the question

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posed, and ﬁnally, after due discussion, bring forth a deﬁnition derived from Scripture that would remove all doubt from the people. . . . ”101 All of these varying conceptions regarding the relationship between Word and Spirit were formulated in such a way that they provided their authors with the certainty they needed. For all these thinkers, the argument about Word and Spirit had to secure certitude or it was worthless. Everyone agreed that the same Spirit that inspired the Scripture was needed for the true understanding of Scripture. And all parties agreed that the same Spirit that instilled the certainty of salvation also furnished the certainty of interpretation. The “Comforter” has become the “Illuminator.” Illumination by the “Spirit of truth” became the source of the believer’s ability to expound the meaning of Scripture with certainty. By knowing oneself to have the “spirit of adoption,” the believer became qualiﬁed to “judge all things.” These two spiritually inspired certainties were inexorably united. The order of the topics in John 6:44–45 indicated this inseparability: “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall be taught by God.’” To be “drawn” meant to know that one was saved. The people who knew themselves to be saved and had experienced this “drawing” were those who were also “taught by God.” Once again, we see here that the experience of certitude was not considered to be the natural state of human reason. As we have shown, the reformers believed that natural human powers could never have convinced the soul to be certain of its salvation. Left to its own abilities, the soul would continually tremble in doubt and fear because it believed it could not face a judging God with the stain of sin. So, too, the mind could never, by its fallen natural powers, attain to the truth about God and the divine will with any certainty. Relying on natural reason, the mind would inevitably fall into superstition, error, idolatry, deception, and uncertainty. Only the mind that received certitude from the Spirit could know the truth with certainty. Because such certainty was experienced as originating from outside the self, the believer could trust this spiritual certainty as self-authenticating. Nonetheless, the reformers perceived the means of grasping that certainty differently. For those with more spiritualist leanings, only immediacy could guarantee certitude. But nothing human could produce such immediacy. Any mixture of the human or the material increased fallibility and uncertainty. Anything that had to “mediate” the truth through an external means was subject to deception. It is signiﬁcant that the reformers repeatedly identiﬁed God as the only one who “does not deceive and cannot be deceived.” For some of the reformers, this meant that God touched the soul directly so that the Spirit immediately and inwardly taught the truth to the soul. Zwingli’s spiritualist tendencies are clear in his conviction that to be “taught by God” meant to experience the direct communication between the divine Spirit and the human spirit. For some reformers Scripture became not the source of faith or truth, but the testimony of the preceding existence of faith and true knowledge of

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God. According to Carlstadt, Gelassenheit also meant letting go of Scripture, “Here I must also state how a truly yielded person must let go of Holy Scripture and not know its letters, but enter into the might of the Lord (as David has it) and ceaselessly pray to God the Lord for true understanding. Then when a person fails to understand something or would like to hear a judgment, he ought to stand in full surrender; i.e. he must divest himself of self, hold back with his reasoning, and earnestly ask for God’s favor and hear what God has to say to him.” Nonetheless, Carlstadt concluded by saying that such a person “would soon recall and then verify and justify it with Holy Scripture.”102 The spiritualist Sebastian Franck, whom we will discuss in chapter 5, wrote to Johannes Campanus, “God will probably not provide thee with a person but he will himself be thy helper to thy great advantage. Scripture and [another] person can only give to a person and a believing brother some testimony, but cannot teach what is divine [directly]. . . . I should wish, however, that thou wert not so addicted to the letter of Scripture, thus withdrawing thy heart from the teaching of the Spirit, and that thou wouldst not drive out the Spirit of God as though it were Satan, crowding him against his will into the script and making Scripture thy god . . . thou should much rather interpret the Scripture as a conﬁrmation of thy conscience, so that it testiﬁes to the heart and not against it.” For Franck, Scripture could serve as a conﬁrmation but one should “not believe and accept something [merely] reported by Scripture—and feel that the God in thy heart must yield to Scripture. It were better that Scripture should remain Antichrist’s.”103 For most of the reformers, the direct illumination of the Spirit did not render the Scripture dispensable. Müntzer spoke adamantly about Scripture as a testimony to the inwardly perceived, and spiritually revealed truth. Zwingli described Scripture as the test according to which one “proves the spirit.” In order to understand just how important Scripture was, it is necessary to recall that the battles that drove the Protestants apart were exegetical ones; that is, they erupted over the meaning of the Scriptural words, “This is my body.” For Luther, however, immediacy was not the primary issue. In his view, certainty derived from knowing where the Spirit would reliably be present. The difference regarding the means of grasping certainty is clear by comparing interpretations of John 3:8, “The spirit [wind] blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Zwingli interpreted this verse to mean that the Spirit is utterly free and that we cannot make the Spirit be present simply by preaching, baptism, or the Lord’s Supper. Such a reading protected the sovereignty of God as well as the possibility that the Spirit could touch individuals directly without being bound to external things. Zwingli argued, “Moreover, a channel or vehicle is not necessary to the Spirit; for he himself is the virtue and energy whereby all things are borne; neither do we read in the holy scriptures that perceptible things, as are the sacraments, bear certainly with

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them the Spirit.”104 But Luther found that this verse meant exactly the opposite; namely, we must cling to preaching, Scripture, and the sacraments. Luther preferred to translate the word spirit as “wind” so that he could read the verse as, “the wind blows where it will.” He then placed the emphasis on the incomprehensibility of the “wind” and how or where it blows.105 In Luther’s interpretation, this verse meant that the “wind” or “Spirit” was present everywhere but not accessible to the sinner, except in the visible and external signs of Word and Sacrament. The Spirit, like the wind, may indeed blow wherever it wills, for “Whoever is converted to faith cannot say anything else than that the Holy Spirit comes when he wills and where he wills and to what person he wills, all in his own good season. He comes when and where he chooses and he confers as many gifts as he pleases.” Nonetheless, Luther’s main issue was that this verse taught that, although human reason could not comprehend why, nonetheless, the Christian must be baptized and partake of the body and blood of Christ. The question was how to recognize where the Spirit was present: “It blows where it wills, and one hears its sound, but no one knows whence it comes and where it goes. Thus Christ says, is a man who is born anew. The only way he can be recognized is the way the wind is recognized, namely, by the sound: when he speaks and treats of the divine Word, of Baptism, of the Supper of Christ’s body and blood, of absolution or the Ofﬁce of the Keys—which are visible things and signs. This is all we hear.”106 As we will see, for Luther, the Spirit blows where it will, but the gift of certitude occurs only when it comes through concrete visible signs. As did Luther, Calvin insisted that only the inseparability of Word and Spirit could guarantee certainty. Calvin’s emphasis, however, was more anthropological. He started not from the issue of immediacy or of divine accessibility but from the unrestrained nature of the fallen mind. According to Calvin, the fallen mind “wanders,” “strays,” and veers off into “labyrinths.” Only Scripture could keep the mind “bridled” on the “right path.” Scripture was indispensable because it restrained the mind of the faithful. Left to itself, the mind would “hold to nothing certain, solid, or clear-cut.” The fallen mind would wander away from the true God “and raise up in his stead dreams and specters of our own brains.” Calvin taught that God provided Scripture as a “direct and more certain mark” that would distinguish God from idols. It was the Word, he insisted, that was “the instrument by which the Lord dispenses the illumination of his Spirit to believers.” Only by respecting this “mutual bond” could believers “embrace the Spirit with no fear of being deceived.” As Calvin explained, “Nevertheless, all things will tend to this end, that God the Artiﬁcer of the universe, is made manifest to us in Scripture and that what we ought to think of him is set forth there, lest we seek some uncertain deity by devious paths.”107 By approaching the controversy over Word and Spirit in the Reformation from the perspective of certainty, we can discern a question that was coming to haunt the sixteenth century. In Calvin’s words, that question was “How does

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one embrace the Spirit without the fear of deception?” We shall demonstrate in chapter 6 how the fear of deception came to permeate the religious thinking of the sixteenth century. Presently, however, we should return to Tyndale to summarize the way in which the reformers defended their certitude of hermeneutical authority. In The Obedience of the Christian Man, Tyndale repeatedly discussed the certainty of salvation whereby one “feels” the “seal of adoption.” In his subsequent work, An Answere unto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, Tyndale began by defending the certitude of his hermeneutical authority. Oure savioure Ihesus in the xvj. chaptre of Iohan at his last souper when he toke his leaue of his disciples/ warned them sayenge/ the holye gost shall come and rebuke the worlde of iudgement. That is/ he shall rebuke the worlde for lacke of true iudgement and discrecyon to iudge/ and shall proue that the taste of their mouthes is corrupte/ so that they iudge swete to be sowre and sowre to be swete . . . And this same is it that Paule sayeth in the seconde chaptre of the ﬁrst epistle to the Corinthians/ how that the naturall man that is not borne agayne and created anew with the spirite of god/ be he never so greate a philosopher/ never so well sene in the lawe/ never so sore studyed in the scripture . . . yet he can not vunderstonde the thinges of the spirite of god: but sayeth he/ the spirituall judgeth all thinges and his spirite sercheth the depe secretes of god/so that what so ever god commaundeth him to do/ he never leveth serchinge till he come at the botome/ the pith/ the quycke/ the liffe/ the spirite/ the marye and verye cause why/ and iudgeth all thinge. . . .108 However, something else was at work here. The issue of certainty did not surface only in the debates about the Word and Spirit. The concern with certainty in the Protestant debates about other issues becomes even clearer if we carefully examine the way the disputants argued. By brieﬂy analyzing two such controversies we can discern that something other than Scripture, reason, the fathers, the Creeds, or even the Spirit formed a foundation upon which Protestants defended their teachings. We will see that as the debates raged on, certitude itself became a criterion of doctrine. The reformers came to believe that unless a doctrine provided certainty it was, by deﬁnition, false. We can observe the criterion of certitude at work among Protestants in the Eucharistic controversy between Luther and Zwingli.109 In this controversy, the differences between the views on Word and Spirit were fused with the test of certainty. Luther’s defense of his Eucharistic teaching included many important and nuanced arguments. He believed, above all, that his defense of the real presence was biblical, and he vigorously refuted any attempt to read the text in terms of metaphors, tropes, or ﬁgures. He also appealed to the fathers and the creeds. He reasoned in painstaking detail about the notion of “place.” He intensely rejected any attempt to limit the omnipotence of God or to enclose

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God’s actions within the limits of human reason. Luther maintained repeatedly that a thing could be invisible and contrary to reason and yet at the same time be “real.”110 More importantly, permeating all these arguments was a twofold test of certainty. In the ﬁrst test, Luther argued from the certainty of the text. In the second and more crucial test, Luther argued from the certainty of a deﬁnite place. We shall see that Zwingli replied with his own test of certitude. Luther was acutely aware that the sacramental controversies involved competing claims to certitude. Consequently, he framed the debate in terms of certainty and uncertainty. He frequently noted that his opponents boasted that their opinion was “the most certain, certain truth.” Luther recognized that those writing against him “boast they have the clear, pure, truth with certainty.” They declare their position, Luther sneered, “as if it were certain,” or “as if it were proved with absolute certainty.” He insisted that in order to be believed, they must “prove” their teachings to be certain. But, he charged, this was impossible because they spoke only from their own thoughts, dreams, imaginations, and delusions. He accused Zwingli of “proving an uncertain proposition by something more uncertain.” In fact, he charged, “They try to see if they can make the sayings of Scripture or the fathers uncertain and bring them into doubt in the minds of the common people.” Several times Luther accused Oecolampadius and the “fanatics” of rendering the meaning of the fathers uncertain. Oecolampadius, he charged, “leaves [the sayings of the fathers] dangling and hanging between heaven and earth, with all his followers and adherents. But this is not teaching but ‘misteaching’ and to extol this as sure truth is doubly to lie and deceive poor consciences.” So, too, by making the text and faith uncertain, the fanatics were inspired by the devil who, “takes pleasure in jarring men’s hearts everywhere, and permits them on no side to be certain and sure, but keeps them dangling and hovering whichever way his wind blows, like an aspen leaf.” In contrast, “The Holy Spirit is the sort of teacher who is sure and makes men sure and does not let them toss and dangle. . . .” They obscured Scripture and deceived believers. Their interpretations, he insisted, are “uncertain and ambiguous.” Delivering the ﬁnal blow, Luther concluded “they lead into confusion and uncertainty and teach nothing certain.”111 Luther’s ﬁrst test of certainty focused on the stability of the biblical text itself. His arguments focused on the conviction that if the scriptural text was not taken in its exact wording, the text itself became something uncertain and unreliable. His opponents invented tropes where there were no tropes. They argued from similes or ﬁgures of speech where the text contained none. Luther explained that with these ﬁgures of speech Zwingli reasoned from a “representation concept,” while Oecolampadius talked about a “sign concept.” Against Carlstadt, Luther maintained that imposing one’s own punctuation onto the text was to render that text uncertain. The insertion of the Greek word touto also changed the text as it stood. Luther said that Carlstadt “juggled” with the text, the same accusation that Tyndale had thrown at his Catholic opponents.

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By “juggling” with the text, one could twist its meaning to say anything. To say that “this is my body” meant “this is the sign of my body” was to render the words unreliable because such an interpretation was “obscure and uncertain” and imposed a meaning not stated in the text itself. Refuting Oecolampadius, Carlstadt, and “the giant of Zurich,” Luther insisted that certainty could be found only by sticking to the natural and clear sense of the words. Thus he warned, “If you admit a trope nothing will be safe.” Throughout his Eucharistic treatises Luther contrasted the “uncertain text” of his opponents with the “clear, lucid, plain words and texts” of Scripture. The words of the Supper, he said, had to be “unambiguous, simple, sure, and certain in every word, syllable, and letter.” Against Oecolampadius’s view that the words “this is my body” were not clear, Luther maintained, “In Scripture we should let the words retain their natural force, just as they read, and give no other interpretation unless a clear article of faith compels otherwise.”112 He expressed his anger by asking his opponents, “Dear Lord God! Who asked you about your notion? Who wants you to tell what you regard as certain?”113 Luther believed that if the interpreter were to impose signs, tropes, and other readings on the text, he would only undermine the certainty of Scripture altogether. After all, “an uncertain text is as bad as no text at all.”114 Isn’t it a ﬁne thing, then, that Oecolampadius produces a new, unknown, obscure, uncertain interpretation and tries thereby to make the old interpretation appear obscure and uncertain? In this way no word in Scripture would remain clear if license were given to every spirit to produce new interpretations and then say the old interpretation is obscure and uncertain.115 At this point, the well-known rule of the reformers that one should stay with the literal sense of the text functioned as a guarantee of certainty: They themselves are utterly uncertain of their text, and none of them as yet has irrefutably proved that his text is plausible and necessary, as they allege. Moreover, they will never succeed in producing a certain text. But our text is certain; it is plausible and necessary that it should stand as the words read, for God himself has placed it where it is and no man dare take away or add a single letter.116 By sticking or “clinging” to the “naked bare words of God,” Luther believed he had a foundation rooted in certitude. He insisted that he had the “perfectly clear, certain words of God that can never deceive us or allow us to err.”117 If the believer “holds to the text as it reads,” then the certainty of the text will remain secure. There can be no true Supper where there is “no sure Word of Scripture.” If the words are rendered doubtful by inserting metaphors, tropes, ﬁgures, or other foreign concepts, then the reader is left with an unstable or uncertain text. For Luther, even the fact that his opponents disagreed with one

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another proved that their text was uncertain. Thus Luther asked, “But if they declare the words of these [apostolic] witnesses dubious, the words of the fanatics must reasonably be considered much more dubious, especially because they disagree among one another; not one of them is sure of his text, nor can he become so.” The disagreements among these “erring spirits” meant that “no one is certain of his course.”118 Rendering the text unstable through ﬁgures and metaphors destroyed any ability to arrive at the clear and true meaning of the words. Most importantly, such “juggling” with the text made the ultimate source of authority uncertain and unreliable. These words had to be “unambiguous and plain” if they were to form a deﬁnite basis for the articles of faith. “It is dangerous,” Luther warned, “to play with the Word of God by which conscience and faith are to be guided.”119 This statement, aimed initially at Carlstadt, reveals the second and primary test from certitude in Luther’s argument. Luther was determined to guarantee the certainty of the conscience by means of the Eucharist. For Luther this meant that the real presence of the body and blood must be in the bread and wine. Any other doctrine left the conscience uncertain. To argue this position, he had to confront the interpretation by the Swiss reformers that the body of Christ was “at the right hand of the Father.” Whereas Luther had insisted earlier on a non-ﬁgurative reading, he was now only too happy to say that this creedal phrase was, indeed, a metaphor.120 The phrase “right hand of the Father” meant wherever God reigned— namely, everywhere.121 According to Luther, this meant that Christ had a threefold existence. The circumscribed or corporeal mode of presence existed when Christ bodily walked the earth and took up a deﬁnite space. The uncircumscribed or spiritual mode existed when Christ’s body did not take up space and could not be measured. This mode was evident when Christ came out of the grave and came to the disciples through a closed door. And, ﬁnally, Christ was present supernaturally, or “repletively,” where he was simultaneously present in all places, but without being measured or circumscribed by any place. Such a mode was beyond comprehension and belonged to God alone.122 Arguing about the creedal phrase, “the right hand of God,” Luther explained that these words meant that God was “not in a speciﬁc place” for the “power of God cannot be so determined and measured, for it is uncircumscribed and immeasurable, beyond and above all that is or may be.”123 For Luther, divine presence was beyond human reason, “He is above body, above spirit, above everything man can say or hear or think: how at one and the same time can such a being be completely and entirely present in every single body, every creature and object everywhere, and on the other hand must and can be nowhere, beyond and above all creatures and objects, as our Creed and Scriptures confess both truths about God. Here reason must conclude without further ado: Oh surely this is utter nonsense. . . .” However, if God can be present wholly, entirely, and deeply and inwardly in all creatures and yet unable to be circumscribed, “Should not this same God also know some way whereby his body could be

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wholly and completely present in many places at the same time, and yet no one of these places could be where he is?”124 In these Eucharistic writings, Luther and his opponents struggled with two different issues. Zwingli, Carlstadt, and Oecolampadius asked how one was to bridge the space between Christ’s body in heaven and the believer existing on earth. But Luther’s question was not about how Christ would go from one place to another. Nor was he worried about how Christ’s body could be in more than one place at a time. Simultaneity or ubiquity was a given assumption based on the omnipotence of God. Speaking of the third or “heavenly mode” of Christ, Luther stated, “For if according to the second mode [Christ] can be present in and with created things in such a way that they do not feel, touch, measure, or circumscribe him, how much more marvelously will he be present in all created things according to this exalted third mode, where they cannot measure or circumscribe him but where they are present to him so that he measures and circumscribes them. You must place this existence of Christ, which constitutes him one person with God, far beyond things created, as far as God transcends them; on the other hand, place it as deep in and as near to all created things as God is in them.”125 The presence of Christ was everywhere in all created things. Christ was both hidden and revealed, but was never far away. Christ, Luther said, was always “not far but near.” Indeed, Luther described this ubiquity in a manner reminiscent of Cusa. Even if Christ’s body were just at one place, in heaven, as they prattle, yet all creatures may be present to it and around him even there, like the clear, transparent air. I have seen crystals or jewels within which was a kind of spark or ﬂame, as in an opal or a little bubble; and yet this little bubble or opal could shine, as it were, at every side of the stone, for whichever way the stone is turned the bubble can be seen as if it were at the very front of the stone, although it is really in the center of it. . . . If Christ also sat at one place in the center of the universe, like the bubble or spark in a crystal, and if a certain point in the universe were indicated to me, as the bread and the wine are set forth in the Word, should I not be able to say, “See there is the body of Christ actually in the bread,” just as I say when a certain side of the crystal is placed before my eyes, “See there is the spark in the very front of the crystal?”126 Luther’s problem was neither distance nor presence but, rather, accessibility. Christ is always present everywhere, but he is not accessible everywhere. Like the spark in the crystal, Christ is everywhere. But this omnipresence is not sufﬁcient to grant the conscience any assurance. David Steinmetz clearly explains

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that, for Luther, “the Eucharist is important as a place where God has attached the promise of his saving and accessible presence. Wherever I turn, God is there; but he is only there for me where he has bound himself to be accessible by his promise.”127 In Luther’s view, the omnipresence of God could grant certitude. Only knowing where God was accessible could give certainty. This was why it was so important for Luther to maintain that God “knows various ways to be present at a certain place, and not the single one of which the fanatics prattle, which the philosophers call local.”128 Christ is everywhere, Luther repeated, but this does not mean he can be “grasped” or “touched” everywhere. Christ’s body becomes “useful” only where God has added his Word of promise, “This is my body.” Accordingly, Luther maintained, “both God and Christ are not far away but near, and it is only a matter of revealing themselves; they do not move up and down or back and forth, for God is immutable, and Christ also sits at the right hand of God and does not move hither and yon.”129 Luther’s insistence against the spiritualists that God always ﬁrst used an outward and material object was now aimed at this certainty of accessibility. Here we see a parallel between Luther’s arguments about Word and Spirit and those about the Eucharist. Both are aimed at providing the reliability and certitude of accessibility. Luther believed that the Spirit was everywhere but that one could only ﬁnd it with certainty through the instrument of the Word. God promised to be present to the believer through the Scripture and the Sacraments. Against his opponents, Luther argued, “You ﬁnd no word of God in the entire Scriptures in which something material and outward is not contained and presented.”130 One must know where and how the Spirit was to be found before one could claim to have the certainty of interpretation. Luther himself drew this analogy by asking about the spiritualist interpretation of the Eucharistic presence and other articles of faith: “Did they get these ideas from the Spirit before they physically and outwardly heard or read them? Here they must say, No, I know full well, for they got them through the material, outward Word and Scripture. Then how can this outward Word, through which the Holy Spirit is given with all his gifts, be of no avail?”131 Just as the believer had to be certain of the Spirit in order to interpret Scripture, so, too, the believer had to know where God’s presence was accessible in order to “grasp” it. This certainty of accessibility was found in the external and physical elements of bread and wine. Otherwise, like the Spirit, Christ’s presence would be omnipresent but inaccessible. Like the rays of the sun, Christ is everywhere but “does not permit himself to be so caught and grasped; he can easily shell himself, so that you get the shell but not the kernel. Why? Because it is one thing if God is present, and another if he is present for you. He is there for you when he adds his Word and binds himself saying, ‘Here you are to ﬁnd me.’ Now when you have the Word, you can grasp and have him with certainty and say ‘Here I have thee according to thy Word.’”132 Unless one knew exactly where Christ had “bound” himself and was “present for you,” no amount of divine presence could ease the conscience.

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He is present everywhere, but he does not wish that you grope for him everywhere. Grope rather where the Word is, and there you will lay hold of him in the right way. Otherwise you are tempting God and committing idolatry. For this reason he has set down for us a certain way to show us how and where to ﬁnd him, namely, the Word. . . . Let us adhere to the words as they read: that the body of Christ is present in the bread and that his blood is truly present in the wine. This does not mean that he is not present in other parts and in other places also with his body and blood, for in believing hearts he is completely present with his body and blood. But it means that he wishes to make us certain as to where and how we are to lay hold of him [Sondern das er uns will gewis machen, wo und wie du yhn fassen solt]. There is the Word, which says that when you eat the bread you eat his body, given for you. If the Word were not there, I would pay no attention to the bread.133 Luther believed that because the “fanatics” could not make the place of divine accessibility certain, they could not offer certitude to the conscience. Luther thought that the misinterpretation of the words “right hand of the Father” meant that his opponents were saying, “Christ is no longer with us.” To say Christ is in the Eucharist “spiritually” could not “assure consciences.”134 For Luther, to remove Christ’s body and blood from the sacrament left Christ present but not “for me, for me.”135 The certainty of the conscience in the forgiveness of sins, however, required something other than a free-ﬂoating spiritual presence. It required a concrete place where God promised to be available “for me.” Therefore, Luther charged his opponents with denying that the forgiveness of sins was present and real in the sacrament. He [Carlstadt] has undertaken to deny the forgiveness of sins in the sacrament. Such an understanding is ﬁlthy, where the words, “broken for us,” still stand. It cannot mean other than that such breaking of bread and body takes place and is instituted so that it might avail us and redeem us from sins. For Christ has placed the strength and power of his suffering in the sacrament, so that we may lay hold of it there and ﬁnd it according to the Word, “This is my body, which is given for you. . . .”136 In a sermon dating from 1526, Luther spoke the following words in order to prepare his congregation for partaking of the Eucharist. Those who go to the sacrament, he said, “should be assured not only that they are receiving the true body and blood of Christ in it but also that it is there given to them and is their own.” For this reason every Christian must know these words letter for letter: “Here my Lord has given me his body and blood in the bread

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and the wine, in order that I should eat and drink. And they are to be my very own, so that I may be certain [Und sol mein sein, dazu ich sicher sey] that my sins are forgiven, that I am free of death and hell, have eternal life, and be a child of God and heir of heaven.”137 Be specifying the word here, Luther emphasized the certainty of the divine presence. He was convinced that Satan had blinded the “fanatics” so that they did not instruct consciences in such a way that they could “give them certainty.” The “fanatics,” therefore, shared with the “papists” this inability to assure the conscience. The sacramentarians could not assure the conscience because they could not guarantee the necessary and knowable presence of Christ in the Sacrament. Catholic doctrine could not give certitude because it taught that complete worthiness was required. Both groups failed to see that the proper use of the sacrament was to “strengthen the conscience” and assure the believer of the forgiveness of sins. To Luther’s way of thinking, because the arguments of the Catholics as well as those of Carlstadt, Oecolampadius, and Zwingli left the soul uncertain, their arguments were false. Luther judged their interpretations of Scripture to be wrong by the criterion of certitude itself. This is an argument that recurs in his attempts to “test the spirits.” In Strasbourg seven preachers, including Wolfgang Capito and Martin Bucer, wrote to both Luther and Zwingli for advice regarding the Eucharist. Luther’s answer is found in his 1524 treatise entitled Letter to the Christians at Strasbourg in Opposition to the Fanatic Spirit.138 However, Zwingli’s reply to the Strasbourg preachers, as well as his refutation of Luther’s treatise Against the Heavenly Prophets, gained an increasingly sympathetic hearing. Writing to the Lutheran pastor Matthew Alber, Zwingli explained what he understood as the “spiritual eating” of the Eucharist. It is in this letter that we ﬁnd his earliest argument for the ﬁgurative interpretation of the word est as it applied to the bread and the wine. In 1525 Zwingli further expounded his views in the Commentary on True and False Religion. Although he tried to distance himself somewhat from Carlstadt, Zwingli admitted that on many fundamental points he agreed with the latter’s interpretation. Zwingli also understood quite well that Luther’s concern was with certainty for the conscience. In his attack on Luther in the Friendly Exposition of the Eucharistic Affair, to Martin Luther, Zwingli paraphrased Luther’s position quite astutely: Though Christ’s human nature is everywhere and ﬁlls all things as wheat ﬁlls a sack, yet [Christ] desired in a special way to place himself in this sacrament and give himself to us in order that we might know where we might ﬁnd him. That he ascended no one denies, but that he is also in the Eucharist, so that we know where he is to be sought and found is . . . at variance

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not only with religion but with your [Luther’s] own utterances. . . . What is he going to do when eaten? Conﬁrm the heart, remit sins, etc. But I have already shown that it is impious to attribute these things to physical eating . . . for the mind is satisﬁed with the contemplation of Christ.139 According to Zwingli, Luther’s search for assurance from the sacrament was totally misguided for several fundamental reasons. First, Luther’s position denigrated the “once and for all” saving efﬁcacy of Christ’s sacriﬁce on the cross. He insisted that the passion of Christ was the true pledge of our salvation. The believer must trust in the suffering and death of Christ in order to ﬁnd consolation and certitude. Only the historic sacriﬁce on the cross could appease the justice of God. According to Zwingli, the “faith which is certain is that Christ cruciﬁed is our redemption and salvation.” To talk about Christ’s risen body as ubiquitous seemed to undermine the saving ability of Christ’s human suffering. The only “pledge and security” of God’s mercy was the cruciﬁxion. In order to retain the unique propitiation achieved by Christ’s death, the ﬂesh of Christ had to remain human. [Christ] is only salvation for us insofar as he was slain for us; but he could be slain only according to the ﬂesh and could bring divinity only according to his divinity. In this way, then, Christ is the good of the soul, because the soul, seeing that God did not spare his only begotten Son, but, rather, delivered him to a disgraceful death in order to restore us to life, becomes certain of the grace of God and salvation. . . . He is the means of salvation not by being eaten but by being slain. The human mind is made certain of the mercy of God when it perceives that God did not spare his son. For what did God ever promise to those who believed that bodily ﬂesh is eaten in the Supper? And did not those who were truly faithful know with certainty that salvation is found here, that is, in relying upon the mercy of God, of which we have the indubitable sign or pledge in Jesus Christ the only-begotten Son of God?140 Zwingli went on to make an even more important argument against Luther. In Zwingli’s view, the search for certainty should not focus on the sacraments but on faith alone. It was faith alone, given by the Spirit, that enabled the believer to know with certainty that his sins were forgiven. Externals, including the sacramental elements, could not bring anything to the soul, including faith, forgiveness, trust, and certitude. Hence Zwingli countered Luther on his own terms regarding certainty.

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They err . . . in applying faith to the things of the senses, and in saying that through these it brings us certainty. But of that there is no need. For what is perceived by sense owes nothing to faith.141 In Zwingli’s view, the certainty that Luther sought was unattainable in the material elements of the sacraments. Zwingli repeated the same principle that governed his thinking on the relationship between Word and Spirit. For Zwingli, to attach certitude to anything material would destroy certainty altogether because nothing external, even the ﬂesh of Christ, could mediate the divine to the soul. External things could not ease the conscience. The heart, he said, could not “be strengthened” by anything material or physical; only the Spirit could comfort or strengthen the soul. Moreover, the ﬂesh could not nourish the soul because “the ﬂesh proﬁts nothing.” Zwingli went so far as to say that even if Christ’s body and blood were present in the sacrament, eating them would never provide what Luther sought: namely, the “comforting of the heart, the effective presence of the gospel, and the pardon of sin.” No certainty could result from eating the body and blood because, “the soul does not feed on the ﬂesh, but lives by the Spirit alone.” Just as faith could not be attained through the words of Scripture or by the sermon of the preacher, but only by the previous illumination and “drawing” of the Spirit, so, too, the eating of the body of Christ would not make the certainty of forgiveness present in the soul. As Zwingli stated, “the pious heart cannot be fed or strengthened by a body.”142 Zwingli contended that the real “sacramentarian” was the one who “hangs upon the sacraments and attributes far more to them and trusts in them more than is right.” A “sacramentarian” seeks in the sacraments “what they do not, no, indeed, cannot even contain.”143 That which the sacraments “do not and cannot contain” was certitude. That certitude belonged only to faith. Salvation, Zwingli argued, was promised to faith, not to eating. Zwingli could not understand why Luther needed a second source, so to speak, for certainty. Certainty was found in faith alone, and that faith was the work of the Spirit. Zwingli insisted that the believer had no “need” for the body of Christ in the sacrament. To his mind, “we appear to have no need of Christ’s body inasmuch as the Spirit does all things better than the ﬂesh can.”144 Zwingli wondered why Luther even wanted “carnal manducation.” After all, “What else do you hunger and thirst for? Does not ‘by faith alone’ sufﬁce?”145 Luther was simply looking for certitude in all the wrong places. Zwingli found several scriptural passages to be crucial in explaining that the Spirit alone could provide the certainty of faith: namely, John 6:63, “It is the Spirit that gives life; the ﬂesh proﬁts nothing,” and John 14:25–26, “These things I have spoken to you, while I am still with you. But the Comforter, who is the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all

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things.” The most important passage was John 16:7, “Nevertheless, I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you.” On the basis of this latter passage, Zwingli reasoned that the Spirit could not come until Christ had “gone away” or ascended into heaven. The two persons of the Trinity, Christ and the Spirit, could not be present simultaneously. Zwingli thereby cited this verse to prove the necessity for Christ’s physical ascension into heaven. Now he says, “If I do not go away, the Comforter will not come.” [John 16:7]. What, I ask, does he say here but what he had said before? “The ﬂesh must be removed from us, for its presence proﬁts nothing. Now there will be need of the comforting Spirit, who will immediately be present as soon as I go away. If I do not hasten by going away, I will delay its coming.” See how necessary it is that his body be removed!146 The reason that John 14–16 must be interpreted in light of John 6:63 is clear: the ﬂesh, even the risen ﬂesh of Christ, does not bring the comfort or certitude that is the work of the Spirit. We must recall that, like his fellow reformers, Zwingli understood this “comfort” to be the certainty of salvation experienced by the soul. For Zwingli, John 6:63 explained the necessity for the coming of the Spirit; the ﬂesh or the body cannot do the work of the Spirit. Zwingli asked, “Do we attribute to the body the comforting which belongs only to the Spirit? What would have been the purpose of the Spirit if the bodily presence and the supper room, provided all things?” Only if Christ ascended bodily into heaven would the Spirit be present “in a far more special way.”147 In Zwingli’s mind, Luther was confusing the role and attributes of Christ’s divine and human natures. The bodily cruciﬁxion was the source of salvation. It was the divine nature that offered assurance or comfort to the soul. In order to ﬁnd certainty, it was not the body that needed a “special place,” as Luther contended, but the Spirit who needed to become present in a “special way.” For Zwingli, the removal of Christ’s body was a necessity if believers were to receive certainty from its one and only source—that is, the Spirit. In Zwingli’s view, Luther’s Eucharistic teaching would actually deprive the soul of certainty. Luther was directing the believer to the wrong “place” to seek assurance, with the result that he committed idolatry. Luther’s belief in the ubiquitous presence of the body of Christ contradicted the promises in the Gospel of John, especially the words, “Nevertheless I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away, the Comforter will not come to you, but if I go, I will send him to you.” If the body of Christ did not “go away” the true source of comfort or certitude could not be present to the heart of the believer. The certainty that Luther appeared to attribute to Christ’s body was actually available only through the faith given by the Spirit. For

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Zwingli, only Christ’s absence could make room for the certainty of faith, a certainty that is always only the work of the Spirit. Thus Zwingli asked Luther, “If it is expedient that he goes away, it will be of no advantage that he remains. If the Comforter does not come until all the comfort of the bodily presence is taken away, why do we not see that the eating of the body does not guarantee any of the things you maintain”148 Interpreting John 6:56 (“He that eats my ﬂesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him”), Zwingli interpreted “eating” in terms of the certitude of faith: If then his ﬂesh or body has suffered death for us and his blood, which was shed for us, has redeemed us poor sinners, no stronger food of the soul can be offered to us than to believe this with all certainty; thus his death and the shedding of his blood become life and joy to the soul. That these words of Christ are to be understood in such a way as to signify faith by the term “ﬂesh and blood,” he himself teaches in the same context.149 If “the ﬂesh proﬁts nothing” and it was necessary that the bodily presence of Christ “go away,” then, for Zwingli, it was clear that belief or faith alone granted certainty, life, and the spirit. Therefore, in Zwingli’s view, Luther’s doctrine failed the test of certitude. Using certainty as the criterion for the truth of doctrine also emerged as a method of arguing about the nature of justiﬁcation. We have already seen that Luther refuted the Catholic view on the basis that it left the conscience anxious and doubtful about salvation. He debated the issue on biblical and theological grounds but, ﬁnally, declared that the Catholic teaching on justiﬁcation was obviously false because it could not grant the soul certainty. He rejected the validity of any “pious doubt” as the blasphemous distrust of God’s promise. Only a doctrine that successfully banished the “monster of uncertainty” could, in Luther’s view, be true to the biblical teaching. Calvin repeated this argument by saying the scholastic doctrine of justiﬁcation was incorrect precisely because it left the believer uncertain. He employed the criterion of certainty against every aspect of Catholic teaching. In the following statement he criticized the traditional view of penance because it could not provide the soul with certainty: Unless this knowledge [of the forgiveness of sins] remains clear and pure, the conscience can have no rest at all, no peace with God, no assurance or security; but it continually trembles, wavers, tosses, is tormented and vexed, shakes, hates, and ﬂees the sight of God.150 So, too, Calvin refuted the facere doctrine of “doing what is within you,” because this teaching only created “new anxieties.” Indeed, Calvin argued, the facere doctrine caused “new tortures” to strike anxious souls. To tell the believer to “do what is in him” would return him to the state of uncertainty.151 Calvin

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argued this point by saying, “If they say we must do what is in us, we are always brought back to the same point. For when will anyone dare assure himself that he has applied all his powers to lament his sins?”152 The requirement for a complete confession, Calvin added, was not only impossible but makes us tremble at the sight of God and casts us “into ruin and despair.” The attribution of the keys to priests alone so that they may bind or loose produced nothing but uncertainty. Such binding and loosing, Calvin argued, “always remains ambiguous” because one never knew when the priest correctly discerned those who deserved pardon. Because the power of the keys was based on the discernment of the priest, it could provide “no ﬁrm ground.” The Catholic doctrine of absolution was false and useless, therefore, precisely because it was uncertain. Why then do they say that they absolve when their absolution is uncertain? What is this imaginary power to us if it is useless? Now I hold that it is either nothing or so uncertain that it ought to be considered as nothing. For since they admit that a good many priests do not use the keys rightly, and that the power is ineffective without lawful use, who will convince me that he by whom I am loosed is a good dispenser of the keys?153 Calvin also used the criterion of certitude against his Protestant opponents. This is most evident in his polemic against the Lutheran pastor Andreas Osiander (1498–1552).154 Osiander, a Lutheran reformer at Nuremberg and Königsberg, sparked a controversy over the true meaning of Luther’s doctrine of justiﬁcation. Although he voiced concerns about certainty, his primary interest was in the inner renewal or regeneration of human life. To that end he articulated a doctrine of justiﬁcation that mitigated the forensic element taught by Luther. Nonetheless, he insisted that he was true to Luther’s doctrine by teaching that justiﬁcation by faith included the cleansing from sin and the renewal of the soul. Moreover, this cleansing and renewal took place on the basis of the soul’s personal union with Christ. Osiander also believed he was being true to Luther by arguing repeatedly that this union was effected only by faith. Osiander clearly believed that the incarnate person of Jesus Christ satisﬁed the justice of God on the cross. In so doing, Christ gave believers the “grace and gift of justiﬁcation and eternal life.” However, the ideas of imputation and justifying faith meant not that we are merely declared just by God in a juridical and external way but that we are actually made just by God’s grace. He emphasized the inner renewal of the believer who, through faith, was united with Christ. By means of the “indwelling” of Christ, the inner Word “dwells” or “lives” within the human heart. Repeatedly, Osiander spoke of the indivisible Father, Son, and Holy Spirit who “in nobis habitant”; he stated throughout his works that “Christus per ﬁdem in nobis habitat.” It is through this indwelling that Christ becomes our righteousness. In his 1552 treatise, Wider den lichtﬂüchtigen Nachtraben, he summarized his teaching by stating, “Faith apprehends Christ

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so that through faith he dwells [wonet] in our hearts.” He constantly emphasized that “Christ, dwelling in us through faith is our wisdom, righteousness, holiness, and redemption.”155 To argue his case, Osiander distinguished between being called just and truly becoming just. Only the latter brings true righteousness. Justiﬁcation meant that God not only pronounced us righteous but “made us just” and gave us “the thing itself and in truth.”156 In short, justiﬁcation means that God gives us his righteousness through faith in Christ, a faith which brings Christ into the heart. Not surprisingly, Osiander frequently cited or referred to I Corinthians 1:30, promising that Christ’s righteousness and holiness becomes truly ours.157 For Osiander, justifying faith always included the object of that faith: namely, Christ. Therefore, justifying faith was never a “mere faith” or a “naked faith,” but a faith that grasped Christ. According to Osiander, Christ is our righteousness.158 To believe that we are only externally declared or imputed to be righteous was a doctrine, he said, that was “colder than ice.”159 God was not a lover of unrighteousness and, therefore, God did not regard as just someone who lacked true righteousness. Consequently, Osiander concluded that the righteousness of Christ is truly effective for us only “when it is in us.”160 The indwelling of Christ meant that believers were, in the words of II Peter 1:4, “partakers in the divine nature.”161This verse was central to Osiander because it meant that justiﬁcation included regeneration, for “nothing justiﬁes which does not also vivify.”162 Osiander’s main concern was the renewal or rebirth of the Christian in whom the inner Word dwelt.163 Christ acted as mediator because he was the means of salvation and the bearer of divinity. Moreover, it was the indwelling of the divinity of Christ that was man’s “essential righteousness.”164 Osiander spent a good deal of time on the distinction between Christ’s two natures in order to explain how it was the divine nature or “inner word” that dwells within the human soul.165 This distinction was important because inner renewal was the work of the divine (inner word), not the human, nature of Christ. Only according to his divine nature, Osiander argued, is Christ our wisdom and our righteousness. Since Christ was made our righteousness and Christ, His whole undivided person in which both the divine and human natures are united, is our righteousness, then according to which nature is Christ the creator of heaven and earth? Or it is as if one asked according to which nature did he die? Here I distinctly and clearly answer that he is our righteousness according to his divine and not his human nature, although we are not able to ﬁnd, obtain, or apprehend this divine righteousness apart from his human nature. . . .166 It is important to note that Osiander also had a robust understanding of the certainty of salvation provided by the indwelling of Christ’s righteousness. Only through this participation in Christ or the work of Christ’s essential

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righteousness could the Christian be certain of God’s mercy and salvation. A doctrine which tells us that we are merely pronounced righteous could never render us certain. Romans 8:16 both proved the indwelling of Christ’s righteousness and the certainty of that indwelling. To experience the indwelling of Christ is to know that one is “a child of God.” Thus we should be content with faith alone, which gives us the testimony of Christ’s indwelling, a testimony which also brings joy, trust, and the conﬁdence that God has called and justiﬁed the believer.167 The believer knows that God rules in him, so he can say that, although God is hidden, “ich fühle den heiligen Geist.” Finally, the believer can say that he does not doubt (ungezweifelt) that God has provided for him from all eternity in order to bring him to eternal life.168 The knowledge and experience of this divine indwelling, therefore, was the source of certainty. Lutherans such as Melanchthon vigorously opposed Osiander. Calvin took up the charge against him in Book III.2.5–12 of the 1559 Institutes. The sheer length of his rebuttal indicates how seriously he believed the Lutheran reformer had erred. One reason that Calvin took Osiander so seriously may have been that in many ways the two men sounded the same themes. Both Osiander and Calvin talked at length about the union between Christ and the believer. They both emphasized as well the importance of regeneration and even the participation in God that was the source of righteousness.169 Calvin had to distance himself from Osiander in order to establish the correct meaning of these pneumatological issues. Calvin attacked Osiander on several points. According to Calvin, because Osiander stressed that it was the divine nature of Christ that justiﬁed and made the soul righteous, he underestimated or ignored the priestly role of Christ. Christ’s obedience and sacriﬁcial death, which appeased God completely, was accomplished according to the human nature of Christ. We are justiﬁed by Christ, Calvin argued, “in so far as he was made an atoning sacriﬁce for us; something that does not comport with his divine nature.”170 Calvin’s real target, however, was Osiander’s idea of “essential righteousness.” Calvin thought Osiander was teaching that Christ’s essence was “mingled with ours.” This “strange monster of essential righteousness” indicated, in Calvin’s view, a “mixture of substances by which, God . . . transfusing himself into us, makes us part of himself.”171 Calvin vehemently denied that any such “gross mingling” of the human with the divine ever existed. The whole notion of an “essential righteousness” revealed that Osiander confused the “two graces” of justiﬁcation and sanctiﬁcation. Repeatedly, he reminded his readers that “to be justiﬁed means something different from being made new creatures” and “to justify” did not mean the same thing as “to make one righteous.”172 Calvin did, however, want to stress the union between Christ and the believer. He found himself in the awkward position of having to distinguish his own view of the “indwelling of Christ” from Osiander’s doctrine of essential

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righteousness. Calvin, too, argued that Christ deigned to make us one with him. Calvin believed that the correct doctrine of union or “indwelling” required attention to the Holy Spirit.173 Osiander, he charged, “did not observe the bond of this unity” between Christ and the Christian. Calvin distanced himself from Osiander’s language of union by insisting that “we hold ourselves to be united with Christ by the secret power of the Holy Spirit.”174 The “manner of the indwelling” was important to Calvin because it was only through the “power of the Holy Spirit that we grow together with Christ.”175 The correct meaning of justiﬁcation and the distinction between the “two graces” was of critical importance because of the problem of certitude. In Calvin’s argument, the confusion of the “two graces” and the resulting notion of an “essential righteousness” were dangerous precisely because they seemed to require that the human being be “substantially righteous” before he could be saved.176 The believer would have to be justiﬁed not by imputation, faith, or “free pardon,” but, rather, by “the holiness and uprightness that the essence of God dwelling in us inspires.” For Calvin, Osiander claimed that God “pours” and “breathes his righteousness upon us, by which we may be really righteous.” The danger of this doctrine becomes evident, Calvin argued, if we turn to “experience.”177 Calvin insisted that “experience” always shows us that we remain sinful. If Osiander’s doctrine were true, then we return to the Catholic or “scholastic” error that we must either be truly holy or remain uncertain of our salvation. Throughout his writings, Calvin battled against all demands for holiness or perfectionism of any kind. Any demand for perfection, holiness, or an “essential righteousness” made the experiential reality of sin a cause of uncertainty. By confusing justiﬁcation and regeneration, Osiander’s doctrine of essential righteousness required a kind of perfection never available to believers in this life. However, if we recall the passages cited above regarding Osiander’s understanding of certainty, it becomes clear that he seemed to draw the opposite conclusion from that of Calvin. As we have seen, for Osiander the experience of the indwelling Word, of essential righteousness, or of Christ dwelling and working within the soul was the source of comfort. In a sermon on Romans 9, he spoke of the justiﬁed person as feeling the governing or the signs of the Holy Spirit working within the soul. Such spiritual feelings ensured the person that he or she was a child of God. To “feel” the working and ruling of the indwelling Word made one certain of salvation. The believer could believe without doubting that God had decided from all eternity to provide and make him holy. He could also be certain that the devil could in no way tear him out of God’s hand. According to Osiander, those to whom God had given faith could be certain that God would call, justify, and glorify them. God could in no way abandon them.178 Therefore, Osiander repeatedly told his congregation that he who is chosen and has faith is justiﬁed and experiences the witness of the Holy Spirit and thereby knows with certainty that he is a “child of God.”179

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He often relied on Romans 8:28–30 but also on the experience of the indwelling Word which gives the conscience certainty against the gates of hell. Through the presence and work of the indwelling Word, the believer experiences becoming one body with Christ. The Christian thus knows that the Spirit of Christ is within him. Thus Osiander cited, as did Calvin, Romans 8:9: “But you are not in the ﬂesh, you are in the Spirit, if the Spirit of God really dwells in you. Anyone who does not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him.”180 But for Calvin, Osiander’s unrelenting emphasis on being “made just” and possessing “essential righteousness” meant only that the traces of sin which all believers experienced would cause uncertainty. He carefully distinguished his own pneumatology and statements about union with Christ from those of Osiander in such a way that sin could not threaten certitude. Thus Calvin wrote against the idea of “essential righteousness” on the basis that it would leave the soul uncertain: But because it is very well known by experience that the traces of sin always remain in the righteous, their justiﬁcation must be very different from reformation into the newness of life. . . . No portion of righteousness sets our consciences at peace until it has been determined that we are pleasing to God because we are entirely righteous before him. From this it follows that the doctrine of justiﬁcation is perverted and utterly overthrown when doubt is thrust into men’s minds, when the assurance of salvation is shaken and the true fearless calling upon God suffers hindrance-nay, when peace and tranquility with spiritual joy are not established . . . For faith totters if it pays attention to works since no one, even the most holy, will ﬁnd there anything to rely on . . . Assuredly [the Christian] will hang uncertainly, wavering to this side and that, for he will not be allowed to assure in himself as much righteousness as he needs for assurance.181 In Calvin’s view, Osiander had failed the test of certitude and, therefore, proved his own doctrine to be false. Calvin concluded his disputation against Osiander with the same argument used against the scholastics: “No portion of righteousness sets our consciences at peace.” Calvin argued that because Osiander’s doctrine demanded purity it was clearly false because it would create doubt or uncertainty and make believers “hang uncertainly” regarding their own salvation. In both the scholastics and in Osiander the result was uncertainty since the sinner could never ﬁnd in himself “as much righteousness as he needs for assurance.” Calvin applied this same argument to any doctrine that required an inherent righteousness; at all costs the illusion of perfectionism had to be avoided. This theological argument had as its ﬁnal authority the test of certitude. He contended against opposing interpretations both on the basis of Scripture and on the test of certitude. By making certitude itself the test of

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doctrinal authority, Calvin believed he could argue with hermeneutical conﬁdence that his doctrine was based on the true meaning of Scripture. All the participants in these controversies cited the Bible. They all relied on those verses that most strongly supported their case: John 6:45, John 6:63 and 65, Galatians 4:6, and Romans 8:15–17. By means of such verses, these reformers tried to provide a biblical theology that was true to Scripture. Moreover, they attempted to ground that theology in certitude. And thus we end where we began: Scripture and its interpretation. To put the matter more clearly, we conclude with the certainty of Scripture and the certainty of authority to interpret that Scripture. The problem of Word and Spirit swirled around the Reformation in many contexts and in various circumstances. Always, however, the issue concluded with the problem of certitude. All the reformers agreed that the Spirit was necessary to understand the true meaning of Scripture, but how and where the Spirit provided that certainty was disputed. To anchor authority in Scripture required a certainty of authority that was, once again, expressed in the same pneumatological language found in the claims about the certainty of salvation. We can see from these controversies and the growing importance of the criterion of certitude that the search for true doctrine based on Scripture alone became increasingly difﬁcult. We are constantly reminded of Steinmetz’s eloquent description of the way in which the Bible was, “in the fullest sense of the term, a sixteenth-century book.” In these last two chapters we have seen that the most pitched theological battles of the Reformation centered on issues about Scriptural certitude, or to put it another way, the certainty of hermeneutical authority. Indeed, it can be argued that certainty was the fundamental theological locus of the sixteenth century. The redeﬁnition of faith as the experiential certainty of salvation was only the beginning of a long trajectory. These reformers were forced to confront the certainty of interpreting Scripture correctly, a certainty that guaranteed the knowledge of salviﬁc truth. The forms of argumentation for this certitude of scriptural and doctrinal authority became more complex as the magisterial reformers were increasingly surrounded by various forms of religious radicalism. Moreover, in the following chapters we will see that the search for, and the appeal to, certitude did not go unanswered by the Catholic church of the sixteenth century. We will also place the widespread use of experience in the context both of the claims for certitude as well as in sixteenth-century spirituality as a whole. This use of experience inevitably led to the overriding problem of the discernment of the spirits. We will also see that the claims for certainty brought with them various responses, some of which were to question the availability and value of certainty altogether.

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4 Are You Alone Wise? The Catholic Response

Catholics did not sit idly by as they watched Christendom shatter. The various claims and disputes about certainty went neither unnoticed nor unanswered by Catholic writers. There was scarcely a reformed position on justiﬁcation and the certainty of salvation that Trent did not reject. Trent did wrestle with the problem of religious certainty, and in its ﬁnal decrees the Council answered what it perceived as the Lutheran errors concerning the certainty of salvation. On January 13, 1547, the sixth session of the Council of Trent condemned various aspects of Luther’s teaching regarding certitude. In Canon 13, the ﬁdes sacramenti was declared anathema. Canons 14–16 condemned the certainty of justiﬁcation and predestination; the Christian is not to believe with certitude that he is predestined or justiﬁed by faith alone. And without a “special revelation,” the Christian cannot be certain “with an absolute and infallible certitude [absoluta et infallibili certitudine]” that he has the gift of perseverance to the end.1 These condemnations do not mean that the issue of certitude was summarily dismissed at Trent. We can best understand the labyrinthine debate about certitude at Trent if we recall what “faith” traditionally meant in medieval theology. Theologians of the Middle Ages distinguished between different types and degrees of faith. The different forms of faith included demon’s faith, implicit faith, explicit faith, infused faith, acquired faith, and, most importantly, unformed and formed faith. Infused faith and formed faith were concerned with the theological triad of virtues: faith, hope, and love. These virtues were infused into the soul in the reception of ﬁrst grace— baptism and penance. It was, of course, formed faith or “faith formed

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by love” that was central in the process of justiﬁcation, a process that included the acquisition of merits and the attainment of salvation. However, medieval theologians also understood faith as belonging primarily to the intellectus or to knowledge. As Berndt Hamm explained, in medieval thought faith was “essentially cognitive.” What kind of certainty could this cognitive faith possess? As Hamm stated, medieval thinkers believed that “Faith is a ﬁrm adherence to the truth . . . and consequently possesses in its recognition an infallible certainty, certitudo and securitas, of the contents of faith.”2 Cajetan had argued that infused faith could be certain regarding matters “in the ambit of faith.” For example, by means of infused faith one was certain that the sacrament conferred grace to a worthy recipient. However, the certainty of infused faith could not “embrace error.”3 Since the believer could not subjectively be certain as to whether he posed an obstacle to grace, the cognitive certainty of receiving grace or of being in a state of grace did not belong to the “ambit of faith.” Anything pertaining to “particular facts,” such as one’s individual or particular salvation, could not be known with certainty and, therefore, could not be the object of infused faith. The importance of this understanding is threefold. First, there was, indeed, a certitude of faith in medieval theology, but it was a cognitive adherence to the truths transmitted by Scripture within the teaching of the church. Secondly, this certainty of faith did not reach “the heart” of believers so that they could experience an affective certainty of being in a state of grace or of being justiﬁed. Believing the objective articles of faith with certitude did not result in caritas or securitas. Faith in itself only “solidiﬁed the didactic, cognitive understanding of ecclesiastical truth transmitting a universally valid certitudo” that remained merely cognitive. Finally, while faith was a fundamental principle of Christian life, it was caritas, not ﬁdes, that was the higher theological virtue.4 Only formed faith transformed human nature and gradually created the inherent righteousness necessary for salvation. The foundational role of faith was reafﬁrmed in Chapter VIII of the sixth session at Trent: “But indeed when the Apostle says that man is justiﬁed by faith and freely, these words must be understood in the sense that the perpetual consensus of the Catholic Church has held and expressed them, namely, that we are therefore said to be justiﬁed by faith because faith is the beginning of human salvation, the foundation and root of all justiﬁcation.”5 When the medieval theologian addressed the subjective level of the human soul, it was the theological virtues of hope and love that were the most signiﬁcant. These virtues were not directed only to the assent of the intellectus regarding the truths of the faith. They pertained to the affective transformation of the soul. As we have seen, Gerson had spoken about the certitude of hope. More rigorist preachers such as Geiler of Keiserberg also taught that in the attempt to balance divine justice and mercy, the sinner could still have the hope of salvation. Even if only one in a thousand people were to be saved, the Christian should hope that he or she was one of the predestined.6 But it was the virtue of

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love that enabled the Christian to progress toward that ﬁnal salvation. As Trent decreed, justiﬁcation was “not only a remission of sins but also the sanctiﬁcation and renewal of the inward man through the voluntary reception of grace and gifts whereby an unjust man becomes just. . . .” Christians, Trent insisted, were not “reputed” to be righteous but, rather, “we are truly called and are just, receiving justice within us.” The justice of God is “infused” within us and “inheres” within us. Citing Romans 5:5, the Council of Trent stated that the process of justiﬁcation required “the charity which is poured forth in their hearts by the Holy Spirit.”7 While formulating the ﬁnal decree on justiﬁcation, the Council of Trent had to address repeatedly the nature of faith and the possibility of certitude. The questions for the Tridentine fathers were the following: Can the viator possibly know with the certainty of faith whether he is in a state of grace? Was it possible to obtain a certainty of grace, not on the basis of a special revelation but, rather, because of the efﬁcacy of the sacrament?8 For some members of the Council, the condemnation presented at the beginning of the General Convocation seemed too strong. It was anathema to say that “the one justiﬁed is bound to believe that he is in a state of grace, that sin is not imputed to him, and that he is predestined.”9 Other thinkers at Trent, however, wanted to consider the problem more thoroughly. The Generals of the Conventuals and the Servites, as well as a few other ﬁgures, asked that the question of the certainty of grace be reconsidered in view of the teaching of Duns Scotus. The particular passages that received the most attention were Ox I. d. 17, q. 3, Ox. IV. d. 14, and Ox. IV. d. 9, q. 1. a.1. in Ox. IV. d. 14, Scotus had stressed the efﬁcacy of the ex opere operato character of the sacraments. According to Scotus, the penitent was not worthy because of his disposition but because he did not place an obex to the reception of grace at the time he received the sacrament. If one did not place an obstacle to the reception of grace, then the believer could be certain of being in a state of grace. Antonius Delphinus, a Conventual, was asked to study Scotus and to write an “expert opinion” on how the Subtle Doctor understood the certitude of grace. He concluded that Scotus taught two roads to justiﬁcation. The ﬁrst one included the presence of doubt. This road required a bonus motus interior, that is, contrition or the detesting of sin for God’s sake, which, as a congruous merit, brought about the remission of the guilt of sin. This path was uncertain because not every act of contrition was sufﬁcient for the meritum de congruo. The necessary intensity and duration of the act of contrition was known only by God. However, the second road provided a certainty based on the ex opere operato character of the sacrament. According to Delphinus, Scotus believed that Christians could determine sufﬁciently whether they fulﬁlled the conditions for the valid reception of the sacrament. When receiving the sacrament, the sinner could know with certainty that he had not sinned and that he did not intend to sin in the future. In short, the penitent could discern whether or not

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he posed an obstacle to the reception of grace. The penitent could have a greater certainty of not placing an obstacle to grace than he could have regarding the quality of the act of sorrow or the earning of the congruous merit.10 The General of the Conventuals, Bonaventura Costacciaro, also argued that Scotus believed the only requisite for the reception of baptism and penance was to place no obstacle (non ponere obicem) in the way of grace. Perfect contrition was not required because the power of the sacrament, ex opere operato, would supply whatever was lacking. He added that if a perfect act of contrition were necessary, the sacrament of penance would have little signiﬁcance because such contrition alone would effect the remission of guilt and the reception of grace. Costacciaro further explained that he was not asserting that this certitude was an obligation; he was only afﬁrming its possibility.11 In the course of the discussions about justiﬁcation, the Council had to address the kind of faith that could conceivably grant certitude. According to Costacciaro, Scotus only rejected a natural, experiential, or “evident” certainty about being in a state of grace. He argued, however, that Scotus did allow for a kind of certitude of faith. The believer could not have such certitude “of himself,” that is, he could not gain this certitude by his own natural powers. Nonetheless, the believer could have the certitude of faith regarding the presence of grace in the same way that he believed in the Holy Scripture, the fathers, the church, and the sacraments. Costacciaro, the Observant Franciscan Ludovicus Vitriarius, and others explained that, according to Scotus, since infused faith was given immediately by God, it could never be acquired by one’s natural powers. Infused faith, moreover, could never be in error. Nor could such faith be known by experience. Infused faith had as its object the truths revealed by God.12 The certainty of these truths was based not on the objects but on the fact that God revealed them. Therefore, faith derived its certainty neither from the objects of truth nor from our understanding of those truths. This certainty came from the trustworthiness of its source—namely, God. Aquired faith could be acquired by natural means. For Costacciaro, it was necessary to distinguish between infused faith and acquired faith. God could cause an act of faith through the infusion of a habitus. However, God could also cause an act of faith through an immediate motio. The latter was not a habitus but, rather, a ﬁdes acquisita. The certitude of acquired faith also involved the authority of the church. Guided by the Spirit, the church was an infallible source of truth and could not err in matters of faith. Consequently, the church could give an infallibly acquired faith. Costacciaro argued on the basis of Scotus that the believer could have an infallible acquired faith of being in a state of grace. The assent of such an acquired faith was “ﬁrmus, certus, indeceptibilis” because, on the basis of the authority of the church, the light of acquired faith excluded all doubt: quod lumen omnem dubietatem excludit, ut dubietas ex ﬁde excludi requiritur. . . . As Valens Heynck made clear, Costacciaro made his case by arguing that Scotus had granted the possibility that acquired faith could, indeed, be infallible.13

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The debates regarding the certainty of faith of being in a state of grace dragged on for two interrelated reasons. Opponents included such leaders as Cardinal Pachetto, and many Dominicans ﬂatly opposed it. Ambrosius Catharinus, however, came to be a defender of such certitude. The opponents insisted that the ex opere operato nature of the sacrament did not entail the certitude of being in a state of grace. Although the sacrament objectively conferred grace, the recipient could not be certain that he posed no obstacle. Even the penitent who had a moral certainty about posing no obstacle could be deceived. Since the subjective state of the recipient could not be known with certainty, the certitude of being in a state of grace was excluded. There was, however, a disagreement even among the Scotists.14 The discussion about the certainty of grace later split the Council into two factions because of a lengthy dispute regarding the interpretation of Scotus. As Heynck stated, “the discussion proper concerning the certainty of grace, which later split the Council into two factions and consumed a considerable amount of time, had its origin in a dispute concerning the doctrine of Duns Scotus.”15 The key text in the debate was, not surprisingly, the interpretation of Ecclesiastes 9:1 as found in Ox. IV. d.9 q. 1. The debate was among the Franciscans. The Conventuals and the General of the Observants favored the view that Scotus afﬁrmed the certitude of faith. While the General of the Observants also advocated this view, several other Observants, including Vega and de Castro, denied that Scotus argued for such certitude. The latter insisted that men such as Costacciaro had overreached and misinterpreted Scotus’s true meaning. Vega insisted that when Scotus spoke about placing no obstacle to grace, he had required true contrition for the reception of the sacrament. The disposition of the recipient did not, in itself, effect grace, but if the recipient went to the sacrament without true contrition, he thereby posed an obex.16 According to Vega, when Scotus emphasized the ex opere operato efﬁcacy of the sacrament, he merely intended to say that the validity of baptism and penance did not depend on the moral disposition of the priest or whether the priest was in a state of grace. Although this contrition did not need to be so intense that it justiﬁed as a congruous merit, nonetheless, it had to be genuine contrition.17 Regarding the unworthy reception of the Eucharist, Scotus had stated that if one had to know himself to be in a state of grace, then, on the basis of Ecclesiastes 9:1, there would be no sacrament of the Eucharist because “such certitude would not be ﬁtting for the viator.” Vega proceeded to explain this statement by saying that Scotus spoke only of a moral or humanly possible certitude. He did not, Vega insisted, speak of the certitude of faith. For the viator, such certitude was “not ﬁtting.”18 Responding to the argument that Scotus allowed for the certitude of faith regarding being in a state of grace through acquired faith, Vega insisted that Scotus excluded both “evident” certitude as well as genuine certitude, including the certitude of faith. According to Vega, Scotus denied that the believer could prove the possession of a supernatural

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habitus by natural means. Therefore, he rejected any certitude of faith about the state of grace because it was impossible to conclude that one possessed any of the infused virtues from the existence of particular mental acts and their quality. Vega focused on Scotus’s understanding of the “obstacle.” In Vega’s reading, Scotus did not allow that a person could have the certitude of faith that he was sufﬁciently disposed and, consequently, that he was certain of being in a state of grace. The faith one had of being in a state of grace could not be a certainty that excluded all doubt. Therefore, only a “moral,” but never an “infallible” certitude was possible.19 Debates about the certainty of grace wore on as the Council continued to formulate the decree on justiﬁcation. Those who advocated the “afﬁrmative” interpretation of Scotus tried to distinguish their understanding of the “certitude of faith” from the “Lutheran” teaching. For some, the issue was inseparable from that of double justiﬁcation. By the time of the November draft, the doctrine of a twofold justice, as held by Seripando and others, had been rejected. Those Scotists who still held out for the certitude of grace inserted the word communiter into chapter IX of the decree. This insertion made the text read that “generally a man does not know whether he is worthy of God’s love.”20 The inclusion of the term communiter only caused further ambiguity and confusion. Finally, on January 9, 1547, the controversy drew to a close. After all the debates, no statement deﬁning any possible certitude of faith was formulated. By a majority of 33 votes to 16, the Council decided to conﬁne itself to a condemnation of the Lutheran teaching on the certitude of salvation. The Thomists defeated any remaining language in the decree allowing for the certitude of grace. The ﬁnal statements reﬂected the denial of the certitude of grace in the sense that the Thomists understood it. Lainez, the General of the Jesuits, was also emphatically opposed to any language allowing for such certitude. The word communiter was dropped. Nonetheless, according to Jedin, the ﬁnal wording left the “certitude stemming from faith as conceived by the Scotists . . . an open question.” In any case the ﬁnal decree stated, “No can know with a certainty of faith, which cannot be subject to error, that he has obtained the grace of God.”21 However, to seek the type of certitude offered by sixteenth-century Catholicism in the Tridentine decrees on justiﬁcation is to look in the wrong place. The way in which Catholicism answered the reformers was to present an alternative form of certitude. The Catholic defense of certainty never did promise the subjective certainty of salvation. Catholic writers, however, did offer a powerful alternative in their arguments about the certainty of truth. The Catholic understanding of certitude, formulated in response to Protestantism, can be discerned by examining the polemical arguments and responses to Luther. The Catholic form of certitude that permeates this literature drew on long-standing concepts within the tradition to articulate a threefold argument. First, the Catholic controversialists joined pneumatology with ecclesiology. It is important to recognize

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that this connection was traditional and long preceded the Reformation. Catholic controversialists employed it with a new force because they fundamentally agreed with the Protestant belief that, in cases of doctrine, the Spirit was the agent of certitude. The question they asked was, “Where is the Spirit?” Their identiﬁcation of the Spirit with the church then led to the argument from providence and history. And lastly, the claim that the Spirit of truth resided only in the Church led these writers to attack the ecclesiology of the reformers precisely on the issue of certitude. They did so by arguing that the ecclesiology of “these heretics” actually rendered the faith uncertain. Catholic controversialists of the sixteenth century are a vast topic, one dealt with quite admirably by David Bagchi.22 I limit myself to several important and representative pieces by Henry VIII, John Eck, and Thomas More. By reviewing these texts, we will see that the concept of certainty underlies controversies about more explicit issues such as papal authority, the nature of the church, and the role of the Spirit in history. Moreover, these writings proceeded on two fronts: biblical exegesis, and the interpretation of history and tradition. Sixteenth-century Catholic controversialists did not, of course, distinguish carefully between the positions of various reformers or reformed groups. They did not inquire about the actual institutional structures erected in the cities of the Reformation. They based their critique on early statements about the church found in the writings of the reformers, writings which often stressed the spiritual nature of the true church. They were polemicists, and their purpose was to attack that which they understood to be the false teachings, assumptions, and consequences of their opponents’ theology. Moreover, the purpose of polemic, which historians debate, was not simply to convice people to turn back to Catholicism. It was also a practice in self-deﬁnition, clarifying and establishing for Catholics exactly what they believed as Catholics. Therefore, besides winning back the reader to Catholicism, this polemical literature was also an indispensible exercise in Catholic self-deﬁnition and identity.23 The understanding by the various polemicists regarding Reformation ecclesiology centered on several interrelated issues that were drawn primarily from the earlier writings of such reformers as Luther, Zwingli, and Tyndale. The arguments of the controversialists focused on the question of authority as well as the visibility or invisibility of the church. In the treatises by such thinkers as Catharinus, Prierias, Latomus, Fisher, Eck, and More, the controversy concerned both the primacy of the pope and the identiﬁcation of the true church. First we must understand that Catholic writers looked on Luther with ancient eyes; they had seen it all before. When the controversialists looked at Luther they saw John Hus. At the 1519 Leipzig Disputation, Eck accused Luther of the “Bohemian heresy” on the basis of Unam Sanctam.24 This accusation stuck. In the bull of excommunication, Exsurge Domine (1520), and in the Edict of Worms (1521), Luther’s teachings were associated with both Wycliffe and Hus. In his Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum (1521), King Henry VIII predicted that when the Germans unmasked Luther as a heretic,

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he would take refuge among the Bohemians.25 Luther did not help this situation by openly identifying himself with Hus. At Leipzig, he replied to Eck that not all the articles of Hus condemned at the Council were heretical. Many of Hus’s articles, he said, were “most Christian and evangelical.” In his Disputatio et excusatio F. Martini Luther adversus criminationes D. Johannis Eccii (1519), Luther criticized the council of Constance for condemning Hus’s statements that the Roman pontiffs received their excellence from Caesar.26 In his Defense and Explanation of All the Articles . . . Luther maintained, “Now I say, not only certain articles, but all the articles of John Hus, condemned at Constance, are altogether Christian; and I admit that the pope and his followers acted in this matter like the true Antichrist.” Writing to Spalatin in 1520, Luther said, “Just like Johannes von Staupitz, I have taught and maintained the whole of Hus. In short, without knowing it we are all Hussites. Properly considered, Paul and Augustine are also Hussites.”27 In his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, Luther urged conciliation with the Czechs because of the injustice done to them.28 He also advocated compromise regarding the doctrine of transubstantiation, a doctrine against which he had already voiced his disagreement.29 Scholars have examined closely this relationship between Hus and Luther. Scott Hendrix argued that the two men held very different views of the church. Moreover, according to Hendrix, Luther eventually distanced himself from Hus after 1520.30 According to Bernhard Lohse, although Luther overstated his agreement with Hus, he was probably right to identify with the Bohemian reformer. Lohse argued his thesis by pointing to the similarities in their views about the lordship of Christ, the authority of Scripture, the presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and the understanding of the church.31 Jaroslav Pelikan has studied the ecclesiological thought of Hus in detail, noting that the inseparability of unity and holiness was by no means an exclusively Hussite emphasis. Emperor Sigismund, who convoked the Council of Constance stated, “There cannot be true union without reformation, no true reformation without union.” He demonstrated that Luther’s opponents, Emser and Cochlaeus, feared driving Luther and the Czechs together, but their attempts to prevent this connection failed.32 Heiko Oberman argued that Luther continued to cite Hus as the “ﬁrst martyr of the Antichrist.” In 1522 Luther publicly addressed the Bohemian estates and explicitly connected the discovery of the pope as Antichrist to the beginning of the Reformation. In this connection Luther states, “Hus with his blood has brought forth the Gospel which we have today.” In 1537 Luther cited Erasmus’s view that Hus had been burned but not refuted. As late as 1542, Luther referred to Hus as a “holy martyr” a reference with apocalyptic meaning.33 Because the charge of “Bohemianism” or being a “new Hussite” remained so constant among Luther’s critics, it is worth examining brieﬂy why the connection with Hus seemed so natural and important for Luther’s Catholic opponents. The article by Hus to which Eck referred at the Leipzig disputation was the assertion that papal power did not arise by divine right but, rather, from secular

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power: namely, Caesar. The article stated that, “The papal dignity arose from Caesar and the papal pre-eminence, and institution emanated from Caesar’s power.”34 When Eck argued that Luther’s view of church authority was Hussite, he was referring to the following articles by Hus condemned at Constance: [7] Peter was not, nor is, the head of the holy Catholic Church. [13] The pope is not the manifest or true successor of the prince of the apostles, Peter, if he lives in a manner contrary to Peter. [28]Christ, without such monstrous heads, would rule his church better through his disciples scattered over the circumference of the earth.35 What was the central concern at Constance regarding Hus? On September 24, 1414, Gerson had formulated twenty articles from De ecclesia that he considered heretical. By the time he arrived at Constance on February 25, 1415, the University of Paris had ratiﬁed Gerson’s decision. Gerson saw Hus as an adherent of Wycliffe. As a follower of Wycliffe, Hus was stirring up rebellion against ecclesiastical and secular dominion. In Gerson’s view, they both denied the principle of law and were inciting the peasants to sedition. For Gerson, the “most pernicious” of Hus’s errors was the belief that the reprobate person, living in sin, did not have dominion or jurisdiction over the church laity. For Gerson, the statements by Wycliffe and Hus about the deceptive nature of visibility and their insistence on the authority of holiness represented the inevitable danger of sedition and anarchy.36 The obvious reason for the fear of anarchy was that Hus had argued that the laity had the right to disobey the jurisdictional power of ecclesiastical authorities who were living in sin. Hus also taught that canon law held no authority in the face of the lex Christi. Moreover, as noted above, Oberman showed that concern over the tricks of the Antichrist permeated Hus’s ecclesiology. For Hus, the true church was now under attack from the Antichrist, whose treachery must be unmasked. Such a belief already warned of a fundamental disorder within the church.37 Gerson, then, also saw that the threat Hus posed to ecclesiastical order concerned the problem of visibility and invisibility of the church. Prior deﬁnitions of the church had clearly distinguished the communion of the saints from the mixed body of the earthly church. From the beginning of the fourteenth century, the quest for the true church had become increasingly multifaceted. Prior to 1300, ecclesiology rarely received separate analysis, except in the writings of the canonists. From 1300 to 1500, treatises on ecclesiology multiplied as various thinkers tried to deﬁne the locus of the church and its authority, treatises that reﬂected a crisis of conﬁdence in the church and the papal hierarchy.38 The humiliating defeat of Boniface VIII made the claims of Unam sanctam seem unrealistic. There had developed a disjunction between theory and reality. The church of 1302 could not realistically model itself on the image

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of Innocent III and his claims for the plenitudo potestatis. The controversy caused by John XXII over apostolic poverty and the subsequent split of the Franciscan order furthered the problem of papal authority. However, it was the Great Schism that fully manifested this crisis of authority. Graus observed that “no part of Europe escaped the shock of the so-called Papal Schism in 1378.” As Graus further explained, for the majority of people, the church continued to be the administrator of the sacraments and the ultimate guide: “it could guarantee a death safe from an infernal host of demons, or, at least, it could fend off the probability of eternal damnation.” Any attack on the trustworthiness of the church could, he argued, have fatal consequences. Hence Graus argued, “I certainly do not ﬁnd it accidental that large numbers of people were greatly alarmed to hear that the sacraments were being misused or perhaps worthless, that the Church was corrupt, that it was not the true Church of Christ, or that the sacraments were vitiated.”39 De ecclesia was only one reﬂection of the general feelings of insecurity and uncertainty.40 However, Hus’s work was itself judged to be a threat to the stability and safety of ecclesiastical authority, including the statements of Unam Sanctam. In comparison to the Waldensians, who promoted the idea of a true church independent of Rome, Hus’s views may seem moderate. He remained, after all, dependent on the sacerdotal power of the priesthood for the sacramental grace necessary for salvation.41 He was one of those people, described by Graus, who were alarmed at the thought that the church might no longer be the bulwark or refuge because of the security provided by its sacraments. Just as the protection provided by the sacraments was of central importance to the common people, the doctrine of the church became the dominant concern for Bohemian theologians. Hus was the prime example of this concern. Nonetheless, Hus’s portrait of the true church presented a radical challenge to the secure authority of the earthly church. In his attempts to deﬁne the church, Hus made a series of distinctions. He distinguished between predestination and present righteousness, predestination to eternal life and predestination to righteousness, and between being a member in the church and being a member of the church. He also made a distinction between two kinds of graces. The grace of eternal life was a grace from which one could never fall away. The grace of present righteousness made one acceptable to God only for a time. So, too, there was a twofold separation from the church. One kind of separation was permanent and applied to the reprobate. There was also a separation from the church because of sin, but this separation could be canceled by grace.42 According to Hus, the true church consisted of those predestined to eternal life. Such a person was also predestined to righteousness. However, an individual could be granted the grace of present righteousness but not the gift of perseverance. Such a person would fall out of a state of grace because he had never been predestined to eternal life. This person was a member in the church but, since he would eventually fall away, was never a member of the church. As

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Hus explained, “For many are partakers of present righteousness but, because they lack perseverance, are not partakers of eternal life.”43 The two biblical ﬁgures who personiﬁed Hus’s struggle to deﬁne the true church were Judas and Paul. Hus saw that at one time Judas had lived in a state of present righteousness. Nonetheless, he was only a member in the church, since he never received the grace of predestination to eternal life. Therefore, Judas was, at the same time, both presently righteous and reprobate. Paul was once a blasphemer according to the standards of present righteousness, but he had received the grace of predestination to eternal life. Consequently, Paul was a sinner and, at the same time, a member of the church. Describing the difference between being “in” and “of” the church, Hus wrote, The relationship of pilgrims to Holy Mother Church is fourfold. Some are in the church in name and in reality, as are predestined Catholics, obedient to Christ; some are [in the church] neither in reality nor in name, as are the foreknown pagans; some are in name only, as were the foreknown hypocrites, and some are in the church in reality, although they seem in name to be outside, as are the predestined Christians whom the satraps of the Antichrist seem to be condemning before the eyes of the church. . . . This is seen in the fact that our Redeemer was condemned by the pontiffs and the Pharisees to a most bitter death as a blasphemer and, therefore, as a heretic, qui predestinatus est ﬁlius dei.44 As vertiginous as these distinctions may appear, Hus’s categories were neither radical nor novel. From at least the time of Augustine, the church recognized the various types of “the faithful” who coexisted in the church. Hus was perfectly Augustinian in deﬁning the church both as the mixed body and as the body of the predestined. The wheat and the tares would grow together in the church militant until the time of the harvest or ﬁnal judgment. Moreover, the communio sanctorum or corpus mysticum was the church of the saints and was not identiﬁable with the earthly church. Therefore, the element of invisibility was a traditional element of ecclesiology. What made Hus’s ecclesiology so dangerous was not the invisibility of the mystical body of the saints but, rather, the link that he made between invisibility and authority. As noted above, Hus never questioned the sacramental authority or efﬁcacy of the priesthood. It was jurisdictional authority that Hus challenged. Hus tried to move the power of jurisdictional authority to the laity. In De ecclesia, the laity must exercise a twofold judgment. In some passages, Hus instructed the laity to judge the commands and precepts of their ecclesiastical superiors according to the teaching of Scripture. The lex Christi, found in Scripture, was superior to all other laws and commands, including canon law. According to Hus, both canon laws and papal decrees were human creations

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and could be heretical.45 For Hus the ultimate example of this possibility was Unam Sanctam.46 As Oberman pointed out, the Augustinian position of Hus developed a new and sharper edge once the Antichrist was sighted in the claims to world dominion. Moreover, Oberman added, “this Antichrist had the features of Boniface VIII.”47 In his arguments against Unam Sanctam, Hus insisted that the laity should not assume that the church or the pope was infallible. He further concluded that it was not necessary to believe that the pope was the head of the church. Directly opposing Unam Sanctam, Hus argued that only God “cannot deceive or be deceived.” Hus reasoned that, Believing is an act of faith, that is, to put one’s trust in something. Therefore, to believe what is necessary for blessedness means to adhere ﬁrmly and without wavering to the truth as spoken by God. A man ought to expose his life to the danger of death for this truth because of its certitude. In this way, every Christian is expected to believe explicitly or implicitly all the truth that the Holy Spirit has placed in Scripture. A person is not obligated to believe the sayings of the saints which are not a part of Scripture. Nor should a man believe papal bulls except insofar as they are based on Scripture or if they are based implicitly on Scripture. But a man may believe these bulls as probable, for both the pope and the curia can make mistakes from ignorance of the truth. And it can be proved that the pope makes mistakes and can be deceived. . . . One kind of faith is that which is placed in God. God cannot deceive or be deceived. And another kind of faith is that placed in the pope, who may deceive and be deceived.48 Several issues are noteworthy in this passage. The Christian was to believe both explicitly and implicitly in the truths found in Scripture. Furthermore, the layperson was to judge the bulls of the papacy against the “simple” or “clear” sense of Scripture. Most importantly, God was characterized as the one who was unable to deceive or be deceived. The radical nature of this passage becomes clear when placed against the background of Unam Sanctam. Innocent III had applied the phrase homo spiritualis of I Corinthians 2:15 to the papacy.49 The Bull by Boniface VIII, Unam Sanctam, stated that the pope was “set in the middle between God and man, below God but above man, who judges all and is judged by no one.” We have analyzed the troublesome history of this verse among the reformers. However, the problem of the “spiritual man” preceded the Reformation.50 Hus applied the words of Innocent III and Boniface VIII about the pope to the true Christian. The way in which Innocent described the pope as the spiritual man who could judge all things was the way in which Hus described the elect Christian. Hus railed against Unam Sanctam because Boniface VIII

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had repeated the words of Innocent III by referring I Corinthians 2:15 to the pope. According to Boniface, “Therefore, if the earthly power errs, it shall be judged by the spiritual power, if a lesser spiritual power errs, it shall be judged by its superior, but if the supreme spiritual power errs it can be judged only by God. God, not man, as the apostle witnesses, ‘The spiritual man judges all things and he himself is judged by no man.’” For Hus, the homo spiritualis of I Corinthians 2:15 was most deﬁnitely not the pope. Hus referred this verse to the layperson in his role of “judging all things himself generally pertaining to his salvation, as it is written, ‘He that is spiritual judges all things.’”51 If the layman truly knew that the “pope’s command is contrary to the command or counsel of Christ or that it tends to some harm of the church, then he ought to resist it boldly, lest he become a participant in the crime by consent.”52 On these grounds, Hus justiﬁed his own refusal to cease preaching at Bethlehem Chapel. Hus was aware that he left himself open to the charge of imposing his own singular opinion on Scripture. He tried to defend himself against the charge that he and the Bohemian clergy were interpreting Scripture according to their own minds or opinions. He responded in a manner that, as we have seen, was to become all too familiar. In Hus’s view, “With God’s help, we do not intend to explain Scripture in any other way than the Holy Spirit requires and as the holy doctors expounded it, to whom the Holy Spirit gave understanding.”53 Closely related to the judgment about the decrees and laws of the church was the duty of the layperson to judge the life and works of ecclesiological superiors.54 By means of this judgment, the laity was to determine whether this superior was sent by God. According to Hus, a true priest followed the lex Christi and the life of the apostles. He also must teach only apostolic doctrine. Referring to Galatians 2:14, Hus stated that the layperson must “examine and judge the works of his superior just as the apostle judged the works of Saint Peter.”55 For Hus, the righteous conduct of a priest and his “fruitful labor” in Christ’s Word could demonstrate that he was truly sent by God. This test of holiness was particularly important for the pope because no one could legitimately occupy the seat of Christ or Peter, “unless he follows his manner of life since no other kind of following is more ﬁtting. Nor does anyone receive the procuratorial power from God in any other way. Therefore, the requirements of the vicarial ofﬁce are the conformity of life and authority from the one who appoints.” Contrary to Unam Sanctam, it was not necessary for salvation that all Christians believed that anyone was the head of any church whatsoever, unless their evangelic deeds and manner of life clearly moved them to do so.56 Amidst his many distinctions about the true and false church, Hus used holiness as the most reliable or presumptive “proof” of authority. Luther recognized that a major difference between Hus and himself was that the former was interested in morals and he was interested in doctrine. Nonetheless, we will see that Luther’s own words about the morals of the

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church led to attacks from Thomas More about requiring holiness as a true mark of the church. Moreover, as Oberman observed, the challenge posed by Wycliffe and Hus went beyond morals. Their criticism targeted the displacement of the lex Christi as formulated in Scripture by canon law. For both men, “the fundamental issue of legitimacy stood beyond all censure of morals.”57 This question of legitimacy raised the specter of disobedience to authority. Hus’s insistence on following the law of Christ threw the issues of legitimacy and authority into question. In particular, this insistence exposed the difﬁculty of linking visibility with authority, as seen in the following passages. For it would be much too presumptuous to claim that we are the heads of any particular church that might be a part of holy mother Church. How, then, can any one of us, without revelation, presume to assert of himself or of another, that he is the head, since it is truly said in Eccl. 9:1 that “no one knows, with respect to his predestination, whether he is worthy of love or hatred.”58 What is decisive here is the application of Ecclesiastes 9:1 to both the individual and to the church. The viator or pilgrim could not subjectively be certain of salvation of either himself or any other person. Because of this uncertainty, even a visible “present righteousness” could be, at best, only a conjectural means of identifying the true church. Bypassing the papacy, Hus insisted repeatedly that the head of the true church was Christ alone. Only the predestined constituted the true church ruled only by Christ. He repeatedly stated that “Christ alone is the head of the universal church.” He criticized Boniface VIII and Unam Sanctam by saying that if any Christian shared the headship of the universal church with Christ, then the church would be a two-headed monster. Satan, he argued, was the head of the body of the devil, over which Christ also reigned. But Christ alone was the head of the elect, on the basis of a bond of love and the unity of faith. This was the church without spot or wrinkle and could be ruled without pope or cardinals.59 As we have stated, Christ alone is the head of the holy, universal church, and all the predestined of the past and of the future belong to His mystical body and each of them is a member of the same body. Therefore the pope is not the head and the cardinals are not the entire body of the holy Catholic, and universal church. For Christ alone is the head of that church and all the predestined together form the body, and each one alone is a member of that body because the bride of Christ is united with him.60 But how was one to know this Church? The priest or the pope whom one could presently identify in a visible manner might really be in a state of mortal sin or

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fall out of present righteousness. Hus was clearly aware of this problem, as is evident in his struggle to grant visibility and, therefore, knowability and authority both to Scripture and to holiness. By these means, the faithful were to distinguish true from false clergy as well as true from false doctrine. Nonetheless, Hus indicated that these signs might not be sufﬁcient by admitting that “although without a clear revelation the pilgrim is not able to determine clearly and with certainty who the holy pastor really is, nonetheless, from his works which conform to the law of Christ, we ought to assume that he is such a pastor and be subject to him.” Hus went on to explain that if the “pilgrim” saw the pastor living in a way that was contrary to the law of Christ, he should judge him to be the “vicar of the antichrist.” The verse Hus used most frequently to defend the visibility of holiness or wickedness was Matthew 7:15, “From their works you shall know them.”61 Wicked conduct conﬁrmed the decision to decide that a person was not elect. Moreover, because only the predestined were the “spiritual men” who could judge all things, they were the sole legitimate authorities in the church. This made the question of knowability crucial. The problem that haunted Hus’s ecclesiology was that the priest might be like Judas, who appeared righteous but was actually reprobate. The priest, even the pope, might be in the church but not of the church. This did not, of course, affect the ability to administer the sacrament but it did pose the question of true teaching and obedience to church laws. For Hus to follow the teaching of such a priest might be necessary but ultimately deceptive. Hus actually seemed to give more reliability to visible wickedness than to that of holiness. He knew that holiness was more able to deceive and to mask iniquity under hypocrisy, “Consequently, men can easily recognize the wicked by their external works that are contrary to Christ; but the good cannot be known so easily because hypocrisy may lurk within them.”62 John Hus brought the traditional views of the visible and invisible church into a collision course with the need for knowability and authority. The distinction between the visible church militant and the unknown church triumphant as well as the distinction between the true church and the earthly church were all long-held Augustinian categories. Still, not everyone within the earthly mixed church belonged to the communion of the saints. These distinctions and categories peacefully coexisted until a central question arose, namely, “Which church was authoritative?” To which church must the viator be obedient? In Hus’s ecclesiology the answer was complicated. According to Hus, committing a mortal sin canceled the jurisdictional power of a priest. Nonetheless, Hus did not desire to establish a different church or an alternative administration of the sacraments. However, with reference to teaching, or giving commands and prohibitions, the truly authoritative church consisted of the invisible and unknowable predestined or mystical body of Christ.

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We must establish from the words of the apostle that Christ is the head of the holy universal church, that she is his body and that everyone who is predestined is one of her members and, consequently, a part of this church which is the mystical body of Christ, ruled by a secret power ﬂowing from Christ, the head, joined together and connected by the bond of predestination [connexum predestinacionis vinculo].63 Despite his emphasis on Scripture and moral rectitude, the problem of hiddenness and unknowability remained at the heart of Hus’s ecclesiology. However, there could be no knowability of the church without visibility, a problem accentuated by Hus’s traditional beliefs about the uncertainty of salvation. At times, the true church visibly appeared, but at other times it was hidden. The laity had to judge but was left ultimately with conjecture and probability. His struggle with the ﬁgures of Judas and Paul exempliﬁed the problem of relying on external behavior to make a judgment about whether one was predestined. According to Hus’s reasoning, the believer should have obeyed Judas because by all appearances he was one of the elect. By combining the traditional belief in the uncertainty of salvation with the infallibility (and often unknowability) of Christ and the predestined, Hus bequeathed an ecclesiological legacy plagued by the uncertainty of the church and its authority. From the beginning, Luther’s opponents charged him with being a Hussite or advocate of the Hussite or “Bohemian heresy.” Tetzel, Henry VIII, Prierias, Eck, and others all made this accusation.64 This accusation focused attention on both his statements about papal authority and about the nature of the church. Initially the attention was concentrated on the issue of indulgences, but soon critics such as Prierias recognized the ecclesiological implications of Luther’s statements in the Ninety-ﬁve Theses. Thus the debate eventually became one about ecclesiology and papal power. What had Luther said that aroused the alarm of his opponents and caused him to become associated with the Hussite heresy? With regard to papal authority, Luther ﬁrst denied that the pope had the authority to extend indulgences to the souls in purgatory. It is worth remembering that Hus had also attacked indulgences, a point not lost on Eck when he called Luther’s criticism “Bohemian poison.” Eck was commenting on Luther’s Thesis 37, which read, “any true Christian, living or dead, participates in all the blessings of Christ and the church; this is granted him by God, even without indulgence letters.”65 In his Explanation of the Ninety-ﬁve Theses [Resolutiones, 1518], Luther stated his position by arguing that the pope had the power of intercession over purgatory but not the power of the keys.66 Moreover, he said, it made no difference to him whether his argument pleased or displeased the pope. The pope was a human being like everyone else and, therefore, was able to err. Luther argued that he listened to the pope when he spoke according to the canons or made a decision in accordance with a general

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council. He added that it was not for the pope alone to decide upon new articles of faith or make judgments regarding questions of the faith. Luther believed that “Otherwise since the pope is only human and can err on matters of faith and morals, the faith of the whole church would be constantly in danger if it were necessary to believe as true whatever might occur to the pope to be true.”67 In theses 57 and 58, Luther had also maintained that the treasury of the church did not constitute the merits of Christ and the saints.68 In his explanation of these theses he passed over the decree Unigenitus [1343] by Clement VI, which had interpreted the treasure of the church as the merit of Christ and the saints. When summoned before Cajetan in 1518, Luther had to confront this papal bull. In the Acta Augustana (1518) Luther said that Unigenitus had not been unknown to him but that he believed it twisted the words of Scripture. He further argued that the “universal church” agreed that the merits of Christ could not be given to sinners through human mediation, as Unigenitus implied.69 When Cajetan confronted Luther with the authority of the pope over councils and Scripture, Luther responded by citing the gloss in canon law that limited papal decrees to those that agreed with Scripture and the church fathers. He also cited Panormitanus (Nicholas of Tudesco), who argued that in matters of faith, a general council is above the pope and the believer is also above the pope if he uses better authority or reason. According to Luther, it was quite possible that “papal decretals occasionally are erroneous and militate against Holy Scripture.” Christians need not obey decretals as if they were “the voice of Saint Peter,” despite the claims made in the Decretum, dist. XIX. Only those decretals that agreed with Scripture were authoritative.70 Luther could not resist turning to the dispute between Peter and Paul in Galatians 2:14 to show that the Peter could, indeed, err. It would not seem strange, therefore, if his successors could err.71 In the Acta, Luther denounced Unam Sanctam by asserting that it was not necessary to believe that “whatever the Roman church says, damns, or wants, all people must eventually say, damn, or want and that no other reason need be given than that the apostolic See and the Roman Church hold that opinion.” According to Luther, such a belief resulted in “the traditions and words of men” replacing Scripture. He also defended the right to preserve the purity of Scripture over the traditions of the jurists. Denying the superiority of the pope over councils, he added “one council is condemned by another until nothing certain remains for us and ﬁnally one man, the pope, can crush all things under his feet.” It was a brazen error, he said, to say that the pope “cannot err and is above Scripture.”72 Finally, in an argument that would become central to Luther regarding papal authority, Luther appealed to the Eastern churches. And who dare deny that one can be a Christian who does not submit to the pope and his decretals. Thus for more than eight hundred years they have thrown out of the church of Christ, Christians in all

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the Orient and Africa who were never under the pope. . . . For until the time of St. Gregory, the Roman pope was not addressed as the universal bishop. Even Gregory himself, although bishop of Rome, attacks most vehemently the name of universal bishop and pope of the entire church in more than six letters.73 In 1519 Luther published his ﬁrst work dedicated to the speciﬁc issue of papal authority. In this work, the Resolutio Lutheriana super propositione sua decima tertia de potestate papae, Luther responded to twelve theses proposed by John Eck in the latter’s preparation for the future debate with Andreas Carlstadt at Leipzig. Therefore, the Resolutio was Luther’s ﬁrst sustained critique of the papacy. This text was a response to the proposition Eck added to his set of theses that he intended to debate at Leipzig. Originally, the debate was to be between Eck and Carlstadt.74 While waiting for ofﬁcial permission to debate Eck himself, Luther composed the Resolutio. Eck’s added thesis read: “We deny that the Roman church was not superior to the other churches before the time of Pope Sylvester. Rather, we have always acknowledged that he who has the faith and the seat of the most blessed Peter is Peter’s successor and the vicar of Christ.”75 Luther’s counter-thesis, the infamous “Proposition Thirteen,” stated, “The very callous decrees of the Roman Pontiffs which had appeared in the last four hundred years prove that the Roman Church is superior to all others. Against them stand the history of eleven hundred years, the text of divine Scripture, and the decree of the Council of Nicea, the most sacred of all Councils.”76 The debate had now turned from indulgences in particular to focus speciﬁcally on the papacy and papal authority. In particular, the issue was about the divine origin of the papacy and the proper jurisdiction of the Roman church. At Leipzig and in the Resolutio, Luther attempted to prove that the papacy was not established by divine law. He was willing to grant the papacy if it was understood to be based on human law and especially on the common consensus of the church. In his denial of the divine right of the papacy, Luther marshaled all the evidence he could ﬁnd from Scripture, decretals, conciliar decisions, and historical sources such as letters from Jerome, Cyprian, and others. Continually Luther found evidence for the statements he made in the Acta Augustana quoted above. In the Resolutio Luther took up the issue of the establishment of the papacy. He began by listing six arguments that could be used in favor of papal primacy: God’s permissive will; the precept in Matthew 5:25 ordering one to submit to one’s enemies for the sake of the unity of the church; as punishment for sins; by the fact that all power comes from God; the scriptural passages from Romans 13 and II Peter 2:13–15; and the consensus of all the faithful who are under the power of the Pope. However, in the course of his counterarguments, Luther once again concluded that these reasons could only lead to the

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conclusion that the monarchy or primacy of the pope could only be established by human right and could be justiﬁed by God’s will and the consent of the faithful. But the divine right of the papacy could not be proven by these arguments. Luther’s primary purpose was not the analysis of these arguments but the refutation of those proofs that were generally held to support papal primacy by ius divinum. To do so, he confronted scriptural passages, canons and decrees of the church, and tried to adduce “very strong reasons.” The argument for the divine right of the papacy had been based largely on Scripture, especially on Christ’s twofold promise to Peter at Caesarea Phillipi. In Matthew 16, Christ promised: (1) that he would establish his church on Peter, the “rock,” and (2) that he would give to Peter the keys to the kingdom of heaven. As the passage read, “And I tell you, you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church and the powers of death shall not prevail against it. I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven and whatever you bind or loose on earth shall be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” There was a second biblical passage that had also been interpreted as supporting papal primacy. John 21:15–17 read, “When they had ﬁnished breakfast, Jesus said to Simon Peter, ‘Simon, son of John, do you love me more than these?’ He said to him, ‘Yes lord, you know that I love you.’ He said to him, ‘Feed my sheep.’” Jesus proceeded to ask this of Peter three times, always with the same response. Luther interpreted these verses in ways that were to shape subsequent controversial writings. Calling on the authority of St. Augustine, Luther interpreted the “rock” (petram) upon which Christ built his church not as Peter but as Peter’s confession of faith. Therefore, Christ built his church on Peter’s confession that Christ was the “Son of the living God,” as stated in Matthew 16:16. If the “rock” did not refer to faith, then, Luther argued that Matthew 16:18 must be read as meaning that Christ founded his universal church on the authority or power of Rome. To this position Luther replied, “But then upon what is the Roman church founded upon? Not upon the rock, that is its power, not upon faith and, therefore, upon nothing.”77 Luther also argued that the words in Matthew 16:18–19 were not directed to Peter alone or to Peter’s successors. These words, he argued, were directed to the church and all of the apostles in the person of Peter. He went on to explain that verses 18–19 had to be understood in the context of the passage as a whole. According to Luther, Matthew 16:15–17 demonstrated that Peter spoke on behalf of all the Apostles. Christ, he said, had addressed all the disciples present and, therefore, also accepted or received Peter’s response as the answer of all the disciples, as though they were speaking together through the person of Peter. Luther concluded that Christ made his promises to the entire church in the name of Peter [non solum Petrum sed omnes apostolos . . . Christus responsum Petri acceptarit non pro solo Petro sed pro toto collegio apostolorum et discipulorum].78

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Luther attributed great importance to the verse in which Christ repsonds to Peter by saying, “Beatus es, Simon Bariona: caro et sanguis non revelavit tibi, sed pater meus, qui est in coelis.” For Luther, this verse demonstrated that it was not the Peter of ﬂesh and blood to whom the Father revealed the truth of Christ. But Peter was placed beyond all men; he was not any one person in himself but was, rather, the “hearer of the Father’s revelation.” Thus, “Simon Bar-Jonah did not anwer these things as ﬂesh and blood, but as the hearer of the Father’s revelation.”79 In Luther’s interpretation, this verse made Peter something other than a ﬂesh-and-blood person in himself. Peter becomes cui revelat pater. Luther argued that the pope could possess the keys only if he, too, were a revelantis patris auditor. Luther argued that the keys “have been given to no one unless he who hears not as ﬂesh and blood but from the Father in heaven, that is, one who is holy and just in spirit.” Luther’s main exegetical purpose here was to show that the condition of being the revelantis patris auditor could not be handed down to one’s successors. A later pope could only be the bearer of the keys if he, too, was a hearer of the revelation of the Father. This would require that the pope be “holy and just in person.” He was quick to avoid any Donatist implications of this statement by acknowledging that there were evil and impious ministers in a holy and just church; one must not seek a perfect priesthood. Signiﬁcantly, Luther also added that this verse could not possibly refer to any one individual because believers could never be certain that any one person was a hearer of the revelation. Since it is impossible to decide who is, indeed, an auditor revelationis patris, Luther concluded that “the keys have been given to no private man, but to the church alone, since we are certain of no private man that he has the revelation of the Father.”80 Most importantly, it was the church that was the possessor of the keys because it cannot be doubted that she is the body of Christ who receives the revelation of the Father. Since Christ was not speaking to the ﬂesh and blood of Peter, he was speaking to Peter as the ﬁgure of the one who was a hearer of the revelation. Peter’s words in his confession of faith, therefore, became the words or confession of the church because Peter bore the person [gessisse personam] of the church. Just as Judas was representative of the enemies of Christ, so, too, Peter represented the church or followers of Christ. Consequently, the object of Christ’s promise could only be the collective body of the universal church.81 Luther’s statements about subsequent popes being just and holy came to haunt him; to many of his opponents, they sounded like those of Hus. Luther’s argument that either one would have to believe that all the Roman pontiffs were holy and had the revelation of the Father or that they were not pontiffs and did not have the keys sounded to many of Luther’s opponents like Hus’s insistence on the moral holiness of the priest and pope. Luther had emphasized that Peter had not remained in that state which made him a “hearer of the revelation of the Father.” He pointed to the fact that in the same chapter of Matthew, Christ told Peter, Vade post me, Satana: non enim sapis ea quae dei sunt. For

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Luther, this rebuke ﬁrmly demonstrated that Peter had lost his revelation and had not persevered in that previous blessed state. Consequently, Peter could not have been the object of Christ’s promises, and Christ could not have entrusted the keys to any one individual man. In this argument, Luther meant only to conclude that the church was the only applicable object of this verse, since the church alone was that against which the gates of hell could not prevail, a point he repeated at Leipzig.82 In Matthew 16:18, Christ said of his church that “the powers of hell shall not prevail against it.” The keys were given to that against which the gates of hell could not prevail. But what existed against which the gates of hell could not prevail? Luther, again emphasizing Christ’s rebuke of Peter, insisted that this verse could not refer to Peter, since he later denied Christ three times. The “gates of hell” clearly prevailed against Peter, as was evident in Matthew 26:69. At this point, Luther grants that Christ was speaking to the individual “ﬂeshand-blood” Peter. Luther declared that it could only be the church as a whole that would be able to withstand the gates of hell, not Peter or any individual person. Therefore, he said, the church was founded on faith that was an immovable rock, and the keys were given not to Peter but to this church who was the “daughter of God.” This church, Luther explained, was not united in any particular person or place. This “daughter of God” was the universal church, extended throughout the whole world, and consisted of all who heard and persevered in the word of God.83 Having opposed the notion of a singular individual to the communion of the saints, Luther turned to John 21:15–17. Again he argued that when Christ said, “Feed my sheep,” he was speaking to all of the disciples, just as he did in Matthew 28:19, when he commissioned the Apostles to “teach all peoples.” Peter did not commission or send any of the apostles and, therefore, the “sheep” were entrusted not to Peter but to all the disciples in common. Luther observed that Paul had never been entrusted to Peter’s care. Paul was called directly by God from heaven to be the “apostle to the Gentiles.” In fact, Luther stated that Peter was “ﬁrst in order,” but that all of the apostles were sent directly and equally by Christ. Luther also noted that in Acts 8:14, the other apostles were the ones who sent Peter and John to Samaria, thereby proving that the other apostles had authority that was not exclusive to Peter. Not surprisingly Luther also relied on Galatians 2:7 in order to show that the entire ﬂock had never been given to Peter. Peter, he explained, was sent to the Jews or the circumcised, while Paul had been sent to the Gentiles, thereby showing that Christ intended that Peter should teach only the Jews. Therefore, Luther interpreted John 21:16 through the lens of Galatians 2:7 in order to demonstrate that Peter was not the ruler of the apostles and had never been given the entire “ﬂock” of Christendom.84 Finally, Luther argued that the term pascere did not mean the traditional interpretation in which it designated power or superiority. “To feed” did not

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mean preeminence over subordinates. When Christ said, “Pasce oves meas,” he meant that the pastor should love and should preach and teach the word of God. The word pascere bore no reference to governing or dominion and militated against the belief in the Roman monarchy. Luther further insisted that in this passage Christ was again speaking to the disciples as a whole and prescribed this spiritual condition on all of them equally. All priests, therefore, must love and teach their ﬂock. Any priest who did not love and teach was not truly a priest and should not be listened to or heeded because, “Nonne sequitur, quod, si non diligat, non sit audiendus?”85 Commenting on the decree Signiﬁcasti, Luther maintained that since the command “to feed” meant “to love and to teach,” then there had been no pope for the last six hundred years. According to Luther, there had been no pope since Gregory the Great since he was the last pastor in the Roman church to study sacred scriptures.86 In Luther’s view, it was the jurists who had mangled, tortured, and distorted the term “to feed.” They twisted its true deﬁnition to mean authority, government, and power. Luther spoke this way not only to shield the pope but because he would turn to the evidence from history to prove his point. Having established that the papacy could only be permitted by human law, Luther focused his critique on the decretals and the practices of the early church. He concentrated on those papal decrees from the years 500 to 1200 in order to show the growth of papal power—a power that was not present in the earliest years of the church. Five earlier decrees were collected in Gratian’s Decretum, while the latter two were from Gregory’s IX’s Liber extra. As John Headley has argued, Luther’s initial foray into history began with his search for the origin of the papacy.87 In his search through the various decrees of the tradition of the church, he challenged their many claims for papal primacy and power. Throughout his research, Luther found that one council or decree was contradicted by another until “nothing remains certain for us.” In the Acta Augustana, Luther restated his reply to Cajetan that papal decretals, including Unigenitus, should only be accepted as the “voice of Peter” if they agreed with the Scriptures and the fathers of the church. At Augsburg, Luther argued that Unigenitus could be considered as a pious exhortation but was not binding doctrine precisely because it had not established convincing grounds for what it had decreed.88 As Wicks notes, Luther perceived his thinking in the Theses and the Resolutiones as an area still open to free inquiry because these issues were not settled doctrinal decisions.89 The Roman church, he argued, had insisted on the ultimate authority of its own statements to such an extent that the “words of God” had been replaced by the “words of man.” The result of this calamity was that the laity had been deprived of the teaching and preaching of the Gospel, “as if Holy Scripture no longer existed.” Nonetheless, Luther looked to the church fathers and the practices of the early church to examine and support his position. In this historical quest, he also confronted those decrees used to support papal primacy. Still, he used

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Galatians 2:11 as a governing principle. Relying on Tudeschi, Luther approached the papal decrees by arguing that the pope might be wrong and individuals might be right. The argument between Peter and Paul in Galatians provided Luther with a fundamental anti-papal stance by which to confront the tradition of the church. While Luther appealed to and argued against many authorities, there were four main decrees that he was intent on refuting: Ita dominus (dist.19. c. 8, Leo I); De libellis (dist. 20. c. 1, Leo IV); Quamvis universae (dist. 21. c. 3, Gelasius); Cleros et clericos (dist 21. c. 1, Psuedo-Isidore). These decrees derive from Gratian’s Decretum and date from the late ﬁfth to the eleventh centuries. In his interpretations of Matthew 18:18–19 and John 21:16, Luther also contested two decrees from the Liber extra: Signiﬁcasti (Paschal II) and Solitae (Innocent III) in order to show that Christ only promised the keys to Peter in the latter passage but handed them to all the disciples in John 20:23. In these discussions Luther called on Panormitanus in order to oppose other authorities, thereby showing that one jurist was opposed by another and that the reasoning of an individual Christian could be more correct than that of a Pope.90 Our purpose is not to analyze all of Luther’s arguments regarding the decrees of the church. It is sufﬁcient to understand that throughout his discussion of these and other decrees, Luther challenged the authority of both the pope and tradition. In response to Ita dominus, Luther returns to the interpretation of the “rock” in Matthew 16:18. If Leo’s refernce to the in soliditate Petri as the rock meant Peter’s faith, then he spoke correctly. However, if the rock is understood as the jurisdiction and power of Peter as Roman pontiff, then Leo had misinterpreted Scripture and abused the Gospel. Once again, Luther referred to the East. To equate the rock with Peter would be to deny that those who lived before the establishment of the Roman church were members of the church. This, Luther reminded the reader, excludes the Apostles as well as the Eastern church, which was beyond Rome’s jurisdiction. Turning to Quamvis universae, Luther attacked the idea that the phrase “you are Peter” means that “you are ﬁrst” and that “to the Roman church alone I give the keys.” Did this imply that the primitive church was never the church and that the martyrs of the Eastern church were condemned?91 If the doctrine of papal primacy was founded on Peter by divine right, then the entire early church, “at least up to the last four hundred years, with all its martyrs and saints were heretics.”92 For Luther these decrees demonstrated the continual illegitimate growth of papal power throughout the past four hundred years. In this text, Luther found the claim that the Roman church itself establishes the ecclesiastical hierarchy because only the Roman church was built on the rock. This decree interpreted Christ’s words about “my church” to mean the “Roman church.”93 Luther then made what became a contentious historical claim: namely, that because the church in Jerusalem was founded before the Roman church, it was impossible that the latter could have established the former. Moreoever, the church at

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Jerusalem, rather than Rome, should be called the mother church because, as Galatians 2:1 shows, St. Peter was in Jerusalem up to fourteen years before St. Paul’s conversion. (This was an argument also made by Hus.) And, ﬁnally, there was no church at Rome when Paul was said to have been persecuting churches. Were not these churches founded before the church at Rome? Therefore, the primacy of Rome did not derive directly from Christ. Luther again asserted that Christ’s promises in Matthew 16:18 established equally among all the churches. Christ’s reference to the church as “my church” refuted all other decrees that tried to prove the primacy of Peter and Rome. As I Corinthians 3:21 states, all things, including the power of the keys, were to be shared. The reference to “my church” denoted unity rather than hierarchy. Luther repeatedly challenged the idea of the universal supremacy of Rome. He referred again and again to the Eastern church, which had produced many saints, martyrs, and some of the greatest writers, a point he repeated at Leipzig.94 In opposition to Cleros, Luther cited Primae sedis, which originated from an African council. After showing that these decrees contradicted one another, he argued that Primae sedis denied that the pope should be called princeps sacerdotum, or “universal.” This latter point was borne out both by a letter from “Pelagius” to all the bishops and a letter from Gregory the Great to Eulogius in which both popes had rejected the title “universal” because it diminished the honor of their brothers and was contrary to the virtue of charity. So, too, in the decree Solitae, Innocent III wrongly declared that the pope was superior to the emporer. The decree wrongly cited 1 Peter 2:13 because in this verse Paul only told Christians to be obedient to human authorities. To misinterpret this verse as meaning subjection to the ecclesiastical hierarchy was proof again of how the clergy had failed to fulﬁll the duties stated in John 21 to “feed my sheep.”95 Luther brought this anti-papal argument about the universal rule of the Roman church to Leipzig, where he frequently called attention to the Greeks. At the time of Gregory I, he said, the church did not exercise jurisdiction over the other churches, especially the church of the Greeks. This was clear from the fact that Rome had been unable to impose its canonical punishments on the Greeks since they were not under the jurisdiction of Rome at the time.96 Luther adduced evidence from Constantine IV and Platina’s Lives of the Saints to prove that Roman superiority was based on the decrees of the last four hundred years. Constantine IV, he said, had granted Rome the primacy of honor only in the latter seventh century. Moreover, Galatians 1:18 proved that the Roman church had not been established at this time. Eighteen years after the ascension of Christ, Peter was in Jerusalem, not Rome.97 Luther returned frequently to the belief that those not subject to Rome were heretical, “If the Roman Pontiff is the general Vicar of Christ in the whole church by divine command, it inevitably follows that those sin, indeed are heretics, who are not subject to him.” Repeatedly, Luther argued, both in the Resolutio and at Leipzig, that the Greeks could not be considered heretical. He insisted that Basil the Great, Gregory of

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Nazianzus, Epiphanius, and “innumerable other Greek bishops” were not subject to the pope but were not heretics.98 At Leipzig he asked if the claims to papal primacy meant that the “gates of hell” prevailed over the Greek martyrs. In all these arguments concerning the Greeks or the Eastern church, Luther was demonstrating that Christendom was greater and larger than the Roman church. In fact, Luther spoke of the Eastern church so often that an exasperated Eck ﬁnally cried, “Enough said about the Greek saints!”99 Luther’s repeated statements about the Greeks were proof that history itself demonstrated the human origin of the papal primacy. If the primacy had been instituted by God, then it would have been eternal and immutable. But the mutability within the history of the church showed the many “human” decrees and the “traditions of men” that formed the papacy. Luther admitted that in the early church Peter had been the “ﬁrst in order,” the “ﬁrst member of the church,” and had the “primacy of honor.” But the growth of power attributed to the pope in the decrees of the last four hundred years was a prime example of the way that the church had exchanged the words of God for the words of man. In De libellis, Pope Leo IV stated that the canons from the church councils and the statutes of the fathers were to be recognized as having the same authority as Scripture. Luther asserted that this decree confused the “traditions with the Gospel and the word of God with the word of man.” To accept such decrees as De libellis and Solitae was to believe incorrectly that popes could not err and that the popes alone determined the true interpretation of Scripture. Rather, Luther argued, decrees should be regarded as having the same kind of authority as the letters of Jerome, Augustine, Gregory and Bernard. They should be consulted “according to each man’s judgment.” To do otherwise was to suppress the Gospel and permit the tyranny of Rome. Such decrees had exalted papal power and, thereby, “the gospel is extinguished and the word of God is taken away by the word of man.”100 The use of history is most evident in the debate about Nicea. It was Canon VI of Nicea that became the true touchstone for the debate about the antiquity of papal supremacy.101 This canon most forcefully concentrated the debate on the historical realities of ancient Rome, Jerusalem, Antioch, and other churches. Canon VI read, “The ancient customs of Egypt, Libya, and Pentapolis shall prevail, according to which the Bishop of Alexandria has authority over all these places since a similar custom exists for the bishop of Rome. Likewise in Antioch and the other provinces, the churches shall retain their privileges.” Canon VI went on to state that no one was to be made a Bishop without the consent of the Metropolitan. Luther cited Canon VI both in the Resolutio and at the Leipzig debate. In his view, Canon VI of Nicea proved deﬁnitively that entire parts of the East had never been subject to Rome. Moreover, Rome’s authority was referred to as “custom” and not as divine law. Furthermore, this canon demonstrated that bishops had not always received ordination from the Roman bishop but, rather, from provincial bishops. Nicea also proved that the primacy of

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honor was given to Jerusalem, the “mother of all churches,” and not to Rome. Indeed, Luther reasoned, Jerusalem had been the head of Christendom before Rome was even founded. This authority of Jerusalem would have been heretical if Rome ruled by divine law.102 Luther used these historical sources in order to prove that in the ancient church equality had existed between all the churches. He turned to both Jerome and Cyprian to show this ancient practice. Jerome’s letter to Evagrius proved that all bishops had been equal as they were all the successors to the apostles. Cyprian also described the equality of all bishops among themselves, their election by popular vote, and the discretion of neighboring bishops. All of this historical evidence demonstrated that the Roman church “never was, is not, and never will be above the other churches of the world, although it may be above most of them. Indeed it was never above the churches of Greeks, Africans, and Asians, nor did it conﬁrm their bishops in the way it conﬁrms ours, as history satisfactorily proves.”103 Luther repeatedly hammered home the evidence from history that he believed proved that papal primacy and jurisdiction were not established by divine law. The keys, he insisted, had been given equally to all the apostles. When Christ addressed Peter, he was talking to all the apostles equally. The decrees from Nicea, he claimed, demonstrated that the growth of papal privilege had been the result of various decrees over time and, therefore, subject to the mutability of history. They did not reﬂect the eternal and immutable divine law. In these arguments, Luther depicted the decline of the church, as papal theory developed into a tyranny of laws, observances, and other “snares” that tortured the consciences of believers. As these decrees grew in number, they made greater and greater claims for the elevation and reach of papal power. Boniface VIII, Clement I, and Gregory IX stood as benchmarks of this decline. For Luther, Gregory IX was singled out as particularly detrimental to the church because he was believed to be responsible for collecting the papal decretals into the Liber extra and establishing their authoritative stature.104 Thus, throughout the tradition, “human law and customs had obscured the gospel and displaced the word of God.” Luther’s many opponents were quick to equate Luther’s dismissal of scholastic theology with John Hus. Tetzel warned that Luther’s criticism of the scholastic doctors would “encourage many people to despise the might and authority of his Papal Holiness and of the Holy Roman See. They will neglect the work of sacramental satisfaction. They will never now believe the preachers and doctors. Everyone will interpret Scripture as takes his fancy.” He reminded his readers that the last person to reject the scholastic doctors was John Hus and he was burned at the stake.105 It was Prierias who ﬁrst articulated the ecclesiological arguments against Luther, identifying him with Hus or the “Bohemians.”106 In his Dialogus de potestate papae (1518), Prierias stressed that the universal church consisted of all who believed in and worshipped Christ. The head of

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this church was Peter, and Rome was the head of all churches. This universal or catholic church could not err in matters of faith and morals. Although a council could sometimes err, it would eventually be brought to the truth by the Holy Spirit. Therefore, when the pope spoke “ex ofﬁcio,” and was “doing what was in him so that he would understand the truth,” he and the Roman church could not err. Anyone who did not believe the pope to be the head of the church by divine right or did not hold to the teaching of the Roman pope was, indeed, a heretic.107 Cochlaeus challenged Luther’s patriotism by identifying him with Hus, as opposed to the glory of Germany and its empire.108 In To the Christian Nobility, Luther had questioned the legality of Hus’s execution at the Council of Constance. In fact, Luther’s criticisms of Constance and his appeal to a council convoked by the laity infuriated Eck so much that he authored a small text entitled Des heiligen concilii tzu Costentz, der heylgen Christenheit und hochlöblichen keyssers Sigmunds und auch des teutzschen adels entschüldigung. . . .109 The debate over papal primacy engaged a number of Luther’s opponents, perhaps none more than the indefatigable John Eck. For Eck, Luther was a “true Bohemian.” There were several issues that led Eck to see Luther as a Hussite on matters of ecclesiology. Luther had defended Hus at Leipzig, especially his ﬁrst article condemned at Constance. Eck was quick to perceive the problems with Luther’s ecclesiastical statements and identiﬁed Luther’s view of the church as Hussite. After all, Luther had agreed with Hus that “Unica est sancta universalis ecclesia, quae est praedestinatorum universitas,” a belief that he claimed was also the view of Augustine.110 Luther had also argued that the papacy was not of divine origin. However, while Hus had attributed the establishment of the papcy to secular power, Luther found its origin in the decrees. In these arguments, Eck saw Luther as denying Unam Sanctam by saying it was not necessay to believe that the Roman church was superior to all other churches and that the pope was not the head of the church. Consequently, Eck saw that Luther was saying that there was no necessity to obey the Roman canons since the Eastern church had different rules.111 The insistence that only Christ was the real head of the “true church,” criticism of bulls, decrees, and the scholastics, and the denial of the divine right of the papcy were more than enough for Eck to see in Luther the same threat to authority as that posed by Hus. Eck’s most extensive treatise regarding papal authority was De Primatu Petri adversus Lutherum libri tres, published in 1521.112 De Primatu was largely a response to Luther’s defense of Proposition Thirteen. He stated that he was moved to compose the book because of Luther’s denial that papal primacy was by divine law and that the Roman church had not been superior to other churches before the time of Slyvester. In this lengthy and often repetitive work, Eck explained that he sought to answer three questions: (1) whether the pope was, is, and always will be superior to others by divine law; (2) whether the Greek, African, and Oriental churches have always been subject to the Roman church; and (3) whether this primacy is consistent with sacred Scripture.113

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Eck’s method was ﬁrst to establish the primacy of Peter on the basis of Scripture. He then demonstrated that the tradition of the church recognized papal primacy and traced the continuity of the successors to the Apostolic see. While Luther preferred “singularity” by relying on his own judgments, Eck would base his case on Scripture as well as the fathers, the decrees of the councils, canon law, and the popes. Eck thereby immediately identiﬁed himself as standing in the tradition of the church. In short, Eck argued from a twofold basis: exegesis and history.114 With regard to Scriptural proof, Eck knew he had to debate the meaning of the same biblical passages as did Luther in order that others would not regard Luther’s teaching as that of the Catholic church. He acknowledged from the start that this would be a battle over scriptural interpretation and warned that like all heretics, Luther would hide behind the beauty of religion by using the authority of Scripture.115 He maintained that Luther used “new grammar” and forced interpretations to argue his position. Eck interrupted his own argument several times to comment on this exegetical controversy. He noted that while Scripture may seem to have many meanings, the interpreter should never read the Bible according to his own powers.116 Moreover, the interpreter should not contradict the holy fathers. The best way to ﬁnd the truth was to follow the plain meaning of the text with the guidance of the interpretations of the fathers.117 The proof from Scripture is found primarily in Book I of De primatu, where Eck quoted numerous biblical verses to support papal primacy; in fact, he began by citing twelve passages from the Gospels that he believed supported his case. Among the many biblical citations, the most important were the Matthew 16:18–19, John 20:21–23, and John 21:17. Not surprisingly, Eck contended that the “rock” referred to Peter. In Matthew 16:18–19, Peter was established as the foundation of the whole church by Christ and, therefore, by divine law. Christ clearly made Peter the “prince of the apostles,” as Jerome testiﬁes. Eck acknowledged that the “rock” could refer also to Christ and perhaps even to the solidity or ﬁrmness of faith. Nonetheless, in its principal or primary meaning, the rock signiﬁed Peter. Therefore, Eck concluded, Christ said he would build his church on Peter.118 However, Eck had to confront Luther’s use of John 20:21–23, where Christ gave the Spirit and the keys to all the disciples in common. Throughout Book I, Eck tried to ﬁnd a way to balance biblical and historical evidence for the single supremacy of Peter with the evidence that the apostles held all things in common. He had to determine whether Matthew 16 or John 20 took precedence. In his struggle with the passage from John 20, Eck also had to tackle Luther’s use of Cyprian and Jerome as evidence that in the early church all bishops had held power equally. After stating that the rock signiﬁed the primacy of Peter, Eck turned to the “ancient and holy fathers” whose testimony and exposition of the truth of

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Scripture was inspired by the Holy Spirit.119 According to Eck, Cyprian had explained John 20 in terms of Peter’s primacy. Although Christ spoke to all the apostles, the unity of the church arose from Peter as its source and foundation. Christ established Peter as the source of this unity in order to show that the church was one and that within the church there was unity. Eck also argued that Jerome acknowledged that in some places the church was said to be founded on Peter, while in other places it seemed to be founded on the apostles. Jerome had noted that in John 20 the apostles received the keys of heaven and that the solidity of the church was established upon them. However, according to Eck, Jerome recognized that Peter was made “head” of the apostles in order to establish unity and to eliminate any occasion for schisms.120 Eck ﬁnally turned to the Glossa ordinaria to demonstrate that Christ established Peter as the prince of the apostles so that the church could have one principal vicar of Christ to whom different members could return if they strongly disagreed among themselves. In order to encourage this unity, Christ granted supremacy to Peter alone. As Bernard said, “Where there is unity, there is perfection.”121 Eck sought further to harmonize the passage from Matthew 16 with that of John 20. He insisted that John 20 did not contradict Peter’s primacy. The primacy that was given to Peter was not, he said, given to all the apostles in John 20. The text that solved the problem was John 21:17. In Eck’s interpretation, Christ promised the primacy to Peter in Matthew 16:18–19 but actually gave him the primacy in John 21:17 when he told Peter to “feed my sheep.” Although John 21 stated that six other disciples were present, Christ entrusted the care of his sheep to Peter. While Luther had preferred John 20 as the interpretive key, Eck made John 21:17 the ﬁnal arbitrator. Furthermore, Eck maintained against Luther that the verb pascere meant more than teaching and preaching. “To feed” also meant to rule. Both Jeremiah and Ezekiel had described the saving shepherds as opening the gate, leading the sheep out, and going before them. This was the role of Peter as he “fed” the sheep.122 In the course of his treatise, Eck disputed other biblical interpretations of Luther. Referring to Luther’s insistence that Peter was not the head of the Apostles because he was sent by others to Samaria, Eck accused him of Arianism. Eck argued that Peter was not equal or inferior to the other apostles merely because others had “sent” him to another area. If Luther thought the term sent denoted inferiority, then he must believe that the Son was inferior to the Father because the Father sent him.123 Eck also argued for Peter’s primacy on the basis of the keys. For Eck, John 21:17 demonstrated that the power of the keys was given principaliter to Peter alone. Moreover, Peter received the keys in accordance with his plentitude of power, not for his private use but for the sake of the “whole church and all the faithful.” Furthermore, while all the churches had sacramental power in common, they did not share jurisdictional power. The keys were given to the Roman church, from which all other churches received them. In fact, all the power of the other churches was received from Rome. Eck

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argued that Luther misunderstood the Catholic view when he equated the “rock” of Matthew 16:18 with Rome. He explained that the church that was built upon the rock was the one universal church. All particular churches were also founded on the rock, insofar as they were united to the Roman church. Rome received this primacy of power from a certain connection and arrangement, whereby Christ united Peter with the Roman church. The universal church, Eck explained, was compressed or contracted into the one Roman church.124 Eck also refused Luther’s distinction between the primacy of power and the primacy of honor. Luther had argued that the church was not to be identiﬁed with the prelature. Eck responded that, in agreement with the fathers, Peter was equal to the apostles in honor and power but not in regimine praelationes, and thus they were subject to obedience to Peter. This primacy is clear from the fact that Christ made Peter the head of the one universal church in the various Petrine passages. The unity of the church, therefore, stemmed from one source and one person, namely, Peter. Agreeing with Leo I in Ita dominus, Eck argued that the other apostles were in soliditate Petri, that is, they were under his power and in obedience to him. Disputing Luther’s use of the Johannine passages, he insisted that when Christ spoke to the apostles, as he did in John 20, he did so “in the person of Peter.” When Christ said, “I have prayed for you, so that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32), he spoke only to Peter, again proving Peter’s primacy. And, ﬁnally, Christ told Peter to “strengthen” or “conﬁrm” your brethren. According to Eck, this demonstrated Peter’s superiority because only the higher can conﬁrm the lower.125 Throughout this work, Eck cited numerous authorities in order to support his biblical interpretations. We have already noted his explanation of the words of Cyprian and Jerome. Of particular importance were the statements by Leo and Augustine. Eck reasoned that according to Leo, power was given principally to Peter and ﬂowed from Peter to the other apostles.126 Eck had to confront Luther’s insistence that the Pope had only ruled over the Western church and never had universal authority. On the basis of Leo’s ﬁrst and fourth canons, Eck maintained that Peter was not only the head of the Western church but of the whole universal church.127 Eck repeatedly relied on Leo to dispute Luther’s contention that Rome had not always been supreme. The seat of Peter was translated to Rome by the Lord’s law or command and, therefore, by divine right. Eck explained that Augustine’s comments on Psalm 108 taught that certain words were spoken that pertained particularly to Peter but, nonetheless, in their clearest meaning referred to the church. However, Augustine had also said that Peter “wore the face of the church” because of his primacy. From Augustine, Eck concluded that typologically, Peter was a “type” of the one uniﬁed church. When Peter answered Christ, he did so unus pro multis because in Peter we have unitas in multis. Therefore, Peter accepted the keys because he “stood for the person of the church.”128 Moreover, as Augustine said, power was given not to the person of Peter alone but to his

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ofﬁce in perpetuity. Trying to wrest Augustine from Luther, Eck argues that Luther has it “backward,” so to speak; it was because Peter had the primacy that he bore the person of the church. Above all, he wanted to exclude any reading that led to the conclusion that the keys could belong to any private (lay) person. In Books II and III, Eck directly refuted Luther’s thesis that only the most unconvincing decrees of the past four hundred years supported papal primacy. To accomplish this task, he quoted a massive number of authorities from the early church, including Leo, Gelasius, Gregory, Hilary, Justinian, and others. Eck was always eager to point out that Luther had no decision-making body by which to judge scriptural interpretation and doctrinal truth. If Luther admitted that only those councils were authoritative that agreed with Scripture, how was one to decide on this agreement? While Luther and the other reformers were eager to halt the conﬂation of human and divine words, the question of the authority of councils was left hanging. Thus Eck warned that if one removes “the authority of councils, then everything in the Church will be ambiguous, doubtful, hanging ﬁre, and uncertain.”129 Consequently, throughout his writings, Eck was happy to cite the decisions of the Councils as authoritative statements. The Councils were of primary importance, particularly that of Nicea. According to Eck, Canon VI of Nicea did not at all disprove the primacy of Peter. Canon VI, he wrote, recognized three patriarchal sees: Rome, Alexandria, and Antioch. Citing the testimony of Gregory, Eck argued that these three seats were of “one cathedra,” through which the whole church was gathered together. If, as patriarch, the bishop of Rome did not have power over the provinces, nevertheless, the bishops of all the churches were subject to him and appealed to him as to someone greater and superior. The same canon showed that only the Roman pontiff had primates under his authority and that the Eastern churches were under his authority long before Gregory’s pontiﬁcate. Furthermore, this authority was by divine right and not mere “custom,” as Luther had claimed.130 Eck also cited numerous councils to prove that the Eastern churches were subordinate to Rome before the time of Gregory. According to Canon IV of the Nicene Council, many Eastern churches appealed to Rome regarding the deposition of bishops. In order to refute Luther’s argument that the papacy was based on the decrees of the last four hundred years, Eck cited Athanasius, Julius, Leo, Innocent, Anastasius, Pelagius, Gregory, and others to prove that the Greeks were subject to Rome. According to Eck, Chalcedon recognized the Roman bishop as the “universal pastor.” Moreover, he noted that Chalcedon was attended mainly by members of the Eastern churches.131 The councils had their authority from the pope, and therefore the Eastern churches were subject to the pope in their councils. Eck also explained that Phokas healed the schism between the pope and Constantinople. While Luther denied that the pope conﬁrmed Greek bishops, Eck demonstrated that bishops everywhere were

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instituted by papal authority.132 In Eck’s arguments, history and the ancient observances of the church demonstrated that Eastern churches were under Rome’s authority. He acknowledged that the Greeks were often schismatic. In answer to Luther’s question as to whether the “gates of hell” had prevailed over the Eastern churches, Eck argued that when the Eastern churches were subject to the pope they were Catholic; when they were not subject to Rome they were heretics and schismatics.133 According to Eck, Athanasius and Julius served as proof that anyone who opposed the Roman pontiff was a schismatic. To hold the right faith included recognizing the pope as the greatest and the ﬁrst of all the bishops.134 Councils proving the ancient supremacy of Rome, therefore, included Nicea, Chalcedon, Constantinople, Ephesus, the Sardician council, and the councils of Rome, Lyon, and Constance. According to Eck, the Council of Lyon called the pope the vicar of Christ. The Council of Florence recognized the Pope as Peter’s successor and the vicar of Christ. The Council of Constance called for special attention. Eck placed great authority on Constance and condemned Luther for criticizing its decisions with regard to Wycliffe and Hus. He reminded Luther that Hus had been examined by judicious judges of all nations and not by inquisitors or “ﬂatterers” of the pope.135 Eck also confronted the troubling legacy of Constance in several writings regarding the relative authority of pope and council. The problem was the question of the authority of the Pope over a council. Eck charged Luther with inconsistency in appealing for a council and yet disavowing the decisions of another council, namely, Constance. In De primatu Petri he began by stating that the Council of Constance was convened in order to revoke the schism, to condemn the schismatics of the two obediences, and to make certain that which had been in doubt.136 However, Constance had decreed in Session V (April 6, 1415) that this council was assembled in the Holy Spirit, “constituting a general council and representing the Catholic Church.” The decree went on to say that, “everyone of every state or dignity, even papal, was bound to obey it in those matters which pertain to the faith, the eradication of the said schism, and the general reform of the said church of God in head and members.” Moreover, anyone, even the pope, who refused “to obey the past or future mandates, statutes, ordinances, or precepts of this sacred council or any other legitimately assembled general council, regarding the aforesaid things or matters pertaining to them, shall be subjected to well-deserved penance.” The problem posed to the papalist writers was that in the ﬁnal session of the council, Martin V said that he wished “to hold and inviolably observe and never contravene in any way, each and everything that had been determined, concluded, and decreed in a conciliar way, in matters of faith by this present sacred general Council of Constance.” Did these words of Martin V conﬁrm the superiority of a council over a pope, as stated in Session V? It should be noted, however, that just two years before Luther

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published his Resolutio, Lateran V had decreed Pastor aeternus, which stated that only the pope who was reigning at the present time had “authority over all councils. . . .”137 Eck ﬁrst explained that Martin V had promulgated his bull (Inter cunctas) against the heresies of Wycliffe, Hus, and Jerome of Prague. These heresies, he said, had been condemned before the union of the three obediences had taken place. Eck then argued that some things in the “matters of the faith” could be discussed in two ways: that is, either concerning the form or the matter of the faith. If the discussion concerns the form of the faith, it is said as something to be believed or condemned by the faithful. But if a subject was treated only materially, inasmuch as it pertained to the faith, then it was not treated as something to be believed or condemned. Eck made clear that unless a statement was understood formally, certitude would perish. Therefore, the words of Martin V in the last session were to be understood formally; he spoke formally in the Council when treating and defending matters of the faith regarding the three heresiarchs. Many other things were discussed at Constance but not as matters of the faith, among which were the discussions in Sessions IV and V. In these sessions there were no representatives to examine issues of the faith and no mention of believing or not believing. Eck concluded that Martin V approved the decrees of Constance only in those things concerning matters of the faith. However, he did not approve other statements and discussions of the Council. Consequently, because Martin V ratiﬁed and approved the condemnations of Wycliffe and Hus, no one could defend their teachings.138 Eck did not only debate Luther’s biblical interpretations and his historical arguments, he also presented a carefully crafted view of the church. In the midst of his many refutations of Luther’s arguments, he depicted a monolithic and harmonious church that had been uniﬁed in its beliefs, decisions, and observances throughout the centuries. Eck knew that abuses existed in the church and acknowledged that changes had occurred. But when it concerned true doctrine or teaching, the church had always been uniﬁed and universal. To demonstrate his understanding of the church, he emphasized the unity, universality, stability, and, above all else, the continuity of the church and its teaching. In Book II he traced the early and continuous belief in universal primacy held by the councils, the church fathers, and all the Roman pontiffs. He recorded the ordered and unbroken succession of popes, drawn mainly from Augustine and Optatus.139 Eck argued the antiquity of the primacy by looking back to the Aaronite priesthood. Moreover, he stated, God predicted monarchy as the form of his church throughout the Old Testament prophets.140 In all of these historical arguments, Eck was determined to demonstrate that papal primacy was not founded on the decrees of the past four hundred years. Even the titles of the pope stemmed from the early church—that is, titles such as “most blessed,” “most holy,” and “universal pastor.” The primacy of Peter had been recognized

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by the early church and throughout the church’s history. He reminded his readers that Lateran V had called the Roman church the magistram ﬁdei, to show the universal monarchy of the church.141 In so doing, however, Lateran V was not inventing something new. The antiquity of the primacy proved that Rome’s authority was based on divine law. This ancient primacy of Peter was important to Eck because of his concern for the unity and stability of the church. Following the traditional argument from the Pseudo-Dionysius, Eck explained that the primacy of the pope revealed the divinely willed conformity of the church militant to the church triumphant, a conformity that formed a “very elegant pyramid.” Eck carefully delineated the different ranks within the earthly church. The ultimate head of this elegant pyramid was Christ. However, Christ has a ministerial head on earth in the monarchy of the pope. All bishops were equal in order, just as all the apostles were equal in the Apostolate. But the bishops were different in regime and power. The bishops, Eck reasoned, were the successor of the Apostles in the Episcopal order but not in the Apostolate. This means that bishops are successors to the apostles in regimine but tied to certain places and churches.142 This difference preserved the ordered unity of the church. Christ did not establish twelve independent churches or heads but one head of the one universal church. All leaders of the church, therefore, stood in a hierarchy; the priest was subordinate to the bishop, the bishop was subordinate to the pope, and the pope was subordinate to Christ.143 Answering Luther’s charge that the claims made by the papacy made the church a two-headed monster, Eck replied that the one head of the earthly church preserved unity by deﬁning the faith and correct practices. Without this order and unity, the church would be divided and subject to innumerable schisms. Therefore, this order protected the church from doubts about the faith144 While Eck did not want to make grand claims for the pope with regard to temporal affairs, he did insist on the plentitude of power and the infallibility that belonged to the pope with regard to spiritual matters. Eck made two arguments about the papacy that would become central in the subsequent writings against Luther and the other reformers. It was of critical importance to Eck that the church be united universally under one pope who could not err in matters of the faith. He interpreted the “gates of hell” as heresies; Eck argued that since the pope had never deﬁnitively erred in matters of the faith, the “gates of hell” had never prevailed against the church. The fact that the church had never failed in the faith proved that Peter’s supremacy was decreed by divine law. The church, Eck contended, could not fall away from Peter’s faith.145 Relying on Ambrose and Augustine, Eck maintained that whoever did not agree with the Roman church did not belong to Christ’s universal church. Consequently, those who did not obey the Roman pontiff and agree with the Roman church were not true Christians.146

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Eck made a signiﬁcant statement in his defense of the canons of Analectus. By accusing the holy men who were popes of various vices, Eck said, Luther implied that the Holy Spirit had not guided the church throughout history. If Luther was correct and papal decrees and councils were wrong, then the Spirit had allowed the church to be taught false doctrine. When Christ said in Luke 22:32, “I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail,” he was promising that divine providence would always guide the church.147 In his argument, Eck made an important link between infallibility and providence. By arguing that the church had believed false doctrine, Luther was denying that providential guidance of the church; he was saying that God had abandoned his church. Eck was insisting that God would never desert his church throughout her history. The issues of authority, the deﬁnition of the faith, and the themes of providence and infallibility permeate the entire treatise. Near the end of De primatu, Eck again addressed these issues by warning the reader that certain evils would occur if the councils of the church did not have the authority to condemn errors and if the church could not anathematize and condemn heresiarchs. He vehemently rejected Luther’s view that councils were merely made of men who, like all human beings, could fall into error. He responded by observing that all heretics said that which seemed true to them. All heretics chose particular passages in sacred Scripture that supported their teachings. But this conviction of having the truth was not sufﬁcient. The Holy Spirit inspired the understanding of Scripture only through a council or a pope. If this was not recognized as true and authoritative, then the Christian faith would fall into obscurity and the faithful would be in doubt. Furthermore, there would be no remedy for such doubt. However, Eck assured the reader that God would not abandon his spouse, since he promised to be with the church until the end of the age. In this passage, Eck articulated an argument that would prove critical to the Catholic understanding of certitude. Being convinced of one’s beliefs and interpretation of the Bible did not guarantee the truth. Truth could only be found within the sphere where the Holy Spirit provided inspiration. According to Scripture, that sphere was the church. The reference to Matthew 28:20 was the argument from providence. The Holy Spirit would lead the church into the truth until the end of the age. Eck, therefore, identiﬁed the evil that would befall the church without the authority of councils and the pope as the “terrible misery” of uncertainty and doubt.148 De primatu Petri was only one of many answers to Luther. In 1520 Luther published his Babylonian Captivity of the Church, in which he criticized ﬁve of the seven sacraments of the church and challenged the traditional interpretation of the Eucharist. It is hard to overestimate the importance of this treatise and the impact it had on Luther’s readers. Luther’s opponents immediately jumped into action. Thomas Murner translated Luther’s treatise into German in order to warn the common people about the dangers of Luther’s teaching. Cuthbert Tunstal alerted Cardinal Wolsey to the danger of the book in order

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that it would be banned. By 1520 several of Luther’s works had been circulating throughout England. In 1521 Wolsey prohibited all of Luther’s writings in England. On May 12 of the same year, John Fisher, the bishop of Rochester, delivered the sermon at the formal ceremony where, at White Horse Inn, Luther’s books were burned. At this point, England was publicly proclaiming her orthodoxy. The pope repeatedly asked Henry to suppress Luther’s works and to burn both the books and their author.149 Meanwhile, Henry was composing his treatise entitled Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum, for which he received the title “Defender of the Faith.”150 In this book Henry attacked Luther’s Babylonian Captivity and warned his readers that Luther was a “wolf in sheep’s clothing” and accused him of many errors, including the “Bohemian” heresy.151 Henry also charged Luther with disturbing the order and tranquillity of the church, inciting the common people against authority, contradicting himself, and imposing his own interpretations on the sacraments and on Scripture.152 In his defense of each sacrament, Henry argued from the weight of the tradition; authority, he said, should be accorded to the antiquity of the sacraments, rites, and customs of the church. The authority of the ancient fathers was to be respected. All of Christendom, he insisted, recognized the vast power and supremacy of Rome. “All the faithful,” Henry wrote, “honor and acknowledge the sacred Roman see as their mother and superior.” If Luther would look at the ancient monuments and read the ancient histories, he could easily ﬁnd that ever since the conversion of the world, all churches in the Christian world have been obedient to the See of Rome. Despite the fact that the empire was translated to Greece, nonetheless, the Greeks obeyed the supremacy of the church and See of Rome, except during those times when they were in schism.153 With regard to the Eucharist, Henry defended the doctrine of transubstantiation (which Luther had criticized in the Babylonian Captivity) on the basis of such Scriptural passages as Matthew 26, Mark 14, and Luke 22.154 He also cited Ambrose, Eusebius, Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, and many other ancient fathers. According to Henry, all the fathers taught that the bread and wine did not remain in the Eucharist because they were changed into the body and blood of Christ. As Henry stated, “For it is certain that for more than a thousand years the faithful have taught that the bread and the wine did not remain in the Eucharist because they were changed into the body and blood of Christ.” According to Henry, the fathers “confessed that the whole substance of the bread and the wine was truly changed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ.”155 They also taught that the Mass was both a good work and a sacriﬁce in which Christ himself was offered for the sins of his people.156 Henry, like Eck, was intent on proving the antiquity of the church’s teachings. Defending the primacy of the pope, Henry argued that if such primacy dated from a time surpassing human memory, then one must believe that it

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had a lawful beginning. He was intent to dismiss Luther’s claim that the doctrine of transubstantiation had originated only three hundred years ago. He took great pains to prove the truth of transubstantiation by relying on Scripture, the fathers, and the “public faith” of the church throughout the ages. He also argued that in the past only the word but not the meaning of transubstantiation was lacking. He then maintained that after the church had decreed the doctrine of transubstantiation to be true, everyone was bound to believe it. In Henry’s view, “But after the church decreed [transubstantiation] to be true (even if this was now the ﬁrst time it was decreed to be so), nevertheless, the ancients did not believe the contrary, even though no one had ever explained transubstantiation previously.” Henry challenged Luther’s use of John 3:8, that the Spirit “‘ubi vult spirat,’ ita spirat et quando vult.”157 In response to Luther, Henry asked, “Why should Luther not be obedient to the present decree of the whole church, since it is regarded as true and is now revealed at length to the church, which in a former time had been obscured?”158 Of particular interest to Henry was Luther’s denial of the Sacrament of Order. He reacted strongly against Luther’s statements about the priesthood of all believers and the idea that priests held their authority and ofﬁce from their election by the congregation. Henry challenged Luther’s distinction regarding the church, which thought that the Sacrament of Order was real from the true “church of Christ.” In Henry’s view, by arguing in this way, Luther was separating himself not only from Rome but from all of Italy, Germany, Spain, and England, all of which obeyed the See of Rome. If Luther denied that these nations were true Christians, “if follows that either he must confess Christ’s church to exist in no place at all or, like the Donatists, reduce the universal church of Christ to two or three heretics whispering in a corner.”159 Henry added that if the church had erred in matters of the sacraments, then many absurdities would follow, the chief one being that almost all of the teachings of the faith, having been established for so many ages, would be newly disputed and thrown into doubt. This meant that all stability would be destroyed and everything would be thrown into uncertainty. Henry challenged Luther by arguing that God had always preserved his church from error. He identiﬁed the church’s inability to err with the providential guidance of the Spirit who guided the church into the truth throughout history. He responded to Luther’s belief that the entire church had the power to distinguish between the words of God from the words of man, or the divine and human senses of Scripture. He explained that it was, indeed, true that the church had this power. However, God bestowed this power on the church in order to preserve her from error. Luther’s teaching would mean that the doctrines of the church would be brought back into dispute and debated according to the fancy of every new heretic. The problem, of course, was to identify the true church. For Henry, only the church that had been promised the Spirit had the ability to discern the words of God from the words of men. God also gave

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this church the power to decide which writings were apostolic, to judge between true and false senses of Scripture, and to separate divine from human institutions. Therefore, God also instructed his church throughout history in those things that were not written down in Scripture, such as the perpetual virginity of Mary. However, this was not the church ruled by the laity, but the true church that had existed throughout history and had always recognized the power of the pope’s authority.160 In all these arguments, Henry linked authority to the history of the tradition, the doctrine of providence, and the promise of the Spirit. In fact, he began his treatise by warning that the Holy Spirit did not tolerate deception and falsehood.161 As did Eck, Henry argued that if people followed Luther’s teachings on such things as indulgences, transubstantiation, the authority of the pope, and the sacraments, then they would also have to deny the providence of God. If Luther were correct about indulgences being nothing but deceptions, then it follows that Leo X and all the Roman bishops before him were also deceivers. Not surprisingly, Henry referred to Christ’s promise to remain with the church until the end of the world, citing Mathew 28:20, “Lo I am with you until the end of the age.” Would the Spirit of Truth allow the church to fall into error over such an important matter as the sacraments? Would Christ abandon his church for so many ages and now go over to Luther, who is her enemy? Who taught Luther that the sacraments of penance and conﬁrmation are not true?162 By making the weight of tradition bear heavily on Luther’s isolated shoulders, Henry asked if Luther alone could know the truth. Unlike the universal church, Luther stood contra publicam ecclesiae ﬁdem of all the ages. Commenting on Luther’s rejection of the mass as a sacrament, Henry wrote, “It is a wonder that so many holy fathers and so many eyes have read the same Gospel in the church for so many ages without anyone being able to understand something so clear; on the contrary they are all so blind even now that they are unable to discern (although Luther shows it to them) what Luther sees so clearly?” Is it not Luther who is dreaming and thinks that he sees something which in reality he does not see and tries to show us that which is no where to be found? Henry asked, “What new eyes does Luther have?” He relied on chapters 15 and 16 of the Gospel of John to show that Luther stood alone outside the realm of truth. These verses, which proved so central to sixteenthcentury religious debates, identify the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Truth who guided the church “into all truth” throughout the ages. Thus Henry asked, “Shall we believe, then, that the church, with so many and great teachers and so many living evangelists, and the Spirit who inspires the truth, recklessly instituted a sacrament and placed her hope in an empty sign? Or should we not rather believe that the church learned this from the Apostles and from the Holy Spirit?” Luther, Henry wrote, must carry the Holy Spirit within his breast. However, Henry also asked, what spirit really inspired Luther? The devil must be the source of Luther’s inspiration because he was the father of lies.163

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Throughout his treatise, Henry challenged Luther’s interpretations of history and Scripture. He thereby depicted Luther as just another heretic who misused Scripture for his own sake. Indeed, Luther’s citations of Scripture did not impress Henry. All heretics, he said, quoted Scripture and stirred up sects based on their own interpretations. In so doing, they only created novel senses of Scripture and tried to make everything seem ambiguous. Like Eck, Henry believed that the greatest danger Luther posed to the church was to throw the “undoubted and certain” faith into uncertainty. Therefore Luther’s way is false and against the public faith not only of the present time but of all the ages. Nor does Luther free from captivity those who believe him. Rather, Luther leads them away from the liberty of faith; that is, from a safe place. . . . He captures them, leading them to a precipice and into inaccessible, uncertain, and doubtful ways that are full of danger [vias invias, incertas, dubias, eoque plenas periculi, “et qui amat periculum perit in illo”].164 No polemicist expressed these themes more powerfully than did Thomas More. It was More who most clearly saw the implications of Luther’s ecclesiology and who tied the themes of history, providence, and visibility together in order to offer an alternate form of certitude. Luther had written a vehement reply to Henry’s Assertio in 1522. The abusive nature of Luther’s text required a spirited English defense of the king. In order to answer Luther, More took up his pen. The result was the Responsio ad Lutherum. The Responsio was an answer both to Luther’s Contra Henricum Regem Angliae (1522) as well as The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520). More also read the Acta et res gestae D. Martini Lutheri Augustiniani in comitiis Principum Wormaciae.165 However, More’s response to Luther cannot be fully understood without a knowledge of the treatise by Ambrosius Catharinus, Apologia pro veritate Catholicae et apostolicae ﬁdei ac doctrinae adversus impia ac valde pestifera Martini Lutheri Dogmata, published in 1520. In his refutation of Luther, More also responded to Luther’s reply to Catharinus, Ad librum eximii Magistri Nostri Magistri Ambrosii Catharini, defensoris Silvestri Prieratis acerrimi responsio (1521). Catharinus’s Apologia was one of the earliest and most extensive rebuttals of Luther’s early thought and deserves a detailed analysis that is far beyond the scope of this chapter.166 The following summary of some of its salient points will, therefore, have to sufﬁce. As we will see, Catharinus made several points against Luther that were common to the views of other Catholic controversialists. However, his argumentation was often more sophisticated and philosophically astute. Furthermore, being a Dominican, Catharinus often cited and defended the authority of Thomas Aquinas. In fact, among Luther’s calumnies, Catharinus listed Luther’s belief that Thomas spoke without Scripture, without the canons, without the fathers, and without reasons. Luther’s audacity often astounded

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Catharinus and made him ask in disbelief, “Are you wiser than Thomas?” In fact, Catharinus believed that while Luther held the entire tradition of the church in contempt, he particularly hated and insulted Thomas and Bonaventure.167 As did his fellow controversialists, Catharinus was determined to refute Luther’s allegation that the papacy was established on decrees dating back no more than four hundred years. And like the other controversialists, he identiﬁed Luther’s views on the papacy with Hus.168 He argued his points on the basis of the familiar Petrine passages as well as the authority of the tradition. According to Catharinus, in Matthew 16:18 and in John 21:17, Christ gave Peter the primacy of honor and power by divine law.169 Neither verse indicated that Christ spoke to the apostles equally. The “rock” referred to Peter and not to his confession of faith.170 Although Peter’s confession of faith was made for himself alone, Christ did accept it on behalf of the whole church, but this did not imply equality. The “gates of hell” did not “prevail” against Peter because he did not persist in his denial of Christ. After the resurrection, the “gates of hell” never prevailed against him.171 For Catharinus, this primacy had been recognized from the beginning of the church; Book II of the Apologia is devoted to proving the papacy originated by divine command from antiquity; it did not originate four hundred years ago. Rather, these decrees were only collected and published in the last four centuries in order to ensure order and stability in the church.172 Catharinus reached back to Old Testament ﬁgures such as Moses and Aaron because they preﬁgured Peter. He cited innumberable councils and “holy doctors” who recognized Peter as the vicar of Christ by divine law. All of these authorities agreed that the pope was “the vicar of Christ of Christ, the universal pastor, the universal bishop, the pince and head of the church. . . .” Indeed, Catharinus referred to the pope as “virtualis ecclesia” and “caput et princeps” of the church.”173 With regard to the keys, Catharinus distinguished between power and use. Peter alone received the power of the keys, while the other apostles were given their use through and by means of Peter. Luther was wrong to say that Christ gave the keys to the whole church. Catharinus asked, “Which church?” Paul spoke of “one body” that was complete and whole. If the body were healthy, it had to have a head, who was Christ. Did Christ give the keys to himself? This would be absurd.174 Moreover, the church was not a “two-headed monster” because Christ was the true and principal head, but this did not prevent him from assigning an earthly head who was his vicar.175 Catharinus concluded that Christ gave the keys principally to Peter in his plentitude of power; the rest of the apostles or church received them through the mediation of Peter.176 This mediating role of Peter also explained the command “to feed” the sheep. Catharinus denied that Christ spoke to all the apostles equally in John 21:17. The term “to feed” did not in and of itself signify power but did presuppose power. For Catharinus, the words “to feed” meant “to correct.”177 To explain John 21, he distintinguished between authority and act. Peter alone

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received the authority “to feed,” while the apostles received this ability from and through Peter. Moreoever, the command did not mean “to love.” Luther’s opponents had seen his demand for “love” on the part of the priest as Hus’s demand for the moral purity of the priesthood. Both Eck and Catharinus wanted the priesthood to love and teach, but in such a way that the power of the priest was never qualiﬁed in any way. If a pastor did not love, then he did not feed the sheep, or at least, he did not feed the sheep well. However, Catharinus added, he thereby did not lose his authority to feed the sheep and did not cease to be a pastor.178 The issue of infallibility was crucial for Catharinus. As the vicar of Christ, the pope preached the word and administered the sacraments, but he also “extirpated errors of the faith.” Discussing the power of the pope to decide the truth of the faith, Catharinus distinguished between knowledge and the key of knowledge. If one referred to knowledge in general, then the pope, indeed, did not know many things and was often in doubt and could be deceived. But like other heretics, Luther had confused knowledge with the key of knowledge. The key of knowledge pertained to the authority to deﬁne and establish the faith. The pope alone possessed this privilege and, guided by the Spirit, would necessarily ﬁnd the truth by seeking according to the key of knowledge. Christ’s words, “but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail” (Luke 22:32) referred to the Pope’s inability to err in “quae ad ﬁdem pertineant vitaeque christianae directionem et decisionem.” Directed by the Spirit, the pope could not err in “all things pertaining to the faith.”179 As did Eck, Catharinus connected the issue of infallibility to certainty. In the midst of so many heresies and controversies, Christians had to rely on the infallibility of the church because if the church could err, faith would fall into uncertainty. If one allows the authority of the Roman pontiff and the church to be overturned or destroyed in matters of the faith, by describing that which is divine and infallible truth as human opinions and traditions, what will be reliable and remain standing?180 Catharinus explained that a person was not a heretic because he did not believe human testimony as if it were proved and most certain. However, he was a heretic if he resisted divine testimony. Consequently, anyone who did not recognize the primacy and was not obedient to Rome was a heretic. And for Catharinus, this included all the churches of Asia, Greece, Armenia, and others. These churches, he said, have all perished because they separated themselves from their head. The same, he warned, would happen to the churches of Bohemia, Germany, and Saxony. Referring to Galatians 3:1, he asked Luther, “Who has so bewitched you that you cannot see this?” Did Luther really believe that he alone was correct? Was he wiser than Thomas and Bonaventure? Could the pope and the universal church err but not Luther? Was it possible that Luther alone was wise?181 Amidst Catharinus’s views about the origin of the papacy, the primacy of the pope, and the importance of the tradition, there emerged a certain vision of the church. Although the church was clearly the mystical body of Christ, it was

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also an organism with a head and members. He strongly criticized Luther’s statement that “where there is faith, there is the church.” The church was not a collection of atoms but, rather, a visible functioning entity.182 Catharinus explained that the nature and power of the church was twofold. There were those beings created as invisible by the power of the Holy Spirit, and for these beings Christ alone was the head, with no one acting in his place. There were also many beings created visibly who were ministered to visibly in power and strength. With regard to the care of the church, this visibility was evident in such as the sacraments, preaching of the Word and Gospel, and other sacred works. The visible realm required a head that was perceived visibly, and therefore Christ most wisely established one visible head in his place. Catharinus concluded that there were not “two heads” but only one principal head and one vicar of that head. Christ was always the head of the invisible beings but Peter and his successors were the head of those things that were visible. Catharinus recognized that the distinction between the church militant and the church triumphant was visibility. The church militant was the visible earthly body of Christ and consisted of both the good and the wicked. This church was not the communion of the saints but the mixed body consisting of both the good and the wicked. Following Dionysius, Catharinus portrayed the hierarchy of the earthly church as a reﬂection of the celestial hierarchy. Therefore, just as all things came from and stood underneath one God, so, too, all things stood under one highest priest. Just as the lower beings are illumined and cleansed by that which is higher, with all things ascending upward to God, so, too, all earthly things, according to degree, stand under and move toward the pope.183 Catharinus reminded Luther that the members do not ﬂow from the head, the foundation was not raised on the building, and the pastor was not tended by the sheep. This earthly church, with its divinely willed hierarchy, is holy and catholica, or universal, which means that the pope is the “head” and “prince” of the universal church. Repeatedly, Catharinus deﬁned the church as that being which is guided infallibly by the Holy Spirit so that it teaches the truth without error.184 There exists an important parallel between the ecclesiological statements made after the Council of Constance and those made by Catholic authors in the wake of Luther and Zwingli’s reformations. After the condemnation of John Hus, theologians writing on the nature of the church had emphasized the visibility of the earthly church and its distinction from the communion of the saints. Thomas Netter, the Carmelite theologian, deﬁned the church in terms of visibility by stating, “According to its visibility, we say that the church militant is the congregation of all those who are called, joined together in Catholic society. Referring to the distinction in Matthew 22:16 between those who were called and those who were chosen, Netter argued that the earthly church was not restricted to those who were given the grace of perseverance. Torquemada delineated sixteen uses of the term ecclesia. In one deﬁnition he spoke of the entirety of all the faithful. Following Aquinas, he included both those in the

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status viae and those who enjoyed the beatiﬁc vision. In the sixteenth century we see the same emphasis on the distinction between the church triumphant and the church militant. Albert Pighius argued, “We understand the church to be the gathering of Christ’s faithful; not a congregation of the saints alone, hidden in the Spirit, which we could neither recognize nor know how to seek; but the congregation of all Christ’s faithful, whether they be good or bad, who have given their names to Christ and are enrolled in his warfare through his sacrament.”185 Jacobus Latomus also stressed the mixed body of the visible church. According to Latomus, “In the Holy Scriptures and in the Catholic commentators the church is taken in one way for the assembly of the good and of those in whom the Holy Spirit dwells, of those who are called the body of Christ . . . It is taken in another way for the assembly of the baptized, including both the good and the evil, whom the unity of the body, and Catholic peace, and the communion of the visible sacraments in some way bring together. Augustine calls this the ecclesia permixta.”186 By the time Thomas More took up his pen against Luther and other reformers the battle was no longer solely about speciﬁc biblical passages and the divine authority of the pope. It was now about the nature of the church. More understood fully that the weakness of the reformers’ ecclesiology was the connection between visibility, knowability and authority. He hammered home relentlessly the danger of understanding the church as a “spiritual assembly” or the “communion of the saints.” Most importantly, More perceived that this spiritualistic view of the church undermined all attempts at certitude. His link between certitude and ecclesiology was the most coherent challenge to Luther, Tyndale, and other opponents such as John Frith, George Joye, William Roye, Bugenhagen, and Robert Barnes. The three most important works that reﬂect this insight into the problem of certainty were Responsio ad Lutherum (1523), A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, (1530), and The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answere (1532–1533). By the time he composed the Responsio, Luther had published, among other writings, Contra Henricum and the Babylonian Captivity of the Church. By the time More wrote the Confutation, Tyndale’s biblical translation had been published, as well as such works as The Pathway to Scripture, The Practice of Prelates, Parable of Wicked Mammon, and The Obedience of a Christian Man. After More published A Dialogue concerning Heresies, Tyndale responded in 1531 with An Answere unto sir Thomas Mores Dialogue. This text was central to the Confutation and was refuted by More in Books IV–VIII. The following analysis of More’s arguments draws primarily on the Response to Luther, A Dialogue concerning Heresies, and the Confutation of Tyndale’s Answere.187 Since More’s refutation of his opponents centered on ecclesiology, it is worth pausing to ask what he believed to be the understanding of the church held by his Protestant opponents. Our task is not to present Reformation ecclesiologies accurately but, rather, to examine how the use of polemic regarding ecclesiology contributed to the debates about certitude. In order to discern the way in which More

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formulated his understanding of certainty, we must approach the problem from his viewpoint. More expressed a growing and central criticism of the reformers, namely, that by rendering the church wholly spiritual, they made the church invisible and unknowable. Luther, Tyndale, Zwingli, and Barnes had left themselves vulnerable to this criticism, since throughout their works they spoke of the spiritual or faithful church. As Scott Hendrix has shown, Luther had developed ecclesiological themes prior to 1519 in the Dictata. According to Hendrix, one of the most striking ecclesiological issues in the early lectures on the Psalms was Luther’s deﬁnition of the ﬁdeles. The ﬁdeles, Luther wrote, oriented themselves around the invisible spiritual goods of faith rather than the visible things of the world. The spiritual character of the truly faithful meant that they were “hidden before men of the world.” Examining Luther’s view of the hidden and invisible nature of the church, Hendrix explained, “Luther not only depicts the individual ﬁdeles as founded in spiritual and invisible things which speak collectively of the church as invisible, he links this invisibility of the church’s spiritual and heavenly character to the necessity of faith for recognizing this people. The church, which is called the new heaven and new earth, is invisible and intelligible through faith.” Hendrix argues that for Luther, the true believers were “quite visible to the eye” because their way of life was visible, although the “foundation of their existence (eternal and spiritual goods) and their orientation toward this foundation (in faith) are invisible to the human eye.”188 However, he also notes that the truly faithful could be perceived or discerned only with the spiritual eyes of faith. “Recognition” was the difﬁculty. Hendrix goes on to discuss Luther’s novel interpretation of the true ﬁdeles or “mini-church.” According to the tradition, the true ﬁdeles were invisible because one could not know whether a person was in a state of grace and possessed caritas. This “was a question of the uncertain possession of an invisible entity.” For Luther, however, it was a question of “the certain foundation in and orientation towards invisible goods.” In Hendrix’s analysis, the tradition gave “the negative cast of uncertainty” on this invisibility or indiscernibility. For Luther, however, “the invisibility of the true ﬁdeles belongs to the heart of their character.” As Hendrix so aptly demonstrates, Luther moved from the traditional “caritas-ecclesiology” to a “ﬁdes-ecclesiology.” In so doing, I Corinthians 2:15 came to refer to the true ﬁdeles, or the spiritual men whose understanding was superior to, and independent of, a hierarchy or teaching ofﬁce that misuses its authority. Luther continued to discuss the church in terms of that which was “spiritual” and invisible, not bound to people and places. In May 1520, Luther addressed his treatise regarding the papacy to Prierias, Eck, Cajetan, and the theological faculties of Louvain and Cologne. On the Papacy in Rome, against the Most Celebrated Romanist in Leipzig was Luther’s ﬁrst major treatise on the nature of the church. Bernhard Lohse has observed that in his ecclesiological statements, Luther applied Hus’s characterization of the church as

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the congregatio spiritualis to his own view of the church as the communio sanctorum. Luther even expressly traced to Hus the view that the church consisted only of those predestined to eternal life.189 Repeatedly, Luther deﬁned the church and Christendom in a way that left him open to the charge of invisibility and unknowability. According to Luther, the church was “a spiritual assembly of the faithful wherever they are on earth; and whatever is of ﬂesh and blood, whatever has to do with person, place, time, and those things which ﬂesh and blood can make use of, does not belong to the church of God.” He also stated the following about the nature of the true church: Christendom means an assembly of all the people on earth who believe in Christ, as we pray in the Creed, “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the communion of the saints.” This community or assembly means all those who live in true faith, hope, and love. Thus, the essence, life and nature of Christendom is not a physical assembly but an assembly of hearts in one faith.190 Luther then proceeded to discuss Scriptural passages referring to the kingdom of God. He explained that this kingdom was not in Rome or bound to Rome; it was “neither here nor there.” The kingdom, Luther wrote, “is where there is inward faith.” Stressing the importance of this faith, Luther stated, Therefore, whoever does not want to err should remember clearly that Christianity is a spiritual assembly of souls [ein geistlich vorsamlung der seelenn] in one faith and that no one is regarded as a Christian because of his body. Thus, he should know that the natural, real, true, and essential Christendom exists in the Spirit and not in any external thing, no matter what it may be called.191 Luther explained that there were two churches. The church that was “natural, basic, essential, and true” was that of the “spiritual internal Christendom.” The humanly constructed and external church was that of “physical external Christendom.” In Luther’s mind it was clear that these two churches were not separate from one another. Just as Paul had spoken about the inner and outer man, so, too, the Christian assembly was a community “united in one faith according to the soul, although according to the body, it cannot be assembled in one place since every group of people is assembled in its own place.” The unity of the church cannot be cannot be bound to “external places and locations.” The church, he said, was a “spiritual unity” and was found wherever there was “inward faith.” Consequently, it was clear that on earth there is no head to give life to the spiritual church other than Christ himself.192 Luther’s opponents had argued that the church, like any earthly institution, had to have a head. Luther agreed that all communities, even empires, have a

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head. Nonetheless, the church had only one head who was Christ. To have two heads was to create a monster. The spiritual internal Christendom, “which alone is the true church, may not and cannot have an earthly head. It may be led by no one on earth, neither bishop nor pope. Here only Christ in heaven is the head and rules alone.”193 Christ alone gave the gift of inward faith, just as the head infused life into the body. But, Luther asked, “How can a man rule something he neither knows nor recognizes? But who can know who truly believes or does not believe. . . . The head must instill life. That is why it is clear that on earth there is no head of spiritual Christendom other than Christ alone.”194 Furthermore, in the Babylonian Captivity and his reply to Henry, Luther had insisted that the church had the right to “distinguish the words of God from the words of men.” Citing such verses as “Test all things and hold fast to what is good,” and “the spiritual man judges all things,” Luther stated that it was the right of every Christian anointed by the Spirit “to judge and prove” that which is in accordance with Scripture. All who are “taught by God” have the “right and power to weigh and decide what was in accordance with the true meaning of Scripture.”195 It was precisely these kinds of statements that would lead Eck and More to join together the issues of authority and certitude. The problems of authority, papal primacy, the interpretation of Scripture, the use of history, and the nature of the church quickly became inseparable from one another. Both John Eck and Thomas More represented the way in which authority became inseparable from the need for certainty. This connection became clear as the debate extended to various opponents. Luther was not the only reformer whose statements about the church raised the specter of unknowability. For Thomas More, it was Tyndale who represented this same danger. For Eck, it was Zwingli who, perhaps even more than Luther, who made statements regarding the nature of the true church that manifested the threat posed by a spiritualist ecclesiology and most resembled those of Hus. As was his common pattern, Zwingli began from his theological premises about divine sovereignty and divine providence. He explained that God was free to give grace and faith to those whom he had chosen. Nothing could limit or determine God’s freedom. From this principle, Zwingli concluded that the true church was composed of the predestined. This church was known to God alone because only God knew who had faith. The unity of this true church consisted in its unity with Christ alone as its head. The church was catholic or universal because it was not limited to any geographical location or to any historical age.196 Zwingli wrote one of his most detailed discussions about the nature of the church in his Reply to Emser. Jerome Emser was born in Ulm in Swabia in 1478. He studied law and theology at the universities of Tübingen and Basel. Emser, however, did not become a professor. Rather, he worked as secretary to Cardinal Raymond von Gurk, who was the papal legate regarding indulgences, until 1505. He read widely in the classics, the church fathers, and history. He transferred to Leipzig, where he served as the secretary and court

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chaplain to Duke George of Saxony. While at Leipzig he received the bachelor’s degree in theology and the degree of Licentiate of Canon Law. In the Babylonian Captivity of the Church, Luther had attacked the sacramental structure of the church, paying particular attention to the idea of the Mass as a sacriﬁce. In return, Emser wrote a defense of the Mass against Luther. In 1523 Zwingli published a treatise entitled On the Canon of the Mass. In the same year, Luther published his Advice Concerning the Mass and Images, and in 1524 he published A Proposal Concerning the Mass and Images. In 1524 Emser turned his attention to Zwingli by writing A Defense of the Canon of the Mass against Ulrich Zwingli, in which he stressed the antiquity and continuous history of the Roman Mass, a tradition that Zwingli abandoned when he opposed all the saints of the Catholic church. Like Luther, Zwingli had denied that the Mass was a sacriﬁce. According to Zwingli, Christ performed the one and only sacriﬁce on the cross, which could never be repeated. The Mass, he said, was the memorial of Christ’s sacriﬁce and the assurance of redemption.197 In his answer to Zwingli, Emser defended the traditional understanding of the Mass as a sacriﬁce, noting that the prayers correctly expressed this truth. For Emser, the royal priesthood offered Christ as a sacriﬁce for all Christians, both the living and those in purgatory. The purpose of the Mass was intercession. Moreover, only a “royal priesthood” could perform such a sacriﬁce because the priest was the mediator who represented sinful humanity before God. In Emser’s view, to oppose the sacriﬁcial nature of the Mass was to oppose the priesthood altogether. In his Reply to Emser, (1524) Zwingli addressed the nature of the church. He distinguished three ways in which the term ecclesia was used. The term could refer to individual churches, all of which belonged to the one universal church, the “communion of all the saints.” Second, the term ecclesia referred to the visible church, which consisted of all people who came to confess Christ, both the faithful and the unfaithful. But this was not the church for which Christ died. The true church was that of Ephesians 5:25 (“without spot or wrinkle”). This third reference was to the church of the predestined. This “one beautiful dove” did not consist of a few pontiffs but of “all who ﬁrmly believe themselves to be redeemed by the blood of Christ and, like a beautiful spouse, are united to Christ.” Zwingli had to answer the objection, originally made by Thomas Murner, that such a church no more existed than did Plato’s Republic. If the true church, against which the gates of hell could not prevail, was the church of the saints as described in Ephesians 5:25, then how could she have an earthly existence? How could the church “without spot or wrinkle” ever be found in a world where no one lived without sin?198 In the Resolutio Luther had written, wherever the word of God is preached and believed, there is the true faith, that immovable rock: where there is faith, there is the church; where there is the church, there is the bride of Christ; where there is

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the bride of Christ, there are all things that belong to the bridegroom. Thus faith has with it all things that follow from faith; the keys, the sacraments, and all other things.199 Therefore, Luther had opened himself up to the critique made by Murner and Emser. In his own reply to Emser, Luther had answered Murner’s question by afﬁrming the true spiritual nature of the church. Citing numerous biblical passages from Romans, Luke, and John regarding the spiritual nature of the kingdom of God, Luther wrote, Compare, then, the holy church of Christ and the insane church of the pope. The holy church of Christ says, “I believe one holy Christian church.” The insane church of the pope says, “I see a holy Christian church.” The former says, “The church is neither here nor there.” The latter says, “The church is here or there. . . .” Contrary to Murner and all the papists, [the church] will have to remain a spiritual place standing in the Spirit, invisibly built upon the rock of Christ.200 Zwingli responded to Murner’s accusation that the reformers had a church like the Platonic Ideas by saying the church had her source of holiness only in Christ; her human members did indeed remain sinful and in need of forgiveness. Therefore, earthly holiness was not necessary for the existence of the true church and, therefore, human purity or sinlessness were not the source of the church’s visibility in history. The true church was not characterized by purity from sin but, rather, by listening and relying only on the Word of God. The truly faithful are the sheep who recognize the voice of their shepherd and are “taught by God.”201 Having distinguished the three uses of the term ecclesia, Zwingli now had to address the issue of authority. Which one of the three kinds of churches had authority? The issue of authority was not simply about obedience but was primarily about the claim for an infallible truth. According to Zwingli, only the invisible church of the predestined, resting on God’s Word alone, was “ﬁrm,” “immovable,” and “without error.” To support his position, Zwingli again appealed to the Spirit. He relied on verses from Galatians 4:9 (“I know my sheep and they know me”) and John 5:44 (“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him . . . And they shall be taught by God”). Zwingli, therefore, applied the same verses that he used for the authority to interpret Scripture to the deﬁnition of the church. The “sheep” were known by God because God “drew” them and they alone constituted the church that could not err. They alone were able to discern the true knowledge of Christ because they were directly “taught by God.” These sheep, therefore, were the true church referred to by Ephesians 5:25.

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Here you ﬁnd the church that cannot err; namely, the one that only hears, without doubt, the voice of the shepherd, and not just any shepherd but only the one who enters by the door and brings only what Christ brings. . . . Finally, that church alone cannot lapse or err that hears only the voice of its shepherd, God; for this voice alone is from God. . . . Therefore, those who hear are God’s sheep, they are the church of God and cannot err because they follow only the Word of God, which can in no way deceive.202 In this passage, Zwingli identiﬁed “lapsing” not with sin or lack of holiness but with falling into error. The “sheep” alone were able to hear the Word, which, because it was from God, could not deceive. Zwingli proceeded to explain that the reason Emser did not know this true church was that he did not perceive the power of the Word. Moreover, only God’s Word could protect the church from error. According to Zwingli, “Only pious minds have this knowledge because such knowledge does not depend on human judgment but is most ﬁrmly established in men’s minds. This knowledge is an experience, for all the pious have experienced it.”203 Defending God’s Word as the sole foundation of the true church, Zwingli cited I Corinthians 2:15. The “spiritual man who judges all things” was now the layperson who had already been rendered faithful by the Word. That Word, Zwingli explained, gives faith and “illumines” the soul so that, we understand and it draws us in such a way that we follow. . . . Those who are imbued with this word judge the word, which resounds to a congregation and strikes our ears. Nevertheless, at this time the word of faith which lies within the minds of the faithful is judged by no man but itself judges the external word.204 Trying to repudiate the possibility of confusion and discord, Zwingli reasoned that “the church judges the word that is set before it.” According to Zwingli, it was “the church that is the spouse of Christ that judges both the shepherd and His word.” But how would the church do this? Recognizing that the catholic or universal church never assembled together at any one time or place, Zwingli maintained that individual churches should “judge both the shepherd and the external word, but only through the word of God, written in the minds of the faithful.” This church, he said, “cannot err” because, having been taught within by the Spirit, they are the sheep that could recognize the voice of the shepherd.205 For Zwingli, this church can not fall into error because “through His Spirit,” God “teaches his own in such a way that they judge all things themselves and are judged by no one.” Repeatedly, Zwingli cited I Corinthians 2:15 to explain the infallibility of the church.206 Clearly, therefore, Zwingli used the same argumentation and the same biblical verses that explained the authority

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to interpret Scripture in order to deﬁne the church and her ability to judge the truth. In 1530 Zwingli presented his Account of the Faith to Charles V. In the sixth article, Zwingli again addressed the nature of the true church. He wrote that the term church referred to the elect who were predestined by God to eternal life. This church, which was “without spot or wrinkle,” was known to God alone. He added that the word church could also designate all those who professed to be Christians. However, many of these people were not elect. Judas, for example, belonged to the church as well as to “all those who turned away from God.” Zwingli argued that the apostles themselves had once regarded Judas as belonging to the true church, “although this was by no means the case.” The visible church was, therefore, the mixed body that contained both the elect and the damned. The church, he said, “is visible, albeit it does not assemble in this world. It consists of all those who confess Christ, even though among them are many reprobates.” This church, he confessed, is “unknown to men, and will never come together until the last day, when the son of God will call all nations to himself and will contend with them in judgment. There it will be seen what kind of faith each one has.”207 In the following passage, Zwingli deﬁned the church that possessed authority and certain truth. I believe there is one church that is made up of all those who have the same spirit, through whom they are made certain that they are the true children of the family of God; and this is the ﬁrst fruits of the church. I believe that this church does not err in regard to the truth, namely, in those fundamental matters of the faith on which everything depends. I also believe that the universal visible church is one so long as it maintains the true confession [of the faith], of which we have already spoken.208 Passages such as these by Luther, Zwingli, and others fueled the debate about authority, ecclesiology and, ultimately, certainty. Both Eck and More asked the question, “How could a person identify a church that consisted of inward faith and was known to God alone?” How could a spiritual church be authoritative and without error if, while on earth, it could not be identiﬁed? Eck responded to Zwingli’s Account of the Faith in 1520 with his Refutation of the Articles of Zwingli.209 Eck argued against “the great debater Zwingli,” by challenging his distinctions between the three uses of the word church. Eck reminded Zwingli that he believed in the certainty of salvation. Therefore, he said, all of “Zwingli’s saintlets” should know each other and, therefore, be able to identify their church. Zwingli, Eck said, contradicted himself, “for having said that the church of the predestined was known to God alone, yet he forgets himself and says further that those who are members of the church when they have faith, know that they are elect and are members of this ﬁrst [elect] church. What do I hear?

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This holy church of Zwingli is known only to God and yet is at the same time known to the Zwingli saintlets.” Eck knew that the identiﬁcation of the true church with the predestined was the Hussite heresy. Therefore, he insisted, “it is a damnable error that the Church consists only of the predestined, an error condemned in both the Roman Council and the Council of Constance.” This error was based on the misinterpretation of Ephesians 5:25. According to Eck, this verse did not refer to the church of the elect. Eck maintained that St. Paul was not saying that presently “the church is without spot or wrinkle.” Rather, Paul taught that, “at least for the time being, the church is undergoing sanctiﬁcation and cleansing by Christ in order that he may present it to himself as a holy and glorious church.” Eck then explained that, “the church is not, therefore, at present, without spot or wrinkle but, rather, is daily undergoing puriﬁcation and purging by Christ in order that he may present to himself a glorious church,—at the time, ‘When he shall deliver up the kingdom to God, even the father.’”210 For Eck, the verse that best deﬁned the church was Matthew 22:11, which referred to the ten virgins, ﬁve of whom were foolish. He also referred to Matthew 25:1–2, where it is stated that both the tares and the wheat grew together in the Lord’s ﬁeld. Eck would only distinguish between heaven, earth, and hell. In heaven, he said, are only the elect. In hell only the wicked exist. But in the “middle sphere, namely the church, there are both good and bad.” According to Eck, Zwingli erred by “narrowing too much the Church which cannot err, by conﬁning it to that which is without spot.” Like Luther, Eck said, Zwingli had wandered from the visible church. The true church was visible on earth to all people in her doctors, prelates, pontiffs, cardinals, bishops, and her ecumenical councils.211 It was really Thomas More who brought all these issues to bear on the problem of certainty. It was More’s Responsio ad Lutherum that ﬁrst centered on the connection between ecclesiology and certitude. Throughout the Responsio, More repeatedly tried to demonstrate that Luther’s beliefs were in error precisely because they led to uncertainty. More challenged Luther on various grounds, including Scripture, tradition, and authority. In terms of Scripture, he frequently quoted a cluster of biblical verses in order to prove the validity of his position. Most commonly cited were Matthew 28:20 (“I am with you always even unto the end of the world”), Luke 22:32 (“But I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail”), John 16:13 (“When he shall have come, who is the spirit of truth, he will lead you into all truth”), John 6:44 (“They shall be taught by God”) and Psalm 67:7 (“The Spirit of God makes those who dwell in a house to be of one mind”). Nor did he shrink from the famous verse in I Corinthians 2:15, “The spiritual man judges all things but may be judged by no one.”212 Luther’s reply to Catharinus forced Thomas More to delve more deeply into the nature of the church. In turn, it was during his response to Luther that More articulated more thoroughly his argument about ecclesiology. More used the passages cited above, along with numerous sources from the tradition, to

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develop a position that refuted Luther, Tyndale, and Barnes. More’s refutation centered on two interrelated questions: “Where is the Church?” and “Where is the Spirit?” By addressing these questions, More developed an ecclesiology that formed a “counteroffer,” so to speak, of certainty. This offer of certainty shared some crucial characteristics, but also differed in decisive respects, from that of his opponents. More attacked the reformers on what he perceived to be their most vulnerable point: namely, their understanding of ecclesiology. We have seen that Luther made statements stressing the invisible nature of the church. In his reply to Catharinus, Luther asked where a person could ﬁnd the church against which the “gates of hell” could not prevail. He argued that Catharinus could not show him this true church because he could not point to a church that was without sin. You will not point to any external church, still less the Roman. Because if you listen to Christ, who alone is without sin, the Lord of the gates of hell, you will point only to that church which is without sin; namely, the mistress of the gates of hell. No matter which church you indicate, it is uncertain whether or not she is in sin and subject to the gates of hell. . . . Therefore, I conclude against you with demonstrative proof that the words of Christ in Matthew 16 pertain to no particular person but only to the church built in the spirit [in spiritu aediﬁcatam] upon the rock Christ and not upon the pope or upon the Roman church.213 Luther went on to say that this “rock without sin, invisible and spiritual,” was “perceptible by faith alone.” The “rock” could not be Peter, since Peter was not sinless, as his denial of Christ demonstrated. Citing Hebrews 11, Luther equated “the evidence of things not seen” with that church which was known only by faith. Rejecting the idea that the church had to be identiﬁed with a body and location, Luther argued that Christ’s words did away “with all place.” Paul, too, did away with the idea of a sensible body as constituting the church. Luther struggled to explain that although the earthly church could not exist “without place and person,” nonetheless, these things were not “properties to her.” In Luther’s view, the “spirit of liberty” reigned in the church and thus made “all corporeal and earthly things indifferent and unnecessary.” To insist on persons and places was to try to bind the freedom of the Christian and his church. This portrait of the church as “inner,” “spiritual,” “free,” and “invisible” became the center of the debate between More and his Protestant opponents.214 The application of Hebrews 11 to ecclesiology was exactly the point where More believed Luther was most in error. He also was quick to pounce on Luther’s references to the “church without sin.” As did Eck, More did not read these statements in reference to Christ being the source of the church’s holiness. He interpreted the phrase as meaning that the members of the earthly

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church must be sinless in order to constitute the church against which the “gates of hell” could not prevail. This requirement for holiness, More wrote, rendered the church either nonexistent or uncertain. According to More, “Since faith is the evidence of things not seen, if the church is believed in and is a matter of faith, then the church is in no way that perceptible [sensibilem] multitude of good and bad men which is apparent to everyone and perceived by human sense.”215 More explained that Christians fell in and out of sin and, therefore, would “now belong to the church, now not belong to the church.” Quoting Ecclesiastes 9:1, More argued, “according to this reasoning, we would, on a particular matter, believe the same man today, not believe him tomorrow, believe him at sunrise, not believe him at sunset.” More added, “Or, rather, we would not believe anyone at all, for we could not know of other men which one was in sin, which was out of it, since no one may be sure even concerning himself whether he is worthy of hatred or love.”216 Taking up the problem of Judas, More wrote, Who would not wonder at Luther’s judgment on this point, when he sees that Luther’s brother, Judas the traitor, even after his crime was plotted and perpetuated, still nevertheless belonged to the church and so long as he lived was not expelled from the apostleship, although he was called a devil by the mouth of Christ himself. . . . Therefore, if the gates of hell prevail against all those who sin, yet no one does not sin exceedingly if Luther’s doctrine is true, then it is clear that there is no church at all on earth. . . .217 In More’s reasoning, because Luther refused to distinguish between the communion of the saints and the earthly church, he failed to understand the nature of the true church and the character of her historical existence on earth. More argued that since Luther conﬂated the church militant and the church triumphant, Luther had only an invisible and, most importantly, an unknowable church. More repeatedly insisted that there must be “some place in which a deﬁnite church may be recognizable and certain.”218 An unknowable church, he endlessly pointed out, was always uncertain. If the church “lived in the spirit” and was only known by faith because it was the “evidence of things not seen,” then Luther was left with a church that could be found nowhere. He [Luther] admits that the church is certain, yet discusses her in such a way as to render her most uncertain, [ut reddat incertissimam] and he is not content to judge in a human manner; while pursuing and manifesting a kind of concealed and hidden wisdom, he reduces the palpable and commonly known church to an invisible one, from an external one to an internal one, he utterly reduces her to no church at all.219

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Luther knew this argument had force. In his reply to Catharinus he had tried to identify the church visibly with three signs: namely, baptism, the Eucharist, and the preached gospel. He maintained that the gospel was the most important by arguing that, “before bread and baptism [the gospel] is the most certain and most excellent sign of the church.” More scoffed at this idea. He noted that even Luther had to admit that the “papists” also had the signs of “Baptism and bread.” This meant that the preaching of the gospel remained “the sole sign by which the church is recognized with certainty.” Most signiﬁcantly, More insisted that Luther’s deﬁnition left the knowledge of the church uncertain, “For since you leave uncertain to whom the gospel must be preached, and since you do not consider the gospel true unless it is preached to some persons or other whom you do not sufﬁciently specify, but conceive in your mind like Platonic Ideas. . . .”220 More employed this argument constantly when demanding a “bodily,” or “palpable,” church militant that was knowable here on earth. Insisting on a “deﬁnite church” that was “recognizable and certain,” More accused Luther of making the knowability of the church completely uncertain. Taking up Murner’s original accusation, More contended that Luther thought the church militant was like the Platonic Ideas. Luther, he said, believed, [t]he church militant on earth has not been recognized in this palpable and perceptible church, but in some other multitude of Christians, somehow imperceptible and mathematical—like Platonic Ideas—which is both in some place and in no place, is in the ﬂesh and is out of the ﬂesh, which is wholly involved in sins and yet does not sin at all.221 In Tyndale’s writings, More perceived the same problematic understanding of the church. When deﬁning the church, Tyndale, like Zwingli, explained that the church had different “signiﬁcacions.” The word church could refer to a place or a house where Christians hear the word of doctrine, the law of God, and the faith of Christ. Tyndale continued by saying that the term church had been applied mistakenly to those who were “shaven shorn and oyled whych we now calle the spirytualtye and clergye.” Properly speaking, he said, the church was a “congregacion” or multitude gathered together into one from “all degrees of people.”222 With this deﬁnition, Tyndale was repudiating any identiﬁcation of the church with the monastic orders or the priesthood. However, he also stated that the church could signify only the elect, namely, “they only that repent and fele that the law is good / And haue the law of god written in their hertes and the fayth of oure sauioure Iesus / even wyth the sprite of God.” And those “in whose hertes God hath written his lawe with his holy spirite and geuen them a felinge faith of the mercy that is in christen Iesu oure lorde.” Tyndale explained that there was a twofold church, just as there was a carnal Israel and a spiritual

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Israel. Sometimes the church referred to the common multitude who believed “wyth the mouth only and carnally with out spyryte nether louinge the law in their heretes.” The church also consisted of those who repented “and haue the law of god written in their hertes and fayth to be saued thorow christe written there also.” As I John 3 and Ephesians 5 said, this church “sinneth not.” Still, I John 3 taught that if we tell ourselves that we have no sin, we deceive ourselves. According to Tyndale, both ideas were true, “there is a church that sinneth not and that there is no man but that he sinneth.” Over and against the multitude of those who have only a historical faith and visibly worshipped God through idolatry, there is a “litle ﬂocke” that “receaueth this testament in his hert and in it walketh and serueth God / in the spirite. And from hence forth al is christ with him / and christ is his and he christes.” Only this “small ﬂocke” came to the word and promises of Christ.223 In the strict sense, therefore, the church was that “litle ﬂocke” which had the Scriptures, the law written on its heart, a “feylinge fayth,” and knew the “voyce of Christ.” Drawing a parallel between the situation of the New Testament and his own time, Tyndale explained that just as John did not believe the scribes and Pharisees to be the true church, so, too, the true church present today was not made up of the multitude. The elect “spie out” their Lord for, “Christes shepe heare the voyce of Christ Ihon.x. where the world of ypocrites as they know him not / even so the wolues heare not his voyce / but compell the scripture to heare them. . . . And euen so saide Paule in his tyme. And even so saye we in oure tyme / that the lord of hostes hath saued him seed and hath gathered him a ﬂocke to whom he hath geuen eares to heare.”224 More answered Tyndale in the same way that he responded to Luther. He argued that such an elect “litle ﬂocke” would necessarily always remain unknown and unrecognizable, thereby rendering the church uncertain. For what congregacyon were that whiche neuer were gathered togyder, nor neuer one parte wyttyngly speke wyth other / of whych yf they mette to gyther, neuer one knoweth other. For though they knowe to gyther, as folke of acquayntaunce or kynred, or neyghbours peraduenture all of one towne or strete, ye or of one house eyther; yet can they not one knowe an other as for a member of hys owne vnknowen chyrch, that is to wytte for one of the trewe fayth and ryght lyuynge, & for a penytent synner, and fynally for a fynall electe. And all these condycions ye wote well muste those persons haue that Tyndale taketh for the very chyrche.225 It was really Robert Barnes who prompted More’s most thorough refutation regarding the nature of the church, a refutation found in Book III of the Confutation. Barnes was a former Augustinian friar who escaped from England in 1528 and went to Wittenberg. In his Supplication unto Henry the Eighth, he

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wrote that the church sometimes meant the mixed body of the whole church. However, the true church was the church “with out spot or wrynkille.” This church “stond by Cristis eleccion.” A person cannot be of this church “except that you haue the sprite of christ and be wasshid in his blessed bloude.” Most important, Barnes also stated that “[t]he churche ys a spyrtualle thynge and no exteryor thynge but invisible from carnalle yies (I say not that they be invisible that be of the churche / but that holy churche in hyr selfe ys invisibyle) as faithe is / and hyr puernes and clennes is a fore chryst only / and not a fore the world/ for the worlde hathe no Iudgement nor knowledge of hyr but alle hir honour and clennes is a fore Christ suer and faste. . . .”226 More once again jumped on the idea of a church that was so pure that it was “without spot or wrinkle.” Without paying much attention to Barnes’s argument that the purity of the church and of each Christian was through Christ alone, More focused on the problems involved in applying Ephesians 5:25 to the true church, which could not err. Such a church was totally unknowable and could not exist on earth. More demanded visible signs of this church, including the presence of miracles. The seriousness of this accusation was not lost on Tyndale or Barnes. When struggling to answer More, both men tried to identify the church with visible signs. As Tyndale explained, For the church that was the true mesinger of god / hath euer shewed a signe & a bage therof/ether a present miracle or autenticke scripture. . . . Nether was there any other cause of the writynge of the new and last and euerlastinge testament/then when miracles ceased / we might haue wherewith to defende oure selues agenst false doctrine & heresies.227 Both Tyndale and Barnes also had posited the pious life of the Christian as a visible sign of the church. According to Tyndale, the members of the true church were known by their faith as examined by Scripture and by their profession and consent to live according to the laws of God. Barnes, too, tried to identify the visible signs of the church by saying, “now we must declare by what synges and tokens that we may knowe that in thys place or in that place there be serten members of this holy church / for though she be in hyr selfe sprytualle and can not be perfytly knowen / by oure exterior senses / yet neuer the lesse we may haue serten tokens / of hyr spiritualle presens / where by we may reken that in this place and in that place be sertyne of hyr members.”228 These tokens included the true preaching of the Bible and a life of good works that agreed with the doctrine of the Gospel. More responded by saying that the reasoning of his opponents only left people in “more dowt” since no person could truly know the nature of another person. He leveled the same criticism against Barnes by saying that good works were insufﬁcient, since “hypocrysye maye deceive us.” To make his point, More turned to the familiar problem of Judas.

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After all, Judas was thought to be of Christ and the church, but fell away. Judas was a “secrete traytoure” and “though he were out of Crystes favour, was not out of hys housholde.” According to More, if Barnes remained true to his deﬁnition of the church, then a person was in the church only when he was clean and pure. However, because no one could attain perfection, one could be “of the chyrche and not of the chyrche seuen tymes in a day.”229 In any case, the church could not be reliable or certain because her invisibility rendered her unknown. Now good readers, yf the very chyrche whych can not erre, be a congregacyon inuysyble, and a company vnknown / though euery one of them haue the very treuth in him self: yet yf I can not know that chyrch, I can not lene to that chyrche as to a sure pyller of trouth, syth I can not knowe it for the very [true] chyrche though I sholde happen on it.230 Finding the true church was a problem of the utmost signiﬁcance. As in the Middle Ages, sixteenth-century thinkers (with the exception of certain spiritualists) assumed a link between soteriology and ecclesiology. For both the reformers and the Catholic controversialists, this link was associated not only with the reception of the sacraments but also with the location of the certitude of truth. What is crucial to understand is that for all parties concerned, the certitude of truth could only be guaranteed if one was certain of ﬁnding the Holy Spirit. All sides agreed that the Spirit was the agent of certainty. Only by knowing where the Spirit provided salviﬁc truth could the Christian know he was within the saving sphere of truth. For Luther, Zwingli, Tyndale, Barnes, Eck, More, and other disputants, the question “Where is the spirit?” was a craving for certitude.231 More depicted a Christian who “longs to be certain about some true church.” It was insufﬁcient, More said, to identify that true church with the signs of “baptism, bread, and the true preaching of the Gospel.” Would anyone know for certain that a particular church, rather than all the others, was the one “without sin” and the bearer of truth? More reminded his readers that “there can be good preaching among wicked men . . . and that the truth can be preached not only by a wicked man but even the devil.” It is worth noting that More is claiming that Luther and his fellow reformers demanded a morally pure church. Nonetheless, even without that requirement, More asks how one would know what the true Scriptures were or whether they were interpreted correctly? After all, with regard to the Scriptures, the disagreement was not about the words of Scripture but about their interpretation. This could only be seen and known with certainty by “a certain unbroken succession from the one which Christ long ago established and which has ever remained uncorrupted in the faith of its origin.”232 This uncertain Christian was seeking the church in which the Holy Spirit was present. More’s demand for a “deﬁnite and recognizable church” was a way of guaranteeing exactly where the Spirit was granting

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the certainty of truth. His call for obedience to Rome was neither blind submission nor ultra papalism. The importance that More gave to the divine right of papal primacy was itself an argument that provided the ability to identify visibly the “treue chyrch” with certainty. As we will see, More’s constant emphasis on authority was grounded in his belief that only visible and legitimate authority granted certainty. The Spirit did, indeed, give certainty, but to whom did the Spirit speak? According to More, Matthew 28:20 was directed to the church and not to any private individual. The promise, “Lo I am with you always, even to the end of the world,” and the assurance that “the Holy Spirit will teach you all things and lead you into every truth” were given only to the “comen knowen chyrch” or the “knowen catholyke chyrch.” This “trewe chyrche” was the one to which God promised his Spirit. The Spirit would lead the Christian into the truth because the Spirit was the guarantor of that truth.233 This was not some unknown church of the elect. This church was not, as Luther claimed, an object of faith in that which was yet unseen or the “communion of saints.” Rather, the true church was a perceptible multitude of both good and bad people about whose identity and location there could be no “dowt” and no “uncertainty.” According to More, it was against this “perceptible” church that the “gates of hell” could not prevail. Furthermore, Christ prayed that the faith of this visible church would not fail.234 More emphasized repeatedly that the visible and known church was the object of the Spirit’s revelation and illumination. The Spirit could be found only in the church, as the history of the tradition demonstrated. More framed his argument in terms of Augustine’s statement that he would not have believed the gospel if the authority of the church had not moved him. Luther had responded to these words by ﬁrst challenging the authority of the bishop of Hippo. Augustine, he wrote, was like any human being, and his words could not command assent as if they were articles of faith. However, Luther went on to interpret Augustine to mean that he had spoken of the universal church spread throughout the whole world. That which the “papists” attributed to the pope, Augustine had ascribed to the whole church; namely, the “right to judge concerning doctrines.” More never forgot that Luther had stated that “to investigate and judge about doctrine belongs to each and every Christian.” When Matthew said, “Beware of false prophets who come in sheep’s clothing,” he was telling Christians to examine all teachings and to judge their ﬁdelity to Scripture. To escape believing in false prophets, the people had “to judge between the words of God and the words of men.” In his reply to Henry, Luther stated, “to judge in this matter belongs to everyone and to each one, in order that we may distinguish between the voice of the shepherd and the voice of strangers.” He added, The Word of God is above all things. The divine majesty does not make me care at all even though a thousand Augustines, a thousand

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Cyprians, or a thousand of Henry’s churches should stand against me. God can neither err nor can he be deceived. Augustine and Cyprian, although they were all elected, were able to err and did err. If Christ says in his teaching anything about false teachers, [Matt. 24] and Peter and Paul of false apostles, who are teachers, and John speaks of “testing the spirits,” then it follows that the authority in judging, testing, and condemning, belongs to the people, and most justly. . . . For each person believes rightly or wrongly at his own risk, and, therefore, each person must be careful for his own sake that he believes correctly.235 More was horriﬁed at Luther’s dismissal of “a thousand Augustines, a thousand Cyprians.” He argued repeatedly that Augustine’s words demonstrated the authority of the visible or “knowen chyrch.” In response to Luther’s statement that the faithful must judge between the words of God and the words of men, More stressed that the church was older than Scripture. Therefore, the church determined the true scriptures from false ones. By deciding the canon, the church, which had existed from the beginning, was the judge between the “words of God and the words of men.” According to More, Augustine’s statement about being moved by the authority of the church meant that Christians could know with certainty which works were inspired precisely because the Spirit had guided the church in this task. Otherwise, More asked, how would anyone, including Luther and Tyndale, ever know which writings were certain, true, and divinely revealed? 236 From his argument that the church established Scripture, More concluded that the church was also the judge of the interpretation of Scripture. Both More and his opponents talked in terms of the church judging that which is true. But More’s point was that only the Catholic Church could not judge wrongly because, “to judge which are false doctrines belongs to that same church to which it belongs to judge which are the true scriptures.”237 More was also horriﬁed at Luther’s claim that every Christian should judge doctrine and that the whole church should distinguish the words of God from the words of men. His response to Luther on this issue led him to the more problematic issue of interpretation. We have seen that Luther made the preaching of the Gospel the most important visible sign of the church. Barnes’s most “perfayt token” of the true church was also the “worde of God preached purely, and sincerely preached,” as well as the proper administration of the sacraments. Barnes also maintained that in this church that could not err was the “congregacion of faythfull men, whiche be neyther bounde to Rome, nor to Hierusalem, nor yet to any certayne place, but it is spredde abrode throughout the holle worlde. . . .” This “holle churche can not erre” because in this church, “God suffereth not to erre, in those thynges, that belonge to saluacion.”238 Tyndale had stated that the faith of true Christians would be examined by Scripture.

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According to Tyndale, the church was the true messenger of God and always had a visible sign, “ether a present miracle or autenticke scripture.” Because miracles ceased, only the writings of the Old and New Testaments could defend Christians against false doctrine and heresies.239 However, More argued that biblicism was an inadequate basis for the certainty of authority. He knew that the problem was one of interpretation. He reminded his readers that both Luther and the Catholics had the Scriptures but obviously disagreed about their meaning. Both Luther and King Henry were citing the same texts but could not agree on what the words meant. Who was to determine which words were the “words of men” since Scripture alone was not sufﬁcient? How would the unlearned be able to interpret Scripture? Who was going to judge which person spoke according to Scripture? Seizing upon Luther’s disparagement of the Apostle James, More asked whether the ancient church could have been deceived when it approved the letter of James to be apostolic? What was to keep Luther from next questioning the Gospels or the letters of Paul? More contended that Luther was inserting uncertainty in Scripture itself. To Luther he replied, “And you who contend that nothing is certain except the sacred scripture would then be rendering nothing more uncertain than sacred scripture itself.”240 At this point, we cannot help but be reminded of Luther’s accusation that by adding the word touto, Zwingli had rendered the Scriptural text unstable and uncertain. According to More, if people followed Luther’s teaching, everything would become uncertain because “there would be as many varieties in the faith as there would be heads among the people.” Luther, More argued, tried to persuade everyone that they must believe with certainty and at their own risk so that he could win them over with the fear of danger. However, in so doing, Luther was “despising the authority of the whole church, despising the holy fathers and the doctors and all the ancient interpreters.” According to More, Luther would make each person interpret Scripture “according to his own understanding and form for himself whatever faith he chooses.” Since Luther made each person the judge of Peter and Paul, then each one “may mount the tribunal in his own heart and judge both men.” What was to keep everyone from interpreting Scripture according to his “own feeling and fancy?” Would Luther have counseled the common people to decide the truth in the Arian controversy? Would they have been qualiﬁed to do so? If everything must be judged according to the explicit teaching of Scripture, then everyone would be free “to approve, disapprove, change, condemn, reject, whenever, wherever, and as often as he pleases.” This would mean that each person would decide about “human laws, decrees of the fathers, the councils of the church and the sacraments.”241 More concluded that “liberty and safety stem from the side of the church,” but that on the other hand, captivity and the greatest danger come from Luther’s own side.” Referring to Henry’s words in the Assertio, More warned that Luther claimed to be leading Christians into the “liberty of faith,” when actually, “he imprisons them in error, leading them into

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a steep place and along trackless, uncertain, and doubtful ways, and to that extent ways full of danger.” To encourage each person to judge for himself was a practice that would only “stir up tumult from the heedless disagreement of private individuals.”242 More’s warning that Luther’s teaching would only “stir up tumult” and result in as many “varieties in faith as there as there would be heads among the people” was prophetic. In 1523 he did not have the opportunity to prove his point by referring to the Eucharistic and Anabaptist controversies that were beginning to tear Protestantism apart. But by the time Eck wrote the Enchiridion, he could gleefully point to the various Protestant divisions as evidence that the Bible alone was insufﬁcient as a ﬁnal arbitrator of truth. In his dedicatory letter to Konrad von Thüngen (1529), Eck characterized his unhappy age as full of Anabaptists, those who smashed and burned images, denied the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, and refused to baptize their children. In Eck’s view, “There is daily the diverse splitting apart of all these groups, so much that not even rabbits bear offspring more frequently then these heretics.” To describe this situation he wrote, By looking at the example taken from modern heretics we see how the Lutherans, Oecolampadians, and Zwinglians dispute about the sacrament of the Eucharist. Is it truly and spiritually the body and blood of Christ or only a ﬁgure and a sign? Who among them will be the judge? Who will ever bring them into agreement? Will it be Scripture or the church? (Apart from these, there can be no other judge.) It is not, indeed, upon Scripture, about which each one contends that he is to be the judge, that they base their foundation. For, indeed, they are all using the same identical words of Scripture. Nor do they allow Scripture to be the judge against their own doctrine but, rather, they make themselves the judges of Scripture. Therefore, the church will necessarily be the judge. . . .243 By the time More wrote his Confutation, he, too, was keenly aware of the Protestant debates about the Eucharist and saw the rise of Anabaptism. He also was very conscious of the Peasants War. More asked why all those who had Tyndale’s “felynge fayth” could not agree with one another and maintain unity. And then syth all they be by hym the very chyrche, all they muste by his deﬁnycyon of the very chirch be nedes very electes, and haue by his owne deﬁnycyon al so the very felynge fayth wryten in theyr hertes by goddes owne hande: I demaunde and aske of Tyndale therefore how yt happeneth that his holy electes & faythfull felynge folke gone out fro the catholyque chyrch, fele not all one fayth / but in great necessarye poyntes of fayth fele eche of them so contrarye

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fayth to other, that eche of theym feleth other, and eche of them calleth other false fumblynge heretykes / . . . yet theyre contrary sectes so vary betwene them selfe, that Lutheranys, Anabaptystes, Huyskyns, or Swynglianis wyth many sectes mo, wolde one byte of a nothers nose. And where as they complayne that heretyques be punyshed here / yet one secte there punysheth and kylleth a nother among them selfe.244 Both Eck and More insisted that unity was a visible sign of the church. According to Eck, the true church manifested the “unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace,” with “One Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is over all and through all and in all” (Eph. 4:1). Therefore, Eck explained, “the church is one, not outwardly but inwardly, just as the ark of Noah was one—I Peter 3:20—which was a ﬁgure of the one church. Outside of that one sealed church, no one is saved, just as those people outside the ark perished. Christ is not a bigamist: the church of the apostles and ours is one church. Before Luther was born there was a church that believed the mass was a sacriﬁce, that there were seven sacraments and all the rest. She was the bride of Christ. Therefore, let us remain with that same church. . . .”245 More recognized that the appeal to the Holy Spirit was the crux of the dispute. When appealing to the consensus found in the tradition of the church, More was isolating his Protestant opponents. Standing outside the church and the tradition, the Protestants were not relying on Scripture but on their own private interpretation of Scripture. He replied to Luther by asking, “What fruit will the Scriptures bring forth if anyone whatever claims such authority for himself that in understanding them he relies on his own interpretation in opposition to that of everyone else, so that he is inﬂuenced by no authority at all not to measure the Scriptures according to feeling and fancy?”246 More clearly perceived the weakness of basing authority on Scripture and certainty on the appeal to the Holy Spirit. More fully understood that his opponents were claiming the certainty of their Scriptural interpretation and doctrine on the basis of the interior teaching of the Spirit. He recognized that this was an appeal to an intimate or experiential certainty and authority. Tyndale, he said, believed that he knew the truth in the same manner as did John the Baptist and the other prophets: namely, by “the secrete inwarde techynge of the spyryte of god.” Relying on John 6:45, Tyndale had referred continually to those who were “all taughte of god” and to that “sure felynge” of having been instructed by the Spirit of God, or to the “secrete inspyracyon” and “secrete inwarde mocyon.” Ridiculing this idea, More said, Now good chrysten readers here haue ye fyrste herde the wordes of god, wyth wych Tyndale wold make vs wene that he proueth vs hys felynge fayth of all hys heresyes / & after haue ye herde the wordes of

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hym selfe declarynge the effecte of the same, in hym selfe so depe & so surely wryten in hys herte, that all the prechours in the worlde can not now scrape it out, no more then make hym byleue that the fyre were colde in whyche he had burned hys fynger.247 More also chastised Luther and Tyndale for their presumptuous use of Romans 8:16, Galatians 4:6, and John 6:45. In More’s view these verses, so important to the reformers in terms of the certainty of salvation, were misused by Luther, Tyndale, and others. To say that the Spirit bears witness to our spirit so that we know ourselves to be the sons of God meant, for More, only that believers were given the comfort “of good hope” as long as they did good and charitable deeds. But when they “fall into sin and walk in the ﬂesh, they ceased to be the sonnes of god.” Exasperated, More insisted that this verse had nothing to do with Tyndale’s “felying fayth” or with his alleged certainty of salvation or his supposed ability to understand Scripture. Even if Tyndale was deluded enough to believe that because of his feeling faith he had spoken to Christ “mouth to mouth,” how could he prove such a thing? He could not point to any miracles and had only his own beliefs to support him. More rejected Tyndale’s distinction between “historical” and “feeling” faith. For Tyndale, historical faith was only a cognitive assent to the truths of the faith. According to Tyndale, Judas had only an “hystorcall fayth.” But “felyng fayth” belonged only to the elect. More also believed strongly that the Gospel must be written in the heart. This inner Gospel was the source of faith. However, it was infused into the hearts of the faithful who were within the universal church of Christ. The “new law” had been inscribed on the heart inwardly by the “ﬁnger of God.” In a marginal gloss to the ﬁrst edition of the Responsio, More added, “The gospel is written with greatest certainty in the hearts of men.”248 Nonetheless, this inward faith was present only through the Spirit and solely to the true church, which the Spirit promised to guide throughout her history. Most importantly, such inward faith could not be claimed outside the church as authority for one’s interpretation of Scripture.249 As More wrote against Luther, But the church of Christ did not doubt that whatever the Holy Spirit inspired in the church was undoubtedly true, whether it was contained in scripture or not. Indeed, if any apparently contradictory scriptural text was alleged, the faith written in her heart taught that this text was insufﬁciently understood by those to whom it seemed so contradictory, since it was a matter of absolute certainty that Christ does not fail His church on articles of faith, nor does the truthful Spirit of God contradict Himself.250 More attacked both Luther and Tyndale regarding their claim to the Holy Spirit. In his treatise to Henry, Luther had written, “I am certain that I have my

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teachings from heaven, I who have triumphed even over him who has more strength and cunning in his little ﬁngernail than do all the popes and kings and doctors.”251 More simply could not stop mocking the claim that Luther “had his teachings from heaven.” He answered Luther by sarcastically remarking, “But God has of course opened to your seeking, according to the text ‘Seek and you shall receive,’ for you are accustomed to boast that you are certain you have your teaching from heaven, spiritual man that you are, you have, of course, sought with sure conﬁdence that the twofold spirit of Elias might be breathed into you, a man into whom it is clear that several myriads of evil spirits have thrust themselves.”252 He also taunted Luther by saying, Certain, then, indeed most certain that he has his doctrines from heaven, as men who sleep are certain, indeed most certain that everything they dream is true; or rather certain, indeed most certain that he lies with his eyes wide open saying that his teachings are from heaven, whereas his own conscience murmurs to him that they have been let loose in him by the deceits of demons; he curses any man and angels who contradict his teachings. . . . His only cry is: “let all be anathema who attack my teachings, because I am certain that I have my teachings from heaven.”253 More was acutely and insistently aware that the claim to a spiritually inspired certitude was a very questionable basis for authority. Not surprisingly, he took up the issue of who was the “spiritual man” of I Corinthians 2:15. In the Responsio, More maintained that Luther had ﬁrst placed authority in the pope, then in a council, and ﬁnally in the people. Applying I Corinthians 2:15 to all Christians, Luther had argued that every believer was a spiritual man. In More’s view, Luther was saying that the power of discerning the truth belonged not to “men as a whole” but to individuals. Following Henry, More said that Luther must be “exceedingly spiritual since he admits that the Holy Spirit is nowhere but in his own bosom.”254 Tyndale had also cited I Corinthians 2:15 as applying to his authority to interpret Scripture and judge doctrine.255 Referring to Tyndale’s use of this verse, More wrote, “but he sayeth that ye spyrytuall iudgeth all thynges . . . Tyndale taketh that high power vnto his wurshypfull spirytuall sorte / sayeng the spirtuall iudgeth all thynges, and his spyrte sercheth the depe secretys of god.” Repeatedly, More jeered at their claims by saying that, “Tyndale and his felowes be spyrytuall & electys” and Luther, “beynge specyally borne agayne & new created of the spyryte.” Against their claim to search “the botome, the pyth, the quycke, the lyfe, the spiryte, the mary, and very cause why / and so iudge all thynge,” More cited Romans 11:33, “Oh the depths of the wisdom and knowledge of God.” More wondered who these people presumed themselves to be that they claimed to have searched the “depe secretys of god” and thereby possessed the true and certain understanding of Scripture and doctrine.256

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More perceived that although these claims to the Spirit ﬂattered the laity, they also left individual Christians with the burden of discerning the truth. Combining the charge of an invisible church with the idea of individual spiritual judgment, More concluded that everyone was left judge the truth by himself. This meant that just as each one must “truste vnto hym selfe,” he would also be left to his own deceptions. More portrayed the followers of Luther, Tyndale, and the other reformers as people wandering about, searching for an invisible, secret, unknown church, and individually having to judge between true and false doctrine. This “spiritual man” stood alone at the mercy of false teaching, or “dampnable errour,” and was continually in danger of being “deceyued,” “bywyched,” or “bygyled.”257 Above all, this believer could never know with any certainty what was false and what was true. He could never know whether he correctly “distinguished the words of God from the words of men.” Standing alone, this individual Christian was deprived of all means of certitude. More portrayed the followers of Luther and the other reformers as wandering alone into deception and uncertainty, into “wasteless tracks” searching for an unknowable church. Against the lonely and chaotic uncertainty of the Protestants, More posed the ultimate means of certainty, “the sure way that neuer shall deceyue.”258 The alternative to wandering, tumult, divisions, deception, and uncertainty was the “refuge” offered by the church. In More’s view, “safety” lay in the certainty granted by knowing exactly where the Holy Spirit guided the church into the truth. More reasoned, the Spirit had granted this certitude throughout a visible and knowable history and by means of a perceptible, visible, and recognizable church. He argued that “all these infallible means of techying of the trowth & perserucecyon of the trowth, hath ben made vnto the chyrche of Cryst by hym that is hym self trowthe & therefore can not lye.” According to More, as long as the church dwelt on earth, there shalbe many nought, yit shall alway the doctrine of his chyrche with which hym selfe hath alway promised to be & lede it into euery trouth, be so good and so sure, that vnto those that shall be well wyllynge to lerne the trouthe, it shall alwaye be knowen where they may lerne it. . . . And this chyrche must be that knowen catholique chyrche / of whiche from age to age the scripture hath ben receiued, and the people taught/and not a chyrche unknowen of onely good men or electes onely / in whciche is neither precher nor people assembled to preche vnto / . . . , among whom can be no suche assemble / for no man can know where to call a nother, nor how to know another, yf they cam to gyther by happe.259 To argue this position, More took up all those biblical verses so often used by the reformers to denote an experiential certainty and applied them to the visible church in her existence throughout history. To be “taught by God” or to have the

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Holy Spirit written in one’s heart was not to have some “felynge fayth” or “secrete inwarde instincte of the spiryte of god,” within the soul of the individual believer who stood outside the church. John 6:45 referred to Christ and the new law. Christ gathered his church together and taught his church true doctrine so that “by the spyyrte of god,” they would “haue the lawe, that is the trewe bylyefe, good hope, and well wurkynge cheryte, gracyously wryten in them.” When Jeremiah spoke of the law written in the heart, he, too, was talking about the “chirch of Christ.” God would write this law on the heart through the preaching of the clergy within the true church. To insist solely on inward inspiration or revelation was, according to More, to bypass any need for the church. The Spirit, he explained, did work “inwardly,” but only within, and on behalf, of the true church. Wondering who would distinguish the orthodox from the heretic, More asked, “Will God teach him inwardly?” More answered that God would have taught individuals inwardly in the way Luther and Tyndale claimed, “[h]ad He not left a church to whom he sends those who need to be taught.”260 Within that church the Spirit “will incline you inwardly and by His inspiration direct your hearts into all truth.” According to More, “the gospel was written in the heart by the Spirit with a certainty that could not be destroyed.” However, this “heart” was the church. “On the heart, therefore, in the church of Christ, there remains inscribed the true gospel of Christ which was written there before all the books of the Evangelists. There God has inscribed his faith so indelibly that no deceptions of heretics can erase.”261 More argued his case for certitude by opposing the individual to the many, the private to the public, and the fragmented to the uniﬁed. Against some alleged “spiritual man” who judged all things “by hym selfe,” More posited the consensus of the church over time. His emphasis on consensus is a well-known theme of his ecclesiology.262 Our purpose is to demonstrate how this constant appeal to consensus functioned as the ultimate proof for the certainty granted by the Spirit. In More’s view, the tradition of the church presented a uniﬁed harmonious teaching. This consensus, or concordia, conformed to the Vicentian Canon, since it referred to that which was believed by all people throughout the world and throughout history. Most importantly, this unity and continuity of the faith was made possible only through the action of the Spirit. Central to More’s reasoning was the belief that the natural course of history would have produced discord and the separation of the church into various sects. However, because, as Matthew 28:20 said, Jesus promised that the Spirit would be with the church until the end of the age, and because of the Spirit, the unity of the church would prevail. More repeatedly cited Psalm 67:7 to support this argument: “The Spirit of God makes those who dwell in a house to be of one mind.” It is abundantly evident that Christ breathed out His Spirit on the holy doctors of the church, whose teaching and life He has conﬁrmed by many miracles. Therefore, even if not a single one, being human, has

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not at some time been in error, . . . nevertheless, when they have agreed on a point in such great numbers through so many ages, it must not be doubted that they reached this agreement by the inspiration of the divine Spirit who makes those who dwell in a house to be of one mind.263 In More’s reasoning, where the Spirit of God was present, there was unity of mind or consensus. Indeed, such unity could be explained solely by the activity of the Spirit. It was in such passages that More spoke frequently about the interior action of the Spirit. Attacking the use of John 6:45 by Luther and Tyndale, More insisted on the absurdity of believing that a private individual could be “taught by God,” at the expense of the church as a whole or the “common corps of Christendom.” Interior certainty and teaching belonged not to the individual but to the church as a whole. He explained that the Spirit inwardly inspired the church so that all Christians would be inwardly “taught of God” and would understand God’s truth correctly and with certainty. In opposition to the various sects and divisions within the reformation, More portrayed the unity wrought by the Spirit. For this very thing, Luther, which we have so often dinned into your ears and you did not wish to hear, that the Holy Spirit of God interiorly inspires His church with truth, that that interior Spirit renders all taught of God, that he alone makes those who dwell in a house to be of one mind, that He teaches so that they understand the same thing, judge the same, investigate the same, prove the same, confess the same, follow the same, teach the same, that that interior Spirit is the only one who makes men who dwell in a house to be of one mind, so that those who are outside the house are not of one mind but divided by heresies and sects.264 Biblical verses about the interior teaching of the Spirit in the “heart” must, in More’s view, always refer to the inward inclination of the whole church with all its individual members. He insisted that the Spirit had not failed to teach his church. Therefore, “these truthes had the apostles, the martyrs, the confessours, the holy doctours of Crystis chyrche, and the comen crysten people of euery age from Chrystes dethe hitherto. And in this comen knowen chyrche of christendome . . . hath euer the true iudgement remained & the ryght savored taste / and neuer loste any of those heretyqyes these necessarye truthes. . . .” To apply such verses to individuals, particularly those outside the church, contradicted Christ’s promise to send the Spirit to “lead you into all truth.” Interpreting the word you as the pronoun her, More attributed this verse to the church. Tell me, what is the signiﬁcance of Christ’s words, “when the Spirit, the Paraclete, comes he will lead you into all truth”? He did not say, “he will write to you,” or, “He will speak to you audibly,” but, “He will

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lead you”; that is, he will incline you inwardly and by His inspiration direct your hearts into all truth. But tell me, whom will the Holy Spirit lead into all truth? Is it the apostles only, to whom Christ was then speaking personally? . . . Who then will doubt that it was of the church that Christ said that the Holy Spirit would lead her into all truth?265 More’s argument was that the Spirit had inspired the prophets, the evangelists, and the whole church, and has continued to inspire all Christians so that they may be “taught by God and his spyrite, that shall wryte the new law the ryght fayth in the hartes of hys chyrche.” Since the Spirit has always guided the church throughout time, all subsequent traditions, customs, decrees, and doctrines were equally inspired. The Spirit was not sent only to the apostles or the early church because “Criste no more promsyed to send the holy goost vnto the apostles onely / then he promised to be with the apostles onely, all the days vnto the ende of the worlde.”266 The promise extended to the present church, the church that stretched back in time through succession and tradition to the apostles. More repeatedly asked, “If you trust an individual member, why do you not trust the members taken as a whole?” More enjoyed nothing so much as juxtaposing his opponent as a lone ﬁgure standing against the consensus of the universal church. Luther had accused Henry of supporting of his beliefs with only the decrees of men, the glosses of the fathers, the practices and the customs of the ages. He insisted that the authority of the “church of the multitude and the length of time” did not give the church authority to establish articles faith or institute sacraments not found in Scripture. Luther rejected the power and weight of the tradition by asking himself the question that would become a famous accusation: “The Thomistic asses have nothing to bring forward except a multitude of men and ancient usage; that then when someone presents the Scriptures they say, ‘You are the most foolish of all men; are you alone wise?’”267 More was simply dumbfounded that Luther or anyone could willingly stand alone against the historical consensus of the church. For anyone to place himself outside the safety of the church was to believe that God had inspired him alone. Mocking the idea that God would teach an individual alone “inwardly,” More argued, “The man who contemns her [the church], persuading himself that he alone is such a darling of God that he alone is especially taught by God something different from what the church publicly believes and professes, then, however humble he may think himself, he is surely convicted of arrogance before God, since he believes himself to be of greater concern to God than the whole church is . . . and he does not believe God’s promise to the church, ‘I shall be with you till the consummation of the teaching.’” If the authority of the tradition did not sufﬁce then, More asked, why should the authority of Luther sufﬁce? Did Luther realize that every heretic believed

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“hym self onely right?” According to More, Luther believed that he alone could not err. Luther, he said, counted the “whole church as straw” in comparison to himself so that “against everyone and everything he alone is to be believed in all matters.” So, too, More mocked Tyndale for thinking that he alone was the “spiritual man who judged all things.” Like Luther, Tyndale wanted everyone to think that, “we sholde byleue that all crysten people haue hytherto byleued wronge.”268 More was particularly contemptuous of the idea that Tyndale’s “feylnge fayth” should be believed over and against the entire tradition of the church. What did all the fathers and doctors do, he asked, before Tyndale came along with his “feylnge fayth?” In response to such arrogant claims, More asked both Luther and Tyndale where the church had been throughout history until they were born. This argument was a favorite of both More and Eck. Referring to II Corinthians 4:3, Eck wrote, “But if our Gospel is hidden, it is hidden to those who are lost” [II Cor. 4:3]. If the Holy Scripture is so completely clear, it is remarkable that the holy fathers, who read it so frequently, did not understand it for 1200 years. But if it was obscure to Augustine, Jerome, Bernard, and Thomas, how will it be clear to Lutheran laymen? In vain God sent his son, in vain the Holy Spirit, in vain the apostles, martyrs, doctors, confessors, if through Luther alone the light of truth was to be revealed. Why then did God not send one Luther for everybody?269 More repeated this same taunt countless times. When Luther stated that the presence of the “true Gospel” was the surest sign of the church, More answered that the Catholic church had carefully considered the meaning of Scripture by walking in the footsteps of the holy fathers: But you alone preach the gospel truly and before you no one did so. For you carefully weigh the scriptures and rely on yourself alone in regard to their meaning; nor do you rely on any of the holy fathers, knowing that, however holy they were, they were nevertheless men and often erred, as you often proclaim; whereas all the while you know, I suppose, that you are not a man at all, but you are certain that you have your doctrine from heaven, and you are certain that you can err no more than an ass—I meant to say an angel.270 In his Dialogue Concerning Heresies, More attacked the novelty of Luther’s doctrine of justiﬁcation by faith alone. This teaching, More argued, must be a “great mystery newe founden oute,” and not known before by the church. He further argued that the Christian should believe the church of 1500 years above the interpretation of men like Luther and Tyndale. As did Eck, More asked why

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no one had understood the Scriptures, which were allegedly so “playne & easy,” in the way that Luther and Tyndale did “now so sodeynly.”271 His question to Luther was the same question he posed to all his opponents: If you argue that God is indicating to you at the present time so many, such useful, such necessary truths, why should you think that He concealed all these truths for such a long time from such holy men to the great detriment of his whole church? But I also ask this of you: If the church has not existed during this whole time among these people who obey the pope and have so long obeyed him, tell me where has it been these past ﬁve hundred years before you were born?272 This type of argument from the history of the church was not a debate about the meaning of historical decrees, councils, the antiquity of papal supremacy, or even the interpretation of the fathers. This appeal to history was an argument about providence. Since John 16:13 was a promise made by Christ that the Spirit would lead the church into all truth, and Matthew 28:20 was a promise that Christ would be with the church until the end of the world, the denial of the consensus or of tradition was a denial of providence. Luther, More said, “does not believe God’s promise to the church, ‘I shall be with you till the consummation of the world.’” If Luther or Tyndale alone were right, then where was the Spirit of Truth throughout the history of the church? Did Christ fail his church? Did the Spirit abandon the church for the last 500, 800, 1,000, or 1,500 years? For Luther or Tyndale to stand against the authority of the ecclesial tradition was to accuse Christ of breaking his promises. Against Luther’s dismissal of the authority of the fathers, More stated, For the writings of our predecessors represent to us the faith of their own times. Nor do we have any other way of speaking with the dead in order that we can know the content of their faith. Therefore, out of the books of those who lived before us we ﬁnd out that knowledge and thus we discover that this faith which Luther attacks is not, as he falsely asserts, new or proper to any one nation, but that it is the public faith of the whole church through many ages. That this church is true and unable to err and be deceived in a matter of such great importance was promised by Him who said, “The Paraclete, when He shall have come, shall lead you into all truth.”273 More made the same point against Tyndale by saying, “Tindall maketh God a breker of the promises, whiche he hath made vnto his church in scrypture, to be therwith al dayes vnto the end of ye worlde assistent himselfe & with himselfe his holy spirite sent by himself to teach his churche & to leade it into euery

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trouth. This promise had he by Tindalles tale broken if he had suffered this eyghte hundred yere, yt doctrine of his church to be false, & fallen into so many dampnable errours, as Tindall layeth to our charge.”274 In opposition to Luther, More insisted that unless the Paraclete has guided the church throughout “so many ages in the times of the holy fathers,” then one must conclude that “Christ abandoned his church, and that the faith failed immediately after the apostles, contrary to the text which said, ‘Christ prayed that the faith of the church would not fail,’ and as though truth itself were a liar like Luther when He [Christ] said He would be with the church even to the consummation of the world.” Defending the doctrine of transubstantiation, More again maintained that the doctrine was not new but, rather, was the “uninterrupted faith of the whole church from the time of Christ’s passion.” To challenge this ancient truth was to believe “that Christ has abandoned His church through so many centuries—that is, the Truth has made false promises or the Spirit of Truth has taught false doctrine. . . .”275 Against the reformers, More consistently justiﬁed the oral tradition and the changes made by the church throughout history by equating the Spirit with providence. Those things that Luther and Tyndale called the “words of men” or the “traditions of men” were actually the result of the Spirit guiding the church throughout the ages. The teachings of the church, including sacramental rites and such practices as pilgrimages and the veneration of the saints, were simply not the “words of men.” All these teachings and practices were inspired by the Spirit over time. The certainty of the truth of the traditions or the consensus of the church was guaranteed by the promise that until the end of the world the Spirit would lead the church into all truth. Tyndale had presented a picture of the history of the church in terms of the continual failure and reawakening of the faith. Generation after generation had fallen into idolatry. Moses left a glorious church that clung to the word of God. After a period of time, however, the people fell again into idolatry. Even after God sent various prophets, the people could not persevere in the faith. The Jews were kept from the outward idolatry of the heathen but fell into the inward idolatry of a false faith and a trust in their own works and traditions. After Christ and the apostles, the clergy took over because of their love of money. Christ, Peter, and others had warned the Christians how they would “begyle and leade out of the right waye / all them that had no loue to folow and liue aftir the trouth.”276 Against this picture, More presented a history of the “common knowen catholyke chyrch”—that is, the mixed body that Augustine had traced in the City of God. Augustine had followed the history of the church and the pagans. More’s sacred history transformed this duality into the history of the orthodox Catholics and the heretics. To be more precise, he divided history into that of the visible true church and the “counterfeit” invisible church of the heretics. The true church was visible throughout history, unlike the church of

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his opponents, which was not “a certayne secrete scattered congregacyon vnknowen to all the worlde.” Rather than the invisible church of his opponents, More described the progress extending from the “uncreate church” of the Trinity through the fall of Lucifer, the sin of Adam and Eve, the Flood, Moses, Abraham, Aaron, the kings of Israel, the judges, priests, prophets, and kings until the time of Christ and into the present time. Although this “same knowen church decaied, and waxed weale in fayth,” nevertheless, throughout its history God kept his church and preserved the truth of her doctrine. In More’s understanding, God continually preserved and taught his church throughout the ages. It is telling that More repeatedly emphasized the fact that the true church was the church which was led into all truth so that “no man coulde be deceiued.” This protection against deception was guaranteed by the fact that God made “his chirche so open and so well knowen, that no man coulde but know hit.” God provided for the church because, unless one was willingly blind, this church “was knowen for the very chyrche of god.” John 16:13 proved the continuity and infallibility of this visible church. Therefore, More argued, the Spirit would lead this visible church into “euery trouth” so that those willing to learn “shall alwaye be knowen where they may lerne it.”277 This mixed visible body had always been guided by the Spirit into all truth. This church was a church one could “trust,” have the “surety of trew doctrine,” and where one would never be “beygyled in doctrine.” This church, visible and known, was a “questionlesse and cleare vndowted chirche,” that “can not be hyd,” and is “without any errour,” a church where “the Christian can not be decyued therein.” As More assured his readers, Christ would not send his follower “where he sholde be bygyled in doctrine to ye dampnacyon of his soule.”278 Moreover, this was the visible or known church that had withstood heresy and had been guided by the Spirit of truth throughout the last 1,500 years.279 More’s polemics against Luther, Tyndale, Barnes, and others were more than a searing critique of their teaching. His polemics offered an alternative form of certitude. Amidst the criticisms against various positions and beliefs, More presented a form of certitude based on the joining together of history, ecclesiology, and the Holy Spirit. In More’s understanding of certitude, believers must ﬁrst know where the “Spirit of Truth” resided before they could ﬁnd the truth of speciﬁc doctrines, such as the Eucharist or justiﬁcation. The believer had to know which church could not err. That infallible church had to be the only church to which God sent the Holy Spirit. Furthermore, that church had to have a visible form so that it could be recognized by the believer. Finally, the Spirit had to have guided that church throughout history, long before men like Luther and Tyndale were ever born. To identify this church was, as More stated, “wherevpon all the matter moste especially dependeth.” In this church, and only in this church, could the believer ﬁnd “the sure trouth and certeynte” of all the articles of faith necessary to salvation.

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This true church did not grant the individual the certitude of salvation. Nonetheless, it did grant something that, in More’s view, was much more fundamental. This church granted the certitude of truth. It is striking that More equated the promise of the Spirit of Truth with the role of the Comforter. Unlike the reformers, he did not distinguish the role of the Comforter as one who gave the assurance of salvation from the Spirit of Truth who enabled the believer to ﬁnd the truth. To be within the sphere of infallible and knowable truth was precisely the “comfort” given by the Spirit. More asked how the Spirit could be a Comforter if he was not leading the church into the certainty of truth. If the spyryte of god gouernynge the chyrche, and ledynge it in to all trouth, put vs not in surety and certaynte of the trouth: how could he be to vs as he is named paracletus, that is, a comforter, yf we were lefte so comfortelesse that we were vncertayne whyther the hole chyrche were in damnable errour in stede of the ryght fayth.280 In the midst of so many different factions and churches, More took the burden of judging the truth off the back of the individual believer. The Spirit of truth was promised to the church whom the Spirit promised to guide. Consequently, the believer could trust the church to decide the canon, to interpret the Scriptures, to distinguish true from false miracles, to recognize the truth of oral tradition, to establish true doctrine, to discern heresy, and, of course, to bring about the unity of mind on all of these decisions. This church could never err on all of these important issues. Furthermore, the Spirit has done this throughout history and would continue to do so in the present and the future. As More stated repeatedly, God would not fail or abandon his church and its vicar. “The trewe fayth is a thynge by the spyrite of god accordynge to Crystes promyse perpetually taught vnto hys chyrche, and therefore canne neuer fayle . . .” This alone was the “sure way” to put oneself “out of all perplexyte.” Although the certainty of the truth could never be found outside the Catholic church, the believer could be assured and certain that within the church, truth was taught, “For the truste of Chrystes promise made thereto, that hymselfe & hys holy spyryte wolde for euer be resident therein, and teche it euery necessary truth.” It is crucial to understand that while More endlessly exhorted his readers to submit to the authority of the church, this authority was about more than obedience. Writing against Luther, More articulated the principle that would guide his thought on ecclesiology, namely, that authority gave certainty. Criticizing Luther’s invisible and spiritual church, More argued, The church needs to be recognized much more so that one can know by whom the gospel is being preached, so that if different persons preach different things, the authority of the church may give the

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listener certainty as to the true preacher of the gospel and reject the false one, just as her authority, even by Luther’s own admission, gives the reader certainty as to the identity of the true Scriptures.281 As More stated, the “unanimous authority [of the church] gives everyone certainty about the true scriptures and about the necessary articles of faith. . . .” Only in this “known and perceptible” church could it be “manifestly certain that this common and perceptible multitude of men professing the name and faith of Christ is the Catholic church by whose teaching the scripture is determined and the faith is learned and recognized with certainty.” This church alone could “put the people in certentye” because God’s spirit would protect the church so that it could not “be deceyued.”282 More’s arguments about certitude were grounded in the conviction that the Spirit was the agent of certainty and spoke only to the church. As this church moved throughout history, the Spirit was “assisting” and leading her into “every necessary truth.” The recognition of that church and of her authority thereby provided the Christian believer with certainty. For More, it was perfectly obvious that there could be no comfort without certainty of truth. For More, authority was certainty. Equating “comfort” with “truth,” More responded to Tyndale that Christ promised the Spirit so as not to leave men “comfortelesse” but, rather, that they could be “certain” and “sure.” Equating the comfort provided by the Spirit with the certainty of truth, More wrote, And he sayd also to them / that this comforter, this holy goost the spyryte of trouth/sholde be sent to abyde with them for euer / which can not be mente but of the hole chyrche. For the holy gost was not sent hyther into the erthe here to dwell with the appostles for euer. . . . Nowe yf the sypryte of trouthe shall dwell in the chyrche for euer / howe can the chyrche erre in perceyuynge of the trouth.283 The concept of promise was as central to More as it was to Luther. However, More was referring to a different promise from the German reformer. The promise to which More clung was the promise that the Spirit would guide the church into the certainty of truth and would continue to do so until the end of the world. More argued that it was Luther who failed to believe or trust the promise of God to be with the church “until the consummation of the world.” His method of argument was in many signiﬁcant ways similar to that of his Protestant opponents. For More, as for his opponents, if a belief or doctrine left one uncertain, then it was, by deﬁnition, false. Therefore, More repeatedly tried to reduce the teachings of men like Luther and Tyndale to uncertainty. However, More differed from his opponents about which the believer could be certain. More did not believe in the certainty of salvation. As noted above, however, More shared with his adversaries the fundamental assumption that it

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was the Spirit who granted certitude. He stood solidly within the Catholic tradition when he spoke of the councils as gathered in the Spirit and the decrees of the church as being dependent on the knowledge granted by the guidance of the Spirit. Now, however, this traditional teaching centered on the absolute certainty of that knowledge in the face of so many competing claims to truth. The idea of infallibility was, of course, not new in the sixteenth century. What was important was the emphasis laid on the certainty inherent in the assurance that the church could not err in matters necessary to salvation. The importance of ecclesiology in the debates about certainty was that Catholicism also offered the certainty of faith but it was faith in the knowable place where one could ﬁnd the truth. In More’s reasoning, the authoritative consensus of the church guaranteed a Spirit-inspired certainty about the articles of faith. This certitude of truth, based on the unfailing promise of the Spirit, could never be found outside the church. Doubt about one’s salvation was appropriate. But doubt about teaching, the sacraments, or the “articles of the faith” was eliminated. As More wrote, “it is dampnable to dwell in doute.” The church cured this doubt by providing a “sure and vndoutable refuge” in which God kept the believer “saufe” against the danger of error. God did not leave man uncertain. As More promised, “But now yf we maye onys knowe whyche of all these is our very mother [church], then we are saufe & sure.”284 And, ﬁnally, like his opponents, More was preoccupied with the fear of deception. Repeatedly, he characterized the church as that body which, like God, “could not be deceived,” or “beguiled.” The heretics were those who “wolde bywych you wylyly.” Tyndales’s The Wicked Mammon was a book, “by whyche many a man hath ben bygyled.” Like the devil himself, these heretics took delight “to bygyle good people, and brynge theyr soules into euerlastynge torment without any maner wynngnge.”285 For More, the “public faith of the catholic church (which scripture testiﬁes to be certain and true and unable to be deceived even apart from scriptures), has been such for many centuries; since the clear words of Christ also prove the same faith. . . .”286 More assured his readers that, “Of this chyrch we can not be deceyued, nor of the right faith can we not be deceyued whyle we cleue to this chirch / syth this chyrch is it in to which god hath gyuen his spyryt of fayth.” The correct interpretation of Scripture, as determined by the church, showed the heretics that “the comen consent of Crystes catholyke chyrche can not in crystes very trew fayth erre and be dampnably deceyued.”287 He who believed the meaning of Scripture taught by the church “maye be sure that he can not be deceyued / but that yf a false techer wold lede men out of the ryght fayth, the chyrche of Cryste shall reproue hym and condempne hym, and put the people in certentye.” For More, all certainty could be found by “resting” in the church. Only by staying in the refuge of the “thys great knowen congrgacyon” would believers be “saufe agaynste all suche parell”; namely, the danger of deception. Here one would ﬁnd the true articles of faith as things that are “certayne/sure/and stable,” including “the surest rules that can be founden for the ryght interpretacyon of holy scrypture.”288

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If we now turn back brieﬂy to the Council of Trent, we may be able to discern its understanding and offer of certainty, which existed not in the decrees on justiﬁcation but in its statements on authority. Accordingly, the Creed of the Council of Trent (1564) stated I resolutely accept and embrace the apostolic and ecclesiastical traditions and the other practices and regulations of that same church. In the same manner I accept sacred Scripture according to the meaning which has been held by holy Mother Church and which she now holds. It is her prerogative to pass judgment on the true meaning and interpretation of sacred Scriptures. And I will never accept or interpret Scripture in a manner different from the unanimous agreement of the fathers. I accept and profess without hesitation all the doctrines handed down, deﬁned, and explained by the sacred canons and ecumenical councils, and especially those of this most holy Council of Trent. . . . I promise, vow, and swear that, with the help of God, I shall most constantly hold and profess this true Catholic faith, outside of which no one can be saved and which I now freely profess and truly hold.289 Under the governance and guidance of the Holy Spirit, the church was to “set forth the true and ancient doctrine regarding faith and the sacraments” so that it could “apply a remedy to all the heresies and the other most grievous troubles with which the church of God is now miserably agitated and rent into many and various parts.” The Council was to “pluck up by the roots those tares of horrible errors and schisms, which the enemy has, in these calamitous times, sown in the doctrine of the faith.” To extirpate the many and “most pernicious heresies,” the Council was to declare the truth of doctrine and morals. The decrees of Trent were supposed to withstand dissent because of the promise that the Spirit guided the Council. The Creed of the Council of Trent, therefore, proved a ﬁtting conclusion by guaranteeing that “holy Mother Church” had not, and could not, err. Within her faith, therefore, the certainty of truth could “safely and surely” be found. By the time of Trent, the arguments of the controversialists had coalesced into a doctrine and promise of certainty; that is, the promise of the Spirit to guide the church into all truth had been met. In the midst of so many contradictory and opposing interpretations of Scripture, claims to spiritual inspiration, and attempts to identify the church, More and his fellow controversialists saw that the way to “escape deception” was the task of ecclesiology. Escaping deception was, indeed, the primary role of the church. More continually reminded his readers that God had not left “euery man perplexed in dowte and out of certaynte.”290 The Spirit of God, who was the giver of certitude, governed the church and led it into the truth and, therefore,

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could not leave the believer in doubt. To do so would mean that God had forsaken his church, and left her without a “cure” for error, deception, and heresy. Safety against beguilement and deception, therefore, lay in knowing where the Holy Spirit was present to secure true doctrine with certitude. To be outside this sphere of safety was to wander in bewitchment and error along “paths.” The adjective “trackless” perfectly suited all heretics because it depicted an unworn path where no one in the history of the tradition had ever walked. This wandering person would inevitably fall into the devil’s trap of deception. Not understanding that he was deceived, the Christian would come under the power of the “father of lies.” Perhaps the warning that would resonate most in coming years of the troubled sixteenth century was More’s question about which spirit really inspired Luther. Was his teaching from heaven or from hell? Was he a disciple of Christ or a disciple of Satan? More was determined to show “what spirt inspired the man.”291

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5 Experientia The Great Age of the Spirit

When Martin Luther remarked that experience made one a theologian, he exempliﬁed the spirituality and the problems encountered in the early modern era. It was an age yearning for an intensiﬁed, spiritualized religion. Central to the arguments about both the certainty of salvation and the certainty of authority were claims to the experience of the Spirit. We have analyzed the ways in which the reformers repeatedly spoke about “feeling” the spirit of adoption and thereby knowing the certainty of salvation. Zwingli described the way in which the believer could be sure “by personal experience” that he had been “taught by God” and, therefore, know both that he was saved and that he understood Scripture correctly. Müntzer raised the need for experience to a new and even more intense level. In so doing, he argued that the person who had experienced God’s testing could feel the certainty of authentic faith and could “pronounce ﬂawless judgment on everything.” Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, believed that the ability to cry “Abba! Father!” meant that one experienced the benevolence of God’s salvation and could judge with certainty “about all laws and doctrines, about our own lives and those of others.” Calvin repeatedly deﬁned faith as the assurance of God’s goodness that requires “our truly feeling its sweetness and experiencing it in ourselves.” The fact that the Gospel of John named the Spirit both the “Comforter” and the “Truth” secured the role of the Spirit as the giver of certitude in matters of both salvation and interpretive authority. The importance of the Spirit in these discussions always involved the spiritual claim to an experiential knowledge. This is not to say

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that all experiences were understood to be identical, to be granted in the same way, or to produce the same knowledge or feeling. In this chapter we concentrate on those texts that emphasize an experiential knowledge, often but not always, associated with certainty. As Luther and the other reformers repeated, faith was both knowledge and a sapientia experimentalis. The role of experience has been a controversial element in Reformation scholarship, the bulk of which has focused on Luther. In his seminal two-volume work, The Reformation in Germany (1939–1940), Joseph Lortz made the accusation that, “Down to his roots, Luther was cast in a subjectivist mold.” Granting that Luther’s intentions were deeply religious, Lortz still concluded that the development of the German Reformer’s thought was based on his personal experience. According to Lortz, despite Luther’s efforts to abandon himself to God and his Word, he neither escaped subjectivism nor became a “hearer in the full sense of the word.”1 This charge of subjectivism has haunted Reformation scholarship. As we have seen, scholars have refuted Lortz’s accusation by appealing to Luther’s belief in the objective test of Scripture, his understanding of the ofﬁce imposed on him by his doctorate, his understanding of Scriptural interpretation, and his use of the tradition. Ecclesiology has also been invoked in Luther’s defense. According to Hendrix, Luther’s theology was “anything but subjectively oriented” because ecclesiological concerns lay at the heart of his theological development.2 Bengt Hägglund argued that, far from advocating an individualistic notion of scriptural interpretation, Luther insisted that the “evidence” of Scripture could be recognized only within the church. The decisive judge about the meaning of Scripture was not the teaching ofﬁce of the individual but, rather, the self-authentication of Scripture in the words of faith. Michael Baylor maintained that Luther was “not essentially subjective or circular in his theology, and neither did he credit the conscience with any independent right to determine for itself what is religious truth.” Luther’s subjective sense of certainty of his beliefs did not function as a “criterion for the truth of these convictions. It was the fact that Luther was captive to the Word that forced him to resist human authorities such as popes and councils.”3 The fact that Lortz hit a nerve is also clear in the recognition that his work has received. In 1987 a group of scholars published their reﬂections on the continuing signiﬁcance of Lortz’s writings. Bernard Lohse valued Lortz’s interpretation of the Reformation because of the importance he placed on Luther’s theology. For Lohse, this emphasis stood as a cautionary tale to those who would explain the Reformation mainly as an event in social history, particularly in the social changes that occurred at the end of feudalism. O. H. Pesch addressed the problem of subjectivism by placing Lortz in his own historical context; namely, the anti-modernism of Catholic theology during the ﬁrst half of the twentieth century. According to Pesch, Vatican II opened an avenue for reading Luther in ways that Lortz could not have imagined. He argued that the issue of subjectivism was not the concern of the Tridentine fathers. It was the feared ethical consequences of the

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certainty of salvation that caused alarm. He concluded that Luther was interested in both the experiential side of faith and the objective Word of God in Scripture.4 The issue of subjectivism has focused on what we have called the certainty of doctrine or exegetical authority. What role did experientia play in the reformers’ scriptural interpretations of sin, grace, and justiﬁcation? Did the experiential language used by the reformers denote that these issues were interpreted only according to their personal experiences? Clearly, none of the reformers would have conceded that their teachings were based on any kind of “subjective” or “private” opinion. In fact, they accused their opponents of imposing their own “fancies” and “opinions” on the biblical texts. They all agreed that the interpreter must rid himself of his own thoughts and teach only what the Word and Spirit instructed. To varying degrees, they also agreed that whether the Spirit worked through the external Word or directly on the soul, Scripture was the test of doctrine and tradition. As we have also seen, they recognized certain rules for interpretation, including the knowledge of biblical languages, attention to context, and the primacy of the literal, plain, or “clear” sense of the text. Moreover, Scriptural interpretation was an ecclesial activity that was guided by the creedal and exegetical traditions of the church. Equally important was the fundamental conviction that the experience of certainty was not the natural state of the fallen mind. The natural fallen powers of reason and will could never convince the believer of the certainty of salvation or the certainty of “divine truths.” As Calvin argued, even the divine origin of Scripture was an object of certainty because of the inspiration of the Spirit. As Luther explained, our very ability to exercise a “new judgment” was not the work of human reason or will but proof of the Holy Spirit. When a person exercised authority in the church or the government, Luther said that he was “to believe with certainty that his ofﬁce is pleasing to God.” However, Luther continued, “He would never be able to believe this if he did not have the Holy Spirit.” A shared belief of the reformers was that only the illumined mind could “recognize” the truth with certitude. The certainty of that truth had to originate in a source outside the self. Luther argued that “this is the reason why our theology is certain: it snatches us away from ourselves and places us outside ourselves, so that we do not depend on our own strength, conscience, experience, person or works but depend on that which is outside ourselves, that is, on the promise and truth of God which cannot deceive.”5 The reformers believed that certitude originated only from this external and transcendent origin. The experiential certitude of salvation or of doctrine, therefore, was never perceived as a “personal,” “private,” or “subjective” opinion; such certitude could only have its source in God. Nonetheless, complex questions about “subjectivism,” “spiritualism,” and experience are best understood outside the debate initiated and framed by Lortz. The controversies about the Spirit in which the reformers were

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embroiled point to a much wider current of early modern spirituality: namely, the desire for a direct inner spiritual experience. This desire crossed all religious divisions of early modern writings; the focus on experience emerged among humanists, late medieval thinkers, and sixteenth-century Catholics. By focusing on the history of experience in this era, we will be able to understand more fully that the debates and issues analyzed in the previous chapters were but one part of a wider sixteenth-century phenomenon. Such an overview will enable us to place the experiential language of the reformers in the proper historical context. The concern with inner experience had long been an important element throughout the history of Christianity. Bernard McGinn explores aspects of this issue throughout his magisterial multivolume works on the history of Western Christian mysticism. He observes that Bernard of Clairvaux, who was among the favorite thinkers of the reformers, was the ﬁrst to use the expression liber experientiae, by which he meant “an emphasis on the need for experiential conﬁrmation of the message found in the liber scripturae and a heightened concern for the analysis of states of inner experience.”6 The centrality of experience surfaced everywhere in this era. We have already seen that the epistemology of nominalism attributed greater reliability to the direct experiential perception of an object. The criticism of vana curiositas was a rejection of seemingly useless and purely speculative knowledge and, at the same time, a validation of empirical experientia. During this era the understanding of reform was inseparable from the need for inner and spiritual renewal of the soul. This was an inner reform that constituted the search for religious experience and the experiential conﬁrmation of the truth. Diverse thinkers and movements throughout the early modern era manifested this drive toward the cognitio Dei experimentalis. These included the great mystical writers of the fourteenth and ﬁfteenth centuries, devotional movements such as the Modern Devotion, humanist calls for a spiritualized religion, the spirituali or evangelicals in Italy and the alumbrados in Spain, the interest in spiritual exercises and mental prayer and, as we shall see, the discernment of the spirits. The outstanding single ﬁgure that personiﬁed this interest in experience was Jean Gerson, who consistently ranked the affective above the intellective. Moreover, it was always experiential [experimentalis, cognitio Dei experimentalis, cognitio experimentalis] or savory knowledge [sapida scientia, sapida notitia] that was the object of Gerson’s interest in reform. When interpreting Augustine’s statement that “knowledge is love,” Gerson explained, “[t]hrough doctrine or teaching, no one can be shown this knowledge. As people say when they are in great pain: no one knows what he does not feel [nul ne la congnoist qui ne la sent].”7 The difference, Gerson said, between knowledge and wisdom was precisely this affectivity, “For knowledge belongs chieﬂy and almost soley to the understanding, while wisdom to affectivity.”8 Analyzing the various ways in which the soul experienced the three manners of grace, Gerson spoke of justiﬁcation, the feelings of consolation,

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and the spiritual joys of contemplation. The latter grace was a mystical “wondrous certitude” that was full of humility.9 The affective knowledge of mystical theology was, of course, a superior and interior knowledge. According to Gerson, mystical theology, “begins in doctrine gathered from the internalized experiences lived in the hearts of devout souls, just as the other half of theology proceeds from those matters that operate extrinsically.” Intrinsic knowledge, Gerson concluded, “is most certain for the soul that experiences it.” As Gerson stated, “To feel is to know.”10 Similar (although mainly non-mystical) references to the experiential knowledge of God can be found in members of the Modern Devotion. These authors continually stressed the role of the heart [cor] because it was within the heart that progress and transformation took place. Strict examination of the thoughts, intentions, and desires allowed the devotionalist to detect any motive of self-love, anger, pride, or inconstancy of the heart.11 The goal was a purity of heart that provided experiential knowledge. Gerard Zerbolt, for example, deﬁned meditation as “the means by which you studiously turn over in your heart [studiosa ruminatione in corde/vlijtigen aanzien in uw herte overlegt] what you have read or heard and thereby stir up your affections and illuminate your intellect.”12 Grote, Zerbolt, and others stressed the meditative (and originally monastic) activity of rumination. As Jean Leclercq said of this practice, “active reading” or “rumination” had as its goal a memorization of Scripture that transformed the soul. According to Leclercq, “In this case the vocabularly is borrowed from eating, from digestion, and from the particular form of digestion belonging to ruminants. For this reason, reading and meditation are sometimes described by the very expressive word ruminatio. . . . It means assimilating the content of a text by means of a kind of mastication which releases its full ﬂavor.” This type of meditative reading meant that one was “to taste it with the palatum cordis or in aure cordis.”13 Thus the reading and spiritual exercises practiced by the devotionalists had as their goal to make Christ’s life and virtues “interior” or “take place in the heart.” Furthermore, the devotionalist could comprehend the true meaning of Christ’s life as recorded in Scripture only if understood by the “eyes of the heart.” One must not merely read or memorize Scritpure but, rather, should read it in such a way that he or she “inﬂames the purity of the heart.” These brief citations could be greatly expanded and analyzed to demonstrate the heightened interest in experience that characterized the late Middle Ages. Attention to the history of experience in this period is worthy of study unto itself but far beyond the scope of this chapter.14 In terms of the years prior to the Reformation, the reader need only note, beyond Gerson, such ﬁgures as Grote, Thomas à Kempis, Jan van Ruusbroec, Julian of Norwich and humanist reformers such as Erasmus. Erasmus shared with many thinkers of this age a yearning for a revitalized Christianity. This revitalization was to be a return to a spiritual, interior, learned and experiential piety. The new learning was an aide for inner spiritual renewal.

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As did Gerson, Erasmus worried that impia curiositas had diminished the importance of experiential knowledge. For Erasmus, this docta pietas would favor a practical, simpliﬁed, and non-theoretical Christianity. Learned piety would restore the “living philosophy of Christ” in order that the truths of Christiany could “be experienced within oneself.” This desire for a simpliﬁed, clear, and “living” Christianity became painfully clear from Erasmus’s dismay that Luther wanted to debate the freedom of the will. In Erasmus’s view, such a debate would be a return to the “squabbles,” “irreligious curiosity,” or “irreverent inquisitiveness” that had characterized dogmatism, especially scholasticism.15 Seeking freedom from empty rituals, formalism, externals, and dogmatism, Erasmus sought to renew a devotion that nourished the inward spirit or “heart.” The spiritual inner life was one of continual spiritual battle. The weapons against vices, the devil, the world, and the self were those of prayer and the proper kind of knowledge and study. Above all, the Christian must transcend the “dead letter” of Scripture, rituals, and other externals in order to penetrate to the hidden and deeper spiritual reality of the Christian religion. To stay at the level of externals was to remain stuck in the letter rather than “to advance to the invisible through the visible.” Erasmus strove after a spirituality that emphasized the spiritual indwelling of Christ that would produce a living Christianity accessible to everyone. According to Erasmus, “if we are true Christians, which means that we profess the gospel teaching as its law directs, let us take all these external symbols and make them real in our hearts.”16 Making the truths of Christianity “real in our hearts” was the goal of the philosophia Christi. The teachings of Christ had to be made interior or experiential so that Christ could dwell within the soul. As Erasmus wrote to Volz, “The perfection of Christ consists only in the inward state and not in the manner or kind of living; it consists in the mind and not in the garments or in meat and drinks.”17 The church fathers, he promised, would lead the reader “to an inner penetration of the word of God, to an understanding of the spiritual worth it contains.” Erasmus believed that the Jews had been summoned “away from ceremonies to true piety, from shadows to light, from the letter to the spirit.” While the Jews failed to respond to this summons, the true Christian would “drink in the spirit of Christ.” Although monasticism was “decaying in literalism,” the devout Christian could strive to worship God with “an unadulterated mind and spirit.”18 This was clearly superior to the useless disputations of the scholastics. As Erika Rummel explained, Erasmus’s pia doctrina contrasted sharply with the tradition of medieval scholasticism that “placed a higher value on logic than on experience.” The spiritual following of Christ and the practice of a devout and spiritual reading meant that the study of theology was to be about “praying rather than arguing and seeking to be transformed rather than armed for combat.”19 Living according to the spiritual meaning would nourish both the mind and the heart and would be expressed in a Christian spirituality that was “more of inspiration than of learning, transformation more than reasoning.”20

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In Erasmus’s philosophia Christi, the Holy Spirit was of the utmost importance. It was the Spirit that enabled one to leave all forms of literalism behind and brought about the transformation and ascent of the soul. The Spirit fortiﬁed believers so that they did not defect from Christ to Satan or turn from the spirit back to the letter. The Spirit enabled pious learning to be the true source of that “eternal ﬁre” that would “enkindle” and set the soul “aﬁre.” As Erasmus argued, “I must still admonish you that we are to live rightly, in keeping with the true faith. Wherever faith is, it is like a thing aﬁre, not a thing at rest.”21 So, too, the Spirit “seals” what he has written in the heart. As Erasmus explained, “If rejecting the spirit [the soul] listens to the deceiving ﬂesh, she becomes one with the body, but if, spurning the ﬂesh, she is elevated in the direction of the spirit, she will be transﬁgured into spirit.”22 For Erasmus, the Spirit was the “ﬁnger of God” because only the Spirit could write within the heart and effect a “metamorphosis” or transformation that raised the soul to the divine.23 Erasmus described this metamorphosis in several ways, including spiritual communion, the ascent or ﬂight from the world, the contemplation of God, and the life of virtue.24 Above all else, Erasmus sought in the “philosophy of Christ” to renew theology in order that one might “philosophize devoutly.”25 The true philosophy of Christ taught a theology that was useful and that nurtured both the heart and the intellect. The spirit would create the true homo spiritualis who had the ability to discern the spiritual meaning of Scripture with the “illumined eyes of the heart” and, therefore, “judge all things” and live the life of virtue. This ability to judge, of course, took place within the ecclesial sphere, since the Spirit handed down the truth through the consensus of the church. Erasmus also identiﬁed the Spirit with freedom. For Erasmus, liberty or Christian freedom meant the freedom from dogmatism and ritualism, both of which remained external to the soul. It was the Spirit that liberated the soul, enabling it to become a “friend of God” and to know God with a “living faith.” Explaining the task of a true theologian, Erasmus expressed the common concern of early modern spirituality when he stated that the study of theology should be “more in the emotions [affectibus] than in syllogisms,” and was a “transformation more than reasoning.”26 Although states of ecstasy or rapture were rare and transitory in this life, nonetheless, all Christians should strive to achieve this “lively faith” that was of the greatest importance for a holy and happy life. Christians should “feel the seed of faith increase” and when they fell back into sin they should “soon raise themselves up by the vigor of their faith, which like a ﬁre, strives upward toward the things of heaven.” By applying the spiritualization of Christianity to all people, both clerical and lay, he “was in effect opening up the cloistered cells and bringing into the world what were then regarded as characteristics of the religious life.”27 Erasmus’s thought was both important and controversial in Spain and in Italy. The University of Alcalá, with its emphasis on philology, welcomed

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Erasmus’s work, while the University of Salamanca remained loyal to traditional scholastic philosophy. Erasmus’s chief opponent was Diego López de Zúñiga, who, although associated with Alcalá, argued that Erasmus’s thought was heretical. In his classic study on Erasmus in Spain, Bataillon demonstrated that Erasmus’s inﬂuence was considerable.28 Court humanists, such as Juan de Vergara, Alfonso de Valdés, and Alfonso Ruiz de Virués, supported Erasmus’s work. In the mid-1520s, the writings of Erasmus began circulating more widely and created debate. In 1525 at Alcalá, the Castilian version of the Enchiridion militis Christiani was published and immediately became popular. The monastic circles, however, greeted Erasmus’s works with contempt. They objected to his attacks on ceremonialism, monks, and friars, as well as his views on various theological issues. Moreover, some surmised that Erasmus’s works were being used to promote “Lutheranism.” One scholarly debate has been whether the Spanish translations of Erasmus inﬂuenced the Spanish movement of alumbradismo, or illuminism. Bataillon maintained that the Enchiridion did affect the alumbrados, including Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz and other ﬁgures, such as Juan de Valdés. Nieto, however, argued that since Alcaraz’s teaching began no later than 1511 or 1512, Erasmus’s work was too late to have affected the religious thought of the alumbrados. In any event, Spain is where we ﬁrst encounter a full-blown spiritualism or illuminism. According to Nieto, the alumbrados were a diffuse group of individuals who were not uniform in doctrine and whose origin dated from the late ﬁfteenth century during the primacy of Cardinal Cisneros.29 Throughout his research, Nieto has ﬁrmly rejected or minimized any outside inﬂuence on the spirituality of the alumbrados. In 1982, however, Carlos Gilly demonstrated that texts by Valdés contained signiﬁcant and substantial sections or extracts from the early texts of both Luther and Oecolampadius. Currently most scholars of early modern Spain recognize the complexity of sixteenth-century Spanish spirituality and accept the inﬂuences on Valdés of both Erasmus and the northern reformers.30 Scholars also agree on the importance of the reform initiated by Cardinal Francisco Jiménes de Cisneros, who was the Cardinal Archbishop of Toledo, was attracted both to messianic prophecies and dramatic expressions of mysticism. Although many of the alumbrados rejected both of these spiritual currents, they did ﬂourish in the spiritual climate initially promoted by Cisneros. This climate included mysticism, dogmatic ﬂexibility, the learning of biblical languages, and the promotion of devotional literature in the vernacular. Cisneros also encouraged the reform of monastic orders in Spain, especially the Franciscan order to which he belonged. The Franciscans became the bearer of many aspects of Cisneros’s spirituality. Originally the alumbrados were associated with the Franciscan reform movement and used the mystical language found in writers such as Francisco de Osuna. Essential to the Franciscan reform was the practice of meditation. Two important methods of meditation developed: namely, those of recogimiento and dejamiento.

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Recogimiento, or “recollection,” was that method analyzed most thoroughly by Osuna. According to Osuna, one kind of recogimiento was the life of virtue detached from the cares of the world. The second, speciﬁcally meditative type of recogimiento, was a spiritual exercise whereby the individual recollected or “gathered together” the senses and powers of the soul. This type of recollection required the gradual leaving behind of the external world as well as the lower powers of the soul. Books, vocal prayer, and ceremonies are transcended. Sensuality becomes subject to reason. The senses become progressively quieter the further one “withdraws into the heart.” As Osuna said, “When the soul enters into truest recollection it carries the mind along with it and the body becomes contracted toward the chest.” As one became more deeply recollected, he discovered that “God hides in the deepest recesses of the heart.” By turning inward and recollecting all parts of the soul and body, the recogidos ﬁnally ascended to that state where “recollection gathers God and the soul that has been so greatly drawn into itself into one.”31 This truly happens when divine clarity is infused into the soul as if through a glass or crystal, sending forth its rays of love and grace like the sun to penetrate the heart and be received ﬁrst into the soul’s highest part. Then occurs the most perfect recollection which unites and recollects God with the soul and the soul with God. The soul participates in the Lord himself and is perfectly recollected in him.32 Osuna knew the work of Gerson and the inﬂuence of the French Chancellor permeated his thought.33 Like Gerson, Osuna believed that mystical theology could be mastered by all of the faithful, including “women and the unlearned.” As did Gerson, Osuna cautioned that learning could become an obstacle to true devotion. Writing about the experience of spiritual consolation, Osuna insisted, “Do not think that logic and metaphysics are needed to dedicate yourself to the devotion of recollection. People who just write and teach about recollection but do not practice it are probably the ones who say such things . . . since mystical theology is not concerned with knowledge of letters, it does not need a school where it can be articulated for the understanding but rather it is to be sought in the school of desire through the arduous exercise of virtues.” To describe the kind of devotion he sought, Osuna, like so many of this era, used affective language such as “ﬁre,” “inﬂame,” “kindle,” “taste,” and “experience,” in order to stress the superiority of experiential knowledge. He warned that knowledge must not “choke devotion.” Everywhere Osuna stressed the importance of experience. Like Bernard, whom he had read, Osuna spoke of the “book of experience” that inexperienced people could not understand. Speaking of spiritual experiences, he referred to Gerson’s saying that “These feelings . . . cannot be understood unless one has experienced them.”34

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He cited Gerson as afﬁrming that speculative theology should serve only as a prelude to mystical theology. The soul “yet unkindled” might acquire knowledge according to analytical theology, but unless it was kindled “by the loving heat of mystical theology it seems listless and self-contained.”35 According to Osuna, mystical knowledge was superior precisely because it was “felt” or experienced. Affective knowledge was superior to all other kinds of knowing because it included the experience of love, transcended human understanding, and provided the surest way to union with God. Osuna explained that there were two forms of theology: namely, “speculative or analytical” and that which is “hidden.” Speculative theology taught about God in order that believers could meditate on God as the highest truth. While the “hidden” theology presupposed the ﬁrst, it also “goes on to love [God] as the highest good.” Speculative or analytical theology could be known even by demons since it concerned the understanding. However, the hidden theology pertained to the will that was “enamored with the highest good” and belonged to the lovers of God. As Osuna wrote, “The other theology will perish when the vision of God supersedes belief as the prize; this theology will be perfected by adding love, and it will no longer remain hidden.”36 This hidden theology was a “delectable knowing” that “sweetens everything.” Mystical theology alone provided the “experiential knowledge of God.” Osuna attempted to explain the spiritual ascent and the union with God in terms of the powers of the soul. At times he divided the soul simply between the understanding and the will, but he also divided these powers according to the memory, understanding, spirit and intelligence. The latter distinctions provided Osuna with a way to discuss the role of knowledge in the mystical union. In the union with God the soul transcended understanding. However, Osuna was striving to express that the recollected soul attained to a higher, experiential knowledge. Discussing the function of understanding, Osuna explained that in the spiritual realm, when God infused revelations and “lofty knowledge into the souls of holy people, the substance is such as to destroy understanding. That does not happen, however, for understanding is incorruptible, but they are overwhelmed, nonetheless, left almost stunned, unable to function.”37 As did Gerson, Osuna often equated this experiential knowledge with wisdom: when the “spirit of love is conceived in the fervor of the heart, in some way the soul goes jumping outside itself or ﬂying above itself. In this way, it can be said that what was science and speculative knowledge in the understanding and intelligence has now become wisdom.”38 Through recollection, the soul found the “taste” of the divine and attained experiential intimacy with God. In this state of recollection and union, the soul received an “infused” spiritual knowledge of God that transcended all other forms of knowing. Repeatedly, Osuna emphasized this intimacy, as is clear in the opening chapter of his famous Third Spiritual Alphabet, where he stated that friendship or communion with God, “is not remote but

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more certain and more intimate than ever existed between brothers or even between mother and child.” This intimate experience or communion was “more certain than anything in the world, and nothing is more joyous, more valuable or more precious.”39 The thought of man, if he is recollected [se recoge] then, as he ought to be, will receive that excellent gift, that perfect present from above, that descends from the Father of Light; the darkness that was in him previously and negated his own understanding will be transformed into the clarity of midday wherein the bridegroom will instruct him spiritually. Another higher form of knowledge is being communicated to the understanding as a light shining halfway between the ordinary spiritual traveler and the blessed in which the recollected [recogidos] do not abandon the operation of understanding by not understanding but rather understand in a more sublime manner, and their souls are ﬁlled with splendor and divine learning. . . .40 This experiential state was that of wisdom, which consisted in an immediate experiential knowledge of God, the highest experience of which was a love that sealed the intimacy of the soul with God. As the soul strove for the experiential knowledge of God, Osuna urged his reader,”Be bold, inflame your will and heart in love for your Creator. Awaken yourself to this. Enliven your faith.”41 As the soul ascended, the understanding had to grow quiet and become silent. When the recollected soul was “very quiet and attentive to God,” several kinds of silence occurred. The first type of silence was that of the imagination and the memory. In the second kind of silence, the soul became forgetful of the self. In the third kind of silence, the understanding was “stilled and sealed” and the “soul is completely transformed into God and tastes his sweetness abundantly.” Here we see Osuna employing the traditional identification of love with the indwelling of the Holy Spirit.42 At this point only the “intelligence” remained and the soul attained the experiential knowledge of the divine: “The silence of love is marvelous and most admirable and praiseworthy, that silence wherein the understanding is profoundly quieted, receiving the sublimely contenting knowledge of experience.”43 According to Osuna, the truly recollected soul directly or immediately received infused spiritual joy, knowledge and love of God, tranquillity, and the experiential presence of God in the soul. In this state of experiential wisdom, the soul also experienced certainty, since it would have “perfectly pure knowledge not subject to error or failure.” Finally, the recollected and perfected soul would receive “the sublimely contenting knowledge of experience.”44 Such souls also experienced the inner testimony that they “are the children of God.”45

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Recogimiento was a spiritual exercise that required activity and discipline on the part of the practitioner. Certain conditions were required. To achieve recollection, the individual was to ﬁnd a dark and silent place. He was to close his eyes, focus on one point, and practice recollection at least two hours a day. He was always to “be attentive” or “alert and receptive to God.” He was required to keep his memory and imagination from wandering. He had to obtain “victory” over the imagination and the self and had to win the “battle of thought.” The practitioner had to actively “strive” and ascend through different levels and stages until he reached the passive state where he received infused knowledge.46 Another constant activity was the warfare against Satan. As with so many other thinkers of this age, the devil was identiﬁed with subtle deception. As we will see in chapter 6, coming as an “angel of light,” the devil deceived those exercising devotion. Satan could speak to the soul so that the soul did not know whether the voice originated from God or the devil. Discernment must be practiced carefully since “the devil is so ingenious that hardly anything is foolproof.” The devil also caused illusions by making people believe they were having religious experiences and believing that they “were in no way deceived.” Humility was the true safeguard against the deceptions of the devil. The soul “goes about seeking the advice of experienced people, asking if what it feels is from God or whether the angel of Satan has transﬁgured himself so as to deceive the soul and make it fall through pride as he did.” By staying within the “security and safety” of humility, the soul should have no fear of selfdeception.47 Not surprisingly, Osuna properly referred to the practice of recollection in terms of an “arduous exercise” or “arduous practice.”48 Dejamiento required no such strictures. This form of meditation was the way of “abandonment,” characterized by a passive reliance on God’s will. No special form of prayer or place for meditation was necessary. Moreover, the practitioner was not to combat temptation because all activity was an obstacle or hindrance to God’s presence in the soul. Despite these distinctions, the opposition between these two forms of prayer may have been unclear. Both types were associated with the Franciscans, although to some degree the order was divided between them. The house in Salceda practiced recogimiento, while others practiced dejamiento.49 Clearly, Osuna advocated recogimiento. It was the alumbrados who were associated with the method of dejamiento. The term alumbrado was originally one of abuse and scorn, used to refer to excessive piety, hysteria, hypocrisy, and fraud. In 1519 in Guadalajara, groups of people met at the palace of the Mendozas in order to read and discuss Scripture and various contemplative treatises written by members of the University of Alcalá during the early years of the sixteenth century. They became known as alumbrados because they claimed to have received spiritual illumination directly through their various religious experiences. They also commonly attacked ceremonialism and clerical privileges. Their emphasis was on the individual who received a direct or unmediated experience of God. As Bataillon explained,

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illuminism, including that of the alumbrados, involved direct divine inspiration as a protest against formalism. The alumbrados exercised a different form of contemplation that was also targeted against routine external devotions such as genuﬂections before the cross, the cult of images, and the adoration of the cross.50 The alumbrados gathered around a charismatic spiritual teacher, many of whom were women. Three of the most noteworthy of these women, or beatas, were Isabel de la Cruz, Mariá de Cazalla, and, later, Francisca de los Apóstoles. While Osuna’s work was always judged to be orthodox, these women and their followers came under suspicion of heresy. In 1525 the Inquisition issued an Edict of Faith condemning forty-eight propositions. Among those attributed to the alumbrados were the denial of hell and of the belief that penance was of divine origin, as well as the rejection of religious processions, the veneration of the saints, the need for indulgences, and the refusal to take oaths. Caution must be used, however, in identifying the beliefs of the alumbrados with this edict. Some of the condemned views were those of Luther and the Anabaptists. However, the most important indictment was that forbidding the practice of dejamiento, the method of prayer taught by Isabel de la Cruz and Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz.51 The condemnation of alumbradismo was but one indication of the growing concern about claims to direct, experiential illuminations. Such claims were made more and more frequently and constituted authorial claims to certitude based on the directness of revelation in their religious experiences. Isabel de la Cruz taught that the one who is illumined by the Spirit lives in the love of God and, although still sinful, is free from doctrinal error. Such illumined people can read the Bible with certainty that the Holy Spirit is guiding them in their interpretation. Other such illumined teachers included Maria de Santo Domingo and Juana de la Cruz.52 A follower of Isabel de la Cruz, Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz gave systematic expression to the non-apocalyptic form of alumbradismo. He knew the Bible well and often focused on the Pauline epistles. He taught and interpreted Scripture to small groups gathered in private homes. He also stressed the direct presence of divine love in the everyday life of the people, a presence that seemed independent of the church hierarchy and the sacramental system. Alcaraz opposed external religious practices of piety as well as any form of merit. The believer could only wait to receive the grace of God and the love bestowed by God from above. Teaching dejamiento, Alcaraz believed that the Christian must “abandon oneself to the love of God.” Basing his teaching about God’s love within the human soul on I John and I Corinthians, Alcaraz explained that God is present in the human heart with his love. Faith, too, is the work of the Holy Spirit within the heart of the believer.53 Alcaraz also stressed the illumination of the heart and mind by the Holy Spirit. Once again, I Corinthians 2:15 became important. The Spirit, he explained, enabled the “spiritual man to judge all things.” The Spirit guaranteed

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the certitude of one’s interpretation of Scripture.54 According to Alcaraz, the Spirit illumined the mind of the reader and freed him or her from incorrect teaching and from the constraints and errors of human traditions. Through this illumination and the daily reading of the Bible, the illumined person attained to a personal and experiential love of God. Alumbrados such as Alcaraz emphasized their certainty of possessing a love that they “tasted” and “experienced.” This certainty, infused by the Spirit, protected those who were illumined from being deceived or falling into error. This certitude, however, was not based on purity. Both Isabel de la Cruz and Pedro Ruiz de Alcaraz believed in the profound sinfulness of human nature, a sinfulness that continued to coexist with the illumination by the Spirit. One was illumined and sinful at the same time. Juan de Valdés (d. 1541) heard the sermons of Alcaraz in 1523–1524 when he served as a page at the Castle of Escalona. He was also a humanist and admirer of Erasmus. From 1524–1529 he concentrated on the study of Scripture as well as works by Erasmus and Luther. In 1526 he was attending the University of Alcalá where he studied Hebrew, Greek, and Latin. At Alcalá he also encountered Erasmian humanism and read the Enchiridion in both Latin and Spanish. In 1529 he wrote the Diálogo de doctrina cristiana, a treatise that Battaillon called an “Erasmian catechism.”55 According to Massimo Firpo, the Diálogo revealed an open profession of Erasmianism which in reality “masked deeper layers in the text, concealing both the subversive spiritualism of the alumbrados as well as actual quotations from the works of Luther, Melanchthon, and Oecolampadius.”56 After the Dialogo, the inﬂuence of Erasmus began to lessen. By 1529 the Inquisition was in a position to pursue leading Erasmians in Spain, largely by accusing them of Lutheranism and illuminism.57 Following the publication of the Diálogo, Valdés came under suspicion but was able to escape the fate of other Erasmians. He stayed in Spain until 1531, at which time he learned that a second proceso was being ﬁled. He then ﬂed to Italy during the winter of 1530–1531 and initially stayed in Rome. In 1535 he settled in Naples, where he resided until his death. The period from 1535–1541 was his most fruitful. He published the Alfabeto cristiano in 1536. During this period he also wrote Las ciento diez divinas consideraciones. Valdès also composed commentaries on the Psalms, the Gospel of Matthew, and the letters of Paul. In Valdés’s thought we ﬁnd the now familiar primacy of experience. As Bataillon noted, his main word was experiencia.58 Experiencia also became the guarantee of certainty. The inherent immediacy of experience produced a living and effectual faith. The importance of immediacy emerged in his exegesis of the third chapter of Genesis. For Valdés, the Fall should be understood in terms of God’s two forms of governance. Before the Fall, the human being was subject to God’s immediate will, that is, to the direct action of God through Word and Spirit. Because of sin, humanity is now subject to the mediated will of God, namely, the will by which God governs the universe and makes human

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nature subject to sin and death.59 By his obedience, Christ restored his people to the immediate action of God’s will. The believer or justiﬁed person “feels” this “beneﬁt of Christ” and prays that God will grant him the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit and restore him to the governance by his “immediate will” [a la sujeción de la voluntad de Dios que es ynmediata].60 Valdés emphasized experience in three main topics: the experiential understanding of the Creed and Scripture; the experience of justiﬁcation; and the experience of the regenerated person. In the Alfabeto, Valdés counseled Guila, “You will progress toward verifying within yourself those truths that you confess in the Creed in such a way that what you confess now through obedience, you will then confess through experience. . . . You will speak by truly knowing, [con verdad], and feeling within your soul that which you say.”61 Here again, we encounter the attempt to “make interior” to the soul all the teachings of Scripture and the Creed. He concluded by telling her about a “living and true faith.” After having confessed her sins and believing that in “this universal church” there is truly the remission of sins, Valdés predicted, Besides this, when through inward experience [por experiencia interior] you have felt the truth [sentido la verdad] of all the rest that a faithful Christian ought to believe, you will have no doubt [no dudaréis] in confessing the resurrection of the body . . . and beginning to feel the beneﬁt of it. . . . And now, when you have such an inward experience you will have a living and true faith [fe será viva y verdadera] because you will have the experience of it within you.62 In typical spiritualist fashion, Valdés contrasted the knowledge of God obtained by “report” [por relación] with that gained by the immediacy of experience. To know God “by report” was to have a mediate rather than an immediate and experiential knowledge. This knowledge was that testimony merely recorded by others in Scripture and could not provide the “certainty of knowledge,” which was gained only by experience.63 This contrast was particularly applicable to the reading of Scripture. For Valdés, the mere reading of Scripture could not produce the true experiential knowledge or understanding of God. The words of Scripture could only bring about a secondhand knowledge, or knowledge “by report.” This may be an objectively true knowledge but not a knowledge that was truly known by experience. External knowledge, reading or hearing, like external observances, cannot be called true understanding. Valdés was referring to the experiential knowledge granted through the illumination, inspiration, or revelation of the Holy Spirit. In order to understand Scripture, the reader must inwardly “feel” or “experience” this knowledge. Therefore, experience became the key to Scripture. In fact, Valdés taught that for the person who has received the Holy Spirit, the Scriptures are only the “alphabet” of the Christian faith. After he “tastes and feels” the teachings of Scripture, the believer

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goes ﬁrst to “the book of his soul” and learns directly from the Spirit of God. He then compares what he has understood with the written teachings of Scripture.64 Valdés explained that the Christian must avoid curiosity and focus only on the “interior knowledge and feelings” that God produces in the soul through the work of the Holy Spirit. Most importantly, the Christian will ﬁnally perceive that he cannot understand what he has not contemplated and experienced. Being a Christian, Valdés explained, “consists not in knowledge but in experience.”65 Repeatedly, Valdés distinguishes between the false piety of theoretical or speculative knowledge and the true spiritual faith based on el ánimo y no con el ingenio. He opposed sciencia and cienca to experiencia in order to describe the truth as understood by the “inward vision” and “light” that occurred when the Spirit entered the soul.66 Valdés repeated the same words and metaphors that we have seen in previous authors; namely, that the Spirit would “enliven” faith and set the heart “on ﬁre.” He instructed Guila to “exercise yourself” to know God through Christ. Such “exercise” was done through the “light of faith” inspired by the Holy Spirit dwelling in the soul.67 Above all else, Valdés insisted on a “living faith,” a faith that “felt,” “tasted,”and “experienced” the truths of Christianity. In Diálogo, Valdés had deﬁned the virtue of faith in two ways. The ﬁrst was a “dead” faith, without charity. Real faith was “trust in the authenticity and truth of God’s words.” Here Valdés substituted “fe biva” for what “the theologians” called “fe formada.”68 So, too, when speaking with Guila, he identiﬁed the faith in the mere history of Christ, which lacked charity, as a “dead faith” rather than a “living faith.” This “living faith” was the trust in God’s promises and an experiential knowledge that penetrated the heart so that one could “taste” and “feel” their truth. Valdés’s unrelenting emphasis on experience followed a trajectory similar to those of the reformers; that is, he came to equate the experience of the Spirit with certainty. Those who read Scripture “without experience” did not “have the proof of it within themselves” and, therefore, could neither be certain nor feel that which they understood. The “inexperienced person” could not “certify” the hope and truth of faith in the word of God through an inward experience. Such inexperienced persons could read Scripture and hold an opinion but were without the “certiﬁcation” or certainty provided by the Spirit. Therefore, Valdés warned that he who was without experience was also without certainty.69 The “regenerate,” who were “experienced in spiritual things,” were the only ones that had certainty regarding spiritual matters. Having experience, they possessed a “solid,” “ﬁrm,” and “constant” certitude about that which they should trust or distrust, as well as the certainty of God’s mercy through Christ.70 Valdés distinguished clearly between the unregenerate and the regenerate on the basis of certainty. The unregenerate based their trust or distrust in the same way that they judged human matters. The regenerate, whose certainty was given through the experience of the Spirit, had a ﬁrm and trustworthy knowledge. Moreover, that certainty of experience was guaranteed by the immediacy

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of God to the soul. The restoration of the divine image was a return to the immediate governing by God. To the regenerate, God spoke inwardly and directly to the soul in such a way that one was inwardly “awakened” and “enlivened” and could “taste” the interior things that are the nourishment of the soul.71 Among those spiritual things that the experienced person learned from the Spirit, the most important was justiﬁcation by faith and the certainty of salvation. As Valdés explained constantly, the faith that justiﬁed was precisely that “living” or “experienced” faith. According to Valdés, no works or actions could ever merit justiﬁcation. Natural reason, he argued, always believes that justiﬁcation is the fruit of piety because reason thinks that a person cannot be justiﬁed and pure in his conscience unless he “ﬁrst worships God in spiritu et veritate.” Natural reason believed that when one rendered to God that which he owed, he would then have a clean conscience and be justiﬁed. But the Holy Spirit taught the opposite of reason. When the Spirit illumines the mind, then it is clear that piety can only be the fruit of the preceding justiﬁcation. By accepting the Gospel and appropriating the righteousness of Christ, the believer then begins to worship God “in spirit and in truth.” For Valdés, the believer was “just by believing.”72 The righteousness of Christ’s works “become mine by faith.” Moreover, Valdés taught that God “accounts us as righteous without any works, when we are incorporated by faith into Christ, no longer judging us for what we are in ourselves, but what we are in Christ. Christ’s righteousness and holiness are accounted to the believer.”73 Valdés’s primary interest was this experience of justiﬁcation. As did Luther, he argued that the main feature of that experience was the certainty of salvation. The justiﬁed person experiences the interior dwelling of the Spirit and can say that he “feels himself justiﬁed by the justice of God executed through Christ.”74 Immediately upon being called by God to the grace of the Gospel, the faithful person feels himself to be incorporated into Christ and completely changed inwardly in all that he does.75 Such a person is “ﬁrm and constant in the pardon received through the justice of God fulﬁlled by Christ.”76 The believer experiences through mortiﬁcation and the hatred of self and the world that he “knows himself to be a child of God and an heir to eternal life.”77 The believer “knows for certain” that Christ has fully justiﬁed him. He must “remain assured of it and regard it as certain.”78 According to Valdés, the believer can say about justiﬁcation and predestination, “I am certain that God has called me, and because of this I am certain that he has known me and predestined me and has justiﬁed me and that he will glorify me. I am conﬁrmed in all these things without doubting in the least way.”79 Valdés went on to explain that the extent of one’s faith, hope, and love depended not on faith or on merit but on one’s certainty of God’s promises to do two things: namely, to sustain him by grace in the present life and to give him immortality and glory in eternal life. Such certainty, Valdés admitted, was

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contrary to human reason. Through the Holy Spirit, the Christian should be “certain and ﬁrm” that God will give him faith, hope, and love, to the extent that he is “certain and assured” that God will sustain him in the present life through grace and grant him immortality and glory in the future life.80 Not surprisingly, Valdés also spoke of doubt in terms of temptation. According to Valdés, the stronger the faith, the less one experienced doubt. However, when believers were just beginning to trust in God’s pardon through the Holy Spirit, they should expect to ﬁnd themselves the target of evil spirits who will tempt them to doubt. He assured the believer that such doubt was of a very different character than that felt by those who were without the Spirit.81 The inﬂuence of both Erasmus and Valdés was felt in Italy, where the latter attracted a number of followers, mainly from the patriciate and the wealthy.82 They were ecclesiastics and laypeople, men and women. The so-called “Ecclesia Viterbiensis” was formed in 1541, when Valdés’s followers, known as the spirituali, gathered around Reginald Pole. In 1541, Valdés writings were prepared for the press. These writings ﬁrst circulated secretly but were published in 1543. Their publication was due largely to the spirituali at Viterbo. It was also at Viterbo that the ﬁnal copy of Il Beneﬁcio di Cristo was completed. A Benedictine monk named Benedetto da Mantova authored this treatise in Naples. When he went to Venice, he met Marcantonio Flaminio, with whom he collaborated. After moving from Naples to Viterbo, Flaminio edited and completed the ﬁnal draft of the Beneﬁcio. The Beneﬁcio was published in Venice in 1543 and enjoyed great popularity until 1549, when the Inquisition banned this “little book.” Several Cardinals had approved of it and promoted its sale, including Reginald Pole and Giovanni Morone. According to Gleason, “This work is important as testimony to the intense preoccupation with justiﬁcation, faith, and works so noticeable in Italian religious thought in the early part of the sixteenth century. In it answers to deeply felt personal religious problems are given in simple and clear fashion.” Gleason added that the appeal of the Beneﬁcio conﬁrms the argument once given by Lucien Febvre, “whatever its roots, the work certainly shows the yearning for a return to biblical Christianity and insists on the necessity of reforming the individual on the basis of a personal, direct experience.”83 In this text, the idea of reform as an intensely spiritual life resulting from a direct, immediate, and experiential knowledge of God shines forth clearly. The Beneﬁcio di Cristo has provoked numerous debates. Ruth Prelowski identiﬁed the three areas of controversy as “its Valdensian inspiration, its relationship to the thought of the Northern reformers, and its signiﬁcance as a representative work of the early Italian reformers.” Jedin had characterized this text as a “riot of individualism,” by which he meant a confusion of ideas that were ﬂuid and capable of both good and bad consequences. Maria Jung listed various characteristics of “Italian Evangelism,” most of which have been refuted by other scholars. Whether the Beneﬁcio shows the inﬂuence of Valdensianism has been the subject of debate. The question of its

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relationship to the northern reformers has also been analyzed. While Caponetto regarded this text as stemming from Italian Valdensianism, Tommaso Bozzo argued that its inspiration was Calvin’s 1539 Institutes.84 Throughout the text we hear echoes of such writers as Valdés, Luther, Calvin, Erasmus, and Melanchthon as well as Augustine, Ambrose, and Bernard. Without attempting to resolve such complex issues, we can safely depend on Gleason’s characterization of “that vexing elusive phenomenon” known as Italian Evangelism and the spirituali, terms that set the context for the Beneﬁcio. According to Gleason, Italian Evangelism was a general religious outlook shared by a speciﬁc group known as the spirituali. They were few in number and associated in some way with Bernard Ochino, Peter Marty Vermigli, Cardinal Giovanni Morone, Gaspar Contarini, Vittoria Colonna, Pietro Carnesecchi, and Reginald Pole.85 Gleason also concluded that it is not possible to speak of Evangelism prior to the elevation of Contarini to the cardinalate and the appointment of the commission from which the Consilium de emendanda originated. Of the utmost importance was the “focus on ethical and moral reform of the individual Christian who encountered God’s word in the Bible, especially the Gospels and the Pauline epistles, and responded with faith and trust in the divine mercy through which man had been given the incalculable beneﬁt of Christ’s death on the cross.” While justiﬁcation by faith was central, Evangelism was otherwise “dogmatically manifold.” In fact, the spirituali came under suspicion of heresy precisely because of their uncertainty or ﬂuidity in doctrinal matters. This “eclectic doctrinal synthesis” was the reason the Inquisition associated them with Lutheranism. Firpo described Valdés’s message, so important to the spirituali, as capable of absorbing the most genuine aspects of the Protestant Reformation, but also of enclosing them within the secret spaces of personal inner illumination, of pointing the way for a spiritualism founded on the individual conscience, and of entrusting the destinies of the ecclesial community to a cautious Nicodemite practice.86 The author of the Beneﬁcio spoke frequently of justiﬁcation by faith alone, without the merit of works. The soul of the Christian is united with Christ in marriage. This “union of divine marriage” allows the Christian to receive the beneﬁt of Christ, that is, justiﬁcation and the remission of sins. Believers are then “clothed in the righteousness of Christ” and their sins are “hidden under the purity and innocence of Christ.” The Beneﬁcio also stressed the effect of that justiﬁcation and tried to deﬁne in experiential or affective terms the nature of justifying faith. The justiﬁed person must be inspired with a “holy and living faith” [fede santa e viva], a faith that is experienced and transforms the soul.87 This living faith would inevitably reveal itself in works of charity, works that demonstrated one’s justiﬁcation but never contributed to it. In deﬁning the nature of the faith that justiﬁed, the author was intent on stressing the difference between historical faith and the true living faith. Historical faith was a

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faith “by report” and consisted only of “believing the story of Jesus Christ in the same way one believes those of Caesar and Alexander. This kind of belief is an historical faith, founded on the mere report [fondata in mera relazione] of men and writings and impressed lightly on the mind through established custom.”88 Clearly such faith could not renew the heart, transform one into Christ, or pacify the conscience. True justifying faith, however, was very different. This was a living faith that was felt or experienced and which united the soul to Christ. It was the Holy Spirit who inspired this living faith and made the believer “enjoy the general pardon announced by the Gospel.” Because of this faith, God lives or dwells within the heart and “clothes our soul with himself.”89 With living faith, the Holy Spirit granted charity which “cannot be idle or cease from doing good works.” The text continually uses the metaphor of “ﬁre,” saying that “justifying faith then is like the ﬂame of a ﬁre, which cannot help but shine forth.” True faith is “inﬂamed with good works.” So, too, the justiﬁed are “inﬂamed with the love of God.” Good works, inspired by charity, “are a fruit and testimony of living faith and they proceed from it like light from the ﬂame of a ﬁre.” This imagery was repeatedly used to describe the joyful, experiential, and purifying effect of justifying faith. Through this “living faith” the soul was united with God and was always transformed and renewed, a renewal that was deeply experiential and necessarily expressed itself in works of charity. Through faith, believers became “children of God and participants in divine nature.” Moreover, they “are urged by the Holy Spirit dwelling in them to live as becomes the children of such a great lord.”90 Throughout the Beneﬁcio, we ﬁnd the emphasis on the joyful experience of justiﬁcation and certainty. In fact, the two are intertwined. The Beneﬁcio stressed that the believer must “feel” or “experience” justifying faith. Furthermore, the author repeatedly used experience as a test for the existence of justifying faith: Whoever does not experience [sente] through his own faith these marvelous effects, which as we have said, inspired faith causes in the Christian, may know that he still does not have Christian faith . . . Inspired faith works these and other similar thoughts, desires, and affections in the minds of the justiﬁed. Whoever does not feel [sente] these divine affections and operations in his heart, either in whole or in part, but is given over to the ﬂesh and the world, may know for certain that he still does not have justifying faith [non ha ancora la fede che giustiﬁca].91 The last section of the treatise addressed the issue of certitude. Chapter VI, “Some Remedies for Lack of Conﬁdence,” begins by attributing doubt to human prudence and to the devil. According to the Beneﬁcio, doubt about one’s salvation

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was a “most wicked temptation.”92 Like the Protestant reformers, especially Luther, this text argues that the devil intrudes into the conscience and makes the believer doubt whether he has attained the remission of sins. When the believer was “tempted to doubt,” he was to have recourse to the “precious blood of Christ” and thereby regain conﬁdence and certitude. Having made doubt a demonic temptation, the author then contrasted faith with doubt. To the believer who “lives in perpetual fear” because of his remaining sin, the Beneﬁcio counseled: Most beloved brother, I say in reply to these doubts of yours, that you should believe with certainty that these are temptations of the devil, who tries in every way to rob you of faith and of the trust which is born of faith and which assures us of God’s good will toward us. The devil endeavors to deprive the Christian soul of this precious garment . . . I say that whoever is not deﬁnitely persuaded [persuade certamente] by these promises that God is a favorably inclined and indulgent father, and whoever does not wait for the inheritance of the heavenly kingdom with ﬁrm faith [ferma ﬁducia], is not truly faithful and makes himself completely unworthy of God’s grace.93 The devil was never vanquished and, therefore, the inner battle against this satanic doubt continually plagued the Christian. Often the remedy was the consolation offered by the Eucharist: At times the Christian feels that his enemies wish to overpower him, namely, when he doubts whether he has attained the remission of his sins through Christ and whether he can endure the devil with his temptations. He feels that the accusation of his doubtful conscience will prevail over him, so that he begins to fear that hell will swallow him up and that death has conquered and killed him forever, because of God’s wrath. When the Christian feels these anxieties, let him go to this most holy sacrament with a good mind and with trust and receive it devotedly in his heart saying in reply to his enemies, “I confess that I merit a thousand hells and eternal death for my sins, but this most divine sacrament that I receive now makes me secure and certain [sicuro e certo] of the remission of all my iniquities and of reconciliation with God. . . . I am as certain of having obtained this and of having his grace as I am conﬁdent and certain that he, who has promised and made the covenant, cannot lie or deceive.94 According to the Beneﬁcio, Christ instituted the Eucharist in order “to make our afﬂicted consciences secure about reconciliation with Christ.” Identifying the Supper as a testament, the author went on to discuss conﬁdence and certainty.

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Therefore through Christ’s death we are conﬁdent and extremely certain [securi e certissimi] of the validity of this Testament. . . . As a sign and a pledge of this, [Christ] has left us this most divine sacrament in the place of a seal. It not only gives our souls assured conﬁdence [certa ﬁducia] in our eternal salvation, but also makes us secure about the immortality of our body . . . 95 The Eucharist, therefore, was a source of comfort because it “drives fear from the soul.” The purpose of the ﬁnal chapter was to offer “weapons” with which the believer could ﬁght off the demonic temptations of doubt and anxiety regarding salvation. These weapons consisted of prayer, frequent holy communion, and the memory of one’s baptism and predestination. The same experiential tranquillity and certainty resulted from the memory of one’s predestination. The text explicitly rejected the idea that the believer could attain only the objective certainty about the salvation of the elect. In order to feel the certainty of one’s own salvation, the believer had to know that he personally was included among the predestined, a knowledge that brought joy and peace to the soul. There is no greater joy or consolation in this present life for the Christian who is afﬂicted and tempted, or who has fallen into some sin, than the memory of predestination and the certainty [la memoria della sua predestinazione, e la certezza] of being one of those whose names are written in the book of life. . . . Oh it is an ineffable consolation for a man to have this faith and to reﬂect continually in his heart on this most sweet predestination [dolcissima predestinazione].96 The author exclaimed that, “This most holy predestination maintains the true Christian in a state of continual spiritual joy,” so that predestination “inﬂames him with the love of God.” He continued by saying, “enamored with their God and armed with the knowledge of their predestination, they fear neither death, sin, the devil or hell.” Nonetheless, the devil was not yet vanquished. Having made doubt a demonic temptation, the author then contrasted faith with doubt. To the believer who “lives in perpetual fear” because of his remaining sin, the Beneﬁcio counseled that Christians should believe with certainty that such doubts were the temptation of the devil who knew how to rob them of trust and the assurance of faith.97 Many such passages offered comfort to the reader who was struggling with doubt. The reasoning is by now familiar. The Holy Spirit dwells within the believer by faith and “authenticates and stamps those divine promises in our hearts whose certainty he has previously impressed on our minds.” It is the Holy Spirit who enables the believer to utter the cry of certainty, “Abba! Father!” The Holy Spirit inspired the experience of certainty and made the believer

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“feel” and “taste” how “sweet the Lord is.” And ﬁnally, the “Abba! Father!” passages assured believers that their predestination was knowable and secure. The discussion thus far has shown that the Catholic spirituality of this era was characterized by the yearning for a revitalized, spiritualized, and experiential faith. Humanists such as Erasmus added to this yearning the need for that faith to be learned as well as experienced. For Erasmus, a revitalized faith would be saved from superstition through learning. For these authors, the concept of reform centered on the ideal of a “living faith,” a faith that was “felt” and “tasted” within the soul. Repeatedly, we ﬁnd a reaction against a purely theoretical and speculative theology (a theology based on mere report) in favor of a theology that was expressed in simpler language and a knowledge that was truly experienced within the soul. Many of these texts spoke constantly about an “experienced” or “living faith,” created by “making interior” to the soul the teachings and events of Scripture. The phrase “to make interior” expressed the means whereby the Christian could ﬁnd a deeper, more intensiﬁed, and experiential religious life. These writers all shared a common concern: the nature of true faith. For such writers as Valdés and the author of the Beneﬁcio, the question was asked in terms of how one knew the nature of that faith which justiﬁes the believer. The subject of true and justifying faith ﬂourished everywhere in the sixteenth century. Having already examined Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin, we turn to the phenomenon known as the Radical Reformation. It is a commonplace that members of the Radical Reformation believed Luther and the other magisterial reformers had not gone far enough in their attempt to reform the church. Controversies over such issues as baptism, the Eucharist, and images demonstrated their concern with the unﬁnished business of the Reformation. At the heart of these disputes, however, was the nature of justifying faith. To say that one was saved by faith means that one must know the nature of that faith which justiﬁed. The “radicals” believed that they had to defend the living and experiential nature of faith and the effects that faith produced in the soul and in one’s life. Justifying faith could not be a dead faith or mere belief. The following discussion will show that in their controversies regarding the sacraments, the radicals feared that the magisterial reformers were crushing the possibility of a deeply felt or experienced faith. For this reason they concentrated on describing and defending the nature of justifying faith in the now-familiar language about interiority, immediacy, and experience. However, even the briefest analysis of the radicals’ emphasis on experience would be incomplete without the mention of Johannes Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch. Besides the movement of the Modern Devotion, there was a second similar movement that exempliﬁed the yearning for an interior, experiential spirituality; namely, the Friends of God. This was a fourteenthcentury group that was deeply inﬂuenced by Tauler. Like Gerson, Tauler was determined to defend true mystical teaching against the so-called Free Spirits

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who, in his opinion, had misused mysticism and constructed a false sense of freedom. Referring to the Free Spirits, Tauler warned, “Others, again, fall into a different trap by wishing to ﬁnd a false freedom in this sweetness. In this state of emotional joy, nature cleverly turns back upon itself and takes possession; and this is what human nature is most inclined to do, it likes to rely upon emotions.”98 Tauler’s primary criticism of the Free Spirits or any false mystic was the unwillingness to “let go” or totally surrender oneself to God. They always turned back to the self, even while striving to reach God. Tauler’s teaching, therefore, emphasized Gelassenheit, or detachment of the soul from the world and the emptying or yielding of the soul in order that the divine might enter. Tauler’s mysticism centered on the two concepts of gemeute and grunt. As Bernard McGinn has explained, “while the grunt and the gemeute are inseparable in Tauler, there are signiﬁcant differences between the two aspects of the deepest reality of the human being.”99 For Tauler, the gemeute (related in Middle High German to the Latin mens) was the term used for “the divinely-formed, ineffable, eternal inclination back to God.”100 Grunt was the end toward which the gemeute turned, that is, the ground of the soul, or the place where the soul ﬁnds its source in God. The grunt was the deepest reality of both the soul and of God. As McGinn demonstrates, Eckhart was the creator of the “mysticism of the ground,” followed (with signiﬁcant differences) by his disciples Suso and Tauler. Tauler’s message concentrated on how by “turning inward” the gemeute reached the grunt. When the gemeute turned toward the grunt, it was turning to the ground where the soul meets the ground of God. It was in the grunt where the soul ﬁnds the image of the Trinity. Tauler’s concern was to join the ground of the soul with the ground of God, and to describe the activity of the gemeute in reaching downward and experiencing that grunt. Tauler always sought to ﬁnd ways of expressing the experiential nature of this inward journey to the ground. As McGinn states, Tauler stood in the Bernardine tradition of “appealing to the hearer to inscribe within the depths of her soul the objective truth of the relation between God and the human revealed in Scripture and taught in the church.” Tauler’s frequent use of the term bevinden meant “to get to know” or “to experience,” and this was a central word in Tauler’s teaching.101 It is when a person with all his faculties and his soul turns within and goes into this Temple that he truly ﬁnds [vindet] God within living and working. He ﬁnds him in an experiential way [in bevindender wisen], not by sensation or by reason, or as something heard or read about, or as something that comes in from the senses, but by tasting in an experiential way [in bevindender smackender wisen] as something that wells up out of the ground as from its own source and spring. . . .102

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Two of Tauler’s sermons must sufﬁce for demonstrating the key experiential aspects of his teaching, aspects which inﬂuenced Luther, Müntzer, Carlstadt, and others. In sermon 24, [the Monday before Pentecost], Tauler preached on I Peter 4:8. Approaching the feast of the Holy Spirit, the believer must prepare to receive the Spirit into the depths of the soul. This was done through detachment, abandonment, inwardness, and single-mindedness. Using his common distinction between the inner and outer man, Tauler explained that the outer man must ﬁrst be at peace, and the lower faculties must be governed by the moral virtues. The Holy Spirit would then “adorn the higher faculties with infused virtues.” The inner man must also be prepared and cleansed of the seven deadly sins, especially pride, anger, and envy; all impurity and hidden vices and motives must be discovered and eradicated. The soul then became receptive to the Spirit: As soon as the outer man has prepared his lower and higher faculties, the whole of him becomes receptive, and the tender, divine sun begins to send its bright rays into his noble ground; and now a joyous summer commences, a down-right may-blossoming is about to unfold. . . . As soon as the Holy Spirit can come with His presence and freely ﬂood the depth of the soul with his wondrous radiance and divine light, then He who is rightly called the Comforter, is able to exercise His sweet comfort there. . . . Now as soon as some people discover and experience this rare comfort, they would like to immerse themselves and fall asleep in it, rest forever in its bliss. . . . But this was not Our Lord’s wish. . . . It is with immense gratitude that we should receive [this sweetness] and then humbly offer it back to God, giving Him great thanks and praise and confessing our own unworthiness.103 Tauler continued by describing this experience in terms of ﬁre and love: Into this noble and wondrous ground, this secret realm, there descends that bliss of which we have spoken. Here the soul has its eternal abode. Here a man becomes so still and essential, so singleminded and withdrawn, so raised up in purity, and more and more removed from all things, for God Himself is present in this noble realm, and works and reigns and dwells therein. This state of the soul cannot be compared to what it has been before, for now it is granted to share in the divine life itself. The spirit meets wholly with God and enﬂames itself in all things, and is drawn into the hot ﬁre of love which is God in essence and in nature.104 Those who experienced this work of the Spirit (such as the Friends of God) prayed for friends, sinners, souls in purgatory, and embraced every man’s

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need. As Tauler believed, they “draw all into their embrace in this same abyss, in this ﬁre of love, as in a divine contemplation. Then they turn their gaze back to this loving abyss, to this ﬁre of love and there they rest. . . .”105 In Sermon 29 [Feast of the Blessed Trinity II], Tauler preached on the “experience of the working of the Trinity” deep within the soul. He taught that one must “allow the Holy Trinity to be born in the center of your soul, not by the use of human reason, but in essence and in truth; not in words but in reality.” In the deepest “most intimate, hidden, and inmost ground of the soul” God would be present “essentially, actively, and substantially.”106 Tauler explained that whoever “wishes to experience this must turn inward,” far beyond all exterior and interior faculties, so that he may “sink and melt into that ground.” Then, “the power of the Father will come and call the soul into Himself through his only-begotten Son, and as the Son is born of the Father and returns into Him, so man is born of the Father in the Son, and ﬂows back into the Father through the Son, becoming one with Him.”107 The Holy Spirit then “pours Himself out in inexpressible and overﬂowing love and joy, ﬂooding and saturating the ground of the soul with his wondrous gifts.”108 The Father, Son and Spirit are the witnesses “who give the true testimony that you are a child of God.” According to Tauler, these witnesses illuminate the “depth of your ground and thus your own ground becomes your witness.” Tauler’s talk of “comfort,” “sweetness,” and “joy” could be misleading. One of his central messages is the necessity for “emptiness” and spiritual afﬂiction. The individual must undergo the complete emptying of the self in order that the Holy Spirit may be received. One must become empty before one is ﬁlled. “If God is to go in, the creature of necessity must get out.”109 According to Tauler, two forms could not coexist in one being: “If God is really to perform his works in you, you must be in empty passivity [lidekeit], and all your powers must abandon all their own activities and preoccupations and stand in pure self-denial.”110 Tauler taught that this emptying is a total abandonment, of all exterior things as well as of the self. Only when this emptying had taken place was the believer in the state of true “poverty of spirit.” The Holy Spirit would then pour seven gifts into the empty soul. Perhaps the most important for sixteenth-century readers was the gift of inner suffering. Tauler referred to this as the gift of “counsel,” by which he meant that God would leave the soul to its own resources in order to see how we bear ourselves in the spiritual trial. This trial is the spiritual suffering of God’s abandonment: God now lets us sink to the very depth, so that no knowledge of Him remains, no grace, no comfort, nor anything that we or any good person may have ever gained. All this is now totally hidden and removed. In such a state the gift of counsel is sorely needed, in order that we may conduct ourselves in the way God wishes. With its help we learn abandonment, death to self, and surrender to the awesome

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and secret judgments of God which now painfully deprive us of that sublime and pure good in which we had found our salvation, our joy, and comfort.111 Tauler depicted the soul traveling on a dark and unknown path, and “where it leads is not known.” This is the stage of “spiritual poverty” when “in a strange manner God withdraws Himself from the soul, leaving it anguished and denuded.”112 An extremely rough path lies ahead of him, dark and lonely, and as he is led through it, God deprives him of everything He had given him before. The man is now left so completely on his own that he knows nothing at all of God; he is brought to such desolation that he wonders whether he was ever on the right path, whether he has a God or not, whether he really exists; he is so strangely afﬂicted, so deeply afﬂicted, that he feels that the whole wide world has become too narrow for him. He can neither taste God nor know Him. . . . The stronger his experience of God was before, the stronger and more intolerable is now the bitterness and pain of loss.113 In this state, the soul was unable to believe that “this insufferable darkness could ever give way to light.” However, Tauler encouraged the sufferer by saying, “The Lord is not far away. Cling to the rock of the true and living faith.” Only after this anguish did one become divinized. The soul had reached the stage which was the transition into a divinized life, into a union of our created spirit with God’s uncreated one. The soul that is divinized has “returned from death to life.” Having been led out of himself, he enters into God. God “raises him from a human to a divine mode of being, from sorrow into a divine peace, in which man becomes so divinized that everything which he is and does, God is and does in him.” Thus one becomes “by grace what God is essentially by nature.”114 Tauler had depicted this spiritual suffering as that endured by Job. Job 17:12 states, “after darkness I will hope for light!” Tauler explained that “after the darkness we hope for the light. Hold yourself together [when you are in darkness] do not run away! Bear your suffering to the end and seek nothing else! . . . for truly, when you stand this storm, the birth of God is close at hand and God will be born in you.”115 Elsewhere Tauler preached on Job’s words, “In the horror of a vision by night, when deep sleep is wont to hold men, fear seized upon me and trembling, and all my bones were affrighted.” Tauler explained that “ this horror of the nocturnal judgment is the dark and blind taking possession of the heart by creatures and is followed by an inexpressible dread and shuddering that makes one’s bones tremble. The passing of the spirit is the passing by of God.” Tauler then reiterated the need for the total

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yielding or emptying of the self. In order that God pass toward us, however, “there must be an exit.” This meant that “if God is to penetrate our innermost core to bring about his birth in us, then our creaturely selves must be brought to nothing.”116 These passages immediately explain why Luther held Tauler in such high regard. The descriptions of spiritual abandonment, or Anfechtung, resonated with Luther’s own experiences. So, too, the rhythm of destruction followed by rebirth was an insight that Luther expressed throughout all of his writings. Reﬂecting on such passages Luther wrote the following in his annotations on Tauler: Although we might know that God does not work in us without ﬁrst destroying us and what is our own (i.e. through a cross and suffering), still we are so foolish as to desire that the sufferings we undergo are only those which we choose. . . . Thus we dictate to God the extent and form [of these sufferings], and are prepared to teach Him what He may do and how far He may go when he deals with us. We do not in other words stand in sheer faith (in mera ﬁde) . . . [Now God deals with us only on his own terms.] He will either have nothing to do with us at all, or will work in us as in those who have no knowledge [of His way of salvation]. What He works He works in those who do not understand it, so that there may be [only] saving faith. . . . He immediately shatters our purpose (propositum), hope and design.(intentionem). He disperses our plan (consilium) with a work that is the very reverse of it (contrario opere). . . . Thus, as [Tauler] says here, the whole of salvation is resignation of will in all things, whether spiritual or temporal—and naked faith (nuda ﬁdes) in God.117 As Steven Ozment made clear, Luther’s anthropology ended up very different from that of Tauler. For Luther, the stripping away and detaching from temporal things never revealed a ground of the soul. There was no Seelengrund that was uniﬁed with the ground of God. The believer did not stand with God on the basis of an innate grunt, but rather with “sheer” or “naked” faith alone.118 Luther’s admiration for Tauler extended to the Theologia Deutsch. As David Blamires observed, the sermons of Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch achieved the most continuous and widest circulation of any medieval German religious writing. The popularity of both was due largely to Luther. He published an abbreviated form of the Theologia Deutsch in 1516 and a full translation in 1518. His prefatory comment bears repeating. In the ﬁrst edition he stated that this book, to which he gave the title Eyn deutsch Theologia, was “a ﬁne little spiritual book about the correct meaning and understanding of what the old and the new man are, what Adam’s and what God’s children are, and how Adam must die in us and Christ arise.” It was the necessity for the spiritual death that provided Luther with a way to interpret his own experience. Luther’s afﬁnity for both Tauler and the Theologia Deutsch lay primarily in the stress on humility, on

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the insights into the suffering of spiritual abandonment, and on the belief that “of himself and his own strength, man is nothing.” As Ozment established, it was the members of the radical reformation that most fully embraced the Theologia Deutsch. Hans Denck distributed an edition with comments in 1528. Sebastian Franck wrote a Latin paraphrase of this work in 1542. Castellio translated it, and it was inﬂuential on the thought of Valentin Weigel.119 The original context of the Theologia Deutsch was the late fourteenth century, the time in which the Friends of God were most active. Like Tauler and Gerson, the author, known as the Frankfurter, was also determined to distinguish between true mystical experiences and the falsity of those claimed by the Free Spirits. It is not surprising that the Theologia Deutsch reﬂected many of the themes so familiar to this tradition of late medieval German mysticism: namely, detachment, interiority, experience, and the unmediated union with God. Repeatedly, the Frankfurter insisted that this union required the destruction of the self-will and was achieved only through Christ. The themes that were so important to the radical reformers were expressed by the Frankfurter in terms of the original and fallen situation of humanity. Adam’s sin was that of disobedience, a sin that resulted in the attachment to the self, self-will, to the “I” and the “mine.” The eating of the fruit in the garden was nothing other than “one’s own will or wishing something different from what the eternal will wishes.” Salvation required true obedience that was a freedom from all attachment to the partial, to creatures, and especially to one’s self-will. Thus one must abandon the will by means of releasement (gelassen) and detachment (abgescheiden).120 As the Frankfurter explained, the individual must not “lay claim to anything, be it knowledge, love, or desire. All good things such as these belong to God and not to the human being. When we recognize this, we see that we were foolish to believe our claims to belong to us when they really are God’s.”121 To ﬁnd God, the searcher ﬁrst had to die to the self: People also say that a person should die in himself, that is, the person’s selﬁshness and selfhood must die. St. Paul says this: “Put aside the old person with his activities and put on a new person who is created and formed according to God (Ephesians 4:22, 24). Whoever lives in his selfhood and according to the old person is really and actually a child of Adam . . . This is why it is also written, “the more self-hood and selﬁshness, the more sin and wickedness; the less the former, the less the latter.” Furthermore, it is written: “the more my ego, that is selfhood, and selﬁshness, decreases, the more of God’s self, that is God himself, increases in me.122 The Frankfurter repeated this requirement throughout the text. “Selﬁshness and selfhood pertain entirely to the devil, and that is why he is a devil.” To be

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pure was to be “entirely without self.” A person could not become receptive to the divine truth and be taken “hold of by the Holy Spirit” unless he was “so utterly yielded to God that God is himself the man. God is indeed there himself, and that same One is constantly active and acts or desists without any ‘I,’ ‘me’ and ‘mine.’” Consequently, the Johannine passages where Christ said, “No one comes to the Father but through me,” and “No one comes to me unless the Father draws him,” meant that, “If anyone wants to enter otherwise than through me, he will never rightly enter or come to the highest truth, but is a thief and a murderer (John 10:1). May he help us to get rid of self, die to our own will and live only for God and his Son, who yielded his will to his heavenly Father. . . .”123 Only through the total abandonment of the self could one gain “access to a true inward life.” The inward begins only after the outward. Only after the detachment from the self could the soul be empty and yield to God. In this state of spiritual passivity, God then acted. Spiritual poverty created the emptiness necessary for God to enter and thereby divinize the person: “Now where the creature or the person loses what is his own, his selfhood and himself, and moves out, there God goes in with what is his, that is, with his own selfhood.”124 This is the reality of divinization: What, then, is this union? For it to exist, a person should be purely, singly, and entirely single with the single, eternal will of God, or indeed be completely without will, after the created will has ﬂowed into the eternal will and been merged with it and become nothing, so that the eternal will alone can act or not act in that place. The Frankfurter went on to describe the divinized state as that in which the inner person was immovable and God moved the outer person. This was the state of true obedience which replaced Adam’s disobedience. The created self was emptied and replaced by the divine: It is also true to say that where the union takes place and becomes organic, the inner person remains immovable in the union, while God allows the outer person to be moved this way and that in whatever manner that must be. This is how the outer person speaks, and rightly so: “I do not want either to be or not to be, to live or die, to know or not know, to act or to abstain from acting, and so forth. But whatever has to be and has to happen, I am obedient to, both passively and actively.125 Thomas Müntzer argued passionately about the true nature of faith by distinguishing between an inauthentic or counterfeit faith and the true faith of the believer.126 In Müntzer’s thought, this distinction began with the experience of suffering, or what the tradition of Tauler and the Frankfurter understood as

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spiritual, inward anguish. Müntzer was unrelenting in his constant demand that true faith required spiritual afﬂiction. He also expressed the need for all of Scripture to take place within the soul. He agreed wholeheartedly with the statement in the Theologia Deutsch that before a person became truly free from pain, he must have “previously experienced and suffered everything that Christ experienced and suffered.”127 Writing to George Amandus, Müntzer explained, “No one can be saved unless he allows the whole of Scripture to be brought to pass in him by God, Matthew 5. Christ did not come to redeem us in a way that dispensed us from suffering poverty of spirit. . . .” The true believer had to experience fully the reality of God, “grinding his outward self down to nothing.” Fundamental to Müntzer’s teaching (as was that of the Theologia Deutsch) was the belief that God had to empty the soul and strip it of all earthly desires before the Holy Spirit could enter and dwell.128 The conscience had to “devour the very marrow of my being, my strength, everything that makes me what I am.” Counterfeit faith was always an “untried faith,” a faith that had not endured “testing,” and, therefore, was characteristic of the “inexperienced.” Thus Münzter constantly railed against the “untried biblical scholars” of Wittenberg, who were the prime examples of such inauthentic or untested faith. Most importantly, an inauthentic faith was never obvious to the inexperienced person. The nominal Christian was unable realize that his faith was false. Therefore, the believer must “experience unbelief,” by which Müntzer meant that the depths of his unbelief had to be “unmasked” and revealed to him. This could be accomplished only through the experience of suffering, which gave birth to a real and authentic faith. The “sincere Christian” had to “endure” the work of God in the “heart,” especially the horrifying experience of being forsaken by God. According to Müntzer, the proper use of the Scriptures was to “do us death.” This was necessary because “the living word, which brings us to life, is heard only by the soul that has been purged.” Until this purging took place, the Christian believed only the “outward word.” To get rid of “feigned faith,” therefore, required that the believer “be reduced to confusion.”129 Those “lacking in experience” were unable to understand this process because they believed that the outward testimony could create an inward reality. Such people would say they “believe in Scripture” but they have never “endured it.”130 In his interpretation of the ﬁrst chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Müntzer explained this unmasking in terms of a breaking through [durchgang] of false faith to the depths of the soul. For the power of the most high . . . at once drives out all counterfeit, secret, unbelief, the latter being unmasked by the putting on or breaking through [to the spirit] in the abyss of the soul [im abgrund der seelen]. . . . But someone who has not experienced this breakthrough has absolutely no notion of what faith is, for he

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continues to maintain a speculative faith which clothes his arrogant spirit like an old beggar’s coat.131 God “works in the soul” by causing the experience of suffering to break through unbelief to faith. Only after the endurance of suffering did Christ or the Spirit “climb down” into “those who are by now completely drowned and have abandoned all hope; he comes to them in the night when their sadness is at its height, and then the elect think he is a devil, or that he is a phantom, for he says, ‘Ah my most beloved, have no fear, it is me; I cannot illumine you in any other way; there is no other way that I can pour my grace into you.’”132 After the “night,” when believers have experienced the “bitter Christ,” they were able to ﬁnd the “sweet Christ” who gave them consolation and the experiential certainty of salvation. Attacking the Catholic teaching on the uncertainty of salvation, Müntzer described the true “experience of faith,” a faith that included certitude. That is what the usurious, interest-exacting priests are like, who gulp down the dead words of Scripture and then pour out [schuten] the mere letter and untried faith . . . upon the poor, the really poor people. The end result is that no one is sure of his soul’s salvation. For these same Beelzebub-like fellows bring a single piece of holy Scripture to market. Hey, a man doesn’t know if he deserves God’s hate or love! The abyss from which this poison rises is that each whore-riding priest acknowledges the most treacherous and wicked princes of the devil . . . Anyone who has once received the Holy Spirit as he should, can never again be damned. . . . This is why the people live without real pastors, for the experience of faith is never preached to it . . . From none of these, however, do they learn what it is to experience God, what real faith is, what robust virtue is, what good works are after reconciliation with God.133 The all-important experience of faith was also the feeling of certainty. According to Müntzer, the Holy Spirit gave the elect “invincible testimony that they are the children of God,” and “inscribes” this testimony on the “heart.” This testimony was never uncertain, because if a person was unsure about feeling the work of the Spirit, then he was not a member of Christ.134 Müntzer repeatedly focused on the experiences wrought by the Spirit. He strove to depict how one “feels” who has come “to experience the true work and teaching of God without any beneﬁt of books.” To do so he emphasized the affective nearness of the divine to the soul. The believer “experiences the operation of the divine Word from the well of the heart.” The elect experience the teaching and speaking of God in the “abyss of the soul,” or the “abyss of the heart.” The “heart” of the elect “is completely melted and ready to receive the gift of God.” Preaching on Daniel, Müntzer urged his listeners to attend to their “inward being” and

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urged them to understand that, “the word is not far from you. Look, it is in your heart.” Frequently he spoke of God or Christ dwelling within the soul of the believer, saying, “as long as [the believer] lives, he is the dwelling of God and the holy spirit.” “God,” Müntzer repeated, “is in us.”135 In one of his most vivid passages Müntzer contrasted living and dead faith in terms of that which courses through the body: Anyone who does not hear from the mouth of God the real living word of God and the distinction between Bible and Babel, is a dead thing and nothing else. But God’s word, which courses through heart, brain, skin, hair, bone, marrow, sap, might, and strength surely has the right to canter along in quite a different way from the fairy-tales told by our clownish, testicled doctors.136 This painful process of death and rebirth continually engrossed Müntzer, whose thought has been appropriately called a “Theologie der Anfechtung.” The dying and resurrection of Christ were always his experiential model for the nature of true justifying faith, a faith that underwent the experiences of dying and rising. Knowledge about or the contemplation on Christ’s life and death was insufﬁcient; the actual inner experience of these events was necessary: “Only he who dies with CHRIST can rise with him.” In short, the death and resurrection of Christ had to be made interior to the soul.137 Many of these same themes abound in the writings of the Anabaptists. The Anabaptists defended adult or believer’s baptism on several grounds. Central to their arguments, of course, were the “strict” and clear words of the Bible. They passionately thought that only believer’s baptism conformed to the “order” or the stages prescribed by Scripture. Citing such passages as Mark 16:15 (“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved”) and the troublesome passage from Acts 19, the Anabaptists insisted that Scripture laid down a literal and unalterable “order of God.”138 This order consisted of preaching, repentance, faith, and water baptism. Only the person who could reason, believe, and choose would be capable of responding to the Gospel and committing to the new or reborn life. Believers received water baptism as a sign of their previous repentance and faith and as a public commitment or testimony that henceforth they would lead a new life according to the “Rule of Christ.”139 In his dispute with Zwingli, Balthasar Hubmaier insisted that water baptism was a “sign with which we obligate ourselves to God and to live a new life.” Outward baptism, therefore, meant that the baptized person must have already inwardly died “with Christ to vices” and resurrected with Christ so that he or she could “rise up from sin and walk in the newness of life.” Consequently, water baptism was “a public testimony of his internal faith [ein offenlich zeügknüß seins inwendigen glaubens].”140

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There was, however, another factor that led to the insistence on believer’s baptism. It is important to understand that Anabaptist writers defended this practice in order to preserve a deeply experiential understanding of baptism. After citing the church fathers, Hubmaier made a revealing comment: “I point out these opinions, not because I need human witnesses, but so that it may be seen how we have been paper Christians and mouth Christians.” He continued, “Yes, one testiﬁes to the truth with Scripture and mouth, but one does not touch the same with the least ﬁnger, which the devil appreciates very much.”141 Baptism was intimately connected to this issue of being merely “paper” and “mouth” Christians. A different and deeper kind of faith was required for baptism, a justifying faith that had experienced the truths of Scripture. For men such as Hubmaier, Hans Hut, and others, the core of baptism was the soul’s experience of life and death. Anabaptist thinkers, including Hubmaier, made important distinctions between different kinds of baptism. This was not unique to the Anabaptists; we ﬁnd the explanation of John’s baptism of water and the twofold baptism of the Holy Spirit. Zwingli’s emphasis was on the baptisms of the Holy Spirit. In the ﬁrst kind of baptism, all believers are “ﬂooded within” by the drawing and enlightenment of the Holy Spirit. The second referred to “external baptism of the Holy Spirit,” when “pious men began at once to speak in foreign tongues” as a sign to others that they had “faith and the enlightenment of the soul.” The Anabaptists referred to different types of baptism, all of which referred to the baptism of suffering. Hubmaier sometimes spoke of three distinct baptisms. For I confess three kinds of baptism: that of the Spirit, which takes place inwardly in faith [jnwendig im glauben], the second of water, which takes place outwardly by oral afﬁrmation of faith before the church, and the third of blood which takes place in martyrdom or on the deathbed.142 In his tract On the Christian Baptism of Believers, Hubmaier named ﬁve types of baptism: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Baptism in water. Baptism in water, for or unto change of life. Baptism in the Spirit and ﬁre. To be reborn out of water and Spirit. Baptism in water in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, or in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Arguing against infant baptism, Hubmaier stressed that the mere external saying of the proper words and the pouring of water was not a true baptism but simply an empty ritual.

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They think that if they pronounce the names and pour water that this is baptism. No, it is not like that, dear brethren! But baptizing in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit takes place when a person first confesses that he is a sinner and guilty, when he then believes in the forgiveness of sins through Jesus Christ. . . . And when he now testifies all such publicly before people with the reception of the outward water: that is baptism.143 Hubmaier examined at length the nature of the baptism of the Holy Spirit. He made clear that “to be children of God is a work of God.” Repentance and faith, which were required before water baptism, were the works of God experienced in the soul and were caused by the “internal drawing” of Christ or the Spirit.144 Only after the experience of “internal drawing,” which included the painful process of repentance, could outward baptism take place. After the confession of sins, water baptism was received as a public testimony of repentance and the beginning of the new or regenerated life. Thus after water baptism, the baptism of the Spirit could take place. Another crucial aspect of the experiential nature of baptism for all Anabaptist writers was the experience of the “new life.” He described this life as a belief and “[t]rust that the Holy Spirit, has come into me, and that the power of the most high God has overshadowed my soul like that of Mary, so that I might be conceived a new man and be born again [vmbschettiget darmit ich ein new mensch entpfangen] in thy living, indestructible Word, and in the Spirit, and that I might see the Kingdom of God.”145 In familiar language, Hubmaier described this latter baptism in terms of ﬁre and of being “enlivened.” Baptism in the Spirit and ﬁre [geyst vnd feür] is to make alive and whole again the confessing sinner with the ﬁre of the divine word by the Spirit of God. This takes place when the pardon of his sins has already been granted to him by the life-giving Word of God. The Spirit of God makes and effects this enlivening internally [Die lebendmachung thůt vnd wirckt der geyst Gottes inwendig im menschen]. Outside of the same all teaching of the Word is a killing letter. To be reborn out of water and Spirit is to help the sinner out of the fear and dread which he received when his sins were pointed out to him by the letter of the law and to give him medicine and comfort again through the Word of God which will remain for eternity, so that he will not despair. For the unbeliever this promise is a dead letter or death, but for the believer it is spirit and life, and this God alone gives to whomever he wants. He knows his own.146

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Clearly, Hubmaier treasured the experiential demands and rewards of believer’s baptism: the painful feeling of repentance as well as the internal baptism of the Holy Spirit. We ﬁnd these types of explanations and descriptions throughout texts that defended believer’s baptism. Hans Hut composed his treatise On the Mystery of Baptism in 1526. He, too, stressed the importance of the “right order” found in Scripture concerning baptism. First Christ commanded the preaching of “the gospel of all creatures,” whereby the suffering of Christ is “preached to you in all creatures.”147 Then, Hut explained, came belief, which was followed by baptism. He went on to argue that there was a threefold baptism: water baptism, inward baptism, and the baptism of the Holy Spirit. Hut argued that water or external baptism was not that which made a person godly, as one’s faith was still untested. Water baptism was only a symbol, parable, or covenant that denoted the desire for true baptism. “Untried faith” lasted up to the time of justiﬁcation, “where it must be prepared and justiﬁed.” This prior untested or artiﬁcial faith had to undergo the suffering of “inward baptism.” Hut contended that “The Word must be received with a pure heart, through the Holy Spirit, and become ﬂesh in us. This creates great fright and trembling in us, even as in Mary, when she heard God’s will through the Angel, Luke 1. The Word must also be born in us. This cannot happen except through pain, poverty, and misery within and without.”148 Hut also explained, “According to the Word of Christ and all of Scripture, one should baptize nobody except one who gives an ardent account of his faith. Where this sign of baptism is accepted, it symbolizes the coming baptism of suffering.”149 In the “inward baptism,” or the baptism of suffering, the person had to endure “the suffering of God’s abandonment” and bear the “sign of Jonah,” which Hut described as the “abyss of hell.” During this suffering, when nothing could bring joy, the Christian, “must simply wait until the comfort of the Spirit comes upon him.”150 Whoever . . . concludes that he has been abandoned by God and sees nothing other than death, stands in the true baptism to which he consented before God and his community or people by the symbol of baptism.151 This “inward baptism of tribulation” was the “real essence and power of baptism.” The believer felt himself to be “swallowed up in the death of Christ, after which one receives the comfort of the Holy Spirit.” Through the “water of tribulation,” Christ works in the soul by cleansing a place in which he will dwell. In this baptism, the believer is reborn and made new. True inward baptism leads the soul “into hell and out again.” As Hut wrote, “He makes dead and then brings to life again.”152 Once this inner cleansing has taken place, the Christian will ﬁnd the mercy of God and will become “one with the person of Christ, the cruciﬁed Son of God, puriﬁed and wholly united in one body.”153

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Moreover, the believer is assured in baptism that “he is accepted as a child of God, a brother or sister of Christ, a member of the Christian community and the body of Christ, because he has, with faithful heart, desired to come to such unity according to the will of Christ.”154 The person who has endured the baptism of suffering ﬁnally came to the “baptism of the Holy Spirit,” which enabled the Christian to ﬁght against sin for the remainder of his life. Here again we see the experience of the “new birth” which was brought about by the Spirit. As Hut said, “Through the body of Christ the third part is revealed, the goodness and mercy of the Holy Spirit, to which no one can come except through the water of tribulation and the bath of the new birth, in which persons are born anew, yes, become children of God and brothers of Christ, are comforted, awakened from death, led out of hell and made alive in Christ.”155 This baptism also, “makes a person wholly new in senses, speech, and heart, in all actions and conduct.” Hut explained that after the waters of tribulation, “the waters become clean, pure, joyous, and pleasing clear so that one can accept the Spirit of God in all fullness to fulﬁll the word of God.”156 For Hut, the baptism of the Spirit was signiﬁed by a ﬁre that created purity. God, he said, “likes ﬁre and gives his commands from the ﬁre. He calls himself a consuming ﬁre which consumes all things and burns them in Himself. That is why he will have no foreign ﬁre in his house for his offerings and incense.” As Hut concluded, no one “can accept the sweet Son of God, except he ﬁrst taste the bitterness of justiﬁcation.”157 Even when the three baptisms are deﬁned somewhat differently, the experience of death and renewal remained constant. Leonard Schiemer, baptized by Hut, spoke of three graces as well as three baptisms. The ﬁrst grace was the enlightenment God gives through the Word, a “light” that brings faith. Moses gave the Law as the ﬁrst act of grace. Schiemer explained that Moses was only the external conduit of the internal ﬁrst grace: “Through Moses we are given the external law, while the light or Word dwells in us internally. Believers then set their hearts on the Word of God when they experience this light.”158 The second grace was the “wine of suffering,” which was the cross. Believers would experience all types of suffering: loss of family, property, and health as well as the anxiety that one had been forsaken by God. Such suffering was a “powerful reﬁning,” during which the uncruciﬁed Christian was like “untested metal or a house before the timbers are even split.”159 The third grace was “the Comforter, the Holy Spirit.” However, as Schiemer maintained, “The Holy Spirit teaches nobody who has not already despaired of all human comfort and wisdom and offered his heart up to God alone.”160 These three graces corresponded to the three baptisms that Schiemer explained in his treatise Three Kinds of Baptism in the New Testament Clearly Outlined. The ﬁrst baptism was brought about by the Holy Spirit and enabled the Christian to become obedient to God. In this baptism one “yields his body and life to God.” Such “yielding” was a witness that the Christian had received the Holy Spirit. Distinguishing between the baptism of John and the baptism of

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Christ, Hut argued that the second baptism was that of water and was the baptism that testiﬁed to the reception of the Holy Spirit. This was the public demonstration of true discipleship. The third baptism was the “baptism of blood.” According to Schiemer, this was the true test of the Christian. “An untested Christian,” he wrote, “is like untested or unhardened metal.” In the baptism of blood, the Christian experienced suffering, especially the suffering of persecution. As Schiemer explained, “Christ received this baptism from Judas, Caiphus, Herod, and Pilatus, the high priest, and the religious scholars.”161 Schiemer was one of many who often equated the baptism of blood with persecution: The drink of this bottle is nothing else than a crushed, pulverized, ground up, and troubled heart, crushed in the mortar of the cross, for the grapes in God’s vineyard must be pressed in the winepress of tribulation. . . . Our friend and brother Christ drank of this herb or bottle on the cross, and the drink was mixed with vinegar and hyssop. In brief, whoever has not learned of God but from people, can never come to a ﬁrm faith. And such a faith lasts only until persecution begins.162 Anabaptist writers devoted considerable space to the experiential nature of rebirth and renewal. Conversion was of central importance. Conversion and the life of the spirit were inseparable.163 For some, this rebirth included the experiential assurance of forgiveness and the certainty of salvation. Hut wrote that “Those who do not feel a wisdom which makes them so certain in their faith that no one can disturb them, do not have the Holy Spirit.”164 Hubmaier required this certainty before one received water baptism. He approached baptism in a way reminiscent of Luther’s earlier views about receiving the sacrament of penance. Water baptism does not wash away our sin, nor does it save us, but only the certain knowledge of a good conscience toward God through the resurrection of Christ Jesus. This knowledge is nothing but the faith in which we are sure and certain that we have a gracious and favorable Father in heaven, and that before we receive water baptism.165 If now a person who has been brought through the Word of God to recognition of his sin, confesses himself to be a sinner, it is further taught by the Word of God that he should call upon God as Father for the forgiveness of his sin for the sake of Christ, and if he does that in faith and does not doubt anything, then God has cleansed his heart in this faith and has remitted all his sin.166 According to Hubmaier, the Christian who wanted to be baptized with water had to ﬁrst “have certain knowledge of a good conscience toward God through

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the Word of God.” Christians must be “certain and sure [sicher vnnd gwiß] that they have a gracious and favorable Father in heaven and that before we receive water baptism.” Throughout his writings, Hubmaier argued that this certainty of forgiveness must precede water baptism and that this certainty was obviously unknown to infants. While John’s baptism taught the Law and brought one to the confession of sins, Christ’s baptism effected the actual forgiveness of sins as well as the experience of “rest, peace, and security.”167 For Hubmaier, “Before baptism we should learn the gospel which is such a comforting teaching, through which we are certain and sure that we have a gracious Father in heaven who forgives us all our sins through the death and resurrection of his most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.”168 The faith required for baptism was trust in God and the belief that he was a gracious good, benevolent and merciful Father. This was that justifying faith that believed God shields us “like a hen her chicks under her wings.” Finally, “this conﬁdence and heartfelt trust [zůuersicht vnd hertzlich vertrauwen] . . . is exactly true faith.”169 After being released from a Zurich prison in 1526, Hubmaier went to Augsburg where he met and allegedly baptized Hans Denck.170 Denck also distinguished between different types of baptism. Outward or water baptism, he said, was not essential. Inward baptism or the “baptism of Christ in the Spirit” was the baptism that saved the soul. This baptism required belief and the confession of sins. Denck was concerned to deﬁne and describe the nature of true faith as a faith not learned from one’s parents or from the reading of books. This was only traditional “false faith” that had to confront the “inborn poverty of spirit.” Denck’s question was: who gives me that faith that leads me into the sanctity of life? “They say one comes to that life through faith. I let that be. But who gives me that faith?”171 Denck contended further, “Now, all believers were once unbelievers. Consequently, in becoming believers, they thus ﬁrst had to die in order that they might thereafter no longer live [ for] themselves as unbelievers do, but for God through Christ that their walk might indeed no longer be on earth but in heaven.”172 Denck explained that for the person still in sin and with a false faith, to wash with water was useless. First one must “become penitent and won over from within.” The word of God must “descend and penetrate into the hard abyss of man’s uncleanness, just as an arid soil is softened up by a good rain.” One’s inborn nature yields and experiences despair. Distinguishing between the baptism of John and the baptism of Christ, Denck argued, “Therefore, not only John the Baptist but also the apostles of Christ baptized in water. [The] reason: whatever does not survive the water can indeed much less endure the ﬁre, for the baptism of Christ is in Spirit (and) the perfection of his work.” Water baptism, he insisted, made blessed only because of the “covenant [ for] a good conscience with God.” As Denck stated, “Where this covenant is, there the Spirit of Christ also comes hither and ignites the ﬁre of love [der geyst Christi auch hin und erzündet an das feür der liebe] which consumes fully what inﬁrmity remains and completes the work of Christ.”173 While

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external baptism was not required for salvation, “internal baptism” was indispensable because “he who believes and is baptized will be saved.”174 Throughout his writings, Denck stressed that internal baptism revealed the nearness of God to the soul. In his treatise Concerning the Law of God, he warned that “Moreover, the spirit of him who says he is not able to keep [the law] is not of God, for he does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the ﬂesh. He says in his heart that Christ is ten miles from him.”175 However, the one who has received the covenant of God in the heart experiences the work of the Spirit and the understanding of Scripture. Only when the hatred of God was exposed to the sinner did the love of God come to light. “Only then does the power of the Almighty work in his heart without any mediation (for God himself is the true mediator, the Alpha and Omega of all good) to the end that he might fear, acknowledge, love and believe God, which no creature or created thing in heaven or earth could ever grant him.” When one’s inborn “enmity against God is overcome in man’s heart,” then the Law of God and the Gospel were “perceived and received in the heart though it may never have been externally heard by any creature.”176 If one knew God only from his (external) testament, he would remain unknown. As Denck insisted, “Whoever does not learn to know God from God himself has never known him.”177 Denck’s emphasis was on the belief that true faith required making the word of God internal to the soul. This happened only after repentance when God worked directly or immediately [on alle mittel.178 With this immediate knowledge, one learned that God is love—a theme Denck explored extensively in Concerning True Love. Regarding the experiential knowledge of God as love with reference to baptism, Denck concluded: Therefore, baptism, the sign of the Covenant, will be given and not refused any of those who, by God’s power through recognition of true Love, are invited and who desire it and are committed to follow. And, moreover, they shall not be constrained by any Covenant partners or kinsfolk (where Love does not constrain them) to abide in Love, as is written in the Psalter: Your people shall be there willingly.”179 As did Hubmaier, Denck spoke of the experiential assurance of forgiveness that came in true baptism. The believer prays daily for the forgiveness of sins and seeks after perfection. Therefore, the Lord has accepted him and accounted him among the perfect and given him to understand that he has so willed and elected him from the beginning. He sealed this for him with his Spirit which he poured into the heart of his elect (II Corinthians 1), so that person may without fear truly say: You are my Father and I your son! (Romans 8, Psalm 89).180

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Denck spoke frequently of the power of the indwelling Christ, a power which ﬁnally divinized the believer. Denck knew that “Christians deny in their hearts the preaching of Christ whose Word is a work powerful in proving to everyone in particular the glory of the Father through [inner] death and resurrection. That [internalization] they will not approach but rather seek Christ solely in the ﬂesh.”181 Nonetheless, the Word is in the heart and one must earnestly strive to hear what “God would say to us.” This must be done continually until “with the utmost clarity we hear God speaking with us” and we become certain of his will. At this point, the “new birth” is felt within the soul. “Then man takes after God and acquires the characteristics of the divine generation as a son of God and co-heir with Christ.” The Word, he said, is so “near” that when “returning to God” the believer was united to the Father. Thus, Christ calls himself a light of the world and also calls his disciples, that is, all Christians, a light of the world. Again he is come to light a ﬁre, which Jeremiah also ignited, as the Holy Spirit says to him: Behold! I will make my words in your mouth ﬁre and this people wood, and it will consume them and much more. In summary, all Christians, that is, they who have received the Holy Spirit, are one with Christ in God and like Christ, so that what concerns one also concerns the other. . . . The Word was in human beings for the purpose that it might divinize [vergottet] them, as happens to all the elect; and the Scripture therefore also calls them gods.182 In such passages, we see once again the desire for an experienced and living faith. Anabaptists were eager, by means of that experience, to conﬁrm that God was “working within you.” Once again, this experienced faith was described in terms of immediacy and interiority, as well as ﬁre, life, and light. It is crucial to see the yearning for experience in the context of their rejection of infant baptism. The important point here is that to give baptism to children would be to eradicate the experiential element of this important sacrament. Infants cannot “feel” the “ﬁre” or the suffering and remorse necessary for inward or spiritual baptism. Nor can they experience the new birth, renewal, and even deiﬁcation of the soul. Clearly the biblical injunction was of the utmost signiﬁcance for the Anabaptist position. However, their insistence on believer’s baptism went beyond the need for reason to respond to the preached word. By reﬂecting on the actual descriptions of baptism in their writings, we can discern their fear that by insisting on infant baptism, the magisterial reformers would suffocate or stiﬂe this critical experiential moment in the life of the Christian. In the writings of the radicals, we see the intense craving for an experienced, or felt faith. The hunger for immediacy was a quest for the experiential dimension of faith.

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In these texts, the Holy Spirit is the agent of experience. The Spirit worked directly in the soul and created the experience of sorrow over sin, the cleansing of sin, the comfort of forgiveness, and the “ﬁre” of renewal. Interiority was always prior and superior to anything external. The Christian, for example, must ﬁrst “feel” the truths of Scripture within the soul before Scripture could become a witness or testimony. As Denck taught, “Whoever holds the testimony higher than the truth itself, inverts the order.”183 It was the “nearness” or presence of God that these writers sought to experience and to express. According to Denck, “It is not enough that God be in you, you must also be in God.”184 For both Denck and Carlstadt, the divine indwelling was linked inseparably to the theory of Gelassenheit. The heart that yields or lets go of “everything that is not God” is the place where God lives. Carlstadt explained that, “it is clear that creaturely things obstruct human hearts so that God refuses to enter and possess his house until these creatures have been dropped off and the soul is free and empty.”185 Yielding to God enabled the believer to hear and feel God dwelling “without intermediary” within the soul. These writers frequently cited Jeremiah 31:33 to describe how God worked and dwelt in the soul. As Müntzer wrote: The hearts of men are the paper or parchment on which God’s finger inscribes his unchangeable will and his eternal wisdom, but not with ink; a writing which any man can read, provided his mind has been opened to it . . . God has done this for his elect from the very beginning so that the testimony they are given is not uncertain but an invincible one from the Holy Spirit, which then gives our spirit ample testimony that we are the children of God. For anyone who does not feel the spirit of Christ within him [Wan wer den geyst Christi, nyt in ym sporeth], or is not quite sure [nit gwyszlich] of having it, is not a member of Christ but of the devil.” What is your Scripture to me? But if we learn that real living Word of God, we will win over the unbeliever and speak with obvious authority, when the secret places of his heart are revealed so that he has to confess humbly that God is in us.186 Perhaps no one exempliﬁed these themes regarding the priority of experience better than the radical spiritualist, Sebastian Franck. Born in 1499, Franck was educated at Ingolstadt and the University at Heidelberg. He was ordained as priest in 1524 but became a Lutheran preacher in the village of Büchenbach in Ansbach-Bayreuth. In 1528 Franck left the ministry, critical of all groups, including Catholics, Anabaptists, and Lutherans. He brieﬂy worked as a printer in Nuremberg, where he published his Tűkenchronik. This book was a German

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translation of a Latin manuscript of unknown authorship. In his preface, Franck contrasted the simple life and worship of the Turks with the rituals, divisions, and impurities of Christianity. He argued that there were a dozen sects of Christianity to which were now added the Lutherans, the Zwinglians, and the Anabaptists. At the present time, however, the fourth sect was now in the process of formation, namely, that of spiritual Christians. This group would banish all audible prayer, ceremonies, sacraments (including baptism), and ordinances such as excommunication. Theirs would be the true invisible church. Franck moved in 1529 to Strasburg, where he wrote his letter to Campanus, which spelled out his understanding of the spiritual church. He published his Chronica in 1531. This work was so controversial that many groups, led by Bucer, had him expelled from Strasbourg in the same year. The controversy arose because he had listed both respected and viliﬁed groups and people among the “heretics” who had lived throughout history. He ﬁrst went to Kehl and then to Esslingen, where he earned his living by making soap. He continued, however, to write and publish. At Ulm he published his translation of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly along with three supplements, including a paraphrase of Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s book on the vanity of all knowledge. In 1534 he published hisOne Hundred and One Paradoxes. In the Paradoxa he expressed, under the form of apparent contradictions, theological ideas that were similar to those of Denck. In 1534 the censors forced Franck to promise not to publish anything more under his own name and to submit to the censors any texts he intended to publish. Consequently, he published his works elsewhere. In 1535 both Franck and Schwenckfeld were expelled from Ulm. Franck then settled in Basel, where he became a citizen in 1541 and died a year later.187 In the Paradoxa, Franck deﬁned a paradox as a thesis contradictory to common sense but still true from a particular point of view. In these paradoxes he examined the nature of true faith. Combining the themes of Gelassenheit and experience, Franck deﬁned faith in paradoxes 220–226: Now this free, living faith is poured out in the school of Christ under the holy cross in greatest resignation [Gelassenheit], self-emptying, and purity of spirit, from sheer grace. And it is experienced and taught in experience more than it is derived from the reading of Scripture and the hearing of sermons. It is derived exclusively from being addressed by the living word of God and from hearing of the same which goes forth unmediated [ohne Mittel] from the mouth of God through the agency of the spirit and not the letter.188 Franck referred to Staupitz in order to emphasize the experiential nature of faith and of truth: “Whatever cannot be known except through a concrete experience, cannot be learned from another person.” Franck concluded by saying, “Theology and faith are more of an experience than a science, which is acquired

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externally.”189 Franck expressed the need for experience by giving priority always to the internal. No words, teachings, or Scripture could change the “heart” or illumine the soul. The “resigned” person had to be “taught by God” directly or “from within.” This faith was present only in “believing” or “surrended hearts.” Only those who were taught through the Holy Spirit, “without intermediaries,” could have “spiritual eyes,” capable of recognizing the truth of God.190 External testimonies and even the historical knowledge or ﬂesh of Christ must be left behind so that the Spirit could create a new mind and a new heart. Scripture, therefore, had to be “experienced” in the heart before the Christian could recognize the truth of its outward witness. As Franck believed, “Now Scripture is totally oriented toward our heart, how it seems to be in us and is experienced.”191 Franck continually stressed the indwelling of the Word of God. Christ, he insisted, “is in us, not outside us.” The suffering, death, resurrection, and ascension of Christ must be “implanted” and “ﬂow into all members.” Only then would Christ and his righteousness become truly ours. The indwelling of Christ was always known through experience: “For the kingdom of God is not knowledge or art, but power, experience [Erfahrung], and feeling [Empﬁndung] which alone are the true knowledge and art. This God effects inwardly in the hearts of believers through his Spirit.”192 Stressing the immediate presence of God, Franck wrote that only the indwelling Christ was of use to the believer because, “outside of you he would be of no use to you.”193 Seeing Christ through the “eyes of the spirit,” the believer ﬁnally discovered the love of God, known as, “a feeling, expression, and living image of God.” Franck explained that after love drove out all fear of God, “the spirit of God is stirred up, experienced, and revealed within us.”194 Anything purely external was useless, for as John said, “The ﬂesh proﬁts nothing, it is the spirit who makes alive.” Therefore, the “external history” of Christ’s suffering did not save anyone. In order to be saved, the Spirit must implant and expound Christ’s suffering in the “innermost sanctuary of our hearts.” According to Franck, “Therefore the suffering of Christ is not yet accomplished and perfected and is of no avail to anyone until it enters into him . . . the suffering, death, resurrection and ascension of Christ must, in short, be distributed and implanted. Yes, it must ﬂow into all members.”195 In Franck’s writings, the experiential immediacy of Christ’s indwelling found expression in three familiar themes: authority, certainty, and deiﬁcation. Because the believer was “taught by God” directly, he was illumined and had the authority to claim a true knowledge of God. As Ozment demonstrated, Franck opposed the “oppressive masters of Scripture and tradition” to an “authoritative view of life from experience.”196 The living histories and experiences, especially those which God himself brings about in every man, [as] he directs [each] by

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experience from one [thing] to another, teach us everything. He who attends to his own life, observes what God is doing with him, and sees how God leads him in and out of all things from his youth, will become aware of a great deal and have a personal chronicle to write of his own life. . . . The inner man believes only what he has learned, heard, seen, and experienced of God in accordance with his own nature [glaubt . . . der inner mensch allein was er nach seiner art innerlich von Gott gelert/gehort/gesehen/und erfaren hat]. . . . For this reason experience is like a key to Scripture.”197 Throughout the Paradoxa, Franck referred to the authority of those who, through Gelassenheit, have made a place for Christ to dwell. In these people, the inner Word teaches, enlightens, and illumines the unveiled truth, including the true spiritual sense of Scripture.198 God revealed this truth in the “heart” of the people of the Old Testament although it still remained hidden. At that time the truth was a “felt power of God.” Franck explained that the New Testament was always present in the Old but “only in the few illumined and spiritually-minded.” Now, after Christ, the believer could clearly perceive the truth with “spiritual eyes” and “without any mediators.” Therefore, “the New Testament—because it is not letter but the Holy Spirit itself—must be learned from God without any mediators [muß man ohne Mittel von Gott selbst lernen]. Thus, properly speaking, no book or external word and worship is of the New Testament.” Franck further contended that “the word cannot be shouted into us from outside but must be found, taught, and perceived within us, stimulated and taught by the Holy Spirit.”199 We must, Franck taught, “learn the art of God from God alone.” According to Franck, God “takes possession” of the “resigned” or surrendered believer through “his Holy Spirit, who then pours love into our hearts, rules, indwells, teaches, loves, and leads us into all wisdom.”200 Repeatedly Franck explained the perception of the truth of God and Scripture by the fact that “Christus ist in uns und nicht außer uns.”201 This meant that the life, death, suffering, and resurrection of Christ must also take place within heart or soul, because “Christ’s suffering outside of us and not accomplished in us is of no avail . . . the suffering of Christ must be written into our heart by the ﬁnger of God.”202 No one could “learn faith” from books or anything external but only “under a holy cross, in the school of Christ, from God alone, through his own word.” No one can “experience God’s faithfulness” or believe in his grace and love “until he has experienced everything himself as being true and is able to see and know it with his inward eye and heart.”203 This uncovers the interior, experiential wisdom, a wisdom equated with certainty. According to Franck, “Faith is the inward person’s faith and certainty which he knows more assuredly than anything that stands before his physical eyes and therefore it stays with him in times of peril. . . .”204

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The world, Franck insisted, had only a temporary and false certainty. In reality, the faith expounded by “the world” was a lie. False as well as true certitude was attained only through testing. Intellectual knowledge was not sufﬁcient. As Franck explained, “No one can believe and suffer steadfastly just because his interpretation is right, unless one has been assured and taught by the Holy Spirit and knows this ﬁrmly and senses it in his heart, that the understanding is light from light and from God.”205 The phrase “light from light” brings us to Franck’s conviction stemming from the experiential indwelling of Christ. The soul had to become like God in order to know God. For the resigned and illumined believer, the soul is deiﬁed. Franck repeatedly explained that the human being takes on the divine nature. When the heart clings to God alone in total resignation, God “impregnates” the soul and changes its nature.206 The believer is unable to die because, “this birth is of God, spirit of spirit, John 1.3;11: 1 John 3.” The Christian is then “by nature and birth” born of God and is “indwelled, taught, wrought, and created by the Holy Spirit. . . .”207 Franck also spoke of deiﬁcation using Eucharistic terminology. Interpreting John 6:44 as referring to spiritual nourishment of the soul, Franck argued that Christ “lifted himself up in order that he may draw us though himself into his word—as we have heard—spirit into the spiritual nature.” Playing with the Eucharistic phraseology, Franck inverted the subject and object; the believer did not eat Christ but, rather, Christ ate the believer. Christ was the “food” that so overcomes the spiritual person that it “eats and devours me so that it is no longer I, but a new being unto eternal life.” No one, Franck explained, digests this food: “Rather it eats, digests, and devours all things when it is taken.” Reverting to the usual terminology, Franck explained that to “eat Christ is to believe in Christ and to take him into the soul in faith and in spirit.”208 The inwardly experienced faith of the believer was the power that transformed the believer into spirit. In all of these descriptions, Franck spoke of faith in terms of the principle that like is known by like. Describing faith and deiﬁcation in terms of spiritual immediacy, he discussed the return of the soul to God. The union of the soul with God was one of spirit to spirit, and like to like. Nothing external could effect this deiﬁcation; the Spirit alone could transform the soul into a purely spiritual nature. According to Franck, only that which the soul knew and felt pertained to the true justifying faith. Referring again to Staupitz, Franck wrote, “those things which cannot be learned or known other than through a sensitive experience, no one can learn from another, since no one can teach the other to see hear, smell, grasp, rejoice in or sorrow over. David says, ‘Taste and see.’” Referring to the Theologia Deutsch, Franck further explained that, “Medicine must be swallowed—outside of us it has no effect.”209 As he repeatedly stated, the believer had to take Christ into the soul, become spirit, and be “transplanted into him.”

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Note, therefore, there is no Christ as long as he is outside of us, worshiped only from afar and praised only with the lips. . . . He has to enter the heart and must be united with the soul within us in order for him to live in us, so that the word may become ﬂesh in us as it was in him. For unless Christ is born in us, Christ the incarnate word, the life, Christ in the ﬂesh outside of us, yes, God himself, outside our soul means nothing at all . . . the word must get in us that we may be one and one Christ with him who has become our ﬂesh that he may deify it [daß er’s vergeistige] and draw it unto himself. . . .210 R. Emmet McLaughlin once observed that the sixteenth century was the “great age of the Spirit.” Our study thus far has clearly shown him to be correct. The role of spiritualism has commonly been relegated to the so-called “Spiritualists” of the sixteenth century. This is a very useful category when trying to impose some kind of order on the ever-changing and complex reformations of this era. However, this chapter has attempted to demonstrate that an important wave of “small-s” spiritualism spread across Europe throughout the early modern era. We could have pushed this analysis further backward to the fourteenthcentury mystics, including Eckhardt, Ruusbroeck, and the author of the Cloud of Unknowing. The focus on experience, however, did not belong exclusively to the mystics. Instead we have concentrated on Gerson, the Modern Devotion, the alumbrados, Osuna, The Beneﬁcio di Cristo, Valdés, Tauler, the Theologia Deutsch, Müntzer, Hut, Denck and Franck. Nonetheless, an analysis of the mystical experience is not our aim. In this overly brief analysis, I have sought to discuss the way in which language about immediacy and experience was used in the late Middle Ages and then both inherited and transformed in the sixteenth century. We began by noting that as early as Occam, immediacy was the best support for reliability. Occam expressed this association between immediacy and reliability by his rejection of the species. Nominalist theology, with its distinction between the potentia absoluta and the potentia ordinata, reﬂected what Oberman called a “hunger for reality” and an insistence on “the full reality of our experienced world.” The association between immediacy, reliability, and the full reality of experience was also present in the realm of spirituality. The experienced reality of God or of the suffering Christ was the goal of those seeking an intensiﬁed spiritual life. The preaching and writing in the vernacular by late medieval authors further demonstrated the widespread interest in a heightened devotional life. In the treatises of Gerson, we can see the proliferation of this desire for an experienced Christianity. The “anti-intellectualism” evident in some ﬁfteenth-century treatises was actually an afﬁrmation of the priority of experience over learning, but never a rejection of knowledge. It would be better to say that the priority of experience was an afﬁrmation of

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experiential knowledge. The search was for the kind of knowledge of God that was deeply felt within the “heart” and capable of transforming the soul. This outpouring of affective theology permeated the spirituality of those seeking reform on the eve of the Reformation. From at least the time of Gerson, late medieval reform centered on the need for an experienced faith. If we recall Hamm’s analysis of the “minimalization” trend of late medieval Frömmigkeitstheologie, we can gain a more accurate sense of context. The anxiety uncovered by Hamm’s analysis was not only about the uncertainty of salvation. These texts betray a very real concern with spiritual inadequacy, dryness, weariness, and the inability to feel the proper emotions necessary for the sacrament of penance and the living of the Christian life of repentance. As Hamm demonstrated, the writers of pastoral piety found it necessary to assure the penitent that only a “minimum” of experience was required; “to grieve that you cannot grieve” had to be sufﬁcient. The focus, nonetheless, was on experience or, to be more precise, the need to feel spiritual experiences. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the concept of reform of the soul focused on spiritual reawakening. The mystical union with God through love was often seen as too high a goal. The Modern Devotion, in particular, demonstrates the striving after a deeper spiritual life that operated on a lower experiential level. Interiority, humility, mortiﬁcation, repentance, and the practice of spiritual exercises were all attempts to lead a more “ardent” devotional life. In some cases, including the Modern Devotion and the works of Valdés, the emphasis lay on the traditional monastic goal of making Scripture something that took place experientially in one’s soul. The laity, however, was now engaged in this exercise. Repeatedly we encountered the importance of a “living faith” that made the words and events of Scripture take place experientially within the soul of the believer. To portray this kind of faith, writers of spiritual treatises used the experiential language of tasting, feeling, being rekindled, or set “aﬁre.” For critics such as Erasmus, Christians of his time were content with mere formalism or the external observances of rites and ceremonies. His concept of reform went beyond the revival of learning; he advocated a spiritualizing and a “making interior” of the Christian faith. The radicals shared in this wave of spiritualism. By the time of Müntzer, ritualistic, historical faith and scholarly expertise were described as “counterfeit” and equated with unbelief. For Müntzer, God had to break through and destroy false faith, thereby unmasking its superﬁciality. As Műntzer made clear, the individual remained unaware of his lack of faith until tested by spiritual suffering. Other radicals echoed Müntzer’s concern. For the Anabaptists, the event of baptism could remain central only if it retained its experiential nature. The faith professed in believer’s baptism must be one of experienced suffering, forgiveness, and rebirth. Anything short of believer’s baptism rendered this sacrament a mere ritual and reduced the Scripture to its mere letter. Infant baptism smothered and emptied faith of any true experiential

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knowledge or meaning. For spiritualists such as Franck, any attention to external means or sacraments was a denial of the real nature of living faith, a faith that was known more through experience than from reading Scripture or hearing sermons. For Franck, any “mediators” between God and the soul threatened the “living” nature of God’s word. That living nature must “go forth unmediated from the mouth of God through the agency of the spirit and not the letter.” The appeals to experience made by Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, and many of the Radical reformers should be placed in this wider historical context. By looking to the history of spirituality for the proper context, the claims of the reformers sound very familiar. When Luther and his fellow reformers expressed the effect of the Holy Spirit both in faith and illumination, they were using a language continuous with the spirituality of the late Middle Ages. When Luther referred to faith as sapientia experimentalis, he was using a thoroughly traditional vocabulary and was expressing a widespread desire for a deepened experiential faith. This experiential language was, of course, now joined to a speciﬁc doctrine of justiﬁcation. While the doctrinal concern over justiﬁcation cannot be underestimated, nevertheless, the reformers stood in continuity with the late medieval and sixteenth-century concern about an experienced faith. It is not surprising that one of the earliest inﬂuences on Luther was Tauler and the Theologica Deutsch. In this text he read that the blessed must experience God’s works inside the soul, “as an inner knowledge, as love, as feeling and taste.”211 As we have noted, although the Spirit continued to be identiﬁed with the theological virtue of love, in the sixteenth century the main gift of the Spirit increasingly became that certainty. As the Reformations took hold, the deﬁning experience became that of certitude. This certainty was an experienced knowledge and trust deep within the soul. For thinkers such as Zwingli and many of the radicals, it was the immediacy of the Spirit that guaranteed certitude. Throughout their writings, Müntzer, Denck, and Franck equated faith with certitude. The certainty of truth was known directly from the Spirit, “without any intermediaries.” Here we ﬁnd a further transformation of the fourteenth-century epistemological principle that immediacy was the source of reliability. The sixteenth-century discussion took place on the spiritual and theological plane and immediacy came to guarantee not just epistemological reliability but certitude of salvation. And the nature of God increasingly came to be deﬁned not only as gracious and benevolent but as that being “who did not deceive and could not be deceived.” Always suspicious of a free-ﬂoating Spirit, Luther and Calvin anchored this experiential knowledge to a minimum of mediators, namely, the Word and the sacraments. Nonetheless, in all these cases, we ﬁnd that the nearness or immediacy of the divine presence to the soul was the guarantee of an inescapable certainty of an experienced truth that could not be doubted.

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The desire for certitude crossed all religious boundaries in the sixteenth century. Parallel to the Protestant claims about the Spirit was the continuation of the search among Catholics for a deepened and experienced faith. Erasmus sounded the call with his attacks on a merely external religion. His appeal to interiority and to a spiritualized Christianity found widespread appeal. From Zwingli in Zurich to Valdés in Spain and Italy, we ﬁnd the conviction that faith must be spiritually experienced in the soul. Erasmus’s teaching was fused with the native alumbradismo and the Franciscan element that had taken root in Spain. The alumbrados and the spirituali continued the quest for a “living faith” that was “felt” within the soul. The spiritual exercises of Osuna or the practices of recogimiento enabled the practitioner to attain the immediacy of experiential knowledge of God. The same was true for those who practiced dejamiento. Valdés’s teaching expressed this craving for a “living faith,” as is evident from the popularity of the Beneﬁcio di Cristo. In both Valdés’s treatises and the Beneﬁcio, the desired experience of faith became acquainted with certainty. In both cases, faith had to be felt, often as a ﬁre, within the soul of the believer. As Valdés said, “God requires the heart.” To return to Lortz’s charge of subjectivism, several things should be noted. First, the idea of subjectivism requires a modern concept of the self. It is very questionable whether this concept of the self was a part of sixteenth-century thought about the nature of the soul. When we spoke of the subjective certitude of salvation among the reformers, the reference was to an individual experiential feeling that was divinely given, a certitude that did not belong to the realms of epistemology or interpretation—and clearly not to the “subjectivism” of modern use. Historical context cautions us against assuming that the sixteenthcentury opponents immediately perceived Luther and the other reformers as working from the privacy of the “self.” It also cautions us against anachronistically assigning the ideas of “objectively valid” and “merely subjective” to the sixteenth century. In fact, as we shall see, the polemics of this age employed very different categories, all of which revolved around the problem of certitude. Second, as we have repeatedly noted, the reformers understood their experiential certainty to have its source completely outside of their soul. The literature on the eve of the Reformation stressed that it was God, Christ, or the Spirit that came to dwell within the soul to effect mortiﬁcation, renewal, and love. In the sixteenth century, this understanding of the divine presence in the soul continued to exert a powerful inﬂuence. However, for many thinkers the descent of the Spirit into the soul also created certitude. Whether it was the theological virtue of love or the claim to certainty, both came from a transcendent source outside the soul. These qualities did proceed from an intimate and unshakable conviction—but a conviction that they believed had its source in a revelation from outside and beyond the soul. Third, however, we cannot mitigate the problem alluded to by the reproach of subjectivism. When this experiential vocabulary expressed only a “living

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faith,” it did not create the challenge posed by the reformers. It was the use of this language to claim salvation and express the authority to interpret Scripture and formulate doctrine that created problems. When experienced faith became associated with certainty, the issue of private interpretation became a troubling issue. As Pesch argued that it was the ethical consequences of the doctrine of justiﬁcation by faith that troubled Catholic thinkers. As we have seen in the previous chapter, the issue of hermeneutical authority brought about the accusation that the reformers were using Scripture and claiming the Spirit for the basis of their own interpretations. The reformers, including Luther, denied this accusation because of their trust in the objective clarity of Scripture. This exegetical optimism was dashed on the rocks of the Eucharistic controversy. Consequently, for Catholic polemicists, the issue of authority became both the Achilles heel of Protestantism as well as their own alternative source of certitude. We will revisit many of these same thinkers in the following chapter where we will see that the problem posed by the emphasis on experiential authority was that of deception. However, we will also see that nothing more clearly demonstrates the distance between the modern concept of the self and the sixteenth-century idea of the soul than the fear that one’s teaching was inspired neither by the “self” nor by one’s own “fantasies.” The real fear was that the soul received its teaching from the devil.

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6 Unmasking the Angel of Light The Discernment of the Spirits

When Thomas More asked, “Which spirit inspires this man?” his reader knew the expected answer was Satan. These kinds of statements were common on all sides of the religious controversies in the sixteenth century. However, it would be a mistake to dismiss them as mere rhetorical ﬂourishes. In the midst of all the debates, heresies, disputations, trials, and claims to certitude, the source of one’s experiential knowledge or of one’s spiritual experiences became an urgent topic. In both controversial and non-controversial literature, we ﬁnd uneasiness with the cause or source of one’s thoughts and experiences. Theological treatises, including polemical works, and mystical writings reveal this on-going preoccupation with spiritual discernment. This concern was not unique to the sixteenth century. The discernment of the spirits had a long and venerable history in both the Eastern and Western traditions of the church. A series of biblical verses, many of which became central in the sixteenth century, were crucial in the development of this tradition.1 In the Old Testament, Deuteronomy 13:1–3 and Deuteronomy 18:10–22 condemn diviniation, sorcery and false signs, wonders, and prophecy. In the New Testament, most of the references to false prophets are found in apocalyptic contexts. Matthew 24:24, Mark 13:22, II Timothy 3:6–7, and II Thessalonians 2:10–13 warned that the last days would be ﬁlled with false prophets, “a strong delusion,” and various forms of deception. Revelation 20:7–8 depicted the time when Satan would be loosed from his prison and “and will come out to deceive the nations from the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog.” By far the most

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important verse was I John 4:1, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are of God; for many false prophets have gone out into the world.” To “test the spirits” was, however, was a difﬁcult task. To recognize a demon or the devil in his true nature required a person to uncover or unmask Satan’s deception. Satan, after all, was the “father of lies.” The problem of deception was perfectly described in II Corinthians 11:13–14: “For such men are false apostles, deceitful workmen, distinguishing themselves as apostles of Christ. And no wonder, for even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” Precisely because Satan came as an “angel of light,” the attempt to test the spirits was an urgent but arduous task. I Corinthians 12:10 listed the discernment of the spirits as one of several spiritual gifts that were given only to a few. Those concerned with the discernment of the spirits recognized that evil, or Satan, did not come in a clearly recognizable fashion. On the contrary, demons came under the guise of goodness, piety, and even as Christ himself. As Henry of Suso stated with breathtaking clarity, “Evil hides within what is good.”2 Joachim of Fiore wrote that the “greatest Antichrist” would be the devil who “strives for nothing more than to appear like the Most High in every possible way.” He added, “Because Jesus Christ came in hidden fashion, Satan himself will do his works in a hidden way, that is, signs and false wonders will be designed to seduce even the elect, if possible.”3 In his 69th Laud, Jacopone da Todi wrote, But in the guise of an angel He returned to the assault And showed me a crumbling church I was called to repair. . . . Then showing himself to me as Christ he said, “I am your Teacher; take delight in me and I will console you . . .” The Devil then appeared to me as an angel of light And said, “You are worthy of being adored.”4 The tradition of spiritual discernment dates back to the patristic era, the most famous exmple perhaps being Athanasius’s account of St. Anthony. Many patristic writings contributed important discussions about the discretio spirituum. The writings of Chrysostom, Ambrosiaster, Origen, Augustine, Cassian, and others offered explanations about various kinds of visions and the different spirits that could move the soul. It was, however, the late Middle Ages that became most preoccupied with the problems of discernment. The causes for this late medieval concern were multifaceted but generally revolved around several issues: the legacy of Joachim of Fiore, the problem of prophecy among the Spiritual Franciscans, the fear of the so-called “Free Spirit” heresy, and the Great Schism with its accompanying phenomenon of wandering visionaries, prophets, and (especially women) mystics. Nancy Caciola has explained the

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interest in spiritual discernment between the twelfth and the ﬁfteenth centuries by saying, “The medieval revival of John’s injunction [to test the spirits] emerged as a response to the rapid proliferation of religious lifestyles that began in the late twelfth century, and it constituted a vivid expression of the mingled admiration and hostility that certain of these movements elicited.”5 The role of apocalyptic thinking was also important. As indicated in the biblical verses cited above, the proliferation of false prophets was a sign of the end times. Demons would inspire visions, dreams, and voices as the end drew near. During this period we see increased vigilance regarding the spirits in various kinds of writers. In the university-trained contexts, there were the treatises by authors such as David of Augsburg, Henry of Lagenstein, Pierre d’Ailly, and Jean Gerson. The discourse about distinguishing between the spirits also appeared in the two women mystics who became the focus of intense scrutiny, namely, Catherine of Sienna and Birgitta of Sweden. These and many other writers reveal the constant struggle to ﬁnd deﬁnitive criteria for testing the spirits. Experience and discernment were inseparable phenomena. The growing emphasis on experiential knowledge inevitably caused an ensuing concern with determining whether one’s experience was divine or demonic. Not surprisingly, we ﬁnd that Gerson was the most well-known thinker in the late Middle Ages on the discernment of the spirits. Writing in the context of the Great Schism, he composed the treatise On the Testing of the Spirits in 1415 at the Council of Constance, a treatise that was intended as an evaluation regarding the canonization of Birgitta of Sweden. He also authored two other important works on the problem of discernment. In 1401 he wrote On Distinguishing True from False Revelations, which reﬂected his concerns with false mysticism and dangerous visions. Then, in 1423, he authored On the Examinations of Doctrines. He also composed several treatises dealing with the visions of Ermine of Reims and Joan of Arc. Gerson began his earliest treatise with the warning that the angel of Satan sometimes transformed himself into an angel of light. He told the reader that in the old age of the world, in this ﬁnal hour, just before the Antichrist came, “many illusions would be reported and many false prophets would seduce the people by saying, ‘I am Christ.’” In order to test such spirits, Gerson used the traditional analogy of a money changer who had to examine carefully “the precious and unfamiliar coin of divine revelation, in order to ﬁnd out whether demons, who strive to corrupt and counterfeit any divine and good coin, smuggle in a false and base coin instead of the legitimate one.” He proceeded to explain that the coin of spiritual revelation was to be examined on the basis of ﬁve virtues: humility, discretion, patience, truth, and charity.6 Along with these ﬁve virtues Gerson also examined the ambiguous proof offered by miracles.7 Throughout the treatise, however, Gerson was plagued by how easily the performance of miracles and the appearances of these virtues could be deceptive.

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Because Gerson found a likeness between each virtue and its opposite vice, the treatise is ﬁlled with disclaimers and warnings about simulation and ambiguity. For example, arrogance was a sign of the demonic, but humility was not always reliable. Gerson told of a woman whom he examined from Arras who said that she was unworthy to eat food. She also admitted that she had never received a rule of life, counsel, or absolution from her confessor. Although she believed herself to be a “wretch, sinner, and more ignorant and unlettered than anyone else,” she did not possess true humility. Gerson counseled her to give up her foolish obstinacy in fasting and to pursue “nothing singular” without the advice of an expert.8 Discretion and patience were also important. Regarding discretion, Gerson wrote, “I think that in the end the accumulation of the greatest evils that we now experience and suffer from in the schism is the result of this disease of indiscretion, by which no one will let anyone else give advice.”9 By means of discretion, the Christian had to do all things “with counsel and not rely on his or her own insights.” Faith and obedience had to follow the counsel once received. Gerson recalled that Cassian had demonstrated that through the virtue of discretion, the “great Anthony” had walked the route toward God’s kingdom without obstruction. Although patience was a virtue, it, too, could be deceptive. Vices and virtues often seemed indistinguishable. Gerson explained that the vice of obstinacy often imitated the virtue of patience. Some people gloried foolishly in suffering. To endure reproaches and insults was not proof that a revelation had been received from God. The mental arrogance of these people “brings such blindness that their rashness desires to be seen as something like virtue.” Virtue, therefore, was not to be considered, “safer or more genuine” than any other sign of divine revelation or illumination.10 Gerson constantly vacillated and struggled to ﬁnd a consistent way to determine that which was true. In a passage that demonstrates the ambiguity of the “counterfeit” virtue or similitude between evil and good, Gerson wrote, But sometimes the false coin can be so close in appearance to the true one that its counterfeit can only be detected by the most learned people. For with so many true lines on the counterfeit coin, it is hard to see the one point of falsity. Heretics have been seen who composed great books of catholic doctrine so that amid so many truths they might secretly insert one sole point of heresy and make it public by means of such a careful and effective fraud. This practice shows how necessary it is that the coin of extraordinary revelations ﬁrst be examined by theologians, whose job it is to distinguish between true and false religion and to deal with morals.11 This expert theologian, moreover, had to have the divine gift of discerning the spirits. When asked how the gift of discernment functioned, Gerson turned to

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his usual affective or experiential language. He explained, “It makes it happen that a person through a certain intimate taste and experimental illumination senses a difference between true revelations and deceptive illusions.” Saint Bernard, for instance, “felt” or “tasted” some kind of “breath or odor within himself when the power of performing miracles came to him, such as acts of healing.” To discuss the matter of revelatory certitude, Gerson employed the traditional comparison between the vividness of dreaming and the state of wakefulness. This comparison led him to say that “Finally, so much happens that makes sleeping resemble wakefulness that only experience enables one to distinguish the two states.” Anyone asked to distinguish between these states would ﬁnally have to say, “Certainly I know for I have experienced it.” Therefore, “a person can say only that experiential knowledge alone of this wakefulness, which is quite different from dreams, is stronger and more vivid.” However, Gerson again immediately cautioned that experience could also be deceptive and could not, in itself, prove divine activity.12 After all, even mental disorders could cause hallucinations, apparitions, and disturbances. Mania or a melancholy passion might be the cause of why a person believed “he or she can see or touch that which the external senses in no way perceive.”13 Even truth could be deceptive. Saint Gregory had believed that the mind which was ﬁlled with the divine Spirit had its own signs of inspiration such as truth and humility. But Gerson was uneasy with Gregory’s teaching. It was, of course, necessary that a revelation conform to the faith and be useful for morals, society, and the honor or increase of religion. Nonetheless, truth was often mixed with lies and, therefore, the origin of a prophecy or revelation could be difﬁcult to assess. Despite his continual vacillations and warnings, Gerson did lay down four requirements for a revelation to be judged as divine. Following Deuteronomy 18:20–22, he argued that, “no holy angel or prophet announces that anything will happen except that it exists truly in the future in the way he himself or the Holy Spirit intended.” Immediately, however, Gerson drew attention to biblical accounts that contradicted this general rule; namely, Jonah who predicted the destruction of Nineveh and Isaiah who predicted the death of Hezekiah.14 Now a second rule had to be employed if the prophecy did not occur in a manner predicted. The prophet might have received a revelation from the Spirit explaining whether the prophecy was conditional, mystical, or literal. This second rule saved the prophecies of Jonah and Isaiah. A third rule stated that holy angels and true prophets would not preach anything contrary to true morals or sincere faith.15 Immediately we have another problem of discernment. Just as Jonah and Isaiah seemed to contradict the rule of “truth” or accuracy, so, too, Genesis 22 obviated the straightforward rule that true prophets never preached anything contrary to good morals. At this point Gerson could only argue that a fourth rule was necessary. “If God had ordered it or given his dispensation, the killing of Isaac would not have been against the law. But someone who sacriﬁced sons and

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daughters to demons would be called wicked and idolatrous.”16 Nevertheless, Gerson still maintained that the revelation must not be contrary to good living since the revelation “ought to take place in such a way that the one who receives the revelation on the matter or for whom the revelation is made in no way can be in doubt about it. For it is necessary that the revelation be perceived as something clearly coming from God in the same way as something that is in accord with Holy Scripture or right reason.”17 Such recourse to this divine authentication of true revelations was not uncommon among late medieval thinkers. But this feeling of certitude never stood alone. Humility had to “precede, accompany, and follow” every revelation, miracle, experience, ecstatic love, rapture, and contemplation.18 Once again, the reader did not have to wait long for another qualiﬁcation. Gerson added that passionate feelings, including love and zeal were “dangerous companions” for true virtue. He explained this point by saying, Furthermore, so that you will see that nothing is safe in the love of God itself, so long as we are on our pilgrimage from the Lord, regard carefully how a terrible deception can arise among those who are trained in God’s love and in the other virtues. What deception is this? It happens that these devout people, by the just but hidden permission of God, so that they are taught a lesson or are ruined, are deceived by the noonday demon of pride. He changes himself into an angel of light in appearing to do great good.19 In his treatise at the Council of Constance regarding Birgitta of Sweden, Gerson tried to lay down still more rules. The norms of Holy Scripture took on greater importance. Experiential knowledge of the struggle of emotions in the soul was now required. Stressing external actions or deeds, Gerson cited Matthew 7:16 in order to reiterate the common requirement that proof from one’s works must be present. Since we cannot scrutinize or see what is in the heart, we must “judge them by their works for, ‘by their fruits you shall know them.’”20 Nonetheless, if one or even several of these signs were not evident, other signs were still not reliable. Since recourse to various signs could cause inﬁnite problems, Gerson set out yet more rules. Certain questions had to be answered: “Who is it to whom the revelation is made? What does the revelation mean and to what does it refer? Why is the revelation said to have taken place? To whom did the receiver of a revelation turn to for advice and counsel? What kind of life did the visionary lead? From whom did the revelation originate?”21 Gerson repeated many of the same caveats as found in his earlier discussion. Virtue had to be examined carefully in order to see whether there existed some hidden spiritual pride.22 Although a divine spirit only spoke the truth, nonetheless “a thousand clear truths are sometimes taught by the spirit of lies in order that he may deceive someone by means of one latent falsehood.” Here Gerson returned to the importance of interior motives. The motivations of the

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visionary had to be examined very prudently. Did this person seek to be exalted? Does the visionary recognize his or her own spiritual pride?23 As Gerson said, “For what is easier than to call oneself the most vile sinner? Such a person is subject to the temptation of pride and should remember the holy father in the desert who was visited by the demon. Having transformed himself into Christ, the demon told him, ‘I am Christ, visiting you personally because you are worthy of it.’”24 Gerson warned that in order to discern why these visions have taken place, one should beware of those who claim to be edifying others. Something false may be discovered that was ﬁrst thought to be a sign of holiness. Gerson spoke about this type of deception by warning that his own age had experienced this falsity in people such as John Hus.25 Gerson also expressed concerns about the ambiguous nature of interiority. Once again, he expressed distrust as he recognized the ambiguous and mysterious nature of interiority. Even Saint Bernard said he did not have the gift of discerning within himself where a spirit came from or where it went. The similarity between the Spirit of God, the good angel, the evil spirit, and the human spirit made such discernment problematic.26 In De probatione spirituum, Gerson emphasized to a greater degree that there must be an expert who was both learned and experienced in such matters. Nonetheless, in the end Gerson had to conclude that there could be no deﬁnitive way to distinguish true from false revelations. He warned at the outset of De distinctione that “there is for human beings no general rule or method, that can be given always and infallibly to distinguish between revelations that are true and those that are false or deceptive.”27 This left the problem of “testing the spirits” a matter of faith rather than knowledge. However, in order not to leave the reader in despair, Gerson offered, once again, the certitude of hope. Such certitude was an experiential, self-authenticating knowledge. I know a man who, after being overwhelmed by temptation concerning an article of faith, was suddenly brought into such light of truth and certitude that there remained in him no trace of doubt and no hesitation. There was only a great calm instilled in him by the one who commands the waves. This person added that his change did not come about from any new process of reasoning which he had then been looking for and remembered seeking. The new faith he had merited alone from humbling his intellect and handing it over to the service of the faith and of the Almighty God, so that he no more doubted that faith than his own existence.28 This was the kind of certainty, Gerson said, that St. Paul experienced in II Corinthians 12:2. In Gerson’s view, Paul “certainly has certitude but from God’s light and not alone from human investigation and judgment.”29 Comparing Paul’s experience to those who would be “lifted up into the certain hope of their salvation,” Gerson stressed that this hope resided not in the natural powers of

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the human being but only in God.30 In De probatione spirituum, Gerson seemed more hesitant. In this treatise he explained that there were three methods for testing the spirits. The ﬁrst method was “doctrinal” and came from knowledge and general learning, especially of the Holy Scriptures. The second method came by means of an “intimate inspiration” [inspirationem intimam] or “internal taste” as through the experience of a “certain sweetness” that chased away the “darkness of all doubt” [effugantem tenebras omnis dubietatis].31 This method, however, could only be used by someone who had himself gone through such spiritual experiences. The third method required the gift of discernment from the Holy Spirit. This way was “ofﬁcial” because a hierarchical ofﬁce was joined with the spiritual gift. Still, as in De distinctione, Gerson conceded that it was impossible to ﬁnd a general and infallible rule of knowledge to apply to each individual case. In each particular instance, the expert had to discern whether the person was inﬂuenced by one of three spirits: a good angel, an evil angel, or one’s own natural light. The last two, Gerson warned, could always be a source of deception.32 Gerson’s threefold distinction between good, evil, and natural was not unique. Among the many writers in the later Middle Ages who employed this distinction were Henry of Friemar “the Elder,” Suso, Tauler, and the Frankfurter in the treatise Theologia Deutsch. Tauler’s distinction between the natural light that turned outward and the divine light that turned inward was the context in which he spoke of deception. Those who were held captive by natural reason were unable to distinguish between the two lights. The light of natural reason could never penetrate the inward light of grace. Only by total renunciation could someone reach the true and divinely inspired awareness of one’s own nothingness, an awareness that provided knowledge of the true light and escape from the deceptions of the devil.33 The Frankfurter also attempted to ﬁnd a way to distinguish between the true and the deceptive. As did Tauler, the Theologia Deutsch described the true and the false light.34 Just as there were two lights, so, too, there were two kinds of love, each informed by its own light. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Adam’s sin caused attachment to the creature, to the “I, me and mine.” This sin brought about the false light that was now natural to the fallen soul. As did Tauler, the Theologia Deutsch distinguished between the true and false light in terms of deception. “It is the property of the true light (and must be so) that it does not wish to deceive and cannot desire anyone to be deceived, and it cannot itself be deceived. But the false light is, and has been, deceived and further deceives others along with itself. For God does not wish to deceive anyone and is incapable of wanting anyone to be deceived, which is also the case with the true light.”35 Consequently, the light of nature “must necessarily be inwardly deceived and false.” The false light is “cunning,” and “clever.” It “mounts and climbs to such a height that it imagines that it is above nature and that it is impossible for nature or any creature to get so high. In this way it imagines it

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is God, and as a result it lays claim to everything that pertains to God, and especially God as he is in eternity and not as he is human.”36 The false light sought for knowledge and learning and developed the ridiculous notion that it actually knew or understood God. “If anything imagines it understands God, it imagines also that it is God, and it presents itself as God and wants to be considered as such.” However, the false light, being turned in on itself, could never get beyond the love of itself. The natural man might even imagine that he was God; in his imagined detachment he might think he had even transcended Christ. Such delusions (attributed to the Free Spirits) demonstrated that the self-will had never been destroyed. Such people were trapped in delusions about their liberty and deiﬁcation. For these reasons the Frankfurter was deeply worried about the problem of demonic deception and delusion. For as all falsehood is deceived and all deception deceives itself ﬁrst of all, that is what happens with this false light and life too. For whoever deceives is himself deceived. . . . In this life and light and in its love everything that pertains to the devil and belongs to him is so fully present that there is no distinction, since false light is the devil, and the devil is that light. Of course, just as the devil imagines he is God or would like to be God, or regarded as God, and is deceived in all of this, he is so completely deceived that he imagines he is not deceived. It is the same with the false light, its love and its life. As the devil would love to deceive all people, draw them to himself and to his own and make them like himself, for which he knows many techniques and tricks, so it is with this light. . . . . It all arises from the fact that both the devil and nature imagine they are undeceived and at their best point. That is the most wicked and damaging deception.37 The person, therefore, who was deceived by following the false light could not recognize his own delusion. Both the sinner and the devil were self-deluded.38 The inability to recognize one’s own delusion was a recurring theme in the Theologia Deutsch. Having the experience that one was free like the resurrected Christ was not a true divine freedom. Such a claim was only the extension of the self-will that had never been renounced. This false freedom was “a natural, unrighteous, false, deceptive, satanic freedom coming from a false, natural, and deceptive light.” Self-deception could be detected by the fact that the false light always sought out not the “good as good” but, rather, it “wants and singles out itself and its own end as the best, and that is false and the ﬁrst deception.”39 These people remained imprisoned in deception and at the prey of the devil who tricked them into a life of “imagination” and “delusion.”

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The devil and nature are therefore one, and where nature is conquered, so the devil is conquered; and again, where nature is not conquered, so the devil is not conquered either. Whether it is turned to the worldly or to the spiritual life, everything remains in his false deception, both in being deceived and in deceiving others along with him, where it is able to do so.40 The later Middle Ages saw the culmination of a long tradition regarding the discernment of the spirits. As these various thinkers reﬂected on the ability of the devil to become almost undetectable by disguising himself as an angel of light, they tried to devise rules that would tear off the various masks Satan wore. Repeatedly they discovered the difﬁculty in recognizing evil as it came under the guise of the good. Similar but not identical circumstances made the problem of discernment so urgent in both the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century. The wave of spiritualism that was occurring throughout Europe caused increasing concern. Reformers, visionaries, beatas, and mystics all claimed illumination and thereby created suspicion and the need to test the authenticity of their experiences. Added to this phenomenon were the religious controversies that were shattering the unity of Western Christendom, bringing in their wake the crisis of authority, the need for certainty, and the appeals to the Spirit. It is customary to identify the discernment of the spirits with Catholicism. The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation mentions such discernment in three contexts, all of which are Catholic. This identiﬁcation with Catholicism is perfectly justiﬁed since it was the Catholic tradition that formulated the methods for testing the spirits. However, as we shall see, the wave of spiritualism in all its various forms meant that the injunction in I John 4:1 to test the spirits became a shared concern belonging to both sixteenth-century Catholicism and Protestantism. One of the entries in which the Oxford Encyclopedia makes reference to spiritual discernment is, of course, Ignatius of Loyola. It goes without saying that the most important text of this era on discernment was Ignatius’s “Rules for Discernment of the Spirits.” This treatise laid down a set of rules or instructions for the ﬁrst and second weeks of the Spiritual Exercises. In the Exercises and other writings, Ignatius expressed a profound concern with distinguishing between the spirits. This issue was not necessarily articulated in a purely polemical context. Recent scholars have emphasized Ignatius’s detachment from the religious controversies of the time. As O’Malley has demonstrated, Ignatius was not a church reformer in the sixteenth-century meaning of the term. According to O’Malley, Ignatius and his companions “deliberately foreswore the very ofﬁces with which reform was concerned—papacy, episcopacy, and pastorate.” He also noted that as late as 1555 when Ignatius ﬁnished dictating his Autobiography, he scarcely mentioned the Reformation. O’Malley observed that as Ignatius “looks back and interprets his life at this late date . . . nowhere

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does he speak about reform or suggest that he or the Society has anything to do with it.” The Autobiography, “is remarkable for its detachment from all the urgent issues facing the Church, more than suggesting that they had little or nothing to do with his vocation.”41 This is not to say, however, that Ignatius was unacquainted with controversy. Throughout his life as a spiritual director and as General of the Society, he had to defend himself against the charge of illuminism or of being associated with the alumbrados. As we have seen, the Edict of Faith issued in 1525 reﬂected this growing anxiety about illuminism and the danger posed by the priority given to inner experiences as over and against traditional devotional practices such as fasting, the cult of the saints, relics, vocal prayer, and other external forms of worship. One year after the Edict, Ignatius arrived at Alcalá and became the object of investigation by the Inquisition because he was suspected of being an alumbrado. In 1527 at Salamanca he was questioned by several Dominicans. When asked what he preached, Ignatius replied, “We do not preach . . . but we do speak in a familiar manner with some people about the things of God.” When questioned further regarding the content of his discussions, Ignatius explained that he and his companions spoke about virtues and vices. The Dominican replied, “You are not educated men and you speak about virtues and vices, but no one can speak about these things except in one of two ways: either through learning or through the Holy Spirit.” Ignatius recognized that he was about to be identiﬁed with the alumbrados and kept silent. One of the friars insisted by saying, “Well now that there are so many errors of Erasmus and of so many others who have deceived the world, don’t you wish to explain what you say?” Ignatius was then imprisoned and interrogated by four judges regarding the Spiritual Exercises. They focused on the discernment of the spirits and on the teaching about the interior motions of consolation and desolation in the soul. Eventually Ignatius was released but was ordered not to talk about mortal and venial sins.42 He then went to Paris in 1528 where he was again summoned by an Inquisitor. The matter, however, proceeded no further. However, at Rome in 1530 the “persecutions began” and Ignatius and his friends were again suspected of being alumbrados or “Lutherans.” After appearing before the governor and the legate, Ignatius demanded a deﬁnitive sentence. He spoke with the pope, who ordered a verdict or sentence which, once again, was in Ignatius’s favor.43 Some scholars have argued that the Rules for Thinking with the Church were a defense of the orthodoxy of the Society. O’Malley observed that these Rules resembled some of the decrees of the Council of Sens (1528). Several of the rules were directed against the alumbrados and other heretics. In O’Malley’s view, the emphasis on the institutionalized aspect of religion balanced the rest of the instructions in the Exercises. Accordingly, the Rules were, “a manifesto of Ignatius’s own orthodoxy.”44

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Although Ignatius was repeatedly cleared of being an alumbrado, it is undeniable that some of his teachings resembled that of the alumbrados in important respects.45 There were, in fact, reasons for his being continually suspected of being in the Erasmian-alumbrado-Lutheran group. In this respect, the Censura y parecer . . . contra el Instituto de los Padres Jesuitas by Melchor Cano is most revealing. Cano was a Spanish scholastic theologian who entered the Dominican order in 1533 and became professor of theology at Alcalá in 1543. He then taught at Salamanca and attended the Council of Trent on behalf of Spain. Cano was a polemical writer who was not afraid of controversy, as was evident in his treatment of Carranza. He was also an unrelenting critic of the Jesuits. According to Terence O’Reilly, the contents of the Censura were known by the Dominicans in Castile by 1555. For our purposes, the Censura exposes the reasons that Ignatius was suspected to be among the Alumbrados o Dexados.46 In turn, these same reasons explain why Ignatius himself was so concerned about the discernment of the spirits.47 Cano criticized many aspects of Ignatius and the Society. He believed Ignatius to be arrogant, to be feigning holiness, and to be someone who falsely claimed to have visions. He also denounced the extent of the papal privileges granted to the Society. In particular, he faulted the Society for the failure to chant the divine ofﬁce in common and to practice corporeal penance. He also believed that the promise to make someone spiritual within the span of one month was a complete misunderstanding of the true monastic life.48 But Cano’s main concern was with the affective spirituality he found in the Spiritual Exercises, a spirituality that seemed to him to be dangerously similar to that of the alumbrados. It is important to note that in their ﬁrst encounter, Ignatius had recounted his visions to Cano. Ignatius’s descriptions shocked Cano, who then persistently distrusted Ignatius and his teachings.49 Believing that Ignatius had ﬂed Spain on suspicion of alumbradismo, Cano immediately became alarmed. In the Censura, Cano wrote speciﬁcally against the Spiritual Exercises in which he saw signs of illuminism. He warned that those who read and practiced the Exercises or observed the work of the Society should guard themselves against deception. He insisted that the phrase from Matthew 7:16 (“By their fruits ye shall know them”) had to be read in conjunction with the preceding verse, “Beware of false prophets.”50 Cano warned that members of the Society only appeared to set a good example by preaching, giving alms, helping the poor, and doing other good deeds. Nonetheless, St. Matthew had warned Christians to attendite. Behind the false sanctity of these good works, Cano detected the devil, who sometimes “transforms himself into an angel of light.” Satan, he wrote, was using such good and holy deeds to lead people astray. For example, the Exercises would lead people in all walks of life to believe that they could become contemplatives. Such people would proceed, like the alumbrados, to abandon their stations in life and their societal and familial responsibilities. The

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devil would use contemplation or mental prayer and spiritual feelings so that, while these people believed themselves to be on their way to heaven, they were really being led into the pit of hell.51 This had clearly happened, Cano argued, en España de los Alumbrados y Dexados que fueron primos hermanos de éstos, los quales por devoción y contemplación y otros cosas divinas hicieron tanto y más fruto que estos Padres, aunque el provecho de éssos es más universal . . .52 Such people falsely interpreted the verse I John 2:27, Unctio eius docebit vos de omnibus. This caused such false contemplatives to believe that they were sinless and could do anything that came into their imaginations by referring everything to God. They excused such libertinism by claiming to be inspired by the Holy Spirit. According to Cano, Ignatius and his Compañía were like those heretics who had been imprisoned in Spain. They were Alumbrados o Dexados, and their actions and beliefs were a sign of the End Time.53 Cano spied out the “artiﬁces of the devil” everywhere in the Spiritual Exercises. The emphasis on various spiritual experiences was, he insisted, a tool of Satan or demons. By transforming himself into an angel of light, Satan’s device was to produce spiritual gifts, which he then used to harm the recipient. Cano made special mention of the role of detachment or indifference that Ignatius said was necessary for making the correct “election.” In this instruction, Cano again saw a sign of the End Time.54 The belief that someone could conform completely to the divine will was a false and dangerous illusion. In the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius taught the exercitant to make himself “indifferent” [indiferentes] so that the Lord would “move” the will or “put into” the mind [mover mi voluntad y poner en mi ánima] that which he wanted the person to do.55 Ignatius described the best way to seek God’s will by saying it was “far better that the Creator and Lord himself should communicate himself to the devout soul, embracing it with love, inciting it to praise of himself, and disposing it for the way that will most enable the soul to serve him in the future.” The retreatant should not lean or incline to one side or another but, rather, maintain a point of equilibrium that allowed “the Creator to deal immediately with the creature and the creature with its Creator and Lord [dexe immediate obrar al Criador con la criatura, y a la criatura con su Criador y Señor].”56 The goal of such “indifference” and the stress on God’s immediacy to the soul made Cano very nervous. For some people, including Cano, such a belief was far too similar to the dexados. To believe one could be in such an emptied, suspended state and that God would thereby work directly within the soul was a false piety that sounded suspiciously like the alumbradismo condemned in 1525. Moreover, Ignatius elevated grace to such an extent that he fell into the Lutheran error of denying free will. Furthermore, seeking immediate or direct guidance from God in all of one’s affairs would leave one open to demonic illusions and inspirations. For Cano, Ignatius’s emphasis on the training in mental prayer, the intense analysis and attention to the interior motions of the soul, and the trust in spiritual sensations or experiences would lead the individual

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into the error of illuminism and would make him vulnerable to the subtle and alluring temptations of Satan. Thus Cano believed that although Ignatius and his followers claimed to be inspired by God, they were, in fact, inspired by the devil. In making his case, Cano cited the traditional verses: II Timothy 3: 1, 5, 6; Matthew 7:15–20; as well as II Corinthians 11:14. This was, indeed, Satan transforming himself into an angel of light.57 Ignatius was not, of course, an alumbrado but, as Luis Fernández has argued, he did share important aspects of their teaching and had friendly relationships with some alumbrados and their defenders. These elements that Ignatius shared with the alumbrados were part of the current religious spirituality and renewal common throughout sixteenth-century Spain.58 Cano, among other critics, feared that many aspects of this experiential spirituality were dangerous and demonically instigated. The command to “test the spirits,” therefore, became ever more urgent lest the devil deceive all those who tried to practice contemplation and desired illumination or spiritual experiences. In terms of the problem of discernment, it was the emphasis on immediacy and direct interior spiritual experiences that were important. It was clearly evident that Ignatius’s writings demonstrated a continual and intense interest in the nature and process of experience. As his Spiritual Diary shows, Ignatius himself experienced such things as visions, loquela, the gift of tears, as well as consolations and desolations. Even the briefest review of Ignatius’s vocabulary shows his preoccupation with the scrutiny of experiences. Not surprisingly, the word sentir was almost ubiquitous in his writings. Sentir could mean “to feel,” “to experience,” or “to be aware.” Those feelings that required examination were diverse and occurred on several levels of the soul. Mociones were movements or impulses in the heart. According to John Futrell, “motions” bore a sense of passivity in the mystical vocabulary of Ignatius. Motions or impulses impelled the soul toward devotion, tears, insights into spiritual reality and to the willing of a particular choice.59 In “The Three Times Suitable for Making a Sound and Good Election,” Ignatius spoke of such movements caused by God, movements, moreover, that were characterized by certitude: “The ﬁrst time is an occasion when God our Lord moves and attracts the will in such a way that a devout person, without doubting or being able to doubt [sin dubitar ni poder dubitar] carries out what was proposed.”60 In his Spiritual Diary, Ignatius recalled an earlier experience and remarked, “A little later while I was walking and recalling to memory what had happened, I experienced a new interior impulse [nueva moción interior] to devotion and tears.”61 On February 21 he recorded that, he experienced more interior, spiritual impulses [internas mociones espirituales] and felt moved to weep.62 Descriptions of such “interior spiritual motions,” “impulses to weep,” and “new devotions and impulses,” directed especially to the “Blessed Trinity,” recur frequently throughout the Spiritual Diary.63

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Equally important were the experiences of spiritual consolations and desolations. Ignatius explained that the second time suitable for making a good election required knowledge derived from such experiences. The second time is present when sufﬁcient clarity and knowledge are received from the experience of consolations and desolations and from experience in the discernment of the various spirits [experiencia de consolaciones y dessolaciones, y por experiencia de discreción de varios espíritus].64 Spiritual consolations were those experiences given by God that were feelings of joy, peace, delight, warmth, and the love of God. As Ignatius stated, consolations occurred when, “some interior motion is caused within the soul through which it comes to be inﬂamed with love of its Creator and Lord . . .” Ignatius added that consolations included every increase in hope, faith, charity and “every interior joy which calls and attracts one toward heavenly things and to the salvation of one’s soul by bringing tranquility and peace [quietándola y paciﬁcándola] in its Creator and Lord.”65 Throughout the Spiritual Diary, Ignatius wrote about his enjoyment of spiritual visitations, all of which left him with “wonder,” “internal devotion,” “enjoyment,” “repose,” and “love.” He also spoke about times of spiritual desolation when he felt “heavy-hearted” and “bereft of all spiritual things.” After Mass he once found himself “completely bereft of all help, unable to ﬁnd delight in the mediators or in the Divine persons; I felt as remote and separated from them as if I had never felt their inﬂuence in the past, or was ever to feel any of it in the future.”66 He was beset by thoughts against Jesus and other persons. He described spiritual desolations in the Spiritual Exercises as opposite to consolations. Spiritual desolations included the “darkness of the soul, turmoil within it, an impulsive motion toward love of earthly things, or disquiet from various affections or temptations.” He explained that such feelings would move one to feel a “lack of faith and leave one without hope and without love. One is completely listless, tepid, sad, and one feels separated from his Creator and Lord.”67 These brief passages illustrate the intense concentration on experience in Ignatius’s spirituality. Independently of the suspicions by the Inquisitors, Ignatius recognized that the importance of such affective states made the problem of discernment a constant necessity.68 Both the spiritual experiences and the thoughts they produced had to be scrutinized. Thoughts, feelings, tastes, visitations, spiritual intuitions, consolations, desolations, impulses or motions and loquela were the experiences of Ignatius’s own spiritual life and the objects of his concern with spiritual discernment. It was of the utmost importance to Ignatius to determine the sources of his own experiences. Did they originate from God, from the evil spirit, or from natural processes within the soul?

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Both the Autobiography and the Spiritual Diary demonstrate that Ignatius both underwent these experiential states and that he worried about their origins. The Autobiography traces Ignatius’s increasing concern with the discernment of the spirits during his sojourn at Manresa, a time during which he experienced a period of very difﬁcult spiritual growth. During the years 1522– 1523, Ignatius saw something “in the air near him” that was remarkably beautiful. He could not discern the kind of thing he saw but “in a way it seemed to him to have the form of a serpent with many things that shone like eyes.” He felt great pleasure and consolation in this image and every time he saw it he experienced the growth of spiritual consolation. During this period Ignatius remained nearly always in an interior state of great joy. Nonetheless, he recalled that at this time he did not have knowledge about the interior things of the spirit.69 At Manresa he began to experience temptations and spiritual desolations. He began to suffer terribly from scruples. Ignatius also became suicidal. He tried fasting but the scruples kept returning. Finally, he said, the Lord “deigned to wake him up.” When Ignatius “had some experience of the diversity of spirits from lessons God had given him, he began to examine the means by which that spirit [causing the scruples] had come into his soul.” He decided not to confess anything from the past anymore and remained free from scruples, holding it “for certain that Our Lord had mercifully deigned to deliver him.”70 Ignatius explained that in his devotion to the Trinity, his “understanding began to be elevated.” He experienced a vision of the Trinity as three musical keys. He saw in his understanding the manner in which God created the world, an experiential knowledge that brought him great joy. Ignatius also experienced a vision of white rays coming from above which he understood to be Christ present in the Eucharist. With his “interior eyes” he saw the humanity of Christ but without the distinction of members. In the same way he saw “Our Lady.” He stated that these spiritual visions and understandings strengthened him to such an extent that, “If there were no Scriptures to teach us these matters of faith, he would be resolved to die for them, solely because of what he had seen.” The eyes of his understanding were opened and he understood many things “both spiritual matters and matters of faith and letters and this with so great an enlightenment [ilustración] that everything seemed new to him.” Camara inserted the following statement into the narrative: “This left his understanding so very enlightened [ilustrado] that he felt as if he were another man with another mind.”71 Ignatius then recounted a crucial event that shaped his understanding of the demonic. With “great clarity of understanding,” Ignatius again experienced the vision of that “thing” which appeared to be a serpent and had once “seemed very beautiful to him, with many eyes.” While kneeling before the cross, he realized that this object no longer had its “usual beautiful color.” Ignatius then “knew very clearly with a strong agreement of his will that it was the devil.”72

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The imagery of the beautiful serpent in this account is clearly related to II Corinthians 11:14; the serpent was the devil who had transformed himself into something “very beautiful” and had given Ignatius great joy and consolation. Only after much spiritual testing and growth was he able to discern that this beautiful image was, indeed, the original serpent or the devil. This account, which was basically an exegesis of II Corinthians 11:14, continued to govern Ignatius’s understanding of Satan and the discernment of the spirits. In the Spiritual Diary, Ignatius recorded his many thoughts and experiences during the time he was to decide about the issue of poverty for the society. Anyone reading the Diary knows that this was an excruciating decision. At one point, Ignatius felt doubt about his previous afﬁrmation of the requirement for poverty and also experienced anger toward the “Blessed Trinity.” Later he recognized that these doubts and this anger came from an evil spirit.73 It is telling that in the Diary and elsewhere Ignatius always equated “the Tempter” with “doubt” (dudar, dubitación).74 Throughout his painstaking and difﬁcult struggle regarding the question of poverty, Ignatius hoped for a divine sign or “ﬁnishing touch” that would conﬁrm his decision. In the Autobiography, Camara reported that when engaged in important matters, Ignatius often had visions that “gave him conﬁrmation.” The Spiritual Diary recounted his many prayers, requests, and visions. Ignatius reported that his visions of the Trinity experienced during Lent caused tears, reverential awe, and “greater conﬁdence.” However, the continued doubts caused by the Tempter still plagued him. Finally, Ignatius came to understand that these doubts were caused by the devil and said, “as to a beaten enemy—Go to your place.”75 This description of how he defeated doubt recalled Christ’s words, “Get thee behind me, Satan.” Subsequently, Ignatius also discerned that his desire for a ﬁnal divine sign was his own wish and proceeded from his own desires and inclinations. He realized that he had been looking for too many signs so that he had been seeking “not certitude about the matter, but rather an end of the whole process in a manner ﬁtted to my own pleasure.” Determined not to seek more “conﬁrmations” or proofs, Ignatius ﬁnally made his election for the vow of poverty. The idea came to him to say three Masses of the Trinity, but he recognized that this, too, was “from the evil spirit.” 76 We see in this example the way in which the devil could inspire good and holy desires. Having recognized the work of the demonic, Ignatius then considered the matter “ﬁnished.” Satan still tried to incite doubt but he immediately replied, “Go where you belong.” Ignatius proceeded to describe how he came to discern between the experiences of God and the devil. A quarter of an hour later I awakened to a new fact. I realized or saw clearly that when the Tempter suggested thoughts against the Divine Persons and the Mediators, he was putting, or trying to put, doubts into my mind on the subject; and on the contrary, when I was

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experiencing visitations from, and visions of, the Divine Persons and Mediators, I felt complete ﬁrmness and conﬁrmation about the matter. This realization was accompanied by a spiritual delight. It was as if tears were coming to my eyes; in my soul was a great sense of security.77 This “great sense of security” was of crucial importance. Having decided on the vow of poverty, Ignatius wrote that he experienced “a certain security and assent that the election was well-made.” He repeatedly recounted “visitations” that “inspired greater security.” After receiving a vision of the Trinity as something “spherical,” he again felt “a great security” [una grande seguridad] and explained that he “could not doubt [sin poder dubitar] about what he had been shown.”78 Indeed, Ignatius referred to many occasions when he received spiritual experiences that he was “unable to doubt.”79 The most dramatic of these events was the famous vision at La Storta in November of 1537. At this time Ignatius reported that he clearly saw that God had placed him alongside Christ. He experienced [sintió] such a change in his soul that he could “not dare doubt [que no tendría ánimo para dudar de esto] that anyone except God the Father had placed him with his Son.”80 During the Exercises there were times when the Lord would act in the soul in such a way that “a devout person, without doubting or being able to doubt” carried out what was proposed. Ignatius also believed that God taught him personally as a schoolmaster taught a child. The immediacy of this teaching produced such clarity and certainty that “if he were to doubt this, he would offend his Divine Majesty.”81 If these were the visions and experiences that Ignatius told Cano, it is little wonder that the Dominican became suspicious. Ignatius’s statements about his new understandings might also have caused concern. Ignatius repeatedly spoke about his “experiencing spiritual insights” into various matters. God, he said, had given him his Spirit in order “to reason and discern.” Ignatius emphasized that he received a “deep perception” or an “intellectual seeing” into the nature of the Trinity. He explained that in his Trinitarian visions his mind did not rise to the Divine Persons, nor did it descend “to the letter.” Rather, his understanding remained in a “middle area” that brought him intense devotion and tears. As God taught him directly, he learned more and more about the Trinity. Always he stressed the experiential nature of his new knowledge. He explained that he learned mysteries about the Divine persons “more by experiencing with feeling or contemplating than by understanding.” Once during Mass he received spiritual insights “to such an extent that I seemed to understand that there was, so to speak, nothing more to be known abut this matter of the Holy Trinity.”82 Ignatius repeatedly and explicitly declared that his experiential knowledge was superior to all study. Having experienced “very many insights into the Holy Trinity,” he said,

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These enlightened my understanding to such an extent that it seemed to me I could not learn so much by hard study. Later when I considered the matter further I knew that I had understood more in my experiencing or seeing than I would have learned have learned even if I should study all my life.83 Throughout the Spiritual Diary and the Autobiography, Ignatius recalled his immediate communications from God. Through “spiritual intuitions,” “visions” or “enlightenment,” he came to a deeper and deeper understanding of spiritual matters. He wrote of “feeling,” “tasting,” and of “union” with God. He described his spiritual experiences in terms of colors and warmth. He felt “drawn” toward God or “drawn by devotion.” He felt a “warm clarity and spiritual enjoyment.” He was “intensely moved from within.” During his “awareness” of the Trinity and of Jesus, he felt “more united with the Divine Majesty.” During a vision of the “Divine Being,” Ignatius also gained “much new knowledge.”84 Internal loquela gave him pleasure and devotion. These loquela came “from deep inside” his soul. Both the external and internal loquela “wholly moved” him toward the divine love. So, too, in the Spiritual Exercises, Ignatius spoke about reaching “a deeper, interior understanding of the reality and malice of one’s sin.” Moreover, through the application of the ﬁve senses, the exercitant may “smell the fragrance and taste the inﬁnite sweetness and charm of the Divinity, of the soul, of its virtues . . .” In these almost sensual mociones and experiences, the exercitant would feel and “clearly perceive interior lights, consolations, and divine inspirations.” At these times the exercitant should “recollect” himself in spirit and enter into mental prayer. We have seen, the exercitant was to be in a state of indifference in order that God might communicate directly to the soul.85 As stated above, Ignatius recalled that he “seemed to understand that there was, so to speak, nothing more to be known about this matter of the Holy Trinity.” Ignatius did not fail to recognize the audacity of such claims and, consequently, asked himself, “And you, who are you? Where did you come from? How could you merit this? Or whence did this come to pass?”86 Throughout his explanations of these spiritual experiences, we see that the direct or immediate communication of God to the soul provided and guaranteed the necessary certitude about the spiritual knowledge that had been received. Nonetheless, this was a certitude that had to be defended. None of these experiences were without ambiguity or risk. At Barcelona, Ignatius came to recognize that the numerous spiritual insights which kept him from studying were a temptation from the devil. He began to have doubts about the pleasure and delight caused by the loquela and wondered if they might be from an evil spirit. Satan continually inserted himself into Ignatius’s deliberations about poverty when he was so earnestly seeking to know the divine will. A vision, such as the one of the beautiful serpent, was ﬁnally recognized to be from the devil. Ignatius’s repeated formula that he “could not doubt” or “dare

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not doubt” was a denial that he was receiving these experiences from Satan, who apparently was always present.87 The earnestly desired sense of security and certainty did not come to Ignatius easily or quickly. Only gradually did he come “to recognize the difference between the spirits that were stirring, one from the devil, the other from God.”88 The difﬁculty of this recognition was the reason Ignatius formulated his “Rules for the Discernment of the Spirits.” These rules were intended to help the director guide the retreatants in being able to distinguish or practice discernment (discreción) about the good and bad “motions” as well as their cause or origin within the soul. Throughout the ﬁrst week of the Exercises, the retreatants were taught how to analyze and interpret their internal experiences. These experiences could include emotions or desires such as love, hate, and fear. They also included intellectual acts of the soul such as thoughts, imaginings, and lines of reasoning. The exercitants also had to attend to affective feelings, including feelings of warmth, cold, consolations, desolations, and other impulses and inclinations. The Rules for the ﬁrst week addressed those who were experiencing different and spiritual internal motions and were aimed at enabling one to discern whether the spirit that was moving him was good or evil. Rule 1 concerned “persons who go from one mortal sin to another.” Rule 2 addressed those who were trying to purge away their sins.89 In the ﬁrst week, Ignatius clearly identiﬁed the good spirit with spiritual consolation and the evil spirit with spiritual desolation. The evil spirit would tempt the retreatant in order to unsettle the soul with “false reasons” and desolations. The exercitant was to react to these experiences by counterattacking the enemy. The exercitant had to insist on more prayer, practice more meditation, earnest self-examination, suitable ways of doing penance, and ways to maintain patience. During this ﬁrst week the emphasis was on attacking evil spirits and bringing them out into the open. In comparison to the rules for the second week, the recognition of evil at this earlier stage was fairly easy. Evil spirits and the thoughts and desires they caused were relatively obvious. The rules dealt primarily with spiritual desolations and how to accept them, use them as a test, examine their causes, and ﬁght against them. If the retreatants were open with their confessors and directly attacked the evil spirits, they would succeed in withstanding the devil’s inﬂuence.90 It was in the last section of the rules for the ﬁrst week that the complexity of discernment began to emerge. Ignatius explained that “the enemy of human nature prowls around and from every side probes all our theological, cardinal, and moral virtues.” Finding the weakest point, “he attacks and tries to take us.” This section follows naturally from the image of the devil acting as a military commander who studied the strength of a fortress and attacked at its weakest point. However, it is important to observe that now the enemy was probing the virtues and not tempting the retreatant with the

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more recognizable and obvious vices. This strategy of the devil was becoming more subtle and less easy to discern than what Ignatius had called “manifest deceptions.”91 In the second week, the complexity and shrewdness of the evil spirits became the focus of the rules for discernment. Ignatius began with clear identiﬁcations: God and his angels produced genuine happiness and spiritual joy, while the enemy fought against such spiritual consolations. The evil spirit accomplished this by “using specious reasonings, subtleties, and persistent deceits.”92 These deceits or deceptions were the problem because they were aimed at those who had now progressed to the point of making an election. Now the devil deceived by appearing under the guise of goodness. The difﬁculty was that both the good and the evil spirits were able to cause spiritual consolations in the soul.93 During this more advanced stage, the retreatant could not identify the evil spirit with desolation and the good spirit with consolation. The task of discernment depended on determining the cause or origin of these experiences. In order to detect demonic deception, Ignatius ﬁrst distinguished consolations “without a preceding cause” from those “with a preceding cause.” Only God could give the soul spiritual consolations directly or “without a preceding cause,” such as a previous perception or understanding of the object.94 Ignatius explained that both good and evil spirits could act by means of a preceding cause but, of course, for contrary purposes. The good angel acted for the progress of the soul, while the evil angel enticed the soul to its “own damnable intention and malice.” Nonetheless, the evil angel was also capable of producing such feelings as spiritual peace, joy, delight, sweetness, warmth, and an increase in faith and love. In short, the evil angel could produce virtues and all the feelings included in spiritual consolations. Because the evil angel was able to cause “motions” in the soul that felt like an attraction toward God, the exercitant might perceive these feelings as if they were divine or spiritual consolations. This was the evil angel “transforming himself into an angel of light.” Ignatius knew that it was a powerful and effective strategy. It is characteristic of the evil angel, who takes on the appearance of an angel of light, to enter by going along with the devout soul and then to come out by his own way with success for himself. That is, he brings good and holy thoughts, attractive to such an upright person and then strives little by little to get his own way, by enticing the soul over to his own hidden deceits and evil intentions.95 Evil was now much more difﬁcult to discern. The evil angel appeared under the cover of “holy thoughts” and devotions. He acted stealthily, little by little, and his deceits and intentions are much more hidden. Ignatius used a similar description in a letter to Father Broet and Salmerón:

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Whenever we wish to win someone over and engage him in the greater service of God our Lord, we should use the same strategy for good that the enemy employs to draw a good soul to evil. He enters through the other’s door and comes out his own. He enters with the other by not opposing his ways but by praising them. He acts familiarly with the soul. Later he tries, little by little, to come out his own door, always suggesting some error or illusion under the appearance of good but which will always be evil.96 For the person who was already a “good soul” and was “progressing from good to better,” the evil angel entered on the person’s own terms or in accordance with his good nature. As the person progressed from good to better, the evil angel would bring the devout soul holy thoughts and feelings. He was never obvious because such an advanced person would be able to detect manifest evil and temptations. Thus, the evil spirit must “enter the door” undetected or as an “angel of light.” The devout soul would then be tempted under the appearance of a seductive and deceptive goodness. How, then, could this soul recognize the evil spirit if such a spirit could come in conformity with the present spiritual disposition of the soul? At this juncture we can see the importance of intense scrutiny in Ignatius’s thought. Affectivity or experience was not, in and of itself, sufﬁcient. Experience was always deeply ambiguous. The director and the exercitant had to analyze the experience and determine its origin and result. They were to “pay close attention to the whole train of our thoughts, beginning, middle, and end.” If one discovered something “evil” or “diverting” in this analysis, or even something less good than what the soul originally proposed, then the evil spirit was at work. Ignatius instructed the retreatant that he must “immediately analyze the whole train of the good thoughts which the evil spirit brought to the soul, including their beginning and how little by little the evil spirit endeavored to bring the soul down from the sweetness and spiritual joy in which it had been, and ﬁnally brought it to its evil intention.”97 By “understanding this experience,” the soul could then be on guard in the future against such snares of the devil. Even in the second week, Ignatius tried to identify the good spirit with spiritual feelings and the evil spirit with sad and disturbing feelings. The evil spirit, he said, “weakens, disquiets, or disturbs the soul by robbing it of the peace, tranquility, and quiet which it enjoyed earlier.” Such disturbance was a “clear sign” that the evil spirit was at work. The seventh rule of the second week stated that in the case of the good soul, the good angel touched the soul “gently, lightly, and sweetly.” The evil spirit touched the soul, “sharply, with noise, and disturbance.”98 The principle with which Ignatius was working was that the spirit acted in different ways, depending on the present disposition of the soul. The reason for this is that fact that the disposition of the soul is either similar to or different from the respective spirits who are

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entering. When the soul is different, they enter with perceptible noise and are quickly noticed. Where the soul is similar, they enter silently, like those who go into their house by an open door.99 This rule appears to contradict rules three though six, according to which the effectiveness of evil is based on the fact that it “enters” clothed as an angel of light. Commentators have struggled with the seeming inconsistency of this seventh rule. Michael Buckley argues that there must be some sign of evil from the beginning, a sign that is often too subtle for the person to detect.100 Jules Toner maintains that while the evil spirit can, indeed, begin his deception without any disturbance, he cannot sustain “the angel-of-light act” because sooner or later, the evil spirit will clash with the soul of the person he is entering. Something, he argues, will betray his evil inﬂuence and the soul will experience conﬂict.101 These explanations attempt to make Ignatius consistent and may be quite correct. It is also possible, however, that, like many who went before him, Ignatius was striving for a ﬁnality, clarity, and certainty that would eventually be elusive. After stating rule seven, he proceeded immediately to speak of that consolation without a preceding cause in which “no deception can be present.” He equated the certainty of this type of consolation with immediacy, saying that it came “immediately from God our Lord.”102 Only the Creator, Ignatius explained, could “enter the soul, depart from it, and cause a motion in which it draws the person wholly into love of his divine Majesty.”103 Here again we see the identiﬁcation of immediacy with certainty. When the spiritual origin or cause of a visitation was divine, the immediacy between God and the soul created certainty in the experience that is self-authenticating. According to Ignatius, such certainty came suddenly without any previous perception or understanding of the object, “by means of which the consolation just mentioned might have been stimulated through the intermediate activity of the person’s acts or understanding and willing.”104 Mediation of any kind lessened certitude. In the case of absolute certainty, no intermediary could be present, including the internal actions of the mind and will. In fact, the mediation of the human faculties could lead the person receiving the consolation into error. Ignatius warned that one must carefully examine his or her experience with great vigilance and attention. In so doing, the spiritual person to whom God has given the experience must “distinguish the time when the consolation itself was present from the time after it, in which the soul remains still warm and favored.”105 According to Ignatius, in the period following the consolation, the reasoning that “springs from the habits and from conclusions reached by one’s own concepts or judgments, or through the inﬂuence of either an angel or devil” might form proposals or convictions which were “not coming immediately [inmediatamente]” from God.106 Ignatius concluded with the principle that was ubiquitous throughout the sixteenth century: that

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is, immediacy guarantees, or brings with it, a subjective or experiential certainty. Any form of mediation, be it human or demonic, could lead the soul astray into deception. Ignatius’s counsel in his letter to Teresa Rejadell has been called a commentary on the discernment of the spirits. Written in 1536, Ignatius sent his ﬁrst letter to Teresa and wrote about the various temptations that the devil posed to beginners. In the process he also explained the nature of consolations and desolations. The devil, he warned, knows well the soul he is trying to attack and acts according to that soul’s disposition. If a person has a lax conscience, he makes that person think venial sins are no sins at all. He also makes that person believe that mortal sins are only venial and that very serious mortal sins are of little consequence. In this way, the devil “perceives and exploits the failing of each individual.”107 Ignatius warned her that the devil attacked at the point of weakness. In Teresa’s case, the devil was exploiting her through a false humility by telling her not to reveal her spiritual visitations. He encouraged Teresa to speak of these spiritual experiences and explained that in discerning the spirits a person had to “reﬂect carefully” and remember that “the enemy does not care whether he tells a truth or a lie, so long as he overcomes us.”108 Ignatius added that in order not to be troubled and “to outwit our deluder,” Teresa should rely on Sirach 13:10, “Beware of being so humble that you fall into folly.”109 Ignatius analyzed the proper responses to the evil angel in various spiritual states. The main point was that both times of consolation and in times of desolation, “it is necessary to be aware of our opponent.” The soul had to be “vigilant and ﬁght the enemy by doing the opposite of his promptings.” Ignatius repeatedly warned that this vigilance was necessary because Satan always tried to introduce “some error or illusion under the appearance of the good.”110 Consequently, he had to describe those spiritual experiences that a person could trust absolutely to be from God. Writing to Teresa, he spoke of the Lord’s movements that urged the soul to some activity. The Lord began by “enlightening the soul,” by “speaking interiorly” and by wholly “lifting up the soul to his divine love and ourselves to his meaning without any possibility of resistance on our part even should we wish to resist.” In this experience, God communicated to the soul so powerfully and with such immediacy that the soul could not obstruct or hinder the divine activity. Equally important was the fact that the soul could not fail to perceive or know that this was the presence of God and to understand what had been revealed. Immediacy, therefore, gave certitude of the divine presence as well as the mind’s understanding of the revelation.111 Nonetheless, Ignatius instantly then cautioned the individual regarding the identity of the source of this consolation. He explained that divine inspirations were always in accord with the commandments, the precepts of the church, and obedience to superiors. This agreement or conformity with the matters of

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the faith had its basis in the “origin” or “source”; namely, the Holy Spirit who was the source of all inspirations and could not contradict himself. Therefore, the Spirit would not teach the church one thing and tell the believer the opposite. The time when a person was most easily deceived was following the time of a consolation. Ignatius explained that “we can frequently be deceived because after such consolation or inspiration, when the soul is abiding in its joy, the enemy tries under the impetus of this joy to make us innocently add to what we have received from God our Lord.”112 Hence the devil once again entered the “door” not by opposing the feelings of the soul but, rather, under the guise of spiritual feelings. According to Ignatius, the devil did this to disturb and confuse the soul or to “lessen the import of the message we have received.” The devil would thereby confront the soul with obstacles and difﬁculties in order “to prevent us from carrying out completely what has been made known to us.”113 False humility was just one way in which the devil appeared under the guise of something seemingly good. Zeal, as well as thoughts and feelings that were lofty and divine were also avenues for the devil to subvert obedience. As Ignatius said, “Great is the glee of the enemy of our nature when he sees a soul traveling, even on ways that are lofty and sublime, without caution and without the bridle of someone able to rule and govern, for he has all the more reason to anticipate its fall and plunge to ruin.” He added, “And zeal, which under the direction of obedience would be holy, becomes a powerful weapon and instrument of the devil for robbing the heart of true charity and hence of spiritual life.”114 When providing guidelines for the detection of true prophecy, Ignatius recalled that even Savonarola, “who was a man of great and exceptional gifts . . . of great virtue and devotion,” had been deceived by believing his inspiration was from God when it was actually from the enemy.115 Persons receiving spiritual experiences constantly had to be on guard lest the devil ensnared them.116 Among the many writings that addressed the discernment of the spirits in the sixteenth century, Ignatius’s Exercises have become the most well known. His discussions are also the most traditional. With Ignatius we stand ﬁrmly within the Catholic tradition on discernment as it developed in the later Middle Ages. What has to be remembered is that the problem of discernment crossed all confessional boundaries. Being the “great age of the Spirit” meant more than the constant appeal to the Spirit; the sixteenth century was also the great age of the devil. Fear and accusations of demonic inspiration permeated many of the writings of the reformers. In Luther’s view, Satan had been aroused by the preaching of the Gospel and now “prowls around like a roaring lion.” Among Protestant writers, the concern with detecting Satan was urgent and frequent. In the writings of many of the reformers, the discernment of the spirits became an important part of the arguments regarding interpretive authority. The anxiety over unmasking Satan occurred, however, in different

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contexts, all of which revealed the fear that Satan was lurking about, undetected, seductive, and powerful. The reformers also knew that Satan was often unnoticed precisely because he came as an angel of light. Citations of II Corinthians 11:14 were common. When Conrad Grebel wrote to Müntzer in 1524, he described his own fellow reformers who, he claimed, were persecuting and denouncing the Anabaptists “publicly from the pulpit as scoundrels and Satans disguised as angels of light.”117 Müntzer also referred to the “self-indulgent” biblical scholars as those who “take on the appearance of the angels of light.” He complained that such scholars, especially Luther, were “making me out to be a Satan or devil. . . .” Referring to Luther, he charged that, “Dr. Liar makes me out to be a devil, saying like his biblical scholars: What is wrong, then, with my teaching and writing? The sole fruit of your work is insurrection. You are a Satan, nothing but a satan etc. Look, you are a Samaritan, one possessed by the devil.”118 In his Vindication and Refutation, Müntzer responded to Luther’s accusation that he was a “satan” by stating, Are you listening to me? I am not possessed by the devil; what I am trying to do through my ministry is to proclaim the name of God. . . . Now that you realize that things might go too far, you are trying to ofﬂoad your name onto another man, to whom the world is completely opposed anyway, and to affect purity, as the devil is wont to do, so that no one may spot your wickedness.119 Müntzer’s concern with the various disguises of Satan went beyond rhetorical ﬂourish. The detecting of Satan was an important part of the spiritual process whereby one left behind a “counterfeit faith” and came to a true and experienced faith. Repeatedly, he insisted that only by breaking through counterfeit faith by means of suffering could one come to an authentic faith.120 He explained that Moses had to learn to distinguish between the false light of nature, the presence of God, and the inﬂuence of the devil. Moses did not have faith in God’s “living promise” and had to be brought to an “unfeigned trust in God.”121 According to Müntzer, Moses might “have taken God for a devil if he had not recognized the directness of God and the deviousness of the creature . . .”122 Müntzer repeatedly argued that “those who have not been put to the test” could not know “what is of God or of the devil.” As Müntzer said, “Only painfully and gradually do the elect learn to discriminate between the things of God and of the devil. . . .”123 Tribulation clariﬁed one’s sight and thereby enabled spiritual discernment. Suffering, moreover, usually accompanied true dreams and visions. Müntzer taught that it was in the “greatest tribulation that Almighty God is pleased to send genuine visions and dreams.” This insight demonstrates that for Müntzer, suffering not only emptied the soul and made it a home for the indwelling Word but it also clariﬁed the perceptual abilities

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of the believer. In Müntzer’s understanding, only after all traces of one’s “counterfeit” faith had been cleared away, could the believer be free of the deceptive light of nature and truly discern whether it was God or the devil who was speaking. Only in the light of authentic faith could the believer possess the ability “to distinguish [the good and evil spirits] in the ground of the soul.”124 If such suffering did not tear away one’s counterfeit faith, the person would easily be deceived. As Müntzer said, “Hence we need knowledge—not just some windy faith—so that we can discern what is from God, the devil, or from nature.”125 Interpreting the second chapter of Daniel, Müntzer defended the continuing revelations and visions of God by interpreting Nebuchadnezzar’s dream. He proceeded to articulate certain rules or conditions by which one could distinguish true from false visions and dreams. In his exegesis of this passage, Müntzer was opposing the “biblical scholars” who, like the soothsayers, publicly denied that there was any ongoing revelation from God. Müntzer argued that it was because they had “no experience of the coming of the Holy Spirit” that they were “unable to differentiate the good from the bad (when it masquerades as goodness (unter dem guten schein vordecket).”126 Müntzer admitted that the devil could deceive people through dreams. Because the devil could deceive people in this way, the believer ﬁrst had to become an “inward being” and then be able “to experience the operation of the divine word from the well of his heart.”127 God also had to put to death all the pleasures of the ﬂesh. If a person was to receive the revelation of God, he had to cut himself off from all distractions and develop an earnest concern for the truth. The person could then “by the practice of such truth distinguish the authentic visions from the false ones.” Continually, Müntzer relied on the statement in John 6:45 that such people would then “be taught by God.” To determine which visions were “of God, of nature, or of the devil,” the elect had to distance his will, heart, and natural reason from all temporal comforts. Müntzer again emphasized that visions were associated with suffering, as was clear in the story of Abraham in Gen 15:17.128 The elect must also make sure that the ﬁgurative images found in dreams and visions had “their parallels in every respect in the holy Bible, lest the devil sneak in and spoil the sweet ointment of the holy spirit . . .” Believers must pay close attention to the way in which visions manifested themselves. Visions, Müntzer explained, “do not gush out at human prompting, but emerge straightforwardly according to God’s unchangeable will.”129 He further warned that the prophecy of Joel retained its full force. In the last days God would “pour out his spirit and “our sons and daughters will prophecy and have dreams and visions.” Furthermore, true judgment must be learned directly only “from the mouth of God himself.” Müntzer concluded, “It is true—I know it for a fact—that the Spirit of God is revealing to many elect and pious men at this time, the great need for a full and ﬁnal reformation in the near future.”130

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His emphasis on experience also led Sebastian Franck to express concern over the discernment of the spirits. Such discernment, he said, was crucial to understanding the meaning of Scripture and the role of Christ and the Spirit. Franck’s interest in discernment stemmed from his fundamental belief in the opposition between God and the world. As was increasingly common in the sixteenth century, this opposition was expressed in terms of perception, deception, appearances, and reality. Franck joined the discernment of the spirits to the theme of our next chapter; namely, the disjunction between appearances and reality. According to Franck, that which was true “in God’s sight” was false in the “sight of the world.” Therefore, “absolutely all things behave differently in truth than they appear to be on the outside. God always maintains in everything the very opposite of the world and judges contraries.”131 Franck elaborated on this principle by arguing that “the wise is foolish, the light is darkness, and that which is noble, righteous, and good living etc. in the sight of God, is evil, unrighteous, heretical and death.” “Everything,” he wrote, “is in the reverse.”132 On the other hand, whatever is antichrist, heresy, might, folly, evil and death with the devil, is God Christ, God’s word, light, wisdom, goodness and life with God. Thus everything is in reverse order with God and the world, so that the free, rich, lord, victors, etc. are not free, lords, rich etc. in the eye of God, but captive, poor, slaves, and vice versa. Inversus Silenus omnia—everything is the reverse.133 Franck deﬁned the fall in terms of this “reversal.” When Adam chose the advice of the devil, he descended into the ﬂesh and took on a “visible nature.” However, visibility was always deceptive. Meanwhile, God remained the spiritual opposite of this “nature.” Thus God became the enemy and “counterpart” of the devil so that “now God maintains, judges, plays, believes, teaches, wills etc. the very opposite of Adam and his god. In other words, God’s nature is the world’s counterpart.” Franck wrote frequently about God and the devil (or world) as counterparts or opposites. For Franck, “The world turns everything upside down and in everything proves to be God’s very counterpart.”134 He articulated this theme in terms of perception, discernment, and judgment. The problem, he argued, was that appearances were illusions that were contrary to what seemed to be real. Drawing on Erasmus’s Moria, Franck explained that ignorance was the highest wisdom. For the spiritual person who perceived things truly, “everything will have to be different with the world and God’s counterpart and all things must be other than they appear. Thus appearance and being will forever be opposites and the word of God shall always be an enigma and paradox.” That which appeared true in the world was the opposite in the “sight of God” because “absolutely all things behave differently in truth than they appear to be on the outside.”135 Thus “the tables are turned in the sight of God, so that the vanquished is

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victorious and whoever is victorious after the ﬂesh, shall be seen lying, defeated, and without victory.”136 Franck repeated this theme in his discussion of Deus absconditus Deus: His kingdom is not of this world. It is spiritual, inward, invisible, hidden in spirit and in truth in such a manner that the entire world which looks upon outward things only, 1 Sam. 10; Rom. 2, is unable to see him even as he nourishes his own unto eternal life. . . . Nonetheless, all this remains true of Christians in its own way, according to the inner, hidden being who is born of God, even though it appears as a lie and an untruth to the entire world which cannot judge and see anything other than what is external . . . It is true, nonetheless, in the truth and hiddenness of God who sees that which is hidden, rules secretly and truly maintains everything, even though the world may not either see or believe it. Therefore, he is called a hidden God by Isaiah in chapter 45 who makes alive his own people in death, before death, indeed, through death. . . . Look at the paradox, “God’s word is a fairytale to the world.”137 In Franck’s view, such paradoxes are true in the hearts of all human beings. Everyone says that there is “no God” or that “Christ is not Christ” and the “people of God are not God.” But, he says, “Again, God maintains the opposite position, saying that the world’s God is not God but the devil and its Christ, Christians, and the people of God are Antichrist, heretics, and Mamelukes. . . . In other words, God’s nature is the world’s counterpart.”138 According to Franck, only the “spiritual person” could perceive this disjunction between “appearance and being.” The person with “spiritual eyes” saw that God judged all things in a way totally opposite to the judgment of the world. Franck taught that the world wanted to be deceived and to be “governed by deception.”139 This was only natural since, as the Gospel of John said, the “world is darkness and incapable of accepting the spirit of truth.” The world was most comfortable with lies and preferred “to be ruled by sheer deceptions and lies and to be cheated and deceived.”140 The prophets, Christ, and the apostles spoke the truth and tried to lead the “world out of deception into the light.”141 Faith, through the indwelling Christ, grasped the invisible truth, which stood contrary to appearances.142 Blinded by delusions, the Spirit had to grant “spiritual eyes” in order that one may recognize the truth.143 Christ was referring to the necessity for such spiritual discernment when he stated in John 6 that “the ﬂesh is of no avail.” The literal and plain sense of Scripture would not reveal this truth. This is because the “ﬂesh in line with its nature comes within that which is external; it comprehends no more than what it can see and hear, while, on the other hand, God’s word

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which is spirit and life always intends to be something else at the core than appears at ﬁrst glance and is almost totally allegory and an indicator to the intellect, i.e., a pointer to spirit, understanding, the spiritually-minded, given to those who are spiritual as a riddle which they soon solve.”144 According to Franck, without the light of the Holy Spirit, the letter of Scripture was a “dark lantern.” Only those who were “taught by God” and illumined by the Spirit could ﬁnd this inner or allegorical meaning, which was the true “mind of Christ.”145 Franck’s emphasis on the themes of reversal and hiddenness led him to believe that the “spiritual ones” always had to test the spirits, especially with regard to the interpretation of Scripture. According to Franck, “the letter and grammatical meaning of Scripture cannot be the testing stone and the ﬁnal scales for discerning the spirits, for its spirit, meaning, interpretation, and understanding alone is like God’s word, hence the exclusive testing ground of the spirits.” Franck declared that “because the letter of Scripture is cloven and divided in itself, all sects arise from it.” Furthermore, “all sects are of the devil.”146 Only the true inner meaning of Scripture was the ﬁnal test for the discernment of the spirits. Franck understood that this discernment was particularly important because the devil masqueraded as the good. Satan was wellversed in Scripture and “thus makes fools of all of us and makes sure that he goes according to Scripture. . . .”147 Even the devil, therefore, did not contradict the divine word. The Antichrist, too, could look and sound like Scripture and could be full of religious zeal: “Now the Antichrist simply does not lack any of the appearance, name, title, zeal for God not to call himself and appear like Christ.” Franck believed that the Antichrist could never be a “public enemy” because the entire world would worship him as Christ. Rather, the Antichrist was more like a “familiar enemy and a member of the household, a Judas among the apostles who will sell himself under the name of Christ, appear zealous for God, and with clever pretense place himself in all human hearts in God’s stead and in his temple.”148 Franck spoke eloquently of the deceptive character of appearances, especially appearances of truth and worship. Always he maintained the principle that the deceptive mimicked the true and the real. He wrote, “If you read the world’s lies, you will note that she cries loudly of God and his word . . . is zealous for God . . . and seeks, in short, to appear as believers and God’s people in the sight of others.” He cautioned that the “beautiful, spiritual, dangerous devil” that resided in the soul was difﬁcult to detect, largely because he was supported, not by obvious evil desires, but by various passages from Scripture as well as by hypocrisy and zeal. Therefore, this “beautiful devil possesses the whole world with excessive power throughout.”149 God had to tear away the masks of the devil in order that the truth might be known and recognized. To escape the deception of this “beautiful dangerous devil,” the believer had to be totally resigned and surrendered to God. Resignation allowed the

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spiritual person to see that the “spirit of God is stirred up, experienced, and revealed within us.”150 It is signiﬁcant that Franck also identiﬁed the work of discernment effected by Christ as freedom from deception. As he explained so succinctly, the Spirit, unlike the world and the devil, never sealed the heart with a lie. He further stated that “for the spiritual person a lie only ﬂoats about in the external being alone” and could not “survive testing.”151 In Franck’s theological vision, it was Christ who, through the experience in the innermost heart, grants spiritual perception and led the world “out of deception into the light.”152 This preoccupation with the detection of Satan recurs throughout the writings of many of the reformers. For some thinkers, such as Hubmaier, Marpeck, and Phillips, the command in I John 4:1 referred to the judging of doctrine against the word of Scripture lest we be deceived by the “children of darkness” who posed as the “angels of light.”153 Throughout the writings of many members of the radical reformation we ﬁnd continual warnings about false prophets and teachers who were really acting according to the “wiles of the devil.”154 Nonetheless, not all thinkers of the sixteenth century emphasized this fear of the demonic. Not every event or treatise was polemic and polarizing. Efforts toward coexistence, tolerance, and peace did take place repeatedly. Scholars endeavored to attain to a greater spirituality through reading and correspondence.155 Yet they did so in the context of strife and discord. Not even all the reformers stressed the demonic nature of their enemies. This concern was, indeed, present in Calvin but not to a great degree. The pope, Sevetus, the Libertines, Catholics and Anabaptists all came under the accusation that they were acting as angels of light. He warned that Christians must always test the spirits because “it is the perpetual state of the Gospel that Satan strives to infect and corrupt its purity with all sorts of errors.”156 Nevertheless, this concern never became paramount in Calvin’s theology, including his polemical writings. While other writers, both Catholic and Protestant, voiced these same, more restrained, sentiments, they often did so in an atmosphere overwhelmed by the fear of being deceived. A comparison of two very dissimilar thinkers demonstrates how the underside of certainty became the fear of demonic deception: namely, Martin Luther and Teresa of Avila.157 This chapter concludes by focusing on these ﬁgures because they stand as two very distant representatives of their age. One dates from the early sixteenth century and the other from late in that same century. One was Protestant and the other was Catholic. Luther was learned in the theological tradition of the church, while Teresa, although not unlearned, knew no Latin. Both were reformers and both had to grapple with an era of division and turmoil as well as the problem of heresy. In their respective writings we can detect a current of anxiety that acted as an undertow to the search for, and claims about, certitude. Both of these ﬁgures exhibited an intense uneasiness about the ever-present fear of illusion and

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deception. Moreover, in these two thinkers we see the certainty of truth authorized by what we have seen to be the increasingly problematic appeal to experience. By juxtaposing Luther and Teresa, who surprisingly expressed many of the same concerns, we are able to perceive the pervasive presence of the sixteenth-century preoccupation with certainty and deception that crossed confessional boundaries. More than any other sixteenth-century writer and polemicist, Luther’s claims to certainty were fraught with a thoroughgoing fear of the devil’s power to deceive. Luther was challenged from the beginning by Catholic opposition, the rise of religious radicalism, and the sacramental debates, all of which forced the question of deception to the forefront. In one form or another, all his opponents asked, “Are you alone wise?” All of his life, Luther felt the sting of this accusation and saw clearly that the issues of certainty and authority were closely linked. To defend his own teachings, Luther had to account for the errors or the deceptions of his opponents. Increasingly, his explanation was that the devil was inspiring his enemies. Heiko Oberman and Mark Edwards have proven the centrality of demonology in Luther’s theology and in his polemics against the “false brethren.”158 It is important to understand that Luther’s demonology also reveals the heart of his anxiety about certainty and deception. Furthermore, Luther’s demonology exactly paralleled his pneumatology. Just as the Holy Spirit was the agent of certitude, Satan was the agent of deception. The intensity of Luther’s preoccupation with the battle between certainty and deception is clear in his fascination with the method or means by which Satan operated as the “father of lies.” To explain Satan’s ability to deceive, Luther tapped into the centuries-long teaching regarding the nature of evil—a teaching that we have seen permeated this era. As did many in the tradition, Luther explained that evil came disguised as the good or as an angel of light. According to Luther, the noble, sincere, religious, and pious appearance of evil gave the devil his seductive power to deceive. This is why Luther so distrusted religious zeal; under the cover of zeal, the sinner came to rely more and more on his own religious efforts. The passages from Matthew 24:24, II Thessalonians 2:9–11, and II Corinthians 11:13–14, 26 were crucial to Luther’s self-understanding regarding the formation of various reformation sects opposed to different aspects of his theology. He interpreted both II Thessalonians 2:9–11 (“The coming of the lawless one by the activity of Satan will be with all power and pretended signs and wonders, and with all wicked deception for those who are to perish because they refused to love the truth and so be saved. Therefore, God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false”) and Matthew 24:24 (“For false Christs and false prophets will arise and show great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect”) as warnings of demonic activity. He often focused on the false miracles and signs

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performed by the devil. It is worth recalling that in his Responsio, More had defended the church on the basis of her history of miracles. More demanded that Luther show him the miracles which conﬁrmed his “new teaching.” On the basis of II Thessalonians, Luther repeatedly made it clear that miraculous events could be deceptive because the devil could produce false miracles and signs. As we have seen, Luther denounced the “papal” interpretation of Matthew 16:18 and insisted that the basis of the papacy was built on a lie. The pope, he said, was the Antichrist, or the “lawless one” foretold by Paul in II Thessalonians 2:9. According to Luther, Paul was warning that “the coming of the Antichrist shall be through the activity of the evil spirit, who enters only through lies and false interpretations of Scripture.” Denying that the Christian church existed only in the realm of the Roman church and the pope, Luther stated, “for the papacy is assuredly the true realm of the Antichrist, the real anti-Christian tyrant who sits in the temple of God and rules with human commandments as Christ in Matthew 24 and Paul in II Thessalonians 2 declares, although the Turk and all heresies, wherever they may be, are also included in this abomination which according to prophesy will stand in the holy place. . . .”159 It was in this kingdom of lies that false miracles were performed in order to deceive the people. Luther also depicted the tradition of saint’s lives and miracle stories as proof of this history of “delusion.”160 The devil could make one who appeared to be dead seem to be brought back to life. The story of Saint Macarius restoring the correct perception to parents who believed that their daughter had been turned into a cow was just another “deception” or false miracle of the devil. Luther insisted that Satan “bewitches” people and “dupes their ﬁve senses,” making them believe they are blind or lame and then heals them.161 At times the devil takes possession of a person and then lets himself be cast out by adjuration, blessing, etc. All this he does for the purpose of conﬁrming his lies and deceptions and of impressing the people, so that because of these apparently great miracles they are seduced into idolatry. This he has accomplished to date with pilgrimages and the idolatrous adoration of the saints, at one place with the Sacred Blood, another with this or that Mary. He has ﬁlled the entire country with shameful delusions and has prompted people to throng to such places and everybody to make vows there and transfer their trust from God to his lies. For in the end it was nothing but devilish deception with which he made fools of the people and persuaded them to believe that they had really been helped.162 Because the devil could produce false visions, apparitions, signs, and miracles, Luther warned that the Spirit had to enable believers to discern the true from the false. Christians must “hold to Christ’s Word and prophesy” and then must

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“judge all teachings and signs, life and activity. To accomplish this, the Holy Spirit himself must be present with his revelation.” Even if it “snows miracles everyday,” the Christian had to disbelieve them if they contradicted the “chief doctrine and article of Christ.”163 When explaining the nature of demonic deception, it was II Corinthians 11:14 that most fascinated Luther. Paul, he said, was discussing the “false apostles” who were “deceitful workmen disguising themselves as apostles of Christ.” This was not surprising because “even Satan disguises himself as an angel of light.” The reference to false apostles and false brethren who were disguised under the guise of light and truth provided Luther with the perfect explanation for the effectiveness of Satan in a world under the control of the “father of lies.” The battle between God and the devil was a battle between the “spirit of lies” and the “Spirit of truth.” Therefore, Christ promises to give us a Spirit who will not only strengthen our hearts and increase our courage but will also make our faith sure, remove all doubt, and enable us to judge all other spirits. Such a promise is necessary in order that we may successfully resist the devil’s lies . . . This [Spirit of truth] judges and thus separates from itself all false doctrine and all opposition, even though the devil becomes an angel of light and appears in a form as beautiful and resplendent as God Himself.”164 Luther stressed that Satan, “puts on a most beautiful appearance,” when he “captivates,” “bewitches,” “blinds,” and “beguiles,” through “lovely thoughts and words,” and gives the convincing appearance of wisdom and goodness. The Christians had always to beware so that “the devil does not take us by surprise. Here we see that he is such a master of dissimulation, disguise, and pretense that he becomes fairer than the ‘angels of light,’ and false bishops are holier than true bishops, and the wolf more pious than the sheep.”165 Luther exploited this insight to its fullest extent. For Luther, Satan’s effectiveness revolved around hiddenness. Scholars have long recognized the importance of divine hiddenness in Luther’s theology. However, for Luther an equally important counterpart to the hiddenness of God was the hiddenness of Satan. Luther saw that God revealed himself “under a contrary,” or in ways opposed to human reason. So, too, the devil came under a contrary by transforming himself into an angel of light. In Luther’s view, Satan came by hiding under the appearances of holiness, truth, zeal and faith. It was precisely the “goodness” of Satan that made his appearances so dangerous. The devil could even appear as Christ himself. “The devil,” Luther remarked, “so clothes and adorns himself with Christ’s name and works and can pose and act in such a way that one could swear a thousand oaths that it is truly Christ himself, although in reality it is the Archenemy and the true Antichrist.” Luther warned

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that this “Archenemy” quoted Scripture, “under the guise and name of Christ.” The devil perverts God’s words and “transforms truth into a lie.”166 Satan instructed people about the sacraments and could even inspire a life of ethical works. This so-called “white devil” counseled people to trust the church of the apostles and the holy fathers. Luther insisted that, “the devil always adorns himself with such an angelic, yes, such a divine form and appearance.” Satan did not come as evil or as temptation but he always appeared “in the disguise of the angel of light and adorns his murdering with the beautiful trappings that are called piety and the worship of God.” “This white devil, who transforms himself into an angel of light—he is the real devil.” Luther concluded that the adversaries referred to in I John 2:8, “had a false light, not the true light. They transformed themselves into angels of light and teachers. Thus the devil insinuates himself into our hearts, not as one who is evil and false but as one who is good and the best, as an angel of light.”167 Perhaps ironically, it was the Sermon on the Mount that most completely captured the ways in which the devil worked.168 Matthew 5–7 is commonly known today for the Lord’s Prayer, turning the other cheek, and the lilies of the ﬁeld. But for Luther, the Sermon on the Mount was a polemical call for battle against Satan and those he inspired. Luther’s interpretation of the Sermon originated in a series of sermons delivered between 1530 and 1532, years in which he felt surrounded by “enemies from within” and “enemies from without.” The latter were Catholics whose church the Antichrist governed. In this connection the Carthusians came in for particular criticism. The devil also inspired the “enemies from within,” that is, the “new monks” or Anabaptists. As Edwards has shown, Luther came to identify himself and his situation with St. Paul, who was surrounded by the “false brethren” of II Corinthians 11:26; namely, those whom Luther identiﬁed with the “false apostles” of Matthew 7:15. These false brethren were the various religious radicals whom Luther was convinced were the tools of the devil. Satan was everywhere. According to Luther, the preaching of the Gospel had aroused the devil’s fury, and the inevitable result was tumult and confusion. In his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, the verses that informed Luther’s understanding of this turmoil and disorder were Matthew 24:24 and II Corinthians 11:13–14. These verses served as proof that Satan came under the deceptive cover of “signs and wonders” and that all the enemies of the church were being led by the false angel of light. In his interpretation of the Sermon on the Mount, Luther repeated his favorite German proverb in order to express the religiously seductive manner in which Satan mimicked God. As Luther loved to say, “Wherever God builds a church, Satan builds a chapel next door.” The Carthusians, priests, bishops, Anabaptists and the other radicals had all been “beguiled,” “bewitched,” and “blinded,” by Satan so that they believed they were inspired by the Spirit and, therefore, members of the true church.

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All this originated from the godly traditions of the fathers; for wherever Christ builds a temple and gathers a church Satan invariably has the habit of imitating him like an ape and inventing idolatrous forms of worship and idolatrous traditions similar to the true doctrine and the true forms of worship. But he belittles the promise and spirit of the fathers, and meanwhile he introduces impressive pomp and magniﬁcent pageantry. The result is that he overcomes and obscures true worship and the church by means of a semblance of religion and of saintliness.169 In Luther’s interpretation, the Sermon on the Mount had been “stolen” by the monks and Anabaptists and understood in conformity with their vile imaginations. Being supremely religious, such people always tried to fashion a life of religious perfection. The devil deluded them into a life of religious zeal and made them into “counterfeit saints.”170 They lived a life of visible holiness and insisted on displaying their righteousness. They “ﬁll the world with worship” and “have a beautiful appearance” in terms of “the highest kind of sanctity.” They performed “big beautiful works of love.” The world, Luther said, stared at their “outward marks of special works and worship,” which were so “dazzling” that an ordinary Christian life seemed paltry by comparison.171 But these “special and showy works” by the pious were only an “outward mask” and were deceptive. False prophets and false brethren were “wolves in sheep’s clothing” because, like Satan, they could deceive only “under a beautiful impression and appearance.” Luther observed that they claimed “to teach nothing but the Word and use grand words like ‘the glory of God,’ ‘truth,’ and ‘eternal salvation.’”172 In a phrase that reﬂected his deep distrust of visible appearances, especially the appearance of holiness, Luther denounced them by saying that “no one is deeper in hell than the great servants of God, the most saintly monks.”173 Throughout his sermons on Matthew 5–7, Luther cautioned Christians must be on guard and “beware of false prophets” who were “wolves in sheep’s clothing.” The devil used these wolves and false prophets by citing Holy Scripture and inspiring “beautiful thoughts.” He thereby “deceives and seduces even the sharpest mind.” Discernment was difﬁcult, and often seemingly clear and obvious signs were “the devil’s deception.” Satan, Luther warned, “can make fools of people and cast a spell over them.” The world was “blind,” trapped in delusions, and unable recognize this demonic deception. Only those with “spiritual eyes” or “spiritual vision” along with the touchstone of the Word made one capable of being able to discern the devil and to judge the truth behind the “ﬁne outward appearance” of Satan’s servants. Therefore Christians had to be vigilant at all times and always had to “beware” in order to unmask the angel of light.174 Luther was keenly aware that the sin involved in demonic deception was not primarily an act of will but, rather, a noetic failure. He argued that although

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his opponents sincerely believed that they were being inspired by the “Spirit of truth,” they were in reality inspired by the “father of lies.” Both the Catholics and the false brethren did not simply refuse to understand; they were unable to recognize the truth. The devil ﬁlled the world with deception and makes one proceed “on his own ideas without the Word of God and that is sheer deception and delusion, as Scripture teaches everywhere.” Stirring up factions, sects, and false prophets, the devil made the “outward name and appearance” seem to be “so beautiful that no one can recognize it” without the understanding of the Word. This was always the way of the world: ”Well, there is nothing we can do about it. We have to put up with these snakes, dogs, and swine surrounding us and corrupting the Gospel both in doctrine and in life. Wherever there are faithful preachers they always have to take this. Such is the fortune of the Gospel in the World.”175 The Bible itself explained this dilemma as to why the “world” was wrong and he, Luther, alone seemed to be wise. The devil, Luther said, planted his seed in Christ’s kingdom so that it took root in doctrine and in life. Korah rebelled against Moses, asking “Why do you exalt yourselves above the people of God. Are they not all holy?” In Luther’s eyes, history always remained the same. Thus his opponents rebelled against him in the same manner as the false prophets rebelled against St. Paul and all preachers of the truth. As Luther said, “And nowadays they say: ‘Do we not have as much right to have the Spirit and to understand Scripture as others do?’”176 It was precisely this demonically inspired inability of the world to see the truth that answered the taunt, “Are you alone wise?” That derisive question “Are you alone wise?” haunted Luther throughout his life as a reformer. As early as 1521,Henry VIII had asked if Luther alone could be right while the whole tradition was wrong. Almost every opponent repeated this accusing question. Time and again, Luther defended himself against this accusation in both his early and late writings. He addressed this question in his Genesis commentary on the basis of Noah’s story. Luther explained that Noah alone remained steadfast in pure doctrine and the true worship of God. Everyone around Noah had become corrupt and accused him of believing that he alone had the truth. Luther likened himself to Noah, who was asked by all his friends, “Are you alone wise? Is it you alone who pleases God? Are the rest of us in error? Shall we all be condemned? Is it you alone who is not in error? . . . Do you think that all the fathers were in error?” Sympathizing with Noah, Luther replied, “No one believes how difﬁcult it is for one man to oppose the common opinion of all other churches, to contend against the views of very good men and very good friends, to condemn them and to teach, live, and do everything in opposition to them. . . . We observe the same today, how much wrath, hatred, and envy one sermon addressed to the people generates.”177 The “wretched papists” were doing the same to Luther by saying, “Do you think that all the fathers were in error?” While it seemed impossible that one man should rightly defy the whole world, Luther argued that

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Noah’s story proved that this had been the case throughout history because “the world refuses to change.”178 Referring to Noah, Luther wrote, “Because the devil continually beguiled the world, the one who spoke the truth was always attacked.”179 Moreover, Matthew 24:37 warned that the “end times” would be like the times of Noah. This was the situation in which Luther believed he lived. I realize how serious a matter it is if the opinions of all men assail one solitary individual and condemn him. We are condemned not only by the opinions of the pope but also by those of the Sacramentarians, the Anabaptists, and a thousand others. But these are child’s play and a pastime in comparison with the troubles of righteous Noah, who, apart from his own children and his godly grandfather did not ﬁnd one human being in the entire world who approved either of his religious views or his life. When all these people became corrupt, Noah alone remained steadfast . . . he retained the true worship of God. There is, therefore, no doubt that the perverse generation hated him intensely and harassed him in various ways while exposing him to ridicule: “Is it you alone who is wise? Is it you alone who pleases God? Are all the rest us in error? Shall we all be condemned? Is it you alone who is not in error? Is it you alone who will not be condemned? Therefore the righteous and holy man had to determine by himself that all the others were in error and should be condemned, but that only he, together with his descendents would be saved. Even though he reached this correct conclusion, it was very difﬁcult. Thus the holy man wrestled with various thoughts such as these.180 In the Gospel of John, Christ foretold that the world “cannot understand” because it did not have the “Spirit of truth.” Like the generation of Noah, the Johannine “multitude” and those of the present day were incapable of recognizing the truth because they were under a “spell,” a “satanic illusion,” or a “dream.” They were “insane,” subject to the “bewitchment of the spirit,” and suffering from “spiritual blindness or madness.” Luther ﬁrmly believed that humanity was locked into a world of satanic deception that seemed all too real. The “bewitchment of the spirit” even extended to a real but delusional certitude. In his preaching on the Sermon on the Mount, Luther argued that the “ancient serpent” was now deluding the “fanatics,” that is, Anabaptists and Sacramentarians. However, Satan was doing so by honestly convincing them that their beliefs were correct. Commenting on Galatians 3:1, Luther wrote:

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This is why Paul applies the bewitchment of the senses to the bewitchment of the spirit. But with this spiritual witchcraft that ancient serpent captures, not men’s senses but their minds, and deceives them with false and wicked opinions; those who are bewitched in this way suppose that these opinions are true and godly . . . With his tricks he has so bewitched their minds that they are embracing lies, errors, and horrible darkness as the most certain truth and the clearest light . . . [the devil] works internally with plausible opinions about doctrine, by which, as I have said, he so dements the hearts of men that they would swear that their most vain and wicked dreams are the most certain truth.181 In Luther’s view, the devil created a world that was the mirror image of the truth. The hiddenness of God and the hiddenness of Satan were locked into a deadly contest between the real and the counterfeit. The individual was immersed in an illusion that seemed more real than the truth. In Luther’s frequent use of II Corinthians 11:14, the world became a nightmare of mimicry, illusions, and deceptions that skillfully masqueraded as reality. Evil parodied the good so authentically that all claims to certainty fell into a demonic perceptual chaos. Luther did not shrink from the consequences of the paradoxical nature of both God and Satan as they appeared under the hiddenness of their contraries. For Luther, both God and Satan wore masks. The following passage is worth quoting at length because it so dramatically illustrates that when the hiddenness of God confronted the hiddenness of Satan, the world becomes a kind of tragic shadow play in which the line between deception and reality, bewitchment and sight, truth and lies, threatened to disappear. God’s faithfulness and truth always must ﬁrst become a great lie before it becomes truth. The world calls this truth heresy. And we, too, are constantly tempted to believe that God would abandon us and not keep his Word; and in our hearts he begins to become a liar. In short, God cannot be God unless he ﬁrst becomes a devil . . . We cannot become God’s children until we ﬁrst become the children of the devil. All that God speaks and does the devil has to speak and do ﬁrst. And our ﬂesh agrees. Therefore, it is actually the Spirit who enlightens and teaches us in the Word to believe differently. By the same token, the lies of this world cannot become lies without ﬁrst having become truth. . . . The godless do not go to hell without ﬁrst having gone to heaven. They do not become the devil’s children until they have ﬁrst been the children of God. To summarize, the devil does not become, and is not, a devil without ﬁrst having been God. He does not become an angel of darkness

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unless he has ﬁrst been an angel of light. For what the devil speaks and does must ﬁrst have been said and done by God. . . . I know the devil’s word must ﬁrst become the delicate truth of God before it can become a lie. I must grant the devil his hour of godliness and ascribe the satanic to our God.182 Luther delighted in this type of paradoxical, enigmatic, and bewildering description of reality. As a result, he had to lay great stress on the “testing of the spirits.” It is not surprising that amid the competing and conﬂicting claims to the illumination of the Spirit, I John 4:1 took on an urgency in Luther’s thought that revealed the crisis of certainty and authority of his time. He continually warned believers, “We must be on our guard against the devil who can pose and masquerade in the form and name of Christ.” The faithful had to unmask Satan and his followers and strip him of his angelic garb in order to recognize him as the devil: “Therefore, we must pull off their masks and point out the true nature of the Gospel, Baptism, and the ministry. The devil always adorns himself with such an angelic, yes, such a divine form and appearance just as he makes a god of himself when he speaks to Christ in Matt. 4. Here Christ himself must contend, not against man but against a god—not against the true God but against the devil, who uses God’s name and adorns himself with divinity.”183 To “test the spirits” was to plunge the believer into the battleﬁeld between the Spirit of truth and the father of lies. This testing required a depth of knowledge and spiritual experience and perception that could safely distinguish between these two opponents and thereby could choose truth versus heresy. To show the difﬁculty of spiritual discernment Luther appealed to II Corinthians 2:15 saying, “It is indeed a real Christian art to distinguish in the heat of battle between the suggestions of Christ and those of the devil. Only one who is experienced will realize the difﬁculty.”184 Repeatedly, he reminded his followers that only the spiritual man, the one with “spiritual vision” would be able to practice this art and discern truth from the errors and deception with which the devil was determined to delude the world.185 Convinced that fallen humanity was the constant prey of demonic deceptions, Luther was compelled to explain how one was to discern or to test the spirits. To warn about the devil was not sufﬁcient; the believer had to have signs to avoid Satan at every turn. Luther—and later Teresa—tried to formulate objective and external standards by which they defended their teaching. We will see, however, that in the end both relied primarily on the experience of certainty itself. Recognizing that everyone was claiming the Spirit, Luther argued that a doctrine had to be tested: “If I see that it agrees with the words of Christ, I consider it true and good. But if it deviates . . . I declare, ‘You are not the Holy Spirit, you are the devil!’”186 But Luther knew only too well that the

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solution was not that easy. He recognized that his opponents both claimed the Spirit and were arguing on the basis of the same Scriptures. The ancient insight was true: heretics and Satan always quoted Scripture and did so with an earnestness that kept them from perceiving that they were bewitched. Luther was convinced that the errors of his many opponents gave evidence that they were being led by the evil spirit. Writing against the “fanatics” regarding the Eucharist, Luther warned, “The devil takes no vacation and does not sleep. . . . They do not consider that he is round about them with all his venomous ﬂaming darts, which he puts into them, such superlative beautiful thoughts adorned with Scripture that they are unaware of what is happening. . . .The devil is a master of a thousand arts. If God does not defend and help us, all our actions and councils are nothing.”187 So, too, Luther recognized that “Our whole quarrel with all these factions revolves about their claim that they have the Holy Spirit and that therefore they should be believed. It is our lot to be constantly locked in combat with the devil and false spirits.” The devil, Luther warned, “tries to conjure up his phantoms . . . First he employs all his craft and cunning to beguile the people. This he does with the very words of Holy Writ and under the guise of the name of Christ. Thus, all the schismatic spirits and heretics come clad in sheep’s clothing; they use the same word, manner, and mein, as though they were the true teachings of this way. They exalt nothing but Christ’s honor and faith in Christ.”188 Luther, of course, endlessly repeated his principle that all doctrine must be measured according to Scripture. Nevertheless, opposition on all fronts forced him to turn elsewhere to ﬁnd additional means for discerning deception. By following him in this search, we arrive at the deeper core of Luther’s struggle to test the spirits. When combating the “false brethren,” Luther articulated several tests “by which the spirits are to be tested.” One such test involved teaching or preaching. The Spirit, he explained, establishes a wide difference among teachers and gives the right rule by which the spirits are to be tested. He wants to say that there are two types of teachers. There are some who speak on their own authority; that is, they draw their message from their own reasoning or religious zeal and judgment. The Holy Spirit is not to be that kind of preacher; for He will not speak on His own authority, and His message will not be a human dream and thought like that of the preachers who speak on their own authority of things which they have neither seen nor experienced . . . No. His message will have substance; it will be the certain and absolute truth.189 In his attempts to ﬁnd a criterion by which to discern between the spirits Luther returned to all the arguments about the Spirit as the agent of certainty that we

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have seen in the course of this study. Once again, Luther had recourse to a clearly experiential language. The Spirit, Luther explained, effected a change within the believer that was primarily a change of perception. The heart and mind were renewed so that the believer possessed a “spiritual insight” that provided the enlightenment necessary to understand Scripture.”190 This enlightenment or spiritual vision provided by the Spirit would undo the “spiritual witchcraft” of the devil and, as we have seen, would create the “spiritual man who judges all things.” Therefore, Luther insisted, Christ promised that the Spirit would “make our faith certain, remove all doubt, and enable us to judge all other spirits. Such a promise is necessary in order that we may successfully resist the devil’s lies.”191 The fact that the Spirit was also the “Comforter” led Luther to the examination of different spiritual experiences in order to “test the spirits.” If the spirit was satanic, there would be no comfort and the individual would feel inward terror and sadness. The devil inwardly harassed and disquieted the soul, killed troubled consciences, and brought despair. For Luther, only the “experienced person” could recognize the devil by these feelings and thereby say, “’This is not my Lord, Christ; it is His enemy, the devil.’ He indeed deceives pious hearts by disguising himself as an angel of light (II Corinthians, 11:14) He displays himself as, and pretends to be, Christ himself. But this is the sign which deﬁnes him. . . . He invariably leaves his stench behind him, that is, a faint, fearful and disquieted conscience. This is evident in all the false teachers and schismatic spirits, who share in the nature of their master the devil. . . . He delights in making hearts afraid, cowardly, and dejected.”192 Luther, therefore, tested the spirits by demonizing doubt and anxiety over salvation. Such feelings were sure signs of the devil. Most importantly, the demonic spirit threatened damnation. For Luther, the ultimate deception was not a false vision or voice, but doubt about salvation.193 In some cases Luther used his distinction between Law and Gospel as a test for discernment of the spirits. This distinction “establishes believers in a position as judges of all styles of life and over all laws and dogmas of men. Finally it provides us with a faculty for testing all the spirits.”194 However, as Luther delved into the problem of discernment, he once again came upon the ambivalent nature of human experience.195 We have seen that as the “Comforter,” the true Spirit erased doubt and left inward feelings of “peace,” “security,” “courage,” and “joy.” But these feelings of peace and consolation are not an irrefutable test of the spirits in Luther’s thought. Luther’s attack on the antinomians warned against seeing Christ as one who consoled the conscience. Moreover, despair and repentance over sin was also the work of God. Nonetheless, Luther always returned to the argument that the “Son of man” entered the world “to destroy doubt about one’s salvation.”196 To test the spirits, therefore, was to engage in the perceptual and experiential battle between doubt and certainty.197 Satan could not make the believer cry “Abba!

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Father!” with all the certainty that cry entailed. The “experienced Christian” would continually feel contradictory experiences in his soul and would experience the temptation of the devil as well as the comfort of Christ198 In the midst of this conﬂict, the Christian must not judge according to his “own feelings” of sin but, rather, cling to the growing experience of certainty. Therefore, in recognizing and ﬁghting the devil’s temptations, the believer underwent a battle between experiences: But the devil . . . assails and hinders us on all sides, in an attempt to check and obstruct the Word. At this point experience must enter in and enable a Christian to say, “To this point I have heard that Christ is my Savior, who conquered sin and death; and I believed this. Now my experience bears this out . . . Now I see and know that He loves me and that what I believe is true.199 According to Luther, the person “trained by experience” would emerge from the battle between the spirits with an internal certitude that only the true Spirit could provide. To explain what the Christian must do in these periods of demonic temptation, Luther marshaled all the language of experience and interiority at his disposal. Believers had to “creep” to Christ in order to be completely “merged into [Christ]” and thereby “feel this comforting conﬁdence and assurance.” They had to “lay hold” and “cling” to Christ and “experience” the Spirit of certitude “within the soul.” Those who endured such trials would ﬁnally “feel and experience peace.” The believer could discern that it was the Spirit at work because only the Spirit could inspire feelings of security, fearlessness, comfort, conﬁdence, assurance, and, of course, certainty.200 Criticizing those who denied the doctrine of “faith alone,” Luther concluded on a very familiar note. He insisted that it would do no good to argue with these opponents because “[t]hey are fooling you. For no matter how long you follow their doctrine, you are just as uncertain as you were before.”201 Throughout the disputes about the certainty of salvation, the certitude of interpretation, the role of experience, and the search for the true church, we have seen the same argumentation repeatedly occur. For all parties involved, Protestant and Catholic, the test of truth was whether it left the Christian in a state of certainty or uncertainty. The same argumentation recurs in Luther’s attempt to ﬁnd a principle by which one could safely distinguish between God and the devil. In the end Luther’s ultimate criterion for “testing the spirits” became the experience of certitude itself. The necessity for detecting the demonic or testing the spirits became only more urgent during the course of the sixteenth century. From the time of Gerson throughout the early modern era, increasing numbers of treatises were written in order to offer instruction on how to discern between the divine and the demonic. The task never became easy, as is evident from the statement by

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the Spanish theologian Diego Pérez de Valdivia who, in his 700-page book, stated that, “no vision is absolutely certain.”202 Moreover, the insight that Satan imitated the good was never forgotten. St. John of the Cross was only one of the ﬁgures concerned with the way in which the devil mimicked God. Speaking about the danger of “spiritual gluttony,” St. John warned that the devil could even cause a delusional certitude: It can be deduced and easily understood from all we have said above how much evil can come from the devil by way of these supernatural apprehensions. He can present many false ideas and forms to the memory under the guise of their being true and good. This he does by impressing them on the spirit and the senses through suggestions with much certiﬁcation and efﬁcacy. They then seem so certain that the soul thinks they cannot be false, but that what it feels is in accord with the truth. Since the devil transforms himself into an angel of light, he seems to be light to the soul. But this is not all. In true visions from God he can also tempt [the soul] in many ways by causing inordinate movements of the spiritual and sensory appetites and affections toward these visions. If the soul is pleased with these apprehensions it is very easy for the devil to bring about an increase of appetites and affections and a lapse into spiritual gluttony and other harmful feelings.203 For John, the devil was inextricably linked with delusion: “Deception necessarily follows when one is forsaken by God. The devil then intervenes, answering in harmony with that person’s desire and pleasure; and since the devil’s replies and communications are pleasing and satisfactory, that man will let himself become seriously deluded.” As he reminded his readers, “To a blind soul falsehood no longer seems falsehood and evil no longer evil and so on, for the darkness appears to be light and the light darkness.”204 Staying safe from delusion was a pervasive concern that John of the Cross shared with his co-founder of the Discalsed Carmelites, St. Teresa of Avila. The anxiety regarding the ambivalence of spiritual experience caused Teresa to suffer doubts about the origin or source of her experiences. Recent scholarship has stressed that these doubts were partly forced upon her by the Inquisition and the decision by some of her confessors that her experiences were, indeed, from the devil. Teresa’s difﬁculties as a female mystic and teacher of mental prayer have been explored in important studies by such authors as Alison Weber. Weber analyzed the ways in which Teresa negotiated issues of validation, power, and authority in her defense that her experiences were not demonic. She places Teresa in the context of “Counter-reformation misogyny” and explains that Teresa stood in the shadow of alumbradismo or illuminism because of her emphasis on mental prayer.205 If we look at Teresa’s writings

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through this valuable lens of power and authority, studies such as those by Weber offer invaluable insights into the ways that Teresa framed her arguments, used language, and negotiated issues of authority. Her confessors ordered her to write the Vida, and in this book she explained and defended the practice of mental prayer and the authenticity of the spiritual favors granted to her by the Lord. Moreover, Teresa’s thought cannot be understood fully unless we see her as a “displaced person.”206 As a woman, a person of Jewish descent, and as one who claimed ecstatic experiences, Teresa stood outside the traditional hierarchical circles of legitimacy in sixteenth-century Spain. She lived at a time when the fear of novelty, mysticism, and illuminism had pervaded Spanish society. This was a time when (mainly) women tried to reach for divine inspiration by means of visions, ecstasies, and mystical experiences. However, at the same time these very means were coming under growing suspicion and “the boundary between a licit vision and an illicit and demonic delusion or simulation was totally porous.”207 Scholars such as Weber and Sluhovsky also remind us that Teresa was very much a member of her era in her belief that the world was full of both good and bad spirits. Keeping these insights in mind, the following analysis focuses not on the issue of female authority but on the practice of discernment. Teresa did not deny the existence and the threat of demons, although in her later writings she expressed impatience with the fear of the devil. This does not mean, however, that she believed she could not succumb to demonic inﬂuence. For Teresa the problem was the discernment, not the reality, of the demonic. Teresa did know that claims to visionary experiences were dangerous. Holy women or beatas were being challenged. In 1546 in Córdoba, the Inquisitional tribunal tried Magdalena de la Cruz for making a pact with demons. She confessed that she had entered such a pact and took a demon as her lover. Magdalena also admitted to faking her religious experiences. As Gillian Ahlgren has observed, Magdalena de la Cruz was often held up as a warning during the latter sixteenth century of the “danger and public scandal a woman could cause.”208 In fact, this phenomenon continued to plague the late sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. On October 1, 1575, the Inquisition ordered the arrest and imprisonment of Francisca de los Apóstoles, a woman who was known for her holiness and her visions. She and her sister Isabel attempted to organize a religious community of women who did penance and prayed as payment for human sins. From January 27 through February 21, 1576, Francisca defended herself against her Inquisitor, Juan de Llano de Valdés. One of the most important parts of the trial was Valdés’s challenge to Francisca that she was unable to discern the spirits. How did she know with certainty that her visions were not from dreams, her imagination, or from the devil? She told the Inquisitor that she was certain her visions and raptures were not demonic because they left her soul in a state of “inner peace with great calm.” She also explained that her spiritual experiences had to be “something

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from God and not the devil ﬁrst of all because her spirit would be enraptured with great tenderness and in that time the senses do not feel any corporal thing nor is the soul perturbed. Instead everything is gentleness, and the soul is given a very great light and great knowledge of its own vileness and of what has just happened in what it has seen.” In such experiences she reported that she “grew in knowledge and understanding.” Her Inquisitor was not convinced. Valdés warned her that “it is common for the devil to appear as an angel of light and that he looks for these means and others to deceive even the saints.” In the end, the Inquisitor decided that all her visions had to be from the devil and stated about Francisca, “It is a very certain and conﬁrmed thing that none of those revelations was from God, and to believe anything else would be a very great deceit.” On April 14, 1578, Francisca appeared in the public auto de fe where she confessed and abjured her offenses. She was declared publicly to be “an arrogant, bold and miserable heretic, blasphemer and perjurer.” She received one hundred lashes and was banished from the city for three years. She had been discredited as a religious visionary and lost in the movement of history.209 Teresa’s fate was very different from that of a beata such as Francisca de los Apóstoles. Nonetheless, she was the object of concern to the Inquisition. Several Inquisitors believed that Teresa had committed various “frauds and deceits.” In Seville, Teresa and other nuns were suspected of various disrespectful practices and moral misconduct. There were accusations and suspicions aimed against the Carmelites’s practice of mental prayer. In February 1576 the Inquisitors visited the Carmelites searching for information about Teresa and Isabel de San Jerónimo. After Teresa completed her Vida, the Inquisition held on to it for thirteen years. She composed two accounts of her life which, as Ahlgren explains, convey the substance of what her defense before the tribunal would have been.210 Because she could not use the Vida during this time, Teresa composed the Interior Castle. Meanwhile, her confessor had ordered her to burn her Meditations on the Song of Songs. Seven years after her death, in 1589 the Inquisition urged the burning of all her books. If Teresa had been found guilty by the Inquisition, she would have been punished in the year before the auto de fe of Francisca. Teresa clearly inherited the growing suspicion of the church and the Inquisition toward beatas. Once again the problem was the preoccupation and authority invested in experience. Alumbradismo was part of that larger atmosphere of spiritualism evident in illuminism, Italian evangelism, and the various forms of the Reformation, all of which stressed the authority of the Spirit as experienced in the soul. Just as Luther was vulnerable to the charge that he alone was wise, Teresa was vulnerable to the charge of illuminism or of being one of the alumbrados.211 Although like Ignatius she was eventually cleared of this suspicion, it is not difﬁcult to see why she was susceptible to such an accusation. She claimed intimacy and union with God. She wrote of

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the presence of Christ in the interior depth of the soul. She spoke frequently about detachment [dejamiento], prized mental prayer and demystiﬁed it by refusing to relegate it to “learned men.” She also described her many visions, raptures, locutions, and levitations.212 Above all else, Teresa repeatedly authorized her teaching by declaring, “I can speak of what I have experienced.”213 Nonetheless, Teresa was able to distance herself from the alumbrados and, after defending and explaining herself many times, she was found to have genuine spiritual experiences. Fray Domingo Báñez rendered the following decision about Teresa’s Vida. There is only one thing in this book with which, after it has been fully examined, fault can fairly be found—namely, that it says a great deal about revelations and visions, which are always very much to be feared, especially in women, who are more apt to believe that they come from God. . . . They are to be regarded rather as trials full of peril to those who are striving after perfection, for Satan is wont to transform himself into an angel of light and to delude souls that are curious and lacking in humility, as we have seen in our own times. Still we must not for this reason lay down a general rule that all these revelations and visions are of the devil. . . .214 Báñez added the qualiﬁcation that Teresa was “not a deceiver, although she might to some extent be deceived.” Teresa searched for a way to distinguish between the spirits in ways similar to Luther. Her spirituality was focused not only around her own supernatural experiences but around both the ambiguity of all experiences as well as the desirability of having such “spiritual favors.” As is well known, she chafed against the authority of those confessors who told her that her visions were of demonic origin as well as other authorities who found her suspect.215 Although she carefully defended the role of “learned men,” she gave priority to those who also “had experience”: “This is a mistake we make: we think that with years we shall come to understand what in no way can be comprehended without experience. And so many are wrong, as I have said, in wanting to discern the spirits without having experience.”216 A learned, but not experienced, confessor should not “kill himself or think he understands what he doesn’t, or suppress the spirit, for now in respect to the spirit, another greater Lord governs them; they are not without a superior.”217She was greatly relieved to be told by Father Diego de Centina, a member of the Society of Jesus, that her experiences were from the Spirit of God.218 At one point, her confessors forbade her to read any more devotional books in the vernacular. According to Teresa, the Lord promised that he would give her a “living book.” She then recognized that she had very little need for books because she now experienced the direct teaching of the Lord, “His majesty became the true book in which I saw the truth.”219 She observed,

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“I ﬁrmly believe that whoever has had experience will understand and see that I succeeded in saying something; whoever has not had experience—I wouldn’t be surprised if it all seems nonsense to such a one.” Teresa repeatedly explained that she knew things “through experience.”220 Her writings are ﬁlled with phrases such as “My experience explains,” and “From what I see and know through experience.” She stated that the soul, “now understands through experience” and that “one cannot be sure about what one has not experienced.” She assured her sisters who were subject to the wiles of the devil that: “So I have desired that my Sisters might take warning from my own experience. I shall say nothing about what I have not experienced myself or seen in others.” Commenting on the Song of Songs, she began with the prayer, “Oh my daughters, what deep secrets there are in these words! May the Lord give us experience of them, for they are hard to understand.”221 Nonetheless, Teresa was deeply aware of how ambivalent and dangerous experience could be. The soul could undergo three kinds of experiences: those from God, those from melancholy (or the imagination), and those from the devil. Teresa’s insights into the problems of doubt, anxiety, and melancholy have been examined by historians of both medicine and of spirituality.222 In her later work, The Foundations, Teresa was much more wary of ecstatic experiences and counseled that melancholy could cause apparitions. The nuns, she said, should not immediately think that “every little thing that comes to our fancy is a vision, and we should believe that when a vision does occur, this will be clearly known. Where some melancholy is present, there is need for much greater care.”223 Sisters suffering from melancholy, she wrote, “Truly think that they see what they do not see.” (One cannot help but observe that while some had rejected Teresa’s experiences because they believed their source to be the demonic, she herself dismissed some of her nuns on the basis of melancholy.) However, although Teresa distinguished melancholy from the demonic; she often explained that the devil worked through melancholy in order to beguile and gain souls.224 As did all who went before her, Teresa knew that spiritual discernment was difﬁcult precisely because the devil transformed himself into an angel of light.225 She was always acutely aware of the ever-present danger of deception. Analyzing the different stages of prayer, she was anxious to warn about the deceptions that endangered the soul at every level. She prayed repeatedly that God would protect her against delusions. “Oh my Lord!” she prayed, “In your mercy do not consent to allow this soul to suffer deception.”226 Teresa opened her analysis of the prayer of union by praying, “Send light from heaven, my Lord, that I might be able to enlighten these your servants—for You have been pleased that some of them ordinarily enjoy these delights—so that they may not be deceived by the devil transforming himself into an angel of light.” She warned that there were “few dwelling places in this castle in which the devils do

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not wage battle.” Thus it was “very necessary that we don’t grow careless in recognizing the wiles of the devil and that we may not be deceived by his changing himself into an angel of light.” She continued, “there is a host of things he can do to cause us harm; he enters little by little and until he has done the harm, we don’t recognize him.”227 This “host of things” included the demonic simulation of almost all divine gifts and favors. Hearing voices or “locutions” was dangerous and should always be validated by a confessor because of Satan’s ability to mimic God’s words. The devil could cause visions, produce tears, instigate good desires, give false humility, cause quiet, delight and consolation in the soul, offer peace, and “feign” or “counterfeit” the gifts of God.228 The devil, Teresa warned, “knows well how to counterfeit [contrahacer] the Spirit of Light” and tries to “counterfeit” the Lord by taking on the form of ﬂesh and making false representations.229 It was in the imagination that the devil most often practiced “his wiles and deceits.” The importance given to the fear of deception is clear in the fact that Teresa ranked visions according to their vulnerability to the devil. Corporeal visions (which Teresa never experienced) were of the lowest order and were the ones in which the devil could cause most illusions. Imaginative visions were those in which images were seen by the “eye of the soul.” Since the devil could interfere in such imaginative visions, they were inferior to intellectual visions in which Satan was not permitted to practice deception.230 Teresa repeatedly sounded the alarm by warning her sisters about deceptions and delusions. She continued to caution that all along the way of spiritual progress, one could fall prey to the devil. Addressing the question, “What are the ways in which the devil can enter so dangerously that your soul goes astray?” Teresa answered, “There is no enclosure so fenced in that he [the devil] cannot enter, or desert so withdrawn that he fails to go there.”231 She explained that in the prayer of union the devil would carefully try to conquer the soul: “I tell you daughters that I have known persons who had ascended high and had reached this union, who were turned back and won over by the devil with his deep and cunning deceit.”232 The devil could easily deceive beginners who were not yet advanced in virtue and not yet mortiﬁed and detached. In such a state, the beginning soul must exercise great caution. Trusting God, such souls practiced a dangerous zeal and fell because they did not recognize they were still ﬂedglings: The devil plays a trick on the soul. Since it sees itself so close to God and perceives the difference there is between heavenly and earthly goods and the love the Lord shows it, it gains conﬁdence from this love and the feeling of security that it will not fall away from what it enjoys. It thinks it clearly sees the reward and that it is no longer

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possible for it to abandon something that, even in this life, is so delightful and pleasing . . . and by this conﬁdence the devil takes away its lowly estimation of itself . . . The soul places itself in dangers and begins with splendid zeal to give away fruit without measure. It doesn’t do this with pride: it well understands that of itself it can do nothing. It does it with great conﬁdence in God, but without discretion since it is still a ﬂedgling. It can leave the nest, and God takes it out, but it still is not ready to ﬂy.233 Teresa went on to say that, “This self-reliance is what destroyed one.” She was particularly concerned that when a “ﬂedgling” soul fell, it must not be tricked by the devil into giving up prayer through a “false humility.”234 Spiritually advanced souls were also not immune from the devil. Those who had made spiritual progress could still fall prey to Satan. Teresa found the perfect image of such danger in the person of Judas. Teresa noted that Judas had been in the company of the apostles and had conversed “with God himself.” Nevertheless he fell away. Therefore, spiritually advanced persons should take a lesson from Judas who had by now become the representative of deception and false appearances for everyone from Hus to Teresa. Judas’s example taught Teresa that “there is no security in these things.”235 A spiritually advanced soul, such as one who had reached the ﬁfth dwelling, asked how a soul desiring to do God’s will could “be deceived since it doesn’t want to do anything but His will in all things?” Teresa replied by saying that clearly if the souls were always attached to God’s will, it would not go astray. But the devil comes along with some skillful deception and under the color of good, confuses it with regard to little things and induces it to get taken up with some of them that he makes it think are good. Then little by little, he darkens the intellect, cools the will’s ardor, and makes self-love grow until in one way or another he withdraws the soul from the will of God and brings it to his own.236 Throughout her writings, Teresa warned against such deception, saying, “I mark danger everywhere.” If the soul stops advancing, it must walk with fear since the devil always “wants to cause some lapse.” The soul can feel very secure in its interior part, especially when it is alone with God but it also “goes about in deep distress because it fears the devil may in some way beguile it into offending the one it loves so much.”237 According to Teresa, inexperienced confessors further confuse the soul by telling it to take another path. The soul resists the confessor’s instructions and, therefore, feels distressed because it has disobeyed. Nonetheless, “obeying and not offending our Lord, [the soul] thinks, is the complete remedy against deception.”238 Teresa warned that the desire to see God seemed to be characteristic of very advanced persons, but “the

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devil could instigate them so that we might think we are advanced.” Therefore, “it is always good to walk with fear.”239 The devils, she explained, have “legions of battles” everywhere in order to prevent souls from going from one room to the other in the “castle” of the soul.240 Teresa warned that there “must be war in this life.” The soul must be a “soldier of Christ” fearing only those “traitorous enemies, the devils who transﬁgure themselves into angels of light, who come disguised.” Only after much harm had been done to the soul did these enemies “allow themselves to be recognized.”241 As a soldier, the soul must always be careful because “the devil is watching to see how he can take away the spoils if you do not defend yourself against him. Believe that you have to strive here with a sword in the hands of your thoughts. . . . There is no security while we are alive.”242 Consequently, it was “very necessary that we don’t grow careless in recognizing the wiles of the devil and that we be not deceived by his changing himself into an angel of light.” Even in the seventh dwelling, where the spiritual betrothal took place, the soul was secure only so long as God kept it “in His hand.” The soul should not “consider itself safe . . . but goes about with much greater fear than before, guarding itself from any small offense against God.”243 In the Way of Perfection, Teresa reminded her sisters that, “no one can be safe while living and engulfed in the dangers of this tempestuous sea.”244 Always being on guard, Teresa spent a great deal of time and effort in teaching others how to distinguish the false from the true or the spiritual from the demonic. She never forgot that the devil made “truth seem evil.”245 The most critical factor that enabled the soul to discern the spirits was experience. As we have noted, her constant complaint against the confessors who judged her experiences to be demonic was that they were too inexperienced to recognize the truth. Teaching how to judge whether locutions came from God, the devil, or the intellect, Teresa wrote, “I shall like to explain the delusions that can take place here, although it seems to me that for anyone who has much experience there will be few or none at all; but there must be much experience.”246 Rarely, she said, “can an experienced person be deceived if that person does not knowingly want to be deceived.”247 Teresa stated certain criteria that she believed kept the soul secure from delusions caused by the imagination, the devil, and from the Lutheran heresies.248 Conformity to the church and to Scripture kept “one safe.” The Lord, she promised, will not permit the devil to deceive “a soul that does not trust itself in anything and that is fortiﬁed in the faith and understands that it would die a thousand deaths for one item of the faith. And with this love of the faith, which God then infuses and which is a strong living faith, it always strives to proceed in conformity with that the Church holds . . . All the revelations it could imagine—even if it were to see the heavens open—wouldn’t move it one bit from what the Church holds.” If the soul wavered in its ﬁrmness in the faith, then “it shouldn’t consider its locutions safe.”249

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Teresa also explained in some detail the way in which experiential effects served as a means of discernment. Locutions that came from the imagination were ones that passed away and were forgotten. Such false locutions failed to leave certitude, peace, or interior delight. Locutions from the devil were particularly problematic because “the words come from the devil can be more quickly understood, even though his wiles are so many, for he knows well how to counterfeit the Spirit of Light.” Teresa went on to say, “In my opinion the devil will say the words very clearly so that there will be certitude about their meaning, as with those coming from the Spirit of truth. But he will not be able to counterfeit the effects that were mentioned or leave this peace or light in the soul.” On the contrary, demonic locutions left the soul restless and disturbed. The words spoken by the Lord, however, remained in the memory and were never forgotten. When the words were from the devil, they left bad effects such as spiritual dryness, agitation, or afﬂiction. As Teresa said, “It seems that the soul resists; it is agitated and afﬂicted without knowing why because that which [the devil] says is not evil but good. I wonder if one spirit doesn’t feel the presence of the other spirit.”250 Teresa, then, identiﬁed experiences of demonic origin with states of dryness, disquiet, afﬂiction, turbulence, and restlessness. For Teresa, the content of the delusion was not really the decisive issue because the devil could appear as an angel of light. It was the disturbing effects left in the soul that betrayed the demonic origin of various types of supernatural experience. A genuine spiritual experience could be judged as authentic by feelings within the soul which, Teresa claimed, the devil could not “counterfeit.” The divine spirit produced quiet, consolation, calm, peace, clarity, virtue, and security.251 Nonetheless, the ambiguity of experience continually haunted Teresa’s attempts to set clear boundaries between the real and the counterfeit. As stated above, the devil could also cause many of the effects of genuine divine gifts. Frequently, Teresa recounted false experiences of delight and other spiritual experiences as warnings about the complexities of discernment. According to Teresa, the most important safeguard against Satan was humility. She had to admit that the devil could cause a false humility in the soul, but believed that this false humility would not bring with it the effects of peace, sweetness, and calm. Teresa recounted that the devil instilled in her a false humility, and she warned, “Now be also on your guard, daughters, against some types of humility given by the devil in which great disquiet is felt about the gravity of your sins.”252 Therefore, although she continually instructed that a sister examine her humility and that her “daughters” must always “strive for humility” in order to stay “on one’s guard,” she was aware of a false and demonically instilled humility. Still, she said, the devil did not tempt the truly humble person about such things as seniority or rank. She advised her sisters, “If you wish to take revenge on the devil and free yourself more quickly from temptation, ask the prioress as soon as the temptation comes to give you orders

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to do some lowly task.”253 Explaining to her nuns that not everyone could become a contemplative, Teresa explained, If humility is present, I don’t believe they will be very worse off in the end but will be very much the equals of those who receive many delights; and in a way they will be more secure, for we do not know if the delights are from God or the devil. Now if the delights are not from God, there is greater danger because the work of the devil here is to instigate pride. But if they are from God, there is nothing to fear; they bring with them humility.254 The importance of humility in the life of prayer cannot be underestimated in Teresa’s writings. She averred that love, detachment, and humility were the foundations of prayer. It was the virtue of humility that played a complex and crucial role in the battle against deception. The reason that humility was so important was that it kept the soul aware that it never deserved such favors and could never produce such delights by its own efforts. The importance of this awareness was that when a genuine spiritual experience occurred, the recipient could know with certainty that it could only be from God. For example, Teresa taught that the Lord bestowed a great dignity on a soul in the fourth degree of prayer. In this stage of prayer, all the faculties of the soul were united. In this prayer of union the person “has no power to do anything.” How did one know that God was the cause? The intellect cannot understand this union for “He who is the cause of it is almighty. Since we have no part at all to play in bringing it about no matter how much effort we put forth but it is God who does so, let us not desire the capacity to understand this union.” The intellect came to a halt because it was so amazed that the Lord would bestow this union on “souls that have offended You so much.” When Teresa experienced the prayer of union she said, “Look Lord what you are doing. Don’t forget so quickly my great wickedness. . . . Don’t, my Creator, pour such precious liqueur in so broken a bottle.”255 The relationship between humility and deception turned on this knowledge that the soul was both incapable and unworthy of divine favors. In Teresa’s thought, the soul received genuine divine favors only when it realized that “through no diligence of its own did it receive that very generous and magniﬁcent gift and that it played no role in obtaining or experiencing it.”256 The key word here is receiving, as opposed to obtaining. If the intellect or the efforts of the soul obtained the gift of “quiet” then, Teresa said, this quiet produced no effects in the soul. If this quiet came from the devil, the soul felt a “lack of humility” as well as other disquieting effects. But true humility made the experienced soul recognize that “this little spark [of divine love] cannot be acquired.”257 Teresa described the ascent of the soul in prayer by stages distinguished between activity and passivity. At some earlier stages, Teresa said that the powers

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of the soul were active. However, when supernatural experiences began, as in the fourth and ﬁfth dwelling places of the castle, the soul became passive and purely receptive to the favors granted by the Lord. The more passive the soul became, the more secure it was from deception. Experiences that were achieved through virtue and prayer differed from those which were infused into the soul. In the fourth dwelling place both natural or acquired and supernatural or infused experiences occurred. The prayer of recollection could be acquired by the intellect striving to think about God within the soul or by the imagination which pictured God within the soul. Such efforts were “good and an excellent kind of meditation.” But the prayer of recollection could also be infused. As Teresa went on to say, the prayer of infused recollection “comes in a different way.” In the case of the latter, she explained, “this recollection doesn’t come when we want it, but when God wants to grant us this favor.” In the earlier stages of prayer, Teresa described those things “we can do of ourselves,” with the help of God. Ascending toward the divine, however, required “being lifted up.” At this stage, “the intellect ceases to work because God suspends it.” One must not, by oneself, try to suspend the intellect; the soul that did so lacked humility and its labor would be wasted. It was very important that the soul not try to ascend unless the Lord raised it upward. In this “work of the Spirit,” she wrote, “the one who thinks less and has less desire to act, does more.”258 As the soul entered the higher dwelling places it received experiences or delights and prayers infused by God. In her descriptions of the later stages of prayer, such as the “prayer of quiet,” the soul began to be recollected “and comes upon something supernatural because in no way can it acquire this prayer through any efforts it makes.”259 In the third stage of prayer, the soul or “gardener” irrigated the garden by means of the water ﬂowing from a river or a spring. Teresa explained that “by this means the garden is irrigated with much less labor.” This prayer, she said, “is a sleep of the faculties.” In the fourth degree of prayer the gardener did no work at all. The water was not “drawn through aqueducts” anymore but came only from God and only to those whom God willed to give it. At this stage the imagery of water gives way to that of a “ﬂame” that shoots very high above the ﬁre. This ﬂight of the spirit resulted in greater detachment and appeared to lose its entire being. Moreover, “in this prayer all the faculties fail and they are so suspended that in no way, as I said, does one think they are working.” Intellectual visions were always infused or received. In determining how to discern a true intellectual vision, Teresa stated, “And since the vision is something deﬁnitely understood to be a gift from God and human effort would not be sufﬁcient to produce this experience, the one who receives it can in no way think it is his own good but a good given through the hand of God.”260 Therefore, the connection between humility and discernment rested on this passivity of the soul. When the soul acknowledged that it could not obtain these favors, it remained very still and waited until they were received. During

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the infused experience, the soul was aware that this was an experience received from outside the self. Teresa illustrated this experience through the images of speaking and listening in order to explain how someone could recognize a true spiritual experience and escape from “delusions” caused by the demonic or the intellect. The difference between true and false, she said, is like the difference between speaking and listening. As in the case of locutions, the soul knew if the intellect was producing the words because it was actively composing them. In this case, “it would be impossible for it to fail to realize that it composes and speaks them itself and that they haven’t come from the Spirit of God.” Therefore, she explained, the intellect “will see that it is not then listening because it is working.” But if the words were from God, the soul would be passive and quiet and would feel itself listening. As she stated, “For when I speak . . . I compose with the intellect what I am going to say; but if others speak to me, I do no more than listen without any effort.” When the words were from God, she said, “In no way does it seem to me that we can then fail to know they are something we do not fabricate ourselves.” So, too, when the Lord desired to give understanding, he did so “without our effort.”261 Describing a vision seen during a rapture, Teresa wrote, “It seems this ﬁre comes from above, from God’s true love; for however much I may desire and seek and strive after it, I play no part in obtaining even a spark of it, save when His Majesty so desires.”262 While experiencing raptures, the soul could not resist the Lord’s power and had to “abandon itself into the hands of God and go willingly wherever it is brought since, like it or not, one is taken away.” After such raptures, Teresa continued, the soul is detached from the body and there occurs “a painful experience that we cannot produce ourselves.”263 Nonetheless, the problem remains that satanic experiences which mimicked the divine were also “received” from outside of the soul. What, then, was to distinguish the spiritual from the demonic, especially if one is not talking about the intellect? And so we discover Teresa continually striving to ﬁnd a deﬁnitive test of the spirits. We ﬁnd her asking whether the favors the Lord gave her were “illusions.” Increasingly Teresa came to identify doubt about a spiritual experience as a sign that it had come from the devil. The devil caused her to “walk in the midst of a thousand doubts and suspicions making it seem that I had not understood that perhaps I have fancied the vision.” This, she said, was the devil creating in her a false humility in order to bring her to despair.264 When she founded the monastery of St. Joseph, the devil stirred up within her “a spiritual battle” and “brought doubts to my mind about whether what I had done was wrong—whether I had gone against obedience in having made the foundation without my provincial’s orders.” As this spiritual battle went on, the devil continued to raise doubts and tried to keep her from prayer.265 She recalled that early in her life she had become distracted and spoiled by various vanities. She was then ashamed to return to the search for God. But this, she recognized, was another trick of the devil who was trying to prevent her from praying. At

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one point Teresa had a vision of Christ with the “eyes of the soul” and was warned against the dangers of friendship. She recounted that she had at that time not realized that she could see in other ways than with bodily eyes. The devil worked to encourage this ignorance in order to instill doubts within her soul. “The devil,” she wrote, “urged me on in this ignorance and made me think that any other way of seeing was impossible and that I had fancied the vision or that it could come from the devil.”266 Satan, Teresa cautioned, brought many illusions and deceptions to contemplatives. He caused those who listened to him to be “struck with terror of approaching prayer, for they think they will be deceived.” The doubt that divine visions were really demonic illusions was, for Teresa, the greatest temptation and afﬂiction the devil could produce. After receiving a rapture where she saw the heavens opened and felt the Divinity to be present, Teresa again began to doubt and to wonder whether her visions were illusions or had come from God. At this time the Lord reproached her and said severely, using the words from Psalm 4:2, “O children of the earth! How long will you be hard of heart?” After listening to the Lord’s message, she explained that she ﬁnally “could see that my experiences weren’t from the devil; that I shouldn’t think God would allow the devil to play such a role in the soul of his servants, or that the devil could give the quietude or clarity of understanding that I experienced.”267 Since Teresa identiﬁed doubt about true visions and spiritual favors as demonic, it is not surprising that the most commonly cited proof for the divine authenticity of such events was the experience of certitude. For Teresa, the delights, consolations, raptures, fears, and visions that had their source in God brought with them a certainty infused into the soul. St. Paul became the model for such certitude about visions. In the sixth dwelling of the Interior Castle, Teresa examined the nature of a true imaginative vision. She explained that like St. Paul, the soul would experience “in this interior world a great stirring, and in a moment . . . all remains calm and this soul is so well instructed about so many great truths that it has no need of any other master. For without any effort on the soul’s part, true Wisdom has taken away the mind’s dullness and leaves a certitude which lasts for some time that this favor is from God.”268 Reﬂecting on what were obviously her own “trials,” Teresa went on to say that even if the confessor told the soul it had been deceived, certitude would gain victory over doubt. However much the soul is told the contrary, others cannot then cause it fear that there could be any deception. Afterward, if the confessor puts fear in [the soul], God allows it to waver and think that because of its sins it could possibly be deceived. But it does not believe this; rather. . . . the devil can stir up doubts, as he does with temptations against matters of faith, that do not allow the soul to be ﬁrm in its

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certitude. But the more the devil ﬁghts against that certitude, the more certain the soul is that the devil could not have left it with so many blessings [a manera de tentaciones en cosas de la fe; que puede el demonio alborotar, mas no dejar el alma de estar ﬁrme en ella; antes mientra más la combate, más queda con certidumbre de que el demonio no la podría dejar con tantos bienes], or he cannot do so much in the interior of the soul. The devil can present a vision but not with this truth and majesty and these results.269 Commenting on her vision of Christ’s “sacred humanity,” Teresa stated that in this non-imaginative vision Christ “impressed” his identity upon her intellect in such a way that it could not be doubted. In the vision of Christ’s presence, Teresa described how certainty triumphed over doubt. In this vision, she said, Christ’s presence, is impressed with such clear knowledge that I don’t think it can be doubted [no parece se puede dudar]. The Lord desires to be so engraved upon the intellect that this vision can no more be doubted than can what is seen; and even less, because when we see we sometimes suspect we may have fancied what we saw. In this vision, even though a suspicion may at ﬁrst arise, there remains in the soul, on the other hand, such great certitude that the doubt has no force [gran certidumbre que no tiene fuerza la duda].270 Regarding the authenticity of locutions, Teresa stated that the Lord’s words were engraved on the memory and that, “the certitude is so strong that even in things that in one’s own opinion sometimes seem impossible, and there is doubt as to whether they will or will not happen, and the intellect wavers, there is an assurance in the soul that cannot be overcome.” She added that, “Although, as I say, the soul still suffers when it sees the many delays, for since time has passed since it heard the words, the effects and the certitude that were present about their being from God has passed, these doubts take place. The soul wonders whether the locutions might have come from the devil or from the imagination. Yet none of these doubts remain in the soul but it would at present die a thousand deaths for that truth.”271 Speaking of the ﬁfth dwelling, Teresa wrote that the soul could determine whether in the prayer of union there was any illusion present by means of a certitude placed deeply within the soul. God so places himself in the interior of that soul that when it returns to itself it can in no way doubt that it was in God and God was in it [Dios a sí mesmo en lo interior de aquel alma de manera que cuando torna en sí, en ninguna manera pueda dudar que estuvo en Dios y Dios en

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ella]. . . . Afterward it sees the truth clearly, not because of a vision but because of a certitude remaining in the soul that only God can place there [sino una certidumbre que queda en el alma, que sólo Dios la puede poner].272 Expressing the same feeling about the prayer of union, Teresa wrote, “I can only say that the soul appears to be joined to God, and there remains such certitude about this union that the soul cannot help believing in the truth of it.”273 Such statements abound in Teresa’s writings. She recalled the two years of severe trials caused by her confessors telling her that her experiences were from the devil. During this period she found that she “couldn’t believe but that the vision was from God” and persistently begged God to “free me from deception [Suplicava mucho a Dios que me librase de ser engañada].”274 The Lord appeared to Teresa on the feast day of St. Peter and St. Paul and “told me that they would protect me from being deceived.” Finally, during this time of “great afﬂiction,” the Lord assured her with the words, “Do not fear, daughter; for I am, and I will not abandon you; do not fear.”275 Describing the effect of this experience Teresa wrote, “and behold by these words alone I was given calm together with fortitude, courage, security, quietude and light so that in one moment I saw my soul become another. It seems to me I would have disputed with the entire world that these words came from God.”276 After she was told by God that he was the giver of her divine favors, Teresa began to mock the devil and to believe that the demons were afraid.277 She more fully desired to follow the path in which God was leading her, since she was now incapable of believing that the devil was the source of her experiences: I saw that on this road I was being led to heaven, and that previously I had been going to hell, and that I should want to follow the road and not believe that it had the devil as its cause. Nor was I able to force myself, even though I did all I could, to believe and desire another road; it wasn’t in my power to do so.278 She also described an immediacy between herself and God using the analogy of light: It is incorrect to think that the vision is like that experience of those who are blind or in the dark who don’t see the other at their side. . . . In the [intellectual] vision there is nothing of this, nor do you see darkness, but the vision is represented through knowledge given to the soul that is clearer than sunlight. I don’t mean that you see the sun or brightness, but that a light, without your seeing light, illumines the intellect so that the soul may enjoy such a great good.279

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This illumination of the intellect was a direct revelation and understanding given by God. The knowledge such a vision or illumination bestowed was always “such clear knowledge that I don’t think it can be doubted.” Teresa described the immediacy of the intellectual vision in terms of “seeing the truth clearly,” with the “clarity of understanding.” In such a vision, she was “given knowledge of a truth that was the fulﬁllment of all truths,” which was a knowledge of the “truth of Scripture in clarity and truth.” After one such vision, however, God rebuked her doubts with the words of Psalm 4:3 and Teresa then saw that “I shouldn’t think God would allow the devil to play such a role in the souls of his servants, or that the devil could give the quietude or clarity of understanding that I experienced.”280 Depicting the “aspirations” and “arrows” that she felt “very clearly” and which “could not be doubted,” Teresa wrote, Just as a distracted person would feel this water if he were suddenly bathed in it and would be unable to avoid feeling it, so are these operations recognized and even with greater certitude. For just as a great gush of water could not reach us if it didn’t have a source, as I have said, so it is understood clearly that there is Someone in the interior depths who shoots these arrows and gives life to this life and that there is a sun in the interior of the soul from which a brilliant light proceeds and is sent to the faculties.”281 When the Lord “engraved” such truths on the intellect, he taught the soul divine mysteries from deep within it. Teresa always referred to these as truths that “cannot be doubted.” Answering her confessor’s questions as to how she knew her vision to be of Christ, she answered: “But before He told me He impressed upon my intellect that it was He . . . for without being seen, it is impressed with such clear knowledge that I don’t think it can be doubted. . . . Hence there is also another way in which God teaches the soul and speaks to it. . . . The Lord puts what he wants the soul to know very deeply within it, and there he makes known without image or explicit words, but in the manner of this [intellectual] vision. And this manner in which God gives the soul understanding of His desires and great truths and mysteries is worthy of close attention.282 Teresa added that this type of vision was so spiritual that the devil could “interfere least in this experience.”283 The certainty of these visions, raptures, and illuminations was further guaranteed by the fact that they were “without intermediaries.” This immediacy increased as the soul ascended more and more toward God. The more closely one came to the sixth and seventh dwellings of the soul, the more one approached the center where Christ dwelled. As she

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described this journey, she explained that the closer the soul got to the center, the less power the devil had and the more certainty the soul felt. This part of the interior journey was deﬁnitely a journey toward an always-increasing certainty. Thus, in the sixth dwelling, the soul knew with certainty that a vision “is not an illusion.” Here, in the deep interior of the soul, God “will at once ordain how [the soul] may be undeceived.” At this level, Teresa reported that she was continually “unable to doubt,” and told her sisters, “Commend yourself to the divine Majesty that He not let you be deceived.”284 As one approached more deeply into the center of the soul the more one experienced the unassailable clarity and certainty of the truth. Teresa explained that in the ﬁnal or seventh dwelling place of the soul, the Lord appeared and the soul was made one with God. It was here that the spiritual marriage took place. The soul ﬁnally understood the deepest mysteries and encountered the truth “in God himself.” According to Teresa, “This truth which I saw was given to my understanding, is in itself truth and is without beginning or end; all other truths depend on this truth.” Her prayer, “Lead us not into temptation,” was now ﬁnally answered because the soul was delivered from deception. She no longer felt any suspicion that her visions were illusions.285 Identifying the “temptation” spoken about in the Lord’s Prayer with deception, Teresa said that at this ﬁnal level “the soul does not need to fear deception because the devil cannot work here.” She added, “His majesty communicates Himself in other ways that are more sublime and less dangerous because the devil, I believe, will be unable to counterfeit [the divine favors].” She continued, “The devil, in my opinion, and even one’s own imagination, have little capacity at this level and so the soul is left with profound satisfaction.”286 Moreover, “the soul is almost always quiet. There is no fear that this sublime favor can be counterfeited [contrahacer] by the devil, but the soul is completely certain that the favor comes from God. His majesty reveals Himself to the soul and brings it to Himself in that place where, in my opinion, the devil will not dare enter, nor will the Lord allow Him to enter. Nor does the Lord in all the favors he grants the soul here, as I have said, receive any assistance from the soul itself, except what it has already done in surrendering itself totally to God.”287Repeatedly, Teresa told the reader that these experiences “cannot be doubted” by the soul. She even depicted a process in which the soul should attempt to doubt the experience or try to convince itself that the experience was a deception. If that doubt could not be sustained, then the experience was from God. At this point, certainty has literally triumphed over doubt. Teresa ﬁnally encountered the Lord who would “never let those who love Him be deceived by the devil (I Corinthians 10:13).” This, she frequently said, was a God who was faithful and would never lie or deceive.288 If these arguments by Luther, Müntzer, Teresa, and others seem at times to be circular, it might be reassuring to know that Inquisitors and polemicists faced the same dilemma. The reliance on spiritual effects was helpful but not deﬁnitive because the devil could also mimic many of these effects. The fact

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that Satan came as an angel of light made both the content and the spiritual experience itself less than reliable. In the end, only certainty guaranteed certainty. Returning to Thomas More, we might ﬁnd empathy with his caricature of Luther’s claim to certitude, a critique that could have applied to many sixteenth-century thinkers: By what reason, father, do you prove that you alone must be believed? Because I am certain, he says, that I have my teaching from heaven. By what means are you certain that you have your teachings from heaven? Because God has seized me unawares, he said, and carried me into the midst of these turmoils. How do know that God has seized you? Because I am certain, he says, that my teaching is from God. How do you know that? Because God has seized me. How do you know this? Because I am certain. How are you certain? Because I know. But how do you know? Because I am certain.289 The reader cannot help feeling sympathy with More’s frustration. But the circular and dizzying nature of the arguments only demonstrates the intensity of the problem. As representatives of this turbulent century, Luther and Teresa illuminate the sixteenth-century search for competing certainties: the certainty of salvation, the certainty of the Spirit, the certainty of the true church, the certainty of authority, the certainty of scriptural interpretation and doctrine, and the certainty of mystical visions and experiences. In the midst of these many claims for certitude, Luther and Teresa, as well as many of their contemporaries, were forced to confront the underside of the craving for certainty: namely, the threat of deception and, particularly, demonic deception. In trying to extricate themselves from Satan’s grasp, they tried to unmask the angel of light and thereby free themselves from the ever-present danger of deception or delusion. It was a problem they shared with their era. They grappled with the dilemma that even haunted Hamlet: “The spirit that I have seen may be the devil; and the devil hath power to assume a pleasing shape.” Nonetheless, the certainty that all these thinkers sought, and so insistently proclaimed, continued to be an uneasy and elusive certitude that never fully defeated the fear of deception and doubt. We will conclude by analyzing the repercussions of this uneasiness in the works of three early modern masters: Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare.

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7 “Men Should Be What They Seem” Appearances and Reality

Returning to Karsten Harries’s Inﬁnity and Perspective, we are now in a position to appreciate more fully the implications of his analysis regarding perspective. Begging the readers patience, I would like to recall brieﬂy that earlier discussion. As stated in the opening chapter, Harries characterized modernity in terms of the growing awareness of perspective. In the early modern era artists, philosophers, and other thinkers came to realize that “to get to ‘actuality’ or objective reality, we have to reﬂect on perspectival appearance. Reality cannot, in principle, be seen as it is. Reality, as it is, is invisible. Such distrust of the eye is one of the deﬁning characteristics of the emerging modern understanding of reality.”1 The interest in perspective disclosed the unsettling realization that one’s particular understanding was grounded in what one was in a position to know; knowledge depended on one’s point of view. Harries’s primary interest is in the fact that the philosophical and theological counterpart of this interest in perspective was speculation about inﬁnity. Our examination of the sixteenth century reveals that the growing interest in inﬁnity, traced so ably by Harries, is but one important consequence of the growing awareness of perspective. The emerging modern self-understanding had yet another important counterpart: the concern with the disjunction between appearance and reality. The concern with this disjunction provoked a search for the real. The fear of deception, examined in the last chapter, was not limited to the testing of the spirits or even to various claims about the interpretation of Scripture. There emerged a growing uneasiness about whether one was dealing with reality or with false appearances,

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illusions, and deceptions. We ﬁnd an increasing suspicion that there was no identity or correspondence between the apparent and the real or between seeming and being. In an age haunted by uncertainty, the preoccupation with the fear of deception and the relationship between appearance and reality is not at all surprising. The previous chapters have shown that the craving for certitude in the early modern era reﬂected such problematic issues as the adjudicating of experiential claims, the role of authority, and the detecting of the demonic. Despite claims to Scripture, authority, tradition, the Spirit, and experience, this age continually struggled to ﬁnd an anchor in the midst of constant vertiginous change. The various claims and controversies that caused the feeling of a “great unmooring” came to be expressed in the problematic relationship between the apparent and the real. We can discern a deep anxiety about whether the human mind can know the nature of truth or have access to reality at all. In the following, I am trying to describe an ethos in which the uneasiness about the problematic relationship between appearances and reality was played out in various ways. I have chosen to conclude this study with Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare because they represent a wide spectrum of dates, contexts, and styles, extending from the early sixteenth to the early seventeenth century. As such, they illustrate the way in which the fear of not knowing things as they really are permeated this age. They reveal how this fear came to be expressed in different genres and was experienced by different audiences. We see in these very disparate thinkers a set of common concerns about the problem of appearances and reality that, in turn, issued in different resolutions.2 With Montaigne we will ﬁnd a sense of melancholy as well as humility as he learned to reconcile himself to living amidst appearances. We will also ﬁnd with Montaigne a redeﬁnition of reality itself. With Luther and Shakespeare, we will discover a sense of tragedy regarding the fate of humanity living in the midst of illusion. Luther’s writings offer a myriad of themes revolving around the problem of deceptive appearances. Since his thought is saturated with the theme of hiddenness and the problem of the noetic effect of sin the fear of deception was inevitable. For Luther the struggle with “beguilement” operated on several levels. We have already explored the way in which the fear of deception manifested itself in Luther’s preoccupation with the hiddenness of God and the hiddenness of Satan.3 However, the disparity between appearances and reality also emerged in Luther’s intense focus on the danger of idolatry. Moreover, the problem of idolatry reintroduced Satan as a major ﬁgure who, once again, came “hidden under a contrary.” As we have seen, in Luther’s view, the human being stood between the hiddenness of God and the hiddenness of Satan. After the Fall, humanity became trapped in a delusion that was impossible to detect. This illusory world was so thoroughly deceptive that the human mind could not recognize or pierce through its falsity. The faithful had always to be on their guard in order not to

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fall into the grip of demonic deception. But as II Corinthians 11:14 made abundantly clear, the devil did not make this task easy. In his role as the “father of lies” Satan was all too adept at “beguiling” humanity. In his commentary on Genesis we can see how Luther imaginatively re-created in every detail the insidious nature of the original temptation and the subsequent idolatrous world. Explaining Genesis 1–3, Luther identiﬁed the essential consequence of the Fall with the love of idolatry. His main interest in this section was not in the bondage of the will but in the blindness or fall of human perception. This perceptual blindness was exempliﬁed in the inability of Adam and Eve to see what was happening to their world. Luther explained that Satan succeeded in tempting Eve because he “imitated” God. Satan, Luther said, came with a “word” in order to attack the divine Word.4 Just as God preached to Adam, Satan preached to Eve. Satan did not work “in the open” or with “open force” because if he clearly taught what was forbidden, he would have been unmasked. As Luther explained, “If Satan were to teach that people ought to kill, commit fornication, and disobey their parents, who would not realize that he is suggesting something that is forbidden by the Lord? Therefore, it would be easy to be on one’s guard against him. But here, when he propounds another word, when he discourses about the will of God, when he uses the names, ‘God,’ ‘the church,’ and ‘the people of God’ as a pretext, then people cannot readily be guard against him.”5 Thus Luther called the devil the “invisible enemy.”6 Commenting on Genesis 3, Luther delighted in depicting how carefully and gradually Satan deceived Eve. He elaborately explained the step-by-step nature of Satan’s deceptive lies and promises.7 First Satan spoke in defense of God by making Eve believe that God would not have said that she would die if she ate of the forbidden fruit. Luther explained that human reason was very easily deceived when “under the pretense of God’s name and Word, God and the Word are lost.”8 Satan came in a way that seemed to praise and ﬂatter God. Coming “under the appearance of something good,” Satan seemed to defend the goodness of God: It is as if Satan were saying: “Surely you are very silly if you think that God did not want you to eat from this tree, you whom he appointed lords over all the trees of Paradise. In fact, he created the trees on your account. How can he, who favored you with all these things, be so envious as to withhold from you the fruits of this one single tree, which are so delightful and lovely?” Satan is seeking to deprive them of the Word and knowledge of God in order that they might reach the conclusion that “this is not the will of God; God does not command this.”9 The key verse for Luther was Genesis 3:3 where Eve answered the serpent by saying, “But of the fruit of the tree which is in the midst of Paradise, God

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commanded us not to eat or touch it, lest perchance we die.” Luther positively jumped on the word “perchance.” God, he pointed out, never said they “might” or “perchance” die [ne forte moriamur].10 Adding the word “perchance” or “perhaps” demonstrated that Satan made “such inroads with his crafty speech that Eve adds the little word ‘perchance.’ She had been persuaded by the devil that God was not so cruel as to kill them for eating the fruit.” By the time Eve uttered these words, the serpent had slowly and carefully used deceit, trickery, and wiles in order to make Eve distort God’s original command. Out of God’s absolute command “not to eat of the tree lest you die,” Eve made a statement that was “absolute” into one that was “not absolute.” Luther observed that as Satan continued his gradual temptation, the word “perchance” became “not,” so that Eve came to believe they would not die. Satan continued his reasoning until Eve fell completely away from God’s will and command.11 In so doing, she distorted the divine will and was led away from the divine word to the word of Satan. The devil now had a hook and hence he proceeded to say, “But God knows that on that day in which you will eat from the tree your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” Luther was fascinated with this exchange. He admitted that one could interpret Satan’s words as meaning that he was trying to “stir up resentment against God.” But he preferred a more complex and subtle explanation. According to Luther, the serpent appeared to be praising God so that he could lead Eve further and further astray. As Luther explained, Satan praises God so that he might more easily involve Eve in his treachery. It is as if he said, “Surely God is not such a one that he wants you to live in darkness, as it were, without any knowledge of good and evil. God is good. He does not begrudge you anything that is useful and helpful for you in any way. He will take it calmly that you like him.12 Luther continued by saying that within this “praise” lay “the dagger to cut man’s throat.” Coming under the cover of goodness, Satan made Eve fall from belief to unbelief, from “the word into a lie.” But this lie was undetectable. Luther made this clear by adding, “Because Satan restrains her mind and eyes [tenente autem Satana animum et oculos], however, she not only does not see death or become aware of it but is also more inﬂamed by her desire for the fruit and the delights found in this idolatry and sin.”13 He concluded this initial section by explaining the exact nature of Eve’s sin in terms denoting vision and appearances. Eve’s “eyes cannot be satisﬁed by the appearance. It is not enough for her that she has the knowledge of God and a sound reason; she wants the knowledge of evil to be added. But this is Satan’s very own poison that she wants to have insight beyond what was commanded.”14 In Luther’s analysis, Satan’s temptation involved “wisdom,” a far more effective temptation than the

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more obvious ones such as lust, greed, and pride. Satan promised to “make us wise against and even above the Word of God, just as he himself did in heaven.”15 Luther added that because of the Fall, Adam and Eve became suspicious of God, doubted his truthfulness and wondered whether God was inconsistent or a “liar.” He emphasized the nature of being enveloped in a “lie,” that one takes to be the truth. Adam and Eve now doubted the good will of God and began to see God as their enemy and judge.16 Now distrusting the word of God, Adam and Eve fell from faith to unbelief, from trust to doubt, from true wisdom to blindness, from truth to lies, from belief to reason, and from perception to blindness and deception. Satan had achieved his purpose; namely, to deprive them of the Word of God. Above all else, Adam and Eve fell “from the Word of God to idolatry.”17 The crucial point for Luther was this equation of the Fall with idolatry. Abandoning God’s Word, Adam and Eve plunged the human race into an idolatrous world. Analyzing the serpent’s temptation, Luther made a remark that is crucial but easily overlooked. He explained that after they were drawn away from the Word, “a new god is invented by Satan for men without their even being aware of it.”18 It is this total lack of awareness that was, for Luther, the most deﬁnitive and dangerous mark of idolatry. He went on to say that by falling into idolatry, humanity was deprived of all spiritual discernment. This loss was critical because the true nature of idolatry was now undetectable or unrecognizable. As Luther remarked, “we need the keenest judgment of the spirit in order to distinguish between the true God and the new god.”19 Having created a new god, Satan proceeded to create an idolatrous world around this false divinity, Luther passionately warned about the unknowingly self-constructed nature of this idolatrous world and stressed the fact that the idolatrous world was invisible and all-encompassing. Luther keenly understood that idolatry did not feel false or painful. He recognized that the power of idolatry lay in the fact that it was both intensely rational and intensely religious. As a rational system, idolatry perfectly conformed to the way in which fallen reason perceived the self and the world. Luther stressed the “leprosy” that crept into the “perceptual powers” of the soul. In the Fall the intellect became darkened so that humanity no longer knew God and God’s will. Moreover, we no longer know the self in relationship to God. Satan, Luther said, has made our “eyes dull” and we have become “blind” to reality. The “keen judgment” of the spirit is now gone so that we are not able to perceive the idolatry that imprisons us. For Luther, idolatry was like any other sin: “While it is active it is not felt.” In fact, sin “does not frighten, and it does not bite, but it ﬂatters and delights.” Comparing the original Fall to the papacy, Luther wrote that, like the popes, Adam and Eve could not discern the falsity of their world and their new god: “But now Satan makes their eyes dull, as it were, so that they cannot see the wrath of God and his judgment. And so they live in the utmost smugness with joy and gladness in their most serious sins and they celebrate their triumphs as

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if they had achieved something good.”20 The reason that idolatry is not “felt” is that, since idolatry answers every human question and satisﬁes every human need, the human being never experiences any desire to go beyond this unreal world. This makes the idolatrous universe self-enclosed, completely coherent, and totally unrecognizable. Consequently, humankind is totally oblivious to the falsity of this apparently real world. Luther saw the intensely religious nature of idolatry as Satan’s way of entrapping us within this counterfeit world. The all-encompassing nature of idolatry was clear to Luther in the fact that idolatry amply satisﬁed the human need for religion. Luther recognized that no one ever thinks he is committing idolatry; no one sets out to worship idols. But the idol conforms so completely to the needs of the self that the mind cannot discern the deception in which it is now submerged. The subtlety of idolatry was evident to Luther by the fact that it never denied human sin. In fact, idolatry answered the unquenchable need felt by humanity to make satisfaction for sin. Idolatry supplied the human being with a way to repent and ﬁnd absolution for offending God. Luther knew that the undeniable awareness of sin lay at the very heart of idolatry, making it a powerfully effective religion aimed at very real spiritual needs. In the Book of Isaiah, Luther found the theological core of idolatry. This biblical text provided him with numerous passages describing the transcendence of God, a transcendence that was far beyond anything human reason might “mold,” “shape” “fashion,” or “create.” Commenting on Isaiah 40:12, Luther said of idolaters, It is the nature of every ungodly man to mold God for himself and refuse to be molded by God. Therefore, ungodly self-righteous people shape God according to their own worship and prescribe for themselves a god according to their own opinion. . . . They want to whittle down God according to their purpose. . . . Just as the heathen worshiped God in wooden form, so our self-righteous people, internally by a hypocritical appearance, fashion God for themselves in their hearts. This is what it means to fashion God; he becomes the creature, and I the creator. . . . Man begins to fashion and to control him and to be lord for himself, because this is the way the devil deceived us in the beginning, saying, “You will be like God.”21 Throughout the text of Isaiah, Luther found a stark contrast between earthly idols and divine transcendence. He also found in Isaiah an explanation for the appeal of idolatry; that is, the human need to appease God for sin. For Luther, idolatry and appeasement were inseparably linked. The idolatrous god created by Satan was, above all else, a god who had to be appeased. Luther thought that act of appeasement was currently taking place in a religion based on the

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necessity for good works.22 Fallen human reason responded to a system of worship that appeared completely rational. In this system, a just god was offended by sin and must be satisﬁed. By offering works of satisfaction, the human sinner could ward off the anger of this divine judge. This was a god who punished and rewarded according to one’s obedience to the Law. Because the system conformed so completely to human reason, the sinner trusted that this exchange would work to absolve him from sin. In short, idolatry provided a god and a means of appeasement that suited the very distorted and limited sense of sin, justice, and satisfaction held by the human mind. Just as Luther never underestimated the cunningness of Satan so, too, he never minimized the religious power and appeal of idolatry. The profoundly religious nature of idolatry demonstrated to Luther once again that, like all of Satan’s works, idolatry came under the appearance of that which was pious, righteous and good. For Luther, the Book of Isaiah also taught that idolatry always made God “smaller” than his true nature. In their constant attempts to appease an angry god, human beings were really trying to “fashion” and “shape” a god according to their own fears and needs. The religion of the Law suited the human need for a god “small” enough to satisfy. While Isaiah spoke of the God who sat “above the circle of the earth,” the idolater was trying to “conﬁne him to a little statue and to reconcile his immeasurable mercy and grace with a little piece of workmanship.” Furthermore, Luther linked idolatry to the world of appearances. According to Luther, idolaters carve out a god so that they “have what they may see, what may appear, what may be approved by all.”23 Luther condemned idolatry in the name of divine transcendence and proceeded to join the idea of transcendence to the doctrine of justiﬁcation by faith. Isaiah spoke of a God who said, “My thoughts are not your thoughts; neither are your ways my ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts,” (Isaiah 55:8–9). Moreover, according to Isaiah 44:9–20, “All who make idols are nothing. . . . Who fashions a god or casts an image that is proﬁtable for nothing? . . . No one considers, nor is there knowledge to say . . . ‘Shall I fall down before a block of wood?’ He feeds on ashes; a deluded mind has led him astray, and he cannot deliver himself . . .” Such verses enabled Luther to discuss the transcendence of God in terms of the immeasurable mercy evident in justiﬁcation by faith. By making God “smaller,” the deluded mind of the idolater could not perceive the immensity of divine mercy. The idolater tried to “whittle down” God’s mercy to his justice. For Luther, the passages in Isaiah describing the transcendence of God proved that divine mercy was larger than any justice conceived by humanity. The “measureless” mercy of God was “beyond our comprehension.”24 Caught completely within the world of idolatry, the idolater could not see that God’s mercy transcended his wrath. The idolater was too busy leading the life of good works to be able to perceive or discern the falseness of all his false but sincere religious endeavors.

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Luther also placed the stories of Noah and Abraham in the context of idolatry. The ﬂood, he said, came upon the world because the race of the righteous had “fallen into idolatry.” In Luther’s view, “The world is unable to do otherwise; after it had turned away from God it worships the devil. After it has despised the Word and has lapsed into idolatry, it plunges into all the vices of concupiscence.” Everyone to whom Noah preached “lived in idolatry and false religion.”25 Once again Noah became Luther’s exemplar. He was eager to point out that no one was able to believe Noah because to everyone around him the world “appeared to itself most holy and most righteous; it assumed it had adequate reasons for persecuting Noah, especially so far as the First Table and the worship of God were concerned.” Luther added that the people felt justiﬁed in persecuting Noah because “the sins of the First Table usually remain hidden under the guise of saintliness until God reveals them.”26 But Noah was granted the unique perspective granted by faith. Only that higher perspective enabled him to believe God. Luther lingered over the text, telling his readers “what must have been” the thoughts of Noah and his neighbors. Luther emphasized that God commanded Noah to do things that appeared to everyone else to be “preposterous, impossible, and unﬁtting.” As Luther wrote, “In the sight of his age Noah was treated and regarded as a stupid and worthless person. . . . The world regarded Noah as exceedingly stupid for believing such things; it derided him and without a doubt also made his structure [the ark] the object of ridicule.” As the great example of faith, Noah was the “spiritual man who judged all things.” As such, he was able to see through the idolatry of his time and trust in the word of God. Therefore, as the great man of faith, Noah “complied with the majesty of him who gave the command: this was sufﬁcient for him, even though he was commanded to do things that were preposterous, impossible, and unﬁtting. He passes by all these offenses as if with his eyes closed and relies on one fact; that it was God who had given the command.”27 Idolatry was also the context of Abraham’s story. According to Luther, Abraham was originally “an idolater and very great sinner who worships a god he does not know.” Luther argued that although Abraham was “in appearance not a bad man,” he was a participant in the Nimrodic idolatry of his time.28 Luther reﬂected at some length on the nature of this idolatry. He reiterated his conviction that Satan’s effectiveness depended on his ability to mask himself with the name of God. Consequently, idolatry always imitated true worship. Luther explained that Nimrodic idolatry began with God sending ﬁre down from heaven to consume the sacriﬁcial animals. The Chaldeans corrupted these sacriﬁces into idolatry and began to worship light or ﬁre itself, instead of God.29 Throughout his discussions of idolatry, Luther once again argued that this imitation of pure religion was how the devil always worked, “For wherever Christ builds a temple and gathers a church, Satan invariably has the habit of imitating him like an ape and inventing idolatrous forms of worship and idolatrous traditions similar to the true doctrine and the true forms of worship. . . . For it

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is the devil’s rule to build a chapel next to a church and temple of Christ; that is, to appropriate the works and examples of the fathers, disﬁgure them, and turn them into a work that is performed without regard to faith.”30 Luther always found this proverb about the devil to be useful. This saying suited his purpose exactly because it explained that idolatry always looked like the real image that it imitated, and that image was always religious. In his depiction of the Fall, Luther observed that just as God spoke a word, so, too, Satan spoke a word. In the story of Abraham, Luther explained that just as God gave promises, so, too, Satan made promises. Luther warned, “a keen judgment is needed to distinguish properly between the promises of God and those of Satan, that is, between the true and the false.”31 In order to deceive the children of God, the devil must appear as the true form of salvation and worship. As he stated in his explanation of the Sermon on the Mount, “Satan always wants to be in the midst of the children of God.”32 Thus idolatry created a “spiritual blindness” that could not be recognized as false. Satan hides most thoroughly by fulﬁlling the spiritual needs of humanity. Luther was fascinated with just how seductive and real idolatry seemed to the human mind. He emphasized that the idolatrous world was one of false appearances and ultimately unreal. However, this unreality could not be detected by human reason because it could not be seen. Only God can make idolatry recognizable. In his interpretation of Abraham’s story, Luther explained that the great patriarch was only able to perceive the idolatrous nature of his native religion because of faith, “for idolatry is recognized only through the Word of God.” Furthermore, in Luther’s view, appearances do not just conceal or mask reality; they are satanic and a malignant force in obstructing access to the real. Appearances “bewitch” or “deceive” the mind so that the sinner never suspects the insubstantiality of his world. Therefore, Luther’s depictions of “the world” and of idolatry are permeated by terms denoting perception. Before the Fall, Adam was endowed with “extraordinary perception,” which, of course, was lost through Satan’s deceptions. Repeatedly, he spoke of Adam and Eve as unable to “see,” “discern” and “understand.” Central to Luther’s theology was that God wore “masks” and came contrary to the expectations of human perception and understanding. So, too, Satan wore masks that allowed him to “imitate” God, Christ, and true worship. Idolatry always looked holy and saintly, full of praise and worship of God. However, things were different “before God” than they “seemed” to humanity. The self-righteous, he argued, “have what they may see, what may appear, what may be approved before all, that they lead an outstanding life with so many prayers, so much fasting.”33 Thus Abraham seemed an “honorable man” while still immersed in idolatry. As Luther observed, “All things seem the opposite of what they are.”34 The centrality of the promise in Luther’s understanding of God corresponded perfectly to this preoccupation with perception. He explained that according to appearances, Abraham’s situation contradicted all reasonable hope that the power of Canaan could be

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subdued. Nonetheless, Abraham’s story demonstrates that we must cling “to the judgment of Him who makes the promises rather than to our own view and appearance. Therefore we must lift up our head to the God who promises rather than to our view and appearance.”35 As did Sebastian Franck, Luther believed that the world wanted to be deceived. According to John 3:19, in the midst of the “great light and glory of the Word, the majority remains blind and loves the darkness more than the light.” Citing II Thessalonians 2:11, Luther warned that the situation of the church in the world remains the same: “the more abundantly the Word is revealed, the greater is the ingratitude of the people; for they misuse it to their own glory and to cover their sins. Therefore God sends strong delusions. . . .”36 To pierce through the deceptiveness of idolatry required a way out of illusion and deception. Only God was powerful enough to break the grip of Satan’s “beguilement.” Without the intervention of the new perception granted by faith, the imprisoning power of such delusions would only continue their captivating grip on the soul. To escape idolatry, therefore, a higher perspective is needed. As cited above, “we must lift up our head” in order to trust the promises rather than our own perception. For Luther, that perspective came only from faith in the cross. Only the God who “comes under a contrary appearance” could dispel the illusions of idolatry. The irrational, small, contradictory, and cruciﬁed God alone could pierce through the counterfeit world of appearances. Luther’s teaching that God “comes under a contrary” corresponded exactly to his view of idolatry. In Luther’s theology, God’s revelation sets visibility in opposition to truth. Fallen reason was always in alliance with the visible, the evident, and everything that was apparently just. Only the perspective granted from faith in the cross can open our eyes to idolatry. Without the horror of the cross, idolatry continues to deﬁne the world. Faith, which is a gift of God and the work of the Spirit, “fashions a different mind” and grants a different understanding of the world. Faith crashes through the delusory world of idolatry, inverts the rational but fallen order, and sets appearances in contrast to reality. Only the life lived in the faithful perspective of this kind of opposition allows the believer to escape and transcend the illusory world of idolatrous appearances. Faith grants a new perspective on reality and on God. The perception of faith reveals God as a merciful Father rather than an angry judge. The ability to see God as this merciful Father heals the noetic fall and breaks through the “bewitchment” of idolatry. To see God differently was to see all of reality differently. The new perspective granted by faith raises the mind above the selfenclosed world of idolatry and gives true access to a reality that is still presently unseen. Once God places the believer outside the universe of idolatry, the deceptive power of appearances loses its grip. Therefore, the “spiritual man” judges all things because he can turn to the invisible and trust in the impossible. Once the falsity of the world is revealed, the believer is able to see reality from an altogether different perspective.37

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By the late sixteenth century, the discrepancy between appearances and reality had become an even more urgent issue. In Montaigne we see the development of this theme in the hands of a late Renaissance humanist and skeptic. Montaigne spoke often about the insubstantial character of human life. Our world, he said, is nothing but “wind,” “smoke,” “vanity,” a “dream,” and an “illusion.” In Montaigne’s view, humanity lived in a world of “Cimmerian darkness.” In this foggy darkness, we exist in a state of constant deception that always looked like the truth. Montaigne believed that we actually enjoy and seek the deception in which we live: “I ﬁnd not only that we are lax in defending ourselves against deception but that we seek and hasten to turn ourselves over to it” [F.III.784–785].38 For Montaigne, our existence is permeated by unreality and falsity. In his descriptions of the human condition, Montaigne was often not saying anything new. However, as he continued to explore the relationship between appearances and reality, he became more radical and concluded by redeﬁning the nature of the real. In her study of rhetoric and skepticism in the Renaissance, Victoria Kahn made the keen observation that “Montaigne can be read as a kind of secularization of Luther,” in terms of the failures of human powers of intellect and will.39 Her insight may go beyond even her astute analysis. Operating without Luther’s religious framework, Montaigne, too, depicted our understanding of the world as unknowingly fabricated by the falsity of the human mind. His attack on this falsity was a profound assault on the pretensions of reason His concern with appearances and reality is evident in his epistemological challenge to essentialism. Montaigne’s rejection of essentialism took aim at that ancient philosophical tradition which had long supported claims to the certainty of knowledge and the belief that the mind could have access to the realm of true being. As a critic of that tradition, the great French humanist stood in that rhetorical tradition discussed in chapter 1. Recalling Grassi’s analysis, we must remember that this ontologically based philosophy assumed that through the “rational deﬁnition of being,” the mind ascended to the knowledge of eternal and unchangeable essences. To do so, the mind had to strip away the nonessential qualities such as the temporal, changeable, and empirical. The result was that the “historicity of being” could never be the object of true and certain knowledge. By transcending the historical realm the mind could ﬁnd eternal truths valid in all times and places. This epistemology removed the world of becoming, which is the historical realm, far from true being. We should recall that Nominalists also renounced the idea that in cognition the mind knows by means of the universal that inhered in singular reality. Ockham also rejected the traditional link between the rational core of being and the mind; there was no extraction of an essential intelligible element from the phantasms or the object. Furthermore, as we have seen, Nominalism placed a renewed emphasis

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on the particular and on the experiential. Ockham’s “razor” afﬁrmed the reality of the experienced world by eliminating the ideas, concepts, and hierarchy of being that were invented by “sheer speculation” and which resulted in the obfuscation of knowledge and of contact with the particulars of concrete reality.40 It was precisely this “sheer speculation” that Montaigne attacked in all of its aspects. As did previous humanists in the rhetorical tradition, he rejected the appeal to an abstracted essential nature, reality, or truth. He voiced suspicion of the universal and rational while, at the same time, he afﬁrmed the experienced world. In his arguments against essentialism, Montaigne tried to demonstrate that the mind never ascended to this unchangeable and eternal realm of being. Therefore, as did many humanists, he rejected the idea that ontology was the starting point of knowledge. He challenged all claims to know reality as it is, in its own objective nature. As Harries points out, Montaigne realized that our experience and perceptions were all ruled by perspective, “an experience of mere appearances having their center in the subject.” It is the attention to the soul or the self that characterized Montaigne’s denial that the mind can satisfy its demand for truth.41 He challenged all claims that the mind could penetrate accidental qualities (appearances) in order to arrive at a stable essential nature.42 He asked whether objects really possessed the qualities we attribute to them. If they did not, what conclusion could we reach about true essences? Basic to Montaigne’s argument was the conviction that the soul always conformed all things to itself. Therefore, “we no longer know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except falsiﬁed and altered by our senses.” Our conception is not itself applied to foreign objects, but is conceived through the mediation of the senses; and the senses do not comprehend the foreign object, but only their own impressions. And thus the conception and semblance we form is not of the object, but only of the impression and effect made on the sense; which impression and the object are different things. Wherefore, whoever judges by appearances judges by something other than the object. [F.II.12.454] In a way similar to the critique of “representationalism” in epistemology, Montaigne added: “As for saying that the impressions of the senses convey to the soul the quality of the foreign objects by resemblance, how can the soul and understanding make sure of this resemblance, having of itself no communication with the foreign objects? Just as a man who does not know Socrates, seeing his portrait, cannot say that it resembles him” [F.II.454]. Moreover, it is not only the nature of the sense faculties that render us incapable of reaching the knowledge of essences. Illness, health, age, and our natural humors all block our

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attempt to know what things are in truth; for nothing comes to us except as falsiﬁed and altered by our senses. We no longer know what things are in truth: for nothing comes to us except falsiﬁed by our senses. When the compass, the square, and ruler are off, all the proportions drawn from them, all the buildings erected by their measure, are also necessarily imperfect and defective. The uncertainty of our senses makes everything they produce uncertain. [F.II.12.453–454] Montaigne was deeply interested in the fact that the soul was active in cognition in such a way that it transformed objects according to its own ability to comprehend them. In his essay, “Of Democritus and Heraclitus,” he explained that the soul “treats a matter not according to itself, but according to herself.” Objects “in themselves,” he continued, “may have their own weights and measures and qualities; but once inside, within us, [the soul] allots their qualities as she sees ﬁt” [F.I.51.220]. Montaigne extended this critique to concepts, ideas, and values. All things, he claimed, including “health, conscience, authority, knowledge, riches, beauty and their opposites—all are stripped away on entry and receive from the soul new clothing, and the coloring she chooses—brown, green, bright, dark, bitter, sweet, deep, superﬁcial—and which each individual soul chooses; for they have not agreed together on their styles, rules, and forms; each one is queen in her own realm.” Death, for example, was “frightful to Cicero, desirable to Cato, a matter of indifference to Socrates” [F.I.51.220].43 Montaigne’s descriptions of the active nature of the soul demonstrate the “form-giving” or creative activity attributed to the Renaissance by Dupré and Bouwsma. However, Montaigne was not afﬁrming the creative freedom of the soul. On the basis of this active form-giving power, Montaigne concluded by ridiculing the pretensions of human epistemological activity. In his discussions about the unreliability of the senses, the unknowability of essences and the transforming activity of the soul, Montaigne was well aware that he was undercutting traditional guarantees about the capacity of the mind and the reliability of cognition. Nonetheless, Montaigne was doing more than gleefully demolishing the traditional foundations of human knowledge. He was portraying the mind as something that could not break free from itself. In his various attacks of the knowledge of essences and human claims to certitude, Montaigne often depicted a claustrophobic world in which we can never get out of our own skull. By stressing the formative activity of human perception, Montaigne made such things as essences, concepts, or knowledge of external things nothing more than the reﬂections of our own reasoning and imagination. As he said in the Apology, “This same deception that the senses convey to our understanding they receive in their turn. Our soul at times takes a like revenge; they compete in lying and deceiving each other. . . .” [F.II.12.450]. According to Montaigne, the mind can only reach a kind of “seeming” that

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presupposed a perception of reality based only on the conformance to our own being. However, such “seeming” had to forgo certitude. For Montaigne, “our seeming is so uncertain and controversial, it is no longer a miracle if we are told that we can admit that snow appears white to us, but that we cannot be responsible for proving it is so in its essence and in truth; and with this starting point shaken, all knowledge of the world necessarily goes by the board” [F.II.12.452–453]. Montaigne’s anti-essentialism was a denial that the human mind could pierce through the level of appearances to something immutable and universal that lay within or behind the visible external world. He was also challenging all claims by human reason to reach ﬁnal and unchanging truths. His purpose was to deny that unaided human reason could ﬁnd knowledge of that which was unchanging, ﬁnal, and absolute. The Essais repeatedly challenged any form of ﬁnality, whether it was the deﬁnitive reading of texts, the conclusive knowledge of virtue, or possession of any absolute truth. For Montaigne, such claims to certitude and ﬁnality were denials of human ﬁnitude. Montaigne’s discussion regarding the interpretation of written texts demonstrates clearly his denial of any ﬁnality that could grant the mind certainty. He argued that when studying a piece of writing there was no interpretation or meaning that the human mind could not ﬁnd. Any book was subject to “thousands of different interpretations and points of view” and there was no “sense or aspect” that the mind could not claim to understand. He questioned whether Homer or Plato really intended all the meanings that subsequent authors have attributed to them [II.12.442–443].44 Montaigne likened the nature of interpretation of books, contracts, wills and laws to children grabbing hold of quicksilver: “The more they press it and knead it and try to constrain it to their will, the more they provoke the independence of this spirited metal; it escapes their will and keeps dividing and scattering in little particles beyond all reckoning” [F.III.13.816]. Interpretation involved nothing more than the endless “exegesis of words.” His reﬂections on language further demonstrate his belief that human beings live unknowingly in a purely verbal world. He admitted that human reason necessarily had recourse to the “airy medium of words.”45 He also made clear that language was an artiﬁcial, non-substantial, and purely human construct. Language consisted of signs that bore no essential or necessary relationship to their referent. “There is the name and the thing. The name is a sound that designates and signiﬁes the thing; the name is not a part of the thing or of the substance. It is an extraneous piece attached to the thing, and outside of it” [II.12.442–443].46 As Richard Regosin observed, “because [language] ‘ﬂoats free’ of any essential relationship with its referent it participates in the world of appearances as part of what things ‘look like,’ as if language were located in the sensible world, apprehended by the eye or ear like color, shape, sound, accidental qualities susceptible to misunderstanding.”47 For Montaigne, words belonged to the external world of

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appearances and did not inherently link the mind to any solid or substantial reality. Language, or the “airy medium of words,” was a part of that ﬂeeting and transient realm in which human beings live.48 In fact, language reveals the core instability of human existence. Montaigne reports that he decided to write in French precisely because that language was not yet stable. Language, therefore, is a part of the “mobilism” that is so characteristic of Montaigne’s thought.49 Like any “sound” or any object in the human world, words come and go and differ in time and place. Words are ambiguous and cannot preserve or even designate reality with any certainty. Since language is never essential to the thing itself, it is incapable of leading to any knowledge of the absolute, reliable, and certain; “verbal knowledge” cannot claim to represent reality as it is. By mistaking words for the reality that they supposedly signify or by seeking essences behind appearances, the human being only creates a tissue of verbal ﬁctions. Human “vanity” and “presumption” fabricate a weblike illusory world that is then mistaken for something “real.” Those things the philosophers and rhetoricians have called reality were nothing but a mesh of verbal illusions that led one to believe he could attain the eternal, unchanging, and universal. Since words evoke a vision of truth which is purely verbal Montaigne continually warned against the incessant proclivity of the mind to create a totally verbal universe and then to assume that universe was real. There was no end to the pretensions of human reason. By means of argument, deﬁnition, and concepts, reason held out the promise of attaining the universal, the ﬁrm, the unchanging and ﬁnal truth, and in so doing it deceives us. Such “realities” are beyond our grasp and not natural to our natural being. Claiming the knowledge of essences, unchanging natures, and truths was, for Montaigne, a pretense that was actually a delusion. Criticizing the claims of reason and arguments, Montaigne asked, “Who has acquired understanding from logic? Where are all her ﬁne promises? Do we witness more of a jumble in the chatter of ﬁshwives than in the public disputations of professional logicians?” [F.III.8.707]. He criticized the inefﬁcacy of education by saying, ”If we do not know what wisdom is by practice and experience we know it by jargon and by rote. . . . Education has taught us the deﬁnitions, divisions, and partitions of virtue, like the surnames and branches of a genealogy, without any further concern to form between us and virtue any familiar relationship and intimate acquaintance” [F.II.17.501]. So, too, he explained that he preferred a style that was a “formless way of speaking, free from rules and in the popular idiom, proceeding without deﬁnitions, subdivisions, and conclusions, confused like that of Amafanius and Rabirius” [S.II.17.724–725]. Montaigne’s early training in the Renaissance commonplace method made him well aware that words and verbal arguments could support “both sides of the question” equally well. As Zachary Schiffman explained, classical rhetoricians had employed loci and loci communes in order to construct arguments in utramque partem. Aristotle began the technique of arguing on both sides of the

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question in order to establish verisimilitude where truth was not able to be ascertained. This technique was adopted by the Academic Skeptics who denied that one could ﬁnd any truths and thereby limited all knowledge to verisimilitude. In humanist education, notebooks or commonplace books were used to place words, idioms, and ideas for use in composition. Agricola recommended classifying the contents of these books under various headings or loci and pairing them with their opposites such as virtues and vice, life and death, and so on. Erasmus created more elaborate categories in order to accommodate the increasing range of information made available by the spread of printing and the discovery of more and more ancient texts. His purpose was to “distill enduring moral norms from a diverse and ﬂuctuating world.” For Erasmus, therefore, the loci of commonplace books were not divided into arbitrary categories but, rather, represented “the moral substratum of reality.” In humanist education, students were trained to use this commonplace material in disputations and exercises to argue in utramque partem, a pattern of thinking from both sides of the question that was implicit in the organization of the notebooks that paired contrasting or opposite loci. According to Schiffman, this practice of argumentation transformed the humanist school into a “competitive arena” with an “intense spirit of rivalry.” The student “learned to be quick-witted and facile with his knowledge, eager and able to defend or attack any proposition from a variety of perspectives.” More importantly, Schiffman demonstrates that the humanist program of education “inculcated an intellectual system that united a normative view of the world with a skeptical mode of thinking, balancing one against the other.” The spread of typographical literacy made the balance between the two increasingly precarious, “ﬁrst by expanding the stock of wisdom to the point where commonplaces threatened to burst from within, and second, by encouraging a more abstract view of the world that threatened to overwhelm commonplaces from without.” The threats to this balance were forestalled by elaborate classiﬁcatory schemes to accommodate the ever-growing diversity of information about classical authors and their various, sometimes opposing, views. However, “such techniques for broadening and deepening the traditional normative view of the world enabled the European mind to control the problem of relativism only until commonplaces began to break down, after which the skepticism they had held in check was unleashed.”50 Montaigne’s Essais clearly reﬂect the use of this commonplace method. In the Apology he stated, Many times (as I sometimes do deliberately), having undertaken as exercise and sport to maintain an opinion contrary to my own, my mind, applying itself and turning in that direction, attaches me to it so ﬁrmly that I can no longer ﬁnd the reason for my former opinion, and I abandon it. I draw myself along in almost any direction I lean, whatever it may be, and carry myself away by my own weight. [F.II.12.426]

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This method of reasoning, joined with the Pyrrhonism of Sextus Empiricus, led Montaigne into a relativism that radically challenged the nobility of human reason. By the time he wrote the Apology for Raymond Sebond, Montaigne had given up the ability to use this way of argumentation in order to ﬁnd unchanging norms in moral philosophy from different ideas and examples. However, even in Montaigne’s earlier essays we ﬁnd a growing skepticism in his trust that by arguing in utramque partem one could ﬁnally reveal permanent normative values and rules. Schiffman explains, “Montaigne used the discourse in utramque partem to demonstrate that one could not even establish verisimilitude in human affairs; for any given question, the diversity of human responses provided too many contradictory answers. In other words, Montaigne transformed the instrument of Academic skepticism into that of an even more radical skepticism.”51 Montaigne’s observation that he could attach himself to either side of a question was also clear in his concern with the “wandering” of the mind. “It is a thorny undertaking, and more so than it seems, to follow a movement so wandering as that of our mind, to penetrate the opaque depths of its innermost folds, to pick out and immobilize the innumerable ﬂutterings that agitate it” [F.II.6.273]. Montaigne observed that we cannot keep the mind still or control its restlessness and agitation. This is clear from the observation of our own minds as well as from the endless diversity of opinions we ﬁnd everywhere, even in the “most gifted and ablest of scholars.” Let us leave aside that inﬁnite number of opinions that is seen among the philosophers themselves, and that perpetual and universal debate over the knowledge of things. . . . Besides this inﬁnite diversity and division, it is easy to see by the confusion that our judgment gives to our own selves, and the uncertainty that each man feels within himself, that it has a very insecure seat. How diversely we judge things! How many times we change our notions! What I hold today and what I believe, I hold and believe it with all my belief; all my tools and all my springs of action grip this opinion and sponsor it for me in every way they can. I could not embrace or preserve any truth with more strength than this one. I belong to it entirely. I belong to it truly. But has it not happened to me, not once but a hundred times, a thousand times, and every day to have embraced with these same instruments, in this same condition, something else that I have since judged false? [F. II.12.423] Montaigne also described the incessant movement of the mind in terms of contradictions, “What differences in sense and reason, what contradictions of ideas are offered us by the diversity of our passions? What assurance can we then take of a thing so instable and mobile, subject by its condition to the

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master of disturbance, never going except with a forced and borrowed pace? If our judgment is in the hands even of sickness and perturbation; if it is from folly and heedlessness that it is bound to receive its impression of things, what certainty can we expect of it?” [F.II.12.427]. Reﬂecting on his writing of the Essais, Montaigne stated: “I cannot keep my subject still. It goes along befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. . . . This is a record of various and changeable occurrences, and of irresolute and, when it so happens, contradictory ideas; whether I am different myself, or whether I take hold of my subjects in different circumstances and aspects” [F.III.2.610–611].52 Montaigne freely contradicted himself and welcomed contradictions because they were simply more proof of the naturally unstable condition of the human mind in its ongoing judgments [F.III.5.705]. It is our nature to oscillate and to be inconstant, “We ﬂoat between different states of mind: we wish nothing freely, nothing absolutely, nothing constantly.” If we would admit this inconstancy, then the human mind would operate naturally and properly. Montaigne believed that the hunt or “chase” for knowledge by means of discussion, experience, reading, and honest conversation was natural to human nature and far superior to the pretensions of logical argument. These modes of inquiry kept an issue open and undecided. The problem arose when someone “crowed out ergo” and believed he had reached the ﬁnality of truth. Rather than speaking “didactically and dogmatically,” Montaigne preferred such words as “perhaps,” “to some extent,” “I think” “it seems to me,” because they were “not decisive” and did not claim infallibility [F.III.11.788]. For Montaigne, the desire for certainty permeated the pretense of reason. Montaigne also demonstrated this lack of ﬁnality and universality by speaking in terms of perspective. As Harries pointed out, Montaigne understood that the human condition was one of “imprisonment in a labyrinth of perspectives.”53 So, too, Auerbach said of Montaigne that he had the clearest conception of the “problem of man’s self-orientation; that is, the task of making oneself at home in existence without ﬁxed points of reference.”54 Repeatedly using the language of perspective, Montaigne spoke about seeing things from one “angle” [biais] or “face” [visage] and enjoyed considering subjects from “some unaccustomed point of view.” He explained that “[t]hings may be considered in various lights and from various viewpoints: it is principally from this that diversity of opinions arises. One nation looks at one side of a thing and stops there; another at another” [F.II.12.438]. Speaking of his own self-portrait, Montaigne described the diversity found in a single person, not only does the wind of accident move me at will, but besides, I am moved and disturbed as a result merely of my own unstable posture; and anyone who observes carefully can hardly ﬁnd himself twice in the same state. I give my soul now one face, now another, according to which direction I turn it. If I speak of myself in different ways, that

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is because I look at myself in different ways. . . . I have nothing to say about myself absolutely, simply, and without confusion and without mixture, or in one word. [F.II1.242] “What matters,” Montaigne observed, “is not merely that we see the thing, but how we see it” [F.I.14.47]. In an early essay Montaigne argued that the “laws of conscience, which we say are born of nature, are born of custom.” The power of custom is hard to escape because we are born into it “and because the face of the world presents itself in this aspect to our ﬁrst view” [F.I.23.83]. The Essais as a whole were seen by Montaigne as discussions that “weighed” things from different aspects and perspectives. Therefore, Montaigne stated, “I add but I do not correct.” To correct earlier essays would be to deny the realities of change that his mind constantly underwent [F.III.9.736]. Speaking of Democritus and Heraclitus, Montaigne noted, For I do not see the whole of anything; nor do those who promise to show it to us. Of a hundred members and faces that each thing has, I take one, sometimes only to lick it, sometimes to brush the surface, sometimes to pinch it to the bone. . . . And most often I like to take them from some unaccustomed point of view. . . . I am not bound to make something of them or to adhere to them myself without varying when I please and giving myself up to doubt and uncertainty and my ruling quality, which is ignorance.” [F.I.50.219] By contrasting absolute, unchanging, and universal reality to the verbal and the rational, constructs of the mind, Montaigne’s Essais became an exploration of what Grassi called “the historicity of being” and what Oberman described as life “under the dome” of the ordained power of God. Like his nominalist and humanist predecessors, Montaigne revolted against the “meta-categories” that were seen as obfuscating reality and was deeply critical of ontological claims that sought for unchanging norms and universal natures. He rejected as presumptuous and illusory all attempts at the metaphysical penetration of being; to claim such ability was to enter a labyrinth of verbal alleyways that led away from the empirical realities of human life. He explained his rejection of systematic thought by saying, “The scholars distinguish and mark off their ideas more speciﬁcally and in detail. I, who cannot see beyond what I have learned from experience, without any system, present my ideas in a general way and tentatively” [F.III.13.824]. Montaigne, therefore, expressed that same desire attributed by Oberman to the fourteenth-century nominalist, namely, the “hunger for reality.” There was, of course, a striking difference between Montaigne and these predecessors; Montaigne wanted to “consider for the moment man alone, without outside assistance, armed solely with his own weapons, and deprived of divine grace and knowledge. . . .” His primary interest was in the

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life of man “unaided” by revelation, by infused knowledge or supernatural help. [F.II.12.328]. In Montaigne’s view, unaided human nature faced only inconstancy and uncertainty. Human beings lived in the world of change, whether it be changes in the body, passions, or ideas. The human being had no “touchstone” or “foothold” in the midst of a vertiginous world. The discovery of the New World was one such dramatic change that fascinated Montaigne and heightened his awareness of the incessant changeableness and diversity that characterized human existence. This discovery of a boundless country seems worthy of consideration. I don’t know if I can guarantee that some other discovery will not be made in the future, so many personages greater than ourselves having been mistaken about this one. I am afraid we have eyes bigger than our stomachs, and more curiosity than capacity. We embrace every theory, but we clasp only wind. [F.I.31.150]. Our world has just discovered another world (and who will guarantee us that it is the last of its brothers, since the daemons, the Sibyls, and we ourselves have up to now been ignorant of this one?) no less great, full, and well-limbed than itself, yet so new and so infantile that it is still being taught its A B C; not ﬁfty years ago it knew neither letters, weights, and measures, nor clothes, nor wheat, nor vines [F.III.6.693]. Montaigne delighted in describing the human world as one of constant change, movement, and diversity. Using the imagery of that which was apparently the most stable and solid, he depicted the constancy of change, “The world is but a perennial movement. All things in it are in constant motion—the earth, the rocks of Caucasus, the pyramids of Egypt—both with the common motion and with their own. Stability itself is nothing but a more languid motion” [F. III.2.610]. This “perennial movement” pertained to all aspects of human life including the self, judgment, and history. Regarding human reason, he explained that the impossibility of knowledge was due to changeability: “Finally, there is no existence that is constant. And we, and our judgment, and all mortal things go on ﬂowing and rolling unceasingly. Thus nothing certain can be established about one thing or another, both the judging and the judged being in continual change and motion” [F.II.12.455].55 In the conclusion of the Apology he made clear the importance of recognizing this incessant changeability by arguing that we cannot reach a state of immutable being. Montaigne’s favorite method for illustrating human inconstancy and the ever-present realities of change and ﬂux was the use of history. Unlike the

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religious polemicists, however, Montaigne used history not to prove a ﬁnal argument or interpretation but to show that such ﬁnality was impossible and was unnatural to human earthly existence. His turn toward history also showed no conﬁdence in discerning a continual, uniﬁed, providential course of events stretching from creation to the last judgment. Montaigne’s use of history depended on the ever-increasing availability of ancient texts. Schiffman has placed Montaigne and other French humanists of the later Renaissance in the context of the growing awareness of the diversity within antiquity. He explores one response to this awareness of the complexity of the ancient world in terms of the need to order and classify a vastly enlarged body of unwieldy information. One solution was the making of lists. Neo-Bartolists sought similarities that underlay diversity while others sought to establish various categories according to causation and origins.56 Jean Bodin, whom Montaigne had read, said of his attempt to write world history, Such is the multiplicity and disorder of human activities, such the abundant supply of histories, that unless the actions and affairs of men are conﬁned to certain deﬁnite types, historical works obviously cannot be understood, or their precepts long retained in mind. What scholars, then, are accustomed to do to assist memory in other arts should, I think, be done for history also. That is, similar instances of memorable matters should be placed in a certain deﬁnite order, so that from these, as from a treasure chest, we may bring forth a variety of examples to direct out acts. Montaigne read history in a way that undermined Bodin’s attempt to order and classify historical facts. With Montaigne we ﬁnd endless lists culled from historical sources. However, Montaigne’s lists betray his abandonment of trying to ﬁnd a classiﬁcatory schema by which to order history. For Montaigne these lists demonstrated the reality of change that is the primary characteristic of historical existence. Throughout the Essais we ﬁnd lists of types of governments that have changed, fashions and diets that have changed, laws that have changed, customs that are no longer considered acceptable or that are completely foreign to present French society. By his use of these lists, Montaigne illustrated what scholars call the “crisis of exemplarity.” In the early Renaissance, history was valued as a storehouse of moral examples that the student should imitate in his own life. Hampton analyzes the way that humanist culture was characterized by “both its nascent historical consciousness and by its commitment to the words, deeds, and texts of antiquity as sources of value for all men.57 Often the writer decried the evils of his own time in comparison with the higher standards of ancient Rome. Salutati, for example, wrote a letter in 1392 in which he commended the Grand Master of the Order of St. John of Jerusalem for having “cherished the historians whose duty it is to hand down to posterity

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the memory of things done so that the examples of kings, nations, and illustrious men can be either equaled or exceeded by imitating them. . . . The knowledge of things done warns princes, teaches people, and instructs individuals. . . . It is the most certain basis for the conduct of affairs.”58 The works of every major classical historian were available by the ﬁfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Livy and Tacitus were of special importance. The Romans provided lessons in political education of rulers, statesmen, princes, and generals. The history of wars and of states provided examples, both negative and positive, that could inform the present. Cicero’s famous phrase that history was the Magistra vitae was adduced as the explanation for the value of historical study. History, therefore, was inseparable from moral philosophy, since history was “philosophy teaching by examples.”59 However, in the writings of Montaigne we ﬁnd the failure of history to function as example. He shared with his fellow humanists, especially the philologists, an incisive awareness of historical distance and estrangement. The sense of distance between past and present, lamented as early as Petrarch, had rendered the past less and less capable of instructing the present. The evidence of contradictory lessons and teachings of the past further rendered tenuous the conﬁdence in the ability to imitate examples from antiquity. Speaking of Montaigne, Hampton commented that “political and social chaos renders problematic the very process of reading history. Exemplary ﬁgures from antiquity are seen as dangerously ambiguous and the essayist turns away from exemplarity altogether.”60 Hampton’s analysis of Montaigne’s essay “On the Education of Children” concludes that the authority of models or exemplars is eclipsed and the self becomes the only basis of education and judgment. Furthermore, Montaigne’s rejection of the ideals of public and heroic action in favor of the private sphere means that the role of the ancient model is undermined. Examining the actions of men like Cato from the perspective of the judging self outside the public realm makes motives and appearances poor models to be imitated. Motives cannot be “seen” and, therefore, properly judged and followed. From various perspectives and analyses Montaigne repeatedly referred to history while at the same time reacted against the “humanist veneration of ancient exemplarity.”61 Montaigne used a devastating historicizing perspective in order to strike down the human presumption that an unchanging universal norm or belief could be found in the past. He showed that the understanding of any given subject varied according to the passage of time, passions, age, and particular conditions or situations. In the essay “On Coaches” Montaigne stated, “If we could view that expanse of countries and ages, boundless in every direction, into which the mind, plunging and spreading itself, travels so far and wide that it can ﬁnd no limit where it can stop, there would appear in that immensity an inﬁnite capacity to produce innumerable forms” [F.III.6.692]. Montaigne responded to the sense of disorientation caused by the multiplicity of historical examples and schools of thought by challenging the

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illusory search for what was certain and unchangeable. His argument against the ability to ﬁnd certainty about universal truths centered on the premise that unless we can ﬁnd one thing about which we are completely certain, we cannot claim certainty about anything. Since no such thing exists, the soul can ﬁnd no sure footing and is “thrown headlong into boundless uncertainty” [S.II.12.632].62 Montaigne’s rejection of human certitude and ﬁnality is based on his understanding of the nature of truth. Montaigne always argued that truth was that which had “one face” and was eternally unchangeable. Truth was that which was “uniform and constant” [F.II.12.415]. Questioning the human tendency to make one’s own customs absolute, Montaigne wrote, “Truth must have one face [un visage], the same and universal” [F.II.12.463]. However, because we always see only partially, from our “angle” or “point of view,” we can never “see the whole of anything” or discern a “picture of the whole” [F.I.50.219; II.1.243]. The problem is that certainty cannot be found in anything that is only partial or that is subject to change. Judgments founded on “external appearances are marvelously uncertain and doubtful” [F. II.16.474]. Whatever “suffers change does not remain one and the same, and if it is not one and the same, it also is not; but together with its being the same, it also changes its simple being, from one thing always becoming another” [F.II.12.456]. Since there was “no existence which is constant,” and our judgment as well as all mortal things are “ﬂowing and rolling unceasingly,” change excluded certitude. Nonetheless, the mind seeks that which is “solid” and “ﬁrm.” Human beings try to ﬁnd the “true essence of things” and things with a “true” substance, even though they live only in the world of instability. Montaigne explained that he had nothing to say even about himself that was “absolutely, simply, and solidly” [F.II.1.242]. Solidity and ﬁrmness were not available in a world of constant ﬂux. Searching for such knowledge, men have found nothing that is “solid and ﬁrm” and, therefore, should renounce their vanity and presumption in order to recognize their natural condition. [F.II.12.370]. Presumption was Montaigne’s ultimate target. He believed that the presumption to know the truth was that which had plunged society into chaos. In Montaigne’s view the deﬁnitive human presumption was the claim to know the divine. Throughout the Essais he depicted the human mind as reaching for a realm that was far too transcendent for its natural capacities. Clearly the realm of the divine particularly exceeded the rational capacities of any unaided human reason. He agreed with Socrates and Plato that things divine and celestial were beyond human reach. “In Socrates’ opinion and mine too, the wisest way to judge heaven is not to judge it at all” [F.II.12.400]. Far too great a chasm existed between the divine and the human for humans to presume to ascend to God. Therefore, our natural and earthly powers cannot

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conceive that supernatural and heavenly knowledge. We cannot reach the divine through the self or through creation. Speaking of divine causality, Montaigne argued, In natural things the effects only half reﬂect their causes: what about this cause? It is above the order of nature; its condition is too lofty, too distant, and too much in authority, to suffer our conclusions and to tie and bind it. It is not through ourselves that we reach it; that route is too low. We are no nearer heaven at the top of Mount Cenis than at the bottom of the sea. . . . [F.II.12.396]. In the Apology Montaigne again turned to listing historical examples to accentuate the variety of the many different opinions found in philosophy and religion regarding the cosmos, truth, and God.63 The listing of these past beliefs exempliﬁed the relativism of “truth.” Philosophers have disagreed on all aspects of God, the world, the soul, and religious practices. For Pythagoras, God was a spirit diffused throughout the nature of all things. For Anaximenes, air was a god who was created, immense, and always in motion. Thales believed god was a spirit who made all things of water. Anaximander thought that the gods were dying and being born again in various seasons. Diagoras and Theodorus were convinced that there were no gods at all [F.II.12.382]. History also proved the vast diversity of beliefs regarding the soul and the afterlife. For Thales, the soul was without rest. Plato thought the soul was a substance moving itself. Some thinkers believed in the eternity of souls and others added that they lived beyond this life but were still ﬁnite. Pythagoras and Origen taught the transmigration of souls. Crates and Dicaearchus did not believe in souls at all [F.II.12.405]. Philosophers also tried to decipher the justice of God. According to Montaigne, Pythagoras was the ﬁrst to argue that souls were rewarded and punished after their earthly life. Some thought God could be satisﬁed by human sacriﬁce. Thus Amestris buried her fourteen children alive in accordance with the religious beliefs of her day. The Carthaginians immolated their children to Saturn. The death of Iphigenia was supposed to clear the Greek army of their offenses “in the eyes of God” [F.II.12.388]. Montaigne could continue on this way forever. The endless recitation of these differing beliefs left the reader with the awareness that all ideas were subject to time and change. Following the list of varying historical conceptions of God stretching from Thales to Epicurus, Montaigne exclaimed, “Now trust to your philosophy! Boast that you have found the bean in the cake, when you consider the clatter of so many philosophical brains!” [F.II.12.383]. If truth must be unchanging, knowledge of the diversity of beliefs and the changes occurring throughout time threw the claim to knowing the immutable truth of

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God into serious doubt. Like nature, Montaigne argued, the beliefs, judgments, and opinions of men had their season. In his own way, Montaigne also asked, “Are you alone wise?” If nature enfolds within the bounds of her ordinary progress, like all other things, also the beliefs, judgments, and opinions of men; if they have their rotation, their season, their birth, their death, like cabbages, if heaven moves and rolls them at its will, what magisterial authority are we attributing to them . . . if we see ﬂourishing now one art, one opinion, now another, by some celestial inﬂuence; such-andsuch a century produce such-and-such natures, and incline the human race to such and such a bent . . . what becomes of all those ﬁne prerogatives on which we ﬂatter ourselves? Since a wise man can be mistaken, and a hundred men, and many nations, yes, and human nature according to us is mistaken for many centuries about this or that, what assurance do we have that sometimes it stops being mistaken and that in this century it is not making a mistake? [F.II.433–434] Scholars have argued for both Montaigne’s skepticism and his conservative Catholicism. Popkin believed he was “mildly religious.” Don Cameron Allen argued that he belonged to the “three French Atheists”: Montaigne, Bodin, and Charron. Frame acknowledged the difﬁculties in determining Montaigne’s religious convictions but denied that he was an unbeliever. Screech argued that Montaigne’s skepticism led to ﬁdeism and that he was the voice of “post-Tridentine rigour.” Starobinski stated that Montaigne indicated “no intellectual preference” when faced with a multiplicity of religions.64 The fact that these scholars have disagreed on this issue proves Montaigne’s point that the interpretation of texts is never conclusive! However, the question that is most useful for our purpose is that posed by Regosin: Given Montaigne’s delight in paradox and the eclecticism of his approach, he unabashedly supports Christian claims with pagan sources, juxtaposes orthodox norms on the nature of man to equivocal statements on the immortality of the soul (his remarks on Plato are also valid for the Christian position). When he posits the relativity of religion to suggest what man takes for absolute is determined by custom, time, and place, is the reader to extend this to include Christianity?65 History proved that the ever-changing convictions of the past were once held as strongly as those in the present. Therefore, to attempt a leap of faith outside the

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conditions of history in order to grasp religious immutable and universal truths contradicted Montaigne’s whole way of thinking throughout the Essais. Montaigne believed religions, like laws and customs, were a product of one’s historical circumstances. We receive our religion only in our own way and with our own hands and not otherwise than as other religions are received. We happen to be born in a country where it was in practice; or we regard its antiquity or the authority of the men who have maintained it, or we fear the threats it fastens upon unbelievers, or pursue its promises. Those considerations should be employed in our belief, but as subsidiaries; they are human ties. Another region, other witnesses, similar promises and threats might imprint upon us in the same way, a contrary belief. [F.II.12.325]66 Like the lists of past beliefs about God and the soul, Montaigne strongly implied the relativity of even Christianity. His thought is permeated with the historicizing perspective that renders everything temporal. Like customs, laws, philosophies, virtues, reforms, and governments, religious beliefs were also subject to that “rotation” of the seasons. They all come into being and pass away. We believe certain things because of the place and time in which we live and the authority they hold from the past. Nonetheless, “these ties are human.” Throughout the Essais, Montaigne argued that there was no criterion upon which one could judge absolutely regarding any of these beliefs.67 Just as there was no higher sense faculty that could judge the true nature of things, so, too, there was no ﬁnal judge of religious differences. Drawing a parallel between his anti-essentialist arguments and religious disputes, Montaigne adopted the argument from Sextus Empiricus that there could be no ﬁnal criterion in order to show the impossibility of establishing religious doctrine. He spoke in a way reminiscent of Luther’s opponents but without the conviction of certainty: Furthermore, who shall be ﬁt to judge these differences [of sense perceptions]? As we say in disputes about religion that we need a judge not attached to either party, free from preference and passion, which is impossible among Christians, so it is in this . . . we would need a judge that never was. [F.II.12.454] This is not to say that Montaigne had no religious beliefs or sensibility. It should be noted, however, that his many statements about God center always on the remoteness of God, often exempliﬁed by God’s “incomprehensible power.” [F. II.12.385]. God is far above the order of nature that surrounds us. We cannot presume to limit God or to understand him. God is not our

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“colleague, fellow citizen, or companion.” The promises of the immortal soul and the afterlife spoken by Plato and others are really unimaginable, and incomprehensible [F.II.12.389]. Speaking of Augustus Caesar and Quintilius Varus, Montaigne observed, “For those surpass all madness who, adding impiety to folly, turn their blame against God himself, or against Fortune, as if she had ears susceptible to human nature” [F.I.4.15]. The remoteness of God did not preclude the practice of religion. Montaigne was acutely aware that human beings have always needed concrete religious practices and have opposed those who tried to make religion totally spiritual and contemplative. As Montaigne observed, “It is still man we are dealing with, and it is a wonder how physical his nature is” [F.III.8.710]. Nonetheless, these observances remained human and never gained the attribute of the eternal and the absolute. Writing of divine authority Montaigne argued, “The knot that should bind our judgment and our will, that should clasp and join our soul to our creator, should be a knot taking its twists and its strength not from our considerations, our reasons, and passions, but from a divine and supernatural clasp, having only one form, one face, one aspect, which is the authority of God and his grace” [F.II.336]. Nor did Montaigne deny that some have received grace or the “divine aid” which allowed them to reach beyond the relativity of the natural world. This is a most important point for understanding Montaigne’s view of religion. At the close of the Apology we ﬁnd the famous passage that begins with a citation from Seneca: “O what a vile abject thing is man . . . if he does not raise himself above humanity.” This is a good statement and useful desire but equally absurd. For to make the handful bigger than the arm, and to hope to straddle more than the reach of our legs, is impossible and unnatural. Nor can man raise himself above himself and humanity; for he can only see with his own eyes, and seize only with his own grasp. He will rise if God by exception lends him a hand; he will rise by abandoning and renouncing his own means, and letting himself be raised and uplifted by purely celestial means. What is of importance here is that Montaigne never claimed to be one of those exceptional ones to whom God offered his hand or lifted by celestial means. Nor did Montaigne write for or about such people. These exceptions were of no interest to him. He wrote for those of the human level. Despite his admiration for the rapture of poets and the activities and virtues of the ancients, Montaigne admitted that “I admire the greatness of those souls; those ecstasies which I ﬁnd most beautiful I clasp unto me, though my powers do not reach so far. . . .” [S.II.32.822]. Although Montaigne admitted the possibility of that “miraculous metamorphosis,” he also criticized the desire to be so transformed.

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The greatness of the soul, he said, is “not in greatness, but in mediocrity” [F. III.2.614]. Commenting on the Stoic contempt for life, Montaigne argued that it was a “vain desire which makes us want to be something other than what we are. . . . Anyone who wished to be changed from man to angel does nothing at all for himself: he would gain nothing by it. Who is supposed to be feeling that amendment for him and rejoicing at it? He exists no more” [S.II.3.397]. Human beings were, above all else, historical creatures and as such had to live in the midst of a historical mutability. Montaigne distrusted zeal and religious frenzy, be it from the Catholic League or the Huguenots. Those who wanted to escape the human condition and climb to inaccessible reaches were dangerous and were not living the fully human life. Montaigne exclaimed, “To how much vanity are we driven by the high opinion we have of ourselves! The best-regulated soul in the world has only too much to do to stay on its feet and keep itself from collapsing to the ground through its own weakness.” Furthermore, “all actions which exceed the usual limits are open to sinister interpretations since higher things are no more to our taste than inferior ones.”[F.II.2.249, 250]. In his essay “On Vanity” Montaigne made a comment that summarizes his thought. After bewailing the sickness of his age, he observed that, “we cannot escape the present” [F.III.9.760, my emphasis]. It was to ordinary souls in the present that Montaigne wrote his Essais. As he wrote in the Apology, “Man cannot be other than that which he is.” But to know “what he is” was the real task of the human life and of the Essais. For Montaigne, as for Luther, only self-knowledge could dismantle this seemingly real universe. However, the crucial difference between Luther and Montaigne regarding the relationship between appearance and reality is encapsulated by Montaigne’s remark that “we are not so full of evil as inanity; we are not so wretched as we are worthless” [F.I.51.221]. Although he identiﬁed Adam’s fall with the desire for knowledge that was forbidden, Montaigne’s interest was not in Satan or human sin. The culprit was human presumption, which Montaigne deﬁned as the unnatural desire to escape the limits of humanity. He wanted to accept humanity in its natural condition. As scholars of Montaigne have recognized, his earlier essays are much more positive toward Stoicism than the later ones. He came to see that Stoicism, like any claim to knowledge or virtue beyond our nature, was an “excessive” or “inhuman wisdom” [F.I.39.179, 849]. Montaigne came to reject anything that betrayed contempt for natural human existence. His growing ambivalence toward the extraordinary, including Stoicism, is evident in his evaluation of Cato’s suicide. Though he once praised Cato for this act, he had changed his mind by the time he wrote, “A custom in the island of Cea.” He now perceived suicide to be unnatural. As for the opinion that disdains our life, it is ridiculous. For after all, like our being, it is our all. Things that have a nobler and richer being

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may accuse ours but it is against nature that we despise ourselves and care nothing about ourselves. It is a malady peculiar to man, and not to be seen in any other creature, to have and disdain himself. [F.II.3.254] It became Montaigne’s mission to recall his readers to return to the “rank” or level of humanity. He repeatedly used the images of the lower “road” and “path,” on which humanity should walk: “Even in roads I like to avoid sloping and slippery sides, and cast myself into the beaten part, even the muddiest and boggiest, from which I cannot sink lower and seek security there. . . .” [F.II.17.488]. Montaigne deﬁned himself as one who operated “only close to the ground” [F.III.13.849]. He believed that “the lowest step is the ﬁrmest” [F.II.17.489]. His preference in the course of the Essais changed from the amazing “courage” of Cato to the humble life of Socrates who respected the limits of human nature.68 Comparing Cato and Socrates, he wrote, For in Cato we see very clearly that his is a pace strained far above the ordinary; in the brave exploits of his life and in his death we feel that he is always mounted on his high horse. The other [Socrates] walks close to the ground, and at a gentle and ordinary pace treats the most useful subjects; and behaves both in the face of death and in the thorniest trials that can confront us, in the ordinary way of human life. [F.III.12.793] The wisdom of Socrates exempliﬁed the way in which we should live according to our human nature.69 It was Socrates, Montaigne insisted, who made his soul “move with a natural and common motion; he despised pomp and show.” It was Socrates’s aim “to furnish us with things and precepts that serve life really and more closely” [F.III.12.793]. “Socrates,” he wrote, “was a man, and wanted neither to be nor to seem anything else” [F.III.5.681]. Comparing himself to more noble and exceptional men who attained “that disdainful vigor which ﬁnds fortitude in itself, which nothing can either aid or disturb,” Montaigne said, “I am a peg lower” [F.III.9.748]. He wanted people to recognize that it was vanity “to wish to be something other than we are.”70 As a consequence of afﬁrming the lower nature of humanity, Montaigne caustically mocked those who wished to transcend human limits. It seems to me that the false opinion which is the mother suckling of all the others, both in public and private, is the over high opinion which man has of himself. Those people who perch astride the epicycle of Mercury and see so far into the heavens, are an excruciating pain in the neck. [S II.17.721]

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The desire to transgress human limits, the yearning to be more than human, was, for Montaigne, inhuman. They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels they change into beasts; instead of raising themselves, they lose themselves. These transcendent humors frighten me; like lofty and inaccessible places. . . . It is an absolute perfection and virtually divine to know how to enjoy our being rightfully. . . . We seek other conditions because we do not understand the use of our own and go outside ourselves because we do not know what it is like inside. Yet there is no use mounting on stilts; for on stilts we must still walk on our own legs. And on the loftiest throne in the world, we are still sitting on our own rump. [F.III.13.856–857]71 Montaigne wanted his fellow human beings to climb back down, as Socrates did, and accept the limited life of humanity. He recalled his readers to their “lowly rank” with such statements as, “Both kings and philosophers shit, and ladies too” [III.13.831]. The task of humanity was to know the self and to live a life that was “fully human,” a life that respected limits and imperfection. Even his beloved Socrates was subject to a rare criticism because of his “ecstasies and possessions by his daemon” [F.III.856]. Montaigne taught that “man can only be what he is, and imagine only within his reach.” We are, he noted, “all of the common herd” [F.II.12.367, 400, 429]. He said of himself that he was “neither an angel nor Cato” but simply a man whose “actions are in order and conformity with my condition” [F.III.2.617]. Comparing humanity to the animals, Montaigne remarked, “We are neither above nor below the rest: all that is under heaven, says the sage, incurs the same law and the same fortune” [F.II.12.336]. Montaigne insisted that there was good reason to pity those who “trespass beyond, and cannot be content with the measure of a man” [F. III.13.1268]. To remain within the rank of humanity was to accept limitations and not to strain for that which was “beyond our reach.” To be fully human was to live in the realm of motion, inconstancy, transience, and change. Hence Montaigne’s famous phrase, “I do not portray being, I portray passage. Not the passage from one age to another, or as the people say, from seven years to seven years, but from day to day, from minute to minute” [F.III.2.611]. To live a fully human life was to strive to know only those things “close to the ground,” a knowledge that often focused solely on the knowledge of the self. To “know oneself” as instructed by the Delphic oracle was not to see oneself before God or to know and strive after transcendent truths, but to accept fully the human condition.

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Look into yourself, know yourself, keep to yourself, bring back your mind and your will which are spending themselves elsewhere, into themselves. . . . Do you not see that this world keeps its sight all concentrated inward and its eyes open to contemplate itself? It is always vanity for you, within and without, but it is less vanity when it is less extensive. Except for you, O man . . . each thing studies itself ﬁrst and according to its needs, has limits to its labors and desires. There is not a single thing as empty and needy as you, who embrace the universe; you are the investigator without knowledge, the magistrate without jurisdiction, and all in all, the fool of the farce. [F.III.9.766] Montaigne believed that as historical creatures, we had to live our lives in the midst of the mutability and ﬂux that deﬁned human existence. The world of ﬂuctuating appearances is the realm in which we live and there is no escaping this reality. In Montaigne’s words, we must “make our home here, not elsewhere.” By proclaiming that our home is “here,” Montaigne proceeded to undertake the task of rehabilitating the “historicity of being.” He counseled his readers to ﬁnd an ethic that would enable them to live within history or within the present. Referring to Montaigne’s thoughts on living through the religious wars, David Quint deﬁned Montaigne’s desire for an “ethic of yielding.” Analyzing Montaigne’s use of Epaminondas in various essays, Quint states, “[T]he choice of pardon over revenge is the moral and political touchstone of the Essais, to which other issues, the nobility and valor, the quest for Stoic philosophical mastery versus the acceptance and embrace of human limitations and weakness, become ancillary, judged according to how they will or will not result in a practice of clemency.” The “refusal to yield” by the French nobility had been disastrous to France and led only to the “unheard-of-cruelties of the Wars of Religion.”72 Quint’s book is an excellent study of Montaigne’s reaction to the wars that were devouring France and the violence surrounding his own territory. A further dimension of this “ethic of yielding” however, is a more general ethic that I will call the “ethic of incompleteness.” This was an ethic that called human beings to live with the incompleteness of knowledge imposed by the historicity of human existence. As we have seen, the human realm of “perennial movement” is characterized by that which the philosophers considered to be the nonessential; it has no stability, nothing unchanging or eternal. The human realm, including the human mind, is a world of “inconstancy.” In order to claim this world as our “home,” Montaigne had to redeﬁne the nature of that being that was available to humanity. In this world, he said, “being is something we hold dear and being consists in movement and action” [et être consiste en mouvement et action] [F.II.8.279 my emphasis]. As Montaigne believed, “our life is nothing but movement” [F.III.13.840]. By calling this world of movement our proper realm, Montaigne was arguing

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something quite radical for the sixteenth-century reader. He was arguing that this world of ever-shifting appearances is the only being or reality we possess. We cannot reach above change or behind appearances to something that is “more” real. Within the limits of humanity, only the world of appearances had being. In Montaigne’s view, human existence or “being” was precisely within this realm of appearances, and it was to these ever-ﬂuctuating appearances that he tried to give value and meaning. The world of mutability and appearances may be “smoke” and “wind,” but this is where we exist and there is no transcending this realm. He saw that our task is to live here amidst the insubstantial and the incomplete. Moreover, it is our task to live here well. As Montaigne wrote, “To compose our character is our duty, not to compose books, and to win battles and provinces, but order and tranquility in our conduct. Our great and glorious masterpiece is to live appropriately” [F.III.13.850–851]. According to Montaigne, our greatness does not lie in reaching beyond our nature but in living fully in this human historical world of becoming. Because of his insistence that we live in our proper “home,” Montaigne had to address the role of experience. We have seen that the category of experience had become very problematic in the sixteenth century. But Montaigne wanted to bring experience back down to this lower level of humanity. He wanted to limit experience to the earthly and the temporal. In so doing, he rehabilitated and reinstated experience as a suitable guide to the limited human life. He invested human experience with a kind of authority and reliability. This was not true of all experiences, but only of those experiences to which we have applied judgment: “It is not enough to count experiences, we must weigh them, to extract from them the reasons and conclusions they contain” [F.III.8.711].73 His last great essay, “Of Experience,” poignantly expressed his ﬁnal afﬁrmation of earthly human experience. Rejecting the superiority of examples handed down from antiquity, Montaigne argued that we could ﬁnd rules for our life “from the most ordinary and commonplace things.” Neither ancient nor foreign examples can equal “the fruit we can reap from [ordinary] experiences.” The “experience we have of ourselves” is “sufﬁcient to inform us of what we need” [F.III.82, 829]. Montaigne knew that neither experience nor judgment could boast of the eternal and the universal but they were the natural and sufﬁcient guides for our level of existence. Despite contradictions, ﬂuctuations, and changes in both thoughts and experience Montaigne recognized that this level of knowing was appropriate to humanity. Common everyday experiences show us how to “live appropriately” in the realm of change, movement, and ﬂux. As Starobinski said of Montaigne’s thought, “We have lost the essential, but relative and phenomenal existence has been restored.”74 Freed from the verbal pretensions of an unreal world and liberated from the task of straining toward the eternal and essential, the human being is left to ﬁnd a way to live in the world of change and appearances. Whereas Luther saw the power of faith as breaking the grip of illusion and granting a new

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perspective, Montaigne searched for an epistemological humility. In so doing, he wanted to advocate an ethic of incompleteness, an ethic that afﬁrmed the reality that all human knowledge is perspectival and partial. [F.I.50.219]. Montaigne knew that to accept this level of existence as being proper to our nature was to live amidst appearances without the consolation of solidity or certainty. For this reason, he sought an ethic that would conform to the life of incompleteness, an ethic that accepted the relative and incomplete nature of our knowledge and existence. He knew it took a certain kind of strength to live “here” and to resist the pull of the universal, the certain, the absolute. The human being had to reject the constant yearning to be more than itself or to transcend its being. The ethic of incompleteness required human beings to live in full recognition of the contingency of their laws, customs, knowledge and beliefs. The tentative, the provisional, the transient, and the uncertain were the natural companions of a fully human life. Greatness of soul is not so much pressing upward and forward as knowing how to set oneself in order and to circumscribe oneself. It regards as great whatever is adequate and shows its elevation by liking moderate things better than eminent ones. There is nothing so beautiful and legitimate as to play the man well and properly, as knowledge of how to live this life well and naturally; and the most barbarous of our maladies is to despise our being. [F.III.13.852] This “greatness of soul” was the acceptance of living in a precarious balance amidst shifting appearances. Those appearances did not lead to a deeper, immutable and essential reality that the mind could grasp. Montaigne was seeking to make the world of appearances in and of itself real. The difﬁculty of Montaigne’s ethic of incompleteness should not be underestimated. Montaigne was asking that humanity live suspended, as it were, in time, in change, and often in uncertainty. Within this realm the human being made judgments and acted accordingly. But Montaigne was aware of the strength it took to be true to the reality around us and to resist the demand for transcendence, ﬁnality, and certitude. In desiring his readers to be fully human, he knew that the human mind had to ﬁght against the constant yearning to be more than human or to stretch “beyond our reach” and, thereby, beyond our nature. The ethic that Montaigne sought was based on an awareness of contingency. To be fully human, humanity must live knowing that one’s beliefs would someday pass away and be replaced by others. Montaigne sought to understand the ethical life in the absence of absolutes and in the midst only of appearances. Such a life consisted of great pleasure, including bodily ones, as well as great pain. To live appropriately required the full acceptance of life amidst ﬂux, motion, change, and appearances. Above all else, the virtuous human life

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required humility about the limits of our knowledge, existence, and the nature of our being. There was a humility and melancholy about Montaigne as he looked out on his war-torn world and questioned the reality of those transcendent causes for which his neighbors claimed to be ﬁghting. His attack on epistemological and ontological assumptions was much more than a ﬁght about the reality or unreality of essences. His purpose was to show that the mind could not know such transcendent truths. His was never a merely epistemological or philosophical skepticism. In Montaigne’s counsel of doubt there was a real existential anguish as he watched his society tear itself apart. His skepticism was an ethic. In the name of verbal ﬁctions, he argued, French society was devouring itself. Beyond the political solution, Montaigne addressed what he saw as the fundamental philosophical and epistemological heart of the problem. He insisted that safety consisted in the acceptance of the limited, relative, and incomplete world of appearances as the only realm proper to the human condition. By arguing in this manner, Montaigne subverted and reversed the traditional hierarchy of appearance and reality. The disjunction was not between appearances and reality but, rather, between appearances and the inaccessible. To try to reach a reality beyond appearances was to live in a self-constructed, purely verbal illusion. To claim to have found the transcendent truths of religion was to commit the “verbal crime” of presumption. To defend these unsubstantial illusions as absolute and certain truths was to deny one’s being and to destroy society. Beyond Montaigne stood the towering ﬁgure of Shakespeare in whom we ﬁnd a much darker vision. Despite his concentration on heroic and royal ﬁgures, Shakespeare shared with Montaigne a depiction of humanity as those who must live “close to the ground.” However, Shakespeare deepened and vastly complicated the problem of the relationship between appearances and reality.75 By looking at Shakespeare’s four major tragedies, we will ﬁnd the existential tragic vision of Luther combined with the skepticism of Montaigne. The result was an overwhelming and majestic portrayal of the profoundly tragic existence of humanity. As was true of Montaigne, Shakespeare’s skepticism was never an epistemological problem. In fact, as we shall see, calling Shakespeare a skeptic may itself be problematic. Nonetheless, Shakespeare scholars from Graham Bradshaw to Millicent Bell have made compelling cases for the skeptical dimension of Shakespeare’s thought.76 The best description of Shakespeare’s “skepticism” is found in Norman Rabkin who argued, “It is perhaps the most familiar mark of Shakespeare’s complementary sensibility that he recognized how from any subjective position there is a kind of truth, each man’s world makes sense to him, and all his intelligence serves what he is—even if he is a scoundrel.”77 Rabkin explains that Shakespeare created a universe susceptible to contradictory interpretations, a “complementary” world that provided various views of

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an event at one time. Moreover, this “complimentarity” or “dialectical dramaturgy” was a way of seeing, not an ideology. The dramatic structure of the plays set up opposing views and values, all equally valid, equally desirable, and equally destructive alternatives. This structure invents illusory worlds that make sense in ways that consistently elude one’s power to articulate them rationally or logically. As Bradshaw demonstrates, Shakespeare, working with competing ideas of nature and value, makes us feel how a character “apprehends his own situation.” At the same time, Bradshaw observes, “the plays frame dual or multiple perspectives both on the characters and on issues like ‘love’ and ‘honour.’” According to Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s “perpectivism” made him more radical and more complex than logical and discursive thought could ever achieve.78 Millicent Bell analyzes Shakespeare’s four great tragedies in order to illustrate how the will to believe in universal coherence and meaning struggles unsuccessfully against skepticism. Bell argues that in the four great tragedies contrary views contend from line to line so that the audience must continually question the accepted truths of the time. As Stephen Booth wrote of Hamlet, Shakespeare took his audience to the “brink of intellectual terror.” That terror was characterized by the sense of limitlessness and boundlessness as well as the experience of “perceiving a multitude of intense relationships in an equal multitude of different systems of coherence, systems not subordinate to one another in a hierarchy of relative power.” Alasdair Macintyre characterized this phenomenon in Hamlet as exemplary of an “epistemological crisis” whereby, “the individual may come to recognize the possibility of systematically different possibilities of interpretation, of the existence of alternative and rival schemata which yields mutually incomprehensible accounts of what is going on around him.”79 These authors are describing a type of skepticism in Shakespeare that has as its core a radical perspectivism. In an age delving into the implications of perspective, Shakespeare’s tragedies dramatize the fact that only perspectivism could unveil the tragic nature of reality. In the epistemic crisis of his characters, Shakespeare portrayed human life as enmeshed in deception, illusion, deceit, and falsity. His perspectivism reﬂected the awareness that traditional modes of thought and inherited beliefs could no longer, in Bouwsma’s phrase, “invest experience with meaning.” With traditional assumptions crumbling, there was an uneasy awareness that the old was coming apart but had not yet been replaced by something new. Even more terrifying was the fear that underneath these vanishing values lay a seething underworld of evil and chaos. Like Montaigne, Shakespeare posed the question of how the human being could ﬁnd his bearings in an ever-shifting world. How was one to pierce through appearances to reality? Shakespeare’s characters had to negotiate reality in a universe far from God, a universe that was always uncertain, dissolving, in confusion, and often malevolent. His tragic heroes searched for reality in the

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midst of deceptions and delusions. And, once again, the anxiety about ﬁnding truth and reality expressed itself in questions about the relationship between appearances and reality. As Shakespeare developed his mature tragic vision, he was driven more and more toward questions about the power of deception, the human capacity to be deceived, the obfuscation of reality by illusions, and the problem of human perception.80 In Hamlet the difference between reality and appearance dominates every level of the play. This problematic issue opens the initial scenes by the counterpoising of the darkness of the night with the light of Claudius’s glittering court. We are confronted immediately with two different worlds. Throughout the play, these two worlds struggle against one another forcing the questions: What is real? What is true? What is illusion? How can one penetrate to reality? In the ﬁgure of Hamlet, Shakespeare heightens the conﬂict between appearance and realty to its highest pitch. As Maynard Mack explained, the mysteriousness of Hamlet’s world is forced on the audience from the beginning as Shakespeare dramatized, “Man in his bafﬂement, moving in darkness on a rampart between two worlds. . . .” Who is this inky-clad ﬁgure who arrives from Wittenberg? One of the many approaches to this eternally vexing question is to distinguish between the Hamlet in Act I, scene III from the Hamlet who later encounters the Ghost. The character of Hamlet is often assumed to be the young intellectual who is skeptical about the traditional values of his world. The ﬁrst glimpse we have of Hamlet does not show him to be the personiﬁcation of the early modern skeptic. At the beginning of the play, Hamlet is a young man suffering from grief and shock. The ﬁrst soliloquy of Hamlet expressed his deep disgust at his mother’s sickening, overhasty, and “incestuous” remarriage. He grieves the loss of his father and of the mother he thought he knew. In his grief and shock, but before any knowledge of the Ghost, Hamlet speaks of suicide. The world Hamlet experiences this early in the play is an “unveiled garden / That grows to seed” and is completely “possessed by things rank and gross in nature.” Wishing the “everlasting” had not forbidden suicide, Hamlet feels “How weary, stale, ﬂat, and unproﬁtable / Seem to me all the uses of this world!” [I.ii.129–136]. No words could better express the alienation caused by grief. Even before Hamlet had any knowledge of the Ghost, he was in tension with his world. Grief was the tool or means that distanced him from this world and awakened in him the feeling of the staleness and ﬂatness of life. In the beginning of this great tragedy, it was not necessarily skepticism but the shock of grief that detached Hamlet from the all-absorbing society around him. Nonetheless, Hamlet is not allowed to stay in the condition described in his ﬁrst soliloquy. The tension between Hamlet and the world is only beginning. In short, Hamlet is not permitted to be just melancholy. The Ghost pushes him further and forces him to see the deepest level of reality. This is the reality of the “night world,” the world the Ghost inhabits. Although the Ghost appears very few times, the world of the Ghost will gradually overshadow the

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whole play. After Horatio informs him of the Ghost, Hamlet closes the ﬁrst scene with the words calling for the night: My father’s spirit in arms! All is not well. I doubt some foul play. Would the night would come! Till then sit still, my soul. Foul deeds will rise Though all the earth o’erwhelm them, to men’s eyes. [I.ii.254–257] The foul deeds revealed in the night would defeat the “earth’s” desire to “o’erwhelm” them. Shakespeare accentuated the power of the night through his depictions of horror. The Ghost ﬁrst appeared to the watchman, “in the dead waste and middle of the night.” He reappeared to Horatio the next night but disappeared “like a guilty thing,” when the cock awakened, “the god of day.” Shakespeare emphasized the horror by comparing the appearance of the Ghost to the time when Caesar was killed, a time when, The graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets; As stars with trains of ﬁre and dews of blood, Disasters in the sun; and the moist star Upon whose inﬂuence Neptune’s empire stands Was sick almost to doomsday with eclipse. And even the like precurse of fear’d events, As harbingers preceding still the fates And prologue to the omen coming on, Have heaven and earth together demonstrated Unto our climatures and countrymen. [I.i.115–125] Shakespeare extended this image of open graves when Hamlet asks the Ghost, Why thy canoniz’d bones, hearsed in death, Have burst their cerements; why the sepulcher Wherein we say thee quietly interr’d Hath op’d his ponderous and marble jaws To cast thee up again. What may this mean, That thou, dead corse, again in complete steel Revists thus the glimpses of the moon, Making night hideous, and we fools of nature So horridly to shake our disposition With thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls? Say, why is this? Wherefore? What should we do? [I.iv.47–57]. The Ghost discloses to Hamlet a deeper reality that alienates him even more thoroughly from the traditional world of appearances. After the Ghost revealed what Claudius himself would later call that “primal eldest curse,” Hamlet could never fully return to the world he once knew. The nature of the Ghost’s

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description of the murder is worth recalling. Clearly Shakespeare was reminding his audience that Claudius’s murder of Old Hamlet was a reenactment of the Fall and the Cain and Abel story. The poison imagery that permeates the whole play is here associated with the “serpent” that “stung” Old Hamlet while “sleeping within his orchard.” This poison, poured into the “porches of his ears,” coursed through his body from within. While sleeping, the king was killed “by a brother’s hand.” This revelation, which is based on Genesis 3 and 4, forced Hamlet to look into the abyss of evil. Most importantly, it made Hamlet see that this evil was the foundation for the world of appearances. The knowledge of this evil rendered all other appearances and values fundamentally false. Now Hamlet is separated from everything he once knew, even from the “unweeded garden” of life. At this point, Hamlet changes from melancholy to tragic. Having gazed into the abyss, Hamlet could never again belong to Elsinore. Perhaps it was Nietzsche who best expressed this insight: In this sense Dionysiac man might be said to resemble Hamlet: both have looked deeply into the true nature of things, they have understood and are now loath to act. They realize that no action of theirs can work any change in the eternal condition of things and they regard the imputation as ludicrous or debasing that they should set right the time which is out of joint. Understanding kills action, for in order to act we require the veil of illusion; such is Hamlet’s doctrine, not to be confounded with the cheap wisdom of John-aDreams, who thought too much reﬂection, as it were, on a surplus of possibilities, never arrives at action. What both in the case of Hamlet and of Dionysiac man, overbalances any motive leading to action, is not reﬂection but understanding. Now no comfort any longer avails, desire reaches beyond the transcendental world, beyond the gods themselves, and existence, together with its glittering reﬂection in the gods and an immortal Beyond, is denied. The truth once seen, man is aware everywhere of the ghastly absurdity of existence, comprehends the symbolism of Ophelia’s fate and the wisdom of the wood sprite Silenus: Nausea invades him.81 After the revelation of the Ghost’s message and the night world of the abyss, Hamlet must still struggle to exist on that “rampart between two worlds.”82 He hesitates because the truth is not certain; he must discern whether this ghost be “a spirit of health or goblin damn’d.” He must know whether the Ghost “airs from heaven or blasts from hell.” But he also must account for his father’s command to “revenge.” To “revenge” is to “Remember me!” And yet the command for revenge backﬁres because it demands that Hamlet re-engage in that surface world he now recognizes to be false. As Nietzsche explained, action requires

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that the veil of illusion remain intact. Hamlet must re-enter the world, but in so doing he must become a part of its ultimate falsehood. Therefore, he must live between the two worlds. Shakespeare dramatized the separation between the two worlds most effectively in the person of Polonius. He intensiﬁed the suspense and horror of the Ghost by constantly shifting between the night scenes and those in which Polonius speaks. After Hamlet speaks those frightful words, “Would the night would come! . . . For deeds will rise, / Though all the earth o’erwhem them, to men’s eyes” [I.ii.255–257], we are immediately taken not to the Ghost but to Laertes, Ophelia, and Polonius. We turn from the initial knowledge of the Ghost’s murder to a conversation among these three unknowing persons. They speak of travel. They talk of romance and love. Laertes warns Ophelia that Hamlet’s position as prince precludes him from marrying her. We are then treated to Polonius’s fatuous advice to Laertes on how to conduct himself in the world where “the apparel oft proclaims the man,” a reference to one’s appearance as all-important. The scene ends with Polonius also warning Ophelia not to be deceived by Hamlet. She is not to take “these tenders for true pay, / Which are not sterling.” [I.iii.107–108]. Cautioning her about the falsehood of the world, Polonius tells her, “Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers, / Not of that dye which their investments show, / But mere implorators of unholy suits, / Breathing like sanctiﬁed and pious bawds, / The better to beguile” [I.iii.128–131]. It is noteworthy that Polonius warns his children about the traps and falsity of the “real” world by speaking of clothing, counterfeit money, and the false “dye” of one’s clothing and intentions. Polonius personiﬁes the world of appearances without knowing its ultimate falsity and gives advice on how to live within this realm. His intentions may be good, but his advice is both artiﬁcial and wrong if applied to a deeper reality. He mistakes Hamlet’s feelings for Ophelia and then goes on to misdiagnose the cause of Hamlet’s “madness” as lovesickness. His words introduce the theme of deceptions lurking around every corner—or arras—in the surface world of appearances. After hearing Polonius’s advice, Shakespeare returns us directly to the world of the night and the famous scene between Hamlet and the Ghost. The tale of murder is revealed and the night is truly “made hideous.” Hamlet is told to revenge his father. This scene ends with everyone sworn to secrecy, while Hamlet reveals that he will “put on an antic disposition.” However, everyone must keep their “ﬁngers on their lips.” Hamlet ends the scene by bemoaning his destiny, “The time is out of joint. O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right” [I.v.189–190]. Then we immediately return to Polonius, who is instructing Reynaldo how to spy on Laertes in France. He tells Reynaldo to gather information by speaking in a roundabout way and to invent false stories in order to ﬁnd out the truth about Laertes’s behavior. His instructions are exactly what Hamlet will proceed to do throughout the rest of the play: “See you now, your bait of falsehood takes

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this carp of truth; And thus do we of wisdom reach, / With windlasses and with assays of bias, / By indirections ﬁnd directions out” [II.i.59–63]. In the sequence of these scenes, Shakespeare has carefully plotted Polonius’s entrances and exits to correspond to those of the Ghost in order to highlight the disjunction between the worlds of appearance and reality, surface and depth, light and darkness. He arranged the scenes to move from the Ghost to Polonius, back to the Ghost, and then back to Polonius. This sequence also intersperses the appearance of the Ghost with scenes of Polonius in order to illustrate Hamlet’s dilemma as he is pulled back and forth between the two worlds. Finally, this sequence raises the ultimate question: What is real? Even the stark contrast between the two worlds does not erase the ambiguity present in each one. Who, then, is this spirit? Does the spirit only “assume” the “shape” or “ﬁgure” of the king? More importantly, is he a “spirit of health or goblin damned?” Hamlet is one of the ﬁrst ﬁgures to question and distance himself from his own real experience. Even after telling Horatio, “It is an honest ghost,” he later says: The spirit I have seen May be the devil, and the devil hath power T’assume a pleasing shape; yea, and perhaps Out of my weakness and my melancholy, As he is very potent with such spirits, Abuses [deceives] me to damn me. [II.ii.589–604] Thus Hamlet grudgingly returns to the world of the court to pierce through falsehood and secrets. He must re-enter this ever-bustling world in order to dig out the truth. In doing so, he must split himself between reality and appearance. He is no longer the one who “knows not seems”; he can no longer be the one who unites his inner and outer being. Hamlet now does know “seems” and realizes that he, too, must play a part. He must “put on” an “antic disposition” so that by seeming mad he can ﬁnd the truth. He joins all the other actors and players at Elsinore, but he does so with a dreadful secret. Throughout the rest of the play, Shakespeare creates layer upon layer of false appearances. This is clear in his constant use of visual imagery of those who do not “see” as well as in his metaphors of painting and women’s cosmetics. He also emphasizes the deceptive nature of appearances by the continual intrigue of spying. Throughout the play someone is always hiding, spying, and eavesdropping, with the result that they think they have found out the truth. Reynaldo is to spy on Laertes. Polonius and Claudius are “lawful espials” who hide behind a pillar so that “seeing unseen” they can spy on the encounter between Hamlet and Ophelia. Hamlet and Horatio spy on Claudius during the Mousetrap play. They again spy when they are in the graveyard watching Ophelia’s burial. Hamlet spies on Claudius while at prayer, concluding falsely that he is repenting of his sin. Polonius spies behind

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an arras as Hamlet confronts Gertrude, with the result that he is accidentally killed. After this death, Hamlet utters a phrase that summarizes the nature of this surface world. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern tell Hamlet that he must disclose where he has hidden Polonius’s body. Hamlet ends their enigmatic exchange with the words, “Of nothing. Bring me to him. Hide fox and all after.” This latter phrase is a reference to the game of hide-and-seek. Everyone has been playing hide-and-seek, including Hamlet, for this game is the nature of the human condition in the surface world of appearances. Two scenes best illustrate the dilemma that Hamlet confronts in having to enter the world of the court. The most crucial is the Mousetrap play. Hamlet’s “madness” tells us that he must put on a false appearance in order to penetrate through false appearances. It is Hamlet who fulﬁlls Polonius’s words, “If circumstances lead me, I will ﬁnd / Where truth is hid, though it were hid indeed / Within the center” [II.iii.157–159]. Hamlet is the one to ﬁnd the hidden truth. However, he must use a play in order to unmask the role acted by Claudius. He must enter even more deeply into the non-real in order to uncover the real. Instructing Horatio, Hamlet says, Observe my uncle. If his occulted guilt Do not itself unkennel in one speech, It is a damned ghost that we have seen, And my imaginations are as foul As Vulcan’s stithy. Give him heedful note, For I mine eyes will rivet to his face, And after we will both our judgments join In censure of his seeming. [III.ii.79–86] After the play, Hamlet cries, “O good Horatio, I’ll take the ghost’s word for a thousand pound. Dids’t perceive?” [III.ii.283]. Repeatedly, visual images of seeing or not seeing demonstrate the elusiveness of reality and truth. Just as Hamlet’s cloud becomes a camel, then a weasel, and ﬁnally a whale, so, too, the perception of reality is slippery and puzzling. Such visual images also dominate the confrontation between Gertrude and Hamlet. In this scene, Hamlet holds up a “glass” so that Gertrude “may see” her inmost parts. Holding up the pictures of his father and of Claudius, Hamlet twice asks, “Have you eyes?” He then inquires, “What devil was’t / That thus cozen’d you at hoodman-blind? / Eyes without feeling, feeling without sight” [III.iv.77–79]. The bafﬂing question of sight and reality culminates when only Hamlet can see the Ghost in his mother’s room. Thus Gertrude asks, Alas, how is’t with you, That you do bend your eye on vacancy, And with th’ incorporal air do hold discourse? Forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep . . . Whereon do you look?

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Hamlet replies Do you see nothing there? Gertrude answers, Nothing at all; yet all that is I see. [III.iv.120–128] But “seeing” in both its visual and mental dimensions has become problematic. Images denoting “show,” “act,” “play,” “put on,” “watch,” “assume,” “paint,” “see,” and “seem” pervade the story in order to emphasize the ambiguity, duplicity, and falsity of this apparent world. Reality is hard to ﬁnd and deceptiveness has to become the means to the truth. A play, or king acting in a play, in view of a seemingly legitimate king is, in turn, watched by men who spy on that king in order ﬁnally to uncover the truth. The convoluted nature of this plot demonstrates how deeply the truth is hidden beneath deception. The play within the play illustrates the layers of deception: the audience is watching actors while they themselves are watched by other characters—all of whom are watching the play. The multiplying of the various perspectives makes it clear that truth is hidden and must be “found.” References to “blind-man’s bluff” or hide-and-seek also depict how difﬁcult it is to ﬁnd the path to the goal, that is, to the truth “hid within the center.” The court has not changed at the end of the play. Claudius is secretly plotting with Laertes to kill Hamlet. They will trick Hamlet with poison in a rigged sword ﬁght. But Hamlet has changed. Scholars agree that the Hamlet who returns to the court is a changed and more dangerous man. He tells Horatio of the “ﬁghting” in his heart that would not let him sleep has ended. The reason for this change in Hamlet, however, is debated. Perhaps the change has been misinterpreted. The discovery of Claudius’s plot and the killing of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern were really an extension of the “blind-man’s bluff” that constituted the Court of Elsinore. The most compelling explanation for Hamlet’s transformation is not only the events on the ship but also the encounter in the graveyard. It was Yorick’s skull that transformed Hamlet. In the graveyard scene the two worlds are brought together, face to face. Every major character in the play is present in the graveyard and the reality of death is omnipresent. Ophelia’s open grave harkens back to the “ponderous and marble jaws” of Old Hamlet’s grave that opened and cast him forth. In the graveyard scene Hamlet squarely faces the full horror of death and decay. Now Hamlet knows the answer to his former question, “What is this quintessence of dust?” To what base uses we may return, Horatio! Why may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander, till ‘a ﬁnd it stopping a bung hole? [V.i.202–204]

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Alexander died, Alexander was buried, Alexander returneth to dust; the dust is earth, of earth we make loam; and why of that loam, whereto he was converted, might they not stop a beer-barrel? Imperious Caesar, dead and turn’d to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away. O, that that earth which kept the world in awe Should patch a wall t’ expel the winter’s ﬂaw! [V. I 209–216] As the play has progressed, the Ghost has become ominously more and more real, eventually “overwhelming” the ever-busy plots of Claudius’s court. Hamlet gradually came to belong more to the underworld of death and the night, the truth of which he could not deny. The demand for revenge caused him a fundamental existential problem that went beyond the Christian censure of such deeds.83 Hamlet had to ask how one acts in a world he no longer believes to be fundamentally real. It was not skepticism that made Hamlet tragic but the reverse: the knowledge that reality is ultimately a tragic horror made Hamlet skeptical regarding the world of appearances. He was still caught between two worlds. Just as the Ghost was caught in the middle world of purgatory and walking about as an “extravagant [wandering] and erring spirit,” so, too, Hamlet was caught between the world of the night and the surface world of appearances, plots, intrigue, and action.84 Returning to the court, Hamlet was no longer playing a part. He has seen and understood too much. He speaks of a providence that is really a kind of resignation to fate, “If it be now, ‘tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come. The readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows what is it leave betimes, let be” [V.ii.218–222]. By the time Hamlet ﬁnally takes action, he is most dangerous, detached, and ready to leave this world. Hamlet has ﬁnally “let go.” He falls victim to the methods of the world he left behind. He falls prey to the manipulation of the appearances orchestrated by Claudius. He does not see the trap that is to cause his death. He is out of practice in the ways of this world. As he lay dying, Hamlet still begs for the truth to be revealed: “O God, Horatio, what a wounded name, / Things standing thus unknown, shall I leave/behind me. / If thou didst ever hold me in thy heart, / Absent thee from felicity awhile, / And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain / To tell my story” [V. ii.345–350]. It is now Hamlet who echoes the cry of his father to be remembered. To the very end Hamlet’s demand for the truth remains the core of his being. It is the only act of integrity he can cling to within this false world—and the only act he can take with him into the world of the night. And so Horatio, after bidding, “Good night, sweet prince; and ﬂights of angels take thee to thy rest!” summarizes the world of appearances, a world in

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which Hamlet could not live. This was a world of meaningless events, of accidents and mistakes—all denoting the transient, futile, and ultimately deceptive nature of this surface realm. And let me speak to th’ yet unknowing world How these things came about. So shall you hear Of carnal, bloody, and unnatural acts, Of accidental judgments, casual slaughters, Of deaths put on by cunning and forc’d cause, And, in this upshot, purposes mistook Fall’n on th’ inventors’ heads. All this can I Truly deliver. [V.ii.381–388] The painful discovery of the difference between certainty and illusion, appearances and reality, surface and depth, preoccupied Shakespeare as he composed Othello.85 Othello’s story was one that allowed him to focus intensely on the problem of perception and truth. As we watch these pairs of opposites replace one another, we witness the collapse of all order, stability, meaning, and certainty. In the marriage of Othello and Desdemona we begin with the ideal of romantic love in which we ﬁnd the vision of goodness, love, and loyalty. Shakespeare is also careful to portray Othello and Desdemona as so much in love that they are transparent to one another. In fact, Othello sees himself as transparent to everyone, as is evident in his words about appearing before the duke, Desdemona’s father, and the senators. Refusing to hide, Othello calms Iago by saying, “My parts, my title, and my perfect soul / Shall manifest me rightly” [I.ii.31–32]. Desdemona says of Othello, “My heart’s subdu’d / Even to the very quality of my lord. / I saw Othello visage in his mind.” Denying the charge that he seduced Desdemona by witchcraft, Othello protested, “She lov’d me for the dangers I had pass’d, / And I lov’d her that she did pity them. / This only is the witchcraft I have us’d” [I.iii.169–172]. In the opening of the play we also have the portrait of an epic hero who is conﬁdent and certain of his identity: “My services which I have done the signiory / Shall out-tongue his complaints. ‘Tis yet to know— / Which, when I know that boasting is an honor, / I shall promulgate—I fetch my life and being / From men of royal siege, and my demerits / May speak unbonneted to as proud a fortune / As this that I have reach’d” [I.ii.18–24]. However, into this world slinks what Heilman has called the “athlete of deception.”86 With the entrance of Iago we watch the development of that jealousy that Millicent Bell has described as “an epistemological crisis that brings everything into doubt.”87 Iago envisions himself as the skeptic out to destroy all delusions of ideality. To Iago, love, honor, loyalty, virtue, and goodness are selfdelusions or presumptions by which human nature pretends to be other than it really is. “Virtue,” he says, is “a ﬁg.” Without the constraint of reason, the

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unconstrained lusts of human nature would rage out of control, “If the balance of our lives had not one scale of reason to poise another of sensuality, the blood and baseness of our natures would conduct us to most prepost’rous conclusions. But we have reason to cool our raging motions, our carnal stings, our unbitted lusts, whereof I take this that you call love to be a sect or scion” [I. iii.329–335]. Iago believes that he is the destroyer of false ideas by which humans deceive themselves. He is the “new man,” without illusions, without belief in the unseen, and without idealism. Thus Iago refers to himself as the “honest man,” who, as Empson argued, “can see through nonsense.”88 Having rejected the ideals with which human beings deceive themselves, Iago says about Othello, “The Moor is of a free and open nature, / That thinks men honest that but seem to be so, / And will as tenderly be led by th’ nose / As asses are. / I have’t. It is engend’red. Hell and night / Must bring this monstrous birth to the world’s light” [I.iii.403–404]. Iago sees himself as a superior observer of reality. Because he is without the blindness of idealism, Iago believes he can strip others of their self-deceiving delusions by which they try to live. Iago is also a superior observer of reality because he is evil; he has no constraints holding him back or restraining his means and purposes. Ever since Coleridge described the problem of interpreting Iago as “the motive hunting of motiveless malignity,” there has been an abundance of literature that attempts to explain the motive of Iago. It is certainly the case that Iago feels the condescension directed toward him by Othello, Cassio, and others. But ﬁnally we come back always to the fact that Iago personiﬁes the envy of evil associated with the devil. Nicholas Grene has astutely analyzed the ﬁgure of Iago in the traditional sense of the Fall. As Grene explains, the scene in Act III.iii is relevant as an analogy of the Fall, especially in the way it shows the “inch-by-inch movement of the tempting strategy, and yet also the instantaneity of yielding with the absoluteness of the change which it brings about.”89 Moreover, it cannot be insigniﬁcant that Othello’s temptation scene occurs in III.iii, just as the Fall is recounted in Genesis 3:3. In any event, Iago works his way into the trust of Othello with various hints, disavowals, and insinuations that gradually lead him to disavow all that he once held as true and certain. Furthermore, Iago had no fear; the world he was about to expose was a world of which he was very much aware and in which he was at home. Iago’s creed is the discrepancy between reality and appearance. For Iago, appearance and reality can so easily replace one another that there is no stable ground on which to stand. In Iago, Shakespeare used a cynical skepticism to manipulate appearances and to achieve demonic purposes. The play constantly refers to “deception.” Even in the opening scenes when the members of the Senate are confronted with the fact that a Turkish ﬂeet has moved up to Cyprus, the First Senator says, “This cannot be / By no assay of reason. ‘Tis a pageant / To keep us in false gaze.” The reference to the “false gaze” [I.iii.20] foretells the

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way in which the story will proceed at Iago’s prompting. As in Montaigne, the world in Othello is one of constant ﬂux, lacking all solidity and stability. But there is no benevolent “nature” that can act as a guide.90 Montaigne’s world lacked the malignant force of evil. This was not the case with Othello. Iago is constantly transforming truth into falsehood, certainty into deception, and appearances into reality with the most malign of intentions. As Heilman argued, Iago converts qualities into their opposites.91 As the physician, Iago is a poisoner. While Iago acts as the doctor, diagnosing the various characters in the play, he is also the one who poisons and spreads a plague. In the temptation scene Iago identiﬁes himself with the act of poisoning when he says, I will in Cassio’s lodging lose this napkin, And let him ﬁnd it. Triﬂes light as air Are to the jealous conﬁrmations strong As proofs from holy writ. This may do something. The Moor already changes with my poison. Dangerous conceits are, in their natures, poisons Which at the ﬁrst are scarce found to distaste, But with a little act upon the blood Burn like the mines of sulphur. [III.iii.327–334] As the light-bearer, Iago brings darkness. In Act V, Cassio wounds Rodrigo, and Iago wounds Cassio. Cassio calls out, “O help, ho! Light! A surgeon!” After a delay, Gratiano says that someone is coming “with a light.” Iago appears carrying a light—and weapons. Iago lies and pretends how shocked he is that Cassio has been “sent on in the dark” and asks, “Kill men i’ th’ dark?” Iago’s transformation of light into darkness culminates in the ﬁnal scene in Desdemona’s bedroom. Here again, Iago enters “with a light.” By means of these actions, Iago dissolves the boundaries between the real and the unreal, between “seeming and seeing.”92 He confuses reality and appearance and thereby uncovers chaos and brutality. The reason that Iago is so successful in these reversals is that he himself has no form, no stable identity or essence. He is a chameleon or formless vacancy who takes on whatever identity the circumstances demand. As Bell argues, Iago’s work is “to destroy belief in unimpugnable essences,” including the essence of personal identity.93 Iago shows that “nothing belongs inalienably to one’s nature.” Iago’s own formlessness is introduced in the opening of the play as his main characteristic. He tells Rodrigo that he is one of those “Who, trimm’d in forms and visages of duty, / Keep yet their hearts attending on themselves, / And throwing but shows of service on their lords, / Do well thrive by them, and when they have lin’d / their coats / Do themselves homage” [I.i.51–58]. He only “seems” to act for love or duty. And such a one do I profess myself. For sir, It is as sure as you are Rodrigo,

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Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago. In following him, I follow but myself— Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty, But seeming so, for my peculiar end. The native act and ﬁgure of my heart In compliment extern, ‘tis not long after But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve For daws to peck at, I am not what I am. [I.i.61–66] The phrase “I am not what I am” begs us instinctively to insert the word “seem.” But Iago’s phrase is a blasphemous counterpoint to Yahweh’s “I am that am.”94 In these words Iago’s diabolical character emerges. Both his invidia and his nothingness reveal him as the demonic. This identiﬁcation is conﬁrmed by the reptilian images used to refer to him. But most importantly, Iago is demonic because he is the “father of lies.” Using the tradition that the devil comes as the “angel of light,” Shakespeare knew that Iago must appear good in order to effect evil. In Shakespeare’s source, Cinthio, Iago is described as a man with an attractive and charming exterior. Iago’s evil nature must be concealed within something handsome and virtuous. Therefore Iago states, “‘Tis here, but yet confus’d. / Knavery’s plain face is never seen till us’d” [II.i.310–311]. In a later soliloquy, Iago repeats this insight that so fascinated Luther: “How am I then a villain / To counsel Cassio to this parallel course, / Directly to his good? Divinity of hell! / When devils will the blackest sins put on, / They do suggest at ﬁrst with heavenly shows, / As I do now” [II.iii.345–347]. As the vacant, empty, and formless ﬁgure of evil, Iago can exploit the human ability—even desire—to be deceived. Iago’s vacany, emptiness, and ﬂuidity of character and appearances have been noted by many Shakespeare scholars. According to Bell, Iago presented a “philosophical skepticism that suggested the same deprecation of essences that underlies the writings of Montaigne.”95 Like Luther’s devil, Iago’s method of deceit is all-important. He is the master of dissimulation or the manipulator of appearances. He is the liar. He deceives by pretending to be loyal and good. In Iago’s world the false permeates the true, rendering both unreal. Iago can manipulate appearances so masterfully that he can make things appear and disappear with no regard to any actual being or reality. In so doing, he destroys all trust in the identity of appearance and reality and renders all reality elusive and unstable. As he lies to Othello, or “pours pestilence into his ear,” Iago always claims to be making reality visible. He insists that he is only bringing to light that which lies concealed, unseen, and unknown. He replaces truth with falsehood, being with seeming, reality with appearance. He renders all experience thoroughly malleable and unreliable. Appearance and reality become so indistinguishable that their ﬂuidity dissolves all difference between the real and the unreal. Seeming and seeing are constantly conﬂated or reversed. He draws Othello

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into a vertiginous world that has no substantiality and consists only of elusiveness, shifting illusions, deception, and doubt. As the ﬁgure of the demonic, Iago seeks to reverse all norms and beliefs that keep chaos at bay. The play is full of references to transformations that are, in fact, reversals. Following his statement, “I am not what I am,” Iago promises to discredit Desdemona by turning “her virtue into pitch”[II. iii. 354]. By the end of the play, Desdemona has become a “fair devil” to Othello [III. iii 482]. Of course the greatest transformation is the change from what Othello thought his nature was into that of a brutal beast, a transformation traced in the play by the increasing number of animalistic images.96 In Iago’s hands, even the line between humanity and the bestial world evaporates. At the end of the play, Lodovico asks regarding Othello, “Is this the nature / Whom passion could not shake?” In a massive understatement Iago answers, “He is much chang’d” [IV.i.267]. At the end, even Othello refers to himself in the past tense: “That’s he that was Othello. Here I am.” [V. ii. 292]. This haunting reply echoes Iago’s earlier words, “I am not what I am.” If Iago’s creed is the ﬂuidity between appearance and reality, Othello’s creed was their identity. As Grene states, for Othello, as for Troilus, the identity of appearance and reality, of beauty and truth, are crucial to the integrity of a moral universe.97 Othello craved a stability that would provide him with certainty. He could not live among shifting appearances. He could not endure the chameleon-like existence personiﬁed by Iago. A comparison with Montaigne is instructive on this point. If we recall Montaigne’s urging for the acceptance of the incomplete life lived amidst appearances, we will see Othello as one who shows that life to be unbearable. Montaigne thought such a world to be safer. But Shakespeare made clear that an insubstantial world was open to the endless manipulations by a ﬁgure such as Iago. People such as Desdemona and Othello were easily victims of those who chose not to accept but, rather, to exploit the ﬂuidity of the world of appearances. And people like Othello were particularly vulnerable to the deceptions of Iago because Othello could not live with doubt and skepticism. The nagging doubt instilled into Othello’s mind by Iago was “What can you know?” The result was an epistemological relativism that was unbearable.98 If appearances are, indeed, all we have with which to live, Othello’s world has become chaotic darkness. Othello demanded certainty at all costs. Shakespeare demonstrated this demand for certitude by using terms of sight throughout the play, words such as “see,” “perceive,” “behold,” “mark,” “look,” and “light.” Othello’s insistence for “ocular proof” is only the most explicit portrayal of his craving for certitude. Moreover, sight belongs to the world we experience. By undermining knowledge gained by sight, language, and appearances, Shakespeare’s Iago is throwing all of experienced reality into doubt. If all we have, as Montaigne suggested, is appearances, then the constant shifting and manipulating of those appearances leaves one in a world of constant instability.

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Iago uses that mutability to strip Othello of all certainty through a manipulation of appearances that renders all of experience unreliable. His intent reaches it culmination in the temptation scene. Here Iago stealthily, inch by inch, plants jealously in Othello’s mind. As in Hamlet, Shakespeare used the imagery of poison. Poison, like adultery, is that which cannot be readily observed and, therefore, “infects unseen.” Shakespeare masterfully depicts how Iago pretends that he does not want to share his suspicions with Othello. Othello has to force it out of him as he insists again and again that Iago tell him what he is thinking. Finally, Othello cries, “As if there were some monster in his thought / Too hideous to be shown. Thou dost mean something. / I heard thee say even now, thou lik’st not that, / When Cassio left my wife. What didst not like? . . . As if thou then hadst shut up in thy brain / Some horrible conceit. If thou dost love me, / Show me thy thought” [III.iii.112–121.1144]. Othello attributes Iago’s hesitation to his “honesty” saying, “This honest creature doubtless / Sees and knows more, much more, than he unfolds” [III.iii.249– 250]. Iago moves back and forth with hints and disavowals therby dragging Othello into deception. Regarding Cassio, both Othello and Iago agree that “Men should be what they seem” [III.iii.131–133]. But what are they? Othello no longer knows. The ground is shifting beneath him as all his previous assumptions and experiences come into question. He begins to doubt Desdemona and demands the certainty that he still believes sight can offer: For she had eyes, and chose me. No, Iago, I’ll see before I doubt; when I doubt, prove; And on the proof, there is no more but this— Away at once with love or jealousy! [III.iii.195–198] Othello’s demands for certainty become obsessive. He tells Iago, “Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore! / Be sure of it. Give me the ocular proof, / Or, by the worth of mine eternal soul, / Thou hadst been better have been born a dog / Than answer my wak’d wrath!” [III.iii.364–368]. After Iago asks, “Is‘t come to this?” Othello answers, “Make me to see ‘t or, at the least, so prove it / That the probation bear no hinge nor loop/To hang a doubt on; or woe upon thy life!” [III.iii.368–371]. The play is full of references to “proofs.” In the temptation scene, Iago humbly states, “I speak not yet of proof.” He then speaks of “other proofs” as if some proofs already existed. But Othello has already begun to trust Iago’s perception. Although Iago has not “proven” or “shown” Othello anything, nonetheless, Othello tells him, “If more thou dost perceive, let me know more.” Shakespeare repeatedly made Othello assume that he had seen or heard “more” than he actually had witnessed. The most startling of these statements is found in the exchange between Emilia and Othello after Desdemona’s murder. Emilia cannot believe that her husband, Iago, has convinced Othello of Desdemona’s unfaithfulness. Othello replies, “Ay ‘twas he that told me on her ﬁrst. An honest man he is” [V.ii.153–153]. That Iago was the “ﬁrst” to tell him leaves the impression

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that others had also told him of Desdemona’s adultery. But, of course, we know this to be false. By adding words such as “more” and “ﬁrst,” Shakespeare portrayed the growth of a new certainty in Othello’s deluded mind. Othello expresses the anxiety of that uncertainty he cannot bear when he says, “I think my wife be honest and think she is not; / I think that thou art just and think that thou art not. / I’ll have some proof” [III.iii.389–395]. Shortly thereafter, he convinces himself that Iago is right—even before spying on Cassio and Iago conversing. After Iago “thickens the other proofs” with the report of Cassio’s alleged sleep talking, Othello cries, “Now I do see ‘tis true. Look here, Iago, / All my fond love thus do I blow to heaven, / ’Tis gone. / Arise, black vengeance from the hollow hell!” [III.iii.448–551]. On the basis of a dream reported secondhand, Othello is willing to exchange one certainty for another. Anything is better than “not knowing” the truth, as is clear in Othello’s words, “Thou hast set me on the rack. / I swear ‘tis better to be much abus’d [deceived] / Than to know ‘t a little” [III.iii.340–343.]. As Othello begins to distrust Desdemona, he fully believes that he is ﬁnally seeing reality for what it is. Like Iago, he has become a man “in the know” about the world. Calling Iago a fellow of “exceeding honesty,” he completely believes what Iago “sees and knows” [IV.i.279]. After spying on Iago and Cassio, Othello agrees with Iago’s “perceiving” and “seeing.” He interprets Cassio’s laughter and the handkerchief as if he were party to the conversation [IV.i.102–160]. In fact, before Iago even has a chance to tell him what Cassio allegedly said, Othello says, “How shall I murder him, Iago?” [IV.i.169]. He yells at Desdemona that he “saw” the handkerchief. He informs Emilia that her husband, “honest, honest Iago,” revealed the truth to him about his wife [V.ii.144–164]. Of course, the tragedy is that when he “sees” he is deceived; when he thought he was deceived, he “saw” the truth. But by this time, reality has become so unstable that the idea of “the truth” has become radically ambiguous and unsteady. In Othello, Shakespeare shared Luther’s fear that evil parodied the good in such a way as to seem all too real. In Othello the power of evil acts by making falsehood parody the truth to such an extent that its masquerade is undetectable. As did Montaigne, Shakespeare undermined that sense most identiﬁed with knowledge in order to render the possibility of knowledge questionable. By focusing on the relationship between perception and truth, Shakespeare portrayed a deep skepticism about the power of perception, the ability to interpret experience, and the stability of reality. By changing light into darkness, Iago rendered all of reality precarious. In the ﬁgure of Othello, Shakespeare has shown the danger of the demand for certainty as well as the unbearable difﬁculty of living without it. By destroying the identity between reality and appearance, Iago brings Othello to a “seeming” but “certain” knowledge that is the opposite of truth. The ﬁnal words of the play epitomize the theme of perception and reality. In the ﬁnal scene, the emphasis on “sight” gives way to “speech.” Iago tells

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Emilia, “I told him what I thought, and told no more / Than what he found himself was apt and true” [V.ii.183–184]. The dialogue then centers on Emilia’s repeated attempts “to speak.” Determined to speak, she rebukes Iago by saying, “I will not charm my tongue; I am bound to speak.” She emphatically insists on speaking three more times and ﬁnally is able to reveal Iago’s plot. Signiﬁcantly, Iago’s last words are about silence: Othello: Will you, I pray, demand that demi-devil Why he hath thus ensnar’d my soul and body? Iago: Demand me nothing. What you know you know. From this time forth, I never will speak word. [V.ii.309–312] This silence of Iago’s is most important. As Heilman and others have noted, with his absolute silence, Iago retreats from the world of social intercourse. A further comparison with Montaigne is useful. Despite his barbs about the “airy medium of words,” Montaigne had a deep love of language. This is clear not only from his use of words but also the vitality of his expression and style. It was because of this deep love of language that he so vehemently criticized the misuse of words. He was aware of the fragility of language. However, Montaigne knew that although words are easily misused, nonetheless, language is all that we have to keep society intact. Consequently he condemned lying as a crime against society. In his essay “On Giving the Lie,” Montaigne warned, “Our truth nowadays is not what is, but what others can be convinced of.” It is a dangerous situation when “dissimulation is among the most notable qualities of this century.” Montaigne knew that lying was dangerous because it broke down all civil ties. As Montaigne wrote, “Since mutual understanding is brought about solely by way of words, he who breaks his word betrays human society. It [language] is the only instrument by means of which our wills and thoughts communicate, it is the interpreter of the soul. If it fails us, we have no more hold on each other, no more knowledge of each other. If it deceives us, it breaks up all our relations and dissolves all bonds of our society” [II.18.505].99 By means of lying, Iago did exactly what Montaigne had feared. He “dissolved all bonds of our society.” Rendering knowledge uncertain and words deceptive, it was really Iago who made “chaos come again.” Both King Lear and Macbeth portray that world where “chaos is come again.” These two plays dramatize a fundamental insight running throughout Shakespeare’s great tragedies: just beneath the surface of the civilized world lies an underworld of chaos, disorder, savagery, violence, and the raging abyss. And, once again, the issue of appearances and reality poses the question of how this surface world and this feral depth are related. Can the surface world of appearances make any ﬁnal claim to reality? What is the value of this realm where humanity functions and maneuvers? The realm of appearances has in place such structures and ideals as justice, law, reason, legitimacy, and hierarchy as well as the bonds of family and society. The latter include the ideals of

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love, reverence, obedience, and loyalty. All of these values depend ultimately on order because order is essential for the survival and preservation of human civilization. These manifestations of order become, in these plays, the world of appearances. Shakespeare believed that the means of order were not something inherent and immutable in nature. In these plays, appearances serve a different function than deception. Rather, humans create the appearances of order for the vigilant restraint of chaos and evil. In the opening scenes of both King Lear and Macbeth, Shakespeare threw into question the basic bonds that held together the family and the state. In Shakespeare’s presentation, “nature” dictates loyalty, care, gratitude, and obedience toward parents and superiors. Ideally there is a cosmic and earthly hierarchy exempliﬁed in the proper relationships between parents and children or between kings and their subjects. Reason, love, and loyalty secure this order. By overthrowing such values, the world is “turned upside down.” In these two tragedies, Shakespeare posed a slightly different question from that which we encountered in Hamlet and Othello. He was, of course, asking about the deceptive nature of appearances. But in King Lear and Macbeth he was also exploring the power of those appearances. Were the appearances in the phenomenal world powerful enough to hold back the forces of chaos? In King Lear, Shakespeare addressed these issues by combining the theme of the “natural” versus the “unnatural” with the imagery of sight and blindness. A further image that will be important for understanding the complex relationship between appearance and reality is that of boundaries and restraint. All of these themes and images unite around the question of what would happen if the instruments of order were transgressed. King Lear begins with a preordained purpose wrapped in a highly ritualistic ceremony. That ceremony, which is the love-test, denotes order but actually marks an action that is fundamentally unnatural. Lear divides his kingdom while retaining “the name, and all th’ addition to a king.” The division of a kingdom is the ﬁrst violation of order. As Lear’s daughter, Regan, later remarks, “Should many people under two commands / Hold amity? / Tis hard, almost impossible” [II.iv.242–2431].100 In his act of division, Lear carefully draws three new boundaries on a map. The new boundaries are publicly announced and bestowed in order that “future strife / May be prevented now.” Kent then pleads with Lear to “Check / This hideous rashness.” When Lear orders Kent “out of my sight,” Kent responds, “See better Lear.” Although Cordelia vows to “obey,” “honor,” and “love” Lear according to her natural “bond,” Lear yells that he prefers the “barbarous Scythian” or he who eats his children [I.i.1–160]. Shakespeare has set up all the imagery that will depict the oncoming collapse: sight, boundaries, natural obligation, barbarity, and a plea for restraint that goes unanswered. The subplot immediately reinforces the themes of the opening scene. Edmund prays to “nature” as his goddess. Like Goneril and Regan, Edmund’s

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“nature” is the law of self-interest that disregards natural laws and ethical bonds.101 For Edmund, the “plague of custom” is mere opinion. He is determined to “Let me / if not by birth, have lands by wit / All with one’s meet that I can fashion ﬁt.” For Edmund, anything is a justiﬁable means to his end. His cry, “Now, gods stand up for bastards!” is a challenge to nobility and monarchy, both of which rested on legitimacy. Edmund impugns the law of primogeniture as he plots to ruin Edgar, Gloucester’s son, by “order of law.” In response to Edmund’s false attempt to conceal the forged letter, Gloucester says, “Let’s see, let’s see” [I.ii.1–44]. Gloucester then repeats Othello’s mistake by refusing to wait and to live with uncertainty. Telling Edmund to ﬁnd Edgar, Gloucester says, “I would unstate myself, to be in a due resolution” [II.ii.101–102.] Nature, or the natural, is now opposed to the unnatural, and this opposition corresponds to those who think they “see” the ways of the world and those who have been exiled. This antithesis will be strained to the breaking point and will result in the eruption of that disorder accurately depicted by the superstitious Gloucester: These late eclipses in the sun and moon portend no good to us. Though the wisdom of nature can reason it thus and thus, yet nature ﬁnds itself scourg’d by the sequent effects. Love cools, friendship falls off, brothers divide; in cities, mutinies; in countries, discord; in palaces treason; and the bond crack’d twixt son and father. This villain of mine comes under the prediction; there’s son against father. The King falls from bias of nature; there’s father against child. We have seen the best of our time. Machinations, hollowness, treachery, and all ruinous disorders follow us disquietly to our graves. [I.ii.106–117] As Grene states regarding this passage, “It may be a mistake to blame it on the stars, but something terrible is happening in the world of King Lear, and its causes are obscure. An irresistible movement is on towards the expulsion of the good, a movement so apparently arbitrary and convulsive as to suggest something beyond the observable concatenation of human characters and events.”102 Lear assumed he could safely divide his kingdom and create new boundaries because he trusted in the natural obligation of loyalty, obedience, duty, love, and gratitude. And yet, as the fool never tires of telling him, Lear inverted all order by making “his daughters his mothers.” Hence the fool asks, “Mads’t thy daughters thy mothers?” and “May not an ass know when the cart draws the horse?” [I.iv.169–170, 220–221]. This inversion of order is recognized as reality itself when Lear tells the now-blinded Gloucester, “See with thine ears. See how yond justice rails upon yond simple thief. Hark in thine ear: change places and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?”[IV. vi.151–154]. The “handy-dandy” interchange of justice and the thief is played

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out again in the loss of identities throughout the play. When order is lost, so are identities. As Lear begins to recognize this loss of order and identity, he, like Othello, speaks of himself as absent or unknown: “Does anyone here know me? This is not Lear / Does Lear walk thus? Speak thus? Where are his eyes? / Either his notion weakens, his discernings / Are lethargied—Ha waking! Tis not so. / Who is it who can tell me who I am?” [I.iv.222–226]. The ﬂuidity of all order takes on a nightmare quality, a nightmare from which one cannot wake up. Edgar is disguised as a poor and mad beggar. Gloucester is blinded. Kent is outlawed and disguised as Caius. And Edmund takes on the identity of his father as he becomes the duke of Gloucester. The Lear universe is a world where truth must hide and goodness must be exiled. Truth is “under eclipse” and “exiled into the language of the mentallyretarded, the mad, the possessed.”103 The convulsive movement toward madness and chaos is unrelenting as Lear comes face to face with the inscrutability of the universe. The “monster ingratitude” rears up and begins to reveal what is just under the surface. Ingratitude is unnatural and opens the door to the underworld or, in Bradshaw’s terms, the “undernature.”104 Equally important, Lear’s increasing skepticism also comes face to face with the emptiness of the heavens, the silence of the gods, and the absence of divine providence. As Elton observed, Lear “touched the abyss of disbelief in a nihilism that discounts the heavens themselves.”105 Lear shouts, “Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted ﬁend, / More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child / Than a sea monster” [I.iv.258]. The references to the depths and the sea-monster are signiﬁcant. Throughout the play, references to the “deep” and that which is “below,” “beneath,” and “under” will multiply. The underworld is rising with all of its fury. Cruelty, an animalistic sexuality, aggression, and violence have been raging below the surface. They are now bursting forth. The action is frantic, relentless, and confusing. Throughout the play, people are running—always at night, in the dark—with letters, rumors, and plots. This sense of frenzy and derangement is intensiﬁed by the terror of what Stephen Booth has called the “boundlessness” in the play. The language and structure of the play is characterized by limitlessness, a lack of ﬁnality, or a “confrontation with inconclusiveness.”106 Lear began by trying to draw new boundaries. Now we see that even mental boundaries are collapsing. Deﬁnition is illusory. No system or category can contain reality. We cannot get our bearings in this play because, “there are no bearings to get.” To illustrate this boundlessness, Booth suggests we ask ourselves a question: “Stop for a minute and ask yourself in simple-minded terms whether the battle in Act V is won by the good side or the bad side.” The French lose to the English, which means that “our side” wins. But this is the party of Goneril and Regan. The armies of Lear and Cordelia lose. Albany, then, “simultaneously ﬁghts against and on behalf of Lear and Cordelia.” Booth demonstrates that this “simple-minded question” leads to confusion and to the recognition that there is no secure point of view.

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This “boundlessness” or “limitlessness” occurs both in the “inconclusive”107 structure of the play and in its imagery and content. Shakespeare was dramatizing the fact that the limits imposed by the surface world of appearances could not hold. While the heavens are silent, the depths are erupting. Lear is terriﬁed by this bursting of boundaries and restraints, both physical and mental. Fearing madness, or the “tempest in my mind,” he cries, “O, that way madness lies; let me shun that! / No more of that” [III.iv. 21–22]. “O, how this mother swells up toward my heart! / Hysterica passio, down, thou climbing sorrow, thy elements below!” [II.iv.55–57]. But reason can no longer hold down the passion rising from below. Again Lear cries, “O me, my heart, my rising heart! But down!” [II.iv.119]. When Regan, too, transgresses the “ofﬁces of nature, bond of childhood / Effects of courtesy, dues of gratitude,” Lear shouts “O sides, you are too tough! / Will you yet hold?” [II.iv.195–196].108 Shakespeare shows that Lear, like Edgar, is becoming the “unaccomodated man” [III.iv.105–6], without the natural bonds of protection.109 The imagery denoting a “holding down” of the depths culminates in the language describing the storm. In order to appreciate fully Shakespeare’s concern with the loss of boundaries it is important to remember the traditional cosmology with which he was working.. The four elements of air, ﬁre, water, and earth are each weighted. Since water is heavier than the air, it should overﬂow the earth. What, then, keeps water restrained both above the earth (in the clouds) and in the seas? Why does the water not bury the dry land? The traditional answer in Christian thought was that God restrains the waters. In fact, all the elements must be restrained lest they collide and the earth plummets into chaos. Divine restraint kept the stars from colliding, held the heavier earth suspended in the lighter air, and kept the waters from covering the earth. But no such providential God is present here. What happens if the heavens or the realm of the gods is silent? Shakespeare powerfully introduced the storm with the imagery about “unloosing” and “breaking forth.”110 Referring to the disloyalty of the servant Oswald, Kent says, “That such a slave as this should wear a sword, / Who wears no honesty. Such smiling rogues as these, / Like rats, oft bite the holy cords a-twain / Which are too intrinset’ unloose; smooth every / passion / That in the natures of their lords rebel, / Bring oil to ﬁre, snow to their colder moods” [II. ii.73–76]. The word “unloose” often refers to water, either the water of tears or of rain. Thus Lear tells Goneril, “Life and death! I am asham’d / That thou hast power to shake my manhood thus, / That these hot tears, which break from me perforce, / Should make thee worth them. Blasts and fogs upon thee! / Th’ untented woundings of a father’s curse / Pierce every sense about thee! Old fond eyes, / Beweep this cause again, I’ll pluck ye out, / And cast you, with the waters that you loose, / to temper clay” [I.iv.293–301.1182]. Promising to unleash “the terrors of the earth,” Lear again tells himself not to weep. Having allowed

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Lear to wander out into the storm, Regan tells Gloucester, “Shut up your doors.” Cornwell adds, “Shut up your doors, my lord; Tis a wild night. / My Regan counsels well. Come out o’ the storm.” The storm, however, cannot be “shut up” or “conﬁned” [II.ii.308–9]. Descriptions of the storm fully express the breaking loose of all boundaries. In answering Kent’s inquiry about where the king has gone, the Gentleman answers: Contending with the fretful elements; Bids the wind blow into the sea, Or swell the curled waters ‘bove the main, That things might change or cease; tears his white hair, Which the impetuous blasts, with eyeless rage, Catch in their fury, and make nothing of; Strives in his little world of man to outscorn The to-and-fro-conﬂicting wind and rain. [III.i.4–11] Lear is, indeed, “moving into an order of nature that’s indifferent to human affairs.”111 Lear cries out to the storm: Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks! You sulph’rous and thought-executing ﬁres, Vaunt-couriers, of oak-cleaving thunderbolts, Singe my white head! And thou, all-shaking Thunder, Strike ﬂat the thick rotundity o’ th’ world! Crack nature’s molds, all germains spill at once, That makes ungrateful man! [III.ii.1–9] The “cracking” and “bursting” of nature continues and symbolizes all the forces of chaos rising up to the surface. The “great gods” who “keep this dreadful pudder o’er our heads” continue to remain silent. The waters above “let fall” as Lear bellows helplessly, “No, I will weep no more. In such a night / To shut me out? Pour on; I will endure” [III.iv.17–18]. Edgar utters a phrase appropriate to sailors describing a deluge, “Fathom and half, fathom and half!” Gloucester describes the storm saying, “The sea, with such a storm as his bare head / In hell-black night endur’d, would have bouy’d up / and quench’d the stelled ﬁres” [III.vii.60–62]. Lear has told the heavens to “rage” and “blow” until the steeples and weathercocks are drowned; that is, he tells the waters to overﬂow their bounds and rise higher than the steeples. Even his curse hangs in the air as Lear cries out against his daughters by saying, “Now, all the plagues that in

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the pendulous air / Hang fated o’er men’s faults light on my daughters” [III. iv.66–67]. Finally, we have that strange scene in which Gloucester asks Edgar to lead him to the cliff where he can commit suicide: “There is a cliff, whose high and bending head/ Looks fearfully in the conﬁned deep” [IV.1.73–74]. But the deep is no longer conﬁned; the sea does not remain bounded by its shores. All the characters in the play are doing precisely what Gloucester is describing; they are looking over a cliff at the no-longer “conﬁned deep” that rages below and is rising. Immediately following this scene, Shakespeare extends this imagery to Goneril and Regan. Albany rebukes Goneril saying, O Goneril, You are not worth the dust which the rude wind Blows in your face. [I fear your disposition; That nature which contemns its origin Cannot be bordered certain in itself.] [IV.ii.30–34] Cordelia had left the kingdom with the penetrating and ominous words to her sisters, “I know what you are”[II.i.271]. Now Albany knows, too. The evil in their nature cannot be conﬁned or “bordered certain.” At one time, “Robes and furr’d gowns hide all” [IV.vi.165.1206].112 Now the clothing has come off. The sisters are “tigers, not daughters” [IV.ii.41.1201]. His daughters have hidden their true nature underneath their appearance of femininity and virtue: Beyond yond simp’ring dame, Whose face between her forks presages snow, That minces virtue, and does shake the head To hear of pleasure’s name; The ﬁtchew, nor the soiled horse goes to ‘t With a more riotous appetite. Down from the waist they are Centaurs Though women all above. But to the girdle do the gods inherit, Beneath is all the ﬁends’. There’s hell, there’s darkness, there is the sulphurous pit, Burning, scalding, stench, consumption. Fie! ﬁe! ﬁe! [IV.vi.118–129] Previously Goneril hid her true self from Albany. Through the false appearances of “robes and furr’d gowns,” she concealed her savage nature. When he recognizes her true nature, Albany speaks in terms of a false appearance that can no longer hide the devil himself: See thyself, devil! Proper deformity seems not in the ﬁend

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So horrid as in a woman. . . . Thou changed and self-cover’d thing, for shame, Be-monster not thy feature. Were’t my ﬁtness To let these hands obey my blood, They are apt enough to dislocate and tear Thy ﬂesh and bones. Howe’er thou art a ﬁend, A woman’s shape doth shield thee. [IV.ii.60–68] While Albany can bridle himself, the sisters cannot. The evil that is their nature can no longer be restrained within boundaries. Their savagery bursts the bonds of their “coverings” or appearances. Like Lear’s “ungovern’d rage,” their nature has wreaked chaos. And, ﬁnally, one “gilded serpent” kills the other. Although Albany calls for an ofﬁcer to “restrain her,” Goneril has poisoned Regan, who then stabs and kills her. As the bodies pile up, Albany cries, “If there be more, more woeful, hold it in / For I am almost ready to dissolve, / Hearing of this” [V.iii.206–207]. But nothing can any longer “hold it in.” As Edgar responds, “This would have seem’d a period / To such as love not sorrow; but another, / To amplify too much, would make much more, / And top extremity” [V.iii.208– 211]. There is no “period” or limit as events continue to “top extremity.” When Lear sees Cordelia dead, he says, “that heaven’s vault should crack” [V.iii.262]. The imagery is then enlarged to encompass allusions to the apocalypse and last judgment when Kent asks, “Is this the promis’d end?” Edgar replies, “Or image of that horror?”[V.iii.267–268].113 Albany’s words, “Fall, and cease!” calls for the heavens to fall and all things to end. With these words, Albany sees fulﬁlled his earlier dire warning: If that the heavens do not their visible spirits Send quickly down to tame these vile offenses, It will come, Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, Like monsters of the deep. [V.ii.47–51/Quarto] In Macbeth, humanity does, indeed, “prey upon itself like monsters of the deep.” As Northrop Frye observes, Shakespeare twice spoke of “a second fall of cursed man.” Regarding King Lear, Frye continues by saying, “Before the play begins we are in roughly the upper world of human nature; not a paradisal state, of course, but a world where there is authority, social discipline, orders of distinction, and loyalty. . . . Then the dreaded image of the map appears. . . . By the end of the scene we have the feeling of sliding into a different world.” Act III describes the storm scene as “an image of nature dissolving into its primordial elements, losing its distinctions of hierarchies in chaos, a kind of crossing of the Red Sea in reverse.”114 In Macbeth, we again see this unrelenting descent from the surface world of appearances to the chaos beneath. Macbeth was Shakespeare’s greatest and most intense study of absolute evil. In this tragedy

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Shakespeare developed his insights into evil by means of two interrelated, and by now familiar, themes: the savage underworld erupting onto the surface world of appearances and the quest to discern the real from the unreal. In both cases, the theme of certainty regarding appearances and reality govern the play. In the universe of Macbeth, all limits and boundaries are violated. The opening scenes establish the transgression of all those boundaries that constitute what we perceive to be an ordered human civilization. By beginning with the three witches, Shakespeare shows that the underworld has already penetrated the surface world. By speaking in ambiguity and contradictions, the witches shows that speech itself will not be a means of securing order and stability. This ﬁrst appearance of the witches vividly dramatizes the recurring problem of determining what is real. They “look not like th’ inhabitants o’ th’ earth, / And yet are on ‘t?” [I.iii.41–42]. Their bearded faces dissolve the category of gender. Banquo asks, “I’ th’ name of truth, / Are ye fantastical, or that indeed / Which outwardly ye show?” [I.iii.52–53.] With this question Banquo distinguishes between external appearance and reality. Yet we will see that to be “outward” is no guarantee that something is real. Still trying to determine if the witches are real, Banquo wonders if he and Macbeth had eaten of the “insane root / That takes reason prisoner?” We then have the familiar problem of detecting good from evil. When Macbeth becomes the Thane of Cawdor, Banquo asks, “What, can the devil speak true?” and warns Macbeth, “But ‘tis strange; / And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, / The instruments of Darkness tell us truths, / Win us with honest triﬂes, to betray’s / In deepest consequence”[I.iii.106, 122–126]. Act I.iv reveals the further transgression of limits by portraying the violation of bonds within human society. Duncan says of the traitor Macdonwald, “There’s no art / To ﬁnd the mind’s construction in the face. / He was a gentle man on whom I built / An absolute trust” [I. iv.11–14].115 In this world, however, trust is fragile and will be broken with disastrous consequences. Throughout the various and ritual greetings, the bonds of kinsman, subject, and host are broken. After Duncan names Malcolm his successor, Macbeth reﬂects on his desire to kill the king and his proper relationship to that king, “He’s here in double trust: / First, as I am his kinsman and his subject, / Strong both against the deed; then, as his host, / Who should against his murderer shut the door, / Not bear the knife myself” [I.vii.12–17]. But Macbeth cannot “shut the door” against the ultimate transgression of all order and bonds of humanity, namely, the murder of the king. Regicide is the “deed without a name,” an action so monstrous that one must be “unsexed” even to plot it. Blood must be “made thick” so as to “stop up th’ access and passage to remorse” and allow to enter no “compunctious visitings of nature.” Even Lady Macbeth, who is speaking here, knows that regicide is a violation of nature and tells her husband “False face must hide what the false heart doth know.” Such a deed can be committed only at night. As she says,

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Come, thick night, And pall thee in the dunnest smile of hell, That my keen knife see not the wound it makes, Nor heaven peep through the blanket of the dark, To cry “Hold! Hold!” [I.vi.50–54] But there will be no holding back. Although the “horrid image” of the murder “unﬁxes” Macbeth’s hair and makes his heart knock at his ribs, “against the use of nature,” nonetheless, the murder that is “yet fantastical” will be done. Macbeth, too, knows such a horrid deed requires the night, “Stars, hide your ﬁres; Let not light see my black and deep desires”[I.iv.50–51]. Only in Banquo do we see restraint as he says, “Merciful powers, / Restrain in me the cursed thoughts that nature / Gives way to in repose” [II.i.7–9]. No such constraint can rein in Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. The analysis of the murder scene by Thomas de Quincey remains the best description of how Shakespeare makes this deed so horrible and yet so fascinating. He describes the murder scene as it ends with the “knocking at the gate.” This passage is so powerful that it is worth quoting in full. De Quincey applies to Macbeth the principle that all dramatic action is best measured and apprehended by reaction. Here, as I have said, the retiring of the human heart, and the entrance of the ﬁendish heart was to be expressed and made sensible. Another world has stept in; and the murderers are taken out of the region of human things, human purposes, human desires. They are transﬁgured: Lady Macbeth is ‘unsexed;’ Macbeth has forgot that he was born of woman; both are conformed to the image of devils; and the world of devils is suddenly revealed. But how shall this be conveyed and made palpable? In order that a new world may step in, this world must for a time disappear. The murderers, and the murder must be insulated—cut off by an immeasurable gulf from the ordinary tide and succession of human affairs—locked up and sequestered in some deep recess; we must be made sensible that the world of ordinary life is suddenly arrested—laid asleep—tranced— racked into a dread armistice; time must be annihilated; relation to things without abolished; and all must pass self-withdrawn into a deep syncope and suspension of earthly passion. Hence it is, that when the deed is done, when the work of darkness is perfect, then the world of darkness passes away like a pageantry in the clouds: the knocking at the gate is heard; and it makes known audibly that the reaction has commenced; the human has made its reﬂux upon the ﬁendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, ﬁrst makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.116

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Of course, the ordinary life of order and stability never really resumes. The horror in Macbeth moves so rapidly and eerily that one almost does not breathe again until Malcolm declares, “The time is free.” No restraint can hold Macbeth back; he is about to unleash the underworld of chaos and in doing so, unmask the fragility of all boundaries imposed by the world of human society. Regicide cracks open the surface and lets the deep rise up. There results a “convulsion of nature.”117 Duncan’s wounds “look’d like a breach in nature / For ruin’s wasteful entrance” [II.iii.114–15]. The “horrid deed” ushers in the savagery and evil that will “ruin” humanity. The animals, all predatory, signal this fearful “entrance.” Duncan’s horses, “Turn’d wild in nature, broke their stalls, ﬂung out, / contending ‘gainst obedience, as they would / Make war with mankind.” In one of the most potent of these descriptions, we learn that Duncan’s horses “eat each other” [II.iv.16–18]. This would not be the last we hear of horses. The image of galloping horses runs throughout the play. The ﬁrst scene opens with messengers galloping furiously toward the castle. Macbeth gallops home after the battle. The third murderer cries, “Hark, I hear horses.” After his ﬁnal encounter with the witches, Macbeth says, “Infected be the air whereon they ride, / And damn’d all those that trust in them! / I did hear / The galloping of horse. Who was’t came by?” [IV.i.138–140]. While horses are galloping, the witches are ﬂying. They “untie the wind,” and “ride the air.” They are the “posters of the sea and land.” That is to say, the witches are the “fast ﬂying travelers over the earth.” Humans also try to ﬂy. Banquo cries for Fleance to “ﬂy, ﬂy, ﬂy.” Macbeth fears, “They have tied me to a stake; I cannot ﬂy.” At the end, Macbeth shouts, “Bring me no more reports. Let them ﬂy all!” as he runs to put his armor on and ﬁght to the death [V.iii.1]. All of these images have to do with speed. The pace of Macbeth is frantic and feverish.118 The image of speed corresponds to the overriding importance of time mentioned throughout the play, an importance introduced by the idea of prophecy. As Banquo said to the witches, “If you can look into the seeds of time, / And say which grain will grow and which will not, / Speak then to me, who neither beg nor fear / Your favors nor your hate” [I.iii.58–61]. Almost every scene refers to “hours,” “instant,” “moment,” and “time.” Lady Macbeth tells her husband, “Thy letters have transported me beyond / This ignorant present, and I feel now / The future in the instant” [I.v.57–58]. Macbeth says of Duncan’s murder, “Had I but died an hour before this chance, / I had liv’d a blessed time; for, from this instant, / There’s nothing serious in mortality; / All is but toys” [II.iii.92–95]. Reacting to Macduff’s ﬂight, Macbeth remarks, Time, thou anticipat’st my dread exploits. The ﬂighty purpose never is o’ertook Unless the deed go with it. From this moment The very ﬁrstlings of my heart shall be The ﬁrstling of my hand. [IV.i.144–148]

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Macbeth is saying that from now on his impulses will be acted on immediately, without any time elapsing. Repeatedly, each character must hurry, and “beguile” or “mock” the time. Thus in Act IV.i, the third witch cries, “‘Tis time, ‘Tis time.” The headlong passage of time is incessant and irreversible. The convulsive speed hurtles the characters forward toward universal chaos. Action irrevocably leads to further actions. No act is ever complete because no action can be stopped. Macbeth tries to violate the perennial law of time when he wishes that with the one murder of Duncan he “Could trammel up the consequence, and catch/With his surcease, success, that his blow / Might be the be-all and end-all—here, / But here, upon this bank and shoal of time, / We’d jump the life to come” [I.vii.3–7]. Like Lady Macbeth, he wanted the “future in the instant” and then call a halt. He hoped that after he could “catch the nearest way” by making the prophecy come true, he could then stop the consequences.119 The man who transgressed all limits frantically now wants to set a limit on time and the aftermath of his actions. Macbeth repeatedly insisted on violating the nature of time. His insistence on knowing the future in his ﬁnal meeting with the weird sisters reveals a presumptuous certainty unavailable to any mortal creature. By demanding, “Howe’er you know it, answer me,” Macbeth uncovers the demonic desire to be more than human. The witches tell him, “Seek to know no more,” but his insistence on certainty of the future recognizes no bounds as he says, “I will be satisﬁed. / Deny me this, / And an eternal curse fall on you! Let me know.” [IV.i.104–106]. Like the other tragic heroes, Macbeth craves certainty. He demands certainty of that which is beyond what is legitimate for human knowledge—namely, the future. As Grene explains, “What [Macbeth] seeks with increasing desperation is pure present unhaunted by past or future. The craving for instantaneity, the addiction to certainty, can be traced back to the ﬁrst leap toward the ﬁxed point of the prophesied kingship. Thereafter everything ﬁxed in prospect becomes unstable when reached, mirage succeeds mirage in the unreeling sequence of time.”120 Macbeth “cannot buckle his distemper’d cause / Within the belt of rule” [V.ii.15–16]. He has unleashed the river of blood that overﬂows his time. Most critics argue that the dramatization of the limitless of action begins with Duncan’s murder. Actually, however, we miss the point if we do not take seriously the offstage battle that opens the play: namely, the “hurly-burly” that is never really done. Macdonwald, the Thane of Cawdor, has joined forces with Norway, thereby rebelling against his king. In Act I.ii King Duncan receives news of the battle between Macbeth and Macdonwald. The two men are reported to have clung together “as two spent swimmers.” Macbeth then is described as, Disdaining Fortune, with his brandish’d steel, Which smok’d, with bloody execution, Like valor’s minion carved out his passage

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Till he fac’d the slave; Which nev’r shook hands, nor bade farewell to him, Till he unseam’d him from the nave to th’ chops, And ﬁx’d his head upon our battlements. [I.ii.19–25] It is the blood of this initial battle that rushes onward and bleeds into the rest of the play. Macbeth repeats Macdonwald’s crime of treason and enters into the irresistible onward ﬂow of blood begun on that battleﬁeld. It is a commonplace worth repeating that the image of blood is omnipresent throughout the play. Violence begets violence as Macbeth tries to secure his crown and history becomes a “bloody stage.” One murder leads to the next—Macbeth cannot kill the sons. Malcolm, Duncan’s son, escapes. Banquo’s son Fleance also escapes. Despite his increasingly ﬂailing efforts, Macbeth cannot halt the succession. He cannot reign in the future. And so he spills yet more blood. He grows into evil as he accepts the rule, “Blood will have blood.” Macbeth has entered the gates of hell and cannot return. He has become what he has done: “The secret’st man of blood.”121 Joining together the themes of prophecy and blood, Macbeth insists And betimes I will, to the weird sisters More shall they speak; for now I am bent to know By the worst means, the worst. For my own good, All causes shall give way. I am in blood Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, Returning were as tedious as go o’er. Strange things I have in head, that will to hand, Which must be acted ere they may be scann’d. [III.iv.134–141] By the time he has “supp’d full of horrors,” Macbeth has entered completely into the river of blood that has become human history. The underworld has erupted and unleashed its mighty forces against all means that would try to hold them within the “belt of rule.” The murder of Duncan has called into being the “great doom’s image” as Macbeth words to the witches show: I conjure you, by that which you profess, Howe’er you come to know it, answer me. Though you untie the winds and let them ﬁght Against the churches, though the yesty waves Confound and swallow navigation up, Though bladed corn be lodg’d and trees blown down, Though castles topple on their warders’ heads, Though palaces and pyramids do slope Their heads to their foundations, though the treasure

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Of nature’s germains tumble all together, Even till destruction sickens, answer me To what I ask you. [IV.i.50–61] Knowing he has “scorch’d the snake, not kill’d it,” Macbeth cries, “Let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer.” The frame has, indeed, collapsed. This surging up of the forces of darkness is most vividly described by Macbeth’s reaction to Banquo’s ghost: Blood hath been shed ere now i’ th’ olden time, Ere humane statute purg’d the gentle weal; Ay, and since too, murders have been perform’d Too terrible for the ear. The time has been That, when the brains were out, the man would die, And there an end; but now they rise again With twenty mortal murders on their crowns, And push us from our stools. This is more strange Than such a murder is. [III.iv.76–84] Even the dead rise up and will not stay “down!” where they belong. “If charnel houses and our graves must bend / Those that we bury back,” then even burial is useless. Critics have speculated on whether or not Banquo’s ghost objectively appeared to Macbeth (and the audience) on stage or whether it was evidence of the “scorpions” in his mind. As in King Lear, Shakespeare makes Macbeth parallel the outward confusion with the “tempest” or “scorpions” within the mind. But Macbeth’s disintegration is depicted in more detail. In Macbeth’s fall, Shakespeare carefully demontrates the power of evil and focuses that power on the question of reality. In Macbeth there is an evil force that drives Macbeth onward. The “dagger of the mind” marshals him forward where his deep and dark desires want to go. We watch Macbeth’s horror at his own deed as he almost unwillingly participates in the “deed without a name.” The reality and power of evil is evident both in the dagger speech and in Lady Macbeth’s sleepwalking scene. Even Lady Macbeth, who begins with an iron will, is broken by this force of evil. Although she wanted the “future in an instant,” she cannot live with the continuity of the consequences that play themselves out in ordinary human time. While Macbeth becomes hardened in blood, she is overcome by the darkness. In her sleepwalking speeches, Lady Macbeth vacillates between her former cold rationality and the horror that has overtaken her. Out, damned spot! Out I say! . . . Hell is murky—Fie, my lord, ﬁe, a soldier, and afeard? What need we fear who knows it, when none can call our pow’r to account? Yet who would have thought the old man to have had so much blood in him? [V.i.34–39]

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Here’s the smell of the blood still. All the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand. Oh, Oh, Oh! [V.i.48–51] Wash your hands, put on your nightgown; look not so pale! I tell you again, Banquo’s buried; he cannot come out on’s grave. To bed, to bed! There’s knocking at the gate. Come, come, come, come, give me your hand. What’s done cannot be undone. [V.i.61–67] The unraveling of Lady Macbeth’s mind, the encounter with the witches, the question of Banquo’s death, the endless hand washing, the disintegration of Macbeth’s soul, the knocking at the gate, all bring to the fore both the power of evil and the question of reality. Apparitions, voices, witches, sleepwalking, and prophecies repeatedly raise the problem of distinguishing the real from the unreal. One of the many ways that Shakespeare makes this problem permeate the play is his portray of Macbeth’s insomnia. By killing Duncan, Macbeth has “murdered sleep.” He hears a voice that cries out, “Sleep no more! . . . Glamis hath murder’d sleep, and, therefore Cawdor / Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more” [II.ii.39–41]. Insomnia is a perfect representation for Macbeth’s future state of mind. As the play progresses, Macbeth becomes more and more isolated from human bonds and ordinary reality. His murder of Duncan isolates him from humanity and then he further cries to the “seeling night” to “Scarf up the tender eye of pitiful day, / And with thy bloody and invisible hand / Cancel and tear to pieces that great bond / Which keeps me pale” [III. i.50–53]. He is morally isolated from everyone around him. He fears everyone but his wife. Insomnia fuels such isolation and fear. The normal rhythm of time is now dead. Almost everything in the play takes place at night, at that “dark hour” when evil is done. Insomnia signiﬁes that Macbeth lives in a suspended time where day and night bleed into each other and where nightmares become indistinguishable from waking. He now lives in that endless “seeling night,” the “darkness” that “entombs” the earth and makes the “fatal vision” real. Insomnia makes dream and reality merge so that the insomniac cannot escape the world through sleep. Shakespeare did not contradict the emphasis on insomnia when in the later speech Macbeth refers to the “afﬂiction of these terrible dreams / That shake us nightly” [III.ii.20]. Dream and reality are so intermingled that Macbeth lives in an in-between world of the waking nightmare. In this state, he cannot escape either the world or his own being. The self becomes an ever-present weight, always awake, always imagining, and always an overwhelming and burdensome presence. The “scorpions” in his mind will not be silenced. As Macbeth knows, sleep is that which “knits up the ravel’d sleave of care, / The death of each day’s life, sore labor’s bath, / Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, / chief nourisher in life’s feast—” [II. ii.35–38]. This balm is now gone forever. There is a frantic quality to insomnia that is reﬂected in Macbeth’s ever-increasing frenzied and ﬂailing actions. Not

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surprisingly, Macbeth begins to envy the dead Duncan, “Better be with the dead, / Whom we to gain our peace, have sent to peace. / Than on the torture of the mind to lie/In restless ecstasy.” Duncan, in his grave, “sleeps well” [III. ii.21–25]. Insomnia and the waking nightmare of life makes every “horrible imagining” equally real. And perhaps they are real. The entire play moves in a world of the nightmarish dream from which one cannot awaken. Greenblatt has astutely written that virtually everything in Macbeth “transpires on the border between fantasy and reality, a sickening betwixt-and-between. . . . Shakespeare achieves the remarkable effect of a nebulous infection, a bleeding of the spectral into the secular and the secular into the spectral.”122 T. G. Wilson Knight described this borderline as the metaphysic of evil; namely, a “fear that succeeds nightmare, wherein there is an experience of something at once unsubstantial and unreal to the understanding and appalling to the feelings: this is the evil in Macbeth.” Having canceled the “bond of reality,” Macbeth has no home. As Knight explained, “The unreal he understands not, the real condemns him.” As he further notes, “reality and unreality change places.”123 But do they? Perhaps we are asking somewhat the wrong question. By asking “What is real and what is unreal?” we make a clear distinction between the two. A better question may be, “What is more real?” In Macbeth and in King Lear, Shakespeare makes the surface world of appearances a more desirable reality. In these plays, appearances are not simply deceptive, as they are in Hamlet and Othello. Rather, the world of appearances acts as a restraint on the underworld raging just beneath the surface. The problem is that the surface world of order and appearances is too fragile; the “humane statutes” that “purg’d the gentle weal” are not strong enough to hold back the onrush of blood, evil, and raging chaos. Describing the night of Duncan’s murder, Lennox cries, “The night has been unruly. Where we lay, / Our chimneys were blown down, and, as they say, / Lamentings heard I’ th’ air; strange screams of death, / And prophesying, with accents terrible / Of dire combustion and confus’d events / New hatch’d to th’ woeful time. The obscure bird / Clamor’d the livelong night. Some say the earth / Was feverous and did shake” [II.iii.5361]. With the murder of the king, “Confusion now hath made his masterpiece!” [II.iii.66]. As Macbeth states to his wife, “We have scorch’d the snake, not kill’d it. / She’ll close and be herself, whilst our poor malice / Remains in danger of her former tooth / But let the frame of things disjoint, both the worlds suffer” [III.ii.15–18.12]. Everything and everyone will now “ﬂoat upon a wild and violent sea.” Nothing, including order, speech, hierarchy, sight, law, and reason, can keep the underworld restrained. The world of appearances cannot keep the feral forces at bay. This surface world is a hope, an instrument of order, and a means of restraint. But it is not as powerful as that reality that lies in the abyss waiting to break forth. The secondary reality of the world of appearances brings up the question of the last scene, where order is restored. Many critics have argued that

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Shakespeare’s tragedies end with the restoration of the “objective persistence of order.” The restorative vision of tragedy is an “aesthetic completeness” that “brings us the assurances of form, presents its formal order as a token, a security—something given in hand—to guarantee the cosmic order beyond the turbulence it has conquered.”124 Some interpreters have dissented. Kastan argues that in Shakespeare’s tragedies “no regenerative order of being exists which would allow the tragic progress to be transcended or transformed.” Comparing Shakespeare to the morality plays, Kastan, referring to Eliot, shows that there is no forgiveness after the knowledge attained by tragedy is found. “In the tragic world where time does not intersect the timeless there is no redemption; knowledge is available, but never forgiveness.” He also argues that there is no restorative vision in Shakespeare because the future is unable to redeem the tragic past. As Kastan concludes with regard to Macbeth, “The moral order can destroy evil: it can not redeem it.”125 What is Shakespeare saying with this restoration of order in Macbeth, with the victory of Macduff and Malcolm, and the phrase, “The time is free”? What weight does Shakespeare give Malcolm’s ﬁnal words, “by the grace of Grace, / We will perform in measure, time, and place” [V.viii.74]? Are we really to believe that order has won a permanent victory? Has the natural order of things been fully restored? Exactly what does the strange exchange between Macduff and Malcolm portend for the future? What did Malcolm mean by comparing himself so unfavorably to Macbeth, “I grant him [Macbeth] bloody, / Luxurious, avaricious, false deceitful, / Sudden, malicious, smacking of every sin / That has a name. But there’s no bottom, none, / In my voluptuousness. . . . Better Macbeth / Than such an one to reign. . . . Nay, had I pow’r, I should / Pour the sweet milk of concord into hell, / Uproar the universal peace, confound / All unity upon the earth” [IV.iii.57–66, 97–100]. Did Malcom speak the truth when he assured Macduff by saying, “Unspeak mine own detraction, here abjure / The taints and blames I laid upon myself, / For strangers to my nature” [IV. iii.123–125]. Was it not legitimate for Macduff to reply, “Such welcome and unwelcome things at once / ’Tis hard to reconcile.” According to David Kastan, the Shakespearian tragic ending does not ask us “to confront a vision of futurity.” Shakespeare, he argues, “forces our attention not forward in time but back.”126 Kastan’s perceptive analysis of Shakespeare’s tragic endings rightly concludes that, as Karl Jaspers said “Christian salvation opposes tragic knowledge.” Kastan’s analysis is most valuable in its insight that past suffering cannot be redeemed and, therefore, remains a powerful force within the present. However, Kastan’s rejection of the traditional reading of Shakespeare should not be conﬁned to the idea that there is no vision of futurity. In particular, this is not the case with Macbeth. If we compare the last scene to the ﬁrst scene, we will recognize that Shakespeare was most deﬁnitely not giving us any assurance regarding the restoration of order. The parallels between these two scenes are ominous. Macdonwald’s head was ﬁxed

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upon the battlements. Macbeth’s head is brought to Malcolm, the new king. Malcolm and Macduff are left. How long will it be before they come to blows? Are they reminiscent of the “two spent swimmers that cling together,” who started the play? Just as Macbeth was greeted by the witch the words, “All hail, Macbeth! Hail to thee, Thane of Cawdor!. . . All hail Macbeth, that shalt be king hereafter,” so, too, Malcolm is greeted, “Hail King of Scotland! / Hail King of Scotland.” And we are haunted by that insight of Duncan’s, “There’s no art / To ﬁnd the mind’s construction in the face.” The restoration scene is but a temporary respite where the world of appearances holds the abyss of evil at bay. However, the blood, darkness, and violence that deﬁned Macbeth’s universe will rise again. Shakespeare’s insight is similar to that of Camus, who knew that the “plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; that it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and that perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and the enlightening of men, it would rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”127 Just as the rats will again come forth, so, too, the “monsters of the deep” are always there and will rise again. No one understood this aspect of the play better than the great ﬁlmmaker Akira Kurosawa, who both began and ended his masterful interpretation of Macbeth with the following words: Look upon the ruins Of the castle of delusion Haunted now only By the spirits Of those who perished. A scene of carnage Born of consuming desire Never changing Now and throughout eternity. [Throne of Blood]

Conclusion

This study has argued that the underlying problem that concerned this era and which dictated the terms of the discussions, spirituality, and debates, was that of the anxiety about certainty. Whereas justiﬁcation by faith was the clarion call of the Reformation and controversies over the papacy, the sacraments, the tradition, authority, biblical exegesis, and the church pervaded the discussions of the early modern era, nevertheless, underlying all of these issues we can see that this age was haunted by the common anxiety about certitude. Historians, theologians, and philosophers have provided us with sophisticated works on Nominalism, reformation doctrines and debates, and the great literary works of this period; this study has attempted to demonstrate that these crucial and diverse issues had a common undercurrent that cut across all religious divides. Particular themes kept surfacing in these various topics and genres: immediacy, experience, authority, assurance, appearances, knowledge, discernment, ambiguity or clarity, the search for reality, and the ever-present role of the Holy Spirit. Thus, while many believed that sola Scriptura would be the balm of Gilead, it also fueled the search for the certainty of authority, interpretation, and the role of experience. While the authority of tradition offered certitude of truth, it also led to heated debates about the use of history and the providential guidance of the Spirit. Although the search for an interiorized religion was widespread throughout this era, this “spiritualism” led to a questioning of the role of experience and a deeply felt concern over the discernment of the spirits, a concern expressed by both Catholics and Protestants. And although this age was preoccupied

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with knowledge and the process of knowing, we see that from Nicholas of Cusa to Luther and Shakespeare, the insight that often marks the fundamental understanding of this period is that appearance and reality are, indeed, not the same. This may lead to the awareness of perspective and the intuition of the intellect or to the belief that we live in a closed world of idolatry from which our reason cannot escape—or to the insight that the truth can be found “in the center” of a bloody and tragic reality. So much more could be said. While I have analyzed many thinkers and issues in this book, there are many more that should have been studied: Agrippa, Bullinger, Bucer, Weigel, Beza, and others. An entire study could be written on Melanchthon and his defense of the “many causes of certainty.” Erasmus, too, illustrated the concern about the difference between appearances and reality. Many other mystics, skeptics, humanists, philosophers, and theologians contributed to the early modern search for certitude. Perhaps the most important omission is the discussion about the gradual and partial realization of the danger of certitude, a realization that surfaced in the toleration debate. This is not to say that skepticism was the force behind decisions and treaties that enforced toleration. Richard Tuck, among others, has disproved this theory. Tuck has demonstrated that skeptics could advocate repression just as much as toleration. In the seventeenth century, moral and religious beliefs had to be subordinated to pragmatic political principles so that civil order could be secured. Therefore, toleration was not the “child of doubt.” Even when skepticism did favor toleration in the seventeenth century, it was on pragmatic grounds that guaranteed public order and peace.1 Nonetheless, the fact should be noted that there were serious voices in the sixteenth century that cautioned against the insistent demand for certainty. We have already seen that Montaigne urged an epistemological humility and an ethic of incompleteness that would prevent claims to knowledge beyond what the human mind could know with certitude. Other voices raised the issue of persecution and toleration on the basis of spiritualistic and rationalistic grounds, including arguments for the liberty of conscience: Mathew Gribaldi, Sebastian Franck, Bernardo Ochino, Erasmus, Davis Joris, Dirck Coonhert, and others. The ﬁgure that most obviously comes to mind is Sebastian Castellio in his battle with Calvin and Beza regarding the execution of Servetus. Like others in his time, Castellio favored the limitation of doctrines that must be confessed by Christians in order to prevent persecution and to emphasize the ethical precepts of the Christian faith. Many doctrines, including predestination, were beyond human knowledge and could not be known with any certainty. Ethical teachings of the Bible, however, could be known clearly and with certitude. In the name of an epistemological limitation of doctrine, Castellio made his famous statement, “To kill a man is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man.” In his arguments Castellio demonstrated the danger of certitude in the form of

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that question that so plagued the sixteenth century: “Are you alone wise?” Replying to Calvin’s defense regarding the death of Servetus, Castellio wrote: All sects hold their religion as established by the word of God and call it certain. Therefore, all sects are armed by Calvin’s rule for mutual persecution. Calvin says he is certain, and they say the same. He says that they are mistaken, and they say the same of him. Calvin wishes to be the judge and so do they. Who will judge? Who made Calvin judge of all the sects that he alone should kill? How can he prove that he alone knows? He has the word of God, so have they. If the matter is so certain, to whom is it certain?2 These statements recall Luther’s reply to Schwenkfeld that, “I, too am certain.” They evoke Eck’s taunts regarding the Protestant disputes over the Eucharist when he asked, “Who among them will judge?” They also remind us of the question posed by Eck, More, and others, “Are you alone wise?” The anxiety over certainty lay at the heart of the debates of the age, debates expressed in the question posed by both More and Tyndale: “How shulde I be sure?” For the vast majority, the limits of certainty as articulated by men such as Montaigne and Castellio formed a completely insufﬁcient answer. But then they were left with Shakespeare’s fear that “Humanity must perforce prey upon itself, / Like monsters of the deep.”

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Notes

PREFACE

1. Richard Tuck, Philosophy and Government (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 31–64. 2. William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance 1550–1640 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 143–261. 3. Idem, “Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), p. 172. 4. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), p. 88. 5. Arthur B. Ferguson, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry, Studies in the Decline and Formation of Chivalric Idealism (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1960). 6. David Tracy, On Naming the Present: Reﬂections on God, Hermeneutics and Church (Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books, 1994), p. 133 CHAPTER

1

1. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans., Robert M. Wallace, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983), pp. 229–456. It should be noted that Oberman has disputed this interpretation of curiosity by arguing that throughout the ancient and medieval period, “curiosity” toward the natural world was perfectly respectable. That which was condemned was the “vain curiosity,” i.e., a curiosity that attempted to penetrate and understand the secrets of divine revelation. Heiko A. Oberman, “Reformation and Revolution: Copernicus’ Discovery in an Era of Change,” in Dawn of the

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Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), pp. 179–203, and idem, Contra vanam curiositatem: Ein Kapitel der Theologie zwischen Seelenwinkel and Weltall, Theologische Studien, 113 (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1974), pp. 110–125. On curiosity see also Curiositas: Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierde in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Lorraine Daston and Klaus Krüger (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002); Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Edward Peters, “The Desire to Know the Secrets of the World,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62 (2001): 593–610. 2. Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, p. 554. See also pp. 353 and 389. 3. Ibid., pp. 138–139, 234, 468ff. 4. Ibid., pp. 380, 384–385. 5. Ibid., p, 237. 6. Ibid., p. 466. 7. Ibid., p. 466. 8. Ibid. 9. Karsten Harries, Inﬁnity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 13. 10. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 513–514. On the “illusion of centrality,” see pp. 538, 551–561. 11. Harries, Inﬁnity and Perspective, pp. 12, 19. 12. Ibid., pp. 34, 42. Harries also examines the centrality of the perceiving subject in the perspectival art and the “new science” of this era, pp. 64ff. 13. Ibid., pp. 54, 297. 14. Ibid., pp. 328, 330. See also pp. 165, 174, 213. On p. 124, Harries writes, “There is something profoundly right about the traditional view that makes an aperspectival knowing the measure of all perspectival knowing. Something similar is implicit already in our everyday understanding of truth as a correspondence of our thoughts or propositions to the facts. The truth is not bound to particular perspectives, is not mine or ours rather than yours or theirs. The ideal of objectivity, an ideal inseparable from our ordinary understanding of truth, has its foundation in the self-transcendence or self-elevation of the human spirit.” On the history of the concept of objectivity, see Lorraine Daston, “Objectivity and the Escape from Perspective,” in Social Studies of Science 22/4 (1992): 597–618; Thomas Nagel, The View from Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986); Karsten Harries, “Descartes, Perspective, and the Angelic Eye,” Yale French Studies 49 (1973): 28–42. 15. Stephen Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990). 16. Ibid., p. 23. 17. Ibid., pp. 9, 174. 18. Louis Dupré, Passage to Modernity: An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). 19. Ibid., p. 249. 20. Ibid., p. 40. 21. Ibid., p. 3. See also pp. 40–41, 51, 79, 87, 89, 112–115, 118–119, 125, 160, 220. On page 119, Dupré states, “In one sense the idea of self-making through self-expression

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may be traced back to early humanism. Yet the humanists mediated the self’s expressive power through its integration with nature and through its intrinsic dependence on a transcendent reality. The self of rationalist philosophy, however, serves a foundational purpose: the existence of the world and of God have to be established and deﬁned by the thinking subject. In becoming pure project, the modern self has become severed from those sources that once provided its content. Being itself became a project for the mind. What previously had been the very substance of the real now provided merely the material to recreate it.” 22. Ibid., p. 252. 23. Ibid., pp. 189. 24. Ibid., p. 248. 25. David Tracy, “Fragments or Synthesis? The Hopeful Paradox of Dupré’s Modernity,” in Christian Spirituality and the Culture of Modernity: The Thought of Louis Dupré, ed. Peter J. Casarella and George P. Schner, S. J. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1998), pp. 9–26. 26. Ibid., pp. 11, 14, 20, 23. 27. Ibid., p. 23. 28. Ibid. 29. Ernst Troeltsch, “Die Bedeutung des Protestantismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt,” Historische Zeitschrift 97 (1906): 1–66; Karl Holl “Was verstand Luther unter Religion?” Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, Bd I: Luther (Tübingen, 1921), pp. 1–110; Jaroslav Pelikan, “Leopold von Ranke as Historian of the Reformation: What Ranke Did for the Reformation—What the Reformation Did for Ranke,” in Leopold von Ranke and the Shaping of the Historical Discipline, ed. Georg G. Iggers and James M. Powell (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1990). 30. Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, 6 vols. (—Leipzig: Dunker & Humblot, 1881). 31. Heiko A. Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). See also idem, Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986). 32. Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, ed. Thomas A. Brady with the collaboration of Elisabeth Müller-Luckner, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs 50 (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 2001), pp. 1–18. 33. Ibid., pp. 19–62, 91–122. 34. Ibid., pp. 159–172. 35. Ibid., pp. 231–250. 36. For discussions regarding the theory of a “radical break,” see Heinz Schilling, “Reformation—Umbruch oder Gipfelpunkt eines Temps des Réformes?” in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch: wissenschaftliches Symposion des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1996, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 199, ed. Bernd Moeller with Stephen E. Buckwalter (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verl.-Haus, 1998), pp. 13–34.

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37. Berndt Hamm, “Why Did Faith Become for Luther the Central Concept of the Christian Life?” in The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm, ed. Robert J. Bast (Leiden: Brill, 2004), pp. 153–78. 38. Idem, “Volition and Inadequacy as a Topic in Late Medieval Pastoral Care of Penitents,” in The Reformation of Faith, p. 126. 39. Idem, “How Innovative was the Reformation?” in The Reformation of Faith, p. 254–267. 40. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation, p. 20. 41. Gerhard Ebeling, “Luther and the Beginning of the Modern Age,” in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era, ed. Heiko A. Oberman (Leiden: E. J. Brill,1974), pp. 11–30. 42. Toulmin, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity (New York: The Free Press, 1990), pp. 44, 56–62, 69–87. 43. William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, 1550–1640 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), p. 260. 44. Ibid., pp. 1–100. 45. Ibid., p. 260. 46. Ibid., pp.113, 121, 142–164. 47. Ibid., pp. 179–197. 48. Ibid., p. 259. 49. Toulmin, Cosmopolis, pp. 35–36. 50. Richard H. Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Savonarola to Bayle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 3–16. 51. Rainer Wohlfeil, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Reformation (Munich: Beck, 1982), pp. 190–191. 52. Monika Hagenmaier and Sabine Holtz eds., Krisenbewusstsein und Krisenbewältigung in der frühen Neuzeit: Festschrift für Hans-Christoph Rublack (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992); Howard Kaminsky, “From Lateness to Waning to Crisis: The Burden of the Later Middle Ages,” Journal of Early Modern History 4/1 (2000): 85–125. Of signiﬁcance regarding the history and use of the term “crisis” remains that of Reinhart Koselleck, “Krise,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Konze, and Reinhart Kosselleck, 8 vol. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–1997), III: 617–650. 53. Heiko A. Oberman, “The Shape of Late-Medieval Thought: The Birthpangs of the Modern Era,” in idem, The Dawn of the Reformation, pp. 18–38; William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, pp. 112–142; idem, A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 157–189; František Graus, Pest, Geissler, Judenmorde: das 14. Jahrhundert als Krisenzeit. Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 86, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1987), pp. 529–550; idem, “The Crisis of the Middle Ages and the Hussites,” in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, pp. 76–104; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), pp. 88, 174, 219; Alisdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 9 (1977): 453–471;

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Berndt Hamm, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr, 1982), p. 218; Robert J. Bast, “Honor Your Fathers”: Catechisms and the Emergence of Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1997), pp. 40–41. Bast argues that the catechetical movement revealed three ways in which “crisis” played a substantial role: (1) because of the general “dysfunction of the late-medieval church and the subsequent struggle between rival confessions, ‘crisis’ served as the interpretive lens through which successive generations of ecclesiastical reformers viewed Church and society. ‘Crisis consciousness’ thus became something of a mentalité collective, coloring the perceptions and expressions of wide circles of clergy”; (2) the “perception of crisis led reformers of various eras and confessions to develop arguments that not only justiﬁed but required extraordinary action for crisis resolution”; and (3) “the convergence of crisis ideology and political power became a dynamic force within society that reiﬁed crisis.” See also Winfried Eberhard, “Die Krise des Spätmittelalters: Versuch einer Zusammenfassung,“ in Europa 1400: Die Krise des Spätmittelalters, ed. Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), pp. 303–321. 54. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation, pp. 21–24. 55. Bouwsma, A Usable Past, p. 172. Greenblatt also discusses the dissolving of boundaries throughout Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 124–125, 146, 196–198. Also see Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, pp. 112–113, 135, 146–147. 56. Alisdair MacIntyre, “Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” Monist 60 (1977): 453–472. 57. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, passim. 58. Bouwsma, A Usable Past, p. 172 (my emphasis). 59. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 88. 60. Ibid., pp. 25, 174, 219, 227. 61. Graus, “The Crisis of the Middle Ages and the Hussites,” p. 79. 62. Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 254; Graus, “The Crisis of the Middle Ages and the Hussites,” p. 80. 63. Quentin Skinner, “Meaning and Understanding in the History of Ideas,” History and Theory 7 (1969): 3–53. 64. Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, pp. 152–161, 172. 65. Ibid., p. 154. 66. Ibid., pp. 131, 294–304. 67. Ibid., p. 155. Cf. p. 151. 68. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 3. 69. Ibid., p.39 70. Ibid., pp. 40–41. 71. Katherine H. Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundations of Semantics, 1250–1345 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988), p. xv. 72. Heiko A. Oberman, Masters of the Reformation: The Emergence of a New Intellectual Climate in Europe, trans. Denis Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), pp. 27–40. On Ockham’s inﬂuence in England, see William J. Courtenay, “The Reception of Ockham’s Thought in Fourteenth-Century England,” in From Ockham to Wyclif, ed. Anne Hudson and Michael Wilks, Studies in Church History, 5

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(Oxford [Oxfordshire]: Published for the Ecclesiastical History Society by B. Blackwell, 1987), p. 107; idem, Schools and Scholars in Fourteenth- Century England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 193–249. 73. Ibid., p. 43. For a history of medieval epistemology, see G. R. Evans, Getting It Wrong: The Medieval Epistemology of Error (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). 74. The following analysis is indebted to Tachau, Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham; Marilyn McCord Adams, William Ockham, 2 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1987); John F. Boler, “Ockham on Intuitive Cognition,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 11 (1973): 95–106; Philotheus Böhner, O. F. M., “The Notitia Intuitiva of Non-Existents According to William Ockham: With a Critical Study of the Text of Ockham’s Reportatio and a Revised Edition of Rep. II. Q. 14–15,” Traditio 1 (1943): 223–275; and Sebastian J. Day, O. F. M., Intuitive Cognition: A Key to the Signiﬁcance of the Later Scholastics (St. Bonaventure, NY: The Franciscan Institute, 1947); G. R. Evans, Getting It Wrong, pp. 31–40. 75. William of Ockham, Ordinatio, prol. q. 1, Opera philosophica et theologica 1. Scriptum in librum primum sententiarum ordinatio: prologus et distinctio prima, ed. Gedeon Gál and Stephen F. Brown (St. Bonaventure, NY: Editiones Instituti Franciscani,Universitatis S. Bonventurae, 1967). 76. Quodlibeta V, q. 5, Quodlibetal Questions, 2 vols., trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelly, Yale Library of Medieval Philosophy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1991), I:414 77. Ockham, Ordinatio, prol. q. 1. 78. Ibid. Cited by Day, Intuitive Cognition, p. 153. See also Rega Wood, “Intuitive Cognition and Divine Omnipotence: Ockam in Fourteenth-Century Perspective,” in From Ockham to Wyclif, pp. 51–61 79. Quodlibeta I. q.13.art. 2, Quodlibetal Questions, I:65, p. 65. 80. David C. Lindberg, Theories of Vision from Al-Kindi to Kepler (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), pp. 58–68. 81. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 3–26 See also Anneliese Maier, “Das Problem der ‘species sensibiles in medio’ und die neue Naturphilosophie des 14. Jahrhunderts,” in idem, Ausgehendes Mittelalter;:Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Geistesgeschichte des 14. Jahrhunderts 3 vols. (Roma: Ed.di Storia e Letteratura, 1967), II: 419–451. See also Jügen Sarnowsky, “Natural Philosophy at Oxford and Paris in the Mid-Fourteenth Century,” in From Ockham to Wyclif, pp. 125–143. 82. Day, Intuitive Cognition, p. 193. See also Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 130–135. 83. Ockham, Reportatio, q. 12–13. See also Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 120, 130. 84. Ockham did allow that an impressed quality was necessary for vision. Explaining Ockham’s understanding of the act of sensation, Tachau explains, “For Ockham, the impressed quality rather than a species sufﬁces to incline the faculty to act” (p. 131). On page 139, Tachau argues that, according to Ockham, “neither in sensitive nor intellectual intuitive cognition, nor in abstractive cognition, ‘which immediately follows an intuitive cognition,’ is the object ‘constituted in any sort of being such as to be a mediator between the thing and the act of knowing.’”

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85. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, p. 151. Commenting on Ockham’s Ordinatio prol. 1, Day writes, “Thus we see the problem of intuitive cognition being located at the very heart of the problem of certitude.” Day, Intuitive Cognition, p. 148. 86. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation, p. 55. 87. Quodlibeta I. q. 13; Qodlibetal Questions, p. 65. 88. Dupré, Passage to Modernity, pp. 39–40. 89. Adams, William Ockham, pp. 13–16. 90. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation, p. 55. 91. Ibid., p. 27. 92. Robert Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 220. 93. Ibid. 94. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, p. 147. See also p. 138. 95. Ibid., p. 232. 96. Ockham, Quodlibeta I. q. 13; Ordinatio I, d. 27, q. 3, cited by Tachau, p. 145. On the problem of deception and illusion, see Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 229–236, 292–293; Tachau, Vision and Certitude, p. 119, 140–147. 97. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 148, 202 ff; Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 290–291. 98. Philotheus Böhner, “The Notitia Intuitiva of Non-Existents according to William of Ockham,” Traditio I (1943): 223–275; Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 415–447. 99. Quodlibeta V. q. 5 and Quodlibeta VI. q. 6. cited by Adams, William Ockham, pp. 588–599. Adams observes that in this passage, which is about the deception caused by the clever placement of mirrors by demons, that, “Ockham never worries about how we could infallibly discriminate sensory illusions from veridical acts whose effects they mimic; nor does he here draw back from his conviction that sensory awareness is the beginning of all human knowledge in this life.” On p. 600 Adams notes that there is “a little noticed passage in Reportatio IV. q. 14 where . . . Ockham grants that God could cause in us a habit that would incline us to assent to certain false propositions about the past. The most likely explanation is that Ockham drew the same conclusion from the Condemnations of 1277 as his contemporaries did, and saw no problem in granting God the power to deceive us.” The question regarding the skeptical implications of Ockham’s discussions regarding the intuitive cognition of non-existents was formulated in the modern scholarship by Étienne Gilson and Anton Pegis. Their conclusion was that Ockham’s epistemology did have skeptical consequences. Étienne Gilson, “The Road to Scepticism,” in The Unity of Philosophical Experience (New York: Charles Scribner and Sons, 1937), pp. 80–81 and Anton Pegis, “Concerning William of Ockham,” Traditio II (1944): 476. Adams argues that Ockham was not interested in establishing the certainty of the physical world according to the standards of the Academics, but rather to show how we attained knowledge that was “free from doubt and error.” Regarding evident cognition “as a paradigm of certain knowledge, Ockham did not have his eye on Academic certainty, but the certainty of freedom from doubt and error” (pp. 594–595).

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Like Scotus, Ockahm believed that “no reasonable person would adopt the Academics’ standard of certainty. For if, as Ockham joined others in admitting, it is logically possible that God should deceive us, the Academics’ demand for infallible signs by means of which to distinguish genuine from merely apparent instances of knowledge cannot be satisﬁed. Rejecting their standard, Ockham proceeds to construct a theory according to which we can have knowledge that is free from doubt and error and that ultimately has its causal origin in sensory intuitive cognitions” (p. 601). This conclusion is a change of mind from her earlier article, “Intuitive Cognition, Certainty, and Scepticism in William Ockham,” Traditio XXVI (1970): 389–398. On Ockham and skepticism, see also Leonard A. Kennedy, “Philosophical Scepticism in England in the Mid-Fourteenth Century,” Vivarium 21 (1983): 35–57; idem, “Late-Fourteenth Century Philosophical Skepticism at Oxford,” Vivarium 23 (1985): 124–151; Tachau’s critique in Vision and Certitude, p. 312, n. 123. See also, Pasnau, Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages, pp. 230–236. 100. Quodlibeta VI. q. 6; Quodlibetal Questions, pp. 417–418. 101. Ibid. 102. Ibid. 103. Quodlibeta V. q. 5; Quodlibetal Questions, pp. 414–415. It is worth noting that regarding the intersection of optics, theology, and religious life, Dallas G. Denery has argued that, “medieval and visual theorists like Roger Bacon assumed that in certain common, normative, and paradigmatic circumstances, things could be seen and known for what they really are. The experience of preachers, penitents, and confessors undermined this assumption, not by denying that such ideal circumstances might exist, but by demonstrating our inherent inability to recognize them when they occur. Distinguishing true perceptual experiences from false ones (or even more accurate experiences from less accurate ones) proved increasingly difﬁcult and certain knowledge of objects disappeared within an endless proliferation of appearances.” Denery, Seeing and Being Seen in the Later Medieval World: Optics, Theology and Religious Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p.17. 104. Ibid. According to Böhner, “As a Christian theologian, Ockham maintains that an intuitive cognition of non-existent things is possible with the supernatural help of God; as a philosopher, he maintains also that even in this case the statement, ‘This thing does not exist’ is evident—because intuitive cognition is the basis of an evident and hence absolutely true statement that a thing exists or does not exist, as the case may be. Ockham never doubted the infallibility of evident knowledge,” Philotheus Böhner, Ockham: Philosophical Writings (Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 1990), p. xxvii. On this point, see also idem, “The Notitia Intuitiva of Non-Existents According to William of Ockham,” Traditio I (1943): 223–275; idem, “In Propria Causa: A Reply to Professor Pegis,” Franciscan Studies N. S. V (1945): 37–54. 105. Eleonore Stump, “The Mechanisms of Cognition: Ockham on Mediating Species,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, ed. Paul Vincent Spade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 184–187. 106. Ockham, Ordinatio, prol., q. 1. 107. Ockham, Quodlibeta, V. q. 5; Quodlibetal Questions, pp. 415–416.

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108. Adams, William Ockham, p. 601. 109. Böhner, “The Notitia Intuitiva of Non-Existents According to William of Ockham,” pp. 234–235. 110. Tachau, Vision and Certitude, pp. 242–312. 111. Adams, William Ockham, pp. 942–943. 112. Ibid., pp. 941–996. 113. Oberman, “Luther and the Via Moderna: The Philosophical Backdrop of the Reformation Breakthrough,” in idem, The Two Reformations. The Journey from the Last Days to the New World, ed. Donald Weinstein (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), p. 32. and p. 185, n. 44. 114. Oberman, Contra vanam curiositatem, pp. 44–49. 115. Ibid., pp. 37–38; idem, Dawn of the Reformation, pp. 85–186, 194–195. Gunther Bös, Curiositas: die Rezeption eines antiken Begriffes durch christliche Autoren bis Thomas von Aquin, Veröffentlichungen des Grabmann-Institutes zur Erforschung der Mittelalterlichen Theologie und Philosophie n. F. 39 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1995); Neil Kenny, The Uses of Curiosity in Early Modern France and Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Several studies emphasize the historical distinction between curiosity and wonder: Lorrain Daston, “Die Lust an der Neugier in der frühneuzeitlichen Wissenshaft,” in Curiositas,:Welterfahrung und ästhetische Neugierd in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, ed. Klaus Kruger (Göttingen: Wallstein, 2002), pp. 147–176; Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature 1150–1750 (New York: Zone Books, 2001); Robert John Weston Evans and Alexander Marr, Curiosity and Wonder from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2006). 116. Heiko A. Oberman, “Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism, with Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Theological Review 53 (1960): 68–69. 117. Ernst Cassirer, Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft der neueren Zeit (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1974) I: 120–143. 118. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 101. See also Erika Rummel’s urging to note how carefully Kristeller phrased his statements, “It is clear that the forcefulness of his remarks was mustered to combat the notion that humanism succeeded scholasticism as a philosophy.” Erika Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and the Reformation, Harvard Historical Studies 120 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), pp. 16–17. 119. Lewis W. Spitz, “Humanism and the Protestant Reformation,” in Renaissance Humanism, ed. Albert Rabil Jr., 3 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988), III: 393. 120. Charles Nauert, “The Clash of the Humanists and Scholastics: An Approach to Pre-Reformation Controversies,” Sixteenth Century Journal 4 (1973): 1–18. 121. Steven Ozment, “Humanism, Scholasticism, and the Intellectual Origins of the Reformation,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to George Hunston Williams on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. Studies in the History of

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Christian Thought, vol. 19, ed. H. A. Oberman, F. F. Church, and T. George (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), pp. 134, 137. 122. Lu Ann Homza, Religious Authority in the Spanish Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), p. 210. 123. James H. Overﬁeld, Humanism and Scholasticism in Late Medieval Germany (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 245. 124. Paul Oskar Kristeller, Renaissance Thought and Its Sources, pp. 21–23. 125. Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, pp. 79–80 and passim. See also Alan Perreiah, “Humanist Critiques of Scholastic Dialectic,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13/3 (1982): 3–22. 126. Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, pp. 12–13, 58. 127. Ibid., p. 78. 128. Ibid. 129. The literature on the issue of poetics, and its ranking among the disciplines, is extensive. See Danilo Aguzzi-Barbagli, “Humanism and Poetics,” in Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms, and Legacy, 3 vols., ed. Albert Rabil Jr. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988) III: 85–169, and the bibliography therein. See also Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), II: 697–721; idem, “Humanism and Poetry: The Quattrocento Poetics of Bartolommeo della Fonte,” in The Scope of Renaissance Humanism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 88–139. 130. Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, p. 92. On the history of rhetoric during this era, see Marc Fumaroli, L’ Age de l’ éloquence: rhétorique et “res literaria,” de la Renaissance au seuil de l’époque classique, Hautes études médiévales et modernes 43 (Genève: Droz, 1980); idem, Histoire de la rhétorique dans l’Europe moderne: 1450–1950 (Paris:PUF, 1999); Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the theory and practice of Renaissaance rhetoric, ed. James Jerome Murphy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983). 131. Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, pp. 169–192. 132. Laurentii Valla Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, ed. Gianni Zippel, Thesaurus mundi vol. 21–22 (Patavii: In Aedibus Antenoreis,1982); Lisa Jardine, “Lorenzo Valla and the Intellectual Origins of Humanist Dialectic,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 15 (1977): 143–164. See also Charles Edward Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), I: 150–170. 133. Epistolae, pp. 214–215, cited by Peter Mack, Renaissance Argument: Valla and Agricola in the Tradition of Rhetoric and Dialectic (Leiden, New York, Köln: E. J. Brill, 1993), pp. 26–27. 134. Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 26, 31, 44, 59–63, 116; Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, pp. 177–179. On the importance of Agricola, see Richard Muller, “Reformation, Orthodoxy, ‘Christian Aristotelianism,’ and the Eclecticism of Early Modern Philosophy,” Dutch Review of Church History 81(2001): 306–325.

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135. Jerrold E. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy in Renaissance Humanism: The Union of Eloquence and Wisdom, Petrarch to Valla (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1968), p. 162. 136. Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 38–39, 51–52. 137. Ibid., 67. 138. Lisa Jardine, “Humanist Logic,” in The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy, ed. Charles B. Schmitt and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 179. 139. Ibid., p. 179. See also Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, pp. 168–169, and Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 49–51, 80–88, 114. This is not to say that Valla rejected all syllogistic arguments resulting in certitude. According to Mack, Valla argued that if two propositions are agreed upon and certain, then the conclusion is a necessity. 140. Repastinatio dialectice et philosophie, pp. 241–243. For an analysis of these passages, see Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 81–82. 141. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, pp. 11–12. Seigel points out that for Plato this position meant that people would be persuaded by what appeared to be true and not by truth itself. Therefore “the rhetorician need concern himself only with what was probable and not with that which was true. In Socrates’ view, the orator who acted thus did not teach his hearers, but, rather, could deceive them” (p. 10). 142. Mack, Renaissance Argument, p. 82. 143. Jardine, “Humanist Logic,” p. 180. 144. Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 233–237, 254–255. See also August Faust, “Die Dialektik Rudolf Agricolas. Ein Beitrag zur Charakteristik des deutschen Humanismus,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 34 (1922): 118–135; J. Monfasani, “Lorenzo Valla and Rudolph Agricola,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 28 (1990): 181–199. 145. Jardine, “Humanist Logic,” p. 184; Rummel, The Scholastic-Humanist Debate, p. 171; Mack, Renaissance Argument, 168. 146. Rodolphus Agricola, De inventione dialectica lucubrationes (repr. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1967), p. 193, cited by Mack Renaissance Argument, p. 170. 147. Jardine, “Humanist Logic,” p. 182. 148. Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 178–182. According to Mack, Agricola was not an Academic skeptic in the strict sense of the term because “although he believed that most things are not certain, for him the probable included the certain.” 149. Agricola, De inventione dialectica, pp. 2, 307, cited by Mack, Renaissance Argument, pp. 178–179. 150. Oberman, Masters of the Reformation, pp. 23–44; idem, “Via antiqua and via moderna: Late Medieval Prolegomena to Early Reformation Thought,” Journal of the History of Ideas 48 (1987): 23–40; Cf. Gerhard Ritter, Studien zur Spätscholastik II: Via antiqua und via moderna auf den deutschen Universitäten des XV. Jahrhunderts (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1922). 151. Oberman, Masters of the Reformation, p. 37. 152. John E. Murdoch, “The Development of a Critical Temper: New Approaches and Modes of Analysis in Fourteenth-Century Philosophy, Science, and Theology,” in

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Medieval and Renaissance Studies: Proceedings of the Southeastern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, summer 1975, ed. Siegfried Wenzel (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1978), pp. 66. 153. Ibid., p. 56. It should be noted that with Melanchthon we see a return to dialectics as a way to establish certitude. After the Zwickau prophets and the Peasants War, Melanchthon became increasingly convinced of the need for the proper method to teach ethics and theology. He transformed natural philosophy so that it could serve as a useful tool for the ethics and order of a civic Christian society. From 1527–1528 onward, Melanchthon’s writings on dialectic had as their purpose to teach the proper method that could guarantee absolute certainty. Three criteria provided this certitude: innate knowledge, experience, and syllogistic demonstrations and conclusions. In Book IV of his Erotemata dialectices he stated that “God wills that some things be certain, ﬁrm, and immutable—the rules of our life. . . . He wants some unshakeable moral laws.” He denounced the Pyrrhonists and Academics because they wanted to destroy “the chief gift of God, namely; truth.” He insisted it was a crime to seek out tricks to elude those statements that “God wants us to embrace without doubting.” For Melanchthon, there was need for dialectic “not only so that doctrine receives some light but also that it be the chain of concord . . . For in order that the voice of those who teach be one and unanimous, it is necessary to keep the substance of knowledge enclosed within the conﬁnes of the arts, held together by speciﬁc language and order.” Therefore, the proper use of dialectic would secure the truth of doctrine and harmony within the church as well as order within society. See Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The Case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, pp. 140–147. Melanchthon, Erotemata dialectices, Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. K. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindseil, Corpus Reformatorum 28 vols. (Halis Saxonum, apud C. A. Schwetschke et ﬁlium, 1853–1860), XIII: 645–646; Philip Melanchthon, Orations on Philosophy and Education, ed. Sachiko Kusukawa, trans. Christine F. Salazar, Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp 85–86. On the history and transformation of dialectic in the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century, see the following: Amy N. Burnett, “The Educational Roots of Reformed Scholasticism: Dialectic and Scriptural Exegesis in the Sixteenth Century,” Dutch Review of Church History 84 (2004): 299–317; Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academics, 2003), I: 52–61; Günther Frank, “Melanchthons Dialektik und die Geschichte der Logik,” in Melanchthon und das Lehrbuch des 16. Jahrunderts Begleitband zur Ausstellung im Kulturhistorischen Museum Rostock 25. April bis 13. Juli 1997, ed. Jürgen Leonhardt (Rostock: Universität Rostock, 1997), pp. 125–145. 154. Murdoch, “The Development of a Critical Temper,” p. 59. 155. Ibid., pp. 59, 61. 156. Ernesto Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, trans. Walter F. Veit Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 51 (Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1988); idem, Rhetoric as Philosophy (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1980).

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29–33

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157. Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 21–22, 47–59, 65. 158. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, p. 70. 159. Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, p. 115. 160. Ibid., pp. 22–24, 54–57, 60. 161. Ibid., pp. 80–81 and pp. 44ff. 162. Seigel, Rhetoric and Philosophy, pp. 3–30. It should be noted that Seigel did not see rhetoric as philosophy. Rather, he examined how the humanists adopted or rejected traditional modes of ancient and medieval philosophies. 163. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, pp. 64–67, 95–98; idem, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 12–13, 48, 71, 88, 112–113. 164. Grassi, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 101–102. 165. Heiko A. Oberman, “Some Notes on the Theology of Nominalism, with Attention to Its Relation to the Renaissance,” Harvard Theological Review 53 (1960): 69–76. 166. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation, p. 27. 167. Grassi, Rhetoric as Philosophy, p. 10. 168. Ibid., pp. 60–61, 72–94; idem, Renaissance Humanism, pp. 11–13, 35–36, 42–45, 54–57, 60–63, 81–86, 93–97. 169. On paradox, see Rosalie Littell Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1976, 1966) and Le Paradoxe au temps de la Renaissance, ed. Marie Thérèse Jones-Davies, Centre de recherches sur la Renaissance 7 (Paris: J. Touzot, 1982). 170. Rummel, The Scholastic-Humanist Debate, p. 52. 171. Hanna H. Gray, “Renaissance Humanism: The Pursuit of Eloquence,” in Renaissance Essays, ed. Paul Oskar Kristeller and Philip P. Weiner, Library of the History of Ideas vol. 9 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 1992), p. 213; Zachary Sayre Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 12–13, 17, 54–59, 84–85, 95–97. 172. D. Marsh, The Quattrocento Dialogue: Classical Tradition and Humanist Innovation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980); Rummel, The ScholasticHumanist Debate, pp. 54–56. 173. On Learned Ignorance III.10.241, p. 195; See also Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision of God in Nicholas of Cusa, Selected Spiritual Writings,I. 1–4 (New York: Paulist Press, 1977), pp. 235–236; Harries, Inﬁnity and Perspective, pp. 42–63; Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds., Nicholas of Cusa in Search of God and Wisdom (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991); Louis Dupré, “The Mystical Theology of Nicholas of Cusa’s De visione Dei,” in Nicholas of Cusa on Christ and the Church, ed. Gerald Christianson and Thomas M. Izbicki (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). 174. Donald R. Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law, and History in the French Renaissance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970); idem, Faces of History: Historical Inquiry from Herodotus to Herder (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 130–188. 175. E. B. Fryde, Humanism and Renaissance Historiography, (London: The Hambledon Press, 1983), pp. 3–54. On the revival of history, see the following: Eric W. Cochrane,

408

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Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981); Donald R. Kelly, “Humanism and History,” in Rabil, Renaissance Humanism, III: 236–270; Peter Burke, “A Survey of the Popularity of Ancient Historians 1450–1700,” History and Theory 5 (1966): 135–152; Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970); Julian H. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963; Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies, vol. 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979). 176. Fryde, Renaissance Humanism and Historiography, p. 93 177. Kelly, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship, pp. 53–86. 178. Ibid., pp. 19–50. 179. Ibid., pp. 47–50. 180. Peter Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli: Florentine Humanism in the High Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 54. See also Arnaldo Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography Sather Classical Lectures 54 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). 181. Godman, From Poliziano to Machiavelli, p. 59. 182. Myron P. Gilmore, “The Renaissance Conception of the Lessons of History,” in Facets of the Renaissance, ed. William H. Werkmeister (Los Angeles: University of Southern California, 1959), p. 78. On the history of the idea of the exemplar up to Hegel, see Reinhart Koselleck, “Historia Magistra Vitae: The Dissolution of the Topos into the Perspective of a Modernized Historical Time,” in Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time trans. Keith Tribe (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), pp. 26–42; idem, “Some Questions Concerning the Conceptual History of Crisis,” in Culture and Crisis, ed. Nina Witoszek and Lars Trägårdh (New York: Berghahn Books, 2003), pp. 1–23. 183. Gilmore, “The Renaissance Conception of the Lessons of History,” pp. 85–86; Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 1–30; Zachary Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Karlheinz Stierle, “L’histoire comme exemple, l’exemple comme histoire,” Poétique 10 (1972): 176–198. CHAPTER

2

1. WA 18. 604.33 2. Berndt Hamm, “Normative Centering in the 15th and 16th Centuries,” in The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, ed. and trans. Robert J. Bast (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), p. 27, n. 75. 3. Johannes Herholt O. P., De tempore, sermon 156, cited by Anne T. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002), p. 108. Also see Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and

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38–41

409

Reformation France, Renaissance Society of America Reprint Texts 14 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002), p. 105. 4. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation, pp.116–117. 5. Steven E. Ozment, “Homo Viator: Luther and Late Medieval Theology,” in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, ed. Steven Ozment (Chicago: Quandrangle Books, 1971), p. 149. 6. Peter Lombard, I Sent. dist. xvii. cap. 6; Thomas Aquinas, I Sent. dist. xvii. q. 1. art. 1; Hamm, “From the Medieval ‘Love of God’ to the ‘Faith’ of Luther—A Contribution to the History of Penitence,” in The Reformation of Faith, pp. 136–137. 7. David Curtis Steinmetz, Misericordia Dei: The Theology of Johannes von Staupitz in its Late Medieval Setting (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), pp. 105–108; Steven E. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson and Martin Luther (1509–1516) in the Context of Their Theological Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1965). 8. Hamm, “From the Medieval ‘Love of God’ to the ‘Faith’ of Luther,” in The Reformation of Faith, pp. 128–137. 9. Ibid., p. 187. 10. Concilium Tridentinum: Diariorum, actorum, espitularum, tractatuum nova collectio (Freiburgi Brisgoviae: Herder, 1901) V:793.35–37. Decretum de iustiﬁcatione, sessio sexta. cap, 7: “Demum unica formalis causa est iustitia Dei, non qua ipse iustus est, sed qua nos iustos facit, qua videlicet ab eo donati renovamur, spiritu mentis nostrae, et non modo reputamur, sed vere iusti nominamur et sumus, iustitiam in nobis recipientes.” 11. Ibid., 794.29–33: Decretum de iustiﬁcatione, sessio sexta. cap. 9: “Nam sicut nemo pius de Dei misericordia, de Christi merito deque sacramentorum virtute et efﬁcacia dubitare debet: sic quilibet, dum se ipsum suamque propriam inﬁrmitatem et indispositionem respicit, de sua gratia formidare et timere potest, cum nullus scire valeat certitudine ﬁdei, cui non potest subesse falsum, se gratiam Dei esse consecutum.” 12. Steinmetz, Misericordia Dei, pp. 122–131; Hamm, “Why Did ‘Faith’ Become for Luther the Central Concept of the Christian Life?” in The Reformation of Faith, 159–160; idem, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts: Studien zu Johannes von Paltz und seinem Umkreis, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 65 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1982), pp. 222–226. 13. For example, Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, I/II. q. 112. art. 5. 14. Heiko A. Oberman, Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Nominalism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), pp. 217–200, 204–230. 15. Steinmetz, Misericordia Dei, p. 123. 16. Ibid., pp. 125–129. 17. WA 54. 185.12–186.24. 18. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, trans. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 156–172; Alberto Tenenti, La vie et la mort à travers l’art du Xve siècle (Paris: A. Colin, 1952, 1977); Humana Fragilitas: The Themes of Death in Europe from the 13th Century to the 18th

410

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Century, ed. Pierroberto Scaramella and Alberto Tenenti (Clusone, BG [i.e. Bergamo, Italy]: Ferrari editrice, 2002). 19. Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 222. 20. Jean Delumeau, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13–18th Centuries, trans. Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990). 21. Lawrence G. Duggan, “Fear and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 75 (1984): 153–175. 22. Thomas N. Tentler, Sin and Confession on the Eve of the Reformation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1977). 23. John Bossy, “The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 25 (1975): 21–38. 24. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 308. 25. W. David Myers, Poor Sinning Folk: Confession and Conscience in CounterReformation Germany (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 57–60. 26. Larissa Taylor, Soldiers of Christ: Preaching in Late Medieval and Reformation France, p. 133. 27. Katharine Jackson Lualdi and Anne T. Thayer, eds., Penitence in the Age of Reformations (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2000), p. 242. 28. Ibid, p. 1 29. Richard Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” in Christian Spirituality: High Middle Ages and Reformation, ed. Jill Raitt in collaboration with Bernard McGinn and John Meyendorff, World Spirituality: An Encyclopedic History of the Religious Quest, vol. 17 (New York: Crossroad, 1978), pp. 82–83. 30. Anne T. Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation, p. 4. 31. Ibid., pp. 97–114. 32. Ibid., pp. 114–123. 33. Ibid., pp. 123–133. 34. Ibid., pp. 134–142. 35. Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” p. 83. See also idem, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Petra Seegets, Passionstheologie und Passionsfrömmigkeit im ausgehenden Mittelalter: Der Nürnberger Franziskaner Stephan Fridolin (gest. 1498) zwischen Kloster und Stadt, Spätmittelalter und Reformation, neue Reihe 10 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1988). 36. Kieckhefer, “Major Currents in Late Medieval Devotion,” pp. 83–89. 37. Ibid., pp. 89–93; Walter Delius, Geschichte der Marienverehrung (Munich: E. Reinhardt, 1963); Hilda C. Graef, Mary: A History of Doctrine and Devotion (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1963–1965); Hamm, “Normative Centering,” 44–46; idem, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, pp. 299–303; Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976); Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture (New Haven,

NOTES TO PAGES

44–46

411

CT: Yale University Press, 1966); Rachel Fulton, From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary 800–1200 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002). On Mary in the Reformation see Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in the History of Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 38. Kieckhefer, “Major Currents of Late Medieval Devotion,” pp. 97–99. On Mary as co-redemptrix see Oberman, Harvest of Medieval Theology, pp. 298–303. 39. Berndt Hamm, “Normative Centering in the 15th and 16th Centuries: Observations on Religiosity, Theology, and Iconology,” pp. 1–46. 40. Berndt Hamm, “Was ist Frömmigkeitstheologie? Überlegungen zum 14. bis 16. Jahrhundert,” in Praxis Pietatis: Beiträge zu Theologie und Frömmigkeit in der Neuzeit: Wolfgang Sommer zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Hans-Jörg Nieden and Marcel Nieden, (Stuttgart: Kolhammer, 1999), pp. 9–45; idem, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts. 41. Hamm, “Three Models of Pre-Reformation Urban Preaching,” in The Reformation of Faith, pp. 55–65; Donald Weinstein, Savonarola and Florence: Prophecy and Patriotism in the Renaissance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1970), pp. 112–158. 42. Hamm, “Three Models,” pp. 65–73. 43. Ibid., pp. 73–87; See also E. Jane Dempsey Douglass, Justiﬁcation in Late Medieval Preaching: A Study of John Geiler of Keisersberg, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought I (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966). 44. Hamm, “Three Models,” p. 81; Douglass, Justiﬁcation in Late Medieval Preaching, pp. 163–165. 45. Hamm, “Volition and Inadequacy as a Topic in Late Medieval Pastoral Care of Penitents,” in The Reformation of Faith, pp. 88–127. On this topic see also Adolar Zumkeller, “Das Ungenügen der menschlichen Werke bei den deutschen Predigern des Spätmittelalters,” Zeitschrift für katholische Theologie 81 (1959): 265–305. 46. [doleo quod non doleo]. Hamm, “Volition and Inadequacy,” p. 97–99; idem, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, pp. 153, 201, 283–284, 326, passim. On page 332, Hamm contrasts this minimalization to the “Maximalprogramms” of Biel and Ockhamist Nominalism, which had a very different interpretation of the facere quod in se est. 47. Ibid., pp. 90–91. 48. Hamm, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, pp. 247–302. 49. Sven Grosse, Heilsungewissheit und Scrupulositas im späten Mittelalter: Studien zu Johannes Gerson und Gattungen der Frömmigkeitstheologie seiner Zeit, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 85 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994), pp. 93–97. 50. Ibid., pp. 102–158. On the background of the certitude of hope, see Juan Alfaro, “Certitude de l’espérance et ‘certitude de la grâce,’” Nouvelle revue théologique 94 (1972): 3–42; Andrea Schrimm-Heins, “Gewissheit und Sicherheit,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 34 (1991): 175–178 and note 25 of page 180; Gustaf Karl Ljunggren, Zur Geschichte der christlichen Heilsgewissheit von Augustin bis zur Hochscholastik (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1921), pp. 187–219, 269–279; Michael Basse,

412

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Certitudo spei: Thomas von Aquins Begründung der Hoffnungsgewissheit und ihre Rezeption bis zum Konzil von Trient als ein Beitrag zur Verhältnisbestimmung von Eschatologie und Rechtfertigungslehre (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1993); Hamm, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, pp. 247–302; idem, “Volition and Inadequacy,” pp. 91–100. 51. Steinmetz, Misericordia Dei, p.106; Hamm, “Volition and Inadequacy,” p. 116. On this topic in French sermons of the period, see Taylor, Soldiers of Christ, pp. 90–92. 52. Hamm, “From the Medieval ‘Love of God’ to the ‘Faith’ of Luther,” pp. 142–146. 53. Taylor, Soldiers of Christ, p. 106. 54. Ibid., 140. Taylor demonstrates that in his sermons, François Le Picart “conveys an almost wholly positive and reassuring image of God”; idem, Heresy and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Paris: François Le Picart and the Beginnings of the Catholic Reformation, Studies in Medieval and Refomation Thought 77 (Leiden: Brill, 1999). 55. Larissa Taylor, “God of Judgment, God of Love: Catholic Preaching in France, 1460–1560,” Reﬂexions Historiques (Summer 2000) 2/26: 247–268. 56. Hamm, “Three Models of Pre-Reformation Preaching,” pp. 84–85; idem, “Volition and Inadequacy,” pp. 103–104. 57. Hamm, Frömmigkeitstheologie am Anfang des 16. Jahrhunderts, pp. 216–147. 58. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 307. On the debates about confession in the Reformation, see Ronald R. Rittgers, The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Ernst Bezzel, Frei zum Eingeständnis: Geschichte und Praxis der evangelischen Einzelbeichte (Sttutgart: Calwer, 1982); Henry Charles Lea, A History of Auricular Confession and Indulgences in the Latin Church, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: J. J. McVey, 1896); Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), pp. 91–107; Myers, “Poor Sinning Folk”: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany; Bernhard Lohse, “Die Privatbeichte bei Luther,” Kerigma und Dogma 14/3 (1968): 207–228; Frank Senn, “The Confession of Sins in the Reformation Churches,” in The Fate of Confession, ed. Mary Collins and David Powers (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1987), 105–116. 59. “Berngt Hägglund, “Heilsgewißheit,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie 14 (1985): 760. 60. The following discussion of Luther’s early years is heavily indebted to Jared Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace: Luther’s Early Spiritual Teaching (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1969), and idem, Luther’s Reform: Studies on Conversion and the Church (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1992). 61. Alfred Kurz, Die Heilsgewissheit bei Luther: eine entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Darstellung (Gütersloh: C. Bertelsmann, 1933), pp. 90–94, 110–115, 197–201. See also Karl Heim, Das Gewissheitsproblem in der systematischen Theologie bis zu Schleiermacher (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1911). 62. WA 56. 257.18–22; LW 25:244. 63. WA 56. 82.5–7; LW 25:269.

NOTES TO PAGES

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413

64. WA 56. 259.9; 280.10f; 281.5, 16–19; LW 25: 244, 246, 267, 300, passim. 65. WA 56. 258.1–2; LW 25: 244. 66. WA 56. 258.3–6; LW 25: 244. 67. WA 56. 258.6–7; 266.24; 348.20–21; 413.1–17; LW 25: 245, 254, 337, 404. 68. WA 56. 348.14–16, 27–28; LW 25: 337. 69. WA 56. 413.15; 429.20–431.2; LW 25: 404, 422. 70. Karl Holl, “Die Rechtfertigungslehre in Luthers Vorlesung über den Römerbrief mit besonderer Rücksicht auf die Frage der Heilsgewißheit,” in Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols. (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1948) I: 111–154. 71. Hartmann Grisar, Luther, 2 vols.(London: K. Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1913–1917) I: 374–388. 72. Ernst Bizer, Fides ex auditu: Eine Untersuchung über die Entdeckung der Gerechtigkeit Gottes durch Martin Luther (Neukirchen Kreis Moers: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1958); Paul Hacker, The Ego in Faith: Martin Luther and the Origin of Anthropocentric Religon (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970); Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976). 73. Jared Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace: Luther’s Early Spiritual Writings (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1969), p. 109. 74. Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace, p. 341, n. 88; Axel Gyllenkrok, Rechtfertigung und Heiligung in der frühen evangelischen Theologie Luthers (Weisbaden: Franz Steiner, 1952), pp. 66–73. 75. WA 56. 295.24–296.2; LW 25: 283. 76. Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace, pp. 95–129. 77. WA 56. 172.8–10; LW 25: 153. 78. WA 56. 153.12–13; LW 25: 130. 79. WA 56. 441.14–17; LW 25: 433. 80. WA 56. 442.19–20; LW 25: 434. 81. WA 9. 47.15, cited by Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace, p. 5. 82. WA Br. 1.111.17–22; LW 8: 46. 83. WA Br. 1. 111.27–29. 84. WA Br. 1. 111.32–36. 85. Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace, pp. 216–264; idem, Luther’s Reform, pp. 97–116. 86. Wicks, Luther’s Reform, p. 100. 87. WA 56. 276.12–14; LW 25: 263. 88. Tractatus de indulgentiis per Doctorem Martinum ordinis s. Augustini Wittenbergae editus, WA Br. 12; Wicks, Luther’s Reform, p. 110 (my emphasis). This treatise was not published in Luther’s time. 89. Wicks, Luther’s Reform, p. 93. 90. Ibid., pp. 97–114. 91. WA 56. 370.8–11; LW 25:360. The marginal gloss is found in WA 56. 79.2–5, 18; LW 25: 71. Also see Jared Wicks, Man Yearning for Grace, pp. 95–129.

414

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54–57

92. WA 56. 86.19–24; LW 25: 78 (marginal gloss, my emphasis). 93. On Luther’s concept of “ﬁdes sacramenti,” see Wicks, Luther’s Reform, pp. 117–187. 94. WA 1. 542.34–39. 95. Hamm, “From the Medieval ‘Love of God’ to the ‘Faith’ of Luther,” p. 133. 96. WA 1. 540.41–541.7; LW 31: 100. 97. WA 1. 541.22–24; LW 31:101. 98. WA 1. 595.5: “Tantum habes quantum credis”; LW 31: 193. 99. WA 1. 595.7; LW 31: 193. 100. WA 1. 596.7–9; LW 31: 195. 101. WA 1. 542.34–39; LW 31: 103. 102. On Luther and Cajetan, see Jared Wicks, Cajetan und die Anf änge der Reformation, Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung 43 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1983), pp. 720–136. Cf. Gerhard Hennig, Cajetan und Luther: Ein historischer Beitrag zur Begegnung von Thomismus und Reformation, Arbeiten zur Theologie II/7 (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1966). 103. WA 1. 544.40–41: “Oportet enim accedentem credere, deinde non sacramentum sed ﬁdes sacramenti iustiﬁcat”; LW 31: 107. 104. “Augsburg Treatises” (1518) in Cajetan Responds, ed. and trans. Jared Wicks, (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1978), p. 51. 105. Ibid., p. 52. 106. Ibid. 107. Ibid., p. 54. 108. Ibid., p. 55. 109. Ibid., p. 66. 110. WA 2.13.11–14.12; LW 31: 271, 274. 111. WA 2.14.2–3; LW 31: 271. 112. “The just person lives not by his attitude but by faith. For this reason you should not harbor any doubt on account of your unworthiness. You go to the sacrament because you are unworthy and so that you may be made worthy and be justiﬁed by him who seeks to save sinners and not the righteous. When, however, you believe Christ’s word, you honor it and thereby are righteous.” LW 31: 271; see also WA 1 542.35–543.2. 113. WA 2; LW 31: 271. 114. WA 2; LW 31: 272. 115. In his comments on Hebrews 9:24, Luther afﬁrmed the subjective certitude of salvation and ﬁrmly opposed any interpretation of Eccl. 9:1 that would indicate otherwise. Using James 1:6–7 (“But let him ask in faith, with no doubting; for he who doubts is like a wave of the sea“), Luther defended the certitude of faith. However, even here he left room for uncertainty: “For this reason one must observe prudently and circumspectively the opinion of those who apply the well-known statement in Eccl. 9:1, ‘Man does not know whether he is worthy of love or hatred,’ to the circumstances of the present hour in order that in this way they make a man uncertain with regard to the mercy of God and the assurance of salvation. For Ecclesiastes is not about the

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415

present circumstances. No, it is speaking about perseverance and future circumstances which are certain for no man, as the Apostle says, ‘Anyone who thinks that he stands, take heed lest he fall.’ ” 116. WA 20. 158.6–16. 117. WA 46: 611.32–33; LW 22: 88. 118. WA 46. 611.33–35. 119. On Luther’s view of human reason see, Bernhard Lohse, Ratio und ﬁdes: Eine Untersuchung über die ratio in der Theologie Luthers (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1958), esp. pp. 59–118 and Brian A. Gerrish, Grace and Reason: A Study of the Theology of Luther (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962). 120. WA 40/1 580.11–12. 121. WA 40/1. 10.23; LW 26: 378. 122. WA40/1.588.7-591.25–26; LW 26; 386–389. 123. WA 45. 559.22–26; LW 24: 108. 124. WA 45. 562.10–17; LW 24: 113. 125. WA 45. 586.36–587.3. Such passages bring up the question of the theosis in Luther’s thought. Space does not permit me to analyze this still-debated issue, an issue that is central to the the “Renaissance and Reformation Team” in the Academy of Finland and the Luther-Agricola Society in Helsinki, which has published numerous books. The emphasis is on the real presence of Christ in the soul in Luther’s theology. The reader should see Luther und Theosis: Vergöttlichung als Thema der abendländischen Theologie: Referate der Fachtagung der Luther-Akademie Ratzeburg in Helsinki 30.3–24. 1989), ed. Simo Peura and Antti Raunio, Veröffentlichungen der Luther-Akademie Ratzeburg Bd. 15 (Helsinki: Luther-Agricola-Gesellschaft, 1990); Joachim Heubach Luther und Theosis (Erlangen: MartinLuther-Verlag, 1990); and the Finnish Luther Studies Web site at www.helsinki.ﬁ /~risaarin/luther.html. 126. WA 40/1. 588.12–14; LW 26: 386. 127. WA 40/1. 588.31–589.17; 591.26–30; 592.28–30; LW 26: 387–389. 128. WA 40/1. 579.17–20; LW 26: 380. 129. WA 57/3. 215.18–216.12; LW 29: 216. 130. Andrea Schrimm-Heins, “Gewißheit und Sicherheit. Geschichte und Bedeutungswandel der Begriffe certitudo und securitas,” Archiv für Begriffsgeschichte 34 (1991): 198, 201–202. 131. WA 45. 512.29–30, 529.3–8, 29ff; LW 24: 57, 64–65. 132. WA 18. 684.32–686.13, 689.18, 690.8; LW 33: 138–147. 133. WA 43. 458.20–22. 134. WA 43. 459.22–34; LW 5: 44–45. 135. WA 43. 460.4–8; LW 5:45. 136. WA 43. 460.23–24; LW 5: 46. 137. WA 43. 460.24–26; LW 5: 46. 138. WA 43. 460.26–28; LW 5: 46. 139. WA 43. 460. 29–32; LW 5:47. 140. WA 43. 461.13–15 (my emphasis); LW 5: 47.

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141. For an analysis of the certitude of salvation in Zwingli’s exegetical work, especially on the Psalms, to the year 1522 see Ralf Hoburg, Seligkeit und Heilsgewissheit: Hermeneutik und Schriftauslegung bei Huldrych Zwingli bis 1522, Calwer theologische Monographien Reihe 11 (Stuttgart: Calwer, Verlag, 1994); Cf Martin Brecht, “Zwingli als Schüler Luthers. Zu seiner theologischen Entwicklung 1518–1522, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 96 (1985): 201–219. 142. Z III. 782.7. Huldreich Zwinglis Sämtliche Werke, ed. Emil Egli, Corpus Reformatorum, vols 88–101 (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke und Sohn, 1905) [hereafter Z]; Ulrich Zwingli, On Providence and Other Essays, edited for Samuel Macauley Jackson by William John Hinke (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1983; idem, On True and False Religion, edited by Samuel Macauley Jackson (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1981); Huldrych Zwingli, Writings I: The Defense of the Faith, trans. E. J. Furcha; Huldrych Zwingli, Writings II: In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral and Eucharistic Reformed Writings, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984). 143. Z VI/iii. 137.23–138.5; On Providence, p. 172. 144. W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 142–153. 145. Z III. 655.22–30; On True and False Religion, p. 76. 146. Z V/ii. 172.14–16: Selected Works (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), p. 237. On Zwingli’s view of the Spirit, see Gottfried W. Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), pp. 178–180; W. P. Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp.129–138; Edward Furcha, “In Defense of the Spirit: Zwingli Authenticates His Reform,” in Prophet— Pastor—Protestant: The Work of Huldrych Zwingli after Five Hundred Years, ed. E. Furcha and H. Wayne Pipkin, Pittsburgh Theological Monographs, New Series 11 (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), pp. 43–58; Hans Joachim Kraus, “Charisma Propheticon: Eine Studie zum Verständnis der neutestamentlichen Geistesgaben bei Zwingli und Calvin,” in Wort und Gemeinde. Probleme und Aufgaben der praktischen Theologie. Eduard Thurneysen zum 80. Geburtstag (Zurich: EVZ-Verlag 1968, 80–103). 147. Z VI/iii. 177.19–22, 24, 178.2; On Providence, p. 197. 148. Z VI/iii. 178.3–4, On Providence, p. 197. 149. Z VI/iii. 184.1; Z VI/i. 177.15. 150. Z VI/i. 176.24–177.9; Ulrich Zwingli, Refutation of Baptist Tricks, in Selected Works (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), pp. 241–242. 151. Z VI/i. 177.13–18, 178.3–8. See also Z VI/iii. 184.1–17; 186.12–187.6. idem, Refutation of Baptist Tricks, pp. 240–242. 152. Z VI/iii. 169.19–21; On Providence, p. 193. 153. Z VI/iii. 169.21–170.2. 154. Z VI/iii. 171.14–15: “Evidentiam ergo vertimus, quae nobis manifestam, indubitatam et adpertam certitudinem signiﬁcaret.” 155. Z VI/iii. 171.17–18: “evidentem lucem ac certitudinem animi.” 156. Z VI/iii. 176.21–177.1; On Providence, p. 196–97. 157. Z VI/iii. 223.11; On Providence, p. 228. 158. Z VI/iii. 179.17–18.“Deum scis tuum esse.”

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159. Z II. 404.16–17; Explanation of the 52nd Article, from Huldrych Zwingli, Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles, in The Defense of the Reformed Faith, p. 321. 160. Z II. 786.12–13. 161. Z II. 786.14, On True and False Religion, p. 213. 162. Z III. 764.26; On True and False Religion, p. 187. The various distinctions in kinds of baptism would become central for the Anabaptists. Here Zwingli is discussing the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus. On this controversy, see David C. Steinmetz, “The Baptism of John and the Baptism of Jesus in Huldrych Zwingli, Balthasar Hubmaier, and Late Medieval Theology,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History, Essays Presented to George Hunston Williams on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday, ed. R. Forrester Church and Timothy George (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), pp. 169–181. 163. Z III. 781.16–17; On True and False Religion, p. 207. 164. Z II. 72.25–31; “Explanation of the 13th Article,” p. 57. 165. Z II. 73.12–17; “Explanation of the 13th Article,” p. 57 166. Z II. 75.34–36; “Explanation of the 15th Article,” p. 61. 167. Z II. 194.12–20; “Explanation of the 20th Article,” p. 155. 168. Z II. 194.21; “Explanation of the 20th Article,” p. 155. 169. Z. III. 853.18; On True and False Religion, p. 281. 170. Z II. 195.13; “Explanation of the 20th Article,” p. 156. See also Z III. 776.12–13. 171. Z III. 786.27; On True and False Religion, p. 213. 172. Z. V. 690.34–691.1; Huldrych Zwingli, Friendly Exegesis, in In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral and Eucharistic Writings, p. 328. 173. Z III. 259.8–12; Reply to Emser in On True and False Religion, pp. 667.5–668.13; 670.37–671.11; 764.27–29, 821.29–32; 908.14–17; On True and False Religion, pp. 89–90, 94–95, 187, 254, 339, 372. 174. Heribert Schützeichel, Die Glaubenstheologie Calvins (Munich: Max Hueber, 1972); Victor A. Shepherd, The Nature and Function of Faith in the Theology of Calvin (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1983); Walter E. Stuermann, A Critical Study of Calvin’s Concept of Faith (Ann Arbor, MI: Edwards Brothers, 1952); Barbara Pitkin, What Pure Eyes Could See: Calvin’s Doctrine of Faith in Its Exegetical Context. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). On certainty and faith, see Randall Zachman, The Assurance of Faith: Conscience in the Theology of Martin Luther and John Calvin (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005); David Willis-Watkins, “The Unio Mystica and the Assurance of Faith According to Calvin,” in Calvin: Erbe und Auftrag: Festschrift für Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Willem van‘t Spijker (Kampen: Kok, 1991), pp. 77–84. 175. Institutionis Christianae religionis 1559, in Joannis Calvini, Opera Selecta, vols. III–V, ed. Petrus Barth and Wilhelm Niesel (Monachii: Kaiser, 1957) [hereafter OS]; Inst. III. 2.7; OS IV: 16.32–34. 176. Inst. III. 2.15; OS IV. 25.24–28. 177. Inst. III. 2.15; OS IV. 26.7–13. 178. Inst. III. 2.7, 8, 10, 33, 36; OS IV. 16–18, 19–20, 44–46. 179. Inst. III. 2.15, OS IV. 5–14.

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180. Ibid., OS IV. 26.15–16. 181. Ibid., OS IV. 26.17–21, 24–25. 182. John Calvin, Sermons sur l’epitre aux Galates, Corpus Reformatorum 78: 588. 183. Ibid., p. 591. 184. Ibid., p. 588. 185. Ibid., p. 591. 186. Further passages can be found in Joel R. Beeke, Assurance of Faith: Calvin, English Puritanism, and the Dutch Second Reformation, American University Studies, Series VII/Theology and Religion 189 (New York: Peter Lang, 1991), pp. 47–77. Also see the discussion in Randall Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, pp. 91–243; A. N. S. Lane, “Calvin’s Doctrine of Assurance,” Vox Evangelica 11 (1979): 32–54. On the role of the Spirit, see Werner Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), pp. 233–275; Calvin and the Holy Spirit, Sixth Colloquium on Calvin and Calvin Studies, ed. Peter de Klerk (Grand Rapids: Calvin Studies Society, 1989). 187. Inst. III. 2.36; OS IV. 46.34–35. 188. David Willis, “The Inﬂuence of Laelius Socinus on Calvin’s Doctrines of the Merits of Christ and the Assurance of Faith,” in Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Socinus, ed. John A. Tedeschi (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1965), p. 238. 189. Inst. III. 2.11; OS IV. 20.30. 190. Inst. III. 2.10; OS IV. 19.30–31. 191. Inst. III. 1.1, 4, III. 2.10, 12, 33–36; OS IV. 20.15–7. 192. Inst. III. 2.36; OS IV. 47.5–12. 193. Inst. III. 2.11, 13; OS IV. 20–21, 22. 194. Inst. III. 2.38. See also, Inst III. 2.24, 28 and III. 2.37, 40; OS IV. 48.9–10. See also OS IV. 34.12–24, 15–21, 50.5–10, 29–34. 195. Inst. III. 2.24; OS IV. 34.26–28. 196. Inst. Ibid., OS IV. 34.28–35.11. 197. Inst. III. 2.10; OS IV. 20.16–17. 198. Inst. III. 2.39; OS IV. 49.28–30. See also I John 3:24, 4:13 and John 14:17. 199. Inst. III. 1.3, 4; OS IV. 1 3–6, and passim. 200. Inst. III. 1.1; OS IV. 1.22–23. 201. Inst. III. 2.11; OS IV. 21.19–20. 202. Inst. III. 2.12; OS IV. 22.15–18. 203. Inst III. 2.6, 16, 17, 19; OS IV. 13.15–16, 26.40–27.4, 29.27–30. 204. Inst. III. 1.3; III. 2.11–12, III. 13.5; OS IV. 3.15–16; 21.8–9; 220.15–17. 205. Inst. III. 2.11; OS IV. 21.9–10. 206. Inst.III.2.10, 11, 12, 34–37; OS IV. 20.16–18, 21.31–32, 22.9, 21, 45.27, 46.35, 47.28. 207. Z VI/iii. 184.11–17. 208. Z II.89.31–90.3; Explanation of the 16th article, p. 72. 209. S IV. 124; cited by Gottfried W. Locher, Zwingli’s Thought: New Perspectives, Studies in the History of Christian Thought XXV (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), p. 185. 210. Inst. III. 14.19, III. 24.4; OS IV. 237.23–27, 414.1–10.

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211. Inst. III. 14.18; OS IV. 236.35–237.19. Zachman also shows that Calvin saw the peaceful or “good conscience” as a testimony of election, The Assurance of Faith, pp. 188–203. 212. Inst. III. 24.19; OS IV. 237.23–24.19. 213. Inst. III. 17.12; OS IV. 266.7–9. See also Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, p. 217–219. 214. Heiko A. Oberman, “Iustitia Christi and Iustitia Dei: Luther and the Scholastic Doctrines of Justiﬁcation,” Harvard Theological Review 59 (January 1966): 1–26, repr. Dawn of the Reformation, pp. 104–125. 215. Steven E. Ozment, “Homo Viator: Luther and Late Medieval Theology,” in The Reformation from Medieval Perspective, pp. 142–154. 216. WA 18. 783.24–33; On the Bondage of the Will, p. 329. On Erasmus’s understanding of the debate, see Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus’ Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983). 217. Inst. III.3.10, 11.23, 14.10, 17.15; OS IV. 229.20–21, 207, 229, 269. 218. WA 40. 589.8–10; LW 27: 387. 219. WA 40. 205.25–26; LW 26:114. For discussions of Luther and the devil, see Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen WalliserSchwarzbart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), esp. pp. 209–271; Mark U. Edwards Jr., Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975); Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, pp. 63–68. 220. WA 40/2. 42.34–35; LW 27.34. 221. WA 40. 316–322; LW 26: 192–196. 222. WA 40. 321.7–12; LW 26: 196. 223. WA 40. 561–570; LW 24: 110–120. 224. WA 43. 461.42; LW 5: 48. 225. Inst. III. 2.17–18; OS IV. 27–29. 226. Inst. III. 2.17; OS IV. 28.5–8. 227. Schreiner, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? Calvin’s Exegesis of Job from Medieval and Modern Perspectives (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). 228. Inst. III. 2.18, OS IV. 29.5–30.6. 229. Z VI/iii. 180.8. 230. Philip Melanchthon, Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, Loci communes 1555, trans. Clyde L, Manschreck (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1965), pp. 161–174; Loci communes, trans. L. J. Satre, revised W. Pauk, in Melanchthon and Bucer, The Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1969), chapter XIII. See also Timothy J. Wengert, Philip Melanchthon’s ‘Annotationes in Johannem’ in Relation to Its Predecessors and Contemporaries (Genève: Droz, 1963) 231. Melanchthon on Christian Doctrine, p. 170. 232. Martin Bucer, Metaphrasis et enarratio in epist. D. Pauli ad Romanos, pp. 231–232. Cited in W. P. Stephens, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Martin Bucer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 48–100. 233. Stephens, The Holy Spirit in the Theology of Martin Bucer, pp. 50–70.

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234. On Luther and experience, see Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, pp. 77–87. The problem of the ambiguity of experience will be addressed in chapter 6 of this volume. CHAPTER

3

1. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christian Man, trans. David Daniell (London: Penguin Books, 2008), p. 17. Also see David Daniell, The Bible in English (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003). 2. David C. Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), p. 44. On the issue of “the dying and the killing for,” see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake, Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 3. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Reformation Bible and the Bible of the Reformation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day, ed. Stanley Lawrence Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963); David Daniell, The Bible in English; Lay Bibles in Europe 1450–1800, ed. M. Lamberigts and A. A. den Hollander, Bibliotheca Ephemeridum theologicarum Lovaniensium 198 (Leuven: Peeters, 2006), pp. 3–181. 4. G. R. Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), p. 56. 5. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Ford Lewis Battles, ed. John T. McNeill, Library of Christian Classics Vol. XX (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1975) I.7.1 and Institutionis Christianae religionis 1559, in Joannis Calvini, Opera Selecta, vols. III–V, ed. Petrus Barth and Wilhelm Niesel ( Monachii: Kaiser, 1957) [hereafter OS], III: 60–61; Ulrich Zwingli, Huldreich Zwinglis sämtliche Werke, ed Emil Egil, Corpus Reformatorum vols. 88–101 (Berlin: C. A. Schwetsche und Sohn, 1905) [hereafter Z]; Huldrych Zwingli, Exposition of the Sixty-Seven Articles in the Defense of the Reformed Faith, in Writings: In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral, and Eucharisitc Writings, II, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications, 1984), pp. 7–12, 60–61 [hereafter given the number of the “article”]; Philip Schaff, The Creeds of The Evangelical Protestant Churches, Theological and Philosophical Library 3 (London, New York: Harper and Brothers, 1882) III: 239. See also Richard A. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics: The Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520–1725, 3 vols. (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2003) II: 80–83. On Calvin’s argument, see Werner Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), pp. 202–217. 6. Ulrich Zwingli, Von Klarheit und Gewißheit des Wortes Gottes, in Z 1. 359. 34–360.12; On the Clarity and Certainty of the Word in Zwingli and Bullinger, trans. and ed. Geoffrey W. Bromiley (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1953), p. 74. The literature on this topic is considerable. Several important studies include Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates, pp. 37–69; Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, II: 63–94, 322–324; idem, “Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: The View from the Middle Ages,” in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the

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Reformation, ed. Richard A. Muller and John L. Thompson (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmans, 1996), pp. 3–16; Ralf Hoburg, Seligkeit und Heilsgewissheit: Hermeneutik und Schriftauslegung bei Huldrych Zwingli bis 1522 (Stuttgart: Calwer Verlag, 1994). 7. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, II: 63. 8. The major scholar of this subject in the Reformation is David C. Steinmetz. See his bibliography in Biblical Interpretation in the Era of the Reformation: Essays Presented to David C. Steinmetz in Honor of His Sixtieth Birthday (Grand Rapids, MI: W. B. Eerdmams, 1996). 9. Scott H. Hendrix, “Deparenting the Fathers: The Reformers and Patristic Authority,” in Scott H. Hendrix, Tradition and Authority in the Reformation (Ashgate,UK: Variorum, 1966) V: 55–68; Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation, pp. 70–85; Anthony N. S. Lane, “Calvin and the Fathers,” in Bondage and Liberation of the Will, in Calvinus sincerioris religionis vindex (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1997), pp. 67–96; Otto Scheel, Luthers Stellung zur heiligen Schrift (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1902); Brian Gerrish “The Words of God and the Words of Scripture: Luther and Calvin on Biblical Authority,” in The Old Protestantism and the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 51–68; Jaroslav Pelikan, Luther the Expositor: Introduction to the Exegetical Writings (St. Louis: Concordia Pub. House, 1959). 10. OS I: 488, cited by Hendrix, “Deparenting the Fathers,” p. 61. 11. Cited in Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates, p. 76. 12. Ibid., p. 280. Evans explains that the background to many of these debates by Calvin and others was the insistence by the Paris theologians of obedience to the Articles of 1544. 13. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, p. 63. 14. Z II.22.21–24; “Exposition of article 1,” p. 8 15. Some of the most important studies concerning the issue of authority with regard to Reformation issues are: David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists 1518–1525 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991); Scott H. Hendrix, Luther and the Papacy: Stages in a Reformation Conﬂict (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1981); idem, Tradition and Authority in the Reformation (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996); Rupert E. Davies, The Problem of Authority in the Continental Reformers: A Study of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin (London: Epworth Press, 1946); Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates; Bernhard Lohse, “Luther und die Autorität-Roms im Jahre 1518,” in Christian Authority: Essays Presented to Henry Chadwick, ed. G. R. Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Alexandre Ganoczy, Autorität und Gewissen im Zeitalter der Reformation, (Mainz: Zabern, 1991), pp. 43–81; Steven Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973); K.-V Selge, “Das Authoritätsgefüge der westlichen Christenheit im Lutherkonﬂikt 1517 bis 1521,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 591–617; Jared Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther,” in Jared Wicks, Luther’s Reform: Studies on Conversion and the Church (Mainz: P. von Zabern, 1992), pp. 149–187; Allan K. Jenkins and Patrick Preston, Biblical Scholarship and the Church: A Sixteenth-Century Crisis of Authority, Ashgate New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007).

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16. David Steinmetz, Luther in Context (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), p. 96. 17. Gordon Rupp, “Word and Spirit in the First Years of the Reformation,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 49 (1958): 13–26. 18. Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent. 19. George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, 1992), pp. 1248–1249. 20. WA 7.546.21–28; LW 21: 299. 21. Z 1. 361.31–33; Z 1. 366.18–23; Z 1. 337.10–20; Z 1: 371.28–372.7; Clarity and Certainty, pp. 75, 79, 83, 87, 89. 22. Z 1. 370.26–371.7; Clarity and Certainty, pp. 86–87, 89; W. P. Stephens, Zwingli: An Introduction to His Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), pp. 61–66; idem, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986), pp. 51–69. 23. Z 1. 362.21–364.18; Z 1. 366.26–30; Clarity and Certainty, pp.76–77. 24. Z 1. 379.18–30; Clarity and Certainty, pp. 90–91. 25. Z 1. 380.6–11; Clarity and Certainty, p. 91. 26. Two of the most important studies are Prenter, Spiritus Creator, trans. John M. Jensen (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1952); Karl Holl, “Luther und die Schwärmer,” in Karl Holl, Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, 3 vols. (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck,1923), I: 420–467; Mark U. Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). 27. Hermann Barge, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, 2 vols. (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1968); Querdenker der Reformation: Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt und seine frühe Wirkung, ed. Ulrich Bubenheimer (Würzburg: Religion & Kultur Verlag, 2001); Gordon Rupp, Patterns of Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1969), pp. 49–153; Ronald J. Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt: The Development of His Thought 1517–1525, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 11 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974). 28. WA 18. 136.9–23; LW: 33:146. 29. Dialogue or Discussion Booklet on the Infamous and Idolatrous Abuse of the Most Blessed Sacrament of Jesus Christ, in The Essential Carlstadt [hereafter EC], trans. E. J. Furcha, Classics of the Radical Reformation 8 (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1995), p. 282. 30. WA 7. 98.40–99.2: See also WA 7. 97.23. On Luther’s doctorate, see Brian A. Gerrish, “Doctor Martin Luther: Subjectivity and Doctrine in the Lutheran Reformation,” in Seven-Headed Luther, Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary 1483–1983 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 1–24. On the background and the theological issues in this debate, see Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation Debates, pp. 37–80; Bengt Hägglund, “Evidentia sacrae scripturae: Bemerkungen zum ‘Schriftprinzip’ bei Luther,” in Franz Lau, Vierhundertfünfzig Jahre lutherische Reformation 1517– 1967, Festschrift für Franz Lau zum 60. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1967), pp. 116–125; Walter Mostert, “Scriptura sacra sui ipsius interpres: Bemerkungen zum Verständnis der Heiligen Schrift durch Luther,” Lutherjahrbuch 46 (1979): 60–96; Bernhard Rothen, Die Klarheit der Schrift (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990).

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31. Heiko A. Oberman, “Quo Vadis Petre? Tradition from Irenaeus to Humani Generis,” in Heiko A. Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), pp. 269–296. 32. WA 6. 561.3–18; LW 36: 107–8; Cf. LW 35:150–152. 33. Caspar Schwenckfeld, Corpus Schwenckfeldianorum, ed. Chester C. Hartranft, 19 vols. (Leipzig: Breitkopf and Härtel, 1907) [hereafter CS], II: 127–140; R. Emmet McLaughlin, Caspar Schwenckfeld, Reluctant Radical: His Life to 1540 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986); idem, “Spiritualism and the Bible. The Case of Caspar Schwenkfeld,” MQR 7 (1953): 282–298; Paul Gerhard Eberlein, Ketzer oder Heiliger? Caspar von Schwenckfeld: Der schlesische Reformator und seine Botschaft, Studien zur schlesischen und Oberlausitzer Kirchengeschichte 6 (Metzingen: Ernst Franz Verlag, 1999); Selina Gerhard Schultz, Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1489–1561). Spiritual Interpreter of Christianity, Apostle of the Middle Way, Pioneer of Modern Religious Thought (Norristown, PA: The Board of Publications of the Schwenckfelder Church, 1946), pp. 180–191. 34. CS II: 276.21–22: “Er hat mir j zůgesagt: Er wὀlle mich nicht irren lassen.” See also Schultz, Caspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig, pp. 93ff. 35. CS II: 277.3–4. 36. CS II: 277.6 37. CS II: 277.7–10, 280.6–13. See also McLaughlin, Caspar Schwenckfeld, pp. 62–70. 38. Cited by McLaughlin, Caspar Schwenckfeld, p. 263. 39. Steinmetz, Reformers in the Wings (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1971), pp. 128–130; Sider, Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, pp. 140–144; Barge, Karlstadt, I: 485–487. Barge lists Carlstadt’s Theses from the years 1521–1522 concerning De Pane Christ and De Adoratione Panis. In these Theses Carlstadt still advocated many elements of Luther’s Eucharistic doctrine. His concern over idolatry was evident in his rejection of the elevation of the sacrament. Moreover, unlike Luther, he demanded that the communicant partake of the Eucharist in both kinds. On the Eucharistic dispute also see Barge’s work, II: 144–295. 40. Dialogue in EC: 282. 41. The Meaning of the Term Gelassen and Where in Holy Scripture It Is Found (1523) in EC: 148–151, 155–156, 158. Sider, Andreas von Bodenstein Karlstadt, pp. 216–223; Markus Matthias, “Die Anf änge der reformatorischen Theologie des Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt,” in Querdenker der Reformation-Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt und seine frühe Wirkung, pp. 87–110; Alejandro Zorzin, “Gelassenheit gegen Sanftleben: die Umsetzung des neuen Glaubens in einen evangelischen Lebensstil bei Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt (1522–1527),” in Querdenker der Reformation: Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt und seine frühe Wirkung. Zorzin makes the point that the adoption of Gelassenheit did not result in a contemplative life withdrawn from the cares of the world. Karlstadt combined the practice of Gelassenheit with the necessity for bodily labor. 42. Reasons Why Andreas Carlstadt Remained Silent for a Time and On the True Unfailing Calling, in EC: 174–175.

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43. EC: 177. 44. EC: 178-179. 45. On Müntzer, see Walter Elliger, Thomas Müntzer, Leben und Werk (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1975); idem, Aussenseiter der Reformation: Thomas Müntzer: ein Knecht Gottes (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1975); Alexandre Ganoczy, Autorität und Gewissen im Zeitalter der Reformation, pp. 43–81; H.-J Goertz, Innere und äussere Ordnung in der Theologie Thomas Müntzers, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967); Eric W. Gritsch, Reformer without a Church: The Life and Thought of Thomas Müntzer 1488?–1525 (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967); idem, Thomas Müntzer: A Tragedy of Errors (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989); Hans Joachim Hillerbrand, A Fellowship of Discontent (New York: Harper and Row, 1967), pp. 1–30; Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, pp. 61–97; Rupp, Patterns in Reformation, pp.157–356. On the Zwickau prophets, see Paul Wappler, Thomas Müntzer in Zwickau und die Zwickauer Propheten (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1966). 46. Thomas Müntzer, Propositions Attributed to Egranus in The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, ed. and trans. by Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988) [hereafter CW], p. 381; Thomas Müntzer, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Paul Kirn, Günther Franz, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte Bd. 33 ([Gütserloh]: Mohn, 1968) [hereafter SB], pp. 217–224. 8–14. Siegfried Bräuer and Helmar Junghans, Der Theologe Thomas Müntzer: Untersuchungen zu seiner Entwicklung und Lehre (Göttingen: Mohn, 1989). 47. On Counterfeit Faith, SB: 218.18–26; 220.15–22; 224.8–14; CW: 220–224. 48. Ibid., SB: 224.24–36; CW: 224. 49. Ibid., SB: 220.25–28; 224.4–9; CW: 218, 223. 50 A Protestation Concerning the Situation in Bohemia, SB: 498.23–499.16; CW: 365. 51. Protestation or Proposition SB: 234.2–12; CW: 99: Müntzer to Christopher Meinhard in Eisleben: Interpretation of Psalm 18; SB: 402.18–24; CW: 77. See chapter 5 below on the “friends of God.” 52. Müntzer to Luther, Allstedt, 9 July 1523; SB: 390.9–13; CW: 57. 53. Sermon to the Princes/Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel, SB: 250. 9–12, 251.6–21, 252.31, 253.21–254.24, 256.17–19; CW 237, 239, 241–245. 54. Prague Manifesto, SB: 492.12–15; CW: 358 (my emphasis). See also CWS: 302, 345, 363. 55. Sermon to the Princes/Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel, SB: 249.5–8; CW: 237 (my emphasis). 56. Ibid., SB: 251.16–19; CW: 240; A Manifest Exposé of False Faith/Testimony of the First Chapter of the Gospel of Luke; SB: 270.7–15; CW: 264; Sermon to the Princes/Interpretation of the Second Chapter of Daniel, SB: 251.16–19; CW: 240. 57. Protestation or Proposition SB: 234.2–10; CW: 199.

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58. WA 45.622.19–22; LW 24:76. 59. The literature on the disputes about the Word and Spirit among the reformers is extensive. The following are still the most important and accessible: Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent; Goertz, Innere und äussere Ordnung in der Theologie Thomas Müntzers, pp. 49–72; Prenter, Spiritus Creator; Rupp, “Word and Spirit in the First Years of the Reformation”; Gottfried W. Locher, “The Characteristic Features of Zwingli’s Theology in Comparison with Luther and Calvin,” in Zwingli’s Thought. New Perspectives, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 25 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1981), pp. 160–164, 178–180; H. Jackson Forstman, Word and Spirit. Calvin’s Doctrine of Biblical Authority (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962); Hermann Noltensmeier, Reformatorische Einheit: das Schriftverständis bei Luther und Calvin (Graz-Köln: H. Böhlau, 1953); Scott H. Hendrix, “Luther’s Contribution to the Disunity of the Reformation,” in Tradition and Authority in the Reformation (Aldershot, UK: Variorum, 1996), XIV: 48–63; Werner Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1957), pp. 202–233. 60. WA40.572.20–26. 61. WA 20.723.22–35, WA 23.555.1–10, WA 40/2.178.16–32, WA 45.514.33–515.16; LW 20:218–219, 24:58–59, LW 27:146, LW 30:283. 62. WA 45.568.35- 569.4; LW 24:118. 63. WA 20. 722.31–723.35. 64. WA33.1–41; LW 23:66 65. WA 46.17–18, 24–25; WA 33.439.31–33; LW 24:321; LW 23:275. 66. WA 33.355.33–356.3, WA 33:550.5–19 (“Sonst wen ein privatperson ettwas von sich selbest zeuget, das ist nicht recht”), WA 333.358.9–30; LW 23: 225, 227, 342. 67. WA 33. 361.34–362.7; LW 23:229. 68. WA 33.18–31, 365.5–10; LW 23:230. 69. WA 6.412.20–23; LW 44:134. 70. WA 14.670.9–14; LW 9:167. 71. WA 40/2.174.21–22; LW 27:136. 72. WA 31/2.453, 1–2; LW 17:248. 73. WA 18.653.1–5. 74. WA 33.146.8–29, WA 45.620.1–622.38, 729.23–24, WA 46.28.6–19; LW 23:96, 24:174, 294, 329. 75. Z II.74.31–76.2; “Exposition of article 13,” p. 61. See also Z I. 380.2–18. 76. Z II.75.31–76.2; 267.19–21; ZIII.259.9–24; “Exposition of article 13,” p. 61; Reply to Emser, in Commenntary on True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1981), pp. 372, 380. 77. Z V. 663.9–19; Huldrych Zwingli, Friendly Exegesis, in Writings II : In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral and Eucharistic Writings, p. 309. 78. Z II.109. 28–111.6; Z III.260.26–32, 263.5–264.4;“Exposition of article 17,” p. 89; Reply to Emser, pp. 254, 376. 79. Z III.672.29–30; True and False Religion, p. 95.

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80. Z III.263.16–26; Reply to Emser, p. 376. 81. Z V.734.14–15; Friendly Exegesis, p. 354. 82. Z IV.84.170–401.30. 426.12–5; Huldrych Zwingli, On the Preaching Ofﬁce, in Writings II: In Search of True Religion: Reformation, Pastoral and Eucharistic Writings, pp.159–162, 178–179. 83. Z IV.431.20–21; On the Preaching Ofﬁce, p. 182. 84. Z III.673.4–10; On True and False Religion, p. 96. 85. John Calvin, the Bondage and Liberation of the Will: A Defense of the Orthodox Doctrine of Human Choice against Pighius, ed. A. N. S. Lane and trans. G. I. Davies, Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought 2 (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1996), pp. 232–233. 86. Inst. I.9.2–3; OS III: 83.33–34, 84.21–23. See also Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin, pp. 161–164. 87. Inst. I.9.3; OS IV: 84.14–18. 88. Jean Calvin, In Evangelium secundum Johannem commentarius, ed. Helmut Feld, in Ioannis Calvini, Opera omnia, series II: Opera exegetica Veteris et Novi Testamenti (Genève: Librarie Droz, 1997) [hereafter OE], XI/2: 148.1–3, 14–18; 190.6–191.9; Comm. John 14:17, 16:13. 89. Werner Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin, pp. 202–232. 90. Inst. III. 1.4; OS III. 5.25–29. 91. Inst. III. 2.34; OS IV. 45.20–30. 92. Comm. on I Corinthians 2:15; Corpus Reformatorum, 77: 344–345. 93. Calvin, Contra la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins qui se nomment spirituelz, in Ioannis Calvini, Opera Omnia, Scripta didactica et polemica, series IV, ed. Mirjam van Veen (Genève: Librairie Droz, 2005), I: 77. 94. Responsio ad Sadoleti epistolam, OS I: 485; Cf. Inst., I. 7.1–4, I. 9.1–2, III. 2.33–34; OS III: 65.1–70.15; 81.36–85.3; OS IV: 44.4–46.32. 95. Calvin’s New Testament Commentaries: A Harmony of the Gospels, 3 vols., ed. David W. Torrance and Thomas F. Torrance, trans. A.W. Morrison (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1972), III: 245. 96. Psalm 119:64, CR 32: 242. Herman J. Selderhuis refers to this verse in Calvin’s Theology of the Psalms, Texts and Studies in Reformation and Post-Reformation Thought (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007), p. 123. See also pp. 86, 122–124 and Willem Balke, “The Word of God and Experientia according to Calvin,” in Calvinus Ecclesiae Doctor (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1978), pp. 19–31. 97. Inst. III.2.6; OS IV. 14.24–28. 98. Comm. on John 3:11; OE XI/1: 94.14–24. 99. Inst. I. 6.3; OS III. 64.2–3. 100. Inst. IV. 8.11; OS V. 143.17–21, 144.12–16, 22–25. 101. Inst. IV. 9.13; OS V. 161.6–22. 102. Carlstadt, The Meaning of the Term Gelassen, in EC: 153. 103. Sebastian Franck, “A Letter to John Campanus,” in Spiritual and Anabaptist Writers, ed. George H. Williams, Library of Christian Classics (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1957), pp. 157, 159.

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104. Z VI/2. 803.10–22. Cited by Stephens, The Theology of Huldrych Zwingli, p. 136. 105. WA47. 29.8–26, 30.28–37; LW 22: 299, 300–301. 106. WA47. 32.7–26; LW 22: 303. 107. Inst. I. 6.1, I. 9.3, I. 10.2; OS III. 61.31–34, 83.37–85.3, 87.14–19. 108. William Tyndale, An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, S.N.D., and Jared Wicks, S.J. (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), p. 5.7–25. 109. The literature on this topic is extensive. Some important examples are Walther Köhler, Zwingli und Luther, ihr Streit über das Abendmahl nach seinen politischen und religiösen Beziehungen, Bd I: Die religiöse und politische Entwicklung bis zum Marburger Religionsgespräch 1529, Bd II: Vom Beginn der Marburger Verhandlungen 1529 bis zum Abschluss der Wittenberger Konkordie von 1536, ed. Ernst Kohlmeyer and Heinrich Bornkamm, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte Bd. 6–7 (Leipzig: Verein für Reformationsgeschichte, Vermittlungsverlag von M. Heinsius Nachfolger, 1924–1953); on Luther and Zwingli, see Bd. I: 190ff; Locher, “In Spirit and in Truth,” and “Zwingli’s Theology Compared to Luther and Calvin,” in Zwingli’s Thought, pp. 20–23, 230–238; A. Hyma, “Hoen’s Letter on the Eucharist and Its Inﬂuence upon Carlstadt, Bucer and Zwingli,” Princeton Theological Review 24 (1926): 124–131; Steinmetz, Luther in Context, 72–84. 110. WA 23. 215.48, 245.24–34; LW 37: 108, 125–126. 111. WA 23. 99.31–32 (“incertum per incertum probare”); WA 23. 153.4–22, 167.37–168.1, 196.26, 215.24–27, 216.3, 233.19–21, WA 26. 323.22–23 (“Das heist aus der Zwinglische Logica incertum per incertius, ignotum per ignotius probare”),404.4–5, 9–11; 446.4–10; LW 37: 36, 70, 79, 97, 108, 112, 118, 270, 271, 305; LW 40: 157, 159–160, 170, 189–190. 112. WA 23. 243. 22–27; WA 26. 262.31–263.6, 265.29–30, 270.8–14, 404.8–14, 417.11–16; LW 37: 125, 163 167, 171, 270–1, 272, 278; LW 40: 143, 158 183, 190. See also WA 23. 152.22–24. 113. WA 23. 169.23–26; LW 37: 79. 114. WA 26. 262.31–33, 263.1–2; LW 37: 163. 115. WA 26. 404.8–12; 405.12–406.2; LW 37: 271. 116. WA 26. 446.6–17; LW 37: 304. 117. WA 26. 450.14–451.2; LW 37: 304–305, 308. 118. WA 26. 491.36–37; LW 37: 314, 355. 119. WA 18. 180.24–25; LW 40:190. 120. Steinmetz, Luther in Context, pp. 78–82. 121. WA 23. 139.32–140.3, 155.34–156.7, 336.13–19, 152.22–24; LW 37: 61,71, 223, 225; LW 40: 220–223. 122. WA 26. 327.16–335.28; LW 37: 215–222. 123. WA 23. 133.19–30; LW 37:57. 124. WA 23. 137.40–138.2; LW 37:60. 125. WA 26. 336.13–27; LW 37: 223. cf. WA 26.335.38–336.7.

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126. WA 26. 337.15–24; LW 37: 224. 127. Steinmetz, Luther in Context, p. 83. 128. WA 26. 326.13–327.2 LW 37: 214. 129. WA 23. 147.22–27, 259.13–14 (begreiffen); LW 37: 66, 134. 130. WA 23. 261.15–17; LW 37: 135–36. 131. WA 23. 263.29–33; LW 37: 137. 132. WA 23. 151. 3–4, 15–20; LW 37: 68. 133. WA 19. 492.22–26, 499.32–36; LW 36: 342, 346 (my emphasis). 134. WA 23.165.17–18, 209.19 [“Es mus die warheit und sicher gewissen thun”]; WA 26.15–16; LW 37, 77, 103,196; WA 18: 181.13–14, 204.9, 213.29–214.8; LW: 40: 190, 214, 222–223. 135. WA 18. 195.35–39 LW: 40: 206. See also WA 18. 202.33–203.2. 136. WA 18. 200.11–17; LW: 40: 210. 137. WA 19. 506.26–32; LW: 36:350. 138. WA 15. 391–397; LW: 40: 65–71. 139. ZV. 707.12–14; Friendly Exegesis, p. 338. 140. Z III. 779.33–39, 787.31–35; On True and False Religion, pp. 205, 215 (translation altered). 141. Z V. 786.26–29, True and False Religion, p. 213. 142. Z III. 625. 7–8; Friendly Exegesis: p. 281. 143. Z III. 574. 30–575.3; Friendly Exegesis, p. 246. 144. Z V. 692.10–12; Friendly Exegesis, p. 329. 145. Z V. 670.18–671.1; Friendly Exegesis, p. 313. 146. Z V. 691.5–10; Friendly Exegesis, p. 328. 147. Z V. 688.12–14 (translation altered). 148. Z V. 690.30–34; Friendly Exegesis, p. 327. 149. Z II. 142.23–26; “Exposition of article 18,” p. 114. 150. Inst. III. 4.2; OS IV. 87.22–26. 151. Inst. III. 4.17; OS IV. 105.2–9. 152. Inst. III. 4.2; OS IV. 88.11–13 153. Inst. III. 4.21; OS IV. 110.9–14. 154. On Osiander, see Patricia Wilson-Kastner, “Andreas Osiander’s Theology of Grace in the Perspective of the Inﬂuence of Augustine of Hippo,” in Sixteenth Century Journal X/2 (1979): 73–91; Gunter Zimmermann, “Die Thesen Osianders zur Disputation ‘de iustiﬁcatione,’” in Kerygma und Dogma 33 (1987): 224–244; idem, “Calvins Auseinandersetzung mit Osianders Rechtfertigungslehre,” Kerygma und Dogma 35 (1989): 236–256; Claus Bachmann, Die Selbstherrlichkeit Gottes: Studien zur Theologie des Nürnberger Reformators Andreas Osiander, Neukirchener theologische Dissertationen und Habilitationen, Bd. 7 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener, 1996). 155. Andreas Osiander, De unico mediatore, in Gesamtausgabe 10, Schriften und Briefe September 1551 bis Oktober 1552 sowie Posthumes und Nachträge, ed. Gerhard Müller and Gottfried Seebaß (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1997) [hereafter OGA] 10: 131.8–11, 137.14–19, 167.3–11, 217.27–31, 287.10, 412.16– 23, 879.30–31.

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156. Andreas Osiander,De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 157.1–10, 26–29. 157. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 167.19, 169.24–26, 285.21, 325.14–16, 412.18–19. On the distinction between being pronounced just and made just, see De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 147–149. 158. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 83.18–20, 167.9–1, 171.10–11, 227.16–18, 292.13–15. 159. Andreas Osiander, Disputatio de iustiﬁcatione in Gesamtausgabe 9, Schriften und Briefe 1549 bis August 1551, OGA 9: 444.7–9/445:8–11. 160. Ibid., pp. 444.10–12, 16–18, 445.12–15, 20–22; OGA 9: 157.26. 161. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 227.28–30. 162. Disputatio de iustiﬁcatione, OGA 9: 428.1–2; Disputatio de lege et evangelio, OGA 9: 509.17. 163. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 215.33–36, 171.1–12. 164. The references to essential righteousness are numerous throughout Osiander’s writings. A few representative ones include De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 137.14– 20: “Haec dicta omnia unam ac simplicem exprimunt sententiam, nempe quod Deus secundum suam veram divinam essentiam in vere credentibus habitet. Ubi enim Christus est, ibi est etiam ipsius divina natura seu divina essentia; ubi vero ﬁlius Dei secundum suam divinam essentiam est, ibi sunt etiam Pater et Spiritus sanctus indivisibiliter. Nam Pater, Filius et Spiritus sanctus sunt una, aeterna, indivisibilis, divina essentia.” See also Disputatio de iustiﬁcatione, OGA 9: 438.20–21, 513.5–11; De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 99.16–19,131.8–14,215.33–217.4, 285.8–11; Wider den lichtﬂüchtigen Nachtraben, OGA 10: 412.20–22. On the indwelling of the “internal Word” see De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 119.17–121.13 and pp. 129.13–16,131.1–14,153. 6–12. 165. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 205–207. See also OGA 10: 131.4–11 and OGA 9: 487ff. 166. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 227.14–21. See also De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 219.13–21. 167. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 127.14–18, 129.14–16, 299.14–20. See especially Abschnitte aus einer Predigt über Röm 9,10 [-13],OGA 10: 683.13–19 and 685.11–17. 168. Abschnitte aus einer Predigt über Röm 9,10 [-13], OGA 10: 683.16–18. 169. On Osiander’s concept of “participation” see De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 219.15–21, 227.28.31. 170. Inst. III.2.9; OS IV. 191:6–8. 171. Ibid., III. 2.5; OS IV:.186.23–27 172. Ibid., III. 2.6; OS III. 187.30–188.3. 173. Krusche, Das Wirken des Heiligen Geistes nach Calvin, pp. 265–299. 174. Inst. III. 2.5, 10; OS IV. 185.19–186.31,191.27–34. 175. Inst. III.2.5; OS IV. 86.25. 176. Inst.III.2.5; OS IV.186.4–15. 177. W. Balke, “The Word of God and Experientia According to Calvin,” pp. 19–31;Charles Partee, “Calvin and Experience,” Scottish Journal of Theology 2 (1949): 29–47. 178. Andreas Osiander, Abschnitte aus einer Predigt über Röm 9,10 [-13]; OGA 10: 683.11–25.

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179. Andreas Osiander, Abschnitte aus einer Predigt über Röm 9,10 [-13]; OGA 10: 685.10–23. 180. De unico mediatore, OGA 10: 129.12–15, 139.21–33,197.15–19. 181. Inst. III.9.11; OS IV. 193.30–34, 37–194.8. CHAPTER

4

1. Decretum de iustiﬁcatione; Canones de iustiﬁcatione, 13–16, in Concilium Tridentinum: Diariorum, actorum, epistolarum, tractatuum nova collectio (Friburgi Brisgoviae: Herder, 1901) [hereafter CT ] V. 798.29–30. 2. Berndt Hamm, “Why Did ‘Faith’ Become for Luther the Central Concept of the Christian Life?” in The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, ed. and trans. Robert J. Bast (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004) [hereafter Reformation of Faith], p. 156. 3. Cajetan Responds: A Reader in Reformation Controversy (Washington: Catholic University of America Press, 1978), p. 51. 4. Hamm, Reformation of Faith, pp. 156–163. 5. Decretum de iustiﬁcatione, cap. 8 CT V. 794. 11–14. 6. Jane Dempsey Douglass, Justiﬁcation in Late Medieval Preaching (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966), p. 176. 7. Decretum de iustiﬁcatione, cap. 7 CT V. 793.25–27, 37, 43. Canones de iustiﬁcatione, 11 CT V. 798.22–25. 8. The following discussion is dependent on: Hubert Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, 2 vols., trans. Dom Ernest Graf, O. F. B. (London and Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons Ltd., 1961), I: 171–196, 234–265, 283–316; Valens Heynck, “A Controversy at the Council of Trent Concerning the Doctrine of Duns Scotus,” Franciscan Studies 9 (1949): 181–258, idem, “Die Beurteilung der Conclusio theologica bei den Franziskanertheologen des Trienter Konzils,” Franziskanische Studien XXXIV (1952): 146–205; H. Hutmacher, “La Certitude de la grâce au Concile de Trente,” Nouvelle revue théologique 50 (1933): 213–226; P. Franz Josef Schierse S.J., “Das Trienter Konzil und die Frage nach der christlichen Gewissheit,” Das Weltkonzil von Trient, sein Werden und Wirken, 2 vols., ed. Georg Schreiber (Freiburg: Herder, 1951), I: 145–167.l Adolf Stakemeier, Das Konzil von Trient über die Heilsgewissheit (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1947), pp. 189–202; G. des Lauriers, “Saint Augustin et la question de la certitude de la grâce au Concile de Trente,” Augustinus magister, 3 vols. (Paris: Études augustiniennes 1954), II: 1051–1067. For this controversy after the council of Trent, see Beltrán de Heredia, “Controversia de certitudine gratiae entre Domiñgo de Soto y Ambrosio Catharino,” Ciencia tomista LXII (1941): 181–258. 9. CT V. 282.24–25, 324.34; CT XII. 651ff, 675.10. Heynck, “A Controversy at the Council of Trent,” 192, 221–225; Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, vol. II: 288–290. 10. Ioannes Antonius Delphinus, Pro certitudine gratiae praesentis (1546), CT XII.651–658. 11. On the vote by Costacciaro regarding the certitude of grace on August 17, 1546, see CT V. 410.3–5. The vote on October, 17, 1546 is recorded in CT V. 479ff.

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Regarding the difference between the certitude taught by Scotus and that taught by the “heretics,” see CT V. 484.21–23. 12. CT V. 569–576. 13. Heynck, “A Controversy at the Council of Trent,” p. 249–253; idem, “Die Beurteilung der Conclusio theologica bei den Franziskanertheologen des Trienter Konzils,” pp. 146–205. 14. Stakemeier, Das Konzil von Trient über die Heilsgewssheit, pp. 127–140, 148–149, 150–152, 164–165; Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent II: 247–253; Heynck, “A Controversy,” pp. 181–258; idem, “Die Beurteilung,” pp. 146–205; on Jacobinus Malafossa, see Heynck, “Zur Kontroverse über die Gnadengewissheit auf den Konzil von Trient,” Franziskanische Studien (1952) 34:1–17, 161–188. 15. Heynck, “A Controversy,” pp. 208, 235–236. 16. Andreas de Vega, De iustiﬁcatione-doctrina universa libris XV absolute tradita,et contra omnes omnium errores iuxta germanam sententiam Orthodoxae veritatis et sacri Concilij Tridentini, praeclare defensa. (Ridgewood, NJ: Gregg Press, 1964). For an analysis of his argument on the necessity for true contrition, see chapter 9. An analysis of Vega’s thought can be found in Valens Heynck, “Der Anteil des Konzilstheologen Andreas de Vega, O.F. M. an dem ersten amtlichen Entwurf des Trienter Rechtfertigungsdekretes,” Franziskanische Studien 33 (1951): 49–81; idem, “Die Beurteilung,” pp. 183–193. Also see Michael Oltra Hernández, Die Gewissheit des Gnadenstandes bei Andreas de Vega, O. F. M., ein Beitrag zum Verständnis des Trienter Rechtfertigungsdekretes (Düsseldorf: Gesellschaft für Buchdr. und Verlag, 1941), pp. 1–28, 52–56, 80–88. 17. Heynck, “A Controversy,” pp. 229–231; Hernández, Die Gewissheit des Gnadenstandes bei Andreas de Vega, p. 21; V. Heynck, “Die Stellung des Konzilstheologen Andreas de Vega, pp. 141–143. 18. Hernàndez, Die Gewissheit des Gnadenstandes bei Andreas de Vega, pp. 68–69; Heynck, “Die Beurteilung,” 183–190. These authors draw from De iustifactione 9, 39, 41. 19. Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, II: 253–258. 20. CT V. 633.24, 513.1. Cf. CT V. 430.8–15, 654.37–41, CT XII. 725.13–15. Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, II: 285. 21. Jedin, A History of the Council of Trent, II: 297–298. Some argued that this ﬁnal formulation left open a positive or afﬁrmative reading of Scotus in terms of a certitude of hope. 22. David V. N. Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1991). See also Jared Wicks, “Roman Reactions to Luther: The First Year (1518),” The Catholic Historical Review 69 (1983): 521–562, repr. Luther’s Reform, 149–188; Kurt-Victor Selge, “Das Autoritätsgefüge der westlichen Christenheit im Lutherkonﬂikt 1517 bis 1521,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 591–616; J. P. Dolan, “The Catholic Literary Opponents of Luther and the Reformation,” in Reformation and Counter Reformation, ed. E. Iserloh, J. Glazok, H. Jedin, History of the Church, vol. 5 (New York: Seabury Press, 1980), pp. 191–207.

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23. For an analysis of similar traits in polemics, see Karl Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville: University Press of Virgnia, 1992). I owe this reference to Lucy Pick, who adopted parts of Morrison’s theory in Lucy K. Pick, Conﬂict and Coexistence (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004). Literature on the nature of polemics in the early modern era is extensive. On this topic, see Miriam Usher Chrisman, “From Polemic to Propaganda: The Development of Mass Persuasion in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 73 (1982): 175–196); Robert Scribner, “Luther’s Anti-Roman Polemics and Popular Belief,” Lutherjahrbuch 57 (1990): 93–113; Barbara Sher Tinsley, History and Polemics in the French Reformation: Florimond de Raemond, Defender of the Church (Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1992); Luc Racaut, Hatred in Print: Catholic Propoganda and Protestant Identity during the French Wars of Religion (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2002); Alexander Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press for The Royal Historical Society, 1993). Also see the vast bibliography in Religious Polemics in Context. Papers presented to the Second International Conference of the Leiden Institute on the Study of Religions (Lisor) Held at Leiden, 27–28 April, 2000, ed. T. L. Hettema and A. Van der Kooij, Studies in Theology and Religion V.11 (Assen: Royal van Gorcum, 2004). 24. Der authentische Text der Leipziger Disputation (1519): Aus bisher unbenutzten Quellen, ed. Otto Seitz (Berlin: C. A. Schwetschke, 1903) [hereafter Seitz], pp. 98, 108. Respondeo: Inter articulos Huss est et ille: “Unica est sancta universalis ecclesia, quae est praedestinatorum universitas.” Eck responded, “Verum est, unam sanctam et universalem esse ecclesiam, sed quod sit tantum una, sicut est unus numerus praedestinatorum ad Hussiticam intelligentiam. . . .” Other references to Hus can be found on pages 88 (regarding the origin of the papacy), 91, 93, 95, 112, 113, 114, 117, 122, 129, 145. 25. Dokumente zur Causa Lutheri (1517–1521), ed. Peter Fabisch and Erwin Islerloh, Corpus Catholicorum 41–42 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1988, 1991), II [hereafter Dokumente]: II 368, 370. For the statements by Henry VIII regarding Luther as “Bohemian,” see Assertio septem sacramentorum adversus Martinum Lutherum, ed. Pierre Fraenkel, Corpus Catholicorum 43 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1992) [hereafter Assertio], p. 136. Also see pp.107, 109, 141, 236. 26. Seitz, 98; Luther, Disputatio et excusatio in Dokumente II: 254–255; WA 2. 159. 17–20. See also Seitz, 82–83, 88–89. 27. Wa Br. 2.42.22. Also see the remarks against Eck regarding Eck’s accusation of Luther as a Hussite in Von den neuen Eckischen Bullen und Lügen (1520), where he insists that the articles he defended were not those of Hus but of Christ, Paul, and Augustine, WA 6. 588.4–5. See Scott Hendrix, “ ‘We Are All Hussites’? Hus and Luther Revisited,” in Scott H. Hendrix, Tradition and Authority in the Reformation (Aldershot, UK: Viariorum, 1996), VII, pp.134–161. 28. WA 6. 455.11ff, cited by Hendrix, “‘We Are All Hussites’?” p. 137. 29. Hendrix notes, however, that Hus never denied the doctrine of transubstantiation. Ibid., p. 136. 30. Ibid., pp.134–161.

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31. Bernard Lohse, “Luther und Huss,” Luther: Zeitschrift der Luthergesellschaft 36 (1965), pp. 108–122. 32. Jaroslav Pelikan, The Reformation of Church and Dogma (1300–1700) (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 85; idem, “Luther’s Attitude toward Hus,” Concordia Theological Monthly 19 (1948): 747–763. 33. Heiko A. Oberman, “Hus and Luther. Prophets of a Radical Reformation,” in The Contentious Triangle: Church, State, and University, A Festschrift in Honor of Professor George Hunston Williams, ed. Rodney L. Petersen and Calvin Augustine Pater, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 51 (Kirksville, MO: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999), pp. 135–159. For Luther citations see: WA 7. 389.33–34, WA 53.167; Wa Br. 2. 22–26. 34. Seitz, 83, 88, 93, 98. 35. Hus stated that it was secular power that permitted the Bishop of Rome to rule over the West (De Ecclesia, cap. 15). This became Article 9 of the condemnations of Hus at the Council of Constance. The condemned articles can be found in Enchiridion Symbolorum, deﬁnitionum et declarationum de rebus ﬁdei et morum, ed. Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer (Barcinone: Herder, 1965), pp. 322–325. These articles and Hus’s responses can be found translated into English in Matthew Spinka, John Hus at the Council of Constance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), pp. 260–269. 36. Jan Hus, Historia et monumenta, 2 vols. (Norimbergensem: J. Montani and U. Neuberi, 1715) I: 29–30, see also pp. 523–528 and Spinka, John Hus at the Council of Constance, p. 171 note 15, and pp. 262–264. 37. Oberman, “Hus and Luther,” p. 143. 38. Scott H. Hendrix, “In Quest of the Vera Ecclesia: The Crisis of Late Medieval Ecclesiology,” Tradition and Authority in the Reformation, VI: 347–378. 39. Graus, “The Crisis of the Middle Ages and the Hussites,” pp. 88–80. 40. Jan Hus, Tractatus de ecclesia, text established and ed. by Samuel Harrison Thomson (Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 1956) [hereafter De Ecclesia]. I have also consulted the English translation: Jan Hus, De ecclesia/On the Church, trans. David S. Schaff (New York: Scribner, 1915). The latter was based on the 1715 text. 41. Kenneth Hagen has demonstrated that Hus’s position was that of “semi-Donatism,” since Hus believed mortal sin canceled only the potestas iuridictionis but not the potestas ordinis of the priest. See Kenneth Hagen, “Hus’ Donatism,” Augustinianum 11. (1971): 541–547. 42. De Ecclesia, chap. 3 G H, 16–17. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., chap. 3 F, 16. 45. Ibid., chap. 16 E, 136–7. 46. On Unam Sanctam, see chapters 12–13. 47. Oberman, “Hus and Luther,” p.143. 48. De Ecclesia, chap 8. F, 56. 49. Occam also rejected the identiﬁcation of the pope with the Pauline homo spiritualis of I Cor. 2:15. On the history of the concept of authority, including the use of

434

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142–147

I Cor. 2:15, see Brian Tierney, Origins of Papal Infallibility 1150–1350: A Study on the Concept of Infallibility, Sovereignty and Tradition in the Middle Ages (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1972); Yves Congar, O.P. “The Historical Development of Authority in the Church; Points for Reﬂection,” in Problems of Authority, ed. John M. Todd (Baltimore, MD: Helicon Press, 1962), pp. 119–156. 50. Steven E. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), pp. 184–197. 51. De Ecclesia, chap. 19 H, 180. 52. De Ecclesia, chap. 18 E, 164. 53. De Ecclesia, chap. 16 B, 133. 54. De Ecclesia, chap. 18, 157–173. 55. De Ecclesia, chap. 19 H, 180. 56. De Ecclesia, chap. 13 H, 107–108, chap. 14 C, 112. 57. Oberman, “Huss and Luther,” p. 142. 58. De Ecclesia, chap. 14 H, 108. 59. De Ecclesia, chap. 2 A, D, chap. 4 A, G, 8, 10, 25–26. 60. De Ecclesia, chap. 7 A, 7 G, 43, 50–51. 61. De Ecclesia, chap. 15 K, 129–130. See also, Oberman, “Hus and Luther,” p. 160. 62. De Ecclesia, chap. 18 K, 130. 63. De Ecclesia, chap. 3 B, 12. 64. Prierias was one of the ﬁrst to make this accusation; several such statements can be found in his Replica ad Martinum Lutherum, in Dokumente I:118. See also Epitoma responsionis ad M. Lutherum, p.154–155, n.17. See also Oberman, “Wittenberg’s War on Two Fronts,” in The Reformation, Roots and Ramiﬁcations, trans. Andrew Colin Gow (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1994), pp.122–130. Referring to Prierias’s four fundamenta, Oberman argued that “Prierias replaces Luther’s exegetical foundation with an ecclesiological one as a means of distinguishing truth from heresy in the course of the dispute,” p. 123. On Prieras also see, Michael Tavuzzi, Prierias: The Life and Works of Silvestro Mazzolini da Prierio, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 16 (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1977). Tetzel’s accusations can be found in “Vorlegung gemacht von Bruder Johan Tetzel Prediger Ordens Ketzermeister; wyder eynen vormessen Sermon von tzwentzig irrigen Artickeln Bebstlichen ablas und gnade belangende allen cristglaubigen menschen tzuwissen von notten, in Dokumente I: 348, 354 and in his Fünfzig Positiones, Dokumente I: 372, number 14 which refers to the Bull Inter cunctas by Martin V with regard to indulgences. In 15 18 Eck published his “Obelisci zu Luthers Thesen und dessen Erwiderung” in Dokumente I: 401–407. In this text he accused Luther of the Bohemian heresy for subverting ecclesiastical authority, Dokumente I: 431, 435. See also pp. 392–33, 409. Luther responded with Asterisci Lutheri adversus Obeliscos Eckii, WA 1. 279–313 and Dokumente I: 400–447. 65. WA 1. 235.9–11, 593.4–38; LW 31: 29, 89–90. 66. Luther’s Thesis 26 read: “The Pope does very well when he grants remission to souls in purgatory, not by the power of the keys, which he does not have, but by way of intercession for them.” WA 1. 234.27–28, 574–584; LW 31:29, 157–174. 67. WA 1. 582.2–4; LW 1:72. On this period of Luther’s attitude toward the papacy see Scott H. Hendrix, Luther and the Papacy (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), pp. 32–43.

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68. WA 1. 236.12–15, 605.23–614.37; LW 31: 30, 211–212. 69. WA 2. 9.28–34; LW 31: 264. 70. WA 2. 10.7–11; LW 32: 265. 71. WA 10. 12–17; LW 31: 265. 72. WA 2. 10.7–11, 20, 22.14–18; LW 31: 276, 284–85. 73. WA 2. 20.5–12; LW 31: 281. 74. On Leipzig see, “Kurt-Victor Selge, “Die Leipziger Disputation zwischen Luther und Eck,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte (1975): 26–40; idem, “Das Autoritätsgefüge der westlichen Christenheit im Lutherkonﬂikt 1517 bis 1521,” Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976): 591–617; idem, “Der Weg zur Leipziger Disputation zwischen Luther und Eck im Jahre 1519,” in Bleibendes im Wandel der Kirchengeschichte, ed. Bernd Moeller and Gerhard Ruhbach (Tübingen: Mohr, 1973), pp. 169–210. 75. WA 2. 185.3–6. 76. WA 2. 161.38; LW 3:318. 77. WA 2. 202.33–34. At Leipzig, Luther denied that all the fathers accepted Matthew 16:18 as supporting the divine right of the papacy, a position Eck said that Augustine did not retract. However, after consulting Augustine’s Retractions, Luther said that he found “the contrary.” He went on to dispute the statement that Ambrose never identiﬁed the rock with faith, Seitz 96–97. For other references to the “rock” as faith see WA 2. 191.25–40, 198.14–15, 202.204.29. 78. WA 2. 189.29–35. 79. WA 2. 190.1–9. 80. WA 2. 190.11–15. 81. WA 2. 189. 1–10. (referring to Augustine’s interpretation of Ps. 108). 82. Seitz, 85–86. 83. WA 2. 208. 25–29. See also this discussion at Leipzig, Seitz, pp. 91ff. 84. WA 2. 231.36–232.22, 194. 24–26, 195. 5–15, 203.5–9. 85. WA 2. 188.71–2, 195.5–25, 30–31,196.4, 213.4–5. 86. WA 2. 197. 30–32, 213.17–19. 87. John M. Headley, Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1963), p. 163ff. See also P. Polman, L’ élément historique dans la controverse religieuse du XVIe siècle (Gembloux: J. Duculot, 1932); L. W. Spitz, “History as a Weapon in Controversy,” Concordia Theological Monthly 18 (1947): 747–762; John W. O’Malley, “Historical Thought and the Reform Crisis of the Early Sixteenth Century,” Theological Studies 28/3 (1967):531–548. 88. WA 2. 10.9–16. 89. Wicks, Luther’s Reform, pp. 51–53. 90. WA 2. 187.366–202.4. Luther mistook Gelasius for Pelagius and showed that the attribution of Sacrosancta Romana to Analectus II was erronrous. 91. WA 2. 202.18–24. 92. WA 2. 198.1–199.34, 202.19–24. 93. WA 2. 203.14–24. See also WA 2. 204.20–38. 94. WA 2. 203.28–204.5, 206.30–35. Regarding Jerusalem,also see the Leipzig debate, Seitz, pp. 53, 95.

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154–159

95. WA 2. 200.20–24, 201.6–25,217–222, especially 219.11–221.10, 225.7–21. He argued this same point at Leipzig, see Seitz, p. 94. Primae sedis is from Corpus Iuris Canonici, Decr. 1a pars, dist XCIX, c, 3. and disputed by Luther in WA 2. 202.18–203.13. 96. Headley, Luther’s View of Church History, p. 164. 97. WA 2. 236.4–6; Seitz, 83, 88–89, 90–91. 98. Seitz, 87. 99. Seitz, 90, 92, 94. See also WA 2.159.8–20 (Luther’s Disputatio et excusatio, 1519). 100. WA 2. 199.8–29, 200.2–3, 225.25–28, 227.11. 101. On the use of Nicea, see Pierre Frankel, “John Eck’s Enchiridion of 152 and Luther’s Earliest Arguments against Papal Primacy,” in Studia Patristica 21 (1967): 151-154 5,” pp. 151–154. 102. WA 2. 237.23–40, 238.3–11 22–32; Seitz, pp. 91, 94–95. 103. WA 2. 225.35–38; Seitz, pp. 96–98. 104. WA 2. 226.18–20. 105. Tetzel, Vorlegung in Dokumente I: 347–348. 106. Cited by Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents, pp. 32–33. 107. Silvester Prieras, Dialogus de potestate papae, in Dokumente I: 54; Heiko A. Oberman, “Wittenberg’s War on Two Fronts,” pp. 91–116. 108. Cited by Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents, pp. 104–105. 109. Johannes Eck, Gegen Martin Luthers Anklage wider das Konzil von Konstanz in Sachen des Johannes Hus und des Hieronymus von Prag, in Werke katholischer Schriftsteller im Zeitalter der Glaubenspaltung, ed. Karl Meisen and Friedrich Zoepﬂ, Corpus Catholicorum 14 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1929), pp. 1–18. 110. Seitz, p. 98. 111. WA 2. 199.30–200.6; Seitz, 82, 87, 89–90, 91–93. 112. Johannes Eck, De primatu Petri adversus Ludderum Ioannis Eckii libri tres (Parrhisiae: Petrus Vidouaeus, impensis honesti viri Conradi Resch. . . , 1521). See also Pierre Fraenkel, “John Eck’s Enchiridion of 1525 and Luther’s Earliest Arguments against Papal Primacy,” 110–163; idem, “Johann Eck und Sir Thomas More 1525–1526: Zugleich ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des ‘Enchiridion locorum communium’ und der vortridentinischen Kontroverstheologie,” in Von Konstanz nach Trient, ed. R. Bäumer (Paderborn: Schöningh, 1972): 481–95. I want to thank Dr. Maura Campanelli for sharing her doctoral research with me on both Eck’s De primatu and Luther’s Resolutio. 113. De primatu, I. 2. 114. De primatu, I. 1. 115. De primatu, I. 42. 116. De primatu, I. 34, 35. 117. De primatu, I. 3, 18, 23. 118. De primatu, I. 3–6. 119. De primatu, I. 3–8. 120. De primatu I. 24. I. 3, II. 5 (Jerome). See also Bk. I. 47. 121. De primatu, I. 19, 33, 39. 122. De Primatu, I. 19, 33, 39, 41, 44. 123. De primatu I. 29.

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124. De primatu, I. 8,19, 28, 30. 125. De primatu, I. 23, 24, 26, 27, 44, 46. 126. De primatu, I. 25, 26; II. 7,12. 127. De primatu, I. 26, 46. Note also I. 13. 128. De Primatu, I. 9, 38. 129. Cited by Evans, Problems of Authority in the Reformation, p. 251. On this question see pp. 241–249. 130. De Primatu, II. 18, 19; III. 11–19, 51. On the three Patriarchal sees: III. 47. 131. De primatu, II. 9–19; III. 11–20, 31. 132. De primatu, II. 22, 28. On the role of Phokas in Luther’s view of the history of the church, see Headley, Luther’s View of Church History, pp. 192–194. 133. De primatu, III. 17. See also III. 11. 134. De primatu, III. 11, 41. 135. De primatu, II. 22, 23. 136. De primatu, III. 49. For the importance of Constance, see Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents, pp. 63–65. Bagchi observed that Eck published in the vernacular a treatise whose English title would be “Defense of the Sacred Council of Constance, Holy Christendom, His Imperial Highness Sigmund and the German Nobility.” See also Erwin Iserloh, Johannes Eck (1486–1543): Scholastiker Humanist Kontroverstheologe, Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung 41 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1985). 137. De primatu, I. 23, III.49. See also II. 11 where Eck states that the pope was recognized as the greatest and ﬁrst of all bishops as early as Chalcedon. See also Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents, p. 60–65. 138. De primatu, III. 49. 139. De primatu, II. 29. 140. De primatu, II. 27. Eck was arguing the “second reason” or argument for papal primacy through the “similitudine ad synagogam,” since the monarchs of the Synagogue preﬁgured the hierarchy of the church. 141. De primatu, II. 23, 24, 30. 142. De primatu, II. 27; III. 43. 143. De primatu, III. 43, 53–54. 144. De primatu, II. 27. 145. De primatu, I. 18, 20, 30, 45. 146. De primatu, I. 41, cf. II. 11. 147. De primatu, I. 22. 148. De primatu, III. 46. 149. Louis A. Schuster, “Thomas More’s Polemical Career,” in Complete Works of Thomas More 8/III, ed. Louis A. Schuster, Richard C. Marius, James P. Lusardi, and Richard J. Schoeck (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973) [hereafter CWM], pp. 1137–1268. 150. Henry VIII, Assertio, 118; Exsurge Domine, Leo X. Dokumente II: 364–410. 151. Assertio, p.136. 152. Assertio, pp. 126, 134, 147. 153. Assertio, p. 128.

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154. Assertio, p. 139. 155. Assertio, p. 144. 156. Assertio, pp. 150–155. 157. Assertio, p. 143. 158. Assertio, pp. 143–146. 159. Assertio, pp. 207–208. 160. Assertio, pp. 190–192, 208–209. 161. Assertio, p. 125. 162. Assertio, pp. 26, 146, 147, 189 163. Assertio, pp. 184–187. 164. Assertio, p. 146. 165. John M. Headley, “Introduction” to Responsio ad Lutheram, in The Complete Works of St. Thomas More, vol. 5/2 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1969) [hereafter Responsio], pp. 784–785. For background on the controversy, see pp. 713–715. 166. On Luther’s controversy with Catharinus see, Konrad Hammann, Ecclesia spiritualis: Luthers Kirchenverständnis in den Kontroversen mit Augustin von Alvedt und Ambrosius Catharinus Forschungen zur Kirchen-und Dogmengeschichte 44 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), pp. 125–141. 167. Ambrosius Catharinus Politus, Apologia pro veritate Catholicae et apostolicae ﬁdei ac doctrinae adversus impia ac valde pestifera Martini Lutheri dogmata (1520), ed. Josef Schweizer and August Franzen, Corpus Catholicorum 27 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1956) [hereafter Apologia], pp. 42. 6–7, 45.20–24, 52.4–32, 282.25–27, 331.19–20, 332.25–29, 341.26–39. 168. Apologia, 177.36–178.3, 206.33–35. Cf. 92.10–14. 169. Apologia, 93.12–34, 116.25–30, 233.30–234.11–14. 170. Apologia, 90–95, 131.4–7, 224.10–225.20–27. Cf. 124.11–20, 130.19–22. He did acknowledge, rather grudgingly, that according to the mystical sense, the “rock” could designate the church. Luther, he argued, had preferred the mystical sense over the literal sense of the text. 171. Apologia, 151.20–152.4. 172. Apologia, 195.30–31. 173. Apologia, 97.2, 98.12–14, 116.24–117.8, 141.28, 153.24–25, 167.1–12, 184.7–14, 205.28–206.13, 237.27–35, 331.8–12. 174. Apologia, 121.1–16, 122.25–28, 138.5–37, 139.18–24, 141.17–19, 141.26–30, 172. 20–30, 337.22–25, 339.6–8. 175. Apologia, 97.25–30, 130.18–22. 176. Apologia, 97.25–30, 130.18–22. 177. Apologia, 157.19–21, 158.11–18, 159.4–11. Cf. 150. 4–20. 178. Apologia, 157.19–21, 158.11–18, 159.4–11. Cf. 150. 4–20. 179. Apologia, 97.37–98.3, 240.22–241.1, 242.9–10. 180. Apologia, 97.37–98.3, 240.22–241.1, 242.9–10. 181. Apologia, 155.23, 175,21–177.29, 194.17, 196.17–196.29, 222.34–223.4. Cf. pp. 56.27, 28, 250.31, 317.31–318.10, 343.25–33.

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182. Apologia, 97.24–98.3, 145.10–148.21, 149.17–20, 230.14–15, 248.1–20. Cf. 105.28–106.1. 183. Apologia, 126.10–14, 217.4–30. Cf. 213.4–5. 184. Apologia, 84.21–85.7, 127.18–39, 128.4, 26–31, 167.1–168. 185. Joseph Clifford Fenton, “Scholastic Deﬁnitions of the Church I,” Ecclesiastical Review CXI (1944): 61, 63, 65–66. 186. De ecclesia et humanae legis obligatione, ch. 2–3, cited by Fenton, “Scholastic Deﬁnitions,” 67. 187. On the controversy between More and Tyndale regarding biblical translation and interpretation, see Allan K. Jenkins and Patrick Prestion, Biblical Scholarship and the Church: A Sixteenth-Century Crisis of Authority (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 81–148. On More’s ecclesiology, see Brian Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom: Ecclesiological Themes in the Writings of Sir Thomas More (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), John Headley, “Introduction,” CWM 5/II, pp. 760–774; Philip Sheldrake, “Authority and Consensus in Thomas More’s Doctrine of the Church,” The Heythrop Journal XX (1979): 146–172; Richard C. Marius, “Thomas More’s View of the Church,” in The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer/Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere CWM 8/III [hereafter Confutation], pp. 1135–1268. 188. Scott H. Hendrix, Ecclesia in via. Ecclesiological Developments in the Medieval Psalms Exegesis and the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–1515) of Martin Luther, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 8 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 185, 194–95, 198. 189. Lohse, “Luther und Huss,” p. 117. It should be noted that the treatise was also aimed at Alved without mentioning his name. 190. WA 6. 293.1–5; LW 39: 65. 191. WA 6. 296.5–9; LW 39: 69. 192. WA 6. 293.35–39, 297.6–9, 298. 21–24; LW 39: 66, 70, 72. 193. WA 6. 298.37–40; LW 39: 71. 194. WA 6. 298.2–4, 22–24; LW 39:71. 195. WA 6. 561.3–5. Luther argued that the church had the power to distinguish the words of God from the words of men on the basis of Augustine’s statement. See Headly, Introduction to the Responsio, CWM 5/II: 734–736. See also CWM 10/II: 218.13–19 and 219.20–32; LW 36: 108, 15–51. 196. Z VI/2. 800.16–12. See also Z III. 258.32–259.31; On True and False Religion, pp. 372–3. 197. Z II. 584–592 198. Ein christliche und briederliche Ermanung. Von Doctor Martinus luters leren und predigen, in Thomas Murner, Kleine Schriften, (Prosachriften gegen die Reformation), vol. I, ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1927), p. 74. See Headley, CWM 5/II: 900. 166/20–21. 199. WA 2. 208.25–29; Z III. 255.14–21. 200. WA 7. 685.3–9, 686.32–35; LW: 220, 222.

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201. Z III. 255.23–256.20; On True and False Religion, ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson (Durham, NC: Labyrinth, 1981), pp. 368–69. 202. Z III. 259. 9–24 (my translation), On True and False Religion, p. 372; Z III. 257.35–258.3. 203. Z III. 260.20–23; On True and False Religion, p. 374. 204. Z III. 260.4–7 (my translation). 205. Z III. 167.19–21, 30–33; On True and False Religion, p. 300. 206. Z III. 263.7–8; On True and False Religion, 373. Throughout this section Zwingli used I Corinthians 2:15 to explain the nature and role of the church. See Z III. 12–15, 24–263.4, 27–29. 207. Z III. 261.14–17; On True and False Religion, p. 374. 208. Z VI/II. 802.5–8; “An Account of the Faith,” in On Providence and Other Essays, edited for Samuel Macauley Jackson by William John Hinke (Durham NC: Labyrinth, 1983).p. 45. 209. The following citations are from “The Refutation of the Articles of Zwingli, presented to his Imperial Majesty, by John Eck,” in On Providence and Other Essays [hereafter Refutation], pp. 62–104. 210. Refutation, p. 76–77. 211. Refutation, p. 79–80. 212. Headley explains that with regard to John 16:13, More preferred Erasmus’s translation which changed “docebit” [Vulgate] to “ducet.” He also argues that More sometimes used the Old Latin version, see Headley’s introduction in CWM 5/II: 823. 213. Ad librum eximii Magistri Nostri Magistri Ambrosii Catharini, defensoris Silvestri Prieratis acerrimi, responsio, WA 7: 709.20–28. 214. WA 7. 710.5, 719.36–720.4. 215. Responsio, 196.29–32/197.35–39. 216. Responsio, 160.5–9/161.5–10. 217. Responsio, 160.12–30/161.15–33. 218. Responsio, 166.12–13/167.15–16. 219. Responsio, 148.2–8/149.2–9. 220. Responsio, 178.28–180.3/179.34–181.3. See also WA 7.720.32-721.28. 221. Responsio, 166.18–24/167.24–28. 222. An Answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores Dialoge, ed. Anne M. O’Donnell, S. N. D., and Jared Wicks, S.J., Independent Works of William Tyndale, vol. 3 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000) [hereafter Answere], pp. 10–12. 223. Answere, 52.28–31,107.2–5, 112.19–20. 224. Answere, 47.10–26. 225. Confutation, 667.13–22. 226. Supplication, 1042.4–9, Barnes’ Treatise on the Church in the Supplication of 1531 in CMW 8/II: 1039–1061. 227. Answere, 145.10–17. 228. Supplication, 1048.24–40. 229. Confutation, 668.16, 844.35–36, 907.5–10. 230. Confutation, 847.21–26.

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231. Responsio, 187.20. 232. Confutation, 250.29; Responsio,186–193. 233. Confutation, 617.13–16. 234. A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, ed. Thomas M. C. Lawler, Germain P. Marc’hadour, and Richard Marius, The Complete Works of St. Thomas More 6/I (New Haven: Yale University Press,1981) [hereafter Concerning Heresies], 152.36–153.2, 195.29–197.34, 199.24–25, 201.34–203.17, 205.4–6; Responsio, 166.12–13,19– 20/167.15–17, 24–25, 196.29–32/197.35–39, 198.26–30/199.32–37, 200.7–12/201.8–14; Confutation, 607.15–19, 617.9–618.16, 627.25–31, 645.26–32, 668–670, 727.25–26, 807.16–21, 807.16–21, 847.21–26, 855.28–856.15, 975.4–20, 993.36, 1020.15–33, 1031.25–36. 235. WA 10/2. 215.2–6. See also WA 10/2.217.15–10 236. Responsio, 241–245, 602–611; Confutation, 223–227, 501.4–27, 676.20–33, 707.19–709.3, 744.22–14; Concerning Heresies, 181.10–16. See also Heiko A. Oberman, “Quo vadis, Petre? Tradition from Irenaeus to Humani Generis,” in Heiko A. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), pp. 269–296 and Hendrix, Tradition and Authority in the Reformation; John M. Headley, “The Reformation as Crisis in the Understanding of Tradition,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 78 (1987): 5–22. 237. Responsio, 608.6–9/609.7–9. 238. Supplication, 1058.29–40. 239. Answere, 42.11–32-44.7–10, 145.10–17. 240. Responsio, 292.9–14/293.12–18, 302.29–304.6/303.33–304.7, 612.9–14/613.9– 16, 616.14–22/618.17–25. 241. Responsio, 282.22–284.18/283.20–284.24, 292.24–294.3/293.25–295.6; 618.19–620.4/619.22–621.6. 242. Responsio, 284.8–10/285.12–14, 676.32–678.2/677.37–679.2. 243. Johannes Eck, Enchiridion locorum communium adversus Lutherum et alios hostes ecclesiae (1525–1543) ed. Pierre Fraenkel, Corpus Catholicorum 34 (Münster,Westfalen: Aschendorff, 1979), pp. 8, 82.I 244. Confutation, 817.11–25. 245. Eck, Enchiridion, 18–19. 246. Responsio, 282.16–27/283.14–30. See also 284.9–18/285.12–23, 318.5– 19/319.8–24, 612.7–614.22/613.8–615.27, 620.3–4/621.4–5; Concerning Heresies, 169. 10–28, 366.21–367.15, 367.12–15; Confutation, 269.1–17. 247. Confutation, 752.15–21. See also 719.5–13 and Concerning Heresies, 366.21–30. 248. Cited by Gogan in The Common Corps of Christendom, pp. 92–93. 249. Confutation, 749.32–753.28, 757.17–758.3, 762.24–34. 250. Responsio, 102.6–12/103.6–14. 251. Contra Henricum Regem Angliae, WA 10/2.184.27–31. 252. Responsio, 184.2–6/185.2–8. 253. Responsio, 314.3–14/315.3–16. See also 620.9–16/621.13–19. 254. Responsio, 612.9–14/613.11–18/ 614.11–22/615.14–27. 255. Answere, 5.24–29, 8.20–32.

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256. Confutation, 48.6–19, 27–33, 49.27–50.6 257. Confutation, 13.2, 39.19, 223.29, 362.24, 729.20. 258. Confutation, 654.29. 259. Confutation, 617.10–27. 260. Confutation, 615.11–15, 752.30–753.117, 901.21–34. 261. Responsio, 100.28–31/101.31–36, 204.20–21/205.25–27. Gogen, The Common Corps of Christendom, pp. 90–94, 141–143, 177–180, 194–198; Headley, Responsio, “Introduction,” CWM 5/II:736–37. 262. On the concept of consensus in More’s thought, see Gogan, The Common Corps of Christendom, pp. 96–103; Sheldrake, “Authority and Consensus in Thomas More’s Doctrine of the Church,” pp. 146–172; Headly, “Introduction,” to the Responsio, CWM 5/II: 743–745 and Richard C. Marius, “Thomas More’s View of the Church,” in CWM 8/III: 1271–1363. 263. Responsio, 128.6–12/129.5–14. 264. Responsio, 622.3–14/623.5–16. 265. Responsio, 100.3–12/101.5–14. 266. Confutation, 332. 34–36, 345.25–28. 267. Contra Henricum, WA 10/2.214.25–35. 268. Confutation, 344.19, 395.10–11. See also Responsio, 252.17–21/253.20–24, 308.8–9/309.12–13. 269. John Eck, Enchiridion, 34.80. 270. Responsio, 182.22–28/183.26–33. 271. Concerning Heresies, 380.30–31, 381.2–3; Confutation, 120.22–30, 141.14–16, 250.32–251.1, 690.3–7. 272. Responsio, 184.8–11/185.10–13. 273. Responsio, 250.18–27/251.21–32. See also Responsio, 203.28–30/204.29–30. 274. Confutation, 1031.24–33. 275. Responsio, 280.27–33/281.32–39, 486.5–13/487.7–15. 276. Answere, 41.29–31. 277. Confutation, 617.15 (my emphasis). 278. Confutation, 878.26, 892.34, 902.7, 953.3–5, 995.34–35. 279. Confutation, 575. 1–16, 28–34, 613.10–16, 690.1–5. 280. Confutation, 377.5–9 (my emphasis). More interpreted the Spirit as the “Comforter” in the same way in his Concerning Heresies, 178.1–29. 281. Responsio, 162.13–17/163.15–22. 282. Responsio, 200.11–13/201.11–14; Confutation, 397.10–27. 283. Concerning Heresies, 178.6–13. 284. Confutation, 389.5–6, 892.35. See also: 153.25–33, 159.24 and 668.22, 892.35. 285. Confutation, 952. 1–5. 286. Confutation, 952. 1–5; Resolutio, 446.29–31/447.35–37. 287. Confutation, 362.22–24, 399.11–13. See also Confutation, 45.16–29, 48.17–24, 482.15–34, 914.21–23. 288. Confutation, 397.20–24 (my emphasis), 668.22. See also: Confutation, 389.17–19;Concerning Heresies, 245.34–35, 419.15–17.

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289. Denzinger, Enchiridion symbolorum, 425–426. 290. Confutation, 389.5–6. 291. Responsio, 6.21/7.24, 348.10–12/349.13–14. CHAPTER

5

1. Joseph Lortz, The Reformation in Germany, trans. Ronald Walls (London: Darton, Longman, and Todd, 1968) I: 185. More recently, see Paul Hacker, The Ego in Faith; Martin Luther and the Origins of Anthropocentric Religion (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1970). This is a condensed version of his Das ich im Glauben bei Martin Luther (Graz, Wien, Köln: Styria, 1966) 2. On Luther’s “Doktoratsbewusstsein,” see Hermann Steinlein, Luthers Doktorat: zum 400 jährigen Jubliäum desselben (18 und 19 Oktober 1912) (Leipzig: A. Deichert, 1912); Brian A. Gerrish, “Doctor: Doctor Martin Luther: Subjectivity and Doctrine in the Lutheran Reformation,” in Seven-Headed Luther: Essays in Commemoration of a Quincentenary 1483-1983 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), pp. 1–24; Scott H. Hendrix, Ecclesia in Via: Ecclesiological Developments in the Medieval Psalms Exegesis and the Dictata super Psalterium (1513–1515) of Martin Luther (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), pp. 196ff. 3. Bengt Hägglund, “Evidentia sacrae scripturae: Bemerkungen zum ‘Schriftprinzip’ bei Luther,” in Vierhundertfünfzig Jahre lutherische Reformation, 1517–1967: Festschrift für Franz Lau zum 60. Geburtstag (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck und Ruprecht, 1967), pp. 116–125; Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1977), pp.264–267. Bernhard Lohse, “Conscience and Authority in Luther,” in Luther and the Dawn of the Modern Era, pp. 158–183; Gerrish, “Doctor: Doctor Martin Luther,” pp. 1–23. 4. Rolf Decot and Rainer Vinke, eds., Zum Gedenken an Joseph Lortz (1887–1975): Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte und Ökumeme (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1989). 5. WA 3/III. 518–527; LW 40: 385–387. See also WA 40. 509.8–10. This letter is entitled “Inﬁltrating and Clandestine Preachers,” dates from January 1532, and was a response to the spreading of Anabaptist teachings. Earlier, in 1523, Luther had written that only if one was in a place where there were no Christians present, then any Christian should preach who had God’s word and “was anointed by him.” If Christians were present, then one must “let himself be called and chosen to preach and to teach in the place of and by the command of the others.” As early as this treatise in 1523, Luther vehemently warned against “false prophets” and instructed Christians to “test everything but hold fast to that which is good.” LW 39: 307–308. 6. Cited by Bernard McGinn, “The Language of Inner Experience in Christian Mysticism,” in Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality 1.1 (2001): 156–171; see also Pierre Miquel, Le vocabulaire latin de l’expérience spirituelle dans la tradition monastique et canoniale de 1050 à 1250, Théologie historique 79 (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989). Though never uncritical, both Luther and Calvin often cited Bernard of Clairvaux. Interest in the inﬂuence of Bernard has increased. Some of the most important are the

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following: Theo Bell, Divus Bernhardus: Bernhard von Clairvaux in Martin Luthers Schriften, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz Bd. 148 (Mainz: P.von Zabern, 1993); Anthony Nigel, Sidney Lane, Calvin and Bernard of Clairvaux, Studies in Reformed Theology and History, new ser., no. 1 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1996); Franz Posset, Pater Bernhardus. Martin Luther and Bernard of Clairvaux, Cistercian Studies Series 168 (Kalamazoo, MI: 1992); Jill Raitt, “Calvin’s Use of Bernard of Clairvaux,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 72 (1981): 98–121; Dennis E. Tamburello, Christ and Mystical Union: A Comparative Study of the Theologies of Bernard of Clairvaux and John Calvin (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990); idem, Union with Christ: John Calvin and the Mysticism of St. Bernard, Columbia series in Reformed theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1994). 7. Jean Gerson, Œuvres completes, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Paris: Desclée: 1960) [hereafter Gl]. Montaigne de contemplation is found in vol 7.1 16–155. This citation is on page GL 7:22. 8. Gl 7:19. 9. Gl 7:55. 10. Jean Gerson, De mystica theologia, ed. André Combes, (Lucani: In aedibus Thesauri Mundi,1958), pp. 11, 13, 15. 11. Gerard Zerbolt van Zutphen, De spiritualibus ascensionibus=Van geestelijke opklimmingen, ed. Jérôme Mahieu (Brugge: Beyaert, 1941). Chapter 50 is entitled, “De tribus necessariis his qui volunt legitime contra vitia praeliari, videlicet strenuitate, serveritate et benignitate/Van drie dingen die dengene noodig zijn die te rechte tegen de gebreken strijden wil, als standvastigheid strengheid en goedertierenheid.” English translation can be found in Devotio moderna, Basic Writings (New York: Paulist Press, 1988) [hereafter CWS], 245–315. On the compunction of love as the affective goal see G. H. Gerrits, Inter Timorem et Spem: A Study of the Theological Thought of Gerard Zerbolt of Zutphen (1367–1398), Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 37. (Leiden: E. J. Brill), pp. 180, 269. On the Modern Devotion, see John van Engen, Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life: The Devotio Moderna and the World of the Later Middle Ages (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 12. De spiritualibus ascensionibus, XLV, pp. 228/229; CWS: 288–89. See also Gérard Zerbolt de Zutphen, Manuel de la réforme intérieure=Tractatus devotus de reformacione virium anime, ed. Francis Joseph Legrand (Turnhout: Brepols, 2001), IV–V, pp. 114, 151. 13. Jean Leclercq, The Love of Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham:, 1977), p. 90. See also R. R. Post, The Modern Devotion (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1968), 324. On the orthodoxy of the Modern Devotion as well as their monastic identity, interior life, and communal ideal, see Theo Klausmann, Consuetudo consuetudine vincitur: Die Hausordnungen der Brüder vom gemeinsamen Leben im Bildungs-und Sozialisationsprogramm der Devotio moderna (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003). 14. For a study of the history of experience, see Hans Geybels, Cognitio Dei Experimentalis: A Theological Genealogy of Christian Religious Experience, Bibliotheca

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Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 209 (Leuven: University Press, 2007). 15. Erika Rummel, “Monachatus non est pietas: Interpretations and Misinterpretations of a Dictum,” in Erasmus’ Vision of the Church, ed. Hilmar M. Pabel, with a foreword by Erika Rummel (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1995), pp. 41–56 and Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Rhetoric and Reform: Erasmus’ Civil Dispute with Luther (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 16ff. 16. Erasmus, The Correspondence of Erasmus, trans. R. A. B. Mynors, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 9 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989) [hereafter CWE], p. 239. 17. “Letter to Volz,” in Erasmus and the Seamless Coat of Jesus, trans. Raymond Himelick (Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Studies, 1971), p. 122. Also see Georges Chantraine, “Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ” selon Érasme: Étude de la lettre à P. Volz et de la “Ratio verae theologiae,” 1518 (Namur: Secrétariat des publications, Facultés universitaires, r. de Bruxelles, 61, 1971). 18. Erika Rummel, “Monachatus non est pietas,” p. 54; “On Praying to God,” CWE 70:148, 216; Explanation of the Creed, CWE 70:326. 19. Rummel, The Humanist-Scholastic Debate, p. 57, discussing Alonso’s critique of Bruni’s translation of Aristotle’s Ethics. 20. Cited by James D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), p. 105. 21. CWE 70:352. 22. The Enchiridion of Erasmus, trans. Raymond Himelick (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1970), p. 81. 23. Enchiridion, p.110. 24. Enchiridion, pp. 63, 79; for an analysis of the idea of metamorphisis see M. A. Screech, Ecstasy and the Praise of Folly (London: Duckworth, 1980), especially pp. 161–174. See CWE: 70:245.174. 25. CWE 70: 239, 243, 245, 276, 279, 318, 323, 329, 352, 358; CWE 9: 237, 241; CWE 3: 78, 202–203, 257; CWE 6: 106–107; Enchiridion, pp. 38–46, 63–67. On these themes, see Chantraine, “‘Mystère” et “Philosophie du Christ” and James D. Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, pp. 104–115; Richard L. DeMolen, The Spirituality of Erasmus of Rotterdam (Nieuwkoop: De Graff, 1987); pp. 35–67. 26. CWE 6: 36, 79, cited by Tracy, Erasmus of the Low Countries, p. 105. 27. `DeMolen, The Spirituality of Erasmus, p. 55. On the ideas of freedom, ecstacy, and rapture, see Screech, Ecstacy and the Praise of Folly, pp. 158–159. 28. Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et l’Espagne: Recherches sur l’histoire spirituelle du XVIe siècle (Paris: Droz, 1937), updated version, idem, Erasmo y España, trans. Antonio Alatorre (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1986) and idem, Erasme et l’Espagne, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance 250 (Genève: Droz, 1991).

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29. A brief but very helpful introduction to Cisneros can be found in Erika Rummel, Jiménez de Cisneros: On the Threshold of Spain’s Golden Age, Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 212 (Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 1999). 30. José C. Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformation, Travaux d’humanisme et Renaissance 108 (Genève: Droz, 1970); Carlos Gilly, “Juan de Valdés: Übersetzer und Bearbeiter von Luthers Schriften in seinem Diálogo de Doctrina,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 74 (1983): 257–305. 31. Francisco de Osuna, The Third Spiritual Alphabet, trans. Mary E. Giles, Classics of Western Spirituality [hereafter CWS] (New York: Paulist Press, 1981), p. 173. Spanish: Francisco de Osuna, Tercer abecedario espiritual, ed. Saturnino López Santidrian, Místicos franciscanos españoles II Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1998) [hereafter BAC], 173. 32. CWS: 173; BAC: VI.4.211. 33. CWS: 143, 319, 326; BAC: V.2.183; XII.2.340; XII.4.346, passim. It is worth noting that Bernard of Clairvaux was also one of Osuna’s favorite authors. 34. CWS: 280–281; BAC: X.4.306: “Los no experimentados no entienden estas cosas si no las leyeren más claramente en el libro de la experiencia, a los cuales la misma unción enseñ; mas en otra manera ninguna cosa aprovecha al que lee la letra exterior; y muy poco sabrosa es la lección de la letra de fuera si el hombre no toma la glosa y el sentido interior del corazón. Esto ha dicho este santo, lo cual conviene mucho a las lágrimas de los aprovechantes en este ejercicio del recogimiento.” 35. CWS: 161–3; BAC: VI.2.197–202. 36. CWS: 161–162; BAC: VI.1.197–198. 37. CWS: 99; BAC: III.1.143. 38. CWS: 163–4; BAC: VI.2.201–203. 39. CWS: 45, 169; BAC: I.1.93; VI.3.207–208. 40. CWS: 273; BAC: X.2.300. 41. CWS: 439, 562, 566; BAC: XVI.9.448: See also XXI.4.556–7. 42. CWS: 419; BAC: XVI.5.429–433. 43. CWS: 558; BAC: XXI.3.553. 44. CWS: 441, 562, 556, 558. 45. CWS 335: BAC XII.7.353. 46. CWS: 164–169, 171, 174–177, 337–339, 345–351, 431, 484–90, 559–562; BAC: XIII.1–4.355–371; XVI.7.438–441; XVIII.4.495–496; XXI.4.554–557. 47. CWS: 315–320., 490–91; BAC: XII.2–4.340–347; XVIII.4.495; The Seventh Treatise is devoted to the spiritual battle against the devil and all temptations. 48. CWS: 175; BAC: VI.5.213–214. 49. On the recogimiento-dejamiento debate, see Alastair Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992), pp. 29–32. in Erasme, pp.187–190. Bataillon argued that the distinctions were not always clear, at least until 1523. One of the fundamental Spanish studies of the alumbrados has been Antonio Márquez, Los alumbrados: Orígenes y ﬁlosofía (1525–1559) (Madrid: Taurus, 1980); idem, “Conocimiento o experiencia? La epistemología del

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iluminismo,” Revista de Occidente XXIV (1971): 150–167 (regarding Alcaraz); Melquíades Andrés Martín, Reforma española y reforma luterana: aﬁnidades y diferencias a la luz de los místicos españoles (1517–1536): conferencia pronunciada en la Fundación Universitaria Española el día 12 de febrero de 1975 (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975). See pages 21–38 for the differences between Luther and such thinkers as Osuna and St. Teresa with regard to experience; idem, Los recogidos: nueva visión de la mistica española (1500–1700): obra elaborada en el Seminario Suárez de la Fundación Universitaria Española. Publicaciones de la Fundación Universitaria Española 13 (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, Seminario Suárez, 1975). 50. Bataillon, Erasme, pp. 187–188, 199–204. See also Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Itahca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), pp. 8–15. 51. Márquez, Los alumbrados, pp. 229–238. See also the introduction by Ahlgren in Francisca de los Apóstoles and Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, The Inquisition of Francisca: a sixteenth-century visionary on trial, ed. and trans. by Gillian T. W. Ahlgren (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), pp. 1–36; idem, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity, pp. 9–15. 52. Joseph Pérez, “Illuminisme et mysticisme dans l’Espagne du XVIe siècle,” in Les réformes enracinement socio-culturel: XXVe Colloque international d’études humanistes, Tours, 1er-13 juillet, 1982, ed. Bernard Chevalier and Robert Sauzet (Paris: Editions de la Maisnie, 1985), pp. 43–55; Alastair Hamilton, “An Episode in Castilian Illuminism: The Case of Martín Cota,” Heythrop Journal 27 (413–27); idem, Heresy and Mysticism in Sixteenth-Century Spain: The Alumbrados (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992); John E. Longhurst, “La beata Isabel de la Cruz ante la Inquisición (1524–1529),” Cuadernos de historia de España 25–26 (1957): 279–303; idem, Luther’s Ghost in Spain (1517–1646) (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1969), pp. 279–303; Milagros OrtegaCosta, Proceso de la Inquisición contra Maria de Cazalla (Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1978); Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World, ed. Mary E. Giles (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), pp. 98–118; Bataillon, Erasme, pp. 226–227; Ronald E. Surzt, The Guitar of God: Gender, Power, and Authority in the Visionary World of Mother Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534), (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). 53. Longhurst, Luther’s Ghost in Spain, pp. 103–115; Hamilton, Heresy and Mysticism, pp. 55–63; José C. Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformations, pp. 63–70; Bataillon, Erasme, pp. 182–186. 54. José C. Nieto, “The Non-mystical Nature of the Sixteenth-Century Alumbrados of Toledo,” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, p. 453, note 37. Cf. Antonio Márquez, Los alumbrados: Orígenes y ﬁlosofía (1525–1559). 55. Bataillon, Erasme, pp. 373–392. 56. Massimo Firpo, “The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés,” trans. John Tedeschi, Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 357; idem, Tra alumbrados e “spirituali”: studi su Juan de Valdés e il valdesianesimo nella crisi religiosa del ’500 iltaliano, Studi e testi per la storia religiosa del Cinquecento 3 (Firenze: L. S. Olschki, 1990). Firpo discusses the “Ecclesia Viterbiensis” which gathered around Reginald Pole. He dates

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the birth of this “church” to 1541 when Flaminio and others moved to Viterbo. On Valdés, see Gordon A. Kinder, Juan de Valdés (Bibliotheca dissidentium IX (Baden Baden: Valentin Koerner, 1988); and John A. Tedeschi and James M. Lattis, The Italian Reformation of the Sixteenth Century and the Diffusion of Renaissance Culture: A Bibliography of Secondary Literature, ca. 1750–1997 (Modena: F. C. Panini, 2000). 57. John E. Longhurst, Erasmus and the Spanish Inquisition: The Case of Juan de Valdés (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1950), pp. 69–77. On Luther’s inﬂuence in Spain, see Augustin Redondo, “Luther et l’Espagne de 1520 à 1536,” in Mélanges de la Casa de Velázquez 1 (1965): 109–165. According to Redondo, Luther’s works appeared in Spain in the same year he was condemned. There were four main periods in which a few of Luther’s works were found: (1) 1521, (2) 1523–1525, (3) 1528–1531, (4) 1535. Redondo explains that “Lutheranism” meant the adherence to the spirit of Luther’s doctrines, even if some of these doctrines were rejected or transformed; idem, “Les premiers ‘iluminés’ castillans et Luther,” in Aspects du libertinisme au XVIe siècle: actes du colloque international de Sommières: exposés, De Pétrarque à Descartes 30 (Paris: Vrin, 1974): 85–91, arguing against Márquez, Los alumbrados, concerning Lutheran inﬂuence. 58. Bataillon, Erasme, 384. 59. Juan de Valdés, Las ciento diez divinas consideraciones in Obras completas, I: Diálogos, Escritos espirituales, Cartas., ed. Ángel Alcalá Galve, Biblioteca Castro (Madrid: Turner, 1997) [hereafter Consideraciones, cited by treatise and page numbers], 40.73– 575. 60. Ibid, p. 573; 61. Juan Valdés, Alfabeto Cristiano. Diálogo con Guila Gonzaga in Obras Completas I [hereafter: Alfabeto], p. 430. 62. Alfabeto, p. 432 63. Consideraciones, 69. 634. 64. Consideracones, 32. 556. Also see Nieto, Juan de Valdés, 243–255. 65. Consideraciones, 55. 609–610. 66. Consideraciones, 47. 586; 57. 612; 63. 623–24; 69. 634. 85. 677 [visión interior]. 67. Alfabeto, p. 426. 68. Diálogo de doctrina christiana in Obras completas I; 77. See also Nieto, Juan de Valdés and the Origins of the Spanish and Italian Reformations, p. 317. 69. Consideracions, 67. 630. 70. Ibid. and Trataditos, p. 876ff. 71. Alfabeto, p. 443; Consideraciones, 75.649–651. In this section Valdés equates eternal life with the immediacy of God to the soul, an immediacy that the “beneﬁt of Christ” bestows to the members of the church in this life. 72. Consideraciones, 97. 709. 73. Trataditos, pp. 882–903. 74. Consideraciones, 54. 607. 75. Consideraciones, 92. 695. 76. Consideraciones, 102. 721. 77. Consideraciones, 92. 695.

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78. Consideraciones, 30. 551. 79. Consideraciones, 16. 524. 80. Ibid. 81. Consideraciones, 103. 724–6. 82. On the impact of Erasmus in Italy, see Silvana Seidel Menchi, Erasmus als Ketzer: Reformation und Inquisition im Italien des 16. Jahrhunderts, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought 49 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1993). 83. Elisabeth G. Gleason, Renaissance Thought in Sixteenth-Century Italy (Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1981), pp. 104–105. I am using the translation by Ruth Prelowski of the Beneﬁcio di Cristo included in this volume. This translation with her introduction can also be found in Italian Reformation Studies in Honor of Laelius Sociunus, ed. John A. Tedeschi (Firenze: Le Monnier, 1965), pp. 1–94. Italian edition: Benedetto du Mantova, “Il Beneﬁcio di Cristo” in Corpus Reformatorum Italicorum (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1972). 84. Tommaso Bozza, Nuovi studi sulla Riforma in Italia. Il Beneﬁcio di Cristo, Uomini e dottrine 22 (Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1976). This controversy is analyzed by Elisabeth G. Gleason, “On the Nature of Sixteenth-Century Italian Evangelism: Scholarship 1953–1978,” Sixteenth Century Journal 9/3 (1978): 3–26. Also see Dermont Fenlon, Heresy and Obedience in Tridentine Italy: Cardinal Pole and the Counter Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972). 85. Elisabeth G. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini. Venice, Rome, and Reform (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), p. 191. Also see the discussion of these ﬁgures, including Vittoria Colonna and Marguerite de Navarre, in Constance M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); idem, “Intellects Inﬂamed in Christ: Women and Spiritualized Scholarship in Renaissance Christianity,” Journal of Religion 84/1 (2004): 1–22. 86. Gleason, Gasparo Contarini, pp. 191–197, 260–76, 290–299; idem, “On the Nature of Sixteenth-Century Evangelism,” pp. 24–25. Also see Massimo Firpo, “The Italian Reformation and Juan de Valdés,”pp. 359, 362. 87. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 117; Beneﬁcio, p. 27. 88. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 129; Beneﬁcio, p. 42. 89. Beneﬁt of Christ, pp. 129–130; Beneﬁcio, p. 42. 90. Beneﬁt of Christ, pp. 131, 133; Beneﬁcio, p. 44 [una ﬁamma di fuoco]. 91. Beneﬁt of Christ, pp. 131, 135; Beneﬁcio, p. 49. 92. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 141; Beneﬁcio, p. 60. 93. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 150–51; Beneﬁcio, p. 71 94. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 145; Beneﬁcio, p. 63. 95. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 143; Beneﬁcio, p. 61. 96. Beneﬁt of Christ, p. 149, Beneﬁcio, p. 69. 97. Beneﬁt of Christ. p. 150; Beneﬁcio, p. 71. 98. Sermon 24, p. 87. All citations are from Johannes Tauler: Sermons, trans. Maria Shrady, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1985). 99. Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroad, 2005). The following discussion of Tauler is dependent on McGinn and

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Steven E. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969); Ignaz Weilner, Johannes Taulers Bekehrungsweg: Die Erfahrungsgrundlagen seiner Mystik (Regensburg: F. Pustet, 1961) and Gösta Wrede, Unio mystica: Probleme der Erfahrung bei Johannes Tauler (Uppsala: Universitet, 1974). 100. Sermon 64, cited by McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 255. See also Ozment, Homo Spiritualis, pp. 15–21. Wrede discusses the use of gemeute, grunt, and abgrund in Unio mystica on pages, 153–159, 200–202; McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, pp. 254–265, 101. McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 265. 102. Ibid. 103. Sermon 24, pp. 86–87. 104. Sermon 24, pp. 89–90. See also Wrede, Unio mystica, pp. 144–152. 105. Sermon 24, p. 90. 106. Sermon 29, pp. 104–105. 107. Wrede, Unio mystica, pp. 203–281. 108. Sermon 29, p.106. 109. Cited by McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 268. 110. Cited by McGinn,, Harvest of Mysticism, pp. 269–270. 111. Sermon 26, p. 96. On Tauler’s concept of “spiritual malediction,” see McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, pp. 268–275. 112. Sermon 40, p. 141. 113. Ibid., p. 143. 114. Ibid., p. 141. 115. Cited by Ozment, Homo Spiritualis, pp. 199–200. 116. Sermon 55, p. 161. 117. WA 9.102.10ff. Cited by Ozment, Homo Spiritualis, pp. 200–201; idem, “An Aid to Luther’s Marginal Comments on Johannes Tauler’s Sermons,” Harvard Theological Review 63/2 (1970): 305–311. 118. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis, p. 205. 119. Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973). 120. See McGinn, Harvest of Mysticism, p. 397. 121. Luther’s 1518 edition can be found in The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, trans. Bengt Hoffman, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). There are several editions of the Theologia Deutsch, including Alois M. Haas, ‘Der Franckforter’: Theologia Deutsch (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1993) and Wolfgang von Hinten, ‘Der Franckforter’ (Theologia Deutsch): Kritische textausgabe Ausgabe (Munich: Artemis, 1982). I will be using the recent translation by David Blamires, The Book of the Perfect Life: Theologia Deutsch—Theologia Germanica (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003) [hereafter TD, cited by chapter and page numbers]. Important studies on the Theologia Deutsch include Alois M. Haas, “Die ‘Theologia Deutsch’, Konstitution eines mystologisches Texts,” in Das“Einig Ein”: Studien zu Theorie und Sprache der deutschen Mystik, ed. Alois M. Haas and Heinrich Stirnimann, Dokimion Bd. 6, (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1980), pp. 369–415; idem, “Sprache und mystische Erfahrung nach Tauler und Seuse,” in idem, Geistliches

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Mittelalter (Freiburg, Switzerland: Universitätsverlag, 1984), pp. 239–247; Bernard McGinn, The Harvest of Medieval Mysticism, pp. 392–404; The citation is found in The Book of the Perfect Life, 5.34–35 [hereafter TD]. 122. TD, 16. 44–45. 123. Ibid., 53. 98. 124. Ibid., 24. 53. 125. Ibid., 27. 58–59. 126. See the discussion on Müntzer’s spiritualism in Eric W. Gritsch, “Thomas Müntzer and the Origins of Protestant Spiritualism,” in Mennonite Quarterly Review 37 (1963): 172–194, and idem, Thomas Müntzer: A Tragedy of Errors (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), pp. 25–30, 58–63, 65–75, 86–91, 112–118; idem, “Müntzer Glaubensverständnis,” in Der Theologe Thomas Müntzers Untersuchungen zu seiner Entwicklung und Lehre, ed. Siegfried Bräuer, Helmar Junghans (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1989). Gritsch disputes the emphasis on medieval mysticism in Müntzer’s thought, as argued particularly by Hans-Jürgen Goertz, Innere und äussere Ordnung in der Theologie Thomas Müntzer, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1967); also see Eric Gritsch, Reformer without a Church: The Life and Thought of Thomas Müntzer (1488?–1525) (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967). 127. TD, 29. 60. 128. Thomas Müntzer, The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, trans. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1988), p. 105. German edition: Thomas Müntzer, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Paul Kirn and Günther Franz, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte Bd 33 ([Gütersloh]: Gütersloher Verlaghaus G. Mohn, 1968). See also Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, pp. 61–97. 129. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 72–73, 98, 105, 199, 214–16, 218. 130. Ibid., pp. 223, 270. 131. Ibid., p. 270. 132. Ibid., p. 105. 133. Ibid., pp. 367–369. See also p. 232. 134. Ibid., p. 358. 135. Ibid., pp. 239–240. 136. Ibid. 137. Ibid., p. 221. 138. On the controversy regarding Acts 19, see David C. Steinmetz, “The Baptism of John and the Baptism of Jesus in Huldrych Zwingli, Balthasar Hubmaier and Late Medieval Theology,” in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History, Essays Presented to George Huntston Williams on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1979), pp. 169–181. 139. Balthasar Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, Classics of the Radical Reformation, trans. H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), pp. 85, 121, 146. Original texts are found in Balthasar Hubmaier, Schriften, ed. Gunnar Westin and Torsten Bergsten, Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer, Bd. IX ([Gütersloh]: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1962) [hereafter QGT], pp.111, 135.

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140. “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p. 117; QGT: 136. 141. “Dialogue with Zwingli’s Baptism Book,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p. 216. 142. “A Brief Apologia,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism , p. 301; QGT: 275. 143. “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p. 142; QGT: 156–57. 144. “Freedom of the Will,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p. 444; QGT: 394. 145. “Twelve Articles in Prayer Form,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p.236; QGT: 216. 146. “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p. 100; QGT: 121–122. 147. Hans Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism,” in Early Anabaptist Spirituality, Classics of Western Spirituality, trans. Daniel Liechty (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), pp. 67–68. On Hut, see Werner O. Packull, Mysticism and the Early South GermanAustrian Anabaptist Movement, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History 19 (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1977); idem, Hutterite Beginnings: Communitarian Experiments during the Reformation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995); Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, pp. 98–115. 148. Cornelius J. Dyck, Spiritual Life in Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald, 1995), p. 64. 149. Ibid., p. 81. 150. Ibid., p. 76. Hans Hut, “On the Mystery of Baptism,” in Early Anabaptist Spirituality, trans. Daniel Liechty Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1994), p. 81. 151. Hut, On the Mystery of Baptism, p. 79. 152. Ibid., pp. 73–74. 153. Ibid., p. 73. 154. Ibid., pp. 72–73. 155. Dyck, Spiritual Life in Anabaptism, p. 64. 156. Hut, On the Mystery of Baptism, p. 80 157. Ibid., pp. 79–81. 158. Leonard Schiemer, “Three Kinds of Grace Found in the Scriptures, and the Old and New Testaments (1527),” in Early Anabaptist Spirituality, p. 85. On Hut and Schiemer see Packull, Mysticism and the Early South German-Austrian Anabaptist Movement, pp. 106–112. 159. Schiemer, “Three Kinds of Grace Found in the Scriptures,” in Early Anabaptist Spirituality, p. 92. 160. Ibid., p. 94. 161. Ibid., pp. 95–96. 162. Dyck, Spiritual Life in Anabaptism, p. 217. 163. Myron S. Ausburger, “Conversion in Anabaptist Thought,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 36 (1962): 243–255; Cornelius J. Dyck, “The Life of the Spirit in

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Anabaptism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 47 (973): 309–326; idem, Spiritual Life in Anabaptism, pp. 13–26. 164. Dyck, Spiritual Life in Anabaptism, p. 38. 165. Hubmeier, “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p. 134; QGT: 150. 166. “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” p. 117; QGT: 136 (my emphasis). 167. “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” p. 106: QGT: 127; 215. 168. “ Dialogue with Zwingli’s Book,” in Hubmaier, Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, p.215; QGT: 200. 169. “On the Christian Baptism of Believers,” p. 116; QGT: 135. 170. This is questioned by Werner O. Packull, “Denck’s Alleged Baptism by Hubmaier: Its Signiﬁcance for the Origin of South German-Austrian Anabaptism,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 47 (1973): 308–333. Also see Williams, The Radical Reformation, pp. 248–69. 171. I have used the German and English texts in Clarence Bauman, The Spiritual Legacy of Hans Denck: Interpretation and Translation of Key Texts (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991), pp. 54/55. On Denck also see Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, pp. 116–132; Robert Friedmann, The Theology of Anabaptism, Studies in Anabaptist and Mennonite History 15 (Eugene, OR: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998); Rufus M. Jones, “Hans Denck and the Inward Word,” in Spiritual Reformers in the 16th and 17th Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1928), pp. 17; and the introduction by Clarence Bauman in The Spiritual Legacy of Hans Denck, pp. 8–47; Williams, The Radical Reformation, pp. 257–282, 85–86, 1238, 1252. 172. Denck, The Spiritual Legacy of Hans Denck, pp. 60/61–62/63. 173. Ibid., pp. 60/61–62/63. 174. Ibid., 62/63. 175. Ibid., pp. 142/143. 176. Ibid., pp. 146/147. 177. Ibid., pp. 148/149. 178. Ibid., p. 26. 179. Ibid., pp. 190/191. 180. Ibid., pp. 230/231. 181. Ibid., pp. 94/95. 182. Ibid., pp. 96/97; 100/101. 183. Ibid., pp. 94/95. 184. Ibid., pp. 86/87. 185. Andreas Karlstadt, The Essential Carlstadt: Fifteen Tracts, trans. Edward J. Furcha , Classics of the Radical Reformation 8 (Waterloo, Ont.: Herald Press, 1995), pp. 146–147. 186. The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 358–359: Schriften und Briefe, p. 492. 187. Patrick Hayden-Roy, The Inner Word and the Outer World: A Biography of Sebastian Franck, Renaissance and Baroque Studies and Texts 7 (New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1994). On Franck, see Christoph Dejung, Sebastian Franck interkulturell

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gelesen, Interkulturelle Bibliothek, Bd. 81 (Nordhausen: Traugott Bautz, 2005); Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, pp. 137–167; Horst Weigelt, Sebastian Franck und die lutherische Reformation ([Gütersloh]: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1972); Siegfried Wollgast, Beiträge zum 500. Geburtstag von Sebastian Franck (1499–1542) (Berlin: Weidler Buchverlag, 1999). 188. Sebastian Franck, 280 Paradoxes or Wondrous Sayings, trans. E. J. Furcha, Texts and Studies in Religion 26 (Lewiston/Queenstown: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1986) [hereafter Paradoxes], p. 376; German text: Sebastian Franck Paradoxa, ed. Siegfried Wollgast Philosophische Studientexte (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1966) [hereafter: Wollgast], p. 349. 189. Paradoxes, 377; Wollgast: 350. 190. Paradoxes, 137–139; Wollgast: 129–131. 191. Paradoxes, 215; Wollgast: 201; Eugene Peters, “Sebastian Franck’s Theory of Religious Knowledge,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 35 (1961): 265–281; Russell H. Hvolbek, “Being and Knowing: Spiritualist Epistemology and Anthropology from Schwenckfeld to Böhme,” Sixteenth Century Journal 21 (1991): 97–110. 192. Paradoxes, 209; Wollgast: 196. 193. Paradoxes, 230; Wollgast: 215. 194. Paradoxes, 207; Wollgast: 194–195. 195. Paradoxes, 200–201; Wollgast: 188–189. 196. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, pp. 149–150. 197. Cited by Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, p. 150. 198. Alfred Hegler, Geist und Schrift bei Sebastian Franck: Eine Studie zur Geschichte des Spiritualismus in der Reformationszeit (Freiburg i. B: J. C. B. Mohr [P. Siebeck], 1892), pp. 83–119; Otto Langer, “Inneres Wort und inwohnender Christus. Zum mystischen Spiritualismus Sebastian Francks und seinen Implikationen,” R. Emmet McLaughlin, “Sebastian Franck and Caspar Schwenckfeld: Two Spiritualist Viae,” André Séguenny, “Le spiritualisme de Sebastian Franck: ses rapports avec la mystique, le luthéranisme et l’humanisme,” Sebastian Franck (1499–1542). ed. Jan-Dirk Müller (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1993, pp. 39–112. 199. Paradoxes, 138–139; Wollgast: 130–131. 200. Paradoxes, 138, 199; Wollgast: 130, 186–187. 201. Paradoxes, 215; Wollgast: 187, 201. 202. Paradoxes, 208; Wollgast: 195. 203. Paradoxes, 379; Wollgast: 352. 204. Paradoxes, 382 Wollgast: 356. 205. Paradoxes, 382. 206. Paradoxes, 428; Wollgast: 400. 207. Paradoxes, 412; Wollgast: 385. 208. Paradoxes, 428: Wollgast: 400. 209. Paradoxes, 263, 408; Wollgast: 246, 382. 210. Paradoxes, 263. 211. The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, trans. Bengt Hoffman, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p.70.

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1. Jacques Guillet [et al] “Discernement des esprits,” in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité ascétique et mystique (Paris: Beauchesne, 1957) III: 1222–1291; J. T. Leinhard, “Discernment of Spirits in the Early Church,” Studia Patristica 17/2 (1982): 519–522; S. Alexe, “Le discernement selon Saint Jean Cassien,” in Biblica et Apocrypha, Ascetica, Liturgica, Studia Patristica 30 (1997): 129–135; Anthony D. Rich, Discernment in the Desert Fathers: Diákrisis in the Life and Thought of Early Egyptian Monasticism, Studies in Christian History and Thought ( Milton Keynes: Paternoster, 2007); Paul Quay, “Angels and Demons: The Teaching of IV Lateran,” Theological Studies XLII, no. 1 (March, 1981): 20–45; K. Waaijman “Discernment: Its History and Meaning,” Studies in Spirituality 7 (1997): 5–41. 2. Heinrich Seuse, Das Büchlein der ewigen Weisheit, Prol. in Heinrich Seuse, Deutsche Schriften, ed. Karl Bihlmeyer (Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1907), p. 327. Cited by Wendy Love Anderson, “Free Spirits, Presumptuous Women and False Prophets,” Ph.D. thesis, University of Chicago, 2002, p. 121, note 65. 3. Apocalyptic Spirituality, ed. and trans. Bernard McGinn, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), p. 147. 4. Jacopone da Todi, The Lauds, trans. Serge and Elizabeth Hughes, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1982), pp. 212–213. 5. Nancy Caciola, Discerning Spirits, Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), p. 2. 6. The Latin text, De distinctione verarum revelationum a falsis, is found in Jean Gerson, Œuvres complètes, ed. Palémon Glorieux (Paris: Desclée & Cie, 1960–1973) [hereafter Gl], 3: 36–56. English translation: Jean Gerson. Early Works, trans. Brian Patrick McGuire, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1998) [hereafter CWS], pp. 334–364. On Gerson’s discussions of the discernment of the spirits, see André Combes, La théologie mystique de Gerson, proﬁl de son évolution, 2 vols. (Rome: Desclée, 1963); Dyan Elliott, “Seeing Double: John Gerson, the Discernment of Spirits, and Joan of Arc,” American Historical Review 112/1 (February, 2002): 26–54; Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, Possession, Mysticism and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 175–180; Cornelius Roth, Discretio spirituum. Kriterien geistlicher Unterscheidung bei Johannes Gerson (Würzburg: Echter, 2001), especially pp.126–179; Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, pp. 175–180. 7. Gl 3: 42; CWS: 342. 8. Gl 3: 42–43; CWS: 344–345. 9. Gl 3: 44; CWS: 345. 10. Gl 3: 45; CWS: 348. 11. Gl 3: 46; CWS: 349. 12. Gl 3:47; CWS: 351–352. 13. Gl 3: 44; CWS: 345. 14. Gl 3: 46–47; CWS: 349ff. 15. Gl 3: 47; CWS 349–50.

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16. Gl 3: 47; CWS: 350. 17. Ibid., my emphasis. 18. Gl 3: 50; CWS: 354. 19. Gl 3: 53; CWS: 358. 20. De probatione spirituum, Gl 9:180.6. 21. Ibid. 22. Gl 9: 180.7. 23. Gl 9: 180.7–181.9. 24. Gl 9: 182.9. 25. Gl 9: 183.10. 26. Gl 9: 184–185.12. 27. Gl 3: 37. “Etenim angelus sathanae secundum Apostolum transﬁgurat se nonnumquam in angelum lucis. . . . Cur ita? quatenus per hoc abducantur homines a spiritualis veritatis cognitione quae per miraculorum aut revelationum media tradita est, quando ad falsitatem vident similia introduci. Dicamus praeterea quoniam non est humanitus regula generalis vel ars diabilis ad discernendum semper et infallibiliter quae verae sunt et quae falsae aut illusoriae revelationes.” 28. Gl 3: 54; CWS: 360. 29. Gl 3: 54; CWS: 359–60. 30. Gl 3: 54; CWS: 360. 31. Gl 9: 178.3. 32. Gl 9:184–185.12 and 178.4. 33. On Tauler see, Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Christian Mysticism, vol. IV, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany (New York: Crossroads, 2005), pp. 240–296; Louise Gnädinger, Johannes Tauler: Lebenswelt und mystische Lehre (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1993); Gösta Wrede, Unio mystica: Probleme der Erfahrung bei Johannes Tauler (Uppsala: Universitet, 1974). Steven E. Ozment, Homo Spiritualis: A Comparative Study of the Anthropology of Johannes Tauler, Jean Gerson, and Martin Luther (1509–16) in the Context of their Theological Thought (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1969), pp. 23–46; Wendy Love Anderson, “Free Spirits, Presumptuous Women, and False Prophets,” pp. 129–137. 34. Luther’s 1518 edition can be found in The Theologia Germanica of Martin Luther, trans. Bengt Hoffman, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). For its importance among Protestant Reformers, see Steven E. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1973). There are several editions of the Theologia Deutsch, including Alois M. Haas, ’Der Franckforter’; Theologia Deutsch (Einsiedeln: Johannes Verlag, 1993) and Wolfgang von Hinten, ‘Der Franckforter’ (‘Theologia Deutsch’): Kritische Textausgabe (Munich: Artemis, 1982). I will be using the recent translation by David Blamires, The Book of the Perfect Life: Theologia Deutsch—Theologia Germanica (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 2003) [hereafter TD]. 35. TD, 52.24, 72.40, 78.42.

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36. TD 73.40. 37. TD 82–83. 43. 38. TD 55.26; 73–75.40; 76.40: “The false light is the seed of the devil. Where it is sown, the devil’s fruits and the devil himself grow.” See also TD 49.20 and 97.53. 39. TD 72.40. 40. TD 83.43. 41. John W. O’Malley, “Was Ignatius Loyola a Church Reformer? How to Look at Early Modern Catholicism,” Catholic Historical Review 77/2 April (1991): 177–194. 42. Autobiograﬁa, 1.8; 7.63–66; CWS: 71–72, 96–97. All texts by Ignatius are from Obras de San Ignacio de Loyola, ed.Ignacio Iparraguirre, S. I., Candido de Dalmases, S.I. and Manuel Ruiz Jurado, S.I., 5th ed. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1991) [hereafter Autobiografía, cited by chapter/section numbers]. English translation is found in Ignatius of Loyola. Spiritual Exercises and Selected Works, trans. George E. Ganss, S.J (New York: Paulist Press, 1991) [hereafter CWS, cited by page number], pp. 65–112. Terence O’Reilly, “Melchor Cano and the Spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola,” in Terence O’Reilly, From Ignatius of Loyola to John of the Cross: Spirituality and Literature in Sixteenth-Century Spain, Collected Studies Series CS484 (Aldershot: Variorum, 1995) V.369-105. 43. Autobiografía, 8. 73–86; CWS: 99–105. 44. Ejercicios espiritualis, 302.352 [cited by page number/section number] “Para el sentido verdadero que en la Iglesia militante debemos tener, se guarden las reglas siguientes”; CWS: 211–214. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp. 49–50. 45. Luis Fernández, “Iñigo de Loyola y los alumbrados,” Hispania sacra 35 (1983): 585–680; See also Melquíades Andrés Martín, “Common Denominators of Alumbrados, Erasmians, Lutherans, and Mystics: The Risk of a More Spiritual ‘Intimate Spirituality,’” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind: International Symposium: Selected Papers, ed. Angel Alcalá (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1987), pp. 437–494; Constance Joan Mathers, “Early Spanish Qualms about Loyola and the Society of Jesus,” The Historian 53 (1991): 679–690. 46. Melchor Cano, Censura y parecer que dio el Padre Maestro Fray Melchor Cano de la Orden de Predicadores contra el Instituto de los Padres Jesuitas, in Terence O’Reilly, From Ignatius of Loyola to John of the Cross, pp. V.11–22. This is a reprint of the transcription of the manuscript in the British Library [hereafter Censura, cited by chapter (V) and section number in the volume by O’Reilly]. On Cano, see Terence O’Reilly, “Melchor Cano and the Spirituality of St. Ignatius of Loyola,” in From Ignatius of Loyola to John of the Cross, IV. 369–380. Further analysis of Cano’s attacks on the Society can be found in O’Malley, The First Jesuits, pp. 292–293, 317–319 and Antonio Márquez, “Origen y caracterización del iluminismo (Según un parecer de Melchor Cano),” Revista de occidente 21 (1968): 320–333. 47. Censura, V. 3, 48. Censura, V. 3, 4. 49. Censura, V. 4. 50. Censura, V. 8.

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51. Censura, V.8: “Unde suspicandum est no sea artiﬁcio del Diablo, y la Orden de los Alumbrados más universal, y que el Diablo se transﬁgura en Angel de Luz y los alumbra, y da gustos espirituales para después mejor urdir su trama.” 52. Censura, V.3. 53. Censura V. 6. Cf. V.11. 54. Censura, V.13. 55. Ejercicios espirituales,229.23; CWS, 262.180; CWS:130. See also Georges Bottereau, “Le rôle de ‘l’indifférence’ dans la spiritualité ignatienne,” Revue d’ascétique et de mystique 45 (1969): 395–408. 56. Ejercicios, 224.15; CWS: 125. 57. Censura, V.16, 8, 9, 13–14. 58. Luis Fernández, “Iñigo de Loyola y los alumbrados,” pp. 677–680. 59. Inigo: Discernment Log-book, The Spiritual Diary of Saint Ignatius Loyola, ed. and trans. by Joseph A. Munitiz, S. J. with appendix by John Futrell, S. J. (London: Inigo Enterprises, 1987) [hereafter Spiritual Diary cited by page and section], pp. 77–80 (appendix); Diario espiritual [hereafter Diario, cited by page and section]. 60. Ejercicios, 261.175; CWS: 162–163. 61. Diario, 363–364.17; Spiritual Diary, p. 27.17. 62. Diario, 378.61; Spiritual Diary, p. 35.61. 63. Diario, 382.74, 383.81, 386.91, 387.94, 391.110, 393.116, 394.121–122, 398.138, 399.140; Spiritual Diary, pp, 37, 38, 40, 42–44, 46. 64. Ejercicios, 261.176; CWS: 163. 65. Ejercicios, 295.316; CWS: 202. 66. Diario,372. 42, 400.145; Spiritual Diary, 32, 47. 67. Ejercicios, 295.317; CWS: 202. 68. On the subject of the discernment of the spirits in Ignatius, see Jules Toner, S.J., A Commentary on St. Ignatius’ Rules for Discernment of the Spirits (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1982); Michael Buckley, S.J., “Discernment of the Spirits,” The Way. Supplement 20 (Autumn 1973), pp. 19–37.; John Carrol Futrell, S.J., “Ignatian Discernment,” Studies in the Spirituality of the Jesuits II/2 (April 1970) ; Hugo. Rahner S.J., The Spirituality of Saint Ignatius of Loyola (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1953), pp. 35–45; idem, Ignatius the Theologian (New York: Herder and Herder, 1908), pp. 312–343. 69. Autobiografía, 3: 22–26; CWS: 76–77. 70. Autobiografía, 3.22; CWS: 77. 71. Autobiografía, 3.28–30; CWS: 79–81. 72. Autobiografía, 3.30–31; CWS: 81. 73. Diario, 377. 57; Spiritual Diary, 34. 74. Diario, 377.57, 403.152; Spiritual Diary, 34, 48. 75. Diario, 402.151; Spiritual Diary, 48. 76. Diario, 401–402.148; Spiritual Diary, 48. 77. Diario, 403.152; Spiritual Diary, 48–49. 78. Diario, 391.110, 394.122; Spiritual Diary, 42, 44. 79. Autobiografía, 3.27, 4.42; CWS: 79, 85.

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80. Autobiografía, 10.96; CWS: 109. 81. Autobiografía, 3.27; CWS: 79; Ejercicios 261.175: “El primer tiempo es quando Dios nuestro Señor así mueve y atrae la voluntad, que, sin dubitar ni poder dubitar, la tal ánima devota sigue a lo que es mostrado; assí como San Pablo y San Matheo lo hicieron en seguir a Cristo neustro Señor.” 82. Diario, 378.63; Spiritual Diary, 35 Ejercicios, 261.175; CWS: 162. 83. Diario, 376.52; Spiritual Diary, 34. See also Autobiograﬁa, 119.3.30; CWS: 80–81. 84. Diario, 362.12–363.15, 365.22, 369.33, 378.60–62, 380.66–67, 388.97–389.102, 392.113–116; CWS: 27, 28, 30, 32, 35, 36, 41, 43. 85. Diario, 409.10, 413.221. 14.221; Spiritual Diary, 53, 56. Ejercicios, 235.44, 251.124, 261.176, 261–62.176, 269.213, 274.239, 277.258; CWS 135, 151, 162, 163, 172, 178, 181. 86. Diario, 379.63; Spiritual Diary, 35. 87. Autobiograﬁa, 132–133.6.54–55; CWS: 91. 88. Autobiografía, 106.1.8; CWS: 71. 89. Ejercicios, 313.13–15; CWS: 201–202. Toner, A Commentary on Saint Ignatius’ Rules, pp. 49–57. 90. Ejercicios, 293.313–297.327; CWS: 203–204. 91. Ejercicios, 296.326–297.327; CWS: 205–206. 92. Ejercicios, 328–329.12; CWS: 205. 93. Ejercicios, 298.332; CWS: 206. 94. Ejercicios, 299.336; CWS: 207. 95. Ejercicios, 298.332; CWS: 206 (my emphasis). 96. Letters of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, ed. and trans. William J. Young, S.J. (Chicago: Loyola University Press., 1959), pp. 51–52; Cartas, 753 (my emphasis). 97. Ejercicios, 298.333–334; CWS: 206. 98. Ejercicios, 335; CWS 207. 99. Ibid. 100. Michael Buckley, S.J., “The Structure of the Rules for Discernment,” pp. 32–35. 101. Toner, A Commentary on Saint Ignatius’ Rules, pp. 56–58, 240–242. 102. Ejercicios, 298.336; CWS: 207. 103. Ejercicios, 297.330; CWS: 205. 104. Ejercicios, 297.330; CWS: 206. 105. Ejercicios, 298–299.336: CWS: 207. 106. Ejercicios, 299.336; CWS: 207. 107. Letters of Ignatius of Loyola, pp. 21–25; Cartas, 728–734. CWS: 205. 108. Ibid., 20; Cartas, 731.5 “y el enemigo no cura si habla verdad o mentira, mas sólo que nos venza.” 109. Letters of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, p. 21; Cartas, 731.5. 110. Letters of Saint Ignatius, pp. 21, 25, 51, 202; Ejercicios, 298.331–335; CWS: 206–07. 111. Letters of Saint Ignatius, pp. 21–22; Cartas, 732–733.7–8. 112. Letters of Saint Ignatius of Loyola, p. 22–23; Cartas, 733.8.

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113. Letters of Saint Ignatius, p. 23; Cartas, 733.8. See also Ejercicios, 299.336; CWS: 207. 114. “To the Fathers and Brothers of Coimbra: On Discretion, and Obedience as a Means to It.” CWS: 345. 115. Letters of Saint Ignatius, p. 198; Cartas, 845–846.3. 116. Letters of Saint Ignatius, p. 200; Cartas, 847–848.4. 117. Müntzer, The Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, trans. Peter Matheson (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1988), p. 31; Thomas Müntzer, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Paul Kirn and Günther Franz, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, Bd. 33 ([Gütersloh]: Gütersloher Verlagshaus G. Mohn, 1968). 118. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 215, 328, 338. 119. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, p. 338; Schriften und Briefe, p. 332. 120. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 214–215. 121. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 214–215. 122. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 216–17. 123. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 106, 211. 124. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, p. 201. 125. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, p. 238; Schriften und Briefe, p. 250. 126. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 236–238; Schriften und Briefe, p. 249. 127. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, p. 239. 128. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, p. 242. 129. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, p. 241. 130. Collected Works of Thomas Müntzer, pp. 244–245. 131. Sebastian Franck, 280. Paradoxes, p. 38; Wollgast, 39–40. For bibliographical details see p. 454, note 188. 132. Paradoxes, p. 38, 42, 239, 272–273; Wollgast, 39, 42, 224, 255. 133. Paradoxes, p. 39; Wollgast, 39. 134. Paradoxes, pp. 40, 239; Wollgast, 40, 224. 135. Paradoxes, p. 38; Wollgast, 38. 136. Paradoxes, pp. 38–39; Wollgast, 38–39 137. Paradoxes, pp. 102–103; Wollgast, 97. 138. Paradoxes, pp. 39–40; Wollgast, 39. 139. Paradoxes, p. 406; Wollgast, 378–379 140. Paradoxes, pp. 404–406; Wollgast, 376–379. 141. Paradoxes, p. 406; Wollgast, 379. 142. Paradoxes, pp. 192–201; Wollgast, 180–189. 143. Paradoxes, pp. 202–203; Wollgast, 190. 144. Paradoxes, p. 203; Wollgast, 190–191. 145. Paradoxes, p. 203. See also pp. 4, 49, 99, 206–207, 302, 306–307, 384. 146. Paradoxes, pp. 8–9; Wollgast, 9–10. 147. Paradoxes, p. 359; Wollgast, 335. 148. Paradoxes, p. 321–322, 359; Wollgast, 200, 335. 149. Paradoxes, pp.12, 48, 361–362. “If you read the world’s lies, you will note that she cries loudly of God and his word . . . ,” p. 48; Wollgast, 48. 150. Paradoxes, pp. 206–207. See also p. 49; Wollgast, 194–195 and p. 49.

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151. Paradoxes, p. 383; Wollgast, 356 152. Paradoxes, p. 406; Wollgast, 378. 153. Balthasar Hubmaier, Theologian of Anabaptism, trans. and ed. H. Wayne Pipkin and John H. Yoder, Classics of the Radical Reformation (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), pp. 300–458; Writings of Pilgrim Marpeck, trans. and ed. William Klassen and Walter Klassen (Eugene OR: Wipf & Stock, 1999), p. 54. 154. Dirk Philips, The Writings of Dirk Philips, trans. and ed. by Cornelius J. Dyck, William E. Keeney, and Alvin J. Beachy (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1992), pp. 209–214. 155. For an analysis of irenic discussions of religious issues, see Constance M. Furey, Erasmus, Contarini, and the Religious Republic of Letters (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 156. Ioannis Calvini Commentarii in secundam Pauli Epistolam ad Corinthios, Opera omnia, Series II, Opera exegetica vol. 15, ed. Helmut Feld (Genève: Librairie Droz, 1994) [hereafter OE], pp. 181.15–182.6. Comm. on I John 4:1, pp. 283–286; Inst. I.9.2, III.3.14; Defensio orthodoxae ﬁdei de sacra trinitate, contra prodigiosos errores Michaelis Serveti Hispani, Corpus Reformatorum 36, pp. 464–465; Responsio ad Sadoleti epistolam, Opera Selecta 1:465; Contre la secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertins qui se nomment Spirituelz in Ioannis Calvini Opera omnia. Series IV, Scripta didactica et polemica (Genève: Droz, 2005) I: 77; Comm. on I John 4:1, p. 285; Inst. I.9.2; OS III:83. 157. The following is derived from my article “Unmasking the Angel of Light: The Problem of Deception in Martin Luther and Teresa of Avila,” in Mystics, Presence and Aporia, ed. Michael Kessler and Christian Sheppard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), pp. 118–137. 158. Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil, trans. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989); Mark U. Edwards, Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1975). 159. WA 26. 507.3. See also WA 26. 494.25–30; LW 37: 367–8. 385–386, WA 47. 107.8.3–14. 160. WA 45. 528.15–20; LW 24: 74. 161. WA 45. 528.24–33; LW 24: 74–75. 162. WA 46. 65.13–16; LW 24: 371. 163. WA 45. 729.5–11, 30–35; LW 24: 294. 164. WA 50. 574.20–25; LW 41: 85. 165. WA 45. 474.38–475.–10; LW 24:16. See also WA 45. 577.8–9. 166. WA 40/1. 96.10–11. 167. WA 20. 649.25–27; WA 40/1. 130.35–131.8–9; LW 26: 41, 65; LW 30: 241–242. 168. The following is drawn from my chapter “Martin Luther [and the Sermon on the Mount]” in The Sermon on the Mount Through the Centuries from the Early Church to John Paul II, ed. Jeffrey P. Greenman, Timothy Larsen, Stephen R. Spencer (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2007), pp. 109–127. 169. WA 43. 405.6–12; WA 32. 474.36–38. Cf. LW 21: 237. 170. WA 32. 65.21, 387.14; LW 21: 79.105. The German reads, “falsche heiligen.” See also WA 32.322.17. 171. WA 32. 353.37–38, 523.16–17, 533.15–26; LW 21: 66, 270, 281.

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172. WA 32. 507.24,511.15, 520.6–8; LW 21: 33, 266. See also WA 32.533.19. 173. WA 32. 522. 10–11; LW 21: 268. 174. WA 32. 436.29–31, 506.24.–508.13, 518.28–29, 515.1–2 [geistlichen verstand], 527. 19–23. 175. WA 32. 325.30–32, 506.33–507.2; LW 21: 34, 250. 176. WA 32. 474.25–26; LW 21: 211. 177. WA 42.300.25–301.3, 302.10; LW 2: 56–57. 178. WA 42.300.31; WA 32.474.33–34; LW 2.55; LW 21.212. 179. WA 42.300.21–29; LW 2:54. 180. WA 42. 300. 323.40–324.4; . WA 42.300.21–30; LW 21: 87, 54–55. 181. WA 40/1.316.22–29; LW 26: 192. See also WA 32.446.33–34; WA 45. 503.1–11, 528.15–23,569.17–29, 592.34–35; WA 46. 24.11–19. 182. WA 31. 249.25–250.10; LW 14:31–32. 183. WA 46. 13.17–18; LW 24: 312. Luther is employing a traditional theme in an original manner. For a discussion of the illusions of the demonic, see Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), pp. 80–93. Clark speaks of a “demonic inversion” that inverted values and turned particular things “upside down.” Luther, in contrast, speaks more often of an exact imitation of God by the devil. 184. WA 45. 474.4–10; LW 24:16. 185. WA. 45. 502.35–503.11, WA 45. 515.3–4, 645.4–13;WA 46. 21.33. 186. On this argument, see Brian A. Gerrish, Continuing the Reformation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 38–56. 187. WA 23. 70.10–11, 21–26; LW 37: 17–18. 188. WA 45. 622.30–31, 503.5–8; LW 24: 46. 177. 189. WA 46. 58.7–10; LW 24: 363. 190. WA 46. 62.5–15; LW 24: 367. 191. WA 45. 727.33–728.1–10; LW 24: 293–294. 192. WA 45. 472.23–27; LW 24:13. 193. WA 33. 112.22–35, 563.21–565.26; WA 40/1. 205.22–28, 299.3–5, 320.16–24; WA 40/2. 42.33–35; WA 43. 459.-462; WA 5. 565.14–21. See also Zachman, The Assurance of Faith, pp. 63–68. 194. WA 40.511.31–34; LW 26:331. 195. On the ambiguity of experience in Luther’s thought, see Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, trans. Herbert J. A. Bouman (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1976), pp. 77–88 and Zachman, Assurance of Faith, pp. 183–187. 196. WA 43. 458.21–22, 461.34–42, 462.1–5; LW 5: 48–49. 197. WA 40/1. 577.20–579.3; WA 45.515–517, 597; LW 24:59–61; LW 26: 379–381. 198. WA 45. 475.4–10; LW 24:16. 199. WA 45. 599.23–24; LW 24:151. 200. WA 45. 590.22–28, 591.29–36; LW 24: 142–143. 201. WA 45. 664.30–31; LW 24:223. 202. Cited by Moshe Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit: Possession, Mysticism, and Discernment in Early Modern Catholicism, pp. 186–187. Also see idem, “The Devil in the Convent,” American Historical Review 107/5 (December 2002): 1379–1411. For an

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analyysis of how Diego Pérez attempted to negotiate a place for the religious practices of the beatas after the 1570s, see Alison Weber, “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation in Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23/2 (1993): 221–234. 203. St. John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, in The Collected Works of St. John of the Cross, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1991), p. 228. 204. Ibid., pp. 229, 282, referring to Is 5:20. 205. Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1990), 234–235, 259–263; See also Alison Weber, “Spiritual Administration: Gender and Discernment in the Carmelite Reform,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000): 123–146; Antonio Pérez-Romero, Subversion and Liberation in the Writings of St. Teresa of Avila, Portada hispánica 2 (Amsterdam: Rodopi 1996); Sonya A. Quitslund, “Elements of a Feminist Spirituality in St. Teresa,” in Carmelite Studies 3: Centenary of St. Teresa, Catholic University Symposium—October 15–17, 1982, ed. Catholic University Symposium and John Sullivan, O.C. D. (Washington D.C.: ICS Publications, 1982), pp. 19–52. 206. Rowan Williams, Teresa of Avila (Harrisburg, PA: Morehouse, 1991), pp. 37–38; Teófanes Egidio, “La familia judía de Santa Teresa,” Studia Zamorensia 3 (1982): 449–479. 207. Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, p. 187 208. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 209. The Inquisition of Francisca: A Sixteenth-Century Visionary on Trial, ed. and trans. Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe (Chicago; University of Chicago Press, 2005). 210. For an account of Teresa’s relationship with the Inquisition see Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity, pp. 47–60; Enrique Llamas Martínez, Santa Teresa de Jesús y la Inquisición española. (Madrid: C.S.I.C. Inst. Francisco Suárez, 1972); idem., “Santa Teresa de Jesús y los alumbrados,” in Congreso Internacional Teresiano 4–7 octubre, 1982, ed. Teófanes Egido Martínez, Victor G. de la Concha, Olegario González de Cardedal (Salamanca: Universidad de Salamanca,1983): 137–67; Ciriaco Morón-Arroyo, “‘I Will Give You a Living Book’: Spiritual Currents at Work at the Time of St. Teresa of Jesus,” Carmelite Studies 3, Centenary of Saint Teresa, pp. 95–112; Alison Weber, “Saint Teresa: Demonologist,” in Culture and Control in Counter-Reformation Spain, ed. Cruz and Perry (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 171–195. 211. Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, pp. 180–188, 209–229; David Coleman, “Moral Formation and Social Control in the Catholic Reformation: The Case of San Juan of Ávila,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26/1 (1995):17–30; Alison Weber, “Between Ecstasy and Exorcism: Religious Negotiation and Sixteenth-Century Spain,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 23 (1993): 221–234. 212. Melquíades, “Common Denominators of Alumbrados, Erasmians, Lutherans, and Mystics: The Risk of a More ‘Intimate’ Spirituality,” in The Spanish Inquisition and the Inquisitorial Mind, pp. 457–494.

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213. Libro de la vida, in Obras Completas de Teresa de Jesus (Madrid: Biblioteca de autores cristianos, 1967) [hereafter Vida cited by chapter and section], 8.5; Teresa of Avila, Book of Her Life, in The Collected Works of St. Teresa of Avila, vol. 1, trans. Kieran Kavanaugh, O.C.D., and Otilio Rodriguez (Washington, DC: Institute of Carmelite Studies, 1985) [hereafter BL cited by page number], p. 201. All citations to Teresa (with the exception of the English edition of the Interior Castle) are from these editions. 214. Cited by Weber, Teresa of Avila, pp. 158–159. 215. Vida, 25.14–15, 25:15, 26.3, 29.5; BL: 219–220, 225, 248; Sluhovsky, Believe Not Every Spirit, 212–214. 216. Vida, 13.14; BL: 297–298 and p.129. 217. Vida, 34.11; BL: 298. 218. Vida, 23.14, 18, 24.4; BL: 207–8, 210. See 28.14–17 for the help Teresa received from her confessor, a Jesuit by the name of Balthasar Alvarez. 219. Vida, 26.5; BL: 226. 220. See, for example, Vida, 26.5; BL: 226. 221. Meditaciones sobre los cantares [hereafter Meditaciones cited by chapter and section]: 4.1; Meditations: 242. See also Vida, 19.13, 252, 12–13; BL: 170–171, 213, 218. 222. Jennifer Radden, “Melancholia in the Writing of a Sixteenth-Century Spanish Nun,” Harvard Review of Psychology 12/4 (2004): 293–297; Pierre Vercelletto, Epilepsie et état mystique, La maladie de Sainte Thérèse d’Avila (Paris: La Bruyère, 2000); M. Barton “Santa Teresa d’Avila, Did She Have Epilepsy?” Catholic Historical Review (1982): 68: 581–598; Sluhovsky, “The Devil in the Convent,” note 19. Also see Sluhovsky’s warnings against such interpretations in this same article (p. 138) as well as in his chapter “Trivializing Possession,” in Believe Not Every Spirit, pp. 14–32. For historical explanations regarding the connections between demonic possession and mental illness in the thirteenth century, see Barbara Newman, “Possessed by the Spirit: Devout Women, Demoniacs, and the Apostolic Life in the Thirteenth Century,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 73/3 (July, 1988): 733–770. 223. Libro de las fundaciones [hereafter Fundaciones cited by chapter and section], 8.6; Foundations [hereafter F], pp. 141–142 (my emphasis); Camino de perfección (Códice de Valladolid) [cited by chapter and section, hereafter Camino]; 24.4; Way of Perfection [hereafter WP], pp.129; Vida, 28.14; BL: 244. 224. Moradas del Castillo interior [hereafter Moradas, cited by book, chapter, and section] and The Interior Castle [hereafter IC, cited by page number], trans. Kieran Kavanaugh O.C.D. and Otilio Rodriguez, O.C.D. Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press, 1979), Moradas, 6.1.8–9, 6.3.3; IC:. 111–112, 119–120; Fundaciones: 7.1–10, 8.5–6, F:134–139, 141–142. 225. Moradas, 5.1.1; 5.1.4; IC: 85, 87;.Vida, 14.8; BL: 36. 226. Moradas, 2.1.6; IC: 51. 227. Moradas, 1.2.15, 5.1.1, 6.6.6, 6.6.8; IC: 46, 51, 140. On the prayer of union, see Mary Margaret Anderson, “Thy Word in Me: On the Prayer of Union in St. Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle,” Harvard Theological Review 107/5 (2006): 329–354. 228. Fundaciones, 8.3; Moradas, 6. 3.16; Meditaciones, 2.1.1–2; Vida 15.10, 28.4, 10, 19.14–15; F: 140; IC: 125; BL: 144, 171–172, 238, 242.

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229. Moradas, 6.3.16; Vida, 28.10; IC: 125, BL 242. 230. Vida, 28.4–5,10; Moradas, 6.3.16, 6.10.1; BL: 238, 242; IC: 124–125, 163. 231. Moradas, 5.4.8; IC: 105 232. Moradas, 5.4.6; IC: 104. 233. Vida, 19.14; BL: 171–172 (my emphasis) 234 Vida 19.15; BL:172. 235. Moradas, 5. 4.7; IC: 105. 236. Moradas, 5.4.8 (my emphasis); IC: 105. 237. Moradas, 5.4.10, 6. 6.2, 6. 6.6, 6.6.8; IC: 106, 138, 140. 238. Moradas, 6.6.2; IC: 138. 239. Moradas, 6.6.8; IC: 140. 240. Moradas, 1. 2. 11–12; IC: 44–45. 241. Camino, 38.2; WP:185. 242. Meditaciones, 2.13; Meditations: 227. 243. Moradas, 1.2.15, 7.2.9; IC: 46, 181. 244. Camino, 40.7; WP: 194. 245. Vida, 8 7; BL: 97. 246. Vida, 25.2; BL: 213. 247. Vida, 25.6; BL: 217. 248. Moradas,6.1.8-10, 6. 8.3, 6. 9.12, 6.10.8, Epilogue 25; IC: 112–113, 151–152, 159–160, 165, 196. . 249. Vida, 25.12; BL: 218. 250. Moradas, 6.3.7,10,16; IC: 121–122, 125. 251. Moradas, 6.3.1–18; IC: 119–126. 252. Vida, 7.1, 30. 9–10; Caminio, 38.4, 39.1–2; BL: 82, 257–58; WP: 186, 189. 253. Camino, 12.6–7; WP: 84. 254. Camino, 17.3; WP: 100. 255. Vida, 18 4; Moradas, 5.1.10, 5.4.1–11; BL: 159; IC: 90, 102–107. 256. Vida, 19. 2; BL: 164. 257. Vida, 15.4,10; BL: 141, 144. 258. Vida, 11.9,12. 2–7; Moradas,s 4.3.3; BL: 114, 120–123; IC: 79. 259. Vida, 14 2; BL: 133. 260. Vida, 16. 1, 18.1–14; Moradas, 6.8.4; BL:147, 157–163; IC: 152. 261. Vida, 25.3, 6; Meditaciones, 1.2; BL: 214–16; Meditations, p. 216. 262. Vida, 39.23; BL: 352. 263. Vida, 20.4, 9; BL: 173, 174–175. 264. Vida, 30. 8–9; BL: 256–257. 265. Vida, 36.7–8; BL: 312–313. 266. Vida, 7.7; BL: 86. 267. Vida, 39.24; BL: 352–353. 268. Moradas, 6.9.10: IC: 159 269. Moradas, 6.9.10; IC: 159. 270. Vida, 27. 5; BL: 229–230. 271. Moradas, 6. 3.7; IC: 121.

465

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272. Moradas, 5.1. 9–10; IC: 89 (numbered 5.1.8–9). 273. Vida, 18.14; BL: 163. 274. Vida, 29.5; BL: 248. 275. Vida, 25.18; BL: 221. 276. Vida, 25.18; BL: 221. 277. Vida, 25.20–21; BL: 222–223. Also see Weber, “Saint Teresa, Demonologist.” 278. Vida, 27.1; BL: 227. 279. Vida, 28.5; BL: 239. 280. Vida, 39.24; BL: 353. 281. Moradas, 7.1.6; IC: 180. 282. Vida, 27.5–6; BL: 229–230 283. Vida, 27.6; BL: 230. 284. Moradas, 6.8.3, 6.8.8; IC: 151–2, 154. 285. Vida, 40.3; BL: 355. 286. Moradas, 6.10.2, 9; IC: 163, 165; (6:10.1, 8). 287. Moradas, 7.3.10; IC: 185–186. 288. Vida, 23.15; BL: 207. 289. Thomas More, Responsio ad Lutherum, pp. 305–307. On this citation, also see Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 58–59 and Schreiner, “Unmasking the Angel of Light,” pp. 131–132. CHAPTER

7

1. Harries, Inﬁnity and Perspective, p. 34. For a detailed analysis of the development of perspective in the Renaissance, see James Elkins, The Poetics of Perspective (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 2. This chapter was published in a much earlier version in: Susan E. Schreiner, “Appearance and Reality in Luther, Montaigne, and Shakespeare,” Journal of Religion 83/3 (July, 2003): 345–380. 3. There are numerous studies on the theme of divine hiddenness in Luther’s theology. A few of these include, Walther Köhler, Der verborgene Gott (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1946); Hellmut Bandt, Luthers Lehre vom verborgenen Gott: eine Untersuchung zu dem offenbarungsgeschichtlichen Ansatz seiner Theologie, Theologische Arbeiten 8 (Berlin: Evangelische Verlaganstalt, 1958); Brian A. Gerrish, “ ‘To the Unknown God’: Luther and Calvin on the Hiddenness of God,” in The Old Protestantism and the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), pp. 131–149; Walther von Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1976), pp. 27–49. 4. WA 42. 110.16–17, 111.12; LW 1: 1146–147. 5. WA 42.112.9–13; LW 1: 148. 6. WA 42. 99.40. 7. This emphasis on the gradual nature of Satan’s temptation was not new with Luther. See Frank Egleston Robbins, The Hexaemeral Literature; A Study of Greek and Latin Commentaries on Genesis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912). For

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further analysis of the history of exegesis on Genesis 1–3, see: Genesis 1–3 in the History of Exegesis: Intrigue in the Garden, ed. Gregory A. Robbins, Studies in Women and Religion 17 (Lewiston: NY: E. Mellen Press, 1988). 8. WA 42. 111.21–119.36; LW 1:153. 9. WA 42. 115.1–6; LW 1:152. 10. WA 42. 116.34–117.5; LW 1:155. 11. WA 42. 117.27, 31–33; LW 1:156. 12. WA 42,119.15–19; LW 1:158. 13. WA 42. 120. 12–15; LW 1: 159. 14. WA 42. 28.31; LW 1: 160. 15. WA 42. 121. 5–8; LW 1: 161. 16. WA 42. 110.38–39, 111.5–6, 21–24, 111.35–36, 115.16–23, 116.16–19, 40–44; LW 1: 147, 153, 161. 17. WA 42. 112.20–21, 115.20–23, 30–31, 116.16–19, 121.15–18; LW 1: 147, 149, 154, 161–162. 18. WA 42. 112.3 (my emphasis); LW 1: 148. 19. WA 42.112.13–15 (trans. altered); LW 1: 149. 20. WA 42 120. 10–15, 122.36–37; LW 1: 159, 163. 21. WA 31/2. 274.20, 28–32; LW: 17.18–19. 22. WA 31/2. 277.30–280.24; LW: 17. 22–26. 23. WA 31/2. 279.12–282.36. 24. WA 31/2. 273.6–7, 279.15–17, 31–33; LW: 17: 17. 25. WA 42. 306.25–30; LW 2: 63. 26. WA 42. 303.22–25, 27–30: LW 2: 59. 27. WA 42. 303.22–23, 15–17; 305.16–17; 319.9–13; LW 2: 59, 61, 71, 89 (translation altered). 28. WA 42. 438.23–24, 440.17; LW 1: 248, 250. 29. WA 42. 434.24–31, 435.17–32; LW 1: 242–243. 30. WA 43. 305.6–12, 37–39. In his note to Matthew 7:1–2 (Sermon on the Mount), Pelikan explained that this saying dated far back into German mythology. See LW 21:212, note 2. 31. WA 41. 452.3–5; LW 2: 266. 32. WA 32. 474. 38–475.1; LW 21: 212. 33. WA 31/2. 281.32–33; LW 17: 27. 34. WA 42. 87.3–4; WA 31/2. 282.13–20, 31–24, 295.1. 35. WA 31/2. 272.30–34; LW 17: 28–29. 36. WA 42. 515.12–13, 26–29; LW 2: 354. 37. Loewenich, Luther’s Theology of the Cross, pp. 58–111, 114–117. 38. Montaigne, The Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1943/1971) [noted in the text as F cited by Book, essay, and page number]; Michel de Montaigne, The Essays of Michel de Montaigne, trans. M. A. Screech (London: Penguin, 1987) [noted in the text as S cited by Book, essay, and page number). 39. Victoria Kahn, Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 139.

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40. Oberman, Dawn of the Reformation, pp. 27–28. On the subject of appearances and reality in Montaigne, see Jean Starobonski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), pp. 67–88 and passim. 41. On the translation and impact of Sextus Empiricus (which Montaigne read around 1576), see Richard Popkin, History of Scepticism (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 17–63; The studies on Montaigne’s skepticism are vast. Several important works include: Michaël Baraz, L’Être et la connaissance selon Montaigne (Paris: J. Corti, 1968); Frédéric Brahami, Le scepticisme de Montaigne, Philosophies 83 (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997); Humanism in Crisis: The Decline of the French Renaissance, ed. Philippe Desan, Studies in Medieval and Early Modern Civilization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1991); Donald M. Frame, Montaigne, A Biography (San Francisco, CA: North Point Press, 1984); idem Montaigne’s Essais: A Study (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969), pp. 22–31; Myles Burnyeat, The Skeptical Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983); Floyd Gray “Montaigne’s Pyrrhonism,” in O Un Amy! Essays on Montaigne in Honor of Donald M. Frame, ed. Donald Murdoch Frame and Raymond C. La Charité (Lexington, KY: French Forum,1977), pp. 119–136; Richard Popkin, The History of Skepticism from Savonarola to Bayle, pp. 17–63; Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). Besides the studies of Popkin and Burnyeat, see the following on the history of skepticism: Ancient Scepticism and the Sceptical Tradition, ed. Juha Sihvola, Acta philosophica Fennica 66 (Helsinki: Philosophical Society of Finland, 2000); William Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), pp. 179–199. On the inﬂuence of the ancient academy before the appearance of Sextus Empiricus, see Charles B. Schmitt, Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Inﬂuence of the Academica in the Renaissance (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1972). 42. As Auerbach noted, “Montaigne limits himself to the detailed investigation and description of one single specimen, himself, and even in this investigation nothing is further from his method than isolating his subject in any manner, than detaching it from the accidental conditions and circumstances in which it is found at a particular moment, in order to arrive at its real, permanent and absolute essence. Any such attempt to attain to the essence by isolating it from the momentary accidental contingencies would strike him as absurd because, to his mind, the essence is lost as soon as one detaches it from its momentary accidents.” Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Williard R. Trask (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953), p. 299. 43. Compare “On Judging the Death of Others [F.II.15.462]. 44. See also Steven Rendall, “Mus in pice: Montaigne and Interpretation,” Modern Language Notes 94 (1979): 1056–1071; Richard Regosin, “Conceptions of the Text and the Generation(s) of Meaning,” Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 15 (1985): 101–114. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text. Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 271–321. On the problem of interpretation in the Renaissance, also see Ian Maclean, Interpretation and Meaning in the Renaissance: The Case of Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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45. F.II.6.274. CF. Yvonne B. Rollins, “Montaigne et le langage,” Romanic Review 64/4 (1973): 258–272; Regosin, The Matter of My Book, pp. 94–123; Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 85–88. 46. On this topic, see Philip P. Halle, The Scar of Montaigne (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1966), pp. 72–113; Hugo Friedrich, Montaigne, ed. Philippe Desan and trans. Dawn Eng (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 158–159, 363; Craig B. Brush, From the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-Portrait (New York: Fordham University Press, 1994), pp. 103–110; Mary B. McKinley, “The City of God and the City of Man: Limits of Language in Montaigne’s ‘Apologie,’” Romanic Review 71 (1980): 22–140; Richard L. Regosin, The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s Essays as the Book of the Self (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977),98–110, 199, 244–249. Jean Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 200, 208, 220–222; M. A. Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy. The Wisdom of the Essays (London: Penguin Books, 1983), pp. 75–80; Marcel Tetel, Montaigne, updated edition (Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1990), pp. 63–67; Dilys Winegrad, “Language, Truthfulness, and the Self-Portrait of Michel de Montaigne,” in O Un Amy!, pp. 314–336. 47. Regosin, The Matter of my Book, pp. 96–97. 48. Ibid., pp. 70–71: “If man is totally at home among natural signs, he ﬁnds the written word opaque, more reluctant to give up its truth. Language resides within this universe of evident correspondences, but as enigmatic symbol, ambiguous and multi-layered, the words themselves no longer unequivocally expressive. . . . The written word does not impose its truth on the reader but rather allows myriad interpretations, and even heretical readings.” See also pages 29, 211–214, 244. 49. Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, passim. 50. Zachary Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity: Relativism in the French Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 1991), pp. 12–13. On the role of skepticism (and relativity) in the late Renaissance, see also William J. Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, pp. 35–51. 51. Ibid., pp. 53–55. See also Bouwsma, The Waning of the Renaissance, p. 41: “Montaigne, himself a lawyer, although doubting everything else, had no doubts about the workings of his own mind and concluded that truth was relative to his own conception of it and that it might even vary from moment to moment” (my emphasis). 52. Regosin, The Matter of My Book, pp. 183–188, 206–214. 53. Harries, Inﬁnity and Perspective, p. 99. 54. Auerbach, Mimesis, p. 311. 55. Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 228–238 56. Schiffman, On the Threshold of Modernity, pp. 9–11, 23–52, 57. Timothy Hampton, Writing from History: The Rhetoric of Exemplarity in Renaissance Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 28–29; idem, “Unreadable Signs: Montaigne, Virtue, and the Interpretation of History,” in Humanism in Crisis, pp. 85–106. See also John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989);

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Karlheinz Stierle, “L’histoire comme exemple, l’exemple comme histoire,” Poétique 10 (1972): 176–198. For a critique of these studies, see François Cornilliat, “Exemplarities: A Response to Timothy Hampton and Karlheinz Stierle,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59/4 (1998): 613–624; François Rigolot, “The Renaissance Crisis of Exemplarity,” Journal of the History of Ideas 59/4 (1988): 557–563; Richard Regosin, “Le mirouer vague: Reﬂections of the Example in Montaigne’s Essais,” Oeuvres et Critiques 8 (1983): 73–86; Fredrick Kellermann, “Montaigne’s ‘plus excellens hommes,’” Romanic Review 55 (1964): 173–180. 58. Myron P. Gilmore, “The Renaissance Conception of the Lessons of History,” in Facets of the Renaissance (New York: Harper and Row, 1963), pp. 73–100. The citation is found on pages 85–86. Petrarch was of particular importance in the evaluation of history and time, see Montaigne et l’histoire: actes du colloque international de Bordeaux 29 septembre-1er octobre 1988, ed. Claude-Gilbert Dubois (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991); Felix Gilbert, “The Renaissance Interest in History,” in Art, Science and History in the Renaissance, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), pp. 373–387; Theodore E. Mommsen, “Petrarch’s Conception of the ‘Dark Ages,’” Speculum XV (1943): 226–249; Ricardo J. Quinones, The Renaissance Discovery of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp. 106–171. For a literary analysis of the role of examples, see John D. Lyons, Exemplum: The Rhetoric of Example in Early Modern France and Italy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989). 59. On the origins and development of the exemplar view of history, see George H. Nadel, “Philosophy of History before Historicism,” History and Theory III (1964): 291–315. 60. Hampton, Writing from History, p. 28 61. Hampton, Writing from History, p. 197. 62. Compare the sixth trope of Sextus Empiricus. 63. Halle, The Scar of Montaigne, pp. 40–50; Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 79–93, 138–30; Regosin, The Matter of My Book, pp. 47–64; Hampton, Writing from History, pp. 134–197. According to Hampton, Montaigne was an example of one who wrote “against history”; cf. Michel Peronnet, “Montaigne et l’histoire immediate,” and Gisèle Mathieu-Castellani, “Lecture (de l’histoire), écriture (d l’essai): le modèle de la Vie,” in Montaigne et l’histoire, pp. 83–90, 115–125. 64. Popkin, The History of Skepticism, p. 263; Don Cameron Allen, Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1964), pp. 75–110; Screech, Montaigne and Melancholy, p. 96; Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, p. 256. On the nearness and remoteness of God in Montaigne’s thought, see Baraz, L’Être et la connaissance selon Montaigne, 108–109, 112–117. 65. Regosin, The Matter of My Book, p. 551. See also R. A. Sayce, The Essays of Montaige: A Critical Exploration (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1972), pp. 223ff; Donald M. Frame, “Did Montaigne Betray Sebond?” Romanic Review 38 (1947): 297–329. See also Donald M. Frame, Montaigne’s Essais: A Study (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentiss Hall, 1969), pp. 55–71. 66. Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 254–57, 282–83l; Baraz, L’Être et la connaissance selon Montaigne, pp. 99–102.

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67. Popkin, The History of Scepticism, pp. 1–17. 68. See Frederick Kellerman, “Montaigne’s Socrates,” Romanic Review 45/3 (1954); idem “The Essais and Socrates,” Symposium X (1956): 204–216. Kellerman rejected the explanation by Baraz. See Baraz, LÊtre et la connaissance selon Montaigne, pp. 80–86; Regosin, The Matter of My Book, pp. 178–183; B. Waddington, “Socrates in Montaigne’s ‘Traicte de la phisionomie,’” Modern Language Quarterly 41/4 (1980): 328–345; Hampton, Writing from History, pp. 174–188. See also Frame, Man’s Discovery of Man, pp. 148–157. 69. On this topic, see Donald M. Frame, Montaigne’s Discovery of Man; idem, “To ‘Rise Above Humanity’ and ‘To Escape from the Man’: Two Moments in Montaigne’s Thought,” Romanic Review 62 (1971): 28–35; Ann Hartle, Michel de Montaigne, Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 1–38; Baraz, L’Être et la connaissance selon Montaigne, pp. 73–86 and passim. 70. Baraz, L’Être et la connaissance selon Montaigne, pp. 78–86; Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp.126–137; Craig A. Brush, From the Perspective of the Self: Montaigne’s Self-Portrait (New York: Fordam University Press, 1994), pp. 197–214. 71. Starobinsky, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 209–217 72. David Quint, Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the Essais (Princeton: Princeton University Pres, 1998), pp. 134–197. 73. Space limitations prevent an anlysis of Montaigne’s concept of judgment. On the concept of judgment, see Raymond C. La Charité, The Concept of Judgment in Montaigne (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1968); Baraz, L’Être et la connaissance selon Montaigne, pp. 118–142; Elaine Ancekewicz, “‘C’est tousjours un tour de l’humaine capacité’: la notion d’histoire et le jugement,” in Montaigne et l’histoire, pp. 233–240. 74. Starobinski, Montaigne in Motion, pp. 157, 242; W. G. Moore, “Montaigne’s Notion of Experience,” in The French Mind: Studies in Honor of Gustave Rudler, ed. Will Moore et al. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1952). 75. The most important study on this issue remains Theodore Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man (New York: Macmillan Company, 1942). See also Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Seven Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge, UK; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes and An Approach to Hamlet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1959), pp. 40–41, 55–73 (on Troilus and Cressida), 160–164; Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in Othello (Lexington: University of Kentucky, 1956); Norman Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Nicholas Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1992). On Hamlet, see also, G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire. Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy (London: Metheun, reprint: New York: Routledge, 1998), pp. 17–46; Helen Gardner, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), pp. 466–505; John Dover Wilson, What Happens in Hamlet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935); A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and Other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theater of Arts Books, 1961), pp. 171–188. Recent important studies that have examined the themes of deception, knowledge, appearances

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and reality include: A. D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007); Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning behind the Plays (New York: Harper Collins, 2006). Cf the thesis of Shakespeare’s “skeptical faith” by John D. Cos, Seeming Knowledge (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2007). 76. Millicent Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2002); Graham Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1987). 77. Rabkin, Shakespeare and the Common Understanding, p. 69. 78. Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, pp. 48–49. 79. Alisdair MacIntyre, “ Epistemological Crisis, Dramatic Narrative and the Philosophy of Science,” The Monist 60/4 (1977): 453–472. 80. On Shakespeare’s skepticism, see also Stanley Cavell, Disowning Knowledge in Six Plays of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 81. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), p. 51. 82. Maynard Mack, Everybody’s Shakespeare (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), p. 111. 83. On the problem of revenge in Hamlet, see Eleanor Prosser, Hamlet and Revenge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967). Cf. I. J. Semper, Hamlet Without Tears (Dubuque, IA: Loras College Press, 1946). 84. On the debates and ambiguities about the Ghost and Purgatory, see Stephan Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). See also F. W. Moorman, “The Pre-Shakespearean Ghost,” Modern Language Review 1 (1906): 86–95; idem, “Shakespeare’s Ghosts,” Modern Language Review 1 (1906): 192–201; Anthony Low, “Hamlet and the Ghost of Purgatory: Intimations of Killing the Father,” English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999): 450–468. 85. On Othello, see Robert B. Heilman, Magic in the Web: Action and Language in Othello (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1956). See also Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, pp. 122–135; Nicholas Grene Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, 90–125; Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, pp. 222–254; G. Wilson Knight, The Wheel of Fire: Interpretations of Shakespearian Tragedy, pp. 97–119; Gardner, Shakespeare After All (New York: Pantheon Books, 2004), 588–616; Othello: Critical Essays, ed. Susan Snyder (New York: Garland Publishing, 1988); Aspects of Othello: Articles Reprinted from Shakespeare Survey, ed. Kenneth Muir and Philip Edwards (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977); Bernard Spivack, Shakespeare and the Allegory of Evil: The History of a Metaphor in Relation to His Major Villains (New York: Columbia University Press, 1958); Jane Adamson, Othello as Tragedy: Some Problems of Judgment and Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press); Rossiter, Angel with Horns, pp. 189–208. 86. On Iago and deception regarding appearances and reality, see Heilman, Magic in the Web, pp. 45–98. 87. Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism, p. 21.

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88. William Empson, The Structure of Words (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1967), pp. 218–249. 89. Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, p. 106. See also S. L. Bethel, “Shakespeare’s Imagery: The Diabolical Images in Othello,” Shakespeare Survey 5 (1952): 62–80. 90. Donald Murdoch Frame, Montaigne’s Discovery of Man: The Humanization of a Humanist (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). 91. Heilman, Magic in the Web, pp. 45ff. 92. Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism, p. 96. 93. Ibid., p. 93 94. On this passage, see also Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, p. 236. Bell associates the phrase with St. Paul’s words “By the grace of God I am what I am.” Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism, p. 92. 95. Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism, p. 95. 96. Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), pp. 335–336. 97. Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, p. 111. 98. On the issue of epistemological relativism, see Helen Gardner, “The Noble Moor,” in Othello: Critical Essays, pp. 169–188; McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy, 61–71; Nuttal, Shakespeare the Thinker, pp. 194ff. 99. For examinations of Shakespeare’s view of language, see Inga-Stina Ewbank, “Shakespeare and the Arts of Language,” in The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare Studies, ed. Stanley Wells (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press1986), pp. 49–66; Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947, repr. Hafnew, 1966). 100. Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, pp. 142–152; Robert Bechtold Heilman, This Great Stage: Image and Structure in King Lear (St Louis: University of Washington Press, 1963), 89–114; Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, pp. 303–304; L. C. Knights, Some Shakespearean Themes, pp. 83–109. For the analysis of the way in which the terms “something” and nothing” reﬂect the “appearance-versus-reality motif,” see William R. Elton, King Lear and the Gods (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1968), pp. 178–179. 101. On the nature of Goneril, Regan, and Edmund, see Elton, King Lear and the Gods, pp. 115–146. 102. Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, p. 162. See also T. McAlindon, Shakespeare’s Tragic Cosmos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 103. Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, p. 169. 104. Bradshaw, Shakespeare’s Scepticism, p. 14. 105. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, pp. 232–236. Elton also rightly argues, “to say, with some commentators, that Lear repents and attains humility and patience, thus becoming ﬁt for heaven, in a kind of reviviﬁed morality pattern, is to underestimate the complexity both of the play and of Lear’s character,” p. 238. See also Helen Gardner, King Lear, The John Cofﬁn Memorial Lecture 1966 (London: The Athlone Press and University of London, 1967), pp. 7–10. 106. Stephen Booth, “On the Greatness of King Lear,” in King Lear, Macbeth, Indeﬁnition and Tragedy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), pp.1–57.

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377–389

107. Ibid., pp. 43–57. 108. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, pp. 184–194. 109. Elton, King Lear and the Gods, pp. 171–263. Elton describes Lear in terms of the “Deus Absconditus.” 110. On the “breach in nature,” see Heilman, This Great Stage, pp. 89–114. 111. Northrop Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, ed. Robert Sandler (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), p.108. 112. On clothing metaphors in King Lear explained in terms of the religious controversies of the times, see Judy Kronenfeld, King Lear and the Naked Truth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998) pp.1–52; also see Heilman, This Great Stage, 67–87; Knight, The Wheel of Fire, pp. 184–186. 113. For an analysis of apocalyptic imagery used throughout the play, see Joseph Wittreich, “Image of that Horror” History, Prophecy, and Apocalypse in King Lear (San Marino, CA: The Huntington Library, 1984). 114. Frye, Northrop Frye on Shakespeare, p. 114. See also, Spencer, Shakespeare and the Nature of Man, pp. 153–162. See also A. P. Rossiter, Angel with Horns and other Shakespeare Lectures, ed. Graham Storey (New York: Theater Arts Books, 1961), pp. 212–215. Rossiter refers to the “sub-natural” or the “hypo-natural” forces that are released from “beneath the normal order of integrated nature”; Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 89: “But the cover is a very thin one; we have been permitted a sickening glimpse of the seething, claustrophobic fear that lies beneath.” 115. Maynard Mack Jr., Killing the King (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973). 116. Thomas de Quincey, “On Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth,” in Shakespeare Criticism, ed. D. Nichol Smith (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 335–336. 117. Spurgeon, Shakespeare’s Imagery and What It Tells Us, pp. 333. 118. Bell, Shakespeare’s Tragic Skepticism, pp. 226–229; Grene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, pp. 211–213; Mack, Everybody’s Shakespeare, pp. 193–195. On the nature of time in Shakespeare, see David Scott Kastan, Shakespeare and the Nature of Time (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1982). The section on Macbeth is found on pages 91–101. 119. D. W. Foster, “Macbeth’s War on Time,” English Literary Renaissance 16/2 (1986): 319–342 120. Greene, Shakespeare’s Tragic Imagination, p. 211. 121. William Blissett, “Secret’st man of blood,” Shakespeare Quarterly 10/3 (1959): 397–408. 122. Greenblatt, Hamlet in Purgatory, p. 193. 123. Knight, The Wheel of Fire, pp. 149–153. 124. Thomas McAlindon, Shakespeare and Decorum (London: Mcmillan, 1973), p. 138. The reference to the “objective persistence of order” is by Robert Heilman, Tragedy and Melodrama (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), pp. 160–161. Both are cited by Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, pp. 87, 91. 125. Kastan, Shakespeare and the Shapes of Time, p. 100. See also pp. 82, 89. 126. Ibid., p. 87.

NOTES TO PAGES

390–393

475

127. Albert Camus, The Plague, trans. Stuart Gilbert (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1958), p. 278. CONCLUSION

1 Justifying Toleration: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives, ed. Susan Mendus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 1–36. 2 Sebastian Castellio, Reply to Calvin in Concerning Heretics, trans. Roland Bainton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1935), pp. 281–282.

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Index

Abraham, 85, 202, 287, 330–332 Adams, Marilyn McCord, 22, 401n.99 Ahlgren, Gillian T. W., 305, 306 Alved, Augustinus, 137, 439n.189 alumbrados, 212, 216, 220–222, 255, 258, 271, 272–273, 274, 306, 307 angel of light, x, 75, 100, 220, 262, 263, 266, 270, 272, 273, 274, 281–283, 286, 291–292, 294–296, 300, 302, 304, 306, 307, 308–309, 311, 312, 321, 322, 369 appearances, x, xii–xiii, 32, 35, 49– 50, 53, 288–290, 296, 323–390 Aquinas, Thomas, 39, 169, 170, 171, 199 Bacon, Frances, 4 Bacon, Roger, 18, 402n.103 Bagchi, David V. N., ix, 137, 437n.136 baptism, sacrament of, 38, 83, 87, 131, 135, 184, 187, 230, 231, 241–249, 251, 256–257. three baptisms, 245 Barnes, Robert, 173, 174, 182, 185–186, 187, 189, 202 Bell, Millicent, 356, 357, 366, 368, 369 Beneﬁcio di Cristo, 226, 255, 258 Biel, Gabriel, 40, 45, 411n.46 Blumenberg, Hans, 4–6, 10, 15–16

Booth, Stephen, 357, 376 Bouwsma, William J., xi, 11, 12, 13–14, 335, 357 Bradshaw, Graham, 356, 357, 376 Bucer, Martin, 76, 81, 119, 251, 392 Cajetan, Thomas, ix, 55–56, 73, 132, 147, 152, 174 Calvin, John on authority, 80–81, 82, 83–84, 96–97, 103–106, 108, 127–129, 285 on justiﬁcation/salvation, 62, 66–68, 69–70, 71–74 on predestination/election, 69, 71–72, 103 Camus, Albert, 390 Cano, Melchor, 272–274, 278 Carlstadt, Andreas, 10, 87, 88, 89, 90–92, 94, 110, 113–116, 118, 119, 148, 233, 250, 423n.39 Castellio, Sebastian, xi, xii, 237, 392–393 Catharinus, Ambrosius, 135, 137, 169–172, 181, 182, 184 church, visible and invisible, 108, 137, 139–141, 145–146, 169, 172–175, 177, 178–190, 195, 201–203, 251 Costacciaro, Bonaventura, 134–135

478

INDEX

councils Contance, 138, 139, 157, 162–163, 172, 181, 263, 266, 433 Nicea, 148, 155–156, 161–162 Trent, 37, 39–40 De Quincey, Thomas, 382 deiﬁcation, 65, 249, 252, 254–255, 269 dejamiento, 216, 220–221, 258, 307 Delphinus, Antonius, 133 Denck, Hans, x, 237, 247–250, 251, 255, 257 devil, 12, 40, 49, 61, 74–76, 113, 220, 228–230, 237, 259–263, 237, 259–263, 268–270, 272–274, 276–321 dialectic, vii, 9, 11, 17, 25–28, 406n.153 doubt, viii, x, 40, 46, 48, 53, 54–62, 64, 66–67, 69, 72–73, 74–77, 109, 123, 126, 127–128, 133–134, 136, 165, 205–207, 223, 225, 226, 228–231, 246, 257, 266–268, 274, 277–280, 294, 302–303, 315–320, 327, 341, 345–347, 356, 370–371, 392, 401–402n.99, 406n.153, 414n.112, 414n.115, 469n.51 Duns Scotus, 17, 133–134, 135–136, 401–402n.99, 430–431n.11 Dupré, Louis, 7–8, 9, 16–17, 19, 335, 396–397n.21 Eck, John, ix, 100, 137, 138, 139, 146, 148, 155, 157–165, 166, 168, 169, 171, 174, 176, 180–181, 182, 187, 191, 192, 199, 393, 432n.24, 432n.27, 434n.64, 437n.136 Edwards, Mark U., 292, 295 Elton, Geoffrey, x Elton, William R., 376, 473 Erasmus, 7, 80, 100, 213–216, 222, 226, 227, 231, 256, 258, 271, 338, 392 Eucharist, 43, 44, 56, 83, 89–90, 101, 112, 114–123, 135, 138, 165–166, 184, 191, 202, 229–231, 254, 259, 276, 301, 393, 423n.39 Evans, G. R., ix, 80 Faith Aquired, 56, 73, 131, 134–135, 251 Demon’s, 131 Explicit, 131, 142

ﬁdes sacramenti, 54–55, 131 Implicit, 131, 142 Infused, 56, 73, 131–136 false brethren, 292, 294, 295–296, 297, 301 feeling, 47, 54, 67–68, 70, 84, 127, 184–185, 191–196, 199, 209–210, 212, 217, 223, 224, 240, 252, 256–258, 266, 273, 274, 275, 278–279, 280, 281–282, 285, 302–304, 309, 312, 318, 319 Frame, Donald, 347 Francisca de los Apóstoles, 221, 305–306 Franck, Sebastian, x, 110, 237, 250–255, 257, 288–291, 332, 392 Gerson, Jean, ix, 39, 45–46, 47, 132, 139, 212–214, 217, 218, 231, 237, 255, 256, 263–268, 303 Gleason, Elizabeth G., 226, 227, 276 Grace, 37, 39, 40–41, 45, 46–47, 51–52, 59, 67, 70–74, 91, 124–127, 132–133, 140, 176, 268, 273, 349 Calvin on two graces, 126–127 Certitude of/state of, 56–58, 60, 64, 76, 101, 120, 132–136 Ex operae operato, 135 Gerson, three manners of, 212 Habit of, 39 Hus on grace of predestination, 141 Hus on grace of present righteousness, 140 Infused, 37, 46, 52, 56 Justifying, 38, 131 Leonard Schiemer, three kinds of, 245, 452n.158 Obstacle to, 132–135 Reception of in the sacrament, 131, 133, 135 (Trent), 174, 229, 411n.50 Gleason, Elizabeth, 226–227 Grassi, Ernesto, 29–31, 33, 333, 341 Greenblatt, Stephen, xi, 13, 14, 388 Grene, Nicholas, 367, 370, 375, 384 Grote, Geert, 213 Hamm, Berndt, 9, 10, 13, 39, 44–45, 47, 54, 132, 256 Hampton, Timothy, 343–344 Harries, Karsten, 5–6, 32, 323, 334, 340, 396n.14

INDEX

Henry VIII, 137, 146, 297 Heilman, Robert B., 366, 368, 373 Hendrix, Scott, 81, 138, 174, 210 Heynck, Valens, 134, 135 hiddenness, 61–62, 116, 146, 173, 174, 199, 218, 262, 266, 289–291, 294, 299, 324 history, xii–xiii, 25, 26, 30–32, 33–35 Holl, Karl, 9, 50, 51 Hus, John, 137, 138–139, 140–146, 150, 154, 156, 157, 162, 163, 170, 171, 172, 174–176, 267, 310, 432n.27, 432n.29, 433n.35, 433n.41 Hut, Hans, 242, 244–246, 255 idolatry, x, 87, 108–109, 118, 122, 185, 201, 293, 324–332, 392, 423n.39 Ignatius of Loyola, viii, x, 9, 270–285, 306 illumination, 5, 35, 63, 74, 81, 82, 84, 89, 96, 101, 105, 107–111, 121, 179, 188, 211, 215, 220–225, 252–254, 257, 265, 274, 289, 290–300, 319 illusion, 23, 49, 61, 74–75, 113, 220, 261, 263, 268–270, 273, 281–282, 284, 288, 289, 291, 292–295, 296–299, 304–305, 308–312, 315–317, 320, 321, 323–325, 332–333, 337, 352–353, 356, 357–370 indulgences, 44, 48–49, 51–53, 54, 55, 146, 168, 221, 434n.64 inquisitors, 221–222, 226, 227, 271, 275, 304–306, 320 Jedin, Hubert, 135, 226 Jesuits, 136, 270–272 John of the Cross, 304 Kastan, David, 389 Knight, T. G. Wilson, 388 Leipzig disputation, 137–138, 148, 151, 154, 155, 157, 435n.77, 436n.95 love caritas, 45, 46, 47, 74, 37–39, 131–136, 175, 225–226 of God, 212, 217, 218–219, 221–222, 233–234, 247–248,252, 256 ,266, 275, 283, 284, 313, 315

479

Luther, Martin on appearances, 49–50, 53, 296, 324–332, 350, 354, 392 on authority, 81, 83–84, 87–89, 96–100, 115, 129, 285, 292, 302 on justiﬁcation/salvation, 50–55, 56–62, 72–73 on predestination/election, 60–62 on sacraments, 53–55, 56–57, 118–120 MacIntyre, Alisdair, 13 Mack, Maynard, 358 Mack, Peter, 27, 405 McGinn, Bernard, xv, 212, 232 Melanchthon, Phillipp, 76, 83, 89, 126, 222, 227, 392, 406n.153 Modern Devotion, 212–213, 231, 250 Montaigne, Michel, vii, x, xi, xii, xiii, 7, 32, 321, 324, 333–356, 357, 368, 369, 370, 372, 373, 377, 392, 393, 468n.42 More, Thomas, ix, 137, 144, 169, 173–174, 176, 180, 181–307 Müntzer, Thomas, x, 92–96, 97, 110, 209, 238–241, 250, 255, 256, 257, 286–287, 320 Myers, W. David, 42 Nicholas of Cusa, 6, 9, 32, 116, 392 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 360 Noah, 85, 297–298, 330 Nominalism, 7, 15–23, 28, 29, 31, 212, 255, 333, 411n.46 Oberman, Heiko A., 9, 10, 13, 19, 31, 72, 138, 139, 142, 144, 255, 292, 341, 395–396 n.1, 434n.64 Ockham, William, 15–23, 29, 31, 333–334, 400n.84 Oecolampadius, Johannes, 100, 113, 114, 116, 119, 216, 222 Osiander, Andreas, 124–128, 429n.164 Osuna, Francisco de, 216, 217–220, 255, 258 Ozment, Steven E., 24, 38, 41, 72, 84, 236, 237, 252 Paltz, Johannes von, 45 papacy, 100, 137–139, 142–145, 146–165, 166, 168, 170–173, 174, 176, 188 penance, sacrament of, 37, 38–39, 41–44, 46–48, 52, 53–55, 56, 123, 131, 134, 135, 221, 256

480

INDEX

poetry, 25–26, 30, 34 Prierias, Silvester, 137, 146, 156–157, 174, 434 Quincy, Thomas de, 382 Quint, David, 353 Rabkin, Norman, 356 reason, effect of sin on, 58, 70, 97, 105, 296, 324, 332 recogimiento, 216, 217, 220, 258, 446n.34 Regosin, Richard, 336, 347 rhetoric, ix, 9, 24–27 Rummel, Erika, 25, 26, 29 Satan. See devil Schiffman, Zachary, 337–339, 343 Schwenckfeld, Caspar, 89–90, 251 Shakespeare, William Hamlet, 321, 357, 358–366, 371, 374, 388 King Lear, 373–381, 386, 388, 473n.103, 113 Macbeth, 373–374, 380–390 Othello, 366–373, 374, 376, 388 Sermon on the Mount, 295–296, 298, 331, 467n.30 Sluhovsky, Moshe, 305 Spirituali, 226–227, 358 Starobinski, Jean, 347, 354 Staupitz, Johannes von, 39, 40–41, 44–45, 46, 47, 84, 138, 251, 254 Steinmetz, David, xv, 40, 45, 79–80, 83, 116, 129 St. Paul, 99, 154, 181, 237, 267, 295, 297, 316, 318,

Tachau, Katherine, 19, 20, 22, 400n.84 Tauler, Johannes, 84, 231–236, 237, 238, 255, 257, 268 Teresa of Avila, viii, x, 291, 292, 300, 304–320, 321 Thayer, Anne T., 42–43, 48 Theologia Deutsch, 84, 231, 236–238, 239, 254, 255, 268–270 Thomas à Kempis, 213, 255 Toulmin, Stephen, 7, 11, 12 Tracy, David, xii, xv, 8–9 Tuck, Richard, x, 392 Tyndale, William, 79, 80, 112, 113, 137, 173, 174, 176, 182, 184–185, 186, 187, 189–197, 199, 200, 201, 202, 204, 205, 393 Unam Sanctam, 137, 139, 140, 142–143, 144, 147, 157 Valdés, Juan de, 216, 222–226, 227, 231, 255, 256, 258 Vega, Andreas de, 135–136 vision, spiritual, 61, 98, 224, 296, 300, 302 Weber, Alison, 304–305 Wicks, Jared, 51, 53, 152 Zerbolt, Gerard, 213 Zwingli, Huldrych on authority, 80–86, 96–97, 101–102, 129, 285 on justiﬁcation/salvation, 62–66, 70–71, 72, 73, 74 on predestination/election 62, 64, 71

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