Per Caritatem

By Michael Vendsel

The medievals generally favored Aristotle’s conception over Plato’s. For them, then, the metaphysical portrait of human choosing was an inner drive channeling through the intellect to influence the human will. The same basic debate just described, however, re-emerged within this tradition. Some, in a more Platonic fashion, thought that the intellect exerts a decisive control over the will – that the will can only choose in the direction of what the intellect has already judged to be good. On that account, one’s range of choice would be circumscribed the number of goods presented to the intellect and a choice was free insomuch as it was informed by reason rather than brute impulse. Others, in a more Aristotelian fashion, claimed that the essence of human freedom is a certain independence of the will such that it can even choose contrary to the deliverances of reason. According to J.B. Korolec, between these two traditions, “eventually it came to be characteristic of Dominican writers to link freedom very closely with reason and of Franciscan writers to locate…[it] rather in the will.”[1] The former was especially characteristic of Thomas Aquinas:

“For Thomas it is not the will but the intellect which has the major role in the moral activity of human beings. For the intellect is the final or teleological cause of the will’s action. It is the intellect which presents to the will its ultimate aims. This last opinion gained wide popularity through its acceptance by the Thomist school….”[2]

The latter, Franciscan position, however, was especially characteristic of later medieval voluntarism. For the voluntarists, “the will is independent of the intellect in the sense that whatever object the intellect presents to it may be freely chosen or rejected.”[3] This position was particularly influential on Scotus and Ockham.

As to the first question, then, by the late Middle Ages there was a broadly Aristotelian analysis of the metaphysics of human choice, within which some located freedom in the role of the intellect (the Dominican and Thomistic tradition) and others located it in the power of contrary choice (voluntarism and those who followed Scotus and Ockham).

As for the second question, the medieval tradition was similarly divided. The tendency to take theological cues from Plato’s idea of The One and from Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover made it difficult for some to conceive of God knowing changing particulars and contingent things. In those situations, the idea of a universal providence of God was somewhat problematic in itself, and so the tension between sovereignty and free will may have been less acute.[4] However, there were also those who held that God’s providence is all encompassing (or at least encompassing enough to include the human will) and made efforts to explain how that is consistent with freedom and moral responsibility. According to Korolec,

“…[this] is most fully discussed in Thomas Bradwardine’s treatise De causa Dei, written before 1325 against the Pelagian heresy. Bradwardine emphasizes the absolute dependence of man’s will on God’s. Human beings can free themselves from the influence of psychological forces and from the influence of the stars, but they cannot become independent of God. But in spite of the absolute divine influence on human behavior, it is man and not God who is the cause of sin. The action itself is caused by God, but its sinfulness is caused by man himself.”[5]

As will be seen, Vermigli and Turretin both attempt to identify themselves within strands of the medieval tradition on each of these first two questions. Matters are different, however, on the third question. There was an undeniable attempt throughout the medieval period to be faithful to Augustine’s theology. In the view of the Reformed, however, by the end of the period the view of the human heart as morally impotent had slipped into a sort of semi-Pelagianism. Whether they were right or wrong about this, the result was that both thinkers see themselves making a sharp break with the later medieval tradition in favor of an earlier and more robust Augustinianism on this third question. If it can be put this way, then, the characterizations discussed above may perhaps be true to Reformed theology if the freedom in question has to do with freedom to choose the good. If the question, however, is whether the sovereignty of God covers the human will and thereby cancels out the significance of human choices, the above characterization is probably unfair. Vermigli and Turretin gave an answer that was, in their minds, continuous with the medieval Catholic tradition. That, at any rate, is what I will try to show in what follows.

With these observations in place, we’ll begin by looking at Vermigli.

Notes
[1] Korolec, J.B., “Free Will and Free Choice”, in The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy, ed. Norman Kretzmann, et al (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1982) 634
[2] Ibid, 635
[3] Ibid, 636
[4] Both Turretin and Vermigli find it necessary to respond to this line of medieval reasoning. Vermigli, for example, writes: “God works according to His purpose; all things are subject to His providence…. Yet some dare to deny it, ascribing only the greatest and principal things to divine care and attributing the rest if they are of little account, to natural causes, while greater matters they leave for angles or demons to accomplish.” He cites Plato’s Protagoras as an example. Turretin also writes about “those who, although seeming to acknowledge the providence of God, still shut it up in too narrow limits. These either restrict it to heavenly things only, so that in the sublunary there is room for chance and fortune and the contingency of things (as the Peripatetics); or extend it to the sublunary also, but natural, not free and contingent (as the Pelagians, who to make men free have made them sacrilegious); or refer it to great things, the mean and minute being excepted, which after the Peripatetics some of the Scholastics also held. Thomas Aquinas especially asserts this: ‘Although God may know the number of individuals, yet the number of oxen and gnats and other similar things was not preordained by him….’” See Vermigli, Peter Martyr, Philosophical Works: On the Relation of Philosophy to Theology (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1996) 178, and Turretin, Francis, Institutes of Elenctic Theology v1 (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992) 497-498.
[5] Korolec, 640

By Michael Vendsel

This begins a series of posts by Mike Vendsel on the doctrine of free will as understood and taught by Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) and Francis Turretin (1623-1687). Mike is a colleague of mine and a very good friend. He holds a Master of Arts in philosophy from the University of Dallas, a Master of Arts in Religion from Westminster Theological Seminary, and is an adjunct professor of philosophy at LaSalle University. Mike also plans to pursue doctoral studies in philosophy.

The “spirit” of this series is to foster continued dialogue between traditions. In other words, the spirit is one of ecumenicism while also acknowledging important differences between traditions. My hope, as is Mike’s, is to engage potential stereotypes and caricatures set forth by both Protestants and Catholics (and Eastern Orthodox as well, though not the focus here) and to attempt to understand each position “from within.” This of course does not rule out various disagreements, nor does it suggest that perfect harmony will be reached when prevalent caricatures are dis-mantled. Yet, one hopes that as older stereotypes fall away—should they prove to be such—new possibilities will open that will perhaps allow for greater understanding, renewed appreciation, and a realization of the deep commonalities that we share. With that said, on to Mike’s first post.

***

There is a widespread stereotype that Reformed theology sacrifices free will in the name of affirming divine sovereignty and that it considers it a badge of honor to do so. As a student of mine several semesters ago put it, Protestants tend to emphasize predestination while the Catholic tradition has always emphasized free will. In my experience, however, this characterization is not limited to those with a piecemeal exposure to Reformed theology; several years ago at a conference of Reformation historians I remember a participant making the statement that “Calvin believes we do not have free will.”

Commonplace as this may be, however, I think it is a deeply mistaken reading of both Catholic and Reformed theology. To show this, I want to briefly look at the doctrine of free will in the writings of Reformed theologians Peter Martyr Vermigli and Francis Turretin. Though writing in different centuries and with a view to responding to very different issues, the two end up analyzing free will the same basic way, and that way has a great deal in common with medieval Thomistic analysis. To establish this, it will be necessary to (1) do a brief survey of medieval theories of free will, (2) look closely at Vermigli’s analysis, and then (3) do the same thing for Turretin.

Before beginning, though, it will be helpful to clarify exactly which questions fall under the rubric of “free will.” For our purposes here, three sub-questions will be of particular importance: (1) Which conditions must be satisfied in order for a person to have free will? (2) Does God’s sovereignty include sovereignty over the human will, and if so, can the conditions for free will still be met? And finally, (3) is the will equally able to choose that which is morally good and that which is not? To begin with, though, let’s attempt a broad outline of the doctrine of free will in the Middle Ages.

As with most things in the Middle Ages, the debate over free will took cues from the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. (There is debate, of course, over whether there actually is a doctrine of the will in either of these two thinkers. I am not trying to suggest that there is, but only that later theories of the will were influenced by their accounts of human nature.)

On Plato’s anthropology, one’s choices are always in the direction of what the intellect perceives as best. However, one’s perception of what is best can be radically mistaken depending on which part of the soul one cultivates. The rational, spirited, and appetitive parts of the soul compete with each other for dominance in a manner which Plato compared to the struggle between a charioteer and his horses. Just as the charioteer is meant to be triumphant, so reason is meant to hold the lower parts of the soul in check. It is possible, however, for the lower parts to dominate the rational part, and when that happens one’s perspective on what is best will be skewed and poor choices will follow.[1]

Aristotle took a slightly different view. He thought that all things, including human beings, have an impulse toward a particular end by virtue of an indwelling form. In the natural world, this manifests itself in the process of biological growth and development. In the case of animals, it further manifests itself in blindly instinctual or spontaneous behavior. In the case of humans, however, the same of blind instincts are channeled through a higher, rational nature. A virtuous man, Aristotle said, is one who makes choices based on the skillful use of his intellectual faculties rather than blind impulse. For Aristotle, however, we are capable of resisting the intellect. In addition to a well-tuned mind, then, we need to be habituated to choose in the direction of the mind.[2]

In part II, we will focus on the medieval appropriation of various aspects of Platonic and Aristotelian conceptions of the will outlined above, as well as the beginnings of how Vermigli and Turretin fit into the larger genealogy.

Notes
[1] While these ideas run throughout the dialogues, they are particularly prominent in Republic book IX, as well as in the Phaedrus, where he presents the image of the charioteer.
[2] The ideas summarized here are presented most clearly in Nicomachean Ethics.

The Catholic scholar, John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. in his book, Calvinism and Scholasticism in Vermigli’s Doctrine of Man and Grace, shows that Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562) was thoroughly acquainted with Aristotle and St. Thomas, as well as a number of other medievals (Lombard), patristics, and numerous ancient philosophers. In fact, Vermigli wrote a commentary on Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics; however, he only completed through book III. Vermigli’s approach to the relationship of theology and philosophy and the appropriation of the latter for the service of the former, has much in common with St.Thomas.

Having examined Vermigli’s thought on a number of topics (e.g., reason and revelation, philosophical anthropology, soteriology), Donnelly, near the end of his book, devotes some space to address the claims of older scholarship on the supposed intrinsic link between Protestantism and nominalism. Representatives of the older view, e.g., John Todd and Joseph Lortz, see nominalism as a “decadent scholasticism, even a theology no longer authentically Catholic. They see Luther’s theology partly as a direct result of his nominalist background, partly as a reaction against it, especially its Pelagianism. For these Catholic authors several of Luther’s central teachings—justification by extrinsic imputation, simul justus et peccator, predestination, distrust of human reason—are rooted in nominalist presuppositions. In fact, none of these Catholic authors has an expert background in nominalist theology or philosophy. Recent research, especially that of Heiko Oberman, has revised their interpretation of nominalism, seeing it in a more favorable light, employing more precise scholarship, and re-opening the question of Luther’s relation to the whole Occamist tradition[1]” (pp. 202-203). Donnelly goes on to say that he is not necessarily denying certain aspects of the influence of nominalism on Luther’s personal development, nor is he purporting to give an analysis of the “proper evaluation of nominalism as a philosophical or theological system” (p. 204). It is, however, a calling-into-question the claim that there is an intrinsic connection between Protestantism and nominalism. “The thesis that Occam is the foster father of Protestantism needs revision in the light of Peter Martyr’s theology.” With Martyr, we have a theologian who maintains essential continuity with the Protestant distinctives of Calvin and Luther; however, Martyr “came to these conclusions out of a generally Thomistic rather than Occamist background. The same applies a fortiori to Zanchi [1516-1592]” (p. 204).

Notes
[1] In a footnote (n. 13), Donnelly states that “several recent Catholic studies, independently of Oberman, have begun a reassessment of the relationship between nominalism and the Reformation, particularly McSorley, 183-215, and Francis Clark, Eucharistic Sacrifice and the Reformation, (London: 1960), 296-322. William J. Courtenay reviews the recent literature, “Nominalism and Late Medieval Religion,” […] in Charles Trinkas and Heiko A. Oberman, editors, The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion, (Leiden, 1974),” [Donnelly, p. 203].

This year’s guest speaker for the Aquinas Lecture (which occurs each Spring at the University of Dallas) is Dr. Timothy Noone, who will present a lecture entitled, “Nature, Freedom and Will: Sources for Philosophical Reflection.”

Additional information:

Timothy B. Noone is a professor at the Catholic University of America and is the director of the Center of Medieval and Byzantine Studies.

His lecture will treat the themes of nature, freedom, and will in Aristotle, Aquinas and Scotus; the emphasis will be upon how these figures present fundamental alternative ways of relating nature to human action.

Location: University of Dallas, Lynch Auditorium
Date/Time: Monday Jan. 29 at 7:30 pm

By Stephen Grabill

This post sketches out the rough outline of Jerome Zanchi’s understanding of natural law. An interesting difference between Zanchi and Martyr is that Thomistic elements are far more important in Zanchi’s theology than in Martyr’s theology.

The historian John Patrick Donnelly thinks Zanchi is the best example of “Calvinist Thomism,” meaning a theologian who was Reformed in theology and Thomistic in philosophy and methodology. Zanchi was born and raised near Bergamo where he entered the Augustinian Canons and received a Thomistic training. Martyr was his prior at Lucca and was instrumental in his conversion to Protestantism. Zanchi spent ten years as a Nicodemite, or crypto-Calvinist, teaching theology before fleeing north to Geneva in 1552, where he studied for a year under Calvin. Later he served as professor of theology at Strasbourg, Heidelberg, and Neustadt until his death in 1590. After his death his relatives gathered most of his writings into his Opera in eight large tomes, which went through three editions. In all, there were about seventy printings of his writings. (See John Patrick Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 444).

Zanchi planned a great Protestant “summa” modeled after Thomas’ Summa theologica. According to Donnelly, the first four volumes of Zanchi’s Opera, which appeared under separate titles as he finished them at Heidelberg, cover the same material at twice the length as the first half of Thomas’s Summa. Even though Zanchi never completed his “summa,” it is unrivaled for thoroughness and synthetic power in sixteenth-century Protestant theology. (See Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” 444).

Zanchi begins his analysis of natural law by noticing that canon lawyers and theologians restrict their idea of natural law to human nature, defining it as “the law common to all nations and that’s obeyed everywhere by natural instinct not by any statue.” Civil lawyers also use this definition for the law of nations because all people employ these laws and are led by them. Examples of such laws include statues concerning God, public worship, religion, obedience to superiors and the state, and defense of oneself, one’s family, and the state.

Zanchi distinguishes three levels to natural law as follows. On the first and most basic level, natural law teaches self-preservation, an instinct common to all living things. On the second level, natural law teaches that the human race should be advanced through procreation and education of offspring; this level is shared with the animals. On the third level, natural law teaches people to worship God and to do justice to their neighbor; this level applies only to humans.

Zanchi thinks natural law must be understood within what is called the three primary estates (creation, fall, and redemption). Before sin entered the world, natural law was perfectly a part of all people. He says, “Divine will and the precepts for doing some things and avoiding others had been co-created with Adam when the image of God was breathed into him.” After the fall, however, it “was almost entirely blotted out as was any law that looks to God and the worship of him or to our neighbors and the just and fair relationship with them.” The first and second levels of natural law — instinct and procreation — were badly warped. While some sliver of the third — worship and justice — remained in humanity at large. While the fall did not blot out natural law, it did make it so that human nature on its own was now an unreliable guide. Based on his reading of Jeremiah 31:31-34 and Romans 2:15, Zanchi thought God reinscribed general, natural principles of worship, goodness, fairness, and honesty into humanity a second time.

After surveying various definitions of natural law, Zanchi lays out his own jam-packed definition.

“Natural law is the will of God, and consequently, the divine rule and principle for knowing what to do and what not to do. It is, the knowledge of what is good or bad, fair or unfair, upright or shameful, that was inscribed upon the hearts of all people by God himself also after the fall. For this reason, we are all universally taught what activities should be pursued and what should be avoided; that is, to do one thing and to avoid another, and we know that we are obligated and pushed to act for the glory of God, our own good, and the welfare of our neighbor both in private and in public. In addition, we know that if we do what should be avoided or avoid what we should do, we are condemned; but if we do the opposite, we are defended and absolved.”

There are several ideas to notice in this definition but I want to focus only on two.

First, the definition draws attention to the fact that God originally inscribed natural law on everyone’s heart. And second, it shows that God also reinscribed natural law a second time after the fall. Given the corruption that set in after the fall, Zanchi argues that natural law cannot come from nature or human nature but must come instead from God. He says, “Natural law, however, being a principle of reason is a good, divine, and spiritual thing. Thus, it must come from somewhere besides nature; that is, it must . . . come from God.” If natural law came from nature or from human nature, says Zanchi, “then it would exist equally in all people; for those things that are shared by all people naturally exist equally in all people.” But some are clearly wiser, more concerned with justice, and more zealous for God than others are. Zanchi’s definition emphasizes that natural law does not now arise from natural instinct but is rather a gift of God, a natural revelation of the Creator’s will. According to him, those within the Augustinian tradition “call it natural law as the apostle Paul does because the principles of justice and honesty have been inscribed on our hearts by God and those little sparks of heavenly light (as Cicero calls them) appear inside of us as innate and natural.”

Following from the definition, Zanchi lists three functions of natural law that correspond with certain goods. First, natural law is a “trait shared with all other living things that we protect and save ourselves. This includes eating, drinking, sleeping, resting, moving, using medicine, clothes, and so forth. This produces these laws: A healthy lifestyle is praised while an unhealthy one is rejected; it is permitted to drive off force with force.” Second, natural law is a “trait shared with all animals, that we endeavor to propagate our species, that we take time for having and rearing children, and the other things related to it; that is, that we pay attention to domestic affairs.” Third, natural law is a “trait applying to all human beings, that we know and worship God and that we maintain a community among human beings.” This third aspect is typically divided into two categories, just as the Decalogue is divided into two tablets: one concerns knowledge and worship of God (piety), while the other concerns loving our neighbor (justice).

Though significantly more could be said, let me conclude this series on the largely forgotten catholicity of Protestant ethics, with a few brief remarks and reflections. My goal for this series, as stated part I, was to show that voluntarism and nominalism are not the same thing, that two important Reformed theologians (Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi) had more than a passing interest in Thomism (or intellectualism as Pope Benedict XVI referred to it in his now famous Regensburg address), and that evangelicals need to revisit their wariness on the capacity of reason to discern moral truth. Much more could be written on each of these topics, but the fundamental point should not be missed that two significant sixteenth-century Reformed theologians break the modern mold for Protestant ethics. Among the thinkers and writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I can assure you there are numerous others who also break the mold.

For almost one hundred years now, Protestant theologians and ethicists have held natural law at arm’s length. During this same period, Protestant theologians have also largely shunned any vestige of the scholastic and metaphysical base of Reformation-era theology in order to gain acceptance in the modern Academy and to increase their contemporary cachet. Whether this strategy has been successful, or if it is even coherent to begin with, is beyond this blog series to determine, but I have my doubts.

It is enough to simply point out that natural law is tied to philosophical realism — the belief that the created world is the external foundation of knowledge for all science. (Read Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics, 1, pp. 223-33). According to the Belgic Confession, the world “is a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God.” It is high time that Protestants recover a sense of their connectedness with the broader and older Christian moral tradition and take up once again “the invisible things of God.”

By Stephen Grabill

This post examines Peter Martyr Vermigli’s understanding of natural law, while part 6 will take up the natural-law thinking of Jerome Zanchi, Martyr’s former student and colleague.

Martyr was born in Florence in 1499, entered the Augustinian Canons, and took a doctorate in theology at the leading center of Renaissance Aristotelianism, the University of Padua. His favorite authors were Aristotle and Thomas. In Italy he enjoyed a distinguished career as teacher, preacher, and abbot. By 1540 he was already Protestant by conviction; after persuading many citizens and canons, including Zanchi, to convert, Martyr fled to Zurich in 1542 to escape the Inquisition. During the last twenty years of his life he taught at Strasbourg, Oxford, and Zurich. He died in 1562 two years before Calvin. Over half a dozen of his students became important theologians. And all together there were about 110 printings of his various writings, which consist of about twenty-five massive volumes. Within Reformed circles he was universally admired for his piety, prudence, and scholarship. (This paragraph is adapted from John Patrick Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” Viator 7 (1976): 442).While Martyr both disagrees with Thomas and adopts much of his teaching, they both view theology as a science whose principles are borrowed from revelation. In fact, Martyr’s discussion of the nature of theology borrows the content, language, and examples of the opening question of Thomas’s Summa, but without acknowledging their source. Like Thomas, Martyr tries to incorporate as much from Aristotle in his system as is consistent with Scripture; thus in his commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics Martyr usually concludes each chapter by showing the agreement of Aristotle’s teaching with the Bible. (Adapted from Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” 443).

In his theological works Martyr cites Aristotle ninety-eight times — more than ten times as often as Calvin does in the Institutes. Martyr’s works cite thirteen other Aristotelian philosophers a total of eighty-five times. Martyr also refers to twenty medieval scholastic authors, particularly Peter Lombard and Thomas. And he never cites a nominalist work with approval. He agrees with Thomas far more often than he lets on. This is so because their theologies are a synthesis of Scripture and Aristotelian philosophy. (Adapted from Donnelly, “Calvinist Thomism,” 443).

For Martyr, like Thomas, all knowledge is either revealed or acquired. Theology is revealed knowledge and philosophy is acquired knowledge. (Some might even say philosophy is an acquired taste.) Knowledge of God breaks down along parallel lines as revealed and acquired knowledge. Revealed knowledge of God is restricted and refers to things that can only be known by special revelation, such as the doctrines of justification, forgiveness of sins, and the resurrection of the body. Acquired or natural knowledge of God, however, is unrestricted and refers to things that can be known through nature, reason, or conscience.

Martyr uses two explanations to account for the natural knowledge of God. First, knowledge of God can arise simply from reflection on the Creator’s workmanship. And, second, it can arise from certain information the Creator hardwired into the mind. Martyr thought the hardwired information led people “to conceive noble and exalted opinions about the divine nature” and, as a result, to pattern their behavior consistent with those opinions. Martyr calls the first type contemplation, and sees it illustrated in Romans 1, and the second he calls practical, and sees it illustrated in the natural moral law of Romans 2. Like Luther and Calvin, he held to the existence of a universally imprinted knowledge of God that justly holds people accountable for their innate moral consciousness and awareness of God.

According to Romans 2:14, the classic natural-law passage, even though the Gentiles did not have the Decalogue, they did “by nature” the things contained in it. “The light of nature,” declares Martyr, allowed them “to discern between honesty and dishonesty, between right and wrong. So if we look upon the life and manners of Cato, Atticus, Socrates, and Aristides, we shall see that in justice and civil comeliness they far excelled a great many Christians and Jews. Therefore they cannot excuse themselves for not having had a law.”

Martyr disagrees with Augustine and Ambrose who both thought the apostle Paul was referring to believing Gentiles — and not unredeemed humanity — in Romans 2:14. To justify his position, he gave two reasons why knowledge of the moral law is implanted in the human mind. The first is to take away all excuses by providing objective and universal knowledge of the moral law and the fact of future judgment. The second is to motivate us to do what we know to be just and honest. This is what prods us to pursue righteousness and serves to renew God’s image in us. According to Martyr, “The image of God, in which man was created, is not utterly blotted out but obfuscated in the fall, and for that reason is in need of renewal by God. So natural knowledge is not fully quenched in our minds, but much of it still remains….” While natural law takes away excuses, Martyr thinks it can only effectively motivate believers to pursue righteousness because apart from Christ, as they already know, it is impossible to please God.

So much for Martyr, in the next post we will take up Zanchi.

By Stephen Grabill

As promised in part 3, this post will begin a discussion of natural law in the thought of the Reformer Peter Martyr Vermigli (1499-1562), but first I want to touch on the broader issue of natural law in the context of Reformation theology.

More than any other Reformer, John Calvin is appealed to for his insight on natural law. This is probably due to the stubborn persistence among scholars to single him out as the chief early codifier of Protestant doctrine. While this approach is understandable given the force of habit, the discussion should be widened beyond Calvin to include those Reformers who either preceded him or were contemporaries of his and the later representatives of Protestant orthodoxy. Though Calvin talks a fair bit about natural law, his treatment of it is unsystematic and imprecise compared to the medievals and some of his contemporaries. Susan Schreiner, a Calvin expert and University of Chicago Divinity School professor, thinks Calvin’s discussion of natural law should be seen as an extension of his doctrine of providence. In her view, Calvin uses natural law for the practical purpose of explaining how order is preserved after the fall in society, law, and morality.

As time passes in the sixteenth century, however, Protestant theologians develop increasingly sophisticated doctrines of natural law that they situate in the wider context of the grand moral tradition with Aristotle, Cicero, Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, and many others. What is striking here is the degree to which Martyr and his fellow Reformer and former student Jerome Zanchi, for example, show continuity with Thomas and Scotus. The Jesuit historical theologian John Patrick Donnelly expresses a similar viewpoint. “Does Martyr’s scholasticism have affinities to any particular medieval school? Yes. Martyr cannot fairly be called a Thomist, yet his scholasticism stands far closer to Thomism than to any other major school of the Middle Ages. His training was mainly Thomistic and he cites Aquinas far more than any other scholastic except Lombard.”The astonishing thing about the rise of Reformed scholasticism in the 1540s and 50s is that its medieval roots run heavily to Thomism and Scotism, hardly at all to nominalism. This challenges the opinion of several prominent contemporary Roman Catholic and Protestant intellectuals, who credit the emphasis on the will in Protestant ethics to the influence of William of Occam rather than to medieval Augustinian antecedents.

Use of traditional natural-law terms in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant orthodoxy show significant points of continuity with the thought of Thomas and Scotus. The discontinuities stem from disputes over the interpretation of key biblical passages, an expanded sense of how sin affects reason and human nature, and a criticism of works righteousness, to mention a few key areas. Calvin, Martyr, and the Reformed scholastics all share the conviction that Scripture is the cognitive foundation of theology and that moral arguments can be based on precepts drawn from that foundation.

Part 5 will begin to sketch out Martyr’s view of natural law.

By Stephen Grabill

As I mentioned in part 2, a common stereotype of Protestant ethics is that it is wedded to nominalism. While this may be true for some (particularly modern) Protestant ethicists, it is false for Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi, two older Reformed moral theologians. Before showing how this is so, and still by way of introduction, I want to point to four doctrines where natural law exerts some influence.

First, it is important to recognize that none of the confessional documents of the magisterial Reformation — whether Lutheran or Reformed — rejected the doctrine of natural law. In fact, those documents universally state that Gentiles — though outsiders to God’s special revelation to Israel in the law and the prophets — remain accountable to the moral law by means of the natural knowledge of God’s will experienced in creation, conscience, and reason. Confessional examples abound to prove this point, but I will mention only what the Second Helvetic Confession (1566) states:

“We teach that the will of God is set down unto us in the law of God; to wit, what He would have us to do, or not to do, what is good and just, or what is evil and unjust. We therefore confess that ‘the law is holy . . . and good’; and that this law is, by the finger of God, either written in the hearts of men, and so is called the law of nature, or engraven in the two tables of stone, and more largely expounded in the books of Moses.”

This confession, like so many other sixteenth-century confessions, makes an explicit identification of the law written on the heart in Romans 2 with the natural law.

Second, natural law played a significant role in the three uses of law articulated by the Reformers. The first use of law is to convict of sin by taking away all natural presumption of righteousness. The Reformers made frequent appeal to the conscience’s imprinted knowledge of right and wrong in this respect. The second use of law is to maintain order. “Since the devil reigns in the whole world,” states Luther, “God has ordained magistrates, parents, teachers, laws, shackles, and all civic ordinances to at least bind his hands and keep him from raging at will.” The third use of law is to exhort believers to ongoing obedience and gratitude. “The law is to the flesh,” says Calvin, “like a whip to an idle and balky ass, to arouse it to work. Even for a spiritual man not yet free of the weight of the flesh the law remains a constant sting that will not let him stand still.”

Third, while the Reformers famously emphasized Scripture as the ultimate authority for doctrine and Christian living, the modern doctrine of sola scriptura falsely pits the Reformers against the Scholastics on the issue of tradition. Unlike modern Protestants, the Reformers did not pit Scripture and tradition against each other as antithetical sources of authority, even though they did affirm the normative priority of Scripture in theology and ethics. The Reformers also did not play special revelation off against general revelation, as tends to happen today, both were considered legitimate forms of revelation that served distinct roles in theology. This is why the modern Protestant rejection of natural law in favor of supernaturally revealed legal or moral instruction is skewed in relation to the thought of the Reformers.

Fourth, the Reformers felt no tension in affirming a strong doctrine of original sin, on the one hand, and natural law, on the other. While every aspect of reality was affected in the fall, including the rational and social nature of human beings, the Reformers did not believe the divine image was totally annihilated. Instead, only aspects of the image were destroyed while other aspects were permanently disoriented. That disorientation put people in a wrong relationship with God, their neighbors, and the world. However, the implanted knowledge of right and wrong, which survived the fall as a relic of the original image, was now weakened and obscured. The Canons of Dort, a doctrinal standard issued by the Synod of Dort (1618-19), for example, affirms the existence of natural law but also points to its insufficiency:

“There remain in man since the fall, the glimmerings of natural light, whereby he retains some knowledge of God, of natural things, and of the difference between good and evil, and shows some regard for virtue and for good outward behavior. But so far is this light of nature from being sufficient to bring him to a saving knowledge of God and to true conversion that he is incapable of using it aright even in things natural and civil.”Without this affirmation of the natural knowledge of God, the result for ethics would be pessimism toward any transcultural, universal moral ontology. The alternative, then, would be to place ethics exclusively within the sphere of redemption and the new creation. If those “glimmerings of natural light” were wiped out, it would be difficult to find a bridge to the public sphere in which Christians and non-Christians could work side by side.

In Part 4 we will begin looking closely at Peter Martyr Vermigli.

By Stephen Grabill

As I mentioned in part 1 of this series, my aim is to probe the natural-law doctrines of only a few influential sixteenth-century Protestant theologians.

Some, such as John Calvin, may already be familiar to you, while others, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli (known as Martyr) and Jerome Zanchi, may be entirely new. What is surprising about Martyr and Zanchi is how much their natural-law doctrines are in line with the metaphysical essentialism of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus. Before going any further I should forewarn you that what I just said challenges a good many Protestant and Roman Catholic stereotypes.

The most common stereotype is that the Reformers and their successors were indebted to the nominalist metaphysics of William of Occam, which resulted in the Bible being treated as a law book and God being conceived as an arbitrary and irrational sovereign. In subsequent posts, this interpretation will be examined in relation to the thought of Marytr and Zanchi. So stay tuned for more on this topic.

However, at this point, I should mention that the stereotype is largely accurate in regard to the modern natural-law tradition associated with Samuel Pufendorf and later thinkers but not with Hugo Grotius. The distinguished medievalist Francis Oakley has shown recently that Grotius’s famous remark in The Law of War and Peace about natural law being valid “even if we should concede that which cannot be conceded without the utmost wickedness, [namely] that there is no God, or that the affairs of men are of no concern to him” does not point to a fundamental break with scholastic patterns of thought. In fact, Oakley thinks no real novelty attaches to the way in which Grotius identifies the ultimate grounding of natural law. He provides two reasons to support his view.

First, counterfactual assertions concerning the existence of God were commonplace in antiquity, the middle ages, and later. Grotius was not unique in his use of counterfactual arguments. Second, according to Oakley, “understood in the broader context of his natural law thinking, Grotius’s impious hypothesis can be seen to witness less to any great secular novelty than to the continuing dialectic between two distinct theories concerning the metaphysical grounding of natural law which the early modern natural law thinkers had inherited from their medieval and late medieval predecessors. In the De jure belli et pacis, it turns out, he was maneuvering for position in such a way as to distance himself from the more voluntaristic approach with which he had appeared to sympathize in his earlier De jure praedae (”On the Law of Booty“) and in accordance with which even the content of natural law was understood to be grounded in the mandates of a legislating divine will” (p. 66).

The second most common stereotype, particularly among evangelicals, is to assert that Thomas’s synthesis of Aristotle and Augustine started Christian theology on the way to secularization. According to Carl Henry, founding editor of Christianity Today and prolific evangelical theologian, “Thomas may have thought he was directing Aristotelian thought God-ward; instead, he grounded Christian theism and morality on secular turf.”

I will respond to these stereotypes in due course, but I first want to mention four Protestant doctrines in which natural law historically played an important role, which I will take up in my next post.

Since I am somewhat immersed in reading Protestant scholastic-related texts at the moment, I thought that this new series by a guest post-er would be a nice complement to the Muller series and would perhaps stimulate a good deal of discussion.

***

By Stephen Grabill

Dr. Grabill has kindly given me permission to edit and re-publish a series that he wrote last year that centers on recovering and reviving the catholicity of Protestant ethics. Dr. Grabill is Reformed theological ethicist and the inaugural editor of the Journal of Markets & Morality, a peer-reviewed, interdisciplinary, academic journal published by the Acton Institute, that integrates theology, ethics, economics, and moral philosophy.

***

Protestant catholicity? Isn’t this an oxymoron? It may come as a surprise in light of a common stereotype of Protestant theology, but the older Protestant understanding of reason, the divine will, and natural law actually provided a bulwark against the notion of a capricious God, unbounded by truth and goodness, as Pope Benedict recently pointed out in relation to Islam’s understanding of God. “In all honesty,” he states,

“one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God’s “voluntas ordinata.” Beyond this is the realm of God’s freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done.This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn [the representative of the Islamic doctrine of God] and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions.”

What the pope is saying is that the relationship between God and creation becomes fundamentally distorted when God’s power and will are separated from the covenantal context of revelation. That revelational and redemptive context, in short, is the voluntary limitation that God imposed upon himself and vowed never to rescind. But there is more.In addition to God’s covenant faithfulness, there is an analogy of sorts between God and us, between, as Benedict writes, “the eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason.” Herman Bavinck, the renowned Dutch Reformed theologian, uses the language of correspondence to describe the analogy: “There just has to be correspondence or kinship between object and subject. The Logos who shines in the world must also let his light shine in our consciousness. That is the light of reason, the intellect, which, itself originating in the Logos, discovers and recognizes the Logos in things. It is the internal foundation of knowledge. Just as knowledge within us is the imprint of things upon our souls, so, in turn, forms do not exist except by a kind of imprint of the divine knowledge in things. So, in the final analysis, it is God alone who from his divine consciousness and by way of his creatures conveys the knowledge of truth to our mind–the Father who by the Son and in the Spirit reveals himself to us” (Reformed Dogmatics, I, p. 233). It is hard to imagine what Protestants like Bavinck would take issue with in this statement by Benedict: “God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf.”Yet, many Protestants and Catholics alike, believe that the fundamental postulates of the Reformation severed the correspondence between God and man, the divine intellect and the human intellect, faith and reason. What I hope to accomplish in this blog series is to show that voluntarism and nominalism are not the same thing, that two important Reformed theologians (Peter Martyr Vermigli and Jerome Zanchi) had more than a passing interest in Thomism (or intellectualism as the pope referred to it), and that evangelicals need to revisit their wariness on the capacity of reason to discern moral truth.

[This post concludes my brief introduction to Muller’s thesis].

In a section titled, “The Design and Scope of the Present Study,” Muller begins to explicitly state the various assumptions and aspects of his continuity thesis, or better his “double” continuity and discontinuity thesis. As we saw in the previous two posts, Muller contends that the Reformed scholastics are a continuation of the Reformed tradition (not a major departure) begun by the early Reformers; hence, the continuity aspect of his thesis. However, Muller does not equate continuity with identity, which would be an oversimplistic and even impossible claim, and thus, he also recognizes elements of discontinuity as Reformed scholasticism develops. Consequently, Muller rejects the idea of pitting “Calvin” against the “Calvinists” (meaning here the Reformed scholastics), which argues for an essential discontinuity between the two. An example of the kind of discontinuity highlighted by Muller is that in the Reformed scholastics, given the historical situation and the needs of the Protestant tradition to codify its doctrines for institutional and other teaching purposes, we find significantly more “positive reference to medieval theology, more overt use of scholastic distinctions, and a broader reliance on reason for the development of theological concepts” than are explicitly manifest in the early Reformers. Yet, even in Luther and Calvin, and especially in Peter Martyr Vermigli (who was quite conversant with Aristotelian and Thomistic categories), one cannot deny the debt to medieval theology and philosophy. Hence, the first aspect of Muller’s thesis is “that continuity and discontinuity must be traced out across a broad spectrum of thinkers and documents in the Reformed tradition” with “attention given to the genres and the historical location of the documents in specific contexts.” In sum, any study of the development from the early Reformation period to the Protestant scholastics “worth its salt” must recognize “the diversity and variety of Reformed thought both in its beginnings and in its later forms: there is simply not a monolithic unity to be found in Reformed orthodoxy [=Reformed scholasticism], nor can its varied but confessional theology be reduced to a single paradigm” (Post-Reformation Dogmatics, p. 38).

The second aspect of Muller’s thesis deals with the “theological methods of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (Ibid., p. 38). Here Muller addresses a common criticism leveled at Reformed scholastics, viz., they became too rationalistic, developing deductive theological systems and a theology based on and driven by one doctrine (e.g., predestination, covenant etc.). However, Muller shows that when we examine the methods of both the early Reformers and their scholastic successors, we find that “the relationship between exegesis and the topical formulation of theology precluded the creation of either a purely rational or deductive theology or of a theology grounded on topically defined ‘central dogmas’” (Ibid., p. 39). To claim that the scholastic method employed by the Protestant scholastics necessarily paved the way to rationalistic systems would seem to implicate many medieval theologians and philosophers (e.g., St. Thomas), which some Protestants are of course eager to do, and to ignore textual evidence of the Protestant scholastics themselves. “Indeed, the evidence indicates that the scholastic method of the Reformed orthodox [=Protestant scholastics], with its highly developed sense of prolegomena and principia and its intentional balance between revealed doctrinal content and rational examination and defense of doctrine, militated against rationalism and against the dogmatic deductivism of such theological models as the central dogma hypothesis” (Ibid., p. 39).

Third, Muller states that in light of the problems inherent in the central dogma theories in attempting to explain the development of Reformed theology, “the various ‘centrisms’ of much modern discussion of these older materials must be set aside” (e.g., whether there is a theocentric or Christocentric, or any-other-centric center in Reformed theology) [Ibid., p. 39].

Fourth, one must understand the theologies of the Protestant scholastics “in terms of the trajectories of intellectual history that extend through the sixteenth into the seventeenth century” (p. 39). In light of the fact that Protestant theology was now being discussed in the major Protestant universities, the scholastic methodology (which itself was a hybrid of medieval and Renaissance elements) was adopted to aid theological discourse given its structural clarity and synthetic quality.[1]

Fifth, in order to properly understand the development of Reformed theology up to the 18th century, one must examine the roles of both the history of exegesis and the history philosophy as they relate to the Reformed tradition. With regard to the history of exegesis, even with the shift in theological method (i.e., more explicitly scholastic), one still finds a great deal of continuity between the early Reformers and their successors in terms of their interpretations of particular biblical passages. Thus, systematic methodology is not driving exegesis but rather the former is birthed out of the latter. With regard to the history of philosophy and the development to Protestant scholasticsm, “here we identify a consistent classical note throughout the period, a continuity of Christian Aristotlianism, with the newer rationalism finding little support either from the theology of the Reformers in its inception or from the teachings of the orthodox in its development” (Ibid., p. 40).

Much more could be stated and elaborated with regard to Muller’s thesis. However, I hope this at least provides a “taste” of Muller’s work and his approach the Protestant scholastics.

Bibliography

Muller, Richard A. Post-Reformation Dogmatics: Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, Vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

Notes

[1] There were of course other teaching methods used for laypersons and those not engaged in formal, academic roles.

As we highlighted in the previous post, Muller argues that the Protestant scholastics were not a great departure from the early Reformers but were in essentially agreement with teachings of their predecessors and continued in a distinctively Reformed trajectory. Moreover, just as the early Reformers themselves constituted a pluriform movement exhibiting continuities and discontinuites with the medieval tradition, so too Protestant scholasticism manifests the same diversity and complexity. As Martin Klauber explains, Muller’s,

“important interpretation recasts the entire period and portrays essential continuity in theological organization in the west from the introduction of Aristotle in the twelfth century to the decline in orthodoxy in the eighteenth century. Muller does for the post-Reformation period what Heiko Oberman has done for the Reformation era in pointing out the aspects of continuity with medieval antecedents. Oberman resurrected late medieval nominalism from the doldrums of its reputation as a decadent system deviating from the heights of Thomistic clarity. Muller illustrates the rich vitality of the post-Reformation theological system, one that had hitherto been considered arid and devoid of practical piety” (“Continuity and Discontinuity,” p. 467).

Though it is no doubt the case that scathing and vitriolic remarks directed at Aristotelian philosophy and the “schoolmen” can be found in the writings of Luther and Calvin, Muller argues that upon closer examination one finds that much of this anti-scholastic aversion was directed at very specific “schoolmen.” For example in the case of Calvin, we again find continuity and discontinuity. As Muller explains,

“Calvin’s theology—whether from the perspective of its methods or from the perspective of its contents—did not arise in a sixteenth-century vacuum. Not only did Calvin formulate his theology in distinct opposition to elements of late medieval and early sixteenth-century Roman Catholicism; he also quite subtly felt the influence of the medieval as well as the patristic past. It is worth recognizing from the outset that the Reformation altered comparatively few of the major loci of theology; the doctrines of justification, the sacraments, and the church received the greatest emphasis, while the doctrines of God, the trinity, creation, providence, predestination [which was not an invention of Calvin, but is a teaching also found in St. Augustine and St. Thomas], and the last things were taken over by the magisterial Reformation virtually without alteration” (The Unaccomodated Calvin, p. 39). Muller also makes a strong case for the hypothesis that “scholastici” and “théologiens Sorboniques” are not equivalent terms, and that Calvin’s strongest attacks are directed at the latter group, the faculty of the Sorbonne, and not against, e.g., Peter Lombard and what Calvin deems the “more sound” scholastici (Ibid., p. 57).

Another important contribution of Muller centers on his discussion of “scholasticism” as primarily a method of organization that does not necessarily imply a certain content. In light of the fact that the first and second generation Reformers did not leave a fully developed system of doctrine, it became the task of the Protestant scholastics to codify the Reformed teachings for the purposes of teaching and to ensure the survival of Protestantism. Furthermore, just as the doctrinal formulations of the early Reformation did not occur in a historical vacuum, neither did Protestant scholasticism “occur in isolation from theological system or from the Western philosophical tradition.” Scripture was held by both the early Reformers and the Protestant scholastics as the “absolute norm of doctrine.” However, “they never intended that the whole body of Christian doctrine be reconstructed without reference to the doctrinal developments and systematic constructions of the past—and even if that had been their intention, it would have hardly been possible. The Reformers, after all, assumed the truth of the larger body of received doctrine and attacked only what they perceived to be errors. They did not intend to reconstruct the doctrine of the Trinity or of the Person of Christ or of the creation of the world and the providence of God.” Rather, the development of doctrinal confessions and codifications of the Protestant scholastic period (late 16th-17th centuries) consisted in “the adjustment of a received body of doctrine and its systematic relations to the needs of Protestantism, in terms dictated by the teachings of the Reformers on Scripture, grace, justification, and the sacraments” ( , p. 34).

Returning to his understanding of “scholasticism” as a method of presenting material (in this case theological material) and contra the prominent 19th century speculative and a-historical “central-dogma” theories—e.g., predestination is the controlling principle of Reformed scholastic systems—Muller shows that the reason for utilizing the scholastic model of teaching has to do with the process of the institutionalization of Protestant doctrine in the universities during the late 16th and 17th centuries. According to Muller,

“[t]he theology of the great systems written in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like the theology of the thirteenth century teachers, is preeminently a school theology. It is a theology designed to develop a system on a highly technical level and in an extremely precise manner by means of the careful identification of topics, division of these topics into their basic parts, definition of the parts, and doctrinal or logical argumentation concerning the divisions and definitions. This, moreover is the sense of the term used by the writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth century to describe their academic, technical, and disputative theology as distinct from other genre and approaches, namely, the catechetical, biblical-exegetical, and simply didactic or ecclesial” (Ibid., pp. 34-35).

Lastly, the scholastic method of the Protestant scholastics was not identical with that of its medieval predecessors. Rather, it is a kind of hybrid of medieval and Renaissance elements, which incorporated linguistic, philosophical, and logical aspects characteristic of Renaissance scholars. “The mastery of ancient languages typical of the Protestant scholastic writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, like their use of the locus method and inclusion of elements of rhetorical as distinct from demonstrative argumentation, serves to distinguish this later scholasticism from its medieval ancestor: in each of these characteristics, Protestant scholasticism evidences itself a child of the Renaissance as well as a child of the Middle Ages. […] This mixed heritage of Protestant orthodoxy [=Protestant scholasticism] is an indication of the kind of continuity that developing Protestantism maintained with the Reformation—which itself drew on both the scholastic and the humanist models” (Ibid., p. 36). Interestingly, the Protestant scholastics distinguished between the scholasticism of the 12th and 13th centuries and that of the 14th and 15th centuries and considered the former superior and less problematic than the latter (Ibid., p. 36). Just as it would be inaccurate and facile to accuse St. Thomas of simply embracing Aristotle wholesale and then presenting Christianity in a rationalistic system, so too it is mistaken to assume that Protestant scholastics present an arid, rationalistic, deductive system based on e.g., predestination as the controlling principle.[1] This not only neglects the sources themselves (e.g., Turretin’s Institutes, and even Calvin’s 1559 Institutes where predestination does not even appear until book III and even there is not the focal point of the book), but fails to understood the role of Prolegomena and principia in Reformed orthodoxy where the presuppositions and principles of Reformed theology are made explicit.

In part III, we shall take more detailed look at the various aspects of Muller’s thesis itself.

Bibliography

1. Klauber, Martion I. “Continuity and Discontinuity in Post-Reformation Reformed Theology: An Evaluation of the Muller Thesis,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society 33/4 (December 1990): 467-475.
2. Muller, Richard A. Post-Reformation Dogmatics: Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, Vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.
3. Muller, Richard A. The Unaccompanied Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition. New York, Oxford, 2000.

Notes
[1] As Muller time and again reiterates, “since scholasticism is primarily a method or approach to academic disciplines, it is not necessarily allied to any particular philosophical perspective, nor does it represent a systematic attachment to or concentration upon any particular doctrine or concept as a key to theological system. This point has always been clear with respect to medieval scholasticism, but it needs to be made just as decisively with regard to Protestant scholasticism” (Post-Reformation Dogmatics, p. 37).

According to Richard A. Muller, Protestant scholasticism (which he uses synonymously with “orthodox Protestantism”) has been woefully neglected when compared to the attention given to the study of early Reformers (e.g., Luther) and second generation Reformers (e.g., Calvin). The Protestant scholastics of the late 16th and early 17th centuries were the confessional and doctrinal codifiers without whom Protestantism would not have survived. In their systematizing and institutionalizing endeavors, the Protestant scholastics both embraced the distinctives of the early Reformers, and also sought to “identify themselves and their theology with the cause of catholic or universal Christian truth” (p. 28). In other words, just as Heiko Oberman has suggested a relation of continuity (and of course discontinuity) between Luther and his medieval predecessors, so too Muller accepts Oberman’s continuity thesis in which not only first and second generation Reformers adopt the major theological loci of medieval scholasticism (of course there were differences here as well, e.g., justification), but likewise Muller argues that the Protestant scholastics do not exhibit a substantive departure from the early Reformers. As Muller observes, Reformed orthodoxy was by no means a monolithic movement. Both its doctrine and its biblical exegesis formed what Muller calls a “confessional spectrum.” Although in continuity with the early Reformers and embracing Protestant distinctives, Protestant scholasticism, of course, is not a mere reduplication of early Protestant theology. Hence, continuity should not be understood as an exact repetition, nor should discontinuity be understood simply as any change or variation from the earlier tradition. As Muller explains, Protestant scholasticism,

“is clearly a theology both like and unlike that of the Reformation, standing in continuity with the great theological insights of the Reformers but developing in a systematic and scholastic fashion different from the patterns of the Reformation and frequently reliant on the forms and methods of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries. This double continuity ought not be either surprising or disconcerting. Instead, it ought to be understood as one example among many of the way in which the church both moves forward in history, adapting to new situations and insights, and at the same time retains its original identity as the community of faith” (pp. 28-29).

Muller also makes a point not to present Calvin, as the sole standard and expression of Reformed Protestantism.[1] In addition to the diverse and pluriform nature of Reformed Protestantism mentioned above, we should keep in mind that Calvin was only one Reformer among many and he himself was in constant dialogue with other Reformers (e.g., Vermigli), gleaning from their insights and often adjusting his own teaching as a result of such dialogues. Moreover, Calvin was not a primary author of a number of important confessional documents within the Reformed tradition (e.g., the Belgic Confession, the Second Helvetic Confession, the Heidelberg Catechism to name a few). In fact, many individuals who are considered “Calvinists” differ from Calvin in both doctrine and method (e.g., B. Keckermann, W. Perkins) [p. 30]. In light of such diversity and pluriformity, Muller suggests that “the better part of historical valor (namely, discretion) requires the rejection of the term ‘Calvinists’ and ‘Calvinism’ in favor of the more historically accurate term, ‘Reformed’” (p. 30).

Muller, following Otto Weber, divides the post-Reformation development of Protestantism into three periods: early, high and late orthodoxy. Early orthodoxy consists in two phases, ca. 1565-1618-1640. The beginning date, 1565, signals the death of many important second generation codifiers of the Reformed tradition (e.g., Calvin, W. Musculus, and Peter Martyr Vermigli). The Synod of Dort and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War took place around 1618, which marks the end of the first early phase and the beginning of the second early phase. Major figures of the first phase of early orthodoxy include: Z. Ursinus, C. Olevianus, T. Beza, and W. Perkins, while the second phase of early orthodoxy introduced figures such as J. Polyander, F. Gomarus and J. Maccovius, who contributed significantly to the confessional documents of the early 17th century (p. 31). High orthodoxy covers most of the 17th century, as well as the first quarter of the 18th century (ca. 1640-1685-1725). It also consists in two phases, early and late. High orthodoxy “possesses a broader and more explicit grasp of the tradition, particularly of the contribution of the Middle Ages” (p. 31). Important figures of the early high orthodoxy phase include: J. Cocceius, G. Voetius, F. Turretin, and John Owen. After 1685, a change occurred and we see less emphasis and influence than in the previous thirty years of the works of traditional Protestant scholastic writers in terms of an “intellectual pattern” in the church and in the theological faculties of Protestant universities [p. 32]. “The changes that took place included an increased pressure on the precritical textual, exegetical, and hermeneutical model of orthodoxy, an alteration of the philosophical model used by theologians from the older Christian Aristotelian approach to either a variant of the newer rationalism or a virtually a-philosophical version of dogmatics” (p. 32). There were, however, a number of theologians who continued in the trajectory of Reformed scholasticism (e.g., J. Edwards). In late orthodoxy (after 1725), theology “is less secure in its philosophical foundations, indeed searching for different philosophical models, less certain of its grasp of the biblical standard, […] less bound by the confessional norms of the Reformation, and given to internecine polemics” (p. 32).

In part II, we shall take up Muller’s discussion and definition of “scholasticism.”

Bibliography

Muller, Richard A. Post-Reformation Dogmatics: Rise and Development of Reformed Orthodoxy, ca. 1520 to ca. 1725, Vol. 1, Prolegomena to Theology. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2003.

Notes

[1] This would perhaps be a similar (mistaken) move along the lines of Gilson’s exaltation of St. Thomas, which is part of Oberman’s critique and his more positive assessment of nominalism. (Although, if you are going to exalt a theologian/philosopher, Thomas is a pretty good pick : ).

As the title indicates, this post concludes our brief introduction to Avicenna’s thought. Avicenna postulates the “flying man,” i.e., a human born in space who does not have the use of any of his senses. The question is, “What would he know?” Avicenna’s answer is that he would know that he is an intelligent being, a knower, and this is not dependent on one’s experience. We are knowers—this is intrinsically what our soul is. In other words, the nature of the soul is not bodily dependent. The dator formarum gives an additional form, the “special form” (forma specialis)—i.e., the human soul, which is placed in the body as a form. Here it is important to see that Avicenna modifies Aristotle. We have the soul and the body, but the question is, “what is their relation?” The soul is just another possibility, not a necessity—it must come from Allah to the dator formarum. It comes simultaneously with the body. This means that the body is not prior to the soul, nor is the soul prior to the body—they come together simultaneously. However, in Avicenna they are not related as in Aristotle’s form/matter account. This is a key problem dividing Platonists and Aristotelians. The latter says that the form is the act of matter; however, the problem then becomes how to explain the intellectuality of the soul? If the soul is active matter, then it doesn’t seem to transcend matter. So how can one have intelligibility? How can Aristotle give an account of how we experience ourselves to be knowers? Plato does not have this problem. For Plato, the soul is separate from the body; it is that which contains the body. The body is more a container into which the soul is placed, and this gives us the ability to have individual knowing souls. As mentioned above, this issue divided the Platonists and Aristotelians. If you say that each individual is a unified being, then you have to go with Aristotle’s picture, but then you can’t explain intellectuality. If you go with Plato, you can’t have a unity of the person. Avicenna goes with the Neoplatonic view because he says that the soul is a knower. The soul and body are for him accidentally related. Recall Aristotle’s categories—relation is an accident; thus, the relation between soul and body is an accident. For Avicenna, since the body is the container of the soul, the soul is “in” the body. However, because the soul is simple, it doesn’t corrupt, whereas the body does. For animals, the body and soul are more like Aristotle’s picture, so the soul just passes away after death. Our final goal is to be joined to the dator formarum /agent intellect (as something separate from us) in contemplation. Curiously, there is no direct relationship to Allah, as everything is mediated through the dator formarum. Avicenna is ambiguous as to whether the individual soul survives death or whether it is just assimilated back into the dator formarum. The latter position seems more likely, though in some places he says that the intellective soul survives death. Avicenna also says, however, that the more we are illuminated, the more we are united to the dator formarum and in such a state you forget the self. At the end of the day, there seems to be little basis for individuality in Avicenna’s view. The soul is not preexistent, but comes into existence with the body. The soul is actualized when it is joined to the body and then becomes necessary in and through Allah who gives it being, and the dator formarum, who gives it form. The soul uses the body as an instrument. So we have two substances, soul and body which are accidentally related to each other.

In sum, for Avicenna, first and foremost is the question of essence and existence. Allah is without possibility, but is the necessary existent. Allah is the necessary being and gives existence as necessary. We know by remotion that there must be a necessary being that is necessary in and through itself. Second, there is the causality of being—(the cascading intelligences coming down and eventually giving us the sublunary sphere which is subject to corruption—there is no corruption is the superlunary sphere [all earthly substances are composed of earth, air, water, fire—but the fifth element, aether—was thought to make up the superlunary sphere]. So there is a causality that comes down through the dator formarum which gives essences to things. The causality of becoming is through the succession of different forms in matter (a horse dies is made into dog food and a dog eats it). Third, Allah (or the One?) does not know or care for our world or for us—here we have a Plotinian ascent. Fourth, the “flying man” shows that we are essentially knowers, as the nature of the soul is not bodily dependent and the relationship of body and soul is accidental (a category of relation)—the body is the instrument of the soul. Fifth, the immortality of the soul seems to be a return to the agent intellect and thus there is no individuality. Sixth, that which is primarily intellectual is immaterial. The soul is not pre-existent, but comes into existence with the body; it is not immortal, and comes from the dator formarum. A human being is not a unity, which suggests that we have a more Platonic than Aristotelian conception. In this life the dator formarum/agent intellect places in the intellect all possibles as universals which the body knows in sensation as concrete singulars. So when I know e.g., Rover, my intellect is illuminated by the dator formarum. The goal of life then is the knowledge of all essences through union with the dator formarum.

According to Avicenna, Alla is that being who is necessary through himself and is radically simple. This necessary-through-itself being explains the beings that exist through him and have only possible existence. These latter beings are composite beings—composed of essence/existence and form/matter. Allah, as we said, is simple and cannot be composed of parts. If he were composed of parts, the parts would be more fundamental than the composition, and Allah must be prior. Clearly, Allah cannot be a substance/accident composition because accidents are not necessary (i.e., necessary in the way that Allah must be necessary). Also, Allah does not fall within a genus or difference and thus no has no definition, as definition implies a limitation. So Allah is beyond genus and difference and definition (again, this sounds a lot like the Plotinian One). Neither is Allah universal or individual, as these are ways of existing in terms of possibility. Allah is utterly simple, complete, without definition and radically one. Because everything else needs Allah to explain it, as nothing is self-explanatory in its existence, it must receive existence from something that is pure existence, viz., Allah who is the necessary-through-himself being. (As we explained in the previous post, beings receive existence from Allah as a “tenth” accident. Also, since essences are possibles, Allah has no essence).
In addition, to the prime matter/substantial form model, Avicenna adds the “form of corporeity.” This is Avicenna’s correction to Aristotle’s schema according to which we have substance and the nine accidents—the first of which was quantity (dimension). Quantity is necessary for there to be quality (e.g., red). Also, every accident assumes quantity as the first accident. Avicenna, modifying Aristotle’s view, notes that as it stands we have a problem of how to move from prime matter and substantial form to the nine accidents. In other words, on Aristotle’s account we do not have a sufficient bridge for how to account for dimensive quantity. Thus, Avicenna puts forth the “form of corporeity” as the mediator between prime matter and substantial form and the nine accidents. The “form of corporeity” then gives the substance the capacity to receive three dimensions. (Recall that prime matter is pure potentiality and substantial form makes something to be “what it is”). Once dimension is accounted for, then the other accidents can be received. Avicenna calls prime matter together with the form of corporeity the “element” (=the substratum). Into this element comes the whole of what makes something to be the actual, physical being. Thus, on Avicenna’s account we have a plurality of forms (substantinal form=forma specialis, the form of corporeity, accidential form etc.).

Then to account for how things receive the different forms, Avicenna proposes the dator formarum (the giver of forms). Here Avicenna is not addressing the question of existence, but rather the question of becoming, i.e., how things change. The form, e.g., of a horse, will be realized in a concrete horse, however, the horse will die and its matter will pass away and a new form will be taken. Here is where the dator formarum enters. According to Avicenna, things in the sense world receive their substantial form from the dator formarum who is one of the lowest intelligences that moves the planets. The dator formarum gives the forms that we have on earth (sublunary sphere), as the earth is the sphere of coming to be and passing away—the place where corruption can occur. Thus, with Avicenna we seem to have a Neoplatonic metaphysic of the One (or Allah) who is necessary in and through himself and who gives existence to all others. This being/existence is given down through a series of descending planets until finally the sublunary sphere of corruption is reached. The dator formarum rules in the sublunary sphere and gives the forms to the prime matter. Once we are in the realm of becoming we return to an Aristotelian view of physics.

Patrik H. at God in a Shrinking Universe has “tagged” me with a new meme. This meme exists because of an effort to create a kind of canon of contemporary theology. The originator of the meme desires that the focus of your selection be theology (not biblical exegesis, historical studies etc., unless these are of special theological interest!). Also, the books have to have been first published in the last 25 years, that is, from 1981 to 2006. So with that said, here are my selections (given the “unless” clause above):

1. Richard A. Muller. Post Reformation Dogmatics, Volumes I-IV. Grand Rapids: Baker Academics, 2003.
2. Richard A. Muller. The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001.
3. Heiko A. Oberman. The Dawn of the Reformation. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992.

(Technically, I have listed 6 books and the minimum suggested is three. However, I do not think that there is a maximum).

I tag, Joel at sacra doctrina, Michael at Evangelical Catholicism, AH at Trinitarian Life, Geoff H. at the church and postmodern culture, and “Hans” at Anglican Calvinist.

Because I am in a kind of “medieval” mood, I decided to review my notes from a course taken at UD on medieval philosophy taught by Fr. Lehrberger. What follows (which includes subsequent posts in this series) is based largely on his lectures notes. I am, however, not a specialist on Avicenna.

***
Avicenna (Ibn-Sina) was a brilliant Arabian philosopher who lived from 980-1037. Avicenna’s philosophy is an interesting combination of Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism. After the translation of the Aristotelian corpus, we begin to see a conflict between Islamic thinkers with more of a philosophical slant and those who give priority to revelation. That is, within Islam (broadly speaking) there were two schools of thought: (1) the Ashrites—who did not see the need for philosophy in light of the fact that they had the Koran and other sacred writings and (2) the Mutazalites—who believed that Islam should engage philosophy. The Ashrites sought apologetic arguments for Islam, and are often called the dialectical theologians. A third group arose called the Falasofa of which Avicenna was the first and probably most famous representative.

Avicenna makes a fundamental distinction between necessary being and possibles. The core of Avicenna’s thought might be said to be reflected in the statement, “Equinitas is ‘horseness.’” Equinity is the essence of the horse—the “what it is of a thing.” However, for Avicenna this equinity (essence) may be considered in three ways: (1) in itself, (2) as it exists as a singular in e.g., the concrete horse, and (3) as it exists, as a universal in the human mind. None of these three ways of considering essence are dependent on the other. For example, there could be many individual horses and no one would know it, i.e., the fact that there is equinity existing in individual horses does not depend on a knower to know it. Likewise, just because I have the concept of horse in my mind, does not mean that there is a concrete horse.

In Avicenna’s construal, until the essence exists either as (1) a singular in a concrete horse or (2) as a universal in the mind—it does not yet exist, but is merely possible. The possible becomes actual when the knower knows it, or when it exists in the concrete entity. When it comes to actually exist, then it is necessary—not in the sense that it could not be, but that it exists. Possibilities are understood as the opposite of (pure) necessity on Avicenna’s account.

Allah (who seems to resemble the Plotinian One) is that which is (pure) necessity, i.e., Allah is necessary in and through himself. Possibles, on the other hand, become necessary in and through Allah. For example, the individual horse does not have to exist; it has its necessity not in and through itself but in and through Allah who gives existence to this merely possible essence such that it exists concretely in a real horse. Allah gives being to the essence and makes the essence to actually exist either as a singular (concrete horse) or a universal in the mind. So here necessary (not pure necessity) means actually existing, which can be existing in one’s mind or in the concrete horse itself.

Here we should also rehearse a Neoplatonic critique of Aristotle. According to Aristotle (in Metaphysics VII), substantial form accounts for what a thing is and that it is (that which makes a thing to be a this not a that). The difficulty with Aristotle’s account was that given his claim that there is no separate subsisting form (for Aristotle form is the act of matter), how can a non-existing form make anything exist? That is, Aristotle claims that the form makes the thing to be what it is—the form is the actuality—and this form accounted well for what a thing is. If no concrete horses exist, then “horseness” in itself as a subsisting form does not exist. In short, the difficulty for the Neoplatonists was how does a non-existing form account for anything and make anything to exist? Or how do you get being from non-being? Where do you get being? Avicenna will attempt to address this question by combining an Aristotelian natural philosophy with a Neoplatonic metaphysic. As we noted above, Avicenna claims that essence is sheer possibility—it can exist in itself, as a universal in the mind, and as a singular in a concrete entity (a real horse). When a possibility is given real existence, it becomes “necessary,” (i.e., necessary through another, viz., through Allah, not in itself). It exists because Allah gives it existence. In itself an essence is a sheer possibility (it neither exists nor does not exist) and when it does exists, it does so in the mind as a universal or in a singular, concrete horse.

Existence is further explicated by Avicenna as a “tenth” accident. Aristotle had spoken of substance and nine accidents. Any concrete being can be analyzed in terms of the “what it is” (substance) and the things that do not properly belong to it but that are nonetheless are part of what it is (accidents). The accidents depend on the substance. Thus, we do not have 300 lbs in itself, or “standing” in itself, as these are the accidents of a substance. Because Aristotle’s account only gives us the what it is, but not the existence—the concretely existing entity—Avicenna offers his solution of existence received from Allah, who is the only necessary being in and through himself. Since nothing explains its own existence, we have to look for its existence from another which must be necessary in and through itself. That which is necessary in and through itself can actualize those which are sheer possibilities—that which is either a singular or a universal in my mind. Given that essences are mere possibilites, Allah (or the One?) has no essence.

More to come…

Geoff H. at the church and postmodern culture blog recently posted a brief article of mine called, “Bringing Musical Insights into Conversation with Biblical Hermeneutics.” If you are interested, please join us.

In the last section of his essay, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Question of Relativism,” Echeverria argues that Gadamer is a kind of realist about truth and reality. This is not to say that Gadamer explicitly develops his position as a realist in his writings; however, it is to point to certain aspects of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that can plausibly be interpreted in the direction of realism. These aspects are as follows: “(1) the realism of the truth-seeker; (2) an epistemological fallibilism, not to be equated with relativism; (3) an anti-Cartesian and anti-Kantian orientation against a subject-object dualism; (4) the Fregian and Husserlian ontology of the sense of the text; (5) the thesis that relativism is self-refuting” (“Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” p. 53). Though each of these aspects is important, I shall focus on one, viz., (3).

As Echeverria observes, Gadamer rejects modernity’s “turn to the subject” and its concomitant problem—the egocentric predicament. In other words, given the representational view of the mind, one does not directly encounter the world; rather, the direct “objects” of perception are one’s own ideas. Thus, the egocentric predication consists in the inability to know whether my ideas have any connection with extramental reality. Gadamer, however, affirms that the world and history are directly given to us (“Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” p. 66). Though acknowledging the superiority of classical metaphysics in regard to overcoming the many dualisms inherent in modern epistemology, Gadamer seeks an alternative to the theological underpinnings of classical metaphysics’ understanding of a kind of correspondence truth theory, viz., the appeal to an infinite intellect to solve the subject/object problem. Yet, the insight of classical metaphysics in which we have a belonging together of subject and object over against a dualistic conception is appealing to Gadamer. In light of the fact that he believes that we can no longer ground the correspondence between the soul and being in an infinite intellect, Gadamer suggests that perhaps our belonging to traditions might provide an adequate grounding. As Echeverria explains, “according to Gadamer, we are always and already historical beings who are, originally and essentially, rooted in traditions. This rootedness in historical life is a given rather than a matter of choice, because even before we engage in critical reflection we belong to tradition” (“Gadamer’s Hermeneutics,” p. 67). Speaking against the Enlightenment’s ahistorical bent, aversion to tradition, and claims to “objectivity,” Gadamer writes,

“[r]esearch in the human sciences cannot regard itself as in an absolute antithesis to the way in which we, as historical beings, relate to the past. At any rate, our usual relationship to the past is not characterized by distancing and freeing ourselves from tradition. Rather we are always situated within traditions, and this is no objectifying process—i.e., we do not conceive of what tradition says as something other, something alien. It is always part of us, a model or exemplar, a kind of cognizance that our later historical judgment would hardly regard as a kind of knowledge but as the most ingenuous affinity with tradition (Truth and Method, p. 282).

Not only does an Enlightenment (rationalistic) mentality fail to see its own situatedness in tradition, it also fails to see that it exhibits a “prejudice against prejudice itself, which denies tradition its power” (Truth and Method, p. 270). The Enlightenment claim that reason and authority are antithetical is itself an uncritiqued presupposition. Moreover, human reason is not the ultimate arbiter and guarantor of truth. “Reason exists for us only in concrete, historical terms—i.e., it is not its own master but remains constantly dependent on the given circumstances in which it operates” (Truth and Method, p. 276). Gadamer is not, however, suggesting that critical reason has no role in evaluating the various authority claims inherent in tradition, and is in no way promoting a kind of slavish or blind embrace of authority and tradition. Rather, Gadamer seeks to make us aware that even the reflections of critical reason are particular and situated. We all belong to traditions and this “belonging to a tradition is a condition of hermeneutics (Truth and Method, p. 291). Our own presuppositions that play into our interpretation of a text are intimately bound to our tradition. As Gadamer states, “the meaning of ‘belonging’—i.e., the element of tradition in our historical-hermeneutical activity is fulfilled in the commonality of fundamental, enabling prejudices” (Truth and Method, p. 295). Gadamer, of course, acknowledges that traditions can and do possess false presuppositions which lead to misguided interpretations. Thus, the crucial question of hermeneutics becomes, “how to distinguish the true prejudices, by which we understand, from the false ones, by which we misunderstand (Truth and Method, p. 299).

According to Echeverria, Gadamer’s answer to this question is not satisfying. Gadamer appeals to “temporal distance,” as that which enables us to discern between “blind prejudices” and “those which illumine.” In other words, Gadamer seems to imply (as Echeverria presents him) that temporal/historical distance is a necessary condition for distinguishing between true and false prejudices as such apply to our textual interpretations. Surely there are some instances where temporal distance helps us to decide between true and false prejudices; however, Echeverria asks whether such a condition is also a sufficient condition (or even a necessary one). Moreover, how are we then to understand current texts, contemporary works of art, philosophy etc.? We can, after all, have instances in which various traditions transmit to generation after generation systematic misreads of texts or historical events (e.g., religious cults). Given that I have not read enough Gadamer to be able to detect whether or not Echeverria has oversimplified matters or not on this issue, I cannot comment further. I do tend to disagree with a number of Echeverria’s claims at the end of the essay—e.g., his sharp distinction between objective meaning and significance/relevance of a text for me.

Bibliography

1. Echeverria, Eduardo J. “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Question of Relativism,” as found in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, eds. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, James K.A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson, (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 51-81.
2. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. Truth and Method 2nd rev. ed.,, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994).

Eduardo J. Echeverria, in his essay, “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Question of Relativism,” begins by citing a passage from Truth and Method in which Gadamer claims that human reason is both situated in and limited to historical circumstances. Though Gadamer rejects what Echeverria calls “absolute reason”—a kind of universal, objective human reason transcending history—Echeverria argues (as does Robert Sokolowski) that Gadamer is not a relativist when it comes to truth. Here Echeverria makes an important distinction between justification and truth and what he calls “simple relativism” and “sophisticated relativism.” Simple relativism is “the idea that the same belief can be true for one person but not true for everyone” (p. 52). In simple relativism, belief and truth is person relative. Sophisticated relativism, on the other hand, is a “view in which epistemic justification and truth receive different treatment: justification is relative to historical context, but truth is not” (p. 52). Echeverria notes that both Michael Polanyi and Jeffrey Stout have defended variations of sophisticated relativism, arguing that “truth as reality is distinguishable from what one is justified in holding to be true. That is, whether we are justified in believing something to be true is a relative matter, but truth itself is not” (p. 52). Given this distinction, Echeverria contends that Gadamer is not a relativist when it comes to truth and hence, should be understood as a kind of “sophisticated relativist.” As Echeverria explains, “Gadamer’s hermeneutics is an attempt to hold together a concept of truth with our historicity, with the former being irreducible to the latter, which is the epistemic context of justification and its embedded historical standards or warrants” (p. 53).

Echeverria then enters into a discussion of relativism as over against realism. As mentioned above, (simple) relativism may be understood as the “view that beliefs are true for those who hold them, which implies that there is no such thing as objectively or absolutely true beliefs. All truth is then relative to the person who believes it” (p. 53). As is well-known, those who take issue with relativism, point out that it is self-refuting and hence, necessarily false. Moreover, they also argue that relativism does away with the distinction between the way things are and what one believes to be the case about the way things are. This ultimately leads to a rejection of the distinction between true and false beliefs because the latter are parasitic on the former. Here Echeverria highlights the need to distinguish between justification and truth. “That a proposition (p) being true (or false) in no way depends upon someone’s being justified, or rational, in believing that p, nor upon someone’s having reasons for believing that p; indeed, it does not depend upon someone’s believing that p, because if p is true, it would be true even if no one believed it. Thus, according to the realist, objective truth exists. That is, a belief is true if and only if objective reality is the way the belief says it is; otherwise, the belief is false. This view Echeverria calls “objectivism” (as well as “realism”). “Epistemological absolutism,” a view in which “human reason is understood as to aspiring to some kind of universal validity, of reaching absolute truth,” is generally considered the extreme opposite of relativism, as well as a “corollary of objectivism” (p. 54). In addition, the epistemological absolutist believes that there are some propositions that cannot be rejected without entering into irrationalism. The epistemological relativist who is likewise a fallibilist, on the other hand, demurs the notion of objective rationality, as well as the idea that human reason can obtain the “absolute truth,” yet s/he does not have to reject the distinction between truth or error (p. 54). “Truth, as a ‘transcendent,’ ‘regulative,’ ‘normative’ ideal, and epistemological relativism are apparently compatible because an epistemological relativist is a relativist about rationality, not about truth itself. Unlike the epistemological absolutist, he holds instead to a permissive notion rationality where one is justified in believing or warranted in asserting a belief according to one’s intellectual standards, available reasons and evidence, in short, one’s present epistemic circumstances. In these circumstances, we can, and generally do, make situation-and person-specific truth claims. But because of the fallible nature of those claims we can never attain a ‘wholly unconditioned truth’” (pp. 54-55; Thomas McCarthy, “Contra Relativism: A Thought-Experiment,” in Relativism: Interpretation and Confrontation, ed. Michael Krausz (Notre Dame: Univ. of Notre Dame Press, 1989), p. 260).

Bibliography

Echeverria, Eduardo J. “Gadamer’s Hermeneutics and the Question of Relativism,” as found in Hermeneutics at the Crossroads, eds. Kevin J. Vanhoozer, James K.A. Smith, and Bruce Ellis Benson, (Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press, 2006), pp. 51-81.