Rabelais and Montaigne 711 the moral elevation of his work which would make the Church stare and the conventicle groan, and yet would be the truth, and nothing but the truth." These may seem hard sayings, utterly incredible if portions of his work are alone regarded, but accurate enough if the purpose and drift of his teaching as a whole be considered. It has been well said that the confession of faith of the curé of Meudon has far more moral reality than that which Rousseau puts into the mouth of his Savoyard vicar. He believes that the universe needs no other governor than its Creator, whose word guides the whole and determines the nature, properties, and condition of each several thing. Pascal's famous definition of Deity, "a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere," is but an echo from Rabelais. And he can, with the wisest of the ancients and the best of the moderns, speak of the "great Soul of the universe which quickens all things." La Bruyère described his work as "a chimera; it has the face of a beautiful woman, but the tail of a serpent." Yet surely the man who had to wear the mask of a buffoon that he might preach the wisdom of truth and love to his age, well deserves the epigram which Beza wrote in his honour: "Qui sic nugatur, tractantem ut seria vincat, Seria cum faciet dic, rogo, quantus erit?” Montaigne is of all Frenchmen most thoroughly a son of the Renaissance. He loves books, especially the solid and sensible and well-flavoured books written in the ancient classic tongues, the men who made and those who read them, and he loved to study man. He says: "Je suis moy mesme la matière de mon livre." And he does not understand himself in any little or narrow sense, but rather as the epitome and mirror of mankind. The world in which he lived was not friendly to the freedom of thought which was expressed in affirmative speech or creative conduct, and so he learned to be silent or sceptical. He had seen men hate each other, willingly burn or be burned, out of love to God; and he was moved by pity to moralise on the behaviour of those who were so positive where they could not know, and so little understood the God in whom they professed to believe that they never saw what the love of Him bound them to be and to do. The man that he studied and described was not abstract but concrete man, with all his foibles and failings, limited in his nature but infinite in his views, differing without ceasing from his fellows, and not always able to agree with himself. And man, so conceived, dwells amid mystery, has it within him, and confronts it without. Custom may guide him, but not reason; for reason builds on arguments, whose every position depends on another, in a series infinitely regressive. "Les hommes sont tourmentés par les opinions qu'ils ont des choses, non par les choses mesmes." Where man is so ignorant he ought not to be dogmatic; where truth is what all seek and no one can be sure that he finds, 712 The Teutonic Renaissance i.e. where it is nothing but a mere probability, it is a folly to spill human blood for it. God is unknown even in religion; as many as the nations of men so many are the forms under which He is worshipped. And when they try to conceive and name Him, they degrade Him to their own level. God is made in the image of man rather than man in the image of God; to the Ethiopian He is black, to the Greek He is white, and lithe and graceful; to the brute He would be bestial and to the triangle triangular. Man, then, is so surrounded with contradictions that he cannot say what is or is not true. Wisdom was with Sextus Empiricus when he said: “παντὶ λόγῳ λόγος ἴσος ἀντικείται. Il n'y a nulle raison qui n'en ait une contraire, dit le plus sage parti des philosophes." Where man so doubts he is too paralysed to fight or to affirm. Montaigne's sympathies might be with those who worked and suffered for a new heaven and a new earth; but his egoism inclined to the conventional and followed the consuetudinary. Prevost-Paradol termed him "une perpétuelle leçon de tempérance et de modération." But this is a lesson which men of culture may read contentedly; while those who struggle to live or to make life worth living will hardly find in it the Gospel they need. We turn now to the Teutonic Renaissance. Like the Latin, it began as a revolt against the sovereignty of Aristotle; but, unlike the Latin, its literary antecedents were patristic and Biblical rather than classical. They were, indeed, so far as patristic, specifically Augustinian, and, so far as Biblical, Pauline. With Augustine, the underlying philosophy was Neo-Platonic, with a tendency to theosophy and mysticism; with Paul, the theology involved a philosophy of human nature and human history. This does not mean that other Fathers or other Scriptures were ignored, but rather that Paul was interpreted through Augustine, and Christ through Paul. This fundamental difference involved two others. In the first place, a more religious and more democratic temper; the religious being seen in the attempt to realise the new ideals, and the democratic in the strenuous and combatant spirit by which alone this could be accomplished. The thought which lived in the Schools could not resist the authority that spoke in the name of the Church and was enforced by the penalties of the State; but the thought which interpreted God to the conscience was one that bowed to no authority lower than His. In the second place, Teutonic was more theological than Latin thought. The categories, which the past had formulated for the interpretation of being, it declined to accept; and so it had to discover and define those which it meant to use in their stead. The God with whom it started was not an abstract and isolated but a living and related Deity; and man it conceived sub specie aeternitatis, as a being whom God had made and ruled. The very limitation of its field was an enlargement of Characteristics of the movement 713 its scope; its primary datum was the Eternal God, and its secondary was the created universe, especially the man who bore the image of his Maker. This man was no mere individual or insulated unit, but a race a connected, coherent, organic unity. The human being was local, but human nature was universal; before the individual could be, the whole must exist; and so man must be interpreted in terms of mankind rather than mankind in the terms of the single and local man. And this signified that in character, as well as in nature, the race was a unity; the past made the present, the heir became as his inheritance; and so any change in man had to be effected by the Maker and not by those He had made. And here Augustine pointed the way to the goal which Paul had reached : the will of God had never ceased to be active, for it was infinite; and it could not cease to be gracious, for it was holy and perfect; therefore, from this will, since man's nature was by his corporate being and his inevitable inheritance evil, all the good he could ever be or achieve must come. This fundamental idea was common to the types most characteristic of the Teutonic Renaissance. It was expressed in Luther's Servum Arbitrium, in Zwingli's Providentia Actuosa, in Calvin's Decretum Absolutum. These all signified that the sole causality of good belonged to God, that grace was of the essence of His will, and that where He so willed, man could not but be saved, and, where He did not so will, no amelioration of state was possible. But this must not be interpreted to mean that man had been created and constituted of God for darkness rather than light; on the contrary, these thinkers all agree in affirming a universal light of nature, i.e. ideas implanted in us by the Creator, or, as Melanchthon phrased it, "Notitiae nobiscum nascentes divinitus sparsae in mentibus nostris." In this position they were more influenced by Paul than by Augustine; with the Apostle, they argued that the moral law had been written in the heart before it was printed on tables of stone, and that without the one the other could neither possess authority nor be understood. But they also argued that knowledge without obedience was insufficient; and therefore they held God's will to be needed to enable man both to will and to do the good. But their differences of statement and standpoint were as instructive as their agreements. When Luther affirmed the absolute bondage of the will and Calvin the absolute decree of God, the one looked at the matter as a question of man's need, the other as a question of God's power; and so they agreed in idea though they differed in standpoint. Yet the difference proved to be more radical than the agreement. And so, when Zwingli said "he would rather share the eternal lot of a Socrates or a Seneca than that of the Pope," he meant that God willed good to men who were outside the Church or the covenants, without willing the means which both Luther and Calvin conceived to be necessary to salvation. It is through such differences as these that the types and tendencies of Teutonic thought must be conceived and explained. 714 Luther. Jakob Boehme Luther's Article of a Standing or Failing Church, Justification by Faith alone, is the positive side of the idea which is negatively expressed as the bondage of the will; and the idea in both its positive and negative forms implies a philosophy of existence which may be stated as a question thus: How is God, as the source of all good, related to man as the seat and servant of evil? God and man, good as identical with God and evil as inseparable from man, are recognised, and the problem is: how is the good to overcome the evil? The man who frames the problem is a mystic; God is the supreme desire and delight of his soul; and he conceives sin as a sort of inverted capacity for God, the dust which has stifled a thirst and turned it into an infinite misery. Now, Luther has two forms under which he conceives God's relation to man, a juristic denoted by the term "justification," and a vital denoted by the term "faith." “Justification" is the acquittal of the guilty: "faith is nothing else than the true life realised in God." The one term thus describes the universe as ethically governed, while the other describes man as capable of participating in the eternal life; and the two together mean that he can realise his happiness or his end only as he shares the life of God and lives in harmony with His law. The philosophy here implied is large and sublime, though its intrinsic worth may be hidden by the crudity of its earliest forms. The Lutheran doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum attempts for example, to establish a kind of equation between the ideas of God and man. The person of Christ is a symbol of humanity; in it man can so participate as to share its perfections and dignity. Christ's humanity is capable of deity; God lives in Him now openly, now cryptically, but ever really; and His humanity so penetrates the Deity as to touch Him with a feeling of our infirmities and make Him participant in our lot as we are in His life. This is the very root and essence of German mysticism, which gives to the German hymns their beauty and their pathos, which inspired the speculations of Brenz and Chemnitz, and which later determined Schelling's doctrine of "indifference" or the "identity of subject and object," and Hegel's "absolute idealism." If we read Boehme from this point of view, how splendid his dreams and how reasonable his very extravagances become ! We are not surprised to hear him speak of the necessity of antitheses to all being, and especially to the life and thought of God, of evil being as necessary as good, or wrath as essential as love in God, who is the fundament of hell as well as of heaven, both the everlasting No, and the eternal Yes. He dwells in nature as the soul dwells in the body; there is no point in the body where the soul is not, no spot in space and no atom in nature where we can say, "God is not here." The man who is His image, who is holy as He is holy, good as He is good, is of no other matter than God. This may be Pantheism, but it is not rational and reasoned like Bruno's; it is emotional and felt, a thing of imagination all compact. It is born of the love that The Anabaptists.- The will of God 715 loses the sense of personal distinctness and identity in the joy, not of absolute possession, but of being possessed. Boehme says that the processes of nature conceal God, but the spirit of man reveals Him; and how can it reveal a God it does not know? But the spirit that has never seen and touched Deity has never known Him or been so one with Him as to know Him as he knows himself. Here lives the very soul of Luther and the essence of all his thought. Boehme's friend and biographer describes him as a little man of mean aspect, thin voice, snub nose, but eyes blue as heaven, bright and gleaming like the windows of Solomon's temple. And he lived in harmony with lines which he wrote with his own toil-stained hand : "Wem Zeit ist wie Ewigkeit Und Ewigkeit wie Zeit, Von allem Streit." Of course, such a change as Luther instituted could not but powerfully affect the minds of men. But certain concomitants must not be set down as effects; and the Peasants' War had its causes in centuries of German history, though among its occasions must be reckoned the ideas which the Reformation had thrown as it were into the air. But quite otherwise was it with the Anabaptist movement. While it sprang up and flourished in provinces and cities where Zwingli was potent as well as in places more expressly Lutheran, yet it belonged more specifically to the Lutheran than to the Reformed Church. To discuss its causes and forms would carry us far beyond our available space. It is enough to say: the principle of parity which it emphasised was more antagonistic to the one Church than to the other. Luther created his Church by the help of Princes; Calvin founded his on the goodwill of the people. The system that claimed fullest freedom for the individual could find less fault with the latter than with the former. And it is significant that the heresies which troubled the Lutherans were largely political and social, while those that afflicted the Reformed were mainly intellectual and moral. In nothing is the character of a Society more revealed than in the heresies to which it is most liable. Zwingli and Calvin alike conceived God under the category of will, and construed man and history through it. Both held faith to be a consequence of, rather than a condition for, election; man believed because God had so decreed, and into His will every step in their upward or downward progress was resolved. Now, this emphasis on the will of God necessarily threw into prominence the ideas of God and will, with the result that the main varieties of opinion in the Reformed Church concerned these two ideas. If the will of God was the supreme and sole causality in all human affairs, and if the will always was as the nature was, it became a matter of primary consequence to know what kind of being God was, and what His nature and character. This question was |