Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 385 - I Too Can Ask Questions - Protestant Scholasticism.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, I too can ask questions. Protestant Scholasticism. As we saw last time, Calvin was no scholastic philosopher. Unlike Luther, he studied law, not theology, and his major work The Institutes contains in its many pages a scant ten references to Aristotle. And like Luther, he was tireless in carping at the time-wasting pedantries of the scholastics. So the prospects for a Calvinist or Reformation version of scholasticism look dim. Indeed, the scholar Richard A. Miller has observed that some modern-day Protestants would consider this to be an unpleasant theological oxymoron. To be Protestant and scholastic at the same time was to be a living contradiction. Yet as Miller and others have shown, there were plenty of Protestants who deployed the intellectual tools of Aristotle's logic, took inspiration from his ethics and natural philosophy, and even drew on Catholic authorities like Thomas Aquinas. And one of them was a close collaborator of Calvin. His name was Theodore Beza, and he was the first rector of the Academy at Geneva. Beza may be credited with supplying a rational defense of Calvinism, of the sort that Calvin himself failed to provide, or as I suggested in the last episode, deliberately chose not to provide. Beza outlived Calvin by more than four decades, dying only in 1605. His longevity and position as an educator gave him ample opportunity to put his stamp on the intellectual life of Geneva and the Calvinist movement more generally. A Catholic critic went so far as to say that Beza was <20>like a pope to the Calvinists, not meant as a compliment and not likely to be received as one, but still a testimony to his importance.<2E> Beza was open in his use of scholastic methods. He said, for instance, that he would not be importing the newfangled ideas of the Paris thinker Peter Ramos, when they swept across Europe, but would instead stick religiously <20> if you'll pardon the expression <20> to Aristotle. As a Calvinist, he placed limits on the capacity of fallen human reason, but he still believed that <20>reasoning<6E> was of great importance for Protestant thought. One should study dialectic to learn how to test one's own ideas for consistency and for the sake of refuting one's opponents. It sometimes said that for Protestant intellectuals, scholasticism offered a set of useful methods while its doctrines were to be rejected, and Beza might well have said this himself. Like other reformers and the humanists, he often used the word <20>scholastics<63> as a term of abuse when criticizing the teachings of the schoolmen. Yet we can find him using their ideas at the heart of his own Calvinist teaching on the topic of faith and salvation. He held that human reason had held mastery over the will before the fall from grace through original sin, but now in our fallen state, the will often undermines or overwhelms our reason. So in the terms we apply to medieval scholastics like Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Scotus, Beza is a rationalist when it comes to the state of humans before the fall, and a voluntarist when it comes to our situation once corrupted by sin. As a result, it is not enough to be rationally convinced about topics like God's providence. The will must also be reformed through the gift of grace, just as Calvin had been saying, albeit in more philosophical language. This nicely exemplifies the way school distinctions could be reformed for use by Protestants. At the same time, the schools themselves were being reformed. Throughout the 16th century, we see fairly dramatic changes in the universities of Central and Eastern Europe, both in terms of personnel and curriculum. As territories and their rulers adopted one or another Protestant confession, faculty members had to follow suit. Nowadays, academia is often a precarious environment to pursue a career, but at least we don't have to worry about the sort of thing that happened in Heidelberg in 1576, when 11 out of 16 professors left voluntarily, or were fired, after Elector, Ludwig VI, adopted Lutheranism. Only seven years later, Calvinism became the new order of the day, leading to further changes in staffing. As for curriculum, the Protestants' reorganization of these institutions showed their allegiance to humanist values. Chairs in Hebrew and Greek came in, alongside empirical topics like history, geography, and anatomy. Meanwhile, the more abstract study of metaphysics was on the wane, and Aristotelian natural philosophy was not a high priority either. These upheavals were necessarily accompanied by a change in the reading list. Textbooks and encyclopedias were churned out by the printing presses, with Philipp von Langthon's works in particular being assigned to many students. There was a general trend towards studying disciplines individually, rather than seeing them as forming a united structure, as the medieval scholastics had envisioned. Teachers were now more likely to be specialists, focusing on only one or two disciplines, instead of lecturing in rotation across the whole curriculum. If students saw any common link between the different courses they were offered, it came more in the form of method and terminology. This was a legacy of the continuing stress on Aristotelian logic as the introductory topic that needed to be mastered by all young scholars. But again, it was not only method that was retained from the Aristotelian tradition. An outline of the curriculum taught in Freiburg in 1593 stated that the peripatetic philosophers should be taught, defended, and expounded whenever they teach rightly. If this all sounds rather unsystematic to you, then you aren't alone. The scholastic Bartholomew Kekkerman tried to impose a greater degree of order on the school and university curricula around the turn of the 17th century. He was a Calvinist who hailed from Gdansk in modern-day Poland, and taught in Heidelberg before returning home in 1602 to teach at the Gdansk Gymnasium. He died in 1609. He produced a series of textbooks on philosophy towards the end of his life, for which he used the word system, and which he intended as a complement for the reading of primary literature. Thus, Kekkerman sought to move education away from the rather unstructured approach he saw in the humanist movement. Here he would have had in mind the presentation of individual common places for each discipline that had been promoted by Erasmus and the Langthon. Kekkerman was firmly convinced that such a well-structured presentation of the rational sciences could be of support to true religion. He wrote that, Philosophy is of the highest utility and greatest necessity to the study of theology, both for establishing Protestant doctrine and for defending that doctrine against critics. He also had to fend off critics of philosophy like Daniel Hofmann, who argued that a genuinely Christian university would have no place for it. Against Hofmann and other anti-rationalists, Kekkerman insisted that philosophy is a form of wisdom bestowed upon humankind as a gift from God. It is impossible that philosophical truth and religious truth come into conflict, something that Kekkerman characteristically proved using syllogistic arguments like this one, What is one and simple is not multiplied, truth is one and simple, therefore truth is not multiplied and divided, that is, into rival truths of theology and philosophy. So apparent conflicts between philosophy and faith are just that, only apparent. Admittedly, it might take some subtlety to resolve such conflicts, as when Kekkerman said that Aristotelian natural philosophy is right to say that nothing can be generated from nothing, even though it is possible for God to create from nothing. Rather surprisingly, Protestant schoolmen were ready to adopt the same friendly attitude towards Aristotle's Nicomachean ethics, which they might have found deeply problematic. In this work, Aristotle clearly teaches that humans can achieve happiness through their natural capacity for practical virtue and wisdom. How could Protestants possibly make use of this text when they believe that good works stem from faith and that only faith secures a happy afterlife? For an answer, we can turn to Protestant commentaries on the ethics in the 16th century and beyond. A recent study of these counts 27 such commentaries by Lutherans alone. As this shows, Aristotle was still taken as an authoritative writer for ethics. In part, we can explain this by reminding ourselves that Luther and the other leading reformers believed that good behavior and political order should be encouraged across society even among the sinful majority, or rather especially among the sinful, since the faithful would naturally perform good works. But some exegetes went further than that. A commentary written by the Calvinist thinker Peter Martyr Vermigli summarizes Aristotle's doctrines in syllogistic form, and shows the harmony between these arguments and the teaching of scripture. Not content to be the living contradiction that is a Protestant scholastic, Vermigli went so far as to be a Calvinist follower of Thomas Aquinas. Along with his Italian colleague, Giro Malo Zanki, Vermigli has been taken to represent Calvinist Thomism, which sounds not so much oxymoronic as plain old moronic. How could any serious scholar simultaneously follow Calvin and value the teachings of this central theologian of the Catholic tradition? Actually, that was part of the attraction. Zanki delighted in refuting the Catholic doctrine of grace with premises taken from Aquinas' writings, which made for an effective dialectical weapon. Both Vermigli and Zanki were trained in the ways of scholasticism in Italy, in Vermigli's case in the center of Aristotelianism that was Padua. Once they converted to Calvinism, the Inquisition made it impossible for them to stay there. Even if your name is Peter Martyr Vermigli, you might not actually want to be a martyr. So they both made their way to the safe haven of Strasbourg, where they taught together in the 1550s. Zanki would later teach in Heidelberg, where he produced his main writings. Like Keckerman, these two Calvinists believed that philosophy and faith could have a close and productive working relationship. In theory, Protestants settled all questions by consulting scripture, but we've seen how well that worked out in cases like Zwingli and Luther's disagreement over the Eucharist. Philosophical tools could be used, with caution, to settle such disputes among the Reformers, as well as to refute the Catholics. Aristotle in particular was a vital resource in this endeavor. Zanki considered him the best of all authors after God, and prepared an edition of Aristotle's Physics at the behest of the Protestant printer Johann Sturm. In his introduction, Zanki endorses the study of natural philosophy in forthright terms. Vermigli and Zanki thus left ample room for what is sometimes called natural theology, that is, the use of normal human reason to prove the existence of God and learn about his nature. As we saw, even Calvin had allowed some scope for natural theology, but really only so that he could convict the irreligious of having no excuse for their unbelief. For these later Calvinists, natural theology has a more positive function. Using our inborn capacities, we can get quite far in understanding the divine, and then go on to supplement this knowledge using revelation. This is exactly the way Aquinas thought about the relation between natural reason and revealed truth. Vermigli further agrees with him that the resulting combined body of theological knowledge has the structure of an Aristotelian science, with principles that generate demonstrated conclusions. None of this would necessarily be distinctively Calvinist, of course, but like Theodor Beza, our two Italians also applied Aristotelian ideas to the more characteristic topic of predestination. Thus Vermigli invoked a premise from one of Aristotle's logical works that whatever happens is necessary once it has happened. Given that God's knowledge of the future has already been accomplished eternally, this means that the future is necessary, just as Calvin taught. And both men also used scholastic methods when it came to defusing the disturbing implications of that determinism. Vermigli's school training allowed him to make some subtle but crucial distinctions in this area. Strictly speaking, the damned are not predestined to hell because God has not selected them out for their fate as he did with the elect. Rather, he simply allows them to damn themselves through sin. Furthermore, since faith generates good works, someone who does good can observe their own behavior and conclude that they are indeed among the elect. Sankey may have been the first to present this reassuring thought as a syllogism, along the following lines, By this point, you should hopefully be getting the sense that Protestant scholasticism was not only a very real phenomenon, but a phenomenon found across central Europe. I've already discussed thinkers active in modern-day Poland, Germany, Switzerland, and France. And here's a location you almost certainly didn't expect to hear mentioned in this episode, Croatia. It has to be included though, if only because of the activity of one Matthias Flakius Illyrikos. As the last part of his name indicates, he came from Istria, a peninsula on the western coast of Croatia. Flakius studied in Basel, Tübingen, and Wittenberg, where he was taught by none other than Melanchthon. Later he taught himself at Jena and elsewhere, including Frankfurt where he died in 1575. He's remembered especially for his treatise The Key to Sacred Scripture, published in 1567. It has been hailed as a pioneering work by 20th century philosophers interested in hermeneutics, like Wilhelm Diltaï and Hans Georg Gadamer. This is because Flakius tried to develop explicit rules for the interpretation of texts. As the title of his treatise indicates, he's especially interested in exegesis of the Bible, but his rules are of more general application and, in fact, echo to some extent, guidelines already used in antiquity to comment on Aristotle. The most important thing for the interpreter to decide is the purpose or overall intent of a work, which Flakius, following Melanchthon, calls its scope. Having determined this, all parts and aspects of the work can be read in light of their support of this central goal. Thus Flakius compares the scope to the face of a body and the parts of the body to its limbs. Particularly intriguing here is his idea that we firstly propose a possible scope as a kind of hypothesis, which we then test by reading the work, like trying a certain key in a lock, to borrow the metaphor of his title. Flakius deploys his knowledge of ancient philosophy to explain this procedure, saying that the hypothetical interpretation has only the status of what Plato called belief or doxa, whereas once confirmed it becomes knowledge or episteme. As a motto for the good interpreter, he cites Plato's adage that we must seek the one in the many and the many in the one. Plato would no doubt have been pleased by this and might have been even happier to learn that some progress was being made on another cause he supported, at least in his republic, the empowerment of women. We saw that Luther had fairly traditional notions about gender roles and he was hardly alone in that, but just as he unwittingly planted the seeds of political revolt, he opened the door, if only slightly, to the possibility that women might become spiritual leaders. After all, Luther taught the priesthood of all believers, and women can believe just as well as men. More or less this very point was made by Marie Dantier, a remarkable woman who preached the cause of reform in Strasbourg and Switzerland. She argued that the new Christian communities should be even-handed in their treatment of men and women, asking, do we have two Gospels, one for men, the other for women, one for the wise, the other for fools? She accepted, in line with an injunction laid down by Saint Paul, that women should not preach openly in the Church, but argued that this left open the course of writing and admonishing other Christians, which Dantier duly did, especially in a letter addressed to the Queen Marguerite de Navarre, which was full of attacks on the Catholic Church. Protestant printers were happy to disseminate such material, though the man who printed Dantier's letter was arrested for his trouble and might have been less happy at that stage. But the point is confirmed by the equally sensational case of Argula von Grumbach, who tried to intervene directly in this scholastic world we've been discussing in this episode. She was incensed at the treatment of a man named Arcasio who was put on trial for his reformist beliefs. So in 1523, she wrote a letter to the University of Ingolstadt, remonstrating with the theologians for persecuting Seyhofer. She sarcastically told them that, as far as I can see, that means that the hangman is accounted the most learned. In all, Argula's campaign involved writing seven letters to schoolmen and princes, which were collected and printed as a pamphlet that was put out in no fewer than 17 editions. We know that she also wrote to leading reformers like Luther and Melanchthon, though these are lost. She anticipated that some might object to the idea of a woman involving herself in such matters. In response, she delivered a line that might be invoked by any Protestant explaining why they are delving into the affairs of the universities, by the grace of God, I too can ask questions and hear answers. With this tour around Central Europe, we've come to the end of the series of episodes on the outbreak of the Reformation and its immediate philosophical implications. Its wider implications, geographically and chronologically, will be concerning us for many, many episodes to come. For now though, we'll be staying in and around 16th century Germany, as we look at some of the noteworthy figures who lived in the time of the Reformation, but are not especially known for their part in it. In particular, we'll be looking at contributors to science, like Paracelsus, Copernicus, and Tycho Brahe. But first up will be a man who is better known for pseudoscience, thanks to his writings on magic and the occult. Less famous, but also worthy of note, is his treatise On the Nobility and Superiority of the Feminine Sex, a work that would surely have delighted Dantier and von Grumbach. Let us turn then from Arrghula to the solid days of early modern science, as we leaf the Reformation for now and address the work of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Netzheim, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.