Lecture 35, the grass withers waiting of the Middle Ages. The prayer comes from the late Middle Ages, which is the period covered by this lecture from a man named Heinrich von Laffenberg, lived in the 15th century. Actually, no, nothing about this man, except that he wrote this prayer. It was a very wonderful prayer and very appropriate. So we'll use this as we begin this class. Let's pray. Lord Jesus Christ, our Lord most dear, as thou was once an infant here. So give this child a dine we pray, thy grace and blessing day by day. Amen. I want to start with the idea of the medieval synthesis. I think one of the most astounding things about the third, 500 years of Christian history that we've been studying is this synthesis coming together, Christ and culture, theology and philosophy, faith and learning. A harmony of life that brought the sacred and the secular together in culture, in Europe, something we haven't experienced in history since then. So it will hard for us to know exactly how it would have been to have lived in that culture when we live in a culture that is so fractured, but in the medieval period, there was a coming together with synthesis. Let me illustrate it in just three ways. Book of theology, a book from poetry and the example of the architecture of the cathedrals. First, the book from theology. That has to be Thomas Aquinas and the suma theologii. Great suma of Thomas in which all learning is united to the devotion of Christ and the presentation of his truth. You can think of the suma as a great building, magnificent structure, like one of those wonderful Gothic cathedrals rising to the praise and glory of God. To move over into poetry, the great book is The Divine Comedy by Dante, a vision of divine order in heavenly beauty, which incorporates everything on earth, in hell, and in purgatory, and in heaven. I trust that you will read the divine comedy. If you have not, probably have at least read portions of it, but read it again. Here's an illustration of Dante with the comedy, his book being depicted. It's not an easy book to read, of course, but as you read it, you'll become war at home in the middle ages than anything else you can do and read it in Dorothy Sayers' translation. There are many translations of the divine comedy, but I think the one by Dorothy Sayers is the best and the footnotes from Dorothy Sayers, or by far the best, of any of the editors and translators of the divine comedy. Dorothy Sayers was a very competent theologian. She's more noted today for the Lord Peter Wimsey stories. Nine tailors and murder must advertise and buy red earrings and all of those. I've read them many times, because I can never find any detective stories quite up to Dorothy Sayers. I keep rereading her stories, but she wrote those stories to make money so she could really translate the divine comedy into English and do the work on the footnotes. Then the third illustration is the glory of the cathedrals. Thomas Aquinas, there's a synthesis in Dante, there's a coming together of many things and the cathedrals illustrate the same point. Our textbook puts it this way, the final outcome was and still is impressive. Stone seemed to take flight and rise to heaven. The entire building inside and out was a book in which the mysteries of faith in all creation were reflected. You have seen the cathedrals, you know something of the beauty and significance of those great constructions, such as the cathedrals in France, a chartra with its twin towers pointing upward to heaven. This is certainly God-directed architecture and contrasts with the chapel in Florence, which is an indication of Renaissance or humanistic style of architecture. You enter the cathedral and your eyes and spirit are immediately lifted up and the cathedral, like the summa, and like the divine comedy, is a work in which learning, understanding, theology, Old Testament, you Testament it often many other sources of knowledge are brought together. There are at least 1,000 statues separate statues carved into chartra cathedral, and you can see just a few of those there in the main west entrance with its three portals, representing the Trinity. Everything stands for something in a cathedral and certainly by walking through one of those cathedrals who could be impressed with the significance of this medieval synthesis. Dr. Hans Bayer, as you know, is a professor here at the seminary and he has written in his testimony during the first 17 years of my life there was little conscious interest and concern to consider the existence of God. Increasingly, however, I became curious about transcendent realities which might underlie the reality perceived by natural senses. A significant factor in this development was the study of the history, architecture, and message of the chartra cathedral in France. As a result, I began theological studies out of mere curiosity. So Hans Bayer's spiritual pilgrimage was really begun inspired by a visit to this church and that is a very interesting and important statement, I think. So the synthesis, the medieval synthesis. Let me show you another picture that cover from Christian History magazine, issue 49. This issue was called Everyday Faith in the Middle Ages and it shows the bishop blessing the lindit Bayer in France. And I wanted to show you this because here's the bishop in the church right in the center of everything. And then here's life surrounding everything, selling people, practicing various crafts, couple getting together there and sharing with one another, all kinds of activity. And right in the center of it all is the church, a kind of coming together of life in the Middle Ages. That was perhaps the 13th century, but it's not long before the synthesis begins to break apart. So as we look at the very end of the Middle Ages, the last lecture before we move next semester into the reformation of the 16th century, we have to think of the breakup of the medieval synthesis because the reformation comes not at the point of the height of the medieval world, but during the period called the waning of the Middle Ages. There are three theologians of significance. The first one is a kind of transitional figure who can belong to the earlier period, but transitions into the later period. And then two figures who are clearly in the later period, late medieval theologians. The first is John Dunn's scotus. He is Scottish, you can tell by his name, scotus, Scottish Franciscan scholastic theologian. Many ways like Thomas Aquinas. Many ways following the teaching of Aquinas, but in other ways striking out on his own. He lived in different places, in fact on his tomb in Cologne and Germany are the words Scotland gave birth to me. England received me. France taught me. Cologne retains me. Born in Scotland died in Germany. His contemporaries called him the subtle doctor. Once you have a great theologian like Thomas Aquinas, then about all you can do is just refine some of the small points after Thomas. Same thing happens after Calvin. Same thing happens after Karl Barrett, where theologians become more and more precise in attempting to refine and clarify the teachings of the master. So the subtle doctor, John Dunn's scotus, others particularly the human as the later human as to had very little sympathy with our patients for. Scholasticism found the theology of scotus two subtle, two dense and two obscure. It's interesting that we get the word dunns from Dunn's scotus. Now he wasn't the duds in the sense that we use the word. He was very brilliant, but he was so brilliant, people thought he was stupid. They didn't really understand what he was saying. And so that word comes into English curiously from this brilliant man who was not at all a duds. William of Arkham is a true late medieval theologian, English Franciscan. He got into a lot of trouble with the church because William of Arkham was in the strict movement of the Franciscans. The Franciscans had divided into Franciscans who felt it was appropriate to own for the order, to own property, and those Franciscans like William of Arkham who insisted on the absolute rule of Francis, which was don't own anything. And so William of Arkham faced the communication of the Pope over that issue and William was not loathed to criticize the Pope either. But one of the famous things from William of Arkham is what is called Arkham's razor. He read about that in our text and perhaps you've heard about it. It's a principle in philosophy and in theology which Arkham expressed in various ways, including this sentence, whatever can be done with fewer assumptions is done in vain with more. If you can drop out some things, drop them out and don't add them. The way I would translate that is keep it simple, stupid. Here is a opumist pig pondering means of examining philosophical assertions. I've noticed a pig over there in the box and somebody has created a timeline in the form of a pig. And that's appropriate because I've been using pigs all semester. Here's an Arkhamist pig just like a man shaves off his beard, so it's not needed. So the Arkhamist is shaving off all these principles and attitudes and concepts which are not needed. We'll see in a few minutes what some of those were. And then Gabriel Biel, it's called the Last of the Scholastics. German, member of the brothers of the common life, and a teacher of Luther, Gabriel Biel. All right, I just wanted to get those three names before you. And then we'll talk about late medieval theology which comes out of these late medieval theologians. In fact, theology becomes divided now into two types of theology, the Via Antiqua, the Old Way and the Via Moderna, the New Way. So by the time we come to the threshold of Reformation, there are theologians in both camps. There are Old Way theologians and there are New Way theologians. Perhaps the turning point is about the year 1350, Paul Tilley calls it the turning point in the history of Western thought. Well, why is it so important? What happened there? And we'll answer that by looking at three points. Volunteerism, nominalism, and how salvation was understood. Volunteerism is the view that develops in the Via Moderna, the late medieval theology, that the divine will takes precedence over the divine intellect. Now, that means if you're going to think about God, what is the primary characteristic of God that you're going to think about? It had been the divine intellect, what God knows and how God knows. God's rationality and in St. Thomas Aquinas, you've got a theology that is based on the rationality of God, who gives to us minds so that we can understand Him, not exhaust Him, not understand Him completely. But there's a nice fit between what God is and how He made people, and how God acts and thinks, and how we can understand how God acts and thinks. But that view was challenged by volunteerism, which means that the divine will becomes primary. If you're going to think about God, don't think first about God's intellect, think about God's will, what God chooses to do. Now, when that shift takes place, so that divine will becomes, you might say, the heart of theology over the divine intellect, then suddenly God appears to be not so noble as He is in the theology of the Via Antiqua, with the theistic proofs and other ways in which we can know God. We can understand God. The old way said, can we prove by human reason that God exists? And the answer was, of course, yes, even by human reason we can prove that God exists. I say, make sense for us to believe that God exists. There are the five theistic arguments. There was the ontological proof of Ansel and so on. The modern way, though, is going to say, no, we can't do that. There's no way that we can, by thinking and studying and developing arguments, there's no way that we can prove that the existence of God, God is unknowable. Now, that might seem to lead into agnosticism, but it really doesn't. Because the modern way says, we do know God, but we only know God by faith in the Bible. We don't know God by anything that we can do in terms of human rationality. We can know a lot of other things. We can know science, we can know history, but we can't know God. The two worlds there, the world of rationality and the world of faith. You know how those two came together and Thomas applied us in this great medieval synthesis. They're not the same, but they support each other. Now they're pulled apart, and you have one world over here. That's the world you live in, in terms of science, history, everything else. And then there's the world of faith, which you believe you accept on authority, but those two worlds don't touch. Thomas Aquinas did not only touch, but they come close together, even though they do not merge completely. The point of volunteerism is that God should be defined as absolute power, which means God does anything He chooses to do. Why does God do what He does? The old way would say something like this and answer to that question. God will something because that is right. That's good. It's reasonable. It makes sense. Cerdéus Homo, the incarnation comes because human sin and the necessity for a divine savior. So there has to be a God man, and the God man comes and he provides the atonement, which only God could provide, but only man could pay. See how that makes sense. But the new way said God will something because He wills it. There's no reason for the divine will other than the divine will. God did not have to save people through the incarnation of Christ. He chose to do it that way, but He could have done it anyway that He chose. There was not just one way. There were an infinite number of ways. So volunteerism in the Via Moderna talk that the divine will takes precedence over the divine intellect, undermining rational arguments for the knowledge of God. Now, not that God is hidden, like the mystics say, is that God is unpredictable. God can do anything He chooses to do. And all sorts of illustrations were brought forth, some observed, some thoughtful to try to illustrate this point. But still not complete confusion because the Via Moderna theologians were not paretics. They said, we believe, but we believe on the basis of sheer revelation and faith in the Bible, not because we can understand our figure it out. So it's not faith-seeking understanding, it's just faith-believing. Understanding comes over here in this other world. We understand sciences beginning to develop as a new concept. We can understand things here. We don't understand anything here. We just accept it and believe it. The result, you see, is a breach now between faith and authority on the one hand and reason on the other hand. If you live in two worlds, the time of the medieval synthesis, there was no division between those two worlds. You could think and believe at the same time. Now you must think rationally in this world, but in this world, except and believe. So the result is that what we know and what we believe, those two worlds are being pulled apart. It's a kind of secular religious division here. Secular here, religious here. Now the Via Moderna Theologians are not saying don't be religious, but this is how you can be religious. And this is how you live the rest of your life. Kenneth Clark in the book Civilization puts it this way, that the medieval man could see things very clearly, but he believed that these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order, which was the only true reality. Now that leads us into another point. That leads us into nominalism. Volunteerism, we've already talked about, the divine will takes precedence over the divine intellect. Now we're going to talk about nominalism. Medieval man could see things very clearly, but he believed these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order, which was the only true reality. The second emphasis of the Via Moderna was nominalism to challenge the realism of that quotation from Kenneth Clark. Realism puts an emphasis on the importance of universals. There's a universal concept and individual things adhere to that universal concept. It's important to know the concept and to understand the concept. Not so important to study the individual things. They just make up the universals, so the idea is that universals are real. That's realism. These ideas, these universals, this ideal order. The nominalism will challenge that now. Universals, the nominalists, the late medieval theologians, like Occam, would say, universals are just words, just figures of speech. They're not real. They exist only in the human mind. They're just names. That's nominalism. Realism says these universal concepts are real. nominalism says these universal concepts are just names. Now let me illustrate that one more time with pigs. Here's a realist pig and a nominalist pig contemplating a year of corn. The realist pig sees the year of corn. He says, aha, that is part. That's just one individual thing. But what really is important is this concept of corn. That's real. The nominalist pig says the word corn is just a name. And what's important is that individual year of corn, which he is just about ready to eat. Realism affirms that there is a universal concept that could be called cornness somewhere. The realist could never quite decide where that concept residing, but it was somewhere. And the important thing is to grasp that idea. Notalism says that the idea of cornness is not really necessary. So Occam's razor comes in here, cut all these things which you don't need. You don't need the idea of cornness to understand an individual year of corn. Well, what difference does it make? Strangely enough, maybe not so strangely. It made a huge amount of difference because the shift here is from putting stress on categories, universals, moving the stress to specifics and to individuals. Medieval world was taken up with these universals. Quotation that I gave earlier from Kenneth Clark. Medieval man could see things very clearly, see corn and all kinds of things. But he believed that these appearances should be considered as nothing more than symbols or tokens of an ideal order. What's really real there is not that ear of corn, but that ideal order which was the only true reality. That's going to mean that corporate experiences are central, the idea of church, the idea of state, the idea of an order, community. But individuals are not so important. They're only part of that which is important. But the nominalists turn that completely on his head and say, do away with the categories because they're not real and they don't make any difference and we don't need them and let's concentrate on individuals on this person, this ear of corn. That is going to make a difference both in society and in science. This people began empirically to study individual things rather than theorizing about what holds these things together in some sort of universal concept. Paul Tillick puts it this way, medieval realism maintains the powers of being which transcend the individual. Medieval nominalism preserves or emphasizes the value of the individual. We've got two pretty big points here, volunteerism, different way of thinking about God in theology and nominalism, different way of thinking about the world and things in it. The doctrine of salvation in both the Via Antiqua and the Via Moderna was a mixture of grace and works. We've looked at that already. Both are meritorious, semi-pilagian. The old way, though different from the new way, slightly or significantly, I would say, at this one point. The old way of Thomas Aquinas said, you must do something in order to be saved but remember, God starts it all. God starts the process. So it's God's grace plus your cooperation which produces more grace and consequently enables you to cooperate further with that added grace. The new way is more pallagian, not less because the new way says you start the process. With your own natural ability, you do what lies within you and added to your effort, people, as it is, is God's grace, which is mighty, which enables you to do something better, which produces more grace and so on. But in third systems, there is a percentage theology even though the old way is preferable to the new way. There was also, however, a modern Augustinian school that rejected both ways in terms of theology and went back to the teachings of Augustine. We have already noted that in Thomas Bradwardine who died in 1349 and Gregory of Remini in Italy who died in 1358 so in the 14th century there is this renewed emphasis on the teaching of Augustine. The salvation is by grace alone and not through our human effort. Of course, in the 16th century there will be another mighty Augustinian revival in the teaching of Luther and of Calvin. Well, that's a description of the breakup of the medieval synthesis in terms of its theology. The church was breaking up too and we've studied this so I'll just note those points in passing. There was the Babylonian captivity of the papacy in the 14th century. There was the great sism or the papal sism of the late 14th and early 15th centuries and there was failure to reform in head and members. This was an expression that was used constantly by the church saying that there is need to reform the church through and through from the Pope all the way down to the least member. Of the church and certainly there was much concern on the part of many many people that the church was breaking up and collapsing under its own ineptitude and worldliness years of intrigue and infighting and corruption taken their toll on the papacy and on the church. The Italian poet Bocaccio told a story about a Jew who came to Rome and embraced Christianity on the basis that any religion that could survive such equities of its leaders must be the true faith. Christianity could still exist after all of this. There is something amazing about it. Well reform was attempted but it's really too little and it's too late. Then we come to a human life because as we come to the late medieval period there are some great crises in human life. I suppose you could say that's always true in every century and that it would be a true statement but seemingly on the eve of the reformation the troubles of human life were greater than before. Stephen Osmet says this never before were not even during the century of the Roman Empire's collapse Western people walked through the valley of the shadow of death. You can find crises and dangers longing and despair illustrated in so many different ways from the ancient Pierce Palman story of the collapse of Christian culture to the modern book by Barbara Tuckman a distant mirror the calamitous 14th century. In which she says it is reassuring to know that the human species is lived through worse before what she does in that book which is an intriguing book and a big book. It's the right at history of the 14th century and see that as a distant mirror that is the 20th century almost the 21st century we can look back to this distant mirror and see many of the same problems that our culture faces today were problems that were faced in this calamitous 14th century. Well it's not a very good place to end the course and the only thing I can say is to be continued next semester in reformation and modern church history but let me end this lecture and this semester's work this way. Barbara Tuckman said it's reassuring to know that the human species has lived through worse before I don't find that particularly reassuring as I look at the next century soon to begin. But I do find this reassuring from Isaiah 40 verses 7 and 8 the grass withers and the flowers fall because the breath of the Lord blows on them. Surely the people are grass. The grass withers and the flowers fall but the word of our God stands forever. Well thank you very much for putting up with all of these things for so long.