Renaissance and Reformation: the Intellectual Genesis (review)

Anthony Levi's volume has three unfashionable but admirable characteristics: a broad sweep of three centuries of western Christian intellectual history; a new interpretation of visions of human potential in the Renaissance and Reformation; and a frontal tackling of profound issues without undue theorising.

Levi argues that Renaissance and Reformation both arose from the shortcomings of late medieval scholasticism. Aquinas had linked rational divine law with humane aspirations, making human fulfilment a part of human nature, perfected by grace. But after 1300, his 'naturalist' view was displaced by Ockham's nominalism and the via moderna which emphasized the transcendence of an arbitrary God whose moral decrees and absolute justice made salvation ultimately uncertain. Because scholastics could not correlate God's justice with human experience and freewill, the quest for salvation increasingly involved mechanistic facientibus acts of asceticism and ritual meritorious works. Systematized divine law as interpreted by scholastic theologians lost contact with human moral needs and aspirations. It is clear that Levi is describing scholastics' difficulties with the restoration of the imago dei in human fulfilment: they saw inner transformation as a threat to Augustinian understanding of original sin, and feared that it eroded objective moral codes and the theology of God's absolute grace.

The Renaissance, he argues, was a response to this deficient pattern of salvation. Neo-classical scholars by-passed scholastic dilemmas and pursued salvation as an interior fulfilment, moving towards divine transcendence, harmonising human instincts with spiritually elevated notions. Levi employs several vignettes, such as Valla, who restored Aquinas's naturalism by correlating God and the human quest for intellectual satisfaction and moral fulfilment. Ficino's neo-Platonism asserted continuity between human and supernatural aspirations: his De Amore described how four furores (human instincts), the poetic, the religious, the prophetic, and the erotic furores, all elevate and ennoble the mind towards divine rapture and spiritual perfection. The main patristic source of this theology was Greek, and Levi argues that Ficino and others needed Greek to develop their spirituality and theology. He perceptively notes that the Eastern Orthodox, for whom theosis was already fundamental, did not need a Renaissance or Reformation.

The Renaissance notwithstanding, scholasticism's inadequacies continued to thwart human moral and spiritual fulfilment. The devotio moderna partially met the need (somewhere here Levi should have inserted the spirituality of Julian of Norwich), but increasing pressures of the 'fault lines' provoked new reactions from about 1480: More's Utopia 'massively restored confidence in the moral potential of human nature', Erasmus (described as an enigma and disingenuous), exempted Aquinas from his anti-scholastic polemic, and produced his Greek Novum instrumentum and his blasts against corruption, hypocrisy and irreligion in the hope of restoring authentic Christian transformation. Lefèvre, Reuchlin, the trilingual foundation, the polyglot Bible at Alcalá, were also part of this search.

Luther reacted against the sterile constraints of scholastic doctrines which drove people into excessive non-theological emotional repentance, and meditations on the suffering and death of Christ, themselves ineffective 'works' of a kind. Levi might have developed this extra-theological dimension, linking it with, for example, Here followeth a veray deuoute treatyse of 1521 (contemporary with Luther's explosives treatises), promising the reader that 32,004 years of purgatorial punishment will be pardoned with five pater nosters and five aves said with 'piteous beholding' of the illustrated pains of Christ. The crunch finally came with the violent eruption of the Reformation – what Levi calls the schismatic solutions to the scholastic dilemma – when Luther, Calvin and their contemporaries reacted to sterile scholastic categories. His chapter on 'Germany and Luther' has an excellent account of how quickly religion and politics became entwined, splitting Europe and providing the political-religious context for the ideas of Lefèvre and Briçonnet in France, and 'secular supremacy' in England and Switzerland – driving the later Erasmus into his despairing search for solutions to the condition of Christendom.

Three comments. First, Levi's 'fault lines' argument is a little harsh, since the monastic life, parish prayers...