From: riggs@descartes.tec.army.mil (Bill Riggs)
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,talk.religion.misc
Subject: Re: Will the -REAL- Christians please stand up? Was: What did Judas be
Date: 13 Jan 93 03:30:17 GMT
Followup-To: sci.skeptic,talk.religion.misc
Organization: LNK Corporation, Riverdale, MD

In article <RICE.93Jan8093646@hpp-ipc-2.stanford.edu> rice@sumex-aim.Stanford.EDU (James Rice) writes:
>
>Going back into opinion giving mode now (humility not being one of my
>common traits), I am still of the opinion that any religion that can
>make it an article of faith that you are compelled to believe a set of
>assertions, or are to be branded a sinner and will hence spend yet
>more years in pergatory is a viscious and wicked institution.  The
>catholics I knew in my youth genuinely seemed to think that they would
>accumulate ever more theological brownie points for believing ever
>less logical and plausible sounding things.
>
>Although I have met a bunch of screwed up people, RCs are by a fair
>way the most fucked-up people I have met (Jehovah's witnesses are a
>not too distant second).  Catholics are also in, my experience, the
>most theologically ignorant believers in an established religion
>that I have encountered.

	My, oh, my ! Aren't WE in the judgement seat here ?

	Having been off the net for awhile, but also having been in a very
lengthy one-on-one interchange with one of the atheist clan, on the matter of 
the impact of religious obedience on believers' behavior, I have some 
"new material" to throw into the fire. Please be warned; it is quite long, 
but hopefully rewarding to those who choose to slog through it all:

	        A few days ago, I was eating a late dinner at a Denny's 
restaurant in Woodbridge. In the restaurant, there was a young (I'd say late 
20s, from the look of him) Catholic priest who was having a rather intense 
and personal discussion on marriage and family issues with a young woman, 
apparently a family friend, rather than one of his parishoners. Nonetheless, 
the priest was in a counseling mode, and the subject turned to marriage with 
a non-Catholic spouse. Here is a paraphrase of what the young priest had to 
say:

        "When you study math and science in school, study evolution, you don't
reject this knowledge, Right ? No. You would be foolish to quarrel with the
factual truth. Well, it is equally stupid to dispute what the Church teaches.
WE ARE THE ONLY RELIGION WHICH HAS THE TRUTH, BECAUSE WE ARE REALITY. There
is a DIFFERENCE between OUR RELIGION and OTHERS because of this. We respect
the opinions of others, whether they be Hindus, Mormons, Jehovah Witnesses,
or what have you, but THEY ARE ALL WRONG. If you ask a Protestant about this,
he will tell you that it doesn't matter what you believe, as long as you're
sincere, but that is not the position of the (Catholic) Church. THEY ARE
ALL WRONG, EXCEPT US. The Protestants have NO objection to what WE believe,
but we have a LOT of objections to what THEY believe that they cannot
BEGIN to answer."

        The priest did not go into many specifics about what items of belief
the Protestants adhered to which were objectionable, but from the context of
his statements, it seemed as if one of the reasons he felt justified in making
these statements was that the Catholic Church predated all the others, and
that it had both a longer (and presumably more valid) mandate from God, and
that by inference, if that mandate were invalid, a large group of Catholic
Christians must have died in the faith and gone to hell. Or so the logic train
seemed to flow. Toward the end, he made the following comments (presumably
the young woman was a bit shocked by what she had just heard - at this
point, even though the young priest was speaking loudly, I was trying not
to look in their direction, even though the conversation had taken an 
interesting turn. But I was fascinated that the young priest should enunciate 
such patently illiberal sentiments in a public place.), "We ARE ARROGANT, 
JUST LIKE OUR FOUNDER. EITHER WHAT WE SAY IS TRUE, OR WE ARE THE BIGGEST SET 
OF HYPOCRITES IN THE WORLD. EITHER HE WAS WHO HE SAID HE WAS, OR HE WAS A 
FRAUD."

        It isn't every day that you get such a profound and determined
summarization of the Catholic approach to theology, philosophical truth, and
everyday living, absolutely free of charge. And as he uttered the words "We
are the only religion that has the truth, because we are reality", comparing
it to math and science, I knew I was listening to an Aristotelean trained
under the system of St. Thomas Acquinas. Right there in the flesh - WOW !

	Well, historically, the divergence between the Protestant and Catholic
modes of belief is both of relevance to this debate, as well as one of the
more poorly represented data sets in sci.skeptic and talk.religion.misc. What
follows is an introduction to a modern edition of Erasmus's "Praise of
Folly", a work of considerable significance in the history of both philosophy
and theology. It is worth noting here that Erasmus lived in a time when it
was still possible to combine the words "Christian", "Evangelical", and 
"Humanist" meaningfully, however much the modern humanists of the secular
variety seek to cover this unusual phenomenon up.

	My own, parenthetical, comments are in parentheses.

	        ERASMUS, SCHOLASTICS, HUMANISTS, AND REFORMERS

                		by A.H.T. Levi

        "In order to understand what in the end the "Praise of Folly" is
about, it is necessary to point to the reactionary nature of late medieval
scholastic theology. The high middle ages had seen in the work of Thomas
Aquinas (c. 1225-74) a daring attempt to build a theological system on certain
Aristotelian premises in psychology and the theory of knowledge. He
successfully provided a basis for a more optimistic understanding of the world
and human experience than that inherited from Augustine, whose later writings
had emphasized the effects of original sin on man's natural powers.

        In particular, Aquinas believed in a rationally ordered universe which
reflected in its laws and structure the rationality of the divine mind. Since
the human intellect was a created derivative of the eternal mind of God, it
was itself capable of judging what was and what was not in accordance with
'right reason', or the rational norms imprinted on the cosmos by its creator.
In other words the human intellect was capable of making moral judgements which
necessarily accorded with divine law because both were based on the same
rational norms. For Aquinas the norm of morality was the conformity of some
particular object with the rationally perceived end of man, and this norm was
necessarily in accordance with the divine law and the natural law, which was
its reflection.

        Aquinas's use of the related concepts of reason and law therefore made
it possible for him to regard man's perfection as something towards which
his own rational nature necessarily tended, rather than as something to be
achieved in accordance with norms discoverable only by recourse to revelation
or authority and anyway extrinsic to the internal exigencies of human moral
aspiration and rational experience. There were limits to the extent to which
Aquinas took this conclusion. He would not, for instance, concede that, while
it was certainly wrong to act against an erroneous judgement of conscience, it
was therefore necessarily right to follow it. He argued against the necessity
of invincible error in a world in which he thought everyone came into contact
with the gospel message. But the implication that man's perfection was by and
large to be achieved in accordance with the moral aspirations with which his
rational nature endowed him was a clear and important step forward from
Augustine towards a more humane moral and theological system.

        (Note the context in which the author describes the progress Aquinas
introduced as a more 'humane" system, interesting since his subject is one
of the founders of humanism.)

        Unhappily, the Thomist synthesis was too daring to win widespread
acceptance in the schools until the sixteenth century, by the end of which
Aquinas's Summa Theologica had universally replaced the Sentences of Peter
the Lombard as the basis for commentary in the theological schools. A series
of condemnations at Paris in 1277 seemed possibly to have pointed to heterodox
implications in Thomist psychology, and Duns Scotus (c.1265-1308) reacted
strongly against Aquinas by restoring in psychology primacy to the will over
the intellect. He thereby emphasized both the freedom of the human will at the
expence of the rationality of the act of choice and, what was worse, the
arbitrary nature of a divine law no longer linked, as in the Thomist
psychological system, to the moral aspirations of rational human nature. The
link between divine law, natural law and the judgement of conscience was
severed, and human perfection was no longer necessarily linked to moral
aspiration or fulfillment.

        Scotus's emphasis on the freedom of the will might itself have led to
heterodox consequences. The heresy of Pelagius, who had come from Britain to
Rome in the late fourth century and had been strongly attacked by Augustine,
centered on his aristocratic view that the human will could attain to
religious perfection, could define its own values and could reform society. He
held that man could merit his salvation unaided by grace. The 'semi-Pelgian'
heresy consisted in holding that man, by his unaided efforts, could at least
merit the first gratuitous gift of God which, if accepted, could lead towards
the subsequent state of justification in the eyes of God. By extension, it was
also semi-Pelagian to hold that man by his unaided efforts had the power even
to accept grace that was offered to him, but this was the conclusion to which
Scotus's emphasis on the will's freedom seemed naturally destined to lead.
Scotus, however, guarded against any such implication of his psychology by
affirming God's 'absolute' predestination of the elect, that is without
reference to any foreseen merit.

(Note the prefiguring of Calvin's doctrine of predestination here.)

	God first decides to save Peter and then quasi posterius (as if 
afterwards) decrees the grace which in fact determines Peter's salvation. 
Such a system had its difficulties, for while it was orthodox to assume the 
absolute predestination of the elect, it was a lot less orthodox to assume 
the absolute reprobation of the damned without reference to their demerits. 
And it is very difficult to explain how absolute predestination of the elect 
could be reconciled with reprobation of the damned only after taking account 
of their sins. The scholastics had some excuse for the subtlety of their 
theological resoning. But whatever is said about Scotus's system, it is 
clearly not Pelagian, whatever the psychology of the will might suggest.

        Scotus's theological bulwark against Pelagianism was eroded by the
'nominalist' logician and theologian, William of Ockham (c.1285-1341). The
nominalists, on account of the position they took in the dispute about
'universal' ideas (like 'tree-ness', 'humanity', and other generic abstracts
which they regarded as purely conceptual rather than as existent in the
real world in individual modifications), preferred to do away with any
distinction between essence and attributes in God. But this understandable
desire left no room for the quasi-chronological sequence of divine acts on
which Scotus's doctrine of absolute predestination depended. The nominalist
tradition was therefore left with a Scotist theory of the will. but without 
then Scotist safeguard against Pelagianism. At least one nominalist,
Gregory of Rimini (?-1358) solved the difficulty by accepting the absolute
predestination of the elect at the price of accepting also the absolute
reprobation of the damned. Other extremely complex safeguards against
Pelagianism were invoked by the nominalists, but it seems certain that, from
Ockham onwards, and with exceptions like that of Greogory of Rimini whose
solution was unacceptable on other grounds, the Pelagian implications of their
theory of the will were in fact not avoided. Behind the great emphasis in late
medieval theology on divine transcendance, on the arbitrary nature of the law
and the inability of man to fathom the purposes of the divinity except by
recourse to the extrinsic norms of revelation, looms the Pelagian principle of
the late fifteenth century schoolmen. Grace was NECESSARILY (original 
italicized) on those 'who did all that lay within them'. The Pelagian 
implications of this position were not in fact finally to be overcome until, 
in 1588, Molina went back on the whole nominalist tradition and re-introduced 
the quasi-chronological distinction of acts in God, a price which posterity 
has judged too high to pay.

(Note: it would appear that Martin Luther also paid a heavy spiritual price for
these doctrines. Having done "all that lay within him", Luther still did
not feel justified by his actions, and went on to rediscover the basic
Pauline doctrine of justification by faith through grace, starting
the Protestant schism in the process.)

        The current theology of the late fifteenth century was therefore
Pelagian in that it allowed man to earn his salvation by his own efforts,
providing that they were sufficiently intense. 'To those who do what lies
within them,' ran the great principle of nominalist theology, 'God will not
deny grace.' On the level of popular religion, in spite of the mystics and the
more spiritually inclined religious movements, the result was great moral
tension. Since, in the ordinary theology of the late fifteenth century,
religious perfection was no longer considered to be intrinsic to moral
achievement, it was clearly impossible to know whether one had satisfied the
requirement of doing all that lay within one. There were no criteria in the
realm of experience on which one could rely to know whether or not one was
justified. The inevitable consequence was the growth of the religion of 
'works'.The typical devotional forms created in the late fifteenth century 
like the rosary, the stations of the Cross, the Angelus, all have to do with 
making possible the performance of repeated acts. The rise at the same period 
of indulgences applicable to the dead increased the sense that salvation 
depended not on moral achievement but on something extrinsic to it, even 
works or acts performed by another.

	(Clearly, the sorry state of the Church, and the poor moral condition 
of Western Europe in the late 1400s/late 1500s lead to the rise of
anticlericalism and 'righteous atheism' as persistent intellectual movements
in Western Civilization, These were completely new tendencies in Western 
culture, only partially ameliorated by the Reformation and Counterreformation,
which negated the ancient distinction between 'superstition' and 'piety' - 
the latter also termed 'true religion'.)

        Essentially, it was the religion of apparently arbitrarily chosen
works that the early sixteenth-century 'return to scripture' rejected.
Significantly, the return to scripture centered largely on the moral norms of 
the Sermon on the Mount and on the Pauline contention that grace, which was
earned uniquely by Christ, affected behaviour and experience. The return to
scripture was not uniquely inspired by the humanists...indeed the
relationship between evangelical humanism and the reformation itself is still
debated. But the evangelical humanist movement...which Erasmus was to lead,
is of special importance in the present context. It bore a special relationship
to the Platonist humanism of such fifteenth-cnetury figures as Nichalos of Cusa
(1401-64) and Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) which may not be glossed over.

        (There is a lengthy discourse on the Renaissance neoplatonists, which
I'm radically editing)

        Of these figures, by far the more important for Erasmus was Marsilio
Ficino, founder...of the Florentine 'academy' and author of a Platonist
theology on the immortality of the soul. He was an ardent Christian 
apologist, convinced that the neoplatonist authors had provided the most 
suitable philosophic substructure to mediate an understanding of the 
Christian revelation. His system is in fact generally based on the 
neoplatonist Greek philosopher Plotinus, and his most famous work, the 
commentary on Plato's Symposium written in 1469, incorporates the Plotinian 
theory of the soul's alienation in space and time...The commentary on the 
Symposium was an immensely influential work. It gave birth to a whole spate 
of treatises on love , and its doctrine was exploited by countless 
sixteenth-century authors. It was the first formal theory of love which 
allowed the compatibility of love which is spiritually
perfective with that which is instinctively based, and it was Ficino who
coined the term 'Platonic love' to describe the spiritually perfective
affection. But the facts that, in Ficino's Plotinian account of the soul's
ascent to beatitude, there is no foraml separation of natural and supernatural
and that, in this system, religious perfection therefore becomes clearly
intrinsic to moral fulfillment, go a long way to explain how and why the 
commentary on the Symposium was so frequently exploited by the humanists of the
sixteenth century)"...

	(It might be pointed out here that this is the point in Western culture
in which the Greek words 'eros'= physical attraction, or romantic love and 
'agape' = 'brotherly, 'Christian', or 'Platonic' love became intertwined, such
that the poor translators of the King James Version had to dredge up the term
'charity' when the time came for them to translate 'agape' into English in I
Corinthians 13, St. Paul's famous discourse on the meaning of Christian love.
And in the English as well, it has proven the case that charity just isn't 
what it used to be :) 

        Erasmus's early dependence on the Platonist tradition is important
because that tradition contains both the belief in intrinsic human 
perfectibility, which was the pole of Erasmus's opposition to the 
scholastics, and the belief in the autonomous power of self-determination, 
which was to be the pole of Erasmus's opposition ot the (Protestant) 
reformers. It also explains much about Erasmus's preference for Origen and 
the more Plotinian works of the early Augustine. 

	(It might be petty, but it is perhaps not altogether insignificant 
that Erasmus was the illegitimate child of a priest, and that this
probably had some impact on Erasmus's attitudes towards the evolving concepts 
of'love' as well as the inherent authority and inerrancy of the Church. What 
I am suggesting here is that, in a man of high intellectual caliber, the 
temptation to generalize one's own specific experiences is high, and may indeed
make the difference between writing the satirical "Praise of Folly" and taking
on the Church Establishment, or not doing so. The biographical sketch in 
"Praise of Folly" seems to indicate that Erasmus did know his father, and 
that the relationship was healthy, if not 'normal' according to the standards
of the day. )

The achievement of the evangelical humanists generally, and of Erasmus in 
particular, was to be the anchoring of the values which were transmitted by 
the Platonist tradition and might otherwise have seemed heterodox in their 
implications firmly in the text of the Church's own revelation.

        (This, by the way, is why I constantly beat the drum in defense
of the scriptural fundamentalists; intellectually, they are first cousins to
the humanists, whether either of the two parties wishes to own up to
the relationship.)

        The scholastics regarded themselves as the defenders of a traditional
orthodoxy and judged the new attitudes according to rigidly conservative
criteria. To their minds, the relevance of the traditional norms of belief
and behavior to moral experience was unimportant. Their training was 
professional, not pastoral, and they could honestly feel themselves justified 
in obtaining recantations from heretics by the employment of gross physical 
torture, because they believed that faith, which they identified with the 
acceptance of their own orthodoxy, opened the way to eternal salvation. The 
way to salvation was through the acceptance of norms of belief and behavior 
extrinsic to the mind's need to understand its experience and to the moral 
aspirations of the individual. Against this view, Erasmus cautiously urged a 
confidence in nature and its highest impulses which he expressed both in the 
prefatory material to his edition of the Greek text of the New Testament in 
1516 and, even more strikingly, in the second Hyperaspistes letter against 
Luther from which Rabelais later borrowed the famous 'Fay ce que voudras' 
passage on Theleme for Gargantua.

        The touchstone in the dispute was the view to be taken about pagan
virtue. The scholastics were well aware that the ancient pagans had been
capable of the highest moral achievement, but by definition, they did not have
'faith' in the sense of Christian belief. Since grace was always dependent
on faith, they could not therefore have had grace, been justified or been 
saved.

(Comment: Note the scholastic deviation from Paul and Augustine. In the above 
sentence, human faith preceeds divine grace in time and 'causes' grace to 
happen. In the scholastic system, divine grace depends on human faith, rather 
than the other way around.) 

The identification of the theological virtue of faith with assent to the 
Creed therefore precluded them from allowing that justification and grace 
could be intrinsically connected with a moral stature obviously attainable 
without them. The evangelical humanists, as if to confirm that it was 
precisely the issue of intrinsic perfectibility which split them from the 
scholastics, groped towards an exploration of the possibility that the 
ancient pagans on account of their moral achievements were justified and 
saved. They were aided by the recent discover of whole peoples in the new 
world who had no opportunity to receive the gospel through
no fault of their own, although for centuries the heroism of Christian
missionaries was to be based on the supposition that acceptance of the
Christian revelation was an ineluctable precondition of salvation.

        In 1512 the French evangelical humanist Jacques Lefevre d'Etaples 
wrote in his commentary on the Pauline epistles that those who, in ignorance 
of the gospel, keep the divine and natural law and, with the significant 
exception of the rites and ceremonies they prescribed, served their neighbors 
and repented of their faults, would surely be saved. This doctrine represents 
only a relatively slight advance on that of Aquinas, but was revolutionary in 
a late fifteenth-century context. Erasmus himself notoriously allowed the 
term "Saint Socrates" to appear in the 1522 colloquy Convivium religiosum, 
tentatively borrowing from an important letter of Ficino on the sanctity of 
Socrates. In the same colloquy 'Eusebius' says that he is helped by reading 
Cicero and Plutarch but that he rises from the reading of Scotus 'and others 
of his sort' 'somehow less enthusiastic about true virtue but more 
contentious.' Between them, the speakers in the colloquy emphasize the 
conformity of Virgil, Horace, Cicero, and Cato to the Christian spirit.
In the 1523 preface to his edition of Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, 
Erasmus, now writing clearly in his own name, takes the argument
further, asserting that the reading of Cicero has stimulated him to moral
progress and improved his ideals. There was in Cicero 'something divine', and
it is permissible to hope that he is now in heaven. Morally speaking, Erasmus
argues, many of the patriarchs were less blameless than Cicero...

        The circumstances in which Erasmus advocated his view that man's
perfection was intrinisc to his moral achievemeny explain why he so often
preferred to make his points satirically and with an apparent lack of 
directness. To have spoken out would have compromised an orthodoxy he was 
reluctant to relinquish. The circumstances explain, too, why Erasmus was ]
touchy about criticisms of his orthodoxy, at any rate when they were too 
important for him to disdain. His view naturally brought him into conflict 
with the scholastics, and it is a tribute to his patience, ingenuity and 
forebearance that he escaped serious condemnation. The Colloquies were banned 
and accusations of heresy, normally from a lunatic fringe, were frequent...
After his death various of his works were banned in Spain and burned in 
Milan. They were all put on the Roman index of prohibited books in 1559. The 
"Praise of Folly" in particular was banned in Franche-Comte, in Spain, in 
Rome and by the Council of Trent. But the early Jesuits, at least, came very 
near to venerating his memory, and the Jesuit Saint Peter Canisius spoke very 
highly of him. Most of his educational theory was taken up into their own 
carefully elaborated educational program expressed in the Ratio Studiorum 
which was to be the immensely influential charter for their schools after its 
elaboration in the late sixteenth century.

        What has here been called the principle of intrinsic perfectibility
did not only alienate Erasmus from the scholastics. It also alienated him from
Luther. The Wittemberg theses of 1517 were mostly concerend with indulgences
and ritual practices and were by no means clearly heretical. Rome took a long
time about issuing the condemnatory bull Exsurge Domine (1520) and the Paris
faculty hedged until Rome had spoken. Erasmus had agreed with much of what 
Luther said, but carefully kept his distance from Luther's total position in an
important series of letters. His support was solicited by both sides, and
pressure was put on him to prove an orthodoxy on which criticism of
ecclesiastical practices in the Colloquies had seemed to cast doubt, by
speaking against Luther. When he did finally and reluctantly take up his
pen against Luther, Luther had already attacked five of the traditional
seven sacraments and had listed many other ways in which the Church has fallen
away from its revealed function. Erasmus, however, pinpointed in what was now 
a mass of material Luther's one departure from orthodoxy which was to provide 
a doctrinal criterion throughout the century for deciding to which side of the
schism any individual by right belonged. At the suggestion of Henry VIII and
with startling accuracy he picked on the essence of Luther's position, the
denial of any autonomous power of self-determination in man.

        Luther's rebellion against fifteenth-century religion had been less
humanistically motivated but more sudden and more radical than that of 
Erasmus. Above all, he had attacked the Pelagianism of the scholastics and 
the religious tension which it had bred. For Luther, justification consisted 
in the non-imputation of guilt. The need for straining to do all that lay 
within one was thereby removed. Justification had become a clearly gratuitous 
act of God, and Luther's concept of faith as trust and confidence in God 
further removed the need for moral tension. It made it possible for the truly 
devout to be virtually assured of their salvation. In the treatises of 1520, 
Luther had clearly gone beyond the bounds of orthodoxy in his outright 
condemnation of works and merit as well as of the sacraments and practices 
whose importance Erasmus had been careful merely to downgrade. In particular, 
however, Luther had held in the Heidelberg Disputation of 1518 that man by 
his own free will, so far from earning his salvation, necessarily committed 
mortal sin. This anti-Pelagian denial of the autonomous power of 
self-determination to good was confirmed in the Freedom of the Christian 
Man (1520). No doubt Erasmus misunderstood Luther. But the point of attack he 
chose was also that which split More from Tyndale, Bude' from Melanchthon and 
Sadoleto from Calvin in their respective controversies. Much more than 
Eucharistic theology, it was the divisive force behind the schism."


        - Some final comments before closing. The events described above,
specifically the dispute over the possibility of pagan virtue, inevitably
led to the corruption of the ancient concept of virtue, to the point where
this word bears no definitional relationship to its original meaning, in
modern English usage. It was about the same time as Erasmus's disputations with
the scholastic conservatives and the Protestant reformers that Macchiavelli
wrote "The Prince", in which he underscores the growing difference between
ancient virtue and its new, modern meaning, by emphasing the amoral component
of 'virtu' in the art of successfully ruling a principality. Once again
to the .sig, to see if we can somehow ascertain which "virtue" Jonathan
Swift is refering to in the last line...

Bill R.

--

"When up a dangerous faction starts,         "My opinions do not represent 
With wrath and vengeance in their hearts;     those of my employer or
By solemn League and Cov'nant bound,          any government agency."
To ruin, slaughter, and confound;             - Bill Riggs (1993)
To turn religion to a fable, 
And turn the Government to a Babel;
Pervert the law, disgrace the gown,
Corrupt the senate, rob the crown;
To sacrifice old England's glory,
And make her infamous in story.
When such a tempest shook the land,
How could unguarded virtue stand ?"
- Jonathan Swift (1732)
-- 
Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.atheism