[Sidenote: Science, religion and philosophy]
The interrelations of science, religion, and philosophy, though complex in their operation, are easily understood in their broad outlines. Science is the examination of the data of experience and their explanation in logical, physical, or mathematical terms. Religion, on the other hand, is an attitude towards unseen powers, involving the belief in the existence of spirits. Philosophy, or the search for the ultimate reality, is necessarily an afterthought. It comes only after man is sophisticated enough to see some difference between the phenomenon and the idea. It draws its premises from both science and religion: some systems, like that of Plato, being primarily religious fancy, some, like that of Aristotle, scientific realism.
The philosophical position taken by the Catholic church was that of Aquinas, Aristotelian realism. [Sidenote: The Reformers] The official commentary on the Summa was written at this time by Cardinal Cajetan. Compared to the steady orientation of the Catholic, the Protestant philosophers wavered, catching often at the latest style in thought, be it monism or pragmatism. Luther was the {625} spiritual child of Occam, and the ancestor of Kant. His individualism stood half-way between the former's nominalism and the latter's transcendentalism and subjectivism. But the Reformers were far less interested in purely metaphysical than they were in dogmatic questions. The main use they made of their philosophy was to bring in a more individual and less mechanical scheme of salvation. Their great change in point of view from Catholicism was the rejection of the sacramental, hierarchical system in favor of justification by faith. This was, in truth, a stupendous change, putting the responsibility for salvation directly on God, and dispensing with the mediation of priest and rite.
[Sidenote: Attitude towards reason]
But it was the only important change, of a speculative nature, made by the Reformers. The violent polemics of that and later times have concealed the fact that in most of his ideas the Protestant is but a variety of the Catholic. Both religions accepted as axiomatic the existence of a personal, ethical God, the immortality of the soul, future rewards and punishments, the mystery of the Trinity, the revelation, incarnation and miracles of Christ, the authority of the Bible and the real presence in the sacrament. Both equally detested reason.
He who is gifted with the heavenly knowledge of faith [says the Catechism of the Council of Trent] is free from an inquisitive curiosity; for when God commands us to believe, he does not propose to have us search into his divine judgments, nor to inquire their reasons and causes, but demands an immutable faith. . . . Faith, therefore, excludes not only all doubt, but even the desire of subjecting its truth to demonstration.
We know that reason is the devil's harlot [says
Luther] and can do nothing but slander and harm all that
God says and does. [And again] If, outside of Christ,
you wish by your own thoughts to know your relation to
{626}
God, you will break your neck. Thunder strikes him
who examines. It is Satan's wisdom to tell what God
is, and by doing so he will draw you into the abyss.
Therefore keep to revelation and don't try to understand.
There are many mysteries in the Bible, Luther acknowledged, that seem absurd to reason, but it is our duty to swallow them whole. Calvin abhorred the free spirit of the humanists as the supreme heresy of free thought. He said that philosophy was only the shadow and revelation the substance. "Nor is it reasonable," said he, "that the divine will should be made the subject of controversy with us." Zwingli, anticipating Descartes's "finitum infiniti capax non est," stated that our small minds could not grasp God's plan. Oecolampadius, dying, said that he wanted no more light than he then had—an instructive contrast to Goethe's last words: "Mehr Licht!" Even Bacon, either from prudence or conviction, said that theological mysteries seeming absurd to reason must be believed.
[Sidenote: Radical sects]
Nor were the radical sects a whit more rational. Those who represented the protest against Protestantism and the dissidence of dissent appealed to the Bible as an authority and abhorred reason as much as did the orthodox churches. The Antitrinitarians were no more deists or free thinkers than were the Lutherans. Campanus and Adam Pastor and Servetus and the Sozinis had no aversion to the supernatural and made no claim to reduce Christianity to a humanitarian deism, as some modern Unitarians would do. Their doubts were simply based on a different exegesis of the biblical texts. Fausto Sozini thought Christ was "a subaltern God to whom at a certain time the Supreme God gave over the government of the world." Servetus defined the Trinity to be "not an illusion of three invisible things, but the manifestation of God {627} in the Word and a communication of the substance of God in the Spirit." This is no new rationalism coming in but a reversion to an obsolete heresy, that of Paul of Samosata. It does not surprise us to find Servetus lecturing on astrology.