The Master in the theological reflection from the modern era to our times

THE MASTER IN THE THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION
FROM THE MODERN ERA TO OUR TIMES

Acts of the International Seminar
on "Jesus, the Master"
(Ariccia, October 14-24, 1996)

by Fr. Bruno Forte

Summary

1. From objectivism to subjectivism

2. The modern triumph of the subject: Christ Master, model of subjectivity

3. The return to history in the XIX century theologies: Jesus Christ, the living Master in us

I. FROM THE MEDIEVAL SYNTHESIS
TO THE MODERN EMERGENCE OF SUBJECTIVITY

(on the path of subjectivization of values and of the accentuation of moral exemplarity of the Master)

"The modern age," Joseph Lortz writes, "is recognizable in its peculiar nature, above all for its diversity from the preceding age, the Middle Age, and that is, for its dissolving tendencies: subjectivism and individualism, nationalism, laicism and secularization. It’s passing is counter-distinguished by the putting into effect of the potentials contained in these factors." (1) If the medieval world is characterized by the synthesis, in the political-religious level (Empire-Papacy), as on the level of thought (set-in-order mentality and scholastic systematization), the modern age is characterized by the dissolution of the synthesis on the political-religious level, as well as on the social-cultural one. The causes of this process are complex and multiple: if among those political-religious causes we should note especially the formation of national states to centralized monarchy (England, France, Spain) and the growing anti-Roman resistance due also to the immorality of the clergy, on the more properly spiritual and intellectual level, the decline of the Middle Age is forecast in multiple forms. On one hand, humanism, with its positive and critical taste made easy by the invention of the present, allows a broad personal and direct contact, never happened before, with the texts, so much so that, in a new way, it stimulates discernment and judgement of an individual; on the other hand, the "modern manner," inaugurated by William of Occam, opposes human critical knowledge with the positive religious reality relegated in a fideism of the voluntarist type, while nominalism produces a widespread diffidence on the possibility of knowledge that has a real hold on things. The psychological restlessness of the 1400s, then, fed by the social and political uncertainty and favored by dramatic events, such as the black pest in 1348 that overturned Europe, is expressed in an anxious and often infantile mentality, in a religiosity often superstitious, of which witch hunting was a sign typical of the period, and the spread of the theme of death and of the demoniac in art. Of this complex of factors, the Reformation would be the fruit and at the same time the original expression, which would reveal the dissolution of the preceding critical synthesis and the new emergence of the subject in its historical-concrete dimension, in its existence before the living God in a unique and original manner.

In the theological sphere, Scholasticism – after the great flourishing in the XIII century – had become ever more a dialectic exercise which was an end in itself (just think of the sarcasm of Erasmus in Chapter 53 of the Moriæ encomium [The praise of folly], aimed against "the craziest of them all, the theologians"). This would not be without consequences on the progressive detachment of spirituality from theology, from the search of a more subjective, intimistic and concrete, experience of Christ. It is precisely this intimistic and subjective piety that characterizes the devotio moderna of the late Middle Ages, dominated by the motif of the imitatio Christi: in reaction to the intellectualism of the late Scholasticism, benefited by the nominalist separation between faith and reason, a prioritarian attention to the interior life of the subject, according to a need for subjective re-appropriation of values to which is connected also the process of introjection of the figure of Jesus Master. It is the spiritual struggle, it is the soul’s journey to perfection that emerges up front: and Christ is the interior Master who speaks to the souls thirsty of God by offering himself as moral and spiritual model to imitate and follow. Thus it is, for example, in the extraordinary testimony of the interior experience that is the Imitation of Christ; thus it is in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, which face to face with the mysteries of the life of Christ, lead the exerciser to spiritual discernment and to decision of the heart before the supreme alternative, in a manner that the life and the choices of the Master come alive in the following of the disciple.

A great heir of the Medieval Christological piety and at the same time witness and maker of the first lights of the modern era is Martin Luther: if in him the nominalist pessimism and the exasperated individualism get connected, nonetheless in him shines, in his work, the Pauline Christological principle of the theologia Crucis and the jealousy of Christ. "Crux probat omnia" does not only say that the Cross is the subversion and the confutation of all human presumption and hence it is the most radical no to every possible Pelagianism that sees man saving himself, but also that it is only for the dialectic path of breakage and not the analogical one of continuity, "per passiones et crucem" and "sub contraria specie," that man can encounter God’s revelation in Jesus Christ. For him who accepts the folly of the Cross and does not presume to have other certainties outside that of Christ, Lord and Master, and of Him Crucified, life in death becomes possible, grace alone triumphs, faith alone saves. What appears truly new and modern in Luther is that the springboard of his study is the decisive existential problem, the taking of concrete and at the same time radical stand on which everything moves, on which stands the search for salvation. He "is not a systematic. In exchange, he is very much determined by lived experience (Erlebnis) and by the will... All that he has written and has said is confession, that is recognition, which is paid for by concrete life and with his own suffering, and that he must share with others." (2) It is through Luther’s trials and temptations and from his consoling experience of grace – announced by the Word of God assiduously read and meditated by him – that he achieves questions which are basic to his message. Through his own experience, Luther constitutes his way to salvation. For him, Christ is the only Master facing whom every good thing and truth is scaled. "All man’s trust, life, repute, power, wisdom is nothing else than Christ, but Christ is hidden in God. Therefore all internal or external aspects are not what man could assume them to be. This is the reason why I maintain that to be a foolish person – i.e. to know it all – out of Christ, is to know nothing".(3) It is this exclusive and even jealous affirmation of Christ, loaded with existential density, that makes Luther akin to Paul and to Augustine and at the same time makes him a cipher of the new era. His militant theology, strongly rooted on experience, is an image and at the same time a determining factor of the changes that presaged, at the start of a new attention to subjectivism of which the doctrine of "free examination" would not be other than a reflex subject matter. Luther’s subjectivism, however, is not yet solidly anchored on the strength of the pure Object, on the victory of the living God revealed in Christ over the sin of the world: "This is the fixed difference between the old law and the new law: the old tells those who are not proud in their justice: you must possess Christ and his Spirit; the new law tells those who are humbled in their poverty in matter of justice, and who seek Christ: here Christ is and his Spirit. Hence, those who understand the Gospel as something different from the joyous proclamation, do not understand the Gospel. So do those who have transformed it into law instead of understanding it as grace; these, for us, have made a Moses out of Christ." (4) Nonetheless, the rivendication of the strongly personal character of the experience of Grace in welcoming Christ constitutes the decisive premise for the accentuation of that process of subjectivism of faith, which culminates in the reference to the Lord Jesus above all as Master and moral model of the soul. (return to summary)

Continued: The modern triumph of the subject: Christ Master, model of subjectivity

Jesus Master yesterday, today and for ever