Theological Origins of Modernity

134 chapter five
the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit (embodied in the church) were all
thought to be directed by divine reason (ratio) that was the supreme moment
of divine being. Th e human will was coordinated with the divine will
when it was dominated by reason and sinned when it was not. Hence, the
principal goal of a Christian was to overcome the irrational self-will that
led to sin and adopt the universal reason of God embodied in his creation,
his word, and his church as the basis for the direction of one’s life.
For all of its obvious advantages, this scholastic view of the supremacy
of reason seemed to many to call into question God’s divinity, since it subordinated
divine power to reason. As we saw in chapter 1, this Aristotelian
scholasticism was condemned in 1277 and attacked by Scotus, Ockham,
and the nominalists in the years thereaft er. Th ey all rejected the supremacy
of reason in God (and man) in favor of will. God could only be God
if he were truly omnipotent. Th e essence of omnipotence in their view,
however, was an absolute freedom that was indiff erent to its object. God
wills what he wills and wills it only because he wills it. While this position
saved and affi rmed God’s divinity, it also opened up another problem, for
if reason was not preeminent in God or in the world, it was not clear how
the divine and human wills, both in the Trinity and in the world, could
be coordinated with one another. In this way, the nominalist revolution
brought Christians face to face with the central question that had plagued
Christianity from the beginning, and revealed and empowered the Arian,
Manichean, and Pelagian alternatives that the Christianity of late antiquity
(oft en with the help of imperial power) had suppressed.
Christian humanists and Reformation theologians had to face these
questions. In struggling with them, they developed radically diff erent
answers on roughly the same ontological and logical grounds. Th eir disagreements
on this point were not the result of a disagreement about being
itself or about the relationship of words and things, but about the priority
of one realm of beings to another. As we noted in chapter 3, their disagreements
were thus not ontological but ontic. In order to begin to understand
why this was the case and how these diff erences came to play such a decisive
role, we will examine the debate between Luther and Erasmus on the
freedom or bondage of the will.
Erasmus was the greatest of the humanists aft er Petrarch, and the culmination
of the humanist movement. Luther set the Reformation in motion
and his theology remained its driving force for a century and a half.
Th ey were also both clearly aware of their preeminence. Moreover, these
two were so similar in so many ways that their disagreement turned on real
diff erences, not on trivial or insubstantial points: diff erences so profound