The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/Summary: Dilthey - Auffassung und Analyse des Menschen im 15. u. 16. Jahrhundert - Part 2
D. begins this second half of his paper by discussing the intellectual and spiritual movement, more especially in Germany, which preceded the Reformation. This movement of the Reformation he regards, not from the standpoint of church history or the history of dogma, but as an important link in the chain of intellectual processes in the sixteenth century. Of importance here is how a universalistic theism at the beginning of the sixteenth century became victorious in all Europe; how a new ideal of life arose out of the changed conditions of society. In this condition of things lies the beginning of a new theology, freed from scholastic speculation, and founded on experience and the Christian literature. In inner experience and the critical history of Christianity this new theology has had its foundation until to-day. Through this theology insight into the moral autonomy of man has gradually been won. Erasmus, the Voltaire of the sixteenth century, is treated as the exponent of the new liberal direction; along with him as co-workers on the new theology D. discusses Reuchlin. This same combination of an universalistic theism with philological and partly quite radical criticism of the sources of Christianity, which we find in Reuchlin, is seen further in the Erfurt Humanists. The chief of these was Konrad Mudt (Mutianus Rufus). In conjunction with this universalistic theism there was developed in German-speaking countries a new ideal of religious life. In Italy the ascetic ideal had given way to that of a personality developed directly out of man's natural dispositions. Here was evolved in the fifteenth century the uomo universal. This is seen in the autobiography of Leon Battista Alberti and in the large outlines of the person of Lionardo da Vinci. These men rest entirely on themselves and strive to give their natural being its most perfect development. Rabelais gives expression to a related ideal in his characterization of the ideal cloister in Gargantua. In Pirkheimer we have the Italian ideal of the universal man embodied in a genuine German. Sebastian Brant is the most prominent literary exponent of the rising burgher element before the time of Luther, viz. his Narrenschiff (1494). There is in mankind not only a continuity of advancing science, but also a continuity of religious-moral development. The great changes in moral life are always joined with those in religious life. History speaks as yet nowhere for the ideal of a morality without religion. New active will-forces always arise in conjunction with ideas about the invisible. So it was with Luther. He grasps his total diversity from the mode of thought as expressed in the formulae and proofs of Greek dogma, and he frees himself from the external apparatus of means, discipline, and works in the Roman Church. In doing this there closes in him the profoundest movement of the middle ages, viz. Franciscan Christianity and mysticism, and in him modern idealism begins. Life is for him the chief thing. Out of experience arises all knowledge of our relationship to the invisible. The religious process is in its essence something invisible, inaccessible to the understanding: belief. The sphere of the activity of belief is society and its order. In the name of the new Christian spirit Luther demands a transformation of German society. Zwingli in his philosophical ideas is influenced largely by Plato, Seneca, and Pico of Mirandola. God is for Zwingli, in the spirit of Pico, panentheistically the only Being, the all-embracing Good. Zwingli can adopt the formula of the Eleatics, "All is one." The panentheistic determinism of Zwingli is derived from the Stoic philosophy through Seneca. In the time of the reformers were developed both of the chief directions in theology, viz. the rationalistic and transcendental, which in the following centuries were to divide the supremacy with orthodoxy. Erasmus is the founder of theological rationalism ; the modern speculative or transcendental direction is a development of mysticism. Out of this revolutionary chaos arose Sebastian Franck, a writer of genius. In his Universal History he adopts the standpoint of universalistic theism or panentheism, which at that time was the highest and freest element in European culture. He conceives of God, like Zwingli, as the all-efficient Good. God is without will-effect or desire. Nature is nothing but the force implanted by God in everything both to act and to be acted upon. The religious and philosophical consciousness of absolute dependence, Sebastian Franck finds compatible with the moral freedom of man. The divinity, itself without effect, without time, a working force, becomes will only in man. In this will the force expends itself in time and is subject to effect. The will is free in its choice, but its operation in the world is conditioned through the force of God, who determines the world's complex. The divine force employs every determination of will for good. Out of the reciprocal activity of the divine force and the free individual human will, arises the complex of history.