The intellectual development of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries in Europe which sought to base all art and learning on the culture of ancient Greece and Rome is known as Humanism. Humanism opposed itself to Scholasticism, the philosophy that flourished during the Middle Ages and which is personified in St. Thomas Aquinas. Scholasticism might be defined as that spirit whereby an endeavor is made to bring into harmony faith and reason. It is a didactic method.

It was Humanism that helped pave the way for the Reformation. For the symptom of the Renaissance was Humanism, and the Renaissance was in fact the precursor and then the support of the Reformation, giving license to the human self in its natural and sensible activities as Protestantism did in the spiritual order; man’s eyes were turned from God to man. The spirit of the Renaissance ruled the intellectual world until the strong reactions of Romanticism, Physical Science and neothomism in the nineteenth century.

Therefore, the trend of modern history begins at the renaissance. Of course, what has happened in our modern world is wholly different from what was dreamed of by the first humanists and fathers of the Renaissance. They could hardly foresee that the consequences of their new philosophy, of their break with the spiritual depth and sense of the middle ages, of their creative initiative, would be in the nineteenth century, with its machines, its materialism and its positivism. Its socialism and its anarchism, and the twentieth century with its two world wars, and Communism.

The destructive contradiction of Humanism lay in the foundations of the Renaissance and, therefore, it had within itself the seeds of death. Humanism, which on the one hand exalted man and attributed to him unlimited powers, and on the other hand saw nothing in him but a limited dependent creature, knowing nothing of spiritual freedom, could have no other end than in taking away man’s likeness to the divine and subjecting him to natural necessity.

The Reformation was another aspect of that process which first produced the Renaissance; it was also born of the humanist movement, by the revolt of the new man. The Renaissance, it must be understood, was not a revolt or a protest but a showing-forth of the creative mind. The Reformation, on the other hand, was more a revolt and a protest than a religious creation, it was aimed at religious tradition. The Reformation in the beginning contained a great deal of Catholicism, Luther was a rebellious catholic monk, it was Catholic blood that stirred within him. There was a moment in the life of Luther in which he had great truth: his urgent need of spiritual liberation. The tragic part of it was that he quit his true path by negation, by revolt to faith, when it was discipline that needed to be corrected. The evolution of modern history towards what was called the "Enlightenment" of the eighteenth century, towards Rationalism, Positivism and Socialism, sprang from the revolt and protest inherent in the Reformation. The Enlightenment is the expected penalty of the Renaissance with its pride.

Luther, of course, did not draw his theology of the supernatural out of a void, for the very reason that no man is completely isolated from the past, or the time in which he lives. There were certain things that came before him both in his life and doctrine as well as in history which prepared the way for it.

The two principal ideas which formed the background of Luther’s doctrine concerning the relation of grace to nature are: the doctrine of the essential corruption of human nature and the nominalism of the decadent Scholastics.

Luther taught that human nature is intrinsically corrupt. In other words, concupiscence is original sin itself. Nothing can remove it or alter it intrinsically. It even remains after the administration of the sacraments. Human nature, according to Luther, is essentially bad. "We are all a lost lump." What Luther confused was concupiscence, the desire to sin, with original sin.

For him sin and grace then co-exist in the same being, for human nature is essentially sinful, and grace is merely a covering for that sinfulness and in no way affects human nature intrinsically.

The first source of Luther’s peculiar notion of the supernatural is to be fond in his theory of human nature. The second source is to be found in the Nominalism of the decadent Scholastics. William of Occam, who was excommunicated from the Catholic Church in 1328 for his teachings, was considered by Martin Luther as the most gifted of all Schoolmen. Luther was influenced greatly by the theology of Occam. However, what Occam taught as possible, Luther taught as fact.

Now what were some of the doctrines of the Occamists? First, that grace is not absolutely necessary; it is necessary only in the present condition of things. Any act of charity, and any supernatural act, which we perform in the ordinary course of our mortal life does not differ essentially from any act of nature. It is not therefore anything above our natural forces.

Second, God accepts our supernatural acts as such, simply because He has willed to do so. They are not necessarily in themselves meritorious. No act in itself is meritorious, even though it be infused with charity. All merit comes from the free acceptance by God.

Occam’s principles led to materialistic skepticism. If we excluded the element of faith and take his philosophy as it stands, we must pronounce him to be the forerunner of the anti-Christian philosophers of the Renaissance. He has been described as the first Protestant.

There are, therefore, two forces which prepared the way for the Lutheran distortion of the notion of grace, namely, Luther’s doctrine concerning the invincibility of concupiscence and the intrinsic corruption of human nature, and which may possibly have been derived from his experience, and secondly, the Nominalist influence of the Occamists school of thought, which asserted that the supernatural was acceptable, not because it was really worth more than the natural, but merely because God willed to accept it as such. This is the doctrine of Imputation. In other words, according to Luther, man ever remains sinful, but the sin is not imputed to him; he is accounted righteous by the imputation of something which is quite foreign to him, namely, the righteousness of Christ. Christ’s merits cover us like a cloak. The justice of Christ covers us, and when we go before God to be judged it is not the sinner He perceives but Christ. Our justification then is something extrinsic to our sinfulness, it is a covering over that which on the inside is full of corruption. In other words, we are really like "whitened sepulchers," outside clean, but inside full of dead men’s bones. The Imputation saves, not righteousness. Therefore, we need have only faith in Christ, & despite our sinfulness we shall be saved in the next world and imputed righteous in this. "Be a sinner and sin boldly, but believe more boldly still."

As a result of these influences there flow two effects which endure to the present day, but under different forms: Religion ceases to be a total of man’s service to God, but becomes the total of God’s service to man. Secondly, the traditional notion of the placing above of grace and nature gives way to the notion of placing close together. Instead of grace perfecting nature, it merely covers it over. Now let us consider Religion becoming God’s service to man. Nominalism in philosophy denies that the mind can attain the real, and asserts that that with which we are in contact is only an effigy of the real. Nominalism in theology asserts that the divine never really reaches the natural; it is imputed to it; it is something extrinsic to it, but never one with it.

Now, if the mind knows not the real, but only its effigy, then, all knowledge is mental instead of real. The mind then becomes the center around which the world revolves.

A second conclusion that can be drawn from this theology is that of the placing close together of nature and grace. The traditional teaching was that nature and grace were related as a perfection to a thing which could be perfected by a gift, and not merely and simply veneered.

But with Luther, nature and grace ceased to be related in this way. Nature was bad to the core and irremediably so, while grace was just an imputation, a veneer, a covering. Hence, Luther became the source of a twofold evolution of religious thinking; one current which took up nature, which he placed close to grace, worked itself out by the denial of the transcendent, that is, that which is above and independent of the material universe; the other, which took up grace, which he placed close to nature, worked itself out by the assertion of the immanent. Therefore, one current tends to reduce grace to nature, the other to elevate nature to grace. Also, one current tends to absorb faith in reason, and the other current tends to equate reason and faith. Religion in the successors of Luther bases itself either on a faculty of nature and develops along rationalistic lines, or else bases itself upon the individual’s need of a divine power, and develops along the lines of mysticism and sentimentalism.

The rational current in Luther’s principles was particularly developed by the Socinians and the Arminians. They accepted Sacred Scripture as the revealed word of God, but since it requires interpretation, this interpretation must be done in the light of reason. Hence, reason is the organ by which man knows, receives, comprehends and judges Divine Revelation.

A double evolution resulted in the separation and even the juxtaposition of nature and grace, one stressing nature, the other grace. A kind of theological rationalism developed from the first, which we have just briefly traced. The second current starts not

with reason but with the heart and develops towards the spiritual and mystical rather than the rational and humanistic.

In announcing his doctrine of the immanence of justification, Luther struck the keynote of the philosophy and the theology of the immanent. He taught the immanence of faith, the personal experience of justification and the private interpretation of Sacred Scripture. This resulted in a kind of religious romanticism in which the individual believed himself to be in direct communication with God Who reveals Himself to man by prophecies, miracles, visions and the like.

By asserting the individual and his right against a Mystic Corporation, Luther brought the individual into prominence. He put into the individuals hands the Sacred Scriptures which he might interpret as he saw fit. However, Luther’s followers glorified the individual still more by making the individual a kind of Scripture inspired directly by Almighty God. Man was to be free from the Church and free from Scripture. But with this new so-called freedom a new current cuts in through this development; in fact, it was already manifest before Pietism, and that is the current of Rationalism.