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March 3 - March 18, 2019
Byzantine. The heavenly things were all-important and were so holy that they were not pictured realistically.
On the other hand, simple nature—trees and mountains—held no interest for the artist, except as part of the world to be lived in.
So prior to Thomas Aquinas there was an overwhelming emphasis on the heavenly things, very far off and very holy, pictured only as symbols, with little interest in nature itself. With the coming of Aquinas we have the real birth of the humanistic Renaissance.
From Aquinas’s day on, for many years, there was a constant struggle for a unity of nature and grace and a hope that rationality would say something about both.
There were some very good things that resulted from the birth of Renaissance thought. In particular, nature received a more proper place. From a biblical viewpoint nature is important because it has been created by God and is not to be despised.
In Aquinas’s view the will of man was fallen, but the intellect was not. From this incomplete view of the biblical Fall flowed all the subsequent difficulties. Man’s intellect became autonomous. In one realm man was now independent, autonomous.
This interest in nature as God made it is, as we have seen, good and proper. But Aquinas had opened the way to an autonomous Humanism, an autonomous philosophy, and once the movement gained momentum, there was soon a flood.
The vital principle to notice is that, as nature was made autonomous, nature began to “eat up” grace.
With Masaccio’s work, as with much of Van Eyck’s, the emphasis on nature was such as could have led to painting with a true biblical viewpoint. Coming on to Filippo Lippi (1406-1469), it is apparent that nature begins to “eat up” grace in a more serious way than with Van Eyck’s Madonna of the Chancellor Rolin.
They added landscape and The chancellor of Rolin is the same size as Mary.
The point to be stressed is that, when nature is made autonomous, it is destructive. As soon as one allows an autonomous realm one finds that the lower element begins to eat up the higher. In what follows I shall be speaking of these two elements as the “lower story” and the “upper story.”
Thomas Aquinas had introduced Aristotelian thinking. Cosimo began to champion Neo-platonism.
By the time of Leonardo da Vinci, Neo-platonism was a dominant force in Florence. It became a dominant force for the simple reason that they needed to find some way to put something in the “upper story.” They introduced Neo-platonism in an attempt to re-instate ideas and ideals—that is, universals:
Now that nature has eaten up grace
Where do you find a unity when you set diversity free? Once the particulars are set free how do you hold them together?
Therefore you never get beyond mechanics. For a man who realized the need of a unity, he understood that this would not do. So he tried to paint the soul. The soul is not the Christian soul; the soul is the universal—the soul, for example, of the sea or of the tree.1 One of the reasons he never painted very much was simply that he tried to draw and draw in order to be able to paint the universal. Needless to say, he never succeeded.
Like CS Lewis, when MacDonald awakened his imagination.
Leonardo died in despondency because he would not let go of the hope of a rational unity between the particulars and the universal.2 To have escaped this despondency Leonardo would have had to have been a different man. He would have had to let go his hope of a unity above and below the line. Leonardo, not being a modern man, never gave up the hope of a unified field of knowledge. He would not, in other words, give up the hope of educated man, who, in the past, has been marked by this insistence on a unified field of knowledge.
To this problem of unity the Reformation gave an entirely opposite answer from that of the Renaissance. It repudiated both the Aristotelian and the Neo-platonic presentation. What was the Reformation answer? It said that the root of the trouble sprang from the old and growing Humanism in the Roman Catholic Church, and the incomplete Fall in Aquinas’s theology which set loose an autonomous man.
In contrast to Aquinas, only God was autonomous.
the Reformation, final and sufficient knowledge rested in the Bible—that is, Scripture Alone,
So there is no division in either of these areas. There is no division in final normative knowledge—on
Neither was there division in the work of salvation. It was Scripture Alone and Faith Alone.
If you do not have the view of the Scriptures that the Reformers had, you really have no content in the word Christ, and this is the modern drift in theology. Modern theology uses the word without content because Christ is cut away from the Scriptures. The Reformation followed the teaching of Christ himself in linking the revelation Christ gave of God to the revelation of the written Scriptures.
The Scriptures give the key to two kinds of knowledge—the knowledge of God and the knowledge of men and nature.
It is an important principle to remember, in the contemporary interest in communication and in language study, that the biblical presentation is that, though we do not have exhaustive truth, we have from the Bible what I term “true truth.” In this way we know true truth about God, true truth about man and something truly about nature. Thus on the basis of the Scriptures, while we do not have exhaustive knowledge, we have true and unified knowledge.
“Because I know who you are—I know you are made in the image of God.” We then had a tremendous conversation. We cannot deal with people like human beings, we cannot deal with them on the high level of true humanity, unless we really know their origin—who they are. God tells man who he is. God tells us that he created man in his image. So man is something wonderful.
Why can man do these things that make man so unique, and yet why is man so horrible? Why is it? The Bible says that you are wonderful because you are made in the image of God, but that you are flawed because, at a space-time point of history, man fell.
while man is morally guilty before the God who exists, he is not nothing. Modern man tends to think that he is nothing. These people knew that they were the very opposite of nothing because they knew that they were made in the image of God.
Even though they were fallen, and, without the non-humanistic solution of Christ and his substitutionary death, would go to hell, this still did not mean that they were nothing.
What the Reformation tells us, therefore, is that God has spoken in the Scriptures concerning both the “upstairs” and the “downstairs.” He spoke in a true revelation concerning himself—heavenly things—and he spoke in a true revelation concerning nature—the cosmos and man. Therefore, they had a real unity of knowledge.
the Reformation, no autonomous portion.
whenever art or science has tried to be autonomous, a certain principle has always manifested itself—nature “eats up” grace, and thus art and science themselves soon began to be meaningless.
an Adam who was, using twentieth-century thought-forms, an unprogrammed man—he was not set up as a punch card in a computer system. One thing that marks twentieth-century man is that he cannot visualize this, because modern man is infiltrated by a concept of determinism. But the biblical position is clear—man cannot be explained as totally determined and conditioned—a position that built the concept of the dignity of man. People today are trying to hang on to the dignity of man, and they do not know how to because they have lost the truth that man is made in the image of God. He was an
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You have then, in Reformation thought, a man who is somebody. But you also have him in revolt: and he really revolts—it is not “a piece of theater.” And, because he is an unprogrammed man and really revolts, he has true moral guilt.
We need to learn that, when we begin to tamper with the scriptural concept of true, moral guilt, whether it be psychological tampering, theological tampering or any other kind of tampering, our view of what Jesus did will no longer be scriptural. Christ died for a man who had true moral guilt because he had made a real and true choice.
Everything begins with the kind of God who is “there.” This is the beginning and apex of the whole, and everything flows from this in a non-contradictory way. The Bible says God is a living God and it tells us much about him, but, most significantly perhaps, for twentieth-century man, it speaks of him as both a personal God and an infinite God. This is the kind of God who is “there,” who exists.
The gods of the East are infinite by definition, in the sense that they encompass all—the evil as well as the good—but they are not personal. The gods of the West were personal, but they were very limited. The Teutonic, the Roman and the Greek gods were all the same—personal but not infinite. The Christian God, the God of the Bible, is personal-infinite.
He created man, the animals, the flowers and the machine. On the side of his infinity, man is as separated from God as is the machine. But, says the Bible, when you come on to the side of man’s personality, you have something quite different.
Modern man sees his relationship downward to the animal and to the machine. The Bible rejects this view of who man is. On the side of personality you are related to God. You are not infinite but finite; nevertheless, you are truly personal; you are created in the image of the personal God who exists.
the Renaissance set women free. So did the Reformation—but with a great difference.
Dante, for example. He fell in love with one woman at first sight, and he loved her all his life. Then he married another woman who bore his children and washed his dishes. The simple fact is that this nature-grace division flowed over into the whole structure of Renaissance life, and the autonomous “lower story” always ate up the “upper.”
The soul is not more important than the body. God made the whole man and the whole man is important.
The biblical teaching, therefore, opposes the Platonic, which makes the soul (the “upper”) very important and leaves the body (the “lower”) with little importance at all. The biblical view also opposes the humanist position where the body and autonomous mind of man become important and grace becomes very unimportant.
Romanticism
The biblical teaching, therefore, opposes the Platonic, which makes the soul (the “upper”) very important and leaves the body (the “lower”) with little importance at all. The biblical view also opposes the humanist position where the body and autonomous mind of man become important and grace becomes very unimportant.
Rationalism
First, God made the whole man and he is interested in the whole man. Second, when the historic space-time Fall took place, it affected the whole man. Third, on the basis of Christ’s work as Savior, and having the knowledge that we possess in the revelation of the Scriptures, there is redemption for the whole man.
a lordship of Christ in culture.
Christ is equally Lord in both areas: GRACE NATURE
God made the whole man and is interested in the whole man, and the result is a unity.
Christianity was necessary for the beginning of modern science for the simple reason that Christianity created a climate of thought which put men in a position to investigate the form of the universe.
In contrast to Eastern thinking, the Hebrew-Christian tradition affirms that God has created a true universe outside of himself. When I use this term “outside of himself,” I do not mean it in a spatial sense; I mean that the universe is not an extension of the essence of God. It is not just a dream of God. There is something there to think about, to deal with and to investigate which has objective reality. Christianity gives a certainty of objective reality and of cause and effect, a certainty that is strong enough to build on. Thus the object, and history, and cause and effect really exist.
Nature had to be freed from the Byzantine mentality and returned to a proper biblical emphasis; and it was the biblical mentality which gave birth to modern science.
They held the conviction, first, that God gave knowledge to men—knowledge concerning himself and also concerning the universe and history; and, second, that God and man were not a part of the machinery and could affect the working of the machine of cause and effect. So there was not an autonomous situation in the “lower story.”
