Plague and Theology

Oberman again: “The experience of the [bubonic] plague may in fact help us understand the fifteenth-century ascendency of nominalism, its innovations in the whole field ranging from theology to science, and its successful invasion of schools and universities, where it was firmly established as the via moderna . What must have seemed to conservative Thomists of that time to be a threat to the hierarchy between heaven and earth was actually a fact-finding search for order by demarcating the distinct realms of faith and reason. In the domain of faith the epochal shift from God-as-Being to God-as-Person allowed for a fresh reading of the sources of the church in SCripture and tradition as attesting to the personal God of the covenant. At the same time, in the realm of reason the new quest for the laws of nature could be initiated once physics was liberated from its domestication by metaphysics, the speculative welding of Aristotle and the Scriptures. In any account of the transformation of the West, the crucial metamorphosis of the capital sin of curiosity into the nominalists’ bona curiositas validated the exploration of the real world and is therefore to be given a high place in the range of factors explaining the ‘birth of Europe.’”