Reformation and System-building

In discussing the Reformation, Oberman contrasts the via antiqua with the via moderna . Both believed in universals, preconceived ideas that enable humans to “select, interpret, and order the chaotic messages transmitted by the senses.” They differed on the origin and nature of those universals: For the moderns, “these universals are concepted produced by the human mind, a means to access knowledge, to store, and to discern similarities in the surrounding world – and above all to discover the unique characteristics of each individual person or object.” The universals were “man-made adjustable models to be defined and redefined in terms which receive exact and ever new meaning depending on the context in which they are used.”

The Old Way however saw universals as having an “ontological payload” and as necessarily transcending the singular object. The universals are not conceptual but “real tools through participation in God’s order of creation.” In short, “Whereas the Modern Way designs flexible models to be tested by experiment, constantly adjusting to new data, the Old Way embraces fundamental axioms to explain experienced reality by deduction.”

Luther saw the Old Way as “the dark side” and followed instead the more flexible program of the modern way. Calvin too was a moderni, though he was so confident “that all of scholasticism was too outdated to salvage anything from it” and therefore never completely distanced himself from the Old Way as Luther had done. Calvin’s Institutes was not a reversion to the Old Way. Calvin recognized that “hard and fast systems are helpful for teaching basics to students and eager disciples of visionary founders of schools,” but despite his insistence that he provided the book as a manual “for teaching purposes” his disciples “increasingly set upon by a revived Tridentine Catholicism and under duress of persecution, came to embrace a system of doctrine – unintentionally perverting the aim of their leader.” Similarly, within Lutheranism, the “abhorrence of heresy” led German Protestants “to give profound credence to its professors and entrust its universities with powerful authority.”

Because they needed systems for combat with Catholics, Protestants “assailed the moderni as relativistic skeptics who would deny religion the status of experienced knowledge and relegated the open-minded, critical stance of the Modern Way to the sciences.”