Page:Philosophical Review Volume 1.djvu/714

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.