ARISTOTLE'S DESCRIPTION OF the Prime Mover is that it moves all other beings by way of the attraction of its perfection. The last lines of The Paradiso describe the Christian version of the Greek Supreme Being taking control of Dante's desire and will:
... I could feel my being turned . . . by the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.
The Dante who, thanks to the troubadours, found that the most important experience in his life was his love for an individual woman, has been drawn into the orbit of The Prime Mover. His individual will along with his love of Beatrice and his political commitments have been overwhelmed by the bliss of contemplating God. One might say Dante has been Missed out. While bliss wipes you out, joy makes you more intensely you. And in Dante's world every joy is meaning-less compared to the bliss of the beatific vision. "Bliss beyond bliss, all other joys transcending," he says. Dante is ultimately absorbed into the love of all creatures for their Creator. But is this really the way to a fulfilled existence? It seems more like the way to avoid a meaningful life rather than the way to attain one. Indeed, it might be a medieval form of nihilism; for it says that there is nothing in this life that has any meaning whatsoever—even Beatrice's saving love or Dante's deep political motivations are trivial compared with the love of God. It is here that Dante inadvertently shows us that the Greek metaphysics Aquinas is working with undermines the agape love we saw in the early Christianity of John and Paul. On the early Christian model one lives in the world with Jesus in you, and that means you live in the mood of joy not bliss, a mood that guides you to definite and directed action in the world of the word made flesh. The concept of the love of God is therefore ambiguous. In Dante's world it turns out to mean the love of each of us for Aristotle's Supreme Being, whereas in the Gospel it means Jesus' love for each of us. In Dante's final mystical merging there is no place for Jesus as an embodied object and paradigm of agape love. Dante's final experience is merely that God's radiance is "painted with man's image." Jesus is just a face, in Dante's view, with no body beneath it to hold it up. In sum, the medieval attempt to articulate Christianity in Aristotelian terms must fail. The negative message of the Inferno is phenomenologically apt: autonomy really does lead to active nihilism, since when all meaning originates with us nothing has authority over us or the power to move us. But, if we try to put the Christian love of an incarnate Jesus into Aristotelian terms we end up with a Supreme Being and a love so overwhelming and passive that it wipes out individuality and all meaningful differences. Dante's unconditional commitment that has drawn him to Beatrice, and that might have offered him and his medieval Christian culture a new source of personal meaning, is wiped out by an impersonal, Greek, mystical experience. Indeed, it turns out that what has been called the Medieval Synthesis Aquinas's and Dante's achievement of conceptualizing the Christian revelation in Aristotelian terms—is not the answer to nihilism but another step in its direction.
ST. THOMAS, FOLLOWING ARISTOTLE, claimed that the highest goal in life was the beatific vision of the Prime Mover—renamed The Supreme Being. St. Thomas understood this as the bliss of directly contemplating God. But as we have just seen, in Dante's poem this leaves no place for Jesus and agape love, nor for a community of joyful Christians, nor, indeed, for individual selves. Martin Luther, writing a century after Thomas and Dante, was determined to rescue Christianity from Aristotle and get back to the early Christianity expressed in the letters of Paul. Luther minces no words in stating his disgust at the disastrous influence of Aristotle:
It grieves me to the quick that this damned, conceited, rascally heathen has deluded and made fools of so many of the best Christians with his misleading writings. God has plagued us thus for our sins.
And he adds:
The universities need a good, stiff reform. . . . It is my advice that the books of Aristotle, . . . which have hitherto been es-teemed the best, be entirely removed from the curriculum.
Luther thus decisively breaks with the attempt to bring together Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian experience. He could be criti-cizing St. Augustine, St. Thomas, and Dante when he says: "It does [the sinner] no good to recognize God in his glory and majesty, unless he recognizes him in the humility and shame of the cross." Or more succinctly: "The 'theologian of glory' calls the bad good and the good bad. The 'Theologian of the cross,' says what a thing is."25 That is, Christians are not called to experience the Greek-type pure presence of the divine, but are called to relate to Jesus, the "Word made Flesh" as described by John and experienced by Paul. In general, Luther had no use for mystics and monks. Both types were cut off from the world in which, according to Luther, communal joy—rather than blissed-out contemplation of God—is the conta-gious Christian mood. Luther is adamant that
we . . . ought freely to help our neighbor through our body and its works, and each one should become as it were a Christ to the other that we may be Christians to one another.
Rather than leave the world by contemplating God's truth in the depth of the self as Augustine did, or by merging with the love mov-ing creation as Dante did, the Christian is reborn "a new man in a new world." A new world was, indeed, on the horizon. Thanks to Luther the Aristotelian/Thomistic/Dantian theology ceased to hold center stage in our cultural understanding of ourselves. The reborn Christian, whose mood is directly shared with Jesus and with all other Chris-tians, does not need the mediation of popes and priests. According to Luther, every Christian is a Pope and "all they which faithfully believe in Christ are saints."" This is not a way of being a self-sufficient or autonomous being, - but it does open the possibility of thinking of oneself as at least self-sufficient vis a vis the church—up to then the most powerful institu-tion in the West. In the new world of the Enlightenment that Luther ushers in, this can come to sound very self-sufficient, especially when he says:
[A] Christian man, if ye define him rightly, is free from all laws, and is not subject unto any creature, either within or with-out. . . . For he hath such a gift, such a treasure in his heart, that although it seemeth to be but little, yet notwithstanding the smallness thereof, is greater than heaven and earth, because Christ, which is this gift, is greater."
Luther's reformation, and the Protestant Reformation more gen-erally, thus provided a corrective to the medieval passive nihilism of Dante. But its emphasis on individual freedom also prepared the way rforrthe active nihilism associated with the death of God. Luther's cor-rective to medieval nihilism centers on his insistence that God's love embraces us despite our sins. The mood of Christianity in Luther, therefore, is joy and gratitude.3° In Luther's own life this mood gave him a certainty about how to act. This certainty was manifest in his famous statement at the Diet of Worms in 1521: "Here I stand; I can do no other." Certainty about how to act in this world therefore a certainty for which one would "die a thousand deaths," as Luther says in his commentary on Paul's Letter to the Romans—stands in stark contrast with the hope that a mood of bliss might lift one out of this world and its commitments, as in the medieval nihilism of Dante. But the corrective came at the price of meaning. In order to em-phasize the peculiarities of this mood of joy and gratitude, Luther stressed that it was experienced in terms of a personal and individ-ual relation to Jesus. This personal and individual relation to Jesus is not the same as the Enlightenment celebration of the independent individual, but it was a step in that direction. Reform Christianity had the effect of emphasizing the individual as defined by his inner thoughts and desires at the expense of a God-given hierarchy of or-dered, worldly meanings outside the individual. Indeed, in Luther's account of Christianity the world in its politi-cal, religious, and environmental forms is entirely disenchanted. We have now traveled far from Dante's medieval hierarchy of meanings—in which the value of everything is written on its face. Rather, each in-dividual is as a king, according to Luther, since one no longer follows the laws in service to the king and his state. One is indebted instead to the mood that Jesus' love and suffering instills in you, and it is this mood that determines what is lawful. That is to say, as Jesus said, love fulfills the Law. One is no longer dependent on the priests and their mediation or intercession in one's relations with God. Rather, Jesus justifies you as an individual by giving his grace and love to you directly. This brings us a long way toward the Enlightenment understand-ing of the self as the self-sufficient source of meaning in the universe. But unlike the Enlightenment thinkers, especially Descartes and Kant, Luther still had a strong sense of the individual's dependence on a Savior. According to him, works of devotion offered by the church
and by individuals are worthless, willful acts of pride, unless they are experienced in faith and humility. We can't give faith to ourselves any more than we can give ourselves our other moods:
Faith is a living and unshakeable confidence . . . [it] makes us joy-ful, high-spirited, and eager in our relations with God and with all mankind. . . . Righteousness of this kind cannot be brought about in the ordinary course of nature, by our own free will, or by our own powers. No one can give faith to himself . . . "
Descartes took the next big step toward nihilism by denigrating receptivity entirely and focusing exclusively on what one can obtain by one's own willpower.
IT IS NOT UNTIL the early seventeenth century that we arrive at the French philosopher Rene Descartes, the only reconfigurer in the West besides the Jesus figure we have described. Just as Jesus established our Christian World with its saints and sinners, Descartes established Our Modern World in which we understand ourselves as self-sufficient subjects standing over against self-sufficient objects. He does this by drawing on Augustine's discovery of the inner depths of the soul and on Luther's emphasis on each Christian's independence. But Luther, with his understanding of moods—especially agape and gratitude—preserves a sense of the necessary receptivity of the Christian while Descartes claims that human subjects at their best are completely de-tached, self-contained, and, far from being passive, have a willpower SO great that it rivals God's. He says:
It is free-will alone ... which I find to be so great in me that I can conceive no other idea to be more great; it is indeed the case that it is for the most part this will that causes me to know that in some manner I bear the image and likeness of God."
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