As I was reading this splendid new book, an image from another book arose: that of an etching in black and white of Martin Luther in bed and confronting the devil. The image appears in the first pages of a now classic novel of the post-Franco era, Carmen Martín-Gaite's The Back Room (El cuarto de atrás, 1979; San Francisco: City Lights, 2000). She describes Luther's adversary as a naked figure completely drawn in black, with horns and great wings, but even more striking is the use to which she puts the image, which serves as a small mirror reflecting the problem of appearances. The one thing that orients her first-person narrator is the title of the etching, “Luther Meeting the Devil.” The words themselves providing an escape from the “abysses and labyrinths” surrounding her. The entire novel plays continually with the uncertainties of reality, in which a man dressed in black mysteriously appears out of nowhere and begins an all-night conversation with the narrator/protagonist. By no means a religious or religiously inspired novel, The Back Room nonetheless is driven by the demon of uncertainty.
That is what Susan Schreiner's book is about. But to get to that dramatic high point, to “unmasking the angel of light,” or discerning the bad from the good among spirits, Schreiner first sets up a richly layered and nuanced discussion of the various ways that the question of certainty shaped the debates and writings of sixteenth-century Europe. Precisely because this period is a transitional one, a continuation in part of the medieval era, the desirability and dangers of certitude become paramount in debates about salvation, authority, discernment of the spirits, experience, appearances, and reality. When all is in flux, nothing is certain. One of the virtues of this book is the breadth of coverage and examples Schreiner provides, bringing in both Catholic and Protestant as well as religious and secular figures, including Luther, Thomas More, Montaigne, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Müntzer, Sebastian Franck, Juan de Valdés, and Shakespeare. She also surveys current and established scholarship, incorporating the insights of Karsten Harries, Louis Dupré, Stephen Toulmin, and others, while also attending to primary texts with careful and stimulating analyses.
The book is divided into seven chapters: “Beginnings: Questions and Debates in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries”; “‘Abba! Father!’: The Certainty of Salvation”; “‘The Spiritual Man Judges All Things’: The Certainty of Exegetical Authority”; “Are You Alone Wise?: The Catholic Response”; “Experientia: The Great Age of the Spirit”; “Unmasking the Angel of Light: The Discernment of the Spirits”; and “‘Men Should Be What They Seem’: Appearances and Reality.” Each chapter flows into the next, providing not only a series of natural transitions, but a logical argument moving from theological questions of salvation and authority to secular doubts about appearances. At the same time, she argues convincingly that all these issues are really bound together by the overriding problem of certainty.
Chapter 1 grounds the rest of the book by going back to the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing in particular on Ockham's Nominalism as a way of guaranteeing certainty through the immediacy of experience. Ockham's emphasis on “the primacy of the singular” and rejection of species arose out of what has been called the “hunger for reality.” Schreiner then establishes basic points of contact between the Nominalists and the humanists, without ignoring their differences. Humanists too sought the singular and the concrete, with the contemplation of history. In this chapter, she also recognizes the vexed, permanently unsettled nature of concepts like modernity and crisis. Where does modernity begin, and what is its relation to the sixteenth century? How can a crisis of uncertainty be delimited?
In the second chapter, the certainty of salvation is tied to the certainty of faith, and that according to Luther and others, could only come from the Holy Spirit. The question is ultimately also one of knowledge: how does one know one is in a state of grace? Schreiner concludes that “in both the Catholic and the Reformation arguments, uncertainty about God and the divine will was the natural state of the fallen human soul. Certitude could never be obtained by one's natural powers of reason because it required a source outside the human being” (74). Doubt then became demonic.
The language of salvation turns into the language of authority, as the following chapter demonstrates. Debates over such issues as the interpretation of scripture, the reading of the Bible, and the meaning of the eucharist were ultimately battles over authority for figures like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin. The Catholic response is detailed in chapter 4. The reformers' writings helped better define the Catholic position and identity. By attacking the authority of the Church, the reformers were undermining certainty. A wholly spiritual Church would be “invisible and unknowable” (174).
Chapters 5 and 6 delve deeper into the notion of “Spirit.” Here, personal spiritual experience becomes paramount as the basis for certainty in the alumbradismo or illuminist movement in Spain, Loyola, and the mystics. But as Schreiner observes, “when experienced faith became associated with certainty, the issue of private interpretation became a troubling issue . . . The real fear was that the soul received its teaching from the devil” (259). Here, she nicely connects the religious yearning for certitude with the question of appearances. The book concludes with a discussion of the appearances/reality question as seen above all in Montaigne and Shakespeare. Montaigne stresses the mind's contradictions, its “wandering”; Shakespeare, the fluidity and formlessness of life. Individual thinking, so prized yet also feared in the period, produced a growing feeling that the earth beneath men's feet had begun to open up. Cervantes would have been perfect here. This stimulating, thought-provoking book, though marred by typos, is highly recommended.
