Naturalism in the Renaissance and Protestantism
The Renaissance and Naturalism
Naturalism is found beforehand in the Renaissance, which, in its effort to recover the riches of the ancient pagan cultures, and of the Greek culture and art in particular, came to glorify man, nature, and natural forces to an exaggerated degree. In exalting the goodness and the power of nature, one devalued and made disappear from the minds of men the necessity of grace and the fact that humanity is destined for the supernatural order, and the light brought in by revelation. Under a pretext of art, they determined to introduce then everywhere, even in the churches, that nudism—we can speak without exaggeration of nudism—which triumphs in the Sistine Chapel in Rome. Without doubt, looked at from the point of view of art, those works have their value; but they have, alas, above all a carnal aspect of exaltation of the flesh that is really opposed to the teaching of the Gospel: “For the flesh covets against the spirit,” says St. Paul; “and the spirit militates against the flesh.”1
I do not condemn this art if it is kept in secular museums, but I do not see in it a means of expressing the truth of the Redemption, that is to say, the happy submission of nature restored to grace. My judgment will certainly be different on the baroque art of the Catholic counter-reformation, especially in the countries that resisted Protestantism: the baroque will still call on chubby angels, but this art, that is very much of movement and of sometimes pathetic expression, is a cry of triumph for the Redemption, a chant of victory for Catholicism over the pessimism of a cold and hopeless Protestantism.
Protestantism and Naturalism
Speaking precisely, it can seem strange and paradoxical to qualify Protestantism as being naturalism. There is nothing in Luther of this exaltation of the intrinsic good of nature, since, according to him, nature is incurably fallen and concupiscence is invincible. Nonetheless, the excessively nihilistic look that the Protestant casts onto himself results in a practical naturalism: by dint of depreciating nature and exalting the force of faith alone, one relegates divine grace and the supernatural order to the domain of abstractions. For the Protestants, grace does not operate a true interior renewal; baptism is not the restoring of a habitual supernatural state; it is only an act of faith in Jesus Christ, who justifies and saves. Nature is not restored by grace, it remains intrinsically corrupt, and faith obtains from God nothing more than this: He throws over our sins the modest cloak of Noah. From then on, the whole supernatural organism that baptism has just added to nature by taking root in it, all the infused virtues and the gifts of the Holy Ghost, are reduced to nothing, brought back as they are to that lone frenzied act of faith—confidence in a Redeemer who spares only to withdraw far from His creature, leaving an ever so colossal abyss between man, permanently miserable, and the thrice-holy transcendent God. This pseudo-supernaturalism, as Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange calls it, in the end leaves man, although redeemed, to the mere strength of his natural virtues; he collapses fatally into naturalism, so well do the opposite extremes join up! Jacques Maritain expresses well the naturalist outcome of Lutheranism:
Human nature will only have to reject as a vain theological accessory the cloak of a grace that is nothing for it, and to take back onto itself its faith-confidence,2 in order to become that nice emancipated beast whose unbroken infallible progress delights the universe today.3
This naturalism will be applied especially to the civic and social order: grace being reduced to a fiduciary sentiment of faith, the Redemption now consists only of an individual and private religiosity, without a hold on the public life. The public order, economic and political, is therefore condemned to live and to develop itself outside Our Lord Jesus Christ. At the extreme, the Protestant will look for the criterion of his justification in the eyes of God in his economic success; it is in this sense that he will gladly inscribe onto the door of his house this sentence of the Old Testament: “Honor God with thy goods, give Him the first-fruits of all thy revenues, and then thy granaries will be abundantly filled and thy cisterns will overflow with wine.”4
Jacques Maritain has some good words on the materialism of Protestantism, which will give birth to economic Liberalism and to Capitalism:
Behind Luther’s appeals to the Lamb who saves, behind his outbursts of confidence and his faith in the pardon of sins, there is a human creature who raises up his head and who arranges his affairs very well in the mud where he is immersed by the fault of Adam! He will manage in the world, he will follow the thirst for power, the imperialist instinct, the law of this world which is his world. God will be only an ally, a mighty one.5
The result of Protestantism will be that men will attach themselves more to the goods of this world and will forget the eternal goods. If Puritanism comes to exercise an exterior supervision over public morality, it will not impregnate men’s hearts with the truly Christian spirit, which is a supernatural spirit, called primacy of the spiritual. Protestantism will be led necessarily to proclaim the emancipation of the temporal from the spiritual. Now it is precisely that emancipation that one will find again in Liberalism. The popes then had good reason to denounce this naturalism of Protestant inspiration as the origin of the Liberalism that disrupted Christianity in 1789 and 1848. Thus, Leo XIII says:
This audacity of faithless men, which threatens civil society every day with more serious destruction, and which stirs up anxiety and trouble in all minds, has its cause and its origin in those poisoned doctrines which, spread out in these latest times among the peoples like seeds of vices, have borne very malignant fruits in their season. Indeed you know very well, Venerable Brethren, that the cruel war that has been declared since the 16th century against the Catholic Faith by the innovators, aimed at this goal of turning aside all revelation and overthrowing the whole supernatural order, in order that access may be opened up to the discoveries or rather the frenzies of unaided reason.6
Closer to our time, Pope Benedict XV:
Since the first three centuries and the origins of the Church, in the course of which the blood of Christians fertilized the entire earth, one can say that the Church never was in such a danger as that which showed itself at the end of the 18th century. It was then indeed that a philosophy in delirium, a prolonging of the heresy and the apostasy of the Innovators,7 acquired a universal power of seduction over minds and brought about a total bewilderment, with the settled purpose of ruining the Christian foundations of society, not only in France, but little by little in all the nations.8
Endnotes
1 Gal. 5:17.
2 Faith reduced to no more than a mere confidence that one is “saved.”
3 Trois Réformateurs, p. 25.
4 Prov. 3:9-10.
5 Op. cit., pp. 52-53.
6 Leo XIII, Encyclical Quod Apostolici Muneris, December 28, 1878.
7 The Protestant reformers.
8 Encyclical Letter Anno jam exeunte, March 7, 1917.
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