The three articles in this issue speak to very different intellectual and social concerns shaping the theological and pastoral discourse of the Reformation and early modernity. On the one hand they show the way that the Reformation came to birth in a context shaped by centuries-old debates about the relationship of faith and reason. On the other hand they reveal the way in which Christian commitments could often come into dialogue with urgent moral and practical dilemmas, as well as personal and national crises. In the wake of a global pandemic it seems particularly appropriate to consider conflicting religious responses to the early modern crisis of plague, reminding us of our simultaneous proximity and distance from the past.
The first article by Giovanni Tortoriello is on ‘The Transformations of “Renaissance Aristotelianisms”: The Case of Johannes Eck’s Commentary on the Corpus Aristotelicum’. While best known for his polemical opposition to Luther, Eck was an important philosopher and theologian in his own right. Building on recent scholarship, Tortoriello argues for the pluriformity of the Aristotelian tradition that Eck inherited and transformed. At the same time, the article shows how Eck’s understanding of Aristotelianism was shaped by the Neo-Platonic movement, as well as by his own Nominalist and humanist standpoints. Writing in the wake of Paduan Averroism and the Pomponazzi crisis, Eck was particularly concerned, like Marsilio Ficino before him, to develop a Christian philosophy. Against both radical Aristotelian currents, and motivated by a certain anti-Scotism, he therefore strongly maintained the possibility of proving philosophically the immortality of the soul and the creation of the world. Indeed, Eck was adamant in closing the gap between conclusions reached by human reason and truths revealed by faith. While the two movements are often held to be opposed, Eck reveals the possibility of a creative dialogue of Platonism and Nominalism. At the same time, his Aristotelian Commentaries point to an important, ongoing debate concerning the relation of philosophy and theology at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
The second article by Ron Rittgers concerns ‘A Liturgy of Lament for a Broken House-Church: The Pious Meditations (1619) of Johann Christoph Oelhafen’. Following the death of his beloved wife, Johann Christoph Oelhafen, a wealthy citizen of Nuremberg, charted his ongoing struggles with grief in a volume of Pious Meditations. Building on his recent book on Oelhafen, Rittgers’ article argues that Oelhafen’s Pious Meditations was consciously shaped by his memories of the liturgical life of the Lutheran house-church formerly led by himself as Hausvatter and his wife as Hausmutter. In this sense, the work bears witness to the broken liturgy of the house-church, and is an attempt to reconstruct it for the widower and his orphaned children. While drawing deeply on the mystical and consolatory resources of the Lutheran devotional tradition, Oelhafen’s work also shows him seeking to express his overwhelming grief according to the biblical idiom of the Psalms and the Book of Job, which offered more scope for angry questioning of God than the pious conventions of his own day. In doing so, Rittgers argues that Oelhafen sought to rewrite the ‘emotion script’ of early modern Lutheranism.
The third article by Anne-Dunan Page concerns ‘The Nonconformist clergy and the London plague of 1665’. Drawing especially on the writings of Richard Baxter and Edmund Calamy it has long been held that the Nonconformist clergy maintained a heroic ministry in London in the midst of the plague of 1665 in the face of the mass abandonment of their parishes by the clergy of Church of England. Dunan-Page seeks to challenge this narrative by offering a careful reexamination of the historical sources. Without denying the important role of a number of Nonconformists ministering bravely under adverse circumstances, she points to prominent examples of Anglican ministers who also stayed, problematising the later charge of a mass abandonment. In doing so, she seeks to uncover a more nuanced narrative of pastoral responsibility, showing important examples of Nonconformist ministers who argued for the priority of pastoral writing rather than illegal public preaching or compassionate visiting. Following a Presbyterian model, collective decision making was held to be important and individual vocations to plague ministry had to be tested against wider evangelical and political concerns. While studies of the London plague have tended to be dominated by social history and history of medicine, this article seeks to reveal a complex and important religious and providential dimension to early modern experience of epidemics.