Are you alone wise?: the search for certainty in the early modern era

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)As I was reading this splendid new book, an image from another book arose: that of an etching in black and white of Martin in bed and confronting the devil. The image appears in the first pages of a now classic novel of the post-Franco era, Carmen Martin-Gaite's The Back Room (El cuarto de atras , 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 Avila, Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Thomas Muntzer, Sebastian Franck, Juan de Valdes, and Shakespeare. She also surveys current and established scholarship, incorporating the insights of Karsten Harries, Louis Dupre, 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. …