Human Nature and Reason: Conflicting Views from Sixteenth-Century Spain

Abstract

In view of the differences in the intellectual climates prevailing during the respective reigns of Charles I and Philip II, it is not surprising that Luis Vives and Fray Luis de Granada should have diametrically opposite views on the nature of man.* An understanding as to how two radically opposed opinions can stem from the same doctrines may, however, help to explain some of the apparent paradoxes that arose in sixteenth-century Spain as a result of the war of ideas between Catholics and Protestants, and within the Catholic Church itself. In the latter part of the century, for example, the Inquisition censured the ideas of Erasmus, who had flirted seriously with Protestantism; and yet it almost always favored the writings of Fray Luis de Granada,' who sometimes sounds more Protestant than Catholic. Such paradoxes, I believe, spring from the possibility of interpreting the doctrine of the Fall of man in two different ways; and it is hoped that this comparative study of Vives and Granada will shed some light on the Spanish aspects of this conflict of ideas. The idea that man is composed of a higher and a lower part, the higher being reasonable, looking upward, and the lower being unreasonable and looking downward, had already been clearly outlined before the Christian era. In his Timaeus Plato set forth a picture of the dual nature of man which closely parallels the Christian notion that man partakes of the nature of the angels by virtue of his immortal soul, and of the nature of the beasts insofar as he possesses a body. In accepting the Old Testament as part of their Bible the Christians, through the story of the Fall of man, introduced a time element into the concept of human duality. When the Christian moralists of the