Contenu du sommaire : Théologie et philosophie en prédication : de Thomas d'Aquin à Jean Calvin

This article aims to analyze certain aspects of the reception to Paul's Areopagus Address (Acts 17, 22-31). At the outset of this “sermon”, we can indeed articulate the problem of the relationship between philosophy and predication. After a brief analysis of the speech itself, the present article examines the interpretations of this fundamental text by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Erasmus, Cajetan and Calvin and draws the conclusion that the paulinian text leads to an interrogation on the possibility of a philosophical approach to the question of God.

There are around 100 Latin and 120 Middle High German sermons within the eckhartian corpus, as we know it today. Scholars have situated the majority of the German sermons within the last decade of Eckhart's life. However, his interest for preaching is expressed in his work from the very beginning, and continues to infuse his whole career. What distinguishes his homiletic work from that of masters in theology, his peers, seems indeed to be his use of the vernacular and the attention given to literary form and to the publication of his sermons. Thus raising the question: why such an interest in the vernacular tongue ? Therefore, the primary focus of our analysis are the German sermons, and in this regard we will address two arguments that appear especially meaningful. The first deals with the need for a liturgical recontextualization. Indeed, the liturgical aspect has been entirely overlooked in the critical edition and in literature. The second manifests itself through the necessity to explore the literary features of the sermons, that are not, in fact, “reported” by audience members, but have been carefully written and published by the author himself. Finally, a noteworthy characteristic of the eckhartian homiletic is the essential link between locutio emphatica and the demonstrative discourse (« natiurlîche rede »): our close study of a few excerpts from Eckhart's Defense (1326) shall attempt to shed some light on this concept.

According to Jean Gerson's study of pastoral activity, the sermon holds a crucial position alongside confession, a privileged position confirmed by the very practice of predication at which he excelled. Gerson invests the sermon with a seminal role in the articulation of orthodoxy and orthopraxis, since the pastor's word is at the junction between the generality of the law it must transmit and the singularity of the action it must regulate. This tension between generality and singularity is, for Gerson, resolved for the most part by casuistics, understood as a method of positing a problem and resolving the specific issue it raises. In this way, the sermon appears in many respects as a call to an examination of conscience and a preparation for confession that completes on an individual level the work of mediation between the law and the problem at hand in the sermon. It is the application of these proto-casuistics illustrated by the analysis of the cycle of French sermons entitled Poenitemini that allows us to consider the art of the sermon as a form of ethica utens.

In the following paper, we focus on the dialectical tensions between Renaissance humanists and Renaissance scholastics as they are reflected in the oral culture of sermons, university lectures and public debates in Florence of the late Quattrocento. Our aim is to show how this oral culture reflects important aspects of the new atmosphere which we call “The Renaissance”, which does not always correspond to some popular and antiquated historiographical images of a secular and anti-religious movement. Sermons delivered in the religious confraternities by humanists like Francesco Berlinghieri, Giovanni Cocchi, Christoforo Landino and others stand at the centre of the first part of the paper; we then consider one of the most famous documents of the Renaissance: Giovanni Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man. The second part of the paper focuses on Giovanni Caroli's reaction to Pico's project and offers a comparison between Pico and Caroli, while discussing their different motivations and methods with regard to philosophical and theological matters.

Unlike the Christian sermon, the Jewish sermon is not essential to religious life and the preacher has little status. It is, however, a social and literary reality of considerable importance in Spain. The fact that philosophy exists within a genre that addresses everyone has three explanatory factors: the texts that the liturgy leads to examine through predication; Maimonides' rationalist reconfiguration of Judaism; the resistance to proselytism. Hence the choice of speculative topics (Creation, free will, absolute justice or in the name of public interest, service through fear or love, and so on), references to philosophical Jewish as well as non-Jewish authors, a particular lexicon and forms of argumentation. The many cases of acceptance of forced baptism during the 1391 riots put in light the demand for sermons fitting to the needs of the people. The perspectives that had been opened by the Nicomachean Ethics, translated into Hebrew around 1400, and the example of Christian predication gave way by the middle of the XVth century to Joseph Ibn Shem Tov's program concerning the role of predicator, that expressed the importance of philosophy even to the eyes of Jewish thinkers especially concerned with preserving the faith. The singularity of Judaism designated itself as a knowledge according to two models: the first, unavowed, of Christian scholastics, where theology is above philosophy, and the second at a level inaccessible to other men. However, such a specific knowledge does not let itself be easily grasped. After 1492, Iberian refugees in the Ottoman Empire tended to identify it with the corpus of homilies of ancient rabbis. Jacob Ibn Ḥabib gathered and edited them and Solomon ha-Levi developed its theory. Did the final victory of Safed's Kabbalah at the end of the XVIth century result from the failure of this research, or was it otherwise?

After having delivered some general information regarding the corpus of Nicholas of Cusa' Sermons, the article focuses on the concept of manuductio (the act of taking by the hand). Drawn from the dionysian tradition, it is for the Cusan an important notion. The human intellect discovers only gradually the most elevated realities, for which it needs an experimented guide to induct him into the practice of contemplation. The art of Conjectures, the teaching of the De Visione Dei, the Trinitarian developments of the Cribratio Alkorani are presented by Nicolas as manuductiones. We will show here that the sermon is indeed conceived by the Cusan as a manuductio in faith leading the faithful to a deeper understanding of being and acting in Christ. Philosophy plays a limited but real role in this itinerary toward the intelligence of faith.

Luther, like many others, practiced preaching as well as argued the subject of preaching. By inheriting the Barthian programme of a « theology of the Word of God » (Wort-Gottes-Theologie), the Lutherforschung has, it seems, widened the gap between such practice and discourse. Today the dogmatic expectations of the Wort-Gottes-Theologie (the definition of theology as kerygma), as well as its practical claims (preaching as central to ecclesial action) both regulate and restrict the examination of several significant thought processes of Luther's analysis between 1510-1530, some of which clash deliberately with the academic constraints that theology, until Luther, had accepted to abide by. We will examine three of them: the transformation of the exegesis of Rm 10, 17, fides ex auditu; the elaboration of a concept of what is preachable as an indicator of what is a theological truth; the definition of a scopus generalis of all preaching. These three paradigm shifts were tentative efforts and were not all successful. However, they formulated the first attempt at a research methodology on the subject of preaching in the early theologies of the Reformation.

Of a homiletic nature, Calvin's predication follows the principle of the lectio continua, akin to the commentary on the lectiones. The reformer often mentions philosophers in a positive fashion regarding the knowledge they represent but also in order to criticize them. Philosophy and philosophers are ambivalent realities, as in the Institution of the Christian religion, which represent human knowledge of the world and of Man in so far as one can or dare consider these realities as independent from God. The greatest praise of Philosophy leads to its sharpest condemnation. Calvin uses the term philosophers in order to criticize his contemporary rivals: on the one hand, scholastic and tridentine Theology, on the other the Erasmian “Moyenneurs”. The reformer distinguishes two “styles”: that of Philosophy and that of scriptural revelation, as two discursive methods, two literary styles and two strategies. Only Holy Scripture is capable of efficiently leading to (Christian) wisdom.