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Luis de Molina
The Life and Theology of the Founder of Middle Knowledge
By Kirk R. MacGregor ZONDERVAN
Copyright © 2015 Kirk R. MacGregor
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-310-51697-2
CHAPTER 1
Early Years and Religious Conversion
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Luis de Molina was born into a noble family on September 29, 1535, at Cuenca, New Castile, Spain. His father, Don Diego de Orejón, was a wealthy merchant of honey, saffron, forest products, and minerals, all of which could be found in abundant supply in the Serranía de Cuenca, with its thick pine forests overlying a succession of intricate mountainous landforms. In 1530 Orejón ascended to the nobility by purchasing a seat on the municipal council as a veinticuatro (alderman) for 7,000 ducats. To enhance his social standing, in 1531 Orejón married Dona Ana García de Molina, who belonged to an established noble family in Cuenca that since the mid-fourteenth century had owned a massive sheep pasture responsible for the production of textiles. The family possessed deep roots in Cuenca, having played a major military role in reclaiming Cuenca from the Moors in 1177. Because the Molina family name, as old nobility, carried more prestige than the newly dignified Orejón name, all of the children from this marriage — Luis and his two younger brothers — were given the matrilineal name.
The young Molina grew up during an intense period of local religious enthusiasm and reform. Harking back to the proscription of Judaism and the capture of the last Muslim outpost in 1492, New Castile had entered a period of messianic expectations, kindled by both the oppressed conversos (forced Jewish converts to Christianity) and by the Christian populace. Rumors that the Messiah would quickly appear and lead either the conversos or the Christian common folk to the Promised Land swept through the region. Among the professional classes and the nobility, an indigenous religious movement dubbed Alumbradismo (Illumination) arose, which rejected many of the external rites of the Roman Catholic Church, practiced mental prayer, and sought mystical union with God. Moreover, the elites also increasingly embraced Erasmus' criticisms of clerical abuses and popular superstition. Such criticisms found a ready audience in the new reform-minded bishop of Cuenca, Diego Ramírez de Villaescusa, who had been in Rome during the initial years of Martin Luther's break with the Catholic Church. Bishop Ramírez concurred with Luther's observations that the Roman Church financially preyed on its uninformed flock and exploited the flock's worry about the welfare of their relatives' souls in purgatory. As Bishop Ramírez sarcastically exclaimed at his installation: "How the bishopric of Cuenca is one of the most honored in these kingdoms! Because it has been forty years or more in the hands of Italian cardinals who have carried off its rent and promoted Italians to its benefices, that land has been completely lost." Not only did Bishop Ramírez institute major administrative changes in Cuenca to prevent absenteeism (priests not being present at their parish churches), pluralism (priests holding, and drawing incomes from, more than one parish position at a time), and religious ignorance among the clergy, but he also launched a comprehensive program of lay reform. This program made an impact on Molina and his extended family.
When Molina was ten years old, his maternal grandmother, the Widow Molina, was brought before Bishop Ramírez on the charge of falling prey to superstitious customs. In 1545 the Widow Molina sought the help of the sorceress Juana de Sancta Fimia in compelling one of Molina's uncles, who had abandoned one of Molina's maternal aunts, to return to her through love magic. But the Widow Molina was concerned with the orthodoxy of her actions and demanded from Sancta Fimia proof that what she did was "a good devotion," to which Sancta Fimia responded by laughing in her face and telling her a story about selling one's soul to the devil for love. Frightened for her spiritual health, the Widow Molina departed without actually participating in the love magic. Bishop Ramírez compassionately abstained from turning the Widow Molina over to the Inquisition, despite her consorting with a sorceress, for which the Orejón-Molina family was quite grateful. Bishop Ramírez, however, insisted that the Widow Molina and the other members of her family acquire a much better understanding of Christian doctrine. Afterward, the Orejón-Molina family instilled into Luis the importance of keeping his formal obligations as a Christian, which included living a morally upstanding life, confessing his sins and partaking of the Eucharist at Easter, keeping Sunday as the Sabbath, and paying a tithe of whatever money or property he might receive.
By the age of twelve, Molina's parents expressed their desire for him to become a lawyer, probably so that he could safeguard the legal interests of the family businesses. In traditional fashion, Molina underwent preparatory education at the cathedral school in Cuenca from 1547 to 1551, where he studied Latin grammar and literature.
MOLINA'S SPIRITUAL JOURNEY
Molina then matriculated at the University of Salamanca in 1551 to study law. Less than a year into his studies, Molina encountered the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, cofounder of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuit order). A Jesuit community had been established at Salamanca in 1548, and its priests disseminated literature to students at the university. Molina felt particularly disturbed by Loyola's taxonomy of the three classes of rich people, all of which desire to save their souls. For Loyola the first class fails in this endeavor because they obstinately refuse to rid themselves of their wealth under any circumstances before the hour of death. The second class fails because, in spite of their desire to give up their wealth, they feel addicted to the earthly security their money affords. Hence "they do not decide to give up the sum of money in order to go to God, though this would be the better way for them." The third class succeeds in finding salvation because they rid themselves of all attachment to their wealth and seek the will of God as to how they will discharge their wealth, either relinquishing it entirely or personally administering it to advance the well-being of others rather than their own self-interest. In 1552 the seventeen-year-old Molina identified himself as belonging to the second class, which prompted the realization that keeping the moral requirements of the Christian faith was not enough. Concerning salvation, Molina concluded that Jesus was not interested in law-keeping as an end in itself. Although Catholic theologians never taught this idea, it was common among laypeople to think in these terms, overemphasizing works by dissolving faith into ritual or moral requirements. Rather, Molina concluded that Jesus was interested in people's committing (committere) their lives to him and surrendering (tradere) their possessions and desires to his will. As Molina later wrote, people must "surrender the right hand of their hearts and despise themselves, for the sake of God, in order to receive his assistance."
This moment of recognition was profound in Molina's understanding of faith, which parted company with the widespread understanding in sixteenth-century Spain. Stemming from Thomas Aquinas, the prevailing understanding held that faith was an epistemological category, or way of knowing, complementary to reason that consisted in intellectual assent to doctrines not provable by reason. Molina rejected this intellectualist understanding of faith in favor of a relational understanding harmonious with the longstanding tradition of Christian mysticism. Hence Molina described faith as a relation to which every person is called, leading some to freely convert and others not to convert: "All are equally called to faith by God, to the same kind of relation. For some solely in their freedom fall into this relation by embracing this faith; however, others fall out of this relation by showing contempt. When these show contempt, it is not to be attributed to what grace alone had anticipated. But from the hearing of the gospel, some convert and others do not convert." We need only recall the Catholic mysticism of Teresa of Ávila (1515 – 82) and John of the Cross (1542 – 91) prevalent during Molina's day on the Iberian Peninsula to see that Molina was not a lone Catholic voice in opting for a relational understanding of faith over against an intellectualist one.
Here it would be fruitful to place Molina's conception of faith in conversation with the conceptions articulated by Luther and Calvin and by the evangelical Anabaptists. Luther often described faith in terms of a spiritual marriage, which implies personal commitment to Christ: "[Faith] unites the soul with Christ as a bride is united with her bridegroom." Such unification causes the believer naturally to issue forth a life of devotion to Christ and love of humanity, just as a good tree naturally bears good fruit: "We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God.... he always remains in God and in his love." Like Molina, Luther rejected the popular understanding of faith as intellectual assent: "It is not enough or in any sense Christian to preach the works, life, and words of Christ as historical facts, as if the knowledge of these would suffice for the conduct of life." In a later publication Molina explicitly voiced agreement with Luther on this point: "Luther rightly understood that it is not the right of the intelligence that through grace we are now the children who already possess the supernatural dignities." Elsewhere in the same section, however, Molina condemned Luther for his doctrine of providence, thus distancing himself from any Protestant interpretation of his endorsement. Following Luther, Calvin implied that commitment to following Jesus in a life of discipleship was an indispensable part of faith. This is evident in his delineation of the relationship between faith and repentance: "Now it ought to be a fact beyond controversy that repentance not only constantly follows faith, but is also born of faith." Due to faith's production of repentance, Calvin insisted that "no one can embrace the grace of the gospel without betaking himself from the errors of his past life into the right way, and applying his whole effort to the practice of repentance."
The ideas of commitment and surrender to Christ implicit in Luther and Calvin found explicit expression in the evangelical Anabaptists. Balthasar Hubmaier, arguably the foremost theologian of evangelical Anabaptism, defined faith as a person's having "committed himself already in his heart henceforth to change and amend his life.... Now this person surrenders himself to the rule and teaching of Christ, the physician who has made him whole, from whom he received life." The German Anabaptist preacher Jacob Kautz spoke for the entire movement when he affirmed, "Jesus Christ of Nazareth has not suffered for us or made satisfaction for us in any way unless we stand in his footsteps, walk the way he blazed before us, and follow the command of the Father as the Son, everyone in his measure. Whoever speaks, understands, or believes differently about Christ makes an idol out of Christ, which all the scribes and false evangelists and the whole world do." We may therefore conclude that, although feeling no sympathy for either Protestantism or Anabaptism, Molina began his spiritual pilgrimage by coming to a realization about the nature of biblical faith that seems logically consistent with their doctrines of faith.
However, this realization did not break the grip that wealth had on the young man, to which he had grown quite reliant. Molina had the desire to entrust himself fully to Christ, but he found himself too weak to carry out this desire. Therefore Molina became seized with the fear of hell, which he imagined in line with Loyola's portrayal as an abode containing souls enclosed with bodies of fire who perpetually wailed and howled in agony, smelled smoke, sulfur, filth, and corruption, and experienced the palpable absence of Christ's love. Molina thus found himself in a spiritual crisis every bit as terrifying as Luther's thunderstorm experience. For even Molina's fear of hell did not alter his soul so as to forsake his wealth; rather, it only served to produce a deep sense of foreboding. In the midst of this crisis, Molina came upon a biblical text in the lectionary that resonated directly with his situation, 1 John 4:18: "There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love." Molina observed from this text that only perfect love for Christ could transform his soul, empowering him voluntarily to renounce all worldly possessions and surrender himself fully to Christ. As he later recalled, he needed to be "so strengthened by faith and love that he would be set on fire in order to gain a perfect love" and thus "be adopted as among the sons of God by means of grace making gracious." Molina believed that this perfect love was a gift of the Holy Spirit that would cause him to imitate Jesus and, in the words of Loyola's Spiritual Exercises, to "desire and choose poverty with Christ poor, rather than riches; insults with Christ loaded with them, rather than honors ... to be accounted as worthless and a fool for Christ, rather than to be esteemed as wise and prudent in this world." Seeking this spiritual gift, or charism, of love from the Spirit, Molina believed, was the only way to honor the goal for which he was created, namely, the praise of God and the salvation of his soul.
Molina pursued the Spirit's pure love by engaging in a series of directed meditations on the life of Jesus, from his baptism to his ascension. These meditations numbered forty and followed consecutively the twelfth through fifty-first "mysteries of the life of our Lord" spelled out by Loyola. Molina found deep admiration for Jesus' resistance of the devil's temptation, "All this I will give you ... if you bow down and worship me" (Matt. 4:9), as this was precisely the temptation that Molina strove to overcome. Molina took note of Jesus' order when he sent the apostles out to preach, "Do not get any gold or silver or copper" (Matt. 10:9). Molina was also deeply moved by the fact that "with a whip of cords" Jesus "overturned the tables and scattered the money of the wealthy money changers who were in the Temple." In meditating on the Sermon on the Mount, Molina was struck by his observation that the blessed include "the poor in spirit," "the meek," "those who hunger," and "those who are persecuted" (Matt. 5:3, 5, 6, 10; cf. Luke 6:20 – 23). He was also captivated by Jesus' love for his enemies and his instruction to "do good to those who hate you" (Luke 6:27).34 Unlike the fear of hell that had formerly left him paralyzed, Molina was touched and empowered by Jesus' compassion for his disciples when they faltered, gently asking his terrified disciples upon calming the storm, "You of little faith, why are you so afraid?" (Matt. 8:26). Likewise, Molina sympathized with Peter when at Jesus' command he walked on the water and approached Jesus, but when he doubted he started to sink. If Jesus reached out and saved Peter when he could not summon the inner strength to obey Jesus' difficult command, Molina hoped, Jesus would do the same thing for him. As an extremely gifted student, Molina gravitated toward Jesus' concern for the life of the mind, commanding his disciples to be as wise as serpents but at the same time to show intellectual integrity by being as innocent as doves. So significant was the impact of this command on Molina that the balance between sharp, tough-minded dialectic and careful, honest consideration of the objections, both actual and possible, to be raised against his views would prove a hallmark of Molina's scholarship throughout his career.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Luis de Molina by Kirk R. MacGregor. Copyright © 2015 Kirk R. MacGregor. Excerpted by permission of ZONDERVAN.
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