 
                         20051209.00

                       Soli Deo Gloria

     A very superficial WWW search for Soli Deo Gratia,
discovers claims from contemporary Protestant evangelists
that this phrase is a discovery specific to the Protestant
Reformation, aimed a) at the claimed holiness of the Virgin
Mary, b) the panoply of Roman Catholic Saints, c) the
hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church hierarchy.  Soli Deo
Gloria is aboviously a conceptual device for social leveling.

     The concept plays strongly and eloquently in the
literature of the Reformation and the Baroque. Witness hymn
and cantata titles such as "Gott ist mein Koenig" (God is my
king, Cantata 71), "Allein Gott in der Hoeh' Sei Ehr", (Only
to God on High be Honor, Nikolaus Decius 1490?- 1541) and the
air of David which Charles Jennens, no less, wrote for
Haendel's Saul.

     O king, your favours with delight
     I take, but must refuse your praise:
     For every pious Israelite
     To God that tribute pays.

     Yet the Protestant claim to Soli Deo Gloria is belied by
the "Gloria in Excelsis" of the Catholic Mass, dating from as
early as the second century A.D., which includes the lines:

     "Quoniam to solus sanctus,
     Tu solus Dominus
     Tu solus Altissimus, Jesu Christe ..."

where the uniqueness of divine glory can obviously be traced
back to Mosaic monotheism, which according to eighteenth
century theological speculation, Moses learned from the
mysteries of Egyptian priests.  The New Testament teaching
(Matthew 19:17) that men may not call each other "good",
because only God is good, obviously addresses the same issue.

     Closely related is the teaching of Isaiah 53, that the
"good" human being, i.e. the servant or the messenger of God,
appears as evil, the clear implication being that with
respect to humans, as distinct from God, apparent virtue or
goodness has perhaps even a paradoxical meaning.  The New
Testament injunction against judging: "Judge not that ye be
not judged," (Matthew 7:1) is an immediate corollary, as is
the injunction:

     But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet,
     and when thou hast shut thy door,
     pray to thy Father which is in secret;
     and thy Father which seeth in secret
     shall reward thee openly.  (KJV)
                               Matthew 6:6

     A striking parallel to the Judeo-Christian sources is to
be found in the second book of Plato's Republic:
http://www.molloy.edu/academic/philosophy/sophia/plato/republic/rep2a_txt.htm
where the perfectly good individual is described as someone
who _is_ good but appears evil, and is subjected to
punishment, while the perfectly evil individual is described
as someone who _is_ evil, but appears good.

     The common denominator of these theological theories is
the hypothesis that virtue or "the good" is "within you," the
mystical notion that God is somehow  "within" the human
being, and that therefore inwardness or "subjectivity" is the
truth.  (Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript). It
is this dogma which is depicted poetically in the opening
argument of Either/Or, to the effect that the inside is not
the outside.


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Copyright 2005, Ernst Jochen Meyer
