RELIGIOUS ENCYCLOPEDIA
Syncretism Synergism
E diaboli excrementa Calixtinas sordes exquirire. Calixtus answered with his Pietatis officium pii viri innocentiam vindicans. This was followed by writings pro and con, prose and verse, reaching its climax in the appearance of a farce in four acts of three or four scenes each celebrating the installation of Deutschmann into the prorectorship at Wittenberg, almost blasphemous in terms. The elector caused the printer to be fined and the author to be imprisoned. Likewise, Strauch, called to Danzig in 1669, was detained as prisoner at Kiistrin by order of the elector of Brandenburg, 1675-78; and the elector of Saxony renewed the edict against writing polemics without special permission. Calovius now wrote under a pseudonym, and produced also Systema locorum theologicorum (vols, v.-xii., 1677), more flighty than the first four and including also the new polemic against Jena. In vain was Spener's caution to him that the effort to secure the recognition of his Consensus was both futile and injurious. Besides a quarrel with his colleague Meisner and the latter's humiliation, 1677- 1680, he engaged, by sermons, disputations, and writings, in a warfare on Musffius at Jena, who won his displeasure by rendering his allegations against the syncretists void and was now being condemned as worse than they. He succeeded in having the entire faculty of Jena, including Musaeus, compelled to abjure syncretism, if not to adopt the Consensus. But the limits of his accomplishment were reached. Johann Georg II. renewed the edict against polemical writing (Jan. 12, 1680), and the printers of De syncretismo Muscei were severely dealt with. With the accession of Elector Johann Georg III. in 1680 began a protective alliance with the great elector of Brandenburg. Calovius had to see his Historia syncretistica (1682), a compilation issued anonymously and without place, consisting of the blows he had dealt against syncretists together with fresh fulminations, refused circulation. This made such an impression on him that he referred two questions to his most intimate followers at Giessen: whether, in view of the political syncretism made necessary by the danger from France, a Calixtine syncretism with the papists and Reformed was still to be condemned; and whether the strife brought on by the universities of Helmstedt, Jena, and Konigsberg, on account of the elector of Brandenburg and the dukes of Brunswick, should be buried with an amnesty, or the controversy over syncretism be continued. This was taken by friends and foes alike as a wavering and a sign of alinement with the court. This Calovius denied in a pamphlet relating the correspondence thereto and reiterating his anathemas against all his opponents inclusive of the Mussean syncretists. The comprehensive publications, Apodixis articulorum fidei (1668), and Synopsis controversiarum cum haereticis modernis (1685) appeared before his death, which practically closed the controversies.
4. Final Influence: The great work with which Friedrich Calixtus closed his career, Via ad pacem inter protestantes restaur andum (Helmstedt, 1700), was the irenic counterbalance to the Historia syncretistica republished in 1685. The term syncretism
as name of a party gradually disappeared and came to recur only as incidental reference to varying combinations of the unlike. To be sure, the aftereffects of the strife persisted a long time, specially in electoral Saxony. A result was the aversion to affiliation on the part of the German Lutherans and Reformed for a century to come, as seen, for example, in the indifference of the Lutherans to the French Protestants at the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685; q.v.). The peaceable separation of religion and theology and the adjustment of the borders between church and schools, confession and science, were not actualized, though they were frequently on the horizon of promise. According to Calovius pure doctrine is the only necessity; it is ready-made and complete, the ecclesiastical norm, admitting of neither addition nor reduction. According to Calixtus, doctrine is not only not the only necessity but it is also of varying degrees of value within itself, giving room for broad unity on essentials. The controversy leit a cloud of suspicion and prejudice specially over the Lutherans, retarding the progress of these distinctions. The despotic determination to force a Consensus repetitus, as the only and final dogma and theology before which all investigation and progress must fall prostrate, raised up its own factional limits, and the most deplorable result, surviving to the present, is the alienation from the church of educated men, and thereby the demoralization of a great unitary spirit, for the need of which the German Evangelical Church is suffering.
(Paul Tschackeet.) Bibliography: The principal source is A. Calovius, Historia syncretistica, 1685. Consult further: J. G. Walch, Religionsstreitigkeiten der lutherischen Kirche, i. 219 sqq., iv. 666, 10 vols., Jena, 1733-39; W. Gass, G. Calixt und der Synkretismus, Breslau, 1846; E. L. T. Henke, G. Calixtus und seine Zeit, vol. ii., Halle, 1856", A. Tholuck, Akademisches Leben des 17. Jahrhunderts, vol. ii., ib. 1854; W. Gass, Geschichte der protestantischen Dogmatik, vol. ii., Berlin, 1857; I. A. Dorner, Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, pp. 600 sqq., Munich, 1867, Eng. transl., Edinburgh, 1871; G. W. Frank, Geschichte der protestantischen Theologie, ii. 4 sqq., Leipsic, 1875.
SYNEISAKTOI. See StjbintroducTjE Virgines.
SYNERGISM AND SYNERGISTIC CONTRO- VERSY: A type of Semi-Pelagianism in the sixteenth century and the dispute which arose concerning it. Synergism is the doctrine of the cooperation of human effort and divine grace in regeneration. Luther regarded the spiritual life as
Opinions monergistic, the result of the experi-
of Luther ence of a divine act. Faith is a gift of and God. " Free will determined without
Melanch- grace has no power with respect to thon. righteousness but is necessarily involved in sin." Justification follows " whenever we are made purely passive with respect to God with reference to interior as well as exterior acts." God's relation to man is considered as strictly predestinarian. After the Leipsic Disputation Melanchthon maintained that " man is wholly incapable of doing good "; that " in the choice of external things " there is some freedom, but internal effects are not within human power. " All things that happen, happen of necessity by divine predestination; there is no freedom of will." Con-
Synergism Synesius