The oracular writings of the “Christian Socrates” of the eighteenth century, Johann Georg Hamann (1730–1788), have attracted a number of important philosophers, theologians, and men of letters since the time of Immanuel Kant. Some insist that Hamann was a profound and heroic mystic, and some conclude that he was an impossible obscurantist. A figure of conspicuous protest against prevailing Enlightenment attitudes, Hamann's own views exhibit a strange alliance between religious (Lutheran) faith and sceptical (Humean) empiricism.

Despite the persistence of significant differences over the interpretation of humilitas in Luther's early works, an apparent consensus is afoot on both the nature of the problem which drove him to his Reformation theology and the nature of the discovery which forms the heart of this theology. As the picture now comes into focus in the secondary literature, the problem Luther apparently confronted so despairingly might be summarized as the viator-status of Christian life within the traditional medieval ordo salutis.

When Augustine was a young man, he tells us in his Confessions, he asked himself and his friends,

“Do we love anything but the beautiful? What then is the beautiful? and what is beauty? What is it that attracts and wins us to the things we love? for unless there were in them a grace and beauty, they could by no means draw us unto them.” And I marked and perceived that in bodies themselves, there was a beauty, from their forming a sort of whole, and again, another from apt and mutual correspondence, as of a part of the body with its whole, or a shoe with a foot, and the like. And this consideration sprang up in my mind, out of my inmost heart, and I wrote On the Fair and the Fit, I think two or three books. Thou knowest, O Lord, for it is gone from me, for I have them not, but they are strayed from me, I know not how.

In 1843, the Reverend Robert Baird, “an esteemed minister of the American Presbyterian Church,” sojourning seven years in Europe “for the prosecution of certain religious and philanthropic objects,” published a book for the benefit of the various Europeans who had addressed to him “innumerable inquiries … respecting his native country, and especially respecting its religious institutions.”