in Luther, who emphasizes thepro meandad medimensions of faith.
Calvin takes this over from Luther and develops it into an epistem-
ology of knowing oneself through knowing God. For both Luther and
Calvin, personal appropriation is paradoxical: one must renounce
oneself in order to become a personal believer. Ficino proceeds
along different lines, but he also thinks that loving recognition is a
highly personal and individual event in which the lover‘dies’. All
three describe the inner struggle experienced in the appropriation
and the heteronomous outcome of the process. The‘struggle for
recognition’is in this sense a premodern topic.
The third and fourth feature differ from medieval conceptions and
can be understood as distinctive for the Renaissance and the Refor-
mation. The conceptions are nevertheless different from their mod-
ern counterparts. Calvin and Luther think of recognition as‘gift
transfer’rather than‘gift exchange’. In Luther’s view of justification,
God performs a downward act that resembles legal acts and acts of
recognition (R*). People acknowledge God; however, the human act
is very different from the divine act. In this sense, Luther and Calvin
have a stronger idea of otherness than Ficino. The idea of new self-
knowledge emerging in personal appropriation links Luther with later
modernity.
Calvin’s view of human transformation in recognizing sin and
grace is radical in its strong conception of new identity constitution.
In this view, one may perhapsfind some kind of otherness which is
only grasped by the transformed Christians, but, as this otherness
is strictly religious, it is not a universal philosophical doctrine. Calvin
is, however, tremendously important for the modern conceptions
since he uses the conceptrecognitio/reconnaissanceso consistently.
Ficino’s view of the mutual recognition and self-recognition
through love may be the most‘modern’conception discussed in
this chapter. Ficino’s concept is strongly (though not entirely) hori-
zontal. He analyses the constitution of new identity in great detail,
describing how the lover’s identity is known and constituted by the
object of love. Both Calvin and Ficino employrecognoscoas a reflex-
ive second-order verb, depicting a new self-awareness in the person.
As the reflexive sense makes the‘servant’or the inferior partner the
object of recognition, this sense approaches modern conceptions.
When believers recognize God and let themselves be constituted
through the religious affirmation, they‘recognize themselves before
God’, as Calvin puts it inInst.3, 14, 18. In Thomas Aquinas, Ficino,
108 Recognition and Religion