Calvin, The Institutes of the Christian Religion

As much as I've been enjoying my chronological reading, I've noticed that such an undertaking often gives an incomplete view of the discourse of the age. For example, when we read St. Anselm, we were lucky enough to be able to read with his Proslogion the reply of Gaunilo, another monk, followed by Anselm's reply to him. In doing so, we understood that Anselm's achievement was eclipsed to a degree by challenges from contemporary religious figures. As much as one would like to believe--or maybe it's only me--that a chronological reading provides a full picture of intellectual development, it is mostly the vertical history that ends up being covered. The horizontal history--the way in which contemporaneous minds interact and influence one another--is often lost.

So it is with that great theologian, John Calvin, and his magnum opus, Institutes of the Christian Religion. While it is certainly a monumental text, what might be the most interesting aspect--the interaction between Calvin, Luther, Erasmus, and others--is missing. Composed during one of the most intellectually vibrant ages in the history of the world, the Institutes is not an island, and reading it independently of its context can only be a detriment, and will have to be rectified in the future.

Yet much can be gained from its reading, if only because of its place in our current age. American Christianity owes a profound debt to Calvin, and churches across the country look to him as Catholics do to Augustine (or, indeed, as Calvin himself looked to Augustine). At the same time, his Brobdingnagian masterwork, spanning nearly 1500 pages, is absent in many reading lists of Western thought, cast aside in favor of Luther's more bite-sized works.

We won't try to delve into the controversies surrounding the Catholic church at the time, as if I had any insight into them. We know that Luther and Calvin split from the church, that through their close readings of the Bible and early church fathers they testified to how far Christianity had wandered from the strait and narrow. It will still be edifying for us to think about Calvin's work standing alone, as its sheer size obliges us to. And we will see that even my casual, absentminded reading produces great fruit.


Knowing

Thomas Aquinas' Summa began with about a dozen proofs of the existence of God from throughout history. Calvin similarly begins with the question of how men can know God, yet he sets himself apart from Aquinas and the Scholastics in his method. Whereas Aquinas came to know God through proof, with what we may think of as Aristotelian truth, Calvin's knowledge comes not from the brain but from the heart. Yes, though Calvin's reputation is that of the stern forefather of the Puritans, he emphasizes the authority of the heart in matters of faith, and it is this idea that guides the rest of the Institutes. "Each of us," he writes, "must, then, be so stung by the consciousness of his own unhappiness as to attain at least some knowledge of God."

Let us unpack this dense sentence. First of all, Calvin says that it is primarily (that is, in the first place) through unhappiness that we come to know God, for we "cannot seriously aspire to him before we begin to become displeased with ourselves." So unhappiness is not melancholy in a general sense, but rather specifically displeasure with oneself. It is only through this realization--that the way one is is not what one was meant to be--that the knowledge of God comes.

So what is knowledge in this case? To begin with, Calvin says that all men know God in the sense that all men yearn for a godlike figure. He writes that there is "no nation so barbarous, no people so savage, that they have not a deep-seated conviction that there is a God," that "the knowledge of God has been naturally implanted in the minds of men." While I am sure we could scan any textbook of anthropology to refute this claim prima facie, this does not detract from the force of his argument. For he is writing so as to emphasize the legitimacy of religion against critics who, like Marx a couple centuries later, would say that religion is the opiate of the masses, "invented by the subtlety and craft of a few to hold the simple folk in thrall by this device." (That's Calvin, not Marx.) Without even going into how this prefiguring is yet another proof that there is nothing new under the sun, we may note how closely Calvin's argument parallels that of Dostoevsky, who believed that the ability of men to imagine a better world is proof of the existence of such.

How are we then to know? If our hearts are inscribed with the knowledge of God, are we then free to follow our hearts to come to the knowledge of God, as new age philosophy would have us believe? Well, no. Calvin tells us that we are not "to fashion God according to our own whim." He continues: “We ought to observe that we are called to a knowledge of God: not that knowledge which, content with empty speculation, merely flits in the brain, but that which will be sound and fruitful if we duly perceive it, and if it takes root in our heart.” 

Empty is that which flits in the brains, rootless. Intellectual masturbation does not lead to the knowledge of God. This may be a good place to point out how much Calvin hates the Scholastics. Though we briefly touched on the difference between Aquinas and Calvin, it is difficult to overemphasize just how wrong the latter thought the Scholastic method was. Perhaps it is a sign of the times: others, such as Erasmus, had also rejected the Scholastic project in favor of different worldviews.

After quite a bit of build up, Calvin announces how it is we know God: “Consequently, we know the most perfect way of seeking God, and the most suitable order, is not for us to attempt with bold curiosity to penetrate to the investigation of his essence, which we ought more to adore than meticulously to search out, but for us to contemplate him in his works whereby he renders himself near and familiar to us, and in some manner communicates himself. The apostle was referring to this when he said that we need not seek him far away, seeing that he dwells by his very present power in each of us.”

If speculation about God drifts around our brain like a planetary body, in sight but out of reach, true knowledge of God is much more tangible and, to Calvin, is very much within our grasp. He claims that there are more than enough proofs of God that we can see without having to "rack our brains." With a flick of his pen, he casts away Aquinas' proofs of God as a vain intellectual exercise and asks men to ponder the "storehouse of inestimable riches" laying at their feet. 

His rejection of the Scholastic method comes as a result of this belief: that knowing, to Calvin, is not as simple as men make it out to be. Even those as apparently learned as the Scholastics are trapped by the "boundless filthy mire of error" that arises from the difficulty associated with our knowing. "Each man's mind," Calvin says, "is like a labyrinth," his preferred symbol of human frustration and confusion. He offers the following anecdote as illustration: 

“Some praise the reply of Simonides, who, asked by the tyrant Hiero what God was, begged to be given a day to ponder. When on the following day the tyrant asked the same question, he asked for two days more, and after having frequently doubled the number of days, finally answered, ‘The longer I consider this, the more obscure it seems to me.’…Yet hence it appears that if men were taught only by nature, they would hold to nothing certain or solid or clear-cut, but would be so tied to confused principles as to worship an unknown god.” 

Men taught by their minds cannot but fall into the mire of error. Therefore, we must seek truth elsewhere: in the world and, even moreso, in the Bible.


Foreknowledge

Speaking as a Calvinist who could probably do to know more about Calvinism, it seems to me that Calvin's most influential idea is that of election; if it is not the most influential, then it is at very least his most controversial. In the following discussion, I will make no claims (alright, maybe some claims) about what Calvin does or does not believe, because I think this aspect of his theology--election, predestination, and free will--is not only contentious but incredibly subtle. For a better understanding, more than one reading is necessary (especially when that one reading wasn't very careful).

Some things, however, are not so opaque: "There is no such thing as fortune or chance," declares Calvin, sans qualification. Nor, it seems, is there definitive causality, despite what Aristotle might think: "Therefore a godly man will not make the sun either the principal or the necessary cause of these things which existed before the creation of the sun, but merely the instrument that God uses because he so wills; for with no more difficulty he might abandon it, and act through himself." 

We've seen a similar line of thinking before, in the Islamic philosophers. Recall the Ash’arite sect, to which belonged al-Ghazali, who claimed that cause and effect did not exist, that the answer to every question of "Why?" is "Because God willed it." For them, saying that one event caused another was tantamount to denying God's role in the process. Calvin doesn't go this far, although he rejects the idea of a passive god: "And truly God claims, and would have us grant him, omnipotence--not the empty, idle, and almost unconscious sort that the Sophists [here meaning the Scholastics] imagine, but a watchful, effective, active sort, engaged in ceaseless activity. Not, indeed, an omnipotence that is only a general principle of confused motion, as if he were to command a river to flow through its once-appointed channels, but one that is directed toward individual and particular motions." God's will is not directionless, the way al-Ghazali may have claimed (it is uncertain to me, but given the severity of his philosophy, it doesn't seem unreasonable). Rather, it is purposeful. We cannot believe in God and be deists; God must be an active God.

We may return briefly to Boethius, who gave what I consider the best explication of the eternal world of God in relation to the human world of men: that God experiences the whole of time as a lighted room, whereas men grope their way along its perimeter in the darkness. In this way, he was able to account for God's foreknowledge while still granting men free will: men are free to grope as they please, since it was all evident to God beforehand. Yet Calvin has no time for those who "babble too ignorantly of bare foreknowledge." True, Boethius' conception is too passive for Calvin. God is not merely "the first agent" since believers who suffer adversity can "comfort themselves with the solace that they suffer nothing except by God's ordinance and command, for they are under his hand." Foreknowledge does not grant God enough power. 


Election

Now that we understand Calvin's stance on foreknowledge, we can consider the question of election, which is for Calvin the true Christian equivalent of foreknowledge. The basic thesis is that certain people are elected by God to be saved. This election is secret: you don't know your status any better than another person does, regardless of your beliefs or behavior. Why are some elect and not others? "If you proceed further to ask why he so willed, you are seeking something greater and higher than God's will, which cannot be found." This may sound unusually Thomistic of Calvin, but it's interesting nonetheless. At bottom is God's will, period. "By thus covering election with a veil of foreknowledge, they [bad Christians] not only obscure it but feign that it has its origin elsewhere."

Besides, there is little use, Calvin might say, in quibbling about election when the great majority of the world is secret to us and known only to God. When Jesus says that men do not live by bread alone, Calvin adds that this is because "it is not plenty itself that nourishes men, but God's secret blessing." He additionally quotes the lovely Psalm 3:5: "I lay down and slept; I awoke again, for the Lord sustained me."

He also answers through Augustine, which is a really enthralling passage that I'm going to quote in full:

"You, a man, except an answer [about God, secrets, etc.] from me; I too am a man. Therefore, let both of us hear one who says, 'O man, who are you?' Ignorance that believes is better than rash knowledge. Seek merits; you will find only punishment. 'O depth!'* Peter denies; the thief believes. 'O depth!' Thou seekest reason? I tremble at the depth. Reason, thou; I will marvel. Dispute, thou; I will believe. I see the depth; I do not reach the bottom. Paul rested, for he found wonder. He calls God's judgments 'unsearchable,' and thou settest out to search them? He speaks of his ways as 'inscrutable,' and thou dost track them down?"

[*Romans 11:33]

To close the matter, he quotes Pseudo-Augustine (that is, Augustine with a devious mustache): "The Lord can therefore also give grace...because he is merciful, and not give to all because he is a just judge. For by giving to some what they do not deserve...he can show his free grace... By not giving to all, he can manifest what all deserve."



Stray Observations

• Law is not one of my major interests, so I glossed over the sections on government and such, but here is a characteristically Calvinist definition of natural law: "Natural law is the apprehension of the conscience which distinguishes between just and unjust, and which deprives men of the excuse of ignorance, while it proves them guilty by their own testimony." Unlike, say, Aquinas, who spoke of natural law as something like a subset of the whole law, Calvin asserts that it is there so that we cannot claim to not understand the concept of inherent law.
• Again about the law: "Was the law to be limited to our powers so as not to be given in vain? Rather, it was put far above us, to show clearly our own weakness!" Again, characteristically Calvin. We should also remember Kafka's parable: "The true path is along a rope, not a rope suspended way up in the air, but rather only just over the ground. It seems more like a tripwire than a tightrope." 
• Okay, okay, maybe I care about law a little bit. Calvin claims that it was Paul's contention that Mosaic law was "the shadow of good things to come," not "the living likeness of the things themselves... Therefore its sole function was to be an introduction to the better hope that is manifested in the gospel." This is the same conclusion that Maimonides came to. 
• Speaking of Mosaic law, here's a wonderful bit about Judaism and its relation to Christianity: "In communicating his Word to them [the Israelites], he joined them to himself, that he might be called and esteemed their God. In the meantime, 'he allowed all other nations to walk' in vanity.... 'But when the fullness of time came' which was appointed for the restoration of all things, he was revealed as the reconciler of God and men; 'the wall' that for so long had confined God's mercy within the boundaries of Israel 'was broken down.' ...Therefore there is now no difference between Jew and Greek.... but 'Christ is in all.'"
• “Herein is man’s ignorance: when he comes to a particular case, he forgets the general principle that he has just laid down… the intellect is very rarely deceived in general definition or in the essence of the thing; but that it is illusory when it goes farther, that is, applies the principle to particular cases.”