287. Calvinism

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Why stop at one heresy when you can have two

A History of Europe by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War


Book Nine
The Renaissance and the Reformation


Chapter II
The Reformation

2. The Spread of the Reformation. Calvinism [But we will start with England]


Continued...

p577 A generation separated the birth of Calvin (1509) from that of Luther... Luther, like all his contemporaries, had been born into the world of scholastic theology. Calvin grew up in an environment which was passionately concerned with the questions of the authority of the Scriptures, grace, justification by faith, the validity of the Sacraments, the celibacy of the priesthood, and the primacy of the See of Rome... Calvin... had never belonged to... [the Church Luther left]. It cost him no effort to break with it; from the very first he had regarded it as a monument of error and imposture. He was spared the intimate tragedies of the conscience. He had no need to seek for God. He was positive that he had God's Word in the Bible, and that it was to be found only in the Bible. He was to devote his life to arriving at an understanding of the Bible, and imposing upon other men the teachings he discovered in it. His heart and his emotions played no part in his religion. In him there was no trace of Lutheran mysticism. Reflection, reasoning, logic -- these were his means of conviction.

p578 ...what the Reformation needed, after its first outbreak, was a definite, rigid and coherent doctrine; a body of dogma, so to speak, to oppose to the old dogma, and a Church to contend against the old Church. And it had all the more need of this inasmuch as Catholicism was healing its wounds, was drawing new energies from the Council of Trent, and was preparing a powerful counter-attack, which the Reformation could certainly never have resisted without the aid of Calvinism.

...Frances I felt for Erasmus, to whom he offereed a chair in the College de France, an esteem which disquieted and exasperated the theologians of the Sorbonne. Louis de Berquin, one of the disciples of Lefevre of Etaples, preached at his court. His sister, Marguerite, professed a very liberal Christianity, marked by Platonic tendencies, and an evangelical mysticism which was closely akin to Protestantism. She openly protected the innovators, and it was in her little Kingdom of Navarre that Lefevre peacefully spent the last years of his career... And it is certain that the king continued for some time to restrain the University and the Parlements from manifesting their zeal against heresy... The government had no reason to complain of the existing situation [regarding its status over the Church in France]. None of the motives which impelled the German princes, or Henry VIII, to break with Rome, and replace the Roman Church by national Churches, had any application to France... From 1530 or thereabouts he ceased to resist the demands of those who wished to persecute the heretics... he allowed the religious and civil authorities to deal with heresy as they thought fit, the result being a ferocious persecution.

p579 Calvin was twenty-five years of age when this persecution, in 1534, drove him into exile... he turned to Romansh Switzerland. For some years Geneva had been in a state of political and religious ferment. In order to resist their hereditary enemy, the Duke of Savoy, the burgesses had solicited and obtained the aid of Berne. In 1526 the Eiguenots (Eidgenossen) had driven the partisans of the Duke out of the city, [The House of Savoy, again. I find that they actually started in Saxony and worked (married?) their way over the Alps to Italy. It seems that by "Eiguenots" Pirenne means, not Huguenot Protestants influenced by Calvin, but specifically the followers of Besançon Hugues who, confusingly, was not a Protestant] but Berne was Protestant, and the alliance concluded with Berne quickly familiarized the Genevese with the Reformation... the new faith, favored by the love of autonomy and the hatred of Savoy, whose partisans were blockading the city (1534-1535), was quickly triumphant. On August 10th, 1535, the Mass was discontinued by order of the Council; the people began to break the religious images, and the greater part of the clergy took to flight. The victory won over Savoy in the following year made Geneva an independent Republic. Thus a new political regime was introduced simultaneously with a new religious faith, and thenceforth the two were to remain indissolubly united.

p580 It was while these things were happening that Calvin, on passing through Geneva, was detained by Farel... he had just published, in 1536, his Institution Chretienne. Here was an opportunity to apply its principles in this young republic, still thrilled by its victory. Covered in the rear by the Swiss cantons, protected by the policy of France against the repetition of the Savoyard offensive, Geneva had no reason to fear for its independence, and could safely institute within its walls the theocratic government which was to be the most intensive, or perhaps one should say the only, application of pure Calvinism, and which was to contribute powerfully to the diffusion of the latter in the outer world. For Calvinism Geneva was the "Holy City" which the Anabaptists ten years earlier, in their mystical dreams, had hoped for a moment to establish in Munster.

...Salvation depends solely upon the Divine will, and by that Divine will the elect are chosen from all eternity. The Church consists in the union of these elect. But as it is impossible to know if one had been elected by grace, it is each man's duty... to prove it to himself by devoting himself with all his energies to the service of God. The Calvinist predestination, instead of leading to quietism, accordingly incites to activity. It does this all the more so inasmuch as God is not conceived as a father but as a master, whose word, revealed by Scripture, is the supreme law. One's whole life must be subject to this law, and the State is legitimate only in so far as it respects the law... Calvin submitted all human actions to theology. He was as universal, as absolute as the Catholic Church. I would even say that he was more universal and absolute. For, after all, the Church acknowledged that the "temporal sword" had its own mission, above and beyond the mission which had devolved upon the "spiritual sword."... For Calvin, on the contrary, the State, being willed by God, had to be transformed into an instrument of the Divine will. It was not subordinated to the clergy... but it acted in conformity with the end for which it was created only by associating itself intimately with the clergy, in order that the mandates of the Most High should triumph here on earth, and in order to combat all that opposed these mandates or insulted His majesty: vice, heresy, idolatry, and more especially the Roman idolatry, the most abominable of all. Such a system of ideas, if it is fully applied, inevitably leads to theocracy, and under the inspiration of Calvin the government of Geneva did actually constitute a theocracy.

p581 The Consistory, an assembly of pastors and laymen, exercised... the moral superintendence of the Republic. It did not govern, but it supervised and controlled the councillors of the Commune, and kept them in the strait way... [Sounds like contemporary Iran.] The death-penalty, torture, banishment and imprisonment were imposed, according to the gravity of the offense, but always with exemplary severity, upon contraventions of the ecclesiastical or moral regulations. Attendance at the temple was obligatory; adultery was a capital crime; the singing of a profane song was punished by the imposition of public penitence. Each person's conduct was subject to a permanent inquisition which pursued him even into his dwelling, and extended to the most trivial actions of his private life...

And while it became the pattern of the Christian State, Geneva also became an ardent center for religious propaganda... In 1559 the Academy of Geneva was founded, whose essential purpose was the training of "ministers," or... of Calvinistic missionaries... For Calvin the Apostolate, which Luther completely neglected, was the indispensable condition of the propagation of the faith... In Germany only the Elector Palatine adopted Calvinism, and therefore imposed it upon his subjects. Outside Germany the Continental monarchs had everywhere declared for Rome... Therefore, in order to ensure that the Word of God should triumph, it was necessary to prepare for battle... [Pope] Paul III in 1542 revived the Inquisition, and in 1545 he convoked the Council of Trent. Already the young Society of Jesus was beginning to wage war upon heresy, to rouse men's souls from their lethargy, to stimulate Catholic piety, and to found the first Jesuit colleges... Calvin found... [his enemy] everywhere on the alert and fully armed...

p582 ...Now it was necessary to take sides in a debate in which the question of eternal salvation was at stake, and every man... had to enter one of the two opposing camps and prepare for battle... 

Almost makes me envy the German Lutherans of the time.

p583 [Calvinism] ...was greatly helped by the social constitution of the 16th century. Capitalism, which was hampered by the restrictions imposed by the Church upon trafficking in money and speculation, must surely have benefited it by procuring the unconscious adhesion of great numbers of commercial adventurers and men of business. It must not be forgotten that Calvin acknowledged the lawfulness of lending money at interest, which Luther, faithful in this respect... to the traditional theology, had still condemned. The first resources placed at the disposal of the new Church to cover its costs of propaganda... were advanced by the successful merchants. In Antwerp, about 1550, there were already a considerable number of new converts among the frequenters of the Bourse... we can imagine the impression which the impassioned logic of... [Calvin's Institution Chretienne] must have produced upon minds [of the nobility] which were only too ready, thanks to the perusal of Rabelais, whose work had appeared almost at the same time, to deride the Church, and to regard it as an obsolete institution. Lastly, the industrial proletariat, cherishing a rancorous memory of the persecution which had not wholly stifled the Anabaptist faith, furnished predestined recruits to the new faith, though in the beginning, at all events, these recruits were more remarkable for their turbulence than for their sincerity.

From Wiki, "Calvin thought that agriculture and the traditional crafts were normal human activities. With regard to trade and the financial world he was more liberal than Luther, but both were strictly opposed to usury. Calvin allowed the charging of modest interest rates on loans. Like the other Reformers Calvin understood work as a means through which the believers expressed their gratitude to God for their redemption in Christ and as a service to their neighbors. Everybody was obliged to work; loafing and begging were rejected. The idea that economic success was a visible sign of God's grace played only a minor role in Calvin's thinking. It became more important in later, partly secularized forms of Calvinism and became the starting-point of Max Weber's theory about the rise of capitalism.^[120]"

p584 ...In the 1540's... [Calvinists] were already to be met with in all parts of France, in the Low Countries, and in England. Trained at first in Geneva, but presently at Lausanne, Strasbourg and Heidelberg, they displayed all the characteristics of a regular clergy, but a clergy as active and as learned as the Catholic clergy was generally ignorant and apathetic...

p585 [Calvinism] ...did not ask for protection, nor did it avoid conflict. Wherever it appeared it loudly affirmed its dogma and boldly took the offensive, and its radicalism tolerated no compromise. Between it and the sectators of the "Roman idolatry," the followers of the "Whore of Babylon," no reconciliation was possible... The quarrel which it provoked assumed a personal character for every protagonist; it fomented hatred in men's hearts, and was finally to end in civil war.

So what was all this really about? The actions of the princes and kings I understand completely, but what made the bourgeoisie and proletariat suddenly so interested in theology? The sack of Rome, which we shall soon hear about, by the Imperial army, of all people, suggests that hatred of the Papacy was all but universal at this time. Was Protestantism -- outside Germany -- simply the obvious way to break with that institution? The docility of all the peoples converted by their princes, also suggests that faith and theology was not as central to all this as Luther and Calvin probably wanted to think.

And from the Catholic perspective this was not one heresy but at least two. I was going to say something about the differing views on predestination and justification by faith alone, but I really don't understand the distinctions of these respective faithful. And, I don't understand how the Faustian notion of selling your soul to the Devil could be popular at the same time as the notion of Predestination. Perhaps death and Judgment is the Protestant equivalent of the collapse of a quantum wave function?

224. Pessimism

Pessimism

Continuing Reflections on Violence by Georges Sorel

p33 Pessimism... is a philosophy of conduct rather than a theory of the world; it considers the march towards deliverance as narrowly conditioned, on the one hand, by the experimental knowledge that we have acquired from obstacles which oppose themselves to the satisfaction of our imaginations (or, if we like, by the feeling of social determinism),  and, on the other, by a profound conviction of our natural weakness. These two aspects of pessimism should never be separated, although, as a rule, scarcely any attention is paid to their close connection. 
...

2. The pessimist regards social conditions as forming a system bound together by an iron law which cannot be evaded, so that the system is given, as it were, in one block, and cannot disappear except in a catastrophe which involves the whole. If this theory is admitted, it then becomes absurd to make certain wicked men responsible for the evils from which society suffers; the pessimist is not subject to the sanguinary follies of the optimist, infatuated by the unexpected obstacles that his projects meet with; he does not dream of bringing about the happiness of future generations by slaughtering existing egoists.
...

p35 In primitive Christianity we find a fully developed and completely armed pessimism: man is condemned to slavery from his birth -- Satan is the prince of the world -- the Christian... awaits the glorious second coming of Christ...

Sixteenth-century Calvinism presents a spectacle which is perhaps even more instructive; but we must be careful not to confuse it... with contemporary Protestantism; these two doctrines are the antipodes of each other... [how is contemporary Protestantism a single doctrine?] Pessimism, which formed no part of the current of ideas which characterized the Renaissance, [Footnote: "At this epoch commenced the struggle between the Pagan love of life and the Christian hatred of this world and avoidance of it" (Hartmann...)] has never been so strongly affirmed as it was by the Reformers. The dogmas of sin and predestination which correspond to the two first aspects of pessimism, the wretchedness of the human species, and social determinism, were pushed to their most extreme consequences. Deliverance was conceived  under a very different form to that which had been given it by primitive Christianity; Protestants organized themselves into a military force wherever possible; they made expeditions into Catholic countries, expelled the priests, introduced the reformed cult, and promulgated laws of proscription against papists. They no longer borrowed from the apocalypses the idea of a great final catastrophe, of which the brothers-in-arms who had for so long defended themselves against the attacks of Satan would only be spectators; the Protestants, nourished on the reading of the Old Testament, wished to imitate the exploits of the conquerors of the Holy Land; they took the offensive, and wished to establish the kingdom of God by force. In each locality they conquered the Calvinists brought about a real catastrophic revolution, which changed everything from top to bottom.

Where's Ivan K. when you need him? So, I'm in heaven with this topic, but where and when is he talking about? Aside from the Puritans in England, I thought most of the violence of this period started with the Catholics attempting to reassert orthodoxy. As in France. Perhaps the Swiss Protestant cantons? The Dutch? I'm going to have to hit Wiki. (Not obvious to me. Though I hadn't really been aware before that most of the European Colonists of Mid-Atlantic America and New England were Calvinist dissenters of one denomination or another including the Dutch, the Huguenots, and the Scotch-Irish Presbyterians of the Appalachians -- like Thomas Sutpen.)

But to just stick with the Puritans, I'm eager to see how these pessimistic paragons of the Reformation turn into the bedrock of the Bourgeoisie of his time.

Calvinism was finally conquered by the Renaissance; it was full of theological prejudices derived from medieval traditions, and there came a time when it feared to be thought too far behind the times; it wished to be on the level of modern culture, and it finished by becoming simply a lax Christianity. [Footnote: If socialism comes to grief it will evidently be in the same way, because it will have been alarmed at its own barbarity.] To-day very few people suspect what the reformers of the sixteenth-century meant by "free examination," the Protestants of to-day apply the same method to the Bible that philologists apply to any profane text; Calvin's exegesis has been replaced by the criticisms of the humanists.

Wendell Berry has made a point very similar to this about texts being considered as if they don't matter. I also don't know what he means by "free examination" and a quick Google search doesn't discover anything. Perhaps there's a problem with the translation?

There follows quite a bit about Pascal with a comment about how Calvinist he was.

p39 The people who believe in natural right are not always implacable enemies of civil struggles, and certainly not of tumultuous rioting; that has been sufficiently shown in the course of the Dreyfus question. When the force of the State was in the hands of their adversaries, they acknowledged, naturally enough, that it was being employed to violate justice, and they then proved that one might with a good conscience "step out of the region of legality in order to enter that of justice" (to borrow a phrase of the Bonapartists); when they could not overthrow the government, they tried at least to imitate it... all the revolutionary disturbances of the nineteenth century have ended in reinforcing the power of the State.

Proletarian violence entirely changes the aspect of all the conflicts in which it intervenes, since it disowns the force organized by the middle class, and claims to suppress the State which serves as its central nucleus. Under such conditions, it is no longer possible to argue about the primordial rights of man. That is why our parliamentary socialists, who spring from the middle classes and who know nothing outside the ideology of the State, are so bewildered when they are confronted with working-class violence. They cannot apply to it the commonplaces which generally serve them when they speak about force, and they look with terror on movements which may result in the ruin of the institutions by which they live. If revolutionary syndicalism triumphs, there will be no more brilliant speeches on immanent Justice, and the parliamentary regime, so dear to the intellectuals, will be finished with -- it is the abomination of desolation! We must not be astonished, then, that they speak about violence with so much anger. 
...

Foucault must have loved Sorel. Though one wonders if Sorel would have changed his views had he lived to see the 1930s-60s.

Sorel has something to say about Joseph de Maistre which sent me to Wiki... shit, someone else I have to read. And Ernest Renan. And Henri Bergson.

p52 ...For a long time people have been struck by the fact that religious convictions are unaffected by criticism, and from this they have concluded that everything which claims to be beyond science must be a religion. It has been observed also that Christianity tends at the present day to be less a system of dogmas than a Christian life, i.e. a moral reform penetrating to the roots of one's being; consequently, a new analogy has been discovered between religion and the revolutionary Socialism which aims at the apprenticeship, preparation, and even reconstruction of the individual, -- a gigantic task. But Bergson has taught us that it is not only religion which occupies the profounder region of our mental life; revolutionary myths have their place there equally with religion...

Renan was very surprised to discover that Socialists are beyond discouragement. "After each abortive experiment they recommence their work: the solution is not yet found, but it will be. The idea that no solution exists never occurs to them, and in this lies their strength." ... by the side of the Utopias there have always been myths capable of urging on the workers to revolt. For a long time these myths were founded on the legends of the Revolution, and they preserved all their value as long as these legends remained unshaken. To-day the confidence of the Socialists is greater than ever since the myth of the general strike dominates all the truly working-class movement. No failure proves anything against Socialism since the latter has become a work of preparation (for revolution)...

p53 The works of my friends have been treated with great contempt by the Socialists who mix in politics, but at the same time with much sympathy by people who do not concern themselves with parliamentary affairs. We cannot be suspected of seeking to carry on a kind of intellectual industry, and we protest every time people profess to confuse us with the intellectuals, who do, as a matter of fact, make the exploitation of thought their profession. The old stagers of democracy cannot understand why people should take so much trouble unless they secretly aim at the leadership of the working classes. However, we could not act in any other way. [I'm puzzled by this, too.]

... we... have invented nothing at all, [in the way of Utopias] and even assert that nothing can be invented; we have limited ourselves to defining the historical bearing of the notion of a general strike. We have tried to show that a new culture might spring from the struggle of the revolutionary trades unions against the employers and the State; our greatest claim to originality consists in our having maintained that the proletariat can emancipate itself without being compelled to seek the guidance of the middle classes which concerns itself professionally with matters of the intellect. We have thus been led to regard as essential in contemporary phenomena what was before regarded as accessory, and what is indeed really educative for a revolutionary proletariat that is serving its apprenticeship in struggle. It would be impossible for us to exercise any direct influence on such a work of formation.

We may play a useful part if we limit ourselves to attacking middle-class thought in such a way as to put the proletariat on its guard against an invasion of ideas and customs from the hostile class... 

How is this not arrogant paternalism? And how are these ideas not from the "hostile class"? 

Where does this blind faith in the proletariat come from? Why are they assumed to me so morally different from the nobility and the middle classes? And how is this faith in the dictatorship of the proletariat not another Utopian ideal? It reminds me of the Noble Savage. And since Sorel wants to go back to Christianity and Calvinism, isn't he really asserting that the proletariat is somehow immune from the consequences of "The Fall of Man?" By that standard he is even denying them their humanity.

p54 ... I have said that art is an anticipation of the kind of work that ought to be carried on in a highly productive state of society... this observation has been very much misunderstood by some of my critics, who have been under the impression that I wished to propose as the socialist solution -- an aesthetic education of the proletariat under the tutelage of modern artists. This would have been a singular paradox on my part, for the art that we possess to-day is a residue left to us by an aristocratic society, a residue which has, moreover, been corrupted by the middle class... so little did I think of asking the École des Beau-Arts to provide a teaching suitable to the proletariat, that I based the morale of the producers not on an aesthetic education transmitted by the middle class, but on the feelings developed by the struggles of the workers against their masters.
...