Heresies and real presences
Marilynne Robinson
12,173 words
1 July 2002
Salmagundi
30-60
ISSN: 0036-3529
English
Copyright (c) 2002 ProQuest Information and Learning. All
rights reserved. Copyright Skidmore College Summer 2002
COLUMN: THE FATE OF IDEAS
I wish to propose a new approach to the history of the modern
age. Every theory has a metaphor lurking in it. My theory
is that the modern period should be understood as, so to speak,
plagued by an autoimmune disorder. A human body can recognize
a drop of milk as a pathogen and come near killing itself
in its own supposed defense. A human body can detect foreign-ness
in its own flesh and attack itself without mercy.
The old Fascist writers helped me to recognize this analogy
by their insistent use of terms like infection, contamination
and cancer to refer to whatever presence in the racial or
national "organism" they chose to recognize as foreign.
Like a sensitized body, they reacted always more desperately
to always finer degrees of arbitrarily perceived foreign-ness,
of populations, religions, arts or ideas. If the immune system
can be called a diagnostician, then in such cases the diagnosis
is the disease. Much discourse about the modern still accepts,
more or less uncritically, this diagnosis. The prestige of
our civilization helps it to flourish elsewhere.
A modern period not so afflicted, one not conditioned to recoil
from its own substance, its own tissue, would still suffer
drastic maladies, of course. But our agonies of self-attack,
of rejection and purgation, together with more ordinary maladies,
are taken by us to confirm the diagnosis that is the disease.
They have reinforced the alarmed and alarming sense that the
modern must recoil from itself. A very great part of the history,
literature, philosophy and art produced since the French Revolution,
beginning in writers like de Maistre and Chateaubriand, has
amounted to an obsessive iteration of aversion and dread.
This, in the terms of my metaphor, is the sensitization which
produces always more extravagant reaction. Such works are
seen as prophetic, as they are, if the disordered immune system
is prophetic in seeing a threat to life in a drop of milk.
One borrows metaphors from the Fascists with trepidation.
They spoke of races or nations as organisms, to make the argument
that, where health or survival was threatened by the invasion
of the alien into a thing by nature homogeneous and integral-as,
according to their metaphor, races and nations are-no religious
or ethical arguments can be made as to the rights or virtues
of, to borrow a favorite term, the bacillus. They used the
metaphor of organic life to dismiss all rational or civilized
considerations in relationships among human beings. I wish
to declare the inadequacy of their version of the metaphor
and of my own, precisely in the fact that it implies an autonomic
inevitability in reactions which, however deeply they may
be established in us and in the culture around us, are nevertheless
utterly meaningful as ethical judgments and as value judgments,
and entirely within the range of our competence and our responsibility
as rational beings. Wearying as the fact may seem, we can
think.
The modern period seems to figure in historical thought as
a sort of changeling, somehow wholly alien. Its very resemblance
to its sibling eras in human memory or imagination makes it
seem only stranger, colder, more thoroughly disturbing. Most
historians, and those who take the bleakest view of it, place
the beginnings of the modern period in the Reformation, now
a half-millennium ago, almost. So the character of the Reformation
and the character of modernity are subjects that arise together,
each, for the historians' purposes, establishing the most
salient qualities of the other.
The phrase "modern thought" in ordinary use conjures
Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Einstein, Freud, Jung,
Joyce, Beckett. The phrase "modern history" conjures
the World Wars, the death camps, industrialization, depression,
wonder drugs, mass communication, the atom, the automobile,
the Cold War. In other words, people and events which may
have grown remote or venerable or quaint with the passage
of time are still called "modern" in this narrower
conventional sense, and that is problem enough. To expand
the category to embrace a plague-ridden, Turk-threatened,
illiterate Europe still accustomed to sacking its own cities
might seem to deprive it of all usefulness. But the insistence
that the modern world does indeed have its origins in, and
take its character from, the Reformation has had enormous
consequences for historiography and for history. So here I
will propose a theory of the historiography of the modern
world: that it is profoundly influenced by the persistence
and vigor of the concept "heresy," whether under
its old name, or re-named in the terms of the modern anxieties
about decadence, deviancy, thought crime and sinister alien
influences.
Jacques Maritain, writing on Martin Luther in Three Reformers:
Luther, Descartes, Rousseau (1928) says "the modern world
derives from a mystical heresy" (italics his). Luther's
errors and agonies, as they are represented by Maritain, correspond
very neatly with the errors and agonies of the modern world,
as Maritain understands them. Since he is a passionately hostile
interpreter of Luther, and no admirer of the modern world,
the justice and accuracy of his account of both of them are
very much open to question. Since his understanding of the
state of the world at the beginning of the 20th century is
a reflex of his hostility to Luther, his case against Luther
becomes his case against the modern world.
It is a remarkable thing to imagine that the spiritual character
of whole civilizations over centuries of time has sprung from
the mind-- indeed, from the theology-of one man, however demonically
bad and brilliant that man may have been. I would not try
to make the case that Jesus of Nazareth had any comparable
success in creating a world in his image, though his teachings
have been much more widely propagated than Luther's. Maritain
is only typical in the method and substance of his interpretation
of the Reformation and the modern period, however, though
he is unusual in laying the paternity of the modern to Martin
Luther rather than to Jean Calvin.
It is hard to credit the horror heretics have inspired through
most of Western history. Objectively defined, heresy is simply
adherence to a doctrine which is contrary to the dogma of
a church. But the suppression of heresy has taken millions
of lives, devoured whole cultures. Unbelief is a different,
and a lesser, offense, from this point of view, since to be
a Christian heretic one must be a Christian. The aptness of
the metaphor of autoimmunity is demonstrated in a brief list
of some of those whom ecclesiastical authorities have suspected
or accused of heresy or have found guilty of it: Joan of Arc,
Thomas Aquinas, William of Ockham, Meister Eckhart, Teresa
of Avila, John of the Cross, Ignatius of Loyola.
In traditional belief, a heretic is worse than any murderer
because he or she is a killer of souls. A "good"
heretic is worse yet, worse than the very Turk, her virtues
lending credibility to her lethal departures from true faith.
(Women are always well represented among the heretics.) In
this understanding, heresy has its impact, its reality, at
a level of existence science does not acknowledge. It violates
spiritual and immortal being. For heresy is no more a mere
historical event than a meteor strike is weather. In How the
Reformation Happened (1928), Hillaire Belloc cautions his
reader that elements in the history of the Reformation were
"forces outside this world ... You will not discover
in mere terrestrial history anything sufficient to account
for the catastrophe." And because heretical belief and
worship, rather than opening a way of approach to God, offend
him, they are grotesque and delusional, conscious or unconscious
parodies of true religion.
Maritain, a Thomist scholar and philosopher, attaches the
deepest significance to Luther's "heresy," and writes
as if to demonstrate that the old fear was all justified,
that the great heretic has indeed slain the modern soul. He
says:
In the social order, the modern city sacrifices the person
to the individual; it gives universal suffrage, equal rights,
liberty of opinion, to the individual, and delivers the person,
isolated, naked, with no social framework to support and protect
it, to all the devouring powers which threaten the soul's
life, to the pitiless actions and reactions of conflicting
interests and appetites,to the infinite demands of matter
to manufacture and use. To all the greeds and all the wounds
which every man has by nature, it adds incessant sensual stimuli,
and the countless horde of all kinds of errors, sparkling
and sharpened, to which it gives free circulation in the sky
of intelligence. And it says to each of the poor children
of men set in the midst of this turmoil: "You are a free
individual; defend yourself, save yourself, all by yourself."
It is a homicidal civilization.
Our freedom is unbearable because it was bought with apostasy.
Therefore, he says, "great problems ... rack the heart
like angelic instruments of torture"-a telling image,
certainly.
All this makes sense if his many assumptions are granted;
that heresy has ontological significance, that Luther and
his successors were heretics, that they brought into being
universal suffrage, freedom of opinion and equal rights, that
these things are so compromised by their origins as to bring
into life no addition of pleasure or value but only the loss
of them, that life without the mediations of the church, as
he understands them, is full of loneliness and terror.
In strictly political terms, the role of Lutheranism in promoting
such freedoms is at best not overwhelming, and at worst not
unambiguous. Maritain has made the choice, however, to attribute
them to Luther, and, again in the terms of his own argument,
he is right to do so, because he sees modern politics as the
consequence of religious faithlessness, which has "inflamed
everything and healed nothing." The great significance
of the idea of heresy is that it so effectively constrained
thought. To successfully propose another orthodoxy, to persuasively
challenge the orthodoxy of the body of thought against which
heresy was traditionally defined, was to perplex the issue
radically, and to throw into doubt the very meaning of heresy
as an idea. And then there is Luther's profound emphasis on
the self and on the cosmic drama of inward experience, the
unmediated and universal privilege of participation in ultimate
meaning, which encouraged a religious respect for one's own
thought and conscience. All this may indeed have led to the
"free circulation" of "sparkling errors."
The tendency of Maritain's argument in this essay is to demonstrate
the legitimacy of the traditional concept of heresy by asserting
that the consequences of the propagation of heretical ideas
have been vast and dire. All we have contrived in the way
of personal liberty has yielded only condign misery, a city
of man inimical to humanity, an angelic torture. One persuaded
of the meaningfulness of the idea of heresy, as Maritain in
this essay certainly is, would indeed expect such effects
to follow from freedom of opinion.
In light of 20th century history, it seems he may have spoken
for much of Western civilization. Aversion to the modern world
has tended to focus on just those features of it which are
its most characteristic achievements. Belloc, whose demon
is Calvin, says "He it was, for instance, who said that
the ministry must proceed from election, but that ministers
once elected had authority over the electors. What better
parallel for the Parliamentary fallacy, the falsity of which
Europe is only now perceiving?" The culture of democracy
is deplored-individualism, liberty of thought and expression,
and, also, mass prosperity, with its despised correlative,
mass consumption. In and of themselves, it would seem that
there is little here to regret except their uneven realization.
But the belief that someone has poisoned the well of civilization
changes everything: While no one would dispute the value of
water, when the well is poisoned that is sadly beside the
point. Maritain says that as a consequence of Luther's teaching
"religion tends in fact to be reduced (italics mine)
to the service of our neighbor." At best our well-being
and well-doing are snares and delusions. In the very midst
of apparent safety and abundance we are injured and deprived,
in our fears, and in fact, because fear and fact converge.
I begin with Maritain because he is a theologian writing history,
and he makes the importance of the idea of heresy as a factor
in his interpretation very clear. If his assumptions about
reality are granted, the peculiarities of his language and
reasoning are understandable. He is describing a singularity,
an event only comprehensible in terms empirical language cannot
supply. Yet there are features of his non-empiricist approach
to the relation of the Reformation to the modern that are
conventional among writers who would never own up to entertaining
such an archaic notion as heresy. One is the inversion of
values. Maritain is typical in decrying the best achievements
of the modern West. It is not militarism or persisting poverty
or repression he attacks, but the service of one's neighbor,
when it is undertaken, as after Luther it must be, on the
basis of an erroneous metaphysics.
Maritain may appear to be nostalgic or reactionary, but this
is only the effect of his using traditional language to express
a worldview that flourished vigorously when translated into
other terms. In the contemporary world sophisticated Western
people have acquired a number of dialects, including the old
languages of received culture, in which the terms of religion
once had great prestige, as well as the new languages specific
to each of the attempts at or claims to empirical knowledge
made since the beginning of the modern period. (For want of
better, since the writers I will look at apply the word "modern"
to such an unwieldy stretch of time, I will use the word "contemporary"
to refer to the period after 1850.) In many cases these dialects
merely translated the older language into terms more appropriate
to matter and occasion, so that, for example, national hostility
became racial science, class hostility became anthropometry,
and so on. The thing asserted in the use of supposedly empirical
language is that, since it is cleansed of myth and superstition,
wherever it is used something very objective and reasonable
is being said. This transition did not occur at a time when
Western thought was particularly lucid or particularly healthy
or capable of anything like objectivity, yet its consequences
endure in the unacknowledged potency of old ideas smuggled
into self-styled empirical thought under cover of new language.
There are historiographical anomalies in seemingly objective
accounts of the Reformation in relation to the modern which
reflect the tendentious persistence of elements of pre-modern
thinking, the lurid old notion of heresy among them. Clearly
ancient notions do mutate to flourish in new semantic environments.
The rescue of anti-Judaism, by its being recast as a science,
from the general rejection of religion among the European
intelligentsia, is as powerful an instance as can be imagined
of the deeply retrograde tendencies of movements which took
themselves to have put all mystification behind them. Indeed,
it is a proof of the special usefulness of new language in
revivifying old prejudices. At the same time, the older language
is put to newly tendentious use. Georg Brandes, in his Main
Currents in Nineteenth Century Literature (1906), says of
Joseph de Maistre, "When he has shown that such and such
a social institution is inexplicable, he believes that he
has proved it to be divine. There is, in his opinion, no reasonable
explanation for hereditary royalty and hereditary nobility-which
is proof sufficient that they exist by the grace of God. What
is there to be said for war? Hardly anything, thinks de Maistre;
consequently war too is a mystery." De Maistre is among
those early critics of the dawning age who were grieved by
the waning of "mystery."
And the new language is used as if to dismiss or discredit
the old, as when, for example, the doctrine of transubstantiation
is described as a "magical" theory of the sacrament
by Max Weber, or as when writings ascribed traditionally to
Moses are re-ascribed hypothetically to J, E, P, and D-hypothesis
having the authority of truth in the degree that it lacks
the grace of tradition, presumably. The turmoil of Western
history has left a conceptual morass which language half reveals
and more than half conceals.
To return to the metaphor of nation or culture as organism.
It is a convention of such thinking that the intrusion of
the intolerably alien has already brought about precipitous
qualitative change. Heretics, being alien and furtive and
filled with malign intent, are the perfect agents of such
profound disruption. (The heretic is one version of the self
perceived as radically alien. Maritain includes a series of
pictures of Luther, one of them made after his death, so that
the reader can see how his appearance became progressively
more bestial. They are the usual paintings and engravings,
nothing remarkable about them.) At the time of Maritain's
essay, aversion to the modern world was already a cliche,
and only more a passion for that fact. The accusation against
it was that it was not the legitimate successor to the Middle
Ages in which tendencies of the earlier period were realized,
but an imposture which destroyed a natural and rightful order
of things. This interpretation of the period has been translated
into many political dialects, Marxist to Fascist, and has
the status of received truth among many historians and others
of no describeable persuasion.
Another conventional feature of such thinking is hyperbole.
Maritain's Luther bestrides Western civilization. His vast
errors reproduce themselves virulently everywhere. His passions
utterly exceed the normal human range. His vices are triumphantly
expressed even in his failures of understanding, and after
centuries they are still potently alive among us. He has shattered
the peace Christ brought to redeemed humanity. This is clearly
not empirical thinking, but writers of every kind had used
it for generations before Maritain, and they use it still.
Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present
(2000), remarks, "Calvinism, it has been said, makes
every man the enemy of every other, as well as his own."
Quite an accomplishment
Another peculiarity of this rhetoric, besides its Miltonic
extravagance (though Milton's famous respect for his Satan
is entirely missing in it), is its opportunism. It infects
the narrative as it can, or as it will. For example, Calvin,
the evil giant of history by most accounts, is blamed by Charles
Maurras for the rise of democracy, by Erich Fromm for preparing
the world for Nazism, by Michael Oakeshott for anticipating
Marx, by Hilaire Belloc for creating industrial capitalism,
by R. H. Tawney for inhibiting and punishing capitalism. He
is regularly accused, sometimes by the same writer, of establishing
both theocracy and secularism. His vices, which are opposite
to Luther's by all accounts, nevertheless have replicated
to produce the same effects as Luther's are claimed by Maritain
to have had, yielding our bitter modern world. Belloc says
of Calvin, "There is a dark instinct of horror which
is found, lurking or patent, in all antiquity and modern pagan
ritual, a demand for victims and a prostration before dreadful
power. Calvin provided victims... Calvinism had men enrich
themselves and they have done so." No text is cited,
because nowhere does Calvin encourage anyone to enrich himself,
as Max Weber himself makes clear.
Another peculiarity of this rhetoric is its tone of indignant
and/or smirking moralism. Lustful Luther, prudish Calvin.
Many a writer with a strong vocation to objectivity will nevertheless
stop to thrash one or both of them for traits attributed to
them on the basis of their presumed sexual excesses (in Calvin's
case an excess of celibacy, in Luther's, marriage to a nun).
In any case, there is usually an implication of luridly sexual
evil in any account of the great figure of the Reformation,
be it Calvin or Luther.
Another striking feature of these passages is the lack of
documentation. Appalling tales are told, in the absence of
any information as to sources. Since, apparently, we are all
supposed to know that something preternaturally terrible was
afoot in Wittenberg or Geneva, we should accept without question
the poetic truth, at least, of these tales, as the historians
themselves have done.
Finally, and this is a very large subject, historical accounts
of Calvin and Luther, Calvinism and Lutheranism, typically
lack all context. Once upon a time, we are assured, Europe
was of one mind. But we know it was not. There were important
dissenting movements such as the Waldensians, the Lollards
and the Hussites, which were suppressed with great violence
and which nevertheless persisted over centuries. John Wycliffe,
professor at Oxford, and Jan Huss, professor at Prague, wrote
and lectured on theology and politics as well, and their reformist
views anticipated Luther and Calvin in remarkable detail.
Persecution drives dissent underground, yet enough remains
visible in the very fact of persecution to make it clear that
Europe was certainly not of one mind until the Reformation.
Surely there are grounds for the presumption that the change
was in fact evolutionary, made apparently abrupt by repression
on one hand and on the other by the accelerated traffic in
ideas brought on by the printing press. The great momentum
of the movements that arose around Luther and Calvin argues
for the familiarity, not the novelty, of their beliefs. Unless,
of course, one subscribes to the view that, as heretics, they
acted on a larger stage than that of mere history, as serpents
in a garden, so to speak, whose allurements could disrupt
a cosmic harmony and bring down a general curse.
There are other issues of context, as well. For instance,
Europe was not at peace before the Reformation. When it began,
the Holy Roman Emperor was at war with the Pope, who in those
days was a great military power. While it is lamentable that
confessional differences were to become casi belli, warfare
raged before the schisms as horribly as it did after them.
Peace no more than unanimity was shattered by the Reformation.
While not remarkable for the period, the harshness or shrillness
of tone one finds in the polemical writing of Luther and Calvin
should nevertheless be interpreted in light of events like
the wars carried out against the Hussite populations in Bohemia
in the 15th century and the sack of Rome by the armies of
the Catholic Charles V in 1527. The committing of enormity
was one option of which the great men of the time availed
themselves rather freely. The Reformers were exposing all
those who identified with them, whole cities and regions,
to appalling risk. If Luther relied too much on German princes,
if Calvin and his encircled city were sometimes grim, historical
context is surely to be taken into account, before individual
vice or pathology, and before the evils attendant upon theological
deviation, in interpreting these failings.
Then there is the matter of implied comparison. When Geneva
is called severe, that means it was more severe than other
cities of the period. By what standard? What laws were in
place in Bern, Zurich, Rome, Paris, London, and how were they
enforced? Geneva notoriously forbade begging and at the same
time created very effective institutions to assist the poor.
Is that severe? Calvin notoriously discouraged adultery. Was
it smiled upon elsewhere? One finds undocumented anecdotes
to the effect that in Geneva adultery was treated as a capital
crime, though the Registers of the Consistory reflect a milder
attitude altogether. Geneva particularly is shadowed by what
may fairly be called libels. Anyone objecting to them is left
in the position of trying to prove a negative-no such thing
ever happened-because a single instance, even in the absence
of the slightest evidence, is ordinarily treated as sufficient
proof of the existence of a settled policy, systematically
enforced, which reflected the perverse theology and temperament
of Calvinism.
It is always startling to learn what passed in any 16th century
community, and one cannot exclude the possibility of isolated
instances of any barbarity. But this is true universally.
So far as I can discover, the policy of the Genevan Consistory
was practical and compassionate in cases of illegitimacy,
attempting to establish paternity in order to oblige the father
to assist the mother and child. That this is a correct interpretation
is suggested by the practice in 18th century Massachusetts.
Abigail Adams, writing from Paris about the practice there
of providing boxes throughout the city in which unwanted infants
could be abandoned anonymously, and where, in winter, one
third of these infants died of exposure, wrote that in America
"the laws provide resource for illegitimacy by obliging
the parents to maintenance, and, if not to be obtained there,
they become the charge of the town or the parish where they
are born." We do the same now, not because of lingering
animus against "fornication," but because poverty
is still the lot of many fatherless children. Calvin encouraged
fathers to present their infants to the congregation at baptism,
perhaps again to reinforce the meaningfulness of paternity.
The social context of religious thought and reform is too
complex to be dealt with here but also too important to be
left out of account when issues like alms-giving and adultery
arise. Poverty was decried as the great sin of Christendom
from Piers Plowman forward, and the Reform addressed it.
Few historians have any competence in theology or any familiarity
with its history or terminology, and those who do are often
partisans of one tradition who have no sympathy for another
and no great interest in showing it in a positive light. In
neither case can they be relied upon to supply context for
understanding a doctrine, a policy, a posture, or a casual
remark. Jacques Barzun, typical in his approach to the interpretation
of modern history-"The modern Era begins, characteristically,
with a revolution. It is commonly called the Protestant Reformation"-shows
very little comprehension of Lutheran or Calvinist theology,
though some grasp of both would seem useful, given the significance
he attaches to the epochal period defined for him by their
emergence. Explaining the association of Calvin with "the
label Puritan," Barzun says, "Only one feature properly
connects it to Calvin: the desirability of self-restraint,
in itself not a strange idea." He explains it in terms
of a general tendency of revolutions to become "coercive
and 'puritanical.'"
Calvin is regularly accused of stoicism and asceticism, of
a pathological bent toward denying pleasure and suppressing
emotion. But he struggled with his temper, was dogged by illness,
worked continuously, and bore heavy responsibility for the
literal survival of tens of thousands of people. Considering
his circumstances, it is hardly surprising that he cultivated
self-control. Of stoicism he wrote, "We have nothing
to do with that iron-hearted philosophy, which our Master
and Lord has condemned not only in words, but even by his
own example. For he mourned and wept both for his own calamities
and for those of others . . If all sorrow be displeasing,
how can we be pleased with his confessing that his 'soul'
was 'sorrowful even unto death?"' (Institutes, III, viii,
9) If Calvin did not himself take time to grieve, this was
a consequence of his situation, not his theology. He also
wrote, about the creation, "that [God] has so wonderfully
adorned heaven and earth with as unlimited abundance, variety
and beauty of all things as could possibly be, quite like
a spacious and splendid house, provided and filled with the
most exquisite and at the same time the most abundant furnishings...
We shall learn that in forming man and in adorning him with
such goodly beauty, and with such great and numerous gifts,
he put him forth as the most excellent example of his gifts"
(Institutes I, xiv, 20). This is a purer expression of joy
than I have found in any of his detractors.
Maritain alludes to Romantisme et Revolution, by Charles Maurras
(1922), which provides another version of the myth of the
triumph of the alien order. Maurras, no theologian, very much
a political writer, notes that Comte defined the Reformation
as "a systematic [act of] sedition of the individual
against the species." He says, "The Hellenic-Latin
traditions are as wholly innocent of it [the French Revolution,
which Maurras despised] as is the Roman Catholic medieval
genius. The fathers of the revolution were at Geneva, at Wittenberg,
before that at Jerusalem; they derived from the Jewish spirit
and from the varieties of independent Christianity that persisted
in the oriental deserts or in the Germanic forests, that is
in the various crossroads of barbarism." There, he says,
flourished the great heresies of the Middle Ages, the Waldensians
and the Albigensians. The Germanic and Anglo-Saxon worlds
being "poorly impregnated with Catholic humanism, Hebraism
penetrated them without difficulty." These worlds with
their Hebraism brought on the "democratic deviation"
and revolution in France. The implication of the taint of
heresy allows this self-- declared nationalist to reject and
despise as foreign a signal event in his nation's history,
and all that flowed from it.
Max Weber established the contemporary reputation of Protestantism,
more specifically of Calvinism, in two journal articles published
in 1904-1905 which became The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit
of Capitalism. He was a German nationalist who had done an
earlier study protesting the "Polonization" of a
region of Germany through the use of Polish farm labor. His
argument in The Protestant Ethic is that there is something
about "ascetic Protestantism" (Calvinism and the
sects it influenced) which has enabled it to infect the life
of the West with its peculiar passion for work and with its
zeal for achieving success while deferring the rewards of
success. According to Weber, the motive behind these behaviors
was at first an anxiety for assurance of salvation which arose
from the austerities of Calvinist theology. Then, religious
conviction having passed away, the behaviors persisted undiminished
in the culture of ascetic Protestantism, and, by a process
he never describes, pervaded the whole of society.
Calvinists were always a small, beleaguered minority in Europe,
in mid-18th century France still arrested for heresy, sent
to the galleys, imprisoned or driven out of the country. They
were aliens at home and foreigners everywhere else. Not surprisingly,
they maintained international contacts to assist one another.
The notion that, in the absence of uncanny powers, they could
be thought to have changed the whole of Europe to conform
to their "spirit" would seem implausible on its
face. But the form of Weber's thinking is the same as that
of Maritain or Maurras: a novel and alien culture has contaminated
the whole of life, estranging it, causing it to become joyless
and unnatural, "an iron cage."
Weber is thought to have demonstrated that capitalism itself
had its origins in the Protestant ethic. This conviction has
taken its place in the folklore of the educated, from which
nothing is ever dislodged. Weber says nothing of the kind,
however. According to him, capitalism goes back to antiquity,
and only its spirit has been altered-darkened-by Protestantism.
To demonstrate an affinity between ascetic Protestantism and
Capitalism, he offers crude statistical evidence of Calvinist
success in one region of Germany, compiled by a student of
his, which later scholarship has debunked. In other words,
his thesis, surely as influential as any in the history of
sociology, has little or no basis in fact, and asserts very
little that is susceptible of proof. Did the Calvinists live
in terror for their souls? They clung to their faith over
centuries, with extraordinary courage. Did religion die out
among them, leaving only the empty habit of selflessness,
a culture shaped by a devotion to the glory of God they no
longer felt? This seems improbable on its face. We have only
Weber's word for it.
Yet it is on these assertions, that Calvinism was first a
defective Christianity, then empty of religious content altogether,
that his characterization of its spirit, and therefore the
spirit of the modern age, entirely depends. Since it is not
an ethnic group but an international religious tradition Weber
has chosen to alienate, other conventions that surround the
treatment of heresy are very present in his argument. Note
the inversion of values. Devotion to one's calling and to
the public welfare, selfdiscipline, moral seriousness (Weber
prefers the "relative moral helplessness" to be
found in Lutheranism), subordination of one's interests to
the glory of God, simple honesty-traits which Christianity
and every other religion I know of consistently praise-these
are the faults of the Calvinists. Nor is Weber alone in this
appraisal of ascetic Protestantism. Ernst Troeltsch, a friend
of Weber's who acknowledges his influence in his Social Teachings
of the Christian Churches (1911), summarizes its "principles
and ideals" as follows:
The inner severance of feeling and enjoyment from all objects
of labour; the unceasing harnessing of labour to an aim which
lies in the other world and therefore must occupy us until
death; the depreciation of possessions, of all things earthly,
to the level of expediency; the habit of industry in order
to suppress all distracting and idle impulses; and the willing
use of profit for the religious community and for public welfare.
The "inner severance of feeling and enjoyment" is
Troeltsch's formula of alienation, his way of asserting that
there is crucial deviation from the human norm in the culture
he describes. To imagine that these people, if they were as
full of virtue as their detractors insist, might enjoy their
work, be happy in that indifference to possessions which is
a revered attainment in every spiritual tradition, and take
pleasure in generosity to their community and the public,
is to make them good, and religious, in the normal understanding
of both words. But like the service to one's neighbor Maritain
sees in Lutheranism, these ideals of theirs have a negative
valence, they impoverish life, because they are done in the
wrong "spirit."
Adolf Hitler saw the potential for utter cynicism opened by
this way of thinking. In Table Talk, he is quoted as saying
"There is a form of hypocrisy, typically Protestant,
that is impudence itself. Catholicism has this much good about
it, that it ignores the moral strictness of the Evangelicals.
In Catholic regions life is more endurable, for the priest
himself succumbs more easily to human weaknesses. So he permits
his flock not to dramatise sin. How would the Church earn
her living, if not by the sins of the faithful? . . Indulgence,
at a tariff, supplies the Church with her daily bread."
Hypocrisy on one side, corruption on the other-- morality
can make no claims on him at all.
Then there is the matter of hyperbole, first in the theory
itself, that a minority culture formed by decayed versions
of supposed tenets of an abandoned theology could have conformed
Europe to its peculiar worldview, and second in the projection
forward of these influences into a critical European future,
when "entirely new prophets will arise, or there will
be a great rebirth of old ideas and ideals, or, if neither,
mechanized petrification, embellished with a sort of convulsive
self-importance." No mere earthly power can mechanize
petrification, need I say. There is an element of the demonic
sublime in Weber's vision which should, I think, strike anyone
as anomalous in what presents itself as a work of economic
history. These two rhetorical tactics, the inversion of values
which makes sinister what objectively considered is good or
at worst commonplace, and the gross magnification of the power
and threat of a presence perceived as alien, are characteristic
of what I have called the West's autoimmune disorder.
Weber's book was in conversation with the writing of Werner
Sombart. In response to Weber's essays, Sombart wrote a reply
of sorts called-this should not startle anyone-The Jews and
Modern Capitalism. The copious notes added to the second edition
of The Protestant Ethic are largely in response to Sombart.
As his title announces, Sombart argues that it is, in fact,
the Jew who is primarily responsible for the creation of capitalism.
This is no refutation of Weber because, says Sombart, "Puritanism
is Judaism." And here is the familiar hyperbolic language
in a slightly altered context:
What in reality is the idea of making profit, what is economic
rationalism, but the application to economic activities of
the rules by which the Jewish religion shaped Jewish life?
Before capitalism could develop the natural man had to be
changed out of all recognition, and a rationalistically minded
mechanism introduced in his stead. There had to be a transvaluation
of all economic values. And what was the result? The homo
capitalisticus, who is closely related to the homo Judaeus,
both belonging to the same species, homines rationalistici
artificiales.
Werner Sombart is one of those figures, by no means rare and
by no means unimportant in intellectual history, who was renowned
in his time and has since been discreetly forgotten. He was
National Socialist in his sympathies, with an interest in
Marx and a certain optimism about the ultimate course of capitalism.
And he was an adept in the arcana of racialist lore that explained
so much to so many of the mighty thinkers of the time-- Northern
Europeans, he points out, are "sylvan" while Jews
are "Saharan" and therefore (it follows as the night
the day) much more strongly predisposed to capitalism.
Granting that Puritans also had a hand in the making of modern
capitalism, Sombart declares them Jews, and then he uses the
language of opprobrium directed against Puritans to enforce
his case against Jews. Having noted sources of Jewish influence
on Puritanism, for example "that not only the Bible,
but the Rabbinical literature as well, was extensively read
in large circles of the clergy and laity," Sombart quotes
a little humorous publication, which appeared in the year
1608 and the contents of which would seem to demonstrate the
close connexion between Judaism and Calvinism (which is only
Puritanism). It is called, Der Calvinische Judenspiegel [The
Calvinistic Jewish Mirror] ... The Jews are everywhere at
pains to cheat the people. So are we. For that very reason
we left our country to wander in other lands where we are
not known in our true colours, so that by our deceit and cunning...
we might lead astray the ignorant yokels, cheat them and bring
them to us.
And he quotes the German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine: "'Are
not the Protestant Scots Hebrews, with their Biblical names,
their Jerusalem, pharisaistic cant? And is not their religion
a Judaism which allows you to eat pork?"' While it is
to Weber's credit, considering the times, that he does not
accommodate Sombart's version of his thesis in his revisions
(though neither does he reject it), the suitability of his
"method" to stigmatizing, to inculpating, any group
is certainly demonstrated by the use Sombart makes of it.
In 1917, D. H. Lawrence wrote an essay on America (a Calvinist
civilisation, to the European mind), in which he uses the
language of Weber and Sombart to describe the "lust for
sensual gratification on the ethical control of all life on
the part of Jews and Puritans." He says:
... In this the American is like the Jew: in that, having
conquered and destroyed the instinctive, impulsive being in
himself, he is free to be always deliberate, always calculated,
rapid, swift and single in practical execution as a machine.
The perfection of machine triumph, of deliberate self-determined
motion, is to be found in the Americans and the Jews. (I feel
I should put this information upside down at the bottom of
the page: the Puritans of earlier America were Congregationalists,
Presbyterians, Quakers and Dutch Reformed.)
When Weber wrote, Marx was established as the great critic
of capitalism, and Communists were seen as a formidable threat
to Germany and Europe. Weber's thesis grants present unhappiness
in society, but discovers for it a different character than
mass poverty and a different etiology than the existing social
and economic order. There is no mention of injustice or of
class conflict, nor are the actual workings of capitalism
itself even alluded to by him. It is a system as old as civilization,
he says, and if its modern form oppresses, that reflects the
fortuitous effect upon it of a particular theology, more precisely,
a particular culture and population. Not, be it noted, because
in Weber's view that theology and culture encourages greed
or exploitation. Quite the contrary. His interpretation of
the problems of modern capitalist society implies no moral
criticism and reveals no reformist impulse. It could hardly
do so, since those are the very impulses he deplores. Instead,
it finds a scapegoat. As his very title declares, Weber sees
the problem as an excessive and somehow contagious ethicalism-"The
Puritan wanted to work in a calling; we are forced to do so."
His concern is for that very small part of society, that "we,"
whom poverty did not always force to labor, that remnant toward
whose plight Marx showed so little compassion. No wonder Weber's
theory was, and remains, very welcome. Yet the authority of
the thesis is somehow as if moral. And the polemic against
the modern, which in Weber's essay and characteristically
is also a polemic against the Reformation, is so deeply entrenched
in the minds of educated Americans that to raise questions
about the kind of thinking that lies behind it seems to strike
many as a morally dubious act. Yet to subscribe to the view
that the very fabric of our present civilization is the product
of insidious influence is to leave as alternatives either
cynicism or, as in the last century, irrationalist reaction
and self-attack. In other words, the choice is between the
chronic and the acute forms of auto-immune reaction.
Since the influence of Lutheranism has been relatively limited,
the complex of attitudes and assumptions I have addressed
center around Calvin, Calvinism and Calvinist Geneva, about
all of whom there flourishes a black legend, rather lacking
in particulars, but no less potent for that fact. To, as they
say, deconstruct it may seem an odd project, given that the
whole subject is notoriously grim, lurid, and radically unlikeable,
at least in common opinion.
But the issues involved are not obscure or minor. There was
a recent column in my local newspaper by a man who had driven
to the scene of the McVeigh execution to protest it. He was
asked by a Spanish journalist to explain why capital punishment
is still carried out in America. He had said, "It's the
Calvinist worldview; seeking vengeance is doing God's work."
The journalist asked him to repeat this on camera, but he
declined to, because-and here he reveals rare intellectual
integrity-"I didn't know if I was right."
In fact there is no special association of Calvinism with
vengeance in theology or in history. Calvin said:
[We are] willingly to cast from the mind wrath, hatred, desire
for revenge, and willingly to banish to oblivion the remembrance
of injustice. For this reason, we ought not to seek forgiveness
of sins from God unless we ourselves also forgive the offenses
against us of all those who do or have done us ill. If we
retain feelings of hatred in our hearts, if we plot revenge
and ponder any occasion to do harm, and even if we do not
try to get back into our enemies' good graces, and by every
sort of office deserve well of them, and commend ourselves
to them, by this prayer ["forgive us our debts as we
forgive our debtors"] we entreat God not to forgive our
sins. (Institutes III. xx. 45)
The Registers of the Consistory contain many instances in
which people involved in quarrels or disputes are asked to
forgive each other and be reconciled, then and there. No attention
at all is given to discovering the equity of the situation
or to placing blame. This is entirely consistent with Calvin's
gloss on forgiveness. Yet there was capital punishment in
Geneva, just as there was and always had been everywhere else
in Christian Europe. The legends that a child was beheaded
for striking her parents, that Calvin's own step-children
were executed for adultery, that unwed pregnant women were
drowned, have created the belief that Geneva was particularly
given to executing people. But these ghastly tales are legends
only. As for historically corroborated seventies, I have not
seen information that would make comparison between Geneva
and other cities possible, nor have I found any historian
who even considers the question.
The issue raised by the column quoted above is whether the
influence of Calvinism inclines our culture to vengefulness.
Since America was most Calvinist in its beginnings, both in
the degree to which that tradition was known and adhered to,
and also as a simple consequence of patterns of immigration,
its practice of capital punishment relative to other cultures
in the same period would be an indication of the nature of
the influence of Calvinism. Peter Gay, in The Cultivation
of Hatred (1993), describes an anti-death penalty pamphlet
circulated in London in 1831 which "listed the scores
of capital felonies in England for which American courts were
sentencing criminals only to fines or short stints in jail."
According to Gay, Michigan abolished the death penalty in
1847, and Maine in 1876. Rhode Island abolished it in 1852
and restored it in 1882. Switzerland abolished it in 1874,
though seven of twenty-two cantons afterward restored it.
These are the only instances of early abolition he cites.
They do not argue for special Calvinist vengefulness. Indeed,
it appears a case could be made that when the influence of
Calvinism was strong we were relatively advanced, and as it
has faded we have become relatively primitive.
In attributing a regrettable national trait or practice to
Calvinism, the man whose letter I quote above did something
Americans with any education do very frequently. They know
little or nothing about Calvinism, and that may be what makes
it so suitable for the use that is made of it. If they found
themselves laying such a burden of blame on any group or sect
that had reality for them, they would be embarrassed. Like
the evolution of Bogomil (heretic) into Bogeyman, the change
in the meaning of the word "Calvinist" has supplied
the language with a name for a lurking spirit of malice whose
attributes are not otherwise described, but are discovered
in anything regrettable that our great, non-Calvinist body
politic finds itself up to. This is the autoimmune disorder
in a highly attenuated form, an almost benign expression of
the impulse toward isolation and rejection which takes devastating
form when the sense of threat is focused on an actual population.
It is also a very pure example of the phenomenon because "Calvinism,"
when it is used in its bogeyman sense by Americans, is also,
at the same time, identified with whatever the writer takes
to be offensively-and uniquely, quintessentially-American.
It is the formula for the discovery of the radically alien
in our own substance.
And it has its undesirable consequences, which are local except
in that they are morally incapacitating, a deplorable quality
in a world power, and in that they preclude the possibility
of our taking full responsibility for the character of our
civilization. As with modernity, so with America, its epitome-America
was cursed from the outset by a deviant theology. Enlightened
opinion agrees that we owe our vices to the thought crimes
of a clutch of 17th century farming villages. (If the larger
cultural impact of Calvinism were mentioned, we would find
ourselves indicting many great universities and much humane
reform. Better to concentrate on Salem.)
As a version of the worldview that locates the origins of
the modern age in an intricate theology and a remote culture
(here colonial America, which was Calvinist only in New York
and New England), it puts moral responsibility for the things
that happen among us on, in effect, the dark side of the moon.
If anyone wished to snatch power from the hands of these pertinacious
spirits, he would certainly find out what they believed, and
how they lived, and what kinds of civilizations theirs were,
relative to the world in their time. He could explain, for
example, why our cultural ancestry in the slave-holding colonial
South, which had as its established church the Church of England,
is not also to be lamented. Then he could trace out the strands
of Calvinist influence, and show us how they persist and why
they are to be regretted, thereby freeing us of vengefulness,
misanthropy, prudishness, judgmentalism, intolerance, self-righteousness,
elitism, the cult of success, tight-fistedness, racism, the
belief in a special national destiny, capitalism and whatever
else enlightened opinion chooses to describe as "Calvinist."
Or if he found no reason to lay our crimes and failings at
the door of our notional ancestors-and that does seem a little
primitive-then he would set about finding other ways of accounting
for them, and of confronting them.
And there is the rub. If we were to conclude that we are to
blame for our actions and omissions as surely as any of our
ancestors, real or imagined, were to blame for theirs, then
we would also conclude that reform is possible, since the
agents of good and evil are our living, breathing selves.
And, from a moral point of view, when reform was acknowledged
as possible, it would also become necessary. It is so much
easier to believe that this wildly various population have
all drunk from a poisoned cup, ingesting "Calvinism,"
and becoming somehow imperfectly human ever afterward, like
Maritain's world after Luther. This understanding of our culture
makes no demands except upon our credulity and our indignation,
neither of which is ever in short supply. Indeed, it yields
the authority of the past to crudeness and severity, never
consulting history to find evidence of a more benevolent patrimony,
never pausing to consider the consequences of this displacement
onto the fabled dead of our own greatest responsibilities.
The black legend of Geneva (I borrow the phrase "black
legend" from historians at work on restoring the good
name of the Spanish Inquisition, an undertaking which makes
mine seem modest), is based on two facts; first, that Calvin
believed in predestination, and second, that he approved the
execution of one man, Michael Servetus, for heresy. Virtually
every major theologian before Calvin or contemporary with
him, including Augustine, Aquinas, Ignatius of Loyola and
Martin Luther, also believed in predestination. He no more
than they arrived at this complex doctrine out of mere determination
to spread gloom. Other terms and concepts associated with
Calvinism also shock and horrify, for example the idea of
an elect, of sin and fallen-ness, of judgment and condemnation,
as if these were the products of one Frenchman's fevered brain
rather than basic issues in Christianity from its beginnings.
Any cultural historian, anyone who lives in proximity to Christianity,
its texts and artifacts, should know better.
Then there is the matter of Servetus. Christendom would be
unimaginably different, more populous by millions, if the
Genevans had been the first to execute a heretic. In order
to put the matter in context and perspective, it is interesting
to compare Calvin, who tends to be treated in history, on
the basis of the execution of Servetus, as an oppressor of
conscience, with his older contemporary Thomas More, whom
history generally regards as a hero of conscience.
Both men were great humanists, great linguists and scholars,
great prose writers, and men of passionate religious faith.
Both were the sons of lawyers, educated for careers in the
law. Calvin was a figure of decisive though indirect influence
in Geneva-he never held political office-and over the years
the city became more or less conformed to his idea of an appropriate
Christian social order. More, who was Lord Chancellor under
Henry VIII and presided over the Star Chamber, held enormous
and direct political power. Calvin is routinely blamed for
torture and executions carried out in Geneva, without reference
to the fact that both were utterly commonplace in Europe,
having been established in Roman law, or that Geneva had a
civil government Calvin did not control. More himself ordered
judicial torture and executions. More also created an ideal
social order, in his Utopia, and in his Utopia there are slaves.
Calvin speaks of slavery as an evil in his sermons on Deuteronomy,
and in Geneva he established a system of compulsory education,
the best preventive of slavery, actual or virtual. Calvin
was ascetic in that he lived very modestly and worked himself
to death. More was ascetic in that he wore a hair shirt. Calvin
and his tradition are commonly associated with hatred of human
sexuality, for reasons that are never made clear. More objected
to the re-translation of caritas as "love" on the
grounds that the English word had vulgar connotations. Calvin
called for the death of Michael Servetus, a Basque physician
already condemned by the Inquisition, who had written an attack
on the doctrine of the Trinity. More called for the death
of William Tyndale, the priest who made the translation of
the New Testament and the early books of the Old Testament
into English which became the basis of the so-called King
James Bible. Both men were burned, as were their books. Servetus
died bravely, true to his faith. And so did Tyndale, and so,
in due course, did More. And so did countless others, before
and after them. Any allowance made for More in terms of his
times should be made for Calvin also. Any opprobrium that
attaches to Calvin for failing always to rise above his times
should attach to More also. To speak of their times in either
case is to remember that oppression of conscience was by no
means a practice that awaited More or Calvin.
Sainthood, like heresy, has an empirical meaning, that one
has been formally canonized, and a theological meaning, that
one is granted, by God and the Church, a status in heaven
which honors great sanctity of life and which is manifest
in miracles among the faithful. Calvin, like Luther, rejected
the whole idea of canonization, believing that only God can
know who the saints are. In very respect to them, their traditions
cannot make such claims for them. So whether St. Thomas More
and plain Monsieur Calvin can usefully be compared is a metaphysical
question, similar in its historiographical consequences to
the question of the meaning one assigns to the word "heresy."
Interference between cultural and empirical vocabularies has
made a hero of one and a villain of the other on non-historical
grounds.
In our culture of seeming mutual intelligibility there is
in fact a Babel of languages. It is not so much that words
have different meanings depending on cultural and historical
context, as that they have different values. Liberalism, democracy,
capitalism, socialism, idealism-such words are never satisfactorily
defined. Secularism, materialism, individualism and ethicalism
have very different significations, depending who uses them.
For example, secularism, as Europeans use it, can mean bringing
religious values to bear on ordinary life-bringing the monastery
into the marketplace, in Weber's phrase. And it can be regarded
as a great and novel offense. R. H. Tawney, quoting a teaching
of Calvin that "the pious man owes to his brethren all
that it is in his power to give," says, "It was
natural that so remorseless an attempt to claim the totality
of human interests for religion should not hesitate to engage
even the economic appetites." Were not Jesus and John
the Baptist just as remorseless? Not according to Tawney-
"Calvin's system was more Roman than Christian, and more
Jewish than either." Tawney is specifically critical
of Calvinist America.
In the struggle between liberty and authority, Calvinism sacrificed
liberty, not with reluctance, but with enthusiasm . . . The
dictatorship of the ministry appeared as inevitable to the
wholehearted Calvinist as the Committee of Public Safety to
the men of 1793, or the dictatorship of the proletariat to
an enthusiastic Bolshevik. If it reached its zenith where
Calvin's discipline was accepted without Calvin's culture
and intellectual range, in the orgies of devil worship with
which a Cotton and an Endicott shocked at last even the savage
superstition of New England, that result was only to be expected.
The language of hyperbole is by now familiar, the "orgies
of devil worship" and the "savage superstition."
This is no doubt an allusion to the witch trials, which are
notorious, like the death of Servetus, not because they were
characteristic but because they were anomalous. There were
burnings of witches before-tens of thousands of them-and also
after the events at Salem, in England and in Europe.
The implied association with uncongenial modern political
ideas is typical, also. It might startle Americans to find
that their cultural forbears merit comparison with Bolsheviks,
but in fact that indifference to material gain and that willingness
to contribute to the church and community noted by Troeltsch
and others, has struck many of their critics as appallingly
a gauche. On the same grounds H. L. Mencken, who warmed the
heart of the nation with the passion of his contempt for it,
called it, in 1911, a "communistic democracy." Autoimmunity
is so profound in Americans (in its strangely attenuated form,
thank God) that they are eager to join in contempt for qualities
they would heartily admire, if they could first be assured
that they themselves are congenitally deficient in them. The
essay titled "The Voyage of the Mayflower" in William
Carlos Williams' In the American Grain (1925) is a screed
made up almost entirely of the bizarre language Calvinism
and the modern world conventionally inspire. He says, "The
Pilgrims, they, the seed, instead of growing, looked back
at the world and damning its perfections praised a zero in
themselves," and "The agonized spirit, that has
followed like an idiot with undeveloped brain, babbling in
a text of dead years. Here souls perish miserably, or, escaping,
are bent into grotesque designs of violence and despair."
All this is "the inversion of a Gothic Calvin."
I take it this language is mangled in the struggle to convey
that sense of something more than "mere terrestrial history"
Belloc speaks of, to accomplish the lurid aggrandisement that
can make a small boat with a few people on it "the first
American democracy ... who would succeed in making everything
like themselves." And what are the qualities enforced
upon us by these progenitors? Williams says, "Everything
attests their despoiled condition: the pitiful care for each
one, the talk of the common wealth (common to all alike, so
never the proud possession of any one) . . . It is the weakling
in us all that finds this beautiful." Either Americans,
at least to Williams' time, had an excessive solicitude for
one another and a grievously deficient love of private property,
or he has mis-read his contemporaries and/or the Pilgrims
in this regard.
Then again, the whole project of assigning American national
traits to one tiny, highly exceptional population really might
just be nonsense. Whatever we are, and however we have arrived
where we are, we are very much inclined to lament the absence
in ourselves of just those qualities Williams finds much too
present in the Pilgrims, as writers like Troeltsch and Tawney
had found them too present in the Calvinists. This means that,
if we really subscribed to this determinist model, we could
look to our earlier history to find an ineluctable predisposition
toward traits we claim to admire. But the notion of historical
well-poisoning gives us all an excuse to claim one set of
values and live by another. We recognize aversion to ourselves
(here conveniently epitomized in these ancestors) as the necessary,
and, regrettably, the sufficient moral response to our failings.
No one cares what Mencken was saying, or what, in these essays,
Williams was saying. The rage of rejection in both cases is
a version of the great reaction against the modern age then
overwhelming Europe, thrilling and impressive to Americans
to this day.
Andrew Delbanco begins the series of lectures titled The Real
American Dream (1999) rather apologetically. He knows it is
"quaint" to begin a discussion of American civilization
by looking at New England Puritanism, but he does it just
the same. His motives are very generous-- he wants to discover
a new, unifying hope to make our lives meaningful. In his
view, first the belief in God and then the sense of nation,
the civic religion expressed especially in reverence for the
figure of Abraham Lincoln, gave meaning to the lives of earlier
generations. Now, he says, we are lost in the cult of the
self, the no-culture-at-all of radical selfabsorption (though
he notes at the same time that the general public is often
admirably decent and fair). He says, "the imagination
of the young may still be drawn toward what one Puritan writer
called 'an Aliquid Ultra, something further to be sought after,
besides what we have found in ourselves."' And he quotes
Emerson as saying, on the decline of Puritan faith, "Let
us do what we can to rekindle the smouldering nigh quenched
fire on the altar." In other words, he consults the Puritans
for their wisdom and for their example. This is his understanding
of their view of salvation:
Since no one's fate can be separated from the fate of all
others, responsibility is never limited to the self. Extending
oneself to Godthrough others marks the advent of hope; and
while salvation can never be earned, engagement with others
is a sign that it may be granted.
Hope which takes the form of benign engagement with others
is clearly what Delbanco wishes for us all.
Despite all this, his account of the Puritans follows the
conventions. For hyperbole we have the information-itself
highly conventional-that their God was "dark and glowering,"
"a nasty prankster." If this were true, how would
they have arrived at the conception of hope in mutual engagement
which he admires in them? In a sermon Delbanco mentions, John
Winthrop speaks of "the sweet sympathy of affections
which was in the members of this body [the church] one towards
another, their cheerfulness in serving and suffering together,
how liberal they were without repining, harborers without
grudging and helpful without reproaching; and all from hence;
because they had fervent love amongst them, which only make
the practice of mercy constant and easy." Clearly the
grace of this God is not a winning ticket in some cosmic lottery,
as Delbanco and others seem to think, but a present, highly
social experience. That there is no equivalent language outside
religion for the experience of what is here called grace does
not mean that the phenomenon is better understood when it
is translated into other, inevitably reductionist, terms.
Nor is note taken of the fact that the social liberalism that
Troeltsch and others see as expressing anxiety about salvation
can in fact have expressed joy and faith.
Delbanco leers a little, too. He explains, quite fairly, that
the Puritans got that name because they wanted to "purify"
Anglican worship, though not because it was "garish,"
as he says, but because it preserved a liturgy they objected
to on theological grounds. They objected to the costliness
of it as well, for reasons that were political as well as
theological, and not so difficult to understand, given the
profound poverty endemic in Britain. In any case, the word
"puritan" is associated in general use with a kind
of sexual repression that indicates sexual obsession and is
accompanied by hypocrisy and neurosis. Of all 17th century
religions this would be least liable to describe the Puritans,
whose clergy married and who idealized marriage-not celibacy-as
the holiest human state. Nevertheless, Delbanco takes the
liberty the stereotype would give him.
He calls Puritanism a very "alien" religion, and
then he alienates it. He says, "[The Puritans] were regarded
by many of their fellow Englishmen as fanatics," not
alluding to the fact that they were part of a large and growing
movement in England, especially in the Universities, which
was finally powerful enough to seize the government. Nor does
he allude to the high levels of humanist education among them.
He quotes a letter from John Winthrop to his wife, expressed,
as he says, "in phrases drawn almost intact from the
Lord's Prayer." Then he says, "Here is the core
of the Puritans' faith-their willing submission to the 'all-sufficient'
God of Genesis." Since the Lord's Prayer is attributed
to Jesus, why suppose that Winthrop was thinking of the God
of Genesis as he quoted it? Perhaps so Delbanco can then say
Winthrop found in the New World that "one could experience
anew Adam's discovery. . . that when he tried to conceal his
nakedness from God, there was nowhere to hide." In the
passage Delbanco quotes Winthrop sounds profoundly serene:
"I have never fared better in my life, never slept better,
never had more content of mind, which comes merely of the
Lord's good hand." Nothing in it in any way suggests
the appropriateness of Delbanco's interpretation. But his
reading conjures again the terrifying God of the Puritans,
and appears to offer evidence of their warped and meagre spirit.
This sort of thing would seem to run counter to Delbanco's
own intentions. Clearly he wants to present Puritan New England
as one instance, however imperfect, of the discovery of hope
as a social ethos and resource. He may have felt he had to
put a protective coloration of cynicism on this insight, so
that it would not seem merely quaint or nostalgic. And it
is truly a valuable insight, in whatever context it is discovered,
and by whatever means it is found a hearing.
But there is the problem of the language, or languages, in
which history is written. Delbanco seems to accept the Weberian
view, that Puritanism, ascetic Protestantism, Calvinism, is
a sort of salvation machine. You turn the crank as fast as
you can for as long as you can in the hope that something
will happen, knowing that it just might not, since the otherwise-cryptic
instructions say clearly that the crank is not connected in
any way to anything inside the machine. So you turn the crank
faster. Those who have no conception of religion, or who do
not consider Calvinism a form of authentic religion, must
account for the fact of its great influence as an agent of
culture and reform as only more crank-turning.
Its adherents, historically, have studied the Bible so deeply
that the languages they speak and write are rich with it,
and became great languages because of it. Puritan ministers
were required to learn Greek and Hebrew so they could ponder
the great text with their congregations. The Puritans founded
Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Amherst, Williams and literally
hundreds of other colleges, in part to maintain a learned
clergy. Can any aesthetic or intellectual gratification have
rewarded all this? Or did they do it only because they feared
for their salvation? The classic civilizations immersed themselves
in Homer, a vastly less complex literature, and I have never
heard anyone suggest their interest was a sign of simple-mindedness,
though the bibliocentricity of the Puritans is often treated
that way. Are our preoccupations more civilized, or more sophisticated?
In this as in other things the Puritans were rather like the
Jews, as Maurras and so many of their detractors have pointed
out. Is our contempt for them in part a survival of that disgraceful
old polemic?
They spent thousands of hours hearing sermons. Were they only
there trying to get on the right side of the Nasty Prankster?
A sermon is an occasion in which someone is under the deepest
obligation to speak meaningfully and truthfully to people
who are under the same obligation to listen to and consider
what he says in all good faith. There is no occasion in contemporary
society, except among those who still give or hear a good
sermon from time to time, in which honesty on one side and
receptivity on the other is consistently attempted. Especially
within a community who have a history together, who celebrate
the passage of life together, a sermon can be a very moving
and profound collective experience, like nothing else.
I speculate that the language Andrew Delbanco uses in this
lecture is a survival of the conceptual vocabulary that assumes
the ontological meaningfulness of heresy, and also of the
conceptual vocabulary which carried the idea over into politics
and science, in the form of a passionate certainty that there
are people it is a virtue in other people to despise, and
that these people are, simply as what they are by race or
culture, virulent. This is not to say that Delbanco himself
would ever intend to suggest such things, simply that the
conventions of these languages have taken over the subject
of Puritanism, as they have of the Reformation-and as, for
a long time, they did of Judaism-and control historians' understanding
of it. It is a modest claim to make for the Puritans, as for
any other culture or population, that they were human, too.
It has been the worst tendency of the polemic against the
modern to insist that people can in fact fall outside that
category-as demonic, or artificial, or mechanical, or as having
only a zero in themselves. If the point is conceded that human
beings are, by their nature, human, then there are practical
limits to the degree to which they can be called alien. And
this again implies that they are owed at least an effort at
understanding.
I have used the vocabulary of what is called cultural relativism
in my defense of the Puritans, and it is quite appropriate
to the case. They had the same right to live as seemed good
to them as any other community of faith or affinity. They
were not always admirable. But who are the rest of us to judge,
as if from a height of impeccable virtue? We do have that
habit of treating our sins as simply the long shadow of their
sins, so as we grow worse our indictment of them becomes more
and more severe. Shame on us. They bear up as a 17th century
society a good deal better than we do as a 21st century society.
There is another language, the one the Puritans and any number
of other traditions would have recourse to first of all in
explaining who they were and are, what their way of life means
to them. It is the language of religion. The pious feel the
presence of God. This is a source of great joy and sustenance
to them, whatever difficulties it entails, and even in the
face of difficulties No one looking on from the outside can
know the meaning of the silences, celebrations, disciplines,
bonds and renunciations that permit them to express this experience.
The Calvinists felt that, in the presence of another human
being, God displayed to them his highest work. If they did
enjoy that rare thing, a commonwealth, it is more probably
their visionary, God-suffused piety than anything so mean
as fear that brought them to it.
Again I am using the language of culture, not of religion,
and language channels thinking. Something remains unsaid.
Perhaps God forgave the Calvinists also, and blessed them
too, and gave them the grace to be as religious as, to their
detractors, they only seem. Who can speak with understanding
of any religion who does not assume what they all assume,
that it is meaningful to think in such terms? If we acknowledge
this, then the problems of conceptualizing beyond the merely
terrestrial will become manifest. Now these problems are present,
powerfully because implicitly, in the conceptual language
that attacks the founding "heresies" of the modern
and contemporary world. It is an irrationalist language, a
mysticism of dread, which incites rejection by the culture
of its own human substance and essence.
MARILYNNE ROBINSON teaches creative writing at the University
of Iowa and is author of Housekeeping, The Death of Adam:
Essays on
Modern Thought and Mother Country
 |
 |
|
|
