The Calamity of Selfhood

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Classify “A Heart Promptly Offered: The Revolutionary Leadership of John Calvin” (Cumberland House, 320 pages, $16.95) as a didactic biography, since David W. Hall is intent on proving a point: The common understanding of John Calvin is wrong. Mr. Hall believes his subject has been maligned as an authoritarian with a bleak view of humanity and an intolerance that separate him from all that is modern and humane.

To the contrary, Mr. Hall argues, both the man and his doctrines are the bedrock of our democratic society. No Calvin, no America — this is what the American historian George Bancroft and a host of other notables have suggested, as Mr. Hall points out. Why, then, such a huge discrepancy between the real Calvin and his caricature?

To answer that question, turn to “The Legacy and Decline of Calvinism,” in part 3. Mr. Hall argues that Calvinism was overtaken by Enlightenment values, unable to compete in a Rousseauistic world that touted the innate goodness of man and the perfectibility of human nature. In America, the Puritans, the heirs of Calvinism, came to seem a very dour bunch — you know, that group of humorless, black-cloaked figures hectoring Hester Prynne.

But in Mr. Hall’s book, Calvin is far more important than Rousseau or later thinkers such as Karl Marx. Mr. Hall hearkens back to John Adams, who revered Calvin as a harbinger of religious and civil liberty. To properly understand Calvin, his biographer argues, one must compare him not to his successors but to his predecessors, the most important of whom is, of course, St. Augustine. Like Augustine, Calvin addressed the drama of the individual soul, susceptible to sin but capable of redemption through faith in God’s grace. In other words, Calvin led the Reformation, opposing the doctrine of good works that had corrupted Catholicism and substituting the notion of justification by faith. The soul’s sincerity, not brownie points, secured salvation.

Calvin’s emphasis on the dignity and integrity of the individual soul, which became a challenge to the very idea of hierarchy and monarchy, attracted Adams and other American Founding Fathers. Calvin was no modern democrat to be sure, and he was enough of a theocrat to believe heresy had to be punished — even by death — but any careful examination of his career in Geneva shows a man steeped in the idea that individuals worked together collectively to obey the laws of God and to construct a just civil life.

Calvin pioneered government by council and consistory. He was trained as a lawyer, and he believed everyone — including the monarchs of his day — was subject to the law. To know the law of God and to pattern a society in conformance with divine commandments meant congregationalism, a form of religion that dominated early American life and which still exerts enormous influence today.

Mr. Hall does an excellent job rehabilitating Calvin, save for one crucial point: It is rather astonishing that this biographer does not squarely deal with the most troubling aspect of Calvinism for modern minds. There is no chapter on determinism (another term for predestination), and neither predestination nor determinism is indexed. The Calvinist believes in the foreordained: Your life has already been decided. You are either one of elect, the recipient of God’s grace, or you are damned.

Put that baldly, the obvious response to a Calvinist is, “Why should I bother?” If I have no say in the matter, if good deeds don’t count, then all I have to do is wait to see if I have the winning ticket. Why Mr. Hall does not address these questions that every skeptic of Calvinism has raised is beyond me. It is not enough to say Calvin was a good man, that he wrote sociable letters and had a lot of friends, or that the good conduct of his immediate disciples is a kind of justification of the man and his ideas. It is not even enough to say that minds hostile to Calvin’s nevertheless gave him much credit. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wanted to move Calvin’s Genevan academy to Virginia, so highly did this Deist regard the institution of higher learning Calvin had established. Only when Jefferson could not obtain public funding for this buyout did he turn to plans for his own University of Virginia.

This is all impressive, and yet the modern mind cannot get past the doctrine of predestination. So what would Calvin say? This, it seems to me, is what Mr. Hall should have told us. Instead he offers platitudes about leadership (this biography is part of the publisher’s Leaders in Action Series). Do we really need this kind of bromide: “Calvin would learn — as many other leaders have — that success is seldom easy or rapid.”

Why doesn’t Mr. Hall pursue, as a Calvin biographer should, the psychology of Calvinism? The Calvinist did not know if he was one of the elect or the damned. Good works might not save him, but good works were necessary as part of his own effort to convince himself that he deserved election. It was the extraordinary drama of not knowing one’s ultimate fate that drove Calvinists to create just and equitable societies for themselves and for others. In other words, at every turn what the individual did was up to him. This is a hugely liberating psychology that did indeed lead (ironically) to a sense of selfhood that ultimately doomed Calvinism. And yet, without Calvin, it is difficult to see how the secular notion of individual liberty could have flourished.

The modern connection to Calvinism reminds me of T. S. Eliot’s statement in “Tradition and the Individual Talent”: “Some one said: ‘The dead writers are remote from us because we know so much more than they did.’ Precisely, and they are that which we know.”

I wish Mr. Hall had shown that we are all fated to be Calvinists, whether we know it or not.


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