Our great experiment did not spring from the brain of John Locke. It had been tried successfully elsewhere, as our ancestors were well aware. In 1717, the American Puritan John Wise described democracy as follows:
This is a form of government which the light of nature does highly value, and often directs to, as most agreeable to the just and natural prerogatives of human beings. This was of great account in the early times of the world; and not only so, but upon the experience of several thousand years, after the world had been tumbled and tossed from one species of government to another at a great expense of blood and treasure, many of the wise nations of the world have sheltered themselves under it again, or at least have blendished and balanced their government with it.
Wise is defending New England Congregationalism and “its ancient constitution of church order, it being a democracy.”
Significantly, Wise argues from the antiquity and wisdom of democratic political order to justify church polity, and not the other way around. Again, the republican institutions of Geneva were in place before Calvin set foot in that city; the Northern Netherlands freed itself and governed itself under Calvinist influence, which was strong but never exclusive; the New Englanders embraced a revolutionary order whose greatest exponents were Southerners. John Wise describes democracy as tried, practical, and stable, and suited to “the natural prerogatives of human beings.” The fact of the association of relative political democracy — it is always relative, now as then — with centers of Calvinism clearly does not imply to him any dependency of either upon the other.
The affinity of Calvinism for one characteristic type of modern government does suggest that the theology and the civil polity arose from an impulse, or a history, that was common to them, and that they elaborated and legitimized each other. The outlaw status of both of them no doubt heightened their affinity. There was an ancient tradition of relative republicanism and autonomy in the great urban civilization of southern France and northern Italy, and also of popular, anti-hierarchical religious radicalism, epitomized in Catharism, a powerful old heresy with which Calvinism has always been associated by its detractors. A great exertion of papal and monarchical power, the Albigensian Crusades (1209–1226) and the first Inquisition (1233–1350), had suppressed the heresy together with the autonomy of the cities. Historians tend to treat this as a successful cultural extirpation. But Calvin alludes several times to Catharism in his commentaries, in contexts which make it clear that its beliefs were still abroad and still influential, though the culture had been destroyed generations before he wrote. Geneva with its Calvinists looks very like a resurgence of that old martyred civilization.
Yet many innovations of great historical importance are assigned to the influence of John Calvin, including modern marriage, modern capitalism, the modern, “disciplined” self. In precisely the sense that these aspects of life may have deserved to be called Calvinist, if only by affinity, we have closed the historical parentheses, and passed beyond the modern. The idealization of marriage; an economics based on asceticism and a sense of vocation, that is, of sanctified calling; a kind of personality formed around self-scrutiny and concern for the state of one’s soul — these are not things for which we need any longer chide ourselves. Stable, lawful representative government, “modern” government, is no longer an ethos, and is always less a habit.
This is not to say that Calvinism did indeed undergird modern civilization, except as other moral systems did also. Calvinists were always a reviled minority, who therefore enjoyed the ominous tribute of having their influence found everywhere. The German sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1906), associates them with late capitalism by way of expressing his distaste for it and for them. The polemical intent of this ostensibly scholarly argument is as striking as the imprecision of its terms, but the book — or perhaps its title, since that is much more widely read — has been taken terribly seriously, and has greatly influenced the historical reputation of Protestantism and especially of Calvinism, and has perhaps encouraged us to feel that an ethic is itself a doubtful thing, an anxiety, a neurosis.
In the summer of 1922, Karl Barth, Calvin’s great modern exponent, gave a series of lectures on Calvin’s theology. He described its famous ethical dynamic this way: “Knowledge of God engenders a desire to act. A desire to act engenders a new seeking of God. A new quest for God engenders new knowledge of God. That is the way Reformed thinking goes.” Cauvin himself said, “The only true knowledge of God is born of obedience.” Weber’s thought is not of a kind to grant significance to “knowledge of God,” either as motive or as experience. These two contemporaries, Barth and Weber, are writing from entirely different conceptual models. If there is any merit in Weber’s thesis, if there is truth in the belief that Calvinism was in fact a cultural watershed, perhaps it is fair to distinguish between these two conceptions as the one from which the modern came, and the one in which it ended.
For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature — in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag. We have alienated ourselves from our history by systematically refusing it the kind of understanding that would make it intelligible to us, until we are no longer capable of understanding. Barth says, about theology, “[W]e need to ask ourselves how it has come about that something that did speak once will no longer speak to us. We certainly should not suppress the historical truth that it did speak once.”
There are objections to Calvin and to the enterprise of classical theology which it would be well to address at the outset. This great project, theology, which for so many centuries was the epitome of thought and learning, the brilliant conceptual architecture of western religious passion, entirely worthy of comparison with any art which arose from the same impulse, has been forgotten, or remembered only to be looted for charms and relics and curiosities. We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf — it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent. I will touch on certain subjects as they are dealt with in the writing of old John Calvin, with no wish to suggest that in one instance or another he is typical, or exceptional, or even that he is always clearly faithful to his own best insights — though extreme consistency is a thing of which he has often been accused.
Theology of the period of Cauvin employs a characteristic language which discredits it in the eyes of modern readers, including extreme disparagements of the physical body, and more generally of humankind under the aspect of sin or fallenness. The first thing that must be borne in mind is that those who wrote in such terms, whether Cauvin or Luther or John of the Cross, did it in the service of an extraordinarily exalted vision of the human soul. It is a form of hyperbole — purity is corruption, pleasure is illusion, wisdom is folly, virtue is depravity, by comparison with the holiness that can be imagined, not as the nature of God only, but as the nature of humankind also, whom — in the translation of Psalm 8 in the Geneva Bible, a sixteenth-century English Bible assembled, annotated, and printed by English Calvinist exiles in Geneva — God has made “a little lower than God, and crowned him with glory and worship.”