October 2008 Print

Claude Polin

It is widely understood that Catholic anti-Communism cannot accept the liberal economic model as it is practiced in Europe. But what stands behind the liberal societies of Anglo-Saxon inspiration? What philosophy, and even what religion, underpins it? An examination of Calvinism and its conception of society and politics are very revealing on this score.

An analysis of the Calvinist conception of society and politics first of all requires an understanding of what is specific to the Calvinist religion. Calvin’s teaching can be reduced to a few essential principles, which we summarize in three points.

Dependence of Guilty Man

Convinced that the Christian faith was on the brink of extinction, Calvin believed that the danger was due to man’s loss of the sense of their radical dependency on God. His first idea was to make them aware of their dereliction and corrupt nature. He wanted them to feel the guilt of their sinful state, which they forget all too readily, despite their having been reduced to total unworthiness.

Failure of Order

His second idea stems from the first. Since sin has radically corrupted human nature, Calvin concluded that in the world in which man’s sin had cast him, he could no longer discover any trace of God except through Scripture (the word of God), in which he could find in particular the Law, which he received as pure commandment (since his sin prevented him from understanding the reason for this Law). This signifies two things: On the one hand, generally speaking, the world of sin, the temporal world, reveals no particular order that man can consider as more natural than another; there is nothing to understand, and one might equally as well consider everything that happens in it as showing the will of God or as not showing it.

On the other hand, and more particularly, no man can claim to incarnate more than others the divine Word; hence, no intermediary between God and the individual can exist. All men are sinners, especially those who would pretend to be less so: this thesis is at the center of the Calvinist heresy.

Gratuitousness of Salvation

From this reality flows a third idea. It involves considering that man’s sin condemns him to hope for salvation only from the absolutely gratuitous grace of God: man’s corruption is such that it would be presumption for man to hope to be able to do something capable of pleasing God and meriting salvation. There can be no salvation through works (hence Calvin’s dogma of predestination). That being said, it should not be forgotten that God is not a God of vengeance, but of pardon. The proof of this is that He sacrificed His Son to redeem the sins of men with an infinite love since it was entirely gratuitous; so that the true Christian faith consists not in believing that one should strive to please God by acts, but exclusively in believing in His goodness, a goodness that can overlook all sins, that is, in a “trust of the heart by which we say that our election is assured to us.”

Thus the real thrust of Calvinism: the more man feels that he is a sinner, the more he must believe in the gratuitous grace of God; but the more he believes it, the more he is led to believe that he can be saved. The paradox of Calvinism is that it can lead men to convince themselves that the consciousness of sin is the beginning of salvation because the grace of God, precisely because it works upon men who do not merit it, necessarily extends to sinners, so that those whose confidence in the love of God is the greatest are also those who are the most convinced of their salvation. The Calvinist will thus obey the Law not to be saved, but because he is saved: some Calvinists will even claim to have experienced their election. It is a surprising reversal: a train of thought that makes the most extreme humility the very source of what it is hard not to consider as the feeling, not devoid of a secret pride, of belonging to an elite! Better still, this humility is the source of the extraordinary conviction that the Calvinists constitute the new Chosen People, to whom God Himself confides the mission of building the new Jerusalem.

Renew the World

Let us develop this last point. It would be hard to overestimate the feeling the Calvinist can have of being called to regenerate the human race. The Puritans are today thought to be conservatives, but they were in fact rebels against classical society. It might be imagined that, persuaded as they were that the temporal order is sinful, they would turn away from it. Nothing would be more untrue and, after all, nothing could be more illogical on their part. For towards what else would the Calvinist turn? He cannot make his own any contemplative ideal, his original fault having stripped him of the capacity to accede to the intelligibility of the world. But his sinner’s faith leads him to consider temporal action as the only way to prove the ardor of his faith: not that his works can merit him the grace of God, but because he has no other way of demonstrating his confidence in the goodness of God than to plunge boldly into the world, obviously with the strictest respect for the letter of the Law. Neither suicide nor the refusal of the world is an option for a Calvinist; nor is simple obedience to the Law an option, since the faithful is left the task of deciding what he must do regarding everything the Law does not prescribe. It has often been assumed that the Calvinist community was a theocracy, but that is an error: how could there be a social royalty of God? In the world subject to sin there is no order of nature. Everything is to be constructed, all order must be artificially inaugurated. The new man has for his compass only Scripture and his confidence in God. He has made a blank slate of his temporal past and must inaugurate here below a novus ordo sæculorum. As much as their sin condemns men to be alone in the world, so their faith is supposed to give them the energy to renew it.

Society According to Calvin

The exposition of religious Calvinism has led us to sketch the conception of society to which this religion leads. Now we must complete the picture. There might be a temptation to make of the Calvinist Revolution the model of the French Revolution: both have in common the desire to destroy the Ancien Régime, but this contains only a few similarities between the two social and political projects.

The principles of a “Calvinist society” can be outlined from a few basic deductions.

The Question of Regime

The first is that Calvinism cannot lead to monarchy or aristocracy (what sinner can claim to be better than another?); yet Calvin had, without the least doubt, judged as impious the regime of popular sovereignty that Rousseau dreamt of establishing in, among other places, Calvin’s Geneva (how could a people subject to the Law declare itself to be sovereign?).

Homo Homini Lupus

The second deduction is that Calvin’s man has nothing in common with Aristotle’s. How could sin, which broke man’s bond with God, not have broken the bond between man and man? For, in the first place, how could a sinner be genuinely interested in another, since no sinner can help the salvation of another, God only being able to show mercy? Then, if everyone’s faith can make him believe in his own salvation, and if this can only be the object of a subjective certitude, one can always suspect sin beneath the most apparently irreproachable conduct: how then can any man trust another? Calvin’s man is more like Hobbes’s, who is, as we know, a wolf for other men. Thus the Calvinist is more carried by his nature to live alone than in society, and there is in him a reservoir of anarchism that no social tie will be able to completely obliterate.

The Society-Association

This does not mean, thirdly, that the Calvinist is incapable of life in society, but simply that his sociability is essentially conditional. Every Calvinist society tends to be nothing more than a simple association into which one only enters freely.

From the fact that no human sovereignty is possible, it does not follow that society has nothing democratic: on the contrary, every Calvinist community is founded on the mutual consent of people who know one another. No man can legitimately command another; every man must live as he believes he must, guided by his faith in the love of God. This is the source of the affection the Calvinist has for the communities where this consent is not an empty word, that is to say, small-scale communities, whence a collective penchant for a certain provincialism, for local autonomy.

Obedience and Discipline

A Fourth observation: it does not necessarily follow that since the association of men is freely consented to by each individual that permissiveness must reign; quite the contrary. Firstly, because the principal reason for the association is a shared doctrine and religion, which makes the first effect of faith to be a quasi-military obedience to the law. Secondly, and perhaps even more so, because, this obedience being the only manifest sign of faith (how could a sinner know the soul of another?), the only way the faithful have to be sure that no reprobates are among them is the scrupulous adherence by all to the norms of external comportment. Thus Calvinism leads first to discipline, and from discipline to conformity, often not without hypocrisy, and at the limit to a collective intolerance that can assume brutal forms (who does not remember the Salem witch trials?) albeit for strictly internal usage (the pure have a tendency to form a closed society, to shut out the reputedly impure, and not to purify them).

Every Man Is Alone

Fifth observation: As has been said, the feeling of being counted among the number of the elect which the Calvinist derives from the confidence he places in the love of God, takes away nothing of the reciprocal exteriority of individuals; this accounts for the superficial character of their sociability. All men are alone before God.

This spiritual solipsism quite naturally induces a social solipsism: no one can entrust to another the care of his temporal and spiritual affairs. Immured in their destiny, a gathering of individuals constitutes an aggregation of solitudes, and their communities are as closed upon themselves and closed to others as the individuals are towards one another. This feeling of not being able to count on anyone but oneself –individually or collectively—is the source of a more or less conscious pessimism about others that leads everyone to desire to depend only upon oneself–in a word, autarky.

From this mutual misgiving springs the propensity to establish with others only the kind of relationship natural to men who are strangers: trade, for the relationship of exchange is the only one that does not presuppose that men are sociable before entering into it. It suffices that each partner satisfy his own interest. This is to say that Calvinism bears within it the seed of a society in which commerce is likely to develop, and through it, industry, a society based upon economic activity, upon a market economy—in a word, a liberal society.

Work in High Esteem

Sixth remark: This being the case is not sufficient reason to attribute to Calvinism the development of capitalism strictly speaking, as the famous thesis of Max Weber would have it (moreover, if that were so, why would it have been necessary to wait until the end of the 19th century for it to take off?) The well-known maxim of Benjamin Franklin (“Time is money”) in truth constitutes the Calvinist version of the Parable of the Talents: it is not an exhortation to the pursuit of money, but a reminder that man is not on earth to have fun, but to work, since for him it is the only way he has to honor the grace of God and at the same time not put himself at the mercy of others. Work has an intrinsic value, and thus can as well be the solitary labor of the pioneer, hunter, farmer, or rancher clearing land to be his own master there as the commercial activity of the merchant who is equally attached to his independence but, living in town, is reduced to procuring his livelihood in commerce with others.

In both cases, the work ethic does not in any way imply the hubristic characteristic of capitalism properly so-called: the Calvinist is inclined not to asceticism but to frugality, and Calvin, contrary to the legend, did not condemn all enjoyment of temporal life, provided that it respect the Law and that it remain essentially moderate, that is to say austere: Calvin’s Geneva is a far cry from the modern consumer society.

Politics According to Calvin

It remains for us to understand—as a seventh and last observation—what role devolves to politics in the general economy of this society devoted firstly to private activities. I believe that there are three answers to this question.

Guardian of the Law

First, the political power corresponds to the need, affirmed by Calvin echoing St. Augustine, to repress by force all violations of the law (“to punish the perverse and the pestilent, who cannot be corrected otherwise than by punishing them”). This is all the more logical in that, as has been seen, it never involves more than imposing conformity of comportment. Now, as Lock will say, it is not possible to emerge from the state of nature if every citizen is allowed to exact justice himself, if the “lust for vengeance” is authorized: there must be a public officer, a magistrate, a policeman of morals.

This cannot be done without difficulty, though, since the latter is as much as any man “perverse and unworthy of all honor”–there is no church to anoint kings. Therefore the precept Omnis potestas a Deo (all power comes from God) must be tempered by this “rule to keep above everything that the obedience due to the magistrate ought not to deflect us from the obedience due to Him before whose majesty all powers must bow.” One can see how the penchant for the strictest legalism can wed the propensity to permit a periodic reinterpretation of the terms to which obedience may be exacted.

The Prince-Arbitrator

In second place, and following the same logic, since it is in the nature of the sinner to have private interests and to be carried to defend them, while at the same time the bond of the Christian to God, though private, is the most sacred there can be, the political power may neither repress everything nor allow everything. In the logic of Calvinism, besides its moral and coercive role, this power should have the role of a neutral arbitrator between divergent interests, preventing their competition from degenerating into open warfare. This understanding will become the formula of a Locke or Montesquieu: Calvinism is not only the Father of economic liberalism, but of political liberalism as well.

Confederate Associations

Finally, the logic of Calvinism leads it to confer on government a third function—a prolongation of the second, but applied to a different matter. If it is in the nature of Calvinism to pay attention to local affairs above all, and thus to give rise to communities essentially independent of each other, federalism is in many respects a typical product of Calvinism.

That completes this rough sketch of what could be called social and political Calvinism. The reading of this brief analysis has undoubtedly led the reader more than once to notice the resemblances between “Calvinist” society and the United States of America. In a future article, I shall undertake to reply to the question: does the current political situation of the United States still embody the Calvinist spirit?

 

Translated from Fideliter, May-June 2008, pp. 65-70. Claude Polin has been a professor of political philosophy at the University of Paris–Sorbonne since 1966.