The story that German sociologist Max Weber tells in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism is that the rise of Homo economicus, that utility-maximizing creature whose sense of the common good has withered, can be traced back to Calvinists deficient in Gemütlichkeit—or, a kind of friendly public-spiritedness. They retained the austerity and urgency of their religion but abandoned its spiritual content and, doing so, helped turn the modern world into an iron cage.
Perhaps it does not matter that Weber’s bad little tract, written first as essays in 1904–05, is really indefensible. It has stuck in the brain of American academia as if it were truth itself. The explanation of what has gone wrong is obviously a polemical construct, reflecting, no doubt, that Calvinists were a minority in Germany, many of them of French Huguenot origin dating from the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685. I understand that Weber’s mother was Calvinist, which might suggest a reason for his eagerness to establish his distance from that side of his heritage. A friend of his, Werner Sombart, wrote a reply, The Jews and Modern Capitalism (1911), which demonstrated that Weber’s description of the “Protestant” actually described the Jew.
Nothing surprising there. Weber had simply borrowed a stereotype from a slightly different context. He should have recognized that minorities often thrive because they know they have to develop skills. Calvinists were by far the most literate group in Europe when Weber wrote. This is the kind of thing that produces prosperity. Two religious groups of vastly greater influence (Catholicism and Lutheranism) were active in Germany when the country became something worse than an iron cage, but they don’t get a glance. Why German thought of his period has retained such status and influence, I can’t imagine. People who know the title of the book feel they have read it, and they have, since it is all assertion—of a familiar kind—and no argument. Furthermore, the supposed conflation of virtue and godliness with individual prosperity and material flourishing is not what one of the central figures of the Reformation intended.
All this is an unfortunate turn of intellectual history. The religious tradition propelled by the Calvinist reformation, which lies in the deep background of our cultural moment, provides a powerful account of the human person and the meaning of human life that stands in contrast to the anemic anthropology on offer today.
Calvinism, originally a French and Continental movement, came to America by way of England and Scotland. It had a complex history long before it arrived here. It had been heavily influenced by its many adherents in the universities at Oxford and especially Cambridge, and by a deep affinity with a kind of popular religion that had flourished in Britain, despite violent suppression, since the fourteenth century. In 1382, John Wycliffe, an Oxford scholar and theologian renowned throughout Europe, made the first translation of the whole Bible from Latin into English, and his students and others began a surreptitious, nocturnal campaign to acquaint the ignorant poor with this singular text in their own language. This movement, called Lollardy, was driven underground—Lollards were burned as heretics—but it persisted until the Reformation. Then it was absorbed into the emerging forms and cultures of Reformed Christianity, notably those most influenced by Calvinism—the Presbyterians, the Congregationalists, the Baptists, the Quakers. Their churches stand on the corners of our streets, familiar and unnoticed as the maple trees, their adherents oblivious to the tempestuous, insurgent histories that put them there. During Shakespeare’s lifetime there were revolutions in Europe, notably in Geneva and in the Netherlands, that threw off hereditary rulers and established republics in association with Calvinist thought. This is not to mention the seven wars of religion that took place in France, which were unsuccessful but which were also a challenge to the existing regime, again associated with the adoption of Calvinism. In England, these dissenters were given the disparaging name “Puritans.”
So the traditions of religious thought and life that washed up on the shores of the New World had a powerful and quite paradoxical history behind them. Many of their faithful were looking for a place where they could practice their religion without suffering the constraints and disabilities that still plagued them in England. But they were intensely English, a relatively insignificant fringe of the British Empire, dependent on the old country for defense against the French and the Indians, existing by grace of a Royal charter. At the same time, they were sympathetic with the Revolutions in England, roughly 1640 to 1660, often called the Puritan revolutions. Many of them were participants on Cromwell’s side or refugees from the consequences of the failure to sustain government by parliament. In any case, they arrived here thoroughly acquainted with the possibility of being rid of a monarch, and not at all hostile to the idea.
The old Lollard movement anticipated English Calvinism in one very important regard. It was popular, firmly rooted in the lowest classes, and fostered by people who were among the most learned figures in the European world of the time. Calvin was famous for the elegant precision of his Latin, and for his making French, the language of the streets, suitable for use at the level of theology and metaphysics. Their high valuation of the Scriptures made them scholars and teachers and translators as well, with the generous thought of letting the plowman and the fisherman participate in the wealth of beauty and meaning that dignified their own lives. Calvin’s writings were translated into English as soon as they were published, by notable literary figures such as Thomas Norton, a poet and collaborator in Gorboduc, the first English tragedy, and especially Arthur Golding, translator of Ovid, whose work Shakespeare quoted more frequently than any other source except the Bible. Into the seventeenth century in England and Europe, great professors were subject to imprisonment and burning. They are certainly not to be dismissed as an elite, a term of disparagement among us now. We have nearly talked ourselves out of believing that human beings can and will act in the interests of their beliefs and ideals at any risk to their own safety, but these Calvinists had irrefutable proof of it in their own history. They had a famous book, a huge compendium called The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe, a bestseller in England during Shakespeare’s youth and a favorite in early New England.
I mention Shakespeare, who was born in 1564, the year Calvin died, because a very false history centers on him that obscures our own. For one thing, he would have known that there were dissidents everywhere, in literary circles, among the nobility, and certainly among his audience. He wrote play after play in which hereditary monarchy issues in crime or madness or desolating war, and yet it is as if his genius were nurtured by a hierarchy both dazzling and, to quote Wallace Stevens, “most Plantagenet, most serene.” To quote Stevens again, “A violent order is disorder; and a great disorder is an order.” This is a fair description of early-modern England and Europe, where monarchy was challenged by another vision and model of society. It is important to an understanding of our own civilization that America was revolutionary from its beginnings, not the slow child of a fostering motherland. Wealthy absentee British planters and investors organized the Southern colonies to maximize the profitability of export crops like tobacco, indigo, and sugar, and then cotton. The New England colonies were less suited to plantation agriculture, and so they were left to themselves, relatively speaking, and could model themselves after the Calvinist republics of Europe.
Many Anglo-American Puritan leaders had an acquaintance with the world that was broad by any standard. Oppression, especially under Mary Tudor, had driven many Puritan leaders to take refuge in Geneva, the Low Countries, Germany, and elsewhere; so they had seen these societies at first hand. Very high levels of literacy, in women as well as men, were among shared attributes of these threatened or embattled populations in Europe. Dissenting communities created schools and colleges, as well as institutions to care for the poor and the sick. They created presses that flooded Europe with literature of every kind. They practiced religious tolerance, by the abysmal standards of the time. And they prospered, some of them only until a siege or a crusade overwhelmed them and, especially in France, erased them from history. The so-called religious wars in Europe were fully as much about politics as about religion.
Seen in this light, certain aspects of early Calvinist America are understandable. For example, Puritanism’s development under oppression, even in secrecy, may have made Puritan culture self-protective when, in the cold and marginal Eden where Puritans had found themselves, there was really no one to trouble them much. As dissenters, they knew what they wanted in a social order. They were governed by elected councils. Their clergy were learned, and their churches were autonomous, governed by their own congregations. They codified and, crucially, made public humane laws that owed vastly more to Moses than to British common law. When they were still fresh off the boat, they founded a college in a town they called Cambridge, then another in New Haven. That they thought to do this and had the institutional experience and the intellectual resources to do it gives us a good sense of who they were.
So, an influential early settlement in the future United States was in effect an offshoot of the political, religious, and intellectual history of Europe. Two things are striking about this fact. The first is that we know nothing about the history of Europe, and the second is that we know nothing about our own history. The through line, for my purposes here, that links early America with early-modern Europe is Calvin and also Calvinism. I distinguish between them because Calvin left a large and very substantive body of work from which his views of things can reasonably be deduced. He left a Reformed tradition whose influence is so pervasive in our culture that it is invisible to us, and which is, and has been, reformed, transformed, and diluted, always claiming to be rejecting Calvinism, as if this is by nature rigidly opposed to change and reform rather than being the preeminent theological influence behind them. This rhetorical habit of treating something called Calvinism as a rigid pietism to be rejected in a spirit of liberality and reason has also encouraged some branches of the tradition to claim to adhere to a rigidity that is, they believe, the true Calvinism. Surely it is helpful to remember that Calvin was a French Renaissance humanist whose theology was singularly important to the English Renaissance. Calvin’s image as an influence in American culture is, in the popular mind and the minds of historians as well, of a man without period or national culture, an untethered figure who epitomizes all that is narrow and irksome in religion. And we are told that we are a Calvinist culture, which means very little, and none of that good. In any case, it was mainly the work of people who were cultural Calvinists to stigmatize Calvinism to the degree that his actual thought is by now very little known.
There was another revolution going on, intrinsically related to all the other revolutions. It was bent on elevating the status of the vernacular in order to make literate culture available to the great mass of people who did not know Latin. Calvin wrote primarily in Latin but was first to use French as a discursive language. He taught and preached in French.
Thomas Norton’s English is earlier by a generation than Shakespeare’s. Languages drift, euphemisms become the opposite of themselves. Etymologically, insane means “not well.” Calvin is known for the phrase “human depravity,” which sounds truly lurid. But, when he wrote, the word depraved meant “warped,” in both French and Latin. It could be used to describe a flawed text. In other words, Calvin himself treated our fallen nature with a delicacy that has become and has long been seen as something else entirely—a depraved killer is the worst sort of killer—no doubt in part because the Calvin of caricature and polemic would have to have meant something especially dreadful by it, something into which a corrupt imagination would be pleased to enter in the very fact of denouncing it.
Calvin did think a great deal about sin. In the Christian schema, and in the ongoing life of this violent and afflicted world, there is an undeniable human propensity for actions that can be called harmful, wrong—or evil. Europe in his time was a brutal place, held together by oppression that dealt in appalling violence. Calvin’s walled city would have been swept into the sea of blood and fire that awaited “heretics” if its defenses had failed. His worldview might well have been darker than ours, if he had not been a devoted Christian, blessed with a consequential life.
In any case, Calvin’s cosmos did not include Purgatory or anything equivalent, any concept of sin as an objectively existing blot on the soul to be purged away by suffering. He did not formalize prayers for the dead or donations or confession or penance as means of recompense for sins. He had no place in his theology for indulgences, and no equivalent for belief in “merits,” which are a kind of earned deserving that could be banked for future use or transferred as needed. He addressed the matter of sin and guilt in another way, radically reconceiving them. He was the leading controversialist on the Reformed side in a mighty contest of visions and conceptions, including anthropologies, and his theology was necessarily shaped by the need to attend to issues that were most salient at the time. Even his treatment of predestination is affected. This doctrine, universal in Western Christendom, was seemingly made harsher by the absence of these potential mitigations, though by definition predestination, if it is real, must run its course. Sin and guilt are a central subject in his work because all these methods of dealing with sin were so strongly a part of traditional religion, shaping individual practice and experience as well as the institutional presence of the church in society, its power, status, and wealth.
The caricature of Calvinism obliges me to point out that its understanding of Original Sin makes no special reference to sexuality. The first transgression is disobedience and a lack of trust in God and gratitude toward him that make disobedience seem justifiable. Every sin is comprehended in this one sin.
The first page of the first book of The Institutes establishes the dimensions and, more broadly and deeply, the spirit of Calvin’s cosmos. It is a radical erasure of the proposed architecture of the afterlife and the celestial regions offered as doctrine by the old faith. Purgatory and limbo did not exist to accommodate unexpiated transgressors or the souls of unbaptized infants. Calvin rejects all this. He says that the only true knowledge we can have is of God and of ourselves. These two knowledges “are so intimately connected, which of them precedes and produces the other, is not easy to discern. For, in the first place, no man can take a survey of himself but he must immediately turn to the contemplation of God, in whom he ‘lives and moves.’” We must recognize that we are not the sources of the talents we possess. “And that our very existence is nothing but a subsistence in God alone.” Then he says, “Our poverty conduces to a clearer display of the infinite fulness of God.” He is pivoting here to the subject of sin. God’s “fulness” is clear “especially” by comparison with “the miserable ruin, into which we have been plunged by the defection of the first man.” Being despoiled of his divine array, this melancholy exposure discovers an “immense mass of deformity.” Everyone, therefore, must be “so impressed with a consciousness of his own infelicity, as to arrive at some knowledge of God.” The 1813 John Allen translation I have been quoting from ends this paragraph by saying that this knowledge of self not only moves one “to seek after God,” but is also “a considerable assistance towards finding him.”
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americans would have known The Institutes in Calvin’s Latin or in Thomas Norton’s translation. In Norton, the paragraph ends with words that are very close to the Latin. It says, “Therefore every man is by the knowledge of himself, not onely pricked forward to seek God, but also led as it were by the hand to find him.” Quasi manu ducitur. “As if led by the hand.” So the encounter with an awareness of one’s fallen and corrupted state ends in the solicitude of a gentle father, and fallen-ness itself becomes a means by which he can be known. The assertion that the “infinite heape of filthie disgracements,” in Norton’s pungent language, our fallen state, does not alienate us from God but draws us to him is a striking departure from traditional thought. When fallen-ness in ourselves is acknowledged and understood to be our utter difference from God, we begin to arrive at a conception of God. To put the matter in Calvin’s more personal terms, we are led by the hand to find him. At the very outset, Calvin treats sin itself, Adam’s defection, as a part of a reality that is altogether God’s and is God. Even in our fallen-ness we are in no sense outside God’s intention to be known to us. This state of knowledge seems to equal and displace, for example, salvation or reprobation. The scarlet letter becomes a brilliant ornament.
Problems arise. What are the ethical implications of the idea that sin has a positive role in our relationship to God? It is true that, in the common mind, Calvinism is a sort of melting pot of all the severities and absurdities and hypocrisies and obscurantisms that can by any means be associated with what is taken to be religion. But it is never accused of moral laxity, nor should it be. So how does the argument advance from this point to support the moral posture so passionately urged in the law and the prophets and the teachings of Christ?
Calvin invites this question. The whole paragraph is based on the assumption that God and everything to do with God is infinite in the strictest sense, unlimited, without boundaries, wholly able to accommodate what appear to be mighty paradoxes or contradictions but aloof from definition. Think of Emerson. Dickinson says, “The brain is wider than the sky,…. The brain is just the weight of God.” Our gifts, being from God, are sacred. They exceed human possibility. They are given the highest praise and value and allowed their mystery, and at the same time, they are no cause for boasting. They exalt us, and they are not ours. The good things we enjoy on earth pour down on us from heaven. So they, too, are no grounds for self-satisfaction but instead a bond with God as our benefactor upon whom we are entirely dependent. We cannot minimize the grievous harm we are doing, as a species, even now as we pillage Creation. Calvin lived in terrible times, yet here he is, transforming the terms of an ancient argument by means of a rhetorical reversal, bringing it all to rest on three words, quasi manu ducitur (“as if led by the hand”), that make an awareness of one’s fallen state a way to the knowledge of God and therefore an avenue of grace.
This kind of reversal is not unusual in Latin. It was used to great effect by Cicero, the great Roman rhetorician, philosopher, and statesman whom Calvin studied and admired. In a Latin sentence, the verb usually comes at the end—Arma virumque cano, “of arms and the man I sing.” This means that expectations can be aroused and then undercut. The fact that this phrase, quasi manu ducitur, appears at the end of Calvin’s first paragraph and Norton’s first paragraph and page is consistent with its being intended as an irony or reversal. In other words, it signals that Calvin’s seeming paradox regarding the nature of sin is intentional. And he wants it to be noticed. His phrasing is not preserved in Allen’s 1813 translation. This cannot be because Allen was unaware of this Ciceronian device. He might have wished to make Calvin’s argument seem a little less heterodox, which would be understandable considering all the turbulence that had surrounded his theology in the preceding centuries. It had always had influence among certain conformists, as they were called, and, over time, in the Church of England as a whole. A less radical Calvin would have eased reconciliation. I am speculating here.
The importance of sin as a concept in Christian theology is so great that a fundamental recasting of it would have consequences for many and major aspects of his thought. This raises questions too large for me to take on here, but what it might mean is visible in his parsing of the Sixth Commandment, “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” I propose that his explication of this text sheds light on the Calvinist thinking behind the development of literary fiction, in England and, more strikingly, in America, where his theology was less mingled with competing value systems.
In his treatment of it, the subject of the commandment is not homicide as the word is ordinarily understood. Calvin did not believe that sins could be defined or numbered. Sin was a propensity that asserted itself continuously. Whether it dissolves or expands when this view is taken of it, in this understanding it demands an alertness and attentiveness that invests individual experience with great consequence.
Calvin says that God has created a unity among men that means “every man ought to consider himself as charged with the safety of all. In short, then, all violence and injustice, and every kind of mischief, which may injure the body of our neighbor, are forbidden to us. And therefore we are enjoined, if it be in our power, to assist in protecting the lives of our neighbors; to exert ourselves with fidelity for this purpose; to procure those things which conduce to their tranquility; to be vigilant in shielding them from injuries; and in cases of danger to afford them our assistance.” To “not kill” becomes “to be continuously aware and protective of the well-being of everyone.” We live in a time when it is not difficult to imagine how a bad act could threaten billions of our neighbors, or how indulgence and indifference, widely persisted in, could do a literal world of harm. Calvin lived in a time of violent oppression and warfare. So he would have been aware that his reading of this law is visionary at the global scale, even while it is compelling as a personal ethic. Our existence is intermediate between our human particularity and our exalted Adamic origin. Melville captures something of this in Moby-Dick.
Calvin quotes Scripture, “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.” He says “that man is the image of God,” and “he is our own flesh.” Therefore, “unless we would violate the image of God, we ought to hold the personal safety of our neighbor inviolably sacred; and unless we would divest ourselves of humanity, we ought to cherish him as our own flesh.” Again, “If you perpetrate, if you attempt, if you only conceive in your mind any thing inimical to the safety of another, you stand guilty of murder.” He concludes that God cares much more for the soul than for the body. In this context, he is disciplining the soul to refrain from the sins Norton calls “manslaughter of the heart.”
Calvin uses the word neighbor often enough that a text like this one will be illuminated by taking a moment to have a fuller sense of what he meant by it.
Calvin’s theology places a mighty demand on human consciousness, first, last, and always to remember that the sphere of a life is a sacred landscape populated by holy creatures beloved of God, toward whom, in any circumstance, one must show honor and care befitting the sacred image that marks them all. Goodness is, so to speak, situational. The law opens on a world of possibility that almost infinitely enlarges the varieties of generosity or loyalty or assurance one human being can offer another. “Sin” is the name for default, for failure of perception, because all this transpires in the realm of the holy. In the novels of Henry James, characters watch to glimpse revelatory words and actions visible through the gloss of social refinement. Walt Whitman sees exalted, commonplace humankind everywhere, and is profoundly courteous to all its members. This Calvinist cosmos makes us co-creators of ourselves in the choices we accept or refuse. Perception instructs even conscience. Entrenched injustice with all the strata of origin and class loses reality when the world is seen in this holy light.