Institutionalized: Endtroducing Calvin
So in order launch into my reading of the institutes I reckoned it would make sense to read all the various prefaces first. (Well, not all of them, I skipped the 50-or-so pages of stuff from later translators and so on and decided to start with Calvin’s own words of introduction.) Of course the various prefaces that Calvin wrote were completed after the main corpus and comment on the completed work as well as its impact in Europe (hence my DJ Shadow-referencing title for this post). I have to say for prefaces there were already a number of things that stood out to me:
Sufficiency of Scriptures?
This is actually not something particularly unique to Calvin, virtually all Protestant theologians hold to the idea that the text of the Bible is enough by itself. Calvin here is no different, modestly protesting that his own work doesn’t really add anything to what scripture already says. Of course this prompts one to ask the obvious question: why write it? Why not focus on translating and printing as many Bibles as possible in the common tongues of 16th Century Europe? If there were errors in the teachings and doctrines of Rome, then letting everyone have access to the Bible in a language that they understood should, by Calvin’s own admission be enough to correct things. Of course Protestants as a whole have spent a great deal of time and effort translating and distributing Bibles, but at the same many of them publish reams and reams of their own words and ideas. Has anyone else noticed this or thought it curious? It reminds me the quip that, for people who don’t believe words have any meaning, deconstructionists sure like to talk. Likewise, for people who believe that the Bible is a sufficient (or even infallible or authoritative) text, Reformed Christians (and Protestants in general) sure like to write a lot of their own books.
Appreciating the Early Church
In his preface to the King of France, Calvin cites extensively from various church fathers to defend the teachings of the nascent Protestant churches. It is fairly clear that he studied them in some detail since he clearly lived in an age before someone could just google for quotes. This is possibly because Calvin lived right near the close of the age where one could read “everything” – that is to say pretty much all of what one considered Western literature and thought – Ancient Greece and Rome, the Bible, the aforementioned church fathers, some medieval theologians, various epics of one’s own nation. Nonetheless the very fact that Calvin deploys them as evidence for his case (with a disclaimer that they are not on a par with scripture itself) seems to indicate that he took them seriously. This flies in the face of the common evangelical church history narrative (and practice) in which, outside of perhaps Augustine, no one wrote anything worthwhile between the completion the biblical texts and Luther’s 95 Theses. There is no reason why Protestants cannot join with Catholics and Orthodox Christians in learning from these authors.
On Custom
The most arresting aspect of Calvin’s preface has to be his rejection of custom. He appears to regard custom as a repository for bad habits and a justification for doing evil. This is in diametric opposition to the sort of classical Burkean conservative view where custom is general seen as the accretion of good or beneficial aspects of a society, something that is undone at our peril. Here is Calvin unwittingly setting the fuse for the whole of enlightenment rationalism down to the French Revolution. Actually, here’s a point about Calvin that’s often overlooked – he’s French! He’s prepared to tear everything back to the studs and start over again if he thinks something is wrongly constructed, just like Descartes will try to do with philosophy, like the Jacobins will do with the Revolution, like Napoleon will do with law and education and the military. It’s enough to remind me of the ideology of toilets:
I really need to read Calvin’s Institutes again. As someone who accepted Christ in an Assemblies of God church who now is Reformed, I see increasingly everyday how much sense the Reformed view makes.
I think your last two sections have to be weighed together: for someone who thinks custom is a justification for doing evil, he also takes a lot of time to argue he’s in continuity with the best parts of it (patristics). I think Calvin is not necessarily opposed to the view that custom should, on the whole, be given the benefit of the doubt against rash revolution, but rather he’s realistic that human custom is at the end of the day fallible, and thus not completely beyond question or change (especially in the case where custom contradicts Scripture). It would be interesting to see some of the references that you’re drawing from in that last section.
I think Calvin’s logic is as follows: People tend to be depraved i.e.: they commit immoral acts of one sort or another, since everyone is guilty of at least some of these crimes an implicit general social agreement is made to render bad behaviour as custom thereby giving it a veneer of respectability. Thus the church fathers may have taught correct belief or practice, but that’s not what people adopt over time. Instead they find ways to excuse themselves and call it custom. Again this is pretty much opposite of what someone like Burke would believe about custom or tradition.
I don’t have it in front of me, but I’m curious if he actually says that people “tend” to do those things, suggesting that this is what they normally do, or just if they frequently do those things, suggesting that it happens enough that it has to be taken into account (meaning that, because such behaviour exists, people can’t just appeal to custom as a mean to decide a theological controversey).
I’m paraphrasing there, the original text doesn’t have a nice neat quotable quote. I had to reread the thing several times to make sure that I had the gist of it correct. At any rate Calvin appears to have disliked appeals to custom alone.
I’ll try to catch up in the near future, but for now I wonder if Calvin’s negative comments might not be intended to be restricted to a specific sub-field of human custom: i.e., religious custom.
Hmm, that may be explicated on subsequently…
So I watched the Zizek vid. I don’t get it. He’s clearly grasping at straws, or in this case, toilet paper.
I don’t know, I mean Keynes somewhat agrees with him on the pervasiveness of ideology:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong, are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas.”
Fair enough, I’d agree with that. But I can agree with the pervasiveness of ideology and disagree with the application of it. Case in point – ideology and toilets.
Why is this so inconceivable to you? Given that mass production tends toward standardization and so on…