Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 384 - We Are Not Our Own - John Calvin.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, We Are Not Our Own, John Calvin. Modern-day analytic philosophers do not, by and large, take inspiration from the 16th century founders of the Reformation, but there is a notable exception in the work of Alvin Plantinga, who as it happens taught at Notre Dame where I got my PhD. Plantinga is a leading philosopher of religion who explicitly refers to John Calvin in setting out one of his most famous ideas, a so-called Reformed epistemology that proposes a new way of defending the rationality of religious belief. Usually, religious philosophers argue that belief in Christianity or the existence of God can be proven, or at least shown to be rational, by appealing to premises that an atheist might accept. Thus, in the natural theology tradition, one might point to features of the universe that suggest it is well-designed, features everyone should recognize. On this basis, one can infer that the universe has a designer, namely God. Plantinga suggests a different approach. For him, it could be rational simply to believe that God exists without any argument. This could be, as Plantinga puts it, properly basic, a fitting entry in the beliefs we accept without further justification. How could it be rational simply to believe in something that is so controversial? Well, Plantinga says, what if you are aware of God's presence immediately, in the way that we are aware of sensory experiences or memories? It would be just like when you rationally believe you had an almond croissant for breakfast, or see that a giraffe is standing in front of you, without needing to offer any rationale for these beliefs. Theists may just find themselves having a belief like that, but about God. To illustrate how this could work, Plantinga refers to an idea set forth in Calvin's major theological treatise, The Institutes of the Christian Religion. This was a central work of the Reformation, published in 1532 in Basel, and then appearing in numerous expanded editions, with the final version of 1560 being five times as long as the first. Early on in The Institutes, Calvin refers to an awareness of divinity that all of us have, an inborn tendency to believe in God. Plantinga says, Calvin's claim is that one who accedes to this tendency and in these circumstances accepts the belief that God has created the world is entirely within his epistemic rights in doing so. His belief need not be based on any other propositions at all. Under these conditions, he is perfectly rational and accepting belief in God in the utter absence of any argument. Now, as Plantinga is himself a Calvinist, I can hardly object to his taking inspiration from John Calvin, who, as Plantinga remarks, is as good a Calvinist as any. But I would gently correct his interpretation. Calvin's stance might imply that it is rational to believe in God without argument, but this is not what Calvin was trying to say. The question of whether religious belief is rational was not on the table in the 16th century, for the good reason that no one at that time would ever have thought to deny it. Calvin's point is rather that, as he says, people who do not worship the single Christian God are without excuse, because they have been born with a sense of his presence. God bestows it upon us, not to ensure that belief in Him is rational or fundamental, but to ensure that the irreligious cannot complain that they were never aware of Him in the first place. If you ask Calvin on what basis we should believe in God, he will not necessarily refer to the inborn sense, but will offer the standard proof based on the design of the universe. He's especially impressed by the heavenly bodies, which are powerful evidence of a powerful Creator. You can give rational arguments in favor of the veracity of scripture too, but Calvin thinks that in our fallen, sinful state, even this is not enough. Ultimately, certainty lies only in faith, faith in God and in the revelation He has sent to humankind. Calvin's whole line of thought here is similar to one he presents later on in the Institutes concerning morality. He says that we are all born with a conscience, a sense of good and evil that the tradition called awareness of the natural law. Calvin accepts this, and says that the purpose of natural law is to make humans to be without excuse. So again his focus is on the idea that the disbelievers and the wicked are justly condemned. Indeed, when Calvin invokes the natural law, it is usually to blame someone, like the Anabaptists, for failing to observe it. In any case, it is not enough to embrace natural law. Calvin distinguishes between two kingdoms, an earthly or temporal one, and a heavenly or spiritual one. Within the temporal realm, natural law is a reliable guide, and it can be used to lay down laws within secular society whose aim is to protect public observance of religion and keep the peace. For Calvin, these laws have absolute validity. He says that subjects should submit to the rulers they find placed over them. God appointed these men to hold authority, so they cannot be resisted without God being resisted at the same time. Even tyrants have been sent as divine punishment and must simply be endured with patience. Fortunately, worldly life and its laws have no effect on the far more important concern, which is eternal salvation. You don't get saved by obeying any earthly ruler or by following the natural law. You get saved when God decides to save you. Of course, we've already seen all these same ideas in Luther. But it's still striking to see Calvin endorsing such a passive attitude toward secular authority, given that he was a refugee dissident whose adopted city of Geneva became a magnet for other like-minded dissidents. He fled his native France in 1535 after being educated as a lawyer and humanist. His writing career actually began with a commentary on a work by Seneca. Thereafter, he lived in several cities where Protestantism was on the rise, notably Strasbourg, at the invitation of another leading reformer named Vardhman Busser. Together with Busser and Melanchthon, he engaged in debates with representatives of the Catholic Church, including Johannes Eck, who I've mentioned in passing as a critic of both Luther and Zwingli. Eventually, Calvin wound up in Geneva, where he was the leading religious figure, helped to draft the city's constitution, and tried to ensure its precarious survival as a Protestant city-state. Politically and militarily, Geneva provided a kind of buffer between Catholic France and the cities of the Swiss Confederacy, like Bern and Zurich. In the judgment of the Scottish reformer John Knox, Calvin's Geneva was the most famous school of Christ. It banned unlicensed books and introduced social restrictions on everything from dancing to indecent songs, gambling, and immodest hairstyles or dress for women. Notoriously, in 1553, the city executed Michael Servetus as a heretic because of his deviant views on the Trinity and other religious matters. This looks pretty appalling. Even as Calvin and the other Protestants insisted on their own religious freedom, they were far from willing to extend freedom to others. Modern scholars are more apt than Calvin and his God to find excuses for wicked deeds, so they have pointed out that Servetus's radical views would have gotten him executed pretty much anywhere in Europe at that time, that failing to deal with him would have been a political scandal that could have weakened Geneva's position, and that Calvin at least pled that the execution should be by decapitation and not burning, which is far more excruciating. But Servetus was burnt anyway, and Calvin expressed no regret over it. Calvin's political views put him in a difficult position when it came to Protestant sympathizers in France, who would come to be called the Huguenots. As one scholar of Calvin's thought has remarked, the whole enterprise of Reformation in France was, at the very best, a skating on the thin ice on the margins of legality, and more usually was blatantly illegal. How could this be reconciled with the advice to obey authorities however objectionable they may seem? Well, like Luther, Calvin made an exception in cases where rulers direct their subjects to break the commandments of scripture. We should always obey the prince unless it means disobeying God. Still, Calvin's advice to his fellow Protestants was to do what he had done, declare their faith and leave France, or failing that, simply not attend mass, and failing that, attend mass but beg God for forgiveness the whole while. Not exactly a recipe for evolution. Aside from his respect for political stability, Calvin had another reason to advise patience. He believed that whatever was happening was part of the divine plan. The world is governed down to the smallest detail by God's power, wisdom, and justice, so that even apparent evils like tyranny or the oppression of faithful Christians must serve some purpose. We rarely, if ever, know what that purpose is, but trust in Providence can still provide comfort in the face of adversity. When the light of divine Providence has once shone upon a godly man, he is then relieved and set free from every care. So things are always for the best, even if we cannot see why. This is a familiar approach to theodicy, that is the question of why God allows evil. It does not mean denying that some things are in fact evil. Rather, evils are anticipated and made a part of the providential order. So great and boundless is his wisdom, says Calvin, that he knows right well how to use evil instruments to do good. All this had been said by the Stoics in antiquity, as Calvin is well aware. Remember, he started out his career writing on the Stoic Seneca. He does, however, distance himself from the Stoics insofar as he makes God's providence the direct cause of all events, rather than having God work through chains of natural causation or even identifying nature with God. So Calvin is a thoroughgoing determinist who thinks that God foreknows and decrees everything we do, indeed everything that happens, no matter how trivial. He does, however, accept that there are genuinely efficacious causes other than God. That's precisely why he speaks of created things as God's instruments. If God wants something to be burned, he may use fire to do it. And in that case, the fire really does burn the thing, albeit at God's command. Similarly, if God wants to punish a people for their sins, he may use a wicked tyrant to do it. The two cases differ in that the tyrant does evil willingly, whereas the fire does not burn things willingly. Thus, Calvin stresses that humans are not like rocks or tree stumps. We perform our actions voluntarily, but as God has decreed, we will do. So, if you pose to Calvin the question at the center of the debate between Luther and Erasmus as to whether humans have free will, he will tell you that it depends what you mean. If you're asking whether humans can act independently of God, and whether there are alternative paths genuinely open to us, the answer is no. As Calvin says, we are not our own, but the Lord's. And he uses humans like rods, in whatever way he pleases, to guide their plans, to direct their efforts. Everything depends on his providence, and not on the caprice of wicked humankind. But, if you're asking whether our will actually causes our actions, the answer is yes. The same action is willed both by God and the human agent, though in different ways. Clearly, God's will cannot be resisted by a mere human, so we will do whatever he wants us to. But, we are still at fault when we do evil, because we want to do it. Our sinful will is just as real as fire's ability to burn, and exercises just as much causal influence. All this is despite the fact that, of course, God would much rather that humans were not sinful. Thus, Calvin says, in a treatise specifically devoted to the topic of providence, what was done contrary to his will was yet not done without his will, because it would not have been done at all unless he had allowed. So he permitted it not unwillingly, but willingly. Thus in sinning, they did what God did not will in order that God through their evil will might do what he willed. If anyone objects that this is beyond his comprehension, I confess it. But what wonder if the immense and incomprehensible majesty of God exceed the limits of our intellect? Among the numerous objections one might pose here, and we'll get to more of them shortly, would be the question of how we are meant to earn salvation, if it is God who decrees who will sin and who will be righteous. The answer, of course, is that we cannot earn salvation. On this point, Calvin is in full agreement with Luther. Salvation is not merited through good works, or even by wishing to be good. Instead, God decides, before we are even born, or strictly speaking in timeless eternity, who will be among the elect, and who will be reprobate, that is, who is saved and who is not. This is Calvin's notorious doctrine of double providence, which troubled even Luther, even though it arguably just spells out more clearly what Luther's doctrines must amount to. If God selects those who will receive grace, then he is surely selecting those who will not. It is a meaningless fudge to say that God does not choose to reprobate, but merely omits to give them grace, since God is obviously choosing that omission. It is to Calvin's credit that he lays out so clearly the implications of the doctrine that we are saved through faith and not works. As C.S. Lewis put it, Calvin goes on from the original Protestant experience to build a system to extrapolate, to raise all the dark questions, and give without flinching the dark answers. But, as that quotation also suggests, plenty of people find Calvin's conclusions repellent. If this is where Luther's path leads, better not to follow it in the first place. Calvin seems to be describing the ultimate unfree and unfair election, in which humans are condemned to infinite suffering in a completely random fashion. Why in the world would Calvin, or indeed anyone, want to believe in this? By way of an answer, we should firstly remember that the sorting of humans into the saved and the damned is not in fact random, but part of a perfectly providential order. It's just that we mere humans cannot hope to understand that order. As Calvin puts it, people are damned because God has so willed it. Why he's so willed is not for our reason to inquire, for we cannot comprehend it. Furthermore, even if God did arrange things randomly, we would be in no position to condemn him for this. Calvin is a particularly clear example of what has come to be called a divine command theorist, that is, someone who believes that whatever God does is good because he does it, and not the other way around. Thus Calvin writes, Whatever God wills by the very fact that he wills it must be considered righteous. Besides, even on our own limited understanding, it would be perfectly just if everyone were damned, because we all deserve it. This is not an idiosyncratic view of Calvin's, but standard Christian teaching us in Sagustin. Because of original sin, we are all born wicked and worthy of punishment. For any one of us to be saved is already an act of undeserved grace. So whether God offers this to only a few, to many, or to everyone, he's doing more than we have any right to expect. And it makes sense that God should choose some for grace and others for punishment, because this is the only way he can display both mercy and justice. In fact, given that none of us deserve to be among those who get mercy, this election actually has to be arbitrary. Another way to appreciate this point is to remember that many humans were born before the coming of Christ, so they are all barred from receiving grace. And this looks pretty arbitrary too. Why should you be damned just for being born too early? But it's something that pretty well all Christians accept. The only alternative was to say that God retroactively saves those who lived before Christ if they deserved it. As we'll see in a later episode, contact with the peoples of the Americas around this very time would make this problem more pressing. They could not be saved because of where they were born. These reflections show that Calvin's apparently radical teachings is actually deeply rooted in older Christian theology. In fact, we find others flirting with such ideas much earlier in history, notably John Scodas Ariugina way back in the 9th century, as I discussed in episode 198. As Ariugina pointed out, double predestination seems to be an obvious, though usually unacknowledged, implication of Augustine's theory of grace, a theory that had defined orthodoxy for about a millennium before Calvin came along. Arguably then, the question is not why Calvin says these things, but why it has taken us so long to get to a thinker who says them so boldly and forthrightly. Here, I think the answer is obvious. Calvin's position looks, at first glance, extremely unappealing, and is easily avoided. We need to only say that humans do contribute something, however small, to their own salvation, perhaps in cooperation with God, and we've seen how theologians like Gabriel Beal tried to do just that. To accept Calvin's doctrine, by contrast, we need firstly to wrap our minds around the compatibilist notion that humans can be responsible for willing actions that have been timelessly decreed by God. We then need to accept that we and our loved ones may be sentenced to eternal tortures as the result of something that from our own admittedly limited perspective might as well be a coin flip. And then, as if that weren't bad enough, when we express even slight hesitation about accepting these things, Calvin rages at us for having the temerity to doubt God's infinite and inscrutable justice and wisdom. One of his favorite themes is the wickedness of undue curiosity. He charges the scholastics in particular with measuring God by the yardstick of their own carnal stupidity. Thus out of curiosity, they fly off into empty speculations. Anyone who seeks really to understand God's providential design, and especially the part of that design that involves predestination, is being impious and arrogant. Calvin can wax downright poetic on this topic, as when he writes, But these nicely turned phrases ultimately come down to him saying, And yet, many people did believe it. Calvinism spread like wildfire across Europe, taking root in Britain, among other places. So it's worth asking one more time, why? Though his theology is indeed relentlessly consistent, and philosophers prize consistency, I think that the explanation does not lie in its philosophical power. Nor do I think Calvin wanted it to. As we've seen, he polemicized against scholastic and classical philosophers alike, and was more than happy to admit that his theology demands assent to something we cannot understand. One might even go so far as to say that Calvinism is theologically persuasive in part because it is so philosophically unpersuasive. Here, we have a version of Christianity that you can only believe by faith. Faith, for Calvin, consists precisely in confident assurance in God's mercy, without needing to comprehend that mercy. His message is to stop trying to figure out how or why God will save you, and just trust that he will indeed save you. So, while double predestination may seem like a terrifying idea, Calvin thinks it is in fact deeply comforting. It asks you only to have faith, and in faith lies unshakable confidence and peace of mind, even if the faithful have occasional doubts. Especially for people who faced acute suffering, for example, at the hands of repressive Catholic authorities in France, it was surely a relief to think that everything they were experiencing was part of God's plan to bring them to an eternal reward. A later illustration, which will be familiar to those following the series of podcasts on Africana philosophy, would be the way 19th century African Americans in the Calvinist tradition said that slavery was an evil that would be overruled by God, that is, turned to good ends. As this shows, despite Calvin's condemnation of rational speculation, his impact on the history of philosophy was enormous. Here, we come to yet another far-reaching and unintended effect of Reformation thought. Calvin insists that human reason is utterly incapable of grasping the core truths of Christian religion, which are indeed repellent to rational reflection. Instead, he tells us to turn to the Bible, applying the typical Protestant method of using scripture alone. He thus hammers a wedge between religion and philosophy in a way that few medieval thinkers had done. Indeed, across the history of philosophy before the 16th century, you see a wide range of views about the relation of reason and religion, but hardly anyone held that reason is utterly useless, or even actively misleading, when applied to anything in the neighborhood of faith. Ironically enough, when modern-day atheists casually assume that there is an antithesis between religion and philosophy, that faith and reason are mutually exclusive, they are unwittingly echoing the ideas of John Calvin. It was Calvin as much as anyone who created the situation where it might occur to people to say that religion is avowedly and intentionally non-rational. So in a sense, he did after all help to create the problem that Plantinga tried to solve. But of course we do not need to wait for Plantinga for a philosopher inspired by Calvin and the other early reformers. For all the skepticism expressed towards reason by men like Luther and Calvin, there were going to be plenty of people in the coming generations who wanted to combine reformed doctrines with philosophy, believe it or not, even with scholasticism. I'll try to do justice to this topic next time, as we explore more varieties of Protestant thought in the 16th century in what is bound to be a damned interesting episode of The History of Philosophy Without Any Cats.