Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

The idea is very well established now that people have areas of competence from which they should not wander, and into which others should not stray. This results in a sort of intellectual desertification, an always more impoverished stock of ambient information to give context to any specific work. For those of us who live in the atmospheres of general educated awareness, and form our views of the world from what we find in respectable nonspecialist sources — and this means every expert of every kind whenever he or she is reading outside his or her area of expertise — the dearth of good information must necessarily be reflected in false assumptions brought to bear within areas of presumed competence. Americans are astonished to realize that Karl Marx and Abraham Lincoln were contemporaries, let alone that Lincoln and much of literate America would have read Marx, who published articles on European affairs for years in Horace Greeley’s New-York Daily Tribune, and that Marx wrote about Lincoln. They are amazed that Marx also wrote a contemporary account of the Civil War, passionately taking the side of the North. This is only one illustration of the great fact that we have little sense of American history in the context of world history. Given our power and influence, which seem only to grow as disorder and misfortune afflict so many populations, it seems a sad failure that we have not done more to make the world intelligible to ourselves, and ourselves to the world. Shared history is certainly one basis for understanding.

Our Pilgrims, for example, were at least the fourth Calvinist settlement to be attempted in the New World. Three French attempts at colonization had been undertaken half a century earlier, one in Brazil and two in Florida. Jean Cauvin, whom we call John Calvin, was a Frenchman, and his influence was felt first in France. Calvinism was a singularly international movement because its adherents were often forced to seek shelter outside their own countries. Over time, there were Dutch exile churches in England, Italian and French and Dutch exile churches in Germany, French and English exile churches in Switzerland, English exile churches in Holland, French exile churches in England. When the Pilgrims and the Puritans came to North America, they were reenacting a highly characteristic pattern that the people with whom they identified had already carried on for two generations. It is important to our understanding of our origins to realize that they were precisely not provincial, or bound by one cultural perspective, but were a late offshoot of a religious and intellectual movement which arose and developed in continental Europe.

If history has any meaning or value, as we must assume it does, given our tendency to reach back into the past (or what we assume to have been the past) to account for present problems, then it matters to get it right, insofar as we can. Granting the problems of history, some are less insuperable than others. We may never know the full consequences of the introduction of the potato into Europe, or appreciate as we should the impact of a trade route or a plague. We can, however, read major writers, and establish within rough limits what they did and did not say. Since Plato and Aristotle, the names of major writers have been a sort of shorthand for cultural history. While the significance of such figures has its limits, it is also true that their influence has been very great indeed — certainly considerable enough to warrant our reading them. Think how much less stupefying the last fifty years might have been if people had actually read Marx. It seems to have been regarded as a species of disloyalty to acquaint oneself with the terms of that catastrophic argument that engrossed the world for so long, except by the people who called themselves Marxists. And they pioneered this strange practice, so prevalent now, of reading about a writer they did not read. They wrote about Marx endlessly, in language arcane and abstruse as his never was, and at the same time astonishingly devoid of basic information, for example about what he wrote and where he was published, and how long and how widely the terms now associated with him were in use before he adopted them. And now that we are supposedly talking to the Russians about democracy, how useful it would be if anyone had actually read Jefferson, or Lincoln.

In several of the essays in this book I talk about John Calvin, a figure of the greatest historical consequence, especially for our culture, who is more or less entirely unread. Learned-looking books on subjects to which he is entirely germane typically do not include a single work of his immense corpus in their bibliographies, nor indicate in their allusions to him a better knowledge than folklore can provide of what he thought and said. I have encountered an odd sort of social pressure as often as I have mentioned him. One does not read Calvin. One does not think of reading him. The prohibition is more absolute than it ever was against Marx, who always had the glamour of the subversive or the forbidden about him. Calvin seems to be neglected on principle. This is interesting. It is such a good example of the oddness of our approach to history, and to knowledge more generally, that it bears looking into. Everything always bears looking into, astonishing as that fact is.

History has a history, which is not more reassuring nor less consequential than the figures and events it records or constructs or reconstructs, or erases. Calvin, whoever he was and is, walked in the fires of controversy and polemic for centuries, flames of a kind that generally immortalize rather than consume. Yet Calvin somehow vanished. If history means anything, either as presumed record or as collective act of mind, then it is worth wondering how the exorcism of so potent a spirit might have been accomplished, and how it is that we have conspired in knowing nothing about an influence so profound as his is always said to have been on our institutions, our very lives and souls.

The British historian Lord Acton, writing at the beginning of this century, did not perform this feat of exorcism alone, but it is fair to assume that he had a hand in it, because his influence was very great. In a book titled History of Freedom he included “The Protestant Theory of Persecution,” an essay which asserts that Protestantism and especially Calvinism are uniquely associated with illiberalism and repression. He argues — more precisely, he declares — that, while Protestants did not in fact engage in persecution at nearly the same rate Catholics did, their theology required it, while Catholic theology did not. Therefore Protestantism is peculiarly the theology of persecution.

Whether this argument would have merit in any case is a question which will be subordinated here to the question of the adequacy of the writer’s apparently elaborate demonstration that there really was a “theory of persecution” in Protestant theology, and especially in Calvin’s writings. One is staggered at first by the amount of sheer Latin in Acton’s footnotes, which might be taken to imply rigor, and a facility with this formidable tongue sufficient to make him indifferent to the existence of some very serviceable translations of Calvin’s Latin writings into English. Acton was famous in his time for his great erudition. But if one’s eye happens to rest for just a moment on this effusion of fine print, the most terrible doubts arise. For example, the following statement rests on a passage from Institutes of the Christian Religion, Calvin’s first and most famous work of theology. The passage, which Acton cites in a footnote, absolutely does not justify Acton’s characterization of Calvin’s thought, and is in fact famous or notorious for saying precisely the opposite of what Acton implies it says in the following account of it.