Throughout this maddening account of the conflicts that have killed at least 5 million people since 1993, I was thinking “what were we in the West preoccupied with?” Since most of the killing occurred prior to 9/11 it wasn’t the “war on terrorism.” No, it was our domestic preoccupations: our standard of living, the various fronts in the “culture wars,” etc. I find it oddly fitting that the year the Hawaii Supreme Court touched off the current American argument over same-sex marriage, 1993, the assassination of the president of Burundi touched off a massacre of Tutsis that set in motion the events that culminated in the Rwandan genocide and the African World War Prunier writes about.

“Fitting,” because we in the West paid and continue to pay excruciating attention to one and, for the most part, are unaware of the other.

I’m not saying the one shouldn’t care about same-sex marriage or other cultural issues — I do. But we in the West are, to use another term describing a state of mind, narcissistic in our attention to ourselves and our ticks. Sullivan obsesses over a fourth-rate politician from the next-to-least populous state and what “it all means” and not spend .01% as much time on the horrors of Central Africa or Mayer’s piece. He is not alone. He is typical. And it makes me want to scream.

I do like the way you have stuck with this. The way you present the issue now is as though floating it in a balloon across our field of vision, inviting people to shoot it down. Playing along, I believe I have given it both barrels and reloaded. Is it still flying?

“If he is to be condemned then that must be done through joined-up argument, and it isn’t enough to simply condemn him according to our own systems of ethics–that would be merely to repeat the mistake with which Calvin is being accused.”

I don’t think condemnation is the issue at all. If we show that Calvin was out of order, by general means of joined-up argument and, in particular, by reference to the terrain as viewed from from the higher ground of the true sages of history, we find ourselves leaving Calvin where he is and climbing up to where the understanding is better. Unlike JC (John Calvin, not Jesus Christ), the sages are not big on condemnation.

Every sage is, by definition, an exponent of what you refer to as Right Philosophy. If the word ‘Right’ is to have a verifiably real referent, the sages are surely our go-to guys, since it is only through them that we have received the highest of teachings with regard to the nature of Reality and the meaning and purpose of life. Following their lead, we find we cannot follow Calvin; taking a sage’s-eye-view results not in condemnation of him but in his complete dismissal, not for reasons of personal ethics but on absolute grounds.

We find that Calvin’s Philosophy is not Right; in the light of that which is self-evidently correct, his teachings reveal their own unsound nature through an obvious disharmonious relationship to truth. Even then, when we see the failure of the philosophy to pass intellectual muster, it is the teaching that is dismissed rather than the person. It falls away from truth all by itself. We’re not closing our minds against entertaining the ideas involved or refusing at any time to re-examine them but what we are doing is allowing ourselves to directly perceive their true philosophical significance: zero, or very close to it.

True, if expressed publicly, such dismissal hurts people’s feelings, generally in direct proportion to the amount of time, energy and sentiment they have invested in those teachings. Contrary to modern notions, however, as your blog makes crystal clear, the protection of people’s feelings is not the best guiding principle with regard to matters of truth. It isn’t personal; it’s impersonal. We’re not pinning anything on Calvin. We’re taking his teaching and pinning it to the Truth.

Thus, we do not repeat the mistake with which Calvin is accused: we’re not out to get him; we’re not angry at him; we don’t hate him. Looking at the individual, we understand that he is not standing alone but is among the many; as noted earlier, he was of his time, i.e., worldly, up to his eyes in what might be called ‘theo-politics’. On balance, his life comes down on the side of tragedy. It’s not hard to have compassion for one as lost as he, who clearly thought he had been found. He knew not what he did.

“At the centre of the charge of moral relativism I think was the idea that true wisdom is compassionate and non-violent.”

Compassionate, yes, but not necessarily non-violent. It’s very strange how the word ‘violence’ is now used almost entirely pejoratively in contemporary discourse, when it really should be neutral and descriptive. As you say, it’s easy to think of situations where a ‘violent’ response is the correct one. I’ve also read that the Dalai Lama regrets that Tibet did not make every effort to resist invasion at the time.

Meeting aggression passively is no answer to that aggression since, far from stopping it, it allows it go into ascendancy, thereby enthroning tyranny and supporting bullies the world over in their belief that ‘might makes right’. By our passivity, agreeing to might’s rightness, we suffer, our loved ones suffer, innocent people unknown to us suffer; we may even be said to have harmed the bully by letting this behaviour work for them, thereby letting a terrible tendency become entrenched in them. Neither is counter-aggression appropriate, given that it makes the conflict spiral out of control and causes the situation to explode. The answer lies in the kind of non-aggressive self-defense that comes from and moves toward robust health and maximum integrity. These observations seem very elementary indeed. Of course, there are those who teach that there should be no self to defend in the first place – this is true only from a point of view in which there is no other to defend against either. At this enlightened level of insight, beyond self and other, all actions are correct, being expressions of unity; this goes for so-called ‘violent’ actions, just as much as any other kind. Plainly, our Calvin was not coming from here at any point either before or after the Servetus affair.

“The underlying point is that all action must be motivated by a desire to relieve suffering, and the temptations to pursue selfish gain or the harming of others must be resisted and defeated.”

Absolutely, as long as a movement in the direction of increasing understanding first trumps and thereafter guides that well-meaning desire, in order that we may avoid being a do-gooder who, despite impeccable intentions, only helps to lay more paving-stones on the world’s road to hell.

“This is an eternal truth, the underlying message of right religion and philosophy (expressed in non-theistic terms) but the way it plays out will vary according to the situation, including the norms and expectations of the actors. To insist on a particular code of behaviour that must be true for every situation is I think is problematic.”

This is spot-on. The truth doesn’t change; behaviour can and must. The issue, then, for all of us, is:

A. What is our relationship – or the relationship of this thing – to that which does not alter? (This question, however we frame it, expresses the very essence of all true philosophical inquiry. Every real, enduring answer is found in this direction. The answers we settle for are an exact reflection of the quality of our understanding.)

B: This being the case, how shall I act/live/be? (This question is always answered in the light of our answer to Question A. By their fruits, we really do know them. We can see who understands what by observing their behaviour.)

“My argument is really an epistemic one–that it is difficult to be certain about the ethics of a situation that we only partially understand.”

This is true. Hence, philosophical inquiry (Question A), first increasing our own proximity to that which is unchanging by permanently turning ourselves over to it before doing anything else, then referring the situation towards certain self-evidently absolute standards of value, and thereby receiving as full an illumination as possible with regard to that situation.

“…one of the things I do appreciate is religious pluralism, one of the finer achievements of the modern liberal state. It is nots unique–India, for example, has a history of religious pluralism that can be traced to ancient times–but I think it is an achievement to be grateful for.”

Religious pluralism is essential to sanity. That said, it only really means something in a society that is essentially religious. What the modern liberal state giveth with one hand, it taketh away with the other. Modernity is defined by its reaction to and progression away from tradition. Believing itself to be ‘transcendent’ to tradition, it robs every tradition of its deeper meaning and then offers to sell meaning back in an adulterated form that is essentially rooted in materialism. Traditions which buy this find it comes at a very high price, with all kinds of epistemic strings attached. Even at it’s most seemingly benign, the spirit of modernity renders every tradition impotent. Beside this subtlty, visible enemies of religion, represented by the likes of Dawkins and Dennett, are much more like friends than enemies: their attacks strike sparks and stir dying embers to life. Benign modernity, coiled up within each tradition, feeds directly upon its heart and kills it from within.

As it enters the later stages of it’s own logic, modernity appears to be becoming less tolerant and hospitable to religion; there is a growing impatience with the whole business. Witness the recent banning of the wearing of religious symbols in public, for example (this has even occurred in Italy, of all places!). Assaulting tradition from without, the New Atheism is a recent expression of an older spirit that moves forcefully against all religion. Dawkins has the appearance of integrity on his side when he expects and demands consistency in those he targets. He pours scorn and ridicule upon those believers who, having submitted their lives and minds to the ‘reign of quantity’ in every other important respect, hold on to the last remaining vestiges of their inherited tradition for reasons that are purely social and sentimental and therefore intellectually indefensible.

Upon the battle-ground that Dawkins stalks, the war has long-since been won, at least from his point of view; he is simply sticking the knife in and finishing off those who, until now, have done no more than hold on to a last gasp. Even the fight against ID is a skirmish upon materialist ground. The retreat of the enemy to regroup on higher intellectual ground puts them out of sight philosophically; they appear to have disappeared. This leaves only pockets of resistance, a few guerilla-movements in the hills and jungles, and a highly mysterious underground that has always been with us and always will be, despite the best efforts of Dawkins and others to eradicate it.

I also don’t want to spend my own time attacking the ghost of poor Calvin or persecuting his memory. This is just painful behaviour in which to engage. It shuts down minds and helps no-one. Understanding and compassion are in order for Calvin, as well as for those who followed in his train. There also is no reason why Calvinism should be singled out for special ill-favour. Right across the board, there are those who were inherently capable of far higher knowledge who have been frightened, guilted or socialised into spending their lives in philosophical dead-ends or under the huge theological shadows cast by institutions that once enabled light to fall upon the world. These times require us to have understanding and compassion for the whole world in its increasingly sorry state, along with every human being, past and present, whose primary reason for suffering is their own sunken and unregenerate moral and spiritual condition, a sickness of the soul for which every true religion has always possessed the remedy.

What do we do, though, with bad doctrines and misleading paths? Do we look away and focus on quietly taking our own medicine or do we call poisons by their names for everyone’s sake? I confess I see Calvinism in this light; far from having the keys to the Kingdom, or even knowing the way, it begins by heading away from true religion and setting up its own impregnable fortress of stern moralism that is reliably surrounded on all sides by profanity. This rigid externalising of ‘religion’ may provide the basis for a certain kind of social stability but it does not allow for happiness, freedom or any of those goods which follow the soul’s own spontaneous ordering from within.

Since you first posted, I’ve been looking at the different ways Calvin is treated by writers in accordance with their own personal agendas. I reread the introduction to ‘The Death of Adam’ in the hope of finding some objectivity but, on further reflection, it seems to me to contain a number of subtle manipulations couched as arch observations regarding “presumed Calvinist illiberalism” (is she presuming that Calvinism was in any way liberal, either socially or theologically?). Then we have the amazing sentence: “bear in mind that Calvin approved the execution of *only one man* for heresy”, the meaning of which she partially reverses by saying that one was one too many, before proceeding to drive the first point fully home by saying “but by the standards of the time, and considering Calvin’s embattled situation, the fact that he has only Servetus to answer for is evidence of astonishing restraint.”

It’s this “standards of the time” clause again. The phrase “they were children of their time” will let almost anyone off the hook. We could say it of the neo-cons and the bankers and speculators whose ‘of-their-time’ actions still threaten to suck the real-world economy into the immense black hole of a fantasy-land ‘derivatives’ market. It’s ironic that this is frequently said of people who were not simply acting in accordance with the standards of their time but who were actually helping to set those very same standards and shape the times in which they lived, as well as the times that were to follow. The whole point of old-style philosophy and eternally valid religion is, if you find your way, you are no longer a child of your own time but a child of God. That the near-tautology of the ’standards of the time’ must be applied to Calvin in order to excuse his misdeeds says all we need to know of his relationship to true religion. Think of the ones to whom we need not offer this loop-hole, who shine above and beyond their time, and whose words are even more applicable today than ever. John Calvin is not one of these. He is very much of his time.

A text worth reading, clear and detailed, is this chapter of an online book found at http://vlib.iue.it/carrie/texts/carrie_books/gilbert/14.html

Here’s a passage from it about a man named Castellio, a man of Calvin’s time who, by definition, was not of Calvin’s time:
“In 1553 he [Calvin] was appointed professor of Greek at the University of Basel. In the same year Servetus was burned at the stake, and Castellio published his work on the persecuting of heretics, in both Latin and French versions. It consisted of a number of passages from the works of the church fathers and modern writers including Calvin against persecution. There were also passages by Martin Bellius, George Kleinberg, and Basil Montfort, all of whom were no doubt Castellio himself. He brings out vividly the idea that purity of life is more important than the doctrinal orthodoxy for a Christian, and that it is a horrible thing for men to kill each other over doctrinal points in the name of Christ, who commanded them to love each other. Meanwhile, he finds that no attention is being paid to the charity and holiness enjoined on Christians, but that instead of this men are fighting over such matters as the Trinity, predestination, free will, “and other similar things, which it is not greatly necessary to know to acquire salvation by faith.” If anybody takes the commands of Christ seriously and tries to lead a pure Christian life, all the others rise against him with one consent and destroy him. And, worst of all, they cover all this with the robe of Christ and claim to be serving His will by these cruelties.”

Calvin’s importance as a thinker must be measured almost entirely by his impact, since it cannot be derived from the quality of his thoughts. His impact was considerable, which is why he shouldn’t be forgotten, but then I really don’t think he will be.

The bit I still don’t get, though: is Calvin not heretical from a Roman Catholic point of view? I can’t help but think that calling the Pope the Antichrist and describing the Church of Rome as his Kingdom is kind of ’stirring’.

Here’s John himself describing circles with a large wooden spoon:

“Therefore while we are unwilling simply to concede the name of Church to the Papists we do not deny that there are churches among them. The question we raise only relates to the true and legitimate constitution of the Church, implying communion in sacred rites, which are the signs of profession, and especially in doctrine. Daniel and Paul foretold that Antichrist would sit in the temple of God, (Dan. 9: 27; 2Th 2: 4); we regard the Roman Pontiff as the leader and standard-bearer of that wicked and abominable kingdom.

“By placing his seat in the temple of God, it is intimated that his kingdom would not be such as to destroy the name either of Christ or of his Church. Hence, then, it is obvious, that we do not at all deny that churches remain under his tyranny; churches, however, which by sacrilegious impiety he has profaned, by cruel domination has oppressed, by evil and deadly doctrines like poisoned potions has corrupted and almost slain; churches where Christ lies half-buried, the gospel is suppressed, piety is put to flight, and the worship of God almost abolished; where, in short, all things are in such disorder as to present the appearance of Babylon rather than the holy city of God.

“In one word, I call them churches, inasmuch as the Lord there wondrously preserves some remains of his people, though miserably torn and scattered, and inasmuch as some symbols of the Church still remain – symbols especially whose efficacy neither the craft of the devil nor human depravity can destroy. But as, on the other hand, those marks to which we ought especially to have respect in this discussion are effaced, I say that the whole body, as well as every single assembly, want the form of a legitimate Church. (Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book Four, Chapter 2, 698)”

Was he inspired? Is this God speaking through him? It seems his own writings were treated as infallible by many. What gave him the right, we might wonder, to make such pronouncements? And isn’t it extraordinary that it is through Luther, Calvin and the Reformed churches of all stripes that we get the notion that ultimate authority resides not in a pope or in reason but in inspired Scripture? How on earth did this become accepted as absolute? Once in place, it stands like a reality-wide, impenetrable wall between the believer and their own intellectual capacity, effectively sealing them inside their own mental formulations, at least ‘philosophically’. All they are left with is the Bible – by circular reasoning, however, this is all believe they need and so they are happy to plough their narrow furrow straighter and deeper in the belief that it is God’s Will. Anyone outside the circle can only shake their head and wish them well with that.

What did Calvin contribute theologically? Apparently, he left us a flower: TULIP is a popular acronym for the five points of Calvinism.
T= Total Depravity
U= Unconditional Election
L= Limited Atonement
I= Irresistible Grace
P= Perseverance of the Saints

These petals are easily examined, if you want to follow it up. See what you think of them. Does it help you? Personally, I don’t see living wisdom here, or authentic realisation. It’s a spark in the dark, rather than the darkness itself, but it has flown very far from the fire indeed. Compare and contrast with the work of, say, Jan Ruysbroeck.

The clearest, most richly detailed, unsentimental and seemingly unspun account of Calvin I could find was in the Catholic Encyclopaedia.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03195b.htm

The whole thing is well worth reading but there are some very striking lines. No record of Calvin’s claim that he attempted to mitigate the sentence appears in the documents? I also really like the last part, “cold, hard but upright”, culminating in being “austere to the verge of Manichaean hatred of the body”, which chimes with my own fairly extensive experience of modern-day Calvinism. Here are the last three paragraphs:

“Accordingly, sentence was pronounced 26 October, 1553, of burning at the stake. “Tomorrow he dies,” wrote Calvin to Farel. When the deed was done, the Reformer alleged that he had been anxious to mitigate the punishment, but of this fact no record appears in the documents. He disputed with Servetus on the day of execution and saw the end. A defence and apology next year received the adhesion of the Genevan ministers. Melanchthon, who had taken deep umbrage at the blasphemies of the Spanish Unitarian, strongly approved in well-known words. But a group that included Castellio published at Basle in 1554 a pamphlet with the title, “Should heretics be persecuted?” It is considered the first plea for toleration in modern times. Beza replied by an argument for the affirmative, couched in violent terms; and Calvin, whose favorite disciple he was, translated it into French in 1559. The dialogue, “Vaticanus”, written against the “Pope of Geneva” by Castellio, did not get into print until 1612. Freedom of opinion, as Gibbon remarks, “was the consequence rather than the design of the Reformation.”

“Another victim to his fiery zeal was Gentile, one of an Italian sect in Geneva, which also numbered among its adherents Alciati and Gribaldo. As more or less Unitarian in their views, they were required to sign a confession drawn up by Calvin in 1558. Gentile subscribed it reluctantly, but in the upshot he was condemned and imprisoned as a perjurer. He escaped only to be twice incarcerated at Berne, where in 1566, he was beheaded. Calvin’s impassioned polemic against these Italians betrays fear of the Socinianism which was to lay waste his vineyard. Politically he leaned on the French refugees, now abounding in the city, and more than equal in energy — if not in numbers — to the older native factions. Opposition died out. His continual preaching, represented by 2300 sermons extant in the manuscripts and a vast correspondence, gave to the Reformer an influence without example in his closing years. He wrote to Edward VI, helped in revising the Book of Common Prayer, and intervened between the rival English parties abroad during the Marian period. In the Huguenot troubles he sided with the more moderate. His censure of the conspiracy of Amboise in 1560 does him honour. One great literary institution founded by him, the College, afterwards the University, of Geneva, flourished exceedingly. The students were mostly French. When Beza was rector it had nearly 1500 students of various grades.

“Geneva now sent out pastors to the French congregations and was looked upon as the Protestant Rome. Through Knox, “the Scottish champion of the Swiss Reformation”, who had been preacher to the exiles in that city, his native land accepted the discipline of the Presbytery and the doctrine of predestination as expounded in Calvin’s “Institutes”. The Puritans in England were also descendants of the French theologian. His dislike of theatres, dancing and the amenities of society was fully shared by them. The town on Lake Leman was described as without crime and destitute of amusements. Calvin declaimed against the “Libertines”, but there is no evidence that any such people had a footing inside its walls The cold, hard, but upright disposition characteristic of the Reformed Churches, less genial than that derived from Luther, is due entirely to their founder himself. Its essence is a concentrated pride, a love of disputation, a scorn of opponents. The only art that it tolerates is music, and that not instrumental. It will have no Christian feasts in its calendar, and it is austere to the verge of Manichaean hatred of the body. When dogma fails the Calvinist, he becomes, as in the instance of Carlyle, almost a pure Stoic. “At Geneva, as for a time in Scotland,” says J. A. Froude, “moral sins were treated as crimes to be punished by the magistrate.” The Bible was a code of law, administered by the clergy. Down to his dying day Calvin preached and taught. By no means an aged man, he was worn out in these frequent controversies. On 25 April, 1564, he made his will, leaving 225 French crowns, of which he bequeathed ten to his college, ten to the poor, and the remainder to his nephews and nieces. His last letter was addressed to Farel. He was buried without pomp, in a spot which is not now ascertainable. In the year 1900 a monument of expiation was erected to Servetus in the Place Champel. Geneva has long since ceased to be the head of Calvinism. It is a rallying point for Free Thought, Socialist propaganda, and Nihilist conspiracies. But in history it stands out as the Sparta of the Reformed churches, and Calvin is its Lycurgus.”

Read the whole thing, though, if you have the time, particularly the build-up to the Servetus affair.

Speaking of heresies, although all heretics are by no means equal to Christ, Christ himself is one of history’s most prominent heretics – another stirrer, surely, at least as the stories have it. And the powers that be really let him have it… with motivations almost certainly matching those you suggest Calvin and the councils may have had with regard to Servetus.

My problem is with the belligerent noeconservatives and liberal hawks and their great army enablers, the incredibly lazy thinking you find even–and maybe especially–in the intelligentsia.

The bottom line is that you can’t afford to be lazy about these matters. It requires constant self-examination. My angle is less the pathology of the loonies than how our pervasive habits of thought enable their agenda.

Thing is: it’s not for “defense” in any real sense — it’s about policing the borders of an imperium. Bacevich isn’t a man of the Left, he’s a conservative Catholic whose own son was killed in Iraq. (He criticized that exercise in empire before his terrible loss.)

You write very well and your ideas are always worth attending to.

Clearly I don’t see the Christian tradition as anything like as corrupted as you do. I see most of the religious traditions as having been corrupted by modernity, but Christianity, being at the epicentre of the source of corruption, and maybe Islam for different reasons (Muslims generally living on top of the fuel and rightful property of the industrial nations) have had some of the most severe problems to deal with. But, being more tangled up in the confusion, these religions may offer the best objective platforms for a general revival. When you consider how popular they are worldwide (more than half of humanity) I should hope so! Speaking objectively again, I think one of the the best thing the minority religions with less of these problems could be doing is assisting such a revival.

The other disagreement is in seeing Servetus as representing a more harmful agent than you do. We are conscious of the degnerate times we live in, with so few knowing what true Philosophy or Religion is, in any of its many manifestations, and the suffering and destruction that this is bringing about is incalculable.

I most certainly would not try to deal with mischievous hetrodoxy (by which I mean undermining teachings in bad faith) other than by intellectual means–that is why I publish this blog. Whether Servetus was doing all of this in good conscience or for egotistical reasons I just don’t know, and it is beside the point (but I suspect it was ego-driven). I think we are obliged to assume it was so for the purposes of understanding Calvin’s perspective.

Given what happened at Munster (and this kind of thing was by no means isolated), and the mischief that that has in fact flowed from the widespread corruption of Christianity, we have to approach the severity of Calvin’s treatment of Servetus with care. I can’t see how we can lament the total breakdown of civilised values and then insist that no public value can be placed on right philosophy. If we agree that it is a precious inheritance, then how can we not place sanctions on it being attacked (or state categorically that in no time and place can it be right to have such sanctions).

We could take the view that there should be no social sanctions for any wrong-doing. While I am quite anarchistic in temperament, I wouldn’t go that far.

I am far from justifying Calvin, but I do think there are some issues that need consideration.

As for a wider assessment of Calvin himself, Servetus apart, I see no reason to not respect him as an important thinker, so much of what gets attributed to him seeming to be careless and lazy stereotypes. When I read people like Helm and Robinson something very different appears. His thinking as, explained by them, makes sense. I get the sense of people who have integrated it into their lives, and that I am making contact with a living wisdom transmitted from master to student in a lineage of authentic realisation. I confess this is just a sense.

The greatest testament for me is the power of Robinson’s writing itself. This is a more direct thing (for me). It seems implausible that she could write as she does and hold the second-rate reactionary religious leader of stereotype in high esteem. Misunderstanding is all too easy and we all do it all the time, even the best of us. When someone of acute understanding says that here lies an authentic tradition I have to take it seriously, pretty much regardless of all the bad reports, unless some more tangible objection appears, something that can be examined and tested.

Please don’t worry about responding unless you are particularly moved to do so. As I said previously, I would rather see you focusing your energies and pursuing your own lines of inquiry than get yourself tangled up with my lines. Please feel free to skip lightly over all that above verbiage – you can dispose of it in one go with the understanding that I’m looking back at Calvinism primarily through the lens of the white Christian nationalism of apartheid South Africa, with sidenotes of old-style Scottish religiosity. I’m also fascinated by the cold, hard Free Presbyterianism that still thrives in large parts of the Western Isles.

I guess I should have said that I completely agree with your rejection of a ’sentimental defence’of Calvin – weighing the matter carefully and clearly seeing the truth of it would be much better. The bit I really couldn’t go with was:

“To Calvin the mass corruption of people’s faith and destruction of the Church that Servetus was trying to accomplish was the highest crime, for it’s consequences went beyond this life to eternal damnation. Calvin would have known that he would be answerable for his own part in Servetus’s execution, and it seems he wished he weren’t put in the position, but nevertheless felt compelled to act.”

This illustrates why self-examination and self-knowledge are so important. Calvin’s understanding was profoundly flawed, and therefore so was his theology. Had he understood more, he would have seen things differently. People are responsible for their own thinking and for what they think they know, whether they accept that responsibility or not.

The real nub of it, though, is whether you are seeking the Truth in order to take the view that is available from Truth itself or whether you are adopting, defending and enforcing the view of a dominant power whose main concern is maintaining control of the minds or bodies of your fellow human beings. The difference is between these two approaches is the difference between the sacred and the profane. It’s not an easy divide to straddle – Christ himself didn’t even attempt to. He simply stood on the other side and told people to come across. Christianity, however, has long attempted to serve two masters and also to be a master in its own right, hence the tragedy of it. The way of Christ was a lot simpler, lighter and happier to follow, all the way into the Kingdom.

I have a busy day, so I am not going to come back to it later (maybe tonight, probably tomorrow). Needless to say I am pleased to see you taking issue with this. I haven’t even checked over at the Guardian to see what the responses were, but I am glad to see it being probed. I have the feeling it might yield some interesting insights.

I can’t follow you on this one. Truth is eternal and unchanging; teachings, on the other hand, degenerate over time. Christianity contains one of the highest teachings available and yet it degenerated faster and further than almost any other world religion. It can be morbidly fascinating to trace the multiple trajectories it followed as it shattered and performed its own re-enactment of the Fall.

Truth within Christianity doesn’t come on a plate these days, if it ever did. If your intellectual point of departure is squarely within the Christian tradition, unless you are unaccountably blessed, you are going to have to search and search hard to find the gold in your heritage and, when you do discover it, you will still have to wash the dirt and poison from it. Fortunately for the finder, the gold itself, as well as being priceless, is also the antidote to any remaining toxic elements.

With honourable exceptions, Christian teaching today does not come accompanied with the key to its own metaphysics and so most Christians remain the proud possessors of a locked box. They’ve got the heirloom on display and celebrate it whenever they get the chance but they haven’t been able to claim their true inheritance, mainly because they don’t know there is one to be had. Their mental boxes come in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours, with different designs. Many think their own particular container is the very truth itself and insist that the powerful images and varied inscriptions upon the surface are the whole story. In bad times, which in some places lasted long, you risked torture and the flames if your own story, or your interpretation of it, departed too radically from the officially sanctioned one, even if your words, far from contradicting what the box actually contained, were springing fully formed from the realisation of what is inside it.

When they can tear their eyes from the cruelties with which history is littered, and put aside the fact that some of the official stories for which people went to the stake have since been modified or discarded by relevant religious authorities, doubters, sceptics and atheists old and new invariably observe the sheer diversity of belief on display with a little bewilderment and a lot of impatience. “Look at all the boxes!” they say: “And that’s just within Christianity!” And they have a point, up to a point. You can see the disaster of modernity reflected in the range of seemingly possible ‘choices’ with regard to belief, as though spirituality were a supermarket; as though the outward determines the inward; as though what is accidental could determine what is essential. The doctrine of essence being determined by accident is, of course, the hollow heart of modernity’s own ‘spiritual’ teaching; for advanced cussedness, we can go further: choose to forget about essence altogether and go completely with accident, which is nothingness, in the name of thoroughness and consistency.

It is because exactly the reverse of this modern view is true that any teaching has any merit at all. The more the essential part of a teaching has shaped and directed its accidental parts, the more valuable the teaching can be to us. Its value lies in the fact that we are called to do the same thing with and to ourselves; if we want to find our way, our accidental lives must be put entirely at the disposal of our essential lives. We can learn from those who have done this, to the extent that they have actually done it. From those who have gone furthest in this direction, we have the most to learn. Unfortunately for us, they tend to be quiet fellows, stillness being the primary ‘how-to’ of knowing God. Not only that, the world seems to have an in-built tendency to first misunderstand, then misrepresent and eventually discard what these people have to say when they finally do speak. The words of a true teacher direct us to what is essential. Their silence expresses it directly. Eventually, we get to see the way we should be going and everything becomes obvious. If essence were a signal, accident would be noise. Noise that is shaped and directed in accordance with a signal is musical and meaningful. A signal that is overwhelmed by noise is first interfered with and then it is lost. To use a Christian analogy: cast your nets on one side of the boat (accident) and they come up empty; cast them on the other side (essence) and the catch is far more than your nets can hold and more than your boat can contain.

When we can tell the difference between what is essential and what is accidental, we give greater and greater weight to essence and less and less weight to accident. Thus, the accidental aspects of a culture or a person almost vanish in terms of their significance when viewed beside their essential aspects. This is where Calvin and others have stumbled. They got the balance wrong somehow and didn’t quite get that golden goodness for themselves, so that, when it came to the crunch, they didn’t really have it in them for others. Think of all the other great ones who, for all the world contains, would not have had Servetus harmed, never mind have had a part in harming him! Would Socrates have called for someone’s burning or beheading? Would Plotinus? Jesus? Pythagoras? Buddha? You can go as far back as you like, and the fact that you can do so gives the lie to that moral relativism which is now so readily applied to different periods of history, different cultures and different peoples to excuse acts and practices that are, or were, plainly wrong. The great realisers, though different in accident, are recognisably similar in essence. Their differences, as has been wisely said, are a blessing to us all. The human dimension of their lives must be expected to contain errors, blind-spots and incompleteness; the divine aspect, however, in so far as it is revealed, remains perfect.

Calvin would have fried me for sure, I think (perhaps, in a show of mercy, he would merely have called for my beheading), and not only me. He would surely have been outraged by the pick-n-mix theologies of most modern Christians, too; the current Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, would certainly have been a prime candidate for roasting. Would Calvin have been at all impressed by Vatican II and the subsequent contortions of the Catholic Church’s own troubled modernisation/ reformation project? He certainly wasn’t impressed by the unreformed, universal, timeless version of it. It’s also quite unlikely that he would have smiled upon Buddhists of any stripe.

When I think of heretics and heresy, the first person who comes to mind isn’t poor Giordano Bruno at the stake but an aged Meister Eckhart in his cell. The treatment Eckhart received at the hands of his beloved institution is a firm reminder that truth cannot be derived from religion in the first place but that religions themselves will always need to be pinned to the truth before they will be capable of offering up their immortal treasures. If they are true at all, they came from truth at their founding and remain founded upon it, as outward impulses and manifestations of the original inward essence that inspired and substantiated them. Religions that think they have a monopoly become self-absorbed and lose their way. The only purpose of religion, as far as I can see, is to convert the soul to God. A religion that merely converts souls to itself is a very poor thing indeed.

I have read Marilynne Robinson’s essay ‘Puritans and Prigs’ in The Death of Adam, which I purchased on this blog’s recommendation. The writing is indeed excellent but she hasn’t managed to win me for Calvin. The direct quotes from him were surprising and I think I get the point she is making about the abiding value within Puritanism that, along with all genuine values, is currently being undone. Nevertheless, I still see Calvin as rather too short a rope for the depth of the well. When he is pinned to the truth, he almost disappears, which to me means he would have done better to be silent rather than to speak. Having been silent for long enough, he might then have known the truth himself and been able to speak it. Even if he had remained silent, we would admittedly never have known his name, nor (in my case) felt the bitter legacy of his doctrines within the classroom, but the spot he occupied in the world would have been a spot of holiness ever after. It’s a sweet thought and probably a good note upon which to end this particular torrent of words.

I very much appreciate your engagement with my comment. Going by my own previous experience, I’m far from certain that what I was saying is indeed what most people will be thinking. I was not for a moment suggesting abandoning ethics, turning our backs on reality or in any way giving up the ghost. It’s not a case of letting the world go to hell but rather one of aligning with the Way of Heaven as the world goes the way it will.

I am in total agreement with your stern critique of the modern ethical collapse, as beheld from the steady vantage-point of classical philosophy. I think I see it pretty much as you see it. Indeed, I’d go further and say that, as well as our ethics, the ontological and epistemological supports of our thinking have also given way and a near-complete philosophical disaster has been globalised. Thought, in our culture – whether that thought be religious, scientific, political or otherwise – is now proceeding almost entirely without intellectual support.

To take a striking example from your post, the Large Hadron Collider: the use of such a vast amount of public money in its construction is surely an ethical matter, especially since (as you show) it could have been better spent in any number of ways. In the wider scheme of things, however, the sum attached to it is dwarfed by the cost of an illegal war and some belief-beggaring financial bail-outs. The philosophical and ’scientific’ reasons behind the construction of the LHC are an entirely different matter. The Standard Model in cosmology, powered by gravity, underpins and holds together our understanding of the universe, at least in terms of what we think regarding its origin, age, structure and fundamental forces. From this central model, we get the Big Bang itself, black holes, dark matter and countless even weirder speculations. We also get – or rather, need to find – the Higgs-Boson. The Standard Model needs the Higgs-Boson to stop itself from flying apart – it must be there – so let’s build a superduper collider in order to find it.

So far, so good; except that the Standard Model is every bit as badly placed relative to the truth as neo-Darwinian Theory. Indeed, just as random mutation and natural selection have been repeatedly and convincingly shown to be insufficient for the generation and organisation of life, so, at least in the eyes of those who have eyes to see, the Standard Model has long since been taken apart and revealed as not just an incomplete theory but a complete pile of rubbish. Assertions and speculations based on the Model continue to issue forth unabated, however, with all the institutional majesty and intellectual authority of Science behind them. Witness the struggles of the plasma cosmologists [www.plasmacosmology.net] and the ‘Electric Sky’ people [www.thunderbolts.info] – scientists themselves, some of them Nobel prize-winning – to get their simple, truthful observations and testable predictions out into the journals in the face of ridicule, suppression and outright oppression. Unfortunately for them, the idea of a Big Bang appeals to many creationists since it dovetails nicely with their theology, so there is no equivalent of an ID crowd to amplify this argument in the public domain.

We find precisely the same remoteness from reality and concomitant inhabitation of incoherent wonderlands going on everywhere in modern life, whether we look into finance, education, political representation, medicine, agriculture, energy-production, or any other large-scale social system. This is when we discover that our civilisation is not going to fly.

It’s when we ask the question: “So what’s the Answer?” that my earlier comments apply. I agree that ethics is the interior life. Actions and choices, good or bad, spring directly from ethical states of mind. Our ethics are themselves the result of our understanding: the more understanding we have, the more ethical we are. What will give us understanding? Not ethics, if ethics is the result. “By their fruits, you will know them.” A complete understanding of reality is, and can only ever be, 100% ethical.

Nihilism and spiritual liberation are surely at opposite ends of the scale from each other, one staring into an abyss in which meaning is destroyed, the other looking toward a place from which meaning infinitely overflows. From the platform of nihilism, you can either jump off into the terrible void and be destroyed or you can turn back and find another way. From the platform at the other end, you can either enter into the supreme state of Being which some people call God or Him or That or Truth or a million other Names, or you can refuse to do so by clinging to whatever it is you prefer and hiding yourself away in the cave of your choice.

I hope you will forgive the length of this comment, Chris. I will endeavour to keep any future comments on your blog respectfully short. Thanks again for the quality and regularity of your posts.