How can one breathe life into a figure of the past? Is it possible to break free from historical pigeonholing, to pierce through the encrustations of history and make a staid, ignored figure vivid, lively, and relevant once again? This is an arduous task, often as much a labor of love as of scholarship. Whether it is Heiko Oberman reminding us of the fleshly, imaginative life of Martin Luther or David McCullough arguing for John Adams's central role in the United States' early years, historians constantly re-envision the past, challenging the accepted stories of history, bringing its major players back onto the stage and showing us their previously disregarded nuances.

Given this prevalence of revisionary writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Marilynne Robinson's quest to reclaim John Calvin from the clutches of easy generalization and illustrate his continuing vibrancy does not seem surprising. After all, Calvin's image could stand a dose of vitality. Few seminal religious figures find themselves the subject of so much caricaturizing as Calvin. To many, the Protestant theologian is stodgy and rigid, a thinker more concerned with the sinfulness and debasement of humanity than any of its redemptive qualities. Calvin serves as the locus around which a number of phrases, terms, and images have congealed in the popular imagination: predestination; theocracy; Puritanism; the burning of heretics; a songless, joyless Geneva . Marilynne Robinson takes this desiccated and deathly figure and nurtures and rebuilds it, pruning away historical inaccuracies, watering it with care and affection. When a figure is so often associated with dourness and doom, when his views are understood to coincide with Calvinist defender Jonathan Edwards's description of man as a "loathsome insect" held over the fire of Hell by God, such a task seems ripe and even overdue.

What is surprising, however, is the persistency with which Marilynne Robinson has attempted to disprove these popular conceptions and assert Calvin's central role in modern thought and society. Calvin is a ubiquitous presence in Robinson's work. From her 1998 collection of essays The Death of Adam to the preacher steeped in Calvinist theology in her novel Gilead , the specter of Calvin always looms, begging Robinson's quite ample skills of polemic and celebration. The sheer volume of Robinson's Calvin-inflected work is striking. After all, she is a notoriously stingy and deliberate writer: she went 25 years between her initial masterpiece, Housekeeping , and her latest novel, Gilead , allowing her works to grow at their own leisurely pace rather than at the behest of publishers or fans. Why is it that Calvin, a figure many readers find lifeless and dull, so persistently and powerfully demands Robinson's attentions? The answer to this question lies in Robinson's introduction to a recently released collection of Calvin's essays, entitled John Calvin: Steward of God's Covenant.

In the introductory essay, Robinson of course defends Calvin from the constant barbs of critics. He was not, she argues, a brutal theocrat, demanding mindless and slavish obedience to the state; rather, he was a grand exalter of consciousness. As Robinson says, Calvin believed that "one may know God in ways or by means that are not analogous to self-knowledge but in fact are a reflex of it." This radical individualism—a process by which religious or metaphysical knowledge arrives by way of self-reflection and thinking—bears more affinity to Socrates or Descartes than Savonarola or the Ayatollah Khomeini. In fact, in a twist that is sure to surprise Calvin's many critics who denounce him as the illiberal father of theocracy, this Millsian valuing of individual consciousness and self-knowledge serves as the base from which many intellectuals now defend liberal democracy.

Similarly, Robinson argues, Calvin was not a religious fanatic fiendishly devoted to stamping out heresy, especially when compared to the far more vigorous fight against heterodoxy carried out by other religious leaders of the time. His greatest and most synoptic work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion , was in fact dedicated to those suffering, rather than practicing, religious persecution in France at the time of its writing in 1536. While Calvin did later approve the execution of Michael Servetus, a Spanish heretic who condemned the Trinity as a Cerberus, this same man was also condemned and hunted by the Catholic Inquisition. The burning of even one heretic is surely deplorable; it seems hardly fair, however, to use this isolated incident to label Calvin a religious bigot when the Inquisition was operating at the time on a far grander and fiercer scale. This does not exculpate Calvin, but it does soften any rigid characterization through the process of historical contextualization.

Such warring against historical miscomprehension, however, while effectively waged by Robinson, is not the main task of her essay. Instead, she seeks to describe the religious and spiritual experience of perception in Calvin's theology, the experience by which seeing the world leads to loving it, and witnessing mankind brings about acknowledgment of man's infinite beauty and potential. For Calvin, perception is revelation. As Robinson says, "To say that the order of nature reveals divine intent is one thing, and to say that the beauty that floods our sense has the meaning of vision and revelation is another." To lovingly witness the delicacy of a flower is to come into contact with the spiritual; to see the glory of a bending blade of grass is to commune with God. Calvin, a Wordsworthian Romantic? It seems farfetched, but his chapter "Of The Knowledge of God the Creator" in The Institutes of the Christian Religion does posit visionary perception as one of the means to communion with God, and these experiences bear at least a passing resemblance to Wordsworth's "spots of time" that connect perception with revelation of a divine natural order.

Perception for Calvin, however, does not simply deal with the natural world, the romanticized realm of dewy grass and painfully beautiful sunsets; instead, perception also stands as a key to an appreciation and understanding of mankind itself. Critics doubt that Calvin has any such appreciation, instead citing his misanthropy and obsession with man's degradation. They point to Calvin's denunciations of mankind, where he describes humanity as containing "something like a world of misery," full of "ignorance, vanity, want, weakness, in short, depravity and corruption." How can this man be said to understand and love mankind? And what type of perception would yield such a tortured picture?

Ever anticipating such challenges, Robinson has an answer ready. As she explains, critics ignore that Calvin's popularly understood hatred of mankind is only an exaggerated half of a dialectic in his theology. Calvin does oftentimes focus on the wretchedness of this world, the war and poverty and sin that so pervade our everyday dealings, but this is because he also realizes that wickedness is not the only inhabitant of man's soul. There also reside stores and stores of grace, beauty, and holiness, stores that shine forth when we truly and lovingly look at our fellow man. Created in the image of God, mankind is filled with his divine presence; it is only in comparison with this potential for sanctity and goodness that Calvin so painfully denounces man's wickedness.

In focusing on Calvin's denunciations, critics ignore his exultations. As Robinson says, "The first assertion of Calvin's theology, both in order and in centrality, is the continuous, unmediated character of the relationship between God and any human soul." The human soul is a receptacle for God's grace, a container that overflows with divine goodness and makes visible his real, everlasting presence. In perceiving man, we perceive divinity, no matter how obscured it sometimes is. Perception then not only reveals to us the iniquities of this world, but it also shows us the levels of holiness and beauty that we possess. If Calvin seems to harp on man's debasement, it is only because he so vividly sees his heights.

Robinson throughout her essay illustrates the lasting cultural influence of Calvin, informing institutions like democracy and helping lay the intellectual foundations for modern individualism. Perhaps his most pervasive influence, however, lies in the province of American literature through his theory of ecstatic perception. Despite their removal from Calvin's continent and time, Robinson writes, for early New England writers "there remains in all their work the ravishment, or the shock, of revelatory perception, whether of the sea, or of a slant of light, or of the floods of humanity crossing on the Brooklyn ferry." The ghosts of American literary past listed here—Melville, Dickinson, and Whitman—is impressive, as Robinson compellingly describes Calvin as residing at the center of a peculiarly American aesthetic.

Give Robinson a few more slowly grown novels and she could add herself to the list of literary giants channeling Calvin's spirit. From the sketch of the opaque, glassy surface of Lake Fingerbone in Housekeeping to the description of how light has a weight and heft in Gilead , Robinson herself ceaselessly enacts the wonders of perception. Despite her brilliant polemics, despite her immense intellectual and historical dexterity, even despite her avowed Christian faith, Robinson's most lasting and memorable tribute to Calvin is her own fiction. Her new introduction is learned, mature, and thoughtful; it cannot equal, however, the raptures of her fictional prose.

In the new introduction, Robinson beautifully sums up the similarities between aestheticism and Calvin's theology, writing, "Calvin is never more French than in his insistence on the aesthetic character of perception. The beauty of what we see is burdened with truth." Robinson makes us see this burden. Through her prose, we perceive the weightiness of a slant of light on a field of grass, the immensity of so much beauty confronting the limited human eye. Herein lies the greatest tribute Robinson has paid Calvin in her long career of rehabilitating his image: she teaches us to see with eyes of wonder and joy. Calvin, his famous asperity notwithstanding, would be proud.

 

Anthony Domestico reccomends the entire 'A Very Short Introduction' series.