Per Caritatem

By Michael Vendsel

But even if this is a correct reading of Calvin, surely it only goes to show that Calvin’s treatment of Scripture’s authority is hopelessly superficial. There is nothing over which people divide more stubbornly than whether something is truly beautiful or not, and as recent books such as Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great demonstrate, Scripture is no exception.         

That objection, however, assumes something like Thomas Hobbes’ view of beauty. In chapter six of part I of Leviathan, Hobbes writes:

..Good [and] Evil are ever used with relation to the person that uses them: there being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evil, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves.

Hobbes makes it quite clear that this statement would equally apply to judgments of beauty. In the very next paragraph, he says that “the Latin tongue has two words whose signification approach to those of Good and Evil.” The word for Good is pulchrum, and he offers several English terms which approach its sense, including the term “beautiful.” It is safe to assume, then, that Hobbes would say of the aesthetic that “nothing is simply or absolutely so.” And on this view of aesthetics, Calvin’s argument would be genuinely weak – perceptions of beauty would be indications about the disposition of the observer, and would have nothing to say about the text itself. 

It is quite unlikely, however, that Calvin had anything like the above notion of beauty, and far more likely that he would be somewhere in Plato’s vicinity. Plato saw an enormously tight connection between beauty and truth and between beholding beauty and gaining knowledge. In the Republic VI, for example, Socrates attributes truth and knowledge of the truth to the idea of the good, which is something distinct from and superior to them: 

…what provides the truth to the things known and gives the power to the one who knows, is the idea of the good…. But, as fair as these two are – knowledge and truth – if you believe that…[the idea of the good] is something different from them and still fairer than they, your belief will be right.

In Glaucon’s response to this, the idea of the good, as well as knowledge and truth themselves, are all linked with beauty. “You speak of an overwhelming beauty…” he says, “if it provides knowledge and truth but is itself beyond them in beauty.” To confirm this, while this section of the Republic describes movement along the Divided Line as an ascent of the intellect from opinion to knowledge, in the Symposium the same movement is described as the ascent of a lover from things less beautiful to things increasingly beautiful. The same ascent, then, is simultaneously a movement from ignorance to knowledge and from lesser beauty to greater beauty.

Platonism was a significant part of the Renaissance humanism into which Calvin was educated, and more importantly it was influential on the patristic and early medieval sources which Calvin valued.  I am not trying to suggest a direct reliance of Calvin on Plato or an explicit endorsement on his part of Plato’s philosophical aesthetics. I am suggesting, however, that given his context he would come closer to Plato than to Hobbes on aesthetics, and that in the context of Platonic aesthetics the claim that Scripture is self-attesting because of its enormous glory or majesty is not a facile claim.

Even if this were granted, however, one might object that Calvin is still facile about the possibility of working through disagreements over the beautiful. But the above considerations may already deflate some of this criticism. Lack of consensus is only a problem where all parties are equally competent judges, and Plato, it will be remembered, did not share Aristotle’s optimistic view of common opinion. For Plato, disagreement about the nature of the beautiful was due to the disordered souls of the non-philosophers and was therefore inconsequential. Calvin has his own version of this claim. As discussed earlier, Calvin believes that sin causes the human heart to hate and resist the revelation of divine glory, resulting in a sort of spiritual blindness. Those in that condition will obviously not perceive Scripture as beautiful and may even view it as repugnant. Resulting from spiritual disorder, however, those perceptions do not negate the perspicuity of Scripture’s beauty. As Calvin puts it,

God having been pleased to reserve the treasure of intelligence for his children, no wonder that so much ignorance and stupidity is seen in the generality of mankind…. If at any time, then we are troubled at the small number of those who believe, let us…call to mind, that none comprehend the mysteries of God save those to whom it is given.

Along with minimizing the significance of disagreements, however, the above considerations may also point toward a way of working to heal them. If someone were challenging the aesthetic value of the Sistene Chapel or the Mona Lisa, there would be a strong counterargument from the fact that both works have been recognized as masterpieces for centuries by nearly all informed observers. Something similar could be done in the case of Scripture by pointing to the tradition of the universal Church. One might not expect Calvin to be favorable to this given his criticisms of Roman Catholicism, but surprisingly he seems to argue just this way. For example, at the beginning of chapter 8, he says that

in vain were the authority of Scripture fortified by argument, or supported by the consent of the Church, or confirmed by any other helps, if unaccompanied by an assurance higher and stronger than human Judgment….

As quoted earlier, however, with the internal testimony in place, “those proofs which were not so strong as to produce and rivet a full conviction in our minds, become most appropriate helps.” The context would seem to indicate that among those “most appropriate helps” is “the consent of the Church.” This comes out quite clearly in the way Calvin handles the famous statement by Augustine that he would never have believed the Scriptures if not for the Church. He claims that Augustine

had no intention to suspend our faith in Scripture on the nod or decision of the Church, but only to intimate (what we too admit to be true) that those who are not yet enlightened by the Spirit of God, become teachable by reverence for the Church, and thus submit to learn the faith of Christ from the gospel. In this way, though the authority of the Church leads us on, and prepares us to believe in the gospel, it is plain that Augustine would have the certainty of the godly to rest on a very different foundation.

Just as a long tradition of reverence for a piece of art, then, can cause those who would otherwise scorn it to look more closely, the tradition of the church can be a significant indication of the self-evidencing character of the Scriptures for those not yet convinced. For Calvin, however, it is only when the Spirit of God has enlightened the doubting heart so that Scripture’s self-evidencing character can be seen for itself that true, unshakeable assurance develops.

To close then, I have tried to argue that Calvin’s doctrine of the internal testimony avoids both rationalism and blind faith by attributing evidential power to aesthetic categories like glory and majesty through which the Spirit works in assuring Christians of the truth of the Scriptures. I have tried to suggest that something akin to a Platonic aesthetic is behind what Calvin is doing here, and that in the context of an aesthetic of that sort some of the criticisms mentioned at the beginning may begin to lose their force. In all this, however, nothing has been said about whether this type of aesthetic is actually true. If the above reading is correct, however, then that may be the real question that needs to be addressed in order to weigh the ultimate merits of Calvin’s approach. The viability of the internal testimony of the Spirit may ultimately depend on how one views the relationship between the perception of beauty and the knowledge of the truth.