Puritanism is historically significant as an “ideology of
transition”, and it has radical origins in Calvin’s sixteenth-century Geneva.
We see its offspring in Scotland, the
Netherlands, in France as Huguenots, in England during the Civil War, in the
New England Pilgrims, today in the Tea Party - and previously under George Bush
(“the lesser”) - and in the “Harper Government” of Canada. Journalist Marci McDonald has written an
important work,
The Armageddon Factor:
The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada (2011), but she misses the
historical and analytical context, relegating the Reformation to less than one
sentence in her 426 page book.
Puritanism in Canada needs to be discussed in terms of the historical
confluence of both religion and capitalism, and to do so we need to turn the
pages of Max Weber, R.H. Tawney , Michael Walzer, and even St. Augustine (AD
354-430).
Max Weber’s classic work, The Spirit of Capitalism and the Protestant Ethic (1904,05) takes
titular inspiration from Montesquieu’s The
Spirit of the Laws (1748) thereby demonstrating continuity with the tradition of Trinitarianism,
with its implicit ‘middling’ qualities, which can be attributed to St.
Augustine. Calvinism, the precursor to
Puritanism, looked to St. Augustine for support as the Reformation broke away
from a world once dominated by the Catholic Church, and it borrows three
essential elements: voluntarism (the
faith-based notion of an active will), a preoccupation with the ‘middle’(which
it quite possibly hijacks), and predestination.
St. Augustine is important to Calvinism because his thought
represents a sought after continuity as Europe moved from a medieval cosmos –
the great chain of being, connecting the highest to the lowest, Godly, human or
innate – to something profoundly more transitory and shaped by the Reformation,
disintegrating the old hierarchical, place-based order, which was considered seamless
under Catholicism.
Similarly Augustine’s Christian conversion
experience represented a break from the classical consensus following the sacking
of Rome mentioned early in his landmark
City
of God. And it would appear that
today Augustinian thought is employed to delineate direction following the
attack on New York’s Twin Towers on September 11, 2001, an echo of Augustine’s
circumstances, something we find relevant to Charles Taylor’s discussion in
A Secular Age (2007). (See my blog
review).
Max Weber and R.H. Tawney, author of another classic work, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (1926)
likely realized that Calvinist predestination derives from St. Augustine, but
the excellent study by Michael Walzer, The
Revolution of the Saints (1965), seems to miss the connection. Here is a sample of St. Augustine’s writing on
predestination:
But despite what has
happened, God almighty, the supreme and supremely good creator of all beings,
who assists and rewards good wills, while he abandons and condemns the bad (and
yet he controls both good and bad) surely did not fail to have a plan whereby
he might complete the fixed number of citizens predestined in his wisdom, even
out of the condemned human race.
Tawney argues in a very persuasive fashion, perhaps
over-simplifying, that Calvinist
predestination was for the sixteenth century bourgeoisie what Marxism was for
the nineteenth-century proletariat.
In other words predestination reflected an emerging middle-class consciousness
reinforced by St. Augustine’s many reflections on the notion of the ‘middle’. Walzer looks to a delayed embourgoisement process (and overlooks Augustine’s ‘middle’,
as well), but compares Puritan radicalism to Robespierre’s “Republic of Virtue”
during the French Revolution’s period of “Terror” – and to Bolshevism in Russia
following 1917.
In other words, Puritanism can be best
understood as a radical “ideology of transition” which has its prototypical
beginnings in the Reformation.
Luther’s “justification by faith alone” certainly rocked the
Catholic Church, but Calvin’s struggles with the devil and degeneration were a
much more extraordinary force, driven by of the nascent commercial classes. Propelled by the satisfaction of
predestination and social self-love, “they took pride,” if we are to consider
Weber, “in their own middle-class business morality.”
Not only concerned with individual
purification and the problem of sin, it sought to “renew society”.
In order to do so it engaged in “permanent
warfare”, a state of mind of battle-readiness quite characteristic of a
Canadian prime minister we now know only too well, along with a familiar, militaristic sense
of enmity towards any opposition.
In other words, the mind of warfare (at all
levels) is a central paradigm.
This mentality began as a form of resistance theory, which
we find in the French Calvinist
A Defense of Liberty against
Tyrants, or, Vindiciae, Contra Tyrannos (1579; see my blog), but can be found elsewhere, starting in Geneva, as a revolutionary authority in itself – a continuation of its religious
zeal. A good model would have been
Christianized Spartans, where discipline prevails over liberty, and chaos –
sharing an affinity with Hobbes’ “war of all against all” – is considered
natural, thereby overturning the medieval world view.
The solution to disorder is arbitrary power,
again an affinity with the absolutism of Hobbes, and a pride in self-control led
to further repression.
Historically-speaking Calvin’s Geneva was a small and
relatively homogenous collection of merchant brethren – after the burning of
some 150 heretics (in the space of 60 years).
Certainly torture was not unknown in the
fledgling theocracy. If an offspring struck a parent the appropriate penalty
was to behead the child.
With typical aplomb Tawney describes Calvin
in dramatic ways which are yet distinctly recognizable in Canada today (minus
the beheading of children):
In the struggle
between liberty and authority, Calvin sacrificed liberty, not with reluctance,
but with enthusiasm. For the Calvinist
Church was an army marching back to Canaan, under orders delivered once for all
from Sinai, and the aim of its leaders was the conquest of the Promised Land.
Here Calvinism recalls aspects of the Crusades – and
predestination, helping to explain why Stephen Harper today does not deviate
from his government’s unequivocal support for Israel and the evangelical vote
in Canada (which the federal government finances as “economic stimulus”).
It also explains the government’s total
lack of sympathy for the Palestinian cause, despite the fact that most
Canadians want something of an even-handed approach to foreign policy in the thorny
Middle East.
Historical speculation is sometimes fraught with over-generalization,
but it can be instructive. In terms of narrow
intellectual discipline Stephen Harper can be compared to the oppressive
sternness of Calvin – or possibly to England’s constitution-explorer, the
revolutionary regicide known as Oliver Cromwell, a Puritan. Preston Manning, given his upbringing as the
son of Ernest Manning, Alberta’s long-term politician-preacher, may well have
read some parts of St. Augustine – and was possibly inspired by his perusals of
him to “think big”.
His latest incarnation is as the
neo-Augustinian “mediator” in the Conservative Party, a point Tom Flanagan
makes of him
(without implying
Augustine)
.
But Manning was distinctly Puritan in
his earlier role with the Reform Party, rather comparable to the minister
Thomas Case and his charge before the House of Commons in 1641:
… reform all places,
all persons and callings; reform the benches of judgement, the inferior
magistrates …Reform the universities, reform the cities, reform the countries,
reform inferior schools of learning, reform the Sabbath, reform the ordinances,
the worship of God …
Manning’s early calls for a “Triple E Senate – elected,
effective, equal” have their roots in Augustine, for the predestined were also known
as the “elect”. And hence there is a
certain reverence for elections among Puritans,
which is possibly one reason why Stephen Harper thinks he received a mandate
greater than 39% of the vote last May.
Plus the “middle class” nature of the Puritan movement (largely unappreciative
of less-advantaged classes, who are here to work – or suffer) helps to explain
the tawdry credentials of the individuals Harper named to the stacked Senate. There
is, in effect, a certain providential mistrust of highly qualified individuals.
The Puritan emphasis on religious and entrepreneurial qualifications
instead is expressed today in the growth of economic power in Canada’s West,
alongside an excessive reliance on extracting its natural resources. The Puritan was supposed to be as “practical”
man but the potential pipelines emanating from the Alberta Tar Sands, destined
for China, for example, seem far from that.
Hidden in the boastful claim that Canada is a global “Energy Superpower” is an evangelical
belief, combined with a sense of predestination, that “Canada is the only
nation to have its borders described in the Bible.” (“He will have dominion
from sea to sea, and from the river as far as to the ends of the earth.”)
A careful reader will realize that the biblical prophesy also appears in St.
Augustine.
To the literal mind, however, this fact would
only amplify Marci McDonald’s rather overplayed chapter (and title): “The
Armageddon Factor”. At best, any notion
of an impending “Armageddon” amounts to what William James describes
(prophetically) in his
Varieties of
Religious Experience (1906) as a search for “the moral equivalent of war” –
a psychological device with which believers (and the unrepentant) can be flagellated
or stirred into heroic action, middle-class or otherwise.
The distinct Puritan tone of the Canadian government shows a
preoccupation with the legacies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a
shift away from the eighteenth century and its Enlightenment “progress”, which
emphasized man’s reason, his rights, and the excessive power of the Church
(following Voltaire). Rather, in the
name of a particular kind of evangelical “religious liberty” we have been
dragged back to the Reformation, the Age of the Religious Wars, the English
Civil War and even the Thirty Years’ War, which should be examined critically in
schools and universities. In terms of
political philosophy we are now ruled by the Realpolitik of Machiavelli ‘s The
Prince (1515) and (two years after the execution of England’s Charles I) by
the absolutism of Hobbes’ Leviathan
(1651), clever ruthlessness combined with the manipulation of fear – far from
the liberalism of Locke, which emerged when Puritanism depleted itself in
England at the end of the seventeenth century.
I foresee an end to Puritanism in Canada and its
tyranny. As the “Harper Government”
exploits the anniversary of the War of 1812 (while it curiously attempts to
sell oil pipelines to the U.S.A.), there remain stumbling blocks for it. One wonders how Canada’s ever battle-ready
government will mark the centenary of the start of World War One – and the mad
rush in August 1914, which led to the vast slaughter of thousands upon
thousands, divided by a bloody zone of death.
Even more curious is 2015, the next election year – and, significantly, also
the 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta, an event
which was remembered in the seventeenth century, habeas corpus and all that.
Unless the “Harper Government” actually bans the teaching of English
History, and even if it did, I see Canadians of all stripes wanting to reclaim
their “ancient liberties” – and saying goodbye to the 39% solution.
