Excavations


... nothing is more essential to public interest than the preservation of public liberty.

- David Hume



Monday, February 20, 2012

Calvinism, Puritanism, and Harper's Canada - Historical Dimensions to "The Armageddon Factor"


Puritanism is historically significant as an “ideology of transition”, and it has radical origins in Calvin’s sixteenth-century Geneva.[1]  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.[2]
 
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.[3]  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.[4]

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. [5] 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.[6]  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.”[7]  Not only concerned with individual purification and the problem of sin, it sought to “renew society”.[8]  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.[9]  In other words, the mind of warfare (at all levels) is a central paradigm.[10]

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.[11]  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).[12]  Certainly torture was not unknown in the fledgling theocracy. If an offspring struck a parent the appropriate penalty was to behead the child.[13]  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.[14]

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”).[15]  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.[16]

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”.[17]  His latest incarnation is as the neo-Augustinian “mediator” in the Conservative Party, a point Tom Flanagan makes of him (without implying Augustine).[18]  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 …[19]

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,[20] 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. [21] 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.”)[22] A careful reader will realize that the biblical prophesy also appears in St. Augustine.[23]   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.[24]

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.




[1] Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints: A Study in the Origins of Radical Politics (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press), pp. 300, 312.
[2] Ernst Cassirer, The Myth of the State (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974),pp. 81,82.
[3] Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p.
[4] Augustine, City of God, tr. Henry Bettenson, intro. G.R. Evans (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 591.
[5] R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism.  A Historical Study (New York: Mentor, 1963), p. 99.
[6] Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 69.
[7] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, tr. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner, 1958), p. 179.
[8] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 91.
[9] Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, p. 159.
[10] Ibid., p. 299.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, pp. 103,104
[13] Ibid., p. 103.
[14] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 115.
[15] Marci McDonald, The Armageddon Factor: The Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada (Toronto: Vintage, 2011), p. 245.
[16] Ibid., p.333.
[17] G.R. Evans “Introduction” to City of God, p. lvii.
[18] McDonald, The Armageddon Factor, p. 102.
[19] Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints, pp. 10, 11.
[20] Ibid., p. 259.
[21] Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 96.
[22] McDonald, The Armageddon Factor, p. 269.
[23] Augustine, City of God, p. 840.
[24] William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature, ed. Martin E. Marty (Markham, Ontario: Penguin, 1982), p. 367.

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