Calvin's Geneva and Harper's Canada: some more thoughts

Did you know that Prime Minister Harper can be summed up by the cartoon strip “Calvin and Hobbes”?  Some thinkers, for example Michael Ignatieff and Mark Kingwell, have looked to Machiavelli to explain Harper, while others, for example Stéphane Dion (as I have discussed in in my blog review of Harperland), have erringly looked to Harper and Leo Strauss.[1]  Meanwhile, if we peruse Paul Wells’ latest narrative, The Longer I’m Prime Minister, he sums up the Conservative party as “’neo-con’ and ‘theo-con’” – and that, sadly, is about the full extent of Wells’ intellectual analysis.[2]

I have already discussed Harper’s relationship with Hobbes in a previous blog entry (see my book review of Leviathan).  But to get at the first half of the cartoon reference that I suggest here, may I recommend an impressive study – Calvin: Origins and Development of his Religious Thought (1963, English translation) by François Wendel.  It is this work that opens up a window to Harper and the Conservative party’s ‘theo-con’ arguments.

It is important to realize that at the core of Calvin – and Harper – is a break from Renaissance humanism.  While Luther represents the liberal “protest” – and right to resist - against the abuses of the medieval Catholic Church, Calvin’s Geneva “Reform” movement represents a conservative rejection of the culture of the Renaissance (while keeping with its spirit of commerce). Instead of an awakening of man’s greatness and sense of human potential, or humanism, which followed the medieval period, we see instead a profound “consciousness of sin” – and the clearest explanation (outlined almost 500 years ago) for Harper’s anti-crime agenda.[3]  And we find in both Calvin and Harper, as well, an explicit predilection for the victims of crime, rooted in notions of predestination.

Calvin’s Reformed Churches in Geneva functioned in French (as well as Latin), and Calvin himself was well-known for his unwillingness to admit discussion as well as for his “principles of discipline” at the heart of which was his right to excommunicate, which now gives justification for “the Harper government” to take control of the Canadian Senate.[4]  Everything in Calvin’s Geneva was supposed to be saintly.  Inns were forbidden (replaced by ‘abbys’), and all guests were supervised (accompanied by a French version of the Bible, as well).  In other words, all aspects of Renaissance culture were forbidden – art, music, dance, theatre, and today the CBC.  Geneva was governed by “ecclesiastical police” and at one point even the most common personal names were attacked – apparently because they were not biblical enough.[5]

When attempting to discredit their opposition at election-times, Calvinists called them “libertines”, because they appeared (according to argument) too shy of the rigour of discipline.[6]  The position of the Calvinists in Geneva continued to improve over time, because of ongoing religious persecution in France.  The more refugees flooded into Geneva, thereby reinforcing Calvin’s party, the more “the Harper government” today sees the need to court the vote of Canada’s most recent immigrants.

Central to Calvinism is the idea of predestination: there are the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’ – both of which are the result of divine will.  Calvin finds supporting evidence in the New Testament Sermon on Ephesians: “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight.”[7]   Ultimately, however, Calvin generates his notion of predestination from Augustine’s City of God (AD 413-427):

… God almighty, the supreme and supremely good creator all beings, who assists and rewards good wills, while he abandons and condemns the bad (and yet 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.[8]

While Augustine dwells primarily on the notion of the ‘elect’, it is Calvin who develops the logical counterpart – the idea of the ‘elect’ and the ‘reprobate’, and in so doing Calvin (perhaps unintentionally) diminishes the message of Christ, for some men, in spite of themselves, are apparently incapable of understanding or achieving redemption.[9]  (It is worth noting that Martin Luther, long an Augustinian monk, does not dwell on predestination but instead looks to unilateral faith, against which Calvin reacts).[10]  To put it in François Wendel’s words, Calvin’s thinking is that “the elect cannot lose salvation whatever they do” and the “reprobate are condemned justly by their own fault.”[11]

 

It is this type of binary thinking in Calvinism, combined with notions of predestination, which is at the heart of Harper’s Conservative movement (the confrontational style of which brooks no notion of the middle). In other words our prime minister’s ‘theo-con’ playbook is almost 500 years old, and Canadians actually have much to learn from Calvin’s theocratic Geneva. Calvin has been combined with Hobbes (who also does not cater to the middle) to become a powerful religious and intellectual force on the land – the results of which, unfortunately, are not always comical.

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[1] See Michael Ignatieff “Niccolo Machiavelli’s The Prince” in Globe and Mail (March 14, 2008).  Ignatieff wrote this piece while he was Deputy Leader of the Liberal Party, and his concluding sentence (remarking on Machiavelli) was: “Those who fail in politics sometimes live longer in the memory of posterity than those who succeed.”   See also Mark Kingwell ”If Machiavelli were prime minister” in Globe and Mail (October 15, 2013) .

[2] Paul Wells, The Longer I’m Prime Minister: Stephan Harper and Canada, 2006- (Toronto: Random House, 2013), p. 55.

[3]  François Wendel, Calvin: Origins and Development of his Religious Thought, tr. Philip Mairet (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), p. 44.

[4] Ibid., p. 82; p. 60; p. 73.

[5] Ibid., p. 85.

[6] Ibid., p. 39.

[7] The Bible: Ephesians 1.4

[8] St. Augustine, Concerning the City of God against the Pagans, tr. Henry Bettenson, intro by G.R.Evans (Toronto: Penguin, 2003), p. 591.

[9] Wendel, Calvin, pp. 280,281.

[10] Ibid.,  p. 257.

[11] Ibid., p. 277; p. 281.Calvin's Geneva and Harper's Canada: some more thoughtsCanada's Geneva and Harper's Canada:some more thoughts