Bouyer on Calvin


No sooner do we open the Institution Chrétienne than we are struck with Calvin's conviction that the fundamental error to be countered in medieval religion is idolatry. (The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, p.82)

Against this error, Calvin, in language of incomparable majesty, opposes the figure of the Old Testament God, the God of the prophets. It is impossible to consider him as only one source of our life among others which we carry within ourselves, or which are provided by some institution, some human or created agency; he is clearly shown to be, not just the first among beings, but the sovereign, in a sense the only, Being. Consequently, all reality, seen from the specifically religious standpoint, can come only from him, just as, in the final analysis, it can have no other end than him. Its restoration in Christ, like its original creation, has no other meaning than the glory of God. It achieves this end precisely in attributing glory to him alone, the source and reality of all good, in demonstrating that he alone can and does all by his sovereign power. (pp.82f.)

His idea of the sovereign greatness of God is closely allied to Luther's strong feeling for the element of mystery, and, in our day, has received, rightfully, especial emphasis in the works of Barth. In this connection, Luther's idea, that gratuitous salvation involves something which surpasses human reason and imagination, plays a conspicuous part. To put it more exactly, the idea that there is not merely the revealed God and the hidden God, but that God reveals himself precisely as a hidden God, is the germ, and more than the germ, of Calvin's idea of God, acknowledged, before and above all, as the Sovereign Being. (p.83)

The truth which, above all, is admirably elucidated in the Institution Chrétienne, from its very beginning, is that the most profound revelation about God in the Gospels is his utter mysteriousness. (p.84)

We completely fail to understand its logic, as long as we do not view it as a mystical logic; that is, the strict application of a profoundly religious insight, whose validity Catholics should find it quite impossible to dispute. (p.84f.)

Once we are thoroughly convinced of this, the impression we receive from the work of Calvin changes entirely. It has been said that the mathematical logic of Spinoza, far from being a sign of the aridity of his religious ideas, is the expression of the deep-rooted mysticism of a man "drunk with God". The phrase is even more appropriate to the Institution Chrétienne and Calvin's whole theological system than to the Ethics of Spinoza. This intoxication is, without doubt, the /sobria ebrietas/ characteristic of Christian mysticism since Philo, at the furthest remove from sentimentality.

Provided the words are taken in their proper sense, it is absolutely certain that none of the historic forms of Christianity is, in fact, more radically mystical than Calvinism; for it is not governed by abstract ideas, whether one or many, but a genuine intuition, utterly religious in nature, of God as Sovereign, Holy, absolutely Other, who 'inhabits light inaccessible'. Now this intuition is, in the strictest sense, mystical, whatever our opinions about Calvin's temperament, and in spite of the prejudice against the word or the reality which makes Calvinists distrust the expression. There, in this intuition, is to be found the source of Calvin's thought and, likewise, of the historical religion which proceeded from it. (p.85)
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