THE THEOLOGIAN

Philip Melanchthon, Luther's close friend and colleague and himself no mean theologian, reportedly dubbed Calvin “the theologian.” Other Reformation leaders, including Luther, published theological treatises of significance. On the Reformed side, Zwingli, Bullinger, Bucer, Beza, and Peter Martyr made theological contributions. Yet it was only Melanchthon who wrote something like a systematic theology with his Loci Communes (1521 and later editions). Even so, Melanchthon was quite willing to acknowledge that Calvin was without peer when it came to theology.

The Institutes

That reputation originally resulted from the favorable reception of Calvin’s magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, which has been hailed as one of the books “that has changed the world.” A more modest assessment, and one generally recognized, is that it is a classic of Protestant theology. It should be kept in mind, however, that the first edition of the Institutes (1536) takes up only 243 pages in volume I of the opera selecta, whereas the second edition (1539), in which Calvin really comes into his own, is three times as large; and the final edition of 1559 is almost five times as large as the first edition.

Neither of the key words in my title is unproblematic. 'Literature' signifies a tension between all kinds of writing and a special literary kind of writing: not until the 1830s is there a conception of literature as normatively belletristic, essentially different from other kinds of more public and instrumental writing. 'Politics' is even more problematic, as the word denotes not only the politics of the crown and parliament but also the politics of the extraparliamentary opposition. Moreover, the Enlightenment public sphere that Jöurgen Habermas describes as emerging in the eighteenth century generated a quasi-political republic of letters that invited all, regardless of social origins, to participate in the literary culture in a career open to all talents. Finally, the sense we now have that everything cultural is also political originates in this period.

From the 1740s to the 1830s, the major political trends included the challenge to aristocratic power by an array of democratic forces; the strengthening of the British Empire; and, especially after the defeat of Jacobitism and the final consolidation of the Protestant claim to the throne, an increase of religious toleration, with anti-semitism and anti-Catholicism declining but hardly disappearing. Many other trends had political implications: agricultural capitalism flourished, with widespread enclosures of common land dispossessing the rural poor; the industrial revolution began in earnest, with the population roughly doubling in the period; literacy grew as the middle classes increased, so that by 1800 about half the women and two-thirds of the men could read.

Between 1740 and 1760, Samuel Richardson (1689-1761), Henry Fielding (1707-54), and his sister Sarah Fielding (1710-68) published a total of some eighteen novels - from Richardson's astonishingly successful and influential Pamela and its continuation (1740-1) to Sarah Fielding's The History of Ophelia (1760). During the 1740s, the three authors published their finest works: Richardson's Clarissa (1747-8), Fielding's Tom Jones (1749), and Sarah Fielding's The Adventures of David Simple (1744, with a continuation in 1753). Thereafter Fielding and Richardson brought out ambitious and innovative last novels, Amelia (1751) and Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4), neither as well received as their predecessors, while Sarah Fielding published three of her most significant works: The Cry (1754), in collaboration with Jane Collier, The Lives of Cleopatra and Octavia (1757), and The History of the Countess of Dellwyn (1759). The relationships among these writers, and among their novels, are intricate and shifting, and shed valuable light on the larger phenomenon associated with their influence throughout the century to follow: the bifurcation of the novel genre into competing, though of course regularly intersecting, traditions, one building on the techniques of psychological representation pioneered by Richardson, the other on the social panoramas and self-conscious artifice of Fielding.

Joyce and feminism? Very strange bedfellows. Change either term to catch the full effect: Woolf and feminism; Joyce and Ireland. Now these couples were meant to share beds. But Joyce and feminism? What possibly have these two to say to one another? Can the conjunction be anything more than the now obligatory ('politically correct'?) supplementing of every analytical survey of the work of any writer with a critique supplied by 'feminism'? After all, on most of the several thousand websites currently citing 'James Joyce', readymade 'feminist' hatchet jobs wait to be read. Caveat lector. Didn't Joyce himself say 'I hate intellectual women'? Did he not, if we believe his close friend Frank Budgen, 'talk bitterly about women . . . [about] woman's invasiveness and in general her perpetual urge to usurp all the functions of the male - all save that one which is biologically pre-empted, and even on that [to] cast jealous threatening eyes'? Where in his work is there a single example of an independent, successful, happily fulfilled woman character? Beyond this, isn't the writing elitist, being, as it is, notoriously and renownedly 'difficult', and isn't such 'difficulty' just another male modernist writer's attempt to elevate his work to the realm of art, above the domain of the popular and populist culture of the newly educated masses or, more pointedly, to 'ward off the onslaughts of women [writers]' who over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were entering the profession of literature in ever-increasing - and increasingly successful - numbers?

When Edward Young compares his Conjectures on Original Composition (1759) to a garden, he is also doing a number of other things. He is implying that you will get pleasure, rather than only information about it, from his writing. He is suggesting that you will want to wander, rather than march, through his book. And he is reaffirming the flexibility of the kind of writing he is undertaking. Its unity is not like that of the idea of a poem in one of the neo-classical categories, given by prescribed manner or matter; nor is it like that of a philosophical treatise, given by a deductive or inductive logic. It is, instead, like that of a garden, a series of walks, prospects and emblems, in which the designer hopes to make his caprice gratifying, and occasionally instructive, to visitors.

What is criticism, in this period? Only at certain times and in certain places has ‘criticism’, as it now does, primarily designated literary criticism. Between 1740 and 1830 the term’s meanings are complex, for a number of reasons. Not only did literature only by the end of this period come to refer chiefly to works of invention, rather than to a much wider range of the products of the world of letters; but criticism bore a number of more specific senses, all of which in various ways and to various extents interacted with and informed the criticism of invented texts.

To Caroline Spurgeon, Shakespeare scholar, 'every scrap of information and every ray of light on Jane Austen are of national importance' - an assertion which might be completed by G. K. Chesterton's observation that 'Jane Austen, of course, covered an infinitely smaller field than any of her later rivals [the Brontë sisters and George Eliot]; but I have always believed in the victory of small nationalities'. Spurgeon was writing in 1927, Chesterton in 1913, and between them stretched the 'Great' War of 1914-18. Jane Austen, too, was a wartime writer whose perspectives and philosophies can, with justice, be described as determined by Britain's wars with revolutionary and Napoleonic France, a backdrop against which her short adult life was lived. In thinking about how and why certain works of literature gain status as cultural capital (as 'Literature'), war as the real test of value has always been important. By the same argument, literary history (the practice by which we discuss, enforce, and occasionally revise the traditional curriculum of works that form the literary canon) is itself inseparable from the formation of nations and nationalities through the recognition and celebration of collective practices and shared accomplishments which distinguish 'us' from 'them'. We write our own history – the history of our particular moment in cultural and personal time – across the body of the works we read and, in recent times, repackage as texts in other forms – screenplay, audio-cassette, even the slogan across tee-shirt or coffee mug.

'Reading is to the Mind, what Exercise is to the Body', wrote Richard Steele in his periodical paper, the Tatler, in 1710. By the middle of the eighteenth century, readers of all classes and kinds were plentiful, and were growing in both wealth and influence. Men and women, gentry and professionals, merchants and urban servants read all kinds of printed works, from scientific treatises and travelogues to jest books, sentimental plays, advertisements, collections of poetry, periodical journals and, in increasing numbers, novels. They read for information, for entertainment and for profit, but as the period wore on they were increasingly reading for a further reason: moral improvement. Reading had become a route for the development of the individual into a fully formed member of society. Thus, what people read, as well as how and where they read it, could be seen to indicate much about them. 'Miss Eliza Bennet . . . despises cards', sneers Caroline Bingley in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813), as Elizabeth picks up a book: 'she is a great reader and has no pleasure in any thing else.' To this shallow and jealous upstart, Elizabeth Bennet’s love of reading proves her a dangerous rival for the aristocratic Darcy’s affection, for it denotes Elizabeth’s natural refinement. By now, reading shows both social and moral merit.

John Calvin can be seen in an ecumenical context from the sixteenth century right into the twenty-first century. He had a broad and catholic understanding of the one church of Jesus Christ, an outreaching pastoral relationship to churches all over Europe that encouraged greater unity among them, and a passionate concern to make the worldwide reign of Christ visible. Many heirs to his thought have been active leaders and participants in the modern ecumenical movement, believing that Calvin's theology supported their work.

This chapter will identify elements of Calvin's own thought and work which laid a foundation for ecumenical work, selecting them from the broad outlines of Calvin's theology and its history surveyed in earlier chapters. Then it will suggest a few of the ways in which Calvin's influence remains visible in the modern ecumenical movement and in the worldwide church today.

First, however, a definition of “ecumenism” as it will be used here is in order. In a general sense, ecumenism has been understood as a movement in search of Christian unity, inspired by the Holy Spirit. Evidence of such a movement can be found in many periods of church history, including the sixteenth-century Reformation.

The literary style of sixteenth-century polemical writings is quite foreign to modern readers. For those theologians, religion was a matter of life and death, literally. Phrases and expressions that should not be used in “polite company” today are found heavily seasoning the writings of both Roman and Protestant polemical authors.

As an example of sixteenth-century polemic writing style, listen to Sir Thomas More speak of Martin Luther in his Latin work Response to Luther:

In Stephen Hero, the abandoned forerunner to A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the undergraduate artist-hero attacks the Irish educational system and gives promise of his rebellion against it and the culture it represents:

Joyce’s repudiation of Catholic Ireland and his countering declaration of artistic independence are well-known and integral features of his life-long dedication to writing. Yet he was formed by the Ireland he repudiated and his quest for artistic freedom was itself shaped by the exemplary instances of earlier Irish writers who had, in his view, failed to achieve that independence which he sought for himself, an independence which was at once the precondition and the goal of writing.

The foundational theological doctrine for understanding Calvin's view of Christian ethics is creation. In the act of creation God brings into existence, not only all creatures, but also “the very order of things” directing them. This ordering is the means by which God governs all of his creation. Creatures in their diversity obey God by submitting to the “order of nature” that he has determined for them. This is also the case for human beings. Though they are distinct from all other creatures in that they are made in the image of God, their lives are still governed by the order of nature. It prescribes their relations to God, to one another, and to the rest of creation. The entry of sin and evil into the world has not changed that. Calvin appeals to Romans 2:14- 15 to argue that all people, including the Gentiles who have no knowledge of the Mosaic law, are still subject to the divinely established order of nature as the ethical law for human life.

The fall of humanity described in Genesis 3 has radically affected human ethical life. Calvin’s view is that the whole of human nature and its faculties are corrupted by the effects of sin. He makes a sharp break with classical philosophers and medieval scholastic theologians who view reason as a sufficient guide for human conduct, both in its ability to discern good and evil, and in its power to direct the human will and affections into virtuous action.

In Richard Hurd's 'Dialogue on the Age of Queen Elizabeth', the third of his Moral and Political Dialogues (1760), the figure of Mr Addison states that the Gothic ruins of Kenilworth Castle at once awaken 'an indignation against . . . the tyranny of those wretched times', and foster 'a generous pleasure in . . . the happiness we enjoy under a juster and more equal government'. For Addison's antagonist Dr Arbuthnot, by contrast, Kenilworth offers the aura of a heroic past, and a 'memorial of the virtue, industry [and] ingenuity of our ancestors'. The Gothic in Hurd's dialogue provides a differential by which the consequences of economic, political, and social change might be assessed. Adapting the long-standing view of the Goths as destroyers of classical Rome, innumerable eighteenth-century writers - in a similar way to Hurd's Addison - represented the Gothic past as a distant epoch, on which the enlightened present could look back in complacent triumph. The Gothic past also retained a potential critical function in the period, however, standing - in Arbuthnot's terms - for what had been lost, or what was seen to be lacking, in the present. Given that the Gothic peoples who had repelled Roman invasion went on to settle in Britain, the Gothic could also be resorted to, in a wide variety of ways, as the fount of a native spirit of liberty, or even of an incipient democratic tradition. Hurd’s dialogue by no means exhausts the possible meanings and uses of this elusive term, but it helpfully points to the way in which the category of Gothic was invoked in different contexts, in order to serve different agendas. While sometimes referring specifically to the Goths themselves, constructions of the Gothic as a pseudo-historical period almost always offered in more general terms a reading of the past and its legacy.

The matter of (with) Finnegans Wake

Thus begins James Joyce's last work, figuratively and thematically in midstream. The sinuous sentence, the swerving phrase, continues a journey: by water, by bodily fluid, by verbal fluency. If we, the readers, are encompassed in the ambiguous 'brings us', then we can begin to understand why the voice of that opening sounds so like the narration of a tour guide. For we have no way of knowing where we, as readers, are situated in this opening. Are we on a boat in the river Liffey in Dublin, or are we inside a human body; are we at the beginning of time, or in the eternal present of every human utterance? The opening of Finnegans Wake drops us, without map, clock, compass, glossary, or footnotes, into an unknown verbal country, and the voice of the tour guide, alas, speaks their language rather than ours, although we catch enough cognates to keep from drowning altogether in that verbal stream. The role of that tour guide is, in a sense, duplicated by the enterprise of this essay. Surely, no other existing literary work needs a 'guide' more sorely than James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, with its strange language, its neologisms, its generic ambiguity, the obscurity of its allusions, the mysterious status of its speech.

John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509 in the small French town of Noyon about sixty miles north-east of Paris, and died on May 27, 1564 in Geneva, an independent city-state whose common interests increasingly lay with the major cities of Switzerland. Noyon would remain a fairly unimportant place, but the fact that Calvin was a Frenchman - originally Jean Cauvin by name - is integral to understanding his role in church history. This made him an outsider in Geneva, but paradoxically it was his achievement, far more than anyone else's, that promoted Geneva to a city of European stature. Most of Calvin's adult career was spent in Geneva, from 1536 to his death, with a break during 1538-41. Prior to his time, it was a place of modest size with scant claim to distinction. It had no university nor leading light of the new learning of Renaissance humanism, it housed no major industries or finance enterprise, it was home to no significant printing press and wielded little or no political or military clout. It was, however, a regional trade center and not far from routes carrying traffic of all kinds between northern and southern Europe.

It was the Reformation, formally accepted by the citizen assembly in 1536 before Calvin’s arrival, which would make Geneva internationally influential.

Academic accounts of the differences between eighteenth-century and Romantic poetry are often over-stated, sometimes accepting on trust self-interested narratives of the renaissance of a pure poetry of imagination and feeling such as Wordsworth's 'Essay, Supplementary to the Preface' (1815). The rebirth of 'pure poetry' was being declared as early as Joseph Warton's Essay on the Writings and Genius of Pope (1756), and even some decades before. Warton wrote against satire and what he saw as the versified morality of the Scriblerians, yet he could still find in Pope's Eloisa to Abelard (1717) at least signs of the raptures of the true poet: 'Poetry, after all, cannot well subsist, at least is never so striking, without a tincture of enthusiasm' (i: 320). Shaun Irlam's recent study of mid-century poetry describes the emergence of a 'poetics of enthusiasm'. Joseph Addison, John Dennis, and Shaftesbury are identified as the critical progenitors and James Thomson and Edward Young the major poets of this cultural transformation. Others that Irlam would include in his line of enthusiasm include Mark Akenside, William Collins, Thomas Gray, Christopher Smart, and Joseph and Thomas Warton.