Great Christians of France: Saint Louis and Calvin

by François Guizot

I have no wish at the present time to enter into a discussion which, in all times and in every country, has divided, and will continue to divide, all serious and earnest men, whether they are theologians or philosophers. I repeat that this discussion will continue to cause division, because it turns upon a problem which men cannot help discussing, and which they are not able to solve—that is, the reconciliation of human freedom with Divine prescience and omnipotence. Forty years ago, in my course of 'Lectures on the History of Civilization in France,' I gave a historical account of this difficult question, and of the discussion concerning it between Pelagius and St. Augustine in the fifth century. And now, in order to describe Calvin's thoughts on this subject with accuracy, and to show their influence on his life, I must recall some of the ideas which I developed forty years ago, as well as those which I have more recently expressed in my 'Meditations on the Christian Religion,' with regard to the intimate union of Christianity and morality.

In order to understand and appreciate that fact connected with man which we call his freedom, his free-will, we must disengage it from all foreign elements, and consider it apart from them. Owing to the want of this precaution, it has been very often misunderstood; men have not studied the fact of free-will, and that fact only: they have looked at it and described it in a confused manner, together with a number of other facts which are, so to speak, bound up with it in the moral life of mankind, and yet which differ from it very essentially. For example, free-will has been said to consist in the power of choosing between different motives of action; and the act of deliberation, together with the act of judgment which follows it, have been said to constitute the essential part of free-will. It is nothing of the kind; these are the acts of the intellect, and not of the will; different motives of action—interests, opinions, inclinations, and others—pass before the intellect, which deliberates, compares, assigns a value, weighs, and ultimately passes judgment. This is a preparatory labour which precedes the action of the will, but does not constitute that action. When the act of deliberation has taken place, when a man has investigated the motives presented to him and their worth, then comes in an entirely new fact,—the action of the will. The man forms a resolution, that is to say, we come to a new series of facts which have their origin in the man himself, of which he looks upon himself as the author; which exist because it is his will, and would not exist if it were not his will; which would be other than they are if he chose to make them other than they are. Keep apart from this act all recollection of the deliberation of the intellect, of motives recognised and appreciated, concentrate your thoughts on that single moment when the man 'forms his resolution,' when he says 'I will,' and ask yourself—ask the man himself to tell you in all sincerity whether he could not have willed differently. Undoubtedly you would answer, as he would answer, 'Yes.' And it is at this moment and in this manner that the freedom of the human will is revealed. It resides altogether in the resolution which a man forms as the result of deliberation; it is this power of forming a resolution which is the special action of the man, existing by his will and his will only; it is a distinct act, separate from all the facts which precede and surround it; it is the same under the most dissimilar circumstances, always alike whatever may be its motives or results.

This action of the will is recognised at the very moment of its exercise; we have the same knowledge of our freedom as of our existence; we feel and know that we are free. But at the same time that we know ourselves to be free, and recognise in ourselves the faculty of originating by our own will a certain series of actions, at that very time we discover that our will is placed under the control of a certain law which constrains but does not coerce us; and which takes different names,—is called the moral law, reason, justice, good sense,—according to the occasions on which it is applied. Man is free, but even according to his own notion this is not an arbitrary freedom; he may use it in an absurd, mad, unjust, or guilty manner; but every time that he does use it, there is a certain law which ought to govern him. The study of this law is his duty: it is the task imposed upon him by his freedom.

We soon perceive that we can never altogether perform this task, that we can never act in perfect accordance with reason or the moral law; that whilst we are always free, that is, morally capable of conforming to the law, we do not in fact accomplish all that we ought to do, or all that we can do. Whenever we question ourselves closely, and answer sincerely, we are compelled to acknowledge, 'I could have done it if I would;' our will has been weak and cowardly, and has not gone to the full extent of our duty or our power. Hence arises a feeling which is found in all men under different forms, the feeling of the need of external help, of some support for the human will, of a strength to be added to its strength which may sustain it in time of need. Man seeks this support, this help in time of need on all sides; he asks it from the encouragement of friends, from the counsel of the wise, from the example and approbation of his fellows, and from fear of punishment. There is no one who cannot find in his own daily conduct innumerable proofs of this impulse of the soul, this eagerness to find out of itself an aid to the liberty which it feels to be at the same time real but insufficient; and as the visible world and human society do not always respond to this desire, as they also are tainted with the same insufficiency, which is at length perceived, the soul seeks the support which it needs in something apart from the visible world, above these human relations; it addresses itself to God, and calls to him for help. Prayer is the most elevated, but not the only form under which this universal feeling of the weakness of the human will, and its resort to an external and yet kindred strength, is manifested.

In addition to these facts which occur in the human soul and are clearly manifested whenever we make use of our free-will, there is another fact more obscure, but which I consider equally capable of proof. Certain changes, certain moral phenomena take place and are manifest in us, the origin of which we cannot refer to any act of our own will, and of which we do not recognise ourselves as the author. I will take an example of this class of facts in the first place from the domain of intellect, where they occur more frequently and can be more easily investigated. I suppose there is no one who has not at some time or other made painful efforts at night to recall some idea, some event, and fallen asleep without succeeding in the attempt; waking on the morrow, he has immediately and without effort accomplished his aim. I draw one single deduction from this; that, independently of the voluntary and premeditated activity of the mind, there is a certain unconscious and involuntary action of the intellect which we do not control, which we cannot follow in its development, and which, nevertheless, is real and fruitful in result,—a kind of unconscious growth which is not the act of our will, but bears fruit spontaneously. Now that which takes place in the realm of intellect takes place also in the moral world; certain changes take place in the man which he cannot attribute to himself and which he cannot account for by the action of his own will. On a certain day or at a certain moment he finds himself in an altogether new moral condition, quite unlike that to which he is accustomed and which he knows. He cannot discover the sources of these changes; he has no recollection of having acquiesced in or originated them. In other words, the moral man, even in the exercise of his own free-will, is not altogether complete in himself; he learns from experience and feels that causes and powers, or to speak more correctly, a cause, a power external to himself, acts on him and changes him without reference to his own will: in his moral life as well as in the whole of his destiny he finds the incomprehensible and the unknown.

Thus in the unconscious and free development of the human soul, moral and religious facts are evolved, called forth and united naturally. Man recognises of himself the distinction between moral good and evil, recognises moral law, moral liberty, moral responsibility, moral excellence or unworthiness; and at the same time he recognises that the moral law is not a human invention imposed by human consent, neither is it one of those immutable laws by which the material world is governed. That is, he recognises a higher power from whom the moral law emanates, whom it reveals, and in whose presence he either keeps or violates this law. God a moral ruler, and man a free subject, are revealed to us side by side in the facts which constitute the moral nature of man. And just as a moral law without a sovereign legislator who ordains it is an incomplete and inexplicable fact,—a river without a source, so also man's moral responsibility without a supreme judge who applies the law, is incomplete and inexplicable, a river without an outlet, which flows on until it loses itself we know not where. God is implied in the moral law as its first author, and God is included in the moral responsibility of man as his ultimate judge.

But if a man discovers and acknowledges the existence of God in himself and in the world around him, he cannot study and investigate, or explain, nor does he know God as he knows himself and the external world which we call nature. Man and the external world are mirrors in which God is reflected; but this reflection or revelation is limited by the measure and limitations of our own mind, and does not manifest the plenitude and immensity of the divine nature. Those special and direct revelations which are treasured up for us in the sacred volume only disclose an infinite perspective of divine action, they do not give a full and clear knowledge of that action. Even when we acknowledge and worship God, we find that there is that in him which is not only unknown, but unknowable by man; and that although he has manifested himself, he is still impenetrable and inexplicable. Why has God created man? Why has he created him free, that is, capable of deciding his actions by his own will alone, in spite of the many external motives which seek to influence him, and in a world governed by fixed and inflexible laws? What is the nature and what the extent of the moral responsibility which, according to his own account, man as a free being incurs? What part was assigned to him, and what influence did God give him over his own life and his own destiny when he created him free? Is it possible that he assigned him no part at all, no influence at all, that beforehand and irrevocably he decided the life and fate of man whom he created free, as he did that of the material world which is governed by inflexible laws? Do we not borrow the terms of merely human language when we use the word prescience as applied to God,—God an eternal being, everywhere eternally present, to whom we cannot apply our notions of space and time, and of that succession of events in the midst of which our fleeting life passes? These are questions of supreme importance which we naturally ask ourselves, and which bear witness to the nobility of human nature, but which we are not permitted to answer; for in order to answer them we should need to know and comprehend God, his nature and his designs, as God knows and comprehends himself and his own actions. There is no answer to these questions; even in the midst of Christian light man must resign himself to Christian ignorance; all his knowledge of his own being and of the world around him will never give him a knowledge of God, or of the design of God in the creation of the world and of mankind.

And this brings me to Calvin's great mistake. He was much more engrossed in speculations concerning God than in the observation of mankind. God is, so to say, the fixed centre and starting-point of all his thoughts. He meditates and imagines, and if I dared I would say that he presents God to us, and describes him as if he knew him thoroughly, and had exclusive possession of him. He then summons man into the presence of God, and denies or calmly rejects everything in him which does not accord with or cannot be adjusted to the God whom he has conceived and depicted. He denies the free-will of man and affirms his predestination, because he imagines that man's free-will is opposed to the idea which he has formed of the omnipotence and omniscience of God, and that his predestination is necessary to it. Calvin had a very imperfect knowledge and understanding of man because he professed to know and understand too much about God.

I find proof in the works of Dr. Chalmers, the most eminent Protestant theologian of our time, a faithful follower of Calvin, and a man profoundly versed in science, that the state of Calvin's mind must, in fact, have been that which I have described; and that at first he was led to deny the free-will of man and affirm his predestination, in order to prove his assumed knowledge of the nature of God and of his design in creating the universe. I find the following passage in Chalmers' 'Institutes of Theology:'—