kuehnelt-leddihn calvin or rousseau

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The WesternDilemma:Calvin or Rousseau?

E R I K V 0 N IC U E H N E L T - L E D D I H N

INEARLY VERY ONE who saw the filmcalled The Third Man remembers a sar-donic gibe by one of the leading charac-ters: And what has Switzerland given tothe world? The cuckoo clock! Many, evenamong those who like and respect theSwiss, believe this to be the lamentabletruth. Switzerland, they tell themselves,may have excellent trains, clean well-man-aged hotels, an efficient postal system, andfine chocolate; but as for great ideas andhigher intellectual and cultural contribu-tions, it is too small and too materialisticto have achieved them, Such a view re-flects the monumental ignorance that char-acterizes so many of our contemporaries.As a matter of fact, Switzerland, situatedat the crossroads of Europe, has alwaysbeen an intellectual and spiritual power-house-not so much perhaps in the finearts but ,certainly in the domains of phi-losophy, technology, the natural sciences,

medicine, psychology, and above all, the-At the middle of this century the threemost influential theologians of the Re-formed Church were Swiss: Karl Barth,Emil Brunner and Oscar Cu1lmann.l In theageof the Reformation itself two of the threeleading Reformers worked and preached inSwitzerland. Indeed, were it possible to ex-cise from the map and from history just asingle Swiss city, our Western civilizationwould not be what it is, for by eliminatingGeneva we should eliminate two of themost powerful influences on the modernWestern mind: Jean Calvin, French-bornthough he was, and Jean Jacques Rousseau.Without the one the puritan capitalistwork ethics-Max Webers Protestan-tische Wirtschujtsethik-would probablynever have taken root, and without theother the course taken by the French Rev-olution would have been unthinkable.To understand the Western worlds di-lemma, itsvacillations between the Calvin-

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ist and the Roussellian way, one needsabove all a thorough understanding of thetrue significance of the Protestant Ref-ormation. It is too frequently regarded-asfor example in de Rochemonts film aboutLuther2-as the beginning of liberalismand democracy with their various sequels,such as the United Nations and medicare;yet it was, to the contrary, a conservativerevolution. The birth of the Reformationwas not in 1517, the date on which Luthernailed up his ninety-five theses, but a halfdozen years earlier in the winter of 1510-1511 which Luther spent in Rome. I t wasthere in the Eternal City that the GermanAugustinian friar made his first contactwith modernity. Before then he had en-countered Humanism only in its literaryform; in Rome he found himself face-to-face with the synthesis of Christianity andAntiquity, whereby the mediaeval conceptof the world as a circle with God as its ten-ter had been replaced by the concept of anellipse with two focal points-God andman. Luther had no patience with whatKarl Barth has called dus kutholische Und,the Catholic And. Neither could he ac-cept the Catholic-Humanist doctrine thateverything true, everything beautiful, what-ever its origin, had to be embraced and in-tegrated into the treasurehouse of Chris-tianity. To Luther the spirit and climate ofthe Renaissance were a treason to Christ.The new age, visibly perfected in Italy, wasthe revival of paganism; it represented atriumph of rationalism, estheticism, andsecularism, all of which he detested and re-jected.

Thus it is a mistake to think of Lutheras the first modern man-a designationmore appropriately applied to Nicholas ofCusa-or asmodern in any sense; ratherhe was a Gothic man who came from a verynew German university in a truly colo-nial area, for fromthewall of Wittenbergone could then look over the thatched roofs

of the cottages of the indigenous Slavic in-habitants. When Luther learned to hishorror that Ulrich Zwingli, one of the fewHumanists among the Reformers, believedin the possible salvation of pagans and waslooking forward to conversations withPlato, Aristotle, and other Greek sages inHeaven, he furiously denied Zwinglis rightto call himself a Christian. The other lead-ing Humanists of the epoch-Reuahlin,Erasmus, Adelsmann, Pirckheimer-alloriginally favorable to reformation, be-came fiercely anti-Lutheran as soon as theyrecognized the friars real position. Thusit is clear that the Reformation began as areaction against Humanism and the spiritof the Renai~sance.~n Germany the move-ment was distinctly illiberal and anti-intel-le~tual.~t supported royal absolutisms asagainst the later mediaeval conception ofthe monarch restrained by law, the princi-ple of rex sub lege; but at the same timeLutheranism was an organic outgrowth ofthe mediaeval spirit? While Catholicismmoved on from the Renaissance to theBaroque, and from the Baroque to theRococo,B the worldof the Reformation con-tinued to adhere to the Gothic style, to theold order and the common law. For a longtime the Reformed Church remained themost conservative force in Europe.

I T IS IMPOSSIBLE, of course, to think ofCalvin without Luther, yet the two are inmany ways different, though the differenceshave sometimes been wrongly evaluated.The patently fallacious notion of Luther asthe inaugurator of a liberal-democratic out-look has been transferred to Calvin. He hasbeen represented as the father of politicalliberties and of the right of resistance totyrannical rule. In reality, Calvins politi-cal attitudes were aristocratic or oligarchi-cal. He considered arbitrary government


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to be a chastisement divinely ordained, unire de die^^ to be endured with humilityand patience. In this he agreed entirelywith Luther. It was not until more than acentury after his death, that is until afterLouis XIVs revocation of the Edict ofNantes in 1685, that a Calvinist theory ofthe right to resistance, largely inspired byearlier Jesuit teachers, was developed byPierre Jurieu. As for predestination, weshould remember that Luther, too, was apredestinarian, as is shown in his essay Deservo arbitrio, although Melanchthon, an-other Humanist and an early ecumenist,made sure that Luthers position in thismatter was not incorporated into theAugs-burg Confession. Calvins view of predes-tination did not wholly erase the olderChristian tradition of free will, and thoughit was a strong factor in the shaping of theProtestant mnd: it never became thesame fatalistic force as Kismet in Islamicreligion. Western man may accept the ideaof belonging to an elect few: but hisdynamic nature does not allow him to thinkof himself as a mere puppet manipulatedby God. I t is significant that Karl Barth,founder of a neo-Calvinist orthodoxy, hasrejected Calvins theory of predestinati~n.~

Both Luther and Calvin were truewrestlers with Christ. The doctrines of bothwere strictly theocentric-more so, in asense, than those of the Catholic Church.The outlook of both was essentially monas-ticlo and, in Calvins case at least, decided-ly ascetic.ll Both were severe types, con-vinced that without strict discipline manis destined to founder because he is by na-ture a sinful wretch bent on mischief. Theycondemned those elements in the Catholictradition and temperament which wereanthropomorphic, sensual, artistic, person-alistic, intellectual and rational. The Catho-lic Counter-Reformation for its part wasfrequently inclined to take positions direct-ly opposite to those held by the Reformers.

IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY we en-counter in the Western world the twinphenomena of Rationalism and the En-lightenment, both derived from Catholicculture and civilization. Rationalism, as J .Bochenski has pointed out, is the grand-child of Scholasticism,12and the Enlighten-ment is a late product of the Renaissancespirit. Both emphasize the power and theglory of man. Both-to borrow the phraseof Romano Guardini-are expressions ofmenschliche Selbstbehuu.ptzmg, human self-assertiveness. The catastrophic consequenceof these two currents was the French Rev-olution. The genius of that revolution, asHegel wisely observed,lS finally triumphedin the Reformed rather than the Catholicorbit. The reason for this paradox was that,thanks to the character it had acquired inthe Renaissance,14 the Catholic world hadbeen vaccinatedt so to speak, against thenew ideological infection. The influence ex-erted by Rationalism and the Enlighten-ment had little or no permanent effect onthe Catholic world, but with the churchesof the Reformation it was another story.15There the influence was profound and di-visive; hereafter these churches developedin one or the other of two distinct direc-tions--ether along a line determined bythe deposit of faith established by theirfounders, or taking a radical turn awayfrom that line, following the roadof secularliberalism on to relativism. Since then al-most every Protestant church has hadtwo branches: an orthodox Christian-though not necessarily fundamentalist-branch and a secularized and relativist0ne.l

Thanks to this intrusion of the secular-and to a degree the Renaissance-Catholic-spirit into the post-Reformation world, wefind in the nineteenth century, though notuntil then, a growing belief that Protes-


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tant nations are somehow enlightened,progressive, advanced, intellectual and in-dividualistic, whereas Catholic nations areignorant, backward, uninventive, sterile,mediaeval, andso forth. Such views are dueto a profound confusion of facts in thesemantic order. The notion that Catholicslive under an ecclesiastical autocracy whichdenies them the pleasures of life is heldonly by those Protestants who no longershare the spiritual and cultural values ofthe Reformers but live instead in theshadow of liberal relativism. In the eyes ofa true Reformation-Christian the Catholicethos is one of Rum, Romanism, and Re-bellion, or, to put it in somewhat kind-lier terms, one of pagan joie de uivre, theRenaissance spirit, and anarchical inclina-tions. If you doubt this, just compare theviews expressed about the Catholic faith bya dominie of the Nederlandse Gereforme-erde Kerk in Groningen and those ex-pressed by a minister of the Marble Col-legiate Church on Fifth Avenue, New York.Y ou will find them diametrically opposed.The person chiefly responsible for thechange of outlook was that other J ean ofGeneva, Jean Jacques Rousseau, who fora brief periodof his youth had accepted theCatholic religion. His view of human na-ture was exactly opposite to Calvins.Whereas Calvin, the adopted son ofGeneva,17 had held that man is a creatureSO vile that his sins can be washed awayonly by the Blood of the Lamb, Rousseau,the native Genevois who lived most of hislife abroad, believed that man is by naturewholly good. If man shows signs of wick-edness, external circumstances alone are toblame: Man is born free, but he is every-where in chains. Everything, therefore,depends upon a right order. Rousseauisthephilosophical coordinator of a not-very-ra-tional rationalism and of an Enlighten-ment which, as we can now perceive, her-alded the coming of an ageof darkness. His

contradictory message consistsof an appealto mans innate goodness, especially in hisnatural stateas the noble savage, to,a con-cept of liberty which has a purely collec-tive character, and to a most unclearly de-fined political order which is entirely re-strictive. No wonder that his books wereburned at Geneva or that during theFrench Revolution his remains were trans-ferred to the Pantheon. Rousseau is the onewho anticipated the Grand Inquisitorsmessage to Christ in the Brothers Karama-

The time will come when mankind,through the mouth of its philosophersand scientists, will proclaim that thereis no such thing as crime, perhaps noteven sin, but only hungry people. On thebanner they will carry against Y ou willbe written: Feed them first and thenyou can ask virtue from them! andwith this they will destroy Your cathe-dral.The numberless contradictions in Rous-seaus thought merely reflect the con-tradictions in his per~onalityl~nd in theideas he spawned and which are still ef-fective today. Vague notions of freedomand of collective slavery, inherent in hisconcept of the wlontk gknkml , alternatewith exaggerated notions of the efficacy ofeducation. We must not forget that, withall his totalitarian ideas, Rousseau is per-haps not so much a child of the Enlighten-ment as the central figure in the Romanticmovement with its ambivalent veneration

for sophistication and simplicity, its adula-tion of philosophes, shepherdesses andpeasants, itscraving for absolutes combinedwith a latent anarchism, its sentimentalitycoupled with a trend toward the utmostbr~ta1ity.l~n fact, if we consider theantagonism between Classicism and Ro-manticism, as brilliantly formulated byIrving Babbitt,20we can say that if Calvinwas a classicist-which, unlike Luther, he

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certainly was--then Rousseau representsRomanticism par exce2lence.IV

THE D I L E M M A of Western Man, torn be-tween Calvin and Rousseau, is less percepti-ble in Europe than in the United States. Inthe Old World so many other painful al-ternatives offer themselves-Adam Smithversus Karl Marx, Burke and de Maistreversus Sade and Robespierre, the FirstRome versus the Second and Third-thatthe only real choice at issue, the occupiedtomb of Lenin versus the empty tomb ofChrist, is obscured. In the New World,however, where the tables of history are notrewritten over and over until they becomealmost illegible, the transition from Calvinto Rousseau stands out in stark relief. If wecall the American statesmen of the lateeighteenth century the Founding Fathersof the United States, then the Pilgrims andPuritans were the grandfathers and Cal-vin the great-grandfather. In saying this,one need not exclude the Virginians be-cause Anglicanism has essentially Calvinis-tic foundations still recognizeable in theThirty-nine Articles, and the Pilgrim Fa-thers, like the Puritans generally, repre-sented a kind of re-reformed Anglicanism.Though the fashionable eighteenth centuryDeism may have pervaded some intellectualcircles, the prevailing spirit of Americansbefore and after the War of Independencewas essentially Calvinistic in both itsbrighter and uglier aspects. They were ahard-working, frugal, plain-spoken, intense-ly nationalistic people,z1 aware and proudof their moral standards which included theProtestant work ethics.y22As a nation ofsuch virtues they aroused the admirationof the worldz3 and in their own self-esteemthey were convinced that their nation hada messianic mission to save the worldthrough a novusordo seclorum.

At the end of the eighteenth and the be-ginning of the nineteenth century religionplayed a much larger role in Americathan in Europe, not so much perhapsamong the intellectual and social leaders%as among the people generally. Pluralismwas not then the cant word it has becometoday, but it was much more the fact, andthe sectarian divisions served to strengthenrather than to weaken religious zeal. It isworth remembering that the Colonial warsagainst the French had something of thecharacter of crusades against Popish idol-atry and popular enthusiasm for the Warof Independence was helped along by abelief-absurd as it was-that George 111had secretly become a Catholic and by theQuebec Act of 1774, granting religioustoleration to French Canadians, which theColonists considered a direct threat to theirlibertie~.~~

American Catholics were for a long time,as was shown il l their puritanical ways,a tiny minority much influenced by theProtestant culture that surrounded them,their religious sobriety, their clericalismz6and legalism and total acceptance of Thom-istic theology.2 They were at the same timeculturally Calvinistic and intellectuallymediaeval2* and this was the occasion ofmany misunderstandings between them andtheir Continental European coreligionists.To many American and Irish-AmericanCatholics the Italian immigrants seemedmore pagan than Christian. Indeed, asEverett Dean Martin has pointed out, theAmerican spirit was-and to a small extentstill is-more mediaeval than modern. D.H. Lawrence came to much the same con-clu~ion.*~ artin thought the Americanwas not a modern man because he hadmissed the liberalizing influences of theRenaissance;Lawrence maintained that theRenaissance influence was precisely whatthe Pilgrim Fathers had fled from. Beforethe First World War most colleges and uni-

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versities, some banks and a good many mil-lionaires palaces were built in the Gothicstyle and some skyscrapers had Gothic pin-nacles. Even the so-called Gothic letterswere deemed to have a sacred characterand were favored for religious inscriptionsand the advertising of liturgical objects.But perhaps the contrast between theGothic American and the RenaissanceEuropean may be best understood by com-paring the faces and figures in GrantWoods famous work of portraiture withthe baptized goddess in BotticellisBirthof Venus.While European peoples within theCatholic orbit generally pursued the sweet-ness of life, the United States, thanks to itsCalvinist psychology and virtues, becamea world power. The Spanish-American Warand its aftermath marked the radical turn-ing point. Under the banner of John Cal-vin the American saga began to unfold.Forgotten were the days when the aid oftwo Catholic monarchs, Louis XVI ofFrance and Charles I11OF Spain, had beeneagerly welcomed by the nascent Republic.When in 1917 the United States came tothe rescue of the Anglo-French Alliesagainst the Catholic-Lutheran Central Pow-ers, French Calvinist writers expressed theirsatisfaction and delight.30 George D. Her-ron, Woodrow Wilsons left hand in foreignpolicy and perhaps his chief ideologist, per-suaded him to propose Geneva as the seatof the League of Nations because it was thesource and origin of both puritan theologyand the French Revolutionary dynamism.31It was a symbolic indication that theUnited States, although still Calvinist inspirit, was already on the steep and slipperyroad laid out by Rousseau in theDiscoursesand The Social Contract. The descent to amoral and political Avernus had begun.

VOF COURSE the American propensity to

withdraw from Calvin toward Rousseau didnot begin just yesterday. Some aspects ofJeffersons thought are distinctly Roussel-lian and we find still stronger evidences inThomas Paine, a champion of the FrenchRevolution. The cult of deism is violentlyopposed to the Calvinist ideas of God. Free-masonry, a considerable factor in theAmerican Revolution, is decidedly deisticin temper, and its conception of human na-ture is much more Catholic than Protes-tant, that is to say much closer to theRenaissance than to the mediaeval notionof the condition of man. Yet the Americanretreat from Calvin was never a completeone, nor is it so even today. His influencecontinues to run like a dark, subterraneanstream through the American subconscious-ness. The presence of Maistre J ehan of theGenevan theocracy can be felt throughoutall great American literature and to a less-er degree through all other forms of Ameri-can artistic expression. For all their super-ficial optimism, Americans cannot whollyrid themselves of the notion that man is awretched creature totally crippled by Orig-inal Sin and that Gods grace alone cansave him. Beneath all the frenetic activity,the restless pursuit of pleasure, a certainsomberness pervades American life andfinds expression in a folk music which isprofoundly Calvinistic, expressing in itsown way what J acques Chardonne, a Cath-olic, has called les terribles vkritds chrk-tienne~.~o doubt Calvinism gives anenormous impetus to those who believethemselves to be saved, to be among thepredestined elect-a belief held collectivelyby the American people. But the Calvinistdoctrine of election and reprobation canalso crush the lesser souls, those troubledby an inferiority complex; hence the bitterand biting nature of poverty in all coun-tries where the Reformed Faith and itsethics prevail, and where the pauper andthe beggar are outcasts.


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A delayed historical reaction, however,caused a large sector of American thoughtto be deflected in a direction opposite toCalvinism. The prevailing temper becameone of buoyant optimism which made it-self felt even in the national folklore. Thiswas in harmony with the new politicaltrend toward egalitarian democracy whichthe Founding Fathers in 1787 had sensedand rejected, a fact that is too often will-fully ignored. The popular distinctionsdrawn between Jeff ersonian and Jacksoniandemocracy33 ought not to obscure the factthat Washington, Hamilton, Adams, Gouv-erneur Morris, and Fisher Ames were ashostile in their way to democracy-and tothe French Revolution-as were later thediehards of the Holy Alliance, though forsomewhat different reasons. But throughoutmost of the nineteenth and all of the twen-tieth century we can observe the gradualdemocratization of the American Constitu-tion concurrent with the psychologicaldemocratization of American society inwhich wealth and learning hadonce35played an important part. The Rous-sellian notion that man by nature is intelli-gent and good, that he is politically knowl-edgeable and responsible, began step bystep, to permeate the American outlook.Americans began to consider themselvesmasters of an Island of the Blessed wherethese self-evident truths were recagnizedand understood. The picture of Europe asacontinent whose shores were teeming withwretched refuse enslaved and oppressedby kings, aristocrats and priests becamean addition to American folklore, thoughit was never accepted by such hardy spiritsas Herman Melville, 1rvir.S Babbitt, andH.L . M en~ken.~~

By the middle of the twentieth centurytlle deification of the Common Man,heralded by his prophet Henry Wallace,was complete. The ancient moral disciplineswere replaced by a new gospel of permis-

siveness. For Calvins Soli Dei Gloria wassubstituted the worship of human agglom-erates, entire races, entire nations, entireclasses-or, by contrast, the worship of thealienated individual, the non-hero. If thereis anything wrong with any of these,whether collectively or individually, thefault is not in themselves but in externalcircumstances-in economic oppression,faulty education, traumata due to minoritystatus, exclusion from clubs, fraternitiesand sororities, inadequate sexual outlets,socially imposed tabus, authoritarian fa-thers, run-down neighborhoods, unsuitabletoilet facilities, lack of recreational oppor-tunities, ethnic discriminations, and so onad infinitum.

For all its predestinarianism, Calvinismhad fostered an ascetic manner of life.Though God may have decided from thebeginning of time just who was to be savedand who was not, mankind was never ab-solved from the duty of at least striving foreternal happiness through prayer, hardlabor, and the chastening of appetites, byseverity to oneself and charity to others, byobedience, discipline and the reading andfollowing of the Holy Scripture, by recep-tion of the two sacraments and by generalpersonal saintliness. In Calvins eyes man,though inescapably born into sin, wasnevertheless a responsible creature. InRousseaus eyes, man is at once good andirresponsible-a creature of circumstance.Though nature may permit physical andintellectual inequalities, one man is essen-tially as good as another, a notion nowdeeply imbedded in American folklore. Awayward Christian theology has indorsedthe notion by asserting that we are allequal in the sight of God. But the Scrip-tures speak nowhere of equality; we aregiven varying amountsof Grace. Christ didnot love all his disciples equally, and ifJudas had been admitted to be the equalof St. John, Christianity would have had


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to close shop. There is no equality inHeaven, nor for that matter in Purgatory,but there may very well be equality inHell, where it belongs.3TIt is sad to reflect that the gradual trans-fer of the Christian imagination from theCalvinistic to the Roussellian concept ofhuman nature has been fostered by variousdenominations, especially in their liberalbranches, and that it has been accompaniedby a smuggling of secularism into theirtheologies. Instead of leading their flocks,the clergy began to follow the seculartrends, heedless of Chestertons warning

that the Church is the only thing that savesus from the degrading slavery of becomingchildren of our times. In this respect theCatholic Church, too, in America and else-.where has failed her followers. In hercounter-reformatory zeal, she ran fullspeed away from Calvinism, only to haveher apologists end too often in the arms ofJean Jacques.The constant, lachrymose chatter aboutthe dignity of man is depressing. Ofcourse it exists, but it can easily be for-feited. Dignity is something that must beregained every day; it is not to be taken fornor is it to be automatically con-ceded to every little windbag or to everyscoundrel great and small.In some Catholic theological quarters oflate there has been a respectful revaluationof the personality and teachings of MartinLuther. A similar reassessment of JohnCalvin would be a more dimcult matterboth doctrinally and psychologically, forwhere Luther was choleric but warm-hearted, Calvin was hard, cold and bal-anced. Still, it has been Calvin rather thanLuther who has had enduring significanceand has changed the world; and as betweenCalvin-after all a Christian theologian of

genius-and Rousseau the pagan philo-sophe, there should be no doubt aboutwhich merits the appreciation of Catholics.

VIIT IS I N the social and political spheresthat the shift of loyalties from the religiousreformer to the philosophic romanticisthas wrought the greatest mischief. In theconduct of both domestic and foreign af-fairs the actual or potential wickedness ofhuman nature is willfully overlooked, Sincenobody anywhere is deemed really guiltyof anything, social conditions must be con-stantly criticized and corrected; thus onenoble experiment follows upon the failureof another, a good example being thesocialist experiments in Soviet Russia. Thathuman beings can be lazy, deceitful,avaricious, envious, spiteful, and just plainstupid is apparently never allowed to enterthe neo-Roussellian mind. Original Sin andits manifestations are, of course, at thecoreof the Calvinist theology. The dominantCatholic doctrine on the subject is lesssevere: Man is deprived of his extra-ordinary gifts and wounded in his nature.We are left with an enfeebled will, adarkened understanding, and a strong in-clination to evil. With the aid of gracesought and obtained, however, the inclina-tion may be resisted, thus allowing thepos-sibility of salvation by free choice as wellasby divine election. But the contemporarytendency is toward a total rejection of thedoctrine. In placeof a mankind corrupt bynature we are given an image of man asnaturally good, sometimes weak perhaps,but aspiring always to goodness, truth andbeauty. Since the evident facts so oftencontradicted this pleasant theory, it wasnecessary to democratize it. Majorities arealways good, always right, were it not forthe existence of inimical minorities-aristocrats, capitalists, Jews, priests, gen-erals, bankers, manufacturers, certainpoliticians or certain intellectuals, a5 occa-sion may require. The majority, represent-ing the average, consists, as the popular

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idiom would have it, of the good guys, theminority, representing the exceptional few,of the bad 0nes.3~The doctrine of thevolonte?ginkrde allows no room for minor-ities and all the ideological movementsstemming out of the French Revolution-Jacobin democracy, socialism, communism,fascism, national socialism-are theoreti-cally intolerant of them. The notion of aninfallible majority ruling by a kind of di-vine right has become part of the Americanpolitical and social folklore; hence thesuspicion of conspiracies by the few. TheNuremberg trials, for example, were basedon the charge of a conspiracy by theNazis, though everyone knows, or shouldknow, that the Nazis were the largest partyin Germany, voted for by the good peoplein free elections, and so came to power bythe democratic process. Similarly, theItalian Communists today are hoping togain power by the democratic process,without a conspiracy, without a revolution.The attitude of most Americans andmany Europeans toward conditions inLatin America affords another example ofdistorted political perspectives. To theliberal mind it seems obvious that the socialstructure in Latin America must be allwrong since the virtuous masses there arefrustrated in their effort to find workthat will earn them better living standards,and are therefore turning to communism,just as the exploited Italian masses havedone. The truth isthat virtually all the lead-ers of the radical leftist movements in LatinAmerica are the children of oligarchs or ofthe bourgeoisie; the massesso far have re-mained unmoved by them. Nor have themasses shown much enthusiasm for thebourgeois way of life or the bourgeoisvirtues of hard work and thrift. Our con-temporaries tend to cling to the unhistoricnotion that history is strictly rational, thataction and reaction follow in a logical andmathematical fashion.'O The superstition

underlying this belief is again RousseUian,though it also derives in part fromacertainCatholic naivetk which has placed too muchemphasis on the Aristotelian and Scholasticconcept of man as a rational animal. Thenotion of a "communism of the stomach"fits easily into the concept. So does the in-terpretation of the Bolshevik revolution asa reaction fo Czarist oppression, as a re-bellion of landless peasants against feudallandlords. Yet except for Kalinin and Dy-benko, none of the Bolshevik leaders of1917-20 was a proletarian. The leaderswere nobles like Lenin and his wife, likeChicherin, Dzerzhinski, Lunacharski andAlexandra Kollontay, or Jewish bourgeoislike Trotsky, or ex-seminarians like Stalinand Mikoyan. Besides it was not the Bol-sheviks that overthrew the Russian mon-archy; that was largely the work of otherliberal-democratic elements. In 1917, more-over, only 23 percent of the arable land inRussia-as compared to 55percent in GreatBritain- belonged to large landowners.

VITHEBELIEF that man is good and becomesbad only in desperation is utter nonsense.The Portuguese proverb, Custigo o born,mlhorara', casdgo mao, peorara'-"Pun-ish a good man and he becomes better, pun-ish a bad man and he becomes worsey'-isfar more realistic; suffering separates thewheat from the chaff. One must face thefact that man is a sinner, that he is weakand inclined to be wicked. No scientific orphilosophical preparation is needed torecognize this sad truth: all we need do islook into our own lives and into our ownsouls to realize that we have at least thepotentiality for great evil. This is some-thing that the neo-Roussellian, whether ademocrat, a socialist, a communist or ananarchist, wishes to ignore. He prefers tobelieve in the inexhaustible capacity of

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man for good. The liberal Roussellian ex-pects him to achieve it through a boundlesspermissiveness, the illiberal Roussellianwould have him find it in systems andutopias. But total dissolution and total regu-lation both mean death.

Political, social, and economic history,even the history of religions, shows usclearly that though saintliness and altruismdo exist in the world, the prevalence ofenvy, malice, hatred, cruelty and avaricecan never be safely ignored.41 Nor does his-tory give any assurance that the good willeventually triumph. Good governments aswell as bad have been destroyed in revolu-tions, good rulers and statesmen have beenmurdered, scoundrels and monsters havesucceeded, evil causes have prevailed. Bycomparing Luthers concept of this worldas des Teufels Wirtshaus, the Devils Inn,and Rousseaus concept of the limitless per-fectibility of man on earth, it becomesevi-dent where both the lesser error and thegreater arrogance lie.

We are living today in an age of Rous-sellian triumphalism. Bolshevism is onlyone evidence of its victory; another is the

The three most outstanding living CatholicSwiss theologians of world fame are Hans Ursvon Balthasar, Otto K arrer and the controversialHans K iing.The F rankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung remarkingon the complete lack of modem scholarship whichcharacterized ths film, called it Der amerikanischeLuther, the very caricature of the Reformer.On the profoundly Christian character of theRenaissance and Luthers reactions cf. H. W. Riis-sel, Gestalt eines christlichen Humanismus (Am-sterdam: Pantheon, 19401, esp. pp. 142-147; G.Toffanin, Storia del umanesimo (Rome: Perella,1940) ; Fred BBrence, La Ren&sance ltalienne(Paris: La Colombe, 1954), p. 16.

The resistance of the German universities (anduniversity cities) to Lutheranism iswell describedby Herbert SchGffler, Die Reformation (Frankfurt:V . K lostermann, n.d.1, pp. 20, 42, 50.

hippie movement of the intellectual Lum-penproletariat. Rousseau is the grandfatherof the concentration camps and also ofthose armed brothels that we continue tocall universities. We have with us on onehand the Old Left, a finished product of1 Cducation sentimentale, with its bent forsocial engineering and its tendency to iden-tify its own plans and policies with thevdantd genkrale; on the other the NC WLeft which has taken up the slogan Re-tournons ci l a nature! exemplified in therabble of unwashed, unkempt, debauched,unbridled ignoble savages who look to theThird World of the underdeveloped for in-spiration. Its heroes are Chairman Maowith his Little Red Book, Ch6 Guevara,Ho Chi Minh, Holden Roberto, the Harlemcriminals and the pistol-packing priests.The New Left will continue its game untilits time is up, and that will be either whenthe Roussellian dissolution engulfs us all or-as we should rather hope-when out ofthe deeper recesses of the American sub-conscious memories of the other Genevoisrises to a new life. That will be a new dayfor Maistre Jehan, a great day and a bitterone for the rest of us.

In Catholic American colleges the character ofthe Reformation was always taught the other wayround. A ll this went with an ex c k v e and nzivepraise of the M iddle Ages (versus the wickedRenaissance). J ames J . Walshs The Thirteenth,Greatest of Centuries was then the most popularbook. (Heaven knows what it is today!)T h e greatest praise for the Renaissance andthe strongest criticism of the M iddle A ges writ-ten by a Catholic are perhaps contained in Gio-vanni Papinis Limitazione del padre. Saggi sulRinascimento (Florence: L e Monnier, 19421, pp.4-5, 8-9, 18-19, 27.C. Calvin, Institutions, I V, xx, 25.V e put this term in brackets as it is a termof opprobrium invented in the sixteenth centuryby the Counter-Reformers who began to use i tmore generally a hundred years later. I t has noofficial standing on the European continent. The

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explanation that Protestant comes from pro-tes-tare, i.e. to stand witness is a nineteenth centurylegerdemain.Cf . H. U. v. Balthasar, Kml Barth. Darstellungund Deutung seiner Theologie (Cologne: JakobHegner, 19511,p. 186.Sehastian Franck (J 499.1543) exclaimed thatone merely thought to have escaped the monasterybut now everybodv had to he a monk. Cf. A.Riistow, Ortsbestirnmung der Gegenwart (Erlen-bach: Rents&., 1952), Vol. 2, p. 291. It is. however.significant that the revival of monasticism amongthe Reformation faiths came primarily from Cal-vinists-vide TaizC.On Geneva under Calvin and his successors cf.F. W. K arnpschulte, J ohann Calvin. Seine Kircheund sein Stnnt in Genf (1;eipzig: Duncker undHumblot, 1869 and 18991, 2 vols esp. Vol. 1: p.444 sq.Cf. I . M. Bochenski. Der sozujetrussi.de dia-lektische Materialisrniu (Bern: Francke, 1956), p.34. Cf . F. W. Hegel. Philosophie der Geschichtein Werke (Berlin: Duncker und Humhlot, 1948),Vol. 9, pp. 541-542.We should sav that without a real grasp ofthe Renaissance and the Baroque spiri t an under-standing of the Catholic world i s well -nigh impos-sible. T he only Catholic conntry which has escapedthese influences, significantly enough, is Ireland.7 n German L utheranism auricular confession(which Luther himself practiced to his dying day)fell victim to Enlightenment. It was revived andreinstated only in 1956.I t is one of the common errors of the Ameri-can Catholic who ignores the very healthy survivalof the former (though in a certain isolation fromthe hi2 world). to see in the latter the real repre-sentative of Protestantism. No wonder, becausehe stil l believes that Luther stood for private in-terpretation. L uther did nothing of the sort. Woeto the man who dismeed with him!On Calvin and Rousseau cf. also A. M. Cor-nelissen, Calvijn en Rousseau (Nijmwegen-Utrecht:Dekker, 1931 and Corrado Eggers-L ecour, Cal-rino y Rousseau o la amhivalencia ginebrina i nRazdn y F6, VoI. 165 (May I 962), pp. 481-494.Rousseau who had written so beautifully oneducation put all his children into an orphanage.R e could not be bothered with them.On M an as an organic product of GermanRomanticism cf. Ernst Kux, Karl Marx. Die revo-lutionare Konfession (Erlenbach: Rentsch, 1967).J iving Babbitt, Rousseacl and Romanticism(Boston: Houghton Mifftin, 1919).9 s there a connection between the theatricalfigure of Chauvin (Chauvinism) and Calvin? T hemeaning of the L atin-French word is originallythe same.=The attitudes of Jefferson and Franklintowards money were similaF--counting, calculating,cautious.

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WJ efferson, too, was convinced that the UnitedStates (due to its agrarian character but also forother reasons) was more virtuous than Europewhere nascent republicanism identified virtue asthe essence of the republic while the monarchicsystem was depraved. Honesty, forti tude, chasti-ty, veracity became vertus republicaines.A lexander Hamilton, however. seems to havebeen a truly religious man. This is evident fromhis fatewell letter to his wife before his duel withAaron Burr. Cf. The Basic Ideas of A , Hamiltonedited by R. B. Morris (N.Y .: Pocket L ibrary,1957) p. 451.Cf . Ray A llen Billington. The Protestant Cru-sade 1800-1860 (New Y ork: Macmillan, 19381,p. 17 and John C Miller, Origins of the AmericanRevolution (Boston: L ittle Brown, 1943), pp. 190-191, 373-374.

mGenuine clericalism exists only in decapi-tated societies where the priests can assume thefunction of the First and Second Estate. For thisreason clericalism existed or exists in Ireland, Hol-land, French Canada, Slovenia, Slovakia, hut neverin Spain, Bavaria etc.is significant that there were in the UnitedStates during the nineteen-forties, nineteen-fiftiesthree Catholic theological reviews called M odemSchoolman, New Scholasticism and The Thomist.T o uphold a non-Thomist view in Catholic circleswas considered extremely rash if not down-rightheretical. Today the fashion aims at the other ex-treme.=There were several Catholic clubs in theUnited States calling themselves The Medievalists.T f . Everett Dean Martin, Liberty (New York:W. W. Norton, 1930), pp. 79 and 81; D. H. Lawr-ence. Studies in Classic American Literature (NewY ork: Doubleday, 19531, p. 15.mCf. Emile Doumergue, Calvin et 1Entente deWilson i Calvin in Revue de M etaphysique et deMorale, Vol. 25 (Sept.-Dec. 1918).YX. Herrons L etter to the President, datedMarch 20. 1919. In the Herron Papers, Box ofDocum. W a. (Hoover Institute, Stanford.) Hewrote: We are in the hounds of historic truthwhen we say that the Puritan Revolution, theFrench Revolution, the American Revolution, allhad their springs in Geneva. Indeed, they had,but Calvin and Rousseau were two different menand Cotton Mather no more than George Washing-ton would have accepted Danton as brother underthe skin.T her e is a tombstone at the Stadtpfarrkirchein Klagenfurt which carries the inscription NASCI,PATI. MORI. To see the switch from Calvinist se-riousness (and Christian devotion) to modemhedonism (and il lusionism) one must compareancient New England graveyards with modem

hlemorial Parks.asJ ackson was undoubtedly a democrat, but theposition of J efferson is by no means clear. In al lhis collected works (Washington edition) he only


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once spoke out (indirectly) in favor o democracywhen in a letter to Dupont de Nemours he calledthe temper of the American people democratic.Y et in a letter to Mann Page (Aug. 30, 1795) hespoke about ilie swinish multitudes Cf. TheIFritings of Thomas J efferson,Ed. P. L. Ford (NewY ork: Putnam) 1896, Vol. 7, p. 24. His outlookwas essentially elitarian and he proposed theestah-lishment of harems so that superior men (likehimself), could have a large progeny. Cf. L. J .Cappon. The Adam-J ejerson Letters (Chapel Hill:U of N. Carolina Pres, 19591, Vol, 2, p. 387.%OnAmerica in the early nineteenth centurycf. Francis J . Grund, Ar&OCTQCy i n America (NewYork: Harper Torchbook, 19. 591, passim.

W chard Hofstadter, Anti-intellectualism inAmerican Life (L ondon: J onathan Cape, 19641,passi mToday it ought to be evident to all and sundrythat suppression by such enlightened and un-crowned leaders as the late AdoIf HiIter or Jo-seph Stalin, Fidel Castro or Ma0 Tse-tung, ErnestGerii or Antonin Novotny was worse than that ofkings in times bygone.

g7E~al i tynvoked by our theologians is usuallyadverbial equali ty. We have equally souls (hut, ofcourse, not equal souls), we are equally childrenof God (but not equal children of God). etc. Ifwe have equally banking accounts, it does notmean by any means that we have equal bank ac-counts.T could, however, be argued that in no politi-cal system is the dignity of man so challenged than

ae

precisely i n those stemming from the French Revo-lution, i.e. those inspired by Rousseau. Democra-cy belong3 into the same group. Here man is amelo cypher, an arithmetical, not an algebraicunit. Long ago Aristotle remarked that men indcmocracies are counted by numbers and not ac-cording to worth.Locke was convinced that right is what themajority wills-what the majority wills is right.C. Willmoore K endall , John Locke and the Doc-trine of M ajority Rule, in I l l i n o i s Studies in theSocial Scfences, Vol. 26, No. 2 (1941), p. 132. Thisnotion is very Roussellian. It would certainly nothave been shared by V oltaire who belonged to theEnlightenment, but not to Romanticism. His con-tempt for Rousseau was impressive. Cf. his ex-change of letters with dA lembert in Oeuvres corn.plbes de Voltaire (Paris: SociBt6 L ittBraire, 1785),V d. 68.

The worst upheavals in Latin A merica aretaking place in that former Model-State, the LatinAmerican Switzerland-Uruguay. Thi s is a strictlydereligionized welfare state with a very balancedsocial structure. There are neither grave social norracial problems. The leaders of the terroristic Tu-pumaros. however, are sons (and daughters) ofwell-to-do or even rich families. The Tuparnarosare called after Tupac Amaru, an Indian-Peruvianeighteenth century rebel . . . . but there are noIndians in Uruguay.%nVy according to the late Earl Bertrand Rus-sell is the driving motor of democracy. C. hisThe Conquest of Happiness (New Y ork: HoraceL iveright, 19301, pp. 83-84.

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kuehnelt-leddihn calvin or rousseau

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