Book contents
- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture
- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 How to See in Early Modern Europe
- 2 True Spectatorship
- 3 Blind Idolatry
- 4 Corrective Lenses
- 5 Reforming Perception
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
3 - Blind Idolatry
Imagination and the Perceptual Effects of Sin
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2026
Book contents
- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture
- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 How to See in Early Modern Europe
- 2 True Spectatorship
- 3 Blind Idolatry
- 4 Corrective Lenses
- 5 Reforming Perception
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
This chapter interprets Calvin’s infamous claim that the human mind is a “perpetual factory of idols” through early modern theories of imaginative dysfunction unto delusion. Calvin’s charge of “idolatry,” including the institutionalized idolatry of the Catholic Mass, emerges as a targeted diagnosis of a condition that inverts the ideal of spectatorship – one in which a sinful imagination, left unchecked, generates corrupted phantasms that come to supplant external sense data, resulting in functional blindness to God’s sensible accommodations.
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- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture , pp. 126 - 180Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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