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
4 - Corrective Lenses
Faith, Doctrine, and Perceiving God after The Fall
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 tests the proposed “perception versus delusion” framework across a broad swath of the Institutes, tracing how familiar doctrinal loci – including faith, illumination, union with Christ, the law, justification, and predestination – gain new coherence within an itinerary of perceptual rehabilitation. The result is a composite picture of how Calvin’s God choreographs accommodations, supernatural help, and even human interventions like doctrine to enable fallen humans to approximate the perceptual ideal of spectatorship unto piety outlined in Chapter 2, but to do so under the conditions of imaginative dysfunction described in Chapter 3.
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- Calvin and Perception in Early Modern Visual Culture , pp. 181 - 233Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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