The Latin cognate for the English word ‘tradition’ is traditio, which means a teaching or instruction, the delivery of a possession or a saying handed down from earlier times. Yet, traditio can also refer to a giving over in treachery. In fact, traditio is the common etymological root not only for the English ‘tradition’, but also for ‘treason’. In a way that may seem paradoxical, traditio can signify both fidelity and betrayal. Traditio can signify both of these contrary acts because it is a noun derived from a verb – tradere – that refers merely to the movement of handing over. The noun, therefore, refers to a complicated ‘thing’ that exists as a gesture or movement involving at least three entities: a giver, a receiver and the thing given and received. To enter the choreography of ‘tradition-ing’ at all requires making a break – reaching out to grasp something and handing it on, a moment of vulnerability when the object might get dropped or resignifed by the new hands it enters. This entails risk. Yet, to treat traditio as a marker of a stable identity, as a static object, is to forget not only the rich history of the term's use but also the discourse on pedagogy that grew up around it.
It is unfortunate, I think, that this is precisely how ordinary users of English are likely to hear and use the term: as a noun referring to a more-or-less static thing – a thing that is either accepted or rejected, a thing used to determine the identity of particular group. For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘tradition’ as the thing ‘handed down’, rather than as the act of handing down. It then proceeds to give a second specifically theological definition: ‘[Tradition is] a particular doctrine, which is not stated in scripture but which is believed to have comparable authority, having been transmitted orally or by other non-written means.’Footnote 1 Here, tradition is a thing that takes the form of an authoritative doctrine – a fixed teaching – that can be distinguished from or opposed to scripture. To the right kind of reader, this definition bears certain marks, or perhaps scars, of the sixteenth-century struggles over ecclesial-political reform in Europe. To the extent that these struggles involved negotiations over competing models of authority, many Protestant reformers drew on a humanist ad fontes (‘to the sources!’) impulse to critically elevate scriptural authority over the ‘mere traditions’ of ecclesial-scholastic authority. It is not surprising to find that the citations for the OED’s theological definition are drawn heavily from early modern English sources produced in the wake of reform.Footnote 2
This article returns to a collection of theological sources from disparate times and places to remember an older, more fluid sense of traditio that I argue is not only found in but formative of a variety of major Christian theological sources. I look in particular at the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformer Jean Calvin, his preferred theological authority Augustine who wrote a millennium prior, and briefly at the Greek New Testament itself, showing that each demonstrates a fundamental interest in Christian teaching as participation in active divine pedagogy. This, I argue, evidences the more dynamic conception of traditio as tradere, or a discourse on how a human being faithfully participates in what is properly a divine giving-and-receiving. This conception of tradition as pedagogy is worth remembering both for its theological and its critical merit.
Theologically, attending to the dynamics of Christian pedagogy in this way accomplishes two important things. First, it recalls the extent to which two of the most impactful Christian theological writers, whose respective work spanned a millennium, employed a dynamic notion of Christian teaching explicitly as a practice of reception – one that echoes the New Testament use of tradere’s Greek equivalent, paradidomi. Second, attention to dynamic pedagogy deeply informs, perhaps even recasts, our range of options for interpreting doctrinal claims. If the genre of doctrinal argument is designed to facilitate the proper posture of passing and receiving revealed divine teaching – scripture, but also the incarnation itself – then doctrinal loci cannot be read as stand-alone claims, nor can they be used to statically identify either the boundaries of, or the proper members of, a ‘tradition’.
On a critical level, attention to the pedagogical dynamics underwriting doctrinal arguments helps to recast the way in which doctrines (and the traditions they supposedly identify) are used to fund secularisation arguments.Footnote 3 Max Weber, Carl Schmitt and Karl Löwith are only three of the most famous theorists who have forwarded some form of the argument that theological doctrines have fixed structures that have become secularised into modern institutions or social imaginaries.Footnote 4 My intent here is not to dispute the merit of these kinds of arguments. While I agree with critics from Hans Blumenberg to Peter Gordon, who argue that causal accounts of secularised ideas tend to suffer from oversimplifications, I do find it plausible that statically rendered theological doctrines can and do play a role in shaping and reinforcing broader institutional and methodological patterns of thinking. When doctrines are understood to be fixed ideas with fixed structures, they can be more easily extracted from a field of practice and transferred to other social domains.Footnote 5 For this reason, it is important for those of us who work with theological sources to be able to draw out the complexities and nuances of doctrinal arguments in order to supply critical tools for critiquing not only the content of secularisation narratives, but also – and more importantly – their consequences.
One of the most notorious of the ideas found in these narratives is the doctrine of election, or predestinarian soteriology. The concept is found in both Calvin's and Augustine's thinking, and it has evident support in the New Testament itself. For centuries, the doctrine has been criticized for fundamentally disrupting systems of ethical recognition and moral desert, as well as for undermining the logical grounds for pursuing moral self-improvement.Footnote 6 More recent critics are furthermore attuned to the way this theological imaginary has reinforced claims to national, cultural, economic and/or racial chosenness, thereby funding the logic of colonial enterprises, Manifest Destiny, free-market determinism and White Supremacy.Footnote 7
To cover this constellation of concerns over tradition, pedagogy, doctrine and the ethical effects of secularisation, this article will proceed in two distinct parts. In the first, I look at how Calvin frames the relationship between traditional teaching (doctrina) and scripture. By reading key passages of the 1559 Institutio closely, I resist the assumption that he maintains an axiomatic distinction between scripture and doctrine, and argue instead that his anxiety over fallen faculties and idolatry leads him to construct a complex pedagogical relationship between the revelation of Christ through scripture and the activity of teaching and learning such revelation enables. I then draw out resonances between this position and that of Augustine, on whom Calvin drew liberally, starting with a brief look at how both authors echo the biblical use of tradere’s Greek equivalent, paradidomi, in order to construct a pedagogy around the necessity of human receptivity.
In the second part, I turn to the doctrine of election as a case study for how pedagogy recasts the operation of doctrinal arguments. Specifically, I show how the doctrine of election carries out an important function within the larger choreography of tradere. I then argue that this reading should give us pause before conceding that the doctrine can serve as an identifier of either ‘the Augustinian/Calvinist tradition’ or – ipso facto – as a conceptual structure congenial to shaping secular imaginaries of innate superiority.
The dynamic of tradition
If a novice reader were to begin the 1559 Institutio Christianae Religionis at the beginning, uninitiated in the common assumptions over Calvin's outsized role as a Protestant reformer, she might not immediately peg him as an advocate of scripture versus tradition.Footnote 8 In the preface to that final edition, Calvin first presents himself as a doctor (doctor) of the church whose task is the pure teaching (doctrina) of piety. Scripture does not make an appearance until the end of the preface, where it appears not as the overriding authority, but as a divinely given tool to mediate the larger exercise of doctrina.Footnote 9
This theme continues into the opening chapters of the text. From the opening sentence, Calvin's theological writing is directed toward a distinctly pedagogical dilemma: namely, how one can attain ‘knowledge of God and ourselves’ (cognitio Dei et nostri)? Calvin makes two things clear from the outset. First, he emphasises that this relational cognitio between the divine and human is ‘joined by many bonds’. It is not merely rational or epistemic but also grounded in the sense and affective faculties that refer creatures to their Creator (Inst. 1.1.1–2).Footnote 10 The second thing is that human beings are fallen, and the inherited fall into sin fundamentally distorts sense perception, thinking and feeling. So although ‘there is no one spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern at least some marks of [God's] glory’, and although those sparks still inhere in the human cognitive and bodily faculties, the effects of sin nevertheless cause human beings to constantly misperceive things and misunderstand the relationships that give them meaning. This, in turn, leads to a spiralling affective cycle of pride and dread – one that entices humans to erect idols as false and flattering comforts (Inst. 1.5.1; 1.15.3; 1.11).
The fallen condition thus represents a basic challenge to the enterprise of learning, because it calls into question the human ability to progress in genuine knowledge acquisition without spinning off into distortion and self-deception. Only after Calvin sets up this pedagogical dilemma over five chapters does he introduce scripture – and the way he does so is telling. In the sixth chapter of the Institutio, scripture is presented as the privileged accommodation through which God comes to our aid, providing us with a tool to accommodate our fallen faculties towards genuine learning. Enabled by the work of grace by the Spirit and through the incarnation, scripture allows human beings to hear the pure preaching of the Word, and thus to begin learning to perceive things rightly and to recognise their relationships to one another, ‘once more know[ing] God as Father’ (Inst. 1.6.1, 1.6.3, 2.6.1).Footnote 11
Along the way, however, Calvin does offer several arguments that seem particularly evocative of sixteenth-century polemics over the nature of church authority, and which, read in isolation, could reinforce the perception that he views ‘tradition’ as uniquely vulnerable to idolatry while ‘scripture’ is not. In fact, there are two moments in these early chapters where he appears to make this kind of argument. First, after having made the case that the fallen misrecognition of creation generates a vicious cycle of dread and pride that lead to sin and idolatry, Calvin argues that this situation requires a special intervention. If fallen human beings are to advance in learning, they can only do so with the help of a direct witness – an authority with the capability to disrupt the problem at its root. So Calvin asks,
[Who] could so acquiesce in decrees of his ancestors, or enactments of the people, as to receive without hesitation a god humanly taught him? Each person will stand upon his own judgment rather than subject himself to another's decision. Therefore, since either the custom of the city or the agreement of tradition (traditio) is too weak and frail a bond of piety to follow in worshiping God, it remains for God himself to give witness of himself from heaven. (Inst. 1.5.13)Footnote 12
Here, traditio appears as a noun to present a contrast to the exceptional self-witness of God.
One chapter later, Calvin introduces scripture by name, using the image of ‘spectacles’ to flesh out the fuller dynamics of scripture's function. Scripture clarifies the senses that are otherwise distorted, thereby enabling the recognition of the divine significance inscribed in creation and our own selves (Inst. 1.3.1, 1.6.1, 1.6.3). He then proceeds to draw a direct line between the ‘divine self-witness’ invoked one chapter earlier and scripture itself, writing that scriptures ‘obtain full authority among believers only when [they] regard them as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard’ (Inst. 1.7.1). Scriptural authority is itself conferred through a broader exercise of signification – through the graced ability to see scripture as if the living words of God were heard. Calvin advances this case by privileging the force of the activity surrounding scripture's use and drawing a contrast between that posture and the ‘pernicious error’ that subordinates the use of scripture to the ‘consent of the church’. He argues that if one were to privilege the static authority of the church over the dynamic use of scripture, this would submit the power of exceptional divine self-witness to the ‘judgment of men’, and scripture would no longer be received as if ‘the living words of God’ (Inst. 1.7.1).
So, on one level, Calvin clearly assumes a distinction between scripture and tradition and privileges the former over the latter – if tradition is understood as Calvin uses traditio in 1.5.13, as a static term to refer to the non-scriptural doctrinal codification of teachings by human beings. On another level, however, Calvin is not merely juxtaposing the static object of scripture with the static object of traditio. He is arguing, instead, that scripture be received in a certain way – as if it is of God, which, by definition, is opposed to something received as if of men. The force of the argument is to connect the reception of scripture to a posture that hears the voice of God speaking now as it did to the apostles.Footnote 13 For Calvin, this is not a matter of choosing among competing objects of authority; it is rather a matter of choosing from among competing subjects of authority. The 1559 Institutio is setting up an understanding of Christian teaching precisely as a dynamic process that takes place between human beings and God, mediated through the divine self-witness of the incarnate Word and the apostolic witness of scripture to that Word, and aimed at achieving a kind of knowledge (cognitio or notitia) that is deeply intertwined with sense perception, affective feeling and the ability to recognise and attribute meaning. For Calvin, the reification of tradere into human traditio is problematic precisely because it stalls the movement of responsiveness to scripture as the ‘living words of God’ and instead renders learning as mere agreement.
In short, what is crucial for Calvin is that learning is the kind of thing that relies on a relationship of alterity and mediation. To advance in learning, human beings need to receive something from beyond the ordinary domain of immanent relationships. That is, we need to receive something handed down, but not merely by other human beings. Many anterior echoes of this problematic exist in the Christian archive, and not least in Augustine's approach to Christian teaching, to which I'll return in a moment. But it is worth noting that attention to the verb paradidomi, tradere’s Greek equivalent, presents a strikingly similar pedagogical problematic cutting across the New Testament. As with tradere, paradidomi can be rendered both as faithful handing over and as betrayal, depending on the context. Interestingly, however, the term's meaning in the New Testament is almost always contingent on who is recognised as the subject of the action. In the gospels as well as in some of Paul's letters, the object being handed is often the literal body of Christ or witness's accounts of the ministry of Christ. When ordinary human beings assume the subject of the sentence, paradidomi connotes betrayal. Yet, when God holds the subject-position, the action of paradidomi constitutes faithful teaching and salvation.
For example, Luke begins his Gospel with an account of the faithful handing over (paradosan) of the story of Jesus’ life by divinely submitted ‘ministers of the word’ (Luke 1:2), but the next iterations of the verb are ambiguously passive, with no subject named. Jesus foretells that the Son of Man will be delivered (paradidosthai) into the hands of men (Luke 9:44), and that he will be ‘handed over’ (paradothesetai) to the Gentiles and mocked (Luke 18:32). Later, when the verb is once again active, it connotes betrayal. Judas goes to the chief priests to ‘betray’ (paradoi, paradounai) Jesus to them (Luke 22:4, 6); and that on the night when Jesus and his disciples are gathered for dinner, Judas ‘betrays’ (paradidos) Jesus with a kiss (Luke 22:48). After Jesus is taken into custody, Pontius Pilate asks the people whether they want Jesus or Barabbas released, and when they demand Barabbas, Pilate ‘delivers’ (paredoken) Jesus to the will of the people (Luke 23:25). Across the four gospels, there are many examples of ordinary people handing Jesus over in various ways. All signal treachery.
The same word signals something different when the subject of the action is divine. Returning to Luke, the exceptions to the betrayal connotation cluster around divine agency. For example, ‘All things have been delivered (paradothe) to me by my Father’ uses the perfect tense, connoting completion, and ending with a gesture to the structure of revelation (Luke 10:22). In John, the verb is used to refer to Jesus’ agency over his own death: ‘[Jesus] said, “It is finished.” Then he bowed his head and gave up (paradoken) his spirit’ (John 19:30). But the clearest examples of the significance of divine agency appear in Paul's writings, specifically when he is establishing a practice of ‘tradition-ing’ for his own recipients to follow. In keeping with the gospel usage of the verb, Paul writes that God did not spare his own son, but ‘gave him up’ for us all, and this use of paradidomi signals the condition of the possibility of the very gospel that Paul is relaying to the church in Rome (Rom 8:32). To Corinth, Paul repeatedly frames himself as passing on what he first received (1 Cor 11:23, 15:3), pointing not only back to God's originary handing over, but also forward to an eschatological time in which Jesus himself finally completes the act of reception by handing the kingdom back to the Father, such that God is ‘all in all’ (1 Cor 15). In that eschatological vision, paradidomi is grammatically framed by a divine subject and a divine object. There is, then, a New Testament precedent for thinking of Christian teaching precisely as a tradere between God and humanity, and moreover one in which human beings must avoid the reification that occurs when one person claims the role of sovereign subject. For what is decisive is not merely the content of that which handed over (namely, the body and word of Christ). What is decisive is who is recognised as the agent of the giving and, ultimately, the receiving – and the paradoxical problem that the human beings who want to learn must also avoid occupying the subject-position. For this is what fundamentally differentiates treacherous tradere from that which is faithful.
A similar pattern recurs several centuries later in Augustine's De doctrina christiana, a pedagogical manual overtly aimed at teaching methods of scriptural interpretation, or how to receive the Word of God properly. Interestingly, like Calvin later, Augustine does not begin with scripture, but with a set of concerns over how learning is even possible. In other words, Augustine begins with the very dilemma inscribed in the structure of faithful tradere, or with the question of how an ordinary person may enter a properly divine movement of receiving and passing on. Augustine frames his text with a version of the Eristic Paradox, a pedagogical puzzle tracing back to Plato's Meno that asks how a student can learn when she always already lacks the thing to be learned.Footnote 14 For Augustine (and Calvin, but unlike Plato), the solution to the paradox echoes Paul's use of paradidomi.Footnote 15 Learning is possible because Word becomes flesh and thereby creates the conditions for human learning through the analogously incarnate medium of preaching. For the exercise to be deemed faithful, God must be recognised as acting at every level: as initiator, as the revelation being passed on and as receiver.
Yet, from a human perspective, this only makes the question of reception more puzzling. After all, how can one know whether one is being faithful or enacting a betrayal? What can it mean to ‘know oneself’ through a process in which the role of active subject is foreclosed from the outset? What does it mean to insert oneself passively into the activity of another? In De doctrina, Augustine addresses these concerns in at least three ways: first, by asking his reader to cultivate a specific kind of posture that is humble before the inevitability of mediation; second, by developing a robust theory of signs and things that effectively places the would-be interpreter in a chain of significations; and third, by supplying rules to help one know oneself through those relationships rather than as the master of them.Footnote 16
First, in the preface to De doctrina, Augustine calls his reader to willingly embrace the divine use of humble mediations:
Let us not tempt the one in whom we have placed our trust, or we may be deceived by the enemy's cunning and perversity and become unwilling even to go to church to hear and learn the gospel, or to read the Biblical text or listen to it being read and preached, preferring to. . . see the Lord Jesus Christ in person and hear the gospel from him rather than from humans. Let us beware of such arrogant and dangerous temptations, and rather reflect that the apostle Paul, no less, though cast to the ground and enlightened by a divine voice from heaven, was sent to a human being to receive the sacrament of baptism and be joined to the church. And Cornelius the centurion, although an angel announced to him that his prayers had been heard and his acts of charity remembered, was nevertheless put under the tuition of Peter not only to receive the sacrament but also to learn what should be the objects of his faith, hope, and love.Footnote 17
Here, the reader who desires to hear words ‘as having sprung from heaven, as if there the living words of God were heard’ (to borrow Calvin's phrase from Inst. 1.7.1) is instructed that this must be done by assuming one's place in the world, ready to learn in and from those material conditions through which a creating and incarnating God signifies divine truths.
Within this broader framework, Augustine then develops his theory of signs. According to Augustine, creation consists of ‘things’ (isolated objects) and ‘signs’ (things that mean only by referring to something else). All signs are also things, but not all things are signs. Created things exist while always also pointing beyond themselves to other things, and ultimately to their source and end in God (who is the only completely self-referential ‘thing’). This means that created existence entails more than static presence; rather, to exist means to participate in networks of relationships, each of which grants fuller significance to the others.Footnote 18 And to learn therefore involves honing the ability to interpret things in the context of those relationships, but always mindful that God is the beginning and end of all significations.Footnote 19
Third, Augustine supplies his reader with an array of devices and accommodations designed to position her rightly in the network of signs and things and to draw her into the proper practical context for coming to actively participate in that network. Perhaps the most prominent are Augustine's two rules of interpretation – rules that, crucially, refer directly to divine revelation and therefore act as guidelines for interpreting signs. Both rules are rooted in incarnational logic, or in the fundamental claim that God teaches humanity through gestures of incarnate mediation and therefore that learning must involve relating properly to textual and human mediations, ‘as if there the living words of God were heard’. The first is the rule of faith, which calls the student to embrace the claim of the incarnation as a prerequisite to committing to its pattern of learning and teaching. The second is the rule of love, which draws the student to relationally embrace the human community as the embodied and affective context without which learning is impossible.Footnote 20 Mark Jordan describes this as follows:
To become redemptively manifest in human life, the Word takes flesh. Just so, thought takes on word-sounds in order to be spoken and heard. In the same way, again, the continuity of knowledge about God requires a ‘fleshly’ community within which it can become active. To put the proportion perhaps too naively: What the assumed human person is to the Son, that the spoken word is to the inner word of thought, and that the believing community is to the context of revelation.Footnote 21
Interpretation, therefore, requires not merely reading or repeating the text, but the more fundamentally embodied practice of receiving the text in a concrete context such that the divine will actively constellates living signs to the end of love.
A close reading of the 1559 Institutio suggests that Calvin views the task of teaching (doctrina) in structurally similar terms.Footnote 22 We've seen that he sets up the task of the manual by first embedding himself in the larger context of teaching. He describes himself as a teacher (doctor) of and for the church, and moreover as one who has been taught by forebears (such as Augustine himself).Footnote 23 On the flip side, Calvin also invokes the role of ‘the pious’ (piorum) – the community – as both the initiators and the recipients of his own text's creation, and he frames piety itself as analogous to Augustine's rules. Calvin writes that piety is the ‘reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces’, and that God is not known where there is no piety (Inst. 1.2.1). This suggests that piety, like Augustine's rules, is not a teaching but both the prerequisite for and fruit of teaching properly enacted. Piety is a kind of active-and-passive posture that positions one rightly in relation to God-as-subject.Footnote 24
As the text proceeds, Calvin embraces an increasingly robust account of how divinely given mediations facilitate exercises of resignification. The knowledge of God the Creator culminates in the doctrine of providence, teaching the reader to learn to see worldly events as if signs of divine glory and care.Footnote 25 The knowledge of God the Redeemer in Christ, the second part of Calvin's ‘twofold knowledge’ (duplex cognitio), teaches human beings to recognise God's redeeming work in the world through the signifying humanity of Christ. In book 3, which I will examine in greater depth, the duplex cognitio resignifies the status and activity of the ordinary human through the adopting work of the Spirit. Then, in book 4, this same semiotic impulse anchors Calvin's distinct theory of sacramental signification, which asks believers, for example, to perceive not only the ordinary elements of bread but to recognise them as if they were the body of Christ given for spiritual nourishment (Inst. 4.17.10).Footnote 26 In the very structure of the Institutio, the reader receives teachings concerning God as Creator and Redeemer, is adopted into those teachings by the Spirit, and is then asked to pass those teachings on through exercises of prayer, participation, worship and sacrament.
Attention to this way of thinking about Christian pedagogy, with resonant themes evident across many important sources beyond the ones I have named, should give contemporary interpreters pause before assuming an overly static rendering of ‘tradition’ that can simply be opposed to ‘scripture’ – and especially before assuming such a view to be an essential component of Protestant thinking. The pattern that I have begun tracing here is one in which scripture mediates as the apostles did: by witnessing to the proper object of Christian teaching – the body of Christ, the Word of God – and by praying to faithfully pass that on without asserting a sovereign subject-position over it. According to this logic, ‘tradition-ing’ has little to do with finding a particular set of teachings to delimit or identify a group. It has much more to do with the posture of receptivity and love that one cultivates toward both a set of teachings and the wider world of signs in which they are received.
A case study: election
This pattern of pedagogy as tradere does not merely establish a structure around which doctrinal claims are made, it also informs the meaning and practical effect of doctrines themselves. To examine what this might look like in a particular case, I will look at the doctrine of election, or predestinarian soteriology.Footnote 27 The main features of this position are shared by Augustine and Calvin, who cites Augustine exhaustively on the topic. Both insist that God elects to save human beings, that God remains the sole subject of saving action and that divine grace alone enables the responsive embrace of faith by the human person. Both also maintain that God chooses how to dispense saving grace according to a hidden purpose, one that cannot be identified with worldly economies of moral desert or regimes of recognition. I have already noted that many find this account of salvation troubling for a number of compelling reasons. Not only does it seem to unravel motivation for moral self-cultivation, it may also fund a troubling social imaginary prone to interpret the world in terms of elected and rejected groups.
In this final section, I will examine Calvin's doctrine of election as it appears in the 1559 Institutio, reading it in its context and in view of the larger pattern of Augustinian signification. The vulnerability of the knowing-and-desiring human subject, straddling active and passive postures before God, is absolutely crucial to the late Augustine's account of salvation. Such a soteriology follows neatly from the larger claim that Christian teaching succeeds as the divine will works actively through mediating signs to turn the orientation of the knower, place him among others and render him receptive to divine tradere.Footnote 28 Within this framework, salvation can be read as the proper name for that crucial moment of this subjective turning, or the instant when the believer recognises himself differently in relation to God. Salvation indicates a believer who knows God as the proper subject and knows the self as recipient – a receiver who, by virtue of occupying her proper place, becomes an active, yet mediate, giver of signification through the rule of love. In what follows, I will show that a similar pattern structures the itinerary of Calvin's 1559 Institutio, with the instant of turning narrated through the doctrine of election. First, however, let me briefly examine some other instances of post-Augustinian pedagogy in order to establish some common features.
Mark Jordan has argued that the influence of Augustine's theory of signs can be traced across a number of major works of medieval Latin theology, with its tell-tale signature being the impulse to think signification-in-general through the analogical lens of the Word become flesh.Footnote 29 In texts that demonstrate this influence, it is possible to locate a critical moment (or a series of such moments) when the argumentative structure of the text describes or even performs the reorientation of the subject-position of the protagonist/reader. In other words, there is a key point at which the human being in pursuit of divine learning comes to know himself differently, as if from a different vantage, as if addressed by an excessive and reorienting divine reality to which all signs, including the self, point.Footnote 30 This reality may be figured in different ways and through different strategies – one might think, for example, of the effect of Thomas’ five ways or of the shattering coincidence of the seraph with the crucified framing Bonaventure's Itinerarium mentis in Deum.Footnote 31 Both of these textual moments effectively place the reader epistemically and ontologically in a mediate relation to God as the source and origin of signification, forbidding the occupation of the sovereign subject-position.
Yet, perhaps the most elegant narration of such a critical moment of turning appears in Anselm's Proslogion, the entirety of which is structured as a prayer – specifically, a prayer that Anselm be able to learn. Harking back to the Eristic Paradox, Anselm beseeches God,
When will you show yourself to us again? . . . For I cannot seek you unless you teach me how, and I cannot find you unless you show yourself to me. Let me seek you in desiring you; let me desire you in seeking you. Let me find you in loving you; let me love you in finding you. I acknowledge, Lord, and I thank you, that you have created in me this image of you so that I may remember you, think of you, and love you. Yet this image is so eroded by my vices, so clouded by the smoke of my sins, that it cannot do what it was created to do unless you renew and refashion it.Footnote 32
In clear Augustinian fashion, Anselm anticipates that his ability to learn depends on a divine creative and redemptive prerogative. Yet he finds himself in the paradoxical position of actively reaching for it, asking for it and doing what he can to place himself in the way of the gift by embracing the rules of faith and love. He prays,
I am not trying to scale your heights, Lord; my understanding is in no way equal to that. But I do long to understand your truth in some way, your truth which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand in order to believe; I believe in order to understand.Footnote 33
At this point, Anselm's prayer positions him as the kind of subject who can hope to understand in the only way a created thing can understand: by entering into a receptive relationship to that which it does not understand, and praying for grace and illumination.
Anselm's journey thus begins with a prayer to move from faith that God exists toward an actual understanding (intellectus) of God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’.Footnote 34 Not incidentally, this is a divine name borrowed from De doctrina christiana.Footnote 35 Like the claim that Christ is ‘Word made flesh’, the name for God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ has a semantic character that does not merely describe God abstractly; it also addresses the human person's living context with particular force. That is, it refers to God not only as a conceptual being but also as a being who exists in relation to created things – the things alongside which human beings are embedded, and through which human beings themselves exist. The claim that God is ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ is also a claim about God's relation to the knower's context, or God's relation to all other words and flesh that the knower perceives, addresses and, in turn, conceives. The claim is that God surpasses all of them while also relating to all of them, because the name for God exceeds all other conceivable things while also referring to all other conceivable things.Footnote 36
In the brief arc of the Proslogion, Anselm's prayer is quickly answered. In chapter 3, he receives an illumination, one that teaches him that God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’ must also exist in reality by subjectively transforming his own understanding of his position in the world. It is unfortunate that this illumination has become deracinated under the shorthand of the ‘ontological proof’, because it is more accurately a narration of Anselm's own reorientation, and the nomenclature of ‘proof’ tends to obscure what is most striking about the quality of the learning that Anselm experiences. When Anselm receives the illumination, nothing has actually been added to the sheer linguistic content of that which he had already embraced in faith. There is no new information. Rather, Anselm has experienced a different ontic relation to the content – content that he had already desired to believe. He has become able to hear it in a new way, such that it transforms his entire sense of his own being-in-reality.
When he realises that ‘that than which nothing greater can be thought’ must also exist in reality, the realisation is that those words refer to a reality that exceeds the grasp of the subject who utters them. This places him in a new relation to the utterance. The words refer to a being that exceeds the grasp of his cognition, one greater than his cognition can characterise or control. Yet, it is also a being that has assumed a relation to him. The illumination is that Anselm's understanding (intellectus) is enabled as he assumes a posture of receiving, rather than a posture of epistemic mastery over the object. And, as with Augustine's rule of love, this understanding places him in in a new relation not only to God but (through God) to other things. He assumes a place in the middle, as it were, of a chain of signs, becoming a conduit for the divine activity of handing over. Crucially, the structure enabling this moment of turning is also the precise condition of possibility for treachery. This is precisely what Gaunilo's ‘Reply on Behalf of the Fool’ demonstrates. For, in that critical moment, the subject may insist on maintaining epistemic control and doing with the object what she wills – handing it over to be betrayed.Footnote 37
A similar sort of pedagogical itinerary is legible across Calvin's 1559 Institutio, with the doctrine of election representing the pivotal point of subjective turning.Footnote 38 Contrary to popular reputation, predestination doesn't headline Calvin's theological project. While he certainly gestures to divine priority in earlier loci, especially when discussing providence (Inst. 1.16–18) and sin (Inst. 2.2–5), he does not flesh out the doctrine of election until the end of book 3 (Inst. 3.21–4). By the time he has arrived at book 3, Calvin has already moved his reader through the duplex cognitio Dei, the order of teaching fit for placing the student in relation to God the Creator (book 1); and then coming to know the Creator through the redeeming activity of Christ (book 2).Footnote 39 These teachings effectively situate the reader in the world as a domain created, governed and cared for by God; and then teach the student how Christ's redeeming work mediates the knowledge of God to us as human beings.Footnote 40 In book 3, Calvin finally moves to the place where Anselm began: the reader is equipped with the content of faith, and desires to be transformed by actually receiving, and coming to fully participate in, these teachings. Book 3, ‘The Way in Which We Receive the Grace of Christ: What Benefits Come to Us From It, and What Effects Follow’, is expressly devoted to the human reception of divine pedagogy, and therefore with the dynamics of how the Eristic Paradox is actually addressed: how humans enter the activity of tradere even as they acknowledge God as proper subject and object.Footnote 41
The locus on election represents the climax to this question by drawing attention to that critical moment when the reader, who has already received a sufficient treatment of the articles of Christian faith, will either become a betrayer or a faithful recipient of that teaching. For Calvin, this hinges on a dramatic encounter between two different kinds of ‘knowing’. First (and positively), there is the Anselmian desire to be able to understand oneself as elect – to hear the divine teachings and have confidence that they pertain to you personally, that the knowledge of God is indeed joined to the knowledge of ourselves (cognitio Dei et nostril). Then (negatively) there is second urge to know, which Calvin frames as a pathological urge to get inside the mind of God and occupy the position of sovereign knower, abstractly understanding why God wills what God wills. It is this pathological urge to know that functions as the primary target of Calvin's polemics across the four chapters on election. Calvin begins his discourse by writing that God would have us ‘revere’ what we do not understand (Inst. 3.21.1), a call back to the opening definition of piety as ‘that reverence joined with love of God which the knowledge of his benefits induces’ (Inst. 1.2.1).Footnote 42 Later in the election locus, he writes that, more than any other doctrine, election demands that humanity accept its cognitive and intellective limitations: ‘Let us not be ashamed to submit our understanding to God's boundless wisdom so far as to yield before its many secrets. For, of those things which it is neither given nor lawful to know, ignorance is learned; the craving to know, a kind of madness’ (Inst. 3.23.8). If election is designed to perform the relation between knowledge of God and self-knowledge, it involves cultivating epistemic humility.
This may, to a degree, help to contextualise why Calvin is willing to make so many difficult and even dubious claims about predestination across these chapters. For instance, he writes, ‘All are not created in equal condition; rather, eternal life is foreordained for some, eternal damnation for others’; and a bit later, ‘By his just and irreprehensible judgment [God] has barred the door of life to those whom he has given over to damnation’ (Inst. 3.21.5, 7). As many have noted, such claims run counter to conventional notions of divine benevolence and equity. They may also lead a careful reader to wonder precisely how Calvin has the authority to assert them with such confidence. Isn't he overstepping his own cognitive limitations? Yet Calvin forwards these claims, even while admitting that the teaching is ‘dreadful’ (horribile), and that it has the potential to lead many to ruin (Inst. 3.23.7; 3.21.2).Footnote 43
Why does he spend so much time discussing election in such argumentative detail and with such confidence? On my reading, he offers no less than four (and perhaps five) reasons. The first is simple empirical realism: we observe that some reject the call while others embrace it (Inst. 3.21.1). The second points to the relatively clear scriptural grounding of the teaching (Inst. 3.21.3). The third is logical: if salvific grace is to be conceived as specially given grace addressed to the concrete individual, and not a categorical feature of humanity as such, then it stands to reason that some must be excluded (Inst. 3.21.7, 10). Yet the fourth is the one Calvin cites more than any other and the one most consonant with Augustine's late position: namely, that election renders humanity utterly humble – and grateful – before God.Footnote 44 In some ways, Calvin's radical and troubling assertiveness on double predestination seems aimed to defend the fact that God could justly elect some and damn others if God so chose. If we have the urge to say otherwise, that evidences something problematic about the affective-epistemic position we are assuming (Inst. 3.21.1, 3.23.11).Footnote 45
There is a way of reading the unflinching quality of Calvin's arguments as conferring rhetorical depth and strategic complexity to a larger exercise in pedagogy. For by challenging and even offending the reader's affective-epistemic sensibilities, these arguments generate a new range of questions: questions that, if received in the right posture, can reveal something of the reader's preconceptions and emotions to the reader herself. And by revealing what may previously have been unconscious or hidden in the self, these arguments allow the reader to observe and confront his own desires – his desire, perhaps, to know things that are simply beyond the proper bounds of human cognition. Alternatively, the reader may observe in herself evidence of a different desire that sincerely wants to know as God gives knowledge, surrendering cosmic curiosity to know himself in relation to God as a recipient of grace. This is what I see as the possible fifth reason that Calvin treats election in the place and manner that he does. It is diagnostically effective.
Along these lines, it is also significant that election appears immediately after Calvin's chapter on prayer, the longest chapter of the entire Institutio. In a structural echo of the Proslogion, Calvin prepares his reader for the most critical moment of the itinerary by assuming the tensive posture of active petition. The reader knows that she needs to receive understanding, but she is also actively doing everything she can do to put herself in the proper posture of a recipient. Calvin is clear that the crucial components of a prayer involve actively grasping at the teachings of the duplex cognitio and then earnestly asking that they take on significance in the concrete context of one's own life.Footnote 46 He writes,
After we have been instructed by faith to recognize that whatever we need and whatever we lack is in God, and in our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom the Father willed all the fullness of his bounty to abide so that we may all draw from it as from an overflowing spring, it remains for us to seek in him, and in prayers to ask of him, what we have learned to be in him. Otherwise, to know God as the master and bestower of all good things, who invites us to request them of him, and still not go to him and not ask of him – this would be of as little profit as for a man to neglect a treasure, buried and hidden in the earth, after it had been pointed out to him. (Inst. 3.20.1)
Calvin's prayer desires not merely conceptual knowledge, but a visceral understanding of providential and incarnational faith.
Once again, this is a recognisable iteration of the Augustinian-Anselmian posture that believes in order to understand. The aim of prayer is not only to assent to faith that God is bestower, but to actually experience God as bestower.Footnote 47 Calvin puts it vividly in the following section: ‘By [praying] we invoke the presence both of [God's] providence, through which he watches over and guards our affairs, and of his power, through which he sustains us, weak as we are and well-nigh overcome, and of his goodness, through which he receives us, miserably burdened with sins, unto grace; and, in short, it is by prayer that we call him to reveal himself as wholly present to us’ (Inst. 3.20.2).Footnote 48 Here, the structure of the prayer also mimics the Pauline structure of faithful paradidomi: God's presence assumes a dynamic structure that gives a revelation and receives it back through the work of Christ, who makes humans participants in it. The person praying thus knows herself as if in medias res: as having grasped the claims of faith while desiring to be the kind of person who can participate in the movement of that faith in time and place.
If the duplex cognitio furnishes the content of faith, and if prayer is seeking, then election signals the modicum of understanding that is granted when an individual is turned by grace to become a recipient. Calvin gestures to this when he arrives at the crux of the election locus: the question of how a reader attains certainty concerning his or her own election.Footnote 49 He approaches the matter by giving several injunctions that fence the doctrine in keeping with the way he has been navigating between beneficial and pernicious forms of knowledge. For example, at the close to 3.23, he cites Augustine to argue that a reader's concern over the knowledge of election must be triangulated around the reader's singular life. With regard to all others, ‘We know not who belongs to the number of the predestined or who does not belong, so we ought to be so minded as to wish that all men be saved’ (Inst. 3.23.14).Footnote 50 Yet as concerns our own selves, Calvin opens 3.24 by arguing similarly that we ought not to look for evidence of our own election in any external effort. This merely flatters the pathological desire to know the signs of divine favor in the abstract (Inst. 3.24.1). The sole sign of election Calvin will admit is the sheer content of the call itself, in as much as it subjectively reveals the content of the individual's inner response of desire. For Calvin, this call consists both in the ‘preaching of the Word’ and, crucially, the ‘illumination of the Spirit’ (Inst. 3.23.2; see also 1.9.3). This means two things: first, that knowledge of one's own election is not the kind of knowledge that can be had through static, socially visible modes of recognition; and second, that this knowledge itself hinges on the active work of Word and Spirit in dynamic relation to the concrete self.Footnote 51 Calvin concludes that ‘the inner call, then, is the pledge of salvation that cannot deceive us’ (Inst. 3.23.2).Footnote 52
Here is the passage where Calvin unpacks the logic in full:
Rare indeed is the mind that is not repeatedly struck with this thought: whence comes your salvation but from God's election? Now, what revelation do you have of your election? This thought, if it has impressed itself upon him, either continually strikes him in his misery with harsh torments or utterly overwhelms him. Truly, I should desire no surer argument to confirm how basely persons of this sort imagine predestination than that very experience, because the mind could not be infected with a more pestilential error than that which overwhelms and unsettles the conscience from its peace and tranquility toward God. Consequently, if we fear shipwreck, we must carefully avoid this rock, against which no one is ever dashed without destruction. Even though discussion about predestination is likened to a dangerous sea, still, in traversing it, one finds safe and calm – I also add pleasant sailing unless he willfully desire to endanger himself. For just as those engulf themselves in a deadly abyss who, to make their election more certain, investigate God's eternal plan apart from his Word, so those who rightly and duly examine it as it is contained in his Word reap the inestimable fruit of comfort. Let this, therefore, be the way of our inquiry: to begin with God's call, and to end with it. (Inst. 3.24.4)Footnote 53
The implication, here, is remarkable, for the call itself is nothing more than the reception of the content of faith, and the decisive evidence is the way in which it is received. In other words, the question is whether it indeed reorients the self and renders the self receptive, as with Anselm's illumination; or whether it remains a stumbling block, as with Gaunilo's ‘Reply on Behalf of the Fool’. Like the name for God as ‘that than which a greater cannot be conceived’, the illumination to which Calvin refers does not generate new information. It is rather the performance of a new posture in relation to information already given, and that posture is its own evidence.Footnote 54 For Calvin, assurance is given by the simple proof that one who hears the call yearns to live it out with faithful tradere rather than to assume treacherous sovereignty over it.
Conclusion
Election is Calvin's most notorious doctrine, the one often used to define the so-called ‘tradition’ bearing his name.Footnote 55 Yet, I have argued that the doctrine itself, read in its broader pedagogical context, eschews the very logic that supports this effort – a logic that would establish static identity through a stable, socially recognisable, external signifier. In other words, if there is a pattern of Christian-scriptural thinking that approaches tradition as a verb, and from there thinks of Christian teaching as the dynamic exercise of learning to participate as a human being in what is properly a divine activity, then this cuts to the very heart of how we read and understand the function of both scriptural and doctrinal arguments. I've argued that for Calvin, as for Augustine and others, neither election in particular nor Christian teaching in general proceeds as a static set of claims that can be opposed to, or even neatly derived from scripture. Instead, teachings are mediations that are useful to tactically position the knowing self in relation to divine signification, guiding the self to assume the proper posture of humility and receptivity before a divine will that engages and occupies all created things as signs of divine love. This suggests a fundamental rebuke against the common urge to conceive knowledge as sovereign-subjective mastery over either theological ideas or created things.
I take this to be an important consideration for those invested in Christian teaching – in reading and interpreting scripture, doctrinal arguments and especially the act of preaching so crucial to the exercise of tradere. But it is also important because Christian doctrines continue to inform our broader social imaginations. Election has been used to shape and defend the supposedly de facto justice of free-market capitalism, Manifest Destiny, colonial domination and White Supremacy – any logic that identifies certain modes of human life as central, exceptional and superior to that of others. Yet, these linkages presume, from the outset, that traditional doctrines are the kinds of things that possess the kind of static content that can be deracinated and transferred into a different social context.
The reading I've offered of Calvin's election – and of the dynamic connection between Augustinian pedagogy and soteriology more generally – offers critical tools to resist such deracination. Most pointedly, it undercuts the fundamental epistemic position that allows for such modes of secularisation to occur: one in which the doctrine is reified, abstracted from the concrete inner experience of the individual, and allowed to control a different set of data. Attention to the conditions of fidelity and betrayal that haunt tradere enables a responsible critic to recognise such uses of doctrinal arguments, within and beyond ecclesial contexts, and to name them as betrayals. They are betrayals inasmuch as they reflect an effort to control and delimit the will of God, eschewing the vulnerability, receptivity and relationality that supply the very conditions for the possibility of doctrinal fidelity.Footnote 56
