What Marxism was to the society of Economic Man, Calvinism was to that of Intellectual Man: the final, messianic exaggeration of i...ts creed. In both, the belief in the attainment of freedom and equality could only be maintained by sacrificing actual freedom. The doctrine of determination through predestination in Calvinism is parallel to that of determination through the class situation in Marxism. Both abolished actual freedom in existing society to maintain the belief in the reality and imminence of freedom in the coming society. And both collapsed as orders when it was proved that the only society which they could realize was an unfree society.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Indifference to all the refinements of life--it's really shocking. Just Calvinism, that's all. Calvinism without the excuse of Cal...vin's theology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Dogmatic toleration is nonsense: I would no more tolerate the teaching of Calvinism to children if I had power to persecute it tha...n the British Raj tolerated suttee in India. Every civilized authority must draw a line between the tolerable and the intolerable.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Emerson said that the "scholar is man thinking." Had Southerners of that era taken seriously the famous lecture entitled "The Amer...ican Scholar," they might have replied by saying that the gentleman is man talking. The accomplished Christian gentleman of the old South was the shadow, attenuated by evangelical Calvinism, of his Renaissance spiritual ancestor, who had been the creation of the rhetorical tradition, out of Aristotle through Cicero distilled finally by Castiglione. By contrast, the New England sage, embodied in Ralph Waldo Emerson, took seriously what has come to be known since the Industrial Revolution as the life of the mind: an activity a little apart from life, and perhaps leading to the fashionable alienation of the "intellectual" of our time.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »