Herdt on Calvinist Virtue

In her book, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, Jennifer Herdt has a fascinating section on the Reformed approach to the acquisition of virtue, and the suspicion of false virtue. Luther had blatantly rejected the idea of mimetic virtue, which he thought necessarily manifested a kind of works-righteousness. Any seeming acquisition of virtue via human agency was actually a sneaky form of vice. Within the Reformed tradition, Herdt supposes, we might expect to see at least partial recovery of mimetic virtue. Calvinism, after all, famously teaches the third use of the law (although perhaps not as clearly in the 21st century), by which Christians can see and respond through grace to the right virtues given to us in Scripture. And in fact, in some ways, Calvinists did manifest a more common, or civic, idea of virtue — specifically in the political sphere, where they animated reforms in education, health care, poor laws, political theory, and so on.

However, Herdt argues that Calvinism harbored an even more paralyzing instability concerning mimetic virtue than did Lutheranism. While Calvin stressed the necessity to imitate Christ, and did not seem as concerned as Luther with the self-deluded qualities of virtue, he did emphasize the danger of the faithful failing to manifest their salvation in true inward faith. Both strands of reformation thought attempt to point us away from our own works, but the Calvinist tradition in particular stressed the necessity of a personal assurance of salvation — for salvation.

This is something I’ve always been puzzled by. For all the apparent consolation contained in the doctrine of the preservatation of the saints, the emphasis on the necessity for that individual consciousness (what the WCF calls the “infallible assurance of faith”) has always seemed dangerously vague. Calvin prefers to place the burden on the consciousness of salvation over and against the mimetic virtue. Herdt argues that this point may be Calvin’s most egregious departure from Augustine. In his attempt to keep justification categorically distinct from sanctification, Calvin surprisingly adopts a rather high view of the human ability to discern the full potential of grace. Augustine had rather argued that we can only recognize grace “imperfectly and retrospectively.” There is an eschatological humility in Augustine which Calvin seems ready to dispense with. This Calvinist divide of course only grew wider with the Puritans, and continues in large part to the present day. Calvinists are still — arguably more than any other tradition — concerned with questions like “Who am, really? Am I, or am I not, one of the elect?” It’s a strange and unsatisfying approximation of the Pauline warning to work out salvation in fear and trembling.