To get a better understanding of the Triumph of Orthodoxy from a Reformation world-view perspective, it is important to recognize that it is more than the legitimization of images that is being celebrated. It is, at the same time, a celebration of liberation from a way of perception dominated by the pagan "scale of being" metaphysics of the iconoclasts. It is a transformation of world-view to a mode of perception much more closely in tune with what we encounter in the Reformation. So much of this new way of seeing is now a commonplace of our modern perception, that we can easily forget that seeing could have ever been otherwise. The Triumph of Orthodoxy is therefore a triumph for "westerners" too.

Calvin, of course, was quite "iconoclastic", given the problems with statues and images that had developed in the pre-Reformation, "western" stream of the Church. To what degree he might have held "scholastically" to the metaphysical "scale of being" is still being investigated! However, it is of the utmost significance to discover that Calvin's theology can be read contemplatively as a very close approximation to the "mystical theology of the Eastern Church". While he rejected the whole business of contemplation of humanly-constructed statues and pictures, he applied to the contemplation of God's handiwork in nature a way of gazing remarkable in its similarity to the Byzantine way of contemplation of icons.

These remarkable insights into the "Eastern" nature of Calvin's theology are to be found in a fascinating study by Dr. Ford Lewis Battles, _Calculus Fidei Some Ruminations on the Structure of Calvin's Theology_, Grand Rapids: Calvin Theological Seminary, 1978 [Privately-published edition with the profoundly important appendices]. Calvin never forgot the transforming power of the Gospel in his own experience of conversion, and Calculus Fidei is, in fact, a study of the "epistrophic" conversion structure built into his theological methodology, in its significant links with Patristic Orthodoxy. His theology was undoubtedly "apophatic" in the Eastern sense.

You will find Calvin's mystical descent/ascent pattern set forth so beautifully by Dr. Battles on pages 120-121 of Calculus Fidei that it is devotional to read it. Here, however, I will draw from pages 112-113, where Calvin's manner of contemplation, the "meditatio coelestis vitae" (or, "meditatio futurae vitae") is set forth in its equivalence to Byzantine iconographic inverse perspective, which Calvin bans with respect to artifacts, but requires with respect to the natural world and the true order of nature restored in Christ, as ladder of contemplation.

"The critique and the affirmation are brought together in
Comm. Gen., 1:6:...

Here the Spirit of God
wills to teach all at once
without exception:
and therefore what Gregory
falsely and wrongly declares
concerning statues and pictures
truly applies to the history
of the creation:

it is the true 'book of the
unlearned'
Whatsoever therefore he re-
lates
has to do with the adornment
of that theater

which He sets before our eyes.

Calvin's preference, then, for theatrum as a figure for the
created realm, seems to rest upon his desire for a single
metaphor that expresses the ordered beauty of God's self-
revelation to man, but which at the same time rejects any
theater in which man's own acts are glorified or in which
false representations of Deity are depicted. By setting the
theatrum Ecclesiae alongside the theatrum mundi, bracketing
men and angels in both, Calvin is approaching metaphorically
the question of how rational beings can be instruments of God's
will, yet operate for their own part as well".

June, 1996

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