CALVIN: INTUITIVE-AUDITIVE KNOWLEDGE

Just as...the natural world could become an iconic ladder of contemplation for Calvin, so also, ...in the Eucharist this same visual-dramatic, iconic perspective that we might not have expected of Calvinists clearly holds true (Nicholas Wolterstorff, _Not Presence But Action Calvin on Sacraments_, Perspectives 9(3):16-22(March 1994). Calvin focuses on the prescriptive action by which the Presence (which he does not deny, except as an application of magic) is manifested as Real in the lives of the communicants whom the Holy Spirit has made willing to follow the spiritual direction which he has set forth. Nature is iconic for Calvin, and so also is Communion. There is also a third way in which Calvin is iconic, in spite of the fact pointed out by David Cooper that Calvin is so intensely iconoclastic that even the image of God in mankind is vitiated (at least in part):

"But, if Calvin challenges the Orthodox jump from Christ `the Image, to images, he makes the same leap himself from Word to words...The Calvinist formula `Word and Spirit', frequently meaning `Scripture and Spirit', conveys the extent to which words have usurped the position of the Son in the Holy Trinity and effectively turned the Faith into an ideology...Calvin's transference of all image `eggs' into the Word `basket' distorts both the *Logos* and the human perception of him. We are somehow to `see' images in the words of Scripture and in the food of the Lord's Supper. A more balanced theology might be conceived as presenting Scripture for reading, sermons for listening, pictures for looking at, and food for eating."

(The Rev. David J. C. Cooper, _The Theology of Image in Eastern Orthodoxy and John Calvin_, Scottish Journal of Theology 35:219-241(1982) (pp.231-233,236-237).

Rev. Cooper has very much to say that is good about Calvin in this paper, but he finds the outcome of Calvin's Word reduction to have been very dismal in Protestant theology and in this theology's effects upon church and society. An Orthodox Christian, however, would have to admit that even Calvin's usage of words is iconic, and that this usage is quite in accordance with the teaching of the Seventh Ecumenical Council: "What is less well known is that this conciliar definition is saying something equally important about the words of Scripture and by extension about all other words which express the Church's faith, particularly in liturgical texts and patristic writings. It is saying that they are actually verbal icons. This means that as far as possible, they seek to give concrete expression to the ineffable realities that are revealed and experienced within the Church's life. The theological writer and the iconographer are thus engaged in the same task, only they work in different media. This is why word and icon, as parallel experienced realities, presuppose each other and are mutually revelatory. As we seek to understand what they reveal, we can place them side by side and use them to interpret each other...In the Orthodox world, artistic and conceptual modes of expression come together, coinhere in each other and are mutually revelatory. The same God is both Truth and Beauty, and all proper icons of him, whether verbal or visual, manifest both" (Verna E. F. Harrison, _Word as icon in Greek patristic theology_, Sobornost 10(1):38-49(1988) (pp.38-40). Also, Ivan Moody, _Icons in music? Two works by Tavener_, in this same issue).

So profound is the love for the Word of God in Calvin, and for the dynamic meaning of "word" and "words", that their very created meaning begins to be deepened in *faith anticipation*. The Word becomes time-dynamic process and communication, more than the book the very Speech (*la Parole*) of God, God breathing His Spirit upon us through the Word Incarnate. See Lucien Joseph Richard, _The Spirituality of John Calvin_, Atlanta: Georgia: John Knox Press, 1974, Chapter V: _The Epistemological Relevance of the Word and the Spirit Calvin's Contribution to a New Spirituality_. So profound is the deepening of the dynamic meaning of "words" in Calvin that the structure of the *duplex cognitio Dei* itself begins to disclose the contours of the thermodynamics of language and information theory (but then my perception tends to be mathematical, and this is at least a feeling and a "phenomenology of hearing", and it is iconic). If a person can not hear this, what can I say? To me, it sounds like a less-well-known strand of genuine catholicity, a step back(ward?)(or deeper?) into the Biblical order of the unfolding of contemplation, in which faith stemming from hearing awakened by the Word, precedes sight (as Job discovered) (and Satan has a hand in it -- cf. Walter Wink, _The Bible in Human Transformation *Toward a New Paradigm for Biblical Study*_, Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1973).

"Calvin understood man's knowledge of God as knowledge gained in the immediate experience of his presence. We know God through the direct impact and causality of his divine being in and through his Word. God manifests himself and acts towards man and is present to him through his word. Thus knowledge of God is attained primarily by hearing rather than seeing...This hearing caused by the power of the Word of God is experiential and the source of an intuitive knowledge...Through this notion of an intuitive-auditive knowledge of God, Calvin was proposing a method of knowing which presumed to cut through the shield of images and concepts separating reality from the perceiving subject. It depended on a personal *rapprochement* between the subject and object of knowledge rather than upon the ordinary subject-object-antithesis. In his theory of knowledge, Calvin proposed a method of knowing in which the object takes the initiative and reveals itself to the subject. God presents himself to man, breaking in upon the consciousness from the outside. Thus God and man are not separated by a veil of conceptualization. Knowledge of God does not end with a concept of God but with God himself" (Lucien Joseph Richard, op. cit., pp.158-159). A Hesychast could not have said this better. See also Thomas F. Torrance, _Theological Science_, Oxford / London / New York: Oxford University Press, 1969, 1978, pp.38-40,306-309).

June, 1996

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