who shall stand?”
Calvin’s vision from the vantage point of the Judge is calculated to inspire trembling and consternation. He elsewhere describes this vision from the perspective of the nature so judged:
[Under the teaching of the law] we must then . . . descend into ourselves. From this we may at length infer two things. First, by comparing the righteousness of the law with our life, we learn how far we are from conforming to God’s will. And for this reason we are unworthy to hold our place among his creatures—still less to be accounted his children. Secondly, in considering our powers, we learn that they are not only too weak to fulfill the law, but utterly nonexistent. From this necessarily follows mistrust of our own virtue, then anxiety and trepidation of mind. For the conscience cannot bear the weight of iniquity without soon coming before God’s judgment. Truly, God’s judgment cannot be felt without evoking the dread of death. So also, constrained by the proofs of its impotence, the conscience cannot but fall straightway into deep despair of its own powers. Both of these emotions engender humility and self-abasement. Thus it finally comes to pass that man, thoroughly frightened by the awareness of eternal death, which he sees as justly threatening him because of his own unrighteousness, betakes himself to God’s mercy alone, as the only haven of safety. Thus, realizing that he does not possess the ability to pay to the law what he owes, and despairing in himself, he is moved to seek and await help from another quarter.
These two passages capture the spirit of the observation with which Calvin opens the Institutes, that true wisdom consists in two parts, “the knowledge of God and of ourselves.” This knowledge elevates God to the highest while it strips nature of any claim to righteousness. The sinner comes before the God by whose power the earth was formed, and before whose wrath it quakes with anguish, with the result that he feels the full severity of the law and the unqualified powerlessness of nature to appease its Maker. To know the immeasurable greatness of God is to know the antithetically immeasurable smallness of man, and beyond this, the perdition awaiting sinners apart from grace. The knowledge of God for Calvin presupposes this dual realization of the justice and majesty of God and the worthlessness of his disobedient creatures, a realization constitutive of the descent into the self.
At the heart of this descent is man’s acknowledgment that nature’s powers are “utterly nonexistent,” the perception that immediately precedes the experience of grace. His consideration of that grace “will be foolish and weak unless every man admit his guilt before the Heavenly Judge, and concerned about his own acquittal, willingly cast himself down and confess his nothingness.” To be cleansed of its “thousand sins,” what can a nature that is nothing do? Thus the denigration of nature unto nothingness that Calvin repeats throughout the Institutes, illustrating the progress of the descent into the self until one “betakes himself to God’s mercy alone, as the only haven of safety.”
Looking to Christ out of nature’s depravity, man observes “a wonderful consolation: that we perceive judgment to be in the hands of him who has already destined us to share with him the honor of judging! Far indeed is he from mounting his judgment seat to condemn us!” The man stricken unto nothingness discovers a great solace, a righteousness imputed by the Son’s grace “that he may care for the consciences of his people.” This turn of events elicits the “feeling of delight” in which the heart throws off the threat of perdition just as it is remade in its eagerness to obey, now a heart of flesh rather than stone. The destined graced firmly stamped upon the will, the Christian sets about the life of ceaseless obedience with the zeal of an assured conscience.
The docetic logic pervades this account of inner religious experience. As for Luther, for Calvin the law and nature combine in an initial leaning toward form countered by their eventual reduction to shapelessness. Also like Luther, for Calvin the law loses its form via its expansion to infinity while nature suffers as the object of that expansion, with grace consummating the dissolution of both. The terminology of the story changes from Luther to Calvin, but its ontological meaning does not.
Nature’s initial estimation of itself as capable of some righteousness, relying on its powers of obedience as at least partially sufficient for justification, implies an ontological hope in the acquisition of form through obedience. Nature seeks to rise in form as it seeks justification via obedience to the law. Yet Calvin wants to destroy the impression that nature could add to its justification by completely denying natural righteousness. He insists that man abandon the “human tribunal,” coming before the unmitigated requirement of the law in the person of the divine Judge. Calvin’s descent into the self mirrors the growth of the law to infinity experienced by Luther, though couched in the language of the majesty and wrath of God rather than the multiplication of commands. In each reformer, the power and judgment of the law expand beyond all expectation that obedience could fulfill it. This produces, for Calvin as well as Luther, dual and antagonistic qualities within the law itself. The law promises to give life as the way of justification while its expansion to infinity would annul that promise, and by extension the law’s capacity as life-giver.
The increasing chasm between the righteousness of the Judge and the weakness of the believer presses in upon nature’s earlier confidence in its capacities. Where the will seemed capable of choosing the good, one finds that capability progressively neutered. Where one might have thought reason sufficient to discern saving truths, its conclusions evaporate as smoke and foolishness. For Calvin, the righteousness that nature would hold up as its achievement shrinks before the “thousand sins” that the Judge brings in accusation, just as, for Luther, each single act of obedience is dwarfed by nature’s “wagonloads of sins that increase infinitely.” Surveying the nature that tempts man to pride, Calvin finds it all but helpless before the immensity of God’s judgment. Like Luther’s exhortation that the law reduce the believer to nothing, imposing a “true taste of death,” Calvin insists that nature come to recognize its “nothingness” under a law that bears “the most immediate death.”
By this process both the law and nature reverse their assumed tendency toward form. The law loses definition in its growth to infinity at the same time that God appears unforgiving, severe, and bent upon punishment. Whereas Calvin elsewhere identifies divine law as a restatement of natural law, the identification of the same divine law with the character of God suggests an intriguing distortion, as if the nature of the creature should replicate the ineffability of the Creator. So the law’s infinity crushes the individual by a mercilessness in step with the looming holiness of the Judge. Terrified under this judgment, nature endures the opposite diminishment of form, shedding its definition in the lessening confidence that it possesses intrinsic righteousness. The law expands without boundary while nature contracts into the infinitesimal, with both progressively abdicating the form with which they were designed. The ontological pattern of growth to infinity and reduction to nothing by which Luther’s believer experiences the deformation of the law and nature resurfaces in Calvin.
When man at last releases the claim to natural righteousness in toto, acknowledging nature’s utter emptiness and submitting to the inevitable curse of disobedience, when the descent into the self hits bottom in a psychological hell, then one meets the grace that comforts the conscience, liberating the believer unto joy. Ontologically speaking, when the law has so expanded as to completely annul its support of nature’s inclination to form, its movement to infinity equaling and thereby conquering its appearance as a way of righteousness, nature sincerely perceives its own nothingness, that is, it is freed from form as freed from the law. Just as for Luther, Calvin’s law perishes in the equality in which the movement to infinity annuls the law’s claim to justify, an annulment that renders nature free from the law’s curse. Again like Luther, Calvin implicitly links this culminating ontological event to the appropriation of grace in the heart, the felt knowledge that the Christ, secretly redefined as Christ-Idol, justifies the sinner in nature’s total abdication of form.
This shared ontological story joins Luther and Calvin despite their differences, notably the latter’s embedding of the law within grace. In Calvin’s thought, the underlying ontology and the embedding combine in the ceaseless obedience that he requires
