Out of the Flames

Out of the Flames by Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone

This book was on the reading list for the "History of Books and Print" class that was offered in my library school last fall. I didn't take that class, but put the book on my Christmas list last year and have finally got around to reading it. It's a well-written historical piece that talks about the violence (both physical and intellectual) of the Reformation, the slow process of understanding the workings of the human body, and the strange story of a book related to both of these that disappeared from history and slowly came to the surface again.

John Calvin is one of the bad guys in this book. Sometime in my late twenties or early thirties, I attempted to read some of John Calvin's writings as a way to be in touch with the religion of my youth (Presbyterian) and was appalled by most of what I read. Around the same time, I read some George Fox (a founder of the Society of Friends, or Quakers--the religion of one branch of my ancestry) and was equally disillusioned. Perhaps, the lesson I should have drawn from that was it takes a zealot to start a religious movement and that the movement is best judged by the actions of those engaged in it generations later. At the time I read Calvin and Fox, however, I took away the notion that all religions are intolerant at the core and, therefore, unsuitable spiritual outlets for a lifelong learner.

Given that background while reading this book, I was intrigued to hear an interview on To the Best of our Knowledge of author Marilynne Robinson who seems to have a real appreciation for Calvinism. I now seem to have thoroughly exposed myself to some of the worst parts of Calvinism, but there surely has to be some good things since more than one modern religion has roots there.

Here is a quote about the nature of Calvinism, from the Marilynne Robinson interview, that makes me think I could find something attractive in it, something so basic to my nature that I'm barely aware of it as part of my belief system:

It assumes that experience is a continuing revelation. It's not as if you believe once and then adhere to what you believe in a frozen moment in effect. But that you are continuously being reinstructed. And that whenever your ideas harden around one set of conceptions, that's a form of idolatry because you think you have something that equals truth or equals God. It made very tough people, really, because they always assumed if things fell apart, there must be some wonderful lesson in it. And it also dignifies our experience. Anything can be absolutely meaningful.

So I have requested her novel Gilead and a nonfiction work, The death of Adam : essays on modern thought, through the library.     #

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