Charitable Inconsistency

 I just finished reading James Hogg's rediscovered classic, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner—a Gothic novel on the theme of Protestant fanaticism that was published two hundred years ago, then forgotten for a century, until André Gide (who knew something about Protestant fanaticism) happened upon it in 1924 (the centennial year of its first publication). Since 2024 is now the novel's bicentennial, and its ghoulish elements befit the month of October, I suppose it is an appropriate time to write about it here. 

The novel works equally well as supernatural horror and a darkly comic satire on Calvinism. Put briefly, it tells the story of a man so thoroughly convinced of the truth of "absolute predestination" that he carries it to antinomian extremes. Since the justified have already been chosen from eternity for salvation, he reasons—then nothing they do in this life can possibly put their blessed future estate in jeopardy. Thus, they can sin with impunity. He therefore proceeds to commit murder and other atrocities, in the belief that no harm can ever come to the saints from their own actions. 

On this level, the book can simply be interpreted as a polemic against the teachings of Calvin (the predestinarian protagonist, after all, is literally revealed to be in league with the devil). But, in fairness, it must be said that just about any stripe of Christianity can yield the same antinomian conclusions, if taken without a grain of salt. Whether they believe salvation is worked by faith alone or by baptism and absolution, every communion is united in teaching that moral behavior is not the key to divine grace. To believe otherwise would be Pelagianism—which the denominations are at one in condemning as heresy. 

Thus, one could just as well have written a novel in which a Lutheran serial killer takes too literally the Protestant founder's instruction to "sin boldly," because they believe they have been saved by faith alone. One could have written a novel about a Catholic zealot who murders and confesses, murders and confesses, rinse and repeat. 

The critique has often been lodged against freethinkers, Deists, and universalists that, having removed the threat of Hell from their theology, they have left no otherworldly incentive to refrain from evil. But the truth is, all of Christianity suffers from the same difficulty: if the saved are saved for reasons other than ethics, what force constrains them to do good? 

Perhaps, then, we need to ask that people do good for its own sake—rather than for the sake of a posthumous reward. This is what the Protestants actually taught, by their doctrine of "Christian liberty." But if they are to be allowed to believe in the possibility of human virtue that is unmotivated by fear of punishment—then surely the same privilege must be granted to the preachers of universal salvation and the nonbelievers too. 

Hogg's novel, therefore, has not really identified a tendency in Calvinism alone that could not be found in the extremist interpretation of a variety of other doctrines. What he is really taking aim at, therefore, is not so much one sect, as extremism itself. His recommended corrective is not to switch denominations and vilify the Calvinists. Rather, the lesson to be gleaned here is to hold whatever religious convictions one may possess with a dash of that "charitable inconsistency" that Samuel Butler urged all people to retain. Believe whatever one wants, worship however one wants, belong to any confession one chooses—just so long, Butler would say, as one doesn't take it all that literally. 

As one of the Calvinist murderer's victims in the novel puts it (and one can be sure he is speaking here for the author's own view): "Religion is a sublime and glorious thing [...] but there is nothing so dangerous to man as the wresting of any of its principles, or forcing them beyond their due bounds: this is of all others the readiest way to destruction." 

Hogg's novel was published in 1824, and no doubt served as a sly commentary on fanaticism in his own time—and every other time. But it looks back specifically to the period of the Civil War, when religious extremism of various kinds triggered bloodshed throughout Britain. Hogg's novel is therefore also very much in the spirit of the other Samuel Butler—the seventeenth century Samuel Butler, who wrote of the time of the religious wars in his satirical poem Hudibras (this Butler is not the 19th century Butler, that is to say, who was the one who penned the line about "charitable inconsistency"). 

Butler's memorable scene-setting stanza at the top of the poem describes the Civil War as a time "when men fell out they knew not why," and contended amongst themselves "for Dame Religion as for Punk." In short, it was a great big bloody mess, in retrospect—and, even a few years after the hostilities had ceased, people had already forgotten what it was all supposed to be about. They could not recall why doctrinal hairsplitting about predestination and works and grace and Pelagius and faith had ever seemed worth killing each other for in the first place. 

It would therefore be a great mistake to use Hogg—who reads as very much a kindred spirit to both Samuel Butlers—as a pretext for still more theological hairsplitting. One should not say: "aha! See! This is what Calvinism leads to!" Rather, one should say: be a Calvinist if you want to. Be an atheist. Be a Pelagian. Be an Socinian. Be an Arminian. Be a Muggletonian. Be a Swedenborgian. Be anything you please. Just don't take it all so seriously that you place your own conviction of certainty above the more fundamental law of charity. 

Better to be inconsistent, yet charitable, than to consistently follow out the implications of all one's dogmas, and yet to be possessed of the fanatic's demoniacal sense of self-righteousness. For the latter is the "cursed conceit of being richt," as Hugh MacDiarmid once called it (himself a product of the same Scottish literary tradition that shaped Hogg), "that damns the vast majority of men."