Jean-Jacques’ Come-Back !

The remarkable Musée International de la Réforme in Geneva has retained Rousseau’s discreet place at the predestination table alongside Luther and Calvin. This does involve an ironic wink since there is little evidence that Rousseau adhered to the dogma of predestination, even if all his personal history encouraged him in a deep personal feeling that he had been chosen by God.

This inclusion of Rousseau in Protestant history remains marginal and he is among the quiet Protestants we don’t often come across in sermons or conferences.

A new book changes that. The Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard published separately in a new edition (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Profession de foi du vicaire savoyard, ed. Pierre-Olivier Léchot, Geneva, Labor et Fides, 2012) is taken from a larger work, ﾉmile, published by Rousseau in 1762.

Rousseau was really a 21st century Protestant and it has taken until now to realise this. In his introduction, Pierre-Olivier Léchot tries to discover « What [Rousseau] owes to Calvin ». Not a lot, and this is quite easy to demonstrate: we remember Rouseau’s later wisecrack, related here by Léchot, « Calvin was no doubt a great man, but he was in the end just a man, and – worse – a theologian. » Léchot also tells us that Rousseau advocated a « freedom of expression » in itself foreign to Calvin. Rousseau’s rejection of miracles, unease with intercessory prayer, stress on personal experience and feeling above the biblical text – all these elements would have repelled Calvin, and that’s before we even get to Rousseau’s rejection of original sin and of orthodox patristic christology!

Rousseau’s Jesus was the apostle of a moral system and his divinity had an « allegorical » character. Taken as a whole, Rousseau’s Christianity is Unitarian: we are not far from Isaac Newton or Samuel Clarke (briefly quoted by Rousseau). Léchot also underlines Rousseau’s intellectual debt to contemporary Protestantism: pastors Jean-Alphonse Turretini of Geneva and Jean-Frédéric Ostervald of Neuchâtel.

Léchot’s exposé finishes by outlining Rousseau’s rejection of St Paul. It seems clear that in Rousseau’s later writings, beginning with his Lettres écrites de la montagne, he wished for a return to the religion of Christ’s Beatitudes, which struck him as more authentic than Paul’s teaching. Rousseau openly prefers James the Lord’s brother and his « letter of straw » (as Luther dubbed it) to Paul and his Letter to the Romans. This may be the heritage of Rousseau’s youthful period as a Catholic, with a religion of works replacing justification by faith in his heart. But is Christianity or Protestantism even thinkable without Paul?

Rousseau’s is a liberal Protestantism before its time, but also a Protestantism of paradox, where provocation is a sign of authenticity. Even though Rousseau is a son of Calvin by his style, the lucidity of his prose and the freedom of his tone, he is nonetheless engaged in an unremitting conflict with Calvin’s theology, just as he combats Augustine even while he writes his own Confessions.

So what does Rousseau owe to Calvin? I recommend that you read Léchot’s fine edition, from which I take this phrase of Rousseau’s as a conclusion: « Return to your homeland, take up again the faith of your ancestors, follow it in the sincerity of your heart and do not forsake it: it is very simple and very holy. I believe that it is of all the religions on earth the one which teaches the purest ethics and which is most in accord with reason. »

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