Kids

[Paul Mackin]

On Sun, 25 Jun 2000, Dave Monroe wrote:

> ... but a Protestant "rising towards human perfection"?  Certainly not in the
> seemingly Calvinist, Puritan Protestanism of preterition and election
> foregrounded in Gravity's Rainbow, "human perfection" being an assumed
> impossibility therein ...


The sharper than actual contrast between Protestant and Catholic was
called into service by me in order to suggest it as a modern (post
reformation) manifestation of the quite sharp 5th Century  division
between those favoring the spirit within (gnostic influenced) view of the
Pelagians and the man-is-doomed-if-left-to-his-own-devices position of
Augustine, which was to become orthodoxy.

True, Calvinists did not think of themselves as achieving perfection.
They did believe however in spiritual and material achievement, much of it
presumably through their own efforts, in which sense they were
arguably followers  of Pelagius. Such success was for them a sign of
devine favor. The funny  thing was however was that  salvation (for the
Elect) was by God's grace alone, in which sense the Calvinists were
Augustinians.

Even the best things break down. There are no surviving binary oppositions
in Christianity. Everything always comes back to its opposite. The last
shall be first and the first shall be last. As below so above.

				P.