The Visio Dei: We can only know ourselves in the light of our experience of God

Calvin’s Institutes, which represent his theology and spirituality, begins with the way in which we experience our faith – which is really what spirituality is all about. He focusses on how we see ourselves and contrasts with this how we should regard ourselves. It is striking to see what significant role contemplation of God plays in Calvin’s institutes in this regard.

Calvin was critical about the way in which we overestimate our own importance, wisdom, righteousness, holiness and merit. In this hubris and self-pride, we lack true self-knowledge.

The only way we can arrive at a true understanding of ourselves is by contemplating the face of God. He therefore writes in the second paragraph of his opening chapter on our lack of self-knowledge which he says we need to overcome by looking at the Lord. Several times he underlines how important it is for us to experience God’s presence – only then will we be able to live faith. “We need,” he writes, “to raise our thoughts to God.”

This is how he formulates it (note how he repeatedly refers to the need to experience God - to have a visio Dei:

“2. On the other hand, it is evident that man never attains to a true self-knowledge until he has previously contemplated the face of God, and come down after such contemplation to look into himself. For (such is our innate pride) we always seem to ourselves just, and upright, and wise, and holy, until we are convinced, by clear evidence, of our injustice, vileness, folly, and impurity. Convinced, however, we are not, if we look to ourselves only, and not to the Lord also —He being the only standard by the application of which this conviction can be produced.... If, at mid-day, we either look down to the ground, or on the surrounding objects which lie open to our view, we think ourselves endued with a very strong and piercing eyesight; but when we look up to the sun, and gaze at it unveiled, the sight which did excellently well for the earth is instantly so dazzled and confounded by the refulgence, as to oblige us to confess that our acuteness in discerning terrestrial objects is mere dimness when applied to the sun. Thus too, it happens in estimating our spiritual qualities. So long as we do not look beyond the earth, we are quite pleased with our own righteousness, wisdom, and virtue; we address ourselves in the most flattering terms, and seem only less than demigods. But should we once begin to raise our thoughts to God, and reflect what kind of Being he is, and how absolute the perfection of that righteousness, and wisdom, and virtue, to which, as a standard, we are bound to be conformed, what formerly delighted us by its false show of righteousness will become polluted with the greatest iniquity; what strangely imposed upon us under the name of wisdom will disgust by its extreme folly; and what presented the appearance of virtuous energy will be condemned as the most miserable impotence. So far are those qualities in us, which seem most perfect, from corresponding to the divine purity.”