Negotiating the “Forum Politicum” and the “Forum Conscientiae”

The conspicuous growth of a popular “culture of persuasion” fostered by the Protestant Reformation contributed in no small part to the genesis of the early modern public sphere. ¹ This chapter aims to draw closer attention to changes in religious assumptions, specifically through an exploration of the theological anthropology of John Calvin, in order to investigate an overlooked source of explanation for Jürgen Habermas's well-known account of the structural transformation of the public sphere. By the end of the sixteenth century, and largely owing to this cultural shift, the “moral ontology” which defined religious identity had come to be radically transformed for both the evangelical avant-garde and the Catholic reformers newly energized by the Council of Trent. ² While at a certain level the distinction between the primary ontological orders of the divine and the human— between eternal and temporal planes of reality, soul and body, grace and nature, immortality and mortality—was jointly affirmed by both Protestant reformers and Catholic defenders of traditional religious identity, the impulse toward comprehensive reformation of the doctrine and practice of the church as well as the reinterpretation of the principles underlying secular political life was based upon a deep-seated theological difference about how to interpret the precise disposition of this ontological distinction.