9. Next, there is religious individualism, which is
conceptually closely related to the notions of autonomy
and of privacy (see above: II, Secs. 3, 4). This may be
defined as the view that the individual believer does
not need intermediaries, that he has the right, and
sometimes the duty, to come to his own relationship
with his God in his own way and by his own effort.
It is thus both a religious doctrine and, by implication,
a view of the nature of religion; and it points to two
further and important ideas: spiritual equality and
religious self-scrutiny. The former was stressed in the
early Church and the latter found its supreme expres-
sion in the thought of Saint Augustine. Indeed religious
individualism could be traced back at least to Jeremiah,
but its modern forms characteristically date from the
Reformation, when it was expressed in terms of the
doctrine of the “inner light” and of the universal
priesthood of the believers.
It evidently embraces a wide range, from the most
communal forms of Protestantism to cults of private
mysticism, but it has usually been associated with
Calvinism. Here spiritual self-scrutiny and the “inter-
nalization of conscience” were carried to their ex-
tremes. As Max Weber wrote: “In spite of the necessity
of membership in the true Church for salvation, the
Calvinist's intercourse with his God was carried on in
deep spiritual isolation” (Weber, 1904-05 [1930], pp.
106-07; see Watt, 1957 for an examination of the
literary consequences of Puritanism's introspective
tendency). Weber stressed the connection between the
doctrine of predestination and “a feeling of unprece-
dented loneliness of the single individual,” given “the
complete elimination of salvation through the Church
and the sacraments (which was in Lutheranism by no
means developed to its final conclusion)...”:
In what was for the man of the age of the Reformation
the most important thing in life, his eternal salvation, he
was forced to follow his path alone to meet a destiny which
had been decreed for him from eternity
(ibid., pp. 104-05).
This “inner isolation of the individual,” Weber argued,
“forms one of the roots of that disillusioned and pes-
simistically inclined individualism which can even
today be identified in the national characters and the
institutions of the peoples with a Puritan past...”
(ibid., p. 105).
