Professor Stark examines the cultures historically connected with Catholicism and Calvinism, the one the product of community life, the other of associational society. Catholicism continued, practically without interruption, the Hebrew tradition of thinking in holistic terms: the Church is a form of being which is prior to its members. The author shows how there develops, from this germinal attitude, a whole array of cultural phenomena. The Catholic world-view is consistently symbolistic, and its logical perfection, approached but never reached, is a consideration of all things, not as what they are, but as what they stand for-as adumbrations and reflections of an unseen reality.
In the second part of the book, the author demonstrates that Calvinism led to a transvaluation of values. A thrust towards modernization, it considered the Church as a covenant society, allotting to the individuals joining it the primacy of being as well is the-supremacy of judgment. The 'Reformed Church' made man's domination over the physical universe the leading pursuit, symbolism is allowed to decay, and realism takes its place. Thus Calvinism engenders in the fullness of time a world-view in which science. Technology and economic enterprise are the commanding elements.