Page "Jean-Jacques Rousseau" Paragraph 13

In converting to Catholicism, both De Warens and Rousseau were likely reacting to Calvinism's insistence on the total depravity of man.

Leo Damrosch writes, " an eighteenth-century Genevan liturgy still required believers to declare ‘ that we are miserable sinners, born in corruption, inclined to evil, incapable by ourselves of doing good '.

" De Warens, a deist by inclination, was attracted to Catholicism's doctrine of forgiveness of sins.