The Reformation
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Farel was now forty-seven; and though he was destined to outlive Calvin by a year, he saw in the stern and eloquent youth, twenty years his junior, just the man needed to consolidate and advance the Reform. Calvin was reluctant; he had planned a life of scholarship and writing; he was more at ease with God than with men. But Farel, with the mien of some thundering Biblical prophet, threatened to lay a holy curse upon him if he should prefer his private studies to the arduous and dangerous preaching of the undiluted Word. Calvin yielded; Council and presbytery approved; and-with no other ordination—he began his ministry (September 5, 1536) by giving in the church of St. Peter the first of several addresses on the Epistles of St. Paul. Everywhere in Protestantism, except among the socially radical sects, the influence of Paul overshadowed that of Peter, the reputed founder of the Roman See.
In October Calvin accompanied Farel and Viret to Lausanne, and took a minor part in the famous disputation that won that city to the Protestant camp. Returning to Geneva, the senior and junior pastors of St. Peter’s set about to rededicate the Genevese to God. Sincerely accepting the Bible as the literal Word of God, they felt an inescapable obligation to enforce its moral code. They were shocked to find many of the people given to singing, dancing, and similar gaieties; moreover, some gambled, or drank to intoxication, or committed adultery. An entire district of the city was occupied by prostitutes, under the rule of their own Reine du bordel, the Brothel Queen. To the fiery Farel and the conscientious Calvin a genial acceptance of this situation was treason to God.
To restore the religious basis of an effective morality, Farel issued a Confession of Faith and Discipline, and Calvin a popular Catechism, which the Great Council approved (November 1536). Citizens persistently transgressing the moral code were to be excommunicated and exiled. In July 1537, the Council ordered all citizens to go to the church of St. Peter and swear allegiance to Farel’s Confession. Any manifestation of Catholicism—such as carrying a rosary, cherishing a sacred relic, or observing a saint’s day as holy—was subject to punishment. Women were imprisoned for wearing improper hats. Bonnivard, too joyous in his liberty, was warned to end his licentious ways. Gamblers were put into the stocks. Adulterers were driven through the streets into banishment.
Accustomed to ecclesiastical rule, but to the lenient moral discipline of a Catholicism softened by southern climes, the Genevese resisted the new dispensation. The Patriotes, who had freed the city from bishop and duke, reorganized to free it from its zealous ministers. Another party, demanding liberty of conscience and worship, and therefore called Libertins or Liberals,* joined with the Patriotes and the secret Catholics; and this coalition, in the election of February 3, 1538, captured a majority in the Great Council. The new Council told the ministers to keep out of politics. Farel and Calvin denounced the Council, and refused to serve the Lord’s Supper until the rebellious city conformed to the sworn discipline. The Council deposed the two ministers (April 23), and ordered them to leave the city within three days. The people celebrated the dismissal with public rejoicings.27 Farel accepted a call to Neuchâtel; there he preached to the end of his days (1565), and there a public monument honors his memory.
Calvin went to Strasbourg, then a free city subject only to the emperor, and ministered to L’Église des Étrangers, a congregation of Protestants chiefly from France. To eke out the fifty-two guilders ($1,300?) annually paid him by the church, he sold his library and took students as boarders. Finding bachelorhood inconvenient in this situation, he asked Farel and Bucer to search out a wife for him, and listed specifications: “I am none of those insane lovers who, when once smitten with the fine figure of a woman, embrace also her faults. This only is the beauty which allures me—that she be chaste, obliging, not fastidious, economical, patient, and careful for my health.”28 After two false starts he married (1540) Idelette de Bure, a poor widow with several children. She bore him one child, who died in infancy. When she passed away (1549) he wrote of her with the private tenderness that underlay his public severity. He lived in domestic loneliness the remaining fifteen years of his life.
While he labored in Strasbourg events moved on at Geneva. Encouraged by the expulsion of Farel and Calvin, the exiled bishop planned a triumphant return to his cathedral. As a preliminary step he persuaded Iacopo Sadoleto to write an Epistle to the Genevese, urging them to resume their Catholic worship and faith (1539). Sadoleto was a gentleman of exceptional virtue for a cardinal and a humanist; he had already advised the papacy to handle Protestant dissent gently, and he later received under his protection at Carpentras heretical Waldenses fleeing from massacre (1545). In a fine Latin learned under the impeccable Bembo, he addressed “to his dearly beloved Brethren, the Magistrates, Senate, and citizens of Geneva,” twenty pages of diplomatic courtesies and theological exhortation. He noted the rapid division of Protestantism into warring sects, led, he alleged, by crafty men avid for power; he compared this with the centuries-long unity of the Roman Church, and asked whether it was more likely that truth lay with those contradictory factions than with a Catholic doctrine formed by the experience of ages and the assembled intelligence of ecclesiastical councils. He concluded by offering to Geneva whatever service it was in his power to give.
The Council thanked him for his compliments, and promised him a further response. But no one could be found in Geneva who would undertake to cross swords, or Latin, with the polished humanist. Meanwhile a number of citizens asked to be released from their oath to support the Confession of Faith and Discipline, and for a time it seemed that the city would return to Catholicism. Calvin learned of the situation, and in a reply to the Cardinal he rose with all the power of his mind and pen to the defense of the Reformation. He countered courtesy with courtesy, eloquence with eloquence, but he would not yield an inch of his theology. He protested against the implication that he had rebelled through personal ambition; he could have risen to far greater comfort had he remained orthodox. He admitted the divine foundation of the Catholic Church, but he charged that the vices of the Renaissance popes proved the capture of the papacy by Antichrist. To the wisdom of Church councils he opposed the wisdom of the Bible, which Sadoleto had almost ignored. He regretted that the corruption of the Church had necessitated secession and division, but only so could the evils be cured. If Catholics and Protestants would now co-operate to cleanse the doctrine, ritual, and personnel of all the Christian churches, they would be rewarded with a final unity in heaven with Christ. It was a powerful letter, perhaps unappreciative of the incidental virtues of the Renaissance popes, but otherwise phrased with a comity and dignity rare in the controversies of the time. Luther, reading it in Wittenberg, hailed it as quite annihilating the Cardinal; “I rejoice,” he cried, “that God raises up men who will .... finish the war against Antichrist which I began.” 29 The Council of Geneva was so impressed that it ordered the two letters printed at the city’s expense (1540). It began to wonder whether, in banishing Calvin, it had lost the ablest man in the Swiss Reform.
Other factors nourished the doubt. The ministers who had replaced Farel and Calvin proved incompetent both in preaching and in discipline. The public lost respect for them, and returned to the easy morality of unreformed days. Gambling, drunkenness, street brawls, adultery, flourished; lewd songs were publicly sung, persons romped naked through the streets.30 Of the four syndics who had led the movement to expel Farel and Calvin, one had to be condemned to death for murder, another for forgery, a third for treason, and the fourth died while trying to escape arrest. The businessmen who controlled the Council must have frowned upon this disorder as impeding trade. The Council itself had no taste for being replaced and perhaps excommunicated by a restored bishop. Gradually a majority of the members came to the idea of recalling Calvin. On May 1, 1541, the Council annulled the sentence of banishment, and pronounced Farel and Calvin to be honorable men. Deputation after deputation was sent to Strasbourg to persuade Calvin to resume his pastorate at Geneva. Farel forgave the city for not ex
tending him a similar invitation, and with noble generosity joined the deputations in urging Calvin to return. But Calvin had made many friends in Strasbourg, felt obligations there, and saw nothing but strife in store for him at Geneva; “there is no place in the world that I fear more.” He agreed only to pay the city a visit. When he arrived (September 13, 1541) he received so many honors, so many apologies, so many promises of co-operation in reestablishing order and the Gospel, that he had not the heart to refuse. On September 16 he wrote to Farel: “Your wish is granted. I am held fast here. May God give His blessing.” 31
IV. THE CITY OF GOD
Calvin behaved, in the early years of his recall, with a moderation and modesty that won all but a small minority to his support. Eight assistant pastors were appointed, under him, to serve St. Peter’s and the other churches of the city. He labored twelve to eighteen hours a day as preacher, administrator, professor of theology, superintendent of churches and schools, adviser to municipal councils, and regulator of public morals and church liturgy; meanwhile he kept enlarging the Institutes, wrote commentaries on the Bible, and maintained a correspondence second in extent only to that of Erasmus, and surpassing it in influence. He slept little, ate little, fasted frequently. His successor and biographer, Théodore de Bèze, marveled that one little man (unicus homunculus) could carry so heavy and varied a burden.
His first task was the reorganization of the Reformed Church. At his request the Small Council, soon after his return, appointed a commission of five clergymen and six councilors, with Calvin at their head, to formulate a new ecclesiastical code. On January 2, 1542, the Great Council ratified the resultant Ordonnances ecclésiastiques, whose essential features are still accepted by the Reformed and Presbyterian churches of Europe and America. The ministry was divided into pastors, teachers, lay elders, and deacons. The pastors of Geneva constituted “The Venerable Company,” which governed the Church and trained candidates for the ministry. No one henceforth was to preach in Geneva without authorization by the Company; the consent of the city council and the congregation was also required, but episcopal ordinations—and bishops—were taboo. The new clergy, while never claiming the miraculous powers of the Catholic priests, and though decreeing themselves ineligible for civil office, became under Calvin more powerful than any priesthood since ancient Israel. The real law of a Christian state, said Calvin, must be the Bible; the clergy are the proper interpreters of that law; civil governments are subject to that law, and must enforce it as so interpreted. The practical men in the councils may have had some doubts on these points, but they appear to have felt that social order was so profitable to the economy that some ecclesiastical assumptions might for the time being go unchallenged. Through an astonishing quarter of a century a theocracy of clergymen seemed to dominate an oligarchy of merchants and men of affairs.
The authority of the clergy over Genevese life was exercised through a Consistory or Presbytery composed of five pastors and twelve lay elders, all chosen by the Council. As the pastors held tenure throughout their ministry, and the elders for only a year, the Consistory, in matters not vitally affecting business, was ruled by its ecclesiastical members. It took the right to ordain the religious worship and moral conduct of every inhabitant; it sent a minister and an elder to visit every house and family annually; it could summon any person before it for examination; it could publicly reprove or excommunicate offenders, and could rely on the Council to banish from the city those whom the Consistory banned from the Church. Calvin held power as the head of this Consistory; from 1541 till his death in 1564 his voice was the most influential in Geneva. His dictatorship was one not of law or force but of will and character. The intensity of his belief in his mission, and the completeness of his devotion to his tasks, gave him a strength that no one could successfully resist. Hildebrand, revived, could have rejoiced over this apparent triumph of the Church over the state.
So empowered, the clergy first regulated religious worship. “The whole household shall attend the sermons on Sunday, except when someone shall be left at home to tend the children or the cattle. If there is preaching on weekdays all who can must come.” (Calvin preached three or four times a week.) “Should anyone come after the sermon has begun, let him be warned. If he does not amend, let him pay a fine of three sous.”32 No one was to be excused from Protestant services on the plea of having a different or private religious creed; Calvin was as thorough as any pope in rejecting individualism of belief; this greatest legislator of Protestantism completely repudiated that principle of private judgment with which the new religion had begun. He had seen the fragmentation of the Reformation into a hundred sects, and foresaw more; in Geneva he would have none of them. There a body of learned divines would formulate an authoritative creed; those Genevans who could not accept it would have to seek other habitats. Persistent absence from Protestant services, or continued refusal to take the Eucharist, was a punishable offense. Heresy again became an insult to God and treason to the state, and was to be punished with death. Catholicism, which had preached this view of heresy, became heresy in its turn. Between 1542 and 1564 fifty-eight persons were put to death, and seventy-six were banished, for violating the new code. Here, as elsewhere, witchcraft was a capital crime; in one year, on the advice of the Consistory, fourteen alleged witches were sent to the stake on the charge that they had persuaded Satan to afflict Geneva with plague.33
The Consistory made little distinction between religion and morality. Conduct was to be guided as carefully as belief, for good conduct was the goal of right belief. Calvin himself, austere and severe, dreamed of a community so well regulated that its virtue would prove his theology, and would shame the Catholicism that had produced or tolerated the luxury and laxity of Rome. Discipline should be the backbone of personality, enabling it to rise out of the baseness of human nature to the erect stature of the self-conquered man. The clergy must lead by example as well as precept; they may marry and beget, but they must abstain from hunting, gambling, feasting, commerce, and secular amusements, and accept annual visitation and moral scrutiny by their ecclesiastical superiors.
To regulate lay conduct a system of domiciliary visits was established: one or another of the elders visited, yearly, each house in the quarter assigned to him, and questioned the occupants on all phases of their lives. Consistory and Council joined in the prohibition of gambling, card-playing, profanity, drunkenness, the frequenting of taverns, dancing (which was then enhanced by kisses and embraces), indecent or irreligious songs, excess in entertainment, extravagance in living, immodesty in dress. The allowable color and quantity of clothing, and the number of dishes permissible at a meal, were specified by law. Jewelry and lace were frowned upon. A woman was jailed for arranging her hair to an immoral height.34 Theatrical performances were limited to religious plays, and then these too were forbidden. Children were to be named not after saints in the Catholic calendar but preferably after Old Testament characters; an obstinate father served four days in prison for insisting on naming his son Claude instead of Abraham.35 Censorship of the press was taken over from Catholic and secular precedents, and enlarged (1560): books of erroneous religious doctrine, or of immoral tendency, were banned; Montaigne’s Essays and Rousseau’s Émile were later to fall under this proscription. To speak disrespectfully of Calvin or the clergy was a crime.36 A first violation of these ordinances was punished with a reprimand, further violation with fines, persistent violation with imprisonment or banishment. Fornication was to be punished with exile or drowning; adultery, blasphemy, or idolatry, with death. In one extraordinary instance a child was beheaded for striking its parents.37 In the years 1558–59 there were 414 prosecutions for moral offenses; between 1542 and 1564 there were seventy-six banishments and fifty-eight executions; the total population of Geneva was then about 20,000.38 As everywhere in the sixteenth century, torture was often used to obtain confessions or evidence.
Regulation was extended to education, society, and the economic life
. Calvin established schools and an academy, searched through Western Europe for good teachers of Latin, Greek, Hebrew, and theology, and trained young ministers who carried his gospel into France, Holland, Scotland, and England with all the ardor and devotion of Jesuit missionaries in Asia; in eleven years (1555–66) Geneva sent 161 such envoys into France, many of whom sang Huguenot psalms as they suffered martyrdom. Calvin considered class divisions natural, and his legislation protected rank and dignity by prescribing the quality of dress, and the limits of activity for each class.39 Every person was expected to accept his place in society, and to perform its duties without envy of his betters or complaint of his lot. Begging was banned, and indiscriminate charity was replaced by careful communal administration of poor relief.