John Calvin was not an original thinker. Most of his core ideas came from Luther (and Augustine). But he was able to express those ideas far more lucidly than Luther himself ever could—a reflection of their very different temperaments. Whereas Luther was tempestuous, florid, poetic, and wild, Calvin was orderly, precise, logical, and intensely disciplined. In writing, Luther would pour out his thoughts in a red heat, then send off the manuscript to the printer without even rereading it. Calvin would compulsively revise his Institutes, making sure every modifier, antecedent, and punctuation mark was in its place. Luther’s scriptural exegesis flowed on for page after unruly page; Calvin’s struck with piquant force. Luther provided the combustion, Calvin the engine to harness it.
Like so many other evangelical leaders, Calvin (who was born in 1509) began as a humanist. His first work in print was a commentary on Seneca’s De clementia, for which he used an edition by Erasmus. In his preface, he called the Dutchman the “second glory and the darling of literature.” Even then, however, Calvin was showing signs of his future rigor. In 1523, when he was fourteen, he went to Paris to study at the university. Soon after arriving, he entered the Collège de Montaigu—the same institution where Erasmus had suffered as a young man. Calvin felt none of Erasmus’s revulsion; on the contrary, the college’s austerity suited his exacting, no-nonsense mind. (Among students, he became known as the “accusative case.”) In 1528, at the urging of his father, Calvin began to study law at Orléans, but in 1531 he returned to Paris to pursue his scholarly interests. Intent on improving his Greek, he entered the Collège Royal, a newly created institute of higher learning modeled on the College of Three Tongues in Louvain.
At the time, Luther’s ideas were circulating in Paris, and sometime between the summer of 1532 and the spring of 1534, Calvin underwent a “sudden conversion,” as he would later put it, accepting the central place of faith in attaining God’s grace. (Modern scholars, examining his writings, have had trouble detecting the change.) In the autumn of 1533, Nicholas Cop, a friend from Calvin’s days at Montaigu, was named rector of the University of Paris. In his inaugural address, delivered on November 1, 1533, Cop, with a vehemence that seemed almost Lutheran, denounced the Scholastic doctors of Paris and called for ecclesiastical reform. The university erupted, and the Parlement (the highest court in Paris) initiated proceedings against him for heresy. Calvin—warned that he faced arrest as a suspected coconspirator—fled Paris, and he began preparing a comprehensive summary of his theological views. He returned clandestinely to Paris, but early in the morning on October 18, 1534, it, along with several other cities, was plastered with inflammatory placards that denounced the Mass as idolatry and the pope and Catholic clergy as “apostates” and “murderers of souls.” One poster appeared on the door of the bedchamber of Francis I himself—a serious breach of security that enraged the king and resulted in a wave of arrests. Fleeing, Calvin traveled around France under an assumed name. He ended up in Basel, where he continued work on his tract. (His stay there overlapped with that of Erasmus by several months, but there is no evidence that the two men met.)
While thus occupied, Calvin learned of the horrible outcome of the affair of the placards in Paris. Hundreds of suspected Protestants were arrested and about two dozen were burned; some were attached to chains and repeatedly lowered into and raised from the flames. The king himself watched with pleasure as the men slowly roasted to death. Once a great patron of humanists, Francis would from that point on seek to stamp out all traces of dissent and reformism. In his book, Calvin hoped to convince the king that not all French evangelicals were irresponsible radicals, and in his preface he urged Francis to distinguish between the reasonable reformers who were loyal to him and the seditious hooligans who had posted the placards.
The first edition of the Institutes of the Christian Religion, written in Latin and appearing in Basel in March 1536, was only six chapters long. Over the next quarter century of revision and elaboration, it would swell into a massive tome longer than the Old Testament. It would be the grand Reformation summa that Luther himself never produced; indeed, Calvin is often compared to Thomas Aquinas for his ability to synthesize and systematize. In meticulous detail Calvin described the depravity of man and the majesty of God; the false promise of works and the justifying power of faith; the inherent fallibility of human law and the unimpeachable authority of God’s Word. In expounding these doctrines, Calvin intensified and distilled them. As frail and powerless as man is in Luther’s world, he is utterly bereft in Calvin’s. For him, the Fall was the defining event in history, and with elegiac sorrow he described the state of bliss that man would have enjoyed had Adam not violated the divine command.
As for God, his power is even more absolute in Calvin’s universe than in Luther’s. From both Luther and Augustine he took the idea of predestination and expanded it. According to Calvin, God foreordained not only those who will be saved, as Luther held, but also those who will be condemned—a doctrine that came to be known as double predestination. “All are not created in equal condition,” Calvin declared; “rather, eternal life is foreshadowed for some, eternal damnation for others.” God makes this determination with complete foreknowledge, for all things “always were, and perpetually remain, under his eyes.” Calvin expressed contempt for those who, insisting on man’s free will, “bitterly loathe” the doctrine of predestination “as dangerous, not to say superfluous”—a clear reference to Erasmus.
As Calvin himself acknowledged, this decree was horribile—terrifying. To make it more palatable, he joined the doctrine of predestination to the idea of the “elect”—the small sliver of humanity preselected by God for salvation. Calvin usually put the ratio of those saved at one in a hundred, though in more charitable moments he increased it to one in twenty or even one in five. Whatever the number, those elected could expect great blessings. Once the “light of divine providence” shines on a man, Calvin wrote, “he is then relieved and set free not only from the extreme anxiety and fear that were pressing him before, but from every care.” The elect individual takes comfort in knowing “that he has been received into God’s safekeeping and entrusted to the care of his angels, and that neither water, nor fire, nor iron can harm him, except insofar as it pleases God as governor to permit.” The clearest sign that one is among the elect is the undertaking of tireless work to build the kingdom of Christ on earth.
These ideas about predestination and election were not fully formed when Calvin prepared the first edition of the Institutes; only over subsequent editions would they take shape as he worked to apply his theology to the real world—a process that would soon get under way. After a brief return to France to settle some family affairs, Calvin in the summer of 1536 prepared to travel to Strasbourg and devote himself to his studies. Because of imperial troop movements, however, he had to make a detour through Geneva. He planned to stay just for the night, but Guillaume Farel—a fiery evangelical who years earlier had clashed with Erasmus—now headed the reform party in the city, and he browbeat the reluctant Calvin into staying and helping. At the time, Geneva was known for its lax behavior, with high rates of gambling, drinking, and prostitution. In addition to introducing Protestant practices, Farel and Calvin sought to reform personal morals. A stern code of conduct was enacted; under it, repeat offenders were subject to excommunication or exile. With resistance rising, the city council directed both men to stay clear of politics. When they refused, they were ordered to leave, and their departure, in April 1538, set off public celebrations.
Calvin’s expulsion, however, would prove a stroke of fortune. He went to Strasbourg, where he found a wife (the widow of an Anabaptist), developed his skills as a teacher and pastor, and produced a commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. He also completed a greatly expanded edition of the Institutes, including a French version that would become a model of French style. Most important, Calvin saw how Martin Bucer was able to use the local clergy to govern the city without producing the type
of backlash that had developed in Geneva. As he revised the Institutes, Calvin added sections on the structure and governance of a reformed church, providing a sort of handbook for establishing a church based on biblical principles.
The chance to establish such a church would soon arise. Since his departure from Geneva, moral probity had declined while religious strife had increased, and the city council sent Calvin several messages urging him to return. Calvin refused, saying that he would rather die a hundred times than take up that cross again. But the entreaties kept coming, and Calvin eventually gave in. On his return to Geneva, on September 13, 1541, he was greeted with honors and apologies. He was provided with a large house and appointed pastor at St. Peter’s cathedral. Once installed, he set out to cleanse the city. He drafted a set of Ecclesiastical Ordinances—a detailed blueprint for governance that would prove one of the Reformation’s most significant documents. It established four orders of officers: pastors to preach and indoctrinate; teachers to instruct the faithful and safeguard doctrinal purity; deacons to distribute alms to the poor and help the sick; and, most important, elders to oversee discipline and guide souls. These elders were to “watch over the lives of everyone,” “admonish in love” those who erred, and report malefactors for “fraternal correction.”
Among the many activities proscribed were drunkenness, gambling, card playing, profanity, dancing (said to incite lust), indecent songs, immodest dress, promiscuous bathing, extravagant living, the introduction of unapproved doctrines, and the neglect of Scripture. Attendance at Sunday sermons was made compulsory, even for those who subscribed to another creed. Penalties were imposed for making loud sounds or laughing during services and for inappropriate behavior on the Sabbath. Enforcement and discipline were entrusted to a Consistory, which, made up of pastors and elders, became the city’s most powerful agency. Once a year every household received a visit from an elder who questioned the occupants on all phases of their lives. Any person charged with an infraction could be summoned before the Consistory, and a network of informers was set up to report cases of moral turpitude.
Calvin himself had little trouble living up to this code. Strict, methodical, and single-minded, he worked up to eighteen hours a day, lived sparingly, fasted frequently. He preached prodigiously, taught theology, supervised churches and schools, and maintained a correspondence that in volume and breadth rivaled that of Erasmus. And he worked hard to make sure the city’s moral code was strictly enforced. A woman was detained for piling her hair to an immoderate height. Gamblers were put in the stocks and adulterers punished by jail terms of up to nine days on bread and water. Calvin also banned the naming of children after Catholic saints, and many parents erupted in anger at the baptismal font when informed that the name they had chosen was unacceptable.
One thing Calvin could not control while in Geneva was his temper. His self-effacement before God was matched by his high-handedness toward men, and he raged at those who dared challenge him. And there were many, including not only Catholics who resented having to worship a Protestant God but also citizens who detested his stringent moral controls and demands for theological conformity. Calvin’s doctrine of predestination in particular rankled many citizens, who rejected the assertion that man has no control over his destiny. Calvin called his opponents “libertines,” implying moral laxity.
Dissenters paid a heavy price. Jacques Gruet, a young freethinking patrician, was accused of putting up a placard on Calvin’s pulpit that denounced him as a “puffed-up hypocrite.” A search of his room turned up papers mocking the authority of Scripture and dismissing the immortality of the soul as a fairy tale. Gruet was also accused of having appealed to France to intervene in Geneva. He was tortured twice daily for thirty days until he confessed to having put up the placard and conspiring with French agents. As punishment, he was beheaded, with Calvin’s consent.
Far more damaging to Calvin’s reputation was the case of Michael Servetus. An accomplished physician, skilled cartographer, and eclectic theologian from Spain, Servetus held maverick (and sometimes unbalanced) views on many points of Christian doctrine. In 1531, he published Seven Books on the Errors of the Trinity, enraging both Catholics and Protestants, Calvin among them. At one point, Servetus took up residence in Vienne, a suburb of Lyon about ninety miles from Geneva, where, under an assumed name, he began turning out heterodox books while also practicing medicine. His magnum opus, The Restitution of Christianity—a rebuttal of Calvin’s Institutes—rejected predestination, denied original sin, called infant baptism diabolical, and further deprecated the Trinity. Servetus imprudently sent Calvin a copy. Calvin sent back a copy of his Institutes. Servetus filled its margins with insulting comments, then returned it. A bitter exchange of letters followed, in which Servetus announced that the Archangel Michael was girding himself for Armageddon and that he, Servetus, would serve as his armor-bearer. Calvin sent Servetus’s letters to a contact in Vienne, who passed them on to Catholic inquisitors in Lyon. Servetus was promptly arrested and sent to prison, but after a few days he escaped by jumping over a prison wall.
After spending three months wandering around France, he decided to seek refuge in Naples. En route, he inexplicably stopped in Geneva. Arriving on a Saturday, he attended Calvin’s lecture the next day. Though disguised, Servetus was recognized by some refugees from Lyon and immediately arrested. Calvin instructed one of his disciples to file capital charges against him with the magistrates for his various blasphemies. After a lengthy trial and multiple examinations, Servetus was condemned for writing against the Trinity and infant baptism and sentenced to death. He asked to be beheaded rather than burned, but the council refused, and on October 27, 1553, Servetus, with a copy of the Restitution tied to his arm, was sent to the stake. Shrieking in agony, he took half an hour to die.
Calvin approved. “God makes clear that the false prophet is to be stoned without mercy,” he explained in Defense of the Orthodox Trinity Against the Errors of Michael Servetus. “We are to crush beneath our heel all affections of nature when his honor is involved. The father should not spare the child, nor the brother his brother, nor the husband his own wife or the friend who is dearer to him than life.”
Among humanists, however, Servetus’s execution caused a storm. Sebastian Castellio, a professor of Greek at the University of Basel, felt compelled to speak out. Though Basel was no longer the humanist mecca it had once been, Erasmus’s spirit lingered, and Castellio was inspired by his writings. A protest attributed to him, titled Concerning Heretics, Whether They Should Be Persecuted, is widely considered the first modern defense of religious tolerance. Among Christians, Castellio wrote, contention had become so fierce that scarcely anyone could “endure another who differs at all from him.” They fought over the Trinity, predestination, free will, and a host of other issues that were ultimately irresolvable and that in any case were not critical to salvation. The result was “banishments, chains, imprisonments, stakes, and gallows” and a “miserable rage to visit daily penalties” upon those holding contrary views. Satan himself “could not devise anything more repugnant to the nature and will of Christ!” Given the many faults all men have, the best course for each would be to look within and correct his own life rather than to condemn that of others.
Castellio’s most famous pronouncement came in a subsequent work aimed directly at Calvin. “To kill a man,” he wrote, “is not to defend a doctrine, but to kill a man. When the Genevans killed Servetus, they did not defend a doctrine; they killed a man.” This captured with epigrammatic power the horror many humanists felt at the willingness of Calvin and his supporters to burn Christians for their beliefs. Such views were so controversial that Castellio dared not attach his name to them; his books were published anonymously or pseudonymously. Calvin had little trouble identifying him, however, and for years he led a campaign to silence and defame him.
Ironically, Calvin’s attacks on Servetus’s ideas would help spread them, and they would become one of two key s
ources of Unitarianism. (The other was Erasmus’s rejection of the Trinitarian passage at 1 John 5:7.) At the time, however, Servetus’s execution strengthened Calvin’s position in not only Geneva but also Europe as a whole, for it showed how far he was willing to go to defend the faith. From that moment on, he was seen as not just one reformer among many but as the outstanding voice of Protestantism. In Geneva, the apparatus of discipline and control was tightened. In the mid-1550s, four of Calvin’s chief opponents in Geneva were beheaded—an act seen by evangelicals as a triumph for both Calvin and God. From 1541 to 1564, when Calvin was in control of Geneva, an estimated fifty-eight people were executed and seventy-six banished.
With opposition largely suppressed within the city, Calvin looked to spread his ideas beyond it. Geneva had steadily filled with Protestants who, fleeing persecution in France and other Catholic lands, came to participate in this exciting endeavor to build a heavenly community. To help train them, Calvin in 1559 set up an institute of higher learning. Offering instruction in Latin, Greek, rhetoric, and the Bible, the Geneva Academy turned out pastors and missionaries who, after graduating, returned to their homelands to preach the gospel according to Calvin. To further promote his views, Calvin supported a vibrant publishing industry that flooded France with theological texts.
With its rigorous schools, vigilant morals squads, and attentive congregations, Geneva became a beacon to evangelicals across Europe. Just as Calvin’s theology gave Protestantism a clear statement of beliefs, so did his governing structure provide a model by which a truly Christian society could be organized. That model would prove especially effective at spreading the Reformation in regions with hostile governments. Whereas Lutherans often collaborated with princes, Calvinists would encourage the formation of disciplined, tight-knit groups expert at winning converts in unwelcoming settings. Working clandestinely, these cells were difficult to detect and uproot. Through them, Calvinism would make major inroads in France, Hungary, Poland, and Germany itself. It would gain control of the northern Netherlands after the 1550s and Scotland after 1560. In the seventeenth century, Calvinism would inspire the Puritan revolution in England and, across the ocean, become the dominant faith in colonial New England. Calvinism thus restored to the Reformation a dynamism and an expansionist energy that had largely disappeared from Lutheranism.
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