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God having taken me from my originally obscure and humble condition, has reckoned me worthy
of being invested with the honorable office of
a preacher and minister of the gospel.
—John Calvin, Preface to the Commentary
on the Book of Psalms
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young man caught up in the religious upheavals of the time
A
made his way to the city of Strasbourg. Protestants controlled the city, and its leaders welcomed those who had turned to this new expression of Christianity. John Calvin, French by birth and one of these new Protestants by choice, had been on the move for quite some time. Having returned to France to settle his affairs after a time in exile because of his newfound faith, he left the country again and headed for a city friendly to his religious perspective. He planned to settle down and continue his private studies and writing, pursuits that suited his shy, intellectual nature. The movement of troops along the roads caused him to detour, however, looping south of his intended destination. He found himself in the city of Geneva, Switzerland, meaning to stay there only a day or so.
Once in Geneva, word of Calvin’s presence made its way to William Farel, one of the leaders who had recently helped win the city for the Protestant cause. Farel encouraged Calvin to stay and help with the work in Geneva, but Calvin hesitated. Though his devotion to the cause of religious reform ran deep, he did not think himself suited for such work. He was not ordained and had not studied theology formally, nor had he ever held a position of religious leadership. He would go on to Strasbourg and fulfill his desire to live the life of the private scholar.
Having no luck persuading Calvin to stay, Farel turned to threats. In Calvin’s words:
After having learned that my heart was set upon devoting myself to private studies, for which I wished to keep myself free from other pursuits, and finding that he gained nothing by entreaties, [Farel] proceeded to utter an imprecation that God would curse my retirement, and the tranquility of the studies which I sought, if I should withdraw and refuse to give assistance, when the necessity was so urgent. By this [curse] I was so stricken with terror, that I desisted from the journey which I had undertaken.1
JOHN CALVIN
In fact, except for a period of just a few years, Calvin would remain in Geneva from the time of his encounter with Farel in August 1536 until his death in 1559. Few historical relationships are as widely recognized as that between the man Calvin and the city of Geneva.
Calvin’s identification with Geneva marked him almost as strongly as a book he authored, which was published in March 1536, just a few months earlier. The work carried a very long and ambitious title: Institutes of the Christian Religion, Embracing Almost the Whole Sum of Piety, and Whatever Is Necessary to Know of the Doctrine of Salvation: A Work Most Worthy to Be Read by All Persons Zealous for Piety. Though he went on to write many other books, it is this work that became, for so many people, the embodiment of Calvin’s religious thought, so much so that it has been said that “Calvin was a man of a single book.” 2
Calvin was 26 years old at the time of the publication of the Institutes, and he had published only one other book: a commentary on an ancient Roman thinker named Seneca. In terms of sales and the attention it earned for its writer, the first book was a failure. His second book, however, more than made up for it. Having become known more commonly by its abbreviated title, Institutes of the Christian Religion, the work eventually established Calvin as one of the most influential Protestant Christians of the sixteenth century. Indeed, he still stands today as one of the most important religious thinkers in the Western Christian tradition, and the pervasiveness of his ideas can still be found in contemporary American culture. Much of this can be attributed to the Institutes, a book that grew with Calvin as he himself matured. Though his goal had been to quietly pursue private studies, his position in Geneva and his Institutes pulled Calvin into the spotlight, both in his own century and in the centuries to follow.
The word piety, which the Institutes emphasizes in its long title, is a word that means religious devotion and duty. Calvin’s work presented a way of thinking about how to be a good
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Christian: the things one should believe, how one should worship, how to act, and the obligations one has to society. Though the initial 1536 edition may have been meant as a catechism, or summary of religious beliefs, it became as well a defense for “evangelical” Christianity. This is how the early Protestant Christians thought of themselves, as returning to the evangel, a word that means gospel, which itself means a story of the life and teachings of Jesus. Thus, Calvin’s Institutes became both an instruction in evangelical Christianity and a defense of it. Calvin reworked and revised his book throughout his life, ending with what is considered to be the definitive Latin edition of 1559. Despite its tremendous growth in size over the years, however, its primary purpose remained the same: to teach true piety. Although, as a book, it was widely read across Europe, it was in Geneva itself that Calvin worked to implement, in a practical and real-life manner, the teachings of the Institutes.
A PERIOD OF ANXIETY Of course, Calvin’s work did not appear in a vacuum. By the time his Institutes appeared, Christianity had been around for 1,500 years. Furthermore, Calvin ministered most of his life in an area known today as Switzerland, so the tradition to which Calvin belonged was the European tradition, which had long been institutionalized in the form of the Catholic Church. Indeed, since the time of the Emperor Constantine, in the early fourth century, Catholicism and the various European societies were intimately connected. In fact, there had developed the notion of what has been called Christendom—the idea that the institutions of Christianity worked with the various machineries of state (kings, princes, dukes, war leaders, etc.) to rule society. Thus, if one considers especially the countries that today make up Western Europe—England, Ireland, France, Spain, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, the low countries (Holland, Luxembourg, and Belgium), and the Scandinavian countries—one finds in all these places a strong tradition of church and state working together to order society.
JOHN CALVIN
Although by Calvin’s time a long tradition of Catholic Christianity had embedded itself in Western European society, there was also the sense then and for some time before that things were not quite “right.” Calvin’s century (the sixteenth, or the 1500s) saw tremendous changes take place; what is more, for well over a century, the church itself had been called into question—not only its role in society, but also its ability to serve the people in such a way as to provide the much hoped for salvation Christianity had traditionally promised. The fact is, many experienced the sixteenth century as an “age of anxiety,” and while some of that anxiousness came from social, economic, and cultural factors, a great part of it came from the uncertainty of the religious situation. All factors need to be acknowledged and explored if the rise of Protestantism and Calvin’s role in it are to make sense historically.
A variety of factors made the sixteenth century a time of change. In was in this century that European images of the world began to be fundamentally challenged. The old child’s rhyme says that “in 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Columbus found a “new land” to the west, one populated with people who did not look like or think like the Europeans. The tales brought back from the other direction, the East, also began to confront European imaginations, as knowledge of the lands between Europe and India, and on toward Japan and China, grew. At least some in Europe began to question their unique position in the world, and they began to worry about how to square their long-held religious beliefs with traditions obviously different from their own.
Columbus’s ships, and the many that followed from other European countries, returned from the Americas with gold and silver. The effect of this influx of new wealth gradually eroded the buying power of the peasants whose lives (and incomes) were tied to a land that did not increase in value. In other words, with the introduction of new money into the economy, one saw in Europe real inflation for the first time in many years. Though only a small percentage (probably 2 or 3 percent per year), the
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cumulative effect of this inflation over a period of a few decades began to take its toll on the livelihood of people whose existence had always hovered just above bare subsistence. In other words, though the peasants who worked the land labored just as hard as always, what they could buy with their meager incomes shrank. This would lead, over time, to a peasants’ rebellion in the 1520s, a movement sparked in part by the ideology of the new religious thought (Protestantism) but also responding to the peasants’ deteriorating standard of living.
In addition, during the sixteenth century, there was a “siege” mentality throughout much of Western Europe. Warfare had long been a way of life, and as certain nation states began to form (England, Spain, France), violence often accompanied the consolidation of power. Conflict dogged the smaller territories, as well: The Holy Roman Empire (what would become Germany in the nineteenth century) was a confederation of more than 300 principalities, ranging from city-states to kingdoms the size of modern-day German states (Saxony, for example), and, as the sixteenth century progressed, rebellions and war would continue to break out.
Interestingly, the threat of the sixteenth century that contributed most to this underlying “siege” mentality came from outside Western Europe. The forces of Süleyman the Magnificent, ruler of the Ottoman Empire, an Islamic kingdom centered in the area that today is called Turkey, had pushed his troops far into central Europe; in the 1520s, he was on the doorstep of Vienna. His power continued to grow; he eventually became a major threat in the Mediterranean, and he pillaged Italian cities. The very existence of the Christian West seemed uncertain. People were anxious about their survival culturally, economically, and politically. No wonder that many, including Calvin, perceived themselves to be living in “a world out of joint.”3
RELIGIOUS UPHEAVAL AND UNCERTAINTY The bedrock upon which many in Western Europe assumed their society rested was the Catholic Church. For a period of JOHN CALVIN
200 years before Calvin, however, one crisis after another had rocked the church. This gradually led people to question the church’s authority to establish the order not just of political affairs but also of religious affairs. The church as an institution had been seen as the guarantor of salvation. The head of the church, the pope, was understood to be the successor of the Apostle Peter, chief of Jesus’s disciples. As such, he represented the true faith and teachings of Christianity. The office of pope itself had become problematic in the eyes of many, however, for various reasons.
Though a spiritual ruler, the pope was also a political power, overseeing the administration not only of Rome but also of much of central Italy. Because of political intrigue and power plays, French forces finally overran Rome. They forcibly moved the papacy (the pope and what was required to run his office) to French-controlled territory, to a city called Avignon. There it resided during much of the fourteenth century, from 1309 to 1377.
Because of the perceived “control” of the pope by the French, other countries sought to restore the papacy to Rome. This led to the Great Schism, a period of time during which a pope resided in Avignon and another one resided in Rome. The existence of two popes called into question the validity of the pope’s power: Who legitimately spoke for the church? Some began to look to other sources of authority for the final word concerning Christian faith and teaching.
Some leaders and thinkers advocated conciliarism—the idea that the true head of the church was a properly constituted council of the church. Indeed, it was a series of councils in the early fifteenth century that put an end to the Great Schism, finally appointing a pope that would be recognized by all. Once the new pope was in power, however, he and his successors successfully opposed the plans of the conciliarists to control the church. In addition, as the fifteenth century wore on, many people, as well as many church leaders, thought the popes were more interested in political affairs than they
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were in their spiritual duties. Viewed more as lawyers than pastors, popes began to lose the confidence of people regarding matters of salvation.
Other ideas came forth about that time. Mysticism, the notion that one could unite with God or Jesus in spiritual ecstasy, thus gaining a type of religious authenticity, was an old path increasingly followed by some. As early as the latter part of the fourteenth century and then on into the fifteenth century, still others began to suggest that, in matters of Christian faith and practice, the Bible stood as the final authority, even above the pope. Traditionally, the pope was seen as the one who held the power to interpret the Bible in accord with his office as successor to Peter (according to the Bible, Jesus appointed Peter to be the foundation of his church, and in the Catholic Church, his role as head of the church is seen as being carried out by the pope). Rather than seeing the pope and Bible, or the pope and Peter, as presenting a unified front, though, some now called into question their relationship. Instead of the pope being judge of the Bible, some began to say that the Bible should judge the pope’s life and doctrine. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, a book appeared that portrayed a pope’s grand procession to the gates of heaven, only to be turned away by Saint Peter himself.4
The people of the sixteenth century lived in difficult times. Aside from the changes taking place in society and in the church, they still lived with the remnants of the bubonic plague. The “black death,” as it was called, had killed untold hundreds of thousands for 200 years (to learn more about this deadly epidemic, type the keywords “bubonic plague Europe” into any Internet search engine and browse the many websites listed). People in such an environment became obsessed with death. One finds the appearance of books on how to die well; pictures of the “danse macabre” or the “dance of death” filled people’s minds. In the midst of such misery, the church had always offered the hope of salvation, saying that the pitiful existence on this earth would not be the final word, but that there would JOHN CALVIN
be an afterlife. Now, however, the very institution that had stood for centuries as the vehicle of salvation seemed to be crumbling under the weight of politics, mistrust, misconduct by church officials, and uncertainty. Where could religious authority be found upon which people could rely? For many people of the sixteenth century, that became a burning question.
John Calvin, the shy young man, stepped into the spotlight in 1536 to provide answers.