John Calvin The Man
6
JOHN CALVIN
THE MAN
O. R. Johnston
Exactly when and by whom the stereotype of Calvin’s character was fixed it is not my purpose to examine. Certainly Bolen’s work of 1577 contributed largely. But a stereotype there undoubtedly is, and a glance at a few typical twentieth-century sources will remind us of what is usually accepted.
In a brilliant Dutch history of western culture by no means hostile to the Christian faith, the illustrated Atlas of Western Civilization, we meet Calvin directing his “iron theocracy”1 as “the hard and penetrating Calvin.” If we take a standard reliable Church History we discover a certain reticence. From Williston Walker’s eleven pages on Calvin’s life and work we can cull only two adjectives that come anywhere near to a personal portrait—earnest and erudite. Walker’s final comment on Beza, Calvin’s successor, as “a man of more conciliatory spirit and gentler ways” certainly implies rigidity and harshness in Calvin.2 And this, let us remember, from Williston Walker, a man who had himself written a full-scale biography of Calvin! The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church depicts Calvin as “without the human attractiveness of the German Reformer [Luther]. He was disinterested, simple and austere in his private life, but his vindictiveness and his claim to be the supreme authority to decide what is true Christianity and what is not was resented even by his followers.” As on other occasions when it deals with Reformation topics, we find this particular work a monument of erudite prejudice.
Turning to a writer more sympathetic to the Calvinist heritage, we may glance at J. S. Whale’s book The Protestant Tradition, in which there is a section on Calvin’s thought and influence. His fifty-two pages on Calvin contain little material to enable us to form a picture of the Genevan Reformer’s personality. He is described as “fitted by faith, temperament and intellect to be a great theologian and a great churchman3 . . . a man of precise notions and constructive action4 . . . a practical man. He never avoided awkward issues5 . . . a man of order, strong as iron in his certainty of the majesty, the sole causality, the glory of God.”6 Whale asserts that Calvin “hotly repudiates” or “warmly and bitterly disavows” unfair charges, despite the fact that “his legal training confirmed his native caution.”7 He can display “grim humour”8 but is chiefly distinguished by his “pitiless logic”9 or “unflinching logic.”10 This and no more do we learn of the man from Whale’s pages. To be fair, it must be said that Whale is writing principally of the Protestant tradition rather than of the Reformers themselves, but the picture is scarcely even an outline—John Calvin: courageous, direct, cautious but heated in controversy, systematic to the point of ruthlessness. Such are the lineaments of the character drawn for us by some typical works of reference.
Four things are striking about the picture which has begun to emerge. First, there seems little doubt about the stature of Calvin. His scholarship is quite outstanding, based on vast linguistic and theological erudition; his style is incomparable, both in use of language (Latin or French) and in sense of form; his influence, both during his lifetime and subsequently, has been tremendous. On all hands it is agreed that we are looking at a great man.
The second fact which seems clear is that any outline of Calvin’s character has to be carefully and delicately sketched in because the direct personal evidence available to the vast majority of those who have written about him is so scarce. We have no Table Talk as we have for Luther, and what indications we have from Calvin’s works must be pieced together with great sensitivity like small pieces of an intricate mosaic. With Luther the task is more like that of putting together a simple jig-saw; there is only one proper place for each piece.
Third, it is worth pointing out that because of the relatively small amount of direct evidence, it is easy to build an outline model of Calvin’s character and then to color it in with one’s own surmises and conjectures. The nature and effect of this coloring will depend not so much on objective evidence, which is scanty, but to a great extent upon the biographer’s own reaction to the Reformer’s life work and doctrinal position, particularly those doctrines which have been in a special way connected with his name, such as the divine sovereignty, predestination, election, total depravity, scriptural revelation, and so on. Widely differing pictures can thus be built up around the same slender scaffolding of material.
Finally, it is interesting to note that there has been no great change in the image of Calvin as a person, even in the world of theological studies. Here again we discover a contrast with Luther, whose image has received considerable correction during the last forty years. Early undisguised vilification by Roman Catholic writers had been succeeded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries by a smear campaign suggesting mental unbalance or similar aberration. However, beginning with Karl Holl in Germany (1932) right through to the works of our own Professor Rupp (1951 and 1953), scholarship has filled in the character of Luther fully, reliably, and in nearly every facet to the credit of the German reformer. Yet for most of us Calvin remains at best strangely elusive, at worst coldly repulsive, notwithstanding the monumental labors of Doumergue.
Early Influences on Calvin
John Calvin was born on July 10, 1509, at Noyon in Picardy, fourth son of the first wife of a minor legal official in the service of clergy and magistrates. The ancient and influential cathedral of Noyon dominated the town in more ways than one; Calvin’s father was for four years the bishop’s secretary. John was taught first by tutors and then later at a local boys’ school—in both cases with the sons of the local aristocracy. Showing early promise of academic brilliance, he was sent to the Collège de la Marche in Paris at the age of 14 (1523) and destined for a clerical career. His father financed his education by obtaining for him a cathedral chaplaincy and later two other benefices—none of which involved any duties whatsoever. It was at the Collège de la Marche under the tutorship of Mathurin Cordier, a distinguished classicist, that Calvin began to take real delight in learning and to acquire what McNeill calls “that unfailing sense of style and diction that marks all his writings.”11 He later transferred to the more rigorous and conservative Collège de Montaigu, notorious, thanks to Erasmus’s biting publicity, for its bad food and the bad health of its students in consequence.
What may be said of the young man during this early period of his studies? A hostile historian speaks of him as mentally alert and vigorous though given to much fasting, serious, reticent, and notably solitary. “He was never seen,” comments Florimond de Raemond, “amongst groups of his fellows, always retiring, of a melancholy disposition . . . sharing his thoughts with few people, not taking pleasure in any company other than that of his own thoughts, a lover of seclusion.” Cadier accepts this testimony.12 But the least that can be said is that it needs some modification. Is this not the stereotype in its early stages? There is evidence pointing in a different direction. For example there is now no ground for believing the once popular epigram that Calvin was called by his fellow undergraduates “the accusative case.” Doumergue has shown that the man who is supposed to have reported this said nothing of the kind. Admittedly Beza tells us that Calvin was critical of student vices, but given the demands of study (and they were heavy) and a real zeal for knowledge, given too a general adherence to Christian morality, what is more probable than that Calvin should turn with some impatience from student buffoonery and licentiousness? Not every student takes part today in rag-day processions, but doubtless there can still be found those who will designate nonparticipants as solitary, overserious, and supercilious.
Other facts show Calvin in quite a different light; McNeill lists them for us: “He maintained good relations with his former schoolfellows of the de Hangest families, with three of whom, and their tutor, he had come to Paris. He was closely associated with his scholarly cousin, Olivétan, three years his senior, whom he had known also in Noyon. He became a welcome guest in the homes of two of the greatest men of the University, Guillaume Cop, a medical scholar, and Guillaume Budé, the most learned Hellenist of France. . . . Calvin formed close ties with the sons of these distinguished men, and later both families were represented among French religious refugees to Geneva. Through his influence a number of the de Hangest family also later became Protestants. . . . All these facts belie the picture of young Calvin as morose. It would be difficult indeed to discover a teenage student of his time who attracted so many choice friends. The fact that his friends were not the rank and file and that they were all older than he, has no doubt some significance. We may suppose that as a student he felt no attraction toward intellectual mediocrity.”13 If we may anticipate a little, and look back on the whole of Calvin’s life, it is noteworthy that he very rarely severed a friendship, and in the few cases when he felt obliged to do so, it was more in sorrow than in anger. He does not overwhelm men like du Tillet and de Falais with scorn and reproach when they returned to Rome or espoused an unorthodox opinion, though he is warm in his persuasion to attempt their recovery, and betrays a certain stiffening and bitter humor in his last letters to de Falais.14
In 1528 Calvin’s father changed his mind about his nineteen-year-old son’s future and sent him to study law at Orléans. Already a licencié, Calvin then pursued his postgraduate studies (as we might call them) in law and later in literature at Orléans, Bourges, and Paris, with occasional visits to Noyon. He was at his father’s deathbed in May 1531. His cousin Olivétan was at Orléans, and by now a convinced Protestant, while both at Orléans and at Bourges Calvin was taught by the classical scholar Melchior Wolmar, a German sympathetic toward Lutheranism, in whose circle Reformation ideas were often discussed. Calvin’s sociability at this stage is attested in two ways—first by his election as president of the Picard students’ group at Orléans (a choice scarcely open to an embittered recluse!) and second by the fact that he could still correspond with former student friends of this period right up to the end of his life. In the years 1531 and 1532 he was engaged in legal and humanistic studies leading to two publications, neither of which betrays any personal interest in matters religious, though while writing his commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia he was lodging in the house of a Waldensian cloth merchant who was a zealous and fearless propagandist of Lutheran ideas and publications. The example of this man, Etienne Laforge, who was later to be burned at the stake for his faith, must have made some impression.
In 1533 Calvin’s friend Nicholas Cop, Rector of the University of Paris, preached a sermon, parts of which bore strong resemblances to Reformation doctrine. Though not overtly anti-papal, it was a bold bid for popular support of religious reform; some sections of the sermon were Erastian, advocating a policy of Christian humanism, others more militant and based on actual sermons of German Reformers. Calvin was somehow implicated—scholars are not agreed just to what degree. But reaction came swiftly and Cop and Calvin both fled the capital. Calvin took refuge with friends in Angoulême at Claix in the house of Canon Louis du Tillet; in the months that followed he had the opportunity for quiet reading and discussion with a group of liberal clergy. In May 1534, after an interview with the aged biblical scholar Lefèvre d’Etaples, revered doyen of the moderate reforming party in France, Calvin resigned all his benefices. The break with Rome had been made.
Calvin’s Conversion
We have now to consider the difficult matter of Calvin’s conversion, difficult, that is, as far as the date of it is concerned. Calvin himself unambiguously refers to it as “sudden,” so presumably he could date it himself. But it is the character of the conversion itself which is far more important. Calvin was always very reticent on the details of his personal life. He quietly omitted anything that might savor of self-advertisement; God must be glorified, not His worthless instrument. There is little material here for the psychologist, little of the delicate, tortuous and—let us admit this—subtly gratifying analysis of inner emotional conflict in which authors aspiring to greatness have indulged ever since Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse.
However, in the precious piece of autobiography that Calvin has left us in the Preface to his Commentary on the Psalms (1557), Calvin does tell us that he was stubbornly addicted to the superstitions of the papacy. This would seem to indicate that despite the discussion of Reformation issues which formed a more or less constant element in his student environment, he had never seriously considered leaving the Roman fold. Where else was there a rallying-point for Frenchmen anyway? An anguished question indeed, as M. Cadier stresses on more than one occasion. Yet there is no reason to doubt that discussion and example since his early days at Orléans in 1528 had been unconsciously working beneath the surface. So that in 1533 or 1534 it was revealed to him that he had been kicking against the goads of all these providential events, meetings, and conversations.
McNeill, rightly in my judgment, suggests that it was in all probability during the quiet days at Claix during the first half of 1534 that the light dawned. Thus Calvin’s first public act of testimony to his newfound faith would be his renunciation of benefices at Noyon on May 21. God had drawn him from this deep mire, and he could no longer (if we may continue the metaphor) keep his hands soiled in the filth of blasphemy. He must refuse to retain even a nominal connection with a system that remained a public insult to the finished work of the Redeemer.
If this account is true, then Calvin again becomes in this respect also a brother of Martin Luther—both were converted in the study, poring over the Scriptures. Both seem to have sought peace of conscience in the traditional round of activities prescribed by Roman tradition and found them wanting; both felt great reverence for the Church and at first recoiled from the way in which the new doctrines were tending, but both were made finally and utterly sure of the gospel and of their own state before God through studying the written Word.
It is surely no exaggeration to see chapters 3–5 of book 3 of The Institutes as an extended biblical commentary on Calvin’s experience. He can write with such certainty and power about false and true repentance, the folly and confusion of papal notions of contrition, satisfaction, auricular confession, and similar unscriptural inventions not only because he has found the profound yet simple Bible teaching on true repentance, but also because this has been burned in upon his own heart by the Holy Spirit. Reticent though he was about his own particular pilgrimage, it is difficult not to hear the voice of a man who has lived in bondage. Among the scholastic authors, says Calvin, “there is indeed much talk concerning contrition and attrition. They torture souls with many misgivings, and immerse them in a sea of trouble and anxiety. But where they seem to have wounded hearts deeply, they heal all the bitterness with a light sprinkling of ceremonies.”15
The Romanists set conditions which are complex, based on defi-nitions which are obscure, contradictory, and sometimes impossible. Yet, Calvin goes on, “if there is anything in the whole of religion that we should most certainly know, we ought most closely to grasp by what reason, with what law, under what condition, with what ease or difficulty, forgiveness of sins may be obtained! Unless this knowledge remains clear and sure, the conscience can have no rest at all, no peace with God, no assurance or security; but it continually trembles, wavers, tosses, is tormented and vexed, shakes, hates and flees the sight of God. . . . Therefore, when consciences have for a long time wrestled with themselves, and exercised themselves in long struggles, they still do not find a haven in which to rest.”16
The other aspect of Calvin’s conversion to which I wish to allude is one which is too well known to spend much time on, but too important to omit entirely. It is the fact that Calvin always refers to his entry on the Christian life as a sovereign act of God’s free grace, arresting him on the path to ruin and as it were forcibly halting his headlong career toward perdition. His heart was hardened, his will was stubborn, he was not easily drawn from the mire. But God subdued his heart and made it docile. It was Calvin’s unswerving conviction from that moment onward that he was not his own; God’s hand was upon him. “He could not explain in terms of human motivation how it happened that he resisted no longer: at once he found himself docile, tractable, obedient, alert to do the will of God.”17
The other image which Calvin uses is the common scriptural picture of the opening of the eyes of the blind, the light given to those in darkness. The minister in Calvin’s Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto (1539) speaks thus of his conversion: “Thou didst shine upon me with the brightness of thy Spirit, that I might detest these things [i.e. papal superstitions as the way of salvation] and recognize how impious and injurious they were; Thou didst bear the torch of Thy word before me that I might loathe them as they deserve; Thou didst arouse my soul.” In this passage we find a personal expression of what had surely been Calvin’s own experience, an expression of those principles which he puts in more strictly theological form in The Institutes in such words as these: “this bare and external proof of the Word of God should have been amply sufficient to engender faith, did not our blindness and perversity prevent it. But our mind has such an inclination to vanity that it can never cleave fast to the truth of God; and it has such a dullness that it is always blind to the light of God’s truth. Accordingly, without the illumination of the Holy Spirit, the Word can do nothing.”18 Or again, “we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.”19
In this double aspect of mind and heart we see the total character of Calvin’s own conversion. His fine intellect was illuminated by the Word of God and by grace perceived the mighty unity of all God’s teaching about His gracious provision for sinners; on the other hand Calvin’s intense and ardent nature found the seal of ownership and control set upon the heart; he was tamed, mastered, and directed, his energies henceforth set upon the glory of God alone.
The Institutes and Geneva Ministry
Whether Calvin had already started to plan and write his small introduction to Christian doctrine before the event of the placards against the Mass in October 1534 is not known. Certainly the situation of French Protestants became serious from this date, and the first edition of Calvin’s doctrinal treatise, with its masterly apologia addressed to Francis I King of France, was ready by the summer of 1535. It was the book which was to go on growing, finally to become the large work which we now read as The Institutes. The work was designed both as a compendium of the doctrines of the Christian religion and as a confession offered to a persecuting king on behalf of the author’s fellow believers. The excesses of Anabaptists in Germany and even within France were also in Calvin’s mind; he felt it his duty to distinguish Reformation believers of the main stream from iconoclasts or those with extreme revolutionary intentions.
In 1534 Calvin had been successively at Noyon, Paris, Poitiers, Angouléme, and Orléans. After the affair of the placards he travelled beyond the borders of France—Metz, Strasbourg, and Basel, where the first edition of The Institutes appeared. We find him then in Ferrara, where for a short time Frenchmen of unorthodox views were welcomed by the liberally minded French princess Renée, who had married the Duke Hercule d’Este, a son of Lucretia Borgia. But persecution threatened even there, and Calvin took advantage of a temporary amnesty offered to religious exiles by visiting Paris in June 1536 to settle some property matters. He then intended to go to Strasbourg, and it seems no injustice to what we know of his temperament and gifts to assume that his aim was (as one biographer puts it, “to resume the life of a scholarly interpreter and inspirer, from a quiet nook, of the movement in which he preferred to let others take the posts of danger and of power.”20 What occurred on that fateful journey is well known even to those who have no more than a nodding acquaintance with Reformation history.
Forced by the renewed hostilities between the Emperor Charles V and Francis I to take another road to Strasbourg, Calvin found himself staying for one night at Geneva en route. His companion du Tillet let it be known that the brilliant young author of the Institutio was in the city, and the leading Reformer of the place, a powerful red-bearded gospel preacher by name Guillaume Farel (1489–1565), called upon him first imploring and then thundering at Calvin to remain and help to organize the work of Reformation then proceeding, and to teach the people. Shaken by Farel’s solemnity and urgency, he complied. In his own words: “Master Guillaume Farel held me back in Geneva, not so much by his advice and urgent exhortation as by a fearsome adjuration, as if God from on high had stretched out His hand to stay me . . . after he heard that I had some particular study for which I wished to keep myself free, when he saw he could get nowhere by prayer he even went as far as a curse, that it might please God to curse my rest and the tranquillity for study that I was seeking, if in so great necessity I were to withdraw and refuse to give my help.”21 Shattered and somewhat ashamed, Calvin stayed. He was never to set foot on French soil again, and Geneva was to be the scene of his labors from that day in 1536 until his death in May 1564, nearly twenty-eight years later, apart from a period in Strasbourg from 1538 to 1541 in which he was the pastor to the French refugee congregation.
While in Strasbourg as well as fulfilling his pastoral duties, Calvin took part in several ecumenical conversations. Even this work was undertaken against all that Calvin had planned, for after his banishment from Geneva in 1538 he had gone to Basel to work away quietly at another edition of his Institutes. But the Strasbourg Reformers—Butzer, Capito, and Sturm—employing something like Farel’s technique two years earlier, solemnly admonished him that he was evading a responsibility for which he had been called and equipped, and once more Calvin acquiesced. He spent three happy years at Strasbourg. The senior Reformer there, Butzer, was a man of wide sympathies eighteen years older than Calvin who was not yet thirty. The city was politically less inflammable than Geneva, and Calvin’s pastoral charge was not an overheavy burden. In May 1539 there came hints that he was thinking of marriage, and in August of the next year he married the widow of an artisan from Liège. The happiness of their marriage was disturbed only by the continual ill health of both husband and wife. They were to enjoy each other’s company for only nine years; a son born in 1542 died in infancy. The loss both of his son and of his wife seven years later caused Calvin great grief, and he determined thereafter to lead a solitary life. Even in these events he saw the hand of God, “a severe wound,” he wrote of his infant son’s death, “but our Father knows what is best for his children.”
Calvin’s recall to Geneva came in October 1540. The decision to go back was not taken without considerable inner struggle. His Strasbourg friends did all that they could to dissuade him, but Calvin knew where his God-given duty lay. “There is no place under heaven that I am more afraid of,” he wrote to Viret. Calvin so often asserts his own innate timidity that in any assessment of the Reformer’s character we must take this seriously. He hated the limelight and he hated responsibility, at any rate in public office. Unlike Knox and Luther, he was by temperament a quiet and sensitive man to whom any kind of struggle but a literary one was repulsive. Yet this was the man who returned to Geneva, to endure the constant strain of hostility, apathy, immorality, and ignorance on all hands.
He confessed that the first few months almost wore him out. Nor was relief to be given speedily. It was fifteen years before the anti-Calvin party was removed from its supreme position. During those fifteen years church discipline was resented, and Calvin was insulted in the streets and attacked from the pulpit by unorthodox teachers. Important and influential families were ranged against him. He winced from violence and was constantly subject to attack, either in his good name, his theology, or his policies for the well-being of Geneva. Luther seemed to thrive on opposition. Calvin was slowly worn down, sustained only by the hidden resources of the spirit.
This is not the place to chronicle his tribulations at Geneva, but it might be useful to note that Calvin’s control of Geneva, if such it may be called, was without any of the apparatus that we associate with the modern word “dictator.” He “used lawful means, went unarmed and unguarded, lived modestly and without display, sought advice from many, claimed no authority save as a commissioned minister of the Word, assumed no title of distinction or political office.” It was not until Christmas Day 1559, after he had been instrumental in the admission of hundreds of refugees to citizenship, that he himself, on the invitation of the magistrates, became a citizen.22 The dominance of Calvin’s views on all matters was never achieved, and when he had espoused a particular cause on principle, it was often only after years of tenacious campaigning, preaching, and persuading that he won his point in the city’s assemblies.
Calvin’s Character
We have already mentioned that Calvin never enjoyed robust health in manhood. From about the age of thirty we are told that he suffered from headaches, catarrh, asthma, and indigestion. On occasions he could not see his lecture notes because his vision was so impaired by migraine. After 1558, when he had an attack of quartan fever, he was never anything but an invalid, stricken with arthritis, hemorrhoids, and then pleurisy leading to tuberculosis. He was ceaselessly in pain, and had finally to be carried to the cathedral to preach.
Any more thorough assessment of Calvin’s character must be made in the light of these disabilities—the deterioration in physical health due to disease, and no doubt aided by the state of more or less continuous exhaustion in which he must have lived. It is not easy to imagine the toll on his time and energies taken by lecturing and preaching, writing and correcting new editions of older works, corresponding with old friends and influential leaders all over Europe, keeping his doors open to entertain strangers and refugees from many lands. Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that a naturally sensitive man should prove quick-tempered, and certainly Calvin does give us on occasion the impression of being irascible, “touchy” as we should now put it. Before his opponent has finished speaking, a stinging retort is on its way back. The early pages of his Reply to Cardinal Sadoleto contain a passionate and detailed justification of his behavior in his first years at Geneva. Is this personal apologia perhaps somewhat overelaborate, the defense excessively concerned with Calvin’s own reputation? Is there room for another Galatians after the death of the Apostles? It is hard to be certain, but one cannot help asking these questions.
In controversy Calvin was accustomed to use strong words distasteful to us today. Yet there is another factor which must be taken into account here. Just as in the case of Servetus, while admitting the wrong that was done, we go on to point out that in that particular age such—and often worse—was the usual fate of the heretic (one pile of faggots here, for instance, contrasted with more than 300 in the five years’ reign of our own Mary Tudor), so in the case of Calvin’s vituperative language. One wonders whether those who are so ready to castigate Calvin’s intemperate idiom in controversial matters have steeped themselves in the literary battles of the sixteenth century to such an extent that they can say, not simply that Calvin is bitter and intolerant, but that he far outstrips his contemporaries in bitterness and intolerance. It is this kind of perspective that we must seek in order truly to evaluate the temper of the Reformer’s writings. Judged by the standards of his age, I should venture to say that an impartial investigation would not justify our calling Calvin’s wording excessive.
It is only fair however to consider whether there has not been a degree of whitewashing on the side of Calvin’s friends. Let us take, for example, Beza’s Discours, usually referred to as Beza’s Life of Calvin. It is certainly fulsome, for it is the voice of a man who has just lost a leader and a dear friend. “Never did Calvin have an enemy,” he writes, “who in assailing him was not making war against God.” He concludes his brief account of some of Calvin’s adversaries thus: “In short, I think that you will not find any heresy, ancient, lately renewed or reforged in our time, which he [Calvin] has not destroyed to its very foundations.” Later he defends Calvin from cruelty and excessive severity; no adulterer was ever executed in Geneva, he points out, and only one heretic was burned, and that with general approval.
However, even Beza, when he comes to Calvin’s irritability, is forced to comment: “I do not wish to make an angel out of a man. Notwithstanding, because I know how God has wonderfully used even this vehemence, I must not be silent. Besides his temperament which was naturally inclined to anger, his quick mind, the indiscretion of several people, the many and infinitely varied business of the Church of God, and—towards the end of his life—illnesses both ordinary and serious had made him morose and difficult. But far from taking pleasure in this fault, no one saw it better than he did, nor counted it so great.” As to his vehemence in public pronouncements and writings, Beza sees it as prophetic and majestic; religion, he reminds us, is no cold matter—it must be fiery if it is true faith. Beza, then, extenuates but does not attempt to deny Calvin’s irascibility in his later years. Nor did Calvin struggle with this temptation only in his declining period; in Strasbourg he had lost his temper in Zell’s house over the attempts of Caroli to drive a wedge between himself and the other Reformation leaders there. In a letter to Farel about the incident he admitted “I sinned gravely.”23
We can moreover go some way toward counterbalancing the hard and sometimes intemperate language with which Calvin assails his enemies in matters theological. He was in many ways a tolerant man. Though he was absolutely certain of the broad lines on which Christian theology must move if it is to be true to itself, in detailed exegesis he is constantly cautious. Readers of the Commentaries will know how careful he is to give the various views, not always pontificating but time and time again telling us, after reviewing the linguistic and patristic interpretations, which sense he is inclined to attribute to the verse in question. His words in the first preface to Olivétan’s French Bible are worth quoting here. Having commended the translator in general terms, he continues, “However, there are, I have no doubt, passages which will not please everyone because of the diversity of our apprehension or because in a work of such a length we sometimes fall asleep. I invite the readers if they meet with passages of this nature not to bite a man who is a worthy servant of the sacred word, not to attack him, but rather to inform him of his lapses in moderate language.”24 Furthermore, Calvin would not consent to overnarrow definitions of the doctrinal terms on which communion might be taken. On some points we are ignorant, and there may well be disagreement on nonessentials.
If we may quote McNeill’s summary: “He favoured a liberal practice of intercommunion between churches, even where minor divergencies existed in doctrine, discipline and worship. In 1554 he besought the English refugees at Wesel not to desert the communion of the Lutheran church there because of dissatisfaction with its worship. Fellowship with Lutherans, Anglicans, Waldenses, Bohemian brethren as well as with the national branches of the Reformed, was cherished by him. . . . He unhesitatingly admits that some within the Church of Rome are God’s elect. His passion for ecumenical unity induced an ecclesiastical tolerance that was unusual in his day and is still distasteful to many who profess themselves Christians.”25
How else may we attempt to fill in this picture of Calvin as a whole man? Perhaps this is the place to say something of Calvin’s appreciation of beauty, both in nature and in art. He had a deep wonder and gratitude for all the glories of the natural world, sun, moon, stars, birds, trees, and flowers. Not only does he constantly turn to them for illustrative material, but he also takes a genuine pleasure in these things for their own sake, or rather for what they are in themselves as creatures of God. “Wherever you cast your eyes,” he says, “there is no spot in the universe wherein you cannot discern, at least some sparks of His glory. You cannot in one glance survey this most vast and beautiful system of the universe in its wide expanse without being completely overwhelmed by the boundless force of its brightness.”26 Or again, it is fitting “for man seriously to turn his eyes to contemplate God’s works, since he has been placed in this most glorious theatre to be a spectator of them.”27 Heaven and earth form “a magnificent theatre . . . crammed with innumerable miracles.”28
Most impressively of all, perhaps, in his Preface to the New Testament of 1535: “The little singing birds are singing of God; the beasts cry unto Him; the elements are in awe of Him, the mountains echo His name; the waves and fountains cast their glances at Him; grass and flowers laugh out to Him.” Beauty, in fact, is different from mere utility; it need not be confused with the use to which created things may be put. “Has the Lord,” asks Calvin, “clothed the flowers with the great beauty that greets our eyes, the sweetness of smell that is wafted upon our nostrils, and yet will it be unlawful for our eye to be affected by that beauty, or our sense of smell by the sweetness of that odour. . . . Did he not, in short, render many things attractive to us apart from their necessary use?”29
Again, although music serves our enjoyment rather than our need, “it ought not on that account to be judged of no value still less should it be condemned.”30 In the Strasbourg church under Calvin’s ministry, the congregational singing in which all could join moved a student visitor to tears in 1545 as he saw each one praising the Lord with a book of music in his hand. The book had been compiled and published by Calvin himself. Music, he wrote, in his additional preface to the edition later published (1545) in Geneva, is one of God’s first gifts to man for his recreation and pleasure. It has power for good—principally in worship—and for great evil. It may affect the heart to edification or lure toward moral ruin. Like Plato, Calvin was conscious that music had to be watched, but he felt no need to deny that it was a good gift from the Creator.
Likewise with the plastic arts. Admittedly it is unlikely that any scholarly figure in Renaissance Europe should be ignorant or unappreciative of the artistic heritage of civilized man; happily Calvin leaves us in no doubt about his position: “Because sculpture and painting are gifts of God, I seek a pure and legitimate use of each, lest those things which the Lord has conferred upon us for His glory and our good be not only perverted by misuse but also turned to our destruction . . . God must not be represented. . . . Therefore it remains that only those things are to be sculptured or painted which the eyes are capable of seeing.”31 Within the limitations he considers Scripture imposes, Calvin sees a broad field of activity open for the artist. Conclusive on this matter, however, is the very style of Calvin himself. It is sensitive, pointed, entirely adequate for every demand made upon it; it can be rich and colorful, humorous, scornful, earnest, solemn, persuasive. The view that Calvin was aesthetically blind, or a foe of the arts, is another side of the caricature that has often passed for a picture of the Reformer’s personality.
With his intense and single-hearted devotion to the cause of God Calvin had a heavy burden to bear; besides the work in Geneva there was, in the words of the Apostle, “the care of all the churches.” We see this travail in his immense correspondence and in his gracious reception of the unending streams of visitors and refugees. It seems under these conditions to be almost ludicrous to ask how Calvin spent his leisure! However there are some few indications here too which leave us in no doubt that Calvin was a whole man, and only the fearful responsibility which God had undoubtedly laid upon him prevented him from relaxing more often. Beza asserts that he was good company at the meal-table, and we know that he sometimes enjoyed a game of quoits. McNeill also tells us that “another game he enjoyed—an excellent one for ready relaxation, as those who have played it will agree—consisted of tossing a bunch of keys so that they slide over a table and approach as closely as possible to the farther end without falling off.”32 A letter to de Falais even mentions—but why should I concede this word “even”?—Calvin’s delight in playing with babies.33
Though it speaks of his deep emotion and thus, in a way, of his humanity, Calvin’s use of satire has sometimes been criticized. B. B. Warfield provides an interesting defense here. This use of satire, Warfield maintains, “was not merely a result of native temperament with him but a matter of deliberate and reasoned choice. Of course he had nothing in common with the mere mockers of the time—des Periers, Marot, Rabelais—whose levity was almost as abominable to him as their coarseness. Satire to him was a weapon, not an amusement. The proper way to deal with folly, he thought, was to laugh at it. The superstitions in which the world has been so long entangled were foolish as truly as wicked; and how could it be, he demanded, that in speaking of things so ridiculous, so intrinsically funny, we should not laugh at them ‘with wide open mouth’? Of course this laugh was not the laugh of pure amusement; and as it gained in earnestness it naturally lost its lightness of touch. It was a rapier in Calvin’s hands, and its use was to pierce and to cut.” Warfield then takes as examples Calvin’s parody of the Sorbonne articles against Reformation teaching, his treatise on relics, and his tract against the Nicodemites (secret believers who remained Romanists in their outward conformity). He concludes thus: “Literature this all is, doubtless, and good literature; and by virtue of it ‘Calvinistic satire’—Calvin, Beza and Viret were its first masters—has a recognized place in the history of French satire. But it is not primarily or chiefly literature, and it had its part to play among the moral and religious forces which Calvin liberated for the accomplishing of his reforming work.”34
The secularization of satire since Calvin’s time has proceeded so far that few Christians in our own day feel able to employ or to enjoy the use of this weapon, though the Honest to God35 debate provided us with distant echoes of what this kind of controversy must have been like.
Calvin’s Correspondence
Our treatment of Calvin has thus far touched upon the more public sources for the most part—the tracts, treatises, commentaries, and The Institutes, besides references to the positions he filled and the policies he pursued. There is one other activity which is worthy of our consideration as we draw toward the conclusion of our short estimate of Calvin the man—his correspondence. More even than a theologian, Calvin saw himself as a pastor, an undershepherd of God’s flock. Souls—precious immortal souls—had been committed to his charge. Time and again he found himself forced into the limelight, forced to take up his pen or to raise a voice from the pulpit simply that the people of God might not be misled, disastrously deceived by some satanic error. The other side of this pastoral solicitude is to be seen in his huge correspondence. Here equally the care of souls lies upon him as a solemn responsibility.
Calvin had a deep sense of the worth of the individual soul, and men knew that he cared for them and valued them profoundly. This value to Calvin was because Christ had died for them, not in any way for what they were in themselves. In this atmosphere respect and compassion flourished, and men could confide. “You brought me to birth in Christ,” writes one correspondent. “I opened my heart to him as a child would to a father,” wrote a minister of his letters exchanged with the Reformer. An imprisoned aristocrat under sentence of death thanks him for not having abandoned him, and for consolation and food for his soul gleaned from Calvin’s letters, a former student testifies that thanks to Calvin he had not given in to despair. Another assures him that he knows nothing apart from the Bible more calculated to strengthen his faith than the friendly letters in which Calvin exhorts and warns him. “The most despised of men,” writes another friend, “can address himself familiarly to you as to an angel of God and a true servant of Jesus Christ.”36
Many of Calvin’s letters were addressed to prisoners and to those soon destined for martyrdom. It was a bleak and bitter age for the French. Pastors were trained at Geneva and then went back into France to accomplish what ministerial charge they could, their heroic pastorate often ending in arrest, prison, and the stake. As soon as Calvin heard of their arrest he would write to them to testify to the anxious care of the church at Geneva, to encourage them, and to prepare them to face death for the gospel’s sake. These letters are among the most moving of any written by the Reformer. We have some knowledge of how they were received; Louis de Marsac, soon to suffer at the stake at Lyons, was imprisoned there in company with another young man, Denis Peloquin, also destined to be burned not long after. The former of these two managed to get a reply to Calvin, which read thus: “Sir and brother, I cannot relate the great comfort that I have received from the letters that you have sent to my brother Denis Peloquin, who found a way of getting them to one of our brothers who was in a cell above me and who read them to me, since I couldn’t read them; I could see nothing in my cell. I beg you to continue always to help us with like consolations in the situation we are in, which invites us to weep and to pray.”37
The first element in all these letters, Benoit notes, is true compassion, the sympathy which sets the Reformer down with the afflicted in their situation; he endures their suffering at their side, he is a prisoner with them. Thus as he joins them in heart and mind—and as he suffers too, for this is real identification, not mere verbiage—the captives are conscious even in their prison cells of the reality of the communion of the saints, the body of Christ. In such a letter, for example, we read: “Although we are not at the moment in a similar condition to yours, we do not cease to strive in prayer, in anxious thought and in compassion as being your members, since it has pleased our heavenly Father in His infinite kindness to unite us in one body under His Son who is our Head.”38
To those about to be “interrogated” (grim word!) Calvin has much to say; where necessary he would get a letter back suited to the particular needs of each accusation. But in the last resort nothing was as telling as a simple personal testimony. Calvin had such confidence in the work of the Holy Spirit on such occasions that he refused to draw up a confession of faith that the martyrs would simply have to learn and repeat. “I am not sending you such a profession of faith as our good brother Peloquin asked for,” he writes, “for God will use the one which He will give you according to the measure of the Spirit which He has imparted to you, to much greater effect than anything which might be suggested by anyone else.”39
In the same way he would not correct a confession submitted to him by a prisoner; he would neither add nor delete a single word, not wishing to lessen the authority and efficacy of the divine inspiration, though he confessed that he (Calvin) would have couched it in rather different terms. Such humility needs no comment.
Calvin’s Greatness and Humility
It is perhaps not unfitting that we should note this quality last of all. Here surely is the strangest of all the things we find in Calvin—strange, that is, when compared with the stereotype of that haughty, scornful, ruthless, power-loving, aristocratic disposition . . . his humility! If we set aside his attitude on the occasions when scriptural doctrine appeared to him to be threatened, Calvin was beyond any doubt humble and did not hesitate to confess his faults. Writing to the church of Geneva after his banishment, he clears his own conduct and that of Farel (also temporarily exiled), but goes on: “I have no doubt that God has humiliated us in this way to show us our ignorance, rashness and other weaknesses which I for my part have been very conscious of, and I have little difficulty in confessing them before the Church of the Lord.”40 On his death bed he was to sound precisely the same note to the Genevan elders: “I have had much infirmity with which you have had to bear, and even the total of all I have done has been worth nothing. Evil men will take this word up, but I still say that all I have done has been worth nothing, and that I am a miserable creature. But I can say that I desired your good, that my vices have always displeased me and the root of the fear of God was in my heart. . . .”41
Here we must finish our brief and disjointed portrait of Calvin the man. I have embarked upon no original research for this paper, and all that I have found to put before you has already been found by others. My sources, apart from The Institutes, the letters, and the little Life of Beza, are all secondary sources—and even in some cases, I suspect, tertiary or even quaternary. Such things are not unknown, even in the austere world of Puritan and Reformed scholarship, and it would be unfair to conceal this fact from you. How much more I owe to McNeill and Cadier than is directly indicated in the text some of you may be interested to discover if this paper should be printed. The only responsibilities I do bear are those of selection and arrangement of the material. I believe that what I have put before you is reliable and relevant to my theme, and I believe the way in which we have looked together at the various sides of Calvin’s character has not been seriously misleading, even if it has been in the last resort inadequate. It is not easy to make a man live in the minds of others, especially at a distance of four hundred years.
What we can perceive, albeit dimly, across those four centuries is first, a man, with his own particular nature and temperament. Sensitive and in many respects timid, intense and quick-tempered, ardent in controversy and in friendship, sympathetic, a lover of beauty and of books, humble yet hard as steel, Calvin was subject both to the infirmities and temptations of his own inherited disposition and to the narrowness and blindness of his age on some scores. He of all men would not have us deny this. Second, we see a Christian, tamed and enslaved by the hand of God, made docile by grace, and thrust out of the study into the street, there to be fashioned into a mighty instrument of spiritual reformation and public reconstruction. Amid nearly thirty years of constant struggle with men, with error, and with disease—never a note of self-pity.
And finally, a mouthpiece and an example to succeeding generations. It is probable that if Calvin himself could hear of this paper, he would deplore the attempt which it represents. For he wished to be forgotten; his gravestone bore no inscription and the place of his burial is now unknown. He tried—and by grace was largely able—to live the message which he preached, taught, and wrote. This is what he would have us remember. If we have not fully grasped his character, the main lines of that message are clear. The man becomes transparent, as he would have wished. Of him more than of almost any other saint it may truly be said: “He, being dead, yet speaketh.”