G. E. Duffield
8
THE GROWTH OF
JOHN CALVIN’S INSTITUTIO
G. E. Duffield
Honesty forces scholars to admit that they simply do not know when John Calvin began to write the first draft of his Institutio. The years between 1533 and the publication of the first edition from the Basle press of Thomas Platter in 1536 are among the most obscure in Calvin’s adult life. In the autumn of 1533 he only just escaped police arrest in Paris for his part in drawing up the famous University Rectorial address delivered by his friend Nicolas Cop. Calvin certainly had some part in it, though precisely what part remains obscure. But to understand the formative influences which shaped the volume, we must glance briefly at what is known of Calvin’s earlier background.
Calvin had been educated at two different colleges in Paris University. At first his father intended him for the priesthood, but then after a quarrel with the local clergy and some reflections on the economic prospects, he substituted the legal profession. As a result, Calvin transferred to the flourishing legal faculties of the Universities of Orléans and Bourges. But when his father died, he went back to Paris to pursue classical studies which had steadily attracted more and more of his attention. Then came the Cop affair and Calvin’s flight.
Calvin’s early experiences and training influenced his later writings. In Paris he experienced the cruel rigors of medieval education, acquired a grounding in languages, got to know the Schoolmen, encountered nominalist philosophy, and above all he made contact with those enlightened humanists who gathered around the aged Jacques Lefèvre of Etaples, Bishop Briçonnet, and the King’s sister, Margaret of Angoulême. These people were reformers but not Reformers. They were fed up with medievalism, its moral corruptions, its bigotry, its poor scholarship, its wild allegorisms, and its hairsplitting disputations. They wanted to discover the world of antiquity—classical and biblical—for themselves, not have it garbled for them by the Schoolmen. That was what it meant to be a humanist, and humanists wanted ordinary people to be able to read the Bible for themselves.
Although some men in this group drew back when literary reform turned into theological Reform, the group also nurtured such future Reformers as Calvin and Farel. Under the influence of humanism Calvin acquired not only an elegant style for his own composition, but a knowledge of the Bible and the classics at first hand. He learnt to study these texts in their contexts and in the original languages. At Orléans and Bourges Calvin studied law, which further developed his prodigious memory and gave him the lawyer’s incisiveness for developing arguments and stating a case clearly. During his period of legal studies Calvin kept up his contacts with humanism and in fact published his first book, a commentary on Seneca.
We simply do not know when Calvin was converted, for he is very reticent with personal details. However, we do have certain facts. He was originally a devout and conscientious Roman Catholic with a great respect for “the Church.” In Paris he must have known of Luther’s writings, for his humanist friends would certainly have kept him abreast of the various reforming currents. Calvin himself states that he read Zwingli early on and was put off by Zwingli’s sacramental views. His association with the Cop address shows him firmly in the reforming humanist camp, but it is not a Protestant address. Later, in the preface to his Commentary on the Psalms, he writes of his subita conversio. I am myself inclined to think his experience of the gospel may have come earlier and that this conversio refers to his decisive break with Rome, but I cannot go into the evidence here. But Calvin was no rebellious radical by temperament, for just as he had been put off by Zwingli’s eucharistic radicalism, so his first religious book, Psychopannychia, was an attack on the Anabaptist doctrine of Soul-sleep.
What sort of man emerges? A talented young man who starts off a devout Roman, who is antiradical by temperament, who respects the Church, a man who has acquired a considerable knowledge of scholasticism, classical languages, and law, a man who has caught humanism’s passion for a real knowledge of antiquity, a man who by that passion has been gradually led to see what Christianity is, and a man who has come to a knowledge of the gospel and a decision to break with Rome. Such a man wrote the Institutio, and the whole variety of his talents and learning can be seen within that book.
The 1536 Institutes
After the Cop incident Calvin became a fugitive. He travelled about, spending the largest amount of time in Angoulême with the Du Tillet family, his friends. In 1534 he must have been working on the book in their excellent library, but toward the end of that year an incident occurred which was to give his book a new urgency and to shape some of its subject matter. During the night of October 18 placards against the mass were posted up all over Paris, and one was even attached to the King’s bedchamber door. The anonymous author proved to be Antoine Marcourt, who was minister of Neuchatel. His language was strong and polemical to say the least, and at times verging on the scurrilous.
The results of the placard incident were catastrophic. The King was incensed not so much by the theological implications as by the overtones of insurrection. He ordered public processions of penitence and prayers “to beg God that he would correct these scandalous heretical placards and books,” but worse was soon to follow. Protestants were burnt at the stake. From Basle whither he had moved to seek “a quiet hiding place” for the pursuit of his studies, Calvin heard about these events in France, and like other Protestants, he was horrified. Now Francis I valued his alliance with the German Protestant princes, so he had it put about in France and Germany that the victims were seditious folk—Ana-baptists, whose excesses everyone would know.
This false charge gave Calvin his immediate reason for publishing the Institutio. He addressed a lengthy preface to the King of France because he believed that the excuses were to shelter even greater bloodshed to come. Calvin had known some of the martyrs personally, and he could not suffer them to be misrepresented as Anabaptist rebels. He explains his twofold aim in writing: first, “to vindicate from undeserved insult my brethren whose death was precious in the sight of the Lord,” and he hoped incidentally to move Protestants in other countries to help the sufferers. Second, “to serve our French people of whom I can see many who are hungry and thirsty for Jesus Christ and few who have gained a right knowledge of him.”
The case of persuading the king was not as hopeless as a cynical latter day observer might suppose. For with the death of the chief persecutor, Cardinal Duprat, in July 1535 there was a lull in the persecution, and Bucer and Melanchthon had even been invited to Paris to discuss Church reform.
But the events of Munster where, after a long seige, the fanatical Anabaptist rebellion had been ruthlessly crushed in the summer of 1535, were a greater threat than persecution. All the Reformers realized the terrible danger which threatened from the Anabaptists, and Calvin was anxious not to let the Reformation get identified with them. Equation with their extremities and fanciful ideas would have sunk the Reformers.
In March 1536 the Latin Institutio appeared with its full title: The Institute of the Christian Religion, Containing Almost the Whole Sum of Piety and Whatever It Is Necessary to Know in the Doctrine of Salvation: A Work Very Well Worth Reading by All Persons Zealous for Piety and Lately Published. I am inclined to agree with Benoit in Studies in John Calvin which I had the privilege of editing, that most of this long title was probably added by the printer as “printer’s blurb,” for it is not an accurate description of the first edition, though it does describe subsequent editions much more accurately.
The word Institutio is interesting and important. It was a common word among the humanists for a manual or summary of instruction. Erasmus and Budé, whose family Calvin knew well and from whose linguistic erudition he had benefited, had each written an Institutio. There may be a fuller meaning in the title as I shall suggest a bit later.
The libellus, the little book as Calvin called it, of 1536 was pocket size (6 1/8 by 4 inches). It was 520 pages long, and contained six chapters, and a short index. The first four chapters follow the familiar ground of Luther’s Catechism expounding respectively the Law, the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the two sacraments. Then the tone changes—perhaps because events in France called for something different. The fifth chapter denounces the other five “sacraments” of the medieval church. The sixth chapter discusses Christian liberty. Such then was the first edition of the Institutio, a libellus based on the plan, at least, of Luther’s Catechism plus certain additions to meet the needs of the hour. Calvin kept this ground plan for his 1537 catechism, and for 1539 and 1541 editions of the Institutio, but the plan of the final 1559 edition is somewhat different.
The 1539 Institutes
Within a year the first edition was exhausted, and Calvin was asked to produce a revision of it. He managed to complete this only in 1538 after he had been turned out of Geneva. The second edition was published by Wendelin Rihel in Strasbourg in 1539. It was simply called Institutio Christianae Religionis, after which appeared a curious little note reading “at length truly corresponding to its title.” This puzzles Professor Battles, but further convinces me of the truth of Benoît’s conjecture that most of the earlier title was publisher’s blurb, not Calvin.
The book had grown from six to seventeen chapters of about the same length as previously. The format was larger—folio 13 by 8 inches. There were 346 pages and wide margins for the student’s notes. In copies to be circulated in France Calvin’s name had been turned into an anagram Alcuinus. Despite his busy program in Geneva, Calvin had been reading hard, particularly in the Fathers. His dismissal from Geneva gave him more leisure (if that is ever an appropriate word for one as industrious as Calvin) than he was ever to have again, and he used it for writing. The second edition shaped much subsequent development of the Institutio. Peter Barth speaks of it being “distinguished from all the others by a peculiar liveliness and freshness in the management of the thought. . . . It proceeds upon the fundamental theological lines which were to be followed in all subsequent editions of the Institutes.”
At Strasbourg, Calvin, like his friend Bucer, had been engaged in controversy with the Anabaptists, and much appears in the 1539 edition to counteract their heresies. He had been reading widely (Augustine, Origen) and in some places that may surprise us (Plato, Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca). The 1539 edition abounds with allusions to Plato, though he is rarely mentioned by name. Here is the continuing influence of Calvin’s humanism, and I believe it may have been partly the same influences which led him to add two new chapters on the knowledge of God and the knowledge of man to the front of his book. Calvin was about to answer the letter Cardinal Sadoleto had sent to the people of Geneva trying to inveigle them back into the Roman fold. Now Jacopo Sadoleto was one of the Roman scholars who had been influenced by humanism, and he had written (not in the letter just mentioned but elsewhere) that all the Church’s problems could be solved by scientia, the knowledge which would come out of a great conclave of scholars sitting down together. He had once put forward proposals on these lines, and had received some support from Melanchthon. This sort of scientia idea was common among humanists both Roman and Protestant, and it may have been partly to counteract this trend and show where true scientia was to be found that Calvin added his two chapters.
Among other additions, he expanded his section on the Trinity considerably, added a completely new chapter on the relations between the two testaments to combat certain Anabaptist misunderstandings. He wrote a section defending infant baptism and another against millenarianism, both aimed at the Anabaptists. The brief 1536 statements on justification and repentance are expanded into chapters in 1539. The influence of Bucer is to be seen in 1539. Calvin follows Bucer and Augustine in his expositions of providence and predestination, whereas as recently as 1535 Melanchthon had played the latter down. Again, in 1536 the main emphasis in the section on faith had been on trust and hope as in Luther, but while these did not disappear, the influence of Bucer and Calvin’s Reformed humanism added an intellectual aspect to his discussion of faith, which is not found in Luther according to Benoît.
In short, Calvin is not only expanding but beginning to organize his material more, and he gives his reasons in the short but vitally important 1539 preface, which is unfortunately left out of the new Library of Christian Classics edition of the Institutio. “My object in this work was to prepare and train students of theology for the study of the sacred volume, so that they might both have an easy introduction to it, and be able to proceed in it, with unfaltering step. I have endeavoured to give such a summary of religion in all its parts. I have digested it into such an order as may make it easier for anyone who is rightly acquainted with it to discover both what he ought principally to look for in Scripture, and also to what head he ought to refer whatever is contained in it. Having thus paved the way, I shall not feel it necessary in any subsequent commentaries on Scripture to enter into long discussions of doctrine, or dilate on commonplaces. I will therefore always compress them. In this way the pious reader will be saved much trouble and weariness so long as he comes furnished with a knowledge of the present work as an essential prerequisite.”
This passage is important for several reasons.
1. It shows that Calvin’s intended readership, in his Latin editions at any rate, was students of the Bible and of theology.
2. It shows the relationships between the Institutio and the commentaries, which is important both for any general study of Calvin and to correct certain current misrepresentations of Calvin which are almost always built up mainly, if not exclusively, from his commentaries. We must interpret Calvin as Calvin intended us!
3. It shows pastoral wisdom in guiding people to Bible study and in helping them use commentaries. (Read Calvin’s preface to his Commentary on Romans for more on this.) Bucer’s commentaries, excellent though they are in many ways, are full of longwinded digressions. Luther’s are, if anything, worse. No wonder Calvin’s have stood the test of time better. They are shorter. They keep to the point. They avoid the interminable topical digressions which mar so many otherwise excellent Reformation commentaries.
After the 1539 Institutio Calvin turned to a French translation. Some have sought to maintain that the first French translation appeared in 1536, but there is no direct evidence for this, and the isolated fragments of 1536 which appear in 1539 translation are best explained as Calvin’s own notes rather than parts of a lost edition. The translation, published in Geneva in 1541, was the first original theological work to appear in what we may call modern French. It is probably not too much to say that Calvin’s French helped to mold the French language in the same way as Tyndale’s New Testament shaped classical English. One effect of this today is that Calvin is studied for his contribution to the French language by some who would not otherwise trouble to read his theology.
The French edition was for those ordinary French Christians who could not read Latin, for Calvin, like all the other Reformers, was a patriot. He never forgot the needs of his fellow Frenchmen. Indeed with all his international contacts and with his Academy at Geneva, later to become the theological center of Protestant Europe, it is remarkable that he spent so much time translating into French. Perhaps in these days of international and intercontinental denominational groupings, we do well to ponder the biblical concept of the nation. Was Calvin just a child of his time, or was he onto something modern Christians, and especially modern ecumenists, have forgotten?
Benoît in one of his contributions to Studies in John Calvin gives an interesting survey of the changes Calvin made in his French editions. They show that such a mighty intellect as that of Calvin was not unaware of the problems of comprehension for ordinary Frenchmen. Once again the true pastor’s concern not to go over the heads of his people. Let me cite a few examples from Benoît. Calvin removes, translates, or paraphrases the Greek words. He gets rid of references to Aristotle. He repeats himself much more, and adds explanations superfluous to scholarly readers. He explains, for example, that Caligula was a Roman Emperor and that Socrates was an ecclesiastical historian.
Calvin uses strong expressions in popular French, but in Latin just plain illi. He makes use of popular proverbs and vivid untranslatable expressions. The whole text is more familiar and easy to read. Listen once again to Calvin explaining his purpose in the French preface.
First I wrote in Latin that it might be of use to all students, whatever their nationality. Afterwards, wishing to communicate any fruit it might contain to my fellow Frenchmen, I translated it into our language. . . . It will be a kind of key opening up to all the children of God a right and ready access to the understanding of the sacred volume. And so, if the Lord gives me means and opportunity in future to write some commentaries, I shall be as brief as possible, and avoid long digressions, since I have already set out at length all the articles pertaining to Christianity.
Since we are bound to acknowledge that all truth and sound doctrine come from God, I shall venture to declare boldly what I think of this work, recognizing it to be God’s work rather than mine. . . . I exhort all who reverence the word of the Lord to read it and remember it carefully, if they want first a summary of Christian doctrine, and second an introduction to the profitable reading of the Old and New Testaments. When they have done this, they will know from their experience that I have not sought to impose on them with words. If anyone cannot grasp it all, he must not give up in despair but press on, trusting that one passage will illuminate another. Above all, I recommend that recourse be had to Scripture in considering the proofs I adduce from it.
Various other editions, and usually translations, followed till the definitive 1559 edition. Each added a little here and there but the main changes came in 1559, by which time the volume had grown to four books and eighty chapters. The 1559 edition saw the introduction of paragraph numbering—1217 of them in all. Two indexes were also added: first, of topics treated, and, second, of Bible passages and works cited.
The 1559 Institutes
In his 1559 preface Calvin says of previous editions, “Though I have not regretted the labour spent, I was never satisfied until the work had been arranged in order now set forth.” The title of the book speaks for itself: Institute of Christian Religion, Now First Arranged in Four Books and Divided by Definite Headings in a Very Convenient Way: Also Enlarged by So Much Added Matter That It Can Almost Be Regarded as a New Work. In 1559 Calvin entirely recast his arrangement. Up till then he had still formally followed the catechism pattern. Now he abandons that for a loose following of the pattern of the Apostles’ Creed. He makes certain theologically significant changes in structure, though as Beza, his first biographer observed, he never changed his basic theology.
1. He divides up his treatment of predestination and providence which had previously formed one section in the Creed chapter. Now providence is moved to book 1 under the doctrine of God, and predestination moved to book 3 where it is discussed under salvation.
2. The section on the Church, its powers, organization, etc., is moved to book 4 away from the heading of faith.
3. The chapter on the Christian life which had previously been the final one in the volume is now moved to book 3 where it is treated as the work of the Spirit in us.
The age of the Reformation saw the great discovery, or rather rediscovery, of justification by faith alone. It was therefore natural that its greatest works should be soteriologically orientated. Certainly this is true of Calvin’s Institutio. It is primarily about salvation because the Bible is primarily about salvation. There have, of course, been many books written about salvation before and since, but in the history of soteriological studies Calvin will always hold a unique place, for he was the first to relate the whole work of the Trinity so closely to salvation. He was the first to work out the theology of salvation in terms of the threefold office of Christ—prophet, priest, and king. He was the first to give the Spirit His proper place in salvation.
The Institutio is a theology of the gospel, and in some ways I think it has affinities with Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and Calvin’s commentary on that book, for it was with this book that Calvin started his commentaries, and deliberately. It was to this book that he referred in the 1539 preface. Book 1 opens with the age old question—How can a man know God? Calvin replies through nature to a limited extent, but savingly only through his revelation in the Bible. Then he proceeds to God the Creator, and man a helpless sinner after the fall. That has opened up the way for the center of book 2, Christ the mediator, God’s answer. Book 3 follows the third section of the Creed on the Spirit. The Spirit applies salvation in repentance and faith. Then follows the central exposition of justification, and after it what results from justification and what the justified sinner is to do in living the Christian life. Then in book 4 he turns to the sacraments, for the ministry of word and sacrament are God’s appointed ways of strengthening faith. Finally there follows the duty of Christian citizenship.
Calvin was not the first Reformer to produce a systematic study of biblical theology. Melanchthon’s Loci, first published in 1521, had done it, and so had Zwingli’s De Vera et Falsa Religione in 1525. But Calvin’s Institutio is by common consent the greatest of Reformation theologies, and some of us might want to go further and say of all times. I have deliberately refrained from trying to put down Calvin’s theology. One can do that with lesser men, but with great seminal thinkers like Calvin, and such men as Augustine before him, it would be a rash and unwise venture. Certainly it is one which I should not dare to attempt in one paper. I have read a good many books on Calvin’s theology, but I have no hesitation in adding that I have always returned to the Institutio with a feeling of relief. Like all great books, it is its own best interpreter.
When we consider the development from the libellus of 1536 following the lines of Luther’s Catechism, through the first major revision in 1539 when there was a slight shift from Luther to Bucer emphasis, through the various semi-popularized French translations and subsequent smaller Latin revisions to the magnum opus of 1559 with its very considerable expansion and structural recasting, when we consider all this, we can see what probably was the printer’s gloss on the title did in fact turn out to be a prophecy, for The Whole Sum of Piety and Whatever It Is Necessary to Know in the Doctrine of Salvation is an accurate description of the definitive edition of the Institutio.
First, it was a magisterial study of biblical theology, centering as does the Bible on the gospel theme of salvation.
Second, it was an introduction to Bible study, and to the charge of critics that Calvin stuffed the Bible into a straightjacket of his own fashioning, we may reply by pointing to that 1545 French preface where Calvin explicitly urges his reader to check what he says from the Bible texts given. If he had distorted the Bible, it was as he said on his deathbed “not wittingly,” and Calvin would be the first to urge emendation if any distortion be proved.
Third, it was a magnificent apologia for the Reformation. It refuted the Roman claims and equally the Anabaptist claims. We are today rather more inclined to notice the former than the latter, but perhaps the first two chapters of book 4 and several similar passages are timely for us today when many are exercised on when to separate from churches which teach or tolerate various degrees of doctrinal error. The constant repetition of the Preface to the French king showed that the book was a perpetually cogent defense of French Protestantism.
And fourth, it was a summa pietatis, a handbook to show ordinary people how to live. Calvin would not have known the difference between intellectual and pastoral theology. His approach was too biblical to allow such a distinction, and that is why ordinary Christians as well as experts can benefit from the pastoral wisdom of the Institutio.
Professor Battles is correct in saying this of Calvin’s Institutio: “The secret of his mental energy lies in his piety; its product is his theology, which is his piety described at length.” To understand this we must remember the real meaning of pietas, and not think of its debased modern usage for something sentimental and ostentatious. But four centuries earlier Philip Melanchthon had summarized Calvin’s achievement with praiseworthy humility, because Melanchthon himself was something of a scholar, when he described Calvin in two words, ille theologus, or in English the theologian.1