§7 Introduction (part 1 of 7)

PART II

LIFE OF CALVIN

Cf. the autobiography in the preface to the Commentary on the Psalms, 1556 (31, 13f.), especially the passages on his conversion, his meeting with Farel, and his struggles; Beza, preface to Calvin’s Joshua Commentary (1564); Beza’s Panegyrikus, a loyal but not very critical account that gives factual material.! As a living portrait it may well be more historical than an objective account by a nonparticipant. Nicolas Calladon (1565) amplifies Beza.2 Beza wrote a Latin Vita in 1575.3 For all three of these cf. 21, 21ff. New biographies: P. Henry, 3 vols. (1835-1844); and E. Staehelin, 2 vols. (1863).4 Both are erudite, sympathetic, and anxious to set forth the Reformed side so as to do justice to Reformed reformers who are often overshadowed by Luther, but in my view they are more valuable as collections of materials and too edifying to be instructive, Staehelin

1. For the preface to the commentary on Psalms, see CO 31, 13-36; for the preface to the Joshua commentary, 22, 21-50. By Panegyrikus Barth is probably referring to the editors’ preface in CR: Notice Littéraire, CO 21, 9f., which notes the inadequacy of Beza’s panegyric and the need for a more detailed and methodical account.

2. CO 21, 51-118. Colladon was a pastor at Geneva from 1553 onward and in 1564 succeeded Calvin as a professor at the academy. He came from a French refugee family. See M. Haag, La France protestante, vol. 1V (Paris, 1853), 4f

3. CO 215,119-72!

4. P. Henry, Das Leben Johann Calvins des grossen Reformators, 3 vols. (Hamburg, 1835-1844); E. Staihelin, Johannes Calvins Leben und ausgewihlte Schriften, 2 vols. (Elberfeld, 1863).

Life-of Calvin

being much superior. Kampschulte, 2 vols. (1869 and 1899),° is nonsympathetic, stresses the objections against Calvin too much, but is a corrective to the former two and should be consulted but not made determinative. E. Doumergue, 5 vols., folio (1899-1917),° is probably the best of all Calvin scholars; he searches the ground thoroughly and does a good job, though inclined to try to justify Calvin through thick and thin, so that he does not finally help us to understand, being so much the pupil who reproduces the teacher. For short accounts cf. A. Bossert (1908) in Krollick’s translation; A. Lang (1909); G. Bayer, a popular but welldocumented and vivid presentation, in which the author tells us on p. 1 that if he were not a Lutheran he would like to be Reformed; K. Holl (1909); E Barth, Calvins Persénlichkeit (1909); and Schwarz, Calvins Lebenswerk in seinen Briefen (1909).”

I have not found an account that combines the thorough knowledge of Doumergue, the sympathy of Staehelin, and the critical glance of Kampschulte, and that also so profoundly grasps the historical and principial contexts of the Reformation as to be able to treat them with detachment. But that is perhaps a combination of qualities that is beyond our human capabilities, so that we should be glad to have at least the parts in the works cited, with here and there at least a glance at the whole.’ But now to work.

If in the course of these lectures I try to take a look at the life of our hero, it is not because this is something that for the sake of completeness we should not omit. From the two preceding sections on the Reformation and the Middle Ages and the interrelations of the three main reformers

5. F W. Kampschulte, Johannes Calvin: Seine Kirche und sein Staat in Genf, 2 vols. (Leipzig, 1869-1899).

6. E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin.. ., 7 vols. (Lausanne and Neuilly, 1899-1927; vol. VE.1926; vol. VII, 1927).

7. A. Bossert, Calvin (Paris, 1906); German translation by Krollick (Giessen, 1908); A. Lang, Johannes Calvin... (Leipzig, 1909) (Schriften des Vereins fiir Reformationsgeschichte 99); G. Bayer, Johannes Calvin... (Neukirchen, 1909); K. Holl, Calvin, an address in Berlin in commemoration of Calvin's birthday 400 years before, delivered on 7.10.1909; reprinted in expanded form and with notes (Tübingen, 1909); then in Gesammelte Aufsitze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. Il (Tubingen, 1928), 254-84; FE Barth, Calvins Persinlichkeit.. ., a commemorative address (Bern, 1909); Johannes Calvins Lebenswerk in seinen Briefen, a selection in German translation by R. Schwarz with an introduction by P. Wernle, 2 vols. (Tubingen, 1909); new ed. with introduction by O. Weber, 3 vols. (Neukirchen, 1960).

8. Cf. Goethe’s Faust, I, vv. 1936-39.

Life of Calvin

you will have gathered that my chief concern in the whole enter see the inner and outer connections and the place of intersecti historical and principial line on which Calvin stood. If we could sé@ thesé contexts exactly, infinitely more so than we have succeeded or can ever succeed in doing, then in my view we could at once see the subject of our study and no further special examination would have to be devoted to it. In viewing the contexts we arrive at what I call our presuppositions. By this I do not simply mean preparatory materials but prolegomena in Kant’s sense, and therefore ideally the whole.? If we still have to look at Calvin's theology as a special second theme after the presuppositions, this is more for the hardness of our hearts [cf. Matt. 19:8] than for any other reason.

We now come to the third and most inward circle of these presuppositions, Calvin’s life. In its own way this life is also, or ought to be, the whole of his theology. As I said yesterday, we cannot separate the man and the theologian if we are dealing with an important person, a theologian who has to be taken seriously. Those who achieve a full grasp of his life cannot fail to see that here was a man who preached, who expounded the Bible, who engaged in polemics, and who had to shape in a particular way his doctrines of the Lord’s Su ef, predestination, and Justification. My ont PaRGrIn his

Tectures on

Calvin used to give no more than an explicit and vivid account of his life from beginning to end, and we finally saw something of Calvin’s theology even though there were only incidental references to it.!° I regard that path as more artistic and more pertinent to the theme than the one we ourselves are taking. To repeat what I said yesterday, the nature of historical understanding consists of insight into the necessity imposed by that double context. Yet I do not trust myself to be able to tread such a path consistently, and so I choose a more broken method. Equipment is needed for the first method that I do not even remotely have. Yet I would ask you to note that in the arrangement of our main material into preaching, exegesis, polemics, and system, we have a pointer at least to the biographical link and therefore to the ideal of a historical presentation. If this pointer leads you to a consideration from eternal and temporal angles at the same time, then you have perhaps gained the very best that I can give you apart from what Calvin himself gives.

9. Cf. Kant’s Prolegomena to a Future Metaphysics (New York, 1950), 22.

10. Fritz Barth, Barth’s father, taught church history at Bern University from 1899 to his death in 1912. He does not seem to have taught a special course on Calvin but frequently lectured on Reformation history in general.

Life of Calvin

I see no reason to divide up Calvin's life in any way but the traditional one: (1) The beginnings to the arrival in Geneva, 1509-1536; (2) the first stay in Geneva, 1538-1541; (3) the Strassburg period, 1538-1541; (4) the years of conflict in Geneva, 1541-1555; (5), the victory and final years to Calvin's death, 1555-1564. If thus far we have rightly fixed the place where Calvin stood, our true theme of the story that we shall now sketch must be his distinctive will, how it was formed in the first period, made a first beginning in the second, was inwardly confirmed in the third, wrestled through defeat to victory in the fourth, and finally prevailed and came to full expression in the fifth. You know already that I finally view the whole of this extraordinary self-contained and complete and heroically successful life as a tragedy, as I do all else in history. I will not repeat that verdict at detailed points.

SS ‘ 3 i,

Early Years, 1509-1536

Calvin's father, Gerhard Cauvin, of Pont d’Evéque, had risen from humble origins — his own father had worked on riverboats — to become a well-situated middle-class lawyer who acted as financial counsel to the bishop of Noyon in Picardy (the ancient Noviodunum) and also to the cathedral chapter, which was often in conflict with the bishop. From all that we know, his relation to the church as represented by his clients was a purely objective and financial one. His educational ambitions for his children were also primarily practical. He had his second son, the later reformer (born July 9,2 1509), first study theology, and made it possible for him to do this by securing for him when he was only 14 years of age, first a quarter share in a benefice, then a whole benefice (i.e., its income). Later, when he had fallen out with his clerical clients, he unhesitatingly transferred Calvin to the study of law as a better means to bring him to wealth and fame. It made little difference. The church was a worldly possibility like any other. Things really were different with Calvin’s mother Jeanne, née Lefranc, who had brought a dowry to her husband. Though of no special intellectual gifts or maternal qualities, she seems to have been fairly devout and even bigoted, zealously hauling

1. This heading is in the margin of the MS.

2. In the biographies of Calvin listed by Barth, and in more recent works, July 10 is given as the date of Calvin's birth.

| Early Years, 1509-1536

off her children to prayer, to church, to processions, to the revering of relics, and the like.

It is not irrelevant to note that the atmosphere in which Calvin, unlike Luther or Zwingli, was reared was that of a middle-class and in particular a lawyer’s home. The sober way, free from every illusion, in which the middle stratum of society usually views human things would later distinguish Calvin, too. We also note that the form in which he met the church in his youth was not, as especially in Luther’s case, that of titanic asceticism or works righteousness, but the very opposite. In his father’s profession he saw the dubious secular and economic side, and in his mother’s piety a superstitious deification of the creaturely. It was natural ‘that his opposition to this church would develop primarily on the ethical side in the broadest sense. Calvin was well aware why later he had such zeal for the glory of God. He had seen something of the dishonor that God suffered at the hands of Christians.

The very best things that Calvin owed to his parents’ home derived from the prudent concern of his father to secure early on a good education for his children. The second son received this first in a kind of local private school at which he excelled for his talents and industry, then in the house of the noble family of de Montmor along with the sons of the family. The rather aristocratic side of his nature was first enhanced here. Later he had a surprising number of noble and even princely friends and correspondents. The path from the working class to the middle class and then to the upper class that his own family had trodden in three generations was in fact a natural one that could easily be traversed. _

With means provided by those early ecclesiastical positions, and with a tonsure signifying at least his imaginary spiritual dignity, the boy went in 1523 to the Collége Lamarche in Paris to prepare for the university. His honored teacher there was Mathurin Cordier, a first-class innovator in the teaching of Latin, but also a fine educator at the personal and moral level. In 1550 Calvin gratefully dedicated to him his commentary on 1 Thessalonians.> For reasons that are not wholly clear he then moved on to the Collége Montaigu, at which not only late scholastic dialectic but also the whip and other nonpedagogic brutalities held sway. As Bossert notes, however, good students can gain profit for themselves even from poor methods, and Calvin learned the art of verbal warfare that would

3. Bossert, 16, tells us the dedication was to Cordier. For the dedicatory epistle of ZA lss0 ch, CON3,525h—.

§7 nionucHon

later be one of his main strengths (18). This was probably the time when the serious, all too serious, young man earned from his fellow students the nickname of accusativus or accuser.4 Recall what I said yesterday about Pharisaism. When Calvin left the Collége Montaigu at the end of 1527 or the beginning of 1528, another promising student enrolled, Ignatius Loyola. So closely enmeshed things often are spatially!5

Already during these student days Calvin must have been in touch with thoughts of Reformation, or at any rate reform. When he had come to Paris in 1523, the great battle that pitted Lefevre d’Etaples, whom we have mentioned more than once already and who was supported by all the Humanist groups and at that time by Francis I and his court, against the Sorbonne, the high seat of Scholasticism, which was supported by the Parlement, had reached a climax. The occasion was the declaration by the Sorbonne that Lefevre was guilty of heresy in his historical thesis that the NT speaks of three different Magdalenes, whereas in the liturgy Mary Magdalene, Mary the sister of Lazarus, and the sinner who anointed the Lord’s feet are supposedly one and the same person.° Profound differences were concealed behind this strange problem: grace or works righteousness, scripture or human decrees, faith or automatic efficacy, all stirred up to some degree by the Lutheran Reformation in Germany. Melanchthon in fact entered the Parisian debate directly with a polemical work against the Sorbonne.’ It is quite impossible that so alert a man as the young Calvin should not have had an inner part in these controversies. It so happened that a relative, Peter Robert, known as Olivetanus (or Olevian),® stood alongside Leftvre as one of the most stalwart and religiously most zealous champions of Humanistic biblicism in Paris. This man apparently drew Calvin’s attention to the Bible. With what result? Who was John Calvin,

4. Cf. Kampschulte, I, 225 n. 1. But the source is unsubstantiated Counter- Reformation polemic. Cf. E. Pfisterer, Calvins Wirken in Genf (Neukirchen, 1955), 111ff, on Calvin as Accusativus.

5. Cf. E Schiller, Wallensteins Tod, act II, scene 2, 789.

6. Cf. Doumergue, I, 91-93; and Bossert, 19F.

7. Barth is obviously referring to the work of Melanchthon mentioned by Doumergue, I, 91ff., and Bossert, 20, though Melanchthon, of course, was not concerned about the debate as to the number of Magdalenes but was opposing the Sorbonne’s attack on Luther.

8. Olivetanus (ca. 1506-1538) is best known for his translation of the Bible into French, for which Calvin wrote a preface. C. Olevian (1536-1587) was a Reformed theologian who had a hand in writing the Heidelberg Catechism. and where did he stand, when, obedient to his father’s wishes, he left Paris in 1527 and moved to Orléans?

It is Calvin himself who at this point in his career tosses to historians a bone of fierce contention. In the little autobiography to his commentary on the Psalms (31, 22), directly after mentioning his transfer from philosophy to law, with which the account begins, he goes on to say that he was then so obstinately addicted to papal superstition that it was hard for him to draw himself up out of the deep slime, but that he (God), by a sudden conversion, brought his heart to obedience even though, considering his youth, it had already been truly hardened. As, then, he received a certain taste for true piety (“godt et cognaissance de la vraie piété”), he was set on fire to continue this study, even though he did not abandon his other studies, if now with less interest.? He then goes on to tell how he would much rather have had isolation and rest even though he was the leader and center of a whole group of like-minded people.

What does all this mean? When are we to date the sudden conversion? Doumergue!? and Holl put it in 1527/28. In favor of their view —I am following Holl!! — it is argued that in 1542 Calvin said he had come to know only the earlier works of Zwingli. Why only the earlier works? Because Zwingli was still alive, his later works had not yet come out, hence the end of the 1520s. Again, in 1538 Calvin was accused of ingratitude to the Catholic church whose education he had enjoyed for fifteen years and more. Adding eighteen to 1509 brings us to 1527. Again, the passage in the Psalms commentary refers plainly to a once-for-all break in Calvin's religious development. Again, Calvin later argued so strongly against following the example of Nicodemus, against a concealed Protestantism, that it is unthinkable that he was himself a secret believer from 1527 or so to 1533. Again, Calvin's reference to his great hardness considering his years makes sense only if he was really young at the time, that is, 17 or 18. Again, in the commentary on Seneca,!2 which was published in 1532, and in which the absence of any new religious thoughts, or any religious thoughts at all, is a main argument for the other side, we must know how to read between the lines to find traces of the sudden conver-

GIECOR NS 21:

10. Doumergue, I, 327-55.

11. See Holl, 37-44 n. 1 (255-59 n. 1), for a discussion, with references, of Calvin’s conversion. Also see n. 7 above for first and expanded editions of Holl.

12. CO 5, 1ff.: L. Annet Senecae... (Paris, 1532). sion. Finally, the fact that in 1533 Calvin was at a chapter meeting in Noyon, and gave up his benefice only in 1534, may very well be explained by a certain broadness of outlook and the hopes that he might still have had for the church.

The other view, advocated by Staehelin, K. Müller, Wernle, and Lang,!> dates the conversion to early 1533. The basis of this view is that there is little evidence that real Protestant influences might have affected Calvin in any dramatic way in his early years. Again, why did not the alleged change manifest itself in the young man’s life from 1528 to 1533? Why did he write his Seneca commentary of 1532 along such Humanistic lines? Why did he not emphasize the superiority of Christian ethics over philosophical ethics? Why are there only three biblical quotations in a sea of classical references? Why is he apparently only seeking a name for himself as a scholar? Must we not date the conversion to the time when he acted as a converted person, as stated in the Psalms commentary (Lang)? Among supporters of this view there is a difference inasmuch as K. Müller takes sudden conversion to be the last decisive breakthrough after a longer period of preparation, of a desire for the other things of true piety after the manner of Nicodemus, whereas Lang no less vigorously than Holl on the other side rejects any intermediate period and takes the word “sudden” literally, though unlike Holl putting the conversion no earlier than 1533.

As I survey all the material adduced on both sides, it seems to me that everything hinges on how we understand the word “sudden.” Both sides, though intentionally only in the case of Müller, appear to shed light by showing that the period from 1527 to 1533 was the critical and ambivalent one in Calvin's life. He received a jolt but did not yet make a move. He was under impulsion but did not yet decide. He saw something but did not yet sufficiently understand himself to make the inferences. We cannot possibly deny that they surprisingly left no imprint on, for example, the Seneca commentary. This being so, a sudden conversion as an incomparably sudden spiritual event was just as unlikely at the beginning of the

13. Stihelin, I, 21-28; K. Miiller, “Calvins Bekehrung,” Nachrichten der kiniglichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Gottingen, phil.-hist. Cl, (1905), 188-255; P. Wernle, “Noch einmal die Bekehrung Calvins,” ZKG 27 (1906), 84-99; and in response to Holl, “Zu Calvins Bekehrung,” ZKG 51 (1910), 556-83; A. Lang, Die Bekehrung Johannes Calvins, Studien zur Geschichte der Theologie und Kirche, ed. N. Bonwetsch and R. Seeberg, vol. II (Leipzig, 1897). period as at the end, at the beginning because it did not really lead to anything, and at the end because then something had already happened.

What does a sudden conversion mean? It seems to me that here again we see how inappropriate it is that modern theology thinks it should have to read the NT and church history with Pietistic spectacles and therefore to see conversion as a spiritual event in time. With the same premise, and the same defective insight into the relativity of time, it seems to me that the understanding of Romans 7, and also of expectation of the parousia and its history, was obstructed and made impossible from Revelation to Blumhardt.!4 Is there not something humorous about the debate of these scholars as to whether that act of God by which Calvin became Calvin took place, with or without preparation, in 1527 or 1533? Must not anyone who is not involved in the debate raise the crucial issue? What are we really talking about? The act of God! If an act of God, then we have here a vital existential event, as both parties and Calvin himself believe, and can there be any question of 1527 or 1533, of yesterday or today? Is it not obvious a priori that a man who was essentially a thinker, and we have every reason to say this of Calvin, if he calls an act of God sudden, will have in view a change which compared to all the changes that take place in time is absolutely unique, so that to the extent that it is seriously placed in a temporal sequence it can denote only a stretch of time, a permanent crisis, not a crosscut, something that happened with unheard-of suddenness in 1527 or 1533?

I also believe that I can prove this a posteriori, at least from the text in the Psalms commentary. If you read through the whole preface you will see that the guiding thread in Calvin’s account of his life is not at all the chronological sequence, so that we are not forced to think of the sudden conversion in terms of a moment in time. The thread is the parallel

14. Barth dealt with gaps in modern theology in his Overbeck essay, “Unsettled Questions in Theology Today,” in Theology and Church (New York, 1962), 55ff. He thought the two Blumhardts, Ziindel, and Overbeck had not received in their day the respect they deserved, the result being that 19th-century theology failed to deal with the question of biblical eschatology. Barth is in agreement with the thinkers mentioned (ibid., 64): “But in any case, after the expectation of the Parousia had lost its reality, Christianity lost its youth and itself. It has become something wholly different; it has become a religion.” Cf. Barth's retractions on this theme in CD, II/1, 633ff., and then his verdict on the way in which Blumhardt’s contemporaries found his concern a strange one, CD, IV/3, 170f. For Barth on the Pietist misunderstanding of Rom. 7 cf. his 1st ed. of Romerbrief (1919), reprinted in part II of Gesamtausgabe (Zurich, 1985), 276ff., on “The Law and Pietism.” between David and Calvin, and the point is that the power, the goodness, the grace, the miracle of God stands over both lives. This preface is not a biography if we mean by a biography the history of an individual and the progress of the personality of that individual through time. The history of the individual is here a means by which to recount the eternal history of the acts of God that we do not see as such on the plane of historical things. Hence at the decisive point, as Holl rightly argues against Müller,!5 Calvin equates the sudden conversion with the taste for the things of true piety that is much less evident. This is how what is divine impinges on what is human. The radical sudden conversion means a relative taste for other things, the wholly other becomes a modest something.!° The Seneca commentary fits well enough with this modest something without any artificial reading between the lines.

In fact Calvin did see something in 1527 but without achieving full clarity about himself. Friends and foes might or might not have found something new and strange in him! As others later wanted to be, and as he himself, when his ambivalence was recognized, renounced for himself and opposed in others, he might have seemed to be a Nicodemus, who out of fear came to the Lord by night.!7 He could very well visit the Noyon chapter in 1533 and enjoy his income up to 1534. All this is basically in keeping with his desire for other things that would later grow and make it all impossible, for the light of that desire dispelled unambiguous darkness and brought the first light of dawn. But the sudden conversion, God’s own act, was written in another book, all that is said in the preface about God’s comfort, help, judgment, and presence being something different from what Calvin experienced in his life in time under this promising sign. It was against his own expectations and wishes,!* he tells us, that God drew him up out of the slime of papacy, out of his obduracy, out of his natural prejudice and perplexity. This is the point of the celebrated passage. Historians will note that at the time of his first Parisian stay —it did not have to be in 1527 — something did begin to happen in the life of Calvin, namely, conscious contact with Reformation thinking. They

15. See Holl, 256f.

16. See above, 16 n. 6.

17. An allusion to Calvin’s controversy with those who followed the model of Nicodemus in John 3:2. Calvin coined for them the label Nicodemites.

18. Barth paraphrases here Calvin's statements in his preface to the Psalms commentary, CO 31, 21. will also note that-Calvin himself perceived in this something, this new taste for other things, incomparably more than that, namely, God’s converting act. Seeing that, they will understand to what distinctive logic a life of this kind was subject no matter what it might finally mean at every stage. They will thus be on guard against trying to assess historically what Calvin himself calls the act of God. For historical assessment can deal only with the new taste, not the sudden conversion. The new taste is the event, the sudden conversion the recognition of it. The new taste is in time, the sudden conversion beyond all time in eternity.

After this digression we may resume our account. Calvin had left Paris as one who had been awakened and unsettled and gripped by the thinking of the German Reformation, for which he was not unprepared. At the time when he had given up theology, he was not clear whether he was not really for the first time beginning the study of theology. He was reading the Bible. He found like-minded people, unsettled just as he was, and to his own added unsettlement, against his will he became their leader. His other studies, which he still diligently pursued, secretly hampered him. So he came to Orléans. As the same man he was? No, not the same! As another man? No, not another! But thirty years later he saw that the great sword of Damocles, the great either-or, had visibly hung over his life at the time, that the great crisis in which he stood and would always stand had come, so that he felt the power of the eternal hand in which he always was and always would be, and was therefore elected and called. Yet what we see of all this in time [cf. 2 Cor. 4:18] is simply a student, a jurist, a Humanist, a Roman Catholic, a scholar of fine-tuned and nervous disposition, rather ambitious, rather cautious, in short, one human, earthly, questionable possibility among others. He moves only slowly, like the hand of a clock, yet no less inexorably than the hand of a clock. New things will take place in this life. From 1533 onward new and surprising possibilities will open up. The awakening will become conscious, the unsettlement stronger, the pressure of the hand stronger. But those who see that this life was pushed by the eternal hand will not make of this movement, of his sudden conversion, at any given time a datum in time and history. It belongs in his biography precisely because it is so much the meaning, the totality, of the biography.

Calvin was in Orléans from 1528 to 1529 and Bourges from 1529 to 1531, in both cases studying law at the university as his father wished. His feelings regarding the questions raised by Luther cannot have grown weaker during these years. When he was in Orléans in 1528 Protestants came under persecution there. The new teaching had confronted him in Paris just as it did now in this situation of antagonism. In both Orléans and Bourges there were many German students, so that interest was thus kept alive in the great events taking place in Germany. Bourges in particular was in the territory ruled over by that friend of the Reformation, Margaret of Angouléme, the sister of Francis I.19 Calvin even seems to have preached there occasionally, not without attracting attention.29 His works after 1533 seem to indicate that he was doing some theological study, which gradually gained in incisiveness. It is not impossible that already in 1528, when in Orléans, he paid a short visit to Bucer and Capito in Strassburg (Kampschulte, I, 231).2! In Bourges he learned Greek from Melchio Volmar of Wiirttemberg, to whom he dedicated his 1546 commentary on 1 Corinthians.2? One of this man’s students at the time was the young Theodore Beza, who twenty years later would be Calvin’s most loyal fellow worker in Geneva. It seems that in spite of what he said later,23 Calvin was not a little interested in his legal studies; we read at least that by way of the preface to a friend’s work he took part publicly in a legal debate of the time, between Stella in Orléans and Alciati in Bourges,*4 and to the end of his days he could not suppress the old, or, shall we say, the born, jurist.

It was at this time that by overly assiduous academic labor he must have begun to undermine his health. Certain character traits like his nervous punctiliousness and his extreme personal sensitivity begin to appear in his letters. In 1531 he broke off his study of law, and with the death of his father in the same year returned to Paris, showing his desire for the things of true piety by studying Greek and Hebrew under the famous teachers Danesius, Buddaeus, and Vatable. Kampschulte is perhaps right when he says that this was the happiest time in his life (I, 237).

He had not yet come dangerously close to the theological problem. We see this from the Seneca commentary De clementia, which came out in 1532 (5, 1ff.).25 Was the repetition of this warning of the Stoic sage

19. Margaret (1492-1549) later became queen of Navarre.
20. Bossert, 27; Kampschulte, I, 232.
21. Kampschulte, I, 231 n. 2.

22. Cf. Beza, Johannis Calvini Vita, CO 21, 30; Bossert, 28; Kampschulte, I, 229. For the dedicatory epistle of August 1, 1546, cf. CO 12, 364f.

23. Cf. n. 104 n. 3 above.
24. Kampschulte, I, 228f., CO 9, 785f.
25. See n. 9 on 136.

Early Years, 1 509-1536

meant as a hidden exhortation to Francis I, who was now becoming intolerable? Was he concerned about the problem of good government in general and hence enticed into a discussion with Seneca? Neither interpretation is impossible, neither is probable. On the basis of the preface and letters of the period it seems most likely that the work was undertaken as an example of Humanistic scholarship evoked by Erasmus’s edition of Seneca, as one of those academic exercises about which we' need not ask too urgently what the purpose was. The later iron Calvin, who knew what he was about, reveals himself in the strictness and industry that the work displays. Materially, in spite of all his past, he was obviously capable of following a different course. The door to a career as a Humanist scholar was still open to him.

But that changed abruptly in 1533. The year saw a new flaring up of the twenty-year struggle between the Sorbonne and the Humanists, whom the king favored. The scholastic party, attacking the king’s sister Margaret, who was sympathetic to the Reformation, had gone too far. Impertinent scholars had even taken the liberty of making fun of this noble lady in a theatrical performance, a kind of revue such as Paris is still fond of today,?° and the time seemed to have come for the Humanists to launch a counterstroke that would make them masters of the situation. By ancient tradition the newly elected rector of the University of Paris, the young professor of medicine, Nicholas Cop, was to take up his office with a solemn address on All Saints Day. As was not unusual, he had the address written for him by his intimate friend Calvin, and so the strange result was that the jurist put on the lips of the teacher of medicine an address that was from first to last theological, in form and tone even a sermon (1O/II, 30ff.).27 Recently, it is true, Calvin’s authorship has been contested, especially by K. Müller.28 In this case, too, the address is still typical of the circle in which Calvin moved even if he was not the leader. I see no reason why it should not have originated with Calvin himself.

We have the impression that the author has entered with some vehemence a field that is unfamiliar to him with the intention of striking a powerful blow. It is rather like student sermons in which the aim, as we know, is often to say all that is to be said. Lines are drawn boldly and with assurance in all directions from a point that has been discovered with great

26. Kampschulte, I, 243.
27. OS I, 4ff; BI 462fF.
28. See n. 13 above.

enthusiasm. It is thus hard to sum up the content in a few words. One unmistakable feature is the Pauline doctrine of justification as Luther understood it, the message of the forgiveness of sins by grace alone. This teaching is extolled in the introduction, developed in a first part, and recommended for courageous promotion in a second. That a novice is saying all this is unambiguously clear from the fact that Luther’s 1522 All Saints Day sermon is quoted in the Latin translation of Bucer even to the point of verbal reminiscences (as Lang discovered), along with discussion of Erasmus’s supposedly reformed preface to the third edition of his New Testament, from which Calvin takes the description of the gospel as “Christian philosophy” when extolling it in the introduction.29 That it was not impossible for him to make use of both Luther and Erasmus in the same breath never entered his head, nor did it trouble him that he could close his Erasmian exordium with a solemn invocation of the most blessed virgin, Ave Maria, and so on.3°

Along with Luther, Erasmus, and a tiny remnant of Romanism, we find a fourth line of thinking, namely, that those who hold the Christian philosophy differ from others as humans do from animals. This philosophy enables us to keep within bounds the turbulent impulses of the spirit. God’s greatest blessing is to have given us his Word.3! Luther’s trust in Christ alone is equated with seeking God’s glory alone.%* Luther’s thought that God wills our /eart is obviously but unwittingly changed by the author into the different thought that it is God who wills our heart, the result being an urgent appeal to renounce other things so as to be able to stand before Christ’s judgment seat. The exposition of the thought of forgiveness of sins reaches a climax in a thought already known to us from the Geneva Catechism, that those who do not grasp this are as far from salvation as animals.33 A strong challenge>4 comes at the end: Dare to bring the church peace by adhering to the Word of truth, the Word of God, and not to human dreams, and even if necessary dare to accept the charge of heresy and persecution.3> That is obviously Calvin! But it is so mixed with what

29. For Luther see WA 10/III, 400-407. Cf. Lang, Bekehrung, ch. 4: “Die akademische Rede vom Allerheilgen-Tage 1533.” For Calvin, see OS I, 4; BI 462.

30. OS I, 5; BI 463.
31. OS I, 4; BI 463.
32. OS I, 6; BI 464.
33. OS I, 7; BI 465; OS II, 75, 10ff.

34. The MS had Anlaufhere, corrected by Barth in the typescript to Anruf.

35. OS I, 9; BI 467. is taken from Luther and Erasmus, and the decisive Lutheran element is so dominant that it can be no more than an accompanying element, thus leaving the impression that with the main statement the author also wanted to say something else.

There is something chaotic, contingent, and tumultuous about this work. The various thoughts are integrated into one another like unhewn blocks. One suspects that the author still has a good way to go before he can make an assimilated and independent totality out of all the things that in part he repeats and in part he adds from his own knowledge. But we cannot rule out the possibility that all this is accidental, a Humanistic whim, the product of a scholar’s study, when, having previously devoted his attention in the main to other things, but inwardly moved for some time by the plight of theology, this scholar is now testing himself in the theological genre. From such bold sorties many ways at that time also led back to Rome. This bold amateur theologian who hastily poured out his whole heart, who in so doing showed a certain lack of independence, who did not yet see all the connections and was not yet aware of the implications, was the Calvin of 1533. Was he converted by then? But again, what does conversion mean? I would say more cautiously that he was being increasingly awakened, that he was coming to himself, that he was discovering the theologian in himself. We can say that much if we read the address attentively. This man had probably immersed himself so deeply in theology that he would probably not be able to reverse himself or call a halt.

But what takes place here is not heroic advance. If we follow the interaction of inner pressure and outer counterpressure in this life, we will probably conclude that here the latter was much stronger and more determinative. Not for nothing, and not just to evoke flattery, did Calvin repeatedly refer later to the natural modesty of his character. He felt himself to be much more forced than forceful. He was not aware of the majesty that others saw in him. So it was now. The necessity that he foresaw in the second part of the address, namely, that we must adhere to the Word of God once it is grasped, and maintain it even at the risk of being persecuted, was indeed in tune with events. The time had come to play this part, which had been adopted for reasons we do not know how profound.

The reaction of those who heard this address left Calvin no option but to take up his own enterprise in all earnest and automatically prevented him from being afraid of where his courage was leading him. The attempt to carry through Humanistic reform in Paris was a complete failure, and among its leaders this failure upset the career of Calvin in particular. The public was not ready for the insights put on the lips of Cop, nor for the way in which they were presented, which was not calculated to instruct the public. In short, the effusion provoked only anger. The Sorbonne and the Parlement made a common complaint against Cop and his speechwriter, the university was divided and impotent, the king was unwilling to offer protection, and so the two, to avoid anything worse, had to flee. Calvin was openly forced into the position of the persecuted, the typical Huguenot situation that would characterize his whole life’s work, even before he had achieved full clarity as to the meaning of this situation.

There now began for him a period of wandering. At the end of 1533 he was in his hometown of Noyon, then for a short time, protected by Margaret of Angouléme, he was back in Paris, then early in 1534 he was in Angouléme with his friend, the cathedral canon, Louie du Tillet, whose fine library he used, in whose house he studied Greek, and where he began the Institutes, not least to teach himself. In April 1534 he was in Nérac at the court of that princess Margaret who so distinctively combined a disposition for Renaissance and Reformation. She herself wrote comedies and pastoral pieces but also a Mirror of the Sinful Soul, she provided a final shelter for Faber Stapulensis, and she was always favorable to Calvin, though, like other women, she sometimes found that he went too far.3¢ It was in relation to her that Calvin would later make his famous statement that if a dog barks when its owner is being attacked, why should he keep silent when God’s truth is under assault.3” For the time being, however, this Kierkegaardian absoluteness did not show itself on the surface of his nature.

In May 1534 he was again in Noyon, and having now reached the canonical age (25) he had to decide whether to continue to receive the ecclesiastical income he had been given as a boy or whether to renounce it. He chose to renounce it, but not without taking compensation, which was obviously not against his conscience. What happened next? According to a note in the chapter register at Noyon, unless there is some confusion with his brother Charles, who had broken with the church, he was arrested for causing a tumult in the church on May 26.38 This seems to suggest

36. Stihelin, I, 34; Kampschulte, I, 243ff.

37. Calvin’s letter of 4.28.1545, no. 634, CO 12, 67.

38. In the Noyon 1534 archives we read of the arrest of a Jean Cauvin for causing a disturbance, but whether this does or can tefer to Calvin is disputed. Cf. Doumergue, I, 426. that in these years he was actively propagating his convictions at times, and later all kinds of unsubstantiated reports of this activity would circulate.39 But there is little inner probability that this was so. However that may be, a short time later he was again in Paris and seems to have engaged in debate with spiritualizing Enthusiasts who had now made an appearance in France, though it is not clear whether they were of the older or newer observance. A meeting with the well-known antitrinitarian Michael Servetus failed to materialize because the latter did not show up at the appointed time. In view of Calvin’s painful love of punctuality it was doubtful whether this beginning of a relationship could in any case have led anywhere.40 Angouléme, Poitiers, and Orléans were then further stops on Calvin's travels, though there is much obscurity as to why he went to them or what he did there.

In Orléans toward the end of 1534 Calvin seems to have finished his second major work, the Psychopannychia. On the advice of his friends, however, it was left unpublished and came out only later, in 1542, in a revised form. But we must discuss it here as a stage on the way of Calvin's inward development (5, 169ff.).! The title, usually rendered “soul sleep,” means literally “night of the soul,” perhaps in the sense of a night banquet. Certain Christian teachers, whom Calvin calls Anabaptists, were promoting the thesis that at the death of the body the soul sinks into a sleep resembling death, or actually dies, and that only at the resurrection of the dead will it be awakened again to life with the body. Calvin’s counterthesis is that the departed souls of the elect are indeed at rest, but not asleep, not in a state of indolence, sleepiness, or intoxication — his interpretation of the opposing view — but with the rest and assurance of conscience that comes with physical death (5, 188), contemplating God and his peace,

39. Kampschulte, I, 246ff.

40. On this incident cf. CO 8, 481, in Calvin’s 1554 defense of the doctrine of the Trinity against the errors of Servetus, with a French translation by Beza in 1565 which adds a sentence to the effect that Calvin was willing to risk his life to win Servetus, but Servetus would not accept his offer.

1, CO 5, 169-232. from which they are still at a distance, but of which they are sure. With no impatience or pain of deprivation they await the revelation of perfect glory (5, 190f.). If not yet in possession of the kingdom of God or in beatitude, they are saved in certain hope of the blessed resurrection. They now see what we here can only believe in hope (5, 213).

What is the point of this work? How does Calvin arrive at such thoughts at this particular moment? We are rightly surprised at the arbitrary isolating of the theme. Calvin students often unadvisedly ignore the writing. Even the faithful Staehelin (I, 37)? regards it as so alien that he remarks that the debate that evoked it has long since died away, and that we are now all agreed on what it seeks to prove, so that he is content to take pleasure at this juncture in the sincere belief in the Bible that Calvin displays. Kampschulte (I, 248)3 can even suggest that after his conversion Calvin had a burning desire to emerge as a theological author as well. I cannot say that I am satisfied with the great silence that reigns on the matter apart from observations of this kind. A work of Calvin written two years before the first edition of the Institutes demands that at least we try to understand it and fit it in in some way. Look upon what I now say as an attempt at explanation. If the explanation is not good, it is at any rate better than nothing. I will present my observations and conjectures in sequence as material for further work.

1. Biblicism.4 If we ask what Calvin was really doing in the period of wandering from late 1533 to late 1534, the Psychopannychia at least supplies us with an answer. At the various places where he stayed during that year Calvin did an astonishing amount of new and intensive theological work. He was no longer just an amateur theologian. The author of this work had plainly studied the Bible in its full scope and with a thoroughness that is not even remotely apparent a year earlier in the Cop address. He knew it now almost as well as he knew antiquity when he wrote the Seneca commentary. He proved his statements already in the way that characterizes the later Calvin. His positive presentation follows well-chosen biblical passages closely, but his attack, especially on what he regards as the false interpretation of his adversaries when they quote scripture, is also very biblical, leading us both in attack and defense throughout the whole of the OT and the NT and if necessary the church

2. See 129 n. 4 above.
3. See 130 n. 5 above.
4, Heading added in the margin.

fathers as well. This achievement gives unambiguous proof that now, and only now we might say, Calvin has moved ahead of others and become in a serious sense a theological Humanist. The question arises: What impelled him in this direction? |

2. Urgency of the Theme.> As regards this work we cannot so easily buy the idea of a chance theme as we can in the case of the work on Seneca. It is true that in the second preface written in 1536 he did not clearly succeed in making his point that the subject is more important than many think.® We can read through the work and still shake our heads as much as when reading the title. There is in this respect, perhaps, something youthful about the work. It smacks of the scholar’s study. For he did not yet see how to present the matter of principle lying behind what so greatly stirred him in a way that would make it apparent to us, too. Yet the whole tone of the work, of which Calvin himself said that he had softened it in the new edition,’ tells us that this time he was in grim earnest. In the first preface of 1534 he feared that he would be called a traitor to the truth if he did not speak out in this emergency.’ He expected to be accused of violating love by taking up the fight, but he replied in advance that there is no unity except in Christ, no love in which he is not the bond. Love is preserved only when the faith is kept intact.? In the second preface of 1536 he anticipated the further charge that he was making much ado about nothing.!° His answer was that the light of God was under threat of extinction by the devil’s darkness. The guilt in this conflict lies with those who have caused it.!! Both objections, probably raised among his friends, and both replies, probably given to them, offer us with remarkable clarity a profile of Calvin the relentless polemicist of his later years. It might well be that when Calvin brought these guns to bear he was not putting on a purely academic performance, even if it is not clear at a first glance what his purpose really was.

3. Historical Context.!* From a historical perspective we may obviously say this about the Psychopannychia. In Paris in the summer of 1534,

5. Heading added in the margin.
6. CO 5, 175 and 176.
7. Ibid., 173 and 174.
8. Ibid., 169 and 170.
9. Ibid., 171f.
10. Ibid., 175 and 176.
11. Ibid.
12. Heading added in the margin.

and perhaps in other places, Calvin had run up against the people called Anabaptists. Like Luther and Zwingli he had first to deal with the question whether the opposition of this group to the church was not the same as his own, whether it might not be possible or even necessary to go along with circles of this kind. As pointed out already, he even held out a hand to Servetus. But the answer that he gave to the question, and that he wished to be loud and public, was a round, flat No. The preface tells us that he was not just afraid of the unjust infamy of being an innovator, but he also did not wish to accept every novelty as the winds of change directed. No matter how true a teaching might be, he was not ready to lend an ear to it apart from the Word of God. He displayed a real aversion to those who, having digested a few chapters of loci communes, proclaim mysteries from the Pythian tripod and thus cause schisms, scandals, and heresies. !3 He feared — note this well — the threat of Jesus that the kingdom of God can be taken away and given to others. His cry was that we must always hang on God’s Word.!4 We must present ourselves to the Lord as the students he would have, poor, wholly emptied of our own wisdom, eager to learn, but not knowing and not wanting to know anything but what he teaches us, fleeing above all everything exotic as though it were poison.!° We see that Calvin’s confrontation with what we might call the Baptist possibility was swift and sure. Almost as soon as he met it, he knew uncannily well and quickly what his reaction must be: Not that! For that is wantonness.!¢ It is exotic, arbitrary, aberrant. The complete antithesis to it is the Word of God, which stands above even the truth that is known so well and that is so full of vitality.