Portrait Of Calvin

Reading

INTRODUCTION

THE number of books on Calvin seems endless. On the Continent the river has been high, if not in spate, most of the time since the celebrations in 1909 of the fourth centenary of his birth. Even in England there has flowed a trickle sufficient for a man to wet his thirst. Why, then, yet another? The great Emile Doumergue has surely told us all that can at present be known about the history of Calvin’s life; and if we lack the time, patience or French to make the Grand Tour of those seven huge volumes, we can still find out all we need to know from Mr. R. N. Carew Hunt’s Calvin, which, whatever qualifications must be made about its interpretation of the Reformer’s theology, is reliable and well-written history. There is little point in entering into competition with Mr. Carew Hunt by putting forward another biography. But, because some village or other has been photographed from every possible angle, I am not prevented from attempting a water-colour of the same place. So the title of this book should be taken as differentiating it somewhat from a straight biography. It is a portrait, not a photograph.

The presentation may come, I hope, as a pleasant surprise to some who have always in their imaginations seen Calvin with horns and wreathed about with the incense of brimstone; those who, had they the organizing of Madame Tussaud’s, would move his not very lifelike effigy from its present position in the Main Hall into the Chamber of Horrors. Perhaps I may be allowed two anecdotes to illustrate the irrational aversion against him among my brethren in the Church and also the popular ignorance of his position in church history.

A new clerical acquaintance and I were talking of John Knox. He was reminded of John Calvin.

‘Calvin, now,’ he said, ‘he was terrible.’

‘Terrible,’ I asked, ‘how?’

‘I mean Calvin,’ he said, ‘you know about Calvin, don’t you?’

He plainly thought I had not caught the name. Calvin was terrible. No one, surely, who called himself a loyal Anglican could dissent from the verdict that Calvin was terrible.

‘But why terrible?’ I asked.

He found the question difficult. It was axiomatic that Calvin was terrible; but in what way, it was not easy to say, especially if one knew of him only by hearsay. But he was a strong-minded man and refused to be beaten.

‘He was terrible,’ he replied firmly; and then, with inspiration, ‘I mean, look how bad-tempered he was.’

Then there was the man in the W.E.A. class. Rom. 3.21ff. was being expounded. The teaching of the Council of Trent was mentioned and also that of Luther and Calvin. He interrupted me at the name: ‘Calvin,’ he said, ‘he was all on about predestination, wasn’t he?’

Bad temper and predestination! A gruesome picture, certainly, but rather too bad to be true. Nobody could be quite so bad as that. But let it not be inferred from what we have just said that we intend to make Calvin better than in fact he was. Othello left the cardinal rule for all biographers—

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice.

Besides, Doumergue used up all the whitewash when he was busy redecorating Calvin, and there is none left for us. Nevertheless, the Calvin we see is neither angelically good nor diabolically evil. Alongside undeniable faults, we shall see undeniable virtues in him.

One fact will, however, stand out above all others: or rather, it will be the basic truth of his life. It is the essential harmony of the man. There are, of course, dissonances that spoil the harmony. But in spite of them, the last and truest thing to be said of Calvin is that, within the limits of sinful mortality, the unity of his life is astounding; his thoughts, his actions and his intentions point in the same direction. As he thought, so he lived and so he purposed. He was like an Old Testament prophet in that he proclaimed the Word of God both by words and by actions. In that sense, the course of his life takes on a certain sacramental reality. It bore visible witness to the gospel he preached. It is this harmony or consistency that gives its particular significance to Calvin’s life.

CHAPTER I

THE TRAINING OF

A REFORMER

FOR a hundred years and more the magnificent structure of Church and common life that the Middle Ages had painfully built out of the ruins of the old Roman Empire had shown signs of wear. And, as will happen when buildings are not well looked after, time only accelerated the decay. In theology, the universal breadth of the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas had given place to the ‘mummified philosophy’ of the fifteenth century. The odour of decayed sanctity hung about the cloisters of the old monastic orders. And the enthusiasm of the poor brethren of St. Francis had grown something tarnished by the breath of the world. If this is only a general picture, with a vast deal to be said on the other side, it is nevertheless a generally true picture. It was not only the so-called ‘Reformers before the Reformation’ who attacked the Church; many of her most devoted and loyal children were the least sparing of her faults.

Yet the calls for reform met with little response from the Roman court. Here and there a little was put right, and here and there a little was made worse. A few bones were tossed to the dogs to stop their barking. But the radical reform of the Church was not attempted. We may well doubt whether the Roman Church could have been reformed from within at this time. Certainly, she reformed herself in the Counter-Reformation of the sixteenth century, but not before she had been shocked into action by the widespread Protestant revolt.

In the most important respect, moreover, the calls for reform which came from within the Church differed in purpose from those of the Reformers. They had for their object the removing of practical abuses in organization, worship and morals; so far as theology was concerned they were content to define what was already believed. But, for the Reformers, the reformation of doctrine stood in the fore-front, and from it flowed all the other reforms which they attempted. The Reformation was first and foremost a theological revival. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin regarded their work as a bringing to light again of the great doctrines of the Scriptures, neglected or obscured by the mediaeval Schoolmen.

Calvin himself had no hand in beginning the Reformation. He appeared late on the theological scene, when the early battles had been won and the Reformation was an established fact. By the time he was born in 1509, the monk Luther had spent four years of spiritual anguish and search after a peaceful conscience in his monastery. While he was still learning to read, Luther was already giving his evangelical lectures on the Psalms, Romans and Galatians at Wittenberg. He was only a schoolboy when Luther took that step—a little step it seemed to him, not knowing that it was wearing seven-league boots—of publicly questioning the right of the Papacy to levy indulgences.

Although all this was taking place as Calvin grew up, he was untouched by it. Everything in his upbringing combined in making a firm and zealous churchman of him. His father was a lawyer to the Cathedral Chapter—something kin to a Diocesan Registrar in these days. In that house the flavour was distinctly ecclesiastical. The many clerical visitors with their cathedral talk brought the family into a closer relationship to the Church than most laity enjoyed. What was more, the predominating atmosphere in his home town of Noyon was ecclesiastical and he grew up under the shadow of the Cathedral. This training and environment produced the desired effect, so that, looking back at his early life, he could say, ‘I was obstinately devoted to the superstitions of Popery.’ From the time he was a small boy the course of his life was determined. He was to take orders. In this he had the support of the Chapter, which defrayed some of the expenses of his education. He had his early schooling in the family of the de Montmors, patricians in Noyon. And here another strand was woven into the thread of his life and character, for with them he not only learned his grammar but also imbibed an aristocratic outlook that was to add a certain dignity to his demeanour throughout his life. Indeed, it must be confessed that this somewhat stiffened in him towards the end, so that he had not a little of the grand seigneur about him—as witness the incident in a Genevan street when a grateful but too enthusiastic refugee addressed him as ‘Brother Calvin’, and was informed that the correct title was ‘Monsieur Calvin’.

At fourteen he departed with the two de Montmor sons and their cousin Claude de Hangest for the University of Paris. It was fitting, if somewhat ironical, that the great Reformed theologian should have his early training in the greatest mediaeval theological school. But the Paris of the sixteenth century was no longer the glorious Paris of the spring and summer of the Middle Ages. There were no longer names like Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas or Peter Abelard to bring eager students flocking from the ends of Europe to her lecture rooms. She was grown tired with age. Her theology lived in the past, not creatively but with a hardened traditionalism that made it irrationally suspicious of any fresh approach to a problem, let alone a new idea. The mediaeval undergraduate had ever been a riotous, careless creature and his younger brother of the sixteenth century was probably not much worse, though conditions in Calvin’s college, where Erasmus and Rabelais had spent unhappy years before him, were a scandal even in that age neither squeamish in manners nor over meticulous in morals.

At Paris Calvin was at first an arts student, and at the Collège de la Marche had the good fortune to be taught Latin by one of the greatest of all French schoolmasters, Mathurin Cordier. From him Calvin gained the mastery of Latin that was to make the Institutes one of the best written books of the Renaissance—Scaliger, the classical scholar, said that his Latin was almost too pure and elegant for a theologian. Calvin acknowledged the debt he owed his old master when twenty-seven years later he dedicated to him the Commentary on the First Epistle to the Thessalonians: ‘It is befitting that you should come in for a share in my labours, seeing that, having entered on a course of study under you, I became so far proficient as at least to be prepared to profit the Church of God in some degree. When my father sent me, still only a boy, to Paris after I had merely tasted the first elements of Latin, Providence so ordered it that for a short time I had the privilege of having you as my teacher, so that I might be taught by you the true method of learning, in such a way that I might be prepared afterwards to become somewhat more proficient. For after presiding over the first class with the highest renown, when you saw that pupils who had been ambitiously trained by the other masters produced nothing but show,