The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE

THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY is somewhat misleading. My intention, my hope, is to revive interest in Jean Cauvin, the sixteenth-century French humanist and theologian — he died in 1564, the year Shakespeare was born — known to us by the name John Calvin. If I had been forthright about my subject, I doubt that the average reader would have read this far. Anyone interested in American history knows that Calvin exerted as important an influence on it as anyone — John Locke was deeply in his debt, and this is hardly surprising, since Locke’s political thinking was formed during the great Calvinist experiment of the English Revolution and Commonwealth. Yet when we talk about our history, Calvin does not figure in the conversation, or when he does, it is as Adam Smith’s censorious cousin. People know to disapprove of him, though not precisely why they should, and they know he afflicted us with certain traits the world might well wish we were in fact afflicted with, like asceticism and an excess of ethical rigor. His misdeeds are somehow of a kind to forbid attention. Coincidentally, they are not great, by the standards of his century or of ours.

And if his misdeeds were very great, and we are marked by a grim paternity, then we should certainly know the particulars of our inheritance. Finding the etiologies of our crimes and vices has given purpose to much writing of history. Surely if Calvin is as bleak an influence as we ordinarily assume, he presents an opportunity not to be missed. A more flamboyant life than his would have attracted attack and then inevitable defense, or celebration and then ferocious debunking. Calvin was a sickly, diligent pastor, scholar, diplomat, and polemicist, who wrote theology of breathtaking beauty and tough-mindedness as well as line-by-line commentary on most books of the Bible. When he died he was buried, as he had asked to be, in an unmarked grave.

(I use the name Jean Cauvin in this essay to free the discussion of the almost comically negative associations of “John Calvin,” which anglicizes the Latin name under which he wrote, Ioannes Calvinus. Even scholarship in French uses the surname Calvin. Still, it is so burdened that I choose to depart from custom.)

To argue that Marguerite de Navarre, sister of the French king François I, was a decisive influence on the literary and religious imagination of Jean Cauvin is to do her no service at all until Calvin is recovered and rehabilitated. On the other hand, the fact of her influence does place Cauvin in his true context, as an elegantly educated Frenchman with aristocratic connections, very much the creature of Renaissance humanism. Marguerite herself is a writer of great interest. She was ambitiously educated, very learned in philosophy and an early exponent of the revival of Platonism in Renaissance Europe. Although Platonism had been deeply influential in the writings of Augustine and others, at the time of Marguerite interest in it amounted to an attack on the Aristotelianism that dominated the schools, and was sometimes punished as heresy. She was also a patroness of writers and especially of religious reformers. Scholars debate the degree to which she was influenced by Cauvin, and not the degree to which he might have been influenced by her, though she was almost a generation older than he and interested in reform ideas years before he was, and though, in her lifetime, she enjoyed great prestige. So she deserves as much as he does to be summoned out of obscurity. It gives me no little pleasure to find a woman at the head of this formidable stream of tradition, the last place I would have expected to find one.

Putting Cauvin into the context appropriate to him should draw attention to the fact that New England political and intellectual culture was more Continental than British in its origins, or Continental by way of Britain, not only through the influence of Cauvin on the early settlers, and on Cromwell, Milton, and the whole of English Puritanism. New England was Continental (and Calvinist) in its tendency toward relatively popular government. New England church polity and the distinctive political order associated with it had emerged generations earlier, in Europe. In 1528 Geneva became an autonomous city governed by elected councils as the result of an insurrection against the ruling house of Savoy. Though the causes of the rebellion seem to have had little to do with the religious controversies of the period, in the course of it two preachers, Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret, persuaded the city to align itself with the Reformation, then recruited Cauvin to guide the experiment of establishing a new religious culture in the newly emancipated city. That is to say, Calvinism developed with and within a civil regime of elections and town meetings.

In 1572, the northern Dutch fought themselves free of control by Spain and established their federation, which they called the United Provinces, under strong Calvinist, therefore Genevan, influence. Persecution and exile made Calvinism at once international and strongly identified with Geneva, its capital and city of refuge, and therefore greatly magnified the influence of the Genevan example. So the association of Calvinism with government that was popular by the standards of the time (and of our time) was established long before the settlement of New England, and endorsed by the uncanny power and prosperity of its two tiny republics.

Seventeenth-century New Englanders were called the Dutch of the British Empire. The American South was not Calvinist, not settled as New England was by Puritans who felt oppressed by the religious and political order of England before Cromwell’s Puritan revolution, or who fled the country after it. It did not send its young men to fight on the side of Cromwell against the king. The South was instead a direct and characteristic offshoot of British colonial policy. It compared to New England as England compared to Holland: despite far more considerable resources, its population was relatively poor and illiterate (English agricultural workers did not thrive better than American slaves) and very sharply stratified. In other words, the similarity of New England to other Calvinist societies, despite differences of culture and language, and its difference from the South, despite shared origins and language, argue that powerful political models and values can be transmitted actively as ideas, through writing and example.

We tend to imagine that political culture must in effect be inherited, passively received. This assumption has as a corollary the notion that the social order will sustain itself if we do not think and theorize about it, and in any case will not benefit if we do. More disturbingly, it implies that populations not already acculturated to orderly representative government will not become capable of it. To say that ideas now have no place in our own political conversation is to understate the matter. It would be truer to say that we no longer have a political conversation. We grope for “traditions” (except for such honorable old customs as substantive debate) as if safety lay in them, and we indulge a somber fear of the outside world, and more particularly of the outsiders among us, in part because we suppose these are the conditions for preserving democracy.

Insofar as these assumptions are articulated as ideas, we are told that representative government found a sheltering niche in liberal aristocracy and blossomed there, and that its flourishing had awaited certain fortuitous erosions in the structure to which its existence finally was owed. This notion allows us to derive our institutions from England, obvious dissimilarities — rights established in law, for example — not at all withstanding. Besides flattering a kind of nativism, this lightens the work of historians. For example, to treat the balance of powers as Enlightenment theory first put to the test in our cheerfully mechanistic Constitution is much more congenial labor than to ponder the murky struggles of the three councils that governed Geneva 250 years before our Constitution was written.

Our great experiment did not spring from the brain of John Locke. It had been tried successfully elsewhere, as our ancestors were well aware. In 1717, the American Puritan John Wise described democracy as follows:

This is a form of government which the light of nature does highly value, and often directs to, as most agreeable to the just and natural prerogatives of human beings. This was of great account in the early times of the world; and not only so, but upon the experience of several thousand years, after the world had been tumbled and tossed from one species of government to another at a great expense of blood and treasure, many of the wise nations of the world have sheltered themselves under it again, or at least have blendished and balanced their government with it.

Wise is defending New England Congregationalism and “its ancient constitution of church order, it being a democracy.”

Significantly, Wise argues from the antiquity and wisdom of democratic political order to justify church polity, and not the other way around. Again, the republican institutions of Geneva were in place before Calvin set foot in that city; the Northern Netherlands freed itself and governed itself under Calvinist influence, which was strong but never exclusive; the New Englanders embraced a revolutionary order whose greatest exponents were Southerners. John Wise describes democracy as tried, practical, and stable, and suited to “the natural prerogatives of human beings.” The fact of the association of relative political democracy — it is always relative, now as then — with centers of Calvinism clearly does not imply to him any dependency of either upon the other.

The affinity of Calvinism for one characteristic type of modern government does suggest that the theology and the civil polity arose from an impulse, or a history, that was common to them, and that they elaborated and legitimized each other. The outlaw status of both of them no doubt heightened their affinity. There was an ancient tradition of relative republicanism and autonomy in the great urban civilization of southern France and northern Italy, and also of popular, anti-hierarchical religious radicalism, epitomized in Catharism, a powerful old heresy with which Calvinism has always been associated by its detractors. A great exertion of papal and monarchical power, the Albigensian Crusades (1209–1226) and the first Inquisition (1233–1350), had suppressed the heresy together with the autonomy of the cities. Historians tend to treat this as a successful cultural extirpation. But Calvin alludes several times to Catharism in his commentaries, in contexts which make it clear that its beliefs were still abroad and still influential, though the culture had been destroyed generations before he wrote. Geneva with its Calvinists looks very like a resurgence of that old martyred civilization.

Yet many innovations of great historical importance are assigned to the influence of John Calvin, including modern marriage, modern capitalism, the modern, “disciplined” self. In precisely the sense that these aspects of life may have deserved to be called Calvinist, if only by affinity, we have closed the historical parentheses, and passed beyond the modern. The idealization of marriage; an economics based on asceticism and a sense of vocation, that is, of sanctified calling; a kind of personality formed around self-scrutiny and concern for the state of one’s soul — these are not things for which we need any longer chide ourselves. Stable, lawful representative government, “modern” government, is no longer an ethos, and is always less a habit.

This is not to say that Calvinism did indeed undergird modern civilization, except as other moral systems did also. Calvinists were always a reviled minority, who therefore enjoyed the ominous tribute of having their influence found everywhere. The German sociologist Max Weber, in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1906), associates them with late capitalism by way of expressing his distaste for it and for them. The polemical intent of this ostensibly scholarly argument is as striking as the imprecision of its terms, but the book — or perhaps its title, since that is much more widely read — has been taken terribly seriously, and has greatly influenced the historical reputation of Protestantism and especially of Calvinism, and has perhaps encouraged us to feel that an ethic is itself a doubtful thing, an anxiety, a neurosis.

In the summer of 1922, Karl Barth, Calvin’s great modern exponent, gave a series of lectures on Calvin’s theology. He described its famous ethical dynamic this way: “Knowledge of God engenders a desire to act. A desire to act engenders a new seeking of God. A new quest for God engenders new knowledge of God. That is the way Reformed thinking goes.” Cauvin himself said, “The only true knowledge of God is born of obedience.” Weber’s thought is not of a kind to grant significance to “knowledge of God,” either as motive or as experience. These two contemporaries, Barth and Weber, are writing from entirely different conceptual models. If there is any merit in Weber’s thesis, if there is truth in the belief that Calvinism was in fact a cultural watershed, perhaps it is fair to distinguish between these two conceptions as the one from which the modern came, and the one in which it ended.

For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature — in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag. We have alienated ourselves from our history by systematically refusing it the kind of understanding that would make it intelligible to us, until we are no longer capable of understanding. Barth says, about theology, “[W]e need to ask ourselves how it has come about that something that did speak once will no longer speak to us. We certainly should not suppress the historical truth that it did speak once.”

There are objections to Calvin and to the enterprise of classical theology which it would be well to address at the outset. This great project, theology, which for so many centuries was the epitome of thought and learning, the brilliant conceptual architecture of western religious passion, entirely worthy of comparison with any art which arose from the same impulse, has been forgotten, or remembered only to be looted for charms and relics and curiosities. We are forever drawing up indictments against the past, then refusing to let it testify in its own behalf — it is so very guilty, after all. Such attention as we give to it is usually vindictive and incurious and therefore incompetent. I will touch on certain subjects as they are dealt with in the writing of old John Calvin, with no wish to suggest that in one instance or another he is typical, or exceptional, or even that he is always clearly faithful to his own best insights — though extreme consistency is a thing of which he has often been accused.

Theology of the period of Cauvin employs a characteristic language which discredits it in the eyes of modern readers, including extreme disparagements of the physical body, and more generally of humankind under the aspect of sin or fallenness. The first thing that must be borne in mind is that those who wrote in such terms, whether Cauvin or Luther or John of the Cross, did it in the service of an extraordinarily exalted vision of the human soul. It is a form of hyperbole — purity is corruption, pleasure is illusion, wisdom is folly, virtue is depravity, by comparison with the holiness that can be imagined, not as the nature of God only, but as the nature of humankind also, whom — in the translation of Psalm 8 in the Geneva Bible, a sixteenth-century English Bible assembled, annotated, and printed by English Calvinist exiles in Geneva — God has made “a little lower than God, and crowned him with glory and worship.”

The self-abnegation that is always the condition of a true perception of the self or of God can only be understood as the rigorous imagination of a higher self. This is more complex than it sounds. Cauvin has an unsettling habit of referring to himself or to any human being as a “worm.” His readers would have known that the speaker of Psalm 22 uses this word to describe himself. That is the psalm Jesus recites from the cross, and Christian interpreters have always identified the speaker of the psalm with Christ. So the use of the word describes temporal estrangement from God and at the same time ultimate identity with Christ. In context it is the farthest thing from a term of contempt. In Book I of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, Cauvin says, “Indeed, if there is no need to go outside ourselves to comprehend God, what pardon will the indolence of that man deserve who is loath to descend within himself to find God?” He argues passionately that humankind is itself a sufficient revelation of the divine presence:

How detestable, I ask you, is this madness: that man, finding God in his body and soul a hundred times, on this very pretense of excellence denies that there is a God? They will not say it is by chance that they are distinct from brute creatures. Yet they set God aside, the while using “nature,” which for them is the artificer of all things, as a cloak. They see such exquisite workmanship in their individual members, from mouth and eyes to their very toenails. Here also they substitute nature for God. But such agile motions of the soul, such excellent faculties, such rare gifts, especially bear upon the face of them a divinity that does not allow itself readily to be hidden.

This is humankind in its fallen state. We have today no comparable language for celebrating human gifts and graces, and no comparable awareness of them, or pleasure in them. The disparagement of “the flesh” is one half, an intrinsic part, of an assertion about human nature which exalts it above all perceivable reality. Modern scholars point to the language of extreme disparagement as if it were exactly what it is not, inhumane and world-hating. It is true that Christian tradition has sometimes approved extreme asceticism in service of the “mortification of the flesh.” Cauvin forbade such practices, because in his view sinfulness is not associated with the physical body more than with the whole of the mortal state, and no effort of ours can free us from it. Still, he retained the language of self-disparagement, and the discipline of self-perception implied in it is as essential to his understanding of religious experience as it is to the vision of any mystic.

Since Calvinism is associated with a brooding preoccupation with fallenness, it is worth pointing out that Cauvin considered the Fall of Man to be, on balance, a good thing. As a result of it, God’s grace “is more abundantly poured forth, through Christ, upon the world, than it was imparted to Adam in the beginning.” His commentary on Genesis, completed the year before his death, is a joyful and effusive work, in which he relaxes the discipline of brevity which so strongly marks his earlier exegetical writing. It is touching to find this sick and weary man so eager to call Creation good.

Nor does he find in the Fall any grounds for antipathy toward women. He sees it as a grave sin in Adam that he tried to blame Eve: “Adam, not otherwise than knowingly and willingly, had set himself, as a rebel, against God. Yet, just as if conscious of no evil, he puts his wife as the guilty party in his place.” He says that Eve, equally with Adam, was made in the image of God “respecting that glory of God which peculiarly shines forth in human nature, where the mind, the will and all the senses, represent the Divine order.” Of her creation from Adam’s rib he says, “He lost, therefore, one of his ribs; but, instead of it, a far richer reward was granted him, since he gained a faithful associate of life; for he now saw himself, who had before been imperfect, rendered complete in his wife … Moses also designedly used the word built, to teach us that in the person of the woman the human race was at length complete, which had before been like a building just begun.” He is at special pains to dissociate human propagation from sin. Commenting on Genesis 1:28, in which God blesses Adam and Eve and tells them to “be fruitful and multiply,” he says, “This blessing of God may be regarded as the source from which the human race has flowed … here Moses would simply declare that Adam with his wife was formed for the production of offspring, in order that men might replenish the earth. God could himself indeed have covered the earth with a multitude of men; but it was his will that we should proceed from one fountain, in order that our desire of mutual concord might be the greater, and that each might the more freely embrace the other as his own flesh.” Marriage is “the bond which God has preferred to all others.”

In this Calvin entirely rejects Augustine, whom he follows in many other things, and embraces Chrysostom, who also influenced his theology profoundly. Augustine says, “A good Christian is found in one and the same woman to love the creature of God, whom he desires to be transformed and renewed; but to hate the corruptible and mortal conjugal connection and sexual intercourse: i.e. to love in her what is characteristic of a human being, to hate what belongs to her as a wife … This is to be understood of father and mother and the other ties of blood, that we hate in them what has fallen to the lot of the human race in being born and dying, but that we love what can be carried along with us to those realms where no one says, My Father; but all say to the one God, ‘Our Father.’”

But Chrysostom writes, “For why do we not all spring out of the earth?… In order that both the birth and the bringing up of children, and the being born of one another, might bind us mutually together … Whence also many kinds of affection arise. For one we love as a father, another as a grandfather; one as a mother, another as a nurse … And He devised also another foundation of affection. For having forbidden the marriage of kindred, he led us out unto strangers and drew them to us again … uniting together whole families by the single person of the bride, and mingling entire races with races.” On one hand Cauvin rarely innovates, and never claims to. On the other hand, his singular devotion to the literature of theology prepared him to exploit its great richness.

In the matter of human dominion over the earth, Cauvin remarks Calvinistically that in giving man the earth to cultivate, God “condemned, in his person, all indolent repose.” Then he says:

Let him who possesses a field, so partake of its yearly fruits, that he may not suffer the ground to be injured by his negligence; but let him endeavor to hand it down to posterity as he received it, or even better cultivated. Let him so feed on its fruits, that he neither dissipates it by luxury, nor permits it to be marred or ruined by neglect. Moreover, that this economy, and this diligence, with respect to those good things God has given us to enjoy, may flourish among us; let every one regard himself as the steward of God in all things which he possesses. Then he will neither conduct himself dissolutely, nor corrupt by abuse those things which God requires to be preserved.

If subsequent generations found in Cauvin a pretext for misogyny or rapacity or contempt for humankind, as historians sometimes claim, it is surely because they were determined to find one. They could easily have found pretexts in his theology for acting well, if they had wanted them.

Finally, those who know anything about Calvinism know that Cauvin asserted and defended a doctrine of election or predestination: we are lost or saved as God wills and our destiny has always been known to him. In this he parts with Chrysostom and embraces Augustine. His position is a consequence of his refusal to allow any limit to the power or knowledge of God or to the efficacy of his grace. Cauvin’s apparent isolation with the burden of this thorny doctrine is an artifact of the history of polemic rather than of controversy. His great contemporary and nemesis, Ignatius of Loyola, says in his treatise, Spiritual Exercises, “Whilst it is absolutely true that no man can be saved without being predestined and without faith and grace, great care is called for in the way we talk and argue about these matters.” Furthermore, he warns, “Nor should we talk so much about grace and with such insistence on it as to give rise to the poisonous view that destroys freedom … our language and way of speaking should not be such that the value of our activities and the reality of human freedom might be in any way impaired or disregarded, especially in times like these which are full of dangers.”

Ignatius was writing for an elite of highly committed men; Cauvin, for anyone who could read him. Cauvin’s theology does not permit the esotericism that allows Ignatius to nuance this doctrine by advising “great care” in the manner in which it is discussed, though in the Institutes he also warns that the subject be approached with caution. Certainly neither Cauvin nor Loyola lived the life of a fatalist, nor does either show the least reluctance to urge others to act decisively. Anomalies must be expected along the conceptual frontier between the temporal and the eternal. Clearly it is not at all Ignatius’s purpose in writing to find logical solutions to theological problems — “I will believe that the white object I see is black if that should be the decision of the hierarchical church.” Nor is it Cauvin’s, who does not “contrive a necessity out of the perpetual connection and intimately related series of causes, which is contained in nature.” He is as committed to the freedom and mystery of God as Ignatius is to the divine authority of the Church. The logical difficulties of their positions matter only if the question is understood in terms both explicitly reject.

A great part of Cauvin’s authority, in his lifetime and for as long as he was read, came from his gifts as a writer. He was splendidly educated in classical literature, and his Latin was concise and elegant. His translations of his own work into French were early classics in the use of French as a literary language. What is most remarkable about his work is that it seems to have been treated almost from the beginning as an “orthodoxy,” when, as such things were measured when he wrote, it was grandly, systematically heterodox. This would have been true in part because of his extraordinary mastery of Scripture and of the writing of the Early Fathers. His theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God, and this is the source of the distinctive aesthetic coherency of his religious vision, which is neither mysticism nor metaphysics, but mysticism as a method of rigorous inquiry, and metaphysics as an impassioned flight of the soul. This vision is still very present in writers like Melville and Dickinson. It is the consequence of a poetic or imaginative stance which, I will argue, Cauvin learned from the religious poetry of Marguerite de Navarre.

Still, I would like to consider a little longer the strange figure of Jean Cauvin himself, because he is a true historical singularity. The theologian Karl Barth called him “a cataract, a primeval forest, something demonic, directly descending from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, marvelous, mythological.” And in fact, the more deeply one reads in him the more thoroughly his thinking baffles paraphrase. Then, too, his personal life is so featureless it seems to have been lived to make reticence redundant. In matters of unavoidable interest, for example the circumstances under which he left Catholicism and embraced the Reformation, he is silent. He served for decades as a pastor in Geneva, but no one knows when or whether he was ordained. His contemporaries would have had the example of Luther in mind, who literally personified the struggles of conscience from which such epochal decisions arose. Cauvin seems to have chosen so far as possible to avoid all personalization, a choice his temperament made very available to him. But the power he derived from this remarkable self-negation suggests that he understood its effects. Only he among the Reformers enjoyed equal status with Luther while they lived, and over the centuries his influence has eclipsed that of Luther, though Cauvin never hesitated to acknowledge that he was deeply in Luther’s debt.

Luther was a monk, the son of prosperous peasants. He was brilliant, learned, coarse, robust, emotional. Cauvin, seventeen years younger than he, was the son of a lawyer, and was himself trained as a lawyer. As a child Cauvin was sent, after the death of his mother, to be reared and educated in an aristocratic family, and as a young man he studied classical literature and languages with some of the finest teachers in Europe. Scripture and theology he taught himself. In portraits made in his youth, Cauvin looks refined and gentle. In portraits made toward the end of his life, he looks crabbed and depleted. There is an assumption abroad among historians that the ravages of time spare those who live their lives well, that a harsh portrait is as absolute an exposure of the soul as one finds this side of Judgment. Perhaps this is not true in every case. It is worth remembering that a fair part of anyone’s life would be required to read what Cauvin read, and then to read what he wrote, even someone in good health, with decent light to work by and a comfortable chair. His commentaries on the Psalms and on Jeremiah are each about twenty-five hundred pages long in English translation, and he wrote commentary on almost the whole Bible, besides personal, pastoral, polemical, and diplomatic letters, treatises on points of doctrine, a catechism, and continuous revisions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first, greatest, and most influential work of systematic theology the Reformation produced. At the same time, he preached and lectured several times each week, and married, buried, and baptized people like any other pastor. He was endlessly caught up in the religious and political controversies that swept through Geneva and Europe, and he was frequently the city’s emissary to councils and disputations. Yet he considered himself temperamentally unsuited for anything but scholarship. His shortness of temper and his headaches and sickliness, and those late portraits, seem to bear him out. There is only his singular religious, political, and cultural influence to contradict him.

Cauvin did not claim that the theology he articulated was in any sense original with him. His first theological work, the first form of the Institutes, was written, he says, to give an account to the king of France, and to the world, of the beliefs of people then being burned in France in a persecution that had forced Cauvin (no one really knows why) to flee Paris for Nérac in Angoulême and then for Basel. Nor did he figure in the insurrection that established the autonomy of Geneva, nor did he influence the form of its government, which was in place when he arrived. He did not establish the reform church at Geneva, but instead carried forward work already begun there by pastors Pierre Viret and Guillaume Farel. Cauvin, who says so little about himself, is careful to make these things clear. He never held any office in Geneva except pastor and lecturer, and he hesitated some months before agreeing to serve as a pastor. He did not accept Genevan citizenship until five years before his death. His famous preeminence, or dominance, in Geneva emerged gradually, over years. He loomed as he did in large part because the civil government produced no figures striking enough to rank with him. Through years of turmoil and fractiousness, he appears to have upheld, by steady, lawyerly deference, a magistracy his personal authority was for a very long time great enough to overwhelm. His insistence that honor be given to magistrates should be understood in this light.

In his commentaries on Scripture, he scarcely slights a verse, or fails to pause over any issue of interpretation of the Hebrew or Greek. By dint of unimaginable labor he creates a body of interpretation that is not allegorical, not analogical, and not offered by him as certainly true. Where he is uncertain, he offers alternative interpretations and tells the reader to decide among them. He tries to avoid forced readings, and he is carefully attentive to the immediate context of a phrase or passage. He is sometimes called the father of modern exegesis.

Cauvin emphasizes the literary character of the books of the Bible and their human authorship — while at the same time claiming for them unique sacredness and authority. Like all controversial writing of the period, his commentaries are marred by bursts of polemic. But even these are not entirely without interest. He frequently vents outrage and exasperation at Jewish interpretations of Old Testament passages, as well as at Catholic interpretations. In the second instance he clearly wishes to refute traditional understandings he might assume were in the minds of his readers. But he would have no grounds for assuming that his readers would be aware of Jewish interpretations or attracted by them. All the complaining means that Cauvin, for the purposes of exegesis, made a habit of consulting the Jewish interpreters. His attention to them is not surprising. He considered the covenant of God with Israel in effect identical with the covenant of Christ, and the Old and New Testaments one continuous revelation — “all men adopted by God into the company of his people since the beginning of the world were covenanted to him by the same law and by the bond of the same doctrine as obtains among us.” His exasperation with Jewish scholars is not surprising either, since their methods of interpretation are very remote from his. Still, they seem to have helped him toward a certain objectivity. For example, though the doctrine of the Trinity was a sensitive point with him, Cauvin refused to follow other Christian writers in finding evidence for it in the use in Genesis of the plural form Elohim to refer to God, insisting instead on the Hebrew use of the plural to emphasize or intensify.

Cauvin is sometimes called the father of the modern university, because he designed an academy at Geneva to prepare Reform clergy, training them in languages and literature and in scholarship and criticism, to anchor the biblicism of the movement in humanist learning. Clearly such training would liberate those who followed him from dependency on his commentaries, and would diminish the authority of his own great learning. Evidence of his success may lie in the fact that one can read very far into the voluble literature of his tradition — not a tradition inclined to spare citations or balk at footnotes — and never find him quoted or even alluded to. I offer our own Jonathan Edwards as a case in point. His revivalism has no basis in Cauvin, who would surely have denounced these efforts to precipitate salvation as Catabaptist or worse. But his philosophical essays are grounded in Cauvin absolutely. Clearly Edwards feels no need to account for his departure in the first instance or to declare his indebtedness in the second, and no need to invoke authority in any case whatever.

Marguerite de Navarre was the sister of the king of France, and they were devoted to each other. She frustrated, so far as she could, her brother’s attempts to destroy the Reform movement by persecution, and he tolerated her efforts to encourage it by her patronage and influence and by her own writing. Perhaps for her sake he protected Protestants in other countries even while he oppressed them at home. Navarre, of which she was titular queen, lay in a region of northern Spain once beyond full control of either Spain or France, in the old land of the Cathars. Whatever significance the title still held seems to have been customary, a courtesy to the king’s relatives. Nevertheless it became a great rallying point of Protestant resistance to royal power, which was led by these same relatives. Marguerite’s daughter, Jeanne d’Albret, was to make a gift of all her jewelry to the Protestant cause, and of her son as well, Henri de Navarre, who became Henri IV.

Jean Cauvin had contact with the influence of Marguerite (then Marguerite d’Angoulême) in many forms. It is speculated that he fled Paris because he had written a defense of a book of her poetry, which was under scrutiny for “Lutheran” sympathies. It is known that he went to her court at Nérac in Angoulême, where she sheltered Reform preachers and writers who were suffering persecution. He went from there to the house of the aristocratic du Tillet family, also in Angoulême, where he studied theology in their vast private library, and then to Basel, where he lived under a pseudonym while he wrote the first version of the Institutes. He prefaced his book with an address — not an appeal or a dedication — to François I, the king himself, in which he declares that the intention of his book is to prove that the movement being persecuted in France is neither heretical nor seditious. This second point was crucial, since the persecutions had stirred sympathy for the French dissenters in Germany, and the French had justified themselves by claiming that the dissenters were a threat to public order. In the circumstances, Cauvin’s “address” seems itself oddly seditious. This reading of it is very much reinforced by the chapter on civil government with which his treatise ends. Through all his revisions, and even after the death of François I, Cauvin left the address and the chapter on civil government unchanged.

In the address, the obscure young man tells the great king that it is in fact the Established Church which is heretical, using the drastic examples of Elijah and Noah to make the point that the True Church is sometimes very small indeed. This is not the soft answer which turneth away wrath. Elijah can hardly be imagined working out a compromise with King Ahab and Queen Jezebel, or Noah reaching an understanding with his neighbors. It certainly does not suggest that kings are in all cases (or in this case) to be deferred to. The obscure young man warns the great king not to “connive” with those who oppress the dissenters, that “the strong hand of the Lord” will “come forth armed to deliver the poor from their affliction and also to punish their despisers.” What must Marguerite have thought of this production? After the publication of the Institutes, Cauvin was invited to the court of her cousin, Renée de France, duchess of Ferrara, also a Reform sympathizer and a protector of Protestant exiles and refugees. It appears Marguerite took it in good part, and feared her brother might not.

Cauvin begins his chapter on civil government by saying that authority must be obeyed even when it is corrupt or tyrannous, because it is established by God. Indeed, a tyrant is a punishment ordained by God. Yet, in biblical history, one whose calling it was to overthrow a tyrant, was “armed from heaven [and] subdued the lesser power with the greater, just as it is lawful for kings to punish their subordinates.” Even wicked rebels did God’s work “unwittingly” — accommodation to events is the genius of providential history. Cauvin’s conclusion tells us what is salient for him in this argument: “Let princes hear and be afraid.”

The last section of the chapter is titled “Obedience to Man Must Not Become Disobedience to God,” an allusion to Acts 5:29, in which Peter says, “We must obey God rather than men.” Cauvin published his commentary on Acts in 1560, and it was published in English in 1585. The gloss on 5:29 says “So soon as rulers do lead us away from obedience to God, because they strive against God with sacrilegious boldness, their pride must be abated, that God may be above all in authority. Then all smokes of honour vanish away … If a king, or ruler, or magistrate, do become so lofty that he diminisheth the honour and authority of God, he is but a man.” The same, adds Cauvin, is true of pastors. Furthermore, he says, “any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the willfulness of kings,” if they should tolerate kings “who fall upon and assault the lowly common folk … they [the magistrates] dishonestly betray the freedom of the people, of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.” This view of revolution as the work of parliaments would have profound consequences in England and America.

In 1647, Charles I of England, all smokes of honour vanished, would be brought to trial as plain Charles Stuart, accused of crimes including complicity in the death of his father and found guilty of treason and murder for persisting in warfare against the parliamentary government established by Oliver Cromwell. As king, in the view of the court, Charles had been “trusted with a limited power to govern by and according to the laws of the land, and not otherwise; and by his trust, oath and office [had been] obliged to use the power committed to him, for the good and benefit of the people, and for the preservation of their rights and liberties” and, with his failure to abide by this trust, his legitimacy and authority had passed into the hands of Parliament, and his resistance was therefore insurrection. Evidence against him included depositions by common soldiers who had seen him or his banner at the scene of a battle. (Cromwell is always named among the commissioners in attendance, though no special prominence seems to have been given him. Nor is there evidence in the record that he spoke.)

Surely Jefferson and his lawyer friends knew the transcript of this famous trial, and were familiar with the kind of language the parliamentary commission employed: “Resolved, That the people are (under God) the original of all just powers…” The Declaration of Independence, with its lengthy indictment of George III, is clearly as much a Calvinist as an Enlightenment document. If monarchy were simply wrong in itself, the character of any particular king would be irrelevant, unless as an instance of the general tendency of power to corrupt. For the American as well as the English revolutionaries, the provocation of tyranny was required to sanctify the claims of those who would act in the name of the people.

The Geneva Bible, first published in 1560, was a very great influence on political thought in England and America. It was the Bible of Shakespeare and Milton, the Bible one hears referred to sometimes as the “breeches” Bible, because its Adam and Eve, unlike the Adam and Eve of the King James Bible, did not have the presence of mind to fashion their fig leaves into “aprons.” The implication is that it was a crude or naive translation, but in fact it is largely identical with the King James Bible, which was published in 1611. Both of them are based on still earlier translations, most notably the work of William Tyndale, who published a New Testament in 1526 and a Pentateuch in 1530. Tyndale was burned at the apparent behest of Henry VIII, who would not approve any translation of the Bible into English.

The great difference is that the copious interpretive notes that fill the margins of the Geneva Bible are gone from the King’s Authorized Version. At Acts 5:29, the Geneva Bible comments, “We ought to obey no man, but so farre foorth as obeying him, we may obey God.” The notes are compiled from commentary by Reform writers including Cauvin, and they are full of seditious sentiments, from a monarchical point of view. They are also scholarly and informative, enormously interesting as background for English and American history and literature into the eighteenth century. Printing of this Bible in England was forbidden, and it was gradually driven out of circulation in England and America by the King James Version, which basks in the legend that it is a masterpiece created by a committee, and enjoys the reputation of having been the great watershed of English-language literature. Now even highly educated people have never seen a Geneva Bible, and, interestingly, it does not occur to them that they have not seen one.

Neither John Calvin nor his Geneva is associated in the collective mind with revolution or with zeal for the rights of the downtrodden, but rather with severity, repression, and persecution. Such were the passions of the times, and so cataclysmic and transforming their consequences, that every major figure on every side was demonized and also sainted, which greatly complicates the problems of history. Characterizations of Calvinist Geneva are only meaningful relative to the standards of the time, and relative to reasonable expectation. Pluralism was not a value of late medieval and early Renaissance Europe, the period of the Inquisitions, of the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews from Spain, of the destruction of the Hussites in Bohemia — these centuries were one long, fierce purge. I know of no reason to consider Geneva severe at all by the norms that prevailed around it.

Judicial violence — torture and barbarous punishment — was commonplace everywhere; if this is not borne in mind, it is easy to mistake the normal workings of civil law for bizarre manifestations of local pathology. The atmosphere of Geneva was said to be somber, but elsewhere autos-da-fé were gaudy public spectacles. Clearly such judgments reflect individual preferences. Johan Huizinga, in his classic history, The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1919), describes France and Europe in the fifteenth century this way: “It is an evil world. The fires of hatred and violence burn fiercely. Evil is powerful, the devil covers a darkened world with his black wings.” If there is truth in this, then Geneva in the early sixteenth century can hardly be expected to have put off entirely the dire traits of the larger civilization. Of course Geneva was repressive. The questions to be asked are what the origins of repressiveness were, and whether the influences of republicanism and Calvinism intensified or moderated the harshness of European life as it was lived in Geneva. On one hand, Cauvin, with Farel and Viret and others, did attempt to have all Genevans sign a statement of belief, with the proclaimed but unenforced penalty of banishment from the city for those who refused. On the other hand, when the people of Geneva decided this demand was unacceptable, even though most of them did sign the statement, they could and did banish Cauvin and his friends from the city. Severity so liable to correction hardly deserves the name.

After three years Geneva called Cauvin back again, greeting his return with a public festival. But his relationship with the city never became entirely harmonious. His presence attracted exiles from all over Europe, especially from France, overwhelming the local population with zealous foreigners, many of whom were naturalized as citizens. Cauvin and his supporters seem to have been intent on consolidating a revolution, one in which religion was as central to the imagination of the project as political liberty would be in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and economics and nationalism in the nineteenth and twentieth. Traditionally European societies instructed their members in approved beliefs through rituals, processions, feasts, fasts, pilgrimages, and iconography. Geneva replaced all that with hour upon hour of sermons and lectures, and a system of education that was compulsory for all children and free for the poor. Cauvin rejected the “old saw that images are the books of the uneducated” remarking, “I confess, as the matter stands, that today there are not a few who are unable to do without such ‘books’… those in authority in the church turned over to idols the office of teaching for no other reason than that they themselves were mute.” If all these lectures and sermons seem a poor exchange for pageants and altarpieces, it is well to remember the Renaissance passion for books, and for the languages and literatures of antiquity, first of all the Bible. Cauvin’s virtuosic scholarship could be thought of as monumental public art, by analogy with the work of contemporaries like Michelangelo.

The revolutionary impulse to try to change the way people think is inevitably more or less coercive, as is the counterrevolutionary impulse to prevent or suppress new thinking. This is a fallen world. Geneva became the model or laboratory of Reform civilization, which otherwise could not have discovered its own implications or its own coherency or viability as a social ethos, nor developed its own institutions. This same experiment, the creation of a new social order, has been tried repeatedly in our century, usually with horrific consequences, beside which Genevan rigors and excesses are surely very mild indeed.

Cauvin’s special reputation for severity was established by the burning of Michael Servetus for heresy. Cauvin did not serve on the tribunal which condemned Servetus, but he did approve of the sentence of death, even in anticipation of Servetus’s arrival in Geneva. He is associated with only this one such death, though he did use his influence to have an enemy of his banished and another forced to walk around the city twice in his bare feet and shirttails. Of course, the assent to the killing of Servetus is absolutely deplorable, but precious few who have figured in religious and political history as significantly as Cauvin did, in his time or in ours, have only one life to answer for. This is not exculpation — he of all people should have had advanced views about tolerance toward heresy, he being a great promulgator of heresy by the lights of those who traditionally made such judgments. It is fair to remember, however, that his association with the killing of Servetus was an anomaly in his career.

A friend of Servetus, Sebastiano Castellio, attacked Cauvin very powerfully for approving and then defending in principle the punishment of heresy as a crime. So far as I can discover, Cauvin’s defense has not been published in English, except for the excerpts which are quoted by Castellio for the purposes of rebuttal. This is no doubt a thing for which Cauvin should be grateful. The consequence of the whole affair was that the practice of religious and intellectual repression was vigorously attacked, and was not effectively defended. Nothing better could have come of it.

But the issue of repression, or of freedom, is obliquely illuminated by Castellio. His rhetoric implies that Cauvin invented the idea that heretics should be persecuted. Yet he argues that for the sake of consistency Cauvin ought to have been punishing Catholics as heretics — which reminds us that he did not — or at least “he ought to have apprehended the Cardinal Tournon when shortly before the death of Servetus he went through Geneva, on his way, as all know, to burn the godly men who lay in chains at Lyons, and whom not long after he did burn.” This event was clearly graver than the death of Servetus by the factor of the undisclosed number of godly men, but Castellio wishes to isolate Cauvin with the scandal of persecution, so he does not pause over this fact. The success of Castellio in making Cauvin seem peculiarly and monstrously bent on persecution lingers as the darkest element in the modern reputation of John Calvin.

Another attack on Cauvin’s inconsistent practice of repression — a rhetorically interesting use of the fact that it was not characteristic of him — casts further light on the subject of the repressiveness of Geneva. Castellio asks, “Why does he not prohibit the printing and sale of other pernicious books at Geneva? Aristotle is allowed, though he denies the foremost article of the creed, the creation of the world. The Koran is permitted and Apuleius, Martial, Plautus, Terence, Horace, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and other nefarious corrupters of morals. Ovid’s Art of Love — that is, of Adultery — is allowed, as well as the words of his imitator Clément Marot … What shall I say of the trash that is printed there?” We can say that it is Renaissance and humanist and not evidence of a generally repressive atmosphere.

Why was Servetus executed in Geneva? His writings were so perfectly calculated to offend prevailing Christian opinion that if the authorities had simply sent him on his way he would surely have met the same end somewhere else. As was customary, at the time of his trial the Genevans solicited the views of the magistrates of neighboring cities, all of whom concurred in their judgment. They even sent queries to the Inquisition in Vienna. Though Cauvin appealed for a more humane method of execution, Servetus was burned, and so were his books. His famous, fatal book was an attack on the doctrine of the Trinity. To the end, Servetus could have saved his life by repeating a phrase to the effect that Christ was a person of the Trinity, but with touching courage he refused to do it.

Heresy implies orthodoxy. The trial and execution of Servetus defined important limits to Calvinist departure from Catholic teaching. Such limits were necessary if his movement was to be regarded as a reform of Christian practice and tradition rather than as an abandonment of them. If Cauvin were not simply to release the centrifugal energies contained by mystery and complexity and paradox, he had to make clear which things were to be kept as well as which were to be rejected. The doctrine of the Trinity, reconciling belief in the divinity of Christ to belief in the unity of God, was vulnerable because it does not have an unambiguous basis in Scripture — in Reform theory Scripture was the standard to be applied to everything. Then, too, Manicheanism was a virtual synonym for heresy because it had been attacked as such by Augustine, so nonconformists were usually accused of it. And parts of Europe very receptive to Calvinism had, centuries before, been very receptive to Catharism, which resembled the older Manichean heresy in that it asserted the existence of a “true God” and an evil god, the latter being the creator of the physical world, which was therefore essentially evil as well. So this kind of dualism is what Cauvin might have expected his followers to be accused of, and also, perhaps, to be predisposed to. He had had to defend himself, early in his stay in Geneva, against a charge that he denied the Trinity.

So the trial and death of Servetus would have clarified Cauvin’s position on that point, once and for all, for his detractors and for his supporters as well. This is no extenuation. Nor is Cauvin justified by the fact that his attacks on Servetus in the Institutes coincide with, or are the occasion for, the distinctive understanding of the Old Testament which allowed Jews and Judaism to flourish in safety in Calvinist societies as they could not anywhere else in European Christendom. (I know it is customary to remark that these societies were rewarded for such “tolerance” — why have we never found a better word? — with prosperity, the implication being that the motives behind it were grasping, which would in turn imply that persecutors of Jews acted from loftier motives. It is customary also to trace this decency to a source in Cauvin’s theology. But cynics and mercantilists are not notoriously inclined to turn to systematic theology for guidance. So it seems reasonable to consider it a benign consequence of the singular reverence with which he regarded the covenant relationship between God and the Jewish people.) Servetus, like the Cathars before him, insisted that the God of the New Testament did not reveal himself to the ancient Hebrews. The God of the Old Testament was for the Cathars the evil creator. For Servetus — here I am following Cauvin’s account — he was an angel they mistook for God, and his covenant with the Jews was entirely this-worldly. Cauvin makes the argument at great length that justification by faith is as central to the Old Testament as to the New: “For the same reason it follows that the Old Testament was established upon the free mercy of God, and was confirmed by Christ’s intercession … Who, then, dares to separate the Jews from Christ, since with them, we hear, was made the covenant of the gospel, the whole foundation of which is Christ? Who dares to estrange from the gift of free salvation those to whom we hear the doctrine of the righteousness of faith was imparted?” Again, he says, in Corinthians Paul “makes the Israelites equal to us not only in the grace of the covenant but also in the signification of the sacraments … For Paul here means to disabuse Christians of thinking they are superior to the Jews through the privilege of baptism.” (In fairness to the Cathars, who have had little enough fairness — despite what is said to have been their view of the Old Testament, the culture in which they flourished seems to have had amicable relations with Jews. An important center of Talmud studies in the south of France, in which Sephardic and Ashkenazic influences were both active, was destroyed together with the Cathars, and a condition of surrender for nobility who had defended Cathars was that they must no longer employ Jews.)

In arguing for the effective presence of Christ in the Old Testament, Cauvin’s rebuttal of Servetus’s teachings follows certain of Augustine’s writings against the Manicheans, except that he carries the argument farther, finding Christ himself where Augustine found the prefiguration of him. But he could have claimed the authority of Augustine’s gloss of Psalm 105, which anticipates his argument closely. As usual, his apparent innovations really amount to selection and emphasis within a tradition made available to him by great learning. This is the posture of orthodoxy over against which he attacked heresy, the same one which allowed him to consider himself engaged in the basically conservative enterprise of reform, however radical and distinctive his teachings might be in effect.

If one may judge by Cauvin’s refutations, Servetus did not believe in baptism of infants or children, but he did believe in the damnation of those who died unbaptized, even children. Cauvin did believe in the baptism of infants as a sign of God’s care for them, though he did not believe that baptism was unconditionally necessary for salvation. Of infants, Cauvin says, “anyone Christ blesses is freed from the curse of Adam and the wrath of God. Since, therefore, it is known that infants were blessed by him, it follows that they were freed from death.” Altogether, in the death of Servetus, it seems that a mean doctrine was meanly suppressed, with the result that meanness won out.

Cauvin’s detractors have always condemned him for his severity on account of Michael Servetus. Worse, within his tradition he himself has been so stigmatized with intolerance that when certain of his loyalists have defended severities he himself explicitly discouraged — the strictures on church membership and communion enforced by Jonathan Edwards and others being one example — this is taken as a pure manifestation of Calvinism. It is no accident that the most liberal branch of American Protestantism descends from Calvinism, or that New England and upstate New York, in their Calvinist era, were great centers of social and educational reform and experimentation. (And gloomy, like Geneva, we are always told — compared with the slave states, presumably. Again, people differ in where they find cause for gloom.)

But where this side of Cauvin’s heritage has survived it has done so by denying his paternity, or by supposing it has in fact rejected or defied his heritage precisely in carrying forward its most distinctive elements. There are things for which we in this culture clearly are indebted to him, including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in “the humanities.” All this, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva — in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline. That mysterious energy, Calvinism, appears to be spent. It seems, in retrospect, utterly specific to its origins and circumstances, to the excitements of the Renaissance and of revolution and defiance and martyrdom, and to the vast stimulus of the availability of printed books, especially the Bible in modern languages. It is hard to imagine our recovering a sense of it. Certainly we cannot recover the thing itself.

Yet, lacking curiosity and the habit of study and any general grasp of history, we have entered a period of nostalgia and reaction. We want the past back, though we have no idea what it was. Things do not go so well for us as they once did. We feel we have lost our way. Most of us know that religion was once very important to our national life, and believe, whether we ourselves are religious or not, that we were much the better for its influence. Many of us know that Calvinism was a very important tradition among us. Yet all we know about John Calvin was that he was an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism. Our ignorant parody of history affirms our ignorant parody of religious or “traditional” values. This matters, because history is precedent and permission, and in this important instance, as in many others, we have lost plain accuracy, not to speak of complexity, substance, and human inflection. We want to return to the past, and we have made our past a demonology and not a human narrative.