CALVIN'S LIFE
After the death of Zwingli and the treaty of Cappel (1531), the progress of the Reformation was checked in German Switzerland, but only to make a more important conquest in French Switzerland, and from thence with the course of empire to move westward to France, Holland, beyond the Channel, and beyond the seas.
The supremacy passed from Zurich to Geneva. Providence had silently prepared the person and the place. The 'little corner' on the borders of Switzerland and France, known since the days of Julius Caesar, was predestinated, by its location and preceding history, for a great international mission, and has nobly fulfilled it, not only in the period of the Reformation of the Church, but also in the nineteenth century on the field of international law and peaceful arbitration. After varying fortunes, Geneva became an independent asylum of civil and religious freedom, and furnished the best base of operation for John Calvin, who, though a Frenchman by birth and a Swiss by adoption, was a cosmopolitan in spirit, and acted as the connecting link between the Germanic and Latin races in the work of reform. Farel, Viret, and Froment had destroyed the power of Popery, but to Calvin was left the more difficult task of reconstruction and permanent organization.
John Calvin, [790] the greatest theologian and disciplinarian of the giant race of the Reformers, and for commanding intellect, lofty character, and far-reaching influence one of the foremost leaders in the history of Christianity, was born at Noyon, in Picardy, July 10, 1509. His father, Gerard Chauvin, a man of severe morals, was secretary to the Bishop of Noyon; his mother, a beautiful and devout, but otherwise not remarkable woman. He received his first training with the children of a noble family (de Mommor), to which he was gratefully attached. His ambitious father destined him for the clerical profession, and secured him even in his twelfth year the benefice of a chaplaincy of the cathedral--an abuse not infrequent in those days of decay of ecclesiastical discipline. He received the tonsure, but not the ordination for the priesthood; while Zwingli and Knox were once priests, and Luther both priest and doctor, in the Church they were called to reform. His elder brother, Charles, became a priest at Noyon, and died a libertine and an infidel in the same year in which John proclaimed his faith to the world (1536)--as if to repeat the startling contrast of Esau and Jacob, reprobation and election, from the same womb. [791] Another remarkable coincidence is the fact that the Reformer studied scholastic philosophy under the same Spanish instructor of the College de Montaigu at Paris in which a few years afterwards Ignatius Loyola, the famous founder of Jesuitism--the very opposite pole of Calvinism--laid the foundation of his counter-reformation. [792]
Calvin received the best education which France could afford, in the Universities of Orleans, Bourges, and Paris, first for the priesthood, then, at the request of his father, for the law. [793] He early distinguished himself by excessive industry, which undermined his constitution, severe self-discipline, and a certain censoriousness, for which he was called by his fellow-students 'the Accusative Case.' [794] He made rapid progress. Even as a student of nineteen he was often called to the chair of an absent professor, so that (as Beza says) he was considered a doctor rather than an auditor. When he left the university he was the most promising literary man of the age. He might have attained the highest position in France, had not his religious convictions undergone a radical change.
Protestant ideas were then pervading the atmosphere and agitating the educated classes of France even at the court, which was divided on the question of religion. Two of Calvin's teachers, Cordier (or Corderius, who afterwards followed him to Geneva) and Wolmar, were friendly to reform, and one of his relatives, Olivétan, became soon afterwards (1534) the first Protestant translator of the Bible into French. He seems, however, to have exerted as much influence on them as they exerted on him. [795]
His first work was a commentary on Seneca's book on Mercy, which he published at his own expense, April, 1532. [796] It moves in the circle of classical philology and moral philosophy, and reveals a characteristic love for the nobler type of Stoicism, great familiarity with Greek and Roman literature, masterly Latinity, rare exegetical skill, clear and sound judgment, and a keen insight into the evils of despotism and the defects of the courts of justice, but makes no allusion to Christianity. Hence it is quite improbable that it was an indirect plea for toleration and clemency intended to operate on the King of France in dealing with his Protestant subjects. [797] His earliest letters, from 1530 to 1532, are likewise silent on religious subjects, and refer to humanistic studies, and matters of friendship and business. [798]
His conversion to the cause of the Reformation seems to have taken place in the latter part of 1532, about one year after the death of Zwingli. [799] The precise date and circumstances are unknown. It was as he himself characterizes it, a sudden change (subita conversio) from Papal superstition to the evangelical faith, yet not without previous struggles. He tenaciously adhered to the Catholic Church until he was able to disconnect the true idea and invisible essence of the Church from its outward organization. Like Luther, he strove in vain to attain peace of conscience by the methods of Romanism, and was driven to a deeper sense of sin and guilt. 'Only one haven of salvation is left for our souls,' he says, 'and that is the mercy of God in Christ. We are saved by grace--not by our merits, not by our works.' After deep and earnest study of the Scriptures, the knowledge of the truth, like a bright light from heaven, burst upon his mind with such force that there was nothing left for him but to abjure his sins and errors, and to obey the will of God. He consulted not with flesh and blood, and burned the bridge after him. [800]
There never was a change of conviction purer in motive, more radical in character, more fruitful and permanent in result. It bears a striking resemblance to that still greater event near Damascus, which transformed a fanatical Pharisee into an apostle of Jesus Christ. And indeed Calvin was not unlike St. Paul in his intellectual and moral constitution; and the apostle of sovereign grace and evangelical freedom never had a more sympathetic expounder than the Reformer of Geneva.
With this step Calvin renounced all prospects of a brilliant career, upon which he had already entered, and exposed himself to the danger of persecution and death. [801] Though naturally bashful and retiring, and seeking one quiet hiding-place after another, he was forced to come forward. He exhorted and strengthened the timid believers, usually closing with the words of St. Paul: 'If God be for us, who can be against us?' There is no evidence that he ever was ordained by human hands to the ministry of the gospel; but he had an extraordinary call, like that of the prophets of old, and the Apostle of the Gentiles. This was felt by his brethren, and about a year after his conversion he was the acknowledged leader of the Protestant party in France.
For awhile matters seemed to take a favorable turn at the court. His friend, Nicholas Cop, a learned physician, was even elected Rector of the University of Paris. [802] At his request Calvin prepared for him an inaugural address on Christian philosophy, which Cop delivered on All-Saints' Day, in 1533, in the Church of the Mathurins, before a large assembly. He embraced this public occasion to advocate the reform of the Church on the basis of the pure gospel. [803] Such a provocation Catholic France had never before received. The Sorbonne ordered the address to be burned. Cop was warned, and fled to Basle; Calvin--as tradition says--escaped in a basket from a window, and left Paris in the garb of a vine-dresser, scarcely knowing whither he was going. A few months afterwards the king himself took a decided stand against the Reformation, and between Nov. 10, 1534, and May 3, 1535, twenty-four Protestants were burned alive in Paris, while many more were condemned to less cruel sufferings. [804]
For more than two years Calvin wandered a fugitive evangelist, under assumed names, from place to place. We find him at Angonlême with his learned friend, the young canon Louis du Tillet, using his excellent library, and probably preparing his 'Institutes;' then at the court of Queen Margaret of Navarre, the sister of Francis I., where he met Le Fèvre d'Estaples (Faber Stapulensis), the aged patriarch of French Protestantism, and Gérard Roussel, her chaplain, who advised him 'to purify the house of God, but not to destroy it;' at Noyon (May, 1534), where he parted with his ecclesiastical benefices; at Poictiers, where he celebrated, with a few friends, for the first time, the Lord's Supper according to the evangelical rite, in a cave near the town, called to this day 'Calvin's Cave;' at Orleans, where he published his first theological work, a tract against the Anabaptist doctrine of the sleep of the soul between death and the resurrection, using exclusively Scriptural arguments with rare exegetical and polemical skill; [805] again (towards the close of 1534) at Paris, where he met for the first time the unfortunate Michael Servetus, and challenged him to a disputation on the Trinity. But the persecution then breaking out against the Protestants forced him to forsake the soil of France. With his friend Du Tillet he fled to Strasburg, where he arrived utterly destitute, having been robbed by an unfaithful servant, and formed an intimate friendship with Bucer. Thence he went to Basle, where he quietly studied Hebrew with Capito and Grynæus, and published the first edition of his 'Institutes' (1536). In the spring of 1536 he spent a short time at the court of the Duchess Renée of Ferrara, the daughter of Louis XII., a little, deformed, but highly intelligent, noble, and pious lady, who gathered around her a circle of friends of the Reformation, and continued to correspond with him as her guide of conscience. [806] Returning from Italy, where he was threatened by the Inquisition, [807] he paid a flying visit to Noyon, and had the pleasure to gain his only remaining younger brother Anthony and his sister Mary to the Reformed faith. With them he proceeded to Switzerland, intending to settle at Basle or Strasburg, and to lead the quiet life of a scholar and an author, without the slightest inclination to a public career. But God had decreed otherwise.
Passing through Geneva in August, 1536, where he expected to spend only a night, Calvin was held fast by William Farel, the fearless evangelist, who threatened him with the curse of God if he preferred his studies to the work of the Lord. 'These words,' says Calvin (in the Preface to his Commentary on the Psalms), 'terrified and shook me, as if God from on high had stretched out his hand to stop me, so that I renounced the journey which I had undertaken.' [808] Farel, a French nobleman, twenty years older than Calvin, and like him driven by persecution to Switzerland, where he destroyed the strongholds of idolatry with the zeal of a prophet, did a great work when 'he gave Geneva to the Reformation,' but a still greater one when 'he gave Calvin to Geneva.'
This was the turning-point in Calvin's life. Once resolved to obey the voice from heaven, the timid and delicate youth shrunk from no danger. Geneva was then a city of only twelve or fifteen thousand inhabitants, but within its narrow limits it was to become 'the scene of every crisis and every problem, great or small, which can agitate human society.' [809] It then represented 'a tottering republic, a wavering faith, a nascent Church.' Calvin felt that a negative state of freedom from the tyranny of Savoy and Popery was far worse than Popery itself, and that positive faith and order alone could save the city from political and religious anarchy. He insisted on the abolition of immoral habits, the adoption of an evangelical confession of faith and catechism, the introduction of a strict discipline, Psalm singing, and monthly celebration of the Lord's Supper, with the right of excluding unworthy communicants. [810]