Calvin Driven From Paris to Geneva

This series has ten easy 5 minute installments. This first installment: Calvin’s First Great Sermon.

Introduction
Among what may be called the second generation of Protestant reformers, the great leader was John Calvin. By his writings, and by his directive and administrative work, he exerted a strong influence upon the reformed churches in his own day and upon the theology and polity of later times. He was born in France in 1509, and while still in early manhood, having become familiar with classical learning, with law, and especially with theology, he ardently embraced the Protestant faith and began to preach the reformed doctrines.

Calvin spent some time in Paris, then a center of the “New Learning” and of religious ferment, and there he felt the effects of raging persecution. The publication of his great work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, marked an epoch in the history of Protestantism. Though differing on certain points from the teachings of Luther, it was a powerful exposition of the Protestant faith as Calvin understood it, severely logical in form, and especially distinguished by its stern doctrines relating to divine sovereignty.

When in 1536 Calvin went to live in Geneva, it was already a Protestant city. He became virtually its ruler and made it a kind of theocracy, or rather a “religious republic,” which he administered with vigorous laws enforced with the greatest strictness. Zealous Protestants from many countries gathered at Geneva, and from there the influence of Calvin, somewhat modified by that of his Swiss predecessor Zwingli, spread rapidly into France, England, Scotland, and Germany. At the time of Calvin’s death (1564) there were three types of Protestantism established in the world — his own, and those of Luther and Zwingli. In Great Britain, and afterward in America, the Calvinistic type came to play a most important part in religious and national development.

Two estimates of Calvin, the first from a Protestant point of view, the second that of a Roman Catholic writer, are here presented.

The selections are from:

• Calvin and the Reformed Church in The Cambridge Modern History, Volume 2 by A. M. Fairbairn published in 1903.
• History of John Calvin by Jean M. V. Audin published in 1851.

For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

There’s 5 installments by A. M. Fairbairn and 5 installments by Jean M. V. Audin.

We begin with A. M. Fairbairn (1838-1912). He was INSERT

Time: 1533
Place: Paris

In 1528 Calvin’s father, perhaps illuminated by the disputes in his cathedral chapter, discovered that the law was a surer road to wealth and honor than the church, and decided that his son should leave theology for jurisprudence. The son, nothing loath, obeyed, and left Paris for Orleans, possibly, as he descended the steps of the Collège de Montaigu, brushing shoulders with a Spanish freshman named Ignatius Loyola. In Orleans Calvin studied law under Pierre de l’Estoile, who is described as jurisconsultorum Gallorum facile princeps, and as eclipsing in classical knowledge Reuchlin, Aleander, and Erasmus; and Greek under Wolmar, in whose house he met for the first time Theodore Beza, then a boy about ten years of age.

After a year in Orleans he went to Bourges, attracted by the fame of the Italian jurist Alciati, whose ungainliness of body and speech and vanity of mind his students loved to satirize and even by occasional rebellion to chasten. In 1531 Gérard Calvin died and his son, in 1532, published his first work, a commentary on Seneca’s de Clementia. His purpose has been construed by the light of his late career; and some have seen in the book a veiled defence of the Huguenot martyrs, others a cryptic censure of Francis I, and yet others a prophetic dissociation of himself from Stoicism. But there is no mystery in the matter; the work is that of a scholar who has no special interest in either theology or the Bible. This may be statistically illustrated: Calvin cites twenty-two Greek authors and fifty-five Latin, the quotations being most abundant and from many books; but in his whole treatise there are only three Biblical texts expressly cited, and those from the Vulgate.

The man is cultivated and learned, writes elegant Latin, is a good judge of Latinity, criticises like any modern the mind and style, the knowledge and philosophy, the manner, the purpose, and the ethical ideas of Seneca; but the passion for religion has not as yet penetrated as it did later into his very bones. Erasmus is in Calvin’s eyes the ornament of letters, though his large edition of Seneca is not all it ought to have been; but even Erasmus could not at twenty-three have produced a work so finished in its scholarship, so real in its learning, or so wide in its outlook.

The events of the next few months are obscure, but we know enough to see how forces, internal and external, were working toward change. In the second half of 1532 and the earlier half of 1533 Calvin was in Orleans, studying, teaching, practicing the law, and acting in the university as proctor for the Picard nation; then he went to Noyon, and in October he was once more in Paris. The capital was agitated; Francis was absent, and his sister, Margaret of Navarre, held her court there, favoring the new doctrines, encouraging the preachers, the chief among them being her own almoner, Gérard Roussel.

Two letters of Calvin to Francis Daniel belong to this date and place; and in them we find a changed note. One speaks of “the troublous times,” and the other narrates two events: first, it describes a play “pungent with gall and vinegar,” which the students had performed in the College of Navarre to satirize the Queen; and secondly, the action of certain factious theologians who had prohibited Margaret’s Mirror of a Sinful Soul. She had complained to the King, and he had intervened. The matter came before the university, and Nicolas Cop, the rector, had spoken strongly against the arrogant doctors and in defense of the Queen, “mother of all the virtues and of all good learning.” Le Clerc, a parish priest, the author of the mischief, defended his performance as a task to which he had been formally appointed, praising the King, the Queen as woman and as author, contrasting her book with “such an obscene production” as Pantagruel, and finally saying that the book had been published without the approval of the faculty and was set aside only as “liable to suspicion.”

Two or three days later, on November 1, 1533, came the famous rectorial address which Calvin wrote, and Cop revised and delivered, and which shows how far the humanist had travelled since April 4, 1532, the date of the de Clementia. He is now alive to the religious question, though he has not carried it to its logical and practical conclusion. Two fresh influences have evidently come into his life, the New Testament of Erasmus and certain sermons by Luther. The exordium of the address reproduces, almost literally, some sentences from Erasmus’ Paraclesis, including those which unfold his idea of the philosophia Christiana; while the body of it repeats Luther’s exposition of the beatitudes and his distinction between law and gospel, with the involved doctrines of grace and faith. Yet “Ave gratia plena” is retained in the exordium; and at the end the peace-makers are praised, who follow the example of Christ and contend not with the sword, but with the word of truth.

Jean M. V. Audin begins here.

More information here and here and below.

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