Calvin As Educator

An educated ministry was helpless without an educated people.

Continuing Calvin Driven From Paris to Geneva,
with a selection from Calvin and the Reformed Church in The Cambridge Modern History, Volume 2 by A. M. Fairbairn published in . This selection is presented in 5 easy 5 minute installments. For works benefiting from the latest research see the “More information” section at the bottom of these pages.

Previously in Calvin Driven From Paris to Geneva.

Time: 1533
Place: Paris

The ministerial ideal embodied in these ecclesiastical ordinances may be said to have had certain indirect but international results; it compelled Calvin to develop his system of education; it supplied the reformed church, especially in France, with the men which it needed to fight its battles and to form the iron in its blood; it presented the reformed church everywhere with an intellectual and educational ideal, which must be realized if its work was to be done; and it created the modern preacher, defining the sphere of his activity and setting up for his imitation a noble and lofty example.

Calvin soon found that the reformed faith could live in a democratic city only by an enlightened pulpit speaking to enlightened citizens, and that an educated ministry was helpless without an educated people. His method for creating both entitles him to rank among the foremost makers of modern education. As a humanist he believed in the classical languages and literatures — there is a tradition which says that he read through Cicero once a year — and so “he built his system on the solid rock of Graeco-Roman antiquity.” Yet he did not neglect religion; he so trained the boys of Geneva through his catechism that each was said to be able to give a reason for his faith “like a doctor of the Sorbonne.” He believed in the unity of knowledge and the community of learning, placing the magistrate and the minister, the citizen and the pastor, in the hands of the same teacher, and binding the school and the university together. The boy learned in the one and the man studied in the other, but the school was the way to the university, the university was the goal of the school.

In nothing does the pedagogic genius of Calvin more appear than in his fine jealousy as to the character and competence whether of masters or professors, and in his unwearied quest after qualified men. His letters teem with references to the men in various lands and many universities whom he was seeking to bring to Geneva. The first rector, Antoine Saunier, was a notable man; and he never rested till he had secured his dear old teacher, Mathurin Cordier. Castellio was a schoolmaster; Theodore Beza was head of college and academy, or school and university, together; and Calvin himself was a professor of theology. The success of the college was great; the success of the academy was greater. Men came from all quarters — English, Italians, Spanish, Germans, Russians, ministers, jurists, old men, young men, all with the passion to learn in their blood — to jostle each other among the thousand hearers who met to listen to the great reformer. But France was the main feeder of the academy; Frenchmen filled its chairs, occupied its benches, learned in it the courage to live and the will to die. From Geneva books poured into France; and the French church was ever appealing for ministers, yet never appealed in vain.

Within eleven years, 1555-1566 — Calvin died in 1564 — it is known that Geneva sent one hundred sixty-one pastors into France; how many more may have gone unrecorded we cannot tell. And they were learned men, strenuous, fearless, praised by a French bishop as modest, grave, saintly, with the name of Jesus Christ ever on their lips. Charles IX implored the magistrates of Geneva to stop the supply and withdraw the men already sent; but the magistrates replied that the preachers had been sent not by them, but by their ministers, who believed that the sovereign duty of all princes and kings was to do homage to Him who had given to them their dominion. It was small wonder that the Venetian Suriano should describe Geneva as “the mine whence came the ore of heresy”; or that the Protestants should gather courage as they heard the men from Geneva sing psalms in the face of torture and death.

It was indeed a very different France which the eyes of the dying Calvin saw from that which the young man had seen thirty years before. Religious hate was even more bitter and vindictive; war had come and made persecution more ferocious; but the Huguenots had grown numerous, potent, respected, feared, and disputed with Catholicism the supremacy of the kingdom. And Calvin had done it, not by arms nor by threats, nor by encouragement of sedition or insurrection — to such action he was ever resolutely opposed — but by the agency of the men whom he formed in Geneva, and by their persuasive speech. The reformed minister was essentially a preacher, intellectual, exegetical, argumentative, seriously concerned with the subjects that most appealed to the serious-minded.

Modern oratory may be said to begin with him, and indeed to be his creation. He helped to make the vernacular tongues of Western Europe literary. He accustomed the people to hear the gravest and most sacred themes discussed in the language which they knew; and the themes ennobled the language, the language was never allowed to degrade the themes. And there was no tongue and no people that he influenced more than the French. Calvin made Bossuet and Massillon possible; as a preacher he found his successor in Bourdaloue; and a literary critic who does not love him has expressed a doubt as to whether Pascal could be more eloquent or was so profound. And the ideal then realized in Geneva exercised an influence far beyond France. It extended into Holland, which in the strength of the reformed faith resisted Charles V and his son, achieved independence, and created the freest and best educated state on the continent of Europe.

John Knox breathed for a while the atmosphere of Geneva, was subdued into the likeness of the man who had made it, and when he went home he copied its education and tried to repeat its reformation. English reformers, fleeing from martyrdom, found a refuge within its hospitable walls, and, returning to England, attempted to establish a Genevan discipline, and failed, but succeeded in forming the Puritan character. If the author of the Ordonnances ecclésiastiques accomplished, whether directly or indirectly, so much, we need not hesitate to term him a notable friend to civilization.

A. M. Fairbairn begins here. Jean M. V. Audin begins here.

More information here and here, and below.

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