Calvin’s Christianae Religionis Institutio

It throbs with a noble indignation against injustice, and with a noble enthusiasm for freedom and truth.

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

This address enables us to seize Calvin in the very act and article of change; he has come under a double influence. Erasmus has compelled him to compare the ideal of Christ with the church of his own day; and Luther has given him a notion of grace which has convinced his reason and taken possession of his imagination. He has thus ceased to be a humanist and a papist, but has not yet become a reformer. And a reformer was precisely what his conscience, his country, and his reason compelled him to become. Francis was flagrantly immoral, but a fanatic in religion; and mercy was not a virtue congenial to either church or state. Calvin had seen the Protestants from within; he knew their honesty, their honor, the purity of their motives, and the integrity of their lives; and he judged, as a jurist would, that a man who had all the virtues of citizenship ought not to be oppressed and treated as unfit for civil office or even as a criminal by the state. This is no conjecture, for it is confirmed by the testimony he bears to the influence exercised over him by the martyred Étienne de la Forge. He thus saw that a changed mind meant a changed religion, and a changed religion a change of abode. Cop had to flee from Paris, and so had Calvin.

In the May of 1534 he went to Noyon, laid down his offices, was imprisoned, liberated, and while there he seems to have finally renounced Catholicism. But he feared the forces of disorder which lurked in Protestantism, and which seemed embodied in the Anabaptists. Hence at Orleans he composed a treatise against one of their favorite beliefs, the sleep of the soul between death and judgment. Conscious personal being was in itself too precious, and in the sight of God too sacred, to be allowed to suffer even a temporary lapse. But to serve the cause he loved was impossible with the stake waiting for him, its fires scorching his face, and kindly friends endangered by his presence. And so, in the winter of 1534, he retired from France and settled at Basel.

Now a city where Protestantism reigned, where learning flourished, and where men so unlike as Erasmus and Farel — the fervid preacher of reform — could do their work unhindered, was certain to make a deep impression on a fugitive harassed and expatriated on account of religion; and the impression it made can be read in the Christianae Religionis Institutio, and especially in the prefatory Letter to Francis I. The Institutio is Calvin’s positive interpretation of the Christian religion: the Letter is learned, eloquent, elegant, dignified, the address of a subject to his sovereign, yet of a subject who knows that his place in the state is as legal, though not as authoritative, as the sovereign’s. It throbs with a noble indignation against injustice, and with a noble enthusiasm for freedom and truth. It is one of the great epistles of the world, a splendid apology for the oppressed and arraignment of the oppressors. It does not implore toleration as a concession, but claims freedom as a right.

Its author is a young man of but twenty-six, yet he speaks with the gravity of age. He tells the King that his first duty is to be just; that to punish unheard is but to inflict violence and perpetrate fraud. Those for whom he speaks are, though simple and godly men, yet charged with crimes that, were they true, ought to condemn them to a thousand fires and gibbets. These charges the King is bound to investigate, for he is a minister of God, and if he fails to serve the God whose minister he is, then he is a robber and no king.

Then he asks, “Who are our accusers?” and he turns on the priests like a new Erasmus, who does not, like the old, delight in satire for its own sake or in a literature which scourges men by holding up the mirror to vice, but who feels the sublimity of virtue so deeply that witticisms at the expense of vice are abhorrent to him. He takes up the charges in detail: it is said that the doctrine is new, doubtful, and uncertain, unconfirmed by miracles, opposed to the fathers and ancient custom, schismatical and productive of schism, and that its fruits are sects, seditions, license. On no point is he so emphatic as the repudiation of the personal charges: the people he pleads for have never raised their voice in faction or sought to subvert law and order; they fear God sincerely and worship him in truth, praying even in exile for the royal person and house.

The book which this address to the King introduces is a sketch or programme of reform in religion. The first edition of the Institutio is distinguished from all later editions by the emphasis it lays, not on dogma, but on morals, on worship, and on polity. Calvin conceives the Gospel as a new law which ought to be embodied in a new life, individual and social. What came later to be known as Calvinism may be stated in an occasional sentence or implied in a paragraph, but it is not the substance or determinative idea of the book. The problem discussed has been set by the studies and the experience of the author; he has read the New Testament as a humanist learned in the law, and he has been startled by the contrast between its ideal and the reality which confronts him. And he proceeds in a thoroughly juridical fashion, just as Tertullian before him, and as Grotius and Selden after him. Without a document he can decide nothing; he needs a written law or actual custom; and his book falls into divisions which these suggest.

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

More information here and here, and below.

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