Calvin, Jean (1509-64). Religious Reformer whose doctrine still exerts a powerful influence, especially in northern Europe and North America. The son of an ecclesiastical lawyer from Noyon, Calvin received theological and legal training at Paris, Orléans, and Bourges; though destined originally for the Church, and already the possessor of two benefices, he also pursued humanist studies, publishing a learned commentary on Seneca's De clementia in 1532. Attracted by Evangelical circles in Paris, he fled the city in 1533 when his Erasmian friend Nicolas Cop delivered an imprudent rectorial oration, partly written by Calvin. After a period of wandering, during which he visited Marguerite de Navarre at Nérac and wrote a preface for his cousin Olivétan's French Bible (Neuchâtel, 1535), Calvin settled at Basle where the first version of his master-work, Christianae religionis institutio, was published in 1536.
In July of that year Guillaume Farel persuaded Calvin to settle in Geneva and assist in establishing a Reformed church; Calvin became a pastor, but an ill-judged attempt to impose a Confession of Faith on the citizens resulted in another flight. Between 1538 and 1541 Calvin was pastor of the French Reformed Church at Strasburg, whence he was recalled to Geneva by the Council, who recognized belatedly his unique powers of leadership and organization. Once there he published a French version of the Institutio (Institution de la religion chrétienne) to be followed by four revisions, in both Latin and French, culminating in the definitive text of 1559-60. The book's principles were the basis of Calvin's ordering of the Genevan community: his first tasks were the drafting of new civil and penal codes of law for the city, and the establishment of an oligarchical hierarchy of Orders. During the next 23 years he presided over a theocratic government, based on a devoted and rigidly supervised pastorate which strove to impose a rigorous moral code and strict religious conformism: all this authorized by direct reference to the revealed word of God. Energetic proselytism soon began, since Calvin's experiences had convinced him that the pietistic Lutheran ‘church of the converted’ must become a ‘church of conversion’. It was particularly successful in south-western and western France. The French Calvinists, who held their first general synod in Paris in 1559, were increasingly perceived as a threat to monarchical and ecclesiastical authority, and such suspicions contributed much to the outbreak of the Wars of Religion.
Calvin's authority in Geneva was tested, and eventually strengthened, by the notorious affair of the aggressive Spanish anti-trinitarian Michael Servetus, who had attacked Calvin's Institutio in his Christianismi restitutio. In 1553 Servetus was sent to the stake for heresy by the Genevan Council, relying largely on Calvin's evidence. This apparently inquisitorial behaviour provoked protests, especially from Calvin's erstwhile colleague Sébastien Châteillon, but Calvin's opponents in Geneva, having sided with Servetus, were irretrievably damaged by the Spaniard's conviction. Calvin resumed his pastoral and educational tasks. The Genevan Academy, with Bèze as rector, was established in 1559, a model for the later seminaries which helped carry Calvin's reformation into the world.
The springs of Calvin's doctrine were, as with Luther and other Reformers: his impatience with the perceived worldliness and decadence of the Roman Church (see his TraitÉ des reliques, 1543), his concern at the spread of impiety and spiritual laxity (Traité des scandales, 1550), and his desire, accentuated by his humanist and patristic studies, to return to the lost purity of the gospel teaching and of the primitive Church. Although Calvinism is frequently identified with the single doctrine of the predestination of the elect, it is of course more complex. Though in broad agreement with Luther on justification by faith, the bondage of the will, and mankind's total depravity, Calvin differed fundamentally over the central doctrine of the Eucharist: he did not accept that the sacrament of Communion was necessary to salvation (which is through faith in the Word alone), and rejected Lutheran consubstantiation in favour of the view that the bread and wine are the ‘spiritual substance’ of Christ's body, accessible only to the faithful (Traité de la cène, 1541). His controversial views on the necessity of discipline in the Church's guiding role in the life of the State, and on the impracticability of compromise with Rome, were expounded in a flood of treatises in Latin and French. Calvin's French is distinguished by a dignity, simplicity, and clarity which make him a precursor of the classical style, but also by flexibility of register, humour, and sarcasm, as the need arose to persuade a less-cultivated audience.
[Michael Heath]
Bibliography
- Calvin, Three French Treatises (ed. F. M. Higman, 1970)
- T. H. L. Parker, John Calvin (1975)
- R. S. Wallace, Calvin, Geneva, and the Reformation (1988)
