CALVIN, JOHN

CALVIN, JOHN (Jean Cauvin; 1509–1564), French theologian and reformer. Calvin was the leading second-generation Protestant reformer, yielding only to Martin Luther in influence. He was born in Noyon, Picardy, a town under the rule of the prince-bishop but one that also retained a medieval communal tradition. His father, despite his lack of formal advanced education, held several lay legal positions for local church bodies. His mother was from the family of a wealthy hotelkeeper. Calvin's early education was at a local school, and perhaps also in the company of the youth of the local high noble family that controlled the office of prince-bishop and several other ecclesiastical positions.

He received his university education in Paris, supported in part by church benefices his father had secured for him. Following his father's wishes, he initially aspired to a career in the church but then turned to Roman law, in which he received a degree after studying at Orléans and Bourges. In his university studies and the law studies he pursued at Orléans under the jurist Pierre de l'Estoile, Scholasticism was preponderant. However, he also acquired a strong grounding in humanism through his tutelage by the renowned pedagogue Mathurin Cordier and his attendance at lectures by leading lights of the newly formed Collège Royale in Paris and at those of the jurist Andrea Alciato at Bourges, as well as through more informal studies. Indeed his first major work, a commentary on the Stoic philosopher Seneca's Declementia (Onclemency), showshimasa highly capable humanist scholar-commentator. It also reveals a young man filled with the desire to make a name for himself as a humanist literary figure, but ambivalent about this goal and uncomfortable with the cultivation ofelitepatrons, thenso necessary for the attainment of legal or literary success.

Until 1533, there is little to suggest that Calvin was more than a follower of the moderate religious reform exemplified by Desiderius Erasmus and Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples. On 1 November 1533 his friend Nicolas Cop, who had been elected rector of the University of Paris, gave an inaugural address containing a mixture of Lutheran and Erasmian ideas. But the monarchy of Francis I had turned against even moderate reform, and Cop had to flee Paris, as did Calvin himself. By early 1534 Calvin had turned from a spectator into an active reformer. By this time it had also become clear that the reception for his Seneca commentary did not fulfill his hopes. Protected for a few months at Nérac by Marguerite de Navarre (Marguerite d'Angoulême), the sister of Francis I, he soon gave up his minor benefices and moved to Basel and then to Geneva.

Central to Calvin's influence was his ability to define comprehensively the doctrine and liturgy of Christianity in the face of several alternative forms of Christianity. He confronted not only the Catholic Church but also conflicts among such reformers as Luther and Huldrych Zwingli, the recent German Peasants' movement with its more socially revolutionary understanding of Christianity, and the mostly pacifist but separatist movements known collectively as Anabaptism. Indeed, at about the time of his conversion, the most bizarre and uncharacteristically violent expression of Anabaptism was unfolding in Münster.

Calvin's first theological work, the Psychopannychia (written 1534), attacked a doctrine concerning the soul after bodily death, popular among some Anabaptists. By 1536, with the appearance of his most important work, the Christianae Religionis Institutio (Institutes of the Christian religion), Calvin had set out most of the fundamental tenets identified with his name. With Luther and Zwingli, he strongly advocated justification by faith alone and denied any role for one's own works in salvation (his insistence on predestination was a logical consequence of this doctrine). Like them, he retained only two of the Catholic Church's seven sacraments, baptism and Communion. He was more innovative in espousing a doctrine of the Eucharist that, in contradistinction to both Luther and the Catholic Church, denied any physical presence of Christ in the Communion elements, yet, in opposition to Zwingli, accepted a spiritual but nevertheless very real presence of Christ. His rejection of a role for Christ's physical body was part of a larger mistrust of any role in worship for that which took physical form or was apprehended primarily through visualization. Thus he espoused a categorical opposition to religious images, including images of Christ, again in contrast to the German reformer. His view undermined the patronage of religious art, whether by groups or individuals, by clerics, nobles, or craftspeople.

By 1539 Calvin had formulated his doctrine of the calling, in which he counterposed godly productive work to work motivated by the pursuit of honor and usually involving flattery of highly placed or well-connected individuals. In practice those "called" were approved and regulated primarily by fellow members of the craft or profession in question, as evidenced by the appointment of ministers and by Calvin's doctrine of the lesser magistrate. Moreover, he associated godly work in one's calling with steady, persevering, disciplined emotions, while he linked the pursuit of fame and status to unsteady and turbulent emotions. This way of distinguishing sacred from profane experience harks back to his early interest in Stoicism (which also rejected the pursuit of fame). The emotional qualities he depicted as marks of the sacred also have a strong affinity with those accompanying disciplined scholarly reading, teaching, and writing, activities that predated his activity as a religious reformer.

Calvin also stands out in his attitude to secular authorities. While he asserted that individuals could not take up arms against even a tyrannical ruler, he also forbade those who found themselves in Catholic-dominated areas from participating in Catholic forms of worship; they could neither participate in the Catholic Eucharist nor show honor to religious images. He insisted that such practices were offensive to God, and he argued that such participation communicated to others affirmation of these practices, regardless of one's own private intent. Thus individuals caught in this predicament risked drawing the attention of the authorities but could not resist persecution with force. Their only alternatives were escape or the risk of martyrdom. However, Calvin allowed for resistance to evil rulers by other recognized political authorities, the doctrine of the "lesser magistrate" (his examples included, from antiquity, the Spartan ephors, Roman tribunes, and Athenian demarchs, and, from his own day, the assemblies of the three Estates). In this way he provided an opening for active resistance to persecution—an opening that was elaborated by his followers during the religious wars of the later sixteenth century in France and elsewhere. The sources and impact of Calvin's views on this and other subsequent religious and political conflicts continue to be lively areas of research.

Calvin distinguished the invisible church, which encompassed all those, living and dead, who had been elected to salvation, from the visible church. The visible church could and did include people who were not among the elect and only feigned Christian faith. The true visible church he distinguished from false churches by their preaching of correct doctrine and proper administration of the sacraments, and not by the moral perfection of their officers or members. Since the elect could be known only to God, all but people whose religious profession or moral behavior obviously denied Christ were included in the visible church. Thus an established, visible church could be coterminous with any existing political jurisdiction, as in Geneva. Yet in keeping with his doctrine of the calling, Calvin insisted upon the independence of the church from secular authorities in matters of doctrine and liturgy. In Geneva the church had four offices: pastors and teachers (their functions overlapped as both were involved in ascertaining and teaching doctrine, although teachers also had primary responsibility for education); elders, who were concerned with over-seeing religious orthodoxy and moral discipline among Geneva's citizens; and deacons, who were charged with care of the poor and sick. Calvin continually pressed for the independence of church leaders from the Genevan government, including the control of excommunication. He was initially rebuffed and expelled from Geneva and spent three years ministering in Strasbourg. But the Genevan rulers, concerned to end religious discord, called him back in 1541. Aided by the influx of French Protestants fleeing persecution in their homeland as well as by considerable local support, Calvin was able to defeat opposition from several powerful, interlinked Genevan families. By 1555 he had won for the consistory, the church body charged with surveillance of religious doctrine and morality, the right of excommunication, a powerful symbol of the church's independence from secular authorities, although in Geneva civil authorities continued to hold key church functions. The factors involved in this dispute are an important area of current scholarship. With most of his contemporaries Calvin did not favor religious toleration; the most notorious example is his support for the execution of Michael Servetus for heterodox views on the Trinity in 1553. However, he favored noncapital penalties for those of less extreme heterodox views.

Although favoring a church embracing the entire community rather than the elect, Calvin, like the Anabaptists, sought to bring all members of the community into at least outward conformity with the religious beliefs and moral behavior he considered appropriate to Christians. Through the surveillance of the consistory, in which he was preeminent, he had considerable success in imposing a restrictive moral regime on Geneva's inhabitants, excluding not only heterodox religious practices, but dancing and card playing as well as more commonly recognized vices. Yet the consistory did not merely chastise moral failings; it frequently brought about reconciliation of the parties to familial and community conflicts.

Calvin's views regarding women are an important topic of current scholarship. The reformer allowed a role for women in public preaching only when suitably trained men were not available. It is a matter of current debate whether he excluded women because he believed that they were inherently less capable or because he thought it inappropriate to his own time. The consistory, over which Calvin presided, probably did not take women's heretical statements as seriously as those of men, but suspected women more often than men of Catholic practices. Like most other Protestants, Calvin allowed divorce; he limited it to grounds of adultery or desertion. During his tenure, the consistory applied the same criteria to rich and poor, women and men, in divorce cases before it. However, since separation was now deemed illicit, and cruelty was excluded as grounds for divorce, women were generally required to remain with abusive husbands. The death penalty was applied for particularly egregious cases of adultery, but Calvin probably did not take the lead in pressing for it. The ongoing publication and translation of the Genevan consistory records has shed much new light on this and many other aspects of the social history of Geneva, and no doubt will continue to do so.

In addition to his other activities, Calvin found the time to comment on almost all of the New Testament, on the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and several other books of the Hebrew Bible. In his commentaries he seeks to square the entirety of scripture with his doctrines. His commentaries on the Hebrew Bible reveal a tension that sometimes approaches the breaking point: Calvin displays a historical understanding of the Hebrews' beliefs and practices unsurpassed by other commentators of his time, an understanding derived from humanism; but he also displays a strong tendency to impute to the whole of Scripture, including the Hebrews, his particular understanding of Christian doctrine and practice, an ability rooted in the synthesizing, generalizing tendency of the medieval Roman law tradition in which he had been educated. The role of humanist and Scholastic assumptions in Calvin's interpretive and teaching practices continues to be an important area of research.

Finally, using Geneva as a base, Calvin and his fellow members of the Genevan Company of Pastors advanced the cause of reform on an international scale, continually advising their confreres in France and elsewhere. By his death he had helped to organize a corps of highly educated and effective preachers who had succeeded in establishing a network of French churches and were making inroads elsewhere in Europe as well.

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