John Tulloch · 15 of 27

II. Calvin. · Part 3

Westphal, a pastor at Hamburg, takes his rank among most violent of these Lutheran divines. In the hands of this man the sacramental “concordat” of Zurich became a nucleus of more embittered controversy than ever. Instead of “being softened to concord" “by that temperate simplicity of doctrine, he seized upon the very name of agreement as a kind of furies’ torch to rekindle the flame”—a flame which continued to burn in the Lutheran Church till it ate all the heart of Christian life out of it, and which, by the antagonistic spirit. it provoked, became a source of weakness and disgrace to the Protestant cause in genera1. Calvin first of all replied with some mildness to this “foolish fellow,” refusing to name him, or to enter into personal conflict with him. But when, instead of being silenced, “he flamed forth with much greater impetuosity,” it became necessary, he says, “to repress his insolence”; and he wrote and published with incredible haste, in 1556, his “Second Defence of the Sacraments, in Answer to the Calumnies of Westphal.” The heat and rapidity with which he composed this treatise may be held in some degree to excuse the vehemence of its expressions, as he himself urges to Bullinger. Moreover, the conduct of Westphal in his cruel treatment of John A’Lasco and a company of reformed brethren, who, having been driven from England on the accession of Mary, sought refuge in Denmark, had justly kindled the keen sensitiveness and warm feelings which Calvin ever showed towards the oppressed. Yet, making every allowance, it must be admitted that here, as too often, Calvin “answered a fool according to his folly.” Invective, Contempt, and scorn he pours upon him as from a full vial, overwhelming him at once with logic and abuse. “If I have used in some cases too strong expressions,” he says in the preface addressed to “all honest ministers of Christ,” “you must consider, according to your wisdom, how he has goaded me to this. His book appears written with no other object than that of casting us down to hell, and overwhelming us with curses. What could I do otherwise than act according to the proverb, ‘the bad ass must have a bad driver,’ to prevent him indulging too complacently in his savage temper?” Westphal retorted, complaining that Calvin had treated him worse than the Anabaptists, Libertines, and Papists; and Calvin replied in a “last admonition to Joachim Westphal.”

In the meantime, many still smaller names had entered the field—“petulant, dishonest, and rabid men, as if they had conspired together” to make the reformer “the special object of their virulence”—“a foul apostate of the name of Staphylus,” one named Nicolas le Coq, and lastly, Tilleman Heshusius; and finally, in one more publication, on the “True Partaking of the Flesh and Blood of Christ,” the reformer made a rejoinder to these attacks. His old strength is not abated, but there is mingling with traces of the former violence a nobler spirit of aspiration for peace from the weary contentions which now, in 1560, were fast wearing him out. This gathers around the name of Melanchthon, just departed, in an affectionate and touching appeal, wherein we can read a depth of tender warmth amid all his proud and flaming zeal. “O Philip Melanchthon, for I appeal to thee who art now living in the bosom of God, where thou waitest for us till we be gathered together with thee to a holy rest! A hundred times halt thou said, when, wearied with labour and oppressed with sadness, thou didst lay thyself familiarly on my breast, ‘Would that I could die on this breast!’ Since then I have a thousand times wished that it had been our lot to be together.”

Well might Calvin be weary of controversy! And yet we have still to notice the two most memorable struggles in which he was engaged—viz., his final contest with the Libertines, with Amy Perrin at their head, and the sad affair of Servetus.

The renewed contest with the Libertines was protracted during a long period, and was beyond doubt the central contest of Calvin’s existence—waged hand to hand, and for life or death, through many strange turns and changes. It did not terminate till about two years after the death of Servetus, and this latter event is in some degree mixed up with it; but it will be more convenient to complete our view of it, before passing to consider the circumstances connected with the trial and execution of Servetus. It is only its most general outline that we can trace; and indeed, amid the confusion in which, to some extent, the subject has been left by all the historians of Geneva, as well as the biographers of Calvin, it is not easy to describe the various influences under which it was so long prolonged, now in Calvin’s favour, and now in favour of his opponents, while yet terminating in what appears a contemptible émeute, leaving Calvin victor of the field.

Amy Perrin had at first been a friend of Calvin—one of those who solicited his return, and to whom, in conjunction with the reformer, had been committed the preparation of the ecclesiastical ordinances. Ambitious himself, however, and united to a family both the male and female members of which seem to have cherished a natural dislike to the reformer, he soon began to chafe under the pride and rigour of the Calvinistic rule, and gradually attached himself to the mixed liberal party, whose principle of fusion was mainly hostility to Calvin. Personal causes served to embitter the animosity—scandals too dark and wretched for us to rake from their forgotten hiding-places. The picture which the reformer has drawn of the whole Favre family in his letters is coloured with a grim harshness, and vivid with touches of the most biting sarcasm. The intensity of his temper—sparing no folly, and exposing with a kind of zest all the details of their disgrace—comes out strongly. He fixes their several features by some ludicrous or opprobrious epithet, concentrating at once his scorn and their absurdity or baseness. Speaking, for example, of a marriage in the family, which had been conducted, in his view, with a flagrant mockery of religion, and the consequences of which were deservedly humiliating, he writes to Viret: “Proserpine [supposed to be wife of Francis Favre, the head of the family], the day before they received the spouse with such honours, beat the mother-in-law in such a manner that she bled profusely; her whole countenance was disfigured with wounds, and her head covered with dirt. You know the old woman’s temper; she was heard through the whole street calling on God and man to assist her. We cited her before the consistory, but she escaped to her sisters: Penthesilea [Perrin’s wife] will certainly have to be reprimanded stoutly; she patronises the worst causes and defends herself furiously in short, her every word and deed betray her utter want of modesty.” Another marriage at the house of a widow was celebrated with dancing, at which the same Penthesilea had distinguished herself, and the opportunity of reprimanding her could not be passed over. She seems, however, to have been almost a match for Calvin, for, according to his own confession, she “abused him roundly,” while he answered her as she deserved. “I inquired,” he continues “whether their house was inviolably sacred—whether it owed no subjection to the laws? We already detained her father in prison, being convicted of one act of adultery; the proof of a second was close at hand; there was a strong report of a third; her brother had openly contemned and derided the Senate and us. Finally, I added, that if they were not content to submit to us here under the yoke of Christ, they must build another city for themselves, for that so long as they remained at Geneva, they would strive in vain to elude the laws, and that if each person’s head in the house of Favre wore a diadem, it should not prevent the Lord from being superior.”

All this occurred at an early period of the struggle in 1546. The execution, in the year following, of Gruet, a leader among the spiritual Libertines, whose opinions are represented as of an impious and flagrant character, increased the bitterness of the factions. Calvin stretched his power to the utmost. Slashed breeches, in which the young Libertines had delighted as a symbol of their party, were prohibited—“not that we cared about the thing itself,” he says, “but because we saw that, through the chinks of those breeches, a door would be opened to all sorts of profusion and luxury.” The Libertines in their turn carried their licence to the extent of publicly insulting Calvin, and threatening to cast him into the Rhone. He professed to laugh at their threats as only “the froth of the pride of Moab, whose ferocity must at length fall with a crash.” Things continued in this state through various alternations, Perrin being now imprisoned, with his wife and father-in-law, and now again, through a change of fortune, not only elevated to the magistracy, but made chief syndic. This took place in 1549, and Calvin ridicules unsparingly his attempts at statesmanship, calling him now the “Comic Cæsar,” and now the “Tragic Cæsar.”

The execution of Servetus in 1553 gradually drew the contest on to a dénouement. The deep feeling which in various quarters was excited by this event, and the vehemence with which it was directed against Calvin, seemed to encourage the Libertine party to action. One Berthelier tried to wrest from the consistory its right of excommunication, and to force admission to the Lord’s Supper, from which he had been excluded. But Calvin’s firmness baffled him, and even awed Perrin. In the beginning of 1554 there was a sudden truce, and things assumed a quieter look. But there was no sincerity of reconciliation on either side, and the contention soon broke out more fiercely than ever. Calvin’s power seemed to totter in his hands. He wrote to an old friend, whose name is not given, “If you knew but a tenth part of the abuse with which I am wounded, feelings of humanity would make you groan at sufferings to which I am myself grown callous. Dogs bark at me on all sides.” At length, in 1555, the crisis came—a confused and disorderly affair, the account of which reads more like a street riot than anything else. Perrin, with his fellow-leaders Berthelier and Peter Vandel, had probably planned a regular rising of the populace, which. was to be directed against the French in the city, for the cries heard in the tumult took something of this shape. Their own confusion, however, or the apathy of the citizens, converted it into a ridiculous failure. They then tried to make light of the affair, but the Council of Two Hundred assembled and took a very different view of it; and, apprehensive for their safety, the agitators fled from the city. Sentence was pronounced against them in absence. They were condemned to lose their heads and be quartered, and special tortures were to be inflicted on Perrin. The sentence was executed in effigy; and the city permanently delivered from commotion.

Thus terminated the long struggle with the Libertines, in which, whatever be our judgment of particular points of Calvin’s conduct, we must admire his heroism, and moreover rejoice in his triumph. For it was undoubtedly the triumph of moral order against a liberalism which, resting on no basis of principle, and conserved by no bonds of moral feeling, must have speedily dissolved in its own success, and left Geneva a sure prey to internal factions and weakness. As it was, Geneva became, strange as it may seem, the stern cradle of liberty, an asylum of Protestant independence against the gathering storms of despotism on all sides. Freedom of thought and action were crushed for the time under an iron sway, but in behalf of a moral spirit which, nursed by such rough discipline, was to grow into potency till it became more than a match for Jesuitical state-craft in many lands, and, from the very limitations of its infancy, only expanded into higher and healthier forms of development.

In the meantime, it must be confessed, as we turn to gaze upon the picture presented to us in the trial and death of Servetus, it is difficult to trace the germs of liberty in the Genevan theocracy. We shall not attempt to enter into the endless polemics that surround this affair. The main facts are palpable, and not only not denied, but gloried in by Calvin and the other reformers—for they all share almost equally with him the undying disgrace which, under all explanations, must for ever attach to the event. The wise Bullinger defended it, and even the gentle Melanchthon could only see cause for gratitude in the hideous tragedy. The special blame of Calvin in the whole matter is very much dependent upon the view we take of his previous relation to the accusation and trial of Servetus by the Inquisition at Vienne. If the evidence, of which Dyer has made the most, were perfectly conclusive, that the reformer, through a creature of his own of the name of Trie, was really the instigator from the beginning of the proceedings against Servetus—that from Geneva, in short, he schemed with deep-laid purpose the ruin of the latter, who was then quietly prosecuting his profession at Vienne—and, from MSS. that had privately come into his possession, furnished the Inquisition with evidence of the heretic’s opinions,—if we were compelled to believe all this, then the atrocity of Calvin’s conduct would stand unrelieved by the sympathy of his fellow-reformers, and would not only not admit of defence, but would present one of the blackest pictures of treachery that even the history of religion discloses. The evidence is not satisfactory, although there are admitted facts which raise suspicion. There can be no doubt that Calvin was so far privy through Trie to the proceedings of the Inquisition, and that he heartily approved of them. Nor is there further any reason to doubt that he contemplated from the first the death of Servetus as a stern necessity, should he ever come to Geneva, as he had offered to do. In the well-known letter on the subject, which is not printed in Beza’s collection, but has since been published, he tells Farel that he was unwilling that Servetus should trust to him—for he adds, “If he should come, and my authority be of any avail, I will never suffer him to depart alive.”

Having escaped from Vienne, before the completion of his trial, about the 7th of April, Servetus is found in Geneva about four months later. His intention appears to have been to proceed to Italy, although Calvin represents him as having come from Italy—a fact which he himself denied in the course of his examination. In any case, it seems to have been something like infatuation on the part of the heretic to put himself in the way of Calvin, of whose disposition towards him he could scarcely be ignorant. The reformer seemed to recognise a sort of judicial blindness in his conduct. “I know not what to say of him,” he remarked, “except that he was seized by a fatal madness to precipitate himself on destruction.”

It is a deeply pathetic picture, as we look back and try to realise it,—that of the homeless and persecuted man entering the theocratic city on foot and alone in the middle summer of 1553, taking up his residence in a small inn by the side of the lake, and entering into frank and humorous talk with his host—more like a man of the world than a speculative enthusiast; and finally, after he had dined, wandering into the church where his great adversary was preaching,—a fatal audacity which led to his discovery. Some one recognised and immediately reported the fact to Calvin; and just as the wanderer had made his arrangements to leave for Zurich, and hired a boat to carry him across the lake, he was arrested and conveyed to prison. Calvin takes to himself all the merit of this step, and the character and circumstances of the trial were mainly arranged by him.

The particulars are full of interest. At first a young man, Calvin’s secretary, undertook the office of accuser, and prepared an indictment against him of thirty-eight articles, enumerating various forms of heresy and of insulting offences against the reformers, and especially Calvin. It was found that the young champion of orthodoxy was no match for the veteran polemic who had vexed his brain so long with every species of theological subtlety; and Calvin himself and the other clergy then entered the lists personally against him. Encouraged probably by some feeling that there was a party in Geneva prepared to back him, Servetus gave way at first to great insolence of manner, and dared his adversaries in a very contemptuous way. In reference to some charge about contradicting Moses’ account of the Holy Land in his notes on Ptolemy, which he considered very paltry, he wiped his mouth and said, “Let us go on,”—a proceeding which deeply offended Calvin. The most violent and abusive language was used on both sides. Servetus addressed the reformer as a “pitiful wretch,” a “disciple of Simon Magus,” a “liar,” and even a “murderer.” Calvin retorted on him as an “obscene dog” and “perfidious villain,” and publicly devoted him to eternal fire. The trial, nevertheless, proceeded in a regular and formal manner, on through August and September. The advice of the churches of Zurich and Berne was asked, while the unhappy prisoner, complaining bitterly of the hardships of his confinement, begged to have his case appealed from the ordinary Council to that of the Two Hundred. In this Amy Perrin supported him, more with the view of turning the event to his own advantage against Calvin than from any pity to the heretic. There is no evidence that the reformer urged the Council to any summary violence, or that his influence swayed with them, especially in the judgment to which they came. They seem to have taken the course of proceedings very much into their own hands. But there is just as little doubt of the conclusion to which Calvin’s advice and movements pointed all along, and—confirmed in their own feelings by his authority and that of Bullinger, Farel, and others—they passed sentence on Servetus on the 26th of October, condemning him to death by fire. To do Calvin justice, he appears to have used his exertions to have the mode of the heretic’s death alleviated, but without success.

On the very next morning after the sentence was pronounced, Servetus was led out of the city to his dreadful doom. The spot where he suffered is an extended eminence of the name of Champel—about two miles off,—from which the eye can trace the encircling ridges of the Jura as they rise like frowning battlements around the scene, and the clear windings of the Arve as it pours its “snow-grey” waters into the bright azure stream of the Rhone. There the wretched man was fastened to a stake surrounded by heaps of oak wood and leaves, with his condemned book and the MS. he had sent to Calvin attached to his girdle; and while with choked utterance he could only say, “Oh God! oh God!” the fire was kindled. The wood was green, and did not burn readily. Some persons ran and fetched dry fagots, while his piercing shrieks rent the air, and—exclaiming finally (in words which, with a strange perversity, have been supposed to indicate his persistence in his heresy to the last), “Jesus, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy upon me!”—he passed from the doom of earth to a higher and fairer tribunal.

It is needless to indulge in reflective commonplace on this memorable crime. To the reformers, on the principles they avowed and advocated, it scarcely needed any apology. To us, looking back upon it from this point of time, it can receive no palliation, and they are but poor and unfaithful sons of Protestantism who have sought for a moment to defend it. Whatever apology it may admit of from the spirit of the age, and the supposed (blasphemous) character of the charge, it can admit of no apology on any intelligibly Protestant ground. In so far as the reformers were concerned in it, they were simply untrue to their own position, and ignorant of their own only rational weapon of defence. To the benefit of this inconsistency and ignorance they are entitled, but to nothing more. The act must bear its own doom and disgrace for ever; and if it stirs the heart more with pity for the long darkness of human mistake than with indignation for the harshness of human cruelty, it yet remains a mournful and unhappy blot upon the history of the Reformation.

Ater the expulsion of the Libertines in 1555, Calvin’s power in Geneva was thoroughly consolidated. He had still his controversies with Westphal and others, but the life-and-death struggle at his door had ceased, and none any more sought to question his supremacy as the master-spirit and governor of the city. Beza—a lively, meddlesome, serviceable, but by no means great man—became his active coadjutor in the last years of his life, and in his faithful reverence for his master’s traditions, and ardent and affectionate admiration of his genius, was a man after Calvin’s own heart. The great struggle that was proceeding in France during these years, between the hierarchical party, with the Guises at their head, and the Protestants led by Condé and Coligny, deeply interested both. In the somewhat unintelligible conspiracy of Amboise in 1560, the aim of which was to wrest the power from the hands of the Guises and bring them to trial, Calvin was supposed to have been implicated. He has himself confessed that he knew about it, but that he disapproved of it, and did all he could to hinder its execution. This is a more likely version of the fact, for Calvin’s political opinions were never of an active and violent character. He had no love for political revolution of any kind, and was not likely to have advised it.

About 1561, Calvin’s long-continued bad health greatly increased. Abstemious to an unnatural degree, and overwrought by his many labours, he was, towards the close of this year, seized with gout. Unable to walk, he was transported to church in a chair to continue his preaching, from which he would not desist. His sufferings became aggravated during the next three years. Not one but numerous disorders, bred by his unhealthy habits of study, laid waste his frame. On the 6th of February 1564 he preached his last sermon. He was henceforth only able, when carried occasionally to church, to say a few words to the people. He is said to have been very uncomplaining,—only the cry would sometimes come from him, “How long, O Lord?” On the 2d April, Easter-day, he was for the last time carried to church, and received the sacrament from the hands of Beza; but after this was still able to address a long discourse to the members of the Council who came to his house. On the 28th he received the clergy, and boldly encouraged them to persevere in the great work which he had begun. Farel, himself tottering to the grave, came from Neufchatel to visit him, and the old fellow-labourers, after one more conference, parted, only to meet in a less disturbed state of existence. He lingered on during May, and had even another meeting of the clergy in his house. Then on the 27th of the month, as summer was flushing over those bright scenes amidst which he had lived untouched by their beauty, he peacefully fell asleep. Beza had quitted him only for a moment, and on his return the reformer lay calm in death. “At the same time with the setting sun,” says his admiring friend, “was this great luminary withdrawn.”

He was buried without ostentation, but amidst the profound regret of the citizens, in the common cemetery of Plein Palais outside of the city, on the banks of the Rhone. He had especially enjoined that no monument should mark his resting-place. His severe simplicity turned away from all such honours. His biographerHenry. accordingly says that his grave continues unknown. In point of fact, however, a plain stone, with the letters “J. C.” upon it, is now pointed out to the stranger as marking it, although on what authority we do not know. Whether his remains lie in that particular spot or elsewhere, the simple and rude stone, as the meditative visitant stands beside it and looks round upon many imposing tablets raised over comparatively unmemorable dust, seems no unfitting memorial of the man—starting by its very nakedness associations all the more sublime.

Thus lived and died Calvin, a great, intense, and energetic character, who, more than any other of that great age, has left his impress’ upon the history of Protestantism. Nothing, perhaps, more strikes us than the contrast between the single naked energy which his character presents, and of which his name has become symbolical, and the grand issues which have gone forth from it. Scarcely anywhere else can we trace such an imperious potency of intellectual and moral influence emanating from so narrow a centre.

There is in almost every respect a singular dissimilarity between the Genevan and the Wittenberg reformer. In personal, moral, and intellectual features, they stand contrasted—Luther with his massive frame and full big face, and deep melancholy eyes; Calvin, of moderate stature, pale and dark complexion, and sparkling eyes, that burned nearly to the moment of his death. Luther, fond and jovial, relishing his beer and hearty family repasts with his wife and children; Calvin, spare and frugal, for many years only taking one meal a day, and scarcely needing sleep. In the one, we see a rich and complex and buoyant and affectionate nature touching humanity at every point in the other, a stern and grave unity of moral character. Both were naturally of a somewhat proud and imperious temper, but the violence of Luther is warm and boisterous, that of Calvin is keen and zealous. It might have been a very uncomfortable thing, as Melanchthon felt, to be exposed to Luther’s occasional storms; but after the storm was over, it was pleasant to be folded once more to the great heart that was sorry for its excesses. To be the object of Calvin’s dislike and anger was something to fill one with dread, not only for the moment, but long afterwards, and at a distance, as poor Castellio felt when he gathered the pieces of drift-wood on the banks of the Rhine at Basle.

In intellect, as in personal features, the one was grand, massive, acid powerful, through depth and comprehension of feeling, a profound but exaggerated insight, and a soaring eloquence; the other was no less grand and powerful, through clearness and correctness of judgment, rigour and consistency of reasoning, and weightiness of expression. Both are alike memorable in the service which they rendered to their native tongue,—in the increased compass, flexibility, and felicitous mastery which they imparted to it. The Latin works of Calvin are greatly superior in elegance of style, symmetry of method, and proportionate vigour of argument. He maintains an academic elevation of tone, even when keenly agitated in temper; while Luther, as Mr Hallam has it, sometimes descends to mere “bellowing in bad Latin.” Yet there is a coldness in the elevation of Calvin, and in his correct and well-balanced sentences, for which we should like ill to exchange the kindling though rugged paradoxes of Luther. The German had the more rich and teeming—the Genevan the harder, more serviceable, and enduring mind. When interrupted in dictating for several hours, Beza tells us that he could return and commence at once where he had left off; and that amidst all the multiplicity of his engagements, he never forgot what he required to know for the performance of any duty.

As preachers, Calvin seems to have commanded a scarcely less powerful success than Luther, although of a different character—the one stimulating and rousing, “boiling over in every direction”—the other instructive, argumentative, and calm in the midst of his vehemence. Luther flashed forth his feelings at the moment, never being able to compose what might be called a regular sermon, but seizing the principal subject, and turning all his attention to that alone. Calvin was elaborate and careful in his sermons, as in everything else. The one thundered and lightened, filling the souls of his hearers now with shadowy awe, and now with an intense glow of spiritual excitement: the other, like. the. broad daylight, filled them with a more diffusive though less exhilarating clearness.

Altogether, it is sufficiently easy to fix the varying characteristics, however difficult it may be to measure the relative greatness of the two chief reformers: moral and intellectual power assumes in the one an intense, concentrated, and severe outline,—in the other, a broad, irregular, and massive, yet child-like expression. The one may suggest a Doric column, chaste, grand, and sublime in the very simplicity and inflexibility of its mouldings; the other a Gothic dome, with its fertile contrasts and ample space, here shadowy in lurking gloom, and there riant in spots of sunshine, filled through all its amplitude with a dim religious awe, and yet, as we leisurely pause and survey it, traced here and there with grotesque and capricious imagery—the riotous freaks, as it were, of a strength which could be at once lofty and low, spiritually grand, yet with marks of its earth-birth everywhere.

Simplicity is beyond doubt the main feature of Calvin’s character; yet it is not the simplicity of nature—but of an even and orderly spiritual development. Earnest from the first, looking upon life as a great and stern reality, a hard yet noble discipline, his moral purpose is everywhere clear and definite—to live a life of duty, to shape circumstances to such divine ends as he apprehended, and in whatever sphere he might be placed to work out the glory of God. Protestantism changed the direction, but probably very little the principle, of his energies. As Romanist or Protestant he must have equally led a life of intense devotion and spiritual work. For there were no elements of lawless affection in him, no excesses of youthful passion, and, moreover, no impulses of mere selfish desire that could have ever drawn him aside to the service of the flesh or the world. He was naturally fitted as well as divinely trained for the special work which he had to do. He found his career, or rather it found him, with a singular felicity, amid the exciting strifes into which he. was born. Before his arrival in Geneva, he appeared very much the mere scholar and theologian. Intellectual study seemed not unlikely to divert and absorb his energies. But so soon as he settled there, his great practical and administrative qualities were drawn forth, and intellectual interest became henceforth subservient to that which he felt to be his peculiar mission,—the reorganisation of the divine kingdom in the world, as he saw and believed in it.