John Tulloch · 16 of 27

II. Calvin. · Part 4

Combined with this strict simplicity of aim in Calvin there is a wonderful grandeur of endurance and power. Nowhere lovely, he is everywhere strong. Strength looks upon us with a naked glance from every feature of his life and work. He is stern and arbitrary and cruel when it suits him, but never weak. He seldom mistakes, and as seldom fails. Confident in his own conclusions, and inflexible in his resolutions, he never goes back upon his practical policy, nor upon his theological views, for revisal or modification, but always forward in expansive and consistent development. He never wavers, and has no scruples. In all his pained and worn countenance you cannot trace a quivering of feebleness, scarce a spark of sensitiveness,—only the forward and steady gaze of resolved and imperious duty, whatever it might cost him.

As to the more social aspects of his character, it becomes a very difficult task to be at once just and critical. On the one hand, even in the face of his acknowledged harshness in many cases, it is impossible to adopt the representations of some, and regard him as destitute of all warmth of affection. Many of his letters are marked, on the contrary, by an affectionate interest, which, if not very warm or tender, is yet considerate and kindly. Then his relations with Farel, and Viret, and Bucer, and still more Melanchthon, from whom in many points he differed, sufficiently show that there was something in him lovable and capable of love, fitted both to engage sincere and deep regard, and to respond with an affectionate faithfulness to the friendly emotions which he excited. We have seen how his weary spirit clung to that of Melanchthon, removed beyond the contentions of theological strife; and there is something peculiarly affecting in’ his long and sometimes very trying and delicate relations with Farel, terminated by that last kind and tender memorial which he sent him from his deathbed. On the other hand, it appears to us altogether a misinterpretation of character to read these tokens of friendly sympathy as being what have been called “the overflowings of a heart filled with the deepest and most acute sensibility.” Overflowing of any kind is exactly what you never find in Calvin, even in his most familiar letters. His strongest expressions of affection are always calm and measured. When he condoles with Viret and Knox, for example, on the death of their wives, there is no impulsive trembling or sensitive fulness in his tones, but only a becoming and regulated expression of grief. Then it cannot be forgotten that there are some of his letters full of fierce expressions of hatred and anger, which one can only read now with pity and sorrow. Affectionate and even hearty to his friends let us admit him to have been, and capable of unbending so far as to play with the syndics at the game of the key (whatever that may have been), on a quiet evening; but Calvin was certainly not in the least a man of genial and overflowing sensibility. His temper was repressive and not expansive, concentrated and not sympathetic, and his heart burned more keenly with the fires of polemic indignation, than it ever glowed with the warmth of kindly or tender emotion.

There are nowhere in all his letters any joyous or pathetic exaggerations of sentiment; there is nothing of that play of feeling or of language which in Luther’s letters makes us so love the man. All this he would have thought mere waste of breath—mere idleness, for which he had no time. The intensity of his purpose, the solemnity of his work, prevented him from ever looking around or relaxing himself in a free, happy, and outgoing communion with nature or life. Living as he did amid the most divine aspects of nature, you could not tell from his correspondence that they ever touched him—that morning with its golden glories, or evening with its softened splendours, as day rose and set amid such transporting scenes, ever inspired him. The murmuring rush of the Rhone, the frowning outlines of the Jura, the snowy grandeur of Mont Blanc, might as well not have been, for all that they seemed to have affected him. No vestige of poetical feeling, no touch of descriptive colour, ever rewards the patient reader. All that exquisitely conscious sympathy with nature, and varying responsiveness to its unuttered lessons, which brighten with an ever-recurring freshness the long pages of Luther’s letters, and which have now wrought themselves as a commonplace into literature, are unknown, and would have been unintelligible to him. No less strange to him is the fertile interest in life merely for its own sake—its own joys and sorrows—brightness and sadness; the mystery, pathos, tenderness, and exuberance of mere human affection, which enrich the character of the great German. There is nothing of all this in Calvin; no vague yearnings or sentimental aspirations ever touched him. Luther, in all things greater as a man, is infinitely greater here. And in truth this element of modern feeling and culture is Teutonic rather than Celtic in its growth. It springs out of the comparative rich and genial soil of the Saxon mind,—deeper in its sensibilities and more exuberant in its products.

On the whole, simplicity, grandeur, and consistency of purpose, mark out Calvin from his fellows, and constitute the main elements of his greatness and influence. The same kind of consistency which we shall meet with in his theological system appears in his character—a consistency not of manifold adaptation, but of stern compression. As in the former the complexities of Christian doctrine are not merely evolved and laid side by side, but crushed into a unity, so in the latter there is uniqueness and symmetry at the expense of richness and interest, and a whole and hearty humanity. His theology and life alike must be judged in reference to the exigencies which called them forth, and the work that they accomplished. Human progress needed both of them assuredly, although it is a melancholy and saddening reflection that it did so. It was a hard and bad world that needed Calvin as a reformer. And when we think of the Institutes in comparison with the Gospels, we cannot help acknowledging how far man was then, and alas is still, below his blessings—how infinitely higher is the reach of divine truth than the response of human desire or the capacity of human understanding!

An impression of majesty and yet of sadness must ever linger around the name of Calvin. He was great, and we admire him. The world needed him, and we honour him; but we cannot love him. He repels our affections while he extorts our admiration; and while we recognise the worth, and the divine necessity, of his life and work, we are thankful to survey them at a distance, and to believe that there are also other modes of divinely governing the world, and advancing the kingdom of righteousness and truth.

According to what we have already said, the great distinction of Calvin, as we see him appearing within the sphere of the Reformation, is that in him the movement found its genius of order. He is from the outset of his career not at all, like Luther, the head of an onward. struggle, but the representative of a new organisation of the disturbing forces, spiritual and social, that were spreading all around in France and. Switzerland. While, therefore, Luther is characteristically the hero, Calvin is characteristically the legislator. He feels that the insurrectionary movement, which has been proceeding vigorously and fiercely for a quarter of a century, needs a guide—some one, not indeed to beat back and check it, but to rein it in, to impress upon it a definite constitution, and to bring it under discipline. Unless such an one should arise, the movement seemed likely to spend itself, on the one hand, in the most extravagant forms of social disturbance, through the spread of Anabaptism and other forms of pseudo-Christian Communism; or, on the other hand, in intellectual unbelief, like that of Servetus and others. With a view to what seemed the probable development of such tendencies, Calvin was just as much the master of the occasion as Luther was of a very different occasion: or, to speak in other language, the instrumentality of divine Providence was manifested equally in the rise of the Genevan as in that of the German reformer. The elements of religious thought and social liberty let loose by Luther, and within more limited spheres by Zwingli and Farel, and which required, as eminently in the case of Luther they found, a heroic impulsion of character and a strength of popular and enthusiastic zeal to represent and carry them forward to triumph,—now in 1536 demanded the influence of a quite different character, and a strength of intellectual and moral, rather than of popular earnestness—an aristocratic, in short, rather than a democratic power, to direct and control them.

Calvin was the impersonation of this spirit of order in the surging movement of the sixteenth century. He was so in two distinct and important respects, closely connected with one another, but separately so important that it is difficult to say in which point of view he appears most as a genius and master. He was so, first as the great theologian of the Reformation; and secondly, as the founder of a new religious and social organisation—a new order of Church polity—which did more than anything else to consolidate the dissipating forces of Protestantism, and to oppose, if not a triumphant, yet an effectual front to the old Catholic organisation, now beginning to gather life again after its first rude shocks. His influence in both these respects not only survived himself, but from the small centre of Geneva was propagated through France and Holland and Scotland, and to a large extent England, in a manner which, as we look back upon it, exalts him to the highest rank of great men, who, by the concentration and intensity of their thought and will, have ever swayed the destinies of their race. Limited, as compared with Luther, in his personal influence, apparently less the man of the hour in a great crisis of human progress, he towers far above Luther in the general influence over the world of thought and the course of history, which a mighty intellect, inflexible in its convictions and constructive in its genius, never fails to exercise.

In briefly speaking of Calvin as a theologian, we shall not attempt to criticise in detail his religious opinions. This would be altogether foreign to the purpose of these sketches. We shall try, however, to seize the spirit and general character of his dogmatic system, as they serve to explain his historical position, and as they came in contact with the spiritual tendencies then most active, not only in France, but in other countries.

When Calvin turned his keen glance upon the spiritual atmosphere around him, he saw at once the necessity, not so much of charging it with any new impulses, as of introducing clearness, intelligibility, and arrangement into those already in operation. This was the task that he essayed; and he brought to this task no new spirit or principles, but simply learning, faith, and vigour of mental conception. Novelty of purpose or of doctrine was as far as possible from his thought. The famous preface to the Institutes is mainly a powerful protest against any such view. What he really contemplated, and what he accomplished in the Institutes, first in a comparatively slight, and then in a more elaborate and definite form, was to reconstruct on a professed Biblical basis those doctrinal ideas which, disengaged from the old Catholic tradition by the powerful preaching of the earlier reformers, had not yet assumed, at least to the Gallic mind, any consistent expression. The primitive Christian character of these ideas is the great point which he tries to force upon the attention of Francis I., in view of the calumnies which the enemies of the Reformation had widely spread abroad. Novelty or even originality in doctrinal conception would have been repelled by him as a shameful accusation, and in fact was so when, under the misrepresentation of Caroli and others, he was accused of Arianism. Nothing in his early career moved him more, or gave him more pain. In the very face of all such views, it was his single aim to set anew in a Scriptural framework the old truth—to rebuild in its purity and completeness the old dogmatic edifice which had been overlaid and disfigured by the corruptions of Popery.

It arose from the very nature of the case, that this could only be done in the abstract and systematic spirit in which he attempted it. It was necessary to meet system with system—theory by theory. The old Catholic tradition, notwithstanding all that had happened, and the vigorous rents that had been made in it by the attacks of the reformers, had a power not merely of resistance but of successful reaction to the “new” opinions, in the mere coherence and apparent unity which it seemed to present in contrast with the latter, so long as these could at all be regarded as the mere opinions of individual teachers. To show, in a systematic method, that they could not rightly be so regarded, but that they were in reality the revival of the primitive Christian teaching—to raise thus a coherent front of Scriptural dogmatism, in opposition to the old ecclesiastical dogmatism, and thereby at once save the principles of the Reformation from licence, and strengthen and consolidate them against Popery,—such was Calvin’s great work as a theologian.

In a historical point of view we cannot think that any will deny the distinguished success with which he accomplished this work. Never did man, perhaps, more truly measure his powers to the exact task for which they were fitted, and then bring them to bear with a more steady and adequate energy upon the achievement of that task. Seizing with a powerful and comprehensive grasp the whole scheme of Christian doctrine, he analysed and exhibited it step by step in all its parts, and set it forth in an order most imposing and effective. Melanchthon had previously systematised the reformed tenets, but without the same confident grasp and mastery of logic. The German theologian possessed a more delicate perception, and a more subtle insight into many points; but this very fineness of spiritual texture unfitted him for the more bold and compact dogmatic handiwork that was then required: it gave indecision and apparent feebleness to many of his views. Calvin did not know the meaning of dogmatic indecision. His intellectual penetration and directness overmatched all scruples and doubts, and enabled him at almost every point to maintain a firm footing—to show his readers, as he himself says, “how to pursue and hold without wandering the good and right way.” And this mere strength of intellectual consistency, traversing the whole ground of Christian truth—mapping it out, and arranging it territory to territory, so as to present a great whole was the primary, as it was among the most powerful, means of giving to his work the influence which it secured; it met exactly one of the most urgent wants of the Reformation.

When we bring into view the prominent Scriptural ground on which this consistency was made to rest, we recognise a further important element of Calvin’s success. It was not merely the coherence of a great logical method which was presented in the Institutes, but the method seemed to identify itself at every point with Scripture, and appropriately express its truth. “He who makes himself master of the method which I have pursued,” he says, “will surely understand what he should seek for in Scripture.” The logical framework, in all its well-ordered parts, was clothed with the living garment of the divine Word. Even now it is difficult to disentangle the two; for Calvin, with all the theologians of his century, and of the succeeding century as well, does not quote Scripture merely in support of his view, so that you can see the view distinctly, and then the Scriptural warrant for it, but he everywhere blends undistinguishably his own reasoning and Scripture, so that it is often very difficult indeed to say where you have the human reasoner, and where the divine Teacher. He applies Biblical language, moreover, as all his compeers did, with comparatively little regard to its historical connection, taking a statement at random from any book of the Old, or from any book of the New Testament, as bearing with equally conclusive force upon his argument. The result of this is to exhibit the outline of his system as representing, in all its successive evolutions, a strikingly Scriptural aspect. The argument at every point, even in the first book, “De Cognitione Dei Creatoris,” takes up Scriptural phrase, and drapes itself in it as a sure vesture fitted to it closely, and with great skill. This prominence of Biblical statement, worked into every phase of his dogmatic scheme, and disguising its mere abstract propositions, constituted, and constitutes to this day with many minds, the greatest success of Calvin’s work. The philosopher is hidden in the divine—the dogmatist in the Scripturist.

But it was a still farther characteristic of Calvin’s system that may be said to have completed its triumph. He not merely apprehended the Christian scheme as a whole, and set it forth with the rare logical and Scriptural consistency we have described, but he apprehended it with clear and firm vision, in the view of a great central truth, which shed light, darkened indeed, but intense in its very darkness, upon all its relations. The great moving-spring of the Reformation, we formerly saw, was the principle of individual religion—the assertion of the immediate relation of the soul to God expressed in the doctrine of justification by faith alone. Calvin seized this great truth with the same clearness, if not with the same intensity, as Luther. He saw with an equal force that God is the only source of all good in man—that human righteousness can only spring out of the free act and communication of the divine grace, and that therefore the supposed merit of any human work, even of the noblest piety, as recognised by the Catholic tradition, was a mere delusion, ensnaring to the soul. He laid down this as a distinctive article of faith with his usual lucidity and coherence, bringing out the Scriptural proportions of his own view against what he considered to be the perversion of an eminent Lutheran teacher, Osiander. But beyond this special aspect of the principle of the free and immediate relation of the soul to God in the doctrine of Justification, Calvin saw a still higher and more comprehensive aspect of it in the doctrine of Predestination. If there be no veil between the soul and God, so that the former finds all its life and righteousness only in the latter—the human in the divine Personality—it is but a mere step from this to apprehend the Divine Being as not only freely but sovereignly, “of His mere good pleasure,” bestowing life and righteousness. Not only is justification of God alone, but an act of the divine sovereignty—definite, immutable, irrefragable—has determined from all eternity the objects of justification. Only then do we fully recognise free grace in all its grandeur, when we recognise it in this shape as the eternal election of God—when we acknowledge the divine act of clemency: and not merely so, but, moreover, the divine act of reprobation, as eternally consummated in certain persons without any reference to their conduct. The whole of human life and of human history, the good and evil that are in them, are gathered up by Calvin into a single point in the abyss of eternity, from which all their complicated threads go forth in a double series of undeviating demarcation. The divine is apprehended not only on its positive but on its negative side, as working out not only a progressive kingdom of righteousness, but also a retrogressive kingdom of evil, and in each case equally for its own glory. And this moral dualism is applied with a fearless and untrembling hand. It is in no sense a mere theory—the mere blank category of a transcendental philosophy—but a living principle which he brings to bear without flinching upon all the mysteries of human existence. He confesses, indeed, that it is a “horrible decree”; but its clear and undeniable proof seems to him to lie in the simple statement which follows up this confession: “God must have foreseen the special destiny of each individual before He created him, and He only foresaw this as having ordained it.” This was the highest triumph of his system. Even a logic such as Calvin’s could go no farther than this.

In what degree this confident audacity in carrying out the great principle of the Reformation helped to give permanence to its general doctrines, and to make them dominant not only over the learned but over the popular minds that came within its sway, is a question far too wide and important to take up here. But none can doubt, looking merely at the most obvious facts, that it had a very powerful influence, not only in virtue of its own logical vigour, and the craving there then was, in all minds astir about religious truth, for some great theory or absolute idea into which to fit and harmonise their floating conceptions; but especially in virtue of the profound spiritual instinct out of which the theory sprang, and which it long continued and even continues to express to many deeply religious minds. The feeling of direct and devout dependence upon God—of tracing all to Him, and finding all in Him—of emptying the creaturely will wholly in the Creative will—of bending low before the Majesty of heaven, and rejoicing that our very weakness and misery are its strength and glory;—this deep instinct of humility appeared to many merely sublimed in the doctrine of Predestination, and, apart from its own argumentative consistency and hardihood, it thus carried with it the energy and triumph of a lofty spirituality.

As we look back, therefore, upon this great system in conjunction with the spirit not only of the century which produced it, but of that which followed, we can well understand the success with which it maintained its ground, and the conquest which it won against rival systems. Viewed as systems—as exhaustive logical generalisations of Christian truth—Calvinism is the natural victor of Arminianism in this very thoroughness and higher consistency of system which it presents, in its greater Scriptural earnestness, and in the superior boldness and directness with which it carried out the great fundamental principle of the Reformation. Arminianism—no less infected than Calvinism by a mere logical zeal, having no more than the latter any apprehension of a higher method than that of argumentative definition even in the highest region of spiritual truth—yet paltered and sophisticated in its logic everywhere. It had neither the courage to lay aside logic and confess its weakness, nor yet the vigour to carry it out. And so it patched at every point, and covered the last mystery, into which Calvinism rushed with daring footing, with its thin glosses—glosses so feebly transparent now when we examine them, that it seems strange they should have ever satisfied any minds, and least of all minds of such acuteness as some of those that professed to rest on them.

The higher Scriptural congruity of Calvinism was especially apparent on the dogmatical principle of interpretation then common. It mirrored far more profoundly the spiritual depths of the Epistles, and took up more naturally and directly the great keynotes of their language. It was more true, as a whole, to the vast and shadowy outlines of thought which meet us everywhere on the surface of Scripture, and especially concentrate themselves in certain deep utterances of the letters of St Paul over which criticism has long hung perplexed.

While thus claiming for Calvinism a higher Scriptural character, it would yet be too much to say that Calvinism, any more than Lutheranism, or Arminianism, was primarily the result of a fresh and living study of Scripture. Calvin everywhere appealed to Scripture,—he is the greatest Biblical commentator, as he is the greatest Biblical dogmatist, of his age. But his dogmas, for the most part, were not primarily suggested by Scripture; and as to his distinguishing dogma, this is eminently the case. Like Luther, he had been trained in the scholastic philosophy, and been fed on Augustine; and it was no more possible for the one than for the other to get beyond the scholastic spirit or the Augustinian doctrine. An attentive study of the Institutes reveals the presence of Augustine everywhere; and great as Calvin, beyond doubt, is in exegesis, his exegesis is mainly controlled by Augustinian dogmatic theory. As to the question of predestination—so apt to be identified with his name in theology—Calvin is not merely indebted to Augustine, but he verbally reproduces him at great length; and it is a favourite plan with him, when hard pushed by the dilemmas which his own acuteness or the representations of opponents suggest, to retreat behind the arguments of his great prototype, and to suppose himself strong within the cover of assertions not less startling and inadmissible, though more venerable than his own. In fixing anew, therefore, this keystone in the Christian arch, he was merely repeating, as elsewhere, an old work; and strangely enough,—as is so often the case in all such reactions,—the chief weapon which he employed against the degraded scholasticism of his day was tempered in the very forge which it was meant to extinguish.

This appeal to an earlier Catholicity on the part of the Reformed theologies—this support in Augustine—beyond doubt greatly contributed to their success in their day. For few then ventured to doubt the authority of Augustinianism, and the theological spirit of the sixteenth century hardly at any point got beyond it. It was a natural source of triumph to the great Protestant confessions against the unsettled unbelief or more superficial theologies which they encountered, that they wielded so bold and consistent a weapon of logic, and appealed so largely to an authoritative Scriptural interpretation. Calvinism could not but triumph on any such modes of reasoning or of Biblical exegesis as then prevailed; and so long as it continued to be merely a question of systems, and logic had it all its own way, this triumph was secure. But now that the question is changed, and logic is no longer mistress of the field; now, when a spirit of interpreting Scripture, which would have hardly been intelligible to Calvin, generally asserts itself—a spirit which recognises a progress in Scripture itself—a diverse literature and moral growth in its component elements—and which, at once looking backward with reverence and forward with faith, has learned a new audacity, or a new modesty. as we shall call it, according to our predilections: and while it accepts with awe the mysteries of life and of death, refuses to submit them arbitrarily to the dictation of any mere logical principle—now that the whole sphere of religious credence is differently apprehended, and the provinces of faith and of logical deduction are recognised as not merely incommensurate, but as radically distinguished,—the whole case as to the triumphant position of Calvinism, or indeed any other theological system, is altered. An able writer has shown with convincing power what are the inevitably contradictory results of applying the reasoning faculty with determining sway to the settlement of religious truth. The conclusions of this writer, sufficiently crushing as directed by him against all rationalistic systems, are to the full as conclusive against the competency of all theological systems whatever. The weapon of logical destructiveness which he has used with such energy, is a weapon of offence really against all religious dogmatism. What between the torture of criticism, and the slow but sure advance of moral idea, this dogmatism is losing hold of the most living and earnest intelligence everywhere. And it seems no longer possible. under any new polemic form, to revive it. Men are weary of heterodoxy and of orthodoxy alike, and of the former in any arbitrary and dogmatic shape. still more intolerably than of the latter. The old Intitutio Christianæ Religionis no loner satisfies, and a new Institutio can never replace it. A second Calvin in theology is impossible. Men thirst not less for spiritual truth, but they no longer believe in the capacity of system to embrace and contain that truth, as in a reservoir, for successive generations. They seek for it themselves afresh in the pages of Scripture and the ever-dawning light of the spiritual life of humanity. The age of tradition is gone beyond recall, and the most venerated creeds, no less than the most novel religious theories, must submit to the tests of an expanding historical and moral judgment.

In the endless conflict of systems, and the mutual destructiveness of their opposing principles, there is a lesson to be learned, but it is by no means the lesson which the Bampton lecturer draws. The uncertainty of reason in all religious matters, and the contradictoriness of its vaulting theories, should teach us a greater trust in revelation, but a trust in its spiritual unity and simplicity, rather than in the dogmatic meanings assumed to represent it. If the intellect be a helpless arbiter in religious questions, and everywhere starts more difficulties than it suggests solutions, our appeal must be to Scripture, and we thank God for it but to Scripture in its historical connection, and the critical and literary conditions which its several books present, rather than to traditionary conclusions drawn from these books—to the Divine Spirit, in short, that speaks in Scripture under the necessary limitations of human language and a progressive development of moral thought.