John Tulloch · 17 of 27

II. Calvin. · Part 5

We have still to consider Calvin in what appears to us his most creative capacity—as an ecclesiastical legislator; and in order to do this, we must understand yet more fully the historical necessities of his position, and of the Reformation as represented by him.

After the first spiritual impulse of the Reformation had spent itself, great difficulties and dangers arose on all sides. Not only did the unsettled elements of Christian doctrine require a master-mind to mould and reconstruct them into an authoritative shape, but the same process of reconstruction was still more urgently demanded in the sphere of social life. With the overthrow of the old Catholic polity and discipline there was left a great opening for moral laxity, and the dissolution of the bonds of society. Corrupt as that polity was in its deeper springs, it remained a machinery highly conservative of social and national existence. Intolerable in its unspirituality and oppressiveness, it operated as a vast social and political agency, touching life everywhere, and binding it together in all its relations. Gradually it had grown to be this. Augustine’s grand idea of a civitas Dei—of a divine commonwealth had developed itself till the hierarchy sketched by him covered the whole of the western world, and not merely placed itself in contact with human activity at every point, but directly held within its embrace all the intricacies of personal, family, and national relation. Starting as the most individual of all religions, and seizing, by its primary influence, not on man’s outward condition, but on his deepest inward sensibilities, Christianity had taken the place of the old imperial authority as the latter decayed, and become a religion in the strictest sense—a great system of political as well as moral government. At first, slowly pushing its way in conflict with the immoralities of paganism, and the spurious ethics alike of Gnostical and Epicurean philosophy, it had grown in the course of five centuries into a vast Power, extending its control over all the interests of human existence within its reach. Christianity had become the Church: spiritual individualism had developed into Catholic Authority. Augustine stood on the verge of this great change, recognised it, gloried in it—and, by his great work, helped to forward it.

This second phase of Christianity had now worked itself out. The radical Christian spirit was not and could not be extinguished under all the compression of the Catholic system; and it had now, after many partial and ineffectual efforts, risen up against it in might. For a thousand years the system had dominated over all expressions of individual energy, fitting itself into human history, and so far constituting that history in its successive manifestations. Now, however, it was broken up. The warm breath of a living Gospel had dissolved it, and men were cast loose from the bonds which had so long controlled them. The old spirit of individualism, which in primitive Christianity had gone forth with triumphant success into pagan society, had once more awakened as from a long slumber, and rent with sundering force the repressive machinery which had bound without destroying it.

Such an awakening as this, in the very nature of the case, soon began to run into many extravagant issues. In the first feeling of liberty men did not know how to use it temperately; and Anabaptism in Germany and Libertinism in France testified to the moral confusion and social licence that everywhere sprang up in the wake of the Reformation. We can now but faintly realise how ominous all this seemed to the prospects of Protestantism. It appeared to many minds as about to terminate in mere anarchy. The religious revival seemed likely to become mere social disorder. At the very best, the new life was every where obscured by the disorder which spread alongside of it, and was apt to be confounded with it.

To add to the exigency thus arising out of the circumstances of the Reformation itself, there were signs now at length (1536) showing themselves in all directions of a reviving strength in Romanism. With that singular vitality which it had so often previously, and has so often since, displayed, it now, after the first shock of the Reformation, took a new and more powerful start than in any of its preceding developments. Jesuitism arose as the formidable and well-matched opponent of Protestantism; the highest craft, subtlety, and energy, the consummate immorality and persistent cruelty of the Romish system, received in this marvellous agency a fresh and vigorous birth; and it is only when we apprehend and bring clearly into view its peculiar working and influence, that the later history of the Reformation becomes intelligible.

This, then, was the historical position which Calvin occupied. He surveyed and realised it as no other mind of his time did. He naturally hated every species of disorder. His whole character and mind were constructive and legislative. Protestant by religious conviction, he was conservative and Catholic by natural instinct; and accordingly he was no sooner within the reformed movement, than he aimed to fix it. Especially did the great idea, which had been originally expressed in the Catholic Church, but had’ become degraded into an unspiritual hierarchy—the idea of a divine state—hold possession of his mind. The unity and completeness which it presented charmed Calvin. He felt, moreover, that it was only by the resurrection of this idea in some new form that the reactionary strength of the Catholic polity could be met and withstood. He saw clearly that unless the moral intensity which had broken forth in the Reformation, and separated itself from the old ecclesiastical forms, could be turned into some new disciplinary institution, it would spend itself and disappear. In the nature of things it was unable to propagate itself merely by its own force. Already in Germany it was failing to do so. A controversial interest there was fast beginning to swallow up the spiritual life out of which the Reformation had sprung; and with all his own strong polemical tendencies, Calvin sufficiently discerned the evil that would come from such a spirit—the negation and deadness to which it would give rise. He was himself too practically earnest, and he had far too deep a feeling of the wants of human nature, and the divine education through which alone it can be trained to strength and goodness, not to aim at something higher than the mere settlement of controversial dogma. Argumentative as he was, he was yet more the legislator than the dialectician; and it was an institutional instinct and capacity, still more than a philosophical or dogmatical interest, that directed all his activity. His mind, therefore, could not rest short of a new Church organisation and polity—of a new order of moral discipline, which, planting itself in the heart of Protestantism, should at once conserve its life, and enable it to confront the re-collecting forces and still powerfully repressive energy of the Roman hierarchy. Strongly impressed by its necessity, he aimed to impart to Protestantism a new social as well as doctrinal expression—to reconstitute, in short, the divine commonwealth, the civitas Dei.

There are two distinct views that may be taken of this part of Calvin's work. It presents itself, on the one hand, as a moral influence—a conservative spiritual discipline suited to the time, as it was called forth by it; and on the other hand, as a new theory, or definite reconstitution, of the Church. In the first point of view, it is almost wholly admirable; in the second, it will be found unable to maintain itself any more than the Catholic theory which it so far displaced.

The general principle of Calvin’s polity was simply the reassertion of a divine order amid the confused activities of the time—of the majesty, right, and peacefulness of divine Law. That there is a kingdom of God in the world; that man is God’s creature and subject, and that there is life for human society, and happiness for the human race only in recognising and acting upon this idea; the consequent obligation of self-sacrifice, and the duty of subordination and combination among all the members of a common State,—these were the old truths applied by Calvin to the reconstruction of the Christian community. Any one who reads the opening chapter of the fourth book of the Institutes will at once see how deeply he was struck and penetrated with the idea of the Church visible as well as invisible, and with the necessity of a due and becoming relation of authority among its various constituents. His consistorial scheme of government was to him the appropriate expression of this authority; and whatever may be our critical judgment of this scheme, we are not to forget, in reference even to its most extreme and misdirected efforts, the absolute lawlessness with which it came in contact. Such an order, though of the most stern and repressive kind, was better than no order; and in truth we may believe it was only through such a system of iron repression—a system which, in the nature of the case, and in all the circumstances of the period, sometimes confounded mere liberty with wrong, and mere folly with crime, and cast its restraining presence into the very heart of the family as well as the bosom of the Church—that the moral life of the Reformation could have been saved, or at any rate strengthened and hardened for the fearful contest that was before it. The more any one studies the facts of this great crisis, the more will he be forced to see that no mere aesthetic spirit of freedom could have then maintained its ground Against the dark perjuries and malice of the reactionary interest. It required a moral spirit nurtured in hardness, and made strong-limbed by strenuous and daring exercise, to encounter the supple deceit and Satanic persistence of the Jesuit faction, spread into every land, and working by the most dexterous and disguised communications.

And when we contemplate for a moment the actual results of Calvin’s discipline, all this plainly appears. It was the spirit bred by this discipline which, spreading into France and Holland and Scotland, maintained by its single strength the cause of a free Protestantism in all these lands. It was the same spirit which inspired the early, and lived on in the later Puritans; which animated such men as Milton and Owen and Baxter which armed the Parliament of England with strength against Charles I., and stirred the great soul of Cromwell in its proudest triumphs; and which, while it thus fed every source of political liberty in the old world, burned undimmed in the gallant crew of the “Mayflower”—the pilgrim-fathers—who first planted the seeds of civilisation in the great continent of the West. A stern and unyielding reverence for law and duty, combined with a high resistance to the encroachments of mere selfish tyranny; an intense love of the Bible, and an undoubting and indiscriminating application of its examples to the business of life and the affairs of state; all the moral heroism in Puritanism which awes us by its grandeur, though it may fail to win our sympathy or enlist our love,—had its wellspring in Geneva, and reflects a lineal glory on the name of Calvin. Linked not only spiritually but formally with the Genevan polity, it was from thence it received the great theocratic idea which it prominently embodied, and launched forth once more with such triumph into the history of the world. That man, as the creature of God, is near to God, and under the control and sanctity of the divine influence, not only in some, but in all expressions of his manifold activity—that he is bound in all by a relation to the divine will—that as there is no individual goodness, so there can be no social blessing, and no real civil grandeur apart from God;—that the civitas Dei, therefore, is no dream of mere enthusiasm or of sacerdotal ambition, but a true idea resting on the everlasting relations of things, and all other ideas of the nation or society rather the dreams and shows of which this is the reality;—all this, of which Puritanism was conspicuously the renewed powerful expression, germinated in the small state of Geneva, and from this narrow centre went forth to mingle in the increase, and to add moral stability to the ambition, of the highest forms of modern civilisation. Saving for this new and grand development given to Protestantism—in which Germany had no share—it would have fared ill with it in the great crisis through which it had to pass; for it was only this profound belief in a divine society and state,—in a kingdom of truth and righteousness in the world,—that was able to encounter the falsehoods of state-craft and the immoralities of mere arbitrary power. It was only Puritanism that proved a match for Jesuitism, and held it in check; and while other phases of Protestantism were shrinking into mere formality or dying out in weakness, this was not merely holding its own in a stern struggle with Romish intrigue, but, through many strange aberrations and internal contradictions, was working out in a higher form the principles both of religious and of civil liberty.

It is a very different subject that is before us when we turn to contemplate the theocracy of Calvin, in its formal expression and basis as a new and definite outline of Church government. In this respect he made more an apparent than a real advance upon the old Catholic theocracy. He took up the old principle from a different and higher basis, but in a scarcely less arbitrary and external manner. There is a kingdom of divine truth and righteousness, he said, and Scripture, not the priesthood, is its basis. The divine Word, and not Roman tradition, is the foundation of the spiritual commonwealth. So far, all right; so far, Calvin had got hold of a powerful truth against the corrupt historical pretensions of Popery. But he at once went much farther than this, and said, not tentatively, or in a spirit of rational freedom, but dogmatically, and in a spirit of arbitrariness tainted with the very falsehood from whose thraldom he sought to deliver men, “This is the form of the divine kingdom presented in Scripture.” Not the presence of certain spiritual qualities, but the presence of certain external conditions, which I have fixed and determined, constitute the Church. Scripture absolutely demands this and forbids that in reference to the organisation and order of the Christian Society. This idea of going back to Scripture not merely as a historical starting-point, but de novo and entirely, for all the elements of an ecclesiastical polity, was one peculiar to Calvin, and all who more or less embraced or were influenced by his principles. Luther had no perception of it,—it was, in fact, strongly distasteful to his concrete and historical sympathies. He sought rather to preserve the inherited Catholic machinery in every respect, so far as it was not plainly opposed to Scripture. He wished to amend and rectify, but not to abolish and re-institute. He strenuously resisted the pretence of Scriptural simplicity by which Carlstadt urged forward his pseudo-Puritanism. The old Catholic usages were not to be wantonly touched; under all the corruptions which had overlaid them, they remained dear to his affection and beautiful to his imagination. But Calvin felt no such ties to the past, and could never understand the influence of them on others. It was his constant complaint against the Lutherans that they preserved so many ceremonies; and his contempt for the tolerabiles ineptias of English Protestantism is well known. With no imagination, and but cold feelings, and a meagre sympathy with traditional associations—with a sphere, moreover, singularly cleared for his activity in the small state of Geneva—he was led to indulge to the full his legislative bias, and to plan and rearrange, according to his own arbitrary convictions, a “religious constitution.”

The vigour of this religious constitution sufficiently showed itself in the approbation which it commanded, and the manner in which it spread itself wherever the popular will had scope in moulding the progress of the Reformation. Presbyterianism became the peculiar Church order of a free Protestantism, carrying with it everywhere, singularly enough, as one of the very agencies of its free moral influence, an inquisitorial authority resembling that of the Calvinistic consistory. It rested, beyond doubt, on a true divine order, else it never could have attained this historical success. But it also contained from the beginning a source of weakness in the very way in which it put forth its divine warrant. It not merely asserted itself to be wise and conformable to Scripture, and therefore divine, but it claimed the direct impress of a divine right for all its details and applications. This gave it strength and influence in a rude and uncritical age, but it planted in it from the first an element of corruption. The great conception which it embodied was impaired at the root by being fixed in a stagnant and inflexible system, which became identified with the conception as not only equally, but specially divine. The ritual thus once more preceded the moral,—the accidental, the essential,—external uniformity, moral unity; and Calvin himself, seduced by this radical mistake, sought by the mere rigour of the consistory, and the most trivial details of over-legislation, to touch the heart of life, and mould it to a holy and peaceful order. Never was there a greater mistake. All the richest qualities and most genuine aspirations of life forbid the attempt. However temporarily strengthened, they cannot healthily grow under such a system. The kingdom of righteousness can only flourish in an atmosphere of freedom; it is never helped but truly injured by any species of external compulsion; divine society is only held together by inner bonds; it lives along lines of spiritual communication, and not of legal enactment; in its essence, in short, it is not “of this world,” while yet necessarily taking to itself, according to circumstances, some definite outward shape. In so far as Presbyterian Puritanism came short of all this—nay, in many respects contradicted it—it failed to realise the only divine principle of moral government; and the theocratic idea accordingly, in its renewed assertion, fell back once more into its old mistake and confusion. The garments of Judaism still clung to it; the idea had not yet worked itself clear from the beggarly elements that haunt it as its shadow, and are everywhere ready to supplant and degrade it.

But were not these “elements,” some will say, really Biblical?—did not Calvin establish his Church polity and Church discipline upon Scripture?—and is not this a warrantable course? Assuredly not, in the spirit in which he did it. The fundamental source of the mistake is here: The Christian Scriptures are a revelation of divine truth, and not a revelation of Church polity. They not only do not lay down the outline of such a polity, but they do not even give the adequate and conclusive hints of one. And for the best of all reasons, because it would have been entirely contrary to the spirit of Christianity to have done so; because the very vitality of Christian principle and the conditions of human progress do not admit of the imposition of any unvarying system of government, ecclesiastical or civil. The system adapts itself to the life, everywhere expands with it or narrows with it, but is nowhere in any. particular form the absolute condition of life. A definite outline of Church polity, therefore, or a definite code of social ethics, is nowhere given in the New Testament; and the spirit of it is entirely hostile to the absolute assertion of either the one or the other. Calvin, in truth, must have felt this sufficiently in his constant appeal to the spirit and details of the Old Testament legislation. The historical confusion, in this respect, in which he and all his age shared, was a source of fruitful error here as elsewhere.

But what of the Church, then, and Church authority? Do they not disappear altogether in such a view as that suggested? No; not in the least. They appear, on the contrary, in their only true and divine light, as resting on Scripture, but not as absolutely contained and defined in it. There is and ought to be in both a rightful conformity with Scripture, as with the growth of the Christian Reason in history. The Church is everywhere a positive divine institution resting on these two bases—on the latter not less than the former, as constituting no less, really and practically, a jus divinum. For the renewed assertion of the positive character and educational necessity of the Church, and for the fresh element of strength thus imparted to Protestantism, we are indebted to Calvin; but his special theory of the Church is not more authoritative than any other theory. Neither his Church nor any Church is necessarily and absolutely the divine institution. Turn some arbitrary ritual element in front, whether Romanistic or Calvinistic, and make it the divine, and you invert the truly divine method. This always turns the moral elements in front—the rights of faith, the rights of reason and of charity; and the ritual follows as a fitting and shifting vestment. The spirit, in short, dominates, the form serves; and it was Calvin’s great error—and is, alas! by no means an extinct error of Protestantism—to forget this fundamental law of the divine, which we can never alter save at our peril.

While claiming this divine freedom, without which truth can nowhere live, it becomes us at the same time to remember that the highest freedom is always bound fast in moral law. This, the essential spirit of Puritanism, is eternal, whatever may be the temporary character of its dogmatical or ‘ecclesiastical machinery. These may perish, as they seem in many of their forms decaying; but the earnestness, righteousness, purity, and resoluteness, which were the highest meaning of Puritanism, and the really valuable growth of Calvinism, can never decay without moral and social ruin. Amid all the expansions and refinements of modern thought and life, let us hope, therefore, that we shall never lose these genuine elements of the Calvinistic spirit; and while we open our minds to the higher and more comprehending expressions of divine truth that meet us everywhere, and learn a nobler wisdom and tolerance amid all our differences, let us, at the same time, always remember that there is no strength of good save in the Gospel of old, and that the highest dignity and beauty of human life are in Him “who did no sin.”