Calvin and Calvinism
The Protestant revolt did not just bring about a change in the religious life of Europe, but had severe and long-lasting consequences in the political, social and economic life as well. The entrance of Christianity into the world allowed the Divine Plan for the organization of society to be fully implemented under the Mystical Body of Christ. The Catholic Church began to exercise a profound influence upon culture and civilization even to the modification of the existing temporal order. The guidance of the Church was accepted because mankind came to realize that the supreme end of man consisted in the vision of God in the Three Divine Persons and the Church provided the means of sanctification to reach that end.
When the heresiarchs denied the value of good works and the resulting effect of sanctifying grace on the soul, they denied the existence of an organized, supernatural power to guide human activities and the potential sinner was left without the protection and knowledge necessary for salvation. The rising tide of revolutionary forces (humanism and secularization) influenced Luther and was amplified by him; and it also dominated the life of John Calvin to an even greater extent. For better or for worse, the ideas of Calvin coincided and merged with the rise of the mercantile class which led from a society where nobles, knights, monks and peasants predominated to one where merchants, materialism, money and profits (and ultimately industrialization) ruled the day. When he added his own peculiar ingredient of intense individualism and self-seeking to the heretical mix, a new civilization resulted that knew no law but man's own needs and ambitions. Although the austere Frenchman probably did not anticipate the ultimate result, the unleashed forces of intrigue, unrestricted material power and manipulation continued their march against God's Divine Plan of subordinating human society to supernatural law.
John Calvin
Calvin was born in July of 1509 in Noyon, Picardy on the northern plains of France where few vineyards grow; thus he was only eight years old when Luther placarded the Wittenburg church door. However, the two men chiefly responsible for religious revolution in the 16th century shared few similarities. Luther descended from Saxon peasant stock and, although possessing a certain eloquence, always remained bombastic and crude. Calvin on the other hand came from a middle class bourgeois family and influenced his followers through the precise, scholarly language of a self-possessed teacher, though one who had the instincts of a cobra if opposed.
Several outside influences combined to steer the studious youth in the direction of heresy. His father, who was concerned only about the material welfare of his son, had as part of his legal practice the responsibility of directing the financial affairs of their diocese. When the father and John's older brother were discovered to be involved in irregular transactions concerning church funds, they were excommunicated and eventually denied Christian burial due to their impenitence.
The fermentation of Lutheran ideas also poisoned the religious thinking of the brilliant but gloomy youth during the period of his humanistic studies at Paris and Bourges in his teen years. He studied Hebrew under a member of the Meaux Cenacle1 and Greek under a Lutheran and gained the patronage of the irreverent Margaret of Navarre. By the time the morose scholar returned to Paris in 1533 with his law degree, he had gone from studying and approving the new subversive ideas to spreading them among the intellectual circles. But he had miscalculated, for the pendulum had swung from tolerance to the opposite: arrest and execution.
In Paris, Calvin aligned himself with a small underworld of subversives that included the newly-elected rector of the university, Nicholas Cop, the son of the King's physician, and his landlord, de la Forge, a wealthy cloth merchant. When Cop in his inaugural speech made reference to the Lutheran heresy of justification by faith alone that had been skillfully inserted by Calvin, a furor arose that resulted in a severe backlash. Cop made his escape by night and Calvin by disguising himself as a laborer, but the unfortunate de la Forge was apprehended and eventually burned at the stake.
Institutes of the Christian Religion
By the end of 1534, Calvin had settled in Basle, Switzerland where he began to write a book of prodigious scholarship, destined to have a powerful effect in molding Calvinism into the destructive force that it became. Published in Latin under the title, Institutio Religions Christianae, it gave shape to what had up to that point lacked any solid body of doctrine and permanency and was in danger of becoming a temporary fad. The movements of Luther and Zwingli never expanded after their deaths because their success was based on their electrifying personalities. On the other hand, the influence of the sour, irritable, energetic French man was more durable for it imposed on Protestantism what was lacking until then, an intellectual discipline.
Luther did not establish a church or any governing structure; nor did he provide any way of maintaining liturgical and doctrinal uniformity. Consequently there was one spin-off after another to the point that the anarchy and depravity of the Anabaptists were possible. Any authority and order that existed became the responsibility of the government and the secular princes who were primarily interested in confiscation of Catholic property and not in salvation and justification. Calvinism supplied a church, authority and an international network that insured uniformity.
The theology of Calvin is partly Lutheran. Like his counterpart from Germany, Calvin declared that original sin had so completely weakened human nature that man, deprived of free will, can do nothing but evil. But the severe Frenchman carried the idea of justification by faith alone one step further, thereby developing the distinguishing characteristic of Calvinism: the doctrine of absolute predestination. According to this doctrine, God ordains some to everlasting life, others to everlasting punishment. In this cheerless, pessimistic system, God, who is the author of evil, condemns innumerable souls, irrespective of any merit on their part, to eternal torment from which they never had a chance to be saved. In this twisted logic, all men not belonging to the Calvinist sect were enemies of God; Catholics in particular, being the worst, had to be rooted out.
Calvin in Geneva
After we come to understand Calvin's repulsive theological system, we can complete the picture of his place in history by reviewing the period of his tyrannical rule in Geneva, where he carried intolerance to inhuman and oppressive lengths. Most non-Catholic Christian historians praise the Protestant "Reformation" for liberating the enslaved mind of man and securing political freedom. When these historians speak of the enslaved mind, they are referring to a Catholic's obedience to an infallible Church. Jesus Christ, the incarnate God, suffered an agonizing death to put a seal on His teaching of what we must do and believe to be saved. He established the Holy Catholic Church as the only institution to teach in His name; and of all the Christian religions it is the only one that can trace its origin back to Him. Our Savior plainly taught that error and sin are not freedom but slavery of the intellect and the will. "You shall know the truth and it shall make you free."
Just before Calvin's arrival, Geneva had revolted, with the help of neighboring cantons, against its bishop and temporal overlord, the Duke of Savoy, and proclaimed itself a free city. Guillaume Farel descended upon the newly "freed" city with a band of revolutionaries and began to preach the new heretical doctrines. The usual persecution of Catholics followed. Convents were closed, the religious were expelled, Church property confiscated and the Catholic laity threatened.
Among the large numbers of heretics who fled from France and were crossing into Switzerland came John Calvin who was persuaded by Farel to set up his headquarters in Geneva. Farel, although a competent revolutionary, knew his own limitations and recognized Calvin's great powers as an organizer and administrator. Geneva had just given up the sweet yoke of Catholicism and the distant rule of Savoy for the harsh tyranny of a cold, severe theocrat.
The Genevans soon grew tired of the dictator and his miserable, joyless rule and drove him from the city. Without any governing authority, anarchy ensued. Two years later the citizens recalled the unbending Frenchman and gave him even more power, which he used to formulate a harsh code of rules that regulated every aspect of the citizens' daily life.
A lady was imprisoned because of the fancy way she arranged her hair. A merchant who played cards, a peasant who spoke harshly to one of his animals, a citizen who did not extinguish his lamp at the appointed hour were all sent to jail. Three tanners were sent to prison for three days on bread and water for eating too much pastry at breakfast. This system of repression succeeded only because of prying busybodies and spies.
If the harsh dictator could hand out such severe penalties for mere trifles, those who defied his authority could expect to suffer more merciless cruelties including lengthy prison stays, torture and even death. Of the fifty-eight executions during his rule, one stands out above the rest. Michael Servetus, a Spanish physician and heretic, nevertheless entered into a controversy with Calvin, first in a public dispute and then by correspondence. Calvin, who never forgave an injury, denounced him to the Dominican inquisitor at Lyons, where Servetus was working. After making his escape from France, he made an attempt to pass over the Alps through Geneva but was recognized and arrested.
After six weeks in a filthy, vermin infested prison without being granted a trial or counsel, Servetus was burned over a slow fire. The enormity of this cruelty is highlighted when one considers that the Spaniard was a harmless stranger just passing though Geneva, had committed no crime in the territory, and whose only offense was that he exasperated the great reformer's temper.
Death and Legacy
Toward the end of his life, Calvin suffered from numerous and complicated diseases that affected practically every part of his body, internal and external; some of which must have been quite painful. After passing a night in horrible agony, he died on May 27, 1564, at 8:00 in the morning. When he was quickly buried at 2:00 that afternoon, word spread throughout the city that the body bore the traces of a desperate struggle and premature decomposition, signs of divine vengeance. This story was verified by a young student and follower of Calvin who was present at his death. He wrote: "Calvin ending his life in despair, died of a most shameful and disgusting disease, which God had threatened to rebellious and accursed reprobates, having first been tortured in a most excruciating manner, and then consumed."2
In the opening paragraphs of this chapter, we noted that the Protestant Revolution, especially Calvinism, had a profound affect on many other areas of European life than just religion. Beginning in 1559, a series of bloody, ruinous wars between Catholics and Protestants broke out all over Europe that lasted 130 years until the English Revolution of 1688, which one can argue was the opening bell for the French Revolution.
Early in the twentieth century the German sociologist Max Weber and the English economist R. H. Tawney unleashed a heated controversy by tracing the modern economic system back to John Calvin. Without delving into the claims and counter-claims, we can state that one aspect of Calvinism is indisputable. Because of its doctrine of absolute predestination, the accumulation of wealth is a sign by which man can recognize his divine election; this leads to the supremacy of gain and profit over all other values.
Pope Pius XI criticized the control of money in the modern economic order in his encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno, by stating that unrestrained competition "permits the survival of those only who are the strongest, which means those who fight most relentlessly, who pay least heed to the dictates of conscience." He went on to remark that, since reaction against this leads to socialism and communism, these conditions "prepare the way for the overthrow and ruin of the social order."
Father Denis Fahey, in his highly informative study on social conditions,3 illustrates the right order of things: "Money is for the production, distribution and exchange of material goods and (these) goods are meant to favor the development of human personality in Christ. There is an anti-Christian as well as an anti-natural perversion in the existing reversal of order by the subordination of human persons to production and of production and distribution to finance." By associating the 16th century split of Catholic unity with the modern system of money-creation he bemoans that they have left "disastrous repercussions on human personality, family life and private ownership, and finally led to the domination of those who manipulate the exchange-medium and to terrible international struggles."
Bibliographical Note
For the works used in this last chapter on the Protestant Revolution, see the previous studies beginning with chapter V
Notes
1. The Cenacle of Meaux, Margaret, the King's sister. and the alternating policy of Francis I were discussed in the last chapter.
2. M. J. Spalding, History of the Protestant Reformation, vol. I, p. 391.
3. The Mystical Body of Christ and the Reorganization of Society, p. 102.
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