In an article first published in The Age newspaper, BARNEY ZWARTZ says John Calvin gets a bad rap…
The French writer Stendhal, visiting Edinburgh in the early 19th century, found no entertainment available on the Sabbath except a promenade through the city. Even this had its dangers: “Slow down,” his companion advised. “People will think you are enjoying yourself.”
This anecdote about a country much shaped by the ideological heirs of John Calvin encapsulates the popular image of Calvin as repressive, puritanical and domineering. English historian Paul Johnson compared Calvin to Lenin, saying he was notable only for his ferocity, his passionate self-righteousness and his intolerance.
“If he was inclined to be harsh, censorious and rigorous, that was the temper of the times. In the cauldron of contemporary ideas, Calvin was actually quite a moderate, as his letters show.”
Friday being his 500th birthday, it is timely to redraw this caricature of the man who provided not only the most important theological impetus for the 16th-century Reformation, but was also a founding father of representative democracy, of capitalism, and of public schools. He played a key role in developing the ideas of religious freedom, the importance of the individual conscience and the right to resist tyranny that we take for granted. His impact has been vast, and Time magazine put it back on centre stage this year when it listed “the new Calvinism” third among “the 10 ideas changing the world right now”.
Born in France in 1509, Calvin studied law in Paris and converted from Catholicism to the new Protestantism in his early 20s. In 1535 he moved to Basle and Strasbourg, writing the first version of his magnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, before being called to Geneva, which had recently voted to become Protestant. He fell out with the town council over who would have authority to exercise church discipline, and was exiled in 1538 but persuaded to return three years later. He stayed there until his death in 1564.
By Calvin’s time, the Reformation was in danger of falling into anarchy. Calvin remoulded and revitalised it, developing Luther’s doctrines into a theological system of great power and consistency. He combined deep piety and incredible self-discipline with unrivalled learning, to which he brought the new values and methods of humanism – in fact, he was the first to apply them to the Bible.
If he was inclined to be harsh, censorious and rigorous, that was the temper of the times. In the cauldron of contemporary ideas, Calvin was actually quite a moderate, as his letters show.
He suffered more than his fair share of discomfort and opposition. Constantly embroiled in political problems in Geneva, carrying out a demanding pastoral ministry, preaching six days a week and producing one of the most prodigious literary outputs in history, he was no ivory tower academic. He achieved all this in a home shared with the two children of his wife’s first marriage and the eight children of his brother’s two marriages, who must have provided quite a challenge to scholarly concentration.
One of the biggest stains on his reputation was the execution of Michael Servetus, a man elsewhere condemned to death by “slow fire” by the Catholic Church for heresy. Instead he died at the stake in Calvin’s Geneva, but the story is not simple. Servetus was sentenced by the town council and, although Calvin thought his heresy deserved death, he and the other ministers pleaded in vain for a less cruel execution.
In The Legacy of John Calvin, David Hall identifies 10 ways in which the modern world is different because of Calvin. In founding the Geneva Academy and making free education available to all, he provided a forerunner of modern public education. In the Bourse, he provided welfare to the needy and a stream of refugees (60,000 in 10 years). He devised a system of separation of church and state, while his view of collegial government, aimed at limiting government ambition, “altered the trajectory of governance”. He decentralised authority, requiring at least two councils to agree on decisions, predating Montesquieu’s doctrine of the separation of powers by two centuries.
Another huge contribution was his doctrine of vocation: that all work had dignity and people in any job, not only priests, were serving God. According to sociologist Max Weber, Calvin helped lay the groundwork for capitalism’s rise.
Calvin’s legacy was perhaps assured when his followers founded America. Calvinist theologians and jurists provided the seedbed of US constitutionalism, including religious and political liberty.
At his own request, he was buried in an unmarked grave. But it could not confine his ideas.
This article was first published in The Age newspaper.
