Marilynne Robinson - The Death of Adam - Essays on Modern Thought

Calvin was as positive as Luther in asserting the duty of obedience to rulers irrespective of their mode of government. He constantly declared that tyranny was not to be resisted on political grounds; that no civil rights could outweigh the divine sanction of government; except in cases where a special office was appointed for the purpose. Where there was no such office — where, for instance, the estates of the realm had lost their independence — there was no protection. This is one of the most important and essential characteristics of the politics of the reformers. By making the protection of their religion the principal business of government, they put out of sight its more immediate and universal duties, and made the political objects of the State disappear behind the religious end. A government was to be judged, in their eyes, only by its fidelity to the Protestant Church. A tyrannical prince could not be resisted if he was orthodox; a just prince could be dethroned if he failed in the more essential condition of faith.

And more to the same effect. But here is the passage from Calvin quoted in Acton’s footnote. I include in italics the paragraph which immediately precedes it in the Institutes, because it is highly germane, and I supply language Acton omitted from the passage itself, also in italics, insofar as the difference in word order between the Latin and the translation allows them to be set apart.

But however these deeds of men [that is, the overthrow of Old Testament kings] are judged in themselves, still the Lord accomplished his work through them alike when he broke the bloody scepters of arrogant kings and when he overturned intolerable governments. Let the princes hear and be afraid.

But we must, in the meantime, be very careful not to despise or violate that authority of magistrates, full of venerable majesty, which God has established by the weightiest decrees, even though it may reside with the most unworthy men, who defile it as much as they can with their own wickedness. For, if the correction of unbridled despotism is the Lord’s to avenge, let us not at once think that it is entrusted to us, to whom no command has been given except to obey and suffer.

I am speaking all the while of private individuals. For if there are now any magistrates of the people, appointed to restrain the willfulness of kings (as in ancient times the ephors were set against the Spartan kings or the tribunes of the people against the Roman consuls or the demarchs against the senate of the Athenians and perhaps, as things now are, such power as the three estates exercise in every realm when they hold their chief assemblies), I am so far from forbidding them to withstand, in accordance with their duty, the fierce licentiousness of kings, that, if they wink at kings who violently fall upon and assault the lowly common folk, I declare that their dissimulation involves nefarious perfidy, because they dishonestly betray the freedom of the people of which they know that they have been appointed protectors by God’s ordinance.

Obviously, there is no mention of institutional religion here at all, and certainly not of the Protestant Church, which, at the time Calvin wrote these paragraphs, could hardly be said to have existed, and never did exist as the monolith Acton seems to conjure. The justifications given here for resistance to tyranny are precisely political — defense of “the freedom of the people.” Since he finds his chief examples of “magistrates of the people” in pagan governments, clearly Calvin does not consider the political state essentially Christian, let alone Protestant, nor imagine that God acts only to vindicate the rights of the church. Calvin does not discuss the consequences of the absence of offices entrusted by God with the defense of the people, as Acton implies; instead he says the three estates “in every realm” hold the power of restraining kings, and must assert it. Acton’s interpretation of the passage is fanciful at best, and could be used as evidence that his Latin was really very poor, if his deletions were not so effectively deployed to disguise the actual drift of Calvin’s argument.

The footnote does draw attention to the fact that the long sentence which ends the second Latin paragraph quoted by Acton concludes with the word veto. This is a rhetorical strategy of emphasis and irony. Veto is the word the Roman tribune of the people spoke to forbid an action of the Senate which he took to be hostile to the interests of the plebeians. In this instance Calvin says non veto, “I do not forbid” — the action of a senate in defense of the “lowly common folk.” This is curious language from Calvin, who makes very little use of the first person, and who, as a young fugitive writing anonymously, was hardly in a position to forbid or assent to anything. The use of the word here could be a joke, or a threat, or a promise, or all three at once. In using it, Calvin puts himself in the role of a pagan and entirely political “magistrate of the people.”

Since Acton’s subject is the history of freedom, it is as the enemy of freedom that Calvin is especially reviled by him. He says, “… [Calvin] condemned all rebellion on the part of his friends, so long as there were great doubts of their success. His principles, however, were often stronger than his exhortations, and he had difficulty in preventing murders and seditious movements in France. When he was dead, nobody prevented them, and it became clear that his system, by subjecting the civil power to the service of religion, was more dangerous to toleration than Luther’s plan of giving to the State supremacy over the Church.” This erudite man would have known that Calvinists never controlled the French “civil power,” that the civil power served religion precisely in destroying Calvinists, just as it had always served religion in destroying heretics and dissenters.

Acton was an English Catholic reared in Italy. His mother and wife and a significant part of his education were German. He was the student and friend of Johann von Döllinger, a Munich professor and church historian famous for his attacks on the papacy, which were occasioned by the promulgation of the doctrine of papal infallibility in 1870. Acton also strongly opposed this doctrine, though he did not leave the church, as Döllinger did, to join the Old Catholic movement which arose in Germany at that time. He did, however, end the publication of an important English Catholic journal, which he edited, rather than accede to the claim of the church that Catholic writers must be governed by its views and teaching. Döllinger, who trained Acton in new German historical methods, was the author of books on Luther and the Protestant Reformation which are said to be very severe. Aside from the direct influence of Döllinger’s work on Acton, the fact that both of them were vehemently critical of their own church might have predisposed them to emphasize their ultimate loyalty by engaging in still more vehement criticism of other churches. Acton wrote to William Gladstone, hyperbolically, that in the Catholic church “[w]e have to meet an organized conspiracy to establish a power which would be the most formidable enemy of liberty as well as of science throughout the world.” To be worse than this, the other traditions would have to have been very bad indeed.

I suspect Acton’s influence may be reflected at least indirectly in Jonathan Israel’s The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1407–1806 (1995). In his discussion of the Dutch War of Independence from Spain, Israel says:

‘Freedom’ was adopted by William the Silent and his propagandists as the central justifying principle of the Revolt against Spain. In his manifestos of 1568, explaining his taking up arms against the legitimate ruler of the Netherlands, William referred, on the one hand, to the Spanish king’s violation of the ‘freedoms and privileges’ of the provinces, using ‘freedom’ in this restricted sense; but he also claimed to be the defender of ‘freedom’ in the abstract, in the modern sense. He maintained that the people had ‘enjoyed freedom in former times’ but were now being reduced to ‘unbearable slavery’ by the king of Spain.