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

Though Calvinism played a decisive role in the origins and history of the Dutch Republic, no work of Calvin’s appears in Israel’s bibliography. Presumably he is unaware that he has described precisely the kind of revolt justified by Calvin in the passage from the Institutes quoted above. He attributes to Calvinism the influence of “clear doctrines,” but it seems not to have occurred to him to wonder what the content of those doctrines might have been. But the shadow of presumed Calvinist illiberalism — Acton says “the order it defended or sought to establish was never legitimate or free” — hovers over his interpretation of the culture of the Republic. The point is made repeatedly that the famous liberty of the Dutch had its dark side — on one hand, women may have enjoyed unprecedented status, freedom of movement, and autonomy, but, on the other hand, prostitution was suppressed. It seems we are always obliged to choose our poison.

Simon Schama, in The Embarrassment of Riches: An Interpretation of Dutch Culture in the Golden Age (1988) also assumes Calvinist illiberalism, and assigns the enlightened aspects of the culture to other influences. He says, for example, “Calvinist suspicions and anxieties did not … monopolize the cultural response to Jews and Judaica. Humanist scholars, many of whom were busy reviving Hebrew as one of the three indispensable classical languages, were capable of softening the divisions between one faith and another in the interests of scholarly community.” He would have learned from closer acquaintance with the history of the Reformation period that the study of Hebrew was a religious and especially a Calvinist discipline. It was Calvin himself who instituted the study of the three languages in the academy that he established for the training of clergy in Geneva years before there was a Dutch Republic. Ministers educated in his tradition studied Hebrew as a part of their training until the middle of the present century. Schama’s characterization of the Calvinist view of the Old Testament is thoroughly misinformed, nor is there any sign elsewhere of acquaintance with the theology. No work of Calvin’s is listed in his bibliography.

Acton’s influence is very visible in the work of the prolific American religious historian Roland H. Bainton. In an essay titled “Protestant Persecutors,” published in 1935, his nine-page discussion of Calvin is fortified, to all appearances, by sixty-eight footnotes, almost all of them simply citations of volume and page numbers in the Calvini Opera, the forbidding nineteenth-century Swiss edition of his complete works in the original Latin and French. By comparison, Acton seems tenderly solicitous of the reader. Of the three discussions of Calvin in English cited by Bainton, one is an article of his own and another is Acton’s History of Freedom. Almost all the rest are in German, which tends to disguise the fact that Calvinism has had a long and uniquely significant history in English-language culture and theology, reflected not least in the availability of translations of most of the texts Bainton refers to. Bainton is writing for Americans, who then still included the largest concentration of Calvinists ever to exist on earth, as he would have known, being himself a Congregationalist. Yet he writes as if he were describing a theology and an ethos not only wholly alien to them but also beyond their competence, over their heads. This Duke-and-the-Dauphin style of scholarship is really very funny. We can see in it the importance of the persistence of yokelism among us, and of our ever unbridled deference in the face of pretension.

Bear in mind that Calvin approved the execution of only one man for heresy, the Spanish physician known as Michael Servetus, who had written books in which, among other things, he attacked the doctrine of the Trinity. One man is one too many, of course, but by the standards of the time, and considering Calvin’s embattled situation, the fact that he has only Servetus to answer for is evidence of astonishing restraint. Consider Luther and the Peasants’ War. Consider the Inquisition. Out of this anomaly, this one execution, has come all the writing about Calvin’s zeal for persecution, till he above all others is associated with it. Bainton says, “Calvin brought Protestant persecution to a head. He began where Luther left off. Euphemisms disappeared. Calvin did not pretend that persecution is not constraint of conscience. He did not worry about any conscience save his own which compelled him to vindicate the divine majesty.” He continues, “Heresy was for him, as for the Middle Ages, a sin against Christendom … He felt as keenly as Augustine the sin of schism and could not but regard heresy as an offense against Christian society.” But Bainton offers no evidence that anyone else took another view. “Heresy” is, after all, a word freighted with just such assumptions.

Geneva in the time of Calvin had in fact reformed its laws so that religious infractions could not receive a penalty harsher than banishment. Servetus came there perhaps for this reason, having escaped from imprisonment by the Inquisition in Vienne. (Oddly, this escape is one of the things he was charged with in Geneva.) Then the Genevans broke their own law by trying and burning him. Disheartening as that fact is, it nevertheless indicates that Calvinist Geneva was eschewing a practice which was, and for centuries had been, commonplace all over Europe — as Geneva was well aware, since their coreligionists elsewhere were chief among those being burned.

Bainton sees Calvin’s use of the Old Testament as a device for evading the Sermon on the Mount — “The gentle Savior who said, ‘Love your enemies’ was prefigured by David, who sang ‘Do I not hate them, O Lord, that hate Thee?’” Bainton says, “This resort to the Old Testament necessitates also a picture of God as ruthless and arbitrary … In the service of such a God we must crush all considerations of humanity.” This is, of course, Bainton’s reading of the Old Testament, certainly not Calvin’s, and it is an alarmingly hostile one. Calvin wrote a commentary on Psalm 139, the psalm which Bainton quotes here. In it he says, “We are to observe … that the hatred of which the Psalmist speaks is directed to the sins rather than the persons of the wicked. We are, so far as in us lies, to study peace with all men; we are to seek the good of all, and, if possible, they are to be reclaimed by kindness and good offices: only so far as they are enemies to God we must strenuously confront their resentment.” He says, “David’s example should teach us to rise with a lofty and bold spirit above all regard to the enmity of the wicked, when the question concerns the honour of God, and rather to renounce all earthly friendships than falsely pander with flattery to the favour of those who do everything to draw down upon themselves the divine displeasure.” Surely it is fair to wonder why Bainton did not consult the Calvini Opera before denouncing Calvin’s bloody-mindedness. A better scholar would certainly have known that this verse was not traditionally taken to “crush all considerations of humanity.” Augustine wrote a gloss on the psalm also. He takes David to mean, “I hated in them their iniquities, I loved Thy creation. This it is to hate with a perfect hatred, that neither on account of the vices thou hate the men, nor on account of the men love the vices.”

Bainton does note that Calvin would not countenance the breaking of icons, an excess sometimes engaged in by people who claimed his influence. He notes that Calvin restrained the Comte de Coligny, a powerful supporter in France, from acting to defend the Protestants there by saying, “Better that we should perish a hundred times than that the name of Christianity and the Gospel should be subject to such a reproach.” Yet he says, “If Calvin ever wrote anything in favor of religious liberty it was a typographical error,” like Acton, offering no instance of his supposed frothing intolerance except the trial and execution of Michael Servetus.