Marilynne Robinson - The Givenness of Things

Considering the variety of Protestantisms already active on the Continent, it is striking that Calvin should have had so singular an impact among the English. Arthur Golding, uncle by marriage to the Earl of Oxford, best known now for his translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses , was also an important translator of Calvin’s sermons and commentaries from French and Latin, including a three-volume Commentary on Psalms. Golding’s Metamorphoses is, of course, the book most frequently alluded to by Shakespeare after the Bible, typically the Geneva Bible. And there were a number of important printers and booksellers in London at this time who were French Protestant refugees, including Shakespeare’s first publisher.

More important, I would suggest, is the similarity between Lollard or Wycliffite theology and Calvin’s theology, for example, in their interpretation of Communion or Eucharist. Many critics, taking transubstantiation to be the one understanding of the sacrament that realizes the presence of Christ in the Supper, repeat the canard that for Protestants the rite is symbolic only. In fact the rejection of transubstantiation had to do with the role it asserted for priests, the teaching that they uniquely are capable of making the presence of Christ real, in effect interposing themselves between the faithful and the Lord’s gift of Himself. The twentieth-century Reformed theologian Karl Barth describes Calvin’s conception of the Eucharist as of a high and holy mystery. “We must listen to the words. We are told to take, and that means that it is ours; we are told to eat, and that means the other thing that we cannot see or take or eat becomes one substance with us. The whole force of the sacrament, says Calvin, lies in the Word: ‘given for you,’ ‘shed for you.’ Those who take in the language of the sign truly take the thing signified.” A poem attributed to the young Queen Elizabeth expresses the same understanding:

Hoc est corpus meum

’Twas Christ the Word that spake it.

The same took bread and brake it,

And as the Word did make it,

So I believe and take it.

I pause over this because Puritanism especially is treated as having been a stripping away of the poetics of the traditional faith, out of some supposed shopkeeperish impatience with the beautiful. This notion in turn occludes the indisputable fact that much of the literature and poetry of the English Renaissance was the work of people who were Puritans and Calvinists. Here I will mention only Spenser and the Sidneys, Milton and Marvell, though it is relevant that Arthur Golding translated Abraham’s Sacrifice , the first play written on the model of classical drama in a modern European language. Its author was Théodore de Bèze, Calvin’s closest associate in Geneva. The play went through twenty-three editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Calvin himself was a famous stylist in French and Latin, though the way historians and critics speak of him makes his reputation for eloquence seem an anomaly. His dozens of volumes might as well have “predestination” and “depravity” inscribed in blackletter on every page for all the information these scholars offer, or have, that might be more sufficient to the subject. In any case, it is true that the arts of English Renaissance culture were markedly weighted toward the literary rather than the visual. A dispassionate appraisal might not find the world poorer for this fact.

To say that Calvin was widely read is by no means to say that everyone who read him agreed with him. Nor is it to say that there was a considerable overlap of his readership and Shakespeare’s audience. Still, it seems arbitrary to dismiss the significance of this readership. The society was moving toward civil war, and the insurgent and militarily successful side was called Puritans or Calvinists or Roundheads, the last a derisive term for the lower classes. This would imply that Calvinism was popular in the way Lollardy was popular also, despite and because of the learning and prestige of their great theologian and the power of his thought. The affinity between Wycliffe and Calvin, Lollardy and Calvinism, is strong enough to permit the thought that Calvinism, from an English popular point of view, was less an innovation than a restoration, a boldly public assertion of beliefs it had been perilous to utter for generations. The source of this affinity is not obvious. I know of no mention of Wycliffe by Calvin, though if Hus and Luther were aware of him, no doubt he was aware of him, too. In some sense Wycliffe and Calvin may have had a common source. The Reformers were not the first European critics of priestly celibacy or of transubstantiation. Long before the Reform there were the Waldensians in Italy and southern France, a persecuted egalitarian sect whose piety, like the Lollards’, was formed around vernacular Bibles and who also merged with the Reformation. Before Calvin joined the Reform, his cousin Pierre Robert had made a new translation of Scripture for the Waldensians. Since celibacy and transubstantiation became doctrine and dogma only in the thirteenth century of the life of Christianity, isolated communities or groups committed to another experience of the church might have continued to adhere to the customs and teachings of those earlier centuries. The claim these movements made to having origins in the primitive church, often dismissed as crude biblicism, may have had a real basis. When beliefs are driven underground, it is difficult to gauge their actual importance. When their adherents are persecuted they tend to scatter, taking their faith with them into new territories and populations, as for example the Huguenots in Renaissance London had done.

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It is broadly assumed that the Elizabethan population subscribed to an ideology that enshrined the existing order of things. I have seen a recent history that invokes in all seriousness E.M.W. Tillyard’s old variant on Arthur O. Lovejoy’s Great Chain of Being . Tillyard asserts that the resourceful Elizabethan mind simply could not think beyond the manifest goodness and necessity of the divinely established hierarchy that ordered not only physical nature but also human social and political relations. Again, this was a society drifting toward civil war, toward the startlingly modern trial and execution of a reigning king. In their own recent history, the English had seen repeatedly that notionally hereditary monarchy with all its uncertainties and complications could and did untune the string of social order to disastrous effect. Shakespeare opens his first history play with the hero king Henry V dead on the stage, leaving as successor an infant who would live into adulthood yet never really come of age. The conquests in France, which were unsustainable, in the plays and in fact, left England overextended and impoverished, without authoritative leadership. In more recent history the boy king Edward VI died too young to have left an heir. His half sister Mary, whose father had declared her and his daughter Elizabeth illegitimate in order to bar them from succession, did succeed Edward, and in turn left no heir. Elizabeth, famously, did not marry. Monarchies and dynasties in dissolution, the disintegration of powerful persons, are subjects to which Shakespeare returns persistently. If there was a divinely ordained and inviolable order of things, it was in fact violated so continuously and so profoundly as to disappear in the endless turmoil of the actual world. It is hard to imagine how God’s will could be inferred from a system that at best constantly threatened collapse even while it sustained a violent order. When at his trial Charles I invoked the sacredness of hereditary succession, his judges could reply that half the kings of England after the Norman conquest were not in fact lawful heirs to the throne. I will concede that William Shakespeare might have looked in at a bear baiting. With a little difficulty I grant the possibility that he sometime danced around a May pole. But I draw the line at the thought that he, the most brilliant mind in a brilliant age, could have given a moment’s actual credence to a Tillyardian Great Chain of Being, a God-ordained social order intrinsic to reality like the relative status of oysters and angels. Certainly this view of things is not to be found in Wycliffe, or Aristotle, in Raleigh or even in Hooker. The list of writers in whom it is not affirmed or reflected would be very long, but one or two are sufficient to dispel the notion that Elizabethans could only imagine the world in these terms. And one on any list should be Elizabeth herself. She said, “I know the inconstancy of the people of England, how they ever mislike the present government and has their eyes fixed upon that person that is next to succeed; and naturally men be so disposed: ‘More to adore the rising than the setting sun.’” She said this in reply to the urging of those who believed that by bearing a child, producing a clear successor, she would ensure political stability and order.