Calvin. History and Reception of a Reformation Week 5. Reading Calvin Today Sequence 2. Calvin, Object of Hate? Welcome to this sequence, which will focus on the dark side of Calvin's legend; in other words, John Calvin as an object of hate. Speaking schematically, it could be said that the dark side of Calvin's legend involves two paradigms. The first, dating back to the 16th century, when Calvin was still alive, endured until the 18th century and even into the 19th. The second paradigm developed during the 20th century. Upon Calvin's death in 1564, a certain number of texts were written about him, including several biographies. The first of these was the work of Calvin's close collaborator,
Theodore Beza. In it, Beza wrote of the pain of losing such a great servant of God. Beza's laudatory biography was followed by one much less sympathetic, entitled "Life of Calvin," published in 1577 by Jérôme Bolsec, a Carmelite theologian and physician who'd spent time in
Geneva and had been banished from the city in 1551. The full title of Bolsec's biography was "History of the life, customs, acts, doctrine, constancy and death of John Calvin." What exactly was it about? Bolsec depicted Calvin as cowardly and authoritarian. He insisted above all on Calvin's debauchery. According to Bolsec, Calvin, while still a young man living in Noyon, had been convicted of sodomy. This accusation, which has been thoroughly discredited by modern historians, found its way into just about every anti-Calvinist text published by Catholics, well into
the 18th century. There also arose, in the 17th century, a series of fantastical, far-fetched claims directed at Calvin. For example, it was reported that according to the annals of Noyon (dated 1633),
Calvin's mother, when she gave birth to this future heretic, also released from her womb a swarm of bees -- as if to leave no doubt of her newborn son's association with the devil. Not to mention the endless series of insults that underpinned almost every religious controversy and flowed freely from the pens of Calvin's opponents: Calvin was a con man, an apostate,
a man devoured by his libido. So that's the first paradigm, which gave way to a second and entirely different paradigm. This second paradigm flourished during the 20th century. This time, Calvin was depicted as inhuman and dictatorial. For example, a Catholic Dictionary of Theology was published, in several installments, over the course of the first half of the 20th century. The letter C, under which the "Calvin" entry appears, was published in 1905. This Dictionary was used in every French-speaking Catholic seminary well into the 1960s, 70s and 80s (and is still in use today in some places). The Calvin it depicts is a man obsessed by a single goal: "to replace the Pope's church by Calvin's church." He is described as an authoritarian, a man with the soul of a sectarian. A man who, unlike Luther, did not have a human, sympathetic, jovial side -- a personality that, even if one disagrees with his ideas, tends to arouse feelings of compassion. The author Stefan Zweig also described Calvin in a similarly inhuman light in a work, published in Vienna in 1936, entitled "Castellio gegen Calvin" ("Castellio against Calvin"). In "Castellio against Calvin," Zweig describes life in Geneva during Calvin's time. Geneva was a totalitarian kingdom; Calvin its dictator. The Consistory established by Calvin was, in Zweig's words, a "gestapo of people's moral behaviour." The worst kind of dictator, for Zweig, is the man who practices asceticism. Calvin was such a man; therefore nothing good can be expected from him. For Zweig, dictatorships are necessarily built and maintained by violence -- thus Calvin's Geneva was a city that directed violence towards its own population. This is evidenced, according to Zweig, by the trial and, ultimately, the execution of Michael Servetus. Zweig was encouraged to write about Calvin by a man who, at the time, was pastor of the Saint-Pierre cathedral (in a sense, then, an heir of Calvin): Jean Schorer. Schorer was a liberal pastor who personally detested Calvin and provided Zweig with a certain number of documents to help him in writing his book. It's important to understand the context in which this book was written. In 1936, Zweig's true enemy was not Calvin, but a rising dictator who was rapidly putting his malevolent stamp on all of Europe: Adolf Hitler. In Zweig's portrait of Calvin, all that was missing was the little mustache and perhaps a lock of hair over the forehead. When Zweig likened 16th century Geneva to Germany under the Third Reich, he was in fact taking a stand against the Nazi regime. As many historians have argued, it was not Calvin that Zweig was talking about, but Hitler. Taking a stand against Hitler was of course perfectly legitimate; in 1936 Vienna, it needed to be done -- and Zweig's books were duly burned following the 'Anschluss'. Yet, from the historian's point of view, the attempt to transpose one reality -- that of 20th century totalitarianism -- onto another -- 16th century Geneva -- is highly problematic:
the 16th century did not possess the means and the knowledge to put totalitarianism into practice --
even if one accepts the dubious assumption that it had the desire. Thus a certain number of historians, including such erudite Genevans as Henri Delarue and Paul Geisendorf, have shown that Zweig's book is replete with historical errors,
and that its outlook itself is largely meaningless. From a historical point of view, it can be said that Zweig's book is of no value whatsoever. Zweig is a great writer; his works are well worth reading from a literary point of view. But it would be a grave mistake to make him out as a historian, and hence to use his book as a basis upon which
to imagine who and what Calvin was in 16th century Geneva. Yet this picture of Calvin the dictator has endured in the minds of many. Calvin is still depicted in mass media as a power-hungry despot. When Khomeini came to power in Iran in the late 1970s, journalists took to describing Calvin as an
Ayatollah. When the Hezbollah came to the forefront, Calvin was likened to a member of Hezbollah. This type of journalistic prose, while prevalent, has nothing -- absolutely nothing -- to do with historical reality. It is undeniable, nonetheless, that this "dark legend" of Calvin has gained a foothold in the minds of many. Whenever someone refers to Geneva by the nickname "city of Calvin," it is almost always meant pejoratively. "There are not enough tramways to get home after a concert" -- the "city of Calvin" is to blame. Calvinism is a morality that forbids you from expressing joy and exuberance -- here again, the "city of Calvin" is likely to be invoked. Thus, although Calvin's legend is a part of history insofar as it reflects the development of a certain vision of the man, it does not correspond to the reality of the 16th century, nor to what historical
research tells us about the true nature of Calvin's deeds and accomplishments in Geneva. This sequence is being filmed in the University aula. We are now going to take a short walk of a few hundred feet over to the International Monument to the Reformation, where we will try to present a different picture of Calvin. I invite you to join me for the next sequence in our course, in which I'll have the pleasure of introducing you to Luc Weibel. We've reached the end of this sequence; thank you for your attention.
