The ideas of the Reformed Church were propagated across Europe through an underground network whose members embraced a single book, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, that was composed in Latin, published in Frankfurt in 1536, and then translated into many languages. Upon publication, its author, a French humanist named Jean Cauvin who had left Paris for Switzerland two years earlier, became Calvinus.
Winter 1534: Jean Cauvin is forced to flee Paris, to leave Babylon behind, without ever turning back. In France, after anti-Catholic posters had surfaced in various cities, “votaries of Jesus Christ” — those hot-headed believers whose souls were inflamed by ideas from Germany and elsewhere abroad — were persecuted. They believed that God alone could save; that the pope, the church, the holy mass, the saints, the miracles, and even human works could not contribute to salvation. These men and women would soon be known as Protestants. Cauvin, or Calvinus in Latin, was one of them. This humanist and lawyer who had studied, like so many others, at the University of Orléans was not yet well known. He was an autodidact when it came to theology, newly won over by the ideas of Martin Luther, the German monk who had started it all in 1517. Unless Luther had instead ended it all. For it came to seem like the end of a world, the end of Christianity. In 1534, Calvin was twenty-six, and he would seldom return to Paris. He would remain a refugee, looking at France from the outside, far from the center. A sentinel on the fringes of the kingdom, he would launch ideas to conquer Europe.
To be precise, it was a book that conquered the world. In January 1535, Calvin sought refuge in Basel, Switzerland, taking up residence with the printer Conrad Resch, among the first to distribute Lutheran books in France. Basel, the city to which Erasmus had retired, accepted the Reformation under the influence of the German humanist Johannes Oecolampadius. It was there that, in the spring of 1536, during the Frankfurt fair, Cauvin became John Calvin with the publication of the work that would make him famous and spread “Calvinism” far and wide. Composed in Latin, the language of international communication, the five-hundred-page Institutes of the Christian Religion came in a small size. Easy to carry, easy to hide, it was an apologia framed as catechism and also a cry of alarm that, by presenting a synthesis of new religious ideas, tried to convince King Francis I of France to extinguish the fires that were everywhere being lit to burn Reformers at the stake. Six chapters in all. The first four revolved around the law (an explanation of the Ten Commandments); faith (the Apostles’ Creed); prayer (the Lord’s Prayer); and the sacraments (baptism and communion). There followed two further chapters, one on the “false sacraments” (penance, confirmation, extreme unction, order, and matrimony) and the other on Christian freedom, the church, and the state.
The first printing sold out within a year. There would be more than twenty subsequent editions in the sixteenth century alone. Even the author was surprised at his book’s success — particularly as it contained little that was really new. There were traces of Calvin’s humanist readings — of Seneca, about whom he had published a commentary in 1532 — but it mainly rehearsed the bolder theses of “protesting” Europe, which Calvin had read with passion and now presented in a new configuration. He never hid his admiration for Luther. The organization of the Institutes and many of its ideas were borrowed from his Catechism, published in 1529, and from his great classics, On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church and On the Freedom of a Christian (1520). The success of the Institutes earned Calvin an invitation to Geneva from William Farel, who had just persuaded his city to adopt the Reformed religion. In Geneva, from 1536 to 1538, Calvin had his first experience of pastoral duties, which he broadened in Strasbourg after his expulsion from Geneva, working with the Alsatian theologian Martin Bucer. Basel, Geneva, Strasbourg: he was always near borders, near margins. Calvin would always be a pastor for the edges of the world.
In Strasbourg from 1538 to 1541, Calvin was a pastor to French Protestant refugees who had fled the persecution at home. He gave numerous sermons and extended his knowledge of the discipline and structure of the church. He also kept reworking his Institutes, whose final edition would come out in 1559. In 1539, he revamped the first edition, influenced by the Loci communes of Philip Melanchthon, Luther’s closest disciple. Calvin also absorbed the work of the Swiss reformers Ulrich Zwingli and Heinrich Bullinger. Gradually, the concepts took on a more personal character. Calvin tried to reconcile Protestant theologians on the subject of the mass, which he called the Lord’s Supper, rejecting the position that it was a sacrifice but also Zwingli’s idea that it was no more than a “memory” of Jesus’s Last Supper. Calvin believed that the Eucharist contained the “true presence” of Christ, but “in spirit”; the bread remained bread while hosting the body of Christ thanks to the intercession of the Holy Ghost.
Most importantly, in the 1536 edition of the Institutes Calvin developed the Calvinist concept par excellence, the doctrine of “double predestination”: God has from eternity divided the elect from the fallen, with the former preordained for eternal life and the latter for eternal damnation. Some have found predestination terrifying, but it is also, as the historian Denis Crouzet has argued, a panacea against anxiety. Blind and sinful creatures since their exile from the Garden of Eden, human beings can do nothing by their own actions to ensure their salvation. It is enough for them to have faith and put themselves in the hands of a just and all-powerful God. By offering respite from actions, prayers, and traditional religious processions, predestination relieves the pressing anguish that so often cripples believers. Freed from impossible calculations about their fate on Judgment Day, men and women could peacefully go about their lives on earth, no longer tortured by the afterlife.
Calvin quickly realized that he would need to translate his Institutions out of Latin. In order for the merchant, the tanner, the mother to receive the Word, it had to be couched in their own language. How else could the divine message be conveyed without go-betweens? Calvin himself translated his book into his native French. This was the first time the language had ever been used so ambitiously in a defining theological treatise or entrusted with deploying abstract arguments. Calvin raised French to the ranks of a language of reasoning, suitable for philosophical exposition. L’Institution de la religion chrétienne was acclaimed as “the prime monument to French eloquence.” Its linear sentences and sequences of arguments were Calvin’s direct contributions to the invention of France’s “classical language.” This bears reiteration: the decisive impetus toward the creation of modern French came from a man under sentence of banishment, living beyond “national borders,” from Strasbourg first and then from Geneva, where Calvin took up permanent residence in 1541 and published the first French edition. The work was immediately banned by the appellate court of Paris and listed by the Sorbonne on the Index of Prohibited Books. Nonetheless, it made its way into France, smuggled through back channels and finding its way into the hands of anxious, clandestine souls looking for certainty.
The ball was now rolling, and the text was translated into Spanish in 1540 by Francisco de Enzinas, a native of Burgos and a friend of Philip Melanchthon, also a protégé of the archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer. Then came an Italian translation, in 1557, by Giulio Cesare Pascali, a young poet who had sought refuge in Geneva. Others followed: into Dutch in 1560 by Jan Dyrkinus, a lawyer and native of Ghent who emigrated to Emden; into English in 1561 by Thomas Norton; into Basque in 1571; into German in 1572; into Polish (in excerpts) in 1599. And then a Czech translation in 1617 by Jirik Strejc, a Hungarian translation in 1624 by Albert Molnár, and others yet. Having founded an academy in Geneva in 1559 to educate pastors who would preach the reformed message across Europe, Calvin was equipping them with the Institutes, an indispensable manual of Christian life.
In a famous quip, historian Robert Kingdon coined the term “Calvintern,” on the model of “Comintern,” to suggest the Calvinist international, the underground of men and ideas that fanned out from a headquarters in Geneva to undermine the Catholic world. Their proselytism paid off. Numerous reformed churches were established, with confessions of faith derived from the Institutes: in Hungary in 1557, the Hungarian Confession; in France in 1559, the La Rochelle Confession of Faith. The Scottish theologian John Knox and the Walloon Guido de Bres, both of whom spent time in Geneva, imported the Scots Confession (1560) and the Belgic Confession (1561) to their countries. Calvinism also penetrated into Germany despite the strong presence of Lutheranism. In 1563, Frederick III, Elector Palatine, converted to the Reformed religion and oversaw the drafting of the Heidelberg Catechism, which enjoyed enormous success in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, and the Netherlands. To adopt Calvinism was also to reject the Habsburgs.
In a strange twist, persecution played an important role in the spread of Calvinism across national borders. The repressive policies enacted in Spain, Italy, France, and England not only created martyrs but launched thousands of Calvinist dissidents onto the roads of Europe. As early as the 1540s, evangelists were leaving northern Italy for Zurich and Geneva; Walloons were taking refuge in Wesel; and residents of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland were fleeing to London and Emden. Some five thousand English Protestants emigrated to Geneva during the reign of Queen Mary I (r. 1553–1558). In France, where the Huguenots (or Protestants) represented 10 percent of the population, the French Wars of Religion drove thousands of them to seek haven in England and Germany. In the early seventeenth century, the exile’s path expanded globally. Calvin’s Institutes boarded the Mayflower with the Pilgrims in 1620 and landed in North America, where the first book printed, in 1640, was the Bay Psalm Book, which was none other than a Calvinist psalter. After the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, 180,000 Calvinists fled France, scattering across Europe and to America, South Africa, and Russia.
We will stop the story of this diaspora there, at the dawn of globalization. Today, some 75 million faithful from South Korea to Nigeria, by way of Massachusetts, Indonesia, Uganda, and Brazil, embrace the tenets expounded in Calvin’s Institutes. While innumerable factors have contributed to this worldwide success, John Calvin is in no small part responsible. Exile is integrally bound with Calvinism, this “Reformation for refugees” (Heiko Oberman). In Geneva, Calvin considered himself a soldier posted to a military camp, the pastor for an army whose parish was the whole globe (to paraphrase historian Patrick Cabanel). Tirelessly, he called on the elect to leave their towns and countries in order to travel to congregations where they would lie in wait to take power or live clandestinely — sleeping cells for the Gospel. Predestination is also the refugee’s comfort. It gives the believer the certainty of being saved “as long as he is assured of belonging to the aristocracy of salvation, comprising the small number of the elect” (Max Weber). Because it consists of the elect, the empire of Calvinism cannot form a uniform entity; it is made of archipelagos, ready for submersion or insurrection.
This rootless identity also explains the worldwide success of John Calvin’s ideas. The man who was born in Noyon, in the province of Picardy, in 1509, declared in his Institutes, “If heaven is our country, what can the earth be but a place of exile?”
Jérémie Foa
REFERENCES
Cabanel, Patrick. Histoire des protestants en France (XVIe–XXIe siècle). Paris: Fayard, 2012.
Calvin, John. Calvin: Institutes of the Christian Religion. Edited by John T. McNeill. Translated by Ford Lewis Battles. Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001.
Cottret, Bernard. Calvin: A Biography. Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 2003.
Crouzet, Denis. Jean Calvin: Vies parallèles. Paris: Fayard, 2000.
Gordon, Bruce. John Calvin‘s Institutes of the Christian Religion: A Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016.
Oberman, Heiko. John Calvin and the Reformation of the Refugees. Geneva: Droz, 2009.
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