John Calvin on How to Use Words in Turbulent Times

Chapter 1: Turbulent Times 
“When we saw idolatry openly and everywhere stalking abroad, were we to connive at it? To have done so would have just been to rock the world in its sleep of death, that it might not awake” – John Calvin, in The Necessity of Reforming the Church (1554).

The world as the young Calvin knew it was a world in which matters of political allegiance and religious identity were deeply intertwined and difficult to unravel. Born in Noyon (1509) and educated in Paris, Orleans and Bourges (during the 1520s), Calvin came of age in a European culture still largely unified in its religious vision. Before the radical rupture we refer to as the Protestant reformation, Calvin’s France was a social and cultural space with Catholicism woven into its very fibers. Both the humdrum rhythms of daily life and the pageants, parades, and spectacles of holidays reinforced for French citizens an overwhelming sense that being a good Catholic was synonymous with being a good citizen. By the time the young Calvin arrived in Paris in 1523 or so, fault lines and stress fractures could already be seen in this cultural edifice.
Even though Luther’s religious ideas began to filter into the French universities by the early 1520s, reform efforts were mild in character, calling for changes from within the traditional Church. Those sympathetic to various reform causes during the 1520s were broadly referred to as “Lutherans” by Catholic traditionalists, even though some French evangelicals – like Calvin – were influenced as much by the Swiss reformers as by Martin Luther himself. But in the France of this early period, it was possible to be both “Lutheran” and “Catholic” at the same time.

Luther’s works were being eagerly read in Paris in early 1519. The Sorbonne theological faculty was asked to consider the Leipzig debate and received the documents in January 1520. Fifteen months later – in April of 1521 – the Sorbonne issued a formal condemnation of Luther. Ganoczy argues that the delay was due to the doctrinal confusion that prevailed among the Sorbonne theologians, a confusion that characterized the rest of Europe as well (1987: 49). In fact, the Sorbonne faculty acted only after Luther was excommunicated by Catholic authorities in January of 1521. Generally speaking, the early 1520’s in France were a time of doctrinal flexibility in matters of Catholic self-understanding. But the Sorbonne’s condemnation of Luther also shows that official Catholic resistance to “Lutheran” ideas was already beginning to harden. In August 1521, the Parlement of Paris took the next step of prohibiting the reading of Lutheran books. In spite of this growing anti-Lutheran atmosphere, Catholic movements for the reform of church practices and doctrines continued. Bishop Briconnet, Lefevre d’Etaples, Guillaume Farel, Gerard Roussel and other members of the “Meaux circle” of reform represented this kind of position from 1521-1525. Yet widespread movements for gentle and moderate reform met the consistent opposition of the Sorbonne theological faculty and the Parlement of Paris, signaling to some that the only way forward lay in more radical versions of reform.

By the early 1530s the situation began to change. Some reform minded groups had given up on the idea of a gentle and gradual reform. Events in Paris in 1533 show increasing fissures between conservative Catholic groups and more progressive, reform-minded groups. In November of 1533, Calvin was forced to flee Paris because of his connections with the Rector of the University of Paris, Nicolas Cop. Cop gave an address that alarmed many with its starkly “Lutheran” and critical stance toward the Sorbonne theological faculty. Cop – and apparently Calvin, too – was part of a growing swell of dissatisfaction with the slow pace of a reform that remained tangled in compromises. In the early morning hours of Sunday, 18 October 1534, posters denouncing the mass – the liturgical and symbolic heart of Catholic piety and politics - went up throughout France, an attack on established authorities that disrupted the unity and peace of French culture for the rest of the sixteenth century. After that fateful morning, the question of religious identity became even more contested. Boundaries between religion and politics, heresy and treason, citizens and criminals were being continually redrawn – often violently - despite the absence of cultural agreement about where to draw the lines.

The Placards Affair 
Anyone headed to church on that Sunday morning in the French cities of Paris, Orleans, Blois, Rouen, Tours, or Amboise could have read the scathing and provocative attack on the Catholic Mass that had been fixed in prominent places during the night. The shock and surprise of this public blasphemy against both Church and King led to an energetic search for those responsible. It turns out that the placards were authored by reformed pastor Antoine Marcourt, successor to Guillaume Farel at Swiss Neuchatel. Because of the danger and difficulty of printing an attack on the Mass within France, the placards were printed in Neuchatel and smuggled into France. The scandal caught faithful Catholics by surprise. Public outrage was further fueled by the circulation of a rumor that a placard had even been placed on the King’s bedchamber door in the chateau of Amboise. This rumor, combined with the news that a number of cities had been targeted, suggested that this was the work of a reformed movement more numerous and better organized than many French citizens realized.

The placards made a public splash, having been placed strategically on the doors to public buildings and affixed along well traveled streets throughout several cities in north-central France. The broadsheets were about 10 by 14 inches in size. Hardly any bigger than a legal pad, they were big enough for a title, a preamble, and four main articles. The title and the first word of each paragraph were printed in large, bold characters. Their design and their placement were meant to attract attention, making the reading easy for the curious.

I begin with a brief sketch of the 1534 placards affair for the simple reason that it serves as a flashpoint where a number of important themes converge. In what follows I will begin to highlight some of the themes that will bear significantly on the present study of Calvin’s theology and the question of religious identity. The most salient issue for the present study is what all this has to do with the French exile John Calvin, his theological imagination, and the social contexts in which French Reformed congregations would attempt to live out their evangelical faith. The rest of this chapter will unfold primarily as an unraveling of some of the themes that converged in the placards affair.

The Eucharist as Doctrinal and Political Focal Point 
The content of Marcourt’s broadsheet was an all out attack on the mass. The boldfaced title left no doubt about its explosive tone: “Trustworthy Articles On the Horrible, Great, and Unbearable Abuses of the Papal Mass, devised directly against the Holy Supper of Jesus Christ.” The preamble warns of the complete ruin of the world “if God does not soon provide a remedy.” Clearly the placards themselves – and those responsible for them – suggested that the time for the divine remedy (or at least the first dose) had come. The mass is not only a reverential act that objectively dishonors God (“our Lord is so outrageously blasphemed”) but also functions to distort the lives of those participating in it (“the people are seduced and blinded”).

The first article characterized the mass as an attempt to repeat a “visible sacrifice,” a denial of the “most perfect sacrifice” that took place once and for all in the offering up of Jesus Christ. The second article accuses the mass of having provoked the whole world to “public idolatry.” Christ cannot be bodily present in the bread and wine here below because the resurrected and ascended body of Christ is in heaven. The third article criticized the teaching of transubstantiation. The final article claims that whereas the mass results in the world being deceived and devoured, the Holy Supper results in the upbuilding of the faithful.

This subversive message appeared clandestinely and anonymously on placards posted during the night. But very soon some of the principal supporters of this reform position were going public. By 1535 Calvin was at work writing his own criticism of the Catholic mass, published in 1536 as part of his Institutes of the Christian Religion. Given the dangerous climate across Europe, but especially in France, Calvin’s contributions to sacramental discourse carried social and political freight. The Catholic mass was a sacred ritual backed by longstanding institutions – not only ecclesial but political and legal as well. Thus to challenge the mass itself was also to challenge its institutional backing, not to mention rupturing the tightly woven French social fabric. The French courts ordered those responsible for the placards executed at various places around the city, near where each had posted the placards. This symbolic retribution signals the political significance of the Eucharist in the sixteenth century: the sacredness of the Eucharist and the sacredness of French space were of a piece. The placing of these ritualized executions were meant to symbolically reclaim cities and neighborhoods as bona fide Catholic places. This notion of Eucharistic space is seen once again in January 1535 when Marcourt’s Petit Traite was distributed (yet another attack on the mass). French authorities responded by organizing a procession through the city in honor of the Eucharistic elements. What French person could miss the symbolic significance of witnessing King Francis I himself in procession with God’s sacramental body? Not everyone agreed with the symbolic display of a sacred power shared and circulating between the sacramental elements and the French King, but everyone got the point. As will become clearer in what follows, Calvin came of age in a conflict ridden social context in which religious identities – far from being a private affair of attitudes and beliefs – were created and enacted in public space, or “in the presence of others” as Richard Trexler puts it.

More will be said later regarding the 1536 edition of Calvin’s Institutes. Here I simply want to show that Calvin’s earliest theological writings regarding the Catholic mass reveal a deep affinity with the basic ideas and positions of Marcourt’s placard. Calvin shared the view that the Catholic mass was idolatrous and harmful to God’s people, primarily because of Catholic notions of “sacrifice” and transubstantiation. According to Calvin, Christ’s “sacred supper” had been “completely erased and annulled” by the Catholic claim that “the Mass is a sacrifice and offering to obtain forgiveness of sins” (115). In the Supper believers are offered the “power” of Christ, the “benefits” of Christ’s body won on the cross, but not the “bodily” presence of Christ in the elements. Christ’s body is in heaven, circumscribed and localized as are all other “bodies.” Calvin echoes the placard also in emphasizing how the mass harms instead of benefits the faithful: the “lifeless and theatrical trifles” of the Catholic ceremonies “serve no other purpose than to deceive the sense of a people stupefied” (123).

Offered in a golden cup, [the mass] has so inebriated all kings and peoples of the earth, from highest to lowest, and has so stricken them with drowsiness and dizziness, that, more stupid than brute beasts, they have steered the whole vessel of their salvation into this one deadly whirlpool (118).

Calvin was not shy about utilizing provocative rhetoric to picture the damage done by the Catholic sacramental system. Neither is he shy in suggesting that even the “kings” of the earth were part of the drunken crowd of brute beasts. One wonders whether Francis – referred to as the “most noble King” in Calvin’s preface – read this far. If so, this willingness to criticize royal power may have sat uneasily with Calvin’s repeated claims to be representing an evangelical religious community whose beliefs were not the least bit politically subversive.

The hardening and polarization of religious identity. 
At the beginning of 1534, King Francis I was sympathetic to the reform efforts of Lefevre, Roussel, and others. He was resistant to the excessive and fanatical conservative orthodoxy of the Sorbonne. The King’s response to the placards affair represents a decisive shift, inaugurating a period in which Francis I – formerly sympathetic toward reform – began an earnest campaign against the seditious “Lutheran” heretics.

Before 1534, there were many thoughtful humanists who were supportive of reform. These were moderates who wanted change, but change at a gentle pace and of a non-violent sort. For many within this camp, the violent rhetoric of Marcourt’s text drew the boundaries too sharply and dogmatically. Whereas there had been a number of more moderate calls for reform of the Catholic mass, they tended to speak of the errors that needed to be corrected. Marcourt, on the other hand, pictured the Catholic sacramental system as “horrible and execrable blaspheme,” “idolatrie publique,” a “doctrine des diables” (218). The placards made the reforming cause appear to be a religion of rebels, a schismatic force, demanding all to make a choice one way or the other. Such a situation made it difficult for many humanists to openly continue their support of various reforms, since the reform they envisioned had not included a decisive break with the Catholic Church. “The King, Marguerite of Navarre, the humanists, all actors of a first plan in the possible establishment of a reform of the Church, were, after the Placards, hostile or reticent” (Berthoud, 1973: 221).

The uncompromising and bombastic rhetoric of the placards signaled the importance of the theme of “idolatry.” The flip side of Reformed understandings of practices of worship that honor God, of course, was the issue of “idolatry.” Eire’s work on Reformed rhetoric concerning idolatry has sought to highlight the social and political dimensions of such “religious” rhetoric. He attempts “to chronicle the way in which theology became a sociopolitical ideology . . .” (3-4). Eire’s historical point is not that something called “theology” in an a-political sense gradually degenerated into something like (non-theological) secular discourse. Rather, he seeks to show that latent in the very rhetoric about “right worship” and its parody in “idolatry” were politically significant themes and postures which began to manifest themselves more clearly as the political climate grew more volatile. As Eire puts it, “To study the issue of idolatry in the Reformation is to realize that there is a very concrete social and political dimension to the theology of the Reformers, and that one needs to look beyond the purely theoretical aspect of their thought” (6).

The important connections between “censorship” and increasingly polarized religious identities have been helpfully explored by Higman. The importance of paying attention to censorship, according to Higman, is simply that lists of banned books can serve as a guide to the kinds of material that were considered dangerous. Higman focuses on the Sorbonne lists of banned books because prior to the Roman index of 1557 “book censorship was the responsibility of national authorities, ecclesiastical and secular” (9). The Sorbonne theological faculty wielded influence not only in France but also throughout Europe. Yet its authority was in no way absolute with regard to censorship legislation and enforcement. The ecclesiastical courts, the Parlement, the King, and the Inquisitors representing Rome were all involved as well. Moreover, during the very period when the Sorbonne was taking a leading role in banning “Lutheran” writings there were also a number of works criticizing the authority of the Sorbonne faculty, including one by Calvin himself written in 1544.

By paying attention to censorship lists, Higman is able to show the important role censorship played in the drawing of increasingly defined boundaries between “Catholics” and “Protestants” in France. Before 1543 or so, these boundaries were quite fluid. Up to 1540 (and even beyond), “a wide range of different teachings could lay claim to be the orthodox doctrine of the church” (45) and “orthodoxy” had much less specifiable content than it would come to have following the doctrinal formulations at Trent (1545-1563). But the clear ties between censorship and charges of “heresy” were evident already in the twenty six articles of faith drawn up by the Sorbonne theological faculty in 1543. First, the articles establish for France “a defined, and officially sanctioned, yardstick by which to judge heresy” (55). Most of the contentious issues were settled in favor of ecclesiastical conservatives: penance and confession, works as well as faith, the mass as sacrifice, prayers to Mary and to saints, pilgrimages, images, purgatory, extra-scriptural church tradition, and the Church’s authority to interpret scripture. Second, the Sorbonne obtained the backing of the Parlement and Francis I, who was now squarely behind the traditionalist Sorbonne.

Third, and most interesting for my purposes, Higman notes that the drawing up of the articles and the first extensive list of heretical books happened at about the same time. This is not surprising, since “the definition of orthodoxy is the natural counterpart of the condemnation of heterodoxy” (56). The religious propaganda flooding France from Genevan presses made evident the need for a clearly defined statement of orthodoxy.

Thus the Sorbonne articles of 1543 are a direct answer to Calvin’s [1541] Institution, and the Genevan assault which it spearheaded; and as the Genevan writings had now firmly established a doctrinal position in French, so also the articles had to appear in French (56).

So from the mid-1530’s to the mid-1540’s, a series of multiple reactions served to rigidify competing religious identities. First the reformed placards party elicited an intensification of Catholic boundary markers from French authorities. Subsequently, this attempt to define Catholic identity led to a minor exodus to Geneva of a number of reformed leaders. Thus the playing field was set for a rhetorical war over the imaginations and allegiances of the French public. Calvin’s 1541 French edition of his Institutes elicited the Sorbonne articles – also in the vernacular - of 1543. The rhetorical violence of these developing positions was never free from the threatening shadow of literal violence, and in fact that transition was made repeatedly during the course of the sixteenth century.

The Symbolic, Public, and Social Dimensions of Religious Controversy. 
The response of the Church, the Sorbonne, and the Parlement to the placards incident aimed at more than identifying and punishing those responsible. Also in play was a desire to rehabilitate the holy sacrament that had been publicly ridiculed in the placards, and the sacred space of France that had been polluted by heresy. During the next week, a number of processions were organized. Berthoud describes a procession occurring in Paris on Thursday (October 22), just four days following the discovery of the placards. The clergy carried “the precious body of our savior” through the streets, culminating in services of prayer to God for protection against heresy. In this procession – undertaken in grande pompe – various monastic orders carried the “beautiful relics,” while clergy chanted praises and prayers in behalf of the “holy sacrament.” Other religious and civic leaders carried torches, surrounding the Eucharistic host (corps dieu) along with incense-carrying choirboys. In the procession was the Archbishop of Lyon and other ecclesiatical authorities as well as members of parlement. With this dramatic pageantry, the sacrament was carried to Notre Dame where the mass was solemnly celebrated. The following Sunday, all the churches in Paris celebrated by processions through the streets, “with great devotion of the Christian people and detestation of heretics” (1973: 182).

Marcourt’s second bombshell, the Petit Traite de la Sainte Eucharistie distributed in pamphlet form, provoked yet another procession to honor the holy sacraments on 21 January 1535. In “one of the most grandiose public displays ever staged in the city [Paris] up to that time,” the “royal court, the church hierarchy, the university administration, the municipal government, the religious houses, the trade guilds, and each and every parish in the city came out to witness to the Catholic faith” (Eire, 1986: 191). Important relics were brought out of the churches and made part of the procession in order to remind the city of its sacred inheritance and of the danger of heresy. The streets were elaborately decorated. And at the center of all the pomp and celebration was the Blessed Sacrament itself, carried by the bishop of Paris and followed by King Francis I himself. After High Mass at Notre Dame, the procession culminated in the burning of six heretics. The “propaganda wars” between Catholics and Protestants in early modern Europe is a familiar theme. But the war of symbols over the sacredness of public space in France has received less attention. If the posting of the placards was intended as a symbolic challenge to the idolatrous pollution of France, these grandiose processions formed the equally public symbolic counterpoint.

The significance of religious identities enacted in public space would not have been a surprise to the newly exiled Calvin. It had already marked his formative educational years in Paris. Because we have none of Calvin’s personal papers from the 1520’s, no argument can be made that Calvin was affected by any particular incident. But it seems unlikely that the tense religious climate made no mark on Calvin the student. Ganoczy begins his treatment of Calvin’s early years in Paris by pointing out that in the very month that Calvin would have arrived in Paris – August 1523 – the Augustinian monk Jean Valliere was burned alive in front of Saint-Honore. The Parlement of Paris had charged him with reading and being sympathetic to “Lutheran” ideas. The execution was a dramatic spectacle. He was forced to attend Mass at Notre Dame, then had his tongue cut out and was burned alive at the pig market outside the city. If this public event did not register with young students at the university, the public burning of all Lutheran books ordered by the Parlement most likely would have. The use of tongues and texts was becoming tightly regulated by the various forms of institutional power.

One of the primary themes at play in this dissertation is the theological question concerning the mode or character of God’s presence and power in the world, and the related question concerning how theological symbols of divine power are borrowed and put to use in public debate. Rather than asking this question directly, I will be pursuing it from a number of angles. For instance, what does Calvin have to say about the way that God’s “glory” and “power” is manifest in the buzzing aliveness of the created world? Or, what does Calvin have to say about the way the power of divine grace is present in the lives of the faithful? Or, what about the manner in which the body of the risen Christ is present in the sacred supper? Or – in the light of the political context I have begun to sketch – what does Calvin think about God’s presence and power as they are mediated in and through political and social dynamics? Perhaps within this last question we can imagine a more specific political question. What would Calvin have to say about Catholic claims regarding the sacredness of French space?

Two questions will continue to be in the background throughout the argument. First, do we find in Calvin’s theological writing some sort of pattern for how to think about the mode of God’s presence and power: in the world itself, in the lives of Christians, in the “Lord’s Supper,” and in social or political space? If so, what is that pattern? And how does it differ from prevailing Catholic treatments of these same kinds of issues? Second, could Calvin’s theological meditations on both “French” space and “Genevan” space afford us a fresh way to approach the long debated problem of the relation of Calvin’s theology to the development of “modernity”? It is commonly assumed that Calvinism had some significant influence upon the development of (secular, democratic, and capitalist) modernity. Moreover, this claim is often wedded to the theory that medieval Catholic religion worshiped a God imminent to the world while Calvinism worshiped a transcendent God; Catholicism represents a material religion, while Calvinism is “spiritual.” The ensuing chapters will be, in part, a test of whether these sorts of claims are helpful for understanding Calvin and his legacy in Western culture. So far I have focused largely on Paris. But later in the chapter I will sketch the social situation in Geneva as well. The material/spiritual dichotomy may turn out to be a helpful interpretive grid after all. But the question can already be raised whether the social space of Geneva was any less “sacred” in the Reformed imagination than Paris was in the Catholic imagination.

Before leaving the topic of the symbolic, public, and spatial character of sixteenth century religious life, it will help to situate these issues within recent scholarship. In the last twenty years or so there have been some important contributions to the historiography of early modern Europe. Not only has “social” history come to be seen as a greatly needed corrective of and supplement to standard “intellectual” history, but the very relationship between “social” and “intellectual” history has been scrutinized as well. And this cross-fertilization of theology by critical historiography has been of enormous benefit to historical theology. At the moment I want simply to note that a theological awareness of trends in sociology, history, and literary theory highlights the importance of the public and symbolic character of sixteenth century religious identities.

Consider the emphasis on public social space in the connections between “group behavior” and “personal identity” as analyzed by sociologists:

[N]o matter what one’s nation, class, status, sex, religion, or age, to have an identity is, among other things, to have done things in the presence of others. We presume that actions performed in social spaces partly create and change individual and collective identities. Social spaces are, in our opinion, central to the formation, expression, and modification of individual and group identities. Individuals take action in public to make a certain image of themselves recognizable to others, and in that process they come to recognize their own person in that image. Often individuals enter into public groups to the same end and with the same effect. Through their own public identities, such groups produce not only audience – but self-recognition for the individuals who formed them.

Borrowing Trexler’s language, Catholics and Protestants in early modern Europe “did things in the presence of one another.” One’s identity as Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran, or Reformed had as much to do with “actions performed in social spaces” as it did with what official doctrines one took to be true. I will be focusing on the identities of Reformed communities that were given shape to a greater or lesser degree by John Calvin. And while it is true to say that Calvin challenged the Roman Catholic articulation of the Christian faith, I want to emphasize that inherent in this “doctrinal” challenge was a controversy about social space and power. Put another way, being a good “protestant” in the middle of the sixteenth century had as much (if not more) to do with publicly observable action than it did with merely having a favorable attitude toward Luther’s complaints.

Donald Kelley’s work provides one good example of the way in which historians have tried to take account of the social, public, and symbolic character of religious identity in the sixteenth century. Kelley describes the sixteenth century world as being both “renewed” and “turned upside down.” The source of this turmoil was “that primal scream of the modern world we call the Reformation” (7). This reformation was a complex, multidimensional “traumatic human experience.” The “trauma” was due, in large part, to the simple fact that the “religious” dimension of sixteenth culture was not neatly distinguishable from other cultural spheres. Thus, a “religious upheaval precipitated by Luther involved not only the break-up of Christendom but a whole range of secular disturbances,” including economic ferment, institutional changes in everything from family to state, national uprisings, the disruption of all kinds of social conventions, and a modern “world war.” Whether or not the term “revolution” is appropriate,

[T]he transfiguration of European society in the age of the Reformation ought to be understood not merely as a changing design upon a historical fabric but as a violent, multi-dimensional, and perhaps multi-directional process which needs examining from several angles, through a variety of sources and by a number of methods (7).

Obviously, no such comprehensive analysis of the Reformation will be attempted here. Nevertheless, Kelley’s observation signals a desire to situate “religious” matters within a complex set of interconnected cultural factors. Trexler’s claim that religious identity is inherently “public” is affirmed by Kelley’s picture of a complex cultural fabric which has religion woven through it. This was the world inhabited by Calvin and his audiences. By the second generation of reformers, “conversion implied not only an expression of conscience but also an initiation into a religious community” (68). To convert was to inhabit a new social identity – by behaving differently in public space.

Stephen Greenblatt has written on the construction of literary and social identities in sixteenth century England. Greenblatt is, at one level, reading texts. But he reads texts as pieces of cultural discourse that participate fully in the social symbols that give shape to the broader culture. This cultural lens provides an important link between “literary” and “social” identities. So in line with Trexler and Kelley, Greenblatt offers an interpretation of sixteenth century social identities that takes the public character of these identities seriously. “Social actions are themselves always embedded in systems of public signfication . . .” (5). In this sense, it is quite important that Greenblatt does not understand his title’s “self-fashioning” in the sense of “autonomy.” Were he to do so, the shaping power of social forces and cultural institutions in which all persons lived (and live) would be denied. Rather, he is after “the power to impose a shape upon oneself” (1). But the “self” that is “fashioned” is always a site of conflict between “an authority” and “an alien” (9). In fact, Greenblatt concludes in the Epilogue that “autonomy” is a rather unhelpful way to interpret identity in the sixteenth century. He says he began to perceive “that fashioning oneself and being fashioned by cultural institutions – family, religion, state – were inseparably intertwined. . . . indeed, the human subject itself began to seem remarkably unfree, the ideological product of the relations of power in a particular society.” These wide-sweeping (and bleak) characterizations of the “human subject” may be underdetermined, but that does not cancel the significance of his insight. In sixteenth century England the power of making oneself and being made by cultural powers are “inseparably intertwined.”

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, social conventions were becoming unstuck. What Greenblatt says about Tyndale’s rejection of the Catholic Church applies to protestants of any nationality during this turbulent period: “Man must live outside the institution, must not accept it as mediator between himself and other men or God. There is no longer a dense body of offices, ceremonies, rituals, and traditions passed down from generation to generation, in the midst of which a man takes his place” (158). To refrain from participating in a long-standing and thickly textured batch of cultural practices, or worse yet, to take part in a rival set of practices, this would have been “to have done something in public.”

IV. Citizens and Criminals: Heresy Prosecution after the Placards 
The very next day after the placards were posted, those suspected of involvement were arrested. Condemnations were swift, and in such a dangerous situation, many fled Paris. Kelley claims that by the end of 1534 at least twelve men had been arrested and convicted as a result of the ensuing investigation. Nine of these were burned at the stake (1981: 14). Including the January incident involving Marcourt’s Petit Traite, Monter estimates that two dozen people were executed in conjunction with the turmoil following the placards affair, the largest execution total for heresy in any French city in such a short period (1999: 69f).

If there is any issue that demonstrates the public and social character of religious identities in early modern Europe, it is the issue of “heresy.” In what follows I will rely on Monter’s (1999) work to help situate the circumstances faced by Calvin and others in France within the social and political dynamics elsewhere. Luther began a public crusade against Catholic practices like indulgences and against papal authority in 1517. In spite of the fact that Luther was condemned and excommunicated by the papacy in 1520, and in spite of Luther’s inflammatory remarks before Emperor Charles V at the Diet of Worms in 1521 resulting in an edict outlawing Luther and his writings, he never spent a day in jail (largely due to the protection of his German prince, Elector Frederick of Saxony). Nevertheless, opposition to Luther and his writings became widespread, as Lutheranism was officially opposed by the Sorbonne in France, by Henry VIII in England, and by the Spanish Inquisition by the end of 1521. Despite such resistance, Luther’s followers were not generally prosecuted in the 1520’s. The favorable political climate in electoral Saxony and the success at controlling the propaganda war through the printing industry kept this opposition to Lutheranism from developing into heresy trials and executions in this early period (1999: ch. 2).

Anabaptists in Ferdinand I’s Austria and Charles V’s Low Countries fared far worse from the German peasants’ war (1524-25) to the mid 1530’s. Thomas Muntzer, leader of the peasant revolt, was captured and put to death in May 1525. Zwingli’s Zurich began enforcing a policy of drowning for anyone rebaptizing others in 1527. Rebel leaders like Michael Gaismair (a Zwinglian) and Anabaptist Jacob Hutter were active in Austria and provoked a savage anti-heresy campaign. A 1527 decree made heresy a crime, covering anyone who denied Christian doctrines or the sacraments. Michael Sattler (burned), four of his followers (beheaded), and his wife (drowned) were all put to death in 1527. The 1529 Diet of Speyer is well known as the “origin” of Protestantism, due to the protests of German Lutheran princes and cities against anti-Lutheran legislation. The Diet approved a new imperial law decreeing that any rebaptized person was to be executed, with no need to consult the ecclesiastical courts. Monter concludes that the Tyrolean region of Austria was the site of more suffering by Protestant heretics from 1528 through 1533 than any other territory. Official sources suggest around 250 executions. Gaismair was assassinated in 1532. Hutter was tortured and killed late in 1535.

Charles V ruled both Germany and the Low Countries. In 1529 he issued a decree prescribing the death penalty for unrepentant Lutherans. In 1531 the decree was reissued with the important addition that such matters were to be removed from the slow moving ecclesiastical courts and placed under the care of the speedier secular courts. Heresy hunting and executions in the Low Countries – especially Holland – increased dramatically after the Munster incident in early 1535. The fact that some Anabaptists were radicals inflamed by the rhetoric of Melchior Hoffman while others were pacifist followers of Menno Simons made little difference. Official records show that at least four hundred Anabaptists were put to death in the Low Countries between 1534 and 1540, a number surpassing even that of Ferdinand’s Austria between 1527 and 1533.

The danger of being identified as a Protestant reached its peak in the decade from 1555 to 1564. “Many signs indicate that, overall, heresy trials and public executions of various kinds of Protestants peaked throughout Europe in the years after 1555.” England was an exceptional case in the story of European heresy trials and executions. Most of those executed during the reign of Henry VIII were Catholics whose allegiance to the pope was deemed treason. Obviously, the tide turned against Protestants in the famous Marian persecutions from 1555 through 1558. Hundreds of prominent Protestants fled England. In the Low Countries after 1555 there were both Mennonite and Calvinist martyrs, but Mennonites bore the significant portion of executions. In Spain under Philip II, the Spanish Inquisition was exceptionally successful at stamping out Lutherans in the years after 1559.

Monter emphasizes that the situation in France unfolded much differently from the rest of Europe. French executions of protestant heretics were concentrated in the years between 1544 and 1554, a flurry of activity when heresy prosecution had slackened elsewhere. Thus the 1534 placards affair and its after effects were a sign of a more intense anti-heresy campaign that would build over the next two decades. The chronological high point of France’s heresy prosecution made its situation peculiar, as did the fact that France was spared the problems caused by Anabaptists elsewhere. Yet in France, as elsewhere, it was the secular and not the ecclesiastical courts that proved most effective in repressing various forms of protestantism.

Monter’s chronicle of the social and political situation in France enable us to see the challenges and constraints faced by anyone sympathetic to the reforming cause from 1520 to 1560. While Francis I (1515-1547) had humanist sympathies that tempered his early reactions to the initial excitement about Luther’s writings in France, the conservative parliament and Sorbonne theological faculty did not. Calvin would enroll as a student beginning the five year arts curriculum at Paris around 1523. These were dangerous times for anyone showing sympathies with the Lutheran cause in Paris. Blasphemy (understood as heretical talk about Mary, the Saints, or the Eucharist), sacrilege (understood as dishonoring images or the eucharistic elements), and owning “Lutheran” books were all crimes for which a number of folks were tried and executed at Paris in the 1520’s. Attending “private heretical sermons” got three persons arrested and whipped in the region of Alencon.

Incidents of heresy prosecution waned in the early 1530’s in Paris. But the situation was inflamed once again in November of 1533 when Nicolas Cop – rector of the University of Paris – delivered an address to the University that called for reform and was highly critical of the theological faculty. It was this incident that forced both Cop and Calvin, who apparently had a hand in the address, to get out of town fast. This was no mere paranoia on Calvin’s part: police searched his room and confiscated all of his personal papers just hours after Calvin had fled. Yet it was in the very next year that events in Paris reached a boiling point. At the very time that the Anabaptists had taken over Munster and had staged a coup against Amsterdam, Marcourt’s placard of scathing criticism of the Catholic mass was posted in all the important places. The political danger posed to established governments by seditious religious groups was acutely recognized at this time, and thus it was not surprising that the French political and ecclesiastical response to the placards affair was an all out legal assault on “heresy.” All in all, the efforts to repress heresy were successful. The once flourishing reform movement of the early 1520’s was broken. Throughout the 1520’s and 1530’s, the early French “Lutherans” lacked both social standing and a coherent articulation of doctrine. Calvin’s 1541 version of the Institutes – completed in Strasbourg just before he returned to Geneva - in the French language would begin to remedy this lack of organization and structure.

Monter argues that it was the 1540’s that proved to be the high period of French prosecution of heresy. This means that French courts were tracking heresy feverishly when courts elsewhere in Europe had slowed down. Francis I’s most important legislation on heresy was the 1539 Edict of Fontainbleau. This edict moved the jurisdiction for heresy cases from the ecclesiastical to the secular courts, a policy that had been in effect in Germany and England for over a decade. The effect was that the more quickly moving parliaments replaced the slower moving church courts. The tone of the Sorbonne theological faculty grew more intense as well. In 1543 the theological faculty defined an orthodox credo to be imposed on all public officials; in 1544 they tightened censorship by printing an index of banned books. Also in 1544, Francis I changed his mind about the prosecution of Waldensians in the south of France, joining an all out anti-Waldensian campaign. And from a statistical perspective, heresy prosecutions peaked in the 1540’s at the end of Francis I’s reign.

In summary, Monter estimates that around 3,000 “protestants” were executed for heresy between 1520 and 1565 in Reformation Europe. Peak years for executions in France differed from the peak years elsewhere. But the details of Monter’s argument are less significant for my purposes than the broad picture. Calvin’s education and exile took place in a time of enormous social conflict. Because he had fled Paris himself, he knew well the danger experienced by all who dared publicly confess their sympathies with the reform cause throughout Europe. And it was to folks in these precarious circumstances that Calvin directed a good deal of the writings I will examine in the following chapters. And this is true as much for the successive versions of the Institutes as it is for the more obviously occasional treatises he wrote addressing particular problems faced by Protestants.

One possible theological response to an aggressive heresy campaign by religious minorities would be to claim that God sees the “heart,” and thus it is one’s “attitudes” about the gospel that matter, not outward, ritualized, and public behavior. This was not Calvin’s response. According to Calvin, if evangelicals were to remain in the idolatrous space of France, Christian faith and the right worship of God demanded that they abstain completely from participation in the Catholic sacramental system. But even better than practicing the evangelical faith privately in France, thought Calvin, was migrating to territory where God can be worshiped publicly. In that sense, a good deal of Calvin’s theological writing aimed at constructing alternative sacred spaces where evangelicals could worship freely - places like Geneva.

V. The Placards and Calvin the theologian 
Little is known about Calvin’s conversion to the Reformed movement. But there is little doubt that the persecution of evangelicals in France following the placards affair framed a highly charged social context that was the backdrop – sometimes even the subject matter – of the young Calvin’s theological writing. An unknown French exile living in Basel in 1535, Calvin began writing what he called a “little booklet” called the Institutes of the Christian Religion. It was both a catechetically geared summary of the Christian faith and a defensive political tract. Calvin tells King Francis I in the dedicatory letter that the original intention was simply to transmit the basics of the faith to “our French countrymen” who lacked such knowledge. But a French edition of the 1536 Latin text never appeared, leaving the majority of these “French countrymen” without any direct contact with the initial Institutes. The first French edition of the Institutes did not appear until 1541 and was a translation of the revised 1539 Latin edition. Whether Calvin intended a French version of the 1536 Institutes is not clear. Taking seriously his avowed interest in providing catechesis would suggest that he did. Regardless, the appearance of the original work in Latin suggests that it was intended primarily for educating the French authorities and the German Protestant princes about the content of reformed teaching.

But the original catechetical intent was not the only goal. Calvin went on to explain to Francis I that the second purpose of his Institutes was to defend French evangelicals against political charges of sedition and rebellion. Having perceived that the “fury of certain wicked persons has prevailed so far in your realm that there is no place in it for sound doctrine,” Calvin tells Francis I, “it seemed to me that I should be doing something worthwhile if I both gave instruction to those I had undertaken to instruct and made confession before you with the same work.” After the escalation of persecution of evangelicals following the placards affair, Francis I sent a memorandum to the German Protestant princes in February of 1535. Francis I was trying to nurture an alliance with Germany’s protestants, and thus attempting to persuade them that the French evangelicals were simply political subversives no different from the Anabaptists. The Munster rebellion came to its tragic end in June of 1535. For Calvin and his colleagues to allow their reform cause to be identified with Anabaptism would have been political suicide. The dedicatory letter to Francis, as well as the final chapter of the Institutes, contain Calvin’s argument that important boundaries distinguish the communal identities of Anabaptists and French Evangelicals with regard to politics.

Battles suggests that Calvin’s Psychopannychia (written in 1534/5 and published in 1542) was Calvin’s earliest attempt to distinguish French evangelicals from the more radical Anabaptists. Calvin refuted the doctrine of “soul-sleep,” says Battles, in order to assure Catholics that French evangelicals held no such heretical ideas. (Protestant rejection of Catholic notions of purgatory, prayers for the dead, and the intercession of the saints is what provoked the seemingly insignificant matter in the first place). At Captito’s advice, Calvin did not publish the Psychopannychia. But he could not remain silent on the charge that French Evangelicals were political radicals. The dedicatory letter to Francis said as much. And Calvin reaffirmed the point later in life in his 1557 Preface to the Commentary on the Psalms:

But it happened that while I was dwelling at Basel, hidden there as it were, and known only to few people, many faithful, holy men were burned in France . . . Unless, then, I strongly opposed them to the best of my ability, I could not justify my silence without being found lax and disloyal. This was the reason that roused me to publish my Institutes of the Christian Religion: First, to answer certain wicked charges sowed by the other, and to clear the memory of my brethren whose death was precious in the presence of the Lord; Secondly, as the same cruelties could very soon thereafter be exercised against many poor people, that foreign nations might at least be touched with some compassion and concern for them.

So both in the dedicatory letter to Francis written in 1535 and in the Psalms preface of 1557, Calvin himself testifies that the precarious political situation in France prompted him to write and influenced the goals of his writing.

Calvin’s theological writing would develop and change over the next several decades. One only has to take notice of the significant revisions of the numerous editions of his Institutes to see this. But I hope to show in the following chapters that Calvin’s awareness of the social and political situation of reformed communities would continue to influence his theological writing in significant ways. And one dimension of this effect of Calvin’s theological writing was his attempt to craft a particular religious identity for these reformed communities. This theological fashioning of group identity was complex. Not only was Calvin attempting to carve out an alternative social space within a France saturated with and defined by Catholicism, but he was also burdened with the additional task of seeing to it that reformed congregations were not lumped together with the radical Anabaptists. There was, to put it simply, a propaganda war between forces lined up behind Francis I and supporters of reform like Calvin. It was a battle, at least in part, over how to delineate and characterize the identities of these allegedly dangerous reformed communities.

It is this question about religious identity – and the recognizability of its boundaries and borders – that I will use to explore some central doctrinal themes in Calvin’s writing. Because the question of religious identity was an inherently political question, Calvin’s theological writing - and his theological anthropology in particular - was “political” in a way that cannot be confined to explicit treatments of “politics” more narrowly defined in terms of magistrates, laws, civil authority and national sovereignty.

Battles is right when, in his introduction, he notes the “political frame” of the 1536 Institutes. The opening appeal to Francis I, combined with the closing comments on the theological rationale for Christian obedience to the King, show that Calvin’s writing sensitively registered the tense political climate. But what needs to be noted here is the ambivalence of Calvin’s political posture in this early period. Calvin no doubt wanted Francis I to know that reformed Christians had no seditious aspirations whatsoever, indeed fully supported the French King. In the dedication, Calvin deferentially refers to France as “your realm.” He addresses Francis as “most noble king,” most invincible king,” “most serene king,” “most mighty king,” and “O generous King.” Hardly the rhetoric of the leader of a rebellious and subversive sect. Calvin’s apologetic concerns are clear. “May you not be at all moved by those vain accusations with which our adversaries are trying to inspire terror in you.” Far from “contriving the overthrow of kingdoms” (13), the reformed community is a “poor little church” that has been “wasted with cruel slaughter or banished into exile, or so overwhelmed by threats and fears that it dare not even open its mouth” (2). And in the final section on the obedience owed to civil authorities Calvin is clear that even unjust kings continue to demand obedience due to their installment by God.

Thus in all these ways Calvin’s hybrid text – half apology, half catechesis – gives itself as posing no threat whatsoever to the order established, secured, and maintained by the power of the French crown. The ambivalence mentioned above is due to the fact that this treatise, which gives itself so clearly in one direction, can be taken in quite another. In the dedication, Calvin warns Francis not to dismiss the issue before him. “Now, that king who in ruling over his realm does not serve God’s glory exercises not kingly rule but brigandage” (3). In light of the political climate, what can this be if not a barbed reminder that failing to come to the aid of the persecuted evangelicals or to put a stop to the present array of idolatrous Catholic practices turns Francis from legitimate King into a mere “brigand”? The same ambivalence is registered in the concluding paragraph of the 1536 Institutes. Calvin follows a lengthy admonition regarding the obedience due to the authority of rulers by marking out an “exception” that is “primary” to the rule of obedience itself: “such obedience is never to lead us away from obedience to [God]” (225). It is Scripture itself – “We must obey God rather than men” [Acts 5:29] – which demands the exception.

Let me be clear regarding the alleged “ambivalence.” It has nothing to do with the question of whether French citizens have the right to violently resist and/or remove the King. Calvin is absolutely clear that (private) Christians have no such right. The ambivalence has to do, rather, with the question of the sacredness of French culture and royal power. Put another way, Calvin’s text raises the question of whether Christians ought to continue to participate in an economy of sacramental practices that is deemed to be “idolatrous” in some sense. Calvin’s answer – and here we see something of Marcourt’s placards-theology – was a clear “no.” This answer is laid out in the middle parts of the Institutes. And the upshot is that Calvin’s text could be – and was – taken to mean that the symbolic connections between the French King, the sacramental elements, and a French culture unified by this sacred economy, were to be seen as idolatrous fabrications. Of course, Calvin did not put things this way. The interpretive issue here is whether we ought to have Calvin’s sacramental theology in mind when we read him on obedience and authority. I am arguing that we should. Calvin’s “political theology,” on this reading, should include his understanding of the way the power of Christ’s flesh is present in the host just as much as it includes his understanding of the way divine power is mediated by Kings like Francis.

From France to Geneva 
Paris and Geneva were only two of the many cities and towns that played significant roles in Calvin’s life and in the movement for reform throughout Europe. I focus on Paris not only because it serves as a model of Catholic social space but also because it was the city from which the young Calvin was exiled. I now focus briefly on the social and religious context in Geneva because it became Calvin’s home and the model of Calvin’s theological attempts to create an alternative social space to that of Catholic France. Behind Calvin was the idolatrous public space of Paris, before him was the liturgical space of Geneva. The reforms in Geneva never happened in France, but not for lack of effort on Calvin’s part.

Kingdon asks whether the Protestant reformation in Geneva was a “revolution,” and answers in the affirmative. If the term “revolution” is taken to mean “a sweeping, fundamental change in political organization, social structure, economic property control, and the predominant myth of a social order, thus indicating a major break in the continuity of development,” then what happened in Geneva in the middle of the sixteenth century should be termed a “revolution.” But Kingdon points especially to the rejection of the Roman Catholic bishop and priests in 1535. “A revolution does not have to be aimed at the power of kings and aristocrats or at the bourgousie to be a true revolution . . . The class against which the Protestant Reformation was aimed was the Roman Catholic clergy.”

In 1534 the Genevan citizens ousted the last Catholic bishop. So Calvin came to a Geneva in 1536 that had, only two years earlier, won a long battle for civic independence against Catholic control. When Guillaume Farel arrived in Geneva in 1532, the anti-Catholic sentiment of the city meant that his iconoclastic takeover of the Genevan churches was not opposed. Thus when Calvin arrived in 1536 the city had already decided for reform. The religious situation in Geneva offered clarity about what was not wanted – the traditional forms of Catholic authority had been destroyed – but there was no clear sense of what new structures should be put in place.

Calvin worked with the other ministers to write a code of Ecclesiastical discipline, a confession of faith, and a catechism for Geneva. But the Genevan Council rejected several points in the Articles, namely, the proposed monthly celebration of the Lord’s Supper and the creation of an ecclesiastical disciplinary tribunal independent of the civil tribunals. And some citizens resisted a public confession of faith. These tensions between the ministers and the civil authorities led to Calvin and Farel being expelled from Geneva in 1538.

The civic and ecclesial reform in Geneva, at least during the 1530’s and 40’s, was far from stable. The stability would come only later, in large part from the development of several important institutions. In those earlier years of the Reform, Geneva’s decision to side with the evangelical cause was a precarious and fluid one.

Consider, for example, the vacillating journey of two of Calvin’s acquaintances, Louis du Tillet and Pierre Caroli. Caroli and du Tillet are just two examples of the fact that many persons swerved back and forth between Reformed and Roman Catholic allegiance. Given Calvin’s uncompromising view of the significant differences between these two religious commitments, such wavering worried him. Though only individual cases, they represented for Calvin the real possibility that even some newly reformed communities like Geneva might slip back into the errors of the papal Church. Caroli went from Catholic to Protestant, back to Catholic briefly, became Protestant again, and finally returned to the Catholic faith. That Calvin’s theological disputes with Caroli were bitter comes as no surprise. But du Tillet was an old friend of Calvin’s. Having been in Geneva with Calvin, he left and returned to the Catholic faith. The two exchanged letters in which du Tillet suggested to Calvin that Calvin’s rocky experience at Geneva was a sign from God that Calvin and the Genevans were to return to the Catholic fold.

Yet one more example of the fluid character of Genevan religious identity can be seen in Calvin’s well-known interchange with Sadoleto. The intersection of political and religious change in Geneva during the 1520’s and 1530’s resulted in a city mostly in charge of its own affairs and in transition towards becoming a “Protestant” community. Yet this newly acquired religious identity was far from seamless, and was marked by instability and uncertainty about the shape and extent of reforms needed in both society and church. The exchange between Cardinal Sadoleto and Calvin in 1539 regarding Geneva’s religious identity, while interesting on several fronts, helps make clear that at this early stage the reforms begun in Geneva had yet to be solidified.

Already in 1535, Geneva’s ruling bodies had decided in favor of the reformation, and against the continuance of Catholicism, even to the point of abolishing the mass. In 1536 the citizens of Geneva agreed to the reform measures proposed by the councils. It is probably true to say that at this point “Geneva had reformed in name but not entirely in heart, many of its citizens having wanted rather freedom from the restraints of the old regime than the guidance of the Word of God.” This religious reform coincided with the city’s political liberation from the Catholic bishop and the Duke of Savoy. It was Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret who led the way to the Protestant cause in Geneva, as early as 1533. It was not until 1536 that Calvin happened through Geneva on his way to Strasbourg. Due to disagreements with the city councils over the enforcement of the reform measures, Calvin and Farel were forced out of Geneva in April 1538. Their expulsion marked the presence of conflict within Geneva. No doubt those who had never agreed with the Genevan rejection of the Catholic faith hoped that a return to Catholicism was now a real possibility.

It was at this point of uncertainty about Geneva’s future that Cardinal Jacopo Sadoleto, bishop of Carpentras in southern France, wrote a letter to the Genevans urging them to return to the Catholic fold. Interestingly, Sadoleto was a humanist who had helped author a report strongly criticizing the exaggeration of papal power and calling for ecclesiastical reform in response to the Protestant crisis. Yet the humanist Sadoleto calling for reform made an important distinction between criticism from within and the – to him – unacceptable Protestant rejection of Catholicism all together. Sadoleto’s letter is dated May 1539 and was received by the Little Council of Geneva. Apparently unable to find someone willing or able to reply, Genevan authorities passed the letter on to Bern, who in turn passed it on to the exiled Calvin, then living at Strasbourg. In August 1539, Calvin replied to Sadoleto by calling Geneva to stand firm in its allegiance to the reforming cause. Both letters were published by a Strasbourg printer in September 1539, and then Calvin’s French translations were published in Geneva in 1540.

The two letters provide a helpful window onto the doctrinal-rhetorical efforts of both Sadoleto and Calvin to provide a mirror in which Genevans could see and understand themselves. Sadoleto argues that Genevans should return to the Catholic fold, for a number of reasons. First, the decision whether to return to Catholicism concerns eternal destinies.

[T]he point in question is jeopardy to our salvation; since we set the highest value upon our souls, i.e., ourselves; and since it is not our fortune or our health, or even our body and this mortal life, which are at stake . . . but the point to be decided is whether we are to live eternally most miserable, or most blessed – it behooves us to look around, consider and diligently weight how we may establish ourselves . . . how, I say, we may stand, where the least fear and danger, and the greatest hope and security appear (Olin 2000: 34).

Second, the return to Catholicism would be a turn away from a thin and inadequate understanding of “faith” to one that includes love for and obedience towards God. The third and dominant issue in Sadoleto’s appeal to Geneva concerns the benefits of security and confidence that can be provided only by the institutional Catholic Church. It is through the ministry and sacraments of the Church that all the benefits of faith flow to believers. Here Sadoleto paints the choice between Catholicism and Protestantism as a choice between true and false religion, between reliable tradition and whimsical innovation.

Calvin’s letter to the Genevans casts the community in a far different light. Calvin sees the community not as having strayed from the safety of mother Church and made vulnerable to divine punishment, as did Sadoleto. Rather, he sees Geneva as only recently having begun to breathe the free air again, only recently liberated from the idolatrous prison of Catholicism. Calvin tells the Genevans that Sadoleto is asking them to, once again, put on the “yoke” of Rome.

When the Genevese, instructed by our preaching, escaped from the gulf of error in which they were immersed, and betook themselves to a purer teaching of the gospel, you call it defection from the truth of God; when they threw off the tyranny of the Roman Pontiff, in order that they might establish among themselves a better form of Church, you call it a desertion from the Church (Olin: 51).

Thus Calvin counters Sadoleto’s description of the present situation in Geneva by characterizing the turn to the reforming cause as an act of faithfulness and obedience to God. To the charge that Protestants are “innovators,” Calvin responds that “our agreement with antiquity is far closer than yours” and that “all we have attempted has been to renew that ancient form of the Church, which . . . was afterward flagitiously mangled and almost destroyed by the Roman Pontiff and his faction” (Olin: 56). On the question of true and false worship, Calvin counters Sadoleto by arguing that the Spirit of truth is not simply a matter of historical continuity, but a matter of keeping together the Spirit and the Word of God. Only thus will right worship be offered to God, i.e. the kind of worship that God prescribes in Scripture. This rhetorical battle between Calvin the Reformer and Sadoleto the priest for the hearts and minds of Geneva indicate why it is possible to refer to Calvin’s theological writing as a kind of identity construction. Even beyond his responses to Sadoleto, Calvin was at work to shape the lives of his readers by shaping their ecclesial allegiances as well as the political arrangements under which they lived.

No religious or civic vision captures the hearts and minds of every single person in a city or territory. Obviously there were folks in Geneva who were less than enthusiastic about the legislation of reform spearheaded by Calvin and the other pastors, either because they continued to see the Roman Catholic faith as their true faith or because, having been freed from Rome, they were not eager to have been offered an alternative form of religious authority. Nevertheless, new civic and ecclesial arrangements, as well as new forms of religious practice, gradually came to identify a more or less defined religious consciousness in Geneva.

Yet it would be unwise to overlook the dramatic effects of Reformed Geneva upon the religious and political climate in Calvin’s native France. Calvin’s leadership in Geneva was solidified only in 1555. But this was also the period in which the Geneva company of pastors began sending pastors trained in Geneva back into France. The company of pastors, led by Calvin himself, were well aware that these missionary pastors were undermining the ecclesiastical foundations of French society and that such activity was regarded as seditious by the French government. This is why the campaign to dispatch ministers to Reformed churches within France was undertaken with careful secrecy. Such secrecy was necessary not only to protect the lives of the missionary pastors themselves but also to guard against the Genevan government being suspected of openly challenging France itself. Several of these pastors were captured and executed, having been caught with books and letters that gave them away. Kingdon dramatically captures both the danger and the goal of these missions: “Under assumed names, parading as merchants, by devious mountain paths, the pastors from Geneva reached the pulpits prepared for them in France. There the real work for which they had been so carefully trained and tested finally began” (1956: 40). The role of Geneva in sending pastors into France signals the solidification of Geneva’s leadership in the Reformed cause; it also signals that there were a great number of secret reformed communities in France who desperately wanted pastors. That the protestant cause in France was spreading rapidly can be seen in the simple fact that there were 2,150 Protestant churches in France by 1562. And before long these reformed congregations abandoned the policy of secrecy advocated by Calvin and began to meet publicly. This rise in the publicity of protestant activity culminated with Protestants taking control of several cities.

Monter’s picture of the flurry of heresy prosecution in the 1540’s helps us understand the situation of a good part of Calvin’s audience and situates the importance of the writing he did during this period. During the late 1530’s and through the 1540’s Calvin directed a number of treatises and letters to the issue of “Nicodemism.” Calvin labeled as “Nicodemites” those who claimed to have basic sympathies with the truth of the reform movement but who continued, for one reason or another, to participate publicly in Catholic worship, keeping their evangelical sensibilities a secret. Monter has provided a helpful way to understand why such a pattern of behavior would have become an attractive option in France. Clearly, in the 1540’s the Calvinist movement in France had not achieved any significant degree of organization like it would after 1555. So Calvin’s anti-Nicodemite writings were intended for sympathizers that were only very loosely part of a group, a group without much of an organized institutional identity at all. Monter writes, “A movement so dispersed, so disorganized, and so energetically tracked by royal judges in many parts of France had no real alternative defense other than the camouflage of external conformity to Catholic rituals.” Calvin’s insistence that such “camouflage” was unfaithful to God was in good part responsible for persuading many leading protestants to emigrate to Geneva during the 1540’s.

Conclusion

I began this chapter with the dramatic events in France in 1534-35 because many of the issues my argument addresses in Calvin’s writing converge there, and because this convergence, when analyzed, provides a brief overview of some of the main features of the historical and political context of Calvin’s theological writing. The danger of beginning with such a specific example of these issues is that it might wrongly suggest that my interest in Calvin’s theology is focused exclusively on the mid-1530s. Calvin continued to write for another three decades until his death in 1564, and the 1559/60 Institutes will be central in the analysis in the following chapters. Furthermore, I will be concerned not only with Calvin’s theological response to the situation in his native France, but also with his attempts to address similar political situations throughout Europe, and a very different social and political situation in Geneva, Calvin’s new home from 1541 until his death.

The goal of this chapter was to set the stage for a reading of Calvin’s theological writing that stays close to the ground, historically speaking. Hopefully we now know something of the lived and experienced reality both for Calvin and for some of the people who comprised a part of Calvin’s targeted audience. And in all that follows, the concern with how these social and political factors were perceived by Calvin and how they may have influenced the aims and objectives of his theological writing will persist, even if often only implicitly. In the aftermath of the placards affair, French “citizens” who were no longer recognizably “Catholic” became “criminals.” Later in life, Calvin’s attention would bend toward writing theology aimed at giving shape to the recognizably “Reformed” city of Geneva. Nevertheless, the borders and boundaries, thickets and tangles of citizenship, heresy, and public religious identity would continue to be one of the important and enduring themes in Calvin’s theological imagination.







On The Comprehensive John Calvin Collection (compact disc), p. 249.

See McGrath (1990: 47-50) for a nice summary of the resistance to Lutheranism at Paris

The text of the condemnation can be found in CR I, 366-388.

Cf. Oberman’s Initia Calvini (1991) for the importance of the Meaux circle for understanding pre-reform Paris; also Ganoczy (1987: 50-52).

Donald Kelley (1981: 13-19); Alister McGrath (1990); Francis Higman, “De L’Affaire des Placards aux Nicodemites: Le Mouvement Evangelique Francais sous Francois Ier,” in Etudes Theologiques et Religieuses, 70 (1995: 359-366); Gabrielle Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt, Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1973, especially chapter 6; and Berthoud, ed. Aspects de la propagande Religieuse, 79-142; Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols (1986: 189-193); Stephan Skalweit, “Die ‘affaire des placards’ und ihr reformationsgeschichtlicher Hintergrund,” in Reformata Reformanda. Festgabe fur Hubert Jedin (Munster, 1965), vol. 1;“Jean du Bellay, les Protestants et La Sorbonne (1529-1535)” Bulletin de la Societe de l’histoire du protestantisme francais, 53, 1904, 97-143; “L’origine des Placards de 1534,” in Bibliotheque d’Humanisme et Rennaissance, VII, 1945, 62-75.

A picture of the document itself can be seen in Aspects de la Propagande Religieuse (1957: 79).

An English translation of the 1534 placard can be found in Appendix 1 (p. 339f) in Battles’ translation of Calvin’s 1536 Institutes. The French text can be found in Robert Hari, “Les Placards de 1534,” in Aspects de la Propaganda Religieuse (Droz, 1957), pp. 114-119.

On this procession, see Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt (1973: ch. 6) and Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken (1999).

Trexler, Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe (1985). “[T]o have an identity is, among other things, to have done things in the presence of others . . . actions performed in social spaces partly create and change individual and collective identities” (4).

Page references are to the translation by Battles, Institutes of the Christian Religion, 1536 Edition. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans (1975).

On this see Francis Higman, “De L’affaire des Placards aux Nicodemites: le Mouvement Evangelique Francais Sous Francois Ier,” in Etudes Theologiques et Religieuses (1995/3, 359-366).

Carlos Eire, War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin. Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Francis Higman, Censorship and the Sorbonne: A Bibliographical Study of Books in French Censured by the Faculty of Theology of the University of Paris, 1520-1551. Geneva: Librarie Droz S.A., 1979.

Articles de la sacree faculte . . . avec le remede contre la poison (1544).

In order to argue against the anachronistic imposition of a “polarization” between Catholics and Protestants upon this pre-1543 period, Higman says: “The Gallican Church was an organism with many diverse tendencies; its doctrinaire, scholastic, integriste wing (represented by the Sorbonne) was balanced by a liberal movement which could accommodate an attitude of radical reform of doctrine and practice within the body of the Church. . . . Apart from [rejection of the sacraments or violence], not only was considerable latitude possible; in the 1530s there seemed every prospect of the liberals becoming dominant in France – and, indeed, throughout the western Church” (45).

On the January 21 procession, see Berthoud, Antoine Marcourt, (1973: 190f); Eire (1986), 191-2; Kelley (1981), 18.

Interestingly, Eire (p. 191) cites Chronique du Roy Francoys Ier (p. 114) concering the prominence of banners depicting the fabled “Jew and the Host.” Greenblatt analyses a painting of this same theme in Practicing New Historicism (2000, co-authored with Gallagher).

Persons in Groups: Social Behavior as Identity Formation in Medieval and Renaissance Europe. Richard Trexler, ed. (1985:4).

The Beginnings of Ideology: Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation, (1981).

See Kingdon (1985: ch. 5), “Was the Protestant Reformation a Revolution? The Case of Geneva.”

Higman notes well the blurry lines between private opinion and public action in France. Parceling out “heretical opinions” to the ecclesiastical courts and disturbances of “civil order” to the secular courts was no easy matter. “A heretical idea, believed in silence by an individual, could be deemed a strictly religious matter; but as soon as that individual opened his mouth, turned the idea into a teaching, then he was on the road to sedition, to political misdemeanour in the kingdom of the roi tres chrestien. ‘Leze mageste divine et humaine’ is the succinct summary in the edicts of the time to describe a heretical position which also involved any public action (such as preaching, printing or placarding such a position)” (1979: 18).

Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Univ. of Chicago Press, (1980).

The cultural analyses he relies on were published in the 1960s and 70s, when cultures and their sign-systems were generally thought of as seamless wholes. More recent cultural theories emphasize the rifts and cracks in all cultural symbol systems. Greenblatt’s most recent work on Shakespeare (2000) attempts to provide more space for authorial imagination, emphasizing that literary texts are more than just windows through which to view cultural dynamics.

William Monter, Judging the French Reformation: Heresy Trials by Sixteenth Century Parlements.

Monter (1999), 35.

Monter (1999), 42.

Monter (1999), 43.

Higman (1979) argues that the divide between liberal and conservative forces vis-à-vis matters of reform were not only between Francis I and the Sorbonne faculty, but between most of France and the Sorbonne. Cf p. 47: “Doctrinally, a number of competing viewpoints, especially on the question of authority, could all claim to be the correct teaching of the church . . . considerable radicalism in demands for reform of structures and teachings was acceptable to a significant, and influential, section of the hierarchy of Church and state – though not to the Sorbonne.”

Monter (1999: 68)

See Ganoczy (1987: 83ff)

Battles (1975: xl-xliii).

Quoted in Battles (1975: xliii-xliv) from The Piety of John Calvin, translated by Battles (1978: 31-32)

Muller (2000) persuasively argues for the significance of Calvin’s ongoing exegetical work for the evolving editions of the Institutes. My focus on the social and political context of Calvin’s theological writing is not meant to be a denial of Muller’s thesis.

Calvin’s correspondence with Reformed churches and leaders in France reveal him consistently counseling patience. While he was well aware of their predicament as a persecuted minority, he never advised any revolutionary plans against the French government. His 1536 assurance to Francis I that Reformed Christians were not seditious continued to inform his position throughout his life. Stevenson (1999: 146-7) directs attention especially to Letter CCII [5:129-130], Letter DLII [7:82-85], and Letter CCCCLXXVI [6:364-65], CCCCLXXXIII [6:381-84], CCCCLXXXVIII [6:395-6], CCCCXCVII [6:418-21], DXXXIX [7:49-54], DCXXIV [7:278-79].

For good summaries of the social and political instutional shape of Geneva, see Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement 1564-1572 (chs. 1 and 2); Kingdon, Church and Society in Reformation Europe (1985); Alister McGrath, A Life of John Calvin (chs. 5 and 6).

R.M. Kingdon, Church and Society in Reformation Europe (1985), ch. 5.

Kingdon (1985: 206). Also see Carlos Eire, “Antisacerdotalism and the Young Calvin,” in Anticlericalism in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Dykema and Oberman (E.J. Brill: 1993).

See Ganoczy (1987: 106-126).

Ganoczy (1987) provides two telling comments by Calvin himself about 1536 Geneva: “When I first came to this church there was practically nothing. They preached, and that’s all. They searched for idols and destroyed them, but there was not the slightest reformation. Everything was in disarray” (p. 108 – from 1564, OC 9, 891-892). Then from 1557 (OC 31, 26): “Now a little beforehand, the papacy had been driven out by means of this good man whom I have named [i.e. Farel] and by Pierre Viret; but since everything was not in good order, there were terrible divisions and dangerous factions among the citizens.”

See Ganoczy (1987: 113-114).

For a brief account of Caroli and du Tillet, see Steinmetz (1995: 13).

The iconoclastic character of this shifting of religious allegiance signals in an unmistakable way the inter-connections between practices of worship and communal self-understanding.

Wallace, 1988: 15.

See the report of the Consistory for accounts of Genevans disciplined for secretly continuing to observe Catholic practices. Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, vol. 1. (2000).

On this and for a helpful overview of the exchange, see Olin’s “Introduction” in A Reformation Debate (2000), ed. Olin.

“For faith is a term of full and ample signification, and not only includes in it credulity and confidence, but also the hope and desire of obeying God, together with love, the head and mistress of all the virtues, as has been most clearly manifested to us in Christ . . .” (Olin 2000: 30).

For those within the Catholic Church, there is confidence that God hears prayers and forgives. There is no such confidence for Protestants. “But in this deep and dreadful sin of preposterous and false religion, we no longer leave to ourselves either God or anchor. Wherefore, dearest brethren, if we would be safe, this danger, in particular, we must most carefully and studiously shun” (Olin: 33). On the issue of tradition vs. innovation, Sadoleto comments: “The point in dispute is whether is it more expedient for your salvation, and whether you think you will do what is more pleasing to God, by believing and following what the Catholic Church throughout the whole world, now for more than fifteen hundred years . . . approves with general consent; or innovations introduced within these twenty-five years, by crafty or, as they think themselves, acute men; but men certainly who are not themselves the Catholic Church?” (Olin: 34-5).

see Kingdon (1956: 34)

Kingdon (1956: 106)

See Natalie Davis, “Strikes and Salvation at Lyons,” in Archiv fur Reformationsgeschicte (56:48-64).

For an overview, see Eire (1986), ch. 7. Other secondary treatments include Francis Higman, “The Question of Nicodemism,” in Calvinus ecclesiae genevensis custos, ed. Wilhelm H. Neuser (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1984), 165-70; and two articles by Robert White – “Calvin and the Nicodemite Controversy: An Overlooked Text of 1541,” in Calvin Theological Journal 35 (2000): 282-296; and “Calvin, the Nicodemites and the Cost of Discipleship,” Reformed Theological Review, 56 (1997): 14-27. Relevant writings by Calvin include private letters published in 1537: De fugiendis (CR 5.239) and the first letter of the Duae epistolae (CR 5.239-312); a letter to the duchess of Ferrara written in 1540 (CR 11.326); a letter to friends (Herminjard 7.307-19) written in 1540 and published in 1543 paired with the next relevant work, the Petit Traicte. Finally, the most significant treatise was the 1544 Excuse a Messieurs les Nicodemites, sur la Complaincte qu’Ilz Font de Sa Trop Rigeur (CR 6.601).

Monter (1999: 112).