SOURCE: Waller, G. F. “Fulke Greville's Struggle with Calvinism.” Studia Neophilologica XLIV, no. 2 (1972): 295-314.

[In the following essay, Waller considers the influence of Calvinism on Greville's life and works.]

I

Burke's sage remark on the subjective reception of ideas is as relevant to sixteenth-century Calvinism as it was to the French Revolution—or, for that matter, as it is to modern existentialism. Ideas, he wrote, “entering into common life, like rays of light which pierce into a dense medium, are, by the laws of nature, refracted from their straight line.”¹ Fulke Greville's commitment to Calvinism is a fascinating case of how the ideology which provided the main driving force behind his public life and writings was significantly adapted, consciously and unconsciously, by his peculiar needs and to his peculiar demands. A study of the relationship between Calvinism and Greville's writings is crucial to an understanding of his work.

Greville was educated under the stern Calvinist regime of Thomas Ashton at Shrewsbury in the 1560's, and he was conversant with leading European Calvinists such as Philippe de Mornay and Hubert Languet. He was variously the patron, friend or associate of leading English Calvinists like William Perkins and John Preston. But whether arising from education or temperament, his Calvinism took root in the constant habits of introspection that characterize his lifelong religious struggles. There can be no disagreement that “the guiding light of Greville's mind was always his Calvinism.”² And yet to date no intensive analysis of the precise nature of his religious allegiances has appeared.

In the following consideration of Greville's work, I hope to analyse in detail the subtle interplay of ideology and imagination in his work. In particular I will concentrate on his frighteningly logical exploration of what for him was the fundamental Calvinist doctrine of man's total inability to effect any virtue despite intentions or ideals:

So as what's good in us, and others too
We praise; but what is evill, that we doe.(3)

II

Part of Calvin's appeal to many late sixteenth-century intellectuals lay in the strongly empirical element in his theory—indeed, it might be said, his Realpolitik. Calvin seems to start with the state of mankind as it is: the only too obvious imperfections, miseries, inadequacies and frailities of human life, and the obvious facts of human contingency. He puts his observations into a compelling ideological framework: man's deeply felt anxieties are demonstrably the consequence of an unbridgeable gulf between man and God. Only through Christ can the gulf be bridged, and then only for the Elect. Otherwise, man is “utterly undone in himself, and incapable of working out his own cure by thinking a good thought, or doing what is acceptable to God.” And yet, Calvin nevertheless argues, “God our Maker supports us by his power, rules us by his providence, fosters us by his goodness, and visits us with all kinds of blessings;” indeed, there is “not a particle of light, or wisdom, or justice, or power, or rectitude, or genuine truth … which does not flow from him”.⁴ To make sense of life, man needs a sense of achievement, Greville constantly asserts, and yet the “fatall stane” [of] “our falne estate”⁵ denies him any possibility of this. Indeed in Greville's most pessimistic statements of the human lot men are merely the puppets of God's inscrutable will, or as John Preston, his close friend, put it:

If thou and thousands perish, it is nothing to him; he cares no more for the destruction of the whole world, than thou doest for the throwing away of a little dust.

Nor can the justice of man's plight be questioned:

… do not dispute with God, and aske, why are so many damned … shall the clay say to him that fashions it, what makest thou?⁶

It ought to be made clear at this point that Greville, of course, is by no means a systematic theologian and the theological emphases of his work do not necessarily reflect an adequate understanding of either Calvin or contemporary Calvinist theologians. Although his poems of monarchy and religion versify most salient points of the Reformed faith, what is more significant are his peculiar emphases—what, from the point of view of a historian of ideas, are more accurately described as distortions of Calvinism. Greville, for instance, gives more weight to man's depravity than to God's grace and, as I shall show, has some revealing waverings on the full force of other key points of Calvinism.⁷ But the main drive of my paper is to suggest that such distortions or misunderstandings are often more revealing than cases of the faithful transmission of ideas.

Greville's personal starting-point is not that of Calvin, with man's knowledge of God, but the fact of man's fallen nature, particularly as manifest in society and politics. As a successful politican under Elizabeth and James, Greville gained first-hand insight into the practical and moral labyrinths of power. His picture of society is an unrelievedly grim one of conflicting evils:

When evill strives, the worst have greatest name
…
Those mischiefes prosper that exceed the rest.

In political life, it is the tyrants, atheists and the clearsightedly wicked who seem to possess the necessary ruthlessness and versatility for success.

We that are made to guard good men and binde the ille,
See both miscarried here below, against our power, and will,
As if the earth, and hers, were to the worst left free.(8)

Given such apparent facts of politics, the virtuously-inclined man must either opt out of society, or else accept the necessity of craft and policy as the “base instrument of humane frailtie.” The first of these alternatives Greville could not countenance. He praised Sidney as “a man fit for Conquest, Plantation, Reformation, or what action soever is greatest and hardest among men;”⁹ a noble nature like Sidney's could not escape the responsibility of public duty, even in an unredeemable world. To Greville, it followed from the received Calvinist ethic that man's salvation is held to depend not on his works but on God's predestinate will, and yet continual activity in the world is nevertheless stressed to be the test of a man's election. William Perkins argues that men with no particular active calling—such as rogues, vagabonds, gentlemen, servants, monks and friars—give evidence of their depravity by their very idleness. So, argues Greville, even the godly must employ the very means they abhor, since God, as he puts it, “made all for use.”¹⁰

In certain developments in late sixteenth-century Calvinism both society and politics come to be regarded as the consequences of man's fall. Secular life is held to be outside the realm of grace—and yet is necessary for the proper ordering and disciplining of men. Although never explicit in Calvin himself, there is an implicit dualism between the world and God, between the realms of time and eternity which is a significant shift from the typical medieval view of society, that, as Aquinas puts it, “man is by nature a social animal” and “in the state of innocence … man would have lived in society.”¹¹ The Calvinist stresses unreservedly the schism between the secular and the timebound, the sacred and the eternal. Yet the Christian must still live in these two spheres of life simultaneously and consequently his life in society will be, necessarily, frustrated and corrupt. This aspect of Calvinism was especially congenial to Greville. Society can be disciplined but never redeemed. Greville suggests that in special cases of remarkable human virtue, like Sidney, some limited achievements in the world are possible—although one senses in Greville's praise of Sidney a belief that Sidney's ideals were never adequately tested by the realities of politics. But in general, what matters for him is power, advantage, craft, and “the knowledge of evil” which “doth ever teach the first offender to seeke advantage.”¹² The necessary practice for the Christian who faces up to his inner corruption is therefore to “first judge your Ends, and then your Meanes,” leaving the success of the outcome “to His will that governs the blind prosperities of Chance; and so works out His own ends by the erring frailties of humane reason and affection.”¹³ Whether Greville's thought accurately reflects Calvin's own social theories is, of course, questionable. Certainly the history of Calvinist political theory in the sixteenth century is very complicated, and as Robert Langdon and others have shown, is greatly modified by the influence of the religious wars in France and the Low Counties. Greville's expression of secular pragmatism in Calvinist terms is, arguably, a reflection of the gradual secularization of Calvinist social doctrine in the late sixteenth century to which Michael Walzer has drawn attention. Here as elsewhere, Calvin's own teaching is generally so skilfully articulated that many of his followers misinterpreted him as they attempted to adapt his principles to rapidly changing political and social conditions.¹⁴ Burke's observation is again suggestively relevant.

Underlying Greville's pragmatism is, I suggest, a thoroughgoing fatalism, derived from, if a distortion of, Calvin. If, in Calvin's works, “all events whatsoever are governed by the secret counsel of God” who “holds the helm, and overrules all events,” then every event in the political world is the work of God, and it is “God's peculiar property never to err.”¹⁵ And yet, as Calvin himself admitted, “we see the righteous brought into affliction with injuries, overwhelmed with calumnies, and lacerated by insult and contumely, while, on the contrary, the wicked flourish, prosper, acquire ease and honour.”¹⁶ Greville is deeply troubled by the seeming irreconcilability of these key assertions: that God cannot err and yet events consistently seem to display the triumph of evil. He poses a crucial question in Alaham:

                                                                                Are we not diligent, or is the good not wise?
Showes Truth lesse glorious in the earth, than her ill picture Lies?

Or, more specifically, in Mustapha: “Is Providence of no … use to power?”¹⁷ Greville's faith answers affirmatively; his experience of politics negatively. The evidence of man's depravity seems overwhelming.

The theological question Greville is concerned with here is the problem of divine justice in the face of earthly evil. If God organizes and directs all events “to the end that all men may perceive, that God hateth wicked men and wickedness alike,” then divine justice should be clearly manifest in the world. As Calvin puts it, quite bluntly, “It is impossible to doubt his punishment of crimes.“¹⁸ And yet the plain facts of politics seemingly prove, as Greville observes, quite the opposite. Alaham represents Greville's own troubled scepticism when he gibes:

                                                            that God of whom you crave
Is deafe, and only gives men what they have.(19)

Greville is uneasily sensitive to the force of this argument and its corollary, that the really effective distinction in politics is not between the good and the evil, but between the successful and the failures.

Calvin's answer to the problem was that God works through the actions of evil men to a hidden end, and that God's actions are not to be understood by men's standards of reason or justice.²⁰ Men can only accept the evil means that they trust they are being led by God to use. The Reformed theologian, Heinrich Bullinger, is at one with Calvin here:

Suffer and grudge not at the thing that thou canst not alter: it is God's will that it shall be so; and no man can resist it: suffer therefore the power of the Lord, unless thou canst not escape.²¹

Men must plunge into the world and submit to what the heathen might call fate, but what the Christian believes to be the will of God. It is a grim creed. In lesser writers than Calvin, it may involve an element of escapism, in placing the responsibility for all men's human miseries squarely upon God. Greville's God has the power of the earthly tyrants of his dramas, plus—a feature denied to earthly monarchs—an incomprehensible impregnability. It is as if Greville were afraid to allow God any degree of mercy or man any ability to respond to grace, for fear of undermining the rigorous justice by which the precarious order of society is maintained:

If what were best for them that doe offend
Lawes did inquire, the answer must be, Grace.
If Mercie be so large, where's Justice place?(22)

Formally abstract, but compelling in their logic, Greville's plays mull over such questions. He is intent on juxtaposing—“dramatizing” is hardly an apt term—the opposing positions in the debate over the nature of evil and justice. The play's structure and characterization are all determined by his ideological demands. He seems deeply aware of his own inner reactions against the rigour of Calvinism, and yet his intellect can provide no logically compelling alternative. He probes deeply, therefore, for some basic doctrine to reconcile and help him accept the seemingly irreconcilable and unacceptable.

III

Greville finds such a doctrine in Calvin's stress that the explanation of man's depravity has its origins in God's predestinate will. Calvin tries to provide an explanation for what seemed evident to most sixteenth-century Christians, apart from Anabaptists or Familists, that man is

                                                                                                                                                      A crazed soule, unfix'd;
Made good, yet fall'n, not to extremes, but to a meane betwixt:
Where (like a cloud) with windes he toss'd is here, and there.

—or, more typically, utterly corrupt, unable to achieve the obedience both divine revelation and the whole order of the universe decree he must attain to please God:

… when each of us, in his owne heart lookes,
He finds the God there, farre unlike his Bookes.(23)

Calvin argues that God is responsible but not morally reprehensible for man's depravity. God does not decree that each man is subject to sin; it is by the fact that he partakes of a common humanity that he is, in fact, so—that, as Calvin puts it, he is either idolatrous, profane or hypocritical. If God so wills it, he may be regenerate; but in himself he can produce nothing “save that which is abominable in God's sight … this life is never free from the taint of sin,” and “whatever righteousness we could acquire would ever … be corrupted, overwhelmed, and destroyed.” Given the facts of man's depravity, strictest justice demands that men “cannot but be hateful to God, and that not from tyrannical cruelty, but the strictest justice.”²⁴

Man is forced to exist, therefore, in two contradictory worlds:

”Borne under one Law, to another bound:
”Vainely begot, and yet forbidden vanity,
”Created sicke, commanded to be sound.(25)

Calvin postulates a schism in man's nature not just between good and evil or soul and body, but between two worlds, two “diverse Lawes”—the world of secular activity and that of God's eternal kingdom. “There is,” argues Calvin, “a twofold government in man … one which, placed in the soul or inward man, related to eternal life … the other which pertains only to civil institutions and the external regulation of manners.”²⁶ Greville echoes Calvin exactly:

Mixe not in functions God, and earth together;
…
          The world doth build without, our God within;
          He traffiques goodnesse, and she traffiques sinne.(27)

For Calvin, it is God's law which, nevertheless, rules and governs the world, but Greville's dualism implies that for him, at any rate, the world is left, in practice if not strictly in theory, to the devil. Typically extreme in his pessimism, Greville examines this argument in the dialogue between the good and evil spirits in the Chorus tertius of Alaham. The good spirits are accused of distracting men with “abstracted dreams” and tempting them “against affections streames,” whereas “the greater spirits, which are ours, feel not these nimble tyes.”²⁸ In their argument lies a crucial question for the Calvinist: in a fallen world, how can public man base his life upon principle when time is wholly dominated by evil? The only way evil can be defeated, Greville suggests, is by the patient passiveness of good and the self-destructiveness of evil. But in the end only eternity can redeem the inadequacies of time; only God can give man hope and security:

          Fly unto God: For in humanity
Hope there is none.(29)

Insecurity, decay and transience are the unavoidable marks of man's life—and this is so in man's inner as in his social being. The lamentable progression of vice in the political world is merely the reflection of man's inner corruption:

Worth must decay, and height of power declyne,
Vices shall still, but not the same vyce raigne:
Error in mankinde is an endles Myne,
And to the worst, thinges ever doth constraine.(30)

Even human love, seemingly the most ennobling of human experiences, contains inevitable elements of betrayal and imperfection. Greville's stern Calvinism dare not accept any state less than perfect, and the disillusion inherent in man's idealizations of love is a pressing theme in Caelica. Greville constantly stresses both the transience of love, and its underlying cause:

For lest Man should thinke flesh a seat of blisse,
God workes that his ioy mixt with sorrow is.(31)

In love, as in politics, Greville looks for God's approval in vain in the world and in himself, and concludes that

Nature containes him not, Art cannot showe him,
Opinions, idolles, and not God expresse.(32)

Above all, Greville, finds man subject to time. In Chorus tertius of Mustapha, Greville juxtaposes the conflicting claims of Time and Eternity for men's allegiances. Time's argument is that it is the very restlessness of temporal life that allows man the pleasures he esteems so highly:

Could Pleasure live? Could Worth have reverence?
Lawes, Arts, or Sects (meere probabilities)
Keepe up their reputation in Mans sense,
If Noveltie did not renew his eyes;
          Or Time take mildly from him what he knew
          Making both me, and mine, to each still new?

But set alongside Eternity, Time's benefits are shown to be illusory. Time is “the weakest worke of my Creation … but a Minute of my Infinite.”³³ Greville's juxtaposition of time and eternity is, of course, commonplace, but it has a distinctive Calvinist tinge. The typical medieval view was that under God's control time was an harmonious progression towards a divinely-ordained goal. Its order was reflected naturally in the seasons and ecclesiastically in the Church's year. But for Calvin, time becomes a series of disconnected revelations from God, not the smooth, sequential unfolding of God's general government of the universe.³⁴ Each moment of time is a seemingly new and arbitrary creation. It is interesting to note how many of John Donne's sermons show a distinctly similar bias, as, for example, when he stresses the importance of every particular instant as possibly man's last: “Upon every minute of this life,” he writes, “depend millions of yeares in the next.”³⁵ Greville's emphasis is similar:

Reader! then make time, while you be,
But steppes to your Eternitie.(36)

Eternity represents a refuge from the changes and unpredictable miseries of time. “What greater contraries can there be,” exclaims Philippe de Mornay, “than tyme and eternity.”³⁷ The eternity of God provides the goal for timebound man's longing for permanence. “There is nothing,” writes Calvin, “that desireth not to abide continualli … We ought to loke unto the immortalitie to come, where we may atteine a stedfast state that no where appeareth in earth.”³⁸

But, in Greville's view, unregenerate man refuses to acknowledge the ultimate unreality of time. He attempts to ape God's eternity by his pursuit of fame. Whereas true fame is afforded only to the elect, other men, by their very corruption attempt to be “immortall here” and

… worship Fame, commit Idolatry,
Make Men their God, Fortune and Time their worth,
Forme, but reforme not; meer hypocrisie,
By shadowes, onely shadowes bringing forth.(39)

Typically, however, while Greville acknowledges man's desire for fame as fruitless and evil, he nevertheless accepts that given man's corruption, it is an inevitable and therefore acceptable aspect of public life. It is both a consequence of man's fallen nature and God's means of disciplining man, of providing the unrepentant and unregenerate—the majority of mankind—with some goal, however illusory:

For to be good the world finds it too hard,
And to be nothing to subsistence is
A fatall, and unnaturing award;
So as betweene perfection, and vnblisse,
          Man, out of man, will make himselfe a frame,
          Seekes outward helpe, and borrowes that of Fame.(40)

Consistently Greville accepts what he sees as the inevitability of man's corruption and subjection to time. “Necessity is the law of Time.”⁴¹

IV

An important key to understanding the importance of Calvinism in Greville's thought is the doctrine of Providence. Indeed, to analyse the modifications of the doctrine in sixteenth-century thought and literature is to draw out a significant strand in the age's intellectual history. In a detailed review of the various extant theories of Providence, Calvin's disciple Jean Veron significantly rejected the traditional scholastic view of God's “general ruledome” which made God rule over events “onelye in name and not in deede.” On the contrary, the Calvinist asserts, God's Providence governs every moment of man's life separately and individually. Man appears to Greville as a puppet in the hands of an unpredictable master, and can “effect nothing but by the secret will of God, and can deliberate on nothing but what he has previously decreed, and determines by his secret direction.”⁴²

The doctrine of panergism, by which God is held to continually intervene in his creation, is one the whole Reformed tradition stressed,⁴³ but Calvin's insistence—an outflow of his emphasis on the sovereignty of God—is especially strong: “every year, month, and day is governed by a new and special Providence of God … he takes a special charge of every one of his works.”⁴⁴ This aspect of Calvinism seems to have struck a deep chord in many uncertain minds. Georges Poulet observes that the religions of the seventeenth century are all religions of “continued grace,” in the sense that God is believed to be continually upholding each moment of a man's life.⁴⁵ A century after Calvin, an analogous idea appears in Descartes' remark that “from the fact that we now are, it does not necessarily follow that we shall be a moment afterwards, unless some cause, viz., that which first produced us, shall … conserve us.”⁴⁶ It may be observed that elements in Calvinism that obviously answered to some fundamental anxiety are here becoming secularized and integrated into what develops into a significantly different view of man during the later seventeenth century.

A standard ingredient of the Calvinist doctrine of Providence was a discussion of the means by which Providence is manifested in specific, historic and contemporary events. In his treatment of the doctrine, with what should by now be his familiar pessimistic emphasis, Greville deals in some detail with God's providential direction of monarchies, tyrannies, wars, and the succession of apparently unavoidable evils and vicissitudes of political life. War, for instance, argues Greville, exists as a necessary scourge, a cure for the diseases of the body politic:

Mans error, havinge fram'de his mynde and sense
So divers, as no reall worcks longe please,
Is justlie scourg'd by that omnipotence,
Which never in it selfe letts vyce finde ease.(47)

Ironically war is both a divine scourge and type of the tortures of hell, and yet also—another modification of Calvin typical of Greville—the means by which men achieve fame and glory. Although it brings misery, plague, and massacres, it is still accepted by Greville as an inevitable consequence of man's inner corruption, and part of God's just governing of the world:

God then sends War, commotion, tumult, strife,
Like windes, and stormes, to purge the ayre and earth,
Disperse corruption; giue the World new life,
In the Vicissitude of creatures birth,
          Which could not flourish, nor yeeld fruit againe,
          Without returnes of heate, cold, drought & raine.(48)

In Greville's doctrine of war, Calvinist ideology joins with practical and shrewd Realpolitik. It thus enables Greville to reconcile piety and policy, one of the problems that haunted pious Protestants in the later sixteenth century as some of the implications of Calvinist social policy were worked out.⁴⁹ Calvin's explicit pronouncement was quite clear, that “no polity can be successfully established unless piety be its first care, and … those laws are absurd which disregard the rights of God, and consult only for men.”⁵⁰ But a possible inference from Calvin's doctrine of society is the attitude to policy and war that Greville advances. Only by such a total pessimism as Greville's could raison d'état be transformed into faith and so be accepted in conscience as proceeding from God:

Warre proceeding from the Omnipotence,
          No doubt is holy, wise, and without error,
          The sword of justice, and of sinne the terror.(51)

Calvinism gave Greville the solid ideological basis that lies behind his celebrated aphorism, “I know the world and believe in God.” The world and God, temporal knowledge and Christian faith, are never reconcilable but have necessary and proper, if qualitatively distinct, claims on men's lives. The “abstract rules of Truth” can apply only to those few elect whom God, of his secret will, chooses to pluck out of the corrupt world; otherwise men have no choice but to apply “the rules of use” by which “there is no native cure but terror” for the disruptions constantly threatening society. Church, state, and law must be used to discipline and, if necessary, repress offenders against social order. Although laws are merely “corrupt reason,” and state and Church may become tyrannous and corrupt, nevertheless they must combine to hold back the ever threatening inner disorders of mankind.⁵²

Calvin's view is similar. The “goodness, power and providence of God” is “wondrously displayed even in corrupt laws and tyrants” since God employs these to chastise men. Man's duty is not to resist such just proceedings, nor “to inquire into the duties of one another, but to submit each to his own duty.”⁵³ To be sure, Greville is careful not to commit himself explicitly to Calvin's view that the end of political power is to aid and promote man's salvation. Greville's view is, if anything, more pessimistic. Society is incapable of promoting any good; it is simply the grim consequence of man's alienation from God. Only the elect, whom God chooses gratuitously and mysteriously, “those pure, humble Creatures,” can be redeemed from the world, and are enabled to possess the appropriate kinds of temporal and eternal perspectives:

Their Arts, Laws, Wisedome, Acts, Ends, Honors being
All stamp'd and moulded in th'Eternall breast;
Beyond which truth, what can be worth their seeing,
That as false wisedomes all things else detest?
          Wherby their workes are rather great than many,
          More than to knowe, and doe, they haue not any.(54)

V

Although Greville's starting-point and prime concern in his anatomy of man is politics, nevertheless, as I have suggested, he is constantly forced to probe back into the underlying, individual roots of political behaviour. For ultimately, of course, in the Calvinist scheme man stands alone before God and it is God's gratuitous will alone which can save him.⁵⁵ God is not strictly required to save any man and “none will come in but those whom God enables.”⁵⁶ The severity of this doctrine was obviously congenial to Greville's cast of mind. He writes of the privileges the Elect are granted:

Onely those blessings of Mortality,
Which he that made all, fashion'd for their sake.(57)

The rest of mankind, the majority, are the reprobate. “Election,” argued Calvin remorselessly, “cannot stand, unless we confess that God separated out from others certain men as seemed good to Him.” Those few who are plucked out are “set aside in the council of God to the end that in them He might demonstrate His power.”⁵⁸ Greville's view is orthodox, reflecting one of the ways Calvin's doctrine developed:

As God by goodnesse saves those soules he chooseth,
So hell condemnes those wicked soules it useth.(59)

In the strict Calvinist scheme, there is no question of man's cooperating with God in his salvation. Calvin and his strictest followers round sternly on those who think that works or merely “a common assent to the Gospel history” is adequate to work man's salvation.⁶⁰ On this point, however, Greville is interestingly heterodox. He implies a measure of autonomous human merit when he asks:

Is it not then by warrant from above
That who gives faith, gives true obedience?(61)

Greville is unwilling to believe that the loyalty and service that dedicated public servants like Sidney and himself gave to their state could go unrewarded. His elect souls are not like Calvin's, those men picked out solely by God's gratuitous will to be saved; they are simply those who live by faith and in obedience to their princes. Greville is falling short—perhaps morally recoiling—from the rigours of the Calvinist position in his assertion that God

… showes his glorie clearlie to the best,
Appeares in clowdes and horror to the rest.(62)

“Best” is hardly an appropriate term for the strict Calvinist. Yet Greville sticks stubbornly to this small, but significant, degree of human autonomy.

Light may perhaps be thrown on Greville's apparent heterodoxy on this point by some correspondence he had in the 1590's with Peter Baro.⁶³ Baro was one of the first divines in England to oppose the strict Calvinist views of reprobation that were developing among late sixteenth-century Calvinists. Against Perkins, he argued for the universality of God's grace, and also opposed Calvin's distinction between the antecedent and consequent will of God in the determination of election. In Baro's view of predestination, God's will does not destroy some degree of human cooperation; he holds that faith, obedience and, above all, Christ's death, effect man's salvation.⁶⁴

The degree of autonomy Greville claims for the obedient, faithful servant of God is not, it must be admitted, particularly great. It consists almost entirely in passive obedience, steadfastness in the face of the obvious corruptions of the world. But nevertheless there is an element of cooperation, almost an agreement, involved:

… these pure soules (who only know his voice)
Haue no Art, but Obedience, for their test:
          A mystery betweene God, and the man,
          Asking, and giuing farre more than we can.(65)

Greville's view is closely akin to that which Perkins categorizes as that of the “semi-pelagian papists,” which stressed both God's will and man's free obedience and works. This concept of cooperation is fiercely attacked by Perkins as a dangerous and prevalent heresy,⁶⁶ and it is significant to see this small chink in Greville's Calvinist armour. The ambitious, faithful, persevering public man was not, it seems, fully able to accept the worthlessness of his actions.

Nevertheless, Greville is firmly in line with Calvin and Perkins on the irresistibility of grace and the belief that once chosen, the elect cannot “from him fall.”⁶⁷ Of course, discovering that one was elected was not easy. Indeed, a most pressing question for the individual became whether he was of the elect—the so-called problem of assurance. “There is scarcely a mind,” admitted Calvin, “in which the thought does not sometimes rise, whence your salvation but from the election of God. But what proof have you of your election?”⁶⁸ Calvin's answer is tinged with caution. He asserts that the elect may have sure knowledge of their election, but that it is inevitably accompanied by doubts, anxieties and an unquiet conscience. But some of Calvin's later followers, including Perkins and William Ames, stressed the need to look for the certain signs of election much more strongly. Perkins asserts that “the Elect alone, and all they that are elect, not onely may be, but also in Gods good time, are sure of election in Christ to eternall life.”⁶⁹

Greville's position on this point is, in fact, closer to Calvin than to his more extreme followers. Calvin writes of believers living in hope of salvation; Perkins, however, rejects as a common error the belief that “none can tell whether hee shall bee saved or not certainely: But that all men must be of a good beleefe.”⁷⁰ Greville argues that man never achieves certainty, but must go on in hope. “Obedience,” he asserts, “is the most acceptable sacrifice of mankind.” Men should accept “what our owne creation bindes us to” and accept what is not reformable in their lot as God's will.⁷¹ Above all, the faithful should combine their determination to obey and persevere with a humble awareness of the ultimate incompatibility of the world and God:

                                                                                                    honour you your kinge,
Reverence your preists, but never under one
Fraile creature both your soule and bodie bringe.(72)

The world is merely a testing-ground for men's perseverance, unredeemable in itself and eventually to be destroyed. There is no hint of apocalyptic transformation in Greville's writing, no belief in any transfiguring of the world, only the grim acceptance that “the world is made for use; God is for love.”⁷³

VI

Greville's Calvinism, then, although taking as its basic data the evident corruption of man in society, implies a detailed doctrine of the nature and value of man's individual struggles. On the one hand, in its rigour and completeness, Calvinism obviously gave Greville a satisfying context for his own inner needs. In particular, the underlying dualism of Calvinist thought justified both his sense of grim duty and gave him an indestructible and eternal goal to counterbalance the disillusions and changes of the world. Greville's writings display a lifelong search for an unassailable stability and permanence which he quickly realised would be found only in the timeless and incorruptible will of God.

On the other hand, however, Calvinism set up as many tensions in him as it solved. What must be termed his frustrated idealism emerges strongly in the Caelica poems. As opposed to Sidney, whose idealism, if anything, fed on the disillusions and failures it perceived in love—witness the seventh song of Astrophel and Stella—Greville works through a kind of Realpolitik of love as in the fine “Sonnet 56,” so acutely analysed by Mr Gunn.⁷⁴ Love and human aspiration seem inevitably associated with guilt and mistrust, which is projected onto the formerly peerless mistress, and love itself thereby corrupted:

Whence I conceau'd you of some heauenly mould,
Since Loue, and Vertue, noble Fame and Pleasure,
Containe in one no earthly metall could,
Such enemies are flesh, and blood to measure.

The disillusion in the last line is strongly wrought through the concrete, agonized imagery, and then is put into the inevitable theological context:

And since my fall, though I now onely see
Your backe, while all the world beholds your face,
This shadow still shewes miracles to me,
And still I thinke your heart a heauenly place:
          For what before was fill'd by me alone,
          I now discerne hath roome for euery one.(75)

The mistress is still the desired paradise; but the limitations and jealous demands of fallen men have corrupted the vision so that the largesse of heaven becomes equated with the hell of promiscuity.

The later sonnets show Greville fleeing the show of earthly love, but he is grimly aware that he cannot escape the bonds of earthly existence. Even man's deepest, most sincere, cries for salvation are interwoven with guilt and sin. Some of the most striking of the later sonnets show Greville looking within his own guilt and depravity, and finding in his deepest isolation, the presence of God:

And in this fatall mirrour of transgression,
Shewes man as fruit of his degeneration,
The errours ugly infinite impression,
Which beares the faithless downe to desperation;
          Depriv'd of humane graces and diuine,
          Even there appears this sauing God of mine.(76)

Implied in the last line is perhaps an element of desperate reassurance. Greville is straining for God, and his phrase “this saving God of mine,” with its strong emphasis on the possessive, echoes Calvin's similar claim that “by the faith of the gospel Christ becomes ours.”⁷⁷ Both are oddly grasping phrases, the product of a faith that demands that the believer look for certain signs of assurance and yet is based on a view of man that denies the possibility of finding such signs.

Greville's poems show more directly than the dramas or treatises the tensions within himself to accept the Calvinist ideology that his intellect accepted but so much of his humanity revolted against. The strength of many of his sonnets is, as Mr. Gunn finely puts it, born of the struggle as “the body cries out in pain at the rejections it is forced to make, and in the note of the cry we recognize the very humanity it is a cry against.”⁷⁸

With the evidence from the plays and treatises before us, it is a struggle in which the man eventually bows down before “this saving God of mine.” But the domination of Greville by this tyrannical God results in his vision being capable of neither glory nor tragedy. Greville demonstrates remorselessly the dark underside of the Renaissance idealization of man, but his alternative vision is dominated not by humility, so much as cruelty, guilt, incomprehensible injustice, and the nightmares of the psyche. Greville's vision is nevertheless admirable in its perseverance. It bore fruit not only in his dedication to his political vocation, but also in the rigorous clearsightedness of his later writings. He shares, in his own more intellectual realm, the courage of his great contemporary Ralegh who, his own death imminent, took up a fine but conventional poem written in the 1590's and appended another two lines: a cry to a deus ex machina to pluck him out of a sinful, abandoned world:

Even such is tyme which takes in trust
Our youth, our Joyes and all we have,
And payes us but with age and dust:
Who in the darke and silent grave
When we have wandred all our wayes
Shuts up the story of our dayes.
And from which earth and grave dust
The Lord shall rayse me up I trust.(79)

These last two lines might also stand for Greville's epitaph—except that, more logical and pessimistic than Ralegh, his particular cry would be less of trust than despair, a despair born out of his lifelong struggle with Calvin's God. Or, more accurately, as a sensitive if untheological mind misunderstood Calvin. It is by distortions rather than accurate transmission that ideas are often conveyed from one generation or country to another—and more than most seminal thinkers, Calvin has had ideas attributed to him which radically distort his careful, sensitive, even poetic vision of the awesome omnipotence of God. But it is by such pregnant misunderstandings that poets are inspired, ancient regimes challenged, intellectual world-views shattered. The influence, in this subtle sense, of Calvin and Calvinism upon Greville—for that matter on the whole of the Sidney Circle, including Sidney, Spenser, the Countess of Pembroke, as well as Greville himself⁸⁰—is one fascinating example of, returning to Burke's words, how ideas “entering into common life … are … refracted from their straight line.”

Notes

1. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. F. G. Selby, (London 1900), p. 67.

2. Poems and Dramas of Fulke Greville, ed. Geoffrey Bullough (Edinburgh, 1939), I, p. 9. Subsequent citations from Caelica, A Treatie of Humane Learning, An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, A Treatie of Warres, Mustapha and Alaham are from this edition.

3. A Treatise of Religion, 13, The Remains, ed. G. A. Wilkes (London, 1965). Subsequent citations from A Treatise of Monarchy and A Treatise of Religion are from this edition. The most interesting recent criticism includes Selected Poems of Fulke Greville, ed. Thom Gunn (London, 1968); Fred Inglis, “Metaphysical Poetry and the Greatness of Fulke Greville,” Crit. Rev., VIII (1965), 103-109; Hugh N. McLean, “Fulke Greville: Kingship and Sovereignty”, HLQ, XVI (1953), 237-271, and “Greville's ‘Poetic’”, SP, XLI (1964), 170-191.

4. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, trans. Henry Beveridge London, 1962), Prefatory address, I. i. 40-41.

5. A Treatie of Humane Learning, 19.

6. John Preston, Life Eternall … (London, 1631), p. 127.

7. Because of reasons of space and relevance, too, I do not pretend my analysis of Calvin's thought or subsequent developments in Calvinism is complete. No critic can hope to get at Calvin's thought by a few quotations, however well chosen.

8. Alaham, I. i. 203, 205; Chorus Primus, 1-3.

9. A Treatise of Monarchy, 284; The Works … of … Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, ed. A. B. Grosart (London, 1870) IV, p. 37.

10. William Perkins, Workes (Cambridge, 1616), I, pp. 755-756; A Treatise of Humane Learning, 71.

11. Aquinas, ST, la. xcvi. 4.

12. Works, IV, p. 238.

13. Works, IV, p. 32.

14. See e.g. Robert Kingdon, The Political Resistance of the Calvinists in France and the Low Countries (Berne, Indiana, 1958), Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement (Madison, 1967). For detailed discussion of Calvinist social and political teaching see Josef Bohatec, Calvins Lehre von Staat und Kirche (Achen, 1961), and Michael Walzer, The Revolution of the Saints (Cambridge, Mass., 1965).

15. Calvin, Institutes, I. v. 10; [John Aylmer,] An Harborowe for Faithfull and Trewe Subjectes … (Strasbourg, 1559), sig. CIv.

16. Calvin, Institutes, I. v. 10.

17. Alaham, chorus primus, 9-10; Mustapha, I. i. 115.

18. Calvin, Institutes, I. v. 7.

19. Alaham, IV. iii. 14-15.

20. Calvin, Concerning the Eternal Predestination of God, trans. J. K. S. Reid (Edinburgh, 1961), X. 10.4; Perkins, Works, I, p. 278; Preston, Life Eternall, pp. 143-144.

21. Heinrich Bullinger, Decades, trans. H. I. (Cambridge, 1849), II, p. 92.

22. Mustapha, II. iii. 188-190.

23. Alaham, chorus primus, 21-23, Mustapha, chorus sacerdotum, 23-24.

24. Calvin, Institutes, III. xiv. 1, 7, 10; III. xxiii. 2, 3.

25. Mustapha, chorus sacerdotum, 2-4.

26. Calvin, Institutes, IV. xx. 1; cf. III. xix. 15.

27. A Treatise of Religion, 98.

28. Alaham, chorus tertius, 44-45, 50.

29. Alaham, IV. ii. 56-57; cf. Institutes, II. iv. 20.

30. A Treatise of Monarchy, 83.

31. Caelica, Sonnet 94.

32. A Treatise of Religion, 7.

33. Mustapha, chorus tertius, 19-24, 91, 96.

34. Calvin, Institutes, 1. xvi. 2; cf. John Donne, Sermons, ed. G. R. Potter and Evelyn M. Simpson (Berkeley, 1953-62), II, p. 147. I have discussed the distinctive Calvinist contribution to changing theories of time in a forthcoming book, Time's Subjects (The Hague, Mouton & Co.), and in an article, “Transition in Renaissance Ideas of Time: the Place of Giordano Bruno”, Neophilologus, LV (1971), 3-15.

35. Donne, Sermons, III, p. 288; I have developed this point in detail in an article entitled “John Donne's Changing Attitude to Time,” due to appear in a forthcoming number of Studies in English Literature.

36. Caelica, Sonnet 82.

37. Philippe de Mornay, A Woorke concerning the trewnesse of the Christian Religion, trans. Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding (London, 1587), p. 139.

38. Calvin, Institutes, III. ix. 5 (Norton's translation, 1561).

39. An Inquisition upon Fame and Honour, 82, 86.

40. Ibid, 19.

41. “A Letter to an Honourable Lady,” Works, IV, p. 281.

42. Jean Veron, A Fruteful treatise of Predestination … (London, 1561), fols. 85^r, 105^r; Calvin, Institutes, I. xvii. 1.

43. Francois Wendel, Calvin, trans. Philip Mairet (London, 1963), p. 177.

44. Calvin, Institutes, I. xvi. 4.

45. Georges Poulet, Studies in Human Time, trans. Elliott Coleman (Baltimore, 1956), p. 18.

46. René Descartes, Principles of Philosophy …, trans. John Veitch (London, 1912), p. 173.

47. A Treatise of Monarchy, 522.

48. A Treatie of Warres, 43; cf. Calvin, Institutes, IV. 20. xif.

49. See George L. Mosse, The Holy Pretence (Oxford, 1957), passim.

50. Calvin, Institutes, IV. xx. 9.

51. A Treatie of Warres, 50.

52. A Treatie of Humane Learning, 91, 92.

53. Calvin, Institutes, IV. xx. 30, 29. For a detailed discussion of Greville's view of the state, see McLean, “Kingship and Sovereignty”.

54. A Treatie of Humane Learning, 128, 131.

55. Calvin, Institutes, III. xi. 16.

56. John Preston, The Breast-Plate of Faith and Love (London, 1634), p. 10; cf. Calvin, Institutes, III. xxii. 8.

57. A Treatie of Humane Learning, 129.

58. Calvin, Predestination, V. i. iii.

59. A Treatise of Religion, 84.

60. Calvin, Institutes, III. ii. 1; cf. II. ii. 6, III. xv. 7.

61. A Treatise of Religion, 72.

62. Ibid, 48.

63. Mss. of Sir John Coke, Melbourne Hall, Derbyshire; Historical Mss. Commission, 12th Report, Appendix I, 16.

64. For Baro's views, see The Work of James Arminius, trans. James Nichols, (London, 1825), I, pp. 92-100.

65. A Treatie of Humane Learning, 64.

66. William Perkins, A Golden Chaine, (Cambridge, 1587), pp. 7, 10.

67. A Treatise of Religion, 95.

68. Calvin, Institutes, III. xxiv. 4; cf. III. ii. 17.

69. Perkins, Golden Chaine, p. 210.

70. William Perkins, The Foundation of Christian Religion (Cambridge, 1597),

71. Works, IV, p. 259.

    Sig. Aa².

72. A Treatise of Monarchy, 209.

73. A Treatise of Religion, 114.

74. Gunn, pp. 26-28.

75. Caelica, Sonnet 64.

76. Ibid., Sonnet 99.

77. Calvin, Institutes, IV. i. 1.

78. Gunn, p. 41.

79. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. Agnes M. C. Latham (London, 1951) p. 72.

80. See my “‘This Matching of Contraries’: Bruno, Calvin, and the Sidney Circle”, Neophilologus, LII (1972), 331-343.