SOURCE: " 'Initia Calvini': The Matrix of Calvin's Reformation," in Calvinus Sacrae Scripturae Professor: Calvin as Confessor of Holy Scripture, edited by Wilhelm H. Neuser, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1994, pp. 113-54.

Quand je n'aurais pour moi père ni mère,
Quand je n'aurais aucun secours humain,
Le Tout-Puissant, en qui mon âme espère,
Pour me sauver me prendrait par la main.
Conduis-moi donc, ô Dieu, qui m'as aimé!

Délivre-moi de mes persécuteurs;
Ferme la bouche à mes accusateurs,
Ne permets pas que je sois opprimé.
Clément Marot, Psaume XXVII¹

I. "De Me Non Libenter Loquor"

Everyone who sets out to trace Calvin's "Road to Reformation" encounters not only formidable obstacles in the cultural debris separating us from the sixteenth century, but also and especially in the person of Calvin himself. The five short Latin words "De me non libenter loquor"² raise a screen of reticence penetrable only at our own risk. Calvin's silence is especially striking when compared with the directness of Martin Luther, the reformer whom he admired as the Inceptor until his death. Whereas Luther's persona looms large on every page of his work, Calvin inclined to be so "private" that it is difficult to discern the person behind the pen and to discover the emotional heartbeat behind his intellectual drive to grasp the mysteries of God and the world. While Luther continued to be a preacher even in the most academic of disputations or exegetical lectures, Calvin remained true to his first office in Geneva as lector, so that even in his sermons he was the teacher charged with enlightening the darkness of human confusion.

Amply displayed in the biblical commentaries of Erasmus, Zwingli, Bucer, or Melanchthon, a general characteristic of this period's biblical humanism was an objective-expository thrust that anticipated the nineteenth-century ideal of descriptive scholarship. Calvin's "ego" surfaced often and explicitly, but served as a scholarly adjudicator rather than as a carrier of personal sentiments. This instructional ideal of communication colored Calvin's sermons and letters—typically the most personal literary genres—and was strengthened by his deep sense of divine immediacy, transforming the prophets and doctors from Moses and Isaiah through Paul and Augustine into instruments of the Word and notaries of the gospel.

Calvin's dislike of self-disclosure is but one of the obstacles on our path to clarify his origins and early development. The Luther scholar has many more hard data to work with thanks to three fortunate constellations, none of which apply in the case of Calvin. As the "Initiator" of the Reformation both in his own eyes and in those of Calvin—the Wittenberger continually had to confront the deeply disturbing question "are you alone wise?", "how dare you contradict the wisdom of so many centuries?" Luther responded to the challenge by relating himself to Occam, Gerson, and Staupitz in a variety of revealing ways. From the very beginning Calvin was never "alone." He provided a rare autobiographical passage in his answer to Cardinal Sadolet (1539), wherein he described his path to the "sudden conversion"³ and articulated his initial aversion to an ultimate approval of the spokesmen for biblical reform.⁴ Confronted by two mutually exclusive claims to truth, Calvin had come to see the weight of the evangelical party's arguments. But he mentioned no specific individuals. Apart from the uncontested impact of Luther, this leaves a wide array of potential candidates as shapers of his earliest thought.

Second, for Luther we can draw on precious and extensive documentation from the periods before and after his Reformation discovery. Though we continue to debate the exact timing of Luther's Reformation breakthrough, we can document stages in his development and reconstruct a remarkably accurate list of books in his library and on his desk while he prepared his first Psalms commentary (1513-15). We possess his marginalia to the works of Augustine, Anselm, and Lombard and know that he studied the sentences commentaries of Occam, d'Ailly, and Biel. Moreover, the most recent discovery documents his early interest in Gregory of Rimini some ten years before the Leipzig disputation (1519).⁵ For the preconversion Calvin we have only the Seneca commentary. Although this is indeed a rich source for our knowledge of the young Calvin, its subject matter is not yet biblical theology; hence comparisons with his later works are hazardous.

Finally, for an investigation of Calvin we have to do without what proves so illuminating for Luther research, namely structural interpretive guides that help to describe Luther's place and function as acting vicar within his order or as a professor of biblical theology within his university. Calvin's social and intellectual milieu proves more evasive precisely because the newly emerging phalanx of French biblical humanists did not easily fit into well-established medieval organizations, whether monastic orders or academic institutions. In this light it is understandable that the little we know about the young Calvin during his "student years," from 1523 to 1528 at the Collège de la Marche and the Collège Montaigu in Paris, has had to be squeezed for more information than it could yield. This has led to a history of speculation no less fascinating than fallacious. In the next section we must therefore turn to the task of distinguishing between fact and fancy in the delicate enterprise of retracing and reconstructing the early stages in the development of John Calvin.

II. The Pitfalls of Pedigree Pursuit

Under the impact of German idealism there has been a phase in the history of ideas in which scholars looked for "systems," for so-called "unfolding principles," and in German research preferably for the right "Ansatz." In this tradition a thinker was declared to be a Platonist, an Aristotelian, or a Kantian; and those elements which did not "fit" this systematic model were declared to be inconsistencies revealing a lack of intellectual vigor. Usually the author of such a study could show himself superior to his subject by pointing to neo-Platonic deviations, to subversive pseudo-Augustinian elements, or, in rare and extremely thrilling cases, to a sniff of Averroism.

Until the middle of this century one liked to write books to show that Calvin was a thoroughgoing Augustinian, Platonist, or Scotist. A new phase in the investigation of the beginnings of Calvin can be discerned in the middle of this century when the awareness emerged that an incontestably original thinker and text-oriented exegete like Calvin is most unlikely to have been systematically derivative or, in any sense of the word, to have been a schoolman. It is to be noted that even though the tendencies of the past proved to be too stubborn to be completely exorcised, and, perhaps because the majority of interpreters were theologians, Calvin continued to be seen as a "thinker" rather than as a real historical person of flesh and blood, who in the decisive stages of his development responded not only to currents of thought, but also and especially to religious needs and political challenges, to personal encounters and social experiences.

In 1950 François Wendel made a new beginning with his study of Calvin's Origins and Development, published in English in 1963 and in a revised and enlarged French edition in 1983.⁶ For an intellectual biography four decades is a remarkably extensive career; and its end is not yet in sight since it is still the best one-volume introduction to Calvin's theological thought. Perhaps because Wendel could draw even-handedly on French and German scholarship, he does not look for the "master plan" but subtly points to "the echo of Scotus" or to remarkable "traces of nominalism."⁷ Admittedly, while looking for the scholastic roots of Calvin's thought, Wendel fails to distinguish between Scotism and nominalism, and (as I will argue) overstates Erasmian influences at the expense of the significance of Lefèvre d'Étaples and the circle of Meaux.⁸ Nevertheless, he has set a standard by which succeeding scholarship is to be measured.

Wendel's work whetted the appetite and his allusions unleashed the urge for further clarification. This has been pursued in a series of studies that have in common a search for Calvin's roots, best characterized as the pursuit of the pedigree. In 1963 Karl Reuter published Das Grundverstàndnis der Theologie Calvins,⁹ in which he argued for a pervasive "scotisch-scotistische Personalismus" of Calvin after placing him at the feet of John Major (Mair, 1550) until the spring of 1528—even though Major taught from 1518 through 1526 in Glasgow and Saint Andrews and lectured upon his return to Paris at Sainte Barbe. Calvin is said to have learned from Major "eine neue Konzeption antipelagianischer und scotistischer Theologie" as well as a "erneuerten Augustinismus."¹⁰ Behind Calvin's doctrine of sin Reuter discerns the authority of Thomas Bradwardine (1349), who found in Calvin "a true disciple"¹¹—"bien étonné de se trouver ensemble!"—even though Calvin never "found" Bradwardine. In 1966 Hiltrud Stadtland-Neumann turned to an analysis of Calvin's understanding of the Sermon on the Mount.¹² The pursuit of the pedigree now leads to the conclusion that Thomas Aquinas, though never mentioned, "exerted no small influence on the thought of Calvin."¹³ In the case of the permissibility of an oath, Calvin's direct dependence on Thomas is argued—without consulting the sentences of Peter Lombard, commentaries on canon law, or Duns Scotus's treatment of this burning issue.¹⁴

In comparison with these speculative constructions of Calvin's dependence on Thomas, Scotus, Bradwardine, or Major, Alexandre Ganoczy's Le Jeune Calvin, published in 1966, marked a considerable advance.¹⁵ Ganoczy points to the fact that the young Calvin in and before the first edition of the Institutio (1536) does not display any knowledge of the leading scholastic theologians, whether they hail from the Thomistic, Scotistic, or Occamistic tradition.¹⁶ Anyone who wants to argue that Calvin had been initiated in scholastic theology in Montaigu, Ganoczy points out, must prove that "Calvin between fourteen and seventeen years of age dared to go against the strict school curriculum and took instead of lectures in grammar, philosophy and science, courses in theology which were the privilege of the much senior students."¹⁷

Ganoczy does suggest, however, that Calvin in following lectures in scholastic philosophy was introduced to the kind of Aristotelian ethics that were "without doubt rife with scholastic casuistry," and imbibed not only dialectical reasoning but also a "metaphysics which in the nominalist fashion opposed systematically the divine and the human."¹⁸ While this last conclusion, par ticularly with its loaded word "opposed!" is still the unfortunate remnant of an outdated, Thomist view of nominalism, Ganoczy achieved for Calvin studies what R. R. Post did for the interpretation of the Modern Devotion,¹⁹ facilitating the return ad fontes by cutting through a thick layer of secondary literature.

Whereas it was the strength of Ganoczy that he had limited himself to the works of the young Calvin, in 1982 he revived the pedigree search in his edition—together with Stefan Scheld—of Calvin's annotations to Seneca and Lucanus, dating quite likely from the years 1545-46.²⁰" On this late basis Ganoczy argues for the formative influence of Stoicism on Calvin in two directions. Always suggestive rather than assertive, and with all of the usual reservations, Ganoczy relates Calvin's so-called "Weltverachtung" to the Stoics, at least as concerns its nonbiblical root, and points to "eine stoische Färbung" in Calvin's emphasis on human beings as clay in the hands of God. He further discerns "die Tendenz einer stoisch beeinflussten Schriftauslegung" in Calvin's biblical doctrine of election and reprobation.²¹ Accordingly Ganoczy bases Calvin's sense of vocation not only on Christian faith but also on a Stoic view of the immutable God.²²

For our purposes it suffices to point out that the young Calvin, writing his Institutio in 1535—and therefore well before any later elaborations—interprets the immutability of God as the reliability of his Word. As a matter of fact, for Calvin it is the cornerstone of Christian faith that God cannot undo his promise: so certain is God's truth "ut non possit non praestare, quod se facturum sancto suo verbo recepit"; God cannot but deliver what he has laid down in his Holy Word (Rom. 10,11).²³ We discern here not the Stoic but the longstanding medieval vocabulary of commitment that we encounter with Scotus and the nominalist theologians as the pactum Dei to which God is bound de potentia ordinata.²⁴ The Stoic notions of tranquility and moderation, which Calvin was willing to accept as biblically sound, he did find with Cicero.²⁵ As far as Seneca is concerned, he is for Calvin in no sense of the word a Christian. As in earlier research, Ganoczy has overlooked Calvin's uncompromising statement: "For his involvement with Christianity there is nowhere at any time even the slightest indication."²⁶

The most recent publication to be considered in this context is an article by Alister E. McGrath, John Calvin and Late Medieval Thought. A Study in Late Medieval Influences upon Calvin's Theological Development.²⁷ Sufficiently warned by Ganoczy's Le Jeune Calvin, McGrath no longer looks for proof but rather for "circumstantial evidence" to establish Calvin's dependence on late medieval theology. Defending and indeed reviving Reuter, McGrath is by no means convinced that Major could not have had a significant influence on Calvin.²⁸ McGrath finds the circumstantial evidence he is looking for in drawing on the early and late Calvin throughout the period 1536-60. By positing that not only in the fourteenth century, but also in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the theology of Gregory of Rimini (1358) was "on the ascendency," he assumes that Gregory—and the "schola augustiniana moderna" associated with him—was so prominent in Paris that Calvin could not possibly have avoided taking note of him.

Beyond a close relationship between Calvin and Gregory of Rimini, McGrath stipulates "the essential continuity between Calvin's thought and that of the later medieval period in general and that of the via moderna in particular."²⁹ Throughout the footnotes he documents his conclusions with reference to secondary literature, and nowhere is the test-question raised whether or to what extent Calvin's avid reading of St. Paul and St. Augustine can sufficiently—and hence convincingly—explain convictions reemerging (in a markedly different form and context) in the via Gregorii. Gregory is never mentioned by Calvin and the via Gregorii is not incorporated into the statutes of any of the forty or so Parisian colleges. Furthermore, one of the chief characteristics of the so-called "schola augustiniana moderna" is its programmatic effort to recall the scholastic doctors to read and study the authentic writings of St. Augustine in context and not in excerpts (florilegia). Through the celebrated Basel editions of Amerbach (1503-06) and Erasmus (1520-29; Paris 1531-32), Calvin could bypass the circuitous road of scholastic reception.³⁰ It is uncontested that already the young Calvin of 1532-35 had an impressively broad and independent access to the Opera Augustini.³¹

The preceding survey, which could have been easily extended, is instructive both in alerting us to pitfalls to be avoided and in pointing to promising avenues of approach in four respects:

1. In studying the initia Calvini we should apply Occam's razor and control the "plurality" of sources by limiting ourselves to the writings of Calvin prior to 1536, including therefore the first version of his Institutio written in 1535 in Basel. In this first edition, Calvin—according to an exceptional consensus among all Calvin scholars—speaks to us as a man who has already found both his voice and his message, and addresses the reader as a seasoned spokesman for the embattled evangelical cause. In the later editions from 1539 through 1559 (1560), this first manifest is periodically enlarged and changed; in the course of twenty years of intensive study, taking note of ever new and complex objections, the Genevan reformer had to study a large array of authorities. These additions should not be taken into consideration as the textual basis for studying the origins of the reformer.

2. A promising and already most rewarding avenue of investigation has been opened up by Francis M. Higman in studying Calvin's use of the French language. Higman set out on this path in his important The Style of John Calvin in his French Polemical Treatises.³² Drawing on Higman's study of Calvin's French polemical writings from the forties and applying this to the period before 1536, we can discern the importance of Calvin's first French publication and are indeed struck by the fresh and compact power of Calvin's preface to Olivétan's French Bible. In 1535 Calvin had not only found his theological, but also his "French voice." More generally, Calvin's French writings deserve equal time, and more. My extensive list of Calvin's French expressions and proverbs not only highlights his creative use of a language in statu nascendi, but also the extent to which his native tongue was his primary mode of molding experience and shaping reflection.

3. Though it may sound self-evident and therefore redundant, it must be insisted upon that the terminus post quern is as important as the terminus ad quern: in our case this means that the initia do not start only in 1532 with his first breaking into print or in 1533 with the computed date of his conversion. We should study Calvin's "beginnings" from 1509 to 1536 and thereby take into consideration that there is far more to influence a person than the books read—including the Scriptures!—namely, political and social as well as psychological and religious experiences. Hence we should apply to the study of Calvin a rule he used with reference to understanding the mysteries of God: " …plus in hac inquisitione valere vivendi quam loquendi modum."³³

4. There cannot be any doubt that it is essential to be committed to the close scrutiny of Calvin's late medieval resources. But without clear evidence these resources cannot be transformed into sources. They are listening devices or hermeneutical tools to uncover Calvin's own profile by highlighting—always "zur Stelle" and ad hoc—both continuity and discontinuity. In the case of his final (1562) clarification of the intimate relation between the sacramental sign (sacramentum tantum, signum) and the thing signified (res sacramenti), we can notice Calvin's application of Scotist terminology to define his position between Zurich and Wittenberg with greater precision.³⁴ In every such case the interest should be not to construct a pedigree, but rather to show why and how the medieval backdrop is a pertinent and necessary tool for clarifying a particular passage or complex issue.³⁵ The traditional type of intellectual history is as treacherously reductionist as its twin brother "Ahnenforschung" is racist. For this reason, intellectual history is badly in need of deconstruction, this time not to eliminate but to recover the authorial intention.

Once this is clearly in place, it can be safely said that there is a whole range of themes clustered around Calvin's presentation of the ordo salutis,³⁶ which a hundred years before would have earned him the school ranking "Scotist." Each taken separately, the following seven tenets can be traced back to other traditions, but as a cluster they must have suggested a close proximity to Scotus. We in turn can most readily decode their originality with a Scotistic dictionary in hand:

1. The beginning and end of the ordo salutis hinge on the sovereign acts of God in predestination and acceptation;

2. there is a twofold acceptation of the Pilgrim (Viator) and of his works;

3. fundamental and eternal (not cancelled by "disobedience"!) is the covenant of God (foedus, pactum) with Israel and the church;

4. the final acceptation is unmerited "ex mera misericordia" on the basis of God's covenant commitment;³⁷

5. throughout we note the retention of such terms as "ex puris naturalibus"³⁸ and "facere quod in se est," or (more often) "quantum in se est";³⁹

6. indicative of progressive revelation and the approximation of the end (finis!) is the felix culpa doctrine;⁴⁰"

7. of central importance is the "formal" distinction,⁴¹ which also underlies the favorite expression "docendi causa," once succinctly defined by Calvin as "disiungi res inter se coniunctas."⁴² It allows for the distinction between the being of God (essentia) and his revealed power (virtus) which forbids on the one hand "curiosity" about the aseity of God (that is, the "being" behind the "person") and rejects on the other the late medieval expression "de potentia absoluta" as the suggestion of God's use of sheer power (tyranny for Calvin)⁴³ that improperly separates power and justice.⁴⁴

More important even than such single issues is to grasp the overarching view, which teologians call "eschatological" and philosophers prefer to designate as "teleological": it is characteristic of Calvin's mode of thinking that throughout the Latin "finis" or French "but" (terme) is given priority above the second causes or "steps" toward this goal. Hence, metaphysically, "final" causality is given precedence over "first" causality and, psychologically regarded, the human agent is not "pushed" but "reoriented," and "drawn." This perspective is operative in each of Calvin's privileged levels of discourse, which arranged here in temporal sequence has to be read backward "sub specie aeternitatis." It should be kept in mind, moreover, that in the five following paradigms we separate what Calvin would merely distinguish "docendi causa"; actually the five are closely related roles of God:

1. "Father"—family (adoption)—protection and discipline—final mercy;

2. "King"—reign (providence)—obedience—final glory;

3. "Teacher"—school—exercise—final wisdom;

4. "Lord of Hosts"—army—oath—final victory;

5. "Judge"—courtroom—scrutiny—final adjudication s(acceptation/reprobation).

Two examples may serve to illustrate that what could seem an abstract analysis has far-reaching consequences for the interpretation of single aspects. (1) The German rendering of "finis legis" as "Gesetzesende" is misleading: Calvin does not—and indeed, never—mean "the end" of the Law, but its goal or "scopus." (2) "Meditatio futurae vitae" is not only a spiritual exercise, but designates the appropriate mental attitude or frame of mind with which the Christian "sees" and interprets all events in the world and in his own life, namely in terms of the eschaton, "the end." "Promissio" and "spes" are as future-orientated as the cosmic order itself. Yet, since faith "knows" and "grasps" the End, the present is already transformed or—more precisely—transfinalized.

Theology and metaphysics can only be distinguished "docendi causa" and only be understood in retrospect. In Calvin's case "sub specie aeternitatis" can only be rendered as "in the light of eternity," if it is understood as "in the light of the End." For Calvin's view of nature and history, the term "second causes" can only be used metaphorically: de facto they are "agents" of God-in-action; human beings come alive when they respond to the call of trekking toward the End.

In this thoroughgoing and radical finalism Calvin is "plus Scotiste que Duns Scot"—so much so that he transcends the boundaries within which such school ties make sense. Indeed, Calvin found this vision already enunciated by the prophet Isaiah: "recte docet Isaias …finem spectandum, eoque referenda esse omnia."⁴⁵ This is the extent to which the scotistic dictionary can assist us. From hereon in we have to start reading the book of his life itself.

III. The Historical Calvin: The Growth of a Vision

Confronted with the various claims for Calvin the Platonist,⁴⁶ the Stoic, the Thomist, the Scotist, or the nominalist—not to mention the frequent references to "humanism" and the Modern Devotion—it is not too much to conclude that Calvin is caught in a true captivitas systematica. What makes Wiliam J. Bouwsma's John Calvin, A Sixteenth-Century Portrait⁴⁷ the most significant interpretation since François Wendel is his quest for the historical Calvin, not a man of one system but a real human being exposed to a complex bundle of contradictory impulses.

Gingerly Bouwsma wades through the ocean of systematic claims, providing suggestive hints relating the reformer to Budé and Erasmus, Rabelais and Montaigne, rather than to the great medieval schoolmen. Without writing a psycho-history, Bouwsma is acutely aware of the pervasive power of Angst and hope, of terror and trust. One avenue of approach proved here to be particularly rewarding, namely Bouwsma's intent in reading Calvin's major achievement, the biblical commentaries, with a sharp eye for interpretations not required or not immediately following out of the scriptural text.

In consequence there emerge not one but two Calvins, characterized by two favorite expressions: the "labyrinth" and the "abyss." The first Calvin, "the forward-looking humanist and adventuresome discoverer," has escaped from the confusing maze of the labyrinth of medieval scholasticism. The other Calvin is the philosopher, "a rationalist and a schoolman in the high scholastic tradition represented by Thomas Aquinas, a man of fixed principles, and a conservative…. This Calvin was chiefly driven by terror that took shape for him in the metaphor of the abyss."⁴⁸ While some of Bouwsma's insights will continue to be basic ingredients of every convincing reinterpretation, it is a mark of the significance of this book that it may take scholarship quite some time to refashion these two Calvins into the one historical person.⁴⁹

Inclined to blend out the major theological themes in Calvin's thought, Bouwsma is both a reaction to and a correction of traditional theological Calvin research. At first sight these two approaches seem to be irreconcilable and mutually exclusive.⁵⁰" Traditional Calvin interpreters have to be convinced that Calvin's writings contain far more than this doctrina. Bouwsma on the other side has to be convinced that one cannot draw "a sixteenth-century portrait" without retracing the physiognomy of established religious language in order to capture the unique features of the Genevan reformer. And part of these features reflects his lifelong passion: the renewal of theology as the clarification of the gospel.

A case in point is Bouwsma's important discovery of Calvin's predilection for the word and concept of "labyrinth," formerly generally overlooked. Its significance can only be properly assessed, however, against the background of the fact that Erasmus had carved the expression in stone by including it among his Adagia (2.10, 15), of which there were twenty-eight editions between 1500 and 1536. But even before Erasmus's Adagia had captured the book markets in Paris and Basel, the expression "labyrinth" had already become part and parcel of the humanist arsenal against the "obscurities" of scholasticism. The correspondence in the circle around Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples amply documents this. Charles de Bovelles—like Lefèvre Calvin a Picardian—employs the term in defense of geometry in 1501, though not yet against a clear target.⁵¹ Hieronymus Gebwiler (1540), writing from Strasbourg to Sebastian Brant in March 1511, seizes upon the image of the "labyrinth"—this time with a specific attack on scholastic logic.⁵² And a year later Robert Fortune (1528), teacher of grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy at the Collège du Plessis, contrasts in the preface to his Paris edition of Cyprian (1 Nov. 1512) the clarity and revitalizing power of these writings with the confusing works of the unmentioned scholastics.⁵³

Such negative use of the "labyrinth" to decry scholasticism as the prison of the mind had not always been a foregone conclusion. Hardly twenty years before, Wessel Gansfort (1489) invoked the myth of Thesus in a strikingly positive fashion by emphasizing the "thread through the labyrinth" as the classical image for disciplined prayer and well-structured speech.⁵⁴ For Gansfort the "labyrinth" is associated with challenge rather than with doom, with the need for direction rather than with loss of orientation. For Calvin the "labyrinth" stands for confusion, and is already part of an established vocabulary that was available to express impatient disdain for scholasticism.⁵⁵ It suggests—of ten as synonymous with "laqueus" or the classical "nassa"—the state of perplexed moral bewilderment, typical of the troubled conscience, overtaxed in the confessional. In its most general application the "labyrinth" characterizes the human condition in terms of a natural knowledge of God that is too dim to find "the right path" but in its frustration creates "fantasies." The docilitas that Calvin experienced as the first gift of "conversion" is the only way out of the "labyrinth."⁵⁶

Twice as frequent and far more revealing is Calvin's extensive use of the word "abyssus," to which again Bouwsma was the first to point. In the 1986 Kuyper lectures on "The Heritage of John Calvin" at the Free University of Amsterdam, I had already chosen the same hermeneutical path by identifying a series of favored expressions of Calvin as keys unlocking the existential strata of his thought and pointed to four such catchwords: "nonchalant," "secret" with its Latin equivalent "arcanum," and the expressions "Dei nutu" as well as "meditatio vitae futurae."⁵⁷ As fruitful as these four windows proved to be, I must frankly admit that Bouwsma's discovery of "abyssus" opens up even larger horizons—larger, I submit, than even his cultural interpretation admits.

With its biblical roots, "abyssus" is understandably much more prominent⁵⁸ than "labyrinth' as the classical shorthand for the intractable maze.⁵⁹ One New Testament text in particular makes Calvin reach for the term "abyssus" to describe confusion, the hell of despair, and the threat of ultimate annihilation. A second one, which in the Vulgate version reads "bestia quae ascendit de abysso (Rev. 11:7)," can be mentioned only in passing since Calvin nowhere explicitly invokes or interprets this passage. Yet, in a later version of the Institutio (1543), pondering why the Scriptures sometimes refer to "the devil" in the singular and sometimes to "devils" in the plural, he explains the singular as indicative of the ongoing war between the kingdom of righteousness under the one-headed leadership of Christ and the kingdom of impiety under the one devil. This adversary will finally be thrown "into the enternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels (Matt. 25:41)"—and hence ultimately be forced to return to the abyss out of which he emerged.⁶⁰ And when Calvin argues that the sinner cannot possibly enumerate all his sins in the confessional, he invokes common sense, that is, the awareness of everybody "quanta esset peccatorum nostrorum abyssus …quot capita ferret et quam longam caudam thraheret haec hydra."⁶¹ This abyssmal hydra suggests the biblical "Beast" of the Book of Revelation, which threatens to emerge from the Abyss.

The key biblical text, however, and the ever present context is the story in Luke 8 about the exorcism of the legion of demons who at their own request are sent running into the abyss: "in abyssum irent" (Luke 8:32). It is this powerful image of the crazy⁶² yet "voluntary" submersion and death-by-drowning that also stands behind the commentary on Jeremiah 33:44, where Calvin analyzes the unwillingness of the Jews to accept God's offer of grace and forgiveness: "they rather wanted to throw themselves in the abyss of desperation."⁶³ Without this sense of "existence on the brink" we would not grasp the urgency of Calvin's appeal to his old friend François Daniel, writing on 15 July 1559, "[you are] loath to climb out of the abyss of the papal church in which you have plunged…."⁶⁴

The full import of the term "abyss," with both its emotional and doctrinal freight, is already accessible to us in Calvin's earliest work, the Psychopannychia (1534), holding treasures that still await mining. In the central and oldest part of this twice rewritten treatise, Calvin first points out that true theology cannot go beyond the boundaries of what the Holy Spirit teaches: to penetrate further and beyond these boundaries is to drown oneself in the abyss, the "abyssum mysteriorum Dei…."⁶⁵ He concludes this passage with the warning that those who reach beyond their ken will invariably come to naught: "…eos qui supra se nituntur, semper corruere."⁶⁶ The classical myth of Icarus had already been transformed into moral advice by Erasmus in the Adagia: "quae supra nos nihil ad nos" (1.6.69); and used by Luther in De Servo Arbitrio to warn against the penetration of the hidden counsels of God.⁶⁷ For Calvin the yonder is "down under."

While Calvin's warning against reaching out for the Deus absconditus has—with the water simile of "drowning"—a flavor all its own, the report on his experience of the wrath of God permits us an unparalleled glimpse into his own psyche.⁶⁸ The wider context of this revealing passage is his argument against those who teach that the soul dies at the end of the human life. No, Calvin responds, in reality the soul dies when hit by the judgment of God, when the sinner hears the chilling challenge "Adam, where are you?" This is easier to think than to say, to ponder than to express in words; yet so terrible is the majesty of God that even thinking about it is impossible without having had the experience yourself. Those on whom his wrath falls discover the full terror before the omnipotent God; however they try to escape, they will not succeed, even though "in mille abyssos se demergere parati sunt."⁶⁹ Who does not have to admit that this is true death! But to spell this out in words is not necessary for those who have experienced this sharp compunction of the conscience.⁷⁰ No doubt Calvin knows what he is talking about.

In the third and final passage we draw on, the experience of conversion has solidified into a doctrine that would become typical for the teachings of Calvin and Calvinism. Often, Calvin points out, the Scriptures mean by "death" not the end of present life nor by "hell" the grave. "To die" and "to descend into hell" frequently mean "alienation" from God and "depression" caused by the judgment of God: it characterizes those who are made attrite [!] by his Hand. In this case hell does not mean physical but spiritual death: "abyssum et confusionem significed."⁷¹

When in the New Testament the Gospel writers refer to "Hades" they do not mean a place or location but the condition of utter misery, exposed to the wrath of God and assigned to exile. This is the meaning of the words in the Creed that Christ has "descended into hell." When the Bible says that "God redeems my soul from the grasp of hell," it means "He has accepted me." The impius, who stubbornly (proterve) rejects God and instead puts his hope in his own achievements, will die, descend into hell, and disappear in the abyss. But he who trusts in the Lord will be liberated from the power of hell⁷² and escape the clutches of the abyss.

Let us venture now to address the implications of our findings. We started out by pointing to Calvin's extreme self-reticence. Then, following the sign-posts of catchwords and favorite expressions, we reached a layer of revealing primordial reactions and gut decisions that can best be described with the German word Vorverständnis. Three preliminary conclusions are in order.

1. By concentrating on the earliest layer in Calvin's work, we have found that a firm grasp of late medieval theology is required in order to understand a whole series of terms and assumptions, reaching from God's self-binding covenant (pactum)⁷³ to the inscrutable God (Deus absconditus) and the naked state of incapacitating fear (attritio). All of these late medieval themes had already been integrated and transformed into a biblical theology that Calvin could have encountered in the French translations and Latin writings of Luther, including De Servo Arbitrio of 1525. On a much broader textbase than can be displayed here, an extensive study of Erasmus's Adagia must be assumed. Yet the young Calvin is theologically not an Erasmian, but—in view of his different understanding of the iustitia Dei⁷⁴—to a remarkable extent in experience and at times even in expression a disciple of Luther.

2. The special characteristic of Calvin's teaching, which can therefore be designated as an extra-Calvinisticum, is to be found in his reinterpretation of hell as a condition,⁷⁵ and the descent of Christ into hell as the extreme experience and exposure of the Son of Man to the wrath of God. This extra-Calvinisticum is already part of the earliest stage of Calvin's thought, and with its deep sense of alienation in keeping with his own conversion experience as deliverance "from the pits" ("bourbier si profound").⁷⁶ Indeed, the interpreter—and the translator!—of Calvin needs to be as familiar with late medieval terminology as with the Latin and French of that day; yet, I repeat, this is no warrant to construe a medieval pedigree that can be as easily advanced as gainsaid. Calvin did not learn this striking psychological interpretation of the abysmal Descent into Hell in a medieval school but in the school of life.

3. Whereas William Bouwsma marked a significant advance in discovering the centrality of the terms "labyrinth" and "abyss," our analysis places us in a favorable position to start to reunite the two Calvins that Bouwsma sees in tension and even in a crippling conflict with one another. To begin with, the two metaphors are not mutually exclusive; confusion is typical of both. As we noticed, Calvin warns not to penetrate the mysteries of God; such speculation plunges us in the abyss. But this abyss is indistinguishable from the labyrinth when Calvin warns against following Augustine—as Bouwsma himself noted⁷⁷—in speculating how the sin of Adam was transmitted: such puzzling drives you into the labyrinth.

Furthermore, Bouwsma properly points out that it is the "humanistic Calvin who chiefly dreaded …entrapment in a labyrinth."⁷⁸ This same concern, however, Calvin shared with the humanists of his age, particularly with the circle around Lefèvre d'Étaples in Paris. The alleged "dread" is a stereotypical humanist concern not to slide back into the labyrinth of the man-made "solutions," of scholasticism and canon law.

Finally, Bouwsma is again right in discerning that "Calvin was chiefly driven by a terror that took shape for him in the metaphor of the abyss."⁷⁹ Whereas the references to the labyrinth are standing expressions of less than central importance, with the abyss we reach the heart of the matter, and indeed into the heart of the one Calvin. Initiating his conversion is an experience of drowning and annihilation that Calvin regards as generic and applies to all true Christians at all times. It is the experience of hearing God's piercing call, "Adam, where are you?" Scared to death by the majesty of God and caught in the labyrinth of a life without exit, the sinner frenetically flees and, blinded by fear, seeks "refuge" in the abyss of hell and damnation. If saved from drowning by God's outstretched hand,⁸⁰" this soul-rending experience gives way to the resuscitating power of God as pledged in his Word. This encounter with naked terror is not left behind, however, but ever present and methodically kept to mind by continuous mediation.⁸¹

The medieval call "de profundis"—the traditional conclusion of the funeral mass⁸²—is rephrased in the language of experience: "obrutus sum, sepultus sum, suffocatus sum"—in the abyss I am drowning, buried, choking.⁸³ Bouwsma is right: the timor Dei as awe for God has marked Calvin for life. But at the same time, knowing about the terrifying abyss neutralizes all other human fears. Such fears Calvin knew very well. He describes his own all-encompassing fear of persecution in a 1562 sermon on II Samuel. Looking back at the time before his refuge, "when tyranny reigned in France," he remembered that he was scared to death, "j'ay esté en ces destresses là, que i'eusse désiré voulu estre quasi mort pour oster ces angoisses …":⁸⁴ the same urge to escape the anxiety that drove the "swines of the Gerasenes" into the abyss (Luke 8:26, RSV).

Looking at all the evidence, we reach five conclusions:

1. "Labyrinth" and "abyssus" do indeed provide appropriate lenses—together with "theather" the favorite image drawn from the vital but vitiated world of vision—but the right focus (scopus) still has to be established. To present Calvin in his campaign against the "labyrinth" as "the forward-looking humanist and adventuresome discoverer," as does Bouwsma, is to assume a Burckhardtian view of humanism that Calvin shared as little as we do today. With all respect for the studia humanitatis as welcome tools and new resources, Calvin does not tire of discrediting all the classical authorities for the moral philosophy of his day: he assails the vagaries of the Platonic dialogues, as well as the implicit or explicit "atheism" of the very best in Virgil, Horace, and Seneca.⁸⁵ Except for glimmers ("scintillae") and disparate tidbits of truth ("poetis extortae sunt"!) nothing these unbelievers or profani homines can offer alleviates the basic human disorientation, exacerbated by the confusion of scholastic doctors and canon lawyers.

2. There is no "adventurous" way out except by docilitas and fraenum, by redirection and by the bridle, so that the "wild horse" can be put back on the right track: conversio ad docilitatem.⁸⁶

3. Calvin's undeniable fear for the "abyss" does not reveal him to be the "rationalist" or the "philosopher," let alone the "Thomist." The "abyss" stands for the psychological experience of hell, alienation, and ultimately annihilation when confronted before the tribunal Dei with the holy majesty of God the Judge. The "abyssus" is the finis of all mankind, except for the elect who experience exactly the same "condition" but then are moved to invoke the mercy of God and thus seize his "extended hand." To use another favorite expression, it can be said docendi causa that whereas faith (revelatio) is the map leading out of the "labyrinth," hope (invocatio) is the escape and life jacket for the drowning creature who has lost his footing in the "abyss." Both metaphors, "labyrinth" and "abyss." relate to confusion: yet the "abyss" does not call for enlightenment but for redemption and has the teleological connotation of the ultimate "discrimination" between life and death. In the "experienced"—and preached!—gospel, Calvin's doctrine of reprobation is sublapsarian: the reprobate are drowning in their own guilt. While the elect throw themselves at the mercy of God the Judge, the reprobate reject his "extended hand."

4. Calvin knows that on the basis of fixed credal points (fixa stat sentential), theology provides a discourse of metaphors. The frequent expression "docendi causa" in the Institutio alerts the reader to the fact that what follows is a clarification by abstraction, transcending the cohesion of lived experience. Hitherto unnoticed, it is an important warning signal that should be especially heeded by those interpreters who make this teaching manual the mainstay of their interpretation.

In the Commentaries the same function is laid on the slight shoulders of the short word "quasi," which has not drawn the attention it deserves, though it appears some hundred times more frequently than "abyssus." Under this fascinating "quasi"-blanket of expressions, allusions, and approximations lies for Calvin the hard core of psycho-spiritual experiences and traumatic developments such as the growth and shriveling of joy and despair. The Holy Spirit, long recognized as a major and characteristic theme in Calvin's doctrine, is de facto the Divine Analyst and Psychotherapist. The Book of Psalms provides the manual for analysis since it offers—to use the phrase that Calvin is proud to have coined—"the anatomy of all parts of the soul."⁸⁷ In charge of God's Secret Service (operatio arcana), the Spirit penetrates not only the thoughts, words, and deeds, as the tradition had it, but also the affectus, transforms external doctrine into persuasion,⁸⁸ and above all leads from inner confusion to sanity.⁸⁹

As we shall see, this insight is already the center and heartbeat of the Psychopannychia. At this point it serves to underscore an aspect of Calvin's character to which Bouwsma pointed, but which he saw nipped in the bud: Calvin was indeed an "adventurer," namely an adventurer-into-the interior. He offered both a new diagnosis and a novel therapy for that part of Europe which had broken out of the protection of the confessional and, while risking to live without the benefit of absolution and without the prospect of the "last rites," henceforth found itself directly confronting the tribunal of God with a conscience still trained and sensitized by the medieval interpretation of the Seven Deadly Sins and the Ten Commandments.

The "labyrinth" marks the point of departure, namely the perplexities of the confessional, too heteronomous to assuage and redirect the conscience. The "abyssus," on the other hand, expresses the new priestless life coram Deo, where sins can no longer be left behind through the exercise of contrition and the sacrament of absolution. It marks at once the fierce storms outside the confessional and the fiery breath of direct, unmediated exposure to the justice of God.

5. The intensity of the quest for "sincerity" and a "good conscience," as well as the crucible of the examen pietatis, reveals the dimensions of the traumatic experience that those generations had to "absorb" (a verb used in connection with "abyss" almost as frequently as "drown"), who had consciously embraced the Reformation or found themselves in Reformed territories. This "exodus from the confessional" is an important dimension of the social and political exile that marked the audience of Calvin. With this exodus in mind Calvin explored the Scriptures. His Commentaries reveal best the extent to which he himself is not merely an observer but a participant who carried the full brunt of its trauma.

Calvin was at once driven by the ever present awareness (meditatio!) of the threat of drowning in abyss of death, devil, and hell, and drawn by a deep-seated trust in the promise of God's saving intervention. To him applies not the expression "come hell or high water";⁹⁰ the diabolical abyss is hell and high water. Yet the mercy of God subdues and swallows the power of the Beast, so forcefully formulated in his outcry: "Abyssus tuae misericordiae hanc peccati mei abyssum absorbeat"—May the abyss of my sin be drowned into the abyss of Your mercy.⁹¹

IV. The Decisive Decade: 1525-35

In six steps we now endeavor to place the young Calvin in his historical context, the increasing threat of persecution.

1. The chaotic structure of the Psychopannychia—notwithstanding or perhaps even due to the double revision in 1536 and 1542—does not facilitate easy access. Even so, it is an amazingly rich treatise⁹² for all who try to find the original thread in the labyrinth of Calvin's later thought. The unwieldy structure goes quite a way in explaining why this earliest theological work of the reformer has been given such cursory treatment during the last fifty years. When it was read at all, as in the case of George Hunston Williams, it suffered from a false contrast with Luther, who was claimed to teach the mortality of the soul.⁹³ This is a misreading not only of Luther,⁹⁴ but of Calvin too.

Calvin's point of departure is the immortality of the souls, which he believes to be a truth he can share with all reasonable humans. And indeed he himself refers to the Psychopannychia (which literally means "The Waking of the Soul") as his libellus "de animarum immortalitate."⁹⁵ His point is, however, that just as death strikes when the gospel is rejected, the soul receives life eternal when through justification it is resuscitated and placed on the path of the Kingdom. Calvin explicitly denies that the soul is immortal in and of itself, as if she could subsist without God's care: "sed dicimus, eius manu ac benedictione sustineri"⁹⁶—we learn from experience that it is the might of God and not our human nature that allows us to last in eternity.⁹⁷ Not only in this central passage but throughout the Psychopannychia, we see how the Platonic presuppositions that swayed the minds of the leading humanists in Florence and Paris, around Ficino and Lefèvre d'Étaples, provide Calvin with a point of departure and with a vocabulary that is consciously tested and critically transformed according to the standards of biblical speech.

2. If the major thrust of the Psychopannychia can be so readily misunderstood, it should not surprise us that a seemingly minor aside in the preface of 1534 has not drawn the attention it deserves. Calvin argues here that "recently" a number of anabapist authors⁹⁸ have revived the old heresy of the mortality of the soul, which according to Eusebius was taught by Arabs and sometime later upheld by the "Bishop of Rome,"⁹⁹ Pope John XXII (4 Dec. 1334), "whom the University of Paris forced to recant."¹⁰⁰ In one respect the questions raised by this passage have indeed been investigated. It is now well established that Calvin's characterization is mistaken. Pope John, though deviating from the received opinion of the immediate and full vision of the departed souls, never taught the morality of the soul. Rather, he argued for an intermediate state in which the souls of the departed receive the beginning of their reward in seeing the humanity—though not yet the divinity—of Christ, and do therefore not yet enjoy the beatific vision.¹⁰¹

The positions of Pope John and John Calvin seem quite similar when compared with the extreme alternatives of mortality and immediate full beatific vision.¹⁰² Joseph Tylenda even concludes, "Calvin's opinion is, in fact, hardly distinguishable from that of John XXII."¹⁰³ There is one crucial difference, however, in that Pope John articulates the "not yet" dimension of the intermediate stage in relation to the resurrection, whereas Calvin places an equal emphasis on the "already." Calvin's theme is the progress of the Christian in three stages, from conversion (awakening), resting after death yet fully awake in the joyous expectation of the full beatitude, which will finally be received on the day of the resurrection. The progress of the pilgrim "in dies magis magisque" is already the mark of the earliest thought of Calvin.¹⁰⁴ Contrary to the impression left by Calvin scholarship, the alertness of the soul after death is not a youthful "folly": in none of the later biblical commentaries will Calvin miss an opportunity to illustrate and develop the importance of this theme.¹⁰⁵

3. For our purposes even more relevant is the question what we can learn about Calvin's initia from his reference to the condemnation of Pope John XXII by the University of Paris. The fact itself, that is, the critical Gutachten of twenty-nine Parisian doctors concerning the eschatology of John XXII, dated 2 January 1334, is well documented.¹⁰⁶ The point is, however, that Calvin invokes here with great specificity, as he does again in the Institutio¹⁰⁷ and in his Briève Instruction of 1544,¹⁰⁸ the authority of Jean Gerson (1429). Calvin does not refer to him in general terms but points accurately to the "first" Easter sermon of the famous chancellor of the University of Paris. This is Gerson's sermon "Pax vobis," preached on Palm Sunday 1394 (April 19) and originally delivered in French. The Latin version was not published until Jacob Wimpfeling (1450-1528) had it translated by a gifted German student in Paris and incorporated it in his Supplementum to the 1502 Strasbourg edition, which contains, as he says explicitly, "prius non impressa." This edition, republished in Strasburg (1514), Basel (1518), and Paris (1521), contains two further Easter Sermons and hence explains Calvin's identification of "Pax vobis" as the first Easter Sermon.¹⁰⁹ Two centuries later "Pax vobis" was incorporated by L. Ellies Du Pin in his fine edition of Gerson's Opera Omnia;¹¹⁰ the original French version was published for the first time by Palemon Glorieux in 1968.¹¹¹

Since the first preface to the Psychopannychia is written in Orléans (1534), shortly after Calvin had to flee from Paris and before settling in Basel (1535-36), he may have relied on his memory for the reference to Gerson. It certainly means, however, that if he did not work himself extensively with Gerson manuscripts, he must have used the Wimpfeling edition, that is, the Supplementum. In either case it shows that Calvin was early acquainted with the most eminent of late medieval French authors,¹¹² whose authority was preeminent in Gallican circles that liked to invoke Gerson's authority for that reformation of France for which the chancellor had once delivered such an eloquent blueprint.¹¹³

Concluding this section on the Psychopannychia, it may be said that just as the text itself deserves renewed attention as documenting the method, scope, and findings of the young Calvin, the preface points to an even earlier phase when he apparently had access to the works of the great French conciliarist, or moved in circles where Gerson's memory was kept alive.¹¹⁴

4. In his plea for the reform of France, Gerson invoked the authority of Seneca. Though admitting that nothing is so poisonous as tyranny, he made quite clear that "sedicion" is rampant rebellion without rhyme or reason: "she is often worse than tyranny." But even so, also to tyranny the rule applies: "Riens violent aussi ne peust durer"—violence has no future. Hence Gerson suggests that the king submit to "reasonable" reform, since to submit to reason does not mean to bow to one's subjects. As Seneca so convincingly put it: "si vis omnia subicere tibi, subice te rationi"¹¹⁵—thus Gerson presented his king, Charles VI (1420), with the Stoic yardstick "between severity and clemency" for that enlightened absolutism which a century later would be personified by Francis I (1547).¹¹⁶

Calvin's Seneca commentary,¹¹⁷ understandably often studied for possible hints about his conversion or nascent theological convictions, should rather be road in the context of the politically turbulent situation in France after the Concordat of 1516 and its confirmation in 1519. Initially Parliament resisted, and when it had been placated the University stepped in, blocking the printing of the text of the Concordat.¹¹⁸ The new alliance between king and pope, which steadied the royal hold on the French Church, presented a challenge to which the older Gallican coalition had to provide new answers. Future interpretations of Calvin's Seneca commentary will want to draw on this challenge to politicians and legal experts as the immediate context of Calvin's earliest publication.

With the commentary on Seneca's De dementia we have access to the earliest phase of Calvin's academic career.¹¹⁹ At the feet of Pierre Taisan de l'Etoile (Petrus Stella) in Orleans and of Andrea Alciato in Bourges, he was so fortunate as to be introduced to the cutting edge of the political science of his day. Different from the traditional "Fürstenspiegel" in addressing all matters of public administration, and different from a "Utopian" concern by regulating existing legal practice, this new legal prudence found its guiding principles not in canon law but in Roman law. Although Josef Bohatec has convincingly documented the overwhelming extent to which Calvin drew on Guillaume Budé in his later legal thought,¹²⁰ for the young Calvin Pierre de l'Etoile was the "prince of the jurists."¹²¹ From Alciato (1550; 1529-33 at the University of Bourges), Calvin occasionally distanced himself as he did in his preface to the "Antapologia" of his friend Duchemin.¹²² Yet he may have encountered in Alciato the more significant and innovative legal mind, who, to quote Myron Gilmore, "became the founder of a new school of jurisprudence, based on the principle of humanist exegesis with an appreciation of the importance of the interpretation of the Roman law as a living common law…,"¹²³ This application of Roman law is what Budé tried to achieve in France and what Calvin set out to implement in Geneva. Whereas legal scholars had already been eminent carriers of Renaissance humanism in fifteenth-century Italy, in the sixteenth-century this trend reached France and Germany.¹²⁴ In this campaign for the emancipation of civil law from canon law, Alciato was an important transalpine link.

Calvin was fortunate not only in his teachers, but also in the Seneca theme, which he dared to tackle notwithstanding two earlier editions of De Clementia by Erasmus (1515; 1529). Since 14 February 1531 documented as "Maistre Jean Cauvin, licentié es loix," he published a year later a commentary on the civic virtue of clemency that, as the personalized dimension of the issue of "peace and concord," had been the central theme in political science and reform tracts north and south of the Alps. In measuring the relationship of power and justice, and in reaching for a balance between tyranny and mob rule, "clemency" was sought after as the golden mean.¹²⁵ Whereas Calvin's Seneca commentary is too often dismissed as a youthful display of humanistic tools, or praised as the beginnings of "Calvin the exegete," and once even as his "'pagan apprenticeship' to the Christian life,"¹²⁶ the point of departure for future scholarship will be Calvin as the student of statecraft in the politically volatile situation of an emerging absolutist monarchy.

Drawing on his studies in Orleans (1528-29), Bourges (1529-31), and under the Royal Readers (1531-33), Calvin comes well prepared to design his appeal to Francis I as the preface to his Institutio¹²⁷ and to sketch the "humanitatis et civilitatis officia"¹²⁸ in its conclud ing section about power and justice in a Christian society.¹²⁹ Without the hermeneutical tool of the Sen eca commentary, Calvin's early political theology could be misunderstood as a rhetorical device to win the clemency of Francis I rather than as a programmatic effort to acknowledge and regulate royal absolutism between the boundaries of human "aequitas" and the sovereignty of God as "rex regum."¹³⁰ Calvin defended by defining both limits and goals: "sunt certique fines!" This is not fear for the abyss, but the common sense of legal circumscription: no humanity without order,¹³¹ no order without checks and balances, no balance without law—which itself is for Calvin the charta of all "true humanism."

Yet even more important than the use Calvin made of his legal training in defending the cause of the French loyal opposition is his vision and ability to create new institutions in the form of the Compagnie des Pasteurs and the Consistory, the General Synod and the Genevan Academy. There is a wise French saying: "Les hommes passent, les institutions subsistent." Calvin did not fade away because he incarnated his vision by designing durable legal structures. His ever growing Institutio would have been long dated and shelved if he had not initiated viable institutions as the underpinnings of his "textual community," No biography of Calvin can be complete without due attention to the institutional dimensions of his legacy.

5. Calvin did not publish his Psychopannychia in 1534 because Wolfgang Capito—among the city reformers the most sensitive to winning the radical reformers—strongly advised him against it. This is the first time we learn that the young Calvin had contacts with Strassburg and had apparently already developed such a relationship of respect and trust with Capito that he submitted his theological maidenwork¹³² to the scrutiny of this Strassburg reformer.¹³³ The Strassburg connection cannot surprise us since, after September 1524 when the Reformation had triumphed in this imperial city, it became, to use the expression of Jean Rott, "un centre de propaganda vers les pays de l'Ouest."¹³⁴ When on 3 October 1525 the Parliament of Paris decided to take action against the Circle of Meaux, Lefèvre d'Étaples and his chief officers such as Guillaume Farel, Michel d'Arande, and (for a shorter stay) Gerard Roussel sought refuge in Strassburg and were received under the roof of Capito.

From a network of secretive messages¹³⁵ we know that a stream of French refugees went to Basel and Zurich, but all of them circulated through Strassburg as the extraterritorial safeplace for the French evangelicals. For a correct understanding of the initia Calvini, it is important that instead of the usual opening chapter on "l'Affaire des Placards" in October 1534, the story begins to unfold on 3 October 1525, when Parliament exploited the absence of King Francis I, imprisoned in Spain after the lost battle at Pavia (24 Feb. 1525). At this point in time, Parliament decided to act on the pressure of the Sorbonne to suppress what it called "lutheranism."¹³⁶

Apart from the horror of imprisonment, torture, and death at the stake, the ensuing wave of persecution had a clarifying and accelerating effect. The broad coalition of reform-minded Gallican Episcopalianism, which had taken institutional form in the diocese of Meaux in the years 1521-25, was now broken into three discernible parties, personified by (1) Guillaume Briçonnet, the bishop of Meaux; (2) by his learned vicar Lefèvre d'Étaples, the mastermind of the reform in the diocese; and (3) by Guillaume Farel, the radical student of Lefèvre, who would have such a decisive influence on the course of Calvin's life.

The impact of the persecutions, designed and executed through the cooperation of Parliament and University, forced each party to clarify its understanding of reform. Bishop Briçonnet, in his concern for peace and order the most Erasmian among the "reformists," purged the ranks of his clergy and reinforced traditional devotions to the Holy Sacrament and the Virgin Mary.¹³⁷

Lefèvre d'Étaples, perhaps the most mysterious of the three and certainly the most difficult to place,¹³⁸ takes the road to Strassburg and, after his return to France, continues to be in touch with his more radical disciples such as Farel, and may well have met with Calvin two years before his death in 1536. Later Calvin would have counted him among the Nicodemites, but his best modern interpreter can answer this charge in one loaded sentence: "Lefèvre ne se cache pas, il se tait."¹³⁹

Whereas Lefèvre responded to the use of force with the power of silence, Guillaume Farel responded by rejection: he concluded that the Antichrist raged in the Church of Rome and was stretching his greedy fingers to the kingdom of France, forcing the truly faithful to take the counteroffensive.

Reading, side by side, Lefèvre (c. 1440-1536) and Farel (c. 1489-1565)—almost half a century younger—one cannot help but notice the striking new tone of urgency expressed in the intensive and extensive use of Antichrist terminology.¹⁴⁰ Probably early in 1525, the handbook for the reform of instruction and preaching in the diocese of Meaux was published, which Michael Screech has properly called "un ouvrage révolutionnaire."¹⁴¹ Though it was published anonymously, there can be no doubt as to the authorship of Lefèvre d'Étaples. The Épistres et Évangiles follow the text of his translation of the New Testament,¹⁴² and his Paulin ism, biblicism, the emphasis on the gloria Dei, as well as the revealing silence about the invocation of the saints, inform the preaching examples.¹⁴³ Probably in spired by Luther's "Adventspostille" of 1522, it dares to develop a biblical theology that makes it quite understandable that the Sorbonne censured (on 6 Nov. 1525) forty-eight propositions drawn from this text as "diabolical figments" and characterized them as Manichean, Waldensian, Wyclyffite, and Lutheran.¹⁴⁴

For our intent to measure the difference and, in this case, even the distance between Lefèvre and his disciples, it is important that in the later edition printed by Étienne Dolet (Lyon, 1542),¹⁴⁵ six new "exhortations" were added and quite a number of interpolations were made by changing words, phrases, and sometimes an entire paragraph. The changes reveal a heightened tone of critique and impatience, and are properly characterized by Screech as "plus scripturaires, plus militantes, que celles de Lefèvre lui-même."¹⁴⁶

V. Conclusion: "Nous N'Avons Autre Refuge Qu'a Sa Providence"¹⁴⁷

It is the extended line from Briçonnet via Lefèvre to Farel and his other radical disciples that brings us into the heartland of the initia Calvini. In this climate of persecution—and this applies to the whole decade that saw Calvin grow from puberty to adulthood, from 16 to 26 years of age—the themes developed that were to become cornerstones in Calvin's biblical theology: the glory of God,¹⁴⁸ the secret operation of the Holy Spirit, the growth of the Kingdom, the danger of idolatry, and the strategy of Satan.

In Calvin's eloquent preface to the 1535 Bible of Pierre Robert Olivétan (†1538), all of these themes are integrated within the one history of the covenanting God.¹⁴⁹ In this brief summa of the whole history of salvation, one element is novel and deserves our special attention. After relating the liberation from Egypt and before turning to the arrival in the Promised Land, Calvin inserts the revealing sentence: "Il les a accompagnés nuit et jour en leur fuite, étant comme fugitif au milieu d'eux"—he accompanied the Children of Israel night and day on their flight, "present among them as a fugitive himself."¹⁵⁰

The ten years of ever increasing persecution (1525-35) almost resulted in the annihilation of the Reformed party, but then led increasingly to the radicalization of the "rest" along stages on the line marked by the distance between Briçonnet, Lefèvre, and Farel. The political reality of persecution cried out for a religious interpretation that led to the discovery of the work of the Antichrist, a key phrase in the vocabulary of extraand anti-hierarchical reform. The yield of this history of persecution, the refuge, made Calvin read the Scriptures anew and allowed him to discover God as the first refugee, trekking with the people of Israel through the desert.¹⁵¹

In unfolding his biblical theology and in building his institutions, Calvin used a whole range of authors from Augustine to Luther, from d'Étaples to Budé, from Erasmus to Bullinger; and he reflected currents ranging all the way from Platonism to late medieval Scotism. But at the center of the initia stand the never forgotten experience of the abyss as the deadly flight from God and the growing insight in the life-giving refuge with God.

At times Calvin broke the silence of his reticence. In Genevan exile he confessed, "It is very hard to have to live far from one's fatherland."¹⁵² This experience enabled him to understand and unfold the biblical theme: "I have been a stranger in a strange land" (Exod. 2:22). The threat of the abyss is ever present—but the fugitive God is trekking along, "manum porrexit"—his "hand is stretched out." Both this conviction and this language made Calvin the compelling spokesman for all Christians in the European diaspora. Thus Calvin initiated—after the reformation of Luther and of the cities—the resilient Reformation of the Refugees.

Ie t'anymeray en toute obeissance,
Tant que viuray, o mon Dieu, ma puissance:
Dieu, c'est mon roc, mon rempar haut et seur,
C'est ma rencon, c'est mon fort defenseur.

En luy seul gist ma fiance perfaite,
C'est mon pauoys, mes armes, ma retraitte;
Quand ie l'exalte et prie en ferme roy,
Soudain recoux des ennemis me voy.
Clément Marot, Psaume XVIII¹⁵³

Notes

¹Clément Marot et le Psautier Huguenot, étude historique, littéraire, musicale et bibliographique, ed. O. Douen (Paris, 1879; repr. Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1967), 2.430. In 1541 Calvin incorporated in the new Genevan liturgy psalms that Marot (1544) had begun to "translate" from 1533 onward in what became known as the "style Marotique." Marot provided the dispersed "Churches under the Cross" both with tender hymns commensurate with their refugee experience and with battle songs preparing for mob action and survival. I open and close this essay with Marot because he has lent Calvin's piety poetic power and is to be regarded as a major cohesive factor offsetting the centrifugal forces operative in this long-dispersed underground movement.

²Responsio at Sadoleti Epistolam (1539); Opera Selecta, 1.460.42. The Opera Selecta (henceforth OS), vols. 1-4, ed. P. Barth and G. Niesel (Miinchen: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1926, 1936), are quoted with page and line references, also where this edition omitted line numbering.

³ This is Calvin's later—and indeed late: 1557—designation in his Commentary on the Psalms: "subita conversione ad docilitatem subegit …" CO 31.21 C. Since the Calvini Opera (henceforth CO) do not provide line numbers, I divide the columns into A, B, and C to help the reader locate the quotations in context.

This much-discussed statement deserves a fresh analysis, since it cannot be rendered with the usual—classical or patristic—dictionaries in hand. The most convincing evidence must come from Calvin's Psalms commentary itself. Fortunately, this provides an eloquent answer, and if we include the French rendering of the Preface (if not written by Calvin himself, then certainly by someone thoroughly familiar with his thought and vocabulary), even bilingual evidence. I include supportive references to the French Sermon Series of 1553, in which all the main themes of the Psalms commentary are already available, and which provides the rich extra dimension of French expressions.

Here four points suffice: (1) As in the answer to Sadolet, the wider context of the conversion passage is the argument that Calvin had not sought office on his own account—Sadolet had suggested "ambitio" and "avaritia": lust for power or riches. No, Calvin had been called directly by God—as he shows in other commentaries, David to his throne, Isaiah to his prophecy, and Paul to his apostolate. Hence, even in these two "classical" autobiographical passages, Calvin presents "official" business, speaking "ex officio" about the unexpected intersection of his own designs with God's providence.

(2) In the phrase "subita conversio," conversion means "mutatio" (this can also happen to "impii": CO 31.475 C); the suddenness of "subita," "subito" (adverb), or "repente" refers to an event "praeter spem," beyond all expectation (CO 31.78 B; 459 C; 311 B; cf. CO 48.141 C), at times also applicable to the "secure" enemy (349 B): God intervenes "in a flash." Even in the most hopeless situation, he can "restore" us (as already in the sermon of the 2nd of April, 1553, on Ps. 119) "en une minute de temps" (CO 32.614 C). (3) Most baffling for interpreters proves to be the clause "ad docilitatem subegit." The French parallel version is more explicit: "…par une conversion subite il domta et rangea à docilité mon coeur …" (CO 31.22 C). In line with Calvin's favorite image, "dom(p)ter" and "ranger" refer to the taming of wild animals, particularly of wild horses to be placed on track by receiving a "fraenum" ("fraenare": 213 B) or bridle (CO 31.322 C; 32.639 A). Without redirection (rectitudo legis), the "wild horses" get lost "in flexuosas vias" (CO 32.200 C) and do not know in or out: they are caught (perplexed) in the "labyrinth" (CO 31.368 C; 32.642 A; cf. 52.447B), tire out and finally lose their way completely, to be drowned in the "abyss" (CO 31.368 B).

(4) Calvin describes his preconversion situation as the need to be drawn "e profundo luto," "de ce bourdier si profond" (CO 31.21 C; cf. 22 C): He is "stuck in the pits." Though "labyrinth" and "abyss" overlap in the meaning of "confusion" and "disorientation," I am inclined to believe that the labyrinth of ethical directives is intended, when he still was "under the papacy" (CO 31.204 B). In the earlier commentary on Cor. I, Calvin stated explicitly that the "beginning of salvation" is "quod ex peccati et mortis labyrintho extrahimur" (CO 49.331 C). Characteristic of the "abyssus" is the most acute stage of despair which engenders such thoroughgoing "Anfechtungen" that it leaves the believer only one refuge, namely, to call on the mercy of God and his "extended hand." Though the "abyssus" is also the place where, ultimately, the hard of heart, the "protervi" or the "méchants" (impii) are "exterminated," the primary function of the "abyssus" is to characterize the human condition coram Deo: God is committed (foedus) to salvage from death and the sepulchre. The Psychopannychia (1534) documents both how early and how seriously Calvin takes this metaphor. See further the concise definition of "docilitas" in CO 7.594 Â / C (1549) and the interpretation of the confessional as a threat to the certitude of salvation (pax conscientiae), with "the abyssus" as the final consequence: "Haec demum pax est conscientiae, sine qua null est salus, quum indubia est absolutionis fides …nihilo minus conficient, quam si aperte iugularetur …et tandem abyssus trahet …quisquis hunc laqueum sponte induet, sciens ac volens salutem suam proiicit." CO 7.604 A/B.

The Commentary on the Psalms was completed in 1552 and published in 1557. For a clarification of the three types "hidden" in what is usually referred to as "Commentaries"—commentaries proper (the books of Moses, the Psalms, and Joshua), lectures, and sermons—see the fundamental work by T. H. L. Parker, Calvin's Old Testament Commentaries (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 9-41. See here also the helpful list of the known dates of completion and of publication; ibid., 29.

⁴ "Ego vero novitate offensus, difficulter aures praebui: ac initio, fateor, strenue animoseque resistebam. Siquidem (quae hominibus ingenita est in retinendo quod semel susceperunt instituto, vel constantia, vel contumacia), aegerrime adducebar, ut me in ignoratione et errore tota vita versatum esse confiterer. Una praesertim res animum ab illis meum avertebat, ecclesiae reverentia. Verum ubi aliquando aures aperui, meque doceri passus sum, supervacuum fuisse timorem ilium intellexi, ne quid ecclesiae maiestati decederet. Multum enim interesse admonebant, secessionem quis ab ecclesia faciat, an vitia corrigere studeat, quibus ecclesia ipsa contaminata est. De ecclesia praeclare loquebantur, summum unitatis colendae studium prae se ferebant." OS 1.485.17-30.

⁵ Jun Matsuura is presently pursuing the identification of volumes in the Erfurt library of the Augustinians, some containing Luther's marginal notes. See his report, "Restbestände aus der Bibliothek des Erfurter Augustinerklosters zu Luthers Zeit und bisher unbekannte eigenhandige Notizen Luthers. Ein Bericht," in Lutheriana ed. G. Hammer and K.-H. zur Mühlen, Archiv zur Weimarer Ausgabe, 2 (Köln: Böhlau, 1984), 315-32.

⁶Calvin, sources et évolution de sa pensée religieuse (Paris, 1950; revue et complétée, Geneva, 1985); Eng. trans. Calvin. Origins and Development of His Religious Thought (New York: Harper & Row, 1963).

⁷Calvin. Origins and Development, 128f.

⁸Ibid., 130.

⁹Das Grundverständnis der Theologie Calvins unter Einbeziehung ihrer geschichtlichen Abhän gigkeiten. Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche, Band 15 (Neukirchener-Vluyn: Neukirchener-Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1963).

¹⁰Ibid., 20f. Major, some forty years older than Calvin, was absent from Paris—in Scotland—between 1518 and 1526, and then taught in Sainte Barbe. See James K. Farge, Bibliographical Register (Toronto, 1980), 304-11; with full biography and bibliography. Cf. Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Modern France. The Faculty of Theology at Paris, 1500-1543, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 32 (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 100-104. Major went back to Paris in 1521, just long enough to oversee the printing of his vast History of Greater Britain, for which he wrote a dedication at the College of Montaigu, where he had taught logic and philosophy since 1499. See Alexander Brodie, George Lokert: Late Scholastic Logician (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1983), 11. Here, also, the most extensive sketch of the life and works of Major: 4-31. One could only wish for an equally substantial study of Major, for over forty years the friend of Lokert (1548).

¹¹Ibid., 162.

¹²Evangelische Radikalismen in der Sicht Calvins. Sein Verständnis der Bergpredigt und der Aussendungsrede (Matth. 10). Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche, Band 24 (Neukirchener-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1966).

¹³Ibid., 64, 68f.

¹⁴ For Petrus Lombardus see Magistri Petri Lombardi Parisiensis Episcopi Sententiae in IV Libris distinctae, Tomus II, Liber III et IV (Grottaferrata, 1981), III d 39, 4 (153); 218-27. As Calvin's immediate background—and as explanation of any such "Thomistic" traces—Martin Bucer's 1529 Psalms commentary is most pertinent. Attached to his primarily philological interpretation of Psalm 24 is a separate "Disputatio, an Christiano liceat iurare." Thanks to the collegial help of Wim van 't Spijker (Apeldoorn), I could use the Geneva 1554 edition of Robert Stephanus, Psalmorum libri quinque ad Hebraicam veritatem traducti et summa fide parique diligentia a Martino Bucero enarrati; here, fol. 155f. In a number of the eighteen inserted "Disputationes" Thomas Aquinas is explicitly quoted. We know that Calvin read this Commentary at an early stage. Though he is critical of Bucer's evasiveness—he felt the first edition was inappropriately "hidden" under a pseudonym: Aretius Felinus—Calvin had high praise for this "opere alioqui praeclarissimo, si quod aliud exstat." A. L. Herminhard, Correspondance des Réformateurs, 4 (1536-38) (Genève-Paris, 1872), 347 (henceforth quoted as Herminjard); Letter from Geneva, 12 January 1538.

¹⁵Le Jeune Calvin, Genèse et évolution de sa vocation réformatrice. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte, Abteilung Religionsgeschichte, Mainz, Band 40 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1966).

¹⁶Ibid., 191.

¹⁷Ibid., 192.

¹⁸Ibid., 192.

¹⁹ See R. R. Post, The Modem Devotion, Confrontation with Reformation and Humanism. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 3 (Leiden, 1968).

²⁰Herrschaft—Tugend—Vorsehung, Hermeneutische Deutung und Veröffentlichung handschriftlicher Annotationen Calvins zu sieben Seneceatragödien und den Pharsalia Lucans. Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte, Abteilung Religionsgeschichte, Mainz, Band 105 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1982), 6f. On the popularity of Lucian, who "had a new vogue in the Renaissance," see Erica Rummel in the introduction to Erasmus's "Tyrannicida," Collected Works of Erasmus, 29 (Toronto, 1989), 72. I do not pursue here the edition of Calvin's annotations to Chrysostom, both because there is no proof that they date from the period before 1536 (Calvin used the Paris edition of 1536 but quoted this Church Father already at the Disputation of Lausanne, Oct. 5, 1536), and whereas the editors emphasize the formative influence on Calvin's hermeneutics, I find Calvin drawing on Chrysostom for support as often as criticizing him for misunderstanding the text. See Calvins Handschriftliche Annotationen zu Chrysostomus. Ein Beitrag zur Hermeneutik Calvins, ed. A. Ganoczy und K. Müller (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1981). Lucian is quoted in the commentary In Isaiam, but merely to show the agreement between biblical and Roman law concerning the legal status of the married woman. CO 36.95 A/B; Com. Is. 4:1.

²¹Ibid., 46, 49.

²² I quote the relevant passage in toto to illustrate the subtle, cautious, and suggestive formulation of Ganoczy, which in a summary is easily distorted: "Calvins Berufung und Selbstvertrauen wurzeln sicher wesentlich im biblisch-christlichen Glauben. Doch diesem Glauben treten stoische Vorstellungen von einer ewigen und unwandelbaren Bestimmung und Lenkung aller Dinge hilfreich zur Seite und gewinnen nicht zuletzt dort wesentlich an Gewicht, wo der Reformater, über ein christliches Verständnis der Erwählung aller Menschen hinausgehend, eine die Berufung zum Heil kontrastierende Vorherbestimmung zum Bosen und zum ewigen Tod lehrte.” Ibid., 52. Apart from the fact that it is improper to leave the impression that Calvin taught a "predestination to evil," there is little in Seneca—or the later Stoic tradition in general—to suggest the providential concern of the deity with the course of individual human lives. See Marcia L. Colish, The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. II: Stoicism in Christian Latin Thought through the Sixth Century. Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 35 (Leiden, 1985).

²³Institutio (1536), ch. 2; OS 1.69.31. See, however, the version in the Institutes of the Christian Religion 1536 Edition, translated and annotated by Ford L. Battles, revised ed. (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans and H. H. Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, 1986 [1975]), 43. Whereas Battles's annotations are generally helpful, the translation is unclear, imprecise, occasionally incomplete, and it times so misleading that a mere revision will not suffice. One of the reasons for these insufficiencies is a lack of familiarity with the medieval matrix of Calvin's thought.

²⁴ In Calvin's first theological treatise, the Psychopannychia (first printed in Strasbourg 1542, but designed probably in Orleans 1534) we find the formulation that will continue to be the shorthand for this "selfbinding of God": "Promisit hoc [i.e., life eternal] nobis qui fallere non potest," CO 5.194.23f. Cf. ed. Zimmerli (see below, n. 56), 5O.15f. For the history of this covenant tradition, see Berndt Hamm, Promissio, Pactum, Ordinatio, Freiheit und Selbstbestimmung Gottes in der scholastischen Gnadenlehre, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie, 54 (Tübingen, 1977), esp. 345ff.

²⁵ Quite explicit, for instance, in his Com. on Phil. 4:5; CO 52.60 B. Amid the vast international literature on "Stoic" concepts of mental health and mental growth, I have found most helpful for the interpretation of Calvin Ilsetraut Hadot, Seneca und die Griechisch-Romische Tradition der Seelenleitung (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), esp. the sections on "securitas" and "tranquillitas animi"; 126-41.

²⁶ "…neque ullo unquam vel minimo indicio se Christianum esse probavit." CO 52.66 C; Com. Phil. 4:22.

²⁷Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 77 (1986), 58-78.

²⁸Ibid., 67, 71.

²⁹Ibid., 77f.

³⁰ Luchesius Smits makes a strong case for Calvin's use of the Basel edition of Erasmus, Saint Augustin dans l'oeuvre de Jean Calvin, 1 (Assen: van Gorcum, 1957), 201-5.

³¹ See J. M. J. Lange van Ravenswaay, Augustinus totus noster. Das Augustinverständnis bei Johannes Calvin (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1990). Two aspects of this work deserve our particular attention: (1) the extent to which Calvin personally identified with the Bishop of Hippo; (2) the extent to which Augustine became such a "key" for doctrinal discernment that it can be argued that (after 1543) Calvin founded his own "schola augustiniana" (ibid., 151f.,180). It should be noted, however, that the claim made in Calvin's "totus noster" is not to be understood as total approval. Augustine is not only incidentally "wrong" in his exegesis (CO 31.310 B; Ps. 31:19; cf. CO 48.137 B; Acts 7:14) but also belongs to those sancti (Cyprian, Ambrose, and more recently Gregory the Great and Bernard) who had the right intention, but "…saepe aberrarunt" (CO 49.357 A; I Cor. 3:15).

³² Oxford, 1967. See also Jean Calvin, Three French Treatises, ed. Francis M. Higman (London, 1970). As concerns the period before 1536, see idem, "Dates-clé de la réforme française: le sommaire de Guillaume Farel et la somme de l'escripture saincte," Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 38 (1976), 237-47; idem, "Farel, Calvin et Olivétan, sources de la spiritualité gallicane," Actes du Colloque Guillaume, Farel …1980 (Genève, 1983), 45-61; idem, "Luther et la pieté de l'église gallicane: le Livre de vraye et parfaicte oraison" Revue d'historie et de philosophie religieuses, 63 (1983), 91-111.

³³ CO 53.333 A; I Tim. 6:16.

³⁴ "The 'Extra' Dimension in the Theology of Calvin," in Dawn of the Reformation: Essays in Late Medieval and Early Reformation Thought (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1986), 241ff.; German version, Die Reformation von Wittenberg nach Genf (Göttingen, 1986), 266ff. See also the cautious procedure of Jean-Claude Margolin in "Duns Scot et Erasme," Regnum Hominis et Regnum Dei, ed. C. Berube (Rome, 1978), 89-112. Commenting on I Tim. 4:6, Calvin points out that "fidelis Christi minister" is an infinitely higher title than to be called a thousand times over "seraphici subtilesque"—the traditional designation of Bonaventure and Scouts! (CO 52.298). The selection of these two names as the standard of comparison strongly suggests that Calvin associates scholasticism with the Franciscan tradition rather than with Thomas and the Dominican tradition.

³⁵ A fine example of using "background" information to better grasp Calvin's intentions is E. David Willis, Calvin's Catholic Christology. The Function of the socalled Extra-Calvinisticum in Calvin's Theology, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 2 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1966).

³⁶ In Part I of his The Hermeneutics of John Calvin (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1988), Thomas F. Torrance has presented an analysis of Calvin's "Parisian background"—Scotus, Occam, Major—that takes its point of departure in epistemology. Though rich in helpful and at times precious observations in the realm of metaphysics, this abstract "grit" proves to lack the specificity that one likes to find in historical evidence. I am particularly uneasy about "developments flowing from the teaching of Duns Scotus" that are claimed to have a direct bearing on the Devotio Moderna (p. 12), which in turn is said to have provided "a spring-board for a leap into the Reformation" (p. 97). In the presentation of Calvin's hermeneutics, however, Torrance's study is exemplary.

³⁷ CO 52.334 B/C; I Tim. 6:18. Here and in the following notes I indicate only representative passages.

³⁸ CO 49.343 C; I Cor. 2:14.

³⁹ CO 31.520 B; cf. 504 C; 523 B; Ps. 51:15; cf. Ps. 50:16; Ps. 51:20.

⁴⁰ "In summa, hoc vult Paulus, conditionem, quam per Christum consequimur, longe potiorem esse, quam fuerit sors primi hominis; quia Adae collata fuerit suo et posterorum nomine anuma vivens, Christus autem nobis attulerit spiritum qui vita est." CO 49.558 C; I Cor. 15:45.

⁴¹ The "distinctio formalis" is a distinction "ex natura rei"—in this case "ex natura Dei"—but not "inter rem et rem" (distinctio realis). See the glossary in my Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge, MA, 1963), 466. Cf. O. Muck in Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie, hrg. v. J. Ritter, 2 (Basel, Stuttgart: Schwabe Verlag, 1972), 270.

⁴² CO 49.522 A; I Cor. 14:14. How far this expression "docendi causa" can take over the function of "de potentia absoluta" appears from the continuation of the definition: "…non quia id vel possit vel soleat contingere"!

⁴³ CO 31.387 C; 402 B; Ps. 38:4; Ps. 39:10.

⁴⁴ See David C. Steinmetz, "Calvin and the Absolute Power of God," Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 18 (1988), 65-79. It is to be noted, however, that Calvin can use himself the expression "potentia absoluta." What he opposes is the "nuda potentia absoluta" (CO 31.402 B; cf. 387 C), that is, tyranny. It is Job who—mistakenly—regards God's punishment as "puissance excessive," which threatened to submerge him in the abyss: "…comme s'il me vouloit abysmer." Sermon 88 on Job; CO 34.338 A/B; cf. 336 A/B.

⁴⁵ CO 36.194 C; Isa. 9:6.

⁴⁶ See Charles Partee, Calvin and Classical Philosophy, Studies in the History of Christian Thought, vol. 14 (Leiden: Brill, 1977). Though referring to Calvin only once, James Hankins's rich reconstruction of the Platonic discourse in the (later) Renaissance documents how unsuitable Plato is as key to Calvin: Plato in the Renaissance, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1990).

⁴⁷ New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

⁴⁸ Bouwsma, John Calvin, 230; cf. 233.

⁴⁹ See my review "Reforming out of Chaos," Times Literary Supplement, 455.4 (Aug. 19-25, 1988), col. 913f.

⁵⁰ The divide is not bridged but widened by the view expressed in the extensive review of Bouwsma's John Calvin by William Neuser in Historische Zeitschrift, 250 (1990), 152-57, which I read with growing concern. Apart from the fact that it is difficult to agree with most of the propositions of Mr. Neuser—even including his rare points of praise for Bouwsma's achievement—the (for Neuser atypical) condescending tone of the magister correcting a novice in the field does not bode well for the chances of the doctrinal school to catch up and thus provide a hearing for its precious tradition. For such a "hearing" see the exemplary review by Edward A. Dowey in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 57 (1989), 845-48.

⁵¹ "Daedalus inextricabilem labyrinthum fabricavit, quo cuique sine glomere lini improperanti interclusus exitus negabatur." The Prefatory Epistles of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples and Related Texts, ed. Eugene F. Rice, Jr. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 93.

⁵² "…praedecessorum nostrorum modorum significandi …inextricablies labyrinthi, quibus totum aevum absumpsere." Rice, 244.

⁵³ "…opus inquam inclitum multis ante saeculis absconditum, cuius lectio dormientes excitet, calcar addat, ad Deum convertat, ad beatorum theologiam invitet et modo quodam ineffabili disponat, nee denique per scabrosa sive ambages et inextricablies quosdam labyrinthos Gordiive nodo legentium mentes." Rice, 292-93f. For Erasmus see Jean-Claude Margolin, "Duns Scot et Erasme" (as in n. 34 above), 91; Erasmus, Laws Stuititiae, Leuvensche bijdragen 4.465C-466A.

⁵⁴ "Scalae meditationis," in Opera (Groningen, 1614), fol. 269.

⁵⁵ For the most immediate foil for Calvin's use of the term "labyrinth," see the concluding passage of the Praefatio of Bucer in his Psalms commentary (1529): "Finally, I must say something about the meaning of the word 'Selah,' which is so variously discussed in prefaces of this kind; I follow the opinion of Rabbi Kimhi in order to escape these labyrinths": "…ut his me tandem labyrinthis expediam …" Praefatio, fol. iiiii^v. For Calvin's early use and respect for this commentary, see above, n. 14. For Bucer's commentary, see W. van 't Spijker, "Bucers commentaar op de psalmen: Hebraica veritas cum Christi philosophia coniungenda," Theologia Reformata, 30 (1987), 264-80.

⁵⁶ For this "docilitas" see above, n. 3.

⁵⁷De Erfenis van Calvijn: Grootheid en Grenzen (Kampen: J.H. Kok, 1988), 18-22. Since that time I have been pursuing other recurrent terms and phrases, such as Calvin's striking predilection for the word "porro"—his NB or the raised finger of the schoolmaster—his use of "absurd" and "absurdity" at the point were his argument slides from persuasive to coercive discourse, and the unusual frequency of "quasi" in the Commentaries and of "docendi causa" in the Institutio.

⁵⁸ To give an impression of the relative frequency of occurrence, I Corinthians may serve as a test case for a biblical book in which the terms do not occur and for which we have both a Latin Commentary and French Sermons (CO 49). This yields the following count: In the Commentary (in toto 277 cols.) "labyrinth" 2x, "abyssus" none. In the French Sermons (in toto 249 cols.) "labyrinth" 4x, "abyssus" 5x, but "abysmer" 14x as a verb. A second test case is provided by the first part of the Book of Psalms (Ps. 1-50; CO 31), in which the word "abyssus" does occur in the biblical text (Ps. 36:7; 42:8). Here we find on 470 cols, "labyrinth" 5x, "abyssus" 12x. Throughout the Commentaries the ratio is about 1:2, climbing close to 3 when the French verb "abysmer" is added to "abyssus."

⁵⁹ The one dimension of Calvin's abyssus" that overlaps with "labyrinth”—confusion—is articulated in two sources we have reason to believe Calvin to have known. The one is Tractatus XI of Gerson's Super Magnificat, where the risk of penetration of the transcendent judgement of God is articulated. See Oeuvres complètes 8, no. 418, ed. Mgr. Glorieux (Paris: Desclee, 1968), 485f. Gerson unfolds the "abyssus" in a twofold way, namely as the immeasurable depth of the mercy and the immeasurable depth of the severity of God. The other foil is again Bucer's Psalms commentary (see n. 14 above), which either descriptively relates "abyssus" to water (fol. 446, Ps. 136:7; fol. 469, Ps. 148:7) or associates it—as Gerson—with the "iudicia Dei," which should not be penetrated or—according to Bucer—cannot always be grasped: "Neque enim potest animus iusti moerore oppressus, abyssum iudiciorum Dei …cognitive consequi" (fol. 73, Ps. 10:1). More in line with Calvin's intensification of the meaning of "abyssus" is the exegesis of Ps. 71:11, where the word indicates to Bucer that no human being can ascend from the abyss on his own power (fol. 299).

⁶⁰Institutio 1.14.14; OS 3.165.23-28. This basic discussion of the function of the devil introduces the characterization of his range of operation, which is described as the realm circumscribed "sub Dei potestate," "ipsius nutu"; OS 3.167.21f. Cf. CO 31.445 A: "…usque in abyssum fuisse contritos. Nam per 'locum dacronum' non intellego deserta et solitudines, sed profundissimos gurgites maris . . [C] Meminerimus ergo, hoc verum esse pietatis examen, ubi in abyssos deiecti oculus, spes, et vota dirigimus in solum Deum." Ps. 44:20. In keeping with the psychological interpretation of "space" as Christ's descent into hell, the "abode" of the Dragon is utter despair. This characteristic from of demythologization is an aspect of another encompassing shift: in the later Middle Ages—as with Luther—Satan is the anti-type of Christ. With Calvin he is the counterforce to the Holy Spirit, assailing individual sanity and communal stability of the body of Christ, the church.

⁶¹lnstitutio (1536), cap. V; OS 1.182.10-13.

⁶² See the (later) observation on the "typically biblical way" of understanding insanity: "Insanos vocat David in Ps. 5,6 more scripturae, qui caeca cupiditate ad peccandum runt. Nihil enim magis furiosum impiis qui abiecto Dei timore, nocendi libidine ferunter: imo nulla est amentia deterior, quam Dei contemptus, quo fit ut fas omne pervertant homines." CO 31.68 C.

⁶³ "…Quum ergo porrigeret illis Deus manum, malebant sese in abysso desperationis ita demergere, ut nihil levaret eorum animos. Hanc ingratitudinem merito castigat propheta, quod adiudicent terrain suam aeterno exitio cuius tamen restitutio promissa fuerat. Perinde igitur est ac si diceret, Superabit Dei misericordia et fides vestram malitiam: quantum in vobis est exstinguitis eius promissiones, aboletis eius gratiam, neque datis locum promissionibus: ipse nihilominus complebit quod pollicitus est," CO 39.48-49 (1551).

⁶⁴ "[You are] tardif à sortir de l'abysme, où vous estes plongé …" CO 17.585 (nr. 3089). Cited by A.M. Hugo, Calvijn en Seneca. Een inleidende studie van Calvijns Commentaar op Seneca, De dementia, anno 1532 (Groningen, 1957), 11. It is highly desirable that this Dutch disseration of Hugo be translated into English and/or German. Only parts of Hugo's insights could be incorporated into the critical edition, but his premature death on 24 January 1975 in Capetown prevented him from fully unfolding his life's theme. See the critical edition, Calvin's Commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, ' with introduction, translation, and notes by F.L. Battles and A. M. Hugo (Leiden, 1969), 3-71. See also the use of "abimer" ("abysmer") for the final drowning—four times!—in the revealing "Sermon de dernier Advenement," perhaps so consistently overlooked while it is printed between the Latin Commentaries on II Thessalonians and I Timothy: CO 52.232f. The survivor should be grateful to God "q'il nous a retirez de tels abysmes …" ibid., 229 A.

⁶⁵ CO 5.201.13f. This same concerted effort is assailed by Calvin in the traditional way as "curiosity." See the meticulous study by E.P. Meijering, Calvin wider die Neugierde. Bibliotheca humanistica et reformatorica 29 (Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1980).

⁶⁶ CO 5.201.23f.; cf. the edition of the Psychopannychia by Walter Zimmerli, Quellenschriften zur Geschichte des Protestantismus (Leipzig, 1932), 60f.

⁶⁷ Cf. Weimarer Ausgabe 18.685.6f. For the exact parallel with Calvin, see Institutes 1.17.2 (ed. 1559).

⁶⁸ Whereas Zimmerli already noticed this existential dimension (see his edition, p. 65, n. 1), he failed to see the function of Luke 8:31 in Calvin's formulation of his experience.

⁶⁹ CO 5.204.40f.; ed. Zimmerli, 67.12f.

⁷⁰ See the rhetorically powerful and personally authentic description of this heart-rending experience of the wrath of God, addressed to those who do not know this from their own experience: "Atque ut quod dictum est in universum, partibus ostendatur: si extra Deum lux non est, quae nocti nostrae luceat, ubi lux illa se subduxerit, anima certe in tenebris suis sepulta, caeca est. Tunc muta est, quae confiteri non potest ad salutem, quod crediderit ad iustitiam. Surda est, quae vivam illam vocem non audit. Clauda est, imo se sustinere non potest, ubi non habet cui dicat: Tenuisti manum dexteram meam, et in voluntate tua deduxisti me. Nullo denique vitae officio fungitur"; CO 5.204.52-205.7; ed. Zimmerli, 68.7-15. My use of italics serves to accentuate the realism and completeness of dying in the absence of God: the unforgiven sinner is all but clinically dead—all vital functions have stopped. Two conclusions are called for: (1) this is exactly what it means to be in the "abyss"; (2) once a person is awakened by saving grace, all functions of the soul are so thoroughly revitalized that clinical death can no longer induce "sleep": Conversion is the decisive "Great Awakening": "…mors animae alienatio est a Deo. Ergo, qui in Christum credunt, quum prius mortui essent, incipiunt vivere, quia fides spiritualis est animae resurrectio, et animam ipsam quodammodo animat ut vivat Deo …" CO 47.262 C; Com. John 11:25.

The briefest formulation of the "Great Awakening" is to be found in the Commentary on Isa. 19:22: "Hinc collige, conversionem esse quasi resurrectionem ab aeterna morte," CO 36.347 B.

⁷¹ "Infernus ipse non sepulcrum sed abyssum et confusionem significet." CO 5.223.43f.; ed. Zimmerli, 97.20-22. N.B.: the "confusion," characteristic of being in the "labyrinth," is here identified with the "abyss." The "labyrinth," however, has the connotation of the self-made (CO 32.551 B) contraption (and trap) of "fantasies" or "inventions"; "abyssus" designates the human condition coram Deo, that is, "drowning, naked, without refuge"—were it not for the extended hand of God.

It should be noted that the content of "attritus" is anything but Scotistic. As its usage in many parallel contexts shows, it means far more than "regret," namely something in the range between "beggarized" and annihilated, broken-down (in German: zerrieben): CO 36.202 A; 265 C; Isa. 9:10; 13:12.

⁷² CO 5.224. 13-46; ed. Zimmerli, 98.5-99.2. Zimmerli establishes that the reference to Hades is an addition of 1545.

⁷³ For its far-reaching consequences in Reformed orthodoxy, see the clear analysis of Richard A. Muller, Christ and the Decree: Christology and Predestination in Reformed Theology from Calvin to Perkins. Studies in Historical Theology, vol. 2 (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1986).

⁷⁴ This contrast calls for further investigation. Here are some preliminary observations: Luther's description of his exegetical breakthrough by interpreting the righteousness of God as "iustitia passiva" (grasped in faith), articulated in the Praefatio to the first edition of his Latin works (Wittenberg, 1545), may very well have been read by Calvin. More importantly, he contradicts the validity of this interpretation. Careful to interpret the expression "iustitia Dei" always in terms of the changing biblical context, Calvin in interpreting the Psalms does relate "iustitia" to "fides," yet not to the faith of the believer but to the "active" faithfulness of God as the stable foundation of salvation. See his exegesis of Ps. 7:18 (CO 31.87 B); Ps. 22:31 (ibid., 237 B). When iustitia Dei is interpreted as the goodness of God ("pro bonitate accipitur"), it means an attribute of God: Ps. 51:16; CO 31.520 C. Though in all these contexts, iustitia Dei does not refer to the punishing justice of God—which Luther rejected—it does not mean the righteousness received by faith as in the case of Luther's iustitia passiva. See my article in the Festschrift for G. W. Locher (in press).

⁷⁵ I owe a special debt of gratitude to my colleague Alan E. Bernstein, who, in the process of completing an extensive history of the concept of hell ranging from early mythology through the works of Dante, helped me in tracing the importance of Calvin's formulation. See his "Esoteric Theology: William of Auvergne on the Fires of Hell and Purgatory," Speculum, 57 (1982), 509-31; and "The Invocation of Hell in Thirteenth-Century Paris," Supplementum Festivum, Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. J. Hankins, J. Monfasani, and F. Purnell, Jr., Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 49 (Binghamton, New York, 1987), 13-54.

⁷⁶ CO 31.21 C.

⁷⁷ Com. Ps. 51:7; as quoted by Bouwsma on 271, n. 101.

⁷⁸ Bouwsma, 231.

⁷⁹ Bouwsma, 230.

⁸⁰ The "extended hand" of God stands for his "potentia ac virtus." CO 48.260 B.

⁸¹ The young Calvin reflects on this transition and is conscious of going his own way—"meo quidem iudicio"—in defining the biblical meaning of "poenitentia." Inst., cap. V; OS 1.170.1-172.38; 171.20; cf. 172.37f. In the following section, he criticizes and rejects scholastic solutions from Lombard onward (OS 1.172.39-202.30), proving to be well informed and showing his legal training by pointing to the "pugna inter canonistas et theologos scholasticos," a rift overlooked by earlier reformers (OS 1.175.22f.). His own view of "penance," however; is worked out by correcting the respected pre-Scholastic tradition ("docti quidam viri, longe etiam ante haec tempora"; OS 1.170.If.)—which I take to reach from Augustine and Ambrose to Hugo and Richard of St. Victor—recently edited in Paris. See the ten books of Richard's Liber Exceptionum (c. 1160), published in Paris 1526—under the name of Hugo—for Jean Bordier. A second part had already been published in Paris 1517 by Henri Etienne, and seen through the press by Josse Clichtoye—at that time still in close touch with Lefèvre d'Étaples. See Jean-Pierre Massaut, Critique et tradition à la veille de la Réforme en France (Paris, 1974), 81-99. Reading Calvin's Old Testament Commentaries side by side with the Liber Exceptionum, one is struck by such parallels (per se inconclusive) as the frequent use of "manifestare" for the "Son of God." Cf. Calvin's favored formulation "Deus manifestatus in carne." See Liber Exceptionum IV, cap. 1; ed. Jean Chatillan (Paris, 1958), 267f.

The second respected tradition, which Calvin reports before choosing his own course (OS 1.171.8-10), draws on Luther and Melanchthon. The point that Calvin finds missing in the fine insights of the Fathers and the reformers is the lasting function of the fear of God ("verus ac sincerus timor Dei"; 171.22), first in compunction and conversion, but then in the mortificatio. This is not a passing stage in life—left behind in the "great awakening"—but a lasting characteristic of the Christian life: "ut morti Christi insertus poenitentiam meditetur" (172.36f.). This highly unusual formulation and spiritual directive Calvin regards as "sententia … simplicissima omnium"; OS 1.172.37.

⁸² Jean Delumeau has articulated the related question, what it meant for the first generation(s) of Reformed Christians to live without the assurance of pardon, which medieval Europe had received in the confessional; they are now directly confronted with the wrath of God. Whereas Luther reformed this key sacrament by relating it to baptism, the young Calvin placed it in the category of "false [= misleading, diabolical] sacraments"; OS 1.162.22f. For Delumeau look beyond the too impressionistic "dossier" in L'aveu et le pardon. Les difficultés de la confession XIII-XVIII siècle (Paris: Fayard, 1990) to the more intriguing volume La Peur en Occident (XIV-XVIII siècle) (Paris, 1978), and—again less cohesive and convincing—Le Péché et la peur, La culpabilisation en Occident XIII-XVIII siècle (Paris, 1983).

⁸³ The images of "abyss" and "drowning" can indeed be related to the sacrament of penance as the second plank after baptism. Yet, Calvin's cry "de profundis" is so suggestive of the experience of death that in his case we must pay at least equal attention to the impact of dying without extreme unction. The central theme of the Psychopannychia—the "Great Awakening" is not interrupted by physical death—can be read as the elimination of the need of the "last rites."

The "pain" experience in the absence of absolution and extreme unction is the missing link in a volume full of insight: Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

⁸⁴ Sermon of 1 July 1562 on 2 Samuel 5:12-17, Predigten über das 2. Buck Samuelis, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inedits, ed. Hanns Rückert (Neukirchen: Moers, 1936-61), 122.27f.; identified by Paul Sprenger, Das Rätsel um die Bekehrung Calvins, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche, Band 11 (Neukirchen: Moers, 1960), 29, n. 5.

⁸⁵ For the "blasphemy" of Virgil, CO 39.517 C; Lam. Jer. 1:8. For Horace as the "impurus Dei contemptor," CO 31.287 C; Ps. 29:4. For Seneca see CO 52.66 C; Phil. 4:19. The rich and creative French translations of the Latin poets, which I take to be Calvin's own work, deserve to be overlooked no longer: "by heart" he knew the giants he was dwarfing!

⁸⁶ See above, n. 3.

⁸⁷ For this view Calvin does not refer to tradition, but to his own way of speaking: "Librum hunc non abs re vocare soleo 'anatomen' omnium animae partium. Immo omnes … spiritus sanctus ad vivum repraesentavit"; CO 31.15 C.

⁸⁸ See CO 39.587 C; 586 B.

⁸⁹ See CO 39.576 B; 586 C.

⁹⁰ "Water" as a threat was available to Calvin in the exegetical tradition (Richard and Hugh of St. Victor!) and a commonplace in the Scriptures, as Bucer observed (Ps. 42:8; fol. 229). It is not surprising to find it to be prominent with the Dutchman Wessel Gansfort (1489); see my contribution to the forthcoming proceedings of the 1989 Gansfort fifth centennial, edited by A. J. Vanderjagt, Yet in some respects closer to home for Calvin is the revealing "naked" poem (1547) written by Marguerite de Navarre (1575), to whom since 1524 all "Lutherans" in France had looked for help. See the opening two lines: "Navire loing du vray port assablée, / Feuille agitée de l'impétueux vent …"; edited by Robert Marichal, La navire ou consolation du Roi Francois I^er à sa soeur Marguerite (Paris: Librairie Champion, 1956), 237. Cf. the observation of the editor in the Introduction: "… on ne peut relire l'Institution [of Calvin] sans se rappeler en maint endroit la Navire"; ibid., 17. For differences see p. 21.

⁹¹Institutio (1536), cap. V; OS 1.183.23. This is Calvin's rendering of the public confession: "Domine, propitius esto mihi peccatori" (Luc. 18:13). For the uninitiated a bombastic statement of baroque proportions, for Calvin this sentence expresses at once the pain of the price of emancipation and the bold hymn of praise for the God who liberates from the "pit of despair." The other side is expressed in the 4th sermon on I Cor. 10:8f.: The "vileins," the enemies of the church, "sont dignes d'estre abysmez au profound des abysmes." CO 49.625 B.

⁹² Under the unassuming title "Quelques indications bibliographiques," B. Roussel provides essential information in "Francois Lambert, Pierre Caroli, Guillaume Farel … et Jean Calvin (1530-1536)," in Calvinus Servus Christi, ed. W. H. Neuser (Frankfurt a.M., 1984), 35-52; 43f. Throughout alert to the dangers of "reconstruction," Calvin is placed in the wider context of the opponents of the Sorbonne, "ces autres acteurs de l'agitation religieuse." Ibid., 48.

⁹³The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 104f. Even more explicitly Williams writes eighteen years later: "… at the University of Wittenberg Luther sustained a still more radical view, namely, that the soul dies with the body and that only at a Second Advent of Christ and as a consequence of the Last Judgement of the quick and of the dead, resurrected for that end, would salvation be experienced by the righteous." "Commentary to Lionel Rothkrug," in Lionel Rothkrug, "Religious Practices and Collective Perceptions: Hidden Homologies in the Renaissance and Reformation," Historical Reflections, 7 (1980), 259-64;259.

⁹⁴ From his first statement in 1522 onward, the sleeping of the souls (dormire) has for Luther the connotation of "quies," the "rest" so important to Calvin; WA Br, 2.422.4-423.44; Jan. 1, 1522 to Augsburg: To sleep, Luther writes, is not to be dead, but to be certain of the resurrection; WA 46.470.17f. (1538).

⁹⁵ See his letter of 11 September 1535 (from Basel to C. Fabri, i.e., Libertet), which does not prove a publication in print, but rather refers to the manuscript of which we still possess the preface, signed "Orleans, 1534," and first printed in 1542 under the title Psychopannychia. See Herminjard, Correspondance des Reformateurs, 3.349. Cf. CO 10.38f. Though we still have the letter in which Capito dissuades Calvin from publishing (CO 10.45f.; nr. 35; 1535), in 1538 Calvin points to Bucer as "qui editionem antea dissuaserat, nunc est mihi hortator"; CO 10.260 B.

⁹⁶ CO 5.222.18-20.

⁹⁷ "Nam quum dicimus spiritum hominis esse immortalem, non affirmamus contra manum Dei stare posse, aut sine eius virtue subsistere. Absint a nobis hae blasphemiae. Sed dicimus, eius manu ac benedictione sustineri … experimentoque discamus, quoniam ex illius magnitudine, et non ex nostra natura habemus in aeternum perseverantiam"; CO 5.222.18-22; ed. Zimmerli, 95.7-16.

⁹⁸ On closer scrutiny the tracts of Karlstadt and Westerburg invoked by George Williams do not teach "mortality" in any form or fashion. See Karlstadt's Ein Sermon vom stand der Christglaubigen Seelen von Abrahams schoβ und fegfeür / der abgeschydnen Seelen (Wittenburg, 1522). As the preface by Wolfgang Kuch forcefully highlights, this pamphlet is directed against "das arme elende unselge fress und geytzvolck / Münch und Pfaffen" (fol. a i v); cf. fol. a iiii r. Karlstadt: What Devil permitted you to declare the departed souls to be "unselig"?: "Sy haben ain ewig leben und sein nicht todt vor gott …" (fol. b ii v / b ii r). The same point is made by "Gerhart Westerburch" in his pamphlet Vom fegefeuer und standt der verscheyden selen: eyn Christliche meynung (Cologne, 1523). Before the resurrection the departed souls are "in der Schoss Abrahe zuruwen, genomen. Dan got ist nit eyn got der verstorben [the dead], sunder der lebendigenn …" (fol. a iiii v). Like Luther, Westerburg can use the image of "sleep" (eyn süsser schlaf), not, however, as a form of death but of life "dieweyl yr leben trefflich und köstlich worden ist durch abkleydung yrer beschwerlicher leychnamen" (fol. b ii r). Since the young Calvin could have met Karlstadt in Basel, where this early ally of Luther spent the last phase of his life (1534-41) as a professor (particularly of Old Testament), it is important to note that Karlstadt also in his last publications (1535, 1538, 1540) discusses the resurrection from the perspective of the renewal (the awakening by grace) in this life. Just as Calvin did in 1534! See M. A. Schmidt, "Karlstadt als Theologe und Prediger in Basel," Theologische Zeitschrift, 35 (1979), 155-68; esp. 160f.

Though the Italian debate around Pomponazzi establishes indeed how "current" the problems of immortality were, they cannot explain Calvin's reference to "anabaptist authors." Since Calvin explicitly says that he had not seen these anabaptist tracts himself, he may well have relied on the information found in Zwingli's Elenchus of 1527. Bernard Roussel has pointed to evidence in the Orleans Preface for Calvin's use of Alphonsus de Castro, Adversus omnes haereses, s.v. "Anima" and "Resurrectio," published at the beginning of October 1534. Whereas this would require an exceptionally rapid transmission from Cologne to Orleans to reach Calvin, and to allow him time for reaction at the latest in December 1534, it is more likely that Alphonsus and Calvin reacted to the same common source. Most convincing, I find Roussel's suggestion that Calvin, in his attack on these as yet unknown anabaptist authors, lines up with the "politique religieuse 'allemande' du Roi" in disassociating political and heretical revolt (in Germany!) from the genuine reform intended by those falsely called "Lutherans" at the Sorbonne. See "Histoire et théologies de la Réforme," Annuaire, École pratique des Hautes Études, Section des sciences religieuses, 95 (1986-87), 389-97; 393.22.

⁹⁹ Ganoczy properly observes that the Psychopannychia is still void of anti-Roman sentiment; Le Jeune Calvin, 77. All the more striking, however, is the designation of Pope John as "Bishop of Rome," which I am inclined to interpret as a "Gallican" statement.

¹⁰⁰ CO 5.170-71.32-35; here I follow Walter Zimmerli's edition (see n. 66 above), 16-17: "Neque tamen nunc primum nascitur. Siquidem legimus arabicos fuisse quosdam huius dogmatis auctores, qui iactarent animam cum corpore una emori, in die iudicii utrumque resurgere. (Eus. eccl. histor. 1.6. c. 37—Augustinus lib. de haeresibus c. 83). Et aliquanto post tempore Joannem episcopum Romanum, quem schola Parisiensis ad palinodiam adegerit (Joan. 22. de quo Gers, in serm. pasch. priore)."

¹⁰¹ See Marc Dykmans, ed., Les Sermons de Jean XXII sur la Vision Béatifique, Texte précédé d'une introduction et suivi d'une Chronologie de la Controverse avec la liste des Écrits pour et contre le Pape, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, vol. 34 (Rome, 1973); Marc Dykmans, ed., Pour et Contre Jean XXII en 1333. Deux Traités Avignonnais sur la Vision Béatifique (Citta del Vaticano, 1975); cf. La Vision Bienheureuse. Traité envoyé au pape Jean XXII, Edite avec une introduction et des notes par Marc Dykmans, Miscellanea Historiae Pontificiae, vol. XXX (Rome, 1970).

¹⁰² The best analysis to date is provided by Joseph N. Tylenda, "Calvin and the Avignon Sermons of John XXII," Irish Theological Quarterly, 41 (1974), 37-52. To his extensive references should be added the reliable summary in G. C. Berkouwer, De Wederkomst van Christus, 1 (Kok: Kampen, 1961), 55-60; 57.

¹⁰³ "Calvin and the Avignon Sermons of John XXIII," 47.

¹⁰⁴ Cf. Institutio (1536), cap. I; OS 1.6.3. After death the believer is no longer a pilgrim in the sense that he is no longer "in via": the mortificatio begun at baptism is then perfected when "… ex hoc vita migrabimus ad Dominum." Institutio (1536), cap. IV; OS 1.132.8-10.

¹⁰⁵ See CO 31.491 C; Ps. 49:16. CO 7.28 C / 29 A; Articuli … cum antidoto (1544), art. 17 cum antidoto. CO 48.319 A; Acts 9:41.

¹⁰⁶ "Litterae viginti novem magistrorum Parisiensium in theologia ad Philippum VI, regem Francorum, de statu animarum corpore exatarum," Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis, ed. H. Denifle (Paris, 1841), 2.429-32; 429; quoted by Tylenda, 49, n. 48 (see n. 102 above).

¹⁰⁷ OS 5.130.23-33; Institutio (1543).

¹⁰⁸ "Brieve instruction pour armer tous bons fideles contra les erreurs de la secte commune des Anabaptistes," CO 7, col. 43-142; 127. The most extensive and reliable treatment of Calvin's lifelong debate with the "Anabaptists" is presented by W. Balke, Calvijn en de doperse radikalen (Amsterdam: Bolland, 1977 [1973]). Here the title page of the Instruction and a regest of the Psychopannychia, 318-23.

¹⁰⁹ I am grateful to the rare book department of the Universitätsbibliothek, Tübingen, which allowed me to make this comparison by providing me with the collection of early prints of Gerson's works. For the early printing history see the article on Gerson by Chr. Burger in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, 12.535f. In the "Prologus" to his Supplementum Wimpfeling acknowledges royal support for his work, which the Court must have regarded as the presentation of high French political and religious culture to the European learned world: "Novissime vero his diebus … alia quaedam in intimis Parrhysiensis gymnasii penetralibus ac diversis Galliae locis quaesita et nutu summae maiestatis inventa sunt, quorum nonnulla cum Gerson gallica lingua scripsisset, aut in concionibus popularibus disseminasset operae pretium fuit ilia in latinam utcunque interpretari atque transferre." Fol. I^v. The ambivalent compliment for the German student-translator expresses respect for the French original: "Si non eleganter, tamen fideliter traducta sunt." In Wimpfeling's copy—preserved in the Haguenau Stadtbibliothek (Inc. 539)—this student is identified as Johannes Brisgoicus; see Herbert Kraume, Die Gerson-Übersetzungen Geilers von Kaysersberg, Studien zur deutschsprachigen Gerson-Rezeption (München: Artemis Verlag, 1980), 81.

¹¹⁰ L. E. Du Pin (Antwerp, 1706), 3.1204-14.

¹¹¹ "… pour quoy en seurplus appert la fausseté de la doctrine au pape Jehan le XXIIe qui fut condempnée aux boix de Vincennes devant le roy Philippe vostre aieul, par les théologiens de Paris, de visione beata. Et en cru plus les théologiens de Paris que la court," Jean Gerson, Oeuvres complètes VII*, ed. Mgr. Glorieux (Paris: Desclee, 1968), 779-93; 780. I am indebted to my Leiden colleague, G. H. M. Posthumus Meyjes, who alerted me to the complex publication history of this sermon, incompletely presented by Glorieux. For the preceding assembly at Vincennes, see his volume Jean Gerson et l'Assemblée de Vincennes (1329). Ses conceptions de la jurisdiction temporelle de l'Église, Accompagné d'une édition critique du 'De Jurisdictione Spirituali et Temporali,' Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 26 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1978).

¹¹² See Christoph Burger, Edificatio, Fructus, Utilitas. Johannes Gerson als Professor der Theologie und Kanzler der Universität Paris, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 70 (Tübingen, 1986). All three terms prove to be central to Calvin's program, in his French works gathered in the one concept "profit"—the (tenuous) basis for the later Weber thesis.

¹¹³ See Gerson's Gutachten for the King on the Reformation of the Kingdom, dated 7 November 1407; ed. Glorieux VII*, 1137-85; esp. 1183f.

¹¹⁴ Herbert Kraume has particularly pursued the German reception of Gerson, and in this context dedicates a special section to the circle around Wimpfeling in Strassburg. Kraume assumes that partly due to Wimpfeling's edition, Gerson was better known at the end of the fifteenth century in Germany than in France. See his Die Gerson Übersetzungen Geilers von Kaysersberg (as in n. 108 above), esp. 79-90; 82. But Wimpfeling apparently also found a new readership for Gerson in France.

¹¹⁵Oevres complètes, ed. Glorieux, VII*, 1159f; 1160.7. Seneca, Epistula 37.

¹¹⁶ R. J. Knecht, Francis I (Cambridge, 1984 [1982]), 62f.

¹¹⁷ In De clementia, cap. V, Seneca formulated the revealing parallel "clementia rationi accedit" amid the Stoic thesis of misericordia as "sickness of the soul." Understandably, this context draws Calvin's full attention—and critique!—so that we do not have his explicit response to the main clause (ed. Battles and Hugo, 360-68). His later works amply make up for this early lacuna!

¹¹⁸ What is best designated as Calvin's "Parisian view" of royalism and of Gallican reform in the kingdom has recently been sharply criticized as "traditionalism," and once even explained as "manichaeism." So W. Fred Graham, who invokes Bouwsma's reconstruction of Calvin's fear of the "abyss." See "Calvin and the Political Order. An Analysis of the Three Explanatory Studies," in Calviniana. Ideas and Influence of Jean Calvin, ed. R. V. Schnucker, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies," vol. 10 (1988), 51-61; 57ff. A further study of the Gallican-royalist tradition of jurisprudence seems to promise a stricter control of the evidence.

¹¹⁹ In a precious, recently discovered ear-and-eye-witness report of February 2, 1534, we have the first evidence of the academic impact of the young Calvin. The Erasmian "regens" at the Collège de Beauvais in Paris, Claude Despence, attended in the Collège de Fortet some lectures by "a certain Calvin" on Seneca, and now reports that the audience—with the exception of one small-minded colleague—was impressed: "Calvinum istum nescioquem aliquoties audivi ennarantem Senecam suis commentariis illustratum in aula Forteretica, cuius eruditionem tantum non admirabitur Simon Bouterius [unknown to the editor] vix anxie eruditus …" J. Dupebe, "Un document sur les persécutions de l'hiver 1533-1534 à Paris," Bibliothèque d'humanisme et renaissance 48 (1986), 405-17; 406. Since the letter reports on recent events, I am disinclined to follow the editor in dating these lectures of Calvin as early as 1531 or 1532. Since Calvin could not have publicly lectured after the address by Cop (November 1, 1533), I am rather inclined to date Calvin's Seneca course in the late summer or early fall of 1533. The rest of the letter vividly documents—with rich footnotes provided by the editor—how small and vulnerable the "network" is of the Protestant underground ("évangélisme lutheranisant"). A central pawn proved to be the poet Nicolas Bourbon (Nugae, 1533; perhaps also the unknown author of the Placards), who was indirectly in touch with Nicolas Cop—and hence brings us as close to Calvin as hitherto possible. This may well be the time and the situation Calvin refers to in his late Samuel sermon, in which he recounts "the time of terror" in which one blow "could have silenced us" (see n. 84 above). The editor properly calls attention to the growing distance between the "Erasmian" Despence and the "Lutheran" group (also called "Gerardini" after Gerard Roussel, like Farel a radical disciple of Lefèvre d'Étaples). The academic address of Cop—with its use of both Erasmus and Luther—may have to be seen inter alia as an effort to bridge this divide and thus to forge a coalition, which in Germany had already broken down. For the development of Calvin, the probable author, this appeal to the Rotterdammer should not be taken as proof of the direction of his own loyalties. Francis Higman kindly called my attention to the fact that Claude d'Espence dedicated in May 1547 to Marguerite de France, daughter of Francois I, a "Consolaytion en adversite" to console her on the death of her father—six years later condemned by the Sorbonne: it is a straight translation of Luther's "Tesseradecas Consolatoria" (1519). See Index des Livres Interdits, I, Index de l'Université de Paris 1544, 1545, 1547, 1551, 1556, ed. J. M. Bujanda, F. M. Higman, and J. K. Farge (Sherbrooke: Droz, 1985), nr. 528; on the remarkable career of d'Espence "between the fronts" see nr. 527, p. 433.

¹²⁰ Josef Bohatec, Budé und Calvin, Studien zur Gedankenwelt des franzðsischen Frühhumanismus (Graz, 1950), 440.

¹²¹ CO 9.875 B. In 1530 de l'Etoile was sufficiently prominent to be drawn into the efforts of Henry VIII to find legal support on the Continent for his divorce case. See the rich dossier gathered by Guy Bedouelle and Patrick le Gal, Le 'Divorce' de Henry VIII. Études et documents. Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, 221 (Geneva, 1987), 399.

¹²² "Nicolai Chemyni Aureliani antapologia adversus Aurelii Albucii defensionem pro Andrea Alciato contra D. Petrum Stellam nuper editam Paris 1531"; cf. Bohatec, Budé und Calvin, 439, n. 5 and n. 6. For the legal principles of the later Calvin—with only two references to Seneca—see Bohatec, Calvin und das Recht (Graz, 1934). Among the works of Guido Kisch, see esp. Erasmus und die Jurisprudenz seiner Zeit. Studien zum humanistischen Rechtsdenken (Basel, 1960), note here the important appendix with relevant legal texts and extensive bibliography, 473-538.

¹²³ Myron P. Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists: Six Studies in the Renaissance (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 79.

¹²⁴ After a brief stay in Orleans, some thirty years before Calvin's arrival, Erasmus started to get "Heimweh" and long for the North, since—in his opinion—"Accursus, Bartolin and Baldus," that is, the faculty of law, created a climate unfavorable for the "Musae," the true spirit of humanism. Letter from Orleans, dated 20 Nov. 1500; Opus Epistolarum Des. Erasmi, ed. P. S. Allen, nr. 134, I (1484-1514) (Oxonii, 1906), 312.25-27. For the resonance of Budé's critique in Germany, see Gerald Strauss, Law, Resistance and the State. The Opposition to Roman Law in Reformation Germany (Princeton, 1986), 42f.

¹²⁵ See A. M. Hugo, Calvijn en Seneca. Een inleidende studie van Calvijns Commentaar op Seneca, De Clementia, anno 1532, 14 (as in n. 64 above).

¹²⁶ Ford Lewis Battles, "The Sources of Calvin's Seneca Commentary," Studies in John Calvin (Courtenay Studies in Reformation Theology), 1 (1965), 38-60; 56f.

¹²⁷ OS 1.21-36. Cf. as a parallel the dedication to Francis I by Zwingli, ten years earlier, of De vera et falsa religione commentarius (1525), ZW 3 (Corpus reformatorum 90), 626-37.

¹²⁸Institutio (1536), cap. VI; OS 1.232.34. Robert Kingdon has repeatedly called attention to Calvin's activity as an expert lawyer in Geneva. See "Calvin and the Government in Geneva," in Calvinus ecclesiae Genevensis Custos, ed. W. H. Neuser (Frankfurt a.M., 1984), 49-67; esp. 59f. Cf. the seminar report "Calvinus Regislator [sic!]: The 1543 'Constitution' of the City-State of Geneva," in Calvinus Servus Christi, ed. W. H. Neuser (Budapest, 1958), 225-32; esp. 226.

¹²⁹ OS 1.270.17-280.15. Cf. Harro Höpfl, The Christian Polity of John Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 43ff.

¹³⁰ OS 1.36.18 and 279.40.

¹³¹ See the conclusion of Jane Dempsey Douglass: "For Calvin a reformation requires more than preaching; it needs order." Women, Freedom, Calvin, The 1983 Annie Kinkead Warfield Lectures (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985), 21.

¹³² I find the arguments advanced by Jean Rott for Calvin's authorship of "Cop's academic address"—held on 1 November 1533 in Paris—convincing. However, since we cannot exclude the possibility of at least partial authorship by Nicolas Cop and—more generally—since we cannot determine the precise interaction between ghost-writer and public speaker, I find it advisable not to draw on this document—so important for the history of the decisive "events"—for the analysis of the initia Calvini. See Jean Rott, "Documents strasbourgeois concernant Calvin," Regards Contemporains sur Jean Calvin. Actes du Colloque Calvin, Strasbourg 1964 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1965), 28-73; 42. Together with a number of other precious documents, the critical edition can be found on pp. 43-49.

¹³³ A year later Calvin and Capito cooperated again. Whereas Calvin wrote the Preface on the history of salvation (see below, n. 148), Capito contributed "le discours aux lecteurs juifs de la Bible," signed "V.F.C…. ," behind which we will have to discern "Wolfgang Fabritius Capito." As in the case of Bucer's Psalms commentary of 1529, the intended readership in France could not be reached if the police authorities could make out the name of one of the Strassburg preachers. For Bucer's role in the publication of the Psychopannychia, see also n. 95.

¹³⁴ "L'Egiise des refugiés de langue francaise à Strasbourg au XVI siècle," Bulletin de la sociéte d'histoire du protestantisme français, 122 (1976), 525.

¹³⁵ The dangers for the "reformistes," even before Oct. 3, 1525, are vividly described by Gerard Roussel in a letter dated 25.IX.1525 from Meaux to Farel: " …hactenus prohibuit Christi clementia." Correspondance des Reformateurs, ed. A.-L. Herminjard, 1 (Geneva, 1866), nr. 162, p. 391. See esp. p. 390, n. 4.

¹³⁶ See James K. Farge, Orthodoxy and Reform in Early Reformation France, esp. 255-68. Cf. Augustin Renaudet, Humanisme et Renaissance (Geneva, 1958), 214ff.

¹³⁷ See the well-documented and nuanced analysis of Michel Veissiere, L'Évêque Guillaume Briçonnet (1470-1534). Contribution à la connaissance de la Réforme catholique à la veille du Concile de Trente (Provins, 1986), esp. 386f.

¹³⁸ See Guy Bedouelle, Lefèvre D'Étaples et l'intelligence des écritures (Geneva: Droz, 1976).

¹³⁹Ibid., 131. See the conclusion, "Sans se situer nécessairement au-dessus de la melée, alors qu'il était proche des intuitions théologiques des Réformateurs et de leur interpretation de l'écriture, Lefèvre a préféré le silence qui-dit-plus que les disputes"; ibid., 235. Of course Faber had been "speaking" and still "spoke" loud and clear through his Opera in the Dedication of his Psalms Commentary (to the eldest son of Francis I). Martin Bucer acknowledges his indebtedness and calls Faber "pietissimus ille et erudissimus senex." Psalms Com., op. cit. (above, n. 14), fol. iii^r.

¹⁴⁰Guillaume Farel 1489-1565. Biographie Nouvelle écrite d'après les Documents Originaux par un groupe d'Historiens, Professeurs et Pasteurs de Suisse, de France et d'Italie (Neuchâtel and Paris: Editions Delachaux & Niestle, 1930); Christoph Burger, "Farels Frömmigkeit," in Actes du Colloque Guillaume Farel, Cahiers de la Revue de Théologie et de Philosophic, 1, 2 (Geneva, 1983), 149-50. Not only by "swearing" Calvin into service in Geneva was Farel "direct" in his vocabulary. See Michel Peronnet, "Images de Guillaume Farel pendant la Dispute de Lausanne 1536," in La Dispute de Lausanne 1536. La théologie réformée après Zwingli et avant Calvin (Lausanne, 1988), 133-41; 140f. We are in the fortunate position that such reading impressions can be objectified. Henry Heller's The Conquest of Poverty. The Calvinist Revolt in Sixteenth Century France, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Thought, vol. 35 (Leiden, 1986), contains an important chapter, "Popular Roots of the Reformation: The Lutherans of Meaux" (1525-46) in which the social unrest and the vulnerability of the cloth industry in Meaux are spelled out. Cf. pp. 27-69. I call particular attention to Heller's discovery of the fuller Nicolas Boivin, who was interrogated after he fled the persecutions of 1525 in Meaux; Heller, 58-60. Heller's characterization of Boivin fits exactly the case of Farel: biblicism, justification by faith, the priesthood of all believers, and religious certitude: "They supply him with the means not merely of rejecting the old faith but also give him the self-confidence of a new one." Ibid., 60.

¹⁴¹ See his introduction to the facsimile reproduction of the edition of Simon Du Bois, Jacques Lefèvre d'Etaples et ses disciples. épistres & Évangiles pour les Cinquante & deux Sepmaines de l'An (Geneva: Droz, 1964), 9-28; 13. In the following I draw on this substantial introduction with texts.

¹⁴² Cf. the edition with introduction by M. A. Screech of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples: le Nouveau Testament. Facsimilé de la première édition Simon de Colines, 1523, 2 vols. (Paris, 1970).

¹⁴³ "Lefèvre 'Étaples est donc l'auteur de notre texte, dans le sens où c'est lui qui a fourni la traduction des péricopes et où c'est lui le maître qui, en toute humilité, a donné au travail de quatre de ses disciples l'empreinte de sa personnalité, de son style et de sa doctrine." Screech, introduction to Épistres & Évangiles, 12.

¹⁴⁴ See the text in Appendix B of Screech's introduction; ibid., 41-51; 51.

¹⁴⁵ On the complex task of placing Dolet (1546) amid the reform currents in France, see B. Longeon, "Étienne Dolet: Années d'enfance et de jeunesse," in Réforme et Humanisme. Actes du IVe Colloque (Montpellier, 1975), 37-61. Of the same age as Calvin—born 1509 in Orléans—after studies in Padua, he describes in his Commentarii Linguae Latinae (Lyon, 1536), dedicated to Guillaume Budé, the wide variety of positions on the "(im)mortality of the soul": "Has de animae mortalitate, vel immortalitate sententias, simul varia de religione iudicia, sectasque hominum in deo colendo diversas discutimus iis libris, qui de opinione posteritati à nobis relinquentur, ut nos planè viros vixisse intelligat, non ineptiis cruciatos elanguisse"; quoted by Longeon, p. 55, n. 3. Cf. Judith R. Henderson, "Dolet," in Contemporaries of Erasmus, 1 (Toronto, 1985), 394-96.

¹⁴⁶ See the documentation for the adaptation made in the Dolet edition in Appendix A, Screech, ibid., 28-40; 28.

¹⁴⁷ CO 53.273.

¹⁴⁸ Suzanne Schreiner graciously allowed me to read the galleys of her illuminating The Theatre of His Glory (Durham, NC: The Labyrinth Press, 1990). The function of the "theater" with Calvin deserves a separate treatment under the heading of the "rhetoric of the eyes." Since Bouwsma presented "Rhetoric" and "Theater" in two separate chapters (7 and 11), Neuser could wonder what "drama" has "letzlich" to do with Calvin's understanding of the Christian life (art. cit.—as in n. 50 above, p. 156). In my view the answer can be brief: "letzlich" everything! But to document this view would require a separate treatment.

¹⁴⁹ For Olivétan and his bible, see Olivétan: traducteur de la bible, ed. A. Casalis and B. Roussel (Paris, 1987). For an excellent introduction and the text, see Irena Backus et Claire Chimelli, "L'Épitre à tous amateurs," "La Vraie Piété, " Divers traités de Jean Calvin et Confession de foi de Guillaume Farel, Histoire et Société, nr. 12 (Geneva, 1986), 17-38.

¹⁵⁰ Ed. Backus, 27.6f. Some ten years later (1546), after one of his frequent sharp asides against the philological deficiencies of Erasmus ("Erasmi cavillum") Calvin insists that Christ already in the desert was the mediator and dux ecclesiae: "…qui in itinere semper adfuit populo." CO 49.459 B; I Cor. 10:9.

¹⁵¹ This reevaluation highlights the contrast between Calvin and the so-called city reformers. With reference to Theodore Beza, Donald Kelley has pointed to the far-reaching consequences of exile in terms of the "substitution of confessional roles for familial ones": fellow exiles became brothers and sisters. The Beginning of Ideology. Consciousness and Society in the French Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 57: Beza, not only the successor of Calvin in Geneva but also following on a similar path (Bourges, Orleans, Paris, Lausanne, Geneva), found his refugee experience reflected in Abraham's sacrifice—rather than in the trek through the desert—and could perhaps therefore describe it as free choice: I went to Geneva "in exilum voluntarium." Letter to Melchior Volmar, Geneva 12, III, 1560, no. 156, in Correspondance de Théodore de Bèze, ed. Henri Meylan et Alain Dufour, Tome III (1559-61), (Geneva, 1963), 47, 25.

¹⁵² "…et scimus hoc esse durius, ubi quis longe abstrahitur a patria." CO 38.399 B; Comm. on Jer. 22:28. Cf. "Scimus enim durum esse exilium." CO 39.511 A; Lam. of Jer. 1:3 (1563).

¹⁵³ O. Douen, Clément Marot …, 1.504; as above, p. 113, n. 1. The translation of Psalm 18 catches the threatened existence of the transients-in-exile in a form commensurate with what the editor calls a "véritable chefd'oeuvre de poésie orientale." Ibid., 503. See further C. A. Mayer, La religion de Marot, Travaux d'Humanisme et Renaissance, vol. 39 (Geneva: Droz, 1960).