MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE
THE TITLE OF THIS ESSAY is somewhat misleading. My intention, my hope, is to revive interest in Jean Cauvin, the sixteenth-century French humanist and theologian — he died in 1564, the year Shakespeare was born — known to us by the name John Calvin. If I had been forthright about my subject, I doubt that the average reader would have read this far. Anyone interested in American history knows that Calvin exerted as important an influence on it as anyone — John Locke was deeply in his debt, and this is hardly surprising, since Locke’s political thinking was formed during the great Calvinist experiment of the English Revolution and Commonwealth. Yet when we talk about our history, Calvin does not figure in the conversation, or when he does, it is as Adam Smith’s censorious cousin. People know to disapprove of him, though not precisely why they should, and they know he afflicted us with certain traits the world might well wish we were in fact afflicted with, like asceticism and an excess of ethical rigor. His misdeeds are somehow of a kind to forbid attention. Coincidentally, they are not great, by the standards of his century or of ours.
And if his misdeeds were very great, and we are marked by a grim paternity, then we should certainly know the particulars of our inheritance. Finding the etiologies of our crimes and vices has given purpose to much writing of history. Surely if Calvin is as bleak an influence as we ordinarily assume, he presents an opportunity not to be missed. A more flamboyant life than his would have attracted attack and then inevitable defense, or celebration and then ferocious debunking. Calvin was a sickly, diligent pastor, scholar, diplomat, and polemicist, who wrote theology of breathtaking beauty and tough-mindedness as well as line-by-line commentary on most books of the Bible. When he died he was buried, as he had asked to be, in an unmarked grave.
(I use the name Jean Cauvin in this essay to free the discussion of the almost comically negative associations of “John Calvin,” which anglicizes the Latin name under which he wrote, Ioannes Calvinus. Even scholarship in French uses the surname Calvin. Still, it is so burdened that I choose to depart from custom.)
To argue that Marguerite de Navarre, sister of the French king François I, was a decisive influence on the literary and religious imagination of Jean Cauvin is to do her no service at all until Calvin is recovered and rehabilitated. On the other hand, the fact of her influence does place Cauvin in his true context, as an elegantly educated Frenchman with aristocratic connections, very much the creature of Renaissance humanism. Marguerite herself is a writer of great interest. She was ambitiously educated, very learned in philosophy and an early exponent of the revival of Platonism in Renaissance Europe. Although Platonism had been deeply influential in the writings of Augustine and others, at the time of Marguerite interest in it amounted to an attack on the Aristotelianism that dominated the schools, and was sometimes punished as heresy. She was also a patroness of writers and especially of religious reformers. Scholars debate the degree to which she was influenced by Cauvin, and not the degree to which he might have been influenced by her, though she was almost a generation older than he and interested in reform ideas years before he was, and though, in her lifetime, she enjoyed great prestige. So she deserves as much as he does to be summoned out of obscurity. It gives me no little pleasure to find a woman at the head of this formidable stream of tradition, the last place I would have expected to find one.
Putting Cauvin into the context appropriate to him should draw attention to the fact that New England political and intellectual culture was more Continental than British in its origins, or Continental by way of Britain, not only through the influence of Cauvin on the early settlers, and on Cromwell, Milton, and the whole of English Puritanism. New England was Continental (and Calvinist) in its tendency toward relatively popular government. New England church polity and the distinctive political order associated with it had emerged generations earlier, in Europe. In 1528 Geneva became an autonomous city governed by elected councils as the result of an insurrection against the ruling house of Savoy. Though the causes of the rebellion seem to have had little to do with the religious controversies of the period, in the course of it two preachers, Guillaume Farel and Pierre Viret, persuaded the city to align itself with the Reformation, then recruited Cauvin to guide the experiment of establishing a new religious culture in the newly emancipated city. That is to say, Calvinism developed with and within a civil regime of elections and town meetings.
In 1572, the northern Dutch fought themselves free of control by Spain and established their federation, which they called the United Provinces, under strong Calvinist, therefore Genevan, influence. Persecution and exile made Calvinism at once international and strongly identified with Geneva, its capital and city of refuge, and therefore greatly magnified the influence of the Genevan example. So the association of Calvinism with government that was popular by the standards of the time (and of our time) was established long before the settlement of New England, and endorsed by the uncanny power and prosperity of its two tiny republics.
Seventeenth-century New Englanders were called the Dutch of the British Empire. The American South was not Calvinist, not settled as New England was by Puritans who felt oppressed by the religious and political order of England before Cromwell’s Puritan revolution, or who fled the country after it. It did not send its young men to fight on the side of Cromwell against the king. The South was instead a direct and characteristic offshoot of British colonial policy. It compared to New England as England compared to Holland: despite far more considerable resources, its population was relatively poor and illiterate (English agricultural workers did not thrive better than American slaves) and very sharply stratified. In other words, the similarity of New England to other Calvinist societies, despite differences of culture and language, and its difference from the South, despite shared origins and language, argue that powerful political models and values can be transmitted actively as ideas, through writing and example.
We tend to imagine that political culture must in effect be inherited, passively received. This assumption has as a corollary the notion that the social order will sustain itself if we do not think and theorize about it, and in any case will not benefit if we do. More disturbingly, it implies that populations not already acculturated to orderly representative government will not become capable of it. To say that ideas now have no place in our own political conversation is to understate the matter. It would be truer to say that we no longer have a political conversation. We grope for “traditions” (except for such honorable old customs as substantive debate) as if safety lay in them, and we indulge a somber fear of the outside world, and more particularly of the outsiders among us, in part because we suppose these are the conditions for preserving democracy.
Insofar as these assumptions are articulated as ideas, we are told that representative government found a sheltering niche in liberal aristocracy and blossomed there, and that its flourishing had awaited certain fortuitous erosions in the structure to which its existence finally was owed. This notion allows us to derive our institutions from England, obvious dissimilarities — rights established in law, for example — not at all withstanding. Besides flattering a kind of nativism, this lightens the work of historians. For example, to treat the balance of powers as Enlightenment theory first put to the test in our cheerfully mechanistic Constitution is much more congenial labor than to ponder the murky struggles of the three councils that governed Geneva 250 years before our Constitution was written.