Ignatius was writing for an elite of highly committed men; Cauvin, for anyone who could read him. Cauvin’s theology does not permit the esotericism that allows Ignatius to nuance this doctrine by advising “great care” in the manner in which it is discussed, though in the Institutes he also warns that the subject be approached with caution. Certainly neither Cauvin nor Loyola lived the life of a fatalist, nor does either show the least reluctance to urge others to act decisively. Anomalies must be expected along the conceptual frontier between the temporal and the eternal. Clearly it is not at all Ignatius’s purpose in writing to find logical solutions to theological problems — “I will believe that the white object I see is black if that should be the decision of the hierarchical church.” Nor is it Cauvin’s, who does not “contrive a necessity out of the perpetual connection and intimately related series of causes, which is contained in nature.” He is as committed to the freedom and mystery of God as Ignatius is to the divine authority of the Church. The logical difficulties of their positions matter only if the question is understood in terms both explicitly reject.
A great part of Cauvin’s authority, in his lifetime and for as long as he was read, came from his gifts as a writer. He was splendidly educated in classical literature, and his Latin was concise and elegant. His translations of his own work into French were early classics in the use of French as a literary language. What is most remarkable about his work is that it seems to have been treated almost from the beginning as an “orthodoxy,” when, as such things were measured when he wrote, it was grandly, systematically heterodox. This would have been true in part because of his extraordinary mastery of Scripture and of the writing of the Early Fathers. His theology is compelled and enthralled by an overwhelming awareness of the grandeur of God, and this is the source of the distinctive aesthetic coherency of his religious vision, which is neither mysticism nor metaphysics, but mysticism as a method of rigorous inquiry, and metaphysics as an impassioned flight of the soul. This vision is still very present in writers like Melville and Dickinson. It is the consequence of a poetic or imaginative stance which, I will argue, Cauvin learned from the religious poetry of Marguerite de Navarre.
Still, I would like to consider a little longer the strange figure of Jean Cauvin himself, because he is a true historical singularity. The theologian Karl Barth called him “a cataract, a primeval forest, something demonic, directly descending from the Himalayas, absolutely Chinese, marvelous, mythological.” And in fact, the more deeply one reads in him the more thoroughly his thinking baffles paraphrase. Then, too, his personal life is so featureless it seems to have been lived to make reticence redundant. In matters of unavoidable interest, for example the circumstances under which he left Catholicism and embraced the Reformation, he is silent. He served for decades as a pastor in Geneva, but no one knows when or whether he was ordained. His contemporaries would have had the example of Luther in mind, who literally personified the struggles of conscience from which such epochal decisions arose. Cauvin seems to have chosen so far as possible to avoid all personalization, a choice his temperament made very available to him. But the power he derived from this remarkable self-negation suggests that he understood its effects. Only he among the Reformers enjoyed equal status with Luther while they lived, and over the centuries his influence has eclipsed that of Luther, though Cauvin never hesitated to acknowledge that he was deeply in Luther’s debt.
Luther was a monk, the son of prosperous peasants. He was brilliant, learned, coarse, robust, emotional. Cauvin, seventeen years younger than he, was the son of a lawyer, and was himself trained as a lawyer. As a child Cauvin was sent, after the death of his mother, to be reared and educated in an aristocratic family, and as a young man he studied classical literature and languages with some of the finest teachers in Europe. Scripture and theology he taught himself. In portraits made in his youth, Cauvin looks refined and gentle. In portraits made toward the end of his life, he looks crabbed and depleted. There is an assumption abroad among historians that the ravages of time spare those who live their lives well, that a harsh portrait is as absolute an exposure of the soul as one finds this side of Judgment. Perhaps this is not true in every case. It is worth remembering that a fair part of anyone’s life would be required to read what Cauvin read, and then to read what he wrote, even someone in good health, with decent light to work by and a comfortable chair. His commentaries on the Psalms and on Jeremiah are each about twenty-five hundred pages long in English translation, and he wrote commentary on almost the whole Bible, besides personal, pastoral, polemical, and diplomatic letters, treatises on points of doctrine, a catechism, and continuous revisions of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the first, greatest, and most influential work of systematic theology the Reformation produced. At the same time, he preached and lectured several times each week, and married, buried, and baptized people like any other pastor. He was endlessly caught up in the religious and political controversies that swept through Geneva and Europe, and he was frequently the city’s emissary to councils and disputations. Yet he considered himself temperamentally unsuited for anything but scholarship. His shortness of temper and his headaches and sickliness, and those late portraits, seem to bear him out. There is only his singular religious, political, and cultural influence to contradict him.
Cauvin did not claim that the theology he articulated was in any sense original with him. His first theological work, the first form of the Institutes, was written, he says, to give an account to the king of France, and to the world, of the beliefs of people then being burned in France in a persecution that had forced Cauvin (no one really knows why) to flee Paris for Nérac in Angoulême and then for Basel. Nor did he figure in the insurrection that established the autonomy of Geneva, nor did he influence the form of its government, which was in place when he arrived. He did not establish the reform church at Geneva, but instead carried forward work already begun there by pastors Pierre Viret and Guillaume Farel. Cauvin, who says so little about himself, is careful to make these things clear. He never held any office in Geneva except pastor and lecturer, and he hesitated some months before agreeing to serve as a pastor. He did not accept Genevan citizenship until five years before his death. His famous preeminence, or dominance, in Geneva emerged gradually, over years. He loomed as he did in large part because the civil government produced no figures striking enough to rank with him. Through years of turmoil and fractiousness, he appears to have upheld, by steady, lawyerly deference, a magistracy his personal authority was for a very long time great enough to overwhelm. His insistence that honor be given to magistrates should be understood in this light.