In arguing for the effective presence of Christ in the Old Testament, Cauvin’s rebuttal of Servetus’s teachings follows certain of Augustine’s writings against the Manicheans, except that he carries the argument farther, finding Christ himself where Augustine found the prefiguration of him. But he could have claimed the authority of Augustine’s gloss of Psalm 105, which anticipates his argument closely. As usual, his apparent innovations really amount to selection and emphasis within a tradition made available to him by great learning. This is the posture of orthodoxy over against which he attacked heresy, the same one which allowed him to consider himself engaged in the basically conservative enterprise of reform, however radical and distinctive his teachings might be in effect.
If one may judge by Cauvin’s refutations, Servetus did not believe in baptism of infants or children, but he did believe in the damnation of those who died unbaptized, even children. Cauvin did believe in the baptism of infants as a sign of God’s care for them, though he did not believe that baptism was unconditionally necessary for salvation. Of infants, Cauvin says, “anyone Christ blesses is freed from the curse of Adam and the wrath of God. Since, therefore, it is known that infants were blessed by him, it follows that they were freed from death.” Altogether, in the death of Servetus, it seems that a mean doctrine was meanly suppressed, with the result that meanness won out.
Cauvin’s detractors have always condemned him for his severity on account of Michael Servetus. Worse, within his tradition he himself has been so stigmatized with intolerance that when certain of his loyalists have defended severities he himself explicitly discouraged — the strictures on church membership and communion enforced by Jonathan Edwards and others being one example — this is taken as a pure manifestation of Calvinism. It is no accident that the most liberal branch of American Protestantism descends from Calvinism, or that New England and upstate New York, in their Calvinist era, were great centers of social and educational reform and experimentation. (And gloomy, like Geneva, we are always told — compared with the slave states, presumably. Again, people differ in where they find cause for gloom.)
But where this side of Cauvin’s heritage has survived it has done so by denying his paternity, or by supposing it has in fact rejected or defied his heritage precisely in carrying forward its most distinctive elements. There are things for which we in this culture clearly are indebted to him, including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in “the humanities.” All this, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva — in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline. That mysterious energy, Calvinism, appears to be spent. It seems, in retrospect, utterly specific to its origins and circumstances, to the excitements of the Renaissance and of revolution and defiance and martyrdom, and to the vast stimulus of the availability of printed books, especially the Bible in modern languages. It is hard to imagine our recovering a sense of it. Certainly we cannot recover the thing itself.
Yet, lacking curiosity and the habit of study and any general grasp of history, we have entered a period of nostalgia and reaction. We want the past back, though we have no idea what it was. Things do not go so well for us as they once did. We feel we have lost our way. Most of us know that religion was once very important to our national life, and believe, whether we ourselves are religious or not, that we were much the better for its influence. Many of us know that Calvinism was a very important tradition among us. Yet all we know about John Calvin was that he was an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism. Our ignorant parody of history affirms our ignorant parody of religious or “traditional” values. This matters, because history is precedent and permission, and in this important instance, as in many others, we have lost plain accuracy, not to speak of complexity, substance, and human inflection. We want to return to the past, and we have made our past a demonology and not a human narrative.
MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE, PART II
MARGUERITE DE NAVARRE is entirely as striking a presence in history, and absence from history, as Jean Cauvin. When she is mentioned at all it is usually as the great patroness of letters and learning in the early French Renaissance, and the great protector of the early Reformation in France. These things by themselves should be more than sufficient to merit interest and respectful attention, one would think. She also wrote, poetry, plays, and fiction, all of them in French, which was only then emerging as a literary language. The Encyclopaedia Britannica, in its 1910 edition, speculates that her reputation fell victim to the prejudice against women of letters. Presumably her fame would have been greater if she had done less to deserve it.
(Her name is problematic also. Historians and reference books often call her Marguerite d’Angoulême, her name by birth, rather than Marguerite de Navarre, her name from her second marriage, to the titular king of Navarre. Navarre is and was in northern Spain, and while Marguerite was queen of Navarre her court was at Pau, in southern France. Her status seems to have been notional, almost fanciful, though because of her royal birth, her power was very real. I think she may have found a sort of metaphysical humor in her situation. The speaker in her poetry often refers to herself as Rien, Nothing, which I take to be a play on the title Royne, as they spelled it in those days. She chose the king of Navarre over far more advantageous offers of marriage. She is a witty-looking woman, to whom Rabelais dedicated the fourth book of Pantagruel with an absurd little poem.)
With the distinguished exception of the doctors of the Sorbonne, who paid her first book of poetry the compliment of scrutinizing it for heretical ideas, theologians seem never to consider that her writings might have theological content, let alone that her influence on theology could have extended beyond her interventions on behalf of imperiled dissenting preachers. Her religious poems and plays, when they are discussed at all, have been regarded as mere mystical pietism. She lived in the great age of mystical piety, the age of Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross among so many others. But her poems are treated as mere effusions, or as Catholicism or Protestantism set to rhyme, statements of possibly momentary allegiance to doctrines formulated by others, containing nothing of her own religious thought or religious experience.
So far as I have discovered, available information about her involvement with the Reformation in France is sketchy and oblique, but not inconsistent with her having played a very decisive role in its emergence. At the time of the publication of her first book of poems, in 1530, Protestants were still called “Lutherans.” Cauvin had published only a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, a fine piece of scholarship in which he presumed to differ with the great Erasmus, but which showed no indication of the course his life was to take. At the time of the persecutions in Paris — set off by the so-called Affair of the Placards, when leaflets derogating the Mass appeared all over Paris, one even in the king’s bedchamber — Cauvin made his way to Nérac in Angoulême, to the court of Marguerite, already the first recourse of dissenters needing shelter.