A French Youth CHAPTER ONE. Ways of Speaking

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2 CHAPTER ONE A French Youth Ways of Speaking JOHN CALVIN as a child does not come easily to the eye. Our imagination quickly runs to familiar representations of an ageing, bearded man stooped by years of hard labour and illness and to the stool on which he allegedly had to sit to preach in his declining years, or to nineteenth-century illustrations of the great prophet declaiming before the cowering faithful. Of the young boy growing up in the cathedral town of Noyon, sixty miles north of Paris, we know almost nothing. Expansive reflections on his youth form no part of Calvin s writing. Even the self-portrait offered in the preface to his psalms commentary, written later in life, passes almost in silence over his early years in Picardy. He offers only the single insight that his father had a change of heart. When I was as yet a very little boy, my father had destined me for the study of theology. But afterwards, when he considered that the legal profession commonly raised those who followed it to wealth, this prospect induced him suddenly to change his purpose. 1 A solitary childhood memory also appears in a 1543 tract when Calvin recalled the manner in which the good people of Noyon venerated the relics of saints. His written words do, however, contain revelations of the man. In the psalms preface of 1557 Calvin describes himself as being at once awkward, timid and bashful qualities that his later opponents might be forgiven for failing to recognize. As with everything he wrote, however, context is essential. The preface is not autobiographical in any modern sense, but rather a

3 2 Calvin carefully crafted account of his providential call to the ministry, utterly devoid of sentimentality. Providence is God s will, mysterious to humanity, that guides all things. It extends to specific events and actions, works through particular human characteristics and comforts men and women, who by faith see that the world is not random and chaotic, but in God s hands. For Calvin, it was God s providence that he had been chosen to serve in a special capacity. Yet within the lines of elegant Latin prose dwells something of the boy who became the man, and this takes us to the heart of Calvin s story. His great endeavour was to interpret the Bible to the world, and through scripture he saw his own life mapped out. In the Bible he found the man he was called to be: a prophet and apostle single-mindedly dedicated to one cause. His vocation, as described in his psalms preface, brought him face to face with the divine command and demanded unquestioning obedience, something he required both of himself and of others. He lived simultaneously in the world and before the face of God: judgement awaited, pressing upon Calvin the urgency of his calling and a sense of never having done enough. This was only intensified by his weaknesses. His body-destroying illnesses and volatile temperament were theologically interpreted and embraced within his sense of mission. This coexisting divine calling and human frailty formed his identity. The Bible provided Calvin with the narrative of his life and it is possible to catch echoes of his lost childhood in the biblical characters about whom he wrote and preached so fulsomely. It would be too simplistic to draw direct autobiographical references from biblical reflections primarily theological in intention, yet the manner in which he spoke about childhood in the Bible does cast a refracted light on his own experiences. With his contemporaries, and much in contrast to our age, Calvin did not consider his childhood as psychologically formative: it was a brief and brutal preparation for adulthood associated primarily with ignorance, volatility and waywardness. 2 The view was common enough. The great Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, to take one example, did not care for St Augustine s Confessions. He thought the church father talked too much about himself and discussed silly and sordid topics such as childhood, adolescence, his feelings of lust and such things. 3 From the vantage point of a mature man who had come to see his life in providential terms, Calvin regarded childhood as something a young person traversed with the guidance of parents, teachers and masters. Without authority and discipline childish ways distort character, a perversion not easily remedied in later life.

4 A French Youth 3 Calvin read himself into scripture. In his account of his conversion written twenty-five years after the event, he compared himself with David, the shepherd boy called to be Israel s king. For although I follow David at a great distance, and come far short of equalling him, or rather, although in aspiring slowly and with great difficulty to attain to the many virtues in which he excelled, I still feel myself tarnished with the contrary vices. Yet, if I have anything in common with him, I have no hesitation in comparing myself with him. In reading the instances of his faith, patience, fervour, zeal and integrity, it has, as it ought, drawn from me unnumbered groans and sighs that I am so far from approaching them. It has, however, been of very great advantage to me to behold in him, as in a mirror, both the commencement of my calling and the continued course of my actions, so that I know more certainly that whatever that most illustrious king and prophet suffered was exhibited to me by God as an example for imitation. 4 The image of the mirror, or speculum, recurs throughout Calvin s writings to suggest both likeness and difference. In Calvin s eyes, he and David were separated by a vast temporal and cultural gap, but, as humble men called by God to a special office, they were one. As he was taken from the sheepfold, and elevated to the rank of supreme authority, so God having taken me from my originally obscure and humble condition, reckoned me worthy of being invested with the honourable office of a preacher and minister of the Gospel. 5 In reading his own experience through the world of an ancient Israelite we are introduced to both a key aspect of Calvin s thought and a fundamental ambivalence in his character. The past, for Calvin and the other Protestant reformers, was to be reclaimed for the present. This was not to suggest the donning of Old Testament armour or Roman togas; it was the appropriation and application of what was good from earlier times to remedy the corruption and error of contemporary society. Thus Calvin found himself in the ancient figures of the Bible. Yet this was not unproblematic. A supreme confidence in his role as divinely appointed reformer of the whole Church, not simply of Geneva, sat alongside an uneasy, fretful sense of falling woefully short of that commission. Such was the man who rarely, if ever, changed his mind on a topic, yet continuously and restlessly reformulated and rewrote his thoughts in pursuit of greater clarity and insight.

5 4 Calvin Early Years How then do we begin the story of this enigmatic figure? The sources on Calvin s youth are extremely sparse, forcing us to pick over the few known facts. 6 To open with his name, it was, like much of his life, a creation of his adult years. Jean Calvin was born Jean Cauvin and only assumed the Latinized Calvinus later in Basle, probably in imitation of the Roman proconsul named in Cicero ( BCE), the great Roman statesman and orator. There was logic in this. Cicero was in many respects Calvin s guide to the classical world: it was through the Roman writer that he became familiar with much of ancient philosophy and literature, and we know from Theodore Beza s biography, written after Calvin s death, that he re-read Cicero every year. Name changing was a commonplace among humanists of the sixteenth century: Johannes Heusegen, literally house lamp, became Oecolampadius, the reformer of Basle, and Luther s colleague, Philip Schwarzerd, black earth, is better known as Melanchthon. From his name we move to geography. Sixteenth-century Picardy comprised the lands of the Somme river basin north of Paris stretching towards the Low Countries, scene of the worst fighting of the First World War. The inhabitants spoke Picard, close to but distinct from French, and this dialect would have been John Calvin s native tongue. The Cauvin family was local to the Noyon region where his father was an industrious and ambitious man who had achieved bourgeois status in 1497, just over a decade before John s birth. Girard Cauvin, the son of a cooper, made a remarkable ascent up the social ladder through the patronage of the de Hangest family, the bishops of Noyon. Girard married Jeanne Le Franc, a devout daughter of a local innkeeper who died in 1515 when their son John was only six years old. Calvin s positive ruminations on the good fortune of those brought up in the faith may well contain a trace of boyhood reflection, for his mother encouraged her children in devotion, and his later claim that he was blinded by superstition was at the very least a backhanded compliment to the traditional piety in which he was nursed. 7 There were plenty of children in the Cauvin family: John had one elder brother, Charles, who became a priest, though he ultimately turned his back on the Roman church, as well as two younger brothers, François and Antoine. François is thought to have died at an early age, while Antoine followed his brother to Geneva, where he became John s close confidant and business manager. Of the two sisters, very little is known: they were born to a second marriage and we know only the name of Marie, who likewise came to Geneva. 8

6 A French Youth 5 Girard Cauvin held a series of significant and prominent local positions that bore testament to the effectiveness of his patronage connections: notary, procurator to the cathedral chapter, and member of the judiciary. He was closely linked to the workings of the church, though his relations with the clergy were hardly easy, and his character bespoke a man who never stepped away from a fight, a quality evidently passed on to his son. John benefited from the close relationship with the de Hangest family actively cultivated by his father, and at the age of twelve received his first ecclesiastical benefice barrels of wheat from the revenue of La Gésine, one of the altars of the cathedral. It was a straightforward arrangement whereby Calvin received income from the church benefice without the inconvenience of having to perform any religious duty. As a means of supporting the education of a talented young boy there was nothing remarkable in this arrangement; the revenues of the church had long been in the clutches of families eager to expand their patronage networks. Calvin owed his education to aristocratic patronage, and for this he had good reason to be grateful. However, relations with his social superiors remained deeply problematic for him all his life. In certain respects he was besotted with the nobility, utterly persuaded that they ruled as of right. At the same time, he despised their immorality, their world of religious and political compromises and their addiction to material comforts. It was a conflict between the divine order of society and the corrosive effects of sin, a tension he never resolved. With the support of the de Hangest family, he began his rudimentary studies at the Collège des Capettes in Noyon, whose pupils were recognizable by their short gowns. Here Calvin received his first instruction in Latin, an essential prerequisite for advancement in the world, whether in the church or the law. 9 Girard Cauvin well understood the importance of a good education to the further improvement of his family s standing, though there have been suggestions that the provision in Noyon was deficient. We know nothing of Calvin s days as pupil, but they were unlikely to have been pleasant. Schooling was a harsh world of rote learning and corporal punishment. Thomas More s Utopia of 1516 comments that English school masters would sooner beat their boys than teach them. 10 The most widely accepted, or at least most repeated, narrative has Calvin leaving Noyon in 1523 for Paris in the company of several sons of the Montmor family. Theodore Beza, who wrote two biographies of Calvin after the reformer s death based on personal information, tells us that Calvin began his studies at the Collège de la Marche, where as an auditeur, one following a

7 6 Calvin course of study, he came under the direction of Maturin Cordier. 11 Although the story is extremely patchy, attempts to deconstruct this version of events have not proved persuasive. 12 What is not in doubt is that the young Calvin, who his father, with the financial support of the de Hangest family, had sent to Paris to study for the priesthood, was taught by Cordier. Later, in an affectionate dedication of his commentary on 1 Thessalonians, Calvin attributed to providence his arrival at Cordier s feet. 13 He recalled the master s generosity towards a young boy whose Latin was far from proficient, and that he willingly and patiently condescended to teach the rudiments of the language, an act he remembered as a singular kindness on the part of God. 14 He had indeed been most fortunate. Maturin Cordier represented the best of French humanist pedagogy, committed to studies in the promotion of the Christian life and with a particular genius for the education of the young. 15 His A Little Book for the Amendment of Corrupt Phrases in Our Speech (Paris, 1530) offered a succinct creed: There is a twofold reason for my undertaking this work: first, so that every learned person might be drawn to the writing of something better; and next, that youths may not only be stirred to speaking Latin, but stimulated to the leading of a noble life.... For without piety what progress is there in letters? 16 The reciprocity of study and faith, so famously expressed by Erasmus and inculcated in the young pupil in Paris, became Calvin s lifelong standard. How unlikely it must have seemed in 1523 that the lives of this celebrated humanist master and his young pupil would become so closely interwoven. Labelled a luthérien in 1534 Cordier was forced to flee Paris for Bordeaux before travelling to Geneva to teach at the Collège de Rive, a position he was required to relinquish in 1538 specifically on account of his close association with the disgraced Calvin. 17 For four decades the two men remained in contact and died in the same year, the master thirty years older than his former pupil. It was not just Calvin who found inspiration in this remarkable figure: the Savoyard Sebastian Castellio, whose initial friendship with Calvin putrefied into raw enmity, likewise saw in Cordier the perfect mixture of humanist education with biblical piety. Castellio named him his spiritual master. 18 After initial studies at the Collège de la Marche, Calvin moved to the more prestigious Collège de Montaigu at the end of From its creation, the University of Paris had been divided into four faculties (arts, medicine, law and theology) with around forty colleges founded by patrons eager to enable young men from their regions to study in the city. 20 All of these colleges were situated in the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève in the Latin Quarter, whose residents had

8 A French Youth 7 long complained about the violent and debauched conduct of students. Teaching took place through the colleges, but the higher faculties of theology, law and medicine retained their pre-eminence. The university consisted of four nations (France, Picardy, Normandy and Germany) with the French subdivided into five provinces (Bourges, Paris, Reims, Sens and Tours). 21 Each college had a distinct character owing to its head, or rector, men of influence who shaped education in the late-medieval period. When Calvin arrived at the Collège de Montaigu in the mid-1520s he entered a prestigious institution, radically reformed over the previous two decades, whose students were predominantly intended for the church, which, as far as we know, was the young man s path. Montaigu s two hundred students were divided into the domestiques or galoches, who endured a brutal regime wherein they had to work for their keep, the stipendiary students and the caméristes. It was to the last group that the talented boy from Noyon belonged, with his provincial patronage which enabled him to pay for board and lodgings. Under the rectorship of Noël Beda in the early years of the century Montaigu had emerged as a centre of conservative scholarship and religion. 22 Beda raised the Collège to become one of the elite institutions of the university, and its rigour was widely admired, if not always by its students. Among those who passed through its doors were Erasmus and the writer François Rabelais, while during his stay Calvin possibly coincided with the Spaniard Ignatius Loyola, later founder of the Jesuits. Erasmus, never one for the discomforts of life, left a scathing account of his experience. In the middle of winter, they were fed a little bit of bread and made to drink from the well water which was dangerously spoiled, when it had not been frozen by the morning cold. I knew many people who, even today, are not able to recover from the illnesses they contracted at Montaigu.... I will not talk about the cruelty with which they whipped the scholars, even when they had done nothing. 23 The Montaigu of Rabelais, Calvin and Loyola in the 1520s was presided over by Pierre Tempête, infamous for his cruelty and rabid insistence upon an austere monastic regime. Students were to rise at four in the morning and begin their lessons an hour later. At seven mass was heard, followed by a meagre breakfast of bread. From eight till midday the major part of the instruction in the elements of the arts curriculum took place. Following another meal the students passed the afternoon honing their debating skills in public disputations under the watchful eyes of their masters. An evening repast was followed by further study and prayers, and finally bed at nine. It

9 8 Calvin may have been brutal, but it instilled in Calvin a disciplined pattern of life and work he would maintain until his death. Unless prevented by illness, the mature Calvin rose daily around four and his long work day was punctuated by prayer and simple meals. The students at Montaigu had a reputation for submissiveness, less a virtue than a shrewd recognition that their masters controlled the levers of religious patronage. As most of the students were being prepared for service in the church, good behaviour, diligence and the approbation of Tempête marked the path to a secure future. These young men were cultivated in the spirit of Beda to become defenders of religious orthodoxy against heresy, and to serve as obedient servants of the church. It is inviting to speculate on the extent to which Calvin s later ambivalence towards the patronage system was rooted in the authoritarian atmosphere of Montaigu. Certainly, he did not encounter at Montaigu the evangelical currents coursing through the streets and homes of Paris in the 1520s, but they were not far away. Exactly what Calvin studied at Montaigu has led to much speculation, but it has remained just that: speculation. Attempts have been made to connect him to a range of theological lines of thought such as nominalism and late-medieval Augustinism. 24 It has been suggested that he studied Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Gregory of Rimini and other luminaries of medieval theology, but again nothing can be established with certainty. It is not even known whether he studied theology in Paris at all. It appears most likely that during his years at Montaigu he followed a course of studies in arts in which he was instructed in the traditional curriculum of the trivium (grammar, logic and rhetoric) and the quadrivium (arithmetic, music, geometry, astronomy). This would have served as preparation for the higher study of theology, as his father originally intended a path he was, however, soon to abandon. The France of Calvin s Youth It is tempting for a biographer to fill gaps in a life with background context and suggest tendentious connections. Yet if we are to understand the formation of Calvin s character, some knowledge of the intense, exciting yet perilous world of Renaissance France is essential. While we possess precious few details about his life in these years, we know that he was profoundly affected by the whirlwind of events he witnessed as a student. The French religious world into which he was born was marked by the bewildering contrasts found throughout