Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

unattainable, and that therefore theologians and philosophers should

not kill.

The humanist who most clearly spoke for tolerance amid the clash

of certainties had been for a time one of Calvin's closest friends.

Sebastian Castellio, born in the French Jura in 1515, became an

adept in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, taught Greek at Lyons, lived with

Calvin in Strasbourg, was appointed by him rector of the Latin

School at Geneva (1541), and began there a translation of the entire

Bible into Ciceronian Latin. While he admired Calvin as a man, he

abominated the doctrine of predestination, and fretted under the new

discipline of body and mind. In 1544 he charged the Genevese ministers

with intolerance, impurity, and drunkenness. Calvin complained to

the Council; Castellio was found guilty of calumny, and was banished

(1544). For nine years he lived in great poverty, supporting a large

family, and working at night on his version of the Scriptures. He

finished this in 1551; then, lonesome for the placid drudgery of

scholarship, he began again at Genesis 1:1, and translated the Bible

into French. Finally (1553) he obtained a professorship of Greek at

the University of Basel. He sympathized with the Unitarians, longed to

help Servetus, and was shocked by Calvin's defense of the execution.

Under assumed names he and Caelius Curio published (March 1554) the

first modern classic on toleration: De haereticis an sint

persequendi ( Should Heretics Be Persecuted? )

The main body of the work was an anthology, compiled by Curio, of

Christian pleas for tolerance, from Lactantius and Jerome to

Erasmus, the early Luther, and Calvin himself. Castellio contributed

the argument in preface and epilogue. For hundreds of years, he

pointed out, men had debated free will, predestination, heaven and

hell, Christ and the Trinity, and other difficult matters; no

agreement had been reached; probably none would ever be reached. But

none is necessary, said Castellio; such disputes do not make men

better; all that we need is to carry the spirit of Christ into our

daily lives, to feed the poor, help the sick, and love even our

enemies. It seemed to him ridiculous that all the new sects, as well

as the old Church, should pretend to absolute truth and make their

creeds obligatory on those over whom they had physical power; as a

result a man would be orthodox in one city and become a heretic by

entering another; he would have to change his religion, like his

money, at each frontier. Can we imagine Christ ordering a man to be

burned alive for advocating adult baptism? The Mosaic laws calling for

the death of a heretic were superseded by the law of Christ, which

is one of mercy, not of despotism and terror. If a man denies life

after death, and rejects all law, he may (said Castellio) be justly

silenced by the magistrates, but he should not be killed. Moreover (he

thought), persecution of beliefs is futile; martyrdom for an idea

spreads the idea far more rapidly than the martyr could have done

had he been allowed to live. What a tragedy (he concluded) that

those who had so lately freed themselves from the terrible Inquisition

should so soon imitate its tyranny, should so soon force men back into

Cimmerian darkness after so promising a dawn! `062177

Knowing Castellio's sentiments, Calvin at once recognized his hand

in the De haereticis. He delegated the task of answering it to his

most brilliant disciple, Theodore de Besze, or Beze, or Beza. Born

in Vezelay of aristocratic lineage, Theodore studied law at Orleans

and Bourges, practiced it successfully in Paris, wrote Latin poetry,

charmed some women by his wit, more by his prosperity, lived a gay

life, married, fell dangerously ill, experienced a sickbed

conversion reverse to Loyola's, adopted Protestantism, fled to Geneva,

presented himself to Calvin, and was made professor of Greek at the

University of Lausanne. It is remarkable that a Protestant refugee

from a Huguenot-persecuting France should have undertaken to defend

persecution. He did it with the skill of a lawyer and the devotion

of a friend. In September 1554, he issued his De haereticis a

civili magistratu puniendis libellus ( A Little Book on the Duty of

Civil Magistrates to Punish Heretics ). He pointed out again that

religious toleration was impossible to one who accepted the divine

inspiration of the Scriptures. But if we reject the Bible as God's

Word, on what shall we build the religious faith that is so clearly

indispensable- considering the natural wickedness of men- to moral

restraint, social order, and civilization? Nothing would then be

left but chaotic doubts disintegrating Christianity. To a sincere

believer in the Bible there could be only one religion; all others

must be false or incomplete. Yes, the New Testament preaches a law

of love, but this does not excuse us from punishing thieves and

murderers; how then does it warrant us in sparing heretics?

Castellio returned to the contest in a tract Contra libellum

Calvini, but it lay unpublished for half a century. In another

manuscript, De arte dubitandi, he anticipated Descartes by making

the "art of doubting" the first step in the pursuit of truth. In Four

Dialogues (1578) he defended free will and the possibility of

universal salvation. In 1562, in Conseil a la France desolee, he

appealed in vain to Catholics and Protestants to end the civil wars

that were devastating France, and to allow every believer in Christ

"to serve God according not to other men's faith but to his

own." `062178 Hardly anyone heard a voice so out of tune with the

time. Castellio died in poverty at the age of forty-eight (1563).

Calvin pronounced his early death a just judgment of a just God.

VIII. CALVIN TO THE END: 1554-64

-

Perhaps Calvin knew Castellio's secret leaning toward

Unitarianism- belief in a God not triune, therefore a rejection of

Christ's divinity; and he can be forgiven for seeing in this basic

doubt the beginning of the end for Christianity. He feared this heresy

all the more because he found it in Geneva itself, above all among the

Protestant fugitives from Italy. These men saw no sense in replacing

incredible transubstantiation with incredible predestination; their

rebellion attacked the fundamental assumption of Christianity, that

Christ was the Son of God. Matteo Gribaldi, professor of jurisprudence

at Padua, had a summer home near Geneva. During the trial of

Servetus he spoke openly against civil punishment for religious

opinions, and advocated freedom of worship for all. Hailed before

the Council, he was banished on suspicion of Unitarianism (1559). He

secured appointment as professor of law in the University of Tubingen;

Calvin sent word there of Gribaldi's doubts; the university pressed

him to sign a Trinitarian confession; instead he fled to Bern, where

he died of the plague in 1564. Giorgio Blandrata, an Italian physician

domiciled in Geneva, was summoned before the Council on a charge of

questioning the divinity of Christ; he fled to Poland, where he

found some tolerance for his heresy. Valentino Gentile, from Calabria,

openly expressed Unitarian views in Geneva, was thrown into prison,

was sentenced to death (1557), recanted, was released, went to

Lyons, was arrested by the Catholic authorities, but was freed on

his assurance that his chief interest lay in refuting Calvin. He

joined Blandrata in Poland, returned to Switzerland, was seized by the

Bernese magistrates, was convicted of perjury and heresy, and was

beheaded (1566).

Amid these battles for the Lord, Calvin continued to live simply,

and to rule Geneva by the power of a personality armed with the

delusions of his followers. His position became stronger as years gave

it roots. His only weakness was physical; headaches, asthma,

dyspepsia, stone, gout, and fever racked and thinned his frame, and

formed his face to taut severity and gloom. A long illness in

1558-59 left him lame and feeble, with repeated hemorrhages of the

lungs. Thereafter he had to keep to his bed most of the time, though

he continued to study, direct, and preach, even when he had to be

borne to the sanctuary in a chair. On April 25, 1564, he made his

will, full of confidence in his election to everlasting glory. On

the twenty-sixth the syndics and the Council came to his bedside; he

asked their pardon for his outbreaks of anger, and begged them to hold

steadfastly to the pure doctrine of the Reformed Church. Farel, now in

his eightieth year, came from Neuchatel to bid him au revoir. After

many days of prayer and suffering Calvin found peace (May 27, 1564).

-

His influence was even greater than Luther's, but he walked in a

path that Luther had cleared. Luther had protected his new church by

rallying German nationalism to its support; the move was necessary,

but it tied Lutheranism too narrowly to Teutonic stocks. Calvin

loved France, and labored to promote the Huguenot cause, but he was no

nationalist; religion was his country; and so his doctrine, however

modified, inspired the Protestantism of Switzerland, France, Scotland,

and America, and captured large sectors of Protestantism in Hungary,

Poland, Germany, Holland, and England. Calvin gave to Protestantism in

many lands an organization, confidence, and pride that enabled it to

survive a thousand trials.

A year before his death his pupil Olevianus joined with

Melanchthon's pupil Ursinus in preparing the Heidelberg Catechism,

which became the accepted expression of the Reformed faith in

Germany and Holland. Beze and Bullinger reconciled the creeds of

Calvin and Zwingli in the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), which

became authoritative for the Reformed churches in Switzerland and

France. In Geneva itself Calvin's work was ably continued by Beze. But

year by year the business leaders who controlled the Councils resisted

more and more successfully the attempts of the Consistory and the

Venerable Company to place moral checks upon economic operations.

After Beze's death (1608) the merchant princes consolidated their

supremacy, and the Genevan Church lost the directive privileges that

Calvin had won for it in nonreligious affairs. In the eighteenth

century the influence of Voltaire moderated the Calvinist tradition,

and ended the sway of a puritan ethic among the people. Catholicism

patiently struggled to recapture a place in the city; it offered a

Christianity without gloom and an ethic without severity; in 1954

the population was 42 per cent Catholic, 47 per cent

Protestant. `062179 But the most impressive man-made structure in

Geneva is the noble "Reformation Monument" which, running majestically

along a park wall, celebrates the victories of Protestantism, and

raises at its center the powerful figures of Farel, Calvin, Beze,

and Knox.

Meanwhile the hard theocracy of Calvin was sprouting democratic

buds. The efforts of the Calvinist leaders to give schooling to all,

and their inculcation of disciplined character, helped the sturdy

burghers of Holland to oust the alien dictatorship of Spain, and

supported the revolt of nobles and clergy in Scotland against a

fascinating but imperious queen. The stoicism of a hard creed made the

strong souls of the Scottish Covenanters, the English and Dutch

Puritans, the Pilgrims of New England. It steadied the heart of

Cromwell, guided the pen of blind Milton, and broke the power of the

backwardfacing Stuarts. It encouraged brave and ruthless men to win

a continent and spread the base of education and self-government until

all men could be free. Men who chose their own pastors soon claimed to

choose their governors, and the self-ruled congregation became the

self-governed municipality. The myth of divine election justified

itself in the making of America.

When this function had been performed, the theory of

predestination fell into the backwaters of Protestant belief. As

social order returned in Europe after the Thirty Years' War, in

England after the revolutions of 1642 and 1689, in America after 1793,

the pride of divine election changed into the pride of work and

accomplishment; men felt stronger and more secure; fear lessened,

and the frightened cruelty that had generated Calvin's God gave way to

a more humane vision that compelled a reconception of deity. Decade by

decade the churches that had taken their lead from Calvin discarded

the harsher elements of his creed. Theologians dared to believe that

all who died in infancy were saved, and one respected divine

announced, without causing a commotion, that "the number of the

finally lost... will be very inconsiderable." `062180 We are

grateful to be so reassured, and we will agree that even error lives

because it serves some vital need. But we shall always find it hard to

love the man who darkened the human soul with the most absurd and

blasphemous conception of God in all the long and honored history of

nonsense.

CHAPTER XXII: Francis I and the Reformation in France: 1515-59

I. LE ROI GRAND NEZ

-

HE was born under a tree in Cognac on September 12, 1494. His

grandfather was Charles of Orleans, the poet; perhaps song and the

love of beauty were in his blood. His father was Charles of Valois and

Orleans, Count of Angouleme, who died, after many adulteries, in the

third year of Francis' life. His mother was Louise of Savoy, a woman

of beauty, ability, and ambition, with a taste for wealth and power.

Widowed at seventeen, she refused the hand of Henry VII of England,

and devoted herself- barring some liaisons- to making her son king

of France. She did not mourn when Anne of Brittany, second wife of

Louis XII, had a stillborn son, leaving Francis heir to the throne.

Louis sadly made Francis Duke of Valois, and appointed tutors to

instruct him in the art of royalty. Louise and his sister Marguerite

mothered him to idolatry, and prepared him to be a ladies' king.

Louise called him Mon roi, mon seigneur, mon Cesar, fed him

chivalric romances, gloried in his gallantries, and swooned at the

blows he received in the jousts that he loved. He was handsome, gay,

courteous, brave; he met dangers like a Roland or an Amadis; when a

wild boar, escaping from its cage, sought to frolic in his princely

court, it was Francis who, while others fled, faced the beast and slew

it splendidly.

At the age of twelve (1506) he was betrothed to Claude of France,

the seven-year-old daughter of Louis XII. She had been promised to the

boy who was to become the Emperor Charles V; the engagement had been

broken to avoid yoking France to Spain; this was one item in a hundred

irritations that urged Hapsburg and Valois into conflict from youth to

death. At fourteen Francis was bidden leave his mother and join

Louis at Chinon. At twenty he married Claude. She was stout and

dull, lame and fertile and good; she gave him children in 1515,

1516, 1518, 1520, 1522, 1523, and died in 1524.

Meanwhile he became king (January 1, 1515). Everybody was happy,

above all his mother, to whom he gave the duchies of Angouleme and

Anjou, the counties of Maine and Beaufort, the barony of Amboise.

But he was generous to others too- to nobles, artists, poets, pages,

mistresses. His pleasant voice, his cordiality and good temper, his

vivacity and charm, his living synthesis of chivalry and the

Renaissance, endeared him to his country, even to his court. France

rejoiced, and placed high hopes in him, as England in those years in

Henry VIII, and the Empire in Charles V; the world seemed young again,

so freshened with royal youth. And Francis, even more than Leo X,

was resolved to enjoy his throne.

What was he really, this Arthur plus Lancelot? Physically he would

have been magnificent, had not his nose been more so; irreverent

contemporaries called him le roi grand nez . He was six feet tall,

broad-shouldered, agile, strong; he could run, jump, wrestle, fence

with the best; he could wield a two-handed sword or a heavy lance. His

thin beard and mustache did not disguise his youth; he was

twenty-one when crowned. His narrow eyes suggested alertness and

humor, but not subtlety or depth. If his nose betokened virility it

conformed to his reputation. Brantome, whose Dames Galantes cannot

be taken as history, wrote therein that "King Francis loved greatly

and too much; for being young and free, he embraced now one, now

another, with indifference... from which he took the grande verole

that shortened his days." `06221 The King's mother was reported to

have said that he was punished where he had sinned. *06049 Perhaps

history has exaggerated the variety of his amours. Whatever their

number, he remained outwardly faithful first to Francoise de Foix,

Comtesse de Chateaubriand, then, from 1526 to his death, to Anne de

Pisselieu, whom he made Duchesse d'Etampes. Gossip spread a hundred

romantic tales about him- that he besieged Milan not for Milan but for

a pair of unforgettable eyes that he had seen there, `06223 or that

a siren in Pavia lured him to his central tragedy. `06224 In any

case we may have some sympathy for so sensitive a king. He was capable

of tenderness as well as infatuation: when he proposed to divorce

his son from the persistently barren Catherine de Medicis, her tears

dissuaded him. `06225 "Nothing can be imagined more humane than

Francis," said Erasmus; `06226 and if that was the pathos of distance,

Bude, France's own humanist, described him as "gentle and

accessible." `06227

He was vain even for a man. He rivaled Henry VIII in the splendor of

his royal robes, and in the furry insouciance of his beret. He took

the salamander as his symbol, betokening persistent resurrection

from every conflagration, but life scorched him none the less. He

loved honors, distinctions, adulation, and could not bear criticism.

He had an actor whipped for satirizing the court; Louis XII, bitten by

the same wit, had merely smiled. `06228 He could be ungrateful, as

to Anne de Montmorency, unfair, as to Charles of Bourbon, cruel, as to

Semblancay; but by and large he was forgiving and generous; Italians

marveled at his liberality. `06229 No ruler in history was kinder to

artists. He loved beauty intensely and intelligently, and spent almost

as readily on art as on war; he was half the purse of the French

Renaissance.

His intellectual ability did not equal his charm of character. He

had little Latin and no Greek, but astonished many men by the

variety and accuracy of his knowledge in agriculture, hunting,

geography, military science, literature, and art; and he enjoyed

philosophy when it did not interfere with love or war. He was too

reckless and impetuous to be a great commander, too lighthearted and

fond of pleasure to be a great statesman, too fascinated by

appearances to get to essences, too amiably influenced by favorites

and mistresses to choose the best available generals and ministers,

too open and frank to be a competent diplomat. His sister Marguerite

grieved over his incapacity for government, and foresaw that the

subtle but inflexible Emperor would unhorse him in their lifelong

joust. Louis XII, who admired him as "a fine young gallant," saw

with foreboding the lavish hedonism of his successor. "All our work is

useless," he said; "this great boy will spoil everything." `062210

II. FRANCE IN 1515

-

France was now enjoying the prosperity engendered by a bountiful

soil, a skillful and thrifty people, and a beneficent reign. The

population was some 16,000,000, compared with 3,000,000 in England and

7,000,000 in Spain. Paris, with 300,000, was the largest city in

Europe after Constantinople. The social structure was semi-feudal:

nearly all the peasants owned the land they tilled, but usually they

held it in fief- and owed dues or services- to seigneurs and

chevaliers whose function was to organize agriculture and provide

military protection to their locality and the nation. Inflation,

caused by the repeated debasement of coinages and the mining or import

of precious metals, eased the traditional money dues, and enabled

peasants to buy land cheaply from the land-rich, money-poor

nobility; hence a rural prosperity that kept the French peasant

merry and Catholic while the German Bauer was making economic and

religious revolution. Stimulated by ownership, French energy drew from

the soil the best corn and wine in Europe; cattle grew fat and

multiplied; milk, butter, and cheese were on every table; chickens

or other fowl were in almost every yard; and the peasant accepted

the odor of his pigsty as one of the blessed fragrances of life.

The town worker- still chiefly a craftsman in his own shop- did

not share proportionately in this prosperity. Inflation raised

prices faster than wages, and protective tariffs and royal monopolies,

as of salt, helped to keep the cost of living high. Discontented

workers went on strike, but were nearly always defeated; and the law

forbade workingmen to unite for economic purposes. Commerce moved

leisurely along the bountiful rivers, but painfully along the poor

roads, paying each lord a toll to pass through his domain. Lyons,

where the trade of the Mediterranean, ascending the Rhone, met the

flow of goods from Switzerland and Germany, was second only to Paris

in French industry, and only to Antwerp as a bourse or center of

investment and finance. From Marseilles French commerce roamed the

Mediterranean, and profited from the friendly relations that Francis

dared to maintain with Suleiman and the Turks.

From this economy Francis, after the fashion of governments, drew

revenues to the limit of tolerance. The taille (cut) fell as a

personal or property tax upon all but nobles and clergy; the clergy

paid the King ecclesiastical tithes and grants, the nobles supplied

and equipped the cavalry that was still the flamboyant mainstay of

French arms. Taking a lesson from the popes, Francis sold- and created

to sell- noble titles and political offices; in this way the nouveaux

riches slowly formed (as in England) a new aristocracy, and the

lawyers, buying offices, established a powerful bureaucracy that-

sometimes over the head of the King- administered the government of

France.

The King's pleasures did not allow him much time for government.

He delegated its tasks, even the formation of its policies, to men

like Admiral Bonnivet, Anne de Montmorency, Cardinals Duprat and de

Tournon, and the Vicomte de Lautrec. Three councils aided and

advised these men and the King: a Privy Council of Nobles, a more

intimate Council of Affairs, and a Grand Council that handled

appeals to the King. Except for this, the Parlement of Paris,

composed of some 200 secular or ecclesiastical members appointed for

life by the King, served as a supreme court. It had the right to

remonstrate with him when it thought that his edicts contravened the

fundamental institutions of France; and his decrees lacked the full

prestige of law until "registered"- in effect ratified- by this

ancient corps. Dominated by lawyers and old men, the Parlement of

Paris became the national political organ of the middle classes,

and- next to the Sorbonne- the most conservative organization in

France. Local parlements, and governors appointed by the King,

administered the provinces. The States-General was for the time

being ignored; the collection of taxes replaced grants-in-aid, and the

role of the nobility in government declined.

The function of the nobles was twofold: to organize the army, and to

serve the King at court. The court, consisting of the administrative

Durant W. The Reformation. A History of European Civilization from Wyclif to Calvin: 1300-1564

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