Calvin's Tormentors

Understanding the Conflicts That Shaped the Reformer

Jenkins, Gary W.

• Publisher: Baker Academic
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781493413263
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: History of Christianity

This book offers a unique approach to Calvin by introducing the individuals and groups who, through their opposition to Calvin's theology and politics, helped shape the Reformer, his theology, and his historical and religious legacy. Respected church historian Gary Jenkins shows how Calvin had to defend or rethink his theology in light of his tormentors' challenges, giving readers a more nuanced view of Calvin's life and thought. The book highlights the central theological ideas of the Swiss Reformation and introduces figures and movements often excluded from standard texts.

1
Louis du Tillet and Calvin the Nicodemite

The Fitful Separation from the Whore of Babylon’s Church

Calvin had not always been a candidate for the caricature he later obtained, not always the proper prophet or icon of the virulent, violent, capricious, and wrathful God so often conjured when his name is mentioned, nor the definitive traducer of the false religion of Rome. The course of Calvin’s theology, like the course of his life, followed its undulant age. Although Calvin was clearly a child of his times, not every child of that age was a Calvin, and indeed, as this chapter will show, not even Calvin began as a Calvin; and in all justice, the frail French émigré who died in Geneva, far from home in what the French then still considered Germany, bears only a resemblance to the shade so often conjured from the nethermost polemical hell.

Treatment, therefore, of Louis du Tillet as the first of Calvin’s tormentors proves apt, for it shows Calvin at a crucial period in his spiritual and intellectual formation, long before the great and bold tracts against Servetus, Castellio, Westphal, and Baudouin, inter alios, and his confrontations with the Enfants de Genève (the Genevan patriots). We have in this early period a Calvin who is more the Erasmian, more a Reformer, more a moyenneur (a word he coined for those who stood in the middle, neither fully embracing Protestantism, nor at all repudiating Catholicism). This is not to claim that Calvin was an Erasmian, not at least in any formal way, though materially, for a time, he was. Beginning this study with Louis du Tillet and his family also shows a young Calvin whose hopes for the future of reform could be stated with milder assertions and less invective, when lines had not yet been so precisely drawn, and when there were still those in both camps who thought something could be salvaged of a united Christendom. All this changed on all sides by the early 1540s, but by then Calvin and du Tillet, at first close and dear friends, had already parted company.

While this chapter focuses on Louis du Tillet, it does so in the context of the wider du Tillet family. Louis was the fourth son of Elie du Tillet, who had been ennobled by Charles VIII in 1484 and held an estate in l’Angoumois, below Poitiers and to the west of Limoges. Elie had succeeded handsomely as an accountant, first in the province, but then as vice president of the Chambre des Comptes in Paris. Consequently Louis’s older brothers were each already men of notable accomplishment when in 1533 he met Calvin. Jean, the second son, who is often known as the Greffier, was the clerk of the Parlement of Paris, where he recorded laws, certified that the laws as published were correct in their wording, and represented the Parlement to the king; he also functioned as a royal archivist and historian whose contributions to the discipline of history are immense. The Greffier was joined in his historical endeavors by the third brother, also named Jean, who immersed himself as well in antiquarian and humanist studies of the past.1 The second Jean, bishop first of Saint-Bieuc (1553), and then of Meaux (1562), had received from Francis I full access to the vast royal archives, which he put to great use in uncovering the past.2 It was he who first published the Liber Carolini, Charles the Great’s (Charlemagne) response to the seventh ecumenical council, and the very edition that Calvin would use when brandishing the work against the Catholic use of images, statuary, and icons. The oldest brother, Séraphim, had also been the clerk of the Parlement of Paris before being replaced (apparently by legal proceedings) by his brother.3

At some point in Calvin’s time as a student at Paris he had befriended Louis du Tillet. In late 1533, owing to the reaction of the university against Nicholas Cop’s convocation sermon—a homily animated by Lutheran ideas and linked by the authorities to the young Calvin—Calvin took refuge at the du Tillet estate.4 The du Tillet home bestowed on Calvin more benefits than mere asylum, for Louis, the priest of Claix, a village outside Angoulême, and also a canon of the cathedral of Angoulême, enjoyed the large library of his two brothers, a library that numbered several thousand volumes on history and theology, along with a great many manuscripts. Here Calvin spent hour upon hour in study, producing his first theological treatise, a tract against the Anabaptist doctrine of soul sleep, titled Psychopannychia. Calvin also used the library as he began work on the first edition of his Institutes. He saw his time there as fulfilling a duty, with his studies as repayment for du Tillet’s hospitality: “The humanity of my patron is so great that I understand it to be bestowed for the benefit of learning, not me.”5 But his studies were not Calvin’s only activity in l’Angoumois, for he also taught Louis Greek, and so adept did Louis become that he was given the title “the Greek of Claix.” Calvin also took two trips, the first to Nérac in the southwest, where he sought out Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, the great humanist and leader of reform in Paris, who had taken refuge with Marguerite of Navarre. Marguerite, the sister of King Francis I, patronized both humanism and a group of humanist and evangelical Reformers known as the circle of Meaux. Francis I himself had a deep interest in humanism and could easily turn a blind eye to the Reformers’ dalliances in evangelicalism, though this is not to say he countenanced Lutheranism, albeit there was some of that within the circle as well. The circle came under scrutiny, and the University of Paris was none too happy with their activities. Lefèvre, while no Lutheran, certainly appeared to the conservatives of the university to skirt orthodoxy, and thus he sought refuge out of the reach of the Sorbonne. His reputation drew Calvin. The other trip was to Noyon in April and May of 1534 to resign his benefices, cures, and livings.6 While in Angoumois, Calvin and du Tillet met with notable clergy from the area, doubtless to discuss theology, humanism, and the state of the church. Participants included Anthony Chaillou, the prior of Bouteville (later called the pope of the Lutherans); the abbot of Bassac; and also two brothers, the Sieur of Torsac and the young Pierre de la Place, who would later be a historian of the Reformed church but was only fourteen or fifteen at this point.7 Otherwise, Calvin was tireless in his scholarly endeavors: Florimond de Raemond remarks that Calvin threw himself into his studies, neither stopping to eat during the day nor going to bed at night.8

But the halcyon days, no doubt an ideal that always remained with Calvin, formally ended on October 17, 1534, finished off by the Affair of the Placards. On that night, broadsheets denouncing the Mass as an abominable abuse, written by Antoine Marcourt and printed in Neûchatel, were posted throughout France, and particularly in Paris, Orleans, and Blois. One even found its way to the royal bedchamber in Amboise.9 Francis I, who had until that time showed some restraint in dealing with the “evangelicals,” now turned on them with a fury. Calvin and du Tillet, on du Tillet’s franc, thought it best to leave France. Traveling under pseudonyms, du Tillet as Haulmont (a village on his family’s estate) and Calvin as d’Espeville (one of his first benefices near Noyon), the pair made for Strasbourg, where they met the city’s Protestant leaders, Martin Bucer and Wolfgang Capito. From there they traveled to Basle, arriving in January of 1535, where Calvin further worked on his Psychopannychia and continued work on the Institutes, finding a publisher for the work, which came out in 1536. In Basle Calvin also may possibly have met the thundering Reformer Guillaume Farel.10 Though a meeting in Basle seems improbable, Farel certainly somehow had the measure of Calvin before their confrontation in Geneva in August 1536. ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Louis du Tillet and Calvin the Nicodemite
• 2. Pierre Caroli and Calvin
• 3. Sadoleto
• 4. Michael Servetus
• 5. Sebastian Castellio
• 6. Calvin and the Enfants de Genève
• 7. François Baudouin
• 8. Jerome Bolsec
• 9. Joachim Westphal
• 10. The Radicals
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Author Index
• Subject Index
• Back Cover