The Fear of Unitarianism
Calvin had apparently discovered Castellio's inner belief in Unitarianism, which rests on the unity of God's nature and implies denial of Christ's divinity, and so he had reason to regard the spread of this belief as a danger to Christianity's existence. He feared it more than any other, for in Geneva itself he had met its signs among Italian Protestant refugees. They thought belief in predestination as groundless as the doctrine of the Trinity, and their beliefs discredited one of Christianity's most basic foundations, that Christ is the Son of God.
Matteo Gribaldi, professor of law at Padua, lived in summer in his country house near Geneva. At the time of Servetus's trial he warned the civil authorities against punishing people for their religious opinions and called for religious freedom for all. In 1559 the Geneva council banished him from the city on the charge of Unitarianism. Gribaldi was appointed professor of law at the University of Tübingen, but when the university officials received a message from Calvin about his religious leanings they pressed him to sign a confession of belief in the Trinity. Instead of signing, Gribaldi fled to Bern, and died of plague in 1564. Giorgio Biandrata, an Italian physician settled in Geneva, was summoned before the council for denying Christ's divinity, but fled to Poland, where he enjoyed relative religious freedom. Valentino Gentile, who had come to Geneva from Calabria, did not hide his Unitarian belief. He was jailed and sentenced to death (1557). After he recanted he was freed, went to Lyons, and was arrested there by Catholic authorities, but regained his liberty by assuring them that he had meant to oppose Calvin. From Lyons he went to Poland and joined Biandrata. On returning to Switzerland he was seized by the authorities of Bern and in 1566 was beheaded for breach of faith and heresy.
Illness and Death
Amid these God-ward disputes Calvin lived simply and, by his strong personality and the support of followers intoxicated with their vision, ruled Geneva. With time his influence there grew deeper and firmer. Only illness plagued him. Constant headaches, shortness of breath, weak digestion, kidney stones, gout and fever made him more worn, thin, sour and depressed. A long illness in 1558 and 1559 weakened him still more. After that he was often bedridden, yet he did not stop studying, leading and running the city, and preaching, even when he was carried to the pulpit in a chair because of his weakness. On April 25, 1564, he wrote his will, which testified to his firm assurance of eternal salvation. The next day the syndics and members of Geneva's council came to his bedside. Calvin apologized for the times he had been unable to restrain his temper and urged them to stay faithful to the pure, unadulterated doctrines of the Reformed Church. Farel, now eighty, hurried from Neuchâtel to his old friend. After many days of prayer and suffering Calvin died on the 27th (the book's month is garbled; May is the reconstruction), 1564.
Calvin and Luther
Calvin's influence, though deeper than Luther's, went along a road Luther had made smooth. Luther secured his new church by relying on German nationalism. Though he had no other way of bringing his cause to fruition, his reliance on German national feeling tied Lutheranism more and more to the Teutonic people. Calvin loved France and worked for the cause of its Huguenots, but unlike Luther he was bound by no patriotic feeling and knew no homeland but his creed. For this reason Calvinism became universal and, in modified form, shaped the beliefs of Protestants in Switzerland, France, Scotland and America, and won groups of Protestants in Hungary, Poland, Germany, Holland and England as well. With the organization, assurance and pride that he gave Protestants in many parts of the world, Calvin enabled them to pass victoriously through some of the hardest trials in history.
A year before Calvin's death his pupil Olevianus, with Ursinus, a pupil of Melanchthon, drew up the Heidelberg Catechism, which became the catechism of the Reformed churches of Germany and Holland. Beza and Bullinger, merging the confessions of Calvin and Zwingli, drew up the Second Helvetic Confession (1566), later the official creed of the Reformed churches of Switzerland and France. In Geneva Beza skillfully carried on what Calvin had begun, but with time the city's financial leaders, who controlled the councils, increased their resistance to the Consistory, which had made strict rules for trade and commerce. After Beza's death (1608) Geneva's financial magnates again dominated the city and took back the powers in non-religious matters that Calvin had won for Geneva's church. In the eighteenth century Voltaire's influence softened Calvin's traditions and ended moral bigotry. Catholicism returned to Geneva and offered its people a Christianity free of gloom and a morality free of severity. In 1954, of Geneva's population 42 percent were Catholic and 47 percent Protestant (the book's figures). Yet the most splendid work that man has left in Geneva is the Monument of the Reformation, which stands beside the wall of an imposing park and, with the commanding faces of Farel, Calvin, Beza and Knox carved on its front, keeps alive the memory of the Protestant victory.
Calvinism and Democracy
Calvin's religious government, despite its tyranny and severity, hastened the growth of democracy in many parts of Europe. The efforts of Calvinist leaders to spread education and to set severe moral rules for the people moved the stubborn townsmen of Holland to throw off the tyranny of foreign Spain, and roused the nobles and clergy of Scotland against their charming but impure queen. The importance Calvinism gave to piety produced the Scottish Covenanters, the Puritans of England and Holland and the pilgrims of New England. Calvinism strengthened Cromwell's heart, inspired the pen of the blind Milton and broke the following of the reactionary Stuart dynasty. It created bold, stubborn men who opened a continent and, so that people might live in shelter of liberty, labored to spread education and strengthen the foundations of government of the people by the people. People who chose their own pastors soon claimed the right to choose their political rulers too, and self-governing religious communities became the nucleus of free, self-governing towns. The legend of divine election justified itself in the making of America.
The Fading of a Doctrine
After such brilliant results the theory that some are chosen and others condemned to eternal damnation was gradually forgotten. When Europe after the Thirty Years' War, England after the revolutions of 1642 and 1689, and America after 1793 recovered their social order, the pride of imagined election gave way to the pride of work and construction. People felt more capable and secure; the terror the god of Calvin had created gave place to a more humane idea of God. The churches that inherited Calvinism's tradition gradually dropped the dry and harsh features of Calvin's theology; theologians came to believe that all who die in childhood will be saved, and a well-known divine, without causing any uproar, declared that the number of those condemned to eternal torment "is very small and negligible." We are glad to be given this assurance and accept that even the lives of the erring play an essential part in humanity's destiny. But it is hard for us to love a man who, in one of the longest and most glorious ages of the history of superstition, darkened people's minds with the most futile and blasphemous description of God. (That last judgment is the book's.)