The Organizer
Calvin's moderation in his first years after returning to Geneva won nearly all the city's people to his side. To run St. Pierre and the other churches, eight assistant pastors were placed at his disposal. He gave twelve to eighteen hours a day to preaching, administration, teaching theology, supervising churches and schools, advising the city councils, and framing social regulations and forms of worship. In the midst of all this he enlarged his Institutes, wrote commentaries on the Bible and kept up his correspondence. His letters are somewhat fewer than Erasmus's, but they surpass them in eloquence. He ate very little, slept little and fasted often. His successor and biographer, Theodore Beza, marveled that so small a man could carry such varied and incongruous work.
His first act after returning was to reorganize the reformed church. At his request the Little Council appointed a committee of five pastors and six council members, with Calvin presiding, to draw up church regulations. The "Ecclesiastical Ordinances" it produced, some of whose principles still underlie the organization of Reformed and Presbyterian churches in Europe and America, were approved by the Great Council on January 2, 1542. They placed church administration in the hands of pastors, teachers, lay elders and deacons. Geneva's clergy formed a body called the "Venerable Company," whose task, besides overseeing the city's churches, was training new pastors. From then on no pastor could preach in Geneva's churches without its permission. To serve in a church, a pastor needed, besides the Company's license, the approval of the city councils and the congregation concerned, and was no longer appointed by a bishop.
Although the reformed pastors, unlike Roman Catholic clergy, claimed no superhuman power for themselves, and the Ordinances forbade them secular employment, in practice they gained a power such as no clergy had held since the priests of early Israel. Calvin said the laws of every Christian country must spring from Scripture, that pastors are qualified to interpret Scripture, and that the government is bound to apply Scripture's laws as the clergy understand and interpret them. These ideas must surely have been hard for the capable, realistic members of Geneva's councils to accept, but since they thought order necessary to the city's prosperity, they submitted. Thus, for a quarter of a century, a clerical government replaced the oligarchy of merchants and capitalists in Geneva.
The Consistory
The government's decisions were carried out by a consistory of five pastors and twelve lay elders, all chosen by the Great Council. Because pastors sat for the whole of their ministry and elders for only a year, decisions not directly tied to finance or commerce were taken by the clerical members. The Consistory reserved the right to arrange worship and oversee residents' conduct. Once a year an elder and a pastor visited the city's families. It could summon anyone for questioning, punish wrongdoers publicly or excommunicate them, and ask the council to banish those cast out of the church. Calvin led the Consistory, and from 1541 until his death in 1564 was the most powerful person in Geneva. He imposed his despotic rule on the people by force of will and character, not by arms or law. His unshakable faith in the rightness of his mission and complete devotion to his duty gave him a power no one could resist. If Hildebrand could have raised his head from the grave and looked at Calvin's Geneva, he would have been pleased that the dream of the Church ruling the state had at last come true.
Worship, Dissent and the Death Penalty
Using their unlimited power, the clergy first made rules for worship, with an order saying that all members of households, except those who must stay home to look after children or cattle, must attend Sunday services. If a sermon was preached during the week in any of the city's churches, those with time should go (Calvin himself preached three or four times a week). Anyone arriving after the sermon began would first be warned, and if he kept coming late would be fined. No one in Geneva could stay away from Protestant services because his religious opinion differed. In denying freedom of belief Calvin was harsher than the most despotic popes. The principle of freedom of belief and religion that had launched the Protestant movement was trampled by its greatest Protestant lawgiver. Seeing Protestants split into hundreds of sects and foreseeing still more divisions, he allowed no Christian sect in Geneva but the one he led. A group of religious scholars there had the right to draw up a creed as they liked, and any residents unwilling to accept it had to leave. Continued absence from Protestant services or refusal to take part in the Supper was a punishable offense. Heresy or disagreement with the Church's official beliefs again counted as insult to God and treason against the state, and heretics were condemned to death. Catholicism, which had made this doctrine of heresy common, now itself counted as heresy. Between 1542 and 1564, for violating the city's new laws, fifty-eight people were sentenced to death and seventy-six banished from Geneva.
In Geneva, as elsewhere, witchcraft was a deadly sin, so that in a single year, at the Consistory's urging, fourteen witches were burned on the charge of spreading plague through the devil's help. The Consistory made no division between religion and conduct, believing the fruit of piety is purity of behavior and moral virtue. Calvin, himself austere and strict, dreamed of building a community whose order, discipline and purity would testify to the truth of his beliefs and shame Catholicism, which had made Rome a center of corruption and revelry. He took discipline to be the backbone of character, by which a man can rise above the baseness of human nature and master himself. He expected the clergy to be models of purity and honesty. Pastors had the right to marry and raise children, he said, but must avoid hunting, gambling, revelry, trade and all secular amusements, and let the heads of the church examine their conduct each year.
The Moral Code
To oversee ordinary Christians' conduct it was ordered that each year one of the Consistory's elders should call at the houses in his assigned part of the city and inquire into all aspects of the residents' lives. The Consistory and the council together watched the people's behavior and tried to keep them from passing time in gambling, card playing, profaning sacred things, drinking, frequenting taverns, dancing (which at that time was accompanied by kissing and embracing), singing indecent secular songs, excessive entertaining, luxury, and licentious dress. The authorities even limited the color and amount of clothing and the number of dishes used at meals. Decking women's bodies with jewels and gold braid was condemned. A woman was jailed because she had done up her hair in an indecent, provocative style.
Plays were first limited to religious subjects and then every kind of performance was banned in the city. Giving newborns the names of Roman Catholic saints was forbidden, and the authorities urged people to choose their children's names from the Old Testament. A father who insisted on naming his son Claude instead of Abraham was jailed. The Protestant authorities took over the Catholic tradition of press censorship and tightened it (1560). Publishing books with false religious teaching or whose contents were judged harmful to morals was banned. Later the writings of Montaigne and Rousseau's Émile were banned too. Speaking ill of Calvin or the city's clergy was an offense. Violators were first reproved, fined if they repeated, and jailed or banished if they persisted. The penalty for prostitution was banishment or drowning, and for adultery, blasphemy or idolatry, death. In one exceptional case a child who had struck his parents was put to death. In 1558 and 1559, 414 people were prosecuted for breaking the moral rules, and between 1542 and 1546 (the book's own dates, which sit oddly with the earlier figures) seventy-six residents were banished and fifty-eight executed. Geneva's population then was about 20,000 (the book's figure). Here too, as in other sixteenth-century cities, accused persons were tortured to extract documents and confessions (I omit the details).
Schools, Missions and Class
Rules were also made for education, social life and the economy. Calvin founded several schools and an academy and searched western Europe for able teachers of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and theology. He also trained young pastors who preached Christ's gospel in France, Holland, Scotland and England with the same fervor and self-sacrifice as the Jesuits in Asia. In the eleven years from 1555 to 1566 (the book's dates), 161 missionaries were sent from Geneva to France, and many of them sang Huguenot hymns at their martyrdom. Calvin took the division of society into classes as natural, and in his law fixed the dress and range of activity of each of Geneva's classes. He expected everyone to accept his social position and, without envy of others or complaint about society, to perform the duties his place laid upon him. Begging was banned in Geneva and charitable organizations were founded to help the poor and needy.
Calvinism and Capitalism
The value that Calvinism placed on industry, vigilance, perseverance and thrift may have been one reason for the growth of industry and trade in Protestant societies, but the link between Calvinism and the rise of capitalism has been overstressed. Capitalism had grown up in Catholic Florence and Flanders before the Reformation, and in Geneva before Calvin's time. Calvin thought as little of the individual in economic matters as in religious and moral ones. For him the social unit was not the free individual (the basis of Luther's revolution) but the community of the state or city, whose strict laws bound all its inhabitants together. His sense of man's dependence on the society he lives in shows clearly in his writing: a member of the Christian community has no right to think his property his own and to use it only for his private needs; he shares it with all the members of the community and takes no benefit for himself except what the whole community enjoys.
Calvin did not look kindly on trade for personal profit or the amassing of wealth by oppressive means. Like some late medieval theorists, he allowed interest but limited it to five percent, and insisted that loans to needy individuals or the community should be made without interest. With his approval the Consistory rebuked hoarders, monopolists and money-changers who lent at heavy interest. He fixed the prices of food, clothing and surgery in Geneva. The Consistory punished merchants who cheated buyers, those who altered weights and measures in their own favor, and drapers who cut cloth short. At times Geneva's government leaned toward state socialism, as when the Venerable Company founded a bank to run some industries directly.
Yet the tie between Calvinism and trade and capitalism cannot be ignored. Calvin could not have continued as leader if he had blocked the growth of Geneva's commerce, on which the city's existence depended. So he acquainted himself with the facts, raised the permitted interest to ten percent, and advised the government to lend to capitalists to found or enlarge private weaving and silk workshops. Industrial centers of Europe like Antwerp, Amsterdam and London turned to the new faith, which understood the needs of the new economy. Calvinism took the middle classes under its wing and spread with them.
Judging the Experiment
What results did Calvin's system bring to Geneva? Certainly it was hard for the people to bear, since in all history no city has been put under such strict and inflexible moral restraints. A section of Geneva's inhabitants rose against Calvin's order to the point of revolt. But, as appears, the city's influential men, aware of the people's pressing need for moral rules, supported it. A group of French Huguenots and other Protestants who had flowed into Geneva strengthened Calvin's rule. The confinement of his system to Geneva and its surroundings was undoubtedly one cause of its success. The danger of foreign attack (from Savoy, Italy, France and the Empire) made political stability and the people's obedience to the government unavoidable; in other words, outside danger strengthened inner stability.
Bernardino Ochino, an Italian Protestant who had taken refuge in Geneva and saw Calvin's leadership with his own eyes, describes its results: of the cursing, oaths, unchastity, profanation, adultery and impure life that afflict people in many places where he had lived, no trace is seen here; there are no panderers or prostitutes; people do not paint themselves or wear improper dress; the townspeople do not gamble; charitable organizations keep the poor from begging; people guide one another as brothers, as Christ advised; quarrels, the sale of church offices, murder and factions have disappeared and given place to peace and goodwill; no organ, church bell or street song is heard; and in the churches there are no candles or relics, torches, images or statues, domes or adorned robes, lewd shows or dry ceremonies. Idolatry has left the churches.
The records of the Great Council that have come down to us do not confirm Ochino's report. They testify to many illegitimate children, abandoned children, forced marriages and death sentences. Calvin's son-in-law and stepdaughter were among those condemned for adultery (the book's words). Yet even in 1610 we find Valentin Andreae, a Lutheran pastor from Württemberg, envying Geneva's agreeable state. He writes that on visiting Geneva he met such an admirable community that he would never forget it nor give up the wish to live in one like it. Not only is there a perfect republic, but such discipline that the city's authorities can examine and oversee the citizens' behavior every week, even their smallest lapses; swearing, gambling, luxury, enmity and rancor are forbidden, and graver sins rarely occur. What ornament could be better for Christianity than such moral purity! He says we must mourn with tears that we Germans once sought such a community and forgot it, and that were it not for religious difference he would have lived in Geneva to the end of his life.