Myths about Calvin survive in high school history textbooks, collegiate lectures on "Intro to Western Civilization," and, even worse, untold areas of divinity school curricula. Even with careful, reproving scholarship rolling off the presses, Marilynne Robinson has sarcastically written,
Many of us know that Calvinism was a very important tradition among us. Yet all we know about John Calvin was that he was an eighteenth-century Scotsman, a prude and obscurantist with a buckle on his hat, possibly a burner of witches, certainly the very spirit of capitalism….We want to return to the past, and we have made our past a demonology and not a human narrative.
Such is the case even in the year of the 500th anniversary of Calvin's birth. It is never fun to ruin a punch line, but for those not in on the joke: Calvin was a sixteenth-century Frenchman living in exile in Geneva, the eighteenth-century Puritans wore the buckles, the prudes were the Victorians, and the rest belong to other unseemly episodes several degrees removed from Calvin himself.
John Calvin's place in Western intellectual and cultural history is important, certainly important enough to demand a fair accounting of these legends and others, the various wildly inaccurate tidbits of supposed common knowledge, oral tradition, and received lecture-hall wisdom.
It is sometimes thought that Calvin was the hired gun of the Reformed branch of Protestantism, the executioner of Counter-Reformation Catholics and religious progressives, or even a social and sexual deviant with a loose tongue and even looser morals. More frequently, it is claimed that Calvin was a heretic of epic proportions, usually on the alleged grounds that he dismissed the trinitarian creeds and developed a unique and "strict" or "harsh" doctrine of election and reprobation. Along these lines, it is difficult to imagine a more despised theological doctrine in the modern world than predestination, and the subscribers and witnesses to this biblical teaching, past and present, are surely doomed in our day to scathing-even if unfair- criticism. But perhaps this has always been the case.
Recent scholarship has shown that most of the libelous stories and myths about Calvin can be traced back to one original source, even one particular individual. The man's name was Jerome Bolsec. He was a refugee and layman who returned to the Catholic Church after a spell as Calvin's theological nemesis in Geneva and Bern, who later failed to be ordained in the Reformed Church in Paris. Bolsec became Calvin's first Catholic biographer in 1577 and the stories he narrated have a long tail in European history.
Bolsec's own life was a curious one and he provides an excellent example of how the biographical genre was used for outrageous polemical purposes in sixteenth-century Europe, coming in every form from pamphlets to woodcarvings to the first early modern encyclopedias. According to one scholar, Bolsec "wanted to destroy the image of Geneva [and Calvin] as quickly and effectively as possible." Coming up for mention in his biography, then, was: (1) Calvin's "calamitous influence" on France and his personal role in the destruction of Christian peace in Europe; (2) Calvin as the "reincarnation of all heresies" previously known in the church; (3) Calvin as the convicted sodomite who should have been burned at the stake by church officials in Noyon, only to have his sentence commuted at the last minute instead to receive a branding of a fleur-de-lis on his shoulder blade; (4) Calvin as the promiscuous tyrant who had "intercourse with most of Geneva's married women under the cover of pastoral guidance"; and more infamously (5) Calvin as the sole person responsible for the execution of Michael Servetus ("a myth that turned out to have an astonishingly long life."). Bolsec, however, was not the only party guilty of spreading tales of immorality in order to undermine Calvin's authority.
As Protestant Christians, we sometimes relish our own opportunities to spread a little dirt about Roman Catholicism. The Renaissance Papacy (1447-1521) comes to mind, for example, and we must admit that there is great irony that popes named Pius II and Innocent VIII fathered illegitimate children, were previously married (at least in the case of the latter), and appointed many of their children as cardinals while they were still infants, all the while claiming them as "nephews." This is to say nothing of Pope Alexander VI whom Luther called "the Mystery of Iniquity," or Julius II who according to legend once served the Eucharist in full battle armor brandishing a sword in his other hand. Leaving confirmation of the veracity or falsity of these legends to readers, suffice it to say both Catholics and Protestants at the time of the Reformation engaged in a unique form of embellished biographical polemic. To tarnish moral character was to strike at the heart of the message, or so it seemed at the time.
But it does seem that some of the utterly ridiculous stories about Calvin have persisted in the general populace far longer than Lutheran or Reformed tales of Catholic corruption, and this despite the fact that later Catholic interpreters advanced by leaps and bounds in the intervening decades, in fact pioneering "objective and historical methodologies" that radically called Bolsec's Life of Calvin into question. After investigating each individual claim about Calvin's life, these later Catholic writers discarded most if not all of these myths on the grounds that Bolsec had fabricated sources (surely a mortal sin in the historical-biographical genre) and was inappropriately clouded by his personal animosity toward Calvin, which was significant.
In the case of Calvin, sometimes explaining the origins of the vast majority of myths and legends is a more effective apologetic strategy than debunking each slanderous claim. The same holds true for the doctrine of predestination and its place and function in Reformed theology. For now, with each regurgitated lecture about Calvin's life and thought, that buckle-hatted tyrant of Geneva, one may be tempted to call for a moratorium on popular opinions.
