Liberty and Property. Ellen Wood
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when Emperor Charles V threatened to suppress Lutheranism by military means, a group of principalities and cities, led by two powerful German princes, the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector of Saxony, formed the Schmalkaldic League to defend the Protestant faith. A theory of resistance was devised, which invested in ‘lesser magistrates’ – the lower levels of imperial government, such as local civic officials – a right to resist by military force. It was made very clear that no such right belonged to private citizens: never again should there be such a thing as a peasant revolt. Indeed, the right to resist was less a right than an official duty.
Luther himself – belatedly and reluctantly – had come around to this point of view, having been repeatedly called upon by the Elector of Saxony and others to write in support of the princes’ political moves against the Empire or the Catholic Church. At first, he supported the princes on narrowly constitutional grounds, saying that if the lawyers were right in their interpretation of the imperial constitution and the rights of lesser officials, then the princes were entitled to resist the emperor. Even then he narrowly defined the right of those public authorities and explained his change of mind on the grounds that imperial law itself, that is, law imposed by the emperor himself, called for resistance to a notorious injustice wrought by government. For German princes and their supporters, resistance remained a prerogative of office, and the right of other authorities to repel force with force rested on the emperor’s having himself become a rebel – whose punishment was clearly a duty of office. Even when the argument expanded from purely constitutional principles to arguments from natural law, the issue was still the rights of princes, or at least the right to disobey the orders of the emperor to take up arms against Protestants.6 For Luther, if the private citizen had any rights, they almost certainly did not go beyond the citizen’s right to join his prince’s army against the emperor.
Later, under the influence of Calvin, who was himself – as we shall see – a strong advocate of secular obedience, this defence of Protestant religion against imperial threats would be transformed into a doctrine of secular resistance against any overweening royal power; but even then it remained – as in the Huguenot resistance tracts in France – not a declaration of individual freedom but, above all, an assertion of autonomous powers belonging to provincial nobles and civic officials.
John Calvin
The city of Geneva, where John Calvin would find his spiritual home, had, like other cities in the Holy Roman Empire, long been a battleground for power struggles among bishops, counts and dukes. In the Middle Ages, the bishop of Geneva had been a prince of the Empire; but there were constant battles between the bishops and other princely claimants, eager to gain access to the fruits of the city’s commercial success. When the House of Savoy sought to turn Geneva into a duchy, the city countered the threat by joining the Swiss federation in 1526; but this union would soon be disrupted by a division between Catholic and Protestant cities. When Geneva finally asserted its autonomy as a republic in 1536, it did so under the banner of Protestantism, for obvious practical and economic no less than spiritual reasons, and managed to maintain its independence as a city-state against prevailing trends.
Calvin would arrive in Geneva the year of its establishment as a Protestant republic, and – except for a period of exile from 1538 to 1541 – he would stay there until his death in 1564. Born in France in 1509 as Jean Cauvin, he began his career as clerk to a bishop; intended for the priesthood, he studied philosophy in Paris, but then gave up the Church for the study of law. At the University of Bourges, he came under humanist influences. The exposure to humanism clearly played a major part in his religious conversion; and like other humanist reformers, he would soon abandon the Catholic Church. On his return to Paris, caught up in conflicts between the reformers and the orthodox Catholics, he was compelled to flee and in 1535 settled for a time in the Protestant city of Basle.
It was during his stay in Basle that Calvin, in 1536, published the first edition of his major life’s work, the Institutes of the Christian Religion, a catechism of his faith and the principles of reformation to which he subscribed. Written first in Latin, it would later appear in French editions, which would have an enormous influence not only on theology but also on the French language. He would continue to edit and amplify this work throughout his life. On his return to Paris from Basle, finding his reforming views unwelcome in his native France, he set out for the free imperial city of Strasbourg; but, forced by circumstances to take a detour, he arrived in Geneva, and there he would remain.
Calvin settled in Geneva at the urging of another Frenchman, who invited him to join in reforming the Church. Their proposals for ecclesiastical reform, undertaken at the behest of civic authorities, were immediately accepted by the city council. Although Calvin would find himself in conflict with the council in 1538 and yet again forced into exile, the civic authorities of Geneva invited him to return in 1541 to carry on his project of reform. In November of that year, the council amended and passed the Ecclesiastical Ordinances drafted by Calvin, which spelled out the organization and functions of the Church in what amounted to a blueprint for a division of labour between civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions in governing the city. The Ordinances struck a difficult balance between separating the functions of Church and state, allocating each its proper domain, and at the same time establishing a partnership between them in governing the city according to the principles of the reformed religion. There would be other moments of conflict and danger for Calvin, especially when some Genevan notables challenged the Ordinances, in opposition to the strict discipline imposed on them by both civic and ecclesiastical jurisdictions. But in the end, the so-called libertines were defeated and their leaders banished or executed.
It is difficult to disentangle Calvin’s theological development from the evolution of his political consciousness. His first book, a commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, which he began writing while still a law student, was not a work of theology but a humanist essay on a classical text. Seneca’s work, addressed to the emperor Nero, has been called a forerunner of what would become the humanist genre of ‘mirrors for princes’. While it would be too much to say that Calvin’s commentary was intended as a comparable lesson to Francis I, some of the essential principles of his later views on civil government already make an appearance here. There is, for instance, a significant note citing St Paul’s Romans 13 to demonstrate that Christianity requires obedience to princes; and there are several references to princes as the vicars or delegates of God, an idea that would play a central part in his mature political theology. By the time he wrote the first edition of the Institutes after his conversion, his theological principles were already bound up with his views on civil government; and, whichever came first, Calvin’s political ideas are securely grounded in the most fundamental tenets of his theology. The inextricable connection would be firmly sealed by his career in Geneva.
The first edition of the Institutes was introduced by an epistle dedicatory to Francis I of France, which presents the catechism that follows as a defence of the reformed religion against threats faced by French Evangelicals. In his effort to demonstrate that the reformed faith poses no threat to the king’s authority, Calvin proceeds on two fronts: he seeks to show that the Roman Church, in its usurpations of temporal power, represents a more sinister challenge to the monarch’s authority, while at the same time the theologian opposes radical reformers, notably the Anabaptists, who deny the legitimacy of civil governance. The book ends with a long chapter on civil government, which may be read as a continuation of his letter to the king; but it also confronts a different set of questions, posed not by the threat of the Catholic Church but by the distinctive relations between civic authority and a reformed Church within the free Protestant city.
It has been said that Calvin’s theology, like that of Zwingli and Bucer, is ‘the result of the Reformation message filtered through the actuality of the free city’.7 It is true that the very specific relationship between secular and spiritual spheres that characterized the Protestant cities, where civic and ecclesiastical authority were both separate and intertwined in such distinctive ways, posed different problems for theology than those that preoccupied Luther. When Calvin wrote the first edition of the Institutes, he was certainly concerned with the fate of French Evangelicals under threat from the Catholic Church; but he was also compelled to address a very different set of questions, which did not have to do with the rival claims to temporal authority in conflicts between kings or German princes and the Holy Roman Empire or the