Calvin, John (1504–1564)

Life and Works

Calvin was born as Jean Cauvin on July 10, 1509, in Noyon, in the Picardie region of France, as the son of an influential legal assistant to the bishop of Noyon. At the age of 14 he enrolled in the colleges De la Marche and Montaigu, both parts of the University of Paris. Though initially he intended to study theology after he had acquired basic knowledge in Latin and the liberal arts, he prevailed in his decision to study law in the central humanistic law schools Bourges and Orléans, from 1528 to 1531. In Orléans, he attained a doctoral degree. But after the death of his father, Calvin decided to give up jurisprudence and to attend the Royal College in Paris to study Greek and Hebrew languages and the history of antiquity. Here he authored his first published work, a comment on Seneca's De dementia

After a Lutheran speech by a friend of his whom he was said to have influenced, Calvin was forced to flee from Paris in 1533. As a matter of principle he renounced the benefices of the Catholic Church in Noyon, arranged by his father. He had [Page 144]to escape a second time when the king authorized the prosecution of (Zwinglian) Protestants.

Upon his arrival in Basel in 1535, the highly intellectual Calvin began to study theology, already influenced by the spirit of Renaissance humanism as embodied in the work of Desiderius Erasmus and other leaders of the Reformation: Luther, Zwingli, and Philipp Melanchthon. Calvin began to write about theology, starting with a preamble to a translation of the Bible into French by his cousin Pierre R. Olivétan. The next year, Calvin himself set out to influence the whole Protestant movement by the release of a first version of his Institutio Cbristianae Religionis (Institutes of the Christian Religion) that, although somewhat immature, nonetheless attracted considerable attention. Within his Institutes, Calvin developed his ideas about predestination.

During 1536, the Protestant Reformer Guillaume Farel insistently asked and finally convinced Calvin to join his enterprise to encourage the Reformation in Geneva. After several months of religious teaching in the Cathedral, he became a priest and soon published a first Catechism. Because they proved to be too restrictive in their postulations in face of the governing council and in their parochial obligations to the citizens, Farel and Calvin were ejected from Geneva in 1538.

Until 1541, Calvin stayed in Strasbourg where the Reformist Martin Bucer had persuaded him to act as lecturer and preacher in a French fold. In 1540, he married the widow Idelette de Bure in defiance of the celibate habits of the clergy and published his Comment on the Letter of Faul to the Romans. In Strasbourg, he met Melanchthon.

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