‘Where the Spirit of the Lord is,’ Paul had written to the Corinthians, ‘there is freedom.’24 Between this assertion and the insistence that there existed only the one way to God, only the one truth, only the one life, there had always been a tension. The genius of Gregory VII and his fellow radicals had been to attempt its resolution with a programme of reform so far-reaching that the whole of Christendom had been set by it upon a new and decisive course. Yet the claim of the papacy to embody both the ideal of liberty and the principle of authority had never been universally accepted. For centuries, various groups of Christians had been defying its jurisdiction by making appeal to the Spirit. Luther had lit the match – but others before him had laid the trail of gunpowder. This was why, in the wake of his defiant appearance at Worms, he found himself impotent to control the explosions that he had done so much to set in train. Nor was he alone. Every claim by a reformer to an authority over his fellow Christians might be met by appeals to the Spirit; every appeal to the Spirit by a claim to authority. The consequence, detonating across entire reaches of Christendom, was a veritable chain-reaction of protest.
Flailingly, five Lutheran princes had sought to put this process on an official footing. In 1529, summoned to an imperial diet, they had dared to object to measures passed there by the Catholic majority by issuing a formal ‘Protestation’. By 1546, when Luther died, commending his spirit into the hands of the God of Truth, other princes too had come to be seen as ‘Protestant’ – and not only in the empire. Denmark had been Lutheran since 1537; Sweden was well on its way to becoming so. Yet elsewhere, the spectrum of what it might mean to be Protestant yawned as unbridgeably as it had ever done. Luther, a man whose genius for vituperation had helped to make the whole of Christendom shake, had never been content merely to insult the pope. Those who, like him, had dared to repudiate the Roman Church but had then been guilty of what Luther condemned as a failure properly to understand the Spirit, had also been the objects of his ire. Theologians in Swiss or German cities who presumed to dispute his views on the eucharist; Anabaptists, with their wild contempt for infant baptism and secular authority; Henry VIII, who seemed to think he was God. Luther, fretting where it all might lead, had not shrunk from contemplating a nightmarish prospect: a world in which the very concept of truth might end up dissolving, and everything appear relative. ‘For whoever has gone astray in the faith may thereafter believe whatever he wants.’25
Certainly, in the years that followed Luther’s death, the task of steering the great project of reformatio between rocks and shoals appeared an ever more desperate one. Lutheran princes were crushed in battle by Charles V, and cities that had long echoed to the impassioned debates of rival reformers brought to submit. Many exiles, in their desperation to find sanctuary, headed for England, where – following the death of Henry VIII in 1547 – his young son, Edward VI, had come to be hailed by Protestants as a new Josiah. This was no idle flattery. Edward might be a boy, but he was committed to the cause. Indeed, the only aspect of it he in any way seemed to dislike was the style of beard sported by German Protestants. Heir as he was to the title of head of the English Church, the young king provided the radicals on his council with a formidable instrument of reform. It was one they exploited to the full. ‘The greater change was never wrought in so short a space in any country since the world was.’26 Yet the thread on which all this hung was a delicate one. What a monarchy charged with the governance of the Church could give, it might also take away. In 1553, Edward died, to be succeeded by his elder sister Mary, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon. Devoutly Catholic, it did not take her long to reconcile England with Rome. Many leading reformers were burned; others fled abroad. The lesson to Protestants on the perils of placing their trust in a secular authority was a harsh one. Yet there was peril too in being a stateless exile. To refugees in flight from Mary’s England, it seemed an impossible circle to square. The liberty to worship in a manner pleasing to God was nothing without the discipline required to preserve it – but how were they to be combined? Was it possible, amid the storms and tempests of the age, for a seaworthy ark to be built at all?
The most formidable, the most influential attempt to answer these questions was undertaken by a reformer who was himself an exile. Jean Calvin was a Frenchman, a scholar whose intellectual brilliance was rivalled only by his genius for the detail and grind of administration. Schooled as he was in law, he might under normal circumstances have enjoyed a profitable career at court; but instead, embracing what the French authorities condemned as a sinister and foreign heresy, he had been obliged in 1534, at the age of twenty-five, to abandon his homeland. Fortunately for the young fugitive, there had lain, just across the border, a number of cities renowned as hotbeds of reform. Calvin, restless and anxious to play his part, had made a tour of them: Zurich, Strasbourg, Bern. When he did finally put down roots, though, it was in a city that had barely registered in the consciousness of most Protestants: Geneva. Calvin had first visited it in 1536; but then, after two years of attempting to create a godly community, had ended up being run out of town. Invited back in 1541 to have a second go, he had demanded official assurance of their backing from the city magistrates. This they had provided. Geneva was a city racked by political and social tensions, and Calvin – a man of evidently formidable talents – seemed to its leaders the man likeliest to heal them. And so it proved. Calvin, recognising a rare opportunity when he saw it, had moved with what proved to be decisive speed. It took him only a couple of months to set the Genevan church on new foundations, to recalibrate its relationship with the civic authorities, and to commit the entire city to an unsparing programme of moral regeneration. ‘If you desire to have me as your pastor,’ he had warned the council, ‘then you will have to correct the disorder of your lives.’27 He was nothing if not true to his word.
Naturally, there was opposition. Calvin brusquely, even brutally, overrode it. The means he used, though, were always within the law, never violent. He lived unarmed, unguarded. He turned the other cheek when he was spat at by his enemies in the street. His only weapon was the pulpit. Lacking any civic office, or even – until 1559 – citizenship, he relied solely on his authority as a minister of the Word to bend the Genevans to his purposes. This, to the growing numbers of his admirers beyond the city, only confirmed that his achievements enjoyed divine sanction. In 1555, when a group of exiles from England arrived in Geneva, they found themselves in what appeared to their stupefied gaze the very model of a Christian commonwealth: a society in which freedom and discipline were so perfectly in balance that none of them would ever forget the experience.
To a degree exceptional among reformers, Calvin had always wrestled with the practicalities of defining a godly order. That the ‘privilege of liberty’28 was one to which all Christians were entitled he took for granted. Accordingly, in his vision of what the Church should properly be, he set a premium on every Christian’s freedom both to join it and to leave. The dictates of conscience, so Calvin believed, had always, ‘even when the whole world was enveloped in the thickest darkness of ignorance, held like a small ray of light which remained unextinguished’;29 but he knew, nevertheless, that it was not given to everyone to be saved. Only an elect few, reaching out to God with their faith, would be met by God with his grace. All the descendants of Adam were predestined either to heaven or to eternal death. That this decree was ‘a dreadful one’,30 Calvin freely admitted; and yet he did not shrink before it. It was precisely because he knew that many would spurn the gifts of the Spirit that he laboured so hard, not just to gather together a community of the elect, but to bring it into harmony with God’s plans. Four offices existed to uphold it. There were ministers to preach the word of God; teachers to instruct the young; deacons to meet the needs of the unfortunate. Then, watchdogs elected to stand guard over the morals of the laity, there were the ‘elders’: the presbyters. Meeting every Thursday, it was they and the city’s ministers who provided the church with its court: the ‘Consistory’. Fail to attend a service on Sunday, or transgress the Ten Commandments, or break the laws devised by Calvin to define the doctrines of the Church, and a summons was bound to come – no matter the rank of the offender. Every year, almost one in fifteen Genevans would end up making an appearance before it.31 For those in the city who hated Calvin, who rejected his theology, who resented the endless lectures and harangues from the pulpit, it was this that constituted the worst intrusion: the dread that the eyes of the Consistory were always on them, watching, marking, judging. Conversely, for Protestants fleeing persecution, uprooted from their homes and desperate to believe that the disorder of the fallen world might yet be brought into harmony with God’s plan, it was precisely Calvin’s concern to rectify sinners that made Geneva seem such a model. He had created in it, as one admirer put it, ‘the most perfect school of Christ that ever was in earth since the days of the apostles’.32