Читать книгу History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin (Vol. 1-8) - J. H. Merle D'Aubigné - Страница 40

Table of Contents

The Reformation was concerned both with God and man: its aim was to restore the paths by which God and man unite, by which the Creator enters again into the creature. This path, opened by Jesus Christ with power, had been blocked up in ages of superstition. The Reformation cleared the road, and reopened the door.

We willingly acknowledge that the middle ages had not ignored the wonderful work of redemption: truth was then covered with a veil rather than destroyed, and if the noxious weeds be plucked up with which the field had gradually been filled, the primitive soil is laid bare. Take away the worship paid to the Virgin, the saints, and the host; take away meritorious, magical, and supererogatory works, and other errors besides, and we arrive at simple faith in the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. It is not the same when we come to the manner in which God enters again into man. Roman catholicism had gone astray in this respect; there were a few mystics in her fold who pretended to tread this mysterious way; but their heated imaginations misled them, while in the place of this inward worship the Roman doctors substituted certain ecclesiastical formalities mechanically executed. The only means of recovering this royal road was to return to the apostolical times and seek for it in the Gospel. Three acts are necessary to unite man again with God. Religion penetrates into man by the depths of his conscience; thence it rises to the height of his knowledge, and finally pervades the activity of his whole life.

The conscience of man had been seared not only by the sin which clings to our nature, but also by the indulgences and mortifications imposed by the Church. It required to be vivified by faith in the atoning blood of Christ.

Tradition, scholasticism, papal infallibility, mingling their confused questions and numerous superstitions with the natural darkness of the heart, man’s understanding had been completely obscured. It needed to be enlightened by the torch of God’s word.

A society of priests, exercising absolute dominion, had enslaved christendom. For this theocratic and clerical society it was necessary to substitute a living society of the children of God.

With Luther began the awakening of the human conscience. Terrified at the sin he discovered in himself, he found no other means of peace but faith in the grace of Christ Jesus. This starting-point of the German reformer was also that of every Reformation.

To Zwingle belongs in an especial manner the work of the understanding. The first want of the Swiss reformer was to know God. He inquired into the false and the true, the reason of faith. Formed by the study of the Greek classics, he had the gift of understanding and interpreting Scripture, and as soon as he reached Zurich he began his career as a reformer by explaining the New Testament.

Calvin perfected the third work necessary for the Reformation. His characteristic is not, as the world imagines, the teaching of the doctrines to which he has given his name; his great idea was to unite all believers into one body, having the same life, and acting under the same Chief. The Reform was essentially, in his eyes, the renovation of the individual, of the human mind, of christendom. To the Church of Rome, powerful as a government, but otherwise enslaved and dead, he wished to oppose a regenerated Church whose members had found through faith the liberty of the children of God, and which should be not only a pillar of truth, but a principle of moral purification for all the human race. He conceived the bold design of forming for these modern times a society in which the individual liberty and equality of its members should be combined with adhesion to an immutable truth, because it came from God, and to a holy and strict, but freely accepted law. An energetic effort towards moral perfection was one of the devices written on his standard. Not only did he conceive the grand idea we have pointed out; he realised it. He gave movement and life to that enlightened and sanctified society which was the object of his noble desires. And now wherever churches are founded on the twofold basis of truth and morality—even should they be at the antipodes—we may affirm that Calvin’s sublime idea is extended and carried out.

It resulted from the very nature of this society that the democratic element would be introduced into the nations where it was established. By the very act of giving truth and morality to the members of this body, he gave them liberty. All were called to search for light in the Bible; all were to be taught immediately of God, and not by priests only; all were called to give to others the truth they had found. ‘Each one of you,’ said Calvin, ‘is consecrated to Christ, in order that you may be associated with him in his kingdom, and be partakers of his priesthood.’416 How could the citizens of this spiritual republic be thought otherwise than worthy to have a share in its government? The fifteenth chapter of the Acts shows us the brethren united with the apostles and elders in the proceedings of the Church, and such is the order that Calvin desired to reestablish. We have already pointed out some of the reasons by virtue of which constitutional liberty was introduced into the bosom of the nations who received the Reform of Geneva. To these must be added the reason just mentioned.

Disunited from each other, the three great principles of Luther, Zwingle, and Calvin would have been insufficient. Faith, if it had not possessed for its foundation the knowledge of the Word of God, would have easily degenerated into a mystical enthusiasm. The abstract authority of Scripture, separated from a living faith, would have ended in a dead orthodoxy; and the social principle, deprived of these two foundations, would have succeeded only in raising one of those artificial edifices in the air which fall down as soon as built.

God, by giving in the sixteenth century a man who to the lively faith of Luther and the scriptural understanding of Zwingle joined an organising faculty and a creative mind, gave the complete reformer. If Luther laid the foundations, if Zwingle and others built the walls, Calvin completed the temple of God.

We shall have to see how this doctor arrived at a knowledge of the truth; we shall have to study his labours and his struggles until the moment when, quitting for ever a country whose soil trembled under his feet and threatened to swallow him up, he went to plant upon a lowly Alpine hill that standard around which he meditated rallying the scattered members of Jesus Christ. But we must first see what was the state of France at the time when the reformer was brought to the Gospel.

The history of the Reformation in France, prior to the establishment of Calvin at Geneva, is divided into two parts: the first includes the favourable times, the second the unfavourable. We confess that the favourable times were occasionally the reverse, and that the unfavourable times were often favourable; and yet we believe that, generally speaking, this distinction may be justified. This subject has been frequently treated of; we shall, however, have to describe some phases of the French Reformation which have not always been set forth by those who have written its history.

Two persons, a man and a woman, whose social position and character present the most striking contrasts, laboured with particular zeal to propagate the Gospel in France at the epoch of the Reformation.

The woman appears first. She is the most beautiful and intelligent, the wittiest, most amiable and influential, and, with the exception of her daughter, the greatest of her age. Sister, mother of kings, herself a queen, grandmother of the monarch whom France (right or wrong) has extolled the most, namely, Henry IV., she lived much in the great world, in great ceremonials, with great personages, among the magnificence of the Louvre, St. Germain, and Fontainebleau. This woman is Margaret of Angoulême, Duchess of Alençon, Queen of Navarre, and sister of Francis I.

The man who appears next (he was younger than her by seventeen years) contrasts with all these grandeurs by the lowness of his origin. He is a man of the people, a Picardin; his grandfather was a cooper at Pont l’Evêque; his father was secretary to the bishop, and, in the day of his greatest influence in the world, he apprenticed his own brother Anthony to a bookbinder. Simple, frugal, poor, of a disposition ‘rather morose and bashful’417—such is the humble veil that hides the greatness of his genius and the strength of his will. This man is Calvin.

This man and this woman, so opposite as regards their condition in the world, resemble each other in their principal features. They both possess faith in the great truths of the Gospel; they love Jesus Christ; they have the same zeal for spreading with unwearied activity the truths so dear to them; they have the same compassion for the miserable, and especially for the victims of religious persecution. But while the man sometimes presumes upon his manly strength, the woman truly belongs to the weaker sex. She possesses indeed a moral virtue which resists the seductions of the age; she keeps herself pure in the midst of a depraved court; but she has also that weakness which disposes one to be too indulgent, and permits herself to be led away by certain peculiarities of contemporary society. We see her writing tales whose origin may be explained and even justified, since their object was to unveil the immorality of priests and monks, but they are nevertheless a lamentable tribute paid to the spirit of her age. While Calvin sets up against the papacy a forehead harder than adamant, Margaret, even in the days of her greatest zeal, is careful not to break with Rome. At last she yields, outwardly at least, to the sovereign commands of her brother, the persevering hostility of the court, clergy, and parliament, and though cherishing in her heart faith in the Saviour who has redeemed her, conceals that faith under the cloak of Romish devotion; while Calvin propagates the Gospel, in opposition to the powers of the world, saying: ‘Such as the warfare is, such are the arms. If our warfare is spiritual, we ought to be furnished with spiritual armour.’418 Margaret doubtless says the same thing; but she is the king’s sister, summoned to his council, accustomed to diplomacy, respected by foreign princes; she hopes that a union with the evangelical rulers of Germany may hasten on the Reformation of France. Finally, while Calvin desires truth in the Church above all things, Margaret clings to the preservation of its unity, and thus becomes the noble representative of a system still lauded by some protestants—to reform the Church without breaking it up: a specious system, impossible to be realised. And yet this illustrious lady, in spite of her errors, plays a great part in the history of the Reformation: she was respected by the most pious reformers. An impartial historian should brave hostile prejudices, and assign her the place which is her due.

Let us enter upon the French Reformation at the moment when, after great but isolated preparations, it is beginning to occupy a place in the affairs of the nation.419

The defeat at Pavia had plunged France into mourning. There was not a house where they did not weep for a son, a husband, or a father; and the whole kingdom was plunged in sorrow at seeing its king a prisoner. The recoil of this great disaster had not long to be waited for. ‘The gods chastise us: let us fall upon the christians,’ said the Romans of the first centuries; the persecuting spirit of Rome woke up in France. ‘It is our tenderness towards the Lutherans that has drawn upon us the vengeance of heaven,’ said the zealous catholics, who conceived the idea of appeasing heaven by hecatombs.

The great news of Pavia which saddened all France was received in Spain with transports of joy. At the time when the battle was fought, the young emperor was in Castile, anxiously expecting news from Italy. On the 10th of March, 1525, he was discussing, in one of the halls of the palace at Madrid, the advantages of Francis I. and the critical situation of the imperial army.420 ‘We shall conquer,’ Pescara had written to him, ‘or else we shall die.’ At this moment a courier from Lombardy appeared at the gate of the palace: he was introduced immediately. ‘Sire,’ said he, bending the knee before the emperor in the midst of his court, ‘the French army is annihilated, and the King of France in your Majesty’s hands.’ Charles, startled by the unexpected news, stood pale and motionless; it seemed as if the blood had stagnated in his veins. For some moments he did not utter a word, and all around him, affected like himself, looked at him in silence. At last the ambitious prince said slowly, as if speaking to himself: ‘The king of France is my prisoner.... I have won the battle.’ Then, without a word to any one, he entered his bed-room and fell on his knees before an image of the Virgin, to whom he gave thanks for the victory. He meditated before this image on the great exploits to which he now thought himself called. To become the master of Europe, to reestablish everywhere the tottering catholicism, to take Constantinople, and even to recover Jerusalem—such was the task which Charles prayed the Virgin to put him in a condition to carry through. If these ambitious projects had been realised, the revival of learning would have been compromised, the Reformation ruined, the new ideas rooted out, and the whole world would have bowed helplessly beneath two swords—that of the emperor first, and then that of the pope. At length Charles rose from his knees; he read the humble letters of the King of France, gave orders for processions to be made, and attended mass next day with every mark of the greatest devotion.421

All christendom thought as this potentate did: a shudder ran through Europe, and every man said to himself as he bent his head: ‘Behold the master whom the fates assign us!’ At Naples a devout voice was heard to exclaim: ‘Thou hast laid the world at his feet!’

It has been said that if in our day a king should be made prisoner, the heir to the throne or a regent would succeed to all his rights; but in the sixteenth century, omnipotence dwelt in the monarch’s person, and from the depths of his dungeon he could bind his country by the most disastrous treaties.422 Charles V. determined to profit by this state of things. He assembled his council. The cruel Duke of Alva eloquently conjured him not to release his rival until he had deprived him of all power to injure him. ‘In whom is insolence more natural,’ he said, ‘in whom is fickleness more instinctive than in the French? What can we expect from a king of France?... Invincible emperor, do not miss the opportunity of increasing the authority of the empire, not for your own glory, but for the service of God.’423 Charles V. appeared to yield to the duke’s advice, but it was advice according to his own heart; and while repeating that a christian prince ought not to triumph in his victory over another, he resolved to crush his rival. M. de Beaurain, viceroy of Naples, Lannoy, and the Constable of Bourbon, so detested by Francis I., waited all three upon the royal captive.

Francis had overplayed the part of a suppliant, a character so new for him. ‘Instead of a useless prisoner,’ he had written to Charles, ‘set at liberty a king who will be your slave for ever.’ Charles proposed to him a dismemberment of France on three sides. The Constable of Bourbon was to have Provence and Dauphiny, and these provinces, united with the Bourbonnais which he possessed already, were to be raised into an independent kingdom. The King of England was to have Normandy and Guienne; and the emperor would be satisfied with French Flanders, Picardy, and Burgundy.... When he heard these monstrous propositions, Francis uttered a cry and caught up his sword, which his attendants took from his hands. Turning towards the envoys he said: ‘I would rather die in prison than consent to such demands.’ Thinking that he could make better terms with the emperor, he soon after embarked at Genoa and sailed to Spain. The delighted Charles gave up to him the palace of Madrid, and employed every means to constrain him to accept his disastrous conditions.424 Who will succeed in baffling the emperor’s pernicious designs? A woman, Margaret of Valois, undertook the task.425 The statesmen of her age considered her the best head in Europe; the friends of the Reformation respected her as their mother. Her dearest wish was to substitute a living christianity for the dead forms of popery, and she hoped to prevail upon her brother, ‘the father of letters,’ to labour with her in this admirable work. It was not in France only that she desired the triumph of the Gospel, but in Germany, England, Italy, and even Spain. As Charles’s projects would ruin all that she loved—the king, France, and the Gospel—she feared not to go and beard the lion even in his den.

The duchess as she entered Spain felt her heart deeply agitated. The very day she had heard of the battle of Pavia, she had courageously taken this heavy cross upon her shoulders; but at times she fainted under the burden. Impatient to reach her brother, burning with desire to save him, fearing lest she should find him dying, trembling lest the persecutors should take advantage of her absence to crush the Gospel and religious liberty in France, she found no rest but at the feet of the Saviour. Many evangelical men wept and prayed with her; they sought to raise her drooping courage under the great trial which threatened to weigh her down, and bore a noble testimony to her piety. ‘There are various stations in the christian life,’ said one of these reformers, Capito. ‘You have now entered upon that commonly called the Way of the Cross.426 ... Despising the theology of men, you desire to know only Jesus Christ and Him crucified.’427

Margaret crossing in her litter (September 1525) the plains of Catalonia, Arragon, and Castile, exclaimed:

I cast my eyes around,

I look and look in vain ...

The loved one cometh not;

And on my knees again

I pray unceasing to my God

To heal the king—to spare the rod.

The loved one cometh not ...

Tears on my eyelids sit:

Then to this virgin page

My sorrows I commit:—

Such is to wretched me

Each day of misery.428

She sometimes fancied that she could see in the distance a messenger riding hastily from Madrid and bringing her news of her brother.... But alas! her imagination had deceived her, no one appeared. She then wrote:

O Lord, awake, arise!

And let thine eyes in mercy fall

Upon the king—upon us all.

Once or twice a day she halted at some inn on the road to Madrid, but it was not to eat. ‘I have supped only once since my departure from Aigues-Mortes,’ she said.429 As soon as she entered the wretched chamber, she began to write to her brother at the table or on her knees. ‘Nothing to do you service,’ she wrote: ‘nothing, even to casting the ashes of my bones to the wind, will be strange or painful to me; but rather consolation, repose, and honour.’430

The defeat of Pavia and the excessive demands of Charles V. had given the king such shocks that he had fallen seriously ill; the emperor had therefore gone to Madrid to be near him. On Wednesday, September 19, 1525, Margaret arrived in that capital. Charles received her surrounded by a numerous court, and respectfully approaching her, this politic and phlegmatic prince kissed her on the forehead and offered her his hand. Margaret, followed by the noble dames and lords of France who had accompanied her, and wearing a plain dress of black velvet without any ornament, passed between two lines of admiring courtiers. The emperor conducted her as far as the door of her brother’s apartments, and then withdrew.

Margaret rushed in; but alas! what did she find? a dying man, pale, worn, helpless. Francis was on the brink of the grave, and his attendants seemed to be waiting for his last breath. The duchess approached the bed softly, so as not to be heard by the sick man; unobserved she fixed on him a look of the tenderest solicitude, and her soul, strengthened by an unwavering faith, did not hesitate; she believed in her brother’s cure, she had prayed so fervently. She seemed to hear in the depths of her heart an answer from God to her prayers; and while all around the prince, who was almost a corpse, bowed their heads in dark despair, Margaret raised hers with hope towards heaven.

Prudent, skilful, decided, active, a Martha as well as a Mary, she established herself at once in the king’s chamber, and took the supreme direction. ‘If she had not come he would have died,’ said Brantôme.431 ‘I know my brother’s temperament,’ she said, ‘better than the doctors.’ In spite of their resistance, she had the treatment changed; then she sat down at the patient’s bedside, and left him no more. While the king slept, she prayed; when he awoke, she spoke to him in encouraging language. The faith of the sister gradually dispelled the brother’s dejection. She spoke to him of the love of Christ; she proposed to him to commemorate his atoning death by celebrating the holy eucharist. Francis consented. He had hardly communicated when he appeared to wake up as if from a deep sleep; he sat up in his bed, fixed his eyes on his sister, and said: ‘God will heal me body and soul.’ Margaret in great emotion answered: ‘Yes, God will raise you up again and make you free.’ From that hour the king gradually recovered his strength, and he would often say: ‘But for her, I was a dead man.’432

Margaret, seeing her brother restored to life, thought only of restoring him to liberty. She departed for Toledo, where Charles V. was staying; the seneschal and seneschaless of Poitou, the Bishop of Senlis, the Archbishop of Embrun, the president De Selves, and several other nobles, accompanied her. What a journey! Will she succeed in touching her brother’s gaoler, or will she fail? This question was continually before her mind. Hope, fear, indignation moved her by turns; at every step her agitation increased. The emperor went out courteously to meet her; he helped her to descend from her litter, and had his first conversation with her in the Alcazar, that old and magnificent palace of the Moorish kings. Charles V. was determined to take advantage of his victory. Notwithstanding the outward marks of politeness, exacted by the etiquette of courts, he wrapped himself up in imperturbable dignity, and was cold, nay, almost harsh. Margaret, seeing that her brother’s conqueror kept the foot upon his neck, and was determined not to remove it, could no longer contain herself. ‘She broke out into great anger:’433 like a lioness robbed of her cubs, full of majesty and fury, she startled the cold and formal Charles, says Brantôme. Yet he restrained himself, preserved his icy mien, made no answer to the duchess, and busying himself with showing her the honours due to her rank, he conducted her, accompanied by the Archbishop of Toledo and several Spanish noblemen, to the palace of Don Diego de Mendoza, which had been prepared for her.

Alone in her chamber the princess gave free vent to her tears; she wrote to Francis: ‘I found him very cold.’434 She reminded him that the King of heaven ‘has placed on his throne an ensign of grace; that we have no reason to fear the majesty of heaven will reject us; and that he stretches out his hand to us, even before we seek for it.’ And being thus strengthened, she prepared for the solemn sitting at which she was to plead her brother’s cause. She quitted the palace with emotion to appear before the council extraordinary, at which the emperor and his ministers sat with all the grandeur and pride of Castile. Margaret was not intimidated, and though she could not perceive the least mark of interest on the severe and motionless faces of her judges, ‘she was triumphant in speaking and pleading.’ But she returned bowed down with sorrow: the immovable severity of the emperor and of his councillors dismayed her. ‘The thing is worsened,’ she said, ‘far more than I had imagined.’435

The Duchess of Alençon, firmer than her brother, would not agree to the cession of Burgundy. The emperor replied with irritation: ‘It is my patrimonial estate—I still bear the name and the arms.’ The duchess, confounded by Charles’s harshness, threw herself into the arms of God. ‘When men fail, God does not forget,’ she said. She clung to the rock; ‘she leant,’ says Erasmus, ‘upon the unchangeable rock which is called Christ.’436

She soon regained her courage, asked for another audience, returned to the attack, and her agitated soul spoke with new eloquence to the emperor and his ministers. Never had the Escurial or the Alcazar seen a petitioner so ardent and so persevering. She returned to her apartments in alternations of sorrow and joy. ‘Sometimes I get a kind word,’ she wrote, ‘and then suddenly all is changed. I have to deal with the greatest of dissemblers.’437 This beautiful and eloquent ambassadress filled the Spaniards with admiration. They talked at court of nothing but the sister of Francis I. Letters received in France and Germany from Madrid and Toledo extolled her sweetness, energy, and virtues. The scholars of Europe felt their love and respect for her increase, and were proud of a princess whom they looked upon as their Mæcenas. What charmed them was something more than that inquiring spirit which had led Margaret in her earliest years towards literature and divinity, and had made her learn Latin and Hebrew;438 Erasmus enthusiastically exclaimed when he heard of the wonders she was doing in Spain: ‘How can we help loving, in God, such a heroine, such an amazon?’439 The courage with which the Duchess of Alençon had gone to Spain to save her brother led some christians to imagine that she would display the same heroism in delivering the Church from her long captivity.