Calvin: A Biography.

Calvin: A Biography
Bernard Cottret
Eerdmans, $28, 376 pp.

First published in French, Bernard Cottret's Calvin is a very readable study of that central Reformation figure. Cottret traces John Calvin's (1509-64) intellectual development in the context of sixteenth-century Northern humanism, with its emphasis on critical study of the Bible and patristic literature. In some particularly fine pages, Cottret explains in what sense Calvin was a humanist (both by training and by his philological interests) and in what sense he was not (Calvin accepted none of humanism's benign view of human perfectibility).

Cottret's work favorably resembles William Bouwsma's 1988 biography, and is quite balanced in its historical judgments. Cottret argues, for example, against the common characterization of Calvin as absolute ruler of Geneva. Calvin had an ongoing battle with the Genevan councils over whether the church was to be subservient to political or judicial power in the right to excommunicate. At the same time, he did not mind appealing to the council to discipline recalcitrant citizens who played tennis in the town square while he was preaching on Sunday. Geneva was a refuge for religious reformers of every stripe, but that refuge did not countenance the presence of Catholics or members of the so-called radical reformation. In fact, although Calvin had an abiding antipathy for anything Roman, his real bete noire was the radical wing of the Reformation.

One of the most useful things about this biography is its focus on the content and style of Calvin's teaching. There is a fine discussion of Calvin as a polemicist, preacher, and French prose stylist. One very illuminating section discusses his most famous work, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, which developed through a series of additions and expansions over the decades until it arrived at the architectonic whole in which the grandeur of God stands as a pole over against which sinful humans dwell. Calvin's logic of election and damnation, the twin decrees of predestination, are, in Cottret's words, "as chiaroscuro, the work of a painter or an architect, sensed more in the mass than in the detail."

The reader comes away from this learned book with two somewhat contradictory impressions: admiration, to be sure, for the single-minded devotion to the Word of God expressed by an ascetic person of keen intelligence and great piety; equally a kind of repugnance for a person who seems to have been humorless and driven by logic into personal and theological rigidity. It is still not clear to me why, for instance, predestination, a doctrine found from Augustine through Aquinas, should have become such a central article of faith for Calvin and the subsequent Reformed tradition though it never reached that level of importance in the historic Catholic creeds. Was this simply the result of Calvin's relentlessly logical mind? From my outsider, Catholic viewpoint, Calvin's theology seems bloodless, and insufficiently attentive to the implications of the Word made Flesh. But Cottret gave me many reasons to contemplate why, even if one does not love Calvin, one cannot ignore him.

I conclude with a minor quibble: While the translation by M. Wallace McDonald is crisp and very readable, the translator should have provided a select bibliography of Calvin's work in English, rather than repeat the original French bibliography. The neophyte student of Calvin would not know from this bibliography that the Institutes of the Christian Religion and most of his corpus are available in good English versions.

Lawrence S. Cunningham is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Theology at the University of Notre Dame.