Out of the Flames Read online

  Béda was, to say the least, displeased and began accusing everyone in sight, including Henri, of heresy. Marguerite complained in a letter to Francis. Francis didn't like having his brother-in-law called a heretic—it was bad for family relations, and he needed Henri's support. He had Béda kicked out of Paris. One Béda supporter moaned that “the theologians had suffered such a defeat that their only hope was for Marguerite, who was pregnant, to die soon.”

  The Sorbonne wasn't through fighting, however. In October some of the students put on a play ridiculing Marguerite, depicting her as a puppet of Roussel and an overbearing shrew who went around spouting heresy and making everyone miserable. At the same time, the theological faculty censured Marguerite for publishing Mirror of the Sinful Soul, a long religious poem with Lutheran overtones. The faculty went so far as to raid the Parisian bookshops in an effort to suppress it.

  Again, Marguerite complained to Francis (who was now in the south of France). Francis wrote to the Sorbonne and told the faculty that if they were going to treat his sister like that, they had better list their reasons, and the reasons had better be good ones.

  At this point Nicholas Cop stepped in. He had strong positive feelings about Mirror of the Sinful Soul— Marguerite had sent him an inscribed advance reader's copy. As rector, he called a meeting of all the faculties and forced the Sorbonne to back down. Cop's victory was complete: on October 8, fifty-eight members of the Sorbonne had to sign a statement that they had never even read Mirror of the Sinful Soul, and so obviously could not pass judgment on it.

  For the first time it seemed possible that the reformers could win in France, and the leader of the movement might well be Nicholas Cop. And right behind Cop was his friend, supporter, intimate, and new number two man, John Calvin.

  But there was now someone else to consider. It had not taken long for Michel de Villenueve to seek out and join the most radical faction he could find at the university. Eventually he felt sufficiently comfortable to reveal to some of the key members of this French reform underground that he was, in fact, Michael Servetus, author of the celebrated On the Errors of the Trinity, a book that Calvin could not have helped but known. Servetus, two years younger, was already a famous scholar and a wanted man, someone who had traveled extensively, held a senior position at the emperor's court, been on the frontlines of the revolution in both Switzerland and Germany, and was now an up-and-coming member of the movement in Paris at just the right time.

  Calvin hated him.

  THE REFORMERS, FRESH FROM backing down the Sorbonne on Mirror of the Sinful Soul, realized that this was the moment to press their advantage and decided to use the occasion of Cop's inaugural speech to the university, All Saints' Day, 1533, to make their statement. Calvin, bristling with ambition and desperate to make his mark, helped Nicholas Cop compose a speech with mild but unmistakable Erasmian and Lutheran overtones. Although the rhetoric was nothing compared to On the Errors of the Trinity, it was nonetheless sufficient to prompt the Sorbonne to label it heretical and call for a purge at the university. This time the reformers had overplayed their hand. Francis, fickle as ever, did not intervene, and arrest warrants were issued for those thought to be responsible.

  When the police came for Cop, he had already fled, later to resurface in Basel. When they came for Calvin, they found only a rope made of twisted bedsheets hanging out the window. From Paris, he walked all the way to Noyon dressed as a vineyard worker.

  As for Michael Servetus—he had disappeared once more.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AFTER COP'S INAUGURAL, reform in France was once again forced underground. Many of the leaders fled and oth-ers went into hiding, but for once in his life, circumstances fa-vored Servetus. Had he arrived in Paris earlier, with more time to establish himself, his name, along with Calvin's and Cop's, would surely have been on the Inquisition's wanted list. As it was, however, Michel de Villeneuve (or Villanovanus as he Latinized the alias) was still largely unknown outside the movement itself, and no warrant had been issued for his arrest. As long as he did nothing to publicly call attention to himself, he could remain in Paris with his new identity intact. Calvin, who could only come back to the capital at great personal risk, kept in touch with other members of the movement from Noyon. But when he learned in January 1534 that Marguerite was again attempting to intercede with Francis, he took the chance and slipped quietly back into Paris. He was now of sufficient stature to obtain a private audience, but she told him that it was still too dangerous for him to remain, so Calvin accepted the invitation of a friend at Angoulême, a Marguerite stronghold in the south.

  It was at Angoulême that Calvin began a project that was to change the course of Christianity. It started simply enough: his host, Louis du Tillet, a canon of the local cathedral, knew all of the reformed ministers in the area and naturally invited them over to meet his friend, John Calvin, recently of Paris. Calvin became a minor celebrity, studying with them, exchanging ideas, and touring the countryside. Eventually, some of the rural pastors, impressed by his scholarship and erudition, asked if he wouldn't write them a sermon or two.

  Calvin complied, and even did a little preaching on his own. It was his first experience in a country parish, a hands-on opportunity to mingle with the laity and observe the shortcomings in their spiritual education. He began jotting down his thoughts on the nature of religion, organizing the primary principles so as to make them accessible to a general audience.

  The notes grew, and Calvin began to realize that the reform movement as a whole lacked a clear and practical explanation of its philosophy. As a result, the common people were having trouble accepting its positions. He decided to write a little manual, a sort of spiritual how-to, laying everything out simply and easily. Calvin was later to write in his preface:

  All I had in mind was to hand on some rudiments by which anyone who was touched with an interest in religion might be formed to true godliness. I labored at the task for our own Frenchmen in particular, for I saw that many were hungering and thirsting after Christ and yet that only a very few had even the slightest knowledge of him. The book itself betrays that this was my purpose by its simple and primitive form of teaching.

  Calvin began by laying out his own religious philosophy. It was passionate, heartfelt, reasoned, and bleak. Over and over throughout the pages ran the message: Man is nothing; God is everything. Man is small, corrupt, weak. Free will is an illusion. God alone decides who will be saved. An individual cannot alter that decision by good works or other exertions. It is made before that person is born.

  Through Christ, Calvin continued, man as a species participates in salvation. To understand God, people must turn to the pastors and teachers of the true Church, for which he, Calvin, was prepared to provide a definition.

  In the writing of his book, Calvin brought to bear the full force of his superior legal training and intensely analytic mind. The result was a volume that reconciled religious practice with almost every aspect of daily life. It proceeded with relentless logic, like arguments in some divine legal brief. One by one he defined the terms of the Church: faith, Christ, penitence, redemption, Scripture, the soul, the Trinity, righteousness:

  Original sin… may be defined as a hereditary corruption and depravity of our nature, extending to all the parts of the soul… Because our weakness cannot reach his height, any description which we receive of [God] must be lowered to our capacity in order to be intelligible… We thus see that the impurity of parents is transmitted to their children, so that all, without exception, are originally depraved.

  Calvin's book would become known as Christianae Religionis Insti-tutio (Institutes of the Christian Religion). More than any other single act, the writing of this book is responsible for Calvin's enduring legacy. It has been called by Will Durant “the most eloquent, fervent, lucid, logical, influential, and terrible work in all the literature of the religious revolution.”

  Calvin would spend the rest of his life expanding and revising the
Institutes, and it would eventually run to 1,118 pages. From the moment it appeared in print for the first time in 1536, it caused a sensation. It was to do everything that its author had hoped for with his first book, and more.

  But 1536 was still two years away.

  DURING HIS STAY AT ANGOULÊME Calvin became increasingly aware that the time had come for him to choose between two paths. He now knew what he believed in: the question was, how best to work toward this vision? Despite his fugitive status, it might still be possible to make peace with the established Church and work for reform from within. This alternative had much to offer. It was the way of Erasmus and Lefèvre, the humanist way of moderation, the way in which Calvin had been conditioned to believe since he first began his studies and embraced the classics. It was the conservative, practical way to proceed. Not insignificantly, this choice would allow him to stay in France.

  The second path was much more risky—he could break with the Church completely and secure his place at the forefront of the reform movement. But the movement was currently in tatters, its leaders spread out, their authority weakened. Who knew if they would regroup and become a real force for change? This path could also easily mean permanent exile. What if he made the break and found himself not a power in the world, but a refugee allied to a fringe group, helpless to do anything but natter from the sidelines?

  In an act that demonstrated both his courage and the purity of his beliefs, in March 1534, Calvin left the relative safety of southern France, returned to Noyon, and abruptly resigned his phony chaplaincy. He not only gave up the benefices of an office he had held since he was twelve, which still accounted for the lion's share of his small income, he announced that at twenty-four, he now considered himself as officially and publicly cut off from the Catholic Church.

  He spent the next months wandering, planning, working. He was intent on completing his book and his mission. “Calvin,” wrote Francis Hackett, “with his metallic voice, his consuming gravity, his fierce appetite for abstraction and his cold appetite for power—he built on a book, not Das Kapital, only the Bible. He was molding his absolute system… carried from secret lodgings to secret lodgings, the body a black lantern for the burning brain.” Although he avoided Paris where possible, on one occasion, in late summer of 1534, he felt compelled to venture in despite the danger.

  With Cop in exile and many of Marguerite's older allies afraid to show themselves, a vaccum had formed in the leadership in Paris. One of the more radical reformers who had remained in the capital had been spreading ideas that Calvin found repugnant but that were nonetheless gathering support. Calvin had met this man before and knew him to be brilliant, charismatic, and persuasive.

  The man was Michel de Villeneuve—Michael Servetus.

  Calvin knew he must act quickly to oppose the threat from the Spaniard. His vision of a united church based upon the precepts that he was just now committing to paper could be lost forever if Servetus's alternative of a simpler and more compassionate Christianity gained acceptance. In Calvin's view, this optimistic construction of man and his relation to God was intensely corrupt. He challenged Servetus to a secret debate.

  The confrontation was to take place in the rue Saint-Antoine, which ran through a grimy section of Paris across the river from the university, in the very shadow of the Bastille. Three centuries later, Charles Dickens would have Madame Defarge ply her knitting needles and malice here in A Tale of Two Cities. The exact location for the debate was known only to the participants and those deemed sufficiently trustworthy to be allowed to observe. Everyone involved understood the danger. Calvin was to say later of this meeting that he had risked his life to try to convert Servetus.

  Two brilliant minds—Calvin the coldly logical reformer against Servetus the mystic revolutionary. It might have been one of the great intellectual confrontations in history.

  Except that it never happened. Servetus did not come.

  The reasons for Servetus's failure to appear at the debate with Calvin have been guessed at ever since. He never spoke of it himself or mentioned it in his writings. Some speculated that he was detained and couldn't make the appointment. Others thought that he feared for his safety, still others that he had been tipped off that the meeting was a trap. Certainly, he had more to lose than Calvin. If he had been caught and his real identity revealed to the Inquisition, there was virtually no chance that he could have come out of it alive.

  There is another possibility. Calvin needed this debate and Servetus did not. Calvin had just made a momentous decision and was desperate to prove that he had made the right choice. He needed the recognition, the celebrity. Servetus's obsession lay solely in the acceptance of his ideas. At no time in his life did he demonstrate ambition for personal or political power. In fact, he often shunned it. Both traveling with Quintana and at Oecolampadius's dinner table, all Servetus needed to do was temper his opinions, and a powerful position would have been sure to follow. But temperamentally, Servetus proved to be much like Isaac Newton—a pure intellect, ignorant, even dismissive of social necessities. He could be rude, intolerant, and domineering—unwilling and probably unable to moderate his passion or his views in order to achieve a larger goal. A less politic person is hard to imagine.

  Whatever the reason, Calvin was left standing in front of a meeting with no one to debate, ignored and dismissed by an adversary, intentionally made, he felt certain, to look ridiculous.

  He never forgot it.

  UNKNOWN TO EITHER MAN, however, the question of who would lead reform in France was about to become moot.

  On October 18, 1534, the citizens of Paris, and of five provincial cities in France as well, woke up to find a one-page broadside posted on church walls, doorways, and public buildings. It had been taken from a pamphlet written by a reformer, Antoine Marcourt, who had been exiled to Switzerland from Lyon and was then first pastor of Neuchâtel. Hundreds of copies had been smuggled into France by a servant of the king's apothecary. The broadside, a four-point paper decrying the Mass and calling for its abolition, was entitled Articles véri-tables sur les horribles, grandz & importables abuz de la Messe papalle (True Articles on the Horrible, Great and Insufferable Abuses of the Papal Mass).

  This paper represented the most radical segment of the reform movement, not so much in the arguments it made as in the language in which it was expressed and, most importantly, in the manner in which it was delivered. One of the provincial towns where Articles véritables appeared was Amboise, where Francis had a château. Francis, who happened to be staying at the château on October 18, woke up to find a copy pasted on the door of his bedchamber.

  Francis was livid. It wasn't so much the content—although that was bad enough—as the idea that anyone would be sufficiently brazen to violate the sanctity of the royal apartments—his royal apartments. At that moment, the king abandoned all pretense of religious evenhandedness, which had only been prompted by diplomatic necessity anyway, and threw his full and enthusiastic support to the conservatives.

  Reformers were pursued mercilessly. An attractive reward was offered for information leading to the discovery of any “Lutheran.” There were hundreds of arrests. Within a month, the executions began. The victims were simple people—a shoemaker's son, a printer, a weaver, a draper.

  For this insult, ordinary burnings weren't enough. On January 21, 1535, an immense Francis-size royal procession wound its way from the Louvre to Notre-Dame, with the king himself at its head. Along with him came all the trappings of orthodoxy The nation's most precious relics—the Shrine of Saint Genevieve, the True Cross, the Crown of Thorns, the Robe of Purple—all these were taken from the vaults and carried aloft in the streets. The city officials, the nobility, the university faculties, the Swiss guard, the musicians, the heralds—everyone, including Francis, dressed for a funeral, bareheaded and carrying a candle. High mass was held at Notre-Dame, and afterward Francis spoke.

  What had happened with the placards, he said, this wasn't France.
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  These were low people, vile people, heretics. They must be removed, like a disease. If his own arm were infected with such corruption, Francis told the crowd, he would not hesitate to cut it off. If his own children had done this, said the man who had sentenced his sons to four years in a Spanish prison, the punishment would be the same.

  Then began the burnings. Before the Affair of the Placards, as it came to be called, victims had had their necks broken prior to being tied to the stake. Now heretics were to be burned alive. Special machines were even devised so that the condemned could be lowered into the flames, then raised up and lowered again and again to prolong the agony. Six people burned to the jeers of the crowds on the day of the procession while Francis and his court ate dinner.

  The burnings continued. Calvin's friend and landlord was among the condemned. More and more were consigned to the flames until finally the pope himself ordered Francis to stop.

  Religious tolerance in France was over. Even Marguerite was now helpless. Despite political overtures to the German reformers later in 1535, Francis remained orthodox at home, becoming increasingly so as he aged. In 1539, the Inquisition would be reintroduced all across the country, and ecclesiastical courts granted ultimate authority under the king. Entire villages would be destroyed and their occupants slaughtered on the altar of piety.

  As for those reformers still in France in the aftermath of the placards… no one had to tell them twice what to do. Protestants poured across the French border into Switzerland and Germany, and once again, Basel was the destination of choice. Oecolampadius was dead (another middle-aged man who succumbed shortly after marriage), and the city had recovered something of its past reputation. Erasmus, now frail and housebound, had come there to die. Cop was there, as were Capito and Guillaume Farel. There were enough scholars to effectively staff a university in exile. It was the obvious choice for Calvin as well.