The Right to Heresy: Castellio against Calvin

On Sunday, May 21, 1536, the burghers of Geneva, formally summoned by a trumpet blast, assembled in the principal square, and, raising their right hands, unanimously declared that henceforward they would live exclusively “selon l’évangile et la parole de Dieu.”

It was by referendum (an ultra-democratic institution which is still in vogue in Switzerland) and in the sometime episcopal palace, that the reformed religion was thus declared to be the only valid and permitted faith in Geneva—to be the faith of the city-State. A few years had sufficed, not merely to drive the old Catholic faith from the town beside the Rhone, but to pulverize it and completely to extirpate it. Amid the menaces of the mob, the last priests, canons, monks, and nuns were expelled from the cloisters, while the churches, without excep-tion, were purified from graven images and other tokens of “superstition.” Then at length came this May Festival to seal the triumph. From that date, in Geneva, Protestantism had not merely the upper hand, but held exclusive sway.
This radical and unrestricted establishment of the reformed religion in Geneva was mainly the work of one terrorist, Farel the preacher. A man of fanatical temperament, with a narrow brow, domineering and relentless. “Never in my life had I seen so presumptuous and shameless a creature,” says the gentle Erasmus. This “French Luther” exerted an overwhelming influence upon the masses. Small of stature, hideous, with a red beard and untidy hair, he thundered at them from the pulpit, and the fury of his violent nature aroused an emotional storm in the populace. Like Danton, a revolutionist in politics, so Farel, a revolutionist in the religious field, was able to combine the scattered and hidden instincts of the crowd, and to kindle them to a united onslaught. A hundred times before the victory, Farel had ventured his life, threatened in the countryside with stoning, arrested and put under the ban by all the authorities; but with the primitive energy and unscrupulousness of a man dominated by one idea, he forcibly broke down resistance. Attended by a bodyguard of storm troops, he rioted into a Catholic church while the priest at the altar was celebrating mass, he forced his way into the pulpit and, amid the acclamations of his supporters, fulminated against Antichrist. He organized the street arabs into a second army at his service, inciting gangs of children to raid the cathedral at service time, and to disturb the devo-tions of the Catholics by screams, a quacking noise like that of ducks, and outbursts of laughter. At length, emboldened by the growing number of his adherents, he mobilized his guards for the last attack, and instructed them to violate the monasteries, tear down the images of saints from the walls and burn these “idols.” This method of brute force was success-ful. A small but active minority can intimidate the majority by showing exceptional courage, and by readiness to use the methods of a terror—provided that the majority, however large, is slack. Though the Catholics complained of these breaches of the peace, and tried to set the Town Council to work, on the whole they sat quietly in their houses, until, in the end, the bishop handed over his see to the victorious Reformation, and ran away without striking a blow.

But now, in the way of triumph, it became apparent that Farel was a typical uncreative revolutionist, able, by impetus and fanaticism, to overthrow the old order, but not competent to bring a new one into being. He was an adept at abuse, but devoid of formative talent; a disturber, not a constructor. He could rail against the Roman Church, could incite the dull-witted masses to hatred for monks and nuns; with sacrilegious hands, he could break the tables of the law. Having done this, he contemplated with hopeless perplexity the ruin he had made, for he had no goal in view. Now, when new principles were to be established in Geneva to take the place of the Catholic religion which had been driven out, Farel was a failure. Being a purely destructive spirit, he could only make a vacancy; for a street-corner revolutionist is never of the intellectually constructive type, destruction ends his task; another must follow in his footsteps to undertake the work of rebuilding.

Farel did not stand alone in his uncertainty at this criti-cal moment. In Germany, likewise, and in other parts of Switzerland than Geneva, the leaders of the Reformation were disunited, hesitant, and perplexed at the mission history had assigned them. What Luther and Zwingli had originally planned was nothing else than a purification of the existing Church, a leading back of the faithful from the authority of the pope and the council to the forgotten evangelical doctrine. For them, the Reformation signified at the outset that the Church was to be re-formed, that is to say, was to be bettered, purified, restored to its primitive integrity. Since, however, the Catholic Church stubbornly held to its views and would make no concession, they were faced by the need for working outside the Catholic Church instead of within—and forthwith, for when it is necessary to pass on beyond the destructive to the productive, there is a parting of the ways. Of course, there could have been nothing more logical than that the religious revolutionists, Luther, Zwingli and the other theologians of the Reformation, should have united in brotherly fashion upon a unified creed and a unified practice for the new Church. But when have the logical and the natural swayed the course of history? Instead of a worldwide and united Protestant Church, a number of petty Churches sprang up all over the place. Wittenberg would not hear a word of the theology of Zurich. Geneva repudiated the practices of Berne. Each town wished to have a Reformation of its own, in the Zuricher, Bernese, or Genevese fashion. In every crisis, the nationalist arrogance of the European States was propheti-cally foreshadowed on a small scale in the arrogance of the cantonal spirit. In acrimonious disputations, in theological hair-splittings and tracts, Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, Bucer, Karlstadt, and the rest of them, now proceeded to squander the energies which had served, so long as they held together, to undermine the gigantic structure of the Ecclesia Universalis. Farel was absolutely impotent in Geneva when he contemplated the ruins of the old order; this being the typical tragedy of one who has embraced the mission assigned to him by history, but is unequal to the duties that are imposed on him as a consequence of acceptance.