William J. Bouwsma's Oxford U.P., I988; pp. Oxford U.P., I988; pp.

summarized in Chapter i), nor is it a

study of his theology or thought. It is summarized in Chapter i), nor is it a study of his theology or thought. It
is a portrait, and (with intentional ambiguity) a sixteenth-century portrait. Professor Bouwsma argues that
Calvin is an excellent representative figure to illustrate the sixteenth century, which he sees as 'tense, driven,
fundamentally incoherent, and riven by insoluble conflicts'. Throughout the work the key words used to
describe Calvin, and his century, are 'contradiction', 'paradox', 'tension', 'doubt', 'anxiety'. The structure of the
work explores (Chapters i-6) traditional elements of thought inherited by the sixteenth century (realism,
scholasticism, the knowable universe ... ), then counter-balances (Chapters 7-II) with other currents of
thought (nominalism, humanism, rhetoric): three final chapters deal with society, State and Church, working
out the tensions uncovered in the pre- vious sections. This is a vast area in which to work, and Bouwsma's
experience of the period makes him an impressive guide. The work is built on detailed familiarity with, and
extensive quotation (in English) from, Calvin's commentar- ies, sermons and the Institution (he makes little
use of Calvin's other treatises). The quotation technique gives a rich harvest of views not always associated
with Calvin - on enjoying the good things in life, on not imposing one's own rule of conduct on others - and
mostly succeeds in presenting a credible human figure far from the authoritarian Calvin of tradition. Calvin
was indeed an anxious man, attempting (not always successfully) to reconcile conflicting convictions and
needs. Inevitably, some aspects of such an exploration are open to question: the quotation technique can
mislead, as can the need to find contradictions and anxieties everywhere. On occasion, when the author has
not found the quotation he wanted, he falls back on formulations like: '[Calvin] implied, rather than stated,
the competence of the human mind to know the world in a traditional sense.' He introduces a whole
paragraph of emphatic affirmations of man's total depravity with the remark: 'Failure to recognize the
rhetorical element in Calvin's discourse has sometimes resulted in the mistaken view that he thought God's
image and likeness in human beings totally destroyed by sin.' In order to create his tension theme, Bouwsma
occasionally needs to be tendentious. The structure of the book presents another problem, most clearly seen
in the treatment of natural theology in Calvin. In Chapter 6 Calvin's formation gave him 'an assump- tion that
the mind is adequate to grasp the world as it actually is', and 'it is hardly surprising that he was attracted to
natural theology.' One has to wait until Chapter 9 to counterbalance this with: 'The limits of the human mind
would appear, then, to make natural theology virtually impossible.' It is dangerous to read only part of this
book. In such a wide-ranging survey, one omission seems especially regrettable. It seems to me that Calvin
lays much more stress on man's dependence on God's grace, on the gift of faith, on God's rescuing of man
from his own condition, than appears in these pages. It is a very 'this- wordly' book, and does less than
justice to a central part of Calvin's vision of life. None the less there is much here to interest and challenge. It
is an exciting and novel exploration of a person who did not always say the same thing, who was eclectic in
the influences he absorbed. Particularly in the exposition of late medieval theological and philosophical
attitudes and their survival into the six- teenth century, and in the presentation of rhetoric as supplying the
'dynamic EHR Oct. 9I992 SHORTER NOTICES October element in Calvin's thought, constantly
challenging his philosophical culture', Bouwsma provides the reader with a stimulating and refreshing study.
Institut d'Histoire de la Reformation, Geneva FRANCIS M. HIGMAN

The early chapters on Calvin's anxiety provide an excellent overview and prepare readers for two substantial
sections devoted to "the two Calvins, coexisting comfortably within the same historical personage" (p. 230).

The first, "philosophical Calvin" prized system, selfcontrol, and intelligibility.

The first prefers "the labyrinth," theological synthesis and social control.

The second dreads entrapment in "constructions [that] were losing their plausibility" (p. 48)
and asserts the primacy of practice over theory.
The second approaches "the abyss"
of freedom and skepticism.

Bouwsma cleverly teases Calvin's self-presentation from his sermons and commentaries before he presents
Calvin's "program for the Times," a final set of chapters that shows how the reformer and humanist-and how
contradictions shaped his ideals for a reformed society and church.

It is a shame that there is no Holbein or Diirer to go along with this narrative and subtly psychobiographical
"portrait."

One cannot but agree with Bouwsma's brief against the Calvin of Calvinism: "Calvin did not conceive of his
task in life as the exposition of 'theology' for the ages. He had more urgent matters to attend to" (p. 191). The
trouble is that Bouwsma, I believe, has missed some of those matters. His Calvin is driven to reform the
world, to come to terms with his dead father, with his exile, with the labyrinth and the abyss, and, of course,
with the two "Calvins" that inhabit the one.

Of equal urgency and importance, however, was the opposition in Geneva, particularly its campaigns to
subvert Calvin's consistory, if not also his reformation. Bouwsma awards Ami Perrin a short sentence--
Berthelier gets not a syllable-yet Calvin's correspondence with Bullinger suggests that Perrinist conspiracies
were a chief source of anxiety in the 1550s. They account for some of the first complaints about Calvin's
authoritarianism; his reactions account for others.
William J. Bouwsma's John Calvin is characterized by psycho-logical conflict and conflicting ideas; the ideas are part of
his cen-tury's cultural options. The psychological and intellectual traits are arranged in opposite groups and paired,
organized under the con-cepts of "abyss" and "labyrinth," two frequent metaphors in Calvin's writings. The abyss
represents Calvin's terror before the unbound, unlimited,. and unintelligible, in the face of which he called upon the
traditional stock of medieval scholasticism and the parts of the classical heritage that were absorbed into it -a rational
universe, a clear Scripture, a knowable God, and a knowing human mind -for control. The labyrinth represents the
constriction inev-itable in just that traditional stock, against which he used his cen-tury's younger helps: humanism and
rhetoric and their inherent flexibility,a daptability, relativism, and the nominalist critique of scholasticism. This is a
sparkling, dramatic, and erudite book, in which the au-thor separates the strands of his subject's complexity and lets
each play or speak itselfo ut; in successive sections, countertextsr espond to earliert exts,a nd thus we literallye
xperience the contradictionsi n Calvin. For example, Calvin-the anxious, fearful Calvin who needed the clear and
absolute truthso f Scripture- denied its rhetor-ical art because a reasonable God would not speak ambiguously or
deceptively; Calvin-the humanist and rhetorician who sought to reform the morals of his world with words -saw and
delighted in Scripture as a rhetorical document. Similarly, Bouwsma presents the arguments for natural theology in
Calvin's writings and the ar-guments for its unimportance and worthlessness. Bouwsma also convinces us that Calvin
was an extraordinarily anxious person, though (perhaps reflectinga preoccupation of his own century) he overdoes his
proofs, and some of the terms he cites to demonstrateC alvin's anxietys eem to refert o quite differentem o-tions-for
example, anger, sorrow, weariness (pp. 32, 37). The great unknown to Calvin was an all-powerful, inscrutable, totally
transcendent,ju dgmental God. The anxiety thats o oftenm ade him fear himself at the brink of this abyss had roots, in
Bouwsma s view, This content downloaded from 155.247.166.234 on Mon, 28 Dec 2015 14:37:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and
Conditions
3 14 RENAISSANCE QUARTERLY in the young Calvin's unresolved conflictw ith his father.C alvin was so afflictedw ith self-
doubt in face of God's judgment that he came to feel guilt about creatureliness itself. Bouwsma's psychological portrait
is not unprecedented; this is a central point in my Calvin Against Himself.a n Inquiryin I ntellectualHi story(i9 84). I
also suggest there that Calvin's early relationship with his father was a contrib-uting factor in his psychological
complexity. A deep knowledge of the Renaissance is Bouwsma's forte, and over and over again he places Calvin in
unexpected juxtaposition with the humanists of his time. The picture of the Calvin who as-pired to counteract the
troubling trends of his world-irresponsi-bilitya nd greed in rulers,t he flauntingo f authorityb y theirs ubjects, clerical
laziness, immorality at all social levels -by instating a re-stored and purified Christendom is highlighted by parallels
with the inward piety and biblical reformism of Erasmus and Rabelais. Par-allels are made with humanist
utilitarianism,w ith Machiavelli's re-alistic analyses of the political world, and with Petrarch's experien-tial religion and
critique of ancient philosophy for its mere intellectualism. (Luther is curiously slighted. In a footnote, we are referredt o
a review article by G. R. Elton which discusses the pal-pable reality of Satan to Luther; this apparently disqualifies him
for modern significance.) More familiarly, Bouwsma places Calvin's love of classical authors and languages, and his
commitment to their use in education, in a Renaissance context. So many parallels with contemporaries are given by
Bouwsma that we have an inventory of Renaissance humanism, and this is both the main strengtha nd weakness of the
book. We will never be able to forget that Calvin was an exiled French humanist who cultivated a new home in a real
community of minds. With Bouwsma, "we may discern the influence of the humanistic ideal of civic life" in Calvin's
sense of responsibilityf ort he world (p. i 9 i). But many will be reluctantt o accept as meaningfulsu ch parallels as a
preoccupation with power in Calvin's conception of God, on the one hand, and Machiavelli's preoccupation with power
in politics, on the other, or the awareness in each that rulers often used religion to instill obe-dience and docility in their
subjects. Bouwsma himself acknowl-edges that "what Machiavelli was prepared to accept for its utility, Calvin hoped to
abolish" (p. 55). Similarly, Erasmus is so frequent a presence that he comes to dominate the portrait. Bouwsma says the
differencesb etween the two are temperamentalr athert han substan- This content downloaded from 155.247.166.234 on Mon, 28 Dec
2015 14:37:03 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
REVIEWS 315 tive and presents Calvin's "Erasmianism" as a counterpart to his somber view of human existence. However,
differencesin temper-ament seem inadequate to account for Calvin's very un-Erasmian need for certaintyo n essential
mattersa nd his particularp osition on one of these matters- human nature and the unfree will. Calvin was a Protestant
theologian and, despite Bouwsma's con-tention, he was a systematic theologian -not in the tidy, linear sense thati s
pejorativelye quated in thisb ook with intellectualisma nd sys-tematic thought generally and scholastic philosophy in
particular, but in a multidimensional way. The Institutcs, his prolegomenon to everythinge lse he wrote, was as
intenselyp ractical as it was rhetor-ical. Insisting upon the dichotomy between the human and the di-vine and on thel
imitso fhuma n knowledge even when aided by Scrip-ture and faith,i t was intended to avert a retreatf rom complexity.
Many readers may wish for more attention to the theology of Calvin than we have here; that might also have cut down
on some of the sixteenth century" proofs" that start after a while to raise doubts. Bouwsma is an advocate of one of the
two sides of his Calvin, the rhetorical side, at the expense of the philosophical side and, I think, to the detriment of this
otherwise illuminating book. DREW UNIVERSITY Suzanne Selinger

John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait. By William J. Bouwsma. (New York:

Oxford University Press. 1988. Pp. x, 310. $22.95.)
For centuries scholars have approached John Calvin with religious axes to grind,
portraying him as either a foul heresiarch or an inspired prophet. William Bouwsma
suggests that he ought to be studied as a sixteenth-century intellectual. The sugges
tion makes sense, for Calvin was a highly educated and articulate man. There are
few scholars today, moreover, better equipped than Bouwsma to approach Calvin
from this vantage point, given his distinguished career as a student of sixteenth
century thought. The result is this wise, subtle, deliberately static, and thought
provoking intellectual portrait.
Bouwsma does not find Calvin to be a particularly systematic thinker, like most
intellectuals of his time he was an eclectic, borrowing ideas from sources not
This content downloaded from 150.135.239.97 on Sun, 18 Oct 2015 14:57:38 UTC
All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
610 BOOK REVIEWS
always fully compatible. At the root of his concerns, Bouwsma feels, was an acute
anxiety fed by both introspection and observation of his fellow men. To resolve
that anxiety Calvin developed a body of ideas drawing on two rather different
sources. One was inherited philosophies, both ancient and medieval, that Calvin
felt helped to protect him from falling into the chaos of an abyss. The other was
Renaissance humanism, that Calvin felt helped to protect him from being entrapped
in a labyrinth. It is around these two metaphors of abyss and labyrinth that
Bouwsma constructs most of his book.
His philosophical interests led Calvin to an acceptance of a rather optimistic
epistemology, confident that man's mind could uncover truth. It led him to recom
mend moderation in all things as a method of personal and social control. It led
him to use scholastic reasoning and natural theology. Much in this mixture was
not particularly Christian.
His humanistic interests led Calvin to extract from intensive study of the Bible,
viewed as a rhetorical document, insights into human nature as organic and utili
tarian, and into God as a wielder of power in a cosmic drama. He then used them,
like a good civic humanist, in strenuous attempts to reform society, government,
and the church.
Bouwsma's analysis is based on a sensitive meditation on all of Calvin's published
writings, particularly his Biblical commentaries, but also his Institutes, his polem
ical tracts, and his correspondence. Parts of it I found wonderfully fresh and sugges
tive, most notably a chapter on Calvin as a humanist, committed to a rhetorical
approach to reality and to an inspired use of philology. Other parts I found not
particularly original but still masterful as syntheses of the best existing knowledge,
for example, a chapter on Calvin's political thought. No book of this sweep can
fully satisfy every specialist at every point. It remains fresh and authoritative
enough, however, to deserve the attention of every student of sixteenth-century
European thought.
Robert M. Kingdon
University of Wisconsin?Madison
Index des Livres Interdits. Volume V: Index de l'Inquisition Espagnole, 1551, 1554,
1559. By J. M. De Bu j and

WILLIAM J. BOUWSMA. John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Cen-tury Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press. 1988. Pp. viii, 310.
$22.95. As his introduction's title announces, in this book William J. Bouwsma sets out on "The Quest for the Historical
Calvin." He seeks the John Calvin not of historiography but of history, a troubled man in his thoroughly troubled sixteenth
century. Bouwsma is one of those rare hunters who bags more than he hunts, for he returns from the sixteenth century with
not one Calvin but two. The structure of Bouwsma's "portrait," not bi-ography, of Calvin is shaped by his discovery of two
Calvins who coexisted "uncomfortably within the same historical personage" (p. 230). One was "a philosopher, a rationalist
and a schoolman in the high scholastic tradition represented by Tho-mas Aquinas, a man of fixed principles, and a
conservative" (p. 230). This Calvin tended to "static orthodoxy," abhorred "what we now call 'cognitive dissonance,"' and
"craved desperately for intelligibility, order, certainty" in the face of "a terror that took shape for him in the metaphor of the
abyss" (p. 230). The other Calvin was "a rhet-orician and humanist, a skeptical fideist in the manner of the followers of
William of Ockham, flexible to the point of opportunism, and a revo-lutionary in spite of himself' (p. 231). Over intel-ligibility
and order, he "celebrated the paradoxes and mystery at the heart of existence," asserted "the primacy of experience and
practice over theory," and possessed "a considerable tolerance for individual freedom" (p. 231). This Calvin chiefly dreaded
what he described as "entrapment in a labyrinth" of universalized and dogmatized human thought and language (p. 231).
The ten-sions between the two Calvins "illuminate the momentous cultural crisis central to his century, which was at the
heart of the Renaissance as well as of the Reformation and as crucial for Catholic Europe as for the peoples that separated
from the Roman church" (p. 4). They also "promiscuously jumbled together" elements that "have been vari-ously combined
in the whole course of Western Civilization" (p. 231). Bouwsma's method is as unusual as the argu-ment it presents. First, he
quotes copiously from Calvin's writings without much attention to their chronological order, although he strongly favors the
sermons and biblical commentaries over the better-known Institutes. Second, he organizes the heart of his book thematically.
Following an initial portrayal of Calvin's career and anxieties and a diagnosis of his age appear three parts: Calvin's search
for order and authority (the labyrinth); his search for freedom and a whole personality (the abyss); and his program for
society, state, and church. Although Bouwsma insists that both Calvins are the historical Calvin, the book's structure
suggests, and its conclusion confirms, Bouwsma's belief that the humanist, rhetorical, freedom-seeking side of Calvin was the
more profound, the more Chris-tian, and the more modern and that "the compos-ite character of his thought doomed the
philo-sophical side of his mind, though without destroying it, to failure" (p. 231). This side Bouw- This content downloaded from
193.105.245.90 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:21:01 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1058 Reviews of Books sma tends to identify with the Middle Ages, while the rhetorical side was fated, though submerged
for years in Calvinist dogmatism, to re-emerge in the riotously pluralistic, unstructured, and antiau-thoritarian religious and
emotional culture of modern times. This succession-modernity to medievalism, rhetoric to philosophy, freedom to authority-is
Bouwsma's own resolution to the problem of the two historical Calvins, the ultimate victory of word over idea, of rhetoric
over philos-ophy, in Calvin's own soul. Bouwsma's book requires digestion and reflec-tion. Cast in a beautifully clear and
deceptively simple prose, studded with interesting and strik-ing quotes from little-known corners of Calvin's works, and
suffused with an intellectual tension that mirrors its subject's horror of and love for the world, this book will provoke much
discussion and not a little opposition. Many readers will recognize here the culmination of the line of thought that Bouwsma
began in his brilliant article, "The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,"
published in Itinerarium Italicum: The Profile of the Italian Renaissance in the Mirroro f its EuropeanT ransformations(1
975), edited by Heiko A. Oberman, and it is to Oberman's work that Bouwsma's Calvin stands closest in mood and vision.
Bouwsma's placement of the historical Calvin fuels at least two doubts. First, the identification of medieval philosophy with
an ultimately Thomist quest for stasis, authority, harmony, and order reflects a conception of Christian Aristotelianism that
scholarship (for example, that of Quentin Skinner) has largely outrun. Second, Bouwsma's feeling that the rhetorical Calvin
was the more modern forces him to regard Calvinist scholasti-cism as a kind of relapse into "medieval" ways of thought. This
notion suggests, however, a more dialectical way of relating two Calvins than Bouw-sma's portrait of Calvin warrants. This is
a courageous book. Bouwsma accepts what is for those who quest historical figures a risk, a risk that the Alsatian theologian
Albert Schweitzer identified eighty-five years ago. Schweit-zer wrote of the New Testament scholars, "They loosed the bonds
which had chained him for centuries to the rock of dogma and rejoiced, as movement and life returned to his form, and as
Jesus, the man of history, moved toward them. Instead of stopping with them, however, he went right past our age and back
into his own." Ham-mer in hand, Bouwsma sends John Calvin back into his own age. Whether forever, no one can say.
THOMAS A. BRADY, JR. Universityo f Oregon

REVIEW SECTION
John Calvin:
A Sixteenth Century Portrait
By William J. Bouwsma
New York, Oxford University Press, 1988. 310 pp. $22.95.
Students of the Renaissance and Reformation have been following for
some time the fascination with Calvin of William J. Bouwsma, professor
of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and looking forward
to the publication of this book. Its prompt and positive reviews in the
general press suggest that its appeal will not be limited to specialists in
the field. Bouwsma, writing as a secular historian of the sixteenth
century and especially of humanism of that period, has determined to
draw Calvin out of what he regards as the confining domain of
specialists in theology and Calvin studies and to present him as a fully
human sixteenth-century man.
Bouwsma emphasizes that he has not offered a biography but a
portrait. A sketch of Calvin’s life is provided in the first chapter. But
Bouwsma then goes on to draw materials for his portrait “indiscriminately
from every period in his life for which data are available, ,and the
portrait itself is relatively static.” Believing that the issues with which
Calvin struggles and his coping methods do not significantly change over
time, the author has combed Calvin’s works for passages that reveal
Calvin as a person. In this process, he focuses heavily on the biblical
commentaries.
Considering how seldom Calvin explicitly spoke about himself, the
richness of the assembled material proves remarkable. It is notably the
portrait of a life-long humanist; parallels are regularly drawn to other
humanists. Even such a familiar tale as that of Farel’s persuading Calvin
to stay in Geneva is freshly illuminated by the perspective of humanism.
It is also a portrait of an anxious man, caught between two forms of
“extreme spiritual discomfort”: “the anxiety of the void”-the abyssand
“the anxiety of constriction”-the labyrinth. Bouwsma believes that
Calvin’s thought reveals a persistent struggle to find a way to live with
integrity between these two opposing forms of anxiety. To some extent,
the elements in this portrait are purely personal; to some extent, they are
culturally defined, allowing us entry into the broader sixteenth century
world.
The concluding chapter admits that two Calvins, “co-existing uncomfortably
within the same historical personage,” have been identified.
One, particularly terrified by the boundless abyss which suggested the
unintelligibility of things and even non-being, was the philosopher, the
conservative, intent upon establishing order and certainty. The: other,
335
Downloaded from ttj.sagepub.com at University of Manitoba Libraries on June 25, 2015

336 Theology Today

dreading entrapment in the labyrinth, was the rhetorician and humanist,
flexible, even revolutionary, celebrating paradox and mystery. This
Calvin was not so much concerned with timeless systems of thought as
with practical transformation of society. Bouwsma regards this Calvin
as the more creative, adapting Christianity to the social conditions of his
own day, though the other Calvin probably dominated.
Bouwsma’s provocative portrait has the very great virtue of providing
an interpretive framework drawn out of Calvin’s own writing. It takes
seriously complexities, tensions, and even frankly contradictory aspects
of Calvin’s thought and work. Bouwsma’s insistence that it is, indeed, a
sixteenth century portrait is also crucial. Those who know the period will
not be startled by his focus on anxiety or on the holding in tension of
unresolved conflicts of thought. Though, as he suggests, not all readers
will be comfortable with his portrayal, surely they will acknowledge a
fundamental fairness and appreciation for Calvin in the presentation
and admire the learning and skill apparent in the creation of this
revealing portrait.
The approach to Calvin’s life that Bouwsma takes also raises some
questions:
(1) Why a static portrait? Should not some argument be presented for
the fundamental assertion that no significant change took place over his
lifetime? Occasionally, comments are made about the historical
moment reflected in particular statements of Calvin, but for the most
part his writings are cited without reference to chronology or circumstances.
Is it not possible that more of the contradictory attitudes might
be illuminated by knowing the different circumstances in which he was
writing?
(2) Does it not seem that the case for the order-seeking Calvin has
been made more persuasively than the case for the freedom-seeking
Calvin? The statement that Calvin “had little to say about the freedom
. . . of a Christian” needs considerable qualification. Even so, Bouwsma
is surely right that the conservative Calvin dominated.
(3) Bouwsma’s view that Calvin was more focused on bringing the
world to order than creating timeless systematic theology is important
and a useful corrective to less historically-oriented views. But, as
Bouwsma makes quite clear, teaching the proper understanding of
Scripture was fundamental to Calvin’s method of reordering church and
society. Should not the role of the Institutes in this process be more
clearly visible? Calvin never intended the commentaries to stand alone,
but assumed the teaching of the Institutes as he wrote them. For
example, in Chapter 5, would not consideration of Calvin’s distinctions
in the Institutes between human moral capacities with and without
grace and his “third use of the law’’ (also used by other humanist
Protestants) be helpful in sorting out at least some of what seem to be
contradictions between “pagan” carryovers and Christian views of
moral capacity?
We are indebted to Prof. Bouwsma for an instructive, stimulating,
Downloaded from ttj.sagepub.com at University of Manitoba Libraries on June 25, 2015

338 Theology Today

and clearly written book, which will have a deep influence on Calvin
studies for years to come.
JANED EMPSEYD OUGLASS
Princeton Theological Seminary
Princeton, New Jersey

John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait. By WilliamJ. Bouwsma (New York, Oxford University Press, 1988) 310 pp. $22.95
Each age deserves its reinterpretation of Calvin, and this is the first truly major one to appear since Franqois Wendel's
Calvin in 1952. Bouwsma emphasizes that his book is not a conventional intellectual biography, since it rarely stops to trace
parallel ideas among Calvin's contemporaries and never analyzes Calvin's relationship to his sources in any depth. Although
the author eschews formal psychological analysis, this "por- This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sun, 25 Oct 2015 02:34:24
UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions R} LVI.EWS 493 trait" resembles psychobiography more than anything else; its
avowed model is Febvre's famous Religion of Rabelais.1 The parallel goes deeper: Bouwsma's Calvin, a late-Erasmian
French humanist, "resembled Ra-belais more than either he or Rabelais could have appreciated" (4). Bouwsma's method is
easier to characterize than his genre. To a remarkable extent, his book is a collage of English translations (often new ones) of
Calvin's own prose. Its fourteen chapters, including the obligatory biographical introduction, include over 1,750 citations of
Calvin, an average of more than 8 per page. Other authors, ancient and modern, get short shrift: barely I I percent of
Bouwsma's notes refer to anything other than texts by Calvin. The author relies even more ex-clusively on Calvin's own
words than Calvin himself relied on scriptural texts when he published the Institutes of the Christian Religion at Basel in 1536
(I7). Within this welter of Calviniana, no text is privileged. "I respect H6pfl's warning against amassing quotations that are
'contextless and random, taken from works of unequal level and from different periods'; but," claims Bouwsma, "I have not
found it fruitful for my purposes to make such discriminations as he has found necessary" (237-238, n 20). We thus are
dragged relentlessly back adfontes to view a portrait of Calvin which is 88 percent "pure," but quarried virtually at random
from the huge corpus of the Opera Calvini. For all its novelty, Bouwsma's portrait shares at least one attribute with the Great
Stone Face on Geneva's Wall of the Reformation, which he dislikes: it does not change over time. But the differences are
much more important. Bouwsma's Calvin spends much less time than the Great Stone Face frowning in disapproval at the
inevitable sins and follies of humanity, and much more time wrestling with his deep-seated anx-iety and with contradictory
trends in his thought. If noncontradiction be the mark of small minds, then Calvin's claim to greatness .is pow-erfully
reinforced here. Bouwsma's primary thesis postulates a major tension which he symbolizes by two of Calvin's favorite
images: an abyss (in Calvin's Latin, usually abyssus but occasionally vorago or gurges) and a labyrinth (labyrinthumb ut also
ambages).T hese images enable us to penetrate somewhat more deeply into Calvin's experience of anxiety; they point to the
contrasting strategies with which he dealt with it; and they help to identify tensions and contradictions in his thought. These
two key images, Bouwsma concludes, "suggest the sources of his anxiety in the cultural dilemmas of the age" and make
Calvin typical of the sixteenth century-an age which Bouwsma sees as "tense, driven, I Franqois Wendel (trans. Philip Mairet),
Calvin: The Origins and Development of his Religious Thought( New York, I963); Lucien Febvre, Problemed e l'incroyancea u XVIe siecle, la
religion de Rabelais (Paris, I942). This content downloaded from 129.180.1.217 on Sun, 25 Oct 2015 02:34:24 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and
Conditions 494 | WILLIAM MONTER fundamentally incoherent, and riven by insoluble conflicts that were . . . as much within as
between individuals and parties" (45, 4). Within this bipolar imagery, Bouwsma arranges his arabesque of Calvin's
quotations. Many features, both familiar and unfamiliar, emerge helter-skelter. Although he is often described as coldly
imper-sonal, "there is hardly a term in Calvin's vocabulary more pejorative than 'frigid,"' and predestination "clearly made
him uncomfortable" (174, 173). We even find Calvin making the Machiavellian observation that Greek and Roman rulers
"feigned religion in order to keep the others obedient" (204). Reassuringly, Calvin can also sound like the Great Stone Face,
whose God punishes more often than He rewards: "Why has He power, unless to exercise justice?" (170). This theologian
sought scriptural trans-parency; but he had an odd reaction to Noah's ark, simply could not grasp the Book of Job, and
praised Jesus as "a singular example of a thrifty and frugal life" (5, 47, 94-96, 200). As an intellectual biography, this volume
provides a wonderfully refreshing portrait of Calvin, as good as this generation is likely to see; as an interdisciplinary effort,
it succeeds in camouflaging much of the psychology and theology which intersect in its pages. Among the 3,000 books and
12,000 articles in the Calvin Studies Center at Calvin College, it will rank with the handful of the Elect (235, n.4). William
Monter Northwestern University Colonial Identity in

John Calvin: A Sixteenth Century Portrait. William J. Bouwsma. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. viii + 310
pp. $22.95. This is a study that Calvin scholars have been waiting for. Tantalizing glimpses of Bouwsma's work have appeared in various journals,
tantalizing enough for us to know that the completed work would be formidable, exhaustive, even combative. It is all of these. More than that, it
provides a 'disclosure model' of Calvin's personality and his work that will fertilize future studies. It is not a biography, nor as the author says, a
psychological study, and certainly it is not a book of theology. Rather, Bouwsma tries to interpret "Calvin as a figure of his time", as a French
intellectual, an evangelical humanist, a rhetorician, an exile. As a student of Renais- sance rhetoric, Bouwsma knows how to get into the character and
spirit of an age through its language, and here he digs deep into Calvin's work not only to reveal the tensions and anxiety of the man, but, more
important, those of an epoch. The sixteenth century was, he writes, "tense, driven, fundamentally incoherent, and riven by insoluble conflicts that
were all the more serious because they were as much within as between individuals and parties" (4). The anxiety of the age, the anxiety to which
Calvin spoke so eloquently and per- suasively, was for him a hesitation between the Abyss of disorder, unrestrained evil-doers and the uncertainty of
the future, and the Labyrinth of the suffocating sense of having no sure way out, of the failure of all the institutions of society to order life aright.
Especially does Calvin excoriate the papal church for its complicity in dissolving proper boundaries (Abyss), as well as in asphyxiating the gospel by
rules, regulations, ceremonies of no help to suffering people (Labyrinth). Fear of the Abyss led Calvin to hate all excess, as in drinking or dress, and
loath polluting mixtures, such as women who did not keep to their station. Thus Calvin seeks boundaries in the social arena, and expresses in the
clarity of his writing style his own appreciation for order. After setting up these twin fears and the anxiety Calvin and others of his age knew in
hesitating between them, Bouwsma proceeds to divide the rest of his study between Calvin's allegiance to the past, as he tried to avoid the abyss of
doubt, and his contradictory espousal of Renaissance humanism, which provided intellectual and rhetorical tools, whose mastery promised an escape
from the suffocating labyrinth of the past. His allegiance to the past is explored in several chapters, where the author lays out Calvin's attachment to
parts of the medieval understanding of nature, especially the Ptolemaic cosmology, his fear of disorder that clouded his advice to persecuted
Protestants, his resistance to change. Here are the remnants of scholastic theology that Calvin students know so well. This is the Calvin who stresses
the primacy of the intellect; the Calvin who identifies his own views with God's. This Calvin worries about the God of reason accommodating himself
to rude humans in the scriptures by appearing as a passionate, even a savage, deity There was no antidote to anxiety in this tradition. He had to move
away from its suffocating embrace toward freedom. Bouwsma turns next to what he calls "the opening;' which is Humanism. "The failure of the
philosophical culture to relieve Calvin's anxiety compelled him to turn for relief in another direction. In Renaissance humanism and its assumptions
about the human personality and the possibilities of knowledge, he found a way to extricate himself from the labyrinth of philosophy. His humanism
was thus not merely peripheral or auxiliary to his achievement, as has commonly been supposed. It was crucial to his thought. It constantly challenged
his traditional culture, and Calvinism had its origins in his struggle to come to terms with the double legacy of philosophy and humanism (113). In
five chapters Bouwsma examines the humanist side of Calvin. After a chapter on Renaissance Humanism, its history, its models, its tools, the reader is
introduced to the 'other Calvin'. Here also is a Calvin the reader knows well: for whom heart, not intellect, is primary, who has good things to say
about the body, about beauty, music, wine, sexuality, marriage. Here is the Calvin who can explain Paul's apparent lapses into legalism as mere
kowtowing to This content downloaded from 185.44.78.76 on Fri, 13 Jun 2014 08:19:02 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
486 The Sixteenth Century Journal local custom, who can criticize the church fathers, who has a practical and flexible approach to church
polity, who knows that theology does not express God's truth unequivocally. In this section Bouwsma attempts to explain Calvin's attachment to the
doctrine of predestination as protection against anxiety: anxiety caused by the church, or by the apparent success of the wicked, or the
unpredictableness of life. At this point I found myself wanting a synthesis. How did Calvin the philosopher, the traditionalist, the scholastic embrace
pragmatic humanism and its drive toward openness and freedom? Of course, this is more than Bouwsma can do-to unite a Calvin whom he has
exhaustively described to be torn between the Labyrinth of the past and the Abyss of freedom toward the future. The two are "not only combined but
promiscuously jumbled together within the historical Calvin, much as they have been variously combined in the whole course of Western civilization.
In this respect Calvin was not only a singularly representative sixteenth-century personage . . . he was also Everyman (321).' Calvin's attraction, then,
was his ability to provide people with guidance for living with the anomalies and contradictions the age supplied in abundance. Unlike its role in
Weberian historiography, Calvinism did not intensify people's anxieties, but rather relieved them, or at least made them appear normal. Both liberty
and order found their roots in his thought as it was translated into other cultures, other times, as our nation's history makes abundantly clear. For this
reviewer, the book is a booming success. There are parts that seem wrong, or the nuance tips badly. But not many. I think historians should not use
contemporary portraits as diagnostic tools as Bouwsma appears to in one place (3). Surely gall stones and tuberculosis and thromboid hemorrhoids
and gout were as much the cause of the "fatigue and revulsion" in his later portraits as was anxiety (Maritain said the older Luther's portraits just
showed what happened to people who reject Rome!) And I wish he had done more, or less, with the iterated comments about Calvin's coldness toward
his father. Once or twice I thought he might plunge the study into psychobiography. But perhaps the bruising that reviewers gave to Suzanne
Selinger's excellent Calvin against Himself (1984) quenched some Bouwsma remarks on Calvin's personal traumas leaving only these vestigial
remnants. And there are a few straw figures - people who think Calvin was a systematic theologian, people who ignore his debt to and skillful use of
the tools of rhetoric or his immersion in the humanistic enterprise of the age. There aren't too many of these folk writing on Calvin these days. But
these, as Calvin would say, are puerile cavils -cavils about a study that has already made my present reading of Calvin's commentaries measurably
more interesting and more understanding. Any model that opens up other studies is useful. And this one opens up the totality of Calvin studies and

simply cannot be ignored by anyone who follows. W. Fred Graham