Calvin and Aquinas Reconsidered

chapter 2 Calvin and Aquinas Reconsidered

Charles Raith ii

What did John Calvin (1509–64) know of Thomas Aquinas’s (d. 1274) theology? Did he actually read the Angelic Doctor’s work, or is his knowledge of Aquinas a mediated knowledge? And in the end did he understand what he encountered? The answers given to these questions have fluctuated drastically over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries. The older scholarship was generally optimistic about Calvin’s firsthand familiarity with Aquinas’s work. The edi- tors of the Opera selecta, for example, state confidently that Calvin “without a doubt” read Aquinas’s books firsthand and had his books “before his eyes.”1 François Wendel likewise affirmed Calvin’s intimate familiarity with Aquinas, claiming that it had been “proved” (though Wendel provides no citations for these proofs) that Calvin studied the works of Aquinas firsthand.2 If one were to gauge Calvin’s relationship to Aquinas by the copious number of footnotes to Aquinas found in the McNeill-Battles edition of Calvin’s Institutes, one might conclude that not only did Calvin have a deep knowledge of Aquinas’s thought, but that Aquinas was one of his primary interlocutors!3 Others, however, have been more pessimistic. In his 1967 dissertation “Cal- vin’s Criticism of Scholastic Theology,” Armand Aime LaVallee concluded, “There seems to be no definitive case presented for Calvin’s direct knowledge of Anselm or Thomas.”4 Alexandre Ganoczy concluded likewise, arguing for

1 John Calvin, Opera selecta, vol. 4: Institutionis Christianae religionis 1559 librum IV continens, eds Peter Barth and Wilhelm Niesel (Munich: 1962), vii: “quanquam nihilo secius adhuc in quaestionem vocatur, quae opera Scholasticorum praeter Anselmum, Petrum Lombardum, Thomam, quorum libros sine dubio legit, Calvinus ipse ante oculos habeurit.” 2 François Wendel, Calvin: The Origins and Development of His Religious Thought, trans. Philip Mairet (New York: 1963), 126–27. 3 Calvin’s Institutes has a long history of receiving apparatuses that have presented Calvin as being more interested in Thomas than the text actually warrants. To give but one example: Inst. ii.ii.26, where Calvin addresses the rectitude of the liberum arbitrium. He never references Aquinas, and his comments go without a marginal citation to Aquinas in the 1559 editions of Estienne and O.R. Stephanus, the 1561 editions of Rihel and Reboul, and the 1576 edition of Le Preux. But starting with the 1585 edition of Vignon, the citation “Thomas partis prima quest. 83 art. 3” appears and continues in later editions. 4 Armand Aime LaVallee, “Calvin’s Criticism of Scholastic Theology” (PhD diss., Harvard Uni- versity, 1967), 237–41.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2019 | DOI:10.1163/9789004409309_003 20 Raith the rather late development of Calvin’s knowledge of medieval theology and contra Wendel for a more limited knowledge of Aquinas.5 Arvin Vos followed Ganoczy and extended his assessment to assert that Calvin knew Aquinas only secondhand, “probably from some scattered quotations in the scholastic liter- ature,”6 and Muller has more recently affirmed Ganoczy’s position, concluding that Calvin’s general attacks on the scholastici are often in actuality attacks aimed at his French contemporaries—the théologiens Sorboniques—and “are no longer directed against such luminaries of the scholastic past as Bonaven- ture, Aquinas, or Duns Scotus.”7 Reflecting well the bipolar state of affairs on this issue, Paul Helm says little more than that it cannot be argued that “he knew nothing of him,” since Calvin mentions Aquinas by name, and argues that the general intellectual relation between Calvin and Aquinas “is a puz- zling one.”8 We should be clear up front what exactly we are attempting to assess when addressing the Aquinas-Calvin relationship. One approach is to gauge the broader influence of Thomistic thought on Calvin, as has been done by David Steinmetz, Richard Muller, and Susan Schreiner.9 This approach provides the context in which Calvin may have encountered Aquinas’s thought and his works, though it contributes little to assessing Calvin’s direct encounter with Aquinas’s texts. Another approach is to assess to what degree Aquinas’s and Calvin’s theologies are in agreement or disagreement, as has been done by Arvin Vos and myself.10 While these analyses raise questions of a more direct

5 Alexandre Ganoczy, Le Bibliothèque de L’Académie de Calvin (Geneva: 1969), 103; Alexandre Ganoczy, The Young Calvin, trans. David Foxgrover and Wade Provo (Philadel- phia: 1987), 173–78. 6 Arvin Vos, “Calvin and Aquinas,” Theology Digest 34 (1987): 337–41, here 339. 7 Richard A. Muller, “Scholasticism in Calvin: Relation and Disjunction,” in Calvinus Sin- cerioris Religionis Vindex: Calvin as Protector of the Purer Religion, eds Wilhelm H. Neuser and Brian G. Armstrong (Kirksville: 1997), 247–65, here 264; cf. Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin (New York: 2000), 13. 8 Paul Helm, Calvin at the Centre (New York: 2010), 150; Paul Helm, John Calvin’s Ideas (New York: 2004). 9 Steinmetz affirms a mediated Thomistic influence on Calvin via Martin Bucer (“Calvin among the Thomists,” in Calvin in Context [New York: 1995], 152), while Richard Muller points to various 15th- and 16th-century Franciscan and Dominican texts (After Cal- vin: Studies in the Development of a Theological Tradition [New York: 2003], 40–41), and Susan Schreiner looks to Nicholas of Lyra’s exegetical work (“ ‘Through a Mirror Dim- ly’: Calvin’s Sermons on Job,” Calvin Theological Journal 21 [1986]: 175–93); for Lyra, see also Muller, “Scholasticism in Calvin,” 263. 10 Arvin Vos, Aquinas, Calvin and Contemporary Protestant Thought: A Critique of Protestant Views on the Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington, DC: 1985); Charles Raith ii, Aquinas and Calvin on Romans: God’s Justification and Our Participation (Oxford: 2014).