Pastors and Professors As Shapers of the Huguenot Tradition

chapter 6 Pulpit and Pen: Pastors and Professors as Shapers of the Huguenot Tradition

Karin Maag

In his 17th-century work on how to prepare sermons, the Huguenot pastor and professor Jean Claude laid out the aims of preaching, highlighting how much more effective sermons were than simply reading and meditating on Bible passages:

Everybody can read Scripture with notes and comments to obtain simply the sense, but we cannot instruct, solve difficulties, unfold mysteries, penetrate into the ways of divine wisdom, establish truth, refute error, comfort, correct, and censure, fill the hearers with an admiration of the wonderful works and ways of God, inflame their souls with zeal, power- fully incline them to piety and holiness, which are the ends of preaching, unless we go farther than barely enabling them to understand Scripture.1

Claude’s high view of preaching illustrates the significant role Huguenot pastors ascribed to their own work in decisively forming the spiritual and moral outlook of their congregations. Focusing particularly on printed sermons and other writings by Huguenot pastors and professors in the hundred-year period from 1570 to 1670, this essay will examine how these pastors understood their role in shaping the world- view of the French Reformed communities they served. Indeed, the emergence of the clergy and professoriate as an inter-married and closely-related class, with its own rites of passage, emergent dynasties, internal fissures, and con- flicting visions of what the Reformed churches in France could be, played a pivotal role in fashioning the Huguenot tradition. Although many of the pastors and professors discussed here were equally ardent polemicists who regu- larly clashed with their Catholic adversaries,2 this essay will concentrate on the

1 Jean Claude, An Essay on the Composition of a Sermon, trans. Robert Robinson (Cambridge: 1778), 5. The original French version of the work, Traité de la composition d’un sermon, was published after Claude’s death in his Oeuvres Posthumes (Amsterdam: 1688). 2 See, for instance, the work of Paul Ferry, pastor in Metz from 1612 to 1669, and his polemical exchanges with Catholic clergy, in Julien Léonard, Être pasteur au XVIIe siècle: Le ministère de Paul Ferry à Metz (1612–1669) (Rennes: 2015), 152–92.

Pulpit and Pen 151 sermons and writings intended for their flocks. Through their sermons, writings, and service as the intellectual leaders of the Church, the Huguenot pastors and professors sought to articulate their vision of the Church, focusing above all on biblically-grounded faith and morals formation for the entire Reformed community. Although their legacy has been overshadowed to a great extent by historiographical attention paid to the political and military strug- gles of the later French Reformation, the influence of these intellectual leaders on the Reformed communities of their day should in no way be discounted.3 At the outset, it is important to point out that the characteristics of the French Reformed pastorate highlighted below were not unique to the Huguenots. Indeed, across early modern Europe in the later 16th and 17th cen- turies, similar patterns of training, examination, oversight, and inter-marriage helped create a strong esprit de corps among Protestant clergy, whether Reformed or Lutheran. At the same time, the growing emphasis on seminary training for Catholic priests after the Council of Trent also built increasing uni- formity among Catholic clergy.4 One possible starting point for a consideration of early modern Huguenot pastors and professors’ influence on their communities is to examine numeri- cal data. Unfortunately, these numbers are hard to come by, largely because of

3 Recent studies focusing on the political and military aspects of Huguenot history after 1570 include Robert Knecht, The French Civil Wars, 1562–1598 (Harlow: 2000); Mack Holt, The French Wars of Religion, 1562–1629, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: 2005); Scott Manetsch, Theodore Beza and the Quest for Peace in France, 1572–1598 (Leiden: 2000); Michel Grandjean and Bernard Roussel (eds,), Coexister dans l’intolérance: l’édit de Nantes (1598) (Geneva: 1998). 4 For the Reformed clergy in the German Palatinate, see Bernard Vogler, Le clergé protestant rhénan au siècle de la réforme, 1555–1619 (Paris: 1976); for Scotland, see John McCallum, Reforming the Scottish Parish: the Reformation in Fife, 1560–1640 (Farnham: 2010), especially Chapter 5, “The Ministry as a Profession”; for the Netherlands, see Willem Frijhoff, “Inspiration, instruction, compétence? Questions autour de la sélection des pasteurs réfor- més aux Pays-Bas, XVIe–XVIIe siècles,” Paedagogica Historica 30 (1994), 13–38. For Lutheran clergy, see Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, “Das reformatorische Verständnis des Pfarramtes,” in Das Evangelische Pfarrhaus. Eine Kultur- und Sozialgeschichte, (ed.) Martin Greiffenhagen (Stuttgart: 1984), 23–46; Luise Schorn-Schütte, Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit (Gütersloh: 1996). For more on Catholic clergy, see Joseph Bergin, “Between Estate and Profession: the Catholic Parish Clergy of Early Modern Western Europe,” in Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification, (ed.) Michael Bush (London: 1992), 66–85. Comparative works include Luise Schorn-Schütte, “The ‘New Clergies’ in Europe: Protestant Pastors and Catholic Reform Clergy after the Reformation,” in The Impact of the Reformation. Princes, Clergy, People, (eds.) Bridget Heal and Ole Peter Grell (Aldershot: 2008), 103–24; and Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe,” Central European History 33 (2000), 1–39.