John Calvin Between the Labyrinth and the Abyss : JOHN CALVIN A Sixteenth-Century Portrait<i> by William J. Bouwsma (Oxford University Press: $22.95; 310 pp.) </i>

To modern readers, the name “Jean Calvin” calls up various images: the idealized champion of purified Christianity (depicted in the great Reformation monument in Geneva), the saintly patriarch of French Protestantism, the embattled defender of a divisive and politically threatening sect, the fanatical and authoritarian “pope of Geneva,” the austere and oppressive creator of “Puritanism” and its legacy. To correct such caricatures, William Bouwsma (Sather professor of history at UC Berkeley and a distinguished and versatile historian of early modern Europe) offers a more human and more colorful “portrait,” drawn largely from the writings closest to Calvin’s heart, especially his biblical commentaries and sermons.

In order to catch this likeness, Bouwsma makes a very large assumption, which is that “in what mattered most to him, Calvin developed little between his break with the church that had nurtured him and his death some thirty years later” (1564). In other words, Calvin’s career was not, like Augustine’s, a pilgrimage; it was a continuous struggle with the demons--the inner as well as the outer demons--of 16th-Century Christian existence. We may question the assumption, but it does have the advantage of making Calvin sit still for his portrait, with his features composed, his expression constant, and his blemishes apparent to all viewers.

Yet even in this magisterial rendition, Calvin never quite comes into focus. Contradictions remain, and for Bouwsma, there are at least “two Calvins--one drawn to rationality and order, the other to emotion and divine mystery. Calvin was never able to overcome the tension between the two, though he did hold up unity as an ideal, even in his conception of “total depravity.” He hated “mixture,” whether sexual, social, or spiritual. Above all, he detested the contamination of the godly by the human, exemplified by religious hypocrisy and, most conspicuously, by the Roman church. He insisted upon rules and “boundaries” and tried to impose them on his large and growing “Calvinist” following in Geneva and throughout Europe.

As pastor and patriarch, Calvin, like Martin Luther, projected his anxieties on his society, and applied his confessional, social, and, at least implicitly, political remedies to a world terribly “out of joint.” He was fascinated with power and emulated his God by trying to wield it in the interests of a social order that touched on all aspects of the human condition. Again, Bouwsma presents Calvin’s social, political, and ecclesiastical program for the times in terms largely of his confessional writings.

In general, Bouwsma stresses personal above religious or social factors. Yet he does not indulge in any recognizable form of psycho-history, and he avoids exploiting the more sensational episodes in Calvin’s life. He does not even mention, for example, the scandal within Calvin’s own household (which involved the adultery of his sister-in-law and then his step-daughter). Nor does the famous confrontation with Servetus figure significantly in Bouwsma’s portrait. Bouwsma prefers to follow the ups and downs of Calvin’s career in his writings, sometimes retaining Calvin’s own contradictions: “Like other humanists, he defended wealth,” Bouwsma writes--”But”--elsewhere--”he particularly criticized mercantile wealth.”

Intellectually, Calvin also shows two faces--one fashionable inclined toward Renaissance humanism (a law-school dropout with a taste for classical literature), the other drawn back toward the “traditional culture” of scholasticism. In religious terms, he was torn between rational theology and the mysteries of a transcendently powerful God. His conversion was not, like Paul’s, sudden, blinding, and terrifying; it was only “a shifting and quickening of his interests.” More unsettling, Bouwsma argues, were the early death of his mother and subsequent exclusion from his father’s house.

In his writings, Calvin often lived up to the Puritan stereotype. He warned of the dangers of sex, and talk about sex, and activities like dancing, which was a “prelude to fornication.” His attitude toward women was ambivalent. He professed a happy marriage, brief as it was, but found much to lament in the vanity and self-love of womenkind in general. Children were there to be shaped in the faith. None of Calvin’s own children survived, and his true family was (as his language abundantly suggests) his confessional flock.

In many ways, the Reformation was an affair of the fathers, and Calvin himself drew inspiration and strength from such patriarchal models as Luther, Melchior Wolmar, Guillaume Farel, and especially Martin Bucer. From them he learned the ways of authority, the burdens of responsibility, and the pressures of leadership. In Geneva, Calvin himself assumed the fatherly role, acting as mentor, emotional guide, placement official, and marriage counselor for numerous young men who called him “father.” He was also called on for political advice, as his network of correspondence came to extend over much of Western Europe, and to include the movers and shakers (as well as the moved and shaken) of these years of religious and finally civil conflict.

But Bouwsma’s focus remains on the man, or rather the writer. The key to Calvin’s character, throughout all his private and public struggles, was anxiety. For Calvin the word anxiety and its semantic neighbors (anguish, distress, perplexity) were a sort of “perpetual crisis” that not only threatened his own soul but does lay at the roots of unbelief in general. Anxiety was the name of the human condition; it was, says Bouwsma, “the source of sin.” It was the source, too, of Calvin’s “terrible imagination” and his “dark vision of the contemporary world,” which informed his preaching and his social program.

Throughout his life, in his verbal behavior at least, Calvin was poised between the abyss and the labyrinth--two of Calvin’s favorite images through which Bouwsma hoped to penetrate the anxieties not only of the two Calvins but also of his age. The abyss stood for the unbounded and the spiritually threatening--hell, death, and even the unfathomable nature of God. The labyrinth was the earthly expression of human anxiety--the inescapable prison of human existence.

Like Augustine, Calvin was a Christian orator, and Bouwsma emphasizes his preference for persuasive rhetoric above demonstrative philosophy not only for saving souls but also for reforming the world. In his disputations with other scholars and leaders, Calvin appealed to reason and learning, but in his pastoral vocation, he set out to “inspire souls and set hearts on fire.” In view of this, one question arises. Is it really possible to compose a portrait out of such hyperbolic and histrionic material? Can we really find “the historical Calvin” through this sort of literary analysis of extravagant and hortatory confessional writings?

Probably not, but we do have something more accessible and more enjoyable than an exhaustive disinterment or a quasi-scientific “explanation” of a public career. Through Bouwsma’s synchronic and textualist examination, we can attain an appreciation of some of Calvin’s long-term and deep-seated preoccupations, prejudices and aspirations--a sense of Calvin’s human spirit between the lines and behind the surface of his texts. We may not understand him any better than he understood himself, but we can enjoy a richly wise, and splendidly engaging portrayal of a man whose doctrines and aspirations--and whose anxieties and fears--shaped, and perhaps are still shaping, the modern world.