John Calvin

John Calvin

   John Calvin (the Latinized form of his birth name, Jean Cauvin) studied for the priesthood at Paris in his youth, then turned his attentions to civil and canon law in Orleans. Exposed to the ideas of Martin Luther while he was still in Paris, Calvin had definitely moved into Luther's Protestant camp by 1533. On November 1 of that year, he delivered a speech in which he attacked the established church and called for reforms. He started a revolt against the Catholic Church's medieval condemnation of "usury" -- basically offering loans to be paid back with interest. (This doesn't seem like a religious argument, but most major churches banned usery at the time.) Calvin was offering a poor man an opportunity to work his way out of his then-hopeless condition, and the caste system. This idea would set the stage for the development of capitalism in northern Europe. Other ideas weren't as popular, such as the doctrine of predestination, which states that God has not only appointed the eternal destiny of some to salvation (Unconditional election), but also appointed the remainder to eternal damnation (Reprobation).
   Rather than bringing about the reforms he sought, Calvin's ideas elicited a wave of anti-Protestant outrage that forced him to flee. He ended up in Geneva, where in 1541, pro-Protestant forces gained control of the city. Geneva that became a point of refuge for persecuted Protestants from all over the world, and Calvin became the dominant figure there, as he created a new church. The process was brutal: Calvin had the Catholic opposition suppressed, punished and sometimes executed as he forced his ideas on the population of Geneva. "Freiheit" at this time wasn't so much the freedom to break free from an oppressor as it was the freedom to choose to be oppressed by someone else.