The Right to Heresy: Stefan Zweig on a Hero Who Stood Up to Calvin’s Oppressive Regime in Geneva
I’ve been reading another historical work by Stefan Zweig, his THE RIGHT TO HERESY: CASTELLIO AGAINST CALVIN.
I’d not known that Calvin’s reign in Geneva was such an intolerant dictatorship, but Zweig makes the picture of this man’s insistence that everyone else adhere strictly to the doctrine he laid out. The totalitarian nature of Calvin’s regime is really quite breathtaking. I’m not sure that anything so intrusive and domineering had ever been seen on earth before this mid-sixteenth century dictatorship; it may be more complete than even what’s in North Korea in our times.
Once more, in the figure of a heroic individual defending the spirit of tolerance and freedom of belief in the face of a mighty and unyielding power, Zweig has chosen to explore the story of someone who has encountered history at once of its more dangerous moments. There was Erasmus at the moment that Christendom was splitting in two between warring religious camps. And Marie Antoinette, Queen of France, when Revolution erupted to destroy the French monarchy. And this book about a man who, though he knew he had no chance against the almost totalitarian power of Calvin’s dictatorship, stood up to protest its intolerance and brutality.
The book was published in 1936, as Zweig’s Austrian/Germanic world was in the ever-tightening grip of another totalitarian, brutal, intolerant regime.
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Zweig writes that, In the contest between Castellio and Calvin (Castellio having spoken out against the killing by Calvin and his enforcers of the “heretic” Servetus, defending the right of people to freedom of belief and conscience):
“a timeless question was at stake…A battle was opened, which, under other names and in changing forms, has perpetually to be refought. Theology was no more than an accidental mask, worn because theology was the mode in sixteenth-century Geneva (and elsewhere). Castellio and Calvin were the symbolical expressons of an invisible but irreconcilable conflict. It matters not whether we term the poles of this enduring conflict toleration versus intolerance, freedom versus tutelage, humaneness versus fanaticism, individuality against mechanical uniformity, conscience against violence. In the last analysis these names signify an inward and personal decision as to which counts more for us: mankind or politics, the ethos or the logos, personality or community.
“Every nation, every epoch, every thoughtful human being, has again and again to establish the landmarks between freedom and authority: for, in the absence of authority, liberty degenerates into licence, and chaos ensues; and authority becomes tyranny unless it be tempered by freedom. Buried deep in human nature is a mystical longing for the absorption of self into the community; and ineradicable is the conviction that it must be possible to discover some specific religious, national, or social system which will definitively bestow peace and order upon mankind…[F]or the most part, men are afraid of the gift of freedom; and in very truth the generality, from slackness in the face of the enigmas that have to be solved and the responsibilities that life imposes, crave for the mechanization of the world by a definitive and universally valid order which will save them the trouble of thinking.”
February 9th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
“in the absence of authority, liberty degenerates into licence, and chaos ensues” — is that even true? What would be some examples? It seems to me that sooner or later some “authority” steps in when there is no authority. Have we simply been sold an idea by those who would exercise authority that we need authority, that it is good for us, and that its absence is bad for us?
February 9th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Imagine a world in which parents –to name the original source of authority, in the course of a developing person’s life– exerted no moral influence.
February 9th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Am reminded of Erich Fromm’s book “Escape From Freedom” (1941).
February 9th, 2010 at 8:31 pm
“The Right to Heresay”- Zweig
Hmm ! seems like a Right is something claimed and or somethjing granted.
To claim what the authority is not disposed to permit is to invite martyrdom . . especially in those days and the path to liberty has been bloody.
As for Calvin, I had no idea he had such ‘power’ in Geneva. I think his health was not all that good and his marriage not exemplary and I have read he was buried in an unmarked grave in Geneva. So !
It is his writing that took hold and I think practically became the Protestant religion of Scotland and the Scots-Irish Presbyterians brought it expecially to the part of America where I live. Numerous of our Presidents have been Presbyterian-in earlier days of the last 100 years or so and I have noticed their churches many times were in the town center near the Court House.
It has been a religion of authority, respect for integrity and citizenship.
It’s rather diluted now like much of the rest as the pervasive absorbtion with the material has more or less dissolved the sense of principle.
Too bad !
February 9th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
A few lines from one of my favorite songs, “The Yew Tree”:
“Did you no’ think tae tell when John Knox himsel’
Preached under your branches sae black
To the poor common folk who would lift up the yoke
O’ the bishops and priests frae their backs
But you knew the bargain he sold them
And freedom was only one part
For the price o’ their souls was a gospel sae cold
It would freeze up the joy in their hearts”
On the other hand I understand that one of Knox’s passions was universal education and he worked tirelessly to implement it in Scotland as long as and as well as he could, one consequence being that eighteenth-century Scotland was a major contributor to the Enlightenment period in Western civilization.
February 10th, 2010 at 2:02 am
Calvin eventually captured Servetus and burned him at the stake for refusing to recant. Servetus had read the bible and found that it didn’t mention the Trinity at all. Servetus is considered the father of Unitarianism.
February 10th, 2010 at 5:32 pm
Thanks Andy… The last three sentences provide a profoundly articulate statement of the fundamental basis of our Nation’s social divide… But how do we bridge that chasm without capitulating to those who have abdicated thinking in favor of loyalty to their culturally-assigned Ideological Authority?