This week here’s a piece I wrote last summer on the very striking use of Virgil in the opening of Calvin’s Institutes of Christian Religion. We tend not to think of Calvin as a stylist, or a great prose writer, but he was a remarkable one — both in French and Latin. This piece also features in passing a taste of various early modern English verse translations of Virgil, from Dryden back to Thomas May and Phaer & Twyne.
The first extended quotation in Jean Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion, perhaps the single most influential work of the sixteenth century, comes not from Christian scripture, or the long tradition of commentary upon that scripture, but from Virgil. It’s part of the speech of Anchises, Aeneas’ father, when he encounters his son in the underworld in Book 6 of the Aeneid:
Principio coelum, ac terras, camposque liquentes,Lucentemque globum Lunae, Titaniaque astraSpiritus intus alit: totamque infusa per artusMens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet.Inde hominum pecudumque genus, vitaeque volantum,Et quae marmoreo fert monstra sub aequore pontus.Igneus est ollis vigor, et coelestis origoSeminibus: quantum non noxia corpora tardant,Terrenique hebetant artus, moribundaque membra.(Aeneid 6. 724-32)
To give a sense of the various facets of Virgil’s style and influence in early modernity, in this piece I’ve used a variety of (very roughly) contemporary verse translations of Virgil. Here’s Dryden’s version of this passage, first published in 1697:
Know first that Heav’n and Earth’s compacted Frame,And both the radiant lights, one common soulInspires and feeds, and animates the whole.This active mind, infused through all the space,Unites and mingles with the mighty mass.Hence men and beasts the breath of life obtain,And birds of air, and monsters of the main.The ethereal vigour is in all the same;And every soul is filled with equal flame:As much as earthly limbs, and gross allayOf mortal members, subject to decay,Blunt not the beams of heaven and edge of day.
As a well-educated humanist, his commentaries to hand, Calvin almost immediately points out that these lines are related to a passage from Georgics 4, in which the poet is prompted by consideration of bees to make a similar claim about a ‘universal mind’:
His quidam signis, atque haec exempla secuti,Esse apibus partem divinae mentis, et haustusAetherios dixere: Deum namque ire per omnesTerrasque tractusque maris, coelumque profundum.Hinc pecudes, armenta, viros, genus omne ferarum,Quemque sibi tenues nascentem arcessere vitas.Scilicet huc reddi deinde, ac resoluta referriOmnia: nec morti esse locum; sed viva volareSideris in numerum, atque alto succedere coelo.(Georgics 4.219-227)
This time, the version is a slightly earlier one, published by Thomas May in 1628:
Noting these signs, and tokens, some defineThe Bees partakers of a soule divine,And heavenly spirit; for the godhead isDiffus’d through earth, through seas, & lofty skies.From hence all beasts, men, cattle, all that live,All that are borne their subtle soules receive.Hither againe they are restor’d, not dy,But when dissolv’d, returne, and gladly flyUp to the stars; in heaven above they live.
Both passages describe a kind of ‘divine mind’, diffused through creation. In fact they are linked by bees, too: the lines from Aeneid 6 are immediately preceded by a simile that compares the souls in the underworld swarming on the banks of the Styx to bees on a summer’s day:
Ac veluti in pratis, ubi apes aestate serenaFloribus insidunt variis, et candida circumLilia funduntur:
This time we can go back even farther, to Phaer and Twyne’s very popular translation of the Aeneid into fourteeners, published in 1584:
And peoples thicke on euery side that no man number can.As bees in medowes fresh, (whom somer sun doth shining warme)Assembling fall on floures, and Lilies white about they swarme.
It is not surprising that Calvin acknowledges Virgil’s enormous cultural authority, nor that he treats Virgil’s works as a unified whole – one passage naturally leading to or suggesting another – in a way that is not typical of, for instance, most modern treatments of Dante or Shakespeare, but which reflects how Renaissance commentaries generally worked. (A lot of scriptural commentary still works this way: because scripture is often understood as a unity, one passage can illuminate another.) Quasi-scriptural approaches to Virgil are not uncommon. There are lots of good stories about people trying the sortes Virgilianae (when a verse of Virgil, opened at random, is supposed to predict the future). My favourite is the one about Charles I and Cowley’s impromptu and unfortunate translation, of which there are many versions.
When Augustine quotes Virgil’s Anchises in the very first paragraph of City of God — a parallel of which Calvin was surely well aware — he does so to emphasise the continuity between the wisdom of Virgil and that of the Bible.1 It is not uncommon to find quotations from Virgil interpersed with those from the Bible, as here in the Parisian catacombs (there are several of these inscriptions, and most are scriptural):
Calvin, however, quotes Virgil twice, and at some length, not to demonstrate continuity between classical and Christian perspectives but on the contrary to assert the foolishness and indeed the profanity of Pythagorean pantheism, introducing the first of his passages, from the speech of Anchises, as follows:
Quod autem de arcana inspiratione quae vegetat totum mundum quidam blaterant, non modo dilutum, sed omnino profanum est. Placet illis celebre dictum Virgilii:2
Some persons, moreover, babble about a secret inspiration that gives life to the whole universe, but what they say is not only weak but completely profane. They are pleased by that famous passage of Virgil:3
He then follows the second verse passage I gave above (from the Georgics) with an apparently sarcastic aside:
En quid ad gignendam fouendamque in cordibus hominum pietatem valeat ieiuna illa speculatio de uniuersa mente quae mundum animat ac vegetat.
See, of what value to beget and nourish godliness in men’s hearts is that jejune speculation about the universal mind which animates and quickens the world!
Calvin could easily have cited or summarised Virgil without quoting him (as indeed he does for that ‘filfthy dog’, Lucretius, in the next sentence); or he could have referred to any of the more precisely philosophical treatments of this theme to be found in ancient literature: early modern commentaries on these passages provide a host of parallels. That he did not do either of these things suggests that in the case of Virgil – even Virgil at his most abstractly philosophical – Calvin took the form of the expression (that is, the poetry) to be significant. Whatever else he is doing, Calvin here quotes Virgil the poet and allows us to hear him as such.
That Calvin is conscious of, attentive to, and indeed drawing our attention to what it is actually like to read Virgil is apparent from that artful remark with which he at first seems to redeem Virgil for the Christian reader, and then asserts the emptiness of that hope. Calvin wrote wonderful Latin prose, and this sentence is worth looking at closely: En quid ad gignendam fouendamque in cordibus hominum pietatem valeat ieiuna illa speculatio de uniuersa mente quae mundum animat ac vegetat. The first half of the sentence evokes in sequence the three texts of the modern Virgilian canon — the Eclogues (Virgil’s early collection of pastoral poems), the Georgics (a didactic poem about farming) and finally the Aeneid. En (look!, behold!) is an emotive word in Latin: it belongs to the emotional register of the Eclogues, and in fact it’s particularly strongly associated with Eclogues 1, where it appears three times in only 84 lines.4 The sentence continues with two words with similar endings: gignendam and fouendam are both gerundives (verbal adjectives), derived from words meaning ‘beget’ or ‘produce’ (gigno) and ‘nourish’, ‘protect’ or ‘cherish’ (foveo). Gerundives in classical Latin, however, are not particularly poetic: the one type of poetry they are strongly associated with is didactic verse — poetry which sets out to teach a topic. The gerundive construction of ad gignendam fouendamque, and especially the use of two or more gerundives in a row, suggests the instructional mode of the Georgics.5 A few words farther on we reach pietatem, the noun with which those two verbal adjectives are agreeing. Pietas (‘sense of duty’, ‘piety’) and the closely related adjective pius (‘dutiful’) appear, in Virgil, only in the Aeneid, in which they feature so frequently as to be characteristic of that poem and of its protagonist.6 In all later Latin, to describe someone as pius is almost always to recall Aeneas.
By his extremely careful choice of words in the first half of this apparent ‘aside’, Calvin very neatly summarises one traditional approach to the Christian interpretation of Virgil – that reading the works of Virgil as a whole can lead us from noticing (en!), to nurturing (ad gignendam fovendamque), to naming true pietas. This attitude to Virgil was a common one: in Calvin’s own time, Marcus Antonius Maioragio (1514-1555), professor of eloquence at Milan, asked ‘For where better will you discover what virtue and wisdom is possible, than in this divine work of Virgil?’7 But all the way to valeat we have not yet encountered the subject of the sentence. When we finally reach it (speculatio), we discover that this subtle and beguiling summary of the experience of reading Virgil’s poetry is after all a false lead: all he really offers is ‘starveling speculation’ (ieiuna illa speculatio).8
Calvin implicitly acknowledges the seductive power of Virgil’s verse only to repudiate it. His somewhat embattled evocation and denial of Virgil suggests a real complexity of experience: he allows Virgil to speak at length, and indeed his quotations of complete verse paragraphs from the Aeneid and the Georgics emphasise the remarkable flexibility, strength and coherence of Virgil’s poetry at the unit of the paragraph or sequences of paragraphs (as distinct from the clause or line). Secondly, the theme of the quotations reminds us of the central place of the natural world in the Virgilian poetic and religious imagination. But ultimately Calvin’s response unmistakably conveys dissatisfaction or disappointment: there is a hint of real pain, as well as anger, in that ieiuna speculatio, a beauty that offers no real nourishment.
Not all of the great readers of Virgil have expressed or implied such disillusion; but Calvin’s reproach represents one version of a common response. We recognize the germ of feeling which, at its harshest, becomes Ezra Pound’s provocative assessment of Virgil as ‘a second-rater, a Tennysonianized version of Homer’, or Pope’s memorable comment that Virgil wrote only one honest line. Virgil’s Latin is unsurpassably beautiful and moving (for me, most of all in the Georgics), and I have several times tried to write about his distinctive style — most recently in a chapter for the revised Cambridge Companion to Virgil, available here. But the older I get, the more I have a sneaking sympathy for Calvin.
Augustine links Anchises’ famous instruction to his son parcere subiectis et debellare superbos (A.6.853, ‘to spare the defeated and war down the proud’) with the Biblical proverb Deus superbis restitit, humilibus autem dat gratiam (Prov. 3.34, quoted several times in the New Testament, ‘Toward the scorners he is scornful, but to the humble he gives favour’).
Quotations are from the 1576 Latin edition of the Institutes, p. 10.
Translations are based on those in Battles and McNeill (1960; repr. 2006), p. 57.
Compared to three times in the whole of the Georgics (c. 2000 lines) and sixteen times in the entire Aeneid (about 10,000 lines). The word is always associated with strong emotion.
See for instance strings of gerundives at G. 1.178-9, 2.61-2, 398-401, 418-9.
Pietas is found 22 times in the Aeneid; pius 29 times.
Quoted in de la Cerda’s monumental commentary on Virgil, published in 1628.
Ieiuna in Virgil appears only in the Georgics, where it denotes something that offers little nourishment (such as infertile soil).
Ezra Pound, in his ‘ABC of Reading’, retells a favourite anecdote of Yeats’s:
A plain sailor man took a notion to study Latin, and his teacher tried him with Virgil; after many lessons he asked him something about the hero.
Said the sailor: “What hero?”
Said the teacher: “What hero, why, Aeneas, the hero.”
Said the sailor: “Ach, a hero, him a hero? Bigob, I t’ought he was a priest.”
Thank you for opening up Calvin’s Latin. Something you know but perhaps not many readers will is the way the 17th-century poet Lucy Hutchinson went through something like this trajectory in a very precise way: copying out those lines from book 6 from an early version by Denham in a notebook, then choosing to read Calvin in Latin when there were translations available and giving her own (‘That which some prattle of a hiden inspiration whereby the whole world thriues and flourisheth is not only vnsound but very prophane’ and beginning the Latin quotation; and alluding to Virgil in the very non- and partly anti-Virgilian poem Order and Disorder. Still room for a lot of debate about her uses of Virgil.