Calvin John (1509–64), French theologian and church reformer, a major figure in the Protestant Reformation. He was especially important for the so-called Reformed churches in France, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, and England. Calvin was a theologian in the humanist tradition rather than a philosopher. He valued philosophy as ‘a noble gift of God’ and cited philosophers (especially Plato) when it suited his purposes; but he rejected philosophical speculation about ‘higher things’ and despised – though sometimes exploiting its resources – the dominant (Scholastic) philosophy of his time, to which he had been introduced at the University of Paris. His eclectic culture also included a variety of philosophical ideas, of whose source he was often unaware, that inevitably helped to shape his thought. His Christianae religionis institutio (first ed. 1536 but repeatedly enlarged; in English generally cited as Institutes), his theological treatises, his massive biblical commentaries, and his letters, all of which were translated into most European languages, thus helped to transmit various philosophical motifs and attitudes in an unsystematic form both to contemporaries and to posterity. He passed on to his followers impulses derived from both the antiqui and the moderni.
From the former he inherited an intellectualist anthropology that conceived of the personality as a hierarchy of faculties properly subordinated to reason, which was at odds with his evangelical theology; and, though he professed to scorn Stoicism, a moralism often more Stoic than evangelical. He also relied occasionally on the Scholastic quaestio, and regularly treated substantives, like the antiqui, as real entities. These elements in his thought also found expression in tendencies to a natural theology based on an innate and universal religious instinct that can discern evidences of the existence and attributes of God everywhere in nature, and a conception of the Diety as immutable and intelligible. This side of Calvinism eventually found expression in Unitarianism and universalism. It was, however, in uneasy tension with other tendencies in his thought that reflect both his biblicism and a nominalist and Scotist sense of the extreme transcendence of God. Like other humanists, therefore, he was also profoundly skeptical about the capacity of the human mind to grasp ultimate truth, an attitude that rested, for him, on both the consequences of original sin and the merely conventional origins of language. Corollaries of this were his sense of the contingency of all human intellectual constructions and a tendency to emphasize the utility rather than the truth even of such major elements in his theology as the doctrine of predestination. It may well be no accident, therefore, that later skepticism and pragmatism have been conspicuous in thinkers nurtured by later Calvinism, such as Bayle, Hume, and James. See also HUMANISM , PHILOSOPHY OF RELI- GION , TRANSCENDENC. W.J.B.