Books in Brief: God’s Man: A Novel on the Life of John Calvin

God’s Man: A Novel on the Life of John Calvin, by Duncan Norton-Taylor (Baker, 298 pp., $8.95). Of the seven spiritual works of mercy, “to admonish sinners” can more readily be applied to John Calvin during his active ministry in Geneva than, say, “to forgive all injuries,” or, “to bear wrongs patiently.” He and Geneva’s Little Council laid down laws governing every facet of life, public and private, and any who transgressed them suffered the consequences, at the stake, on the block, or in the lake: drownings, beheadings, and burnings were common, also the lopping off of offending limbs. Calvin was a man driven by God, and as God’s man he showed no mercy to heretics and blasphemers. The trial, sentencing, and burning alive of Michael Servetus (whose heresy was his refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity), described in horrifying detail by Duncan Norton-Taylor, is the dramatic climax of this well-researched novel. Norton-Taylor succeeds in the difficult task of making Calvin, if not likable, at least understandable and even, at times, pitiable. A useful device he employs is to entrust sections of the narrative to two followers of Calvin, the childhood friend who will break with him over the rigidity of his nature and doctrine, and an older man who remains Calvin’s disciple to the end. Seen through their eyes, Calvin is three-dimensional—more vulnerable than the Calvin who is the stern and unyielding narrator. As interesting as Calvin’s development from devout Catholic to totally Protestant author of the massive Institutes of the Christian Religion is Norton-Taylor’s picture of the often venal, frequently self-righteous, not overly bright bourgeois town fathers who made the self-governing Swiss cities of Geneva, Zurich, Basel, and Berne central to the intellectual development of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.

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Priscilla L. Buckley

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God’s Man: A Novel on the Life of John Calvin, by Duncan Norton-Taylor (Baker, 298 pp., $8.95). Of the seven spiritual works of mercy, “to admonish sinners” can more readily be applied to John Calvin during his active ministry in Geneva than, say, “to forgive all injuries,” or, “to bear wrongs patiently.” He and Geneva’s Little Council laid down laws governing every facet of life, public and private, and any who transgressed them suffered the consequences, at the stake, on the block, or in the lake: drownings, beheadings, and burnings were common, also the lopping off of offending limbs. Calvin was a man driven by God, and as God’s man he showed no mercy to heretics and blasphemers. The trial, sentencing, and burning alive of Michael Servetus (whose heresy was his refusal to accept the doctrine of the Trinity), described in horrifying detail by Duncan Norton-Taylor, is the dramatic climax of this well-researched novel. Norton-Taylor succeeds in the difficult task of making Calvin, if not likable, at least understandable and even, at times, pitiable. A useful device he employs is to entrust sections of the narrative to two followers of Calvin, the childhood friend who will break with him over the rigidity of his nature and doctrine, and an older man who remains Calvin’s disciple to the end. Seen through their eyes, Calvin is three-dimensional—more vulnerable than the Calvin who is the stern and unyielding narrator. As interesting as Calvin’s development from devout Catholic to totally Protestant author of the massive Institutes of the Christian Religion is Norton-Taylor’s picture of the often venal, frequently self-righteous, not overly bright bourgeois town fathers who made the self-governing Swiss cities of Geneva, Zurich, Basel, and Berne central to the intellectual development of the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century.