The Seekers: The Story of Man's Continuing Quest to Understand His World (18 page)

Though Calvin had never intended to settle in Geneva, he was persuaded. Eventually his remarkable energy and courage would make Geneva famous as “the Protestant Rome.” City and Church were to be a single community, both enforcing the model of a biblical commonwealth. Many of the rules of morality declared by Farel and Calvin had been in the city’s code since the Middle Ages, but now the community feared they would be enforced. In 1538 a newly elected city council expelled both Farel and Calvin from the city. Calvin went to Strassburg, where he ministered to French refugees. Three years of chaos in Geneva, without the leadership of Farel or Calvin, led the citizens then in 1541 to recall Calvin, whom they provided with a comfortable house (including a wine cellar) and a good salary.

Calvin could now build the Reformed Church of Geneva in enduring form. He drafted ecclesiastical ordinances that would remain substantially the constitution of the Church of Geneva and be a model for Reformed Churches in Europe and the New World. He established four orders of the ministry: (1) teaching doctors (at first Calvin was the only one); (2) preaching pastors; (3) disciplining elders; and (4) deacons, charged with the works of charity. Morality would be strictly enforced, while Protestant doctrine would be expounded at the new University of Geneva, which he established. The program also included responsibility for a missionary effort to spread Calvinism abroad, which made it the only Protestant sect with universalist aspirations. While Calvin delivered regular biblical commentaries as public lectures, religious instruction was under a Company of Pastors, whose members were screened under Calvin’s direction. The elders acted as “policemen” of the Reformation morality, and met with the pastors in a Consistory where, too, Calvin’s voice was heard. They had the power to excommunicate, and were responsible for Geneva’s reputed “reign of terror,” which might have been called the reign of biblical morality. It was this regime that came to be called “Puritan.” The deacons in a “Hospital-general” administered the orphanage, the distribution of free bread, and works for the poor, where also Calvin was active.

Calvin’s energetic oversight of this ecclesiastical system did not go unchallenged. The melodramatic climax came when a Spanish doctor, Michael Servetus (c. 1511-1553), who had written a book attacking the doctrine of the Trinity, came to Geneva. Calvin had Servetus arrested and convicted of heresy, for which crime he had Servetus burned at the stake. And so Calvin obliged later Catholic partisans (including Lord Acton) with a spectacle of Protestant intolerance. After 1555, when Calvin was in full control in Geneva, he devoted his fierce energies to spreading Reformed Protestantism. He trained French refugees to serve as Reformed pastors and smuggled them back to France. Congregations on the Geneva model would be founded in Scotland and America, in England and the Netherlands.

While Calvin wielded dogmatic and dictatorial powers in Geneva and in some of the successor communities, the enduring influence of Calvinism on Christian religious and political institutions was quite otherwise. The presbyterian form of church government, of which Calvin was a founder, was very much in the spirit of modern Western representative political institutions. Calvin’s theory of church government declared that only Christ was the head of the community, with all members being equal under him. The ministry then belonged to the entire church, though responsibilities might be distributed among several officers. All who held church offices would be elected by the members of the congregation, whom they represented. The church, then, was to be governed not by clergy but by persons (including officeholders, pastors, and elders) who represented the whole church. This too provided a federal relation among the local churches drawn together in an elected presbytery, or national or general assembly.

Calvinist doctrine centered on the local church. The power that resided in the membership as a whole created a decentralized form of organization that gave the Calvinist churches great strength and power to resist and defy persecution. If Calvinism was to be defeated, every one of the congregations had to be eradicated in turn. To arrest the minister would not silence the church, for the community itself was what survived, and could always elect new ministers. Based on the principle of representation, not of authority or dictation, Calvinism satisfied the modern need for participation—in church as well as state. And the transplantation of Calvinism to New England in a New World would nourish and encourage the dignity and participation of separate congregations and the independent faithful, out of which a new society would arise in North America.

COMMUNAL SEARCH

As you set out for Ithaka
hope the voyage is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.

—C. P. CAVAFY (1910)

The great shift in the direction of seeking, which marked the opening of the modern mind, was the turn to experience. This was the turn from the upward reach of the Hebrew Prophets and the inward search of the Greek philosophers to the thrust outward and all around. This new way of seeking would bring Seekers back to community—not for orthodox dogma, but as a way of making the search continual, renewed in each generation. Modern liberal society would be a way of organizing for unending search. When the dyspeptic Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) noted “the three great elements of modern civilization, gunpowder, printing and the Protestant religion,” he was not far off the mark. Gunpowder expanded warfare—between nations and would-be nations. Printing endlessly widened the community of current and past experiences. The Protestant Reformation made personal experience the authentic avenue to religious faith. Discoverers in science—Galileo, Vesalius, Harvey, Newton, Malpighi, and others—were revealing how boundless were the still-uncharted areas of nature, while Columbus, Magellan, and Balboa awakened Europeans to how limited had been their experience of the earth and the seas. As science went public, societies pooled experience in parliaments of scientists. The growth of cities and the rising commerce of great colonial empires in America, Africa, and Asia widened European experience of exotic peoples and products. At every turn, enlarged experience revealed unimagined possibilities, there for the finding. And kept alive the Seekers’ quest for meaning and purpose.

WAYS OF DISCOVERY: IN SEARCH OF EXPERIENCE

If the Past has been an obstacle and a burden,
knowledge of the Past is the safest and surest
emancipation.

—LORD ACTON

The Legacy of Homer: Myth and the Heroic Past

In the past—the first universal source of experience—Seekers hoped to find clues to life’s meaning and purpose. And in the Old Testament the ancient Hebrews left the most influential interpretation of the past ever to come to the West. Though it was the book of human destiny, the story belonged to God, His works of creation, His mercy, or His wrath. The story of God’s covenant with His chosen people told how He rewarded or punished their response to His commands. And so affirmed Jewish national identity, confronting the powerful empire of Assyria, suffering exile and captivity in Babylon, and returning to the Promised Land. Though a work of many authors, it told a single theme—God’s purposes.

The ancient Greek view of the past—the next great tradition for interpreting history—offered a stark contrast. Their heroic epics were tales of human deeds, despite the whims of gods and goddesses. In this, as in everything else, the Greeks found their own way, and marked new paths that we still follow. For the ancient Hebrews there was no doubt of how or by whom future events would be governed. The ancient Greeks explored the uncertainty of man’s moral purposes. We think of the future as what lies before us, and the past as behind us. But the ancient Greeks, as Bernard Knox observes, took an opposite view. For them “behind” or “back” (
opiso
in Greek) referred not to the past but to the future. They saw their past (and their present) so plainly and vividly in front of them that it is no wonder they thought of the unknown and invisible future as behind them. In the
Odyssey,
Homer describes a wise old man as “the only one who sees what is in front and what is behind.” Naturally, then, they saw themselves “backing into the future.”

Long before they began writing what we call history, they had found their own vivid and persuasive way of organizing and interpreting the past. Their heroic myths, no mere tales of long-past happenings, became sacred texts of morality and religion. And long before they invented the writing of history, they had a confident and traditional view of the past that they could see plainly before them.

For the ancient Greeks it was myth—the heroic epic—that gave their past real and memorable form and filled it with meaning. In the reach for experience the first universal source is tradition: what grandparents told parents and what parents tell children. But for their tradition the Greeks did not rely on the casual spoken word heard at the mother’s knee. In heroic myths, perpetuated in deathless poetry, they gave their past an enduring charm and what would seem an endless resource of meaning. While we see their myths as the realm of fantasy, for classic Greeks these were the treasured record of their past. Myth gave tradition its memorable drama. In myths all people learn of ancient times beyond everyday experience, of superhuman creatures and miraculous events. Unlike historical events, these need no proof. Their survival in the sacred word makes myths the first authentic story of purpose, of first causes and origins.

While our own modern Western society has not been fertile of myth, fortunately we have inherited the myths of ancient Greece. Familiar in our education, they brighten our lives. In them we can see how myths, serving our own need to know origins and purpose, sometimes frustrate our search for the true past. Their authority comes from being traditional and having no known author. They survive in the tradition of the spoken—or sung—word. So they dramatize our need to know why and our willingness to take poetry for truth.

The English word “myth” derives from the Greek
mythos,
which meant “word” in the sense of a final pronouncement. Its special meaning appears by contrast with the Greek
logos,
which meant “word” in the sense of a truth that can be argued and demonstrated. So myths are traditional statements of truths. Their anonymous source somehow added to their authenticity.

Greek myths, then, were an ancient “vulgate,” a popular way of making the past known, as widespread a way of creating belief as journalism is today. And their “vulgate” was validated by the consensus of the ages. Just as the journalist nowadays expects the reader to take his word for the truth of the story, so did the ancient bards. Like modern journalists, they too were commonly silent on their “sources.” Time itself gave authority to their utterances. “History is born as tradition,” Paul Veyne observes, “not built up from source materials.” Like the bard, the historian, when he begins to appear, also treats himself as a source. But he will have other purposes and find new paths in his search for the true past.

* * *

The
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
at the end of the oral period of Greek culture, are a legacy of generations of bards. What we have learned about the ways of bards today in the Balkan mountains, where the Homeric bards once sang, suggests that there was a stability and continuity in the tales they told. For, unlike modern poets, Homeric bards were not concerned with “originality.”

The Homeric epic had originated in long centuries before Homer and the eighth century B.C., in the creative period when bards were improvising, learning from older men, and even adding to the familiar heroic themes. While creative talent was still at work on the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey,
bards assimilated their individual contributions into these monumental poems. The Homeric word for poet is
aiodos,
or singer. And like all successful singers, bards were not reluctant to build their repertoires from the works of others.

When bards, enriched by the creative talents among them, found an attractive version, they could reproduce it for generations. The Homeric bards had probably reached this stage in the mid-seventh century B.C. But the rise of literacy and reliance on fixed texts brought the decline of the spontaneity of the bard, the
aiodos
singing to the accompaniment of his lyrelike
kitharis.
He was displaced by the
rhapsode,
or trained reciter. The rhapsode (the word means “song-stitcher” in Greek), who appeared in the fifth century B.C., was well trained, and probably had texts of Homer, though he still recited from memory. Rhapsodes then competed for prizes at public festivals. But while the bards were relied on for the authentic traditional myth, the very name “rhapsode” became a byword for unreliability as they continued to perform and compete for prizes into the third century A.D. The last stage in the degeneration of the tradition of the oral myth, rhapsodes were despised by educated people. Scholars can still detect their awkward additions to the works of earlier Homeric bards.

The Homeric epics were finally written down at the end of the true oral period—the “Dark Ages” of ancient Greece (c. 1100-900 B.C.). That Dark Age proved well suited for the thriving and transmission of oral poetry, which, unlike architecture, required no prosperity or any particular materials. The rudeness of daily life in an illiterate community that made literary culture impossible was no barrier to the seeking for heroes. Like the Norse sagas, the Homeric epics themselves suggest that ages of hardship and adversity, which reward courage, pride, and sheer survival, are fertile for heroic poetry.

Perhaps eras when other grand outlets for man’s seeking, hopes, and ambitions are lacking naturally find expression in the only kind of monument that needs no material resource—the monumental epic. Such great monuments—to paraphrase Whitman—require great audiences. The Homeric epics found their audiences (and patrons) in the feasts of noblemen and in the religious festivals of the community. In other ways too the Homeric epics played the role of monuments. For a monument, as the origin of the word (in Latin,
monere,
to remind, admonish, or warn) suggests, aims not to surprise and astonish, but to remind.