Bridling the Prince: Humanist Counsel & Its Perils in Calvin's Seneca Commentary

• In Event: Reimagining the Republic: Institutional Renewal & Virtue in Early Modern Europe

Abstract

This paper examines Jean Calvin’s engagement with the tradition of humanist counsel that developed in the northern humanist mirror literature during the early decades of the sixteenth century. The locus classicus for Calvin’s constitutional thought is the concluding chapter of the 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, which contains his appeal to the Spartan ephors, Athenian demarchs, and Roman tribunes as models for offices established to moderate the passions and resist the license of kings. The 1532 Commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, by contrast, has received less attention, seen largely as a relic of his pre-conversion legal career, chiefly useful in illumining his mature thought on such concepts as equity, ius, or the relation between divine, natural, and civil law. But it was in the Seneca Commentary that Calvin began his reflection on the role of popular institutions in regulating royal power, via a sustained engagement with the perplexities of counsel that occupied contemporary humanists.

Examining Calvin’s Seneca Commentary in its original context, as a commentary on a mirror for a prince, discloses a set of durable moral concerns that would continue to occupy Calvin’s political thought. This paper argues that Calvin grounded the constitutional theory of his Seneca Commentary in a critique of the humanists’ theory of paraenetic counsel, one which saw the counselor’s command of humane pedagogy and moral exhortation as vital to the development of inner moral restraints on the exercise of power. Because of the instability inherent in the humanists’ project, however, Calvin turned to popular institutions as a source of external restraint, capable of providing a stable foundation for the cultivation of virtuous rule.

The paper begins with a study of key works in the northern humanist mirror tradition: Desiderius Erasmus’s Institutio principis christiani (1516), Thomas More’s “Dialogue of Counsel” from Utopia (1516), Josse Clichtove’s De regis officio (1519), and Guillaume Budé’s De l’institution du prince (c. 1522), along with translations of several of Plutarch’s Moralia conducted by Erasmus and Budé between 1505 and 1516. The discourse of counsel developed in these works showed varied assessments of the relation between virtue, natura, and fortuna in shaping the moral character of a prince. These disagreements, in turn, led to different views concerning the possibility of rhetorical or pedagogical techniques to overcome either defects in nature or the hazards of fortune and cultivate a stable, virtuous character within the prince. Yet, maintaining a commitment to Plutarch’s exhortation “that philosophers should converse chiefly with princes,” Erasmus, More, and Budé each carved out a vital role for the humanist counselor in stabilizing a prince’s character and steering the royal court towards the public good.

The paper continues with a study of Calvin’s Seneca Commentary, arguing that Calvin’s turn to popular institutions emerged from a deep ambivalence concerning the project of humanist counsel. Because of the native arrogance of power, Calvin argued, a humane counselor cannot teach the virtues but must exhort in an oblique manner (obliqua via), under the guise of praise (sub specie laudis), seeking to counteract persistent libidinal desires rather than to cultivate a stable character. Because the inner restraints cultivated by humanist counsel often prove ineffective, Calvin turned to counterbalancing popular institutions, especially the models of the Spartan ephors and the Roman tribunate, to impose external restraints on a ruler’s will, reorienting the exercise of royal power towards the public good. It concludes with a reflection on the ramifications for Calvin’s later thought, suggesting that his turn in the Institutes to the models of Sparta, Athens, and Rome should be understood not simply as an instrumental appropriation of classical institutions in defense of the persecuted French evangelicals, but also as the continuation of an earlier interrogation into the moral and psychological foundations of virtuous rule.

Author

• Nicholas Barden, Georgetown University