The enduring image of Calvin as an unyielding, moralistic and stone-faced tyrant who rejected all the pleasures of life has been his opponents' greatest victory. The iconography of the Frenchman has hardly helped matters, above all, the Reformation monument in Geneva, which casts him to look like some forgotten figure of Middle Earth. His sermons reveal a man whose attitudes towards material thing were far more interesting and textured than his reputation suggests. The fruits of the world, according to Calvin, are not simply for subsistence, but rather to be enjoyed: good wine, good food, conversation, friendship, the pleasures of children and of marital relations. He was fond of wine and, indeed, when the nobleman Jacques de Bourgogne was preparing to come to Geneva Calvin purchased a barrel of fine wine for him in anticipation of his arrival. The drinking of a glass of wine was, for him, associated with the most pleasurable things of life--laughing with friends, sharing a meal with intimates, music and art. Naturally, he preached against gross consumption of worldly goods and immodesty; his own sense of style, however, allowed him to admire clean lines and simplicity. He liked what was tasteful. In his correspondence he could let drop a line that indicated an eye for beautiful buildings or a well-dressed woman. His painted portraits reveal his modest yet evident elegance--a good-quality cloak or gown with a fur collar, nothing ostentatious or extravagant. The fine things of life point to a gracious God. Through the eyes of faith the elect enjoy these things not as momentary pleasures but as the revelation of God's love. The Christian life is not just about suffering, though there was enough of that in the sixteenth century. The wonders of creation and the joys of life, when viewed through the lens of faith, sustain and nourish the pilgrim during his journey.
My own first experience of Calvin, despite growing up in a Dutch Reformed church, came in grad school, when I (with a friend) read his commentary on Galatians alongside Martin Luther's. That commentary, for those who don't know, has a reputation in Luther's corpus as one his his least-controlled works: well over 500 pages, spewing out invective at his enemies. Calvin's commentary, by contrast, was brief, looking a philological and historical evidence, setting each verse in context of its passage, and each passage in the context of the letter as a whole. This served as my introduction to the truth that almost everything I had ever heard about Calvin was wrong. Indeed, though many figures of the reformation and modern periods get turned into caricatures--Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, etc--those are usually just exaggerations of underlying traits. Not so with Calvin: I am convinced the general picture of him is almost the opposite of the reality.
This matters, I think, because Calvin and his influence is behind many of the importance advances in modern political thought--both the effigy of his detractors and the reality of his work--and without being able to appreciate both, the pervasiveness of this influence can be missed.
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