BUCHANAN AND CALVINISM
In Buchanan’s case, the revolt from authority seems to have produced
different effects. As regards dogma, it appears to have led him into
an attitude of mind that was mainly negative. He had none of the
‘Evangelical’ fervour which marked the utterances of Knox, Luther,
Calvin though to a less degree, and the Reforming preachers of
Scotland. He never preached, in the popular sense of the word, although
as Principal of St. Leonard’s and ‘doctor in the schools’ he could
easily have had himself ‘called’ and ordained, if he had been animated
by any zeal for the function. He could not have written such letters
as Knox wrote, full of pious sentiment and sympathy, in phraseology
that was absolutely unctuous, to Mrs. Bowes, and Mrs. Locke, and other
women, who leant on him for a sort of semi-priestly or confessorial
guidance. He was a critic, not a sentimentalist. You may read his whole
works through, prose and poetry both, without knowing that he laid
any stress on the Calvinism of the Scottish Church, except on its
destructive side. Indeed, much of his literary work was done before
he openly and formally broke with Rome, which he was in no hurry to
do. He satirises the clergy, especially the monks, and ridicules such
doctrines as those of Indulgences and Transubstantiation, the latter
especially in the _Franciscanus_, where it is stated with a grossness
and extravagance of literalism which would probably be disowned by
the highest order of Catholic dogmatist. As the _Franciscanus_ was
published, after revision and completion, in his Protestant days, this
may have been an addition of the period; but nowhere, in anything he
wrote during the Protestant part of his career, does he emphasise,
or almost even allude to, such doctrines as Justification by Faith,
the Incarnation, the Atonement, Election, and Reprobation, or any of
the positive dogmatic propositions most prominently characteristic of
Scottish Protestantism.
_Not a Zealot_
It is remarkable that in his _History_ he associates the Reformers
less with _Evangelium_ than with _Libertas_. They are the _vindices
libertatis_--‘the champions of liberty’--quite as much or oftener than
the _Evangelii professores_--‘the professors of the Evangel,’--from
which it might seem that for Buchanan, not the least valuable aspect
of Protestantism lay in its being a struggle for liberty--a view in
which a good many other people will be ready to concur. Queen Mary, in
her later years, protesting against Buchanan’s appointment as her son’s
tutor, described him, in writing, as an ‘Atheist’; but that was in the
sense in which Athanasius described Arius as an atheist, and is said to
have seized an opportunity of striking him in the jaw in that capacity,
to show what he thought of it and him. Arius, however, constantly
professed himself a believer in ‘God, the Father Almighty,’ under, of
course, ‘heretical’ modifications; but Athanasius thought that a wrong
God--that is, a God that was not God, according to Athanasius--was no
God, and spoke and acted accordingly. Buchanan was certainly no atheist
in his own sense and intention, which, it must always be remembered,
was essentially of a deep-sea seriousness, although the wavelets of
wit might often dance and gleam on its surface. He manifestly held by
some Almighty Power called by him God, _Deus_, _Numen_, _Providentia_;
but whether this was the God of Mary Stuart, or the anthropomorphic
God of Calvin, or the accommodation to the popular sense of reverence
ascribed by many people, and not without reason, to Carlyle, might form
a subject of discussion.
Bearing on this matter, passing allusion may be made to the Dirge or
_Epicedium_, as he called it, which Buchanan wrote on the death of
Calvin (1564), an event which occurred some three years, more or less,
after Buchanan had publicly become a Protestant, when he was already a
member of the General Assembly, sitting cheek-by-jowl with Knox, and
on the Assembly’s judicial committee; the year when Mary, having been
finally off with the Spanish Don Carlos marriage, was drawing towards
the Catholic Darnley marriage, which Knox, correctly scenting on the
way, was beginning to anathematise by anticipation, he having the
year before fiercely denounced from the High Kirk pulpit the Spanish
alliance as fatal to Scotland, because it was an ‘infidel’ marriage,
and ‘all Papists are infidels,’ said the uncompromising one, in the
true Athanasian vein, on the head of which he had quarrelled with Mary
and Moray also; while all the time Buchanan was, to Knox’s knowledge,
continuing to act as Mary’s Court poet, and possibly meditating on
the ‘Pompa’ or masque for her wedding, and getting on so well with
her that she was arranging for giving him that £500 (Scots) pension
from Crossraguel Abbey, out of which it cost him such excruciating
difficulty to get anything at all, at the same time that he was helping
the General Assembly to revise the _Book of Discipline_, translating
Spanish despatches for the Privy Council, and generally acting as
‘handy man’ on the highest planes all round. This ‘Dirge’ is too long
for quotation: a curious attempt to combine the Pagan spirit and the
Calvinistic theology--spiritual elevation and sarcastic wit in the best
poetic form. ‘Those who believe that there are no _Manes_, _i.e._ no
hereafter, or if they do, live despising Pluto and the trans-Stygian
penalties, may well deplore their coming fate, while they leave
sorrow to surviving friends. But we have no such grief over our lost
Calvin. He has passed beyond the stars, and, filled with a draught of
Deity (_Numinis_), lives in an eternal and nearer enjoyment of “God”
(_Deo_). But Death has not taken all of him from us. We have monuments
of his genius and his fame wherever the Reformed religion has spread.
We have the terror which he struck, and which his name will continue
to strike, into your Popes--your Clements and Pauls, and Juliuses
and Piuses; while we know that the Pontiff tyrant of fire and sword
who appropriated all the functions of the nether kingdom--becoming
a Pluto in empire, a Harpy in his shameful extortions, a Fury in
his martyr-making fire, a Charon in his viaticum (_Charon naulo_),
and a Cerberus in his mitre (_triplici corona Cerberus_)--will have
to appropriate the penalties also of the same lower world, becoming
a Tantalus thirsty amidst waters, a Sisyphus rolling back the
ever-recurring stone, a Prometheus with vultures ceaselessly pecking
at his liver, a Danaid vainly filling her empty bucket, and an Ixion
twisted into a circle on his endless wheel.’
_À propos_ of Calvin’s ‘draught of Deity,’ Buchanan gives in the course
of the poem what seems to be meant for an explanation of the spiritual
work of ‘regeneration,’ which, I am afraid, would not have been so
satisfactory to Mess John Davidson as some others of his efforts to
propitiate that sound divine. As the soul animates the body, otherwise
a mass of clay--_sic animi Deus est animus_--so ‘“God” is the Soul of
the soul,’ and when the _Numinis haustus_, the ‘draught of Deity,’ has
been taken, the soul which before was ‘shrouded in darkness, illusioned
by empty appearance, and grasping at mere shadows of the “right and
good,”’ sees the ‘darkness disappear, the vain “simulacra” cease, the
unveiled face of “truth” reveal itself in light.’ I may be wrong, but
this looks to me more like a Pantheistic theory of ‘illumination’
than the ‘regeneration’ of the Calvinistic creeds! Besides, there is
no word of ‘sin,’ and the change to at least an incipient ‘holiness’
only from ‘_illusion_’ to ‘truth’ (_verum_). If it be said that this
must be assumed, then a new contradiction of Calvinism arises, since
a divine Soul of the soul cannot will evil, and ‘sanctification’ is
thus erroneously made out to be an instantaneous act and not a gradual
process. Altogether, and as it stands, the passage might have been
written by one of those later Stoics, including possibly Aurelius
himself, who seem to have believed in the indwelling Divinity, and that
the souls of good men at death were not immediately reabsorbed into the
All, but lived with ‘God,’ in some cases a thousand years, in others
for ever, or, at all events, until the ‘philosopher’s year’ was over,
and the new cycle began to repeat the history of the old.
But there is one omission which, among various others, seems
remarkable. Of the relics enumerated by Buchanan as left by Calvin,
he passes over the most important of all--Calvin’s own body. He
makes no reference to the resurrection. Yet, on orthodox principles,
Calvin’s glory and beatitude could not be complete until that event.
If Calvin had been writing about Buchanan, instead of _vice versa_,
he would not have forgotten the matter, for he laid great stress upon
it. ‘He alone,’ he says, ‘has made solid progress in the Gospel,
who has acquired the habit of meditating continually on a blessed
resurrection.’ Buchanan’s silence here and on other points that have
been mentioned, and the scantiness, brevity, for the most part simply
Theistic references he makes to matters of faith, are significant.
He clearly was not zealous about most of those doctrines on which
the Reforming preachers placed the greatest emphasis. His training
and wide intellectual illumination must have stood in the way of his
sympathising with the more violent among them, probably not excepting
Knox himself occasionally. In this connection one thinks of another
illustrious son of the Renaissance, Erasmus, Buchanan’s senior by forty
years. After all he had said and done, the Protestants demanded, with
loud reproaches, that he should publicly join their ranks. Erasmus
would not, perhaps could not. The alternate violence and unctuousness
of the Evangelicals repelled him as much as the ignorance, and
worse, of the monks disgusted him. With certain reforms in morals,
constitution, and discipline, he did not see why the old Church should
not be satisfactorily worked on the lines of the traditional doctrine
and ritual. Probably he thought that if a man could reconcile himself
to the Nicene dogmas and their consequences, it was not worth his
pains boggling over Transubstantiation. Although any one may see that
his heart was in many things with the Reform movement, he had never
directly and openly denied any dogma. Apparently he was not prepared in
his own mind to do so.
If a man is asked, ‘Do you deny that Abracadabra is Mesopotamia?’ he
can probably say ‘No’ quite conscientiously; and there can be no doubt
that this attitude of non-denial is widely accepted for positive faith.
The Roman Church, and the Roman Empire before it, were quite willing to
take it so. If a man would hold his peace, they would let him alone.
Erasmus condemned the outbreak of Luther, whose faith in the immense
amount of doctrine he left untouched he perhaps regarded as simply a
huge faculty of taking things for granted, ending in straining at the
gnat and swallowing the camel. For myself, as one of the crowd, I am
glad that with all his blunders and shortcomings, so easy to point out
at this distance, Luther took his own way, and did what he did. Truth
is greater than peace. ‘Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall
make you free,’ is the method of Christianity, unless the Founder of it
is mistaken. The martyrs had faults and weaknesses--say even that they
were mistaken,--but they were men of nobler spirit, and did more for
us and our liberties than the _traditores_, the ‘traitors’ who handed
over their Scriptures to the Prætor rather than face the lions. Up to
a certain point, Buchanan’s attitude seems to have been practically
that of Erasmus. He tells us himself in his _Autobiography_, that while
a student at the University of Paris (1526-29, pp. 20-23) he ‘fell
into the spreading flame of the Lutheran sect.’ Several years later
(1535-38), while resident in Scotland, he wrote some satirical verses
on the Franciscan monks, which the brethren took in high dudgeon, very
much to Buchanan’s astonishment--boys always are astonished that frogs
should object to the pleasant amusement of being stoned,--and gave him
so much annoyance, ending in his having to flee the country for his
life, as to make him, in his own words, ‘more keenly hostile to the
licentiousness of the clergy, and less indisposed to the Lutheran cause
than before.’
_Silent Doubt_
All this time, however, he appears not to have attacked or denied
anything in creed or ritual, although there cannot be a doubt that
he had his own secret doubts. The relentless persecution of the
monkish enemies he had made for himself at last brought him before the
Inquisition (1548) at Coimbra, in Portugal, where he was acting as
‘Regent’ in a college recently founded by the King; but although the
Inquisitors had him through their hands several times, they discovered
nothing against him that could properly be called heretical. He was
said to have eaten flesh in Lent, but everybody did it there, when
they could get it. He was said to have given it as his opinion that on
the Eucharistic controversy Augustine’s opinions were more favourable
to the Lutherans than to the Church; but that was merely literary or
historical criticism, not heresy. Two young gentlemen testified that
Buchanan was not at heart a good Catholic--which was probably true
enough, but was not specific. So they shut him up, as already said,
in a monastery to be taught by monks, who, though good fellows, did
not know anything; and for want of something better to do, Buchanan
made his famous Latin paraphrase of the Psalms. What must his Faith
have been during those years? Manifestly, like that of Erasmus, less
a positive assent than an abstinence from denial. Would he deny
Transubstantiation or the Trinity? No, he was not ready to do anything
of the kind--anyhow, not yet.
It need not be maintained that in all this Buchanan, or Erasmus either,
was merely seeking to save his own skin. He may have thought that it
was best for the order and edification of society to let things alone.
Probably too, by this time, that spirit of Stoicism, which I have shown
reason for believing sank deeper into Buchanan’s nature as time went
on, was beginning to assert itself. And here, in passing may I say
that the common popular image of the Stoic as a gloomy, unbending,
sour, cantankerous, repulsive curmudgeon, is a mistake. There is
nothing in Stoicism to make him so, and as a matter of fact he was
not so. Aurelius was a finished gentleman. Seneca had all the culture
of his time, and was the poet of the day. Boëtius was a polished
courtier. When Buchanan went over to the Reformers, it was the smartest
epigrammatist going who was joining the most advanced party and leaving
the ‘stupid’ party behind. To return. It was a well-known rule of the
Stoics not to quarrel with the popular beliefs, but, if possible, to
utilise them for good, as we see Buchanan does with the Pagan mythology
in his Dirge on Calvin’s death. Socrates, their model wise man,
teaches conformity to the cult of the city where the sage resides; and
everybody will recollect the care with which, as his trial approached,
he arranged that Esculapius should have the cock that was due him.
Probably Esculapius is still receiving a good deal of that class of
poultry. For a long time--indeed until he was fifty-five, the last five
of which he spent in carefully scrutinising and balancing theological
controversies, and examining the whole situation--Buchanan followed the
lines of Erasmus, used the cult of the Roman Esculapius to go on with,
pending eventualities. But when the termination of the Guisian tyranny
in Scotland made it safe for him to return, he had to make up his mind
whether he was to side with the cause of oppression as advocated by the
Church in which he had been born and lived up to now, or that in which,
though unfortunately with certain drawbacks, a battle was being fought
for liberty to express opinions different from those taught by the
Church. Nobody who knew Buchanan could doubt what his choice would be.
The transition would be all the easier that in his new quarters he
would find much less to offend his philosophic reason than in his
old ones; but would there not be an occasional bird to be sacrificed
still? He had been doing it all his Catholic life. Was it completely
over now? That is not likely. But, however that may be, Buchanan was
the least dogmatic and the most tolerant of all the theologically
instructed men who helped to give Protestantism its place in Scotland.
He might have preached had he chosen, but as he shrank from priest’s
orders in the Catholic Church, so he shrank in the Protestant from a
position in which he would be bound to dogmatise. He did not frown upon
Mary’s private Mass, while Knox denounced it as worse than ten thousand
armed opponents. When he narrates the hanging of a priest, according
to statute, for saying Mass a third time, he does not exult, as was
no doubt done by the men of the ‘Congregation,’ and possibly by Knox
himself, when they heard of the happy event. There is nothing about him
of the zeal of the renegade, who often out-Herods Herod in championing
his new faith--a tendency from which Knox was by no means free. In
his _History_ he evidently tries to hold the balance fair between
Catholic and Protestant, and is as just to Mary of Guise as to Moray.
His whole religious career points to a man who thought profoundly and
inquired anxiously after truth, and was careful to give expression to
his feeling of reverence for the mystery of being by outward conformity
with a creed and ritual to which he could more or less reconcile his
reason. Well might James Melville (Rev., not Sir) describe him not
only as a ‘maist learned and wyse,’ but also as a ‘maist godlie’
man, although he himself might have preferred ‘spiritual’ as a more
comprehensive epithet.
It may be objected that men like Buchanan and Erasmus did not act
honestly in remaining silent and conforming members of a system
which they secretly regarded as in many vital respects false, and an
imposture upon the world. Of course, it is to be said for Buchanan that
he did ultimately come out of it; but then, why not sooner? Why did he
not earlier follow the lead of Luther and Calvin and Knox? For one
thing, it must be remembered that even these great heroes of veracity
had probably their reticences. At all events, they have left to us
the legacy of an incompletely performed work. Was their outspokenness
equal to Christ’s? His brought Him to the cross. It seems to be in the
nature of the Ideal that to make an utterly clean breast of it should
be perilous or fatal to its revealer, and the hero of Truth who dies in
his bed has probably made a good many compromises with his conscience
to achieve that result. It is all a matter of degree, a comparison of
the well and the very well, of the bad and the too bad. A good man
is a man who tries to be good, and a bad man is a man who does not
care whether he is bad or good. But man is finite, and there can be
nothing absolute in human life, except perhaps the absolute fool who
thinks there may. Everything depends on the state of the facts. In
these days, for instance, when historical and speculative criticism
has put Scripture and the supernatural in so very different a position
from that assigned to them by the Reformers, there is too good reason
to believe, especially in the light of intra-ecclesiastical demands
for the revision of Confessions and Articles, that many of the clergy
feel extremely uneasy in being pledged to dogmas which they more
or less disbelieve. As they could not speak out without having to
face starvation for those dependent on them, a merciful man might be
disposed to say that while the situation was bad, it was perhaps not
unpardonable, and that the person implicated might still be regarded as
a good and otherwise honestly intentioned man. But if the inner state
of mind should be one of hopeless antagonism to the supernatural, one
would be disposed to say that it was ‘too bad’ to remain, and that
speaking out and coming out, at any cost, was the duty of the position.
Bearing in mind that Buchanan carried his life in his hand, and that
he had never undertaken the function of religious teacher, only a very
heroic person could afford to say that he had not done all he dared,
and that he showed himself deeply in earnest about Truth, when at last
he had the opportunity, and really ‘was of gud religion for a poet,’
and even for a more hopeful character. Buchanan, on the intellectual
side of him, was not merely a poet, but a wit and humorist--a type of
mind not in itself easy to harmonise with being of ‘gud religion.’
Perhaps if the Puritans had not been in so many cases hopelessly
wooden, it might have saved their cause from having so many joints in
its harness open to the shafts of the satirical sharpshooter, but they
would probably not have done so great and grave a work in the world.
Dire, however, are the fruits of an igneous temperament and a ligneous
intellect, and Praise-God Barebones and Co. have done an evil turn to
a good undertaking. The capacity and habit of seeing and enjoying the
ludicrous are a temptation to their possessor to forget that life has
its serious aspect also, and in too many instances this seems to be
forgotten. Hence the presumption is against the laugher until he has
become better known. I recollect once hearing a celebrated preacher
give a highly comical account of his own conversion, and albeit not
given to the frowning mood, I could not help asking myself whether this
could be a serious man; and it was not until I read his life that I saw
he knew that there is a time for everything under the sun, and that he
possessed the secret of assigning its due claim to all views of life.
Buchanan, too, had mastered this power--for it requires an effort of
will, and there must always be an essential difference between the
humorous man’s view of religion, and that of the man who cannot show
his teeth by way of smile, though Nestor swear the jest be laughable.
Buchanan could sparkle when sparkling was in place, but he could also
be depended on when grave or even grim work was in request.
_Renaissance Morals_
Part of the price paid for the enlightenment of the Renaissance
was that in too many instances its breadth of ethical as well as
intellectual outlook was allowed by its possessor to sink into a
practical licentiousness, open or concealed, that corrupted, or even
totally destroyed, the moral and spiritual faculties. I cannot see
proof of any such results in Buchanan’s case. I think he was careful
to secure himself from danger on this side of his temptations. His
bitterest detractors do not raise a whisper against him here. But there
is a section of his poetry which may best be characterised as of the
_Ad Neæram, In Leonoram (Lenam), Ad Gelliam, Ad Briandum Vallium pro
Lena Apologia_ order, which has occasioned misgiving to some of his
friends. One biographer, a very competent authority on this period of
Scottish history, says, somewhat severely, that these pieces ought not
to have been written by the man who wrote _Franciscanus_--a powerful
satire on the vices and hypocrisy of the monks. I must say that, with
every deference to a critic highly worthy of respect, I am not able to
see it. The _Franciscanus_ was essentially an exposure of dishonesty,
not so much of the vices practised under the cowl, as of the shameful
trickery of using the cowl to cloak them. As far as honesty and
consistency go, there is no reason why an honest and consistent man
should not have written every word of these ‘Lena’ sketches. Even from
an artistic point of view they will stand inspection. The subject,
of course, is a revolting one, and so is Dame Quickly--but would any
man of average robustness of mind wish Dame Quickly unwritten? Many
people seem to forget that while the real itself may be unpleasant,
the artistic image of the real may be a delight. We should shrink
from Caliban in the flesh, but Shakespeare throws a charm over him;
Pandemonium is not, I believe, a sweet scene, but Milton’s account of
it is sublime; Falstaff was disreputable, but he makes an admirable
stage figure; a corpse is an unlovely object, but Rembrandt’s
‘Dissectors’ has a fascination.
Probably it was for want of noting this distinction that the late
Principal Shairp, who was a good judge of a certain class of poetry,
lamented that Burns should have written _Holy Willie’s Prayer_ and
the _Jolly Beggars_!--a remark which led Louis Stevenson, in a
compassionating way, to hint that Burns was perhaps too ‘burly’ a
figure for the Principal’s microscope. There is a good deal of this
‘burliness’ in Buchanan’s _Leonoras_, which in point of graphic power
are second only to the _Jolly Beggars_, while their savage and even
hideous realism, contrasting with the elegance of the Latin line,
produce a piquant effect from the mere point of view of art. But I
demur to any suggestion that these or any of Buchanan’s so-called
‘amorous’ poetry are corrupting or intended to be, or that they exhibit
any gloating over the degrading or the degraded on the part of the
writer. From references in them I believe they were satires written for
the warning of ‘college’ youth, and resembled certain passages in the
Book of Proverbs and elsewhere in the Bible, where certain counsels,
highly necessary and practical, are conveyed in language not deficient
either in directness or detail. They could not possibly scandalise
or tempt any one, being written in Latin. Mr. Podsnap and the ‘young
person’ would pass equally scatheless, for they could not read them.
Only men who could construe and scan Horace could understand them, and
these might be trusted to see their true drift. Then the _Ad Gelliam_
verses were merely playful little satires upon ladies who painted,
or wore brass rings and glass gems, which might amuse readers, while
producing no effect, good or evil, upon their subjects. As to the
_Neæra_ series, they are not love-poems at all, but epigrams. There is
no passion, sensuous or otherwise, in them. What show of manufactured
emotion there may be is simply a stage-scaffolding on which to plant
and fire off the epigram. Probably the best known of the series is the
following:--
‘Illa mihi semper præsenti dura Neæra,
Me quoties absum semper abesse dolet;
Non desiderio nostri, non mœret amore,
Sed se non nostro posse dolore frui’;
which James Hannay, who was well able to appreciate this class of work,
translated thus:--
‘Neæra is harsh at our every greeting,
Whene’er I am absent, she wants me again;
’Tis not that she loves me, or cares for our meeting,
She misses the pleasure of seeing my pain’;
adding that ‘Ménage used to say that he would have given his best
benefice to have written the lines--and Ménage held some fat ones.’
What anchorite could discover anything exceptionable here, or if he
had any intelligence left, could fail to perceive that it was simply
a case for admiring extreme cleverness of thought and smartness of
phrase? If any one desires to see how Buchanan could appreciate and
address the highest type of womanhood, let him read such verses as the
_Ad Mildredam_ or the _Ad Camillam Morelliam_, and he will see that he
was a man with tenderness in him as well as virility, with grace as
well as severity of speech; and the fact that in his maturer years he
was not ashamed to publish the incriminated poetry, showed that he was
not conscious of anything to be ashamed of, that he knew the poet’s
dominion was conterminous with the whole range of things, and no part
of it whatever exempt from his critical or sympathetic function, while
his fiercest or lightest dealing with the facts of life is in no way
inconsistent with a profound and silent veneration in presence of the
mystery of existence.