, The Protestant Pope The Right to Heresy. By Stefan

Zweig. (Cassell. 10s. &I.) Calvin and the Reformation By James Mackinnon. (Longmans. 16s.) 'DtEsE two tooks on Calvin, called forth by the quater- centenary of the reformer's call to Geneva, illustrate various

aspects in the conflict between authority and freedom, orthodoxy and individualism, let loose by the Reformation. It was then a struggle in theological terms, as befitting the sixteenth century ; whereas today the language is political and economic. But the struggle is about the same things. Different periods merely provide different trappings for the conflicts due to human foolery; human incapability of reason, human barbarity : a reeord which hardly bears contemplation.

The similarity of the sixteenth century, with its doctrinal wars, its rival ideologies, its mutual persecutions and intoler- ance, to our own age is very striking. So striking that one may well think that to appreciate the twentieth century one needs a thorough grounding in the sixteenth; while there is no greater disqualification for understanding this age than having been born in the liberal humanitarian nineteenth century, with its (comparative) standards of decency, the high value it set upon human life.

It is this contemporary parallel which dominates, not unjustifiably, Herr Zweig's new book. Hitherto he has kept to the well-trodden, the too well-trodden, paths of historical biography : Marie Antoinette, Fouche, Mary

Stuart. With this l000k, better described by its German title, CastelliO against Calvin, Zweig makes a more original, and valuable, contribution to knowledge. For little enough

has been known about Castellio, the gentle but independent- minded humanist 'who crossed Calvin's path, and roused by the burning of Servetus, took up his pen against the autocrat

of 'Geneva whorinst:ktited it. Calvin, who could not tolerate independence of Mind in anyone else, hounded him out of employment, drove him to despair and death, while pre- venting his books from being published, so that Castellio's pernicious doctrine of toleration should not go abroad. Libertas conscientiae diabolicum dogma, wrote Beza, Calvin's

jackal and successor at Geneva.

It is a conflict in its way as illuminating as the Servetus episode itself. C,astellio had the effrontery to quote the earlier Calvin on the subject of persecution : "It is criminal

to put heretics to death. To make an end of them by fire and sword is opposed to every principle of humanity." The difference between this and the later actions of Calvin is simply made by the possession of power. What an effect that has upon men's convictions and how little importance we need attach to their convictions apart from it l Castellio, reflecting with the more detached mind of the scholar upon what a heretic really is, came to the conclusion that "we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views." Nothing more disintegrating, more immoral : it made nonsense of what so many thousands of human beings had suffered at each other's hands-, from burning, hanging,

flaying, strangling, in a good cause, whether Protestant or Catholic. Nothing more demoralising—in this the Catholic ChUrch and the Protestant Pope at Geneva were at One— than to tell people that all their heresy-hunting was absurd, the outcome of an illusion.

Such is Herr Zweig's theme, and its contemporary signific- ance is obvious : the inability of human beings to support freedom and the way they preferto fall back upon a prophet or a leader—the madder, the better.

"Thanks to this overweening self-confidence, this prophetic exaltation, this superb monomania, Calvin was able to hold his own in actual life. Nothing but such an intoxication with the self, nothing but so colossally limited a self-satisfaction, makes a man a leader in the domain of universal history. People are prone to accept suggestion, not when it comes from the patient and the righteous, but f,wth ihi;nome.niacs who proclaim their own truth as the only possibIi3 truth, and their own will as the basic formula of secular law."

The joke (and the tragedy) is that human nature being like that, it makes the monomaniac right, and the sensible and • rational wrong. A world, as Swift saw it, in which the insane are the sane, and the sane driven insane : at any rate, it is true of certain periods in human history, " periods of collective insanity," as Herr Zweig describes them.

Nor has Dr. Mackinnon escaped a certain contemporary reference. His is a general book on Calvin and the Reforma- tion, excellent, learned, judicious and wise. He recognises what the Reformed Churches owe to Calvin, the Reformed Church of Scotland in particular, " albeit no longer subscribing unreservedly to his theology, and totally at variance with his intolerant spirit and practice." That is consoling to hear, though it may be difficult to recognise. Dr. Mackinnon, though good on the historical side, is, as may be expected, exceptionally strong on the theological : here we have made clear the idealogical issues between Servetus and Calvin. Servetus was a Unitarian (dreadful heresy !) ; for him there were " not three eternal, coexisting and consubstantial persons in the Godhead, but three manifestations of the one indivisible God, who has successively revealed Himself in His creative Word, in His Son Jesus Christ, and in His sanctifying Spirit." This, as anyone can see, was a very scandalous position ; the fact that Servetus had an ardent devotion to the person of the Son made no difference ; for years before he foolishly placed himself in Calvin's hands, Calvin had determined : "If he should come and my authority avails aught, I shall

never suffer him to depart alive."

A. L. Rowse.