Calvin as biblical interpreter among the ancient philosophers.(John Calvin)(Critical essay)

 
  God providentially guided the ancient classical authors into the 
  perception of truths and the unmasking of errors. Even the errors 
  they never caught are instructive. For Calvin, the only proper 
  response to this rich intellectual heritage for a devout Christian 
  people called to love God with their minds as well as with their 
  hearts must always remain profound gratitude. 

Like most educated Frenchmen of his generation, John Calvin studied the ancient classics before preparing for a profession--in Calvin's case, the law. His writings are full of allusions to the literature and philosophy of late antiquity. As a young man, he even cherished the ambition of becoming a classical scholar and wrote a critical commentary on Seneca's De Clementia, a treatise on mercy addressed to Seneca's one-time student, the emperor Nero. In the end, De Clementia was the only ancient treatise Calvin was able to edit before his life took him in a sharply different direction.

With the welcome patronage of the bishop of Noyon, Calvin could afford an elite education in the arts at Paris and later earn a doctorate in civil law at Orleans (with additional legal study at Bourges). Like his classmates, he was as comfortable in the Latin language as in his native French and, like the best among them, he could read, think, and speak in elegant Latin prose. While he later mastered Greek and Hebrew, his education was the continuation and development of a long tradition that had its roots in the culture of ancient Rome. Although it would be too much to claim that Calvin was formed intellectually like a late Roman gentleman, it would not be too much to claim he was the intellectual heir of generations of late Roman gentlemen, from his admiration for Ciceronian rhetoric and Stoic philosophy to his study of the fundamental principles of Roman law. The interplay between Christianity and classical culture had not ceased with the death of the ancient Christian writers but was still a living part of his own world. Calvin found that lively conversation with ancient philosophers remained an inescapable part of his theological task. (1)

When Calvin read the Bible, he did so, not only in company with his contemporaries and the Christian traditions that formed them, but also in an inescapable dialogue with the ancient philosophers of Athens and Rome--their wisdom, their faults, their ideas, both good and bad. He knew them "otherwise than by hearsay" and, as his commentary on Seneca demonstrates, could move sure-footedly from Aristotle to the Stoics to Cicero and back again to Plato. The ancient writers provided Calvin with categories, options, angles of vision, maxims, aphorisms, and figures of speech. They formed a considerable part of the furniture of his mind and were as familiar and comfortable to him as the streets of his native Noyon.

There were, of course, other influences on Calvin, from Christian fathers like Augustine and Chrysostom to medieval divines like Peter Lombard and John Duns Scotus, to say nothing of contemporary reformers like Philip Melanchthon and Martin Bucer. Yet it would be a serious mistake to conclude that Calvin was nothing more than the sum total of the influences on him. Still, when Calvin's contribution to the history of biblical interpretation is weighed and assessed, no one should underestimate the fact that he read Scripture with a mind formed by the classical authors he cited so effortlessly. In Calvin's case, Jerusalem never parted company with Athens.

CALVIN AND PLATO

Calvin was not the first Christian theologian to value classical learning. Early Christianity was born into a society dominated by Greek and Roman culture. The process of the assimilation of this classical culture did not begin with the first Christian communities (nor end with Calvin and his contemporaries) but was well under way in the Jewish communities that preceded and, to some extent, spawned them. Not only did Gentile Christians read the stories of Abraham and Sarah, of Moses and Miriam, and of David and Tamar with minds formed by Greco-Roman rhetoric, philosophy, and literature, but so, too, did the first Jewish Christians. As the ancient Israelites plundered the riches of the Egyptians during their hasty exodus from Egypt, so, too, did the early Christians--especially their learned converts--bring with them old habits of thinking and seeing characteristic of the rich classical culture in which they had been formed.