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.’

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:—

which James Hannay, who was well able to appreciate this class of work, translated thus:—

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.