Theodore Beza

Beza’s early life and studies

Beza was born on 24 June 1519 in Vézelay, southeast of Paris. He was the youngest of seven children born to a family of the lower nobility. ¹ Theodore was a hellenized form of his first name, which likely was Déodat or Déode. ² His father, Pierre de Bèze, remained Catholic until his death. As a small child, Beza was sent to his paternal uncle Nicolas in Paris to be brought up. He remained there, surviving at least one episode of serious illness, until age nine, when his uncle transferred him to Orléans to the care of the humanist scholar Melchior Wolmar. The young Beza flourished under Wolmar’s tutelage first in Orléans and subsequently in Bourges, later marking his arrival in Wolmar’s household as his second birthday. ³ Thanks to Wolmar’s training and his advocacy of classical sources, Beza became a fluent Latinist and humanist scholar. Wolmar’s Lutheran convictions also inspired the young Beza to value the study of the Scriptures, although he made no formal break with the Catholic church until the late 1540s. ⁴ For his part, Wolmar prudently left France in 1535 after the 1534 Affair of the Placards, during which broadsheets attacking the theology of the Mass were posted in and around Paris. Wolmar’s decision to depart was a wise one given that French Catholic authorities responded to the document by pursuing anyone suspected of Protestant sympathies. ⁵

Although the religious situation in France was becoming increasingly fraught in the 1530s and 1540s, Beza seems to have been largely unaffected. Following his father’s wishes, he studied law in Orléans, graduating with a degree in law in 1539. He then returned to Paris, living comfortably off the income he received from several Catholic church benefices inherited from his uncles and his older brother. Although his father had plans for Beza to pursue a career in law and eventually take a seat as a lawyer in the Paris Parlement, Beza himself showed little inclination to pursue the legal profession. Instead, he preferred literary endeavors: writing poetry based on ancient Roman and Greek models, and participating actively in the circle of young humanists in Paris. ⁶ In 1548, he published his Poemata, a volume of his Latin poems, including elegies, epitaphs and epigrams. ⁷ Later opponents took advantage of this work to condemn Beza for the explicit character of some of his poems and to accuse him of sexual immorality, yet his verses fit within a larger tradition of classically-inspired love poetry. Furthermore, as his two leading biographers Paul-F. Geisendorf and Alain Dufour point out, if Beza had pursued a life of humanist scholarship and writing, critiques about the morality of the Poemata would have been largely non-existent. It was precisely Beza’s decision to break away from his early trajectory and take on the role of Reformed pastor, professor and advisor that opened the door for his opponents to seize on his earlier publication of these poems and use them to attack his credibility. ⁸

The turning point to the Reformation: from Paris to Lausanne

Up until 1548, therefore, Beza had remained largely distant from any of the growing religious controversy in France. While he may have had some interest in Reformation doctrine and in Protestant critiques of corruption in the Catholic Church, he had a great deal to lose in breaking with Catholicism. He had however promised Claudine Denosse, whom he married secretly in Paris, that they would confirm their marriage in public in a ‘true’ church, i.e. a Reformed congregation. In the meantime, the marriage was kept secret so that Beza could retain the revenues from the benefices that provided his income. ⁹ In his dedicatory preface to Wolmar in the Confessio Christianae fidei (1560), Beza admitted that he was attracted by his emerging literary fame and by his career prospects, to the point that only a serious illness caused him to set new priorities, break with his old life and leave France. ¹⁰

By late October 1548, Beza and his wife had arrived in Geneva, where their marriage was officially recognized. However, they did not remain in Geneva, largely because there was no work for him there. By the end of 1549, Beza had accepted instead a position as professor of Greek in the Academy of Lausanne, along the lake from Geneva. Lausanne was the main city of the Pays de Vaud, a territory (previously part of the Duchy of Savoy) that had been conquered by the powerful Swiss Protestant canton of Berne in 1536. The Bernese magistrates exercised careful oversight of the Lausanne church and academy, insisting that all professors come to Berne to swear an oath of loyalty and confessional orthodoxy before beginning their teaching. ¹¹ In Lausanne, Beza taught and helped run the academy, serving as its rector for a two-year term from 1552 to 1554. Soon after his arrival in Lausanne, Beza also began to publish writings that highlighted his new confessional allegiance. In 1550, Beza put his literary talents to work by composing a Biblical drama for student performance, his Abraham sacrifiant. This play, recounting Abraham’s struggles in coming to terms with God’s command to sacrifice Isaac, allowed Beza to address some of the challenges that he and other exiles were facing, as they sought to be faithful to God’s commands while at the same time experiencing significant losses of family, friends, personal status, etc. This work has been acclaimed as one of the pioneers of early French drama. ¹² Beza also concentrated on continuing the versification of the French metrical psalms begun by the French humanist poet Clément Marot. By 1553, Marot’s forty-nine French psalms had been joined by thirty-four versified by Beza, published as the Octante-trois psaumes. Beza continued his work on this project until the complete French psalter appeared in 1562. ¹³ In this instance, his prior experience as a poet allowed him to put his skills to use in his new religious context, in the service of a work that decisively shaped the communal and individual worship of Reformed believers from the mid-sixteenth century onwards.

Beza’s focus on Scripture during his period in Lausanne was not however limited to the Psalms. In 1553, his French translation of the Apocrypha appeared in the French Geneva Bible. By 1557, he published his annotated edition of the New Testament in Latin, a work he subsequently revised and brought out in 1565 in an expanded version that included his own Latin translation and both the Greek text and the Vulgate for purposes of comparison. ¹⁴ Later assessments of this work have varied: while Beza’s philological talents have been recognized, his annotations drift into polemic or into interpretations that seem driven more by a pre-existing doctrinal framework than by the content of the biblical text, which has led to substantive criticism and later disregard for his work. ¹⁵

Beza also turned his attention to polemic, both by attacking Catholic opponents with lively satire, and by refuting critiques voiced by those who condemned Calvin and Reformation Geneva for intolerance. In 1554, Beza published his Latin treatise, De Haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis Libellus in response to Sebastian Castellio’s work protesting the execution of the anti-Trinitarian Michael Servetus in Geneva in 1553. ¹⁶ Beza’s undoubted polemical skills made him a formidable opponent, but his readiness to target anyone who uttered critiques of Calvin’s theology also contributed to his reputation as someone primarily known for his defense of his master’s approach.

Geneva: the early years: 1558-1572

Indeed, support for Calvin’s views, especially on predestination and church discipline, was the key factor that led to Beza’s departure from Lausanne in 1558. In the later 1550s, the Bernese authorities were increasingly concerned about the divisive impact of teaching and preaching on predestination in the Pays de Vaud, and by the Lausanne pastors’ increasing demands for the right to oversee church discipline following the Genevan model. After the pastors and professors of Lausanne were summoned to Berne in August 1558 to be reminded of their promises to keep to the paths of the Bernese Reformation, which downplayed predestination and kept church discipline in the hands of the magistrates, Beza became the first of the Lausanne professors to hand in his resignation. ¹⁷ While his nine years in Lausanne had developed his skills in teaching and in articulating his Reformed theological perspective, the tension over the direction of the Reformation in Lausanne clearly caused him significant concern, such that he preferred to relocate to more congenial surroundings.

By November 1558, he was in Geneva, where he was swiftly welcomed. That month, the Genevan Small Council of magistrates accepted his nomination as professor of Greek, and by the following April, he was admitted as a bourgeois, giving him voting privileges in the city. Beza had also rapidly been integrated into the Company of Pastors. Although there was no immediate vacancy in the ranks of the pastors of the city, he was still listed in the records as a “ministre” and officially took up a pastoral post in May 1559 following the death of one of his colleagues in ministry. ¹⁸ Beyond his pastoral responsibilities, Beza also took on a leadership role in the nascent Genevan Academy, serving as its first rector beginning in 1559. In his inauguration address on 5 June 1559, Beza highlighted the biblical roots of the Genevan emphasis on education, and the distinctiveness of the academy, where young men would put their learning in the service of God. ¹⁹ Although he had first been nominated for the Greek chair, Beza ended up teaching theology at the academy from 1559 onwards.

While Beza quickly found his niche in Geneva, he was also increasingly becoming the chief spokesman for the Reformed faith in France, especially as Calvin’s health and stamina declined. During the four years he served as rector of the Genevan Academy, Beza was absent from the city for more than half of that time, serving as advisor to the growing number of Huguenot churches and to the Huguenot princes, and as the foremost representative of the Reformed church at the Colloquy of Poissy in France in 1561. ²⁰ Catherine de Medici, the queen mother, had hoped to find common ground between Catholics and Huguenots at the gathering, but the leading Catholic clergy and nobles led by the Guise family had no intention of engaging with the Huguenots as equal partners in any theological discussion. In spite of the failure of the meeting, Beza made a strong impression both on members of the French royal family and on the Huguenot princes, so much so that when war broke out again in March 1562, Beza remained with the Huguenot leadership as their religious advisor and go-between in their efforts to raise funds for the Huguenot cause. ²¹ Yet in spite of Beza’s important services to the Reformed cause in his homeland, his Genevan colleagues also repeatedly urged him to return to his responsibilities in the Genevan church and academy. ²² These multiple recognitions of his valuable contributions underscore Beza’s unique talents, especially his ability to articulate key Reformed beliefs and at the same time work well with political leaders, a combination that Calvin never handled as successfully.

Following Calvin’s death in 1564, Beza became the acknowledged leading pastor of Geneva, serving as moderator of the Genevan Company of Pastors on the basis of annual unopposed elections all the way until 1580. He worked to ensure Calvin’s posthumous reputation by penning an account of Calvin’s life (1564) and by gathering together and publishing his mentor’s correspondence (1575). He continued his theology lectures in the Genevan Academy, focusing primarily on his exegesis of New Testament books. He also oversaw the expansion of the academy’s curriculum to include lectures in civil law and (briefly) in medicine. ²³ His publications in this period featured a number of works written against Lutheran theologians, including Joachim Westphal, Tileman Heshusen, Johannes Brenz, and Matthias Flacius Illyricus. In each instance, Beza refuted the arguments of these hard-line Lutherans on the Lord’s Supper. Beza strongly defended the Reformed perspective emphasizing Christ’s spiritual presence in the sacrament, over against his opponents’ support for consubstantiation and the real presence of Christ’s body in the sacrament. ²⁴

In spite of his polemical skills, Beza did not expend all his energy in refuting confessional opponents. Indeed, based on the number of reprints and translations, his most popular work was an instructional one, his Confession de la foi chrétienne (Confession of the Christian faith), written while he was still in Lausanne, but first published in 1560. This text served as a catechism, providing Reformed believers with the basics of the faith in an accessible format. ²⁵ In the same decade, Beza worked to associate the Genevan church to the Second Helvetic Confession, which the Swiss churches adopted in 1566. This confession, which Beza translated into French, proved to be a rallying point for Reformed Protestants in the Swiss lands, but also in Scotland, Poland and Hungary. The 1571 national synod of the Huguenot church, meeting in La Rochelle, also gave its formal assent to this confessional statement. ²⁶ Thus, Beza’s work in this period both rejected the ultra-Lutherans’ views and sought to strengthen confessional ties with other Reformed churches.

Beza’s doctrinal perspective also emerges clearly in the first volume of his Quaestiones et responsiones, published in 1570. In a text that runs for more than a hundred pages, Beza addressed in turn different doctrinal issues, especially ones related to Scripture, the trinity, Christology, original sin, free will, justification and sanctification, and especially providence and predestination. In each case, Beza presented a question on the topic and then furnished an answer. In his preface to the first French edition of the work, dedicated to Jacqueline de Coligny, wife of the leading Huguenot leader Gaspard de Coligny, Beza noted that his intended audience was pastors and students, but also educated readers, all in search of orthodox interpretations of key theological questions. ²⁷

Beza’s later career: 1572-1605

Beza’s later career in Geneva put him at the forefront of the Genevan Academy. Although other colleagues served in turn as rector of the institution, Beza’s exegetical lectures formed the backbone of the theological instruction provided by the academy to future pastors and Reformed leaders. In 1586, when the academy had to be shut down temporarily and its professors dismissed to save money because of the blockade of the city by Catholic Savoy, Beza not only continued his theology lectures but increased their frequency from bi-weekly to weekly instruction. ²⁸ He also promoted the academy and ensured the welfare of its students, as evidenced by his extensive correspondence, in which he made arrangements for students’ accommodation, responded to parental queries, and provided assessments of students’ performance upon their departure. ²⁹

Beza’s role as one of the preeminent Reformed church leaders in the second half of the sixteenth century continued to grow in the 1570s. In 1571, for instance, he presided at the Huguenot national synod of La Rochelle. ³⁰ In 1586, he served as one of the most prominent Reformed delegates at the German colloquy of Montbéliard, where he encountered the Lutherans Jakob Andreae and Lukas Osiander. Once again, any potential consensus between the two confessions foundered over their different understandings of the Lord’s Supper and the presence of Christ in the sacrament, as well as over their divergent perspectives on baptism and assorted liturgical practices. ³¹ Beza also remained at the center of the Reformed confession through his correspondence, which was extensive both in terms of the number of letters he wrote and received, and in the number of his correspondents. Letters requesting advice, recommending a student or a pastor, or simply keeping him up to date with the situation in Reformed churches across Europe flowed in and out of Geneva up until the end of his life. ³²

Politically, the devastating impact of the Saint Bartholomew’s Day massacre in France in 1572 focused Beza’s attention on the challenges facing the French Huguenots. Geneva became the first stop for many French religious refugees seeking to escape the killings, and in the early days after the news of the attacks reached Geneva, Beza was convinced that Geneva was next on the list of places that Catholic forces would target. ³³ In response to the role of the French king Charles IX in sanctioning the attacks, Beza penned Du Droit des magistrats, a work published anonymously in 1574. In it, Beza upheld the rights of lesser magistrates, including nobles and city leaders, to resist actively against the oppressive actions of the king and his advisors. The grounds for their resistance lay in their duty to defend the people who looked to them for protection and for leadership. Beza’s text therefore provided justification for the Huguenot forces that renewed their struggles against the French monarchy in 1574, and for the cities such as La Rochelle that refused to submit to the royal armies’ demands that they surrender. ³⁴ In the same year, Beza met on several occasions with the Huguenot leader Henri de Condé, and served as one of Condé’s most trusted advisors as the Huguenots attempted to reach a settlement with the new French king Henri III. ³⁵ Beza’s political contacts with the French Huguenot leadership persisted all the way to the end of his life. Indeed, he corresponded with most of these leaders from the 1560s onwards, including Henri of Navarre, who became Henri IV in 1589. While Beza did his utmost to convince Henri IV not to convert to Catholicism in 1593, he could not change the king’s mind, yet Henri did not hold Beza’s critique of his conversion against him. Indeed, a few years before Beza’s death, the two men met in person at the king’s request when the latter led his troops against the forces of the Duke of Savoy in 1600-01. ³⁶

Aside from his academic and political contributions, Beza devoted much of his energy in the last decades of his life to biblical studies and pastoral and devotional writings. He published collections of his sermons on the Song of Solomon (1586), Ecclesiastes (1588), his commentary on Job (1589), his sermons on Christ’s passion (1592) and on Christ’s resurrection (1593). Together, these sermons and commentaries highlight Beza’s careful exegesis but also his pastoral concern, especially in his sermons. ³⁷ Although only a small sample of his sermon output survives in print, his homiletical approach echoed that of Calvin, in that he combined biblical exegesis, doctrinal instruction, and pastoral injunctions in his sermons. In his first sermon on Christ’s passion, for instance, Beza carefully presented and refuted non-orthodox views on the two natures of Christ, but also urged his hearers not to be like the people of ancient Israel who refused to heed God. Basing himself on Isaiah 5:3, Beza explicitly warned his Genevan hearers against their pride, envy, greed, and violence. ³⁸ His devotional writings from this period include his Chrestiennes meditations (Christian Meditations) of 1582, and a collection of his prayers, first published in an English translation as Maister Beza’s Houshold Prayers in 1603. ³⁹ By the late 1590s, Beza’s health was in decline, and he stopped playing any significant public role by the turn of the century, so much so that various Catholic adversaries spread rumors that Beza had in fact died, and had converted to Catholicism before his death. One of Beza’s last works, therefore, was his Response à la lettre d’un gentilhomme savoysien (1598), refuting the story that he had ever even considered converting from the Reformed faith. ⁴⁰

Beza’s theological perspective

Within the French-speaking world, interest in Beza focuses primarily on his literary and humanist contributions, including his Poemata, his Abraham sacrifiant, and his paraphrases of the Psalms. ⁴¹ For those in the English-speaking world, however, Beza’s theological perspective, and its faithfulness or divergence from Calvin’s position have been the key points of contention. On the one side of the debate are those who argue that Beza was among the first of the Protestant scholastics, introducing excessive rationality, Aristotelianism, and a rigid supralapsarian (before Adam and Eve’s fall into sin) predestination perspective into the Reformed faith. In this view, Calvin was more flexible, closer to Scripture, more of a humanist, and less doctrinaire than his successor. On the other side are those who note that while Beza did certainly emphasize the scholastic method as a teaching tool (a common practice also among his contemporaries in mid-sixteenth-century Europe), he should not be charged with diverging from Calvin’s teaching or introducing a less Scriptural and more rationalistic perspective on Reformed doctrine. ⁴²

Part of the difficulty in comparing Calvin and Beza’s theological approach is that the texts that are available from each one are quite different. Beza did not write any extensive doctrinal work comparable to the Institutes. Instead, his doctrinal writings tended to be polemical, in response to a perspective he opposed. Such was the case, for instance, with his Tabula Praedestinationis of 1555, largely written in response to Jerome Bolsec’s earlier critique of the Genevan teaching on predestination. ⁴³ Furthermore, while scholars generally acknowledge that theological method over the course of the sixteenth century shifted to an approach increasingly based on logical argumentation, those examining Beza’s impact differ over whether his more structured and scholastic form of theology also shaped the content of his thought. ⁴⁴

Although at first glance the debate seems to be focused on Beza himself, the bigger issue is the relative amount of continuity versus discontinuity between Calvin and his successors up to and including the upholders of Reformed orthodoxy in the seventeenth century. Those who favor continuity tend to argue that Beza’s approach was in line with that of Calvin and other earlier Reformers, whereas scholars who see a greater disjunction between Calvin and later Reformed theologians place Beza firmly in the latter camp. ⁴⁵ As noted at the start of this essay, Beza seems to have a hard time escaping his role as Calvin’s successor, with all the burdens of being charged either with weakly imitating the great Reformer, or distorting the latter’s legacy.

While it is clearly important to consider Beza’s impact in the context of his own day, assessing him on the basis of his faithfulness to or divergence from Calvin’s theology tends to cast Beza’s own achievements in the shade. He stabilized the Genevan Reformation, ensuring a mostly successful partnership between the civil and ecclesiastical leaders in the city. His unwavering commitment to the Genevan Academy ensured the institution’s continued strength into the seventeenth century, and his teaching attracted students to the academy from across Europe. His theological writings helped to consolidate Reformed doctrine in an increasingly confessional age. On a wider scale, especially after Heinrich Bullinger’s death in 1575, Beza remained as the major reference point for Reformed believers across Europe. It is to be hoped that as Reformation research gradually expands its chronological scope away from a focus solely on the first half of the sixteenth century, more attention will be paid to Beza’s impact in its own right.