Calvin at College

Where did John Calvin go to college? Today, Stephen Nichols tells us about Calvin’s time at the Collège de Montaigu and how his educational experiences helped shape him into the prominent Reformer that we know today.

Welcome back to another episode of 5 Minutes in Church History. On this episode, we are going to look at Calvin at college. We think of the Reformers, and we see them in their portraits as accomplished great men near the end of their lives, and that’s mostly how we think of them, but we need to realize that there was a time when John Calvin was not John Calvin. He was just a young kid making his way to college. Calvin was born in 1509 in Noyon. And in 1523, and if you do the math, he’s twelve years old going on thirteen, he travels about one hundred and ten kilometers to the south and slightly to the west, to the big city of Paris, and he enrolls at the College De Montaigu. The college dates back to 1314. It was one of the earliest colleges of the University of Paris, and that University is one of the oldest of the European Universities.

In 1200, it was chartered by the King of France, but its roots go back to 1045 when the University of Paris, the Sorbonne, as it is known, first started as a cathedral school. Well, back to the College De Montaigu. In the 1480s and 1490s, it emerged as one of the top theological colleges of the University of Paris. Noel Beda was the principal or the president of the college from 1504 to 1514. Under him, the college became entrenched in Roman Catholic Orthodoxy in the face of the rising French humanists and Beda was bent on reacting and responding to the humanists. One of the cries of the humanists was, “Ad Fontes” to go back to the fountain, back to the source. That would include going past Latin and going back to studying these classic philosophical texts or the Bible in the Greek language. Beda actually called the Greek language “The language of all heresies.”

Now, there’s a slight irony here because just before Beda became the president, there was a student, a famous student at Montaigu by the name of Erasmus of Rotterdam. He, of course, would go on to publish the Greek New Testament in 1516. While Erasmus was at Montaigu, he wasn’t very impressed. His recollection of the college was that it had “stale eggs and stale divinity.” Well after Beda, that one who called the Greek language “the language of all heresies,” the new principal or the new president was an even more stern figure, Pierre Tempete. This was the president during Calvin’s tenure as a student. Tempete brought John Major onto the faculty. Major was a master of Lombard’s Sentences, that classic medieval text of Roman Catholic theology. He followed the philosophy of Ockham, that is of the famous Occam’s razor, and he was also a Biblical commentator. Throughout Calvin’s years, Major worked on a commentary on the four Gospels with a singular view in mind; he wanted to refute the big three heretics, Wycliffe, Huss, and Martin Luther.

Calvin was at Montaigu from 1523 to 1528. He received a B.A. and an M.A.. After his time at Montaigu, he would go on to the University of Orleans for graduate studies and law. But as a college student at Montaigu, he would’ve read Augustine and the Church Fathers. He would’ve studied Aristotle. It was back in the 1250s, actually, that Albert the Great was at the University of Paris, and he brought Aristotle front and center to the curriculum. He would’ve studied William of Ockham. He would’ve been exposed to Luther’s ideas, but by way of the faculty attempting to refute them. Calvin would not follow in the footsteps of the leadership of the College of Montaigu. He would actually embrace the new French humanism. But during his time as a college student, he was not converted. It would be another decade. It would be 1534 when Calvin was converted. But as Augustine says, in his Confessions, speaking of his circuitous route to conversion, he speaks to God and says directly, “You use all whether we know it or not.” And so, God used all in Calvin’s time as a college student at Montaigu, as he would become John Calvin, the Reformer we all know. Well, that’s Calvin at college and I’m Steve Nichols, and thanks for joining us for 5 Minutes in Church History.