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.’