George Buchanan

by Robert Wallace; John Campbell Smith

Silent Doubt

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.