This attitude was emphasized all the more by the Latin hymns sung and read in the churches, and on religious occasions, whose chief burden was worship of the Madonna, and even of the saints, against which his mind rose in outraged horror.
II. CALVIN’S FOLLOWERS MORE EXTREME
Human nature being what it is, it was inevitable that Calvin’s followers should carry his ideas to an extreme, and mechanically add the conclusion that hymns independent of the lyrics of the Scriptures should be forbidden.
While Luther stressed the Biblical content of the hymns and exalted the Psalms as the source of religious lyrical impulses, Calvin and his disciples added a rigid and almost superstitious regard for the mere form of the Scripture lyrics. They accepted their distortion and mutilation in giving them a metrical form as justified by the congregational necessity, and by the evident devotional results among the people.
III. MAROT’S SUCCESSFUL VERSIONS
Beneath his austerity Calvin evidently had an appreciation of literary beauty and grace, for he developed an ambition to clothe the Hebrew Psalms in a literary French metrical dress. It was while this problem was exercising his mind that there fell into his hands the French version of some of the Psalms by Clement Marot (1497-1544), who had come under the influence of Marguerite de Valois, the Huguenot princess, whose valet de chambre he was during his early twenties. It is possible that he and Calvin met at Ferrara in 1535. Though the work of a Huguenot poet, these lyrics were admired in high political and social circles in France. Written in measures fitting them to popular tunes, they were very popular among the royal courtiers, Catholics as well as Protestants, and were soon introduced into other countries.
That he was later persecuted by the Roman ecclesiastics only recommended him the more to Calvin. Here was a poet of high reputation, a skillful versifier of the Psalms, a fellow-sufferer at the hands of the Roman hierarchy—why not commit to his hands the task of supplying Calvin’s new church with its needed book of Psalms? So Marot was called to Geneva.
IV. DEVELOPMENT OF THE GENEVAN PSALTER
In 1543, nineteen years after Luther’s first venture, the Acht Liederbuch, appeared, The Genevan Psalter was issued in the French language. It contained fifty psalms by Marot. Marot died in 1544. The completion of the Psalter was committed to Theodore Beza of Burgundy, who revised Marot’s verses, eliminating the classical allusions and offensive gaiety. With the help of Bourgeois, and later of Goudimel, in completing and harmonizing the tunes, he finished the Psalter in 1562.[1]