The Life And Ministry Of Theodore Beza

The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia Of Religious Knowledge:

1. Early Life.

Theodore Beza (Théodore de Bèze or de Besze), Genevan Reformer, was born at Vézelay (8 m. w.s.w. of Avallon), in Burgundy, June 24, 1519; d. at Geneva Oct.13, 1605. His father, Pierre de Bèze, royal governor of Vézelay, descended from a Burgundian family of distinction; his mother, Marie Bourdelot, was known for her generosity. Theodore’s father had two brothers; one, Nicholas, was member of Parliament at Paris; the other, Claude, was abbot of the Cistercian monastery Froimont in the diocese of Beauvais. Nicholas, who was unmarried, on a visit to Vézelay was so pleased with Theodore that, with the permission of the parents, he took him to Paris to educate him there. From Paris Theodore was sent to Orléans (Dec., 1528) to enjoy the instruction of the famous German teacher Melchior Wolmar. He was received into Wolmar’s house, and the day on which this took place was afterward celebrated as a second birthday. Young Beza soon followed his teacher to Bourges, whither the latter was called by the duchess Margaret of Angoulême, sister of Francis I. Bourges was one of the places in France in which the heart of the Reformation beat the strongest. When, in 1534, Francis I issued his edict against ecclesiastical innovations, Wolmar returned to Germany, and, in accordance with the wish of his father, Beza went back to Orléans to study law, and spent four years there (1535–39). This pursuit had little attraction for him; he enjoyed more the reading of the ancient classics, especially Ovid, Catullus, and Tibullus. He received the degree of licentiate in law Aug. 11, 1539, and, as his father desired, went to Paris, where he began practise. His relatives had obtained for him two benefices, the proceeds of which amounted to 700 golden crowns a year; and his uncle had promised to make him his successor.

Beza spent two happy years at Paris and soon gained a prominent position in literary circles. To escape the many temptations to which he was exposed, with the knowledge of two friends, he became engaged in the year 1544 to a young girl of humble descent, Claudine Denosse, promising to make this engagement public as soon as his circumstances would allow it. He published a collection of Latin poems, Juvenilia, which made him famous, and he was everywhere considered one of the best Latin poets of his time. But he fell ill and his distress of body revealed to him his spiritual needs. Gradually he came to the knowledge of salvation in Christ, which he apprehended with a joyous faith. He then resolved to sever his connections of the time, and went to Geneva, the French city of refuge for the Evangelicals, where he arrived with Claudine Oct. 23, 1548.

2. Teacher at Lausanne.

He was heartily received by Calvin, who had met him already in Wolmar’s house, and was at once publicly and solemnly married in the church. Beza was at a loss for immediate occupation, so he went to Tübingen to see his former teacher Wolmar. On his way home he visited Viret at Lausanne, who at once detained him and brought about his appointment as professor of Greek at the academy there (Nov., 1549). In spite of the arduous work which fell to his lot, Beza found time to write a Biblical drama, Abraham Sacrifiant (published at Geneva, 1550; Eng. transl. by Arthur Golding, London, 1577, ed., with introduction, notes, and the French text of the original, M. W. Wallace, Toronto, 1906), in which he contrasted Catholicism with Protestantism, and the work was well received. In June, 1551, he added a few psalms to the French version of the Psalms begun by Marot, which was also very successful. About the same time he published his Passavantius, a satire directed against Pierre Lizet of ill repute, formerly president of the Parliament of Paris, and principal originator of the “fiery chamber” (chambre ardente), who, being at the time (1551) abbot of St. Victor near Paris, was eager to acquire the fame of a subduer of heresy by publishing a number of polemical writings. Of a more serious character were two controversies in which Beza was involved at this time. The first concerned the doctrine of predestination and the controversy of Calvin with Bolsec (see Calvin, John; Bolsec, Jérôme Hermès). The second referred to the burning of Michael Servetus at Geneva Oct. 27, 1553. In defense of Calvin and the Genevan magistrates, Beza published in 1554 the work De hæreticis a civili magistratu puniendis (translated into French in 1560).

3. Journeys in behalf of the Protestants.

In 1557 Beza took a special interest in the Waldensians of Piedmont, who were harassed by the French government, and in their behalf went with Farel to Bern, Zurich, Basel, Schaffhausen, thence to Strasburg, Mümpelgart, Baden, and Göppingen. In Baden and Göppingen, Beza and Farel had to declare themselves concerning their own and the Waldensians’ views on the sacrament, and on May 14, 1557, they presented a written declaration in which they clearly stated their position. This declaration was well received by the Lutheran theologians, but was strongly disapproved in Bern and Zurich. In the autumn of 1557 Beza undertook a second journey with Farel to Worms by way of Strasburg to bring about an intercession of the Evangelical princes of the empire in favor of the persecuted brethren at Paris. With Melanchthon and other theologians then assembled at Worms, Beza considered a union of all Protestant Christians, but this proposal was decidedly negatived by Zurich and Bern. False reports having reached the German princes that the hostilities against the Huguenots in France had ceased, no embassy was sent to the court of France, and Beza undertook another journey in the interest of the Huguenots, going with Farel, Johannes Buddæus, and Gaspard Carmel to Strasburg and Frankfort, where the sending of an embassy to Paris was resolved upon.

4. Settles in Geneva.

Upon his return to Lausanne, Beza was greatly disturbed. In union with many ministers and professors in city and country, Viret at last thought of establishing a consistory and of introducing a church discipline which should inflict excommunication especially at the celebration of the communion. But the Bernese would have no Calvinistic church government. This caused many difficulties, and Beza thought it best (1558) to settle at Geneva. Here he occupied at first the chair of Greek in the newly established academy, and after Calvin’s death also that of theology; besides this he was obliged to preach. He completed the revision of Olivetan’s translation of the New Testament, begun some years before. In 1559 he undertook another journey in the interest of the Huguenots, this time to Heidelberg; about the same time he had to defend Calvin against Joachim Westphal in Hamburg and Tileman Hesshusen. More important than this polemical activity was Beza’s statement of his own confession. It was originally prepared for his father in justification of his course and published in revised form to promote Evangelical knowledge among Beza’s countrymen. It was printed in Latin in 1560 with a dedication to Wolmar. An English translation was published at London 1563, 1572, and 1585. Translations into German, Dutch, and Italian were also issued.

5. Events of 1560–63.

In the mean time things took such shape in France that the happiest future for Protestantism seemed possible. King Antony of Navarre, yielding to the urgent requests of Evangelical noblemen, declared his willingness to listen to a prominent teacher of the Church. Beza, a French nobleman and head of the academy in the metropolis of French Protestantism, was invited to Castle Nerac, but he could not plant the seed of Evangelical faith in the heart of the king. In the year following (1561) Beza represented the Evangelicals at the Colloquy of Poissy, and in an eloquent manner defended the principles of the Evangelical faith. The colloquy was without result, but Beza as the head and advocate of all Reformed congregations of France was revered and hated at the same time. The queen insisted upon another colloquy, which was opened at St. Germain Jan. 28, 1562, eleven days after the proclamation of the famous January edict which granted important privileges to those of the Reformed faith. But the colloquy was broken off when it became evident that the Catholic party was preparing (after the massacre of Vassy, Mar. 1) to overthrow Protestantism. Beza hastily issued a circular letter (Mar. 25) to all Reformed congregations of the empire, and with Condé and his troops went to Orléans. It was necessary to proceed quickly and energetically. But there were neither soldiers nor money. At the request of Condé, Beza visited all Huguenot cities to obtain both. He also wrote a manifesto in which he showed the justice of the Reformed cause. As one of the messengers to collect soldiers and money among his coreligionists, Beza was appointed to visit England, Germany, and Switzerland. He went to Strasburg and Basel, but met with failure. He then returned to Geneva, which he reached Sept. 4. He had hardly been there fourteen days when he was called once more to Orléans by d’Andelot. The campaign was becoming more successful; but the publication of the unfortunate edict of pacification which Condé accepted (Mar. 12, 1563) filled Beza and all Protestant France with horror.

6. Calvin’s Successor.

For twenty-two months Beza had been absent from Geneva, and the interests of school and Church there and especially the condition of Calvin made it necessary for him to return. For there was no one to take the place of Calvin, who was sick and unable longer to bear the burden resting on him. Calvin and Beza arranged to perform their duties jointly in alternate weeks, but the death of Calvin occurred soon afterward (May 27, 1564). As a matter of course Beza was his successor. Until 1580 Beza was not only modérateur de la compagnie des pasteurs, but also the real soul of the great institution of learning at Geneva which Calvin had founded in 1559, consisting of a gymnasium and an academy. As long as be lived, Beza was interested in higher education. The Protestant youth for nearly forty years thronged his lecture-room to hear his theological lectures, in which he expounded the purest Calvinistic orthodoxy. As a counselor he was listened to by both magistrates and pastors. Geneva is indebted to him for the founding of a law school in which François Hotman, Jules Pacius, and Denys Godefroy, the most eminent jurists of the century, lectured in turn (cf. Charles Borgeaud, L’Académie de Calvin, Geneva, 1900).

7. Course of Events after 1564.

As Calvin’s successor, Beza was very successful, not only in carrying on his work but also in giving peace to the Church at Geneva. The magistrates had fully appropriated the ideas of Calvin, and the direction of spiritual affairs, the organs of which were the “ministers of the word” and “the consistory,” was founded on a solid basis. No doctrinal controversy arose after 1564. The discussions concerned questions of a practical, social, or ecclesiastical nature, such as the supremacy of the magistrates over the pastors, freedom in preaching, and the obligation of the pastors to submit to the majority of the campagnie des pasteurs. Beza obtruded his will in no way upon his associates, and took no harsh measures against injudicious or hot-headed colleagues, though sometimes he took their cases in hand and acted as mediator; and yet he often experienced an opposition so extreme that he threatened to resign. Although he was inclined to take the part of the magistrates, he knew how to defend the rights and independence of the spiritual power when occasion arose, without, however, conceding to it such a preponderating influence as did Calvin. His activity was great. He mediated between the compagnie and the magistracy; the latter continually asked his advice even in political questions. He corresponded with all the leaders of the Reformed party in Europe. After the massacre of St. Bartholomew (1572), he used his influence to give to the refugees a hospitable reception at Geneva. About this time he wrote his De jure magistratuum, in which he emphatically protested against tyranny in religious matters, and affirmed that it is legitimate for a people to oppose an unworthy magistracy in a practical manner and if necessary to use weapons and depose them. To sum up: Without being a great dogmatician like his master, nor a creative genius in the ecclesiastical realm, Beza had qualities which made him famous as humanist, exegete, orator, and leader in religious and political affairs, and qualified him to be the guide of the Calvinists in all Europe. In the various controversies into which he was drawn, Beza often showed an excess of irritation and intolerance, from which Bernardino Ochino, pastor of the Italian congregation at Zurich (on account of a treatise which contained some objectionable points on polygamy), and Sebastian Castellio at Basel (on account of his Latin and French translations of the Bible) had especially to suffer. With Reformed France Beza continued to maintain the closest relations. He was the moderator of the general synod which met in April, 1571, at La Rochelle and decided not to abolish church discipline or to acknowledge the civil government as head of the Church, as the Paris minister Jean Morel and the philosopher Pierre Ramus demanded; it also decided to confirm anew the Calvinistic doctrine of the Lord’s Supper (by the expression: “substance of the body of Christ”) against Zwinglianism, which caused a very unpleasant discussion between Beza and Ramus and Bullinger. In the following year (May, 1572) he took an important part in the national synod at Nîmes. He was also interested in the controversies which concerned the Augsburg Confession in Germany, especially after 1564, on the doctrine of the person of Christ and the sacrament, and published several works against Westphal, Hesshusen, Selnecker, Johann Brenz, and Jakob Andrea. This made him, especially after 1571, hated by all those who adhered to Lutheranism in opposition to Melanchthon.

8. The Colloquy of Mümpelgart.

The last polemical conflict of importance Beza encountered from the exclusive Lutherans was at the Colloquy of Mümpelgart, Mar. 14–27, 1586, to which he had been invited by the Lutheran Count Frederick of Württemberg at the wish of the French noblemen who had fled to Mümpelgart. As a matter of course the intended union which was the purpose of the colloquy was not brought about; nevertheless it called forth serious developments within the Reformed Church. When the edition of the acts of the colloquy, as prepared by J. Andreä, was published, Samuel Huber, of Burg near Bern, who belonged to the Lutheranizing faction of the Swiss clergy, took so great offense at the supralapsarian doctrine of predestination propounded at Mümpelgart by Beza and Musculus that he felt it to be his duty to denounce Musculus to the magistrates of Bern as an innovator in doctrine. To adjust the matter, the magistrates arranged a colloquy between Huber and Musculus (Sept. 2, 1587), in which the former represented the universalism, the latter the particularism, of grace. As the colloquy was resultless, a debate was arranged at Bern, Apr. 15–18, 1588, at which the defense of the accepted system of doctrine was at the start put into Beza’s hands. The three delegates of the Helvetic cantons who presided at the debate declared in the end that Beza had substantiated the teaching propounded at Mümpelgart as the orthodox one, and Huber was dismissed from his office.

9. Last Days.

After that time Beza’s activity was confined more and more to the affairs of his home. His faithful wife Claudine had died childless in 1588, a few days before he went to the Bern Disputation. Forty years they had lived happily together. He contracted, on the advice of his friends, a second marriage with Catharina del Piano, a Genoese widow, in order to have a helpmate in his declining years. Up to his sixty-fifth year he enjoyed excellent health, but after that a gradual sinking of his vitality became perceptible. He was active in teaching till Jan., 1597. The saddest experience in his old days was the conversion of King Henry IV to Roman Catholicism, in spite of his most earnest exhortations (1593). Strange to say, in 1596 the report was spread by the Jesuits in Germany, France, England, and Italy that Beza and the Church of Geneva had returned into the bosom of Rome, and Beza replied in a satire that revealed the possession still of his old fire of thought and vigor of expression. He was not buried, like Calvin, in the general cemetery, Plain-Palais (for the Savoyards had threatened to abduct his body to Rome), but at the direction of the magistrates, in the monastery of St. Pierre.

10. Humanistic and Historical Writings.

In Beza’s literary activity as well as in his life, distinction must be made between the period of the humanist (which ended with the publication of his Juvenilia) and that of the ecclesiastic. But later productions like the humanistic, biting, satirical Passavantius and his Complainte de Messire Pierre Lizet . . . prove that in later years he occasionally went back to his first love. In his old age he published his Cato censorius (1591), and revised his Poemata, from which he purged juvenile eccentricities. Of his historiographical works, aside from his Icones (1580), which have only an iconographical value, mention may be made of the famous Histoire ecclésiastique des Églises réformée s au Royaume de France (1580), and his biography of Calvin, with which must be named his edition of Calvin’s Epistolæ et responsa (1575).

11. Theological Works.

But all these humanistic and historical studies are surpassed by his theological productions (contained in Tractationes theologicæ). In these Beza appears the perfect pupil or the alter ego of Calvin. His view of life is deterministic and the basis of his religious thinking is the predestinate recognition of the necessity of all temporal existence as an effect of the absolute, eternal, and immutable will of God, so that even the fall of the human race appears to him essential to the divine plan of the world. In most lucid manner Beza shows in tabular form the connection of the religious views which emanated from thin fundamental supralapsarian mode of thought. This he added to his highly instructive treatise Summa totius Christianismi.

12. Beza’s Greek New Testament.

Of no less importance are the contributions of Beza to Biblical science. In 1565 he issued an edition of the Greek New Testament, accompanied in parallel columns by the text of the Vulgate and a translation of his own (already published as early as 1556). Annotations were added, also previously published, but now he greatly enriched and enlarged them. In the preparation of this edition of the Greek text, but much more in the preparation of the second edition which he brought out in 1582, Beza may have availed himself of the help of two very valuable manuscripts. One is known as the Codex Bezæ or Cantabrigensis, and was later presented by Beza to the University of Cambridge; the second is the Codex Claromontanus, which Beza had found in Clermont (now in the National Library at Paris). It was not, however, to these sources that Beza was chiefly indebted, but rather to the previous edition of the eminent Robert Stephens (1550), itself based in great measure upon one of the later editions of Erasmus. Beza’s labors in this direction were exceedingly helpful to those who came after. The same thing may be asserted with equal truth of his Latin version and of the copious notes with which it was accompanied. The former is said to have been published over a hundred times. It is to be regretted that the author’s view of the doctrine of predestination exercised upon the interpretation of Scripture too preponderating an influence. However, there is no question that Beza added much to a clear understanding of the New Testament.

Eugène Choisy.

Bibliography: J. W. Baum, T. Beza nach handschriftlichen und anderen gleichzeitigen Quellen, Leipsic, 1843–52 (masterly, but extends only to 1563); his life by Heppe is in vol. vi of Leben und ausgewählte Schriften der Väter der reformierten Kirche, Elberfeld, 1861 (complete and excellent, inferior only to Baum); A. de la Faye, De vita et obitu T. Besæ, Geneva, 1606 (by a favorite pupil of Beza); Jérôme Bolsec, Histoire de la vie, maurs, doctrine et débordements de T. de Bèze, Paris, 1582, republished Geneva, 1835 (Roman Catholic, a scurrilous and malignant libel); F. C. Schlosser, Leben des Theodor Beza und des Peter Martyr Vermigli, Heidelberg, 1809; E. and É. Haag, La France protestante, 2d ed. by Bordier, ii. 520–540, Paris, 1879; H. M. McCracken, Lives of the Leaders of Our Church Universal, from the Germ. of F. Piper, pp. 352–362, Philadelphia, 1879; Schaff, Christian Church, vol. vii, passim, especially chap six; Moeller, Christian Church, vol. iii, passim; C. v. Proosdij, T. Beza medearbeiter en opvolger van Calvijn, Leyden, 1895; H. M. Baird, Theodore Beza, the Counsellar of the French Reformation, New York, 1899 (the one book in English, and a worthy treatment of the subject), cf. his Rise of the Huguenots, passim, ib. 1879; A. Bernus, T. de Bèze à Lausanne, Lausanne, 1900; E. Choisy, L’État chrétien calvinists à Genéve au tempe de T. de Bèze, Geneva, 1902; Cambridge Modern History, vol. ii, The Reformation, passim, vol. iii, London, 1904; À Théodore de Bèze (1605–1905), Geneva, 1906.