Government, Law, and Religion in Calvin’s Geneva

 

Government, Law, and Religion in Calvin’s Geneva

Taken from: https://www.johnwittejr.com/uploads/5/4/6/6/54662393/a198.pdf

Read the following lengthy excerpt on Calvin's Geneva. It is not possible that our Reformed or Evangelical conservative leaders today would regard Calvin and Calvin's Geneva as Christian and faithful, in Church or State Government. Simply ask yourself, would you rather live in Calvin's Geneva, or Modern America? The answer is easy if you think for a moment, are holy, and love the Lord.

 

"The Protestant Reformation in Geneva began as a revolution in government, law, and religion. On May 21, 1536, two months before Calvin first arrived in Geneva, the city authorities issued a statute renouncing the Catholic Church and its canon law in favor of “the holy Evangelical Law and Word of God.”3 A prince-bishop who had been sovereign in both the political and religious realms was forced to leave. So were most of the members of his entourage, including a number of canon lawyers who staffed the bishop's court. It was called the court of the official and was responsible, among other things, for resolving problems involving marriage and family throughout the diocese. So was an officer called the vidomne who superintended the administration of justice, arresting people and enforcing laws on sexual immorality and crime between sundown and sunrise (during daylight hours this fell to officers of the commune), and arranging for punishment of those found guilty.

 

The government that remained after the expulsion of the bishop’s court and officials was a hierarchy of councils and the committees and officials dependent on those councils. These councils had already been given some powers by earlier bishops to govern the city internally, to maintain public order, to control sexual morals and, since 1364, to judge some criminal cases.4 But after 1536, the city councils had to take steps to fill the vacuum created by the expulsion of the bishop and his entourage, which they accomplished by realigning the power and procedures of some of the councils as well as creating the Consistory.

 

The Councils.  Four main councils operated in the city after the reformation. First, and most basic was the General Council. In theory, it consisted of all the adult male residents of the community over the age of twenty. In practice, only two privileged groups of residents, the citizens and the bourgeois, were active in this government. The General Council met at least once a year, in February, to elect officers of the government for the coming year, to supervise the elections of the members of the smaller Councils, and to ratify particularly important laws, like the Reformation Ordinance of 1536. Second, the Council of Two Hundred was a smaller body that had been created a decade before in imitation of a similar body in Protestant Bern. This Council met occasionally to handle special cases, to ratify laws, and to handle appeals from people convicted of crimes by the Small Council who felt that its sentence had been too harsh. Third, the Council of Sixty was an older institution, which had earlier been a Council of Fifty. It also met to handle special cases, especially those that involved relations with foreign governments. The members of the Council of Sixty were also members of the Council of Two Hundred.

 

The fourth council, called the Small Council, however, that was the most powerful legislative, executive, and judicial authority of Geneva after the Reformation. Its responsibilities were defined in some detail in the 1543 Ordinances on Offices and Officers that Calvin helped to draft. 5 The Small Council was made up of twenty-five leading Genevan citizens. It met at least three times a week. Its presiding officers were four men called syndics, arranged in order of seniority in government service. They represented the government in announcements to the general public and, often but not invariably, in negotiations with foreign powers. They also supervised the criminal justice system, including the prosecution and punishment of sex crimes. One of syndics also signed the banns of marriage of a newly engaged couple, which banns would be pronounced in the local church. New syndics were elected every year for a term of only one year from among members of the Small Council. The remaining members of the Small Council were normally reelected every year.

 

A number of officers and standing committees reported to the Small Council whose members were also chosen in the annual elections. These officers and committees had responsibilities for duties like maintaining the city's accounts, maintaining the city's grain supply, arranging for the watch that guarded the city's walls, and handling legal cases in both civil and criminal arenas. One important such officer was the lieutenant, who assumed many of the powers that had traditionally been exercised by the bishop’s vidomne. 6 The court of the lieutenant rendered summary justice, with no written record and no right of appeal, for small civil cases involving sums of five florins or less. Larger civil cases were resolved in formal trials with lawyers, written records, and the right of appeal to a special court of appeals appointed annually by the Small Council. Minor criminal infractions were handled directly in the streets by the lieutenant (or by officers of the Small Council). Many of these infractions were regulatory offenses or misdemeanors, such as being outside after nine at night without a candle, or failing to attend sermon. In these cases the officers would order people to pay a small fine on the spot, of which the officers took a cut, based on a variety of edicts issued over the years by the Council. In cases alleging more serious criminal offenses or when an individual had repeatedly committed minor infractions, there would be formal legal proceedings supervised by the lieutenant in consultation with the Small Council. The lieutenant would oversee the gathering of evidence and would conduct interrogations with members of the Council present. The lieutenant, however, would play no role in rendering a verdict or imposing a sentence in these criminal cases. That was left to the syndics, the city's chief executives, in consultation with a quorum of the Small Council.

 

The Small Council was, in part, a key legislative body, with power to draft or commission new statutes, which were then ratified by the other councils. Most of the important legislation on sex, marriage and family life came through this body, and all the major new statutes on point in the 1540s to 1560s were drafted or shaped by Calvin and other Protestant reformers. The most comprehensive such measure was the Marriage Ordinance drafted by Calvin in 1545, and revised in 1546 and again in 1561. 7 It included detailed rules about engagements, marriage, weddings, marital property, household relations, spousal care and responsibilities, impotence, abuse, adultery, desertion, separation, and divorce. Another essential text was the Marriage Liturgy that Calvin first prepared in 1542 and expanded in 1545; its provisions were amplified by a series of discrete rules and regulations passed by the Small Council over the next three decades. 8 Several statutes governed the baptism and care of children by parents and godparents, and their catechesis and formal education.9 A long series of statutes, distilled in 1560 and 1566, governed public and private sexual morality – adultery, fornication, prostitution, public bathing, dressing, dancing, parties, dissolute songs, sumptuousness, and much more.10 Still other statutes, distilled in a comprehensive edict of 1568, governed the economic arrangements of marriage and family life – betrothal gifts, dower, dowry, trusts, wills, legacies, inheritance, probate, and related issues of marital and family property. 11

 

The Consistory.  The Small Council was ultimately responsible to implement and enforce this new legislation, and to adjudicate disputes and to prosecute crimes based upon these statutes. But the Small Council shared much of this work with a new institution called the Consistory. Calvin created this institution in the Ecclesiastical Ordinances that he drafted for Geneva in 1541, and it was one of the institutions that he insisted on having in place to implement the new Protestant reforms of the city.

 

The Consistory was made up of about two dozen men. Its presiding officer was one of the four syndics of the year. Its members sat on two benches. On one sat all the ordained pastors of Geneva and occasionally those from the villages attached to it, headed by Calvin as their moderator. On the other bench sat twelve lay commissioners, called "elders," who were elected for this duty in the February elections every year. The elders were chosen so as to represent the three governing Councils: two from the Small Council and ten from the Council of Two Hundred, with four of those ten also members of the Council of Sixty and/or General Council. The Consistory also had two additional officers, to expedite its business. One was a secretary, always a registered notary, who took minutes of each of its meetings, creating the consistory register. The other was an officier or summoner, who with the lieutenant of the city faced the often difficult task of bringing before the Consistory people it wanted to question. The elders, the secretary, and the summoner were all paid small sums of money for attending meetings of the Consistory. The Consistory met once a week, on Thursdays, in sessions that before long stretched out for several hours.

 

Cases came before the Consistory in a variety of ways. Sometimes they came on the initiative of an individual who sought relief. A jilted fiancée who wanted to have her engagement contract enforced or her dowry returned. A man who claimed his wife was cheating on him and wanted a divorce. A woman who limped into court with blackened eyes and broken teeth asking for protection from her abusive husband. A child whose parents threatened to disinherit him unless he married a woman he did not want. A poor person who was felt unjustly banned from the local hospital and wanted a bed. A businessman who felt his partner had embezzled his funds. A renter whose landlord refused to fix the window.

 

Other cases began on the initiative of the lieutenant or other government official, a pastor, or a concerned citizen. Sometimes they alerted the Consistory to a serious need like poverty, sickness, unemployment, loneliness, or neglect that required pastoral intervention or material assistance. More often, the complaint was about some moral irregularity – non-attendance or disruptiveness at worship services, failure to pay tithes, suspicion of polygamy, concubinage, or prostitution, public drunkenness, mixed public bathing, non-marital cohabitation, wild or blasphemous songs, obscene speech, plays, or publications, a raucous party or wedding feast featuring dancing and debauchery. Occasionally more serious offenses like rape, battery, sodomy, kidnapping, mayhem, torture, or homicide were also reported, though most of these cases went directly to the Small Council. In all of these cases, the Consistory served more as a grand jury and preliminary hearings court. The Consistory had wide subpoena to summon and investigate parties, witnesses, and documents.

 

Each person who appeared or was subpoenaed before the Consistory was identified, informed of the reason he or she was there, and then asked questions by members of the Consistory. Parties generally were not allowed to bring along a lawyer or another adviser, but had to handle questions entirely on their own. Sometimes they would submit affidavits, petitions, contracts, certificates, or other documents for the Consistory’s review. The Consistory would often question the parties about these documents, and summon witnesses to validate their authenticity. The Consistory also had wide subpoena power to compel witnesses to appear to shed greater light on the case. The Consistory would then reach a decision. The most common decision, especially in the early years of the Reformation, was simply to administer a scolding, an "admonition" or a "remonstrance" as it was called. The person administering this scolding was usually Calvin or another minister who sat on the Consistory bench.

 

In cases involving several people, the Consistory often tried to effect reconciliation and to resolve the dispute without a formal trial. In these cases it acted more as a compulsory counseling or mediation service. In hearing a divorce petition, for example, the Consistory usually tried to bring a couple back together again rather than immediately granting the petition. Ceremonies of reconciliation were often staged before the Consistory, although if the problem had achieved general notoriety, a public ceremony of reconciliation might be held in a parish church, accompanying a regular service of worship. The Consistory could also order individuals to perform a "public reparation." People so sentenced had to appear at a main Sunday worship service, get down on their knees, confess the errors of their ways, and beg for forgiveness. This punishment was initially used to punish women convicted of adultery who were visibly pregnant and for that reason could not be sent to jail. Later it came to be applied most frequently to people who, while living in a Catholic area, had renounced their faith in order to avoid punishment.12

 

If the Consistory found an individual to be guilty of particularly offensive behavior or to be particularly stubborn in resisting correction or reconciliation, it could ban that party from receiving “communion” or the “Lord’s Supper” (terms Protestants used to describe the Eucharist), a sacrament which was now held only four times per year. The ban from communion was a far more serious punishment then than it is now. People saw it as preventing them from receiving a sacrament that was a sign of God's grace and formerly, in Catholic times, a necessity for receiving ultimate salvation. It was also a social humiliation that could interrupt normal social routines and business. Banned parties could not act as godparents, an important honor at that time. Nor could they get married. Sometimes they were also excluded from poor relief and access to the city hospital. 13

 

If parties made no attempt to rehabilitate themselves and be readmitted to communion, the Consistory could, as the Ecclesiastical Ordinances put it, have them “separated from the Church and denounced to the Council.” This was, in effect, the power of excommunication, though it was rarely called such in the 1540s and even more rarely used. The use of the term, let alone the practice, of excommunication by the Genevan Consistory was particularly controversial. It reminded too many Genevans of the previous Catholic authorities who had often used excommunication in a variety of ways that were sometimes not even religious -- to enforce the payment of debts, for example. Most early Protestant regimes, including those created by Lutherans, Zwinglians, and Anglicans, refused to give their churches a general power of excommunication, only a power of the ban from communion. In Geneva a group of local leaders called "the children of Geneva" strenuously resisted the idea that the church should reserve to itself the power to excommunicate. They insisted they should at least be able to appeal over the heads of the Consistory to the Small Council to revise or lift a sentence of excommunication. In a number of celebrated cases, Calvin and the other ministers flatly refused to permit an appeal from a Consistory decision. As ministers they would simply not offer communion to an excommunicated sinner. Tension over this issue became more and more intense, until it provoked riots in the city in 1555. Those sympathetic to Calvin and the other ministers ultimately prevailed. Others involved in the riots were brutally punished, all of them removed from political offices, several of them put to death, many more banished from the city.

 

A crucial new weapon won in this political battle was the Consistory's unequivocal power to enforce its spiritual discipline by using either the ban (temporary preclusion from communion) or excommunication (exclusion from the church altogether, which often also entailed banishment from the city as well). This was confirmed by an important statute of 1560 that urged the use of admonition and simple bans in routine cases, and the use of excommunication in serious cases.14 The ban became a more regularly used tool of discipline thereafter. Excommunication, however, was still only rarely ordered. A study of Consistory cases from 1560-1564 shows that the Consistory banned nearly 40 persons for every one it excommunicated.15

 

The Consistory had no further spiritual powers – and no formal legal power. If it decided that a case needed further investigation and further punishment, it had to refer it to the Small Council. In this respect, the Consistory often acted as a kind of preliminary hearings court, something like a grand jury in Anglo-American law. We often find that on the Monday following a Thursday Consistory session, there would be on the Small Council's docket a number of cases referred from the Consistory. On occasion the Small Council might dismiss a charge as frivolous. More often, however, it would proceed with its usual methods of investigating a case. If the case seemed minor, it might be handled immediately by the Council. If it seemed serious, the lieutenant of the city, might take the accused into custody and place him or her in the city’s prison. This prison had earlier been the palace of the prince-bishop, but now it had been adapted for different purposes. It contained a number of holding cells for people awaiting trial. It also contained a large torture chamber. It did not house any long-term prisoners. Imprisonment for long periods of time was simply not a punishment used in sixteenth-century Geneva. Even people sentenced to life in prison as the result of a criminal trial were usually released within a few months, often paroled to the custody of relatives. Most prison sentences lasted for only a few days.

 

Following an arrest, the lieutenant and his assistants, called auditeurs, would arrange for a series of cross examinations of the accused. A fairly long list of related charges would be drawn up and written down, and the accused would be expected to answer them before a panel made up of people usually drawn from the Small Council. There would often be several "repetitions" in which the same questions were put to the accused again, sometimes in the presence of a different panel of Council members. This is the legal method called the inquisitorial process, which was commonly used in Europe at this time.16 If the accused turned out to be stubborn or contradictory, and if the charges were really serious, the authorities were then allowed to administer torture when asking questions. Before that happened, however, a jurisconsult was called in to examine the dossier and to decide whether there was probable cause to believe that a crime had been committed and that the crime was serious enough to warrant such extreme methods. It was regarded as always preferable to have the accused confess the crime. Only a confession was regarded as really sure evidence that a crime had been committed. A confession extracted under torture, furthermore, could be retracted after torture was over, if the accused then claimed it had been a false confession.

 

In complicated cases, the Small Council would often refer issues back to the Consistory for further fact-finding, investigation of witnesses, or advice on novel questions that were not addressed at all or clearly enough in the statutes. The Consistory would then make recommendations of whether or how to proceed, which the Small Council would take under advisement. If an issue was particularly complex or pressing, or if the Consistory decided that the Small Council was not proceeding properly, they would send a representative to the next Council meeting to put their recommendations or press their case. John Calvin was the one often tapped to represent the Consistory’s interest before the Council in these cases. On occasion, Calvin showed up at Council’s meetings on his initiative, sometimes to press the Council to enact clearer rules to address an issue heard by the Consistory, sometimes to urge equity in a given case that the Consistory had removed to the Council. He was sometimes accommodated, sometimes rebuffed.

 

Once a trial dossier had been completed, and the full slate of Consistorial recommendations collected, the Small Council would render a final judgment. On some minor matters, the Council’s judgment would be to send the case back to the Consistory to impose spiritual sanctions alone. On most matters that had been referred to them, however, the Council would impose civil and/or criminal orders or sanctions as well. This could be an order for quarrelling parties to post their banns and get married within a designated period of time. Or it could be a declaration that an engagement or marriage was to be annulled because of a proved impediment, or a couple was to be divorced because of the desertion or adultery of one of the parties. Or it could involve the payment of damages, the restitution of property, or the specific performance of the terms of a contract.

 

Where the case involved criminal conduct (as well), the verdict of guilty would be written out, posted, and read aloud in the public square by one of the town criers, or by a syndic if it were a capital case. Verdicts in a number of different kinds of cases could be appealed to the Council of Two Hundred, but not to a court outside of Geneva. Criminal punishments could involve ceremonies of public shaming, monetary fines, mutilation, banishment, short terms in prison on "bread and water," and, to a degree we would find appalling, capital punishment by a town executioner hired by the city for the purpose. There were a number of rather gruesome ways in which capital punishment was administered. Traitors might be beheaded, thieves hanged, notorious adulteresses drowned, heretics or witches burned."