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July/August 2022
R E F O R M AT I O N O U T TA K E S
Lost and Found: Calvin’s Sermons on the Scrap Heap by Zachary Purvis
Guillaume and Adolphe Monod entered a junk shop in Geneva. A mysterious volume, unusually old and musty, caught their attention. When they examined it closely, the smudged ink inside resolved into letters and the letters into words. The script might have misled other men, but Guil laume and Adolphe came from a line of French Reformed ministers and studied theology themselves. Soon they identified the contents: nothing less than manuscript sermons from John Calvin. For a pittance they bought the set to which it belonged, eight folio volumes in all, for the clerk had priced it only by weight of the paper. They sent their treasure to Geneva’s public library for safekeeping. The episode seems surprising. In fact, the odyssey of Calvin’s sermons—from delivery to scrap heap, from discovery to preservation—is filled with remarkable twists. We begin with the Bourse française, a charity organization in Geneva that helped destitute immigrants and financed religious instruction. In 1549, the Bourse hired Denis Raguenier, himself a French refugee, as Calvin’s stenographer. Calvin entered the pulpit without notes, so Raguenier recorded what he said in shorthand and afterwards transcribed it in longhand. There had been repeated attempts to write down Calvin’s sermons and lectures as he spoke. “Many tried to do this,” Theodore Beza said in his early biography of Calvin, “but they had not yet been able to write everything down word for word.” Raguenier opened a new world and grew in ability as he went. The first sermons he recorded in 1549 ran to an average of 4,000 words each. The sermons he took down between 1550 and 1551 on Micah were 5,000 words. The sermons he transcribed between 1556 and 1559 on Isaiah ran to 7,000 words. It was Raguenier’s handwriting that the Monod brothers deciphered in the junk shop. Because Calvin preached without notes—though not without preparation— the transcribed sermons did not shine with the same polish as those texts that Calvin composed specifically for print. Guillaume Farel complained to him about this: “I would have liked it if you worked on your discourse with more care, as you usually do.” But Calvin was famously overburdened with work. Furthermore, he preached to the flesh-and-blood audience before him, even when that meant sacrificing style or brevity. No one had a sharper sense of the importance of genre: biblical commentaries were not sermons; sermons were not lectures; lectures were not treatises. No one knew more the distance between oral and IN 1823, THE BROTHERS
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