Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on sources, orthography, notes and translations
- Introduction
- 1 The training of a lawgiver
- 2 The Institution: the first version
- 3 The first public ministry
- 4 Reconstruction
- 5 The Institution of 1543
- 6 Geneva and Calvin, 1541–64
- 7 The civil order of a Christian commonwealth
- 8 Political morality in the thought of Calvin
- 9 The laws and mores of a Christian commonwealth
- 10 Unfinished business: a speculative summary and postscript
- Appendix I Calvin's conversion
- Appendix II Predestination
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics
10 - Unfinished business: a speculative summary and postscript
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Note on sources, orthography, notes and translations
- Introduction
- 1 The training of a lawgiver
- 2 The Institution: the first version
- 3 The first public ministry
- 4 Reconstruction
- 5 The Institution of 1543
- 6 Geneva and Calvin, 1541–64
- 7 The civil order of a Christian commonwealth
- 8 Political morality in the thought of Calvin
- 9 The laws and mores of a Christian commonwealth
- 10 Unfinished business: a speculative summary and postscript
- Appendix I Calvin's conversion
- Appendix II Predestination
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Studies in the History and Theory of Politics
Summary
By 1558 Calvin was an extremely sick man, plagued by migraine, gout, colic, piles, nephritis, the stone and quartan fevers. He feared that he might not live to complete the last Institution, which he was composing on his sick-bed. And although he drove himself as hard as ever when not entirely prostrated by illness, his activities were those of a man putting his affairs in order. The Institution was now given an arrangement with which Calvin professed himself satisfied; the Genevan Academy, already described in its statutes as a Université, was at last established in 1559, complete with its own statutes and Theodore de Beze (Beza) as its first rector; an expanded version of the Ordonnances of 1541 was put on the Genevan statute-books in 1560 and 1561; an ordinance concerning the law and discipline of matrimony was appended; and the laws governing Genevan morals and mores were consolidated. All this had been done by 1561; his last magnumopus, the Harmony of the Last Four Books of Moses, was not completed until 1563, but Calvin had been working on it for years. In fact, he did not die until 17 May 1564. His last public act was an address to his ministerial colleagues summarizing his life and travails, and impressing on them the need to ‘make no changes, no innovation’ and to maintain amity and solidarity amongst themselves.
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- Information
- The Christian Polity of John Calvin , pp. 207 - 218Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1982