Some time ago, I started a little series on Calvin’s use of classical authors in the Institutes. In the first two parts, we looked at Calvin’s references to Plato and to Vergil and Lucretius.1 In this installment, we will see what use he makes of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-AD 17/18).
As far as I can tell, there is precisely one reference to Ovid in the Institutes, in 1.15.3 on the image of God. In the course of his argument for man’s composition from both body and soul (i.e. he is both material and immaterial), and that the spiritual part of man is immortal, he says the following argument: Man was created in the image of God; the seat of the image is the soul; therefore the soul is immortal. He says:
A strong proof of this point may be gathered from its being said, that man was created in the image of God. For though the divine glory is displayed in man’s outward appearance, it cannot be doubted that the proper seat of the image is in the soul. I deny not, indeed, that external shape, in so far as it distinguishes and separates us from the lower animals, brings us nearer to God; nor will I vehemently oppose any who may choose to include under the image of God that
“While the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes,
Beholds his own hereditary skies.”
Only let it be understood, that the image of God which is beheld or made conspicuous by these external marks, is spiritual.
Calvin is making a relatively fine distinction here. He goes on to argue against Osiander that the image should be “extend[ed]…indiscriminately as well to the body as to the soul” and can therefore be used as an argument that Christ,2 the perfect image of the Father, would have become incarnate even if Adam had remained in the state of integrity.
He nevertheless does not deny that the “spiritual” image of God is made manifest externally by means of the body, though it is not to be identified with the body. Even if, that is, the “proper seat” of the image is the soul, we can see the “divine glory” in “man’s outward appearance” as though through “external marks” of a spiritual reality.3 Thus, as long as one preserves the essentially spiritual quality of the image of God, one can use the following (pagan) poetic lines as a kind of proof-text for the image:
“While the mute creation downward bend
Their sight, and to their earthly mother tend,
Man looks aloft, and with erected eyes,
Beholds his own hereditary skies.”
Those lines come from the first book of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which deals with the creation of the world:
pronaque cum spectent animalia cetera terram,
os homini sublime dedit caelumque videre 85
iussit et erectos ad sidera tollere vultus…
Calvin does not mention, though he could have, that in the line just before his quotation begins Ovid explicitly refers to man as “fashioned in the image of the gods governing all things” (finxit in effigiem moderantum cuncta deorum) at the hands of Prometheus. Was his omission deliberate? Perhaps so, given that he is attempting to preserve a sense in which man’s body, station, and posture are revelatory of the image of God without conflating man’s body, station, and posture with the image of God.
Metamorphoses 1 is fecund for Christian appropriation, and so one is not surprised to find it, and this passage in particular, employed rather ubiquitously. I myself noted it years ago in Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology, and in the comments thread David Noe remarked on the use of Met. 1 in Junius’ Treatise on True Theology. (I thought Eric Parker had discussed it somewhere as well, but can’t find it at the moment.)
Thus, given that Ovid appears only once in the Institutes, it is not at all surprising that this is the passage quoted. And given that Calvin could have made the same point without quoting Ovid at all, the fact that he does so indicates the importance that classical learning retained in the sixteenth century and that ancient writers, used properly, remained sources of living wisdom.
- Cf. here as well.
- Calvin’s word; he obviously means “the Son.”
- There are implications here for Calvin’s doctrine of the church and the two kingdoms, though I will not pursue them.
