The Calvinist International
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. In this installment, we will see what use he makes of the Roman poet Ovid (43 BC-AD 17/18). As far as I […]
In the first poem of the Heroides, a collection of love elegies in the form of letters (mostly) from mythical heroines to their absent lovers, Ovid has Penelope say to Odysseus: Res est solliciti plena timoris amor (“Love is a thing full of anxious fear”), as he plays on the similarity in sound and difference in meaning between […]
I’ve written briefly in previous posts on the possible configuration of the relationship between creation and redemption, this world and the world to come (e.g. here and here; cf. also Mr. Minich’s post here). I’m currently in the process of putting together a longer post on the treatment of the theme in Calvin’s exegesis, but […]
For those who have read certain of Ovid’s love elegies, he might seem an odd choice for Christian repurposing, but it does happen. Book 1 of his Metamorphoses, with its account of creation, has some sections that especially lend themselves to Christian appropriation. Thus Francis Turretin, in discussing in what the imago Dei consists in […]