A Singular Example of the Wrath of God: The Use of Sodom in Sixteenth-Century Exegesis

Christopher Elwood

doi:10.1017/S0017816005000866

A Singular Example of the Wrath of God: The Use of Sodom in Sixteenth-Century Exegesis

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 August 2005

Christopher Elwood

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Christopher Elwood: Affiliation:
Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary

Article contents

Extract
Luther on Wrath, Mercy, and Moral Degeneracy in the Last Times
Calvin on Sodom, Sin, and Nature
Rhetorical Designs and Political Context
Ambiguous Legacies
Footnotes

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Extract

What did the Reformation do for sodomy? The more or less established view, developed by social and cultural historians and contributors to the history of sexuality, is that it did relatively little. The evidence of the normative discourses of theology and law suggests that definitions and understandings of sodomy after the Reformation movements of the early and middle sixteenth century differed little from what had been proffered in the legal and moral writings of the medieval period. According to these defi nitions, which varied in their particulars, sodomy was a sin of unnatural lust which included, but was often not limited to, sexual contact between persons of the same sex. It was a sin whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants' penchant for unnatural sex led directly to their destruction in a hail of sulfur and fire—a dramatic event that was to stand as a warning both to those tempted to indulge in this vice and to those innocent of that particular sin who would nonetheless tolerate it in their neighbors. This view is found reflected in a wide range of writings from homiletic, exegetical, and penitential productions of late antiquity and the early, high, and late Middle Ages. And, indeed, while Protestant reforming ideas and practices changed many things in Europe of the sixteenth century, they seem to have left untouched this conception of the sin of the Sodomites. Confessions divided on many theological issues appear to have had no quarrel over what sodomy was, where it had come from, and what ought to be done about it. Definitions, then, remained more or less the same through the course of the Reformations; what changed was the capacity of local and regional jurisdictions to enforce legal proscriptions. And so, if the Reformation movements had any impact on the public discourse on sodomy, that impact was limited to the contribution the reforms made to the development of instruments of moral discipline and their facilitation (in some instances) of harsher responses to persons accused and convicted of the crime of sodomy.

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Type: ARTICLES
Information: Harvard Theological Review , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , January 2005 , pp. 67 - 93

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S0017816005000866 [Opens in a new window]
Copyright: © 2005 Cambridge University Press

What did the Reformation do for sodomy?¹

In this study I am concerned with interpretations of the biblical story of Sodom and Gomorrah and an early modern discourse on sodomy. I am not inquiring in any direct way into interpretations of homosexuality, a category that first appeared in Europe and North America in the late nineteenth century (although my research may certainly be relevant to the history of same-sex relations in the West); and so, to avoid anachronistic distortion, I do not apply the term to the practices or identities of sexual dissidents in the early modern period. In other words, what sixteenth-century reformers thought or said about “homosexuality” is not a question a historian can answer, since it invokes a concept with a range of modern nuances that were not a part of the sixteenth-century world. In my view, Michel Foucault's terse statement of a distinction (“Homosexuality appeared as one of the forms of sexuality when it was transposed from the practice of sodomy into a kind of interior androgyny, a hermaphrodism of the soul. The sodomite had been a temporary aberration, the homosexual was now a species”) remains a heuristically useful principle to adopt at the outset, as it discourages burdening sixteenth-century evidence with the intellectual and cultural freight of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Michel Foucault, An Introduction (vol. 1 of The History of Sexuality; trans. Robert Hurley; New York: Vintage, 1980) 43. See also David M. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York: Routledge, 1990) 15–40, 42; and Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (New York: Penguin, 1995) 19–55.

The more or less established view, developed by social and cultural historians and contributors to the history of sexuality, is that it did relatively little. The evidence of the normative discourses of theology and law suggests that definitions and understandings of sodomy after the Reformation movements of the early and middle sixteenth century differed little from what had been proffered in the legal and moral writings of the medieval period. According to these defi nitions, which varied in their particulars, sodomy was a sin of unnatural lust which included, but was often not limited to, sexual contact between persons of the same sex. It was a sin whose origins could be traced to the biblical cities of Sodom and Gomorrah, whose inhabitants' penchant for unnatural sex led directly to their destruction in a hail of sulfur and fire—a dramatic event that was to stand as a warning both to those tempted to indulge in this vice and to those innocent of that particular sin who would nonetheless tolerate it in their neighbors. This view is found reflected in a wide range of writings from homiletic, exegetical, and penitential productions of late antiquity and the early, high, and late Middle Ages.²

A select list of these sources might include Ambrose, De Abraham in Sancti Ambrosii Opera (ed. Karl Schenkl; CSEL 32/1; Vienna: Tempsky, 1897) 537; Augustine, Confessionum libri XIII 3.8 (ed. Lucas Verheijen; CCSL 27; Turnholt: Brepols, 1981) 35; idem, De civitate Dei 16.30 (ed. Bernard Dombart and Alphonse Kalb; 2 vols.; CCSL 48; Turnholt: Brepols, 1955) 535; John Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Romanos, Homilia 4 (ed. J. P. Migne; PG 60; Paris: Vivès, 1857–1866) 415–22; Walafrid Strabo in Anselm of Laon, Glossa ordinaria (ed. J. P. Migne; PL 113; Paris Vivès, 1857–1866) 131–32; Peter Damian, Book of Gomorrah: An Eleventh-Century Treatise Against Clerical Homosexual Practices (trans. Pierre J. Payer; Waterloo, Canada: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1982) 32, 38; Thomas of Chobham, Summa confessorum (ed. F. Broomfi eld, Analecta mediaevalia Namurcensia 25; Louvain: Nauwelaerts, 1968) 398; William Peraldus, Summa de virtibus et vitiis (2 vols.; Lyon: Clutius, 1668) 1:21–22; Hugh of St. Cher, Epistola ad Romanos, in Opera omnia in universum Vetus, & Novum Testamentum (8 vols.; Venice: N. Pezzana, 1732) 7:f. 15v.; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2.2.154, 12 (Blackfriars edition; 60 vols.; New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964–) 43:246–49; Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam (4 vols.; Strassburg, 1492; facsimile edition; Frankfurt-am-Main: Minerva, 1971) 1:fol. Fviii r–Fix r; Bernardino of Siena, Le prediche volgari (ed. C. Cannarozzi; 5 vols.; Florence, 1424; Pistoia: Alberto Pacinotti, 1934) 2: 20; Denis the Carthusian, Enarrationes piae ac eruditae in quinque Mosaicae legis libros in Opera Omnia (42 vols.; Monstrolli: Typis Cartusiae S. M. De Pratis, 1896–1935) 1:268–69.

And, indeed, while Protestant reforming ideas and practices changed many things in Europe of the sixteenth century, they seem to have left untouched this conception of the sin of the Sodomites. Confessions divided on many theological issues appear to have had no quarrel over what sodomy was, where it had come from, and what ought to be done about it. Definitions, then, remained more or less the same through the course of the Reformations; what changed was the capacity of local and regional jurisdictions to enforce legal proscriptions. And so, if the Reformation movements had any impact on the public discourse on sodomy, that impact was limited to the contribution the reforms made to the development of instruments of moral discipline and their facilitation (in some instances) of harsher responses to persons accused and convicted of the crime of sodomy.³

This narrative is apparent in several treatments of the history of sexuality that extend into the early modern period, but is most clearly exemplifi ed in James Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1987), esp. 570–71. For treatments of aspects of the history of sodomy or homosexuality that relate to this narrative see Michael Goodich, The Unmentionable Vice: Homosexuality in the Later Medieval Period(Santa Barbara, Calif.: ABC-Clio, 1979); The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma; New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989); Mark Jordan, The Invention of Sodomy in Christian Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997); William Naphy, Sex Crimes from Renaissance to Enlightenment (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Tempus, 2002); Vern Bullough, Homosexuality: A History (New York: New American Library, 1979); and Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition (London: Longmans, 1955).

At least that is the view that predominates in recent scholarship.⁴

A helpful gauge of this is the amici curiae brief submitted by a group of historians who work on subjects pertaining to the history of gender and sexuality in support of the petitioner in the case of Lawrence v. Texas, decided by the U.S. Supreme Court on 26 June 2003. The brief, whose historical argument was instrumental in the court's decision to overturn the 1986 Bowers v. Hardwick decision and strike down state sodomy laws, refers to developments in medieval Europe in the first construction of an understanding of sodomy (in the eleventh and thirteenth centuries), and then to continuities and transformations in early modern and modern Europe and America. Only passing mention is made of the sixteenth century, specifically to English parliamentary legislation of 1533 which criminalized “buggery.” The Reformation, in other words, plays no role in the historical narrative. See the Brief of Professors of History George Chauncy, Nancy F. Cott, John D'Emilio, et al. (January 2003), http://lambdalegal.org/binary-data/LAMBDA_PDF/pdf/183.pdf (accessed 22 March2005). The dearth of scholarship on the Reformation and sodomy is, however, being addressed by a number of recent studies. See, e.g., Helmut Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), and Tom Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002).

But the accepted view has not been substantiated by a study of sixteenth-century exegetical writings. In this essay I offer a first step toward such a study by attending to the writings of two of the most influential magisterial Protestant reformers, Martin Luther and John Calvin, that deal with the story of the sin and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. It is my hope that an investigation of this sort will help us to see whether the changes in religious ideology introduced by Protestant reformers and developments introduced in biblical hermeneutics and exegetical practice had any discernible impact on the interpretation of Sodom and the crime long associated with it.⁵

It should be pointed out that, while a widely accepted narrative of the history of the interpretation of Sodom and sodomy recognizes no substantial change in understandings in the early modern period, it is generally recognized that significant shifts in the exegesis of Genesis 19 have appeared in the late twentieth century, as historians and biblical scholars have more regularly challenged an older, simple equation of the sin of Sodom with homosexuality. Compare John Skinner, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1910) 307, with some more recent offerings: Derrick Sherwin Bailey, Homosexuality and the Western Christian Tradition, 2–4; John Boswell, Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980) 92–97; Marvin Pope, “Homosexuality,” in The Interpreter's Dictionary of the Bible: Supplementary Volume (Nashville: Abingdon, 1976) 415–17; Walter Brueggemann, Genesis (Atlanta: John Knox, 1982) 164; idem, A Theology of the Old Testament (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1997); J. A. Loader, A Tale of Two Cities: Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, Early Jewish and Early Christian Traditions (Kampen: J. H. Kok, 1990); Robert Ignatius Letellier, Day in Mamre, Night in Sodom: Abraham and Lot in Genesis 18 and 19 (Leiden: Brill, 1995); Weston W. Fields, Sodom and Gomorrah: History and Motif in Biblical Narrative (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1997); and Lyn M. Bechtel, “A Feminist Reading of Genesis 19:1–11,” in Genesis: The Feminist Companion to the Bible (ed. Athalya Brenner; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1998) 117–18. For a recent analysis of ancient traditions of interpretation, see James L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998) 328–50.

Among biblical stories, the story of Sodom is a fairly familiar one, but it might do to rehearse its main outlines at the outset. The story occurs in Genesis 19:1–29, although it has a preface in the previous chapter (Gen 18:16–33, in which God announces judgment on Sodom and Gomorrah to Abraham and Abraham attempts to save Sodom by persuading God to agree to save the city if ten righteous persons are found there). Genesis 19 begins with God making good on a promise to Abraham to go down and investigate the state of Sodom. Two angels appear in the city and Lot, Abraham's nephew, invites them to shelter in his house. While Lot is playing host to his visitors, the entire male population of Sodom surrounds the house and demands that Lot bring out the men, “that we may know them.” Lot tries to spare his visitors by offering the crowd his two virgin daughters as surrogates, but meets with an angry response as the men try to enter his house by force. Lot's visitors then pull him into the house, strike the men of Sodom blind, and urge Lot to take his family and leave the city quickly, so as to escape the destruction coming upon the city for its great wickedness. Lot does escape, with wife and daughters, before brimstone and fire rain down on Sodom and the other cities of the plain. His wife, however, disobeying instructions, looks back, becoming a pillar of salt.

Luther on Wrath, Mercy, and Moral Degeneracy in the Last Times

From antiquity on, Christian interpreters of this story treated it as a fearsome example of what happens when humans provoke God's wrath. John Chrysostom regarded the means by which Sodom was destroyed as an anticipation of the fire of hell and thus a warning of the judgment coming upon all sinful human beings. The idea that the fate of Sodom and Gomorrah announces and prefigures an extraordinary manifestation of divine wrath came to be a regular feature of commentators in the high and late Middle Ages. Sodom was invoked by late medieval preachers as well as political bodies to underline their concern with morally deviant behavior. If God did not spare innocent bystanders (women and children) in the cities of the plain, then it was clear that society as a whole would suffer when the sins of a few were allowed to multiply and go unpunished.⁶

St. John Chrysostom, In Epistolam ad Romanos, Homilia 4 (PG 60:419); compare Augustine, De civitate Dei 16.30, CCSL 48:535: “ the punishment of the men of Sodom was a foretaste of the divine judgment to come”; Walafrid Strabo in Anselm of Laon, Glossa ordinaria (PL 113:131–32); Jean Gerson, De confessione mollitiei, in Œuvres complètes (ed. Palémon Glorieux; 10 vols.; Paris: Desclée, 1960–1971) 8:71–73; Bernardino of Siena, Le prediche volgari, 2:20; Michael J. Rocke, “Sodomites in Fifteenth-Century Tuscany: The Views of Bernardino of Siena,” in The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe (ed. Kent Gerard and Gert Hekma; New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989) 22–23; and Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) 109–45.

Martin Luther also appreciated this aspect of the story. In Luther's case, reflections on divine wrath were invariably tinged with his well-known apocalyptic outlook, an outlook that intensified in his later life. His observation of public life and private morals led him to observe in 1530 that it would be hardly surprising if fire and brimstone began to rain down on Germany, since the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah was not one tenth of what could be found in the Germany of his own time.⁷

A Sermon on Keeping Children in School (1530), WA 30/2:517–88 = LW 46:254–56.

The story of Sodom was preeminently a warning about God's wrath and its impending manifestation on earth.

This note remained in Luther's interpretation when he first undertook a close reading of the story in his lectures on Genesis, although to a certain extent apocalypticism was overshadowed by other theological concerns. Luther began to treat Genesis 19 late in the year 1538 and finished it in the spring of 1539.⁸

The Genesis lectures—the major exegetical undertaking of the last decade of Luther's life—were delivered between 1535 and 1545, and published by Veit Dietrich in four volumes between 1544 and 1554. The second volume, which included the exposition of Genesis 19, appeared in 1550. Although they bear the imprint of Dietrich's redaction, the published lectures are regarded by most scholars as a genuine reflection of what Luther in fact taught. For Luther's full account of the story of Sodom (Gen 18:16–19:29), see WA 43:30–94 = LW 3:218–306. See also Martin Brecht, Martin Luther: The Preservation of the Church, 1532–1546 (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 136.

This places it in a period when Luther was engaged in debate with opponents on a variety of topics. Although he had long been involved with the question of the convening of a general council of the church, in the late 1530s Luther was engaged in a particularly intense way with the matter. His On the Councils and the Church, a work of ecclesiological argument rife with polemic against the Roman church, occupied him at the same time as he was working on the lectures on Sodom.⁹

WA 50:509–653 = LW 41:9–178. The treatise was finished in March 1539, the same month in which the Lectures on Genesis 19 were concluded. Brecht, Martin Luther, 193–98. For the debate in context, see Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther's Last Battles (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983) 68–96.

Also in this period came the last, and the most virulent, in a series of published attacks on Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz.¹⁰

Against the Bishop of Magdeburg, Cardinal Albrecht (1539), written in response to the Schönitz affair. See Brecht, Martin Luther, 84–87.

Perhaps most important, however, in terms of the explicit theological cast of Luther's treatment of Genesis, is Luther's involvement in the antinomian controversy of 1537–1540—a debate between members of Luther's circle and Johann Agricola over the meaning and function of biblical law.¹¹

For accounts of the antinomian controversy, see Joachim Rogge, Johann Agricolas Lutherver-ständnis unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des Antinomismus (Theologische Arbeiten 14; Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1960); and Mark U. Edwards, Jr., Luther and the False Brethren (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975) 156–79.

While Luther's exegesis betrays a number of his contemporary occupations (particularly in his anti-Catholic polemic), he shows special concern to weave the themes of the role of the law and the distinction of law and gospel into the course of his extended exegesis of the Sodom passage. And so Luther's exposition begins with a forthright assertion that the law—the elements of the biblical witness that point to God's demands and God's threat of punishment for sin—is indispensable for the Christian and a matter not to be overlooked by the preacher. The words of comfort offered in God's gracious promises cannot stand by themselves: one needs to attend to both law and gospel; our desire for God's mercy ought not to lead us away from attending to God's wrath.¹²

Luther also pays a good deal of explicit attention to the doctrine of justification, even though the material of Genesis 19 did not lend itself as well to a consideration of the Pauline themes that Luther wanted to highlight as did other sections of the Abraham narrative in Genesis. He regularly weaves into his exposition the theme of the necessity for Christians to rely on God's promise and defy the devil's assault on faith.

If the story impels us to contemplate God's wrath, it also requires us to consider the object of that wrath. Luther notes that the drama of Sodom's punishment indicates an especially serious offense. He begins his exploration of the topic by seeming to reject earlier interpreters' (notably Nicholas of Lyra's) attempts to delineate specific sins (Gen 18:20–21).

¹³

Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam, 1:fol. Fvi r.

But when he attends to the encounter between the men of Sodom and Lot and his two visitors, the specific character of Sodom's sin seems to him self-evident. The words the men speak to Lot, “Bring them out, that we may know them,” show plainly, says Luther, that they mean to have unnatural intercourse with the men, or angels, who have sheltered in Lot's house. Here Luther follows a tradition of thought that equates an implied threat from the men of Sodom with a sexual act contravening (and overturning) the laws of nature. Genesis 19 is read “through” (or with the aid of) Paul's language about natural (

) and unnatural (

) relations in Rom 1:26–27. And so the Pauline phrase about those who “exchange” the natural use of a sexual partner for a use against nature (

, contra naturam) supplies the context for reflections on what it was the men of Sodom meant to do to the angelic visitors. “The heinous conduct of the people of Sodom is extraordinary (singularis), inasmuch as they departed from the natural passion and longing of the male for the female, which was implanted into nature by God, and desired what is altogether contrary to nature.”

¹⁴

Luther adds that such perversity is introduced by Satan who takes the opportunity, once people have abandoned the fear of God, to suppress natural inclinations and introduce unnatural desires. WA 43:57–58 = LW 3:255.

On this point Luther's interpretation is traditional. Had he been of a mind to, he might have cited St. Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, among ancient authors, as authorities who saw the passage in the same light; and among more recent interpreters he could have pointed for support to Hugh of St.-Cher, Nicholas of Lyra (whom he does cite regularly, elsewhere), and Denis the Carthusian, among many others. But Luther does not cite other authorities, nor does he argue for his interpretation, presumably because it is not controversial—not a point on which one might expect a challenge.¹⁵

Hugh of Saint-Cher, Opera omnia in universum Vetus, & Novum Testamentum, vol 1 (Venice: N. Pezzana, 1737) fol. 24–26; Nicholas of Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam, 1:fol. Fviiir–Fixr; Denis the Carthusian, Enarrationes piae ac eruditae in quinque Mosaicae legis libros, in Doctoris Ecstatici D. Dionysii Cartusiani Opera Omnia (Monstrolli: Typis Cartusiæ S. M. de Pratis, 1896–1935) 1: 268–69; and idem, Ennaratio in Epistolam Beati Pauli ad Romanos, in Opera Omnia, 13:17.

The crime of Sodom was not a mere historical artifact, for Luther, but a living and (in some circles) all too prevalent vice. Following a long custom, he claims that sodomy is not native to his own country. It arrived as a relatively recent import from Italy. He also follows popular tradition in blaming the clergy, and particularly the monks, for its spread. The Carthusians, Luther says, introduced it to Germany, after they learned the art in Rome.¹⁶

WA 43:55 = LW 3:251–52.

Rome, in Luther's view, bears a remarkable similarity to Sodom, to the degree that “unspeakable infamies” are committed there entirely in the open and without shame, precisely because of the debauched example of the most prominent members of the city (particularly the ecclesiastical hierarchy). “When in Rome,” he claimed, “I myself saw some cardinals who were highly regarded as saints simply because they were content to have intercourse with women.”¹⁷

WA 43:57, translation mine; compare LW 3:254.

This association of Sodom and sodomy with Rome and the Roman church is a regular refrain in Luther's writing of the 1530s and 1540s. From Luther's Warning to His Dear German People of 1531 to his final and most violent attack on the papacy, Against the Roman Papacy, An Institution of the Devil of 1545, in exegetical and political writings, Luther frequently portrayed the Roman clergy, but particularly the pope and his cardinals, as a society of hypocritical buggerers who preached moral purity but practiced “the chastity of Sodom and Gomorrah.” Not content to sin “with wenches in a natural way” they satisfied their unnatural lusts with one another and with their kept young men. The Roman hierarchy, in other words, was thoroughly corrupt and this corruption was manifested, among other ways, through its practice and tolerance of the vice that originated in ancient Sodom.¹⁸

Dr. Martin Luther's Warning to His Dear German People, 1531, WA 30/3.303–4 = LW 47:36–37.

Luther has no doubt, then, about what Sodom's sin is and where one may find the majority of the modern practitioners of this unnatural vice. But Luther attends to more than sex in his discussion of the lessons to be derived from this story of a most terrible sin. As he rehearses the drama of the encounter between Lot and the men of Sodom, he concludes that the men were given over completely to madness and to a sin that was beyond curing. What was the source of this extreme condition? “They utterly despised the word.” Here they are much like the pope today, says Luther: “He is altogether like the people of Sodom.” Mad with power, arrogant in refusing to heed the reasonable remedies offered to call him back to truth and right, he is like the frenzied men around the house who will bear none of Lot's “sound instruction.” Not heeding Lot and Luther, Sodom and the Roman church must suffer the consequences: “Where no room is left for remedies, there ruin and destruction must ensue.”¹⁹

WA 43:58–59 = LW 3:256–57 (Gen 19:6–9).

Luther strikes a familiar apocalyptic note: destruction is surely on its way. What form destruction will take and how broad its impact will be is not clear. But Sodom's example suggests that it will be violent and dramatic. Those who have turned their back on the preaching of God's word and sought to silence those who serve as emissaries of the word, in Luther's view, compare unfavorably to the people of Sodom: “The people of Sodom are saintly and righteous in comparison with the Roman Church, which not only despises but persecutes the Gospel and kills the believers.” Ecclesiastical rulers are “the pests of the last times.” They should fear God's just punishment. Faithful Christians, on the other hand, have grounds for reassurance as they read this story, thinks Luther. For here they are counseled to rely on faith in God's word, to trust God and refuse to believe the devil whose snares and temptations lie all about, and to have confidence that their enemies and persecutors will be punished as were the people of Sodom, while they, like Lot, will be delivered.²⁰

WA 43:84–87 = LW 3:293–96 (Gen 19:23–25). Here Luther echoes Matt 11:24 and Luke 10:12.

Calvin on Sodom, Sin, and Nature

The interpretation of John Calvin furnishes us with an interesting counterpoint to Luther's exposition of the story. Although he referred often to the example of Sodom in other writings, Calvin's commentary on Genesis was the occasion for his most extensive exploration of Sodom. He had lectured on Genesis in 1550 and the commentary derived from the lectures was first published in 1554.²¹

In primum Mosis librum, qui Genesis vulgo dicitur, Commentarius Johannis Calvini (Geneva: Robert Estienne, 1554); text in CO 23. The exposition of Gen 18:16–19:29 is found in CO 23: 256–80 (a relatively short 25 columns = 12.5 pages). The text was produced by Calvin's assistant Nicholas des Gallars, and derived in part from the earlier lectures. On the Genesis commentary see T. H. L. Parker, Calvin's Old Testament Commentaries (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1986) 26. See also the various insightful readings of Calvin on Genesis (frequently as compared to Luther and late medieval commentators) by David Steinmetz: “Calvin as an Interpreter of Genesis,” in Calvinus Sincerioris Religionis Vindex (ed. Wilhelm H. Neuser and Brian G. Armstrong; Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 38; Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 1997) 53–66; and “Calvin and Tamar,” in Calvin in Context (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).

As he refers to and offers occasional, mild criticism of Luther's interpretation, we know that he was familiar with at least the early volumes of Luther's commentary and used them when he began his own exposition.²²

See his references to Luther at Gen 6:3; 11:10, 27; and 13:14. See also his letter to Veit Dietrich of 1546 (CO 12:317), in which he refers to Dietrich's good work on the first volume of Luther's commentary.

Unlike the long, sometimes meandering lectures of Luther, Calvin's commentary is concise. He digresses occasionally to make a point related to contemporary application, but in general he (or his editor, Nicholas des Gallars) succeeds in limiting the commentary to an interpretation of the sense of the text.

What is that sense? Calvin begins in territory familiar to Luther and most earlier commentators. The story of Sodom is the principal place in Scripture where Christians learn of God's wrath and the fate of the ungodly; it is “a singular example of the wrath of God.”²³

Comm. Gen. 18:21 (CO 23:260).

It also announces words of comfort and hope. And so a twofold aim appears as Calvin unfolds the text's meaning. On one hand, Genesis 19 serves as a “mirror” reflecting for believers the sureness of divine vengeance. It strikes fear into the heart of Christians, urging them on to a life of faithful obedience. On the other hand, it offers comfort to those faithful who live in uncertain times and are subject to violent and sinful forces over which they have little or no control. For them, Genesis 19 offers assurance that God will punish the wicked and save the righteous and all those upon whom God will have mercy. Here God's promise to Abraham to save the cities if ten righteous persons can be found and, more significantly, God's deliverance of Lot and his family serve as the pertinent images.²⁴

Comm. Gen. 18:21; 18:23; 19:29 (CO 23:260–61, 262–64; 280–81). See also Comm. Jer. 50: 40 (CO 39:429–30); Comm. Ezek. 16:50 (CO 40:382–83); Comm. Jude 7 (CO 55:492). For Calvin's use of the story of Lot's deliverance in a pastoral context, see his letter to Madame de Cany (24 July 1554), Letter 1989 (CO 15:193–95).

These messages seem to fit well with Calvin's overall theological interests: founding piety on faith in God's benevolence and encouraging attention to the Christian life as a steady, if uneven, process of repentance and sanctification.

There is a noticeable Calvinian slant in these themes. But, although it is true that Luther's hermeneutic based on the distinction and relation of law and gospel is not in evidence here, one would not likely regard this as a serious departure from Luther's own agenda. Calvin's independence of Luther (and indeed of a wide variety of previous and contemporary interpreters) becomes more apparent, however, as he turns to an explanation of the sin of the Sodomites.

Initially, again, the interpretations seem to be on common ground, especially when Calvin is dealing in generalities. How shall we characterize the sin of Sodom? For Calvin, it appears in essence as the obliteration of the ability to distinguish between good and evil. The inhabitants of Sodom show us a steady descent into what Calvin regularly calls brutishness or the loss of moral sensation (“they wallow like cattle in every sort of foulness”). The descent begins when persons throw off the fear of God. Once “liberated” from restraints imposed by the demands of piety, they indulge in luxurious excesses (luxus), are led from there to pride, then to cruelty, and eventually to insensate indulgence in the most intemperate desires.²⁵

Comm. Gen. 18:27 (CO 23.264–65). The account of this descent is the product of Calvin's attempt to read Genesis 19 through the comment of Ezek 16:48–49 and to harmonize the two passages. For an account of one strand in the effective history of such an interpretation, see Theo van der Meer, “The Persecutions of Sodomites in Eighteenth-Century Amsterdam: Changing Perceptions of Sodomy,” in Gerard and Hekma, eds., The Pursuit of Sodomy, 284. For Calvin's reflections on sensual excess, see the fragment “De Luxu,” in CO 10a:203–6; and for a parallel account of the loss of moral sensation see his Exposition sur l'Epistre de sainct Judas, CO 55:510.

The level of generality here disguises a significant shift in interpretation that appears only when Calvin examines the meaning of the Sodomites' words to Lot in Gen 19:5 (“Where are the men who came to you in the night? Bring them out to us that we may know them”). Calvin rejects the claim that the verb “to know” here refers to sexual intercourse. The Sodomites, indeed, had wicked designs. In their lust for violence, they had no qualms about harassing and abusing strangers. In fact, Calvin assumes it was a habit with them, and thus the habitually hospitable Lot probably had regular experience of his neighbors' hostility toward outsiders. But Calvin is convinced that Lot's neighbors announced only their desire to see who it was who had entered their city.

Calvin does not tell his reader much about what kind of violence the Sodomites intended. It involved harassment, defilement, debauchery, lust, and desire; thus the crime could very well have been the sexual crime of rape. But he is less than explicit on this point. The real horror of the intended crime seems to Calvin to lie in the idea of humans' attempting to do violence to God's own messengers, consequently violating God's heavenly glory.²⁶

Comm. Gen. 19:5–8 (CO 23:268–70).

This apparent reluctance to emphasize or dwell upon a sexual aspect to this crime might be attributed to a tradition of reticence surrounding the “unspeakable vice.” But this kind of interpretation becomes less plausible when Calvin is read in the context of exegetical history. Calvin refuses to do what virtually every major recent interpreter of Genesis 19 had done—namely, equate the sin of the Sodomites with a sin against nature. This is remarkable, given that so many interpreters had already connected Genesis 19 and Rom 1:26–27, and that Calvin himself customarily draws on apparently related passages elsewhere in the canon to shed light on a text whose meaning is not initially clear. Calvin regards the sin of the Sodomites as prodigious, as horrible, as an instance of the worst sort of brutishness—but it does not call for labeling as an unnatural sin. Nowhere does Calvin attempt to place this sin in a special category or remove it from quotidian or “natural” ways of sinning.

What do we make of the absence of a distinction between “natural” and “unnatural” sin in Calvin's exposition? First, Calvin's silence in this regard should not be interpreted as an oversight. The traditional interpretation of the Sodomites as unnatural sinners, an exegetical tradition with which Calvin was intimately familiar, was too firmly established. Calvin knew what he was doing in failing to include in his discussion this schema of interpretation.²⁷

On Calvin's familiarity with antecedent exegetical traditions see, for example, T. H. L. Parker, Calvin's New Testament Commentaries (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1993); and David Steinmetz, Calvin in Context, 73–74.

Second, we may gain some insight into Calvin's purpose by attending to his occasionally expressed frustration with those who would excuse the sin of fornication or even adultery on the basis that these sins were natural. (That is, because they were committed out of a naturally implanted need for procreation, fornication and adultery were “lighter” sins and more susceptible of a ready pardon.) With some sarcasm, Calvin (in 1556) quoted local Genevans making such a claim, but the idea already had enough currency that medieval penitential handbooks regularly warned against the perception that “natural” sins could be overlooked.²⁸

Calvin, Sermon 14 on 1 Cor 10:8–9 (CO 49:625): “Ho, cela est à pardonner, car c'est un peche naturel.” This was a complaint Calvin voiced on several occasions; see the similar claim in a sermon delivered on 2 July 1555, on Deut 5:18 (CO 26:339): “Ce n'est point du iourd'huy que les hommes se flattent, qu'il leur semble que ce n'est point un peché si grand et si mortel, que de paillardise: mesmes nous voyons ces graudisseurs qui en se mocquant de Dieu, appellent paillardise, un peché naturel, et que c'est peu de chose. Il y a de ces villains pourceaux qui parleront ainsi.” Giovanni Boccacio might be cited in a number of places for evidence of the commonly held view regarding natural sinning, but see especially the counsel he has a confessor give to a penitent in the Decameron 1.1 (trans. Frances Winwar; New York: Modern Library, 1955) 6: “ ‘My son,’ said the friar, ‘such sins are natural and slight, and I would not have you burden your conscience with them more than is needful.’ ” For an overview of complaints from canonists regarding popular views, see Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 381–82, 517. For particularly influential examples of the natural/unnatural distinction, see Albertus Magnus, Summa theologiae, 2.28.122.1.4, in Opera omnia (ed. August Borgnet; 38 vols.; Paris: Vivès, 1895) 33:400; and Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 2.2.154.11–12. Luther also attacks the view that simple fornication is not a sin in several places. See his exposition of Gen 3:7, WA 42:125 = LW 1:166–67.

Of course, the gradation of sins and their organization into categories of natural and unnatural that one sees in these handbooks, as well as in a wide variety of medieval moral theology, probably lent substantial support to the notion that “natural” sins of a sexual nature (such as fornication or adultery) were less serious and more tolerable than others (such as masturbation or sodomy). While Calvin was not alone among his contemporaries in his concern over this perception, it seems likely that in his case that concern led to the resistance to categorize sins according to the natural-unnatural distinction one sees in his interpretation of Genesis 19.

But perhaps this peculiar aversion is simply a feature of Calvin's thinking in the context of his exegesis of Genesis and at the time of the commentary's composition. What does Calvin make of the Sodom story when he deals with it in other contexts? If, for a moment, we expand our purview and take account of the reformer's exegetical work across the span of his ministry we discover a fairly consistent pattern of resistance to the traditional accounts of Sodom's sin.

His earliest excursion into exegetical writing, the Commentary on Romans, completed in 1539, is especially instructive.²⁹

Ioannis Calvini Commentarii in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (Strasbourg: Wendelin Rihel, 1540); critical edition: Iohannis Calvini Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos (ed. T. H. L. Parker; Leiden: Brill, 1981). I have not found the available English translations to be reliable, especially at key passages (such as Rom 1:26–27) relating to sin and sexuality.

In the entire commentary, Calvin refers to the story of Sodom and Gomorrah only three times (at 3:6, 5:13, and 9:29), and then only for the purpose of expounding the theme of God's wrath. No reference is made to sexual sin or unnatural vice in connection with the example of Sodom. It is a bit surprising that Sodom does not figure in Calvin's discussion of Rom 1: 26–27, whose reference to women's and men's exchanging “natural relations” for “unnatural” supplied the main textual support for late medieval discussions of sodomy and other forms of unnatural vice.³⁰

Compare Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam, 4:fol. aa iii v; and Luther, Glossiae on Rom 1: 26, WA 56:14–15 = LW 25:12.

His comment on these verses is interesting, in light of his reluctance in the Genesis commentary to emphasize the natural/unnatural distinction; Paul's treatment of Gentile sin hardly allows an expositor to avoid discussing what might be meant by a sexual “use against nature.” According to Calvin, in this passage Paul “returns to his earlier comments on the vengeance of the Lord, and as his first example brings forward the dreadful act of disordered love (horrendo facinore praeposterae veneris); whence it is clear that they were not only sullied with bestial desires (beluinas cupiditates), but rushed well beyond the beasts, since they have subverted the whole order of nature.” This is as far as Calvin will go in referring to nature; he supplies no further elaboration on the meaning of nature or the natural. In identifying the sin to which Paul refers, he avoids the expression vitium contra naturam, preferring to speak of an inverted, disordered, or preposterous love (praepostera venus).³¹

Comm. Rom. 1:26 (Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, 34–35). Interestingly, when a French version of an abridgment of the commentary was published in 1543, this term was rendered “peché contre nature”; in the first French edition of the entire commentary (1550) it became “la paillardise contre nature.” Neither translation was produced by Calvin himself. See Exposition sur l'Epistre de Sainct Paul aux Romains (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1543) 23; Commentaire de M. Jean Calvin sur l'Epistre aux Romains (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1550) 49–50; and for a brief discussion of the translations, see T. H. L. Parker's discussion in Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, xiv–xv.

At this point, Calvin discloses a concern that not enough has been said to explain to the reader what Paul has in mind and what function this example plays in Paul's account of human sinfulness, and so he offers a note to specify the sin in its particular context: “We must take it, then, that Paul here deals with those shameful acts (flagitia) which were common in all times, and which at that time especially were visible everywhere. Indeed, it is astonishing how widespread was this filth, which even brute beasts detest.” Calvin was well enough read in classical sources to know that a type of physical love between males was indeed practiced in the ancient world, and that it was held up as an ideal by one of his favorite pagan authors, Plato. He may also have been familiar with ancient accounts of tribades, or women who have sexual relations with other women—although he makes no direct reference to them.³²

It is noteworthy, however, that Paul's first example refers to women who abandon natural relations, and only then does he turn to men. Since Calvin does not comment directly on women's “preposterous love” or sexual relations between women, we do not know how familiar he was with ancient sources relating to female homoeroticism. For a treatment of the sources, see Bernadette J. Brooten, Love Between Women: Early Christian Responses to Female Homoeroticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

Whether he has in mind principally men, women, or both, Calvin leaves the reader in no doubt that the practices to which Paul refers are to be abhorred. But through the rhetoric of his exposition we see a constant worry that the reader will miss Paul's point by focusing too narrowly on practices that might apply only to certain categories of persons, or only to those inhabiting an ancient culture where, as he says, this practice was especially common. And so, as a caution, he immediately inserts a warning: “However, other [vices], too, were popular. Paul then recites a catalogue of vice in which the whole human race is comprehended.” Indeed Calvin is forthright about making the practical import of this teaching clear: “It matters not a bit that not everyone was burdened with such a swill of vices, for in reproving the general turpitude of humans (vulgari hominum turpitudine) it is proof enough if all, without any exception (ad unum omnes), are constrained to acknowledge some faults.” We can see Calvin here expressing the same concern he exhibits in his exposition of Genesis to make an account of sin, be it set in Sodom or Rome, apply to all persons. Thus, while he has to make sense of Paul's introduction of the idea of a practice “against nature,” he is careful not to exploit the term in a way that would create distinct categories of sin or of sinners.³³

Comm. Rom. 1:26 (Commentarius in Epistolam Pauli ad Romanos, 34–35), emphasis added.

Calvin shows much the same caution in the rest of his New Testament exegesis. His nearest approximation to the traditional interpretation of Genesis 19 is found in an early (1542) commentary, in French, on the Epistle of Jude. Jude 7, which refers to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah going after “other (or alien) flesh (

)” was frequently employed by biblical interpreters to underline the unnatural character of the Sodomites' sin.

³⁴

See, for example, Lyra, Postilla super totam Bibliam, 4:fol. 33vii v.: “Et abeuntes post carnem alteram ist inconvenientem masculi in masculos turpitudinem operantes.”

Calvin's initial exposition of this passage includes the sole invocation in his exegetical corpus of “nature” in relation to the sin of Sodom. His phrasing is worth noting: “By ‘other flesh’ he [Jude] means the strange and disordered desires (cupitidez desordonnées et estranges) with which these people were soiled. For they went beyond the limits of nature to obey their brute sensuality.” Even here, he avoided the simple “against nature” formula, preferring the slightly more cautious image of going beyond nature's bounds; and he similarly avoided a depiction that might lead readers to conclude that the sin to which he referred occupied a category all its own.³⁵

Exposition sur l'Epistre de sainct Judas (Geneva: Jean Girard, 1542). See CO 55:510.

By the time Calvin wrote a Latin commentary on Jude in 1551, the reference to nature was dropped, and Calvin inserted a rather weak contrast between ordinary and extraordinary lust. “To ‘go after alien flesh,’ ” he wrote, “is to be given up to monstrous lusts. For we know that the Sodomites, not content with the license of fornicating in a common manner, were contaminated with a more execrable and preposterous filth.” Interestingly, in neither form of the commentary did Calvin allow any elaboration on his identification of a sexual aspect to the Sodomites' sin. Instead, he chose to focus on what he took to be foremost in the thinking of the epistle's author: “the faults of these unhappy persons who corrupted the churches in those [the author's] times,” as he put it in the French commentary. And so, even when Calvin's reading of a biblical text, such as Jude 7, led him close to the traditional notion that Sodom was punished for sins against nature, he carefully avoided developing the image or deploying it in a discourse on sodomy.³⁶

Commentarii in Epistolas Canonicas (Geneva: Jean Crespin, 1551). See CO 55:492. (Calvin's translators, however, were not quite as careful in their choice of words. In a French translation of the Latin, the words “et contre nature” were added to Calvin's original description of the Sodomites's “filth”—although even with this, somewhat incongruous, insertion there is no development of the concept of a sin against nature. Commentaires de M. Jean Calvin sur les epistres canoniques de S. Pierre, S. Jean, S. Jaques, et S. Jude [Geneva: Jean Bonnefoy, 1562] f. 84v.) The pattern I have discerned in Calvin's exposition of Romans and of Jude is replicated in his exegesis of other passages—such as 1 Cor 6:9–10 and 1 Tim 1:10—that had been linked in exegetical tradition with sodomy or unnatural sin. See Comm. 1 Cor. 6:9–11 (CO 49:393); Comm. 1 Tim. 1: 9–10 (CO 52:256); and Sermon 5 of the Sermons sur les deux Epistres à Timothée et sur l'Epistre à Tite (1561; CO 53:56–57). In his synoptic gospel commentary, Harmonia ex tribus Evangelistis composita (1555), when a reference to Sodom calls for explanation or comment, Calvin follows the sense of the text, identifying the city as a symbol of God's wrath toward those who “despise the word” and oppress the poor, and not as a figure for sexual immorality (natural or unnatural). See Comm. Harm., Mark 6:11 and Luke 16:19 (CO 45:17).

Perhaps the clearest expression of his concern regarding a potential misuse of the concept of nature appears in the context of his lectures on the prophet Jeremiah, which he gave late in life. The lectures were completed in January 1563 and published in the same year. In the course of his exposition of Jer 2:36, Calvin includes the sort of complaint we have noted in his preaching about popular employments of the notion of an inborn or natural sexual appetite. In this case the concern is disguised as a concession to certain critics: “There is indeed often some natural love (nativus amor) in whores. But it is a sign of an animalistic, shameful, even a monstrous lust when a woman passionately desires whatever man she sees, or when a man is immediately inflamed with lust for any woman he may come across. Accordingly, when there is such shamelessness as this it follows that there remains nothing of modesty or even of what is natural, since as I have said it ought to be regarded as monstrous when a woman is carried off by the mere sight of anyone.”³⁷

Comm. Jer. 2:36 (CO 37:542), emphasis added. The lectures on Jeremiah were given in 1559–1562.

It is likely that Calvin has in mind Genevan critics of the rigorous system of church discipline he helped to engineer, with its strict standards of sexual conduct for all members of the polity. But it is also possible that he has in view other Protestant reformers who were more willing than he to accommodate “human nature” in their ethical thought. Luther, after all, had written in certain contexts of sexual desire as a healthy, elemental drive. “The reason [for this],” Luther claimed, “is the following: begetting children is as deeply rooted in nature as eating and drinking. That is why God provided the body with limbs, arteries, ejaculation, and everything that goes along with them. Now if someone wants to stop this and not permit what nature wants and must do, what is he doing but preventing nature from being nature, fire from burning, water from being wet, and man from either drinking, eating, or sleeping?”³⁸

WA 10/2:156, quoted in Heiko Oberman, Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989) 275–76; compare Heinrich Denifle, Luther und Luthertum in der ersten Entwicklung (Mainz: F. Kirchheim, 1904). See also Luther's letter of August 1524 to three nuns: “both Scripture and experience teach that among many thousands there is not one to whom God gives the grace to maintain pure chastity…. God created her body to be with a man, bear children, and raise them, as Scripture makes clear in Genesis 1. Her bodily members, ordained by God for this, also demonstrate this. This is as natural as eating and drinking, sleeping and waking up. It is created by God, and He also wants what is natural … .” WA BR 3:326–27, translation in Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (ed. Susan C. Karant Nunn and Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 141. Martin Bucer is another close contemporary of Calvin whose views on accommodating a natural sexual impulse may have caused Calvin concern. See H. J. Selderhuis, Marriage and Divorce in the Thought of Martin Bucer (trans. J. Vriend and L. D. rBierma; Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999) 165–93.

While Calvin shared Luther's critique of the Catholic requirement of celibacy for clergy and his view that the gift of sexual continence was rare, in his own life and in pastoral practice Calvin often presented sexual continence as a viable option. Before his marriage, he bristled at the suggestion that he would marry because he needed a sexual outlet, and after he was widowed, at the age of thirty-eight, he never remarried. In the practice of ministry, Calvin seems to have had little sympathy for the view that sex is a natural force that cannot be contained.³⁹

A concise summary of Calvin's view of the goodness of marriage may be found in Comm. 1 Cor. 7:1–17 (CO 49:400–14). Calvin in his Consilia (see CO 10a:228) discloses a greater concern for sexual purity than does Luther: “I would not use lack of sexual continence as a reason for marrying; no one can charge me with that” (trans. M. Beaty and B. W. Farley in Calvin's Ecclesiastical Advice (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1991) 115. For Calvin's urging others to attempt a path of sexual continence see N. Balbani's account of the advice given to Galeazzo Caracciolo, Marquis of Vico, in The Italian Convert: News From Italy of a Second Moses (trans. William Crashaw; London: R. Bishop, 1639) 171–78. See also Calvin's critical comments on Farel's late marriage to a very young woman (CO 17:351–53).

His rigorism with respect to sexual conduct is then very likely the source of his reluctance to use the concept of unnatural sin.

To return, then, to Calvin's exposition of Genesis 19, we may see that the innovations introduced in the interpretation of this passage are perfectly consistent with strategies that appear throughout Calvin's exegetical corpus, as well as in his pastoral practice. To summarize, these innovations are three: First, he rejects the claim that the expressed desire of the Sodomites to “know” Lot's visitors refers to carnal knowledge. Second, he distances himself from interpretations of Sodom's sin as principally sexual sin. Third, he does not identify the desires and acts of the Sodomites as components of a sin contra naturam. In fact, the evidence of his interpretation of Jude from the early 1540s through the early 1550s supports the notion that Calvin attempted to suppress the employment of the category of “nature” in light of his pastoral experience, especially in the course of his experience with ecclesiastical discipline in Geneva, which was first established in 1542. It may well be that Calvin found the natural/unnatural distinction less than helpful, especially if those accused of illicit but procreative sexual acts (such as fornication) employed the concept of nature and of a natural sexual appetite in their defense.⁴⁰

It is likely that Calvin's experience of the popular claim that fornication, as a natural sin, was “light” and excusable, was a product of his intimate involvement in consistorial discipline. See, for a close account of this involvement, the Registres du Consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin (3 vols. to date; ed. Thomas Lambert and Isabelle Watt; Geneva: Droz, 1996–). It is noteworthy that the term “contre nature” appears very rarely in the consistory minutes and never names same sex relations. In a few instances, it is used to refer to nonprocreative heteroerotic sex; in at least one instance it names a marital relation (such as a marriage between a young man and an older woman) that would frustrate the end of procreation (11:93 r–v); but it can also have nonsexual connotations (as in cases of domestic disorder or violence). The usage often reflects Calvin's and his colleagues' interpretations of the cases heard, and thus is helpful for indicating how Geneva's pastors sought to shape public interpretations of the natural and what constitutes a violation of nature. See the as yet unpublished transcript of the consistory registers (Archives d'État de Genève, Registres du Consistoire) prepared by Isabella Watt et al., under the direction of Robert M. Kingdon, available in the library of the Institut d'Histoire de la Réformation, Geneva, for the cases of Jaques Gruet and Pierre Moche (2:51v); Le Gausseux and wife (3:57); Claude de La Pierre, Magdelenne, and Germain Goguin (10: 59v); La Dame Bartholomye and Ducreson (11:93r); Antoine Philippin (11:93v); and Guillaume Rens and wife (15:169r). Note especially the case of Amyed Vulliet (16:235r), whose violent treatment of his wife is cited as behavior “which is against nature and principally against God and equity” (“qui est contre nature et principallement contre Dieu et equité”). It is important to note that Calvin's reluctance to invoke the concept of unnatural sin and his refusal to apply it to same-sex relations does not force us to conclude that he in some sense tolerated homoerotic intimacy. Given moral reflection on the topic in the dominant culture of the time, this would be a very surprising discovery and there is no evidence to support such a conclusion. The meager evidence we have indicates that Calvin shared his contemporaries' view that buggery (“bougrerie”) was a monstrous crime, deserving of the penalty of death—the prevailing penalty imposed in criminal cases at this time. However, Calvin was not much concerned to address this particular vice (either in preaching or published writings) and gave essentially no theological attention to it. According to William Naphy, no case involving sodomy came before the Genevan consistory during the period of Calvin's ministry. There were a very small number of criminal cases involving accusations of sodomy in the same period. In only one of these is there evidence of Calvin's involvement, and here he functioned among a group of advisers on legal matters. There is little in the way of evidence in this case disclosing Calvin's interpretation of sodomy and no reference to Genesis 19. The absence of any citation of Scripture together with the inclusion of several legal references suggests that the advisers intended to build the case entirely on secular grounds. See William Naphy, “Sodomy in Early Modern Geneva: Various Definitions, Diverse Verdicts,” in T. Betteridge, ed., Sodomy in Early Modern Europe, 94–111.

So much for what Calvin will not do with the story of Sodom's sin. What, in fact, does he do? To what use is Sodom put? I have already indicated, in general terms, that Calvin wants to understand this story as a reflection of the wrath of God and a promise of God's faithfulness to the elect. The sin of Sodom thus becomes a trope pointing toward sin in general. In one sense, it is the sin to which all of Calvin's readers might descend were it not for the grace of God. The brutishness of the Sodomites does not occupy a special category. Brutishness, in Calvin's idiom, is the quality describing all sin that has escaped from the restraints that piety and God's grace impose.⁴¹

Treze sermons traitans de l'election gratuite de Dieu en Jacob et de la rejection en Esau (n.p., 1562), Sermon 2 (Gen 25:20–22: “[The impious] wallow there [in opposition to God and truth], and remain in their sins as brute beasts”); Sermon 5 (Gen 25:29–34: When God “lets loose the bridle to the reprobate, they become as it were brute beasts, looking to nothing but this brittle and transitory life”). For other pertinent examples see Calvin, Comm. Gen. 1:9 (CO 23:19); Gen 1:28 (CO 23:28–29); Gen 4:19 (CO 23:99); and Institutes 2.1.9, 2.3.3, 3.3.14, and 3.9.1 in John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (ed. John T. NcNeill; trans. Ford Lewis Battles; 2 vols.; LCC 20–21; Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960).

It applies, then, to “us”—to those whom Calvin addresses as readers. Here the Sodomites' brutality serves as a warning to his Christian readers: they must adhere to God's word and be led by fear away from impiety. In another sense, the sin of Sodom calls to mind the hostile environments in which those Reformed Christians in Calvin's audience who had not gone into exile for their faith still dwelled. If we keep in mind these two senses of Sodom's sin, we might see that a focus on the sexual character of the sin of Sodom, and on that sin as a violation of nature (hence, an extraordinary rather than a common crime), would distract from the practical ends of Calvin's exposition. The interpretation, in other words, had to clarify who “we” are as sinful people (if, as readers, we put ourselves in the place of Calvin's primary audience); and it had to call to mind the spiritual, moral, and political plight in which Reformed Protestants found themselves.⁴²

For examples of this particular application of the Sodom tale elsewhere in Calvin's exegetical corpus, see Comm. Ezek. 16:56–57 (CO 40:389–90); and Comm. Isa. 34:5 (CO 36:582).

Rhetorical Designs and Political Context

Both Luther and Calvin approach the story of Sodom as a singular story. But each identifies a different element constituting that singularity. For Luther, it is Sodom's sin, the extraordinary diversion from natural to unnatural sexual desire. For Calvin, the sin of Sodom is not extraordinary and not unnatural. Instead, the singularity of Sodom's history lies in the manner of its destruction. It is singular in the sense that no other episode depicts so vividly the violence of God's destructive power and impresses so effectively upon the human mind the danger of departing from the fear of God.⁴³

WA43:57: “Sodomitarum singularis enormitas est, discendentium a naturali ardore et desyderio, quod divitus implantatum est in naturam, ut masculos ardeat in foeminam, et appetentium, quod contra naturam poenitus est.” (See Walafrid Strabo in the Glossa ordinaria, commenting on Gen 19:24: the punishment of Sodom was more dramatic than that applied to those who perished in the flood, because the concupiscence of the earlier sinners was a natural sin, whereas the Sodomites' sin was contra naturam [PL 113:131–32].) CO 23:260: “Quia hoc singulare fuit exemplum irae Dei, quod Deus celebrari per omnes aetates voluit, et in scriptura passim inculcat.” See Comm. Ps. 21:9 (CO 31:217). See also Comm. Isa. 13:19 (CO 36:268–69) on the “memorable display God gave in Sodom”; and Comm. Isa. 34:9 (CO 36:584): “It is not without good reason that the prophets call [Sodom] to our memory, so that all may learn to dread the judgments of God.”

I want to suggest here that an important part of the difference between the in-terpretations of Luther and Calvin comes down to a difference in rhetorical aims. Luther's polemic against the Roman church hierarchy—a major preoccupation in his political and ecclesiastical battles of the 1530s and 1540s—was well served by his interpretation of the sin of Sodom as sodomy or unnatural vice. The image of priest as sexual deviant, as sodomite, was already fairly well established and Luther had few qualms about employing an image of extraordinary perversion to make clearer to his audience the threat posed to their well being by a corrupt ecclesiastical establishment. The popular association of Italy with sodomy simply underlined in a very helpful way the polemical point Luther wished to make to his German readers.⁴⁴

See Helmut Puff, “Localizing Sodomy: The ‘Priest and Sodomite’ in Pre-Reformation Germany and Switzerland,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1997) 165–95; idem, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600. Examples of popular writings portraying priests as sexual deviants abound in a variety of contexts. For the early German reform, see Bartholomaeus Bernhardi, Schutzrede vor Bartholomeo der ein eehweib so er priester ist gen umen hat (Erfurt: [M. Maler], 1522, fol. Biii), discussed in Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989) 256. For the late French reformation, see Le Manuel ou Instruction des curez et vicaires de l'Eglise romaine (trans. Pierre Viret; Lyon: Claude Ravot, 1564) 137. For an account of Luther's polemic and his political writings of the 1530s, see Edwards, Luther's Last Battles; and for Luther's habit of connecting his exegetical lectures with his attack against papists and the papacy, see Brecht, Martin Luther, 139.

This polemic is closely related to an evangelical valorizing of marriage. Luther regularly contrasted the sexual ethic of the good Christian, who marries and turns the potentially chaotic force of lust into a social good through the bearing and rearing of children and the creation of a Christian home, with the sodomitical practice of pope and cardinals, priests and monks. Christian Germany thus stood over against pagan Italy. The contrast helped to explain Luther's own marriage, his acceptance of a God-given sexual nature, and his Protestant sexual ethic in which the paradox of a “justified sinner” yields a portrait of a Christian's “holy lust.” The controversial context of Luther's rhetoric has a great deal to do with the public shock of a former monk marrying a former nun, an event that called for a good deal of explanation. In the polemical environment of the early Reformation, Luther's acceptance of the sexual needs of “nature,” in the context of the struggle with Roman orthodoxy, required the deployment of the sodomite as foil. Thus, German reformation polemics created an early modern version of the sodomite (Italian, papist, and priestly) as a means of justifying the evangelical movement, helping to explain to vernacular ears why natural lust—which the dominant religious culture had invariably depicted as unambiguously, unrelievedly problematic—when sanctified in marriage might be entirely compatible with Christian holiness, and thus acceptable in ecclesiastical leaders.⁴⁵

On the controversy surrounding Luther's marriage, see Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983) 23–24; and Puff, Sodomy in Reformation Germany and Switzerland, 1400–1600, 156. For interpretations of Luther's approach to the marital condition, see William H. Lazareth, Luther on the Christian Home: An Application of the Social Ethics of the Reformation (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1960); and Oberman, Luther, 272–76. Compare the revisionist account in Susan C. Karant Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997) 6–42.

Calvin's interests were somewhat different, and the difference owes a great deal to context. First, although he shared Luther's rejection of the celibate ideal, Calvin was not forced by circumstances to expend a great deal of energy defending these views. Partly this was a consequence of a benefit accruing to the second generation of Protestant reform: Luther and others who married in the 1520s bore the brunt of the initial public shock over openly married clergy. Another benefit was that Calvin, never ordained a priest, was not bound in the same way to justify the breaking of ordination vows when he married Idelette de Bure, who—unlike Luther's Katharina von Bora—had never been a nun. But equally decisive in distinguishing Calvin's situation from Luther's is the difference of cultural location and signification. While Luther relied on the association of Roman clergy, Italy, and sodomy to bolster a German evangelical movement, such a strategy would have done little to further Calvin's rhetorical aims. The primarily French context to which he addressed himself knew something of the association of unnatural sin with Italy, but the nature of Gallican church politics, at least until the 1560s, did little to encourage those intending to discredit the Catholic church to attack either Italians or an Italian vice. When charges of sodomy were made in France, they were often applied to those regarded as insinuating into France foreign ideas, styles, and practices. Thus, for a representative of a reforming movement frequently portrayed as foreign in influence, and an exile become a foreigner in his own city of residence, the marginalizing discourse of sodomy probably had little appeal. In light of these political realities, it is not surprising that Calvin would largely avoid discussing sodomy or unnatural vice in his reflections on sin.⁴⁶

Circumstances changed in the latter half of the sixteenth century—with the rise to power of the Italian Catherine de Médicis and her children—and one sees evidence of this in the Politique, Huguenot, and League attacks on Henri III. On this and the perception of Italy and sodomy in France in this period, see Rebecca E. Zorach, “The Matter of Italy: Sodomy and the Scandal of Style in Sixteenth-Century France,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 28 (1998) 581–609; see p. 586: “French popular opinion drew a strong connection between Italians in France and homosexual behavior.” Compare also David Teasley, “The Charge of Sodomy as a Political Weapon in Early Modern France: The Case of Henry III in Catholic League Polemic, 1585–1589,” Maryland Historian 18 (1987) 17–30; and Virginia Cox, “Castiglione and His Critics,” in Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier (ed. Virginia Cox; London: J. M. Dent, 1994) 411–12. It is noteworthy that the first apparent employment of the charge of sodomy in a French Calvinist anti-Catholic polemic comes from the pen of Henri Estienne, writing in 1566, after the death of Calvin. Unlike Calvin in the 1550s, Estienne, who evinces no discomfort with the association of sodomy and Italy (and with corrupt Italian ecclesiastics) and who writes openly to expose the “sodomitic vice,” wrote from a position of relative security. In 1566 there was a more or less securely entrenched Calvinist regime in Geneva, as there was not for Calvin until after 1555, and the Reformed movement in France had gained significant political momentum, with an estimated half of the nobility belonging to “the Reformed religion.” See Estienne, Apologie pour Hérodote (Geneva: Slatkin, 1969) 174–78; and Winfried Schleiner, “Linguistic ‘Xenohomophobia’ in Sixteenth-Century France: The Case of Henri Estienne,” Sixteenth Century Journal 34 (2003) 747–60.

This interpretation appears entirely plausible in light of the course of religious and political polemics in late-sixteenth-century France. Polemical exchanges, which became especially heated during the course of the religious wars, focused on the theme of sexual deviance beginning in 1577, when Jerome Bolsec, the French physician whose history with Calvin was especially unpleasant, published his account of Calvin's life. Bolsec claimed that he had seen documentary evidence proving that Calvin, while a young curate and before his departure from France, “was caught in the act and convicted of the sin of sodomy. For this he was liable to death by fire, as this is the ordinary penalty for such sin; but the bishop of the said city [of Noyon in Picardy], through compassion moderated the said punishment to a hot branding in the form of a fleur-de-lys on the shoulder.” In a follow-up account of the life of Théodore de Bèze, Calvin's successor as head of the Genevan Company of Pastors, Bolsec pointed out that in his early poems, published in 1548, Bèze celebrated his “abandonment of himself into all sorts of carnal and shameless liberties,” including simultaneous love affairs with a man and a woman.⁴⁷

Jerome Bolsec, Histoire de la vie, moeurs, actes, doctrine, constance et mort de Jean Calvin, jadis ministre de Geneve, in Histoire des vies, meurs, actes, doctrine, et mort des trois principaux heretiques de nostre temps, à sçavoir Martin Luther, Iean Calvin, & Theodore de Beze, iadis Archiministre de Geneve (Lyon, 1577; repr.; Douay: Jean Bogard, 1616) fols. 39–40; idem, Histoire de la vie, moeurs, actes, Doctrines, & deportements de Theodore de Beze, iadis Archiministre de Geneve, in ibid., fols. 158v–162r. Bolsec was the French physician tried on heresy charges in Geneva in 1551 and exiled from the city for his criticism of Calvin's predestinarian teaching. For discussions of the sodomy charge applied to Calvin and Bèze, see H.-J. Schouten, “La soi-disant pédérastie du réformateur Jean Calvin,” Arcadie 105 (1962) 478–86; and E. Doumergue, Jean Calvin. Les hommes et les choses de son temps (7 vols.; Lausanne: Georges Bridel, 1899–1927) 1.424–40.

Several authors repeated the charge, including Jean Benedicti, a Franciscan theologian and controversialist whose La somme des pechez et le remède d'iceux, first published in 1584, was one of the most successful confessors' handbooks in French in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.⁴⁸

Jean Benedicti, La somme des pechez et le remède d'iceux (Paris: C. Chappelet, 1601) 154–55. This work had appeared in no fewer than fifteen editions by 1620.

By 1623, the Jesuit François Garasse's popular attack on La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, elaborated Bolsec's account into a list of accusations, in which the “horrible lewdnesses” and the “unbelievable abominations” of notable French Protestants and sectarians were detailed, including the by now well-known account of the sodomy of Calvin and of Bèze.⁴⁹

François Garasse, La doctrine curieuse des beaux esprits de ce temps, ou prétendus tels, contenant plusieurs maximes pernicieuses à la religion, à l'Estat et aux bonnes moeurs, combattue et renversée (Paris: S. Chappelet, 1623) 934.

Thus, by the end of the sixteenth century, accusations of sexual perversion—long associated with heretical groups in the popular imagination of the Christian West—had became a common feature of controversial writing against Calvinists and the heresiarchs of Geneva. Calvin, in his lifetime, may certainly have had an awareness of the peculiar vulnerabilities of the French Reformed in the public religious controversy, even if these were not fully exploited until after his death.

In the 1550s, when he was at work on the Genesis commentary, Calvin's writing shows him to be focused on the practical demands of forging a Reformed community.⁵⁰

It is true that, occasionally, Calvin could apply the image of Sodom directly to the Roman church, but this was a generalized attack on moral failing and not explicitly a charge of sexual deviance. See, e.g., Admonitio paterna Pauli III, Romani Pontificis ad invictiss. Caesarem Carolum V ([Basel]: [Winter], 1545), CO 7:258: “If God did not spare Eli, what punishment, think you, is impending over yourself? … In what state is your see, which ought to be to you as a family? What are your vicars doing? What kind of traffic is going on in your court? How do your clergy comport themselves? What Sodom will you find for me, where there ever was greater impunity for all kinds of evil? More abandoned shamelessness? More unbridled licentiousness?” Compare the approach of John Bale, Acta Romanorum Pontificum (Basel: Oporini, 1558), who opted for entirely explicit charges of sexual deviance in his account of the lives of the popes.

The rhetorical aims that rose in prominence at this time centered around his concern to develop in his audience a sense of their own need for repentance and of their identity as committed members of the community of the redeemed. Naturally, these confessional aims were consistent with his strong interest in strengthening the political position of the Reformed party in various parts of Europe, and especially in France.⁵¹

This aim is suggested by Calvin's initial dedication of the Genesis commentary to the sons of Johann Friedrich, the Elector of Saxony. Calvin expresses his worry over the condition of the Reformed in France in a letter to Farel that also reports his progress on his exegesis of Genesis, Letter 1398, 19 August 1550 (CO 13:623). The later dedication of the commentary to Henri de Navarre, in the edition of 1563, suggests that Calvin continued to associate this community-forming and political aim with the work.

Much of Calvin's attention during this period was directed to the international community of evangelicals, but he was also deeply engaged in the rancorous struggle to build a church on the lines of his own design in Geneva. In this effort, he was not above using the image of Sodom to berate the opponents of his ascendant regime for their intransigent opposition and moral failings. In his writing and preaching, Sodom becomes an instrument in the work of community building; it is employed to spur the faithful on in piety and the fear of God, to encourage them to persist in faith in hostile environments, and to warn that God's sure judgment awaits those in the community of the faithful who would impede the progress of reformation. For Calvin, reflection on Sodom as an emblem of human sin becomes reflexive: Luther's outer-directed deployment of the sin of Sodom—defining the other who stands as enemy to the faithful—gives way in Calvin to a concentration on the obstacles to holiness within and among the faithful.⁵²

Useful examples of Calvin's rhetoric may be found in his treatments of Isaiah and Ezekiel. The Isaiah lectures were completed in 1550 and first published in Latin in 1551. The Ezekiel lectures were given in 1562–1564 and published posthumously in 1565. Comm. Isa. 34:5 (CO 36:582): “In like manner Sodom was already burning in the sight of God, while it gorged itself with wine and feasting, and indulged its lust; and the same thing must be said of other wicked persons, who, while they are devoting themselves to pleasures, are held as appointed by God to be slain. Therefore we should not fix our attention on the present state where we see the wicked enjoying prosperity and doing everything according to their own wish. For although no one bothers them, still they are not far from destruction when God is angry with them and is their enemy.” Comm. Ezek. 16:56–57 (CO 40:389–90): “Therefore we should learn from this passage, when God indulges us and treats us softly and delicately, that we must always recall his judgments to mind, so that we may be restrained from all lasciviousness, lest prosperity should incite us to license; for this sort of recollection is most necessary. For we know that nothing is easier than to exult when God feeds us with abundance, just as though we were wild horses. Therefore the remedy must be taken at the right time, so that we may receive instruction from the examples of punishment we read about in scripture, or which are recounted in other histories, as well as those we witness with our own eyes.” For Calvin's reflexive interpretive dynamic in preaching (in which he turns the image of Sodom rhetorically back on his own hearers, as a wake-up call to recognize sin and ill dealing and to repent) see especially his sermon on Gen 19:1–5, which associates Sodom and Geneva: Sermons sur la Genèse (ed. Max Engammare; 2 vols.; Supplementa Calviniana 11; Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 2000) 2:1004–16.

Exposing the communal-confessional and disciplinary aims at play in these interpretations helps to account for these two different approaches to the Sodom story. But other motives related to theological and hermeneutical inclinations may be discovered here as well. Luther, for example, tends in his exegesis to rely on definitions of sexual sin borrowed from canon law and the penitential traditions in which he was trained. In a sermon of 1516, Luther offered a definition of sodomy as unnatural sin that differed hardly at all from defi nitions given in confessors' manuals of the same period. Although his rethinking of the goodness of marriage and of sexuality was undoubtedly revolutionary, Luther never entirely cast off the categories of monastic reflection on sexual sin. This traditional mentality seems to have influenced his interpretation of Genesis 19. Luther, that is, never questioned whether the people of Sodom were “sodomites,” in the contemporary legal sense. The habit of identifying Sodom with the crime known as sodomy was so deeply embedded in the consciousness of those trained as Luther had been that he is unlikely to have even considered the question of whether a distinction ought to be made.⁵³

Decem praecepta Wittenbergensi praedicata populo, 1518 (WA 1:489). Sodomy is the unnatural sin “in which a man misuses a man; or a woman, a woman; or again a man, a woman and a woman, a man; all of which are more foul than one can mention.” Compare Antoninus, Confessionale, Interrogatory, 1.6, quoted in John T. Noonan, Contraception: A History of Its Treatment by the Catholic Theologians and Canonists (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1965) 226: “A man with a man, a woman with a woman, or a man with a woman outside of the fit vessel, is called the sodomitic vice.” For a particularly striking example of Luther's employment of traditional categories of sexual sin, see his Scholia on a Rom 1:24 (WA 56:183–85 = LW 25:164–66). See Heiko Oberman, Luther, 272–76, for a characterization of Luther's approach to sexuality as “revolutionary.”

Calvin, on the other hand, shows a fair degree of freedom from categories supplied by canon law and penitential writings. No doubt this is explained in part by the fact that he did not have the clerical and monastic background that shaped so profoundly Luther's religious experience and theological reflection. It is also likely that Calvin's inductive and analytical method and his humanist exegetical values—preferring the pristine Scriptures over a flawed theological tradition—encouraged criticism of habits of interpretation formed by the definitions of medieval canonists. The canonists relied rather heavily on a dogmatic concept of nature and natural law which, although not entirely absent from Calvin's world of thought, did not figure prominently in his ethical reflection.⁵⁴

For the role of natural law in Calvin's ethic, see Institutes 4.20.16; John T. McNeill, “Natural Law in the Teaching of the Reformers,” Journal of Religion 26 (1946) 168–82; and Paul Helm, “Calvin and Natural Law,” Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology 2 (1984) 5–22. References to nature in Calvin's writings are plentiful, but these do not usually suggest reliance on natural law traditions. The term “nature” is broad and flexible in Calvin's idiom. Although he frequently means by it the creator's intention for creatures, he can employ “nature” to denote “what one would conclude on the basis of observation and experience.” It is instructive, in this regard, to examine his employment of “against nature” or “contrary to nature” in theological writings, where the same ambiguity appears. The expression may refer to what goes against or frustrates a divinely ordained role or purpose, or to what is opposite to what one would expect given the way things or persons are made. Thus, from the Genesis commentary: The desire for death or dissolution, and death itself is contrary to nature, since human life was created for life and not for destruction (Gen. Comm. 3:19; CO 23:77). But it is also contrary to nature that Cain should be able to turn from God's condemnation to enjoy sexual or any worldly pleasure (Gen. Comm. 4:17; CO 23:98). Sarah's conception of a child in her old age is contrary to nature (Gen. Comm. 18:11; CO 23:253). Jacob's taking two sisters, Leah and Rebecca, as his wives (which Calvin regards as incestuous) is contrary to nature (because it is against God's ordination of marital relations, in Calvin's interpretation; Gen. Comm. 29:27; CO 23:403–4). The expression frequently names the miraculous (see, e.g., on obtaining spiritual sustenance from the fleshly substance of Christ, Institutes 4.17.24). When Calvin does employ nature and natural law in a philosophical context, it is clear that it does not function as a source of knowledge independent of revelation. The “rule of natural law” is a rather broad one, as he asserts in a definition probably suggested by Gratian: “that rule which the Lord Jesus Christ established as part of the summation of the law and the prophets: that we should not do to someone else what we would not want done to us.” See the fragment “Ad Certa Quadem Capita” from Calvin's Consilia (CO 10a:264). For an edition of Gratian's Decretals that Calvin may have had at hand, see Decretum Gratiani (ed. Beatus Rhenanus; Basel, 1522) fol. A2 r. Calvin shows an awareness of the difficulty of determining the distinction between what nature teaches and what is merely a product of culture in his discussion of Paul's appeal to nature in 1 Cor 11:14 (and 15) on hair length and gender difference. See Comm. 1 Cor. 11: 14f. (CO 49:478).

While he did not entirely avoid the sin of bending Scripture to fit established traditions of reflection on human sexuality, Calvin's exegetical independence of mind and confidence in the efficacy of historical and philological methods worked together with his practical theological interests to steer him away from the expected homiletical inveighing against unnatural vice.

Ambiguous Legacies

Sodomy, which Michel Foucault memorably labeled “that utterly confused category,” itself produces many perplexities for modern interpreters of its history. By what paths did interpretations of unnatural vice find their way into modern discourse? Were the construals of sodomitic sin devised in the late antique and medieval worlds simply handed down fully formed and unchanged to Western modernity? Readers of much of the current literature could be forgiven for assuming that the processes of Reformation added little to the cultural codes employing Sodom and its sin.⁵⁵

See Foucault, An Introduction, 101; and note Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society, 575: “The principal features of medieval sex law have not only remained intact in post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism but have also been assimilated within Protestantism.”

Yet the volatility of theological definition and debate in the sixteenth century left very little of the biblical text untouched, and clearly this was also the case with Genesis 19. The examples of the interpretive work of Luther and Calvin show us that topics critical to the religious defi nition of normative sexuality—Sodom and the cause of its destruction; nature and its repudiators; sex, law, and grace—were lively subjects for theological and political sparring. The evidence of this contentious activity suggests that, on the way toward a more complete narrative of the formation of early modern sexualities, historians will profit from attending to exegetical practice. Close examination of theological developments and the discourse of exegesis promises to repay richly the effort if it opens a window onto the processes by which communities appropriated, reshaped, and in some cases rejected moral traditions.

Along what lines does our study of these two exegetes suggest a revision of the historical narrative? First and perhaps most obvious is the conclusion that reformminded biblical interpreters approached key texts differently and their exegesis yielded different results. Calvin and Luther took the Sodom story in distinct directions. Luther's contributions tend initially to support the view that Protestantism adopted uncritically and without change the older paradigm equating the sin of Sodom with unnatural vice, while in Calvin we see clear resistance to this. But a closer analysis shows that much more is being accomplished in the theological and political employment of this passage and its images. Reformation biblicism left its mark upon the discourse of sodomy in the sixteenth century as Luther and others firmly grounded the penitential traditions stigmatizing unnatural sex in God's revealed word, making proscriptions of deviant sex appear to depend not on any moral or philosophical tradition but solely on Scripture. Luther's attempt to weave into one narrative the fear of the sodomite and his classic understanding of trust in God's grace and justification by faith alone set the stage for a thoroughly evangelical rehearsal of the Sodom story. As we have seen, this fear tended to be accentuated by Reformation apocalyptic expectation, with its characteristic polar-izing rhetoric and demonization of dangerous others. As apocalyptic waves receded in the seventeenth century, Protestant communities shaped by reformed writings retained the definitions, frequently firmly enshrined in legal codes, that marked out the sodomite as a rebel against nature, clearly cursed by God in the divine word, and a danger to his society.⁵⁶

Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu. La violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1990); Robin Barnes, Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988); Christopher Elwood, The Body Broken: The Calvinist Doctrine of the Eucharist and the Symbolization of Power in Sixteenth-Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999) 77, 143–44; and Richard Godbeer, Sexual Revolution in Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) 84–116.

Calvin's resistance of strategies that would render the sodomite as other signals a rather different legacy. Wary of inherited habits of interpretation and concerned to see biblical accounts of sin apply to all persons, he supplied a model for traditions that employed the fear of Sodom's spectacular punishment as a spur to communal self-examination.⁵⁷

See, for example, Robert Le Maçon, Les funerailles de Sodome et de ses filles, descriptes en vingt sermons sur l'histoire de Moyse en Genese chapitre 18 & 19 (London: Richard Field, 1600) 114: “Ceux de Sodome ont esté des hommes semblables à nous, quant à la substance soit de leur corps soit de leur ame” (“The people of Sodom were men like us, as far as the essence of their body or soul”). Richard Godbeer's studies of preaching and writing on sexuality in colonial New England also point to Puritan divines' unwillingness to separate out varieties of sexual sin as categorically different from other forms of sin, especially when invoking the image of Sodom's destruction. See Godbeer, Sexual Revolution, 65–66; and idem, “The Cry of Sodom: Discourse, Intercourse, and Desire in Colonial New England,” William and Mary Quarterly 52 (1995) 259–86.

The Reformed Protestant churches' concentration upon individual and social sanctification found inspiration not only in Calvin's theology, but also in his insistence on an ordered system of discipline in which moral regulations would be applied consistently to all members of church and commonwealth. Ironically, it seems to have been this rigorous social ethic, which for Calvin required excluding the erotic from ethical reflection, that accounts for the fact that in his discourse the sodomite as a figure remains relatively indistinct. As I have suggested, Calvin's identification with Reformed movements operating on the margins of religious and political power also explains his reluctance to follow Luther's rhetorical lead. But the circumstances giving rise to the experience of vulnerability would change over time. When religious communities escaped their positions of political weakness, the obstacles to employing the marginalizing discourse of sodomy were removed. Such a pattern of development may be discerned in seventeenth-century New England, where Reformed biblicism, a high regard for biblical law, and deep-seated fears of social and spiritual contamination by the law's most egregious transgressors conspired to inscribe deeply upon the legal culture of this new society the traditional narrative of Sodom's unnatural sin.⁵⁸

Samuel Danforth, The Cry of Sodom Enquired Into (Cambridge, Mass.: Marmaduke Johnson, 1674); Michael Warner, “New English Sodom,” American Literature 64 (1992) 19–47; and Godbeer, Sexual Revolution, 65–71, 104–15.

The influence of Calvin on subsequent interpretive traditions is tinged with ambiguity. French Bibles produced in Geneva or by its religious allies tended to reliably reproduce his interpretation of Genesis 19, at this point and elsewhere in the text avoiding any allusions to unnatural vice in the marginal annotations —a fact that indicates broad vernacular dissemination of Calvin's view.⁵⁹

See especially the first of the Genevan Bibles to be heavily annotated, La Bible, qui est tout la saincte Escriture, ascavoir le vieil & nouveau Testament (Geneva: Nicolas Barbier & Thomas Couteau, 1559), at Gen 19:5: “Et appelans Lot, luy dirent, Où sont les personnages qui sont venus ceste nuict vers toy? Ameine les nous hors, afin que nous les cognoissions.” The marginal note to “afin que …” is, “Comme s'ils disoyent, Nous voulons cognoistre qui sont les estrangers que tu as recus en ta maison” (“As if they said, We wish to know who are the strangers you have received into your home.”). Significantly, the substantial marginalia avoid any reference to sin “contre nature.” The Bible that Jean Crespin published in 1564 reproduces the same notes. The message in these Bibles prepared under the influence of Calvin's writing may be helpfully compared with the much earlier first Protestant edition of the French Bible, that of Pierre Robert Olivetan, La Bible qui est toute la Saincte Escripture ([Neuchâtel]: [Vingle], 1535), at Gen 19:5, where the note supplied for “que nous les congnoissions” (“that we may know them”) is: “cest [sic] que nous avons compagnie charnelle de eulx” (“that is, so that we [may] have carnal relations with them”).

But in the circle of Reformed Protestant theologians of the late sixteenth century, few followed Calvin's lead. Among his rough contemporaries and immediate successors, Heinrich Bullinger, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Wolfgang Musculus, Zacharias Ursinus, and Kaspar Olevianus all treated the sin of Sodom as an instance of a sin against nature. In fact the categories of natural and unnatural sin—categories Calvin so assiduously avoided—and reflection on the nature and content of the natural law seem by the late sixteenth century to have gained a reliable foothold in Reformed scholastic writings.⁶⁰

Heinrich Bullinger, The Decades of Henry Bullinger (5 vols.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1849–1852) 1:418–19; idem, Vorlesung über den Römerbrief (1525) inf Heinrich Bullinger Werke. Band 1 (ed. Hans Georg vom Berg and Susanna Hausammann; Zurich: Theologischer Verlag Zürich, 1983) 57, 59–61; idem, In sanctissimam Pauli ad Romanos Epistolam, Heinrychi Bullingeri Commentarius (Zurich: Christoph Froschauer, 1533) fol. D4v (Rom 1:27); Peter Martyr Vermigli, In Primum Librum Mosis, qui vulgo Genesis dicitur Commentarii (Zurich: Froschauer, 1569) 97; idem, In Epistolam S. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos … commentarii doctissimi (Basel: Petram Pernam, 1558) 46; Wolfgang Musculus, In Mosis Genesim plenissimi Commentarii (Basel: Johann Herwagen, 1554) 126; idem, In Epistolam D. Apostoli Pauli ad Romanos Commentarii (Basel: Sebastianum Henricpetri, 1600) 27; and Kaspar Olevianus, In Epistolam D. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos notae (Geneva: Eustathium Vignon, 1579) 51 (Rom 1:26–27), and for the broader discussion of natural law, see 50–77. See also the thoroughly scholastic discussion in Zacharias Ursinus, In Religionis Christianae Catechesin, quae in ecclesiis et scholis Palatinatus traditur, in D. Zachariae Ursini Opera theologica (Heidelberg: Johannis Lancelloti, 1612) 374–75, concerning species of lust (libido): contra naturam; ab hac natura nostra prava, inclinationes pravae; quibus tamen non indulgent boni viri. The trend can be traced even in the sermons of the French Reformed preacher Robert Le Maçon, who, in his early-seventeenth-century sermon collection seems to betray familiarity with Calvin's exegesis of Genesis 19 while rejecting his reading of Gen 19:5; see Le Maçon, Les Funerailles de Sodome, 109–12.

Calvin's interpretation of a significant aspect of Genesis 19 seems to have become a minority position. At least in the realm of theology, his refusal to emphasize the categories of natural and unnatural sin was apparently overwhelmed by the resurgence of Aristotelianism in the late sixteenth century. Calvin's inductive method in biblical interpretation was suppressed, in this notable instance, by the more deductive methods of his scholastic successors. The Aristotelian resurgence was related to confessionalization, a process that seems also to have encouraged a more regular deployment in Protestant circles of stock images of the sodomitical other: the Roman priest and Muslim Turk.⁶¹

See John Platt, Reformed Thought and Scholasticism: The Arguments for the Existence of God in Dutch Theology, 1575–1670 (Leiden: Brill, 1982). For a discussion of sixteenth-century representations of Turks and Arabs as sodomites, see Guy Poirier, “Masculinities and Homosexualities in French Renaissance Accounts of Travel to the Middle East and North Africa,” in Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (ed. Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler; Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996). According to Olevianus (In Epistolam D. Pauli Apostoli ad Romanos notae, 51–52), “Present-day practitioners of sodomitic sins are the Turks, and the Pope and his Cardinals. Religious orders are particularly full of Sodom and Gomorrah.” On the confessional age, see the synthetic work of R. Po-Chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550–1750 (London: Routledge, 1989). On confessional formation, see Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen. Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1965). On theories of confessionalization, see Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983) 257–77; and Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflict und Staatsbildung. Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Graftschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1981).

What, then, does an investigation into the exegesis of Luther and Calvin teach us about the formation of early modern discourse on sexuality? It is tempting, and reasonable, to conclude that in their biblical exposition we find outlined two distinct evangelical options for approaching Sodom and its sin, two distinct construals of sin, law, and nature. Such a conclusion would entail letting go of the false notion that a monolithic ideology of sexuality constrained sixteenth-century imaginations. While such a move seems warranted, we may accomplish more in reconceiving our subject if we go beyond merely opposing two theological stances, to recognize instead the extraordinary complexity of the early modern sodomy discourse, and the many and varied ingredients—multiple theological and other ideological agenda, as well as political realities and interpretations of those realities—giving shape to Sodom's sixteenth-century depictions. One might argue, on the basis of the theological ferment of the age coupled with the intense public attention directed toward all things pertaining to sex, that the Reformation movements provided the pivotal historical moment in which the discourse of Sodom was bequeathed to the modern world. Luther's and Calvin's engagements with biblical texts and their own cultures show us the intricacies and complications of this passage to modernity; the perpetuation of an inherited paradigm for the interpretation of Sodom's sin and destruction was certainly no inevitable development. In their exegesis and exposition we see at once the strength and the fragility of that paradigm. It seems, then, that a responsible historical account must come to terms with the dynamic character of the sixteenth-century discourse and acknowledge that this discursive bequest—one with which contemporary societies continue to struggle—was itself formed in conflict, through anxious struggles to establish and maintain viable communities, and amid deep uncertainties about the nature of human desire, virtue, and sin.

Footnotes

This essay is a revised version of a paper given at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in Cleveland on 4 November 2000. I would like to express my thanks to those who offered comments and suggestions on that occasion. Note the following abbreviations: CO, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia (59 vols.; Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1863–1900); LW, Luther's Works (58 vols.; American Edition; Philadelphia: Fortress, 1955–1986); WA, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar Ausgabe). 1. Abt., Schriften (70 vols. to date; Weimar: Hermann Boehlau, 1883–); and WA BR, D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesammtausgabe (Weimar Ausgabe). 4. Abt., Briefwechsel.

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A Singular Example of the Wrath of God: The Use of Sodom in Sixteenth-Century Exegesis

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Luther on Wrath, Mercy, and Moral Degeneracy in the Last Times

Calvin on Sodom, Sin, and Nature

Rhetorical Designs and Political Context

Ambiguous Legacies

Footnotes

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