Christian History Home > Issue 24 > The Reformer Saint and the Saintly Reformer
The Reformer Saint and the Saintly Reformer
Calvin and the Legacy of Bernard of Clairvaux
W. Stanford Reid is Emeritus Professor of Church History at the University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada. This article was adapted from Bernard of Clairvaux in the Thought of John Calvin, the Westminster Theological Journal, Volume XLI, Fall 1978, by permission of the author. | posted 10/01/1989 12:00AM
The French genius of Geneva, who greatly shaped modern Protestantism, may well have written his greatest works feeling the presence of the French genius of Clairvaux peering over his shoulder.
Because of Bernard’s theological and ecclesiastical point of view, one need hardly be surprised that both Luther and Calvin regarded him as a forerunner of their own movement. Luther expressed his appreciation of Bernard by calling him one of “the greatest doctors of the church,” but did not seem to make much use of his thinking and guidance in his own writings. Calvin, on the other hand, more than once expressed the view that Bernard spoke the very truth itself, and quoted him frequently in the
Institutes
and at least three times in the commentaries. In fact Calvin seems to refer to him favorably more frequently than he does to any other medieval author. Apparently, he recognized Bernard as being of the same mind with himself on the fundamentals of the faith.
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