In those last words,‘owed to our nature’, Calvin hints at one of his reasons for
repudiating the Stoic ideal. It belongs to our created nature—not to our fallen
nature but to our created nature—to be attached to friends and relatives and
thus to be cast into grief upon their death. But Calvin has yet another reason
for repudiating the Stoic ideal:‘Our Lord and Master has condemned [it]
not only by his word, but also by his example. For he groaned and wept
both over his own and others’misfortunes. And he taught his disciples in the
same way.’^36
A natural counterpart to what Calvin says about grief is what he says about
enjoyment. In a remarkable passage in theInstitutes, he says that of grasses,
trees, and fruits we should appreciate not only their utility as nourishment but
their beauty of appearance and pleasantness of odour and taste; of clothes we
should appreciate not only their utility for keeping us warm but their come-
liness; and of wine and oil we should appreciate not only that they are
nourishing but that wine gladdens our hearts and oil makes our faces shine.^37
Augustine had said that God and God alone should be enjoyed; the things of
this world should merely be used. As if with his eye on Augustine’s use/
enjoyment distinction, Calvin asks rhetorically whether God did not‘render
many things attractive to us, apart from their necessary use?’. He answers that
God did. And let this, he says,‘be our principle; that the use of God's gifts is
not wrongly directed when it is referred to that end to which the Author
himself created and destined them for us, since he created them for our good,
not for our ruin’.^38
What is coming to expression here is a theme that we already noted when
discussing Calvin’s Renaissance humanism: the good things of life are to be
seen and received as God’sgiftsto us. What the passages we have just now
considered add is that they are to be seen and received as God’s gifts not only
so far as they are useful but also so far as they are enjoyable.‘This life,’says
Calvin,‘however crammed with infinite miseries it may be, is still rightly to be
counted among those blessings of God which are not to be spurned. Therefore,
if we recognize in it no divine benefit, we are already guilty of grave ingratitude
toward God himself.’^39
One cannot overemphasize the pervasiveness of this theme in Calvin—the
theme of the good things of this life as God’s gift for our use and enjoyment,
and the counterpart theme of the propriety of gratitude on our part. Never, in
this regard, has there been a more sacramental theologian than Calvin, one
more imbued with the sense that in world, history, and self we meet God.
‘Away, then, with that inhuman philosophy which, while conceding only a
necessary use of creatures, not only malignantly deprives us of the lawful fruit
(^36) Calvin,InstitutesIII.viii.9. (^37) Calvin,InstitutesIII.x.2.
(^38) Calvin,InstitutesIII.x.2. (^39) Calvin,InstitutesIII.ix.3.
The Christian Humanism of John Calvin 89