The Soul in Plato, Platonism, and Calvin

Abstract

One might say that, by and large, the French are interested in John Calvin as a Christian humanist, the Germans in Calvin as a Christian theologian, and the Dutch in Calvin as a Christian philosopher. Of course, in some sense, Calvin is all these; therefore the precise relation in Calvin between scriptural theology and Platonic humanism will continue to be discussed. Concerning the doctrine of soul, Roy W. Battenhouse in an influential article entitled ‘The Doctrine of Man in Calvin and in Renaissance Platonism’ suggests that there are important resemblances between Calvin and Renaissance Platonism in the treatment of human nature. He claims that ‘both the Neoplatonists and Calvin base their thinking about man on the premise of a dualism between soul and body’, which reveals ‘Calvin's fundamental Platonism’. Although Battenhouse calls his study ‘frankly exploratory and tentative’ and uses such phrases as ‘may have been’ and ‘seems to have’ and ‘it can be argued’, the evidence demonstrates to him ‘that Calvin's socalled biblical theology is not quite so biblical as its nuggets of quotation would like to impress upon us’. Jean Boisset, while insisting that Calvin's thought is basically biblical, also finds similarities between Calvin and Plato in the doctrine of soul, and Heinrich Quistorp thinks that the question remains whether in fact Calvin does not develop a doctrine of soul which is more philosophical than theological. Quistorp thinks that Luther was more aware of the contrast between biblical anthropology and philosophical dualism than Calvin was.

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