“Neither the Spirit Without the Flesh”: John Calvin’s Greek Doctrine of the Beatific Vision

“According to the error of the Greeks and the Calvinists, the [departed soul] has not gone to God, but to the lower world, or to some other place outside heaven where God is not any more present than he is here with us.”1 With this statement, the Jesuit polemicist, Robert Bellarmine, summed up what he considered one of Reformed Protestantism’s chief heresies in the sixteenth century. The Calvinists were preaching that, upon death, faithful souls did not immediately ascend to God and enjoy the “beatific vision” as was the traditional hope of late medieval Christians. Rather, they migrated to “some other place” where they rested until the last judgment and resurrection. Only then would they enjoy the fullness of beatitude and behold God “face to face.” Bellarmine had no doubt who was to blame for this false teaching in his own day. “[John] Calvin stubbornly defends the notion that souls do not see God [animas non videre Deum]” before the last day, he warned.2 The Genevan heresiarch had drunk from a polluted stream whose headwaters lay to the East. The error of the Calvinists was that of the Greeks. However familiar Calvin’s Greek sensibility was to near contemporaries like Bellarmine, it is likely to surprise modern scholars. The most complete treatments of the reformer’s eschatology remain those of Heinrich Quistorp (1941) and George H. Tavard (2000).3 Despite their different eras and aims, these studies agree in casting Calvin as a “traditional” voice regarding the visio Dei