Addiction and Devotion in Early Modern England. Rebecca Lemon
a form of free will in which the believer might stray from addiction to Christ toward another, less laudable attachment: “They do corrupt the power of Christ, who are addicted to their belly and earthly thinges: hee sheweth what we ought to seeke in hym and for what cause we ought to seeke him.”30 We “are ofte withdrawn” into lusts, being “addicted to [our] belly and earthly things.”31 But, at the same time, he makes it clear that only God can “correct that disease” before one can act: “Because by reason of the grossenes of nature, we are always addicted unto earthly thinges, therefore he doth first correct that disease which is ingendered in us, before he sheweth what we must doe.”32 Once God cures, he “sheweth what we must do” and “sheweth what we aught to seeke in hym.” In other words, one cannot even see the right path until God cleanses the natural depravity evident in one’s misguided addictions. The dedicated mind, with its resolution, is an illusion. Addictions are signs of grace or reprobation that one does not control.
Calvin establishes, then, a complex relationship between the compulsion to follow Christ and the lure of material life. On one level, these desires are clearly opposed to one another since one’s addiction, be it to Christ or to worldly pleasure, indicates elect or reprobate status. But on another, more fundamental, level, Calvin acknowledges that everyone struggles with pure addiction. Even the most faithful wrestle with competing desires. He claims, “It is true that the faythfull them selues are never so wholly addicted to obey God, but that they are ofte withdrawne with sinfull lustes of the flesh.”33 One might aspire to be “wholly addicted” but might err. In other words, addiction to God and addiction to the belly are at once opposed and yet connected as two sites for devotion that might both hold the believer. The tension between these two opposed forms of addiction can be reconciled only by acknowledging the inevitability of one’s dependence on God’s will. Humans, Calvin implies, struggle with some form of addiction. It is just a question of whether abandonment to addiction leads one to or away from God. Through grace, one might be able to embrace as firmly as possible servitude and obedience to God. This form of service and addiction is uplifting. The strength of one’s embrace of this addiction, however, depends on God’s grace. Without such a gift, one struggles with the earthly appetites and compulsions shackling the human body to its baser nature. The resulting addictions represent debasing tyranny.
This dangerous aspect of addiction appears in the English translations of Calvin’s French sermons. In his Latin writings Calvin deploys the term addīcere routinely, and the English translation faithfully tracks the term, rendering it as “addiction,” as noted in the citations above. By contrast, sixteenth-century French lacks modern French’s addiction and dépendence. When Calvin attempts to describe the phenomenon of addiction, he turns to potential cognates in terms ranging from adonner to attacher to dedier. Yet his English translators reintroduce the term “addiction,” illuminating the absent presence of the concept in the French sermons. Translating adonner, a term that designates a willful giving over of oneself, Arthur Golding turns to the term “addiction”—but only in special circumstances. Calvin, for example, uses versions of the word adonner 206 times in his Sermons de M. Jean Calvin sur le livre de Job. In Golding’s sizeable English folio translation (produced in six discrete impressions between 1574 and 1584 and amounting to what Stam calls a “bestseller,” which “achieved a popularity beyond that of any other Calvin commentaries”), he translates adonner as “addiction” in only three cases, each describing a special instance of attachment.34 When Calvin writes, “Or nous ayant acquis si cherement, il ne faut pas que nous soyons plus adonnez à nous mesmes, mais que nous soyons du tout dediez à son service,” Golding translates it as “Hee hath purchased vs so dearly, we must no more be addicted to our selues, but be wholly dedicated to his service.”35 Further, Calvin writes, “Et pourtant ce n’est pas raison que doresenavant nous soyons plus adonnez à nous mesmes: mais qu’un chacun soit prest de se dedier pleinement au service de Dieu,” and the translation reads, “It is not meete that henceforth we shoulde be any more addicted to our selues, but every man should bee readie wholly to dedicate himselfe too the service of God.”36 If active, dedicated devotion to God is the praiseworthy goal, Calvin here also describes an improper form of donation or giving over, a form deemed addiction in English, as in Latin. In this English version, “addiction” and “dedication” appear as synonyms, used interchangeably—one should not be “addicted” to the wrong path but “dedicated” to the proper course—and at the same time indicate addiction as a potentially dangerous form of attachment. Addīcere, adonner, and “addiction” signal mistaken attachment to oneself and the world, even as this attachment might mirror a more desirable form of addiction to God.
Calvin warns of the dangers of this improper addiction because he experienced them, at least according to his personal account of conversion. In the address to the reader prefacing his commentaries on the Psalms (first translated into English by Golding in 1571, following the Latin original published in Geneva in 1557 and French editions in 1558 and 1561), Calvin offers one of his few explicitly autobiographical statements about his conversion. He claims that he had been groomed for the ministry from a young age, but his father directed him to study law instead. While he endeavored to satisfy his father’s wishes, “God with the secret bridle of his providence did at the length turn my race ageine the other way,” toward divinity. Calvin relates how initially he “was more strictly addicted to the superstitions of the Papistrie, than I might with ease be drawn out of so deep a puddle.” His sudden conversion freed him from such bondage. God’s grace literally turned Calvin around, redirecting and reshaping him: God “sodenly turned my mind (which for my yeeres was over muche hardned) and made it easie to be taught.”37 Calvin here views himself as “strictly” or, in an alternate translation, “obstinately” addicted to the pope and superstitious belief.38 By “superstition” he indicates, as Alexandra Walsham notes, devotion to relics, saints, and other material manifestations of faith: “The ease with which the populace had been deceived by these tricks was itself a just punishment from God for its gullibility and natural addiction to ‘this most perverse kinde of superstition,’ and to a carnal religion that revolved around visible, physical things.”39 Here, Walsham’s terminology draws attention to the link between religious devotion and addiction. Only with God’s help to redirect and reshape him can Calvin relinquish his obstinate attachments: God did “turn my race” the right way: he “turned my mind” away from the papacy. God turns him around, softens his heart, and frees him from earthly lures so he can dedicate himself to the divine, a more compelling and liberating addiction.40 As a result, after his conversion he “burned with so great a desire of profiting: that although I did not quite give over all other studies, yet I followed them more coldly.”41
Calvin’s English followers, including Foxe and Perkins, take up and extend his model of addiction to scripture and superstition, continuing to tease out the depravity inherent in misguided addictions even as they trumpet the joys of addictive devotion to the divine. Foxe’s Actes and monuments (after the Bible, arguably the second most popular religious book in Elizabethan England following a 1572 government order requiring copies to be placed in all cathedrals in the country) invokes the devotional aspects of addiction when he narrates the lives of Protestant martyrs such as John Frith and William Tyndale, two figures who dedicated themselves to the study of scripture. These Reformed theologians demonstrate the addictive potential celebrated by Calvin himself. Frith, Foxe writes, “began hys study at Cambridge. In whose nature had planted being but a child maruelous instructions & love unto learning, whereunto he was addict. He had also a wonderful promptnes of wit & a ready capacitie to receaue and understand any thing, in so much that he seemed not to be sent unto learning, but also borne for the same purpose.”42 Like Seneca and Faustus, Frith has a “promptness of wit” and proves “addict,” “borne for” rather than merely acquiring learning.
Tyndale, too, proves addicted to study, which he pursues at Oxford, “where he by long continuance grewe up, and increased as well in the knowledge of tounges, and other liberall Artes, as especially in the knowledge of the Scriptures: wherunto his mind was singularly addicted.”43 Foxe praises the divine pursuits of Frith and Tyndale in terms that resonate with the scholastic addiction of Seneca and