The interior of Notre-Dame de Noyon, France.
From July 6 to 22, Connie Wardle participated in a pilgrimage through countries touched by the Protestant Reformation—France, Switzerland and Scotland. This is the third of a series of reflections on the journey.
It was strange to think about John Calvin as a boy. In my mind, the reformer always looks like his portraits. He’s either an intense, dark-eyed youth or an old man with a beard to rival Confucius. Yet as we stood in Noyon, France, the town where Calvin was born, I tried to imagine him as a child skipping with his family to Mass. Or, perhaps, being dragged half-heartedly.
I wonder what he thought of the Mass as a child. Was he captivated by the mystery of it? There would have been the smell of incense and the ceremony of the Eucharist, the words of the liturgy profound yet scarcely comprehensible to one who was only learning Latin.
Notre-Dame de Noyon stands only a street away from the site of Calvin’s childhood home. He would have grown up with the sound of the church’s bells and the shadow of its towers. Its architecture would have been familiar to him.
Today the church looks very different from the one John Calvin knew. History has not been kind to it.
Once, like most grand medieval churches it would have been ornate—even gaudy—with figures of saints, apostles, angels and demons. Today it’s face is pockmarked with the remains of shattered carvings. There are almost no figures above its doors. I could find only two brave little statues clinging to a lintel.
As Reformation fervor swept through France, believers smashed the statues that adorned many churches, believing the “graven images” to be idolatrous. During the French Revolution, too, the carvings outside the doors of Notre-Dame de Noyon were destroyed in the name of ideological progress, for the church was associated with the French monarchy.
The Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson, who visited Noyon in 1876, described the church as “some great old battle-ship” rising on a swell of ground “as though the good ship were bowing lazily over an Atlantic swell.”
It was an apt description and, indeed, the church saw battle. During World War I, it was heavily damaged by German bombardments. By the end, portions of it were in ruins. It took decades to rebuild.
Our Lady of Noyon should be called Our Lady of Scars, I thought. Outside she bears old wounds. Inside, she is beautiful and full of light.
“I could never fathom how a man dares to lift up his voice to preach in a cathedral,” Stevenson wrote. “What is he to say that will not be an anti-climax? For though I have heard a considerable variety of sermons, I never yet heard one that was so expressive as a cathedral. ‘Tis the best preacher itself, and preaches day and night; not only telling you of man’s art and aspirations in the past, but convicting your own soul of ardent sympathies; or rather, like all good preachers, it sets you preaching to yourself;—and every man is his own doctor of divinity in the last resort.”
I wonder if a young John Calvin would have agreed.
