Satan and the Scots

The Devil in Post-Reformation Scotland, c.1560-1700

Michelle D. Brock

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781472470010
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317059462
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Early Modern History

Frequent discussions of Satan from the pulpit, in the courtroom, in print, in self-writings, and on the streets rendered the Devil an immediate and assumed presence in early modern Scotland. For some, especially those engaged in political struggle, this produced a unifying effect by providing a proximate enemy for communities to rally around. For others, the Reformed Protestant emphasis on the relationship between sin and Satan caused them to suspect, much to their horror, that their own depraved hearts placed them in league with the Devil. Exploring what it meant to live in a world in which Satan's presence was believed to be, and indeed, perceived to be, ubiquitous, this book recreates the role of the Devil in the mental worlds of the Scottish people from the Reformation through the early eighteenth century. In so doing it is both the first history of the Devil in Scotland and a case study of the profound ways that beliefs about evil can change lives and shape whole societies. Building upon recent scholarship on demonology and witchcraft, this study contributes to and advances this body of literature in three important ways. First, it moves beyond establishing what people believed about the Devil to explore what these beliefs actually did- how they shaped the piety, politics, lived experiences, and identities of Scots from across the social spectrum. Second, while many previous studies of the Devil remain confined to national borders, this project situates Scottish demonic belief within the confluence of British, Atlantic, and European religious thought. Third, this book engages with long-running debates about Protestantism and the 'disenchantment of the world', suggesting that Reformed theology, through its dogged emphasis on human depravity, eroded any rigid divide between the supernatural evil of Satan and the natural wickedness of men and women. This erosion was borne out not only in pages of treatises and sermons, but in the lives of Scots of all sorts. Ultimately, this study suggests that post-Reformation beliefs about the Devil profoundly influenced the experiences and identities of the Scottish people through the creation of a shared cultural conversation about evil and human nature.

Chapter 1
Reforming the Devil

Satan is the minister of God’s wrath, and as it were the executioner, so he is armed against us, not through the connivance, but by the command of his judge.

John Calvin, 1539¹

O Lord, confirme us in these perillous days and rages of Satan.

John Knox, 1556²

During the decades that followed the Scottish Reformation, a spectrum of ideas about Satan developed around the Reformed emphases on the sovereignty of God, double predestination and total human depravity. In educated circles across the country, demonic belief shifted, anxiety about the Devil intensified amid apocalyptic expectation, and perceived struggles with Satan and sin pervaded psyches. For many Scottish men and women, including those outside the clergy, beliefs about the Devil and the nature of his involvement in their lives became clarified and sharpened through the lens of a Protestant theology that was at once prescriptive and practical, communal and personal. This chapter provides a theological framework for examining this evolving role of Satan in early modern Scotland. It begins with an analysis of the demonological ideas articulated by early Continental reformers and then traces the expression and development of these ideas by the first generation of the Reformed Scottish clergy.³ These discussions about Satan comprised a core component of the Reformation process. In the century that followed, discourses about the Devil in print, from the pulpit, in personal writings, in the courtrooms and on the streets would make manifest to Scots of all sorts Reformed ideas about sin, salvation and the human condition.

By the mid-sixteenth century, the ideas of men such as Martin Luther, John Calvin, Theodore Beza and many others had been gestating in Scotland for several decades. There, Protestantism underwent a series of fits and starts until 1560, when the Scottish church officially and decisively severed ties to Rome.⁴ The Scottish Reformation, while often opposed, slow and incomplete, thoroughly reshaped Scottish society, leaving a mark that seems especially pronounced from an international perspective.⁵ While the events of the Reformation itself lie beyond the scope of this book, two aspects of its course warrant brief examination. First, the wide adoption of Protestantism in Scotland did not begin with a centralized royal mandate, but developed at the passionate, politically motivated hands of clergyman, lawyers and lesser nobility. This was not a grassroots movement, but nor was it a top-down, act of state, as was the English Reformation. The particularly localized nature of the Reformation was facilitated in no small way by the actions of the kirk sessions – ecclesiastical courts established in parishes in both Lowland and Highland Scotland.⁶ Charged with furthering the goals of the Reformation through the enforcement of moral discipline, the kirk sessions disseminated new Protestant ideas to ordinary Scots while also allowing them to participate in the reforming process.⁷

Second, the Reformation came to Scotland at a comparatively late date. During the 1540s and 1550s, John Knox and his fellow Scottish reformers spent considerable time among Huguenots in France, Calvinists in Geneva and their Protestant colleagues in England. While abroad, they honed their ideas about what the godly Scottish church ought to look like and how they could quickly promulgate Protestantism to the Scottish public.⁸ When Knox and company returned home and pushed for revolutionary change in the late 1550s, the way forward had already been paved, at least in certain circles, by the penetration of Lutheran ideas early in the century, the influence of Reformed Protestantism from England since the 1530s, and the preaching of early reformers such as George Wishart.⁹ In this context, ripe for reform and buzzing with the zeal of recent converts, Reformed theology began, irregularly but consequentially, to transform how many Scots viewed Satan and themselves.

Calvin and the Devil

The demonological ideas espoused by Calvin and other early Continental reformers built an essential foundation for the later expression of demonic beliefs and experiences in post-Reformation Scotland.¹⁰ In the 1530s, Calvin began to write in earnest about his views on theological reform and the fledgling Protestantism, embedding his ideas about Satan within larger discussions about God, salvation and humanity. His magnum opus, The Institutes of the Christian Religion, was first published in Latin in 1536 and marked the beginning of a thirty-year career of theological exploration, preaching and publishing.¹¹

Of course, Calvin was just one important member of a large group of Protestant reformers. His theological ideas did not emerge in a vacuum, and many individuals deserve credit for the development of the Reformed tradition.¹² That said, in the case of Scotland, the influence of Calvin’s thought can be directly traced through the person of John Knox, who embraced the basics of Reformed theology and Presbyterian polity during his time in Geneva. Though they emerged from divergent political contexts and differed on certain points of theology and practice such as eschatology and rebellion, Calvin directly shaped Knox’s understanding of divine providence and God’s attending direction of Satan’s actions in the world.¹³ Concurrently, the growth of French Protestantism spread Calvinist ideas to Scotland through the many political and intellectual connections between the two countries.¹⁴ Though the theology that took root and bloomed in Scotland emerged from a varied confluence of ideas, traditions and individuals, the basic doctrines articulated by Calvin provide an accessible, though certainly not comprehensive, starting point from which to trace the development of Reformed demonological ideas in Protestant Scotland.

An uncompromising belief in the sovereignty of God dictated Calvin’s understanding of Satan, as well as his general theology. Calvin’s God was no passive clockmaker; divine providence shaped everything that occurred in this world and in the next. As he penned in the first chapter of his Institutes:

[God] is deemed omnipotent, not because he can indeed act, yet sometimes ceases and sits in idleness, or continues by a general impulse that order of nature which he previously appointed; but because, governing heaven and earth by his providence, he regulates all things that nothing takes place without his deliberation.¹⁵

This emphasis on divine authority found its most potent expression in the doctrine of double predestination. Basing his beliefs about election on Scripture, particularly on Paul’s epistle to the Romans, Calvin explained in the Institutes that

We say that God once established by his eternal and unchangeable plan those whom he long before determined once for all to receive into salvation, and those whom, on the other hand, he would devote to destruction. We assert that, with respect to the elect, this plan was founded upon his freely given mercy, without regard to human worth; but by his just and irreprehensible but incomprehensible judgment he has barred the door of life to those whom he has given over to damnation.¹⁶

Men and women, within whom ‘nothing appears … that is not tainted with very great impurity’, had no say in the matter of salvation, which lay exclusively in the hands of God.¹⁷

Within the Reformed tradition, thoughts about predestination differed in terms of presentation and precise definition. Some scholars, most notably Menna Prestwich and R.T. Kendall, have contended that it was Beza rather than Calvin who made double predestination a key doctrine of Reformed theology.¹⁸ Others have downplayed Calvin’s commitment to the doctrine, and Bruce Gordon’s recent biography of Calvin devotes very little attention to his thinking on predestination.¹⁹ Yet regardless of who made predestinarianism central to Reformed thinking, Calvin undoubtedly advocated the decrees of election and reprobation in his writings. As Leif Dixon has so cogently put it, to Calvin, predestination was not a doctrine that one could simply take or leave: ‘it was not a matter of taste; rather it was a Scripturally prescribed corrective to human pridefullness’.²⁰ The matter was not so much that postlapsarian individuals were completely devoid of goodness, but rather that they could not, on their own accord, resist the urge to sin.

More importantly, as Richard Muller has argued, ‘the basic premise of the doctrine, whether formulated as a single or double decree or in infra-or supralapsarian terms, is that salvation rests on the free and sovereign elect of God and damnation results from human sin’.²¹ As Calvin wrote, ‘when Adam was despoiled, human nature was left naked and destitute … when he was infected with sin, contagion crept into human nature’.²² The original, absolute condemnation of mankind was thus ‘imprinted on the heavens, and on the earth, and on all creatures’, and only through God’s undeserved grace, given through Christ, could people be saved.²³

Beza, a third-generation Reformer and Calvin’s hand-picked successor at Geneva, accorded even more importance to the doctrine of double predestination through his development of supralapsarianism. This was the view, most famously laid out in his Tabula praedestinationis (1555), that God had chosen the elect and the reprobate prior to his decree of Adam’s fall, which itself then provided the just means for the predetermined damnation of some.²⁴ These ideas were summarized in his Propositions and Principles of Divinity, which would be translated and published in Edinburgh in 1591 and again in 1595. With regard to reprobation, Beza explained that God, ‘according unto his eternal Predestination,’ shall ‘adjudge [the reprobate] together with Satan unto eternal punishments, laying open in their just destruction, the glory of his great and most just hatred against evil’.²⁵ This focus on double predestination would have profound consequences among the godly in early modern Scotland and elsewhere, as ordinary believers were encouraged to look tirelessly within themselves for marks of either grace or damnation.²⁶

Calvin, as with most other Protestant reformers, never wrote a treatise on demonology. Discussions of Satan’s relationship to God and humankind, however, appeared in many of his writings. Explaining the unequivocal master-servant relationship between the Devil and a totally sovereign God, Calvin wrote in 1539 that ‘Satan is the minister of God’s wrath, and as it were the executioner, so he is armed against us, not through the connivance, but by the command of his judge’.²⁷ Though Satan resisted divine orders due to the desire to do all things contrary to God, he could not prevail. As Calvin explained, ‘with the bridle of his power God holds him [Satan] bound and restrained, he carries out only those things which have been divinely permitted to him’.²⁸ In his catechism intended to ‘teache children the Christiane religion’, printed by the Church of Scotland in 1578, Calvin reiterated the relationship between God and the Devil in a fictional conversation between a minister and a child. ‘What sayeth thou,’ the minister asked, ‘as touching the devils and wicked persons? Be they also subject...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Abbreviations and Conventions
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Reforming the Devil
• 2 From the Pulpit
• 3 A Constant Adversary
• 4 Internalizing the Demonic
• 5 Wicked Words and Demonic Belief
• 6 The Devil as Master
• 7 Satan on the Streets
• Conclusion: Of Monsters and Men
• Bibliography
• Index