Pierre Viret

Reformer of Lausanne, 1511–1571

Pierre Viret was the reformer of Lausanne and the gentlest of the three friends who led the Reformation in French-speaking Switzerland. Merle d’Aubigné compared them to the apostles: “The ardent Farel was the St. Peter of the Swiss Reform, the mighty Calvin the St. Paul, and the gentle Viret the St. John.”1 Beza, who heard all three, wrote that “Viret possessed such winning eloquence, that his entranced audience hung upon his lips,” and that “a preacher compounded of the three would have been absolutely perfect.”2

Orbe and Paris

He was born in 1511 at Orbe in the Pays de Vaud, at the foot of the Jura. His father, William, was a “cloth-dresser and tailor,” and the boy grew up among the wool-combers of his father’s shop.1 He was sent to Paris to study for the priesthood and, by his own account, went “pretty deep into that Babylon.” There the gospel reached him. “While still at college,” he said, “God took me out of the labyrinth of error before I had sunk deeper into that Babylon of Antichrist,” and he later gave thanks “that the mark and sign of the beast were not set upon my forehead.”1 Robert Linder notes that he studied at the Collège de Montaigu about the time Calvin was leaving it and Ignatius Loyola was arriving.3

Called by Farel

He came home to an Orbe divided by the preaching of William Farel. Farel saw at once what the young man could be and pressed him to preach in his own town. Viret shrank from it, then yielded. “Let it not be my mouth which persuades,” he said, “but the mouth of Jesus Christ; for it is Jesus Christ who pierces the heart with the fiery arrow of his Spirit.” On May 6, 1531, the church of Orbe was crowded to hear him. One of the first fruits of his ministry was the conversion of his own parents. “Ah!” he said, “if he had made my ministry of no other use, I should have had good cause to bless him.”1 Where Farel was “ardent, intrepid, and almost rash,” Viret “had a wondrously meek temper,” and yet, like Farel and Calvin, “he was firm in doctrine and morals.”1

Geneva and the Poisoned Soup

He preached next at Payerne, where Catholic opponents tried to kill him and left him badly wounded, and at Neuchâtel.3 In 1534 he joined Farel in Geneva, and for a time the city heard the three most powerful preachers in the French language, Antoine Froment, Farel, and Viret. They lodged together in the house of Claude Bernard, and a woman from Lyon took service there in order to poison them. Only Viret ate the poisoned soup. He recovered, but the effects remained with him for the rest of his life.4 He helped Farel win the disputation that led Geneva to renounce Rome, celebrated the first evangelical baptism in the city, and was present in 1536 when Farel laid hold of Calvin.3

Lausanne

Viret then went to Lausanne, the chief city of his native Vaud, and for more than twenty years he was its leading pastor. The city became overwhelmingly Reformed under his ministry. He founded and taught in an academy to train ministers, set up care for the poor, and wrote steadily; Linder counts more than fifty books by him, among them the great Instruction chrestienne.3 His friendship with Calvin was one of the closest of the age. When Calvin’s infant son died, he wrote to Viret, “Certainly the Lord has afflicted us with a deep and painful wound in the death of our beloved son. But he is our Father: he knows what is best for his children.”5 Viret knew the same sorrows. His first wife died in 1546, and he wrote to Calvin, “The Lord has taken the half of myself from me.… I am so affected by this blow that I feel like a stranger in my own house.” Plague later took several of his children and his second wife.3

In 1553 five young Frenchmen who had studied under him at Lausanne were arrested at Lyon on their way home to preach and were burned on May 16. Viret, with Beza and the lords of Bern, pleaded for them with the French king in vain.4 At Lausanne, as at Geneva, he found loose morals and careless admission to the Lord’s Table, and he insisted that a consistory be given power to admonish, suspend, and if need be excommunicate. Bern, which ruled the Vaud, would not allow the church that power. Beza had already resigned from the academy. After a confrontation at Easter 1559 the Bernese drove Viret out, most of the professors left with him, and nearly a thousand of his people followed him to Geneva.4, 3

The Harvest Fields of France

Geneva welcomed him gladly, but France needed him more. In 1561 he went south, nominally for his health. Waylaid and beaten on the road, he said he came to Nîmes like “a dry skeleton covered with skin, who had brought his bones thither to be buried.”4 Soon he was preaching there to crowds of as many as eight thousand, and Nîmes became solidly Protestant. At Montpellier nearly the whole medical faculty was converted, and at Lyon for three years, through civil war and plague, he preached daily, counseled the Protestant soldiers, and cared for the sick, until a royal order of August 27, 1565, expelled him from the kingdom.3 He found refuge in Béarn with Jeanne d’Albret, Queen of Navarre, who made him one of her advisers and set him over her academy at Orthez. Taken prisoner by Catholic troops in the third war of religion, he was spared when seven of his fellow ministers were executed, and was soon freed. He died in 1571, about sixty years old, while preparing to attend the national synod at La Rochelle.3, 4 The queen wrote to Geneva that among all her losses in the war she placed first “the loss of Monsieur Viret.”3

Cautions

Merle d’Aubigné says Viret went to Paris in 1523, at twelve, while Linder places his study at the Collège de Montaigu from 1528. M’Crie calls his father “a dresser of wool” and Linder “a poor tailor”; Merle d’Aubigné’s “cloth-dresser and tailor” reconciles the two. Linder notes that Viret opposed the execution of heretics, which set him apart from many of his contemporaries, Reformed and Catholic alike. He did not seek controversy. “If I did not have the conviction that it was God who was pressing it on,” he wrote to Farel, “I would never enter a controversy with a single person.”6

Other Reformers   William Farel

Notes

  1. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 5, ch. 3, “A New Reformer and an Image-Breaker”. ↩
  2. Theodore Beza, The Life of John Calvin, in John Calvin, Tracts Relating to the Reformation, trans. Henry Beveridge, vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Calvin Translation Society, 1844), on Farel, Viret, and Calvin. ↩
  3. Robert D. Linder, “Forgotten Reformer,” Christian History 71, “The French Huguenots and the Wars of Religion” (2001). Summarized, with Viret’s own words as quoted there. ↩
  4. C. G. M’Crie, ed., Beza’s “Icones”: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters (London: Religious Tract Society, 1906), “Peter Viret.” The biographical sketches in this edition are the editor’s; the portraits and epigrams are Beza’s. ↩
  5. Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers, rev. ed. (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2013), chap. on Calvin, quoting Calvin’s letters to Viret. ↩
  6. J. H. Merle d’Aubigné, History of the Reformation in Europe in the Time of Calvin, trans. William L. R. Cates, vol. 3 (London: Longmans, Green), bk. 5, ch. 3. Robert D. Linder, “Forgotten Reformer,” Christian History 71, “The French Huguenots and the Wars of Religion” (2001); C. G. M’Crie, ed., Beza’s “Icones”: Contemporary Portraits of Reformers of Religion and Letters (London: Religious Tract Society, 1906), “Peter Viret.” ↩