Théodore de Bèze

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Théodore de Bèze
Signature Théodore de Bèze.PNG
Birthplace in Vézelay

Théodore de Bèze (also Theodor von Beza; born June 24, 1519 in Vézelay , Burgundy , † October 13, 1605 in Geneva ) was a Geneva reformer of French origin.

Live and act

Beza came from a noble family ; his father , Pierre de Bèze was in Vezelay bailiff said that the mother Marie Bourdelot. From the age of nine he lived in Orléans and Bourges in the house of Melchior Volmars , a German philologist who instructed him in the humanities and introduced him to Protestantism . After studying law and receiving his doctorate in Orléans in 1539, he moved to Paris , where the income from two benefices enabled him to live as a Latin poet without worries ( Poemata juvenilia, Paris 1548).

After internal struggles and a serious plague, he went to Geneva in 1548, married Claudine Denosse and converted to the Reformed Church . He then worked for ten years as a teacher of the Greek language in Lausanne and completed the rhyming translation of the psalms , the so-called Geneva Psalter , which Clément Marot had begun , the modernized version of which later became the basis for the church chant of the Reformed communities in France. From 1552 to 1554 he was rector of the Academie la Lausanne.

As a fellow campaigner of John Calvin , he wrote writings on predestination and the Lord's Supper . He shared Calvin's view of the punishment of heretics and justified e.g. B. in a book De haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis (1554) the execution of Michael Servetus . He gained such a high level of trust in Reformed Switzerland that in 1557 and 1558 he was a member of delegations to the Protestant princes of Germany , who asked them to intercede at the French court in favor of the threatened Waldensians in Piedmont and the Reformed prisoners imprisoned in Paris.

In 1558 he finally settled in Geneva, where he became pastor and professor of theology and defended Calvin in 1559 and 1560 in several, sometimes bitingly ironic, writings against the attacks of the Lutherans Joachim Westphal and Tilemann Hesshus . His diplomatic talent was now used in many ways for the goals of the Reformed Church. Theodore de Beza stayed in Germany several times between 1557 and 1558, including in September and October 1557 at the Reichstag in Worms.

After winning over King Anton of Navarre to the Reformation in 1559 , at his request he attended the famous religious discussion at Poissy with Peter Martyr Vermigli in 1561 , where he defended the Reformation with boldness and rhetorical skill. At the colloquium of Saint-Germain in 1562, he fought against the veneration of images and, after the outbreak of the Huguenot Wars, worked as a field preacher in the retinue of Prince Condé .

After the treaty of 1563 he returned to his offices in Geneva and after Calvin's death in 1564, as his successor in the office of President of the Consistory , he was considered the leading theologian of this church. In 1571 he took part in the general national synod of the French Reformed at Nîmes . In 1586 he argued against the Lutheran doctrine of ubiquity during a religious discussion in Montbéliard with the Württemberg theologian Jakob Andreae .

He also dealt with state theory and is one of the most important early monarchists . In 1574 he wrote De iure magistratuum (On the law of the authorities).

After the death of his first wife Claude Desnoz in 1588, the 69-year-old married a second woman, the widowed Genoese Caterina del Piano. After he had resigned from presidency in the consistory in 1580, he resigned his teaching post in 1598 and his preaching post in 1600. Francis de Sales tried in vain to persuade him to return to the Catholic Church. When the Jesuits spread the rumor in 1597 that de Bèze had died and had professed his Catholic faith before he died, he wrote a mocking poem . He died in Geneva on October 13, 1605.

A statue of Théodore de Bèze stands on the Geneva Reformation Monument .

His feast day in the Evangelical Name Calendar is October 13th .

Works

  • critical editions of the New Testament
  • Dialogi de predestinatione, de coena sacra contra Io. Westphalium, Tilemannum Heshusium, Castellionem ...
  • Icones id est verae imagines virorum doctrina et pietate illustrium (Geneva 1580)
  • Vita Calvini (1575)
  • Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées au royaume de France, depuis l'an 1521 jusqu'en 1563 (Geneva 1580; attributed to de Bèze)
  • De iure magistratuum (1574). Published in Frankfurt 1608.

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Théodore de Bèze in the Ecumenical Lexicon of Saints

Web links

Commons : Théodore de Bèze  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files
personal data
SURNAME Bèze, Théodore de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Beza, Theodor von
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French reformer
DATE OF BIRTH June 24, 1519
PLACE OF BIRTH Vézelay , Burgundy
DATE OF DEATH October 13, 1605
Place of death Geneva