The Institutes (1559)
Institutio Christianae Religionis, the final edition (Geneva, 1559)
John Calvin, after twenty-three years of revising it
The same book he published at twenty-six, rewritten five times over twenty-three years until it was a different one.
- Catch rate
- Not found in the wild
- Base research
- 372
- Stat total
- 368
Base stats
Every stat is a checkable fact about the actual book, not a designer's mood. Bars are drawn against the highest value any book reaches.
Why these numbers
The game's own explanation, as a reader sees it in the backpack.
Four books, eighty chapters, arranged on the shape of the Apostles’ Creed. There is more of it than of anything else you can carry.
It answers Rome, the radicals, the Anabaptists, Servetus and Osiander in turn, and it does not raise its voice once.
Twenty-three years of a careful man rereading his own argument for holes. Almost nothing has been left where it can be got at.
Long, Latin, and demanding. It goes everywhere in the end and it never goes anywhere fast.
Cited for this book
Five editions across twenty-three years, ending with four books and eighty chapters laid out on the frame of the Apostles’ Creed: God the Creator, God the Redeemer, the way we receive Christ’s grace, and the outward means — the church. Book IV is where the Reformation says what a church actually is, and it does not answer the question by producing a list of bishops.
Development
A book develops as it is read — the fragment becomes the work, the work becomes the corpus.
Moves learned
By levelling up. A book that develops keeps what it knew and learns the rest on its new schedule.
| Lv | Move | Type | Cat. | Pwr | Acc | PP |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Some Sense of Deity | Natural Theology | Argument | 80 | 100% | 15 |
| 1 | Random Verse | Bible | Argument | 10 | 100% | 30 |
| 44 | Chapter… | Bible | Scripture | — | — | 12 |
| 46 | A Seed of Religion | Anthropology | Argument | 76 | 100% | 15 |
| 49 | The Secret Testimony | Presupposition | Argument | 88 | 100% | 10 |
| 52 | Where the Word Is Preached | Ecclesiology | Argument | 93 | 100% | 5 |
| 56 | Six Hundred Students | Ethics | Argument | 84 | 100% | 10 |