If, as literary wisdom proposes, it is best to “begin at the beginning,” then perhaps it might also be good, in true humanist form, to return ad fontes, to the beginning, in search of an appropriate end. Going back once again to 1509, the year of Calvin's birth, we find Lefèvre D'Etaples expressing certain principles that reveal much about the origin of the war on the idols, as well as about its eventual legacy. Presenting his case for a return to the “pure” sources of scripture, the French humanist also argued in his Commentary on Psalms for a certain metaphysical understanding of reality. Without scripture, he said, everything became corrupt:

It is no accident, in an age when such statements were made about the metaphysical relationship between heaven and earth, that some men, such as Copernicus, should have also perceived, for the first time in human history, a new physical relationship between a revolving earth and the heavens through which it moves. Though the connections among Renaissance, Reformation, and “modernity” form a Gordian knot that no pen or sword can easily unravel, it makes sense to say that the scientific and religious revolutions of the sixteenth century share common traits.