CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
EARLY LIFE—WORKS—ARREST AND TRIAL AT VIENNE
CHAPTER I.
MICHAEL SERVETUS, HIS BIRTH, PARENTAGE, AND EARLY EDUCATION.
Michael Serveto, or as we know him best by his name with the Latin termination, Servetus, appears, from the most trustworthy information we possess, to have been born either at Tudela, in the old Spanish kingdom of Navarre, or at Villaneuva, in that of Aragon; but whether here or there, and in the year 1509 or 1511, is an open question. In the course of the Trial he stood at Vienne in Dauphiny, in the spring of 1553, he says himself that he is a native of Tudela, and forty-two years of age; which would make Navarre the country, and 1511 the year, of his birth. But in the Geneva Trial, only four months later, he declares that he is of Villanova, and forty-four years old; which would give us Aragon as the land, and 1509 as the date, of his nativity. When he spoke of himself as a Navarrese at Vienne, it may have been done to conciliate his French judges, Navarre having once been a province of France, and the natives of the two countries having still much in common. It was at a moment, too, when he had paramount motives for seeking to conceal his identity. When he said at Geneva that he was ‘Espagnol Arragonois de Villeneuve’ and forty-four, he was face to face with one who knew him well, and when he had neither motive nor opportunity for concealment. Servetus’s subscription of himself as ‘Michael Serveto, alias Revés, de Aragonia, Hispanus,’ on the title-page of his first work; as ‘Michael Villanovanus,’ on the titles of all the books he edited, and the name ‘Villeneuve’ by which alone he was known through the whole of the years he lived in France, to say nothing of the ‘M. S. V.,’ evidently Michael Servetus Villanovanus, on the last leaf of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ the printing of which led to his death, supply, as it seems, preponderating evidence as to the place of his birth, though the year may still be left uncertain. The alias Revés which appears on the title of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ the first-fruits of his genius, has hitherto been a puzzle and subject of debate with his biographers, but can now be satisfactorily interpreted. Servetus’s mother, it appears, was of French extraction, of the Revés family, and her son took occasion in his first work piously to preserve his mother’s family name beside his proper patronymic.[1] Of the parents of Servetus, however, we in fact know little more than that we have from himself when, on his trial at Geneva, he informed the Court that they were d’ancienne race, vivants noblement, of old families and independent, or in easy circumstances, and that his father was a Notary by profession. Report adds that he was of a family which had been jurists for generations, and that his father was nearly related to Andrea Serveto d’Aninon, some time Professor of Civil Law in the University of Bologna, subsequently member of the Cortes of Aragon, and one of the Council of the Indies. So much makes it clear that Michael Servetus was of gentle blood, of Christian parentage, and neither of Jewish nor Moorish descent, as has been said on no better ground apparently than that he shows he was acquainted with Hebrew, had read the Koran, and in his writings is not intolerant towards Jews and Mahomedans, like his countrymen.
Neither have we any very precise information as regards Servetus’s earlier years and education. Of somewhat slender build, and so of presumably delicate constitution, though he showed no trace of this in after life, he is said to have been destined by his parents to the service of the Church; in which view, whilst yet a youth, he was placed for nurture in one of the convents of his native town or its neighbourhood. And this we should imagine must almost necessarily be true; for the rudiments of the liberal education Servetus shows himself to have received, could only have been obtained in the early part of the sixteenth century in the quiet of the cloister, and under the fostering care of some monk more learned than the general.
The precocious ability and pious temperament with which we must credit Servetus may have been a further motive for the line of life chalked out for him by his parents. The Church was then, as it still continues to be, the close through which an easy and a pious life can be best secured where there is neither talent nor aspiration; as it is also the highway to worldly wealth and power, where there is ambition and ability to back what passes for piety. By mental and moral endowment Servetus probably appeared to all about him a born churchman, with the crosier, and even the cardinal’s hat, in perspective. But side by side with so much that pointed in this direction, the reasoning, sceptical, and self-sufficing nature of the man that led the opposite way, as it had not yet appeared, so was it unsuspected. Servetus as a youth unquestionably received the education that would have fitted him for the Priesthood; and we think complacently of the solace and relaxation from the monotony of monastic life, which the worthy brother we evoke as his principal teacher found in imparting all he knew, and pointing out the onward way to one both apt and eager to learn. Before leaving the convent, or the convent school, where he doubtless remained for several years, Servetus must have been not only a tolerable Latin scholar, but, it may have been, also grounded in Greek and the rudiments of Hebrew.
At what age Servetus left his convent teachers we are not informed; some time however, we should imagine, before definitive vows are required of the youthful aspirant to the holy office, when aptitude for the prospective vocation is made subject of particular inquiry. Now it may have been that he was discovered to be indifferently qualified by mental constitution to follow further the line of life intended for him—a conclusion to which we are led from all we know of the man in his works. He was pious enough and credulous enough through life; but his religion must be of the kind he thought out for himself, and his beliefs of his own fashioning, not such as could be presented to him ready shaped for acceptance. The very air of Europe at the beginning of the sixteenth century was alive with mutterings of the storm that had long been gathering, and found vent at length through the manly voice of Martin Luther; and when we find hints that fears of the Inquisition had had something to do with Servetus’s subsequent movements, we are disposed to imagine that the call to free thought which had sprung up on the revival of letters and found out the northern Monk in his cell, had also reached the Friar of the south, and from him flowed over upon the receptive mind of his youthful scholar.
Be this as it may, when twelve or fourteen years of age, Servetus appears to have entered as a student at the University of Saragossa, then the most celebrated in Spain; and if he had Peter Martyr de Angleria among the number of his teachers, as we are assured he had,[2] he was in the hands of one of the most accomplished as well as liberal-minded men of his age. Angleria was in fact still more distinguished as a scholar, diplomatist, teacher and writer, than as a soldier. Having come to Spain in the suite of one of the Italian embassies to Ferdinand and Isabella, he joined the army of the Catholic king and queen as a volunteer, and having distinguished himself on more than one occasion in the field, he was presented to the sovereigns on the conclusion of hostilities, entered the service of Isabella, in especial, and having taken orders—an indispensable condition to acknowledgment as a teacher—he was engaged by the queen as tutor and general supervisor of the education of the host of young noblemen and gentlemen who thronged the Court. The influence exerted by such a man in such a situation cannot be doubted; and it has been surmised that more than one of the distinguished personages who appeared in Spain, in the early part of the sixteenth century, owed not a little of all that made them notable in after life to their teacher. Angleria was in fact a man in advance of his age, morally, and, we must believe, religiously also—although Spain was not always the devoted slave of Rome we have been accustomed to think her in these our days. He had seen enough in his campaigning and its consequences to disgust him with conversions to Christianity at the point of the sword, and the wholesale deportation from their native country of a great civilised community because of their adhesion to the religion of their fathers. An Italian by birth, it was no part of Angleria’s religion to hate Jews and Saracens with such a hatred as made baptizing, banishing, torturing and putting them to death the virtue it appeared in the eyes of the Spaniards.
At Saragossa Servetus may have remained four or five years, working hard at all that qualified him to appear as he meets us in after life—perfecting himself in classics, and introduced not only to the Ethics of Aristotle and the scholastic philosophy, but also to the more positive domains of human knowledge—the mathematics, astronomy and geography—geography more especially, brought into vogue as it was by the great discoveries of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and the hardy navigators and travellers who came after them, then made accessible to the general reader by the works of Angleria, Grynæus and others.
Having broken definitively with the idea of the Church as a calling, Servetus must now have made up his mind to follow what might fairly be spoken of as the hereditary vocation of his family—Law; and the School of Toulouse being at this time the most celebrated in Europe, to Toulouse he was sent as a student of Law by his father. Here he seems to have remained for two or three years—short while enough in which to fathom the intricacies of civil and canon law, to say nothing of other studies that must have continued to engage some share of his attention; but that the time given to the study of Law at Toulouse was not misspent, is proclaimed by the occasional scraps of legal lore we notice interspersed in his writings. In the covenant between God and Abraham, to cite one among many instances, he observes that we have the first case on record of one of the four forms of unindentured contract, still spoken of as the form Facio ut facias. Elsewhere also, and at other times, on his trial at Geneva in particular, he is credited by his prosecutor with an adequate knowledge of the Pandects, although he says himself that he had never done more than read Justinian in the perfunctory manner usual with young men at college. On the occasion referred to, nevertheless, we find him quoting the decisions of jurisconsults in support of his conclusions.
But Law, we believe, was never the subject that engrossed the thoughts of Servetus. The natural bent of his mind, and the teaching he had received during his earlier years, led him to Theology; and it was at Toulouse, as he tells us himself, that he first made acquaintance with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is not difficult to imagine the effect which the perusal of these writings must have produced on the ardent religious temperament of Servetus. In his earliest work he speaks of the Bible as a book come down from heaven, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science—language, however, that is to be seen as hyperbole to a great extent; for he was already imbued with scholastic philosophy, and, we must presume, with patristic theology also, before he had read a word of the Bible; and in his published works we find him at various times subordinating the teaching of the Scriptures to the conclusions of his reason. Toulouse, indeed, in the early part of the sixteenth century, was an unlikely school for religious study in any but the most rigidly orthodox fashion; and how far Michael Servetus swerved from this—to his sorrow—need not now be more particularly noticed. It was even the boast of the Toulousans for long, that their city had not been infected with what was spoken of as the poison of Lutheranism. So strict a watch had been kept over them by their shepherds, the priests, that, whilst in neighbouring and other more distant cities of France the Reformation had many adherents, it had none—openly, at all events—in Toulouse. It were needless to insist that training of a special kind, in addition to originality and independence of mind, was required to lead to views and conclusions such as those attained to by Servetus.[3]
He had read the Bible, however, at Toulouse; and there, too, if it were not at an earlier period, he must have met with some of the writings of Luther, of which several had been translated into Spanish soon after their publication.[4] But there is another book which enjoyed an extensive reputation through the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and seems to supply the kind of aliment precisely of which a mind constituted like that of Servetus must have felt the want. This is the ‘Theologia Rationalis sive Liber de Creaturis’ of Raymund de Sabunde, in which the Creator is reached by a gradual ascent from lower to higher grades of created things.
The ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde is indeed a most noteworthy book; full of true piety, resting on the wider and surer grounds of nature at large in harmony with human intelligence, than the dogmatic theologian can show in the written text and unwritten traditions on which he relies for his conclusions. Containing no word that is not thoroughly orthodox, doctrine, nevertheless, is not that which it is the grand object of the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde to propound. Neither is authority paraded, as it would have been had the book been written by a professed theologian, instead of a pious naturalist; for Sabunde was a physician, one of the guild whose destiny it is to lead the van of progress. We cannot believe that the work, though often reprinted, was ever heartily approved by the heads of the Church of Rome. Its title went far to condemn it. The Roman Catholic Church requires faith, submissiveness, subserviency, not reason, of its sons; and we are not, therefore, surprised to find that though the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde, as a whole, long escaped being placed on the index of prohibited books, the prologue with which we find one of the early editions, if it be not the first (Argentorati, 1496), introduced, was soon ordered to be expunged; nor, indeed, as culture extended and the Reformation spread, with ever-increasing alarm to the dominant Church, that the book itself was at length pointedly forbidden to be read by the faithful. It was put upon the ‘Index’ by the Congregation of the Council of Trent in 1595, the author ‘holding too much by Nature,’ say the reverend councillors, ‘to give us a knowledge of God and his providential dealing with the world, and making too little reference to the Fathers and the authority of Holy Writ.’
The Prologue of Sabunde is in truth a very remarkable piece of writing, the age considered in which it flowed from the pen. Beginning in the accredited orthodox fashion: ‘Ad laudem et gloriam altissimæ et gloriosissimæ Trinitatis,’ &c., the author proceeds to say that his purpose is ‘to expose the errors, as well of the ancient philosophers as of pagan and infidel writers, by the science he has to propound; to set forth the catholic faith in its infallible truthfulness, and to show every sect opposed thereunto in its necessary falsity and erroneousness. Two books,’ he continues, ‘are given to us by God for our guidance: one, the universal book of created things, or the book of Nature; the other, the book of the sacred Scriptures. The first was given to man from the beginning, when the world was made; the second is to supplement and solve the difficulties met with in the first. The book of the Creatures lies open to all; but the book of the Scriptures can only be read aright by the clergy. The book of Nature cannot be falsified, neither can it be readily interpreted amiss, even by heretics; but the book of the Scriptures they can misconstrue and falsify at their pleasure.’ The author’s design, therefore, is to write a book which gentle and simple alike may read and understand without a master; and he ends his prologue with a compliment and submission to Holy Mother Church, which her hierarchs, however, have not accepted either gratefully or graciously; for they did not of old, any more than they do now, want books that would enable readers to go their own way without the guiding hand of a master. Shall we wonder, therefore, that this notable prologue was looked on at an early date as highly objectionable, and is not to be found in any of the later editions of the book?[5]
Michel de Montaigne has given an interesting account of this ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde. His father thought so highly of it that he set his son, the immortal Essayist, to translate it into French: a task which it were needless to say he performed in a very admirable manner, though the sire did not live to see the work in type and in the hands of the public he was anxious to reach through its means. The book, says Montaigne, is composed by a Spaniard, in indifferent Latin—basti d’un Espagnol, baraguiné des terminaisons Latines—but well adapted to meet a want of the day. The novelties of Luther coming into vogue and shaking old beliefs, Sabunde, as he thinks, ‘gives very good advice against a disease that ever tends towards execrable atheism.’ If Sabunde does give tres bon advis, his ‘Book of the Creatures’ is nevertheless the text from which the most sceptical perhaps of the whole series of the ‘Essays’ is written; and if the ‘Theologia Rationalis’ fell into the hands of the youthful Michael Servetus, as we believe it must almost necessarily have done, we have no difficulty in imagining that it influenced him in a still greater degree, and not much otherwise than it did young Michel de Montaigne. A rational exposition of God’s revelation of himself in nature, we apprehend, must have been a craving in the soul of the serious Spaniard still more than in that of the lively Gascon.[6]
But there is another writer whose influence on his age and the progress of free thought it is impossible to estimate too highly, and from whose teaching Servetus on his death-walk owned that he had had something. This is Erasmus. What Servetus had he does not say. Whatever it may have been, it was unaccompanied by the caution and cold discretion that distinguished the great scholar of Rotterdam. In the Scholia which Erasmus added to his Greek New Testament, however, we fancy we see heralds of the far bolder and more original exegetical annotations with which Servetus, under his assumed name of Villanovanus, accompanied his reprint of the Pagnini Bible, which we shall have to speak of by and by.
In addition to all he learned from his convent teachers, from the professors of Saragossa and Toulouse, from Sabunde, Luther, Erasmus, and others on the subject of theology, Servetus must further have been well read in general history and the works of travellers in foreign lands, as we shall find when we come to study his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, and refer particularly to his biblical criticisms, in days when criticism of the kind he brought to bear on the text of the Scriptures was unknown. It was only in the early part of the sixteenth century that the Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament began to be appealed to by the learned, and made the subject of critical study in a way never thought of before. Long limited to the letter, the study was widened in its scope by Servetus, and, embracing general history, made to include a new and highly important element in its bearing on the Religious Idea. If Servetus of himself arrived at the interpretation he gives of the Psalms and Prophetical writings of Israel, he must indeed have been possessed of no ordinary share of natural sagacity informed by study, and of moral courage in addition; for it runs counter to all that had been assumed from the date of the New Testament writings almost to the present day. The free use he makes of his historical reading in its application to David, Cyrus, and Hezekiah, may have been that which led some of his biographers to imagine that he was of Jewish descent, and to say that he had visited Africa, and had had Mahomedan as well as Jewish teachers, from whom he imbibed his notions, hostile to the common orthodox interpretation of the Prophets, and the conception of a Triune God.
It were absurd to suppose that Servetus’s early convent education and subsequent studies at Saragossa and Toulouse had made him all he shows himself to be in his works. He continued a student through the whole of his life, and it is indeed among the privileges of the physician that his education never ends; but it was certainly at an early period of his career that he became possessed of the theological ideas which he went on elaborating, even to the day when his ‘Restoration of Christianity’ was in type and ready for the publication it did not obtain. It is therefore of moment with us to seize and follow up every incident in his life that induced or strengthened the bent of his mind towards theological speculation; and the event which now befel, we must presume, had no slight influence in this direction.
CHAPTER II.
SERVICE WITH FRIAR JUAN QUINTANA, CONFESSOR OF THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.
School and college days come naturally to an end, or are cut short by one intervening incident or another; and the studies of Michael Servetus at Toulouse were interrupted by an invitation to enter his service from brother Juan Quintana, a Franciscan friar, confessor to the Emperor Charles V., about to attend on his Sovereign to his coronation in the imperial city of Bologna, and, of still greater significance, to the Diet of Augsburg, which followed it closely. In what capacity Servetus joined Quintana we are not informed; but if father confessors ever engaged private secretaries, we can hardly doubt that it must have been in the intimate relationship suggested, for which the accomplishments of the younger man so obviously qualified him. The invitation from Quintana is interesting on many accounts, and was certainly an important element in the mental development of Servetus. Though he may have quitted Spain hurriedly, perhaps secretly—in fear of the Inquisition, as said—he could have left nothing but a good name for conduct and accomplishment behind him, otherwise he would never have been recommended as a fit and proper person to act as secretary to the confessor of the great Emperor. Not forgotten by his old masters of Saragossa, the clever student was thought of by them when Quintana made known his want of a secretary, and must have been recommended to him as in every way qualified to fill a situation of the kind.
Michael Servetus, as we apprehend him, was one of those sensitive natures which, like the stainless plate of the photographer, retains at once and reflects every object presented to it; his service with Quintana, consequently, was one of the incidents that influenced the whole of his after life. Up to the time of his engagement with the confessor he had been but one among hundreds of other students, known to his teachers as a young man of superior abilities, it may be, but not an object of more particular attention to any one of them. In the intimate relationship implied between the elderly principal and the youthful underling matters were entirely changed; and recent inquiries[7] lead to the conclusion that the hood of the barefooted friar Juan Quintana covered the head of a man of superior powers, cherishing larger, more liberal and more tolerant views than were current in his age, more especially among the class to which he belonged.
Quintana appears to have attracted the notice of the Emperor so far back as the date of the Diet of Worms, during the sittings of which he had distinguished himself as a preacher and become generally known as a theologian and man of learning. He had at the same time, however, and in like measure, fallen out of favour with his party, opposed at every point to the reform movement, in consequence of the moderation of his views. Matters at Worms had gone in no wise to the satisfaction of the Emperor, owing in no inconsiderable degree, as he must have believed, to the intolerance and mismanagement of his clerical advisers. To give the approaching Diet of Augsburg, of which Charles was thinking far more seriously than of the pageant of Bologna when he made Quintana his confessor, a chance of proving the bond of union he desired between the two great religious parties which now divided his empire, he saw that he must rid himself of the narrow-minded and utterly irreconcilable Dominican Loaysa, whom he had had at Worms as his spiritual director. From Loaysa he knew he had no prospect of receiving those counsels of concession and compromise which, as a politician, he saw were indispensable and to which he was himself at the moment by no means disinclined. He must have another confessor of more liberal views, not utterly opposed to the reformation of the Church in all its aspects and to the whole body of the Reformers with whom, as heretics, it was condescension on the part of a Roman Catholic dignitary to communicate, and contamination, if it were not sin, to sympathise. The old director had therefore to be got rid of, for a time at least; but he must suffer no slight, be subjected to no show of mistrust, to no seeming loss of confidence; he must not even be superseded in his office, but only removed to a distance and so made innocuous. Charles therefore discovered that a representative, who must be presumed to be familiar with the most secret aspirations of his soul, would be required at Rome as the medium of communication between himself and his holiness the Pope, in connection with the important business in prospect at Augsburg. Loaysa, accordingly—greatly to his disgust beyond question—was dispatched with all the honours to Rome, whilst Juan Quintana, summoned from the quiet of the cloister to the bustle of the Court, found himself unexpectedly with a royal and imperial penitent at his ear in the confessional, and an upper seat in the council chamber pending the discussion of affairs of state.
How should we imagine that an invitation to take service with a man possessed of qualities that brought him into such relationships could have been otherwise than instantly embraced by the youthful student of Toulouse; or how doubt that intimate contact with so great a nature as Quintana’s could fail to impress him deeply? Attached forthwith to the service of the confessor and in the suite of the Emperor, not the least observant among all who accompanied him of the pomp and pageantry displayed at the coronation at Bologna, the open-eyed secretary was witness of much besides that sank into his mind, gave matter for future thought, and found free but needlessly offensive expression in his writings. Here, at Bologna, it was in fact, and not at Rome as has been said, that Servetus saw the Pope ‘borne aloft above the heads of the people, the multitude kneeling in the dust, adoring him, and they among them who could but kiss his slipper accounting themselves blessed.’ Nor was it the ignorant multitude alone that showed such abject servility. He saw in addition ‘the most powerful prince of his age, at the head of twenty thousand veteran soldiers, kneeling and kissing the feet of the Pope;’[8] an exhibition which appears to have been thought of as simply degrading instead of edifying by the independent-minded secretary.
So great an event as the coronation of the Emperor was too favourable an occasion to be neglected for a stroke of business by the financiers of the Romish Church: indulgences were in the market in plenty, and at prices to suit all purchasers, immunity from the pains of purgatory being to be obtained for terms in the ratio of the money paid. How shall we imagine that so glaring an abuse could fail to touch Servetus, in the state of mind to which he must already have attained, in the same way as the proceedings of Tetzel and his coadjutors touched the common sense and conscience of Luther? It was doubtless with all he now observed before him that we, short while after, find him speaking in such virulent terms of the Papacy and exclaiming: ‘O bestia bestiarum, meretrix sceleratissima’—‘O beast most beastly, most wicked of harlots!’[9] Some of Luther’s epithets, we might conclude, had found their way into the vocabulary of Servetus; and it may be that the violence of Luther’s invective, unchallenged by the rest of the Reformers, led him to fancy that he too might indulge without impropriety in language of an unseemly kind.
When we think of the times in which Servetus lived, his early education and subsequent surroundings, the violent hatred he seems already to have conceived against the Papacy is not a little extraordinary. We might be tempted to conclude that the free thought of Europe, of which the Reformation was the outcome and expression, had found even a more genial soil in the mind of this Spanish youth than in that of Luther himself, or any of his accredited followers. They went little way in freeing the religion of Jesus of Nazareth from the accretions which metaphysical subtlety, superstition, and ignorance of the laws of nature and the principles of things had gathered around it in the course of ages. Their business, as they apprehended it, was to reform the Church rather than the religion of which it was presumed to be the exponent; the task that Servetus set himself in the end was to reform religion, with little thought of a Church in any sense in which an institution of the kind was conceived in his day, whether by Papist or Protestant.
From reading the Bible at Toulouse and contrasting the humble life and simple theistic morality of the Prophet of Nazareth with the metaphysical subtleties and dogmatic deductions of the schoolmen, the pomp, the power, the tyranny and the greed of the priests so conspicuously displayed at Bologna, we can readily imagine the impression made on the independent spirit of Servetus—an impression that found more seemly utterance anon than that we have already quoted, and in words like these: ‘For my own part I neither agree nor disagree in every particular with either Catholic or Reformer. Both of them seem to me to have something of truth and something of error in their views; and whilst each sees the other’s shortcomings, neither sees his own. God in his goodness give us all to understand our errors and incline us to put them away. It would be easy enough, indeed, to judge dispassionately of everything, were we but suffered without molestation by the Churches freely to speak our minds; the older exponents of doctrine, in obedience to the recommendation of St. Paul, giving place to younger men, and these in their turn making way for teachers of the day who had aught to impart that had been revealed to them. But our doctors now contend for nothing but power. The Lord confound all tyrants of the Church! Amen.’—The voice of this nineteenth century verging on its close, from the mouth of a man little more than of age, living in the first half of the sixteenth![10]
The business of the coronation at Bologna concluded, the Emperor betook himself to Germany in view of the great Diet of Augsburg, formally inaugurated in the summer of 1530, accompanied of course by his confessor, as the confessor was attended by his youthful secretary. And here it must have been that Servetus saw and may perchance have spoken with Melanchthon and others of the leading Reformers, among the number of whom, however, the greatest of them all did not appear. Luther’s friends believed that the danger he must run by showing himself at Augsburg was too great to be incurred. The brave man would himself have faced the peril, but his princely protectors positively forbade the exposure. They feared that at Augsburg the Emperor might be tempted to violate the ‘safe conduct’ he had been reproached by his Papal advisers with having so honourably observed at Worms; for there were still some among the Roman Catholics, high in place, so ill-informed, so blind to events, as to believe that were the head of the man who had inaugurated the movement which compromised their power but off his shoulders, the Reformation would collapse and die! Luther was therefore permitted by his friends to approach the scene of action on this occasion no nearer than Coburg.
Neither at Augsburg any more than at Worms did matters proceed so entirely to the satisfaction of the Emperor as he wished, and may have anticipated. The Protestant princes, with little cohesion among themselves, showed, nevertheless, that severally they were more resolute than ever in their requirements touching religion, less obsequious too to the advances of their suzerain than he found agreeable. They felt themselves in fact, and in so far, masters of the situation, and had mostly quitted Augsburg before the sittings of the Diet came to a close, content to leave Melanchthon and his colleagues to give final shape to the business for which the Diet had been mainly convoked, and in the great Religious Charter of the Age—the Confession of Augsburg—to establish Protestantism as an integral and recognised element, not only in the religious, but in the political system of Europe.
During his attendance on his chief at Augsburg, Servetus, though he saw and may have spoken with more than one of the distinguished Reformers, could have been an object of particular attention to none of them: his youth and subordinate position precluded the possibility of this. That he may have been disappointed at not seeing the original of the great movement which had brought together the august assembly he looked on around him, we may well believe, but we find no evidence in contemporary documents that would lead us to think he had ever come into contact with Luther, as has been said.[11]
CHAPTER III.
THE SERVICE WITH QUINTANA COMES TO AN END.
It is greatly to be regretted that we have nothing from Servetus on the other impressions he received, during the term of his service with Quintana, beside those connected with the pomp and power of the Papacy. We do not even know precisely how long he continued with the confessor of the Emperor, nor where, nor at what moment he left him. Neither have we a word of his whereabouts and mode of life, after vacating his office, until we meet him seeking an interview with Jehan Hausschein, the individual, with his name turned into Greek, so familiar to the world as Œcolampadius. From Servetus himself we have it that he quitted the service of Quintana on his death, which, he says, occurred in Germany. But the truth of this statement has been called in question on very sufficient grounds, Quintana having been seen alive in the flesh, and still in attendance on the Emperor, years after dates at which we know positively that Servetus had been in Basle and Strasburg, communicating with Œcolampadius, Bucer, and others of the Reformers. More than this, he had come before the world as author of the book entitled ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ a copy of which having been found by Joannes Cochlæus, an ecclesiastic in the suite of the Emperor, in a bookseller’s shop at Ratisbon, was by him shown to Quintana, who, we are informed, expressed extreme disgust that a countryman of his own and personally known to him—quem de facie se nôsse dicebat—should have fallen so far into the slough of heresy as to write on the mystery of the Trinity in the style of Michael Servetus, alias Revés.[12] Nor indeed is this the last we hear of Quintana. After the settlement of affairs at Ratisbon and Nürnberg, he attended the Emperor to Italy, and thence to his native Spain, where we find him installed as Prior of the Church of Monte Aragon and a member of the Cortes of the kingdom. Quintana appears in fact to have lived for yet two years, actively engaged in his duties, having only been gathered to his fathers towards the end of the year 1534.[13]
Servetus did not therefore leave the service of Quintana after, or in consequence of, the death of the confessor. We find it difficult indeed to think of one with the decidedly unorthodox opinions to which Servetus had attained at an early period of his life, continuing on terms of intimacy with a man of Quintana’s capacity, without showing something of the leaven of unbelief that must have been already fermenting in his mind. There is, it is true, commonly enough, so much more of policy than of piety among hierarchs of the Church of Rome, and indeed of any church largely possessed of wealth and culture, that their real opinions and beliefs have often been made subject of debate. But Quintana was a monk, although a liberal one, and he was Charles V.’s confessor. Of the Emperor’s orthodoxy, bigotry, and hatred of heresy, however, there can be no question; so that, though policy moved him for a time to entertain as his spiritual adviser a man more tolerant than the general, the occasion for this ceasing, Charles was not likely to find himself altogether at his ease with one at his elbow much more liberally disposed than himself. Quintana consequently on the return to Spain, being absolved of his office of confessor, but handsomely provided for in the Church, Charles recalled Loaysa, his former director in matters of faith, from Rome, and lapsed into the groove of intolerance from which considerations of state had for a moment withdrawn him.
From the false account Servetus gives of the cause of his quitting Quintana, we therefore think it probable that soon after the settlement of matters at Augsburg in the early autumn of 1530, he had incautiously betrayed the state of his mind on some point of the religious question, and been dismissed from his service by the confessor. Service of any sort, indeed, from the estimate we are led to form of the mental constitution of Michael Servetus, could only have been a bondage never patiently to be endured, but to be shaken off at the earliest possible opportunity. His was not a nature that could brook a master; and we have the assurance of Œcolampadius that Michael Servetus was in Basle and making himself obnoxious by his theological fancies previous to the month of October 1530. The coronation at Bologna having taken place in the autumn of 1529, and the Diet of Augsburg assembled at midsummer 1530, Servetus could not, thus, have been in the following of Quintana for more than a year, or eighteen months—no long term if reckoned by the lapse of time, but certainly covering a vast area in the sphere of his mental development. He may have had little leisure for the study of books, but he had his eyes open to the doings of men; and his inner senses were awakened to truths, his reason to conclusions, that influenced him through the rest of his life, and possibly had no insignificant part in bringing him to his untimely end.
CHAPTER IV.
INTERCOURSE WITH THE SWISS REFORMERS.
It would appear that Œcolampadius, Bucer, Bullinger, Zwingli and others, their friends, had had a sort of ‘clerical meeting’ for talking over the theological questions of the day at Basle in the autumn of 1530. On this occasion Œcolampadius informed his friends that he had been troubled of late by a hot-headed Spaniard, Servetus by name, overflowing with Arian heresies and other objectionable opinions, maintaining particularly that Christ was not really and truly the Eternal Son of God; but if not, then was he not, and could not be, the Saviour—were Christus nit rächter, warer, ewiger Gott, so were er doch und könte nit seyn unser Heiland. Waxing warm in his tale, and fearing that such poison, as he conceived it, would not be poured into his ears alone, but would reach those of others, he was minded that measures should be taken against such a contingency. To this Zwingli, addressing him as brother Œcolampady, replied, that ‘there did seem good ground for them to be on their guard; for the false and wicked doctrine of the troublesome Spaniard goes far to do away with the whole of our Christian religion.’ ‘God preserve us,’ said he, ‘from the coming in among us of any such wickedness. Do what you can, then, to quit the man of his errors, and with good and wholesome argument win him to the truth.’ ‘That have I already done,’ said Œcolampady; ‘but so haughty, daring and contentious is he, that all I say goes for nothing against him.’ ‘This is indeed a thing insufferable in the Church of God,’ said Zwingli—Ein unleydenliche Sach in der Kyrchen Gottes. Therefore do everything possible that such dreadful blasphemy get no further wind to the detriment of Christianity.’[14]
Besides the personal communication with Œcolampadius of which we have this interesting notice, Servetus must have written him several letters—unfortunately lost to us—about the same time, for we have two from the Reformer to the Spaniard, which have happily been preserved. In one of these (probably the second that was written), Servetus having, as it seems, complained that he had been somewhat sharply handled by his correspondent, Œcolampadius replies that he, for his part, thinks that he himself has the greater reason to complain. ‘You obtrude yourself on me,’ he says, ‘as if I had nothing else ado than to answer you; asking me questions about all the foolish things the Sorbonne has said of the Trinity, and even taking it amiss that I do not criticise and in your way oppose myself to those distinguished theologians, Athanasius and Nazianzenus. You contend that the Church has been displaced from its true foundation of faith in Christ, and feign that we speak of his filiation in a sense which detracts from the honour that is due to him as the Son of God. But it is you who speak blasphemously; for I now understand the diabolical subterfuges you use. Forbearing enough in other respects, I own that I am not possessed of that extreme amount of patience which would keep me silent when I see Christ dishonoured.’ He then goes on to criticise and rebut Servetus’s theological views—his denial of Two natures in the One person of Christ, and his opinion that in the prophetical writings of the Old Testament it is always a prospective or coming Son of God that is indicated. ‘You,’ continues Œcolampadius, ‘do not admit that it was the Son of God who was to come as man; but that it was the man who came that was the Son of God; language which leads to the conclusion that the Son of God existed not eternally before the incarnation.’
To satisfy the Reformer, or seeking to get upon a better footing with him, Servetus appears now to have composed and sent him a Confession of Faith, which has come down to us. On the face of this there was such a semblance of orthodoxy that Œcolampadius found nothing at first to object to in its statements; but having conversed with the writer and heard his explanations, he had come to see it as utterly fallacious, misleading, and inadmissible. He concludes by exhorting his correspondent to ‘confess the Son to be consubstantial and coeternal with the Father, in which case,’ he says, ‘we shall be able to acknowledge you for a Christian.’[15]
CHAPTER V.
THE REFORMERS OF STRASBURG—PUBLICATION OF THE WORK ON TRINITARIAN ERROR.
The letter of Œcolampadius, as we have it, is without date, but must have been written from Basle at the close of 1530, or the beginning of 1531, and so before the book on Trinitarian Error had been published, as we find no mention made of the work. By this time, however, Servetus must have had the treatise ready for press, for it was now that he put it into the hands of Conrad Kœnig or Rous, a publisher, having establishments both at Basle and Strasburg. Kœnig was not a printer himself; but accepting the work for publication he sent it to Jo. Secerius, of Hagenau, in Alsace, a well-known typographer of the day, to be put into type. To Hagenau accordingly went the MS., followed by the author to superintend the printing; intending from thence to proceed to Strasburg, where he was anxious to have interviews with the leading Reformers of that city, Martin Bucer and W. F. Capito, and propound to them, as he had done to the Switzers, the new views of Christian doctrine at which he had arrived.
From what we know already we might conclude that he found little more encouragement from the ministers of Strasburg than he had had from those of Basle. Servetus himself, however, appears to have thought otherwise, and left them with the impression that neither of the Strasburgers was so wholly opposed to his views as Œcolampadius in particular had shown himself at Basle. We find him, by and by, in fact, speaking as if he even believed that in the first instance they were alike disposed to abet rather than condemn his conclusions. And this, from what came out subsequently, seems really to have been the case, in so far, at least, as Capito stands concerned. Capito was, in fact, the most advanced and truly tolerant of all the early Reformers, and if we may rely on the report we have of his opinions from the author of the ‘Antitrinitarian Library,’[16] he was really not behind Servetus in his rejection of the orthodox tripartite Deity. A kindly sympathy with a young enthusiast, full of fancies on topics really beyond the reach of demonstration, may have induced Bucer as well as his colleague, Capito, to feel a certain interest in the subject of our study, and so led them both to treat him otherwise than as the irreverent dreamer he had appeared to Œcolampadius; to see him, in a word, as he was in truth—a well-read and piously disposed, albeit in their opinion a more or less mistaken, scholar.
Servetus undoubtedly possessed the character of the enthusiast in perfection, and by natural constitution was not only indisposed, but to a certain extent incapable of seeing a question in any light save that in which he set it himself. Bucer, although he became hostile to Servetus in the end, must in fact have been not a little taken with him on their earlier intercourse, when in a letter to a friend he speaks of him as ‘his dear son’—‘filius meus dilectus.’ When not curtly met as the rash innovator and heretic, Servetus was neither the proud nor the impracticable man he appeared to Œcolampadius and Calvin. During his visit to Strasburg, when he was doubtless busy with his ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’—revising, polishing, and seeing it through the press—in a notable modification of the terms in which one of the cardinal points of his doctrine is spoken of in an earlier and in a later passage of the work, Bucer’s kindly counsel, it is presumed, may be detected. Whilst in Book IV. we find these words, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; the Word was the shadow only, Christ was the substance,’ in Book VII. he says, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; but to Christ himself there is ascribed a kind of eternity of engenderment. The things that were under the Law were shadows of the body of Christ.’[17]
Whatever the two distinguished Reformers of Strasburg may have said, however—and we can hardly doubt of their having tried to win him to the views that were commonly entertained—he was not stayed for a moment in his purpose of getting into print. Nay—and we know not why the right should be refused him—he seems to have thought himself at as full liberty as the leaders of the great movement then afoot to give his own interpretation of the kind of reform which not the Church only, but its doctrine, required. For such an undertaking he was as well qualified by culture as any of the Reformers—better qualified, in fact, than many among them, as in genius we believe he was surpassed, and in liberality and tolerance approached by none. Servetus, in truth, had started in the reforming race unweighted, and so, and in so far with a better chance of reaching the goal of simple truth than either Luther or Calvin; for though he had received the education of the cloister, he was neither professed monk nor priest; and, without detriment to the piety of his spirit, or his belief in what were held by the world as the oracles of God, he had freed himself from the fetters of necessary assent to the interpretations put upon these, formulated into dogmas, by the Church in which he had been born and bred. Servetus seems never to have had any misgivings about his title to show himself among the number of the Reformers. He was in Germany, the land of free thought, as he imagined; among men who had thought freely, and whom he had been used to hear spoken of by his clerical surroundings, whilst in the suite of Quintana, as heretics and blasphemers. These names he did not fear in such respectable company as he found the Reformers of Switzerland and Germany to be; and though he did not agree with them on some topics, he could bear with them as well in that wherein he differed from them as in that wherein they differed among themselves, and saw no reason why they should not in like manner bear with him. He thought of nothing, therefore, but prospective fame for himself in the publication he contemplated. The names of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the rest, appeared on the title-pages of their works: why, then, should his name be withheld from the world? On the title-page of the ‘Seven Books on Mistaken Conceptions of the Trinity’ accordingly, which now came forth from the press, we find not only his family name, Servetus, but the alias, Revés, from his mother’s side of the house, and the name of the country that called him son:—
‘De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem.
Per Michaelem Serveto, alias Revés,
Ab Aragonia, Hispanum,
1531.’
The publisher and printer, having an eye to business, not notoriety, and suspicious in all probability of the reception the article in the production of which they were aiding and abetting, might receive, were more cautious than the author; for the name neither of printer, publisher, nor place of publication, appears on the title-page. In the month of July, 1531, however, the book was to be bought at once in the cities of Strasburg, Frankfort, and Basle: but no one knew for more than twenty years where it had been printed, nor who besides the author—who had also vanished out of sight—had been accessory to its publication. The truth only came out in the course of the author’s trial at Geneva in the year 1553. Basle had the credit for a time of having hatched the cockatrice; and that the charge was taken seriously to heart appears from a letter of Œcolampadius to Bucer which has been preserved.
The Swiss churches, as is known, were not all at one with Luther and his followers upon some of the transcendental topics of their common faith; and Servetus in his book having attacked the Doctrine of Justification by Faith—the leading feature in Luther’s theology, in terms neither complimentary nor respectful, the Switzers were anxious to have the great head of the Reform movement informed that they had nothing in common with the Serveto, alias Revés, of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ and that it had not fallen from any of the presses of their country. In his letter to Bucer dated from Basle, August 5, 1531, Œcolampadius informs him that ‘several of their friends had seen Servetus’s book and were beyond measure offended with it.’ ‘I wish you would write to Luther,’ he continues, ‘and tell him it was printed elsewhere than at Basle, and without any privity of ours. It is surely a piece of consummate impudence in the writer to say that the Lutherans are ignorant of what Justification really means. Passing many things by, I fancy he must belong to the sect of the Photinians, or to some other I know not what. Unless he be put down by the doctors of our church, it will be the worse for us. I pray you of all others to keep watch; and if you find no better or earlier opportunity, be particular in your report to the Emperor in excusing us and our churches from the breaking in among us of this wild beast. He indeed abuses everything in his way of viewing it; and to such lengths does he go that he disputes the coeternity and consubstantiality of the Father and the Son—he would even have the man Christ to be the Son of God in the usual natural way.’[18]
Bucer having perused the ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’ would seem to have been excessively disturbed or scandalised by its contents. Known as a man of a perfectly humane disposition in a general way, he is now violent even to slaying. Denouncing its author from the pulpit, he is said to have declared that the writer of such a book deserved to be disembowelled and torn in pieces! Yet was not Martin Bützer always of this savage way of thinking. In a Preface and Postscript to an early work—a translation by a friend, of Augustin’s Treatise ‘on the Duty of the Ruler in matters of Religion,’[19] he is as mercifully disposed towards the erring as could be desired. They are to be prayed for, instructed, and it may be punished, but it is to be mildly; they are never to be put to death. He refers to his ‘Dialogues’ in which the subject is treated at length.
Luther, too, must have read the work, and it is not a little interesting to us to be made aware from what he says himself that he, like others of the Reformers, as well as Michael Servetus, had been troubled with doubts about the conformity of the orthodox Trinitarian dogma with the dictates of simple reason. In the Table-Talk—Tisch-Reden—of 1532, he refers to what he characterises as ‘a fearfully wicked book—ein greulich bös Buch—’ which had lately come out against the doctrine of the holy Trinity. ‘Visionaries like the writer,’ says Doctor Martin, ‘do not seem to fancy that other folks as well as they may have had temptations on this subject. But the sting did not hold; I set the word of God and the Holy Ghost against my thoughts and got free.’ Luther as usual imagined that the doubts he felt were inspired by the Devil, instead of by God, through the reason given him for his guidance.[20]
But of all his contemporaries Melanchthon appears to have been more taken with the work on Trinitarian Error than any other of the leading Reformers; and he is much more outspoken in expressing his opinion of the incomprehensible and really unscriptural nature of the dogma which it is the gist of Servetus’s book to impugn. To one of his friends he begins his letter by telling him ‘that he has been reading Servetus a great deal—Servetum multum lego—though I am well aware of the fanatical nature of the man. In his derisive treatment of Justification he sees nothing but the quality of Augustin; and he plainly raves when, misinterpreting the text of the Old and New Testament, he denies to the Prophets the Holy Spirit. I also think he does injustice both to Tertullian and Irenæus, when, treating of the Word, he makes them question its being an hypostasis. But I have little doubt that great controversies will one day arise on this subject, as well as on the distinction of the two natures in Christ.’[21]
To Camerarius, another friend, he writes: ‘You ask me what I think of Servetus? I see him indeed sufficiently sharp and subtle in disputation, but I do not give him credit for much depth. He is possessed, as it seems to me, of confused imaginations, and his thoughts are not well matured on the subjects he discusses. He manifestly talks foolishness when he speaks of Justification. Περὶ τῆς τρίαδος—on the subject of the Trinity—you know, I have always feared that serious difficulties would one day arise. Good God! to what tragedies will not these questions give occasion in times to come: εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις ὁ λὀγος—is the Logos an hypostasis? εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις τὸ πνεῦμα—is the Holy Ghost an hypostasis? For my own part I refer me to those passages of Scripture that bid us call on Christ, which is to ascribe divine honours to him, and find them full of consolation.’[22]
This is surely very candid and beautiful. But the spirit of the Prophet of Nazareth did not always find such a resting place as it did in the heart and mind of Philip Schwarzerde, though he too could forget himself and approve of violence, as we shall see, when certain beliefs which he held sacred and thought it a public duty to profess were assailed. At this time, however, on this occasion, he is in his proper placable frame of mind and continues thus: ‘I find it after all of little use to inquire too curiously into that which properly constitutes the nature of a Person, and into that wherein and whereby persons are distinguished from one another. It is very provoking that in Epiphanius, except a few trifling passages, we have nothing from the days when the same questions were agitated by Paul of Samosata—nothing in fact whence we might know what was thought of Paul’s opinions at the time, and of what mind were they who condemned him. I am even greatly distressed when I think of such negligence on the part of the hierarchs of the age of this Paul, as well as of times more near our own.’ When writing thus Melanchthon plainly sympathised more with Paul of Samosata and his opinions than he would have liked to acknowledge at a later period of his life; for he, too, like so many who become narrow and intolerant in age, was liberal enough when younger, and in the earlier editions of his ‘Loci Theologici’ could speak of the Holy Spirit as nothing more than an ‘Afflatus of Deity.’
The above extracts from confidential letters seem to show that Melanchthon was not himself quite clear as to the sense in which a Trinity of the Godhead was to be understood; a state of mind shared in, unless we much mistake, by more than one among the most influential men of the Swiss Churches, by none more certainly than by Calvin, their great head, himself, as we shall show. Melanchthon indeed in his next letter to the same friend, speaking of Servetus’s assumption that Tertullian did not think the Logos an hypostasis—a distinct substantial reality—proceeds:—‘To me Tertullian seems to think on this subject as we do in public—quod publice sentimus, and not in the way Servetus interprets him. But of these things more hereafter when we meet.’ Melanchthon would not therefore trust in writing, even to an intimate friend, all he thought on the subject of the Trinity; and truly there is matter enough when critically scanned in the first edition of his best-known work—‘The Loci Theologici’ of 1521—that puts him out of the pale of orthodox Trinitarianism.[23]
Neither was Joannes Œcolampadius without something of a fellow feeling for Servetus, although he repudiated his conclusions. Writing to Martin Bucer on July 18, 1531, shortly after the publication of the work on Trinitarian misconception, he informs his friend that he had heard from Capito of Strasburg, who tells him that the book is for sale among them there, and has rejoiced some of the enemies of the Church, as it will also afford matter of gratulation to the Papists of France when they see that writings of the kind are suffered to be published in Germany. ‘Read the book,’ continues the writer, ‘and tell me what you think of it. Were I not busy with my Job, I should be disposed to answer it myself; but I must leave this duty to another with more leisure at command. Our Senate have forbidden the Spaniard’s book to be sold here. They have asked my opinion of its merits, and I have said that as the writer does not acknowledge the coeternity of the Son, I can in no wise approve of it as a whole, although it contains much else that is good—Etiamsi multa alia bona scribat.’[24]
In the days of Philip Melanchthon and Joannes Œcolampadius we therefore see that men had private opinions on subjects to which they were committed by their subscriptions, which differed we know not how widely from their public professions, precisely as among the ancients, and ourselves at the present time: culture would still seem to make an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine a necessity of existence.
Made aware, as we are by these letters of the Reformers, that Servetus’s book was causing a considerable stir both in Switzerland and Germany, it seems, in so far as we have ascertained, to have been entirely neglected by the Roman Catholics of these lands as well as of France. We have searched in vain for any notice of it in French theological writings of the period; neither have we been able to discover, though condemned and ordered to be suppressed by the Emperor Charles V. when brought under his notice by Cochlæus and Quintana at Ratisbon, that it figures at any early date on the Roman Index of prohibited books. There are good reasons for believing, nevertheless, that Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Misconception had a large amount of influence on Italian ground. It had been sent south in numbers; and aware of this Melanchthon took it upon him by-and-by to address the Senate of Venice on the subject, informing them that a highly objectionable work was for sale among them, and suggesting that measures should be taken for its suppression. The Sozzini, uncle and nephew—Lælius and Faustus Socinus—and their followers, the Unitarians, have consequently been seen as the disciples of Servetus, though it may be that they were so only indirectly; for Servetus himself, as we shall find, declares that he does not deny a kind of trinity in the unity of God. But his trinity is modal or formal, not real or personal in the usual sense of the word.
If overlooked by theologians of the Latin races, the work of our author appears to have attracted all the more attention from the men of Teutonic descent who had espoused the cause of the Reformation. In their ranks in the early period of the sixteenth century the intelligence of Europe, in so far as the religious question was concerned, seems to have been concentrated. They took pains to inform themselves generally on all that was going on in the republic of letters, and in so much of it very particularly as bore on the subject they had most at heart. It is among the Swiss and German Reformers consequently that we find any particular notice taken of Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Error. They alone show themselves scandalised by the opinions of its author and his style of expressing them, jealous too, it might seem, at the intrusion of a mere layman into their domain—a phenomenon as yet perfectly unheard of, and startled further by the advances they discovered in the book upon all that they, as inheritors of apostolic traditions in common with their Roman Catholic brethren (from whom in matters of Dogma they differed so little), regarded as the truth. Paul of Tarsus preaching his own independent gospel to the Gentiles, proclaiming the universality of the fatherhood of God, the nothingness of Circumcision, and, in opposition to the whole Levitical code, that all days were alike holy and that it was not what went into the mouth of a man that defiled him, could scarcely have been more ominous to the intolerant Nazarene Church of Jerusalem than was the appearance of this daring innovator upon the religious stage of Germany. His book, everywhere freely sold in the first instance, must have been read by everyone of liberal education, though it became so scarce ere long, denounced and decried as it must have been universally by the ministers, that twenty years afterwards a copy, most pressingly wanted, and eagerly sought after, was nowhere to be found in Switzerland; so effectually had zealotry succeeded in having it committed to the flames!
Strasburg and Basle, however, must have been the emporiums whence the supplies of the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis’ were sent forth; for after its author’s visit to the capital of Elsass and his happy delivery of this the first-born of his genius at Hagenau, we find him again in Basle and making himself obnoxious to Œcolampadius as before. Writing what we must presume to be a second or third letter to the Reformer, and complimenting him on what he is pleased to style his correspondent’s clear apprehension of Luther’s doctrine of Justification, Servetus goes on to make a personal request. ‘Somewhat fearful of writing to you again,’ he says, ‘lest I should molest you still more than I have already done, I yet venture to ask of you not to interfere with my sending the books to France which I have with me here, the book-fair of Lyons drawing near; for you of all men are better entitled than any one else to pronounce an opinion upon things unheard of until now. If you think it better that I should not remain here, I shall certainly take my leave; only, you are not to think that I go as a fugitive. God knows I have been sincere in all I have written, although my crude style perchance displeases you. I did not imagine you would take offence at what I say of the Lutherans; especially when from your own mouth I heard you declare you were of opinion that Luther had treated Charity in too off-hand a style; adding, as you did, that folks were charitable mostly when they had nothing else to think of. Melanchthon, too, as you know, affirms that God has no regard for charity. Such sayings, believe me, are more hurtful to the soul than anything I have ever written. And this all the more as I see that you are not agreed among yourselves on the subject of faith; for with my own ears I have heard you say one thing, which is otherwise declared by doctor Paulus, otherwise by Luther, and yet otherwise by Melanchthon;[25] and of this I admonished you in your own house; but you would not hear me.
‘Your rule for proving the Spirit, I think, deceives you; for, if in your own mind there be any fear, or doubt, or confusion, you cannot judge truly of me; and this the more because, although you know me in error in one thing, you ought not, therefore, to condemn me in others, else there were none who should escape burning a thousand times over. This truth is forced on us on all hands, most especially perhaps by the example of the Apostles, who sometimes erred. And, then, you do not condemn Luther in every particular, although you are well aware that he is mistaken in some things. I have myself entreated you to instruct me, which, however, you have not done. It is surely an infirmity of our human nature that none of us see our own faults, and so commonly look on those who differ from us as impious persons or impostors. I entreat you, for God’s sake, to spare my name and reputation. I say nothing of others who are not interested in the questions between us. You say that I would have no one punished or put to death, though all were thieves alike; but I call the omnipotent God to witness that this is not my opinion; nay, I scout any such conclusion. If I have spoken at any time on the subject (the punishment proper for heresy), it was because I saw it as a most serious matter to put men to death on the ground of mistake in interpreting the Scriptures; for do we not read that even the elect may err? You know full well that I have not treated my subject in so indifferent or indiscreet a manner as to deserve entire rejection at your hands. You make little yourself of speaking of the Holy Spirit as an angel, but think it a great crime in me when I say that the Son of God was a man.
‘Farewell.
‘Michael Serveto.’[26]
This letter, so characteristic of the writer, is full of interest even at the present hour. Servetus would have Œcolampadius instruct him; but the invariable complaint of all with whom he came in contact was that he could never be made to receive instruction; in other words, secure in his own conclusions, he thought his would-be instructors mistaken in theirs. And this, indeed, for good or ill, is characteristic of all who impress their age, and show themselves leaders in art, in science, in policy, or religion. Genius measures with its own rod, and is its own guide on the way it goes. The world is not moved by men who have all they own from teachers.
But especially worthy of note is the remark our writer makes on the serious responsibility men assume when they put each other to death for mistaken interpretations of Scripture. Had no scholar in modern times before Servetus come to so great and charitable a conclusion, we should still have to hallow the memory of the man who, more than three hundred years ago, had the head and the heart to proclaim so great a principle, in the enforcement of which in all its aspects the better spirits of the world still find such opposition; though it is not now by the infliction of death that bigotry and intolerance revenge themselves on their victims, the advocates of freethought and outspoken religious criticism.
A good deal has been said, by its author as well as others, of the crude style of the book on Trinitarian Error. But this to us seems the least of its faults—the language is generally simple enough, not Ciceronian certainly, but the meaning, save where the writer probably did not quite understand himself, is not doubtful. As a composition, it is the arrangement that is most defective. The parts have so little either of coherence or sequence, that of the seven books or chapters into which it is divided, the last, as it seems, might advantageously have been made the first. For there it is, and not until the penultimate page of the entire treatise is attained, that the key to the writer’s most important conclusions is discovered. ‘Two fundamental rules or principles,’ he says, ‘are to be steadily kept in view:—1st, That the nature of God cannot be conceived as divisible; and 2nd, That that which is accidental to the nature of anything is disposition.’ The corollary he would have to follow from these premisses or postulates being, that the orthodox idea of a Trinity, i.e., of the existence of three distinct persons or entities in the unity of the Godhead, is an impossibility, and so a fundamental religious error. As Servetus himself believed in God, and acknowledged a Son of God and a Holy Spirit—finding mention of these in the Scriptures, no word of which would he overlook, though putting his own interpretation on all they say—he held that the Son and Holy Ghost, in consonance with his Second Principle, must be what he calls dispositions, or dispensations of the one eternal indivisible Deity—in other words, manifestations of God in the world.
The ‘Idea of God’ to which Servetus had attained is unquestionably grand. ‘God,’ he says, ‘is eternal, one and indivisible, and in himself inscrutable, but making his being known in and through creation; so that not only is every living, but every lifeless thing, an aspect of the Deity. Before creation was, God was; but neither was he Light, nor Word, nor Spirit, but some ineffable thing else—sed quid aliud ineffabile—these, Light, Word, Spirit, being mere dispensations, modes or expressions of pre-existing Deity. (‘Dial.’ i. 4.) God, he says, has no proper nature; for this would imply a beginning; and before and after are terms that have no significance when they are referred to God. Though God knew what to man would be a future, his own prescience was without respect to time, and involved no such necessity as is implied in choice. God, he continues, can be defined by nothing that pertains to body; he created the world of himself, of his substance, and, as essence, he actuates—essentiat—all things. (‘Dial.’ ii.) The Spirit of God is the universal agent; it is in the air we breathe, and is the very breath of life; it moves the heavenly bodies; sends out the winds from their quarters; takes up and stores the water in the clouds, and pours it out as rain to fertilise the earth. God is therefore ever distinct from the universe of things, and when we speak of the Word, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, we but speak of the presence and power of God projected into creation, animating and actuating all that therein is, man more especially than aught else; ‘the Holy Spirit I always say is the motion of God in the soul of man, and that out of man there cannot properly be said to be any Holy Spirit.’ (‘De Trin. Err.’ f. 85, b, and ‘Dial.’ ii.) This is obviously a statement of what may be called the Exo-pantheistic principle in very broad terms, akin to what we find in the Grecian mythology and certain schools of philosophy; other than the Endo-pantheistic conception of later times—the Causa Principio et Uno of Giordano Bruno,[27] the Substantia of Spinoza, the Universum or Kosmos of Goethe,[28] Hegel, Humboldt, Schopenhauer, D. F. Strauss,[29] &c. It is the Principle inseparable from the mighty All as from the individual Atom, or Pantheism proper.
We shall, by-and-by, find our author, on his Geneva trial, damaging his case and exciting, we may imagine, the astonishment of the unlettered among his judges, by the assertion of his pantheistic notions, and arousing the needless, and it may even be, the assumed ire of Calvin—for he was familiar with the idea, having said himself that he only objected to call Nature, God, because it was a hard and improper expression—quia est dura et impropria loquutio.[30]
Criticising the first verse of the Fourth Gospel: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God,’ Servetus maintains that the Greek λὀγος, translated Word with us, does not designate an entity but utterance or speech, as appears by its etymology, derived as it is from λἐγω, to speak, to discourse. Of the Word of God, therefore, to make the Son of God is to do as did the heathen, who turned ideas or abstractions into mythical beings—Echo into a Nymph, Fortitude into Minerva, &c., and so to bring discord and dissidence upon the truths of Scripture. (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 47, b.) The Word spoken by God in the beginning implies fore-thought, fore-knowledge; whence it is characterised as Wisdom, ‘that was from the beginning or ever the earth was. Under the mystery of the Word, the older apostolic tradition understood a certain dispensation whereby God willed to reveal himself to mankind. The Word of God therefore is equivalent to the Act of God; and even as Light came of the spoken word, so too came Creation, so too came Man.’ In this way, says our author, do we readily comprehend the expression of John: ‘The Word was made flesh,’ and learn in what sense Christ is truly the Word: ‘He is, as it were, the voice of God enunciating to mankind the will of the Universal Father.’ (Ib. f. 49 b.) The Word, consequently, is nothing different from God, but is God himself evoking all things, Christ among the number in the fulness of time. If a reasonable meaning is to be attached to mystical language, it seems difficult to imagine any more satisfactory interpretation than this of Servetus, with which we see that of a distinguished liberal divine of our own day essentially to agree, as he says: ‘The Logos of the New Testament means not only the Word as translated, but Reason, Intelligence, communicating itself in thought and speech. It is the divine wisdom which was from the beginning in the mind of God made manifest in time.’[31]
The title Son of God, again, Servetus maintains is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures otherwise applied than to a man—to the man Jesus in particular; and the word Person he insists is always to be understood in the sense of the Greek προσῶπον and the Latin persona, a mask, an appearance, and not any real or individual thing. With this style of exposition the Reformers could of course by no means agree. They had adopted all the symbols of their predecessors of the Church of Rome; and it seems to have been Servetus’ insistance on his own divergent interpretation of the language of John and the creeds that more especially aroused the enmity of Œcolampadius, Bucer, Calvin, and the rest, they holding that to be accounted a Christian it was necessary not only to acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God, which Servetus was quite ready to do, in the way he understood the filiation, but to acknowledge him to be the Logos or Word of St. John, consubstantial and coeternal with the Father—which, to Servetus, was impossible. It is probable that the way and manner in which in any conceivable fashion such coeternity and consubstantiality could be apprehended was among the topics on which Servetus craved enlightenment from Œcolampadius; and as he could obtain none, pique and personal dislike, opposition and enmity, took the place of dispassionate and friendly discussion; precisely as happened in later years and mainly on the same subjects between our author and Calvin.
In his attempt to develope and explain his own conception of the mystery of the Trinity—for it is a mistake to suppose that Servetus was opposed to something of the kind—he does not set out like the writer of the Fourth Gospel from the transcendental Word, but starts with the historical Jesus, the man, the reputed son of Joseph the Carpenter, but verily or naturally, as he says, the Son of God. To this son the name Jesus was given at the time of his circumcision, the title Christ being conferred by his disciples; whilst it was only at his baptism that he was designated Son of God. The Holy Spirit and power of the Highest overshadowing the Virgin Mary, and acting in her as generator or generative dew, Jesus the Son of God and her Son was engendered. It is not the Word consequently, but Jesus the Son of Mary who is a Son of God: ‘The holy thing that shall be born of thee,’ says the angel addressing the Virgin, ‘shall be called a Son of God.’ ‘They therefore plainly err,’ says Servetus, ‘who speak of the Word as the Son of God: the man Jesus was the Son of God, not the Word; the man Jesus engendered, as stated above, by God in the womb of the Virgin.’ ‘All the Trinitarian errors,’ he concludes, ‘have arisen from not understanding the true nature of the Incarnation.’
When he comes to speak of the Holy Ghost, Servetus unhappily forgets what is due to the discussion of a subject that has engaged the serious thoughts of so many pious men. He would seem to have seen some portions of the catholic Christian dogma as so unreasonable that they were even open to ridicule; and this leads him to the use of improper language. The Holy Ghost, he maintains, is never spoken of save confusedly in the Scriptures, the term being applied variously now to an angel, now to the soul of man, and again to nothing more than wind or breath (Ib. f. 22, a.). The Hebrew word Ruach, of which spirit or wind is a translation, has indeed a still greater variety of meanings. On a subject so indefinite and undefined as the Holy Spirit, we cannot wonder that Œcolampadius in one of his letters should declare he can make nothing of what Servetus says on the matter—‘dicit nescio quid—he says I know not what.’ This much, however, we do make out as our author’s opinion, viz.: that the Holy Spirit is nowhere spoken of in Scripture as a distinct and independent entity, but always as a motion, an agency, an afflatus of God or the power of God,—a view in which he certainly had Melanchthon as his predecessor: ‘Nec aliud spiritus sanctus est nisi viva Dei voluntas et agitatio.’ (‘Loci Theol.’ p. 128, ed. 1521.)
Referring to the dogma of the ‘Two Natures,’ Servetus holds that this, too, is founded in error. ‘To speak of the Nature of God,’ he says, ‘is absurd; for the word nature can only apply to something created, something born (from the Latin natus). But God is from Eternity. For my own part,’ he proceeds, ‘I never take nature to signify aught but the thing to which the term is applied—the nature of a thing is the thing itself. To use the word nature in connection with the name of God is, therefore, to speak of God himself. And so of the Son of God: that which was an idea, image, or type of the Son in the mind of God, when the Word was made flesh, became or was Christ, Reality then superseding Idea (‘De Tr. Er.’ f. 92). There was consequently no aggregate of two natures or two different things in Christ; he was one entity or person, in the usual sense of the word.’ Servetus very inconsistently, as it seems at first sight, often speaks of the man Jesus as God. But he can do so only on the same ground as Cyrus in the Bible, Augustus Cæesar, and other rulers, are called Dii or Divi—gods. The Son of God, to Servetus, in conformity with the pantheistic idea, can only be an aspect or Mode of the One God. If this be not his meaning, I know not what it is.
We have said above that Servetus is not opposed to the idea of a Trinity of dispositions, powers, or properties in the Deity, but only denies such a trinity of persons or entities as is embodied in the symbols of orthodox Christianity. It is not unimportant, therefore, to learn what the precise idea was which he had of the threefold state he acknowledged as extant in the essence of God. His words are these: ‘Tres sunt admirandi Dei dispositiones in quarum qualibet divinitas relucet, ex quo sanissime Trinitatem intelligere posses, &c.—There are three admirable dispositions in God, in each of which divinity appears, and from which you may satisfactorily understand the Trinity. For the Father is the one God, from whom proceed certain dispensations. But these imply no distinction into separate entities. By the economy of God—Dei οἰκονομίαν—they are no more than so many forms or aspects of Deity; for the divineness that is in the Father, the same is in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost.’
In another passage, he asserts his belief in a Trinity still more distinctly: ‘I concede one person of the Father, another person of the Son, another person of the Holy Ghost: three persons in one God, and this is the true Trinity.’ (Ib. f. 64, b.) Had we not our author’s explanation of the way in which he understands the word person, this would make his conception, in so far, not different from the orthodox interpretation of the mystery. But his language here must be regretted, for it is misleading, the word person with Servetus not signifying, as we have seen, any real or individual entity distinct from other entities, but property, appearance, or outward manifestation. The second and third persons, therefore, as understood by Servetus, are to be thought of as dispositions or modes of God, the universal Father, and not as individuals or persons in the usual acceptation of these words, though of them it is that distinct personages have been made, and spoken of as being at once God and other than God, as being three and yet no more than one.
In sequence to this, our author goes on to say that ‘he will not make use of the word Trinity, which is not to be found in Scripture, and only seems to perpetuate philosophical error. It were well, indeed,’ he continues, ‘that all distinction of persons in the one God were henceforth abandoned and rooted out of the minds of men’ (Ib. f. 64, b.); words in which we see reason getting the better of subserviency to the letter of Scripture, and putting an extinguisher, as it were, upon his own as well as other vain attempts to give a rational explanation of the mystical Neo-Platonic Logos-Doctrine of the Fourth Gospel, of which the Trinitarian Church-Dogma is the outcome. Hampered, however, by the idea that everything in the Bible is the word of God, Servetus insists on trying to find, for himself and his readers, something like an acceptable interpretation of the leading words of the Imaginative Mystical Discourse entitled the Gospel according to John. In this he fails, as might have been anticipated; and then, his eyes being opened to the fact, he has nothing for it but to conclude that the orthodox Trinitarian mystery were well discarded from the thoughts and the beliefs of man. ‘To believe, however,’ he continues, ‘suffices, it is said; but what folly to believe aught that cannot be understood, that is impossible in the nature of things, and that may even be looked on as blasphemous! Can it be that mere confusion of mind is to be assumed as an adequate object of faith?’ (Ib. f. 33, b.)
The Trinitarian doctrine of dogmatic Christianity Servetus held to have been a great obstacle to the spread of the religion of Christ. Opposed to the conception of the Oneness of Deity to which the Jews had finally attained, the religious system in which it was made so prominent an element, could not possibly be accepted by them; neither, on the same ground, could it be received by Islam; for Mahomet, whilst he acknowledged Jesus as a prophet and power in the world, born of a Virgin, too, like other distinguished individuals, in some incomprehensible manner, never for a moment thought of him as the Son of God; for ‘God,’ says he, ‘as he is not engendered, so neither does he engender.’
But it is not in connexion with the subject of the Trinity alone that Servetus shows the advances he had made on his age in the sphere of Biblical exposition. Commenting on the text, ‘No man hath ascended up to heaven but he who came down from heaven’ (John iii. 13), he says: ‘It is the spiritual heaven that is here to be understood, and this exists wherever Christ is; “to ascend to heaven” means no more than to discourse of heavenly things. “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father,” says the text (Ib. xiv. 9), i.e., says our expositor, ‘he who appreciates the priceless treasures of Christ’s love easily attains to a knowledge of God the Father. But how should an invisible, intangible Word give us to know God?’ (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 46 et seq.)
There are others among the accepted doctrines of the reformed Churches which, as repudiated by Servetus and so arraying the whole of their adherents against him and influencing his fate, require a passing notice at our hands. Justification by Faith, for instance, he maintains, comes not by belief in the merits or sufferings of Christ, but by belief in his worth or dignity as Son of God. On this ground, he says, the Lutherans do not understand what Justification really is. It is by belief of the kind he specifies, however, that we show our obedience to God, accept the new covenant instead of the old law, become the children of our heavenly Father, and have the Holy Spirit imparted to us. Such belief is, in fact, the very kernel of the Christian dispensation, and that on which the new covenant of grace reposes. It is the real rock on which Peter was to build the Church, against which the gates of hell should not prevail. But as hell does seem to have got the upper hand, he adds, we can only conclude that neither the Church on the rock nor the true Faith is now to be found among us. The Lutheran Justification by Faith, in a word, is mere magical fascination and folly (f. 82-84, Conf. ‘Ep. ad Calvin.’ xiii.).
But Faith, even the most fervent, is not yet sufficient for salvation. The Justification thereby attained is still no more than negative in kind; to become positive, it must be associated with Love, i.e., with Charity in the widest sense of the word; with the Love, that is the fulfilment of the law, whereby alone do we secure for ourselves treasures in heaven. Faith is the entrance, Charity the sanctuary—Fides ostium, Charitas perfectio; and there is a fine passage in the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ (p. 349), comparable in some sort to Paul’s eloquent outburst on the excellence of that much misused sentiment. When Servetus speaks of Charity, therefore, it is not the eleemosynary idea of his day that is meant, with its mendicant friars, its convent doles, and its engendered sloth and beggary; neither is it the mistaken view of later days, which gives indolence and improvidence a legal claim on industry and thrift. It is of the nobler, truer kind that, beside good works, gives man a right to think and to speak unfettered, and forbids him to fancy that his brother is damned for divergency in theological opinion.
To the leading Calvinistic doctrines of Predestination and Election, involving as they do fettered instead of free will, Servetus is still more violently opposed than to the Lutheran Justification by Faith. ‘In your fatal, not to say fatuous, necessity of all things, or your servile will,’ says he, at a later period in his life, ‘there is a certain show of folly, seeing that you would have a man do that which you must know he cannot do. You speak of free acts, yet tell us there is no such thing as free action. And it is absurd in you to derive the servile will you abet from this: that it is God who acts in us. Truly God does act in us, and in such wise that we act freely. He acts in us so that we understand and will and pursue. Even as all things consist essentially in God, so do all acts proceed essentially from him. But the power in us to do is one thing, the necessity of doing is another; and though God may deal with us as the potter deals with his clay, it does not follow that we are nothing more than clay, and have no power of action in ourselves.’ (Ib f. 79, b, et ‘Epist. ad Calvinum,’ xxii.)
Another of the most essential doctrines underlying Pauline Christianity, original sin, is made little of by Servetus. Although I spent much time in reading his books, I do not appear to have made a note of more than one or two passages in which he refers to that subject; and when he does, it is by the way rather than more particularly. It is on the necessity of faith in Christ, as he understands the Sonship, that he dwells continually, making of this the prime factor in his scheme of restored Christianity. ‘This faith it is,’ says he, ‘that first makes us aware of our poverty, of our misery; for if we believe that Christ is the Son of God and the Saviour of the world, we already assume that the world is sinful, and requires saving’ (‘Chr. Rest.’ p. 349). He does not refer particularly to what is called ‘the Fall,’ neither does he say very pointedly how the world came into the sorry plight in which he admits that he finds it. The reason usually assigned must have appeared unsatisfactory to an understanding so clear as that of Servetus, when unclouded by fancies of his own creating; but we can hardly think he mends matters by ascribing the origin of sin to heaven and the rebellion of the angels, as he does, instead of to the earth and Adam’s disobedience. Far from maintaining that the heart of man is corrupt and evil by nature, he holds that the cause of good works and well-doing is proper and spontaneous to the individual, who is only answerable for his own sin, not for the sin of another. Faith in Christ, therefore, as the naturally-begotten Son of God; Charity, in which are comprised all the virtues, and a good life, in so far as we can make it out, form the backbone of Servetus’s Christianity, as it is unfolded in his earliest work on ‘Current Misconceptions of the Trinity.’[32]