CHAPTER III.
SOCINIANISM.[634]
The fathers of the Socinian Church were the two Sozzini, uncle and nephew, Lelio and Fausto, both natives of the town of Siena.
The uncle, Lelio Sozzini (b. 1525), was by profession a lawyer. He was a man of irreproachable moral life, a Humanist by training, a student of the classics and also of theology. He was thoroughly dissatisfied with the condition of the Romish Church, and early began to entertain grave doubts about some of its leading doctrinal positions. He communicated his views to a select circle of friends. Notwithstanding the precautions he had taken, he became suspected. Cardinal Caraffa had persuaded Pope Paul III. to consent to the reorganisation of the Inquisition in 1542, and Italy soon became a very unsafe place for any suspected person. Lelio left Siena in 1547, and spent the remaining portion of his life in travelling in those lands which had accepted the Lutheran or the Reformed faith. He made the acquaintance of all the leading Protestant theologians, including Melanchthon and Calvin. He kept up an extensive correspondence with them, representing his own personal theological opinions in the form of questions which he desired to have solved for him. From Calvin’s letters we can learn that the great theologian had grave doubts about the moral earnestness of his Italian correspondent, and repeatedly warned him that he was losing hold on the saving facts of heart religion.
All the while Sozzini seems to have made up his mind already on all the topics introduced into his correspondence, and to have been communicating his views, on pledge of secrecy, to the small communities of Italian refugees who were settled in Switzerland. He can scarcely be blamed for this secretiveness; toleration, as the sad example of the burning of Servede had shown, was not recognised to be a Christian principle among the Churches of the Reformation. Lelio died at Zurich in 1562 without having published his opinions, and without his neighbours and hosts being aware of his real theological position.
He bequeathed all his property, including his books and his manuscripts, to his nephew, Fausto, who had remained at Siena. This nephew was the founder of the Socinian Church.
Fausto Sozzini (b. 1539) was, like his uncle, a man of irreproachable life, a lawyer, a diligent and earnest student, fond of theology, and of great force of character. How early he had come to think as his uncle had done, is unknown. Report affirms that after he had received his uncle’s books and papers, and had given sufficient time to their study, he left Italy, visited the places where Lelio had gathered small companies of secret sympathisers, to confirm them in the faith. His uncle had visited Poland twice, and Fausto went there in 1579. He found that the anti-Trinitarians there had no need to conceal their opinions. The Transylvanian Prince, Stephen Báthory, protected them, and they had in the town of Krakau their own church, school, and printing-press. But the sect as a whole was torn by internal divisions. Fausto bent his whole energies to overcome these differences.
Before his arrival in Poland he had published two books, which are interesting because they show the pathway by which Fausto arrived at his theological conclusions. He started not with the doctrines of the Trinity or of the Person of Christ, but with the doctrine of the Atonement—a fact to be kept in mind when the whole Socinian system of theology is examined.
He believed that the real cause of the divisions which wasted the sect was that the Polish Unitarians were largely Anabaptists. They insisted that no one could be a recognised member of the community unless he was rebaptized. They refused to enroll Fausto Sozzini himself, and excluded him from the Sacrament of the Supper, because he would not submit to rebaptism. They declared that no member of their communities could enter the magistracy, or sue in a civil court, or pay a war tax. They disagreed on many small points of doctrine, and used the ban very freely against each other. Sozzini saw that he could not hope to make any progress in his attempts to unite the Unitarians unless he was able to purge out this Anabaptist leaven. His troubles can be seen in his correspondence, and in some of his smaller tracts in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum.[635] In spite of the rebuffs he met with, he devoted all his energies to the thankless task of furthering union, and in the end of his days he had the satisfaction of seeing that he had not laboured in vain. Shortly before his death, a synod held at Krakau (1603) declared that rebaptism was not necessary for entrance into a Unitarian community. Many of the lesser differences had been got rid of earlier. The literary activity of Sozzini was enormous: books and pamphlets flowed from his untiring pen, all devoted to the enforcing or explaining the Socinian theology. It is not too much to say that the inner history of the Unitarian communities in Poland from 1579 until his death in 1604 is contained in his voluminous correspondence. The united Unitarians of Poland took the name of the Polish Brethren; and from this society what was known as Socinian theology spread through Germany (especially the Rhineland), Switzerland, and England. Its principles were not formulated in a creed until 1642, when the Racovian Catechism was published. It was never formally declared to be the standard of the Unitarian Church, but its statements are universally held to represent the views of the older Socinians.
Socinianism, unlike the great religious movement under the guidance of Luther, had its distinct and definite beginning in a criticism of doctrines, and this must never be forgotten if its true character is to be understood. We have already seen[636] that there is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther’s mind during the supreme crisis in his spiritual history. Its whole course, from the time he entered the Erfurt convent down to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the spiritual revolt of which he was the soul and centre took its rise from something much deeper than any mere criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval Church, and that it resulted in something very much greater than a reconstruction of doctrinal conceptions. The central thing about the Protestant Reformation was that it meant a rediscovery of religion as faith, “as a relation between person and person, higher therefore, than all reason, and living not upon commands and hopes, but on the power of God, and apprehending in Jesus Christ the Lord of heaven and earth as Father.”[637] The Reformation started from this living experience of the believing Christian, which it proclaimed to be the one fundamental fact in Christianity—something which could never be proved by argument, and could never be dissolved away by speculation.
On the contrary, the earliest glimpse that we have of Lelio Sozzini is his meeting with friends to discuss and cast doubts upon such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, and others like them.[638] Socinianism maintained to the end the character with which it came into being. It was from first to last a criticism and attempted reconstruction of doctrines.
This is sufficient of itself to discount the usual accounts which Romanist controversialists give of the Socinian movement, and of its relation to the Protestant Reformation. They, and many Anglicans who have no sympathy with the great Reformation movement, are accustomed to say that the Socinian system of doctrines is the legitimate deduction from the principles of the Reformation, and courageously carries out the rationalist conceptions lurking in all Protestant theology. They point to the fact that many of the early Presbyterians of England and Puritans of America have furnished a large number of recruits to the Unitarian or Socinian ranks. They assert that the central point in the Socinian theology is the denial of the Divinity of our Lord, which they allege is the logical outcome of refusing to accept the Romanist doctrine of the Mass and the principle of ecclesiastical tradition.
The question is purely historical, and can only be answered by examining the sources of Socinian theology and tracing it to its roots. The result of such an examination seems to show that, while Socinianism did undoubtedly owe much to Humanism, and to the spirit of critical inquiry and keen sense of the value of the individual which it fostered, most of its distinguishing theological conceptions are mediæval. It laid hold on the leading principles of the Scotist-Pelagian theology, which were extremely popular in the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, and carried them out to their logical consequences. In fact, most of the theological principles of Socinian theology are more akin to those of the Jesuit dogmatic-which is the prolongation of Scotism into modern times—than they are to the theology of Luther or of Calvin. It is, of course, to be remembered that by discarding the authority of the Church the Socinians are widely separated from both Scotists and Jesuits. Still the roots of Socinian theology are to be found in the Scotist doctrines of God and of the Atonement, and these two doctrines are their starting-point, and not the mere negation of the Divinity of Christ.
In three most important conceptions the Socinian thought is distinctly mediæval, and mediæval in the Scotist way.
Their idea of faith is intellectual. It is assensus and not fiducia. “In Scripture,” says the Racovian Catechism, “the faith is most perfectly taught, that God exists and that He recompenses. This, however, and nothing else, is the faith that is to be directed to God and Christ.” It is afterwards described as the way in which one must adjust himself to the known commands and promises of God; and there is added that this faith “both makes our obedience more acceptable and well-pleasing to God, and supplies the defects of our obedience, provided it be sincere and earnest, and brings it about that we are justified by God.” This is good Scotist doctrine. These theologians were accustomed to declare that all that the Christian needs is to have faith in God as the recompenser (i.e. to assent to the truth that God does recompense), and that with regard to all the other doctrines of the Church implicit faith (i.e. submission to the Church’s teaching) is enough. Of course the extreme individualism of the Socinians coloured their conception of faith; they cannot accept an implicit faith; their assent to truth must always be explicit; what they assent to must recommend itself to their individual reason. They cannot assent to a round of truths which are presented to them by the Church, and receive them implicitly on the principle of obedience to authority. But what is to be observed here is that the Socinian type of faith is always assent to truths which can be stated in propositional form; they have no idea of that faith which, to use Luther’s phrase, throws itself upon God. They further declare, quite in accordance with Scotist teaching, that men are justified because of their actual obedience to the known commands and promises of God. There is not a trace of the Evangelical attitude. The accordance with Scotist theology descends to very minute particulars, did space permit to trace it.
The Socinian conception of Scripture corresponds to their idea of faith. The two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith, as has been already said,[639] always correspond in mediæval theology they are primarily intellectual and propositional; in Reformation thinking they are, in the first instance, experimental and personal. The Socinian conception allies itself with the mediæval, and discards the Reformation way of regarding both faith and Scripture. With the Socinians as with mediæval theologians, Scripture is the divine source of information about doctrines and morals; they have no idea of Scripture as a means of grace, as the channel of a personal communion between God and His trusting people. But here as elsewhere the new individualism of the Socinians compels them to establish both the authority and the dogmatic contents of Scripture in a way different from their mediæval predecessors. They had rejected altogether the authority of the Church, and they could not make use of the thought to warrant either the authority of Scripture or a correct interpretation of its contents. In the place of it they put what they called reason. “The use of right reason (rectæ rationis) is great in things which pertain to salvation, since without it, it is impossible either to grasp with certainty the authority of Scripture, or to understand those things that are contained in it, or to deduce some things from other things, or, finally, to recall them to put them to use (ad usum revocari).” The certitudo sacrarum litterarum is accordingly established, or attempted to be proved, by a series of external proofs which appeal to the ordinary reasoning faculties of man. The Reformation conception of the Witness of the Spirit, an essential part of its doctrine of Scripture, finds no place in Socinian theology. They try to establish the authority of Scripture without any appeal to faith; the Confessions of the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. The Reformation and the Socinian doctrines are miles apart; but the Socinian and the mediæval approach each other closely. It is somewhat difficult to know what books the older Socinians recognise as their rule of faith. They did not accept the Canon of the mediæval Church. They had no difficulty about the New Testament; but the references to the Old Testament in the Racovian Catechism are very slight: its authority is guaranteed for them by the references to it in the New Testament.
When we turn to the Socinian statements about God, and to their assertions about the nature and meaning of the Work of Christ, we find the clearest proof of their mediæval origin. The Scotist theology is simply reproduced, and cleared of its limitations.
A fundamental conception of God lay at the basis of the whole Scotist theology. God, it maintained, could best be defined as Dominium Absolutum; man as set over against God they described as an individual free will. If God be conceived as simply Dominium Absolutum, we can never affirm that God must act in any given way; we may not even say that He is bound to act according to moral considerations. He is high above all considerations of any kind. He does not will to act in any way because it is right; and action is right because God wills to act in that way. There can be neither metaphysical nor moral necessity in any of God’s actions or purposes. This Scotist idea, that God is the absolutely arbitrary one, is expressed in the strongest language in the Racovian Catechism. “It belongs to the nature of God that He has the right and supreme power to decree whatsoever He wills concerning all things and concerning us, even in those matters with which no other power has to do; for example, He can give laws, and appoint rewards and penalties according to His own judgment, to our thoughts, hidden as these may be in the innermost recesses of our hearts.”
If this thought, that God is simply Dominium Absolutum, be applied to explain the nature and meaning of the work of Christ, of the Atonement, it follows at once that there can be no real necessity for that work; for all necessity, metaphysical or moral, is derogatory to the Dominium Absolutum, which is God. If the Atonement has merit in it, that is only because God has announced that He means to accept the work of Christ as meritorious, and that He will therefore free men from the burden of sin on account of what Christ, the Saviour, has done. It is the announced acceptation of God which makes the work of Christ meritorious. A meritorious work has nothing in its nature which makes it so. To be meritorious simply means that the work so described will be followed by God’s doing something in return for its being done, and this only because God has made this announcement. God could have freed men from the guilt and punishment due for sin without the work of Christ; He could have appointed a human mediator if He had so willed it; He might have pardoned and accepted man as righteous in His sight without any mediator at all. He could have simply pardoned man without anything coming between His act of pardon and man’s sin. This being the case, the Scotist theologians argued that it might seem that the work of Christ, called the Atonement, was entirely superfluous; it is, indeed, superfluous as far as reason is concerned; it can never be justified on rational grounds. But, according to the dogmatic tradition of the Church, confirmed by the circle of the Sacraments, God has selected this mode of getting rid of the sin and guilt of man. He has announced that He will accept this work of Christ, Atonement, and therefore the Scotist theologians declared the Atonement must be believed in and seen to be the divinely appointed way of salvation. Erasmus satirised the long arguments and hypotheses of the Scotist theologians when he enumerated among the questions which were highly interesting to them: “Could God have taken the form of a woman, a devil, an ass, a gourd, or a stone? How could a gourd have preached, done miracles, hung on the Cross?”[640]
It is manifest that this idea of Dominium Absolutum is simply the conception of the extremest individualism applied to God instead of being used to describe man. If we treat it anthropomorphically, it comes to this, that the relation of God to man is that of an infinite Individual Will set over against a number of finite individual wills. If this view be taken of the relations between God and man, then God can never be thought of as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth, but only as a private individual face to face with other individuals; and the relations between God and man must be discussed from the standpoint of private and not of public law. When wrong-doing is regarded under the scheme of public law, the ruler can never treat it as an injury done to himself, and which he can forgive because he is of a kindly nature; he must consider it an offence against the whole community of which he is the public guardian. On the other hand, when offences are considered under a scheme of private law, they are simply wrongs done to a private person who, as an individual, may forgive what is merely a debt due to himself. In such a case the wrong-doer may be forgiven without infringing any general moral principle.
The Socinians, following the mediæval Scotist theologians, invariably applied the principles of private law to the relations between God and man. God, the Dominium Absolutum, the Supreme Arbitrary Will, was never regarded as the Moral Ruler in a moral commonwealth where subjects and rulers are constrained by the same moral laws. Sins are simply private debts due by the individual finite wills to the One Infinite Will. From such premises the Scotists deduced the conclusion that the Atonement was unnecessary; there they stopped; they could not say that there was no such thing as Atonement, for the dogmatic tradition of the Church prevented them. The Socinians had thrown overboard the thought of a dogmatic tradition which had to be respected even when it appeared to be irrational. If the Atonement was not necessary, that meant to them that it did not exist; they simply carried out the theological premises of the Scotist-Pelagian mediæval theologians to their legitimate consequences.
In these three important conceptions—faith, Scripture, the nature of God, involving the character of His relations to man—the Socinians belong to a mediæval school of thought, and have no sympathy whatever with the general principles which inspired Reformation theological thinking.
But the Socinians were not exclusively mediæval; they owed much to the Renaissance. This appears in a very marked manner in the way in which they conceived the very important religious conception of the Church. It is a characteristic of Socinian theology, that the individual believer is considered without much, if any, reference to the Church or community of the saved. This separates the Socinians not only from mediæval Christians, but from all who belonged to the great Protestant Evangelical movement.
The mediæval Church always regarded itself, and taught men to look to it, as a religious community which came logically and really before the individual believer. It presented itself to men as a great society founded on a dogmatic tradition, possessing the Sacraments, and governed by an officially holy caste. The pious layman of the Middle Ages found himself within it as he might have done within one of its great cathedrals. The dogmatic tradition did not trouble him much, nor did the worldliness and insincerity often manifested by its official guardians. What they required of him was implicit faith, which really meant a decorous external obedience. That once rendered, he was comparatively free to worship within what was for him a great house of prayer. The hymns, the prayers, many of the sermons of the mediæval Church, make us feel that the Institution was for the mediæval Christian the visible symbol of a wide purpose of God, which embraced his individual life and guaranteed a repose which he could use in resting on the promises of God. The records of mediæval piety continually show us that the Church was etherealised into an assured and historical fellowship of believers into which the individual entered, and within which he found the assuring sense of fellowship. He left all else to the professional guardians of this ecclesiastical edifice. Probably such are the unspoken thoughts of thousands of devout men and women in the Roman and Greek communions to-day. They value the Church because it represents to them in a visible and historical way a fellowship with Christ and His saints which is the result of His redeeming work.
This thought is as deeply rooted in Reformation as in mediæval piety. The Reformers felt compelled to protest against the political form which the mediæval Church had assumed. They conceived that to be a degradation from its ideal. They saw the manifold abuses which the degradation had given rise to. But they always regarded visible Christendom as a religious community called into being by the work of Christ. They had always before them the thought of the Church of Christ as the fellowship which logically and really comes before the individual believer, the society into which the believer is brought; and this conception stood with them in close and reciprocal connection with the thought that Jesus, by His work of Atonement, had reconciled men with God, had founded the Church on that work of His, and, within it had opened for sinners the way to God. They protested against the political form which the Church had assumed; they never ceased to cling to the thought of the Catholic Church Visible which is founded on the redeeming work of Christ, and within which man finds the way of salvation. They described this Church in all their creeds and testimonies; they gave the marks which characterised it and manifested its divine origin; the thought was an essential part of their theology.
The Socinians never felt the need of any such conception. Jesus was for them only the teacher of a superior kind of morality detailed in the commands and promises of God; they looked to Him for that guidance and impulse towards a moral self-culture which each man can appropriate for himself without first coming into a society which is the fellowship of the redeemed. Had they ever felt the burden of sin as the Reformers felt it, had they ever yearned for such a fellowship with Christ as whole-hearted personal trust gives, or even for such as comes in the sense of bodily contact in the Sacrament, had they ever felt the craving to get in touch with their Lord somehow or anyhow, they would never have been able to do without this conception of a Church Catholic of some kind or other. They never seemed to feel the need of it. The Racovian Catechism was compelled to make some reference to the kingly and priestly offices of Christ. It owed so much to the New Testament. Its perfunctory sentences show that our Lord was for the Socinians simply a Prophet sent from God to proclaim a superior kind of morality. His highest function was to communicate knowledge to men, and perhaps to teach them by example how to make use of it. They had no conception that Jesus came to do something for His people, and that what He did was much more valuable than what He said, however precious that might be. They were content to become His scholars, the scholars of a teacher sent from God, and to become members of His school, where His opinions were known and could be learned. They had no idea that they needed to be saved in the deeper sense of that word. They have no need, therefore, for the conception of the Church; what they did need and what they have is the thought of a school of opinions to which they could belong.[641]
In this one thought they were equally far apart from the circle of mediæval and of Reformation theological thinking. In most of their other theological conceptions their opinions were inherited from mediæval theology. They had little or no connection with Reformation theology or with what that represents—the piety of the mediæval Church.