The biographer Henry “cannot repress a sigh” over the thirty days of double torture of Gruet (ii, 66), but goes on to make a most disingenuous defence of Calvin, first asserting that he was not responsible, and then arguing that it would be as unjust to try Calvin by modern standards as to blame him for not wearing a perruque à la Louis XIV, or proceeding by the Code Napoléon! The same moralist declares (p. 68) that “it is really inspiriting to hear how Calvin stormed in his sermons against the opposite party”: and is profoundly impressed by the “deep religious earnestness” with which Calvin in 1550 claimed that “The council ought again to declare aloud that this blasphemer has been justly condemned, that the wrath of God may be averted from the city.” Finally (p. 69), recording how Gruet’s “book” was burned in 1550, the biographer pronounces that “The Gospel thus gained a victory over its enemies; in the same manner as in Germany freedom triumphed when Luther burnt the pope’s bull.”
As to the alleged anti-religious writings of Gruet, they were not produced or even specified till 1550, three years after his execution, when they were said to have been found partly in the roof of what had been his house (now occupied by the secretary of the consistory), partly behind a chimney, and partly in a dustbin. Put together, they amounted to thirteen leaves, in a handwriting which was declared by Calvin to be “juridically, by good examination of trustworthy men, recognized to be that of Gruet.” The time and the singular manner of their discovery raises the question whether the papers had not been placed by the finders. The execution of Gruet, the first bloodshed under Calvin’s régime, had roused new hatred against him; the slain man figured as a martyr in the eyes of the party to which he belonged; and it had become necessary to discredit him and them if the ascendancy of Calvin was to be secure. It is solely upon Calvin’s account that we have to depend for our knowledge of Gruet’s alleged anti-Christian doctrine; for the document, after being described and condemned, was duly burned by the common hangman. If genuine, it was a remarkable performance. According to the act of condemnation, which is in the handwriting of Calvin, it derided all religions alike, blasphemed God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, the Virgin Mary, Moses, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Apostles, the disciples, the gospels, the Old and New Testaments, the gospel miracles, and the resurrection.[46] Not a single phrase is quoted; we have mere general description, execration, and sentence.
Whether the document was a planned forgery, or part of a copy by Gruet of an anti-Christian treatise theretofore secretly circulated, will never be known. The story of Gruet soon swelled into a legend. According to one narrative, he had copied with his own hand and circulated in Geneva the mysterious treatise, De Tribus Impostoribus, the existence of which, at that period, is very doubtful.[47] On the strength of this and other cases[48] the Libertines have been sometimes supposed to be generally unbelievers; but there is no more evidence for this than for the general ascription to them of licentious conduct. It appears certain indeed that at that time the name Libertine was not recognized as a label for all of Calvin’s political opponents, but was properly reserved for the sect so-called;[49] but even a vindicator of Calvin admits that “it is undeniable that the Libertines [i.e. the political opponents of Calvin, so-called by modern writers] of 1555 were the true political representatives of the patriots of 1530.”[50] The presumption is that the political opposition included the more honest and courageous men of liberal and tolerant tendencies, as Calvin’s own following included men of “free” life.[51] The really antinomian Libertini of the period were to be found among the pantheistic-Christian sect or school so-called, otherwise known as Spirituals, who seem to have been a branch of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, or fraternity of the “Spirit of Liberty.” These Calvin denounced in his manner; but in 1544 he had also forced into exile his former friend, Sebastian Castalio (or Castalion; properly Chatillon), master of the public school at Geneva, for simply rejecting his doctrine of absolute predestination, striving to have him driven in turn from Basel; and in 1551 he had caused to be imprisoned and banished a physician and ex-Carmelite, Jerome Bolsec, for publicly denying the same dogma. Bolsec, being prevented by Calvin’s means from settling in any neighbouring Protestant community, returned to Catholicism,[52] as did many others. After Calvin’s death Bolsec took his revenge in an attack on the reformer in his public and private character,[53] which has been treated as untrustworthy by the more moderate Catholic scholars who deal with the period;[54] and which, as regards its account of his private morals, is probably on all fours with Calvin’s own unscrupulous charges against the “Libertines” and others who opposed him.
The tenets of the Libertini are somewhat mystifying, as handled by Calvin and his biographer Henry, both alike animated by the odium theologicum in the highest degree. By Calvin’s own account they were mystical Christians, speaking of Christ as “the spirit which is in the world and in us all,” and of the devil and his angels as having no proper existence, being identical with the world and sin. Further, they denied the eternity of the human soul and the freedom of the will; and Calvin charges them with subverting alike belief in God and morality (Henry, Life of Calvin, Eng. tr. ii, 45–46). The last charge could just as validly be brought against his own predestinarianism; and as regards ethics we find Calvin alternately denouncing the Libertines for treating all sin as unpardonable, and for stating that in Christ none could sin. Apparently he gives his inferences as their doctrines; and the antinomianism which, in the case of the trial of Madame Ameaux, Henry identifies with pantheism, was by his own showing of a Christian cast. Little credit, accordingly, can be given to his summing up that among the Libertines of Geneva there exhibited itself “a perfectly-formed anti-Christianity,” which he calls “a true offspring of hell” (ii, 49). The residuum of truth appears to be that in the pantheism of this sect, as Neander says concerning the Brethren of the Free Spirit among the Beghards, there were “the foretokens of a thoroughly anti-Christian tendency, hostile to everything supernatural, every sentiment of a God above the world; a tendency which contained ... the germ of absolute rationalism” (Hist. of the Chr. Church, Torrey’s tr. ix, 536). Pantheism, logically extended, obviously reduces the supernatural and the natural to unity, and is thus atheistic. But that the pantheists of Geneva in Calvin’s day reached logical consistency is incredible. The Libertine sect, in all likelihood, was only partially antinomian, and only in very small part consciously anti-Christian.
At this period (1552), on the same issue of predestination, Calvin broke utterly with one of his closest friends, Jacques de Bourgogne, Sieur de Falais.[55] It seemed as if the Protestant polity were disrupting in a continuous convulsion of dogmatic strife; and Melanchthon wrote to Bucer in despair over the madness and misery of a time in which Geneva was returning to the fatalism of the Stoics, and imprisoning whosoever would not agree with Zeno.[56] By this time it must have been clear to some that behind the strifes of raging theologians there lay a philosophic problem which they could not sound. It is therefore not surprising to learn that already Basel University, as fifty years before at Erfurt, there was a latitudinarian group of professors who aimed at a universal religion, and came near “naturalism” in the attempt;[57] while elsewhere in Switzerland, as we shall see later, there grew up the still freer way of thought which came to be known as Deism.
A great impulse to that development, as well as to simple Unitarianism, must have been given by the execution of Michael Servetus.[58] That ill-starred heretic, born of Spanish stock in France, brought to the propaganda of Unitarianism, of which he may be reckoned the inaugurator, a determination as strong as Calvin’s own. Sent by his father to study civil law at Toulouse, he began there to study the Bible, doubtless under the stimulus of the early Protestant discussions of the time. The result was a prompt advance beyond the Protestant standpoint. Leaving Toulouse after two or three years’ residence, he visited Bologna and Augsburg in the train of the confessor of Charles V. Thereafter he visited Lyons and Geneva, and had some intercourse with Oecolampadius at Basel, where he put in the hands of a bookseller the signed manuscript of his first book, De Trinitatis erroribus libri septem. The bookseller sent it on to Hagenau, in Alsace, which as an “imperial city” seems to have had special freedom in the matter of book-publishing; and thither, after visiting Bucer and Capito at Strasburg, Servetus went to have it printed in 1531.[59] In this treatise, produced in his twenty-first year, he definitely rejects Trinitarianism, while putting somewhat obscurely his own idea of the nature of Jesus Christ—whom, it should be noted, he held in high reverence. In the following year he produced at the same place another small treatise, Dialogorum de Trinitate libri duo, wherein he recasts his first work, “retracting” it and apologizing for its crudity, but standing substantially to its positions. It was not till 1553 that he printed at Vienne in Dauphiné, without his name, his Christianismi Restitutio.[60] In the interval he had been doing scientific work as an editor of Ptolemy (1535, Lyons), and as a student of and lecturer on anatomy and medicine at Paris, where (1536) he met Calvin on his last visit to France. In 1538 he is found studying at Louvain; and, after practising medicine at Avignon and Charlieu, he again studies medicine at Montpellier. The Archbishop of Vienne, who had heard him lecture at Paris, established him at Vienne as his confidential physician (1541–53), and there it was that he produced the book for which he died. About 1545–46 he had rashly written to Calvin, sending him the MS. of the much-expanded recast of his books which later appeared as the Restitutio. Calvin sent a hostile reply, and on the same day wrote to Farel: “If he come, and my influence can avail, I shall not suffer him to depart alive.” Servetus had denounced the papacy as fiercely as any Protestant could wish, yet his heresy on the question of the Trinity[61] was enough to doom him to instant death at Calvin’s hands. Servetus could not get back his MS., and wrote to a friend about 1547 that he felt sure the affair would bring him to his death.[62] When in 1552–53 he had the book privately printed at Vienne, and the bulk of the edition was sent to Lyons and Frankfort, the toils closed around him, the ecclesiastical authorities at Lyons being apprised of the facts by de Trie, a Genevan Protestant, formerly of Lyons. The whole Protestant world, in fact, was of one opinion in desiring to suppress Servetus’s anti-Trinitarian books, and the wonder is that he had so long escaped both Protestant and Catholic fury. Luther had called his first book horribly wicked; and Melanchthon, who in 1533 foresaw from the second much dangerous debate, wrote in 1539 to the Venetian Senate to warn them against letting either be sold.[63] It is significant of the random character of Protestant as of Catholic thought that Servetus, like Melanchthon, was a convinced believer in astrology,[64] while Luther on Biblical grounds rejected astrology and the Copernican astronomy alike, and held devoutly by the belief in witchcraft. The superiority of Servetus consists in his real scientific work—he having in part given out the true doctrine of the circulation of the blood[65]—and his objection to all persecution of heresy.[66] Philosophically, he was more than a mere Scripturist. Though pantheism was not charged upon him, we have Calvin’s testimony that he propounded it in the strongest form.[67]
Calvin’s guilt in the matter begins with his devices to have Servetus seized by the Catholic authorities of Lyons[68]—to set misbelievers, as he regarded them, to slay the misbeliever—and his use of Servetus’s confidential letters against him.[69] He was not repelling a heresy from his own city, but heretic-hunting far away in sheer malignity. The Catholics were the less cruel gaolers, and let their prisoner escape, condemning him to death at Vienne in absence. After some months of wandering he had the temerity to seek to pass into Italy by way of Geneva, and was there at length recognized, and arrested. After a long trial he was sentenced to be burned alive (Oct. 27, 1553). The trial at Geneva is a classic document in the records of the cruelties committed in honour of chimeras; and Calvin’s part is the sufficient proof that the Protestant could hold his own with the Catholic Inquisitor in the spirit of hate.[70] It has been urged, in his excuse, that the doctrines of Servetus were blasphemously put; but in point of fact Calvin passed some of his bitterest denunciation on the statement, cited (from Lorenz Friese) in a note in Servetus’s edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, that Judea is actually a barren and meagre country, and not “flowing with milk and honey.” Despite the citation of ample proof, and the plea that the passage was drawn from a previous edition, it was by Calvin adjudged blasphemous in that it “necessarily inculpated Moses and grievously outraged the Holy Spirit.”[71] The language of Calvin against Servetus at this point is utterly furious. Had Servetus chanced to maintain the doctrine of the earth’s motion, he would certainly have been adjudged a blasphemer on that score also; for in the Argument to his Commentary on Genesis (1563) Calvin doggedly maintains the Ptolemaic theory. His language tells of much private freethinking around him on the Mosaic doctrine, and his tone leaves no doubt as to how he would treat published heresy on that theme. The audacity of Servetus in suggesting that the 53rd chapter of Isaiah had historical reference to Cyrus is for him anathema.[72]
Even before this hideous episode, Calvin’s passion of malevolence against his theological opponents in his own sect is such as to shock some of his adoring biographers.[73] All the Protestant leaders, broadly speaking, grew more intolerant as they grew in years—a fair test as between the spirit of dogma and the spirit of freethought. Calvin had begun by pleading for tolerance and clemency; Luther, beginning as a humanitarian, soon came to be capable of hounding on the German nobility against the unhappy peasants; Melanchthon, tolerant in his earlier days, applauded the burning of Servetus;[74] Beza laboriously defended the act. Erasmus stood for tolerance; and Luther accordingly called him godless, an enemy of true religion, a slanderer of Christ, a Lucian, an Epicurean, and (by implication) the greatest knave alive.[75]
The burning of Servetus in 1553, however, marked a turning point in Protestant theological practice on the Continent. There were still to come the desperate religious wars in France, in which more than 300,000 houses were destroyed, abominable savageries were committed, and all civilization was thrown back, both materially and morally; and there was yet to come the still more appalling calamity of the Thirty Years’ War in Germany—a result of the unstable political conditions set up at the Reformation; but theological human sacrifices were rapidly discredited. Servetus was not the first victim, but he was nearly the last.
The jurist Matthieu Gripaldi (or Gribaldo) lectured on law at Toulouse, Cahors, Valence, and Padua successively, and, finding his anti-Trinitarian leanings everywhere a source of danger to him, had sought a retreat at Fargias near Geneva, then in the jurisdiction of Berne. Venturing to remonstrate with Calvin against the sentence on Servetus, he brought upon himself the angry scrutiny of the heretic-hunter, and was banished from the neighbourhood. For a time he found refuge in a new professorship at Tübingen; but there too the alarm was raised, and he was expelled. Coming back to Fargias, he gave refuge to the heretic Valentinus Gentilis on his escape from Geneva; and again Calvin attacked him, delivering him to the authorities of Berne. An abjuration saved him for the time; but he would probably have met the martyr’s fate in time had not his death by the plague, in 1564, guaranteed him, as Bayle remarks, against any further trial for heresy.[76]