Books Fatal to Their Authors

by P. H. Ditchfield

PREDICHE DEL REVERENDO
PADRE FRATE HIERONYMO
Da Ferrara facie lanno del. 1496
negiorni delle feste, finito che
hebbe la quaresima: & prima
riposatosi circa uno mese
ricomincio eldi di Scõ
Michele Adi. viii di
Maggio. MCCCC
LXXXXVI.

The text commences "CREDITE IN Dño Deo uestro & securi eritis." In the cell of Savonarola at the Monastery of St. Mark is preserved a MS. volume of the famous preacher. The writing is very small, and must have taxed the skill of the printers in deciphering it.]

The austerity of his teaching excited some hostility against him, especially on the part of the monks who did not belong to his order—that of the Dominicans. He had poured such bitter invective both in his books and in his sermons upon the vices of the Popes and the Cardinals, that they too formed a powerful party in league against him. In addition the friends of the Medicis resented the overthrow of their power, and the populace, ever fickle in their affections, required fresh wonders and signs to keep them faithful to their leader. The opportunity of his enemies came when Charles VIII. of France retired from Florence. They accused Savonarola of all kinds of wickedness. He was cast into prison, tortured, and condemned to death as a heretic. In what his heresy consisted it were hard to discover. It was true that when his poor, shattered, sensitive frame was being torn and rent by the cruel engines of torture, he assented to many things which his persecutors strove to wring from him. The real cause of his destruction was not so much the charges of heresy which were brought against his books and sermons, as the fact that he was a person inconvenient to Pope Alexander VI. On the 23rd of May, 1498, he met his doom in the great piazza at Florence where in happier days he had held the multitude spell-bound by his burning eloquence. There sentence was passed upon him. Stripped of his black Dominican robe and long white tunic, he was bound to a gibbet, strangled by a halter, and his dead body consumed by fire, his ashes being thrown into the river Arno. Such was the miserable end of the great Florentine preacher, whose strange and complex character has been so often discussed, and whose remarkable career has furnished a theme for poets and romance-writers, and forms the basis of one of the most powerful novels of modern times.

Not only were the Inquisitors and the Cardinals guilty of intolerance and the stern rigour of persecution, but the Reformers themselves, when they had the power, refrained not from torturing and burning those who did not accept their own particular belief. This they did not merely out of a spirit of revenge conceived against those who had formerly condemned their fathers and brethren to the stake, but sometimes we see instances of Reformers slaughtering Reformers, because the victims did not hold quite the same tenets as those who were in power. Poor Michael Servetus shared as hard a fate at the hands of Calvin, as ever "heretic" did at the hands of the Catholics; and this fate was entirely caused by his writings. This author was born in Spain, at Villaneuva in Arragon, in 1509. At an early age he went to Africa to learn Arabic, and on his return settled in France, studying law at Toulouse, and medicine at Lyons and Paris.

But the principles of the Reformed religion attracted him; he studied the Scriptures in their original languages, and the writings of the fathers and schoolmen. Unhappily his perverse and self-reliant spirit led him into grievous errors with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity. In vain the gentle Reformer Oecolampadius at Basle reasoned with him. He must needs disseminate his opinions in a book entitled De Trinitatis Erroribus, which has handed the name of Servetus down to posterity as the author of errors opposed to the tenets of the Christian Faith. Bucer declared that he deserved the most shameful death on account of the ideas set forth in this work. In his next work, Dialogues on the Trinity and A Treatise on the Kingdom of Christ, Servetus somewhat modified his views, and declared that his former reasonings were merely "those of a boy speaking to boys"; but he blamed rather the arrangement of his book, than retracted the opinions he had expressed.

He also annotated Pagnini's Latin version of the Sacred Scriptures, entitled Biblia sacra latina ex hebraeo, per Sanctum Pagninum, cum praefatione et scholiis Michaelis Villanovani (Michel Servet). Lugduni, a Porta, 1542, in-folio. This edition was vigorously suppressed on account of the notes of Servetus.

After sojourning some time in Italy, he returned to France in 1534, and settled at Lyons, where he published a new and highly esteemed edition of the Geography of Ptolemy, inscribing himself as Michael Villanovanus, from the name of his birthplace. His former works had been published under the name of Reves, formed by the transposition of the letters of his family name. In Paris he studied medicine, and began to set forth novel opinions which led him into conflict with other members of the faculty. In one of his treatises he is said to have suggested the theory of the circulation of the blood. In 1540 he went to Vienne and published anonymously his well-known work De Restitutione Christianismi. This book, when its authorship became known, brought upon him the charge of heresy, and he was cast into prison. Powerful friends enabled him to escape, and his enemies were obliged to content themselves with burning his effigy and several copies of his books in the market-place at Vienne. Servetus determined to fly to Naples, but was obliged to pass through Geneva, where at the instigation of the great Reformer Calvin he was seized and cast into prison. It is unnecessary to follow the course of Servetus' ill-fated history, the bitter hostility of Calvin, the delays, the trials and colloquies. At length he was condemned, and the religious world shuddered at the thought of seeing the pile lighted by a champion of the Reformation and religious freedom. Loud and awful shrieks were heard in the prison when the tidings of his sentence were conveyed to Servetus. Soon the fatal staff was broken over his head as a sign of his condemnation, and on the Champel Hill, outside the gates of Geneva, the last tragic scene took place. With his brow adorned with a crown of straw sprinkled with brimstone, his Fatal Books at his side, chained to a low seat, and surrounded by piles of blazing faggots, the newness and moisture of which added greatly to his torture, in piteous agony Servetus breathed his last, a sad spectacle of crime wrought in religion's name, a fearful example of how great woes an author may bring upon himself by his arrogance and self-sufficiency. The errors of Servetus were deplorable, but the vindictive cruelty of his foes creates sympathy for the victim of their rage, and Calvin's memory is ever stained by his base conduct to his former friend.

The name of Sebastian Edzardt is not so well known. He was educated at Würtemberg, and when Frederick I. of Prussia conceived the desire of uniting the various reformed bodies with the Lutherans, he published a work De causis et natura unionis, and a treatise Ad Calvanianorum Pelagianisinum. In this book he charged the Calvinists with the Pelagian heresy—a charge which they were accustomed to bring against the Lutherans. It was written partly against a book of John Winckler, Arcanum Regium de conciliandis religionibus subditorum diffidentibus, published in 1703 in support of the King's designs. In the same year he published Impietas cohortis fanatica, expropriis Speneri, Rechenbergii, Petersenii, Thomasii, Arnoldi, Schutzii, Boehmeri, aliorumque fanaticorum scriptis, plusquam apodictis argumentis, ostensa. Hamburgi, Koenig, 1703, in-4. This work was suppressed by order of the senate of Hamburg. Frederick was enraged at Edzardt's opposition to his plans, ordered his first book to be burnt, and forbade any one to reply to it. Nor was our author more successful in his other work, Kurtzer Entwurff der Einigkeit der Evangelisch-Lutherischen und Reformirten im Grunde des Glaubens: von dieser Vereinigung eigentlicher Natur und Beschaffenheit, wherein he treated of various systems of theology. This too was publicly burnt, but of the fate of its author I have no further particulars.

The last of the great schoolmen, William of Ockham, called the "Invincible Doctor," suffered imprisonment and exile on account of his works. He was born at Ockham in Surrey in 1280, and, after studying at Oxford, went to the University of Paris. He lived in stirring times, and took a prominent part in the great controversies which agitated the fourteenth century. Pope John XXII. ruled at Avignon, a shameless truckster in ecclesiastical merchandise, a violent oppressor of his subjects, yet obliged by force of circumstances to be a mere subject of the King of France. The Emperor Ludwig IV. ruled in Germany in spite of the excommunication pronounced against him by the Pope. Many voices were raised in support of Louis denouncing the assumptions of the occupant of the Papal See. Marcilius of Padua wrote his famous Defensor Pacis against Papal pretensions, and our author, William of Ockham, issued his still more famous Defence of Poverty, which startled the whole of Christendom by its vigorous onslaught on the vices of the Papacy and the assumptions of Pope John. The latter ordered two bishops to examine the work, and the "Invincible Doctor" was cast into prison at Avignon. He would certainly have been slain, had he not contrived to effect his escape, and taken refuge at the court of the German emperor, to whom he addressed the words, "Tu me defendas gladio, ego te defendam calamo." There he lived and wrote, condemned by the Pope, disowned by his order, the Franciscans, threatened daily with sentences of heresy, deprivation, and imprisonment; but for them he cared not, and fearlessly pursued his course, becoming the acknowledged leader of the reforming tendencies of the age, and preparing the material for that blaze of light which astonished the world in the sixteenth century. His works have never been collected, and are very scarce, being preserved with great care in some of the chief libraries of Europe. The scholastic philosophy of the fourteenth century, the disputes between the Nominalists and the Realists, in which he took the part of the former, the principle that "entities are not to be multiplied except by necessity," or the "hypostatic existence of abstractions," have ceased to create any very keen interest in the minds of readers. But how bitterly the war of words was waged in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries! And it was not only a war of words; one who witnessed the contests wrote that "when the contending parties had exhausted their stock of verbal abuse, they often came to blows; and it was not uncommon in their quarrels about universals, to see the combatants engaged not only with their fists, but with clubs and swords, so that many have been wounded and some killed." These controversies have passed away, upon which, says John of Salisbury, more time had been wasted than the Caesars had employed in making themselves masters of the world; and it is unnecessary here to revive them. Ockham's principal works are: Quaestiones et decisiones in quatuor libros sententiarum cum centilogio theologico (Lyons, 1495), [Footnote: I have met with a copy of this work amongst the incunabula in the possession of M. Olschki, of Venice. The printer's name is John Trechsel, who is described as vir hujus artis solertissimus.] Summa logicae (Paris, 1483), Quodlibeta (Paris, 1487), Super potestate summi pontifia (1496). He died at Munich in 1343.

The Introductio ad Theologiam of the famous Abélard, another schoolman, was fatal to him. Abélard's name is more generally known on account of the golden haze of romance which surrounded him and the fair Heloise; and their loving letters have been often read and mourned over by thousands who have never heard of his theological writings. At one time the famous Canon of Notre Dame at Paris had an enthusiastic following; thousands flocked to his lectures from every country; his popularity was enormous. He combated the abuses of the age and the degeneracy of some of the clergy, and astonished and enraged many by the boldness of his speech and the novelty of his opinions. His views with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity expressed in his Introductio (Traité de la Trinité) were made the subject of a charge against him, and certainly they cannot be easily distinguished from Sabellianism. The qualities or attributes of the Godhead, power, wisdom, goodness, were stated to be the three Persons. The Son of God was not incarnate to deliver us, but only to instruct us by His discourses and example. Jesus Christ, God and Man, is not one of the Persons in the Trinity, and a man is not properly called God. He did not descend into hell. Such were some of the errors with which Abélard was reproached. Whether they were actually contained in his writings, it is not so evident. We have only fragments of Abélard's writings to judge from, which have been collected by M. Cousin—Ouvrages inédits d'Abélard—and therefore cannot speak with certain knowledge of his opinions. At least they were judged to be blasphemous and heretical by the Council of Soissons, when he was condemned to commit his books to the flames and to retire to the Convent of St. Denys. Some years later, when he had recovered from the horrible mutilation to which he had been subjected by the uncle of Heloise, and his mind had acquired its usual strength, we find him at Paris, again attracting crowds by his brilliant lectures, and pouring forth books, and alas! another fatal one, Sic et Non, [Footnote: Petri Abelardi Sic et Non (Marburgi, Sumptibus Librariae; Academy Elwertianae, 1851). The best edition of Abélard's letters is P. Abaelardi et Heloisae conjugis ejus Epistolae, ab erroribus purgatae et cum codd. MSS. collatae cura Richardi Rawlinson, Londini, 1718, in-8. There is also an edition published in Paris in 1616, 4to, Petri Abelardi et Heloisae conjugis ejus, opera cum praefatione apologetica Franc. Antboësii, et Censura doctorum parisiensium; ex editione Andreae Quercetani (André Duchesne).] which asked one hundred and fifty-eight questions on all kinds of subjects. The famous champion of orthodoxy, St. Bernard, examined the book, and at the Council of Sens in 1140 obtained a verdict against its author. He said that poor Abélard was an infernal dragon who persecuted the Church, that Arius, Pelagius, and Nestorius were not more dangerous, as Abélard united all these monsters in his own person, and that he was a persecutor of the faith and the precursor of Antichrist. These words of the celebrated Abbot of Clairvaux are more creditable to his zeal than to his charity. Abélard's disciple Arnold of Brescia attended him at the Council, and shared in the condemnations which St. Bernard so freely bestowed. Arnold's stormy and eventful life as a religious and political reformer was ended at Rome in 1155, where he was strangled and burnt by order of the Emperor Frederick, his ashes being cast into the Tiber lest they should be venerated as relics by his followers. St. Bernard described him as a man having the head of a dove and the tail of a scorpion. Abélard was condemned to perpetual silence, and found a last refuge in the monastery of Cluny. Side by side in the graveyard of the Paraclete Convent the bodies of Abélard and Heloise lie, whose earthly lives, though lighted by love and cheered by religion, were clouded with overmuch sorrow, and await the time when all theological questions will be solved and doubts and difficulties raised by earthly mists and human frailties will be swept away, and we shall "know even as also we are known."