His murder yet was but fantastical,
It was at a later period, when the guilt as he held it of the man he persistently regarded as the enemy of God and all religion as well as of himself, was full-blown, and the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ appeared in print, that the threat of bygone years took the shape of present stern resolve.
Had we but Calvin’s letter to Villeneuve, ‘written more sharply than was his wont,’ we should, beyond question, find matter little calculated to flatter the somewhat presumptuous self-confident man, and may be fully as certain that the terms in which any future missive was couched, were not more soothing or conciliatory. But Servetus had come to look on himself as commissioned in some sort by God to proclaim a purer form of Christianity to the world; and any assumption of superiority on the part of Calvin, was met by a four-fold show of independence from himself. Yet does Servetus, once embarked in the correspondence, satisfy us that he had fallen under the spell of the great Reformer; fascinated as it seems by him and, far from being repelled by either his coldness or his harshness, finding it impossible to forbear making ever new attempts upon his patience for recognition, were it even of a little complimentary kind.
The ‘great volume full of ravings,’ spoken of in the letter to Farel, must have been a MS. copy of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio,’ already written, but not perhaps finally revised. Upon this work it does not appear that Calvin ever condescended to offer any strictures; although it was doubtless accompanied by a letter—not printed among the thirty—requesting an opinion on its merits. But even as he never had anything of the kind, neither, although repeatedly asked for, both directly and through others, as we learn, could Servetus ever get back his manuscript. Whether retained in mere contempt, or as evidence against the writer, with occasion presenting, as has been surmised, we do not know; but certain it is that Calvin remained persistently deaf to all the writer’s entreaties to have his work returned to him. If not purposely retained in view of the contingency hinted at, it was eventually used in such wise; for it was among the Documents furnished by Calvin through Trie to the authorities of Vienne with the immediate effect of bringing about the arrest of its writer and imperilling his life.
Turn we to the letters to Calvin, less in view of their theological import—the point from which alone they have hitherto been regarded by the biographers of Servetus—than as calculated to let us into the secret of the misunderstanding and enmity that took such entire possession of the mind of the Genevese Reformer. In Servetus’s style of address, as we have said, we at once note an entire absence of the obsequiousness to which Calvin was accustomed. Far from approaching the Reformer as a Gamaliel at whose feet he was to kneel and take lessons, Servetus assumes the part, not merely of the equal, but often of the superior, and is by no means nice in the terms in which he challenges the points he holds erroneous in the doctrines of the great man he is addressing. In the very first of the thirty epistles he wrote, whilst stating an opinion which he knew Calvin must think heretical or even blasphemous, he ‘desires him to remember—memineris quæso, &c.—that the Man, Jesus Christ, was truly begotten of the substance of God;’ and in the second of the series informs him quite bluntly that he is mistaken in his interpretation of Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. He even attempts to fix him on the horns of a dilemma by showing that Calvin’s view, if accepted, would lead to the assumption not of one Son of God, but of three Sons of God. ‘But all such tritheistic notions,’ he continues, ‘are illusions of Satan, and they who acknowledge the Trinity of the Beast (i.e. of Papal Christianity) are possessed by three spirits of demons. False are all the invisible Gods of the Trinitarians, as false as the gods of the Babylonians. Farewell!’ This at the outset is certainly not very respectful from the physician of Vienne to the Spiritual Dictator of Geneva!
The third epistle commences in the same easy style: ‘Sæpius te monui—I have repeatedly admonished you.’ It is on the way in which he imagines Christ to have been engendered by God, and so to be truly and naturally His Son; adding that he has always taught the eternity of the Divine Reason, styled The Word, as prefiguring Christ, in whose face at the Incarnation, he says, Man first verily saw the face of God. ‘You are offended with me,’ he proceeds, ‘for speaking as I do of the human form of Christ; but have patience and I shall lead you up to my conclusion—te manducam,’ etc. Fancy John Calvin feeling himself taken in hand by Michael Servetus!
The fourth, sixth, and seventh epistles are remarkable for their pantheistic views. ‘God,’ says Servetus, ‘is only known through manifestation, or communication, in one shape or another. In Creation God opened the gates of His Treasury of Eternity,’ says he very grandly. ‘Containing the Essence of the Universe in Himself, God is everywhere, and in every thing, and in such wise that he shows himself to us as fire, as a flower, as a stone.’ Existence, in a word, of every kind is in, and of, God, and in itself is always good; it is act or direction that at any time is bad. But evil as well as good he thinks is also comprised in the essence of God. This is indicated, he conceives, by the Hebrew word, ‘π’ (ihei); and he illustrates his position by the text: ‘I form light and create darkness.’ All accidents, further, are in God; whatever befals is not apart from God. Without beginning and without end, God is always becoming—Semper est Deus in fieri.
In the eighth and ninth letters he informs Calvin that he ‘would have him know how the Logos and Sapientia, the Divine Word, the Divine Reason, were to be understood, in order that he should not go on abusing these sacred words;’ and it is here that we meet with various expressions which only acquire significance when the pantheistic ideas with which he is full are borne in mind. Here, too, we find the reason why he would not concede that Calvin and the Reformers held the true belief in Christ as the Son of God:—Ille est vere filius Dei quem in muliere genuit Deus, non ille quem tu somniasti! Neither did the Reformers, in his eyes, rightly apprehend Justification, which, according to him, only comes through belief in the Sonship of Christ as he conceives it.
In the eleventh epistle he says he thinks it will be labour well spent if he exposes the error into which his correspondent falls in his interpretation of the Doctrine of James. Calvin and his sect, we know, set little store by works of charity and mercy. ‘All that men do,’ proceeds our letter-writer, ‘you say is done in sin and is mixed with dregs that stink before God, and merit nothing but eternal death. But therein you blaspheme. Stripping us of all possible goodness you do violence to the teaching of Christ and his Apostles, who ascribe perfection or the power of being perfect to us: “Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” (Matt. v. 48.) You scout this celestial perfection because you have never tasted perfection of the kind yourself. In the works of the Saintly, I say, there is nothing of the corruption you feign. The works of the Spirit shine before God and before men, and in themselves are good and proper. Thou reprobate and blasphemer, who calumniatest the works of the Spirit—Tu improbus et blasphemus qui opera Spiritus calumniaris!’
Can we wonder at Calvin’s rage with the man who dared to address him in such language as this? On his trial at Geneva Servetus tells his judges that the correspondence between him and the Reformer degenerated by degrees on both sides into mutual recrimination and abuse. In the above objectionable passage we see, if not the beginning, yet a significant sample of this unhappy style, which continues even to the end. Had we Calvin’s letters, we should certainly find them not more guarded in expression—for Calvin was a master of invective, with a superabundant vocabulary of epithets at command, and never choice in the use of those he applied to opponents—rascal, dog, ass, and swine being found of constant occurrence among them—had there been any stronger than scoundrel and blasphemer, they would assuredly have been hurled at Servetus.