Assuming the leading positions of the writer as guides, we should say that in his philosophy he regards the world as a manifestation and communication of God in time and space, manifestation taking place, as he says, through the Word, communication through the agency called Spirit. The first of things in which God showed Himself, he says, was Light, which he speaks of as uncreated—lux increata, essence or first principle of things—all existence, all generation being effected by the energising power of light. In, and of, and first manifested by light, God, however, is not identified therewith, any more than with the things of creation, in all of which he is still held to be immanent. God indeed in himself is supersensuous and incomprehensible, for he transcends all things—mind as well as matter. When not sought to be defined by negatives, God is to be thought of as Absolute Being, and all existence, as deriving from him, is to be accounted divine, although in diverse degrees.
The manifold manifestations which God makes of himself in nature are referred to a single dispensation or mode, the mode of the Plenitude of Substance, which comprises all other modes or dispensations in their endless diversity, patterns or types of all things that be having been present in the mind of God before they were in themselves. An architypal universe is therefore assumed as having existed before the actual world came into being, and this, says Servetus, is the Logos of Scripture and Philosophy—the Divine Reason, wherein reflected all things showed themselves visibly. Ea ipsa erat λὀγος erat ratio mirifica in qua omnia visibiliter relucebat. The Logos—Divine Word, Divine Wisdom, God himself, in fact—it is that is revealed or manifested in Creation, as in the fulness of time it also became incarnate in Christ; for, even as before Creation the world existed ideally in God, so before the incarnation was Christ potentially present in the Divine mind as the Divine word, in the same way as the future plant is extant in the seed. From the beginning, therefore, it was a virtual or potential Son, not any actual co-eternal Son, who existed beside the Father, the Son first acquiring form and substance in the womb of the Virgin Mary, and being made participant of the Holy Spirit at the moment of his birth when he began to breathe; for Servetus assimilated the abstraction entitled Spirit to breath or wind: God, say the Scriptures, breathed into the nostrils of man and he became a living soul.
Possessed, as he was, by the principles of the Neo-platonic and other more ancient philosophies, Servetus assimilates Christ to the Demiurgos, and makes of him the architect and fashioner of the world—ille mundi Architectus Christus—Creator even of the elements from which, intermingled, are educed the substantial forms of things. How this was brought about if Christ only became a reality at his birth, he does not say. But it is not a little interesting to note how nearly our own Great King of transcendental song approaches some of these fancies of our author, for Milton too speaks of Light as
Offspring of heaven firstborn,
Or of the eternal coeternal beam;
Since God is light,
And never but in unapproached light,
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate.
A little further on he also has the Son as Agent in Creation:—
And thou, my Word, begotten Son, by thee
This I perform: speak thou and be it done.
Creation ended, he continues:—
The filial Son arrived and sat him down
With his great Father!
Into what labyrinths are men led when they give the rein to imagination, and the demon of speculation divorced from science is suffered to have his uncontrolled way!