Servetus and Calvin / A Study of an Important Epoch in the Early History of the Reformation

by Robert Willis

The refugees as a rule, and almost as a matter of necessity, were entirely devoted to the Reformer; and having been most liberally met by the Genevese at first, and put on a footing of all but perfect political equality, they made themselves felt, through their numbers, in the frequently recurring elections that formed elements in the Genevese Republican system. Favoured in all by Calvin, the strangers, as they increased in numbers, came at length to be ever more and more disliked and distrusted by the native population; so that Calvin may be found using language such as this, when, speaking in the same breath of the fugitives, his friends, and of the people who sheltered both him and them within their walls:—‘They (the Genevese) are dissatisfied with you (the Refugees), because you run not riot with them in their disorderly and barren lives.’ The native population, in a word, found themselves, ere long, controlled and overcrowed by a host of aliens, led by a bigoted and intolerant ecclesiastic—a state of things never to be patiently endured, but to be ended at the first favourable moment; and it is to the culminating dissatisfaction of the Genevese with clerical rule in 1553, much akin to that of the year 1538, when Calvin had been forced to quit the field, that Beza refers in the passage quoted above.

So unpopular had Calvin again become in the year 1553, that, in writing to one of his friends, he speaks of discontent and distrust as universally prevalent, especially among the more youthful of the population. ‘The accumulated rancour of their hearts,’ he says, ‘breaks out from time to time; so that when I show myself in the street, the curs are hounded on me: hiss! hiss! is shouted to them; and they snap at my legs and tear my clothes.’ Calvin must in truth have had a trying time of it during most of the years he lived among the Genevese; his own bed could as little have been of roses without thorns, as he suffered the beds of the citizens to be of down; for, save during brief lulls, he and they seem to have passed their lives in a state of covert, when it was not one of open, warfare.

One of the earlier hostile moves of the civil Council in the present crisis against the Reformer was the exclusion, from the Greater Council of the State, of some members of the Minor Council, known to be among the number of his adherents. More than this, his enemies having come to outnumber his friends in the lately elected Council, he found himself frequently outvoted in directions in which he had been used to think of his wish or his will as already the law. Among those who had now obtained a seat in the Supreme Council, was one whom he had put under the consistorial ban for some infringement of discipline, and forbidden, until he showed signs of amendment, to present his child for baptism. To choose Councillors from among persons such as this, however, was, in Calvin’s eyes, to fly in the face not only of all authority, but of the Almighty himself.

Another move against him was a resolution taken by the Council to deprive the Refugees of the arms with which they, like the native population, had been entrusted at an earlier period for the common defence. This was taken greatly to heart by Calvin, who stigmatised it as a ‘barbarous and brutal act, perpetrated by enemies of the Gospel against exiles for Christ’s sake.’ But the Council did not stop here in showing its hostile mood. The priests, in the olden time, had been privileged like the rest of the Community to be present at the deliberations of the Council, and the Ministers, their successors, had never been challenged in their title to show themselves as auditors in the same way. They were now, however, by a resolution of the Council, declared incompetent to appear at its sittings without special permission given. Of no great moment in itself or politically considered, this interdict pointed with even needless significance to mislike and mistrust of the clergy as a body, and of their distinguished head in particular—the Council would neither have him nor his followers immediately informed of all the business they had in hand.

How keenly all these proceedings were felt by Calvin is apparent from the tone of the letters he wrote to more than one of his friends at this time. To his friend Sulzer, of Basle, he says that for the last two years they pass their lives at Geneva as if they were living amid the declared enemies of the Gospel! and he complains bitterly of the interference he suffers in the exercise of his multifarious functions.

Among the particular incidents that tended to widen the breach between Calvin with the ecclesiastical party behind him, and the civil authorities backed by the more liberally disposed of the citizens, was the case of Philibert Berthelier, one of the Councillors, a man of note, respected and much looked up to by the Genevese; for he was the son of that Philibert Berthelier who had nobly striven for the liberties of the city, in former years, and gone to his death on the scaffold in their assertion. Berthelier, some eighteen months or so before, for an offence against one or other of the arbitrary ordinances of the Consistory—for having gone to a ball with his wife and daughter, we think, they having further exceeded in the matter of dress—had fallen under the interdict of the Ministers, and been forbidden to present himself at the celebration of the Lord’s supper, until he had made submission and promised amendment.

Now Berthelier was not only a man of weight in the Republic politically, but in the opinion of his fellow citizens, of really irreproachable life and conversation; and, his friends being then in power, he took steps to have the interdict removed, which kept him from gratifying his pious feelings by partaking of the commemorative feast. To this end he presented a petition to the Council, setting forth the grievance under which he laboured, and praying for relief; and they, on their part, took it on them forthwith not only to absolve him of the disability of which he complained, but, proceeding a step farther, they declared the Consistory incompetent in time to come to pronounce sentences of Excommunication at all; transferring the right to do so from the Ecclesiastical Assembly to the Minor Council of the State.

This was felt by Calvin as the heaviest blow that had yet been dealt him. Of course he opposed the measure with all his might. Heard in opposition to its adoption, he declared that if it were maintained the very foundations of the Reformation, in so far as Religion was concerned, would be compromised. But all his eloquence was thrown away; after long and eager discussion the decree was finally confirmed. Disgusted with the opposition he encountered at every point, Calvin—though he soon shows that he is anxious to free himself from any suspicion of the kind—appears at the time to have had serious thoughts of throwing up his charge and abandoning the city of Geneva to its own evil devices. It was probably the consciousness that if he left Geneva he would seem to be turning his back on the whole of the Reform movement, which kept him from taking the extreme step he may probably have meditated. He had become accustomed, moreover, to play the despot, and he who has once indulged in the bitter sweets of arbitrary power scarcely retires otherwise than by compulsion into the shade of private life. And then, whither was he to betake himself? Not to France, though he still looked with longing eyes towards his native country; for open heresy, such as he must have felt himself bound to profess, there led inevitably to the stake; neither to Germany, where his own peculiar views were not popular, and the several centres of the great and glorious movement towards light and freedom, brought to a head by Luther, were all adequately occupied. He must stay at Geneva, then, his ‘coign of vantage;’ abide the storm of the present, and hope for better days to come. But it was in bitterness of heart, waiting till reaction had spent itself, and his voice could again be heard as the voice of authority.

It was at this moment precisely, whilst debate and dispute, ecclesiastical and civil, were at their height, that Michael Servetus reached Geneva, and altogether unwittingly and unwillingly on his part became a subject of contention between the party of free thought, now in open rebellion against Calvin and the more rigid of his blind or compliant followers. And we shall possibly see reason to conclude that Servetus, though tried for heresy and finally condemned and done to death by slow fire for blasphemy against God, was in some measure also the victim of the political situation—the scape-goat of the two parties contending for supremacy in Geneva. Had there been less of political rancour there in the year 1553, and Servetus been allowed competent counsel to defend him, it seems to us, on the most careful consideration of the whole subject, that the proceedings would not have been suffered to take the turn they did, which led inevitably to his condemnation to death, whilst the memory of Calvin would have escaped the portentous blot that goes so far to obscure all the other great qualities that attach to his name. The world might then have had triumphs within the domain of physical science other than the discovery of the lesser circulation of the blood, from the man of genius; and the Reformation—type of the holy cause of human progress—have advanced without the lamentable compromise of principle it suffered when its leaders sent one of the very foremost men of his age to the stake.

In presence of the individual he had come to look on as his personal enemy as well as the enemy of God, Calvin appears to have forgotten all his earlier aspirations after toleration. He was not now thinking of himself as editor of ‘Seneca on Clemency,’ when to the text of his author enjoining self-control or moderation of mind—animi temperantia—having the power to take vengeance, he adds: ‘It belongs to the nature of the merciful man that he not only uses opportunities of vengeance with moderation, but does not avail himself of even the most tempting occasions to take revenge;’[69]—a noble sentence, but written in days long past, when he saw persecution for conscience sake inaugurated by Francis I. Neither had he himself as author of the earlier editions of the ‘Institutions’ in his mind, where he is as emphatic in denouncing the ‘Right of the Sword’ in dealing with heresy as he was now, having become the spiritual dictator of Geneva, ready to call it at all times into requisition. Calvin’s natural temperament, in fact, disposed him to severity in furtherance of his purposes and his will. We have seen him in his letter to Farel of February 1546, threatening Servetus with death, did opportunity serve; and writing to a French lady—Madame de Cany—about or a little before the time that now engages us, in referring to some one who had behaved ungratefully both to his correspondent and himself, he says: ‘I assure you, madam, that had he not taken himself off so speedily, I should have held it my duty, in so far as it lay with me, to have had him burned alive.’[70]