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

by Robert Willis

I. and II. That about twenty-four years ago he began to trouble the Churches of Germany with his errors and heresies, and published an execrably heretical book by which he infected many, and for which he had been condemned and forced to fly the country that he might escape punishment.

To this Servetus replies: That he is not conscious of having troubled any of the Churches of Germany; and though he owns that he had published a little book at Hagenau, he is not aware that he had infected anyone, and certainly was never either tried or condemned for anything he had done in Germany, neither had he been forced to fly from that country to escape punishment.

III. and IV. Item: That he has not ceased since then from spreading abroad his poison, in annotations to the Bible and to the Geography of Ptolemy, and more recently in a second book, clandestinely printed, containing an infinity of blasphemies, &c.

Replies: That it is true he wrote notes to the Bible and to Ptolemy; but thinks he said nothing in them that is not good; and in the book lately printed, he does not believe that he blasphemes; but if it be shown him that he says anything amiss he is ready to amend it.

V. Item: That having been imprisoned at Vienne, when he saw that the authorities there would not accept of his retractations, he had found means to escape from prison.

Replies: That he was indeed prisoner at Vienne, having been denounced to the authorities there by Monsieur Calvin and Guillaume Trie, and had made his escape from prison, because the Priests would have burned him alive had he stayed; the prison, however, having been so kept that it seemed as though the authorities meant him to save himself.

VI., VII., VIII. Item: That he had written, published, and said that to believe there were three distinct persons: Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, in the single essence of God was to forge or feign so many phantoms; to have a God parted into three, like the three-headed Cerberus of the heathen poets; all this being said in the face of such doctors of the Church as Ambrose, Augustin, Chrysostom, Athanasius, and the rest, as well as of many holy men of the present day—Melanchthon among the number, whom he had called a Belial and Satan.

Replies: That in the book he wrote on the Trinity, he had followed the teaching of the Doctors who lived immediately after Christ and the Apostles; that he believes in a Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Ghost—but owns that he does not attach the same meaning to the word person as do modern writers; and though he admits that he spoke of Melanchthon in the terms stated, it was not in any printed book or in public, but in a private letter; whilst Melanchthon, on his part, and in a printed book, had used language of the same kind towards him.

IX. to XX. and XXVI. The whole of these articles, with wearisome prolixity and iteration, refer to the transcendental theological dogmas that touch on the way and manner in which Christ is to be regarded as the Son of God; the relationship in which He stands to the ‘Word’ of the Gospel according to John, and how the Word was made Flesh; in what respect Christ is God, and in what respect he is Man, and how, as the Son of God, he could have died like a man. To these recondite propositions Servetus replies in a way that has a sufficient look of orthodoxy, and was evidently intended by him so to appear. He avows his belief in the items generally on which he is challenged with unbelief; and it may be that he could do so with a clear conscience, he putting his own interpretation on the language he used. Christ he acknowledged as the Son of God, but this was because of his having been begotten in some mysterious way by the Deity in the womb of the Virgin Mary, He not having existed actually but only potentially in the mind of God before the epoch of his incarnation. Christ, however, he says, was prefigured by the angels who make their appearance from time to time in the Hebrew Scriptures. When persons are spoken of, further, they are to be thought of as images, formalities, not real entities or individuals; so that the three persons he acknowledges in the Godhead are but so many dispensations, modes, or manifestations which the Invisible God makes of himself in creation.

XXIV., XXV. and XXXV. These articles bear upon Servetus’s conceptions of the Deity, in whose Oneness of Being he declares that he yet acknowledges not merely three hypostases, as generally said, but a hundred thousand dispositions or dispensations, so that God is part of ourselves, we part of His Spirit; the ideas or patterns of all creatures and of all things having been eternally present in the Divine Mind, though they only acquired form and substance in Creation.