After the suspension of the early sitting of the 16th in consequence of the stormy scene between Berthelier and Colladon, and a pause to permit the minds of all to regain a state of calm befitting the circumstances, proceedings of an informal kind only were taken later in the day. These are interesting, nevertheless, because of the recommendation of the Judges to Calvin in sequence to his avowal of himself as virtual prosecutor, to use every fair endeavour to bring the prisoner to what were thought to be better views, as well as to furnish the Court with further and more satisfactory evidence of his heretical guiltiness. To this end Calvin was requested by the Court to visit the prisoner, ‘the better to show him his errors—affin que myeux luy puyssent estre remonstrées ses erreurs: to assist him, à assister luy, and to do what he could with him in respect of the interrogatories put to him, et qu’il vouldra avec luy aux interrogatoires. This surely is both interesting and important. The Court would have spared the man, and given him an opportunity of coming to an understanding with the prosecutor on the difficult matters in debate between them. We shall accordingly find by-and-by that Calvin, accompanied by a number of ministers, in compliance with the benevolent intentions of the Court, paid Servetus a visit in prison; but with results that might have been foreseen—not only not advantageous to him, but damaging in the highest degree to his interests.
On the resumption of proceedings next day, August 17, Calvin took his seat on the Bench, and under him, in the area, were seen a number of ministers, his colleagues, specially introduced, as said, to show the prisoner his errors, but all, like their leader, we fear, rather bent on convicting the dangerous heretic than hopeful of convincing and winning over the mistaken theologian.
Colladon, as counsel for the prosecution, now went on with his interrogatories as at the last meeting; and various particulars which had hitherto remained in the shade were brought prominently forward. Among others it was positively averred that the prisoner had been tried and condemned in Germany, a point only hinted at before; and passages from private letters by Melanchthon and Œcolampadius were quoted in support of the allegation. In these the severest censure is certainly passed on the views of the prisoner; but, as he observed, the adverse opinions of the Reformers referred to by no means implied that he had ever been the subject of any judicial trial or condemnation in Germany; a remark for which Colladon had no better rejoinder than to say that had he and his printer been apprehended and tried, they would undoubtedly have been condemned.
Questioned as to who was the printer of his book on ‘Trinitarian Error,’ he said it was Joannes Secerius of Hagenau. On this, Colladon went on to say that the book was full of heretical poison, and that it was impossible it should not have infected many persons. But there was no evidence adduced to show that it had; and it is not unimportant to observe that Colladon’s statements here are based on a document which is not before the Court, a copy of the book on ‘Trinitarian Error,’ though eagerly sought after, as we have seen, not being anywhere to be found.
On the note or scholium in the Ptolemy, calling in question the truth of the Bible account of Judæa as a land flowing with milk and honey, on which he was challenged, Servetus declared that it was not by him, but quoted from another writer, adding incautiously, from himself, however, that the note contained nothing reprehensible or that was not true. This aroused the ire of Calvin, who now interposed, not certainly in agreement with the recommendation of the Court to show the prisoner that he had been led into error through false information, as he might have done, but to declare that he who approved the words of another characterising Judæa as no land flowing with milk and honey, but as meagre, barren, and inhospitable, necessarily inculpated Moses; and that to use such language was egregiously to outrage the Holy Ghost.
Servetus, however, would not agree to this, coolly denying any such conclusion; insomuch so, as Calvin himself tells us, in no very choice terms, that ‘the villainous cur—ce vilain chien—though put to shame by the obvious reasons adduced, did but wipe his muzzle, ne fit que torcher son museau, and say: Let us go on, there is no harm here—passons oultre, il n’y a poynt là de mal’.[76]
Another important article of the impeachment brought into prominence in this day’s proceedings was from among the prisoner’s annotations to the reprint of Santes Pagnini’s Bible, which he supervised, as we know, for Hugo de la Porte, the publisher of Lyons. This Bible was said by the prosecution to be encumbered with many glosses or comments totally opposed to the Faith; the one most notably so of all perhaps being appended to the thirty-third chapter of Isaiah, where the servant of God who took on himself the sins of the people is spoken of by the Prophet. ‘This passage,’ said Calvin, ‘is referred by the prisoner to Cyrus, whilst every Christian Church refers it to Jesus Christ.’ But Servetus was again bold enough to maintain his position in so far as to say that the interpretation he had given of the passage was borne out in some sort by the opinions of the old Doctors of the Church, who acknowledged, as he said, a twofold sense in the Scriptures—one, literal and historical, applying to contemporaneous personages and events; another, mystical and prophetic, bearing on Christ and the future. ‘In speaking of the individual referred to, as he had done, and calling him Cyrus, he said that he nevertheless held the prophetical and most important bearing of the text to be on Christ.’ But this did not satisfy Calvin. He would by no means accept such an explanation, and far from attempting by reason and kindness to win the prisoner to views which he himself believed to be more in conformity with the truth, he launched out in passion, and declared that ‘the prisoner would never have had the hardihood thus villainously to corrupt so grand a passage had he not, abandoning all shame, taken he knew not what diabolical pleasure in getting rid of the whole Christian faith.’ The cool way in which Servetus stood this outburst appears to have irritated the Reformer extremely. Servetus was in truth far in advance of Calvin and his age in his exegesis. He was not blind, like all about him, to the true import of the Hebrew writings styled prophetical, but divined their only possible bearing upon events and individuals contemporaneous with their writers—in some cases even past and gone. It was to escape doing violence to the idea of the inspiration under which Servetus credited these ancient writings to have been composed, that he acknowledged a prospective reference to incidents still in the womb of far distant time.
The printing of the ‘Christianismi Restitutio’ was next adduced and made a principal topic of accusation against the prisoner. To the question what object he had proposed to himself in having the book printed, he replied that his main purpose was to ventilate his opinions and have them controverted in case they were seen to be erroneous. But Calvin rejoined that it was by no means necessary to print in order to obtain correction of erroneous opinions, and this more especially in a case such as his, where, as writer, he had already been admonished of his errors.
The delicate, difficult, and most essential element in the impeachment, that, namely, having reference to the Doctrine of the Trinity, was now and again brought into the foreground. Particularly questioned on this subject, Servetus maintained, that previous to the Council of Nicæa no Doctor of the Church had used the word Trinity; and that if the Fathers did acknowledge a distinction in the Divine Essence, it was not real but formal; that the persons were nothing more in truth than dispensations or modes, not distinct entities or persons in the usual acceptation of that word. If he had called the Doctrine of the Trinity, as commonly understood, a dream of St. Augustine and an invention of the Devil, which he did not deny; if he had further characterised the Trinity of modern theologians as a three-headed monster, like the Cerberus of the poets, and styled those who overlooked the true Trinity, which he himself recognised, as Tritheists, it was solely because he believed the unity of God to be denied or annulled by such a procedure. Colladon on this—and prompted we may presume by Calvin—maintained that the views imputed to the Fathers of the Church by the prisoner were false as well as mischievous, and that he could adduce none but apocryphal writings full of absurdities in support of what he said.
Most of the other views and opinions of the prisoner which were quoted as heretical in the act of impeachment were either owned to by him, interpreted in the way he understood them, or were taken as proven by the Court; passages in support of this conclusion having been referred to not only in the printed copy of the ‘Restoration of Christianity,’ but in the manuscript sent privately six years before to Calvin for his strictures. There is one particular, however, not mentioned in the record of proceedings, but given by Calvin,[77] that is not uninteresting, as showing the extreme pantheistic views to which Servetus had attained, and may have prejudiced him not a little in the eyes of his Judges, the air of offensive absurdity which the pantheistic doctrine—adversely understood—assumes when pushed to extremes, being made so prominently to appear. The question had turned on the relations between the Divine substance and the substance of creatures and things. ‘All things, all creatures,’ said Servetus, ‘are portions of the substance of God.’ Speaking in his own person, and interposing at this point, Calvin says: ‘Annoyed as I was by so palpable an absurdity, I answered: What, poor man, did one stamp on this floor with his foot and say he trod on God, would not you be horrified in having subjected the Majesty of God to such unworthy usage?’ He, on this, replied: ‘I have not a doubt but that this bench, this table, and all you can point to around us, is of the substance of God.’ When it was then objected to him that on such showing the Devil must be of God substantially; he, smiling impudently, said: ‘Do you doubt it? For my part,’ continued he, ‘I hold it as a general proposition that all things whatsoever are part and parcel of God, and that nature at large is His substantial manifestation.’ Calvin, we imagine, might have spared Servetus on this head when we call to mind how he commits himself to pantheistic views in that passage of his ‘Institutions’ we have already referred to, where he says he only objects to call Nature God because of the harshness and impropriety of the expression. He might further, with reference to the Devil, have bethought him of the verse of Isaiah xlv. 7, where these words occur as coming from Jehovah himself: ‘I form the Light and create Darkness; I make peace and create evil.’ Or of this from Amos iii. 6: ‘Shall there be evil in a city and the Lord hath not done it?’ Or yet this of Ezekiel xx. 25: ‘I gave them statutes that were not good,’ &c. The Jews, through by far the greater part of their history, as a people acknowledged no Dualism in their Deity, as, indeed, they only looked on their God Jahveh as the greatest among the Gods. He was the good and the evil principle in one. But it is easy to imagine the damaging impression which Servetus’s logical but terribly unorthodox statement must have made on the minds of his Judges, ill-informed presumably as they were on such questions. Had Calvin been minded to help instead of determined to crush Servetus, he might even have quoted Luther, who speaks in this wise in his Table Talk: ‘God is present in all created things, and so in the smallest leaflet and tiniest poppy-seed—Gott also gegenwärtig ist in allen Creaturen; auch im geringsten Blättlein und Mohnkörnlein.’