But turn we to our Articles, which we proceed to pass under review in connection with the answers made to them by Servetus. In these we shall now find him more intemperate than he has yet shown himself; more aggressive, too; not only indisposed to yield in jot or tittle, but negligent of opportunities to defend his conclusions, and eager to attack his pursuer; ready to call him opprobrious names, and to charge him with wilful misrepresentation and malignity. The recent triumph of Perrin and Berthelier had obviously infected Servetus, and not only lost him his chance of continuing to improve his position with his judges, but even made him careless of making any serious effort to prove himself in the right.
At the very outset of his replies, and by way of preface, assuming the Articles to be Calvin’s and Calvin’s alone, Servetus says: ‘It is impossible not to admire the impudence of the man, who is nothing less than a disciple of Simon Magus, arrogating to himself the authority of a Doctor of the Sorbonne, condemning everything according to his fancy, scarcely quoting Scripture for aught he advances, and either plainly not understanding me or artfully wresting my words from their true significance. I am therefore compelled, before replying to his Articles, to say, in brief, that the whole purpose of my book is to show, first, that when the word Son is met with in Scripture it is always to the man Jesus that the term is applied, he having also the title Christ given him; and, second, that the Son or second Person in the Trinity is spoken of as a person because there was visibly relucent in the Deity a Representation or Image of the man Jesus Christ, hypostatically subsisting in the Divine mind from eternity. It is because this rationale of the Person is unknown to Calvin, and because the whole thing depends thereon, that I refer as preliminary to certain passages from the ancient Doctors of the Church on which I rest my conclusions.’
Passages sixteen in number, from Tertullian, Irenæus, Clemens Romanus, and others, are then cited to justify the sense he attaches to the words Person and Son; from which we see that Servetus, following his authorities, adopts the Neo-platonic view of the Son as a pre-existing idea in the Divine mind, not as an entity distinct from the essence of God, having a proper life and subsistence of its own, and only proceeding in time to become incarnate in the man Jesus.
We were interested, of course, in referring to these passages from the Fathers (they are given at length in Calvin’s Refutation); and, though disappointed in finding them less cogent and conclusive than we had expected, we yet discover the germs of almost all that is more fully developed by Servetus in connection with the subjects of which they speak. ‘Tertullian,’ says he, ‘declares, that to conform with things human, God, in former times, assumed human senses and affections, and made himself visible to man in the divinity of Christ; and that the words Person and Son of God are used in Scripture because God, invisible, intangible in himself, was made visible in Christ. He who spoke with Adam in the garden, with Noah, with Abraham, and came down to see what the Babylonians were about, and so on, was no other than Christ or a prefiguration of Christ. He who spoke with Moses, too, at different times was Christ—the Relucent visible Image or Figuration of the invisible Deity. In the essence of God there is no real distinction between the Father and the Son; they do not constitute two invisible entities such as the Tritheiti imagine; it is no more than a formal distinction that is made between the invisible Father and the visible Son. It is the idea of prolation or procession of one thing out of another that has given occasion to certain dispositions, dispensations, or modes in the Deity being turned into so many entities, and so into a Trinity of Persons. Quoting St. Paul, Tertullian says that “in the face of Christ is seen the very light of God;” and to this I myself refer repeatedly in my Third Book on the Trinity; but Calvin, persisting in his blindness, will not see God thus.’
From Irenæus we find little that is not repetition of what is said by Tertullian. ‘The Jews,’ he says, ‘did not know that he who spoke with Adam and Abraham and Moses in human form, was the Word, the Son of God. But Jesus, as the Image, as the Word, was then the Divine manifestation of God, being at once, but without real distinction, both Word and Spirit; for in the spiritual substance of the Father was comprised the figuration and representation of the Word. Abraham was taught and knew that the Angel who visited him was the representative of the Word which was, or was to be, the future man, the Son of God—dost hear, Calvin?—the Word was the figuration of the man Jesus! The Word is always spoken of as something visible; so that when John says, “In the beginning was the Word,” we are to understand the prefiguration of Christ in the Deity: invisible in himself, God the Father is visible in the Son. The Logos and the Spirit imply nothing of personal distinction in God so that, when it is said, “God made all things by his Word,” it is himself as Creator, and not another, that is to be understood: the Word and the Holy Ghost are not to be thought of as distinct entities, but as dispositions in God.’
| Articles. | Replies. |
|---|---|
| I.-IV. Servetus, says Calvin, maintains that all who believe in a Trinity in the essence of God are Tritheists, or have three Gods instead of one God; or they are Atheists, and properly have no God at all, their God being tripartite or aggregative, not absolute. That the three Persons of the Trinity are Phantoms; and that there should be distinct entities in the one God is a thing impossible; so that a Trinity of Persons in an Unity of Being is a dream. Further: That the Jews, resting on numerous authorities, wonder at the Tripartite Deity we acknowledge; and, yet more, That it was the admission of real distinctions in the Incorporeal Deity which led Mahomet to deny Christ. | I.-IV. From the authors quoted, it is evident that in the Essence and Oneness of God there is no real distinction into three invisible entities. That there is a figurative or personal distinction between the Invisible Father and the Visible Son, however, I admit; so that in this way I religiously believe in a Trinity, though denying it as usually understood. The truth of what I say about the Jews and Mahometans, I maintain to be amply borne out by history and what we see among the Turks of the present time. |
| V. To colour his infamous opinions, he speaks of a personal distinction in the Godhead; but this is external only, not internal, or inherent in the Essence of God; the Word, according to him, having been Ideal Reason from the beginning—mere Reflection, Figure, or Semblance; Person only in the sense of appearance; and that this prefigured the future Man, Jesus Christ. | V. I have always acknowledged the subsistence of the Son in God, both externally and internally. And you contradict yourself; for if the Reason was Ideal, then was it Internal. It plainly appears you know not what you say. |
| VI. Confounding the Persons, the Wisdom of Scripture is said to have been formerly both Word and Spirit, no real distinction being acknowledged between them; the mystery of the Word and Spirit being defined to have been the effulgent glory of Christ. | VI. Irenæus thus interprets the matter; Wisdom, he says, was the Holy Spirit. So does Tertullian. Solomon understands the wisdom that was given him as the Holy Spirit. And in my Eighth Letter, I show that the whole mystery of the Word and the Spirit was to the glory of Christ, because in him was the plenitude both of the Word and the Spirit. O wretched man, thus to go on condemning what you do not understand! |
| VII. Denying any real distinction in the Persons of the Godhead Christ is said to have been invested with such glory as to be not only God of God, but very God from whom another God might proceed. | VII. Did I say another God? I meant another mode of Deity. But if it offend you that I say another God, say another Person [i.e. as Servetus understands the word, another manifestation] of Deity. Why quote that against me which I have myself corrected? But you show your candour on all occasions! |
| VIII. Christ is said to be the Son of God not only and in as much as he was engendered by God in the womb of the Virgin Mary; and this, not by the virtue of the Holy Ghost, but by God of his proper substance. | VIII. Is not he rightly called the son of him by whom he is begotten? Therefore do I say that God from eternity and of his substance produced [protulit] this Son; and therefore is he said to be of God naturally. |
| IX. The Word of God coming down from heaven, is said to have been the flesh of Christ; so that the flesh of Christ is from heaven, his body being the body of God, his soul the soul of God; both his soul and body having existed from Eternity in the proper substance of Deity. | IX. The Word, I say, is now the flesh of Christ by hypostatical union. I say well, therefore, that the flesh of Christ is from heaven, and indeed is the heavenly Manna. What else I say, I admit in the sense in which I conceive it. You fasten on such things as these, and neglect the main truth! |
| X. The essence of the soul and body of Christ is declared to be the Deity of the Word and the Spirit, and Christ to have existed from the beginning in respect of his body as well as his soul, the substance of the Deity being not only in the soul but in the body of Christ. | X. Essence is spoken of as that by which anything is sustained. Art thou not ashamed to calumniate me, or dost thou think that with thy savage barking thou wilt dull the ears of the Judges? |
| XI. As if to show that to him the divinity of Christ is mere mockery, he says that it means the wisdom, the power, and the splendour of God; as if it were only a certain wisdom and power that in him was excelling. | XI. You do unjustly ever; you quote me falsely. I do not say what you charge me with saying. and the splendour of God; as if it were only a certain wisdom and power that in him was excelling. |
| XII. The man Jesus is said to have been from the beginning in his proper person and substance, in or with God; and yet two persons are elsewhere ascribed to Christ. | XII. What you say first is most true, and I wish you understood it. Christ in himself is one person; but in him verily is the Holy Spirit, who is also a person. |
| XIII. Having said that the Word of God was made man, he says that this Word was the Seed of Christ; also that it was different from the Son; and that the Word by which the world was created, was produced by the grace of God; whence it would follow that Christ was not the Word in question. It is said, further, that the Word of God was the Dew, the natural engenderer of Christ in the womb of the Virgin, similar to the generative element of animals; and, yet further, that the Son of God was naturally begotten of the Holy Ghost by the Word. | XIII. I speak here as do Tertullian, Irenæus, Philo, and others. In the passage you quote, the Word is taken for the voice from heaven saying, ‘This is the Son of God.’ Who does not see that the Word of God is something other than the man his Son? You have not read me aright, neither do you understand me. What else you say, I admit. |
| XIV. The Word of God is said to be itself the seed generative of Christ; and as the generative element is in creatures, so is it in the Deity, in whom was the seed of the Word before the son was conceived of Mary; the paternal element in God acting in the engenderment of Christ in the same way as that of our fathers in us. | XIV. All this I admit. God acted as generator in the way I explain in my first Dialogue. [The Celestial influence overshadowing the Virgin acted in her as the dew or the rain of heaven acts on the ground, and brings forth herb and flower.] |
| XV. The Divine Word, it is said, mingling with created elements, was the agent in the generation of Christ. The divine and the human elements coalescing, there came forth the one hypostasis of the Spirit of Christ, which is the hypostasis of the Holy Ghost; though it had been asserted previously that the three elements in Christ were of the substance of the Father. | XV. I grant everything here if you understand what you say as having reference to the paternal elements, so called because of their existence as ideal reason in God. |
| XVI. To corrupt what the Apostle says—viz. that Christ did not take on himself the nature of the angels, but that of the seed of Abraham—it is said, by way of explanation, that he delivered us from death. | XVI. I corrupt nothing, but accept both interpretations; you, however, quote everything falsely and teach falsely also. |
| XVII. God, he says, is father of the Holy Ghost. But this is nothing less than to confound the persons—even such persons as he feigns. | XVII. The confounding is in your own mind, so that you cannot comprehend the truth. |
| XVIII. Playing with the word Person, he says there was one sole personal image or face, which was the person of Christ in God, and was also communicated to the angels. | XVIII. I play fast and loose with nothing. I make use of the language of those I quote, which you treacherously pervert. |
| XIX. As from either parent there are in us three elements, so are there three in Christ; but in him the material element is derived from the mother only. Whence it would follow that Christ had not a body like to ours, and this were to do away with our Redemption. | XIX. The body of Christ, I say, is like to ours, sin excepted; excepted also this: that his body is participant of Deity. |
| XX. The celestial Dew, overshadowing the Virgin and mingling with her blood, transformed her human matter into God. | XX. The Transformation referred to here is Glorification. |
| XXI. Confounding the two natures, he says that the created and uncreated light were in Christ one light; and that of the Divine Spirit and the human Soul there was constituted one substantial Soul in Christ; so that the substance of the flesh and the substance of the Word were one substance. | XXI. He, I say, who is of and in God, is with Him one Spirit. Is there confusion when two unite in one? Are soul and body confounded when they constitute an individual man? Wretch that thou art, thou dost not understand the principles of things! [See the letter to which this remark gave occasion.] |
| XXII. Partaking of the nature of God and man, Jesus Christ, it is said, cannot be spoken of as a creature, but as a partaker of the nature of creatures. | XXII. And what then? |
| XXIII. One and the same Divineness which is in the Father, it is said, was communicated immediately, bodily, to his Son, Jesus Christ; from whom, mediately, by the ministry of the Angelic Spirit, it was communicated to the Apostles. That in Christ only is Deity implanted bodily and spiritually; all of the Divine that others have, being given through him by a holy substantial halitus, or breath. | XXIII. This, I say, is the Truth. |
| XXIV. As the Word went into the flesh of Christ, so, it is said, did the Holy Ghost enter into the souls of the Apostles. | XXIV. In some sort, in a certain way, as I show in the place you refer to. |
| XXV. Confounding the Persons, he asserts that the λὀγος was naturally, voluntarily, ideal reason and procession,—the resplendence of Christ with God, the Spirit of Christ with God, and the light of Christ with God; whence it would follow that the λὀγος was nothing substantial, inasmuch as it was the figure only of a thing that was not yet in being, and yet did not differ from the Spirit. | XXV. You confound yourself in what you say, and do not understand what you speak about—as if that which subsisted hypostatically in God was no real substance! |
| XXVI. Before the advent of Christ, he says, there was no visible hypostasis of the Spirit. Whence it would follow that there was neither hypostasis nor real person, seeing that there can be no person that is not visible, as he declares in his book and asserts in his answers; speaking also, as he does in another place, of the Spirit of God, as The Shadow in the Creation of the world. | XXVI. Person in the Word is called a visible hypostasis, and in the Spirit is spoken of as a perceptible hypostasis. |
| XXVII. As all things are said by Servetus to be in God, so and in the same order were they in God before creation, Christ being first and foremost of all—such being the kind of Eternity he allows to the Son of God. Further, that God, by his Eternal Wisdom, decreeing to himself from Eternity a visible Son, gives effect to his decree by means of the Word. | XXVII. All this is good, and you would see it so were you not perversely minded. |
| XXVIII. Christ, he says, so long as he abode in the flesh, had not yet received the new Spirit which was to be his portion after the resurrection, and was verily afterwards imparted to him; so that he now possesses hypostatically the glory both of the Word and the Spirit, prefigured by the dove descending on him in Jordan. | XXVIII. There is nothing here that is not true, would you but be willing to understand it. |
| XXIX. In God, he maintains, there are no parts and partitions as in creatures, but Dispensations, and this in such wise that in the partition or imparting of the Spirit every portion is God. Beside this, he says that our spirits substantially are from Eternity, and so are consubstantial and coeternal; although he elsewhere declares that the spirit wherewith we are enlightened may be extinguished. | XXIX. All you say here at first is true; but I do not say that the Spirit of God in itself is extinguished, because, when we die, the spirit departs from us. |
| XXX. The Divine Spirit, it is said, was infused into us in the beginning by the breath of God. | XXX. This is most true; and you, miserable man, deluded by Simon Magus, ignorest it. Making a slave of our will, you turn us into stocks and stones. |
| XXXI. When we find it stated in the Law that the Spirit of God is in any one, this is not to be taken as meaning the Spirit of regeneration. | XXXI. The words quoted, I say, are for the most part so to be understood. |
| XXXII. Angels, he says, were worshipped by the Jews of old; so that he calls Angels their Gods; but, this being so, the true God could never have been worshipped by them—by Abraham in particular—but Angels, only, prefiguring Christ. | XXXII. Almost everything, I say, presented itself to the Jews in the way of Figure. |
| XXXIII. Admitting that Christ or the Word had no hypostatic [actual] existence from the beginning, he nevertheless declares that Angels and the Elect were verily in God from the first. | XXXIII. What you mix up and make me say here, is false. Nothing created—no creature—existed before the moment of its creation. |
| XXXIV. He maintains that the Deity is present substantially in all creatures. | XXXIV. God, I say, is present in all creatures by his essence and power, and himself sustains all things. |
| XXXV. Having mixed up many vain, perverse, and pernicious dreams about the substance of Souls, he concludes at length that the Soul is from God and of his substance; that a created inspiration was infused into it along with its divineness; and that in respect of substance it was united through the Holy Spirit by a new inspiration into one light with God. | XXXV. Take away the words, of his substance, you will find the rest to be true; and that it is you yourself who dream with Simon Magus. |
| XXXVI. Though the soul is not primarily God, yet does it become Divine or is made God by the Spirit, which, indeed, is very God, so that it is improper to doubt that our Souls and the Holy Spirit conjoined with Christ are of the same elementary substance as the Word conjoined with the flesh. Further, that created and uncreated things combine and unite in one substance of Soul and Spirit. | XXXVI. This is so; many things thus unite in one—bones, flesh, nerves, soul, spirit, and form, for instance, to make the one substance of Man. |
| XXXVII. He has written and published horrible blasphemies against the Baptism of Infants, and has said that mortal sin is not committed before the age of twenty years. | XXXVII. I own to having written so; but when you have convinced me that I am in error in this, I will not only acknowledge my fault, but kiss the ground under your feet. |
| XXXVIII. The Soul, he says, was made mortal by sin, even as the flesh is mortal—not meaning to say that the Soul is annihilated, but that deprived by pain of the vital actions of the body, it languishes, and is shut up in hell as if it were to live no more. Thence he concludes that the Regenerate have souls other than they had before, new substance, new divineness being added to them [by the Water of Baptism]. | XXXVIII. The passage you quote against me, shows that you act perfidiously. I there say that it is as if the Soul died, and, languishing, is detained in Hell. But if it languishes, it still lives. See what I have elsewhere said of the ‘Survival of the Soul,’ pp. 76, 229, and 718 [of the Chr. Rest]. The souls of the regenerate, I say, are other than they were before; even as a thing is said to be new or altered by the accession of new properties.[93] |
But enough of this—more than enough, indeed, is before the reader to enable him to judge of the kind of matter that never yet influenced man in his conduct towards either God or his fellow, on which Michael Servetus was adjudged to die.
The answers of Servetus to the incriminated passages of his book are obviously by no means either so full or so satisfactory as he might easily have made them; neither are they always so worded as unequivocally to express his proper views; but of more moment than all, they are given without the references to Scripture which the Court had suggested, and would certainly have had greater weight with it than aught else that could be urged. Though he uses the words person and hypostasis, we know that he did not understand them in the same way as theologians generally. He did not acknowledge any proper personality in the nature of God, who to him was invisible, all-pervading Essence, inscrutable too, save as manifesting and making himself known in Creation. Servetus’s persons and hypostases are modes or manifestations of God in nature, and, not limited to three, are, in truth, infinite in number, and proclaimed in an infinity of ways. To accommodate himself in some sort to such conceptions as were current on the subject of the Trinity, he uses language at times which it seems might fairly bring him within the pale of orthodoxy, were we not aware of the arbitrary meaning he attaches to the terms employed: God, Father, all-pervading Being; Christ, Son, visible manifestation of God to man; Holy Ghost, Angel—ἐνέργεια, actuating force in nature. Such, as we understand him, was the kind of Trinity formulated by Servetus.
The answers of the prisoner to the new articles of incrimination were now ordered by the Court, which has nothing to say to them itself, to be put into the hands of the Reformer for his strictures. This gave Calvin the opportunity which he did not fail to turn to the best advantage. Treating Servetus’s Replies in a very different spirit from that in which the Spaniard had treated his Articles, he proceeded elaborately to criticise and refute them; in other words, and more properly, to demonstrate the incongruity and incompatibility of Servetus’s admitted beliefs and opinions touching the transcendental propositions involved, with the orthodox conclusions of himself and the Churches generally. To a theologian like Calvin such a task presented no difficulties; but the thoroughness of his exposition or refutation, and the length to which it runs, assure us of the pains he bestowed on the work. Calvin is said to have spent no more than two or three days in the composition of this elaborate paper; had the time been two months and more, it would have been little, and few men, we apprehend, could have got through the work in less time.
Signed by as many as thirteen ministers beside himself—for Calvin would not forego the backing of his colleagues in such a cause—the Refutation of the prisoner’s replies to his prosecutor’s Articles of Inculpation was laid before the Court at their next meeting; and in a spirit of entire judicial fairness, was by them ordered to be forthwith submitted to the prisoner, for his observations in assent to, or dissent from, the interpretations put upon his words. He was even particularly told, as he had been before, that he was at liberty to answer in the way and at the length he pleased.