Yesterday (September 26), (writes Haller of Berne, to Bullinger of Zürich) we received the documents in the case of Servetus, and have since been studying them in view of our reply. But we should like to know what your answer is before we send ours. We therefore entreat you immediately to inform us of its tenor. Yet wherefore so much ado! the man is a heretic, and the Church must get rid of him. Let me, however, I beseech you, speedily know the conclusion you have come to.
The Zürich pastor would seem to have been the most active of all the ministers in collecting and imparting information of a kind that would lead to unanimity of conclusion among the Churches and Councils. His friend, Ambrose Blaurer, acknowledging receipt of a letter from him communicating the decision of Zürich, says that he ‘had thought the pestilent Servetus, whose book he had read twenty years ago, must long since have been dead and buried.’ But the self-righteous man must add further: ‘We are surely tried by heresies and satanic abortions of the sort, in order that they who are steadfast in the faith may be made known.’ Sulzer of Basle has also been primed by him of Zürich, for, in reply to the intimation he has received of what has been done, he says that he, Sulzer, ‘is rejoiced to have heard of the arrest of Servetus in a quarter where it seems he may be effectually kept from infecting the Church with his heretical dogmas in time to come; although I know there be some who are violently opposed to Calvin’s proceedings, and the subserviency of the Senate in the business.’
So much for the Churches and Councils of the Cantons consulted; and how little the latter were disposed to act, or, indeed, were capable of acting of themselves, and on their own appreciation of the questions submitted to them, is made manifest by the letter which Haller wrote to Bullinger at this time:
I have to give you my best thanks, dear Sir and Brother, for your diligence in communicating with the Genevese [and, of course, with the Bernese also] so speedily. Our Council have been of the same mind as yours in their reply. We, as ordered by them, have exposed the principal errors of Servetus, article by article. When our Councillors had been made aware of their nature, they were so horror-struck, that I have no doubt, had the writer been in prison here, he would have been burned alive. But as the matters in question were very little intelligible to them, they desired that I should reply in a letter as from myself to the Council of Geneva. They added, however, from themselves, that they exhorted the Genevese so to deal with the poison that it should not, by any negligence of theirs, be suffered to spread to neighbouring districts; and, indeed, it has often happened that commotions in Geneva have extended from its walls and got footing within ours. I think I need not send you a copy of our reply, as it agrees so entirely in every respect with your own.
Yours most truly,
J. Haller.Berne: October 19, 1553.
The Churches and Councils consulted, then, were at one in their condemnation of Servetus. But it has been presumed that ecclesiastical conclusion and innuendo backed by civilian assent, might still have failed to bring matters to the issue aimed at by the prosecution, had not political considerations intervened to complicate and sway judicial action. We are ready enough to believe that there was so much common sense in the Senate of Geneva, and such a feeling of the impossibility of attaining to absolute certainty in questions of dogmatic theology, that they were even more indisposed than they plainly show themselves to have been to come to a final decision in the case of their prisoner. But to assume that political considerations had the lead in the condemnation of Servetus, would, we venture to think, be a great mistake. To remove the prosecution from the sphere of theology to that of policy, were to take from it its chief interest and significance. But the arrest was made, the trial was begun, and the sentence was delivered exclusively on theological grounds. The political element that got mixed up with the business, was no more than an accident, and cannot truly be said to have influenced the judgment finally given. The four Swiss cantonal Councils and Churches which condemned Servetus, condemned him on theological grounds alone; they knew little or nothing of the political strife that agitated Geneva, and were not swayed by it in their decision.
Servetus himself, ill-advised and misled by those who had access to him, fully persuaded of the truth of his opinions, and relying on their consonance with Scripture, as he read it, may be said to have left his Judges one way only out of the difficult and delicate position in which they found themselves; and this was by finding him guilty of the theological errors laid to his charge. He appeared to be opposed not only to every religious principle as known to them, and as understood alike by Catholics and Protestants, but he had used such objectionable language in speaking of subjects held so sacred as the Trinity and the Baptism of Infants, that even the most tolerant in the present day would find it inexcusable; how much less warrantable must it have appeared amid the universally prevalent intolerance of three centuries ago! Nevertheless, it may be that the mind of every member of the Council had not yet been made up as to the degree of the prisoner’s guiltiness, or even granting him guilty of everything imputed to him, that he, therefore, deserved to die; and die he must if they so declared him.
All the grounds for a definitive decree being before the Court on their meeting of the 23rd, we must presume that the sense of the members generally as to the guiltiness of the prisoner had been ascertained, and that the opinion of the majority to this effect was only not formulated and pronounced because of the absence of some of the leading Councillors—that of Amied Perrin, the first Syndic, being particularly remarked. An adjournment was therefore moved; but to afford no further excuse for delay in bringing the protracted business of the Servetus Trial to an end, summonses for a special session on the 26th were ordered to be issued. Doubtful of the decision, as it might seem, and anxious for delay in consequence of the tenor of the letters from the Churches, Perrin had absented himself from the meeting of the 23rd, through indisposition, as he said himself, through feigned indisposition, according to Calvin, as we learn from a letter of his to his friend Farel of the 26th, in which he speaks of his great political antagonist by the derisive title of Cæsar comicus. Meantime, the members of the Court present determined to proceed to the gaol, and inform the prisoner of their purpose to have him before them with the least possible delay, to hear their final award. Before taking their leave, and as if to intimate to the unhappy Servetus what was to follow, they placed him under the care of two special warders, who were to hold themselves responsible with their lives for his safe custody.
The unusual visit of his Judges, and the additional guard set over him must, we should imagine, have sent a chill to the heart of the unfortunate Servetus, and gone far to damp out the hope he had been led to entertain either of acquittal or a sentence short of that which he knew Calvin had made up his mind from the first to extort. Yet does he not appear even now to have thought it possible that his Judges would condemn him to death. Self-conscious rectitude alone, and a better belief than it deserved in the world’s will to do justly and mercifully, had blinded him to the fate that awaited him.
During the three days’ pause that now ensued, some faint show of sympathy for the prisoner was manifested outside the walls of the Council chamber; but it came from no one of weight or standing in the Republic. Zebedee, the pastor of Noyon, a known opponent of Calvin on some of his theological tenets, and Gribaldo, an Italian by birth, by profession a lawyer, now a refugee from his home for conscience’ sake, were bold enough to proffer something in his behalf; Gribaldo even going so far as to defend certain of his conclusions, and having a word to say in favour of toleration. But he was not backed by the congregation of his countrymen, domiciled in Geneva, so that the move he made had no result. The show of opposition on the part of the Italian to his sovereign will and pleasure was not, however, forgotten by Calvin. Denounced by him at a later period for irregularity of some sort, in contravention of consistorial law, Gribaldo found it advisable for safety’s sake to quit Geneva.