A History of the Reformation (Vol. 2 of 2)

by Thomas M. Lindsay

Before his arrival in Poland he had published two books, which are interesting because they show the pathway by which Fausto arrived at his theological conclusions. He started not with the doctrines of the Trinity or of the Person of Christ, but with the doctrine of the Atonement—a fact to be kept in mind when the whole Socinian system of theology is examined.

He believed that the real cause of the divisions which wasted the sect was that the Polish Unitarians were largely Anabaptists. They insisted that no one could be a recognised member of the community unless he was rebaptized. They refused to enroll Fausto Sozzini himself, and excluded him from the Sacrament of the Supper, because he would not submit to rebaptism. They declared that no member of their communities could enter the magistracy, or sue in a civil court, or pay a war tax. They disagreed on many small points of doctrine, and used the ban very freely against each other. Sozzini saw that he could not hope to make any progress in his attempts to unite the Unitarians unless he was able to purge out this Anabaptist leaven. His troubles can be seen in his correspondence, and in some of his smaller tracts in the first volume of the Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum.[635] In spite of the rebuffs he met with, he devoted all his energies to the thankless task of furthering union, and in the end of his days he had the satisfaction of seeing that he had not laboured in vain. Shortly before his death, a synod held at Krakau (1603) declared that rebaptism was not necessary for entrance into a Unitarian community. Many of the lesser differences had been got rid of earlier. The literary activity of Sozzini was enormous: books and pamphlets flowed from his untiring pen, all devoted to the enforcing or explaining the Socinian theology. It is not too much to say that the inner history of the Unitarian communities in Poland from 1579 until his death in 1604 is contained in his voluminous correspondence. The united Unitarians of Poland took the name of the Polish Brethren; and from this society what was known as Socinian theology spread through Germany (especially the Rhineland), Switzerland, and England. Its principles were not formulated in a creed until 1642, when the Racovian Catechism was published. It was never formally declared to be the standard of the Unitarian Church, but its statements are universally held to represent the views of the older Socinians.

Socinianism, unlike the great religious movement under the guidance of Luther, had its distinct and definite beginning in a criticism of doctrines, and this must never be forgotten if its true character is to be understood. We have already seen[636] that there is no trace of any intellectual difficulties about doctrines or statement of doctrines in Luther’s mind during the supreme crisis in his spiritual history. Its whole course, from the time he entered the Erfurt convent down to the publication of the Augsburg Confession, shows that the spiritual revolt of which he was the soul and centre took its rise from something much deeper than any mere criticism of the doctrines of the mediæval Church, and that it resulted in something very much greater than a reconstruction of doctrinal conceptions. The central thing about the Protestant Reformation was that it meant a rediscovery of religion as faith, “as a relation between person and person, higher therefore, than all reason, and living not upon commands and hopes, but on the power of God, and apprehending in Jesus Christ the Lord of heaven and earth as Father.”[637] The Reformation started from this living experience of the believing Christian, which it proclaimed to be the one fundamental fact in Christianity—something which could never be proved by argument, and could never be dissolved away by speculation.

On the contrary, the earliest glimpse that we have of Lelio Sozzini is his meeting with friends to discuss and cast doubts upon such doctrines as the Satisfaction of Christ, the Trinity, and others like them.[638] Socinianism maintained to the end the character with which it came into being. It was from first to last a criticism and attempted reconstruction of doctrines.

This is sufficient of itself to discount the usual accounts which Romanist controversialists give of the Socinian movement, and of its relation to the Protestant Reformation. They, and many Anglicans who have no sympathy with the great Reformation movement, are accustomed to say that the Socinian system of doctrines is the legitimate deduction from the principles of the Reformation, and courageously carries out the rationalist conceptions lurking in all Protestant theology. They point to the fact that many of the early Presbyterians of England and Puritans of America have furnished a large number of recruits to the Unitarian or Socinian ranks. They assert that the central point in the Socinian theology is the denial of the Divinity of our Lord, which they allege is the logical outcome of refusing to accept the Romanist doctrine of the Mass and the principle of ecclesiastical tradition.

The question is purely historical, and can only be answered by examining the sources of Socinian theology and tracing it to its roots. The result of such an examination seems to show that, while Socinianism did undoubtedly owe much to Humanism, and to the spirit of critical inquiry and keen sense of the value of the individual which it fostered, most of its distinguishing theological conceptions are mediæval. It laid hold on the leading principles of the Scotist-Pelagian theology, which were extremely popular in the fifteenth and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, and carried them out to their logical consequences. In fact, most of the theological principles of Socinian theology are more akin to those of the Jesuit dogmatic-which is the prolongation of Scotism into modern times—than they are to the theology of Luther or of Calvin. It is, of course, to be remembered that by discarding the authority of the Church the Socinians are widely separated from both Scotists and Jesuits. Still the roots of Socinian theology are to be found in the Scotist doctrines of God and of the Atonement, and these two doctrines are their starting-point, and not the mere negation of the Divinity of Christ.

In three most important conceptions the Socinian thought is distinctly mediæval, and mediæval in the Scotist way.

Their idea of faith is intellectual. It is assensus and not fiducia. “In Scripture,” says the Racovian Catechism, “the faith is most perfectly taught, that God exists and that He recompenses. This, however, and nothing else, is the faith that is to be directed to God and Christ.” It is afterwards described as the way in which one must adjust himself to the known commands and promises of God; and there is added that this faith “both makes our obedience more acceptable and well-pleasing to God, and supplies the defects of our obedience, provided it be sincere and earnest, and brings it about that we are justified by God.” This is good Scotist doctrine. These theologians were accustomed to declare that all that the Christian needs is to have faith in God as the recompenser (i.e. to assent to the truth that God does recompense), and that with regard to all the other doctrines of the Church implicit faith (i.e. submission to the Church’s teaching) is enough. Of course the extreme individualism of the Socinians coloured their conception of faith; they cannot accept an implicit faith; their assent to truth must always be explicit; what they assent to must recommend itself to their individual reason. They cannot assent to a round of truths which are presented to them by the Church, and receive them implicitly on the principle of obedience to authority. But what is to be observed here is that the Socinian type of faith is always assent to truths which can be stated in propositional form; they have no idea of that faith which, to use Luther’s phrase, throws itself upon God. They further declare, quite in accordance with Scotist teaching, that men are justified because of their actual obedience to the known commands and promises of God. There is not a trace of the Evangelical attitude. The accordance with Scotist theology descends to very minute particulars, did space permit to trace it.

The Socinian conception of Scripture corresponds to their idea of faith. The two thoughts of Scripture and saving faith, as has been already said,[639] always correspond in mediæval theology they are primarily intellectual and propositional; in Reformation thinking they are, in the first instance, experimental and personal. The Socinian conception allies itself with the mediæval, and discards the Reformation way of regarding both faith and Scripture. With the Socinians as with mediæval theologians, Scripture is the divine source of information about doctrines and morals; they have no idea of Scripture as a means of grace, as the channel of a personal communion between God and His trusting people. But here as elsewhere the new individualism of the Socinians compels them to establish both the authority and the dogmatic contents of Scripture in a way different from their mediæval predecessors. They had rejected altogether the authority of the Church, and they could not make use of the thought to warrant either the authority of Scripture or a correct interpretation of its contents. In the place of it they put what they called reason. “The use of right reason (rectæ rationis) is great in things which pertain to salvation, since without it, it is impossible either to grasp with certainty the authority of Scripture, or to understand those things that are contained in it, or to deduce some things from other things, or, finally, to recall them to put them to use (ad usum revocari).” The certitudo sacrarum litterarum is accordingly established, or attempted to be proved, by a series of external proofs which appeal to the ordinary reasoning faculties of man. The Reformation conception of the Witness of the Spirit, an essential part of its doctrine of Scripture, finds no place in Socinian theology. They try to establish the authority of Scripture without any appeal to faith; the Confessions of the Reformation do not recognise any infallibility or divine authority which is otherwise apprehended than by faith. The Reformation and the Socinian doctrines are miles apart; but the Socinian and the mediæval approach each other closely. It is somewhat difficult to know what books the older Socinians recognise as their rule of faith. They did not accept the Canon of the mediæval Church. They had no difficulty about the New Testament; but the references to the Old Testament in the Racovian Catechism are very slight: its authority is guaranteed for them by the references to it in the New Testament.

When we turn to the Socinian statements about God, and to their assertions about the nature and meaning of the Work of Christ, we find the clearest proof of their mediæval origin. The Scotist theology is simply reproduced, and cleared of its limitations.