by Will Durant
Obviously Servetus was a bit more insane than the average of his time. He announced that the end of the world was at hand, that the Archangel Michael would lead a holy war against both the papal and the Genevese Antichrists, and that he, who had been named after the Archangel, would fight and die in that war.62 The Restitutio was a call to that war. No wonder it had difficulty finding a publisher. The Basel printers shied away from it. Finally (January 3, 1553) it was clandestinely printed in Vienne by Balthasar Arnouillet and Guillaume Guéroult. Their names, and the place of publication, were omitted, and the author signed himself only as MSV. He paid all the expenses, corrected the proofs, and then destroyed the manuscript. The volume ran to 734 pages, for it included a revised form of De Trinitatis erroribus, and Servetus’s thirty letters to Calvin.
Of the thousand copies printed some were sent to a bookseller in Geneva. There one came into the hands of Guillaume Trie, a friend of Calvin’s. The thirty letters made plain to Calvin that MSV stood for Michael Servetus of Villanova. On February 26, 1553, Trie wrote to a Catholic cousin in Lyons, Antoine Arneys, expressing surprise that Cardinal François de Tournon should allow such a book to be printed in his diocese. How did Trie know the place of publication? Calvin knew that Servetus was living in Lyons or Vienne.
Arneys brought the matter to Matthias Ory, inquisitor at Lyons. Ory notified the Cardinal, who ordered Maugiron, Lieutenant-Governor of Vienne, to investigate. On March 16 Servetus was summoned to Maugiron’s house. Before obeying he destroyed all papers that might incriminate him. He denied having written the book. Arneys dispatched to Trie a request for more evidence of Servetus’s authorship. Trie obtained from Calvin some of Servetus’s letters, and sent them to Lyons. They tallied with several letters in the book. On April 4 Servetus was arrested. Three days later he escaped by leaping over a garden wall. On June 17 the civil court of Vienne condemned him, if found, to be burned alive by a slow fire.
Servetus wandered about France for three months. He decided to seek refuge in Naples, and to go via Geneva. For reasons unknown he remained in Geneva a month, under an assumed name; and meanwhile he arranged for transportation to Zurich. On Sunday, August 13, he attended church, perhaps to avoid investigation by the authorities. He was recognized. Calvin was informed, and ordered his arrest. Calvin explained this action in a later letter (September 9, 1553): “When the papists are so harsh and violent in defense of their superstitions that they rage cruelly to shed innocent blood, are not Christian magistrates shamed to show themselves less ardent in defense of the sure truth?” The Small Council followed Calvin’s lead, and outran his ferocity. Since Servetus was only a transient, and not a citizen subject to the laws of Geneva, the Council could not legally do more than banish him.
He was confined in the former episcopal palace, now a prison. He was not tortured, except by the lice that infested his cell. He was allowed paper and ink, and whatever books he cared to buy, and Calvin lent him several volumes of the early Fathers. The trial was carefully conducted, lasting over two months. The indictment was drawn up by Calvin in thirty-eight articles, supported by quotations from the writings of Servetus. One charge was that he had accepted Strabo’s description of Judea as a barren country, whereas the Bible called it a land flowing with milk and honey.63 The basic accusations were that Servetus had rejected the Trinity and infant baptism; he was also accused of having, “in the person of M. Calvin, defamed the doctrines of the Gospel of the Church of Geneva.”64 On August 17 and 21 Calvin appeared in person as the accuser. Servetus defended his views boldly, even to pantheism. By an unusual co-operation of hostile faiths, the Protestant Council of Geneva asked the Catholic judges at Vienne for particulars of the charges that had been brought against Servetus there. One new count was sexual immorality; Servetus replied that rupture had long since made him impotent, and had kept him from marriage.65 He was further accused of having attended Mass at Vienne; he pleaded fear of death as exculpation. He challenged the jurisdiction of a civil court over cases of heresy; he assured the court that he had engaged in no sedition, and had not violated the laws of Geneva; and he asked for an attorney, better acquainted than himself with these laws, to help him in his defense. These pleas were refused. The French Inquisition sent an agent to Geneva to demand that Servetus be sent back to France for the execution of the sentence that had been pronounced against him; Servetus, in tears, begged the Council to reject this demand; it did; but the demand may have stimulated the Council to equal the Inquisition in severity.
On September 1 two enemies of Calvin—Ami Perrin and Philibert Berthelier—were allowed to join the judges in the trial. They engaged Calvin in disputes, to no result; but they persuaded the Council to consult the other churches of Protestant Switzerland on how Servetus should be treated. On September 2 Calvin’s leadership in the city was again challenged in the Council by Patriotes and Libertins; he survived the storm, but the evident desire of the opposition to rescue Servetus may have hardened Calvin to pursue the heretic to the death. However, we should note that the chief prosecutor in the trial was Claude Rigot, a Libertin.66
On September 3 Servetus presented to the Council a written reply to the thirty-eight charges adduced by Calvin. He met each point with keen argument and Scriptural or patristic citations; he questioned Calvin’s right to interfere in the trial, and called him a disciple of Simon Magus, a criminal, and a homicide.67 Calvin answered in twenty-three pages; these were submitted to Servetus, who returned them to the Council with such marginal comments as “liar,” “impostor,” “hypocrite,” “miserable wretch”;68 probably the strain of a month’s imprisonment and mental torment had broken Servetus’s self-control. Calvin’s reports of the trial are themselves in the manner of the time; he writes of Servetus that “the dirty dog wiped his snout”; “the perfidious scamp” soils each page with “impious ravings.”69 Servetus petitioned the Council to indict Calvin as a “repressor of the truth of Jesus Christ,” to “exterminate” him, confiscate his goods, and, with the proceeds, reimburse Servetus for the losses he had sustained by Calvin’s actions. The suggestion was not favorably received.
On October 18 the replies came in from the Swiss churches whose counsel had been asked; all advised the condemnation of Servetus, none his execution.
On October 25 Perrin made a last effort to save him by moving for a retrial before the Council of Two Hundred; he was overruled. On the twenty-sixth the Small Council, with no member dissenting, passed sentence of death on two counts of heresy—Unitarianism and the rejection of infant baptism. When Servetus heard the sentence, says Calvin, “he moaned like a madman, and... beat his breast, and bellowed in Spanish, Misericordia! Misericordia/” He asked to talk with Calvin; he pleaded with him for mercy; Calvin offered no more than to give him the final consolations of the true religion if he would retract his heresies. Servetus would not. He asked to be beheaded rather than burned; Calvin was inclined to support this plea, but the aged Farel, in at the death, reproved him for such tolerance; and the Council voted that Servetus should be burned alive.70
The sentence was carried out the next morning, October 27, 1553, on the hill of Champel, just south of Geneva. On the way Farel importuned Servetus to earn divine mercy by confessing the crime of heresy; according to Farel the condemned man replied, “I am not guilty, I have not merited death”; and he besought God to pardon his accusers.71 He was fastened to a stake by iron chains, and his last book was bound to his side. When the flames reached his face he shrieked with agony. After half an hour of burning he died.*
VII. AN APPEAL FOR TOLERATION
Catholics and Protestants united in approving the sentence. The Inquisition at Vienne, cheated of its living prey, burned Servetus in effigy. Melanchthon, in a letter to Calvin and Bullinger, gave “thanks to the Son of God” for the “punishment of this blasphemous man,” and called the burning “a pious and memorable example to all posterity.”73 Bucer declared from his pulpit in Strasbourg that Servetus had deserved to be disemboweled
and torn to pieces.74 Bullinger, generally humane, agreed that civil magistrates must punish blasphemy with death.75
Yet even in Calvin’s day some voices spoke for Servetus. A Sicilian wrote a long poem, De iniusto Serveti incendio. David Joris of Basel, an Anabaptist, published a protest against the execution, but under a pseudonymn; after his death his authorship was discovered; his body was exhumed and publicly burned (1566). The political opponents of Calvin naturally condemned his treatment of Servetus, and some of his friends deprecated the severity of the sentence as encouraging the Catholics of France to apply the death penalty to Huguenots. Such criticism must have been widespread, for in February 1554, Calvin issued a Defensio orthodoxae fidei de sacra Trinitate contra prodigiosos errores Michaelis Serveti. If, he argued, we believe in the inspiration of the Bible, then we know the truth, and all who oppose it are enemies and blasphemers of God. Since their offense is immeasurably greater than any other crime, the civil authority must punish heretics as worse than murderers; for murder merely kills the body, while heresy accepted damns the soul to everlasting hell. (This was precisely the Catholic position.) Moreover, God Himself has explicitly instructed us to kill heretics, to smite with the sword any city that abandons the worship of the true faith revealed by Him. Calvin quoted the ferocious decrees of Deut. 13:5–15, 17:2–5; Exodus 22:20; and Lev. 24:16, and argued from them with truly burning eloquence:
Whoever shall maintain that wrong is done to heretics and blasphemers in punishing them makes himself an accomplice in their crime.... There is no question here of man’s authority; it is God Who speaks, and it is clear what law He would have kept in the Church even to the end of the world. Wherefore does He demand of us so extreme severity if not to show us that due honor is not paid Him so long as we set not His service above every human consideration, so that we spare not kin nor blood of any, and forget all humanity when the matter is to combat for His glory? 76
Calvin moderated his conclusions by counseling mercy to those whose heresies were not fundamental, or were clearly due to ignorance or feebleness of mind. But whereas in general he accepted St. Paul as his guide, he refused to use the Pauline expedient of declaring the old law superseded by the new. In truth the theocracy that he had apparently established would have crumbled into disorder if differences of creed had been allowed public voice.
What, meanwhile, had become of the Erasmian spirit of tolerance? Erasmus had been tolerant because he had not been certain; Luther and Melanchthon had abandoned tolerance as they progressed in certainty; Calvin, with lethal precocity, had been certain almost from his twentieth year. A few humanists who had studied classic thought, and had not been frightened back into the Roman fold by distaste for the violence of theological strife, remained to suggest, diffidently, that certainty in religion and philosophy is unattainable, and that therefore theologians and philosophers should not kill.
The humanist who most clearly spoke for tolerance amid the clash of certainties had been for a time one of Calvin’s closest friends. Sebastian Castellio, born in the French Jura in 1515, became an adept in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, taught Greek at Lyons, lived with Calvin in Strasbourg, was appointed by him rector of the Latin School at Geneva (1541), and began there a translation of the entire Bible into Ciceronian Latin. While he admired Calvin as a man, he abominated the doctrine of predestination, and fretted under the new discipline of body and mind. In 1544 he charged the Genevese ministers with intolerance, impurity, and drunkenness. Calvin complained to the Council; Castellio was found guilty of calumny, and was banished (1544). For nine years he lived in great poverty, supporting a large family, and working at night on his version of the Scriptures. He finished this in 1551; then, lonesome for the placid drudgery of scholarship, he began again at Genesis 1:1, and translated the Bible into French. Finally (1553) he obtained a professorship of Greek at the University of Basel. He sympathized with the Unitarians, longed to help Servetus, and was shocked by Calvin’s defense of the execution. Under assumed names he and Caelius Curio published (March 1554) the first modern classic on toleration: De haereticis an sint persequendi (Should Heretics Be Persecuted?)
The main body of the work was an anthology, compiled by Curio, of Christian pleas for tolerance, from Lactantius and Jerome to Erasmus, the early Luther, and Calvin himself. Castellio contributed the argument in preface and epilogue. For hundreds of years, he pointed out, men had debated free will, predestination, heaven and hell, Christ and the Trinity, and other difficult matters; no agreement had been reached; probably none would ever be reached. But none is necessary, said Castellio; such disputes do not make men better; all that we need is to carry the spirit of Christ into our daily lives, to feed the poor, help the sick, and love even our enemies. It seemed to him ridiculous that all the new sects, as well as the old Church, should pretend to absolute truth and make their creeds obligatory on those over whom they had physical power; as a result a man would be orthodox in one city and become a heretic by entering another; he would have to change his religion, like his money, at each frontier. Can we imagine Christ ordering a man to be burned alive for advocating adult baptism? The Mosaic laws calling for the death of a heretic were superseded by the law of Christ, which is one of mercy, not of despotism and terror. If a man denies life after death, and rejects all law, he may (said Castellio) be justly silenced by the magistrates, but he should not be killed. Moreover (he thought), persecution of beliefs is futile; martyrdom for an idea spreads the idea far more rapidly than the martyr could have done had he been allowed to live. What a tragedy (he concluded) that those who had so lately freed themselves from the terrible Inquisition should so soon imitate its tyranny, should so soon force men back into Cimmerian darkness after so promising a dawn!77
Knowing Castellio’s sentiments, Calvin at once recognized his hand in the De haereticis. He delegated the task of answering it to his most brilliant disciple, Théodore de Besze, or Bèze, or Beza. Born in Vézelay of aristocratic lineage, Théodore studied law at Orléans and Bourges, practiced it successfully in Paris, wrote Latin poetry, charmed some women by his wit, more by his prosperity, lived a gay life, married, fell dangerously ill, experienced a sickbed conversion reverse to Loyola’s, adopted Protestantism, fled to Geneva, presented himself to Calvin, and was made professor of Greek at the University of Lausanne. It is remarkable that a Protestant refugee from a Huguenot-persecuting France should have undertaken to defend persecution. He did it with the skill of a lawyer and the devotion of a friend. In September 1554, he issued his De haereticis a civili magistratu puniendis libellus (A Little Book on the Duty of Civil Magistrates to Punish Heretics). He pointed out again that religious toleration was impossible to one who accepted the divine inspiration of the Scriptures. But if we reject the Bible as God’s Word, on what shall we build the religious faith that is so clearly indispensable—considering the natural wickedness of men—to moral restraint, social order, and civilization? Nothing would then be left but chaotic doubts disintegrating Christianity. To a sincere believer in the Bible there could be only one religion; all others must be false or incomplete. Yes, the New Testament preaches a law of love, but this does not excuse us from punishing thieves and murderers; how then does it warrant us in sparing heretics?
Castellio returned to the contest in a tract Contra libellum Calvini, but it lay unpublished for half a century. In another manuscript, De arte dubitandi, he anticipated Descartes by making the “art of doubting” the first step in the pursuit of truth. In Four Dialogues (1578) he defended free will and the possibility of universal salvation. In 1562, in Conseil à la France désolée, he appealed in vain to Catholics and Protestants to end the civil wars that were devastating France, and to allow every believer in Christ “to serve God according not to other men’s faith but to his own.”78 Hardly anyone heard a voice so out of tune with the time. Castellio died in poverty at the age of forty-eight (1563). Calvin pronounced his early death a just judgment of a just God.
VIII. CALVIN TO THE END:
1554–64
Perhaps Calvin knew Castellio’s secret leaning toward Unitarianism—belief in a God not triune, therefore a rejection of Christ’s divinity; and he can be forgiven for seeing in this basic doubt the beginning of the end for Christianity. He feared this heresy all the more because he found it in Geneva itself, above all among the Protestant fugitives from Italy. These men saw no sense in replacing incredible transubstantiation with incredible predestination; their rebellion attacked the fundamental assumption of Christianity, that Christ was the Son of God. Matteo Gribaldi, professor of jurisprudence at Padua, had a summer home near Geneva. During the trial of Servetus he spoke openly against civil punishment for religious opinions, and advocated freedom of worship for all. Hailed before the Council, he was banished on suspicion of Unitarianism (1559). He secured appointment as professor of law in the University of Tübingen; Calvin sent word there of Gribaldi’s doubts; the university pressed him to sign a Trinitarian confession; instead he fled to Bern, where he died of the plague in 1564. Giorgio Blandrata, an Italian physician domiciled in Geneva, was summoned before the Council on a charge of questioning the divinity of Christ; he fled to Poland, where he found some tolerance for his heresy. Valentino Gentile, from Calabria, openly expressed Unitarian views in Geneva, was thrown into prison, was sentenced to death (1557), recanted, was released, went to Lyons, was arrested by the Catholic authorities, but was freed on his assurance that his chief interest lay in refuting Calvin. He joined Blandrata in Poland, returned to Switzerland, was seized by the Bernese magistrates, was convicted of perjury and heresy, and was beheaded (1566).