Out of the Flames

by Lawrence Goldstone

  After studying law in Leipzig for five years, he was refused admission to the university's doctoral program in 1666 because he was only twenty. Instead, Leibniz transferred to the University of Altdorf which immediately awarded him a doctorate in jurisprudence. Although he was shy, bookish, and a pure academic, Leibniz declined a professorship, choosing instead to seek a wealthy patron and work as an independent scholar. He was engaged by the elector of Mainz to propose legal reform, but in 1672 the elector sent him as emissary to Paris to talk Louis XIV out of attacking Germany. Leibniz proposed to Louis that it would be much more profitable to mount a campaign against rich and heretical Egypt instead, and then to build a canal through the isthmus of Suez as a means of transporting riches back to France. (Louis didn't take the advice about Egypt, although Napoleon subse-quently did. Napoleon would have built the canal as well if his engineers hadn't miscalculated and told him that a sea-level waterway was impossible.)

  Leibniz remained in Paris until 1676, studying philosophy and mathematics. From there he returned to Germany, going to work as librarian, judge, and minister in Hanover for the Brunswicks—the family that would soon spawn kings George I, II, and III of England. While in their employ, Leibniz traveled often. He was by that time sufficiently well known that Peter the Great summoned him to Russia to recommend educational reforms. When he traveled to Italy, Leibniz, although a Lutheran, was offered the custodianship of the Vatican library if he converted to Catholicism (even just for show), but he refused.

  Leibniz was a favorite of royalty for his entire adult life. He was particularly popular with young princesses and queens eager to partake of the new intellectual freedom that accompanied the stirrings of enlightenment. Queen Sophie Charlotte of Prussia, only thirty-seven on her deathbed in 1705, said, “I go now to satisfy my curiosity about the basic causes of things which Leibniz has never been able to teach me, about space and the infinite; about being and nothingness; and for the King my husband, I prepare the drama of a funeral, which will give him a new opportunity to demonstrate his magnificence.”

  In addition to everything else, Leibniz was a passionate and accomplished theological scholar, who believed that free will was central to morality and that man chose goodness or evil. While he never renounced his allegiance to Luther, he rejected parochialism and sought to apply general Christian values across society. He worked actively toward total reconciliation of Catholics and Protestants.

  When he read through the copy of Christianismi Restitutio in the landgrave's library, he came to understand that it was Servetus, not Harvey, who had discovered pulmonary circulation. He mentioned his discovery in several letters, one of them to an English bishop, but could not pursue the matter. At the time, he was occupied defending himself against charges by the Royal Society in London that he had plagiarized Newton in his writings about calculus (he had not—his version, if anything, was superior). But he made sure to tell his host that the only known copy of an extremely important book sat on his shelves. The Colladon copy of Christianismi Restitutio would be anonymous no longer.

  Four years after Leibniz died in 1716, leaving behind perhaps the widest range of intellectual achievements since Aristotle, a French duke, François-Eugène de Savoie-Carignan, came to visit Hessen-Kassel. The duke of Savoy was himself a book collector of some note and interested in the works of Servetus. He owned one of the few remaining copies of De Trinitatis Erroribus but had never seen the now-famed last copy of Christianismi Restitutio. The landgrave ushered his guest into the library to see one of the rarest books in the world, a volume that the great Leibniz himself had pointed out.

  It was gone.

  Hessen-Kassel looked further; he ordered his servants to do a volume-by-volume search; he interrogated everyone who had access to the library. It was no use—the Colladon copy of Christianismi Restitutio had disappeared.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THREE YEARS LATER a Dutchman named Gysbert Dummer traveled to London. He carried with him a thick sheaf of papers about which he spoke to only a trusted few. Dummer had crossed the Channel specifically to engage English printers to typeset this manuscript. He chose England because, at that moment, a combination of forces made it the ideal venue.

  In 1695, Parliament had ended state censorship by voting down the renewal of the Licensing Act, which required all printed materials to be approved and then registered by the Stationers' Company, a quasi-government monopoly. In doing so, Parliament also eliminated the taxes on printing and the tariffs on foreign books. Suddenly, books were a lot cheaper, and the audience for the printed word not only became larger but now also included many for whom books had previously been an unaffordable luxury. For conservatives, who had gone along with the measure only grudgingly, this widening of availability could not have come at a worse time.

  By the end of the seventeenth century, the advancement of science had become such an accepted force that it was impossible to prevent the wholesale application of reason to human affairs, especially religion. Reason meant choice, and choice meant the rejection of the absolutes on which Catholicism and even most of the reformed sects, particularly Calvinism, were based. It was inevitable that the movement that began with Newtonian logic and the grinding of lenses should eventually put God Himself under a microscope.

  As in Servetus's time two centuries before, intellectuals and nonconformists questioning the very cornerstones of established Christianity could disseminate their books and pamphlets to a new and hungry audience. Although two years later a frightened Parliament tried to take back much of the newly gained freedom of the press with the Blasphemy Laws, which threatened anyone who denied the Trinity or the divine authority of the Scriptures in print with three years' imprisonment, the demand for open debate had become so great that the authorities found themselves unable to control the spread of even the most extreme religious literature.

  Atheism in particular had grown so prevalent that Richard Bentley, master of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a Newton disciple, felt the need to confirm the reality of God in the prestigious Boyle Lectures (named for Robert Boyle who had funded the series in his will). He merely succeeded in increasing skepticism. “No one,” observed a wit at the time, “doubted the existence of God until the Boyle lecturers undertook to prove it.”

  Two similar dissenting sects were particularly prolific in print. The first, called the deists, had adopted the most purely rational form of religion. Deists believed only in the existence of a divine force. They often reduced God—whom they referred to as the “Supreme Being”— to more of a moral concept than a physical reality, and sometimes used the concepts of God and Nature interchangeably. Less extreme, but still way outside the boundaries of accepted religious doctrine, were the Unitarians, whose faith had spread from the first tenuous beginnings in Transylvania and Poland to Holland, England, and America. Unitarians, with their denial of the Trinity and their faith in a strict adherence to the Scriptures, were a tiny but highly select minority among the dissenters. “It is now certain that Milton was substantially a Unitarian, and that Locke and Newton were at heart no less so,” wrote J. M. Robertson in his panoramic study, A History of Freethought: Ancient and Modern to the Period of the French Revolution

  Dummer, a Unitarian from Holland, had come to England because his manuscript was too controversial and dangerous to be published almost anywhere else. It was a transcription, made from an original, of Christianismi Restitutio.

  Dummer hired a local printer named Samuel Palmer, who completed the first five sheets before switching to another printer, Isaac Dalton, with Peter Parris, a Frenchman, in charge of the actual composition. These two had completed proofs up to page 260 when a lexicographer, Samuel Patrick, was engaged to do the correcting.

  This was a mistake. Patrick, who had been unfamiliar with the book when he was hired, realized in the course of his work just what it was that he was correcting. He immediately informed Dr. Edmund Gibson, the bishop of London, that heresy was being promulgated in
his city. Dr. Gibson, one of a number of conservative clergyman who had managed both to preach and prosper—he died leaving a fortune acquired while in the service of God—immediately sought and received an injunction under the Blasphemy Laws from the Censor of the Press. He then ordered the page proofs seized and publicly burned. On May 27, 1723, Dummer opened his door and found himself face to face with the police. The proof sets that were in his home were confiscated and subsequently burned, and Dummer himself was fined. He was lucky to escape prison.

  But the Dummer episode didn't end the new interest in Servetus. The following year, a small book appeared at several London bookstalls. It was entitled An Impartial History of Michael Servetus, Burnt Alive at Geneva for Heresie. It bore only the legend “LONDON: Printed for Aaron Ward, at the King's-Arms in Little Britain 1724.” It was 216 pages long and contained both passages from Servetus's writings and a detailed account of the trial, including a verbatim rendering of both Calvin's charges and Servetus's replies. Sources were shown in the original Latin, Greek, and French, and then translated into English.

  The writing was clear and accessible, but as to its impartiality, there might have been some question. In discussing Calvin, the anonymous author observed, “Calvin caused the Papacy of Rome to be banished out of Geneva, yet he established a papacy of his own; that as there was a pope at Rome, so he was no other than a pope at Geneva, not only by establishing an infallibility in the very constitution of the church, but by his maintaining and carrying on of that constitution, together with his own authority, by persecution and blood.”

  By focusing on the political aspects of Servetus's trial, An Impartial History skirted the Blasphemy Laws and as such could be officially frowned on but not suppressed. Copies made the rounds, particularly among England's religious liberals. The author (whose identity has never been firmly established) cited Wotton as the first to note Servetus's discovery of pulmonary circulation. He further noted that he, the author, had “owned a copy of the manuscript for some years.”

  From the bishop of Norwich to Gysbert Dummer to the author of An Impartial History, transcriptions of Christianismi Restitutio seemed to be popping up everywhere. But where was the book?

  It was about to resurface in the hands of Dr. Richard Mead.

  RICHARD MEAD “WAS the most prominent British physician of his day. He treated kings, queens, scientists, and poets. He was by Newton's bedside during his final illness and prescribed ass's milk for Alexander Pope. He was the recipient of the “gold headed cane,” symbolic of the best of British medicine, passed down from one reigning physician to another. His portrait now hangs in the National Portrait Gallery.

  He was born in 1673, the eleventh of thirteen children; his father had been expelled from the Church of England for nonconformity but was wealthy enough to provide private tutors for his brood. Richard attended the best universities, gaining a medical degree in Padua, which still had one of the finest medical schools in Europe, in 1695. He established his practice the next year in the house in which he had been born.

  Mead first attained public acclaim at age thirty for a treatise on the ever-popular subject of poison, although Mead's work focused largely on snake venom. The following year, he asserted in a paper that a common, pesky disease known as “itch” was caused by mites, counter to the widely held belief that it was a “constitutional disorder.” Such was his reputation after this treatise that a scant two years later, he was scratched into the Royal Society.

  He moved to London and quickly established himself as a society doctor. Mead was already making in excess of five thousand pounds a year, a huge sum, when, in 1719, there was an outbreak of plague in Marseilles. Londoners fell into a panic that the disease would strike them as well. At the request of the secretary of state, Mead prepared a pamphlet entitled “A short Discourse concerning Pestilential Contagion and the Methods to be used to Prevent it.” It was a clear, concise explanation of the role of basic sanitation in isolating disease and preventing its spread. The pamphlet went through seven editions and calmed public fear. The following year, he demonstrated the value of inoculation as a preventative measure against plague and established himself as the premier medical authority in Britain.

  In 1720, he bought a huge house on Great Ormond Street that had enough space to allow him to indulge in another passion for which he had gained notoriety. Richard Mead owned the largest and most comprehensive personal library in England. His collection contained more than ten thousand volumes. Unlike other great bibliophiles, however, most of whom were nobility, Mead opened his house and library to the public, allowing access to anyone who wished to stroll through and look at his books.

  Sometime in the late 1720s, that library came to include the Col-ladon copy of Christianismi Restitutio.

  The rule of “finders keepers” seems to have been in force. Mead, who was intimate with almost every major book collector in Europe, was doubtless aware that the Colladon copy of Christianismi Restitutio had formerly been a star attraction in the library of Karl von Hessen-Kassel. He was also aware that the book had not departed by legitimate purchase. Theft and dubious transference were apparently so common to the trade in rare books that they seem to have been an accepted means of acquisition. In any event, the landgrave's heirs (if they knew) did not protest.

  By 1733, Mead's library also contained a copy of the aborted Dum-mer reprint. Apparently, the police had not been as zealous as Bishop Gibson might have liked. Mead even hired a scribe to copy the un-printed pages to complete his copy in manuscript. This led to speculation that it had been Mead himself who had backed the project, but that he had been too powerful a figure for Bishop Gibson to accuse personally. That assumption lasted for two centuries until a bibliophile named Leonard Leopold Mackall spent two years poring through reams of original documents and concluded that Mead had, in fact, purchased both the original and the reprint some years after Bishop Gibson's order.

  Collectors are a fickle breed, however. In the end, Mead, who also collected artifacts, traded his copy of Christianismi Restitutio to his friend and fellow collector, a Parisian named Claude Gros de Boze, in exchange for some rare medals. The details of this transaction are unavailable, so there is no way to know if Mead got a good deal. The only thing that is clear is that Richard Mead, the most prominent physician in England, was willing to trade away what was believed to be a one-of-a-kind item of enormous scientific significance for a handful of coins. (He traded away his copy of the reprint as well.)

  De Boze kept both copies until he died. He had the original rebound and the page ends gilded, and wrote in large letters on the endpaper opposite the title page that the book had been acquired by de Boze from Richard Mead. His library was purchased by another French bibliophile who subsequently sold the Colladon copy of Christianismi Restitutio to yet another collector, Louis-Jean Gaignat, for 1,200 livres sometime in the 1750s. This price reflected Christianismi Restitutios scarcity and its worth as an oddity in a rich man's library, but it was still an obscure title by a minor figure in history.

  Then, in the late 1750s, Servetus became a favorite subject of François-Marie Arouet, who in his teens had adopted the pen name of Voltaire.

  VOLTAIRE “WAS A TITANIC figure, not only the most influential voice of the eighteenth century but a man who became the conscience of Europe and forced the entire Christian world to examine the foundations of its faith. He regularly spouted heresies that could have had him burned a hundred times over yet enjoyed such respect from kings, queens, nobles, philosophers, and even his enemies, that in time he became invulnerable.

  He was born in Paris in 1694, but after two stints in the Bastille in his twenties for lampooning aristocrats, he lived most of the rest of his life in or just outside Geneva. Over the course of his eighty-four years, in addition to thousands and thousands of letters, he composed enough poems, stories, histories, plays, and essays to fill seventy large volumes. In many ways, Voltaire represented the very pinnacle of the printing revolution
that had begun three centuries before. One man, through his writing, changed the way the world thought and brought Western civilization to a period called Enlightenment. It was as if Erasmus had been multiplied a thousandfold. There is not remotely a parallel for him in contemporary society.

  He was nonetheless a man of contradictions. He was an atheist who often invoked the authority of God. He tirelessly championed tolerance but was a virulent anti-Catholic and anti-Semite and believed that the Reformation had descended into persecution and corruption. He was known for clear thinking but refused to accept any validity whatever in differing points of view. He wrote with enormous wit and had the ability to highlight foibles of human nature with hilarious results, yet he himself became more and more cynical with the passage of time.

  But most of all, Voltaire was a man of obsessions, and most of his obsessions centered around what were to him the interlocking concepts of injustice and religion. In the course of his life he threw himself into several celebrated cases of religious persecution, the most famous of which was the Calas affair.

  In 1761, in Toulouse (which had not become one whit more tolerant since Servetus's time), a sixty-four-year-old linen dealer named Jean Calas was one of the few Huguenots who had neither fled the city's repression nor been forced to undergo compulsory conversion to Catholicism. Calas had two daughters and four sons, the oldest of whom, Marc Antoine, had just finished law school. When Marc Antoine found out that only Catholics could be hired to practice in the city, he tried to pass himself off as one but was found out. Depressed that his years of study would be wasted unless he converted, he became a gambler and a drunk. Eventually, he tied a rope to a bar that he had braced between two doorposts and hanged himself.