Strange Gods

by Susan Jacoby

  Further discussion of the infant baptism issue was forbidden to biblical study groups in Zürich. Whereupon Grebel, Reublin, and others promptly began baptizing one another and people who agreed with them in nearby communities. In one of the more comical (had it not led to executions) turns in the argument, Zwingli, while acknowledging that infant baptism was not mentioned in the Scriptures, compared the christening of babies to the rite of circumcision, the foundational biblical covenant of Abraham with God that established the Jews as his chosen people (before Jesus appeared as the Messiah). The irony of using this analogy to argue for infant baptism should have been evident even in the sixteenth century. Simply being circumcised was not the death sentence at the time of the Inquisition that it was to become for Jewish males in the Nazi era, but the circumcision of any boy born into a family of what were supposed to be New Christians would certainly, if discovered, have meant a death sentence for the parents, if not for the baby himself. Such a circumcision would have been incontrovertible proof that the New Christian family was really a nest of “Judaizers.” Also, it is entirely possible that there was a comical and confused equation between the Hebrew Bible’s precise requirement, mentioned in both Genesis and Leviticus, that a Jewish baby boy be circumcised on the eighth day after birth and the eight-day window of opportunity for infant baptism prescribed by the Zürich city council.

  In any event, the Zürich magistrates, with Zwingli’s strong backing, cited a provision of Roman law from the Theodosian Code of 412 that prohibited rebaptizing and had been used against the Donatists in North Africa. (The Inquisition had also employed this ancient provision against the Cathars.) In 1526, rebaptism became a capital offense in Zürich. The form of capital punishment for heretical rebaptizers was drowning, considered a particularly appropriate penalty for those who used the water of baptism to declare their independence from the (barely) established Lutheran churches. Moreover, immersion in water, as practiced by John the Baptist in the Gospels, was beginning to take hold as the standard procedure for adult baptism, and remains popular to this day in many evangelical faith communities in the United States. But in sixteenth-century Lutheran-dominated regions, it was a decidedly bad idea to gather at the river if you wanted to stay alive. The first recorded Anabaptist martyr, Felix Manz (who had been a friend of Zwingli’s), was captured, dragged to a fishing hut on a local river, and drowned. Anabaptist communities also emerged in areas that are now part of Germany, Austria, Hungary, and western Russia—and they were persecuted everywhere. Balthasar Hubmaier, who led Anabaptist movements in the Black Forest and Moravia, was captured and burned at the stake in Vienna in 1528. His wife Elisabeth was executed by being thrown off a bridge into the Danube River with stones tied around her neck.

  In the midst of this targeted carnage, the Anabaptists nevertheless managed to get together in the Swiss town of Schleitheim in early 1527 and agree on seven articles of faith, which included adult baptism as a form of recommitment to a new life in Christ—the experience of being “born again.” The second article of faith—one practiced within communities like the Amish today—rejects physical violence and prescribes “shunning” if a member, after being counseled privately within the group, refuses to abandon what is considered a sin. Shunning can hardly be considered a benign practice, in that it substitutes what might be considered emotional abuse for physical violence. An Amish parent who secretly remains in contact with a child who has been shunned, for instance, may be shunned herself and driven out of the only community she has ever known. Though shunning seems both severe and cruel by modern secular (and many religious) standards, it was less cruel than being killed for dissenting religious beliefs, as the Anabaptists were at the time the Schleitheim articles were drafted. (The present Amish custom of Rumspringa—derived from a Dutch word that means “running around”—embodies the seriousness with which the descendants of Anabaptists regard adult religious vows. When Amish children turn sixteen, they are allowed a period in which they may sample all the wares of what is called the “English” world, including alcohol, mass media and entertainment, and unsupervised contact with the opposite sex. After the Rumspringa interlude, they must decide whether to join the Amish church as full adult members or to remain in the outside world. Should they choose the latter, they will be shunned by their families.) The Anabaptist tradition certainly did involve proselytizing in its early European incarnation, in that it reached out to orthodox Protestants and actively encouraged a form of baptism that bound adherents to a new church in defiance of state-favored religions. However, Anabaptists never tried to induce conversions by force. In the New World, descendants of the Anabaptists basically wanted only to be let alone by government—a position that was not confined to small denominations like the Amish or Adventists but also influenced mainstream Baptists in the eighteenth century and led to cooperation between Baptists and freethinkers in framing the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.

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  In Western Europe, the Reformation meant that one state-approved religion, Roman Catholicism, was replaced by a multiplicity of establishments, which encouraged religious conversions and produced new political majorities supported by different monarchies in different regions. To say that conversions to Protestantism were voluntary is not, as would eventually become evident in England as well as on the continent, to imply that Protestants were more “tolerant” than their Catholic brethren in Christendom. Protestantism is shorthand for what, in the interest of historical truth, ought to be called protestantisms—though some protestantisms were certainly more tolerant than others. And it cannot be emphasized enough that conversions from majority to minority religions were never secure or easy until the onetime minority became a majority or acquired solid secular political protection—usually around the same time. The paradox of protestantisms, beginning with Luther himself, lies in the incompatibility of a core belief in the right of individuals to engage directly with God’s truth through reading the Bible, and a quickly emerging intolerance of divergent conclusions about that truth.

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  The most intolerant of the major founders of the Reformation was, without question, John Calvin (1509–64). Born Jean Cauvin in France, he would eventually flee the Catholic monarchy. After many false starts and twists and turns of political as well as religious fortune, Calvin was able to create a repressive religious polity in Geneva that the Catholic Church, for all the historical intransigence of its absolute truth claims, had never quite been able to manage, even in the territory of the Papal States. Calvin cared not only about doctrine—especially predestination—but about strict social discipline, maintained not only by civil magistrates and ecclesiastical pooh-bahs but by a network of neighborhood informers united in their determination to ferret out anyone who did not subscribe to strict Calvinist practices and beliefs about everything from the basic sinfulness of humanity to any pleasure that might be derived from such inventions of the devil as colorful clothes, music, sweet foods—in short, anything that might please any of the human senses. Having been kicked out of Geneva by city fathers who considered his ideas of discipline too strict (and too threatening to secular power), Calvin returned for good in 1541 as the political and ecclesiastical winds shifted. Pastors of individual churches were approved both by the city council and the Calvinist clergy (there would be no such rebels as emerged from the Grossmünster Church in Zürich). Excommunication from the church was to be enforced by a combination of civil and ecclesiastical authority. All gambling, card playing, and dancing were banned; fornication was added to the usual crimes of murder, assault, and theft as grounds for civil penalties and excommunication. Witchcraft and sorcery, as might have been expected, were capital offenses. Homes of loyal Calvinists were searched once a year, just in case they possessed books or any signs (such as a pack of playing cards) of dissent from the moral and civil order. A legal enforcement agency called the Consistory, including representatives of both the Geneva city council and the church, was establ
ished, and the city’s residents (Geneva then had a population of about fifteen thousand) were to report violations ranging from fornication to the skipping of sermons, as well as to practices, such as naming children after saints, that might indicate some atavistic attachment to Catholicism. Like the Spanish inquisitors, authorities in Geneva kept meticulous records of denunciations. We know, for instance, that in 1550 exactly 160 cases of sexual immorality were reported.1 Since this meant that a report was filed by someone at least every other day, it certainly betokens a high level of Christian neighborly surveillance. The array of prohibitions covering the most minute aspects of daily life was seemingly endless. Women’s dresses were checked to make sure the skirts were neither too long nor too short. There were limits to the number of rings a woman (or a man) could wear on his or her fingers, and a prescribed number of shoes allowed each citizen. Even the amount of meat that could be eaten at any specific meal was regulated by law. Almost anything with the taint of pleasure was forbidden, including family dinners to which more than twenty people were invited. (Perhaps the authorities felt that twenty was the magic number for producing too much sinful laughter. How could so many people get together in one room without telling jokes?) Pastries and candied fruits were specifically prohibited. The Genevan Consistory, like the office of the Holy Inquisition in Rome, gave an imprimatur to books; woe unto the household where books without the imprimatur were found. During the first five years after Calvin’s triumphalist return to Geneva, ten people were beheaded, thirty-five burned at the stake, and seventy-six driven from their houses after their property had been seized. Prisons were so crowded with citizens being prosecuted for heresy that the wardens had to tell city officials that there was no more room.

  No one has described Calvin’s regimen with a more scathing accuracy than Stefan Zweig, who wrote in 1936 that, after Calvin returned to Geneva to stay, “it is as if the doors of the houses had suddenly been thrown open and if the walls had been transformed into glass. From moment to moment, by day and by night, there might come a knocking at the entry and a number of ‘spiritual police’ announce a ‘visitation’ without the concerned citizen’s being able to offer resistance.” Calvin had inaugurated “a Protestant orthodoxy in place of a papistical one; and with perfect justice this new form of dogmatic dictatorship has been stigmatized as bibliocracy.” Zweig also argues that any “reign of force which originates out of a movement towards liberty is always more strenuously opposed to the idea of liberty than is a hereditary power. Those who owe their position as governors to a successful revolution become the most obscurantist and intolerant opponents of further innovation.”2 Zweig, an Austrian Jew who left his country in 1934 and committed suicide in Petrópolis, Brazil, in 1942, offered his opinion of Calvin in a world living between the two poles of revolutionary repression represented by Nazism and Stalinism. He knew all about living in a house suddenly turned to glass.

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  Unlike Queen Elizabeth, Calvin intended to peer into men’s souls and to punish them for thoughts as well as deeds. The well-known severity of the Calvinist regime in Geneva makes it difficult to understand why the Aragonese-born Michael Servetus, who was both an iconoclastic theologian and a medical thinker, made the mistake of thinking that he would find refuge from Catholic persecution in what had become, by the 1550s, a near-totalitarian Calvinist domain. Born into a Catholic family in 1511 in the village of Villanueva de Sigena, young Miguel was originally educated by his father, a low-ranking noble, scholar, and notary to the nuns in the local convent. Miguel was a linguistic prodigy; it was said that he could read French, Greek, Latin, and Hebrew—in addition to his native Spanish—by age thirteen. The study of Hebrew was a sensitive subject, and Miguel would likely have been taught by a “secret” Jew. The young scholar’s facility with Hebrew would lead to rumors that he was himself from a Converso family. Most scholars dismiss this possibility, but I am not at all sure that they are right. Lawrence and Nancy Goldstone, in Out of the Flames (2002), argue that it is “more likely that Miguel, growing up in a time of political and religious upheaval, was bombarded by heterodoxy on all sides. He watched the Jews and Muslims resist Catholicism and the Navarrese resist Spain, both powerless minorities fighting a desperate battle for freedom. He learned to identify with the outcast long before he was to discover that he would be one himself.”3 What the Goldstones ignore in this scenario is that it was dangerous to study or know Hebrew in Spain in the early sixteenth century. Why would Christian parents take such a risk with their brilliant child in the absence of a connection to Judaism? It is a biographical question—like many of the gaps in Shakespeare’s life—that will probably never be answered.

  At age sixteen, Miguel was sent by his father to study at the University of Toulouse, located in Catholic France but then a hotbed of religious disputes generated by the Reformation. In 1531, Servetus published his first book on what he considered the senseless concept of the Trinity (appropriately titled De Trinitatis Erroribus in Latin). For Servetus, Jesus was an intermediary between God and man and could not have been eternal because he was the son of God—not God Himself. Servetus also rejected infant baptism because he, in contrast to Augustine, did not believe that infants had the mental capacity to sin. Although Servetus considered himself a Christian, both Catholics and Calvinists deemed him a heretic. Where, after all, would both Augustine and Calvin be without original sin and the Trinity? Servetus was not a convert to anything; he might well be considered the exemplary anti-convert. That is why he has been revered by generations of humanists and freethinkers, beginning in the seventeenth century. In 1890, the American freethinker Robert Ingersoll, in a statement opposing vivisection, would use Calvinism as a metaphor for sadism. “We can excuse, in part, the crimes of passion,” Ingersoll wrote. “…But what excuse can ingenuity form for a man who deliberately—with an unaccelerated pulse—with the calmness of John Calvin at the murder of Servetus—seeks, with curious and cunning knives, in the living, quivering flesh of a dog, for all the throbbing nerves of pain?”4 The eminent physician and medical educator William Osler observed in 1910, in an article in the Johns Hopkins Hospital Bulletin, that Servetus could have saved himself from the stake even at the last minute by modifying his public views about the Trinity. In extremis, Servetus was said to have cried out, “Jesu, thou Son of the eternal God, have mercy upon me.” Osler notes that the chains would have been removed and the fire doused had Servetus instead cried out, “Jesu, thou Eternal Son of God.” The latter would presumably have upheld orthodox Calvinist (and Catholic) doctrine that Jesus was a co-equal of the three persons in God and was not inferior to or created by God the Father.5 Servetus was executed and burned with a copy of his most recent work, Christianismi Restitutio (The Restoration of Christianity). One unusual aspect of this book—and the reason a prominent doctor was writing about Servetus in the twentieth century—is that it contains the first written description in Western history of the minor circulation of the blood (the circulation and oxygenation of blood through the heart and lungs). Servetus argued against Galen’s incorrect belief that blood was created in the liver from ingested food and flows from there to the right side of the heart. Servetus’s comments on blood circulation were ignored at the time, since they constituted a small portion of a controversial theological treatise. Nevertheless, he was at least on his way to a correct theory of blood circulation seventy-five years before the English physician William Harvey (1578–1657), who published his findings in 1628 and is generally given full credit for the correct explanation of blood circulation in standard medical histories.*2

  The earliest and—because he was the earliest—the greatest defender of Servetus was a man whose name has largely been lost to history: Sebastian Castellio (1515–63), a professor of Greek literature, originally attracted by Calvinism, who did not have the luxury of commenting on the execution from the safe distance of centuries. After the execution of Servetus (whom Castellio did not know personally), the professor at the
University of Basel took on Calvin directly. In a manifesto on behalf of religious toleration, Concerning Heretics and Whether They Should Be Punished by the Sword of the Magistrate, Castellio outlined one of the first arguments against civil punishment for religious offenses to circulate in the Western world. (The work was published under the pseudonym Martinus Bellius, but, as would be the case more than four centuries later with many Russian samizdat works, the real identity of the author did not long remain a secret in a police state.) Castellio wrote that men “are so strongly convinced of the soundness of their opinions that they despise the opinions of others. Cruelties and persecutions are the outcome of arrogance, so that a man will not tolerate others’ differing in any way from his own views, although there are today almost as many views as there are persons. Yet there is not one sect which does not condemn all the others and wish to remain supreme. That accounts for banishments, exiles, incarcerations, burnings, hangings, and the blind fury of the tormenters who are continually at work, in the endeavor to suppress certain outlooks which displease our lords and masters.”6 In denouncing the execution of Servetus, Castellio also uttered the unforgettable sentence “Who burns a man does not defend a doctrine, but only burns a man.” (The statement is often mistakenly attributed to Servetus himself.) Finally, Castellio declared with immense courage, given Servetus’s recent execution for heresy, “When I reflect on what a heretic really is, I can find no other criterion than that we are all heretics in the eyes of those who do not share our views.”7 Soon, as a result of Calvin’s personal intervention, Castellio was dismissed from his post at the university. He had no means of support, and was about to be brought to trial (thanks to Calvin’s behind-the-scenes machinations) for stealing firewood when he died, supposedly of natural causes, at the age of forty-eight. After Castellio’s death, his friends—finding that nearly all of his possessions had been sold to provide food for his family—paid for his funeral. Almost every member of the university faculty marched to Basel’s main church for the funeral, and students carried the coffin on their shoulders. They also paid for a tombstone with the inscription “To our renowned teacher, in gratitude for his extensive knowledge and in commemoration of the purity of his life.” (One wonders where all these academic supporters were while Castellio was still alive.) Castellio’s ideas on religious toleration, originally circulated in pamphlets, were not published until the seventeenth century, after Locke and Spinoza had written similar treatises on the folly of forced conversion and religious persecution. As one Unitarian minister notes (the Unitarian Universalist Church is one of the few religious institutions in which the names of Servetus and Castellio are mentioned), Castellio “is honored by no memorials. No churches are named after him, not even rooms in churches….There remains only that tomb in Basel, overgrown with weeds and neglected by a perfidious people.” This minister reported that, on the four hundredth anniversary of Castellio’s death, he had asked a meeting of the Unitarian Universalist General Assembly to take up a collection to restore Castellio’s grave, “but the motion was ruled out of order.”8