Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis
Fortitude into Minerva, &c., and so to bring discord and dissidence upon the truths of Scripture. (‘De Tr. Err.’ f. 47, b.) The Word spoken by God in the beginning implies fore-thought, fore-knowledge; whence it is characterised as Wisdom, ‘that was from the beginning or ever the earth was. Under the mystery of the Word, the older apostolic tradition understood a certain dispensation whereby God willed to reveal himself to mankind. The Word of God therefore is equivalent to the Act of God; and even as Light came of the spoken word, so too came Creation, so too came Man.’ In this way, says our author, do we readily comprehend the expression of John: ‘The Word was made flesh,’ and learn in what sense Christ is truly the Word: ‘He is, as it were, the voice of God enunciating to mankind the will of the Universal Father.’ (Ib. f. 49 b.) The Word, consequently, is nothing different from God, but is God himself evoking all things, Christ among the number in the fulness of time. If a reasonable meaning is to be attached to mystical language, it seems difficult to imagine any more satisfactory interpretation than this of Servetus, with which we see that of a distinguished liberal divine of our own day essentially to agree, as he says: ‘The Logos of the New Testament means not only the Word as translated, but Reason, Intelligence, communicating itself in thought and speech. It is the divine wisdom which was from the beginning in the mind of God made manifest in time.’31
The title Son of God, again, Servetus maintains is nowhere to be found in the Scriptures otherwise applied than to a man—to the man Jesus in particular; and the word Person he insists is always to be understood in the sense of the Greek προσῶπον and the Latin persona, a mask, an appearance, and not any real or individual thing. With this style of exposition the Reformers could of course by no means agree. They had adopted all the symbols of their predecessors of the Church of Rome; and it seems to have been Servetus’ insistance on his own divergent interpretation of the language of John and the creeds that more especially aroused the enmity of Œcolampadius, Bucer, Calvin, and the rest, they holding that to be accounted a Christian it was necessary not only to acknowledge Christ to be the Son of God, which Servetus was quite ready to do, in the way he understood the filiation, but to acknowledge him to be the Logos or Word of St. John, consubstantial and coeternal with the Father—which, to Servetus, was impossible. It is probable that the way and manner in which in any conceivable fashion such coeternity and consubstantiality could be apprehended was among the topics on which Servetus craved enlightenment from Œcolampadius; and as he could obtain none, pique and personal dislike, opposition and enmity, took the place of dispassionate and friendly discussion; precisely as happened in later years and mainly on the same subjects between our author and Calvin.
In his attempt to develope and explain his own conception of the mystery of the Trinity—for it is a mistake to suppose that Servetus was opposed to something of the kind—he does not set out like the writer of the Fourth Gospel from the transcendental Word, but starts with the historical Jesus, the man, the reputed son of Joseph the Carpenter, but verily or naturally, as he says, the Son of God. To this son the name Jesus was given at the time of his circumcision, the title Christ being conferred by his disciples; whilst it was only at his baptism that he was designated Son of God. The Holy Spirit and power of the Highest overshadowing the Virgin Mary, and acting in her as generator or generative dew, Jesus the Son of God and her Son was engendered. It is not the Word consequently, but Jesus the Son of Mary who is a Son of God: ‘The holy thing that shall be born of thee,’ says the angel addressing the Virgin, ‘shall be called a Son of God.’ ‘They therefore plainly err,’ says Servetus, ‘who speak of the Word as the Son of God: the man Jesus was the Son of God, not the Word; the man Jesus engendered, as stated above, by God in the womb of the Virgin.’ ‘All the Trinitarian errors,’ he concludes, ‘have arisen from not understanding the true nature of the Incarnation.’
When he comes to speak of the Holy Ghost, Servetus unhappily forgets what is due to the discussion of a subject that has engaged the serious thoughts of so many pious men. He would seem to have seen some portions of the catholic Christian dogma as so unreasonable that they were even open to ridicule; and this leads him to the use of improper language. The Holy Ghost, he maintains, is never spoken of save confusedly in the Scriptures, the term being applied variously now to an angel, now to the soul of man, and again to nothing more than wind or breath (Ib. f. 22, a.). The Hebrew word Ruach, of which spirit or wind is a translation, has indeed a still greater variety of meanings. On a subject so indefinite and undefined as the Holy Spirit, we cannot wonder that Œcolampadius in one of his letters should declare he can make nothing of what Servetus says on the matter—‘dicit nescio quid—he says I know not what.’ This much, however, we do make out as our author’s opinion, viz.: that the Holy Spirit is nowhere spoken of in Scripture as a distinct and independent entity, but always as a motion, an agency, an afflatus of God or the power of God—a view in which he certainly had Melanchthon as his predecessor: ‘Nec aliud spiritus sanctus est nisi viva Dei voluntas et agitatio.’ (‘Loci Theol.’ p. 128, ed. 1521.)
Referring to the dogma of the ‘Two Natures,’ Servetus holds that this, too, is founded in error. ‘To speak of the Nature of God,’ he says, ‘is absurd; for the word nature can only apply to something created, something born (from the Latin natus). But God is from Eternity. For my own part,’ he proceeds, ‘I never take nature to signify aught but the thing to which the term is applied—the nature of a thing is the thing itself. To use the word nature in connection with the name of God is, therefore, to speak of God himself. And so of the Son of God: that which was an idea, image, or type of the Son in the mind of God, when the Word was made flesh, became or was Christ, Reality then superseding Idea (‘De Tr. Er.’ f. 92). There was consequently no aggregate of two natures or two different things in Christ; he was one entity or person, in the usual sense of the word.’ Servetus very inconsistently, as it seems at first sight, often speaks of the man Jesus as God. But he can do so only on the same ground as Cyrus in the Bible, Augustus Cæesar, and other rulers, are called Dii or Divi—gods. The Son of God, to Servetus, in conformity with the pantheistic idea, can only be an aspect or Mode of the One God. If this be not his meaning, I know not what it is.
We have said above that Servetus is not opposed to the idea of a Trinity of dispositions, powers, or properties in the Deity, but only denies such a trinity of persons or entities as is embodied in the symbols of orthodox Christianity. It is not unimportant, therefore, to learn what the precise idea was which he had of the threefold state he acknowledged as extant in the essence of God. His words are these: ‘Tres sunt admirandi Dei dispositiones in quarum qualibet divinitas relucet, ex quo sanissime Trinitatem intelligere posses, &c.—There are three admirable dispositions in God, in each of which divinity appears, and from which you may satisfactorily understand the Trinity. For the Father is the one God, from whom proceed certain dispensations. But these imply no distinction into separate entities. By the economy of God—Dei οἰκονομίαν—they are no more than so many forms or aspects of Deity; for the divineness that is in the Father, the same is in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost.’
In another passage, he asserts his belief in a Trinity still more distinctly: ‘I concede one person of the Father, another person of the Son, another person of the Holy Ghost: three persons in one God, and this is the true Trinity.’ (Ib. f. 64, b.) Had we not our author’s explanation of the way in which he understands the word person, this would make his conception, in so far, not different from the orthodox interpretation of the mystery. But his language here must be regretted, for it is misleading, the word person with Servetus not signifying, as we have seen, any real or individual entity distinct from other entities, but property, appearance, or outward manifestation. The second and third persons, therefore, as understood by Servetus, are to be thought of as dispositions or modes of God, the universal Father, and not as individuals or persons in the usual acceptation of these words, though of them it is that distinct personages have been made, and spoken of as being at once God and other than God, as being three and yet no more than one.
In sequence to this, our author goes on to say that ‘he will not make use of the word Trinity, which is not to be found in Scripture, and only seems to perpetuate philosophical error. It were well, indeed,’ he continues, ‘that all distinction of persons in the one God were henceforth abandoned and rooted out of the minds of men’ (Ib. f. 64,