Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis
Jews and Saracens with such a hatred as made baptizing, banishing, torturing and putting them to death the virtue it appeared in the eyes of the Spaniards.
At Saragossa Servetus may have remained four or five years, working hard at all that qualified him to appear as he meets us in after life—perfecting himself in classics, and introduced not only to the Ethics of Aristotle and the scholastic philosophy, but also to the more positive domains of human knowledge—the mathematics, astronomy and geography—geography more especially, brought into vogue as it was by the great discoveries of Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and the hardy navigators and travellers who came after them, then made accessible to the general reader by the works of Angleria, Grynæus and others.
Having broken definitively with the idea of the Church as a calling, Servetus must now have made up his mind to follow what might fairly be spoken of as the hereditary vocation of his family—Law; and the School of Toulouse being at this time the most celebrated in Europe, to Toulouse he was sent as a student of Law by his father. Here he seems to have remained for two or three years—short while enough in which to fathom the intricacies of civil and canon law, to say nothing of other studies that must have continued to engage some share of his attention; but that the time given to the study of Law at Toulouse was not misspent, is proclaimed by the occasional scraps of legal lore we notice interspersed in his writings. In the covenant between God and Abraham, to cite one among many instances, he observes that we have the first case on record of one of the four forms of unindentured contract, still spoken of as the form Facio ut facias. Elsewhere also, and at other times, on his trial at Geneva in particular, he is credited by his prosecutor with an adequate knowledge of the Pandects, although he says himself that he had never done more than read Justinian in the perfunctory manner usual with young men at college. On the occasion referred to, nevertheless, we find him quoting the decisions of jurisconsults in support of his conclusions.
But Law, we believe, was never the subject that engrossed the thoughts of Servetus. The natural bent of his mind, and the teaching he had received during his earlier years, led him to Theology; and it was at Toulouse, as he tells us himself, that he first made acquaintance with the Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments. It is not difficult to imagine the effect which the perusal of these writings must have produced on the ardent religious temperament of Servetus. In his earliest work he speaks of the Bible as a book come down from heaven, the source of all his philosophy and of all his science—language, however, that is to be seen as hyperbole to a great extent; for he was already imbued with scholastic philosophy, and, we must presume, with patristic theology also, before he had read a word of the Bible; and in his published works we find him at various times subordinating the teaching of the Scriptures to the conclusions of his reason. Toulouse, indeed, in the early part of the sixteenth century, was an unlikely school for religious study in any but the most rigidly orthodox fashion; and how far Michael Servetus swerved from this—to his sorrow—need not now be more particularly noticed. It was even the boast of the Toulousans for long, that their city had not been infected with what was spoken of as the poison of Lutheranism. So strict a watch had been kept over them by their shepherds, the priests, that, whilst in neighbouring and other more distant cities of France the Reformation had many adherents, it had none—openly, at all events—in Toulouse. It were needless to insist that training of a special kind, in addition to originality and independence of mind, was required to lead to views and conclusions such as those attained to by Servetus.3
He had read the Bible, however, at Toulouse; and there, too, if it were not at an earlier period, he must have met with some of the writings of Luther, of which several had been translated into Spanish soon after their publication.4 But there is another book which enjoyed an extensive reputation through the whole of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and seems to supply the kind of aliment precisely of which a mind constituted like that of Servetus must have felt the want. This is the ‘Theologia Rationalis sive Liber de Creaturis’ of Raymund de Sabunde, in which the Creator is reached by a gradual ascent from lower to higher grades of created things.
The ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde is indeed a most noteworthy book; full of true piety, resting on the wider and surer grounds of nature at large in harmony with human intelligence, than the dogmatic theologian can show in the written text and unwritten traditions on which he relies for his conclusions. Containing no word that is not thoroughly orthodox, doctrine, nevertheless, is not that which it is the grand object of the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde to propound. Neither is authority paraded, as it would have been had the book been written by a professed theologian, instead of a pious naturalist; for Sabunde was a physician, one of the guild whose destiny it is to lead the van of progress. We cannot believe that the work, though often reprinted, was ever heartily approved by the heads of the Church of Rome. Its title went far to condemn it. The Roman Catholic Church requires faith, submissiveness, subserviency, not reason, of its sons; and we are not, therefore, surprised to find that though the ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde, as a whole, long escaped being placed on the index of prohibited books, the prologue with which we find one of the early editions, if it be not the first (Argentorati, 1496), introduced, was soon ordered to be expunged; nor, indeed, as culture extended and the Reformation spread, with ever-increasing alarm to the dominant Church, that the book itself was at length pointedly forbidden to be read by the faithful. It was put upon the ‘Index’ by the Congregation of the Council of Trent in 1595, the author ‘holding too much by Nature,’ say the reverend councillors, ‘to give us a knowledge of God and his providential dealing with the world, and making too little reference to the Fathers and the authority of Holy Writ.’
The Prologue of Sabunde is in truth a very remarkable piece of writing, the age considered in which it flowed from the pen. Beginning in the accredited orthodox fashion: ‘Ad laudem et gloriam altissimæ et gloriosissimæ Trinitatis,’ &c., the author proceeds to say that his purpose is ‘to expose the errors, as well of the ancient philosophers as of pagan and infidel writers, by the science he has to propound; to set forth the catholic faith in its infallible truthfulness, and to show every sect opposed thereunto in its necessary falsity and erroneousness. Two books,’ he continues, ‘are given to us by God for our guidance: one, the universal book of created things, or the book of Nature; the other, the book of the sacred Scriptures. The first was given to man from the beginning, when the world was made; the second is to supplement and solve the difficulties met with in the first. The book of the Creatures lies open to all; but the book of the Scriptures can only be read aright by the clergy. The book of Nature cannot be falsified, neither can it be readily interpreted amiss, even by heretics; but the book of the Scriptures they can misconstrue and falsify at their pleasure.’ The author’s design, therefore, is to write a book which gentle and simple alike may read and understand without a master; and he ends his prologue with a compliment and submission to Holy Mother Church, which her hierarchs, however, have not accepted either gratefully or graciously; for they did not of old, any more than they do now, want books that would enable readers to go their own way without the guiding hand of a master. Shall we wonder, therefore, that this notable prologue was looked on at an early date as highly objectionable, and is not to be found in any of the later editions of the book?5
Michel de Montaigne has given an interesting account of this ‘Rational Theology’ of Sabunde. His father thought so highly of it that he set his son, the immortal Essayist, to translate it into French: a task which it were needless to say he performed in a very admirable manner, though the sire did not live to see the work in type and in the hands of the public he was anxious to reach through its means. The book, says Montaigne, is composed by a Spaniard, in indifferent Latin—basti d’un Espagnol, baraguiné des terminaisons Latines—but well adapted to meet a want of the day. The novelties of Luther coming into vogue and shaking old beliefs, Sabunde, as he thinks, ‘gives very good advice against a disease that ever tends towards execrable atheism.’ If Sabunde does give tres bon advis, his ‘Book of the Creatures’ is nevertheless the text from which the most sceptical perhaps of the whole series of the ‘Essays’ is written; and if the ‘Theologia Rationalis’ fell into the hands of the youthful Michael Servetus, as we believe it must almost necessarily have done, we have no difficulty in imagining that it influenced him in a still greater degree, and not much otherwise than it did young Michel de Montaigne. A rational exposition of God’s revelation of himself in nature, we apprehend,