Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis

Servetus and Calvin - Robert Willis


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in the soul of the serious Spaniard still more than in that of the lively Gascon.6

      But there is another writer whose influence on his age and the progress of free thought it is impossible to estimate too highly, and from whose teaching Servetus on his death-walk owned that he had had something. This is Erasmus. What Servetus had he does not say. Whatever it may have been, it was unaccompanied by the caution and cold discretion that distinguished the great scholar of Rotterdam. In the Scholia which Erasmus added to his Greek New Testament, however, we fancy we see heralds of the far bolder and more original exegetical annotations with which Servetus, under his assumed name of Villanovanus, accompanied his reprint of the Pagnini Bible, which we shall have to speak of by and by.

      In addition to all he learned from his convent teachers, from the professors of Saragossa and Toulouse, from Sabunde, Luther, Erasmus, and others on the subject of theology, Servetus must further have been well read in general history and the works of travellers in foreign lands, as we shall find when we come to study his edition of Ptolemy’s Geography, and refer particularly to his biblical criticisms, in days when criticism of the kind he brought to bear on the text of the Scriptures was unknown. It was only in the early part of the sixteenth century that the Hebrew Bible and Greek Testament began to be appealed to by the learned, and made the subject of critical study in a way never thought of before. Long limited to the letter, the study was widened in its scope by Servetus, and, embracing general history, made to include a new and highly important element in its bearing on the Religious Idea. If Servetus of himself arrived at the interpretation he gives of the Psalms and Prophetical writings of Israel, he must indeed have been possessed of no ordinary share of natural sagacity informed by study, and of moral courage in addition; for it runs counter to all that had been assumed from the date of the New Testament writings almost to the present day. The free use he makes of his historical reading in its application to David, Cyrus, and Hezekiah, may have been that which led some of his biographers to imagine that he was of Jewish descent, and to say that he had visited Africa, and had had Mahomedan as well as Jewish teachers, from whom he imbibed his notions, hostile to the common orthodox interpretation of the Prophets, and the conception of a Triune God.

      It were absurd to suppose that Servetus’s early convent education and subsequent studies at Saragossa and Toulouse had made him all he shows himself to be in his works. He continued a student through the whole of his life, and it is indeed among the privileges of the physician that his education never ends; but it was certainly at an early period of his career that he became possessed of the theological ideas which he went on elaborating, even to the day when his ‘Restoration of Christianity’ was in type and ready for the publication it did not obtain. It is therefore of moment with us to seize and follow up every incident in his life that induced or strengthened the bent of his mind towards theological speculation; and the event which now befel, we must presume, had no slight influence in this direction.

       SERVICE WITH FRIAR JUAN QUINTANA, CONFESSOR OF THE EMPEROR CHARLES V.

       Table of Contents

      School and college days come naturally to an end, or are cut short by one intervening incident or another; and the studies of Michael Servetus at Toulouse were interrupted by an invitation to enter his service from brother Juan Quintana, a Franciscan friar, confessor to the Emperor Charles V., about to attend on his Sovereign to his coronation in the imperial city of Bologna, and, of still greater significance, to the Diet of Augsburg, which followed it closely. In what capacity Servetus joined Quintana we are not informed; but if father confessors ever engaged private secretaries, we can hardly doubt that it must have been in the intimate relationship suggested, for which the accomplishments of the younger man so obviously qualified him. The invitation from Quintana is interesting on many accounts, and was certainly an important element in the mental development of Servetus. Though he may have quitted Spain hurriedly, perhaps secretly—in fear of the Inquisition, as said—he could have left nothing but a good name for conduct and accomplishment behind him, otherwise he would never have been recommended as a fit and proper person to act as secretary to the confessor of the great Emperor. Not forgotten by his old masters of Saragossa, the clever student was thought of by them when Quintana made known his want of a secretary, and must have been recommended to him as in every way qualified to fill a situation of the kind.

      Michael Servetus, as we apprehend him, was one of those sensitive natures which, like the stainless plate of the photographer, retains at once and reflects every object presented to it; his service with Quintana, consequently, was one of the incidents that influenced the whole of his after life. Up to the time of his engagement with the confessor he had been but one among hundreds of other students, known to his teachers as a young man of superior abilities, it may be, but not an object of more particular attention to any one of them. In the intimate relationship implied between the elderly principal and the youthful underling matters were entirely changed; and recent inquiries7 lead to the conclusion that the hood of the barefooted friar Juan Quintana covered the head of a man of superior powers, cherishing larger, more liberal and more tolerant views than were current in his age, more especially among the class to which he belonged.

      Quintana appears to have attracted the notice of the Emperor so far back as the date of the Diet of Worms, during the sittings of which he had distinguished himself as a preacher and become generally known as a theologian and man of learning. He had at the same time, however, and in like measure, fallen out of favour with his party, opposed at every point to the reform movement, in consequence of the moderation of his views. Matters at Worms had gone in no wise to the satisfaction of the Emperor, owing in no inconsiderable degree, as he must have believed, to the intolerance and mismanagement of his clerical advisers. To give the approaching Diet of Augsburg, of which Charles was thinking far more seriously than of the pageant of Bologna when he made Quintana his confessor, a chance of proving the bond of union he desired between the two great religious parties which now divided his empire, he saw that he must rid himself of the narrow-minded and utterly irreconcilable Dominican Loaysa, whom he had had at Worms as his spiritual director. From Loaysa he knew he had no prospect of receiving those counsels of concession and compromise which, as a politician, he saw were indispensable and to which he was himself at the moment by no means disinclined. He must have another confessor of more liberal views, not utterly opposed to the reformation of the Church in all its aspects and to the whole body of the Reformers with whom, as heretics, it was condescension on the part of a Roman Catholic dignitary to communicate, and contamination, if it were not sin, to sympathise. The old director had therefore to be got rid of, for a time at least; but he must suffer no slight, be subjected to no show of mistrust, to no seeming loss of confidence; he must not even be superseded in his office, but only removed to a distance and so made innocuous. Charles therefore discovered that a representative, who must be presumed to be familiar with the most secret aspirations of his soul, would be required at Rome as the medium of communication between himself and his holiness the Pope, in connection with the important business in prospect at Augsburg. Loaysa, accordingly—greatly to his disgust beyond question—was dispatched with all the honours to Rome, whilst Juan Quintana, summoned from the quiet of the cloister to the bustle of the Court, found himself unexpectedly with a royal and imperial penitent at his ear in the confessional, and an upper seat in the council chamber pending the discussion of affairs of state.

      How should we imagine that an invitation to take service with a man possessed of qualities that brought him into such relationships could have been otherwise than instantly embraced by the youthful student of Toulouse; or how doubt that intimate contact with so great a nature as Quintana’s could fail to impress him deeply? Attached forthwith to the service of the confessor and in the suite of the Emperor, not the least observant among all who accompanied him of the pomp and pageantry displayed at the coronation at Bologna, the open-eyed secretary was witness of much besides that sank into his mind, gave matter for future thought, and found free but needlessly offensive expression in his writings. Here, at Bologna, it was in fact, and not at Rome as has been said, that Servetus saw the Pope ‘borne aloft above the heads of the people, the multitude kneeling in the dust, adoring him, and they among them who could but kiss his slipper accounting themselves


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