Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis
in the subject of our study, and so led them both to treat him otherwise than as the irreverent dreamer he had appeared to Œcolampadius; to see him, in a word, as he was in truth—a well-read and piously disposed, albeit in their opinion a more or less mistaken, scholar.
Servetus undoubtedly possessed the character of the enthusiast in perfection, and by natural constitution was not only indisposed, but to a certain extent incapable of seeing a question in any light save that in which he set it himself. Bucer, although he became hostile to Servetus in the end, must in fact have been not a little taken with him on their earlier intercourse, when in a letter to a friend he speaks of him as ‘his dear son’—‘filius meus dilectus.’ When not curtly met as the rash innovator and heretic, Servetus was neither the proud nor the impracticable man he appeared to Œcolampadius and Calvin. During his visit to Strasburg, when he was doubtless busy with his ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’—revising, polishing, and seeing it through the press—in a notable modification of the terms in which one of the cardinal points of his doctrine is spoken of in an earlier and in a later passage of the work, Bucer’s kindly counsel, it is presumed, may be detected. Whilst in Book IV. we find these words, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; the Word was the shadow only, Christ was the substance,’ in Book VII. he says, ‘The Word is never spoken of in Scripture as the Son; but to Christ himself there is ascribed a kind of eternity of engenderment. The things that were under the Law were shadows of the body of Christ.’17
Whatever the two distinguished Reformers of Strasburg may have said, however—and we can hardly doubt of their having tried to win him to the views that were commonly entertained—he was not stayed for a moment in his purpose of getting into print. Nay—and we know not why the right should be refused him—he seems to have thought himself at as full liberty as the leaders of the great movement then afoot to give his own interpretation of the kind of reform which not the Church only, but its doctrine, required. For such an undertaking he was as well qualified by culture as any of the Reformers—better qualified, in fact, than many among them, as in genius we believe he was surpassed, and in liberality and tolerance approached by none. Servetus, in truth, had started in the reforming race unweighted, and so, and in so far with a better chance of reaching the goal of simple truth than either Luther or Calvin; for though he had received the education of the cloister, he was neither professed monk nor priest; and, without detriment to the piety of his spirit, or his belief in what were held by the world as the oracles of God, he had freed himself from the fetters of necessary assent to the interpretations put upon these, formulated into dogmas, by the Church in which he had been born and bred. Servetus seems never to have had any misgivings about his title to show himself among the number of the Reformers. He was in Germany, the land of free thought, as he imagined; among men who had thought freely, and whom he had been used to hear spoken of by his clerical surroundings, whilst in the suite of Quintana, as heretics and blasphemers. These names he did not fear in such respectable company as he found the Reformers of Switzerland and Germany to be; and though he did not agree with them on some topics, he could bear with them as well in that wherein he differed from them as in that wherein they differed among themselves, and saw no reason why they should not in like manner bear with him. He thought of nothing, therefore, but prospective fame for himself in the publication he contemplated. The names of Luther, Melanchthon, Calvin, and the rest, appeared on the title-pages of their works: why, then, should his name be withheld from the world? On the title-page of the ‘Seven Books on Mistaken Conceptions of the Trinity’ accordingly, which now came forth from the press, we find not only his family name, Servetus, but the alias, Revés, from his mother’s side of the house, and the name of the country that called him son:—
‘De Trinitatis Erroribus, Libri Septem.
Per Michaelem Serveto, alias Revés,
Ab Aragonia, Hispanum,
1531.’
The publisher and printer, having an eye to business, not notoriety, and suspicious in all probability of the reception the article in the production of which they were aiding and abetting, might receive, were more cautious than the author; for the name neither of printer, publisher, nor place of publication, appears on the title-page. In the month of July, 1531, however, the book was to be bought at once in the cities of Strasburg, Frankfort, and Basle: but no one knew for more than twenty years where it had been printed, nor who besides the author—who had also vanished out of sight—had been accessory to its publication. The truth only came out in the course of the author’s trial at Geneva in the year 1553. Basle had the credit for a time of having hatched the cockatrice; and that the charge was taken seriously to heart appears from a letter of Œcolampadius to Bucer which has been preserved.
The Swiss churches, as is known, were not all at one with Luther and his followers upon some of the transcendental topics of their common faith; and Servetus in his book having attacked the Doctrine of Justification by Faith—the leading feature in Luther’s theology, in terms neither complimentary nor respectful, the Switzers were anxious to have the great head of the Reform movement informed that they had nothing in common with the Serveto, alias Revés, of the book ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus,’ and that it had not fallen from any of the presses of their country. In his letter to Bucer dated from Basle, August 5, 1531, Œcolampadius informs him that ‘several of their friends had seen Servetus’s book and were beyond measure offended with it.’ ‘I wish you would write to Luther,’ he continues, ‘and tell him it was printed elsewhere than at Basle, and without any privity of ours. It is surely a piece of consummate impudence in the writer to say that the Lutherans are ignorant of what Justification really means. Passing many things by, I fancy he must belong to the sect of the Photinians, or to some other I know not what. Unless he be put down by the doctors of our church, it will be the worse for us. I pray you of all others to keep watch; and if you find no better or earlier opportunity, be particular in your report to the Emperor in excusing us and our churches from the breaking in among us of this wild beast. He indeed abuses everything in his way of viewing it; and to such lengths does he go that he disputes the coeternity and consubstantiality of the Father and the Son—he would even have the man Christ to be the Son of God in the usual natural way.’18
Bucer having perused the ‘De Trinitatis Erroribus’ would seem to have been excessively disturbed or scandalised by its contents. Known as a man of a perfectly humane disposition in a general way, he is now violent even to slaying. Denouncing its author from the pulpit, he is said to have declared that the writer of such a book deserved to be disembowelled and torn in pieces! Yet was not Martin Bützer always of this savage way of thinking. In a Preface and Postscript to an early work—a translation by a friend, of Augustin’s Treatise ‘on the Duty of the Ruler in matters of Religion,’19 he is as mercifully disposed towards the erring as could be desired. They are to be prayed for, instructed, and it may be punished, but it is to be mildly; they are never to be put to death. He refers to his ‘Dialogues’ in which the subject is treated at length.
Luther, too, must have read the work, and it is not a little interesting to us to be made aware from what he says himself that he, like others of the Reformers, as well as Michael Servetus, had been troubled with doubts about the conformity of the orthodox Trinitarian dogma with the dictates of simple reason. In the Table-Talk—Tisch-Reden—of 1532, he refers to what he characterises as ‘a fearfully wicked book—ein greulich bös Buch—’ which had lately come out against the doctrine of the holy Trinity. ‘Visionaries like the writer,’ says Doctor Martin, ‘do not seem to fancy that other folks as well as they may have had temptations on this subject. But the sting did not hold; I set the word of God and the Holy Ghost against my thoughts and got free.’ Luther as usual imagined that the doubts he felt were inspired by the Devil, instead of by God, through the reason given him for his guidance.20
But of all his contemporaries Melanchthon appears to have been more taken with the work on Trinitarian Error than any other of the leading Reformers; and he is much more outspoken in expressing his opinion of the incomprehensible and really unscriptural nature of the dogma which it is the gist of Servetus’s book to impugn. To one of his friends he begins his letter by telling him ‘that he has been reading Servetus a great deal—Servetum multum lego—though I am well aware of the fanatical nature of the man. In his derisive treatment of Justification he sees nothing