Servetus and Calvin. Robert Willis
I also think he does injustice both to Tertullian and Irenæus, when, treating of the Word, he makes them question its being an hypostasis. But I have little doubt that great controversies will one day arise on this subject, as well as on the distinction of the two natures in Christ.’21
To Camerarius, another friend, he writes: ‘You ask me what I think of Servetus? I see him indeed sufficiently sharp and subtle in disputation, but I do not give him credit for much depth. He is possessed, as it seems to me, of confused imaginations, and his thoughts are not well matured on the subjects he discusses. He manifestly talks foolishness when he speaks of Justification. Περὶ τῆς τρίαδος—on the subject of the Trinity—you know, I have always feared that serious difficulties would one day arise. Good God! to what tragedies will not these questions give occasion in times to come: εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις ὁ λὀγος—is the Logos an hypostasis? εἴ ἐστιν ὑπόστασις τὸ πνεῦμα—is the Holy Ghost an hypostasis? For my own part I refer me to those passages of Scripture that bid us call on Christ, which is to ascribe divine honours to him, and find them full of consolation.’22
This is surely very candid and beautiful. But the spirit of the Prophet of Nazareth did not always find such a resting place as it did in the heart and mind of Philip Schwarzerde, though he too could forget himself and approve of violence, as we shall see, when certain beliefs which he held sacred and thought it a public duty to profess were assailed. At this time, however, on this occasion, he is in his proper placable frame of mind and continues thus: ‘I find it after all of little use to inquire too curiously into that which properly constitutes the nature of a Person, and into that wherein and whereby persons are distinguished from one another. It is very provoking that in Epiphanius, except a few trifling passages, we have nothing from the days when the same questions were agitated by Paul of Samosata—nothing in fact whence we might know what was thought of Paul’s opinions at the time, and of what mind were they who condemned him. I am even greatly distressed when I think of such negligence on the part of the hierarchs of the age of this Paul, as well as of times more near our own.’ When writing thus Melanchthon plainly sympathised more with Paul of Samosata and his opinions than he would have liked to acknowledge at a later period of his life; for he, too, like so many who become narrow and intolerant in age, was liberal enough when younger, and in the earlier editions of his ‘Loci Theologici’ could speak of the Holy Spirit as nothing more than an ‘Afflatus of Deity.’
The above extracts from confidential letters seem to show that Melanchthon was not himself quite clear as to the sense in which a Trinity of the Godhead was to be understood; a state of mind shared in, unless we much mistake, by more than one among the most influential men of the Swiss Churches, by none more certainly than by Calvin, their great head, himself, as we shall show. Melanchthon indeed in his next letter to the same friend, speaking of Servetus’s assumption that Tertullian did not think the Logos an hypostasis—a distinct substantial reality—proceeds:—‘To me Tertullian seems to think on this subject as we do in public—quod publice sentimus, and not in the way Servetus interprets him. But of these things more hereafter when we meet.’ Melanchthon would not therefore trust in writing, even to an intimate friend, all he thought on the subject of the Trinity; and truly there is matter enough when critically scanned in the first edition of his best-known work—‘The Loci Theologici’ of 1521—that puts him out of the pale of orthodox Trinitarianism.23
Neither was Joannes Œcolampadius without something of a fellow feeling for Servetus, although he repudiated his conclusions. Writing to Martin Bucer on July 18, 1531, shortly after the publication of the work on Trinitarian misconception, he informs his friend that he had heard from Capito of Strasburg, who tells him that the book is for sale among them there, and has rejoiced some of the enemies of the Church, as it will also afford matter of gratulation to the Papists of France when they see that writings of the kind are suffered to be published in Germany. ‘Read the book,’ continues the writer, ‘and tell me what you think of it. Were I not busy with my Job, I should be disposed to answer it myself; but I must leave this duty to another with more leisure at command. Our Senate have forbidden the Spaniard’s book to be sold here. They have asked my opinion of its merits, and I have said that as the writer does not acknowledge the coeternity of the Son, I can in no wise approve of it as a whole, although it contains much else that is good—Etiamsi multa alia bona scribat.’24
In the days of Philip Melanchthon and Joannes Œcolampadius we therefore see that men had private opinions on subjects to which they were committed by their subscriptions, which differed we know not how widely from their public professions, precisely as among the ancients, and ourselves at the present time: culture would still seem to make an esoteric and an exoteric doctrine a necessity of existence.
Made aware, as we are by these letters of the Reformers, that Servetus’s book was causing a considerable stir both in Switzerland and Germany, it seems, in so far as we have ascertained, to have been entirely neglected by the Roman Catholics of these lands as well as of France. We have searched in vain for any notice of it in French theological writings of the period; neither have we been able to discover, though condemned and ordered to be suppressed by the Emperor Charles V. when brought under his notice by Cochlæus and Quintana at Ratisbon, that it figures at any early date on the Roman Index of prohibited books. There are good reasons for believing, nevertheless, that Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Misconception had a large amount of influence on Italian ground. It had been sent south in numbers; and aware of this Melanchthon took it upon him by-and-by to address the Senate of Venice on the subject, informing them that a highly objectionable work was for sale among them, and suggesting that measures should be taken for its suppression. The Sozzini, uncle and nephew—Lælius and Faustus Socinus—and their followers, the Unitarians, have consequently been seen as the disciples of Servetus, though it may be that they were so only indirectly; for Servetus himself, as we shall find, declares that he does not deny a kind of trinity in the unity of God. But his trinity is modal or formal, not real or personal in the usual sense of the word.
If overlooked by theologians of the Latin races, the work of our author appears to have attracted all the more attention from the men of Teutonic descent who had espoused the cause of the Reformation. In their ranks in the early period of the sixteenth century the intelligence of Europe, in so far as the religious question was concerned, seems to have been concentrated. They took pains to inform themselves generally on all that was going on in the republic of letters, and in so much of it very particularly as bore on the subject they had most at heart. It is among the Swiss and German Reformers consequently that we find any particular notice taken of Servetus’s book on Trinitarian Error. They alone show themselves scandalised by the opinions of its author and his style of expressing them, jealous too, it might seem, at the intrusion of a mere layman into their domain—a phenomenon as yet perfectly unheard of, and startled further by the advances they discovered in the book upon all that they, as inheritors of apostolic traditions in common with their Roman Catholic brethren (from whom in matters of Dogma they differed so little), regarded as the truth. Paul of Tarsus preaching his own independent gospel to the Gentiles, proclaiming the universality of the fatherhood of God, the nothingness of Circumcision, and, in opposition to the whole Levitical code, that all days were alike holy and that it was not what went into the mouth of a man that defiled him, could scarcely have been more ominous to the intolerant Nazarene Church of Jerusalem than was the appearance of this daring innovator upon the religious stage of Germany. His book, everywhere freely sold in the first instance, must have been read by everyone of liberal education, though it became so scarce ere long, denounced and decried as it must have been universally by the ministers, that twenty years afterwards a copy, most pressingly wanted, and eagerly sought after, was nowhere to be found in Switzerland; so effectually had zealotry succeeded in having it committed to the flames!
Strasburg and Basle, however, must have been the emporiums whence the supplies of the ‘De Erroribus Trinitatis’ were sent forth; for after its author’s visit to the capital of Elsass and his happy delivery of this the first-born of his genius at Hagenau, we find him again in Basle and making himself obnoxious to Œcolampadius as before. Writing what we must presume to be a second or third letter to the Reformer, and complimenting him on what he is pleased to style